firehose

Feeling smug about getting upgraded to ‘attractive’ status on OkCupid? Maybe you shouldn’t.

A controversial plan to kill as many as 5,000 wild badgers is underway in southwest England.

Weird looking potato shapes found In a bag of MB potatoes.

It is named after Tengiz Burjanadze.

Link

A sneaker may refer to:

• A person that moves furtively, possibly with lascivious, salacious, or nefarious intent, generally a person not to be trusted from initial inspection.

Link

Photos on these Facebook pages include shots of luxury vacations, fancy homes, cars, and “selfies” showing off jewelry and designer clothing. The pictures also include something more sinister — multiple images of heavy weaponry and drug dealing paraphernalia.

A week after saying he could become "the most powerful guy in the world" by negotiating the release of jailed U.S. citizen Kenneth Bae, former NBA star Dennis Rodman seems to have lowered the expectations for his latest trip to North Korea considerably.

thats-ri-god-damn-diculous:

catschemicalromance:

owmeex:

Horses With Better Hair Than You

why does this only have 7 notes

maybe it’s neighbelline

Spirit for Twitter is a service created by former Twitter developer Pierre Legrain that allows users to make their tweets disappear after a set amount of time by adding a hashtag like “5m” for five minutes, “10h” for ten hours, or “3d” for three days. The Snapchat-like Twitter app can be enabled at the Spirit for Twitter website.

image via Spirit for Twitter

via TechCrunch

Belgrade, Serbia artist Milos “Sholim” Rajkovic has created a surreal collection of animated GIFs showcasing faceless people with moving mechanical parts packed into their heads. In an interview with The Daily Dot, Milos shared that the models he used his GIFs were “politicians, corporate people, or just pretty faces from the commercials that we watched for hundreds of times during a day and who have no identity and personality.”

images via Milos Rajkovic

via The Daily Dot, Photographs on the Brain, who killed bambi?

Feedbin.me has released the code that runs the service as open source, checkout out the Github. It joins Newsblur as being the second large for profit RSS reader to release its code in such a manner. I’m not aware of any other commercial services that open source all of their code.

This seems like a strong move that only a independent developer can take when faced with competition from well funded competitors. Being a 1 or 2 person team you can’t fight head-to-head with a Feedly or a Digg without doing something a little guerrilla. Open sourcing code makes a ton of sense in this case.

Why in the world would the masterminds behind this episode end the story with a coup in the Fire Kingdom led by Flame Princess and Cinnamon Bun and have all the action off-screen? Cinnamon Bun so rarely gets to do anything cool, and FP has already proven awesome in action, so the conclusion of “Earth & Water” feels like a bit of a missed opportunity. That’s unfortunate because the rest of this episode works very well, and although we don’t get to see the coup, its outcome shows how this series allows its characters to grow and change.

Finn and FP are both struggling with their breakup, and while Finn retreats into familiar activities like playing video games with Jake, FP is having a more introspective reaction. She’s confused by her conflicting emotions of love and hate for the boy who betrayed her, and she’s beginning to ...

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Angolan actor Hoji Fortuna is the next new face to show up in Westeros for Game of Thrones Season 4. Could it be? Have they cast Brown Ben Plumm? Hit the jump for our evidence! 

The assignment was to draw 6 outfits from different eras and inspired by Minecraft characters to be printed life-sized and displayed in the fashion room at the V&A for the World of Minecraft event. They’re being “modeled” by popular Minecraft youtubers. 1- Ghast, modern. 2 - Creeper, modern. 3. Ocelot, late 50s/early 60s. 4- Magma Cube, 1930s. 5- Pig, mid 19th century riding habit. 6- Wither, 18th century. 

exomondo writes "Google has a plan to circumvent the problem of fragmentation of its Android operating system across the installed base by using its proprietary, closed-source Google Play Services. Play Services is a privileged service that runs on Android and provides the sort of functionality to applications that would generally be seen in operating system updates like cloud backup, remote wipe, push messaging, etc... This service can be updated silently and independently of the operating system and runs on almost every version of Android out there allowing Google to add functionality to Android devices without having to go through the OEMs so having an up-to-date version of Android is looking like less of a necessity." It might be worth noting that Google originally rejected copyleft in favor of permissive licensing in the name of giving OEMs and carriers more control over Android on their devices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you happen to be in Muncie, Indiana, some weekend, stop off at Alter Ego Comics — the person who rings up your issue of Daredevil might just be the guy who wrote it. Writer Mark Waid, who sold his print comics collection to fund his digital-comics site Thrillbent, is now a comics retailer: He [...]

