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From Nature magazine

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Map: timeline of discovery of US Coasts (1856)

Map of the Discoveries of the American East, Gulf, and West Coasts Map of the timeline of discovery of the U.S. Coasts (1856) Date: 1856 Author: Johann Georg Kohl Dwnld: Full Size: 01, 02, 03 Source: Library of Congress Print Availability: See our Prints Page for more details pff This map isn't part of any series, but we have other maps of Exploration that you might want to check out....

the BIG Map Blog - Interesting maps, historical maps, BIG maps.

Vancouver Sun

Dying man's blinks lead to murder conviction - USA Today USA TODAY A Cincinnati court convicted a man of murder after seeing video of the victim, two weeks before his death, blinking to identify the assailant. (May 17). Post to Facebook. Posted! A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. Tweeted! A tweet has been posted ... Man convicted of murder after paralyzed victim identifies his assailant by blinkingThe Independent Ohio man convicted by paralysed victim's blinksBBC News Ohio man convicted; jury believed paralyzed victimSan Francisco Chronicle MiamiHerald.com -Minneapolis Star Tribune -NewsOK.com all 54 news articles »

Politico

Poll: Scandal interest below average Politico A majority of Americans are following both the controversy over the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi and the brewing IRS scandal - but at levels below historic averages, according to a new poll. Fifty-four percent said they are closely following the ... and more »

Toronto Star

Mayor Rob Ford bolts from meeting to put fridge magnets on cars Toronto Star Minutes after Mayor Rob Ford arrived at a contentious community council meeting in Etobicoke on Tuesday evening, he bolted out of his seat, sprinted up an aisle, and left the building — to wander around the parking lot and slap “Rob Ford Mayor” fridge ... Toronto Mayor Rob Ford denies drug video allegationsBBC News Reports: Video appears to show Toronto mayor smoking from crack pipeCNN International Crack story immerses Ford in scandalGlobe and Mail Sky News -New York Times (blog) -National Post all 273 news articles »

A Chinese firm best known for building air conditioning units is constructing a vertical city.

Ace Attorney 5 demo

Just like it has for every Ace Attorney game, Capcom has put together a web demo of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies. And just like I have for every Ace Attorney game, I’m going to try to play this demo in Japanese because I CANNOT WAIT.

My Japanese is awful. This is a game that relies entirely on wordplay and careful reading. Have fun!

BUY Ace Attorney games, upcoming releases

Chopard jewels worth $1 million have been stolen at the Cannes film festival, local police said Friday.

An anonymous reader writes "Sheriffs in 13 Northeast Florida counties announced an online system Thursday for residents to report suspicious activity they think may be terrorism-related. The site provides examples of red flags to watch for, such as people with an unusual interest in building plans or who are purchasing materials useful in bomb making. Important places to watch include hobby stores and dive shops."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arrested Development’s imminent return means that its stars have turned up in the weirdest places. Like frozen banana stands in various cities. And while Tobias Fünke’s sizzle reel had a brief snippet of video games in it, Capcom’s taken things to a whole new level.

The publisher of Street Fighter and Dragon’s Dogma took David Cross’ character up on his challenge for folks to Insert Him Anywhere and threw the thespian into a bunch of their games. I think the Resident Evil clip is my favorite but I love the non-sequitur WTF of the Mega Man cameo too. What video game would you insert Funke into?

Photo hub ShutterStock imagines modern businesses that might be embodied by the seven houses of Westeros depicted in “Game of Thrones”.

An anonymous reader writes "A meta-study published yesterday looked at over 12,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate science that appeared in journals between 1991 and 2011. The papers were evaluated and categorized by how they implicitly or explicitly endorsed humans as a contributing cause of global warming. The meta-study found that an overwhelming 97.1% of the papers that took a stance endorsed human-cause global warming. They also asked the 1,200 of the scientists involved in the research to self-evaluate their own studies, with nearly identical results. In the interest of transparency, the meta-study results were published in an open access journal, and the researchers set up a website so that anybody can check their results. From the article: '... a memo from communications strategist Frank Luntz leaked in 2002 advised Republicans, "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate." This campaign has been successful. A 2012 poll from U.S. Pew Research Center found less than half of Americans thought scientists agreed humans were causing global warming. The media has assisted in this public misconception, with most climate stories "balanced" with a "skeptic" perspective. However, this results in making the 2–3% seem like 50%. In trying to achieve "balance," the media has actually created a very unbalanced perception of reality. As a result, people believe scientists are still split about what's causing global warming, and therefore there is not nearly enough public support or motivation to solve the problem.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“To Infinity and Beyond” is a pop culture illustration of Buzz Lightyear by California-based artist Dan LuVisi that gives the animated Toy Story action figure an incredible sense of realism and origin story with a surprise ending. Previously we wrote about Dan and his ongoing series of pop culture illustrations, which includes a criminal portrayal of Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street.

