Out of the more than 500 pages that make up the published version of On the Order of the Species, only 28 pages of Charles Darwin's original manuscript survive today. At least two of these later became scrap drawing paper for the 10 Darwin children. The picture above, a watercolor done on the backside of one page of Charles Darwin's seminal work, is believed to have been done by his son Francis.
    
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firehosevia multitasksuicide
firehose'Make sure you don’t exert the same muscle groups two days in a row. Make sure you’re getting extra sleep, especially if you’re new to working out. Make sure you’re eating enough, because, as we’ve mentioned before, a real recipe for disaster is pushing your body harder than usual while suddenly feeding your body less than usual. I mean, not to get all fake-science on you, but I’m sure 100% of fake-scientists will explain that your body logically interprets that to mean that you are being pursued constantly by tigers and dumps stress everywhere.'
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| This also works if you take 2 months off from running and weight lifting because of, oh, debilitating chronic migraines. :/ :/ :/ (Also, C25K app, I didn't need the 'where you been?!' shit this AM, either.) |
Previous installments of “Feel the Burn” can be found here.
Let’s talk a little bit about when you’re not exercising. Maybe that’s today! Maybe it’s been a few weeks. Maybe forever. I, personally, am really in thrall to the idea of systems and resolutions and I’ll-get-in-there-four-days-a-week and by-May-I-should-be-doing-five-pull-ups and things like that, which is so, so detrimental to actually trying to move your body around. I have to work on it, honestly. It’s something I’m bad at.
What happens–and this may sound familiar to some of you–is that you overcommit yourself to whatever it is you’re doing (five days a week in the gym, or never ever eating sugar, or writing for two hours a day, or, I don’t know, putting in a stupid Crest Whitestrip every day for two weeks) and then, when human life interferes and you miss a few days, being unglued by it and proceeding to cease doing whatever the original thing was altogether, because you couldn’t hack it.
So what I try to do, now, which is cheesy but works, is pretend I wake up fresh and momentarily disoriented in the Cylon goo-water every morning (as Lucy Lawless, obvi), which is how seriously nerdy people interpret “one day at a time,” I guess. Having goals, but not timelines, and making those goals reasonable.
“Today, I’ll go for a walk. Here is the playlist I will listen to on my walk.”
“Today, I am going to roast that cauliflower before the little brown spots take over more of its surface area.”
“Today, while watching House of Cards, I’m going to do five Lady pushups whenever Kevin Spacey’s relationship with Kate Mara makes me uncomfortable.”
And then, of course, there is overtraining. This is a real thing, especially when people are beginning to strength train or run. I’ve tried to take up running about twenty-three times, and have realized I just occasionally enjoy leafing through Runner’s World. Each of those twenty-three times, one of these two things happen:
1. I’ve signed up for one of the Couch-to-5K programs, printed out a physical calendar, filled it out dutifully in pen, missed a single run three weeks in, and thrown it in the trash.
2. I’ve signed up for one of the Couch-to-5K programs, decided to double the whatever to get there faster, messed up my IT band, and then not run again for a year.
The latter is overtraining*. And it’s a lot easier to do than you think, especially if you’re just starting out. If you’re a happy Toast reader, and you’re not someone who is particularly active, and then you decide to start going to the gym five days a week to lift weights, taking the weekends off, you could very easily get yourself into a situation where you are overtraining. Make sure you don’t exert the same muscle groups two days in a row. Make sure you’re getting extra sleep, especially if you’re new to working out. Make sure you’re eating enough, because, as we’ve mentioned before, a real recipe for disaster is pushing your body harder than usual while suddenly feeding your body less than usual. I mean, not to get all fake-science on you, but I’m sure 100% of fake-scientists will explain that your body logically interprets that to mean that you are being pursued constantly by tigers and dumps stress everywhere.
Take some time, is what I’m saying. Overtraining will actually not make you stronger, it’ll make you feel crummy and make you more prone to injuries. The buffest guy I know works out like a beast, and then every six weeks he takes a week off from working out altogether, eats like Baron Harkonnen, and then just picks up where he left off.
Better, actually. If you’ve overtrained a bit (I didn’t overtrain, per se, but I worked out strenuously about five times a week instead of three-ish times a week this summer), and you take a break, many many people will find they have two rough workouts when they start up again, but then find they’re at a slightly higher level than they were before. There are those who report “newbie gains,” which is what people call the glorious honeymoon period of exercising before you start hitting some of the limits of your body and cease getting demonstrably better every week, as a result of taking a week to let everything calm down before climbing back on the horse.
