firehose

Guatamala


Washington, DC


Quito, Ecuador


Polynesia The Earth's Shadow appears on the Rings at night


Arctic Circle The Rings are barely visible

the-science-llama:

If Earth Had Rings

First off, they would be really pretty to look at. They would also dominate the sky in both night and day at exactly the same place as they would never rise nor set. And at night you would see the Earth’s shadow swing across the rings, like in the 4th photo here.

However, life would be very different on Earth if this were the case. Nocturnal animals would have a hard time being nocturnal, as the light reflecting from the rings would illuminate the night.

Because we are closer to the Sun than Saturn is, the rings would be more rocky than ice, making them less bright but still pretty bright. In fact, you would see far less stars at night (living anywhere other than the equator or the arctic circle) because of the light pollution and not to mention ruin most meteor showers because of that.

During the day the rings would block sunlight in certain regions of the planet creating wild weather cycles and effecting plant life as well. So basically, they would be definitely pretty to look at but they would also make a whole lot of things screwy.

Illustrations by Ron Miller // io9
— Click the photos for captions

One of our experts.

Those looking to play some new games on their Neo Geo X consoles can now preorder five volumes on Amazon for $25 each that, in total, include 15 of the system's classic games. Neo Geo X owners also have the option to pay $80 for a Mega Pack that contains all 15 games. The game packs will be available on June 6, according to Amazon's listings.

While we knew these games were coming, here's how they are spread out across the five volumes:

• Volume 1: Sengoku, Metal Slug 2, Top Hunter
• Volume 2: Samurai Shodown 3, Savage Reign, Super Sidekicks 3
• Volume 3: The King of Fighters '96, Blazing Star, Kizuna Encounter
• Volume 4: Garou: Mark of the Wolves, Shock Troopers, World Heroes 2 Jet
• Volume 5: The Last Blade, Blue's Journey, Art of Fighting 3

More Neo Geo X classics arriving June 6 originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 25 May 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

lapizsolarflare:

imperfectwriting:

norwegianblues:

THE most underrated scene in the entire movie. It was perfect. And do you know how often I see gif sets of it? This is the second one I’ve seen since the movie came out (It’s been over 5 months, now).

So let’s just pause for a moment from reblogging gifs of Tony’s sass, Loki’s sex appeal, or Bruce’s fluffiness and just appreciate this nameless, old, German guy and how, even though he knew he would probably die, he stood up to a tyrant to prove that the human race wouldn’t give up their freedom so easily.

Friendly reminder that it’s implied that he’s a Holocaust survivor.

I’m not even kidding, this was my absolute FAVORITE scene in the movie. The fact that he stood and stayed standing and just… those exact words! An inspirational man… Loki doesn’t even know how right the guy is either.

always reblog.

Michael Zoellner sez,

After watching Grant Gee's documentary "Joy Division" I wanted to print the iconic cover of their first album "Unknown Pleasures" in 3D. Unfortunately I could not find a single vector graphic or 3D model anywhere. There are articles about the history of the graphics, Peter Saville's artwork and PSR B1919+21. I even tried to visualize PSR B1919+21's waveforms. But in the end I spend an evening tracing the waves by hand.

The resulting SVG file was extruded and rendered in Processing with Richard Marxer's Geomerative and my RExtrudedMesh extension. OBJ export was accomplished with OBJExport. The model was printed on Makerbot Replicator with white PLA filament. The 3D model and the SVG graphic are published under a Creative Commons license.

Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures printed in 3D

doctorwhogifs:

TARDIS interiors - the wardrobe

sex-panthers:

Every Spring, a vast migratory band of goths congregates in Leipzig, Germany.  The goths’ presence dominates the cityscape for nearly a week before the creatures disperse, and local stocks of fishnets and clove cigarettes become dangerously low, while many disgruntled property owners report having to forcibly shoo bewildered goths out of adjacent alleys.

By and large, however, the goths have become a kind of mascot for the city, and many residents view the arrival of the goths as a herald that Spring has truly arrived.  After only a few days, the goths will go their separate ways—some tagged specimens have been tracked as far away as Japan, Canada, and Russia—and life in Leipzig will return to normal.  The most common reason wild animals congregate—to seek mates—does not apply to goths, who reproduce asexually.  Why do they gather?  What is the purpose of this strange migration?  We just don’t know.