I’m sure a lot of people don’t think of video games as pieces of art, but I’d say they’re wrong, and this proves it. Reddit user RudeBootie has put together a collection of 125 different backgrounds from various fighting backgrounds in animated GIF form, and they’re pretty mind-blowing.

As you can see above and below the artists that created these backgrounds did some fantastic things with pixels, and yes, it’s all pixel art. These images are packed with a ton of details and I’d have to imagine that backgrounds like these would take weeks to complete. My personal favorites are the blowing sand in the Egyptian scene above and the totally random manatees in the GIF below.

Don’t forget to check out the full collection by clicking here.

Early this morning Microsoft acquired Nokia for €3.79 billion (plus €1.65 billion for patents). It is a deal that makes no sense.

While industry observers love to pontificate about mergers and acquisitions, the reality is that most ideas are value-destroying. It is far better to form an alliance or partnership; most of the benefits, none of the costs.

A partnership similar, in fact, to the one formed just two years ago between Microsoft and Nokia.

From Microsoft’s perspective, that was a brilliant deal; Matt Drance characterized it as “Microsoft Buys Nokia for $0B,” and he wasn’t far off. The premier pre-iPhone phone maker, with what was even then one of the best supply chains, distribution networks, and brands in the world would be exclusively devoted to Windows Phone.

There is nothing further to be gained by an acquisition.

Moreover, the fact Steve Ballmer is stepping down makes a deal of this magnitude hugely problematic. Guy English has already characterized Ballmer’s disastrous reorganization as a straitjacket for the next CEO; adding on a mobile phone business that Microsoft probably should abandon is like attaching an anchor to said straitjacket and tossing the patient into the ocean. It will be that much more difficult for the next CEO to look at Windows Phone rationally.

So that brings us to the Nokia perspective. I have argued that Stephen Elop made a massive strategic error by choosing Windows Phone over Android; coming from Microsoft, he failed to appreciate that Nokia’s differentiation lay not in software, but in everything else in the value chain. It would have been to Nokia’s benefit to have everyone running Android, including themselves. Everyone would have the same OS, the same apps, may the best industrial design, distribution, and supply chain win.

Elop threw it all away.

Today no one cares about Nokia’s industrial design, distribution, or supply chain, because their devices lack an app ecosystem, the price of entry into smartphones. Perhaps even now, Nokia was considering going to Android, or maybe even going out of business.

And thus I believe we’ve arrived at the rationale for this deal.

I theorize that Nokia was either going to switch to Android or was on the verge of going bankrupt. (I suspect the latter: part of the deal included €1.5 billion in financing available to Nokia immediately, and the fact Microsoft had to take Asha but not the brand or maps suggests they were trying to keep the price as low as possible). And, had Nokia abandoned Windows Phone, then Windows Phone would be dead.

Windows Phone has already been largely abandoned by other OEMs; Samsung and HTC make warmed-over versions of 6-month old Android hardware, and that’s really about it. Of course that will now stop, Microsoft’s protestations to the contrary, but regardless, without Nokia it would be over.

And so, I would argue that this deal is not unlike the Motorola one, where I believe Google had its hand forced by Motorola’s threat to sue other Android OEM’s for all they were worth.¹ Microsoft felt they didn’t have a choice.

The tragedy in the deal, as I hinted at earlier, is that I think Microsoft ought to abandon Windows Phone. The war is over, and iOS and Android won. It would be far better for Microsoft to focus on serving and co-opting those devices, instead of shooting the most promising parts of their business in the foot for the sake of a platform that is never going to make it.

At the very least, it shouldn’t have been Ballmer’s decision to make.

---

Update: I wrote a second piece, Another Nokia Explanation, the Same Tragic Conclusion

1. To be clear, that’s the only similarity here

The post The Deal That Makes No Sense appeared first on stratēchery by Ben Thompson.