I took two and a half weeks off, while I was in Canada with my mom, and didn’t do jack. Last time I was in Canada, I got in the car and drove half an hour to the gym most mornings to work out. It was fun, I enjoyed it. But I was a little physically done by the end of the summer, to be honest, even though it was a great experience and got me to a new personal level of fitness. I had been bulking up, consciously, trying to put on more physical muscle (deltssss), so I was eating like a truck and really pushing myself in the weight room, and my body was starting to say, hey, cool it for a little while, k? So I just…stopped. For two and a half weeks.
And for me, that’s historically been something which would derail me for MONTHS. How could I take two and a half weeks off, and just…walk into a gym? WILL PEOPLE NOT BE ABLE TO TELL THAT I DID NOTHING BUT PLAY WITH MY KID AND BLOG DURING THAT TIME?
No. After two and a half weeks, you can just start moving your body, no one cares except for you. You can start moving your body any time you want. You can start moving a body you’ve never moved before, slowly, and it doesn’t matter. I had a great workout. I went home, I filled in the little gaps I’d just created in my muscles with some protein, and I woke up feeling like a million bucks.
A new day, a new opportunity to spit out the Cylon goo and just live your life, ideally with pushups.
*There are some douche-y meatheads on the internet who will tell you that overtraining is a myth and you are just lazy and need to keep going, but you have my permission to ignore them and listen to your own body. They’re right that you need to make peace with feeling muscle soreness 24-48 hours after a workout, that’s a good kind of soreness, but if you’re feeling tired and rundown and you’re never NOT sore, remember that being fit does not mean feeling like you have mono. Take three days off, eat well and sleep, pick it back up.
The post Feel the Burn: Down Time appeared first on The Toast.
firehosewomen don't play video games, except for the ones who play them better than everybody else
firehosevia Rosalind
#nevergo
' “I will not be a member of a party in which hate speech elevates candidates for higher office rather than disqualifying them,” added Key, a reference to former GOP San Antonio councilwoman Elisa Chan, who was recorded earlier this year telling her staffers in a meeting that homosexuality is “disgusting to even think about.” '
Chan resigned after the recording leaked--not out of disgrace, but to run for state senate.
SAN ANTONIO --- A Texas judge announced Monday he is leaving the Republican party because he can "no longer tolerate" a party that demeans people for their sexual orientation.
Hot on the heels of its big hardware and software announcements today, Apple has just issued iOS version 7.0.3 to all devices supported by iOS 7. In addition to adding support for the new iPads (all the demo units at Apple's event today were running 7.0.3), the update includes a list of fixes longer than its small version number increase would imply.
The biggest change is the addition of iCloud Keychain support, a feature that was also introduced to Macs in OS X Mavericks today. The feature promises to sync your passwords and some other information between Macs and iOS devices, and we'll be giving it a more thorough look in the coming days.
The "reduce motion" setting in the accessibility options has also been tweaked to shorten the overlong animation durations we complained about in our re-review of iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 (previously, it was used only to disable the parallax motion on the home screen). Also fixed is a sensor calibration issue in the iPhone 5S that we reported earlier this month, a problem that was preventing some iMessages from being sent, yet another lock screen bug, and a problem affecting the operating system's stability when using iWork apps. The full list of fixes can be found on Apple's support site.
Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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If anybody can pull off cutesy theme costumes, it's Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka's clan. They've done great Halloween costumes before, and this year they've given us another gem with this Alice in Wonderland ensemble. You can't handle the cute!
You can always rely on Mike Maihack's Batgirl and Supergirl comics to make you smile. This one has our heroines getting into the holiday spirit with some Halloween fun. Quick, Batgirl! To the candy!
(via: Mike Maihack)
Previously in Batgirl and SupergirlUruguay is moving forward with a plan that would combat drug trafficking by creating a government-run marijuana industry that could begin operation as soon as next year, reports the Associated Press. Smoking marijuana has reportedly been legal in the country for some time now, but growing, possessing, buying, and selling it haven't been. "The illegal market is very risky and of poor quality," Julio Calzada, secretary general of Uruguay’s National Committee on Drugs, reportedly told the local paper El Pais. The plan, he says, is to have Uruguay "offer a safe place to buy a quality product."
"A safe place to buy a quality product."
Calzada expects marijuana to sell for $1 per gram, a far lower price than what medical dispensaries in the United States tend to charge, reports the AP. In Washington, medical marijuana reportedly sells for around $8 to $14 per gram on average, and legal marijuana for non-medical buyers could cost even more. Uruguay plans to only sell the marijuana to its citizens, however, and to sell them no more than 40 grams per month. A single gram, Calzada reportedly says, is enough "for one marijuana cigarette or two or three slimmer cigarettes."
