firehose

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Can felling trees into the Sandy River restore the waterway's ecology and bring back endangered species of salmon and trout?

The III Marine Expeditionary Force band (out of Okinawa, Japan) challenged the Republic of Korea Army Band to a friendly drum battle in a parking lot. The fallout from the battle is a lot of smiling and dancing.

via Digg

Artist Jesse England used a laser engraving machine to alter the typeface of a manual typewriter so it would produce letters in the much despised Comic Sans font, dubbing the project Sincerity Machine. The work was produced to make viewers consider the way media is created and consumed.

As part of my ongoing thesis of questioning how we create, consume, store (and fetishize) media, it’s my wish that a classic, functioning typewriter altered to write in the most popularly despised font of modern times will provoke thoughts about such media concerns.

The project’s name was borrowed from the webcomic “Cat and Girl.”

images via Jesse England

via Waxy.org

Well, it’s finally happened. Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian, who’s long been a target of harassment and abuse for her work on how women are portrayed in video games, was forced to cancel a public appearance due to safety concerns in light of a threat against her and the institution where she was scheduled to speak. Trigger warning for violence, particularly violence against women.

Sarkeesian was expected to give a speech today at the Center for Women and Gender at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. Yesterday, however, it was revealed that a threat against Sarkeesian and attendees of USU was sent via e-mail to several staffers at Utah State University late Monday night.

According to student-run newspaper the Standard Examiner, the author threatened the school with “”the deadliest school shooting in American history” and said that, “feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and the sake of all the others they’ve wronged.” Local press outlet Deseret News also notes that the author specifically invoked the Montreal Massacre gunman by name, referring to a 1989 campus shooting at the École Polytechnique in Canada where fourteen women were killed by a 25-year-old man claiming to be “fighting feminism.”

Despite these threats, the event was scheduled to continue anyway until Sarkeesian requested a higher level of security and was told by school officials that they were not permitted to ban concealed weapons from the premises. “In accordance with the State of Utah law regarding the carrying of firearms,” the statement from USU reads, “if a person has a valid concealed firearm permit and is carrying a weapon, they are permitted to have it at the venue.”

In light of this, Anita Sarkeesian cancelled the event for the safety of those who would have been in attendance, and took to Twitter to discuss her decision.

Forced to cancel my talk at USU after receiving death threats because police wouldn’t take steps to prevent concealed firearms at the event.

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014

Requested pat downs or metal detectors after mass shooting threat but because of Utah’s open carry laws police wouldn’t do firearm searches. — Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014

To be clear: I didn’t cancel my USU talk because of terrorist threats, I canceled because I didn’t feel the security measures were adequate. — Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 15, 2014

Sarkeesian also disclosed that other threats had been made against her and USU, and that one claimed affiliation with #GamerGate, the now months-long campaign for “journalistic integrity” that has the unfortunate side effect of increasing and even encouraging harassment against mostly female indie game developers and journalists.

“At this point supporting #gamergate is implicitly supporting the harassment of women in the gaming industry,” Sarkeesian said in another tweet.

Now that the event has been cancelled, USU has confirmed that there is no lingering threat to students on campus; the FBI Cyber Terrorism Task Force is now working with both school and Utah state officials, and confirmed to the Student Examiner that the threats made are similar to others that have been made against Sarkeesian in the past.

Meanwhile on the Internet, Twitter users frustrated with the news of yet another death threat against Sarkeesian began using the hashtag #StopGamergate2014 to express their concerns over the volatile and destructive nature of the #Gamergate campaign:

#StopGamerGate2014 Because enough smart, lovely people have already been driven out of games. The movement is harmful, even if you aren’t. — Davin IS BEHIND YOU (@onidavin) October 15, 2014

#StopGamerGate2014 because if you want better ethics, you’ve kind of proving you don’t understand moral priorities by using a poison banner.

— Tauriq Moosa (@tauriqmoosa) October 15, 2014

Literally how #GamerGate looks to the rest of the world today. #StopGamerGate2014 http://t.co/5P1rYt0KzA pic.twitter.com/004qmto1ei

— Donna The Dead (@MildlyAmused) October 15, 2014

#stopgamergate2014 because we’re literally having universities threatened with shootings. over video games. O.V.E.R V.I.D.E.O.G.A.M.E.S. — Celtic Steel (@TopGearNY) October 15, 2014

#StopGamerGate2014 Because I am scared to tweet this. — Mara Wilson (@MaraWritesStuff) October 15, 2014

#StopGamerGate2014 Criticism is not “a war on gamers.” Diversity is not “a SJW agenda.” Harassment and terror is not “a consumer movement.”

