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abraxasbooks:

Viktoria Luise Adelheid Mathilde Charlotte von Preußen, Herzogin zu Braunschweig-Lüneburg, Prinzessin von Hannover, Prinzessin von Großbritannien und Irland.

With my permission, my “Interstates as Subway Map” is featured on the cover of a new report, Moving Off the Road: A State-by-State Analysis of the National Decline in Driving, released today by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).

Given the subject matter of the report, my image becomes a nice little visual metaphor, don’t you think?

Read some background information on the report here, or download it here (PDF).

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cold fjord writes with this news, straight from the BBC: "One of the biggest canyons in the world has been found beneath the ice sheet that smothers most of Greenland. The canyon — which is 800km long and up to 800m deep — was carved out by a great river more than four million years ago ... It was discovered by accident as scientists researching climate change mapped Greenland's bedrock by radar. The British Antarctic Survey said it was remarkable to find so huge a geographical feature previously unseen. The hidden valley is longer than the Grand Canyon in Arizona. ... The ice sheet, up to 3km (2 miles) thick, is now so heavy that it makes the island sag in the middle (central Greenland was previously about 500m above sea level, now it is 200m below sea level)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paper Mario, Uncle Scrooge, & more in Spelunky ⊟

Besides its Daily Challenges feature, one of the bonuses of the PC version for Spelunky HD that’s not in the PSN editions is the ability to mod the game. Here you can see several edits people made to play as Mario, Pauline, and even Uncle Scrooge. They’ve also skinned the stages and swapped out the damsels you can rescue. You can see and grab these mods from BoogieLove, Headbox, and Radioduke at the Spelunky forums.

Have I mentioned how jealous I am that the PS Vita version doesn’t have Daily Challenges? Apparently Spelunky creator Derek Yu says it’s a possibility that the PSN versions will receive it somehow, and that he intends to discuss the matter with BlitWorks (the studio that ported Spelunky to PSN). There’s no guarantee that anything will come out of those talks, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for that update, but at least there’s hope.

While we’re talking about Spelunky and Nintendo-themed mods, someone used a hack and finally found a use for the Kid Icarus-esque eggplant item. This seems impossible to pull off without cheating.

BUY PS Vita, upcoming games 

"We have pretty much lived like gypsies for the past year and a half. We've lived in a 20-foot trailer in the woods, scared every night that someone would go and find us and that it would be horrific," she said. "I can't tell you how many nights I've gone or laid awake at night just thinking that I wish to God the circumstances had been different."

San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer has emerged as the antithesis to the Koch brothers, the conservative American industrialists who have bankrolled the Tea Party and other right-wing causes. Steyer has financed ballot initiatives, non-profits and think tanks to promote renewable energy, climate-change activism, and to derail the Keystone XL pipeline. Now he appears to be taking it to the streets.

In a blog post today to mark the 50th anniversary of the black civil-rights movement’s March on Washington, Steyer riffs on whether the time is right for non-violent civil disobedience to protest the continued inaction on climate change as the effects of global warming accelerate.

“Americans are not willing to put up with denial any longer. Opinions are shifting—hard and fast,” Steyer writes, citing a poll that found 13% of Americans would commit civil disobedience to put pressure on politicians over climate change. “People understand the risks as they begin to see and feel the impacts, and are tired of the dysfunction that is preventing change. All that these individuals need is a clear, direct action to take.”

Steyer cites Martin Luther King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In the letter, King laid out his principles for protest in the face of unjust laws and police brutality—themes that would echo in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC months later.

“When you consider the impact climate change will have on our collective future, it is instructive to remember what Martin Luther King had to say about the power of non-violent civil disobedience in that letter,” Steyer writes. “ Dr. King’s key insight is not just that outright oppressors never give up their advantages willingly, but also that moderates never advocate any direct, non-violent, attack on the status quo because they are actually satisfied with it.”

“For the sake of our own struggle, this point is worth keeping in mind,” he adds. “Because of self-interest, the dirty energy industry will always engage in fierce, intense opposition.  But what about the moderates of our era?  Are they still satisfied with the status quo? I think not.”

Steyer’s post stops just barely short of calling outright for mass civil disobedience over climate change. He wouldn’t be the first to do so—Bill McKibben’s 350.org has been leading the charge on that front—but it marks another evolution of the once media-shy founder of Farallon Capital Management (he retired in 2012) into a vocal critic of the fossil-fuel industry and its political supporters.

