An activist couple (she's a neurscientist, he's a psychologist who successfully treated his depression with psychedelics) (they fight crime!) are raising $1M on Indiegogo to fund production of medical-grade MDMA and psilocybin.
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After years of legal battles with the music industry, Grooveshark officially shut down for good on April 30th — that is until a rogue fan relaunched the music streaming website under a new domain.
Grooveshark, originally founded in 2006, quickly became popular among music fans because of its on-demand catalogue that allowed you to stream songs a la carte long before Spotify arrived on the scene. While popular, many of the songs uploaded to Grooveshark were copyrighted songs — with even Grooveshark's founders reportedly instructing employees to upload popular songs — all of which eventually led to the official website's shutdown.
Less than a week later after Grooveshark went dark, a new version of Grooveshark has popped up, and it's the handiwork of a rogue fan who goes by "Shark," who claims he managed to back up 90% of the songs before the official website's shutdown, according to BGR.
"I started backing up all the content on the website when I started suspecting that Grooveshark’s demise is close and my suspicion was confirmed a few days later when they closed," Shark wrote to BGR in an email. "By the time they closed I have already backed up 90% of the content on the site and I’m now working on getting the remaining 10%."
To protect itself from being yanked down again, the new Grooveshark website includes a legal disclaimer, informing users that "the songs you want to download may have copyright(s) on them" and that "you're not allowed to download the song if you don't possess the original record."
Of course, even with obvious links to file DMCA take-down requests and its legal disclaimers plastered all over the site, there's no telling how long the new Grooveshark will manage to keep the lights on — so don't cancel that Spotify Premium membership quite yet.
That’s right. GoatZ is the latest DLC for Goat Simulator and it will be the only survival game on Steam that isn’t in Early Access!*
Features
• Mandatory crafting system because everyone else is doing it • Zombies that bug out. There’s a pun here about actual living bugs, but we’re not going to bother • You can craft anything in the world, as long as it’s one of the half dozen weapons in the game • Zombies, because this is a zombie game, remember? • A pretty big new map with some stuff in it • Completely realistic survival mode where you have to eat every damn five minutes to survive because Dean Hall & Garry Newman said so
*not totally sure if this is even true, to be honest we didn’t bother to look it up. But it’s still pretty funny, right?
GoatZ will be released on May 7th on Steam as a DLC for Windows, Mac and Linux and will cost $4.99. It'll also be released the same day as a seperate app on iOS and Android for the same price.
Interesting, particularly the Rauch piece linked. Although I haven't decided yet whether I agree.
Governors Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo, in happier times (Mark Lennihan / Pool / Reuters)
People say they want more bipartisanship. In poll after poll after poll, they decry the polarized atmosphere in Washington and say they want their leaders to work together.
To which the people of New York and New Jersey might reply: seriously?
It's indictment-and-arrest season in the tri-state region. Monday morning, New York State Senate Leader Dean Skelos, a Republican, and his son Adam were arrested on federal charges of extortion, fraud, and soliciting bribes. It's been just three months since State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, was himself arrested on federal corruption charges. Meanwhile, across the Hudson River in New Jersey, Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni, two former top allies of Governor Chris Christie, pleaded not guilty to nine counts apiece including wire fraud and conspiracy in the George Washington Bridge Scandal. On Friday, David Wildstein, a Christie appointee, pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges in the same scandal.
What New York and New Jersey share, besides oft-imitated accents and embarrassing reputations for political corruption, is bipartisan governance. It wasn't that long ago—before the bridge scandal, credit downgrades, and collapse of Atlantic City—that Christie seemed like a model of a Republican who could work with Democrats and achieve his priorities. Christie forged an alliance with Jersey Democratic boss George Norcross and his protege Steve Sweeney, the Democratic president of the State Senate. Christie even managed to gain many Democratic endorsements in his 2013 run for reelection. In fact, prosecutors say it was his aides' overzealous attempt to squeeze an endorsement from the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee that led to the bridge closure that now threatens to undo his career.
Something similar was going on in Albany. Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, became extremely close with Silver and Skelos, even though Skelos was a Republican. In his January State of the State address—the day before Silver's arrest, it turned out—he described his relationship with the two as "the three amigos." The alliance drove some other New York Democrats nuts. Even though Cuomo had delivered two major progressive priorities in passing gun control and legalizing gay marriage, he governed far too close to the center for liberals' taste on economic issues. But that allowed Cuomo to run the state government smoothly and implement his agenda.
In both cases, government functioned thanks to the lubrication of lucre, which allowed coalitions to grow across the aisle. There's been no clear evidence of illegality outside of the bridge scandal, but reporters including Alec MacGillis have shown how Christie doled out favors to his and Norcross's factions while bullying opponents into support or at least silence. In Cuomo's case, he launched a highly trumpeted ethics inquiry, the Moreland Commission, after a series of embarrassing arrests of lawmakers, but then muzzled and eventually shut it down—when, it seems, it annoyed too many members of both parties. Unfortunately for them, and for Cuomo, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara decided to pick up where the commission left off and ended up with charges against the two leaders.
