firehose

I loved Comics Alliance, the AOL nerd-culture site that was just shuttered this week. Over at The Beat, Heidi MacDonald has a great write-up about why the site mattered, what might be next for its former staffers and what its closing might portend for other similar outlets.

When we finished the shot, I glanced down at the photo and said: “I could hug you right now.”

“No you couldn’t,” she said, “I’m a fierce ass bitch.” 

(San Francisco, CA)

An alarming amount of registered American voters believe an armed rebellion might be necessary in the next few years, according to the results of a staggering poll released Wednesday by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind.

The end of NASA’s Space Shuttle program in 2011 meant the end for more than the shuttles themselves. One aspect of the program you may not have known about was the plethora of incredible photo and video equipment that was used during the program’s heyday to capture each launch.

First time accepted submitter ruhri writes "A 16 year-old girl in Florida not only has been expelled from her high school but also is being charged as an adult with a felony after replicating the classic toilet-bowl cleaner and aluminum foil experiment. This has quite a number of scientists and science educators up in arms. The fact that she's African American and that the same assistant state attorney has decided not to charge a white teenager who accidentally killed his brother with a BB gun has some thinking whether this is a case of doing science while black."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Can obese cyclists sign up for the city’s new bike-share program? Fat chance!

	rachel shared this story from The Atlantic Wire:
	:)

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It's easy to label the men behind theStar TrekandIron Manfranchises as geeks. They clearly have affection for sci-fi and comic book culture. But they are also, apparently, bigDownton Abbey fans, as recent developments would have you believe.

Today—via Vulture—J.J. Abrams's production company, Bad Robot, tweeted a shot of the Star Trek(andStar Wars) director hobnobbing alongside Mrs. Hughes (a.k.a. Downton's Phyllis Logan) in the kitchen:

#WhereisJJ Visiting the set #DowntonAbrams twitter.com/bad_robot/stat…

— Bad Robot (@bad_robot) May 1, 2013

The Bad Robot "Quote of the Day" comes from the mouths of Dowager Countesses:

#BRquotedujour twitter.com/bad_robot/stat…

— Bad Robot (@bad_robot) May 1, 2013

Abrams is currently on theStark Trek Into Darknesspress tour, and has been busy answering questions from eager, panting,Star Wars fans. (Yes, John Williams will probably score the upcoming seventh episode.) But here he is, clearly demonstrating his love for something that couldn't be farther from Klingons and Wookiees. Still, Abrams's (professed)Downtonlove ("It was like opening a bag of potato chips that I'd never tasted before") shouldn't really surprise anyone. This man createdFelicity,so he obviously has a soft spot for soapy television.

Given Abrams's history with emotional, romantic drama, we'd write off the geek-Downtonconnection as a one-time thing. But, no,Downtonapparently plays a role in what is shaping up to be one of the summer's biggest blockbusters:Iron Man 3.

This past weekend Jon Favreau, who plays Tony Stark pal and security guy Happy in theIron Manfilms (and directed the first two), tweeted:

Pay attention to what #DowntonAbbey scene Happy is watching in #Ironman3. It was carefully selected.

— Jon Favreau (@Jon_Favreau) April 28, 2013

No spoilers here (or in our Richard Lawson's new Iron Manreview), but the show ends up being a recurring joke in the film, Richard reports from a screening.

The geek love of Downtonhas tons of crossover potential. Our pitch: Matthew Crawley returns from the dead as a superhero who fights aliens all for the love of Lady Mary. Abrams? Favreau? Anyone in?

Solaris

Zothecula writes "In the ProDesk3D, 3D printing outfit botObjects has come up with not only the first full color desktop 3D printer, but thanks to its anodized aluminum body, unquestionably one of the prettiest. The company's goal was to think about how 3D printers might look in 5 years, aiming to put clear water between the ProDesk3D and its "kit-like contemporaries." To print in color, it uses a cartridge system capable of mixing five base colors of PLA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Injustice League Of North Korea is a series of defaced North Korean currency by German artist and designer Aslan Malik showing political leader Kim Il-sung (1912-1994) on the 100, 1,000 and 5,000 won banknotes reimagined as a Justice League comic book villain.

images via Aslan Malik

(it has to be asked) Bless this man.

