firehose

I strongly encourage people to tell Google why this promoted answer to ‘what happened to the dinosaurs?’ is bollocks pic.twitter.com/FMF71okzl9

— Del Patrick (@WolfieSmiffed) May 26, 2015

For real. If you go on Google, as of this writing, and search “what happened to the dinosaurs,” the top result that comes up is from Answers in Genesis and asserts that dinosaurs are used to indoctrinate children with the crazy idea that the Earth has been around longer than some thousands of years. Luckily, there’s a feedback button to let Google know how you feel about the results. I look forward to your creativity there.

I’m sure this is just an honest mistake on Google’s end, and when you click the feedback button, you can let them in on it by telling them that it’s “awesome,” “incorrect,” or “not useful,” though I personally recommend “something else,” as that’s certainly the most accurate—and it’ll also let you tell them exactly why.

Here’s what the search turned up for me:

Won’t someone think of the children!?

And my planned response:

“Hello, my name is Thomas “T” Rex, and I’m horrified at the suggestion that the Earth has only been around for a few thousand years and dinosaurs as we know them are a sham. You’ve deeply offended the illuminati lizard people in the name of our great ancestors. Please know that I’ll be switching to Bing, AKA the dinosaur-friendly search engine*. Good DAY.”

*The same search on Bing also returned Answers in Genesis first—without even an option to tell them how absurd that is. EDIT: Not true! There IS a feedback button at the bottom of Bing’s search page if you scroll down, and it lets you select the part of the search page you’d like to leave feedback on! Thanks, Andrew Norris, true hero.

(Del Patrick via Phil Plait on Twitter)

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Pantsuit Up.

Growing 80 percent of the globe's almonds in California doesn't just require massive amounts of water. It also takes a whole bunch of honeybees for pollination — roughly two hives' worth for every acre of almonds trees, around 1.7 million hives altogether.

Whaaaaat, it’s a Humble Bundle for 3DS and Wii U ⊟

The pay-what-you-want charity bundle comes to consoles for the first time with a bundle of indie games for 3DS and Wii U (in North America)!! For whatever you want to pay, you’ll get Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition (Wii U), Woah Dave (3DS) and Mighty Switch Force (3DS), all of which are Tiny-approved.

Pay more than the average and add The Fall (Wii U), OlliOlli (Wii U/3DS), and Moon Chronicles (3DS)! $10 and up and you get Stealth Inc 2 (Wii U) and SteamWorld Dig (Wii U/3DS).

Without hyperbole, I can safely say this is the best deal in eShop history. And, like, did you expect Nintendo to be the first on this Humble Bundle thing?

popular shared this story from Existential Comics.

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popular shared this story from The Coquette.

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Everything wrong with Republican Party summed up in one nice juxtaposition.

Courtney shared this story from Captain Awkward.

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My friend told me a creepy story this weekend. A clean cut man with a clip board knocked on her door and asked her questions about one of her neighbors. He asked my friend if she knew the neighbor, and when my friend demurred because something about it felt off – “I just moved here, don’t know anyone that well” – he pulled out a picture of the neighbor from a manila envelope and was like “are you sure?” My friend held fast and eventually he went away.

She asked the neighbor (who she does know) about it later, and the guy is a stalker. Fun!

So, safety reminder time:

• Just because someone knocks on your door it doesn’t mean you have to open it or engage with whoever it is. If you’re not expecting anyone, and they sort of catch you out as being home, “It isn’t a good time!” + ignore.
• People who have some legitimate reason to be there will show you an ID, and (esp. for utility company) if you say “Mind if I verify that?” will be okay with you looking at their ID, writing down numbers, and hang out without protest while you call the company. Someone who gets squirrely about this is bad news.
• Stalkers like to glean information anyway they can. Don’t give out information about your neighbors and/or coworkers to strangers. We are socialized to tell the truth and to be nice, and that’s hard training to overcome especially when someone catches you off guard, but “I don’t know” and “Why don’t you leave your information” are good stock phrases.
• If you live in a multi-family housing situation, be a mensch about security. Lock doors and gates. Don’t randomly buzz people in. Walk downstairs and greet the pizza delivery person, don’t prop the gate or door open or let strangers into the building.
• Creeps will often manufacture very good reasons they need to get into the building. “Your downstairs neighbor knows me, I’m early, can you let me in to wait for her?” or “I’m friends with your neighbor, and she said she was leaving a key out, but I can’t find it, and my cell phone battery is dead, can you help me find it” = NOPE. You don’t have to let anyone in. “Sorry dude, there’s a diner down the street where you can wait. What did you say your name was?“

Signed,

A woman who used to be plagued by a dude who would drive to her house in order to look into her windows and jack off (true story!)

