“A Guide to Paint and Color” (Traité des couleurs servant à la peinture à l’eau) was written in the year 1692 and contains over 2100 colors. You original book can be viewed here.(via)
We live in a now world. If we don’t get what we want, we leave. The tyranny of now is particularly true online where a simple touch or click lets someone exit stage left at the slightest whim. Yet, this axiom also holds true in the real world.
Consider how many people start projects and never finish them because its too hard or unpleasant. Or they can see a losing effort in a game and quit. Or they find work is difficult, so they stop putting in the effort. One could go on and on with hypothetical examples.
For whatever reason, many people don’t finish. It’s a world of instant gratitude.
That’s too bad because finishing is underated today.
Finishing signals to those around you that you are reliable.
More importantly, it’s one of those character building traits that separates you from the pack, reflecting who you are. You see things through when others tank at the first sign of discomfort.
Finishing the War
I am toiling through the final chapters of The War to Persevere, a book I should have finished last winter. There is a great sense of relief as I pen the final chapters.
People seemed to like Exodus, and asked when the sequel would come out. I promised a release at some point this year.
I began drafting The War to Persevere last fall during NanoWriMo and continued into the New Year. I was 2/3 of the way through the drafting process when my grandmother died at the end of January. That set off a series of events that basically distracted me from any extra curricular activities. Then work got crazy — the usual conference season stuff — which left me exhausted every night to the point that from a creative standpoint I could shoot phots, but was not able to write fiction.
June rolled around and I hadn’t picked up the book. A friend nudged me. The excuses were there. I could say forget it, it’s just a novel. Afterall, I don’t make any money from it and I’m really enjoying photography right now. But I know better. Not only had I committed to my novel readers, I had promised myself that I would finish the tale.
So I made a commitment to finish the book. I started drafting again during my vacation last month, and have not looked back. I write four or five days a week, and will complete the first draft by the end of the week. Most importantly, I will meet my commitment to publish this year.
I had a friend who said that suiting up and showing up no matter the circumstance is half the battle in life. I have to agree. Showing up at the virtual till every single day is what lets you finish things.
One of the toughest things I experienced in life was completing my Masters degree. It took me four years attending school part-time while I worked a full-time job. I almost didn’t make it thanks toa dot bomb experience in California. Yet, finishing that degree was one of the most beneficial experiences of my life. Not only does the degree (Communications, Culture and Technology) still impact my work today, the thesis writing — an arduous process that required daily attention for months on end — showed me how to write a long-form piece, such as a book. I am amazed at how important my Master’s was from a character building standpoint.
Once The War is completed and published, I will have successfully written five books. That’s something that no one can ever take away from me.
When I finish things feel good about my efforts. I believe in myself, and know I can accomplish more. That’s why finishing that 10k, going back to school, completing that project gone bad no matter how effed up it is, finishing the novel, wrapping up that degree, etc., etc. is so important.
This post was originally published on the Joey L. Blog and is being republished here with permission
It’s been estimated that as many as 880 billion photos will be taken by the close of this year. I’m not quite sure how that statistic could ever be properly calculated, but I think it’s safe to say that with the rise of the digital medium, human beings are taking a s**tload more pictures than ever before.
With all those photos being taken, chances are you and I have at one point accidentally wandered into someone else’s frame. It’s likely, however, that you’ll never really know you’ve photo-bombed someones shot. That’s why I was surprised by a Twitter message that I received out of the blue from a photographer I’ve never met.
Here’s what I received from photographer Anthony Kurtz:
Varanasi, India is an epicenter for pilgrimages for people of many walks of life. Locals from all over the subcontinent make religious journeys to the ancient city; monks of a variety of religious beliefs seek refuge in the many temples along the Ganges River; and not to mention: photographers, travelers and tourists flock to the region to seek inspiration in what I consider one of the most photogenic places on Earth.
Looking at the photo from the tiny Twitter preview, it seemed like it could be me but how could I be certain? I’m not quite sure how Anthony recognized me, as we are only are aware of each other via social media. I asked him to send me the high-resolution version of the photo, and asked if he had any others taken in the batch. He then sent the following:
Here’s a closer view:
Here’s a closer view of several of Kurtz’s exposures:
After zooming in to the photo I discovered that without question it was me. Looking at Anthony’s image EXIF data, I saw the image was taken on October 18th, 2007. I am 24 years old now, so I was 17 in the photo. I also noticed in one of the photographs, it appears I am taking a photo of something. So, I looked through my own images captured that day, and found the exact exposure I had taken within seconds of his:
Here I am squatting and taking a photograph of two women overlooking the Ganges River:
Here’s the actual photograph I was taking at the same time Anthony’s exposure was made:
And the big kicker: in the background of my picture there are the boats of people photographing from the river. Which one is Anthony?
When something like this happens, it’s hard not to evoke the tired cliché that the world is an incredibly small place. The world is shrinking even further with our growing level of interconnectedness on the Internet and social media, and this occurrence is an example of that.
