firehose

Here’s a post that is both “book-related” and wacky! There’s a new movie in Japan, titled LIBRARY WARS, that is based on the Manga Graphic Novel stories by Toshokan Sensou. Now, this series of books have already been made into an animated TV Show, the graphic up above is an example of that. But wait! Now it’s a LIVE-ACTION MOVIE!

The film tells the story of Kasahara Iku, the first woman to join the Library Task Force. In the near future in Japan, the Media Enhancement Law has been forced upon the population censoring all books and media. To counter this, the Library Defense Force was created. To protect themselves against the Media Enhancement Law Commission, all major libraries are fully equipped with a military Task Force, who take it upon themselves to protect the books and freedom of media of the people. This anime follows Iku and her fellow soldiers as they protect various special books and artifacts from the oppression of the Media Enhancement Law Commission. A love story, war story, and comedy all rolled into one.

Check out the new Movie Trailer down below:

t3r3z1s-dr4gon-c4p3:

flatabsandthighgaps:

girlgrowingsmall:

Guys that Z is in freaking Times New Roman

This person isn’t messing around okay

Chromium OS X stable FreeSMUG build - FreeSMUG:

If you’re addicted to Chrome, are on a Mac, and don’t like Google, here’s a stable branch of Chromium that uses Sparkle to autoupdate.

T. Final 2013 - Fecha 6 - Ramírez - San Lorenzo 1 - Colón 0 (by San Lorenzo)

Pope Frank’s favorite footy team wins their first game as God’s Team on a freak miraculous own goal

this will undoubtedly be the first miracle in Frankie’s inevitable sainthood

When Avis Budget Group announced it would be acquiring car-sharing service Zipcar earlier this year, the company said it expected key members of the Zipcar team to stay on to run the service — but Zipcar's CEO Scott Griffith won't be one of them. Fortune reports that the Griffith has stepped down from the company, just a day after Avis formally completed its acquisition. Taking his place will be Zipcar's chief operating officer Mark Norman.

In a letter to Zipcar employees today, Griffith writes that "Zipcar will require a fully-committed leader to unlock the power of the merger," and that "it's best if I step back and give someone else the opportunity to put the pedal down and take Zipcar to the next level." The Boston Globe's Scott...

Continue reading…

The Vatican has been going high-tech lately, and its next step is digitizing the entire Apostolic Library — all 40 million pages of it. The project will take nine years and be made possible by a 2.8 petabyte storage donation from EMC, a company that specializes in information security and data storage. The library holds nearly 90,000 documents, including rare pieces like the Gutenberg Bible, one of the first Western books printed on moveable type.

EMC hasn't announced what formats it will use to store the data, or how it will handle the different types of media within the library. The company has assisted in similar digitization efforts in the past, including the creation of a 3D digital reconstruction of a Leonardo da Vinci work,...

Continue reading…

Here’s a fun way to break up the monotony in the old cubicle farm. The Mug Plotter will let you expertly inscribe your coffee vessel with a different witty saying or design for each day of the week. If it looks familiar that’s because it’s loosely based on the non-flat drawing robot, the Eggbot.

[Teed] built the machine using laser cut plywood parts. He starts off the build description with the griping technique. There are two parts to this, one is concave and fits in the mouth of the mug. The convex side grips the bottom edges of it. These parts go on the frame along with the slide and thread rods which hold the stylus. A servo motor is along for the ride, providing the ability to lift the marker when necessary.

You can see in the clip after the break that there’s a bit of oscillation in the rig when one of the steppers starts turning really fast. But it doesn’t seem to affect the look of the design very much at all.

