firehose

Anthony Weiner admitted in an interview Wednesday that there might be other embarrassing photos of him out there that have yet to surface.

SAN ANTONIO—Following the Lakers’ 91-79 loss in Game 1 of their playoff series, Spurs power forward Tim Duncan reportedly urged his opponents Tuesday not to be discouraged, reminding them of England’s underdog victory against the French ...

WASHINGTON—According to an announcement Tuesday by the Surgeon General’s office, the “cinnamon challenge”—a new fad in which teens attempt to swallow spoonfuls of cinnamon without water—may be hazardous to pansy-ass tee...

By Dzhokar A. Tsarnaev

madebyabvh:

Animated Paul Kidby

Original illustration by Paul Kidby

Discworld - The Luggage

TOWSON, MD—Kim Kiper proudly displayed her husband’s 2013 NFL mock draft on the refrigerator door Wednesday, claiming that the 52-year-old football analyst worked very hard hand-writing a list of potential selections for every single team in t...

This awesome-looking comics-themed Macbook keyboard skin has been doing the rounds on design blogs, but I saw it on HiConsumption. For an atrocious, eyes-on-the-keyboard, six-fingers-in-a-claw, typist such as myself, it’d be a nightmare. But it does look fantastic. It’s from Killer Duck Decals, and is available from its Etsy store.

The accompanying blurb shows them to be very witty people, indeed: “Zorro instead of Zatanna because I didn’t want to deal with the top hat, sorry”; “Our skins are meant to make your stuff look cooler, not make them bomb proof. So don’t go flashing them around in the bad part of town and skipping them across lakes because they do not grant your electronics super-powers.”

There’s a few inspired choices on this thing (check out the “Y” key), and a couple I’ll admit I’m baffled by. (What are the icons on the “O” and “D” keys referring to? I presume I’ll kick myself when someone points them out.)

 

Los Angeles-based cinematographer and bike fiend Richie Trimble unveiled Stoopid Tall, a freakishly tall bike, at last Sunday’s CicLAvia open street event in Los Angeles. The hand-built bike is 14.5 feet tall at the seat and has a 32-foot-long bicycle chain. Trimble recorded his nerve-wracking 20 mile ride to Venice Beach with a GoPro camera that was attached to his chest. He managed to complete the ride without incident, though he nearly got wedged under a highway overpass. Trimble recently spoke to Streetsblog Los Angeles about the ride and his plans for an even taller bike.

photo by Spencer Harding

photo by Hal Bergman

via Streetsblog Los Angeles, Blame It On The Voices

BOSTON—Days after being apprehended for his alleged role in last week’s Boston Marathon attack, suspected bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev reportedly posted bail earlier today, prompting authorities to release him from custody.

tinyhousesmallspace:

New Tumbleweed Tiny House! The Cypress 20 is a larger version of the popular fencl model

fuckyeahtattoos:

Massive knitter and crocheter over here..

Rohan at Jackson Street Tattoo in Petone, New Zealand
 

WAUKEGAN, IL—After learning Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev had been hiding inside a boat parked in a Massachusetts man’s backyard, 46-year-old Ethan Bryer told reporters Wednesday that he now makes sure to check the interior ...

By Brian Crecente on Apr 24, 2013 at 3:44p

This year's super fast sellout of PAX Prime tickets triggered a more rigorous examination of bulk purchases to identify folks who managed to thwart the ticket limit, officials tell Polygon.

Those who purchased more than the four sets allowed had their tickets refunded. Those tickets will go back on sale sometime in the future, Penny Arcade business manager Robert Khoo said.

While Khoo declined to say exactly how many people were impacted by the ticket cancellations he did say that it was "less than one percent of total orders." Those impacted by the refund were notified yesterday, he said.

Tickets to PAX Prime, the all-things-video-game show put on annually in Seattle by the folks behind Penny Arcade, sold out in a record six hours, according to a post on the official website dedicated to the sellout.

