firehose

The New Yorker

aboardtheblackandtanexpress:

bates—motel:

That’s it. That’s the show.

In Japan, turning 20 is cause for a national holiday. Since 1948, the country has held Coming of Age Day to celebrate when 20-year-olds gain the right to vote, as well as buy cigarettes and alcohol.

But this year, Japan’s demographic problems cast a shadow on the festivities with the smallest coming-of-age cohort since the government began tracking birth data in 1968—only 1.2 million Japanese were born in 1993 and turned 20 in time to celebrate the holiday, down from a peak of 2.46 million in 1970.

The numbers reflect one of Japan’s biggest challenges: its elderly population is outpacing the number of young people. As of Dec. 1, there were an estimated 6.18 million people between the ages of 20 and 24, but 7.66 million between 70 and 74.

And so the faces of young men and women who presented themselves in suits, kimonos, and other garish outfits at ceremonies throughout the country on Jan. 13 were just another reminder of how quickly youth fades.

Bell Labs, Now Devoid of Life | Eero Saarinen | Via

At its peak, thousands passed through its massive, light-filled atrium. Today, Bell Labs Holmdel stands empty, all of its 1.9-million-square-feet utterly without life. An iconic example of the now-disparaged office park, the campus in central Jersey, was shuttered in 2007 and vacated soon after. Years later, it remains in an abandoned, if not unkept state. The grounds are cared for, the floors swept clean, and the interior plantings trimmed, however haphazardly. (That’s saying something; in the laboratory’s heyday, plastic shrubbery filled its glorious central hall.)

For zombie fans, it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine the luckless protagonists of the Walking Dead holed up here, fenced off from the rest of the world by six-story high glass walls. (Alternatively, it would make a great lair for the Governor.) Of course, in such a scenario, it’s plausible that the virus capable of raising the dead would have originated inside the lab itself. As is often noted, the building is as highly prized by scientists as it is by architects. It was here, in Saarninen’s quarter-mile fortress, that has housed some of the last century’s most significant scientific discoveries. 

inja-y-ddraig:

inkfromtheoctopus:

The Adventures of Prince Achmen.
1926. German.
The oldest surviving animated film in history.

Nonono, you don’t understand how AWESOME this movie is

because it’s not done by a big production firm, or someone with a name as big as Walt Disney, no

the writer and “mind” behind this film was a WOMAN

yes, my dear tumblr peeps, the very first trick animator in the world was a young German woman who had an idea, and enough friends and time to make a feature-length animated film. And it took her three years

because the way this movie (and some shorter works she actually did before Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed) are done is really, really complex. You see those leaves, and the hair of the figures? Yes.

That’s hand-cut paper.

Lotte Reiniger - that’s her name, my friends - always loved the art beind the Chinese shadow puppetry, and after she heard a lecture by Paul Wegener (famous vor the early movies Der Golem and Der Student von Prag) about the possibilites of animated movies, she wanted to combine these two things.

And guys, how she combined it…

Most of the puppets and scenerey she made all by herself. Her friends set up a special table that was lighted from underneath, and in the later movies she would even change the colours of the background mid-scene to change the atmosphere. Above it was a camera, shooting photos of the scenes that she moved milimetre for milimetre for those 16 pictures per second she needed for her movie.

Which makes Die Abenteuer von Prinz Achmed not only the first animated feature-length movie, but also the first stop-motion movie.

This is a most fabulous film… have been fortunate enough to catch it both on German TV and here at home.Just exquisite. Must DVD it when it runs next.

wickedlydeeper:

thepoliticalfreakshow:

These Grandfathers Getting Married Might Be The Best Thing You See Today

The New York Times first posted this video of two men who had been together since the Vietnam War, adopted a baby, became grandfathers, and finally got married.

Lewis Duckett and Billy Jones have been together a long time.

Via nytimes.com

They were introduced through a mutual friend and…

Via nytimes.com

They wrote just about every day when Billy was deployed to Vietnam.

Via youtube.com

But they had to be careful, and wrote in code so their relationship was kept secret.

Via nytimes.com

Then they adopted a child. They’re now grandfathers.

Via nytimes.com

And last year this happened.

Via nytimes.com

Which is pretty much the sweetest thing that ever happened.

Via nytimes.com

The tears. The tears.