Derek Lowe on the limits of cancer research:

To the extent, though, that people are told that "More Money" is the answer in this field, I think it's good to make the point that it isn't necessarily the limiting factor. Problem is, there's no way to hold a charity insight-raiser, or to set up a box to Donate Good Ideas For the Cure. Medical research, whether industrial or academic, is a pretty esoteric field to most people. There's not much way for an interested lay person to help out directly; the technical background is too much of a barrier. So people raise money, (while some just raise "awareness", a particularly slippery term), because it's the only way that they feel that they can make any difference.

I'm kind of a jerk about donating to "charities". First, I always refer to Charity Navigator. Second, I avoid the word "awareness". Want more future cancer treatments? Put some of those donations into early education to create more budding scientists. Teach kids to dream and think now. It pays dividends over a very long time.

The famously bizarre and inscrutable headlines that often adorn Bloomberg News articles are a cherished joke among journalists, most of all within Bloomberg itself. But they may be in danger of losing their peculiar edge.

Some prototypically odd headlines from the past year:

∞ Feeding Naked Chef’s Chickens Killing Biggest Bond Rally
∞ Mao’s Red Flag May Need to Evoke Panda DNA to Beat Audi
∞ Harvard Women Freed From Urinal 50 Years After First Female MBA
∞ BMW to Amazon Space Demand Spurs Rush to Inland Empire

That Bloomberg writes sometimes incomprehensible titles for its article is no secret. The phenomenon has a hashtag and a parody Twitter account. But now, to the chagrin of some Bloomberg News staff, someone important has taken notice.

“Several editors acknowledged that headline clarity can sometimes be an issue,” wrote journalist Clark Hoyt last month in a report commissioned by Bloomberg (pdf). He then ticked off a few headlines that had caught his eye:

∞ DSM’s Flirt With Red Hot Mamas Cuts Investor Love for Plastics
∞ Brokers Go Gray as Youth Proves Unsustainable With No Cold Calls
• Cold War With Soup Tempts East Europeans to Menus of HBO, Sony
• DoCoMo Cash, Girl Band Help Beat Softbank on Costs: Japan Credit

“I assume that, to them, it makes complete sense what they’ve written,” said the anonymous proprietor of Strange Bloomberg Headlines, a blog that has documented myriad examples since 2011. “They just don’t realize that a reader coming at it for the first time won’t understand what’s going on.”

He added, “The headlines usually make sense once you’ve read the article.”

That may no longer be sufficient. Hoyt’s recommendations, which Bloomberg said it would follow, included the appointment of a standards editor to, among other things, “review headlines for accuracy, clarity, and tone.”

Hoyt, who previously served as public editor of the New York Times, was hired by Bloomberg to review its journalistic ethics after the revelation that reporters had access to information about how Bloomberg customers used the company’s data and news terminals. Several large banks, which are responsible for the bulk of Bloomberg’s revenue, complained about the intrusion.

The Hoyt report ran just 20 pages but covered a lot of journalistic ground, surprising some Bloomberg editors. It’s not clear how seriously his recommendations will be taken, but he remains employed by the company. Bloomberg declined to make Hoyt available for an interview.

There’s a certain art to the Bloomberg headline—a pile of words that somehow adds up to something meaningful, if not understandable. Let’s pause for some more:

∞ Carney Not Yet With Pink Set Sharing Policies Beyond BOE Circle
∞ Shark Oil for HIV Shot Takes Cue From Hemingway’s Old Man
∞ Giraffe Mulling Suicide as ‘Terrorists’ Chant in Cairo
∞ Kill Your Wife While Sleepwalking or Get Goldman Touch

Most news organizations adopt headline conventions that, over time, become institutional clichés. (The New York Times: In Starting With a Prepositional Phrase, a Way to Sound Intelligent. Business Insider: BOOM: Here Is Something Extraordinarily Mundane. Quartz: Why everything you ever believed is a lie, in charts.) Other headlinese words—mull, see, probe, nix—are artifacts of space constraints imposed by narrow newspaper columns.

Space may also have something to do with how Bloomberg headlines got to be so odd. They are limited to 63 characters (45% of a tweet) to ensure the entire headline can fit on a single line of the terminal, which is the primary context in which Bloomberg News articles are read. “Billionaire Dethrones Kings in Beer to Burgers as Batista Model,” the headline on a profile of a Brazilian private-equity baron, ran exactly 63 characters and probably seemed more legible in the terminal than when the article found its way to the web. Much of Bloomberg’s journalism makes less sense as it gets further away from the terminal.

