Russian Sledges

cumberbuddy:

sherlockisthebest:

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#Acting. He’s brilliant. Just bloody brilliant.

shallow-rewards:

Just a quick note for those in the UK:

The Great British Sewing Bee is currently looking for sewing enthusiasts to take part in their third season! I’m sure many of you are familiar with this adorable show (which previously featured Tilly and Lauren, amongst many other talented home sewists.

If you think you might be interested, email sewing (at) loveproductions.co.uk for more info. Good luck to all!

Highly paid employees are pushing up rents near the tech giant's California headquarters, forcing locals out and destroying communities, say activists. Now Oakland's residents are fighting back – hard. But are they too late?

If pushing your enemy into the sea signifies success, then Google's decision to start ferrying workers to its campus by boat suggests the revolt against big technology companies is going well. Standing on the docks of Oakland, on the east side of San Francisco Bay, last week, you could watch the Googlers board the ferry, one by one, and swoosh through the chill, grey waters of the bay towards the company's Mountain View headquarters, 30 or so miles to the south.

Not exactly Dunkirk, but from afar you might have detected a whiff of evacuation, if not retreat. The ferry from Oakland – a week-long pilot programme – joined a similar catamaran service for Google workers in San Francisco launched last month. The search engine giant is not doing it for the bracing sea air. It is a response to blockades and assaults against buses that shuttle employees to work.

Many fear fresh attacks. A young software designer waiting for a Google bus on the corner of seventh and Adeline street in west Oakland flinches when I approach him. A few weeks earlier, activists here slashed tyres and hurled rocks through windows. Since then a police car has kept watch, but the Googler remains wary. "A reporter? Can I see some ID?" He scrutinises my press card and sighs. "We don't know what's going to happen. Anarchists are driving this."

An eclectic range of motivations are behind the wider backlash against technology companies in their Bay Area home turf as well as globally. Fair-tax campaigners complain that they abuse their clout in order to dodge payments and rewrite rules in their favour. Privacy advocates say they pillage customers' data and facilitate, willingly or not, government mass surveillance. Others accuse them of worsening inequality by enriching plutocratic backers.

Bay Area activists started targeting the fleets of air-conditioned, Wi-Fi-equipped buses last year as symbols of tech-driven gentrification, a process which is fuelling rent increases and evictions. The protests made headlines around the world, seeding hope in some circles, and anxiety or even panic in others.

"Writing from the centre of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its '1%', namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American 1%, namely the 'rich'," Tom Perkins, a venture capitalist, wrote in a recent letter to the Wall Street Journal. "This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent 'progressive' radicalism unthinkable now?"

The comparison was universally ridiculed. But there is no denying that the home of the summer of love is now experiencing a winter of fear and loathing. "Those people on the buses are quite scared, they feel threatened. Now they want to hide their faces," says Jonathan Chin, the co-founder of a new security startup, Bannerman, which rents bodyguards and bouncers, many of them veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. Techies comprise a third of clients. "They like us because there is no need to sign a year-long contract. You pay when you need us," says Chin.

Watching Google's ferry steam out of Oakland docks beyond rock-throwing range it can seem as if here the anti-tech rebellion has found a bastion. It makes sense: Oakland, a gritty, industrial port city of 400,000 souls just across the bay from San Francisco, has been America's crucible of leftwing radicalism for more than a century, home to socialists, trade-union agitators, poets, jazz musicians, rabble-rousers, civil-rights leaders, Black Panthers and anarchists. Occupy activists clashed with police and stormed city hall here in 2012. A bronze sculpture of Oakland's most famous writer and activist, Jack London, overlooks the bay like a sentinel. "You have mismanaged the world," he once told a wealthy, frock-coated audience in New York, "and it shall be taken from you."

