Shared posts

04 Aug 23:17

Terrorist Plot Foiled After Concert Security Taps Woman’s Purse

ANAHEIM, CA—Claiming that thousands of innocent lives had been saved, authorities announced today that a plot to bomb the Honda Center was successfully foiled Thursday evening after a concert security worker lightly tapped a purse with his hands, re...
04 Aug 00:00

@gguillotte >> @bishopthom: i lol’d http://i.imgur.com/vSW2EUk.png

04 Aug 00:00

The first female physician, and the thousand-year campaign against her

by Esther Inglis-Arkell

The first female physician, and the thousand-year campaign against her

Trotula of Salerno has been the subject of a smear campaign lasting roughly one thousand years. Possibly. Or possibly she never existed.

Read more...

    


04 Aug 00:00

Seven telcos named as providing fiber optic cable access to UK spies

by Cyrus Farivar
The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is based in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, United Kingdom.

In the latest leak from the documents acquired by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, a German newspaper has published a list of the telecommunications companies that have provided British intelligence with direct access to their undersea fiber optic cables.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Google Translate) and German public broadcaster NDR (Google Translate) published not only the names of the companies, but also their Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) nicknames: "Verizon ('Dacron'), BT ('Remedy'), Vodafone Cable ('Gerontic'), Global Crossing ('Pinnage'), Level 3 ('Little'), Viatel ('Vitreous') and Interoute ('Streetcar')."

The German newspaper cited as its source an internal GCHQ presentation slide. It also slammed the GCHQ, the NSA's British counterpart, saying that the GCHQ had “lost all sense of proportion.”

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03 Aug 23:59

WWII-Era Record Shows Albert Einstein Took Part in Program to Help Jews Escape the Nazis

by EDW Lynch

Albert Einstein JDC deposit card

This small card shows that Albert Einstein made a deposit to help finance the emigration of a Jewish person named Hugo Moos from Nazi Germany during World War II. The card is from the archives of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), a nearly century-old Jewish aid organization based in New York City that helped more than 81,000 Jews escape from Nazi-occupied Europe by financing and otherwise enabling their emigration. It’s unclear what became of Hugo Moos, though the JDC has found transit records for a child, Rudolf Hugo Moos, who escaped Europe aboard a ship in 1940.

Thanks JahFurry!

03 Aug 23:58

Tomorrow is the Day to Finally Take that Beer Pilgrimage to Corvallis

by Thomas Ross

What are you doing this weekend? Drop everything and go to Corvallis. I mean, finish reading this, then go. Or like finish reading this, get a good night's sleep, then go.

Block 15, Corvallis craft beer OGs and purveyors of spot-on offerings in every style of beer imaginable, are debuting the first bottles from their Turbulent Consequence line tomorrow, Saturday the 3rd, at 10:30am at the brewery pub. The Turbulent Consequence beers are from Block 15's new coolship, a large, open-air fermentation vessel used to invite wild yeast (including brettanomyces, a yeast that often results in tart, sometimes fruity aromas and flavors) and funky bacteria into the beer.

A coolship is a notoriously finicky thing—one is, after all, relying on unpredictable, hyperlocal, extremely productive microflora. Luckily, for Nick Arzner, founder and brewer at Block 15, the process of installing and brewing with the coolship has gone smoothly. He had a coolship built extra deep (to accommodate double batches) and scaled to fit in their wild cellar, where many of their 160 barrels (and their resident bacteria and brettanomyces) already lived:

We built up the flora in the room for over a year before beginning our spontaneous fermentation program. I figured the first couple go-arounds would end up as blend beers or go down the drain. However, most of the barrels have thus far turned out real nice. We have a pretty solid acid-producing bacteria floating around that gently sours the beer quickly. The brett seems to be of medium intensity, increasing with age. I would describe it as a very rounded brett, some nice stone fruits, hay, and dairy type barnyard.

The result, thus far, will be two beers: Première Année, a blend of relatively young one-year-old lambics, feral toddlers just out of the woods (that's a pun) and a Pêche, which was aged for six months with fresh white peaches and sounds DELICIOUS. Make room on your table or in your cellar for these two, which will definitely be worth the drive.

Also releasing tomorrow is the excellent tart farmhouse beer Ferme de la Ville Provisions, though that should make it to Portland in the near future. Provisions, one of the standouts from last year's Oregon bretty farmhouse crop, is a blend of one- and two-year-old beer. Arzner says “we refill the barrels without rinsing if we like the character. This has helped build some brettanomyces notes we really like.” Hey, I like them too!

