firehose

When we think “ancient Mars,” we often picture roaring rivers, warm oceans, and if we’re being optimistic, perhaps some simple life forms. But it’s also possible the Mars of eons past was not a water-covered paradise at all. It may, in fact, have resembled a giant, dirty snowball.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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We've seen baseball players hit home runs onto train tracks before, but this might be the first time a golfer has hit one onto the tracks at a major. Branden Grace was tied for the lead, but then this happened.

(h/t @WillBrinson)

All told, the couple has spent about $40,000 (and worked with sponsors for a couple of key items). The Busby yurt is large, 30 feet across, amounting to about 700 square feet. The money they've spent includes purchase and construction, as well as such upgrades to their yurt as insulation, snow and wind kits, double-pane windows, appliances, a bear fence, the wood stove, solar power, the toilet, trims and all the final touches.

The Busbys did take out a loan for their yurt, but a much smaller one than they would have taken for a traditional home, Sean Busby says. The couple also has a house on another property that they use as rental income that offsets the cost of their loan.
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'Do u know what Obama Coffee is? Black and weak'
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In “Didga Dreams Big“, the amazingly talented cat pretends to be asleep and dreaming about all of the amazing tricks that she wishes she could do, only to wake up in the arms of her human Robert only to find that she was able to do them all along.

Didga dreams that she does over 35 amazing stunts/tricks after watching Jumpy, who is one of the best trained dogs ever!!

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

@Climatologist49


@Climatologist49

Summer Solstice explained

stephendavion writes: Twitter will start curating tweets on live events, the microblogging service said, as it plans major changes to make its real-time news feed more user friendly. Dubbed Project Lightning, the changes will let users follow events instead of just people, and instantly upload photos and videos that can be shared across websites, social news and entertainment website Buzzfeed reported on Thursday. Another reader points out coverage at Wired, which argues that this is a bigger change for Twitter than it sounds: "What Project Lightning represents, more than anything, is the long-overdue death of the Twitter timeline. (Or its demotion, at the very least, in the hope it’ll quietly resign.) With this change, Twitter doesn’t have to look like an endlessly flowing, context-free stream of tweets; instead, you can see a hand-curated set of tweets, links, images, and videos related to what’s happening right now. ... In short, this effort puts a stake through the idea that Twitter is a social network. It’s not. It never should have tried to be. It’s not about people, jokes, and #brands. It’s about information, about news and pictures and stories."

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DuckDuckGo, the privacy-oriented search engine, has been around for over six years. But when Edward Snowden revealed the extent of NSA surveillance in 2013, DuckDuckGo started a period of strong growth that hasn't slowed yet. The search engine has seen a 600% increase in traffic over the past two years, and they're now serving 3 billion searches a year. This shouldn't be a surprise — last month, a Pew survey found that 40% of American adults didn't want their search engine to retain information about them. But members of the general public are notoriously slow to change their privacy-related behavior. DuckDuckGo's growing popularity has led them to double their employee count since early 2014, now totaling 28 people. Their success is beginning to fuel speculation about an acquisition, with Apple a top contender to buy DuckDuckGo.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

arctother writes: UberDRIVE—Uber's simulation/video game/recruiting tool—is, at best, just a poor copy of a much more interesting video game – driving for Uber. The main innovation of Uber, and other smartphone-enabled "e-hailing" car services, is the insertion of a new interface into the human-to-human, on-the-street interactions between drivers and passengers. Uber attempts to transform the cab-driving and -riding experience through the deployment of an allegorithm: the productive joining of a framing narrative (or "allegory") and software-mediated control (or "algorithm"). Understanding how allegorithms shape experience will become more and more important as they are increasingly deployed with mobile interfaces to reshape and "augment" social interactions. "Ingress," you are already thinking; but you should really think of "Uber."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As I’m sure you all have noticed, we here at The Mary Sue have been loving the Jem and the Holograms comic from IDW. Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell have created an awesome re-imagining of an 80s classic that is both true to the spirit of the original while also adding new elements in wonderful ways. Recently Campbell did an interview with The Advocate about her work on Jem, as well as about how coming out as a trans woman back in March has affected her work in comics.

One of the best things about Campbell’s art is how great she is at drawing women with varied body types. However, while she understands the importance of that for reasons of representation, she also just does it because that’s what she enjoys drawing. Says Campbell:

It’s both important and not important. It’s important because of the obvious things like representation and how different body types in fiction break down the mold of narrow beauty standards that we’re smothered with, and it can truly help people to see themselves in fictional work, even when the characters are stylized and cartoony like mine are. That’s really important to me.

But it’s also not important because I don’t do it purely because of that, it’s not an agenda per se, not that there’s anything wrong with having an agenda, that just goes hand in hand with work being personal, but I’d be doing this even if I didn’t care about how it affected people. It feels natural and believable. It’s fun to draw. I can’t really think of doing it any other way.

Campbell came out as trans professionally as of Jem and the Holograms #2, and IDW has been hugely supportive, going back and reprinting editions of Campbell’s work with her new name on it. She talks about the significance of that:

It’s kind of surreal. Jem number 2 is the first printed comic with Sophie on it, but the bigger moment for me was seeing my name changed on existing works that IDW went in and updated, particularly the updated cover of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Volume 8: Northampton. Seeing that was just awesome. I can’t wait for it to be reprinted.

I feel like with Jem, even though the first issue says “Ross” on it, that I was already Sophie when I started working on issue 1, so it feels less like a big change, if that makes sense.

 

Being closeted impacted both her life and her art in negative ways, but coming out has allowed her to have a greater freedom in both areas. She says:

My work started to be affected by everything I was going through. Things started to get bad around 2011, I think and I was really dragging myself through drawing. It hurt Wet Moon, work on volume 6 slowed to a crawl, and then I could barely bring myself to work on volume 7. Same with my comic Shadoweyes.

Doing work-for-hire jobs has helped, like Ninja Turtles and now Jem. It lights a fire under my ass so I have to work instead of lying in bed all day. I took several months off in 2014 and did goof-off personal comics instead, and as I came to terms with myself — at least in part, it’s a process — and what I was going to do, things got better, and I feel more excited about drawing again and doing art in a bit of a different style.

Having the break last year and working through things, I feel less stuck in an artistic rut, I feel like I’m blossoming stylistically and having fun again.

And lest you were wondering, yes she would like to create more trans characters in comics, as well as a comic with a trans lead:

I’ve been looking for spots to put trans characters in Wet Moon and Shadoweyes, but I haven’t been able to yet, there’s going to be a trans girl in Shadoweyes eventually, but I also really want to do something new that has a trans main character and maybe a mostly trans cast. With a token cis character, ha ha.

Well, whenever she gets around to creating that, I know I’ll be plopping my money down at my LCS. ‘Til then, I’ll be enjoying the hell out of Jem and the Holograms!

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An annual analysis of CEO pay by the Economic Policy Institute shows that chief executives at the 350 biggest US firms make 303 times the average worker in their sector:

EPI, a left-leaning think tank, chose to limit its analysis to the largest firms because they provide a significant share of US employment and drive pay standards across the labor market.

Executive pay has not risen to the levels seen before the financial crisis or during the tech bubble, but remains much higher relative to historic measures. The ratio rose comparatively slowly in the 1960s and 70s, but from the late 1980s to 2000 CEO pay quadrupled in relation to worker compensation.

Lawrence Mishel, the economist and president of EPI who wrote the study, attributes most of that change to the significant reduction in top marginal tax rates for the wealthy since 1980, combined with the increase in stock-based compensation schemes and poor corporate governance.

“It’s quite a remarkable escalation of CEO pay relative to everybody else,” Mishel told Quartz. “Executive pay explains about 40% of the doubling of the income share of the top 1%—that’s a pretty big deal.”

In the past, critics of EPI’s analysis have argued this increase in pay isn’t specific to top executives but rather reflects the growing disparity between low and high-skilled workers across the economy. This year, Mishel and his co-author, Alyssa Davis, compared CEO pay to the top 0.1% of wage earners, a good proxy for the most skilled workers, and found that CEOs earn 5.84 times more than very highest-earning workers.

Mishel says this evidence helps demonstrate that external factors—like the cozy relationships between executives and boards of directors—have more to do with escalating CEO pay than value creation.

“I don’t think there is any evidence that CEOs are particularly adding to the overall output efficiency of the economy to a greater degree now than in the past,” Mishel says. “If they are not increasing the economic pie disproportionately, then what they are doing is getting a bigger piece of pie and there is less pie available for everybody else.”

PULLMAN, WA—Warning that those who go on such weekend outings do so at their own peril, a study released Friday by researchers at Washington State University found that more than four in five couples who walk around exploring new neighborhoods never make it back home. “Our evidence suggests that the vast majority of couples who decide to take an afternoon stroll through a part of town they’ve never visited before simply vanish without a trace,” said the report’s author, Monica Briggins, noting that barely 15 percent of couples who decide to check out a cute little area they read about online or a new tapas bar on the other side of the city actually end up returning safe and unharmed to their residences. “Of course, of that 84 percent who wind up being listed in missing persons reports, only about half their bodies are ever located and ...

