"This is not a quietly kept secret, but Starbucks really has discovered that sodomites love the taste of semen in their lattes. And Dracula loves to drink blood. I'm mean, this has been going since child sacrifices have been happening. There are people who love to drink semen and who love to drink blood, and so many of the people that attend Starbucks, you know, are there for the purpose of a partner-less sexual oral experience! Nine dollars! That's cheaper than a 42nd Street streetwalker! For nine dollars at Starbucks you can have an oral sex semen-laced latte and have the same kind of pleasures if you like drinking that kind of stuff. I think that parents and church members and others that walk past Starbucks and see people with such delights on their faces and cups up to their lips, they need to know what's going on. People are saying that I'm off my rocker by suggesting that Starbucks has found a way to have sex in public for nine dollars a hit. And they're trying everything to smear me. No! It is true! It is absolutely true about Starbucks and semen in their lattes." - Harlem hate Pastor James David Manning, doubling down on his claim that Starbucks laces its lattes with "sodomite semen." Also: Coco-Cola has a formula for synthetic cocaine that South American drug lords are desperate to get their hands on.

UPDATE: YouTube satirist Adam Reakes has animated Manning's original claims about Starbucks. You'll like this.

We’ve met Harlem Pastor James David Manning before, back when he warned African-American women that “white homos” will take their men, and when he wished cancer, syphilis, HIV, and hellfire on gay-rights supporters.

Manning still isn’t taking his meds, I guess. If you thought his previous rants were bizarre, well, you ain’t heard nothing yet.

This week, the good pastor released a video in which he warns that Starbucks coffees are flavored with the “semen of sodomites.” Apparently, that’s a reference to a new ad for the coffee peddler in which two drag artists perform: American Idol star Adore Delano and RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Bianca Del Rio.

The commercial was too much for Manning, who appears to be fighting against man-on-man action with the same hotblooded zeal that set apart totally straight folks like Pastor Ted Haggard and the Reverend George Rekers.

This is how he came to learn — and broadcast — the truth about Semengate:

Pastor James David Manning, of the ATLAH World Missionary Church in Harlem, claimed last week that Starbucks was “ground zero” for Ebola, which is being spread by “upscale sodomites.” His remarks sparked a protest in which gay rights advocates handed out free coffee outside his church — which has provoked Manning into another attack on Starbucks.

He said in [a subsequent] video rant: “They had a big bucket of Starbucks coffee. They said that this church is a hate church, and that I’m a hate preacher.”

Citing a satirical news report — which he appeared to take seriously — Manning said: “Starbucks is a place where these types frequent and a lot of body fluids are exchanged there.”

Then it gets, I dunno, almost weird. Watch and listen:

“The thing that I was not aware of is that… what Starbucks was doing, is they were taking specimens of male semen…”

… which, to be fair, tastes much better than female semen,

“… and they were putting it in the blends of their lattes. It’s the absolute truth. They’re using male semen, and putting it into the blends of coffees that they sell. My suspicion is that they’re getting their semen from sodomites. Semen flavors up the coffee, and makes you think you’re having a good time.”

Huh. Not what the ladies at Healthy Homemakers had in mind when they encouraged you to make your own flavored coffee creamer, I bet.

But now that Starbucks’ big gay secret is, um, blown, Manning adds that better times are cumming coming.

“I want to tell you that there will not be a public sodomite in Harlem in not too many days. And Starbucks will close. Starbucks will be found perverting is customers and perverting human sexuality as if drinking Starbucks is some sort of a sacrificial ritual bath where they kill the innocent babies and drink their blood in some of these meetings that are had by these fraternal or sorority groups. Starbucks has for years been using sexual fluids to prosper their businesses, and the truth is now coming out.”

Hallelujah, in Onan‘s name!

Today, we’re introducing something new. It’s called Inbox. Years in the making, Inbox is by the same people who brought you Gmail, but it’s not Gmail: it’s a completely different type of inbox, designed to focus on what really matters.

Email started simply as a way to send digital notes around the office. But fast-forward 30 years and with just the phone in your pocket, you can use email to contact virtually anyone in the world…from your best friend to the owner of that bagel shop you discovered last week.

With this evolution comes new challenges: we get more email now than ever, important information is buried inside messages, and our most important tasks can slip through the cracks—especially when we’re working on our phones. For many of us, dealing with email has become a daily chore that distracts from what we really need to do—rather than helping us get those things done.

