The New York Subway is famous for having a flat fare for any ride within the system – be it for just a couple of stops, or an epic end-to-end trek. So long as you don’t pass through a fare gate, you can pretty much go anywhere!
WNYC is having fun with that fare structure to find the longest possible ride you can take without reusing a section of track. Their initial record – as shown in this mesmerising GIF – was 149.8 miles and required 55 transfers. Since then, the record has ben upped to 154.6 miles with one less transfer while still starting and finishing at the same two stations.
We set out to calculate the longest ride you can take with one Metrocard swipe (not going over the same stretch twice), and after we posted it, someone’s browser found an even LONGER one!
As anyone who reads Ars no doubt knows by now, the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has been hacked hard—losing data on some 21.5 million people. The agency's director just resigned over the situation. But exactly why does the hack matter? What was exposed, and how sensitive was that information?
OPM is sort of (but not quite) like the government's human resources department. Most federal workers probably know OPM as the agency that tells them whether or not they've got a snow day. But OPM also handles background checks for sensitive positions, and this motherlode of data is now in the hands of whichever adversary broke in and stole it.
when you decided this waS AN ACCEPTABLE WAY TO PARK YOUR VEHICLE BECAUSE I SAW IT OKAY I FUCKING SAW IT YOUR CRAPPY PARKING JOB IS ON GOOGLE MAPS IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE WORLD
The Sundogs infographic by Weather Underground describes how light from the sun refracts off ice crystals to portray a half-circle around the sun. Due to the specific angles required for this phenomenon, Sundogs usually occur at sunrise and sunset when ice crystals are present in the air. Also learn how this phenomenon got its name!
In 1994, long before South Carolina’s long-awaited decision this week to remove the Confederate flag from a prominent place adjacent to the statehouse, where it had been since 1961, Sherman Evans and Angel Quintero made the trip from Charleston to Columbia to demand just that.
In an act of protest and self-promotion, they insisted a flag of their own design be hoisted in its place. Theirs was the Confederate flag redone in the red, black, and green of Marcus Garvey’s pan-African flag—which also happened to be the logo for their clothing company, NuSouth.
Before a Confederate battle flag-loving Dylann Roof allegedly killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston and forced a national conversation over it, before Kanye West was throwing it on his tour merchandise and Andre 3000 was sporting it on belt buckles in his music videos, NuSouth’s creators were trying to reclaim the Confederate flag as a symbol for black Southerners—and make a little money to in the process.
Reason’s Jesse Walker, who wrote about NuSouth in 1999, recently drew a rough parallel between its appropriation of the flag to that of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, a student activist group that tried to reclaim it for their anti-racist work. And in an essay for Politico Magazine, Issac Bailey recalled NuSouth as a stand-in for black Southerners who “have been swinging in their own way for years” on the symbol.
“We always thought the Confederate flag had nothing to do with us,” Evans told Quartz. “But in truth it has everything to do with us.”
The company would eventually fold in 2001, but by then it had managed to secure a space in some Southern memories, where it still complicates notions of the region’s relationship with the rebel banner.
The design was originally album art for Da Phlayva, a Charleston hip-hop group signed to Quintero’s record label. When they debuted in 1993, acts like Outkast and Three Six Mafia had yet to secure the South’s place in rap canon, so they needed a way to stand out.
“We just came to a point where we said, ‘what’s the biggest symbol representing the South?’” Quintero told Quartz. “The Confederate battle flag,”
The cover art for Da Phlayva’s 1993 debut album.(discogs.com)
Quintero recruited local artist Colin Quashie to help design the graphics. At the time, he’d been working on a series of six Confederate flags in the pan-African colors, entitled “Options,” and that’s what they went with.
“Everyone was shouting it’s about heritage not hate and these guys said ‘fine,'” said Quashie, who falls decidedly in the “hate” camp. (“It was put up as a symbol of intimidation for African-Americans during the civil rights movement,” he told Quartz. “That’s all it will ever be.”)
When Quintero & co. printed up a run of shirts to toss out at Da Phlayva shows, local black high-schooler Shellmira Green managed to grabbed one. She promptly wore it to school as a rebuttal to white classmates wearing shirts with slogans like “100 percent cotton and you picked it.”
