firehose

lucytwobows:

Florence and the Machine.

A recent poll conducted by WIN/Gallup International concluded that ~13% of the globe self-identifies as atheist (more than twice the percentage seen in America). Here's how those atheists are distributed around the world.

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The Pirate Pancake Griddle is a brilliant cast-iron mold by Chicago-based sculptor ad fabricator Joe Sandor. The griddle displays an intimidating looking skull and crossbones design int he center and can be used to make up to three 5 inch pancakes per batch. If you want to get really creative, the griddle can be used to fry up other foods, other than pancakes.

For the sake of simplicity in design and production, it’s a pancake griddle. It works great as such and is the first of it’s kind. Industrial casting is a complicated process and I specifically designed this to be a one part casting. Jon has started a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to help support further development of the prototype and its process.

And since this is cast iron, you can make anything in it. I’ve been able to make a variety of pancakes, as well as corncakes, and fried eggs. I imagine this would work great for molding chocolate and hard candy as well. It’s designed as a griddle that is set it on the stove and remains stationary while cooking with it. Proper cooking temperature will vary from burner to burner. If you want to move it while it’s still hot, simply use hot pads, but most likely you will be eating tasty pancakes while it’s cooling off. I’m excited to see what innovative culinary warriors will produce with this.

Pirate Pancake Griddle

Treasure Island

video and images via Pirate Pancake Griddle

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has released her highly anticipated, annual presentation on internet trends. Here it is:

Some highlights from the slides:

• More than 500 million photos are uploaded and shared every day. More than half of those are on Facebook.
• About 100 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• About a quarter of people worldwide say they share “everything” or “most things” online. In Saudia Arabia, India, and Indonesia, at least half say the same thing.
• Mobile internet traffic as a percentage of all internet traffic is expected to continued growing one-and-a-half times per year. It’s currently 15%.
• In China this year, mobile internet access surpassed PC internet access for the first time.
• On Groupon, 45% of transactions are conducted with mobile devices.
• Smartphone users check their devices about 150 times a day.
• QR code scanning is up fourfold in China from a year earlier.
• China now has more users of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems than the United States does.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified Meeker’s employer as KPMG.

This is a tweet of a Vine of an Instagram of a Tumblr post of a Facebook post of a tweet: vine.co/v/bYmxJXuIbAb

— Dan Rollman (@snerko) May 28, 2013

Dan Rollman of RecordSetter has made a Tweet of a Vine of an Instagram of a Tumblr post of a Facebook post of a Tweet. He says it’s an “Inception-esque tweet that integrates all major social media platforms.”

And this is a screenshot of a Tweet of a Vine of an Instagram of a Tumblr post of a Facebook post of a Tweet inside of a Laughing Squid blog post:

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

xombiedirge:

Video Games Characters in Real Life on Facebook by Andrew Golden

Inside, Sif, Freyja, and Vali kill the captured and mortally wounded Viking Aegir, to free him from his own pain, and then confronted by Hel. She says Vali is also after the Hammer, but he disappeares. Now it is a lady fight! Thor almost comes in, but they tell him to go after the hammer, so he goes and finds Mjölnir. Thor also finds Fenris, who tells him he had waited a long time for Thor’s return. He even calls Thor, Son of Odin, meaning Odin is Thor’s father.

Link (Thanks, CWW)

WASHINGTON—According to reports, the American people are currently rubbing their hands in anticipation for whatever vile, disgusting garbage the internet will eventually puke up across a variety of news outlets, blogs, social media networks, and com...

The FBI seized and ran a child pornography service late last year as investigators worked to identify its customers, one Western Washington man allegedly among them.

An IndieGoGo project created by Gawker has reached its $200,000 goal, with the intention of purchasing a video from a self-proclaimed member of the Toronto drug scene that allegedly shows Toronto mayor Rob Ford smoking crack.

This is the Otamatone Jumbo, not to be confused with the Otamatone or the Otamatone Deluxe. They were developed in Japan by the Cube Works Company along with Maywa Denki and Novmichi Tosa. Otamatones are available on ThinkGeek and Amazon.

via io9.

4gifs:

Making chains

Feedbonk

Spoiler:

The above APIs are not ready to support the local synchronization approach used by Mr. Reader.

Read the whole thing because it's nice to hear it directly from the people making apps and not arm-chair developers.

