firehose

How dumb is the WHCD? This dumb. You're looking at The Politico's White House Correspondents Dinner memo, left behind at a party last night and obtained by Gawker.

Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, and Remy Zaugg. Architectural Design v.61 n.92 1991 via RNDRD

I think ethnic cleansing means cleaning out your body and soul and becoming refreshed with a new beginning.

MiamiHerald.com

Supreme Court Justice breaks shoulder in bike accident KRMG In this photo taken Jan. 24, 2013, file photo U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer reacts during a lecture at Boston University School of Law in Boston. Breyer is in a Washington hospital after shoulder replacement surgery following a bicycle accident ... Justice Breyer has shoulder surgery after fall from bike, Supreme Court saysNBCNews.com (blog) all 33 news articles »

breelandwalker:

fangirling-daily:

fat-pikachu-mas:

denise-puchol:

Comic Book Readers

orkin 1947

what’s this?

Little girls read comics from the very beginning of their incarnation??

“Girl reading comic book in newsstand” by Teenie Harris (c. 1940-1945) © 2006 Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

That sound you hear is thousands of wangsting sexist fanboys shrieking in horror.

Suck it.

I was there. So many of us were…

AT&T Long Lines Building, New York via Wired

The Russians aren’t the only ones that can design brutalist concrete buildings; architect John Carl Warnecke did a pretty good job with AT&T’s phone-switching facility at 33 Thomas Street in New York. The granite-faced behemoth is called the Long Lines Building because its face is unbroken by windows, to keep the equipment secure and protected. Its 29 stories rise to 550 feet thanks to 18-foot ceilings, built tall to house the long-distance and international switches and exchanges. What it lacks in traditional attractiveness, the 1974 creation makes up in sheer imposition and impressiveness — it’s designed to be bombproof and self-sufficient for up to two weeks in case of a disaster.

Decaying Cityscapes Made Entirely Out of Bread by Johanna Mårtensson via Junkculture

What would happen to our cities if humans suddenly disappeared? Stockholm-based artist and set designer Johanna Mårtensson set out to recreate that scenario by erecting a model cityscape made out of bread, and  documenting the naturally slow process of decay every day for six months. Speaking about the project Johanna says, “I was inspired by an article about how well the earth would do without us. Within 500 years all buildings would be half fallen or fallen, perfect homes for animals and plants. The forrest would soon grow in cities. After hand buildings aswell as pollutions would be taken care of by bacterias and micro-organisms.”

One of the side effects of Google's decision to shut down Reader on July 1st is that numerous mobile and desktop apps are now scrambling for a new way to provide value to their users. Reeder, one of the most popular Google Reader appsfor iOS, had previously announced plans to continue development despite Reader's impending shudown, and now there's a new version of the app available that can sync with third-party RSS reader Feedbin. Of course, you'll need to sign up for the $2 monthly fee that Feedbin charges, but after that you'll be free to use Reeder long past July 1st.

Perhaps more noteworthy is Reeder's new, standalone RSS feature — you don't even need a Feedbin or Google Reader account anymore. Instead, you can start curating RSS feeds right on your iPhone; if you had a Google Reader account you can also simply import your feeds straight from there. Unfortunately, this feature isn't available on the iPad or OS X versions of Reeder yet, but those apps will get all of the iPhone features when they are updated to version 2.0 "in the coming months." For now, Reeder cautions that its standalone RSS syncing is "still a work in progress," so it might be a little buggy at first. If you'd prefer to sync through an alternate service like Feedbin, Reeder says that more options will be added in the future.

• Source ReederiTunes App Store
• Related Items reeder reader google reader rss sync feedbin iPhone 5 (GSM) Google Apple

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Apr 27, 2013 at 5:00p

More SimCity updates are on the way to address several problems that arose after the major 2.0 patch that was released last week, according to a post on the EA forums.

SimCity's 2.0 patch went into effect April 22 to fix a large number of problems and to re-add "Cheetah" speed, the game's fastest setting, which was disabled shortly after launch. The patch, however, introduced several new bugs and game crashes.