Filed under: cnc hacks

redletterdave writes "Apple is facing a potential class action suit in San Francisco's California Northern District Court after an owner of its MacBook Pro with Retina display accused the computer company on Wednesday of 'tricking' consumers into paying for a poor-quality screen, citing an increasingly common problem that causes images to be burned into the display, also known as 'image persistence' or 'ghosting.' The lawsuit claims only LG-made screens are affected by this problem, but 'none of Apple's advertisements or representations disclose that it produces display screens that exhibit different levels of performance and quality.' Even though only one man filed the lawsuit, it can become a class action suit if others decide to join him in his claim, which might not be an issue: An Apple.com support thread for this particular problem, entitled 'MacBook Pro Retina display burn-in,' currently has more than 7,200 replies and 367,000 views across more than 500 pages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trailrunner7 writes "Apple on Thursday released a large batch of security fixes for its OS X operating system, one of which patches a flaw that allowed Java Web Start applications to run even when users had Java disabled in the browser. There have been a slew of serious vulnerabilities in Java disclosed in the last few months, and security experts have been recommending that users disable Java in their various browsers as a protection mechanism. However, it appears that measure wasn't quite enough to protect users of some versions of OS X."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fantasy author Tracy Hickman will be the lead story designer on Richard Garriott's latest venture, Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues. Hickman is a New York Times best-selling author, perhaps best known for his Dragonlance and Death Gate series of novels.

In the above video, Hickman argues that the graphics, sound and physics engines of computer games have "made quantum leaps forward," it's the gameplay that's lacking any real progression. "In fact, gameplay hasn't changed that much for 30 years," Hickman added.

Shroud of the Avatar is currently sitting in the low $900,000 area. With over three weeks left to go before the Kickstarter campaign comes to a close, the goal of $1 million seems well within reach.

Shroud of the Avatar taps Dragonlance author as lead story designer originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yep, that’s what I just saw.  :)  Hilarious.

27 Science fictions that became science facts in 2012.:

thescienceofreality:

1. Quadriplegic uses her mind to control her robotic arm.
2. DARPA robot can traverse an obstacle course.
3. Genetically modified silk is stronger than steel.
4. DNA was photographed for the first time.
5. Invisibility cloak technology took a huge leap forward.
6. Spray-on skin.
7. James Cameron reached the deepest known point in the ocean.
8. Stem cells could extend human life by over 100 years.
9. 3-D printer creates full-size house in one session.
10. Self-driving cars are legal in Nevada, Florida, and California.
11. Voyager I leaves the solar system.
12. Custom Jaw transplant created with 3-D printer.
13. Rogue planet[s] floating through space.
14. Chimera monkey’s created from multiple embryos.
15. Artificial leaves generate electricity. 
16. Google goggles bring the internet everywhere.
17. Higgs-Boson Particle discovery.
18. Flexible, inexpensive solar panels challenge fossil fuel.
19. Diamond planet discovered.
20. Eye implants give sight to the blind.
21. Wales barcodes DNA of every flowering plant species in the country.
22. First unmanned commercial space flight docks with the ISS.
23. Ultra-flexible “willow” glass will allow for curved electronic devices.
24. NASA begins using robotic exoskeletons.
25. Human brain is hacked.
26. First planet with four suns discovered.
27. Microsoft patented the “Holodeck”.

Learn more about each of these scientific break-throughs and discoveries here.

(via Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: Passion Natural Water-Based Lubricant - 55 Gallon)

A 55-gallon barrel of lube. With some unfortunate side effects for some buyers.

Dog Lovers Beware!, March 8, 2013 / Reviewer: Greg M.

Do not put small/medium sized dogs in this 55 gallon barrel of lubricant!!!! The dogs can not swim well in the lube and just sink to the bottom!! Terrible!!!

You sometimes hear American-developed video games set in real-world geopolitical hotspots—like entries in the Call of Duty, Battlefield and Medal of Honor series—get decried as jingoistic, flag-waving propaganda. And Pakistan has issued a ban on Call of Duty and Medal of Honorfor how it's portrayed in those titles. And, yeah, while the claim can be made that political mindsets and cultural biases seep into those video games, they're not explicitly made to froth up ideological allegiances. (Well, there was the America's Army franchise but those games offered a pretty tepid brand of "eff yeah" messaging.)

