Tadeu

Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger had a complicated relationship with mornings. At times, his sorrow over WWI kept him from getting out of bed; other times he was too hungover. He even reorganized the Planck lectures so that he could deliver them later in the day. But by the 1920s, he was also fond of going to the beach in Zurich in the mornings with a blackboard, and he'd sit in the grass in his bathing trunks and work out equations. Read the rest

Someone didn’t think this through. [x]

[lizathornberry]

An anonymous reader writes "An article by David Cole at the NY Review of Books lays out why we should care as much about the collection of metadata as we do about the collection of the data itself. At a recent debate, General Michael Hayden, who formerly led both the NSA and the CIA, told Cole, 'we kill people based on metadata.' The statement is stark and descriptive: metadata isn't just part of the investigation. Sometimes it's the entire investigation. Cole talks about the USA Freedom Act, legislation that would limit the NSA's data collection powers if it passes. The bill contains several good steps in securing the privacy of citizens and restoring due process. But Cole says it 'only skims the surface.' He writes, 'It does not address, for example, the NSA's guerilla-like tactics of inserting vulnerabilities into computer software and drivers, to be exploited later to surreptitiously intercept private communications. It also focuses exclusively on reining in the NSA's direct spying on Americans. ... In the Internet era, it is increasingly common that everyone's communications cross national boundaries. That makes all of us vulnerable, for when the government collects data in bulk from people it believes are foreign nationals, it is almost certain to sweep up lots of communications in which Americans are involved.' He concludes, '[T]he biggest mistake any of us could make would be to conclude that this bill solves the problem.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows."

количество людей, утонувших в бассейне
и количество фильмов, в которых снимался Николас Кейдж



потребление моцареллы
и количество докторских степеней



средний возраст «Мисс Америка»
и количество людей, погибших от горячего пара



потребление сметаны
и количество мотоциклистов, погибших в дтп


потребление курятины
и импорт сырой нефти



американский импорт сырой нефти из Норвегии
и количество водителей, погибших от столкновения с поездом



количество разводов в штате Мэн
и потребление маргарина



расходы США на науку, космос и технологии
и самоубийства через повешение и удушение



Потребление сыра
и количество людей, которые умерли, запутавшись в своих простынях

via

Come as you are

kevin tong


vahalla


daniel danger


shed labs


tara mcpherson

National Poster Retrospecticus

What will happen to Community now that NBC has finally canceled the show following its fifth season? There was talk not long ago that made a sixth season sound, if not inevitable, then at least like something that could happen on Hulu or a similar digital service. But over the weekend, a new report painted that possibility as something much less likely than we’d previously thought. Capping everything off, Community creator Dan Harmon weighed in with words about his thoughts on the chances of a continuation. So will there be a Community sixth season after all? Well.. maybe?

Let’s go in order. First, Dan Harmon talked about the show’s cancelation on his Harmontown podcast. During the edition taped at the Bridgetown Comedy Festival the day after the show was axed, he said, “We all know what happened yesterday, we all got drunk. I was in a place of grief. It’ll take weeks to sink in.”

Then Deadline weighed in today, saying, that while at least one company is interested in reviving the show for a sixth season away from NBC, it is Harmon who doesn’t really want to carry on. Specifically, the site said it had heard Harmon “is ready to move on to other things, prepping Season 2 of his Adult Swim animated comedy Rick & Morty and figuring out his next project.”

And that’s easy to understand. After everything Harmon has gone through with Community, this might be a nice place to stop.

But Harmon has a lot more to say in a piece published after Deadline’s, and in which he specifically avoids name-checking the site and its report. You should read all of his piece, because frankly it hits a few topics, and not in entirely linear fashion. But he does offer this, right in the middle:

I will confess, however, that when Sony called me on Friday with the news, there was brief discussion at the end of the call about the concept of the show living elsewhere, and I was definitely in the “eh” column. For a million reasons, some selfish, some creative, one logistic, five sexual, three racist (in a good way) and, oddly, nine isometric. I won’t bore you with them. I mean, of course I will bore you with them. Boring you is my job, my hobby and my passion. But it doesn’t matter right now WHY I’d be lukewarm or if my reasons would be valid, what matters is, I won’t be lukewarm. I’ll heat up. I said “eh” on a Friday afternoon, I will change it to a “sure, let’s talk” on Monday morning and Sony can do their thing. I’m not going to be the guy that recancels cancelled Community.

One of his major points is that fans should relax and not let themselves be put in a position where they do the marketing for a sixth season. He also says “Anyway, I will not be standing in the way.”

So where does that leave a sixth season? Difficult to say. It would be tough to pull off, as Harmon acknowledges in his post. But it isn’t over yet — hopefully that will come as a relief, rather than providing more anxiety for the show’s creators and cast.

• It’s the Darkest Timeline: ‘Community’ Canceled
• ‘Community’ Movie Talk Raises Hopes of “Six Seasons and a Movie” Fulfillment
• ‘Harmontown’ Trailer: Dan Harmon After ‘Community’
• ‘Community’ Season Five Trailer: Beyond the Darkest Timeline
• ‘Community’ Season Five Teaser: The Return of Mr. Winger
• ‘Community’ Will Return in January

The post Dan Harmon Discusses the Future of ‘Community’ appeared first on /Film.

