After 1st gay marriages, 'joy spread' seattlepi.com CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Newlyweds and couples celebrated Friday along with the lead lawyer in the landmark case behind the first same-sex marriages in Massachusetts and the nation 10 years ago. Lawyer Mary Bonauto said at the Cambridge City Hall ...
Metal band singer gets 6 years for murder plot seattlepi.com VISTA, Calif. (AP) — The lead singer of the band As I Lay Dying has been sentenced to six years in prison for plotting to kill his wife. U-T San Diego (http://bit.ly/1nYl59s ) reports 33-year-old Timothy Lambesis was sentenced Friday in San Diego County.
North American anime distributor Viz Media announced after its Anime Central panel on Friday that it licensed the original Sailor Moon magical girl anime franchise. The streaming, digital, and home video licenses include all 200 episodes from the five television series, the three feature films, and the assorted tie-in specials. This will include the first North American release of the final television series, Sailor Moon Sailor Stars.
Viz is offering the franchise without edits in its original uncropped 4:3 aspect ratio, with the original Japanese names, story elements, and relationships. It is also producing an uncut English dub with a new voice cast.
Viz aims to release the franchise digitally with English subtitles starting this summer, followed by the English dub starting in late 2014. It also plans DVD and Blu-ray/DVD combo releases in half-season sets starting this fall.
The first four television anime episodes will stream with English subtitles on Viz Media's NeonAlley.com service and the Hulu Plus service on Monday. Two more episodes will then debut every Monday ("Moon-day," as Viz's representatives deemed it).
Isaac Asimov's first law of robotics states, "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." However, injury mostly corresponds to physical harm, not mental or emotional harm. Sleep Dealer director Alex Rivera plays with human emotions in his latest short film A Robot Walks Into a Bar. Here, an M-1 labor robot plays a bartender who grapples with causing unintended pain to the people around him, while also being unable to stop the violence people do to one another constantly. Coupled with the miasmic fear that comes with robots replacing every human task, we're left to wonder if Asimov's laws are workable at all if the emotional stakes are always so high. You can watch the full short at FUTURESTATES.tv, which is a collection of thoughtful meditations of technology and the future.
On the strength of monumental support from Reddit users, Josh Wise was voted into NASCAR’s All-Star Race.
Danica Patrick is undoubtedly famous, but her popularity has limits in the form of Dogecoin and Reddit.
On the strength of a grassroots campaign that began within the Reddit social media community and funded by Dogecoins, Josh Wise beat Patrick, last year's winner, to win the fan vote and gain entry into Saturday's All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
"I'm still trying to wrap my head around it," Wise said. "This is huge for me and our team. It really just started with a 16-year-old kid who posted something on Reddit.com about some good runs we had. And for whatever reason this huge, awesome community just got behind us.
"I'm just super thankful to be part of it, really. It's been a pretty cool experience."
Wise thanked folks via his Twitter account as well.
The announcement was made following Friday's Sprint Showdown where the top two finishers, Clint Bowyer and A.J. Allmendinger, also advanced to the All-Star Race featuring NASCAR's best drivers. Patrick and Wise finished 10th and 18th, respectively.
"For you and your community to beat Danica out, that is saying something," said Bowyer, who took part in a Reddit AMA chat earlier in the week.
Sensing a groundswell of support, Wise wasn't shocked he earned the vote and considered it a "definite possibility." Nonetheless, he was still overwhelmed: "What in the world," Wise said to Motor Racing Network when informed of the news.
The relationship between Dogecoin and Wise began in March when members of Reddit, inspired by Wise's underdog story, began collecting Dogecoins to fund Wise's No. 98 team, which most weeks is sponsorless, at Talladega Superspeedway.
Within a week $55,000 was raised.
"I feel this is a big deal for our sport because it is a lot of young kids and people from around the world," Wise said. "It's people who have never watched a NASCAR race but have watched several. It's a pretty cool deal."
Creating an inspiring montage video was one of just many ways Reddit users solicited votes for Wise and were able to topple Patrick.
Wildfires are burning mostly out of control in San Diego County on Thursday as an unseasonably intense heat wave and strong, dry winds have prompted the governor to declare a state of emergency.
