firehose

Foot on El, 1954 - Saul Leiter, RIP

http://imgur.com/WkHHpZ1

Original Source

Original Source

10 Photos Of Plus-Size Models We Deserve A Pat On The Back For Running

We are huge, giant, enormous fans of Carrie Anne Philbin. Carrie Anne’s a pioneering computing teacher, whose Geek Gurl Diaries YouTube series we can’t say enough good things about. (If you haven’t checked it out yet, please do when you’ve finished reading this post.)

Carrie Anne has been busy this year: as well as working full-time as a teacher and producing Geek Gurl Diaries, she’s created a scheme of work for Sonic Pi; she’s been active on the Government’s Computing expert panel which reviews the new Computing curriculum in the UK; and she’s working as vice-chair of #include for Computing at School. She won Talk Talk’s London Digital Hero award, and somehow she’s also fitted in the time to write what we think is hands down the best Raspberry Pi book for young people we’ve seen yet.

Carrie Anne says that this book is for any young person who’s interested in making things happen using computing. Inside, you’ll find nine projects (alongside stickers, achievements and more), which will take you from a standing start to a point where you’ll be breezing through projects like writing your first programs, shaping the Minecraft universe using Minecraft Pi, designing and building your own role-playing game, writing and playing your own music…and making electronic switches out of marshmallows.

It’s a beautifully produced book, full of ideas and clear direction, with a real sense of Carrie Anne’s personality jumping off every page. These projects come out of real activities Carrie Anne has worked through with real kids; they’re tried and tested – and they’re fun, too. You’ll find hints and tips to help you along the way. There’s plenty of extra material online to supplement the book, along with lots of recommendations for further reading.

Adventures in Raspberry Pi is aimed at 11-15-year-olds, but younger kids whose parents have time for a little supervision (if you’re one of those parents, you won’t need any programming experience, because Carrie Anne’s done that work for you) will also find it a tidy fit.

We’re really excited about this book. You can find it on Amazon for preorder at a discount price at the moment, for release on December 5, but if you can’t wait that long, we already have copies available here at the Raspberry Pi Swag Store (full price, I’m afraid – but every purchase you make goes to support our charitable work in computing education). I’m buying a few copies for kids I know for Christmas. I hope you will too.

Oregon Jewish leaders are hopping mad over a statement by an anti-gay-marriage spokesperson who compared loving gay couples to neo-Nazis, according to the Oregonian's Jeff Mapes:

Teresa Harke, a spokeswoman for the [Oregon Family Council] made the remarks while explaining the rationale for a proposed ballot measure from the group that would allow businesses to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings if they had religious objections.

"Would you expect a Jewish bakery to serve a neo-Nazi who wanted a cake with a swastika on it?" Harke said in an interview with The Oregonian.

They went and Godwinned. You should never Godwin before a public vote; it's bad form. You should go check out the article to read the responses to the Oregon Family Council, which includes statements that people should never have to say in a sentence. For example: "Here you're making a comparison between a hate group that supports the elimination of Jews in the world and a couple that wants to sanctify their marriage."

[ Subscribe to the comments on this story ]

It's not like you were working anyway.

Read more...

djempirical

click through for embeds

There’s been a lot of news in the past week about the legal kerfuffle between the Beastie Boys and a company called GoldieBlox, which markets science/engineering toys aimed at girls (and their parents) seeking something beyond the standard pink princess fare.

Apparently, GoldieBlox has successfully leveraged the “viral” qualities of the net to project their “disruptive” brand, and the latest example does so spectacularly well, via a parody of the Beastie Boys’ well-worn, decades-old, silly misogynist ditty, “Girls.”

In fact, my first encounter with GoldieBlox’s version of “Girls” arrived via word of mouth (i.e., Gchat), just the way viral videos are supposed to. My wife shared the link with me, as we ourselves are constantly struggling with the balance between giving our daughters lots of options for growth and play, on the one hand, and indulging their seemingly irrepressible desire to parade around as princesses on the other. As that type of dad, I couldn’t help but myself be smitten by the ad —

So, I was as surprised as anyone to learn about the legal battle currently underway over this parody of a parody (if, in the initial instance, an ambiguous one). Obviously, GoldieBlox’s “Girls” is derived from the Beasties’ “Girls,” but it’s a complete re-recording, marshaling certain familiar elements — the riff, the refrain, and certain text/melodic lines — not all unlike the ways the Beasties themselves cribbed and borrowed and reassembled their own song out of prior performances.

