This week, two bodyguards who worked for Tom Brady and Gisele were convicted of attempted murder for firing at photographers who were trying to get shots of the couple's 2009 Costa Rican wedding.

aquiladafirenze:

steinerfrommars:

soror-tiamat-seratomi:

The Weirdest and Fiercest Helmets from the Age of Armored Combat

For your info, the second beauty with glasses is in Leeds, in the Royal Armouries, just beside Thought Bubble.

1,5,6,7,8 are at the Metropolitan in NY. The rest should be located in the article.

Dark Souls real life…

One of these things is not like the others.

Good coffee, bad customer.  I’m sorry, world

Seattle in a pointless game against a horrible team in green

New Orleans in an important game, against Seattle’s only divisional competition, playing in 4/5 of the US, in red

Falcons fans always keep it classy with regard to weather-related calamities

	Courtney shared this story from Deirdra Kiai Productions:
	This is really good <3

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“Impostor Syndrome” is a short interactive story I wrote in which you play a woman of colour speaking at a tech conference. It wasn’t hard to program and design, but it’s one of the most difficult things I have ever written. And I’m so proud that I wrote it.

You can play it here, and after you’ve done so, read on for some author’s notes.

(more…)

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© Squinky for Deirdra Kiai Productions, 2013. | Permalink | No comment

BRISTOL, CT—Sources confirmed this evening that ESPN’s Sunday NFL Countdown crew is currently giving some dumb fucking demonstration on a fake field in their studio.

As always, Anandtech gets into the details where other reviews do not.

The iPad mini with Retina Display has the same color gamut as the standard iPad mini, which is narrower than the iPad Air and less than the sRGB coverage we normally look for. The biggest issue here is that there are other smaller tablets in this price range that do offer sRGB coverage (e.g. Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HDX 8.9).

“Rose” (season 1, episode 1; originally aired 3/26/2005)

“Run!”

(Available on Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Instant Video.)

When this episode premiered in March 2005, Doctor Who had been off television for 9 years, and it hadn’t aired a full season since 1989. It’s perhaps appropriate then that “Rose,” unlike just about every other episode of the new series, doesn’t open with a pre-credits sequence. Instead, the very first thing the audience sees is the time vortex, and the very first thing viewers hear is the updated version of the iconic theme music. And then, four seconds in, it appears: a big blue box with the words “Police Public Call Box” written on all sides of it. In case new viewers—justifiably unfamiliar with the show after it spent 16 years in the wilderness—don’t quite believe what they just saw, the box slows down ...

Read more

Artist Javi Castro took the words of Clara Oswald, "Run clever boy… and remember," and, uh, ran with it. The result is mesmerizing.

Read more...

How better to celebrate the renowned work of author Jane Austen than with these temporary tattoos by Archie McPhee that literally let you wear your inner Lizzie Bennet on your sleeve.

Jane Austen Tattoos let the world know that you love the romance and complex manners of England in the early 1800s. Of course, in those days only brigands and sailors had tattoos, but today even the highly cultured decorate themselves with ink (at least temporarily). Jane Austen Tattoos come in an illustrated tin, 5″ x 5-1/2″ x 1/2″, that contains 22 temporary tattoos on four sheets. They’ll help you show your undying love for Mr. Darcy and his 10,000 pounds a year, plus your fondness for “bad boys” John Willoughby and George Wickham. If you’re feeling extra naughty, you can even apply the “Imprudent” lower back tattoo. Scandalize your book club!

images via Archie McPhee

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

A few years ago, my daughter’s school switched from Spanish once a week to Mandarin Chinese. Having studied both languages, I was very much opposed to the move, but the decision was made with little input. And so my 9-year-old is studying the language everyone says is our future.

Except Larry Summers.

Earlier this month, the former US Treasury Secretary and Harvard economist Lant Pritchett warned the San Francisco Federal Reserve that “Asiaphoria”—as they dub it—can’t last. Now the text of that paper is out, complete with the charts and analysis that form their argument.

It’s 35 pages of riveting reading, especially when you consider everything these days, from office expansions to investment decisions to foreign-language instruction, is based on the idea of continued growth from China and India. The economists conclude: “Hitching the cart of the future global economy to the horse of the Asian giants carries substantial risks.”

Other notable takeaways (my paraphrases in bold):

It can’t last

“…China already holds the distinction of being the only country, quite possibly in the history of mankind but certainly in the data, to have sustained an episode of super-rapid growth for more than 32 years.”

There are many unknowns

“We have lived through a series of major events in our lifetime none of which were widely predicted by experts in the appropriate domain. Not just the obvious example of the financial crisis or perhaps idiosyncratic individual events like the attacks of 9/11 but major geopolitical shifts like the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Arab Spring (and its seasonal sequalae) have not been anticipated.”

Especially in these places

“All that said, we suspect that the reason for slowdown that will come in China and India is for a similar reason but which will manifest differerntly [sic] given the very different politics. That is, in neither country does investor confidence rely on rule of law. In both countries there are plausible scenarios in which disrptions [sic] of the current ‘political settlement’ that is providing a climate for ‘ordered deals’ … will be disrupted. This disruption of the arrangements that provide settled expectations of investors can easily create processes with non-linear sudden stops.”

Beware, for fast growth comes to a grinding halt

“India and even more so China are into essentially historically unprecedented episodes of growth. China’s super-rapid growth has already lasted three times longer than a typical episode  and is the longest ever. The ends of episodes tend to see full regression to the mean, abruptly.”

China and India have weak institutions 

“It is impossible to argue that either China or India have the kinds of ‘quality institutions’ that have been associated with the steady dynamic of growth in the currently high productivity countries. The risks of ‘sudden stops’ are much higher with weak institutions and organizations for policy implementation. China and India have very different modalities of this risk, but both have tricky paths to continued prosperity.”