This is beer worth geeking out over, brewed by another of the great Oregon breweries in The Wave Of The Brewers. (Northwest Brew Wave? Brewvelle Vague?) Arzner beautifully describes the attention required to make these specials beers:

What I love about these beers is that they complete a circle of brewing: from rustic times with raw grains, wild yeast, and wood maturation; moving through to modern brewing with malted grains, cultured yeast, and temperature controlled stainless steel where brewers have solid control. Now, we're bringing back the tradition of inviting your brewery's surroundings, wood, and wild yeast and bacteria to take part in the beer—and releasing our own control. Though simple, these are some of the most challenging beers to produce and blend in our brewery.

I love that idea of the circle of brewing. We're definitely seeing that in Oregon right now, and if it means more brewers start brewing and blending lambics and wild ales, then I love that, too. So throw caution to the wind and throw back a couple pints at Block 15. These guys are doing it right, every time.

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03 Aug 23:57

Marissa Mayer buys failed startups because it's the best way for Yahoo to hire good developers

by Ben Popper

Yahoo bought Rockmelt today, a startup that debuted with a wave of media fanfare touting it as the company that would reinvent the browser for the age of the social web. It didn't catch on, Rockmelt pivoted, and eventually the company faded into obscurity, at which point Marissa Mayer swooped in to purchase it, as she has with dozens of ailing young tech companies since she became CEO at Yahoo.

Mayer had taken a lot of flack in the press for purchasing startups with little traction, many if whom did not even build or invent the technology for which they were praised in the acquisition announcements. But Mayer isn't buying these companies for what they built; she's buying the engineers who built them.

"Yahoo has locked up engineers with two- to four-year contracts."

As Bloomberg Businessweek noted in its recent profile of Mayer, every time she's bought a startup, "Yahoo has locked up engineers with two- to four-year contracts and set them loose to build apps and hire more mobile developers, according to two people familiar with Yahoo’s deals who weren’t authorized to speak for the company."

Wouldn't it just be cheaper and easier to hire programmers on the open market or right out of college? Actually, no. The competition for developer talent in Silicon Valley today is insane. Take this recent piece from San Francisco Magazine describing the day Zynga laid off several hundred employees. Recruiters tried to hire freshly axed programmers in the comment section of news stories about the firings. Other head hunters descended on the bars where ex-staffers were drowning their sorrows and started buying shots and arranging interviews for new gigs.

Things are especially hard on the hiring front for a company like Yahoo, which still has a reputation as a dot-com dinosaur that has been bested by a new breed of tech titan. What Mayer needs most of all is mobile talent, and with Yahoo flush from cash thanks to its Alibaba holdings, she is finding it without having to recruit directly.

It's hard to hire when you're seen as a dot-com dinosaurAs we wrote back when Apple acquired spectacularly failed startup Color, there is a peculiar ecosystem in Silicon Valley. The best programmers often want to be entrepreneurs, so they go out and raise venture capital funding. If their startup fails, the VCs who backed them want to recoup as much of their investment as possible. They work to find a soft landing at a big tech company, which is mostly interested in the talent. This exchange, dubbed the aqui-hire, is what keeps the wheels turning in Silicon Valley.

Time will tell if Mayer's strategy pays off. Yahoo won plaudits and awards for its new weather app for the iPhone, showing it can produce slick mobile products. While its finances continue to slide, its traffic and user engagement numbers have finally begun to rise, reversing years of declines. Most importantly, the company reported that attrition fell by 59 percent in the second quarter. Perhaps all the new blood at Yahoo is helping to turn around the long suffering moral.

03 Aug 23:55

John Carmack’s $8M pipe dream meets reality: Armadillo Aerospace on life support

by Cyrus Farivar
John Carmack (center), founded Armadillo Aerospace in 2000.

One day after speaking at the QuakeCon in Dallas, John Carmack—the famed video game designer and space entrepreneur—confirmed to Ars that he’s “winding down” his company, Armadillo Aerospace. The private space company began in 2000, and eventually began doing contract work for NASA, but it turned to developing reusable rockets in recent years.

“I laid off most of the full-time employees,” Carmack told Ars on Friday. “[We have a few doing some] minor part-time hours, and there’s one guy still on there. We still have the building, and I own materials there, and I don’t have the funding to continue development.”