Stirring, prescient words for an era scarred by the recklessness behind the economic crisis. But in Oakland the bold prediction of a reckoning, of the have-nots prising power and wealth from the elite, remains wishful thinking. In reality, there is no insurrection. The bus protests are sporadic and fleeting. They worry but do not repel tech settlers. Google's use of ferries is a tactical tweak, not a retreat. Resistance to technology workers, corporations or real estate developers ranges from puny to non-existent. Wealthy outsiders are taking and reshaping the city, gentrifying former ideological cauldrons. This should not really be a surprise. It is a pop-culture truism that the geeks shall inherit the earth, and that includes Oakland.

"They've kicked out thousands. They're the kick-out kings," says Kokavulu Lumukanda, 67, observing a street of Victorian-style houses from the top step of his wooden porch. A former bookshop owner who has seen neighbours evicted and forced out by rising rents, he is referring to corporate landlords, but in his view the young techies who subsequently moved in were equally culpable. "They come here to play the cultural poseur. It's like dominos falling. Whites move in, blacks move out." (Oakland has lost a quarter of its black population over the past decade, though on the whole it has been latinos, not whites, who have replaced them.)

A tall, owlish figure in waistcoat and glasses, Lumukandu faces eviction from the handsome if dilapidated four-bedroom house he has rented since 1988. A new owner recently bought it for $400,000. "They want me out. They want to abide in the abode of covetousness." If banished to a distant, cheaper city – such as south to Fremont or east to Antioch – he will bid farewell to his garden of succulents, camomile, sage, lemon balm and his neighbourhood's history. "The Panthers had some of their biggest rallies two blocks from here." Lumukandu will not go without a fight. "They'll find out who they're dealing with."

Google, which declined to be interviewed for this article, rejects the accusation. In a statement, it says: "Google strives to be a good neighbour in the communities where we work and live. In the last year we volunteered thousands of hours with local organizations and gave more than $19m to Bay Area non-profits." One employee says he and his colleagues help generate jobs and opportunities in the communities they settle – unlike nihilist critics who perpetuate desolation.

Oakland's poverty, decay and murder rates deterred all but the hardiest would-be gentrifier during the dotcom bubble. But from 2007 the foreclosure crisis hit like a "Greek tragedy", according to a 2012 report from the Urban Strategies Council, a local thinktank. "What began with an over-inflated housing bubble and the targeting of predatory loan products to homeowners of colour has ultimately peaked with the displacement of thousands." Some 10,508 homes were foreclosed between 2007 and 2012, with poor, black families bearing the brunt. This created a "colossal opportunity" for wealthy individuals and corporations to snap up real estate, said the report.

Around the same time, a new tech boom driven by the likes of Facebook, Apple, Twitter and Google flooded Silicon Valley with cash and talent. Rather than live in sterile valley towns, much of the influx opted for the bright lights of San Francisco, driving up rents – and evictions. With prices there now rivalling Manhattan, even well-paid techies view Oakland, just a few stops east on the local Bart railway system, as a more affordable, spicier alternative. So now condos pop up like toast.

"The foreclosure crisis created this void that global capital filled," says Steve King, author of the Urban Strategies Council report. "And it certainly wasn't taking cues from long-term residents over what that investment should look like."

Gentrification hums through northern and western Oakland: U-haul vans spilling furniture on to lawns, ADT security signs sprouting alongside bike lanes, hubs of yoga studios, music venues, boutique hotels, miniature parks. All brushing up against slums and grime.

Andre Ernest, 47, an Oakland native who opened a bike shop four years ago, says tumbleweed used to roll past his door. "Now I've got people walking in every few minutes." Most are white techies conscious about their health and carbon footprint, he says. Ernest recoils, however, at the coach-loads of business types who regularly cruise down his street taking photographs. "Investors on field trips scouting out the area. In five years this area will completely change. Good for business, but for the people who don't want to be forced out it's horrible."

