firehose

I don’t know anything about it, haven’t read it yet!

But I don’t see why he can’t be black or mixed race. Why is that even a problem?

An anonymous reader sends this story from Wired: "The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise. Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it's being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. ... The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten. ... The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Facebook has just announced that David Ebersman — the CFO who took Facebook public and attracted some level of scrutiny for its rocky initial ride — is departing the company later this year.

http://uncrate.com/stuff/buffalo-trace-extended-drying-time-bourbon/:

Looking at you, @mercuryeric.

Wall Street Journal

Apple Reports Higher Profit, Stock Buyback Wall Street Journal Chief Executive Tim Cook said the company chose to expand its stock-buyback program by $30 billion because it views its shares as undervalued. "That should show you how much confidence we have in the future of the company," Mr. Cook said in an ... Apple shares surge as second-quarter revenue tops forecastsLos Angeles Times Apple increases stock buyback, will split stockBusinessweek Apple shares jump on iPhone salesFinancial Times Telegraph.co.uk -Fortune all 45 news articles »

Jens Kratholm, a 56-year-old Norwegian, owns a staggering seven Teslas. Six of them are Roadsters and one is a Model S.

He lives in Narvik, one of the world’s northernmost cities where the average annual temperature is three degrees, celsius. Remarkably, Kratholm, who works as an ophthalmologist, says he wasn’t even interested in cars until he read about the Roadster in a newspaper supplement. Previously, he owned a Volkswagen minivan for about a decade. Upon reading about the Tesla, he decided to order one without even seeing it. The nearest sales office was in Denmark at the time. “I read about the car and that was enough,” he said in an interview published by Tesla.

Tesla has an outsized presence in Norway— which is one of the richest nations per capita on the planet and also an extremely environmentally conscious place. The country has an incentive system so generous that it seems almost financially unsound to not buy an electric car. Electric vehicles are exempt from taxes that, on average, add about 50% to the cost of a vehicle. Moreover, electric vehicles get free parking, free charging, and can use the bus lanes. They are also exempt from road tolls and tunnel-use charges. Traffic in bus lanes and competition for charging stations has gotten intense. 

The environment is what spurred Kratholm’s interest in Tesla, though he now also cites its remote-heating function and road handling (both important in Arctic conditions.) He has since bought Teslas for his wife and for his six adult kids to use when they visit.

An anonymous reader writes "This article goes into the making of upcoming fantasy title The Witcher 3. The studio, CD Projekt Red, reveals that, unusually, it'll be releasing the game as a DRM-free download. 'We believe that DRM does more harm to legit gamers than good for the gaming industry, that's why the game will also be completely DRM-free,' says the game's level designer, Miles Tost. The game will build on the strengths of The Witcher 2 while attempting to broaden its scope. 'We want to combine the strong pull of closed-world RPGs story-wise, with a world where you can go anywhere and do anything you want.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's still time to switch to the White Sox.

The Cubs just gave up five runs to the Diamondbacks to blow a 5-2 lead in the ninth inning. Sorry kid, but this probably won't be the last time the Cubs make you cry:

It's fitting, though, since today is Wrigley Field's centennial, and the Cubs are still Cubsing things up as they've been doing for the last 100 years. Or, to put it like D'backs announcer Bob Brenly did:

#Dbacks analyst Bob Brenly, after TV shows young Cubs fan dismayed w/ Montero's tying 1B: "That's exactly what his grandfather looked like."

— Jack Magruder (@JackMagruder) April 23, 2014

Color time! w/ @angel_26r (at ChiTown Tattoo & Body Piercing Co.)

Artist’s Facebook

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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submitted by Crowsby [link] [5 comments]

You still can’t get new HBO shows like this season’s “Game of Thrones” without paying for TV. But starting in May, you’ll be able to get some of the premium cable channel’s older stuff online — via an Amazon Prime subscription.

riddlemetom:

Overheard in the halls of Hogwarts [bonus] inspired by x

The American Local hitches its wagon to small plates. by Andrea Damewood

AS I STROLLED UP Southeast Division, I passed Clay's Smokehouse, where a sandwich board outside proclaimed "no small plates." Within eyeshot? The American Local and the second outpost of Bollywood Theater—two small-plates-heavy new kids on that ever-burgeoning restaurant block.

