firehose

eurovisionth0ngcontest:

I can’t believe there are only that many Maccies in Northern Ireland???

indefinitewonderland:

I don’t even know what half of this food is supposed to be but I don’t fucking care, I want it. look at how fucking delicious everything looks. if you dare to even say looking at this doesn’t make you hungry, I know you’re a lying little piece of shit.

hashtagbachswag:

fenixfilia:

wait

wow sergei it’s about time

John Barrowman, international treasure. (Tor.com)

How the NSA went from off-the-shelf to a homegrown "Google for packets."

Singapore-based photographer Fong Qi Wei has created a series of composite images that portray the passage of time in beautifully imaginative fashion.

Read more...

At the intersection of wearable electronics and heart-rate monitors are results that tell us not just where humans do and do not like to be touched, but also how our bodies betray the fact that some of the touches we find “uncomfortable” can in fact calm us down.

The video above, which has just been posted online, depicts research first published two years ago by Sylvia Hou-Yan Cheng of the Human Media Lab at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. The point of the study, conducted with shirts covered in 24 touch-sensitive patches on the shoulders, arms, back, chest and abdomen, was to determine where players of an electronically-enhanced game of tag would be comfortable touching one another.

Cheng’s results are straightforward: People report that they aren’t comfortable being touched anywhere but their shoulders, arms, and upper back. But all participants in the study were wired with heart rate monitors, and those monitors told a different story.

It’s long been known that humans’ heart-rate decelerates when we are touched in certain ways. Psychologists have taken this to signify the calming effects of touch. But many types of touch are off limits, culturally. Indeed, two of the participants in Hou-Yan Cheng’s research—a man who was asked to touch sensors on the upper chest of a woman, and the woman herself—nervously reported that in their own cultures they would have to be married before this kind of touch would be acceptable.

Yet while both male and female subjects reported that they were uncomfortable being touched on the chest, and their heart rates sometimes went up before being touched there, the touch itself caused their heart rates to decrease.

The study shows what you might not need a research grant to work out: When future interaction designers come up with clothes that can be used to communicate information through touch, they’ll have to be careful where they place the sensors. But it also shows that even as culture determines what kind of touch we find acceptable, its ability to calm us is fairly universal.

Tipping, as a compensation scheme, is great for everyone.

Restaurant customers like tipping because it puts them in the driver’s seat. As a diner, you control your experience, using the power of your tip to make sure your server works hard for you.

Restaurant servers like tipping because it means their talent is rewarded. As a great server, you get paid more than your peers, because you are a better worker.

Restaurant owners like tipping because it means they don’t have to pay for managers to closely supervise their servers. With customers using tips to enforce good service, owners can be confident that servers will do their best work.

There’s only one problem: none of this is actually true. I know because I ran the experiment myself.

For over eight years, I was the owner and operator of San Diego’s farm-to-table restaurant The Linkery, until we closed it this summer to move to San Francisco. At first, we ran the Linkery like every other restaurant in America, letting tips provide compensation and motivation for our team. In our second year, however, we tired of the tip system, and we eliminated tipping from our restaurant. We instead applied a straight 18% service charge to all dining-in checks, and refused to accept any further payment. We became the first and, for years, the only table-service restaurant in America where you couldn’t pay more money than the amount we charged you.

You can guess what happened. Our service improved, our revenue went up, and both our business and our employees made more money. Here’s why:

• Researchers have found (pdf) that customers don’t actually vary their tips much according to service. Instead they tip mostly the same every time, according to their personal habits.
• Tipped servers, in turn, learn that service quality isn’t particularly important to their revenue. Instead they are rewarded for maximizing the number of guests they serve, even though that degrades service quality.
• Furthermore, servers in tipping environments learn to profile guests (pdf), and attend mainly to those who fit the stereotypes of good tippers. This may increase the server’s earnings, while creating negative experiences for the many restaurant customers who are women, ethnic minorities, elderly or from foreign countries.
• On the occasions when a server is punished for poor service by a customer withholding a standard tip, the server can keep that information to himself. While the customer thinks she is sending a message, that message never makes it to a manager, and the problem is never addressed.

You can see that tipping promotes and facilitates bad service. It gives servers the choice between doing their best work and making the most money. While most servers choose to do their best work, making them choose one or the other is bad business.

By removing tipping from the Linkery, we aligned ourselves with every other business model in America. Servers and management could work together toward one goal: giving all of our guests the best possible experience. When we did it well, we all made more money. As you can imagine, it was easy for us to find people who wanted to work in this environment, with clear goals and rewards for succeeding as a team.

