firehose

Renee brings the business.

Cully really liked the idea that Renee was a devotee of the late Bruce Lee. You can see it here.

Art by Cully Hamner, colors by Laura Martin.

The Times (subscription)

Peace process fears as Adams held over 1972 murder The Times (subscription) The arrest of Gerry Adams in connection with one of the most notorious murders of Northern Ireland's Troubles today prompted renewed fears for the future of the peace process. The Sinn Féin president was arrested last night after voluntarily presenting ... Gerry Adams's arrest over Jean McConville's murder is a victory for ordinary ...Daily Mail all 608 news articles »

Glitch

Is it Frida yet?

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

ConstantineM writes: "What has been planned for a long time now, prior to the infamous heartbleed fiasco of OpenSSL (which does not affect SSH at all), is now officially a reality — with the help of some recently adopted crypto from DJ Bernstein, OpenSSH now finally has a compile-time option to no longer depend on OpenSSL. `make OPENSSL=no` has now been introduced for a reduced configuration OpenSSH to be built without OpenSSL, which would leave you with no legacy SSH-1 baggage at all, and on the SSH-2 front with only AES-CTR and chacha20+poly1305 ciphers, ECDH/curve25519 key exchange and Ed25519 public keys."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The talk show host is considering joining an investment group that is interested in purchasing the Clippers if Donald Sterling is forced to sell.

Oprah Winfrey is the latest celebrity name to surface as a potential buyer of the Los Angeles Clippers. According to sources of ESPN, the celebrity talk show host is considering joining music and film mogul David Geffen and business CEO Larry Ellison, who as a group could buy the NBA team if current owner Donald Sterling is forced to sell.

Interest in purchasing the franchise has seemingly become a free-for-all, even before NBA owners have voted to oust the Clippers owner in the wake of his scandal.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced Tuesday that Sterling would be forced to sell his team after an audio recording surfaced of Sterling making racially-insensitive remarks.

Geffen and Ellison were already considered potential candidates to buy the NBA team, but adding Winfrey would only grow to their group's financial backing.

Magic Johnson and his investment group reportedly have interest in buying the franchise, according to Yahoo! Sports Adrian Wojnarowski, who also reported that a bidding war could bring the cost of the team beyond the $1 billion threshold. Also on Wednesday morning, USA Today's Bob Velin reported that boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. has serious interest in buying the Clippers.

First, the NBA owners must reach a three-fourths vote to oust Sterling as owner, but it's possible he doesn't go quietly. Sterling told Fox News' Jim Gray prior to the punishments handed down by the NBA that he had no interest in selling the team.

Welcome to the sports dog days of summer

Rope Cypress, standing in canoe shooting bow and arrow, clouds above, The Everglades, Florida, 1910

The American Museum of Natural History’s Research Library has launched a digital special collections archive that includes at least 7,000 images that had previously only been accessible in person on the museum’s fourth floor in New York City. The museum hopes to eventually digitize up to one million images from the research library’s collection. The current set includes archival photographic images, art and memorabilia images, and illustrations from their Rare Book Collection.

What began as a pilot project of 1,000 images is a long term effort to create comprehensive access to the rich and varied collections of photographs, rare book illustrations, art and memorabilia held in the Library. Images are being scanned and cataloged by teams of staff, interns, and volunteers and new images are added as they become available.

Portunus reticulatus from Herbst’s Versuch einer Naturgeschichte der Krabben und Krebse

Huichol Indian authorities at Guadalupe de Ocotán, Mexico, 1895

American Museum of Natural History exterior, view from roof of Dakota Apartments, 72nd Street and Central Park West, 1880

Roy Chapman Andrews and George Olsen at nest of “the even dozen dinosaur eggs”, Third Asiatic Expedition, Mongolia, 1925

images via The American Museum of Natural History

via The New York Times

After noticing that his beautiful dog Sparky had been snacking out of the cat’s litter box (aka the “stinky cheese shop”), the wonderfully quirky food guru Alton Brown, decided to take matters into his own hands and created a treat that was as stinky as cat feces, but far, far more healthy.

