firehose

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says that recent revelations of the US National Security Agency’s surveillance programs have have led to a meaningful decline in trust of Facebook and other big internet companies.

At an event hosted by The Atlantic in Washington, DC, Zuckerberg said that “trust metrics” for all the big internet firms “went down with PRISM.” It’s the first time that one of the companies implicated in the NSA’s dragnet has acknowledged a significant backlash from customers. Zuckerberg didn’t say whether Facebook had lost users as a result.

Facebook and other internet companies are suing the United States to be able to disclose more information about how much data the NSA collects from them. Exactly how they participate in PRISM and other surveillance programs remains unclear.

Later in the interview with Atlantic editor-in-chief James Bennet, Zuckerberg seemed genuinely frustrated by the US government’s handling of the NSA revelations. “Some of the government’s statements have been particularly unhelpful,” he said. “Like, oh, we only spy on non-Americans.” Zuckerberg pointed out that Facebook is  ”an international platform,” and most of its users aren’t American.

My favorite thing about this year’s GenCon was that I got to attend with my husband for the first time in about seven years. (I’ve lost count, to be honest.) I’d gotten so used to coming on my own and doing my own thing that having someone else along for the ride, someone whose interests mostly overlapped with mine, but not completely, was a new experience. I wound up doing several things that I wouldn’t have thought to do on my own.

One of the things that I enjoyed most was participating in some super-casual Magic: the Gathering tournaments. I’d played maybe twelve games of Magic in my life up to this point; it was my husband who had the monster collection from when he used to play seriously a long time ago. But the tournaments we would be playing in in were sealed booster drafts, where everyone got four booster packs to build a deck with. Cool. So when my husband proposed it, I was willing to give it a shot. At the very least, with the two of us taking up a quarter of the eight slots, we stood a good chance of winning some swag.

And then I walked into the CCG room (more like a hangar really), and for the first time since arriving at the convention I felt really self-conscious about being a woman in an incredibly male space.

One of the things I enjoy about GenCon is that the demographic has been getting increasingly family-friendly. We saw quite a few men wearing babies, and I’d estimate that women accounted for around 40% of the attendees that I saw outside of the CCG area. Inside? Once we reserved spots in the first tournament and were waiting for the other spots to fill up, I decided to see how many women I could count within my immediate sight range. I counted six.

During the half hour that we waited for the tournament to fill up, I had quite a lot of time to look around. And I have to say, as much as I bitch about the awful art in a lot of games, there are also a lot of games making an honest effort to be inclusive in their art. That trend, however feeble, toward inclusivity felt almost non-existent in the CCG room:

Okay, it’s cheating slightly to use this image, since this was taken in the dealer’s room and not in the CCG hall. Still, that’s a CCG they’re playing and those are some super egregious boobs. Way to make me feel valued as a (potential) customer, guys. Keep up the good work.

I’ve gotten pretty blase about terrible game art in my years of blogging. I mean, one of the problems that I’ve run into in attempting to do parodies of awful game art is that it’s impossible to be more extreme than art that actually already exists. It gets to the point where I hear myself saying things like ‘yeah, yeah broken spine’ or ‘wow, more anti-gravity boobs’ or even ‘yup, that’s a serious case of invisible corset she’s got there’. But this? I don’t even know what to do with this. WHY IS HER CROTCH GLOWING? WHY? DOES SHE HAVE MAGICAL LADYBITS? WHY WOULD THAT BE A THING??

This shot does a pretty good job of capturing the problem that I’m talking about. The space was so overwhelmingly male, and then you have banners like this random O-face chick that are Just. Not. Helping. I am a super-cantankerous feminist gamer, and even I felt intimidated venturing into this space, because crap like this might as well be a giant sign saying No Girls Allowed.

This says pretty much everything that needs to be said about gender in the realm of CCGs. Men get to be AWSUM and women get to be SEXAY. And when the space that you dedicate to playing your game is splashed with life-sized images of broken-spined, O-face women with chest TARDISes and anti-gravity watermelon boobs, is it any surprise that women don’t want to enter that space? Because, surprise surprise, when you mark a space that heavily as a male space, a lot of women make a judgement that entering that space would require putting up with a level of bullshit sexism that they just don’t want to deal with.

The thing is, GenCon is a pretty expensive trip to make. The badge is expensive, the hotels are expensive, and the events, depending on which you participate in, can be expensive. So why would you waste any of the limited time, and money, you have by venturing into such an unwelcoming space?

Now in my case, I wound up having fun, in spite of the off-putting atmosphere. We played in two sealed booster tournaments and had quite a bit of fun, and the people we played against were quite nice. But the fact remains that it took my husband expressing direct interest in checking out the Magic events for me to even enter that space. During the seven years I attended GenCon on my own, I never once set foot into the CCG area, nor was I ever likely to. Frankly, I deal with enough bullshit online, I don’t need to deal with it in real life too.

