firehose

God’s only mistake

Theodoros Papadopoulos from Drama, Greece, shared his Shelf Porn with us over the weekend, and in the comments section, he mentioned “some pictures of furniture dressed with comic pages. Something we did at our school.”

Theo is a high school teacher in Drama, and he sent in pictures of a craft project he did with his students.

“I am a teacher in a high school here in my town. I teach computers, but every year it becomes harder and harder. Children are more difficult because life is more difficult. They grow up away from us, hiding in that huge internet place that nobody can control, at least in a good way,” Theo said. “So I tried to do something different in my class. We made some chairs to look like comic books. We used glue and put some comic book pages on them. The glue is crystallized wood that you can buy by the pound. It’ s non toxic and you can remove it from your hands with water. When they dried the next day we used again another layer of glue. It worked like polish. The glue is white but it becomes transparent when it dies. Now people can sit of them without any problem. The students like the experience, or maybe the time that did not have a lesson.”

Check out some of the photos below.

Statistically speaking, girls and boys tend to have similar attitudes toward bikes until their 14th birthday or so. But around that age, gender attitudes diverge dramatically – and no one's quite sure why.

As they enter puberty, Portland girls suddenly start reporting much more concern about not knowing "how to exercise the right way," according to a new study. That's also the age at which girls start worrying more than boys do about hurting themselves if they're physically active.

Portland State University researcher Tara Goddard, who presented those findings to colleagues Friday, wonders if girls and boys should get different sorts of encouragement as they build active teen lifestyles.

"Maybe we need to catch them before this split starts to happen," Goddard said Friday. "Otherwise you're kind of working backwards and trying to repair that split."

Boys who turn 14 may still worry about the same issues, Goddard's research shows, but it tends to be at the same rates they did when they were younger.

Another big divide between girls and boys relates to their attitudes toward their peers. Whether or not boys ride bikes themselves, they feel about the same way about whether other kids their age ride bikes for transportation and whether biking to school is "cool."

But girls who like bikes are much more likely than girls who don't like bikes to say their peers think highly of bicycles.

"By age 14, girls are embarrassed to be seen exercising," Goddard said – and girls who feel that embarrassment more are much less likely to ride bicycles. "Do girls think of bicycling as a non-trivial physical activity?" Goddard wondered. "Or you could look at it the other direction: do girls who like bicycling have this body confidence and they're more comfortable being seen exercising?"

Goddard has looked into different programs designed to attract teens to biking. She found that public health programs tend to be more about discouraging unhealthy behavior – stopping smoking, for example – than encouraging healthy behavior.

She also said it's hard to find programs targeted directly toward helping girls build social connections with peers who ride bikes.

"A lot of girls are more likely to report the influence of their peers, so can we take advantage of that to be able to leverage the influence of bicycling as a transportation mode?" Goddard asked.

Bike-fun groups like Portland's Sprockettes, who recently started operating a summer bike-dance camp for girls, do come to mind. I also thought about this amazing video from a group of young Minneapolis rappers, both boys and girls, about their love of bikes.

This gender split among tweens is one tantalizing drip from a geyser of new data about to emerge from a three-year, $400,000 study of 323 Portland households' travel behavior. The study was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, OTREC and the City of Portland, and it promises a huge amount of new data on how families who live in different neighborhoods navigate our moderately multimodal American city.

"This is just the very first cut – the exploratory stuff," Goddard said. "During the next six months to a year to 18 months, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff coming out on this project."

The leaders of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army told the senator they want the U.S. to provide arms, a no-fly zone, and strikes on Hezbollah.

Taco Cowboy writes "Those of you who like free beer, watch out! The practice of fracking for shale gas may ruin the beer you drink. Under the 'Reinheitsgebot,' or German purity law, brewers have to produce beer using only malt, hops, yeast and water. 'The water has to be pure and more than half Germany's brewers have their own wells which are situated outside areas that could be protected under the government's current planned legislation on fracking,' said a Brauer-Bund spokesman. The Brauer-Bund beer association is worried that fracking for shale gas, which involves pumping water and chemicals at high pressure into the ground, could pollute water used for brewing and break a 500-year-old industry rule on water purity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rose Tyler was ~19 when she traveled with the Doctor

Martha Jones was ~22

Amy Pond was ~21

Is this what it feels like to be an adult? To be older than your favorite TV show’s characters?

