BALTIMORE—Employees at local technology firm Halverson Enterprises remarked to reporters Monday that CEO Peter Weathers, 61, has an extraordinary gift for discovering great ideas and then swiftly running them into the ground with his horrible modifi...

NEW YORK—According to a new report published Friday by the United Nations Development Programme, Raider Nation has for the fifth straight year held the lowest position in the Human Development Index rankings. Taking into account such factors as heal...

Pilbox:

Pilbox is an image resizing application server built on Python’s Tornado web framework using the Python Imaging Library (Pillow). It is not intended to be the primary source of images, but instead acts as a proxy which requests images and resizes them as desired.

The band’s name was inspired by the subtitles of the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, in which the clicking sounds of the Bushmens' Khoisan language were represented as “!”. However, as the bandmembers themselves say, !!! is pronounced by repeating thrice any monosyllabic sound. Chk Chk Chk is the most common pronunciation, but they could just as easily be called Pow Pow Pow, Bam Bam Bam, Uh Uh Uh, Caw Caw Caw, Boo Boo Boo, Faw Faw Faw, Oop Oop Oop, Zee Zee Zee, Gak Gak Gak, Ungh Ungh Ungh, Tak Tak Tak, Eep Eep Eep, Ner Ner Ner, Biz Biz Biz, Loo Loo Loo, Bah Bah Bah, Woop Woop Woop, Pah Pah Pah, Lor Lor Lor, Jis Jis Jis, Yub Yub Yub, Noop Noop Noop, Teek Teek Teek, Lok Lok Lok, Kot Kot Kot, Moo Moo Moo, Wuh Wuh Wuh, Wah Wah Wah, Jer Jer Jer, Psud Psud Psud, etc.

Link

Next Wednesday I'm speaking at the Wade Edwards Foundation and Learning Lab (WELL) to a group of high schoolers about my career in game design and a bit about my previous career in advertising/marketing. In other words, I have no idea what to tell these kids. This opportunity comes at an interesting time, since I'll be about nine months into my first year without the safety net of a full-time salary and benefits. So here are some loose notes that I might touch on:


A Little Personal History

• Early Years: I was first exposed to game design while playing with my step dad. I couldn't figure out how to beat him, so instead I made up my own pieces that moved in their own ways. Sometimes changing mid-game, if I saw I was losing. He was very patient.
• High School: I nearly dropped out of high school in senior year. I was living in a very chaotic situation throughout my childhood and I wanted to escape as quickly as possible. I thought I could get by with a GED and my food service job. Thankfully, a waiter smacked some sense into me before it was too late.  
• College and Advertising: I stuck through the hard days. I worked through college. I got my degree in graphic design, found an internship at an ad agency thanks to some friends, and stuck with that internship until they hired me. I eventually worked my way up to a director position before this year when I decided to devote more time to my true passion: Game Design.

 

 What are Board Games Today?

• Fun, elegant, diverse. Strategy games, dexterity games, co-operative games, with themes ranging from zombies, to trains, to space, to fantasy, to fancy parties. The best are designed  with a modern sense of scale in space and time, never wearing out their welcome before they've stopped being fun.
• Tabletop: You can see some of the best modern classic games out on the market right now being played on Tabletop. There are plenty more games that are just as fun, but they don't work so well on video.
• An international industry with thousands of new products, millions of individuals. There is a sustaining creative and financial force coming out of Europe for the past twenty years, but now that has branched off into major players in USA and Asia.
• Conventions are where the biggest spikes in business happen. Origins is where a lot of business deals get made. Gen Con is where new products are launched. Essen is where the most prestigious awards in game design are bestowed. The PAX conventions are a huge crossover audience between video games and tabletop.
• Perspective: On that note, despite the huge and growing numbers, the tabletop industry is still dwarfed by video games. It can take tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a board game. If it sells more than several thousand copies, it's considered a mega-hit. In video games, all those numbers are multiplied tenfold.

 

 What Games have I Designed?

• Luchacabra: My earliest board games were posted on a blog I called Luchacabra. It's down now, but designing in public really built up a sense of how to prototype efficiently.
• Happy Birthday, Robot! was my first published game. It's a storytelling game for kids where each player rolls dice to determine how many words they and the other players can say in a sentence. Each turn, a new sentence is added, and when the game is over you've created a very silly little story about a robot's birthday.
• Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple was another storytelling game released the following year. This one was inspired a little by Avatar: the Last Airbender, an old French book called the Little Prince, and an anime series called Keno's Journey. Here, players have a little more freedom in what they can add to the story, but the system uses probability as a metaphor for Karma. Each choice affects everyone else's available choices.
• On to Card Games: After that, I devoted more of my attention to the card game genre. Card games are relatively easy to produce, often have a cheap price point making them a good impulse buy, and if I can't find a publisher, they're easy to self-publish. My first two card games to be sold are Koi Pond and Belle of the Ball. I'm also designing an espionage-themed card game for a mystery publisher and I just sold a Princess Bride-themed card game to GameSalute.

