Russian Sledges

Dame Judi Dench does needlework embroidery during movie shoots. And the embroidery is all swear words. "She makes these like needlework embroideries on set in the tedium of filming", says MacFadyen, "but they are all: 'You Are a Cunt'. And she gives them as presents. And it's Dame Judi Dench. And she is doing this beautifully, intricate, ornate (work). You kind of see the work materializing as the shoot goes on. Like: 'You Are a Fucking Shit.'"

There seems to be no end to the uses creative people can find for NextBus feeds. This from Bostonography:

This map shows point-to-point speeds for MBTA buses across the Boston area. Like a stoplight, red lines are the slowest, green are the fastest. While the content of the map is unsurprising (freeways and tunnels make up the fastest segments, downtown streets and major intersections the slowest), this type of visualization is valuable because it takes the seemingly mundane function of a complex transit system and transforms it into a beautiful, comprehensible piece of art.

When we talk about beauty in transit, its easy to get stuck on the characteristics of the vehicles themselves: that shiny streetcar, or the sexy new buses for a branded express service. Properly displayed by someone with a sophisticated design sensibility, the mobility and access that a transit system can provide comes into focus as a dense latticework of possible trips. Local bus service might seem mundane when seen on the street, but visualized in terms of its utility as a system enabling people to get where they are going, it can be be a thing of beauty. 

Original Source

Original Source

Apparently, there’s an unlikely suitor of global luxury goods: Buddhist monks.

A YouTube video showing Buddhist monks sporting aviator specs on a private jet has offended the sensibilities of the world’s largest Buddhist nation. Posted May 22, the snippet features a trio of Buddhist monks in mirrored sunglasses aboard a small jet. The monks, who hail from a temple in Thailand’s Sisaket province, aren’t doing anything outlandish, just fiddling with their headphones and rubbing their eyes. The problem is the luxury handbag placed next to one of them, which prompted a range of complaints about the incongruence of such excesses with Buddhism’s ascetic teachings. On Monday, Thailand’s national Buddhism body responded, saying it will keep a closer eye on monks around the country. Office of National Buddhism director-general Nopparat Benjawatananun said the monks in the video acted “inappropriately, not composed and not adhering to Buddha’s teachings of simplicity and self-restraint,” according to the Associated Press.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has caused problems for Buddhist monks. In 2011, a temple filed a complaint with police of a YouTube clip of dancing monks, saying it tarnished the temple’s image. But YouTube or no YouTube, some say misconduct by monks—many of whom are young men following the tradition of becoming novices or monks for short periods—is a natural outgrowth of Thailand’s growing affluence. According to a Citigroup report on the Asian retail landscape, roughly 19% of Thailand’s households will have incomes over $20,000 by 2017; in 2002 that number was 2.2%. Brisk loan growth in Thailand, which has outpaced GDP in recent years, is helping to boost consumption.

Thailand’s government has leaned fiscally conservative following its debt crisis in the late 1990s. In recent years, the government has turned to the private sector to juice growth. But one can’t help but wonder what the Buddha would think.

mresundance:

reckonedrightly:

indypendenthistory:

On Sep 13, 1944, a princess from India lay dead at Dachau concentration camp. She had been tortured by the Nazis, then shot in the head. Her name was Noor Inayat Khan. The Germans knew her only as Nora Baker, a British spy who had gone into occupied France using the code name Madeline. She carried her transmitter from safe house to safe house with the Gestapo trailing her, providing communications for her Resistance unit.

Oh my God, yes. Let’s talk about Noor Inayat Khan.

• Wireless operators in France had a life expectancy of six weeks. Noor was actively transmitting for over three times as long.
• While she was in France, every other wireless operator in her network was slowly picked off until she was the last radio link between London and Paris. It was “the most dangerous and important post in France”.  
• She was offered a way back to Britain and refused.
• In fact, in her transmissions to London, she once said that she was having the time of her life, and thanked them for giving her the opportunity to do this.
• She was captured by the Gestapo, but never gave up: she made three attempt escapes. One involved asking to take a bath, insisting on being allowed to close the door to preserve her modesty, and then clambering onto the roof of the Gestapo HQ in Paris.
• Her last word before being shot was, “Liberté!”

The term BAMF was coined for such persons. 

As the name implies, a bunch of fonts on iOS. Search by iOS version and preview your own text. This works best when viewed from an iOS device.