When they complained to the principal, he forbade Green’s shirt on penalty of suspension. She wore it anyway and was sure enough suspended. The story went national (paywall) after the local NAACP chapter filed a lawsuit to support her.
“I wanted to wear the t-shirt to school because it stands for black people of the South—white people aren’t the only people living in the South. That’s why I liked it.” Green told reporters at the time (paywall).
The suit would eventually get dismissed, but Quintero and Evans, who was co-executive producer on the album, quickly saw that the controversy was good marketing.
“All of a sudden, we started printing more and more shirts, more and more apparel around it,” Evans said. “There was no getting around it. You had to talk about it.”
The music would eventually take a back seat to the clothes. NuSouth, born soon thereafter, started directly speaking (and selling) to the Shellmiras of the world—their ads hinted at a new Southern unity, including taglines like “For the sons and daughters of former slaves, and for the sons and daughters of former slave-owners.”
A hoodie featuring the NuSouth logo.(nusouth.com via the Internet Archive)
They used protests of their own making to keep the buzz going. Before their rainy 1994 day in Columbia, they sent out press releases to local news outlets and handed them out in the city’s black neighborhoods. But because they only printed them in black and white, the message behind the NuSouth flag didn’t go across as intended. “One lady said ‘I’m not coming out to that. That’s the klan,” Sherman said.
She wasn’t the only person put off by the brand. Quintero said most of their early sales were actually to white customers. Black Charlestonians might have been understandably hesitant to wear any version of the flag in the birthplace of the Confederacy.
Despite the buzz, the brand never really caught on, even after a 1997 GQ profile. Whereas early ’90s mainstay Cross Colours had reportedly booked $100 million in sales, NuSouth never broke more than six figures.
And though the brand made it into a few boutiques across the US, its controversial nature made it hard for Quintero and Evans to land big national retail contracts. Investors were similarly hard to find. (Ironically, one of the only interested backers was William Dorris, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the man behind a local shrine to early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. “I thought they had a damn good idea,” Dorris told Quartz. “They were going after the black merchandise market.”)
Seven years after they started, they were finished.
After closing up shop, the pair went back to their lives, Quintero to his auto detailing business and Evans to his clothing store downtown. A few months ago, before Roof’s alleged attack, they said they started shooting a documentary to tell the NuSouth story.
They said the film should be out by next summer, and they’ll gauge its reception before deciding whether they’ll bring the brand back.
“The support is there way more than it was then, because people get it now,” Quintero said.
Evans, who thinks NuSouth would have been much bigger if the Confederate flag had come down sooner (“We’d be so much further ahead in the healing that needs to take place.”) is a bit more ambivalent on the role of a t-shirt company in the debate over powerful symbols.
“Maybe social change isn’t supposed to be profitable,” he said. “Maybe the flag shouldn’t be on a shirt.”
Both men think it should have come down years earlier, though they expressed sadness over the circumstances that led to its removal.
“Look what we had to lose to gain that,” Quintero said. “By now, we’re connecting it to nine people who had to lose their lives to change it, and we could have done it so long ago.”
At Marina Hoermanseder’s exquisite show at Berlin Fashion Week on Friday (July 10), in the garden of the city’s historic Crown Prince’s Palace, the models wore blouson jackets, Marlene Dietrich pants, shiny molded leather bodices, and bell-shaped skirts covered in handmade leather flowers.
They also wore towering stilettos, many of which appeared to be too big on the models’ feet. (Ill-fitting footwear on the runway is not uncommon, as shoes are often organized for a show before models are cast. Look here and you’ll notice some tape.)
Their willowy legs shuddered as they stepped down the runway, the potential energy of a fall heightened by, well, their height. This was the tallest, thinnest lot I’ve seen on the catwalks this week, and a few looked as if they could be toppled by a stiff breeze.
So it was a relief when halfway up the runway, a shaky model stepped out of one pump, and then the other. She started to bend to pick them up, but her movement was limited by her stiff leather bodice.
“Please?” she said to the women sitting in the front rows that flanked the runway. There was a pause, and then one from each side crouched from her seat to snatch a shoe and clear the catwalk. The model proceeded, barefoot.