The plan has already be approved by the lower house of Uruguay's congress, according to the AP. And Uruguay's president, José Mujica, reportedly expects that the plan will make its way through the senate soon. It's a plan that Mujica has been mulling for over a year now, and — as the low prices might suggest — is really meant as a way to combat illegal drugs rather than to profit off of legalizing and selling one. “It’s a profound change in approach,” The New York Times quotes Sebastián Sabini, a lawmaker who worked on the plan, as saying at the plan's unveiling in June 2012. "We want to separate the market: users from traffickers, marijuana from other drugs like heroin."
firehose"Marking up prices of all products by $70"
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firehosefollowup on the kraken Kraken cake
Miss Cakehead has created a collection of Kraken-themed cakes, many of which are filled with rum. For a mock-autopsy event sponsored by The Kraken Rum, Miss Cakehead created a giant Kraken eye made of white chocolate and filled with Kraken Rum, black, sticky stomach contents consisting of liquorice and black treacle, and a whole Kraken mouth Kraken Rum cake with over 200 white-chocolate teeth. The Black Ink Society also hosted a cocktail contest, for which contestants made Kraken Blood Extract, Leviathan Saliva Syrup, Triple-distilled Kraken Urine, and Kraken Poison Extract. Vistors to Miss Cakehead’s annual Eat Your Heart Out pop-up Halloween cake shop — which is being hosted from from October 25th to 27th, 2013 in London — will get to try some of the Kraken Rum cake with marzipan maggots, as well as Kraken-themed cocktails and other grotesquely delicious cake creations.
images via Miss Cakehead
submitted via Laughing Squid Tips
Another Apple event, another Apple charting failure.
Just like when the new iPhones were announced last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook showed his audience a dubious chart of the history of the soon-to-be-released new product—in today’s case, the iPad. Though this chart had a y-axis labeling the number of units sold (which the iPhone version did not), this chart was still more misleading.
Here’s the chart as shown by Apple in its presentation:
While that is a nice smooth curve, it has little resemblance to the underlying data. Apple’s plot shows cumulative iPad sales accelerating more slowly and more exponentially than in reality. At times this difference was wide enough to represent nearly 30 million units—understating cumulative iPad sales from 2010 to 2012 by about a third.
Here’s that same chart with the real data, as released by Apple each quarter, overlaid on top:
What makes the chart even more misleading is the fact that the line appearing to represent a zero-axis is, in fact, not. The distances between all of the axis labels are equal—as they should be— but the distance between 30M and the bottom axis is noticeably smaller. The zero-axis actually falls below the the line shown on the chart. While there is no label claiming the bottom of the chart is zero, the relationship between the line that does exist and the first-ever quarter data is displayed as if that line is zero (it’s hard to understand why Apple would do this since moving the zero-axis up creates the appearance of lower sales).
Finally, charting the data in cumulative—as opposed to net—terms is an exercise in puffery (which, to be fair, is the point of events like these), because it counts incrementally every iPad sold in every previous quarter. The line, in turn, obscures the quarter-to-quarter fluctuations in sales. For Apple, that means that the last two quarters, which were actually declines, look like increases on the company’s chart.
Apple has yet to return email and phone requests for comment.
batsbatsbats
I SCREAMED IM SO HAPPY
Ahhhh my heaaaart! I can’t handle the cute!
firehose"It’s priced a paltry $100 less than the lowest-end retina MacBook Pro and lacks the processor upgrade that the rest of the notebook computers received. ... For only $100 less than the non-retina MacBook Pro, buyers could get the starting 13-inch MacBook Air, which sports a Haswell processor and 12 hours of battery life. The Air is also a pound and a half lighter."
It wasn’t clear from Apple’s presentation at Yerba Buena today, but the non-retina MacBook Pro still stands in the form of a lonely, un-upgraded 13-inch model. It’s priced a paltry $100 less than the lowest-end retina MacBook Pro and lacks the processor upgrade that the rest of the notebook computers received.
Apple announced a full refresh of its retina MacBook Pro line, bestowing them with new Haswell processors that should afford the models smarter power consumption and better battery life. The new retina MacBook Pros were also bumped to Intel’s integrated Iris graphics.
The lowly non-retina MacBook pro retains its Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip and previous-gen Intel Core i5 and i7 processor options. Its battery life is quoted at 7 hours, 2 hours less than the 13-inch retina MacBook Pro. For only $100 less than the non-retina MacBook Pro, buyers could get the starting 13-inch MacBook Air, which sports a Haswell processor and 12 hours of battery life. The Air is also a pound and a half lighter.
