“Flying Around Book Ops” by photographer Nate Bolt is a short video feature drone footage of the massive book sorting center in Queens, New York that provides material for the 150 branches of the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries. The machine highlighted in the piece is the second largest in the world, sorting 33,000 items a day on average, including books, DVDs and other media. The film’s titles were created by illustrator Matt Huynh and the whole thing was set to the song “The Stick” by Ted Leo and Pharmacists.
With the wide variety of Bandbox Helmet Cover styles, you can chose helmet covers to match the weather and locale from beach hats with sun protection to felt newsboy caps for urban rides on cool days.
The former queen of daytime talk will be returning to the throne, as TMZ reports that Rosie O’Donnell will be returning to The View. For those of you unaware O’Donnell was ever on or had ever left The View, the actress-turned-talk-show-host joined the show in 2006, but left the following year, after spending most of her time sparring with conservative bobblehead Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Hasselbeck has also since left the show to become one of the “friends” on Fox & Friends.
O’Donnell acted as center square on the show’s panel, bridging the gap between long-running hosts Meredith Viera (who left to take over NBC’s Today), and Whoopi Goldberg, who’s led discussions since 2008. This time around, O’Donnell has multiple shoes to fill, as everyone besides Goldberg is leaving the show. Barbara Walters—the only remaining original host—retired in May; Jenny McCarthy stepped down to ...
In this shaky video posted by HAHA, two dogs angrily confront each other from opposite sides of a fence, neither dog noticing or perhaps both willfully ignoring that the fence is actually open for them to meet face-to-face.
Prospective data spies, your future is fast approaching: DARPA has contracted Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LNLL) to develop a brain implant that can record and stimulate neurons to restore memory. Its primary use will be the treatment of patients suffering from various memory loss conditions that currently lack a cure, but I’m sure The Final Cut and Johnny Mnemonic aren’t too far off now.
The conditions LNLL and DARPA hope their implant will remedy include Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Alzheimer’s disease, and epilepsy. Why is DARPA, the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, so interested in healing the sick? TBI has affected 270,000 members of the military since the year 2,000, so it’s a big health issue for the U.S. DoD.
The brain implant will communicate and draw power wirelessly from a device worn on the patient’s ear that will house the data storage and retrieval components. The implant itself will reside within the brain and directly read data from and stimulate neurons in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus—the areas of the brain related to memory—to record and restore memory with the help of the external electronics.
They’re still in the research phase, but LNLL and its Center for Bioengineering are confident that they have the necessary experience in implantable microdevices to make it a reality. They expect to have a prototype device ready as soon as 2017. Then, we just have to wait for it to become commercially available to start our careers in brain-based data espionage.
by Jay Hathaway on Gawker, shared by Charlie Jane Anders to io9
Update: DC Entertainment has reversed its earlier decision, and will now allow Superman's shield to appear on a memorial statue of murdered 5-year-old Jeffrey Baldwin, the Toronto Star reports. The original story is below.
There are falls from grace, and then there's Robin Thicke. His latest album, Paula, has entered the Official UK Chart with a bullet at ... No 200. To achieve this feat, Thicke has shifted a whopping 530 copies of Paula.
It has not been the best year for the singer, who split from Paula Patton, his wife of nine years, in February. His seventh album was named after her and billed as a declaration of love, aiming to win her back, but the campaign was hobbled by the disastrous #AskThicke Q&A on Twitter, in which the hashtag was bombarded with questions such as, "Is your next 'hit' just a lyric sheet, with a Rohypnol Sellotaped to it? #AskThicke" and "#AskThicke Did you really write a rape anthem as a love song for your wife and are you still wondering why she left you?"
The resulting sales of Paula seem to answer the question of whether there can be such a thing as bad publicity. Thicke's previous album Blurred Lines sold 25,981 copies in its first week, according to Music Week. Were Thicke's career to follow this trajectory, his next album would sell about 10 copies, with the following one failing to sell a single copy. Not even his best friend would buy one, nor Thicke himself.
Over in the US, Thicke's sales are not looking too healthy either. Paula sold about 25,000 copies there in its first week, according to Billboard – down from 177,000 sales of Blurred Lines in its first week.
In America Mixcloud has blanket music licences with SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI & SESAC.
These licences stipulate certain rules around how you can listen to a service like Mixcloud:
- You cannot scrub or rewind backwards within a Cloudcast, only forward
As music lovers ourselves, we understand that this may be frustrating at times, and we hope that in the future the rules will evolve to be more open to new types of services like Mixcloud.
In the meantime, Mixcloud is committed to providing a fully licensed and legal service so you can continue to discover and buy new music through listening to DJ mixes and radio shows.
