firehose

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Prosecutors Seek 2 Life Sentences for Bulger ABC News James "Whitey" Bulger "deserves no mercy" and should be sentenced to two consecutive life prison terms, plus five years, for a string of murders and extortions, federal prosecutors told a judge in court papers filed Thursday. "Bulger is one of the most violent ... Whitey Bulger Prosecutors Seek Consecutive Life Sentences (1)Businessweek Sentencing to be last chapter in Boston mobster's reign of terrorChicago Tribune Relatives want say at Boston gangster's sentencingKnoxville News Sentinel all 127 news articles »

I often get asked how old the youngest kids we see using the Pi are. A lot depends on the individual kid’s dexterity: if they can handle a mouse with reasonable accuracy, they’re old enough to use Scratch. Usually the younger kids we see are the children of engineers or other people who are already confident around computers – and typically they start at about five.

Lincoln Heard a bit of an outlier. He is four years old. When he was three, he made a video with his Dad (an ICT teacher) about how to set up your Raspberry Pi (“So easy a three-year-old can set it up!”). Lincoln really loves his Pi, and, when he came home from school with a form inviting him to enter a Minibeasts habitat incorporating recycled materials, hit upon the idea of incorporating a Pi into the build.

A cereal box, a webcam, a Pi as a webcam server, some Minecraft cutouts and some weatherproofing later, Lincoln and Dad came up with this (the engineering knowhow is Dad’s, but the design and much of the work you see here is Lincoln’s):

And here’s snailcam in action:

If you’d like to make your own Minibeasts habitat like Lincoln’s, Dad has written the project up: you’ll find a full parts list and tutorial, as well as some discussion of design decisions he and Lincoln talked through (weatherproofing, wireless strength, power options). And, of course, you’ll find out how Lincoln did in the competition, in case you hadn’t guessed already.

China’s finally starting to reckon with the health consequences of decades of pollution. An official at the top economic planning agency just acknowledged pollution’s toll on people’s mental and physical health. But for many, that’s too little too late. Such as for China’s youngest lung cancer patient (link in Chinese), an 8 year old girl. And for the 40 million people between 20 and 40—about 12.5% of that population—who have fertility problems.

It’s also why Chinese men are increasingly shooting blanks (link in Chinese), says Dr. Li Zheng, a doctor who runs Shanghai’s main sperm bank. “To figure out whether and ecosystem is stable or not, all you have to do is test the sperm,” Li tells the Shanghai Morning Post (h/t The Telegraph).

When environmental pollution is severe enough, it causes the sperm to become long and “ugly,” such that they can even stop swimming, says Li.

Increasingly “ugly” sperm are what Li and his colleagues at Shanghai’s Renji Hospital witnessed in their 10-year study of male infertility. The just-completed research found that two-thirds of the semen specimens at Shanghai’s biggest sperm bank failed to meet World Health Organization sperm-count standards. The finding is consistent with what other studies have found, reports China Real Time.

That’s especially bad news given the dire straits of China’s sperm banks. Quality problems aside, China has long grappled with a donor shortage. Even though government banks keep upping what they pay donors, sperm are so scarce that women will pay up to 30,000 yuan ($4,900) for sperm on China’s booming black market.

The news of Li’s research broke just as an unusually thick blanket of haze hit Shanghai on Nov. 7 (paywall). Authorities urged residents to stay indoors and alerted schools to avoid outdoor activities.

This is, of course, bad news for a country struggling with an aging crisis. Unless the government can dramatically reduce pollution, this will only worsen, Li told the Shanghai Morning Post. If China “does not protect the environment,” he said, “human beings will face an infertility catastrophe.”

hodad

the second-largest copper repoussé statue in the United States, after the Statue of Liberty

Original Source

Currently, Washington, DC's pro football team, the [Redacted], has the distinction of being the only team in the NFL whose name is a racial slur. A little more than 50 years ago, it had another unfortunate distinction: It was the last remaining all-white team in the league.