Islamic Mali—as reported by Foreign Policy—goes hard in the opposite direction. The new game—playable here—made by Islamic extremists takes players into the skies to engage in aerial dogfights in the name of al-Qaeda. It's a rudimentary HTML5 browser game where you control an al-Qaeda fighter jet shooting down and dodging fire from French fighter planes. Islamic Mali virtualizes the very real conflict in Mali, where local rebel forces have been fighting jihadi soldiers with help from the French military.

And like so many top-down arcade shooters before it, there's a one-shot instant-kill power-up in Islamic Mali, too. Click on the black box of Arabic text—which translates as the first part of the shahada, Islam's core delaration of faith: "There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God"—and a black laser obliterates all enemies in its path. And when it's game over, pop-up text indicates that you've become a martyr to the jihadi cause.

Islamic Mali joins the ranks of other explicitly political titles from other countries, like Glorious Mission in China or the Flash games hosted on North Korean web portal Uriminzokkiri. These games won't compete with bigger, fancier games from the West when it comes to entertainment value. But the fact that they exist is a testament to how fervently their creators want their particular ideologies to permeate every aspect of people's lives.

Jihadis create retro 2-D shooter video game [Foreign Policy, via Twitter]

A couple of weeks ago, you might've seen Superman kill the Joker in cold blood in the prequel comics that build the backstory for upcoming fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us. You could argue that Batman's archenemy had it coming since he's a psychopathic mass murderer. But as the series has continued, The Man of Steel has pulled off stunts that can only be called naïve, stupid or straight-up maniacal.

After Lois Lane dies at the hands of the Joker, Kal-El sulks. And doesn't shave.

Then he deposes a head of state in a fictional country. The people seemed to be down with this extra-legal extradition.

That's followed by a revelation of his secret identity in a U.N. press conference filled with self-loathing.

Okay, sure, the Joker might have been deserving of retribution. But what about these American soldiers that Superman killed? That's right. Kal-El straight-up explodes a combat chopper full of U.S. servicemen who were presumably just following orders. That ain't right.

Update: After re-reading, it's clear that Superman destroys an unmanned drone, and not a manned helicopter.

So, what does the U.S. goverment do after Superman wantonly dispatches their troops? They go after Clark Kent's parents with a kill squad led by Flash villain Mirror Master. That's what you get after rather stupidly revealing your Earth name, Superman.

Clearly this version of the DC Comics icon doesn't have super-intelligence. It's clear that the creative and editorial teams are using the leeway of a tie-in product to craft a Superman who diverges from previous portayals. That'd be fine, if the results didn't feel goofy and out of whack. There's only a few weeks until Injustice comes out for Wii U Xbox 360 and PS3. I, for one, can't wait to kick Superman's ass.

Suddenly, the mother of all zombie apocalypses is about to happen. This just wound up in our inbox:

Capcom and Valve are pleased to announce the Resident Evil® 6 x Left 4 Dead 2 project. This crossover project between two of the interactive entertainment industry's most respected publishers will see characters from Left 4 Dead™ 2 featured exclusively in the forthcoming PC version of Resident Evil® 6, while enemies from Resident Evil 6 will invade the PC version of Left 4 Dead 2. All content will be made available completely free for fans of either game to access and play.

Owners of Resident Evil 6 PC will be able to select one of four survivors from Left 4 Dead 2's iconic cast – Coach, Nick, Ellis and Rochelle – when playing PC exclusive mode, The Mercenaries No Mercy. Each character will have a special customized weapon load-out created just for use in Resident Evil 6. In addition to the four survivors, two of the infamous Special Infected zombies from the Left 4 Dead franchise – the Witch and Mini Tank – will also make a cameo appearance in this mode, relentlessly attacking players regardless of whether a character from Left 4 Dead 2 or Resident Evil 6 is chosen. This new and exclusive content will automatically be downloaded in the background to all owners of the PC version of Resident Evil 6 from April 5.

