firehose

Ummmm... pic.twitter.com/LgpbtNUJYP

— WHYGAVS W. Griswold (@whygavs) December 26, 2014

But—dammit ...

(via @kmattio)

We are living in the future!!!

Bitcoin, an invisible money that you can read articles about how to understand, is the new sponsor of St. Petersburg's college football bowl game, which is Friday night between NC State and UCF.

Since Bitcoin is a college football thing, Bitcoin needs a mascot. Fortunately, it already has one. Or BitPay, the company that paid for the Bitcoin Bowl in Bitcoin, does. I don't know. It's a mascot dressed up as a cookie with a pimp hat, and it has a small face in its midsection, like Krang. We'll figure out who's responsible for it later.

Met Mr. Bitcoin at the @BitPay Christmas dinner! #BitcoinBowl @BitcoinBowl pic.twitter.com/Ha9JSYFHXL

— Maria Gallippi (@BitPayMom) December 26, 2014

Mr. Bitcoin is apparently not a new thing.

Mr. Bitcoin in the #bitcoin conference Mexico City , @BitPay you guys rock!!! pic.twitter.com/92uTMpYBfn

— cesar.sx (@mrebola) April 22, 2014

Mr. Bitcoin cutting a rug at FIT 2014! http://t.co/7amoOdQZdQ via @YouTube #bitcoin

— BitPay (@BitPay) October 31, 2014

There is also this Bitcoin mascot, a dog named Curly:

Getting ready for the #BitcoinBowl with @MeetCurly! @BitPay @BitcoinBowl @UCFKnights @NCStateFootball #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/ydzOUBjWsv

— Julia Patterson (@juliaapatterson) December 26, 2014

There is also this Bitcoin mascot, a dog named Curly:

.@MeetCurly @BitPay's mascot is steeling he @espn show! @PackFootball y'all look great too! #BitcoinBowl pic.twitter.com/N5UEaESaMA

— Bitcoin St.Pete Bowl (@BitcoinBowl) December 25, 2014

There is also this Bitcoin mascot, a dog named Curly:

Curly ToTheMoon! #bitcoin #sxsw #nasa pic.twitter.com/cgJuKhEkgM

— BitPay (@BitPay) March 12, 2014

And, last but not least, this lil guy, who'll give you Bitcoin business in exchange for Bitcoin business:

The @Trucoin #bitcoin ATMs are now installed at @HotelZamora for the #BitcoinBowl @BitPay pic.twitter.com/IJwdhrbaHr

— Tony Gallippi (@TonyGallippi) December 26, 2014

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBAAALL?

itwbennett writes: A new programming language out of MIT, called Ur/Web, provides a way for developers to write pages as self-contained programs. It incorporates many of the most widely-used web technologies, freeing developers from working with each language individually. Ur/Web's author, Adam Chlipala, an MIT computer science assistant professor, will present his work next month at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages. He says, "In Ur/Web, everything is based on transactions, where a single client request is handled by what looks like an uninterrupted execution of a single function. The language implementation has optimizations in it to support running many requests in parallel, on real servers. But the programmer can pretend everything is a transaction and think in a simpler concurrency model."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Children's science media is shifting away from books, but it can still be effective as long as it hinges on narrative.

“Latte Motion” is a touching stop-motion animated short created by Japanese company Ajinomoto General Foods using 1,000 cups of coffee to promote its latte drink flavoring, Maxim Stick. The “world’s first latte art animation” carries the decidedly pro-coffee tagline, “Latte warms the world.” The company has also posted a behind-the-scenes video highlighting the making of the short.

via The Presurfer

“Vibe” is a short video by Israeli YouTube user Aviv M that demonstrates the art of “cardistry,” impressive acts of card flourish performed with a deck of standard playing cards.

via Doobybrain

The Savannah .GIF Festival is an upcoming film festival that will take place at the The Jepson Center in Savannah, Georgia on January 24, 2015 as part of Art Rise Savannah that celebrates the art of the animated GIF. The festival, which is currently seeking submissions, will whittle down the list to 20 to 30 minutes of GIFs, which will be projected on a movie screen along with musical accompaniment.

image via Savannah .GIF Festival

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Students at MIT revived an old campus tradition by building a large wooden roller coaster by hand on campus for incoming freshman — who also served as the main labor force for construction. Much to the chagrin of the engineers behind the project, early plans for a large loop had to be scrapped for safety reasons.

