firehose

According to sources close to the situation, Yahoo’s Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh has quit the company, a major departure which comes in the wake of changes made to its media unit after the firing of COO Henrique De Castro yesterday.

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dbvictoria:

A Janitor Secretly Worked On This For 7 Years. No One Knew Til Now… And It’s Baffling Everyone.

Over 30 years ago, a man spent 7 years hand-drawing the most complex, unbelievable and probably unsolvable maze I’ve ever seen. His daughter recently posted the following photos on Twitter and, needless to say, the entire Internet is exploding with questions about her dad.

So who is the man behind it? A professor? A mathematician? A wizard? No, no, and no. The correct answer is… the university janitor.

The maze is 34 x 23.3-inches.

Twitter user Kya7y’s dad, who was a janitor at a university in Japan, spent more than 7 years working on this…

To this point, he has remained completely anonymous and wants no public recognition for his phenomenal work.

Art connoisseurs are going crazy over this, both for its artistic brilliance and its impossibility to solve. To think a university janitor was behind this shows that we should never judge anyone by their occupation or position in life. This is awesome work.

To date, no additional information has been shared about the maze or the man behind it. But it’s without a doubt one of the most humble, remarkable creations I’ve ever seen.

Source: Twitter User Kya7y’s / Buy A Copy Of “Papa’s Maze” Here

lesanneeselegantes:

Vogue 1920

thecatspajama:

Just some kitties playing in the snow.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences unveiled a homegrown operating system called COS (for China Operating System) this week, which it called a crucial national security initiative in light of revelations about pervasive online surveillance by the US National Security Agency. But China’s 618 million internet users aren’t buying it.

Software developer Shanghai Liantong Network Communications Technology said the OS will be used on smartphones, set-top boxes, and PCs, and is “intended to break the foreign monopoly in the field of infrastructure software” (link in Chinese). The Linux-based software can supposedly run over 100,000 apps.

COS’s creators were unsparing in their criticism of the mostly US-developed software that now dominates the market. At an event launching the product, the head of the software division of the Chinese academy “criticized iOS for being a closed ecosystem, while Android has the infamous fragmentation problem, and both Windows plus Android are let down by poor security,” Engadget reported.

Chinese internet users, who have watched previous government-developed software come and go, were mostly unimpressed. They took to social media in huge numbers to to deliver some resounding critiques in over 170,000 posts on COS.

“What does COS stand for? COPY OTHER SYSTEM?… But it really does look like a fusion of the Apple, Android, Symbian, and Blackberry operating system,” wrote one Sina Weibo user.

“Google’s market is called Google play, while COS’s market is called cos-play,” another wrote, referring to the practice of dressing up as sci-fi and other fictional characters, which, he noted, is “comparatively more western than Google play.”

If the system is really as good as it’s advertised, perhaps the government should start using it first, others said: “This is good. I strongly recommend that all party members, cadres, and leaders throw away their iPhones and have them replayed by our superb homemade operating system – the COS system!” a Sina Weibo user said.

Jennifer Chiu contributed reporting.

Not off the top of my head, but then the Marvel universe is a Wes Anderson universe in the way it’s all about Dads.  

(Before someone reads that as critique — it’s not.) 

Suntory’s $16 billion acquisition of bourbon giant Beam Inc. has focused attention on the huge opportunities for growth in the rapidly consolidating global booze industry: Japanese have acquired a taste for bourbon, China is getting into fine wine, and Indians are increasingly thirsty for whiskey.

In fact, India is already the world’s largest whiskey market—sort of. As Quartz has reported, Indians are also the world’s biggest rum drinkers, but what’s sold as whiskey there is really the same stuff, derived mostly from molasses. Either way, because of its huge population, India’s per capita consumption of spirits is actually pretty low, with plenty of headroom, although there are limits—devout followers of the country’s two largest religions, Hinduism and Islam, generally shun alcohol. Euromonitor expects Indian sales for Scotch whiskey to grow by 18% a year.

About a year ago, spirits giant Diageo thought it had sealed a grandiose plan to plunge into the Indian market by buying a majority stake in the country’s biggest liquor company, United Spirits. Not only would it own inexpensive home-grown Indian brands, but it would be able to sell its own high-grade brands of imported whiskey, like Johnnie Walker, which Indians love but often find expensive and difficult to obtain due to high customs duties.