If this all sounds familiar, then Inbox is for you. Or more accurately, Inbox works for you. Here are some of the ways Inbox is at your service:



Bundles: stay organized automatically
Inbox expands upon the categories we introduced in Gmail last year, making it easy to deal with similar types of mail all at once. For example, all your purchase receipts or bank statements are neatly grouped together so that you can quickly review and then swipe them out of the way. You can even teach Inbox to adapt to the way you work by choosing which emails you’d like to see grouped together.

Highlights: the important info at a glance
Inbox highlights the key information from important messages, such as flight itineraries, event information, and photos and documents emailed to you by friends and family. Inbox will even display useful information from the web that wasn’t in the original email, such as the real-time status of your flights and package deliveries. Highlights and Bundles work together to give you just the information you need at a glance.
Reminders, Assists, and Snooze: your to-do’s on your own terms
Inbox makes it easy to focus on your priorities by letting you add your own Reminders, from picking up the dry cleaning to giving your parents a call. No matter what you need to remember, your inbox becomes a centralized place to keep track of the things you need to get back to.

A sampling of Assists

And speaking of to-do’s, Inbox helps you cross those off your list by providing Assists—handy pieces of information you may need to get the job done. For example, if you write a Reminder to call the hardware store, Inbox will supply the store’s phone number and tell you if it's open. Assists work for your email, too. If you make a restaurant reservation online, Inbox adds a map to your confirmation email. Book a flight online, and Inbox gives a link to check-in.

Of course, not everything needs to be done right now. Whether you’re in an inconvenient place or simply need to focus on something else first, Inbox lets you Snooze away emails and Reminders. You can set them to come back at another time or when you get to a specific location, like your home or your office.

Get started with Inbox
Starting today, we’re sending out the first round of invitations to give Inbox a try, and each new user will be able to invite their friends. If Inbox can’t arrive soon enough for you, you can email us at inbox@google.com to get an invitation as soon as more become available.

When you start using Inbox, you’ll quickly see that it doesn’t feel the same as Gmail—and that’s the point. Gmail’s still there for you, but Inbox is something new. It’s a better way to get back to what matters, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Android, Chrome & Apps

Cross-posted from the Official Gmail Blog

Good things happen when everybody’s invited. A few years ago, we had the thought that phones (and stuff that hadn’t even been invented yet like tablets and smart watches) would be way more interesting if everyone could build new things together. So we created Android as an open platform, and put it out there for everyone to imagine, invent, make, or buy whatever they wanted.

Since then, all kinds of people—from companies big and small to folks on Kickstarter, kids in schools, and crazy smart developers—have been innovating faster, together, more than we ever could alone. And the best part is that every time someone new joins in, things get more interesting, unexpected, and wonderful for all of us.
Getting everyone in on the party is the same spirit behind Android One—an effort recently launched in India (coming to other countries soon) to make great smartphones available to the billions of people around the world who aren’t yet online. It’s also why we’re excited about Lollipop, our newest software release, which is designed to meet the diverse needs of the billion-plus people who already use Android today.

Joining the party: Android 5.0 Lollipop
As previewed at Google I/O, Lollipop is our largest, most ambitious release on Android with over 5,000 new APIs for developers. Lollipop is designed to be flexible, to work on all your devices and to be customized for you the way you see fit. And just like Android has always been, it’s designed to be shared.

Lollipop is made for a world where moving throughout the day means interacting with a bunch of different screens—from phones and tablets to TVs. With more devices connecting together, your expectation is that things just work. With Lollipop, it’s easier than ever to pick up where you left off, so the songs, photos, apps, and even recent searches from one of your Android devices can be immediately enjoyed across all the other ones.

As you switch from one screen to another, the experience should feel the same. So Lollipop has a consistent design across devices—an approach we call Material Design. Now content responds to your touch, or even your voice, in more intuitive ways, and transitions between tasks are more fluid.

Lollipop also gives you more control over your device. You can now adjust your settings so that only certain people and notifications can get through, for example, when you’re out to dinner or in the middle of an important meeting. And when an important notification does come through, you can see it directly from the lockscreen.

And because we’re using our devices a lot more, there’s a new battery saver feature that extends the life of your device by up to 90 minutes—helpful if you’re far from a power outlet. We’ve enabled multiple user accounts and guest user mode for keeping your personal stuff private. And you can now secure your device with a PIN, password, pattern, or even by pairing your phone to a trusted device like your watch or car with Smart Lock. But this is just a small taste of Lollipop. Learn more on android.com.