Making the leap to the PC version of Left 4 Dead 2 will be some of Resident Evil 6's most fearsome enemies – Lepotitsa, Napad and Ogroman. All three characters were brought to life in Left 4 Dead 2 by Valve's renowned developers using its Steam Workshop tools. Owners of the PC version of Left 4 Dead 2 will be able to face a new deadly challenge when Resident Evil 6 characters infect Valve's classic zombie title this spring.

Commenting on the crossover project, Chet Faliszek from Valve stated: "We're huge Resident Evil fans, so when the opportunity arose to work directly with Capcom to combine L4D2 and RE6, we jumped at it."

Resident Evil 6 Producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi added: "The Resident Evil 6 team really enjoyed working on this crossover, and we're confident that our fans will have a great time with it too! We hope you enjoy this unique content."

More as we learn it.

Update:


Here's a developer diary from RE6 producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, courtesy of Capcom.

alphadogg writes "The vast majority of 3G and 4G USB modems handed out by mobile operators to their customers are manufactured by a handful of companies and run insecure software, according to two security researchers from Russia. Researchers Nikita Tarakanov and Oleg Kupreev analyzed the security of 3G/4G USB modems obtained from Russian operators for the past several months. Their findings were presented this week at the Black Hat Europe 2013 security conference in Amsterdam. Most 3G/4G modems used in Russia, Europe, and probably elsewhere in the world, are made by Chinese hardware manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, and are branded with the mobile operators' logos and trademarks, Tarakanov said. Because of this, even if the research was done primarily on Huawei modems from Russian operators, the results should be relevant in other parts of the world as well, he said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By John Walker on March 16th, 2013 at 8:10 pm.

A key moment in the week’s SimCity shenanigans was unquestionably the appearance of a video from a modder, Azzer, announcing he’d found a way to remove the game’s offline timer. The final nail in the ridiculous-claims coffin, this mod demonstrated that everything but the asynchronous multiplayer was running on your home machine. We got in touch with the man behind the mod, one Azzer, and he had a lot more to say. In his opinion, the information coming from the servers is so rudimentary that despite Maxis’s claims, there shouldn’t be any problem at all in simulating the regional play offline.

So many of Maxis’s claims about how SimCity runs have come down to the importance of the information from the servers, driving the experience of players whether they’re seeking social conglomeration, or going it alone. And even in Bradshaw’s revisionist version of these claims, we’re still being told that the way it works is “innovative”. Not so, alleges Azzer.

“I’ve analyzed all of the data calls to and from EA servers – all of the APIs, every request for data, and all of the data that comes back,” explains the modder. And in doing so, he’s found some surprising results. “The SimCity servers are not doing any calculations that could not be done on your PC, even for an entire region single player offline mode, let alone just the city you are in.”

It’s his belief (clearly we don’t have a clue – we’re not experts here at all) that the servers aren’t chugging nearly as hard as Maxis say. “All the server sends to your client, is some very basic data about each city – how much power they have available, how much spare fire trucks, you know – that sort of stuff. It’s minor, and it’s sent as raw numbers. Your client then just goes ‘oh there’s XXX power spare from city Z.’ It’s that simple.”

But this seems to contradict the claims from Maxis that the servers are, “using new technology to realize a vision of players connected in regions to create a SimCity that captured the dynamism of the world we live in.” How does Azzer respond to that? “The server side calculations are all, frankly, rubbish.” Ah. In his opinion, clearly. “Every bit of it,” he continues. “The only ‘good’ they do at the moment is for a multiplayer region – they are just a way for my city to tell your city how much power I have spare, and update that data every few minutes while I play. A middleman of sorts.”

In fact, Azzer thinks that even despite this, the tech isn’t nearly as good as it should be. “The servers are terrible, the MySQL set-up sloppy, and they are trying to handle all of the saving server side (“the cloud”) which is bogging them down constantly – they aren’t optimized for how many simultaneous cities are connected at once. Hell, this “cloud” saving isn’t even very clever is it – if you change servers, all your saves are gone. They don’t even “cloud” your saves between their own servers.”

