firehose

Ping Pong Tube: WHOOOAAA slow down, future.

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rachel shared this story from Shakesville.

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If you know who these two puppets creatures are, then you might be kind of excited about this:

From October 1st, 2013 to December 31st, 2013, The Jim Henson Company and Grosset & Dunlap of the Penguin Young Readers Group will be accepting writing submissions to find the author for a new novel set in the world of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. This author search is open to all professional and aspiring professional writers.

Tell me I'm not the only one who loved that movie beyond reason as a kid. (Even if I noticed a few flaws when I got older, okay, OKAY.)

So if the sequel isn't happening-- again! -- officially licensed novels sound pretty good to me. Good luck, writer-fans (especially feminist writer-fans)! I can't wait to see the results.

(Hat-tip to my cuz ACB.)

NEW YORK—Following a year of fruitless efforts to find a job, unemployed 26-year-old Scott Wesley, who reportedly lives off a $2 million trust fund established by his parents, confirmed Thursday he “still has enough in savings” to make e...

Mysterious package labeling on Flickr.

They’re dried medlars. But is that a translation of a brand name, or what?

I’m tearing up (and I only ever watched like 2 episodes of The Sopranos)

James Gandolfini, the actor who played Tony Soprano on The Sopranos, died yesterday. The famous final scene of the series was shot at Holsten's in Bloomfield, NJ. The diner honored Gandolfini by keeping his booth clear and ready.

Link -via The Hairpin

Original Source

Barsky and other skeptics call this debt burden a "noose around the campus' neck" that could prevent Cal from pursuing other worthy projects requiring it to borrow money, like retrofitting buildings that don't meet seismic standards. They also fear it will lead the campus to raid academic funds, and that the University of California regents could raise tuition to pay off debt. Such concerns are fueled by UC's practice of pledging all forms of revenue - "including tuition," according to Cal's fact sheet on Memorial Stadium - when it obtains debt financing. At the same time, the regents have said debt repayment should come from the intercollegiate athletics budget. That department already uses campus funds, however, relying on yearly contributions from a discretionary account to pay its bills. This year, the campus contributed $4.5 million. Stadium debt already absorbs 20 percent of intercollegiate athletics' annual income, or roughly $18 million of its $89 million budget. And that pays only the interest.

There are systemic problems that plague modern parties that are out of power, and consequently, have no de facto leader. In this paradigm the inmates run the asylum. So the way to become the leader isn't to challenge his followers, but instead, to tell them what they want to hear. Jindal's Politico column might be interpreted as a signal that he has gotten with the program.

Black Simon & Garfunkel — Questlove and Captain Kirk Douglas of The Roots — perform a cover of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” on a recent episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

IQuarent,

I've talked to the GM who ran "Way of the Kirin" about your PC's death and I don't think he unfairly targeted you, nor do I think he has a personal vendetta against you. You decided to stay in the fight after being dropped to less than half hp in the surprise round. You could have backed out and healed yourself, or simply removed yourself from being the most obvious target for the next attack, but decided to remain and present your foes with a target they knew from experience could be hit. I don't believe you were the victim of bad GMing. I think you made a very risky tactical decision (given your current hit points and the proven ability of your foes to dish out at least as much damage as they had done before) and it went against you.

Luckily you had enough prestige to be resurrected so you get to learn from your decision and play this PC again, perhaps a bit more cautiously.

Also, in the future I would ask that you take up these kinds of issues with me in person or via email before taking them to the Paizo messageboards. Airing your criticisms of people you play with here can create bad feelings among your actual community who run games for you. Remember that there's a very good chance that your GMs read these posts as well, and they can tell from your posts which games (and people) you are talking about.

Companies that protect your privacy with software are seeing a big to their businesses following revelations that America’s internet giants have been turned into appendages of its surveillance state.

The companies don’t create products that are specifically designed to thwart NSA spying or government surveillance, but as Sarah Downey, privacy analyst for privacy software company Abine explained, “One thing that’s emerged [from the NSA leak] is that the social networks and data trackers are the source of the data supply chain. The private companies are collecting data and feeding the government with it. So if you want to stay more private, you have to limit the data that these companies gather about you.”

In other words, if you want to stay out of the NSA’s databases, you first have to stay out of the databases of marketers and companies—like Google and Facebook—that rely on advertising to fund their services.

Here are the numbers:

54% increase in installations of the DoNotTrackMe browser extension, which prevents web tracking.