Redolent of a schlocky musical and cultural past — and perhaps helping to give the song some of its parodic edge — the Beasties’ “Girls” makes audible nods to both the Isley Brothers and Bo Diddley. Beginning around 0:40 in the following video, you’ll hear Diddley play on guitar the very same riff the Boys coax out of their wonky synth:

And this mashup underscores pretty convincingly how much “Girls” is inspired by the Isley’s “Shout,” with parellels in terms of song syntax, repeated refrain, and even a few striking melodic parallels (e.g., “say that you love me…” == “to do the dishes…”):

What should we make of the Beastie Boys taking two songs deeply inspired by African-American religious ritual — the ring-shout in the case of the Isleys, and Diddley’s hand-clapping & foot-stomping “communion service” — in order to make a rearguard, if possibly parodic, song about women? On what grounds should the Beasties be allowed the privilege of doing something so derivative/transformative, while GoldieBlox should not?

For many, it would seem, the crucial point turns not on questions of musical borrowing and re-signification but rather, on the Beastie Boys’ stated wishes to keep their music out of advertisements, as articulated in their open letter —

make no mistake, your video is an advertisement that is designed to sell a product, and long ago, we made a conscious decision not to permit our music and/or name to be used in product ads.

This is especially poignant given that Adam Yauch (aka MCA) made this same wish explicit in his will.

But then, GoldieBlox isn’t actually using the Beasties’ music. Or are they? It’s a question — and not an easy one to resolve. (For any of us, or for a judge or jury for that matter.) They’re certainly not using the Beasties’ recording, or even a sample from it. Why should we determine that the Beasties’ should be able to stop others from re-assembling the same pieces that they themselves assembled without licensing/permission in the first place? Should GoldieBlox respect the Beasties’ wishes?

What about, say, James Newton’s wishes? An avant-jazz flutist, Newton famously insisted that the Beasties’ use of a sample of his flute performance on “Choir” for the Beasties’ “Pass the Mic” constituted copyright infringement, but a court ruled that the snippet was too short to constitute a part of his composition, and since the Boys had licensed the recording from Newton’s record label (for a paltry $1000), they were allowed to go ahead and use it despite lacking Newton’s permission.

Generally speaking, as readers of W&W will know, I support that sort of relatively unbridled approach to transformative re-use. Songs are shared things, and if you don’t want someone to play or sing along, hold them close and sing them quietly in the corner. Once something is out in the open, in public, via commercial or even non-commercial circulation, it becomes available for sharing and reinterpretation. Courts and lawyers and some artists like to draw hard and fast lines between folk culture and commercial culture, but these are usually little more than language games having to do with claiming ownership, not stable definitions of cultural domains. (Sometimes, they’re struggles over power and money, which are not to be diminished, though they are hardly at play in this case between some rich musicians and a successful start-up.)

When did “Girls” escape the Beasties’ creative control? Perhaps as soon as it was commercially released and massively distributed. In its own way, the Beastie’s “Girls” was, in the first instance, itself an advertisement — an ad for an album, an ad for concerts, an ad for a sophomoric act that the Beastie Boys took to the world and to the bank.

All that said, it’s still a little odd for the likes of the EFF to step into the fray, and to argue for fair use simply because they agree with Glodieblox’s putative politics. Clearly, commercial instances of parodic fair use have been upheld before — s/o Luther Campbell & Henry Louis Gates — but it’s always a matter of convincing some judge/jury about the lines people want to draw around musical ownership. Toward that end, I think considering the big musical picture here helps.

I mean, just imagine the chilling effect on other renditions of “Girls”! In a world of personal branding, where do we draw the line between commercial and non? Between advertisement and not?

Tell this guy Bro Chuy he’d better not “go viral” –

Or this girl for that matter —

And someone should really warn these squirrels not to attempt to monetize their questionable “parody” –

For my part, as a dad, I’ll be sure to teach my daughters how to reverse engineer our favorite Beastie songs as soon as the girls are ready for some serious digital music trickery.

Original Source

FiLIP is a basic phone and locator that kids can wear on their wrist like a watch. Parents can call and send short text messages to the device, and it can be programmed with up to five preset numbers for children to dial. FiLIP also tracks kids’ locations, and sends notifications to parents via a smartphone app when kids leave designated safe zones, like school. The colorful gadget is available to purchase online in pink, blue, red, and green and will ship mid-December.

video and image via FiLIP

via swissmiss

Link

The Terminator reboot is determined to cast its Sarah Connor before it casts anyone else, and we can't really disagree with their choices. Then again, if it were up to us we'd probably start every audition by asking the actress "Are you Sarah Connor?" and observing her reaction.

Bilbo Baggins might be as pleasant a Hobbit as ever lived, but the clearly same can't be said of the actor who plays him, Martin Freeman. The evidence is in the above video, which reveals the many, many times Freeman constantly flipped the bird on The Hobbit set.

