firehose

doctorpuppet:

Doctor Puppet Episode 3: The Doctor in the Garden (x)

Thanks for the gif set! :)

San Francisco Chronicle

In Seattle, former Mexican president urges end to marijuana prohibition Puget Sound Business Journal (Seattle) Former Mexican President Vicente Fox (left) shakes hands with Jamen Shively, (right) of marijuana firm Diego Pellicer Inc. during a press conference in Seattle. Valerie Bauman: Staff Writer- Puget Sound Business Journal: Email | Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn ... Ex-Mexico president praises Wash. pot businessmenThe San Luis Obispo Tribune Former president of Mexico touts marijuana industry hereQ13 FOX all 53 news articles »

OK, so there’s this guy in Texas. He’s not a great fella, so to speak, as he has spent a lot of time getting convicted of stuff like cocaine possession and aggravated assault and leaving the scene of an accident. Not a saint.

But he’s done his time in prison, “paid his debt” or whatever, and now he’s a free man. But then, he does something dumb — he tries to steal some food. Walks into a grocery store and shoves a rack of ribs into his shirt, because, who knows, if you really like ribs, maybe that sounds like a good idea.

But it isn’t, because people are like, “Hey, that guy is clearly stealing meats,” and then the guy gets arrested. Can you guess what is going to happen? Because it is Texas, maybe you can! They’re going to lock him in a small concrete room until he dies.

Yup — Waco resident Willie Smith Ward was arrested back in 2011 after getting caught with stolen ribs and telling a store clerk to stay away because he had a knife. Because he has previous convictions and he happened to be stealing ribs in Texas, this is how he was treated by a jury of his “peers,” per the Waco Tribune:

Ward’s theft of the $35 rack of pork ribs turned into a robbery when he threatened a grocery store employee who saw the huge bulge under Ward’s shirt and tried to stop him in the parking lot. [...]

Jurors took two minutes Wednesday to convict Ward on robbery charges and about an hour to decide his punishment.

62 minutes, to go from “Did this guy steal some ribs?” to “He should never again see daylight.” JUSTICE.

“This verdict shows that the citizens of this county will not tolerate a continued disrespect and disregard for other people and their property,” said Assistant District Attorney J.R. Vicha, who prosecuted Ward with Chris Bullajian. “People who choose to do so will be dealt with seriously and appropriately.”

In case you missed it: A white teen drinks some beers, gets in a pickup and kills a guy, he gets probation and mandated church attendance. A black guy in Texas steals ribs, 50 years in prison. This is how we deal with people “appropriately.”

And yes, let us praise the super-tough “citizens of this county,” who imprisoned Willie Smith Ward to teach him a lesson, a lesson he did not learn all the other million times he was in prison, but this time it will stick, because they will lock him in there and forget about him and let him go crazy and then bury him in a bag. The wonderful people of Texas, who can look at the issue of repeat offenders and say, rather than “Hey, maybe something is wrong with our prisons,” only that the people who offend again just haven’t gotten enough prison yet.

It’s the only logical solution, really. If prison didn’t teach Ward a lesson before, the answer is clearly PRISON FOREVER. We have given up trying to rehabilitate this person, he stole some meat so now he will rot, because sometimes when a habitual offender steals some meat you just have to say “That’s enough, no more meat-stealing, your life is over.” This is Texas. We’re tough.

[Waco Tribune via Gawker]

Fourteen-year-old Tremaine McMillian didn't threaten police. He didn't attack them. He wasn't armed. All the black teenager did was appear threatening by shooting Miami-Dade police officers a few "dehumanizing stares."

As you may have heard, in tones of varying screechiness, Kickstarter has endured a sort of backlash of late, as the crowdsourcing site has been increasingly co-opted by musicians and filmmakers with plenty of means to realize their projects, yet ask you to give it to them anyway. Some have responded by pointedly making their own art for free. Others have taken out their frustrations on Melissa Joan Hart. More recently, comedian Jon Lajoie (best known as “Taco” on The League) witheringly spoofed such endeavors with his “Help Jon Become Super Rich!!!”, a mocking initiative dedicated to helping Jon become super rich “without all the added pressure of actually doing something.” Amid such growing pessimism, it's only becoming harder for people of privilege to ask those without to fund their capricious self-interests without the hassle of first proving merit, like normal people have time to do. 

Take, for instance ...

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SAN FRANCISCO—After reports surfaced Thursday that a local Gap customer became ill after consuming 37 pairs of five-pocket straight-fit corduroy pants, the clothing chain recalled the wrinkle-resistant men’s trousers and issued a statement urg...

