firehose

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings told F.B.I. interrogators that, as he and his brother plotted their deadly assault, they considered suicide attacks and striking on the Fourth of July, according to two law enforcement officials.

“Among the scores of brilliant and interesting women I’ve known is the late Katharine Graham, long the controlling shareholder and CEO of the Washington Post Co. (WPO) Kay knew she was intelligent. But she had been brainwashed — I don’t like that word, but it’s appropriate — by her mother, husband, and who knows who else to believe that men were superior, particularly at business.
When her husband died, it was in the self-interest of some of the men around Kay to convince her that her feelings of inadequacy were justified. The pressures they put on her were torturing. Fortunately, Kay, in addition to being smart, had an inner strength. Calling on it, she managed to ignore the baritone voices urging her to turn over her heritage to them.
I met Kay in 1973 and quickly saw that she was a person of unusual ability and character. But the gender-related self-doubt was certainly there too. Her brain knew better, but she could never quite still the voice inside her that said, “Men know more about running a business than you ever will.”
I told Kay that she had to discard the fun-house mirror that others had set before her and instead view herself in a mirror that reflected reality. “Then,” I said, “you will see a woman who is a match for anyone, male or female.”
I wish I could claim I was successful in that campaign. Proof was certainly on my side: Washington Post stock went up more than 4,000% — that’s 40 for 1 — during Kay’s 18 years as boss. After retiring, she won a Pulitzer Prize for her superb autobiography. But her self-doubt remained, a testament to how deeply a message of unworthiness can be implanted in even a brilliant mind.”

- Warren Buffett Is Bullish … on Women

“The Walking (And Talking) Dead” — A Bad Lip Reading of The Walking Dead (by BadLipReading)

Poster advertising road, rail and river transport services and related goods and services. “Autumn and Winter Transport. Everything that Dispatchers and Receivers of Goods Need to Know.” Anonymous 1926. From Soviet Commercial Design of the Twenties (1987)

Original Source

Poster for the “Transport Publishers of the People’s Commissariat of Paths of Communications, North Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus agency, advertising rail, road and airport transport services.” ‘Right Across the U.S.S.R.’ V. Rakitina, Rostov-on-Don, 1926. From Soviet Commercial Design of the Twenties (1987)

Original Source

@bodnyk and @asyouwere , do you want to check this out if the weather is nice?

Original Source

Original Source

In a review, published in In These Times, about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, Racialicious senior editor, Tamara Winfrey Harris, writes:

Whether Sandberg, from her perch at the pinnacle of a tech behemoth, is the right person to lead a revolution for less-privileged women has been the topic of much debate. But bits of the author’s wisdom may “click” for particular readers in unexpected ways. Sandberg’s message about choosing supportive partners made me blink, because it stands in stark contrast to advice directed toward a particular segment of professional women. Thanks to concerns about low marriage rates among African Americans, professional black women are bombarded with warnings about careerism and success. A burgeoning genre of advice books instructs straight black women to, in effect, “lean back” in order to attract men.

In Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, (the basis for the film Think Like a Man), author Steve Harvey admonishes: “If you’ve got your own money, your own car, your own house, a Brinks alarm system, a pistol and a guard dog, and you’re practically shouting from the rooftops that you don’t need a man to provide for you or protect you, then we will see no need to keep coming around.” Elsewhere, Harvey warns women that if they travel for business, their left-behind husbands might understandably stray.

Black women, especially highly successful ones, are expected to sacrifice achievement for the alleged greater good of traditional marriage. And they are encouraged to think more about being chosen than choosing—making themselves attractive to men by conforming to an outdated template of femininity rather than, as Sandberg suggests, selecting a supportive mate interested in a 50/50 partnership.

Sandberg counsels that choosing a mate is one of the most important decisions a working woman will make. If that is true, lack of support, in addition to systemic sexism and racism, may explain why black women fare worse than their white counterparts in the halls of power. All women of color make up just 4 percent of top corporate jobs, 3 percent of board seats and 5 percent of congressional seats. Snagging unsupportive life partners isn’t likely to improve these statistics (or the personal lives of women).