A major donor to Democratic candidates, Steyer spoke at the 2012 Democratic Convention. But unlike the secretive Koch brothers, whom Steyer defeated in a 2010 ballot battle over California’s landmark global warming law, he seems increasingly comfortable in the limelight.

“Thomas Jefferson thought that 15% of the general population was the number needed for accomplishing significant transformation,” Steyer concludes in his blog post. “If he was correct, this may represent a tipping point.  We may be on the precipice of major change. Let’s hope we are.”

An innovative approach to decking over the Mass Pike through Boston.

Building a surface street above the highway and replacing the frontage roads with development.

From archBoston

Mayor Charlie Hales' push to create a vibrant, walkable "entertainment district" in Old Town took a step forward earlier this month, when the Portland Police Bureau began fielding applications from bars and restaurants who want to extend seating into the area's cordoned streets.

That's a potential game changer for a district that's struggled to find its feet his summer. Despite the mayor's talk of creating a "street festival" atmosphere, and the addition of portable toilets in recent weeks, the closed-off segments of NW 3rd and adjacent streets still feel empty and eerie most Saturdays.

But more than two weeks after the city announced it would accept applications, only one Old Town business has taken them up on the offer. According to documents obtained by the Mercury via open records request, the Dixie Tavern, at NW 3rd and Couch, is the lone bar in the area with aspiring streetward.

The tavern's owners, Concept Entertainment, applied August 16 to install a 780-square-foot seating area in NW Couch during the weekend closures. The enclosure would hold 48 seats and house a food stand, according to plans Concept provided. Portland police approved the plan a week ago.

City rules dictate the seating enclosures can extend no more than 10 feet into the road, and must be staffed by at least one bouncer. They can contain performers and food carts, the city says, but no "adult entertainers/nude dancers," speakers or games. Businesses have to file an additional application with the Oregon Liquor Control Commission if they want alcohol allowed in street seating areas.

Begun under then-Mayor Sam Adams late last year, the entertainment zone concept has been a priority of Hales' who has repeatedly pushed it as a way to make the nightclub district more safe. Not everyone's been enthused about the project, though. Businesses complain it's hurting the bottom line, and Old Town residents don't like the legitimacy it gives to rowdy antics that can take place in the area. Even several city commissioners, who acquiesced earlier this year to Hales' request for an extension to the program, have had hard questions.

The pilot project is now scheduled to end October 27.

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Bledsoe's post-playing career has been a pretty awesome one by any standard, considering he's established a winery, a private investment firm, a specialty coffee roasting company and the Drew Bledsoe Foundation since retiring seven years ago. Recently, he added to that resume by accepting the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach opening under head coach Joe Padilla at Summit High in Bend, Ore., where Bledsoe, his wife and their four children make their home.

Mei the cat plays with moving windshield wipers and gas station employees wiping down the windshield with cleaning cloths in these funny videos by ayapanyan.

via LiveLeak, Daily Picks and Flicks

You asked for it and now it's finally here: Digg and Digg Reader for Android.

After creating two TV shows in which underdogs are pitted against the elite in scenarios involving murder and being rude about catering, Veronica Mars and Party Down’s Rob Thomas is going back to one of the original rich vs. poor vs. food stories with a contemporary TV take on Les Misérables for Fox, one that doesn’t involve Hugh Jackman singing. And—because this is 2013, and Thomas therefore has a choice among making a cop, doctor, or lawyer show—he’ll turn Jean Valjean into a “brilliant lawyer running a legal exoneration program who fights to evade the consequences of his own unjust conviction many years before.” In the modern, sexy lawyer version, presumably he is arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, then having sex with it.

Anyway, much like The Fugitive before it (and much like ABC’s Revenge is to The Count Of Monte ...

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The GNOME Web Browser will no longer be using Google as its default search engine but they have struck a deal to use DuckDuckGo as its new search engine...

South Side, Chicago.

Easter 1941.

Over at The Digital Bits, Bill Hunt has a breakdown of what Paramount has decided to do with their Blu-ray release of Star Trek Into Darkness:

The seven featurettes listed in the press release are basically everything you get on the disc, aside from the usual DVD copy, Digital Copy, UltraViolet copy, Xerox copy and what not. The featurettes amount to about 42 minutes of EPK-style behind the scenes material. There’s no commentary, no deleted scenes, no trailers… which would be bad enough.