 What you Should Learn to Be a Game Designer

• Build up your logic. Learn common mistakes of logic that you'll find in daily life to better equip you for escaping scams, grifts, and peer pressure that will come along. It will also make you a better game designer and game player.
• Learn statistics. You'll always have access to friends that know more math than you, and you'll still bug them for help a lot, but you'll be at a severe handicap unless you learn the essentials of statistics and probability.
• Study human behavior. The more quickly and accurately you can predict human behavior given a set of parameters, the more efficiently you can design and prototype your game. There's no substitute for observation, though.
• Learn business. Even if you don't go into the publishing business, you'll still need to know the basics of how to read a contract, how to make a reasonable deal, and how to manage your own time. This is the least fun part for me, personally, but it's essential if you're going to make a living at this.

 

 Life as an Independent Game Designer

• My inspiration comes from work. I always stay busy with a freelance graphic design job or a prototype I'm tinkering with at the moment. It's by doing work that I'll eventually come up with a breakthrough or a cool little trick, not by just sitting around waiting for some muse.
• I've committed to never design a game that has a violent or gory theme. Partly this is for personal reasons, but also it's a simple business decision. Those themes play well with a certain slice of the audience, but will turn off other audiences who might become a brand new vocal community for your product.
• You can make a living at game design, but it's a very lean living. After all, you can make a living at a lot of things. Game design as a career is tough on the budget, but also much more creatively satisfying. I've no regrets about that transition so far.
• If you sell your games to a publisher, you get paid in Advances and Royalties. Royalties are a percentage of the sale price the publisher chooses for the game. Advances are sort of a down payment, basically the publisher paying you a certain amount ahead of time. If you're lucky, the total royalties you earn will exceed that advance and you can start getting a regular check from the publisher. If this happens, it can take months.
• If you sell your own games, you'll probably use Kickstarter. [obligatory Kickstarter explanation here] I currently have a game on Kickstarter now, hosted by my publisher. [Explain Belle of the Ball]
• I couldn't have had a career in game design unless I had other careers: Graphic design, marketing, writing, etc. And I couldn't have those careers unless I had a broad pool of experience from college and life in general. 

And that's all I've got so far. I'm not sure what else to say or if any of this will be relevant to a group of teenagers. We'll see, I guess!

An anonymous reader writes "Last night the €500,000 INDEX: Award was awarded to five designs that can improve life for millions of people around the world. The winners include high-tech highways that light up at night, the $25 Raspberry Pi computer, a simple piece of paper that can cut food waste by extending the life of fresh produce by 2-4 weeks, and a plan for adapting to climate change."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

meme4u:

so high

septagonstudios:

Morgaen Muñoz ON TUMBLR

BLACK THUMB

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

blah blah Gladwell

Playing football is about as safe as running head-first into a concrete wall, an increasing amount of research finds — and pop-science author Malcolm Gladwell isn't afraid to say it. The New Yorker staffer has been critical of the sport in the past, earning the ire of conservatives for whom concussions and brain lesions are just part of being a real American. But his latest musings on the subject, as aired in the new documentary United States of Football, are sure to stir further outrage from lovers of the brutal sport.

According a report on CBS Sports, in the documentary — which opens tomorrow — Gladwell says in the film that the convincing, frightening linkage between football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy will lead to a nationwide scenario in which "we will disclose the risks and essentially dare people to play…That's what the Army does. So we leave the Army for kids who have other options, for whom the risks are acceptable."

The comparison between football and the military is not new; in fact, faux-macho conservatives make it happily themselves. Coming from a detractor, however, it will seem to cast aspersions on both sides of the analogy.

You'll get mad at the term "ghettoized", I'm mad at how Gladwell insulted the army in his football comparison http://t.co/4fuj9k40xa

— Thomas Galicia (@thomasgalicia) August 29, 2013

Even more controversial will surely be the following statement by Gladwell: “That's what football is going to become. It's going to become the Army. That's a very, very different situation. That's a ghettoized sport, not a mainstream American sport.”

Some on Twitter are already enraged by Gladwell's use of "ghettoized," though that outrage does not appear to be fully justified:

Not sure which is making people angrier, people wanting a living wage or Malcolm Gladwell saying "ghettoized" in relation to their football.

