Mattalyst

kevinmioli:

seriously though

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

blacksquares:

mom - HELL

but every single day
why am i like this

Smokin’

Zothecula writes: If you're a smoker who's trying to quit, you may recall hearing about vaccines designed to cause the body's immune system to treat nicotine like a foreign invader, producing antibodies that trap and remove it before it's able to reach receptors in the brain. It's a fascinating idea, but according to scientists at California's Scripps Research Institute, a recent high-profile attempt had a major flaw. They claim to have overcome that problem (abstract), and are now developing a vaccine of their own that they believe should be more effective.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After nearly 20 years as de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah ibn-Abdulaziz al-Saud died last night at the age of 90. Abdullah, who took power after his predecessor King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, ruled as absolute monarch of a country which protected American interests but also sowed strife and extremism throughout the Middle East and the world.

In a statement last night Senator John McCain eulogized Abdullah as “a vocal advocate for peace, speaking out against violence in the Middle East”. John Kerry described the late monarch as “a brave partner in fighting violent extremism” and “a proponent of peace”. Not to be outdone, Vice President Joe Biden released a statement mourning Abdullah and announced that he would be personally leading a presidential delegation to offer condolences on his passing.

It’s not often that the unelected leader of a country which publicly flogs dissidents and beheads people for sorcery wins such glowing praise from American officials. Even more perplexing, perhaps, have been the fawning obituaries in the mainstream press which have faithfully echoed this characterization of Abdullah as a benign and well-intentioned man of peace.

Tiptoeing around his brutal dictatorship, The Washington Post characterized Abdullah as a “wily king” while The New York Times inexplicably referred to him as “a force of moderation”, while also suggesting that evidence of his moderation included having had: “hundreds of militants arrested and some beheaded”. (emphasis added)

While granting that Abdullah might be considered a relative moderate within the brazenly anachronistic House of Saud, the fact remains that he presided for two decades over a regime which engaged in wanton human rights abuses, instrumentalized religious chauvinism, and played a hugely counterrevolutionary role in regional politics.

Above all, he was not a leader who shied away from both calling for and engineering more conflict in the Middle East.

In contrast to Senator McCain’s description of Abdullah as “a vocal advocate of peace”, a State Department diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks revealed him in fact directly advocating for the United States to start more wars in the region.

In a quote recorded in a 2008 diplomatic cable, Abdullah exhorted American officials to “cut the head off the snake” by launching fresh military action against Iran. Notably, this war advocacy came in the midst of the still-ongoing bloodshed of the Iraq War, which had apparently left him unfazed about the prospect of a further escalation in regional warfare.

Abdullah’s government also waged hugely destructive proxy conflicts wherever direct American intervention on its behalf was not forthcoming. Indeed, in the case of almost every Arab Spring uprising, Saudi Arabia attempted to intervene forcefully in order to either shore up existing regimes or shape revolutions to conform with their own interests.

In Bahrain, Saudi forces intervened to crush a popular uprising which had threatened the rule of the ruling al-Khalifa monarchy, while in Syria Saudi-backed factions have helped turn what was once a popular democratic uprising into a bloody, intractable proxy war between regional rivals which is now a main driver of extremism in the Middle East.

Saudi efforts at counterrevolution and co-optation under Abdullah took more obliquely brutal forms as well.

In the midst of the 2011 revolution in Egypt, when seemingly the entire world was rallying in support of the protestors in Tahrir Square, King Abdullah stood resolutely and unapologetically on the side of Hosni Mubarak’s regime. When it seemed like Mubarak was wavering in the face of massive popular protests, the king offered to step in with economic aid for his government and demanded that President Obama ensure he not be “cast aside”.

A few years later when the pendulum swung back towards dictatorship after General Abdelfattah al Sisi’s bloody 2013 coup, Abdullah and his fellow monarchs were there to lavish much needed financial assistance upon the new regime. This support came with the endorsement of Sisi’s unrelentingly brutal crackdown on Egypt’s former revolutionaries.

With increasingly disastrous consequences, Abdullah’s government also employed sectarianism as a force to help divide-and-conquer regional populations and insulate his own government from the threat of uprising. It also cynically utilized its official religious authorities to try and equate political dissent with sinfulness.

This ostentatiously reckless behavior nevertheless seemed to win Abdullah’s regime the tacit approval of the American government, which steadfastly continued to treat him as a partner in fighting terrorism and maintaining regional stability.

Despite recent tensions over American policy towards Iran and Syria, Saudi under King Abdullah played a vital role in U.S. counterterrorism operations. The country quietly hosts a CIA drone base used for conducting strikes into Yemen, including the strike believed to have killed American-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. More controversially, Abdullah’s government is also believed to have provided extensive logistical support for American military operations during the invasion of Iraq; an uncomfortable fact which the kingdom has understandably tried to keep quiet with its own population.

Perhaps most importantly however, King Abdullah upheld the economic cornerstones of America’s long and fateful alliance with Saudi Arabia: arms purchases and the maintenance of a reliable flow of oil from the country to global markets. The one Saudi king who in past failed to hold up part of this agreement met with an untimely end, and was seemingly on less positive terms with American government officials.