Indeed, my opposition to mandatory Mandarin stemmed not from the difficulty of the language but also from economics—and a sinking feeling I had seen this before. In the early 2000s, I was a reporter covering education in a wealthy suburb of Washington, DC. Decades earlier, the schools there had adopted Japanese instruction in droves, thinking it was necessary for Americans to stay competitive. “What are our kids supposed to do?” vice president Walter F. Mondale infamously asked. “Sweep up around the Japanese computers?”

But by the 21st century, there were new players, new makers of hardware and software, new languages to learn. Students started to drop Japanese and schools could no longer fill the classes they had added. This report (pdf) shows that the teaching of Japanese and Russian in US schools has fallen steadily, while Chinese and Arabic is on the increase.

Who would have known? Summers and Pritchett:

While there were some concerns raised about a bubble in Japanese real estate, we remember almost no one predicting in 1991 that Japan’s real GDP per capita would be only 12 percent higher in 2011 than twenty years earlier …

In recent months, Summers has been in the spotlight not so much for his economic prowess as his political; he was an unsuccessful contender for the Fed chairman job. Last week as Janet Yellen began Senate confirmation hearings for the job, Quartz contributor and economist Miles Kimball (also a former student of Summers’s) wrote that it would be a mistake to discount Summers’s continued relevance as an economist. This latest paper only confirms that point of view—and emboldens mine that my daughter’s school should have stuck to Spanish.

Follow Mitra on Twitter @mitrakalita. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

The Lightworks non-linear video editing application for Linux has picked up a great number of new features in the latest Linux beta that's available for Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu-based distributions...

David Lynch‘s quirky TV series, Twin Peaks was stunning in every way, including the fashion of the show. Suckers Apparel has brought back some of that classic style with a line of Twin Peaks inspired clothing with names such as “Fire Walk With Me“, “Welcome to Twin Peaks” and “Laura” dresses along with “Log Lady” leggings.

It’s definitely the kind of thing Norma Jennings would see in her dreams. But not if you saw them first.

images via Suckers Apparel

via Jezebel

One night at a music festival, someone put something in my drink. What happened next was humiliating and taught me how common these incidents are, and how easy — and wrong — it is to blame the victim.

If one of your cats and a stranger cat are having a catfight outside in the dark, and you want to break them up, shine a flashlight into your cat’s eyes while shooing the stranger cat away. That way your cat won’t see where the other cat is going and then attempt to follow it for a continuing beatdown.

You’re welcome.

design-is-fine:

Charles Wild, The Circular Dining Room at Carlton House, London, 1819. Drawing. England.

laurendestefano:

Today it was brought to my attention that my books (along with MANY others) are available illegally online on a website hosted by someone named Travis. twitter handle: @tuebl. I asked him to remove my books, and the above conversation ensued.

But no worries. Travis assures me that his site is tooootally legitimate.

u

Unfortunately, if you are the copyright holder and you’re issuing someone a DMCA takedown notice, you must indeed as part of it include a mailing address and contact phone number. It’s the way these things work.

Just issue him the DMCA notice and move on to other things. 

SFWA has a how-to guide to the DMCA at its site:

http://www.sfwa.org/2013/03/the-dmca-takedown-notice-demystified/

ETA: yeah, some of my stuff’s there too. Time to pull out the form letter…

The inventor of the Google Glass Sunshade says his motivation was to make it easier to see the Glass graphics when in sunshine. Coincidentally, it also covers up the light that tells others the glasses are in use.

In Catalonia, booming local microbrews are just another way for people to express their independence.

Sophy Medina conquered boot camp and mastered the Marine Corps. Now she faces her toughest challenge yet: breaking into the white- and male-dominated New York City Fire Department.

• From the StatesmanJournal.com

Grocery stores could start stocking their shelves with liquor next year or liquor store agents could start earning more more if a set of proposals pushed by Oregon’s Liquor Control Commission gains traction in the February legislative session.

The four-member group voted unanimously Friday in favor of asking lawmakers to either invest in or reform Oregon’s liquor system.

“We didn’t formalize yet what we are going to ask,” OLCC Chairman Rob Patridge said. “We think it’s important that the legislature makes at least one of these items a priority.”

Liquor stores in Oregon are privately owned, but the alcohol on their shelves is owned by the state with retailers getting a percentage of each sale. Most of the state's 248 OLCC stores can only sell distilled spirits, but a decision by the commission in September allowed store owners to apply for licenses to sell wine and beer.

That upset grocery and convenience store owners, and the Northwest Grocery Association floated a ballot measure for 2014 to privatize Oregon liquor sales. The group unsuccessfully pushed for similar privatization legislation during the 2013 session.

Go here for the full story.

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Caveman Cuisine: Scientists Question Rise of the 'Paleo Diet' - SPIEGEL ONLINE:

The “paleo diet” — which supposedly mimics what our caveman ancestors ate — has become a new health craze. But many scientists doubt that this hunter-gatherer cuisine of meat, veggies and fruit is as healthy as advertised, or even historically correct.

Jah-Wren Ryel writes "Yes, there's yet another company out there with an inscrutable system making decisions about you that will affect the kinds of services you're offered. Based out of L.A.'s 'Silicon Beach,' Telesign helps companies verify that a mobile number belongs to a user (sending those oh-so-familiar 'verify that you received this code' texts) and takes care of the mobile part of two-factor authenticating or password changes. Among their over 300 clients are nine of the ten largest websites. Now Telesign wants to leverage the data — and billions of phone numbers — it deals with daily to provide a new service: a PhoneID Score, a reputation-based score for every number in the world that looks at the metadata Telesign has on those numbers to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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