firehose

Joan Cornellà

Hey, that’s my bike.

It’s Felis bipedus, spotted on Google Street View and posted here.

I have no idea how this happened, but I’m sure a tech-savvy reader can explain. It apparently involves the compression of images by the Google Street View cars, a vehicle that I never thought about.  Matthew Cobb, who sent me the photo and links, also noted that “There’s an art form whereby people tool around on street view and see what they can find. Some are funny, others beautiful, others bleak.”  You can see examples here and here.

The second link explains how they make the street views, a process involving a fleet of hybrid automobiles that cruise the world, each carrying nine cameras on a single pole, with pictures snapped every 10-20 meters. The photos are electronically stitched together, probably explaining the moggie above.

You could get a job at io9 just by being an awesome, well-informed commenter.

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Harrison Weber at TNW:

Adobe has shared with us that Creative Suite 6 will still be available for purchase, but it will not be updated beyond addressing bugs and OS compatibility. There will be no Creative Suite 7.

Instead, Adobe is pointing all of its energy towards Creative Cloud, eliminating the familiar retail box in the process. …

According to our sources, the company had long searched for ways to stabilize its revenue. Previously, it would receive bursts of income every two years with the latest Creative Suite release. Convincing users to upgrade was a daunting task that left an impact on product decisions.

At first, I thought this was a blatant price increase. But as I run the numbers in different common scenarios (owning just Photoshop, owning Creative Suite, upgrading every version, upgrading every few versions, etc.), it actually looks like most people will end up paying less this way — and without the huge initial expenditure of buying your first copy.

What concerns me most is innovation: without that “daunting” task of convincing everyone to give them more money every two years, there may be strong temptation for Adobe to rest on its laurels.

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Paul Bracher is a smart guy (obviously). How could this setting possibly pass a team review:

While I could see the search committee just fine, they saw me as a sad kitten. I know this because (i) I could see my feed in a small box on my screen, and (ii) the professors on the committee were looking at their screen and chuckling. What’s worse is that every time I talked, the kitten’s mouth would open and close. I was mortified.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie secretly underwent lap-band stomach surgery to aggressively slim down for the sake of his wife and kids.

Despite the inherent attractiveness of cute trucks and clever food options, the business stinks.

RSS is dead! Long live RSS! This interview was recorded the week after Google announced the death of beloved feed parsing app, Google Reader. The headlines regarding Reader’s demise  have been predictably and wonderfully hyperbolic. Elena Bulygina and Anton Tolchanov, two of the three co-founders of The Old Reader, help us make sense of a post-Google Reader world. Props to @ChazFrench for […]

SimCity will receive the 3.0 update this week, which will hopefully go down smoother than 2.0 released in late April. The 3.0 update (listed after the break) tweaks traffic routing, phantom air pollution, stuck school buses and university students crossing roads. Apparently SimCity grammar schools didn't implement the "buddy system" as a road-crossing teaching tool.

The SimCity update is another piece on the pyre of good news EA blasted out yesterday in preparation for today's financial call, where the company is expected to deliver bad news (harsh enough to make a CEO stand down). Yesterday's news included a Plants vs. Zombies 2 release window, the announcement of The Sims 4 and EA's Star Wars exclusivity.

Continue reading SimCity 3.0 update out this week, attempts to fix traffic again

SimCity 3.0 update out this week, attempts to fix traffic again originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 07 May 2013 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feeling as though you're trapped in a world that hates and fears you for your amazing abilities? You can show your mutant pride by wearing one of these new contest-winning X-Men T-shirt designs from We Love Fine. Chosen by a panel of judges including famed X-scribe Chris Claremont.

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The bar with a tardis.


Mondays- $4 drafts
 Tuesdays- $4 well
drinks Wednesdays- $5 Jameson all night long
 Fridays 4-8pm- Teachers Appreciation Happy Hour


The most awesome of steampunk tap systems serving local craft beers.