I’m sure people have always been on paths that quietly and unknowingly intersect. Now, with people sharing their passions and experiences more than ever, we can be sure that we’ll meet yet again — or sometime in the future — whether we know it or not.
About the author: Joey L. is a Canadian commercial photographer, director and published author based in Brooklyn, New York. See more of him through his blog, portfolio and video tutorials. He can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This article originally appeared here.
About Anthony Kurtz: Anthony Kurtz is a German-American commercial and fine-art photographer based in Berlin, Germany. You can find his work on his website or by following him on Facebook and Twitter.
Four years (and one day) ago, Kevin Systrom posted the first ever photo to Instagram, then a new social network with an uncertain future and exactly one photo of a cute dog in its archives.
Taken a few months before the app launched to the public at large, the photo shows Systrom’s long-time girlfriend Nicole Schuetz foot next to he Golden Retriever puppy @dolly at the Taco stand Tacos Chilakos. Both taco stand and girlfriend are revealed in the second and third photos ever uploaded to Instagram:
You can see the first three photos above, but swapping out the last letter in the URL with the next (Capital) letters in the alphabet takes you on a fascinating journey through the very first shots posted to the now-massive photo sharing site.
Systrom claims the first three photos (puppy, taco stand, girlfriend… clearly the man has his priorities straight), cofounder Mike Krieger snags the fourth and fifth spots, “public user #1″ @abbot‘s photo of Systrom and Schuetz takes number six, and Schuetz herself grabs number seven:
From then on, the same cast of characters continue to make appearances through the end of the alphabet and beyond. To check it out for yourself, just click on the photos above and mess with the URL. It really is pretty cool to watch Systrom at work long before he pulled in an estimated $400 million from the Facebook acquisition.
It’s not unusual for colleges with large open-source programs to put out a number of courses free for the world to browse through online. In the past we’ve featured courses from both MIT and Stanford.
Today, we have a new course from MIT. Taught in the Spring semester of 2009, this course came a full two years later than the original MIT course we shared and is packed full of useful information for anybody interested in photojournalism.
With syllabus, readings, assignments, image gallery and course material downloads available, the class has everything you need to walk yourself through the world of documentary photography and photojournalism one step at a time.
For those wondering how open-source classes like this work, for the most part, you must be both the teacher and the student. As you learn the material, you must constantly reference the syllabus to make sure you’re taking the course in the correct manner… those who have trouble self-motivating might have trouble.
Of course, if you only want to work on snippets of this course or use it as a rough guide for learning on your own, you’re welcome to do that, too.
Even if you don’t necessarily plan on using it, there’s no harm in sharing it with the world so those who prefer a less formal photography education can gain some valuable knowledge. Check it out for yourself and give the needed materials a download by clicking here.
Bruce Feiler wrote a column in the fashion and style section of the NYT that was basically sharing his distaste for data collection and analysis. It was concurrently fearful, ignorant and just plain wrong.
This quote from the story should have you rolling your eyes:
In the last few years, there has been a revolution so profound that it’s sometimes hard to miss its significance. We are awash in numbers. Data is everywhere. Old-fashioned things like words are in retreat; numbers are on the rise. Unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science and math. Even the most elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list.
The results are in: The nerds have won. Time to replace those arrows in the talons of the American eagle with pencils and slide rules. We’ve become the United States of Metrics.
The whole article reads like this, as if the author is upset and grumpy the world is becoming more scientific and measured. And as if creativity and data are at odds (of course if you actually understand both of these things, you know they aren’t).
Let’s ignore that this is in the fashion and style section of the Times for some reason I can’t explain. Let’s ignore the fact that this author thinks religion is somehow positive (of course it isn’t and religion has already been disrupted by the internet: humans who are self-aware realize there isn’t some magical being in the sky controlling the world). Let’s ignore the fact that the author is an anti-intellectual that throws out the derogatory term “nerds” as if being smart is a negative. Let’s ignore the author directly states that pursuing social sciences isn’t a good thing.
Ignoring all that, when did we get a point that data is somehow a bad thing? Oh that’s right, it isn’t. Data is awesome. It lets us improve our marketing campaigns, understand our health / treat illnesses better, make our public infrastructure more efficient, deliver better digital experiences and essentially improve the world. Without data, science doesn’t exist and we don’t have any sort of technological or measurable improvement of things like poverty. We’d have no clue that the world is on the cusp of irreversible global warming that threatens our very existence. But sure, data is somehow “bad” …because someone who doesn’t like it says so.
As Nathan on Flowing Data said in response to this:
Feiler jumps into a handful of examples that could’ve easily been used as positives, had they been in an article about the boom of data. For instance, he scoffs at a project from New York University and Hudson Yards that aims for a “smart community” that tracks pedestrian traffic, air quality, and energy consumption. Is it better to not know these things? Should we rely entirely on word of mouth for every problem in a city that can easily be fixed? That’s a tough sell.