Before long, another model removed her shoes mid-walk. This one did it with confidence, pausing to pull each shoe off her foot and carry them back to the palace with aplomb. The crowd cheered.
By the time the last model—arguably the star of the show in a petal pink bell-shaped skirt—made her final lap of the runway, it seemed perfectly natural for her to kick off her heels.
Giant monsters are ready for revenge against the giant robots. Pacific Rim 2 is locked and loaded, and director Guillermo del Toro tells Yahoo Movies that the sequel will start shooting in November.
After a few pushed release dates, the kaiju movie is currently set to come out Aug. 4, 2017.
Del Toro, who helmed the upcoming gothic horror film Crimson Peak, alsostarring Rim actor Charlie Hunnam, hasn’t revealed much about the sequel’s story. But he does tell us that he and his team are in the middle of designing the robots and the kaiju for Rim 2. “We have an epic battle at the end [that] we started designing a couple weeks ago,” he added.
American Samoa is the only U.S. territory to hold out against the recent Supreme Court ruling that legalized gay marriage.
As the Pacific island's attorney general reviews the decision, legal observers and gay rights advocates are saying it should go into effect immediately.
"It should be unquestioned," said Rose Cuison Villazor, a professor at University of California, Davis' law school and an expert on territorial law. "The Supreme Court's decision was pretty strong."
But American Samoa Attorney General Talauega Eleasalo Ale hasn't been ready to take that step.
"We're still reviewing the decision to determine its applicability to American Samoa, and I have no specific comments at this time," he said.
Asked if same-sex marriage is legal in the territory, Ale said, "I don't know. We're reviewing the law."
U.S. territories have some self-governance rights. The right to marry, however, isn't a question of self-governance, said Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, staff attorney for national gay rights group Lambda Legal.
"This is a question of individual right, individual liberty," he said.
Other U.S. territories have voluntarily complied with the Supreme Court decision.
In Puerto Rico, Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla signed an executive order soon after the ruling. U.S. Virgin Islands Gov. Kenneth Mapp has signed a similar executive order. In Guam, there is no effort to ignore or challenge the ruling, said territorial legislative Vice Speaker Benjamin F. Cruz, who is gay. The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands is also supporting the decision.
As of Thursday, no one has applied for a same-sex marriage license in American Samoa, according to the island's Office of Vital Statistics.
Christian churches with conservative social views dominate in American Samoa, home to about 50,000, and the government's motto is "Samoa, Let God Be First." Yet the territory has a tradition of embracing faafafine — males who are raised as females and take on feminine traits.
There are many faafafine who aren't supportive of gay marriage out of "respect for our Samoan culture and religious beliefs," said well-known faafafine Princess Auvaa.
Yes, it can get worse. Zodiac Aerospace, a French aerospace company, has designed and patented an “Economy Class Cabin Hexagon” that envisions passenger seats in a beehive arrangement, such that you are—from inches away—staring your neighbor in the face.
The goal, as in so many other abominable airplane seat designs of late, is to satisfy airlines’ seemingly insatiable desire to squeeze more passengers onto the aircraft. Although the exact dimensions of the redesigned seats are not specified, rest assured there would be less room. The patent states that, “by increasing the number of passenger seats in the space, the amount of space available for each passenger is diminished.”
Shameful.(World International Property Organization)
The patent does tout that the seat would increase available space “at the shoulder and arm area.” But as we’ve noted before with other tinkers to seat dimension, that wiggle room (which tends on average to benefit men more than women) would likely come at the expense of slivers of an inch in other cherished areas, such as the cushion width and arm rest.
What’s worse, the design would further expose passengers seated next to children to hours of poking, chattering, and screaming directly in their face. Given the animosity of fliers without children towards those who do, this configuration would probably end in some very ugly scenes in the sky. Already, the growing ire about children on airplanes has led some airlines to designate sections of their aircrafts as child-free zones.
Thankfully, Zodiac Aerospace isn’t making any promises that these seats will come to fruition; for the moment the design is merely a prototype. If this thing ever did become a reality, honeymooners and extreme extroverts might be the only fliers to welcome the change—and even that’s a stretch.
