firehose

Reuters

LAPD: 'Will No Longer Comply With Immigration Authorities To Detain Suspects' MyFox Los Angeles (FOX 11 / CNS) Saying police need to maintain the trust of the community during a federal government stalemate on immigration policy, Mayor Eric Garcetti and Chief Charlie Beck announced today that the LAPD will no longer comply with most requests by ... Fix these immigration outragesNew York Daily News Immigration raids harm immigrants, employersNational Catholic Reporter (blog) all 20 news articles »

The attempted theft of a Tesla model S in Los Angeles went horribly wrong this past weekend. On Friday, July 4, a man allegedly stole one of the electric vehicles from a dealership in West Hollywood. A subsequent chase involving the local authorities resulted in the car, which was said to be traveling at speeds of up to 100 miles an hour, splitting in half and bursting into flames after hitting two other vehicles and a lamp post. A total of seven people, including the driver, were injured, according to reports.

Tesla shares took a bit of a hit on Monday afternoon (the stock closed down about 3%, but is still up about 48% so far this year ) and the Wall Street Journal (paywall) is pinning it on the Independence Day incident. When several Tesla vehicles caught fire in a short space of time last year (in at least one case due to an accident, in others due to them running over metallic debris) it really freaked people out, sparking concerns about the safety of the company’s lithium-ion batteries.

Tesla, whose cars earned the highest safety rating from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has since added additional protections and extra casing to its battery packs to assuage concerns about them. It is not yet clear whether this vehicle was retrofitted with these features.

At any rate, CEO Elon Musk is fairly obsessive about the safety and quality of Tesla vehicles and the company is already signaling that it will study the tragic incident closely to figure out what happened and make them even safer. “There aren’t so many S’s involved in major crashes, and certainly not quite like this one, so we absolutely want to have a look to understand what happened,” a spokesman told Bloomberg. This spokesman told Quartz he was unable to comment on any details of the incident while the police continue their investigations, but said the company naturally reviews selected incidents to understand how its vehicles perform.

The latest incident is a bit different to previous ones in that it involves a stolen vehicle and a police chase. But the knee jerk share price reaction certainly isn’t. It might be less likely that company will need to go out on another PR offensive this time, but whether the stock price will resume its relentless upward march like it has in the past remains to be seen.

Adafruit customer, Jeff Highsmith, built a child’s dream come true interactive Kid’s Room Spacecraft to go with his earlier Mission Control Desk. video via Makezine

I built a spacecraft to go with my Mission Control Desk
Four months, much building, and many parts (most from
AdaFruit) later, we now have a spacecraft. It has a motorized hatch that
opens for deployment of payloads with the RC robot arm. It features many
displays of various types, all sorts of switches and knobs, and very
convincing sound effects, thanks to the bass shaker under the astronaut’s
back. I’m excited to see where my boys’ imaginations will go with it.

Thanks again for the great selection, and service, Adafruit, your the first
stop for home spacecraft builders everywhere.

Read more

Make a GPS tracked bike lock that’s triggered when your bike is stolen with stbennett’s tutorial. via instructables

Having just purchased a half decent bicycle, and living in a city with a bike theft rate almost as high as New York, I wanted to have some peace of mind that if a their with an angle grinder were to cut through my U-lock I could still catch them.

My main design constraints were as follows:

The device has to be Arduino based so that if I run into trouble I can easily search the forums for help
Whatever I make has to be able to fit into a small bag that goes under my seat
The battery must last for a very long time, at least a few weeks. I don’t want to have to plan my bike rides around my lock being charged or not.
This project is pretty cheap, especially if you compare it to the cost of replacing your stolen bike! I’ve outlined the cost of all the components used in my design below. I was able to use some old parts I had lying around and hopefully you will too. If I had bought everything needed brand new this would have cost about $225.

Full Tutorial

“This is literally a franchise which has taken the most notoriously war-mongering stereotype in existence, Viking culture, and gradually transformed it until the characters not only refuse to use violence as a solution, but proudly proclaim that they are a “land of peace.”

That’s an unbelievably radical and transformative narrative for a Hollywood film to deliver, much less a Hollywood children’s film. The HTTYD franchise now joins Avatar: The Last Airbender as one of the only animated franchises to commit this deeply to such a polarizing political stance.”