Ernest's neighbour, Revolution cafe, a joint too grubby and grungy for the new settlers, recently closed. In its place, a few blocks north, is 10th & Wood, a smart new cafe with Wi-Fi and artisan burgers. Not long ago the area was riven by gangs, guns and drugs, but new residents are renovating homes and opening businesses, beams the owner, Vladimir Levitansky, 39. "It's a renaissance."

A former Cirque du Soleil clown, he now hosts geeks, hipsters and assorted bohemians at his pavement tables. Despite a pork pie hat and check trousers, Levitansky sounds more Donald Trump than Marcel Marceau. "I do feel bad for the person who is being displaced, but – on the other side – that's cut-and-dried capitalism. The person who bought and improved (things) should be rewarded for taking that risk. If you don't have enough money to live in a certain neighbourhood, your choice is to make more money or live in another neighbourhood."

A few blocks away, Maggie Larios, 30, a latina single mother sharing a cramped apartment with her two children, is all too aware of that choice. She earns just enough from a care-home job to pay the $685 monthly rent. But the landlord who owns the block is trying to evict her and other tenants who have complained about mould, cockroaches and broken windows. They suspect the neglect is intended to oust them so he can get in more lucrative tenants.

"The mould has made me sick," Larios croaks, indicating her throat. "When we went to court one of my neighbours had bugs on her. You should've seen the judge's face." With her budget, Larios stands little chance of finding another apartment in Oakland. "I don't want to be homeless. My kids and I went through a very bad experience in shelters." But inevitably they will be priced out, she says. "It's gonna happen. A few years ago, to see a white person here was unseen footage. Now you see them walking the street even at night." Resistance could perhaps slow but not halt gentrification, she says. "Money talks, bullshit walks." Larios has kept one asset in reserve for emergencies: her long, luxuriant hair. "When the time comes I can sell it for $400."

Jack London's spirit is not extinguished. Rio Scharf, a young tenant organiser for the East Bay Solidarity network, is helping Larios and others to fight eviction. "We supply legal advice and use people power, pickets and phone calls to wring concessions." It is ominous, says Scharf, that some arrivals have coined the term Broakland, a nod to gentrification's poster child, Brooklyn.

The headquarters of another group, Causa Justa – Just Cause, brims with energy and campaigns, including one to put an anti-displacement initiative on a November ballot. Gentrification does not solve poverty, it merely shunts the poor out of the city, says the executive director, Maria Poblet. She laments that resistance has long been a "losing battle" given proximity to Silicon Valley, which activists refer to only half-jokingly as the Death Star. "We're not in a moment where everyday people can rein in corporations. You can only start from where you are."

At a 100-strong demonstration across the bay, in San Francisco's Mission district, orators speaks of mobilisation and action, of striking against privilege, rhetoric likely to make Tom Perkins sweat about anarchist stormtroopers. Two young activists hold up a black banner saying "SMASH GENTRIFICATION", with a hammer fracturing the offending word. Neither is optimistic. "On good days, I think yes, there's untapped rage," says one. "But most days are not good days." The other, an unemployed waiter called Finn, says America's social and political outcasts risk losing their refuge. "This is where we come, and now we're terrified of potential eviction notices."

Oakland's activists also despair over the city's plan to integrate hundreds of cameras, sensors and data feeds in a new Domain Awareness Center, calling it a tool of mass surveillance masked as an anti-crime measure. Adding insult to injury, the police department, which was fined $1m for brutalising Occupy protestors, hosts an annual event, called Urban Shield, which showcases tactics and technology for crowd control to other police forces.

During the 2011/12 Occupy movement, protestors used to harass an auction of foreclosed properties held daily on Oakland's courthouse steps. Last week the realtors and brokers conducted their business in bright sunshine, unmolested. A woman worried about eviction from her rented home, up for sale, watched quietly from the sidelines, crying.

Street activism stands little chance against amorphous economic forces, says King, the thinktank author. "I don't know how much of that resistance remains."