"While the update made many significant upgrades and fixes, we know that players are eager for more," the post reads. "We are reviewing feedback and bugs that are reported and are working on additional fixes and upgrades."

Fixes include problems players have demolishing buildings, school buses getting stuck in neighboring cities and reports of game crashes. You can read the full list here.

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Apr 27, 2013 at 6:00p

CCP will develop a TV series directed by Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur and a comic from Dark Horse based on player stories submitted through Eve Online True Stories, PC Gamer reports.

Those interested can submit their stories now. Voting will begin in nine days and closes May 21. The first prize winner will receive 10-year subscription and a trip to Reykjavik, Iceland and the opportunity to meet the game's senior developers. Second place is a 10-year subscription, while prizes three through five are one-year subscriptions.

PC Gamer spoke with CCP VP of business development Thor Gunnarsson about player stories, which Gunnarsson called "inspirational."

"There are endless events and shenanigans and just epic drama in Eve, and now beginning to happen in Dust," Gunnarsson said. "It's inspirational to us, as developers. We think we can really amplify and augment these stories hopefully to millions of viewers and readers."

Eve: True Stories will be a 64-page comic featuring the work of four different artist and author pairings. The comic is currently set to hit shelves this winter, and a digital copy will be available for free. A launch date for the TV show has not yet been announced.

“PHOENIX (AP) — The Air Force’s decision to transfer an officer to Arizona after his sexual assault conviction was overturned drew dozens of people to a Tucson military base for a protest led by outraged family members of the woman who made the accusation.
Thursday’s 45-minute demonstration involved about 50 people who questioned why the military would transfer Lt. Col. James Wilkerson to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on the southern edge of Tucson, where roughly half the woman’s family lives.
The protest came amid a congressional uproar over the Wilkerson case, and follows heavy criticism of the military’s handling of another case involving sex-crime allegations in California.
“They could send him to a number of places,” said Stephen Hanks, an orthopedic surgeon in Tucson who is the brother of Wilkerson’s accuser. “Why send him to a place where her family lives? It makes no sense.”
Hanks’ sister, Kimberly Hanks, a civilian employee who works with service members, accused Wilkerson of sexually assaulting her after a March 2012 party at his house. Wilkerson and his wife denied the charges but said Kimberly Hanks stayed at their house that night.
A military jury in November convicted Wilkerson, a former inspector general at Aviano Air Base in Italy, of aggravated sexual assault and other charges. He was sentenced to one year in prison and dismissal from the service.
But a commander overturned the verdict and dismissed the charges, saying he found Wilkerson and his wife more believable than the alleged victim. Wilkerson already has reported for duty in southern Arizona, where he will work as a safety officer for the 12th Air Force.”

- Air Force’s officer transfer draws Ariz. protest - Yahoo! News

"I will never live a day of my life from now on without it (or a competitor). It's that significant."

Avantare writes "The first sci-fi novel I read was A Wrinkle in Time; the next was Dune. Why don't more people read these extraordinarily imaginative books? Delegate Ray Canterbury, who represents Greenbrier County in southern WV, wants to help with that. Canterbury introduced House Bill 2983, which reads, 'To stimulate interest in math and science among students in the public schools of this state, the State Board of Education shall prescribe minimum standards by which samples of grade-appropriate science fiction literature are integrated into the curriculum of existing reading, literature or other required courses for middle school and high school students.' For decades, walking around with a paperback sci-fi novel in your back pocket at school was the quickest way to find yourself permanently excluded from the cool-kid clique. But what if it wasn't just the geeks who read Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke? What if science fiction was mandatory reading for all students?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you hadn't heard, the Executive Branch has finally launched its own Tumblr page. The inaugural post explains it'll be active in all the regular applications of the self-publishing site. "And yes, of course there will be GIFs."

Boston Comic Con was forced to postpone last week because of the lockdown in Boston. But I’m very glad to see that on their website they have a new date of August 3 and 4th at the World Seaport Center. Many of the guests who were scheduled to appear including George Perez and Tony Daniel will be there along with some new names including Brian Azzarello and Cully Hamner. Also listed as attending is Dan Didio. That’s a lot of DC folks. Can’t wait!

