The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins wrote something we had to double-check was not parody.

Sally Jenkins, renowned hot sports take artist at The Washington Post, penned her Sunday column on a National Labor Relations Board decision this week to grant Northwestern University football players the right to unionize. Patrick Vint did a great job breaking down what the ruling actually means, and what's next. Jenkins, on the contrary, lit reason on fire.

But the upside is that she and her sources gave us some memorably hideous quotes about the whole thing.

1. Occupy Northwestern

It's hard to view Northwestern quarterback Kain Colter as the Che Guevara of college sports once you learn that he interned at Goldman Sachs.

Because unions are only for poor people, right?

In fact, one of the more refreshing things about Colter's role in the movement is that he has an obviously prosperous future (like most Northwestern alumni) and still feels a duty to challenge an unfair system. Kind of like, you know, a well-to-do Argentine named Che who went to medical school before becoming outraged at the unfair system around him.

2. All that valuable "stuff"

Colter and his peers aren't laborers due compensation; they are highly privileged scholarship winners who get a lot of valuable stuff for free.

Ooh, what kind of stuff?

This includes first-rate training in the habits of high achievement, cool gear, unlimited academic tutoring for gratis and world-class medical care that no one else has access to.

Oh. So ...

a. something they could get from the self-help section at the library
b. stuff they can't sell without incurring the wrath of the NCAA investigators
c. something all college students basically get
d. doctors to fix injuries suffered making the university money

Cool stuff. Can you buy a loaf of bread with any of it?

3. Revenge of specious

"I think sometimes we take rights to a whole new level," [Tom] Izzo said. " . . . I think there's a process in rights. And you earn that."

I want to believe that Izzo was grossly misquoted, because holy hell, did he just say you have to earn your rights? If he wasn't misquoted or taken completely out of context, man, that explains a lot.

Dear Izzo: you don't have to earn rights. Rights are what you're due. They are what you have, uh, a right to by virtue of being a member of civil society. You don't have to earn the right to be treated fairly. I consider Tom Izzo to be one of the paragons of virtue in basketball, legitimately. But that statement right there, if that's really what he said and meant -- "I think there's a process in rights. And you earn that" -- is straight out of the Jim Crow South.

Tom Izzo, by the way, made $4.9 million this year.

4. #ThanksObama

"I said to my guys, ‘There's a reason you have to be 35 to be president.' That's the way I look at it."

Another banger from Izzo. "You have to be 35 to be president, and you can only get paid in tuition and medical care if you're a college athlete. It's in the Constitution." The reason you have to be 35 to be president is because it's in the danged Constitution! The reason you can't get paid while playing for Tom Izzo is because the NCAA cabal has declared it so. I'm sensing different levels of authority here.

5. What college kids want

College athletes enroll at their institutions to mature. Whatever their end goals, pro aspirations or workloads, they are no different from any other students in that respect. They are there to develop emotionally, intellectually and physically, and that's all a school owes them, no matter how much revenue is generated by Johnny Manziel at Texas A&M.

Football players can't enter the NFL until they've been out of high school for three years. College is basically the only option. Basketball players have to be out of high school for one year. There are options, but they have not been competitive to the college experience. Still, most of the highest-profile third-year football players and first-year basketball players move to the pros at their first opportunity.

So tell me Sally: are they there to develop emotionally, intellectually and physically, or are they there biding their time and boosting their stock before they get paid? If they are there only to develop emotionally, intellectually and physically, why isn't Andrew Wiggins sticking around for a couple more years?

6. The Stanford women's tennis player

If Kain Colter is an exploited laborer, then is a female tennis player at Stanford an exploited laborer, too? Is a lacrosse player at Virginia an exploited laborer? Is a rower at Harvard?

I actually don't know if Stanford tennis players, Wahoo laxxers or Harvard rowers are exploited. Chances are that their universities are not making money on their account, if that's what you're asking. Texas A&M definitely made money off of Johnny Manziel. But shutting athletes out of the profits isn't the only way athletes can be exploited. Unions don't just bargain pay raises. They also advocate for better working conditions, a more fair grievance or arbitration system and the like. It'd sure be nice if athletes outside the big two sports, too, were able to collectively advocate for an improved system.

7. Fear change. Always.

[19 questions about how the system would work if the unionization effort continues]

One can only imagine the conniptions Sally Jenkins would have had when Curt Flood wrote to Bowie Kuhn in 1969. "Wait, so players can just decide where to play?"

8. Rewriting history

What about transfer rules? If players are employees, then can they simply quit? At the end of a game can they cross the field and ask for a job from the opposing coach?