— Robbin’ Graves (@ShadowPraxis) October 15, 2014

At time of writing, #StopGamergate2014 is still the number one trending hashtag across the United States, and many mainstream press outlets over the past few days have started to weigh in on the abuse that’s now become almost synonymous with Gamergate—including The Washington Post, and, as we noted yesterday, MSNBC and CNN.

Regardless of any good intentions that those actually invested in game ethics might have, they are doing a disservice to their own motives by aligning themselves with #Gamergate. It’s become clear that the toxic aspects of #Gamergate are now threatening not just women and marginalized voices in gaming, but the entire medium itself in the eyes of the non-gaming public.

1999: gamers demand we stop blaming school shootings on videogames. 2014: gamers threaten a school shooting because videogames.

— Dead Cousin Squinky (@TheSquink) October 15, 2014

(via Deseret News)

Previously in #Gamergate

• Brianna Wu Describes “War On Women” In The Gaming Industry On MSNBC
• You Can Watch Anita Sarkeesian’s XOXO Talk In Its Entirety Right Here
• Intel Issues Official Statement Over Gamergate Related Advertising Pull

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A reminder to everyone in the comments section: please read and respect The Mary Sue’s official comment policy, as we do enforce it and will delete comments or ban users accordingly. I draw your attention to the following excerpt: “[Comments will be deleted if they contain] personal attacks against another commenter or the writer of the post. This can run from name calling to sentences that include the words ‘people like you’ or statements that begin ‘I bet you’ or ‘you must/probably’ etc. This is regardless of what ‘side’ you’re on.”

They’re also predicting that Lex Luthor will win his bid for president of the United States.

Nobody crunches numbers like FiveThirtyEight, except maybe Randall Monroe and Tim Hanley, the latter of whom is, naturally, referenced in Walt Hickey’s breakdown on FiveThirtyEight.com. Hanley has been crunching the numbers on the gender make up of the folks who work on Marvel and DC comics for years, but FiveThirtyEight wanted to take a slightly different tack by looking at the characters who make up those comics in the first place.

Hickey’s database was that of any good nerd: the fan-curated DC and Marvel wikia projects, which gave him access to lists of characters who had ever appeared in a given comics issue, as well as their gender and sexuality, secret identity, alignment (whether they were a hero, a villain, or neutral), their date of first appearance, and their total number of appearances. Speaking as a regular user of those wikia projects (thanks to a hard drive failure, I have a LOT of back issues to catalog in Delicious Library, believe me), I wonder about the overall accuracy of those total appearance numbers. I’m sure they’re broadly accurate, but more often than not unless a given comics issue was part of a popular run, its entry can lack any information beyond creator names and release date, much less which characters appeared in it.

Of course, there’s a whole ‘nother discussion to be had on why we so often focus on the Big Two when we want to talk about female characters in comics. Which is not to say that the focus is unfounded, but simply that it’s useful to examine the reasons, if only so that we don’t forget to acknowledge the existence of a vibrant American comics industry outside of those two companies. If I had to nail down the biggest reason: I think “superhero comics are our most universal modern American mythology” is a fairly solid position to take, and, in that context, examining who that mythology is designed to appeal to is vitally important.

But I digress: numbers were crunched. For the real nerds reading this, in order to cut down on duplicates due to different versions of characters, Hickey’s data only includes characters from the longest running continuities at DC and Marvel, DC’s New Earth universe and Marvel’s Earth-616 universe. The data also begins in 1961, the year that Marvel Comics began publishing under their current name.

Women were substantially underrepresented among characters with at least one appearance. Among the characters for which we have gender data, females made up only 29.3 percent of the DC character list and 24.7 percent of the Marvel roster…

The same trend bears out when we look at characters with higher appearance counts. When we zero in on the 2,415 DC and 3,342 Marvel characters with gender data who appear at least 10 times — the set of characters that probably gives the most consistent view of what we see on the page — female characters make up only 30.9 percent of the DC universe and 30.6 percent of the Marvel universe…

Of characters with gender data and 100 or more appearances (294 DC characters and 414 Marvel characters), only 29.0 percent of DC’s are female, and a similar 31.1 percent of the Marvel crowd is…

Hickey attributes Marvel’s bigger gap between female characters with  “>1 appearances” and “>10 appearances” to a huge disparity in the gender of one-off villains. 44% of Marvel characters who appeared less than 10 times are bad guys, and Marvel’s bad guys are 80% male.

