firehose

Researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications.

There are never enough whole-body donations to science. Why don’t more people want their death to help the living?

It's not quite Adventure Time's walking, toast-making Gameboy, but Michael Thomas' LEGO creation is the closest thing to a real, live BMO. And it's powered by a Raspberry Pi, which turns it into a miniature media center.

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historyinposters:

English Railways poster (1952)

adorablesnakes:

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“Heads of the church have often been narcissists, flattered and thrilled by their courtiers. The court is the leprosy of the papacy,” he told the 89-year-old journalist (and atheist) Eugenio Scalfari.

Miriam Carey Was in Car When Police Fired, Official Says New York Times The woman who was shot to death after a taut, high-speed car chase through the streets between the White House and Capitol Hill was still in her car, snagged on the curb of a grass-covered median, when the police fired at her, a Senate official said on ... and more »

An anonymous reader writes "Today, the latest victim of the U.S. government shutdown, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory shut its doors and essentially mothballed all three of its radio telescope facilities: the Very Large Array or VLA (think Jodie Foster, Contact); the Green Bank Telescope, and the Very Long Baseline Array or VLBA. While the ALMA telescope is not yet affected (mainly due to it being run by a consortium of European, Japanese, Chilean and U.S. organizations), the U.S. funds for that will soon also dry up. Not only does this furlough most of the ~550 employees, it has also thrown a monkey wrench into many long-term carefully planned observations (to the tune of wasting half a million dollars and a year's worth of work). Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society also has a commentary on the closure — and a plea to 'stop the madness.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

this is my favorite thing on the internet and i will never stop laughing

Looking forward to seeing Santa and all the cheesy decorations MB puts up.

Shirt ideas for the store, 2013 - 

ahhhhhh PUNS

watch out

Dating Tip #225: Be the death of her. Literally. 

deducecanoe:

dontbearuiner:

enjoli-sharkracha-sauce:

turnabout:

jaimealyse:

buzzfeedfood:

Y’ALL, a magical holiday called THANKSGIVUKKAH is happening this year on November 28, and it won’t happen again for 70,000 years. So we figured a huge amount of delicious food was in order. Here are all the recipes you need to throw your own Judeo-Pilgrim feast. 

This is brilliant and every recipe looks amazing.

(Tanner recipe-tested the cranberry apple sauce. I can attest to its deliciousness. The leftovers go well on yogurt.)

(The leftover Manischewitz is another story.)

That kugel might be a noodle kugel I can get behind.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I’m so excited to make the pecan pie rugleach, you guys.

All of that food sounds hella good. Even the rye pie. lol. I have not had good latkes in ages. Or matzo ball soup. Oh god. Feed me. And honestly, brining a turkey in manishewitz just sounds fucking brilliant. Someone, cook for me.  

Wow, it’s that early this year? Cool!

For the digitally savvy, startups founded in New York’s “Silicon Alley” such as Tumblr, Foursquare and Etsy have become household names. But ever heard of MongoDB? The open-source, document database company, backed by high profile investors like Altimiter Capital and Salesforce.com, among others, is worth some $1.2 billion after its latest financing round, in a fillip for New York’s bustling startup scene.

This is the highest valuation ascribed to a Silicon Alley startup, reports Businessweek—even more than the eye-popping $1 billion Yahoo paid for the wildly popular blogging service Tumblr earlier this year.

So what’s all the hype about? Selling databases is by no means a sexy business, which is why you may not have heard of MongoDB. But databases are the lifeblood of corporate IT departments. MongoDB, whose name is derived from the word ‘humongous,’ has been quietly chipping away at database king Oracle’s stranglehold on the sector with an open-source version of its technology. The open-source setup gives enterprise software makers and developers within big corporate IT departments more flexibility to mold the product to their needs.

