Ben Plowman

new-aesthetic:

BBC News - Wikipedia reveals Google ‘forgotten’ search links

The Wikimedia Foundation has also published its first transparency report - following a similar practice by Google, Twitter and others. It reveals that the organisation received 304 general content removal requests between July 2012 and June 2014, none of which it complied with. They included a takedown request from a photographer who had claimed he owned the copyright to a series of selfies taken by a monkey. Gloucestershire-based David Slater had rotated and cropped the images featured on the site. But the foundation rejected his claim on the grounds that the monkey had taken the photo, and was therefore the real copyright owner.

Original discussion of image on Wikipedia

jtotheizzoe:

ecosapienshow:

Are we in the midst of a sixth mass extinction? 

Source -  NYT graphics editor Bill Marsh

Welcome to the Anthropocene, folks.

finally, a proper soapdish

Here is one way to boost the employment to population ratio, two birds with one stone you might say:

Feng’s 23 year-old son, “Xiao Feng” (小冯) started playing video games in high school. Through his years of playing various online games, he supposedly thought himself a master of Chinese online role playing games. According to his father, Xiao Feng had good grades in school, so they allowed him to play games; but when he couldn’t land a job they started looking into things. He, however, says he simply couldn’t find any work that he liked. Feng was annoyed that his son couldn’t even tough it out for three months at a software development company.

Unhappy with his son not finding a job, Feng decided to hire players in his son’s favorite online games to hunt down Xiao Feng. It is unknown where or how Feng found the in-game assassins—every one of the players he hired were stronger and higher leveled than Xiao Feng. Feng’s idea was that his son would get bored of playing games if he was killed every time he logged on, and that he would start putting more effort into getting a job.

The full story is here, and for the pointer I thank Michael Smiddy.

nap life sass triptych

mapsontheweb:

Twin Birth Rate By US State, 1995 to 2012

weird. a definite downward trend. i wonder if people are using fewer fertility drugs or something.

roarslionfiles:

"Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters over darker people in the world. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years." - 1967

sirmitchell:

x

pudgypanda:

thestarlighthotel:

Devran Taskesen

Hello, man bun.

is that mahmoud?

this dude is far more accomplished at scaling the interiors of small spaces than i could ever be.

sci-universe:

The Fukang meteorite, believed to be some 4.5 billion years old, was found near a town of the same name in China, in 2000. It is a pallasite, a type of meteorite with golden crystals of a mineral called olivine embedded in a silvery honeycomb of nickel-iron.

The original meteorite weighted just over a thousand kilogram (~2k pounds), but the rock was so brilliant that everybody wanted a piece of it. Since then it has been divided into dozens of thin slices and auctioned or distributed around the world. Fukang is possibly the most stunning extraterrestrial piece of rock man has ever seen.

Photo sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

Evolution is a diligent innovator and the diversity it has achieved offers the curious seemingly unending marvels. In some cases, though, a particular innovation might not make much sense on initial consideration. In those cases, zooming out in time can be instructive.

Whit Bronaugh, writing for American Forests, demonstrates this using the concept of ecological anachronisms:

An ecological anachronism is an adaptation that is chronologically out of place, making its purpose more or less obsolete.

The concept was developed by ecologist Daniel Janzen (a former SALT speaker) and Bronaugh calls on the Osage-orange to bring it into focus.

The Osage-orange is a North American tree that produces large, lumpy fruit. Those fruit fall to the ground and rot, ignored rather than ingested and spread (along with their seeds), every fall. Other parts of the tree feature long thorns that do little to discourage deer from eating their foliage. These adaptations, it would seem, aren’t adaptive at all, but rather strange, pointless wastes of energy. The tree’s range across North America is known to have contracted over the last few millennia, so this view isn’t entirely unfounded.

