firehose

fuckoffdarren:

…her beauty and her terror -
the wide brown land for me.

inspiration & beauty version

Must go visit some time.

rraaaarrl:

:’)

— Loki, Agent of Asgard #1

:) #attn: Peter Morwood

From the 1990 Treasure Island starring Charlton Heston as Long John Silver, with music by The Chieftains. Other cast: Christian Bale, Oliver Reed, Christopher Lee, Julian Glover, Peter Postlethwaite…

“Anytime individuals in military uniforms cross a border that’s obviously cause for concern. This incident deserves a close look,” Sen. Tom Coburn said.

The auto industry billionaire and long-time owner of Detroit's most popular pro sports franchise passed away at the age of 88 on Sunday.

Detroit Lions team owner William Clay Ford Sr. has died at the age of 88, the team announced Sunday.

"It is with profound sadness that we mourn the loss of Mr. Ford and extend our deepest sympathies to Mrs. Ford," team president Tom Lewland said in a statement.

Having bought controlling interest in the Lions in 1963 for $4.5 million, Ford was the figurehead for the franchise for over five decades. The only current NFL owner with a longer tenure is Ralph Wilson, who founded the Buffalo Bills in 1959. Ford, who had been the last surviving grandchild of Henry Ford, made his money through the Ford Motor Company, where he served on the board of directors for 57 years.

While Ford was largely regarded as a kind and benevolent man in the Detroit community, he was a source of aggravation among the Lions fan base, who regularly criticized him for his inability to turn their team into a winner. The Lions had only 14 winning seasons and won just a single playoff game during the billionaire's half-century tenure as owner.

The Lions have not announced who will take over the team, though William Clay Ford Jr. could be a candidate. Ford Jr. currently serves as the team's vice chairman as well as the executive chairman of Ford Motor Company.

The Tennessee Titans recently went through a similar situation when long-time owner Bud Adams passed away last October. Adams's son-in-law, Tommy Smith, ended up taking over as team president and CEO.

"Marcus is a 20-year-old junior at Florida State University who has contemplated dropping out of school because he makes so much money on Vine."

Love them or hate them, GIFs rule the web—and a pair of graduate students at the MIT Media Lab want to turn them into a language. Travis Rich and Kevin Hu started a site that uses human brainpower to quantify the emotional content of animated GIFs (like the two below), as a side project. But their site, GIFGIF, is no joke.

“We were talking about GIFs one day,” Hu told Quartz, “and we realized that they’re becoming more and more serious of a medium. They’re more popular, they’re used for more things.” Buzzfeed, for example, recently used GIFs to explain what was going on in Ukraine—reaching an audience that otherwise might have ignored the news. “And we realized,” Hu said, “that we could quantify this usage.”

The site, where visitors pick which of two GIFs relates better to a particular emotion, is powered by another MIT Media Lab project’s platform. Place Pulse used the multiple-choice A/B voting system to assign emotions to pictures of different cities, allowing researchers to quantify, for example, how “sad” or “unsafe” people felt when looking at pictures of Rio de Janeiro.

But Rich and Hu, who worked on separate teams but sat near each other (and the Place Pulse group) in the lab, decided to harness the system for their own purposes, to create a visual database of emotion. “It’s the same idea,” Rich said. “Taking something that’s very easy for humans to read—emotion—and translating it for computers.” While humans have no trouble deciphering what a GIF “means,” the same task is impossible for a computer.

Since launching on March 3, the site has drawn an average of 15,000 users a day who vote around 10 times per visit. “The average time is increasing already,” Hu said, “so we’re pretty optimistic for the future.” Their first goal is to build a text-to-GIF translator. “I want people to be able to put in a Shakespearian sonnet and get out a GIF set,” Hu said. But once they’ve gotten qualitative metrics for a large number of GIFs, they think the possibilities are pretty endless. “You could reverse-engineer it and use a GIF to find a movie that fits a certain mood,” Rich said.

The two are also interested in the sociological aspect of emotional GIF analysis. “We’re already seeing that votes vary across different cultures,” Rich said, “and looking at which GIFs are the most volatile—which ones have votes change the most based on country—could help us understand how emotions are interpreted across the world.”