He said that he’d spent over $1 million a year of his own money to fund the company, which will now be cut significantly.

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03 Aug 23:54

Always Accurate, A T-Shirt Design With 7-Day Weather Forecast for Deep Space

by Kimber Streams

Always Accurate

Always Accurate is a Shirt.Woot t-shirt design with a 7-day forecast of the weather in deep space by BootsBoots. The shirt is currently available to purchase from Woot.

image via Woot

03 Aug 23:54

Composite picture of every Superman (unsurprisingly) has a sick chin

by Meredith Woerner

Composite picture of every Superman (unsurprisingly) has a sick chin

Behold every single Superman mushed into one great white superhero. Created by Redditor morphinapg, this image combines Christopher Reeve, Dean Cain, Tom Welling, Brandon Routh, and Henry Cavill all together. It's kind of creepy.

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03 Aug 23:53

LEGO Building Brick Mug

by Justin Page

LEGO Building Brick Mug

The LEGO Building Brick Mug will hold your beverage while also allowing you to connect your favorite construction bricks (LEGO, PixelBlocks, Mega Bloks, KRE-O or K’NEX Bricks) to its exterior building surface. It is available to purchase online at Firebox.

Report due first thing Monday morning? Forget all about it and build a replica of the Taj Mahal whilst drinking a Hot Chocolate instead. Mountain of photocopying to do? Pah, check out this scale model of Wembley Stadium on the side of my mug. Partner gone into the delivery room ready to pop out your first born? Good for her, but you’re too busy building a detailed re-enactment of the video for ‘Time of my Life’ from Dirty Dancing.

LEGO Building Brick Mug

03 Aug 23:51

In vengeful move, CBS blocks web episodes for Time Warner Cable internet subscribers

by Sean Hollister

CBS stations have disappeared for many Time Warner Cable subscribers today, after the companies' negotiations over retransmission fees failed to reach an amicable conclusion. But cable TV users aren't the only ones without access to episodes of their favorite shows. CBS is also blocking Time Warner Cable internet subscribers from watching episodes on its website CBS.com. When trying to access a full episode of any CBS show, like Elementary or Two and a Half Men, those with Time Warner Cable internet will see an attack ad instead of their normal programming.

While this might sound like a valid tactic to use in a no-holds-barred game of chicken like the one these companies are playing right now, it flies in the face of net neutrality principles.

CBS doesn't deny blocking the episodes at all, providing TechCrunch with the following statement:

If Time Warner Cable is a customer’s internet service provider, then their access to CBS full episode content via online and mobile platforms has been suspended as a result of Time Warner Cable’s decision to drop CBS and Showtime from their market. As soon as CBS is restored on Time Warner Cable systems in affected markets, that content will be accessible again.

Of course, TWC is none too happy about the tactic, but interestingly didn't choose to play the net neutrality card. It provided The Verge with a statement of its own:

CBS has shown utter lack of regard for consumers by blocking Time Warner Cable’s customers, including our high-speed data only customers, from accessing their shows on their free website. CBS enjoys the privilege of using public owned airwaves to deliver their programming – they should not be allowed to abuse that privilege.

It's not the first time a content company has gone this far. In 2010, News Corp restricted access to Hulu to customers of Cablevision over a similar dispute, up to and including its internet-only customers.

03 Aug 23:50

Drool Over The Final Harry Potter Anniversary Cover by Kazu Kibuishi, Plus Box Set Designs

I love Mary GrandPré's original covers for the Scholastic versions of the Harry Potter books, but I also love dragons, so I'm a big fan of the final cover in Scholastic's Kazu Kibuishi illustrated Harry Potter 15th anniversary set. Of course, the cover is also gorgeously illustrated with amazing composition and lighting, so that might be a bigger draw than the dragon for some of you. The Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows cover was revealed on July 31 in the New York City Scholastic Store, and will be available in paperback  individually and as part of a box set with Kibuishi's other illustrated covers. Check out the tempting box set design, with even more of Kibuishi's artwork, after the jump. If I keep telling myself that my hardcovers are falling apart, I can magically justify new copies, right?
03 Aug 23:50

Things We Saw Today: A Portable Hobbit Hole

For when you need to go there...and back again. (via Neatorama
03 Aug 23:50

Owl hands on deck

by hodad
03 Aug 01:41

Fuck AMC

by Anonymous

fuck breaking bad
fuck mad men
fuck the walking dead
fuck overly dramatic hour long bullshit
breaking bad? tim watley makes the same fucking face for an hour.
it's mush programming for morons.
the same people who like it watched entourage
fuck it

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02 Aug 23:25

CBR TV @ SDCC: Richard and Wendy Pini Discuss "ElfQuest"

firehose

some of you like this or something
maybe?
is it just OMGKW?

