Researchers reveal that looking at photos of food ruins your appetite.

Could This One Woman In A Business Suit Change The Way All Women Everywhere Are Treated?

Tal Kopan at Politico reports:

A network of think tanks across the country is quietly pushing the agenda of right-wing groups with funding from Koch brothers-affiliated organizations, a new report alleges.

The study, by the liberal Center for Media and Democracy, is aimed at the State Policy Network, which describes itself as “dedicated solely to improving the practical effectiveness of independent, nonprofit, market-oriented, state-focused think tanks,” which are operating in all 50 states. The tax-exempt group seeks to “enable these organizations to better educate local citizens, policy makers and opinion leaders about market-oriented alternatives to state and local policy challenges.”

But that’s not the full story, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, which bills itself as a nonprofit watchdog group. CMD alleges that rather than a loose coalition of locally focused think tanks, SPN’s organizations are using “dark money” — a term for money donated for elections without disclosing its source — from conservative and corporate donors like the Koch brothers to push a cookie-cutter conservative agenda at the state level...

You should go read the whole thing. The Koch brothers hate taxes so much that they're willing to spend a ridiculous amount of money to fight taxes. Could you imagine what could've been achieved, had they decided to donate that money to charity, instead? Or if, heaven forbid, they actually paid a reasonable tax rate?

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On Friday's “Queen Latifah”, former child actress and "Goonies" star, Martha On Friday's "Queen Latifah", former child actress and "Goonies" star, Martha Plimpton revealed she was one phone call away from being a full-time babysitter right before she was cast on "Raising Hope."

Montreal Gazette

Transgender US student's tuxedo photo banned USA TODAY HOUSTON (AP) — Jeydon Loredo, a transgender U.S. teenager, wants to be remembered in his school yearbook wearing clothing that he says reflects his identity. But the 18-year-old, who grew up female but now identifies as male, and his mother say his ... Transgender Texas Student's Tuxedo Photo ApprovedABC News Transgender Teen Photo: Jeydon Loredo, Female-To-Male Transgender Texas ...International Business Times La Feria high school transgender student gets OK for photoSan Antonio Express KGBT-TV -FOX 29 all 55 news articles »

foodfuckery:

Double chocolate cheesecake with chocolate mousse.

Recipe

Magnificent Ruin

Settling a legal feud that spanned six decades, MGM has reached an agreement with the estate of writer Kevin McClory, who claimed to have been instrumental in the creation of Thunderball and ferociously defended his legal rights to that story for decades. McClory purportedly co-wrote a screenplay with Fleming that the Bond creator later repurposed for his Thunderball novel, which was then repurposed again for the 1965 movie. McClory said he even gave Bond creator Ian Fleming the idea to put his superspy character in movies. News of MGM’s acquisition of the rights comes via Deadline Hollywood, which is also reporting that the settlement, whatever it entails (the safe bet is on either loads of money or an official pair of tiny James Bond swim trunks), finally grants MGM full legal rights to Thunderball. 

The dispute over Thunderball first popped up in the ’60s, and McClory was initially granted ...

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We’d Like to Warn Our Viewers, the Following Video Contains Graphic Content 

Howard, a Hong Kong musician, has parlayed his uncanny likeness to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un into a job as a professional Kim Jong-un impersonator. Barcroft TV recently took to the streets of Hong Kong with Howard, where he was thronged by curious passersby, some of whom believed he was indeed Kim Jong-un. Howard does not reveal his last name for fear of being targeted by North Korea.

via Blame it on the Voices

photo via Kim Jong “Um”-Kim Jong Un Look alike/Impersonator, video via Barcroft TV

anarcho-queer:

Police Dog Attacks 5th Grader During “Stimulated Drug Raid” After Cops Planted Drugs on Him

Brazil, Indiana - Children were subjected to a “simulated raid” of a party so they could witness police searching citizens with dogs and look for reasons to arrest them in a “drug awareness” event. The idea went from bad to worse when one of the children was attacked by the police dog as it sniffed them for drugs.

This week is apparently “Red Ribbon Awareness week,” in which children across the country are told how important it is to keep up the status quo with drug prohibition. The Clay County Courthouse set up a police state demonstration for a group of 5th graders which involved a simulated police raid of a party involving searches and seizures using a vicious police dog.