As someone who was recently marooned in space, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti likely has a bit of experience with the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have: a towel. Let her read to you why towels are so great from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in honor of Towel Day—a celebration of Adams’ life—yesterday and explain several ISS-friendly towel functions.

A towel is massively useful on the Space Station. For example, you can use it to work your abs on ARED… #TowelDay pic.twitter.com/9azylvjD9X

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) May 25, 2015

Use it to recover water into the recycling system: squirt water into towel, hang towel to dry near ventilation grid. pic.twitter.com/Upze6St6Av

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) May 25, 2015

Use it to show the quirks of water in weightlessness (you have seen that video by @Cmdr_Hadfield, right?) #TowelDay pic.twitter.com/ibvKHnvY5e

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) May 25, 2015

(She’s referring to this amazing video, by the way.)

Or use it to intercept floating juice drops. If you miss them, use it to clean up the mess. #TowelDay pic.twitter.com/KEnem8D4nE

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) May 25, 2015

Truly, Adams was a space travel visionary.

Happy #TowelDay from Expedition 42, half in #space, half back on Earth… we’re froods who know where their towel is! pic.twitter.com/oLvmn8rUXE

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) May 25, 2015

(via Our Friend Glen Tickle at Laughing Squid)

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The CEO says he knows what millennials and teens want, and it's not on television or Facebook.

He was known for using foul language because he believed that swears said with a pure heart uplifted listeners.

Link (thanks, mshenna!)

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The up-and-coming star who received online venom for playing a character originally conceived as white in "Fantastic Four" is fine with having to "shoulder all this hate" to break down color barriers.

Google has done a great job of honoring female pioneers in STEM careers in their daily doodles, and today provided them with another opportunity. Sally Ride was a physicist and astronaut who was also the first American woman in space, and today would have been her 64th birthday.

Ride became the first American woman in space in 1978, when she was 32. However, as this awesome animated Behind the Doodle video from the GoogleDoodles channel on YouTube—animation by Nate Swinehart and Google doodler Olivia Huynh—explains, she broke down barriers in many other ways, too:

And while the video doesn’t mention this, the fact that she was also a lesbian—which only became widely known after her death in 2012, because she was a very private person—is a huge deal in the barrier-breaking department, as the LGBTQ community has yet another awesome person to claim as one of their own! And the first American woman in space, no less!

There are five Google doodles celebrating Ride today, so make sure you refresh your page to see them all. My personal favorite is the one where a little girl comes up to an animated Sally Ride to shake her hand, and ends up floating toward the sky in a space suit.

Happy birthday, Ms. Ride, and thank you for providing so much inspiration to countless women and girls (and guys, too!) who dream of the stars.

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The last shuttle

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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cerulean-blossom:

I love bell hooks, she just knows.

She knows.

Artist Bordalo II (previously here and here) uses old tires, bumpers, and other scraps of painted found trash to form towering 3D murals of animals on the streets of Lisbon, Portugal. Collected here are several pieces from the last few months, and you can see much more on Facebook. (via Beautiful/Decay)

sci-universe:

We actually have pictures that great of Mars, a planet about 225 million kilometers (140 million miles) away from us.
Image copyright: NASA

“A family on a healthy diet can expect to pay $2,000 more a year for food than one having less nutritious meals, say researchers who recommend that the cost gap be closed. The research in Thursday’s issue of British Medical Journal Open reviewed 27 studies from 10 high-income countries to evaluate the price differences of foods and diet patterns.”

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“Healthy eating adds $2,000 a year to family grocery bill”, CBC News

Let the record reflect the conclusive result of empirical research spanning 27 studies from 10 countries: healthy eating is fucking expensive and people who deny this reality are annoying and full of shit.