wasn’t interested in coming up with a chewy bar-like substance but rather a biscuit, something that would keep, and be hard enough to provide some dentrificios benefits and no I don’t think that’s a word but it works for me. Continuing my research, I decided the bulk of these stinky treats would be sweet potato, and rolled oats, both of which are considered quite good for hounds, the first for fiber and beta carotene, manganese, and vitamins C and B6, the second for soluble fiber which slows things down in the old GI tract which is good for regularity and nobody, and I mean nobody, wants an irregular dog. I wanted the stink to be an add- on…icing if you will and I actually did try to make an icing out of natto, fermented soy beans, Durian, even lutafisk, what we found really really worked for us is: fish sauce. Used in many South Asian cuisines, this is essentially the liquidous remains of stacking fish, typically anchovies in a barrel with some salt and leaving them for a year or more

Times of India

Bob Hoskins, British Actor, Dies at 71 New York Times Bob Hoskins, the bullet-shaped British film star who brought a singular mix of charm, menace and Cockney accent to a variety of roles, including the bemused, live-action hero of the largely animated “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” has died at 71. His publicist ... Bob Hoskins: 10 things you didn't knowTelegraph.co.uk Bob Hoskins remembered fondly by the starsCBS News Bob Hoskins, known for 'Roger Rabbit,' dies at 71CNN BBC News -CTV News -The Globe and Mail all 610 news articles »

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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A Single Note / 48″ diameter, 150″ (12.5 feet) circumference

A Single Note, detail

A Single Note, detail

A Single Note, detail

A Single Note, detail

A Single Note, detail

A Single Note, detail

With meticulous determination and a steady hand, artist Ben Sack picks up a black 0.05 Staedtler pigment liner pen and begins to draw the dense, intricate details of fictional cityscapes: buildings, roads, rivers and bridges. He draws until the ink runs out and picks up another pen. And another. And another. Sapping the ink from dozens of writing utensils until several months later a canvas is complete. His most recent piece, a vast circular drawing titled A Single Note (top), has a 12.5 foot circumference. It staggers the mind.

The architecture found in Sack’s artwork spans centuries, from gothic cathedrals to towering skyscrapers, underpinned by patterns of urban sprawl reminiscent of European cities with a healthy dose of science fiction. If you look carefully you might even recognize a familiar landmark here and there. He shares as his influence some thoughts on “western antiquity”:

Its this sort of image that I think most people, if not all of society have of western antiquity; stainless marble facades, long triumphal avenues, monuments to glory. In actuality, the cities of the past were far from idealistic by todays standards. Yes there was marble, lots of marble, and monuments galore, however these urban centers were huddled together and unless you were considerably wealthy, life in dreamy antiquity was often a heroic struggle. Though the societies of antiquity were bloody, dirty and corrupt the idea of antiquity has come to represent some resounding ideals in present society; democracy, justice, law and order, balance, symmetry. These ideals are now the foundation stones of our own civilization, a civilization that some distant future will perhaps honor as antiquity.

Sack graduated from the Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011 and has since had work numerous solo a group exhibitions, most recently at Ghostprint Gallery. And just this week he returned from a circumnavigation of the globe as part of a residence aboard the m/s Amsterdam. You can see more of his work on his website, and over on Tumblr. Prints are available here. (via Waxy.org, Laughing Squid)

styro:

The battle hymn of my people.

oliviawhen:

Shows up late to pokeddexxy with starbucks and a bunch of birds. 
Stickers on pre-order in my [shop] now!

A gunman opened fire Tuesday morning at a FedEx facility in Kennesaw, Georgia. Six were shot, with their injuries ranging from minor to two in critical condition. Authorities report that the gunman is dead.

