firehose

abessinier:

engiebooty:

thekumazone:

Mom boat!!

“KIDS ARE YOU FIGHTING BACK THERE”

“I WILL TURN MYSELF AROUND”

THE MOTHERSHIP

The Tripathi family's ordeal collided with the Boston bombings shortly after the FBI released images of the two suspects late Thursday.

And at least use the damn imperative form instead of just flinging genitives around.

ebookfriendly:

Bookcase in a bus in Hamburg. More such ideas, please!

I always did like Hamburg. Just another reason…

While illustrator Saul Steinberg‘s map of the United States and Asia, View of the World from 9th Avenue (shown at the end of this post), was the point-of-view map that spawned a raft of imitators (and is certainly one of the great cartographical reimaginings of recent times), it was hardly the first. The map above (found on Core77) was drawn for the 1936 Times Book Fair, and displays just as much humor and NY-centrism as Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker cover. Point-of-view maps like these are interesting for their reflexive quality: in a way, their subject is as much the viewer as it is the content of the piece. (As a native New Yorker, I can confirm that the world does indeed appear as depicted in them, under certain weather conditions.) An even older example turned up recently on Maps on the Web, and can be seen between the two New Yorks below. Dating from 1927, it depicts the world as represented by filming locations in and around California: the Sudan Desert can be found in Nevada, and the Long Island Sound just off the coast near L.A. I’m sure there are far older examples as well.

Paramount Studio map of California’s geographical facsimiles:

Steinberg’s illustration for the cover of the March 29, 1976, issue of The New Yorker magazine: 

The FBI's acknowledgement Friday that it interviewed deceased Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 "at the request of a foreign government" has raised questions about whether the U.S. intelligence community could have prevented the Boston attack.

explore-blog:

Hemingway on writing.

madlori:

lbmisscharlie:

mydwynter:

hamburgerjack:

blackpaint20:

This is lovely!

The moaning of miserable medieval monks who transcribed books.

Source

Lol

My people.

Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.

BUGGRE ALL THIS FOR A LARK.

:)

bluepueblo:

Gate Entry, Russia

photo via jennifer

Goodness.

smartgirlsattheparty:

How awesome is this? 

AAWWWWW.

scanzen:

Rare Photos Of The Soviet Space Program From Gagarin To Intercosmos

Tonight's "haunted house" episode of Doctor Who has a lot going for it, including some genuinely creepy moments and a companion rescuing the Doctor in a way we've never seen before. But it also exposes how the show's over-reliance on romance as a storytelling engine is running into the law of diminishing returns. Spoilers!

Read more...

Don’t be a dick

Image by IceMan1988

Massachusetts State Police gave the go-ahead on releasing this official video shot from the airwing helicopter that hovered over the backyard boat where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s week of terror met its end on Friday night.

meme4u:

http://memeblock.com/

Defying security fears, large crowd cheers on London Marathon competitors NBCNews.com (blog) By Michele Neubert, F. Brinley Bruton and Duncan Golestani, NBC News. LONDON – Defying fears instilled by Monday's deadly Boston bombings, boisterous crowds turned out Sunday to cheer on an estimated 36,000 runners in the London Marathon, many ... and more »

the-last-twerk-lord:

scattered-leaves:

fart-sama:

justanothertallguy:

Shit just got real fast didn’t it?

choking

New submitter JoeyRox writes "On 3/22 the Senate approved a non-binding proposal to allow states to tax online sales to residents outside their state. That vote was a trial balloon to gauge the support for the Marketplace Fairness Act. This week Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid filed a cloture to allow the law to be voted on for real this time. The vote may occur as soon as tomorrow. eBay is attempting to rally Americans against the bill via a massive email campaign."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fripperiesandfobs:

Dress ca. 1876

From the Helen Larson Historic Fashion Collection via the FIDM Museum Blog

Wow!

Born on this day, Mr. Pop

The Nintendo Four Score was a controller attachment for the original Nintendo Entertainment System which allowed you to use four controllers at one time. [Simon Inns] wanted to use some original NES controllers on his computer so he developed a drop-in replacement board that converts the device to USB.

As we’ve seen with other NES controller hacks, the hardware uses a simple parallel to serial shift register to deliver key-presses to the console. This means that reading four controllers at a time is no different than shifting in data to a microcontroller from the four different sources. The remaining portion of the problem is providing a USB connection that enumerates the device as a joystick. We’ve seen a bunch of USB projects from [Simon] so it’s no surprise that he was able to pull it off.

He went with the ATmega16U2 which has built-in support for USB. [Simon] wrote the code so that although there is only one USB cable, each of the four controller ports will appear as a separate USB joystick on the computer. To button up the project he carefully measured the original board and laid out his own version so that it fits the footprint of all the original components as well as the mounting brackets on the case. Top notch [Simon]!

Filed under: nintendo hacks, peripherals hacks

thefatgrackle:

invaderxan:

This is a ring made from dinosaur bone, meteorite, and gold.

I feel like this ring probably has supernatural powers.

And even if it doesn’t, it’s quite a lovely thing.

During the deadly earthquake that hit Ya'an, a rural area in China's southwestern province of Sichuan, a television reporter who was getting married left her wedding to report on the disaster. She was still in her wedding gown:

Chen Ying, an anchorwoman at a television station in earthquake zone Ya'an, was getting married on Saturday when the earthquake hit her city.