Yes, who will think of the coaches when it comes to the transfer rule?!

9. Pandora's cashbox

It's not looking out for college athletes to open the Pandora's box of employment and unionization.

It's not looking out for college athletes to pave the road that leads to some of them getting paid and all of them getting a role in self-advocacy and self-determination. They don't know what's good for them.

10. Who killed Kwame?

Would Kwame Brown truly have been exploited by spending a couple of years on the Florida campus under the tutelage of Billy Donovan? Or was he more exploited and ill-served by going straight to the NBA and joining that union?

Fixed.

For what it's worth, that exploiting NBA union made it so that poor Kwame could make $63 million over a long, solid career.

If he now wants to go get that Florida degree -- a good idea, no doubt -- he can probably afford it. Thank God for his union.

The Pirate Bay Bundle:

Not sure why this is called The Pirate Bay Bundle other than it’s torrented. It seems like this person emailed over 100 game makers and asked them if they’d like their games to be bundled together into a free torrent and they said yes. I want to play every game. -LT

odditie-s:

[CLICK IMAGE]

So here it is: the pirate bay bundle. You can also watch the trailer if you haven’t seen it This has taken me so much longer than I ever anticipated. I’ve been stuck in the thick of this for so long that I thought I would never see the light and even when I did,…

In a recent video, actor Hugh Jackman performs “Who Am I?” from the musical Les Misérables as if the character singing the song were Wolverine from Marvel Entertainment’s X-Men, rather than the original Jean Valjean, on The Matt Edmondson Show for BBC Radio 1. Jackman has previously portrayed both Wolverine and Valjean on screen.

i didn’t do anything but it’s a possibility

deathandmysticism:

A phoenix depicted in Bilderbuch für Kinder, a book by Friedrich Justin Bertuch, 1806

Students in Starship Troopers academy have access to desktop computing environments during class, including a drawing and animation program called “Fedpaint,” that had a number of very forward-looking features.

The screen is housed in a metal bezel that is attached to the desk, and can be left flat or angled slightly per the user’s preference. A few hardware buttons sit in a row at the bottom of the bezel. (Quick industrial design aside: Those buttons belong at the top of the bezel.) The input device is a stylus. (Styli had been in use in personal digital assistants for over a decade when the film came out, I don’t think they had been sold as the primary input for a PC.) When we first see Johnny using the computer, he is ignoring his citizenship lesson and using Fedpaint instead.

The main part of the interface is a canvas. Running along the left and bottom edges are a complex tool palette and color picker that is vaguely reminiscent of Windows 3.0 WIMP applications. It’s easy to tell which category and tool is selected. (What color is selected is unclear.) I’d even say that most of the icons, while a little ham-handed and completely lacking labels, convey what they would do pretty clearly. The tools also seem to be clustered logically with categories across the top left, tools in the middle left, a color palette in the lower left corner, and file operations across the bottom. That’s some reasonable and reasonably convincing layout design for a movie interface. Nowadays a designer might argue to hide the menus when not in use to maximize the canvas real estate, but the most common OS paradigm at the time was Windows 97, and the most advanced paint program, i.e. Photoshop, looked like this. (Major thanks to Hongkiat for keeping their museum of Photoshop interfaces.)

Using the stylus, Johnny sketches a flirty animation for Carmen. He draws each of their profiles in white lines. He then adds some flat color and animates the profiles (not shown onscreen) such that the faces get closer, their eyes close, and their mouths open in readiness of a kiss. He then sends it to her.

On her desk she receives a notification. (We don’t get to see it. Was she already in the program? Did the notification jump her there?) Carmen grabs her stylus and responds by adding to the animation. She sends the file back to him. He opens it and it plays automatically. In her version of the animation, the profiles approach as before, but as they near for a kiss, the female profile blows a bubble gum bubble that gets so large it pops and covers the face of the male.

What’s nice about this interface is that the narrative seems to have driven some innovation in its design. It’s half gee-whiz-circa-1997 of course but half character development as it tells us that Johnny likes Cameron, and Cameron is a bit playfully stand-offish in response. To make this work well narratively, communication of the animation back and forth had to be seamless, and that seems to be the reason we see the communication tools built right into the interface. If ever there was a case for why scenario-driven design for personas works, this is it.

What’s frustrating is that they skipped over the hard part. How does Johnny apply the color? A paint bucket tool is a reasonable guess, but it’s also error prone. How did he specify the number of frames and their speed? How did he ensure that the motion felt relatively smooth and communicative? Anyone who’s worked with an animation program knows that these aren’t trivial matters, and Starship Troopers took the narrative route. Probably best for the story, but less for my analysis purposes.