The worst fire, near San Marcos, was only 5 percent contained as of Thursday morning. The California State University–San Marcos campus was evacuated, and this week’s commencement was canceled, per a CNN report.
Offshore Santa Ana winds helped fan the flames, producing smoke plumes visible from space. Santa Ana winds funnel warm and dry air toward the coast when a strong high pressure moves over the deserts of inland California, reversing the typical west-to-east flow from the ocean that usually keeps Southern California so beautiful and temperate. During times of drought, Santa Ana winds bring humidities down to dangerously low levels, and they can blow up to hurricane force in the mountains, creating the perfect environment for explosive fire growth.
Relatedly, new data released Thursday showed 100 percent of the state of California is now in “severe,” “extreme,” or “exceptional” drought, the three most severe categories. Earlier this month, the governor’s Office of Emergency Services warned that this summer poses unprecedented wildfire risk.
Temperatures on Wednesday reached the triple digits, according to the National Weather Service. Some of Wednesday’s temperatures, like the 102-degree reading in Oxnard, were the hottest ever recorded in the month of May. Oxnard’s oppressive heat was strikingly out of season: It was more than a month earlier than the previous first 100+ degree day and just two degrees shy of the all-time record set on September 22, 1939. Records have been kept in Oxnard since 1923.
Some other daily records were shattered by more than 10 degrees. The hottest previous temperature for May 14 in Laguna Beach was 83, set in 1978. On Wednesday, it reached 99 degrees there. Laguna Beach records have been kept continuously since 1928.
The forecast for Thursday was even hotter, said the National Weather Service office in San Diego, though the Santa Ana winds will likely be calmer. As of 11:35 a.m. Pacific Time on Thursday, the Los Angeles airport had already set a new record high for the date: 97 degrees, breaking the old daily record of 94 set in 1956. According to the NWS, this heatwave surpasses the previous record set in San Diego in 1896—which came 10 days later in the month.
It didn’t take long for local officials to point out the connection to climate change, which scientists say is lengthening the fire season in California by several days per year. The Western wildfire season is now 78 days longer than it was in the mid-1980s. This year, due to worsening drought, the season effectively never stopped.
San Diego Fire Chief Javier Mainar said the unusual weather pattern didn't bode well for the rest of the season.
"It is pretty amazing to see these in May," Mainar said. "We certainly have seen climate change and the impact of climate change. My understanding from Cal Fire is that we've seen twice the number of wildfire starts in the state of California as we typically see this time of year."
The pictures from southern California were apocalyptic:
“Firenadoes,” like those shown above (and in video, here) are actually fairly common in intense wildfires. Here’s the science: Fires obviously generate a lot of heat, and heat rises. Heated air rises even faster when surrounded by relatively cooler air on the edges of major fires, and vortexes can form in particularly strong updrafts. If those vortexes contain flame, you’ve got yourself a firenado.
If the fire is large enough, it can also create its own weather. Pyrocumulus clouds, or billowing puffy white clouds created by the rising air above a wildfire, have even been known to trigger lightning storms, sparking fresh fires nearby.
One of our goals in launching the Raspberry Pi Compute Module was to provide people with a way to take products they’ve prototyped with the Raspberry Pi and bring them to market quickly and easily. We know that historically there have been a lot of people out there with great ideas for electronic products that they can’t afford to produce economically, even with the help of crowdfunding, so we were very pleased to hear from Dave Rauchwerk and friends about their Kickstarter campaign for a hackable point-and-shoot camera based on the Compute Module.
OTTO and compute module
We can’t wait to see how this one turns out, and hope it’s the first of many appearances of the Compute Module on Kickstarter.
Google has just snapped up one of the most futuristic apps to come along in some time. Quest Visual, the maker of the incredible Word Lens app, posted on its website that it has been acquired by Google.
Word Lens is (was?) an augmented reality translation app. As you can see in the video, just point your phone camera at a supported foreign language, and Word Lens replaces the foreign text with translated text. The plan is to move the team over to Google Translate where Quest Visual will work on integrating its technology into Google's app.
