Nick Garner

Just a quick note to future me: now Howlidays are no longer celebrated on the first Tuesday after December 10th.

We never did manage to get it right anyway. So the new tradition is a codification of that fact.

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Rob Cockerham says: "The Internet has a long history of tricking people into clicking on things. The latest version of this is the scourge of Facebook posts linking to Upworthy and Viralnova. The links promise something amazing, tear-jerking or unbelievable, while not quite giving two shreds of actual information about the video. I can't stand this tactic. I have a possible solution: Spoil the surprise. Just describe the goddamn mystery in the first comment."

Short-circuiting the Facebook tease video Link

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Great Scott!! A LEGO Delorean Time Machine!

Our world changed, on that fateful day when Doctor Emmett "Doc" Brown, PhD. slipped in the bathroom, banged his head and invented the FLUX CAPACITOR. Installing it in a Delorean? Brilliant!

Now you can build your own non-working replica out of Lego.

I frequently search Craigslist looking for a deal on a Delorean. I'll likely never buy one, but hey its a fantasy. I really loved the Back to the Future movies and think Doc Brown is one of the greatest movie characters of all time.

The LEGO Back to the Future Time Traveling Delorean

The Vessel is a hanging bathtub. Designed by SplinterWorks, it's constructed from carbon fiber and empties out the bottom into a floor drain. Sadly, it does not swing. "The Hammock Bathtub" (Homes & Hues, via Neatorama)

This is not a Photoshop job. This is the very real toothy smile of sheepshead fish. It lives in North America, writes Becky Crew at the Running Ponies blog. And, like humans, it has both incisors and molars — perfect for masticating an omnivorous diet. Apparently, they also taste good, which should be some consolation. Worse comes to worse, we can always eat them.

Good Evening. It has been some years since I have spoken with you, since we have shared words. I have been on a magical journey—to use the words of a showman—and I would like to tell you about it.

I am a band, now. Perhaps I am several bands, it is hard to say. This is how it happened.

There was a boy who thought well of himself, and he was quite fond of the latest, flashiest technologies. His iPhone, that Judas's cradle of the modern world, that bearer of hollow crux and vinuous grasp, came into my possession one day. On it was a harmless-looking computer program, and when, on a lark of sorts, on a long drive, I opened it up—it allowed me to place small blocks in a grid, and those blocks became sounds. They became music, they became tunes, through the machinery of men who work in Cupertino, California. It sounds like a false place of fallen orchards and glass, but their perversion has created something useful to me.

I was immediately taken with this easy ability to put down the tunes in my head, and change them over time to suit the knowledge I was gaining. Wikipedia.org, that great website, taught me of "circles of fifths," and "counterfeit modulation." Such lofty terms. So, fancy. But they are useful, hard-won things. They ride unto us on the shoulders of madmen, of lunatics who died from their exertions in the service of music, strangled upon the tether from which they hung by the heavens. Beethoven. The mournful Russian Rachmaninoff. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (diminutive coprophiliac and giggler).

I am quite likely several bands. They suit my many moods.

1. FRAN.CE

   I have found kin in that plastic instrument, that lipstick, the synthesizer. I do not know why, but its tones soothe me. Perhaps the precision of its "attack" and "decay" can be specified so cleanly, it is therapeutic. Please, enjoy the music of FRAN.CE.

2. Piano Dan
   Perhaps you might say, he is my "alter ego." Or just a character I have schemed up. A "piano-loving friend" who diddles all the night and day on his keys, creating the most delightful—or perhaps the least delightful—simple piano melodies. I imagine him as serious, silent, leaving when he is done, walking up round the fertile berm of the lane that wound from home to the world beyond.

3. Downtown Mammal
   This is something I don't know that I do.

ENGINEERING NOTE
As you have been aware, I am not of an ease with computers. This "iTunes," with its crazy spelling, is something I simply cannot make known to me. To hear Téodor say it, the songs become one in the air, and appear on devices which have an understanding placed in them by the wealthy. I will have none of it. In my world, music is a good old thing, listened to on cassettes, and easily shared in that way. Because I can not e-mail you all a cassette, however, I played my iPhone into my tape recorder, then played my tape recorder at a computer's microphone. From there it was a hop-skip to share my first song with you. If you enjoy it, please hold your own tape recorder to your computer's speaker, and then carry it with you wherever you go.

MY FIRST SONG
Orris Root Tango - Peter H. Cropes, Programmer of the Piano
This little tune may be considered how it feels to drive at night, down the furrowed hard-clay lanes of Parish Amortane, Louisiana, between the orris fields and the fragrant sassafrass, knowing it was time to do what you had felt building inside you for many days.

After discussing its vision of a digital payments future over the past few years, PayPal is finally making it a reality today with the launch of its new iPhone and Android apps.

The apps (free on iPhone and Android) offer some innovative new features like the ability to order and pay for something before you even step foot in a store, as well as pay right at the table in some restaurants, but their biggest upgrade is pretty simple: It makes all of PayPal’s existing services far more easy to use.