I’m a huge fan of the New York Times but it is disheartening they allow such backwards luddites to write for them. Again, we see an example of someone fighting the future purely because they’re afraid of change (in this case, change for the better – we can’t improve what we don’t measure). Sad.
We’ve been sharingdata related to the decline of people physically going to the movie theater to watch movies for several years, while also showing consistent increases in users streaming content to the comfort (and high quality screens) of their homes.
So it was no surprise to see data for this weekend’s July 4th box office showing that sales were the worst in decades. From Variety [emphasis mine]:
Overall, this holiday weekend topped out at approximately $130 million, a 43.4% drop from last year’s Independence Day, which brought in $230 million overall. If these numbers hold, this could be weakest Fourth of July in at least a decade.
A 43% drop is pretty significant. But when according to Box office Mojo the top two movies this weekend were painfully awful titles: Transformers: Age of Extinction and Tammy (opening weekend) it isn’t surprising people didn’t go to the movies.
July 4-6 Weekend Studio Estimates:
Combine this with the problems we’ve blogged about regarding theaters in the past and you have a perfect storm for low attendance: overpriced tickets, stale / non-customer-centric experience and yes, content so awful you wouldn’t force it on your worst enemy.
The future trend here is simple: streaming will continue to win and Netflix and others will focus on quality and not pandering, while the systems that are designed to profit from mass, generic audiences will continue to flack generic and tired stories on the cheap until their model completely breaks down. Unless they wake up and re-think what’s happening. As someone who does enjoy going to the movies when the content and experience are both worthwhile I hope they work to change this. But I’m currently not optimistic: I didn’t even stop to consider going to the movies this weekend and neither did most who went last year. Looking at the above list of flicks, it’s obvious why.
Declaring the “end of the storage wars,” cloud storage company Box this morning announced that it will start offering unlimited storage to customers on its $15/user/month business plan — expanding a feature that was previously available to those on its higher-priced enterprise plan. Box’s moves come amid heightened competition in online storage and collaboration, as evidenced by Amazon’s announcement of a new enterprise collaboration and storage solution called Zocalo — joining existing rivals including Microsoft and Dropbox. “Storage only matters when it’s a roadblock, and we’re excited to make these limits a thing of the past for our Business customers as... Read More on GeekWire
Amazon has inadvertently revealed plans for a major new addition to its Kindle business — a monthly subscription for e-books. As spotted by GigaOM this morning, Amazon put up a page that introduced a subscription service called “Kindle Unlimited,” which offers access to more than 600,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks on any device for $9.99 month. Amazon has since taken the page down, but you can see a cached version below: The program is similar to Oyster, which bills itself as the “Netflix of e-books,” and allows users to read as many books as they’d like from the company’s library on iOS and Android... Read More on GeekWire
This is not the Wiki bot; the real bot is a computer program, which just looks like a string of random letters and numbers.
Golfi1812 / YouTube
You might think writing 10,000 articles per day would be impossible. But not for a Swede named Sverker Johansson. He created a computer program that has written a total of 2.7 million articles, making Johansson the most prolific author, by far, on the "internet's encyclopedia." His contributions account for 8.5 percent of the articles on Wikipedia, the Wall Street Journal reports.
But how can a bot write so many articles, and do it coherently? As Johansson--a science teacher with degrees in linguistics, civil engineering, economics and particle physics--explained to the WSJ, the bot scrapes information from various trusted sources, and then cobbles that material together, typically into a very short entry, or "stub." Many of the articles cover the taxonomy of little-known animals such as butterflies and beetles, and also small towns in the Philippines (his wife is Filipino).
Several long-time members of Wikipedia are not happy that so many articles are being written by non-humans. But Johansson defends his bot, pointing out that the articles it writes are accurate (although there have been some glitches that he claims have been corrected), and can very useful. For example, Lsjbot wrote a stub about the town of Basey, in the Philippines. When Typhoon Yolanda hit the town, causing deaths, people were able to visit this stub and find out more about the town and its location.
Cards Against Humanity—which literally bills itself as being “for horrible people”—has always been a very complicated game for those who invested in social politics and feminism. Sure, making jokes about wanting to bang genetically engineered super soldiers is always a good time, but the game also has a history of cards with rape jokes and transphobic material on them, which is categorically not. Due to the actions of one of the game’s creators, defending it is about to get a lot more complicated.
On Friday, CAH creator Max Temkin wrote a long post on his Tumblr announcing that a fellow Goucher College alumnus with whom he’d “had a really brief relationship” publicly accused him of rape in a personal Facebook post. In his rebuttal, he calls these allegations “baseless gossip” (which, it should be pointed out, is a term with a very gender-biased history) and shifts the blames on rape culture at large rather than any actions he might have taken during the relationship:
Part of rape culture that hurts everyone is that it makes it difficult to talk about what is and is not consent, and makes it incredibly scary for people to speak up when their boundaries are crossed. It is entirely possible she read something completely different than I did into an awkward college hookup. If any part of that was traumatic for her, I am sincerely sorry, and I wish we would have had a chance to address it privately. I’ve sent her an email and a Facebook message and given her my contact information, but so far I haven’t heard back (but she did edit her post to remove my name).