Maybe it wouldn’t work in every restaurant, in every city. Maybe the fact that it worked so well for us was due to some unique set of circumstances. Then again, other service industries like health care and law aren’t exactly lining up to adopt tips as their primary method of compensation. So maybe we’re all just being suckered into believing tipping works.

It’s something you can think about, at least, the next time you’re waiting on a refill of iced tea.

Result of various workplace behaviors in normal workplace versus in tipped restaurant:

Follow Jay on Twitter at @eltakeiteasy. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

This is the way Detroit did business as it slid toward bankruptcy.

Today is Yours

Corpses of 'Lone Ranger' Producers Hung From Hollywood Blvd. Street Lights As Warning To Others

Aubrey Plaza: Is She This Generation's Mindy Kaling?

I recently spotted what appeared to be remarkably modern looking haircuts in Albrecht Druer’s woodcut of 1521 AD[i]. This image shows a group of Irish soldiers[ii], most likely mercenaries, who were fighting on the European continent during the early 1520s. I soon discovered that, far from being unusual, this distinctive hairstyle was actually very popular amongst the native Irish during the 16th century.

Referred to as a ‘glib’ this style involved the hair at the back and side of the head being trimmed short,  while at the front and top it was allowed to grow long, resulting in a large fringe, which fell down over the face.

Original Source

hodad

otters + fretless banjos = #tgif

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpTqV6LPl8c&noredirect=1

Original Source

untappedcities:

The Beijing That Never Was: A Two-Center Beijing Under the 1950 Liang-Chen Proposal http://bit.ly/1bhXJEX

RALEIGH, NC—Calling it his lifelong dream, local man Brendan Lockhart, an insecure and perpetually frustrated bully who believes he has something to prove to the world, told reporters Thursday that he is seriously considering a career in law enforce...

DENVER—Two years after performing his 2011 spinal fusion surgery, doctors announced this week that Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning has been officially cleared to return to the field and take part in football activities.

The SEC's spree of enforcement actions makes the parallels plain: Both are diminutive, bespectacled, and part of a crime-fighting organization.

Signs have pointed to possible problems all year. In April, Moody’s began studying Portland for a possible downgrade in credit rating. In May, the city auditor criticized Mayor Charlie Hales’ decision to eliminate the city’s chief financial officer. In June, a city audit showed that while the city’s financial health is stable, the overall financial position continues to decline. “I don’t know that I can address what might happen down the line,” said Dana Haynes, the spokesperson for Mayor Hales. “Right now it isn’t a problem and right now we’re still being able to meet all of our mandates and the city is financially sound.” But Pew researcher Draine said the massive amounts of money the city needs to fund pensions, specifically those for police and firefighters, will cripple the city. “It’s going to be a financial burden that is going to weigh down on the city of Portland,” he told KOIN 6 News in a Skype interview. In January, his Pew study put Portland as one of the nine worst large cities in the country at funding pensions. Portland is also just below Chicago with only 50% of what is needed to cover those pension obligations.

"We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now," the company explained in its post. "We'd considered phasing the service out, continuing service for existing customers, and a variety of other things up until today. It is always better to be safe than sorry, and with your safety we decided that the worst decision is always no decision." The company said it would continue to support its Silent Phone, Silent Text, and its Silent Eyes teleconferencing platform, assuring users it collects no encrypted data or metadata about conversations. "Silent Mail was a good idea at the time, and that time is past," the company said. Earlier Thursday, Lavabit, an encrypted e-mail service linked to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, hinted at a U.S. government investigation as the reason for its closure. Ladar Levison, the owner of Lavabit, said he was "forced to make a difficult decision" and that he would like to discuss the circumstances but was prevented from doing so because "Congress has passed laws that say otherwise."

It had originally been part of a two-book set, sold at the World's Fair in New York in 1965. At the time, they tiny book was thought to be (and marketed as) the world's smallest book, though that record has since been broken. The "larger" sibling book (measuring a hefty 1 3/8" by 1 3/8" and thus still, technically, a miniature) was also part of the library's collection, though somehow over the years the two items had been separated. Both books contain the exact same content, the text of Chapter 1 of the King James version of Genesis, but the larger book's font is at 10 times the size.