"ElfQuest" creators Richard and Wendy Pini stopped by the CBR Yacht at Comic-Con International 2013 to discuss the long history of the series, the recent partnership with Dark Horse and what's in store for the future.
02 Aug 23:03

Two People Who Went To Same College Ruin Evening For Rest Of Group

firehose

attn: GRP

CHICAGO—Sources reported that an entire night with several close friends and acquaintances was ruined Thursday when it was revealed that two of the attendees had gone to the same college.
02 Aug 22:34

Cultural Snapshot

by Maggie Gallagher
firehose

via Overbey: "Let us bottle Maggie Gallagher’s tears, and use them as salt tinctures for cocktails at gay wedding receptions."

African-American, Muslim, folk-guitar-strumming Minnesota representative Keith Ellison celebrates gay marriage coming to Minnesota:

You've got to admit, it's a great country.

02 Aug 22:06

Wine 1.7.0 Released, Starts Again With The Changes

firehose

"support for vertical text within Wine's PostScript driver", Overbey

With Wine 1.6 having been released two weeks ago with 10,000+ changes, we're now out of the code freeze and Wine 1.8 development has begun. Wine 1.7.0 was released today as the first version in this new development series...
02 Aug 22:05

XKeyscore

by Bruce Schneier
firehose

I bet Schneier meant to write "from his desk"

but I can understand considering all the shadowrun fanfic he's probably been writing lately

The Guardian discusses a new secret NSA program: XKeyscore. It's the desktop system that allows NSA agents to spy on anyone over the Internet in real time. It searches existing NSA databases -- presumably including PRISM -- and can create fingerprints to search for all future data collections from systems like TRAFFIC THIEF. This seems to be what Edward Snowden meant when he said that he had the ability to spy on any American, in real time, from his deck.

In related news, this essay explains how "three-hop" analysis of the communications of suspected terrorists means that everyone in the US is spied on.

EDITED TO ADD (8/3): The math is wrong in that three-hop analysis essay. Apologies.

02 Aug 21:42

Free Tickets to The Bent Brick's Growler Party

by Clare Gordon
firehose

attn: saucie

Fresh on the heels of the passage of Oregon's wine growler bill, which permitted licensed establishments to fill appropriate reusable containers with bulk vino (read a good overview of rules here), Northwest Portland's the Bent Brick is throwing a little soiree to promote the practice this Thursday, August 8. Featuring wines from Boedecker Cellars, Love and Squalor, Guild Winemakers, Wooldridge Creek, Cana’s Feast, Ribera Vineyards, Proletariat Wine Co., Johan Vineyards, and Helioterra Wines, the growler party will feature tastes of all available wines for discerning drinkers to sample before purchasing (bring your own jugs or purchase at the event). $20 admission includes samples and food provided by the restaurant, and the event runs from 6-10 pm (advance tickets available by calling the restaurant at 503-688-1655). The Bent Brick has long made a point of serving local wines on tap (in addition to an uniquely all-American spirits selection, which has led one of the most creative cocktail programs in town), so this should be an immensely educational opportunity to enjoy some of the Northwest's finest.

And we've got two free passes to the good times for one Blogtown fan: just e-mail your name to our editor here by Monday, August 5 and type "WINO" into that subject line. We'll pick a winner at random for a free evening of fun. Happy drinking!

The Bent Brick is located at 1639 NW Marshall.

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02 Aug 21:12

Rumor: Warner Bros. wants an old Bruce Wayne for Batman Vs. Superman

by Meredith Woerner
firehose

oh god
oh lord no
are they doing The Dark Knight Returns

Rumor: Warner Bros. wants an old Bruce Wayne for Batman Vs. Superman

Rumor of the day: Warner Bros. wants an older Batman to fight the bushy-chested Henry Cavill/Clark Kent. Which means, Armie Hammer is out (plus he just announced he's not all that interested in being the next Bat). So: Inexperienced Superman vs. Old Batman, how does that strike you?