Except…

It turns out that more extras were created for this release—more featurettes and even an audio commentary with director J.J. Abrams and members of his crew. None of it is available on the wide release Blu-ray or Blu-ray 3D SKUs. The commentary can only be found as an iTunes “extra” download. And those extra featurettes? Some are on a Target bonus disc. Some are on a Best Buy bonus disc. And some are only available via CinemaNow and VUDU downloads.

In other words, if you (legally) want all the special features for Into Darkness, you have to buy at least three copies of the movie, from three different places. This isn't interesting not because of what those extras are so much as it's more proof that the very businesses who would benefit from shoring up physical media are instead hastening its demise.

Speaking as someone with a stupidly large Blu-ray and DVD collection—and who realized last time I moved that 90 percent of the crap all my friends had to lug up and down stairs were goddamn books—there are still legitimate reasons to still buy movies on physical media: audio and visuals that still vastly exceed streaming quality, being able to watch something even when it's been yanked from Netflix, and, in the case of things like Criterion releases, having related essays and art kept with the film itself. For me, the biggest draws are still well-produced, thoughtful supplementary materials and extra features, which are growing increasingly rare but can still vastly impact one's perceptions of a film. Realistically speaking—and like everybody else—I watch more stuff via streaming than I do on disc, but I also like having discs of films or shows that I know I'll be revisiting a lot.

But movie nerds like me are pretty much the only people still buying Blu-rays—just as music nerds are the only people still buying vinyl, or book nerds are the only people still dropping $35 on a hardcover. Casual consumers—which is to say, everyone else—has moved on. Which means that in order for physical media to keep going, it needs to provide things that digital can't. I always think of McSweeney's whenever this comes up, but you can make the comparison across media, too, apply it to the Alien Anthology Blu-ray or whatever: You have to provide something that people want to physically own, despite its inconvenience. You can do this by creating beautiful and unique things (McSweeney's), or can do this by creating things that attain some level of definitiveness, appealing to fans' completist tendencies (Alien Anthology). And once you've targeted die-hards as your target market, you can usually charge a premium to justify the extra work and time that goes into making these things, as opposed to just uploading a file somewhere for people to buy and/or steal.

The Into Darkness thing, though, is the opposite of all of that: If you have a stake in physical media continuing to sell—which studios very well should—then it doesn't make sense to make it harder for people to get what they want on physical media. Because once you do that, you remind people how much easier it is to just buy something digitally—or not buy anything at all.

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Click to enlarge This used to be my brother's favourite cake, but is now in second place after a confection called a Dream Cake. Here is the recipe: The way my mother makes this cake is actually a marriage of two recipes: for a sponge cake and for something called a Sunshine Cake with caramel topping. The caramel goes on top of the sponge cake instead of the Sunshine Cake. The caramel is

Yow. Parfumerie Guerlain splashed out the big bucks for this nearly six-minute spot shot on 35mm film on location in India. (NSFW: NUDITY) Directed by Bruno Aveillan, it takes epic creative license with the story of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan … more »

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

This is the first page of a 3-page article. :|

Our epic coffee run yielded five different cups of coffee from four establishments in Brookline.

Original Source

Boston Globe

Boston Marathon Bombing Update: Friend of suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev ... CBS News (CBS/AP) BOSTON - Robel Phillipos, a friend of surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was indicted Thursday for allegedly making false statements to authorities. PICTURES: Boston bombing victims · PICTURES: Boston Marathon ... Grand jury indicts marathon bombing palThe Australian Tsarnaev's Friend Indicted on Charges of Making False StatementsWFJA Classic Hits and Oldies 105.5 FM Boston Marathon bombing suspect's friend indictedCorvallis Gazette Times The Coloradoan all 84 news articles »

Yesterday evening in New York City, Google’s Glass team threw a party. It brought together “Explorers” and “Influencers”—the lucky few people who got to try out the computerized glasses Google is developing. Over cocktails and hors d’oeuvres, the diverse crowd gushed about the joys and dissected the drawbacks of the device, which they’ve been wearing for the last few months.

The takeaway? Google Glass is not for who you think it is. Though Google has been promoting the device with heart-warming videos on rollercoaster rides and in children’s playgrounds, for the next few years at least, its main customers will be large businesses.

Members of the Glass operations team have been on the road showing it off to companies and organizations, and they told Quartz that some of the most enthusiastic responses have come from manufacturers, teachers, medical companies, and hospitals. That suggests that they may be trying to persuade firms to buy the device and develop applications for it. (Google had not responded to a request for comment by the time of publication.)