Teddy Hose has illustrated the “Apartment Hunter’s Guide to Classifieds Terminology” after “choosing to live in a ‘cozy, garden level apartment in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn’ years ago” before he knew what that really meant.

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Robert Scoble in the shower.

White Men Wearing Google Glass is a Tumblr blog that collects photos of white guys wearing the explorer edition of the Google Glass headset.

In its favour, if Google Glass didn’t exist, all these Silicon Valley guys would be having affairs or buying unsuitable motorbikes.

photo via Sean Hollister

photo via Engadget

photo via The Verge

photo via Mashable

photo via Fox News

photo 1 via Robert Scoble

via Valleywag

Veteran cartoonist Roger Langridge has issued a call for help in finding several pieces of original artwork that came up missing following a September exhibition in Italy. They were to be shipped to London, but apparently never arrived.

“I have no idea what might have happened to them,” he writes on his blog. “I’m keen not to accuse anybody of anything, as I have no proof of any wrongdoing; there may have been a mistake made when packing the artwork, and it may still be in Italy. Somebody may have tampered with the package en route. I have no clue what the real story might be. What I do know is that I would like the work back. Some of the pieces are ones I intended to keep for the rest of my life. Others I was hoping to sell to help get me through a period where I’m not earning very much. One piece is the property of another person, who kindly lent it to me for the exhibition.”

You can view some of the pieces here, and the rest on Langridge’s blog (where you can also find his email address in case you’ve spotted any of this artwork).

Leeloo learns about the facts of the human race which she is destined to save through an online encyclopedia available to her in many places: in Cornelius’’ home, the spaceship to Fhloston Paradise, and aboard Zorg’’s ship. Three modes are seen for it. Today we discuss the second mode, which is to select an in-depth topic.

In-Depth Topic

Leeloo can understand each item in the topic lists as they fly past. If she sees a topic that interests her in particular, she can press a button to find out more about that topic in more detail. (We don’t see the button, we just hear it.) Given that she’s looking at a screen of at most 66 and at least 4 options, and we don’t see a selection indicator, it’s anyone’s guess as to how she does this. Later we’ll see that she has a QWERTY keyboard to search for a particular word, and we don’t see that same search interface here, so it’s something other than that.

Once she indicates that she’s interested in martial arts, the entry fills the screen. The screen is a mix of a paragraph of text, images zooming around, and subtopics writ in large red majuscule letters scrolling past: KRAV CONTACT, SUMO, WRESTLING, SAVATE, KUNG FU, JU JITSU, NINJITSU, WRANG DO, FULL CONTACT… A still image of Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon appears. This style of still-image and animated-text continues to play in a watch-and-learn way until it’s done, and then returns to the topic list.

Here, as before, I am examining things unmeant for examination. Still, I have a job to do. In the diegesis of the film, the text flies by too quick for anyone but a perfect Mondoshawan to read. But here in the real world, I hit pause. There I learned that the paragraph of text in the background has nothing to do with martial arts. We only see snippets, but they read as follows. (Please post your short sci-fi stories that can make sense of these lines in exactly this same order.)

: a hindu thus
talks to hi[s] troops about taking
d takes on a persona of its own.
monster, if it wants to live, have
loved. We then get a news flash
cult (think Waco siege coverage)

This little bit of text reads much more like a script than an encyclopedia entry. Like it was a bit of text just lying around on someone’s computer. In any case it would not help Leeloo learn Jeet Kun Do in the slightest.

On the right side of the screen (see above) we also see a vertical green rectangle. At the top is the number 5, bookended with arrows. Below that is a graph, a set of thumbnail images (whose captions are too small to read) are linked by right-angle connecting lines, like what you might see in a tech-tree for a real-time strategy video game.

