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With the help of Commander Chris Hadfield aboard the ISS, the Bank of Canada yesterday launched its new robot- and astronaut-themed five dollar bill. Hadfield had been keeping the new bill under wraps for months.

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Mystic River, Connecticut Birdseye Map (1879)

O.H. Bailey's map of Mystic River and Mystic River Bridge, Connecticut. From 1879. Mystic River, Conn Birdseye Map Date: 1879 Author: O.H. Bailey Dwnld: Full Size (10.3mb) Print Availability: See our Prints Page for more details pff This map isn't part of any series, but we have other featured maps that you might want to check out. Prolific birdseye artist Oakley H. Bailey's depiction of Mystic [gmap], Connecticut. The image is...

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

Audrey Hepburn photographed by Cecil Beaton for ‘My Fair Lady’, 1963 

If there’s one thing Inglourious Basterds needed more of, it’s comedy podcast-style riffing on the fantasized events of the movie-theater massacre that takes out the Third Reich at the end of the film. And who better to offer commentary from a theater balcony than Statler and Waldorf, resident zinger experts on The Muppet Show?

After a Redditor posed the question of which Muppet would have the best chance of assassinating Hitler (our money is still on Beaker), a documentary editor took some clips of Statler and Waldof, cutting them into the climactic movie theater scene, so now Mélanie Laurent’s maniacal revenge laughter and burning Nazi flags are interspersed with the Muppet geezers flinging puns. It creates some incredibly morbid humor, but still oddly fascinating.

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HOMS, SYRIA—As Syrian military aircraft rained chlorine gas on his community Tuesday, local man Amir Najjar, 36, reportedly assured himself that military and humanitarian aid from foreign governments must certainly be racing toward the country at th...

put my tumblr on my resume?

Politico

Prosthetics makers to assist Boston bombing victims Politico Makers of artificial limbs are volunteering to help amputees injured in the Boston Marathon bombings with some of their medical costs — joining a growing list of groups and funds aiding victims of the blasts. Those who lost limbs in the tragedy could face the ... Poll: Public backs more surveillance post-BostonThe Hill (blog) After Boston, concern over another terror attack rises, poll showsCBS News Runners expected to return to Marathon Sports - NECN.comNECN USA TODAY -New York Times -NBCNews.com all 156 news articles »

duck-tective:

you can have 14 pancakes or 132 there is no inbetween

Hot Wheels

New submitter coolnumbr12 writes "For the second time in a week, The Pirate Bay has found a new home for its popular torrent website. A complaint issued Tuesday by Swedish prosecutors threated the Icelandic domain, forcing the file-sharing pirates to take harbor in the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten with a new .sx domain name. 'Control of the island, which has just 78,000 residents, is split between France and the Netherlands. Around 41,000 live on the Dutch side and 37,000 on the French. ... Even if the court grants the prosecutor’s request it remains to be seen how effective any seizures will be. Time and again the BitTorrent site has responded by relocating to new domains.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Receiver, a detailed first-person shooter developed as part of a seven-day challenge for PC and Mac, has found its way on Steam. In the game players explore a minimalist world in search of clues to unravel a conspiracy.

Well, if you survive an onslaught of deadly turrets and drones, that is. Taking cues from roguelikes, players must start from the beginning of the world - in search of the evidence that generates in random areas - upon death. Developed by Wolfire Games, Receiver explores the detailed mechanics behind managing and handling a Colt 1911 A1 pistol. Players must load each bullet into clips, manage a safety, compensate for recoil and more.

Receiver can be a tense experience, as I learned in a livestream with the game when it first launched in June of last year. The Steam version is available for 20% off its regular price of $4.99 - priced to move at $3.99 - until May 6.