For example, now you can easily switch between using your payment sources for every transaction, PayPal no longer pushes to use your bank account for everything. Sending money to friends is easier than ever. And PayPal has also added more extensive integration with its Bill Me Later service. Now you can apply for Bill Me Later right from within the app and have a line of credit available in seconds.

These new apps prove that PayPal can both innovate with completely new features, while also looking inward to make its current technology far more user-friendly.

PayPal’s Anuj Nayar, the senior director of global initiatives, led me on a whirlwind tour of several Manhattan cafes and restaurants to show off the new app. We ordered coffee at the Telegraphe Cafe simply by checking in with the app and telling the cashier to charge us (they identified one of the PayPal reps with me by their profile picture, which showed up in their register). While sipping coffee at the Telegraphe, we ordered ahead for cookies at a bakery, which were ready for us to pick up as soon as we walked in (no line waiting for us!).

Nayar points out that without having to deal with the exchange of money, cashiers can have a more human interaction with you. They know your name and what you look like if you check in. They can basically treat you like a regular customer, even if its your first time stepping foot in their shop.

At the hip City Winery restaurant, Nayar demonstrated how you can also settle your bill with the PayPal app. When you ask for the check, you simply need to enter a code into the PayPal app to pull up your bill and pay. Restaurants can tweak the PayPal experience to suit their needs — for example, some restaurants may give you access to your PayPal bill code as soon as you sit down, so you can add new items to the order from directly within the app without bothering your server. (Nayar stressed that restaurant integration is still early, eventually there could be much simpler ways, like viewing a QR code with your phone’s camera, to get your bill without typing in a code.)

PayPal has also integrated its Groupon-like Offers service directly into the app. Now you can browse for offers and instantly redeem them when you pay through the app. For many consumers, this could be their gateway to using the PayPal app for in-store payments.

I’ve seen PayPal demonstrate much of its in-store payment technology over the past year and a half, but the company has been slow to roll out the truly innovative stuff. Instead, we’ve seen more half-hearted attempts like its Home Depot point of sale integration, which allows you to check out by typing in your PayPal credentials (a significantly more complicated effort than just swiping your credit card).

The company’s deal with point-of-sale giant NCR is paying off in a big way for the new apps. Now PayPal can tap into NCR’s technology in thousands of restaurants, so it doesn’t need to form direct partnerships. PayPal has also joined up with Eat24 to get access to their menu listings (eventually, it could partner with the likes of Seamless and Grubhub).

With the new apps and support from more businesses, what once seemed like a pipe dream for PayPal — the idea that people can just forget about their wallets and manage their payments with their phones — feels within reach.

Filed under: Mobile

Dear Prime Minister, M Rogge, Lord Coe and Members of the International Olympic Committee,

I write in the earnest hope that all those with a love of sport and the Olympic spirit will consider the stain on the Five Rings that occurred when the 1936 Berlin Olympics proceeded under the exultant aegis of a tyrant who had passed into law, two years earlier, an act which singled out for special persecution a minority whose only crime was the accident of their birth. In his case he banned Jews from academic tenure or public office, he made sure that the police turned a blind eye to any beatings, thefts or humiliations inflicted on them, he burned and banned books written by them.

He claimed they “polluted” the purity and tradition of what it was to be German, that they were a threat to the state, to the children and the future of the Reich. He blamed them simultaneously for the mutually exclusive crimes of Communism and for the controlling of international capital and banks. He blamed them for ruining the culture with their liberalism and difference. The Olympic movement at that time paid precisely no attention to this evil and proceeded with the notorious Berlin Olympiad, which provided a stage for a gleeful Führer and only increased his status at home and abroad. It gave him confidence. All historians are agreed on that. What he did with that confidence we all know.

Putin is eerily repeating this insane crime, only this time against LGBT Russians. Beatings, murders and humiliations are ignored by the police. Any defence or sane discussion of homosexuality is against the law. Any statement, for example, that Tchaikovsky was gay and that his art and life reflects this sexuality and are an inspiration to other gay artists would be punishable by imprisonment. It is simply not enough to say that gay Olympians may or may not be safe in their village. The IOC absolutely must take a firm stance on behalf of the shared humanity it is supposed to represent against the barbaric, fascist law that Putin has pushed through the Duma. Let us not forget that Olympic events used not only to be athletic, they used to include cultural competitions. Let us realise that in fact, sport is cultural. It does not exist in a bubble outside society or politics. The idea that sport and politics don’t connect is worse than disingenuous, worse than stupid. It is wickedly, wilfully wrong. Everyone knows politics interconnects with everything for “politics” is simply the Greek for “to do with the people”.

An absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 on Sochi is simply essential. Stage them elsewhere in Utah, Lillehammer, anywhere you like. At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.