The mayor, Jean Quan, would know better than most. During Occupy militants thronged the plaza beneath her city hall office, chanting and banging drums as police and TV helicopters hovered overhead. When I visit, all is quiet, and the mayor, perched on a sofa, spoke of protest in the past tense. "I don't see it as a huge thing here. That's not where it's at in Oakland. The city is undergoing a huge renaissance." Billions of dollars were pouring in for office, retail, housing and infrastructure projects, she says. Oakland would absorb the techies as it had previous migrants, even if this time they were "white people from the midwest".

Militancy in Oakland is not dead. It has deep roots and regenerates. There will be more protests, new causes, other battles. But as sure as the tide rolls into the bay, the geeks are here to stay.

Plans for an extended stay hotel in downtown Evanston are drawing fears from some that it will attract the wrong kind of academics as guests. The Southeast Evanston Association, in an email message to its members, says neighbors need to assure that the establishment will carry "a hotel brand that will maintain a high quality of business, and not devolve into cheap housing for transient academics."

An erratum or corrigendum (plurals: errata, corrigenda) (comes from Latin: errata corrige) is a correction of a book or article. An erratum is most commonly issued shortly after its original text is published. Patches to security issues in a computer program are also sometimes called errata. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e., an error introduced during the publishing process) and a corrigendum for an author's error.

propagandery:

Planetarium Watch tells the time and shows the movements of the solar system, all for just $245,000.

The Midnight Planétarium is an incredible feat of engineering, design and artistic craftsmanship. Besides showing the time, this watch also accurately displays the movement of 6 planets in our solar system as they orbit the Sun.

The watch took 396 pieces and 3 whole years of work to complete.

(via This Astronomical Watch Accurately Shows The Solar System’s Movements On Your Wrist | Bored Panda)

sushiesque posted a photo:

pattern: www.colettepatterns.com/shop/jasmine

Spanish High Court Judge Ismael Moreno on Monday sought international arrest orders for former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, ex-Prime Minister Li Peng and others on allegations of genocide in Tibet.

The Detroit proto-punk group Death had a short and mostly forgotten run in the 1970s, but its music has caught on in recent years. The band's groundbreaking work is remembered on a newly released song, from an upcoming compilation of Death demos.

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Above, a gentleman who was unhappy with Apple's decision to remove the Blockchain bitcoin wallet from the iTunes App Store shot holes through his iPhone with a rifle.

• Boing Boing presents a guest op-ed from the the Chief Security Officer of Blockchain, a Bitcoin wallet app recently removed from Apple's App Store.

On Wednesday February 5th, Apple yanked Blockchain, the last remaining bitcoin wallet from the App Store without notice, firmly establishing iOS as the bitcoin-hostile mobile operating system. In a terse email to the app’s developers, Apple cited an “unresolved issue”, without any further explanation. While Blockchain’s developers scrambled to get clarification, it appears the unresolved issue is that the application is a bitcoin wallet, something that cannot be “resolved.” Blockchain was the last of the bitcoin wallets, the others yanked months ago by Apple’s innovation gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, across the mobile market divide, Google’s Android OS is quite bitcoin friendly. More than a hundred bitcoin related apps, including a dozen different wallets, compete for attention in a crowded market. Clearly, Apple’s “unresolved issue” is not related to bitcoin’s legality, which has been firmly established in the US and almost all other jurisdictions. Presumably, Google’s lawyers arrived at the same conclusion as US law enforcement agencies and the Financial Crime Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the United States, that the use of bitcoin is perfectly legal.

So if legality is not the problem, what is?

Apple’s walled garden has always been touted as a means to ensure a safe and high quality, consistent experience for its users. The blockchain app had built a solid user base with more than 120,000 downloads and high ratings over two years. Apple had offered no warning or expressed any concern over the safety or quality of the application. Rather, it seems to have simply missed the application in its review process and just belatedly decided to drop the hammer once it was noticed.