How’s that for a headline? It ran in the New York Times Sunday magazine on Aug. 27, 1911:

Canals a thousand miles long and twenty miles wide are simply beyond our comprehension. Even though we are aware of the fact that … a rock which here weighs one hundred pounds would there only weigh thirty-eight pounds, engineering operations being in consequence less arduous than here, yet we can scarcely imagine the inhabitants of Mars capable of accomplishing this Herculean task within the short interval of two years.

The Times was relying on Percival Lowell, who was convinced that a dying Martian civilization was struggling to reach the planet’s ice caps. “The whole thing is wonderfully clear-cut,” he’d told the newspaper — but he was already largely ostracized by skeptical colleagues who couldn’t duplicate his findings. The “spokes” he later saw on Venus may have been blood vessels in his own eye.

Whatever his shortcomings, Lowell’s passions led to some significant accomplishments, including Lowell Observatory and the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death. “Science,” wrote Emerson, “does not know its debt to imagination.”

Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents and skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story about book design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both.

“In short,” the post said, “the covers of most novels ‘about Africa’ seem to have been designed by someone whose principal idea of the continent comes from The Lion King.”

Image by Simon Stevens

What makes the persistence of these tired and inaccurate images even worse is that we’re living in an era of brilliant book design (including this lovely, type-only cover for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah; her novel Half of a Yellow Sun begins the collage above). So why is it so hard for publishers of African authors to rise beyond cliché?

I asked Peter Mendelsund—who is an associate art director of Knopf, a gifted cover designer, and the author of a forthcoming book on the complex alliances between image and text—to help me understand how the publishing industry got to a place where these crude visual stereotypes are recycled ad nauseam. (Again and again, that acacia tree!)

He points first to “laziness, both individual or institutionalized.” Like most Americans, book designers tend not to know all that much about the rest of the world, and since they don’t always have the time to respond to a book on its own terms, they resort to visual clichés. Meanwhile, editors sometimes forget what made a manuscript unique to begin with. In the case of non-Western novels, they often fall back on framing it with “a vague, Orientalist sense of place,” Mendelsund says, and they’re enabled by risk-averse marketing departments.

“By the time the manuscript is ready to be produced, there’s a really strong temptation to follow a path that’s already been trod,” he says. “If someone goes out on a limb and tries something different, and the book doesn’t sell, you know who to blame: the guy who didn’t put the acacia tree on the cover.”

He adds that the underlying issue can be more pernicious: “Of course, there are the deeply ingrained problems of post-colonialist and Orientalist attitudes. We’re comfortable with this visual image of Africa because it’s safe. It presents ‘otherness’ in a way that’s easy to understand. That’s ironic, because what is fiction if not a way for you to stretch your empathetic muscles?”

That’s a reasonable diagnosis. But how to solve the underlying problem? Certain books are allowed to stand on their own; others—too often those by African, Muslim, or female authors—are assigned genre stereotypes. Mendelsund suggests that designers should start by initiating conversations with editors about what makes a book unique, so that they have something to respond to visually. And if that fails, and designers are pressured to use an offensive stereotype, Mendelsund says, “We can tell them that it’s racist, xenophobic, whatever.”

But change comes slowly. One day, Mendelsund predicts, there will be a best-selling novel by an African writer that happens to use a different visual aesthetic, and its success will introduce a new set of arbitrary images to represent Africa in Western eyes. “But right now, we’re in the age of the tree,” he says. “For that vast continent, in all its diversity, you get that one fucking tree.”

lunalovegouda:

Those people who constantly reblog your stuff but you never really talk:

Walk to work (larger)

Some of the new releases out this week.

• Tim Barry - Raising Hell & Living Cheap - Live In Richmond
• Cheap Girls - Famous Graves
• Weatherbox - Flies In All Directions
• Me First and the Gimme Gimmes - Are We Not Men? We Are Diva!
• Mad Caddies - Dirty Rice
• Only Crime - Pursuance
• Bane - Don't Wait Up
• Koo Koo Kanga Roo - Whoopty Whoop
• Brian Marquis - Blood & Spirits
• BoySetsFire/Funeral For A Friend - Split 7"

You can find the full list of releases this week (and album covers) right here

Archive

Archive

My Godzilla theme continues! I guess I must be excited about the new movie!

This one’s dedicated to Michael and Carina, who are both celebrating birthdays this weekend. Happy birthday, you two!

There’s always tomorrow

walterbyrd (182728) writes in with news about a new study from Harvard School of Public Health that links two widely used neonicotinoids to Colony Collapse Disorder. "Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or the widespread population loss of honeybees, may have been caused by the use of neonicotinoids, according to a new study out of Harvard University. Neonicotinoids are a class of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine. They were first developed for agricultural use in the 1980's by petroleum giant Shell. The pesticides were refined by Bayer the following decade. Two of these chemicals are now believed to be the cause of CCD, according to the new study from the School of Public Health at the university. This study replicated their own research performed in 2012."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here is a comic strip featuring signs and inspirational quotes.

Here is a comic with everyone’s favorite giant monster.

Also, there’s a new “making of”-video for pledgers over at my Patreon page. Consider becoming a patron to support the comic!