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Toronto Star

Japan Man, 80, Scales Everest, Sets Record Discovery News Japanese adventurer Yuichiro Miura (R) poses with his son Gota Miura (L) for photographers in Tokyo on March 22, 2013. The 80-year-old Japanese adventurer on May 23, 2013, became the oldest person to scale Mount Everest. Octogenarians Compete to Set a New Record on Mount EverestSmithsonian (blog) Everest's latest climbing season brings new records and challengesWashington Post (blog) Man Becomes Oldest to Climb Mount Everestfox8.com Shanghai Daily (subscription) all 93 news articles »

carry-on-my-wayward-butt:

guceubcuesu:

hey

Watchu got there

a skull that connects to my spine hbu

a-cumberbatch-of-cookies:

AND WITH THIS GIFSET MY LIFE IS NOW COMPLETE.

Mine too.

atlinmerrick:

A Certain French Writer wanted proof of the sweeties mentioned in Long Time Coming. Behold proof, as found in a sweets shop in northern England.

My favourite bit is the succulent hard willies? It says “traditional boiled sweets.” Traditional. As in time-honoured. Classic. Conventional.

Fic: LJ | FF | AO3

Succulent. Hard. Willies.

(local hysteria)

Inside a "build party" where anyone can make a rifle that no cop will ever know about.

Knowing more than the conventional wisdom when it comes to alcohol can mean the difference between looking like your bar's resident heavyweight and going home early to fight an epic hangover.

zrbyte writes "One-time pads are the holy grail of cryptography — they are impossible to crack, even in principle. However, the ability to copy electronic code makes one-time pads vulnerable to hackers. Now engineers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, have found a way round this to create a system of cryptography that is invulnerable to electronic attack. Their solution is based on a special kind of one-time pad that generates a random key through the complexity of its physical structure, namely shining a light through a diffusive glass plate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

judgecorp writes "Supporters of the Communications Data Bill (also known as the Snooper's Charter) have lost no time in calling for the Bill to be revived, in response to yesterday's brutal murder of a soldier on the streets of Woolwich, South London. The Bill would have allowed monitoring of all online communications — including who people contact and what websites they visit — but was shelved after Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg opposed it, effectively splitting Britain's coalition government on the issue. Now the fear of new terrorism could rekindle support, based on the argument that even 'lone wolf' attackers use the Internet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When David and Deanna Gonzalez bought a fixer-upper in Elbow Lake, Minnesota, for $10,100, they never dreamed they’d find a treasure worth 10 times that amount hidden in an abandoned house.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that while demolishing a wall, David Gonzalez struck gold amid newspapers from the 1930s that had been used for insulation: a copy of 1938′s Action Comics #1, featuring the debut of Superman.

He says he knew immediately the comic was valuable, but he had no idea how much it was actually worth. He’ll know for sure in another 20 days, when an online auction ends for the CGC-graded 1.5 copy. The top bid is a $113,111; Gonzalez will receive about half of the final sale price.

Unfortunately for the father of four, that figure would be significantly higher if not for the actions of one of his in-laws. It seems his wife’s over-eager aunt snatched the comic, and when Gonzalez went to grab it, the back cover was ripped, resulting in what ComicConnect’s Stephen Fishler calls “a $75,000 tear.” Without the rip, the comic would have been graded 3.0.

Even with that extra damage, the discovery of a copy of Action Comics #1 in that condition — the auction listing says it “boasts bright, sparkling colors and sturdy off-white pages” –  is almost unimaginable.

“This is like a virgin comic in this instance,” ComicConnect’s Vincent Zurzolo says. “It’s so hard for anyone to fathom that, in this day and age, you could still discover a comic book that nobody has known about because this book was in a wall of a house for more than 70 years. It’s pretty miraculous that it even survived and it’s only had one owner.”

About 100 copies of Action Comics #1 are thought to exist, but relative few are in decent condition. A near-mint copy owned by Nicolas Cage sold at auction in 2011 for a record $2.16 million.

“From left: Greg Orme, Kelli Allman, Barack Obama and Megan Hughes at Allman’s parents’ house in Honolulu.”

TIME magazine unearthed some photos of a 17-year-old Barack Obama sporting a white suit jacket and a lei on his way to the senior prom with friends in 1979. The photos come from Obama’s classmate at Punahou School in Hawaii, Kelli Allman (née McCormack).

image via Kelli Allman/Contact Press Image via TIME

via Digg

Yankee Stadium tries to be classy, and fails miserably. Again. Last month, the Yankees caught flak for their "Craft Beer Destination." Of the four options, all four were brewed by the MillerCoors conglomerate, and two of them, a shandy and a cider, weren't actually beers. The stand was hastily renamed the "Beer Mixology Destination." Some more verbal gymnastics are required after DNAinfo noticed the Yankees' four "import beer" carts, located around the stadium. Of the four options, Goose Island IPA is brewed in New Hampshire, while Beck's has been brewed in St. Louis for more than a year.