In November, 2012, Diageo thought it had finalized a $2 billion deal for a 53% stake in United Spirits. Roughly half of the shares would come from the stock market; the remainder would come from owner Vijay Mallya. And then it all went horribly awry.

Mallya, an eccentric tycoon saddled with debt and on the verge of bankruptcy, had already pledged most of his stake to his creditors, whom he owed some $2.5 billion. The creditors moved to block the sale, and in December a state court in India ruled in their favor, ordering that Mallya’s sale of stock to Diageo was null and void. It was a significant blow to Diageo, which has maneuvered for three years to gain access to Indian drinkers.

Diageo is contesting the recent Indian court ruling, and a company spokesperson insisted the share deal was “genuine and bona fide.” To make matters worse, Diageo was also a potential bidder for Beam, but it came to naught because of concerns a deal wouldn’t get anti-trust approval.

Meanwhile, United Spirits is facing increasing competition at home from Diageo rival Pernod Ricard and homegrown Allied Blenders and Distillers. It is also looking to sell Whyte & Mackay, the British distiller that Mallya bought during better times. Even if Diageo triumphs in its legal battle and wins United Spirits, it may arrive in India with quite a hangover.

writeswrongs:

Helga’s thirst was so fucking real.

OKAY YEAH SHE WAS THIRSTY BUT REAL TALK HER DREAM WASN’T JUST TO GET A MAN.

BUT TO FUCKING RUN A COUNTRY TOO.

LIKE DAMN GIRL. GET IT.

dcblogs writes "Despite an expanding use of electronics in products, the number of people working as electrical engineers in U.S. declined by 10.4% last year. The decline amounted to a loss of 35,000 jobs and increased the unemployment rate for electrical engineers from 3.4% in 2012 to 4.8% last year, an unusually high rate of job losses for this occupation. There are 300,000 people working as electrical engineers, according to U.S. Labor Department data analyzed by the IEEE-USA. In 2002, there were 385,000 electrical engineers in the U.S. Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, called the electrical engineering employment trend 'truly disturbing,' and said, 'just like America's manufacturing has been hollowed out by offshoring and globalization, it appears that electrical and electronics engineering is heading that way.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

*STANDARD DISCLAIMER* I’m not handing down life lessons or trying to assert that there’s a ‘correct way’ to draw. I’m just trying to make perspective more approachable for thems that want to tackle it.

Okay. Let’s do this.

1. Understand what perspective is and what it’s for. Stay away from rulers while you get comfortable.

Everyone struggles with perspective because 1. it’s not well or widely taught and 2. artists tend to see linear perspective as a set of rules rather than a set of tools.

Linear perspective is a TOOL we use to create and depict SPACE. That’s it. That’s all it is. Your goal is not to draw in ‘accurate linear perspective.’ Stay away from the ruler and precision for as long as you can. Your goal is to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Perspective is just a tool to help you construct and correct that space.

2. Know in your bones that you can ONLY learn to draw in perspective through physical practice. There is no other way.

Grab some paper and draw with me. If you match me drawing for drawing you will be more fluent in linear perspective and spatial drawing by the end of this post. Unfortunately if you don’t, you won’t be.

3. Sketch around in rough perspective. NO RULERS.

So let’s make some simple space. let’s start with a two dimensional surface…

K. We have a flat, 2D surface. Let’s create some depth by putting a vanishing point in the middle, and having parallel lines converge towards it. Make a gridded plane inside that space.

Good. Let’s make that space meaningful by adding a dude and a road or something. (Again, parallel ‘depth lines’ will converge into the vanishing point along the horizon)

And now we have the rough illusion of some space. I didn’t use any rulers, and it’s not perfectly accurate, but we got our depth from that vanishing point right in the middle of the page. And since we have a little dude in there, we’ve got human scale, which allows us to gauge the size of the space we’ve created. Gives it meaning.

You need people or cars or some recognizable, human-scale THING in there as a frame of reference or your space won’t mean much to your viewer. Watch. We can make that same basic space a whole lot bigger like this:

Same vanishing point in the same place, completely different scale, and a totally different feeling of space. Cool, right?

3. Sketch around in rough perspective MORE. STAY LOOSE.

See what sort of spaces and feelings you can create with vanishing points and gridded planes on a post-it or something. Super small, super rough. Feel it out. Pick a vanishing point or lay out a grid in perspective, and MAKE SOME SPACE. Do it. Draw, I don’t know, a lady and her dog in a desert. I’ll do it, too.

