firehose

Legal | The creator of the Islamic superhero comic The 99 says he hasn’t been officially notified of a reported ban of the animated adaptation of his comic in Saudi Arabia. “Nobody ever contacted me, nobody ever asked me any questions,” Naif Al Mutawa says. There have been numerous Twitter campaigns against me for a […]

From .Hack//Quantum: Lisp that appears to have been written for the show.

Context: Lost Ones are people who’ve been pulled in by the in-show game “The World”. It appears that the code behind is an AI of some sort. Fitting, since some characters have been turned into AI’s.

shutuptres:

greg-pak:

Go, @MiniB622!

fykamalakhan:

"One of my favorite mottos, I actually have it written on a post-it over my computer. I look at it every single day. It was said by a poet named Rumi and it goes, ‘Do not be satisfied with stories, that which has come before. Unfold your own myth.’ And that is our challenge. Every single one of us, no matter the categories we have inherited. We must unfold our own myth. And it won’t be easy. We’re constantly navigating, rearranging, reinventing others’ expectation of ourselves everyday. But every word we write in the narrative of our own lives, we come closer to uncovering what’s beneath our own masks, maybe even embracing that true misfit, that true crazy one within. Oh, it’ll be a fight, that’s for sure, but that battle for your soul, for your authentic self. It’s worth it, isn’t it? It’s bold, it’s brave. In fact, I would say it’s heroic. So now, it’s your turn: tell me your story.”

Myths, Misfits, & Masks by Sana Amanat at TedxTeen (x)

I will fight on the front lines for Sana any day.

Dangnabbit, I want to work with this woman!

The American Museum of Natural History, Jason Polan

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Researchers in Spain have developed a vacuum chamber that can recreate most of the physical conditions found on Mars.

An elite group of highly-trained dolphin soldiers, enlisted to detect submersible mines and combat invading vessels and troops by the Ukrainian navy, is now in the hands of Russian forces.

Lest all those utterances of “six seasons and a movie” be lost in time, like tears in Internet comment boards, some serious discussion has begun about fulfilling Community’s blood oath by whatever means necessary. Last week, Dan Harmon told HitFix he believed in the “shamanism” inherent in the throwaway joke that’s since become the show’s mantra, believing he’s now predestined, through powers beyond his control, to not only see the series through that sixth season, but also to make the movie. “If the movie has to be made out of clay and duct tape in my basement, then that’s how the movie will be made, because there has to be closure,” Harmon said, sounding, as always, both invigorated and a little insane. “The title of the book about the show is not Community, An Interesting Journey Into A Show No One Ever Watched. The title ...

Elementary is unique among the many recent retellings of A.C. Doyle’s famous detective, for better or worse depending on your tastes, because it takes familiar characters and story elements and places them in a completely new or reimagined context. While playing it fast and loose with what’s familiar might alienate some, one thing this freedom does allow Elementary to do—and do well—is give us more interesting, fun, and complex female characters to revel in.

WASHINGTON—Armed with newly acquired strategies on team leadership, effective communication, and workplace sensitivity, President Barack Obama returned to the Oval Office this morning after spending the past three days at a management seminar, White...

Ossuary of the Cemetery Saint Hilaire de Marville, France 

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One in five board members at the UK’s 100 largest listed companies are women. This is “impressive” progress, according to a report published today by the British government. The share of female directors has roughly doubled over the past few years, spurred by a 2011 voluntary pledge by companies for women to hold 25% of board seats by 2015.

British officials are keen to avoid a hard quota on female board representation, like there is in Belgium, Iceland, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Norway, and Spain. The EU is also mulling a quota for all 28 member states, calling for women to comprise at least 40% of corporate directors by 2020, in line with most of the countries with quotas already in force.

Although some executives and officials speak out against gender quotas, most claim that they’re not content with the gender-balance status quo. Studies generally show that more diverse boards boost corporate performance.

But while the experience and perspectives that women bring to male-dominated boardrooms is welcome, it’s mostly left to men to translate that advice into day-to-day action as members of the top executive team. It’s striking to note how the rise in female executives lags the rise in female directors. A quarter of non-executive directors at big British companies are women, but only 7% of executive directors, and a mere 4% of chief executives, are female.