The two companies are a good match for each other. The biggest downside to Word Lens was the limited language compatibility—it only supported translating Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese into English. Google can definitely help here. Google Translate is one of the most advanced translation systems in the world, with 345 supported languages and more than 10,000 language pairs.
Nemo the Magnificent writes: " Everybody knows software development is a young man's game, right? Here's a guy who hires and manages programmers, and he says it's not about age at all — it's about skills, period. 'It's each individual's responsibility to stay fresh in the field and maintain a modern-day skillset that gives any 28-year-old a run for his or her money. ... Although the ability to learn those skills is usually unlimited, the available time to learn often is not. "Little" things like family dinners, Little League, and home improvement projects often get in the way. As a result, we do find that we face a shortage of older, more seasoned developers. And it's not because we don't want older candidates. It's often because the older candidates haven't successfully modernized their developer skills.' A company that actively works to offer all employees the chance to learn and to engage with modern technologies is a company that good people are going to work for, and to stay at."
Obama, Biden Hit Up Shake Shack For Lunch Huffington Post With National Burger Month in full swing, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden got their fix for lunch on Friday. The White House duo grabbed a meal at Shake Shack in Washington's Dupont Circle neighborhood. Per a pool report, Obama ...
Eugene (Ore.) Churchill High senior sprinter Spenser Schmidt entered the starting block area at the Midwestern League championships with a Nike band wrapped around his wrist, according to The Oregonian. The band, meant to treat patellar tendonitis and Osgood-Schlatter disease, was not yet around his knee, where he has worn it previously this season (see him here at April's Oregon Relays).
However, meet officials reportedly deemed the band an item of jewelry and disqualified Schmidt from the 100-meter competition.
Are you ready for the most half-arsed impersonation of explorers Lewis & Clark the internet has ever seen? We've got you covered. We've also got a lengthy review of much-hyped board game Lewis & Clark, on the off chance you come here for the board game reviews.
It's an interesting game, though. In a year when fantastic eurogames are coming thick and fast, like hail in the Great Plains, this one looks pretty enough to make a name for itself. But does it have that frontier spirit? Quinns will let you know. Probably. Assuming he doesn't get distracted and start talking about sodding Timeline again.
Bitcoin merchant payment processor BitPay has announced a new partnership with electronics manufacturer Toshiba that will integrate bitcoin payments into Toshiba’s touch-screen point-of-sale platform, VisualTouch.
BitPay will provide technical assistance for the purpose of integrating bitcoin payments into the existing VisualTouch system. VisualTouch is used by more than 6,000 client-companies in the hospitality, restaurant, grocery and retail sectors worldwide.
The partnership is being formally announced at the 2014 National Restaurant Association Show, an annual conference held by the US-based food services trade group, which begins on 17th May.
Here’s a short video I shot yesterday from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the Zendesk IPO at the opening bell. We’ve been using Zendesk for our help desk at Laughing Squid Web Hosting since November 2007 and they have been amazing. I was honored to be invited to share this special day with them and to be part of their incredible journey over the years, from a tiny loft in Copenhagen to a publicly traded company in San Francisco.
My happy friend Mikkel Svane, CEO and co-founder Zendesk, standing in front of the New York Stock Exchange on the day of their IPO.
"the show is an adaptation of Iceland’s Heimsendir" ... "follows a struggling high school English teacher who suffers a breakdown and lands in a mental institution, where he finally feels normal—and soon becomes the leader of an inmate revolt"
Clearly undaunted by the cancellation of Bored To Death, author Jonathan Ames has been redoubling his television efforts by developing not only Starz’s Blunt Talk with Patrick Stewart and Seth MacFarlane, but also a new half-hour series for Showtime. Titled World’s End—not to be confused with either Edgar Wright’s movie, or the actual apocalypse we’re killing time until by watching cable comedies—the show is an adaptation of Iceland’s Heimsendir (literally “heim sender”), the trailer for which you can watch below. In the tradition of Ames’ interest in stories of literary types doing crazy things, it follows a struggling high school English teacher who suffers a breakdown and lands in a mental institution, where he finally feels normal—and soon becomes the leader of an inmate revolt. Ames will write and executive produce, and probably add some scenes of people trading witty repartee over ...