The Georgia facility is located in Kennesaw, near Atlanta, a quiet suburb unique in the U.S. for mandating every household own at least one gun. The law is not enforced, so the Kennesaw gun ownership rate hovers around 50 percent, according to its police chief. That’s still higher than the average rate of gun ownership in the U.S., estimated to be about 34 percent. When the law was enacted in 1982, Kennesaw had only 5,000 residents. Today, it has a population of 30,000.

The incident comes just one week after Georgia enacted what may be the nation’s most expansive concealed carry law. The National Rifle Association-sponsored “Safe Protection Act” allows gun owners to bring firearms into most public spaces, including schools, bars, churches, airports, and government buildings, even though researchers have generally found that more people die from gun homicides in areas with higher rates of gun ownership.

“FedEx is aware of the situation,” the company told WSBTV. “Our primary concern is the safety and well being of our team members, first responders and others affected. FedEx is cooperating with authorities.” It isn’t the first time a facility has been the scene of a shooting; in 2011, a gunman shot himself in a FedEx warehouse in Illinois. The company is also one of at least 34 corporations that boost the NRA, offering discounted shipping to NRA members.

Original Source

Democrats are from Tumblr; Republicans are from Pinterest. That is not, perhaps, the most salient takeaway from a survey of young adults released today by Harvard’s Institute of Politics — but it’s certainly the most interesting!

David Ebersman did well as CFO of Genentech, regularly making more than $4 million per year at the biotech firm. But his next career move brought far greater riches.

When Facebook was in the market for a finance chief with “public company experience,” it turned to Ebersman (pictured above.) The CFO joined the privately held social network in 2009, led it through its blockbuster $16 billion IPO three years later, and, last week, announced that he was leaving the company at the end of next month. During his five-year stint at Facebook, Ebersman will have made more than $100 million in salary, bonus, and stock awards.

Coding whizzes may be the rockstars of the tech world, but accountants are often more consistent earners. This is particularly true for companies looking to go public, of which there are many at the moment. Founders of fast-growing firms typically come from a technology or marketing background, and hire dedicated finance staff only after their companies reach a certain size. This is sometimes done grudgingly, as there can be resistance to the structure and discipline imposed by finance managers on a freewheeling startup.

But if an IPO is on the horizon, structure and discipline is precisely what’s needed if a company hopes to get investors on board. And that’s why experienced financial hands can command huge rewards for their services. At Twitter, CFO Mike Gupta took home the largest pay package of any company executive in 2013, the year the company went public.

The same was true for Steve Cakebread at Pandora ahead of the streaming music firm’s 2011 IPO, which the company justified due to the “critical need to build the finance department in anticipation of a potential public offering.” There are many other examples of CFOs striking it rich during short stints before and after an IPO. (CEOs are generally wealthier than CFOs but, like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Dick Costolo at Twitter, this derives from large initial stock holdings and isn’t reflected in relatively low pay from year to year.)

Been there, done that

What many of these finance chiefs often have in common is public-company experience, with previous IPO experience an especially hot commodity. Cakebread was at Salesforce.com when it listed, while Gupta helped manage Zynga’s IPO.

Iconoclasts and eccentrics may work well in some managerial and engineering roles, but when it comes to finance the private equity firms and venture capitalists that back tech firms prefer a “safe pair of hands,” says David Bloom, managing partner at FDU Group, a London-based recruiter that places financial managers at fast-growing firms. That means “people who have done it before,” he says. A CFO who’s managed a successful listing is often tapped to do several more.

If all goes to plan, there are few better-paying jobs for finance-savvy managers. The basic salary for a CFO at a pre-IPO company is generally around $150,000 to $200,000, says Bloom, with stock awards ranging from 0.5% to 3% of a company’s equity. It’s the stock that generates the financial windfall for CFOs if a listing goes well.

The work, while gruelling, is bread and butter for experienced finance executives. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently told Bloomberg about how Ebersman, the finance chief, introduced some fairly basic financial processes to the company after he joined:

“I remember when he wanted to do a three-year budget,” she said. “We were like, we can do a three-year budget? And he did it. We’ve had very strong financial planning.”