I certainly hope that NewsBlur can improve their API to enable tools like this...and fast.

lostsplendor:

Armored Diving Suit, France c. 1878 (via Xerposa)

To complete the other part of the equation on the unveiling of the 21st Century Fox logo earlier this month, the other half of the split News Corp has now introduced its new logo — no design credit given. As a refresher: "News Corporation is splitting into two separate businesses. The first, to remain named News Corporation will handle all the publishing properties — newspapers and magazines — like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, with the former’s managing editor, Robert Thompson, as CEO. The second, to be renamed 21st Century Fox will handle the entertainment properties — cable and television channels, filmed entertainment, and direct satellite broadcasting businesses — including the FOX network, 20th Century FOX, FX, among dozens of other channels with Rupert Murdoch as CEO." While the 21st Century logo didn't replace anything and was a new expression, this new News Corp logo does replace the old one.

Today we are unveiling a new logo that will be our emblem for this future. The name is historic and the script is based on the writing of Rupert and his father, who have provided us all with not only a name, but a remarkable professional platform.
— Memo to employees from new CEO Robert Thomson

Rupert introducing the new News Corp logo on Investor Day. Photo by his Chief of Staff, Natalie Ravitz.

The old logo was a graphic manifestation of all we thought was wrong and evil with News Corp, the kind of logo that would be created as a prop for a villain in a Hollywood movie: globe-ish, blue, ambiguous, engulfing. Ugly. The new logo is or, at least attempts to be, all the contrary — human, personal, warm, accessible — by using Ruport Murdoch's handwriting. (The memo quoted also mentions his father's handwriting but I have a hard time thinking they had the same handwriting — it just makes for a better story). As a corporate logo, this is actually quite good. It's unique, it works perfectly in black and white, it has a certain sophistication to it without being pompous, it's a decent set of letterforms (if a little on the wide side), and I'm sure it will look great on stationery. What's more interesting is the company embracing that News Corp is basically synonymous with Rupert Murdoch and that he is as much part of the brand (and the value of its stock price) as the newspapers and magazines it operates. Murdoch may not have the best penmanship but his imprint in the publishing industry is undeniable — and now, trademarked.

Thanks to Andrew Gregory for first tip.

Don't forget to cast your vote about this post online

Zoltan Istvan’s The Transhumanist Wager is an epic story of radical libertarianism, its enemies, and the violent global conflict that ensues.

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After two years of shunning Wall Street, graduates of Harvard College are heading back into finance and consulting. And judging by prior years, that’s bad news for the stock market.

Among members of Harvard’s class of 2013 who secured jobs before graduation, 16% are going into consulting and 15% into finance, making those the most popular industries, according to the Harvard Crimson’s annual survey. The combined 31% in finance and consulting is up sharply from 21% in 2012 and 22% in 2011.

Harvard’s interest in Wall Street, though, should make investors blanch. Since at least 2007, whenever the portion of Harvard College graduates choosing finance or consulting for their careers has increased, the stock market has declined the following year. The opposite is also true: when Harvard flees Wall Street, the market rebounds.

In 2007, 47% of Harvard graduates went into finance or consulting. The next year was the start of the global financial crisis, and the S&P 500 lost nearly half its value. The market bounced back in 2009 and 2010, after Harvard’s classes of 2008 and 2009 opted for careers elsewhere. And the pattern more-or-less repeated itself in the following three years.

Of course, while there are worse theories for why markets move, the correlation of Harvard graduate career choices to the S&P 500 does not imply causation. It’s as specious as a similar theory about Harvard Business School graduates. The relationship simply illustrates some hard truths: Harvard graduates like money, choose careers based on salary, and are terrible predictors of the future. In other words, Harvard is a trailing indicator.

The average starting salary for members of Harvard’s class of 2013 who have jobs is about $60,000, which is higher than the median US household income of $52,762. But the students heading to Wall Street and related fields will earn even more: 71% of those entering consulting will earn between $70,000 and $90,000, according to the Crimson survey, and 21% of those entering finance will make more than $110,000.

Harvard’s class of 2013 isn’t planning to stay in those industries, though. Only 5% expects to be working in finance in 10 years, and just 1% see themselves in consulting.

Yeah, yeah, keep telling yourselves that, kids.