The fruit and the thorns, however, were adaptive when megafauna such as mammoths and gound sloths roamed the continent. The large fruit were a common part of the mammoth diet and the thorns were just the right size to discourage creatures much larger than deer from chewing up the leaves and branches. As Bronaugh explains,

It’s true that such adaptations are now anachronistic; they have lost their relevance. But the trees have been slow to catch on; a natural consequence of the pace of evolution. For a tree that lives, say, 250 years, 13,000 years represents only 52 generations. In an evolutionary sense, the trees don’t yet realize that the megafauna are gone.

Though in our lifetime, mammoths and ground sloths may seem long gone, the evolutionary moment in which we live still resonates with their presence. Perhaps a reprise is possible?

(Read: The Trees That Miss The Mammoths – American Forests)

ihavetobeleaving:

We heart Japan. Matt insisted we do this.

Yikes:

At about 11 o’clock in the morning [June 20], at the grand marketplace in Yulin [China], a dog peddler was haggling with dog lovers over the price of a dog, and because they couldn’t agree on a price, the dog peddler lifted the dog high into the air three times with metal prongs, doing so to force the dog lovers to buy the dog at a high price. In the end, a woman paid 350 yuan to buy the dog. At the scene, quite a few dog peddlers used mistreatment of the dogs to force dog lovers to buy the dogs.

Here is some further background:

Also, according to the official Weibo account of Chengdu Commercial Daily, on the eve of the Dog Meat Festival, a large number of dog lovers gathered in Yulin. On the morning of [June] 20, at 9 o’clock, at the Yulin dog meat market, upon seeing that there were dog lovers present, some dog peddlers began abusing their dogs at the scene, yelling: ”Will you people buy it or not? If not, I’ll strangle it to death [with the prongs]!” Dog lovers bought the dogs with tears in their eyes, and the dog peddlers waved the cash they got before the surrounding onlookers. The onlookers cheered, and some even gave them the thumbs-up.

The story with some rather gruesome photos is here, and for the pointer I thank Ben P.

I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”

“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”

The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”

“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”

“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”

I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.

“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.

“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”

It didn’t seem like they did.

“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”

Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.

I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.

“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.

Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.

“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.

I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”

He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.

“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.

“Because I was afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”

I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.

“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”

He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.

terrible, just terrible.

“hello 911, i want to report a domestic situation. my unborn child is kicking the heck out of my wife’s insides”

ihavetobeleaving:

St. Mary’s Cathedral by Kenzo Tange.

kiiiinda looks like the one in sf, which is also st mary’s i think?

theyre they best animals ive ever seen they look like someone took a regular deer and just pulled its head until it stretched out the whole damn thing

who was in charge of the ratios for this animal. who is responsible for this


i cant even see that as a head at all. it looks like a kangaroo did a handstand and then a weird moth landed on its tail. jesus fucking christ

Tesco has agreed to remove the anti-homeless spikes from outside one of its central London shops after days of protest.

The inch-high steel studs provoked outrage when they were spotted outside the supermarket’s Regent Street branch and in the doorway of a block of luxury flats near London Bridge.

As protests against the spikes gathered pace this week, managers at Tesco insisted that they were designed to prevent antisocial behaviour rather than to deter homeless people from sleeping nearby.

…Homelessness charities described the studs as inhumane. Jacqui McCluskey, director of policy at Homeless Link, said: “It’s shocking to see the use of metal spikes to discourage rough sleeping and hardly helps to deal with the rising number of people who are forced to sleep on our streets.

The full story is here, the France reference is here.

