firehose

Ben Franklin’s proposal of something like daylight saving time was written as a joke.

The Miami Dolphins have released a statement regarding the recent departure of starting left tackle Jonathan Martin, saying that recent reports regarding bullying or hazing are based on speculation and nothing more.

"The Miami Dolphins, including Coach Joe Philbin and Jonathan's teammates, have been in communication with Jonathan and his family since his departure from the club and continue to be in contact. Our primary concern for Jonathan is his overall health and well-being. As an organization, we take any accusations of player misconduct seriously. The notion of bullying is based on speculation and has not been presented to us as a concern from Jonathan or anyone else internally. The reports that the NFLPA is investigating our players are inaccurate. Additionally, the NFL offered its assistance during this time, which we appreciated and gladly accepted. We will continue to make Jonathan's health and well-being a focus as we do with all of our players."

Martin abruptly left the team facilities after an incident in the cafeteria that reportedly involved the offensive tackle slamming his tray and then immediately leaving after a "prank" that had teammates refusing to sit with the second-year player. According to a recent report, the NFLPA is investigating the role that guard Richie Incognito played in the incident.

The young lineman, who became the starting left tackle this season after the departure of Jake Long to free agency, has reportedly had issues dealing with several issues related to hazing or bullying since joining the team in 2012. Yet Martin, through text message with Incognito, says that he does not blame the players specifically but instead the "culture around football."

Martin has been placed on the non-football injury list and is expected to stay away from the team for a least the next several weeks.

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“Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank, and buy a revolver.”

- Countess Markievicz, 19th century Irish revolutionary, eternally relevant fashion advice (via gehdoch)

Europe seems to be fond of decorating its churches with human remains.  Yesterday's post about a Polish bone chapel elicited helpful suggestions of more such architecture.

For example, the Chapel of Bones in Evora, Portugal.

rather than interring the bones behind closed doors, the monks, who were concerned about society's values at the time, thought it best to put them on display. They thought this would provide Evora, a town noted for its wealth in the early 1600s, with a helpful place to meditate on the transience of material things in the undeniable presence of death.

This is made clear by the thought-provoking message above the chapel door: "Nós ossos que aqui estamos, pelos vossos esperamos," or: "We bones that are here, for your bones we wait."

The place is lined with human remains, apparently.

We can find a similar structure in the middle of the Czech Republic, the Sedlac Ossuary.  It welcomes visitors thusly:

The Wikipedia entry reads like a death metal fantasy:

Four enormous bell-shaped mounds occupy the corners of the chapel. An enormous chandelier of bones, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, hangs from the center of the nave with garlands of skulls draping the vault.

This is how you do an impressive coat of arms:

Infocult: your tour guide to the Gothic world.

Previously on Infocult: a Polish bone chapel.

(many thanks to James Caruso and Alan Wolf on Facebook)

The Vikings Twitter account is confused about who plays at AT&T Stadium.

Uh, sorry, Vikings. You dudes actually play the Cowboys this week. The Cowboys.

Hey, it's confusing! The Giants of baseball play at AT&T Park! Baseball and football are both sports! I can see how anyone operating the Twitter account could easily

oh

lololololololol

Oh, Vikings. You really knocked this one out of the park. (Football term.)

My friend Charlotte thinks I will be like my mom if I am ever a mom, which would be amazing probably.

hodad

:pizza:

Original Source

Pirates off the Horn of Africa pocket as little as 0.01 percent of ransoms, which they tend to spend on alcohol, expensive cars and prostitutes, while financiers keep as much as three-quarters of the loot, a new report shows.

Seriously, what year is it?

There’s a torrent for my novel Lock In on Pirate Bay, and it hasn’t even been written yet.

So… yay?

 

Miami radio host Dan Sileo tweeted a threatening message about Florida State running back Devonta Freeman after Saturday night's game in which the Seminoles blew out the Hurricanes.

Sileo, a former Miami defensive lineman employed by 640 Sports, offered a bounty of $1,000 for any Miami player to injure Freeman during the probable ACC title game rematch between the two schools. Sileo also posted a picture of Florida State defensive tackle Timmy Jernigan in the offending tweet.

Here's a photo of the tweet, via our own Tomahawk Nation:

640 Sports has said they are investigating the incident.

Statement from 640 Sports re: Sileo: "640 Sports is just as shocked and stunned as everyone else by this tweet."

— Tim Reynolds (@ByTimReynolds) November 3, 2013

Station executive producer Marc Eisenberg says 640 is "still looking into the (Sileo) situation."

— Tim Reynolds (@ByTimReynolds) November 3, 2013

Sileo is no stranger to controversies caused by his own terrible judgment, as he was fired earlier this year from 560 AM after suggesting Miami players stab the opposing quarterback after a loss to Kansas State. He was also suspended after a series of misogynistic comments directed towards Erin Andrews, including one tweet that said "Love Erin Andrews either naked or in a porn. Not at a sports desk."

The game itself got chippy, with a Miami player sticking his hands through the facemask of a Florida State player in what looked like an attempt to eye gouge.