Killzone developer Guerrilla Games and Sony revealed new IP Horizon Zero Dawn at E3, which—unlike so many other video games—has a woman as its protagonist. That’s great, but what’s less great is how nervous Sony was about introducing such an unheard of concept to their audience.

Speaking to Polygon’s Brian Crecente, Sony head of world wide studios Shuhei Yoshida said of the reveal, “I was nervous to see the reaction from people. She’s a female lead character. That has always been the vision by the team, but we had a discussion. Is it risky to do a female character?”

No. No, it’s not. Guys aren’t afraid of female characters—in fact, you might even say we like them, even and often especially when they aren’t gratuitously or tastelessly sexualized.

And I’ve never gotten the impression that women feel more comfortable identifying with generic-action-man instead of other women, so I’m not exactly sure who business people think they’d be putting off with a woman on the screen.

But Yoshida wasn’t just a little nervous. People inside Sony were so concerned they brought in a marketing group to make sure society doesn’t find ladies to be an affront with focus testing—to be fair, they were also focus testing other aspects of the game, but also to be fair women =/= actual monsters. Yoshida said,

We started to show it to many more people internally and they had questions about it. So we worked with our marketing groups to do this focus testing. We wanted to see how people would react to some of the things: open world RPG, the set up of machine versus primitive weapons, and the female protagonist. All of those things.

Draw your own conclusions about whether any of those three areas of testing should be considered groundbreaking and scary.

What really bothers me about this all, though, is that the resistance to putting a woman in the leading role isn’t on the part of the game creators. It’s one thing to be a male creator—whether you’re a game developer, visual artist, filmmaker, or anything else—and to feel more comfortable making art featuring male characters from a male point of view. That’s only natural, which is why giving opportunities to female creators is so important, and that’s where the problem comes in: For whatever reason, no matter how much public demand is demonstrated, the people on the business end at the entertainment companies we love still can’t seem to believe people want women starring in their products.

That’s so much worse than just not thinking outside of your comfort zone as a creator. That belief in business and marketing—that people are disinterested in female characters to the point of being actively repelled by them—is what teaches society that women aren’t as good or important or capable as men; that they’re the girlfriend, not the hero; the sidekick and not the protagonist.

But luckily for the game and the rest of us, Sony’s focus testing went well, and Yoshida sees the value in expanding diversity—at least as far as it sells games. He said,

I feel great that there is more diversity in the kind of worlds and kind of characters that we are making as an industry.

…

We have a chance to further increase the reach, from a PlayStation standpoint, to a bigger more diverse audience. In order for us to do that, the games we create have to appeal to a broader audience.

Yes. Gaming industry, that’s what we’ve been trying to tell you—even if it’s about more than just the money to us.

(via Polygon)

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Bartesian is an easily programmable countertop machine that automatically mixes capsules of of prepared ingredients with the desired spirit to create any one of six specialized cocktails to a customizable strength.

Bartesian makes delicious, authentic cocktails at the push of a button. You don’t need multiple ingredients and you don’t need complex recipes. The machine’s elegant design combined with our premium capsules make the perfect cocktail every time – all you need to do is provide the liquor. We have worked with experts to develop six classic and signature(*) drinks for launch: Cosmopolitan, Margarita, Bartesian Breeze, Zest Martini, Uptown Rocks and Sex on the Beach. …Each Bartesian Capsule is made with real, premium ingredients. Fresh juice concentrates, non-alcoholic liqueurs, and bitters, all in liquid form. There are no artificial powders or high-glucose corn syrup in these capsules.

Founders Bryan Fedorak and Jason Neevel are currently raising funds through Kickstarter in order to bring the Bartesian to market by April 2016.

images via Bartesian

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Producer Frank Marshall says there hasn’t even been talk about a "Indiana Jones 5," but a new rumor suggests Disney has a release date in mind.

An unconfirmed rumor hints that the third "Wolverine" film will be based on Mark Millar and Steve McNiven's post-apocalyptic storyline.

Creators Jason Aaron and Jason Latour will serve as executive producers of the series, based on their Eisner-nominated Image Comics crime drama.

mathssuck:

i eat flower petals and i’m young

A judge in rural Breathitt County, Kentucky (population: 13,878) ruled earlier this month that a local man who received a loan of 11.95 bitcoins in December 2013 must repay it, including interest, for a total amount of over $67,800.

Rick Perry calls Charleston church shooting an 'accident' Washington Post (blog) The one presidential candidate who cannot make a mistake did just that Friday. Addressing Wednesday's massacre at a South Carolina church, former Texas governor Rick Perry referred to it as an "accident." His campaign quickly clarified that he meant ... and more »

literally just an excuse to draw lizards in costumes

iguanamouth:

everything is broken down eventually