According to that post, the maximum number of sets of tickets a person could purchase was four. The average number of sets, which includes single-day or four-day passes, was 1.45 with only 2.1 percent of all people purchasing the maximum number.

Khoo said that after the tickets sold out he personally went through the ticket sales to identify suspicious activity that could potentially be linked to scalpers. Typically that meant people placing double, triple or more orders.

"I went through all of those those that had double orders and split them up into categories by level of severity," he said.

Of those four groups, he only canceled ticket orders and refunded money for the two most egregious categories. The worst case he spotted was someone who managed to purchase 300 badges through multiple orders, he said.

"We're just being more aggressive about enforcing the rules," he said. "We had a rule saying you can only order four sets, but in previous years we were pretty lax about enforcing them.

While the rule allows for a maximum of 16 tickets, he said even with this year's enforcement they still typically allowed people with 30 or less tickets slide. This year they decided to be a bit more aggressive then previous years because tickets sold out in record time, Khoo said.

"We wanted to make sure that we do what we can to maintain fairness," he said. "We really strive to make sure PAX is as good as possible and part of that is making sure the prices are reasonable and that the process for buying tickets is reasonable."

The decision to cancel and refund some ticket sales was met with some public indignation including tweets to Khoo and a thread on Reddit.

PAX Prime, which runs from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, continues to grow, despite the addition of PAX East in Boston starting in 2010 and PAX Australia this year. While Khoo said the team would like to keep PAX Prime in Seattle, the rocketing attendance may force a move from the city.

"When push comes to shove and it becomes too difficult to do PAX in Seattle I will have to look at other possibilities at some point," he said, "but not right now."

1915

A boy between two mounted lobsters caught off the New Jersey coast.

(via natgeofound)

From the official Doctor Who Twitter comes a simple picture with a simple caption: "A pair of feet."

Read more...

“One” is a photo series of London street scenes in which a single person in each photo is subtly animated. The animated photos, or “cinemagraphs,” were created by photographer Nicolas Ritter.

The project » one « focuses on the individual in a crowd. It particularly imitates the way in which the human eye observes: not viewing a crowd as a crowd, but observing little micro-scenes inside of it.

via FreeYork, Visual News

“On his LinkedIn profile , Savader identified himself as a former vice presidential operations intern at Romney for President in Boston, as well as a special assistant to the chief operating officer of Newt Gingrich’s 2012 campaign in Arlington, Va. Attempts to verify Savader’s titles were not successful, but his Facebook page includes photos of him with Romney and Gingrich.”

- Accused Blackmailer Claims to Be Ex-Romney Intern

“

“I think it’s tasteless when Obama will drag everybody he can up to Capitol Hill and try to pass gun control,” Campfield told ABCNews.com today. “I think that was classless and tasteless. I don’t hear them complaining about that too much.”

“I was showing the hypocrisy of Diane Feinstein, the gun grabbers, of their inability to realize that it is a person that does activity, not an inanimate object, be it a gun or a pressure cooker,” he said.

Campfield also posted a follow-up post on his blog titled, “Inappropriate? Me? Never!”

”

- Tennessee Senator Refuses to Apologize for Pressure Cooker Joke

Charitybuzz, an organization that asks celebrities to auction off unique experiences, has a geeky business leader's dream on the auction block today. Apple CEO Tim Cook is offering one wealthy bidder a chance to have a cup of coffee with him at Apple headquarters, valued (according to Tim Cook, anyhow) at $50,000. The coffee date is "valid for two people," according to the listing, and will last approximately 30 minutes to an hour, with the winning bidder and his or her guest "subject to security screening" before redeeming the coupon. Charitybuzz says the offer can't be re-sold or re-auctioned. As of this writing, there have been two bids. If you'd like to join, you'll have to offer at least $5,750.

