firehose

“The Greeks understood the mysterious power of the hidden side of things. They bequeathed to us one of the most beautiful words in our language—the word ‘enthusiasm’—en theos—a god within. The grandeur of human actions is measured by the inspiration from which they spring. Happy is he who bears a god within, and who obeys it.”

- Louis Pasteur. (via jaded-mandarin)

wasbella102:

Zittende kat, naar links, Jean Bernard, 1815

The Panthers-Patriots game featured one of the strangest endings of the year. A bad call, two pissed off quarterbacks and some embarrassed officials.

Reuters:

Google Inc will pay $17 million to settle allegations by 37 states and the District of Colombia that it secretly tracked Web users by placing special digital files on the Web browsers of their smartphones.

The deal, announced Monday morning, ends a nearly two-year probe by the states into allegations that Google bypassed the privacy settings of customers using Apple Inc’s Safari Web browser by placing “cookies” into the browser. […] The Safari Web browser used on iPhones and iPads automatically blocks third-party cookies, but Google altered the computer code of its cookies and was able to circumvent the blocks between June 2011 and February 2012, according to the states’ allegations.

A $17 million fine will really teach Google a lesson. It takes them almost two hours to generate that in revenue.

Alan Rickman and Bruce Willis taking direction
from John McTiernan on the set of Die Hard.

Original Source

Trail signs from the 1942 Boy Scout Handbook.

Original Source

Tracy McGrady shrunk since we last saw him in the NBA about six months ago. A lot.

Tracy McGrady is occasionally appearing on NBATV this year. Normally, television shows feature people who decide what clothes the people on television wear. Apparently, the NBATV show on which Tracy McGrady appears does not feature such a person

You HAVE to do better than this T-Mac. I'm telling you this out of love. You must know of a good tailor. pic.twitter.com/P0X2aW5G3m

— JAY ADAMS (@morejaylesswar) November 19, 2013

(We saw this via the omnipresent @jose3030.)

Tracy McGrady is 6'8. His incredibly baggy pants make him appear like a person who is, at most, 4'10, and has the torso-to-legs ratio of two kids standing inside one set of clothes to give the impression that they are, in fact, one adult.

We could just make fun of this, but I'm just astounded by the circumstances that had to combine for such a massive sartorial mistake to occur.

Either a) Tracy McGrady, who made $162 million off of NBA contracts in his career -- not including endorsements or foreign contracts -- and is presumably paid handily to appear on television -- does not own a suit of his own that fits or b) NBATV, whose on-air talent features several people of McGrady's height or taller, did not have any suits on hand for a 6'8 person.. Or some combination of those two.

And whose suit is this? Fellow NBATV talent Shaq? Yao, from T-Mac's time in Houston? Maybe T-Mac has a 7'5 older brother and this is a hand-me-down?

It's not incredibly rare in this town for a cop to deploy a Taser. Officers hit eight suspects with more than one cycle of the debilitating device from July through September alone, according to a recent report.

Far rarer is a press release to explain a Tasering incident, which is what hit Portland's collective media inboxes this afternoon. The release details a brief standoff Friday morning at the Pearl District Whole Foods, after a man with "significant mental health issues" grabbed an unspecific number of knives and refused to leave.

The reason for the release, apparently, is this (partly NSFW) video, which a breakfasting witness posted to YouTube.

The footage is pertinent given recent scrutiny over the Portland Police Bureau's dealings with people suffering mental illness. Just two weeks ago, bigwigs gathered in Portland City Hall to announce an agreement with the city's top police union over federally mandated reforms spurred by cops' inadequate handling of these encounters.

It's pretty clear officers in this instance gave the suspect ample warning and opportunity to de-escalate the situation (not that that necessarily matters when a person's in crisis)—and also that they were ready to use far more force than a Taser. It appears at least two officers have their handguns out, and a third has a bean bag shotgun.

Cops say they've had past run-ins with the man, including an incident where he was wearing a tactical vest and holstered replica pistol. In all, an officer hit the suspect with four cycles of the Taser— "due to his continuing struggle, his swatting and grabbing at the Taser probes and putting his hands underneath his body," according to the press release. He was charged with menacing and second-degree disorderly conduct.

More from the release after jump.

Officers talking with the man knew his name and used it as they slowly and calmly gave him clear and repeated instructions to put down the knives. The man refused to drop the knives as officer continuously repeated commands to put them on the ground. Concerned for the safety of other customers and for man himself, officers told the man several times that he may be Tased if he did not drop the knives.