The Lonely Island may have just dropped a new clip, “Diaper Money,” on Monday, but the group’s commitment to #WackWednesdays apparently hasn’t waned one bit. The trio just dropped a new collaboration with Solange (a.k.a. Beyonce’s sister), and it’s hot, naturally. “Semicolon,” an ode to the punctuation that not enough people use, both educates and entertains, sort of like a much hipper Schoolhouse Rock for the 21^st century.

The Lonely Island’s The Wack Album arrives June 11 and features guest contributions from Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Pharrell Williams, and more. 

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t0gekisses:

I literally gasped

by funnyguy

notablegamebox:

Shamus was a knife-throwing robot who liked to dress like Doctor Who. Released in 1982 by Synapse Software for the Atari 800 and Commodore 64. Artwork by Tim Boxell.

Russian subcultures of the Eighties.

porcelain-horse-horselain:

 Not a god damn thing.

proudlybigotedmisandrist:

defranco:

edwardspoonhands:

tyleroakley:

Oops.

lolololol

hehehe

ignore the part with tyler oakley

“It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.” - the Creator of the GIF: I’m sticking...

Nick Fury was and always will be the face of S.H.I.E.L.D., but writer Brian Michael Bendis just revealed a new and surprising member to Marvel’s spy outfit: Dazzler. As revealed in today’s Uncanny X-Men #6, Dazzler has been recruited into S.H.I.E.L.D. by Maria Hill in an attempt to counter-balance Cyclops rebellious talk of a mutant revolution.

“That’s why she’s a perfect candidate. She’s on nobody’s side,” Bendis told IGN. “She is looking at this with eyes wide open. Even though her relationship with Cyclops has been very good in the past she doesn’t know how she feels about what he has turned into. Dazzler’s previous relationship [with] Scott Summers is part of the reason Maria Hill recruited her.”

It’s not the fact that she’s a mutant that makes her a surprising choice; fellow X-Men alums Kitty Pryde and Danielle Moonstar have been agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. at one point or another. What’s surprising is the prominent position the former pop star has moved into. Most recently seen in the pages of X-Treme X-Men bouncing around to alternate realities, the singer-turned-X-Man Alison Blaire has never been that much of a major player in Marvel Comics — but for a time, she was planned to be.

Introduced in 1980′s Uncanny X-Men #130, Dazzler came about when the record label for the band KISS partnered with Marvel to create a transmedia tie-in where the publisher would create a fictional superheroine/singer that the record label would then cast with a real singer, who would go on to star in a Dazzler movie. Decades before Gorillaz, this unique partnership failed to reach those haughty ambitions and instead worked just to introduced a disco diva named Dazzler into the Marvel Universe.

Dazzler went on to star in her own monthly series that balanced her real-world problems, like her career and love life, with superhero guest stars like Power Man and Iron Fist, the Hulk, Spider-Man and Angel (one of her love interests), as well as battles against Klaw, Dr. Doom and Galactus. After her series ended, she eventually joined the X-Men — becoming an official member right after the Mutant Massacre storyline — but was never much of a pillar to the team the way others introduced around the same time, like Kitty Pryde, were.

Storyline-wise, this is interesting; seeing this pop act go all super-soldier on us has some interesting potential, especially in the hands of Bendis. Also, you have to factor in that when X-Men: Schism took place, Dazzler openly sided with Cyclops over Wolverine, but now sits on the opposing team against Cyclops.

This does not seem like a good combination:

1. The FBI wants (has?) backdoors to monitor Skype (along with other Internet telephony apps); tellingly, there's already concern that such backdoors are open to non-FBI intruders.

2. The soon-to-arrive XBox One has Skype built-in, making use of the video camera on the Kinect.

3. Said Kinect is required, and cannot be disconnected.

4. And the XBox One will need to have regular (daily) Internet access, meaning that most people will just leave it connected to their home broadband.

Anyone want to place a wager on how many months it will be after the XBox One is released before there's a "XBox Spying" scandal?

"IF YOU'RE an engineer in Silicon Valley, you have no incentive to read The Economist," an unnamed tech entrepreneur tells George Packer in this week's issue of the New Yorker. "It's not brought up at parties, your friends aren't going to talk about it, your employers don't care."