The way you hear the video game industry tell it, the problem back in 1983 was that video games weren't gatekept enough -- too many people were making games, and that's terrible for The Gamers because that results in low quality games flooding the marketplace! Newsflash: shit floods the AAA marketplace all the time anyway. What they really wanted was control, control over who got to make games and who got to play games and who got to call themselves game developers.

So here's the deal: every game you make is valuable, no matter what AAA says or what AAA has trained its customers to hiss at you. Take any excuse to make a game: make small games as gifts, make games as jokes, make games for school projects, make games because you feel like it, or make games because daylight savings is turning back the time an hour which allows you to claim that you made a game in "zero hours."

I clicked "get theme" and got "sombrero." So I made a game about a sombrero.

Enjoy, or don't enjoy -- because really, I didn't make the game for you.

HEAR YE, O DEVOUT OATHBREAKERS OF THE NIGHTSIDE ABYSS:

THE RETURN OF THE BLASPHEMER SHALL SOON BE MOURNED IN GRIM CELEBRATION WITH A BLACK OFFERING FOR YOUR TREMBLING, CLAMOROUS HANDS TO POSSESS AS YOUR OWN. BUT UNTIL THE STARS ARE ALIGNED ONCE MORE…

"IT’S APOCALYPSE DAY"

homochitto:

because every tumblr should have Queen Elizabeth shooting a machine gun

A few hours after Twitter set a price range for its initial public offering, I met up with one of its employees near the company’s new headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco. He put away his iPhone as I approached.

“Calculating your net worth?” I asked.

“That was earlier,” he said. “Now we’re calculating co-workers’.”

When you join a technology startup, the offer letter typically details your salary, benefits, and how many shares of the company you’ll receive. The last part is often just a number, seemingly chosen at random. And because who knows how large the whole pie is, you have to ask someone if what you’ve been offered is a big slice or a small one. Forget asking how much the shares are worth; in most cases, they are just a daydream of future success.

For a lot of people, Twitter’s IPO is a reminder that it really does happen, that those shares could be worth something someday. Three out of four startups fail, but some go on to be acquired or offer shares to the public. Those are the success stories that fill coffee shops with talk of “exits” and “liquidity events.”

“All of this stock that didn’t mean anything before, all of a sudden has value,” said Adam Nash, a veteran of two IPOs, most recently at LinkedIn, when I reached him on the phone the other day. He’s now the chief operating officer of Wealthfront, a financial advisory startup that’s popular among 20- and 30-somethings who work at technology companies. Employees of Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn are its top customers.

Wealthfront has been pitching a special “IPO service” to people who hold Twitter stock, helping them balance their portfolios over time and manage the tax implications of suddenly striking it rich. Last month, Nash gave a presentation at Twitter headquarters entitled, “Personal Finance for Engineers.” He said the room was packed.

Nash’s premise is that no one is rational with money—”not even these kids with IQs that are off the charts”—and a sudden influx only exacerbates the problem. It’s extremely difficult to handle sensibly a wad of cash you found on the street. Worst of all, it tends to make you think there’s more where that came from.

Well, there’s something worse: watching someone else pick a wad of cash off the ground. Right there, right in front of you. The feeling is not quite envy but mania, and it’s all over Silicon Valley right now. Strike up a casual conversation with someone in the technology industry, and you’ll inevitably end up talking about the intricacies of Twitter’s IPO. Tranches, syndicates, float—everyone is a banker all of a sudden! All of us in search of more wads.

People will call it a bubble, but they’re generally talking finance, as in the reason Pinterest and Snapchat are now worth $4 billion apiece. What I see is a social bubble, the collective delusion that Twitter’s IPO is a celebratory event, even if you’re not one of the few actually holding a stake in the company.

“It’s a big moment for us,” someone who has absolutely nothing to do with Twitter told me. By “us,” he meant the Valley, maybe even society as a whole.

I’m guilty of it, too, obsessively covering an offering of securities by a young and unprofitable company that doesn’t make any tangible goods. Not a word about last month’s wildly successful IPO by Potbelly, a 36-year-old sandwich purveyor that actually makes money. Nothing about the Container Store, which went public last week and promptly doubled in value thanks to enthusiasm for ingenious home organization products.

Later on the same day that Twitter set a price range for its IPO, Eric Ries was speaking at an event thrown by Quartz in San Francisco. He’s best known for his book The Lean Startup, which advocates a certain practicality that can often go missing in the Valley. Lately, Ries has been working on an alternative financial market, the Long-Term Stock Exchange, that he thinks would offer startups better incentives after going public.

“We start companies to do more than help the balance sheets of big conglomerates nobody likes,” he said, referring to financial institutions that profit from IPOs and public companies. “Why is the whole system organized around that purpose, when our rhetoric is all about disruption and making the world a better place?”

Offering shares to the public is simply a financial mechanism for the company’s backers to realize gains on their investments. In Twitter’s case, those winners will largely be venture capital funds that poured money into the startup and private equity firms that picked up shares along the way. The founders own a relatively small slice.

“Walk down the street,” Ries said, pointing north toward Twitter’s headquarters. “We’re building the fresh meat for a system we claim to despise.”

