Original Source

On a recent episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, host Jimmy Kimmel sent Cousin Sal out to throw snowballs at Los Angeles beachgoers while they were bragging about being warm. The unsuspecting beach bums mistakenly thought they were sending a video message to their family members who were enjoying the cold weather back home.

Lemony Snicket, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events, is certainly a clever writer and that cleverness has extended to his interaction with fans. One fan shares a letter she once received from the author, with a hidden message.

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maptacular:

"Lost" New England Revealed by High-Tech Archaeology

From National Geographic

Mediaite

At Democrats' Request, Even Mike Bloomberg Is Giving up on Gun Control Mediaite After donating $2.5 million to the Democratic Senate Majority PAC, America's favorite Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, is signaling that his great crusade against guns is running out of steam. and more »

Is our love of character reboots a source of creative inspiration, that lets us re-imagine and reinvigorate our favorite stories? Or is it a symptom of a progressively timid nostalgia that comforts us with the familiar (but this time, with more lens flare)?

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Micro Art Studio has some new 50×75 rectangular skull bases available over in their webshop. Source From the release: Today we have released two new bases Skulls Bases, 50x75mm Created by Sebastian Makowski

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Derek Kim explores a redesign of the San Francisco Municipal Railway and its iconic MUNI logo.

Seems like a significant and overdue change:

First a bit of background. All Wikimedia sites have been using a home-grown search system based on Apache Lucene since 2005 or 2006. It was written primarily by volunteer Robert Stojnić and is called lucene-search-2. This is a fantastic search engine, which has powered the sites for years now, and has managed to scale very well for the past 8 years or so. Early in 2013 this became a point of significant operational problems; short-term we were able to patch some of the most glaring issues in lucene-search-2 but it became increasingly apparent that a replacement was needed. Robert is no longer around and the system is showing its age.

I’m wrestling with installing Windows 7 drivers for a superannuated (music) keyboard. Peter’s out in the field behind the house flipping over a waterlogged sheep.

Welcome to 2014.

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Soup has seen better days. After decades of sustained growth, the global soup market contracted in 2009, and then again in 2010. While soup sales have since grown, recent growth has been lukewarm at best. In both 2012 and 2013, the market was essentially flat, growing by less than 1%.

Eating habits in North America, the world’s biggest soup consumer, are mostly to blame; the region eats over 70% of the world’s canned and preserved soup.

The move away from soup is likely tied to a growing consciousness about the downsides to processed and canned foods—the vast majority of soup is canned, preserved, or both. And the can appears to be the least-appreciated part, according to market research group Euromonitor. Not only are cans difficult to open, heavy, and harmful to the environment; they’re also perceived to be not fresh. The success of restaurant chains like Panera and Hale and Hearty are proof that it’s more the container than the soup that’s losing favor.

Campbell’s, the world’s largest soup-seller, is clearly concerned. “You listen to us talk for years about revitalizing the canned soup business that has long been the heart of our enterprise in North America, and you think we’re in denial. The question of the long-term plan for our soup business seems to be a perennial moose on the table,” the company’s CEO Denise Morrison said in an analyst call in late 2012.

Rather than expanding, tweaking, or rebranding its canned offerings, Campbell’s has responded by moving away from its metal container. The company has since launched Campbell’s Go, which it sells in pouches, or bags, and teamed up with K-Cup maker Green Mountain Coffee to expand its soup offerings to single-serving, machine-brewed meals. Revamped soup and non-soup products are the ticket to Campbell’s growth; they’re expected to account for 14% of the company’s sales in 2014.

Board Game Quest has another of their game reviews posted up. This one’s for Carcassonne: South Seas. Source From the review: I’ve been an active member of the board gaming community for only a little over a year now, but in that relatively short amount of time, my love/obsession for the hobby (not to mention [...]

EA hasn't approached Mirror's Edge co-story designer and writer Rhianna Pratchett about returning to DICE's upcoming reboot, the author revealed this week. Pratchett, who served as lead writer on the recent Tomb Raider and as co-story designer and ...

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OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

#hawaiibeat

Are you part of the one-hundred-and-eleventy percent of America that is freezing right now? Have you barricaded yourself in your house and then set the house on fire, for warmth? Have you taken to wearing your pets as housecoats? Whose fault is that, hmmmmm? Is it global warming causing increasingly catastrophic weather? Is it a new ice age? Nope! It is Michelle Obama’s ravenous and careless need for sun on her bare arms, which everyone knows literally takes the sun away from you, you poor landlocked Midwestern bastard, and drops it on her sleeveless guns over in foreign Hawaii. Up until now, you weren’t sure that it was FLOTUS’ fault, though you had an inkling, but the Washington Times is here to connect the dots for you.

“When you get that feeling like you can’t feel your fingers anymore or it’s so painful you can’t feel your fingers, you definitely need to head inside,” said Dr. Leana Wen, an attending physician and director of patient-centered care research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at George Washington University. “You should always cover up, any time it goes below freezing, including with the wind chill,” she said. “Make sure to cover your extremities. Make sure you’re wearing gloves, scarf, ear muffs.”

The crippling cold is a far cry from the Oahu breeze First Lady Michelle Obama is enjoying during her extended Hawaii vacation.

Mrs. Obama remained in Hawaii for some extended R&R after President Obama and daughters Malia and Sasha arrived back at the White House Sunday after a lengthy holiday vacation. Her private vacation was a birthday gift from her husband.

While Honolulu is facing overcast skies with a high of 77 degrees, the current forecast for Washington Dulles International Airport on Tuesday is a potentially record-breaking 3 degrees. The current forecast is 7 degrees for the District, where the record low for Jan. 7 was 5 degrees in 1884.