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02 Aug 21:11

Snowpiercer is the biggest hit movie in Korean history

by Charlie Jane Anders
firehose

trains~

Snowpiercer is the biggest hit movie in Korean history

As in, a million people went to see it in the first two days. And the early reviews in English for this post-apocalyptic train story are pretty great. So Korean readers, have you seen this film yet? What do you think?

Read more...

    


02 Aug 21:06

First Look: Everquest Next

by Adam Smith
firehose

RETURN OF THE VOXEL
THE DREAM OF THE 90S IS ALIVE IN VOXELS

By Adam Smith on August 2nd, 2013 at 8:01 pm.

Yesterday, Sony Online Entertainment significantly altered my entire outlook on the next twelve months of gaming. When I sat down, along with a small gathering of journalists invited to see the reveal of Everquest Next, I wasn’t expecting to have my line of thinking about MMORPGs to fundamentally shift, but that’s precisely what happened. From being a game in a genre that I have only the occasional interest in, Next immediately became one of the most fascinating and exciting games on the horizon.

And that’s just the half of it.

At several moments during the presentation, I wrote in block capitals, circling and underlining. This is the headline feature. This is something nobody has tried or managed to do before. Then, toward the mid-point, while I was still processing what had already come, lead designer Dave Georgeson demonstrated a feature that changed everything.

Everquest Next’s world is made of voxels and everything in it is destructible.

I had to fetch a ladder to retrieve my eyebrows. This is not mere “we’ve played Minecraft” rhetoric. It’s something else. It’s big-studio exposure to the kind of things that have been going on in the world of gaming over the past few years. It’s not even a ‘feature’ as such, it’s the foundation of the tech and design choices, influencing everything that is built on top of it. And everything that is on top addresses the accepted wisdom, or lack of, in the majority of MMOs – enemy behaviour, the unchanging nature of the world, player interactions, combat and the nature of questing have all been overhauled. Or perhaps not even that.

This isn’t a reinvention of the wheel, it’s the unveiling of a hovercar.

Like so much else that was shown, destructibility could have been little more than a gimmick and was almost introduced as such. That’s because Georgeson knows how to work a crowd. He showed us in-game footage of a fight, which left the battlefield scarred, covered in fresh craters and debris. A wizard destroyed a bridge, sending goblins tumbling to their death. Impressive, and in keeping with the fast-paced, skill-based combat and movement, which is built around weapon-specific fighting styles and parkour elements. It looks like a third-person action game, without the spongey enemies and toe-to-toe power exchanges that plague most of its peers. Great stuff.

Providing elegance and variety to movement and combat, making exploring and fighting interesting activities for their own sake, does solve many of my issues with the WOW (and original Everquest) model. Players still select a race and class to begin with, each having access to four abilities and a couple of weapon types, but they can learn the skills of the other classes as they progress, mixing and matching skills and equipment.

In the battle we were shown, the wizard was Daud-like, blinking through the air, materialising behind enemies and destroying them, sending splinters of rock screaming through the air. The Kah Shir warrior (lion-like now, rather than the tiger-person of yesteryear) charged, sending smaller enemies sprawling, then pouncing from point to point, chaining attacks together, and avoiding spells and the hefty blows of larger creatures.

And then a golem stamped on the players, breaking through the continent’s crust and sending everybody tumbling into a dimly lit subterranean world. They regained their senses and found themselves in a cavern, a procedurally generated space that could link to demonic lairs, forgotten kingdoms or warrens of tunnels, twisting maze-like into darkness.

The lower layers of the world drawn on the thousands of years of Everquest lore, archaeological depths that can be explored and looted, or that can become tombs for the unprepared. Certain spells will allow characters to teleport beneath the surface but any hero can grab a pick and start digging. When everything from the largest structure to the ground itself is a massive collection of changeable voxels, exploration isn’t simply about walking from point to point, it’s about making new routes to previously impossible places.

That’s worth saying again: exploration isn’t simply about walking from point to point, it’s about making new routes to previously impossible places.

In an MMO.

Rather than relying on the functional blocks of Minecraft, Next is capable of breaking environments down at the smallest level, leaving jagged scars in the side of hills and allowing for earthquakes that can splinter entire regions, revealing the ancient things below. Some of those ancient things may wake up and emerge, creating new problems and new opportunities.