In both DC and Marvel, women were of neutral allegiance at a higher rate than men. Men were also more likely to be bad in each universe — in fact, bad-aligned men alone outnumbered all women combined. In other words, there’s something of a paucity of female villains.

This would certainly bears out my own anecdotal experience as part of a gender-swapped villains cosplay group a few years ago: it was way more difficult to find enough female villains for the guys to redesign. Hickey noted that overall, gender parity is improving over time at the Big Two (see this article’s top pic), but of new characters created every year since the 1980′s, less than 50% are female, with a peak in the early ’00s of 40-45% female.  The pace of change is somewhat glacial (again, see this article’s top pic). You can read all of Hickey’s commentary and findings at the full article on FiveThirtyEight.

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Mashable teamed up with RiffTrax, the original group of writers and performers from Mystery Science Theater 3000, to add their sarcastic commentary to a few scenes from the classic animated Halloween Peanuts special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The full television special will air tonight October 15th at 8PM ET on ABC in the United States.

At New York Comic Con we had an amazing opportunity to sit down with Rebecca Sugar, creator and showrunner of Steven Universe, Cartoon Network’s first cartoon series created and run by a woman. With Adventure-Time-alumn Sugar were voice actors Zach Callison (who plays the titular Steven) and singer/actress Estelle (who provides the voice of the Gems’ leader, Garnet).

In case you haven’t checked out the series, now just a little more than half way through its first season, it concerns the adventures of a group of three near-immortal warrior women with gemstone-based magical powers and their young charge: a half-magical boy named Steven, the son of their late leader Rose Quartz, who “gave up her physical form” in order to have a child with her non-magical beloved, Greg Universe. Steven’s still quite young, and his powers are somewhat unreliable, and even more unknown to the Crystal Gems since they’ve never heard of any other half-magical people. But Steven does his best to keep his weird little family together and to help them get along with their human neighbors and to help with monster-fighting, artifact-recovering missions whenever he’s allowed.

So that’s the plot. More broadly, the show is doing fascinating things with gender, boldly presenting a male main character who is entirely comfortable and even excited about examples of female power, displaying a fantastically racially diverse cast, packaging magical girl tropes and aiming them squarely at a broad audience instead of just young girls, and commenting on its characters’ relationships with family, grief, responsibility, anxiety, escapist entertainment, and the idea of destiny.

But enough of my words! Let’s hear about the show from the folks who make it.

Reporter: How did the idea of Steven Universe come to fruition?

Rebecca Sugar: Fruition? Well, I started with wanting to do something about my younger brother Steven, and we were both big fantasy nerds growing up. So I wanted to try and combine the feeling of the video games we used to play and the stuff we used to watch, with how it actually felt to just be growing up with Steven; to have my best friend be my sibling. And that, to me, was the feeling I wanted to capture with the show.

The Mary Sue: The show has taken its time rolling out the larger details of the Gem’s world, but we’ve had a couple of episodes recently that really started things off, revealing some of those things. Is this the beginning of more frequent hints at the larger world, or is it going to maintain the same pace of exposition?

Sugar: Well, I think the snowball is rolling now. In an unstoppable way. There are things that are pretty complicated that are going on with the Gems, things that they don’t really think Steven is ready to know about, but it’s becoming impossible to ignore. And it’s going to become more impossible, increasingly impossible to ignore, as the season rolls out. So, please watch it! You’re gonna learn everything when he does, and soon.

Reporter: Estelle, how’d you get involved with Steven Universe, and are you excited about the new album coming out?

Estelle: Oh yeah, her people called my people. No! (laughter) No, they called my agent and the more I got to hear about [Garnet], the more I was like: “I think I can do that, it sounds like me… if…” I come from a huge family, I have five sisters and three brothers, and they’re all younger than me. So I understand taking care of being responsible for not screaming every three minutes, “Steven!” Being like, “If you don’t come here, I’ll give you the headlock!” I understand that whole energy too, so it was pretty easy. It’s been fun. I’m waiting, I’m excited for my new album. I’ve been working on that in-between everything. I kind of started on this process at the beginning of my last album. It’s fun. This just gives me extra—I’ve learned I have extra vocal abilities I hadn’t even known I had, with all the work. It’s kinda cool. Extra superpowers!