Inscrutability can also be a ploy for clicks. Bloomberg headlines like “Bieber Joins Ex-Addicts Fighting Chase in Prepaid Market” are often just intriguing enough to find out what the hell they mean. Certain terms alluring to Bloomberg’s clientele will find their way to the top of articles that are really about something else, as in this ur-headline (63 characters long): “Steve Jobs Spurs Harvard MBA to Drop McKinsey for China Website.”

Hoyt observed that Goldman Sachs makes regular appearances in Bloomberg headlines that have nothing to do with the bank: “The most egregious, ‘Ex-Goldmanite Trades on Girl Power of Stiletto Networks: Review,’ was over the review of a book by an author last connected with Goldman 11 years ago as a low-ranking associate.”

OK, just a few more:

∞ Ganges Turns Fecal Lab as Wealthy Bathe With Nude Mystics
∞ Where Raptors Roamed Rio’s Dream Stirs Water Worry
∞ Bin Laden’s Parrots Blood Fuel Boom in Pakistan Artists
∞ Forex During Birth Shows Asian Women Top Men Private Bankers

Within Bloomberg, the unofficial house style for headlines is beloved by many; choice examples are often emailed around the office. But the practice is hardly without critics at Bloomberg, who say the news organization should strive to be understood above all. Surely, market-moving headlines about breaking financial news, which many Bloomberg customers rely on for making trades, are almost always written with complete clarity. Why, they ask, shouldn’t everything else be held to the same standard?

The Bloomberg Way, a book by editor-in-chief Matt Winkler that serves as a bible for the company’s reporting, doesn’t mention clarity in its section on headlines. It advises that every headline include two or three of the following elements: “names,” “surprise,” “what’s at stake?,” and “conflict and conflict resolution.” Winkler, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment on his approach to headlines.

Some Bloomberg staffers say headline clarity was already improving before Hoyt’s report, driven by some top editors. That assessment was confirmed by the financier who runs Strange Bloomberg Headlines. (He asked not to be named.)

“It’s no longer an easy job to collect these things,” he said in an interview. “My activity slowed down quite a bit after a few months. The number of really obvious nonsense headlines went down a lot.”

Asked if he would rue a significant crackdown on strange headlines, the man said, “I’d miss them, sure. They’re like little puzzles.”

With the entire world on edge over (possible) impending airstrikes on Syria, it seems that Israel decided to freak everyone out and start launching ballistic missiles into the sea.

mask.of.sanity writes "Hundreds of thousands of internet-accessible devices manufactured Chinese telco ZTE have been found with default or hardcoded usernames and passwords. The devices were discovered in analysis of the huge dataset from the Internet Census run this year. ZTE topped the charts, accounting for 28 percent of all affected devices worldwide. Only one manufacturer has responded to the researcher's bid to supply the data in efforts to stop production of insecure devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

screw-loose-professor:

brain-food:

The Living Cube by Till Könneker

I moved into a apartment studio without storage room. So i made a minimalistic cube design with a shelf for my vinyl collection, my TV, Clothes and Shoes. On the cube is a guest bed and inside the cube is a lot of storage space. Remo from www.holzlaborbern.ch transferred my sketches very beautifully. My friend and Photographer Rob Lewis made this great photos. Info via Behance

Dude. This would be a DREAM come true if i could have one of these in my studio apartment. I mean, after a few glasses of wine i wouldn’t be able to get to my damn bed, but whatever! SOMEBODY TAKE MY MONEY.

You guys, he took a photo of the blueprints right there! You could do this yourself with the right knowledge and tools!

Russian artist Konstantin Altunin, who made international headlines this week after police seized his painting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in women’s underwear, is seeking asylum in France.

The 45-year-old fled Russia on Tuesday night after police raided an art gallery in the northwestern city of Saint Petersburg and confiscated various works, including Altunin’s painting depicting Putin in a pink nightie and Medvedev in a bra and knickers.

Altunin fears he would be arrested if he returned to Russia.

"Yesterday I went to the prefecture in Paris ... and made this request (for asylum). I now need to go through the procedure and bring written confirmation of where I am staying," Altunin told the Agence France-Presse.

In a separate interview with Bloomberg, Altunin said: “I don’t want to return to Russia. I want to live and work in an atmosphere of freedom.”

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doityourselfproject:

Paint primary colors on fan wings