The current list of attendees is here.

Aspiring animator and character designer Kevin McShane has spent the past 2 years drawing self-portraits of himself in the style of 100 different famous cartoonists and animators. You can view all 100 drawings at his site.

Since the dawn of animation, few characters have proved more enduring than Cartoon Kevin. Based on real-world cartoonist and animator Kevin McShane, Cartoon Kevin has found his way into the work of almost every significant animator and animation studio from Windsor McCay to Walt Disney, from Osamu Tekuza to Pixar. With his signature black t-shirt, blue jeans, and Chuck Taylor sneakers, Cartoon Kevin has delighted audiences from movie to television screens worldwide for over 100 years.

Photo of Kevin McShane and Andre Medina (Paperman)

Trey Parker & Matt Stone (South Park) and Hanna Barbera (The Flintstones)

Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball Z) and Pendleton Ward (Adventure Time)

images via Cartoon Kevin, Kevin McShane Design

via reddit

Brian of Kotaku recently shared photos of the “Ripe Tomato” (“kanjuku tomato”), a cutting-edge hairstyle created by Hiro of Osaka-based salon Trick Store. He says the salon is “located the city’s hipster youth district, Amemura” and the hairstyle is “not mainstream,” at least yet. Check out more crazy ‘dos created at trendy Japanese salons at Kotaku.

image via Kotaku

via ??SUNDAY, Kotaku

In the absence of nuanced data about how people drive and live in different contexts, city regulations and building developers generally assume that people need way more parking than they really do. A new downtown condo winds up with too much parking. A multifamily apartment near a subway stop gets way too much. Even a low-rise suburban development likely doesn't need quite such a sea of asphalt.

But we overbuild parking because that's the way we've been doing it for years, and because the people who finance new developments fear what sounds like a risky investment: the transit-oriented development with hardly any parking at all.

The alternative isn't simply to err on the other end of the spectrum; underestimate parking demand, and you wind up with equally real complications (and angry neighbors). So how do cities and developers get this right? How could they treat parking demand as a subtle science – with overlapping variables based on land use, transit access, demographics, jobs, rent pricing – instead of as an assumption?

The King County Metro Transit agency in the Seattle region has been working on this, with the help of the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the Urban Land Institute Northwest. They've spent the past year trying to measure exactly which factors dictate residential parking demand around the region, in downtown Seattle, in urban neighborhoods, in the suburbs and even farther out. The result of their efforts is this Right Size Parking Calculator web application that can estimate parking demand down to a single parcel of land (and that should be replicated in other cities):

Right Size Parking

That map is based on a model developed through a painstaking survey of 220 representative multifamily buildings from across the region. Researchers went into each of them to count cars in the middle of the night (peak residential demand, as it's defined by the industry, occurs between midnight and 5 a.m.).

"On average, we saw what we assumed, which was that parking was overbuilt," says Daniel Rowe, a transportation planner with the King County Department of Transportation. "Before this project started, we had heard from a lot of different stakeholders in the area that parking was being overbuilt, but we didn’t want to make that assumption. That's the whole reason we did all this data collection – we wanted to verify it."

On average, these buildings were supplying about 1.4 parking stalls per housing unit; residents were only using about 1 stall per unit. And that oversupply extended across the region, from the central business district to urban neighborhoods to the suburbs. The project also collected information from each of these buildings on how the parking was priced, how the rental units were priced, and whether those two costs were bundled together. All of that information from this building survey was then used, alongside data on land use, demographics, job locations, and transit to hone a model capable of estimating the parking demand on a given property, accounting for factors like its proximity to transit and the price of parking relative to rent.

A $100 monthly parking fee doesn't deter parking in a building full of $2,000 a month luxury apartments quite like it does in a complex intended for affordable housing. Unbundle the cost of parking anywhere, and it also looks more expensive than it does when it's nominally free (but drives up the price of your rent). All of these subtle cues, in addition to the more obvious factors like transit access, influence demand.

