A golden retriever named Coco loves her fruit and vegetables and does her best to make sure she gets the daily requirements of both in these amusing videos from 2013 posted by her human, gajyumaru234.
If you find the smell of stinky dog breath gross, you are not alone. And there are plenty of companies ready to take your money to prevent or cure your pooch’s smelly breath. But how do they know that any of these products actually work? Well, apparently there are people who are specially trained to judge dog breath odors. And you thought your job was unpleasant.
“This paper describes a methodology for measuring and assessing changes in canine oral malodor with the intent that it can be used to evaluate products designed to make pets’ breath more acceptable to their owners. Ten judges, able to discriminate and rank malodorous chemical compounds, were trained as a formal sensory panel by an expert in sensory evaluation techniques.The panel was assembled to determine changes in oral malodor resulting from dietary manipulation. A dry experimental food served as the test food, and a commercial dry dog food as the reference food. Dogs fed the experimental food developed significantly less oral malodor (p ‘< 0.01) than when they were fed the control food.”
by Jamie Condliffe on Gizmodo, shared by Shane Roberts, Commerce Team to io9
The Amazon Appstore already gives away one free app each day, but now it's gone and decided to give away 30 apps, worth a combined total of $100, for free to anyone with an Android phone. Here are the pick of the bunch that you should download first.
In the town of Valley City, North Dakota, a former bank has been renovated and is now The Vault, a go-to coffee shop for the small community. Of course it has coffee, tea, and a few pastries…otherwise it wouldn’t really be a coffee shop.
But what it doesn’t have is what sets it apart — Employees.
Nobody works at The Vault. The owners Kimberly and David Brekke stop by to keep it stocked, but that’s it. Prices are clearly marked for customers who get whatever they want, add up their own total, and then swipe their credit card or slip cash or check into the slot on the counter. It’s entirely run on the honor system.
Is it working? Yes, it is.
David says that, while they aren’t making money yet because of the costs of renovations, revenue is 15% higher than if customers only paid the marked prices…
Amazon has found itself on tense terms with publishers as it begins to really use its size and power to gain favorable terms in distribution deals, notably with the major publisher Hachette. Now, the BBC and trade publication The Bookseller are reporting that Amazon is attempting to introduce some strong new terms in its contracts with small UK publishers as well, one of which is calling them an act of "bullying." Among those is the ability for Amazon to begin printing books itself should a publisher run out of copies, allowing Amazon to continue quickly filling orders. The BBC reports, however, that Amazon would be using "print-on-demand" equipment, which generally produces a lower-quality copy than a publisher would make on a traditional press.
Amazon wants the deals that everyone else gets too
Beyond that, Amazon is also said to be asking for a "most favored nation" clause, requiring that publishers offer any promotions to Amazon that they offer to any other party — including themselves. Under such terms, the BBC reports, Amazon would be able to discount a book even when a publisher discounts that book on its own website. Other terms of these alleged contract proposals would require that publishers offer the same ebook pricing to Amazon as they do to any other party.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on these alleged proposals. If accurate, these contracts would put Amazon in an even stronger position than it current holds, though there's no sign that publishers are willing to agree to them. Publishers the BBC spoke with were troubled by the terms; others warned that they could destroy the industry. Amazon has apparently put forth similar terms in the past and been rebuffed, but it's reportedly now presenting these terms again in a far more aggressive manner. It's not clear how, exactly, but Amazon has already shown that it's willing to harness its position and harm publishers during contract disputes by effectively withholding their titles from its customers.
shocking writes: Arizona National Guard member Vivin Paliath was surprised to be commended for writing Perl scripts and Excel macros while his unit was deployed in Iraq. His work automated a number of previously manual processes that were part of the logistics processes of his unit. He wrote, '[A]s a programmer, I'm constantly looking for ways to make my job easy. I didn't want to sit and add qualifications, and print licenses one by one. I was too lazy for that, and worse, the whole thing was horribly inefficient. So I decided to figure out how to automate the process. ... I started writing Perl scripts to query the data. By the time we had reached Iraq, I had a working script that generated licenses as text files for all the soldiers. The script only took a second or two to run, and the longest part of the process was simply printing out the licenses. But I wasn't done yet. I was still annoyed that I would have to add driver qualifications manually. So I wrote another script that would go and add qualifications to drivers en masse. The script even had a configuration file where you could specify what qualifications you wanted to add and to whom."