— ThatsSoTaguchi (@ThatsSoTaguchi) August 29, 2013

Of course, Gladwell used "ghettoized" to mean segregated culturally — much as smoking has become "ghettoized" in the last decade or so. However, there is some innuendo here, for most everyone knows that the people who do continue playing in college and beyond tend to be from the inner city or rural areas of dire poverty. Some of these young men may play for the love of the game; many surely do so because they have been offered no better path to success.

                                                                                                            (Chart via The Atlantic Cities)

United States of Football director Sean Pamphilon endeavored to explain Gladwell's remarks, telling CBS Sports, "His assertion is that it's [football] going to stay relevant at least for the time being in lower income areas and then also football hot beds such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, certainly Texas, places were it transcends socio-economic conditions." Pamphilon also made the comparison between football and the military.

News of Gladwell's latest broadside comes on the same day as the National Football League agreed to pay out almost $800 million in the settlement of a lawsuit by former players who've suffered neurological damage from too many ten-yard fights. Earlier this week came news that the NFL pressured ESPN to bow out of involvement in a documentary that was going to critically portray the sport.

None of this, however, can stop the relentless onslaught of scientific fact. 

Photos: Associated Press

Original Source

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meme4u:

dream is mainstream

djempirical

embeds got gone. here they are back to back:

http://youtu.be/QK8mJJJvaes?t=20s

http://youtu.be/Nrnq4SZ0luc?t=20s

they’re definitely similar, though i don’t think to a degree beyond perhaps “influence”.

i much prefer “Wut”’s beat overall, though.

Original Source

hypnosec writes "The Government of India is planning to ban the use of U.S.-based email services like Gmail for official communications. It will soon send out a formal notification to it half-million officials across the country, asking them to use official email addresses and services provided by India's National Informatics Center. The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and protect it from overseas surveillance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet of Soil and Strife, Dies - NYTimes.com:

Seamus Heaney, a widely celebrated Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, died at a hospital in Dublin on Friday after a short illness, according to a statement issued on behalf of his family. He was 74.

Mr. Heaney, who was born in Northern Ireland but moved to Dublin in his later years, is recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. His fellow poet Robert Lowell described Mr. Heaney as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.”

In a statement, Faber & Faber, which published his work for nearly 50 years, called him “one of the world’s greatest writers. His impact on literary culture is immeasurable.”

Born April 13, 1939, on a farm near Toomebridge in Co. Derry, Mr. Heaney gained prominence in the 1960s after his debut with the “Death of a Naturalist.” His volumes of poetry include “The Spirit Level,” “District and Circle” and “Bog Poems.”

Under constant pressure to write favorably about the goals of his fellow Catholics, many of whom wanted a Northern Ireland free of British control, his work often dwelt on the sectarian violence in the British province of Ulster.

But he saw both sides of the conflict and never wrote polemics to support the violent campaign of the Irish Republican Army. He resented and attacked British oppression, but admired much in British culture and English literature. He was rare among modern poets in that not only the vast majority of critics and academics praised him, but millions of readers also bought him. By some estimates he was the best-read living poet in the world at in recent decades.

The accessibility of his work helped. It had references to Greek and Celtic legend, but was usually clear, often dazzling with images of nature, epiphanies of the soul. He wrote about bogs and rocks and streams and transformed them into the settings for the moral problems in a way that seemed to reach not only agnostic intellectuals, but also believing Catholics.

In “Digging,” the first poem in his first collection, “The Death of a Naturalist,” he exposed his method:

“The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.”

The Irish Times said in an editorial after he won the Nobel Prize: “Book sales may not mean much in the areas of fiction or biography, but for a poet to sell in the thousands is remarkable proof to his ability to speak in his poems to what are inadequately called ‘ordinary people.’ Yet the popularity of his work should not be allowed to obscure the fact that this deep, at times profound poetry, forged through hard thinking and an attentive, always tender openness to the world, especially the natural world.”

Writing in a collection of his lectures in 1995, “The Redress of Poetry, Mr. Heaney said: “It is in the space between the farmhouse and the playhouse that one discovers what I’ve called ‘the frontier of writing,’ the line that divides the actual conditions of our daily lives from the imaginative representations of those conditions in literature.”

In the 1984 collection, “Station Island,” he wrote: “The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night, dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.”

He is survived by his wife, Marie, and his children, Christopher, Michael and Catherine Ann.

On Twitter, Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness said: “Very shocked & deeply saddened to hear that Seamus Heaney, Derry man, poet & Nobel Laureate has died. My thoughts & prayers with Marie & family.”

With "Man of Steel" set to debut in Japan, director Zack Snyder discussed what motivated the controversial destruction in the film's climactic battle between Superman and Zod.