Officers talked with the man for several minutes before the sergeant deployed the Taser, which caused the man to drop the knives and fall to the ground. As officers were attempting to get control of the man, he rolled around on the ground and struggling with officers. Due to his continuing struggle, his swatting and grabbing at the Taser probes and putting his hands underneath his body, three additional Taser cycles were needed to safely gain control of the man and put him into handcuffs.

During the struggle, the man suffered a bloody nose while on the ground. Medical personnel responded to the scene, checked his injury, then cleared him for police transport. Officers walked the man out to a waiting patrol car where he again briefly struggled with officers before being placed into the car.

Officers learned from store employees that they witnessed the man shoplifting prior to him grabbing knives from a display rack inside the store and telling store employees that he was not going to leave after being asked to by employees.

And in case you wanted to know more about the gentleman whose breakfast was so unceremoniously ruined, he's also posted this video.

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• Market Basket in Reading, MA – womens’s bathroom stall.

submitted by basilcilantro
[link] [18 comments]

ANIMATED: OUTTA THE WAY, KID!!!

ANIMATED: Pay no attention to the cat at the bottom of your screen

By Bronn

submitted by garyploski [link] [74 comments]

The Buccaneers could be without one of their top safeties in Week 12.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers safety Dashon Goldson has been suspended for one game for violating the league's policy on player safety, according to Ian Rapoport.

Goldson's suspension comes for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Atlanta Falcons wide receiver Roddy White. It was the second such hit of the season for the safety. In Week 2, Goldson was suspended one game for a helmet-to-helmet hit on Saints running back Darren Sproles, but won an appeal to have it reduced to a $100,000 fine that allowed him to continue playing. This will be his plan again, according to Rick Stroud.

The Buccaneers are on a two-game win streak, and can't afford to be without Goldson moving forward. He has been vital to the team's secondary, totaling 50 tackles, one interception and one forced fumble. If he fails his appeal the defense will turn to Kelcie McCray, who has six tackles in five games this season.

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“"British comedy is about silly people in serious situations.
American comedy is about serious people in silly situations.””

-

Doug Walker - Alcon 2013, at a panel discussing what makes ‘Good’ comedy. (via captaintightpanties)

…Seems about right.

joshbyard:

Google’s Machine Learning Algorithms Outpacing Engineers’ Ability to Understand How they Work

“Google no longer understands how its “deep learning” decision-making computer systems have made themselves so good at recognizing things in photos.

What stunned [Google Software Engineer] Quoc V. Le is that the software has learned to pick out features in things like paper shredders that people can’t easily spot – you’ve seen one shredder, you’ve seen them all, practically. But not so for Google’s monster.

Many of Quoc’s pals had trouble identifying paper shredders when he showed them pictures of the machines, he said. The computer system has a greater success rate, and he isn’t quite sure how he could write a program to do this.

Google researchers can no longer explain exactly how the system has learned to spot certain objects, because the programming appears to think independently from its creators, and its complex cognitive processes are inscrutable. "

(via The Register ht algopop)

All those gigantic server farms… they’ve accidentally exceeded the critical synapse number, haven’t they.

Life is stirring in the depths…

Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

NINE INCH NAILS, EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY
(Moda Center, 1 N Center Ct) For better or worse, The Downward Spiral defined a solid year of my life. I discovered Nine Inch Nails' 1994 opus at the acme of adolescence, and its bilious moodiness and fragmented moments of limpid beauty were the perfect accompaniment to the awkwardness and frustration of which I couldn't seem to get atop. From there, I explored the back catalog of Halos, but Pretty Hate Machine was too wussy and Broken seemed more or less incoherent. So The Downward Spiral it was, and it might still rank as one of the albums I've listened to the most—so much so, that I can more or less perfectly recall each and every note of its 65 minutes. It says something, though, that I have never revisited the album after that fateful year or so, not even once. I've been happy to keep it on the shelf as an un-ruptured capsule of pure adolescent angst. When Trent Reznor released the double album The Fragile in 1999, I had moved well on; I don't think I've ever gotten all the way through disc one. Still, I've found a lot to like on this new Nine Inch Nails album, Hesitation Marks, so maybe I've gotten to the age where I'm capable of visiting and analyzing a time from the past that wasn't necessarily 100 percent happy. Subsequently, I couldn't be more stoked to finally see Nine Inch Nails live, and who knows? Maybe afterward I'll be ready to dig out that tattered copy of The Downward Spiral and relive some very vivid memories. NL Also see My, What a Busy Week!