United Express Flight 4352, what's meant to be a 97-minute jump from Cincinnati to Newark, N.J. The 6 p.m. flight has run chronically late more often than any other U.S. airline flight over the past two years, according to Department of Transportation data. Flight 4352 has been on time only 19% of the time, according to United's website, and has been canceled 7% of the time—far greater than the airline average of about 2% of flights canceled. (Sidebar describes a typical delay of 4352, which gets delayed by three hours. "Many have realized connections will be missed and they'll be stuck at Newark overnight.")

The massive catalog of adventure games from Activision - which once upon a time were known as the Sierra adventure games - is 50 percent off on GOG until Monday, June 3.

The sale includes the Kings Quest, Quest for Glory, Zork, Space Quest, Police Quest, Gabriel Knight series and many, many more. They are all either $2.99 or $4.99. The entire portfolio can be yours for $121.

Also, there's no shame in looking up the answer to the Rumpelstiltskin riddle in King's Quest when you get stuck. We've all done it.

Activision (Sierra) adventure games 50% off on GOG this weekend originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 31 May 2013 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Winning Wheel of Fortune's million-dollar prize is the no-hitter of game shows — a near impossible feat, a long slog made even less possible by the lineup in front of you, not to mention the luck of the spin. Last night Autumn Erhard pretty much walked the bases loaded then struck out the side in the bottom of the ninth.

Strangely, even though “Massachusetts” was a worldwide number one single, it only reached #11 in the United States where the state of Massachusetts is located.

Link (Thanks, keepcalm)

nightshadezero:

This one I actually made a few weeks ago. Just reposting it.

schwit1 writes "Parents in Polk County, Florida are outraged after learning that students in area schools had their irises scanned as part of a new security program without obtaining proper permission. Two days before their Memorial Day weekend break, kids from at least three different public schools — Bethune Academy (K–5), Davenport School of the Arts (K–5, middle, and high school), and Daniel Jenkins Academy (grades 6–12) — were subjected to iris scans without their parents' knowledge or consent. The scans are essentially optical fingerprints, which the school intended to collect to create a database of biometric information for school-bus security."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is Portabliss, a column about downloadable games that can be played on the go.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic is the kind of game that's almost too big to be playing on the iPad. It's easily 30 hours long, with extensive attribute, skill, and combat systems, and it has some of the best storytelling BioWare's ever done, all set in the epic pre-film Star Wars universe. This is a monster of a classic game, and like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Baldur's Gate before it, it seems like cheating to play this game on Apple's touchscreen tablet, like you're somehow breaking the laws of mobile gaming physics, if such a school even exists.

And yet, it works. Aspyr Media is the company responsible here. It's been porting games to the Mac for a long time, and with Knights of the Old Republic has decided to start bringing what it calls "catalog Mac experiences" to iOS. Presumably, the rights were snagged from BioWare and LucasArts, and now there's a very well-made $9.99 port of one of the best Star Wars games ever assembled, running on the iPad.

Continue reading Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic arrives on the iPad, and the Force is with it

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic arrives on the iPad, and the Force is with it originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 31 May 2013 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Say hello to your new desktop background.

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Captain America 2: The Winter Solider is currently filming in Cleveland, and apparently the Cleveland Plain Dealer cares not for Marvel Studios' polite "no pictures" request. The first unofficial look at Sebastian Stan as Bucky-turned-bad guy is here!

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ABC News

Schlafly to Republicans: Reach out to white voters MSNBC Phyllis Schlafly speaks during an interview in her office Wednesday, March 7, 2007 in Clayton, Mo. At 82 the matriarch of the conservative movement is showing no signs of slowing down and is still speaking out against abortion and illegal immigrants, still ... How Romney could have won the popular voteDaily Caller Republicans Should Chase White Vote, Center For Immigration Studies SaysHuffington Post What happened to that GOP makeover?The Week Magazine The Hill -First Things (blog) -MarketWatch (press release) all 22 news articles »

After already enduring criticisms that the show has become a hedonistic bacchanal of snogging, Doctor Who is now under fire for being “thunderously racist”—a type of racism far worse than the scattered showers of drizzling racism that may occasionally be a nuisance, but shouldn’t affect your weekend plans. This argument forms the basis of a new book titled Doctor Who And Race, which collects essays from various academics who were shocked to find numerous examples of racism in the show when they went looking for them specifically.

Among the charges excerpted by Radio Times: “the failure to cast a black or Asian Doctor;” a 2011 episode that offered an “inappropriately slapstick take on Hitler;” the tendency of the show in the 1970s to refer to primitive people as “savages” and cast white actors in ethnic roles; and even the fact that Peter Davison’s fifth Doctor in the ...

