is this like one of those hypothetical trolley questions?
Putin fielded this question at his annual telethon, along with other more serious queries about the crisis in Ukraine and – asked by Edward Snowden – Russia's domestic spying.
You've probably seen the deeply disturbing reports of pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine telling Jews to "register" with their would-be break-away government. But there are reasons to be skeptical.
Bus seats in Finland - for the unsocial people, like me.
Rule number one in Finnish public transport culture: Don’t sit next to anyone. Unless the seats are like this.
In every other cases fill the spots from window seats. Then standing up seats. If the bus gets crowded sit next to someone but sit as far as possible from the other person and turn your head to look to the completely different direction. Don’t say a word.
And if you’re the one sitting next to window pray all the gods that the other person leaves before you, because otherwise you’d have to speak to him/her. Usually it’s something like “Umm..ileavenow”. Remember, no sorries or smiles. Just say it as low and fast as possible without making any eye contact.
legit advise for people visiting finland. that “ileavenow” is “mä jään täs” in finnish. it’s okay if you don’t pronounce it perfectly right because the only reason someone would talk to strangers in public transport is to ask them to move, so they will get the hint.
BUT! usually just things like putting your phone away and rustling your bag and looking like you are about to leave will do the trick. no need for words.
….and this is how you wait for a bus in finland:
Reblogging because of that picture. So true. And familiar.
This is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen…what the actual fuck. It almost seems like a joke but I feel like it’s actually serious????
This is very true and something every tourist should remember
multitask suicide: shall we go on another field trip?
Taberna de Haro has occupied their corner of Beacon and St. Mary’s Streets for over a decade, offering authentic Spanish tapas and a selection of sherry that’s unparalleled in the city. The restaurant has been somewhat of a darling, tucked away from the hustle and bustle of Kenmore Square; its attractive, 13 seat bar has always been an intimate place to enjoy chef-owner Deborah Hansen’s cuisine. Thompson and Sullivan have been brought in to develop a beverage program worthy of the menu. “Deborah has been delivering great food for fifteen years,” says Sullivan, “and we’re going to do something at the bar that does it justice.” The duo, former colleagues at Drink, Barbara Lynch’s Fort Point cocktail destination, has put together a brand new, tightly focused collection of drinks. “The new list is very simple. We’re offering eight dollar cocktails, with an emphasis on gin and sherry,” says Thompson.
I admit that I always assumed it was from "dessins-animés"; I stand corrected
This is perhaps the second most propagated myth about anime on the internet.
The flawed reasoning is this: a French word for "animation" or "cartoon" is "dessins-animés" (literally, "animated drawing"). "animés", in this case, is an inflected form of the past-participle of "animer", "to animate". This word shares a nearly identical pronunciation with the Japanese word "anime". Therefore, through virtue of coincidental existence, the Japanese must have taken this word from the French.
My stack of Japanese dictionaries disagrees with anime fansites.
The actual etymology is somewhat different. It should be noted that the word "anime" didn't just spring into Japanese. In fact, the word "anime" as an abbreviation is somewhat new and isn't even listed in many older dictionaries -- a Japanese dictionary will generally list "anime" as "abbreviation for animeeshon". Looking up animeeshon almost always shows that it was taken from the English word "animation".
In fact, a lookalike, "animation" exists in French as well as English. (Thanks Albert!) It is here from which the English word was appropriated. The coincidence of French and Japanese comes only secondhand from French, and thirdhand from Latin. So if you want to argue that by association anime is a French word, you're wrong. IT'S LATIN!!!
Furthermore, the "e" (ay) sound at the end of "anime" comes from the English pronunciation of the middle "a" in "animation". If the word was taken directly from the French "animation", it would have been pronounced (and thus transcribed into English) as "anima".
How has this myth propogated so far?
Well, there is always The Golden Rule of the Information Age. In addition, I have another explanation: Anime fans are alienated by a society that insists that cartoons must be appreciated by kids and only kids. This can easily cause an insecurity about their hobby, which causes them to seek to promote and legitimize anime. What better way than to associate it with an artsy French term?