Creative coders, brilliant marketers, and visionary leaders do not necessarily pick up the finer points of accounting, controlling, and reporting as they nurture their innovations and build out their companies. That’s why it takes a highly paid professional to introduce things like a three-year plan, something any run-of-the-mill widget maker can do, albeit with less pressure and a much lower profile.

Bloom says he has placed CFOs in finance departments that were “not fit for purpose,” even when the companies were on the cusp of an IPO. Introducing the systems and processes needed to go public can “really upset the apple cart in terms of culture,” he adds. Throw in the stress and urgency of the IPO process and these CFOs’ leadership skills will be tested as much as their accounting acumen. This is increasingly true for CFOs in general, not just at pre-IPO companies.

High risk, high reward

Although some companies insist on it, a lack of IPO expertise or experience at a listed company doesn’t necessarily rule out candidates for pre-IPO finance roles, according to Sarah Hunt, managing director of Equity FD, a London-based recruitment firm that specializes on placements at private equity-owned companies. What a candidate does need, however, is “the experience of going through some sort of transaction,” she says.

Managing an acquisition, divestment, bond issue, or other major deal gives finance managers experience juggling an external-facing transaction “without taking their eyes off of the business,” Hunt says. CFOs who can make a company “look as good inside as it does outside” have the right skills to manage an IPO, even if they don’t have specific experience with a listing, she adds. Companies with board members who served at public companies or went through listings in the past are more willing to take on CFOs without IPO experience.

Hunt notes that companies also increasingly charge her with finding a finance chief for the long haul—”the CFO of the whole business and not just the listing process.” Financial rewards are often motivation enough to do a good job—these are CFOs we’re talking about, after all—but many boards and backers want the “emotional commitment” of finance chiefs who pledge to stay on long after the listing, she says.

Many finance chiefs leave the companies they take public not long after their options vest. The adrenaline of the run-up to a high-profile listing can make the daily grind of life as a public company unappealing by comparison. The buzz, and the bonuses, that come from an IPO makes flitting from firm to firm irresistible.

For his part, Ebersman is returning to an unspecified job in the health-care industry after his short, spectacularly lucrative stint in social media, Facebook says. Along with Gupta at Twitter and other finance chiefs that have cashed in after IPOs, it’s enough to inspire people to put down the programming manuals and develop a newfound affinity for accounting.

I had asked Jolie a few days ago if I could fly with her, and she told me she had never taken a passenger up before but would think about it. When I arrived at the photo shoot, I told her that I mentioned to my mother that I might fly with her and that my mother did not like the idea one bit. Jolie laughed it off. Now, as I am watching her kick off her stilettos (she pilots barefoot) and step up onto the wing of her little white plane, she stops for a second and stares at me standing off to the side. There is a glint in her eye. A big smile spreads across her face. “Let’s go scare your mother,” she says.

Only as I am jammed in the back next to Leibovitz, bumping along the dinky little runway, does the reality of what I’m doing sink in. I imagine the headline: ANGELINA JOLIE AND ANNIE LEIBOVITZ DIE IN PLANE CRASH NEAR LAS VEGAS. I try to remember who went down with Patsy Cline, but I can’t. I am about to become a trivia question. I tell myself this will be a suitably fabulous way to die, and just like that we are in the air, floating above the desert, and my nerves are gone. “I’ll do some tight turns,” says Jolie. “Maddox likes it when there are g-forces.” [x]

“This software allows you to easily implement the stereoscopic camera, touch panel, and sensors with BASIC commands, making it possible to create 2D games in BASIC that are on the level of a Super Famicom or PlayStation game.”

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 Well, Petit Computer for 3DS sounds pretty dang cool. That’s a quote from an interview with Smileboom president Takaki Kobayashi, revealing functionality in the 3DS eShop version of the BASIC compiler, which comes out in Japan this July.

