firehose

Dear Media, Seahawks are Seattle's first championship team since the Storm in 2010, not Supersonics in '79. Women count too, you know.

There's always a lot of debate surrounding Disney and princess culture, but I hope there's one thing we can agree on: Disney princesses should, as a group, aspire to diversity. Representation is incredibly important, especially to kids, whose perception of the world around them is still being formed. All children deserve to see themselves positively represented in media. It's something teenager Jewel Moore took to heart when she started this Change.org petition to get Disney to introduce a plus-size princess.

It's fun when teams get their asses whooped. This is a presentation of data meant for football fans who are wondering whether or not the Broncos lost the Super Bowl.

I'm about to talk about how bad the Broncos got their asses just totally whooped. But before I do, I want to let y'all know that even though I get into some nerdy stats shit, I ain't a nerd. I am actually really cool, and spent last night hanging out with a lot of my friends and drinking some beer. I just know how to do nerd shit because I'm smart.

I couldn't even believe how bad the Broncos got whooped by the Seahawks. When I was little, teams in the Super Bowl would whoop up on fools like every other year, and I'd just stop paying attention halfway through to build cool stuff out of Legos. (I made a guitar once that was as big as a real guitar.) But anyways, every Super Bowl over the last 10 years or so has been kind of close, and a lot of them were really really close.

At the end the line goes way up because the Broncos had to go out there and get totally whomped on. It was like the Seahawks were trying really hard, and the Broncos weren't trying at all. The thing is, that's not true. The Broncos were trying hard to win the whole time, they just got whooped because they just sucked.

Here's some of that nerd shit I was talking about: Simple Ratings System (SRS) is a rating they have at Pro-Football-Reference. Basically, it estimates how good a team really is. An SRS of zero would mean your team is average compared to the rest of the league, and higher is better.

The Broncos' SRS this season was 11.7. According to that, they're the seventh-best team to lose a Super Bowl. But this isn't really just about them losing. What's crazy is how good they were supposed to be and how bad they got their asses kicked.

It's nuts that a team that good got busted up by so many points. I also labeled the 1989 Broncos team there because they also were supposed to be good and got stomped, and they were a Broncos team too.

Y'all look at all those dots on the left. Those teams were supposed to be shitty and not have a chance, but they actually played pretty good and almost won. And like, all the way on the right there's the 2007 Patriots, who had this crazy good SRS, and even though they lost, it was still really close. The Broncos are way different than those teams, though, because they were supposed to be good AND they lost 43-8 like a bunch of baby children.

Pro-Football-Reference got this other thing called Offensive Simple Ratings System (OSRS). Same deal, only it's just about rating a team's offense. This year the Broncos had an OSRS of --

Hey seriously I am not a nerd. I mostly use my computer to watch sports and listen to rap.

Anyways, this year the Broncos had an OSRS of 14.1. That's seriously the second-best offense in NFL history since they started playing Super Bowls. But another thing that's crazy is that almost no offense anywhere near as good as the Broncos' offense has been so crappy at scoring in a single game.

Y'all, they were straight-up crap on offense. Like the worst crapshit ever. And most of those other dots you see are for games in the regular season. A lot of times they were games late in the season, when they were already in the playoffs and nobody really cared.

But the Super Bowl is obviously the biggest possible game. There are people in England and India and places like that who are watching. Plus if you count all the people in America who watched it, it's probably hundreds of millions of people.

I don't know why the Broncos picked that game to totally shit the bed but whatever, I don't really want to tell anyone else what to do. You want to get your ass clobbered when like Nas and Randy Travis and Barack Obama are all watching, more power to you. It's stupid though.

What's another thing that's crazy is that the Broncos started sucking ass right away. Like there was that safety really early on, and they just kept getting whooped after that.

Another stat they got is "Win Probability." They use computers to figure out the percentage chance that a team's gonna win. Before the first quarter, the Broncos' win probability went below 25 percent, and it just got smaller and smaller after that. They got their asses totally destroyed. That shit's only happened like that in six Super Bowls, ever.

Ha ha ha ha ha and three times it was the Broncos. Like literally half the times that's happened, it was the Broncos. Plus, last night was the only time a team started the game as the favorite to win, and were pretty much going to lose before the first quarter was even over.

The Broncos never really had a chance at all, and they got completely stomped. What a bunch of assholes.

