June 18, 2015
Make a little bird bath in your soul
What better way to relax than to see a guy creating a bird bath in his hands for his pet finch?
Kennewick Man has Native American DNA
Kennewick Man - or the Ancient One - has a contentious history (previously and previouslier) that inspired a long legal and moral battle between scientists who said he probably wasn't Native American and wanted to study him, and local tribes who insisted that he was an ancestor and wanted to re-bury him. The scientists won in court in 2005, and a study has now determined from DNA evidence that Kennewick Man "was most closely related to DNA from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, one of the five tribes who originally claimed Kennewick Man as an ancestor."
BRO HARDER!!!
BROFORCE is a multiplayer patriotism simulator. Defeat bad guys, devil-horned dudes, giant saw blades, and other... things... while paying homage to your favorite sweaty, bandana-wearing, minigun-totin', chaw-chewin, salty-talkin' action heroes and heroines from the 80's! [more inside]
Turns out humidity is good for something after all
StarWarsStarWarsStarWars StarWarsStarWarsStarWars
All 6 Star Wars films at once. Has an amazing art-house-like quality. More watchable than the prequels.
Hipster New York Health Advice
Everyone Thinks I’m On The Mend
"At this point, I started banging my head against my desk..."
"What’s compression in the first place? At its most basic, compression is a way of representing data using less space. An emoji is a good metaphor: it represents an entire word or even several words using a single character. Our minds then 'decompress' the character back into the word it represents.I Hacked the Middle-Out Compression from 'Silicon Valley' - Alexander Gould, Major League Hacking (Silicon Valley is on FanFare)
"When hackers see a magical plot-driving compression algorithm, it’s hard to chalk it up as simply a narrative device. After all, universal lossless compression sounds pretty sweet. So, at a recent hackathon, I decided to get to the bottom of middle-out compression."
Is the US justice system up for sale?
Reasonable Doubts About the Jury System Trial consultants allow the affluent to manipulate the biases of those who judge them, putting our justice up for sale.
via The Atlantic
USA: All 50 states fall short of standards on police use of force
USA: All 50 states fall short of international standards on police use of lethal force. An Amnesty International report today highlights that all US states fail to meet both international standards and often US constitutional standards. Additionally, nine states and the District of Columbia have no laws on the use of lethal force (Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming).
Key findings (pdf, 45kb). Executive Summary (pdf, 500kb). Guardian report.
Grey day
I Read The New “Fifty Shades” Book (SLBuzzfeed) (NSFW)
Tim Gill, reacting to Rove, pushes for full LGBT equality in Red States
In 2004, George W. Bush initiated a war over gay marriage when he was running against Kerry, and Karl Rove helped to extend that battle to states in 2004 and 2006, according to Bush Campaign Chief and Former RNC Chair, Ken Mehlman (previously, twice). GWB won in 2004, and voters passed all 11 bans on gay marriage. The latter shook Tim Gill, a quiet and successful software entrepreneur, who had been a political activist since 1992.
Gill became radicalized. “I got depressed and angry,” he says. “But, in the end, my response was to say, ‘Well, how am I going to fix this? These were political defeats. The way you fix political defeats is through politics. And so I thought, ‘These people are in office. We can’t have that. How do we go about undoing it?’ ”Bloomberg Politics: America’s Gay Corporate Warrior Wants to Bring Full Equality to Red States. [more inside]
Grexit
What's happening in Greece? Explaining the Greek Debt Crisis. Latest developments: In the Eurozone, growing support for a Greek Exit. while Greeks are stashing €10,000 bundles in their homes. preparing for what the Greek Central Bank calls a financial collapse.
Raptors & walruses & chickens & penguins & dolphins & camels, oh my!
"Actual zookeepers taking photos of themselves doing Chris Pratt's Jurassic World velociraptor taming move is a thing."
The Mind Meld Theory of Wasp Cognition
Do insect societies share brain power? The society you live in can shape the complexity of your brain--and it does so differently for social insects than for humans and other vertebrate animals. [more inside]
The Earth, our home, is beginning to look like an immense pile of filth
This is an extract from Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si. Here are some of the early analyses.
Baseball and Caviar
The Los Angeles Angels baseball team found themselves embroiled in controversy recently when Robert Alvarado, the team's Vice-President of Marketing and Ticket Sales, brushed aside concerns about decreased attendance at the ballpark this season by stating, "We may not be reaching as many of the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, but those people, they may enjoy the game, but they pay less, and we’re not seeing the conversion on the per-caps,”. This statement by Alvarado prompted this OC Weekly blog headline: Anaheim Angels: We Don't Need Poor Fans, and We Don't Want Them. Alvarado resigned yesterday from the Angels organization.
Number one in the hood, G.
A day inside Adult Swim: the craziest TV network in America (slTheGruaniad)
Suggested link between anxiety and hypermobility of the joints
"Joint flexibility is an oft-coveted trait that provides a special advantage to dancers and athletes, but there can be too much of this good thing. A growing body of research suggests a surprising link between high levels of flexibility and anxiety. A study published last year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology is among the most recent to confirm the association, finding that people with hypermobile joints have heightened brain activity in anxiety regions."
There's no fake hair in T-ball
How do you get your Frozen-obsessed daughters to try softball? Give the team a Frozen theme..
Giant Lumbering Beasts
Since April three of the biggest movies in history have opened: Furious 7 (with a worldwide gross of 1.5 billion dollars), Age of Ultron (with a worldwide gross of 1.3 billion dollars) and Jurassic World (with a worldwide gross of half a billion after just one weekend, and heading towards a likely record). With Star Wars down the pike in December, we're looking at a record setting year for the box office, largely on the backs of franchise action/adventure films. Mark Harris writes about the new franchise film economy in Park Effects, and relatedly, Alex Pappademas considers the efforts to create a farm league of indie directors for these new billion dollar movies in Mr. DNA.
nothing between the body and the earth
At rest in the fields. "Celebrating childhood's end" at Eloise Woods Community Natural Burial Park, in Cedar Creek, Texas. [more inside]
Tragedy at Emanuel AME...again.
At least nine people are dead in a shooting at Charleston, South Carolina's historic Emanuel AME church. Among the victims is Clementa Pinckney, church pastor and SC state senator. The gunman sat with the church for a while before shooting, and told a survivor that he was letting her live so she could tell the story. [more inside]
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