firehose

In the pages of Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo described the four large moons of Jupiter in a series of 64 sketches which looked a lot like ASCII art in the text:

Using an online tool for computing the positions of Jupiter's moons, Ernie Wright compared Galileo's sketches to the moons' actual motions.

Click through for an animated GIF of all the comparisons. Not bad for the telescopic state of the art in 1610. For a taste of how celestial objects actually appeared when viewed through Galileo's telescope, check out this video starting around 7:30. (thx, john)

Tags: astronomy   books   Galileo   science   Sidereus Nuncius   space

googly eye + home button = eyePhone

(fit found by rarityinform)

itsbetterthananal:

APPARENTLY PEOPLE NOT USING THE CROSSWALK TO CROSS THE ROAD BY MY SCHOOL HAS BEEN A PROBLEM RECENTLY SO THE SCHOOL SHOWED THIS THIS MORNING ICAN T BREATHE

"Hop Mr. Bunny, Skip Mr. Bear If you don't dig this party you ain't no where!"


The place was Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s. Rents were high and wages were low for many African Americans and one way they came together to fight the injustice and to raise the rent money was to hold rent parties.
Refreshments and music were provided and they printed up these neat cards to promote the evenings.
When Langston Hughes moved to Harlem he was already familiar with the rent party scene from his days writing for the Chicago Defender. He would eventually put together "quite a collection" of the cards. Hughes said “When I first came to Harlem, as a poet I was intrigued by the little rhymes at the top of most House Rent Party cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a collection.”


Hughes' collection of rent party cards resides at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the above images are from.

Thanks to The Vault, a new blog from Slate for the lead.

Showtime's 'The Vatican' Casts 'Downfall's' Hitler as Its Pope - Yahoo! TV

North Dakota has funds to fight over abortion - Yahoo! News:

our very own Saudi Arabia

Salt Lake City-based documentary and editorial photographer Michael Friberg captured a great series of shots that show official NBA mascot costumes going through the process of being refurbished for an upcoming season.

The entire Internet forgot it was grandpa's birthday today. Symbolics.com—the first domain name ever registered—turned 28 today, and just about no one had anything nice to say.

octopuspiecomic:

HEY you!! This was made by me and Lacey!!

believe it

Wisdom has nested at Midway Atoll since 1956. She is the oldest-known wild bird, and the happy new Laysan Albatross is now proud mama to a very fluffy, very cute chick. Wisdom and her mate will take shifts feeding and nesting with their new baby. This is believed to be her 35th (!) chick.

LoL by: Unknown (via Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge)

Tagged: birds , wisdom , chick , albatross , Babies , squee Share on Facebook

Casa da Musica by O.M.A. 

Photos by Laurent Dequick

inothernews:

2005 [top photo]:  I count one cellphone taking a photo (lower right hand corner) during the announcement of the new Pope, Benedict.

2013:  Eight years later, just about everyone in St. Peter’s Square was shooting Pope Francis’s announcement with a phone or tablet.

(Photos: Luca Bruno [top] / Michael Sohn, AP via NBC News)

The Year in Pies

Ennio Morricone, who has worked on four Quentin Tarantino films, told film students in Rome that he would never collaborate with the director again, saying he “places music in his films without coherence.”

DC Comics has released Greg Capullo's full gatefold cover for "Batman" #19, which reveals the identity of Bruce Wayne's greatest enemy as teased in the cover copy.

• As much as we don’t like to admit it, investment in indie films is usually a bad idea. There is a small chance that you get a return unless something crazy unexpected happens like Napoleon Dynamite. In order for films to make money, they need to be picked up, distributed, shown, sold, screened. Many films will never see that kind of interest.
• That being said, any kind of film that could handily raise 2 million dollars in one day would be an excellent candidate for old school funding. The inevitable success of the film would go towards a tangible reward for the risk taken by the investors, not just as a thank you to the fans, for their fandom.
• And by that I only mean - in the Kickstarter reward model, you are banking on the hope that a t-shirt will be worth more to someone than just cotton and a screen-printed design. In that sense, financing your project is built more on taking advantage of fandom than proposing a solid plan to people who are only interested in the numbers and holding you accountable for them.
• In the old school model of pitching to investors, you are held accountable for your vision and your budgeting. The success of your project and your ability to reach to the fans is primarily dependent on creating something valuable, not just knowing that a big list of people are going to automatically get a digital copy sent to their email.
• Without those checks and balances, crowd-funding enables garbagepeople like Amanda Palmer to raise a shit ton of money, make shady claims about where its all going, and then still ask musicians to play for her on tour for free. 
• Which is the inherent problem in pre-paying for something that you haven’t seen or heard yet. People like Amanda Palmer (who, as I just mentioned, was able to really take advantage of this system) have spoken at great length about how revolutionary this era of crowd funding is. They try to make it sound like circumventing the big evil money men leads to more artistic and creative freedom.
• Though it might, it also leads to possible financial freedom for the artist (and artists are historically awful with money management, especially as it regards their art), and it leads to entitlement and a bloated sense of ownership for the backers.
• Kickstarter can be perfect tool for helping non-famous people attract attention to a project and, as the name states, help kickstart an idea. “I want to make light switches with a magnetic strip to store your keys. I will get enough funding to make a first batch while at the same time be able to prove to investors that there is interest my design to hopefully catapult us into mass-production and give the people another kitschy thing sold at Urban Outfitters.”
• I once bought a Kickstarter cocktail shaker made out of a mason jar because I am a hipster and I live in Brooklyn. The metal, far from feeling like a solid stainless steel, started to get a little grimy after several washes. Now it is just a mason jar that I use for drinking a lot of water.
• Anyways, Amanda Palmer is an idiot.
• I have never seen Veronica Mars.
• Kickstarter is only for people too lazy to do necessary legwork to secure funding for their precious art projects and too safe to take a risk without it. No exceptions.
• Veronica Mars was a terrible TV Show.
• Sloths are not cute or interesting. They only exist because they taste too bad to be eaten by a superior species.
• This bailout is not working.
• Rand Paul was right about drones.
• Bring back tumblarity.