Via nytimes.com

[Buzzfeed]

LOVE IS LOVE IS LOVE

Economic Times

Russia refuses visa to US journalist David Satter; writer banned from country for ... Washington Post MOSCOW --- Russia has refused to allow a U.S. journalist and writer to return to Moscow, an indication that authorities are clamping down on criticism despite recent gestures aimed at burnishing the country's image before the Winter Olympics open Feb. 7. UPDATE 2-Russia expels US journalist critical of PutinReuters Russia defends expulsion of veteran US reportergulfnews.com Moscow Claims US Journalist 'Grossly Violated' Visa-Entry RulesVoice of America Forbes -NBCNews.com (blog) -Fox News all 107 news articles »

As smartphones and tablets take over our world, it’s not just laptops and desktops that could wind up on the pile of dead tech. They may drag the web down with them.

The latest Marvel movie rumor has the Johnny Depp meeting with the studio about the lead role in the long-gestating "Doctor Strange."

Daimler Wins as US Supreme Court Rejects Human-Rights Suit (1) Businessweek The U.S. Supreme Court gave multinational companies a stronger shield against lawsuits, throwing out a case against Daimler AG (DAI) over a company unit's alleged collaboration in torture and killings in Argentina. The justices unanimously said the parent ... and more »

AP

Like a bad hair stylist, Pizza Hut has decided to give you something you didn't ask for: A single slice of Pizza Hut pizza. Two of the pizza chain's restaurants, one in Nebraska and one in Rhode Island, will begin to offer pizza by the slice on Tuesday, testing out a new format idea borrowed from New York City's finest (and not-so-finest) pizzerias.

"We're seeing the trends for quick and ready products," Carrie Walsh, Pizza Hut's chief marketing officer, explained to the AP. The "quick and ready products" she is referring to is quick serve joints like Chipotle, which can give you an inexpensive made-to-order 1 lb. food comas burrito in just minutes. In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Chipotle's profits jumped 15 percent. That kind of money is obviously something companies want, especially Pizza Hut's parent company, Yum Brands Inc., which had its 11-year profit growth streak snapped in the same month Chipotle revealed its good fortune. 

Things are going so well, in fact, that the Mexican chain is getting into the pizza biz. They recently launched a spin-off restaurant called Pizzeria Locale, that offers custom-made pies that can be cooked and served in under two minutes.

So in order to keep up, Pizza Hut and other brands think the key is offering better, "quick and ready" fast food like its pizza by the slice. Little Caesar's has found some success with their "Hot and Ready" pies, full pizzas that are cooked in bulk for customers who want to walk in off the street and take out without ordering ahead of time. It's not just pizza either. McDonald's unveiled a build-your-own-burger concept in Orange County, California, and KFC created a KFC Eleven, a more up-scale fried chicken restaurant with menu items like garlic-infused smashed potatoes and a promised "Mexican food" night. 

However, Pizza Hut's pizza by the slice makes you wonder if it's tapping a dry well. Why would you need pizza by the slice when you have already have the option of personal pan pizzas (invented years ago by Pizza Hut) and breadsticks and chicken wings and the bottomless salad bar and... what were we talking about again?

According to Pizza Hut, the company will continue to test the concept throughout the year and then figure out how or if they should proceed.

Original Source

The replica of the Flintstones’ car stolen last month from in front of World’s Best Comics and Toys has been recovered by police and returned to the Sacramento, California, store. According to the Merced Sun-Star, surveillance video from a nearby bowling alley captured footage of three high school-age suspects loading the 200-pound vehicle — it’s [...]

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

wandrlust:

Portland Building, Portland, Oregon, 1982 — Michael Graves

What is considered to be the first large scale postmodern building is also "one of the most hated buildings in America".

Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s Portlandia derives its namesake from the sculpture work Portlandia (1985) that is perched imposingly above the building’s entrance. It is also featured in the opening credits. 

In the film Paranoia a blackboard is shown with some pseudo-code written on it.

The pseudo-code is actually from a 1975 academic paper titled Finding all the elementary circuits of a directed graph [pdf].

thebestbatgirl:

Cassandra was last seen in Batman: Gates of Gotham Issue #5, on October 1st, 2011. It has been 836 days since then.

Or 2 years, 3 months, 13 days.

Urgh.

That feels awful.

carmendrahl writes "Last fall, MIT researchers made news for developing two bioinspired cocktail toppers-- a moving cocktail boat and a floral pipette-- in collaboration with James Beard Award-winning chef José Andrés. Both the boat and floral pipette operate by taking advantage of surface tension-- either to propel the boat forward or to keep small drops of liquid inside the flower's petals. Some of those early garnishes were nominally edible. But to make them worthy of a restaurant debut requires balancing of flavors, temperature, density, and alcohol content, among other factors. Here's a look inside Andrés' company ThinkFoodGroup to see how the project is coming along. The toppers aren't available to the public just yet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 1994, monster movie maker Roger Corman made a $2 million adaptation of The Fantastic Four, was never released in theaters for obvious reasons. But now the documentary DOOMED! The Untold Story of Roger Corman's The Fantastic Four will show you the lunacy that is this creation, and all the bananas behind-the-scenes goings on. Watch the trailer now.