If you want a good link demonstrating this phenomenon, try this one:
http://forum.japanreference.com/archive/topic/2890-1.html
Witness the pain as linguists try to argue with an anime fan (complete with anime character moniker) on this very point!
The Tech reports both its national fraternity and MIT have suspended Delta Upsilon, based at 526 Beacon St. in the Back Bay, for "inappropriate behavior during unsanctioned events" over January break.
No word if a horse in the dean's office was involved.
German watchmaking company NOMOS Glashütte offers a look at what goes into the assembly of one of their watches in this fascinating short film that follows one of their watchmakers.
Plenty of tradition and handcraft—combined with high-tech, where it outperforms handcraft: That is NOMOS Glashütte. All our movements are built in-house and by ourselves in Glashütte. This also applies to our watches—Tangente, Orion, Zürich and all the other models—many of which are already considered classics.
Since the Boston Marathon, 235 people have been shot in Boston, 35 people senselessly killed in “those places, to those people.” How is that “Boston Strong?” I grieve the collective trauma, suffering and senseless deaths of the Boston Marathon. Yet how is 35 dead any less senseless? When we chant or buy “Boston Strong,” which Boston are we talking about? Boston is a divided city. Which Boston is strong?
The house at 27 Hansborough St. exploded around 9:20 p.m., sending twelve people to the hospital - two with serious injuries - the Boston Fire Department reports.
The apparent natural-gas explosion pushed the house off its foundation and led to its partial collapse. The resulting fire went to three alarms.
Residents of surrounding homes were evacuated. National Grid gave the OK to let them return around midnight.
Mass. Ave. was still blocked off, from Putnam St to around City Hall, during my morning walk to work. The guy I talked to (who was standing outside, waiting to be let him back into his apartment in the center section of the building) said everybody got out okay, including pets, though there was some sort of harrowing rescue from a window on the fourth floor. Apparently the building has multiple courtyards, which helped to contain the fire.
A six-alarm fire caused extensive damage to a Cambridge apartment building, but authorities say all the residents escaped unharmed.
see also <a href="http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/03/08/female-eagle-hunter-reaches-new-heights?videoId=231446109">http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/03/08/female-eagle-hunter-reaches-new-heights?videoId=231446109</a>
A photographer who snapped what could be the world's only girl hunting with a golden eagle says watching her work was an amazing sight.
Most children, Asher Svidensky says, are a little intimidated by golden eagles. Kazakh boys in western Mongolia start learning how to use the huge birds to hunt for foxes and hares at the age of 13, when the eagles sit heavily on their undeveloped arms. Svidensky, a photographer and travel writer, shot five boys learning the skill - and he also photographed Ashol-Pan.
"To see her with the eagle was amazing," he recalls. She was a lot more comfortable with it, a lot more powerful with it and a lot more at ease with it."
The Kazakhs of the Altai mountain range in western Mongolia are the only people that hunt with golden eagles, and today there are around 400 practising falconers. Ashol-Pan, the daughter of a particularly celebrated hunter, may well be the country's only apprentice huntress.
They hunt in winter, when the temperatures can drop to -40C (-40F). A hunt begins with days of trekking on horseback through snow to a mountain or ridge giving an excellent view of prey for miles around. Hunters generally work in teams. After a fox is spotted, riders charge towards it to flush it into the open, and an eagle is released. If the eagle fails to make a kill, another is released.
The skill of hunting with eagles, Svidensky says, lies in harnessing an unpredictable force of nature. "You don't really control the eagle. You can try and make her hunt an animal - and then it's a matter of nature. What will the eagle do? Will she make it? How will you get her back afterwards?"