-

How To Train Your Dragon 2 is a Radical Feminist Triumph

To the very last scene they’re in together, Hiccup is trying to reason with Drago; every one of his actions is done from a position of non-violent communication. That recognition is absolutely central to any kind of effective reading of How To Train Your Dragon.  Dissolve’s essay seems to completely overlook this aspect of HTTYD 2. At no point are the male characters aggressors against Drago. Although they talk about it, they never actually act violently except to defend their home from capture. In fact, the only person to attack Drago first is Valka, who hits him weakly out of anger after watching her giant bewilderbeast get killed. And despite what the Dissolve essay speculates, it seems evident that Valka has never really physically fought with Drago herself.

Valka was never intended to be a serious physical match for Drago, nor should she have been, because the whole point of her character aligned with her son’s is to personify the Viking nation’s progressive anti-violence stance. Sorry that Valka was too busy working as a zoologist to become the vaunted warrior-hero-soldier that apparently makes a female character strong enough for you, Dissolve.

Instead, she spends years subversively rescuing dragons from capture like a radical Greenpeace activist, and she is the one who leads the enormous dragon army into battle against Drago.

Gif by catsight

And come to that, when was the last time you saw a mother and son riding side-by-side into battle together? Another point for you, DreamWorks.

Gif via phenomenallyextraordinary123

While it’s true that she doesn’t get to do much in the third act, she doesn’t have to. She doesn’t have to because unlike 90 percent of other Hollywood films, HTTYD is a universe with more than one woman in it. And as a result, it gets to have a variety of women who do a variety of different things. Valka doesn’t have to be an all-powerful warrior-soldier, because Astrid and Ruffnut are out there dumping flaming sulfur on the enemy and generally proving that women can be badasses on the battlefield. Valka proves that women can be badasses as activists and scientists and even, yes, as moms, too.

[READ MORE]

We had so much outrage over that Dissolve essay. We drink a round for Mako Mori, too, badass feminist cultural icon.

(via dailydot)

redletterdave writes Uber announced in a blog post on Monday it would cut the prices of its UberX service in New York City by 20% — but it's only for a limited time. Uber says this makes it cheaper to use UberX than taking a taxi. Consumers like Uber's aggressive pricing strategy but competitors — and some of its own drivers — are not as happy. UberX, Uber’s cheaper service usually hosted by regular people driving basic sedans rather than fancy black cars, also cut its rates by 25% last week in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. As a result of that announcement, Uber said its service was effectively “45% cheaper than a taxi.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Geek has the story on one man’s extremely strange but very important job working for NASA.

Considering NASA has an employee whose job it is to smell the universe, you might think that, once again, Futurama predicted the real-life future. However, George Aldrich has been employed as NASA’s staff sniffer for 40 years, long before Professor Farnsworth paired a lens and stench coil to create his Smell-O-Scope. Whereas the Smell-O-Scope was generally used to smell things across the universe, Aldrich’s job is to smell anything and everything, because, basically, no one will know if that’s important unless someone does it.

He works at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility, and is the guy who performs toxicity and odor tests on any object that goes up into space with astronauts. While it may sound silly at first, Aldrich makes sure objects that give off noxious odors don’t make it into space, as being trapped in a small box in space makes it difficult to escape a cloud of harmful odors — poisonous or otherwise.

The manager of NASA’s nasal lab, Susana Harper, explains that on Earth, if a noxious odor makes it into the air, it simply airs out. In space, though, there isn’t any extra air to help dilute the odors. So, essentially, it’s Aldrich’s job to make sure NASA doesn’t send harmful — or even new — odors up into space, because once they’re there, they’re stuck there.

Read more.

An anonymous reader writes Jeffrey Baldwin was essentially starved to death by his grandparents. Funds had been raised to build a monument for Jeffrey in Toronto. The monument was designed to feature Jeffrey in a Superman costume, and even though Superman should be public domain, DC Comics has denied the request. "The request to DC had been made by Todd Boyce, an Ottawa father who did not know the Baldwin family. Boyce was so moved by the testimony at the coroner’s inquest into Jeffrey’s death last year that he started an online fundraising campaign for the monument. DC’s senior vice-president of business and legal affairs, Amy Genkins, told Boyce in an email that 'for a variety of legal reasons, we are not able to accede to the request, nor many other incredibly worthy projects that come to our attention.'... For Boyce, it was a huge blow, as he felt the Superman aspect was a crucial part of the bronze monument, which will include a bench. The coroner’s inquest heard from Jeffrey’s father that his son loved to dress up as Superman."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As a follow-up to the story about a Qualcomm DMCA notice taking down 100+ repositories of open-source code on GitHub, Qualcomm has changed course...

