firehose

“As a joke, Arthur Conan Doyle once sent five letters to five friends that read, “We are discovered, flee immediately”, to see what they would do. One of them disappeared and Conan Doyle never saw him again.”

- QI (E Series - Espionage)

dnwinchester:

#happy international women’s day!!

kittydoom:

buzzfeedlgbt:

Eric Elias Is Queering Gender One Comic At A Time

Elias creates hilarious comics that focus on those frustrating moments when people expect you to “explain” your gender to them.

Love this. (Also, I didn’t know BuzzFeed had an LGBT subsite.)

flavorcountry:

Did the Daily Show do a piece on men’s rights activists without me seeing it?

Blood-and-semen-spewing hard-rock act GWAR is venturing into a new arena: food service. The band—or more specifically, Balsac, the metal-faced guitar player—has created its own signature line of BBQ sauce. According to Balsac, GWAR-B-Q sauce “is mostly made out of the blood of really hot chicks,” which he says “was a terrible waste of fine ass, but ultimately worth it because this sauce is absolutely delicious.”

GWAR-B-Q sauce will make its meaty debut at the band’s special Meat And Meet event, scheduled for April 8 at Grinders in Kansas City, Missouri. The sauce will also be featured at the fourth annual GWAR-B-Q, scheduled for sometime later this summer.

GWAR covers Kansas

Read more

WASHINGTON—White House sources confirmed that after hearing a gentle tap on his window Thursday evening, President Barack Obama stepped out onto the Truman balcony to meet with the predator drone that appears outside his bedroom every night at 9 p.m...

Teen pop sensation Justin Bieber was seen struggling during a performance of “Beauty and a Beat” at a show in London last night before walking off stage and fainting out of view of the audience, and was later taken to a hospital.

US Senator Claire McCaskill is currently drafting legislation to allow in-flight electronics like laptops and tablets during all stages of passenger flights. In a letter to FAA Administrator Michael Huerta, McCaskill writes:

I am not currently advocating for the use of cell phones for voice communications during flight. Simply put, electronic devices that are currently allowed above 10,000 feet should be allowed for use during all phases of flight. It is preposterous to think that an e-reader in a passenger’s hands during takeoff is anymore a threat to other passengers or crew members than a hardback book.

In the coming weeks, McCaskill plans to meet with interested parties for advisement and will be working to drum up bipartisan Congressional support for the bill.

image via xlibber

via The Verge, Circa

Thanks Lori Dorn!

Today at SXSW in Austin, MakerBot unveiled the MakerBot Digitizer, a desktop 3D scanner that will allow users to scan and print objects without having to touch complicated 3D-modeling software. The company has not yet announced detailed specs, pricing, or a release date for the Digitizer, but it’s an exciting leap toward consumer-friendly 3D printing services.

via MakerBot

Rumor: EA asks SimCity affiliates to 'stop actively promoting the game' originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Michael Bloomberg isn’t the only New Yorker with an attitude about trailers: The preview for Louis C.K.’s upcoming HBO special Oh My God is a procession and deconstruction of tried-and-true, annoying advertising tropes that gets to have it both ways—dressing C.K. up with fancy suits and solid-gold microphones, but also saying, "Hey, what's the deal with these fancy suits and solid-gold microphones?" Just in the commercial, I mean, not the actual special. That would be a shitty comedy routine. Comedy has to be relatable, and very few people have fancy suits and solid-gold microphones. Anyway, this premieres April 13. 

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hypnosec writes "Google has announced that its Chrome OS has managed to remain undefeated during the Pwnium 3 event that was held alongside Pwn2Own. Announced by Google on January 28, 2013 the Pwnium 3 event carried a prize money of $3.14 million. Researchers were asked to carry out attacks against a base Samsung Series 5 chromebook running the latest stable version of Chrome OS. It turns out security researchers were not able to come up with winning exploits even after the competition's deadline was extended. Google Chrome Team has revealed that partial exploit entries have been filled in but, no other details have been released."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sentenced to walk the earth knowing the eternal hellfire that awaits for being mean to Taylor Swift, Tina Fey has—like so many a death row inmate biding time before the inevitable—embraced the darkness within. After all, Fey already tried playing by society’s rules when she told Entertainment Tonight that her Globes jab at Swift was “a lighthearted joke. And it’s a shame that she didn’t take it in the crazy-aunt spirit in which it was intended.” So as first reported on E! News (before being inexplicably removed), when a paparazzo attempted to reignite their “feud”—because he saw Tina Fey in the street and couldn’t think of what else to ask and doesn’t read things—Fey finally unleashed the demon, telling him, “Go fuck yourself.” Pressed to give him something, anything, Fey replied only, “You can go fuck yourself.” And of course, it ...