A similar pattern plays out around the world. Addressing the British numbers, UK business secretary Vince Cable said that “more needs to be done” to boost the ranks of female executives. “These will be the CEOs of tomorrow, and businesses still aren’t tapping into the vast talent pool available to them,” he said.

Fairness isn’t the only reason to heed this advice. Research suggests that companies run by female chief executives are particularly innovative, which could be an incentive for boards to cast the net wider when they consider CEO succession plans.

The UK report notes a “particularly encouraging” relationship between gender diversity on boards and women in executive roles, but the numbers show that this link isn’t particularly strong. There may be more women than ever in the boardroom, but there remain very few female faces in the executive suite.

The NFL wants its players to be more respectful to each other on the field with some of the new taunting changes.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Vinyl banners in the middle ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton complex encouraged cable television ad sales professionals to be "BrandStars." No corporate conference is complete without a theme. Gold embossed signage for the NFL's annual meeting was less overt in its messaging, but there was a clear theme at the foundation of the business taking place among the league's owners, coaches and executives: respect, on the field and in the locker room.

That, and time management.

The latest effort to clean up the game started Tuesday when the league voted to approve a rule eliminating dunks on the goal post and any other kind of celebration that involves using the ball as a prop.

A wave of "No Fun League" jokes crested on social media and broke on websites late Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday morning, competition committee member and St. Louis Rams head coach Jeff Fisher made it clear what was really behind the league's decision to extend the protections for its crossbars.

"When the committee defined unsportsmanlike conduct and celebrations, made it illegal to celebrate anything using a prop, but allowed the players to use the goalpost as a prop," Fisher said. "Last year, we had an incident in one of the games where there was a dunk and the goalpost was tilted. The game was shutdown for about 25 minutes until they could get the goalpost corrected. That's unnecessary."

Also unnecessary in the competition committee's mind was a rash of taunting penalties around the league last year.

"Our taunting numbers [penalties] increased from nine and 12 to 34 last year, and we're going to effect change immediately and that change will be effected as early as the OTAs when the players come back," Fisher said Wednesday morning.

"We agreed that we have an issue on the field and we agreed that we are going get it under control as soon as we can possibly can," Fisher said.

Reports in February suggested that the committee would introduce a 15-yard penalty for players heard using the N-word on the field. That didn't happen. The competition committee nixed the idea ahead of the annual meetings.

The league will not actually introduce any new rules to cut down on the taunting. Instead, it will press referees to enforce taunting, unsportsmanlike conduct and related penalties that are already on the books. So what constitutes the kind behavior the NFL is trying to eradicate?

"Those who play the sport, who manage the sport, or officiate the sport know. Something that's condescending, disgraceful or just hatred, those words, we can easily determine what those are," NFL executive VP of football operations Troy Vincent said. "Anyone that's close enough to the game, you can hear it. When you have to go 'that's not good.'"

In other words, you'll know it when you see it ... just like the Supreme Court's infamous definition of pornography that caused headaches for communities across the country decades ago. Eliminating ambiguity will be part of Vincent's job.

"That's my responsibility to make sure we're consistent with that," he said.

Vincent will spend the months ahead talking to the referees, coaches and players. "I want to hear what they're hearing, I want to see what they're seeing. Let's talk about it." That includes keeping up with terminology that coaches and referees are not familiar with, a consistently, unofficially updating of the standards for what's acceptable and not acceptable on the field of play.

From the outside, it sounds like a difficult mandate to define, much less enforce. But Vincent remains convinced that it is actually a rather simple matter.

"We're just talking about sportsmanship. It's not about legislating words."

Concern about impressionable young children was cited by Fisher, Goodell and a few other league officials who didn't go to the podium Wednesday morning. Fisher even pointed to concerns from the NCAA over player conduct.

"If the college athlete sees something on the weekends that the pro athlete is doing, they're going to act the same way," Fisher said.

The NFL's efforts to enforce player conduct off the field have been a hallmark of Roger Goodell tenure as commissioner. This marks the first major foray into regulating behavior on the field.

It all seems quixotic from the fan's perspective. You don't need to be bombarded with UnderArmour commercials to know that trash talking is ingrained into the culture of sport, for players and fans alike. How the league goes about cleaning up the words coming out of player's mouths in an efficient and effective manner could end up being the story of the 2014 season.