Read more…

Original Source

Epic Games has released an HTML5 version of its Unreal Engine tech demo Epic Citadel. Currently, the project is optimized for Firefox Nightly version 23 or above, so make sure your browser is up to spec before you check it out.

Collaborating with an engineering team at Mozilla, Epic developed a web-capable port of Unreal Engine 3 in just four days. A combination of the JavaScript subset asm.js and Emscripten drove the port's creation, and the result should be playable in any standards-based browser that implements HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript.

While Epic Citadel currently crashes in Chrome, Google's developers are looking into a fix. Internet Explorer does not support current versions of WebGL. Epic Citadel launched as a free download for iOS devices back in 2010, paving the way for Chair's release of the hit Unreal-powered action game Infinity Blade later that year.

Continue reading Unreal Engine 3-powered Epic Citadel now playable in browsers

Unreal Engine 3-powered Epic Citadel now playable in browsers originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 02 May 2013 20:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last time, I talked a bit about the mechanics of A Tragedy in Five Acts and how I came to write it, with the promise of more discussion of daughters and feminism and art and such in Part 2. With that in mind, here we are.

Daughters and Feminism in Tragedy

So, as I noted last time, there are five roles in tragedy. The role of Daughter is the only one called out specifically by gender, and that’s done for a reason (and not because of Game Chef’s rules that year, because I didn’t end up entering anyway). As I say in the book, daughters have a special place in Shakespeare. They are the center of the social web, the necessary source of future. Issues of inheritance, ownership, love, sexuality, progeny, wealth, honor… it’s all there, centered on the daughter. She is the tool through which alliances are forged and heirs are obtained in a patriarchal society, and the possible leader or heir in a more egalitarian (or even matriarchal) setting. Lovers want to be her partner or owner, Foils may want to help or harm her, Parents want to direct or control her, and Authority figures want to put limits on her behavior so that she remains a controlled commodity — or perhaps want to free her so she can save us all. All of that, then, is placed against any desires that she herself might have. Her very existence and any desire she might have for self-determination places her at the center of conflict, simply by being who she is.

Now, Shakespeare’s fascination with daughters is easily shown in the sheer number of plays that revolve around daughters. That alone would make it a clear choice to include them. My reason for doing so doesn’t stop there, though.

First, and perhaps most importantly, the position of daughters in Shakespeare and the position of women in society are not very dissimilar, even in the twenty-first century. Recent efforts to restrict access to birth control, to eliminate facilities that might provide abortions, to shame women who dare to assert control over their own sexuality, and to ignore victims of rape and excuse their offenders speak eloquently about the position that women — and by women, I mean daughters, seen not as individuals but as defined by their social role — hold in the center of cultural anxiety and controversy. This isn’t rocket science — it’s only barely interpretation. The chance, then, to take on the role of Daughter with all it entails is one that I think is incredibly important, if only because in this game, Daughters have as much agency as they wish to have. If they become a tool, it is the player’s choice (and thus the character’s choice) to do so.

Sons and Daughters

One thing that I’ve found fascinating during playtesting is the resistance to playing a Daughter on the part of some players. It’s often a role that’s left over, or one that someone gets talked into. In particular, this is true for men who don’t want to play cross-gender and feel uncomfortable with the idea. I’ve been asked if the daughter can be a son in at least half the playtests, to which I say that yes, you can play the gender of the character you want. If you play a son, though, the son needs to be “daughtered.” The same questions represented by the daughter have to apply to the son. Princes are a great example, anything where there are responsibilities for the future and their bodies and choices are looked at as belonging at least in part to someone else. I’ve found that people aren’t used to playing men that way, and these efforts to apply outside controls and ownership have resulted in some of the most interesting (and rebellious) male characters in the games.