Here is the first half of Dan’s awesome origin story for Buzz Lightyear:

As Buzz’s final moment came before him, he glared into the black abyss, only capturing one last one thing: a promise he made his son:

“I will always protect and watch over you. To infinity and beyond.”

Buzz was an all American hero. He worked for the Star Command Army and had been recently promoted to Staff Sgt, leading the young and brave through interstellar wars against the evil alien terrorist, Zurg.

While deep in space, Buzz’s ship was pulled into a worm-hole caused by his arch-nemesis Commander Zurg. Buzz tried everything in his power to turn his ship around, but to no avail. At this point, Buzz and his crew only had one option: abandon ship… (read more)

image via DanLuVisiArt

Ottawa Citizen

5.2-Magnitude Earthquake Felt in Ontario ABC News A 5.2 magnitude earthquake centered northwest of Ottawa rattled buildings Friday in Ontario and Quebec and was felt across upstate New York from Buffalo to the Vermont border. Canada's government agency that monitors earthquakes said the quake it ... Earthquakes Canada confirms quake centred near OttawaCTV News 2 earthquakes felt in Ontario and QuebecCBC.ca […] Ontario earthquake hits Toronto, Ottawa with 4.8M tremor | Canada | News ...National Post Toronto Star -CNN International -Detroit Free Press all 108 news articles »

I just came across illustrator and graphic designer Butcher Billy’s “Post-Punk + New Wave Super Friends” series, and I’m not going to be able to resist ordering at least a couple of prints for my walls. Butcher Billy has applied the concept of a superhero to his heroes — the pop culture icons who influenced him as a kid. As he explains it…

As a child of the ’80s I was heavily influenced by everything from Saturday morning cartoons on TV to the music coming from the radio. Ian Curtis or Johnny Rotten are as iconic to me as Superman or Batman. Real people or imaginary characters, the incorruptible ideals of perfect superheroes or the human flaws and desires sometimes so desperately depicted in song lyrics — all of those influences affect us to the point of defining our character and personality, career paths and life choices.

Well, shoot. That just about says it, right? I totally agree, and it looks like Billy and I have a lot of the same heroes.

You can order any of Butcher Billy’s Post-Punk and New Wave Super Friends designs as prints or on t-shirts, iPhone cases and other items through his shop at Society6. View the entire series of posters at Behance.

All images © Butcher Billy / Available for sale through Society6 / Found via Slicing Up Eyeballs

A federal judge in New York, in a blistering new denunciation of the Obama administration for what he said was playing politics with women’s health, refused on Friday to lift his order that the Plan B emergency contraceptive be made available over the counter to women of all ages.  He did give the government until Monday to start pursuing an appeal to the Second Circuit Court, but criticized that appeal as “frivolous.”

Senior U.S. District Judge Edward R. Korman of Brooklyn aimed most of his harsh critique at Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, saying once again that she has abused her position and has frustrated women’s access to Plan B even though the government’s own scientists say it is safe and effective in preventing pregnancy if taken soon after unprotected intercourse.  He derided the arguments that the Justice Department plans to make in its appeal, saying that Sebelius herself has undercut those arguments.   One argument, he said, was “silly.”

Korman went even further, accusing the administration of making a “sweetheart arrangement” with the company that makes Plan B pills, negotiated one day before the government filed a formal notice that it would appeal, lowering the age of no-prescription action to the contraceptive from seventeen to fifteen.  That deal was worked out, the judge asserted, to “provide a sugarcoating” for the appeal the government was planning. The government waited as long as it could to respond to the judge’s April 5 order requiring broader access to the drug, the judge said.