And that seems like a serious mistake on the part of the CCG companies. Given that GenCon drew in nearly 50,000 people this year, with 40% female attendance, that is a huge number of women. So why go to such pains to drive those women away?
Wizards of the Coast in particular were making a clear effort to reach out to new players and draw them into the world of CCG tournaments; anyone with a badge could drop in and get a free starter deck, and there were several tournament options for more casual players who play occasionally for fun and aren’t really into hardcore play. So if they’re looking to expand their audience, why assume that that new audience has to be male?

It seems to me like all of the CCG companies, Wizards included, would do well to make concrete efforts to recruit women into the hobby. Or, at the very least, they should refrain from decorating their spaces with anatomically impossible cheesecake art.

(First Impressions: it’s hard to have fun with CCGs when you’re a woman originally posted on Gaming As Women.)

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Ah, Nietzsche. The first and last resort of disaffected males in their late teens—of the type that keeps such an ironic detachment from life as to refer to men and women as “males” and “females.” They read about The Philosopher and The Overman and The Antichrist and self-flatteringly assume that he’s talking about them. So God isn’t Great after all! So those things we call “manners” are actually vices; morality is an ancient and useless ghost from the Levant, one that has colonized our sadistic superegos and turned them against us! They rush to their keyboards, informing fellow travelers in r/atheism about their discovery. We might indulge their bright-eyed enthusiasm and forgive them for never getting to the passages where Darwin appears as a villain and—what is worse to Nietzsche—a plodding and pedantic bore.

Why do I now relive the combination of admiration and revulsion I felt when I first read Nietzsche? Well, a gentleman by the name of weedguy420boner introduced me to this:

Cyber-dystopia, meet your new official philosopher.

Society has for many years showered the computer-literate with special favors. We have in wholesale fashion displaced our old stereotypes about scientists—heroic men and women, living as ascetics, grasping towards new truths without fear of the consequences—onto coders, social media gurus, and the venture capitalists who enable them. We have thought their characters’ more chivalrous those of other subcultural votaries. (They’re not in some cases, as a Google News query for “Penny Arcade” would reveal). We have treated their cultural products as somehow embodying a greater authenticity than whatever we might categorize under the dread rubric “mainstream.” The Revenge of the Nerds franchise has aged worse than other cinematic classics—yes, even the hammy and ham-fisted On the Waterfront—because the idea that programmers are eo ispo persecuted outcasts has no basis in sociological fact.

We’ve reaped the consequences in the form of Silicon Valley Nietzscheans, digital Leopolds and Loebs. The visionaries behind Candy Crush and the rest of the app-based grab bag now feel so above hoi polloi that finding new ways of taking their money is not so much an exercise in business strategy—which is as it should be—as it is a deeply expressive release. Nietzsche tells us that creative power is a value higher than truth—“the will to truth” of so many Enlightenment milquetoasts was nothing but the covert discharge of the impulse to dominate, the will to power—and such power comes from recognition. It is not enough that I think that I’m noble and that my creative output is great, but others must think so as well. These ideas are narcotic to people who, like me, earn a living through the manipulation of abstract symbols; Nietzsche offers our ever-insecure selves a way to constitute our identity through others’ groveling before out “creative genius,” even—or, rather, especially—as we treat these others with contempt.

Nietzsche in fact hated the capitalism and its entrepreneurial avatars for all the unusual reasons. It wasn’t objectionable as an engine of exploitation or inequality or social disruption. (In fact, in one of the few passages that directly addresses politics, he presciently writes without rancor that in the future private actors will assume responsibility for even the most public forms of human activity, like war). It was objectionable rather because the elites it produces are wholly unlike the Greek aristocracy that sired Aristotle. He accused them of being uncurious and uncourageous “last men,” addicted to comfort and material plenty, inferior to even the devout farmer because they treat nothing with reverence and touch everything with their unwashed hands—guilty above all of “the introduction of parliamentary imbecility, including the obligation of everyone to read his newspaper at breakfast.” Abolishing suffering, which the liberals and socialists of Nietzsche’s day earnestly championed, held out not the promise of a New Jerusalem, but rather the threat of a hedonistic commonwealth in which art is impossible and Farmville is the primary obsession.

