firehose

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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A brand-new dinner menu makes this popular brunch spot good at all hours by Andrea Damewood

WHAT I'M GOING to say may sound like an insult, but it's not. The new dinner menu at Tasty n Sons reminds me of classy Applebee's.

After 5:30 pm, Tasty n Sons transforms into the magical, idealized, scrumptious version of Applebee's depicted in commercials. It's a place where you can hang with friends over (super-balanced) cocktails or a pint of (local craft) beer and eat (OMG so good) Alabama barbecue chicken, without spending a ton of cash. It won't win any Michelin stars, but the execution and food will win plenty of hearts.

Prior to December, I had braved Tasty n Sons' ridiculous wait times for shakshuka and chocolate potato doughnuts, but I had never had dinner there. It was a missing spot on my map, eclipsed in my mind by the steak-centric greatness at downtown's Tasty n Alder.

Last November, on the heels of opening the so-so Mediterranean Exploration Company in the Pearl, restaurateur John Gorham shut down Tasty n Sons' for two weeks, reopening with a small remodel and revamped dinner service. (The blessed brunch remains mostly the same.)

The old crimson cinderblock walls were painted a light gray, opening up the narrow dining room, while the bar area is ever so slightly bigger, giving you the option to have a good sit-down meal in either space.

The menu is largely Americana, served up family-style, and flitting from clam chowder and linguine with ragu to fried chicken and tasty mussel frites with a super garlicky aioli.

A great meal should start with Carolina peel 'n' eat shrimp ($13), dusted heavily with spices, and mercifully served with hot, moistened (sorry for using that word, folks!) napkins with lemon for your fingers. Nightly specials are worth a peek, especially the Alabama barbecue chicken ($17). It's currently available only on Mondays, but it belongs on deck daily. It's a juicy platter of bird, cut into quarters and served with coleslaw and pickles on the side. The real beauty comes from the white barbecue sauce, a vinegar mayonnaise blend with a nice bite of horseradish.

The real business of deliciousness starts with the mains and sides. The "Mains 'n' Twos" portion of the menu offers homey country cooking like vegetable potpie or Cajun meatloaf, along with two sides ($17-22). It easily feeds two, especially if you throw in an extra side for $6. You'll want to do this, because the sides nearly eclipsed their meaty companions (skip the slimy okra). The mac 'n' cheese, served in a mini cast-iron pan, boasts great toasted cheese crusties on the edges. Broccolini, often bitter and burnt in restaurants, was just the right level of crispy and sprinkled with salty cheese. And a shoutout to the prep cooks who make the stock for the insanely savory cheesy grits—we nearly ordered a second pan.

With such a range, it's only to be expected that a few items weren't up to snuff. Let's be real about what was billed as Cast Iron Cassoulet à la Bouvier ($18) on the menu: It's just fancy, oversweet American baked beans. The barbecue pork ribs ($22) were just meh, with no real smoky bark to speak of. A pastrami coppa steak ($18) had great New York deli flavor, but the meat itself was far too chewy.

The waitstaff were knowledgeable, steering us toward Aunt Paula's French toast sundae ($9), a towering monument to caramel, walnuts, bananas, and breakfast food. Unlike Applebee's employees, they also aren't required to wear a minimum amount of flair, unless you count topknots and large glasses.

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Dinner (reviewed): Sun-Thurs 5:30–10 pm, Fri-Sat 5:30–11 pm. Brunch daily 9 am–2:30 pm. Happy hour daily 2:30-5 pm. Call ahead for large groups.

