firehose

newyorker:

As of tomorrow, Clarence Thomas will not have spoken in the Supreme Court for eight years. Jeffrey Toobin explains why Thomas’s “behavior on the bench has gone from curious to bizarre to downright embarrassing”: http://nyr.kr/1jUZRtF

Photograph by Sidney Davis/Tribune Review/AP.

imgfave:

Posted by mistymorrning

centuria:

Kisho Kurokawa
Roppongi Prince Hotel
Tokyo
1982

A few months ago, I did the unthinkable: I posted my email address on the internet.

In fact, I did it multiple times, tweeting multiple email addresses, from different domains (one was even gmail!).

I included the @ symbol, the period, and the rest, so in order to email me, you’d simply need to copy and paste. If the common wisdom of the internet is to be trusted, I should have received a deluge of spam into these newly created inboxes after the spambots crawled past these email addresses.

I turned off spam filtering and waited.

Four months have passed and I have received exactly three pieces of spam to the unobscured addresses I posted on Twitter. (I would share those tweets with you but I want to continue this experiment a little longer.)

One was a solicitation to buy twitter followers, and two were phishing attempts (written in Italian) purporting to be from an Italian credit card issuer. That’s it. All three were labeled as suspicious by my email client.

Strangely, it appears one of the email addresses wound up in the contacts list of a Moroccan man who then invited all of his contacts to join him on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. That address received a dozen or so emails from those services pestering me to join and reminding me of the invitation. Although unwanted, these emails are legitimate. They were not phishing attempts nor another type of malicious attack, even though they were persistent, and in French. One of them read: “Oubaha wants to join your network on LinkedIn. What would you like to answer?”

The suggestion to mask or obscure email addresses to avoid spam has been around for more than a decade. References to replacing the @ with (at) or .com with (dot) com to reduce spam can be found on online message boards and archives dating back to the 1990s. The US Federal Trade Commission even studied the effect of posting email addresses to the internet (pdf) in various ways in 2005. The FTC study found that masking an email address only reduces the amount of spam, it doesn’t prevent it. That is to say, obscuring your email address doesn’t prevent spam, yet the tactic persists.

But there are two realities here. The first is that spammers do not appear to be massively harvesting Twitter for email addresses. (If they are, they’re not using the addresses they collect to send a lot of spam.)

The second is that parsing out an email address from one of the many obscuring formulations is just as easy for software as it is for humans. You think a computer can’t be programed to realize what “[at] gmail [dot] com” means? You’re wrong.

Stop playing games and save everyone the hassle. If you need to give out your email address in public over the internet, just post it there. If you still think you’ll be spammed, reduce your risk by deleting the post once you know the recipient got the address. (Receiving an email from them is a good indication.)

Presumably, your email provider has good spam recognition as a last line of defense—tactics which catch 99.5% of spam with 0.0% false positives have been around for more than a decade. At that rate, when I turn my spam filter back on I should expect spam from putting my email address on Twitter to reach my inbox once every 22 years. I’m willing to take that risk.

I welcome your comments at dyanofsky@qz.com

I started following @2sisters_angie a little over a year ago. Back then she was posting the typical stuff you see from moms on Instagram -- pics of her daughter at the park, pics of her daughter eating breakfast and lots of photos of her daughter playing dress-up.

You know, the same stuff I post.

Then, about nine months ago, Angie's feed started to change. It became clear Angie's daughter (she calls her "Mayhem") was more interested in fashion than the average 4-year-old. Mayhem shunned her store-bought princess dresses and started wrapping herself with scarves and sheets creating her own styles.

Then one day Angie got tired of finding her clothes in Mayhem's toy box and suggested they make a dress out of paper. Mayhem loved the idea and they haven't stopped creating paper dresses since.

I've been continually amazed every time Angie's pictures pop up in my feed. The dresses started like this:

And over the last few months, I've watched them evolve to this:

Having a 4-year-old daughter of my own, whose biggest fashion moment was putting a red bow around the waist of her green Super Soccer Stars t-shirt and calling herself "Peter Pan," I had a few questions for Angie. Namely...

How much is done by you and how much is done by your daughter?

The ideas are pretty much a 50/50 split, but Mayhem constructs a lot more than most people would probably believe. That's one of the best things about this project, I see her learning new skills every single day. At this point, she knows exactly how many sheets of construction paper she needs to make herself a top and a bottom. She can lay the entire thing out and tape it together all by herself. Definitely, the more complex designs have more of my time invested, but she's literally always beside me learning something new if she's not tearing or taping or gluing while I am.

Do you have an example of a dress she constructed on her own?

She made the dress below entirely by herself. I wasn't even home and she couldn't wait to show it to me and have me photograph it.

Are all the dresses made of paper?

Most of the time. We use a lot of construction paper, but we also use tissue paper, wrapping paper, and gift bags. We have also used silk scarves, tulle, and aluminum foil. Basically, if we can find it laying around the house and it's pliable, it's fair game. Clear packing tape and glue are our adhesives of choice.