Reporter: Is there gonna be a chance for Garnet to get her own musical number?

Estelle: Ha-HAH! (laughter) I can’t tell that, can’t tell that. Can’t tell that.

Sugar: There’s a pretty good chance. But you think I’m gonna rush a song for Estelle? I wait.

Estelle: She’s an awesome songwriter, you know. The entire team that’s been doing songs on the show so far, I love them. The theme song itself is brilliant. (to Zach Callison) You sing pretty good in it.

Zach Callison: Thank you! Actually, my original audition was the theme song, the extended theme song. It had a little bit on the front. She actually had me sing it for the audition, when I recorded it and sent it in. In addition to doing the dialogue from the original pilot. And I was already impressed by that when I first heard the song on the audition.

Reporter: What’s it like being the main character on the show, being Steven?

Callison: Well, it’s the first time I’ve had a lead on a show before. But it’s really fun. I mean, getting to come in every week and work on a character like this on a show like this, that’s so much fun. It’s like the shows that I watched growing up on Cartoon Network. It’s kind of a dream come true. It’s a blast and I’m having a lot of fun with it.

Reporter: How important was it that you actually enjoyed the show yourself?

Callison: I think it makes it more fun, to be a part of a project. If you don’t enjoy the product that you’re working on, then can you say that you’re really getting satisfaction from working on it? Sometimes there are things that are tougher to do, maybe that you don’t like to do. But in the end it all leads up to things that are an integral part of your career but also that you really, really enjoy working on and will cherish.

Reporter: Seems like you’re always a superhero. You’re Billy Batson, Steven Universe…

Callison: Haha, yeah.

Reporter: That’s a good way to do things, man.

Callison: Yeah, I gotta play the hero, man. Although I would like to do some more villain stuff. I haven’t really done much of anything in the actual “villain” thing. I’ve done some characters with attitudes or smart mouths, but never a villain. So that might be an interesting future path.

Sugar: It was fun in “Steven and the Stevens.”

Callison: Yes!

Sugar: Because the Steven, well, our main timeline Steven, he learns to understand that he’s obnoxious, and at that point he becomes jaded and basically a jaded Steven can’t exist or it breaks the show, so he has to be destroyed. But there’s this five minutes of a seriously jaded and then kind of criminally insane Steven that you did an amazing job with.

Callison: Thank you!

Sugar: Also three very passive aggressive Stevens, all of that very good. That kind of Steven had never existed before.

Callison: And then eventually Steven mass-murder at the end of the episode, and then we’re left with… Steven.

Reporter: Rebecca, are there any animated works that you would consciously try to reference or pay homage to? There was one episode where Pearl clones herself and Steven has to deal with it. And some fans observed that some of the action choreography seemed to resemble things out of Revolutionary Girl Utena. Is there anything to that?

Sugar: Yes, I love that show! I love that show. That was storyboarded by Joe Johnston, who is really an artist. I mean, I love a lot of anime, I love a lot of cartoons. I suppose we make a lot of references to the things that we love in cartoons. But I try to have it be from so many different things that together they make something really new. That’s really my goal.

TMS: Garnet’s a very tight- lipped and taciturn character. And yet she’s taken on the leader role in the absence of Rose Quartz. Do you think that was a difficult transition for her? To sort of take on a role that meant she had to interact more with the other Gems?

Estelle: Little bit. I feel like, yeah. I understand, I completely identify. But I think she does a good job of it, and you see more and more as we go on that she’s becoming a bit more open and she’s a bit warmer to Steven. She’s less like “ARRR” and she’s been more like, “Okay Steven, it’s alright, you’re a young boy, you get it. You’re growing up.” It’s cool to see, I think, if you look at all the characters, it’s people being able identify with that. Something that’s highly identifiable is people that are really closed off, and really quite “to themselves,” and the more you get around people that you love and you grow with, the more you become open. She gets to it! It just takes her a minute.

Previously in Steven Universe

• The Mary Sue Exclusive Preview: BOOM! Studios’ Steven Universe #3
• Bee and Puppycat, Steven Universe Both Get More Episodes
• Get Ready to Love Every Character in Steven Universe by the End of This Clip

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OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

“torso,” huh?