Inclusive Art

So, nobody who publishes a finished game does it all themselves, not if they want it to come out well. Nowhere was this more true than Tragedy. I wrote the game, but Matt made sure it had a development pass. Jess Hartley edited it so I didn’t have to, because few things are sadder and less effective than a writer editing their own work on a large scale. If I’d had to, I probably could have done both those things, but the game would have suffered for it and taken longer to get done.

When it comes to art and layout, however, I would have been completely at sea. Not only am I only so-so at stick figures, but the mysteries of layout are beyond me as yet. I get publication, and rule one for that is “get a good layout/graphic design person.” In my case, I did both, using Jeremy Kostiew for cover and graphic design and Eloy Lasanta for layout. On top of that, the absurdly talented Jenna Fowler provided the art for Tragedy, and as you can see by the included work here, she’s amazing. When it comes to a range of body styles, complexions, positions, poses, crowd scenes, individual portraits, proportions, perspective… I cannot praise her highly enough.

Art is, in my opinion, a make or break point for a book. I’m of the opinion that if you can only afford a few good pieces, stick with the good ones and use graphic design and clever layout to make up the rest. Good art will sell a book, while bad art will turn a customer away. Because of her skill and flexibility, we were able to get good art, letting us edge ever closer to the diversity we wanted in terms of body types, appearances, cultural backgrounds, and sheer coolness that I’d never have been able to touch otherwise. I can accept that the game itself might only be so-so, but no matter who you are, the art is fantastic.

Jenna provided all the art I’ve included in this post for the game, the topper of which, in my opinion, is the art for the Fortune’s Fool, one of the Fatal Flaws available in the game. The perspective, the shading, all of it… it’s a difficult illustration to pull off for any one of a number of reasons (but hands figure into it) and she nailed it. I couldn’t have asked for more. If you’d like to see the rest of the art she gave me, consider purchasing at least the PDF so I can hire her again in future.

It’s not every day that you get to make a game, and it’s vanishingly rare that you get to make a game that is as meaningful for you as a creator as Tragedy is for me. There are undoubtedly improvements that could be made — there always are. Nothing is ever perfect. I really think, however, that Tragedy is a pretty nice little game that gives you something to think about after you’re done having fun with it, and that’s really about the best I think I could have done no matter what.

 

(Design Diary: A Tragedy in Five Acts, pt. 2 originally posted on Gaming As Women.)

Universe, you are officially not fired. At long last, there's a brand new Janelle Monáe single — "Q.U.E.E.N." featuring Erykah Badu — and a kick-ass music video, featuring musical rebels in a dystopian future. Hell yes.

Read more...

coolnumbr12 writes "Chinese hackers have infiltrated a sensitive U.S. Army database that contains information about the vulnerabilities of thousands of dams located throughout the United States. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' National Inventory of Dams (NID) has raised concerns that information gathered in the hack could help China carry out a cyber-attack on the national electrical power grid."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A public beta of Lightworks, the professional-grade video editor from Editshare, is now officially available for download.

No more limited dry-runs, or badly-communicated access to alpha builds; the app can be downloaded and installed for free on 64bit Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, including the newly released Ubuntu 13.04.

Long Wait

If it seems like you’ve been waiting for this day for years it’s because you have. The first Linux release was promised way back in 2011. 

But we can forgive Editshare, the company behind the app, for their various delays because  Lightworks isn’t ‘just’ another video editor. The ‘professional-grade’ tool has been used in the editing of many well-known television programmes and film industries for years it has a prestigious reputation – one that now graces Linux desktops.

The video editor is free to download and use, with a PRO paid plan offering extra features and codec support for $60/y.

Also note:

• It’s 64bit Only
• Requires ATI or Nvidia graphics card & drivers 
• Only “officially” supported on Ubuntu & Linux Mint
• Not all tools work/are included on Linux
• Requires Lightworks account (free)
• Includes seven day PRO license trial 

On top of this note the following ‘known issues’ concerning the following formats:

• No H.264 MOV, Quicktime/MPEG4 & AVI export options
• No support for .WMV
• AVI playback issues

Want in? You’ll find the download sign-up form and additional information behind the button below.