“The thing we really don’t like about Oracle more than anything is the data model. We think that the [closed] relational data model is good for some use cases, but the [open] document model is actually better for a large number of use cases,” Silicon Valley investor Ben Horowitz of the venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz has said of MongoDB. Because Oracle’s systems are controlled by Oracle, developers aren’t able to change them as quickly as they would like. The faster evolution of MongoDB means that developers themselves are driving companies’ transition to it.

Despite its low profile, MongoDB’s document management technology has been downloaded more than 5 million times. It has roped in 600 corporate customers, including the likes of Goldman Sachs and MetLife, and more than 300 employees.

Walking alone down a third floor hallway of the capitol building, Nita Lowey, a Democrat from New York, sighed heavily. “This place is a crazy house,” she said under her breath. It would be funny if it were not so true.

Didn't catch all of the references in Guillermo Del Toro's amazingly comprehensive Treehouse of Horror intro for The Simpsons? These folks think they did. (Though there are a few more in the comments.)

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Ole Miss panel recommends education, not punishment of athletes Staunton News Leader Reinforcing a sentiment expressed Thursday to USA TODAY Sports by a cast member of the Ole Miss production of The Laramie Project, the university's Bias Incident Response Team has recommended education, not punishment, for the athletes and ... and more »

Daily Beast

Redskins respond to President Barack Obama Toronto Sun Redskins action Oct. 6/13 Redskins running back Roy Helu runs for a touchdown against the Raiders during NFL action last month. (Cary Edmondson/USA TODAY Sports). Tweet. Change text size for the story; Print this story. Report an error ... Obama: Redskins should ponder name changeWXIA-TV all 210 news articles »

theodp writes "In July, MIT drew criticism after issuing a report clearing itself in the suicide of Aaron Swartz. So, one wonders what Swartz supporters will make of The Lessons of Aaron Swartz, an MIT Technology Review op-edish piece penned by MIT EE/CS prof Hal Abelson, who chaired the review panel. Calling Swartz 'dangerously naïve about the reality of exercising that power [of technology], to the extent that he destroyed himself' (others say prosecutorial overreach destroyed him), Abelson questions 'whether the people who mentored Swartz and helped him achieve such brilliance and power had a responsibility to cultivate not only his technical excellence and his passion as an advocate but also, as my grandmother would have called it, seykhel-a wonderful Yiddish word that means a combination of intelligence and common sense.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crazy Monster had to check it out.

I don't think the main flaw is oversimplification (though that is a problem: Einstein was right when he—supposedly—advised that things be made as simple as possible, but no simpler). As I wrote in my own review, the main flaw is a lack of logic and proper evidence in the argumentation. But consider what Gladwell's quote means. He is saying that if you understand his topics enough to see what he is doing wrong, then you are not the reader he wants. At a stroke he has said that anyone equipped to properly review his work should not be reading it. How convenient! Those who are left are only those who do not think the material is oversimplified.

Who are those people? They are the readers who will take Gladwell's laws, rules, and causal theories seriously; they will tweet them to the world, preach them to their underlings and colleagues, write them up in their own books and articles (David Brooks relied on Gladwell's claims more than once in his last book), and let them infiltrate their own decision-making processes. These are the people who will learn to trust their guts (Blink), search out and lavish attention and money on fictitious "influencers" (The Tipping Point), celebrate neurological problems rather than treat them (David and Goliath), and fail to pay attention to talent and potential because they think personal triumph results just from luck and hard work (Outliers). It doesn't matter if these are misreadings or imprecise readings of what Gladwell is saying in these books—they are common readings, and I think they are more common among exactly those readers Gladwell says are his audience.

Original Source

Congratulations, cat owner! Just follow these simple steps:

1. Carefully remove cat parts from shipping container.

2. Insert rank armatures through wallison grommets and attach to torso even moreso.

3. Attach talio inglesias to ‘tocks and rotate counter-upwise.

4. Gently twist cranial command module onto shoulder blades until you hear a harp glissando.

You’re done! If your cat looks like the photo below, you did it wrong.

More of Japan’s most retweeted cat pics.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Kittens

dallonscreams:

charmedsevenfold:

snoozlebee:

lepetitdragon:

tenaciousbee:

destroyer:

WHAT’S GOIN’ ON!