Men focus on a baseball player's torso more than women, who look only at the face.

Cory Grimes

Original Source

hodad

#ethnomusicology

Original Source

The family of the former Bears defensive back joins a group of plaintiffs arguing that the settlement eliminates most players diagnosed with CTE.

The family of former Chicago Bears defensive back Dave Duerson filed an objection to the NFL concussion settlement Tuesday. The objection criticizes the proposal for limitations compensating players or their families in cases of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Duerson committed suicide in 2011 by shooting himself in the chest to preserve his brain for study.

Earlier this week, ESPN reported that most of the retired NFL players eligible have decided to accept the terms of the NFL concussion settlement. However, Dureson joins nine other former players who filed an objection to the settlement based on the same concerns over how it compensates CTE sufferers.

According to a report from ESPN, attorney Bill Gibbs of Corboy & Demetrio said, "The proposed settlement is an insult to his legacy. ... The NFL's denial continues."

Attorneys for Duerson and the other players objecting are arguing that the settlement "disenfranchises the families who will inevitably suffer the horrific ramifications of CTE" by not compensating those diagnosed with the disease after July 7, 2014, when U.S. District Judge Anita Brody issued preliminary approval for the settlement. Players diagnosed with CTE before Jan. 1, 2006, would also not be compensated under terms of the current settlement.

Gibbs blasted the settlement, accusing the NFL of sacrificing long-term health of its players by setting up the settlement to avoid any further lawsuits.

"The League’s motivation is clear—it desires to, once and for all time, forever ban any more lawsuits for damages as a result of its decades long fraudulent concealment of the link between repetitive head trauma and later in life cognitive and mental health deficiencies. But, in attempting to do so, the NFL blatantly ignores the mental health deficits affecting its former players. And, it utterly fails to account for CTE."

Duerson's case is one of about 50 cases that stand to be compensated for a CTE diagnosis. Under the current settlement that most former NFL players are accepting, Duerson's family would receive approximately $2.6 million.

"In the 10 years leading up to his suicide at age fifty (50), as a result of the progressive brain degeneration, CTE, Dave Duerson, a man with no prior history of depression or psychological issues, complained of intense headaches, worsening short-term memory, language difficulties, vision trouble, and a growing problem with impulse control, said Tregg Duerson, the son of Dave Duerson"

CTE has been discovered in the brains of dozens of deceased players. Researchers also believe that they have identified a means of diagnosing players with CTE before their death.

Judge Brody has a fairness hearing for the settlement set for Nov. 19. The objections and the issue of how the settlement treats players with CTE and their families is expected to be further addressed as part of that hearing.

Against all odds, Tony Romo kept the Cowboys alive with a 23-yard pass to Terrance Williams on third-and-20. Danny Kelly takes a closer look at how he did it.

Getting to 5-1 hasn't always been easy for the Dallas Cowboys. After stumbling out of the gate against the Niners, Dallas needed a huge comeback against the Rams in Week 3. They mounted another this past week in Seattle to knock off the defending champs.

Their shocking defeat of a Seahawks team that had lost one of their previous 19 games at home almost didn't happen though, and it took a brilliant, absurdly low probability, gutsy play by Tony Romo on a third-and-20 late in the game put the Cowboys alone in the NFL spotlight after six weeks.

Here's what the official boxscore says:

3-20-DAL 31 (4:55 4th Quarter) (Shotgun) T.Romo pass deep right to T.Williams ran ob at SEA 46 for 23 yards.

I feel like they should add an exclamation mark to plays like this, because that vapid, emotionless fragment does nothing to capture what might be the play of the year thus far in the NFL.

With 4:55 remaining in the game, the Seahawks led 23-20 despite Dallas' huge advantage in yards, first downs, and time of possession. Seattle had the Cowboys on the ropes, though, and after Romo missed Dez Bryant to the short left, Dallas was faced with a 3rd and 20 and the prospect of giving the ball back to the Seahawks so they could run the clock out.

At this moment, according to Advanced NFL Analysis Win Probability Chart, which is based on extensive modeling of previous game situations of this down/distance/time, the Cowboys had an 18 percent chance of winning the game.