When a new entity arrives in the world, whether at the developer’s bidding or due to player interference, its behaviour is driven by a series of objectives, needs and desires. Whether an orc bandit or an enormous demon from the depths, a creature is not the product of a spawn point, mindlessly wandering until the proximity of a hero activates its basic functions. It’s an AI entity that functions as part of a world. At least that’s the claim.

A gang of orcs, for example, won’t simply appear at a specific point in the world, replenishing shortly after they have been eliminated. Instead, when they appear, they react to the changing world. They act as bandits, and their purpose is to steal and murder. Therefore, they’ll lurk near settlements, finding good positions to carry out roadside ambushes as goods and people travel from village to village.

If a group of players start to patrol that road, clashing with the orcs, the parameters change. The AI reinterprets the situation, checking if the threat level is too high and possibly deciding to move on, wandering until it discovers a new suitable location. Or perhaps not. It’s possible that a particular group of players won’t present a strong enough threat, in which case the orcs could become more confident, preparing an assault. Or maybe they have a leader who will call for reinforcements.

The emergent situations created by an AI that is systemically driven carry more potential to change the way Next works as an RPG and online experience than the destructibility, but they’re harder to demonstrate in the short-term. Whether they’ll work as intended, we won’t know until the world has been in progress for some time, but that SOE have worked so long to find solutions to problems that most MMO designers don’t even seem to recognise as problems gives me confidence in their approach.

Having an entire world in which human players are competing with reactive AI provides dynamic objectives. If those orcs stray too close to a village, or kill too many merchants and travellers, an NPC may put a bounty on their heads. Alternately, the villagers may ask for better defences, which could lead players into patrol duty, or even gathering resources for teh construction of a palisade or stone walls. It may even be possible to side with the orcs, becoming a raider, and sodding off to the next horizon and leaving the situation to fester is always an option. NPCs remember players’ actions so the consequences of decisions will affect relations and future interactions.

There’s a final addition to the game’s structure that ties everything else together. Keeping with the blank slate approach to the genre, which involves jettisoning a great deal of jargon, larger quests aren’t defined as ‘raids’ or ‘instances’. There will, at any one time, be an over-riding, worldwide mission, which SOE describe as a ‘Rallying Call’. Every single player is part of a Call, although they are free to ignore its objectives. Each one will last for around three months and they will alter the world in a more directed fashion, creating enormous structural changes or new alliances and enmities.

The example described involved the founding of a city. A location is chosen, true to Everquest lore, and the plans for a new settlement are drawn up. The first players to arrive at the spot can set up camp, a few tents, vulnerable in the wilderness. Because people are idiots, they’ve decided to build in goblin country, so the camp will be in immediate danger. Now, every player knows about the quest, and if the attacks become severe, they will be told that help is needed. Quests come with rewards, so heroes may well converge from every corner of the world to assist in the defence and expansion of the camp, eventually making a village, to which NPCs will move. That village will eventually become a city, permanently established in the world, but before that can happen, the goblins must be driven out of the area for good.

Hunting parties could set out into the woods and wilderness, discovering goblin settlements and destroying them, but the nascent settlement will also require a militia to defend its people. Crafters could work in tandem with the hunters, asking them to bring back resources to aid in the construction of sturdier walls, and while the players react, so does the AI, planning counterattacks and possibly gathering all its forces under one ruler to lay siege.

The system has enormous potential. Civil wars, rebellions, elusive villains – my Tolkien-infused brain jumped to the War of the Ring, a multi-pronged epic quest, in which different groups take on varying tasks in far-flung regions of the world. The opportunity not
just to see a world change, but to contribute to that, either as a famous hero or a small cog in a larger war machine.

There are plenty of unanswered questions, and in a game of this scope that is still many months from release, that’s inevitable. Chiefly, I’m interested to see how a world of consequences and change fuses with the mostly inconsequential nature of player death. It is the one problem of the genre (though not unique to the genre) that I didn’t hear any new thinking about.

That was the key to the entire presentation and the interviews that followed. Everquest Next is being constructed by people who have a creative and intellectual fascination with finding new approaches to familiar problems. The solutions are so far-reaching that it barely resembles the games I expected it to be comparable to, including its named predecessors, and the experiment is hugely ambitious. Of course, eliminating problems tends to create new problems, but they’ll almost certainly be interesting problems.