(An aside: it is unclear if Nietzsche deliberately tinged this portrait of the last man under bourgeois capitalism with anti-Semitism. What is clear is that, despite explicitly disavowing the label of “materialist,” he believed that there is no body-mind dualism, a falsehood derived from the structure of Indo-European languages, and that biology therefore produces ideas. He wrote the Europe’s salvation from “decay” and the looming threat of Russian power lay in breeding a super-race of Jews [embodying adaptability and the virtues of the modern age] with Prussian nobles [embodying time-tested traditional qualities]. Now would be a good time to draw your attention to the fact that Nietzsche, though a great German writer and unrivaled detector of hypocrisy, was not a great philosopher in the conventional sense and was also completely insane).

Are the brave entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley more like the Last Man than they are the Overman who delivers us from spiritual oblivion? The answer may be a matter of taste. But what is clear is that if we do not want their deliverance—if we do not want to live under Ayn Rand’s Nietzschean interpretation of capitalism—we will need to cool our ardor for digital hero-worship and take stock of our values. Neoliberalism consolidates and fails to improve the world by the sensible standards that David Hume and Adam Smith set for evaluating the market economy: the provision of abundance; the amelioration of the struggle of existence in the earthly world. In light of this, it is no surprise that frankly anti-utilitarian defenses of capitalism are growing more common. Charles Murray warned against universal healthcare because, like Nietzsche, he believes that striving and suffering—other people’s striving and suffering—puts individuals on a higher moral and aesthetic plane and wards off the nightmare of the last man’s world.

As for me, I say we first end the scourges of want and privation and injustice, at least on a trial basis. If it turns out we miss them, we can always bring them back.

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America wants to forget about Gitmo.

Sure, we gloat about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. When I visited Guantanamo in June to cover the 9/11 military commissions for VICE, I drew him through three layers of bulletproof glass. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a mass murderer, and we caught him. U-S-A Number One.

But KSM-style terrorists are rare at Gitmo. Out of the 164 men held in the island prison, the chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Military Commissions, Brigadier General Mark Martins, told me that 144 would never be charged with any crime.

During the invasion of Afghanistan, the United States offered locals $5,000 bounties for turning in terrorists. Instead, we got a mixture of Taliban draftees, guys who shot rifles at Islamic training camps in the 1990s, Uighurs fighting China and, above all, Arabs in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Now, branded by Bush as “The Worst of the Worst” they are to be held until the end of the “War on Terror.” But wars on concepts seldom end.

Of the 144 men who will never be charged, 84 have been cleared to leave for years. But they live in a Kafkaesque legal limbo. In what a Guantanamo spokesman claimed was a concession to the Geneva Conventions, they’re banned from speaking to press.

As of September 2, 35 prisoners are on hunger strike. Thirty-two are being force-fed, a brutal process that involves Ensure being pumped through a tube snaked into their stomachs.

One night, I drank beer with a press officer at Guantanamo’s jerk chicken joint. She described herself as a pacifist in camo. As she spoke about the hunger strike, her tanned, pretty face drew tight. “I don’t know if they’re innocent. I don’t know if they’re guilty,” she told me. “I don’t even know their fucking names.”

This is by design. Guantanamo’s guards refer to prisoners by numbers rather than names, and are banned from reading their Joint-Task-Force Guantanamo detainee assessments, which WikiLeaks made public. The U.S. government refused to release prisoners’ names until 2006. When I returned to Cuba in August to write a follow-up article for VICE, I visited the prisons for the first time, but I was not allowed to draw detainees’ faces. Americans see bogeymen in orange jumpsuits—not men with PTSD, favorite soccer teams and back problems; families and dreams; loves and legitimate hates.

For a journalist, trying to piece together the life of a Guantanamo detainee involves staring into the bureaucratic unknown. You have JTF-GTMO assessments, filled with feverish claims and torture-induced accusations. (One former detainee, Binyam Mohamed, comes up repeatedly as a source of accusations against fellow prisoners – accusations he made during C.I.A. rendition in Morocco, while interrogators allegedly sliced his genitals with razors. The U.K. government awarded him a million pounds in damages for their role in his torture.) You have their lawyers. If you’re lucky, you have blacked-out intelligence reports. Thanks to a Freedom of Information suit filed by Miami Herald journalist Carol Rosenberg, you know the names of the indefinite detainees.

But why some are approved to leave while others will be held as long as the prison exists? That’s hidden behind a wall of classification.

Since media are not allowed to photograph prisoners at Guantanamo, the only recent images come from photos taken by the Red Cross. The British legal charity Reprieve shared these photos of seven of their clients. Each of these men has been cleared years ago to leave Guantanamo. None has been charged with any crime. Here are their names, faces and, as best I could figure out, their stories.

Shaker Aamer

Guantanamo press officers hate Shaker Aamer. Though they are not supposed to speak about individual detainees, they roll their eyes at his complaints of abuse. Believing anything Aamer says, they seem to hint, is for chumps.