For this play in particular to be successful, the odds were even worse. To this point in the season, NFL teams were a combined 1-for-55 on 3rd and 20 or longer. That's about a 1.8 percent success rate.

Even without consulting the odds, the gut feeling, whether you were watching the game live or on television, was the same. Despite being largely outplayed by Dallas, Seattle's crowd was back into it, and seemingly had the Cowboys on the ropes. Dallas was deep in their own end, faced a nearly impossible 3rd down conversion, and were going to punt the ball back to a team that could potentially grab a couple of first downs to run the clock out.

The breakdown

Romo wasn't having it. At the snap, Dallas' protections get all wonky, and left tackle Tyron Smith runs into DeMarco Murray, who tries to chip and release. Bruce Irvin easily sideswipes this chip and has a clear, open lane on Romo. Romo reverse pivots into his signature spin move, evades another two oncoming rushers, signals to Terrance Williams to head to the sideline, then throws on the run.

We've seen this trademark play a hundred times, and as Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll mentioned after the game, Seattle even "zeroed in on" that exact spin move in practice that week, in preparation for their rush packages.

As for what was going through Tony's head at that moment?

"I think when you turn and come out of movement, you just try and find guys," Romo said after the game. "You don't just find Terrance, you find the defensive backs. You find where they are and then find out which guys are going to get a first down, which guys are not on your team."

Well, for a bird's eye view of what he was trying to see downfield, here's where Seattle's defensive backs were located in relation to his receivers, just as he spun out of pressure.

"So you put it over the first guy and away from the second guy," said Romo. "Terrance just did all the rest. He made a great play."

The first guy would be Steven Terrell, recently signed off of Seattle's practice squad. The second would be Marcus Burley, a nickel corner forced to play outside due to Byron Maxwell's injury earlier in the game.

As he said, Romo floated the pass over Terrell, who is in the flats on Witten, and in front of Burley, who has deep coverage responsibility.

Williams "does the rest."

Jason Witten holds off on going for the pass, either knowing he wasn't the intended target or that it was out of his reach.

The play is reviewed, and stands. The Cowboys would pounce, and the Seahawks would subsequently fold after their devastating failure to get off the field. Dallas would run DeMarco Murray three straight times. He picked up 46 yards and a touchdown with ease. Lead taken. 27-23. Dallas' defense would hold.

The reaction

"You have to make plays in the NFL, that's the difference," Cowboys' passing game coordinator Scott Linehan said after the game. "You can go back and say five plays that were the difference in winning and losing games. None were bigger than Terrance's catch."

Pete Carroll knew the gravity of that play, and spoke of it after.

"The game is in our hands then," he said. "Third-and-20, if we get out, then we're working to kill the clock and win the football game.

"It looked just like [what Romo did] in Houston [in Week 5]," Carroll continued, "I didn't see it clearly, how he escaped, but you saw how he beat one of the top players in football a week ago. He makes a great throw and catch, and puts them in the scoring zone and everything goes their way from there.

"Tony has magic about him, he always has, and he pulled it out right then and made an incredibly good play."

Good: Encouraging young children to play sports.

Bad: Kicking them.

This is Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, who attended a soccer game with some kids in a park on Wednesday. They invited him to play, so he decided to KICK A 9-YEAR-OLD CHILD in an attempt to win the ball. The Pro-Kicking Children Lobby will give you its endorsement for your next election.

(h/t Deadspin)

Think you like wasabi? Think again.

The little green balls that sting nostrils and line sushi platters around the world are very rarely what their name suggests.

What sushi restaurants actually serve alongside spicy tuna rolls is a horseradish-based concoction that is injected with green food coloring, infused with various types of mustard, and, often even, a bunch of other chemicals. Trevor Corson, the author of The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice, put it pretty starkly a few years back:

...it’s just plain old horseradish, plus some mix of mustard extract, citric acid, yellow dye no. 5, and blue dye no. 1. It comes in big industrial bags as a powder, and the chefs mix it with water before dinner to make that caustic paste.

The real thing is quite different. True wasabi comes from the stem of the wasabi plant, which grows to nearly two feet long, and is famously finicky to harvest. It's most often sold by the stem, and served freshly grated. "It has a more delicate, complex, and sweeter flavor than the fake stuff you’re used to," according to Corson.