With the goal of “educating the Clay County fifth-graders on drug awareness,” police crashed into a simulated party to search the attendees for narcotics. The children involved were told to hold very still while they were searched by police and their K-9.

Brazil Police Chief Clint McQueen revealed that police deliberately planted drugs on an 11-year-old boy in order to make the raid appear more realistic. According to the Brazil Times:

McQueen said a very small amount of illegal drugs were hidden on one of the juveniles to show how the dogs can find even the smallest trace of an illegal substance. He added all this was done “under exclusive control and supervision of members of the court and law enforcement.”

Dog handler, Ray Walters, issued a report that described the event that resulted in his dog attacking the 5th grader’s leg.

“As I got closer to the actors, Max [the dog] began searching the juveniles,” wrote Walters. “The first male juvenile began moving his legs around as Max searched him. When the male began moving his legs, (this is what) I believe prompted Max’s action to bite the male juvenile on the left calf.”

The unnamed boy was transported by ambulance to St. Vincent Clay Hospital for puncture wounds on his leg from where the police K-9′s fangs had ripped his skin open.

Horrifying.

sabri writes "Jen Palmer tried to order something from kleargear.com, some sort of cheap ThinkGeek clone. The merchandise never arrived and she wrote a review on ripoffreport.com. Now, kleargear.com is reporting her to credit agencies and sending collectors to fetch $3,500 as part of a clause which did not exist at the alleged time of purchase. 'By email, a person who did not identify him or herself defended the $3500 charge referring again to Kleargear.com's terms of sale. As for Jen being threatened — remove the post or face a fine — the company said that was not blackmail but rather a, "diligent effort to help them avoid [the fine]."' The terms and conditions shouldn't even apply, since the sales transaction was never completed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Nasal Ranger is a vaguely telescope-shaped device that is used to detect and measure smells, also known as a field olfactometer. The Nasal Ranger does not detect odors by itself. Instead, it allows an operator to compare an ambient odor to fresh air with the aid of a carbon filter. The smell is measured in a ratio called dilution-to-threshold. As Vice reports, a Nasal Ranger has been purchased by Denver environmental health officials to investigate odor complaints involving the city’s marijuana businesses. The Nasal Ranger is produced by St. Croix Sensory, a sensory testing and training firm in Minnesota. And for people who want to visualize their odor data, St. Croix Sensory has created a smell mapping system called ODOR TRACK’R.

via Vice

photo via St. Croix Sensory, video via The History Channel

accidentallydomesticated:

ladykate63:

Great scene, and based on an actual historical incident in medieval Germany:

When King Conrad III defeated the Duke of Welf (in the year 1140) and placed Weinsberg under siege, the wives of the besieged castle negotiated a surrender which granted them the right to leave with whatever they could carry on their shoulders. The king allowed them that much. Leaving everything else aside, each woman took her own husband on her shoulders and carried him out. When the king’s people saw what was happening, many of them said that that was not what had been meant and wanted to put a stop to it. But the king laughed and accepted the women’s clever trick. “A king” he said, “should always stand by his word.”

Medieval women were BAMFs.

(via

TumbleOn)

The choice between having to use Google+ and never commenting on YouTube again is laughably easy for me. I invested so much into my YouTube channel, and they’re taking that investment and threatening to throw it away if I don’t also start investing in Google+. No thank you Google, but you’ve already made me regret investing so much into you the first time. Do you really think I’m going to do it again?