The web tool enables developers or curious residents to change the specifications on a particular parcel (adjust the rent, the square footage and the number of units), as well as other characteristics about the neighborhood, and track how parking demand changes as a result.

The idea is that developers might use the tool when planning a project, but also that local governments might consider this data in updating their parking regulations. King Country is agnostic about what they come up with.

"The name 'Right Size' is very conscious because we don’t want to just say 'in all cases there should be less parking,'" says Ron Posthuma, the assistant director of the King County Department of Transportation. "In some cases, maybe there should be more."

Zoom out on this map to the entire region, and the tool also has the effect of painting larger patterns in parking demand. If the county can update the underlying data in two years, in five years, in 10 years, it may also be able to track how perceptions of parking will inevitably change with time.

"Those macro-scale trends are not surprising to us at all," Rowe says. "The real power in this model is to be at a parcel level, to be able to show it’s really not 'urban' and 'suburban.' It’s not that simple. It really matters at a parcel level, what is the transit access in walking distance to that development? What is the pricing scenario?"

What might influence a family of four more than cultural assumptions that they keep two cars in the garage?

MILWAUKEE—While attending Thursday’s first-round playoff matchup between the Miami Heat and the Milwaukee Bucks, frustrated fans repeatedly urged their hometown team to stop blocking their view of the visiting Heat squad, sources confirmed.

WASHINGTON—Declaring that every affluent child in America has the right to a well-balanced brunch, the U.S.

David Bowie has been in self-imposed media lockdown in recent months, even around the release of his newish album, The Next Day. He’s been in a couple of music videos, but he hasn’t given any interviews, nor said much of anything publicly. That all changed this week when The Rumpus writer Rick Moody asked Bowie to illustrate his “work flow diagram” for the record, prompting Bowie to turn in a list of 42 separate, obtuse words that supposedly influenced the new record—words like “effigies,” “osmosis,” “chthonic,” and “funereal.” The full list is below.

Moody then turned Bowie’s 42 words into a 12,000-word piece of his own that’s well worth a read. Check it out at The Rumpus.

David Bowie's work flow diagram
Effigies
Indulgences
Anarchist
Violence
Chthonic
Intimidation
Vampyric
Pantheon
Succubus
Hostage
Transference
Identity
Mauer
Interface
Flitting
Isolation
Revenge
Osmosis
Crusade
Tyrant
Domination ...

Read more

“After enduring lows, highs, lows and more highs on “Project Runway” Season 11, Portland designer Michelle Lesniak Franklin finally finished at the top, winning the first-ever “Teams” edition of the fashion competition show.”

- Portland’s Michelle Lesniak Franklin on ‘Project Runway’ win: ‘It’s incredibly surreal’ | OregonLive.com

““We have to use male facilities. Toilets and changing rooms are an absolute necessity for women working in the police,” said a senior officer who asked not to be named because her superiors had not authorised an interview. The often filthy, flooded stalls have no locks, so women stand guard for each other when they need to use them.”

- Afghanistan’s female police officers fight for women-only toilets | World news | guardian.co.uk

Two days ago we told you about Zach Braff's Kickstarter campaign to finance his next movie, and it drove you crazy. Yesterday we told you how it drove Tim Heidecker even more crazy—so crazy that he wrote a one-page script to be included in the film. (It wasn't very flattering.) Now, some filmmakers with exactly the right amount of time on their hands have produced Heidecker's work and posted it to YouTube. You may soak it in below.

Read more

The Different Games Conference is today and tomorrow at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn. It’s sold out allready, but check out what’s going on here and the arcade games here.-LT

Different Games is a two-day conference on diversity and inclusiveness in digital games, hosted April 26-27, 2013 at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute in downtown Brooklyn.
Different Games is a space for radical discussions of representation in games and the relationship of the medium to designer and player identity.