Seven-day FPS challenger Receiver now out on Steam originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 01 May 2013 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CBS Local

Colorado ushers in new law with midnight unions Seattle Post Intelligencer DENVER (AP) — The first gay couple granted a civil union in Colorado said their vows before hundreds of people early Wednesday morning at a downtown Denver municipal building, where eager couples and members of the public gathered to celebrate the ... Civil Unions Become Legal in Colorado - USA TodayUSA TODAY Clerk opens for civil unions todayMontrose Daily Press Historic day: Civil unions in ColoradoThe Daily Camera Colorado Springs Independent -York Daily Record -On Top Magazine all 39 news articles »

tdog17 writes "Verizon and MySpace scored a zero out of a possible six stars in a test of how far 18 technology service providers will go to protect user data from government data demands. Twitter and Internet service provider Sonic.net scored a perfect six in the third annual Electronic Frontier Foundation 'Who Has Your Back?' report. Apple, AT&T and Yahoo ranked near the bottom, each scoring just one star. 'While we are pleased by the strides these companies have made over the past couple years, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Amazon holds huge quantities of information as part of its cloud computing services and retail operations, yet does not promise to inform users when their data is sought by the government, produce annual transparency reports, or publish a law enforcement guide. Facebook has yet to publish a transparency report. Yahoo! has a public record of standing up for user privacy in courts, but it hasn't earned recognition in any of our other categories. Apple and AT&T are members of the Digital Due Process coalition, but don’t observe any of the other best practices we’re measuring. ... We remain disappointed by the overall poor showing of ISPs like AT&T and Verizon in our best practice categories.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I will spare you my usual introductory paragraph this morning since you all know what Facebook is and what it does and get right to the point. Last month, without much fanfare, Facebook introduced a revised version of its "f Logo" which is meant to be used to promote an organization's or person's presence on Facebook. It's ubiquitous — yet I had never realized there was, officially, a lighter blue line at the bottom of it. Along with the new "f Logo" also comes an official brand page and a revised set of icons for all the different services/pages found throughout the Facebook universe. Obviously this is not the most earth-shattering change in the history of logo changes but it's my duty to report on it, since, like, a billion people use Facebook.

The "f Logo" in detail. You probably don't need to see it that big but there it is.

For the record, these are the official "Thumbs Up", "Like Button", and "Find Us on Facebook Badge" assets.

Interestingly, you can't download the Facebook logo from the assets page.

So, yeah, there is no more lighter blue line. And the world keeps chugging along. I don't even know why it was there in the first place. In the new version the "f" bleeds out and becomes bigger, which is very helpful since people are using the social sharing icons in really tiny dimensions now that there is dozens of icons to share stuff with. What's more interesting about this whole story is Facebook making a more conscious effort to establish what's right and wrong since so many people have just grabbed unofficial icons off Google image searches or just created their own (I know I have) — and also now that Twitter has upped its game graphically, Facebook can't rest on its laurels. And for a site that changes design every other month and where every platform experience feels different (and almost alien to each other) perhaps this is a sign that things are about to get more consistent. The icons shown below are also a good indication of a graphic standard being set in place. And that can only be promising. Unless they change everything again in a few months, which wouldn't be surprising.

Logos/icons for other large pages/sections/services from Facebook. Gathered first by Tom Waddington.

Thanks to Erik Weiss for first tip.

Don't forget to cast your vote about this post online

The results of a number of Consumer Reports tests won't make you eager to order that next turkey burger.

nk497 writes "Mozilla has sent a cease-and-desist order to Gamma International, after it was revealed the controversial creator of spyware for governments was disguising itself as Firefox on PCs. 'We cannot abide a software company using our name to disguise online surveillance tools that can be — and in several cases actually have been — used by Gamma's customers to violate citizens' human rights and online privacy,' Mozilla said." DavidGilbert99 writes on the wider implications of the Citizen Lab report: "Governmental spying software has been in the news a lot in recent months and today Citizen Lab has revealed its latest findings, showing that one of the most prolific tools in use, Finfisher, is now in use in 36 countries around the world [beware the auto playing video ads with sound]." And, Voulnet adds "According to analysis and report by CitizenLab of the Gamma FinFisher trojan spyware used against dissidents in the middle east and around the world, the FinFisher codebase uses the LGPL GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library, possibly without adhering to its distribution restrictions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What you’re about to watch here is the smallest stop-motion movie ever made. Called “A Boy and His Atom,” the one-minute clip was compiled by manipulating a few dozen carbon atoms on a copper surface.

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If Simba loses his health he floats in the middle of the black screen standing dazedly and faints as a cub while as an adult he faints.

Link (Thanks, Alicia)

Three popular pesticides are being banned in the European Union, where officials are hoping the change helps restore populations of honey bees, vital to crop production, to healthy levels.