Download Lightworks for Linux Beta

After installing be sure to check out the ‘Getting Started’ guide below. While it was made for the Windows beta it can be used step-for-step with the Linux version – just ignore any instructions on opening the app from the Start Menu ;)

Getting Started with Lightworks

Lightworks for Linux Public Beta Available for Download OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.

The latest Adobe Flash Player that's bundled with Google Chrome doesn't work with browsers like Firefox for instance, because it requires an API called "Pepper" that's only available in Google Chrome and Chromium. A while back we wrote about using Pepper Flash from Google Chrome in Chromium browser by installing Google Chrome and manually adding the Pepper Flash plugin but here's an easier way to do it under Ubuntu: by using a PPA.

• Google Chrome is not open source (and thus not available in the official distribution repositories) while Chromium is;
• Google Chrome is tested by the Chrome developers while Chromium may be modified by distributions; for instance, Chromium in Ubuntu is modified to support the WebApps feature while Google Chrome, being closed source, doesn't come with these modifications and thus doesn't support WebApps;
• Google Chrome comes with optional user metrics;
• Google Chrome comes with proprietary plugins such as a PDF viewer and Adobe Flash Player (Pepper).

Install Pepper Flash for Chromium in Ubuntu

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:skunk/pepper-flash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pepflashplugin-installer

Once installed, there's one more step to get Chromium to use the Google Chrome Pepper Flash Player: you need to open /etc/chromium-browser/default as root with a text editor (e.g.: gedit - which I'll use in the command below):

sudo apt-get install gksu #it`s not installed by default in Ubuntu 13.04
gksu gksu gedit /etc/chromium-browser/default

("gksu" is used twice to avoid a bug with Gedit opening a blank file next to our file)

and in that file, paste the followng line at the bottom of the file (after the CHROMIUM_FLAGS="" line):

. /usr/lib/pepflashplugin-installer/pepflashplayer.sh

(yes, there's a dot in the beginning of the line, then a space!)


If you don't want to use a PPA for this, see: Use Pepper Flash Player From Google Chrome In Chromium Browser.

Scott Stantis, a conservative cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune, drew this in response to Jason Collins‘ coming out:

The idea, of course, is that the media is celebrating Collins for telling the world he’s gay, while they were mostly annoyed by Tim Tebow for telling the world he’s Christian.

If that sentence seems weird to you, that’s because the cartoon makes no sense.

Collins did something no male in the NBA (or several other popular leagues) had done: He came out as gay while still playing professionally.

Believe it or not, there’s no shortage of Christians in any sporting league. Need evidence? Just listen to someone on the winning team during a post-game interview.

When Tebow told the world he was Christian — more Christian than other Christians, really, with his eye black messages and on-field prayers — it was annoying. It doesn’t take “courage” to proudly proclaim, “I’m in the majority!”

Not to mention, Tebow chose his religion; Collins didn’t choose his sexuality. Tebow wanted you to become a Christian; Collins isn’t trying to (in fact, can’t) make you gay.

Finally, Christianity of the sort that Tebow preaches is the reason people like Collins have such a hard time coming out. Tebow hasn’t said anything disparaging about Collins, but evangelical Christians have no doubt acted like they’re being oppressed by the “gay agenda” while at the same time being the oppressors.

The main thing both players have in common right now is that they’re each looking for a team to play on — a team that will judge them for their skills and not what they say or do outside the game.

(Thanks to @InkeddMommy for the link)

Kevin Jamieson, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, put his work in active ranking into practice. The experimental app is called Beer Mapper.

The application presents a pair of beers, one pair at a time, from a list of beers that you have indicated you know or have access to and then asks you to select which one you prefer. After you have provided a number of answers, the application shows you a heat map of your preferences over the "beer space."

