Dan Jones

Texts From Superheroes

Facebook | Twitter | Patreon

CORONA, CA—According to sources close to the Manning residence, local mother Linda Manning spent over five hours cleaning her two-story home Monday. She painstakingly cleaned the kitchen, picked up toys all over the house, and found dishes and clothing in random spots all over the house.

The post House That Took Five Hours To Clean Destroyed By Kids In Fourteen Seconds appeared first on The Babylon Bee.

A story about families, togetherness, abuse, and becoming better.

No porno is actually featured in this video.

Because of the Electoral College and the way the primary system works in the US, presidential candidates end up spending a disproportionate amount of time is so-called “battleground states” like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and our dysfunctional friend Florida and primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire and less time where most of the US population actually lives (NY, CA, TX, IL, and in cities). The campaign for the National Popular Vote has produced a map that shows where the candidates did campaign events in 2016:

Because of these state winner-take-all statutes, presidential candidates have no reason to pay attention to the issues of concern to voters in states where the statewide outcome is a foregone conclusion. In 2012, as shown on the map, all of the 253 general-election campaign events were in just 12 states, and two-thirds were in just 4 states (Ohio, Florida, Virginia, and Iowa). Thirty-eight states were completely ignored.

And here’s the map for the 2012 election, which is even more extreme:

State winner-take-all statutes adversely affect governance. “Battleground” states receive 7% more federal grants than “spectator” states, twice as many presidential disaster declarations, more Superfund enforcement exemptions, and more No Child Left Behind law exemptions.

Also, because of state winner-take-all statutes, five of our 45 Presidents have come into office without having won the most popular votes nationwide. The 2000 and 2016 elections are the most recent examples of elections in which a second-place candidate won the White House. Near-misses are also common under the current state-by-state winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes. A shift of 59,393 votes in Ohio in 2004 would have elected John Kerry despite President Bush’s nationwide lead of over 3,000,000 votes.

Texts From Superheroes

Facebook | Twitter | Patreon

As I was listening to an old episode of A Way With Words today (as I’m often wont todo), someone called in with a question regarding pronunciation that I wanted to learn a bit more about. While searchingonline, though, I came across a website which offers courses to reduce one’s accent.

As soon as I saw the title, I felt a little sick. As I read the description on the site, I felt even worse.

These courses are offered by a person who holds a Masters Degree in Speech-Language Pathology, and is certified as aTeacher of Students with Speech and Language Disabilities. She also works as an accent coach for actors. If anyone isqualified to teach someone how to “reduce” their native accent, she is.

However, I’ve always felt that there’s something beautiful about the rich tapestry of dialects and pronunciations wehave in the United States. I happen to work for a company that often hires people from outside the country, as well asmany resident aliens. As a result, every day I communicate with individuals with a wide variety of accents. I’ve gottenso used to them, that I’m starting to be able to pick out regional accents among some of my coworkers from the samecountry.

I can understand that folks would be frustrated when they’re not understood. I can see how that might make someone wantto reduce their accent. I can also see how the desire to fit in might compell someone to use a service like this.

But I feel that most of what drives this desire is not in the individuals with the accents, but rather those aroundthem. I think it’s the attitudes of locals that is the impetus. Some people look down on others because of the way theytalk.

For some folks with accents not native to the area in which they live, I’m sure it’s simply a desire not to stickout. I’m sure many of them regularly hear “Oh, what an interesting accent. Where are you from?” far more often thanthey’d like.

The world is becoming a smaller place in many ways. I think it’s way past time that all of us stop treating people whoare different than us as “exotic”, or less-than.

I also dislike the idea that people should have to speak “Standard American English”, as if that’s an actual thing, justin order to fit in. And I feel like, as Americans, we lose so much of what we are by pushing the idea that people shouldall talk the same.

I’m finding myself unusually upset about this. But, maybe I’m being overly-sensitive, especially for someone who’srarely been on the receiving end of accent discrimination. Do y’all think this is a reasonable way for people toassimilate into a new culture?

Gizmodo has a pretty cool theme this week: the Alternate Internet. Not, like, the internet where they play Stone Temple Pilots b-sides — although, cool idea. No, like, the internet of alternate universes, different pasts and futures, where things went differently and like, Yahoo doesn’t ruin all it touches. That’s my kind of party.

The story on alternate social media networks offers a nice media archaeology of all these sites; how they were covered and explained in the moment. Check out this explanation of Friendster in SF Weekly from August 13, 2003:

“Your induction into Friendster starts out innocently enough: You receive an e-mail invitation from a friend. It doesn’t cost anything to join, so you give it a whirl. You answer questions about your profession, favorite books, movies, music, and other interests, then upload a digital photo of yourself.

Thumbnail versions of your friends’ photos appear on your profile page like a collection of trading cards. Clicking on their pictures takes you to their pages, where you can see all of their friends, and so on. Even with only a few friends, you find that — through friends of friends — you suddenly have access to a social network of thousands of people.”

It’s a pretty common story what happened to all these sites; either they took the money, and got mismanaged, driving off whatever users they had in the first place, or they didn’t take the money, which meant they could never stay usable enough to support all of the users they were taking on.

A few other common threads: a fear of porn, other lewd behavior, and Yik Yak -style harassment. In short, it’s hard to make a social media site actually go big. You need money, a vanilla rep, ruthlessness, and more money. In the end, Facebook really was in the right place at the right time.

