Donald Trump is a hugely polarizing figure. While he repels plenty of people, he continues to attract others.
To wit, the results from the latest Washington Post-ABC News survey show Trump with a commanding lead over his rivals for the Republican nomination for the US presidency. According to the poll, 24% of Republican or Republican-leaning registered voters would vote for Trump, or at least “lean toward” him, if a primary or caucus were held in their state today. The next-closest candidates, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush, polled at 13% and 12% of voters, respectively.
The poll results have a margin of error of 3.5%, meaning Trump has a comfortable cushion between himself and Walker, the governor of Wisconsin.
The results come just two days after Trump angered a number of influential Republicans (and Democrats) when he said John McCain, a longtime member of the Republican party and its candidate for president in 2008, was not a war hero for being captured during the Vietnam War.
But Trump’s lead doesn’t mean conservatives necessarily agree with him about McCain, or that he’s immune to backlash over his remarks. In an article detailing the new poll results, the Washington Post noted that his support “fell sharply” after his comments. The poll was taken from July 16 to July 19, so most of the polling calls were taken before Trump’s criticism of McCain had been widely reported.
Still, it’s a sizable increase for Trump over the slim lead he held in another recent poll, and a major bump up from the mere 4% of right-leaning voters who backed him in a May 31 Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Trump hadn’t yet declared his candidacy at that time; since then he has made headlines with his other inflammatory comments about Mexican immigrants to the US being “rapists” and criminals. While his words caused major business partners, including NBC and Macy’s, to part ways with him, they’ve spurred a number of conservative voters to his corner.
In a fun callback to 2011, when we were all certain that Benicio Del Toro would play the villain in the then-untitled Star Trek sequel, The Wrap is reporting that Disney and Lucasfilm want Del Toro to play the villain in Star Wars: Episode VIII—as in, the one after The Force Awakens. The Wrap says that “discussions are still in the very early stages,” but supposedly “multiple individuals familiar with the casting process” have confirmed that it’s true. We don’t know much about the character that Del Toro would play, but The Wrap does specifically say “the villain” and not “a villain,” so he’d have to be someone even more evil than Adam Driver. (Or at least Adam Driver’s character in The Force Awakens.)
Now, sites make up and/or get fed false rumors all the time, so this isn’t necessarily more believable just ...
With her 2008 breakout, Sarah Palin disrupted the GOP nominating process and made being a potential primary contender a full-time job. As this year’s ballooning GOP field shows, there are many long-shot candidates who are seeking to follow her path.
Partners accounting for more than 90% of YouTube viewing have signed on to the company's paid service. While the lineup incudes home-grown celebrities and music videos, YouTube so far doesn’t have TV networks such as Fox, NBC and CBS, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be identified discussing the project.
This exercise impels students to consider how their actions affect others, and vice versa. I’ve been giving it to students since 2008, and only one class has successfully mastered the challenge.
A group of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies including Facebook, Google, Dell, HP, eBay and others joined the patent war between Apple and Samsung this month with a petition to a federal appeals court.
Matthew Witheiler has a great blog post about tearing down the Coin electronic ‘credit card’. Coin is meant to replace all the credit cards in your wallet with a single electronic card that can still be used in magnetic card readers. Unfortunately Matt’s Coin card broke, but he took the opportunity to take the card apart and show what it looks like inside.
Matt found that overall Coin is a well-engineered device with very thin components that help make it so small. There are long coils at the top of the card where the magnetic strip is normally located, and these are what send data to a card reader when swiped. Interestingly the Coin card is powered by a Nordic nRF51822 system on a chip which is the same chip that’s used in Adafruit’s Bluefruit LE friends and the upcoming BBC Micro Bit. Check out Matt’s blog post for all the details.
The New York Times has a great piece highlighting some older female artists that the art world never gave proper recognition to. Read their bios over at the New York Times site.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
I love writing Pokey adventures, telling stories about Pokey, Little Girl, Mr. Nutty, the Skeptopotamus, Gustavo, and all of their friends and relations. I love sharing these stories with you, too. It means so much to me to get your emails, letters, to see your tweets and words of support. Your Patreon support will help me keep writing new Pokey adventures.
It is a notorious fact that most rap artists and producers are extremely secretive about the process behind the creation of their music. Historically speaking, individual snare sounds, synth samples, and vocal yips are all hoarded and guarded with a fervor to prevent the next man up from biting on classic elements that make up an overall signature sound. A new series called Beat Breakdown on YouTube looks to shed a little light on what happens behind the mixing boards and dispel some of the myths behind the magic.
Created by Andrew Atwood, who goes by the username Sandurz, the series takes classic and popular rap tracks, strips them to the bone, and recreates them to near perfection. No detail is too small and everything from sound effects, the individual drums, strings sections, bass lines, guitar parts, and synth lines are all deconstructed, snipped apart, and pieced back together. Even ...
Another week, another soulcrushing announcement of Disney’s intent to take your childhood animated movies and render them in flesh: the great behemoth has cast its eyes upon The Sword In The Stone, and determined that it would be 100% better with actual humans rather than its foolish, two-dimensional sorcery!
Not everyone can live like Corey Feldman, which is why the former child star has translated his $250-a-head VIP birthday experience into a live stage show, so the hoi polloi can experience, if only for one night, the magic of hanging with the Feld. That experience includes scantily clad women in Leg Avenue angel costumes as well as Feldman in a white T-shirt and sequined pants, spinning and moonwalking in tribute to his late friend Michael Jackson, with whom Feldman has a long-standing, actually kind of understandable obsession. (When Michael Jackson was a normalizing influence in your childhood, you must not have had much else to hang on to.) Here’s what attendees of the minor-league State College Spikes baseball game in State College, PA were treated to at last night’s game:
Courtney Stanton (old Old Reader ex-Villain; half my fuckin' shares are reshares of her tumblr) and Darius Kazemi (all those GIF bots I share, including Scenes from the Wire) have a new Portland-based tech co-op, and this is their first project
“It’s for activists or people who deal with a lot of — I would say — people who expect to be given a free education,” Courtney Stanton, co-founder of Feel Train, the coding studio that designed StayWokeBot, told Mashable. “It allows you to distribute the same information over and over again very quickly.”
For now, StayWokeBot will mostly tweet out little rewards for anyone who follows it. Much like the Hogwarts sorting hat bot, StayWokeBot sends messages that compare new followers to icons — including author James Baldwin, rapper Nas and Oprah Winfrey — by saying things like, "You are the bearer of our tradition, you hold it in your pen. Tell the truth and nothing less, because you embody James Baldwin." It even has one for Riley Curry.
Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry is joined by his daughter Riley at a news conference after Game 5 of the NBA basketball Western Conference finals against the Houston Rockets in Oakland, California, on May 27.
Image: Ben Margot/Associated Press
Soon, however, StayWokeBot will work like this:
Say an activist tweets about police brutality, and a Twitter user responds by saying, "What about black on black crime?" He or she is arguing that black people should be more focused on the crimes black people commit against each other rather than on crimes committed by police. There are plenty of problems with the logic of that argument. But instead of tweeting at this person several times with an explanation, activists can reply by looping in StayWokeBot, and asking it to tell this person "about black-on-black crime."
The bot recognizes whatever phrase comes after the word "about," its designers told Mashable. StayWokeBot will then tweet a brief response to the user, followed by a link that explains the activist's argument in greater detail.
"I had never even thought about a bot for that, but I thought this could be really dope," Mckesson told Mashable. "Twitter's space is still relatively new, you know? There's so much to explore in it, and to explore with a purpose."
StayWokeBot is powered by a Google doc, which functions as its brain. Anyone with access to the doc can plug in a brief argument (e.g. why the Confederate flag is a symbol of racism) and link. Once both are inside the doc, the bot will be able to tweet them out.
Just as we thought we had all the Xena: Warrior Princess news we thought we were likely to get in a day, we noticed that not only does Lucy Lawless want to be in a Xena update, but one is actually happening. Cue running around the house screaming at the top of your lungs and breaking lamps with a frisbee!
Sadly, the project is still just in its early stages at NBC according to The Hollywood Reporter, but original executive producers Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi are in, and there’s talk of a role both in front of the cameras and behind it for Lawless, despite the idea being a “modern reboot.” THR also mentions how the original show was a spinoff of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, which I had completely forgotten and switched around in my head so that Hercules was the spinoff, because that’s how great Xena is.
Other details are still scarce at this point, but they’ve apparently been inspired by Katniss in The Hunger Games and want a sophisticated and smart superhero for a new generation. Maybe Xena’s graduated to Warrior Queen, and her daughter will continue her proud ass-kicking radition?
While the internet news cycle forecasts the Pacific Northwest's doom, Mark Vanhoenacker is quietly writing beautiful prose that is the opposite of panic-inciting gloom, which is weird, given that it's about something many people associate with terror and discomfort: flying.
Vanhoenacker is a first officer with British Airways (for those of you who don't have wacky hobbies, that means he's a copilot), who somehow has managed in his off-hours to write a beautiful, poetic book about airplane-flying, Skyfaring, out now from big old publisher Knopf. It's one of the most enjoyable books I've read all summer, and probably should be required reading for anyone who has an airplane phobia—with care and clean prose, Vanhoenacker explains the various technical aspects of flying an airplane, dispelling the disarming mystery that accompanies most terse, mid-flight announcements from pilots.
There'll be a review of Skyfaring in our upcoming issue. In the meantime, here's an excerpt from the book, that the NY Times ran through its snazzy internet graphics machine last year:
As we push back from our gate at Heathrow Airport we light the Boeing 747’s engines in pairs, starting with those under the starboard wing. A sudden hush falls in the cockpit as the air flow for the air-conditioning units is diverted. It’s this, air alone, that begins to spin the enormous techno-petals of the fans, faster and faster, until fuel and fire are added, and each engine wakes with a low rumble that grows to a smooth, unmistakable roar.
We begin to taxi. In legal terms, a journey begins when “an aircraft moves under its own power for the purpose of flight.” In aircraft manuals, elaborate charts that recall da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” illustrate the angles and distances that the extremities of the plane sweep through as we maneuver on the ground. A pleasing terminology accompanies these images of the plane’s turning limbs: tail radius and steering angle and the wingtip that swings the largest arc.
Nothing to see here, just your typical 2015 ACC Football Guide ... oh wait, what's that in the bottom right corner on page 145? Under the Wake Forest section? That's right: "F*** THIS SHIT"!
Rain in Southern California in July? No worries, call in the helicopter!
Heavy rains hit Southern California Sunday night, which caused the Angels game with the Red Sox to be postponed. It's a rare occurrence as the Angels haven't been rained out at home since 1995. Getting the field ready for a double header on Monday was a major undertaking, so the Angels called in some help.
That is indeed a City of Anaheim Police helicopter being used to dry the outfield. It just sort of hovered around to scatter the water so it drys faster.
It's apparently effective too as Los Angeles and Boston were able to begin the first game of their doubleheader on time. As for the helicopter, according to Boston.com, the Angels pay the cost of using the helicopter and it will leave immediately if it's needed for actual police reasons.
There is no reason to invest in a fancy drainage system when you only rain outs every 20 years and can just use a freaking helicopter to help dry the field. Washington previously broke out the same trick to dry their football field during training camp.
In 2k15 America, Black people now have to proactively and publicly declare for the record that we, like anyone else, would neither lynch ourselves nor commit suicide while in police custody.
This is (apparently) necessary now because if we are caught being human and - even once - state that we were even momentarily sad or depressed, that single statement alone can and will be used against us by corporate media and the police to blame us for our own murders…at the hands of the police.
(to hear all of these Black women’s voices and to watch their full videos, please go to the tumblr
or twitter of youth activist/organizer, millennialau. see full videos here)
Super Opinionated.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
Tilda Swinton stars in "Trainwreck." | Universal Pictures
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