DoNotTrackMe, made by Abine, prevents private companies from tracking your activity across the web, which is the first step in aggregating that data for marketers. In the week after the NSA revelation, installations shot up 54% when compared to the week before. At its peak on Friday June 14, installations of the extension were up 98% compared to the previous Friday. Abine makes money by selling “premium” versions of its privacy products, including DeleteMe and (the forthcoming) MaskMe.

55% increase in traffic to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-protecting search engine.

DuckDuckGo is big on not storing its users’ personal information, unlike Google, which uses that information to personalize search results. The site’s traffic has spiked since NSA leaker Snowden asserted that Google is feeding data to the US government. “By not storing any useful information, DuckDuckGo simply isn’t useful to these surveillance programs,” Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo, recently told Silicon Angle.

48% increase in traffic flowing through the location-masking service FoxyProxy.

FoxyProxy is an extension for the Firefox web browser that re-routes traffic through a “Virtual Private Network,” thus masking the location and identity of anyone using the extension. Bandwidth consumed by FoxyProxy users was up 48% in the week after the NSA leak.

All of these companies remain relatively obscure, despite their collective goal of making online privacy accessible to the masses. Which is either a testament to the complexity of protecting one’s privacy online, or evidence that most people simply don’t care about digital surveillance—or both.

dramasbomin:

9darkhours-9personas-9dorms:

bakuraryou:

johannahmontana:

arclightsarentinzexalii:

kaito-sama:

phoenixedo:

arclightsarentinzexalii:

every american i’ve talked to on skype asked about bagged milk so far

what the hell is bagged milk?

what

gUYS

IT’S JUST MILK

IN A BAG

WHY IS THIS SUCH A STRANGE CONCEPT

BECAUSE IF YOU OPEN IT, DOESN’T IT GO EVERYWHERE?

HOW DO YOU EVEN

#but.. can’t you open it like you open bagged water?

WHAT THE FUCK IS BAGGED WATER

WHY ARE YOU BAGGING DRINKS?

uncalar:

There’s 106 miles to Sesame Street: I love being able to draw :)

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield won the hearts of YouTube addicts the world over with his antics in zero gravity. Sadly, Hadfield has moved out of the International Space Station and back to Canada (although not without a farewell song), so who better for the role of zero-gravity superstar than Major Wang Yaping of China?

The 33-year-old astronaut and her two colleagues are on a short voyage on the Shenzhou 10 to the Tiangong 1 space lab, where she delivered a long lecture on Thursday aimed at 60 million Chinese schoolchildren. Like Hadfield, Wang used social media to connect with her younger audience, accepting questions via the Chinese micro-blogging service Weibo. Her approach was more serious than Hadfield’s, although the cross-legged zero-gravity aerobatics were entertaining. (And yes, David Bowie fans, she holds the rank of major according to Xinhua.)

The lecture got a positive if not ecstatic welcome from earthbound viewers. One Weibo user called Wang’s experiments with water “of great importance to mankind’s exploration of outer space.” That might be going a bit far, but for the most part people enjoyed the show. There were the inevitable grumblers, though—when the mission was launched last week, one micro-blogger wrote: “Why don’t they spend this money solving China’s real problems instead of wasting it like this?”—so it looks like Major Wang has a ways to go before she makes the grade.

How Microsoft's marketing failure is everyone's loss.

(via Twitter / AnthonySarcione: Oh my gosh! It’s so true! …)

At the end of 2012, we brought you our favorite charts of the year—the most significant trends, compelling data, and elegant visualizations, as picked by the Quartz staff. We’re a bit obsessed with charts here, and as 2013 nears its half-way point, we already have a growing list of favorites. Here they are:

Share of the world’s GDP since 1820

This remarkable chart—from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers “Internet Trends” presentation in late May—shows the shifting shares of global GDP over an unusually long timeframe. Europe’s dive over the past century is made clear, along with China’s sharp rise, and India’s middling progress. Perhaps surprising: China’s and India’s huge shares in 1820. And the American Century looks a lot less impressive in this context. —Kevin J. Delaney

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Job growth vs. job quality

The International Labor Organization made this chart (pdf) to compare “job quality,” measured by average wages, benefits, and hours worked, with job creation, between 2007 and 2011. Essentially, the place to be is in the top right quadrant (where countries are creating more and better jobs) and not the bottom left (where economies are creating fewer, worse jobs).