The eagles are not bred in captivity, but taken from nests at a young age. Female eaglets are chosen since they grow to a larger size - a large adult might be as heavy as seven kilos, with a wingspan of over 230cm. After years of service, on a spring morning, a hunter releases his mature eagle a final time, leaving a butchered sheep on the mountain as a farewell present. "That's how the Kazakh eagle hunters make sure that the eagles go back to nature and have their own strong newborns, for the sake of future generations", Svidensky says.
He describes Ashol-Pan as a smiling, sweet and shy girl. His photographs of her engaging in what has been a male activity for around 2,000 years say something about Mongolia in the 21st Century.
"The generation that will decide what will happen with every tradition that Mongolia contains is this generation," says Svidensky, who showed Ashol-Pan's family the photographs on his laptop. "Everything there is going to change and is going to be redefined - and the possibilities are amazing."
We have approximately 100 food-grade, 5-gallon red or white pails with lids. These are used, but were only used previously to contain tapioca or sugar syrup. They've been sitting in our yard for months. They're a bit dirty from winter snowmelt, but o [...]
i did a poster for the mountain goats and erin mckeown and i realized i forgot to actually mention it on the thing where i am ostensibly supposed to be posting art
4 colors on white paper, edition of 63
thank you industry print shop in austin texas, who did a truly amazing job on this thank you alyson west for organizing everything and tolerating all my amateur hour nonsense thank you john darnielle for the impeccable art direction and for being just the coolest thank you erin mckeown for also being the coolest and incredibly kind (note the free album download on her website—-IT IS SO GOOD) and thank you trudy, whose last name i do not know, for doing the actual selling of the posters and for keeping me company before the show!
i have thought about screen printing posters for musicians every day for like 6 years now—-that the first one i did was for my favorite band, and furthermore came out looking pretty okay seems OMINOUS.
Hand-Painted Wing Scarf ($60.00). This is so gorgeous. Of course, I’m picturing it in blacks and grays, with subtle iridescence and silver highlights, and … yeah.
via GN ("See that "BBN" in the upper right hand area of the net? I unplugged that once by accident.")
A 1978 information brochure for ARPANET, the packet switching network created in 1969 that evolved into the Internet, provides a description of the project as well as policies and procedures governing its use. The brochure, which is hosted on the Defense Technical Information Center’s website, includes a number of fascinating diagrams and maps.
"(not Bennington-weird or Hampshire-weird, but weird)"
A few years ago, the psychologist Peter Gray released a fascinating—and sobering—study: Lack of free play in millennials’ overscheduled lives is giving kids anxiety and depression in record numbers. Why? They’re missing what Gray’s generation (and mine) had: “Time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it.”
We’ve always been slightly annoyed at the overly simple manner in which 3D models are sliced and printed. Much more is theoretically possible and that may now become reality with the work developed by Project Silkworm.
If you, like us, spend hours ponderously watching your 3D printer extruder tediously traverse the print bed, gradually building up an object, you’ll start to imagine things. Better ways to extrude. Different directions. You’ll ask yourself, “why can’t it move like THIS instead?”
It’s because the commonly found 3D model slicing software takes a very straightforward approach: cut the model into equally sized slices and print them on top of each other. That’s it. It’s done this way to ensure a reliable print.
But it also restricts things considerably. Why couldn’t we have fatter extrusions in the interior, for example? Why can’t we move up AND down during a print?
Project Silkworm attempts to get at this issue. It works with software modeling Rhino3D and its popular plugin, Grasshopper. Here’s the official description:
Silkworm is a plugin that translates Grasshopper and Rhino geometry into GCode for 3d printing. Silkworm allows for the complete and intuitive manipulation of the printer GCode, enabling novel printed material properties to be specified by non-solid geometry and techniques of digital craft.
Whoa. Hold on.
This means you are developing the print movements DIRECTLY from your CAD software. You know, the CAD software that has far more sophisticated processing capabilities and also happens to intimately know the geometry of your object.
This opens up endless possibilities. Some of them have been explored by the project. Their example page includes these:
Build a continuously extruded spiral with a range of different speeds and flows, making fatter and thinner extrusion lines.