He also makes it a point to remind readers of his efforts to remove those aforementioned rape jokes from future decks, to outline and then subsequently deny he will be using legal options (which many have taken to be an indirect threat against his accuser), and to maintain that he will “continue to be a feminist and an advocate for women’s rights.”
The blog post spread across the Internet and Temkin received both an outpouring of support, mostly from male gamers, as well as a large amount of criticism—most notably from Kelly Kend at Medium, romance novelist Lilith T. Bell, and “Liberate Zealot” of Feminist Armchair Regime, the latter of whom also attended Goucher and suggests that students on campus were aware of this story in 2006.
Magz, the woman behind the original Facebook post, has since created her own blog post (entitled “Humanity Against Sexual Assault”), which reiterates the initial allegation and describes her decision to come forward. She writes:
I am not interested in pressing charges. I don’t think my attacker is a serial predator. I see my assault as an almost textbook example of a “crime of opportunity.” I have no interest in personal compensation, monetary or otherwise. I have no interest in his company or in stifling his intellectual or personal life. If I did, I would use my full name. I frankly have an infinite number of better, more positive things on which to focus my life and attentions.
What I have learned from all of this is that, for all of my fears of rejection, dismissal, and ridicule I have only received expressions of love, respect, and support. All of this anger and energy would be better focused on ensuring that every survivor should be able to speak out about their experiences secure in the knowledge that they are not alone, that they too are entitled to their own voice and their own life.
She also adds at the end that the statement was sent to Temkin in response to the e-mail he mentioned in his own post, but that she received no reply.
Because none of us were in that dorm room eight years ago, we aren’t ever going to know without a shadow of a doubt what truly happened between Magz and Temkin. However, it’s very important both to note that Magz has little to gain from making a false allegation—in no small part becauseTemkin’s celebrity in the gaming world could and no doubt has inspired fans to automatically take his side against hers—and to note that speaking eloquently about the perils of rape culture does not under any circumstances absolve a person of being a rapist. As Lilith Bell notes in her dissection of Temkin’s story,
Max Temkin is very good at using social justice language. He’s very good at making himself seem sympathetic and reasonable. Rapists are perfectly capable of doing all of those things. They aren’t non-human monsters that leap out of closets, with no awareness of society or communication skills. They’re people, like any one of us. They can be intelligent. They can be involved in social justice. They can create awesome games. They can come across as reasonable, kind people. They can, in fact, be reasonable and kind people in every way except for that pesky raping thing.
Is Max Temkin a rapist? I don’t know. I do know that he’s written a manipulative post, though. I know that he’s spreading harmful rape culture myths under the cloak of being a “feminist and an advocate for women’s rights.” I know that he’s using intimidation tactics against someone who, because of his platform and wealth and gender, has far less power than he does.
At the very least, Temkin manages to be right about something: rape culture is a terrible blight that makes talking about sexual assault incredibly difficult. Magz came forward because she’d been inspired by women openly describing their own painful experiences during the #YesAllWomen hashtag campaign, and she now speaks out as a way to own her story and support others who’ve suffered similarly. Regardless of how much you might enjoy Cards Against Humanity, this growing refusal on the part of survivors of all genders to keep silent about their own rapes and assaults is necessary and important, and will hopefully pave the way for positive and lasting changes in the way our society views sex and consent.
Alice Coachman, the track and field star whose high jump at the 1948 London Olympics made her the first African-American woman to take home gold, passed away on Monday several months after suffering a stroke. She was 90.
The United States Olympic Committee issued a statement on Coachman’s passing, saying “Alice literally set the bar with her accomplishments at the 1948 Games, but Olympic champion is only part the incredible legacy she leaves behind [...] Alice Coachman Davis has inspired generations of athletes to be their best and she will be missed.”
In addition to her Olympic achievements, Coachman won 10 consecutive U.S. titles and is honored in nine halls of fame.
While he’s at one of his local coffee shops, artist Jimmy T., the blogger behind the awesome “Morning Coffee Cup Art,” likes to draw illustrations on his coffee cups and them leaves them behind for people to find. Here are a few of my favorites among the multitude he has already created.
Ikea in Russia, with the help of its agency, Instinct, have created the first-ever Instagram website to promote its new PS 2014 Collection.
Designed for mobile users, the website lives on Instagram through the @ikea_ps_2014 handle. Clever tagging and a multitude of handles associated with products in the PS 2014 collection mimic a traditional website experience within the Instagram app.