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Today's interviewee, Viktoria Tsukanov, is one of the executives at predictive marketing company Mintigo who did a study in January, 2015 that seemed to show that large companies with female CEOs "achieve up to 18% higher revenue per employee than male CEOs." The study, titled "She’s the CEO and She’s Sensational," used financial data Mintigo collected on 20 million companies, and determined CEOs' genders by analyzing first names, so it was not subject to survey vagaries but was a straight data analysis job. Could this be a case of correlation and causation being unrelated? It's possible. It's also possible that the revenue per employee figures are affected by the fact that female CEOs are more common in healthcare and non-profit organizations, while men dominate manufacturing and construction -- and, as Viktoria pointed out in a blog post headlined "Women Just Raised the Bar. Big Time." there may be other factors at work as well. The "18% higher revenue" figure specifically applies to companies with more than 1000 workers, while companies with fewer workers may average more revenue per employee if they have male CEOs. Besides discussing the study itself, in our interview Viktoria talks about how male employees might want to alter (or not alter) their behavior if they find themselves working for a female boss for the first time. She also discusses challenges a woman might face if she is suddenly put in charge of a heavily male IT or programming staff. Other thoughts she shares have to do with finding mentors and dealing with negative people, both of which apply to people of all genders. Interesting food for thought all around.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As parts of North America struggle to contain a completely unnecessary measles epidemic, it's important to remember what life was like prior to the onset of vaccines. These maps paint a grim picture of the past — and where we ourselves may be headed in the future.

Read more...

The Cloisters set of fifty-two playing cards is currently accepted as the oldest complete deck of playing cards in the world, estimated to be made between 1470 and 1480. The South Netherlandish cards have an interesting history of ownership that envies the wildest dreams of any Antiques Roadshow fan. An anonymous antiques dealer in Amsterdam bought the cards in 1978 for $2,800 during an auction in Paris, where the auction house claimed the cards dated to “probably” 16th century. After thorough research into the painting style and clothing and hairstyles of the people on the cards, the antiques dealer found that the cards were incorrectly classified. An expert in medieval manuscripts at Sotheby’s and mineral testing of the paint on the cards both confirmed the antiques dealer’s research. Using this knowledge, he was able to sell them only five years later—in 1983—to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for $143,000, earning him a profit of $140,200.

The large, oval-shaped cards, are hand-painted with suits featuring a hunting theme. Instead of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, the suits are hunting horns, dog collars, hound tethers, and game nooses. Their excellent condition despite their age indicates that they may have been made for a collection instead of game play.

The cards cards are available to view on a rotating basis at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

images via The Metropolitan Museum of Art

via Coudal Partners

A very excitable Golden Retriever named Georges jumps up and down in front of the television whenever the ball is in play during the Australian Open. According to his human, Georges likes all sorts of sports, but loves tennis.

The Australian Open is on right now, which means my Golden Retriever is in heaven. Georges will watch this all day. While he does love all sports, tennis is his favorite.

Georges isn’t partial to Australian tennis, as demonstrated by his excitement during the U.S. Open.

Georges also appears to love the Tennis Channel.

via Tastefully Offensive

Staples Agrees to Buy Office Depot for About $6.3 Billion – Bloomberg Business.

Staples Inc. announced plans to buy Office Depot Inc. for about $6.3 billion, forging a deal that will reduce the U.S. office-supply industry to a single major chain and test the limits of antitrust regulators.

Wow! We were just posting about these companies, they stock 3D printers and now they’re basically the only game in town for some things as others exit (RadioShack for example).

Previous:
Staples #3DPrinting in-store service #3dthursday
Cube 3D Printers Now in Staples Store – As in now-now! #3DThursday #3DPrinting
Staples is going to sell 3D printers