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson may be the big names in the new comedy "The Internship," but the real star of the film is Google.

WASHINGTON—According to sources, the long Memorial Day weekend in honor of Monday’s federal holiday is practically over already, with the hours left in said weekend dwindling away at an increasingly rapid pace even as you read this news articl...

Photos of America’s Space Shuttle Program by Dan Winters via MMM

rachel shared this story from Wondermark.

---

Artist Rey Taira updates Georges Seurat's masterpiece of pointillism "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" by adding DC's superheroes. Behold, "Saturday Morning in Front of La Salle De Justice."

Read more...

Happy Towel Day

A federal court on Friday found that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio systematically violated the constitutional rights of illegal immigrants through "saturation" sweeps that ended up targeting people based on their appearance or perceived ancestry. In the ruling, US District Court Judge Murray Snow told Arpaio and his deputies to stop using race and ancestry as reasons to stop or detain drivers in a tactic widely known as "saturation patrols." "The great weight of the evidence is that all types of saturation patrols at issue in this case incorporated race as a consideration into their operations," Judge Snow said in a written ruling.

The ten-foot Wendy Rose sculpture was commissioned in honor of women welders who worked the city's shipyards during World War II. Earlier this month, vandals beheaded the statue. Police haven't determined who's responsible. But some high school students from Fort Vancouver High School's Industrial Arts program welded a replacement - in the image of Bender, a robot from the TV series Futurama.

Robbie Rogers is joining the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer in another step by openly gay athletes in professional sports.

Derrick, who oversees Nostrana restaurant's monthly Negroni program, is preparing for its third annual party in which fans of the classic Italian cocktail gather to taste a year's worth of mixological experiments for charity. This year's theme is magic. "We take the event and make it as theatrical as possible," says Derrick, who promises costumes and dramatic touches at the Negroni Social on June 3, including a repeat appearance by Count Negroni. The character is based on the Italian nobleman who invented the drink bearing his name, circa 1919, by asking a Florence barman to amp up his usual, an Americano cocktail, by subbing the soda water with gin. Derrick himself has become an ambassador around Portland for the drink — equal parts gin, Campari and sweet vermouth — and he’s instituted a bit of cocktail diplomacy this year, working with Imbibe magazine. From Monday till June 3, bars around town such as Kask and Raven & Rose have gotten in on the act with a Negroni on their menus; a dollar from each drink goes to Outside In, an agency that helps homeless youths and others with medical and mental health services and resources.

journeyers-scrapbook:

fuckeverythingbecomeapirate:

“Any ideas for the new park sculpture?”

“How about a giant, metallic octopus attacking a rook?”

“Perfect.”

Is anyone else seeing a Game of Thrones reference here… ???

This is… so unusual.

CBC.ca

Syrian war spills over Lebanon iloubnan.info Two rockets struck down in Beirut and the threat of the war in Syria spreading to Lebanon is echoing all over international news channels. Over the past few weeks, the situation in Lebanon has deteriorated and keeps escalating. “All components of war are ... Danger of civil war looms for Lebanongulfnews.com all 387 news articles »

When John Baptist Greco built Holy Land USA in Waterbury, Connecticut, he envisioned it as a pilgrimage site for American Christians. Closed since 1984 however, the long-neglected park now looks more like a horror movie set than a place for wholesome family fun.

Read more...

video by John Adamson

This impressive and delicious-looking chocolate zoetrope is on display at the Phillip Island Chocolate Factory near Melbourne, Australia.

video by ankitengineer7

via Blame It On The Voices

Swedish riots spread beyond capital AFP STOCKHOLM — Riots in Sweden spread beyond the capital on Saturday, the sixth straight night of unrest that flared in Stockholm's immigrant-dominated suburbs and has sparked a debate over integration in a country long seen as an oasis of peace. and more »