In the video “Amaoto no Yurai” (“The Origin of the Sound of Rain”), digital artist Yugo Nakamura recreates the sound of rain by layering the sounds of individual water droplets falling on a variety of surfaces including dirt, a leaf, and a snail. The video was created for TECHNE, Japanese TV program that provides a behind-the-scenes look at the motion graphics industry.

via Spoon & Tamago

Forget normcore: The real harbinger of the Fall Of The Ironic Empire is the fact that some kid in Ohio has raised over $9,000 (and counting) to make a fucking potato salad. To be fair, Zack “Danger” Brown set a very reasonable goal of $10 when he created a Kickstarter campaign to help make his mustard-and-potato-based ambitions a reality. But then the tech blog CNET got ahold of it, then the local news (which adorably refers to the website as “Kickstart”), and now Brown is being inundated with legal currency from total strangers who refer to the project as “legendary,” “epic,” and “important to me on a deep and spiritual level.” Now a full-fledged ironic Internet phenomenon, “Potato Salad” is currently the number one project on Kickstarter with 90,829% funding and 25 days left to go. Reward options include a “potato-salad themed” hat, Brown saying your name out ...

CHICAGO—Highlighting increasingly dangerous conditions within the city, a new study published Monday by Northwestern University’s Department of Environmental Studies revealed that approximately 75 percent of the air in Chicago is now composed ...

djempirical

way more in the article. (bookmarklet didn’t like the whole thing)

i can’t say i fully understand the ramifications, but there’s this:

https://twitter.com/romanmars/status/485976322976784384

A proposed revamp of NPR’s newsmagazines would allow for longer underwriting credits, expand the number of morning newscasts, and incorporate American Public Media’s Marketplace Morning Report as a baked-in segment within Morning Edition.

NPR is announcing the changes today to staff and member stations after working with stations on the revisions for more than a year. The network will solicit and review feedback from stations over the next two weeks, aiming to implement the changes by Sept. 22.

“These changes give Member Stations new flexibility to meet local audience needs while ensuring that Morning Edition and All Things Considered remain vibrant national programs that continue to fuel the public radio economy,” NPR said in a memo to stations. “We’ve worked through many complex decisions and balanced a variety of sometimes competing needs to arrive at this point.”

At issue are the “clocks” that precisely define the length and timing of all of a show’s various elements, including newscasts, music beds, program segments and underwriting credits. The second-by-second schedules determine how much NPR can charge for underwriting and how much local news or other content stations can insert into the shows as they seek to differentiate their local programming. These sometimes conflicting goals of national underwriting, local differentiation and other factors have made for tense negotiations at times, according to station leaders.

Original Source

“Comedians in Cars Getting Cocaine” is an amusing video by The Soup that parodies the Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee web series. The video features host Joel McHale picking up actor Tony Hale before heading over to their local cocaine dealer.

“The Soup” host Joel McHale takes joy riding in a classic 1959 ride to new heights with “Veep” star Tony Hale. Who wants booger sugar?!

submitted by atrain714 [link] [40 comments]

Dian Pelangi, Indonesian fashion designer.

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The Leather Bat Bow from Dulcecalaveritas can work as a hair-bow or a bow-tie, if that's how you swing. (via Oh Gizmo)

The daring escape comes after days of heavy fighting in northeast Nigeria.

submitted by ugisay [link] [271 comments]

In the city of Somerville, Massachusetts, which is just 2 miles outside of Boston and is the most densely populated municipality in New England, the police force has set up a simple but effective method of protecting pedestrians and generating revenue.

At a busy intersection, the cops plant a “pedestrian” who is supposedly on his way somewhere on foot. In fact, however, the pedestrian is repeatedly crossing the street so the cops can pull over anyone who doesn’t come to a stop for him as they drive by.

When a nearby neighbor noticed the scheme he began to film…

(via Free Thought Project)

It is required by law that motorists stop for people in the crosswalk. At the same time, setting people up to commit crimes is generally frowned upon. So what do you think?

Are these cops protecting and serving by reminding us all to stop for pedestrians or are they just fleecing their town’s inhabitants to increase revenue?

It’s finally here! After years of anticipation and planning, the long-awaited reboot to Sailor Moon has at last arrived. But does it live up to the hype? Let’s find out in our new series of recaps.

A note: this recap is intended for people who are familiar with the basic story of Sailor Moon already. If you’re new to the franchise and want to start out with the original series, Susana Polo has an excellent series of newbie recaps to check out. Otherwise, scroll past the dumpling-eating Usagi for more.

