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👏 “Female voices and female stories are welcomed enthusiastically” at The CW 👏 http://t.co/miQJ8iAouv via @flavorwire

— Femsplain (@femsplain) August 12, 2015

The CW’s session at the Television Critics Association summer tour earlier this week gives us so much reason to hope. After their main presentation, where they debuted their upcoming show from Aline Brosh McKenna called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, eight female executive producers from The CW took to the stage in a panel called Running the Show: The Women Executive Producers of The CW and spoke honestly and optimistically about being women in the television industry and what they’re doing to help other women thrive in the business.

In addition to Brosh McKenna, the panel included Jennie Snyder Urman (Jane the Virgin), Gabrielle Stanton (The Flash), Diane Ruggiero-Wright (iZombie), Wendy Mericle (Arrow), Julie Plec (The Vampire Diaries, The Originals), Caroline Dries (The Vampire Diaries), and Laurie McCarthy (Reign). They all discussed the fact that The CW is a particularly welcoming place for female writers, and McCarthy mentioned that “I feel like [The CW executives] treat us like we’re showrunners. They don’t treat us like we’re female showrunners.”

Ruggiero-Wright on her responsibility as an executive producer:

I think hiring more female writers is something you have more of a say about. You want to hire the best writer for the job. So if the best writer for a particular job is a man, I’m going to want to hire a man. If the best [person for the] job is a woman, I’m going to want hire the woman. And if it’s between the two, honestly, I’m going to pick the woman, and that’s just the truth. That’s how it’s going to be. If they are equal to the job and I have a choice between a man or a woman, right now in this job, I’m going to support the sisterhood.

Plec discussed the types of storylines she will or won’t tackle on a show:

I used to have this rule. Never make anyone an alcoholic, never make them rape, never make them molested. Because when all is said and done, their character becomes singularly about being that and you lose the ability to write them as human beings without that problem weighing over them.

Ruggiero-Wright explained that sometimes writers don’t have the choice to write what they’d prefer to write:

Sometimes you’re on other staffs of other shows or you’re not the showrunner and you have to do a rape storyline and you don’t want to do it. People are going to be watching it and they’re going to see your name on the episode and they’re going to think you think that’s what it means. Like, this is your interpretation of what it feels like to be a female and suffer this — and it’s not. It’s your own staff of the show, and this is what you kind of have to write, and it’s just such a horrible position to be in as a writer, and I don’t want to put any other writer in that position.

Check out some more great quotes from the panel over at Flavorwire, and rest easy with the knowledge that there are female showrunners and executive producers out there working to make television a better medium for everyone.

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The gutting of Germany’s intellectual heritage is far from the worst crime committed by the Nazis, but it was a crime nonetheless. The irony is it was a crime that contributed to their loss of the war. But it also robbed the country of its intellectual riches decades after the war was over.

Read more...

As a society, we are happily ensconced in the internet era. And we're sure that you, oh wonderful blog readers, are among the first to use the internet to find information about candidates come election time. And by and large, we assume the internet search engines we use to find that information are unbiased. But what if they aren't? Could the order of search results skew our perceptions of possible candidates? Well, this paper explores that very scenario. The result? Let's just say that we'

Ben Lecomte is going on a six-month swim from San Francisco to Tokyo, beginning in September.

Doing so will require an 80-foot boat, a six-person crew, technology to ward off sharks and navigate extreme weather, and most important, psychological endurance.

“The biggest issue is that it is very boring,” Lecomte tells Quartz. “It is very repetitive. When you swim, you are very isolated. When you swim, it’s always the same stimuli; it’s always the same blue background; it’s always the same noise; it’s always the same feel with the water there always.”

To get through the boredom, the French-born Texan relives his life on land. “To make sure that your mind is occupied for those eight hours, you have a schedule,” he says. “It’s like going to school: Each hour I have a different subject I will focus on. The technique I use is dissociation. For example, if I am going to focus on an event I have enjoyed in the past, like a birthday, I will try to engage all my senses. I try to remember if it was hot, whether the sun was shining on my skin; what did it smell like, what noises were there?”