In most advanced economies, the new jobs being created are of lower quality, like the German “minijob”, with the exceptions of countries like South Korea, Norway, and Poland. The United States has fewer jobs, but is creating better ones—a finding that reflects growing inequality in the US. The emerging markets, on the other hand, are finding it easier to create more and better jobs because they’re starting from a low base. In other words, it’s easy to improve job quality in a country where most people make less than $10 a day; it’s much harder in a country where the median income is $50,000 per year. —Tim Fernholz

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The recovering US housing market

This chart shows how home prices in large US cities have really started gathering steam this year. The closely watched S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city index jumped 10.9% in March, the biggest change in seven years. —Matt Phillips

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Android’s fragmented user base

I love this chart because it illustrates a point that can’t be made often enough: Despite its dominant market share, Android remains a highly fragmented ecosystem. Most people with Android smartphones are using a version of the Android operating system (Gingerbread) that came out in 2010 and, frankly, isn’t that great. This is exactly the point Apple CEO Tim Cook was making when he flashed this slide at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference earlier this month. —Christopher Mims

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The NSA’s boundless informant

There are many things to love about this screenshot, published by the Guardian, from a US National Security Agency data-mining tool:

• its incredibly corny name, Boundless Informant, which proves that spies lack self-awareness;
• that we are seeing it at all, thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden;
• and how it captures the vast scope of NSA surveillance, which apparently swept up 97,111,188,358 pieces of information around the world in March 2013—a meaningless figure, yes, but one that speaks volumes in its magnitude.

Like so much of what Snowden has leaked, the screenshot raises more questions than it answers. But there’s something brilliant and ultimately very informative about its rudimentary interface and oversimplified heatmap, teasing the troves of data contained within this thing they call Boundless Informant. At a glance, we see where the American surveillance machine has pointed its ears: Iran, Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, India—and, with nearly the same intensity, the US itself. —Zachary M. Seward

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The cost of everything in the world

The US has less than one-twentieth of the global population but accounts for over a fifth of world health-care spending. Africa’s entire foreign debt ($200 billion) is just half what the planet spends each year on prostitution. British data journalist David McCandless’s blog, Information is Beautiful, is a repository of simple and elegant data visualizations. He isn’t the first or only person to try to capture what all the money in the world does—if you want to be truly gobsmacked by numbers, look at this stunning giant chart from XKCD— but his Billion-Dollar-O-Gram, updated for 2013, is certainly one of the easiest ways to get a very quick and sudden sense of perspective on how much the big things in this world cost. —Gideon Lichfield

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An animated catalog of planets

The discovery of dozens of planets by Kepler, a spacecraft designed specifically for that purpose, is difficult to grasp, let alone visualize. The best most of us can do is recall that sunset from Tatooine. That is why this interactive graphic from the New York Times is my pick for the favorite chart of the first half 2013. Though it doesn’t look like a traditional chart, it fulfills the primary function of one: to communicate a lot of complicated information in an easily understandable visual format. Its sparse design contains a wealth of information: size of stars in relation to our sun, star temperature, relative size of planets, velocity of orbit, and more. And it’s beautiful, too, which is a nice little bonus. —Leo Mirani

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The decline of US household wealth

American household balance sheets have healed a lot since the financial crisis hit. The ensuing stock market collapse and housing implosion incinerated some $16 trillion in household wealth. In nominal terms, American households managed to claw all that money back by the first quarter of 2013. But that doesn’t mean households are back where they were before the crisis.

Because of population growth there are now more households, which means aggregate US household wealth is shared by more people. And because of inflation, a US dollar buys less in 2013 than it did in 2008. UBS economists, who created this chart, estimate that after adjusting for inflation and household growth, net worth per household is still down 10% from where it was in 2007. —Matt Phillips

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What metadata reveals about us

When Edward Snowden leaked information about the existence of a large government surveillance program in the US, it brought the concept of metadata into the national spotlight. The NSA is collecting gobs of it, but a key question in the mind of the public is, what exactly can metadata reveal about you?