It’s hard to express how large the shift in my expectations was. When John Smedley, CEO of SOE, introduced key members of the team, he gave them a lot to live up to. Twice, he explained, the project has been abandoned and restarted, with eighteen months of work completed each time. There was a fundamental problem. The games they were making had already been made. Static worlds, in which monsters and equipment act as little more than bundles of numbers, and players grind against them for the rest of time.

‘Enough is enough’, he said, ‘we’ve played the same game too many times’. He’s right. When Everquest Next comes out next year, whether it hits the mark on every front or not, it’s going to change our expectations of what an online fantasy world is capable of.

Rather than releasing Everquest 2.5, which would have been far cheaper than this long-haul iterative design, SOE have actually used their talents, thought about what could be done, and understood the time and money that a cooperative big name publisher can provide. They have elected to experiment with the form and attempt something pioneering. I’m struggling to think of another project in development with as much concentrated potential.

More to come, including interviews with all of the key development staff and composer Jeremy Soule. Also, do read about Everquest Next: Landmark if you haven’t already.

02 Aug 21:04

Please Tell Me That’s Cosplay T-Shirt

by Kimber Streams

Please Tell Me That's Cosplay

Diesel Sweeties creator Richard Stevens has made a t-shirt that says “Please tell me that’s cosplay.” The shirts are available to purchase from the Diesel Sweeties store.

image via Richard Stevens

via Richard Stevens

02 Aug 21:04

Photo

firehose

via Toaster Strudel
highest quality GIF



02 Aug 21:03

rstevens: Charles vs. The Fake Fedora Fiends

firehose

via Rosalind
sorry about my hats



rstevens:

Charles vs. The Fake Fedora Fiends

02 Aug 20:45

The co-founder of PayPal wants to put a baby in you

by Rachel Feltman
firehose

"Levchin and his cofounder, Mike Huang, realized that family planning could benefit from big data when Huang and his wife spent a year trying to conceive."
uhh
"Users can opt for a service called Glow First"
uhhhhhh
"which charges $50 USD a month for 10 months"
UHHHHHHH
"a couple can’t conceive during that time, they’re given an equal split with others in their monthly pool"
UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
"The couples who did manage to conceive cede their money as a donation for the others to get treatment"
UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
"Levchin is seeding the fund"
UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGHGGHHGGGGHHHHH*COUGH*

There's an app for that

Max Levchin wants to talk to you about cervical mucus. The internet entrepreneur, who co-founded the now ubiquitous online payment service PayPal, has turned his focus to solving a problem he feels is more important than the hassle of entering credit card numbers: Infertility.

His new app, coming to Apple’s App Store next week, is called Glow—and through comprehensive data collection and analysis, it aims to help couples conceive naturally, or steer them towards the right medical help if they can’t. But Levchin wants the software to do more than just mark fertile days on a calendar: He wants to radically change the way American doctors and patients talk about infertility. Oh, and then he wants to turn the United States’ health insurance paradigm on its head.

Levchin and his cofounder, Mike Huang, realized that family planning could benefit from big data when Huang and his wife spent a year trying to conceive. “The issue is very dear to me,” Huang told Quartz, “Because I know the emotional roller-coaster is real.” Obstetricians, he said, aren’t equipped with much data on infertility. When a couple goes to their doctor saying they can’t conceive, he said, they’re often given an old-fashioned paper form to track ovulation, then told to come back in a few months.

Both men are cyclists in their spare time, and they saw that the sporting world, people collect and analyze an enormous amount of personal data—part of the so-called “quantified self” movement. “You can become a total quantified-self junkie,” Levchin told Quartz. “Anything that can be measured, you record—and it’s applied to things like managing your weight, or deciding how likely you are to dope in the Tour de France. But with infertility? You get a Xerox from the 1960s.”

So they’ve created Glow to fill the gap. Levchin and Huang hope the free app, which has the same kinds of game-like features and simple design that make fitness junkies so app-happy, will make natural conception both easier and more fun. It gives its users daily prompts to enter data on everything from temperature to the sexual positions they’ve used. And it comes in his-and-hers versions, a choice intended to keep women from feeling that they’re alone in their efforts to conceive.

The goal is to help both current users and future infertility patients. By asking about sexual positions and female orgasms, for example, the app is collecting data on oft-cited but little-researched possible factors in successful conception. The founders say that physicians have already signed on to use this data in studies. And eventually, Levchin said, they hope to make the data collection totally passive (by using a combination of phone sensors and specialized hardware) so that you don’t even have to take the trouble of entering any numbers yourself.