Around 10,000 beers with at least 50 reviews on RateBeer were used as the foundation of the recommendation system. The reviews were reduced to just the individual words and counts, which gives sort of a profile for each beer (or a "weighted bag of words"). You rate beers, and the system tries to find profiles that are mathematically most similar.

Two caveats. The first is that it looks like the app just gives you a heat map of the styles of beer you might like. A recommended list of actual beers would be way better. Second, the app is a research project that likely won't be in the app store any time soon, so the first point is moot. Sad face. Maybe Untappd should read Jamieson's paper. [via Fast Company]

Data Points: Visualization That Means Something is available now. Order your copy.

The cheapest books aren't always in your country of origin. If you're willing to wait, you can find them for less by ordering abroad. CheapRiver searches Amazon's listings all over the world to find the lowest-priced books of your choice, shipping included, so you can get the best deal.

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Google's Web Fonts are really popular. Google created a directory of open source fonts that anyone can use, they're hosted by Google and it's easy to embed them. The most popular font is Open Sans, which has more than 2 billion views only for the last week.

Fonts like Open Sans, Droid Sans and Roboto are only preinstalled if you're using an Android device and there are many other fonts that aren't preinstalled, so how can you use them? "If a page uses web fonts, then the font files have to be downloaded to the site visitor's computer before they can be displayed initially. The font files are served compressed for a faster download. After that initial download, they will be cached in the browser. As the Google Fonts API becomes widely used, your visitors will be likely to already have the font you're using in their browser cache when they visit your page," explains Google.

A search for fonts.googleapis.com in Chrome's cache page (chrome://cache/) returned font families like Open Sans, Tangerine, Oswald, Noto Serif, IM Fell English, Arvo, Droid Sans.

If you want to download some of these fonts to your computer and sync them when they're updated, you can install SkyFonts, a free software for Windows and Mac OS X. "SkyFonts automatically updates the fonts installed on your system whenever they are updated on Google Fonts – for example, when new characters are added – ensuring you always have the latest fonts to work with. And with the fonts installed locally, browsing websites that use web fonts will be faster, since your browser won't have to spend time fetching font data," mentions Raziel Alvarez, from the Google Fonts team.


There are 624 font families and 1105 fonts right now, but SkyFonts only lets you download fonts one by one. It's probably a good idea to visit the Google Fonts directory, sort font families by popularity and download some of the font styles from fonts.com.

If you don't need the syncing feature, you can also download fonts from the Google Fonts site: click "Add to Collection" next to the fonts you want to download, then click the "Download" button, download the font families in your collection as a .zip file and use these instructions.

Squee! Spotter: Unknown

Tagged: cuddle , car Share on Facebook

Philly.com

UPDATE 1-Suicide rate rose sharply among middle-aged Americans, CDC finds Reuters Fri May 3, 2013 1:32am IST. (Adds statistics comparing U.S. to EU, quotes CDC researcher). By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. NEW YORK May 2 (Reuters) - The suicide rate among Americans aged 35 to 64 rose sharply between 1999 and 2010, a trend that ... Suicides among middle-aged Americans jump by nearly one-thirdCBS News Suicide Rates Rise Sharply in USNew York Times Economic downturn cited as suicide rate jumps for those between 35 and 64New York Daily News Los Angeles Times -RT all 144 news articles »