Google was so good at being Google! Why did they decide they want to become FacebookTV? I don’t know, but here’s some problems with the G+/YouTube integration, assuming you know the basics already:

+ Google is trying to re-animate a failed platform by leeching off of a successful one, despite that the failed platform failed because it is bad, and more users are not going to make it less bad

+ Google’s publicized selling point was “comments just got better” while in actuality they managed to take what we all thought was the lowest of the low and actually make it worse (this is a significant accomplishment that leaves me in awe)

+ YouTube has long known their comment section is awful, and out of many possible improvements, the easiest solution is NOT integrating an entire social network. Using comments as an excuse for the integration is dishonest, and would still be dishonest even if the new system wasn’t a failure

+ The integration system is designed for the common casual new user, with integration causing horrible problems for people with multiple channels and preexisting personal G+ accounts/pages, who, being people who have already invested in these products, you’d think Google would at least pretend to care about

+ Making huge forced changes to a platform is problematic for people whose livelihood depends on certain things being a certain way. I would not recommend making YouTube or Google+ a large part of your business, and these changes should be scaring away anyone who was considering investing in the platform. Google’s recent untrustworthiness is certainly what got me getting this old website back up and running, and why I decided blogging is better than vlogging right now

+ This is part of an ongoing trend of Google exerting more control over what information their users see, so that they can optimize for having the user see things that make Google money.

Google’s products used to augment humanity with beautiful tools that helped us get the information we wanted to see. That was the superiority of Google search, Google reader, gmail with its excellent spam filter, and YouTube, which allowed you to subscribe to any individual who might want to post videos. Empowering humanity to efficiently search for and find information, and then to choose what information they consume, is not just a noble goal, but turned out to be a wildly successful thing that people want.

Making things people want is good business. Tricking people into using things they don’t want with a bait-and-switch is not good business.

Now a Google search shows me a full page of promoted, local, and social results–I have to scroll down to see actual search results. Google decided to drop Reader altogether. YouTube inflates subscriber numbers during signups while choosing which videos will actually show up, with a malicious algorithm that includes both total time a user spends on the site (promoting videos that suck you into watching things you don’t really like but are easily distracted by) and revenue gained (this means that by not having ads on your videos you miss out on both the ad money and on having your stuff displayed to many of your own subscribers). You can still “subscribe,” but YouTube changed the definition of the word in the same way Facebook changed the definition of “friend.”

YouTube used to be designed to help you find what you were looking for. Now, it’s designed to keep you looking.

Google used to be about being in control of what you see. Now, “you’re in control of how you’re seen”

Now even discussion is curated by Google, rewarding those who talk often, and promoting hateful inflammatory comments because they provoke responses. Taking all the collected data and computational power of Google and using it to optimally encourage people to watch advertisements and argue with each other is, in this author’s opinion, brazenly unethical. We can only hope that everything that’s happened in the last year has been unintentional and that Larry Page will have some sort of epiphany, pull out before the transformation is complete, and start putting the company’s energy into doing good things again, as in a heartwarming vampire holiday tale.

As for me, I’ll continue posting on my own RSS-enabled site and making my videos available as torrents, and maybe I’ll follow in the footsteps of the many other prominent YouTubers who are moving discussion of their videos off YouTube.

There’s a lot more to say about how this is part of a bigger picture involving various related companies and industries, but I think I’ll stick to the comments integration thing this time.

Hello again, kiddos.  Been a while, hasn't it?

I have been quite busy PhDing, and in particular working on an NSF grant.
Exciting times. I do have several blog posts I want to write, on the illusion of linearity in human systems, and other things.

Today, however, I created my ORCID account.
ORCID--no doubt intended to be read as "orchid", but seen by my brain as ORC ID--is a system for providing researchers with unique identifiers. Thus, if you are like me, and have an unbelievable common name (there are at least five researchers in the US and Canada with a name almost identical to mine, some of whom even work in similar fields), you can make sure that when someone is talking about your work, they mean YOUR work, and not someone who happens to have the same name.

The site also has a profile page for those who have ORCIDs where they will host a list of your works, and eventually things like grants, patents, and institutional affiliations.

My ORCID is below:
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8199-3328

Chiro the Corgi shakes his fluffy butt while waiting for his owner to throw a ball in this funny video by Man Taketyan.

GIFs via Generic Gaming

via Generic Gaming, Corgiaddict, Daily Picks and Flicks

PORTLAND, ME—Saying that he wanted to make things as easy as possible for all the dumbshits to locate, Back Pages Bookshop owner Stephen Larrick told reporters Friday that he had placed all of the Dave Eggers titles on a table near the independent b...

PORTLAND, OR—Claiming they are still struggling to accept their parents’ split-up, the children of seminal alternative rock band R.E.M.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

This is not pizza! This is tomato soup in a bread bowl!

