firehose

Dr. Chris Emdin of Columbia University's Teachers College came up with the idea—one supported by the Wu-Tang Clan's GZA, mentioned in the video above—to teach kids science by encouraging them to rap about it. It's working, not just at getting kids to remember scientific facts and principles, but also to be enthusiastic about them. Says one teenage girl laying down some rhymes about acceleration: "If the rapping doesn't become a thing for me, I want to be a brain surgeon." (To be fair to my ninth grade science teacher, I'm sure I did learn about all the stuff in the video back in the day. I just don't remember it now. Maybe if my North Carolina high school had been more open to rap...) (via: Jezebel) Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

A common complaint over the years has been that R2K loaded all of the images in your browser regardless of whether you opened a share, leading to slow performance generally, and particularly heavy bandwidth usage on mobile devices

No more! R2K now lazy loads images and other media, so your browser will only load the relevant images when you expand a share or RSS post. You should see better performance everywhere, and less data usage on your phone

Spot a bug? Hit up feedback@reader2000.com

Original Source

Jake Evill is hoping that someday 3D printed casts will replace the bulky, stinky plaster casts we are all familiar with. De Zeen shares the story...

A patient would have the bones x-rayed and the outside of the limb 3D-scanned. Computer software would then determine the optimum bespoke shape, with denser support focussed around the fracture itself.

Original Source

Original Source

Ecuador Flower Growers In Snowden Shock NPR PIFO, Ecuador (AP) — Gino Descalzi used to fret about things like aphids, mildew and the high cost of shipping millions of roses a year from Ecuador to florists in the United States. These days he's worried about a 30-year-old American thought to be stuck in ... and more »

Gunkerty Jeb writes "A security researcher has uncovered a number of serious vulnerabilities in one of the core security components of several secure telephony applications, including the Silent Circle system developed by PGP creator Phil Zimmermann. The vulnerabilities in the GNU ZRTPCPP library already have been addressed in a new version of the library and Silent Circle has implemented a fix, as well. ZRTPCPP is a library that implements the ZRTP protocol that Zimmermann and others developed to establish secure sessions over a pre-existing connection. Silent Circle, which sells a cryptographically secure mobile phone application, and several other products implement the ZRTPCPP library, and Mark Dowd of Azimuth Security has identified several vulnerabilities in the library that could give an attacker the ability to get remote code execution. Dowd said that the bugs can be exploited by remote, unauthenticated users."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

	Courtney shared this story from :D SHITTY :(:
	this was my immediate reaction as well

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itsvondell:

beautifullyheeled:

gods why are ampersands so sexy to me… 

That’s a particularly pretty one.

New Order setlist: Glastonbury - June 20, 1981

niknak79:

Mil-House!

The Linux support for Apple's new Haswell-based MacBook Air is less than desirable, but at least it's on the path to getting better...

Rose Colored Gaming recently unveiled a beautiful Earthbound Zero reproduction NES cart, complete with a slick plastic case and custom cover art. The cart includes an English-translated ROM of Japanese Nintendo RPG and cult classic Mother.

Mother never came to the United States, though Mother 2 was released as Earthbound on SNES in North America, and will see a Wii U Virtual Console port this year. The game that followed in the series, Mother 3 for Game Boy Advance, also never saw official North American localization, though fan translators of the game offered Nintendo to use their work free of charge for further Virtual Console localization purposes.

As for Rose Colored Gaming's gorgeous Earthbound Zero reproduction cart, there's no price listed yet on its store as it's working to produce "as many of these as possible for as long as possible." We're just saying, this collectible item would be a great gift for a sorrowful Joystiq editor that has lost hope that any future iterations of the series will come to life in a language they understand.

[Thanks, Wes!]

Buy us this Earthbound Zero NES reproduction cart originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 30 Jun 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Work around persistent 500s when fetching item bodies.

Some item IDs (e.g. 0xa23eae3e1c9b626a and 0x27cb2e8581e4065d) cause persistent
500s when making the /stream/items/contents API call. Previously, this 500 would
cause the entire chunk of ~250 item IDs to be aborted. Switch instead to
(recursively) splitting up the chunk into two, and retrying each split chunk
until we find the specific items that cause the error. The rest of the item
bodies can therefor still be fetched.

Fixes #11

Crunchy Knit And Velvet.

Rex Harrison, My Fair Lady.

Unlike any other book on the subject (to my knowledge), Power and Style presents its thought-provoking, intelligently written text alongside numerous visual examples in the forms of illustrations, contemporary portraits and photographs in a large coffee table-book format.  Less didactic that the other books mentioned above, its tone is primarily descriptive and its organization simple, without being simplistic.  Beginning with the dress and adornment (including scarification and tattoos) of so-called primitive cultures, Power and Style walks the reader through a series of chapters each loosely focusing on a particular historical period or phenomenon’s effects on the use of clothing to signify – or camouflage – power.  As the reader reaches the final chapters, the authors provide their predictions for the future semiotics of clothing and power.