Recently launched on Kickstarter, the KGoal Smart Kegel Trainer, produced by San Fransisco-based sexual
health startup Minna
Life, describes itself as a
“Fitbit for your vagina,” an interactive device to guide, measure
and track pelvic floor muscle exercise. It takes the form of a
squeezable silicone pillow, connected to a smartphone app, that
measures your “clench strength” and feeds the data back to a
smartphone app via Bluetooth. It also has an internal motor for “real
time vibrational biofeedback.”
“Pelvic
floor muscles are one of the most important, yet least appreciated, parts
of the body,” says the product's designer, Grace Lee, in the
promotional video. “But many people never think about exercising
them.” Running
from the pubic bone to the base of the spine, the sling-shaped
muscles hold the bladder and urethra in place, controlling urination.
Critically important during and after pregnancy, they can often be
damaged during childbirth, leading to incontinence and reduced
pleasure during sex.
“30%
of women need direct feedback to perform a pelvic floor
muscle contraction correctly,” says the company's pelvic floor
specialist Liz Miracle. “People come to me and say 'I didn't do my
exercises because I couldn't see what was happening and I didn't know
what was going on,' so they often just give up.”
By
flashing its pink light, vibrating and charting your progress on the
app – soon to come complete with games – the KGoal aims to change
all that. “It's like having a gym, a physical therapist and a
tracking system in the palm of your hand,” says Lee. Or inside
your vagina, as the case may be.
The
biggest challenge in developing the product was “fine-tuning the
human interface and ergonomics of the device,” Minna Life's
appropriately named Jon Thomas told Wired. “By that I mean the
product shape and feel. Because KGoal must fit a wide variety of
anatomies, it was a challenge to make the product both functional and
comfortable across the full spectrum of our users.”
wow, this looks like it was really difficult to animate
When RPF user Mandi planned her Ezio costume, she wanted to show that it was possible to create a femme take on the character from Assassin’s Creed without showing lots of leg or chest. She spent three months working on the cosplay. It took her a while to decide on the proper materials and colors, but she finally gathered the fabrics and drew the belt insignia by hand. She created her own pattern for the tunic by using a plastic bag and masking tape, and she even sewed it together by hand. She also handpainted the intricate designs onto the skrt and tunic and weathered the fabric.
And now for something a little more obscure than usual. Eilonwy and Gurgi from Disney’s Black Cauldron.
After my drawings of Kida, Jane, Esmerelda, Meg and Giselle, I thought I would keep up the theme and go a little deeper into the Disney vault for this one.
If you missed my previous posts, I’ve pasted links to the other leading ladies above. :)
To highlight the importance of the SyncServices folder in OS X, Apple says customers should stay away from it “as if it were a swarm of bees.” This is Apple’s actual wording in a standard support document on the company’s web site.
mwip: "Nick Mattos of the Art of Movement studio is leading a 90-minute all-levels class guided by a soundtrack referencing Lynch's oeuvre on Sunday"
I guess you can blame "bikini season" for the rash of unusual workout options coursing through the intertubes this week? Next up: David Lynch Yoga. This one is a benefit for the David Lynch Foundation, through which he spreads the gospel of transcendental meditation, particularly to at-risk populations like inner-city kids, veterans, and refugees. For just a $15 suggestion donation, Nick Mattos of the Art of Movement studio is leading a 90-minute all-levels class guided by a soundtrack referencing Lynch's oeuvre on Sunday, July 20. In the meantime, meditate on the lovely fluttering motion Lynch makes with his hand while explaining "wakefulness."
"it highlighted just how insular and superior a lot of Apple developers act and feel. If you don’t believe me, just join a group of them at WWDC and whip out your Android phone. Within moments, you’ll wish you had whipped out something less offensive, like your genitalia instead."
Russell Ivanovic, a bipartisan developer, on his first time going to Google I/O:
That said everyone I met at I/O was open-minded and tended to work on more than one platform. As such it wasn’t the least bit strange when someone pulled out their iPhone to check something on it. … What I’m getting at, and let me put it bluntly if I may, is that it highlighted just how insular and superior a lot of Apple developers act and feel. If you don’t believe me, just join a group of them at WWDC and whip out your Android phone. Within moments, you’ll wish you had whipped out something less offensive, like your genitalia instead.
(Russell’s the developer of Pocket Casts, and despite our imminent competition, he’s been incredibly generous to me with his time and expertise. He and I have been exchanging tips for months — how’d you get around this bug, do you normalize these URLs, watch out for this edge case, who’s the right contact for this, etc. Don’t believe his tough, Android-accepting persona: he’s a really nice guy.)