Whether you, in fact, despise the system may depend on how close you are to it. Certainly, the 230 million people who regularly use Twitter are pretty far away from the system. Most will undoubtedly mark Twitter’s IPO with a shrug, at best a tweet. But they must sense what’s going to happen next.

Twitter will have to make money. And then more of it, faster. As it should! That is a public company’s obligation to its shareholders: create value, throw off cash. Get big, and then bigger.

We’ve been through this before. Since going public in May 2012, Facebook has seemed only to focus on becoming more profitable. Users would be hard-pressed to say the service has gotten any better, though the stock price has certainly improved. And this is a company that took pains to protect itself from market influence even as it went public, leaving founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with voting control. “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” he warned potential investors when Facebook filed for its IPO.

“At Twitter, the user experience is our highest priority and of paramount importance,” Dick Costolo, the company’s chief executive, has been telling potential investors at meetings across the country. But users can already sense that’s not the case. When Twitter recently started displaying images in tweets by default, the most noticeable difference was how big and obtrusive and Facebook-like the ads suddenly were.

There will only be more of that. More ads in more places. More pressure to make more money. Which makes sense, but we don’t have to celebrate it.

O artigo Como fazer o review de um jogo de forma épica faz parte do conteúdo do Byte Que Eu Gosto! - Nerd, Geek, Dicas, Cinema, Games e mais!.

Observem atentamente o comentário de um usuário chamado Mattayx, sobre um jogo da EA:

Comentário genial, não? Mostra claramente a indignação de usuários com relação aos IAP (in app purchase, ou compras dentro do jogo). As empresas estão se valendo cada vez mais (e de forma exagerada) desse expediente pra aumentar seu faturamento com os jogos. Os games de celular são lançados de forma “gratuita”, mas em geral vem cheios de funções reduzidas ou travadas que dependem de progresso no jogo (configurado de maneira que torne impossível ou muito demorado o avanço) ou aquisição de chaves, códigos, bônus ou recursos usando dinheiro de verdade.

O capitalismo é selvagem, amigos. A minha recomendação é sempre ler os reviews e analisar bem antes de investir seu dinheiro num jogo, pra não correr o risco de ter que desembolsar uma bela grana pra poder continuar jogando ou acabar ficando sem suporte depois de um tempo.

O artigo Como fazer o review de um jogo de forma épica faz parte do conteúdo do Byte Que Eu Gosto! - Nerd, Geek, Dicas, Cinema, Games e mais!.

Spring ahead, Fall back

Arcades and movie theaters are banned—"immediately"—Cuba's government said on Saturday, according to the CBC. These establishments are not among the 200 types of independent enterprises authorized by the Communist state.

Wise men say…

Rose City ‘Til I Die.

In the all-cash, off-the-books sex industry, workers can be particularly high risk and insurance is often out of reach, but that could all change with the Affordable Care Act.

WASPs being briefed in ready-room, Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas, May 1943. Hazel Ying Lee is second from the right in the back row.






Hazel Lee (43-W-4), Alice Jean Starr (43-W-4), Virginia Hagerstrom (43-W-4)


Hazel Ying Lee (43-W-4)


Hazel Lee in Link trainer

orientallyyours:

Hazel Ying Lee 李月英 (1912-1944), a native of Portland, Oregon, took her first flight in 1932 at the age of 19. She joined the Chinese Flying Club of Portland and in that same year, received her pilot’s license, becoming one of the first Chinese American women to do so, and among the 1% of American pilots who were women. Following the Japanese attack on China in 1933, Lee traveled to China and volunteered to serve in the Chinese Air Force. As the Air Force did not accept women pilots, Lee settled in Canton and took a job flying for a private airline, before returning to the United States in 1938. In 1943 Lee joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (“WASP”) which was created in an effort to sustain the war effort and overcome the shortage of male pilots at home. She became the first Chinese American women to fly fighter planes for the U.S. Army Air Forces. Lee was killed in a flying accident at Great Falls, Montana on November 23, 1944, while ferrying a P-63 from Buffalo, New York.

More images: Texas Woman’s University Libraries

Documentary by Alan Rosenberg and Montgomery Hom, “A Brief Flight: Hazel Ying Lee and the Women Who Flew Pursuit”: www.hazelyinglee.com

Sources: National Museum of the US AIr Force, Texas Woman’s University Libraries, Levine Museum of the New South, Fantasy of Flight, Asiance Magazine, East Coast Asian American Student Union

Continue reading Rhode Island EDC implements tracking software following 38 Studios debacle

Rhode Island EDC implements tracking software following 38 Studios debacle originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 02 Nov 2013 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For the first time since the two teams both participated in USL-1, the United States' old second division, the Portland Timbers lead the Seattle Sounders in Seattle. Ryan Johnson is Portland's hero, firing his team ahead 1-0 in the 15th minute.

Jack Jewsbury provided the assist with a cross, and Johnson's near post run was perfect. The goal came on Portland's first real chance of the game, after Seattle had dominated for the opening 15 minutes. Seattle were already the aggressors, but they might have to turn up the pressure a bit, now that they're down a goal at home.

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