Under that arrangement, Korman said, the Plan B maker — Teva Women’s Health, Inc. — stands to gain a commercial advantage in selling the contraceptive, and women may find it harder to obtain the drug than they would have under the judge’s order.  Women will have to prove their age to a pharmacist or drugstore retail clerk to obtain Plan B, under the Food and Drug Administration’s new arrangement.

The Justice Department told the judge last week that it would challenge his order with two legal arguments: first, that the judge had no authority to order open access to the one-pill version of Plan B (known as Plan B One-Step) because the two-pill version was the only one at issue before him; and, second, that his order intruded on the FDA’s normal process of reviewing when to switch a prescription drug to over-the-counter status.

Judge Korman sought to answer both arguments on the way toward suggesting that the appeal on those grounds would be “frivolous.”  He said the issue of which pill version was before him was no longer an issue, because Teva — instead of taking advantage of the wider access that the judge ordered —  had made its new deal with the FDA to restrict access to any version to those fifteen years old and older.  That issue, he said, is probably moot now.

The judge rejected the argument that he was infringing on FDA’s expertise by issuing a specific order on over-the-counter access.  That is precisely what the experts at FDA had wanted, before Secretary Sebelius overruled them, the judge said, so it was the Secretary who engaged in “undermining the public’s confidence in the drug approval process.”  Sebelius, he remarked sharply, made a “bad-faith, politically motivated decision,” and she “lacks any medical or scientific expertise.”

By refusing to delay his own order as the government asked, the judge said, he was vindicating FDA’s expert judgment that Plan B should be available without a prescription and over the counter to women of all ages.

To a separate argument by Justice Department lawyers that the judge’s access order will only lead to public confusion about which contraceptive is available to women, Judge Korman replied that it is the new arrangement made with Teva that is going to result in confusion.  The judge ticked off the multi-layered system of access that would result from the arrangement FDA has just made with Teva.

It was “nonsensical,” the judge said, to work out that arrangement: first, women fifteen years of age or older will be allowed to buy the one-pill version, but only from a store with an on-site pharmacy and only if they can prove their age; second, other versions of the contraceptive with the same basic ingredient as Teva’s Plan B will only be available from behind the counter and only for women over the age of seventeen who can prove their age with a government-issued ID; and, third, women who do not have a government ID or who are under the age of fifteen will not have any access to Teva’s one-pill version and must get a prescription for a competing product, such as a generic version.

This system is sure to cause confusion, much more than the judge’s order on wide access, he said.

While he denied the requested postponement of his order pending an appeal, he said he would not implement his order over the weekend, giving the Justice Department until noon Monday to file a request for a delay with the Second Circuit Court.

 

In association with Bloomberg Law

Collettivo FX sent us these great shots from Italy. We love the clever use of space and larger than life characters.

 

Every year about this time gardeners start inflicting all manner of experiments upon the humble spud. We drop them into burlap sacks, grow pots, wood towers, mesh towers, tire towers, garbage cans, straw bales and more. We attempt the Square Foot method, the Ruth Stout method, the Hilled Row Method, the Plastic Mulch Method.

The goal with these various growing methods is always the same: maximum possible yield of clean, unblemished potatoes in a minimum of space. To achieve this ideal, potatoes need moist, rich, acidic soil under the seed spud and loose, dryish, lightweight soil or other matter above, where the vine will grow and new tubers will form. These conditions are easily created in container culture, and bins and cages give the added advantage of dead-simple harvest. Once the vines die back, you tip-and-pick.

So it seems that potatoes should be the perfect candidate for all these grow-bin experiments. And yet, for all the internet promises – “Grow 100 Pounds of Potatoes in 4 Square Feet!” – I have never, ever, ever heard from an actual person who has achieved results like these. In fact, often I think that the potato usually manages some yield no matter how you grow it more from the insuppressibility of the tuber than the creativity or skill of gardeners.

My own experiments two years ago in burlap sack potato growing were a dismal failure. Last year I grew potatoes both in ground and in large Rubbermaid plastic tubs. The potatoes grown in the ground were fine: the quality and quantity were neither spectacular nor terrible. The tub-grown taters did better. I filled the tubs with purchased compost and was rewarded with a good yield of very clean, nicely shaped if slightly small potatoes for most varieties grown. (French Fingerling was the clear winner.)