00_NOP writes "'Universal Credit' — the plan to consolidate all Britain's welfare payments into one — is the world's biggest 'agile' software development project. It is now close to collapse, the British government admitted yesterday. The failure, if and when it comes, could cost billions and have dire social consequences. 'Some steps have been taken to try to rescue the project. The back end – the benefits calculation – has reportedly been shifted to a "waterfall" development process – which offers some assurances that the government at least takes its fiduciary duties seriously as it should mean no code will be deployed that has not been finished. The front end – the bit used by humans – is still meant to be “agile” – which makes some sense, but where is the testing? Agile is supposed to be about openness between developer and client and we – the taxpayers – are the clients: why can’t we see what our money is paying for?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve Jobs, in his biography, on his meeting with Larry Page after the former became CEO:

We talked a lot about focus. And choosing people. How to know who to trust, and how to build a team of lieutenants he can count on. I described the blocking and tackling he would have to do to keep the company from getting flabby and being larded with B players. The main thing I stressed was focus. Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It’s now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they’re dragging you down. They’re turning you into Microsoft. They’re causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great.

Skip ahead two years, to the aftermath of last week’s Google I/O, and the backlash is kicking into high gear. Google is the new Microsoft, the story goes, and we hate it.

We, to be clear, are getting exactly what we always wanted.¹

The Google that I saw at I/O was, to use Jobs’ words, focused. They know exactly what their strength is – machine learning – and they know exactly what they want to be – the world’s source of all information, both facts and people.

Of course, it’s been there all along, albeit phrased slightly differently:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

There are no qualifiers here, nothing that says the information is only the information we want them to collect. What websites we visit, what locations we go to, what music we listen to – that’s all information. And Google has made very clear they are just as interested in that as they are in the links that undergird the web, and Google itself.

Look again at the signal-to-ads cycle:

Google dominates every aspect of this cycle, and every announcement at IO accrued to it:

On the signal side:

• Their mobile apps are both the best, and the most popular, and they work best with a Google+ account
• Their browser is the best, and the most popular, and it works best with a Google+ account
• Their maps are the best, and the most popular, and they work best with a Google+ account
• Their video website (YouTube) is the best, and the most popular, and it works best with a Google+ account
• Their mail service (GMail) is the best, and the most popular, and is a Google+ account

And they simply own online advertising, with the best, and most popular, search ads, 3rd-party ads, and display ads.

Android did its job: Google’s signals have unfettered access to users on every mobile platform. Microsoft is in no position to block them, and Apple, for all its bluster, isn’t interested.

Chrome is doing its job: Google’s signals sit on top of an increasing number of PCs, slowly making the underlying OS irrelevant.

Google+ is doing its job: Every Google service is now tied together by a single identity, and identity is the key to data collection on mobile.

Cars and Glass are doing their jobs: not only do they have the potential of capturing an untold amount of information, they also give comfort to shareholders that Google has future growth opportunities, and comfort to geeks that Google is simply a mad scientist who only has ads in order to keep the lights on.²

The tragedy of wishes is that, when you finally get what you want, you realize that you actually didn’t want that at all. That, more than anything, seems to underline the post-IO angst. It turns out that focus is an incredibly powerful thing; in the hands of perhaps the most powerful company in technology, it’s downright awesome.³

Be careful what you wish for.

1. This article is not a moral judgment about whether Google is “evil”. I purposely stay away from that on this blog, and only use “we” as a rhetorical device
2. Related: Google is a hypocrite. That I do agree with. It bugs me.
3. Merriam-Webster: Awesome. “Inspiring awe.” Also, I didn’t say “most profitable.”

One reblogged my post showing me this, and I fell in look with the look of this character! Look at those perfect details!

finofilipino:

Cómo hacer una minitarta de chocolate con un toque de sabor a naranja al estilo hombre de las cavernas.

dresdencodak:

‘We Have Always Fought’: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative

An incredible article about the myths of women’s role in history, our biases from patriarchal education and media, and how not addressing those biases creates a feedback loop in fiction that perpetuates sexism.

A must read!

We forget what the story’s about. We erase women in our stories who, in our own lives, are powerful, forthright, intelligent, terrifying people. Women stab and maim and kill and lead and manage and own and run. We know that. We experience it every day. We see it.

…

[T]he trouble is, it’s often hard to sort out what we actually experienced from what we’re told we experienced, or what we should have experienced. We’re social creatures, and fallible.

http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/05/we-have-always-fought-challenging-the-women-cattle-and-slaves-narrative-by-kameron-hurley/