Matching the information we received from our Maxis mole, Azzer explains that the only other role served by the servers – beyond the obvious “fluff and guff” as he calls it of invites, chat, leaderboards, etc. – is to prevent cheating. “Most of the processing work is probably their attempts at anti-cheat stuff, checking a city doesn’t do… something… at an unrealistic speed.”

As we’ve repeatedly pointed out, while not offering an offline version of SimCity is entirely Maxis’s call, our issue this week has been with their claiming it would be near impossible, rather than their simply believing it undesirable. (Obviously we have enormous issues with any game being crippled by such DRM, too.)

So how simple does Azzer think getting an offline version going might be? “They could make an entire region single player offline with absolute ease. It would be as simple as coding in a switch saying, ‘Is this person playing single player? Take the power values of each city from local memory instead of ask for it from the server instead.’ The only thing missing is saving to local hard drive – but let’s be real, the code for saving your city already exists, I can’t imagine even that would take more than an hour to put into the client (and it probably already exists in the client for development builds), plus a little bit of time for the UI elements for Save/Load.”

“For an offline mode,” he continues, “instead of asking EA servers how much power is available from a fellow city in the region, it will simply have it in memory, as a small handful of values from another city. No live calculations done on them. Just raw values, all the EA servers send anyway. And as you’ll only be playing/simulating one city at a time in offline mode (cities you don’t play are “frozen in time”) – those values of how much spare power, resources, etc. other cities have won’t even need updating, until you change cities.”

But how exactly would that work? If those cities are frozen, resources won’t be renewed, nor depleted? “Let’s say you and I play in a region together,” says Azzer, talking about the regular online game. “You build a town that has lots of power and water (water is a consumable just like coal) and spare fire trucks. I build a big casino city with lots of criminals. You go offline and don’t play for a whole week, but I keep playing for an entire week.” Okay, with you. “During that week, my client will keep telling me stories about fire trucks coming to help me from your city, I’ll keep getting water from you, I’ll keep getting power from you – of a ‘set amount’ dictated by how much you had spare when you last logged off. This is all processed by my client, not by the server. All the server did was tell me ‘X fire trucks available, Y water available, Z power available, from city with the name ABC,’ as a raw list of values. When you log back on, your water levels will be exactly as they were when you last logged off, because EA’s servers were NOT doing any processing, and my client only affects the city I am simulating.”

Crikey. So an offline version of the game could act in exactly the same way. You could play multiple cities in your private region, each freezing when not played just as the current game operates. “No processing is done on the cities you aren’t currently playing on – they simply freeze in time and provide a fixed set of values of ‘resources’ that the currently played city simulates. The client does all the processing, which is why any city not being played (online or not) has nothing done to it by EA’s servers if the owner of that city is not playing their city at the time.”

We also spoke to Azzer about the rather strange happenings with the threads related to his mod vanishing from the EA forums. A series of tweets from, Erik Reynolds, “senior director of worldwide communications” (but apparently not mathematics), explained that he was going to be “1000% clear”.

“Due to our ToS we need to delete the thread about the hack/mod from our forums. Please move it to other places and continue the dialogue.”

Then slightly less than 1000% clearly, he added,

“In the past we’ve supported the modding community and in the future we are committed to supporting. Hacks are not mods.”

This wasn’t an ambiguity he further cleared up. It was one that surprised Azzer too. “A thread I made detailing all of the modding work (and clearing up any mis-information too) on the EA forums was deleted within 30 minutes of posting (after 3 pages of replies).” But despite Reynolds’ stating an apparent distinction between hacks and mods, the baby and the bathwater have been thrown out of the EA forums. (You can read Azzer’s deleted thread here.)

“Hours later,” continues Azzer, “a new sticky thread appeared saying no mod talk was allowed any more.” Just how strictly is this being moderated, the modder wondered. So he started a thread titled, “Mods and rockers”, discussing the 1960s British music culture. “Just to see if they were deleting threads without even looking at the content.”

Were they? “It was deleted within thirty seconds of posting. Yes, I was obviously asking for a deletion with that thread title – but I giggled anyway.”