Given the foundations upon which American-Saudi ties rest, it’s unlikely that the relationship will be drastically altered by the passing of King Abdullah and the succession of his brother Prince Salman. Regardless of how venal, reckless, or brutal his government may choose to be, as long as it protects American interests in the Middle East it will inevitably be showered with plaudits and support, just as its predecessor was.

Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

The post Saudi Arabia’s Tyrant King Misremembered as Man of Peace appeared first on The Intercept.

Cute

brucesterling:

*It’s hard to believe these guys aren’t bigger than Jesus on Tumblr

The Best Things SkyMall Ever Sold

Proof

Capcom is rolling out an official Resident Evil attraction at Universal Studios Japan. It's four floors of terror—and puzzles.

Read more...

There sits, in the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University, a bell that has been ringing, nonstop, for at least 175 years. It's powered by a single battery that was installed in 1840. Researchers would love to know what the battery is made of, but they are afraid that opening the bell would ruin an experiment to see how long it will last.

The bells clapper oscillates back and forth constantly and quickly, meaning the Oxford Electric Bell, as its called, has rung roughly 10 billion times, according to the university. It's made of what's called a "dry pile," which is one of the first electric batteries. Dry piles were invented by a guy named Giuseppe Zamboni (no relation to the ice resurfacing company) in the early 1800s. They use alternating discs of silver, zinc, sulfur, and other materials to generate low currents of electricity.

"What the piles are made of is not known with certainty, but it is clear that the outer coating is of sulphur, and this seals in the cells and the electrolyte," AJ Croft, a former researcher at the Clarendon Laboratory, wrote in a 1984 paper describing the bell in the European Journal of Physics. "Piles similar to this were made by Zamboni, whose batteries were constituted of about 2,000 pairs of discs of tin foil glued to paper impregnated with zinc sulphate and coated on the other side with manganese dioxide."

The bell didn't necessarily start as an experiment. It was manufactured by London instrument makers Watkin and Hill, and has a handwritten note that says "set up in 1840" displayed alongside it. It was eventually purchased by a researcher, who continued to allow it to ring (Oxford University suggests there's evidence that it may have actually been set up as early as 1825). The Guinness Book of World Records has named its power source the "world's most durable battery."

You'd think it'd be annoying as hell for a bell to be going off, constantly, for 175 yearsbut the voltage left in the battery is so low that the human ear can't actually hear the ringing. Instead, the clapper oscillates back and forth between the bell constantly, which you can see happening in this video. At this point, the experiment is more of a curiosity than anythingCroft says that the battery pulls 1 nanoAmp each time it oscillates between the bells sides, which is an exceedingly low amount of energy.

In other words, at this point, were probably not going to build a better battery thanks to this experiment.

The bell hasn't always been merely a curiosity: In World War II, infrared telescopes were powered using similar dry pile batteries, because a portable, low-current electricity source was necessary. Croft wrote that an Oxford physicist, inspired by the bell, looked up a recipe for a similar battery from the era to power the telescopes.

So, the bell rings and rings and ringsno one is sure when it's going to stop. In fact, Croft theorizes that "the clapper seems more likely to wear out than the electro-chemical energy." At that point, we might finally learn what's been powering the thing.

Agree totally

bloodjob:

theverge:

Businesstown is the place to be

Last day to buy!

Forty-six-year-old Massachusetts man Matthew McAveeney has admitted to killing his elderly mother and her two cats, but he'll only officially plead guilty to the charges if the prosecutors will give the cats he murdered the respect they deserve by naming them in the indictment. "The animals are, were, living beings," he ... More »

The best for both of us

biocanvas:

Copper indium gallium selenide

Compared to their rigid first-generation counterparts, second-generation thin film solar panels are flexible, lightweight, and just micrometers thick, making them ideal for integrating into buildings, roofs, and pathways. Instead of using silicon to convert light into electricity, these solar panels use copper indium gallium selenide, or CIGS for short. Some of the world’s largest solar panel power stations power cities using CIGS-based solar panels, which function even on cloudy days. Scientists have recently created the world’s first solar panel that stores its own power like a battery, which is predicted to tame costs of renewable energy by 25 percent.

Image by Eberhardt Josué Friedrich Kernahan and Enrique Rodríguez Cañas.

Video Shows New Jersey Police Fatally Shooting Man with His Hands Raised

american-apparel-sex-wario:

prostheticknowledge:

Brand Killer

Student project by Reed Rosenbluth, Jonathan Dubin, Tom Catullo, and Alex Crits-Christoph is a proof-of-concept Augmented Reality version of Ad-Block, censoring brand logos that appear in the real world - video embedded below:

Corporate branding and advertisements are ubiquitous in society today and impossible to avoid. What if we lived in a world where consumers were blind to the excesses of corporte branding? Brand Killer is a technology demonstration of a future world in which consumers can empower themselves using augmented reality to literally ignore corporate influence. We built head mounted display which uses openCV image processing to recognize and block brands and logos from the user’s point of view in real time. It’s AdBlock for Real Life.