BUY Nintendo 2DS & 3DS/XL, upcoming games

submitted by YbstagYaj [link] [149 comments]

It is, in a way, too bad that Cliven Bundy — the rancher who became a right-wing hero after refusing to pay fees for grazing his animals on federal land, and bringing in armed men to support his defiance — has turned out to be a crude racist. Why? Because his ranting has given conservatives an easy out, a way to dissociate themselves from his actions without facing up to the terrible wrong turn their movement has taken.

Original Source

I feel a bunch of complicated things that don’t completely add up, actually.

Yes, I would love to see Storm written by a great female writer. But I am also pretty close to equally happy to see her written by a great writer at all, simply because she is one of the most recognizable female superheroes in all fiction, certainly one of the most noted WOC heroines, she means a lot to so many people and she’s never had an ongoing series of her own.

Plus, I love her, and I love Greg Pak’s writing.  So I am too happy to be upset, I guess?

Also, I have to give Marvel credit, they have been doing some major launches with female characters written by talented women, like Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel, and that’s after having had a few really good female lead books written by female writers that DIDN’T make it. So I have to give them solid credit for not throwing up their hands and saying, “female lead comics and female lead writers don’t sell.”

It’s a big change from even a few years ago. I like that they are putting top people on these books. It is a hopeful sign. I still want to have more female creators on ALL types of books, I think that is long overdue and a big, necessary step to comics staying viable.

Dissenting viewpoints, anyone?  Maybe I’m missing something.

 

How the trailblazing female journalist got her start at speaking truth to power.

At the age of twenty-five, Nellie Bly did the unthinkable for a Victorian woman — a successful and fierce journalist in New York’s media boys’ club, she raced around the world in a quest to outpace Jules Verne’s fictional eighty-day itinerary. When she eventually got married at the age of thirty — an old maid by the era’s standards — she helmed the management of her husband’s factory and built within it a gymnasium, library, and recreation center for the workers. She even made a cameo in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, where the character of Ella Kaye, a tough newspaperwoman, is based on Bly. It’s unsurprising, then, that Bly’s trailblazing, era-defying career in journalism began at the tender age of twenty, when she responded to a patronizing letter from the father of five girls published in her hometown newspaper, the Pittsburg Dispatch, under the headline “What Girls Are Good For” (the unsubtly implied answer being birthing babies and tending households). The man even evoked China’s then-policy of killing female babies, intimating that such an act would allegedly save girls from the drudgery of their destiny.

Bly’s anonymous letter to the editor, written in 1885 and found in the absolutely fantastic new Penguin Classics anthology Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings (public library), was at once so fierce and so thoughtful that it prompted the editor to print a notice asking the author of the letter to identify herself. Once Bly did, she was hired as a reporter for the paper.

In the letter, titled “The Girl Puzzle,” Bly considers the value of women — not society women and wealthy matrons, “but those without talent, without beauty, without money” — and calls for a sort of empathy rarely afforded those in such circumstances:

Can they that have full and plenty of this world’s goods realize what it is to be a poor working woman, abiding in one or two bare rooms, without fire enough to keep warm, while her threadbare clothes refuse to protect her from the wind and cold, and denying herself necessary food that her little ones may not go hungry; fearing the landlord’s frown and threat to cast her out and sell what little she has, begging for employment of any kind that she may earn enough to pay for the bare rooms she calls home, no one to speak kindly to or encourage her, nothing to make life worth the living?

Bly argues that society’s “solution” to the problem — employing these poor young women at the factory — is more of a punishment than a help:

The pay may in some instances be better, but from 7 a.m. until 6 p.m., except for 30 minutes at noon, she is shut up in a noisy, unwholesome place. When duties are over for the day, with tired limbs and aching head, she hastens sadly to a cheerless home. How eagerly she looks forward to pay day, for that little mite means so much at home. Thus day after day, week after week, sick or well, she labors on that she may live. What think you of this, butterflies of fashions, ladies of leisure? This poor girl does not win fame by running off with a coachman; she does not hug and kiss a pug dog nor judge people by their clothes and grammar; and some of them are ladies, perfect ladies, more so than many who have had every advantage.