Chinese and Iranian users rely on Google Reader to evade government firewalls. Did Google think of that? techdirt.com/articles/20130…

— George Musser (@gmusser) March 15, 2013

The discussion around Google’s announcement that it will shut down its Reader service has focused largely on the impact on the American blogging crowd. Zachary Seward takes a broader view:

[M]any RSS readers, including Google’s, serve as anti-censorship tools for people living under oppressive regimes. That’s because it’s actually Google’s servers, located in the US or another country with uncensored internet, that accesses each feed. So a web user in Iran just needs access to google.com/reader in order to read websites that would otherwise be blocked. And, indeed, Google Reader has long been accessible in Iran, where it is the most popular RSS reader.

Norden by Kim Høltermand

Carpet Pattern Skyscraper Sculptures by Babak Golkar via Designboom

the carpet skyscraper works of iranian artist babak golkar draw a relationship between the two dimensional and three dimensional, architecture and art, and ultimately - the associations with the much-debated tension between east and west. through extruding the elaborate ornamental patterning of nomadic persian carpets, the pieces generate a dynamic visual and conceptual reflection on existent cultural barriers.they do not only reference the erected symbols of western patriotism, they also bring attention to the emerging megapolis’ and the advance of oil powered arab countries.

A dancer dances on top of a skyscraper, Charleston, USA, 1926 via Vintage Everyday

Google may be gearing up to offer a separate digital subscription section for news outlets in its Play Store: A bit of JavaScript uncovered on the desktop web version of the Play Store by the blog Android Police includes several lines of text that mention "Google Play News" and ask users to "sign in to purchase this News Edition Subscription." The Play Store CSS also reveals that the News section will be color-coded yellow, to differentiate it from the rest of the Store's multihued content offerings (Apps are green, Books are blue, Magazines are violet, and so on).

Continue reading…

Oh, sure, the parkour craze may be a little dated, but that doesn’t diminish the entertainment value of this latest video of Stan Lee, having exchanged that orange sweater for a burgundy one, running, jumping and climbing his way — Spider-Man-like! — to a lunch meeting (with Robert Downey Jr., we’re told). Parkour!

OK, it may actually be Josh Yadon performing the stunts dressed, somewhat convincingly, as the 90-year-old comics legend. But still. It’s all backed by Minor Obsession’s “Stan Lee Parkour Master,” which you can download from iTunes. Parkour!

The final Boston Phoenix

The Boston Phoenix, the groundbreaking alternative weekly that in recent years had carried the work of cartoonists ranging from Matt Bors and David Sipress to Karl Stevens and Brian McFadden, has closed after nearly five decades.

The announcement was accompanied Thursday afternoon by a tweet saying, “Thank you Boston. Good night and good luck.” The current issue, dated March 15, will be the last; a final online edition will appear March 22. Executive Editor Peter Kadzis told The Boston Globe that about 40 employees will be let go within the week with another 10 following soon afterward. There will be no severance pay.

In a statement circulated Thursday to staff members and reposted on the Phoenix’s website, Publisher Stephen M. Mindich attributed the closing to a combination of the economic crisis, changes in the media industry and a decline in advertising. Just six months ago the company changed to a magazine format in an effort to attract more advertisers.

“We are a textbook example of sweeping marketplace change,” Kadzis said in a statement. “Our recent switch to a magazine format met with applause from readers and local advertisers. Not so — with a few exceptions — national advertisers. It was the long-term decline of national advertising dollars that made the Boston Phoenix economically unviable.”

Its sister publications The Portland Phoenix in Maine and The Providence Phoenix in Rhode Island, will remain open.

le Bat

New submitter kxra writes "Do you have a federated jabber instant messaging account that never gets responses from Google accounts anymore? Or do you have a Gmail account that a friend has been unable to invite from their 3rd party Jabber account? The Free Software Foundation reports, 'Google users can still send subscription requests to contacts whose accounts are hosted elsewhere. But they cannot accept incoming requests. This change is akin to Google no longer accepting incoming e-mail for @gmail.com addresses from non-Google domains.' This sounds like something Facebook would try in order to gain even tighter control over the network, but they never even federated their Jabber service to begin with. According to a public mailing list conversation, Google is doing this as a lazy way to handle a spam problem."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Old Reader: behind the scenes: Unexpected day: what are we gonna do about Google Reader death? Keep calm and carry on.:

theoldreader:

Hello everyone!

This morning I have mixed feelings: I am happy that we have the possibility to bring our beloved The Old Reader to a new level, and I am sad that Google Reader soon will be completely over. It was a large part of my daily internet life. We even started making The Old Reader…