GIFs that express happiness, he said, are almost universally agreed upon, but the emotion of “relief” showed much  more variation. “So maybe,” Rich said, “situations where you’re expressing relief are the most likely to be misinterpreted by members of a different cultural group.” But even with cultural variation, GIFs are proving to be more universal than the written word: The researchers recently heard from an ESL teacher who’s using GIFGIF to teach students the words for different emotions.

Rich and Hu think that the most useful applications of their database will come from other researchers, so one of their first projects is to create an open API. They’re excited to see what others do with the data, once they’re able to plug it into their own projects.

Whether or not GIFGIF is able to survive and build a usable database, Rich says, GIF-speak isn’t going anywhere. ”Like with any tech trend,” he said, “some people don’t get it. But that’s not going to be an issue in a decade—the people who don’t get it will retire. Whether or not Congress ever convenes to discuss whether or not the constitution should be translated into GIFs, they’re still a big part of culture and going to remain that way for some time… We hope the tool we’re building will be useful in that future.”

rhiannon42:

Captain Kelly Sue speaks for us all, I think.

Cameron Diaz “was way too nice for A-Rod,” according to a building staffer. “He was a douche. No one liked him.”

zackisontumblr:

my textbook and i have a lot in common

fuckyeahtattoos:

LSP on calf (Tumblr: saveitforsatan)
Done by Julia Wheatly (IG: Juliathehuman_)
Apprentice @ DABS tattoo, Southport UK.

This was just after she was finished, had the outline done for a couple of months so we went over a couple of spots then coloured her.

perchu:

when you try to click an image on tumblr to see a bigger version but you get redirected to someones blog

Japan’s feared and resilient crime syndicates the yakuza have seen their numbers decline for the first time in years, but is that because of stricter laws or are they just going underground?

Mulder? (larger)

iheartcrows:

priceofliberty:

A wild raven perches himself on the fence of a human’s farm and squawks for help because he has three porcupine quills stuck in the side of his face. The kind humans who find him attempt to take the quills out, but not without some “lip” from the raven.

Aw baybee!

(Really. It is a baby! Its mouth is still pink.)

NASA wants to visit Jupiter's moon Europa. Why's that exciting? In a word: Water. As this visualization shows, the icy moon may look tiny next to our own planet, but it's got 2- to 3-times as much H₂O as we have here on Earth . That "little" moon is packing quite the store of water — and with it, scientists think, a significant chance of harboring life.

Read more...

This animation tells the story of Ismael "Izzy" Nazario and the time he spent in solitary confinement in New York City's Rikers Island jail.

An anonymous reader writes "Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen were [part of a] wide-ranging session at SXSW today and they revealed that Google's data is now safely protected from the prying eyes of government organizations. In the last few days Google upgraded its security measure following revelations that Britain's GCHQ had intercepted data being transmitted between Google datacenters, Schmidt said that his company's upgrades following the incident left him 'pretty sure that information within Google is now safe from any government's prying eyes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

meanplastic:

'hey, what did you do on your vacation?'

First time accepted submitter paddysteed writes "I go to secondary school in the UK. I went digging around the computers there and found that on the schools machines, there was a root CA from the school. I then suspected that the software they instruct windows users to install on their own hardware to gain access to the BYOD network installed the same certificate. I created a windows virtual machine and connected to the network the way that was recommended. Immediately afterwards I checked the list of root CA's, and found my school's. I thought the story posted a few days ago was bad, but what my school has done is install their certificate on people's own machines — which I think is far worse. This basically allows them to intercept and modify any HTTPS traffic on their network. Considering this is a boarding school, and our only method of communicating to the outside world is over their network, I feel this is particularly bad. We were not told about this policy and we have not signed anything which would excuse it. I confronted the IT department and they initially denied everything. I left and within five minutes, the WiFi network was down then as quickly as it had gone down, it was back up. I went back and they confirmed that there was a mistake and they had 'fixed' it. They also told me that the risk was very low and the head of networks told me he was willing to bet his job on it. I asked them to instruct people to remove the bad certificate from their own machines, but they claimed this was unnecessary due to the very low risk. I want to take this further but to get the school's management interested I will need to explain what has happened and why it is bad to non-technical people and provide evidence that what has been done is potentially illegal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oregon Republican Conference Endorses Same-Sex Marriage:

Republicans at the annual Dorchester conference in Seaside voted to endorse a measure to legalize same-sex marriage that could be on the ballot this November. The vote prompted three conservative groups to organize an alternative event.