firehose

Little Girls Are Better At Designing Superheroes Than You is a project where superheroes are drawn based on the costumes of girls.

This submission is Super Z and Super L. According to their mother, Super Z can knock out any bad guy with her TaeKwonDo kicks, and Super L can twirl her way around any bad guy in a single bound!

This submission was kindly drawn by the talented artist, Angie, of Angie Arts!

Kevin Spacey offers his impression of Christopher Walken auditioning for the role of Han Solo…

(From a 1997 SNL skit, via Reddit)

One day after teasing what may well be the next big thing in football boot design, adidas have made the Primeknit boot official.

By doing so, they have fired the first shot in the woven footwear market when it comes to soccer, with Nike rumored to be launching their own take, the FlyKnit, next week. Adidas have brought the technology to market first, however, and it has big implications.

When it comes to running shoes, where wovens first made their mark, footwear saw a relatively major reduction in weight and a notable increase in comfort. For soccer, the goal has long been a perfect fit, and woven technology allowed for that by allowing the upper to conform to the foot's contours in easier fashion. This will mean big things not only for weight in football boots, where speed has recently been king, but for comfort and touch too.

The Primeknit boot, advertised as having the "prime fit" is the first step on that path. The new boot will be worn by Liverpool and Uruguay superstar Luis Suarez, among other adidas footballers, and will be available from the 17th of March. The new upper is said to provide that custom second-skin fit that everyone has been longing for without the need for custom fits.

The upper is a one-piece, one-layer construction using durable yarns that still manage to provide stability. The upper is also coated, making the boots water resistant. The boot is a limited edition, evidenced by the launch price of  £220. The outsole will be familiar to fans of the Samba f50 as it is the same stud configuration and looks to bring the same comfort.

Speaking about the boot in an adidas release, Markus Baumann, Senior VP for Global Football at adidas, said:

"Every adidas product is developed with the player in mind and in particular, the needs of the player. By producing the world's first knitted football boot we have provided a brand new solution to the search for higher levels of comfort and flexibility."

"primeknit is a further demonstration of our commitment to driving relentless innovation in football and is designed to allow for a bespoke fit for each player, making performance more intuitive and responsive than ever before. primeknit is a technology that is right at the heart of adidas innovation and we're excited about introducing this development into football."

Skottie Young is writing and illustrating an all-new ongoing series starring Guardians of the Galaxy member Rocket Raccoon.

Freshly Exhumed writes "As Apple issued an update for Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion yesterday, Snow Leopard users have not seen a security update since September, 2013. This would not be noteworthy if Apple, like a host of other major software vendors, would clearly spell out its OS support policies and warn users of such changes, but they have not. Thus, the approximately 20% of Mac users still running Snow Leopard now find themselves in a very vulnerable state without the latest security updates."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

submitted by ajumpsbshoots
[link] [comment]

On February 21, 2014, three little orphaned black bear cubs were brought to the Oregon Zoo veterinary medical center by wildlife officials who believe the cubs were orphaned when their mother was scared off by loggers. The cubs will be treated and cared for until they are healthy enough to make their way to their permanent home in Texas.

These little bears have a story very similar to the three cougar cubs who were also brought to the Oregon Zoo for care before they moved to their permanent home in North Carolina.

image via Oregon Zoo

Craig Davison has a series of paintings where he depicts kids in pretend play, and the character's they're emulating. The result is pretty adorable. Many more can be found on his site.

A year after it came out and shined a harsh light on hunger and poverty in our own backyard, Portland-focused documentary American Winter finally found itself caught in the basilisk-like gaze of Fox News commentator Sean Hannity.

Hannity often gets angry at things. But he was angry about thing in particular: Comments in the film from Commissioner Nick Fish, in which he pledged to use public resources to help people left behind by unchecked capitalism.

If capitalism is not regulated or checked, there’s a harsh logic. And it will always seek out the lowest costs, the highest return. Which is why we have historically viewed government as a check and a balance on that.