Aamer, a Saudi-born British resident who worked as a translator for the U.S. army during the first Gulf War, is married to a British woman. On February 14, 2002, the day Aamer was transferred to Guantanamo, the youngest of his five children was born. Aamer has never met his son.

Aamer is also Guantanamo’s most vocal detainee. As organizer of hunger strikes, he writes scathing editorials for the Guardian. He is a cause celebre in Britain.

Ramzi Kassem, Aamer’s U.S. attorney and a law professor at the City University of New York, told me, “Shaker believes that only through constant civil disobedience and peaceful protest can he retain and assert his dignity and autonomy as a human being imprisoned at Guantanamo.”

“I sometimes feel sorry for these young prison guards at GTMO,” Aamer told Kassem. “They have been trained not to be kind, even where their instincts tell them to be kind. They have been told lies and absurdities about the prisoners to the point that they are shocked that I can speak English and they are still in disbelief that I know bands like AC/DC and that I listened to that band before the guards were even born.
 
“The guards check the soles of prisoners’ shoes as part of their body search protocol. They ask me to lift up my shoes behind me while I am standing up, like a mule. I have rejected this procedure for years. Instead, I insist on being brought a seat, I sit down, then I stretch out my foot and make the guard get down to the ground on his knees to check the soles.”

Samir Moqbel

Samir Moqbel got his first job at a factory in Yemen at the age of 12. According to his JTF-GTMO assessment, he practiced rifle shooting for four afternoons in 2000, before splitting to Afghanistan to fight the Northern Alliance (a year before we declared war on the Taliban). Because of these allegations, the United States has imprisoned him for 11 years, at the cost of over $11 million.

Moqbel’s lawyers at Reprieve tell a different story. A friend lured him to Afghanistan with promises of better-paying work, and then, when none materialized, tried to convince him to join the Taliban. He was arrested at the Pakistani border, while asking the Yemeni Consulate with help for his lost passport.

Moqbel has been on a hunger strike since March, and is one of the 32 men currently being force-fed. In an editorial in the New York Times, he wrote: “It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the “food” spilled on my clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to hold on to this last shred of my dignity.”

In June, I asked Guantanamo spokesperson Captain Robert Durand about Moqbel’s editorial. “Most of what they say short of ‘I don’t want to be here’ is patently false,” he replied.

Twice a day, soldiers shackle Moqbel to a restraint chair, and force a feeding tube into his stomach though his nose. They then pump Ensure through the tube. According to Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, as of June he could choose his flavor: vanilla, strawberry or butter pecan.

Nabil Hadjarab

Nabil Hadjarab’s life was shaped by colonialism’s absurdities. Born to an Algerian father who fought on the side of the French, Nabil came to Paris as an infant. While his siblings are all French citizens (one of them even earning a National Medal of Honor in the French army), Hadjarab’s Algerian birth meant French citizenship was anything but assured. On the advice of an immigration lawyer, he left France for England while his residency papers were being processed. Going broke working off the books, Nabil listened to a friend who told him that in Afghanistan, papers were superfluous. Two months later, American bombs hit Kabul.

Like 86 percent of those at Gitmo, Hadjareb was sold for a bounty by Afghans who had every financial incentive to say he was a terrorist. For the next eleven years, he cooperated with U.S. authorities, learned fluent English, worked out and kept his mind on the world beyond Guantanamo’s Camp Delta walls.

In February 2008, the Department of Defense emailed Hadjarab’s council: “Your client has been approved to leave Guantanamo…. As you know, such a decision does not equate to a determination that your client is not an enemy combatant, nor is it a determination that he does not pose a threat to the United States… I cannot provide you any information regarding when your client may be leaving Guantanamo.”

On August 29, the Pentagon announced that Hadjarab had been repatriated to Algeria. Because of travel restrictions, he will likely be unable to return to his family in France.

Hisham Sliti

When Reprieve lawyer Cori Crider first met Hisham Sliti, she wore a hijab out of respect for his religion. “Why are you wearing that?” he laughed. “You don’t need that here. It’s hot!” Born in Tunis, Sliti moved to Italy looking for work, as many young North Africans do. According to Crider, he spent half her first visit talking about how much he missed Italian women. In Italy, Crider told me, Sliti became addicted to heroin. After a few arrests, a conservative Belgian cousin shipped him off to Afghanistan, so he could kick his habit and get in touch with God. Sliti despised it. Detoxing cold turkey in a sweltering country where everything from sex to cigarettes was forbidden pushed Sliti toward homelessness. Then, America blanketed Afghanistan with flyers offering $5000 bounties for Arabs.

On August 16, 2006, a lead inspector from the Belgian Federal Police told the Department of Defense that Belgium’s investigation of Sliti did not disclose any acts of terrorism. He was just a “Jalalabad junkie.”