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Earlier today, Steve Martin—sorry, Mister Steve Martin tweeted a photo of himself with Lorne Michaels, Chevy Chase (seriously!), Paul Simon, Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, and Tom Hanks, all seemingly backstage at Saturday Night Live. (You can see Michaels' show board on the right and the stage on the TV in the background.) While there’s no explanation for this photo so far other than a bunch of cool guys going out for a lunch or something, the most optimistic A.V. Club staffers are hoping we’re getting a little hint about an updated Five-Timers Club sketch for this weekend’s Justin Timberlake-hosted Saturday Night Live. At least, we hope. Even if that’s just a pipe dream, it’s still a cool photo.

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An Interview with Mahbod Moghadam of Rap Genius - Wakefield:

Apparently Zuck never leaves his house because he’s so afraid of people photographing him, and then our investor – his house is one of the only places where Zuck feels safe – so our investor invited Zuck and Nas over. They were chilling together, and I asked if I could take a photo. He was like “Let’s hold off, let’s hold off,” and I just couldn’t resist – I was drunk, and I went paparazzi and Instagrammed it, and I didn’t even think it would be a thing.

Zuckerberg was upset after the press picked up the photo and told Moghadam to take the photo down. He took the photo down and apologized to Zuckerberg. But he doesn’t seem particularly contrite about it:

We wrote a letter of apology and I feel sorry. I regret taking it, I hope this has taught me some maturity, it certainly got me in a lot of trouble. But then on the other hand, fuck that fool – that’s Nas the Don. It’s not like I’m taking a picture of him smoking weed.

He also had some choice words for the New York Times:

They talked mad shit about us and said we were Orientalists or whatever, but honestly they can suck my dick because they’re Carlos Slim’s ho.

So, uh, yeah, there’s that. He reiterated his stance at the end of the interview saying:

Alright so I told you the New York Times is Carlos Slim’s ho, I told you Zuck can suck my dick, what else is there? You know it’s all about the love, I don’t know why I’m being this aggressive.

Larry Wright of Refocused Media has created The Art of the Steadicam, a supercut of some of the best steadicam cinematography in film and television. The video was created using some of the top 50 steadicam shots as listed by Steadishots.org, and you can find the full list of clips in order of appearance at Refocused Media.

via Pewpewpew

kadrey:

Space tourism posters.

futurist-foresight:

How long do you think it will be before space tourism becomes as affordable for vacationing as air travel?

myampgoesto11:

Space Travel Posters by Steve Thomas

Every single thing on Sean Tejaratchi's blog is magnificent 'shoop genius. Twitter: @shittingtonuk.

milesjai:

the sexual tension in this gif is astounding

durnesque-esque:

fuckyeah-nerdery:

sigfodr:

A version for tumblr that can be read without opening a new tab, since plenty of people would scroll past this story otherwise.

The bravest woman on Earth.

Today is Women’s Day- a good day to celebrate this incredible young woman.

flavorcountry:

Listen to my nerd opinions!!

LISTEN TO THEM

Old Photos of Paris-Gare de Lyon, 1900s via Vintage Everyday

Paris Lyon (or Gare de Lyon) is one of the six large mainline railway station termini in Paris, France. It handles about 90,000,000 passengers every year, making it the third busiest station of France and one of the busiest of Europe. It is the northern terminus of the Paris–Marseille railway. It is named after the city of Lyon, a stop for many long-distance trains departing here, most en route to the south of France. In general the station’s SNCF services run to the south and east of France. The station also hosts regional trains and the RER. It is served by the Gare de Lyon metro station. The station is located in the XIIe arrondissement, on the north bank of the river Seine, in the east of Paris.

recoiledsnake writes "This article notes, 'A new technology built into Google Glass, dug up by New Scientist, takes Google Glass from interesting to down right creepy. Google Glass can now pick a person out of crowd based on their fashion style. The system, InSight, developed in partnership with Google, will take a nice little moment to assess the clothing in frame, and then point out exactly where your friends are in busy settings like a bar, concert, or sporting event. It could probably point you out in a protest, or shopping mall too.' We previously discussed the disorienting effects on the wearer of the device."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit writes "The National Science Foundation (NSF) is investigating nearly 100 cases of suspected plagiarism drawn from a single year's worth of proposals funded by the agency. The cases grow out of an internal examination by NSF's Office of Inspector General (IG) of every proposal that NSF funded in fiscal year 2011. James Kroll, head of administrative investigations within the IG's office, tells ScienceInsider that applying plagiarism software to NSF's entire portfolio of some 8000 awards made that year resulted in a 'hit rate' of 1% to 1.5%. 'My group is now swamped,' he says about his staff of six investigators."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