Over the last quarter century we have reduced regulations, degraded wages, cut back on health care. We’ve reduced taxes, and now people are more vulnerable.

My job is to communicate to people the absolute moral imperative during these times of using public resources to maintain the safety net until things turn around. And to make sure that we don’t throw some of our most vulnerable people, essentially, to the wolves.

For Hannity, them's fighting words! And he kept going back to Fish's remarks—"liberal talking points"—over and over and over.

Hannity has hunger and housing solutions, of course. It's just that they're also talking points.

"If government could get out of the way," he says, "and allow drilling and fracking and coal mining."

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

djempirical

give me chocolate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIKqgE4BwAY

Original Source

YOUNGSTOWN, OH—Despite the release of a new documentary exposing the disturbing practices and adverse health effects associated with the fast food industry, impoverished single mother of three Karen Ford told reporters Thursday that the revelations ...

An anonymous reader writes with more chilling news from the Snowden files. Quoting the Guardian: "GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not. ... The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs." Remember, friends don't video conference with friends unless they're using SIP and TLS.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ladies and gentlemen, Bill O'Reilly.

House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday mispronounced his last name as “boner” during a press conference at the Capitol.

sibyllinesketchblog:

I edited my 60’s Adventure Time girls ! Look, Marceline is playing the bass ! And I thought LSP would be perfect as the lead singer of the band ✧

I can’t believe my first post hit 32.000 notes, that’s crazyyy ! Thanks everyone ! ♡

Nonchalance In Corduroy.

David Bowie.

The Chicago Police Department has ramped up the use of its "predictive analysis" system to identify people it believes are likely to commit crimes. These people, who are placed on a "heat list," are visited by police officers who tell them that they are considered pre-criminals by CPD, and are warned that if they do commit any crimes, they are likely to be caught.

The CPD defends the practice, and its technical champion, Miles Wernick from the Illinois Institute of Technology, characterizes it as a neutral, data-driven system for preventing crime in a city that has struggled with street violence and other forms of crime. Wernick's approach involves seeking through the data for "abnormal" patterns that correlate with crime. He compares it with epidemiological approaches, stating that people whose social networks have violence within them are also likely to commit violence.

The CPD refuses to share the names of the people on its secret watchlist, nor will it disclose the algorithm that put it there.

This is a terrible way of running a criminal justice system.

Let's start with transparency, because that's the most obviously broken thing here. The designers of the algorithm assure us that it is considering everything relevant, nothing irrelevant, and finding statistically valid correlations that allow them to make useful predictions about who will commit crime. In an earlier era, we would have called this discrimination -- or even witchhunting -- because the attribution of guilt (or any other trait) through secret and unaccountable systems is a superstitious, pre-rational way of approaching any problem.

The purveyors of this technology cloak themselves in the mantel of science. The core tenet of science, the thing that distinguishes it from all other ways of knowing, is the systematic publication and review of hypotheses and the experiments conducted to validate them. The difference between a scientist and an alchemist isn't their area of study: it's the method they use to validate their conclusions.

An algorithm that only works if you can't see it is not science, it's a conjuring trick. My six year old can do that trick: she can make anything disappear provided you don't look while she's doing it and don't ask her to open her hands and show you what's in them. Asserting that you're doing science but you can't explain how you're doing it is a nonsense on its face.

Now let's think about objectivity: the system that the CPD and its partners have designed purports to objectivity because it uses numbers and statistics to make its calculations. But -- transparency again -- without insight into how the system runs its numbers, we have no way of debating and validating the way it weighs different statistics. And what about those statistics? We know -- because of transparent, rigorous scholarship, and because of high-profile legal cases -- that police intervention is itself not neutral. From stop-and-search to arrest to prosecutorial zeal or discretion, the whole enterprise of crime statistics is embedded in a wider culture in which human beings with social power and representing the status quo can and do make subjective decisions about how to characterize individual acts.

