firehose

Antarctica

From The Field - More Denver Distortion

Another weirdly squashed map of Denver’s light rail system: this time compressed horizontally. Would it have killed them to make the sign a little wider?

Taken at the 18th & California station.

Finally, some good news for the bees. The US government today said it is restricting the use of some neonicotinoids—a type of agricultural pesticide implicated in the mass die-off of honey bees, which has raised fears about the future of the food supply in the US and Europe.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will require the use of a warning label on four neonicotinoids—imidacloprid, dinotefuran, clothianidin and thiamethoxam—that prohibits their use when bees and other pollinators are present.

The move follows the European Union’s ban in April on the use of neonicotinoids for two years, as well as a spate of studies that link the interaction of numerous pesticides and fungicides to bee deaths. Over the past six years, 10 million beehives worth $2 billion in the US have been lost to Colony Collapse Disorder, an affliction that leads to the sudden death of all bees in a hive. Bees pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US—one-third of an American’s diet—and the decline in bee populations has raised fears that the country is one bad winter away from the inability to pollinate almonds, blueberries and other fruits and vegetables.

But the restriction on these four substances won’t be a panacea. As we recently reported, a study found that pollen collected by bees on the east coast of the US was contaminated by as many as 21 different pesticides, eight of which lowered bees’ resistance to disease-carrying parasites.

Another study released yesterday found that supposedly bee-friendly plants sold in nurseries across the country were contaminated with the same neonicotinoids the EPA prohibited today. EPA spokesman Dale Kemery told Quartz the new prohibitions would not be applied to nursery plants.

“While this is a step in the right direction, it falls far short of what is needed to protect bees and other pollinators from pesticides that a growing body of evidence show are harming and killing them,”  Lisa Archer, the director of the food program for Friends of the Earth, told Quartz in an email, adding that the restrictions should include nursery plants.

duessa:

technoskittles:

The blue screen of death everyone

Fucking amazing.

This makes me so happy. I saw something rare - an ad, with a (warrior) woman that’s not sexualized! Instead she was shown as glorious and powerful.

Riders of Rohan make me very happy, just like LOTRO. I was looking through their concept art and screenshots, and let’s just say, I’m really tempted to try out this game! Just the ad alone made me want to look it up!

In the future…

purging

A Romanian princess and her husband, a former sheriff's deputy, are apparently among several people federal agents arrested in Oregon on Thursday in connection with an alleged cockfighting ring. Indictments unsealed in U.S. District Court in Portland charge Irina Walker, 60, and her husband John Wesley Walker, 67, with hosting cockfighting derbies and illegal gambling at their ranch outside the small Morrow County town of Irrigon. The Oregonian newspaper identified Irina Walker, also known as Irina Kreuger, as a daughter of the last king of Romania. Personnel records show John Wesley Walker was a sheriff's deputy from 1998 to 2003.

Alcohol is already forbidden in county parks. But officials want to crack down on rafters who bring coolers of beer and other alcoholic beverages through places like Barton Park on their way to float the Clackamas River. Alcohol is permitted on state-regulated waterways. The proposed ordinance would allow sheriff’s deputies to search coolers and other containers for alcohol. People who resist the searches could be excluded from the county park.

A tour developed by the non-profit Know Your City and held in conjunction with the Portland Art Museum's Cyclepedia Exhibition, will introduce you to our vaunted bike culture. Dubbed, America’s Bicycle Capital: A tour of Portland’s Many Bike Cultures, the ride will leave from PAM at 10:00 am and visit sites and personalities that, "define our city’s bike culture — from bike advocacy to Zoobombers." Guest speakers on the ride include: PBOT staffer Timo Forsberg (also a veteran volunteer with Shift); Ayleen Crotty, who edits ORBike.com and organizes many well-known bike events; Dingo Dizmal, the man who made the (now defunct) Alberta Clown House famous; and Rex Burkholder, a former Metro councilor who helped start the Bicycle Transportation Alliance. The tour is free and everyone is welcome. Here's more from the ride flyer: "Along the ride, we’ll learn about the history of bicycles in Oregon and visit famous bike-related businesses, artworks, and landmarks. Whether you’re a seasoned cyclist or a novice, you’ll enjoy learning about Portland’s offbeat and colorful bike community." Advertisement Then at 1:00 pm, the Portland Architectural Heritage Center is doing their first ever bicycle tour. The ride will be an educational journey of Portland's legendary Olmsted park plan. Expert regional planners and historians Steve Dotterrer and Richard Ross will lead participants through southeast Portland's historic Olmsted landscapes including: the Springwater Corridor, Ross Island Park, Sellwood Park, Sellwood Bluff Parkway, Eastmoreland and Reed College Place, Reed College Campus, Kenilworth Park, Laurelhurst Park, Dr. James Hawthorne Gravesite, Ladd Circle, and Ladd/Elliott boulevards. Registration is required for the Olmsted Parks ride and there's an $18 fee for the public (members of the AHC are $10). Learn more on their website. Also on August 24th is a bicycle tour that will showcase new murals created as part of the Portland International Mural Festival. Gage Hamilton with non-profit art group Forest for the Trees, says this tour will take riders to brand new murals that are all being created over the course of one week (August 18th-25th) by four local artists as well as artists from Japan, Australia, Brazil, and Canada. Gage said the inspiration for the tour was, " a way to highlight the murals and tie them all together in true Portland fashion, I wanted to have a viewing route by bike." For more information, check out the Forest for the Trees website.