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HughPickens.com writes James Simpson has an interesting story about the TP-82 survival pistol that Russian cosmonauts carried into space with them on missions between 1982 and 2006. But calling it a pistol is slightly misleading—the TP-82 was essentially a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun with a short-barreled rifle added onto it. Having a gun inside a thin-walled spacecraft filled with oxygen sounds crazy, but the Soviets had their reasons. Much of Russia is desolate wilderness. A single mishap during descent could strand cosmonauts in the middle of nowhere. In March 1965, cosmonaut Alexey Leonov landed a mechanically-faulty Voskhod space capsule in the snowy forests of the western Urals 600 miles from his planned landing site. For protection, Leonov had a nine-millimeter pistol. He feared the bears and wolves that prowled the forest—though he never encountered any. But the fear stayed with him. Later in his career, Leonov made sure the Soviet military provided all its cosmonauts with a survival weapon. For the Soviets, the weapon was a case of "better safe than sorry," and from 1986, it was a permanent fixture in the portable survival kits of every Soyuz mission. "Astronauts of all nationalities—including Americans—have trained with the TP-82," writes Simpson. "And still today, before they ride the Soyuz to space, they must complete a Russian survival training course in the Black Sea and the Siberian forest."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

paisleyasfuck:

erikaehm:

umokaywhat:

laurenmorrill:

I don’t know why, but I find this delightful

I can give you a good reason

THAT AMIGURUMI SKILL THO

Wow

Quinns: Board games go in and out of print all the time. It's like a party where sexy new friends arrive in a steady stream, only for each one to fall through a network of trapdoors.

But to quote patron saint of board game reviewers Tom Vasel, if a game is really good, it'll always get another print run. The theme of this week's games news is, apparently, an awful lot of sexy people arriving back at the party, dusting themselves off and grabbing another fistful of canapes.

Let's start with the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition of El Grande! Or as we call it in my house, 50 Shades of Beige.

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Some people are used to the way Adobe Illustrator works and get frustrated with they work with InDesign. There are actually a lot of similarities between the two applications, but how they handle their workspaces is definitely very different. In InDesign, “pages” live in “spreads” and each spread has its own “pasteboard.” In Illustrator, one […]

fialleril:

scowlofjustice:

coldlikedeath:

thobewill:

science-sexual:

seasonofrain:

dandelionbreaks:

What arrived in the mail OH IS IT THE KICKSTARTER-FUNDED CHRISTIAN VERSION OF “CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY”

I NEED THIS

Okay but… “Yeast”

i need to play this mixed in with regular cards against humanity

I have never played Cards Against Humanity so I AM IN DESPERATE NEED OF THIS.

fialleril

Okay but this game is incredible. It’s so awful, friends. You have no idea. I mean if you think Cards Against Humanity is terrible this is like 10 times worse. My favorite card is “a pair of she-bears mauling a busload of kindergarteners.”

It’s so great.

Wednesday, noted chef and TV personality Alton Brown will drop by the Eater forums to answer readers' questions. Jon Bois and Spencer Hall already have a lot of them.

Alton Brown's Q & A session at Eater, SB Nation's fellow Vox Media fun machine, will begin at 2 p.m. Eastern. Details are here.

Can I cook this brisket with a gun?

Is there a clever way to mince garlic with a tire pressure gauge?

What if I need to tenderize this chicken, but the Earth has disappeared and I am in space?

Can I brine my turkey with a nebulizer?

How do I clone and then cook myself?

What will happen if I slow-cook a picnic shoulder at 45 degrees for 19 days?

No question for you. I just wanted to let you know that every time I fry an egg, I throw away the skillet.

I don't think it's necessary to titrate Kool-Aid. How badly do you want to punch me in the dick?

I prefer to prep my vegetables on the wall, but every time I take my hands off them, they fall on the ground! Help!

I usually season my wok by leaving it out in the rain for several days, and now my pee comes out orange. Will you please Google some doctors in my area? I have also gone blind.

Has Scott Stapp ever approached you about recording an a capella cover of the Good Eats theme song?

Do you still play "Blinded Me With Science" in your live sets?

What is your credit card number, social security number, and all other personal information?

How do I get rid of the crusty brown stuff that's left on the pan after I'm done searing meat? I usually just Windex it.

latulas:

Live bird cams for when you dont have enough bird:

Aviary Cam

BlackFooted Penguins 

Chicks

Owls

Parakeets 

Red Tail Hawks

Wild Birds

And All These

treesofarden

submitted by andrewtaylorwilkins [link] [48 comments]

Hybrid configurations of masculinity enable young, straight, white men to distance themselves from what they might perceive as something akin to the stigma of privilege.