Since swimming the Atlantic in 73 days about 17 years ago, Lacomte says he has been looking for a bigger challenge. His Pacific swim, however, will not be for purely selfish reasons. Considering his children, he says that he wants to raise awareness of pollution in the world’s waters: “Many things have happened in the past 100 or 150 years, and we need to change our mindset to go forward. It is not sustainable, the way we live now.”

To do so, Lecomte will be a swimming lab. His heart, mouth, and guts will be checked each day to see how the long-term exposure to the Pacific affects his body. Devices attached to his ankles will measure the radioactivity of the water and check for plastics content. Another device will check other plastics to see what DNA is on it and how microbes are reacting with the synthetic materials. He will work with numerous institutions on the research, including the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Marine Biological Laboratory, both based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Concerns have long been raised that the Pacific is turning into a garbage dump. The writer Winifred Bird said in 2009 that the trash consolidating in the middle of the ocean made up an area of around 13 million sq. km. Rolling Stone this month warned we may have reached the point of no return, citing scientists including James Hansen, formerly of NASA, and Eric Rignot, who still works for the space agency.

Beyond the research, however, Lecomte is excited about the adventure. “Once you have done something [like the Atlantic swim], you think about doing something new and something bigger,” he says. “And there is nothing bigger than the Pacific.”

Of course, beyond the boredom, there are risks with swimming through such a vast expanse of ocean. “If there is a big typhoon coming, we can get out of the way and wait for it to pass and then return,” he says. “I am not going to put myself or the crew in harm’s way. So we will be keeping a very close eye on those systems.”

And then there is Jaws. “I had a shark following me for five days when I was in the Atlantic, but, you know… It’s there, and you try control what you can and not be bothered by that which you cannot.” Netting and a device that creates a magnetic field around the boat and Lecomte should keep any sharks at bay.

That’s not to say Lecomte wants them to stay too far away. “I hope we will see sharks. Because I want to tell the story of how we have killed about 90% of the big fish over the past 100 years. And sharks are very important to the ecosystem.”

Ben Lecomte has an Indie Gogo page to raise funds for his swim.

Follow writer Richard Smart at @tokyorich.

rubyetc:

It is exhausting seeing people and I love them but I cannot wait for them to leave so I can be myself again and eat crackers alone in the dark

This Jet From Rosetta's Comet was so Strong it Disrupted the Solar Wind

Enjoying the Cool Evening Breeze on and under the Bridge

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The deadly infectious diseases that were eradicated in America during the 20th century are now roaring back, thanks to growing poverty, failing sanitation, and underinvestment in science and health research and regulation. Read the rest

“Doujinshi” (同人誌) is Japanese for fan-created, self-published comics, magazines, and novels. While Japan has strict copyright laws, doujinshi tend to get a free pass and flourish. A new trade agreement could change that forever.

Doujinshi is a proving ground for new artists, who can create a name for themselves through their self-published works and make the leap from amateur to pro. The country’s biggest geek event, Comiket, is centered around doujinshi. Fans line up to buy independently produced parodies of famous manga and starring popular characters.

Copyright holders typically turn a blind eye to doujinshi, knowing it’s where future manga artists often get their start. But under the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that still might not stop the police from going after doujinshi creators for violating copyright law.

TPP is proposed trade deal with twelve countries possibly participating, including the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, and Colombia, among others. China is currently not part of the TPP negotiations.

As The Yomiuri Shimbun explains, current Japanese copyright law dictates that violations can only be investigated once the copyright holder files a complaint. No complaint means no investigation.

TPP, however, aims to streamline the process so that the copyright holder does not have to file. A third party can report copyright violations. The reason, The Yomiuri Shimbun notes, is that U.S. companies often experience copyright violations and this TPP provision would combat those.

The rub is that by giving third parties the ability to report copyright violations, fans or rival doujinshi creators could start ratting people out to the authorities. See the below image, via The Yomiuri Shimbun:

According to The Yomiuri Shimbun, a person involved in the TPP negotiations said that the copyright provision will allow for a degree of parody.

“If creators can be prosecuted without complaints from rights holders, it could lead to some kind of snitching battle between fans,” said manga artist Ken Akamatsu, who started out in doujinshi. “Places for people to share their work will also disappear.”