We’d love to put these points to Maxis, and to be able to provide you with their corrections for the above, along with their clarifications and responses, but they’re ignoring us.

The Classics are must-see, must-read, must-play works revered by The Verge staff. They offer glimpses of the future, glimpses of humanity, and a glimpse of our very souls. You should check them out.

The year was 1986. A much-younger version of myself went over to my friend Frank's house to play games on his dad's Apple IIe. My gaming experience had been fairly limited up to that point — highlighted by Karateka, Oregon Trail, and some frustrated fumblings around the Zork trilogy (my love for all things Infocom wouldn't blossom for another year). I was about to be introduced to a new game, however; one that would burn its way fiercely into my brain.

Frank handed me a grey cardboard gatefold. Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard's Tale.

Sorcerers, paladins, rogues and half-orcs

Originally released by Electronic Arts in 1985, The Bard's Tale is a first-person perspective role-playing game. Set in the town of Skara Brae — cut off from the rest of the world by an evil spell — you guide your party of six adventurers through an assortment of different mazes and dungeons. The goal? Taking down the evil archmage Mangar, and freeing the city in the process. It has all the RPG tropes of its time: character classes like sorcerers, paladins, and rogues, with players choosing from races like humans, elves, and half-orcs to build their party. The titular bard character class is described as a former warrior with a penchant for ale, one who can create magic simply by playing songs.

The landscape in those days was littered with dungeon crawlers. Die-based RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons were still in vogue, and the emphasis on the computer side was in recreating that experience — usually with rudimentary visuals and extraordinarily steep learning curves. In comparison, The Bard's Tale used early color 3D graphics, a straightforward gaming system, and a dry sense of wit to keep you engaged. Even when your entire party was killed, and you had to run back to a temple to revive them, you never felt like you were wrestling with an obtuse game; you felt like you were simply grappling with the world of Skara Brae itself.

You still needed graph paper

Yes, you still needed to sit down with graph paper and map out 16 dungeon levels to succeed. Yes, you would spend hours tapping out keyboard shortcuts in battle: [A]ttack, [A]ttack, [A]ttack, [D]efend, [D]efend, [D]efend. But the overall result was something that was simply more accessible and engaging than the likes of Ultima and Wizardry; a trip into an addictive and exhilarating fantasy world.

It was a massive hit as a result, and was released on virtually every computer on the market at the time. From MS-DOS machines to the Atari ST, if you had a computer, you could play The Bard's Tale. (When my family got our own computer, my first purchase was the Apple IIGS port.) The brand become so popular it even spawned a series of paperbacks in the 1990s.

While enjoyable, the sequels The Destiny Knight and Thief of Fate never lived up to the original game; in the quest to add complexity, the straightforward charm of the original slowly ebbed away. The studio that created The Bard's Tale, Interplay Productions, went on to produce a number of iconic titles, however — including the game adaptation of William Gibson's Neuromancer.

Just a download away

Fortunately, there are several ways to play the original today. Interplay founder Brian Fargo later started inXile Entertainment, whose debut release was a game titled — yes, you guessed it — The Bard's Tale. That 2004 console game was neither a sequel nor a reboot, but rather a new property with a familiar name. However, it's since trickled down to smartphones, moderns PCs, and the Mac — and now comes bundled with the original Bard's Tale trilogy in its entirety. If you want to really step back in time, however, there are disk images and emulators across the internet for almost every version of the original — giving you the complete flashback experience.

Playing it today is a reminder of the delicate balance between story, game mechanics, and sheer fun. Its graphics may seem primitive, and we've come a long way from its keyboard-heavy gameplay, but the charm of The Bard's Tale persists.

So go ahead. Grab some graph paper. [A]ttack, [A]ttack, [A]ttack. [D]efend, [D]efend, [D]efend.