A couple weeks ago, we moved this static blog from github pages to Amazon S3. The move itself was uneventful, as both plaforms handle CNAME’s pretty well. However, S3 provides a feature that we needed: redirects. We wanted to redirect our feed address to an app which we could use to monitor who is polling our feed. We created a very simple Node application application which proxies our Atom feed while recording hits (both user-agent and IP) in a Redis database.

We believe every decent feed reader should follow redirects (we do it transparently if you use Superfeedr). After a couple weeks we got a pretty clear view of services polling our feeds. The numbers below account for 2 weeks worth of traffic, with 1 significant update to the feed (last week’s post).

A lot of waste.

We registered 36,413 hits for 152 different user-agents, with 6 referers accounting for 50% of the traffic and 16 of them accounting for 73% of the traffic.

What’s more interesting is that, since our feed supports PubSubHubbub, we can match the subscribers to their user agents. A lot of feed readers such as Feedly, Inoreader, MnmlReader, Feedbin, or Newsblur are subscribed via PubSubHubbub. The net result is that, these subscribers, all combined, hit our feed only 4,637 times (12.7% of all hits). Of course, their reduced polling saved them (and us) a lot of resources… but this did not impact their users who were still the first ones to learn about our new posts.

We’re a sad that our followers using Bloglovin, Digg Reader, AOL Reader and a few others learn about our stuff significantly later.

Finally, Fever, TT-RSS and a few other ‘installable’ feed readers were among the largest offenders because all installs will hit our feed quite often. These two alone account for more traffic than all the PubSubHubbub subscribers combined (5,788 hits)!

User-Agents

The second thing we confirmed is that User-Agents are… strange beasts. First, it’s a another big waste (HTTP headers are not compressed) that 69 of them start with Mozilla/5.0. That’s a pointless legacy. They can also be very long: NewsBlur’s UA has 242 characters for our feed!

Having great User-Agents is hard. We identied the following steps to epiphany when it comes to them:

1. Actually have a User-Agent. Some fetches will not identify themselves. This is considered bad practice and several publishers will block these without any further effort.

2. Make sure you do not use the default User-Agent of your HTTP library. Our biggest hitter uses Go 1.1 package http, but we also have a bunch of feedzirra http://github.com/pauldix/feedzirra/tree/master or curl/7.26.0… Don’t hide!

3. Add a way to get in touch: a URL or an email address will help publishers clarify who you are, why you’re polling their feeds and how to report problems.

4. Include debugging information: several of the people fetching our feeds have added a feed-id= value in their User-Agents. We believe this is a pretty good practice (and we’re adding this to the Superfeedr User-Agent)

5. If you’re a feed reader, include the number of subscribers in the User-Agent. But this also tends to behave quite erratically when the number of subscribers changes often. For example, we have 10 different User-Agents for MnmlReader since our number of subscribers seems to very a lot in that reader…

The web is an abstraction layer, which means that the content published here should be displayed similarly in any browser, using any OS. We understand that this may not be true for more advanced Javascript techniques, but for RSS feeds, it’s certainly pointless to include architecture, or OS information: don’t clog the tubes with that!

TL;DR If you’re polling our feeds, you should do the following:

• Identify yourself with a great User-Agent: make sure we can contact you, and help us learn more about why you’re polling it and on behalf of how many people.
• Implement PubSubHubbub (it’s not that complex) so that you get real-time updates to our feed, without polling very frequently

Codrops is one of the most inspirational places on the internet. Yes, I am biased, but I am sure you can agree that that’s true.

If you’re looking for inspiration, the many, many creative resources you can find here are sure to spark an idea or two in your head. That’s one of the things I adore about this website—Manoela and Pedro never fail to impress us with what they have to offer.