Add contours and “grain” to an otherwise flat surface.
Extrude a continuous structure upwards on the Z-axis in one operation
Create a continuous unsupported spiral by using very slow extrusion speeds
Vary extrusion settings for specific zones
Extrude a “layered pattern weave” using vector field geometry
This incredible capability, while still experimental, is available at no charge. All you need is a working copy of Rhino3D on Windows with the Grasshopper plugin.
We can only imagine what people will do with this capability.
The convenient "send to Kindle" feature lets users send documents, text from websites, and Kindle-compatible ebooks to their ereaders with a click from a web browser, desktop, email, or tablet. Now, Amazon is automatically adding those personal documents to a new folder on your Amazon Cloud Drive for easy retrieval.
"You can use Manage Your Kindle to see a list of your documents, re-deliver them to Kindle devices and free reading apps, delete them, or turn off auto-saving of documents to the cloud," Amazon says in an email sent to customers.
It's a useful feature that comes with a generous helping of free storage: the 5GB that you get with an Amazon Cloud Drive account, plus 5GB for personal documents from your Kindle. It's part of the company's plan to hook users on its cloud storage solution, which competes with the likes of Google Drive and Dropbox. Amazon originally pitched the service for photos and video, but it's now emphasizing documents as well.
The Louisiana House of Representatives voted not to remove the state's sodomy ban today, even though it was declared unconstitutional by the U.S Supreme Court in 2003 and cannot be used to arrest people. The 66-27 vote was overwhelmingly against getting rid of the ban.
The New Orleans Times-Picayune explains that a conservative religious lobbying group led the charge to keep the "crime against nature" law -- which, again, isn't even a real law anymore -- on the books, sending letters to all members of the House saying the unenforceable law is somehow protecting young people from sexual predators and public health risks.
"Louisiana's anti-sodomy statute is consistent with the values of Louisiana residents who consider this behavior to be dangerous, unhealthy and immoral," the letter said, apparently not mentioning that the statute is not consistent with the Constitution and that the East Baton Rogue sheriff's department was forced to apologize for trying to use it to arrest gay men last year.
Rep. Valarie Hodges was the only person to speak against the repeal today, according to the AP, saying it was a "vote of conscience" and "we're not here to rubber-stamp the Supreme Court."
The Supreme Court is the highest court in the country.
All but three of the 27 votes to strike down the "law" were from Democrats, while all but 11 of the 66 votes to keep it were from Republicans. Eleven representatives (most of them Democrats) didn't vote at all.
Later this week, the House will be considering a bill to make the Bible Louisiana's state book. Last week, the state's Senate actually had to discuss whether or not to make chicken boxing (a "legitimate sport" in which chickens box each other) illegal.
Mt. Gox, once the leading Bitcoin exchange, has given up its plans to rebuild following a devastating data breach in February. It has requested that a Tokyo court allow it to liquidate.
On February 28, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy just days after going offline due to security concerns. Among the assets that went missing were 850,000 bitcoins, valued at close to half a million dollars at the time (200,000 were later recovered). Hackers also might have stolen millions in liquid assets.
The resulting public relations nightmare caused bitcoin prices to dip and ruined Mt. Gox’s credibility as a secure place to store cryptocurrency. According to The Wall Street Journal, “the complexity of the procedure—including the difficulty of holding meetings with creditors spread around the world—as well as the lack of realistic rehabilitation plans for the Tokyo-based exchange” prevent Mt. Gox from regaining its foothold.
South Korean coast guard officers try to rescue passengers from the sunken ferry, Wednesday, April 16, 2014. (AP PHOTO/HYUNG MIN-WOO, YONHAP)
Original Post (see updates below): At least two people are dead as a rescue effort remains underway after a South Korean passenger ferry began sinking on Wednesday morning. The ship was carrying more than 470 passengers — many of them high school students — when it began to list badly and capsized. One unconfirmed local media outlet reported that the ferry hit a rock.