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While Mr. Reader has a problem with NewsBlur, ReadKit released a new version that supports it as an RSS sync service. Of course, I don't know the technical details and what ReadKit may be losing along the way, but I'm glad they added it anyway.

In the latest sound installation by Swiss artist Zimoun, he used more than 300 balls tethered to electric motors to fill a 42-foot-tall chemical storage tank with a mesmerizing rumbling sound. The permanent installation, entitled “329 prepared dc-motors, cotton balls, toluene tank,” was created in collaboration with Hannes Zweifel in Dottikon, Switzerland. We first posted about Zimoun’s wonderful sound installations back in 2011.

via The Creators Project

You wouldn’t necessarily expect to get health insights from McDonald’s—but it doesn’t mean the company isn’t offering them. At an analyst conference this week, McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson revealed that he’s lost 20 lbs (9 kg) over the past year, though he still eats his company’s fast food every day. He says the weight loss is due to being more active. And he added that it’s rare to see “very, very heavy” Europeans since they tend to walk a lot.

We don’t know how Thompson might define either “rare” or “very, very heavy,” but the increase in obesity among Europeans is striking. In the UK and France, for example, the percentage of the adult population qualifying as obese has roughly doubled since the early ’90s. In 2012, 52% of adults in the European Union qualified as “overweight” or “obese,” according to the OECD. (Both “overweight” and “obese” are defined as certain ranges of body mass index, which is a measure of height compared to weight.) Evidence suggests that it’s more common among poorer and less-educated people.

In recent years, McDonald’s has added healthier items like salads and egg-white breakfast sandwiches. But a recent study found that though US fast-food chains are advertising healthier eating, the food they serve has gotten only marginally healthier overall. Even McDonald’s 400-calorie menu is full of sugar, sodium and preservatives. Nor is the chain shying away from its standard heavy-hitting options. Last week, it released the Mega Potato in Japan: twice the regular serving size of french fries, delivering 1,142 calories.

Europe is the second-largest regional market for McDonald’s with 7,400 stores. In the UK, France and Germany it is the country’s most popular fast food restaurant. This year, fast food’s market share has finally surpassed that of traditional restaurants in France. That occurred in the UK in 2012.

vinces99 writes "The pattern of brain responses to words in 2-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder predicted the youngsters' linguistic, cognitive and adaptive skills at ages 4 and 6, according to a new study from the University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. The findings are among the first to demonstrate that a brain marker can predict future abilities in children with autism."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Army medic Nicholas Walker returned home from Iraq after 250 combat missions, traumatized and broken. His friends and family couldn’t help him. Therapy couldn’t help him. Heroin couldn’t help him. Pulling bank heists helped him.

chuckhistory:

Yeah… so guess what eating this mushroom does to Mario.

Anyone?

Swedish colleges and universities are free. Yep. Totally free.

But students there still end up with a lot of debt. The average at the beginning of 2013 was roughly 124,000 Swedish krona ($19,000). Sure, the average US student was carrying about 30% more, at $24,800.

But remember: Free. College in Sweden is free. That’s not even all that common in Europe anymore. While the costs of education are far lower than in the US, over the past two decades sometimes-hefty fees have become a  fact of life for many European students. Britain got them in 1998. Some German states instituted them after a federal ban on student fees was overturned in the courts. In fact, since 1995 more than half of the 25 OECD countries with available data on higher education have overhauled their college tuition policies at public institions, with many adding or raising fees.

And yet, students in Germany and the UK have far lower debts than in Sweden. And 85% of Swedish students graduate with debt, versus only 50% in the US. Worst of all, new Swedish graduates have the highest debt-to-income ratios of any group of students in the developed world (according to estimates of what they’re expected to earn once they get out of school)—somewhere in the neighborhood of 80%. The US, where we’re constantly being told that student debt is hitting crisis proportions, the average is more like 60%. Why?

Freedom isn’t free

College in Sweden is free. But rent isn’t. And food isn’t. Neither is the beer that fuels the relatively infrequent, yet legendary, binges in which some Swedes partake. Costs of living in Sweden are high, especially in cities such as Stockholm, which regularly ranks among the world’s most expensive places to live. But again, this stuff isn’t free for students in other European countries either. So why do Swedish students end up with more debt? It’s pretty simple, actually. In Sweden, young people are expected to pay for things themselves instead of sponging off their parents.

Meet Ellie

This is Ellie. She’s 22 years old and lives in Stockholm, where she studies engineering and media technology at the Royal Institute of Technology. There’s no tuition to pay for the five-year course of study. And because she is from Stockholm, Ellie was able to live at home with her parents for the first couple years of her university career.