Accounting conventions have required the Washington Post Company to record non-cash pension charges, but it has not had to put a penny into its pension plans since Mr Buffett advised it to change pension adviser in the late 1970s. The group’s pension plans show a $600m surplus, unheard of in an industry where declining headcounts in newsrooms and printing plants have strained retirement plans.

Los Angeles Police Department officials are warning drivers to avoid the areas around the following intersections in Burbank, Canoga Park and Woodland Hills on Tuesday from 2:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.: -- Hollywood Way and San Fernando Road -- Hollywood Way and Burbank Boulevard -- Hollywood Way and Alameda -- Olive Avenue and Buena Vista -- Sherman Way and Hayvenhurst Avenue -- Victory Boulevard and Canoga Avenue -- Canoga Avenue and Burbank Boulevard

Airlines affected included Frontier, American, American Eagle, JetBlue, Virgin America, Alaska, Cathay Pacific, Qantas, British Airways, WestJet and LAN Fiji Air.

Friends will gather in Portland’s Terry Schrunk Plaza tonight to remember a man who played a part in television history. Sean Sasser died Wednesday of AIDS-related illness. His 1994 wedding on MTV’s “The Real World” is considered a milestone in the gay rights movement. Sasser’s partner, Pedro Zamora, was part of “The Real World” San Francisco cast. Zamora, who was also HIV-positive, died shortly after the show ended. Sasser came to Portland and found a new life as a pastry chef. He was in a committed relationship with Michael Kaplan, the director of the Cascade AIDS Project. They left town earlier this year when Kaplan got a new job.

Hot on the heels of my menu donation to the New York Public Library comes this intriguing news story about a team of ecologists using Hawaiian restaurant menus to reconstruct long-term changes in local marine populations. The menus provided the evidence needed to trace historical ecological shifts during “a critical 45-year gap” in the state’s early twentieth-century fishery records.

IMAGE: Menu cover, Monarch Room, Royal Hawaiian Hotel, March 25, 1977. NYPL Menu Collection.

Drawing on library and museum collections, but mostly on souvenirs saved by friends and colleagues, Kyle S. Van Houtan of Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment, Loren McClenachan, assistant professor of environmental studies at Colby College, and Jack Kittinger of Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solutions analysed 376 menus from 154 different restaurants in Hawaii, dated from 1928 to 1974.

The menus, Van Houtan et. al. explain in a peer-reviewed letter in the August 2013 issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, came from “a range of eateries from local businesses to larger restaurants serving tourists (we excluded 60 cruise-ship menus because their pantries were not locally sourced).”

IMAGE: Entrees, Monarch Room, Royal Hawaiian Hotel, March 25, 1977. NYPL Menu Collection.

By counting the mentions of different species on the menus over time, the team were able to track a striking decline in Hawaii’s nearshore fishery stocks and an increasing reliance on larger, oceanic species. Reef fish, jacks, and bottomfish went from being extremely common before 1940 to appearing on less than 10 percent of menus by 1959, the year Hawaii became a state. Restaurants filled the gap by serving large pelagic fish, such as tuna and swordfish, which appeared on 95 percent of menus by 1970.

The scientists benchmarked their menu-derived data against early market surveys and later government fishery statistics from either side of the gap in the historical record, giving them confidence that their findings accurately reflected shifts in wild fish populations rather than just consumer preference or culinary trends.

Hawaii, the team admitted, was particularly well suited for their experiment in menu archaeology as historical ecology because “its remote location meant most locally consumed seafood was locally sourced.”

Nonetheless, the menu presence of some species didn’t accurately reflect changes in the marine environment: molluscs and shrimps were mostly imported from the mainland United States, frogs were sourced from local aquaculture operations, and the majority of the islands’ sea-turtle harvest was sold in fish markets rather than restaurants. “These latter instances,” Van Houtan noted, “may still present important information, such as the market forces supporting wildlife harvests.”

IMAGE: Menu occurrence of fishery items follows the rise and fall of local fisheries: wild-caught offshore fish species (top panel), imported and aquaculture species (middle panel), and wild-caught inshore species (bottom panel). Chart from Kyle S. Van Houtan, Loren McClenachan, and John N Kittinger, 2013, “Seafood menus reflect long-term ocean changes,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 11: 289–290.

The team conclude their report by comparing restaurant menu analysis to the archaeological excavation of a midden in terms of its potential contribution to the historical environmental record — an unwitting testament to over-consumption, ecological pressures, and resource shifts. These menus “were often beautifully crafted, date-stamped, and cherished by their owners as art,” Van Houtan added, but “the point of our study is that they are also data.”