More Here

finally, a use for AR that isn’t creepy, stupid, and horrible!

see

Finding the exact date of the day Ice Cube refers to in his classic song "Today Was A Good Day":

hiphopfightsback:

CLUE 1:
     “Went to Short Dog’s house,
       They was watching Yo MTV RAPS”
Yo MTV RAPS first aired:
               Aug 6th 1988

CLUE 2:
Ice Cube’s single Today Was A Good Day was released on:
               Feb 23 1993

CLUE 3:
      ”The Lakers beat the SuperSonics”
Dates between Yo MTV Raps air date AUGUST 6 1988 and the release of the single FEBRUARY 23 1993 where the Lakers beat the SuperSonics:
      Nov 11 1988    114-103
      Nov 30 1988    110-106
      Apr    4 1989    115-97
      Apr  23 1989    121-117
      Jan  17 1990    100-90
      Feb  28 1990    112-107
      Mar  25 1990    116-94
      Apr  17  1990    102-101
      Jan  18  1991    105-96
      Mar  24  1991    113-96
      Apr  21  1991    103-100
      Jan  20  1992    116-110

CLUE 4:
Dates of those Lakers won over SuperSonics where it was a clear day with no Smog:
                Nov 30 1988
                Apr   4  1989
                Jan 18  1991
                Jan 20  1992

CLUE 5:
     “Got a beep from Kim, and
         She can fuck all night”
Beepers weren’t adopted by mobile phone companies until the 1990s. Dates left where mobile beepers were available to public:
                 Jan 18 1991
                 Jan 20 1992

CLUE 6:
Ice Cube starred in the film “Boyz in the hood” that released late Summer of 1991, but was being filmed mid-late 1990 early 1991 and Ice Cube was busy on set filming the movie Jan 18 1991, too busy to be lounging around the streets with no plans. Ladies and Gentlemen..

The ONLY day where:

• Yo MTV Raps was on air

• It was a clear and smogless day

• Beepers were commercially sold

• Lakers beat the SuperSonics

• and Ice Cube had no events to attend to was…

        JANUARY 20, 1992
      National Good Day Day

linkthehero:

bonitaapplebelle:

bigbootychaylow:

i’m fucKING SCREAMING

And with that I’m going to sleep

same

For when things need to be said, and you really don’t feel like talking.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelysanders/introshirts?bffb&utm_term=4ldqphh#.xs7wgYaQy

According to TMZ, actor and celebrity trainer Greg Plitt was racing a train for an energy drink commercial when he was struck and killed this weekend.

TMZ reports that police watched video of Plitt standing on the tracks until the train approached, at which point he assumed a sprinter's stance and took off running just ahead of the locomotive. The video shows the train catching up and clipping Plitt, who died after being thrown from the tracks.

Police reportedly found several empty energy drinks at the scene and told TMZ that Plitt had been shooting a commercial for the beverage company, which was not named in the report.

Witnesses and friends told the L.A. Times that Plitt may have been trying to mimic a superhero when he was killed. "He just made a mistake," his friend Warren Coulter said.

"He wanted to push things to the limit," his girlfriend Christina Stejskal told the paper. "He's just like Superman."

Gilberto "Cannibal Cop" Valle beat his conviction for conspiring to kidnap, rape, kill, and eat women last summer—and he's ready to get back into the dating scene. The New York Post found his apparent Match.com profile, in which the former NYPD officer seeks the loving companionship of a woman who is "non-judgmental" and "a little kinky ;)"

If you are a woman aged 24–32 and are able to compartmentalize the unsettling imagery evoked by Valle's deepest fetish desires (like roasting you over a fire), then fire up Match.com and search for his username, "AmicableOne14" and be willing to "appreciate the simple things" and "make the best out of a situation that is less than ideal." (He's under supervised release with a curfew.)

Valle notes in his profile that he drinks an "abnormal amount of coffee" and that his "favorite chain coffee is Dunkin' Donuts." Also: he's a "big foodie."

Other brags he has on his profile, should your interest in this man somehow persist:

• "I have a few bucket list items: a cross-country drive along with other traveling, seeing Jerry Seinfeld do stand-up, going to a live Hell's Kitchen dinner service"
• "Occasionally I just need a day indoors by myself and that usually entails enjoying a glass of bourbon on the rocks"
• He has a dog
• He wears turtlenecks
• He grins
• He holds babies
• "I know more about baseball than all of your guy friends"
• "I'm also seriously good at tweeting"

The Post confronted Valle about the profile. He seemed embarrassed:

Valle wanted no part of discussing his romantic pursuits on Tuesday. "A what? A dating profile? No, I'm sorry. I don't know anything about it," he told The Post.

When shown a screenshot of the profile, he blurted, "I don't want to see it, thanks," and hurried inside his home.

"I am spending my energy rebounding from the errors I made in my past and rebuilding my life," the profile reads. "Things are progressing very well on that front, and I am just beginning a new career."http://gawker.com/5955006/cook-h...

Do not date this man.

[Images via New York Post]

Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, learns about drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose. Read the rest