No matter what, fans of the original series and manga pretty much know what to expect from the first episode of a Sailor Moon retelling: Usagi wakes up late for school, helps a cute black cat, and then at the end of the day is visited by that cat and transformed into a guardian for love and justice. So I was surprised when the Toei Animation logo dropped away into the most glorious space porn imaginable instead of the quiet Tsukino residence exterior shot that I’d been expecting.

That’s right, for the first time I can remember since the North American dub, we’re starting with a Silver Millennium flashback! Guess the Crystal writers figured there was no point in trying to conceal the reincarnated moon princess thing too much, I suppose.

Neither Serenity nor Endymion’s faces are revealed, but the mystery is more of a formality at this point than anything else. Most of us know the story, and those who don’t can guess, considering that the official “Usagi wakes up late for school” beginning starts soon afterwards and the whole thing is revealed to be her equivalent of a Slayer dream.

And then we’re off! Kotono Mistuishi is doing some great work reprising her role from 20 years ago, and you can barely tell any time has gone by as she shouts for her mother (whose hair is much lighter and more reminiscent of Takeuchi’s art book illustrations) and then slips and falls down the entire length of the stairs butt-first. “I just hope you can learn from Sailor V,” she says in reply as she looks down at the very-relevant-and-foreshadowing-newspaper-article about Sailor V.  Ohhh, Ikuko. I bet you probably meant something like “Maybe don’t fall down literally everywhere you go,” but you are going to regret those words.

As Usagi runs off down the street–we still haven’t seen her face, by the way–the opening title credits begin to roll. As much as we’re all going to miss the dreamy “Moonlight Densetsu,” I’m 100% on board for “Moon Pride.” Seriously, you can’t go wrong with lines like “We will fight on our own without leaving our destiny to the prince” and “We are not helpless girls who need men’s protection” –which, ironically, are both sung while Mamoru is on screen. The visuals are similarly empowering, switching back and forth between the senshi quietly reflecting on their fates, reaching out to each other in friendship, and deftly taking down scores of enemies. It’s everything I could have wanted and you need to stop everything you’re doing and watch it on Hulu immediately (it starts about 2:48 minutes into the episode). The only problem I have with it is that Queen Serenity is blonde for some reason. I know this isn’t without precedence, but it bothers me nonetheless.

Anyway, back to the episode: rather than her literal “save the cat” moment from the first anime where Usagi rescues Luna from a group on unruly children, here we have her accidentally stepping on her instead and falling flat on her face, just like she did in the manga. Of course, first she introduces herself to the audience in the girliest way imaginable.

As much as they’re going out of their way to make Usagi clumsy, I do wish they’d show us her face during these moments where she falls down. Part of Usagi’s charm is that she’s so emotive, and while I appreciate that she’s not as dead-eyed as everyone feared from the initial character designs, it would be nice if they were less afraid to go a little weirder with her expressions, if only to keep from falling into the “you have to keep them pretty” trap.

From there we get the obligatory peel-off-the-bandaid scene, as well as a brief Dark Kingdom scene where an oddly Beryl-less Jadeite orders his youma to locate the Legendary Silver Crystal. Then the rest of Usagi’s day goes as we’d expect: she’s forced to stand outside in the hall (where she wishes she were the princess from her dream so she wouldn’t have to go to school), gets chewed out for her poor grades by Haruna-Sensei (who, like Ikuko, is pastel-haired), learns about the wonders of Sailor V from Umino, and then heads to the OSA-P jewelry store with Naru (and two extra friends from the manga! Yay!).

After leaving OSA-P–and points to the new Naru for immediately noticing that something is up with her mom, by the way, because highly intuitive Naru is my favorite kind of Naru–Usagi throws her failing test over her shoulder and guess who she hits, I bet you won’t even guess

It’s Mamoru! The banter starts off antagonistically, and of course he calls her “odango-atama,” but then they lock eyes and there’s an immediate connection between them. While I’m hopeful that the romance won’t overpower the girl-power friendship, I did actually like this moment–in the original series they spent more time griping at each other than anything else, so the fact that the new series is going out of their way to set up their attraction to one another is encouraging. But the scene ends with Usagi storming off anyway, as well it should.

Also, I love that Mamoru is quite literally casing a place he’s later going to break into wearing the clothes he is going to wear when he breaks in. Never change, you beautiful dork.

Perhaps needing to vent her romantic energies a bit, Usagi stops by the Crown Arcade to play Sailor V games with her current crush (and she also wishes she were Sailor V so she wouldn’t have to go to school–Usagi, maybe just go to school?), heads home to get briefly kicked out by her mother for poor grades, and then falls asleep upon being allowed back in, dreaming of princesses and rescuing Luna from video game monsters.