If you’re looking to learn about how to use a CSS property, you will find a lot to learn by digging into the source code for the resources you get here. But what if you want to learn more about a property’s basics: property definition, different possible values and what each value means and does, etc.? Wouldn’t it be nice if you were able to find everything you were looking for right here, too?

A little over a year ago, we thought that it would be fantastic if Codrops had some kind of section where you can read and learn all about a CSS property, therefore turning Codrops into a perfect destination for anyone looking for inspiration and wanting to learn about the CSS behind it. Manoela approached me with the idea, and only a few days later, I started writing.

So, over the course of (slightly less than) a year, we’ve created a new department for Codrops: the CSS Reference. And we are beyond thrilled to finally share it with you.

Like any knowledge base, this reference is a work in progress and we strive to improve it and make it better. If you have any suggestions for improvements or see an error, please open an issue on this GitHub repo.

The Reference

The Codrops CSS Reference is an archive containing a list of entries categorized by type: CSS property, CSS function, CSS data type, CSS at-rule and CSS pseudo-classes/selectors/elements. Each entry is an article defining and explaining a CSS property, function, data type, at-rule or pseudo-class/selector/element.

In addition to these five categories, one more category exists: CSS concept. An entry in the CSS Concept category is a complete guide to a specific CSS concept or feature.

CSS concept entries serve as a ‘global’ entry for a group of related properties. For example, Flexbox and Counters are two concepts that have their own entries. Each entry explains what the concept means, what it does, and includes a definition and usage examples of its properties.

So, what does a CSS entry look like?

Structure of a CSS Entry

Each entry has a header that states what category this entry belongs to, and a live search module. We’ll talk about the live search feature in a following section.

Each CSS entry is also made up of several sections, the main ones are: Description, Official Syntax, Values, Examples, Live Demo, Browser Support, Further Reading and Related Entries. Every section may or may not have subsections.

The description section is where you learn what the CSS property/function/selector/etc. does. It’s basically where the definition and further explanation goes.

After the definition, you get an overview of the official syntax, initial value, what element(s) the CSS feature applies to, and whether or not its values are animatable. Some category types do not require this section, so it may or may not be there depending on what feature you are reading about.

Then each value is defined and described in the Values section. Again, if a CSS feature does not have a set of values (for example, an at-rule), this section is omitted.

The Examples section is where you will see examples of the feature in use—they are mainly snippets with or without screenshots of the result.

The Live Demo section will contain one or multiple live demos. The demos are sometimes live demos of the snippets in the Examples section, and sometimes they are that along with additional examples. Depending on browser support, the live demos might be accompanied with screenshots showing how the example should look like.

Note that many entries include several live demos, some of which are embedded within the description section.

Make sure you check the Browser Support section to determine whether or not the browser you are using supports the feature you are reading about.

Because there are many great reading resources about different CSS features and topics, the Further Reading section includes links to some good resources that are worth reading, along with a link to the specification(s) where the CSS feature at hand is defined.

Codrops Playground

While I wrote the entries, Manoela and Pedro worked on one of the best features of the reference: the playground.

The live demos you will see in the entries are all demos you can edit and play with yourself—and we strongly encourage you in the entries to do so, to get a better feel of how a certain feature works and what the different values do. Note that the playground is still in alpha stage and a lot of features are yet to come. Feel free to send any bug reports, suggestions or comments to playground ‘at’ codrops.com.

Live Search

For each entry, you get a live search module that you can also find in the Codrops homepage, right below the featured post, to the left.

The live search, as the name suggests, will give you a list of all CSS entries that match your search string. So if you search for a specific string (or even a letter), the search module will show all the entries that have that string in the title as a drop-down. This is particularly useful for getting related properties as you search for a specific property (for example: border, border-top, border-bottom, border-right, etc.).