By way of someone on Twitter. Sorry, lost the link.

Established in 1908, the Royal Canadian Mint is the for-profit corporation responsible for the minting and distribution of Canada's circulation and collector coins. At the beginning of June — with all of its press release attention going to a special collector coin designed by comedian Martin Short — it announced its new logo through a tweet. Design credit not given.

Logo detail.

Facebook cover photo.

Unfortunately there is no information or any further images — media requests were not answered (surprise, surprise) — but I felt there was enough here for an interesting discussion. The old logo was a little odd; clearly a combination of "M" for mint and the ubiquitous maple leaf of Canadian logos, but it was unclear whether the leaf was sitting on and squashing the "M" or if it was supposed to be the top half of the "M" in which case that's just plain weird. But it had that mid-century corporate logo look to it that has some kind of charm. The new logo is split into two, which has caused confusion for some viewers. One is a maple leaf made out of coins and the other is the English and French name of the organization set in two circles. That, my friends, is a lot of circles. The two things couldn't feel any more different from each other and don't really benefit from being next to each other. The coin leaf seems too playful while the text (although it's trying to be playful) looks stiff. On its own, the coin leaf borders on interesting and bland; it's a refreshing take on the leaf with a relevant graphic device (the coins) but it feels too bubbly. And the typography on a circle is just painful to watch. It's difficult enough setting one line of text in a circle so the ambition to typeset two lines in two languages, while admirable, should have been abandoned early on in the design process or contracted out to a professional to devote at least 40 man hours to refining it. Overall, an interesting change in the sense that it's an unexpected result from this client but the execution could have been better.

Thanks to Jason Bouwman for the first tip.

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Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng claims that New York University booted him from a fellowship because of “unrelenting pressure” from China, where he spent many years under house arrest. NYU has denied that politics played any role in the blind law student’s departure, citing a 2012 agreement to shelter Cheng for a year, and no more.

Whatever the truth, the university has deep ties to China, and they have not been without controversy: In May, three NYU researchers were charged with conspiring to take bribes from a Chinese company for passing on information about their US government-funded work with magnetic resonance imaging technology.

NYU is the third-most popular US university among international students, accepting 8,660 in 2011/12, according to the Institute of International Education. NYU does not publish a breakdown of its students’ nationalities, but about 25% of foreign students in the US are from China, and NYU’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association has more than 2,000 members.

The university’s closest link to China is its Shanghai campus, which is set to open in the autumn. It will form the third leg of what NYU calls a “global network university”—the original campus in Manhattan plus outposts in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi. The NYU Shanghai campus will be run in partnership with an existing Shanghai university. The first student intake will be just 300 students, according to Chinese media, 51% of whom will be from the Chinese mainland, although original plans show that the campus will eventually take up to 3,000 students each year.

The appeal of the project to NYU and its Chinese partners is clear: The number of Chinese university students is growing exponentially—three out of every ten college graduates will come from China by the end of this decade—and Chinese educational institutions are desperately trying to catch up with their regional neighbors.

Chen said on Sunday in a statement that “as early as last August and September, the Chinese Communists had already begun to apply great, unrelenting pressure on New York University.” And China certainly has the ability to make life very difficult for the university—by denying faculty and American student visas for the Shanghai campus, or by discouraging Chinese students from studying at NYU’s main campus in the United States.

Top-flight universities and China are becoming very reliant on each other, and the close ties are bound to multiply: China wants access to American research and expertise; American universities want access to Chinese students. NYU and China may need each other too badly for China to throw its weight around without fear of consequence, but at the same time their relationship is growing very cozy indeed.

The mysterious comings and goings of our feline friends just got a little less mysterious. Researchers at the Royal Veterinary College loaded a group of cats in Shamley Green, Surrey, with cameras and GPS trackers to figure out how roaming house cats spend their days.

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The Harvard Law School Library is pleased to announce the digitization of its collection of student notebooks from the Litchfield Law School.