One rule change considered by owners this week was a measure that would have made taunting and unsportsmanlike conduct reviewable. It was not approved.

Sportsmanship among players and respect for keeping games in tidy three-hour broadcast window doesn't fit so easily on a sign.

California State Senator Leland Yee, noted anti-video games official, was arrested this morning on charges of bribery and corruption, SF Weekly reported. The FBI conducted a raid of San Francisco's Chinatown district, and KCRA reported that agents...

Inequality has risen across America. Once high-paying middle class jobs have disappeared, as the job market has cleaved into high-wage knowledge and professional jobs and an even larger number of low-pay, low skill service positions. The result of this cleaving has been increasingly unaffordable housing, especially in the high-priced cities supposedly suffering least in the wake of the recession.

A report released this week by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach 2014, identifies the growing gap between housing and wages across the United States. To get at this, it uses a metric it calls the "housing wage" – the wage Americans would need to pay for a two-bedroom unit at market rent, devoting the recommended 30 percent of their income to housing costs. The housing wage for the country as a whole is $18.92 an hour, up 52 percent since 2000. Across the country, this means it would take an average of 2.6 full-time minimum-wage jobs to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment.

And, of course, this varies substantially by state and metro areas. In Washington State, where minimum-wage workers are some of the best off in the country, earning a hard-fought $9.32 per hour, it would still take an untenable 80-hour work to afford a two-bedroom rental unit. In Hawaii, it would take 4.4 minimum-wage jobs to afford fair market rental. And in Puerto Rico, where the gap between wages and costs is the lowest, it would still take 1.4 full-time minimum wage jobs. There isn't a single state where full-time minimum-wage workers could afford a market-rate one or two bedroom unit on their own.

The map below, by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute based on data from the report, charts the two-bedroom "housing wage" in several metros across the country, along with how many minimum wage jobs it would take to make that rent. The map also includes the figures for what the average renter in the metro area makes and how many of these "mean renter" jobs it would take to make this two-bedroom rent. In many cases, a household with one “average renter” still wouldn’t be able to afford their rent. 

In high-rent metros like New York, Washington, San Francisco, and L.A., even three minimum wage jobs aren’t enough to afford a market-rate two-bedroom apartment. (Note that, for some of these cities with particularly high concentration of poverty, HUD pins the fair-market price to 50 percent, not 40 percent, of the area's median rent). And in many places, even the average wage that renters make isn't enough to afford that two-bedroom apartment. In Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Miami, households would need one-and-a-half or even two adults working full-time at the average housing wage to afford a two-bedroom apartment.

Median-income renters could afford just 34 percent of the new units built in 2011.

The scope of America's rental affordability problem is substantial, according to the report. More than 40 million American households are renters (35 percent of all households), a figure that has been growing substantially since the economic crisis. Just 34 percent of the apartments built in 2011 were affordable for even the median-income renter. And ten million of these renter households qualify as "extremely low-income," meaning they make 30 percent or less of the area’s median income. Today, there are just 31 affordable and available units for every 100 of these families.

This issue of providing affordable rental housing needs to be tackled from both sides of the equation. As I have written previously on this site, there is no more pressing issue in American than the need to upgrade service jobs, with more responsibility and better pay. A higher minimum wage, pinned to local wages and housing costs, is also needed. But we also need to build more housing. Since so much of the new housing we are building is aimed at luxury or middle class buyers, we need to especially focus on building more affordable housing.

American currently subsidizes single-family home-ownership for the already affluent. The majority of the annual $180 billion spent by the U.S. on tax subsidies and direct spending to support housing goes to affluent homeowners; less than a third goes to low-income renters. And while home-ownership helped stoke the industrial engine of a bygone age, the knowledge economy requires greater proximity, clustering, and flexibility – something that better rental options can help support.

Top Image: A sign in an apartment complex window reads, "Moved In April with Rent $925, Asking $1150 For May?" in Malden, Massachusetts June 17, 2012 (REUTERS/Jessica Rinaldi).