The one thing this doesn’t do is some deep left-field speculating, like, what if Google had seen what it had in Blogger to create Facebook before Facebook? Or Yahoo had figured it out with version X of whatever asset Yahoo had? There are social networks, real or latent, bigger than the social media graveyeard — some of the pieces are still here.

ISRAEL—There was a certain man who had two sons, and the younger son demanded his inheritance and then wasted it all in a distant country. When the son came crawling back, begging for forgiveness, the father made a huge celebration to mark the return of his prodigal son.

The post Prodigal Son Kicked Back Out After Old Tweets Surface appeared first on The Babylon Bee.

Milica Mihajlija:

Adding rel=preconnect to a <link> informs the browser that your page intends to establish a connection to another domain, and that you'd like the process to start as soon as possible. Resources will load more quickly because the setup process has already been completed by the time the browser requests them.

The graphic in the post does a good job of making this an obviously good choice for performance:

Robin did a good job of rounding up information on all this type of stuff a few years back. Looks like the best practice right now is using these two:

<link rel="preconnect" href="http://example.com">
<link rel="dns-prefetch" href="http://example.com">

For all domains that aren't the main domain you're loading the document from.

A quick look at CSS-Tricks resources right now, I get:

secure.gravatar.com
static.codepen.io
res.cloudinary.com
ad.doubleclick.com
s3.buysellads.com
srv.buysellads.com
www.google-analytics.com

That'd be 14 extra <link> tags in the first few packets of data on every request on this site. It sounds like a perf win, but I'd want to test that before no-brainer chucking it in there.

Andy Davies did some recent experimentation:

So what difference can preconnect make?

I used the HTTP Archive to find a couple of sites that use Cloudinary for their images, and tested them unchanged, and then with the preconnect script injected. Each test consisted of nine runs, using Chrome emulating a mobile device, and the Cable network profile.

There’s a noticeable visual improvement in the first site, with the main background image loading over half a second sooner (top) than on the unchanged site (bottom).

This stuff makes me think of instant.page (which just went v2), which is a fancy little script that preloads things based on interactions. It's now a browser extension (FasterChrome) that I've been trying out. I can't say I notice a huge difference, but I'm almost always on fast internet connections.

The post Using rel=”preconnect” to establish network connections early and increase performance appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Working from remains discovered during archaeological excavations, sculptor and archaeologist Oscar Nilsson combines his two disciplines to reconstruct the faces of people who lived hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of years ago.

This Neanderthal woman lived 45-50,000 years ago:

This young woman lived in what is now Britain about 5500 years ago. DNA evidence shows that the skin color of the region’s inhabitants at the time was quite dark, akin to that of modern North Africans.

This man was around 20 when he died in northern Switzerland 1300 years ago. His skull was unusual in that it contained a full set of perfect teeth.

You can read more about Nilsson’s restorations at Facebook and National Geographic.

Nilsson’s forensic technique starts with an exact 3D replica of the original skull, scanned, printed, and then modeled by hand to reflect bone structure and tissue thickness based on the individual’s origin, sex, and estimated age at death.

Recent genome studies of ancient European populations enable Nilsson to outfit his reconstructions with reasonably accurate estimates of skin, hair, and eye color. The Neolithic population that the 5,600-year-old Whitehawk woman belonged to, for instance, generally had lighter skin and darker eyes than earlier occupants of Britain such as Cheddar Man, but were darker than the exhibit’s Ditchling Road man, who arrived on the island in the first wave of light-skinned, light-eyed Beaker people from continental Europe around 4,400 years ago.

Listen in as Anthony Vincent covered Metallica’s classic Enter Sandman in 20 different musical styles, ranging from yodeling to The Eurythmics to Hans Zimmer to Lil Uzi Vert to John Denver.

For the past year, a group of teens in Nigeria called the Critics Company have been uploading short sci-fi films to their YouTube channel. Using a smartphone with a busted screen, makeshift equipment, open source 3D tools like Blender, and green sheets hung on walls, the self-taught group has produced some professional-grade special effects. Check out this 10-minute short they uploaded in January, Z: The Beginning.

Here’s a breakdown of how they did some of the visual effects for their short called Chase:

The group has attracted some media attention; here’s a news report with some further behind-the-scenes details (see also similar reports by Reuters and Al Jazeera):

Gerry is a typeface where the letterforms are created from heavily gerrymandered Congressional districts. For example, the letter U is the 4th district in Illinois:

Click through to download the font for free and to tweet at your representative to stop gerrymandering.

Texts From Superheroes

Facebook | Twitter | Patreon

Anya Litvak, reporting for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The choice for thousands of union workers at Royal Dutch Shell’s petrochemical plant in Beaver County was clear Tuesday: Either stand in a giant hall waiting for President Donald Trump to speak or take the day off with no pay.

“Your attendance is not mandatory,” said the rules that one contractor relayed to employees, summarizing points from a memo that Shell sent to union leaders a day ahead of the visit to the $6 billion construction site. But only those who showed up at 7 a.m., scanned their ID cards, and prepared to stand for hours — through lunch but without lunch — would be paid.

“NO SCAN, NO PAY,” a supervisor for that contractor wrote.

Easy call to boycott all Shell products — forcing your employees to serve as paid supporters is authoritarian bullshit. And this is why Trump accuses protestors of being paid stooges — pure projection.