Small plates are a divisive prospect. ($16 for six BBQ oysters?! I can't even.) Unsurprisingly, the backlash began almost as soon as tapas took off. Clay's owner, Mike Slyman, put it this way in an interview on the Mercury's Blogtown: "I got really tired of going to highly recommended restaurants, dropping a hundred bucks, leaving hungry, and stopping at Burgerville on the way home." I feel ya, Mike. I, too, hate going home hangry. Small plates meals can feel like your party on the Oregon Trail is laboring over the Rockies, with everyone cut down to "meager" rations and nary a buffalo in sight. But in the case of The American Local, I'm going to open my big maw in favor of minuscule portions.

First, let's not forget I'm dining on the Merc's oh-so-luxe company dime (let's not forget the meaning of sarcasm, either), which makes it a little easier to drop $11 on foie gras-dusted poutine and then not finish it because it's just a little too rich without anything to cut through the fat fries, fatty gravy, and super fatty liver. But seriously, the price point here isn't terrible, as everything runs from about $5 to $15. Chef-owner Chris Whaley and his partner Jenny Nickolaus say they're serving "New West Drinking Food"—which I imagine means, "Get drunk and concoct a menu that gets freaky with Asian influences and local ingredients, coherence be damned."

Yet because of those small plates, it all works. Successive visits brought bizarre yet deeply satisfying meals like striped bass with salted radish, yuzu, white soy, and chive ($12), a delicate layering of flavor that could hold its own at any of the city's fine sushi establishments; followed by panko-breaded deep fried macaroni and cheese ($7); and a watermelon radish salad with black garlic, scallion, and nuoc cham ($6). Somehow, the jarred banana ($5), a deconstructed banana cream pie/cake, was the logical and delicious end.

I also appreciate a place that serves a double burger ($9) but lavishes major love on the veggies. The roasted carrots ($8) are sublime: roasted until subtly sweet, then made creamy and herbaceous with just a hint of crunch thanks to yogurt, cilantro, avocado, and sunflower seeds. And, no worries, this is still Portland, and pork is not forsaken: The best skewer on the yakitori list is the Korean rice cakes, roasted over an open flame to chewy, mochi-textured perfection, wrapped in porky guancaile and hit with some savory-sweet tonkatsu sauce ($5).

Of course, delving this far into a drinking menu requires a cocktail or three. The Fighting Cock Bourbon made with house-made salted caramel bitters ($9) was so delicious that my friend asked to buy some of the bitters to take home. The bar staff obliged her with a couple of ounces in a Dixie cup with a lid taped on and a recipe written on the side—good move, cause that drink is strong enough that we sure weren't going to remember the ratios. The drink list rotates frequently, although a relative constant is the Machu Pisco with grapefruit, tarragon, black pepper, and lime ($10), a great twist on the Pisco sour with a bite at the end.

Dishes arrived with reasonably good pacing, although a bit faster than I anticipated, and were brought by servers who actually seemed to care whether we liked our food. (They even grabbed our coats when we sat down and then actually remembered to bring them back to us when we left.) On our last visit, we sat at the kitchen bar on stools that mercifully had backs on them, and alternated between conversation and watching line cooks take blowtorches to sundry plates and pop bushels of Brussels sprouts into the deep fryer. When we left, the chef asked us how we liked it and really listened when we answered. That's good treatment for folks at the end of a long night on the New West drinking frontier.

Tues-Thurs 5-10 pm, Fri-Sat 5-11 pm, Sun 5–9 pm. Beer, wine, sake, cocktails, house-made sodas. Three card limit per table, no reservations.

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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audzilla:

Tiny Griffin! The first in a mini series of mini mythological creatures.

ATTN treesofarden

Most businesses caught up in a social-media firestorm over a product might’ve issued an apology or hunkered down and quietly waited for the controversy to pass, but not Tankhead Custom Tees. The Murrieta, California-based company was thrust into the spotlight this week after a photo taken at WonderCon Anaheim of one of its T-shirt designs […]

For the first time ever, astronomers have detected a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of an inactive galaxy. The unique objects were discovered because they ripped apart a star when the ESA's observatory just happened to be looking in the right direction.

Read more...

“Bad books on writing tell you to ‘WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW’, a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”

-

Joe Haldeman (via maxkirin)

I have said this a million times. “Write what you know” is bullshit.

LEARN THINGS TO KNOW THAT ARE WORTH WRITING ABOUT.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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bevismusson:

euo:

myintrovertedmind:

« The Real Africa : Fight The Stereotype » by Thiri Mariah Boucher

P.R.E.A.C.H.

YAS

Lovely.

Bloody wish someone had ironed the flags before taking the photos though.

by Joe Streckert

THE HOUSES are gone. The theater, the recreation center, and the churches have all been destroyed. Walking through Delta Park, you'd never guess that the second largest city in Oregon once stood there.

Most accounts of Vanport emphasize the flood of 1948—and in fairness, an entire city wiped out by a flood in a single day does cry out for its own disaster movie. Houses getting destroyed, people drowning, and general destruction is way more exciting than, say, informal discrimination on the part of a municipal housing authority, or migratory industrial labor during World War II. However, that non-action-movie-type stuff is arguably more important to Portland history than the flood. Vanport, and the issues surrounding it, changed Portland. Its story is one of politics, NIMBYism, and more than a little racism and xenophobia.

The Birth of Vanport

WWII had an immense effect on the demographics and economics of the United States, including Portland. The Kaiser company wanted to turn the Rose City into a shipbuilding center, churning out a constant supply of support vessels for the Pacific fleet.

"The reason why the Portland region was getting the demand for the 24/7 workforce was that we had the cheapest electricity in the country," says Tanya March, a researcher with a Ph.D. in urban studies who's focused on wartime housing projects. "That's why we could outcompete the East Coast. We could run these factories off the Bonneville Dam. We had cheaper power than everybody."

Assembling ships for the war effort meant a huge influx of new laborers to Oregon from around the country—and Kaiser's old advertisements sound almost desperate to the modern reader. "Previous experience is not necessary," says one ad from 1942. "Training will be given on the job. Willingness to work and a desire to do that work are what will do the maximum good." Kaiser's solicitations appealed to workers' "patriotic viewpoint," and advertised a base pay of $0.88 an hour, just over $12.76 in 2014 dollars.

Workers from around the country answered Kaiser's call. According to the late Manly Maben, author of Vanport, the only states not eventually represented in Vanport were Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, and Delaware. Portland, a muddy Western river town, suddenly became host to Americans from across the continent. That large migratory population included a fair number of African Americans—a group heretofore underrepresented in Stumptown. The African Americans who followed up on Kaiser's offer of employment were going into unknown territory. The 1940 census recorded that less than one percent of Oregon's population was black.

"A lot of established Portlanders didn't like poor white people or poor black people coming here to work," says Portland State University professor Carl Abbott, author of Portland in Three Centuries. "There was race, there was class, there was regional prejudice."

An Oregonian headline in 1942 read "New Negro Migrants Worry City," and Portland's dominant daily wrung its hands over how the new black workers were "taxing the housing facilities of the Albina District... and confronting authorities with a new housing problem."

deducecanoe:

awesomeavocadolove:

Would You Rather: Always Wear Your Superhero Costume or Be Naked All The Time? [x]

I wasn’t going to reblog this until Mackie. 

THE LAST ONE THO

THE FALCON AND ALSO THAT GUY WHAT PLAYS HIM SO GOOD.

The Buffalo Jills are coming after the Bills organization for practices they deem to be unacceptable.

The Buffalo Bills cheerleading team, known as the Jills, are suing the organization for what they believes are unfair business practices and poor treatment, according to Sports Illustrated.

The cheerleaders allege the team is paying them below minimum wage, along with committing inappropriate contact, making degrading comments and treating them in a demeaning fashion. The Bills are not the first team to have action taken against them by their cheer team, with the Cincinnati Bengals and Oakland Raiders already having dealt with this issue.

Underpaid & unpaid

In the lawsuit, it is alleged the Bills did not reimburse business expenses, unlawfully took gratuities and kick-backs from the Jills, and did not always make payments to the cheerleaders in a timely fashion. The Jills also say they were not paid for any of their practice time, which averaged to approximately eight hours per week.

