firehose

About one third of Earth's largest groundwater basins are being rapidly depleted by human consumption, despite having little accurate data about how much water remains in them. Significant segments of Earth's population are consuming groundwater quickly without knowing when it might run out.

For seniors at San Diego’s Monarch School — where 93 percent of students have no form of permanent housing — earning a diploma means leaving behind their only reliable source of food, clothing, healthcare, and more.

Taco fans, rejoice: The taco emoji is finally here.

Emojipedia confirmed today that 37 new emoji characters will be included in Unicode 8.0, the computing industry standard for maintaining consistent text across languages and computers around the world. The new standard will be released tomorrow, June 17.

Being included in the Unicode standard doesn’t guarantee that the emoji will be adopted by Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and other mobile operating systems, which maintain their own emoji character sets, but it’s a good sign. Future updates are likely to include at least some of the new emoji.

The addition of the taco emoji represents a major victory for Taco Bell. In December, the fast-food chain launched a Change.org campaign to lobby the Unicode Consortium—the nonprofit the develops, maintains, and promotes international software standards (including emoji)—to include tacos in its character set. It even launched an online store to sell T-shirts supporting the cause and ended up getting more than 30,000 signatures. From the petition:

Why do pizza and hamburger lovers get an emoji but taco lovers don’t? Here’s a better question: why do we need four different types of mailboxes? Or 25 different types of clocks? Or a VCR tape and floppy disk emoji? No one even uses those things anymore.

But it’s not just the taco that’s finally getting its due. The burrito is as well (Chipotle must be pleased), along with a cheese wedge, hot dog, popcorn, and turkey. To help convey sarcasm, which can get easily lost in text, Unicode 8.0 will also include a face with rolling eyes. There are also new symbols of religious significance: prayer beads, mosque, synagogue, Kaaba, menorah, and a generic place of worship.

Thank God—err, the Unicode Consortium.

Download our free emoji flag keyboard for iPhones.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

---

The leaked draft of Pope Francis’s encyclical letter focuses largely on climate change, and it includes a radical call to action on that front. But the 192-page letter also contains some stark criticism of the role played by the media, and the digital world, in the breakdown of “the human environment.”

Global warming, says the Pope, is the result of how mankind has produced and consumed in recent decades. Alongside that environmental degradation, he sees a spiritual and societal one. He identifies “a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction” in the way we live our lives, and cites increased violence, drug trafficking and “loss of identity,” as signs among others that growth over the past two centuries has not always meant progress, or improvement.

Media and our reliance on the digital world are partly to blame, he writes:

47. Add to this the dynamics of the media and the digital world, which, when they become ubiquitous, hinder the development of our ability to live with wisdom, to think deeply, to love generously.

The great thinkers of the past, in today’s context, would run the risk of seeing their wisdom muted in the chaotic noise of information. It will require an effort to ensure that such tools translate into a new cultural development of mankind and not into a deterioration of its deeper wealth.

True wisdom, as a result of reflection, dialogue and generous encounter between people, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data that eventually saturate and mystify, in a kind of mental pollution. At the same time, real relationships with others, with all the challenges that they imply, tend to be replaced by a type of communication mediated by the Internet.

This allows us to select or delete relationships according to our will, and this often creates a new type of artificial emotion, which have to do more with devices and screens than with people and nature.

The present tools permit us to communicate with one another, and to share knowledge and affection. However, sometimes they also prevent us from making direct contact with suffering, shivering, and the joy of others and the complexity of their personal experience. Then it should come as no surprise that, with the overwhelming offer of these products grows a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction in relationships, or else a damaging isolation.

The full text of Pope Francis’s letter is here (Italian). We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Super inspiring story about young activist/maker Hailey Ford, who’s building small shelters for the homeless in her hometown, via My Modern Met:

The planned homes will have solar panels and use insulation made from recycled denim. “We can’t think of a better example than our Hailey – she’s proof that no person – or act of kindness – is too small to change the world,” Together Rising founder Glennon Doyle Melton told The Huffington Post. With this funding, Hailey plans to make eleven of the residences for Bremerton’s permanent Tent City, which is expected to open later this year.