Sliti is clean now. “He’s seen the bottom of it all, but is very jovial,” Crider told me. “He gets himself into trouble when he sees people mistreated.”

Sliti has been imprisoned since December 2001.

Adel Hakimi

In a former life, Hakimi worked as a hotel chef in Bologna. Now, he only smiles when dreaming about setting up a snack stall back in his native Tunis. According to Crider, who represents Hakimi, he “went through some things in Kandahar from which I don’t know if he will ever recover.” By this she means kicks to the head.

Leaving Bologna would set Hakimi on a collision course with the War on Terror. Hakimi claims to have been looking for a Muslim bride in Pakistan. He married an Afghan women, and his new in-laws demanded he move with them to their native Jalalabad. They spoke about opening a restaurant. Hakimi would be the chef.

Hakimi’s wife was pregnant during the American invasion. Before she could give birth to their daughter, Hakimi was kidnapped by bounty hunters.

Hakimi’s JTF-GTMO assessment claims he shot guns at the Khalden training camp three years before the towers came down, ran a guesthouse for Tunisians in Jalalabad and was an advisor to Bin Laden. They further allege he blamed 9/11 on “the aggressive and tyrannical acts of the U.S. and its support of dictators,” and once refused to pass his food tray back to a guard.

When I asked Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, how the public should regard JTF-GTMO assessments, she told me “These are one-sided assessments that are full of uncorroborated information, information obtained through torture, speculation, errors, and allegations that have demonstrably been proven false.”

In 2012, The Guardian filmed Hakimi’s brother Emad in Tunisia. “He caused no harm to anybody,” Emad said, holding a photo of Hakimi’s daughter, Hind. She grinned in her pink sweatshirt. “We pray to God that he will meet her soon,” said Emad, “and hug her just as any father hugs his child.”

Younous Chekkouri

Born in Morocco, according to Crider, Chekkouri travelled throughout the Islamic world doing relief work. When his younger brother Radwan couldn’t get a job, Younous suggested he join him in Jalalabad. Then, the war started. Wounded by U.S. bombs, Radwan was captured by The United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, and sold for a bounty from his hospital bed. Younous was later captured by the Pakistanis. The two brothers found themselves together in Gitmo. Crider tells me that Younous confessed to wild charges to deflect attention from his brother, who was released from Gitmo in 2004.

In his JTF GTMO assessment, unnamed sources claimed Chekkouri co-founded the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (a terrorist group connected to the 2004 Madrid subway bombings) and met Bin Laden. To the JTF, his denial only confirms his guilt. According to Crider, Chekkouri is racked with remorse for suggesting his brother join him in Afghanistan. His first question to Crider during her last visit was, “How is Radwan?”

Ahmed Belbacha

A former civil servant, Belbacha fled his native Algeria after receiving death threats from the fundamentalist guerrillas of the Groupe Islamique Armée. He settled in England, where he worked as a cleaner. Belbacha once cleaned the rooms of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. He got a nice tip. But Belbacha’s asylum application was turned down and, fearing deportation, he left for Pakistan and then Afghanistan. When war hit, he was captured trying escape back into Pakistan.

Cleared for release since 2007, Belbacha was sentenced to a 20-year-prison sentence in Algeria, seemingly for talking slag about the regime. Unable to return home, and with no other countries willing to take him, Belbacha is trapped in Guantanamo. He has been hunger striking since February.

In October 2007, the United States declined Belbacha’s asylum request, sent from Guantanamo’s Camp Delta. The letter states that asylum requests must be filed on U.S. soil.

This piece, commissioned by Creative Time Reports, has also been published by The Daily Beast.

The post Faces From Gitmo appeared first on Creative Time Reports.

Absolut, like just about every vodka manufacturer, has a loooong line of flavored spirits to keep up with the incredibly competitive market.

Its latest release, however, is an offbeat one: Absolut Amber, aged in a variety of woods.

The company began limited U.S. distribution in April, but now says it will roll it out across North America by the end of this month.

Absolut Amber is an 80-proof (40% abv) vodka that has been aged for a minimum of six months with a variety of wood, including ex-bourbon barrels, American oak and Swedish oak.

To kick it up even more, a variety of roasted American and French oak chips is added to the aging barrels.

"Absolut Amber will create a whole new category of spirits and has been developed to appeal to vodka, whiskey and rum drinkers,” a company spokesperson told The Spirits Business.

However, it must be noted that this is not the first wood-aged vodka, although the number of distilleries producing it is infinitesimal.

Amber has a suggested retail price of $30 for the litre bottle.

Experimental Game Pack 01 from LA Game Space includes 23 new, trippy titles from a lineup of high-profile indie developers and pop-icon game enthusiasts, and it's available for 11 more days. The pack will eventually include more than 30 games, added as they're completed. Grab all of them now for just $15.