To provide a taste of metadata’s power, Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, used metadata from the past to identify Paul Revere as a central figure in a network of American revolutionaries in 1772. The chart itself (cropped in this screenshot) is nothing to put in a frame; but that Healy used relatively straightfoward math to pinpoint Revere three years before his legendary Midnight Ride is an unforgettable example of what metadata can show. —Ritchie King

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Our mobile future

China is the largest internet market in the world, with an estimated 564 million citizens online in 2012. This chart, another from the Kleiner Perkins “Internet Trends” report, shows how smartphones have quickly become the most popular method for connecting to the internet in China. The trend—and similar ones in other countries—helps explain the growth of phone makers like Apple and Samsung and the hard times for traditional PC makers. The chart also points to the continued growth potential for mobile commerce, communications, and services. —Kevin J. Delaney

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Violence and investment in Kenya

We used a chart from the World Bank to illustrate the dropoff in foreign direct investment after Kenya’s violent and deadly elections in 2007. It’s not much to look at, but this chart speaks volumes about attitudes heading into the country’s elections earlier this year. After that staggering 87% drop in FDI, there was no way the Kenyan government or business would allow this election to be anything but peaceful. And so it was. Or so we were told. —S. Mitra Kalita

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The global trade in cow sperm

Especially in this era of anemic demand, talk often turns to global trade. Currency wars, the weakening yen, the fate of periphery euro zone economies, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, China’s GDP—all those thing swivel in some way on the concept. But its near-universal relevance also makes it blandly abstract. That’s why my favorite chart of late is David Yanofsky’s two-part exploration of the international bull semen trade for Quartz. And I say that not just because I want the challenge of avoiding raunchy punning for the next two sentences. The US-Iran trade chart neatly unravels all these little filaments of need—the ones that drive people to trade with each other regardless of who’s government is QE-bombing whose. David’s pink dots are an elegant reminder that ”global trade” isn’t just cars, crude and semi-conductors. It’s also cucumber seeds, toothbrushes, lentils and, yes, bull semen. —Gwynn Guilford

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At least they’re honest

Europeans are quick to stereotype each other, as this survey in May from Pew Research found. Almost everyone agrees that Germans are the most trustworthy, least compassionate and most arrogant nation; in fact, Germans dominate the rankings in general, no doubt a sign of their outsize influence on the continent. Each country pats itself on the back for being the most compassionate, and Greece unsurprisingly gets low marks for trustworthiness. But my favorite finding: Italians consider themselves to be the least trustworthy, and the French reckon that when it comes to arrogance, nobody beats the French. How nice to have a little self-awareness. —Gideon Lichfield

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Gold’s big dive

Amid growing confidence in the US economic recovery as well as a sturdy rally in the stock market, gold prices collapsed in April. They’ve tried to get off the mat a couple of times, but no dice. —Matt Phillips

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Long-term unemployed in the US struggle to find jobs

Businessweek showed the relationship between long-term unemployment and job openings. It reveals that the long-term unemployed in the US are still having trouble finding jobs even as the job market has improved to levels last seen in 2004. —David Yanofsky

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The high price of wives in China

My favorite chart is Quartz’s breakdown of how China’s traditional “bride price” system works today. In this reverse-dowry kind of scenario, men give cash (sometimes measured in weight), appliances, liquor, tea, and other gifts to their fiancees and future in-laws. It also gets at the concern in China that people have become too materialistic. The original version of the chart had gone viral on Chinese social media as people debated whether the bride price system was hurting young couples who have to save for years before they can marry. —Lily Kuo

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The many languages of New York tweets

I take the subway every morning, so I’m pretty familiar with how many different languages echo around New York City. But I wouldn’t have guessed that Portuguese and Japanese are two of the city’s predominant languages (at least on Twitter), or that more of its dwellers tweet in Korean than French, and Turkish than Arabic. And even if I had, I couldn’t have documented it as simply and beautifully as this. —Roberto A. Ferdman

Pinball Quest (TOSE/Jaleco - NES - 1989/1990)

vgjunk:

That is not a happy skeleton.

	rachel shared this story from ThisIsWhyImBroke.com:
	:)

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In the same way, it is entirely possible to go and visit an Upper Cretaceous Series deposit - such as the Hell Creek deposit where the Tyrannosaurus fossils were found - but it is naturally impossible to visit the Late Cretaceous Epoch as that is a period of time.

Link

McGruber writes "Carl Fiorentino, known to many slashdotters for his regular hyperbole-filled emails advertising 'unbelievable' blowout pricing on memory, storage, other components, and overclocker specials, has been indicted in New York federal court on seven counts of fraud and money laundering charges. Fiorentino allegedly took more than $7 million in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for steering more than $230 million in business to the Taiwanese and California companies that made the payments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.