firehose

For open kitchen layouts that blend into the entertaining and living areas (say, in a loft, for example) this idea seamlessly integrates the two: a kitchen island that's kitchen-ey on one side, and home design-focused on the other! 

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“How do we completely redesign and recreate something while keeping it exactly the same?”

Google has announced Gmail Blue, a significantly bluer version of the popular email client. “It’s Gmail, only bluer,” project manager Richard Pargo said in a video demonstrating the redesigned Gmail. After trying other colors like orange, brown, and yellow, the team settled on a nature-inspired blue.

The Philip K. Dick Award, for science fiction books originally published in paperback instead of hardcover, has been awarded to Brian Francis Slattery, for his book Lost Everything. Special citation was also given to Andri Snær Magnason's Lovestar. Huge congrats to them both!

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There have been tons of rumors about Matt Smith leaving the role of the Doctor, that ageless, mercurial time traveler, on Doctor Who at the end of this year. In the 50th anniversary special, or the Christmas special after that. But now it's official: He's on board for season eight.

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technology is changing the way we interact

After years of puzzling over it, I think at last I understand the TSA's strategy for dealing with terrorism: make them laugh so hard they'll all have strokes or something.

Yes, it has publicly sought crack security personnel by advertising on pizza boxes, closed down an airport because of an unscreened baby, swabbed a 95-year-old man for explosives, got all concerned about holiday snow globes, and insisted that those who drive historical-canal-boat-pulling mules get high-tech biometric ID credentials, among many other acts of otherwise inexplicable stupidity.

But the true explanation didn't really dawn on me until recently, when I saw that a TSA agent at JFK "mistakenly shot himself and five other agents with pepper spray" because he thought the canister was a laser pointer and decided to horse around with it.

Hopefully this gag will take out al Qaida's current No. 3 guy without doing too much collateral damage.

The New York Post seems to have first reported this incident, which happened on March 26. According to the Post, the "bumbling TSA agent" found a small canister on the floor. Thinking it was a laser pointer, he tried to turn it on, thereby managing to incapacitate himself and five others as well as halting security checks at JFK for at least 15 minutes. The six were taken to a hospital "out of an abundance of caution," but were not injured. Surprisingly, no travelers were either exposed to the spray or accused of being responsible for the assault.

TSA Agents Examine Mysterious Item

The TSA did, however, arguably lie to ABC News when it asked for a statement. "Officers were examining an abandoned item to determine its contents and to move it out of harm's way," said a spokesperson, "when it accidentally discharged."

First, as we have seen before, these people have no law-enforcement authority and are not "officers," although they do like to dress that way. Second, note how the sentence, especially the phrase "it accidentally discharged," puts all the blame on the item. Perhaps the agents had roped off and secured the area and were carefully examining the mysterious canister with state-of-the-art scanning technology before taking appropriate action?

"They were playing around with it," an airport official told the Post.

If you’ve spent any time perusing web forums you’ve encountered the phrase “RTFM” which stands for “Read the fucking manual.” This invariably offends the initial poster who, rightfully (IMHO), points out that if the documentation was clearer they never would have taken the time to register for a web forum and post their question in the first place. The problem with most documentation is that it only makes sense if you already know the answer. People who write documentation have a hard time putting themselves in the mindset of the people for whom the documentation is actually written.

This is not a trivial insight. I once attended a seminar by Penny Eckert who described a working class high school girl in Detroit. The girl was very bright and everyone thought she should attend college, but when asked about it she told Penny: “Everyone says I should go to college, but I don’t know how to go to college.” (Or something like that, this was years ago and my memory is notoriously fuzzy on the details.)

I thought of this again while reading this NY Times Op-Ed on the difficulty elite colleges have “recruiting the talented rural poor.” The author, Claire Watkins, points out that the military do a much better job. What’s the difference?

But the most important thing the military did was walk kids and their families through the enlistment process.

In Eckert’s seminar she pointed out that middle class students have an entire community of practice surrounding college admissions. They talk about the best schools with their parents, they discuss SAT exams with their classmates, they visit schools and have friends in college who share their experiences, etc. Poorer students frequently lack any of this.

Sure, they could RTFM and learn about this on their own from books, websites, etc. They’re the “talented” students, right? But the reality is that much of this only makes sense if you already have been socialized into the process. If you are on the outside looking in it can be difficult to know where to even start. The military understands this. Why don’t Ivy League colleges? Or is it perhaps a form of willful ignorance, a way of maintaining the myth that schools offer equal opportunity while continuing to reproduce privilege?

It is also something college professors might wish to keep in mind. How many times have you scolded students for not reading the syllabus more carefully? I often find that no matter how many times I explain something, my students are more likely to trust what their classmates say about the syllabus than what I’ve told them. (I can’t say for sure, but I suspect this latter problem might be particularly evident in Taiwan where senior students are referred to as elder brothers and sisters.) In such cases it isn’t enough to simply explain the syllabus once, but also to make students feel comfortable asking seemingly “stupid” questions about the syllabus throughout the year. I admit I’m not as good about this as I should be, but I try not to be the teacher who tells students to RTFS…

UPDATE: From another NY Times piece: “The results are now in, and they suggest that basic information can substantially increase the number of low-income students who apply to, attend and graduate from top colleges.”

infinity-imagined:

Scanning electron micrographs of diatoms, microscopic algae that form the base of the food chain and produce 20% of Earth’s oxygen.