Despite campaigning for the affection—and Instagrams—of influencers such as Karl Lagerfeld and Beyoncé, the Apple watch has yet to really infiltrate the fashion crowd. But maybe that’s just because our accessories don’t have the right accessories—yet.
Ja.(Jenni Avins)
At Berlin Fashion Week today (July 10), two swingy leather tassels were looped around the Apple watch on the wrist of the designer Dorothee Schumacher, keeping the timepiece from ruining her great outfit.
We didn’t notice any of the models in Schumacher’s Spring 2016 show wearing Apple watches, but they did wear the tassels on long, lassoed pendants that accessorized the designer’s collection of tropical prints on practical silhouettes.
Dorothee Schumacher, Spring 2016.(Courtesy/Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week)
Schumacher put the Apple watch to use today as more than just a tassel-vehicle. She tells Quartz that just before the show began, she sent evidence of her elevated heartbeat to her son to share the moment with him—fashionably.
In the ongoing attempt to make New York City streets safer, policymakers have turned to tech giant Google, to ask for help. In a recent report, it was found that New York City has one of the largest accident rates caused my left turning cars. New York City thinks it may be easy to reduce this by reducing the rate of left turn instructions that drivers receive from Google Maps.
Two weeks after the US Supreme Court ruled to uphold the legality of same-sex marriage across the US, Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party has unveiled a ‘straight flag’ to champion conservative values that rival gay pride.
The image, an explicit plug for heterosexuality, was on display for the first time yesterday (July 8) at the annual Day of Family, Love and Fidelity, an event organized by the Russian government that takes place in cities and towns across the country to boost traditional family values.The holiday, instituted in 2008 under former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev, aimed to boost the country’s fertility rate and advocate for stable, two-parent households.
The hashtag emblazoned across the new flag, #НастоящаяCемья (or “real family”) features the silhouettes of a man, a woman, and three children.
Alexey Lisovenko, Moscow’s United Russia’s leader, told national news outlet Izvestia (via Newsweek) that the flag is “our reply to same-sex marriage, that corruption of the concept of family. We must to warn against gay fever in our country and support traditional values.”
“We must to warn against gay fever in our country and support traditional values,” Lisovenko said.
The flag, produced in the three colors of the Russian flag, was officially unveiled at a “traditional values march” in Moscow, where roughly 1,000 Russian families were invited to attend by United Russia.
Homosexuality has been legal in Russia since 1993, though the Russian parlament passed an anti-gay propaganda law in 2013 that bans promoting “homosexual behavior among minors.”
French social advocacy group La Manif Pour Tous, which opposes same-sex marriage, champions a similar flag, albeit with one fewer child.
A conservative family flag protesting same-sex marriage waves at a La Manif Pour Tous rally in Paris.(Reuters/Benoit Tessier)
In response to the Russian flag, same-sex marriage supporters on social media have given it a new spin:
By the end of my three-and-a-half hours dealing with Comcast customer service on Tuesday, I had just about lost my mind. Between repeated disconnections, a borked call-transfer system, conflicting information, a surprise $40 fee, and the eventual discovery that I had been misquoted available speeds, I had a pounding stress headache.
We've seen many horror stories about Comcast service in the past few years, ranging from awful cancellation call recordings to official mail being sent with customers' names changed to such endearing terms as "dummy" and "whore." But sometimes, the pain points don't involve a punchy, headline-worthy moment. Sometimes, dealing with Comcast—especially when they're the only high-speed pony in town—just grinds you down.
Giga what?
Last month, I was living the Seattle dream—at least in terms of Internet speed. I'd been enjoying unbridled gigabit service from Centurylink for most of 2015, thanks to the regional telco's expanded fiber reaching my neighborhood. The service came at a great price: about $70/month for 100Mbps download and upload or $110/month to crank that up to 1,000Mbps both ways. I dumped my old Comcast account and signed up immediately, and I went full gig, not because I needed to but because I could.
Portland independent feminist record label M'lady's Records have released many great and unusual albums from bands both local and otherwise; their roster of both original releases and reissues includes Mecca Normal, Vexx, Julianna Barwick, Magic Johnson, and lots and lots more. Recently, they've reissued a bunch of killer Dead Moon classics on CD.