The Litchfield Law School in Litchfield, Connecticut is generally considered to have been the first formal law school in the United States. Established in 1784 by Tapping Reeve (1744-1823) the school was in operation for almost 50 years, closing in 1833.  Reeve was the sole lecturer until he hired former student James Gould (1770-1838) in 1798, which was the same year that he became a judge on Connecticut’s Superior Court. The Harvard Law School Library’s Historical & Special Collections has 64 volumes of Litchfield student notebooks recorded by 17 students between 1803 and 1825. An example is this page from the notebook of Elisha Whittlesey:

Approximately 1000 men attended Litchfield Law School and many of them went on to significant careers in law, business or education.  Notable students include: Aaron Burr, Levi Woodbury, John Pierce Brace and John C. Calhoun.  (The Litchfield Historical Society has a complete database of students). In addition to the contributions made by many students of the school to the development of the United States, the notebooks provide valuable insight into the development of American common law.  The notebooks can be accessed through the Litchfield Law School Student Notebooks finding aid.

Post contributed by Edwin Moloy, Curator of Modern Manuscripts.

There’s this guy. His name is the Jackal (actually, it’s Joe). And you’ll be damned if he hasn’t been running an underground ramen delivery service right under your nose. It’s true, though. And he’ll deliver whenever. Noon: sure. 3am: of course. It goes on like this. 

This is the worst thing

astonishedcelery submitted:

i hope this goat cheers you up and i hope your day turns out fantastic in the end, elis

This kindly wizard makes me feel I can do anything

thank you ♥

This image shows the editorial board of Volume 51 of the Harvard Law Review celebrating another successful year outside of Austin Hall. In the center of the photograph, Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr., the Review’s President, is hoisted up by his colleagues and classmates. Sidney H. Willner, the note editor of Volume 51, stands with one fist raised and his other hand supporting one of Huddleson’s feet. To the left of Willner, hand jauntily perched on his hip, is Theodore R. Colborn, Volume 51’s case editor. Robert Amory, Jr., Volume 51’s treasurer, stands to the right of Huddleson.

Huddleson, like all Review presidents since the early 1930s, holds a staff in his hand. The staff was given to the Review in April 1931 by U.S. District Judge John Munro Woolsey. Woolsey, a founding member of Columbia’s Law Review, served at Harvard on the Advisory Commission on Research in International Law. He is better known, however, as the judge who delivered the decision in the case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, which allowed James Joyce’s infamous novel to be brought into the U.S. and to eventually be published here.

Historical & Special Collections (HSC) holds papers from three members of Volume 51’s editorial board. These include Robert Braucher, visiting professor at Harvard Law in the late 1940s, full professor from 1949-1971 (teaching courses on commercial law, contracts, and the legal profession)*, and Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 1971 to 1981; Philip Elman, law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter from 1941 to 1943 and professor of law at Georgetown University in the 1970s; and David Schwartz, attorney and member of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Alien Property. HSC also holds Braucher’s 1937-1938 yearbook, the first yearbook ever published by the Law School.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images from the 1937-1938 yearbook and photos of the class of 1938 and 1939 can help uncover who’s who in the Board of Editors photo. The question remains, though, what happened to Huddleson’s shoe? Perhaps he purchased a replacement from The Coop, whose advertisement for Bostonian men’s shoes graced the pages of Volume 51.

* Many thanks to Professor Andrew Kaufman, Charles Stebbins Fairchild Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, for sharing this information about some of the courses Robert Braucher taught at HLS.

Michael sez, "In response to a breaking scandal the head of the Australian Army gives a textbook example on how to respond to sexual abuse in the military, hell, misogyny in any organisation: blunt, unambiguous, drawing on both institutional policy and personal ethics, and frankly a bit terrifying in a Tywin Lassister kind of way. I quailed and I'm not even a soldier. I also think there should be more of this."

If you become aware of any individual degrading another, then show moral courage and take a stand against it. No one has ever explained to me how the exploitation or degradation of others enhances capability or honors the traditions of the Australian army. I will be ruthless in ridding the army of people who cannot live up to its values and I need every one of you to support me in achieving this.

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. That goes for all of us, but especially those who by their rank have a leadership role.

Chief of Army message regarding unacceptable behaviour

(Transcript: Skepchick)

(Thanks, Michael!)

hellolittledaisy

Who would Jesus fire?

Catholic Holy Trinity School in El Cajon, California told second-grade teacher Carie Charlesworth she is out of a job. Charlesworth’s infraction? Funny story: There isn’t one.

She is a victim of a stalker who happens to be her ex-husband. The school has decided that Charlesworth is too unsafe to be allowed back in school, not because of anything she did, but because of the behavior of her former spouse.