Local media said she rushed back to her job to report on the earthquake in her wedding gown.

Link - via MSN

A new report by the ACLU reveals that “debtors’ prisons” in Ohio.  The phrase refers to the practice of imprisoning someone for the failure to pay fines.  This practice is in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Still, people who can’t afford to pay fines issued in response to traffic violations or misdemeanors are being routinely imprisoned in at least 7 out of 11 counties studied.

Among the worst offenders is Huron County.  An investigation found that as many as 22% of the bookings in Huron were for failure to pay a fine, usually coded as “contempt.”  Typically this resulted in a 10 day incarceration.  The state would then charge them fees related to being jailed, making it even more unlikely that a person would be able to pay.

The ACLU profiles several individuals.  One is a young man named John with a girlfriend and a nine-month-old daughter.  He was busted for disorderly conduct and underage consumption of alcohol, plus a few other related charges, and fined $1,300.  He agreed to a monthly payment plan to pay off the fines, but wasn’t able to make the payment every month.  Norwalk County, in response, put him in jail for 10 days.

He came out of jail owing more and the cycle continued.  At the time of the interview, John had been incarcerated for a total of 41 days and had incurred an extra $1,599.10 in fees related to his incarceration.  He had paid off $525 of the original $1,300, but owed an additional $2,374.

The ACLU points out that this is obviously an impossible cycle.  A person who is struggling financially may lose their job if they are incarcerated for ten days, especially if it happens more than once.  Meanwhile, loading on additional fines virtually ensures that they won’t be able to pay.  Moreover, however, they point out that it’s not good for Ohio.  The costs debtors incur don’t pay for their incarceration, so the state loses money each time they do this.  The net loss for the state in John’s case, for example, was $3,853.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Bomb technicians were called to inspect a golden mystery box with question marks on its side.

View Article

The latest Dove advertising campaign, “Real Beauty Sketches,” has already garnered its share of well-deserved criticism: That “Dove is owned by Unilever – the same company that owns Axe, king of misogynistic ads.” That “the real take-away is still that women should care whether a stranger thinks she is beautiful.” That the women in the ads don’t look like the women one sees “on the subway, at highway rest stops, in suburban malls.” That the “main participants” are mostly Caucasian, blonde, thin, and young. Etc.

All that is true. But my interest in the ad is pedagogical. For me it is the perfect illustration of what I call the “bent-stick theory of ideology.”

This is the view that ideology is like wearing glasses that distort the world. All we need to do is apply the correcting lens of critique and we will be able to see the world as it really is. Calibrated correctly, our anti-ideological lenses will enable us to see the straight stick we know is there, not the bent stick distorted by the water. Or at least, like a hunter fishing in a stream, we will know where the stick really should be even if we can never truly rid ourselves of the distorting effects of ideology.

In the case of the Dove ads, this is illustrated by the women’s confrontation of the sketches showing them how they see themselves compared with how their friends see them.

Since the picture on the right more closely fits with what the audience sees, the message is clear: the image on the left is a distorted image caused by low self-esteem. These women will need help from their friends and loved-ones to better see themselves as they really are: beautiful.

That Dove wants you to associate their product with this demystification is besides the point. They are like Penn and Teller, magicians who have made a career of dazzling audiences with magic even as they reveal their secrets.

Like Penn and Teller, Dove are doing advertising with clear plastic cups. They are still selling beauty, but they are doing so by associating their product with the “real,” “undistorted,” “inner-beauty” that our friends and lovers see in us but which we ourselves cannot see. Dove isn’t hiding anything from us, so revealing that they are still in the business of selling beauty products doesn’t really get us any closer to understanding the distorted self-images we see from these women’s self-descriptions.

In my discussion of David Graeber’s Debt I wrote:

Marxist ideology is not some kind of “false consciousness” which is simply imposed upon people by the media, it is the product of their lived experience within market based societies. Markets make us see the world in a certain way because markets involve us in certain forms of social action that lend themselves to see the world in a market-oriented way.

I would like to make the same argument for these women. A recent study of attitudes towards female politicians found that any mention of a female candidate’s appearance “whether those mentions are flattering, unflattering, or neutral — has a negative impact on her electability.”

Why might that be? One explanation might come from Bourdieu, who would talk of beauty as a kind of game.  Just mentioning how a politicians look (as Obama did with Attorney General Kamala Harris)  takes them off the political stage and places them on the stage of a beauty pageant.

The critiques of the Dove ad I linked to above all made this point in the sense that they understand that the ad ultimately reinforces the importance of “beauty.” What I want to add to this discussion is to point out that a distorted self-image is a manifestation of misrecognition, not of false-consciousness. What is the difference? False-consciousness would imply that these women are simply deluded as a result of watching too many advertisements (presumably those advertisements made by Dove’s competitors). Misrecognition, on the other hand, is an accurate assessment of the beauty game (even if it mistakenly blames the individual for their inability to win the game). When lined up next to a dozen other women on the beauty pageant stage, the fact that their chin is too pointy or their brow too wide suddenly matters. Our society puts women in that lineup every day, whether or not they wish to be there. What is wrong with the Dove ad isn’t that it is selling beauty, but that it depoliticizing and psychologizing sociological critique in order to do so.