SB Nation's Super Bowl coverage

• Ufford: Deserve had nothing to do with Seattle's win

• Godfrey: The Super Bowl, or why the NFL always wins

• Trains in vain: The Super Bowl vs. New Jersey Transit

• NFL mock draft: Believe in Bortles | (Early) 2014 power rankings: Philly favored

• See the Super Bowl commercials again | Watch the mini-Seinfeld reunion

• Jon Bois' crazy Breaking Madden Super Bowl basically came true

When we think about NPR (National Public Radio) most of us think of A Prairie Home Companion or another favorite radio show. But NPR also has a research component, NPR Labs, that they say "is the nation's only not-for-profit broadcast technology research and development center." The video (below) is an interview with NPR person Maryfran Tyler about their pilot program designed "to demonstrate the delivery of emergency alerts to people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing in the Gulf Coast states through local public radio stations and the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS®)." NPR also says, "This is the first effort to deliver real-time accessibility-targeted emergency messages, such as weather alerts, via radio broadcast texts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A pair of rare twin Nepalese red panda cubs were born on January 3, 2014 at the Auckland Zoo in New Zealand. Aside from being insanely adorable creatures, these cubs represent hope for a threatened species due to loss of their native habitat and illegal poaching.

The Auckland Zoo has welcomed the birth of Nepalese red panda twins; two very valuable additions to the international breeding programme for this threatened species whose population continues to decline in the wild…Increasingly, we’re part of conservation efforts in the wild. Auckland Zoo continues to grow its support of Red Panda Network, whose outstanding community education and forest guardianship programmes in eastern Nepal (key red panda territory) are playing a vital role in helping protect this species that’s threatened by habitat loss and poaching.

Have we mentioned that they’re really, really cute?

images via Auckland Zoo, ZooBorns

via ZooBorns

You know those sexy, sans serif fonts in the movie 2001? They appear in the credits, but also on pretty much all the technical equipment on the spaceship. Well, now a font enthusiast has figured out what those fonts are, and written an incredibly funny, illuminating essay about the typography of 2001.

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CBS’s plans to give its NCIS franchise yet another spinoff—this time involving sexy, exciting adventures against the colorful backdrop of New Orleans—now include Scott Bakula. Deadline reports that Bakula will assume the central role of Special Agent Pride, a man “who embodies New Orleans” in the number of musicians that can be found inside him nightly, and his iconoclastic method of assessing crime scenes by pouring rum on them until everything’s better. Also, “he’s driven by the need to do what’s right and does it all with warmth, passion, strength, and humor”—each of which we’re assuming are the names of his fellow agents. Like its spinoff predecessors NCIS: LA and the failed NCIS: Red, the new NCIS: NO (note: probably not its title) will debut first as a backdoor pilot two-parter on the flagship NCIS series, giving you your first chance to ...

What kind of Doctor will Peter Capaldi portray on the next season of Doctor Who? In our exclusive interview with director Ben Wheatley, we learned a whole lot about what classic influences this new Doctor will be channeling. Plus find out about Wheatley's brilliant plans for the movie of J.G. Ballard's High Rise.

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straightgirl:

papa can u hear me

i laughed way too hard at this

Woody Allen's friend Robert B. Weide rushes to his defense in The Daily Beast by—you guessed it—attacking the credibility of Dylan Farrow, who accused him of molesting her as a child in an open letter last week, and her mother, actress Mia Farrow.

Aaron Brady in The New Inquiry responds:

This is a basic principle: until it is proven otherwise, beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s important to extend the presumption of innocence to Dylan Farrow, and presume that she is not guilty of the crime of lying about what Woody Allen did to her.

If you are saying things like “We can’t really know what happened” and extra-specially pleading on behalf of the extra-special Woody Allen, then you are saying that his innocence is more presumptive than hers. You are saying that he is on trial, not her: he deserves judicial safeguards in the court of public opinion, but she does not.

The damnably difficult thing about all of this, of course, is that you can’t presume that both are innocent at the same time. One of them must be saying something that is not true. But “he said, she said” doesn’t resolve to “let’s start by assume she’s lying,” except in a rape culture, and if you are presuming his innocence by presuming her mendacity, you are rape cultured.

Allen's response so far? His publicist issued a statement on Sunday calling the allegations "untrue and disgraceful," and his lawyer calls it "a story engineered by a vengeful lover."

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"I hate football," Peyton's dad Archie said with gallows humor.

With the glory and attention that comes with winning a Super Bowl, Wilson could very easily opt out of Rangers training camp and nobody would blame him. But it doesn't sound like that's going to happen. At least not yet.

WASHINGTON—According to a recent poll of various web-based media producers, content could be hotter, more social, more shareable.