The reaction by bitcoin’s iPhone users was both furious and at times quite funny. One reddit user offered Nexus 5 Android phones to anyone who would demonstrate their ire by destroying their iPhone in protest, in the most spectacular way. Many raced to compete, creating hilarious entries with titles such as “blunt object” and “second story window” to document their chosen means of iPhone destruction. The top prize however must go to the reddit user “dieselgeek,” a firearms reviewer who reports under the name R3 or “Ryan’s Range Report” who drove out to the middle of a snow covered firing range to put three bullets into his iPhone at 300 yards with a high-powered sniper rifle. [See video, above.]

All this demonstrates the unenviable position that Apple has as gatekeeper of the App Store’s walled garden. Touting security and user experience as their mission, the reviewers find themselves acting as arbitrators of technology innovation in a world that moves far too fast for them to remain consistent, or credible. Their ambiguous criteria for judging application qualifications can never be flexible enough to anticipate technologies as radical and disruptive as decentralized currencies. Furthermore, by applying a blanket ban on a technology that directly competes with their in-app purchases payment system, from which Apple derives a fat 30% fee and with a rumoured retail payment application for iOS in development, Apple opens itself to accusations of anti-competitive behavior. While it is likely that Apple lacks the internal strategic sophistication to see bitcoin as a threat, the ambiguity and capriciousness of the rules made many in the bitcoin community suspect the worst.

By banning bitcoin wallets, Apple has cut off millions of users from one of the most exciting and empowering technologies since the Internet itself, as crypto-currencies implement what is often called “The Internet of Money”. What started as a trickle of apps with bitcoin wallets in 2013 will likely turn into a deluge as hundreds of companies compete and innovate on bitcoin, as well as hundreds of other crypto-currencies in this exploding new tech industry. Worse, Apple is thwarted by the open nature of the Internet, as most bitcoin wallet designers are quickly pivoting to HTML5 as the platform to deliver bitcoin wallets right in the browser. The last hurdle to such implementations, which was the ability to use the phone’s camera to capture QR code encoded bitcoin addresses was recently overcome and a deluge of HTML5 bitcoin wallets is in development. Apple will now face even more pressure as these wallets slip further outside their control making a mockery of the restrictive App Store rules and leaving them with few options other than imposing orwellian controls inside Safari, the mobile web browser.

Bitcoin is still a niche fad among geeks, but the underlying technology that made it possible is creating a revolution in de-centralized finance that is unleashing a tsunami of pent-up innovation. Bitcoin’s open network architecture allows innovation at the edge of the network, innovation without permission and a proliferation of bitcoin applications that implement novel financial services. Even if bitcoin itself were to be eclipsed by subsequent generations of crypto-currency innovation, the core technology is more likely to have a major impact on financial empowerment for billions of people around the world. Standing alone, in the guard shack at the entrance to its walled garden of applications, the world rushing by too fast for comfort, Apple may find that the role of the gatekeeper of innovation is a very lonely one indeed.

When the fervor flags for the protesters in Ukraine's capital and they want to get away from the barricades, many head to an improvised library in one of the buildings seized by demonstrators.

Tolerance is about to be tested in the National Football League.

And Michael Sam hopes his ability is all that matters, not his sexual orientation.

Missouri's All-America defensive end came out to the entire country Sunday night and could become the first openly gay player in America's most popular sport.

Read More →

The Guardian reports a striking technological breakthrough:

In what appears to be a dramatic escalation of the proliferation of cat photos on the internet, three Australian developers have created an application allowing users to replace pictures of prime minister Tony Abbott with images of cute kittens.

An add on to the internet browser Google Chrome called Stop Tony Meow, built by Dan Nolan, Ben Taylor and Matt Kelsh, allows users who have grown tired of seeing stock footage of the prime minister to replace the photos with cats. It is the first recorded incident of an animal being used to replace a country leader, according to Internet searches.