The National Security Agency has posted its first full transparency report. Posted on the official agency Tumblr, the report breaks out the total number of orders for 2013, broken out into FISA orders, National Security Letters, and government requests for business records. The office of the Director of National Intelligence said the report was part of a larger push for transparency within the agency, and would continue in the future. "We are releasing information related to the use of these important tools," the office said, "and will do so in the future on an annual basis."
The report details 38,812 targets of National Security Letters, 1,767 FISA orders, and 423 targets of FISA business records requests, consistent with the relatively low numbers offered by President Obama in previous speeches. In one notable section, a single 702 order reached nearly 90,000 targets, presumably through the XKeyscore program, which targets emails and online chats.
The word "target" is a little misleading, since the report makes clear that a single target "could be an individual person, a group, or an organization composed of multiple individuals or a foreign power that possesses or is likely to communicate foreign intelligence information." As a result, the 319 targets listed under the Trap and Trace program could potentially add up to thousands of people captured under various groups. The numbers also count analyst queries of existing data rather than the indiscriminate bulk collection that happens earlier in the process, and there may be further undisclosed programs that do not fall into the scope of this report.
Google, Microsoft and other companies have released similar reports, but haven't been able to offer nearly the same level of detail, in accordance with a previous agreement with the Department of Justice. The agreement requires companies to report the same numbers in blocks of 500 or 1000, and lump many different forms of order together as one. As a result, this is the first time we've seen government orders broken out in this much detail.
"the IBM Model M is generally regarded to be one of the finest mechanical keyboards ever made. Admittedly, it weighs as much as a Volkswagen Beetle, but each keystroke produces a biblical thunderclap so loud, and of such authoritative permanence, that you will be left with the distinct impression that you have not merely typed your thoughts into MS Word, but upon the very fabric of existence"
I'd like to buy a mechanical keyboard, but don't have any clue which switches I'd prefer. I've seen sampler kits advertised online, but pretty much every single one of them is out of stock at the moment. Anyone know of a place in town that sells these things and has a few set aside for the public to smear their greasy fingers against?
Attention all men who won’t take no for answer: Pepper Potts is out there. Waiting. Watching. And she will kill you.
And if she doesn’t, there’s always her best friends: Natasha “I can kill a man with my thighs” Romanoff, Maria “I kind of hoped you weren’t the duplicitous lowlife you turned out to be” Hill, and Melinda “You were never on top” May.
This movie was the perfect opportunity for us to get a good, articulated, tattooed Guy Pierce doll. Why didn’t we?
It’s a common use case scenario: you want to broadcast a public WiFi network for anyone to use, but you’ve got strict requirements that only cat images be permitted. Great news: your Raspberry Pi is a perfect transmoggification machine. Intrigued? Read on.
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y’know, seeing as how this website has an incredible collective interest in girls, homosexuals, Marvel superheroes, outer space, and dragons
I’m a little surprised I don’t hear as much about Phyla-Vell, who is a Marvel superhero space-venturing lesbian, who is canonically in a relationship with a girl who is sometimes a dragon
Don't you just love an epic dildo battle? Well, yeah, as long as it's not your kid waving them around the front yard.
This new ad from McCann New York is all about dildos. But it's not all about dildos. Check it out, and then read my take below (where there are obviously spoilers).
Watch the spot first. Spoilers below...
Why this PSA is genius: If we make a sweeping generalization about the sort of conservative people who generally defend their Second Amendment rights, we would suggest they may also be sexually conservative. Showing some boys playing with vibrators might not be all that shocking to a liberal. Heck, it was an Ikea campaign. But to people who don't normally think kids playing with guns is a big deal (trust me, I know these people), seeing kids play with vibrators might be shocking and memorable.