ST. PAUL, MN—Sources at local digital marketing agency Fusion Media confirmed Monday that the company’s stationery, broadband connection, printers, fax machines, and various other office equipment and supplies are primarily used by employees t...

“So Chance” is a fantastic illustration by San Francisco artist Josh Ellingson that honors Dogecoin, a digital cryptocurrency featuring the “Doge” Internet meme Kabousa the Shiba Inu on its logo. Prints are available to purchase from Josh’s online store.

It’s currently worth a tiny fraction of the big dogs Bitcoin and Litecoin. Dogecoin quickly gained a following on reddit as the only digital money with a lovable personality attached to it. The growing Dogecoin community has raised money to help send athletes to the Olympics and provide pizza for homeless shelters. The future of Dogecoin and cryptocurrency itself is murky, but it’s interesting to see people rally around new technology when it’s dressed up as an adorable Shiba Inu.

image via Josh Ellingson

yesss

dotarray writes "Valve continues in its quest for world domination with the announcement of Steam Music, soon to be a part of SteamOS, Big Picture and — eventually — the desktop Steam client. Promising a way for you to 'Listen to your music collection while you play games', beta signups (of a kind) are open now."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Philadelphia, which has the highest obesity and poverty rates of the 10 largest cities in the US, is known for spearheading the fight against food deserts in the country, or areas where fresh produce isn’t available to buy in the near vicinity. But the $900,000 invested in new and improved grocery stores in the city may not be enough to curb obesity, a new study indicates (paywall). Researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Penn State University report that an initial pilot study, which focused on the results from one of these grocery stores on the surrounding community, shows little effect. Without more research, they say, it’s difficult to know if these interventions are going to have any impact on obesity rates at all.

There’s reason to invest heavily in effective obesity intervention programs: By some estimates, US obesity-related medical spending increased costs by as much as $147 billion in 2008. The $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative—a federal project modeled after Philadelphia’s—is a reasonable effort compared to that sum. But are those eggs going in the right basket?

While the study only observed one store, checking in on local residents six months after its opening, the results are compelling. Only 27% of surveyed residents in the intervention area made the new supermarket their main store, and just over half of them used it for any shopping at all. And while residents perceived a greater availability of fresh fruits and vegetables, there was no significant increase in their daily intake of these foods, nor did the researchers see a significant decrease in body mass index (BMI).

As Wonkblog underlined back in 2012, the empirical evidence backing this method of obesity intervention is limited. This marks the first controlled US study of a subsidized market in a food desert, but a similar study in Leeds, England found that even when many residents switched to the new market, their eating habits barely changed. And a 15-year study of areas with “healthy” food options (fresh food market) versus “unhealthy” ones (fast food and convenience stores) found no direct connection between healthy food availability and health. While it seems logical that more widely available fruits and veggies would help foster healthy habits, a causal relationship has yet to be proven.

The authors aren’t suggesting that subsidized grocery stores should go away in the US, but to maximize their impact, the country’s federal initiatives should include other interventions as well. Marketing and branding need to focus on helping residents make the switch, the researchers say, and price incentives should be implemented to push shoppers into grabbing fresh food instead of low cost, high calorie items. With complementary efforts, they say, these grocery stores could make an impact—but simply helping them to open won’t be enough.

Hyper-realism, William Fisk

When a magnet is dropped down a conducting copper pipe, it feels a resistive force (assuming that magnets have feelings). The falling magnet induces a current in the copper pipe and, by Lenz’s Law, the current creates a magnetic field that opposes the changing field of the falling magnet. Thus, the magnet is “repelled” and falls more slowly. Knowledge = Power.

Original Source

Gr8Apes writes "Hitachi has created a 'perfect virtual boss' The company is manufacturing and selling a device intended to increase efficiency in the workplace called the Hitachi Business Microscope (paywalled). 'The device looks like an employee ID badge that most companies issue. Workers are instructed to wear it in the office. Embedded inside each badge, according to Hitachi, are "infrared sensors, an accelerometer, a microphone sensor and a wireless communication device." Hitachi says that the badges record and transmit to management "who talks to whom, how often, where and how energetically." It tracks everything. If you get up to walk around the office a lot, the badge sends information to management about how often you do it, and where you go. If you stop to talk with people throughout the day, the badge transmits who you're talking to (by reading your co-workers' badges), and for how long. Do you contribute at meetings, or just sit there? Either way, the badge tells your bosses.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NameTag, an app built for Google Glass by a company called FacialNetwork.com, offers a face scanner for encounters with strangers.