Where does she find her inspiration? Is she watching runway shows and award shows?

We pull inspiration from wherever we go. The shark dress, for example, came as a direct result of her first visit to an aquarium.

She also gets a lot of ideas from shows that she watches or books we read, like Minnie Mouse, My Little Pony and Elsa from "Frozen."

Sometimes I'll Google images the day after award shows, so she can see the dresses worn on the red carpet and pick which ones she wants to make.

We also leave a tab open on our iPad with a search for "project runway dresses" so that we can quickly reference those as well. She's never actually seen an episode of Project Runway, but I did show her a clip one time explaining that there is a show all about making dresses and I thought she might hyperventilate.

Have you always been crafty? Were you a fashion designer in any sense before this started?

No and no. I actually don't consider myself to be the least bit crafty. Don't ask me to build something out of popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners ... you'll be incredibly disappointed! Cutting and taping paper is about all we do. And the most ironic part of this whole project is that I am literally the least fashionable person you will ever meet. In reality, I know nothing about fashion and cannot sew a straight line to save my life. A friend suggested I could start sewing these creations from scraps of fabric and I laughed at her. I'll take paper and tape any day over getting anywhere near a sewing machine!

Do you think this is going to be a lifelong interest for Mayhem?

After we made our first paper dress, Mayhem requested another the very next day. Then another the day after that. And no one is more surprised than I am, that she still wants to make them nearly 9 months later. I have no idea if it will continue, but as long as she wants to make them, we'll keep doing it.

Follow @2sisters_angie and #fashionbymayhem on Instagram. You'll be one of the first.

If you aren't on Instagram, check out more of Mayhem's creations on FashionByMayhem.com.

If you'd like see my daughter wearing the same striped leggings every day, follow @mommyshorts on Instagram.

Original Source

A Florida chain has started charging customers a 1% surcharge to pay for their American Care Act expenses. The Gator Group's full-time hourly employees won't actually receive health insurance until December.

An anonymous reader writes in with news about a new anonymous instant messenger client on the way from Tor. "Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching. Tor, the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A mathematical model is proposed for interpreting the love story between Elizabeth and Darcy portrayed by Jane Austen in the popular novel Pride and Prejudice. The analysis shows that the story is characterized by a sudden explosion of sentimental involvements, revealed by the existence of a saddle-node bifurcation in the model. The paper is interesting not only because it deals for the first time with catastrophic bifurcations in romantic relation-ships, but also because it enriches the list of examples in which love stories are described through ordinary differential equations…. A series of small discoveries can give rise to a sudden turning-point in the development of a love story. In mathematical terms these turning-points are nothing but so-called catastrophes, which, in the case of Pride and Prejudice, are technically revealed by the existence of a saddle-node bifurcation.” — Discover has a lingo-laced excerpt from the paper "A mathematical model of 'pride and prejudice'" ("as a consequence of the letter the upper saddle-node bifurcation curve is crossed from below and this crossing implies a discontinuous jump from x’ to x”’..."), plus a graph. A graph. It's so beautiful. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

We're Doing a Sequel - Muppets Most Wanted Music Video on Disney Video It's intercut with some trailer stuff, like Disney doesn't know you're going to see Muppets Most Wanted anyway (you are, right?). And it's as splendidly self-aware as I expect all Muppet movies to be. I may be dating myself here, but who's the kid tossing the flowers at 00:50? He's in all the trailers, and I have no clue what cameo I'm missing. I feel old. Behind the cut you'll find another Muppets Most Wanted promo vid, this one of Rowlf and Rizzo going through the drive-through at an ice cream shop. It's exactly that. It's funnier than it has any right to be.

Shazad Iqbal, 22, posted the complaint, demanding that the video be removed from YouTube. "At 01:15 into the video Dark Horse; a man is shown being burned, whilst wearing a pendant (also burned) forming the word 'Allah,' which is the Arabic word for God," he wrote. Iqbal describes Perry's Cleopatra-inspired persona as an opposition to God that "engulfs the believer and the word God in flames." ... On Wednesday, Iqbal and his supporters declared victory: A new version of Perry's video uploaded to her YouTube and Vevo channels has digitally scrubbed the offending pendant.

The 36-year-old man, whose name has not been released, was showing his girlfriend how his three handguns are safe when they aren’t loaded, according to the Detroit Free Press. He was attempting to demonstrate the safety of the handguns by holding them to his head and pulling the trigger. The third gun fired, and the man was struck in the head. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Three children ages 7, 10, and 12 were in the home, but did not witness the shooting, according to reports. The man's girlfriend told authorities he had been drinking most of the day before the incident took place.

LeBron James is wearing an awesome mask.

LeBron James is a scary basketball player. Somehow, he managed to become even scarier. He broke his nose last week against the Oklahoma City Thunder and, in order to protect his nose, he has this badass black mask. It's scary.