While summertime may mean a break from the classroom, ambitious students and professionals understand the importance of learning every day. Public relations students, professionals and educators will gather together on Wednesday, July 16th at 8:30 p.m. ET for a Twitter based discussion on how to leverage social media for a career in public relations.
Topics that will be discussed with the PRStudChat community include:
How have you used social media to build professional relationships?
What brands do you admire most in the social space?
What are your favorite social platforms? Do you use these platforms to connect with brands?
What is your preferred method of communication with a brand- email, phone or social?
How have you used social media to add to what you learn in the classroom?
What do you think is the most significant different between the study and practice of PR?
Where do you look to find mentors?
What is the greatest challenge you see ahead for PR professionals?
What do you find most exciting about a career in PR?
Beyond the classroom, what are your “go to” sources for learning?
Whether you’re a student who is considering a career in public relations or seasoned professional, we hope you will join the conversation. Simply follow the hashtag #PRStudChat and share your thoughts!
If you have any questions around the topic or thoughts you want to share, in advance of the session, feel free to DM us or post your questions in our LinkedIn Discussion Group. We hope you’ll join us for a dynamic Twitter chat session on July 16th.
A Little More About PRStudChat:
It began with a simple question asked byAngela Hernandez, then President of PRSSA atCentral Michigan University (CMU). “Is PR Right for me?” A follow up blog post by PR 2.0 expert Deirdre Breakenridge inspired a series of direct messages on Twitter between Breakenridge and fellow PR industry pro, Valerie Simon. This was an important question and one that should be explored beyond one student or one blog post. Why not build a community to help students across the country, and even the globe, learn from the experience and perspective of industry professionals… A community where everyone can learn and grow together.
Starting at the age of nine, I played the clarinet for eight years.
Actually, that's not true. I took clarinet lessons for eight years when I was a kid, but I'm not sure I ever actually played it.
Eventually, I heard a symphony orchestra member play a clarinet solo. It began with a sustained middle C, and I am 100% certain that never once did I play a note that sounded even close to the way his sounded.
And yet...
And yet the lessons I was given were all about fingerings and songs and techniques. They were about playing higher or lower or longer notes, or playing more complex rhythms. At no point did someone sit me down and say, "wait, none of this matters if you can't play a single note that actually sounds good."
Instead, the restaurant makes the menu longer instead of figuring out how to make even one dish worth traveling across town for. We add many slides to our presentation before figuring out how to utter a single sentence that will give the people in the room chills or make them think. We confuse variety and range with quality.
Practice is not the answer here. Practice, the 10,000 hours thing, practice alone doesn't produce work that matters. No, that only comes from caring. From caring enough to leap, to bleed for the art, to go out on the ledge, where it's dangerous. When we care enough, we raise the bar, not just for ourselves, but for our customer, our audience and our partners.
It's obvious, then, why I don't play the clarinet any more. I don't care enough, can't work hard enough, don't have the guts to put that work into the world. This is the best reason to stop playing, and it opens the door to go find an art you care enough to make matter instead. Find and make your own music.
The cop-out would be to play the clarinet just a little, to add one more thing to my list of mediocre.
As Jony Ive said, "We did it because we cared, because when you realize how well you can make something, falling short, whether seen or not, feels like failure."
It's much easier to add some features, increase your network, get some itemized tasks done. Who wants to feel failure?
The thing about nature is that, if you look close enough at just about anything, you’re bound to find a beauty and symmetry that defies description. In the case of Linden Gledhill‘s microscope photos of butterfly wings, he simply discovered another level of beauty in something that already captures many of our imaginations.
A rainbow of colors and myriad textures greet you in Gledhill’s Butterfly wings Flickr set — each photograph more ethereal and alien than the last.
But don’t take our word for it, take a look for yourself:
Sunset moth wing
Pollen grain on Protographium agesilaus butterfly wing
Morpho didius upper wing surface scales
Hypolimnas dexithea
Troides hypolitus sangirensis
Morpho zephrytes butterfly wing
Argema mittrei moth wing scales
Citharias aurorina wing
Papilio blumei fruhstorferi wing
Sunset moth wing
Graphium weiskei arfakensis wing
Citharias aurorina wing
Graphium weiskei arfakensis wing
Citharias aurorina wing
Graphium weiskei arfakensis wing
Speaking to the Huffington Post, Gledhill explained that he first began taking macro photos of butterfly wings using a standard camera “fitted with old microscope lenses on extension tubes,” but as the series has expanded so has his gear selection.
Now he uses an Olympus BH-2 microscope fitted with LED lighting, a high speed flash and a StackShot drive that makes taking the focus stacked images much easier.
“A microscope lens has a very shallow depth of field so this is where the Stackshot drive helps to automate the whole image taking process as it has the ability to step sequentially through very tiny steps, say two micrometers, in between each picture,” he explained to HuffPo. “It often needs 80 or so individual pictures to make up one final image using a process called focus stacking.”
To see many more of these beautiful images or follow along as he captures and uploads even more, be sure to head over to Gledhill’s Flickr stream by clicking here.