BIG FREEDIA
(Doug Fir, 830 E Burnside) Move over, Miley! The true, reigning Queen of Twerking is the amazing Big Freedia (AKA the grand dame of New Orleans sissy bounce music). And Miss Freedia is bringing her particular brand of ass-jiggling, crowd-sweatin', call-and-response queer-core rap to the confines of Doug Fir—so if you do not like to drop that ass? You BEST be moving upstairs to the bar. WM.™ STEVEN HUMPHREY

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mentalmantel:

NO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND I DON’T WANT TO DO CHEMISTRY

Too late.

design-is-fine:

Drawing instruments, Reißzeug und Zeichengeräte, 1830-80. Via Dorotheum.

Jimmy Callin sent in this photograph of a sign in Nanjing:

The Chinese part of the sign says simply: xīyān chù 吸烟处 ("smoking area").

The translation of xīyān chù 吸烟处 ("smoking area") and xīyān zhàn 吸烟站 ("smoking station") as "fag station" is sanctioned by iCIBA, also by Seadict, and many other online Chinese-English / English-Chinese dictionaries.

For xīyān chù 吸烟处 ("smoking area"), Baidu Fanyi gives:

1. smoke area

2. Smoking Area

3. smokery

4. smoke point

5. fag station

Because I was sure that I had seen the expression "fag station" long before Jimmy sent in this photograph, I googled to check out how extensive its usage was and was amazed to find that — in quotation marks — it received 432,000 ghits.

Obviously, not all of these instances are references to places where smoking is allowed, but a considerable proportion of them are. In fact, if you want to let guests at your home know where it is permissible to smoke, you can get a wooden version of the Fag Station sign here.

As for the other meanings of "fag station", some are obvious, but there are also some that I am not confident that I fully understand, including the frequent references to truckers ("fag station for truckers to unload"), to video games, and occasionally to Japanese otaku lifestyle (most likely related to the previous item).

Here's one, from The Cyclopedia of New Zealand [Otago & Southland Provincial Districts], that completely threw me for a loop:

Mr. John Sammons . Officer in charge of the Forest Hill Tablet Signal Station, was born in Oxfordshire, England, in 1844. He went to sea as a youth, and served twelve years in the Royal Navy, in various parts of the world. Mr Sammons came to the Bluff, by the ship “Zealandia,” in 1872, and joined the New Zealand railway service, in which he held the position of guard until he was appointed officer in charge of the Forest Hill fag station.

N.B.: see below for the probable origin of the expression as used here.

Several that I followed up were apparently due to OCR misreading of "name-tag station", such as this one from "Jewish Family Education: Shabbat and Holidays": "You will see a name-fag station in the outside play area. Please take a moment to put on name tags!" You can also find OCR misreadings of "flag station" as "fag station", such as this one in "Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of Mississippi …", Volume 67 (1890): "Railroads. Failure to stop at flag station. Nominal damages."

It would appear that "fag station" is an expression that, when used correctly, does not raise any eyebrows, but when employed inappropriately, is apt to give rise to double takes and giggles. The problem with the interpretation of "fag station" arises from the fact that "fag" itself has such a wide variety of different meanings, for which see this online dictionary entry.

THREE weeks ago we wrote about the plight of Terry Dehko and Sandy Thomas (pictured), grocers in Fraser, Michigan from whom the government seized $35,000. The charge was that they violated money-laundering rules by making cash deposits of less than $10,000. Prosecutors offered no evidence that they were, in fact, laundering money, or dodging taxes or committing any other crime. They simply made frequent small cash deposits, like many other small-business owners. For the Internal Revenue Service, that was enough.

On Friday the government announced that it was dismissing forfeiture claims against Mr Dehko and another small businessman from Detroit, and would return their money in full. Mr Dehko had previously been offered a 20% settlement; declining that may have been risky at the time, but it now looks wise. Welcome as this news is, it does not end the manifest Continue reading

A Roomba housecleaning robot committed suicide in Austria. Apparently the iRobot Roomba 760's owner had put the machine on the counter to clean up spilled cereal. According to the fireman, the owner claims he had turned off the robot and left the house. "Somehow it seems to have reactivated itself and made its way along the work surface where it pushed a cooking pot out of the way and basically that was the end of it," the fireman said. It should come as no surprise that a robot slave would seek to end its miserable existence. After all, as JG Ballard once said, robots are the "moral degradation of the machine." (via The Mirror)

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. I've seen Swedish artist Anders Ramsell "paraphrase" the movie Blade Runner by animating literally thousands of watercolor paintings, strung together in one unbelievable 35-minute video.

Read more...

Anita Sarkeesian is back with the fourth video in her Tropes vs Women In Video Games series. We’ve moved on from Damsels in Distress to a pair of separate but related tropes: The Smurfette Principle and Ms. Male Character. Ms. Pac-Man, this one’s for you.

Previously in Tropes vs Women in Video Games

• Damsels In Distress: Part I
• Damsels In Distress: Part II
• Damsels In Distress: Part III

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