In case that doesn’t give you a clue, Abbott is not beloved among Australian liberals for, among other things, his opposition to the Carbon Tax and to same-sex marriage.

As the link indicates, you can download it directly (for the link-impaired, the site is here). Here are some examples of the app in operation:

There’s a brief interview with Dan Nolan, one of the three developers of the app; here’s an excerpt:

Stop Tony Meow is an extension that replaces pictures of Tony Abbott with cats. Can you explain what made you decide to build it?

A few months ago Matt (@mattro) tweeted that he was “sick of looking at pictures of Tony’s face” and wanted to replace them with kittens. Ben Taylor (@taybenlor) put together a concept, and Matt asked me to build it into a browser extension. It was honestly just a little bit of fun that seems to have really resonated with people.

How does it work?

It’s a script that looks for the name “abbott” and then drops in a cute kitten photo from placekitten.com. It’s super, super simple and the simplicity seems to be why people are liking it so much.

. . . Is there an endgame to Stop Tony Meow?

The demolition of the entire political artifice and replacing it with a kinder, gentler, cuddlier polity. Also way, way more pictures of cats. It’ll also make a lovely addition to our ASIO files.

Some reader please enlighten us about what ASIO files are.

h/t: Bernard ~

Occupations for the months of January through June from the calendar section of a Book of Hours, ca. 1505.

MS Richardson 9

Houghton Library, Harvard University

Bill Keller, Former Editor of The Times, Is Leaving for News Nonprofit @marshallproj http://t.co/fqlxwNE9fA

— Bill Keller (@nytkeller) February 10, 2014

Read more...

Owl-Themed Cafes Let Patrons Dine With The Wild Birds [Pics] - PSFK

Bard College, Economics/Environmental & Urban Studies

MA in English, University of Georgia

Time and space as construct in Aeneid, Divina Commedia, and Dido Queen of Carthage.  // (or maybe) TACLIS:: time and comparative literature in space.

Lillie Langtry was a goddess and you cannot convince me otherwise. Born October 13, 1853. Forgive me, for I do not think I can bring justice in words to describe her. 

Linguistics, University of New Mexico

"Incompatible Hero: Why Jack Harkness Couldn’t Stay on the TARDIS."

This is not some softened, by-modern-standards definition of slavery. These 30 million people are living as forced laborers, forced prostitutes, child soldiers, child brides in forced marriages and, in all ways that matter, as pieces of property, chattel in the servitude of absolute ownership. Walk Free investigated 162 countries and found slaves in every single one. But the practice is far worse in some countries than others.

How would you like to light a fire perfectly and have it burn for 3-7 hours without touching it or putting on more wood? It can be done, every time, but it requires forgetting everything you’ve learned about starting fires.

“I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor. She told me, “There’s no masturbation in the DC Universe.” To which my reaction was, “Well that explains a lot about the DC Universe.””

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Neil Gaiman, flawless human being (via worldwarlove)

I refuse to believe this is true because Batman is a huge jerkoff

(via ohmygil)

Museum Studies/San Francisco State University

"Museum Collections Online"

Gorgeous, a collection of photos of Chicago at Sunrise.

Justin Bieber, according to the New York Post, was recently “scouring New York for a pool” in which to conduct a “baptism-like ritual.” The fuzzy-lipped Canadian has been in trouble with the law as of late, and so required a “spiritual cleansing” of some sort. Justin is said to favor the Hillsong Church in New York, whose apostle of cool Carl Lentz caused Bieber to once tweet “Amazing sermon at church this morning. Love you man. I broke down today” at him.

Justin, I know we’re not like super good friends or anything, and you probably don’t want my advice but here goes. Just become a Catholic. No, it’s a great idea. Show this chart to your manager, OK?

A year after his shock resignation, Pope Emeritus Benedict has no regrets and believes history will vindicate his tumultuous and much-criticized papacy, the man closest to him told Reuters in a rare interview.

sushiesque posted a photo: