firehose

Sir,

Although this is not a piece of code, I suggest that you took a look at this sheer madness — a screenshot of the very last scene in 2010 Unthinkable, with the hands belonging to an elite forces agent who is defusing an A-bomb by… typing rubbish into MS Excel on Macintosh.

To me, this spoiled the whole positive impression I had got about the movie

Picture found on http://lolsnaps.com/news/87224/0/

Sincerely

K.I.

by john

Irish Independent

Supreme Court declines to hear gun law challenges Washington Post The Supreme Court Monday disappointed gun-rights activists once again, declining to review two cases involving the rights of those under 21 to own handguns. Activists had urged the court to accept the cases, saying there was a “massive judicial resistance” ... High court rejects NRA appealsSan Francisco Chronicle Supreme Court declines to hear gun casesWashington Times Supreme Court Declines Challenges To Gun LawsHuffington Post all 86 news articles »

In 1926, Cuba saw the construction of the Presidio Modelo, a prison based on the Panopticon building design. The idea was that a guard could stand in the central tower and watch all of the prisoners in the surrounding cells.

Read more...

Hmm.

Batman, maybe. Superman would be way up there but I did Action already.

Titans? Green Lantern Corps?

faustuszero:

Miss these two.

They are doing this somewhere right now, only they also gots Liana, is my theory.

Have you ever wondered what happens to a discarded iPhone? Does it crackle in the sun? Does it wallow in the electronic filth until its battery leaks and runs? Maybe it just sits there like a dusty brick. Or maybe, just maybe, it breathes life anew in the land of China.

Part two of a six-part series.

Here are the projected rotations and starting nine for every AL Central team, as described by Google's autocomplete. If you missed the first entry in the series, it's on the AL West, and you can find it here.

Reminders:

• These are from the drop-down menu in Firefox's browser search. I entered a player's name, followed by one letter from A to Z, and the result included here appeared on the drop-down menu.
  
  
• These are not the first results. Otherwise they would all be "stats", "girlfriend", or "shirtless." These are the most interesting or amusing results. In some cases, interesting or amusing could not be found. That is your fault. You didn't search for enough freaky things.
  
  
• Google has all of our brains mapped and on file somewhere, so these are probably tailored specifically to me. I cleared my cookies first, but you never know.
  

To the charts!

Minnesota Twins

Cleveland Indians

Chicago White Sox

Detroit Tigers

Kansas City Royals

Takeaway: The AL Central has some serious issues. But I'll grab my cadence cream and flow fuschia, and I'll give that coloring book a try.

That's one of the opening pages of Conjectures on Original Composition, a book about creative genius published by the English poet Edward Young in 1759. It's considered one of the first big essays to tout the idea that "originals" -- writers of deep originality -- are more important and awesome than derivative folks. I heard about Conjectures while reading a different essay this evening, and since I'm sort of obsessed with tracking the rise of our modern (and disastrous) conceit that originality is something that just kind of wells up from inside you I immediately dialed up Conjectures on Google Books to read it. It's a delightful essay, but what struck me immediately was an aspect of its design: Those tiny pages, crammed full of large-fonted prose.

It looks just like a book displayed on a smartphone screen.

That small-page format was quite common back in the 18th century. It's known as octavo duodecimo -- with pages that are about 6 inches by 9 inches. 5 inches wide by 7 3/8 inches tall. (At least Ithink this particular book is duodecimo format; book-history freaks please correct me if I'm mistaken!) The entire Conjectures is only about 8,000 words long, but it was common to print essays in this pretty little style, because it had great ergonomics: It made for easy one-handed reading and portability.

Pretty much the same advantages as reading on a smartphone, when you think about it. When it comes to books, I read about half my stuff these days in print, and half in e-format; and while I own a Kindle, I don't use it very much any more -- I just read ebooks on my Android phone. Indeed, reading on my phone has led me to read more books than ever, because the octavo-esque duodecimo-esque portability means the books are ever with me: I dip in and out while riding the subway, waiting in line at a store, lying in bed falling asleep, or lying in bed awake with "early waking insomnia", yay. The portability has made it possible for me to read books sufficiently huge that, had I'd been forced to carry 'em around, I'd probably have ditched out and never finished them -- things like War and Peace, Middlemarch, and Moby Dick, all of which I read entirely on my smartphone.

In fact, one of the oddly useful things about reading War and Peace on your phone is that the octavo-like duodecimo-like format makes the epic enormity of the tome less intimidating: It's just one little page after another, each one oddly inviting. I tend to blow up the font on my phone to quite large, so each page has only a few hundred words on it, precisely the way that Conjectures is laid out. Here's a page of Conjectures ...

And here's a page of a book I'm currently reading on my smartphone (sorry for the crappy resolution of the font, which looks weird when I size it comparably):

The point being, of course, that the ergonomics of smartphones as reading devices are not only kind of rad, but historically so.

These small formats from days of yore also help explain the stupendous productivity of many historic authors. I'll often be reading about a nonfiction essayist from the 17th or 18th or 19th century and the bio will mention he or she wrote 56 books or some other ungodly number, and I'll freak out: Man alive! How can anyone generate so much?

But then you realize that a "book" back then wasn't what we think of as a "book" now. Back then, there were a plurality of book-sized formats that were, like octavo or the slightly-smaller duodecimo, pretty compact, so these "books" were only a couple of thousand words long. (Like the totally fun The Art of Memory by Marius D'assigny, from 1706.) Authors who cranked out 40 "books" were actually writing pieces that are closer to a long magazine article.

It wasn't until the 20th century arrived that nonfiction books started to congeal into the 300-page quantum, for a host of economic and cultural and industrial reasons. To wit: If you're going to charge someone $25 for a hardcover nonfiction book and do it via industrial publishing, you have to make the customers feel they're getting $25 worth, which means the book has to be loooooong ... even if the author does not possess an argument requiring 300 pages. (Thus we find so many books that are really just magazine articles gasified to fill the container.) The emergence of digital formats for books is changing these industrial economics, with some pretty cool aesthetic and intellectual effects. If you don't need to charge $25 for a book, you don't need it to necessarily balloon to 300 pages, so you can begin to publish books that look more like ... Conjectures or The Art of Memory. The book fits the length of the utterance, instead of expanding to fill a vessel the dimensions of which were determined by haptic marketing: marketing that is essentially haptic: "Yeah, this book feels weighty. I'm in!"

Part of what made me think about these cool, short, old book formats is that the recent discussion/debate about "long form" writing. I'm thinking particularly of Ben Smith's terrific meditation on how they're integrating longer pieces into Buzzfeed. As he notes, when you don't have an artificial constraint, form fits function: "This is more like book-writing, less like the compromises of magazines and newspapers ..."

The only thing I want now is for someone to sample those amazing fonts they used for Conjectures and The Art of Memory, and instal them on my phone. Holy moses, the fonts that come with the Kindle app on Android are flavorless. Look at the gorgeous fontistry of those old books! Just look at it!

UPDATE: In this post I originally misidentified the size of the book as duodecimo size, 5 inches by 7 3/8 inches; then John Overholt, a curator of early modern books at Harvard, pulled a copy of Conjectures out of his stacks to verify the dimensions: Check out John's excellent comment below, which I've excerpted. Thanks John!

The Essay is actually a small octavo, the next size up from duodecimo, which I have the sense would have been a little beneath the dignity of such a piece. I did see that there was also a pirated Dublin edition in 12mo in just 60 pages, which would have been set in a much smaller type, to keep the book considerably cheaper than the 1£ 6s of the London original.

Bonus: John snapped this shot of himself holding the book:

Original Source

“I never thought I’d ever wish to be back in high school again!”

Filmmaker Ryan Higa has created a brutally “Honest University Commercial” that explains the complete college experience. We’ve previously written about Ryan’s clever collection of videos.

(✪⥎✪), this "Parallax View" music video ⊟

Wow, go watch this "Parallax View" music video from Sumire Uesaka — it might look like a standard Youtube embed on a Tumblr at first, but then it turns into a wild experience that mashes up Doom and Ghosts ‘n Goblins and Pokémon and Final Fantasy and — just watch it. If you recognize the song, by the way, it’s the ending theme from Hōzuki no Reitetsu. Hat-tip to Prosthetic Knowledge for the GIF and link.

SUPPORT TINY CARTRIDGE Join Club Tiny!

Can a headline jump the shark? This one may have.

Former Australian cricketer Shane Warne is a legendary Lothario. Think Derek Jeter, but smarmier. So when it was reported he spent the night with a brassiere mogul WHILE in England to try and reconcile with ex-fiancee Elizabeth Hurley (yes THAT Elizabeth Hurley) The Sun newspaper took it on themselves to write the best headline ever.

After more revelations about Shane Warne and bra queen Michelle Mone, our headline of the day goes to... pic.twitter.com/QBx0kxzUYw

— The Sun (@TheSunNewspaper) February 24, 2014

Let's break it down into its components:

"OVER THE SHOULDER BOWLER"

Yes, that is traditionally how cricket is played. We're right with you.

"BOWLS OVER"

Accepted vernacular for woos. We remain on board.

"AN OVER THE SHOULDER BOULDER HOLDER"

Alright, you're losing us a touch here. We get what you're saying, breasts are boulders, bras are holders. OK, let's see how this ends up.

"MOULDER"

Ah, We get it! She moulds the boulder holders. Well done Sun. It took us a little time to work this one out, and our minds went one place initially.

Photo via Wikimedia

The truth is out there.

San Francisco has some potentially serious problems with its star coach after reports surfaced about the uneasiness by the bay.

The San Francisco 49ers hired head coach Jim Harbaugh three years ago, who took over a team that had not been to an NFC Championship game since 1996. Under Harbaugh, the 49ers have at least been to the NFC title game all three seasons, including a Super Bowl appearance in 2013.

However, that might not be enough to keep the two sides together for very long, according to Jason La Canfora of CBS. Harbaugh and general manager Trent Baalke are "barely speaking", according to La Canfora, and there are reportedly many clashes between Harbaugh and others within the organization, including team president Paraag Marathe.

La Canfora also says that should Harbaugh be jettisoned either by trade or an unthinkable release, the 49ers would likely promote defensive line coach Jim Tomsula. The notion of San Francisco and Harbaugh having issues arose with the news of the 49ers and Cleveland Browns having talks about a trade which would have centered around sending Harbaugh to the banks of Lake Erie.

How did things unravel to this point? Here's a timeline of the drama:

Friday, 4:28 p.m.: Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk reported that the Browns had been in trade discussions for Harbaugh, hoping to fill their head coaching vacancy with the former quarterback. The deal was killed by Harbaugh, who did not want to leave for Cleveland.

Supposedly, the trade would have involved the Browns sending multiple picks to San Francisco.

Friday: 5:21 p.m.: Jon Stinchcomb of Dawgs By Nature compiled a bevy of tweets that Joe Lull of 92.3 The Fan in Cleveland fired off as the news was breaking from Florio about Harbaugh and the Browns.

Lull had previously reported that all the candidates for the Browns' head coaching job had not been brought to light. At the time, he wasn't willing to disclose who the man was, per Chris Pokorny of Dawgs By Nature.

Harbaugh reached out to the Browns. When they called for permission to interview Roman & Tomsula, Harbaugh expressed interest himself…

— Joe Lull (@LullOnSports) February 21, 2014

Harbaugh’s personal assistant in San Francisco? Myck Lombardi, Michael Lombardi’s son. Mike and Jim are close, and Jim has had it w/ Baalke.

— Joe Lull (@LullOnSports) February 21, 2014

Why didn’t Harbaugh end up here? Compensation. Would you trade the entire 2014 draft for him?

— Joe Lull (@LullOnSports) February 21, 2014

Harbaugh wanted Browns job because A) opportunity to work w/ Lombardi & Banner B) get away from GM he doesn’t like C) roster, picks, cap…

— Joe Lull (@LullOnSports) February 21, 2014

Friday night/Saturday morning: Ian Rapoport of NFL.com refutes the claim that San Francisco discussed trading Harbaugh to the Browns.

In response to @ProFootballTalk report on #Browns nearly trading for Jim Harbaugh, #Niners source calls it "completely false. Ridiculous."

— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) February 21, 2014

Friday, 6:12 p.m.: 49ers owner Jed York tells his side of the story.

@ProFootballTalk @RapSheet is this on the record? Report isn't true

— Jed York (@JedYork) February 21, 2014

Saturday, 11:39 a.m.: Browns head coach Mike Pettine talks about his feelings at the NFL Combine on the report that his new team hired him as a consolation prize, per Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

"I got a phone call saying that report was about to come out and I shot the messenger a little bit,'' Pettine said at the NFL Scouting Combine. "I asked, ‘How does that affect my tenure as the head coach? Has that changed?' The obvious answer was 'no' and I think my next sentence, I either used the word flying followed by something, or referenced a part of a rat’s body.''

Saturday, 11:20 p.m.: Vic Tafur of the San Francisco Chronicle caught up with Harbaugh in Indianapolis and got the following quote from the 49ers leader:

"The report? Reee-diculous. Reee-diculous. No. Ridiculous."

In the same story, a rival general manager had a different thought:

"Where there is smoke, there is fire," one general manager said Friday night. "This could be the first visible sign of a crack that could bring the whole thing they've built down to the ground."

Monday, 4:03 a.m.: Browns owner Jimmy Haslam confirms that Cleveland had discussions with the 49ers, per USA Today Sports.

"There was an opportunity there, and it didn't materialize," Haslam said.

In the meantime, David Fucillo of Niners Nation is hoping the story can subside to allow Harbaugh and the 49ers to live in harmony again:

All we can hope for at this point is that the 49ers and Jim Harbaugh get an extension worked out. Until we hear of an extension, we'll be stuck with the PFT's of the world throwing as much out there as they can to prove they were right initially. If the team goes into the 2014 season with an extension still waiting, I can understand why fans would become concerned.

It's one reason winning the Super Bowl any of these last three years would have been even better. It would remove that "can he win the big one?" from contract negotiations. But, the 49ers haven't won, and so we're stuck with this side of contract negotiations. Such is life. I don't think the situation is nearly at the level national media would like us to think it is.

Fucillo also believes there is a man getting away clean from this story who has some dirt on his hands:

One person not mentioned in any reports (except that of socalisteph) is Harbaugh's agent, David Dunn. I've heard from Texas friends that Dunn was behind the Harbaugh-Texas rumors. I thought that was the case, but had never heard it specifically. The belief is that one reason national NFL media reported on it and college guys were not was because Dunn has their ear. Very few people seem to be asking the question about Dunn's involvement in any of this. I do wonder if he's such a significant source for some media members that they wouldn't dare throw anything on him with this.

As the offseason continues, it will be intriguing to see how the drama in San Francisco unfolds. Harbaugh has two years left on his five-year contract, but will he receive an extension? Should he go through the 2014-15 season without an extension, the NFL world will be watching next offseason because without a new deal, he would be coming in as a lame duck.

Diamond Digital, will shut down on Friday, although titles purchased through the service will continue to be available via iVerse’s Comics Plus app.

Brazil is on the verge of a coffee shortage, and that could be bad news for the quality of your morning caffeine fix.

An extended drought in Brazil has significantly curbed expectations for this year’s coffee harvest. The crop could fall below 50 million bags, which would be about eight million short of the country’s production potential. While that’s good news if you’re invested in coffee futures, it’s terrible news if you’re buying the stuff wholesale. The anticipation of a shortfall has sent prices of arabica coffee—the kind Brazil produces, and which many higher-end coffee makers, including Starbucks, prefer to robusta—up nearly 60% since the beginning of the year.

While it hasn’t yet resulted in more expensive coffee at the counter, it could soon. But it also could lead to the start of a subtle bean migration that could negatively impact the taste of coffee blends.

Robusta beans, which are grown in Southeast Asia, and known for their bitterness (and use in instant coffee), have been getting more expensive, too. But their price increase has still been dwarfed by that of arabica, and that’s only further widening the price gap between the two. The price difference is now the highest it’s been since January 2013, according to Rabobank analysts. And it’s come despite an expectation that the price gap would actually shrink.

Robusta beans have long been recognized for their cheapness, but also their lower quality (in the eyes of higher-end coffee makers, anyway). The bigger that price gap gets, the better the chances robusta beans begin to make their way into more and more coffee blends. “[W]ith arabica prices spiking, more robusta may be incorporated into blends, lifting the demand outlook and supporting prices,” Rabobank explained in its note. Some savvy coffee drinkers in the past have complained about other price-related increases in the use of robusta in coffee blends.

As the world continues to down more coffee each year—consumption has grown by an average of 1.2% each year since the 1980s, according to the International Coffee Organization—the impact of poor coffee harvests will only prove more severe. At the moment, Brazil’s troubles could lead to less tasty coffee, at least temporarily, around the world. But down the road, production problems could lead to outright global coffee shortage. Coffee supplies are expected to outpace consumption by about 400,000 bags this coming year, according to Bloomberg, a far cry from the four million bag surplus achieved this past season.

French Map of the Holy Land (1738)

L'Ancienne Thebaide, ou, la Carta generale des lieux habitez par les Ss. peres des deserts French Map of the Holy Land (1738) Date: 1738 Author: Nicolas de Fer Dwnld: Full Size (9.04mb) Source: Library of Congress Print Availability: See our Prints Page for more details pff This map isn't part of any series, but we have other maps of the Middle East that you might want to check out. De...

the BIG Map Blog - Interesting maps, historical maps, BIG maps.

Isn’t it time for Quark’s to open? You don’t want to show up at the bar late, and the Star Trek Deep Space Nine Clock will make sure you get where you need to be on time. DS9 holds a special place of honor in the Star Trek universe, with the show being the first […]

Apple has confirmed that it will issue a software update "very soon" to patch the security flaw found in OS X that allows attackers to capture or modify data protected by the SSL/TLS protocols in Safari, reports Reuters. The vulnerability of OS X to the bug was detailed by security firm CrowdStrike and a Google engineer last Friday, and came right after Apple released iOS 7.0.6 to fix the SSL-related issues on iOS.

However, the security flaw, which has been termed "GoToFail" by security specialists due to the improperly used "goto" command that triggers it, may be affecting more than just Safari. Independent privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani has pointed out on his Twitter (via Forbes) that Apple's vulnerable SSL library is also used by apps including FaceTime, iMessage, Twitter, Calendar, Keynote, Mail, iBooks, Software Update, and more.

A list of apps deemed vulnerable to the SSL bug found in OS X and iOS by security researcher Ashkan Soltani
Soltani does point out that apps such as iMessage and FaceTime have addded security measures that weaken the effects of the security flaw, but also added that the initial iCloud login used to authenticate such apps may also be compromised. The researcher states that other parts of the protocol such as the handshake between a service and a device are vulnerable to an attack as well, and will need to be secured by Apple.

Currently, users can check whether or not their computers are affected by the vulnerability by visiting gotofail.com in Safari. As users wait for a fix to the flaw, CrowdStrike recommends avoiding untrusted and unsecured WiFi networks while traveling. The site also recommends that users update to iOS 7.0.6 if they have not yet installed it on their iOS devices.

Christy Salters Martin is a professional boxer and the owner of a concealed carry permit. But when she attempted to leave her husband, she was shot with her own gun. Today, she cautions other women against making the same mistake. “Just putting a weapon in the woman’s hand is not going to reduce the number of fatalities or gunshot victims that we have. Too many times, their male counterpart or spouse will be able to overpower them and take that gun away.”

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, has argued that firearms are a great equalizer between the sexes. In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee last year, he declared, “The one thing a violent rapist deserves to face is a good woman with a gun.” But the empirical reality of firearm ownership reflects anything but equality, particularly when it comes to intimate partner violence. Such fights become much more frequent and lethal when firearms are involved, and the violence is nearly unidirectional, inflicted by males upon females. This relationship holds true not only across the United States, but around the world.

A recent meta-analysis concluded what many people already knew: the availability of firearms is a strong risk factor for both homicide and suicide. But the study came to another conclusion that is rarely mentioned in the gun control debate: females are uniquely impacted by the availability of a firearm. Indeed, the study found that women with access to firearms become homicide victims at significantly higher rates than men.

It has long been recognized that higher rates of gun availability correlate with higher rates of female homicide. Women in the United States account for 84 percent of all female firearm victims in the developed world, even though they make up only a third of the developed world’s female population. And within American borders, women die at higher rates from suicide, homicide, and accidental firearm deaths in states where guns are more widely available This is true even after controlling for factors such as urbanization, alcohol use, education, poverty, and divorce rates.  

What’s more surprising is how many of these deaths occur in the home, at the hands of a male partner. In a study in the Journal of Trauma, A.L. Kellermann, director of the RAND Institute of health, and his coauthor J.A. Mercy concluded: “More than twice as many women are killed with a gun used by their husbands or intimate acquaintances than are murdered by strangers using guns, knives, or any other means.”

In another study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, researchers interviewed 417 women across 67 battered women’s shelters. Nearly a third of these women had lived in a household with a firearm. In two-thirds of the homes, their intimate partners had used the gun against them, usually threatening to kill (71.4 percent) them. A very small percentage of these women (7 percent) had used a gun successfully in self-defense, and primarily just to scare the attacking male partner away. Indeed, gun threats in the home against women by their intimate partners appear to be more common across the United States than self-defense uses of guns by women.

Another large case-control study compared women who were murdered by their intimate partner with a control group of battered women. Only 16 percent of the women who had been abused, but not murdered, had guns in their homes, whereas 51 percent of the murder victims did. In fact, not a single study to date has shown that the risk of any crime including burglary, robbery, home invasion, or spousal abuse against a female is decreased through gun ownership. Though there are examples of women using a gun to defend themselves, they are few and far between, and not statistically significant.

These facts should be as chilling to men as they are to women. A 2005 study examining mortality data from 1998-2000 found that when a female was shot by her intimate partner, the perpetrator subsequently killed himself in two thirds of the cases. This statistic not only shows necessity of getting mental help for at-risk men. It also further suggests that owning a firearm may make a household more vulnerable than ever.

Top image: A father takes his 14-year-old daughter shopping at a gun show in Houston. (Reuters)

This post originally appeared on The Atlantic.

Bourbon as a Service Bourbon Driven Development Continuous integration bourbon Object oriented bourbon Single responsibility bourbon Open source bourbon Bourbon bourbon bourbon Ice cream Priorities So tired

cmdr-beverlycrusher-md:

FEDERATION REPRESENT!!!!