Read more...

"The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights."
— Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

More than one in four adult Americans say they've recently suffered a bout of low back pain. It's one of the most common reasons people go to the doctor. And more and more people are being treated for it. But treatments are highly ineffective. So now a group of people are just teaching themselves to ignore the pain.

Secret NSA eavesdropping is still in the news. Details about once secret programs continue to leak. The Director of National Intelligence has recently declassified additional information, and the President's Review Group has just released its report and recommendations.

With all this going on, it's easy to become inured to the breadth and depth of the NSA's activities. But through the disclosures, we've learned an enormous amount about the agency's capabilities, how it is failing to protect us, and what we need to do to regain security in the Information Age.

First and foremost, the surveillance state is robust. It is robust politically, legally, and technically. I can name three different NSA programs to collect Gmail user data. These programs are based on three different technical eavesdropping capabilities. They rely on three different legal authorities. They involve collaborations with three different companies. And this is just Gmail. The same is true for cell phone call records, Internet chats, cell-phone location data.

Second, the NSA continues to lie about its capabilities. It hides behind tortured interpretations of words like "collect," "incidentally," "target," and "directed." It cloaks programs in multiple code names to obscure their full extent and capabilities. Officials testify that a particular surveillance activity is not done under one particular program or authority, conveniently omitting that it is done under some other program or authority.

Third, US government surveillance is not just about the NSA. The Snowden documents have given us extraordinary details about the NSA's activities, but we now know that the CIA, NRO, FBI, DEA, and local police all engage in ubiquitous surveillance using the same sorts of eavesdropping tools, and that they regularly share information with each other.

The NSA's collect-everything mentality is largely a hold-over from the Cold War, when a voyeuristic interest in the Soviet Union was the norm. Still, it is unclear how effective targeted surveillance against "enemy" countries really is. Even when we learn actual secrets, as we did regarding Syria's use of chemical weapons earlier this year, we often can't do anything with the information.

Ubiquitous surveillance should have died with the fall of Communism, but it got a new -- and even more dangerous -- life with the intelligence community's post-9/11 "never again" terrorism mission. This quixotic goal of preventing something from happening forces us to try to know everything that does happen. This pushes the NSA to eavesdrop on online gaming worlds and on every cell phone in the world. But it's a fool's errand; there are simply too many ways to communicate.

We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number downward to 13, and then to "one or two." At this point, the only "plot" prevented was that of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn't detect the Boston bombings -- even though one of the two terrorists was on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an ineffective counterterrorism tool.

Not only is ubiquitous surveillance ineffective, it is extraordinarily costly. I don't mean just the budgets, which will continue to skyrocket. Or the diplomatic costs, as country after country learns of our surveillance programs against their citizens. I'm also talking about the cost to our society. It breaks so much of what our society has built. It breaks our political systems, as Congress is unable to provide any meaningful oversight and citizens are kept in the dark about what government does. It breaks our legal systems, as laws are ignored or reinterpreted, and people are unable to challenge government actions in court. It breaks our commercial systems, as US computer products and services are no longer trusted worldwide. It breaks our technical systems, as the very protocols of the Internet become untrusted. And it breaks our social systems; the loss of privacy, freedom, and liberty is much more damaging to our society than the occasional act of random violence.

And finally, these systems are susceptible to abuse. This is not just a hypothetical problem. Recent history illustrates many episodes where this information was, or would have been, abused: Hoover and his FBI spying, McCarthy, Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, anti-war Vietnam protesters, and -- more recently -- the Occupy movement. Outside the US, there are even more extreme examples. Building the surveillance state makes it too easy for people and organizations to slip over the line into abuse.

It's not just domestic abuse we have to worry about; it's the rest of the world, too. The more we choose to eavesdrop on the Internet and other communications technologies, the less we are secure from eavesdropping by others. Our choice isn't between a digital world where the NSA can eavesdrop and one where the NSA is prevented from eavesdropping; it's between a digital world that is vulnerable to all attackers, and one that is secure for all users.

Fixing this problem is going to be hard. We are long past the point where simple legal interventions can help. The bill in Congress to limit NSA surveillance won't actually do much to limit NSA surveillance. Maybe the NSA will figure out an interpretation of the law that will allow it to do what it wants anyway. Maybe it'll do it another way, using another justification. Maybe the FBI will do it and give it a copy. And when asked, it'll lie about it.