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What do people think of this matrix of people who criticize / hate on you?

Check out the link for more of an explanation.

The general rule of thumb? When you receive negative feedback that falls into one of the top two quadrants—from experts or people who care about you who are engaging with and rationally critiquing your work—you should probably take their comments to heart. When you receive negative feedback that falls into the bottom two quadrants, you should just let it roll off your back and just keep doin’ you.

 

When the National Basketball Association’s Jason Collins came out as gay in a Sports Illustrated article Monday, he became the first active publicly gay male athlete in major American sports. That he was the first publicly out man is important to note, since female athletes have been open about their sexuality since at least 1981, when pro tennis player Billie Jean King was outed in a court case and another pro tennis player, Martina Navritilova, came out on her own. Since then, a number of female athletes — the WNBA’s Sheryl Swoopes, Chamique Holdsclaw, and Seimone Augustus, soccer player Megan Rapinoe, and U.S. Women’s National soccer coach Pia Sundhage, to name a few — have come out of the closet.

Brittney Griner, the top pick in the WNBA Draft, joined that list last week in an announcement that was as nonchalant as Collins’ was bold. Griner had already been open about her sexuality, she said, and it seemed that the reason the public didn’t know that was because nobody had bothered to ask. The separate comings out of Griner and Collins were telling for their differences, both in how they were received but in how they were covered in the media. That Brittney Griner was gay didn’t seem to shock anyone — as far as we’ve come in questioning gender roles, if a woman is interested in sports, tall and physically powerful, or both, those are considered indicators that she might be a lesbian. But when Collins came out, people were shocked, and they likely would have been shocked by any other male athlete coming out, even as we’ve become more accustomed to the idea that there must be gay men in professional sports.

The reason for those differences says a great deal about the way society views sports, masculinity, and sexuality. A man who excels at professional sports and has relationships with women has his work, his body, and his sexuality in alignment with norms of traditional masculinity. He’s seen as physically strong, heterosexual, and athletically gifted. A man who is physically strong and athletically gifted but is sexually attracted to men challenges the notion that there’s a relationship between traditional masculinity and heterosexuality. Being gay, it turns out, doesn’t make a man physically weak and passive.

That assumed relationship between masculinity and athletic ability is precisely what changes the equation for women. It isn’t feminine, in society’s eyes, to excel at sports. Where a man who pursues athletics as a career is conforming to gender norms, a woman—straight, gay, or bi—who goes into sports is defying them. And because heterosexual women are assumed to be feminine, women who excel in male-dominated fields, or who exhibit strength normally associated with men, find themselves subject to having assumptions about their sexuality made on the basis of their bodies or their skills. And the ways in which they diverge from gender norms risk becoming more important to the public than the things those divergences let them accomplish.

When a man like Jason Collins comes out as gay, it challenged every preconceived notion we have about what it takes for men to excel in sports, namely, strict adherence to masculine gender norms. But when a woman like Brittney Griner does the same, it only confirms the idea that a woman who succeeds in athletics does so because she’s breaking with expectations for women, both physically and sexually.

That helps explain why we waited so long for an openly gay man in major American team sports: the fears that he wouldn’t fit in a lockerroom, that he would be perceived as “soft,” and that he would be mistreated by fans were all tied to the perception of masculinity. It explains why Collins pushed back on those in his coming out statement, telling Shaq that he wasn’t flopping because he was gay and that he would still set hard picks and commit tough fouls. He clearly feels he has to affirm that there isn’t a relationship between his sexuality and other signs of masculinity, including physical toughness and aggression.

And it explains why there was so little shock when Griner came out as gay — “she looks like a man!” social media users screamed — but it also highlights a totally different set of problems in women’s sports. Where men’s sports have been slow to see gay athletes come out because they challenge the perception that professional athletes are predominantly heterosexual, women’s sports continue to have problems with out gay women because they fear reinforcing the belief that female athletes are predominantly gay. And while male athletes may face censure if they fall out of conditioning and their bodies fail to live up to the sculpted standards for traditional masculinity, female athletes who get themselves in the shape required to do their jobs get criticized for failing to conform to beauty standards.