The cast includes Cactus (AKA Jonatan Soderstrom, creator of Hotline Miami), Santa Ragione (MirrorMoon EP), developers of Kentucky Route Zero, Beau Blyth (Samurai Gunn), Ben Vance (Skulls of the Shogun), Steve Swink (Scale), and tons more. Working together, Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi and Canabalt's Adam Saltsman created Alphabet for the game pack, while Adventure Time mastermind Pendelton Ward and QWOP's Bennett Foddy are collaborating on Cheque Please.

See a list of all of the Game Pack developers, their games and their platforms (PC, Mac, Linux) here.

Swink developed Inputting, a keyboard-controlled game about getting a ball into a hole (and so much more), while Alphabet uses a similar scheme in a racing capacity. Santa Ragione's VideoHeroeS is a film-based physics game about pleasing picky customers, also to be featured at Fantastic Arcade.

LA Game Space is a non-profit organization for video game research and exhibition, funded through Kickstarter in December.

LA Game Space pack stars things from Pendelton Ward, Cactus, more originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 17 Sep 2013 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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tastefullyoffensive:

Adding insult to injury. [via]

An anonymous reader writes "A few months after releasing support for viewing models in .STL format, GitHub just added support for viewing changes to .STL formatted 3D models directly in the browser. 'How does this work? We take both versions of the model, and using binary space partitioning, we compute the added, removed, and unchanged parts. This is done using csgtool, a C library paired with a Ruby gem via FFI. These pieces are cached and displayed by the 3D viewer we already have, though we color them differently and play with their transparency to help illustrate the changes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thanks to the European Space Agency (ESA), a photostream shared by Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano documents his six-month Volare mission at the International Space Station (ISS). Parmitano provides extraordinary views of Earth’s geographic features and candid shots of a cosmonaut’s daily life, including a selfie shot during his first spacewalk and floating over colleagues at Sunday dinner. Seen from the “window of the world” spot on the ISS, a Bolivian snowy peak resembles a snowflake and a South Pacific budding storm appears like the top of a white rose. The sights captured in his mission photos are nothing short of astounding, and we look forward to seeing more from his expeditions.

Tab is an iOS and Android app that makes splitting bills easier. To use the app, you take a photo of your table’s receipt with a smartphone and then everyone claims what they ate or drank from an itemized list. Tax and tip are calculated automatically per person. The copy reads, “No more back-of-the-napkin algebra or typing in prices by hand!” It is available to download at iTunes and Google Play.

Here’s how it works:
• Go around the table selecting which items each person ordered; multiple people can select the same item if they shared it
• Tax and tip are automatically divided proportionally
• If it’s someone’s birthday, you can split their total evenly among everyone else
• You can also add the last four digits of each person’s credit card number to show your server what amount to put on each card

via Netted by the Webbys

popular shared this story from Scouting NY.

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Last week, I took a trip up to 138th Street and Amsterdam to scout a location I’ve been meaning to visit for the longest time: the City College of New York.

City College is one of those great places in the city where you step through the gates…

…and suddenly feel like you’ve been transported far, far from Manhattan.

I was walking around the north quadrangle, which consists of the original four campus buildings built in 1906…

…and as I was heading into Harris Hall, I suddenly got the strangest feeling that I was being watched. I turned to my right…

…and this guy was sticking his tongue out at me!

And he wasn’t alone. Above me, a frowning professor-type was beckoning me in…

…while on my left, I was being laughed at:

There were even more faces buried in the arch…

…all watching with mocking stares.

Finally, two owl statues were positioned on either side of the door.

In total, that’s 9 bits of statuary crammed around a single entrance. Amazed, I stepped back and looked up…

…and realized I was being watched…

…from every direction I turned.

City College has over 1,000 (yes, 1,000!) grotesques and gargoyles covering its buildings, and each has such individual character that it’s hard to kick the feeling they’re on the verge of coming to life Hogwarts-style to mock you as you walk around the campus.

I spent about an hour or so trying to find as many of the bizarre and wonderful creatures as I could – here are some of my favorites.

When it comes to the traditional demon-style grotesques and gargoyles, City College has some great examples. Several winged creatures are perched around the top of the tower at Compton Hall…

…each a completely different style from the next.

The most haunting, in my opinion, is the gargoyle on the west-side, which features a human head disturbingly attached to an eagle-like body, its mouth agape in a pained screech:

Another favorite demon can be found perched on the corner of Harris Hall…

…a horned figure holding a book with the initials FD written inside. I’d love to know who or what this is in reference to (thought for a minute the F might be for Faust, but as far as I know, Faust never had a surname beginning with D).