The rescue operation involving dozens of rescue boats and helicopters has recovered about 180 passengers so far. At least two passengers are confirmed dead and more than 290 are still missing.
Hypothermia is a main concern for passengers who had to jump into the water. CNN reports that the water is 55 degrees right now, a temperature cold enough that humans can only survive for about two hours.
The boat has a capacity of about 900 people and can also carry motor vehicles. It is 480 feet long and according to Reuters, was built in Japan in 1994. The ferry was headed from Incheon, on the Korean mainland, to Jeju, a resort island 60 miles offshore.
UPDATE 3:02 a.m.: An earlier version of this article stated that 368 people were rescued and more than 100 were still missing. Those numbers came from official sources, who later revised their tally to 290 still missing.
UPDATE 6:08 a.m.: Officials have again revised their numbers, saying there were 459 people aboard the ferry when it started sinking. So far, only 164 have been rescued. According to CNN an additional two passengers have been confirmed killed, raising the death toll from the accident to four. Other outlets are reporting that only three deaths have been confirmed so far, but officials fear many are still trapped on board the ship. This is the first major ferry disaster South Korea has seen in about twenty years.
Rescue teams, made up of several members of the coastguard, as well as civilian and military ships and aircraft, are still searching for survivors. Navy divers are scanning the water -- a difficult task, according to Lee Gyeong-og, a vice-minister of security and public administration, who said "There is so much mud in the sea water and the visibility is very low," adding "We are doing our best to try to rescue even one more survivor... We have 160 navy and coast guard divers working at the scene, but underwater visibility is not great.”
REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji
Lee also offered that the investigation into what happened will begin after the rescue mission has concluded, saying "We will try to determine the cause of the accident after rescue operations are over." Some on board reported hearing a "large impact" before the ship started to turn on its side, per Reuters:
"It was fine then the ship went 'boom' and there was a noise of cargo falling," said Cha Eun-ok, who said she was on deck of the ferry taking photographs when the disaster began. "The on-board announcement told people to stay put ... people who stayed are trapped," she said in Jindo, the nearest town from the scene of the accident.
AP Photo/South Korea Coast Guard via Yonhap
This would imply that the vessel hit an object that caused it to start sinking, but one member of a government crew searching for survivors told Reuters that the incident was likely caused by a mechanical malfunction, because the ship went down in an area free of reefs or rocks. The ship was reportedly (slightly) off-course when it sank.
Some of those rescued said those still on board were following the crew's instructions to stay put, suggesting problems with the the on-board safety protocol. The New York Times reports:
“The internal broadcast advised us to remain in our seats,” the national news agency Yonhap quoted a 57-year-old passenger, identified only by his surname, Yoo, as saying. “But I could not stay put because the water was coming up. So I came outside with my life jacket on... I wonder why they didn’t tell us to evacuate immediately,” he added, according to Yonhap.
Parents of the high-school students on board the ship have collected at the Incheon school, seeking answers.
'After a DHS report about right-wing extremism leaked in 2009, the backlash from conservatives led the agency to withdraw it. DHS hasn’t issued another report on the topic since.'
Frazier Glenn Miller, the 73-year-old suspect in Sunday’s fatal shooting of three people outside a Jewish Community Center near Kansas City, Mo., has a decadeslong record of virulent white supremacism and anti-Semitism. He went to prison in the 1980s for weapons charges and for plotting to kill Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In the same decade, Miller founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party. Running for senate in Missouri in 2010, he talked about his views with Howard Stern (our politicians “are all a bunch of whores for Israel”), and he talked to Talking Points Memo in 2012 (“Jews call the shots. But white people, we have no power at all").
An hour with a prostitute costs on average $150, though prices can range from as low as $5 for a single sex act to $1,000 an hour, the going rate for “high-end” online escort services in Miami. Many of those in the sex trade were encouraged by family members to take up sex work. Pimps rely as much if not more on emotional manipulation than physical violence to control their sex workers.
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