Meet the Nexus family, now running Lollipop
Advances in computing are driven at the intersection of hardware and software. That's why we’ve always introduced Nexus devices alongside our platform releases. Rather than creating software in the abstract, we work with hardware partners to build Nexus devices to help push the boundaries of what's possible. Nexus devices also serve as a reference for the ecosystem as they develop on our newest release. And for Lollipop, we have a few new Nexus treats to share with you.
First, with Motorola, we developed the Nexus 6. This new phone has a contoured aluminum frame, a 6-inch Quad HD display and a 13 megapixel camera. The large screen is complemented by dual front-facing stereo speakers that deliver high-fidelity sound, making it as great for movies and gaming as it is for doing work. It also comes with a Turbo Charger, so you can get up to six hours of use with only 15 minutes of charge.

Next, a new tablet built in partnership with HTC. Nexus 9, with brushed metal sides and 8.9-inch screen, is small enough to easily carry around in one hand, yet big enough to work on. And since more and more people want to have the same simple experience they have on their tablets when they have to do real work, we designed a keyboard folio that magnetically attaches to the Nexus 9, folds into two different angles and rests securely on your lap like a laptop.

Finally, we’re releasing the first device running Android TV: Nexus Player, a collaboration with Asus, is a streaming media player for movies, music and videos. It's also a first-of-its-kind Android gaming device. With Nexus Player you can play Android games on your HDTV with a gamepad, then keep playing on your phone while you're on the road. Nexus Player is Google Cast Ready so you can cast your favorite entertainment from almost any Chromebook or Android or iOS phone or tablet to your TV.

Nexus 9 and Nexus Player will be available for pre-order on October 17. Nexus 9 will be in stores starting November 3. Nexus 6 will be available for pre-order in late October and in stores in November—with options for an unlocked version through Play store, or a monthly contract or installment plan through carriers, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon. Specific carrier rollout timing will vary. Check out google.com/nexus for more details on availability.

Android 5.0 Lollipop, which comes on Nexus 6, Nexus 9 and Nexus Player, will also be available on Nexus 4, 5, 7, 10 and Google Play edition devices in the coming weeks.

The party’s just getting started
With this latest release of Android Lollipop, we're excited to continue working with our developer community, hardware partners, and all of you. More ideas and more creators is what gets us all to better ideas faster. And since everyone's invited to the party, we hope you'll join in the fun by creating and sharing an Android character that captures a little bit of who you are—one of a kind. Enjoy!
Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Android, Chrome & Apps

Stronzo Bestiale is a researcher at the Institute for Experimental Physics in Vienna who is a co-author on a small number of major scientific papers. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications that include the Journal of Statistical Physics and The Journal of Chemical Physics.

He’s also a figment of someone’s imagination, which becomes evident when you learn that Stronzo Bestiale, in Italian, means Total Turd, Asshole Beast, or Complete Asshole, depending on whom you ask.

The man who breathed life into this Asshole (sorry for that image) is a retired scientist, William G. Hoover, who was formerly employed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A writer named Vito Tartamella (whose name, I sincerely hope, doesn’t mean “Blithering Buttwipe”) finally noticed how unlikely the Stronzo name is and got in touch with Hoover to ask about it.

Hoover gamely explained that back in the eighties, he occasionally had a hard time getting his research papers published. That was regrettable but not unusual, he said:

New discoveries in science are hard to publish because scientists are rather conservative, as discussed by the epistemologist Thomas Kuhn.

After a couple of rejections, this happened:

While I was traveling on a flight to Paris, next to me were two Italian women who spoke among themselves, saying continually: “Che stronzo (what an asshole)!”, “Stronzo bestiale (total asshole).” Those phrases had stuck in my mind. So … I asked my colleague [Giovanni] Ciccotti [a condensed-matter physicist in Rome] what they meant. When he explained it to me, I thought that Stronzo Bestiale would have been the perfect co-author for a refused publication. So I decided to submit my papers again, simply by changing the title and adding the name of that author.

Somehow, Hoover concluded contentedly, that made a difference, and the papers were accepted for publication.

Tartamella clearly enjoyed learning of – and writing down — that story, but he issues a sincere word of caution, too. The Bestiale episode, he says

… laid bare how vulnerable control systems in the review of scientific research were (and still are!). If you’re able to insert the name of a nonexistent author in a publication, who will guarantee that even the scientific contents have been examined with care?

Very true.

I confess I got a chuckle out of the whole thing, but in the cold light of day I don’t believe that Hoover did anyone any favors with his little joke. Making stuff up is not compatible with the ethos of science; and next to a murder trial or a presidential eulogy, a scientific paper is probably the one platform where scatological levity and juvenile guffawing ought to be avoided.

Earlier this month, about 1,800 evangelical Christian pastors across the country participated in “Pulpit Freedom Sunday,” where they defied the law by endorsing political candidates from the pulpits of their tax-exempt churches. The law basically says that non-profit groups, including churches, don’t have to pay taxes, but in exchange, non-profit leaders (including pastors) can’t tell members how to vote. They can, however, discuss policy issues without the threat of punishment.

The IRS ignored these candidate-endorsing pastors for years due to (what they say were) bureaucratic reasons, but they recently settled a lawsuit brought about by the Freedom From Religion Foundation and promised they would prosecute pastors who violated the law.

Which brings us to what’s happening in Houston, Texas right now.

The city has what’s called the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO). Recently, an amendment was added onto it that offers protection so that transgender individuals could use a bathroom at a public facility that matches their gender identity.

Conservatives were unhappy with that for the usual reasons; some believe that the law would let men walk into a women’s bathroom (or vice versa) on a whim, some are opposed to LGBT rights in general, Houston’s mayor is a lesbian and some people are still angry about that, etc. They wanted a voter referendum on the ordinance change, so they began to collect the signatures necessary to get the issue on the ballot. According to city officials, many of those signatures were invalid, putting a stop to the challenge.

That’s when conservative groups filed a lawsuit against the city.

In the process of the legal battle this week, we learned that attorneys for the city subpoenaed five local conservative pastors to find out if they had said anything to their congregations that might have crossed the line:

City attorneys issued subpoenas last month during the case’s discovery phase, seeking, among other communications, “all speeches, presentations, or sermons related to HERO, the Petition, Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality, or gender identity prepared by, delivered by, revised by, or approved by you or in your possession.”

That’s… very weird.

While it might be relevant to know if the pastors told churchgoers to vote against Mayor Parker, it certainly wouldn’t be illegal to talk about HERO. And why would it matter what they say about homosexuality and gender identity? Pastors have every right to call homosexuality a sin. They can say all sorts of ignorant, bigoted things. But that would have nothing to do with the issue at hand.

In other words, what’s supposed to be an attempt to discover actual illegal activity has been spun by conservative groups into a story about how government officials are trying to silence pastors from speaking out against homosexuality. Which is complete bullshit, but it’s not like the facts have ever stopped the Right from pretending to be martyrs.

The conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom is seeking to halt the subpoenas and right-wingers are claiming this is all part of some big conspiracy:

… ADF attorney [Erik] Stanley suspects the mayor wants to publicly shame the ministers. He said he anticipates they will hold up their sermons for public scrutiny. In other words — the city is rummaging for evidence to “out” the pastors as anti-gay bigots.

(Right… as if we needed more evidence for that.)

They’re also saying this is part of a plan to silence their voices, which is completely over the top. As if requesting copies of sermons would put a stop to Christian television shows, online ministries, multiple sermons a week, and all the money that follows:

Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission told me the city needs to mind its own business.

“The government has absolutely no reason to bully congregations who are speaking out about what they believe,” he said. “It’s none of the government’s business.”

City officials say none of that is the case. There are perfectly good reasons why these subpoenas are valid:

City Attorney David Feldman argues the subpoenas are justified because the churches are where opponents of the ordinance met.

“We’re certainly entitled to enquire about the communications that took place in the churches regarding the ordinance and the petitions because that’s where they chose to do it,” Feldman tells KTRH News.

“Its relevant to know what representations and instructions were given regarding these petitions,” he says.

That may be true, though you have to wonder how strategic it was to go after the churches like this with subpoenas that asked for so much irrelevant information. Especially since many mega-church pastors put their sermons online, anyway…

Even some church/state separation advocates see this as unnecessary overreach:

Rob Boston, Director of Communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a statement, “Government authorities have the right to subpoena pastors and even ask for sermons if there is a reasonable suspicion of wrong-doing. For example, if a pastor delivered a sermon and urged his flock to engage in illegal activities, law enforcement officials could investigate it.” But, Boston went on, “That doesn’t appear to be the case here. The targeted pastors are not even parties to the lawsuit, and the scope of the subpoenas is strikingly broad. This has the look of a fishing expedition. I’m not surprised that the pastors are resisting the subpoenas, and, assuming there is not more to this story than has been reported, I think they might be successful.”

The Interfaith Alliance’s Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy also added in a letter to the mayor and the city attorney:

… I will work as hard to defend the freedom of speech from the pulpit for those with whom I disagree, as I will to defend the rights of the LGBT community. As long as a sermon is not inciting violence, the government has no business getting involved in the content of ministers’ sermons.

Religious communities, of course, do not have unfettered rights to participate in the political process. The IRS rightly restricts the ability of houses of worship to endorse candidates and political parties, to direct money to campaigns, and to spend above a certain percentage of their time on political activities. However, it should be clearly understood that the IRS does allow houses of worship to take positions on ballot initiatives and to advocate for those positions. These are common sense measures that strengthen the boundaries between religion and government and protect the independence of each.

That really highlights the problems here: Why go after these churches? Why go after what they might have said about these policies? Why ask them what they said about homosexuality and gender identity?

The city’s case would be much more compelling if they had reason to believe these pastors were trying to do some political organizing from the pulpit, but there’s just no evidence of that.

Even Mayor Annise Parker now says she had no idea the subpoenas were so broad. A city spokesperson, Janice Evans, told the Wall Street Journal:

Mayor Parker agrees with those who are concerned about the city legal department’s subpoenas for pastor’s sermons. The subpoenas were issued by pro bono attorneys helping the city prepare for the trial regarding the petition to repeal the new Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) in January. Neither the mayor nor City Attorney David Feldman were aware the subpoenas had been issued until yesterday. Both agree the original documents were overly broad. The city will move to narrow the scope during an upcoming court hearing. Feldman says the focus should be only on communications related to the HERO petition process.

That’s more like it. But it may be too late. As Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches writes,

Even if the city does go to court tomorrow and narrow [the] subpoenas’ scope, the damage has already been done, as Scott’s tweet suggests: for conservatives, the cause celebre is already in motion, and is unlikely to be dialed back.

It’s very easy to jump on the ADF bandwagon at this point and claim this is all an infringement of religious liberties, but it’s entirely possible some churches really did violate the law. If that’s the case, and there’s reason to believe they did, then attorneys should be able to subpoena their sermons to discover that activity. I worry that the negative publicity may prevent an actual investigation from taking place.

This really happened to me. No, I am not Ok. I doubt I will ever be OK. I got my wife a Roomba for her birthday. I had no idea those things were so expensive, but I found an amazing deal on a used one, and was able to bring our home one step closer to the Robotopia that I have always dreamed of. She spent the first few days playing with the Roomba, affectionately referred to as “Robit” [row-bit, long O], letting it zoom around and get acquainted with its new home.

She put its charging dock in the pantry and set an auto-schedule for it to clean up the cat litter off the floor (what the cats kick out of the box every time they enter or exit it) every day at 5am. This was really the whole impetus for the robot in the first place. She’s god damn sick of cleaning up cat litter every day, and I’m god damn sick of walking on cat litter when I go into the pantry to get food, thus making me think of food and cat litter simultaneously, WHICH inevitably makes me stop thinking about food all together (diet idea: surround all your food with cat shit). I am rarely asleep at 5am because I have crazy-artist crazy-work-from-home hours, so for the first couple of days I would hear Robit wake up, do it’s little litter dance for about 10 minutes, beep to tell me it was done and shimmy back into his docking station. If he could eat treat biscuits, you’d better believe I’d have given him one. It was a technological marvel. The next day, the pantry would be free of cat litter’s foul crunch under foot and no humans were harmed in the process.

On the third or fourth night, I heard Robit do his business and dock himself, then the house was just ENGULFED in stink. One of the cats, Replay, doesn’t like to cover up his poops. I assumed he’d just dropped a particularly gnarly one without covering it, and went to investigate. I opened the pantry door and It was like that scene in Se7en when they find the “living corpse.” 100,000 pine-scented air fresheners wouldn’t have abated the horrors I was facing. As the panels above illustrate, one of the cats, finding his box too full, had decided to use the floor as a bathroom. Robit, being a cold, unfeeling, emotionless machine who only follows his predetermined directives with no regard for human well being or the consequences of his actions, plowed right through it. Those of you who don’t live with cats probably don’t know that where as an unbroken cat turd smells bad, a BROKEN/SMUSHED cat turd is an ENTIRELY different animal. There’s some sort of natural protective sausage casing that the cat produces which somehow shields the secret stench within the poop. I can only assume this is an evolutionary necessity in order to facilitate the symbiosis of the domestic feline and the humans that house and feed it.