• Via Andy Ihnatko (Twitter)
• Source CharityBuzz
• Related Items tim cook charity Ti Apple

Topito, a French news website specializing in lists and rankings, completely remixed the Daft Punk song “Get Lucky” by dubbing in awful vocals and instrumentation. Nile Rodgers, guitarist in the original song, saw the ‘shred’ video and shared his amusement on Twitter. Topito was inspired by a shredded video for The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around” from massbetelnut, which we previously posted about.

@webabla HA HA! That shredded version has me totally CRYING!!! You’ve made my day with that. I needed a good laugh.

— Nile Rodgers (@nilerodgers) April 20, 2013

via AudioPorn Central, Nerdcore

““Why, whether it’s al-Qaeda central out of the FATAs or two twisted, perverted, cowardly, knock-off jihadis here in Boston. Why do they do what they do?””

- Biden: Tsarnaev brothers ‘perverted, cowardly, knock-off jihadis’ - POLITICO.com

This is a notice of pure desperation. Imagine working on your thesis for five years and suddenly it's gone. University librarians and computer techs say it happens more than you might think. You can store it online, in the cloud, on external drives, or with a professional service. When data is this precious, more than one backup method would be a good idea. Link

Succulents. I love these guys.

Sterling, Virginia-based pixel artist, t-shirt designer and 2D animator Drew Wise created a geekerrific collection of video game pixel art sweatshirts. They are available to purchase online at Beloved Shirts.

via On The Level Gaming, Obvious Winner

Redditor doigoid revealed that their dog Jack has an extraordinarily talent for balancing things on its head, and asked the reddit community for suggestions on what Jack should balance. For more images, take a look at the original post from doigoid and this collection of images posted in the thread.

photos via doigoid

via reddit, Buzzfeed

By John Walker on April 24th, 2013 at 6:00 pm.

We first spotted CraftStudio last year – a collaborative game making game, inspired by, but only loosely related to, Minecraft. Players share the tool by which games are designed and created, allowing people to work in teams as they develop, or even collaborate with strangers, creating games in all manner of genres. Blocks are pretty central, the nostrils on the game’s face, but the variation is offers is damned impressive – see below. And now, the beta lives.

The beta starts today, letting people into… well, it’s a lot easier to watch this:

With an emphasis on accessibility, one-man prodigy creator Elisée Maureris explains, wanting people to be able to start making games without any previous experience, or training. And wow, it looks powerful. The online collaboration element really seems like a winner here – I’m looking forward to seeing what games are born of it. Here are a few examples of what already has been:

There’s a restricted trial version available for free, and the full version costs €20 during the beta period (going up to €30 on release).

At MIT, as the sun shined brightly in a cloudless sky in the mid-afternoon on Sunday, a man named Robert Burke, who runs a small business video production company out of a Boston suburb, sat with a camera pointed at a pile of T-shirts, flowers, teddy bears, and candles. His complaint, like the complaints of many others this past week, was with the media establishment that had descended on his hometown first for the Boston Marathon, then for the aftermath of a tragedy, without much context.

“All these media people in town this week, and none of them have the real story,” he told me in a thick Boston accent. “Well, I’ll tell you the real story here: two terrorists assassinated a good cop.”

If the Boston bombings told us anything, it’s first that everyone has his own story. And second, it’s that cameras such as Burke’s — both those lodged in people’s hands and those installed by government agencies on buildings and roads — can allow everyone’s own story to do as much harm as it can good.

Too many theories

What we know so far — what we can really verify — is that the FBI charged 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the lone surviving suspect, for detonating two improvised bombs with his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan. We know five people died, including Tamerlan, in related events. Nearly 300 were injured. That’s all verifiable.

But there are many unanswered questions.