LoL by: Unknown (via Whomp Comic)

Tagged: talk , comic , Cats Share on Facebook

South Korean artist Wang Zi Won creates enlightened robots, including the Buddha and an idealized mechanical doll based upon himself, as a guidepost for a future in which technology lead to self-actualization:

Humans will evolve and adapt themselves to enhanced science and technology just as men and animals in the past evolved to adapt themselves to their natural circumstances. The artist sees this as our destiny, not as a negative, gloomy dystopia.

The artist considers it important to escape from human bondage in order to achieve harmony between men and machines. He thinks this harmony can be achieved through the process of religious practices and spiritual enlightenment.

The machine man was based on the artist, but this “I” is not a past “I” any more. His own existence vanishes, and a new being-as-machine man emerges. Z is thus a process of becoming the perfect “I”.

“Only mind can discover how to do so much with so little as forever to be able to sustain and physically satisfy all humanity.”

Writer Alvin Toffler once described architect, theorist, designer, and futurist Buckminster Fuller as “one of the most-powerful myth-makers and myth-exposers of our time … a controversial, constructive, endlessly energetic metaphor-maker who sees things differently from the rest of us, and thereby makes us see ourselves afresh” — perhaps the richest and most accurate account of a mind to whom we owe more than we realize.

Today, the concept of synergy permeates everything from boardrooms to artspeak to hipster dinner party chatter — but it was Fuller who coined it as cultural currency in pioneering the study of synergentics, which concerns itself with the “behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.” In “The Wellspring of Reality,” the introductory essay to his seminal 1975 volume Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (public library), Fuller decries specialization as the enemy of synergy and proposes a reframing of culture that could “get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.” At its epicenter he places the value of wide curiosity and generalist knowledge.

Fuller begins:

We are in an age that assumes the narrowing trends of specialization to be logical, natural, and desirable. Consequently, society expects all earnestly responsible communication to be crisply brief. Advancing science has now discovered that all the known cases of biological extinction have been caused by overspecialization, whose concentration of only selected genes sacrifices general adaptability. Thus the specialist’s brief for pinpointing brevity is dubious. In the meantime, humanity has been deprived of comprehensive understanding. Specialization has bred feelings of isolation, futility, and confusion in individuals. It has also resulted in the individual’s leaving responsibility for thinking and social action to others. Specialization breeds biases that ultimately aggregate as international and ideological discord, which in turn leads to war.

He makes an eloquent contribution to history’s greatest definitions of science:

Science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience.

While contemporary neuroscientists might scoff at the distinction between brain and mind, claiming that “trying to suggest one causes the other is like saying wetness causes water” — a contention biologically correct in some ways and spiritually impoverished in others, worrisomely neuro-deterministic and negating the reality of the malleable self — Fuller does make a noteworthy distinction, reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s concept of the “brain attic” and modern-day conceptions of how creativity works:

The human brain is a physical mechanism for storing, retrieving, and re-storing again, each special-case experience. The experience is often a packaged concept.

[…]

Mind is the weightless and uniquely human faculty that surveys the ever larger inventory of special-case experiences stored in the brain bank and, seeking to identify their intercomplementary significance, from time to time discovers one of the rare scientifically generalizable principles running consistently through all the relevant experience set. The thoughts that discover these principles are weightless and tentative and may also be eternal. … It seems also to follow that the more experiences we have, the more chances there are that the mind may discover, on the one hand, additional generalized principles or, on the other hand, exceptions that disqualify one or another of the already catalogued principles that, having heretofore held ‘true’ without contradiction for a long time, had been tentatively conceded to be demonstrating eternal persistence of behavior. Mind’s relentless reviewing of the comprehensive brain bank’s storage of all our special-case experiences tends both to progressive enlargement and definitive refinement of the catalogue of generalized principles that interaccommodatively govern all transactions of Universe.

In a sentiment that the late Aaron Swartz seemed to echo in his memorable wisdom on curiosity, Fuller cautions:

Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery.

(Indeed, we see such “wide-band tuning” as central to the expansive genius of celebrated “specialists,” as evidenced by the reading lists of Carl Sagan and Alan Turing.)