My Fancy Patrons got to read this comic before anyone else! 

 

It was a horror show. Not only was the stench truly overpowering and blinding, but Robit had managed to run over the poop FIRST and THEN do his 10 minute “cleaning routine,” spreading… no, PAINTING the entire floor in concentric doodles of despair. Not only was the floor forever unclean, but Robit had managed to “gum up the works,” so to speak, with as much or more than he Jackon Pollack’d the pantry with. It was in his wheels, in his gears, in the brushes and the filter. Like I said. A horror show. The odd thing is, this happens with human babies all the time. They poop seemingly more than the interior volume of their small bodies and it manages to get from toes to forehead before you realize what has happened.

The deal with babies is, you LOVE them. You would do ANYTHING for them. You HAVE to keep them alive and you HAVE to stop whatever important, grown up business you are working on and de-poop the baby. The trade off is the human baby’s CPU is deep, deep inside a rather remarkable water proof casing, and its exterior shell is incredibly supple, yet resilient and stain resistant.  You can actually put an entire human baby in the bath tub (NOT dishwasher safe) and hose them down. Robit, on the other hand, had to be almost entirely disassembled, expunged of poops and reassembled. It was not a task for the faint of heart, which is why I let my wife do it. “Here, Honey. I bought you a robot to make your life easier. Just one thing… you need to take out a million tiny screws, swab out about a gallon of cat shits, disinfect it AND yourself, them piece the Satanic, mechanized jigsaw back together before it can start with the life making easier stuff. HAPPY BIRTHDAY I’M GREAT!”

Calling all Whovians with holes in their ears! Just look at these Dalek earrings my wife made! They’re in her Etsy store and ready to EXTERMINATE your… lack of perfect ear jewelry?

Via the Guardian:

Penises grown in laboratories could soon be tested on men by scientists developing technology to help people with congenital abnormalities, or who have undergone surgery for aggressive cancer or suffered traumatic injury. Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are assessing engineered penises for safety, function and durability. They hope to receive approval from the US Food and Drug Administration and to move to human testing within five years. Professor Anthony Atala, director of the institute, oversaw the team's successful engineering of penises for rabbits in 2008. "The rabbit studies were very encouraging," he said, "but to get approval for humans we need all the safety and quality assurance data, we need to show that the materials aren't toxic, and we have to spell out the manufacturing process, step by step." The penises would be grown using a patient's own cells to avoid the high risk of immunological rejection after organ transplantation from another individual. Cells taken from the remainder of the patient's penis would be grown in culture for four to six weeks.

Top Close Calls Compilation 2014...(Read...)

"Our relatives are all full of modern, research-based ideas on how to care for an infant. Without them we would be lost."

Submitted by Laura Recchi

The world is still trying to standardize World Standards Day.

This year, 2014, World Standards Day is October 14. That’s according to ISO, the International Organization for Standards. The USA, though, will celebrate World Standards Day over a four-day-long span that begins on October 20 and ends on October 24. That’s according to the American Standards Institute (ANSI)….

So begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.

Turd Wrestling 2014 Calendar

The Chronicle’s Erin Mulvaney has thrown data from Apartment Data Services into this interactive Google map — to give you a zoomable picture of where all the new apartments are heading in Houston. The green pins show the 19,923 units (in 72 projects) that have opened recently; the red dots show the 23,781 (in 85 complexes) that are currently under construction; and the yellow dots indicate the additional 18,065 apartments (in 61 new developments) that are proposed — or at least the ones the data company is aware of. Multifamily construction projects spread over Houston region [Prime Property] Map: Erin Mulvaney/Houston Chronicle … Read More

Bartosz Huzarski posted this picture of his veiny-ass legs to Facebook after completing the 145 km 18th stage of the Tour de France. It is disgusting and these are the grossest legs we've seen since George Hincapie showed up with a mess of veins on his leg that looked like Santa Claus .

Read more...

 

Peter Bach, a cancer doctor, writes about losing his wife to cancer.

The streetlights in Buenos Aires are considerably dimmer than they are in New York, one of the many things I learned during my family's six-month stay in Argentina. The front windshield of the rental car, aged and covered in the city's grime, further obscured what little light came through. When we stopped at the first red light after leaving the hospital, I broke two of my most important marital promises. I started acting like my wife's doctor, and I lied to her.