(via zuky)

BATON ROUGE (The Borowitz Report) – In the aftermath of Irish voters legalizing gay marriage, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has used his emergency powers to ban all Irish products from the state.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Daily Cartoon: Thursday, May 28th

“Tomorrowland’s” middling debut points to a nagging problem in Hollywood. As much as people claim they love fresh and unique movies, they’re more likely to shell out money for sequels and reboots.

Forget chaining your ride to a parking meter. This intricate underground system puts all of that to shame.

Twin Peaks isn’t just back — there’s more of it coming than anyone expected.

The return of Twin Peaks has already become a saga, with Showtime setting up a nine-episode third season to air in 2016, with David Lynch directing all episodes and co-writing with Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost. Then Lynch bailed on the series, reportedly over budget and deal issues. But Showtime worked things out with Lynch, and the director returned, just in time for Showtime to announce the third season had expanded from its original nine-episode order.

We didn’t know much more than that. What would be the final Twin Peaks season three episode count? And who else will return to the series now that Lynch is fully on board? During a convention appearance, Sheryl Lee and Sherilyn Fenn revealed some details. Notably, that the series order has doubled, and there’s a suggestion that Angelo Badalamenti, the musical voice of the show, is also coming back.

At Seattle’s Crypticon, Sherilyn Fenn talked about the show’s development so far, calling it a “roller coaster,” and suggesting, as we assumed, that if Lynch had stayed away she would have refused to do the show. But things are back on, and Fenn looks very happy.

She also said, “And 18 episodes now, even!”

Her comment after that went a ways towards confirming some of our suspicions about the money conflict, saying “and I think when he did the nine, he realized he needed nine more to really complete it.”

So the budget Showtime had agreed upon was basically doubling. That’s just a loose account of the dealmaking process, of course, but it does shed a little bit of light on the situation.

Also revealed is the plan to use music from Angelo Badalamenti. There isn’t a specific mention of him doing new music, but one would suspect that will end up being the case. Badalamenti was among the most significant parts of the show’s formula, as his mournful, ghostly music tied all the show’s eccentricities together.

There was also an interesting detail: Twede’s Cafe in North Bend, WA, which served as the Double R Diner in the show’s original location shoot, is being restored to be used in the new shoot.

“We’re shooting there, 100%,” Fenn said when asked about the original Washington locations. She added,

“[David’s] already come here. They’re redoing the R&R Diner to look exactly like it did in the show, and then the owners of the diner are going to keep it that way.”

She also mentioned that Lynch is figuring out how to shoot the Sheriff station, as it has been built up quite a bit since the original shoot.

While many Pacific Northwest locations were used for exteriors during the show’s pilot shoot, most of the series was actually shot north of Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley, in a warehouse that was refitted into stages, with Malibu forests doubling for the northwest in some scenes. We don’t know what the balance will be for the new series, but it sounds like at least some of the interiors will be shot on location, if the interior of the diner is being restored.

One of those interiors will be the Red Room, as Fenn says “she’s alive in the Red Room” while talking about Sheryl Lee. A few minutes later, Lee says “I know that I’m coming back now, but I don’t know how, and I may not know until I show up for the first day.” That’s obviously an exaggeration, but it’s a good way to say she’s not going to reveal anything now.

Fenn also references her character’s own odd end at the conclusion of the second series, explaining that it was the network’s desire for a cliffhanger that led to Audrey’s final scene.

Twin Peaks should begin shooting this September, with the series slated for Showtime in 2016.

Here’s video of the panel appearance, via Welcome to Twin Peaks. The first season three comments are right at the top, and the mentions of Badalamenti and the diner come much later in the talk.

The post ‘Twin Peaks’ Season Three Doubles to 18 Episodes, Angelo Badalamenti Returning appeared first on /Film.

The Week Magazine

Sen. Thad Cochran marries longtime aide, landlady The Week Magazine On Monday, Sen. Thad Cochran's office announced, in one terse sentence, that the 77-year-old Mississippi Republican had married longtime aide Kay Webber at a private ceremony on Saturday. The marriage comes five months after the death of Cochran's ... Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran marries longtime aideFox News US Sen. Thad Cochran marries longtime aide, his office saysWashington Post Mississippi pol weds aide after wife diesNew York Daily News all 74 news articles »

It is a problem that has taxed the finest minds for generations — what’s the best way to smoke meat?