firehose

K-I-A-S KIAS! KIAS! KIAS!

A team called the Kia Sorentos drafted Manny Pacquiao with the No. 11 pick in the Philippine Basketball Association draft — the penultimate selection of the first round.

Pacquiao was introduced as the head coach of the Kia Sorentos in June, so it would have been ~pretty~ awkward if he were selected by anyone else in the draft.

The new player-coach is scheduled for an upcoming fight against Chris Algieri, too, so ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

PBA Basketball Team Names, RANKED

(1) Talk ‘N Text Tropang Texters
(2) Rain or Shine Elasto Painters
(3) San Miguel Beermen
(4) Kia Sorentos
(5) Barako Bull Energy
(6) NLEX Road Warriors
(7) Alaska Aces
(8) Blackwater Sports

(via @BryanAGraham)

NBC has released a 10-minute video of some of the funniest bloopers from season six of the television show Parks and Recreation. The seventh and final season of Parks and Recreation has begun production and is scheduled to air sometime next year.

An anonymous reader writes Researchers have pinpointed the environmental source of fungal infections that have been sickening HIV/AIDS patients in Southern California for decades. It literally grows on trees. The discovery is based on the science project of a 13-year-old girl, who spent the summer gathering soil and tree samples from areas around Los Angeles hardest hit by infections of the fungus named Cryptococcus gattii.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A look inside Middle East Comic Con! Profiles of Jules Feiffer and Ed Piskor! The worst parents in comics! Plus much more!

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Bike-sharing had a banner year in 2013, with a 60% increase in new programs launched worldwide. That momentum hasn’t flagged; 68 cities around the world have launched bike-share programs this year, says Russell Meddin, who manages The Bike-Sharing World Map. That’s an average of two a week, and it brings the total number of bike-share programs internationally to 730.

And the country with the fastest build-out of sharable bike systems isn’t one known for its urban innovation or environmental consciousness. In almost every category, China tops the global bike-share charts.

The Middle Kingdom surpassed Italy this year to become the country with the most programs, says the Earth Policy Institute. In fact, of the 20 biggest bike share programs on the planet, all but four are in China. The exceptions are Paris, London, Barcelona, and New York (and the last two tie for #20):

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As you can see, the biggest program in the world is Hangzhou, with 78,000 bikes (though Wuhan reportedly had 100,000 as of Oct. 2013, bike-share experts question the city’s reliability, according to Bike-sharing Blog). The city in eastern China launched its program with in 2008, offering 2,800 bikes; to lower the risk of theft, the bikes had fixed gears. But it’s not the only city in China where a bike-share program is booming. Beijing will beat out Paris as the capital city with the biggest bike-share system, with 24,000 bikes by the end of 2014.

Sure, some of that has to do with the sheer size of Chinese cities. But the rapid build-out of China’s bike-share programs also speaks to another way it’s setting itself apart from programs in the US and Europe. The majority of bike-share programs in richer countries charge users fees or rely on corporate sponsors for funding. London bike-sharers pay£90 ($149) a year, and New York’s CitiBike charges users an annual fee of $95 (plus tax),  and Paris’ program costs €29 ($38). In China, city governments pay for bike-sharing the way they do any other form of public transportation programs—meaning that the country’s millions of users are biking for free.

hodad

You can’t make this shit up.

According to a lawsuit filed in 2012 in Missouri federal court, Justin Cosma and another officer, Richard Carter, approached a 12-year-old boy who was checking the mailbox at the end of his driveway in June 2010. Cosma was an officer with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office at the time, the lawsuit states. The pair asked the boy if he'd been playing on a nearby highway, and he replied no, according to the lawsuit.

Then, the officers "became confrontational" and intimidated the child, the lawsuit claims. "Unprovoked and without cause, the deputies grabbed [the boy], choked him around the neck and threw him to the ground," it says. The boy was shirtless at the time, and allegedly "suffered bruising, choke marks, scrapes and cuts across his body."

The 12-year-old was transferred to a medical facility for treatment, but the lawsuit says Cosma and the other officer reported the incident as "assault of a law enforcement officer third degree” and “resisting/interfering with arrest, detention or stop."

Jefferson County prosecutors "refused to issue a juvenile case" against the young child, the suit says.

Original Source

Due to “low ratings,” another radio station switched formats and dumped the vile talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh. This time the station serves listeners in *Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

It’s not hard to believe. People were greatly angered around the country, after Limbaugh ridiculed Robin Williams just one day after the comedian died. Lewis Black publicly slammed Limbaugh last week, in disgust, and subsequently, over a quarter of a million people ‘liked’ Black’s ‘Fuck you, Rush Limbaugh,’ Facebook post. That says a lot about the public’s discontent over Limbaugh. Perhaps last week was enough to trigger this station to bid farewell to the hate jock.