Another demon can be found above the clock on Harris Hall…

…a strange robed figure leaning in an ear to hear the students below:

A shield-holding demon:

But there are more than just demons at City College. In fact, much the statuary follows a particular theme. For example, look closely…

…and you’ll see a laborer drilling into the side of the building:

Another literally screws into the corner of the building:

This guy is yanking out a stray nail with a hammer:

Another is hammering on an anvil:

Still another has at it with a sledge-hammer.

Working the bellows (thanks, Martin & Violetsrose!):

Not sure what this one is up to:

Whereas these literally seem to be taking part in the construction (or deconstruction?) of the building, still another group of grotesques are meant to represent the various disciplines and arts at the university.

It starts simple, with a basic professorial-type reading a book:

I love this glasses-clad professor leering down at students entering the building:

A mathematician. If you notice some of the grotesques have a decidedly more human appearance than the typical caricatures, there’s a good chance they were based on members of the faculty.

Then we hit the music department…

…and you have nearly a full band…

…playing above you:

My favorite is the drummer:

Then on to the sciences: love this guy examining a butterfly with a magnifying glass:

A Dumbledore-like chemist mixes a potion:

And of course, painting, represented by quite possibly the angriest-looking artist in New York:

I’m guessing that this figure contemplating an hourglass represents philosophy:

Another figure, clearly based on a real person (how great would it be to be forever immortalized as a grotesque?):

Still more fascinating examples can be found surrounding the entrances to buildings. Above the door to Baskeville…

…is a professor holding out what appears to be a test in geometry:

A key-holder…

…and beside him, another life-like representation:

There’s something so wonderful about mixing such staid architecture with such whimsical figures. This guy may be in charge of holding a formal shield, for example, but he could care less about it:

Perhaps he’s having a conversation with his neighbor?

In fact, no one’s all that happy at this entrance:

A few final ones. In the corner of Wingate Hall…

….a guy flips his feet over his head while precariously holding on:

Nearby, an impish-looking fellow holds onto a ring:

And beside him, an older-looking grotesque holds the seal of the college:

In fact, quite a lot of the figures are being acrobatic on Wingate, which makes sense since it used to be the original gym (thanks, EG!): Wingate:

As you head into the main entrance at Harris…

…this guy is screaming at you:

If the grotesques look to be in immaculate shape, it’s thanks to a restoration program that began in 1986. At the time, many of the terra cotta figures had fallen into total disrepair (some had even smashed after falling from their perches).

Each figure was restored to its original condition, recast by hand, and returned to its place, at the time considered to be the largest terra cotta preservation effort in the country. You can see a bit of the process in this Facebook post – the picture below shows just how badly this particular figure had deteriorated (the white areas are the restored pieces that had broken off):

The replacements should weather the elements much longer than their predecessors.

Annoyed:

Astounded:

These pictures show a mere 50 or 60 of the 1,000 grotesques and gargoyles covering the north quad at City College – and I didn’t even get into the cathedral-like Shephard Hall.

The campus is open to the public, and is absolutely worth a trip to admire these amazing works of art. If Hogwarts had a satellite campus in New York City, I’m pretty sure City College would be it.

-SCOUT

popular shared this story from TheBloggess.com.

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This week Victor took me to a shop to find a lamp for the bedroom but they were all too expensive. Like, they had an $8,000 crystal chandelier in the shape of a leaping, life-sized, cavorting pony. True story. I wanted to take a picture but Victor thought it would be too weird for me to say, “Hey, can I take a picture of your shiny pony?” so instead I stayed quiet until about 10 seconds later when I saw an enormous bear’s head on the wall and I screamed ,”HOLY SHIT THERE’S A BEAR” and then I think probably Victor realized that he just can’t take me out in public in general.

Several clerks (and shoppers) looked up in a rather annoyed way, which is sort of rude because 1) if there really was a bear in the shop they would probably be grateful for my warning and 2) THERE REALLY WAS A BEAR IN THE STORE. Victor pointed out that it was just the head of a bear, but I countered that the head was technically the most dangerous part of the bear and then he argued that bear paws are just as painful, but I pointed out that no part of the bear is deadly if his head has come off, and then we just agreed to disagree because we were attracting more attention.

Then a salesman came over and I was all, “HOW MUCH IS IT FOR THE BEAR?” but I was trying not to sound too eager because even though the head was dusty and mostly shoved behind a vent it was still pretty bad-ass and I didn’t want to let them know that I was too interested because that’s how they get you. The saleman looked confused for a second and then laughed awkwardly, and then said “Oh. You’re serious” and was like, “I am deadly serious, sir” and he said he’d ask his manager.