Characterizing this world as “open” might be misleading, given that Shropshire is carved up by long, impassable fences. Whenever you want to go somewhere, rest assured there will be a fence in the way. Maybe a chain fence. Or a horse fence. There are chain-link fences, too, if that’s your taste, and hedgerows also double as fences. Many fences have gates, yet most gates do not budge—they are fences in disguise. (Of course, a few gates do open, so you have to try them all.) Perhaps the local fence maker has a kickback deal with the town council. That could be the true intrigue lurking under the surface of this quest. In any case, all these barriers conspire to make exploration miserable, and exploring is the only thing to do in Rapture.

On Aug. 10, Democratic candidate for US president Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled a $350 billion plan to eliminate college debt and allow young Americans to complete four-year degrees without taking out loans.

Some see Clinton’s plan as a crucial step in the right direction. These days, it’s virtually impossible to self-finance an American college education. For those not getting help from mom and dad, loans and/or federal grants are a matter of course. “In 2014-2015, the school year just ended, the total of tuition, fees and room and board for in-state students at four-year public universities was $18,943,” reports Anya Kamenetz for NPR. “The maximum Pell Grant didn’t keep pace with that: It was $5,730.” This leaves the average grantee roughly $13,300 to cover annually. (Pell Grants are funded by the US federal government and are based on financial need, as determined by FAFSA.)

To make ends meet without taking out substantial loans, “a student would now have to work 35 hours a week, every week of the year,” Kamenetz calculates. “To cover today’s costs with a low-skilled, minimum wage summer job? Over 90 days, a student would need to work 20.24 hours a day.”

American colleges and universities have to know this, to some extent. And yet, they seem unwilling to shift away from a degree-seeking structure that is both bloated and exorbitantly priced.

American higher learning could learn much in the way of providing affordable, quality education from its UK cousin across the Atlantic.

British students are generally required to declare an intended concentration prior to gaining admission to a university. This, proponents say, fosters an atmosphere of focus. Students commit to a path of study from the get-go, instead of the more casual dabbling a typical American liberal arts curriculum encourages. And a typical British Bachelor’s degree takes three years to achieve, not four. That translates to a lot of money saved on unnecessary credits at current US prices.

Though it’s difficult to generalize the curricula of American colleges and universities, general education requirements are fairly ubiquitous, and they are usually completed within the first two years of undergraduate coursework. (At least they’re often intended to.) For comparison, let’s look at the general education requirements of seven schools, representative of the varying kinds of institutions native to the American higher-education landscape:

At University of Texas at Austin, a large, public university in an urban setting, students are required to take a total of 13 general education courses before graduating.

At New York University, a large, private, urban university, undergraduates in the College of Arts and Sciences must complete seven courses in the “Morse Academic Plan” before degree conferral.

At Maine’s Bowdoin College, a small liberal arts college, students are required to complete five distribution requirements in everything from math to the visual and performing arts.

At Harvard University, an Ivy League institution, students must complete:

1 “aesthetic and interpretive understanding” course
1 “culture and belief” course
1 “empirical and mathematical reasoning” course
1 “ethical reasoning” course
1 “science of living systems” course
1 “science of the physical universe” course
1 “societies of the world” course
1 “United States and the world” course

(For a grand total of eight distribution requirements.)

At Wellesley College, a women’s college in Massachusetts, students are required to take a whopping 16 courses outside their major discipline.

At Howard University, a historically black college/university in Washington, DC, undergraduates must complete a freshman seminar, nine distribution requirements, demonstrate upper-level mastery of a foreign language, and complete a “cluster requirement” in African-American studies.

And at California Institute of Technology, one of the nation’s premiere engineering schools, students must complete 108 units in the humanities and social sciences before graduating. Typical non-STEM courses are 9 units, meaning roughly 12 courses must be completed in the liberal arts.

Admittedly, there are instances when general-education requirements are useful, if not crucial to a student’s eventual success. There is certainly an argument to be made for English majors taking the odd statistical reasoning and/or economics course. Likewise, when an area of study is crucial to a school’s identity—as African-American studies is to a school like Howard—it’s understandable that administrators would want students to develop a stake in that identity.