Everyone else can go home

OMFG

omg lol

best cosplay of all time

I love that the cheekbones are drawn on her face.

warning: my policy for this blog is to repost this every time it pops up on my dash

can we take a moment to appreciate the fact that every troll cosplayer in this picture is a terezi

OH MY GOD YES

This post doesn’t have any spoilers that I am aware of.

I.

I’ve played something like ten hours of Grand Theft Auto V and while I don’t feel like I have a good read on the structure of the game, where it is going, etc., I do have another feel: boredom. I have mostly been bored.

There have been some great moments–switching between characters on a mission, the heists, riding an ATV, playing tennis. Mostly, though, it has been a great morass of driving around and doing very predictable, dare I say GTA-style, missions. Most have lacked excitement. “Go here,” the game says, “and kill this guy.” Or even worse: “Go here and do a fine-grained and intensive yet utterly unexciting task like towing or dockworking.” This isn’t how I want to be spending my stimulation simulation time.

II.

This past summer I played some Grand Theft Auto III. It holds up as well as you would expect. The control scheme, like most of the control schemes from the early PS2 era, is fumbling at best, and I’m honestly surprised that I was able to beat that game as many times as I did when I was a #teen. And I did beat that game, over and over again, playing through every mission and collecting every secret package and tracking down every weird internet rumor that I could about the game. If you can fly the Dodo all the way to the first island, or you can purposefully glitch into Blue Hell, then anything could be possible.

“Anything could be possible” is probably the best summation of my memories of GTAIII. I didn’t understand how games were designed and built then, being a #teen, and so I had a wild-eyed acceptance of everything I was experiencing. I also thought it was amazing for all the things you could do, including running down pedestrians, murdering rival gangs, and doing sick jumps. While today that game feels painfully limited (you can’t even swim!), at the time it was amazing, and I have fond memories of the experience.

When I fell in love with the idea that “anything is possible,” I also became deeply attached to the object that gave me that “anything”. I didn’t want to give up the world, the possibilities. More importantly, I didn’t want to give up the chance that we could get more but better in the future (which Vice City eventually did give us). These feelings on my part were partially politically oriented. To my young mind, it seemed like what I enjoyed doing with my free time was under attack–Jack Thompson and the various legislators who had, and have, made it their pet project to “protect” children from “excessive” media were spinning up on the topic of video games (yet again) just as I was really settling into “my” world [Jacked is a good book on this. I had my problems with it, but the sections on Thompson are great.]

So I went to ground. I doubled down, as young men do, on rhetoric about free speech and censorship and media effects. I learned about the history of the arguments around the topic. I read up on polemics written during the birth of the novel, film, radio, and television. I became a small-scale “expert” on the topic so when teachers would try to pin me down on questions about violent representation I would be able to speak up.

At the same time, I spent every weekend with friends where we talked about how cool the characters of Grand Theft Auto III were. We fake-planned drug deals, talked about freedom, talked about how to get rid of bodies. These are all things that teen boys talk about, I think–we would have had these odd fantasies of fictional power whether we had video games or young men’s novels or just some sticks in the woods–but GTA gave us a particular frame to discuss it. The game was, after all, modeled on the real world. Then some of us went on to try for that absolute freedom, the dealer’s life, excessive violence in the face of our social situations and I really do wonder about pattern recognition.

III.

I told that long story to give a sense of my investment in GTAIII back in the PS2 era. As I said before, I recently returned to the game.

It isn’t funny. It isn’t engaging. It is boring and a chore to play. More importantly, it always was.