The beautiful base of the pyramid of biology, feeding our air, land and life.

“After challenging a 3-point shot by Duke’s Tyler Thornton in the first half of the Midwest regional, Ware landed awkwardly and gruesomely broke his tibia. It was a compound fracture, bone protruding far through the skin, which Ware looked down and saw. It was the ugliest thing anyone in the gym had ever seen in person on a basketball court. The snap of the leg was so loud that Smith heard it.”

- Kevin Ware’s courage, strength after horrific leg injury inspires Louisville to Final Four - Yahoo! Sports

glukkake:

cineraria:

Magnetic Putty Time Lapse 1080p - YouTube

Waaaaaant!

As I’ve written many many times, if you’re storing anything in Dropbox that you wouldn’t want to see published in the New York Times then you better encrypt it. Here’s yet another reason to do so.

AESTHETICS

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by lucidentropy

Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Guardian reports that Cuban programmers have unveiled a new 3D video game that puts a revolutionary twist on gaming, letting players recreate decisive clashes from the 1959 uprising in which many of their grandparents fought. 'The player identifies with the history of Cuba,' says Haylin Corujo, head of video game studies for Cuba's Youth Computing Club and leader of the team of developers who created Gesta Final – roughly translated as 'Final Heroic Deed'. 'You can be a participant in the battles that were fought in the war from '56 to '59.' The game begins with the user joining the 82 rebels who in 1956 sailed to Cuba from Mexico aboard the Granma. Players then fight their way through swamps shoulder-to-shoulder with bearded guerrillas clad in the olive green of Fidel Castro and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara to topple 1950s Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The game lets you pick from three player profiles, one in an olive hat similar to the one Fidel Castro was known for, another wearing a Guevara-style beret and the last with the kind of helmet worn by the ill-fated Camilo Cienfuegos in many revolution-era photographs. Rene Vargas, a 29-year-old gamer who tried his hand at 'Gesta Final' when it was presented at a technology fair in Havana last week, says the graphics were surprisingly sophisticated. 'Bearing in mind the level of technical support there is in Cuba, it looks pretty good,' says Vargas. There are about 783,000 computers in this country of some 11 million inhabitants, according to government statistics from 2011. Private ownership of computers is low, but many Cubans access them at work, school or cyber cafes. 'We developed (it) keeping in mind the purchasing power and reality of Cubans,' says Corujo. 'It doesn't require incredible technological features.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica's Peter Bright reports on a Netware 3.12 server that has been decommissioned after over 16 years of continuous operation. The plug was pulled when noise from the server's hard drives become intolerable. From the article: 'It's September 23, 1996. It's a Monday. The Macarena is pumping out of the office radio, mid-way through its 14 week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, doing little to improve the usual Monday gloom...Sixteen and a half years later, INTEL's hard disks—a pair of full height 5.25 inch 800 MB Quantum SCSI devices—are making some disconcerting noises from their bearings, and you're tired of the complaints. It's time to turn off the old warhorse.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Congratulations Bruce!

The man allegedly provided fake documentation and 42,000 pounds of Muenster cheese was loaded onto his truck.

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Mar 31st 2013 By: Lauren Davis

Greg Smallwood is drawing Dark Horse's upcoming Jai Nitz-authored title Dream Thief, about a man who steals an Aboriginal mask only to discover that murderous spirits are taking possession of his body while he sleeps. It's appropriate, then, that Smallwood has such a fascination with crime stories. In between posting sample panels from Dream Thief, he's been sketching up moments from crime movies old and new, as well as a handful of characters from The Wire. The preview panels from Dream Thief are quite stunning, with a lovely, shadowed noir look that captures the darkness of the premise without diving too far into the nostalgia the genre can evoke. And his crime movie series shows he has a real sense for significant moments both violent and small. Check out more from Dream Thief at Smallwood's blog.

An anonymous reader writes "HBO programming president Michael Lombardo not only says that illegal downloading of Game of Thrones isn't hurting the show, but goes far as to say it's 'a compliment' and worries about the image quality of pirated copies"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

British hip-hop producer/rapper Funky DL has a freebie for you: Jazzmatic, Nas' Illmatic redone as a jazz album from the late 1930s.

In the belly of Boston’s biggest taxi garage, cabbies shuffle toward a scratched and grimy dispatcher’s window knowing the cost of doing business. If you want to drive, especially on a busy night, you often have to pay the man a little extra to get the keys.

artpropelled:

hand made scrolls (by dwatsonartist)

Charlie Rose steps into the kitchen of Momofuku Ssam to watch David Chang whip up some Korean fried chicken. Prepped an entire day in advance, the poultry is dipped into a batter containing vodka and beer (for its fast evaporating qualities), before it’s dropped into hot oil and twice fried. Talk of varying cooking times leads to a conversation about meaty preferences, where Chang reveals that he prefers dark meat and Charlie Rose white. Chang asks, “Charlie, how can we be friends now?” The two decide to make up and then sit down to eat.

During the interview Rose covers topics from staying true to the original, winning awards, and Chang’s rise to the top. When asked by Rose “How do you make sure that you don’t lose what brought you here?” Chang responds with a quip about needing to lose sometimes to move forward and his thoughts on cooking “getting back to basics.”

Watch the entire video above and hear Chang tell Rose why everyone loves them some fried bird, discuss his awards, and hear Charlie Rose say, “David Chang, I love your fried chicken and I love you.”

[via CBS]

 

 

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