Captured on January 24th by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, this abstract photograph captures almost a mile of Martian sand dunes in just one of the many crater on the planet’s southern region.
According to NASA, the sun was “just 5 degrees above the local horizon”, making for the dramatic contrast between the crests of the dunes and the lower part of the hills. Additional contrast is given by the seasonal frost lines caused by the impending winter on the southern hemisphere of the martian surface.
As with most images shared by NASA, you can grab a full-resolution download on the HiRISE’s website if you’d like to set this as your wallpaper or get the stunning shot printed for your wall.
There are two types of people in this world: people who like their ginger beer sweet, subtle, and unassuming, and people who like their ginger beer to kick them hard in the back of the throat. (I guess there are also people out there who don’t like ginger beer, but for now I’m going to pretend they don’t exist.)
You know real ginger beer if you’ve tasted it. The second you take a sip, it stomps on your tongue with steel-toed boots, taking glee in reminding you how spicy raw ginger truly is.
My version of ginger beer is like the unfiltered, uncensored, hardcore stuff, but with a teensy little bonus: alcohol. While England has been sipping on alcoholic ginger beer for hundreds of years, America has just begun to discover this gem. Well, Brits, your secret’s out.
In addition to its spicy, addictive taste and its boozy bonus, alcoholic ginger beer is also plain-old fun to make. If you dream of being a full-fledged brewmaster but lack the time, equipment, and beard, ginger beer is the perfect starting point. With only a jar, some pantry staples, and a few clean soda bottles, you can have a solidly delicious brew in only three weeks. It might take some experimenting to get it right, but the journey is half the fun. This recipe is really more like a set of guidelines — you must follow your instincts.
2 1/2 cups (600 milliliters) warm, filtered (or pre-boiled) water
1 1/2 teaspoons champagne yeast (available at your local brewing store or on the internet)
Freshly grated ginger
Granulated sugar
Juice of 2 lemons
1 jalapeño, sliced (optional)
1 large glass jar
2 to 3 clean plastic soda bottles
Catherine Lamb
First thing’s first: Start by making a “plant” for your ginger beer. Stir the yeast into the water until dissolved. Add in 1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger, 1 tablespoon sugar, the lemon juice, and the sliced jalapeño, if you’re using it. Stir to combine. (The jalapeño will give your ginger beer that kick you can feel in the back of your throat — if you don’t want it that strong, feel free to omit it.)
Catherine Lamb
Pour the mixture into a glass jar — one that’s large enough for the liquid to fit comfortably, with a bit of extra space. Cover with a clean, dry kitchen towel and secure it with a rubber band. Place the jar in the warmest place in your house: next to your heater, near the refrigerator, or by a heat vent.
Every day for the next week you’ll have to “feed” your plant. First off, feel the bottle — it should be slightly warm. If it’s too cold, your yeast will go into hibernation and stop working, and if it’s too hot your yeast could die. They’re a very temperamental bunch.
Take the towel off your jar and add another tablespoon of grated ginger and another tablespoon of sugar. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then replace the towel and put your plant back in a warm place. Do this every day for a week — just think of it as a babysitting job.
Catherine Lamb
After about a week, you should see small bubbles floating to the surface of your plant. You can keep your plant at this stage longer: The more you feed it, the more concentrated the ginger flavor will become. Don’t stress too much about measurements — you can adjust your flavors later.
Now it’s time to bottle! Think ahead to how many bottles of ginger beer you’ll want to make. Make sure to use plastic soda bottles — glass bottles could explode from carbonation.
Estimate how much water you’ll need to fill these bottles two-thirds of the way full. Then, dissolve enough sugar into the water so that it tastes very sweet — as sweet as soda. Don’t worry about overdoing it; the sugar is there to act as food for the yeast, so most of it will get eaten up and turned into alcohol. You can always adjust the sugar content later.
Catherine Lamb
Using a cheesecloth, strain the plant out into a large measuring cup or bowl. Next, use a funnel to add the sweetened water to the bottles until they are two-thirds of the way full. Add about a cup of the plant liquid to each clean, dry soda bottle — more if you want your ginger beer stronger, less if you want it less intense. Stir with a chopstick to combine. You can dip your finger in and taste here to see if the flavor concentration is to your liking. If it tastes watery, add more plant liquid.
Seal the bottles tightly with their caps and put them back in the same warm place where you once kept the plant. Squeeze the bottles daily to test how they’re carbonating.
Catherine Lamb
After a few days, they should become difficult to compress; when they feel like a rock and are impossible to squeeze at all, slowly start to unscrew the cap just until you hear hissing, but do not open it all the way. Whenever the bottle is impossible to compress, let out the carbonation, then seal it back tightly.