Bly’s most important point, however, is about the social advantages afforded to boys but not girls — about how this early discrepancy in starting points echoes out to shape entire lives and entire classes of citizens, and how fostering an entrepreneurial spirit in girls is the best way to mend the imbalance:

If girls were boys quickly would it be said: start them where they will, they can, if ambitious, win a name and fortune. How many wealthy and great men could be pointed out who started in the depths; but where are the many women? Let a youth start as errand boy and he will work his way up until he is one of the firm. Girls are just as smart, a great deal quicker to learn; why, then, can they not do the same? As all occupations for women are filled why not start some new ones. Instead of putting the little girls in factories let them be employed in the capacity of messenger boys or office boys. It would be healthier. They would have a chance to learn; their ideas would become broader and they would make as good, if not better, women in the end. It is asserted by storekeepers that women make the best clerks. Why not send them out as merchant travelers? They can talk as well as men — at least men claim that it is a noted fact that they talk a great deal more and faster. If their ability at home for selling exceeds a man’s why would it not abroad? Their lives would be brighter, their health better, their pocketbooks fuller, unless their employers would do as now — give them half wages because they are women.

She offers an illustrative example from the town itself:

A girl was engaged to fill a position that had always been occupied by men, who, for the same, received $2.00 a day. Her employer stated that he never had anyone in the same position that was as accurate, speedy and gave the same satisfaction; however, as she was “just a girl” he gave her $5.00 a week. Some call this equality.

It may be tempting to think that such failures of equality and human rights are behind us — this was, after all, the Victorian era. They are not — their ghosts are alive and well, unconsciously shaping even our best-intentioned behaviors today. In world where women still make significantly less than men in the same occupations and girls are still encouraged to do “girl things,” and a media landscape where men still receive 63% of bylines and women are honored in a mere 23% of obituaries, Bly’s lament, even 120 years later, is a far cry from outdated and irrelevant.

Bly concludes the letter with a reflection remarkably timely in our “lean in” era:

Here would be a good field for believers in women’s rights. Let them forego their lecturing and writing and go to work; more work and less talk. Take some girls that have the ability, procure for them situations, start them on their way, and by so doing accomplish more than by years of talking. Instead of gathering up the “real smart young men” gather up the real smart girls, pull them out of the mire, give them a shove up the ladder of life, and be amply repaid both by their success and unforgetfulness of those that held out the helping hand.

However visionary this may sound, those who are interested in humankind and wonder what to do with the girls might try it.

And yet, despite Bly’s consistently intelligent and fearless journalism — she went on to write an exposé on the horrific working conditions for factory girls and an op-ed on the gender inequality embedded in divorce laws — her editor at the Pittsburg Dispatch routinely assigned her subjects deemed appropriate for women, from flower shows to ladies’ lunches. Never one to succumb to the pressures of the establishment, Bly quit and set her eyes on greater horizons — but not without leaving her bigoted editor a farewell note with a piece of her mind:

Dear Q.O., I’m off for New York. Look out for me. Bly.

And look out the world did. In New York, Bly broke into journalism despite the extreme male bias of the field and went on to write such pioneering pieces as her exposé on the abuses that take place in state institutions for the mentally ill, for which she embedded herself in an insane asylum for ten days and endured the very mistreatment on which she reported. In the preface to Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings, NPR Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan reflects on the many letters from girls and young women she receives every year, inquiring about various aspects of Bly’s life:

I suspect these young women want to know something else, too. I know I sure do. I want to know how a poor, skimpily educated teenager named Elizabeth Cochran found the guts to transform herself into a reporter named Nellie Bly who helped change the world by writing about it.

For more of how she changed the world, see Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings, which is superb in its entirety. Complement it with the illustrated story of how Bly raced around the world and some thoughts on feminism from George Orwell.

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Cool pics from Maker Faire Shenzhen including this inventive headdress punctuated with LEDs!