What brings Collins and Griner together isn’t that they both came out of the closet in April 2013, but that they are both swimming upstream against the skewed notion that views sexuality and athletic prowess as inextricably linked. For men, that means that being gay makes it impossible to be an athlete. For women, that means that being an athlete, gay or straight, makes it impossible to be a woman. Neither could be further from the truth.

This week in trivial political intrique, Sarah Palin is back on the scene… sort of.

Saturday, April 27th, was the annual White House Correspondant’s Dinner, an event at which the POTUS does what is essentially a stand-up comedy routine in front of celebrity guests, fellow politicians, and every major player in the American media. It’s a chance to see our country’s leader in a different, more lighthearted way, and something that political junkies look forward to all year.

Politics aside, President Obama is known to be pretty good at cracking a joke. His sense of humor is one of many reasons to be glad we’re not suffering under the leadership of a President Mitt Romney, because really, can you imagine Mittens walking up to the podium to a chorus of “All I do is win win win”?

The presenter of this year’s White House Correspondant’s Dinner was talkshow host Conan O’Brien, who cutely coined the event “Nerd Prom” as a nod to the unusual mix of celebrities, couture, politicians, and jokes about domestic policy making (or lack-thereof).

The jokes of the evening went over well and seemed to be enjoyed by all (especially the part where Obama referred to himself as “not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that [he] used to be”), but there was one political figure who wasn’t very amused.

Sarah Palin, who wasn’t in attendance at the event, tweeted saying “That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom”.

This is her biggest blip back on the scene since her appearance at the conservative conference CPAC in March, where she rebelliously slurped on a Big Gulp and made jokes about Obama needing a background check.

Some information to consider in the context of this tweet is Sarah Palin’s recent history of leaving her governorship in Alaska, being dismissed from her job at Fox News, and spending her time writing a book about the war on Christmas. Assclowns, indeed!

What do you think of Palin’s backlash on the White House Correspondent’s Dinner? Valid, inappropriate, or hilarious? Share your thoughts in the comments below. 

Written by Rhiannon Payne

See full video of Obama at the WHCD

The Florida legislature passed a bill this week to impose new obstacles on challenging the death penalty in a state with the greatest number of exonerations. The bill’s intent was to shorten the time inmates wait for execution by imposing time limits for appeals and post-conviction motions, but DNA and other evidence often emerges years after a crime is committed – a concern that didn’t seem to faze Republican proponents of the bill who said swift justice is “not about guilt or innocence”:

“Is swift justice fair justice?” asked Democratic party Senator Arthenia Joyner, a Tampa attorney who voted against the bill. “We have seen cases where, years later, convicted people were exonerated,” she said. […]

But Republican Senator Rob Bradley said, “this is not about guilt or innocence, it’s about timely justice.” Frivolous appeals designed only for delay are not fair to victims and their families, he said. [...]

“Only God can judge,” Matt Gaetz, a Republican who sponsored the bill in the House of Representatives, said last week during House debate. “But we sure can set up the meeting.”

Florida has more people on death row than any other state except California. Since the state reinstituted the death penalty in the 1970s, one fourth of those sentenced to death were later exonerated. The initial bill set strict timelines for post-conviction motions and appeals that would have likely led to the execution of many of these exonereees, who were facing a death sentence for well over ten years before new evidence emerged in their case. But after several amendments, the most recent version passed by both houses states only that capital cases should be resolved “as soon as possible.” The changes may have been motivated by concerns over a legal challenge. A similar 2000 law was struck down by the state Supreme Court as a violation of separation of powers. But perhaps more alarming than the text of the final version is the intent of the legislators who proposed it to facilitate quick deaths without regard to guilt or innocence, particularly in a system rife with error and racial bias.

ustia…

You know the drill: it's a new mixtape from The Hood Internet:

Downloads, tour details, and more info on their site.

Update: I made a playlist on Rdio of the songs The Hood Internet used in Mixtape Volume Seven...sifting through their sources is a great way to discover new and previously overlooked music.

There are maybe 3-4 songs I couldn't find on Rdio...they are either unreleased or mixes from Soundcloud. Enjoy.

Update: And here's the same playlist for Spotify. (via @Afterschool)

Tags: music   remix   The Hood Internet

Next week, otter pops!

Submitted by: twistedt

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