But in an email from label head Brett Lyman, the label is now doing something incredible and—I think—unprecedented: tackling the US gender wage gap from the other end, in a way that's both generous and absurd. (Absurd, simply because it has to be done in the first place.) This is pretty fantastic. Here's the missive:
Subject: TONIGHT 9PM PST - MAILORDER FOR AMERICAN WOMEN - WAGE DISPARITY PRICE CORRECTION
dear friends and luv'd ones living in America (sorry global friends, you can sit this one out):
Hi. If you've been reading this list for some time, you'll know that, here at M'lady's HQ, there's a tendency towards agitation and silt-kicking. That's still in full effect, and after a long lengthy discussion with some close friends about the wage disparity in this country, we've decided to reflect that in our prices for mailorder from here on out.
SO.
Mailorder for women living in America will now be 77% of the listed price, the current wage gap according to the Bureau of Labor Dept of Statistics (this statistic is for full-time workers nationwide.) The only exceptions to this will be FWOAH subscriptions and any custom runs of turntables or 7" storage boxes that RM Woodworking have fabricated just for us. The way this will work:
1. you order things from us 2. we refund you 23% of the pre-shipping price 3. everyone goes home happy 4. dudebros that grouse about this will have to pay double
That 77% has been hotly contested in the press, and we're not citing it as a figure etched in stone, but it seems like a good place to start. Real progress would be this pricing scheme applied to the grocery store or the utility companies, but since we don't run any of those, we'll just stay here in our insane asylum and keep this going until either that number goes up significantly (like, say, to 100%) or we go down in flames (much more likely.)
The Equal Pay act was passed in 1963. It's now 2015.
And before anyone writes in with a critique or complaint about all of this... actually, no it's cool, bring it on.
yours, in perpetuity, Brett Lyman, M'lady's Records HQ, Portland, Ore. U.S.A.
The policy will go into effect at midnight tonight, and will continue "until we can't anymore (read: not any time soon)," according to the label's Facebook page. So go over to M'Lady's Records' web store and get shopping, unless you're a grousing douchebro. Actually, even if you are. Give them double your money.
In living memory, no world leader has been as widely identified with a particular animal as Elizabeth II with her corgis. Symbols of friendliness, they are shrewdly deployed for publicity purposes, lending warmth to her public image. …The corgis are more than symbols, though. In a life ruled by protocol, they provide an easy way for the Queen to break the ice with strangers. In what can be an isolating position, she gets from them unlimited amounts of love and physical affection, uncompromised by the knowledge that she is the monarch. Whenever possible, the Queen feeds the corgis herself and leads them on daily walks, which also serve as a kind of therapy. Her husband, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, has referred to this form of therapy as his wife’s “dog mechanism.”
Portland’s M’Lady’s Records, home of acts like Dead Moon, Mecca Normal, and Make-Up, is putting its feminist money where its equality-talking mouth is, electing to charge women living in America just 77 percent of what men pay for purchases in its online shop. That figure is directly related to the current U.S. wage gap as reported by the Bureau Of Labor Statistics, and M’Lady’s says it’s enacting the policy because “the Equal pay act was passed in 1963. It’s now 2015.” Ideally, the label says, “real progress would be this pricing scheme applied to the grocery store or the utility companies, but since we don’t run any of those, we’ll just stay here in our insane asylum and keep this going until either that number goes up significantly (like, say, to 100 percent) or we go down in flames (much ...
The Adobe Flash zero-day exploit that spyware developer Hacking Team made available to customers worked successfully against even the advanced defenses found in Google's Chrome browser, researchers said Friday. They also noted that it was used to infect computer users multiple times before it was leaked.
The leak of the previously unknown exploit resulting from the devastating hack of Hacking Team last weekend and exploit kits available on the black market quickly added attack code to use the flaw. It allows attackers to surreptitiously install malware on targets' computers, and there's evidence that before last weekend's breach, Hacking Team customers used the Flash zero-day against live targets.
Super Opinionated.
Expanded from 
![[link]](http://i.imgur.com/dYJ9TzZ.jpg){kind=link}