Still, the stylus-driven direct manipulation, the unique layout, and easy, social sharing were big innovations for the time. I don’t know that there’s much to learn from this today, since our OS metaphors have advanced enough to make this seem quaint at best, and social integration is now the norm. But credit where it’s due, this interface was ahead of its time.

latenightseth:

He just did it right there in front of everyone.

On and Off the Street Grid: Relative Distributions of Road Orientations

Portland, Oregon-based scientist Seth Kadish created a series of graphics comparing the relative directions of urban road networks. Kadish calculated the azimuth of every street within the city-counties using a sinusoidal map projection, and then graphed this against the cardinal directions depending on the longitude of the area. The result showcases which areas more strictly adhered to some sort of grid plan and which did not.

All calculations were made in a sinusoidal map projection using the central longitude of the area of interest. I then graphed the angles on rose diagrams (wind roses) using bins of 5° to show relative distributions for each area. The plots were scaled such that the maximum bar height was the same on each rose. To ensure rotational symmetry in the plots, each azimuth was counted twice: once using the original value and once using the opposite direction (e.g., 35° and 215°). As such, all streets, regardless of one-way or two-way traffic, were considered to be pointing in both directions.

Counties

Europe

via FlowingData

ST. CLOUD, MN—Saying that he was now “paying the price” for his failure to properly pace himself, Talos Analytics junior marketing associate Cameron Gaither, 28, admitted to reporters Wednesday that he had completely exhausted all of his...

levvis:

half of a salmon fillet and a clarinet

	Courtney shared this story from People of Color in European Art History:
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You are being lied to about pirates:

k-ingsfoil:

spoopyfag:

keyboardwarriorprincess:

takethespearandpuncturetheflesh:

incisiveredneck:

Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the 18th century.”

They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.

Oops, turns out piracy is pretty much always a term like terrorist that gets slapped on whatever we don’t like despite being a general reaction to the status quo. And nothing’s really changed.

And when africanpirates were captured by the British they were forced into the slave trade.

Horrible Histories taught me about pirateshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwn5K89dE5c

They were generally democratic, disciplined, communal - they even had pensions! If you wanted out of the pirate life, you would be taken to a destination of your choice (anywhere in the world) and given a lump sum to help you with your new life.

interesting

Honor among thieves.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU YES i’ve spent like two years studying piracy (back when i had time to devote to reading and research) and yes pirates are actually all very interesting and democratic and great

Reblogging since someone recently sent me an ask on this topic (although now it appears to be lost somewhere in my inbox).

hodad

Vestige of American racism, meet vestige of South African racism.

Original Source

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Link

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Dwayne Walker designed the logo for Roc-A-Fella Records — the label co-founded by Jay Z among others — in 1995 for $3,500 and 2% of revenues for ten years. His suit claims he never received that 2%, amounting to $7 million.

Edbrowse:

Edbrowse is a combination editor, browser, and mail client that is 100% text based.  The interface is similar to /bin/ed, though there are many more features, such as editing multiple files simultaneously, and rendering html.  This program was originally written for blind users, but many sighted users have taken advantage of the unique scripting capabilities of this program, which can be found nowhere else.  A batch job, or cron job, can access web pages on the internet, submit forms, and send email, with no human intervention whatsoever. 

 See also

• edway, an ed-inspired audio editor.

Dear Siblings,

I’m trying to direct the care for Mom and Dad in a way that I would want to be cared for. When I started several years ago, that has meant finding doctors, rejecting others (like the cardiologist who insisted on more Coumadin even after Dad almost bled to death twice because of that blood thinner or the one who didn’t do the right thing for Mom when she had her rectal issue), doing web research, trying to understand what is really effective versus the short messages that people give you.

Sometimes this has meant rejecting medical advice (the Coumadin; leaving hospitals early; rejecting surgery to Dad’s scalp for a very slow-growing skin cancer).

Sometimes this has meant seeking out other opinions (adding the kyphoplasty for Mom’s back).

Along the way, we have seen Dad get infected in the hospital requiring readmission, the hospital being very slow about getting test results in our stroke scare of last year (when minutes could have made a big difference), the hospital taking four hours to bring Lasix from their own basement while Dad was struggling against fluid in his lungs, and the hospital wanting to put Dad in the same room as someone with pneumonia.

We have also seen hospitals perform very well.

The bottom line is that I am wary of doctors, hospitals, and treatments, while appreciating what they do.

