firehose

お堀の桜。

Insa

~Eric Kluitenberg

Bridget Erickson is a freshman at Nova Classical Acadamy, a charter school in St. Paul. Last year, she suggested to the school board that they include a student advisory position. She never heard back.

So she took things to the next level. Reading through the school’s bylaws, she saw something that no one else seems to have noticed — Nothing says a student can’t be an actual school board member. So this year, she put her name in and is running against two other candidates, both mothers and previous school board members.

It’s clear from Bridget’s interview that this isn’t simply a kid’s attempt to make a point just because she can. She clearly cares and is going to make the most of her new role if she’s elected…

(via KARE11)

Regardless of the outcome of this election, she’s going to go far.

Seven of the paper’s senior editors resigned.

wallabag:

wallabag is a self hostable application for saving web pages. Unlike other services, wallabag is free (as in freedom) and open source.

A self-hosted alternative to Instapaper et al., with a brace of ‘read later’ browser extensions and apps.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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djempirical

Residents of an Irish island must get very drunk to survive attacks by alien monsters who can't tolerate a high blood alcohol level in their victims.

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"An artist has an obligation to tell the truth. My novels are epic fantasy, but they are inspired by and grounded in history. Rape and sexual violence have been a part of every war ever fought, from the ancient Sumerians to our present day. To omit them from a narrative centered on war and power would have been fundamentally false and dishonest, and would have undermined one of the themes of the books: that the true horrors of human history derive not from orcs and Dark Lords, but from ourselves. We are the monsters. (And the heroes too). Each of us has within himself the capacity for great good, and great evil... [Westeros] is no darker nor more depraved than our own world. History is written in blood. The atrocities in A Song of Ice and Fire, sexual and otherwise, pale in comparison to what can be found in any good history book. Read the rest under the jump.

This headline seems ... unnecessarily painful.

Sometimes the headline just doesn't come out the way you want it to. Sometimes, even after editing, you don't catch something until the next day. For example, this Evansville Courier & Press headline:

Ugh. We meant to say "Nets." pic.twitter.com/q8FME0KUgn

— Ryan G. Reynolds (@RyanReynolds) May 7, 2014

Whoops! D'oh, the "cut nuts" was supposed to go in the "Pets" section.

Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman doesn't need a spokesman or PR firm to announce his new contract. He turned to a Stanford graduate with a degree in communications who is working on his Master's: himself.

"I am blessed to announce that the Seattle Seahawks and I have reached an agreement on a contract extension," Sherman wrote on his blog today.

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“Obliging me to view the graphic torture and rape of women as entry for stories about female characters I like is too steep a cost. And fuck the stewards of this show for making that the cost of access to rare stories about complex women.

Having tweeted about this a bit already, I’m already getting the usual pushback. I’m oversensitive. (Yawn.) I’m trying to ruin everyone’s fun. (Do what you want; I’m speaking for myself.) I should worry about more important things. (Do you know how many people watch this show?) This is just “the way it was back then.” (Don’t argue realism with me in defense of rape scenes in a show with fucking dragons.) The show has always been violent. (Yes, and I am objecting to how certain types of violence are used.) What do I expect? (More.)

I especially expect more from a show that simultaneously demonstrates a capability for writing complex female characters.”

- Shakesville: On Game of Thrones (via brutereason)

wronglikeright:

e-sigh:

Important selfies of our time.

Enchanting Secret.

When you need the object of a picture, but not the background, it can be a pain to separate them, particularly if you don't have Photoshop. As long as you don't need pixel-perfect control, Background Burner can do the grunt work for you in a jiffy.

Read more...

It was totally by accident. Via Raw Story:

A New Orleans Fox affiliate blames a technical glitch that interrupted Sunday’s episode of “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.” WVUE-TV abruptly cut to a news promo, seat belt public service announcement, and commercials just as host Neil deGrasse Tyson was discussing how climate change millions of years ago influenced the primate-to-human evolutionary process. Commercials filled more than 5 minutes of airtime, interrupting 1 minute, 24 seconds of the program’s airtime, before “Cosmos” returned to a discussion on how the gravitational pull of other planets shaped Earth’s weather during the same period. WVUE’s vice president and general manager, Sandy Breland, described the glitch as “an automation error.”