Read more.

---

Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!

Reuters

Experts point to likely wood rot in California balcony collapse Reuters Wood rot from exposure to excess moisture likely weakened the horizontal beams supporting an apartment balcony that collapsed in Berkeley, California, killing six people, several independent experts said a day after the tragedy. But the consensus among ... Amid Grief for Students, a Search for Answers After Balcony CollapseNew York Times As Bay Area reels from Berkeley's balcony collapse, experts say calm caution is ...San Jose Mercury News The Latest: Family members arrive after balcony collapseseattlepi.com Irish Independent -Belfast Telegraph all 3,546 news articles »

What is even going on in Super Mario Maker ⊟ 

We got an 8-bit Wii Fit Trainer sliding down a flagpole sideways, jumping on Goombas, and swimming past Wigglers in Super Mario Bros. scenes. What.

You’ll be able to unlock Wii Fit Trainer and other costumes for Super Mario Maker with the characters’ corresponding amiibo.

PREORDER Super Mario Maker, Amiibo

The "Archie" relaunch continues in September, and CBR has the exclusive first look at new covers by Fiona Staples, Cliff Chiang and more.

It’s 2015. It should no longer surprise anyone that the news-consuming populations of the West are online and using smartphones. But that doesn’t actually tell us very much: Are people consuming news on websites or social networks? Is it in the form of text or visuals? What is the starting point: is it search, social, or a news website?

These are the important questions for news executives, policymakers, regulators, PR people, politicians, and just about anyone else who needs to understand where people get their information. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism attempts to answer them in the latest edition of its annual digital news report (pdf), released this week.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive finding of the report, based on a survey of more than 20,000 people in 12 relatively wealthy countries, is that the vast majority of people across all ages still get most of their news from television.

Even the 18-24 demographic, much touted by messaging-app makers and social network executives as a hungry new audience, prefers TV news to news via social media.

Looked at either by age or by geography, the only category that comes close to TV is “online” But “online” is a curious mix of social and search, aggregator websites and news websites, video and text, podcasts and images. As Facebook and its like push users to video content, expect TV too to be bundled into “online.” The category is losing all meaning.

Much more revealing than whether people are online (they are) is what people do once they’re online. The Reuters study has an answer. Asked what the “starting point” is for news once they get online, respondents across the 12 countries surveyed have widely differing habits. Chiefly, however, they get their news from search and, in a few countries with prominent national news services such as the BBC or Yle, by going direct to news websites. Email and mobile alerts lag far behind.

That may have to do partly with the fact that people aren’t intentionally looking for news on Facebook, the social network on which some 40% of respondents say they nevertheless found news.

But it may also be an issue of trust:

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is generally remembered as a parable about the dangers of scientific progress, and the hubris of tampering with the natural order. It can also be viewed, arguably, as a warning against messing with gender roles. Dr. Frankenstein, a man, seeks to create life, as women do. In punishment, his bride is murdered on his wedding night. Men must be men and women must be women, according to the story—mess with that, and you get chaos and death.

Some centuries later, you’d think we’d be more comfortable with women in the workforce and dads changing the diapers. But prehistoric assumptions about gender roles aren’t so easy to shake, as Hollywood’s newest blockbuster Jurassic World makes clear.

The Frankenstein parallels in Jurassic World—which opened over the weekend to the record-breaking tune of $511 million worldwide—are explicit. The dinosaur theme park, in an effort to keep attracting visitors, has decided to create new, genetically enhanced dinosaurs never before seen on earth. As in Frankenstein, this dangerous tinkering with nature is linked to progressive gender roles.

 Prehistoric assumptions about gender roles aren’t so easy to shake, as Hollywood’s newest blockbuster Jurassic World makes clear. The park’s operation manager, Claire (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) is a brittle control-freak who has no time for family or for maternal instincts. She is supposed to be watching her two nephews for a few days while they enjoy the park, but instead she foists the duty off on her assistant while she does her workaholic thing, which in this case means working to obtain sponsorships tied to the new genetically enhanced Indominus Rex. She is wedded to her job and will not be a mother—and so she creates monsters.