“I’d assert Doctor Who is in a phase of diminishing returns insofar as the episodes are increasingly imitative of previous episodes. If you go back and look at the episode listings for previous new-era Doctor Who season, every single “just okay” episode of this season has a counterpart in a previous season that is way better. The best example would be the recent “Cold War” versus “Curse of the Black Spot.”
Now, I dislike both of these episodes, but at least “Curse of the Black Spot” has pirates, a quirky sci-fi concept, and a lot of charm. “Cold War” has none of this. Indeed, having Clara and the Doctor be from the future/outer space has zero bearing on them being in 1983. There’s no fun time paradox stuff explored, and essentially the Doctor could have been any smartass with a magic wand in this episode. Despite the presence of a nuclear weapon, the stakes of “Cold War” are impossibly low.
We can do this again with “The Power of Three” versus, say, another Earth-bound-fix-the-alien-conspiracy episode like Season 4’s “Partners in Crime.” The former has a generic alien and little bit of charm. The latter has an awesome weird alien in the form of human fat turning into creatures, and tons more charm thanks to Donna Noble and the Tenth Doctor. This can go on and on: “The Rings of Akhaten,” while decent, is totally a poor man’s “The Beast Below.” “Asylum of the Daleks” is the poor man’s “Victory of the Daleks.” The point? Doctor Who is totally just going through the motions. And despite my unabashed love for “Closing Time” in season 6, it is still the faux version of season 5’s the “The Lodger.” And don’t get me started on the Weeping Angels.
Okay, get me started. The Weeping Angels are the best example of the love leaking out of Doctor Who. Each subsequent appearance of these creepy time-shifting statues renders them more confusing and less scary than the previous outing, culminating in the nearly-impossible-to-follow “The Angels Take Manhattan.” Back in “Blink,” the Angels were new and fresh, but now they are a total mess; the mechanics of how they operate have become overly convoluted, thus making them completely dull. And I’d assert this is because…well, we got to know them better. To put a relationship metaphor inside of a relationship metaphor: the Weeping Angels should have been a one-time fling, making Doctor Who’s attempt to actually date them a big mistake.
…
Notably, both season five and season six end with a wacky aborted universe and a wedding. If there’s not a wedding and a wacky alternate universe at the end of season seven, I’ll be worried Stefan Moffat forgot to rip himself off.”

- I’m Probably Going to Have to Break Up With Doctor Who | Tor.com

In a move which should surprise no one who's been following along, New York City livery car groups successfully won a bid yesterday afternoon for a temporary restraining order against New York City's smartphone-based hail pilot program ("e-hails," if you will). This effectively shuts down any (limited) plans UberTAXI and others had for getting back in business in Gotham -- both Uber and Hailo are being stopped from operating in NYC as a result. Under the pilot program -- approved earlier this year but mired in legal drama ever since -- services like Uber and Hailo could be used in NYC's approximately 13K yellow cabs. Livery cab businesses in NYC have sought to stop the program's implementation via legal means. Its latest effort, the "application for interim relief," was admitted via lawyer Randy Mastro of Gibson Dunn, and cites the following as its reason for the temporary restraining order:

"Absent emergency relief, petitioners and the public will suffer irreparable injury to their livelihoods, businesses and industry, fundamental rights and environmental interests, all of which will be impossible to remedy after this case is resolved in petitioner's favor."

Filed under: Cellphones, Transportation, Software

Comments

Via: Bloomberg

multidjc:

j-ckie:

romamochi:

profmth:

Mitt Romney’s family misspell their last name in the greatest Freudian slip in history.

i just spit my drink everywHERE omfG

I’m not even sorry

DENVER (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Thursday the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombings shows how difficult and sensitive the issue of racial profiling can be.

A legend and guitar god

This is a content summary only. Click on the story to read the whole thing at InvisibleOranges.com

egjertse writes "A Louisiana law that opponents say leaves the backdoor open to teaching 'creationism' in public schools will stay on the books after a Senate committee Wednesday effectively killed a bill that would repeal the statute. After hours of testimony for and against House Bill 26, which repeals the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act, the senators narrowly deferred the legislation, effectively killing it in committee. The bill was sponsored by Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This hoodie says “Dumpster Diving Is My Passion, Sex Is My Hobby.” And why not? After all, dumpster diving and sex go together like peanut butter and a box of used syringes.

“the big reason Doctor Who should meditate on Girls is because the only person on TV more self-involved than Lena Dunham’s Hannah Horvath is…the Doctor himself”

- What Doctor Who Could Learn From Girls About Character Development | Tor.com