In a week and a half to two weeks, the yeast should have eaten up most of the sugar in the bottle. This means your ginger beer is ready to open up and taste! There’s not a hard and fast rule for how to tell when this is done — you’ve got to go by intuition and trial and error. If you have multiple bottles, open one up and taste test after a week and a half. Add more sugar or lemon juice if you think your ginger beer needs it.
Catherine Lamb
Serve ice cold with citrus wedges and a rum float if you’re feeling dangerous. Make sure to consume the whole bottle within 24 hours after opening — feel free to enlist a friend or two for help. You should probably throw a party to show off your incredible brewing skills.
Catherine Lamb
It’s impossible to gauge the alcohol content of your ginger beer, but it should be a bit less than that of a light beer. Enjoy!
I don’t think there’s a whole lot of debate over the premise that Photoshop has become the gold standard in photo editing software. I’m pretty sure that my earliest use of Photoshop goes back to Version 3 or 4. Now deeply entrenched in CS6, I’ve decided to sit tight for a while. If I actually stopped [...]
Today IBM announced a new program they’re working on that will use Watson, their now infamous Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, to treat cancer patients by analyzing data from their genes. Yeah, let’s see how you like it when robots start doing your jobs better than you, oncologists!
Robert Darnell, CEO of the New York Genome Center, stated in a press conference that they’ll be working in tandem with IBM on this project, which he calls ”not purely clinical and not purely research.” Watson will be given DNA, RNA, and genome sequencing data from both the healthy and tumorous cell samples of about 20 to 25 glioblastoma patients to see if he’s able to offer any new insights.
Glioblastoma — which is a fancy medical term for “horrifying brain cancer” — is one of the worst possible cancers you can get, and which kills those afflicted about two years after they’re diagnosed. Usually you need highly trained geneticists and doctors to come up with a customized gene-specific regimen for each patient, but since Watson is very good at being better than humans, IBM believes he’ll be up to the challenge of aiding clinicians to design new treatments.
But how is Watson going to figure out what is and isn’t relevant when parsing all of this data? Because, according to Ajay Royyuru at IBM, they’ve already given Watson large amounts of information of biochemical pathway files from the National Institutes of Health, as well as text from the NIH’s PubMed database. Over time, Watson will “develop its own sense of what sources it looks at are consistently reliable,” says Ars Technica. Sorry, what? I mean, I know that’s how humans do it too — read a bunch of information and use reasoning to determine what’s reliable and what isn’t — but it usually takes us a couple of years, not counting the thousands of worth of evolution we went through. He just knowsall this stuff about medicine now?
The pool of samples Watson is working with this time around is admittedly pretty small, so we won’t know how effective Watson’s suggestions will be from the outset. But this could eventually prove to be an incredibly powerful tool for the advancement of medicine. You know, if we can all come to terms with the fact that Watson’s just going to be better than us at everything. Except moving and breathing and stuff! We’ve got him beat there. Yaaay.
Last June, we told you about a documentary film crew that planned to excavate a long-closed landfill rumored to be the final resting place of millions of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Atari game cartridges. Unfortunately, the plan is on hold, and it’s not clear when, if ever, the cartridges will be dug up.
E.T. is said to be one of the worst games in history. I am old enough to be able to personally attest to the game being unplayable nonsense garbage. It’s also possibly the first example of an awful game bred from expensive licensing coupled with too-fast development and release. Millions of dollars were spent licensing the property, and when the game flopped for being terrible, Atari allegedly dumped the leftover cartridges in a New Mexico landfill.
A documentary crew from Fuel Entertainment and Lightbox Interactive announced their plan to dig up the cartridges from the Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill said to be the site of Atari’s big dump, but the appropriate paperwork was denied in February of this year. Levels of certain chemicals were found to be high during a 2004 study that requires further testing, according to the New Mexico Environmental Department. The film companies have not reapplied for the proper permits to excavate the site.
The documentary has already begun filming, and could continue once this issue is resolved. When and if the documentary is finished, the plan is for Microsoft to release it through the Xbox One. It has the potential to put to rest one of the oldest and most pervasive gaming myths of all time.
New York media nostalgists may find occasion to get misty-eyed this morning as the New York Observer launches its revamped look, featuring smaller pages, a tabloid layout, and white — not pale pink — paper. Joseph Meyer, CEO of Observer Media Group, explained the change in an internal memo published by Capital New York.
Our new print format, redesigned both in size and form is accessible, and contemporary, allowing our editors to direct our readers to the big idea of story. Our covers and three feature wells enable us to highlight important New York topics and personalitites and write more long-form, investigative pieces, with more room for opinion pieces and columns, as well as richer photography and more illustrations.
Changes at the paper are more than skin deep. The Observer — once admired as scrappy and unafraid to speak truth to power — recently came under fire for publishing a hit piece on New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman after the AG pursued litigations against Donald Trump. Jared Kushner, who owns the paper, is married Ivanka Trump. And last year, the Observer ran a list of “25 Achievers Who Are Writing New York’s Next Chapter” that, as New York magazine pointed out, included the real estate mogul’s daughter as well as several others in Kushner’s circle of friends and associates.