Here is the radio station’s Wikipedia update:

Clear Channel began simulcasting KKSY’s programming on WMT-FM (96.5 FM) on December 27, 2011.[1][2] The programming moved to 96.5 FM exclusively on January 2, 2012 (with the KKSY-FM call letters following a few weeks later), and 95.7 FM began simulcasting the news/talk programming of sister station WMT, eventually changing call letters to KWMG.[3] On March 1, 2013, KWMG changed their call letters to the current KOSY-FM.

On August 18th, 2014, KOSY-FM dropped the WMT simulcast without warning, likely due to low ratings, and flipped to Top 40/CHR as Y 95.7.

Below is the station’s former logo.

Yes, it seems that most people find the sound of pop/contemporary music much more agreeable, than having to listen to a well-known racist, misogynist, bigot filling their airways. Rush Limbaugh continues to create his own enemies. Hundreds of thousands of people now protest him and are getting more and more aggressive and impatient. The petition below, that goes out to 40 Limbaugh’s sponsors at a time, jumped over 15,000 signatures last week. Folks at StopRush, FlushRush and BoycottRush work hard to make it easy for just about anyone to get involved in big/small ways:

• Sign: Limbaugh Sponsor & Clear Channel Petition
• Visit/Like: BoycottRush Facebook Group
• Join: The Fight To Flush Rush
• Visit: StopRush.net for a list of Limbaugh Sponsors

Thank You Richard Myers. Rest In Peace. We Will Finish This.

Special thanks to BoycottRush volunteer, Freya.  Story cross-posted in Daily Kos.

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.”

― William Faulkner

Original Source

by Gerald Schmidt From a very early glimpse (just a table with a few splashes of color) at the start of 2014, to the big unveiling earlier this summer at PePcon and the Creative Cloud launch, the new fixed-layout EPUB export feature has been, for me, the year’s main event in the InDesign world. Selecting Export […]

NES style Twin Peaks intro!

David Lynch’s 1984 release of Dune had some interesting marketing associated with it – like a series of activity books. Yes, you could actually buy Dune coloring books and add your own spin to scenes like Paul Atreides sticking his hand in the Gom Jabbar. It’s just the kind of image every kid wants to color! Beyond coloring pages, there were activities like weighing Baron Harkonnen, following the dots to create images, dressing up paper dolls, and making No Bake Spice Cookies. Eating those cookies probably won’t result in a case of glowing blue eyes.

Here are some of the best pages.

These activity books are so fun and bizarre that I’m tempted to track them down on eBay. If you can’t get enough of the pages, a Google search turns up several more of the Dune activity book pages.

via Coilhouse

Fran Blanche shares strategies for Opening Up, Setting, and Regulating Clockwork Pocket Watches:

I’m back in the Famous FranLab to show off my favorite timepieces, and a little instruction about how to set and regulate an antique pocket watch yourself.

Read more.

[video]

A magnitude six earthquake shook the Napa Valley and Northern California on Sunday, damaging buildings and disrupting power. Jawbone, creator of the Up fitness tracker, today released data revealing the... Keep reading →

algopop:

Secret Messaging service found in Google Translate

Security researchers have discovered that strange variations of latin words from the Cicero ‘Lorem Ipsum’ text translate into totally unexpected sentences using Google Translate. Google have now hard-coded the algorithm NOT to translate the words Lorem and Ipsum, but from my tests you can still create secret messages using other Latin words. Suspiciously a lot of the variations produce sentences with the words - China, Russia, Network, NATO, and so on. Since Google translation algorithms learn autonomously through Machine Learning the researchers believe that someone has gamed the system to make it learn this instead. I guess they may have done this by surreptitiously feeding Google with latin/secret language texts. 

stephanie-hans:

Storm #5 by myself ^ It’s a tribute to the cover of Wolverine #1

mohawk storm so hard fuckin’ ninjas wanna fine me

stunningpicture:

Made this for my boyfriend

LayoutZone allows multiple InDesign users to work on different sections of the same page simultaneously and with more control. LayoutZone lets you quickly select several InDesign page elements or frames and automatically convert them to a Placed InDesign file (.indd) for editing outside the master document. Once external editing is complete, a seamless round trip workflow automatically converts the linked InDesign file back into native objects. LayoutZone lets you easily export and edit selected elements without changing page geometry for a more flexible collaboration solution. In addition, LayoutZone gives you the ability to export any selection (as opposed to an entire entire page or entire document) in PDF, SWF, IDML, or XFL formats.