See? How dare she take an elitist private vacation paid for by Barack Obama aka YOUR TAX DOLLARS. That’s right, sheeple! Your money is paying for Michelle Obama to get a tan RIGHT NOW while you wander around your shitty apartment with your housecoat worn over your sweater worn over your flannel shirt worn over your long underwear, looking like the goddamn Michelin Man. UNFAIR! INPEACH MICHELLE OBAMA.

Keep yourself warm tonight with your white hot incandescent rage directed at Michelle Obama for blocking out the sun. Lord knows there is no other way you’re going to stay warm enough.

[Washington Times]

Original Source

Vladi Rapaport's Skull Chair isn't the first one we've posted (cf: stacking chair; armchair), but it's my favorite so far. Love the subtlety of the skull, the eamesoid styling. Works especially well accompanied by the brain ottoman, made from leather and foam.

The 'Skull Chair' is part of my 'Vanitas' collection which is a collection of products inspired by the Dutch vanitas still-life paintings from the 16th and 17th century. The characteristic type of paintings where symbols of emptiness, time and death were placed on the canvas as a reminder of the vanity of earthly life. My goal was to combine the idea of thinking about death with a modern design vision and to allow the user of the product to enjoy every moment of his life by surrounding himself with the Vanitas symbols. This creates an environment that makes you understand the mortality and the absurdity of the present, but does so by letting you enjoy the very moment by giving an authentic and interesting product experience. (fibre-reinforced polyester h:80 w:80 d:85 cm)

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Skull Chair | 2008 (via Kadrey)

Chinese and Russian ships immobilized near Antarctica broke free Tuesday, news agencies reported, while a United States Coast Guard icebreaker called in to help rescue them was days away.

JUANITA

BBC The Life of Birds

Global and Population Health, Psychology, University of Sydney.

I had mail from Jürgen Huber at Logi.cals, an Austrian software firm, who have been using a Raspberry Pi in a demo at trade fairs to show off logi.CAD 3, their new, free, software tool for automation. It’s right up our street: they’ve made an automatic decanting machine.

Decanting machines, usually operated by via a hand crank and a threaded rod, turn up in the sort of restaurant I don’t go to as much as I’d like to: the sort of places where you’ll find old bottles of fine wine with delicate contents, which need very careful decanting to gently aerate the wine without over-oxygenating it, while leaving behind any sediment.

Logi.cals’ version looks a bit less gentleman’s-club, and a bit more spaceship.

Here it is in action, making some poor sommelier somewhere slightly less useful.

Micro switches check that both a glass and a bottle are present (which reminds me: we really need to update the Pi Towers coffee machine to detect a mug in order to stop the carpet getting soggy). Light barriers assess the position of the bottle, and capacitive sensors detect flow, and detect how much wine there is in the glass. The bottle is weighed so the Pi knows how much wine is left; the glass is also weighed with a strain gauge so that the Pi knows what’s in there. Jürgen’s team even added an emergency brake.

A stepper motor tilts the bottle gently. The team at Logi.cals used two expansion boards: a PiFace and a Quick2Wire board, to talk to the I2C bus, the motor and the strain gauges: you can read more about the setup at their website.

It’s a great proof of concept. This isn’t going to be a commercial product, so if you’re a wine waiter, you can sleep easy: the rest of us will be dreaming sweetly about robo-boozing.

benigoat:

4gifs:

 [video]

roachpatrol:

neopiacentral:

This is my favorite picture in the world and I feel like its about time I shared it with all of you

IT’S NOT A PHASE, MOM. THIS IS WHO I REALLY AM. 

Up until now, the most shocking statistic about the American criminal justice system was this: we house 5 percent of the world's population, but 25 percent of the world's prisoners.

Here's a stat that's even more troublesome: By age 23, nearly 50 percent of America's black males, 44 percent of Hispanic males, and 38 percent of white males have been arrested.

These numbers come from a new study (paywalled) in the journal Crime & Delinquency. In it, University of South Carolina criminologist Robert Brame and his team examine self-reported arrest histories collected through the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. The survey started in 1997, when the 9,000 participants were between the ages of 12 and 16. The participants have been interviewed annually every year since. Brame's study uses data from 1997-2008. 

Thanks to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, we've known the rate at which whites and blacks are arrested, but Brame's study is the first to look at cumulative arrests for blacks and whites, and to break that data down by gender. The former number measures how many more times a black person is arrested than a white person; Brame's research tells us the number of black people arrested versus the number of white people arrested. 

Here's the summarizing chart: 

These stark numbers put America's tendency to over-criminalize, well, everything. Today, police can place you in handcuffs for using a camera on public property, or littering. The slow expansion of activities deemed to be criminal began in the late 1980s, and today it manifests itself in harsh penalties for nonviolent, victimless behavior, the school-to-prison pipeline, and our engorged prison system. 

While Brame's study doesn't attempt to explain the roots of the racial disparity, the ACLU recently revealed the extent to which blacks are disproportionately arrested for marijuana possession: 

While arrests don't always lead to convictions, Brame argues that the number still matters, a lot. He writes:

There is substantial research showing that arrested youth are not only more likely to experience immediate negative consequences such as contact with the justice system, school failure and dropout, and family difficulties but these problems are likely to reverberate long down the life course in terms of additional arrests, job instability, lower wages, longer bouts with unemployment, more relationship troubles, and long-term health problems including premature death.

Top image: A Los Angeles man being arrested. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

"Fried chicken stands to play a very prevalent role" at the upcoming Reverend's BBQ in Sellwood, says Laurelhurst Market's Ben Dyer.