The Google chairman has previously argued that corporate taxes should be levied in the country where it conducts economic activity and takes risks, rather than where products are consumed.

The biggest public transit infrastructure effort in the U.S. is almost completely invisible — unless you’re 160 feet underground.

With a reputation of taking harsh measures against unauthorized file-sharing, the RIAA has made quite a few enemies over the years. How ironic is it then that the RIAA website now appears to be seeding more than a dozen pirated porn videos? Or could it be that someone is trying to nail the RIAA in a clever way?

rossroads:

How to Scramble Eggs with Gordon Ramsay

1. he seems like a chill mofo to hang with

2. what the hell have i been eating my entire life

No cussing; just eggs. Perfect. :)

retroworks writes "Bloomberg News reporter Adam Minter writes in today's Opinion section that several studies show that there's nothing really remarkable or scandalous about exports of used equipment to developing nations. 'Some is recycled; some is repaired and refurbished for reuse; and some is thrown into landfills or incinerators. Almost none of it, however, is "dumped" overseas.' Minter begins with the most recent study (PDF), released by the U.S. International Trade Commission in March 2013. Several other studies from Peru, Nigeria, Ghana and China show there was never an incentive for overseas buyers to pay money to import junk, and that most of the junk filmed by activists in the dumps in those nations was used for years (Nigeria has had TV since the 1970s). 'A 2011 study by the United Nations Environment Program determined that only 9 percent of the used electronics imported by Nigeria — a country that is regularly depicted as a dumping ground for foreign e-waste — didn't work or were unrepairable, and thus bound for a recycler or a dump. The other 91 percent were reusable and bound for consumers who couldn't afford new products.' The one data source Bloomberg cannot find is a data point for the widely reported 'statistic' that 80-90% of used electronics imported by Africans are burned or dumped. In the comment section, two advocates for legislation banning the exports object to the survey methodology of one of the studies. But the source of the original statistic, reported by Greenpeace and Basel Action Network in their fundraising campaigns, remains a mystery."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an interview with Teen Witch Magazine, Unicorn Kid explained that he has been openly bisexual since the age of 13.^{[22] [23][24]} He has “taken a look” at Manroulette.com.^[25]

Link

Heroes, David Bowie

Animated Albums is a Tumblr blog by Italy-based Mr. Dormouse who makes cleverly animated GIFs of record album covers like David Bowie’s Heroes, The Smiths’ Rank, and more. The entire list of albums he’s animated is listed on this page.

Rank, The Smiths

Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division

via Neatorama

photo by Ra Chandroo

This humorous fish-shaped building is a regional office for the National Fisheries Development Board located near Hyderabad, India. According to Outlook India, the 4-story building is inspired by a “giant fish sculpture in Barcelona,” presumably the 1992 monumental sculpture “Fish,” by Frank Gehry. The building officially opened in April 2012.

video by 9966321532

photo via BuddyBits

via The Awesomer

BOSTON—Hours after arriving at an empty office this morning, local man and R&G Insurance Guaranty sales associate Joel Wyner told reporters that he’s beginning to suspect his employer may have given his staff the day off for Memorial Day.

Leon the Macedonian cat opens five doors to get outside in this video uploaded by Marjan Kirovski.

via Kurir, Daily Picks and Flicks

2" x 2" Vegetarian Section Granted On Backyard Grill

Monkey Light Pro is an LED lighting system that transforms a bicycle wheel into an animated color display. The light consists of four LED-studded spokes that generate images and animations when the bike wheel spins between 10 and 40 MPH. The user can choose from a library of graphics or upload their own via Bluetooth. Created by MonkeyLectric, the Monkey Light Pro is currently being pre-sold on Kickstarter. Back in 2011 we posted about MonkeyLectric’s M210 Monkey Light, a simpler bike wheel light that is currently available.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Frozen mosses that were buried under glaciers 400 years ago have now been regrown. Surprisingly, the hardy "bryophytes" required no special techniques to regenerate. That means they might be candidates for colonizing extreme environments — even in space.