In general, I do not think that the answer to the problem of homelessness involves raising the costs of being homeless.  But if that ever were to be the case, even one percent of the time, who would be willing to do it?  Furthermore, if we regard the current homeless as “low-elasticity” (e.g., raising the costs of being homeless will not much lower the number of homeless), is that a compliment to them or an insult?  Does citing “bad luck” automatically connect one to the low-elasticity view, or can bad luck and high elasticity coexist in the same explanation of homelessness?  It seems to me that the exonerative bad luck explanation and the low-elasticity view are packaged together in discourse, although not necessarily for any strong analytical reason.  For instance, it is bad luck if my car breaks down, but if that cost me my life I would buy a more reliable car or maybe cease driving altogether.

besturlonhere:

obamadawn:

“What none of the media is reporting is that SGT Bowe Bergdahl’s father’s first words at the WH were in Arabic – “bism allah alrahman alraheem” – which means “in the name of Allah the most gracious and most merciful” – these are the opening words of every chapter of the Qur’an except one (the chapter of the sword – the 9th) – by uttering these words on the grounds of the WH, Bergdahl (the father) sanctified the WH and claimed it for Islam. There is no question but POTUS knows this.”

good

wow all this iran hate, wtf

devopsreactions:

by @sdolotom

Halfway through my supply of San Jose honey

shinji-icarly:

it’s got one retweet and nearly 62,500 notes on tumblr. that’s a weird phenomenon.

yeah it’s almost like they’re different websites or something (jk, i also find it weird)

iena:

omgstopembarrassingyourself:

yawneyeroll:

garbagefingers:

caretorecycle:

There are many ways we Care to Recycle®! The next time you finish up the last bit of shampoo, or you’ve emptied your child’s bubble bath, try getting creative with some of the above repurposing ideas as inspiration! 

Wtf is this literal garbage on my dash.

I love the ribbon around the aveeno bottle. Put it on my pinterest board #diy.

I really feel bad for the person out there who had to make this. You know that person is lying awake at night despairing over their life, their crippling student loan debt, their unshakeable ennui.

Their home is furnished with haphazardly sliced toiletry bottles. A pillow stuffed with dried wet wipes, A wind chime made of old razor blades. Baby Shampoo cocktail glasses, unfortunately ruled misleading, because they Popov they held (the most expensive liquor available on a recycled toiletry craft budget) was not “as gentle to the eyes as pure water” and resulted in blindness.

Care to Recycle®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®®

Scientists at Oxford, SLAC, Stanford and Berkeley Lab have discovered that a sturdy 3D material, cadmium arsenide, mimics the electronic behavior of 2D graphene. This illustration depicts fast-moving, massless electrons inside the material. The discovery could lead to new and faster types of electronic devices. (Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC)

Cadmium arsenide could yield practical devices with the same extraordinary electronic properties as 2D graphene, researchers from Oxford, SLAC, and Berkeley Lab have found.

In addition, the new “semimetal” material exists in a sturdy 3D form that should be much easier to shape into electronic devices such as very fast transistors, sensors and transparent electrodes, the researchers say.

The results are described in a paper published May 25 in Nature Materials.

There is a quest to find graphene-like materials that are three-dimensional, and thus much easier to craft into practical devices.

Two other international collaborations based at Princeton University and in Dresden, Germany, have also been pursuing cadmium arsenide as a possibility. One published a paper on its results in the May 7 issue of Nature Communications, and the other has posted an unpublished paper on the preprint server arXiv.

The research team also included scientists at Fudan University in Shanghai, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Diamond Light Source. The work was partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Mesodynamic Architectures program.

Abstract of Nature Materials paper

Three-dimensional (3D) topological Dirac semimetals (TDSs) are a recently proposed state of quantum matter that have attracted increasing attention in physics and materials science. A 3D TDS is not only a bulk analogue of graphene; it also exhibits non-trivial topology in its electronic structure that shares similarities with topological insulators. Moreover, a TDS can potentially be driven into other exotic phases (such as Weyl semimetals, axion insulators and topological superconductors), making it a unique parent compound for the study of these states and the phase transitions between them. Here, by performing angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we directly observe a pair of 3D Dirac fermions in Cd₃As₂, proving that it is a model 3D TDS. Compared with other 3D TDSs, for example, β-cristobalite BiO₂ and Na₃Bi, Cd₃As₂ is stable and has much higher Fermi velocities. Furthermore, by in situ doping we have been able to tune its Fermi energy, making it a flexible platform for exploring exotic physical phenomena.