Back in January, the man, who has a history of inflicting domestic abuse, showed up in the school’s parking lot; in a likely overreaction, the school went into lockdown mode. Charlesworth, who is just now coming forward, was put on indefinite leave for three months, then fired.

The letter confirming her dismissal stated:

“…while you were still physically at Holy Trinity School, … the temporary restraining order in effect was not a deterrent to [the ex-husband]. Although we understand he is currently incarcerated, we have no way of knowing how long or short a time he will actually serve and we understand from court files that he may be released as early as next fall. In the interest of the safety of the students, faculty and parents at Holy Trinity School, we simply cannot allow you to return to work there, or, unfortunately, at any other school in the Diocese.”

So Charlesworth, having done exactly nothing wrong, is out of luck, and so are her four kids.

“They’ve taken away my ability to care for my kids,” said Charlesworth. “It’s not like I can go out and find a teaching job anywhere. … The kids and I are being punished for something we didn’t even do.”

The children also attended Holy Trinity School, but, like their mom, they haven’t been back since January.

While it’s not difficult to sympathize with the school district and the concerned parents of other kids, who acted out of an abundance of caution, it doesn’t seem particularly Christian to kick this teacher while she’s down.

And her firing doesn’t just affect her and her family: it sends a terrible signal to abused women everywhere, many of whom are already reluctant to speak out. To victims, the prospect of getting fired is surely as daunting, and as effective in forcing their silence, as any embarrassment or fear of spousal retaliation.

Charlesworth does not know where she’ll turn next. The Catholic community that long employed, supported, and literally nourished her is crumbling and retreating around her in the face of a bad situation. She’ll get paid through August, and then… well, no one knows.

It remains to be seen whether her faith will sustain her. “I have not been back to a Catholic church since this happened,” she told a reporter for her local NBC station. “Everything I thought I had, I don’t.”

Indian food is incredibly good. It makes sense that they have such a connection with nature to be able to make food this good. Of course it will never even compare to the the hamburger invention by the people of hamborg.

Just how 20th Century Fox will turn the Choose Your Own Adventure book series into a movie remains a mystery. What we do know is that the studio has reams of source material to work from. One-hundred and eighty five books worth from the original run, to be exact. As a service to Fox, and because it seemed like a fun thing to do, we've ranked every one of those books from the most to the least exciting, based on their titles alone. Here we go:

Hell is Other People, an experiment in anti-social media. It uses FourSquare to track your 'friends' and calculates optimal locations for avoiding them.

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

Thomas Jefferson made malt liquor. And he was kind of a snob about it.

The San Antonio Spurs invite back 11-year-old boy Sebastien De La Cruz to sing the national anthem again after racist reaction online to his first performance. Watch.

Sesame Street recently launched a multimedia initiative for children who have an imprisoned parent. Entitled “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration,” the initiative includes videos of Sesame Street characters discussing issues surrounding incarceration, as well as activities and guides for teachers. It may sound like an odd subject for Sesame Street, but according to a 2010 study by The Pew Charitable Trusts, more than 2.7 million American children have a parent in prison.

]

via Super Punch

The event Corey attended at the bookstore featured a room lit with red candles where guests held chicken tostadas, waiting to eat as Haines read aloud the opening pages of The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, by Anne Rice writing under the pseudonym A.N. Roquelaire, which features passages such as:

riotclitshave:

gloomgal:

raw-r-evolution:

maskdeuh:

Indonesian Police shave Punks mohawks.

http://asiancorrespondent.com/71977/hard-line-indonesian-police-shave-punkers-mohawks/

Assimilation 

this is the saddest thing i’ve seen

:(

This is so FUCKED.

Map Stack is a web app that lets anyone create and customize maps based on data from OpenStreetMap. The app lets users change backgrounds, labels, add satellite imagery, and fine tune map colors. Map Stack was created by San Francisco design and technology studio Stamen Design.

via The Atlantic

And then just after noon, we heard about the story of 11-year-old Sebastien De La Cruz, who sang the national anthem at Tuesday nights NBA Finals game and then got deluged by racist tweets telling him to go back to Mexico and that he’d probably just snuck into the country hours before and other good stuff. De La Cruz was born in San Antonio.

Makpal Abdrazakova, the only female eagle hunter in Kazakhstan.