Just one example: when Collier, the MIT police officer, was shot on Thursday evening a little after 10:30PM, the circumstances of his murder were odd. This was during the post-bombing manhunt, 80 hours or so after the marathon ended prematurely. The officer was killed in his car, which meant he hadn’t attempted to chase anyone on foot. If we accept FBI allegations that the Tsarnaevs were involved in that shooting, we know they didn’t take the officer’s police car anywhere. And they didn’t rob him. So was it simply anger? Was he shot because he was a cop in the wrong place at the wrong time? Or was something else afoot?

A conspiracy theory — and again, it’s just one associated with this case — is that the Tsarnaevs had sought to toss one of their improvised explosives into MIT’s “little nuclear reactor” near the corner of Massachusetts Ave. and Vassar Ave. Officer Collier had stumbled upon their plot, the theory goes, and so he had to die.

AMERICA'S FIRST HIGH PROFILE TERRORIST ATTACK IN THE AGE OF OMNIPRESENT CONNECTIVITY AND NEAR-UBIQUITOUS SURVEILLANCE

Like many of the theories floating around Boston right now, chances are that’s not what happened. What the MIT shooting theory represents is just one example of a grassy knoll, second shooter-type guess offered mere days after the event took place. And again, that’s just one theory, from one event. Alex Jones offered another. He said the Tsarnaevs were patsies, set up by the FBI, the event a “false flag.” The Tsarnaevs' father is making similar claims. There are many more.

Everyone’s got their story, after all.

Especially now. The Boston Marathon bombing was the first time America has experienced a high profile terrorist attack in the age of omnipresent internet connectivity, in an environment of near-ubiquitous surveillance.

Reddit users responded immediately. The first post was a photo from Twitter that captured white smoke billowing skyward. That was followed by a live video feed of the finish line, and gruesome photographs of blood spilled on the street, people scrambling, police officers and EMS workers racing toward petrified people scattering for their lives. In turn, more videos, more news reports, and more tweets appeared by the second. The National Guard cleared Copley Square and established a 15-block crime scene. The events continued to unfold, live, across the internet, thanks to America’s conditioned response to anything that happens, good or bad: plastering it all over social media.

Not even law enforcement could resist the lure of the internet. Realizing they needed as much information as they could gather, and that the CCTV cameras near the finish line perhaps didn’t provide all the evidence they needed to identify a suspect, Boston police put out a call at around 4:30PM for video and images of the finish line. Shortly thereafter, when the FBI announced that it had no suspects, Reddit users had plenty of “leads”: suggestions about who the bombers may have been, as well as photos and videos that might lead police to the culprits. It wasn’t long before the Reddit approach to the investigation — guesses based on images and video floating around the web — would spill into the mainstream. On Friday, Boston police said they kept citizens abreast of updates via Twitter and governmental websites because the public speculation had reached dangerous levels.

On Wednesday, CNN’s John King erroneously reported that an arrest had been made, prompting both Fox News and the Associated Press to follow suit. On Thursday morning, the now infamous New York Post front cover was released. “BAG MEN: Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon,” it screamed in bold, capital letters. A photo of two local high school students sat beneath the headline. The students had no connection to the plot whatsoever.

“[E]veryone thinks they’re an investigator,” said Howard Levinson, president of Expert Security Consulting in Norton, Massachusetts. “I would suggest that people should just move on with their lives and be more careful. But I think we know that’s not going to happen.”

We got the bad guys

This is not how it was supposed to play out.

In the wake of September 11th, 2001, we have been constantly promised safety and security in exchange for submitting to increased surveillance. The grant application for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Homeland Security Grant Program — the principle program that helped bring all those surveillance cameras to Boston — is very clear on this. Millions of dollars were ultimately spent to prevent any “acts of terrorism and other catastrophic events” that might occur.

Boston’s CCTV infrastructure was installed in 2004, ostensibly to deter terrorists from attacking that year’s Democratic National Convention. It was paid for by a $4.6 million federal grant from the US Department of Homeland Security. By the end of 2004, there were 59 cameras installed in Boston metro area. By 2007, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, there were 147.

