firehose

An anonymous reader writes "A new study published in the March edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology indicates that a gamer's experience of a video game and not the content of the game itself can give rise to violent behavior. In other words, 'researchers found it was not the narrative or imagery, but the lack of mastery of the game's controls and the degree of difficulty players had completing the game that led to frustration.' Based on their findings, researchers note that even games like Tetris and Candy Crush can inspire violent behavior more so than games like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto if they are poorly designed and difficult to play."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fairy-Tale Treehouse | Terunobu Fujimori | Via

This fairy-tale treehouse in Hokuto, Japan is supported by a single cypress trunk and surrounded by a bevy of cherry blossom trees. Built by architect Terunobu Fujimori for the Kiyoharu Shirakaba Museum, the charming treehouse is actually a Japanese teahouse that was built specifically for enjoying the cherry blossoms in full bloom. Fujimori designed the unique, one-legged structure to be sturdy enough to sway with the tree during stormy weather and through earthquakes. As you can see by the interior shot of the teahouse, though the outside is all fantasy, the inside is left both simple and modern.

frankbeaton:

onipress:

A statement to ULine, our former office supply vendor. Basic human rights trump deals on office supplies any day of the week.

Nicely done, guys.

Code appearing in season 7, episode 9 of the TV show “Burn Notice”

Seems to be applescript code for auto coloring cells in Microsoft Excel taken from here.

BBC television shows Dr. Who, Top Gear, and Teletubbies may soon be expanding to North Korean state television, according to a report in the British paper, The Independent, this past weekend. The BBC, which has been negotiating with Pyongyang (paywall) since January about a TV deal, has declined to comment pending an agreement. And it’s unclear whether an agreement or a working version of Dr. Who’s TARDIS is more likely.

Airing of the BBC shows would certainly be something new in a country where the government controls all broadcasts. Rather than signaling new openness, the prospect of a deal may be a clue of how worried officials are over foreign TV shows and movies already being smuggled into the country.

According to a PBS documentary earlier this year, North Korean security forces have been launching periodic raids of people’s homes in search of banned DVDs. Last year, 80 people were reported executed publicly in seven cities for watching South Korean shows. Still, pirated foreign shows and movies are available throughout the country, as an increasing number of people are willing to take the risk of smuggling the contraband into North Korea and selling it on the black market.

“Information and knowledge of the outside world is beginning to widen out,” David Kang, who teaches Korean Studies at the University of Southern California told PBS. “That means central control is breaking down.”

For state authorities, a deal with the BBC could be a way to bring viewers back to state television, which airs mostly propaganda programs, and retain control of what foreign content North Koreans see. Such a system would be similar to, though far more restrictive than China’s, where officials have allowed some leeway in media and information control, to keep the country’s censorship regime nimble.

Even an occasional foreign show on state TV could be dangerous for Pyongyang, however. Several of more than a dozen defectors interviewed by PBS for the documentary recalled how foreign television and film portrayals of life outside North Korea prompted them to question whether their country really is the unrivaled socialist paradise their leaders claim it is.

Popo Team (Sachen - NES - 1992)

KentuckyFC (1144503) writes "Last month, astronomers announced the discovery of the most distant body in the Solar System, a dwarf planet called 2012VP113. They also said this body's orbit was strangely aligned with several other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt and that this could be the result of these bodies being herded by a much larger Planet X even further from the Sun. They calculated that this hidden planet could be between 2 and 15 times the mass of the Earth and orbiting at a distance of between 200 AU and 300 AU, an announcement that triggered excited headlines around the world. Now it looks as though these predictions were wildly optimistic. It turns out that the position of Planet X can be constrained more tightly using orbital measurements of other planets. And when this data is added into the mix, Planet X can only only orbit at much greater distances, if it exists at all. The new calculations suggest that a planet twice the mass of Earth cannot orbit any closer than about 500 AU. And a planet 15 times the mass of Earth must be at least 1000 AU distant. What's more, the New Horizons mission currently on its way to Pluto, should constrain the distance to beyond 4700 AU. So any Planet X hunters out there are likely to be disappointed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chicago-based comedian Owen Weber has created “How To Piss Off Your State Farm Agent,” a great series of comedy sketches about an angry State Farm insurance agent who is forced to instantly appear whenever and wherever his customers sing the “like a good neighbor” jingle, no matter what. His customers always seem to catch him at a very bad time.