Those potential uses are manifold. For example, two Explorers I spoke to gushed about inventory programs they were developing that could save manufacturers tens of thousands of dollars in compliance costs. Currently, manufacturers hire expensive consultants to help them keep track of inventory and guard against stuff going missing or being stolen. They may even shut down for a few days to make sure their books are in order. But if the employees are wearing Glass, a simple app could not only record them taking inventory, but even recognize products automatically and transmit data about them to a company’s servers, to make sure stock doesn’t run out.

Other uses of Glass would be in medicine. Both new and experienced surgeons could transmit what they’re seeing during a procedure to colleagues for advice. It could also serve as a medical device. One Glass user—a patient with brain damage—has been using it to take pictures of where he left his keys so that he can find them later.

Finance companies are already taking to Glass. We’ve written previously about how it could streamline decision-making for bankers. Boston-based Fidelity Investments has already developed an app that will help Glass users monitor markets.

This is not to say that ordinary people won’t ever use Glass. But not too many people are likely to walk down the street sporting it—at least not anytime soon. Explorers I spoke to agreed that the device can get in the way of normal social interaction. The head movements that control the device can masquerade as normal gestures, they said, disrupting conversations and making other people feel uncomfortable. Its notifications can be distracting and—though this gets better with practice—it’s still hard to navigate and control.

Moreover, even the consumer-oriented apps that Explorers said they were developing weren’t things you might use continuously, but had specific purposes. Some talked about apps that would help a shopper find a specific product in a store. Another mused that mechanics connected to Glass could help stranded drivers fix their cars.

These aren’t the kinds of uses that keep a Glass on your face 24/7. They also require a lot of investment and development by retail companies, and that may not come until a fair number of people have Glass. Right now, there are only around 10,000.

So you might one day walk down the street with Glass glued to your face. But at least in the near term, it could be your boss who makes you start wearing one.

Maybe you heard that collective grumbling from the San Francisco Bay Area last month, when the region's main public transportation system, known as BART, ground to a halt for four and a half days.

America's worst frats: from over-the-top racism and hazing deaths to sexual assaults and caches of automatic weapons.

"There’s been a sort of trend for awhile of people writing strong women as women who are morally right, which is so uninteresting. It's no fun and frankly it's a massive disservice to womankind. It boxes us in to making these sort of slightly dull, virtuous choices... We need to be villains too. We need to be messy and sloppy and three-dimensional and complicated, and that’s writing a strong woman."—Rebecca Hall tells it like it is about female characters while discussing her new movie Closed Circuit. Preach it, Ms. Hall. People all too often throw around the phrase "strong female character" like there's only one way for a female character to be strong. You know what I'm talking about: Your butt kicking, heroic, "don't need anybody but myself" badass. And she's great! But she's not enough. Give us female characters who are physically strong and physically weak. Morally bad and morally good. Mentally secure and struggling to keep it together. Give us female characters who are strong by virtue of being actual, complex human beings. And yes, while you're at it, give us more female villains. Those are my jam. (via: The Wrap) Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Frontback:

Take a photo with the front camera, another with the back camera, and share them both in a single image.

Selfies, contextualised.

App Store

You might recall we recently posted a photo of Geena Davis donning her old A League of Their Own costume while holding her professional archery gear. Well now we know the context. The actress and creator of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media teamed up with Funny or Die for a spectacular shoot (shoot being used here in two different contexts). I am now bumping Ms. Davis to the top of my list for women who should star in the female Expendables. And also, anything else. Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

A judge has accepted a settlement in which the NFL will pay former players $765 million over the issue of concussions. According to the agreement, the terms of the settlement break down the money as such: baseline medical exams, which will be capped at $75 million; a separate fund of $675 million to compensate former players who have suffered cognitive injury or their families; a separate research and education fund of $10 million; the costs of notice to the members of the class, which will not exceed $4 million; $2 million, representing half of the compensation of the Settlement Administrator for a period of 20 years; and legal fees and litigation expenses to the plaintiffs’ counsel, which amounts will be set by the District Court. SI.com's Peter King reported that legal fees will be paid out separately, so that could raise the total cost to nearly $1 billion. The early takes: The monetary total appears startling on the surface, and it makes you wonder how much more it might have been had this gone to trial. But it's not the bank-breaking sum some legal analysts predicted, and it certainly is not a figure that will bankrupt the NFL, which has been awash in profits for years, bringing in somewhere on the order of $10 billion per year.