An Oklahoma Fox station did something similar in March.

[ameloblastoise]

procrastino:

Animated Movie Posters in GIF

Bring me pictures of Spider-Man


Bring me pictures of Spider-Man


Bring me pictures of Spider-Man


Bring me pictures of Spider-Man

"Bring me pictures of Spider-Man."

"Sure thing, JJJ! What do you think of these?"

Listen. Personal talk time. Shit’s bleak, for me, on the job front. No one needs a microbiologist of my particular freakish stripe right now. This is something I’ve been struggling with for about a year now, with nothing more to show for it than “so close!” results. It has worn thin. I have worn thin, in every way that is not physical.

I could have ranted, again, about how things are set up all cockeyed in this field, how there are never enough spots for the amount of cheap labor—I mean PhD students—that go in. A month ago, I could have worked up that froth. Now … well, now it’s just resonating too hard, too true, too exactly to risk speaking it out again.

What I ask, is that if you hear of something available that would be rehabilitation-from-academic-science friendly, please let me know. I know this is unlikely, as research renders one relatively useless in the broader scheme. But, please.

Amherst College said Tuesday it will ban students from joining fraternities and sororities, beginning this summer.

Amherst will prohibit student participation in fraternities and sororities and "fraternity-like and sorority-like organizations, either on or off campus," effective July 1, Cullen Murphy, Board of Trustees chair, told students in an email. The trustees also reaffirmed a 1984 decision barring formal college recognition of any Greek organizations.

"Violations of this decision will be treated consistent with other violations of the Honor Code, which sets forth standards and expectations that apply to all students, faculty and staff," Murphy wrote.

Amherst does not officially recognize fraternities, but has allowed them to organize underground so long as their activities stayed off the campus of the college, in Amherst, Massachusetts. The trustees' review of Greek life at Amherst, a top-ranked liberal arts college, followed a 2013 suggestion from the Sexual Misconduct Oversight Committee, composed of faculty, students, staff, administrators and trustees.

The committee was formed in response to an October 2012 student newspaper op-ed by Angie Epifano accusing the college of mishandling her sexual assault case, sending her to a psychiatric ward in response to her comments about being depressed. Epifano filed a federal complaint against the college in December 2013, sparking an investigation by the U.S. Department of Education into whether Amherst violated the Title IX gender equity law. In that complaint, Epifano lambasted the college for a sexually hostile climate she blamed on the underground fraternities.

The college Sexual Misconduct Oversight Committee took note of the Greek organizations as well, saying underground frats "simultaneously exist but do not exist," and noted the college did not enforce student conduct rules with respect to the frat houses.

As the Amherst Student, the campus newspaper, reported at the time, the committee said it was time the trustees "figure out once and for all what the fraternities’ role should be. Either they should be regularized or they should go entirely."

The trustees said Tuesday in a document accompanying the email that the board had considered restoring recognition to fraternities so that the school could police the system. Trustees also considered accepting the status quo, the document said, "along with its contradictions and consequences, indefinitely. Such a course, in the view of the Board and the Administration, would be counterproductive and unwise."

Instead, trustees chose "to reaffirm, unambiguously, the spirit and intention of the 1984 decision -- by prohibiting membership in off-campus fraternities, as peer institutions have done, while committing the College to new efforts on behalf of student life."

Students will be prohibited from on-campus activities "relating to rushing, pledging, initiating or otherwise admitting to or maintaining membership by any student of the College in any fraternity, sorority or other social club, society or organization (however denominated)," the email said. The email made no mention of students attending parties and other social events hosted by Greek organizations.

Other elite colleges and universities also have grappled with the status of Greek organizations.

Students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania voted to make all fraternities coed, rather than ban them altogether. At Wesleyan University in Connecticut, school officials have warned students not to attend events at fraternities it has deemed unsafe.

Original Source

The Torque 2D game engine now has full support for Linux along with Android and web support...

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