We’ve all seen those State Farm commercials where an insurance agent is instantly summoned whenever somebody sings the State Farm jingle.

…But once in a while you get the State Farm agent at a bad time.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Politico

Rush Limbaugh: Jeb Bush backlash part of plan Politico Rush Limbaugh told listeners Tuesday that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's recent comment that some illegal immigration is an “act of love” comes as a way to preempt any conservative backlash that could come in the future. “I really think when he says, 'Hey, ... and more »

The lyrics encourage sexy club-going ladies to “get busy”… on the dancefloor, that is. 

Link (thanks, slend!)

Passings | Maine cartoonist Jeff Pert, best known for his cartoons and illustrations of lobsters and moose, died Friday on his way to the hospital with chest pains. He was 55. His cartoons adorned souvenir postcards and coffee cups, but he was also an active part of the local comics community in Brunswick, Maine, a […]

Fresco at the St. John the Baptist Church, Huaro, Peru

By Eliot Horowitz, CTO and Co-founder, MongoDB

Discuss on Hacker News

In the five years since the initial release of MongoDB, and after hundreds of thousands of deployments, we have learned a lot. The time has come to take everything we have learned and create a basis for continued innovation over the next ten years.

Today I’m pleased to announce that, with the release of MongoDB 2.6, we have achieved that goal. With comprehensive core server enhancements, a groundbreaking new automation tool, and critical enterprise features, MongoDB 2.6 is by far our biggest release ever.

You’ll see the benefits in better performance and new innovations. We re-wrote the entire query execution engine to improve scalability, and took our first step in building a sophisticated query planner by introducing index intersection. We’ve made the codebase easier to maintain, and made it easier to implement new features. Finally, MongoDB 2.6 lays the foundation for massive improvements to concurrency in MongoDB 2.8, including document-level locking.

From the very beginning, MongoDB has offered developers a simple and elegant way to manage their data. Now we’re bringing that same simplicity and elegance to managing MongoDB. MongoDB Management Service (MMS), which already provides 35,000 MongoDB customers with monitoring and alerting, now provides backup and point-in-time restore functionality, in the cloud and on-premises.

We are also announcing a game-changing feature coming later this year: automation, also with hosted and on-premises options. Automation will allow you to provision and manage MongoDB replica sets and sharded clusters via a simple yet sophisticated interface.

MongoDB 2.6 brings security, integration and analytics enhancements to ease deployment in enterprise environments. LDAP, x.509 and Kerberos authentication are critical enhancements for organizations that require a single authentication mechanism across their entire infrastructure. To enhance security, MongoDB 2.6 implements TLS encryption, user-defined roles, auditing and field-level redaction, a critical building block for trusted systems. IBM Guardium also now offers integration with MongoDB, providing more extensive auditing abilities.

These are only a few of the key improvements; read the full official release notes for more details.

MongoDB 2.6 was a major endeavor and bringing it to fruition required hard work and coordination across a rapidly growing team. Over the past few years we have built and invested in that team, and I can proudly say we have the experience, drive and determination to deliver on this and future releases. There is much still to be done, and with MongoDB 2.6, we have a foundation for the next decade of database innovation.