He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov but his instincts are the same. He may claim that the “values” of Russia are not the “values” of the West, but this is absolutely in opposition to Peter the Great’s philosophy, and against the hopes of millions of Russians, those not in the grip of that toxic mix of shaven headed thuggery and bigoted religion, those who are agonised by the rolling back of democracy and the formation of a new autocracy in the motherland that has suffered so much (and whose music, literature and drama, incidentally I love so passionately).

I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler’s anti-Semitism. Every time in Russia (and it is constantly) a gay teenager is forced into suicide, a lesbian “correctively” raped, gay men and women beaten to death by neo-Nazi thugs while the Russian police stand idly by, the world is diminished and I for one, weep anew at seeing history repeat itself.

“All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing,” so wrote Edmund Burke. Are you, the men and women of the IOC going to be those “good” who allow evil to triumph?

The Summer Olympics of 2012 were one of the most glorious moments of my life and the life of my country. For there to be a Russian Winter Olympics would stain the movement forever and wipe away any of that glory. The Five Rings would finally be forever smeared, besmirched and ruined in the eyes of the civilised world.

I am begging you to resist the pressures of pragmatism, of money, of the oily cowardice of diplomats and to stand up resolutely and proudly for humanity the world over, as your movement is pledged to do. Wave your Olympic flag with pride as we gay men and women wave our Rainbow flag with pride. Be brave enough to live up to the oaths and protocols of your movement, which I remind you of verbatim below.

Rule 4 Cooperate with the competent public or private organisations and authorities in the endeavour to place sport at the service of humanity and thereby to promote peace

Rule 6: Act against any form of discrimination affecting the Olympic Movement

Rule 15 Encourage and support initiatives blending sport with culture and education

I especially appeal to you, Prime Minister, a man for whom I have the utmost respect. As the leader of a party I have for almost all of my life opposed and instinctively disliked, you showed a determined, passionate and clearly honest commitment to LGBT rights and helped push gay marriage through both houses of our parliament in the teeth of vehement opposition from so many of your own side. For that I will always admire you, whatever other differences may lie between us. In the end I believe you know when a thing is wrong or right. Please act on that instinct now.

Yours in desperate hope for humanity

Stephen Fry

 

The post An Open Letter to David Cameron and the IOC appeared first on Official site of Stephen Fry.

It's almost as if it was designed to be turned into short, looping images for use on the World Wide Web. [Video Link via Metafilter]

Robbo sez, "Like Giger - but without the creep factor- Pierre Matter's sculptures invoke a bio-mechanical beauty that is both physically sensual and intellectually fascinating."

Pierre Matter was born in 1964.

A mystical child, then a tormented teenager, he studied mathematics half-heartedly. It was only logical that he headed naturally, though initially in an erratic manner, for the mysterious universe of artistic creation.

His slow progression in this field led him to try out many kinds of expression and material, from oil to gouache to ink, from comic strips to canvas, and also bas-relief in stone.

However, the hidden logic of events (what sceptical people call luck) led him to focus on three-dimensional volumes, a small sample of which he presents on this website…

Gallery : Pierre Matter

(Thanks, Robbo!)

Gunpoint was released on Steam yesterday. The brainchild of PC Gamer UK editor Tom Francis, Gunpoint is a stealth game where you play a freelance spy who has to steal sensitive data for his clients. To finish your missions, you’ll have a variety of gadgets at your disposal, the foremost of which is a Crosslink device that will let you rewire lights, switches, cameras and doors. The other gadgets are acquired optionally and offer the player more ways of achieving his or her goals.

I can't figure out if this Neil DeGrasse Tyson science-themed votive candle is an article of commerce or not, but man, it should be, oh yes, it should.

I Heart Chaos — Hail St. Neil. (via IO9)

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Update: Buy 'em on Etsy

The legendary 55-gallon barrel of water-based love lube is now half-off at Amazon. I wasn't quite sure what to say about this slippery deal, myself, but reviewers there dove right in.

Carla was completely drenched, and her momentum slid her to the front door - which she somehow managed to pry open with a pair of oven mitts. The last thing I knew, "No-Fun Carla" was screaming profanities and sliding down three flights of steps. I didn't pay much attention because I was too busy trying to salvage the lube. I managed to get about half of it back into the barrel - the other half probably seeped into Mrs. Pulaski's unit below me. I never bothered to ask if she appreciated the free gift of lubricant. — Jerome Albertson, Topeka

This is a hazard! I've already lost two cats in this thing. There should be a warning sticker or something. I assumed the cats would float, but they sunk like rocks into the lube. And no, it's not what you think. Don't be disgusting. I was trying to create my own cat lube wrestling league. You know, for sickos. — Mark A.

I bought this product thinking it would be the perfect way to disentangle my 5,000-odd porcupines after a peanut butter tanker flipped over in the yard during the nightly feeding frenzy. Instead of separating them, it just made them amorous. Now I have 2500 pregnant female porcupines, 2500 henpecked males desperate to escape, and 6000 lbs of peanut-scented-porcu-poo. — Joel Hruska, Greencastle, Indiana.

Previously. Alas, not available with Prime.