On January 24, 2014, in a case filed against Facebook by German consumer protection association VZBV, the Berlin Court of Appeal (“Court”) upheld a lower court ruling that Facebook’s “Friend Finder” function is unlawful. The Court agreed with the Berlin Regional Court’s 2012 decision that the Friend Finder function violates both German data protection law and unfair trade law, and re-affirmed the invalidity of several clauses in Facebook’s privacy notice and other online terms and conditions. VZBV has reported the ruling as a consumer victory, stating that the ruling recognizes that privacy is a consumer protection issue.
At the time of the original complaint, Facebook’s Friend Finder function invited users to “find friends from different parts of [their] life” by providing various pieces of information to the Facebook site, such as the schools their friends attended or the names of their friends’ current employers. Friend Finder also invited users to upload personal contacts from other platforms, including Skype and MSN, which enabled Facebook to add those contacts to its database and send them emails inviting them to join the social media platform. The complaint alleged that once Facebook had gathered this data, it could be used for other purposes, including commercial purposes. The Court held that Facebook had failed to provide adequate notice to users regarding this data import, and that its importing of non-users’ contact information constituted the collection of personal data of individuals who were not registered Facebook users without their knowledge or consent.
First, the Court established that German law applies to Facebook in this case because, although the social network’s European headquarters are based in Ireland, the U.S. parent company processes the applicable data and sets cookies on users’ computers located in Germany. The Court also pointed out that Facebook’s use of German service providers results in the application of German law. These facts distinguished the case from a recent ruling of the Schleswig-Holstein Administrative Court, which stated that Irish law—not German or U.S. law—applied to certain Facebook marketing activities in Germany because those activities were controlled from Ireland.
Turning to Friend Finder, the Court found that a breach of data protection law also constitutes a breach of the German Unfair Trade Act (“Unfair Trade Act”). More specifically, according to the Court, the fact that the Friend Finder function collected certain data without informing users or obtaining their consent, breached Germany’s Data Protection Act and Telemedia Act, and the subsequent use of such data for commercial purposes without notice or consent violated the Unfair Trade Act.
The Court also found that Facebook’s email invitations to non-users asking them to register with Facebook, without recipients’ prior explicit consent, amounted to unlawful email marketing under the Unfair Trade Act. The Court highlighted that Facebook itself was the sender of these emails, not Facebook’s users (as might be the case with other companies’ “tell-a-friend” marketing functions), and that Facebook users were deceived because they were unaware that the contact information they had uploaded to the service would be used to send emails to their contacts.
Finally, the Court found certain clauses in Facebook’s terms and conditions (Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen) and privacy terms (Datenschutzrichtlinien) to be invalid, for a variety of reasons. For example, Facebook’s terms and conditions granted the company a worldwide license to use works such as photographs and videos uploaded by users, and the wording of the terms would have permitted the marketing and sale of such materials to other companies for commercial use. The Court found such license to be invalid without obtaining users’ specific consent based on “clear” and “easy to understand” language. Various other provisions, including those that gave Facebook the right to unilaterally modify its privacy terms and other terms and conditions, were also found to be unclear and therefore invalid.
Facebook’s mechanism for obtaining consent to its privacy terms turned out to be critical to this case. Currently, consumer associations are only permitted to bring actions in Germany regarding privacy terms that are considered to be “general terms and conditions” and thereby subject to certain rules concerning standard terms and conditions. Where those rules apply, Germany’s unfair trade provisions are applied. For several years now, VZBV has been lobbying the German government to pass legislation permitting actions related to data protection to be brought directly, and indeed, the German government announced in February 2014 that a draft bill amending the German Injunctions Act is expected in April 2014.
The amendments to the German Injunctions Act are anticipated to extend the scope of certain of its provisions that permit consumer associations to initiate summary proceedings to defend individuals’ rights, so that such provisions cover data protection laws. If these amendments are made, then the Injunctions Act would provide a new legal basis for litigation in Germany related to privacy and data protection.
Geoff Livingston on Google+
File this one under: Why didn’t we think of that?
This is an exciting day for me.
While summertime may mean a break from the classroom, ambitious students and professionals understand the importance of learning every day. Public relations students, professionals and educators will gather together on Wednesday, July 16th at 8:30 p.m. ET for a Twitter based discussion on how to leverage social media for a career in public relations.
On January 24, 2014, in a case filed against Facebook by German consumer protection association VZBV, the Berlin Court of Appeal (“Court”) upheld a lower court ruling that Facebook’s “Friend Finder” function is unlawful. The Court agreed with the Berlin Regional Court’s 2012 decision that the Friend Finder function violates both German data protection law and unfair trade law, and re-affirmed the invalidity of several clauses in Facebook’s privacy notice and other online terms and conditions. VZBV has reported the ruling as a consumer victory, stating that the ruling recognizes that privacy is a consumer protection issue.