“Investigators in white hazmat suits are searching a landfill for a laptop tied to the accused Boston Marathon bombers, a potential lead that emerged as a result of interviews with two men from Kazakhstan who knew the terror suspects, law enforcement sources told ABC News.
Immigration officers arrested the two men, Dias Kadyrbayev, 19, and Azamat Tazhayakov, 20, on Saturday on suspicion that they had violated the terms of their student visas because they were no longer attending classes. They are being detained on the administrative charges at the Suffolk County (Mass.) House of Corrections.
The men lived in an apartment near the campus of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, had been enrolled as a student. Both Tsarnaev brothers were believed to have visited the New Bedford apartment of Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov after the bombing, according to three law enforcement sources, who spoke on the condition they not be named because they were discussing an ongoing investigation. The police sources told ABC News they traced calls and Russian language text messages from one of the bombing suspect’s cell phone to the Kazakhstani men.
It was through the Kazakhstani men that investigators learned of the possible whereabouts of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s laptop and authorities have been searching the New Bedford landfill for the past three days, the police sources told ABC News. And, the sources said, agents found a cell phone believed to belong to Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s in the New Bedford apartment.
One of the New Bedford men drove a BMW with a vanity plate that read “TERRORISTA #1” on the front, which his father told reporters was an unfortunate joke gift from some friends in Spain.”

- Feds Search Landfill for Bomber Suspect’s Laptop

Every year, Apple tries to address the excessive demand for WWDC in new ways.

They already make the WWDC videos available promptly after the conference to all registered developers — and every year, they come out faster. They already periodically send the small Developer Evangelism team around the world doing small “Tech Talks” (free, one-day mini-WWDCs, effectively), and they give attendance priority to people who haven’t attended WWDC.

It hasn’t helped.

Developers usually suggest expanding the conference or having more conferences throughout the year, but both of those have big problems. Jeff LaMarche explains why and proposes a sensible expansion idea, but I don’t think Apple would do it, and it would probably only increase the number of available tickets by two or three times at most — the additional scale may ruin the conference, and when you’re already selling out in less than a minute, it’s not going to make a huge difference to availability.

Daniel Jalkut came up with the creative proposal of Apple ending WWDC entirely, then addressing our demands by significantly expanding the online developer resources and documentation. This sounds plausible on paper, but would crush the spirit of our community. Apple should certainly expand the developer resources, but WWDC provides a lot that online resources can’t.

WWDC has an energy. It’s a huge rally to juice developers’ confidence and enthusiasm for the platform. Every year, I’ve been filled with an insatiable desire to just make something the whole time, and that energy gives me a boost for months afterward.

The reason we all want to go so badly is because it’s great.

When you go, you’ve allocated that week to learning this stuff. That’s your only job. You leave most of your workplace and family obligations behind for a week so you can spend all day in sessions, meeting great friends and colleagues in the industry, and immersing yourself in the technology, community, and culture.

Some of the academic and technical benefits can be had outside of that environment, but watching the videos alone at home doesn’t bring the spirit of actually being there. And since watching those videos at home is never going to be your all-day-every-day-for-a-week job, how likely are you to actually watch many of them?¹

And while the usual community has been disrupted and we’re likely to see continued growth of the smaller, independent conferences, WWDC is still going to be the big one: the one that most of us try to attend every year, the one that matters most, the one with the best access to the most people (Apple or otherwise), and the one that Apple kicks off with an enthusiastic keynote that excites us with new OSes, new features, new APIs, and potential new markets for our apps.

No matter what Apple does to address the extreme demand for WWDC, that demand will always be there as long as so many people want to develop apps for Apple platforms, and no amount of videos or documentation can replace the real thing.

Maclife

Analysts Predict iPhone Will Overtake Android Market Share by 2015 Maclife It might sound a little unintuitive, but according to a poll of 16,000 consumers conducted by the Yankee Group last month, iPhone ownership in the United States will surpass that of Android devices by 2015 through consumer loyalty alone. Based on the ... Apping with the stars: Celebrities pick top 10 appsUSA TODAY 5 Apps to Improve Work Productivity - MashableMashable Apple's iOS devices driving higher share of web traffic than ever before, says ...FierceMobileIT Fairbanks Daily News-Miner -Slide To Play -Financial Post all 133 news articles »