Rebecca J. Rubin is set to change her plea from not guilty to guilty on Oct. 10, according to court documents. Rubin, who was hiding out in Canada, walked up to a border crossing in Washington state last November and turned herself over to the FBI in a prearranged deal with her attorney. In Oregon, she's charged with conspiracy to commit arson and arson against the Bureau of Land Management's Wild Horse Corrals near Burns in 1997 and attempted arson at the U.S. Forest Industries office building in Medford in 1998. She's also facing charges in connection with the 1998 arson attacks against the BLM Wild Horse Corrals in Wyoming, a similar facility in California and the Vail Ski Resort in Colorado. The charges stem from an arson spree in five Western states between 1996 and 2001 that caused $40 million in damage. Rubin, a Canadian citizen and former wildlife researcher, was part of a group that called itself "the Family." Acting under the auspices of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, the groups cells committed 20 arsons, the government alleges.

“Both sides sounded keen,” China Mobile’s chairman Xi Gouhua said today after releasing first half earnings (paywall). Xi was referring to Apple and his company, which are in talks for China Mobile to offer iPhones to its subscribers. Apple CEO Tim Cook met Xi in Beijing last month, to discuss “cooperation.”

Both sides have plenty of reasons to be keen. China Mobile has 740 million subscribers, or two out of every three Chinese mobile users, making it the world’s largest mobile carrier. But less than a fifth of its subscribers have signed up for 3G data plans, which offer faster data connections and bring in much greater revenue per user for carriers. Already data accounts for a third of China Mobile’s revenues. Yet it lags behind its smaller rivals: more than a third of China Unicom’s subscribers have a 3G plan while half of China Telecom’s do. If it offered the iPhone, it would undoubtedly see an uptick in 3G numbers. That’s especially important at a time when voice and SMS revenues are eroding thanks to online services such as WeChat.

As for Apple, there are reasons beyond the obvious attractions of getting the world’s largest operator to offer its devices in the iPhone’s second-largest market. In its second-quarter earnings release, Apple said its overall revenue slumped by 43% in the Greater China region, which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong. Apple’s share of China’s smartphone market has fallen to below 5% from 9% in the first quarter of this year, according to Canalys, a research firm. It stood at 13% in Q1 last year, according to Strategy Analytics. The pace of decline in market share is increasing.

A deal with a carrier that gives Apple a big bump in iPhone sales would help its market share, revenue and no doubt its self-esteem. One estimate pegs the number of potential customers on China Mobile’s network at a whopping 40 million. Compare that to the total of 136 million iPhones Apple sold globally sold in 2012.

That puts China Mobile in a strong position to bargain with Apple for a better deal than other carriers, which must guarantee a minimum number of orders. Those deals are expensive for the cellular companies. Both China Telecom and China Unicom have seen profits slip on the cost of subsidizing handsets. China Mobile exceeded analyst expectations with its earnings today but is struggling with high operational costs from investment in new equipment and—you guess it—handset subsidies. Analysts are already predicting China Mobile’s first annual profit decline in 14 years.

Looking at the long term though, the timing couldn’t be better for a tie-up between Apple and China Mobile. One of the reasons that the Californian firm and the Chinese carrier haven’t been able to agree on a deal so far is that Apple’s hardware was incompatible with China Mobile’s network. That problem could be solved on Sept. 10, when rumors suggest Apple will introduce new models using compatible CDMA technology. That same product launch could also see the release of Apple’s “cheap” iPhone, expected to be priced at between $250-$350. Taking into account carrier subsidies, it is conceivable that the device could take on Xiaomi’s low-cost, high-performance devices, some of which go for as little as $130.