Browser Support

Whenever available, you’ll see a CanIUse.com browser compatibility table embedded in the Browser Support section, so the compatibility table will always be up-to-date.

For the entries that don’t have a CanIUse support table, we wrote the browser support information by hand. The browser support for the majority of features is well-known and tested. Support for other features may or may not change in the future, so if you notice any outdated compatibility information, please do let us know, and we’ll update the entry accordingly.

Moving Forward

There are a few missing properties that have little or no current browser support, or whose specifications are unstable and still in flux. Our hope is to add the entries for those properties some time in the future when—hopefully—browser support gets better and specifications are stabilized.

We also all know that, in our field, something new emerges every day, so our hope is to continue growing and extending the reference, adding any additional properties and features to it with time. Even the current entries will get more improvements slowly with time.

We set milestones, and the first one was to deliver you a great reference to start with, and we’ll be working on gradually and continuously improving it in the future.

Your Feedback

Of course, your opinion and input is important to us. After all, we made this reference for you, so we want to make sure you find everything you need in it.

As such, we will be gathering your input and suggestions in a Github repository dedicated for collecting your issues and suggestions for the reference.

Found a bug? Found a piece of information that needs to be updated? Typos? Got a suggestion to improve the reference? Want us to add a concept entry for a specific CSS concept? Feel free to open an issue on Github. I will personally be looking into the issues frequently and answering your questions and making edits and updates as needed as much and as soon as possible. You can also tweet at me on Twitter if you’ve got a quick note about an entry or a request.

Final Words

We put our heart into the reference, hoping to have provided you with a very useful source of learning. I hope that you learn from the reference as much as I have learned in the process of writing it. :)

And we also hope that you like the subtle makeover Codrops got with this release, too!

Thank you very much for reading, and don’t forget to go check the reference out!

Introducing the Codrops CSS Reference was written by Sara Soueidan and published on Codrops.

by Morgan

Photo by John Grade

Recently unveiled at the MadArt space in Seattle, Middle Fork is the lastest sculptural work by artist John Grade who worked with countless volunteers to realize this enormous scale mold of a 140-year-old tree.

The process began a year ago when Grade and a crew of assistants scaled a Western Hemlock tree in North Bend, Washington with help of a team of arborists. At nearly 90 feet in the air they created sectional plaster molds of the living tree which were carefully lowered and transported back to the MadArt space over a period of two weeks. Over the next 12 months, hundreds of volunteers (some who walked in right off the streets) helped to create a hollow sculpture of the tree using hundreds of thousands of small wood blocks. The final piece was carefully sanded down and is now suspended in the gallery. Watch the video below to see how it all came together.

Middle Fork is the first exhibition at the new MadArt space in Seattle and will be on view through April 25th before it goes on tour to galleries and art fairs around the U.S. In two years the pieces will be transported to the base of the living tree from which the mold was taken where they will decay and disintegrate back into the ground.

Photo by John Grade

Photo by John Grade

Photos by John Grade

Photos by John Grade

Photos by John Grade

Photos by John Grade

Photo by Tim Detweiler

Photo by Katie Wood

Three things that are awesome about NASA astronaut Leland Melvin.

Jake and Scout are the cutest astro pups ever.

His Twitter handle is AstroFlow.

Leland played in the NFL before becoming an astronaut. Nbd.

The Internet has found a new hero.

@AstroFlow @AdamAton I stopped a meeting today so we could pass this around in awe. So amazing!🚀🐺🐺

— Erie (@Erie) January 29, 2015

@AstroFlow @MarketPlunger @AdamAton they're all "take us with u"

— Ezra Rapoport (@HFBondsTrader) January 29, 2015

@AstroFlow you're my hero

— Ben Cusack (@bgecusack) January 29, 2015

@Astro_Flow you are my favorite astronaut. I'm almost 30 years old. I'm not ashamed of what i am. Thanks for all you do!

— Johnathan (@JSlip1) January 29, 2015