Why this PSA is necessary: It's National Safety Month. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, two children per week were killed in 2013 in unintentional shootings, and two-thirds of those tragedies were due to unsecured guns children found in a home. That means two-thirds of those tragedies were entirely preventable. Or as Evoleve—the advertiser in the PSA above—puts it, "It's the right to bear arms. Not the right to be a dumbass."
"Are there any unsecured guns in your home?" is a hard thing to ask another parent before you drop your kid off. But as this ad shows, it's necessary. Since I live in Georgia, the state with the most school shootings since Newtown, where we just passed a sweeping new open carry law that allows more guns in more places, I know I'll be asking it of any parent I leave my child with.
Those who are weirded out by epic dildo battles might also want to ask if there are unsecured sex toys.
Smartphones are phones in name only. For many of us, the green, phone-shaped icon on our home screens has become just another minor feature — like a stopwatch or a stock ticker. And for others, it's completely irrelevant.
Illustration from The San Francisco Call, 1895 (Library of Congress)
The bicycle, when it was still new technology, went through a series of rapid iterations in the 19th century before it really went mainstream. Designers toyed with different-sized front and back wheels, the addition of chains and cranks and pedals, and tested a slew of braking mechanisms.
By the 1890s, America was totally obsessed with the bicycle—which by then looked pretty much like the ones we ride today. There were millions of bikes on the roads and a new culture built around the technology. People started "wheelmen" clubs and competed in races. They toured the country and compared tricks and stunts.
The craze was meaningful, especially, for women. Both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are credited with declaring that "woman is riding to suffrage on the bicycle," a line that was printed and reprinted in newspapers at the turn of the century. The bicycle took "old-fashioned, slow-going notions of the gentler sex," as The Courier (Nebraska) reported in 1895, and replaced them with "some new woman, mounted on her steed of steel." And it gave women a new level of transportation independence that perplexed newspaper columnists across the country. From The San Francisco Call in 1895:
It really doesn't matter much where this one individual young lady is going on her wheel. It may be that she's going to the park on pleasure bent, or to the store for a dozen hairpins, or to call on a sick friend at the other side of town, or to get a doily pattern of somebody, or a recipe for removing tan and freckles. Let that be as it may. What the interested public wishes to know is, Where are all the women on wheels going? Is there a grand rendezvous somewhere toward which they are all headed and where they will some time hold a meet that will cause this wobbly old world to wake up and readjust itself?
Others, like this Sunday Herald writer in 1891, were decidedly less open minded:
The bicycle, as a new technology of its time, had become an enormous cultural and political force, and an emblem of women's rights. "The woman on the wheel is altogether a novelty, and is essentially a product of the last decade of the century," wrote The Columbian(Pennsylvania) newspaper in 1895, "she is riding to greater freedom, to a nearer equality with man, to the habit of taking care of herself, and to new views on the subject of clothes philosophy."
Yes, bicycle-riding required a shift away from the restrictive, modest fashion of the Victorian age, and ushered in a new era of exposed ankles—or at least visible bloomers—that represented such a departure from the laced up, ruffled down fashion that preceded it that bicycling women became a fascination to the (mostly male) newspaper reporters of the time.
Which brings us to a rather remarkable example, from a May 1897 edition of The New York Sun, of early American mansplaining. This particular example features an entire spread—complete with illustrations—of various women's toe-to-knee style in the bicycle age, and writer W.J. Lampton's thoughts on what regional fashion revealed about the city in a woman was biking. Lampton presents his findings lecture-style (and, curiously, refers to the illustrations as if the reader can see them on a screen), suggesting "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glories of the Whirling of the Wheel" as musical accompaniment.