Very few people have tried the real thing, because the real thing is that rare. "The extent to which we're eating fake wasabi is huge," said Brian Oats, the president of Pacific Coast Wasabi, which bills itself as "North America’s only commercial grower of high-quality water-grown authentic Wasabi.". "Probably about 99 percent of wasabi is fake in the North America." That holds just about everywhere else, too. Even, though some might not realize it, in Japan. "I'd say about 95 percent is fake in Japan," he added.

Hiroko Shimbo, a sushi chef and the author of The Sushi Experience, agrees. "99 percent sounds about right," She said. "But it could be 95 percent."

And even in instances that real wasabi is used, it makes up a (very) negligible part of the paste—less than 1 percent, according to Oats.

The reason real, fresh wasabi is rarely served is mainly an issue of economics. There's a lot more demand than there is supply—largely because wasabi root is hard to grow and handle—and there has been for a long time. As a result, serving fresh, shaved wasabi to sushi goers, or even selling it dried in packages, would mean charging more than most customers were willing to pay—between $3 and $5 dollars for the typical ball served alongside sushi, according to Oats.

Rather than pair pricey raw fish with a popular but pricey flavor counterpart, the industry developed a considerably cheaper alternative—and long before sushi was popularized in the United States. "It was first created in Japan, before it came to America," said Shimbo. "People who love food, like 'foodies' from New York City, probably know this, but a lot of people don't."

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A second Texas nurse who has tested positive for Ebola was on a commercial jetliner from Cleveland to Dallas the night before she arrived at the hospital with a fever and was later diagnosed with the deadly virus, officials said today. The nurse, who has been identified as nurse Amber Vinson, 29, was part of the team at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital who took care of Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian man who died of Ebola on Oct. 8. She is the second member of the hospital staff to contract the virus and a Dallas official warned today that additional cases among the hospital's health care workers is a "very real possibility." Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell said today that the patient would be transferred to Emory Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, which has successfully treated other Ebola patients.

The city's animal shelter is now caring for the dog at an undisclosed location, officials said. The Dallas Animal Services and Adoption Center posted a note on its official Facebook page confirming their involvement and they wrote that they will be posting pictures "once we've shown the owner he's okay."

submitted by kellyjeanrobb [link] [41 comments]

submitted by blahyawnblah [link] [39 comments]

...from an anonymous blog entry...
I am a regular renter from Hertz (President's Circle)... I got into a rental car at O'Hare airport. 

I immediately noticed the new NeverLost and I was completely shocked to see a camera built into the device looking at me. The system can't be turned off from what could tell...

I know rental car companies have been tracking the speed and movements of their vehicles for years but putting a camera inside the cabin of the vehicle is taking their need for information a little TOO FAR. I find this to be completely UNACCEPTABLE. In fact, if I get another car from Hertz with a camera in it, I will move our business from Hertz completely. 

I influence car rentals of many others and I don't think anyone would want to be on camera while they are driving around or sitting at a red light. 

Given what Hertz has invested in this system, I wonder how much consumer pressure will make them to pull the plug on this. Business is built one customer at a time and they will no longer have me as a customer. What are your thoughts? (more)

Further investigations revealed...
...the Hertz NeverLost 6 platform will include an ARM Cortex-A9 architecture with quad cores running at 1GHz, a high-res TFT display, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity and a GPS module that engineers built around SiRFstarIV architecture. Also included are a keypad, camera module, accelerometers and a Gyros sensor board...

Feminist Cancels Speech at Utah State Amid Threat ABC News A feminist speaker has canceled a speech at Utah State University after learning the school would allow concealed firearms despite an anonymous threat against her. Anita Sarkeesian was scheduled to give a presentation on the portrayal of women in video ... and more »

What is burnout syndrome? - PubMed Health - National Library of Medicine - PubMed Health:

Having a “burnout” seems to have become a mass phenomenon receiving constant media attention. More and more people are missing work due to “burnout syndrome.” But is this set of symptoms a clearly-defined disease? How is burnout different from depression? There are many questions that remain unanswered.

Peekaboo likes the head scratchies.

Ensmallen this head to the smallets smishes

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Michael Tsai has a nice roundup of additional commentary on Mac developers’ increasing frustrations with the Mac App Store. The one that gets me, and which seems under-remarked-upon, is how Apple’s own apps in the App Store are exempt from sandbox restrictions. Third-party apps are never on equal footing with Apple’s, but with sandboxing, it’s almost absurd.