It's larger on the inside.


Jetpack by Doc.


The Best Little Music Venue in Brooklyn


Music 7 nights a week.


Steam punk guitar by Joe Jung.


Bands from around the corner and around the world.

holzmantweed:

iamababs:

People keep saying “there should be a Doctor Who bar!” 

May I introduce you to Brooklyn’s “The Way Station”?

For the record, the Tardis photographed above really is larger on the inside.

I shit thee not.

Larger.  On.  The. In. Side.

Plus, it’s been autographed by Matt Smith and Karen Gillian.

On the inside.

Which is larger than the outside.

I have been inside it and I can attest to the truth of this statement.

“I can’t really be focused on wife-ing somebody that young… And I’m young too. So I can’t focus on that right now. I just need to fast forward and be a man and be the best Chris Brown I can be, instead of worrying about whoever else is going to be in my side pocket.”

- Chris Brown, on breaking up with Rihanna

Toronto went on to lose to Boston 5-2 and trails the playoffs series 2-1.

In three regions – the upper Midwest, New England and the area around Washington – the job market for younger adults is considerably stronger than in the rest of the country.

An announcement for The Sims 4 confirms the game will include a single-player component playable offline. With SimCity's tumultuous launch fresh on the brain, the news of offline gameplay is undoubtedly welcomed by fans.

Not much else is said about the upcoming sequel in the press release, other than a promise of "new and intuitive tools" with which players can connect with their Sims. There will also be some kind of sharing functionality.

The Sims 4 was announced earlier today and is currently in development at The Sims Studio at EA's Redwood City headquarters. The Sims 4 will launch on PC and Mac in 2014.

Continue reading EA: The Sims 4 is a 'single-player offline experience'

EA: The Sims 4 is a 'single-player offline experience' originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 06 May 2013 21:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New York Times

Game 2: Heat crush Bulls 115-78 Chicago Tribune MIAMI -- Twelve seconds into the Heat's 115-78 victory over the Bulls, Udonis Haslem delivered a foul that sent Nate Robinson back to his college football days and down hard to the American Airlines Arena court. The Bulls knew right after their stunning ... LeBron James wakes up as Heat take Game 2 vs. Bulls - USA TodayUSA TODAY Heat scorch Bulls 115-78, even series at 1Chicago Sun-Times NBA Playoffs: Heat vs. Bulls, Game 2 | Wed., May 8, 2013MiamiHerald.com Palm Beach Post -Sportige -WTSP 10 News all 1,003 news articles »

In 1704, Judge Samuel Sewall presided over the funeral of John Lambert, a convicted pirate who had been executed for his crimes. While murderers and victims of suicide were routinely excluded from Massachusetts burying grounds, Sewall took pity on Lambert's family:

By my Order, the diggers of Mm Paiges Tomb Dugg a Grave for Lambert, where he was laid in the Old burying place Friday night about midnight near some of his Relations: Body was given to his Widow. Son and others made suit to me.

This was not a flashy, public funeral. Sewall buried the pirate at midnight, preventing any sort of spectacle that might have dignified the proceedings. But he did bury him.

When the Winthrop Fleet arrived in Massachusetts in 1630, one of the first legal reforms implemented by the emigrants concerned the establishment and administration of "burying places." At the time, all active graveyards in England were churchyards — consecrated spaces owned by the Church of England and governed by canon law.* Religious dissenters would establish independent burying grounds in the 1660s, but, in 1630, all English subjects could expect to be buried in a churchyard. According to the most recent iteration of canon law (1604), “No minister shall refuse or delay . . . to bury any corpse that is brought to the Church or Churchyard.” Even people who had “lived and died most profanely, more like a very atheist and a gross infidel, than like any Christian at all,” were afforded sacramental burial, though Church officials permitted ministers to use their “wisdom and discretion” in tempering some of the more effusive prayers in the Common Prayer burial service.