When the display shifts to showing the subtopics, this green area changes. The 5 changes to a dot, and a grid of circular icons appears, each with a green rectangle to its right. The left column of icons is hard to decipher, but the right column of icons looks like control buttons one might expect: More detail, next in sequence, prior in sequence, zoom out, zoom all the way out, fast forward. Missing are common controls for video such as pause and play. A the bottom is a button labeled “EDIT”. This control panel is not seen in use.

It’s still about the learning, stupid

That stuff on the left is pointless. Of course that bit from a script is goofy. The animated stuff might be interesting for getting someone kind of excited about the topic, or maybe to remember how awesome martial arts (that they already knew about) are, but for learning any of it from a computer screen, she would have been better off spending time on youtube. Even the subtopics make no sense. Sure, they’re all martial arts, but what’s the order? Not alphabetical. Not age. Savate (18th century) is between wrestling and Sumo, both far more ancient. It’s not even a list of the same scope of thing. Aren’t Krav and Full Contact different translations for the same thing? Anyway, learning the vocabulary of a domain is only a rudimentary first step to actually learning it, much less performing it. Good thing she’s “perfect.”

The first green area on the right does actually seem useful for learning. It’s an abstract representation of how some things fit together. There’s a relationship implied between parts. It may also provide a map to a bigger picture in which this particular topic fits. That’s actually pretty useful and even Wikipedia adopts it for entries that fit into larger domains of knowledge. So, OK, we’ll cut it some slack there.

The second green area, even though I’m doing a lot of inference there from icons, also seems like it might be pretty useful. It’s too bad we don’t get to see it in action.

Better for Leeloo’s purposes of learning a topic—even if you did it blazingly fast—would be to provide her a definition, a bit about the history, and then some blazingly fast how-tos of modern practice augmented with the principles at work in each of the examples.

H/t @MDT

Giving feedback is a creative act. Special thanks for the 7,000+ people who responded to the “group sharing” survey. Here is an overview of what you told us.

Motivation

Here are some of the murmurs which capture the motivation behind this feature:

“Collecting and sharing design inspiration with rest of a team.”

“Commented news sharing between me and my brother. Read an article I like, “share it”, comment it, and then get notifications when he reads it and/or comments about it.”

“Mostly sharing interesting articles with specific people. Email gets old and would like to see what others are interested in as well. More of a two way sharing.”

“I have a small circle of colleagues and friend with likeminded interests. Whenever we come across an interesting article, we want to share it with the circle and get their thoughts on it. Email has too much friction.”

“I provide news alerts & research to a group of corporate recruiters. Topics of interest shared, change often, and may be of short duration.”

“Sharing and commenting with a few friends of similar interest”

“Share articles with my wife.”

“Fast and easy sharing to small group of people sharing interest (e.g, food, technology) and discussion about the items.”

“Co-workers in various disciplines, one group per discipline (project managers, CAD operators, managers, IT department, installers, etc.). Customers in various vertical markets.”

“I find interesting health related articles and forward them via email to people I know would find it relevant to their health efforts.”

Patterns

Despite the very large number of responses, there is a very consistent set of requirements:

Be able to target smaller groups of people (wife, family, team, subset of friends with similar interest) and not pollute their twitter, facebook or LinkedIn timelines.

Remove friction from the type of sharing which is currently implemented using email.

90% of users think that they will be happy with 1-5 groups.

78% of users want support for threaded conversations (ie this is more about triggering interesting private conversations than simply sharing information).

The term “interest” was used more than 1000 times in the use case description field.

People requesting this feature are savvy sharers who use already heavily twitter, facebook, google+ and email – almost evenly.

Focus on simplicity and minimize the number of clicks needed to share an article with a group or comment on an existing conversation.

Next?

We have a few ideas. We are going to turn them into a beta and reach back to you for some testing. More on that in a couple of weeks.

Original Source

Austin-based filmmaker Joe Nicolosi asked his mom to retell the story of The Matrix after watching it for the very first time. Nicolosi then animated her version of the popular film starring “Leo,” “his girlfriend,” and “Moshimo.”