Lampton calls his essay: The Evidence of the Bicycle from the Shores of the Atlantic to Those of the Pacific—a Trail of Wondrous and Varied Beauty. The pictures are charming and the copy is outright bizarre, full of flourish and objectification. Here's what he has to say about the bicycling women of Boston:
"As you are all so well aware, Boston is famed for her intellectuals...There is a delicate grace and refinement limned upon the canvas, so to speak, that is as transcendental in its esoteric concept of the metempsychosis of a plate of beans as there is in the sacred codfish that flutters its ichthyological tail over the golden dome of the State House."
The writer comments on the "Teutonic quality" of the female bicyclists in Cincinnati, saying that "hills and the bicycle will always produce the effect that we now see before us."
Philadelphia, was apparently notable for the tight leggings women opted to wear: "As will be seen, this view is a happy medium between Boston and Cincinnati, and shows neither too much intellect nor too much physical vigor. It also indicates by the leggings, which are unmistakable in their outlines, that shrinking diffidence which has justily made Philadelphia admired and loved by the classes as well as the masses."
And Washington, D.C., was "like a poet's dream" and "the Paradise of Bicyclers, whose asphalt pavements are to the bicycler what the folden streets of New Jerusalem are to the angels."
In Albany, Lamtpon imagined women on bicycles saying nothing but "'hills, hills, hills,' and adds a cuss word now and then, not only for the labor involved, but for the unbeautiful results of the wheel in daily use."
He didn't have much to say about Chicago, other than how flat it is and how "delightfully" the female bicyclists "add to the views about Chicago."
New York City, naturally, was noted for its "inimitable stylishness...which canont be found in any other limbscape on the continent."
In Denver—"what a change has the bicycle wrought!"—women's ankles outshined its "distant snow-white mountains as the finest sight on earth."
Nashville's "delightfully harmonious scenery" only got a passing mention.
While Atlanta was creepily praised for "her glorious and goddesslike daughters" who "speak for themselves, silently, but oh so expressively."
The writer noted Detroit's women for their "charm of contour" and "rustic diffidence of manner that is refreshingly pictured in the primness and preciseness of the pose now on view."
And though Pittsburgh was usually "obscured by the smoke that hangs always over the town," the writer found it "truly substantial" in what the city "shows to the eye since the bicycle has come among us."
He went a little nuts over Louisville: "What poetry and symmetry we have before us as the result of easy grades and asphalt pavements, whereupon the beauty that a goddess might well weep to gain is seen on every hand—I beg your pardon—I should perhaps have said on every foot, though I do not wish to make a joke of sacred things. Perhaps nowhere in the world shall we find just such a view as this one is."
But he seemed kind of wishy-washy about New Orleans, where he said women's legs appeared "steadier" than in hillier cities, but "more harmonious," too.
On St. Louis: "Still, it isn't as bad as it is in Chicago."
San Francisco: "Need I call your attention, ladies, to the hill effect in this picture? ... This California product, like the big trees, the big fruit, the big pumpkins, and the big lies of that noble State, is cosmopolitan, and may well be called a composite view."
He was a bit nicer to Baltimore. "In the words of a well-known poet, ladies, let me say: 'Graceful and airy is the Baltimore fairy,' and Baltimore may well be proud of her beauty record. Only a casual glance is necessary at the screen to show to even the most indifferent what there is in Baltimore to make it an ever charming resort for those who love the spinning wheel. Well may she be called the Monumental City."
And then there was Brooklyn, apparently trying just as hard then as it does now, confusing Lampton enough that he claimed to have sent the sketch artist back several times to double check the fashion, which Lampton ultimately liked: "I have given you here in this modest little picture a refreshing and rural type, which I know will come to you as a breath of fragrance from the apple blossoms and the new-mown hay. How lovely is Brooklyn, and how refining and enobling are all her influences."
Old newspaper pages are littered with this kind of thing. But there's a special layer to this one. Reading Lampton's bad jokes and hyperbole, I couldn't help but imagine what it must have felt like—in an age when American women were still decades from the right to vote and inundated with men's opinions about their ankles—for a woman to to go outside, hop on her bicycle, and ride as fast as she could wherever she wanted, leaving the rest of the world wondering where she might go.
Super Opinionated.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