That being said, in every instance detailed, it appears students are spending a full year, at the least, paying for coursework that may not ultimately prove useful in whatever professional path they end up pursuing.

Some say the flexibility of the American curriculum is what makes it special. That may be the case. The fact remains, however, that colleges and universities have a financial incentive to keep curricula general and “flexible.” The longer a student takes to decide on a path of study, the likelier it is they’ll extend their study. That means more credit hours before graduating, and more tuition dollars in the school’s pocket.

At the end of the day, the current model of degree-financing in America isn’t sustainable. And while it’s nice to think of college years as a period of “finding oneself”—dipping toes in a number of academic disciplines before finally settling on a course of study—it’s not a luxury everyone can afford. And they shouldn’t be forced to.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Chugging your lager is so passé. Luckily, if you’re in London, you can breathe yours in, instead.

On the site of an ancient monastery, Brits can now get buzzed by inhaling instead of drinking, the AP reports. At a pop-up bar, Alcoholic Architecture, a humidifier pumps cocktails into vapors in an enclosed space, allowing patrons to get their drink fix by breathing in the booze, as well as absorbing it through their skin and eyes.

The menu is inspired by the location, with spirits and beers all made by monks, including Chartreuese, Benedictine, Trappist beer, and Buckfast, which the site describes as “a fortified wine so savage that Scotland’s parliament is reportedly drafting legislation to stop the caffeinated intoxicant from entering their country.”

The vapors are so strong that guests have to wear protective suits and are advised to consume only 60% of their normal alcoholic intake, says Time Out London. “It’s going straight into the bloodstream, completely bypassing the liver,” co-founder Sam Bompass of the team Bompass & Parr, told Marketing Magazine.

This isn’t the first bar to serve its patrons vaporized booze. A Chicago bar’s success with a “Vaportini” inspired it to create a version for sale online. And health authorities in the US have expressed concerns about young people and those trying to avoid the calories in drinking alcohol rigging up do-it-yourself versions at home—risking potentially deadly overdoses.

The health issue is that bypassing the liver skips the “first pass metabolism,” making the vapor intoxicate patrons more powerfully and quickly than a regular drink, Dr. William Shanahan, a specialist in addiction recovery, told the AP. “This has the potential to cause serious side effects as well as brain damage in the developing young brain.”

What a buzzkill.

Dont Shoot PDX activist Marcus Cooper is reporting on Facebook that he and five others were invited to sit down with Senator Bernie Sanders on Sunday, following a gigantic rally at the Moda Center.

According to Cooper's Facebook post, Sanders sat down with the activists—including Teressa Raiford, who was arrested earlier that day following an action to commemorate the one-year anniversary of Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson—and listened to their concerns about his failure to address institutional racism as a campaign platform.

Correction: Cooper has since clarified that Raiford wasn't able to attend the meeting with Sanders because she was still sitting in Multnomah County jail.

Cooper—the same activist who was arrested in May when a teen opened fire at an unsanctioned Last Thursday celebration and later had his charges dropped—reports the group spoke with Sanders, his wife, and Sanders' newly-hired press secretary, Symone Sanders.

"We asked how much time he had, and he said he had a flight to catch early... So I said OK," Cooper writes. "Then he said, 'What's your solutions'... I said first and foremost we are not here to attack or protest against you nor are we here to say we support you. I am here to speak out and educate you as much as I can with the platform of privilege that I have, and this is what I would like you to do as well."

The Sunday rally came one day after Sanders appeared in Seattle, where two activists took the microphone and disrupted the event. Sanders ended up leaving without speaking in Seattle at that particular event. Sanders did speak later to a crowd of 15,000.

Amid concerns the same would happen in Portland, Symone Sanders, who introduced the senator in Portland, warned attendees there might be a disruption, and requested that the crowd be ready to chant "we stand together" if it happened.

Don't Shoot PDX activists were present during the rally, as seen in the above photo, and they chanted for most of the event, but the crowd was too loud for them to be heard over the earsplitting cheers. They also remained to the side of the stage and didn't attempt to commandeer the microphone.