I had just taken the PET scan, the diagnostic X-ray test, out of its manila envelope. Raising the films up even to the low light overhead was enough for me to see what was happening inside her body. But when we drove on, I said, "I can't tell; I can't get my orientation. We have to wait to hear from your oncologist back home." I'm a lung doctor, not an expert in these films, I feigned. But I had seen in an instant that the cancer had spread.

The last sentence here really got to me:

Our life together was gone, and carrying on without her was exactly that, without her. I was reminded of our friend Liz's insight after she lost her husband to melanoma. She told me she had plenty of people to do things with, but nobody to do nothing with.

Bach's discussion of treatment options reminded me of Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies, which is one of my favorite books of recent years. I was also reminded of how doctors die.

Tags: books   cancer   crying at work   medicine   Peter Bach   Siddhartha Mukherjee   The Emperor of All Maladies

NYC's Metropolitan Museum of Art has made a whopping 400,000 high-resolution digital images of its collection available for free download. You can browse the collection here.

In making the announcement, Mr. Campbell said: "Through this new, open-access policy, we join a growing number of museums that provide free access to images of art in the public domain. I am delighted that digital technology can open the doors to this trove of images from our encyclopedic collection."

The Metropolitan Museum's initiative-called Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC)-provides access to images of art in its collection that the Museum believes to be in the public domain and free of other known restrictions; these images are now available for scholarly use in any media.

For instance, here's a 12-megapixel image of Rembrandt's 1660 self-portrait...you can see quite a bit of detail:

(thx, fiona)

Update: Wendy Macnaughton on why the high-resolution images released by the Met are such a big deal for art students and art history fans.

For someone who went to art school being able to do this is a revelation. I used to go to the museum with my sketchpad and copy the old masters. I'd get as close as I could to understand the brush strokes, colors, lines. The guards knew who to watch out for and would bark suddenly when we stuck our faces over the imaginary line.

As class assignments we were required to copy hundreds -- literally hundreds -- of the masters drawings and paintings. for those we mostly worked from images in books -- a picture the size of a wallet photo.

Which is one of the many reasons this new met resource is fucking phenomenal.

You can get so, so close -- far closer than one could in real life.

Tags: art   Met Museum   museums   NYC   Rembrandt

In the latest installment of his ten-part series on WWI, Alan Taylor covers the technology used in the war.

When Europe's armies first marched to war in 1914, some were still carrying lances on horseback. By the end of the war, rapid-fire guns, aerial bombardment, armored vehicle attacks, and chemical weapon deployments were commonplace. Any romantic notion of warfare was bluntly shoved aside by the advent of chlorine gas, massive explosive shells that could have been fired from more than 20 miles away, and machine guns that spat out bullets like firehoses. Each side did its best to build on existing technology, or invent new methods, hoping to gain any advantage over the enemy.

It's fascinating to observe both sides using trial and error with things like tanks, testing out what works and what doesn't. Look at this kooky German cannon for instance:

Nothing about that looks efficient.

Tags: Alan Taylor   photography   war   World War I

"This ruling by a federal judge, invalidating Texas’ ban on same-sex marriage, is a troubling display of judicial activism. Our Constitution leaves it to the States to define marriage, and unelected judges should not be substituting their own policy views for the reasoned judgments of the citizens of Texas, who adopted our marriage law directly by referendum. The court's decision undermines the institution of marriage, and I applaud Attorney General Abbott’s decision to appeal this ruling to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals." - Canadian Ted Cruz, via press release.

Location: School

New Republic reports that a Russian critic of Vladimir Putin found a giant wooden cock chained to her car.

Last Monday, when Katya Romanovskaya left her Moscow apartment for work, she discovered that her car had a giant phallus strapped to it with a metal chain. Upon further examination, she discovered that the shaft was made out of one tree trunk, the veins elaborately, carefully carved. Two other, smaller pieces of wood were attached to either side. It was hard to remove: the thing weighed well over 200 lbs. But Romanovskaya understood exactly why it had been put there. "Finally," she wrote under a picture of the phallus on her Facebook page, "the day has come when my work has been noticed and appreciated."

A local man has offered to buy the piece for his "collection of cocks." Nobody has claimed credit for the stunt.

I am on record, both in this magazine and in my local newspaper, as an enthusiastic defacer of books. Recently I had a new kind of marginal experience that I would like to share: the pleasure of joint, or (as they say in grad seminars) “dialogic” marginalia.