They did allow an exception: churchyards should refuse to bury people who had been excommunicated for "some grievous and notorious crime." This usually meant suicide or murder. But it also applied to obnoxious and outspoken dissenters like the Baptist minister Samuel Howe. When Howe died in 1640, no churchyard would take his body, so “his Friends were forced to lay his Body in the High-way, as one which was numbred amongst the Transgressors.” It was an ignominious end, but the only one available to people who could not be admitted to the Church of England's sacred churchyards.

Unlike the churchyards they had known in England, graveyards in Massachusetts were municipally owned and operated. They were not formally consecrated and ministers did not lead funeral services, nor say prayers at the graveside. This rejection of the English churchyard was part of a larger effort by the emigrant generation to purge elements of Church practice that smacked of vestigial Catholicism, including sacramental marriage, burial, the practice of appointing godparents, and the custom of "churching" women after childbirth.


Massachusetts graveyards continued to exclude executed criminals and victims of suicide. This was not true 100% of the time — I have written before about Samuel Sewall's involvement with burying people who died under these circumstances.  Where the churchyard implied that the entire community belonged to the established Church, the municipal burying ground made no distinctions based on denomination (or race, or even religion, necessarily), accepting all members of the civic community. Exclusion from the common burying ground was exclusion from the body politic, not from the church membership.

It is with this history in mind that I have been reading accounts of the Tsarnaev family's difficulty in finding a cemetery to accept the body of Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. While they have found a philanthropic funeral home director in Peter Stefan of Worcester, they have not yet been able to find a cemetery — public or private — that is willing to bury Tsarnaev. Cambridge City Manager Robert W. Healy has announced that he will not permit Tsarnaev to be buried in Cambridge's municipal cemetery:

The difficult and stressful efforts of the residents of the City of Cambridge to return to a peaceful life, would be adversely impacted by the turmoil, protests and wide spread media presence at such an interment . . . The families of loved ones interred in the Cambridge Cemetery also deserve to have their deceased family members rest in peace.

In a city like ours, where the residents share no single language, religion, or ethnic background, it seems that exclusion from municipal burial is the last way we have to excommunicate someone.

I understand Healy's reasoning. But, at the same time, the thing that stands out to me in these press accounts has been the compassion of Peter Stefan. He has dedicated his professional life to burying society's outcasts — people who are homeless or destitute or drug-addicted or criminals or otherwise civilly excommunicated. In the present situation, he has decided to take Tsarnaev's case because someone has to do it. ‘‘My problem here is trying to find a gravesite. A lot of people don’t want to do it. They don’t want to be involved with this,’’he told reporters, noting that he took an oath to bury all of the dead with dignity. It's understandable that others do not want to get involved — Stefan's funeral home has been inundated with angry protesters.

The impulse to excommunicate is strong. It's the last way we can condemn someone who has injured our community. But in focusing on whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev deserves a dignified burial, the protesters outside Peter Stefan's office are missing the Grace of his response. He's not burying Tsarnaev because Tsarnaev deserves it, but because Stefan is giving him the free gift of dignity that he extends to everyone. I'm not Catholic anymore, but I was raised Catholic, and I would like to see some Catholic cemetery somewhere offer to bury Tsarnaev, not because he deserves it, but because it is a powerful statement of the forgiveness that Catholics believe is an absolute mandate from God.

Samuel Sewall hated Catholics. He feared them so much that he once snuck out of a meeting because he was afraid that the others present might adjourn in order to attend a funeral where the Book of Common Prayer and its Catholic-lite prayers would be read, and he didn't want to be swept along to such an affair. But Samuel Sewall also buried John Lambert, the pirate. In the dark, in secret, but he buried him all the same. Sewall is not remembered for his role in burying Lambert — if anyone remembers his name today, it is usually because he was one of the judges who presided over the Salem Witch Trials. He was also the only one to issue a public apology, standing before the congregation of Old South Church and humbling himself for his role in perpetrating injustice. There are worse footsteps to follow.