The mysterious, 15th century Voynich Manuscript is full of codes and bizarre illustrations. Most experts believe it's a hoax, a nonsense book created to fire our imaginations. But now there's new evidence that it may be written in a lost Aztec language, Nahuatl.

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Attention fellow globe-enthusiasts: The good folks at Sky & Telescope Magazine have collaborated with members with NASA's Mercury-mapping MESSENGER team to create the first complete globe of our solar system's innermost planet, and it's beautiful. Do want!

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theashleyclements:

I’M SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW

I am very fond of these two men, and watching them play together / play off each other is a blast.

I had the pleasure of meeting Wil on a Star Trek cruise in the Bahamas some years back. Liked him instantly. (And his parents also. I sat in the surf with them off Little Stirrup Key for hours [without enough sunblock on] and acquired one of the most memorable sunburns of a lifetime, but wouldn’t have traded it for the conversation I had with them.)

Sir Patrick I was lucky enough to meet for the first time at a Trek convention in the UK, where I was slightly distracted at the time because I was busy falling in love. Nonetheless he was memorable then (and remains so) for going out of his way to say publicly that he supported the series’ writers in the middle of what was proving a very divisive and bitter writers’ strike.

Sweet guys, both; would love to meet again.

Just hours after quoting a "top Majestic Realty official" saying he weighs the controversy over a new Trader Joe's at NE Alberta and MLK "every day"—part of a story exploring a lobbying rules technicality with the city's urban renewal director—the Oregonian is now reporting the deal is off the table.

And it's because Trader Joe's wants out. Not because the developer has reconsidered.

"We run neighborhood stores and our approach is simple: if a neighborhood does not want a Trader Joe's, we understand, and we won't open the store in question," reads the essential line in a longer statement published by the O.

The Portland Development Commission's deal, selling Majestic land worth nearly $3 million for just $500,000, has been beset by concerns over gentrification ever since details went public in the fall.

Activists wanted housing and something that fit in with the neighborhood's historic character. Supporters of the proposal said adding a major grocery store—there's a Safeway nearby, which I guess counts...— would help support a second project at the corner filled with local small businesses. The PDC approved it last year.

Last week, Majestic announced it had chosen African American-owned Colas Construction as its contractor on the project. One of Colas' vice presidents, Aneskha Dickson, sits on the PDC's board.

It's unclear if the decision by Trader Joe's was influenced by this morning's report in the O that PDC director Patrick Quinton, before the vote on the project, attended a food-and-wine networking event hosted by Majestic. Quinton put the event on his public calendar but didn't list it on his lobbying gift reports. The PDC's attorney told the O that Quinton didn't have to, because the Trader Joe's project wasn't discussed at the event.

Update 12:55 PM: Mayor Charlie Hales, who oversees the PDC, has called the announcement "a loss for the city and particularly for Northeast Portland" in a statement just sent out by his spokesman.

We respect today’s decisions by Trader Joe’s and Majestic. We appreciate the various concerns raised by neighbors and other stakeholders, both in favor of, and opposed to, this project.

In all, we view today’s news as a loss for the city and particularly for Northeast Portland.

We are grateful for the effort that Colas Construction, a local, minority-owned construction company, put into making this project happen and we recognize all the hard work Majestic Realty has invested in this effort over the past two years.

Moving forward, we will be communicating with the various stakeholders: Including those who wanted this development and who were excited about it, and those who didn’t want it to happen.

It is too soon to say what comes next for this site. We will work with the full range of stakeholders to determine the next steps. And we remain committed to working with stakeholders to find projects for this and other development sites throughout the city.

Update 4 PM: The Portland African American Leadership Forum, leading the protests against the Majestic Realty proposal, addressed the news during a previously scheduled press conference at the development site this afternoon. They said their main grievance has been about displacement of black Portlanders the PDC's work in historically African American neighborhoods—not the prospect of a Trader Joe's.

The O's North and Northeast Portland reporter covered it:

In the past we have settled for far less,” [former State Senator Avel] Gordly said. “This is a people’s movement for African Americans and other communities, for self-determination.”

PAALF members reiterated previous demands to include an affordable housing component on the two-acre lot and issued several demands.

PAALF leaders said the development commission should publish a comprehensive accounting of the tax increment financing and spending in the Interstate corridor urban renewal area and compose a legally binding community benefits agreement to ensure the employment of African Americans in the construction of PDC sites.

The group also asked for the development commission to create a small business assistance fund for the shops and restaurants in Vanport Plaza.

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The founder and CEO of Hunters, a gay hook-up app popular in Russia which bears similarities to Grindr, says that the app came under an attack by hackers.