The female Indominus Rex is an abomination, and the film suggests that Claire is too, in her own way. Everyone in the movie, it seems, lines up to tell her what an awful person she is for being career-driven, their critiques presented as moral rebukes to Claire’s selfishness. Even the kids relentlessly guilt trip her, expressing a bizarre amount of disappointment and betrayal for people who haven’t actually seen Claire in years. How much emotional attachment can they have?

Perhaps most telling, though, is the fate of Zara (Katie McGrath), the assistant Claire assigns to watch her nephews. Of all the deaths in the film—the evil army jerks included—none is as spectacularly brutal and humiliating as Zara’s. An object of the nephews’ resentment and disaffection, Zara enables Claire to shirk her motherly duties and therefore deserves to be punished. In the film, career women are sinful; to expiate that sin, some die brutally. Since Claire is the lead, Jurassic World‘s writers kill off Zara as a substitute.

This need to re-establish and re-affirm the “natural” order of things is also implicit in the relationship between Claire and her romantic interest, swaggering manly-man and former Navy Seal Owen Grady (Chris Pratt).

In the first scene between the two, Owen mocks Clair for being overly professional, and basically tells her he doesn’t want to date her because she’s an uptight businesswoman. She’s also his boss, which makes him uncomfortable.

 The modern world is scary and chaotic, Jurassic World tells us, especially when women don’t stay in their place. Luckily, we have action movies to ritually reassert the old ways. Fortunately for him, Owen gets to spend the rest of the film turning the tables on her. As far as fighting dinosaurs goes, he’s the one with authority. It’s significant that they first kiss after Claire saves his life with a barrage of bullets. This is in part to establish her as a strong female character. But it also shows her embracing the logic of “kill or be killed “as a prelude to embracing Owen and the traditional romance plot. Atavistic action paves the way for atavistic gender roles.

Other female characters in the film also function as object lessons. Claire’s sister is contemplating divorce at the beginning of the film. This disorder in the home is hyperbolically projected onto the test-tube baby Indominus Rex, who is especially dangerous because it lacks parents, according to Owen. Defenders of the traditional family can breathe a sigh of relief however after Indominus meets its fate, and Claire and Owen reassert heterosexual gender relationships. “What do we do now?” the formerly super-organized Claire asks at the film’s end. “Probably stick together for survival,” Owen tells her manfully.

The modern world is scary and chaotic, Jurassic World tells us, especially when women don’t stay in their place. Luckily, we have action movies to ritually reassert the old ways. All of that old DNA from the dim dark past rises up to domesticate Claire. Jurassic World—and Hollywood directors—still fear Frankenstein’s monster, and dream of an exciting, yet predictably gendered past.

You can follow Noah on Twitter at @hoodedu. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

UI Browser:

UI Browser is the ultimate assistant for Apple’s AppleScript GUI Scripting and Accessibility technologies. It helps you to explore, monitor, and control the User Interface elements of most Mac OS X applications running on your computer.

Choose an application in UI Browser’s Target menu to browse its UI elements, or use the built-in Screen Reader or press a hot key to read any application’s UI elements on the screen under the mouse. Then use UI Browser to perform actions on the selected UI element, get and set its attributes, send keystrokes to the target application, and observe notifications when any of the target’s UI elements change. Use UI Browser to test the target while you write GUI Scripting scripts or while you add accessibility features to applications you are developing, and you can be confident they will work as expected.

An alternative to futzing around with OS X’s Accessibility Inspector and AppleScript’s UI elements (a frustrating process, as the information provided by Accessibility Inspector doesn’t always match AppleScript’s understanding of the elements on your screen).

Lewis. Damian Lewis. The former Homeland leading man and current Wolf Hall star is the new frontrunner to replace Daniel Craig as everyone’s favorite secret agent James Bond—at least if you trust the oddsmakers.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Lewis’ odds to succeed Craig at British bookmaker William Hill jumped from 25/1 to 3/1 (now at 6/4) without explanation, leading many to believe those who are suddenly betting on him know something that everyone else doesn’t.