NSA-level surveillance is like the Maginot Line was in the years before World War II: ineffective and wasteful. We need to openly disclose what surveillance we have been doing, and the known insecurities that make it possible. We need to work toward security, even if other countries like China continue to use the Internet as a giant surveillance platform. We need to build a coalition of free-world nations dedicated to a secure global Internet, and we need to continually push back against bad actors -- both state and non-state -- that work against that goal.

Securing the Internet requires both laws and technology. It requires Internet technology that secures data wherever it is and however it travels. It requires broad laws that put security ahead of both domestic and international surveillance. It requires additional technology to enforce those laws, and a worldwide enforcement regime to deal with bad actors. It's not easy, and has all the problems that other international issues have: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapon non-proliferation; small arms trafficking; human trafficking; money laundering; intellectual property. Global information security and anti-surveillance needs to join those difficult global problems, so we can start making progress.

The President's Review Group recommendations are largely positive, but they don't go nearly far enough. We need to recognize that security is more important than surveillance, and work towards that goal.

This essay previously appeared on TheAtlantic.com.

In the past year, Sharon Jones’ fairy-tale music career—the commanding soul dynamo of the retro-fabulous Dap-Kings was once a Rikers Island corrections officer and obscure session singer—hit a bump. The 57-year-old was diagnosed with bile duct cancer, which necessitated the removal of a tumor and chemotherapy. Naturally, Jones tackled her disease with the same kind of tenacity and pluck she displays fronting the Dap-Kings. For example, the caption of her Facebook photo standing next to other bald bandmates: “Finally I fit in..#baldband.”

Her diagnosis pushed the release of the Dap-Kings’ fifth album, Give The People What They Want, from August 2013 until now. But it’s not as if the group’s music has ever been time-sensitive; in fact, although much more upbeat than 2010’s I Learned The Hard Way, this new record doesn’t deviate from the Stax- and Motown-indebted music of the Dap-Kings’ previous albums. While the band has been criticized in ...

Imagine a man who’s spent years describing women as “needy husband-hunters.” A man whose consumer base has grown increasingly upset with his refusal to listen to criticism, lack of diversity, and that time he made fun of a high-profile woman in his industry for criticizing the way he runs his department. Surely he wouldn’t be allowed to keep his job, or at the very least, the higher-ups would tell him to watch his public image? But that man is Steven Moffat, the current showrunner of Doctor Who and co-creator of Sherlock. In Moffat’s universe, he gets rewarded, not punished, for his history of dismissive, problematic speech and writing.

Tokyo Metro: Trains of the Passnet Companies Collectible Farecard

Not a transit map, but too darn cute to not share with you.

From the same series of collectible Passnet cards as this nifty Tokyo Metro map, this card shows an adorably stylised train for each of the (22!) rail companies that participated in the Passnet program.

(Source: Rob Ketcherside/Flickr)

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

vejigante:

comicberks:

Red She-Hulk and her big-ass sword.

My OTP! 

Red She Hulk/Big Ass Sword is so totally TRUE LOVE :D

The Seattle Seahawks' fans keep shaking the earth when Marshawn Lynch does stuff.

You know about Beast Quake.

You might have also known that during this year's first Seahawks-Saints matchup, the Seahawks fans caused another earthquake.

Well, during Saturday's Seattle-New Orleans Divisional round game, Qwest Field once again made the ground shake. Seismologists put additional sensors around the stadium -- for practice observing earthquakes and to study how large structures shake -- and sure enough, they got the results they wanted when Marshawn Lynch sealed the game again. From the Seattle Times:

"This signal looks bigger than the one three years ago," said John Vidale, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at the University of Washington, "but we don't know yet."

Seismologists will need a few days to be sure, he said.

Here's what their sensors looked like:

Excellent. Seattle crowd caused another earthquake after Marshawn Lynch touchdown run pic.twitter.com/gmsXpBsLWT http://t.co/AH28NsMaPh

— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) January 14, 2014

A) We need sensors on every stadium in the league. We need to know who our most seismically active fanbase is. We can detect our loudest fans with a simple decibel meter, but we need this technology to find which of our fans jump -- and, umm, weigh -- the most.

b) All three Seahawks quakes have been caused when the team is playing against the Saints. How do we know this is due to Seattle's fans? Maybe it's just Rob Ryan angrily stomping after his team's failure?

c) You can check out all the sensor activity from the game at the PNSN site.