Man kills wife, self at Washington medical complex La Crosse Tribune SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) — Police in Washington state say a gunman fatally shot his wife Tuesday morning before turning the weapon on himself at a downtown Spokane medical center. Spokane police said the man went to his wife's workplace in the ...
"A Chicago author who penned a guide to surviving Pamplona's famous bull run should perhaps have read his own work more closely, given that he was gored on Wednesday. "Buffalo" Bill Hillmann is described as one of the best bull runners in America"
Mark.JUK (1222360) writes The Bell Labs R&D division of telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent has today claimed to set a new world record after they successfully pushed "ultra-broadband" speeds of 10,000 Megabits per second (Mbps) down a traditional copper telephone line using XG-FAST technology, which is an extension of G.fast (ITU G.9700). G.fast is a hybrid-fiber technology, which is designed to deliver Internet speeds of up to 1000Mbps over runs of copper cable (up to around 250 meters via 106MHz+ radio spectrum). The idea is that a fiber optic cable is taken closer to homes and then G.fast works to deliver the last few meters of service, which saves money because the operator doesn't have to dig up your garden to lay new cables. XG-FAST works in a similar way but via an even shorter run of copper and using frequencies of up to 500MHz. For example, XG-FAST delivered its top speed of 10,000Mbps by bonding two copper lines together over just 30 meters of cable.
Mergely is a powerful online web application for viewing and merging changes between documents online. It is a pure-Javascript library that can be used to enhance your online CMS system. Mergely is open source and also available for commerical use.
Peering through the Stucture Scanner's lens at our loaner DJI quadcopter.
Lee Hutchinson
Last year, California-based Occipital closed out a wildly successful Kickstarter for its Structure Sensor, an iPad-mountable structured light scanner that can perceive the world in three dimensions by projecting infrared dots on things. The company is nearly done shipping the $399 devices to its crowdfunding backers (non-backers who buy one now can expect delivery in about a month), but we managed to finagle a couple of days with an early production version of the Structure Sensor to get a peek at how it performs in the real world. We learned a lot about what the Structure Sensor is—and we learned even more about what it isn’t.
We received a pair of boxes from Occipital: one contained the Structure Sensor and its dedicated Lightning cable, and the other contained the bracket necessary to attach the Structure to our iPad mini (the Structure works with any iPad with a Lightning connector, but you need the correct bracket to mount it). The device itself feels agreeably solid—it's wrapped in an anodized aluminum housing with a glass front, through which are visible two infrared LEDs, the infrared structured light projector, and the infrared camera. It screws into the provided mounting bracket, then slips onto your iPad and is secured in place with a clamp. Once attached, you then connect a custom Lightning cable from the Structure to the iPad’s port on its base. The entire assembly of sensor, bracket, and cable add about 124 grams of weight onto the back of the iPad.
Lee Hutchinson
Our review kit: one Structure Sensor, one iPad mini-sized mounting bracket.
8 more images in gallery
The Structure, though, isn’t so much a scanner as it is a platform. There are mobile and desktop apps you can use to make it work, but at least at this stage in the product’s development those apps are still a bit sketchy. They function more as demonstrations of the scanner’s potential uses than actual apps you’d want to use. The biggest draw about the Structure is its openness: the iOS SDK is available right now, which can be used to create Structure-compatible iOS apps immediately. Other platforms (Windows, OS X, and Android) will be getting open source drivers in the near future, though creating Structure apps for anything other than iOS will require the use of a special "hacker cable" to connect to the Structure.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for bribery, money laundering and other corruption that spanned his two terms as mayor — including the chaotic years after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.
Android/iOS: Your fitness tracker can be a great source of motivation to get active , but if you need a little extra push, FitRPG takes data from your Fitbit and turns it into a game—complete with loot, levels, quests, and some friendly competition.
"Mets celebrate their 4000th win in franchise history on a field covered in garbage, which is just about right."
Literally, trash.
The New York Mets earned their 4,000th win in team history Tuesday night against the Atlanta Braves, which is exciting for them. The baseball gods saw this event unfolding and decided it was too purely positive for the Mets, so they unleashed the TRASHWINDS:
Mets celebrate their 4000th win in franchise history on a field covered in garbage, which is just about right. pic.twitter.com/xRXrOlKqrV
This has happened before, by the way: Citi Field has a chronic TRASHWIND problem. This is April 23:
(Photo: Elsa, US Presswire)
And this is May 25:
(Photo: Mike Stobe, US Presswire)
When the Mets win their 8000th game in the year 2973 or whatever, they'll look back at highlights from Tuesday night and be like "wow, weather used to be really weird." Yeah, yeah it did. Queens used to have napkin storms.
djempirical