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firehose"Sunshine. Harps. It was the most sublimely powerful fragrance experience of my adult life. Truly. After decades of smelling like a flower or a fruit, for the first time ever, I smelled like teen boy spirit. I smelled the way an adolescent male smells when he feels that everything good in the universe is about to be delivered to him, possibly by girls in angel wings. I had never smelled this entitled in my life. I loved it. I wanted more."
firehose"Despite the story’s seemingly happy ending for Internet-justice advocates, the incident prompted many, um, unsavory responses from redditors and YouTubers. Sadly, many comments focused less on the attack itself and more on the assailant's race, whining about diversity in the U.K."
What the heck?? What ballet is this? :)
i just spat out all myt ea what is going on???!?!
This is the Tales of Beatrix Potter
This scene is The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
I absolutely adore the costumes in this.
but can we talk about the skill it must take to dance in a costume like this I mean damn
the reaction image mother lode
firehoseno new Apple TV
no new Mac mini
Mac Pro, but no new Cinema Display
no wearables
After a year in which Apple’s product announcements have largely leaked out ahead of time, today the company delivered something of a surprise: a redesigned tablet, the iPad Air, that is the lightest full-size iPad to date at just 1 pound. Its announcement was coupled with the introduction of an iPad Mini with the same Retina display as the bigger model and the A7 processor used by the iPhone 5s and iPad.
The iPad announcements followed a minor update to Apple’s Macbook Pro line of laptops and some more information on the new Mac Pro desktop computer, which is getting its first major redesign since 2006. The laptops go on sale today, with the Mac Pro arriving in December for $2,999.
On the software side, the watchwords for the event were “free” and “today.” OS X Mavericks, the latest update to Apple’s desktop operating system, is becoming a free download in a move likely to send a shiver up the spine of Microsoft, which generates huge profits from sales of Windows. Also arriving free today, at least for anyone buying a new Mac or iOS device: new versions of iWork and iLife, Apple’s productivity and creativity suites.
firehose'It should be noted that this costume does include the “Widow’s Bite” wrist gauntlets, but you will have to supply your own script full of unforgettably lousy dialogue about “red in my ledger.” '
Halloween is just around the corner, and here at ComicsAlliance, and one of the best parts of the month is gearing up for a night of costumes! It’s the one time of year when even people like me who could never cut it in our Best Cosplay Ever feature can drop by the local department store and walk out with the ability to dress up as our favorite characters.
But is that really a good thing? I have my doubts, which is why I’m spending every day taking on the store-bought costumes inspired by our favorite things. Today, it’s the stars of last year’s biggest movie in the history of everything, The Avengers!
Option 1: Deluxe Black Widow
If you’ve gone through as many Halloween costumes over the past month as I have, you might be thoroughly shocked to discover that there’s no official “Sexy Sassy” version of Black Widow available for purchase. Apparently a skintight black catsuit is both sexy and sassy enough for everyone, even if that super high-waisted belt gives it the appearance of something your mom might wear to fight the Skrulls.
It should be noted that this costume does include the “Widow’s Bite” wrist gauntlets, but you will have to supply your own script full of unforgettably lousy dialogue about “red in my ledger.”
Option 2: Girls’ Thor Costume
Thor, however, did not escape the annual sexification, although given how many other Jack Kirby creations are prone to rocking miniskirts (Darkseid, Hercules, etc), I’d almost believe this one was ripped straight from a comic that I just haven’t read. I like those furry gloves a heck of a lot more than that pajama-lookin’ armor he was wearing for a couple years.
Option 3: Toddler Hulk
I realize that there’s a limited amount of what you can do when you’re making a costume for a three year-old, but since when does the Hulk rock Jerry Only’s haircut? Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m not opposed to this idea at all. In fact, I hope the Misfits (not the ones fromJem) become the prevailing fashion icons for everyone with a toddler. Just hella little babies running around talking about how they want your skulls.
Option 4: Baby Captain America
I think we all liked that Captain America movie pretty well, but imagine how much better it would’ve been if skinny CGI Chris Evans went into the little chamber where they gave him the Super Soldier Serum, and then they opened the door after to reveal this little guy, costume and all. It would’ve been adorable.
Especially when they started just throwing this baby, tiny little fists-first, at Nazis. I’d buy that movie eight times.
Option 5: Muscle Chest Captain America
If Rob Liefeld doesn’t wear this every Halloween, then there is something deeply wrong with this world we live in.