Bond is an important cultural institution in the United Kingdom, and his casting has been a point of contention there ever since Sean Connery first nabbed the role in 1962. As David Sims writes in The Atlantic, “Brits are so touchy about who plays Bond that serious complaints arose about Daniel Craig’s casting because of his hair color”—strawberry-blonde (Bond normally has dark hair).

Lewis, oddly enough, is a redhead.

Idris Elba, known best as the urbane, business-savvy drug runner Stringer Bell in HBO’s The Wire, had the best odds before Lewis climbed to the top, despite there being little evidence that he was actually in the running. Elba would be the first black actor to play Bond—something that, in the eyes of most modern fans, would be a good thing, but was nonetheless protested by a few infantile Bond diehards who refused to accept the character could be anything but white.

For what it’s worth, Elba had one major supporter—former Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal, who, in one of her leaked emails, argued Elba should be the next Bond (Sony owns distribution rights for the Bond franchise, though that could change soon).

The full list is comprised of pretty much every famous white actor with a British accent, within an acceptable age range for Bond. Tom Hardy, who played the villain Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, and was most recently the titular character in Mad Max: Fury Road, is narrowly behind Elba for third. Henry Cavill, the new Superman, is fourth:

• Damian Lewis (6/4)
• Idris Elba (5/2)
• Tom Hardy (4/1)
• Henry Cavill (5/1)
• Michael Fassbender (7/1)
• Orlando Bloom (12/1)
• Andrew Lincoln (14/1)
• Dan Stevens (14/1)
• Richard Armitage (14/1)
• Daniel Day-Lewis (20/1)

You can see the list in its entirety, which also includes names like Christian Bale (33/1), Benedict Cumberbatch (50/1), and, for some reason, David Beckham (200/1), here. (Not accessible in the US without a proxy.)

Craig is under contract for one more Bond film after the upcoming Spectre, so whoever his replacement is, he won’t appear in a film until 2019 at the earliest.

PathPicker:

Facebook PathPicker is a simple command line tool that solves the perpetual problem of selecting files out of bash output. PathPicker will:

• Parse all incoming lines for entries that look like files
• Present the piped input in a convenient selector UI
• Allow you to either:
  • Edit the selected files in your favorite $EDITOR
  • Execute an arbitrary command with them

PathPicker should work with most Bash environments and requires Python >2.6 and

ZSH is supported as well but won’t have a few features like alias expansion in command line mode.

jfruh writes: Facebook [on Monday] announced Moments, a new mobile app that uses Facebook's facial recognition technology to let you sync up photos only with friends who are in those photos with you. Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, which turned out to be easier for building a cross-platform mobile app than other more "modern" languages.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Atlanta-based filmmaker Marcus Rosentrater, a senior animator behind the Archer television series, has created “Star Wars Wars“, a mind-bending full-length video of all six Star Wars films playing at once. The entire collection of still photos featuring the overlapping films are available to view on Imgur.

images via maurcs

via Esquire

Minneapolis Star Tribune

NC teacher resigns amid outcry over reading 3rd-graders story of princes who ... Fox News RALEIGH, N.C. – After a third-grader tearfully recounted how another boy had called him "gay" during gym class, teacher Omar Currie chose to raise the issue during story time by reading his students a fable about a prince who falls in love with another prince, ... Teacher resigns after reading students book about gay coupleWashington Post all 123 news articles »

Newsday

Bloomberg joins de Blasio at Cornell Tech groundbreaking Newsday New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio made a rare joint appearance with predecessor Michael Bloomberg to celebrate the groundbreaking of Cornell University's technology campus expansion on Roosevelt Island, which received a surprise $100 million ... Bloomberg Philanthropies gives $100M to Cornell NYC campusKRMG Are Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg Making Up?Vanity Fair $100M donated to build new tech campus in New YorkNew Zealand Herald all 113 news articles »

For your interests, from the site:

We are building a team of storytellers, editors, and researchers…

We don’t believe the full story is being told about police brutality. With a few exceptions, far too many reports are one dimensional, flat, and too often skewed in ways that don’t fully value the lives of victims and the impact brutality has on families and communities.