Fuller then moves on to the vital distinction between money-work and purpose, debunking the myth of the zero-sum game of prosperity:

It is also mistakenly assumed that employment is the only means by which humans can earn the right to live, for politicians have yet to discover how much wealth is available for distribution. All this is rationalized on the now scientifically discredited premise that there can never be enough life support for all. Thus humanity’s specialization leads only toward warring and such devastating tools, both, visible and invisible, as ultimately to destroy all Earthians.

[…]

It is eminently feasible not only to provide full life support for all humans but also to permit all humans’ individual enjoyment of all the Earth without anyone profiting at the expense of another and without any individuals interfering with others.

Indeed, I wholeheartedly subscribe to this notion of symbiotic prosperity, something my favorite graphic designer, Milton Glaser, articulates beautifully in Debbie Millman’s indispensable How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, in words I quoted in this hand-drawn slide from a recent talk:

Fuller points to the usefulness of useless knowledge as a critical element in this collective abundance and the salvation of our species:

Only a comprehensive switch from the narrowing specialization and toward an ever more inclusive and reining comprehension by all humanity — regarding all the factors covering omnicontinuing life aboard our spaceship Earth — can bring about reorientation from the self-extinction-bound human trending, and do so with the critical time remaining before we have passed the point of chemical process irretrievability.

[…]

Specialization’s preoccupation with parts deliberately forfeits the opportunity to apprehend and comprehend what is provided exclusively by synergy.

Amidst the obstacles to such synergetic success, he counts the bias of the news media — a point all the more prescient in the age of the “Gladwell Effect”, as editors would deliberately inflate information to make headlines more clickable. Fuller laments:

Today’s news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. … We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated events of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for the purposes either of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity’s tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes.

Bewailing scientific reductionism in a passage that falls squarely between Einstein and Tagore, Fuller — true to his reputation as a fringe-thinker — makes a case for the metaphysical as inextricably intertwined with the physical:

Science’s self-assumed responsibility has been self-limited to disclosure to society only of the separate, supposedly physical (because separately weighable) atomic component isolations data. Synergetic integrity would require the scientists to announce that in reality what had been identified heretofore as physical is entirely metaphysical — because synergetically weightless. Metaphysical has been science’s designation for all weightless phenomena such as thought. But science has made no experimental finding of any phenomena that can be described as a solid, or as continuous, or as a straight surface plane, or as a straight line, or as infinite anything. We are now synergetically forced to conclude that all phenomena are metaphysical; wherefore, as many have long suspected — like it or not — life is but a dream.

To be sure, Fuller is far from negating science. To the contrary, he — like Bertrand Russell — sees it as essential to democracy and social good:

Unguided by science, society is allowed to go right on filling its children’s brain banks with large inventories of competence-devastating misinformation.

Presaging the ethos of the Occupy movement, Fuller observes:

The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity.

Fuller portends contemporary grievances about our flawed education system and concludes with a hopeful vision for tomorrow:

Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe.

And whence will come the wealth with which we may undertake to lead world man into his new and validly hopeful life? From the wealth of the minds of world man — whence comes all wealth. Only mind can discover how to do so much with so little as forever to be able to sustain and physically satisfy all humanity.

Synergetics, a hefty tome of nearly 1,000 pages, is fascinating and mind-bending in its entirety. Complement it with Benjamin Betts’s Geometrical Psychology from nearly a century earlier and Bertrand Russell’s Education and the Good Life.

Public domain photographs courtesy State Archives of North Carolina

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Report: Romney to join son's private equity firm USA TODAY Mitt Romney plans to go back to the business world and work for his son's investment firm, according to NBC News. NBC reports Romney will join Solamere Capital as chairman of the company's executive committee. Solamere was co-founded by Romney's ... Mitt Romney To Return To Private Sector, Joining Solamere CapitalHuffington Post Mitt Romney Now Employed by His SonThe Atlantic Wire all 22 news articles »

Love potions do not equal consent. Coercion through magic is illegal. Combined with the use of love potions it is rape.

angelshavethephonebox:

thatstraightedgechickfromjersey:

nonifarted:

I would put this on my wall. 

My jaw literally just dropped. THIS IS THE BEST FUCKING THING I HAVE EVER SEEN.

OMFG I WANT THIS FOR MY WALL.

Designed by Nomon Design | Country: Spain

“Art direction and graphic design of Citrus Spray allowing to spray fruit juice directly from the citrus to flavor dishes, drinks and cocktails.”