Good job. LOOK AT YOU creating the illusion of space! This is how you’ll thumbnail and plan anything you want to draw in space. All of my drawings start this way. I think about how I want the viewer to feel and then play around with space and composition until I find something that works.

Once you have a sketch you like, and space that you feel, THEN you can take out the ruler and make it more accurate and convincing.

4. Draw environments from life.

I cannot stress this enough. Draw the world around you, try to draw the shapes and angles as you see them, and you will ‘get’ how and why perspective is used. Use something permanent so that you’ll move fast and commit. I usually use black prismacolor pencil.

You’ll learn or reinforce something with every drawing. I learned a lot about multiple vanishing points from this drawing:

Learned from the receding, winding space I tired to draw here:

Layered, interior spaces:

You get the idea.

Life drawing will also help you develop your own shorthand and language for depicting textures, materials, details, natural and architectural features, etc. Do it. Do it all the time. Go to pretty or interesting places just to draw them.

Take a second and just draw a quick sketch of whatever room you’re in.

5. Perspective in formal Illustration: apply what you’ve learned.

1. I always start with research. For this particular location I looked at Angkor Wat.

2. Once I had enough reference, I did a bunch of little thumbnail sketches with a very loose sense of space and picked the one I liked best.

3. Scanned the thumbnail and drew a little more clearly over it. Worked out the rough space before using formal perspective.

4. Reinforced the space with formal perspective. I dropped in pre-made vanishing points over my drawing. If I were drawing in real media here’s where I’d get out the ruler to sketch in some accurate space.

5. Drew the damn thing. Because I do my research, draw from life, and am comfortable drawing in perspective, I can wing it. I just sort of ‘build’ the ruins freehand in the space I’ve established, keeping it more or less accurate, experimenting and playing with details along the way. I erase a lot, too, both in PS and when drawing in pencil. Keeps it fun for me.

And that’s what I know about composition and perspective. If you want more formal instruction on perspective and it’s uses, you can use John Buscema’s How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way. Or If you want to get really intense about it, Andrew Loomis can help you

 

 

mmmma pile of steaming dog poop

Japan sure has it tough: Even if the world’s third-biggest economy triumphs against deflation, a rapidly aging population will make it increasingly hard to achieve economic growth. You know what would be amazing? If it had a secret weapon that could somehow bring in new talented workers and supercharge its economy.

Oh, wait. It does have that. Adding 8.2 million women to Japan’s workforce—which is what would happen if women joined the workforce at the same rate as men—would add a whopping 15% to its GDP, according to Goldman Sachs economist Kathy Matsui. Others argue the impact would be around 9% (pdf, p.19), which is still a lot.

Fortunately, this is starting to happen (h/t @JacobWolinksy). In Nov. 2013, female labor participation among women 15 to 64 hit a record-high of 66%, a big jump from the 63.9% a year earlier (data available here):

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Shinzo Abe’s policies to encourage women to work—expanding free child care services, asking corporations to allow a kind-of-insane three-year maternity leave, and directing government ministries to hire more women—necessarily deserve the credit.

For one, these jobs could be temporary; the Japanese government data don’t specify whether these new working women are housewives who have taken on part-time work. Female labor participation often jumps when real wages fall (pdf, p.3), says Credit Suisse. That could mean households are simply reacting to inflation. If the jump in employment is in mostly unskilled sectors, where workers are fungible, it wouldn’t signal a societal shift.

It’s in those skilled jobs that women face a tremendous amount of hiring discrimination and are frequently passed over for promotions, particularly at large companies. At present, only 1.6% of executives (paywall) at publicly traded Japanese companies are women. Japan could use the boost to productivity that would come as men in top jobs faced fiercer competition from the country’s most educated women. And when it comes to those, Japan’s got a pretty deep bench:

kaisergeiser:

Quoth the raven,

BRUSHIE BRUSHIE.

Congress can’t pass a farm bill but it has plenty of time to micromanage nutrition and health.  Buried in the pork-filled Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2014 (see Monday’s post) are some zingers.  Here’s one:

This refers to the ill-fated IWG report I’ve discussed previously. To recap:

• Congress asked the FTC to examine the effects of food marketing to children and make recommendations.
• The FTC, USDA, FDA, and CDC got together and produced a report recommending voluntary guidelines for marketing to children based on the nutritional quality of the foods.
• I thought the guidelines were weak in addition to being voluntary (they allowed lots of junk foods to qualify).
• The food industry disagreed, strongly, and went to Congress to object.
• Congress caved in to industry pressure and said the report could not be released unless the FTC produced a cost-benefit analysis.
• End of story.
• Why Congress feels that it’s necessary to do this again is beyond me.

