firehose

I wish there were an OPML sharing service. There isn’t. (That I know of.) In the absence of that, just for jazz, here are my feeds. (The feeds I personally subscribe to, that is. You may need to right-click and download to disk.)

wetheurban:

ART: Kimsooja’s Room of Rainbows

South Korean-born artist Kimsooja has had a long, intense career full of installations, performances, photography, videos and site-specific project. This particular installation from 2006 is at the Palace de Cristal in Madrid.

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submitted by atrain714 [link] [50 comments]

le Bat

So apparently in Pokemon X & Y at the "Battle Maison" there is a woman who seems to be trans. She says she used to be a Black Belt, an all male trainer class. In Japanese, she says 半年前はカラテおうだったのに医学の力ってスゲーよね！ which literally means "To think I was a Black Belt just half a year ago. Modern medicine sure is amazing!" as an extra bonus, Black Belts are referred to in Japanese as カラテおう, which means "karate king" and is explicitly male.

An anonymous reader writes "The Foursquare blog has an interesting post about some of the math they use to evaluate and verify the massive amount of user-generated data that enters their database. They need to figure out the likelihood that any given datapoint accurately represents reality, so they've worked out a complicated formula that will minimize abuse. Quoting: 'By choosing the points based on a user's accuracy, we can intelligently accrue certainty about a proposed update and stop the voting process as soon as the math guarantees the required certainty. ... The parameters are automatically trained and can adapt to changes in the behavior of the userbase. No more long meetings debating how many points to grant to a narrow use case. So far, we've taken a very user-centric view of p-sub-k (this is the accuracy of user k). But we can go well beyond that. For example, p-sub-k could be "the accuracy of user k's vote given that they have been to the venue three times before and work nearby." These clauses can be arbitrarily complicated and estimated from a (logistic) regression of the honeypot performance. The point is that these changes will be based on data and not subjective judgments of how many "points" a user or situation should get."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Never let a bad loss put a damper on things. Do you. Live your life. Set off fireworks.

The Philadelphia Eagles lost on a last-second field goal to the New Orleans Saints, ending Chip Kelly's first season on a sour note.

But hey -- that's no reason not to have a good time, right? This tweet came about ten minutes after the game ended:

Celebratory fireworks go off at Linc. Must have been malfunction #Eagles #saints

— Jordan Raanan (@JordanRaanan) January 5, 2014

Explanations:

a) wooo! Go Saints!

b) Fireworks are like milk -- if they didn't set them off, they weren't going to keep.

c) Despite the disappointing loss, the Eagles wanted to celebrate the fact that this was still a very good season after going 4-12 last year, and the fact that the future is very bright

d) Inspired by this:

(To be fair, the Vikings also had a fireworks false alarm earlier this year.)

... in their own special way.

WOOOOOOOOO.

The Carolina Panthers have rallied a bit around Ric Flair, the ex-wrestler, this season. But when playoff time came and the Nature Boy needed to show his allegiance... who did he side with?

The San Francisco 49ers:

Nature Boy Ric Flair flew into this shit hole to show us some love. pic.twitter.com/F6gTC4Hpts

— Anthony Davis (@AnthonyDavis76) January 5, 2014

(This, of course, is also notable for Anthony Davis calling Green Bay a shithole, but for now: WOOOOOOO.)

"I don't give marital advice, I'm 0 for 4." -Rick Flare 😂😂

— Nick Moody (@Moody54TMB) January 5, 2014

So, yeah: Ric Flair went into negative temperatures in Wisconsin to give words of wisdom and make cracks about divorces to the Niners.

cold fjord writes with this excerpt from Fox News: "A U.S. senator on Friday pressed the National Security Agency on whether its controversial spying practices extend to monitoring members of Congress. 'Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?' Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., asked in a letter to NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander released from the senator's office. Sanders, a self-described 'democratic socialist,' defines spying as monitoring the phone calls, emails and internet traffic of elected officials."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In a long Facebook post, gay CBS anchor Itay Hod has essentially outed Republican Congressman Aaron Schock on the grounds of hypocrisy.

MLB pitcher R.A. Dickey* slings an erratic knuckleball pitch, posing a challenge for batter and catcher alike. The ball has been colorized to highlight its almost total lack of spin, which usually serves to stabilize the ball's trajectory.

Read more...

United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, 241 U.S. 265 (1916), was a federal suit under which the government unsuccessfully attempted to force the Coca-Cola company to remove caffeine from its product.

The outlet pass: an elegant weapon, for a more civilized age.

psi-thunder:

Never forget when one of my animal crossing villagers called me a goddamn trash can

Here’s an idea I love that’s at the intersection of urbanization, design, and nature.

Brike is series of modular bricks that together serve as a habitat for urban wildlife. The collection includes bee houses, birdhouses, insect hotels, and planters that work in harmony to … Read More...

The post How to Make a Habitat for Urban Wildlife With Bee Houses, Birdhouses, Insect Hotels, and Planter Boxes appeared first on Urban Gardens.

Giffiti

"please do not put shampoo in your eyes" -

70’s Robot Anime GEPPY-X (Aroma - PSX - 1999)

Have I mentioned how great the fake ads are in this game?

It seems Eagles fans like pelting things with other things. The Saints are prepared.

The city of Philadelphia has never lived down the story about throwing stuff at Santa Claus. And perhaps with somewhat good reason.

The Saints chose not to defend themselves from pelting, but rather egg it on:

The @Saints had their team bus egged last time they were in Philly. So this time they drew a target on the bus. pic.twitter.com/HNkkhHYz9G

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) January 4, 2014

Hopefully they avoid shelling while outside of the bus. They should also get some of Kevin Garnett's noise-cancelling headphones.

The presence of Joel’s escape pod in “Docking Bay 14”^[4] implies there are at least fourteen docking bays.

Link (Thanks, Sillstaw)

Rinko Kikuchi by Jumbo Tsui for Jalouse China December 2013

Publication – Jalouse China December 2013
Model/Actress – Rinko Kikuchi
Photography – Jumbo Tsui
 

 

Strangely Compelling - Fashion | Art | Photography

NSA won't say whether it spies on Congress CNN (blog) Congress is just like everyone else. That's the message the National Security Agency has for Sen. Bernie Sanders. The independent senator from Vermont sent a letter to the agency Friday, asking whether it has or is "spying" on members of Congress and ... and more »