Cooper writes that Sanders told the activists on Sunday that he wasn't "going city to city to discuss ... individual topics."

"We reminded him that going from city to city and not discussing what the cities are facing but yet using your platform to discuss about those other issues is equivalent to silencing their screams," he writes. "We address that dialogue needs to happen but only with direct action. People are being massacred and there is no time for just more speeches. Bernie didn't have a response."

Cooper says the group suggested Sanders "reform the police" by placing them on on-call status, similar to a fire department.

"You don't see (fire fighters) driving around profiling for suspected houses to be on fire," Cooper writes. "WE reminded them that talking is one thing, but (the) platform that he has is a privilege and using that privilege with a direct action would bring direct results."

Cooper's post certainly got direct results: As of now, his 10-hour-old post has been shared 39 times, has garnered 88 likes, and has created a long comment thread.

This is the story of how I wrote a Twitter bot to automatically enter contests and ended up winning an average of four contests per day, every day, for about 9 months straight.

If you’ve ever used Twitter, you’ve probably seen a tweet that looks something like this:

Maybe you’ve actually retweeted it, maybe not, but everyone wants to know: does anyone ever win those contests? To discover the answer to that question, I wrote a Python script that logs into Twitter, searches for tweets that say something along the lines of “retweet to win!” and then retweets them. I’m not sure if anyone else has done this before, but I didn’t see any evidence of other bots that were behaving like mine. I did however see evidence of real people who were manually doing the job of my bot by retweeting hundreds of contests over several hours.

Some contests require you to follow the original poster, so after discovering a candidate tweet I made sure it wasn’t an entry to a contest, but the original contest itself, and then checked to see if they wanted a follow. If so, I followed them and retweeted.

The most difficult part of this project was preventing the bot from getting banned by Twitter. They have rate limits which prevent you from tweeting too often, retweeting too aggressively, and creating “following churn,” by rapidly following and unfollowing people. Twitter doesn’t publish these numbers, so I had to figure them out by trial and error. Twitter also limits the total number of people you can follow given a certain number of followers.  Over the 9 months I ran my script, I entered approximately 165,000 contests. Of those, I won around 1,000.  If you have below a few hundred followers, you cannot follow more than 2,000 people. Since a lot of contests required following the original poster, I used a FIFO to make sure I was only following the 2,000 most recent contest entries. That gave me long enough to make sure the person I unfollowed had already ended their contest and it kept the follow/unfollow churn rate below the rate limit. I got lucky in that the rate of new contests launched on Twitter is less than the rate that I could retweet, meaning I was able to enter every contest I could find.

How many was that? Well, over the 9 months I ran my script, I entered approximately 165,000 contests. Of those, I won around 1,000. So that means my win rate was just over half a percent, which is pretty miserable, especially when you consider that a good portion of those winnings were things like logos and graphics, which is Twitter slang for a customized image for use in a gaming or YouTube profile.

Another very large percentage of the things I won were tickets to events. I did manage to go to an event that I won tickets to, but the majority of them were for concerts and events in other countries that I obviously couldn’t go to. I also won a lot of currency to online games (like FIFA). And when the game Destiny was giving out beta codes, I won about 30 of them through as many contests. I won a lot of cool stuff too though, and getting mysterious things in my mailbox each day was pretty fun. Here’s a picture of The Haul:

My favorite thing that I won was a cowboy hat autographed by the stars of a Mexican soap opera that I had never heard of. I love it because it really embodies the totally random outcome of these contests. The most valuable thing I won was a trip to New York Fashion Week, which included a limo ride to the show if you lived in a state near New York for you and a friend, and $500 spending money each, and tickets to some of the shows. That had a retail value of $4,000, but I didn’t claim it because 1) I don’t live near New York and 2) I didn’t want to pay the taxes on a $4,000 prize.

I ended up not claiming the majority of the things I won because I wasn’t able to use them or attend them. In those cases, I just messaged them back and told them to give the prize to someone else. And before you report me to the IRS, yes, I reported and paid taxes on all of the winnings I actually accepted/received. I had a lot of pretty interesting interactions with the unwashed masses of Twitter. 