“My parents told me, ‘You are very stupid to move out because every month you save like 4,000 kroner,’” she said.

In a way, she’s an outlier. Sweden population of roughly 9.1 million—smaller than Belgium’s—is  sprinkled pretty evenly over a geographic expanse greater than Germany’s. So for many Swedes, living with mom and dad while attending school isn’t an option.

But Ellie is also like most Swedish students, in that she’s taken student aid from the Centrala Studiestödsnämnden, or CSN, the state-sponsored entity that distributes student aid in the form of grants and loans.

“Everyone takes the grants,” she said. “Almost everyone takes the loan as well.”

She’s right. According to data collected by the OECD, despite nonexistent tuition costs, Sweden has a virtually 100% uptake rate on student aid. That’s why Sweden is all by itself in the bottom right corner of this chart, although its Nordic neighbors are not far behind.

Moving out

Swedes, like other Nordic Europeans, have an independent streak. They leave their parental homes earlier than almost all their southern neighbors.

One study found that just 2% of Swedish men lived with their parents after the age of 30. In Spain, a quarter of 30-year-old men still are shacking up with mom and dad; in Italy it was around 32%.

Nobody’s exactly sure why this is. One of the more fascinating theories is that the differences in the strength of family ties in northern and southern Europe is a faint echo of invasions by the Roman Empire and Islamic caliphates in the Mediterranean region versus the Germanic-Nordic dominance in regions further north.

Or it could reflect the fact that back in the middle ages, young people in northern Europe were often sent out to work as servants outside the family home. Others simply argue that it’s the economy, with low wages and high housing costs conspiring to keep southern Europeans living at home.

Whatever the reason, ideas about youthful independence are embedded in the system Sweden devised to pay for higher education. For example, whereas in the US parents are expected to help pay for the their children’s college education, in Sweden parental income levels are just not part of the equation. Students are viewed as adults, responsible for their own finances. As a result “levels of student support are based on students’ own income, rather than that of their parents,” wrote analysts in a white paper on the system. Compare that to countries like Germany, where any aid from the state agency that doles it out, known as BAföG, is premised on parental income. In the US it’s the same deal. In Sweden, the entire system is aimed at severing the financial link between parents and young adults.

“The main point is to take away the family’s situation,” said Torbjörn Lindqvist, an analyst at the Swedish Higher Education Authority in Stockholm. “And look at the student as a grown up standing on his own feet.”

Get up, stand up

This is the key. While Swedish students end up with relatively high levels of debt, the monthly costs of carrying that debt are pretty cheap. (It’s about 3.8% of estimated average monthly income of new graduates, according to one study.) Interest rates are low. They’re set by the government and maintained through subsidies. And the length of repayment is long: 25 years or until the student turns 60. In other words, the Swedish system of student debt is financially manageable and sets students up to begin their lives as viable adults separate from their parents.

Compare that to the US system, where high levels of debt are increasingly impeding young people from taking on the trappings of adulthood. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found those with student debt retreating from purchases of cars and homes, for example.

Why this matters

Sure, automobiles and houses are nice. But if you’re looking for indicators of adulthood, the must-have accessory is a human infant. And, in a way, that’s sort of what this is about.

Across Europe, slumping birth rates represent a long-standing economic, demographic and social problem. Sweden, though, is something of a hotspot for European baby-making. Some see clear links between young people moving out of parental homes early and taking the necessary steps to become parents themselves. (Anyone who has ever lived with mom and dad into their 20s will understand this intuitively.) “Childbearing in developed countries almost invariably takes place after young adults have left their parental home, and home-leaving constitutes a central correlate of fertility and union formation in Europe and other industrialized countries,” wrote sociologists in this 2006 paper.

With American students, recent graduates, and their families staggering under a growing pile of debt, it’s becoming clear the US must change how it pays for college. The Swedish-style, state-led solution will be a nonstarter in the US of A. But the Swedish system helps clarify exactly what student debt is about. It’s not just a method of paying for books and professors. In a broader sense, student debt is just our solution for an age-old problem. It’s society’s way of financing a restructuring period for the currently unproductive assets it will depend on in the future: young people.

U.S. News & World Report

Hagel chides China for cyberspying Washington Post SINGAPORE — Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel took China to task Saturday for alleged cyberespionage, drawing a sharp response from a Chinese general who questioned whether the United States' growing military presence in Asia is anything more than a ... Hagel, in Hawaii, praises 'value added' force integrationAir Force Link Hagel issues stern warning to ChinaThe Guardian US and Japan Seek Dialogue With China to Prevent Sea ClashesBloomberg Newsday -Voice of America all 230 news articles »