But more trouble was around the corner for Hernandez after he and his fiancée Shayanna Jenkins were involved in a domestic dispute in March, the magazine reports. Belichick, according to the magazine, "exploded" after hearing about it and threatened to dump the former tight end at the end of the 2013 season if more incidents occurred. "Mortified, Hernandez returned to Boston; Belichick, per a close Hernandez associate, had told him to lay low, rent a safe house for a while," the magazine reported. Hernandez would eventually rent a condominium in Franklin, Mass., just miles from his North Attleborough mansion. The condo was identified as a "flop house" in court documents and it's where authorities say they found incriminating items that police believe link him to Lloyd's murder. In a July press conference, Belichick said Hernandez's June 26 arrest was the first he learned of the 23-year-old's problems with the law.

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OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

This is huge, right? This is a big deal?

According to a big new announcement from the IRS and the Treasury Department, if you’re a legally married gay couple, the federal government will recognize your marriage — even if you live in a state where your marriage isn’t legal.

The statement, released by the Treasury Department Thursday, says that department and the IRS will use a “place of celebration” rule in recognizing same-sex unions (recognition that was illegal before the Supreme Court struck down part of the Defense of Marriage Act last month). That means that the U.S. government recognizes a marriage if the union was legally recognized in the place where it occurred, where it was celebrated. That’s true even if the married couple then lives in a state where gay marriage is illegal.

The press release lays this out very clearly: “The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) today ruled that same-sex couples, legally married in jurisdictions that recognize their marriages, will be treated as married for federal tax purposes. The ruling applies regardless of whether the couple lives in a jurisdiction that recognizes same-sex marriage or a jurisdiction that does not recognize same-sex marriage.”

There was some concern among gay rights groups after the high court’s ruling that the federal government would instead adhere to a “place of residence” rule in recognizing same-sex unions, which would make it much harder for couples living in states that ban such unions to gain legal recognition. Indeed, the IRS usually complies with a place of residence rule but went against precedent in this case.

That means that if you live, say, in Fairfax County in Virginia, where same-sex marriage is illegal, you can simply marry your same-sex partner in nearby Washington, D.C., or Maryland, where it’s legal, and the federal government will treat you as married. Or, if you live in Washington, get married, and then move to Virginia, you won’t lose federal recognition of your marriage.

What’s more, the rule is retroactive. As the press release puts it: “Generally, the statute of limitations for filing a refund claim is three years from the date the return was filed or two years from the date the tax was paid, whichever is later. As a result, refund claims can still be filed for tax years 2010, 2011, and 2012.”

Given that same-sex couples are likelier to have similar incomes than opposite-sex couples (which is why the Congressional Budget Office scored legal same-sex marriage as increasing revenue and reducing the deficit), the number of people eligible for refunds in those years will be considerably smaller than the total married population. And the tax bill for many couples will grow going forward.

This is a big first step to general federal recognition of same-sex marriages. And the government took a second step, too. The Department of Health and Human Services ruled Thursday that legally wedded same-sex couples, wherever they live, are eligible for certain Medicare benefits reserved for married couples. In its memo, HHS “specifically clarifies that this guarantee of coverage applies equally to couples who are in a legally recognized same-sex marriage, regardless of where they live.”

“Today, Medicare is ensuring that all beneficiaries will have equal access to coverage in a nursing home where their spouse lives, regardless of their sexual orientation,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner said in a statement. “Prior to this, a beneficiary in a same-sex marriage enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan did not have equal access to such coverage and, as a result, could have faced time away from his or her spouse or higher costs because of the way that marriage was defined for this purpose.”

It’s still not all federal government roses for these couples. Social Security uses a place of residence rule, and has issued instructions to personnel to deny claims for spousal benefits from  same-sex couples living in states where such marriages are not recognized. But the overall trend is toward a federal government that offers benefits to as expansive a set of same-sex married couples as possible.

Original Source

Dave Chappelle is in the midst of a “comeback tour,” after previously getting sick of frat bros screaming “I’M RICK JAMES, BITCH!” at him. In Hartford, CT, last night, Chappelle ran into his old friends for an unhappy reunion.

Magnificent Ruin

Anyone who lived through the 90s knows color-change technology---from T-shirts to free cereal spoons to doll hair---is nothing new. But it turns out even the ancient Romans had mastered the art of color-change, and to do so they relied on some pretty advanced feats of engineering. The Lycurgus Cup is a 1,600-year-old glass chalice housed at the British Museum. Under normal light it's a washed-out green color---but magically transforms to a blood-red vessel when lit from behind. This colo