Alter-ego time!

LEZORRO

LEDREAD PIRATE BRONERTS

LEPHANTOM OF LEBROPERA

LEBATMAN

LEBRONE RANGER

Feel free to add your own!

We have no details about this other than the video below. (A picture appeared on Reddit last August, but there’s been absolutely no other information: we do not know who these people are, what the event they’re at is, how many worked on the outfit, or where they’re from.) But it’s magnificent, so we had to share. Great job, shady-looking guy! Get in touch with us if you see this: we’d like to know who you are, and what other superpowers you have.

Thanks to Recantha for the spot!

cumberbuddy:

sherlockisthebest:

x

#Acting. He’s brilliant. Just bloody brilliant.

Space Weather Around Venus is Harsher Than That Around Earth.

From redOrbit.

Here is: The very first footage from the second season of Orphan Black. It's short and sweet, but filled with clone tension! It has been FAR too long since we've seen Tatiana Maslany in action.

Read more...

RT

Crimean War Games Wall Street Journal As to how Vladimir Putin might respond to his humiliation last week in Ukraine, the answers came in rough and rapid succession on Thursday. At least the U.S. and the European Union can't harbor any more doubts about the Russian president's intention to ... West warns Russia amid rising tensions in CrimeaBBC News The New Great Game: Why Ukraine Matters to So Many Other NationsBusinessweek Pro-Russia separatists flex muscle in Ukraine's Crimean PeninsulaWashington Post ABC Online -Bloomberg -CTV News all 2,673 news articles »

hypnosec writes "Github has introduced Atom, its new 'web native' code editor which has been in development for more than six years. Atom is available as a part of an invite-only beta program. GitHub describes Atom as an attempt to create an editor 'that will be welcoming to an elementary school student on their first day learning to code, but also a tool they won't outgrow as they develop into seasoned hackers.'" You can request an invite on atom.io. The source to supporting libraries has already been released, but it looks like Atom itself might not be released (although it is a "specialized variant of Chromium designed to be a text editor rather than a web browser."). The editor is extensible in Javascript instead of "special-purpose scripting languages" like Emacs and VIM (is Javascript really any less messy than Emacs-Lisp though?). A preliminary user guide and customization guide are available to all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The jersey went on sale after the league was flooded with inquiries of its availability just two days after Collins' Nets debut.

Jason Collins made his return to the NBA on Sunday night as the first active openly gay athlete in league history, and on Tuesday his jersey became available at NBAStore.com due to incredibly high demand from basketball fans around the globe, according to Mike Mazzeo of ESPN New York.

Not only did the No. 98 jersey -- which he will wear the rest of the season after temporarily donning No. 46 in his first game back -- hit the shelves on Tuesday, but it was the top-seller among all players after the league was flooded with inquiries both at the NBA Store Manhattan location and online. Collins is wearing the No. 98 in honor of Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming who in 1998 was the victim of an antigay hate crime in which he was murdered after being tortured and beaten.

Collins was recently signed to a 10-day contract with the Nets, and he notched two rebounds and a steal in 11 minutes of action during his debut, a 108-102 Brooklyn win over the Los Angeles Lakers. Three $250 authentic Collins jerseys were snagged immediately after going on sale at the Manhattan store at around 5 p.m. ET, per Mazzeo.

Seriously…

LARA CROFT in TOMB RAIDER #1!

LEGENDS OF RED SONJA written by me, MARJORIE LIU and MERCEDES LACKEY!

LOIS LANE #1 written by MARGUERITE BENNETT!

YOU WANT THESE AWESOME LADYBOOKS!

questionableadvice:

~ Road Book of Boston and Vicinity for Bicyclers, Riders and Drivers, Charles A. Underwood, ed., 1893

"It is not advisable to wear a bustle."

Kyoto noodle shop Tawaraya serves a bowl of udon that contains a single noodle—but the noodle is so fat and long that it fills the bowl. Back in 2012 RocketNews24 visited the restaurant and found that the noodle was so long it could not be lifted entirely out of the bowl by one end.

photo via RocketNews24

via RocketNews24

In a move not totally dissimilar to your dad getting really into his woodworking, Steven Soderbergh has used all the extra time his comfortable retirement affords to recut Psycho in its entirety—using material from both Alfred Hitchcock’s original and Gus Van Sant’s 1998 remake. Soderbergh drains the color from Van Sant’s version, then mashes it up with the original to wholly bizarre results. The project reaches peak weirdness during the famous shower scene, where Soderbergh not only brings the color back to the remake, he also layers the two versions on top of each other and plays them simultaneously.  The full-length mashup is available over at Soderbergh’s website (where he’s also, equally weirdly, hawking shirts, Bolivian Brandy and apps). It is, at the very least, worth a quick glance, if only for the chance to compare directly Vince Vaughn to Anthony Perkins.