Today there are very few options for tabletop games for blind players. A few traditional games such as Monopoly, Uno, and Scrabble do exist in accessible formats. These usually cost 2 to 3 times normal retail price. Any blind players who want to play modern games have to have someone help them transcribe the games themselves. If our campaign is successful we will start producing a new line of products that would add accessibility to existing board and card games with far less effort. These accessibility kits would be add-ons to games that would allow both blind and sighted players to play together.

agirlandher-cat:

Metropolis (1927)

*This is pretty close to my “always reblog” category, even though I never do that 

submitted by Kuntzman [link] [3 comments]

Some updates add new features, others just fix problems. A small update, InDesign CC 9.2.1, arrived on March 25, 2014, with fixes for some annoying crashes. The update is available for InDesign CC subscribers either through the Creative Cloud Desktop application, or by choosing Help > Updates… within InDesign. Briefly, the updates fixes crashes related […]

submitted by canausernamebetoolon
[link] [81 comments]

Apparently NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, thinks that what space exploration in the 21st century needs is spacecraft that are a bit more botanical. The center has released a video showing off its starshade spacecraft that opens up like a blossom. Bearing a resemblance to a cosmic sunflower, it’s designed to help astronomers to directly study exoplanets, including taking the first actual pictures of planets beyond our Solar System... Continue Reading JPL develops space flowers to help find Earth-like planets

Section: Space

Tags: Exoplanet, JPL, Light, Space telescope, Spacecraft, Starshade

Related Articles:

• Astronomers discover new way to search for life elsewhere
• Kepler spacecraft discovers tiniest solar system yet found
• New hunting technique to aid in search for Earth-like planets
• CHEOPS, the first ESA “small mission,” will study super-Earths
• First rogue planet discovered
• Historic pics show worlds beyond our solar system

I think I can be of assistance. 

First you must mask out the plane. You can use the pen tool or polygon lasso to cut around everything. I recommend zooming in to 800% so you get a lot of accuracy with your selection. Once your selection is done, create a layer mask from it.

Next thing is add a nice sky background. Just copy and paste behind the plane. 

To get the reflection, add the sky background again on a top layer. Free transform and warp it so it roughly has clouds over the place you want. I gave my clouds a good spherizing filter so they had a warped look to them. 

Do your remember that layer mask you created for the plane? If you control + click on that mask, you can bring back the selection. Now you can add a layer mask to our mess of clouds here. Change the layer blending mode to Soft Light. 

Soft Light may not always be the right choice. You’ll have to play around with the different modes to see what works best with your image. You can also reduce the opacity if they are coming in too strong.

Now we need to do some clean up. I recommend just getting a large eraser with hardness set to 0%. (heh, hardness) Slowly eat away at the spots where you don’t want the clouds reflected. 

The next step is to add a nuclear holocaust. Find yourself a nice mushroom cloud and bring it into the picture. 

With a soft eraser brush, just eat away at the bits you don’t want. This doesn’t have to be super accurate. A little softness on the edges will help it blend. This particular mushroom cloud has way too much yellow. Using Hue/Saturation, I went to the yellows and just dragged the saturation all the way down. Then I moved the cloud into place.

Add an orange photo filter to the clouds to make them a bit spooky. 

Let’s give that fella a laser. 

Just fill a selection with white and add a green outer glow.

OH NO THE ENGINE BLEW UP! 

Find some fire on a black background and set the blend mode to “screen.” Add smoke with soft brushes on low opacity. Just build it up one click at a time until it looks smokey. OR, you can find smoke brushes on the internet. Don’t forget to duplicate your firey engine in the plane’s reflection!

And the final step is to add some aliens shooting nuclear death beams.

Just click the “alien death beam” button under the “Filter > Noise” menu. 

I hope that helped!

I’m a big fan of Chicago based artist and designer Cody Hudson so this collaboration he did with Case Studyo is high on my list of art objects I’m craving. It’s called Vibes Melt Down 2043, a ceramic skull that doubles as art piece and incense burner which comes in white, silver, and gold versions. It’s beauty is in it’s simplicity, and the fact that I think it would look really rad on my desk.

“If 20 gentlemen are serving and [then there are] three platinum blonde ladies, then that spoils the image."

We're pretty infatuated with this brand new print from nature cartoonist Rosemary Mosco, creator of Bird and Moon comics. The premise is simple: Assign each a bird a catch phrase that sounds similar to the sound it makes in the wild. By remembering the catch phrase, you can better identify the sound – and the bird that makes it!

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