We’ve gone through some scary and, for our parents, physically excruciatingly painful times and come out again.

All of this has led me to the following philosophy:

1. Ensure Mom and Dad are as comfortable as possible, at home as much as possible, and that their medical care is holistic.

So for example, I have added in co-q10 as a protection against the most severe side effects of Lipitor. We eliminated aspirin when Dad had a liver problem. Each doctor will prevent Dad from dying of the disease that happens to be that doctor’s specialty. The holistic aspect is the role I coordinate with their general practitioners in the ground floor of their building.

2. Get everyone to pull together in the same direction.

That means the caretakers and we siblings. Mom is particularly vulnerable and must be encouraged at every possible moment.

Right now, the more involved she can be in talking to Dad and holding his hand the better for everyone involved. Her contributions should be celebrated both because they are real and because she needs a goal.

3. We can all take pride in the fact that they have made it this far. Every day is a gift.

That said, it will happen that while I am their health care agent, both of our parents will get sick again, perhaps recover, but eventually die. The proximate cause may be because of a decision I make or a decision I fail to make. I make no pretensions to infallibility and I am often operating under conditions of uncertainty.

4. What I ask from you is to encourage Mom, Dad, and the caretakers. Calmly.

The only corrections should be in an encouraging tone, too—e.g. argue against defeatism and dispel guilt.

5. Arguments with me are always allowed.

Love,
Dennis

Dennis Shasha’s father died on Oct. 19, 2013—at home, surrounded by family. Dennis’s mother is 94 and remains in good health—at home.  Follow Dennis on Twitter @DennisShasha. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com

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Ms. Santos, 61, along with a growing number of baby boomers, is confronting a bitter inheritance: The same loans that were supposed to help their elderly parents stay in their houses are now pushing their children out. “My dad had nothing when he came here from Cuba and worked so hard to buy this house,” Ms. Santos said, her voice quivering. Similar scenes are being played out throughout an aging America, where the children of elderly borrowers are learning that their parents’ reverse mortgages are now threatening their own inheritances. Reverse mortgages, which allow homeowners 62 and older to borrow money against the value of their homes that need not be paid back until they move out or die, have long posed pitfalls for older borrowers. Now many like Ms. Santos are discovering that reverse mortgages can also come up with a harsh sting for their heirs. Under federal rules, survivors are supposed to be offered the option to settle the loan for a percentage of the full amount. Instead, reverse mortgage companies are increasingly threatening to foreclose unless heirs pay the mortgages in full, according to interviews with more than four dozen housing counselors, state regulators and 25 families whose elderly parents took out reverse mortgages.

Having found Mecca, I now discover that barbarians are at the gates. The Green Line’s advent promises to make Union Square an attractive location for much needed office development. But it’s also pricing residents and independent businesses out of their community. La Cantina Mexicana’s property taxes, for example, doubled in one quarter. Union Square’s unique business and cultural ecology is endangered. If city officials, property owners, merchants, developers, and residents don’t work together to protect what is special about the Square, we will lose what makes it an attractive destination and a beloved community.

The fourth-year student, who has requested to remain anonymous at this time, was punched multiple times in the face and lost half of her left front tooth as a result. Kingston Police are currently investigating the attack. MIAS sparked controversy after it announced it will host an event titled “What’s Equality Got to Do With it? Men’s Issues and Feminism’s Double Standards.” The event, held Thursday evening at Ellis Hall at 7 p.m., featured Janice Fiamengo, a University of Ottawa professor who gives talks against the existence of rape culture on Canadian university campuses. The student, who is female, has been actively involved in an opposition to tonight’s Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS) talk. She claims to have received multiple threatening emails related to her involvement prior to the incident. It’s unclear if the student knew the attacker; however, the attacker was male and knew the victim’s name, according to a source who has requested to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

EverdDrive-N8 RAM cartridge for Famicom/NES with microSD interface

Everdrive-GB flash cartridge for Game Boy with SD interface

(via Twitter / SimGenerator)

After tracking down what the government is estimated to spend on ink per year ($467 million), Suvir found that that Uncle Sam could save around $136 million per year by switching to Garamond exclusively. In addition, he found state governments that made the change could pull in $234 million in savings, according to CNN's report. So is the government going to make the switch? Gary Somerset, PR manager for the U.S. Government Printing Office, praised Suvir's works as "remarkable," according to CNN, but he also said the government is focusing its reduction efforts on getting things on the Web.

she is playing a different character in the same universe since NCIS is a spin-off of JAG