Another reason Chinese consumers may rush out to get data plans is that China Mobile is building an LTE network (LTE stands for long-term evolution; LTE networks are a successor to 3G), which it will probably roll out by the end of the year. All those people without smartphones could potentially leapfrog straight ahead to super fast mobile broadband on shiny new Apple devices. Looked at that way, China Mobile’s disadvantages—its low subscriber base for data and lack of iPhone support—may turn out to be just what drives growth in the coming years.

An anonymous reader writes "Best Buy and Barnes and Noble have a problem with showrooming — shoppers checking out the merchandise in their stores and then proceeding to order the goods at a discounted prices online. And Red Hat might have a similar problem with people (not just college kids and software professionals boning up on their skills at home, either) using the free-as-in-beer CentOS rather than licensing Red Hat Enterprise Linux and paying support fees. But according to CEO Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's competitive position may actually be helped by CentOS in the same way that counterfeit Windows products sold on the streets in the Far East may have helped Microsoft — by cementing their position as the technology standard, in a marketplace that also includes entrants from SuSE, Debian, Oracle, and Ubuntu, just among Linux-based entrants. Who does Whitehurst consider to be Red Hat's most direct threat? VMWare."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A corner of the famous Chateau Wine Cellar in Shreveport at the Cuban Liquor Co., Shreveport, La. (by Boston Public Library)

Sammy’s Restaurant, Southwest Louisiana’s finest restaurant and cocktail lounge, Lake Charles, La. (by Boston Public Library)

Want to feel like you're part of a decadent crumbling society that oppresses the working classes and forces children to kill each other for your amusement? CoverGirl has you covered, with their decadent new Hunger Games makeup line.

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Everybody's talking about voter fraud these days. Republicans are using it as a smokescreen to make it harder (or impossible) for minorities and poor people to vote. (Rand Paul says it's no big deal, but Rand Paul is a racist piece of shit, so you should always do the opposite of everything Rand Paul says.) In response to all this, Bill Fletcher Jr. at the New Pittsburgh Courier revives a very important argument against voter fraud:

A fascinating article in Mother Jones from July 2012, which I only just discovered, contains the sorts of ammunition that is needed in this debate, ammunition that really can not only end the argument but open up the real question: Why are the Republicans trying to make it more difficult to vote?
The article, by Hamed Aleaziz, Dave Gilson and Jaeah Lee contains this little factoid at the end: Between 2000 and 2010 there were 649 million votes cast in general elections; 47,000 UFO sightings; 441 Americans killed by lightning; and 13 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation.

If you subtract racism and classism, there's no real reason for Republicans to be pursuing this agenda right now. It makes absolutely no sense.

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When you're out and about with your pet dog, you probably wish you could disintegrate your dog's poop with your phaser. Or tell Scotty to beam the offending dog-turds into space. At least now you can use a Star Trek communicator to make it disappear.

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Be whoever you want

Archie McPhee’s retro metal Meat Parade Lunchbox features a parade of smiling meats all marching to their grinder doom. It’s available to purchase at their site.

The Meat Parade Lunchbox is the perfect thing to carry your pork, beef or chicken for later consumption! One side shows the parade in full swing, including a float, with all the meats cheerfully playing their instruments. The other side shows the end of the parade as the marching band happily falls into the grinder. This 8″ x 7″ x 4″ retro lunchbox is covered with marching meat and big band meat byproducts! The lunchbox is made of metal, has a plastic handle and also includes a vinyl dangle.

Seattle-based artist Jim Koch shows what horrors he carries in his Meat Parade Lunchbox:

s-t-r-a-n-g-e-c-h-a-r-m:

Some author out there has been waiting their whole life to write that headline

Alas, this is most likely true.

hodad

#localnews #everythingisterrible

A Call To Action,

As you have probably heard, on July 26th,Tri-Delta and Alpha Delta hosted a Bloods and Crips Party at Alpha Delta. Our peers mingled for hours while dressed as bloods or crips while using racialized language. It then turned into a “ghetto party” with racialized language, speech and dress. Over 200 individuals attended this racist and classist event.

We are asking everyone who stands for an inclusive Dartmouth to let your voice be heard. Please report this as a bias incident using this link: https://publicdocs.maxient.com/reportingform.php?DartmouthCollege&layout_id=3

You can report anonymously, but names will make the report more personal, more powerful. It takes 5 minutes and will make a powerful statement about this demeaning, degrading and outrageous event.

We are asking everyone to flood the bias incident account with our call for justice, right now.

Today we are dealing with a “ghetto” party, tomorrow it will be a Native American party, and soon after a Latino party. Students of Color are not respected on this campus, and enough is enough. The College has yet to deliver consequences to the aforementioned organizations, so we have to declare their lack of response as not only unacceptable but as disregard for our experiences.