I had a lot of pretty interesting interactions with the unwashed masses of Twitter. Most contests informed the winners by direct message, and a lot of people have an automatic direct message sent to you when you follow them (like the one above), so I had to spend a decent amount of time going though my DMs to find legit winner notifications.

In a strange turn of events, I even encountered an example of someone offering my autograph as a prize. I have no idea how they were going to pull that off, because I had never even heard of this person.

Some people thought it would be hilarious if they mimicked contests by tweeting things like, “RT this and you could win absolutely nothing!!” Naturally, my bot found those tweets and dutifully retweeted them. So there were several instances of me winning “absolutely nothing.” Another variation on that was this guy who offered a unique prize:

Yes indeed, I won this contest and the fantastic prize of warped “tupaware” lids. Unfortunately, like lots of other contests, I never got anything in the mail.

After a while of winning contests, I realized I could use my bot for good too. Lots of people raise money for charities by asking people to retweet. Sometimes they’re fake, but what do I care? I added search terms for tweets like this and had enough bandwidth to retweet every tweet of this kind without going over the rate limit.

If you want to see the full list of stuff I won, it’s here. There are a few gems I’ve left it up to you to discover.

A version of this post originally appeared on HScott.net. Follow Hunter on Twitter at @hunterscott. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

DriveThruComics' parent company gets hacked! Cartoonist Randy Glasbergen passes away. Phoebe Gloeckner talks "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"! Plus more!

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mushroom-just-one:

pyronoid-d:

ostolero:

Most common life mistakes:

• hurtling with reckless abandon
  

• Levitation without a permit
  

• Being sucked into an unseen vortex in the sky

Project Manager

We're looking for an organized, aggressive, and web-savvy project manager to join our team.  This person will assist us in managing customer development projects in addition to overseeing in-house product development.  They'll be responsible for growing current accounts and will participate in business development activities.

They idea candidate will be entrepreneurial, highly motivated, and a skilled multi-tasker.

This is a full-time, salaried position. Compensation is competitive and based on experience.  Levee Labs offers a flexible work environment where all employees are given a strong voice and the opportunity to balance life and work in the way that best suits them.

This FBI alert is interesting:

(U//FOUO) In May 2015, the wife of a US military member was approached in front of her home by two Middle-Eastern males. The men stated that she was the wife of a US interrogator. When she denied their claims, the men laughed. The two men left the area in a dark-colored, four-door sedan with two other Middle-Eastern males in the vehicle. The woman had observed the vehicle in the neighborhood on previous occasions.

(U//FOUO) Similar incidents in Wyoming have been reported to the FBI throughout June 2015. On numerous occasions, family members of military personnel were confronted by Middle-Eastern males in front of their homes. The males have attempted to obtain personal information about the military member and family members through intimidation. The family members have reported feeling scared.

The report says nothing about whether these are isolated incidents, a trend, or part of a larger operation. But it has gotten me thinking about the new ways military personnel can be intimidated. More and more military personnel live here and work there, remotely as drone pilots, intelligence analysts, and so on, and their military and personal lives intertwine to a degree we have not seen before. There will be some interesting security repercussions from that.

The "Punisher: War Zone" director weighs in on Ronda Roussey's Captain Marvel comments and calls for a Kamala Khan movie.

Chris Hadfield became a global sensation after he posted a music video of himself singing David Bowie’s song Space Oddity aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Now, apparently in response to growing demand for space oddities and musical productions, Hadfield announced that he will soon release the first album of music recorded in space.

Hadfield’s internet fame has only accelerated since the Space Oddity performance. Since then, the social media darling has produced countless videos to his fans chronicling his life in space, including one in which he tried out his fans’ science experiments:

Hadfield’s 11-song album will be released in October 2015, according to the Globe and Mail, but the retired astronaut has already released a music video for one of his songs. Unfortunately, the music video does not include footage of Hadfield in space. Instead, the lyrics are accompanied by a cute cartoon animation of space travel.

In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Hadfield discussed some of the challenges of recording music in zero-gravity conditions. “It’s hard to play guitar on a spaceship, because there’s nothing to hold the guitar stable,” he said. “The producer who was helping me, Paul Mills, said: ‘Your guitar playing is a little messy.’ I said, yeah, you come up here and play guitar.”