Put more simply: if cops, judges and prosecutors are more likely to give white people in rich neighborhoods in possession of cocaine an easier time than they give black people in poor neighborhoods in possession of crack (and they do), then your data-mining exercise will disproportionately weight blackness and poorness as being correlated with felonies. Garbage in, garbage out -- there's nothing objective and scientifically rigorous about using flawed data to generate flawed conclusions.

But even assuming that this stuff could be made to work: is it a valid approach to crimefighting?

Consider that the root of this methodology is social network analysis. Your place on the heat-list is explicitly not about what you've done or who you are: it's about who your friends are and what they've done. The idea that people's social circles tell us something about their own character is as old as the proverb "A man is known by the company he keeps." Certainly, it wasn't a new idea to the framers of the Constitution (after all, the typical framer was both a member of a secret society and had recently participated in a guerrilla revolution -- they knew a thing or two about the predictive value of social network analysis).

But the framers explicitly guaranteed "freedom of association," in the First Amendment. Why? Because while "birds of a feather stick together," the criminalization of friendship is a corrosive force that drives apart the bonds that make us into a society. In other words: if the Chicago PD think that crime can only be fought by discriminating against people based on their friendships, they need to get a constitutional amendment before they put that plan into action.

Finally, this program assumes that its interventions will be positive, and this assumption is anything but assured. The idea that being told that you are likely to commit crimes will prevent you from doing so is no more obvious that the idea that being treated as a presumptive criminal will lead you to commit crimes. What's more, well-known, well-documented cognitive biases (theory blindness, confirmation bias) are alive and well in the criminal justice system: if someone on the blacklist is suspected of doing something minor, we should expect the police, prosecutors and judge to treat them more harshly than they would someone plucked from off the street. If you're already in a machine-generated ethnicity of pre-criminals, society will deal with you accordingly.

What's more, this will lead to more arrests, harsher charges and longer sentences for pre-criminals -- seemingly validating the methodology. It's the Big Data version of witchburning, a modern pseudoscience cloaked in the respectability of easily manipulated statistics and suspicious metaphors from public health.

The minority report: Chicago's new police computer predicts crimes, but is it racist? [Matt Stroud/The Verge]

(Woodcut-1598-witch-trial, Wikimedia Commons)

http://www.digicult.it/news/evan-roth-intellectual-property-donor/

a-la-maquina:

"Punk is supposed to be inclusive, right? Artist Suzy X wrote and illustrated this comic about feeling excluded from the punk scene and eventually finding a comfortable place in music.”

Saw this on Melanie Cervantes’ FB. Thanks for posting it girl, I needed to see it. :)

firehose shared this story .

---

It’s time to get over the notion that most people working from home are moms who squeeze reports and conference calls in between children’s games and Cheerios.

A new survey shows that men vastly outnumber women in remote work—either from home, a coffee shop, a co-working or business center.  And the Flex+Strategy Group survey also found that childless workers and parents almost equally commute down a flight of stairs to work.

“I have always known that flexibility itself is gender neutral,” says Cali Williams Yost, CEO of Flex+Strategy, a firm that consults with employers. “But the primary work-remote person is very much more likely to be a man.”

Its research shows 36% of men say they do most of their work from remote places including home, compared to 23% of women. (Men represent about 53% of the US labor force and more than two-thirds of all commuters, according to Flex+Strategy’s survey.)  The telephone survey by ORC International queried 556 full-time US workers.

Other surveys show similar results. A Harris Interactive poll last year indicated 37% of men and 31% of women spent some time working from home—though women were more likely to agree with positive statements about telework.  Almost two-thirds of workers told Harris that working from home improved productivity and work output.

“It’s easier to say flexibility’s about moms, about women, then we don’t have to deal with it” at larger companies, Williams Yost says. She thinks women may be reluctant to request work from home arrangements, fearing they will be shunted onto the “mommy track.” Her survey results show women are more likely to work in open floor plan and cubicles in workplaces, the same group that said they were least likely to use flexibility.

One Harvard economist believes the flexibility, especially in traditional fields, comes at a high cost. Yet telecommuting jobs are growing and plentiful, especially at companies such as Xerox and Aetna.

The message to business leaders who are not sold on the fundamental shift to more flexible work arrangements: “Flexibility, including telework, is not a policy; it’s not perk or a program,” says Williams Yost, the author of two books Tweak It and Work+Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right for You. “It’s a way of operating your business, and increasingly a core strategy” that applies to all.

Follow Vickie on Twitter @WorkingKind. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

hodad

via @LouisPanda

It's time to talk about "True Detective" and the female body. Or rather, bodies, loads of them, left naked and chained, stacked high in the morgue, murdered, traumatized or simply stripped bare for the audience's (and the president's) titillation. Early on, Vulture's Margaret Lyons noted how many more dead women than live ones the show made room for, but for me the breaking point was last night's episode, "Haunted Houses," where Woody Harrelson's Martin Hart was once again mounted, cowboy style, by a nubile young woman whose naked breasts dangled pendulously over his all but unseen body. It's followed later in the episode by a scene in which the young woman, a former child prostitute whom Hart once tried to rescue from her life of sin, calls him up and tells him she'd like Hart to introduce her to the world of what Sinead O'Connor once called "the difficult brown." Hart licks his lips when he hears this, and who wouldn't? You can bet that nagging wife of his is an exit-only gal, and for a man as preoccupied with female purity as Hart, the idea of breaking in an orifice that a onetime whore has never had defiled must be something close to heaven. (On Twitter, BuzzFeed's Kate Aurthur raised the possibility this may be a line she's used before, or else she's drawing a line between her former professional duties and her private life. But the way it's staged, with her looking coyly over her shoulder at her own ass in a full-length mirror, plays right into Hart's fantasy, and the audience's.) 

Scenes like this make it awfully hard to accept "True Detective" as the sobersided philosophical inquiry it presents itself as: Phil-bro-sophical is more like it. Sure, there are the windy monologues delivered by Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle about fourth-dimensional perspectives and the recurring nature of evil, but don't worry: It's also got tits.

Perhaps the best counterargument -- i.e. one that doesn't boil down to the notion that anyone who bristles at the way True Detective treats women is a politically correct scold -- comes from Slate's Willa Paskin, who after six episodes has come to see it as a show about the way (some) men view women. It's not misogynist; it's meta-misogynist.

Ignoring women may be the show's blind spot, but it is also one of its major themes. "True Detective" is explicitly about the horrible things that men do to women, things that usually go unseen and uninvestigated. No one missed Dora Lange. Marie Fontenot disappeared, and the police let a rumor stop them from following up. Another little girl was abducted, and a report was never even filed. "Women and children are disappearing, nobody hears about it, nobody puts it together," Rust told his boss Sunday night, outlining what he believes is a vast conspiracy in the Bayou. Rust is haunted by women who aren't there -- his ex-wife and his dead daughter -- while Marty cannot deal appropriately with the women who are.

To be blunt, I find this idea more credulous than compelling, but it parallels the explanation proffered by the show's creator and writer, Nic Pizzolatto, on Twitter:

There's no question that "True Detective" sees its heroes as tragically flawed, driven by and obsessed with their own visions of what women should and shouldn't be. Cohle's own breaking point, or so police-department rumor has it, was the "Marshland Medea" case of a woman who surreptitiously murdered three of her own children; after coaxing her into a confession, Cohle wraps up his interrogation by suggesting, with coldblooded equanimity: "If you get the opportunity, you should kill yourself." But the real rupture, we later learn, came when Hart's wife, Maggie (Michelle Monaghan), seduced Cohle as payback for her husband's affair. If she didn't exactly do anal, she at least got Cohle to give it to her from behind, later telling Marty: "I haven't been fucked like that since before the girls." (She's referring to the birth of their two daughters, but the multiple ways that sentence can be parsed leave it open to alternate, extremely suggestive, interpretations.)