Oh, hey, speaking of Luna! Her moment has finally come, and she enters the same way she always does–by snidely telling Usagi that her moon isn’t a bald patch, thank you very much, and giving her a brooch that once again completely distracts Usagi from all the weirdness because YAY SHINY. But joke’s on her when Luna tells her to call out her transformation phrase and literal magic happens.

While at times the CGI feels a bit hollow (and as a side note, what’s up with them including the skirt band on the unitard the whole time? That looked kinda weird), the perspective shifts are incredible, the ribbons at the beginning gave me chills on first watch, and it’s clear that a lot of love and passion for the original series was put into this animation. So while it’s not my favorite, I will allow it to grow on me as the series progresses, just like the cheesy PGSM sequences did once the initial shock subsided.

Usagi is understandably freaked out, but she jumps into action when she hears Naru shouting from the other side of town. When the youma asks her who she is, she names herself in her speech, which she does exactly the same way she used to in the original anime and oh my god my heart. I can’t deal with these emotions.

And neither can Sailor Moon, because a bunch of jewelry zombies descend on her and she scrapes her knee, then bursts into tears–which stops the zombies with a powerful sonic boom that shatters glass because of course it does. Tuxedo Mask takes this as cue to give her the very useful advice of “hey maybe you should stop crying and beat that lady up,” and Luna agrees, telling Usagi to chant “Moon Tiara Boomerang.” Now, if my tears could cause extensive property damage like that, I would probably never stop. But I guess you know best, talking cat!

Anyway, “Moon Tiara Boomerang.” It’s rad, and the updated name is a cool nod to both the live-action PGSM and the 10th anniversary edition of the manga.

The youma collapses in a heap of dust upon impact, and that’s when Tuxedo Mask decides it’s safe to come out and congratulate her for being so awesome. That’s right, not a single rose is thrown! Guess they ran out after using ‘em all in those shoujo introductions.

But Sailor Moon’s still totally into dat bishounen sparkle Tux’s got goin’ on–which Jadeite can see from his fancy crystal ball from what must be D Point at the North Pole (there’s snow outside and everything! How’s that for detail?), where he, I dunno, swears vengeance on her or whatever. Listen, it’s Jadeite. If he’s gonna be anything like his anime counterpart, he can be pretty easily ignored. Wake me up when Zoisite arrives, and make sure the rose budget is doubled by then.

The next day Usagi is disappointed to learn that all her crying and butt-kicking actually happened and now she has *shudder* responsibilities. See, this is what you get for making idle wishes about not having to go to school. But all is not lost, because she’s going to get back-up! The most intelligent, adorable backup ever.

Oh my Moon God, we’re getting Sailor Mercury already! We still have to wait two weeks for the next episode, but hooray for Ami!

All in all, any problems with the animation that I personally had are minor, and I can overlook them to applaud how well these writers seem to get the personalities they’re working with. Having a familiar voice to fall back in definitely helps with Usagi’s characterization where her usually-expressive face falls short, and with any luck they’ll loosen up with her as the series progresses. We haven’t officially met the rest of the senshi, but the tone that the opening credit sequence sets up gives me the utmost confidence in their portrayals. I enjoyed myself watching the episode, and I’m excited to see more.

Previously in Sailor Moon Crystal

• Act 1 Is Available To Stream Right Now
• Leaked Images Include Mamoru and the Inner Senshi
• In the Name of the Moon, the Trailer Is Here

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During the song, Poppins says, “You know, you can say it backwards, which is ‘dociousaliexpilisticfragicalirupes’, but that’s going a bit too far, don’t you think?”

When the word is spelled backwards it actually becomes “suoicodilaipxecitsiligarfilacrepus”, which is different.^[6] However, her claim was not about spelling it backwards, but saying it backwards; if one breaks the word into several sections or prosodic feet (“super-cali-fragi-listic-expi-ali-docious”) and recites them in reverse sequence, and also partially reverses the spelling of “super” to “rupes”, one does come close to what Poppins said in the film.

In the stage musical, the word’s proper reversal is used. Rapper Ghostface Killah said “dociousaliexpilisticfragicalisuper” in his song “Buck 50”.

Link

YouTube user Ilsoo Yang has posted a colorful and strangely compelling compilation featuring different varieties of ice cream melting to the song “All There Is” by Chrome Sparks. The video features sundaes, cones, and ice cream popsicles liquefying at high speeds — followed by some footage of the process in reverse for good measure.

via Mental Floss