But by the end of the season, ants had found the bins and had made a happy colony inside the warm, protected, loose soil. Harvesting required overcoming the fear-factor of dozens of ants swarming my forearms and hands as I plucked the potatoes from the soil. And all that purchased compost cost a pretty penny.

So this year, I am trying yet another way. I hope (don’t all we potato growers?) that maybe I’ve found the perfect very low cost, portable, good-drainage, large-scale container for growing. In a few months, the results will, one way or another, speak for themselves.

Assembling the Cages

My Heavy Duty Potato Cage starts, like so many projects around my yard, with a roll of concrete reinforcing mesh. This is the same roll of mesh I’ve used to make rebar arch trellises, pea climbing supports, tomato cages, cloche supports and more. This one 5′-wide, 150′-foot long roll of concrete mesh is like the garden gift that just keeps giving.

I cut a 9 foot section of the mesh and then cut that in half lengthwise. This gave me two sections, each 9 feet long and 2-1/2 feet tall. Each section was wrapped into a circle (the mesh naturally wanted to curl up so this was easy) and I twisted and folded the loose ends of the mesh back around the opposite edge to hold the circle securely. Result: easy heavy duty potato cages.

I decided on locations for my potato cages and roughly leveled the ground where the cages would sit. I set the potato cages into place and used a few landscape staples to hold them in place.

Then, I cut a section of landscape fabric to fit inside the mesh potato cage. I fitted the landscape fabric down to the ground but left the bottom of the potato cage open. I smoothed the landscape fabric against the edge of the cage as best I could.

I folded the extra landscape fabric at the top of the cage over, and held the fabric in place with a binder clip (binder clips are essential garden tools!).

Filling the Potato Cages!

One of the things I like about these cages is their substantial size. But big containers needs lots of soil, and trucking in loads of compost just isn’t in my budget this year.

One of my goals for this project was to reduce the cost by coming up with a good growing material that was on site (not something I had to buy in a bag). Straw, although less expensive than bagged compost, is still $12 a bale in my urban area, and I had terrible results using straw in my burlap sacks so I ruled that out.

I have had pretty good luck growing potatoes in various forms of compost. My chickens make excellent compost for me. However, though I am not particularly squeamish, I hesitate to use fresh chicken bedding (i.e., uncomposted chicken poop) for root vegetables like this.

In the end, the answer was under my feet. We mulch our network of garden paths with free woodchips from a tree trimmer friend of mine. Scratching aside the top layer of last year’s chips revealed wonderful, rich, fine-textured soil just underneath.

I dug up as much wood chip path compost as I needed to fill the potato cages about a foot or 14 inches deep. This was actually really easy, and barely made a dent in my network of paths. If chucks of wood chips or less composted material made it into the bin, I didn’t sweat it.

I dumped some of last years finer (bagged) compost on top, and mixed it into the top layer of soil. This brought the soil level up to about 16 or 18 inches. Then I laid out my seed potatoes atop the soil in each bin.

 

 

 

I scooped out a hole about 5 inches deep for each seed potato and dropped it in.

The light, fluffy soil was smoothed back over everything.

Can’t Build Just One

I made four of these cages, and they were fast and easy to put together. The concrete mesh, lined with landscape fabric, didn’t deflect or bend under the weight of the soil, and so far there’s been no leaking of soil.

I’m pretty optimistic about this design. The landscape fabric should act in much the same way as expensive grow pots, allowing a lot of air and moisture flow and encouraging beneficial air pruning or roots as compared to plastic or masonry containers. Unlike burlap, the landscape fabric should stay in one piece and not start to rot out within a few weeks of soil contact.

And of course it was cheap. Because I had concrete mesh and a roll of landscape fabric lying around from other projects, and was able to utilize the wood chip compost from on-site, this project was free to me. If you had to buy the mesh and landscape fabric new, you still shouldn’t be out more than $10 or so for each bin.

I’ll update you on how this is working as the potatoes grow.

How are you growing potatoes this year and what method has given you the best success?

Youtube Direktnomnomnom, via Science Sushi

Ein Grizzly Bär lutscht auf der GoPro von Brad Joseph.

 
Nick Cave reads the lyrics to “Dead Joe” and manages to keep a straight face.
 

Lucky for those of us outside NYC, Michael Surtees went to Monotype's Pencil to Pixel Exhibition. Dig the Futura Demi-Bold Diatype.