I suppose we should be glad our legislators are at least doing something.

As for the food industry’s role in all this: when food companies say they are doing everything they can to reduce marketing junk foods to kids, you now know what they really mean.

Link (Thanks, WMG)

Hearts of gold, these guys!

The post Skeletonwitch are Releasing a Limited Edition LP to Benefit Animal Shelters appeared first on MetalSucks.

Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the preeminent digital type foundry, has broken out into civil war.

Type designer Tobias Frere-Jones claims he has been cheated out of his half of the company by his business partner, Jonathan Hoefler. In a blistering lawsuit filed today in New York City, Frere-Jones says he was duped into transferring ownership of several fonts, including the world-famous Whitney, to Hoefler & Frere-Jones (HFJ) on the understanding that he would own 50% of the company.

“In the most profound treachery and sustained exploitation of friendship, trust and confidence, Hoefler accepted all of the benefits provided by Frere-Jones while repeatedly promising Frere-Jones that he would give him the agreed equity, only to refuse to do so when finally demanded,” the suit claims. Here’s the full complaint:

Hoefler couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. Messages left at the offices of HFJ weren’t immediately returned.

Frere-Jones joined the company that would come to be called HFJ in 1999. The suit portrays Frere-Jones as the firm’s design genius, and Hoefler as the business and marketing man. In public, the pair have generally been regarded as equals. But the contract that made it so, according to the lawsuit, was never written down and signed. Frere-Jones claims he had an oral contract with Hoefler that entitles him to half the company.

The dispute came to a head last year. ”Stop it. I’m working on it. Stop harassing me,” Hoefler allegedly wrote to Frere-Jones last summer. The suit claims, “On October 21, 2013, for the first time, Hoefler explicitly reneged on his personal agreement to transfer 50% of HTF to Frere-Jones.” (HTF refers to the Hoefler Type Foundry, the company’s original name.)

Frere-Jones’s lawyer, Fredric Newman, a senior partner at Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney, said in a phone interview, ”The two partners tried to resolve it, but couldn’t, and so Mr. Frere-Jones had no choice but to sue to enforce his rights.”

The firm is perhaps the most important type designer of the 21st century. Its fonts have graced the branding of billion-dollar companies, and the covers of glossy magazines. Movie-trailer warning labels in the United States are set in Gotham, an HFJ typeface that was also famously used by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

HFJ’s typefaces have won admiration from designers by taking advantage of the limitless environment of digital design. Where most typefaces only had two weights and two styles in one width, HFJ became known for creating typefaces with several weights and several styles in several widths that included advanced features like alternate characters, and support for multiple alphabets.

Good job, #brands.

Jim Harbaugh's wife-disapproved Walmart khakis are now the stuff of legend. We even sent Spencer Hall to try them out for quality, pleat aesthetics, crotchfeel and so forth. Well, Walmart took notice. This is currently sitting in the middle of their website:

See that? They've even got flat-fronts for those of us with "flattering bodies" like Jim. Meanwhile...

Cheering for our hometown @49ers & we’re rooting for you too, Sarah #Harbaugh! Who’s with us? #CHINOS4JIM pic.twitter.com/PMDPeROick

— Banana Republic (@BananaRepublic) January 16, 2014

Nah, this isn't about you, Banana Republic. Butt out.

@GQMagazine @49ers Some new options are en-route! #CHINOS4JIM pic.twitter.com/HHcSOG1G4k

— Banana Republic (@BananaRepublic) January 16, 2014

Stop trying to make #CHINOS4JIM happen. It's embarrassing.

nnmprv:

40 módulos de descanso para 4 apartamentos turísticos by ARQUITECTURA-G.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Actually, I think this toy of Weyland-Yutani corporate sleaze Carter Burke might be the first figure of Raul Reiser, period. So if you're looking to begin your collection of Beverly Hills Cop, Mad About You or My Two Dads toys, you need to be on the look-out for Diamond Select's upcoming Aliens Mini-Mates set.

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Substantial numbers of patients in South Africa with extensively-drug resistant TB and totally resistant TB, who have exhausted available treatment options, are being discharged from hospital, potentially exposing the wider community to infection, according to new research published in The Lancet.