Following the news that One World Trade Center has been named the tallest building in the United States, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show takes a look at the long-running rivalry between New York City and Chicago, and has a few choice words about Chicago-style deep-dish “pizza.”

video via The Daily Show

Retirement is a rather abstract concept to a 20-year-old. In an international survey of twenty-somethings by insurer Aegon, only a quarter of young people polled said they always made sure to save for retirement.

But this is not just youthful indiscretion, the survey notes. High youth unemployment, the proliferation of unpaid internships and soaring costs of higher education make it hard for young people to save for retirement, even if they want to. And as fiscal shortfalls and longer lifespans push countries to cut state benefits for retirees, younger generations won’t be able to rely as much on governments to support them as their parents did.

Still, when Aegon asked a group of people aged 20-29 when they expected to retire, the results were surprising:

On average, twenty-somethings expect to retire at age 63, roughly the same as older workers today. Young people in China and Japan are particularly bullish on when they will stop working, which Aegon interprets, diplomatically, as a sign that they “may benefit from having a better understanding of when government or workplace retirement benefits kick in.” A study of recent university graduates in the US reckons that they will not be able to retire comfortably until well into their seventies, 10 years later than what young Americans in Aegon’s survey expect. The ranks of pensioners in the workforce in the UK, Germany and elsewhere in Europe are already swelling.

It is striking to compare young people’s expected retirement age with actual observed retirement ages in recent years:

Young people in Europe expect to retire later than the current crop of pensioners, while those in Asia and North America think they can hang it up earlier. A positive interpretation is that “retirement” is an increasingly fuzzy concept, with many older people taking up part-time jobs or dipping in and out of casual work by choice. More likely, and less happily, young people today are simply deluded about how much longer they need to work before they can enjoy their golden years of leisure—if those days ever arrive at all.

The U.S. and Scotland did little to elicit cheers at Hampden Park.

The United States and Scotland played for 90 minutes at Hampden Park, and that's about all that could be said about the two teams. Both sides were sloppy and sluggish, boring the tens of thousands of empty seats at the famed stadium in a scoreless draw.

There was nothing to speak of in the first half. To call what they played soccer would be overly generous. The goalkeepers and forwards could have taken a nap and no one would have noticed. It wasn't too much of a surprise that both teams struggled on the day considering the U.S. were without Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, Fabian Johnson, Matt Besler and Graham Zusi and Scotland is not very good, but it was still a disappointing showing.

The second half was much better, as the Americans at least mounted a couple threats. But while the match turned for them, the scoreboard didn't. Jozy Altidore nearly scored, as did Aron Johannsson, and Scotland were repeatedly forced into panic clearances out of their own box. But it still wasn't beautiful soccer, nor was it overly effective soccer. In fact, it might not have been soccer altogether.

If anyone was going to win the match, it was going to be the U.S., but a draw is a perfectly fair result. Now the U.S. moves on to Tuesday, when they will play at Austria as their prepartations for the World Cup continue.

United States: Howard, Evans (Lichaj 72'), Gonzalez, Cameron, Beasley. Bradley, Jones (Diskerud 61'), Bedoya (Wondolowski 81'), Kljestan (Johannsson 63'), Johnson (Shea 62'), Altidore (Boyd 90').

Scotland: Marshall, Hutton, Whittaker (Wallace 69'), Hanley, Greer, Bannan (Naismith 81'), Mulgrew, Brown, Snodgrass (McCormack 69), Conway (Mackay-Steven 84'), Fletcher.

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More in Soccer:

• Will the UEFA playoffs produce much?

• Potential destinations for Eddie Johnson

• Zlatan vs. Cristiano: There can only be one

• Timbers gunning for playoff scoring record

• France’s transition a badly-timed one

In related news: Did you know books can get herpes?

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OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

So this is apparently a thing

http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/yhst-92271754204341_2266_371070336

Anti-radiation Dresses

Original Source

Don't call us girls: Two veteran female spies on bombs, forgery and Julia Child:

If you want a group of soldiers to stop teasing you about being a female spy, just drop a grenade in the middle of their lunch table and watch them run.