On the one hand, this is pure cliche, not to mention a pale echo of an identical revenge fuck on "Breaking Bad," right down to the "I fucked Rust / Ted." (Before Maggie shows up at Rust's apartment, she tries to pick up a stranger, Betty Draper-style, but even her scarlet dress -- the same color as the ceramic devil that watches over Marty's adulterous screw -- can't give her the courage.) But it's also the first time in the show's run Monaghan's been given a chance to do anything but act peevish, and she knocks it out the park, allowing Maggie a moment of pure, even astonished, pleasure, before the guilt kicks in. "In a former life," she tells the present-day detectives in the interrogation room, "I used to exhaust myself navigating crude men who thought they were clever." She, at least, has been able to move on.

"True Detective," however, has not. The show has been exceptionally clever in establishing and then removing a false sense of security, especially on a structural level: It was a show about a murder that happened in 1995, until it wasn't; it was a show told in flashback by characters who made it to the present unharmed, only now it isn't that, either. But it's still a show about men and the bodies of women, either dead or desecrated or both. In '95, Cohle and Hart pull a dead boy out of Reggie Ledoux's backwoods abattoir, and Shea Whigham's ruined preacher recalls finding pictures of naked children, apparently of both genders, tucked into an obscure volume in an ecclesiastical library. The brutalized boys, however, never materialize. They'd just muddy the waters.

The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, for one, has had enough.

Like many critics, I was initially charmed by the show's anthology structure (eight episodes and out; next season a fresh story) and its witty chronology, which chops and dices a serial-killer investigation, using two time lines.... On the other hand, you might take a close look at the show's opening credits, which suggest a simpler tale: one about heroic male outlines and closeups of female asses. The more episodes that go by, the more I'm starting to suspect that those asses tell the real story.

This aspect of "True Detective" (which is written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Fukunaga) will be gratingly familiar to anyone who has ever watched a new cable drama get acclaimed as "a dark masterpiece"... [A]fter years of watching "Boardwalk Empire," "Ray Donovan," "House of Lies," and so on, I've turned prickly, and tired of trying to be, in the novelist Gillian Flynn's useful phrase, the Cool Girl: a good sport when something smells like macho nonsense. And, frankly, "True Detective" reeks of the stuff. The series, for all its good looks and its movie-star charisma, isn't just using dorm-room deep talk as a come-on: it has fallen for its own sales pitch.

Nussbaum's "Cool Story, Bro," is probably the first to work the phrase "a nice bouncy rack" and a Grindr subtweet ("six minutes, uncut!") into a New Yorker essay, but it's also important for its polemical rejection of "True Detective"'s self-proclaimed importance, and because of the critics who were instantly willing to award it "Best show on TV" status based more on signifiers of quality than a demonstration thereof. Of course, it's a nicely shot show centered around two great performances, stuffed with Easter Egg literary references and semisweet profundities. But it's also, like a lot of HBO series, mired in a very specific, limited idea of what makes a Great Show, namely the focus on "serious" issues of masculinity rather than its apparently unserious converse. As Nussbaum points out, the "It's not misogynist; it's about misogyny" defense of "True Detective" parallels the arguments (including mine) in favor of "The Wolf of Wall Street," but there's a crucial difference. Even though it was wedded to a single narrator, "Wolf" still gave its audience somewhere else to stand. "True Detective" takes Cohle and Hart exactly as seriously as they take themselves.

Original Source

This fine instance of Saudinglish is found, together with other prime examples, in the following article: "Vous avez aimé le 'chinglish', vous allez adorer le 'saudinglish'!"

Roger Allen has transcribed and translated the Arabic on the sign as follows:

bay` al-dawaajin al-madhbuuhah

(double vowels in English for elongated vowels in Arabic).

the sale of slaughtered poultry

Perhaps Language Log readers familiar with Arabic will explain subtleties and nuances that are not immediately apparent to the non-specialist.

[Hat tip Nathan Hopson]

nekosmuse:

kissthefuture:

swagtron4000:

sorry sir, we don’t have the facilities for a cat scan, but we can certainly get you a lab report

#i must have missed this episode of hannibal

Wait, this isn’t a Hannibal spoiler?

I searched for my birth mother and learned two things: She’d recently died. And she’d been desperately searching for me.