If you are interested in joining our launch team as a writer, editor, researcher, or social media storyteller, please click below.

Sounds good to me, click through for The Red Record.  

Ida!  Still inspiring.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

---

An Australian researcher studying fluids from the eye of US Ebola patient, Dr. Ian Crozler, has confirmed that Ebola can linger in the eye for up to 10 weeks after the virus is eliminated from the blood.

Ehdrigor, a game created by a black, American Indian game designer, gently reflects the Native experience, and how that approach to storytelling differs from Western narratives.

These Pokémon watches are pricey, but if you gotta catch 'em all, you should look good doing it.

As people who’ve flocked to the suburbs can attest, sooner or later, city life just wears down on you. It’s cramped. The traffic’s a mess. And of course, the rent’s too damn high.

In San Francisco, some startups are also seeking refuge from the city’s downtown, with its soaring office rents, which are expected to soon overtake Manhattan’s on a per-square-foot basis, and the lowest vacancy rates in the country.

So now some companies are finding reprieve much farther away. Tucked into the idyllic Santa Cruz mountains, 70 miles (about an hour and 20 minutes if traffic’s clear) from San Francisco, the 24-acre (9.7 hectare) Enterprise Tech Centre offers many amenities that parallel the office parks of the Silicon Valley, but with a big focus on fitness and the outdoors.

In addition to 381,000 square feet (about 35,400 square meters) of rentable office space, there are bike paths lining the campus, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, an amphitheater with seating for 2,500 people, an indoor basketball court and a tennis court, as well as a sauna, auditorium, and fitness center—all for $2 a square foot, a relative steal.

At that rate, the cost to rent an office in the Enterprise Tech Centre is 57% lower than the $4.60-per-square-foot average asking rent for class A space in Silicon Valley, according to Colin Yasukochi, research director at brokerage firm CBRE. San Francisco’s average is $5.50 he said.

The irony, of course, is that tech companies have been recently building out their presence in San Francisco, driving up its rents, partly because of the real-estate squeeze in Silicon Valley’s sprawling suburban office parks.

Once the home of Borland Software, the campus in Scotts Valley cost $120 million to complete, but the property lay vacant after the company moved out in 2009 as part of cost-cutting measures. Under new ownership in 2014, the Enterprise Tech Centre has been seeking new tenants, and some, such as the mobile payments startup PayStand, are seeing the appeal.

“The cost of doing business has gone up dramatically,” Paystand CEO Jeremy Almond tells Quartz. “Everyone’s fighting for the same engineers and same office space in [San Francisco’s South of Market district]. As a founder, you want to be thinking about how to scale your business, and you want to do that creatively.”

Paystand currently employs 19 people, but Almond says the company is rapidly hiring, and the campus is accommodating. “That’s part of the attraction,” says Steven Sheldon, whose firm Sheldon Wiseman Commercial Real Estate is leasing out the Enterprise Tech Centre. “A company like Paystand—they can grow to almost any level without having to move.”

Currently, the campus is at 25% occupancy, but Sheldon says it is actively talking with potential tenants, who are interested in renting about 180,000 square feet of space.

And though it is a considerable trek from San Francisco, Paystand says tech workers who are tired of the daily slog are willing to trade in the traffic along the 101 to live in Santa Cruz, with its proximity to nature.

“It’s not a hard sell to say, ‘Do you want to live by the beach or have a house in the mountains?'” says Almond. “For a lot of people, that is very compelling.”

Read this next: Office space is so scarce in San Francisco that startups are fighting to work at the mall

Super Mario Maker packaging ⊟ 

All of the sudden, this is the Wii U game I’m most excited about getting? It releases on September 11 and will come with a ~100-page booklet "that illustrates the boundless possibilities in Super Mario Maker.“

The bottom product shots are from the European release! Here’s a wild two-minute trailer for Super Mario Maker if you missed it earlier.

PREORDER Super Mario Maker