Generating organs and tissue with 3D printers is nothing new. But this bioengineered ear is unique in that it utilizes embedded electronics that allow it to pick up radio frequencies outside the range of normal human hearing.

Read more...

An apple is one of the most fundamental fruits throughout history. Apparently, we've been eating them wrong.

In honor of the 2013 Kentucky Derby on Saturday May 4th, Kentucky for Kentucky collaborated with talented Louisville-based artist Rachael Sinclair to create this infographic art print that chronicles the 1970 essay “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” by Hunter S. Thompson.

The names of the horses, like Mayblossom Senility and Whiskey Gentry, were taken from the story. I endeavored to illustrated the silks in a name-appropriate way, such as the chemical compound for 1970′s formula of Mace, referred to in the story as Chemical Billy. The text was hand distressed in Photoshop and placed letter by letter for a rougher appearance, the colors sampled from vintage 1970′s fabrics.

image and video via Kentucky for Kentucky

via Deadspin

Who?

By Griffin McElroy on May 02, 2013 at 12:45p

Scribblenauts developer 5th Cell and publisher Warner Bros. are named in a trademark infringement suit for the series' inclusion of Nyan Cat and Keyboard Cat, according to a complaint recently filed by the memes' respective creators.

Charles Schmidt, who uploaded Keyboard Cat's breakout performance to YouTube in 2007, and Christopher Orlando Torres, who made the quickly viral Nyan Cat animated GIF, jointly filed a copyright and trademark infringement suit against the two companies. Both felines can be conjured up in-game using protagonist Max's magic notebook, but their cameos were not cleared with Schmidt or Torres, the suit claims.

Keyboard Cat has appeared in all Scribblenauts titles released throughout the franchise's history, while Nyan Cat only appeared in Scribblenauts Unlimited, the latest game in the series. The damages sought by Schmidt and Torres sound fairly substantial, but are not explicitly outlined by the brief; the total royalties would be dependent on an accounting of the Scribblenauts' series sales and total revenue.

We have reached out to 5th Cell for a comment on the pair's claims.

• Source
• LA Intellectual Property Trademark Attorney Blog

Manhattan restaurant Esca has made a fancy after-dinner interpretation of the classic Fluffernutter sandwich with their Fluffernutter Budino dessert. Niko Triantafillou of Serious Eats New York describes as “a thick but velvet-like banana pudding coupled with peanut brittle and salted caramel” with a “…large beehive-style swirl of meringue that’s hand torched to order.” He furthers, “The meringue plays the role of the marshmallow in the classic sandwich by the same name.”

photo by Niko Triantafillou for Serious Eats New York

via Serious Eats New York

John McAfee was best known as a software designer and founder of the computer anti-virus company McAfee Associates until his saga in Belize began. McAfee's works on producing natural antibiotics commercially in Belize was quickly overshadowed by police raids, murder allegations, and a month of evading Belizean authorities while maintaining his innocence. He was eventually captured and deported back to the United States in December 2012 without being charged with any crime. "Boston George" Jung (a man who has lived quite an unusual life himself) has been tapped to write McAfee's biography titled, No Domain. Now that things have mostly settled down, John has agreed to answer your questions. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’ve had dreams like that

Original Source

“An Oregon family who unknowingly bought a house that was used as a meth lab has settled with Freddie Mac, the seller of the previously foreclosed home, and is working with lawmakers to require disclosure about whether a home has been tested for contamination.”

-

Oregon Meth House Owners Settle With Freddie Mac

follow-up

THANKS OBAMA

As the immigration march moved through downtown, the route was watched not only by police on horseback and bicycle — but also by a crew of self-described Seattle “superheroes” dressed in costumes. They stood together watching for trouble. One of them, wearing a blue and red mask and going by the name El Caballero, stood in front of a Wells Fargo Bank branch as marchers paused in front and shouted anti-bank slogans. They quickly moved on, and El Caballero said: “It’s been pretty mellow so far.”