Read more...

[Don] uses a Continuous Glucose Monitor to stay on top of his diabetes. It means carrying around an expensive and fragile device which acts as the readout. He’s an active guy and doesn’t want to destroy the thing while dirt biking or kick boxing so he’s been trying to use a TI Chronos smart watch as a display alternative.

As you can see he has already made some headway. This image shows the watch displaying data from the device. Unfortunately he’s depending on a PC to interface with the CGM display, then pushing it to the watch. He may try moving to a Raspberry Pi to help make this more mobile. This way the sensitive hardware could be tucked safely in a case inside a backpack while the watch shows his current glucose levels. We’d also love to see an embedded solution that would emulate the communications the PC is using to harvest the data. If you’ve got any suggestions in this area we’re sure that [Don] would appreciate the help.

Filed under: Medical hacks

Link

Tom Nook started from the bottom…

Now the guy’s charging a ton for you to live here. He doesn’t even run the general/convenience store in Animal Crossing: New Leaf anymore — Tom lets his nephews manage that while he oversees most of the town’s construction work. Pretty sure both of these businesses are money laundering operations.

Anyway, this pixelart comes from Mae. The piece didn’t make it into Animal Crosszine, but I think it’s awesome so I’m featuring it here. She has some nice photos and art on her blog, if you’re into following people on Tumblr with nice photos and art.

PREORDER Animal Crossing: New Leaf, AC:NL guide, upcoming games

After five weeks in theaters, Marvel Studios' "Iron Man 3" holds the fifth highest box office rank of all-time with $1.142 Billion in tickets, and is just behind "Avengers" for biggest domestic opening.

New submitter nekohayo writes "While Wayland/Weston 1.1 brought support to the Raspberry Pi merely a month ago, work has recently been done to bring true hardware-accelerated compositing capabilities to the RPi's graphics stack using Weston. The Raspberry Pi foundation has made an announcement about the work that has been done with Collabora to make this happen. X.org/Wayland developer Daniel Stone has written a blog post about this, including a video demonstrating the improved reactivity and performance. Developer Pekka Paalanen also provided additional technical details about the implementation." Rather than using the OpenGL ES hardware, the new compositor implementation uses the SoC's 2D scaler/compositing hardware which offers "a scaling throughput of 500 megapixels per second and blending throughput of 1 gigapixel per second. It runs independently of the OpenGL ES hardware, so we can continue to render 3D graphics at the full, very fast rate, even while compositing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DayZ creator Dean Hall hasn't forgotten about finishing the standalone game, or how much you want to play it - but he was giving you the cold shoulder last week. On May 21, Hall reached the top of Mt. Everest, according to a picture tweeted on May 24.

He's now made it safely down the mountain and is back in the studio, working on DayZ. Hall said a dev blog with the latest updates will go live when the team has time. There's still no word on a release date for DayZ, and the public alpha is scheduled for June, at the earliest.

DayZ mastermind conquers Everest, is back in the studio originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 27 May 2013 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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rachel shared this story from Everyone's Blog Posts - My Modern Metropolis.

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Single topic blog Animals Riding Animals features exactly what you'd expect: animals riding other animals. The hilarious and at times adorable (see: Chick riding kitten, below) Tumblr blog includes all members of the animal kingdom, from your basic house cat and dog to barnyard animals and exotic wildlife. The blog first launched in December 2010, but it has only in the last two months been especially fruitful with image after image of entertaining animal combinations. There are even a few gifs thrown in to show the feathered, furry, aquatic, reptilian, and amphibious creatures giving each other a ride.

Top photo: Goat riding a sheep

Dog riding a pony


Goat riding a horse


Dog riding a dog


Monkey riding a pig


Koala riding a dog


Dog riding a pig


Monkey riding a goat


Lion riding a horse


Birds riding an antelope


Dragonfly riding a kingfisher


Cat riding a dog


Chick riding kitten


Dog riding a dolphin

Cat riding a ram


Hyrax riding a tortoise

Animals Riding Animals blog
via [BuzzFeed]

rachel shared this story from Born Of An Atom Bomb.

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Moss Graffiti: A How To Guide