You’ll have to visit JC Penney stores in person to buy the tea kettle that resembles former German Chancellor and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

fishwalk - Umihara Kawase (TNN/NHK - Super Famicom - 1994)

Over the years we’ve had a tons of tips sent in that were more along the lines of “lifehacks”. Simple little tips to make life better. While we would occasionally squeeze them into hackaday, many got left behind. Now we’ve created an entire site called LIFE.hackaday that we’re filling with all these great ideas. Finally, a place for all those docks people send us!

Occasionally, there might be something that we feel works for the “classic” hackaday and “LIFE.”, in which case, we may just mention it here. We hope that by creating another site, we can give people the “lifehacks” they want while keeping hackaday focused on hardware hacking.

We have some other tricks up our sleeve, but they aren’t quite ready to be revealed yet.

Filed under: Featured, news

With a brand new PC certified for Microsoft Windows 8 and shipping the OS, even if you don't plan to use the operating system, it can be difficult to bypass the Windows license agreement before wiping it to install your favorite Linux distribution...

By all appearances, rabbit could be the food of the future.

For $90 million, Intel just acquired the whole of ST-Ericsson’s unit responsible for creating microchips that allow navigation via GPS satellites. It’s the first acquisition for Intel’s new CEO, Brian Krzanich, who has only been on the job for 12 days.

The unit Krzanich just bought for a song has been a huge money-loser for ST-Ericsson, so this move isn’t about bolstering Intel’s flagging revenue. Rather, it’s about giving Intel a stronger foothold in the mobile phone market. Intel makes chips for phones, a line it calls Silvermont, and they’re getting better, but only a handful of manufacturers use them. And that’s at least partly because Intel doesn’t yet create the kinds of all-in-one mobile chips that are currently the sole domain of companies like mobile chip giant Qualcomm. (Intel hasn’t yet responded to requests for comment.)

All-in-one mobile chips that can do everything—compute pretty graphics, talk to cell phone towers, process GPS signals—are key to keeping power consumption in phones low (important for getting the most bang out of a limited battery) and for selling chips at the lowest cost, so that phone makers want to incorporate them into their latest handsets.

Intel also has a habit of using its connections with computer makers to hand them “reference designs” that let the manfacturers make PCs under their own brand name with Intel guts—the most famous one, currently, being Intel’s vision for the “ultrabook,” which is basically a MacBook Air but with anyone’s branding but Apple’s.

Now, if Intel can attach enough of the other pieces of a mobile phone chip to its own ever-more-powerful Silvermont chips, the company can create its own reference designs for mobile. That’s just like Qualcomm, which will basically ship the entire guts of a smartphone, minus the screen and a few other elements, to any manufacturer who wants to slap them into a case.

This has been a huge success story for Qualcomm, according to the company: Though its reference design program was launched only in 2011, it’s already led to 170 different phones from 40 manufacturers, mostly in China, and shortens the time between the conception of a phone to its manufacture from one and a half years to 60 days.

That’s one reason Qualcomm is so dominant in mobile chips. And it’s clear that Intel has woken up to the fact that in a mobile future, one way it can turbocharge its own efforts to gain market share is by offering something similar.

Phil was given the freedom of the city of York, northern England, by the town council in May 2010. He has not yet commented on what, if any, plans he has to visit the city.

Link

“Princess Allura”

Fort Wayne, Indiana-based freelance artist Josh Burns has created an incredible series of realistic portrait illustrations portraying good and evil characters from the Voltron cartoon series. You can view the entire collection of 14 illustrations on Josh’s art blog and deviantART portfolio.

“Keith and Black Lion”

“Pidge and Green Lion”

“Lance and Red Lion”

“Sven and Blue Lion”

“The Pilot Hunk”

“Queen Merla”

“Haggar the Witch”

images via Josh Burns

By Arturo R. García

Calling this past season of Doctor Who uneven might be doing it a favor. Presented as two separate seasons marked by a change in companions for the Eleventh Doctor and capped by the prelude to the show’s 50th anniversary special in November, critiques of the show under Steven Moffat’s watch got louder than ever. That discussion, we hope, will only get louder when Doctor Who and Race is released in August.

Edited by Dr. Lindy Orthia — who has published several academic works dealing with the shows including one on Who’s “inability to acknowledge the material realities of an inequitable postcolonial world shaped by exploitative trade practices, diasporic trauma and racist discrimination” — the anthology will feature more than 20 essays explicitly tackling several aspects of the show’s presentation (and, one presumes, lack thereof) regarding issues regarding racial issues.