Eventually, Huang said, the app will have one-click date night planning capabilities
Eventually, Huang said, the app will have one-click date night planning capabilities

A testing lab in your pocket

More and more health apps are being designed to turn big data into wellness hacks. The Scanadu, which recently broke the funding record on crowdfunding site Indiegogo and aims to have approval from the US Food and Drug Administration by 2015, measures a wide range of vital signs and churns them into diagnoses and suggestions. An app called uChek enables your phone to read testing strips usually analyzed on expensive lab equipment. And Asthmapolis uses a bluetooth-enabled inhaler to track asthma symptoms.

But Levchin thinks such apps are also baby steps towards a new way of maintaining (and paying for) personal health. ”Health-care and insurance are nominally data driven,” he said, “so it’s remarkable to me that something so data-dependent, in which we have the best resources available to look at the data, is so broken. The costs of health-care are skyrocketing, and costs go up exponentially when you delay care.” With vitals constantly tracked and analyzed, patients could be warned to see a doctor early. Glow, for example, responds to reports of pain during intercourse or excessive cramping during periods with a suggestion that women get screened for endometriosis, a disorder that can cause fertility issues. Most women reporting pain won’t have the disorder, but an early screening makes it easier for doctors to remedy the problem if they do.

But the current American insurance system, Levchin said, rewards “self-willed lack of knowledge” by making patients afraid of discovering pre-existing conditions that could raise their premiums. So for big data apps to fulfill their potential, insurance companies would have to accept that early detection is better than benign neglect.

The state of US health insurance is especially troubling for fertility problems, Levchin said, where treatment is often considered an elective (i.e., not medically essential, and hence not eligible for insurance). But they have some ideas for dodging the financial trap some couples face.

Users can opt for a service called Glow First, which charges $50 USD a month for 10 months. If a couple can’t conceive during that time, they’re given an equal split with others in their monthly pool. The couples who did manage to conceive cede their money as a donation for the others to get treatment.  To make sure there’s enough money for Glow First’s early users, Levchin is seeding the fund with $1 million of his own money. “I will personally fund a bunch of babies,” he said, “and if nothing else succeeds, I don’t see how I can be too disappointed with that.”

The key measure of Glow’s success, Levchin and Huang said, will be the number of babies born on its regimen—and they’re already receiving pictures of positive pregnancy tests from the 250 women in their beta group. But after that, it will be measured in the number of dollars saved that couples would otherwise have had to pay themselves.

And once they’ve made conception cheaper and less taboo for research and discussion in the US, they’ll branch out in other ways: To developing countries, where fertility issues get even less attention, and then on to other medical problems that could benefit from data collection. “The ultimate goal,” Levchin said, “Is to go after the overall state of health-care costs in this country.” But for now he says he’ll be satisfied with a spike in boys named Max and Mike.


02 Aug 20:43

Even world leaders care about their Klout score

by Siraj Datoo
firehose

"South Korean president Park Geun-hye has issued a press release to announce that her Klout score went up."

President Park Geun-hye's online popularity is on the up

South Korean president Park Geun-hye has issued a press release to announce that her Klout score went up. Seriously.

Klout, a startup that measures influence on social media, is one of those tools that people mock in public while privately checking to see where they stand. Park, who won election by a tight margin, is obviously less bashful about it.

Park’s Klout score is 82. That’s up from 65 in February, when she took office, according to a report from South Korea’s state-run Yonhap News Agency, which wrote up the press release. US president Barack “Obama’s score is 99, and pop singer Justin Bieber’s score is 92,” Yonhap noted for context.

Park’s social media ascendancy, such as it is, might have something to do with her tendency to post cute images on Twitter. These include photos of adorable children’s plush toys and dogs playing in a garden, which her followers have retweeted in the hundreds. Pro tip for Park: Your Klout score might be even higher if you connected your Facebook profile, too.

In reality, it’s not at all surprising that Park’s stature on social media has risen since she became the most powerful person in South Korea. And not to brag or anything, but Quartz’s Klout score is 81, just a point shy of Park.

Park, a conservative, is South Korea’s first female president. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, who led the country under a dictatorship from 1961 until he was assassinated in 1979. That legacy has made Park a contentious figure in South Korean politics, and her office may be overeager to prove she is liked—on Facebook or otherwise.

When Park visited China in June, she was briefly a trending topic on China’s microblogging service Sina Weibo.