Whatever. Their parties sound lame anyway. Mr Packer might agree; his lengthy piece portrays, with much scepticism, a Silicon Valley that has constructed for itself a glassy political vision far removed from the messy but necessary scraps of city halls, state houses and Congress. It is a place where bland libertarian fantasies about technology replacing (or "disrupting") politics are welcomed, and discussions of marginal income-tax rates left to losers who spend their spare time reading text-heavy weeklies. The public services that are the normal business of government can seem distant to the new plutocrats, too: Mr Packer describes a public school catering to wealthy Valley locals where extravagant fund-raisers compensate for declines in state funding. If there is little room for politics as traditionally conceived in either your worldview or your personal life, then why bother knowing anything about it?

I haven't spent enough time in Silicon Valley to know how close this caricature comes to truth, but Mr Packer is certainly not the only one chucking it about. A new book (reviewed by my colleague here) by Evgeny Morozov, a professional tech-sceptic (and one of Mr Packer's interviewees), derides the "solutionism" of the technology world, which turns insoluble difficulties into discrete problems that may be resolved by the accumulation of enough information and the application of appropriately chosen algorithms. When this "big data" approach starts to crowd out subtler, wiser ways of thinking in fields to which it may not be suited (such as politics), reasons Mr Morozov, we risk forcing ourselves into "digital straitjackets" and undermining the assumptions that make liberal democracy work.

A third attack came from Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles-based demographer best known for defending medium-sized towns in unfashionable parts of America. Writing last week in the Daily Beast, Mr Kotkin ripped into "America's new oligarchs", lambasting the "shady 1-percenters" for concentrating huge amounts of wealth in their own hands while failing to provide jobs to Americans outside their own cosseted creative circles. And now, to pile audacity on to audacity, Mark Zuckerberg and his billionaire pals are doing real politics: lavishly funding a new group, FWD.us, that seeks to further the tech sector's interests by lobbying for an immigration-reform package that will allow it to recruit cheaper software engineers from abroad.

FWD.us took some heat a couple of weeks ago for funding TV ads supporting conservative pro-immigration politicians whose views on matters like the Keystone XL pipeline were not to the taste of the group's liberal backers. (Some of them quit in disgust.) Meanwhile, a good old-fashioned lobbying effort continues in Washington; the New York Times reports a push to ease regulatory oversight of the hiring of foreigners and the firing of Americans. Interestingly, Mr Packer takes all this to be a sign that the tech industry may be showing signs of maturity. Rather than airily rise above the fray, or, worse, try to produce a technological fix to a political problem, it, or at least those elements represented by FWD.us and the grizzly political hacks it has hired, has chosen to dive deep into the political mud.

Consumer-facing technology firms do seem to enjoy a peculiarly exalted status among both citizens and politicians (though Apple took a beating over its tax affairs in Congress this week). The action plan for FWD.us written by its president, Joe Green, an old pal of Mr Zuckerberg's, says, "Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans." Many tech executives have become celebrities in their own right, as we saw with the extraordinary public reaction to the death of Steve Jobs. It's difficult to imagine Barack Obama holding a "town hall" with the CEO of an oil or car company. And so it is reasonable to be wary of an industry of rich and powerful men eliding its own interests with that of the country at large, or of claims that techniques appropriate to fix problems in one field can be applied mutatis mutandis in another.

Yet are there really many signs of that happening at national level? Among the biggest political debates this year—gun control, immigration reform, deficit reduction—I see few signs of solutionism at play. That FWD.us has had to sully itself with politics-as-usual suggests, for better or worse, that outside the gilded worlds of Palo Alto and Cupertino, politics is operating pretty much as usual. That seems an odd thing to celebrate. But it might be some consolation to the Valley-bashers.

(Photo credit: AFP)

I loved topographic maps as a kid, and still do. Fortunately, the Skyrim Geological Survey, after quite an effort, has provided a topographic map of Skyrim and surrounding provinces (first spotted on r/MapPorn). For those who have ventured into Tamriel before, the map should be a delight. For those who haven’t, it should at least be a fascinating instance of a game world becoming more real, simply by virtue of the lens through which it’s examined. Regardless, it’s a formidable instance of one of the most tactile and immediate mapping techniques, applied to the task of making a fictional world yet more immersive.

thefrogman:

I’m trying to teach Otis the positive tenets of buttfeminism, but he’s really upset about his ball. 

[original via okcgoldmine]

Star of The ArScheerio Paul Show Paul Scheer has joined forces with MadTV and Key & Peele star Jordan Peele to remake one of Arsenio Hall's most awkward interviews for YouTube's Comedy Week. This time around, Scheer trotted out the transcript for Arsenio's weird sit-down with rapper Tupac Shakur, who, during the original interview,was making the promotional rounds for his film Poetic Justice with Janet Jackson and spent an inordinate amount of time relishing the fact that he got to make out with her on set. Scheer has been doing word-for-word reenactments of Arsenio's more memorable celebrity interviews like Bill Clinton's legendary appearance on the show with Will Arnett that included a saxophone performance with the show's house band. [via Splitsider] 

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