Naturally, some people are out to silence her efforts before the book’s even released. Warning: Misogynist language just under the cut.

These were the responses to Orthia’s announcement earlier this month of the release date and that the book’s royalties were being donated to charity:

And remember: Doctor Who fans are supposed to be the smart ones. This guy below sent the same tweet to Orthia on consecutive days:

The UK-based site Digital Spy didn’t help matters when it made this claim, seemingly sight-unseen:

A new collection of essays titled ‘Doctor Who and Race’ claims that the sci-fi program is racist for failing to cast a black or Asian actor as the Time Lord and accuses the title character of being dismissive of black companions.

Now, do you get that impression from this abstract for Roseanne Welch’s “When white boys write black: Race and class in the Davies and Moffat eras”?

This essay discusses the different ways former “Doctor Who” show runner Russell T Davies and his successor, Steven Moffat, handle race in writing the show. It concludes that while Davies’ characters of colour (Mickey, Martha and Rosita) are all three-dimensional, sexualized human beings, Moffat’s (Liz Ten, Mels and Rita) tended toward more one-dimensional, Talented Tenth types.

Or this one for Stephanie Guerdan’s “Baby steps: A modest solution to Asian under-representation in Doctor Who“?

This essay points out the lack of previous Asian representation in both the casting choices and storylines of Doctor Who. It goes on to suggest some small steps that could be taken to rectify this lack while also keeping in mind some of the BBC’s previous racial faux pas.

Methinks DS and the BBC doth protest too much. The network responded by citing the casting of Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones and Noel Clarke as Mickey Smith — both moves that occurred during the Davies era.

Digital Spy and other outlets also seized on a statement by Orthia that, “the biggest elephant in the room is the problem privately nursed by many fans of loving a TV show when it is thunderingly racist.” She elaborated on that remark in another statement:

In the book this sentence comes towards the end of my conclusion chapter, in a section which discusses the fact that many people who study “Doctor Who” are also fans, and so are personally invested in what they study and write.

The sentence is not stating that “Doctor Who” is thunderingly racist. The sentence is saying that fans often feel inner conflict at those times when Doctor Who has moments of racism, because we love the show but don’t love racism. An example is the Doctor’s line in “Doctor Who”‘s first episode, “An Unearthly Child,” in which he talks about “the savage mind” of “the Red Indian” – the episode may be 50 years old, but we still watch it today, and the line still sits uncomfortably because of its casual racism. My reflection on this is simply asking how we should best deal with that discomfort.

I end the conclusion by quoting from Kate Orman’s essay in the book, in which she says: “because we are fans, we’re capable of being sophisticated, thoughtful viewers, able to see both a story’s successes and its failings.”

I hope that this is true, and that future discussions about this book and its subject will be considered and thoughtful.

It would seem that, despite their self-appointed reputation, these Who fans aren’t interested in that.

[h/t The Mary Sue]

A core principal in how our nonprofit organization delivers services is to help young people make informed decisions about their future. We want young people to own their decisions as opposed to us making them. This is especially true for the college application and enrollment process. Due to cost and family pressure to stay close to home, government-run colleges are a favored option. They are significantly more affordable than private colleges and, in New York City, the various divisions of the City University of New York (CUNY) can be reached by public transportation.

But often, youth who have been accepted into a four-year college at CUNY will still seriously consider enrolling into a two-year CUNY college to obtain an associate’s degree. They are easily influenced by family members or friends whose advice is based on misinformation—go to community college, get an associate’s degree, save money on tuition, and then enroll in a four-college as a third-year student. They are also told that if college doesn’t work out, after two years at a community college they will at least have a degree instead of just credits completed at a four-year college. This misconception exists all over the country.

Second, even if they complete an associate’s degree, it shows the difference in earnings compared to completing a bachelor’s. An annual difference of $13,000 is tangible for them.

Usually sharing these facts is enough to make youth understand the value of investing in a four-year degree. In addition, we hope they gain the knowledge to help their friends and relatives make more informed decisions about their future.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com. 

The U.S. Army is introducing a new weapon in its fight to get Colombia’s guerrillas to put down their guns: the soap opera.