• Related Items fantasy electronic arts rpg dungeon crawler role-playing game tales of the unknown the bard's tale interplay productions bard

Google's controversial decision to shut down Google Reader on July 1st has left its users searching for a new news-collecting homeland, and we now have an idea of the scale of the RSS diaspora. Feedly has announced that more than half a million Google Reader users have signed up for its RSS service following Google's service termination announcement on Wednesday. Feedly also says it's working to keep up with its growth, increasing bandwidth by 10 times and adding new servers. Moving forward, the developers say its main priorities over the next 30 days are to keep the service running, to solicit suggestions from new users, and to add new features on a weekly basis.

The Google Reader shutdown will force users and developers of third-party RSS clients using Reader's services to find a new solution keep their news aggregators running. On Wednesday, Feedly promised that it would clone the Google Reader API to give users a "seamless transition" when Reader shuts down, and other RSS app makers, including the creators of Press and Reeder, have also indicated they are committed to finding a solution.

• Via Y Combinator (Twitter)
• Source Feedly Blog
• Related Items rss reader google reader feedly Google

If you look up Atlas Shrugged Part 1 on Netflix and take a glance at the “related movies,” you risk tumbling down a hole of deep, dark madness.

Here’s the description for the center movie: ready?

This film chronicles Barack Obama’s life journey in socialism starting with evidence that Obama’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist who indoctrinated Obama into a Marxist ideology during his formative years.

You were not ready.

I hereby assert that the “conservative internet” is a stranger, sadder place by far than any other corner thereof, including whatever zone exists for people who fuck and fall in love with stuffed animals.

fapoleon-bonerparte:

Detail of the gold embroidery on one of Napoleon’s uniforms.

Not really a Picture of a Crush but can we please appreciate Napoleon’s fashion sense

What do you serve a group of mathematicians on International Pi Day?

For International Pi Day, Instructables user Imnopeas made a round rice-covered Sushi Pi Pie using several varieties of sushi and then topped the creation with a large pi-shaped wasabi nugget.

Working with the Iran Media Program, Deroy Peraza, Eric Fensterheim, and Ambika Roos of Hyperakt created Internet Censorship in Iran, a detailed infographic explaining the bodies of government involved in the country’s strict internet censorship.

It visualizes the relationships between different policy-making and enforcement bodies that block and filter content for Iranian internet users. The piece also spotlights four governing structures: the Supreme Cyber Space Council, the Committee Charged with Determining Offensive Content, the Cyber Army, and the Cyber Police. These have emerged since 2009 as key institutions responsible for controlling the flow of online communications, both within Iran, and between Iranians and the worldwide cyber sphere. Yet the infographic also highlights the ability of Iran’s young, tech-savvy population to circumvent these myriad blocks and filters to access the global Internet

via PopSci, Digg

But really, it’s probably not best to do your business in this.

The Remote Control Japanese Style Toilet is an amusing remote-controlled toy from Japan, and Strapya World cautions that “it’s actually designed for fun, and probably would not be a very ideal place for you to do your business. Just a thought.”

images via Strapya World

via 7 Gadgets, Technabob

Following the news that a child had been “functionally cured” of HIV, a new study from the Pasteur Institute’s unit for regulation of retroviral infections in Paris shows that even some adults can be similarly cured if treatment is started early enough. Out of 70 adults who were treated between 35 days and 10 weeks after being infected — much earlier than most receive treatment — 14 went off medication without a relapse. Researcher Asier Sáez-Cirión says the key is treating the disease early, because “it limits the reservoir of HIV that can persist, limits the diversity of the virus and preserves the immune response to the virus that keeps it in check.” The 14 adults in the study still have traces of the virus in their blood, but at low enough levels that their immune systems can keep it in check without medication.

image via National Institutes of Health

via NewScientist, Digg

Feeddler is a customizable RSS reader app designed by Che-Bin Liu for use on iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches. It syncs with Google Reader and “presents RSS stories in an easy-to-ready interface.” On Twitter, Feeddler noted that it will not go away with the upcoming discontinuation of Google Reader. It is available to download as a Free and Pro version at the iTunes store.

Feeddler will not go away with Google Reader. Stay tuned!

— Feeddler (@feeddler) March 14, 2013