Like what you see? Get MongoDB updates straight to your inbox

belonely:

"There are three things you must ask yourself before you say anything…"

Aaralyn and Izzy know how to properly express your feelings about Mondays. Previously in Cute

For those who love TED Talks, here's an interesting rub for the upcoming TEDx Portland: Grammy-winning rapper Macklemore has been signed on to speak on this year's topic, "Perfect." Macklemore will join other Northwest smarty-pants (such as Gov. Kitzhaber, brainiac whiz kid Jackson Gariety, and many more) as well as performers such as Blitzen Trapper for this all-day long event. PLUS! Along with these 14 speakers, there will be four TED.com talks, as well as a happy hour, and a post TEDx event in Keller Park. Woo-WOO! That's a lot of "brainy." You won't have to think again for the entire year! Here are the deets:

TEDx Portland
Keller Auditorium
April 12, 8 am - 8 pm
Tickets are limited, get yours now HERE!

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Mouse Guard creator David Petersen is no stranger to Rocket Raccoon, having drawn him a couple of years ago for the online Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe REDUXE Edition; he’ll do so again for the variant cover of Marvel’s Rocket Raccoon #1, arriving in July. However, he also tackled the fan-favorite character in a […]

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

German Lopez at Vox says:

A new RAND Corporation survey estimates 9.3 million Americans gained insurance between September, the month before Obamacare's marketplaces kicked off, and mid-March. That represents a drop in the uninsured rate from 20.5 percent to 15.8 percent, according to RAND.

The report doesn't necessarily translate to a huge victory for Obamacare's marketplaces: among the newly-insured, the biggest gains were in employer-sponsored coverage.

Republicans right now appear to be preparing to run for midterms on a strict anti-Obamacare platform. That could be a mistake.

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Super Smash Bros. will include the Pokemon Charizard and Greninja when it launches on 3DS this summer and on Wii U in the winter. Nintendo saved the announcement as an after-Direct snack, showing off Charizard and Greninja in a video following Smash...

The Google Cultural Institute has compiled images, videos and documents for an exhibit on Osamu Tezuka, marking the first time a manga artist has been featured in the digital historical archive. Launched in 2011, the initiative is “an effort to make important cultural material available and accessible to everyone and to digitally preserve it to […]

submitted by EcstaticLookingGlass [link] [16 comments]

Each year an intense competition is held that you’ve never heard of — the International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest. The highly competitive event is typically led by participants from Eastern Europe and Asia who vie to create the world’s best aquarium…

Whisper of the Pines, Serkan Cetinkol

Pilgrimage, Shintaro Matsui

These aquariums are meticulously assembled over the course of months or even years and are incredibly expensive to grow and maintain. Additionally, competitors need to be experts in various areas, including biology, design, and photography. In many cases, fish aren’t even part of the aquarium, though they can be seen in a few instances.

If spending several hours a week trimming moss is up your alley, here’s some inspiration to get you started…

Stairway to Heaven, Timucin Sagel

Forest Scent, Pavel Bautin

Pale Wind, Takayuki Fukada

Verve!, Chow Wai Sun

Way to Heaven, Dmitriy Parshin

Wild West, Stjepan Erdeljić

Untitled, Georgi Chaushev

Untitled, Francisco Wu

Untitled, Long Tran Hoang

Spirit of the Rain Forest, AJ Judy Prajitno Putra

Magic Forest, Chan Shih Hsien

After the Rain in Mountain, Katsuki Tanaka

Moment in Time, Nguyen Tien Dung

Ups and Downs, Nguyenthi Xuanthuy

The Late October, Piotr Beczynski

The Virgin Stream, Piotr Dymowski

Green Paradise, Quan Nguyen Minh-Green

Reaching, Robertus Hartono

Titiwangsa, Wei Cheong Chung

(via Colossal)

LaCie is adopting Thunderbolt 2 in a big way this year, with the pre-NAB introduction of three new storage products using 6 TB Seagate hard drives — including the new rack-mounted 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2 system, which the company said … more »

From his perch at Gawker Media’s tech site, Valleywag, Sam Biddle has become an icon of anti–Silicon Valley backlash.

This is quite advanced trolling for such a young age.