I can’t help it

Christmas is canceled. Well, if you got an Xbox or PlayStation console, it might feel that way. Both systems’ online gaming networks are still experiencing trouble today after they were downed yesterday by “hackers.”

Why is “hackers” in quotes? Because the group claiming responsibility is a nebulous bunch of trolls called “The Lizard Squad” that specializes in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. DDoS attacks are nothing more than spamming a server with an obscene number of incoming connections that eventually overload it and bring it down. There is no real “hacking” involved.

It’s a technique that does maximum damage with minimal know-how, and it’s a shame that it still seems to work so well. In the case of Xbox Live and PSN, players were having trouble connecting all day yesterday, which even amounted to some people not being able to play at all online or off.

$500 on @xbox +$250 on game discs=no Xmas play time – seriously, no offline play option WTF?! – sign me up for class action suit

— Ken Randall (@Ken_Randall) December 26, 2014

Imagine if Microsoft had kept their original “Xbox One needs an Internet connection” plan to function? *Shudder.*

As of today, it seems that Xbox Live has come back up for the most part while PSN is still mostly down, but both are reportedly experiencing persisting issues. In tweets from a now-suspended @LizardPatrol Twitter account, The Lizard Squad threatened this action a good deal of time beforehand, so it’s still a mystery as to how Microsoft and Sony managed not to do enough to prevent it.

Attacks were stopped around 2 hours ago, the current downtime is just the aftermath.

— Lizard Squad (@LizardMafia) December 26, 2014

The attacks themselves are supposedly over, so things should return to normal soon, but this never should have happened at all. Hopefully the outrage of a ruined Christmas will be enough to finally get something done about these overgrown trolls.

(image via Mike Poresky)

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carudamon119:

ライブドアニュース ‏@livedoornews  

【ストレス発散に】通常の約6倍サイズ、超巨大エンターキー「BIG ENTER」

theodp writes In addition to The Ghost of Steve Jobs, The Codecracker, a remix of 'The Nutcracker' performed by Silicon Valley's all-girl Castilleja School during Computer Science Education Week earlier this month featured a Bubble Sort Dance. Bubble Sort dancing, it turns out, is more popular than one might imagine. Search YouTube, for example, and you'll find students from the University of Rochester to Osmania University dancing to sort algorithms. Are you a fan of Hungarian folk-dancing? Well there's a very professionally-done Bubble Sort Dance for you! Indeed, well-meaning CS teachers are pushing kids to Bubble Sort Dance to hits like Beauty and a Beat, Roar, Gentleman, Heartbeat, Under the Sea, as well as other music.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Some policymakers (and most recently a Brazilian mayor) have argued that paternity leave policies would disrupt economic productivity. Quite the opposite, actually. In fact, it’s a policy that can boost economies, empower women, and make families happier.

Listen Carefully, This Is What Rape Culture Sounds Like In America:

survivorspeaks:

At the 2014 National Poetry Slam in August, spoken word artists Desireé Dallagiacomo and Mwende Katwiwa (a.k.a FreeQuency) performed the poem “American Rape Culture,” and explained how some of the songs we sing along to on the radio are directly contributing to rape culture. The result is a bold poem that reminds us how subtle — and dangerous — misogyny can be when put to a pop song tune.

Dallagiacomo begins the spoken word by pointing out that Robin Thicke sings the line "I know you want it," 18 times in “Blurred Lines.” Katwiwa adds that in Rick Ross’ "You Ain’t Even Know It" the rapper says, “Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it. Took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it.” Rape culture has become so mainstream that we hardly bat an eye when music icons sing about it.

"If you take the time on any given day to pay attention, you really start to notice these elements of rape culture permeating almost all areas of American life," Katwiwa told The Huffington Post. "Many of the examples used in the poem were things Des and I had already heard of or read about prior to sitting to write the piece, but when we did additional research, we were kinda overwhelmed with all the different examples we could have put in our poem."

Katwiwa’s and Dallagiacomo remind us how intolerable these trends in pop culture are when you consider that nearly one in five women will experience sexual assault in their lifetimes. As Katwiwa says in the poem, “Rape no longer only knows closed doors and dark alleyways, it’s assimilated into our daily routine.”