The Grand Theft Auto series is only successful because of investment. It is the old Thomas Hobbes trick–you give someone an entire world and it is up to that person to make something of it. In the case of GTAV, the world that is given to the player is (intended to be) the largest possible world. Not only is this apparent in the physical location, as shown very clearly in the map size fetish around the game, but also ideologically. The game very clearly intends to allow as many people as possible to be part of the experience, and nothing gets at this better than the “humor” of the game; it is designed to be above all politics, the kind of “we make fun of everyone” that gives even the most virulent racist or sexist a way of escaping criticism. The radio is full of jokes–about conservatives admitting to being assholes during their campaign commercials, about liberals who claim that having a tv show makes you a liberal, about consumerism and Weasel News and everything in between. The sundry cast of characters the player meets in the game works similarly: the paparazzo who has to get the scoop and casts his blatant awfulness in the language of a public good, the FBI agent who demands a torture for the sake of torture rather than to get information, the yogi who preaches selflessness and concentration while demanding that a customer push her butt into his crotch. By making fun of “everything,” GTAV is trying to convince us that it is above any real commitment to an ideology.

I said a few words ago that the game “very clearly intends to allow as many people as possible to be part of the experience,” and I want to follow it up with “the game clearly fails at doing so.” The very attempt to speak from the position of the God’s eye view, somewhere away from ideology, is a guarantee that you are enmired in it. The game is so deep in casual and explicit sexism and racism that it can’t see it, let alone be critical or above it; oppressive politics is the air that Grand Theft Auto V breathes.

IV.

So why is Grand Theft Auto V so conservative? I don’t mean that in the sense of the political party, although they’ve taken that moniker on for a reason, but rather why is its politics so regressive, racist, and sexist? Why has “doggy style” sex been a visual joke twice in ten hours? Why are two of the primary narratives “black man trying to struggle out of the hood” and “white successful criminal,” both of which have been rehearsed over and over again in media?

I think part of it is a time issue. The political moves of Grand Theft Auto V make a lot of sense in the context of the ever-more-sanitized late 1990s. In a decade where the body, the fetish, and violence were increasingly seen as the only aesthetic ways from breaking out of the “end of history,” Grand Theft Auto makes a lot of sense. Lampooning Democrats and Republicans on in-game radio hit so hard in 2001, but in a world where pundits and politicians are already sounding like parodies of themselves, these jokes don’t really land. When the world you’re creating as a parody is hardly distinguishable from the real world, the parody might as well not exist.

Another part, related to time, is that that core tenets of GTAV are no different than those of GTAIII: making a point by shocking people. When GTAIII came out, there was still power in that–MTV, independent cinema, and Marilyn Manson had all demonstrated that purposefully alienating parents was a powerful way to draw an audience. It worked–for many people I knew, GTAIII was just as exciting for its function as a “fuck you dad” as it was as a game. But in retrospect, the “shocks” of GTAIII weren’t shocking at all. They were the dominant culture repackaged in ethnic stereotypes, in homophobic jokes, and in misogynistic writing.

The Grand Theft Auto series has always been about selling our own shitty culture back to us and then explaining that we’re transgressive because we buy it.

What’s shocking after reality tv? What’s shocking after sex tape culture? What’s shocking when grisly and graphic murder is some of the most popular entertainment? This isn’t an appeal to something far away, to a long lost past, but a real question: what is Grand Theft Auto even doing anymore? To make its regressive politics seem progressive it has to project us into a past, or worse, create a strange fake version of the world where being a generally crap human being is seen as heroic. When we’re playing GTAV, we’re not experiencing a fiction of the present; we’re playing historical fiction, ideological fiction, where terrible and boring people can be thought of as progressive and interesting.

 

Filed under: Video Games Tagged: grand theft auto III, grand theft auto V, politics, video games

image via Rizzoli International Publications

Codex Seraphinianus is a surreal encyclopedia that documents an imaginary world populated by fanciful flora and fauna. The book is the work of Italian artist Luigi Serafini, who created its fantastic illustrations and filled its pages with handwritten text in a mysterious invented language. Codex Seraphinianus was originally published in 1981 and has been reprinted several times—the latest edition will be available on October 29, 2013. For more on Serafini and his mysterious book, check out this Dangerous Minds post.

photo via Dangerous Minds

photo via Dangerous Minds

via Dangerous Minds