firehose

Greg Kroah-Hartman released the Linux 3.13.11 kernel this week and then called it end-of-life with the Linux 3.14 kernel now being available. However, the Ubuntu Kernel Team at Canonical has now pledged to take up the upstream maintenance of the 3.13 kernel...

Relics of technology

Uber, the wildly successful taxi-service app that garners both good and virulently hateful feeling, just released maps of how its services are used in the 100 cities in which it now operates.

Releasing beautiful maps is a well-worn strategy for tech companies to get a little bit of free press. Foursquare, the location check-in app, released a bunch of maps last year, Facebook did the same, and Instagram regularly releases lists of the most photographed places in the world. (Considering Quartz covered all of these, the free press strategy is self-evidently working.)

But what makes Uber’s maps different is that they go beyond telling you about how the service is used—Foursquare’s maps, for instance, look like little more than night-time shots of cities from the sky—to reveal the demographic contours of cities. Take the image above, of New York. Uber is clearly popular on the island of Manhattan, and gets decent traffic out to Brooklyn. But few residents of Queens, which is poorer and skews older (pdf), seem to use the service. The Bronx is invisible.

What the world’s cities would look like without poor or old people

Here’s Mexico City. The gridded areas where Uber services seem most concentrated are neighborhoods like Polanco (high-end shopping), Condesa (trendy restaurants and galleries), and the Zona Rosa (nightlife), where the young and well-heeled hang out. There’s also a high concentration on the main avenues of Lomas de Chapultepec, one of the wealthiest areas of town—the higgledy-piggledy bit to the west—but less so on the residential streets, suggesting a lot of Uber users pass through but the people who live there, who tend to have have their own cars and even drivers, don’t use it so much. But large swathes of this enormous city are dark.

This is Sydney, where the vast majority of rides are in the central business district (centre) and the inner, more desirable suburbs, such as Surry Hills.

One of the starkest examples in New Delhi, where the north, west and east of the city get virtually no Uber cars driving through. The city center (the octagonal shapes) and the south, home to wealthy, young Delhi-ites and plenty of bars and restaurants, is bright blue.

It’s the same story in Mumbai, with only the south and west of the city showing any inclination towards Uber.

Paris is one large playground for the rich anyway, but note the areas outside the Périphérique, or ring road. While the desirable western suburbs feature on the map, the banlieues are, unsurprisingly, pretty bare.

It should, of course, come as no surprise that Uber users tend to be younger and richer. For one thing, they need a smartphone to access the service. Moreover, Uber remains a particularly American obsession. Those who use it in Europe, where public transport and decent cabs are plentiful, or in other countries, where car service is expensive, are likelier to be younger and more connected to American trends.

Nor is this is the first time smartphones and their apps have been used to identify where the world’s rich live. A lovely set of maps that showed smartphone use by platform also showed the divide between iPhone users and Android users in the world’s cities.

Though Caleb Sayan, the manager of Blue Rider Designs, has made sporadic public appearances in Portland over the years, in general the Old Town-based textile library that "houses and maintains an international collection of over 40,000 textiles and original artwork" maintains a low profile. It doesn't keep public hours, for starters, and rather quietly moved from its original spot in NYC to right around the corner from my office, and boy have I got to get in there:

This textile library began in New York in 1987 and was skillfully assembled by Andrea Aranow and edited for surface designers of the most exacting standards. Its unique perspective helped them garner inspiration from unique cultural and historical sources worldwide with textile designs representing 6 continents and countless countries. Noted clients included Ralph Lauren, Vuitton, Marni, Dries van Noten, Abercrombie & Fitch and UNIQLO. The collection provides design inspiration to apparel, footwear, wallpaper, upholstery, and stationery industries. The breadth and depth of the textile designs in the collection are exceptional, showcasing aesthetic styles such as mid-century modern, art-deco, toile de Jouy, and tropicals. For whimsical prints clients can peruse French nautical themes, Japanese waves, and 1950s Americana assemblages. For vivid color inspiration a look at our original 1970’s artwork from New York or appliques from Panama and African strip weaving is bound to inspire. Handcrafted highlights from the collection include block-printed linens from England and stenciled kimono silks. The woven selection offers every surface from Japanese crepes to French tissue picks, voided velvets, and jacquards. The needlework section includes French curtains, Victorian laces, and detailed eyelets for simple elegance.

Check out the video about the collection's origins, featuring some chump named Jimi Hendrix:

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Troll hard Toronto, troll hard.

Ah, I see "http://t.co/QyU5WNK03k" now redirects to the Raptors website. Maybe it's time to shell out for that domain, fellas.

— Emma Span (@emmaspan) April 23, 2014

The Brooklyn Nets continue to have a few internet issues. That is, if you consider not owning you team's domain name an "issue" in 2014 (spoiler: it is).

Someone sniping a domain name and holding it ransom in nothing new, but at this point the rest of the NBA is just trolling the Nets. In 2012 "Nets.com" took you to the page for the New York Knicks, last year a quick visit would tell you all about the Boston Celtics -- now you can learn all about the Toronto Raptors, who happen to be the Nets' opponents in the NBA Playoffs.

This is Drake's fault, we just know it.

Designer Ruan Hao in partnership with Lycs Architecture has created the CATable, a wonderful piece of furniture to please the hardest of working humans and the most curious of cats alike. The idea for the CATable, a desk whose sleek modern designs hide a bevy of hidey-holes to keep kitty amused, came from personal experience (translated from Chinese).

People who live with cats always has those kind of experiences?
1. Putting away the cat from your lap top was like a sentimental ritual of temporary farewell.
2. A proper sized hole could be so irresistible to cats. Their curiosity would be greatly satisfied through repetitively exploring the unknown path behind the hole.
The design of CATable was a fusion of those experiences, as well a locus where the interaction occurs.It is a table for us, and a paradise for cats.

images via Lycs Architecture

via Freshome, My Modern Met

Over at The Nib, Zach Weinersmith has a hilarious webcomic about how scientists get government funding these days.

Read more...

NEW YORK—With the 2014 NFL Draft less than a month away, sources confirmed Tuesday that GMs from across the league are closely studying a Bleacher Report slideshow titled “Ranking The Top 100 NFL Draft Prospects” before making their fina...

ofools:

and its finished. I wish tumblr allowed for larger landscape pictures but, eh what can u do

The Infinite Jukebox:

isthisusernametakenyet:

Hello, Tumblr. See this thing?

It is the best goddamned thing you’ve seen all day.

Say hello to the Infinite Jukebox, an experiment in looping songs. See those curves cutting through the circle? What this bad boy does is analyze the song for similar beats…

“My point, aside from remarking that both Tolkien and Le Guin are arguing that escape means hope, and hope is one of the great virtues of fantasy, is what Tolkien says at the end of the passage: they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Because I think that’s exactly it. The denigration of “escapism” comes from an implicit belief that it is brave and necessary and heroic to face “reality,” where “reality” is grim and dark and nihilistic (“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as that tremendous pessimist Thomas Hobbes puts it), and that if you turn away from that “reality,” you are a deserter and therefore a coward.”

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Katherine Addision (aka. Sarah Monette) on “Of Better Worlds and Worlds Gone Wrong (via adribbleofink)

oh, I like this - thank you for sharing.

“And that, I think, is where hope comes in. If we understand “escapism” as the Escape of the Prisoner rather than the Flight of the Deserter, then surely what motivates it, more than anything else, is hope. The hope that the prison is not eternal. The hope of communicating with other prisoners. The hope that if you keep chipping away at the bars long enough, one of them will fall out. And I refuse utterly to classify that hope as weak or foolish.”

(via broadlybrazen)

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Xapers:

Xapers is a personal document indexing system, geared towards academic journal articles.

Think of it as your own personal document search engine, or a local cache of online libraries. It provides fast search of document text and bibliographic data and simple document and bibtex retrieval.

One of the common comments when people see the work of J.H. Williams III is that it looks like fine art. It is, and as it turns out he has some fans in Blondie. This week the rock band debuted the packaging for its upcoming album Ghosts of Download, and it features a expansive set […]

For 50 years, the United States was embroiled in the Cold War, a national effort to hold the powerful Soviet Union in check without actually entering into armed conflict. Now, with tensions once again rising in the east, we find ourselves in a second Cold War, a National effort to hold the powerful Russia in check. And whether there will be armed conflict between the Brooklyn band and Vladimir Putin’s increasingly imperialistic government remains to be seen.

The National has canceled tour dates in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev in response to Russia’s apparent attempts to annex Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. “We remain hopeful of coming to play for you in the future and we sincerely hope this current instability resolves in a positive, democratic and peaceful way,” announced the band. Let’s hope Putin liked Boxer enough to refrain from retaliation.

snowce:

Italian ship Amerigo Vespucci, Departure from Egypt, 1963

effington:

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is my favorite tweet in the history of the medium

"Lint Rollers on deck," that's the motto.

(GIF via @bengolliver)

Can we be honest with ourselves? This is not embarrassing. This is cool as hell. What's embarrassing is lint on your pants.

Drake leaned into the joke on Instagram.

New motto for the summer!

It made me feel sad, seeing the “perfect thing” reduced to such a pedestrian function. Impersonally repurposed, devoid of caché, the antithesis of the iPod’s glory years. Worse still, it had been caged next to instructions on how to use it, as if the average consumer would have forgotten, in stark contrast to the portable phonograph displayed by the cash register for Record Store Day.

Thinking back on the iPod’s “classic” years right now is a little like recalling the heyday of silent cinema from a vantage point in the late 1930s. Purists might lament what listening to music has become in the interim, but it still feels too soon to be properly nostalgic. We’re too excited by what the latest technology can do to enhance our experience, like movie audiences enraptured by the Technicolor majesty of Gone With the Wind, to register what we might have lost in the process.

In the case of the iPod, this task is made harder by the fact that there is no clear-cut distinction between what music sounded like on the vast majority of iPods in 2002 or 2006 and what it sounds like on people’s smartphones today. The loss of nuance that has plagued consumer audio since the mp3 became dominant remains the biggest problem from an audiophile’s perspective. But it’s not as if it has gotten worse.

To be sure, the latter incarnations of the iPod Classic, in their 120 and 160 gigabyte sizes, made it possible to load a lot of music onto one’s portable music player in a “lossless” format at a somewhat reasonable price, as compared to the high-end iPod Touch, which only comes with 64 gigabytes of storage. Yet few people actually used their Classics that way, preferring instead to sync as much of their collection as they could in the compressed mp3 or m4a formats, often from libraries ripped at a lower bit rate than was necessary. The emphasis, in other words, fell on the portable library’s completeness rather than the quality of the reproductions that comprised it.

The situation today is markedly different. Most people’s priorities have shifted from bringing their own music library on the road with them to ensuring that they have access to vastly larger libraries in which they have borrowing privileges, but no claim to ownership. Given how gradually this transformation has occurred over the past decade, its underlying significance is not immediately apparent. But it is worth taking the time to ponder the topic with care.

For some time now, we have been evolving from a society in which ownership — of modern conveniences, cars, and homes, but also of culture — was the primary goal for people of means, into one with a more transitory conception of belonging, one in which we lease, rent, borrow and, at times, steal without as much concern for what will stay in our possession for an extended period of time and, perhaps, outlast us, to be handed down to our heirs.

The reasons for this change are many, though usually bound up with the way in which capitalism has developed since the Cold War. For the purposes of understanding what the classic iPod and its competitors meant to us and what they signify now, however, it is sufficient to point out how much our everyday understanding of collecting has mutated. Increasingly, collections are what we seek to secure and sustain access to, their contents by definition not ours to dispose of, instead of what we want to build for ourselves and, as a consequence, protect.

This is the truth of the Cloud, as Microsoft relentlessly advertised it a number of years back. Like its vaporous namesake, it is ultimately beyond our personal control, however many incantations we cast in its direction. In a manner so self-evident that it is liable to escape detection, the collection has become depersonalized. We may still wish to see ourselves reflected in its vastness, rearranged to suit the particularity of our desires. But deep down we are always mindful of the distinction between querying a database available to billions of people and looking through a library of items that truly belong to us.

Does it make sense for music lovers to mourn the iPod’s decline? While the device cannot take all the blame for the levelling of differences that formats like MP3 and M4A made possible, it certainly played a major role in their ascendance. As people became used to hearing music that had been diminished by compression and recontextualized by the iPod’s file structure — reduced to the common denominator of convenience — the pursuit of fidelity was marginalized. For the majority of consumers, it was more important to have tracks play at the same volume than to respect their original dynamics. The imperative, as theorists of postmodernism might note with satisfaction, was to sustain a sense of flow.

There’s another way to look at this process, though, one that shows the iPod in a more favorable light. Yes, the device levelled musical differences. But it did so in the service of human ones. The more recordings in a collection are made to sound similar, the less likely they are to make it seem incoherent. Personalization doesn’t work unless it solidifies the consumer’s sense of self. By prioritizing the function of the music library as a whole over that of its individual elements, the iPod contributed significantly to a feeling of portable identity, the sort that exists alongside and, potentially, in place of roots.

From one perspective, the cloud-centered culture that predominates now takes this principle even further. Yet it comes to us in a form at odds with ownership. The music we stream — and, in some cases, provisionally download — from Spotify, Beats Music and similar ventures, as well as what we access on YouTube, never belongs to us the way that the music we manually load onto our computers did. No matter how many playlists we construct, no matter how many of our friends to subscribe to them, we are still working with borrowed materials. They belong to a library, but not our library.

To be sure, there were plenty of iPods filled with content obtained through less-than-legal means. As Napster had already made clear in the late 1990s, when the iPod was still a few years away, the digitization of culture dooms property rights to a state of perpetual crisis. But most music lovers built their library on the foundation of records they had purchased, even if they had acquired music by other means. And the iPod had the effect of levelling these differences in provenance as well. Provided that the core of one’s library conveyed a strong sense of ownership, the rest of the recordings would be imbued with its traces as well.

After loading up one’s iPod with songs — a time-consuming process, particularly for the devices with bigger hard drives — the consumer could then fine tune the library over time, creating playlists suited to different activities or moods. Because this customization wasn’t oriented towards sharing with others, as its equivalent on Spotify or Beats is, it enhanced the iPod’s aura of personality, making it function something like a well-worn shoe. Even though Apple offered iPod Classics with only slightly more options than a Model-T Ford — white, then black, then black or silver — the huge range of third-party accessories that developed over the years testified to consumers’ desire to distinguish their particular iPod from other people’s.

In short, the classic iPod was a prized possession. Whatever its shortcomings, the device still encouraged consumers to act the part of curators. Today, that level of care seems excessive, even perverse. Collections that took decades to develop have been rendered irrelevant by easy access to content stored in the Cloud. From one perspective, this could be considered progress, the latest stage in the process Walter Benjamin describes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. But the feelings of dispossession that accompany this development will not dissipate until those great collections in the sky belong to everyone equally, rather than being the domain of corporations.

 

Photographs courtesy of Charlie Bertsch and Joel Schalit

Original Source

hodad

NEW ORLEANS, (WGNO) Friends and family of Mickey Easterling are saying their final farewells to the well-known New Orleanian.

The philanthropist, socialite and proud Louisiana native passed away last week at the age of 83.

More than a thousand people attended her larger than life memorial service, with Mickey just as she wanted to be remembered… causally sitting on an iron bench, wearing a magnificent hat with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other.

“She`s in a Leonardo outfit,” says Sammy Steele who did Mickey’s hair and make-up. “And I actually dressed her tonight for the occasion.”

It`s no secret Mickey loved to be the center of attention.

But she always turned that attention into helping people in need.

“She touched so many different people. She made such a contribution in our city, to arts and the community,” says Steele.

“Mickey is known for throwing some of the most memorable New Orleans party`s.

“One specific one I remember was the one she gave for Lena Horne.

“It’s like something out a department store window in New York. On 5th Ave.,” says Steele referring to how  Mickey’s memorial service was planned by her ahead of time, “This is what she requested.  She`s sitting in a garden scenery to depict her back yard. This is what she wanted.  No stone was left unturned for this memorial.”

“She looks wonderful,” says one bystander. “She looks just like Mickey.”

Mickey is a Graduate of Mt. Carmel Academy.

Original Source

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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