*There was a medieval Jewish cemetery in London, but since England had expelled Jews from the country in 1290 and would not re-admit them until 1656, it was not officially recognized as an active burying place in the pre-Civil War era. There were a few non-parochial churchyards, like "New Churchyard" on the grounds of Bedlam Hospital, but these were still formally consecrated and subject to canon law.

Original Source

Tamerlan Tsarnaev is dead. He is not going to be any more dead if you wave some more signs. He is not going to be any more dead the louder you yell. Your made-for-TV outrage is not going to make him any more dead. Please, I'm begging you. Stop auditioning for yet another national television passion play. Stop demonstrating your willingness to be part of an ongoing freak show. No matter how much fealty you pledge on camera to The Victims or Their Families, he's not going to be any deader. Let his family bury him. Let them bury him wherever they want. Lee Harvey Oswald has a grave. Albert DeSalvo has a grave. Let them find a grave for this guy.

Updated (10:55 p.m.): Thanks to a 911 phone call and the help of an energetic neighbor named Charles Ramsey, three women who've been missing for years are now safe. Cleveland Police found all three women alive in the house of a local 52-year-old school bus driver named Ariel Castro who was arrested soon after the call. (Listen to Amanda Berry's 911 call here. Better yet, listen to Charles Ramsey's 911 call here.)

Amanda Berry, who went missing ten years ago at age 16, and Gina DeJesus, who went missing a year later at age 14 had both been subjects of a years-long missing persons cases that led to many dead ends and more than one excavation in search of a body. Little is known about what happened to the third woman, Michelle Knight. In fact, little is known about what happened inside the Cleveland house, where the women have apparently been held prison for about a decade. In an odd twist of events it was revealed not long after the rescue that Castro wrote a 2004 article about Gina DeJesus and the abductions for the Plain Press, a community newspaper serving the west side of Cleveland.

Following their rescue, Berry, DeJesus and Knight — now 27-, 23- and 32-years-old — were taken to a local hospital. A cheering crowd gathered at the house, where a joyful community was happy to have found the women after so many years of looking. Knight disappeared in 2002 and was held longest. Berry had gone missing in 2003, while walking home from her job at Burger King, while DeJesus was abducted in 2004 while walking home from school in the same area.

This brings us back to Charles Ramsey, who lives next door to the house where the women were found. Ramsey says he was "eatin' [his] McDonalds" when he heard a woman scream for help. "Help me!" she said. "I'm Amanda Berry!" He rushed outside to see what was going on and recognized the woman standing on his neighbor's porch. After police arrived, Ramsey pieced together what had happened and couldn't believe his neighbor hid such a secret from everyone in the neighborhood.

"You got to have some big testicles to pull this off, bro, because we see this dude every day. I mean every day," Ramsey told the local news reporter about his neighbor at one point. "I barbecue with this dude. We eat ribs and what not and listen to salsa music. Know where I'm coming from?" (This man's going to be an Internet meme for sure.)  

Honestly, it's better if you just watch Charles tell the story. Just watch the video, and watch it to the end. Trust us.

This interview from later in the evening is also a must see.

lesbang:

google translate is in complete awe

Though XCOM: Enemy Unknown Elite Edition arrived on Mac on April 25, one place it didn't launch was Steam. A representative of the Mac version's developer, Feral Interactive, told Joystiq that it "does not release games on Steam."

This isn't the only game that Feral has shipped on platforms not owned by Valve, as the developer is credited with creating Mac versions of BioShock 2, Grid and both Batman: Arkham City and Arkham Asylum, among many other games. When asked about whether any games from its catalog would launch on Steam at any point, the representative said they "do not talk about future products."

Feral is offering XCOM: Enemy Unknown on the Mac App Store, among other online retailers listed on its site.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown Mac version not on Steam originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 06 May 2013 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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