The serious reader will discover considerable erudition: the authors make interesting propositions based on anthropological and other research, including the ideas that societies without centralized state power also lack the idea of clothing as a means of covering the body, and that clothing was not invented to protect from the elements but to show differences in prestige.  From here, the authors cover the rise of empires and their sumptuary restrictions, which reserved certain colors and garments to the ruling classes, who themselves were physically isolated from the people.  Drawing on Suetonius’ cautionary tales, the authors contrast the austerity of the togas of citizens of the Roman Republic with the increasing sartorial and ceremonial pomp of successive Roman emperors.  The authors emphasize the Roman emperors’ long-reaching influence on the attire and ceremony of Western rulers for over a millennium, indeed until the shattering of absolute monarchy at the end of the 18^th century.  The emperor who immediately followed such upheavals, Napoleon, spurned court attire and made the military uniform his de factostate apparel through his propaganda and heroic portraits (interestingly, the authors mention that Napoleon was also obsessed with putting every person in France into uniforms of his own design that would reflect their ages and occupations).  In so doing, Napoleon also paved the way for the 20^th-century totalitarians who appropriated the uniform – whether military, proletarian or peasant – as a pretension to representing the popular ideal.

The easily bored reader or barely literate menswear enthusiast will also find much to love in Power and Style, from beautiful curiosities like the 19^th century portrait of a Maori chief in full Western attire and face covered with tattoos, to the later chapters covering the invention of modern men’s fashion, beginning with Edward VII.  Power and Style features ample illustrations of this son of Queen Victoria and his sartorial legacy: he was single-handedly responsible for inventing or popularizing the tuxedo, the Homburg hat, the modern waistcoat, pinstripes, glen checks and much else.  A chapter on JFK purports that he was emblematic of the rise of American style, with much ink and illustration on the Ivy look and, rather surprisingly, on how the Duke of Windsor reflected this new American casualness in dress.  Here the authors’ analysis breaks down a bit, or at least betrays a certain laziness and personal unfamiliarity with tailoring, since they use the hackneyed and deeply flawed opposition of structured English tailoring to sensual and soft Italian clothing, and cite Brioni, of all makers, as an example of such Italian lightness.  What the authors do get right is that the locus of style moved over this period from the upper classes of England to the swells of Hollywood.  And in the intervening half century or so, the clothing of power has either become standardized to the blandness of the suits of the UN diplomatic corps… or has become once again a symbol of political self-determination, as shown by former colonial nations which rejected Western dress in favor of national costume, however ersatz.  The Sarkozys and Obamas provide a visual aid for the awfulness of the ill-fitting business suit, leaders in an age when not just custom, but clothes that fit, must be signs of elitism.  And looking ahead?  New powers are emerging, with different costumes and different mores.  The Gaulmes predict a growth in the camouflage of prestige and the accumulation of details and gimmicks only visible at close range, such as stitching that looks handmade (even if put on by machine) and working buttonholes, as well as a rise in gender-neutral or multifunctional, versatile and egalitarian clothing.  What that would look like, I cannot and do not wish to imagine.  Were it to mirror today’s political realities, such clothing surely would only give the appearance of (small-D) democratic approachability and neutrality in order to allow its wearer to take advantage of us and undermine our rights.

Power and Style also intersperses throughout its text entertaining side articles on the development of various items of personal decoration, from the tie and the watch to the beard to the court sword, and more relevant to today, the loafer and sunglasses.  I note that Power and Style was originally published in French as Les Habits du pouvoir : une histoire politique du vêtement masculine, which is the version I read it in prior to learning that it had been translated.  I urge any readers interested in learning how to say “penis sheath” in French to do so as well (and if you already know how, your mother and I will be proud of you no matter how you are).  In any event, it’s a worthy addition both to your coffee table or to your book case, food for thought as well a feast for the eyes.

Words by Réginald-Jérôme de Mans

Calgary-based artists Caitlind r.c. Brown and Wayne Garrett (previously) swung by Chicago this month and installed this amazing interactive lighting solution called Cloud Ceiling at Progress Bar. Constructed from hand-bent steel, reflective mylar, electronics, motion sensors, LEDs, and 15,000 re-appropriated incandescent light bulbs, the cloud is now a permanent fixture in the bar which opened earlier this week. Motion sensors embedded in the ceiling cause the cumulous surface of light bulbs to illuminate, effectively ‘mapping’ a lit path through the cloud as bar patrons move through the space.

Brown and Garret were featured in this space last year, for a similar interactive cloud installed at Nuit Blanche Calgary. You can learn more about Cloud Ceiling here.

newfluffytown:

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reasonrules:

hermione-ganja:

A necessary message for all the nice guys out there.

SCREAMING

dog days

Wish your kitchen looked more like a laboratory? Well you'll be able to pour the perfect portion of wine with the Periodic TableWare. Or maybe you'd prefer a video game where combat is optional, a speculative look at New York's layout, or a handbook on making and publishing webcomics.

Read more...