What sent her running, Shenteal says, was what happened when she asked whether she would still be bound to the contract if a Chihuahua died. “You can mail the carcass back to us, and then you can get out of the contract,” Shenteal recalls staff telling her. In a telephone interview, Campbell said he couldn’t imagine Shenteal was told that and joked, “Come on. Why not just the ears?”

felixinclusis:

saladdaysdemos: GRIZZLY BEARS R METAL (made with red ink and love) by li-art

sheofthevoid:

molly23:

lexievixen:

clockworkwhooves:

I LAUGHED SO HARD AT NASTY TEACHER

"If I had to paint a burp, it would be this."

Reblogging for “Mother Superior.”

a baby burp

Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away, CBS aired a holiday show about Chewie's family. Lucas still hates it.

submitted by faunablues [link] [20 comments]

Vox Schlock: Science Writer Falsely Claims Sunday Was 'Longest Night in the History of the Earth'

literarystarbucks:

Zelda goes up to the counter and orders a drink all by herself. Her husband and Ernest Hemingway panic and have her removed from the Starbucks. The barista picks up her drink and tastes it. It is delicious.

Suddenly, a big deal tonight: Not being able to watch a Dr. Who Christmas Special on Christmas. (It’s recording on the Sky box at home, but we won’t be back for days yet and it’s not the same.)

Even though one is both a novelist and screenwriter who has been a fan of the Doctor’s since the 1970s. And a fan who sneaked Four into a Star Trek novel.. And a fan who sneaked Five into one of her own novels. And who finally had the pleasure of writing for the Doctor under the Beeb’s auspices, though in print. And is yet, somehow… strangely… a woman.

Dammit, Christmas has not been perfect after all. But perhaps less because of the lack of Dr. Who (today) than the underlying context.

"I think in 10 years when ‘Doctor Who’ is still triumphantly successful, a lot of those [women] will grow up to be writers and directors who are desperate to do ‘Doctor Who.’"

Wait. What? "Wait ten years until the present generation of female Who fans grows up enough to have enough credential and also desperately wants to write for Dr. Who”?

Seriously? What about the last ten or twenty years’ worth of woman writers who have loved the Doctor for who he is, and are also writing for TV, on this side of the water or the other?  You can’t have dug that deeply into that stratum. Otherwise all of them wouldn’t have said “no” except one.

Stephen, for God’s sake, wake up! Women have been holding up half of Who fandom’s sky for decades. Most of the people managing the pledge drives that supported the Doctor on US public television when he was as new there as Monty Python? Women. Most of the people talking up the available Who books (I had them all while I was doing my earliest Trek work) in the eighties? Women. Other women got me into Who, and not because of how he looked. The Doctor does not need to be comely. It’s nice when he is, but dear God, hardly a requisite. The main issue is his courage, and his heart, and how the two engage one another: with the occasional nod to personal style. The character who adventures, who dares in the face of terrible odds to do the right thing, who succeeds (and sometimes fails at least as spectacularly) — that’s the character we want to see more of; to work with.

…And (over here, at least) to see something like as many woman writers working with him as men. Leaving aside the sheer statistical unlikeliness of at least a statistically significant percentage of the woman writers working in US and UK TV right now not being Who fans — this isn’t about demographics, or political correctness. It’s about point of view, and (again) about personal engagement. The Doctor’s male associates and companions have arguably been kind of a mixed bunch in terms of their effectiveness — excepting of course Captain Jack Harkness, always a law unto himself, the one being that every sentient creature in the universe knows would love the one lovable thing about them that no one else can see. But it would hardly take a six-sigma analysis of Who episodes to suggest that on the averages, it’s the female (or female-ish) companions and associates who routinely teach the Doctor most about being human: that being what he seems to most want to learn. And it wouldn’t seem like reaching to suggest that — at the very least — the female Who writers could have things to say to, and through, the Doctor that the male writers have so far missed.

Haven’t found the right women writers? Look more. Look harder.* Christmas is a time to consider the resolutions that will follow in the new time to come. The necessary resonances are all here, and the time is right. Because the more people of all available genders who bring their expertise to writing for our old friend, the stronger, smarter, deeper, better he’ll become. And isn’t that what this is all about?

Colleague: look harder.

(…And dammit, I missed Cabin Pressure last night, too. Plainly perfection is a nuanced thing…)

*And much as it pains me, to prevent confusion, I recuse myself from any such consideration right now. There are lots of woman writers who could do this work as well as I could, or better: with delight, with passion, desperately — as you seem to prefer. While I have universes to tend to that need my attention and no one else’s. It’s the burden we bear.