Read more...

constancecream:

Link: http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-11-26/sherlock-series-3-christmas-broadcast-confirmed-as-bbc-unveils-festive-line-up

My money’s on the 29th. We shall see.

“Doge Adventure” is a new animation by Weebl that features the Doge meme blasting off into space, falling through the air, and swimming in the ocean surrounded by colorful Comic Sans text. Such adventure. So meme. Wow.

In the years leading up to 1979, large numbers of Iranian citizens participated in a series of increasingly impassioned protests against Mohammad Reza, the Shah of Iran, whom many believed was a puppet of Western powers. The protests eventually boiled over into a revolution that would leave hundreds dead and change the face of the country forever. Later, in 2001, a video game called Grand Theft Auto III came out. It allowed players to steal cars and have implied sex with virtual prostitutes. It was incredibly popular. Now, one man is finally trying to bring these two things together.

That man is Navid Khonsari, a director and writer on several of the Grant Theft Auto games and now head of his own development studio, iNK Stories. The game, 1979 Revolution, is being developed for tablets and shows a pretty impressive commitment to historical verisimilitude. It has political and academic advisers on tap and has imported ...

parlor - Marusa no Onna (Capcom - Famicom - 1989)

requested by sighkingu

Is this real? Please let this be a joke.

This is everything wrong with tech-startup culture, unreasonable expectations, and workaholism in one job posting, by a company with a massive audience that probably contains a very high percentage of young software developers.

They would like someone with a computer science degree and at least three years of professional experience in developing web apps top-to-bottom on the full PHP/MySQL stack and Java, Python, or Ruby development¹and high-traffic server and database administration and supporting their other employees’ local office IT needs.

They’re going to require you to be a workaholic, not having any work-life balance, which they flippantly celebrate and glorify.

They don’t specify a salary, but they’re very clear that it’s going to be very low — they’d rather spend a fraction of the difference making the office nice.

I did almost this exact job for Tumblr’s first four years. I required, and was given, a great salary plus stock, a nice office environment, and a healthy work-life balance. The difference is that I didn’t have much experience going in — I learned most of the scaling side as we went. An advanced web developer who also wants to be a sysadmin and already has experience managing high-traffic infrastructure is very rare and far more valuable.

Penny Arcade wants one of those so they can pay them a low salary and burn them out. The candidate is expected to be happy and honored at the privilege of this terrible deal.

Their unreasonable, immature expectations are a damaging message to send to their huge audience of young software developers. Yes, there are other employers this bad (and worse) in the industry, but you don’t have to work for them. There are a lot of better options, especially if you satisfy even half of Penny Arcade’s requirements — and a healthy work-life balance is a basic requirement, like your paycheck, that you shouldn’t tolerate losing for any employer.

∞ Permalink

1. Faddan More Psalter, c. 800: when it was found


2. Faddan More Psalter, c. 800: before start of restoration


3. Faddan More Psalter, c. 800: restored cover


4. Faddan More Psalter, c. 800: words without a page

spindlebug:

erikkwakkel:

The book that emerged from a bog after 1200 years

This is the remarkable story of a medieval book that spent 1200 years in the mud. Around 800 someone had a Book of Psalms made, a portable copy fitted with a leather satchel. The book consisted of sixty sheets of parchment that were carefully filled with handwritten words. Somehow the book ended up in a remote bog at Faddan More in north Tipperary, close to the town of Birr, Ireland. Dropped, perhaps, by the owner? Was he walking and reading at the same time? Did he himself also end up in the bog?

Fast-forward to 2006. Eddie Fogarty, the operator of a turf digger, noticed an object with faint lettering in the bucket of his machine (pic 1). There it was again, our Book of Psalms! At this point it resembled something from an Aliens movie (pic 2), but that changed quickly after it went to the restoration lab. Thanks to the conservation properties of turf, many pages were still intact, as was its leather satchel (pic 3), the only surviving specimen from this early period. Remarkably, among the damaged pages were some that had let go of the words: kept together merely by ink, the words were floating around by themselves - like some sort of medieval Scrabble (pic 4). It’s the most remarkable bookish survival story I know.

More on this phenomenal find in this news article and this one. Here is the bog and the machine that dug up the book More on the restoration process here. More about the papyrus found in the binding here. This is a nice movie on the book.

oh my god

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

On Monday, a group of San Antonio women were released from prison, their sentences vacated, after serving 14 years for heinous sex crimes they didn’t commit. So why haven’t college campuses around the nation rallied on behalf of this execrable injustice? Probably because the accused are Latino lesbians.