The book was Dan Brown’s Inferno. Like most writerers [sic], I am crazy about Dan Brown. Why does he write the way he does? Is he a sneaky genius? How is it possible that he was once in a writing seminar with David Foster Wallace? (One of my dreams is to write a hit Broadway musical about that seminar, in which Dan Brown strides around the stage wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches singing bombastic anthems about the great masterpieces of Europe while DFW sings introverted atonal fugues with mumbling sotto voce footnotes.)

I purchased and read Inferno, which was inscrutable and interminable, and as I read I scribbled in its margins. When I finished, my friend David Rees, the artisanal pencil sharpener, asked if he could borrow it. He added his thoughts.

It was fun to see someone else’s words next to mine. I wrote in black pen, in cursive. David wrote in red pencil, in block letters. I was semi-serious. David swore and told a lot of jokes. Usually we agreed, but occasionally we disagreed. Here are some of the highlights.

WARNING: There are probably Dan Brown spoilers here, but come on, seriously.

Very early in Inferno, I realized that Dan Brown’s career-long fetish for ellipses had reached a whole new level. Basically, ellipses are the hero of the book. They make their first appearance on the dedication page.

After a while I started trying to circle all of them, which became a meditative exercise.

Sometimes I would miss one and David would catch it for me.

We spent most of our time in the margins making fun of Dan Brown.

We mocked his pacing,

his dialogue,

his dialect,

his artless exposition,

his anti-powers of description,

his careless repetitions,

his weak grasp of human behavior,

his lust for fame,

his characters’ gender stereotypes,

his implausible plot points,

and probably the worst “academic” lecture in the history of fiction.

Along the way, we managed to isolate the keywords of the Dan Brown lexicon.

Sometimes David added illustrations.

Usually, David and I agreed.

But sometimes we didn’t.

Recently I passed the book to another friend, who will add her marginal notes, and then I will pass it to someone else, and then someone else, and on and on until eventually we have written more words in Dan Brown’s book than Dan Brown himself. This seems like the only way to tame the monster at the heart of the Inferno.

This oral history about Sir Mix-A-Lot's hit Baby Got Back is way more interesting than it had any right to be.

Sir Mix-a-Lot: There was one event that really made me think that I should do a song about this, which was irritating the shit out of me. Amy and I were at a hotel on tour, when we saw one of the Spuds MacKenzie ads for Budweiser during the Super Bowl. You'd see these girls in the ad: Each one was shaped like a stop sign, with big hair [and] straight up-and-down bird legs. There's nothing wrong with that, but I was so sick of that shit. Now, Amy never said anything about all this until she realized I was so in favor of her physique. She was an actress, and she started admitting that she felt like she lost a lot of parts because of her hourglass figure. I knew for a fact that many artists felt that if they didn't use a skinny-model-type woman in their video, then mainstream America would reject the song. But I do not agree with that: If you look at Dolly Parton at her peak, a lot of white guys were like "daammn!" At the same time, when I did casting calls for videos, curvy women wouldn't show up. They thought they didn't have a chance. Unless you were in the hood, women who had curves -- and I'm not talking about women who are shaped like me, with a gut, but women who ran five miles a day, with a washboard, six-pack stomach and a nice round, beautiful, supple ass -- wore sweaters around their waist! Bottom line: Black men like curves. When they're crooning to women about how beautiful they are in an R&B song, the ladies you see in the video don't reflect what those guys like. Every time an R&B video was on, I heard women say, "I just saw him down in Oakland, and his girls wasn't like that." That made me think that this was more than a funny song, and it wrote itself.

Baby Got Back contributed to the cultural shift that changed that:

Sir Mix-a-Lot: Now, ass isn't a big deal. I go to the gym, and I'll hear a white girl saying to her trainer, "I want this to be round." They realize that it doesn't mean that you're out of shape if you have a nice ass. Anybody who's ever seen a stripper pick up a dollar bill with her ass knows you can't do that with fat.

Tags: music   Sir Mix-A-Lot

Without a lot of fanfare, Reliant Park officials have just announced another round of sales of extracted Astrodome furniture. And it’s scheduled to begin tomorrow morning at 8 am. Astrodome seats once graced by the posteriors of thousands of cheering sports fans will be available for purchase online at the Reliant Park website at that time. [Reliant Park; previously on Swamplot] Photo: mokambo.0219 … Read More