The manager came over to make sure that I wasn’t just fucking with him and I said, “Before we go any further, I just want to point out that this bear is literally75% off. I mean, unless you have the body of the headless bear in the back, in which case I might be interested in purchasing it too” and then he wandered off in a bit of a daze. Victor shook his head and rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, but in his defense it’s possible it was because he was looking at the pony chandelier because that shit was fucking dazzling. Then the salesman came back saying, “We would be so…so thrilled to let you have it for $75″ and I shouted “SOLD!” and then I was a little offended on Beartrums behalf because why were they so happy to get rid of him? Clearly I was saving him from people who did not appreciate him and probably didn’t even realize his name was Beartrum.This was a damn rescue. Plus, when they got climbed up on the ladder to get him down I realized that Beartrum’s head was three times the size of a normal bears and the whole thing was made of fiberglass and fake fur so no one even had to die to make him, unless it was a lot of stuffed animals from a scarlet fever ward, which would explain why they were in such a hurry to get rid of him. Then they really quickly wrapped him up because I think they just wanted us to leave. This is exactly why I often get really good service and also why I recommend not taking your medication during days when you have to buy a car or a bedroom set.

Victor drug the giant box of bear to the car while muttering that I was unstable, and I agreed with him, but I don’t think you have to be crazy to realize that paying 2 bucks per pound of bad-ass bear is a goddamn bargain. I tried to go online to find a similar bear head to prove that I’d made a fantastic buy, but when I searched “Big Bear Head” it gave me a San Diego craigslist ad entitled “Big Bear needs some quick head now” and then I just decided to never go on the internet again.

I got Beartrum Higglebottom home (“Beartrum” was just a given and I think “Higglebottom” is nice because it sort of implies that his non-existent bottom had once been wiggly and positive) and I decided to take some of those fancy unwrapping picture sets like you see on sophisticated techy blogs, but when I downloaded the first one I noticed that Ferris Mewler was doing something weird in the back.

And so then I was like “Enhance….Enhance….Enhance” until finally it was big enough that I could see that Ferris was hiding his head in his genitals. Or something. I’m not sure. All I know is that he’s way more flexible than I am and he seems to be showing off. Victor says he’s probably just hiding his head in shame so that other neighborhood cats won’t recognize him on my blog and make fun of him. I can’t but help to think that this is not going to help his case:

Then I opened the box a little more and you could see Beartrum’s enormous smile, as if he was saying, “YOU ARE MY VERY BEST FRIEND EVER AND NOTHING WILL EVER TEAR US APART.”

Then I asked Victor to walk around holding Beartrum up at various places in my office so that I could figure out the best place to hang him, but I was actually just taking pictures of Victor wearing a bear and then he heard me giggling and was all “WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING?ARE YOU RECORDING THIS?”

Then he put Beartrum down and walked away muttering under his breath. I figured I needed to even the score for the sake of my marriage so I yelled at Victor to come to the front yard and when he got there I was wearing Beartrum’s face and singing “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” in a deep, creepy, slow-motion voice on the yard.

That’s when Hailey’s school bus pulled up and I waved at her, and the bus driver seemed sort of disturbed, but probably only because I looked so realistic that she wasn’t sure if it was safe to leave Hailey there with me. Victor agreed, but not for actual bear-related reasons. Hailey, on the other hand, thought Beartrum was totally bad-ass, and that’s when I decided that from now on I’d only hang out with eight-year-olds, because they still understand the whimsical joy of silliness, and they’re too young to call the authorities on you.

Victor, on the other hand, demanded that I get in the house and stop waving at our neighbors because “WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO THINK?” and I immediately dismissed him, but then I thought, “Oh my God, they probably think we’re furries.” Then I started to explain what a furry was to Victor and he was like, “STOP TALKING ALREADY” because apparently education is not important to him.

Then Victor told me to put Beartrum away, but I told him I needed a few days to figure out where he fit best.

Victor: NO. Just…no.

me:But he looks so happy.And it’s the guest bedroom so it’s hardly ever used and when we have family spend the night they’ll have company. I tucked him in like a burrito baby. LOOK HOW HAPPY HE LOOKS.

Victor: Try again.

I attempted another option:

me: Rowr-rowr-rowr.

Victor: What?

me: OHMYGOD, LOOK OUT THE WINDOW!

Victor:WHAT IN THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?

me: He likes to wander at night. I think he might have narcolepsy.

I briefly considered poking his head through the hedges just to freak people out, but Victor said I couldn’t because I might cause an accident because people weren’t prepared for that much awesomeness. (He didn’t say that last part out loud, but I’m pretty sure it was implied.)

In the end, I left Beartrum on the floor of my office until I find the perfect spot. The cats fucking love him.

The good news though is that I think I’ve finally found my new profile pic.

via

kill-whitepeople:

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