Organizations across campus will be mobilizing for further steps. Reporting with the above link is our first step toward meaningful changes.

Dartmouth will live up to its ideals,

Afro-American Society, Dartmouth Chapter of the NAACP, Women of Color Collective, & La Alianza Latina

Original Source

Pictured: Meghan McQueeney (left), Boo Weintraub (right)

As our business has consistently grown over the past couple years (and continues to expand), we've worked with many women on menswear-inspired suiting, particularly for same-sex weddings. The more couples we work with, the more we have come to learn the difficulties and frustrations of women seeking menswear-inspired suits. Ladies, we hear you! To gain a little more perspective, we asked two of our loyal female clients their thoughts about custom design, the hunt for finding menswear inspired suiting, and what they think of the 9tailors operation. Meghan McQueeney came to us last year for her wedding suit (see her above on the left and her amazing pictures below!) and also referred her good friend, Boo Weintraub, (pictured above on the right) to our services.  

As a woman looking for menswear inspired fashion made for a woman's shape, how would rate the difficulty?Why do you think it so hard to find?
MEGHAN: "It is very difficult to find. I think the biggest problem is that people either: a) don't understand the request; b) think that creating a men's style suit for a female body is drastically different than creating one for a male body (despite the fact that many men have bigger hips and chest than I do); c) they think that women shouldn't be wearing men's styles."

BOO: "It is extremely hard to find a suit that fits properly, especially for people who are on the shorter side."

Tell us a little bit about your experience researching for your ideal suit design.
What problems hindered you the most?
MEGHAN: "The biggest problems are that men's suits off-the-rack are enormous for my frame/body type. Brooks Brothers boys has worked well for me in the past, but the shopping experience can feel embarrassing. The other problem I have faced is from custom made suit sellers who tell me flat out that they don't make women's suits."

BOO: "I am too small to wear men's suits, and boys' suits often use cheesy material or offer little in the way of design."

How did you hear about 9tailors?
MEGHAN: "I heard about 9tailors from a friend who either bought a Groupon or a LivingSocial deal."

BOO: "...from Meghan McQueeney when she went there to buy her wedding suit."

Please describe your experience at 9tailors.
MEGHAN: "Overall, I had a very positive experience. There were a few minor hiccups around shirt style, but other than that, Alex knew to ask what I wanted for every detail. She was very accommodating, friendly, etc. I really felt like she wanted to help me look my best. I will definitely be going back for future suiting/dress shirt needs."

BOO: "Excellent. The staff never batted an eye when I said I wanted a men's suit. Original suit and later tailoring were always very timely."

What are your thoughts on custom design?
MEGHAN: "I love it! For me, in the end, it is only slightly more expensive than buying something off the rack and getting it altered. But the satisfaction is much much higher. It is a more intimate, shared, experience, where you can get what you want.

"I think the biggest takeaway for a custom design clothing company (or any custom design company) is to listen to what your client wants, ask lots of questions, give options, and don't assume you know what they want even for what seem the smallest details."

untappedcities:

NYC That Never Was: A Methodist Skyscraper Church on Broadway http://bit.ly/127AlaG

Punks in the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic.

[via]

Just got a response from Edwin Khodabakchian of Feedly saying they will support dynamic OPML in version 18 or 19. This is very good news for Feedly users, of course, and for people and organizations with domain expertise (curators) and app developers.

It should be possible to hook up new subscription services to Feedly, and because they are using an open format, the same lists will work equally well with any other feed reader or aggregator that supports OPML.

Thanks Edwin, this is very exciting!

PS: If you're a developer, please support the feature so your users can benefit from reading lists produced by experts and by recommendation engines.

PPS: And if you're a user, send a pointer to this post to the developer of your favorite feed reader asking that they support dynamic OPML too. ;-)

"That's the ultimate superhero for a woman. No matter what, no matter who ends up being Wonder Woman someday, I just hope it's something that is done correctly. I know it's there and that it could definitely be done correctly. It's just a matter of getting the right people and having the right vision come together. A director and producer and writer have to see the beauty in it and make it real." Actress and mixed martial artist Gina Carano on the need for a Wonder Woman film. Carano, who herself would fit the role quite well in many fans minds, weighed in on the discussion as to whether Diana should take to the big screen in an interview with ComingSoon.net. Carano has previously appeared in Fast & Furious 6 and Steven Soderbergh's Haywire. She can soon be seen in In the Blood, a thriller where she plays a woman who must rescue her husband after he disappears during their honeymoon.