Of the 20-35 charity and community events the Jills were involved in, most were unpaid by the team.

Each individual cheerleader was paid a different amount. In 2012-13, Jaclyn S. was paid $806.00 for all of her work. For that same campaign, Alyssa U. was paid $420.00. Additionally, Maria P. was cut a check for $105.00 and Melissa M. received $210.00 for the aforementioned 2012-13 season.

It is approximated by the plaintiffs that each woman works, on average, 20 hours per week unpaid as a Jill. All told, each cheerleader is believed to work 840 unpaid hours each year for the Bills. The New York State minimum wage from July 24, 2009 to Dec. 31, 2013 was $7.25 before being raised to $8.00 in 2014. It is alleged that the Bills paid well below that amount.

The team also made each girl pay for her uniform, a cost of approximately $650.00, per the lawsuit. If the team had an event for the Jills out of Buffalo, they were allegedly not reimbursements for cost such as gas or hotels. When the Jills calendars came out, each girl was required to buy 50-75 at $10 each, and sell them on their own time to recoup the money.

Additionally, the annual Jills golf tournament was a cost to the cheerleaders. According to the lawsuit, the Bills had the cheerleaders sell four tickets of $125.00 each on their own time. If the girl could not do it, she was subject to personal financial loss.

Demeaning & degrading treatment

One of the cheerleaders, known as Maria P., discussed exactly what some of her problems are with the team. She mentioned being touched during a golf outing and being made to be put in a dunk tank at the event in a bikini. She also talked about being auctioned as a prize at the event.

Within the lawsuit, the document states that Jills were then mandated to sit with the person who won their auction, many times on the winner's lap due to a lack of seating in the golf cart. At this time, some Jills were subject to inappropriate touching and sexual comments.

There was also "The Man Show" at the Niagara Seneca Casino, in which the Jills had to sport revealing attire and/or bikinis for the mostly male crowd. Again, this led to alleged inappropriate sexual conduct.

The Bills also held a calendar release party, with the Jills once again wearing bikinis. The girls were not paid and had to walk in close proximity to the patrons, leading to alleged groping at the "Lava" nightclub at the Turning Stone Casino and Resort.

"Physique evaluations"

Then there is the "Jiggle test" for the cheerleaders. The lawsuit clarified the meaning of that, per the piece:

In addition, the Jills were subjected to weekly "physique evaluations" during which defendants' representatives tested the Jills' bodies for "jiggling." During the "Jiggle Test" defendants scrutinized the women's stomach, arms, legs, hips, and butt while she does jumping jacks. The physique evaluations largely determine whether or not any particular Jill would be allowed to perform at the Bills' next home game. Jills that failed to meet defendants' physical standards received warnings, and in some cases were penalized, suspended or dismissed.

There were also plenty of requirements on how the girls could dress, walk, talk and act both during work hours and in their personal lives. Jills are expected to have a french manicure or natural nail polish only, along with specific hair colors and styles. If one of the girls wanted to change her hair, it needed to be approved, per the lawsuit.

This is another embarrassing moment in the recent history of the Bills. The team has suffered through a miserable 15 seasons, not making the playoffs since 1999. Buffalo has not enjoyed a sustained run of competitive football since the early 1990's, when the team went to four consecutive Super Bowls, only to lose them all.

[Photo: Radio/Facebook]

Looks like Somerville music venue Radio is really and truly done as the liquor license is up for a transfer at next week's licensing hearing [PDF]. If approved, it'll go to Two Three Zero, the event space at the new Paint Nite headquarters at 230 Somerville Avenue, on the edge of Somerville's Union Square.

Paint Nite hosts events around the globe that involve drinking cocktails with a group while everyone learns to paint the same picture. The company partners up with various bars and other venues with the goal of bringing in business on slow nights. According to the website, Two Three Zero is the "snazzy new event space" at Paint Nite HQ, and painters can currently enjoy $5 snacks like vanilla cream puffs or pretzel chips with hummus, plus beer and wine.
· 4/28/2014 agenda [Somerville Licensing Commission]
· All coverage of Radio on Eater [~EBOS~]