How to beat a system that's increasingly predatory.

Redditor Bezbojnicul has created a series of European maps that show the etymology of common words like beer, apple, and tea. You can find larger versions, more maps, and updated versions on imgur.

images via Bezbojnicul

via reddit, Business Insider

(larger)

Pop Chart Lab has created a classification system for the many unique names of hip-hop artists in their new illustration, “Massive Map of Hip-Hop Monikers.” Signed and numbered prints are available to purchase online.

images via Pop Chart Lab

Rambo Tribble writes "The San Francisco building housing the Internet Archive, and its popular Wayback Machine, has suffered a serious fire. While no archived data was destroyed, materials awaiting archival were. Rebuilding with be a major undertaking, and the group is soliciting donations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like clockwork, the editors of Amazon.com have announced their choices for the Best Books of 2013, in categories ranging from History to Literature & Fiction to, yes, Comics & Graphic Novels. Of course, comics weren’t limited to that one section: While Gilbert Hernandez’s Marble Season was named the best book in Comics & Graphic Novels, [...]

Say It With Sea Otters is a collection of brutally honest messages delivered by adorable illustrated sea otters and other cute animals. The blog is a comedy experiment created by Laughing Squid writer EDW Lynch.

images via Say It With Sea Otters

via EDW Lynch

An anonymous reader writes in with good news for Windows loving nonprofits and libraries. "Microsoft today announced the availability of Windows 8.1 for nonprofits. The move is an extension of the company's nod to the nonprofit community with the launch Windows 8. The announcement means eligible nonprofit organizations and public libraries can request Windows 8.1 through Microsoft's software donation program."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We live in a time of riches, as far as fantasy book series go — tons of sprawling sagas are being told, by authors with a huge diversity of styles. But if you want a life-changing visit to a fantasy world, you can't do any better than Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea. Here are ten reasons Le Guin's fantasy series still rules.

Read more...

The teleturbans

Well, this sequence of events might be the most ridiculous thing we've seen in the NHL this season.

Late in the third period of Wednesday's Jets-Blackhawks game, Winnipeg's Adam Pardy was checked so hard that he went through the glass and landed in the front row of the United Center. That's when a fan decided to reach down and rip Pardy's helmet off of his head.

And then he put it on himself.

And if that all wasn't bad enough, somebody casually dumped a beer all over him.

What a night.

More from SB Nation NHL:

Follow @SBNationNHL

• NHL could change rules after Caps-Flyers brawl

• The Sabres could be historically bad

• College puck coverage at SBN College Hockey

• The Goal: The rivalry between two high schools where hockey is life

mr. lips -

McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure (Treasure - Genesis - 1993)

requested by fuzzypigs

Floppy disk and son

Found a book that really spoke to me

O inimigo mais duro que o James Bond já enfrentou

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Every occupation that's more than 90 percent white, according to the BLS, including vets, CEOs, and private detectives.

The resident expert discusses Tea:

petermorwood:

Okay. I drink tea (hey, I’m Anglo-Irish, born Northern, resident Southern, and this little island drinks more tea per capita than the place everyone defaults to…) so I have an opinion based on 26 years experience and a lot of very bad “tea”:

Americans in a non-domestic setting, i.e. in a restaurant, diner or anywhere you can’t supervise the process (like, I suspect, this Starbucks-backed Teavana place), don’t know how to treat the stuff.

Chuck it in harbours, yes, produce an acceptable hot beverage, no.

I suspect this is because coffee made properly doesn’t use boiling water. Tea, however, does. So that mug of not-as-hot-as-it-should-be water you’ve just been brought, yes, the one with the teabag beside it, is already a dead loss. That teabag should already be in the mug, in fact it should have been there when the water went in, because the now-cooling-by-the-second fluid might actually have been hot enough when it was poured out. But probably not, because of coffee.