Few in the Boston metro area questioned this program. The Boston Globe quoted a police official in a December 15th, 2008, report: “There was no debate in Boston,” the official said.

But debate did, in fact, occur in a suburb west of Boston called Brookline. With a population of about 60,000 people, Brookline is not a huge or particularly unusual place. But its local legislative arm threatened to reject federally provided CCTV cameras within its borders.

The ACLU of Massachusetts spoke out in the town’s favor.

“The overarching concern is what kind of society are we creating, where general police surveillance cameras are in operation,” an ACLU attorney told the Globe. “You cannot assume that we will always be a free society, and we are putting the structures in place that would allow a very different United States of America from the one we have lived in.”

But Brookline — much like the rest of Boston, much like the rest of the US, and much like cities worldwide — acquiesced. In 2009, they agreed to take the cameras. Brookline’s concerns — unique as they were — ended in compromise. It would take the CCTV cameras. But it would only keep them running from 10PM to 6AM.

Which is consistent. Concerns about privacy have a tendency to diminish in the face of fear.

Despite those concerns — and studies, and anecdotes, and journalism showing that CCTV cameras don’t deter crime — the ACLU estimates that more than 500 of the cameras have been installed in the greater Boston area.

But what have they done for Boston?

Most news outlets have focused on the bombings and the investigation. The results: first, we got the bad guys. And second, we got the bad guys because CCTV cameras allowed law enforcement agencies to find and hunt down two terror suspects.

But that was never the point of FEMA’s Homeland Security Grant Program. The main goal was to “protect against” and to prevent terrorist attacks in the first place.

The marathon bombings represented the first real test of that program.

And it failed.

IT WAS THE FIRST REAL TEST OF FEMA'S SURVEILLANCE GRANT PROGRAM — AND IT FAILED

Section TOC Title THE NETWORK TURNED EVERYONE INTO A SUSPECT, CONTRIBUTING TO THE ATTACK'S SUCCESS

She points out that the deceased suspect, Dzhokhar’s older brother, was on the FBI’s radar. He was even interviewed. But because of the overwhelming amounts of information at their disposal, FBI officials failed to follow up. “Part of the problem,” Rose said, “is that when everyone is surveilled, then authorities lose their focus” and civil liberties can be violated as a matter of procedure. Political speech can be targeted. People can be profiled by their race. People can be wrongly accused of perpetrating a horrific crime. Or investigated dubiously in place of a legitimate threat.

“We need to think about the purpose of these cameras,” she said. “If the purpose is to have a camera at an ATM to find people who are stealing, that’s one thing. But putting everyone into a database or recording every moment of every day from more than 500 cameras, the systems become overwhelmed.”

Rose is “not suggesting there needs to be a ban on surveillance cameras,” she said. “But if, in fact, the reason for using them is public safety, then there’s no reason all the innocent people who have been victimized by these awful attacks at the Boston Marathon need to end up in a criminal database or need to be used as a justification for expanded surveillance.”

“We’re part of a surveillance state that has made everyone into a suspect,” she said. “And if everyone becomes a suspect, then nobody is a suspect.”

Robert Burke, who sat for hours on a blue Coleman cooler filming Officer Collier’s memorial at MIT, wasn’t so sure about that. He, like many others in Boston, was just glad the bombing suspects — “the terrorists,” he was sure to clarify — are in custody. And as for adding his story to the media dump, he said he’s not interested. I prodded him repeatedly about who he was doing his video for, where he was planning to post it online. He told me nowhere.

“This video is for one person,” he said. “The officer’s father. He wanted to know why no one was covering his son’s death. So I said I’d do that for him.”

Burke had only met Collier’s dad once, randomly, at another memorial last week.

“Sometimes a story just isn’t for everyone.”

Adrianne Jeffries, Adi Robertson and Nathan Ingraham contributed to this report.

Photo Credits: Getty Images, C. Holmes, Shawna England, and Vjeran Pavic.

"Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source."