awwww-cute:

She’s so sweet until you tell her she can’t have any of your cereal

Cop Assigned To Ferguson Protests Threatens Attorney General Holder:

greasydylanobrien:

christel-thoughts:

thepoliticalfreakshow:

"AG Holder is in St. Louis Today. I should go in early and punch him in the nose for so many different reasons." - Tweet by Sgt. Mike Weston, Velda City Police

A Velda City Police sergeant assigned to the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, couldn’t hold the hate inside.

Sergeant Mike Weston took to Twitter this week, complaining about “libs”, giving out false information, insulting Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson’s approach to community policing and threatening to seek out visiting U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, in order to “punch him in the nose.”

Asked by followers on Twitter why police had gassed a group of people who were in their own back yard, Sgt. Weston responded that gunshots had been fired from that location. The problem is, a Daily RFT reporter was in that back yard and caught the incident on video. No shots were fired; no one was armed and everyone had their hands up in protest. When presented with that information, Sgt. Weston admitted he was not even in the area when the gassing occurred.

"I wasn’t spreading misinformation." Sgt. Weston defended himself. "There were shots being fired some yards, maybe not this particular one."

Too bad police didn’t gas the “particular one” instead of the innocent people. 

Sgt. Weston, who has since deleted his Twitter account, @officeranon2, also made a point of running down Missouri Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson. He called the Captain’s interactions with the protesters “Hug a Thug” and accused him of a double standard based on skin color, posting this tweet: 

Sgt. Weston also took it upon himself to post photos of Mike Brown, the teenager shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson, participating in a strong arm robbery. Sgt. Weston tweeted:

"Happy to release this now. Here is the innocent Mike Brown moments before the shooting."

He then mocked Mike Brown’s death, tweeting:

"what I learned today was Mike Brown was shot 625 times in the back by the grand wizard in ferguson."

Sgt. Weston also shrugged off the gassing of the Al Jazeera news crew as collateral damage, and the fault of the journalists. But he outdid himself with his tweet about Attorney General’s visit to Ferguson. (Photo above with Capt. Johnson.) He tweeted he was considering assaulting Eric Holder:

I had the thought yesterday that we should change our relationship with police. If our elected officials gain their power through the consent of the governed, maybe we should use that model for police - they gain their power only through the consent of those policed. What we need is a mechanism that will enable that dynamic. 

There has to be a workable way to get the Mike Westons off police forces everywhere. A referendum process? A public complaint forum? Some way for a community to force a judgement about an officer’s fitness by some group not affiliated with the police.

Any ideas?

You can see more of Sgt. Weston’s tweets preserved by RFT here.

Mike Weston’s photo in uniform via LinkedIn, in civilian clothes via Twitter

this is why we keep saying it’s not about that one officer.

theoretically it shouldn’t be hard to get rid of bad cops since we are the customers they provide their service to. why else would they be going to such great lengths to defend their own authority? 

thescienceofjohnlock:

zitoisneato:

batter-sempai:

transientday:

lohkir:

fencehopping:

Casting a fire ant colony with molten aluminum

Not saying that killing ants just because it’s cool. But hey.

I’ve seen this post and the original video before.

That ant colony belongs to an invasive species of fire ant (called Red Imported Fire Ants or RIFAs) which cause more harm to the local environment than good. Researchers are experimenting with extremely high temperatures as a means to dispose of invasive insect species and, just so you know, molten aluminum is VERY HOT.

Not saying this is the best way to do it, but these folks are doing a service for the local environment and they got a beautiful piece of art for their efforts.

It’s also good for Science because we get to see what the inside of a fire ant nest look like. That’s really cool.

Thats pretty metal.

It’s literally pretty metal. 

Peer-to-peer lodging service Airbnb has agreed to hand over data on 124 of its hosts in New York as part of an investigation by the state's Attorney General into the operation of illegal hotels. The AG first requested data for almost all of Airbnb's hosts in the state, but after "legal wrangling," that number was whittled down to the current 124. The data in question will be unredacted personal information, meaning names and addresses. In a blog post, Airbnb's David Hantman said, "nothing about these hosting profiles suggests [the Attorney General] is after anyone but individuals who may be flagrantly misusing our platform." Airbnb is confident that the targets of this request are hosts considered to be "bad actors," but they don't explain what classifies somebody as a "bad actor."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.