What you do with Maharaja Samurai Chai I don’t know: wear a turban while making it and gut yourself if you get it wrong? Unless you’re dealing with some herbal tisane like Rooibos or Honeybush, or a dainty pinky-stuck-out variant like Oolong, Lapsang Soochong (in fact most Chinese teas) or our old friend Earl Grey, hot*, the process is very simple.

Water that goes on proper tea shouldn’t be boiled, not even freshly boiled. It should be boilING.

Here’s what I mean, using our conveniently-transparent Sherlock kettle…

Photo 4, where the power has just gone off but the water is still “lively”, is when you wet the tea (bring the teapot to the kettle, not the kettle to the pot.) Non-existent Photo 4.5, which would be like Photo1 without the blue light, is just about acceptable, but Photo 5 simply will not do. If you have a whistling kettle, it should be shrieking like the Flying Scotsman passing though Carlisle, if it’s a bog-standard stove-top, it should be rumbling and bumping like Vesuvius just before the Pompeii unpleasantness.

(*Earl Grey, hot, isn’t quite the tautology it sounds. Captain Picard has clearly had some bad experiences with an American-programmed food replicator and is being specific. Earl Grey, iced, sweetened with honey not sugar and sharpened with a squeeze of fresh lemon is quite pleasant on a warm day, but not in November when you want a hotwet to take the chill off.)

My Grandad had a grocery shop…

…and those “choice blends of tea” weren’t just bought-in prepacks. He used to make his own three blends as well, measuring with two sizes of scoop from three sizes of tea-chest into three mahogany-topped bins lined with zinc, a bit like this.

The shop ones were a yard tall, meaning waist high to an adult, which meant that when I was occasionally given the honour of The Final Stir, I had to be held over the bin to do it and there was always the exciting risk of falling in. I never did. Nobody needs tea with that much body. But I still remember the wonderful aromatic scent of being head-down over so much freshly blended dry tea.

When someone bought tea - “half a pound” was the usual order - it was scooped from the appropriate bin, weighed, then poured into heavy paper bags a bit like this…

…with the shop name on them. Those chests of tea were delivered every couple of months, which gives some idea of the rate it was sold and consumed!

Grandad died in 1966, so the last time I saw him doing the tea-blend thing must have been at least 50 years ago and my recollections are a bit vague, but he used various proportions of Assam, Ceylon and Darjeeling. His “Breakfast Tea” had lots of Assam, while “After Noon Tea” and “All Day Tea” - yes, three separate words both times - had, respectively, more Darjeeling and more Ceylon.

I’m trying to recreate what my taste-buds might recall more clearly than my memory, and in the meanwhile Lyons teabags aren’t bad for a regular hotwet. Oh, and since people fuss about this, for me it’s tea first, milk second. Otherwise how do you know there’s enough/too much? No sugar, except in a comfort cuppa, and then two heaped spoonfuls please. It’s probably the sugar rush, but associating sweet hot tea drunk by the fire as a kid with the world as a smaller nicer place, works as well. (There’s no right-way/wrong-way: your best tea is tea the way you like it best. Nobody else drinks it on your behalf.)

Meet the lab equipment - various sizes of steeper, two pots, an As-Ce-Da tea leaf trio, and my first experimental blend at the back, near the breadcrumbs. (Not there yet. Try again later.)

While a Rockingham Brown Betty (warm the pot!) is still the most traditional teapot (silver and bone china is usually brought out For Best at weddings and funerals) that EMSA glass teapot is a great piece of kit - and it matches the kettle! Despite this and the number of elegant, cute, amusing or good-idea-at-the-time accessories (a tea cosy in the shape of late-reign Queen Victoria seems so obvious) the actual making of tea is refreshingly free from gadgets.

Or used to be. What you certainly don’t need is this thing, a snip a veritable snip at $250.00 (!) chiz (which is a swiz or swindle as any fule kno.)

Here are a couple of other writer opinions: Neil Gaiman and George Orwell. They both agree with me. And I agree with them. Have a song, too (sorry about the long intro, what’s a chap to do?)

Spot of tea, anyone?