One common risk factor for scandal is single-party domination. If one political party controls a state long enough, the opposition party fails to be an effective counterweight and the ruling party may lapse into scandal through sloppiness or lack of competition. I wrote about this pattern a few years ago, discussing the travails of South Carolina, where Democratic Party politicians are perpetual losers. (In that article, I also suggested the Empire State might be getting its own act together, after years of Democratic-dominated corruption, under Cuomo. Oops!)
But bipartisanship holds its own risks, as New York and New Jersey show. Last year in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch argued that what the nation really needs is a bit more corruption. He pointed to the dysfunction caused by the abolition of earmarks in Congress, a step intended to stop corruption but also stopped dealmaking in D.C. More broadly, he said, old-school Tammany Hall politics aren't such a bad thing:
Earnest campaigns to take the politics out of politics can make governing more difficult, with results that serve no one very well. The next time you see some new reform scheme touted in the name of stopping corruption, pause to recall the wisdom of another old-school pol, the late Representative Jimmy Burke, of Massachusetts: “The trouble with some people is that they think this place is on the level.”
This isn't to say that there isn't a line between legal and illegal deal-making (or, as the Tammany mandarin George Washington Plunkitt phrased it, between honest and dishonest graft). If the charges against Baroni, Kelly, Skelos, and Silver are proven, it will show that they went past the sort of backroom pressure that makes politics run. But both inquiries are inseparable from bipartisanship—in New York, from Cuomo's apparent move to protect allies by shutting down the Moreland Commission, and in New Jersey, from the fervid quest to get Democratic support for the Republican governor.
Bipartisanship isn't a bad thing—but voters shouldn't imagine that politicians working across party lines will make everything work beautifully. As New Jerseyans and New Yorkers can attest, comity has its downsides too.
Two men were shot and killed by police on Sunday night after they opened fire outside a controversial art show in Garland, Texas, that focused on cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Shortly before 7 p.m., when the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest was scheduled to end, two men drove up ... More »
I only have room in my heart for a few novelty Twitters at a time, but this might be next should Erowid Recruiter ever go dark (it’s been a while since its last tweet and I admit to some worry). The only drawback is this one gets the songs stuck in your head.
A caterpillar in the Amazon has just created the perfect defense against the ‘stop and chat’: any noise causes it to fire four spiraling tentacles on its abdomen – the cranky bug version of “leave me alone.”
“I had just climbed to the top of a canopy tower overlooking the rainforest when I called to my group below me, when suddenly a flash of movement at eye-level caught my attention,” recalls entomologist Aaron Pomerantz, who happened upon the creature while traversing the jungles of Peru. Given the larva’s strange aversion to conversation, Pomerantz took the only logical next step and yelled at it again. For an hour. Because science.
“Screaming at caterpillars doesn’t fall into most people’s job descriptions,” he says. “But this reaction to noise was so peculiar that once my group joined me, we took turns yelling at it and filmed its contorting reactions…all to bring the story of this bizarre organism to you!”
A bit of digging revealed the caterpillar belongs to the Nematocampa genus of moths, which use hemolymph – the insect equivalent to blood but grosser– to enlarge the long appendages until they become erect (sound familiar?).
The strange defense has been observed before, but there are a lot hypotheses about its origin. It’s possible that the filaments help the larva blend in, mimicking the way a flower’s stamens would blow in the wind. “It could also be that the tentacles extend when the caterpillar is alarmed so that an attacking predator (such as a bird) has a higher probability of snagging a tentacle, as opposed to the main body (similar to how some lizards are able to lose their tails),” explains Pomerantz. Further still, the tips of the tentacles are covered with tiny hairs, called setae, which could act as highly sensitive vibration detectors, allowing the caterpillar to hear incoming threats before they come into view.
It’s a bit of a mystery, but one thing’s for sure, we’ve never wanted to yell at a caterpillar so badly.
So far, the majority of evidence for animals self-medicating—either by ingesting or applying substances with medicinal properties to treat or prevent disease—has been documented in vertebrates, and more specifically chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). But there is a growing body of evidence that a wider and wider range of animals seek out plants and other substances specifically for their healing properties.
Editors note: The feature showcased in this article seems to have been disabled subsequent to this article being published. No word on when the feature will be operational again.
The internet is always going to be full of little surprises. A few months ago, we told you about the online archive that now made it possible to play thousands of MS-DOS games on your internet browser for free. Well it was reported today, through Wired.com, that these browser friendly DOS games are able to be shared and enjoyed through more than just the website. It seems, for some reason, placing the URL for one of the games inside of a tweet, makes the game available to play directly inside that tweet. Want to let your buddy know about one of the games in the archive? Why take the extra time to send them to the site and search their library when you can simply tweet it at them and let them play the game right away? Even embedding the tweet on websites brings the embedded game along with it.
Now you are free to play and enjoy the original Metal Gear right here in the middle of this story, instead of having to search it our for yourself. You’re welcome readers.
Now, losing productivity at work is even easier than the MS-DOS archive made it originally. Yes, I did play Metal Gear while tweeting that out, and again when I was supposed to be writing. The tweeted games do not, however, transfer over well to phones and tablets, since the archive is not built to utilize touch screen or phone keyboard mechanics. So for now, you will need to stick to your computer screens for some classic fun.
How many of you played the Metal Gear copy I linked? How many have put out your own tweets with games in them? Let us know in the comments below.