Hadfield also explained that his voice changed in space because gravity no longer naturally drained his sinuses. “There’s no gravity to pull the fluid out of your head,” he said. “So you always have a full head and swollen tongue and vocal cords.”

cleveland.com

Marco Rubio's cat picture keeps abortion debate going: Marco Rubio in the news cleveland.com Marco Rubio has gained a lot of attention since his performance in last week's debate, and helped keep it alive with a picture and questions about cats. (Christian K. Lee/Associated Press). Print Email · Stephen Koff, Northeast Ohio Media Group ... The GOP's Misogyny PrimaryThe New Yorker The GOP's woman problem goes beyond TrumpLos Angeles Times Morning BitsWashington Post (blog) Boston Herald -Miami Herald -Chippewa Herald all 632 news articles »

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Seattle's Hisashi Iwakuma tosses no-hitter against Orioles USA TODAY SEATTLE (AP) — Hisashi Iwakuma became the second Japanese-born pitcher in major league history to throw a no-hitter, leading the Seattle Mariners to a 3-0 victory over the Baltimore Orioles on Wednesday. The right-hander struck out seven and walked ... Hisashi Iwakuma finally gives Mariners fans reason to celebrateESPN (blog) Seattle's Hisashi Iwakuma no-hits OriolesYahoo Sports Mariners' Hisashi Iwakuma no-hits Orioles, 3-0Los Angeles Times Baltimore Sun -Lookout Landing -Camden Chat all 882 news articles »

Drone racing might be getting ready for prime time. Real estate developer and Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross has invested $1 million into the Drone Racing League (DRL), a New York startup looking to bring live drone racing to the public, the Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported today.

The league hopes to recreate successes that other fast-twitch sports have had in recent years. The X-Games is now a biannual competition broadcast live on ESPN in the US, and e-sports—which drone racing has been compared to—are now watched by over 89 million people across the world. The DRL held a test event earlier this year in an abandoned power plant in Yonkers, and plans to have its first public race later this year, according to the Journal.

“I felt [drone racing] could be a sport that resonated with people because it touches on the heritage of racing, but also brings in the benefits of new technology,” Nick Horbaczewski, one of the founders of the DRL and the former revenue officer at the running-through-seemingly-dangerous-obstacles-race company Tough Mudder, told the Journal.

First-person-view (FPV) drone racing, where racers build small custom-made drones and fly them, seeing through a camera relaying a live feed back to video goggles, is a kind of perfect storm of sports. It’s got speed (drones can travel upwards of 70 mph), it’s got crashes, and it’s got the video feeds live from the drones itself, combining aspects of NASCAR, Formula 1, and virtual-reality gaming into a sport. But what the sport has struggled with so far is turning the excitement of flying into something spectators would want to watch. The drones themselves, only about 10 inches wide, can be hard to spot at high speeds, and current technology only allows the drones to effectively broadcast standard-definition video speeds back to the pilot.

The DRL team isn’t the only one trying to get drone racing off the ground. Last month, the first US drone racing championship look place in a dusty field in Sacramento. The event, held as part of the California State Fair, only garnered a few hundred fans, but organizer Scot Refsland has already announced an international competition to be held in September 2016, with a purse of $100,000.

Ross’ investment firm, RSE Ventures, did not immediately respond to a question about what it is receiving in return for its $1 million investment.

RSE also owns FanVision—a technology that allows NASCAR fans in the stands to follow along with the race on a small screen, instead of constantly having to try to catch the cars as they zip by. In addition, RSE runs the International Champions Cup—a yearly soccer tournament that’s drawn crowds to watch teams like Chelsea, Barcelona, and Manchester United, in countries outside of soccer’s traditional home territories.

While $1 million may be a tiny investment compared to the billions in revenue US sports leagues like the MLB and NFL generate, it might prove to be the catalyst the sport needs to hit the mainstream. FanVision and Ross’ knack for knowing how to draw crowds may well be the lift the DRL needs as it prepares for its first race later this year.

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