Last weekend I went to Shag the Store in Palm Springs, California. A variety of art pieces by Shag were for sale, along with paintings up for a charity auction by artists who painted live at Coachella. Handbags, art books, home décor, and other items were also being sold. It was fun to walk around and view the art. You should definitely check it out if you’re in Palm Springs! (See below for Shag swag giveaway details).
Matthew Epley's Grand Old Party project takes the approval-rating curves of GOP presidential hopefuls and turns them into 3D solids, then turns those into buttplugs.
Grand Old Party demonstrates that as a people united, our opinion
has real volume. When we approve of a candidate, they swell with
power. When we deem them unworthy, they are diminished and left
hanging in the wind. We guard the gate! It opens and closes at our
will. How wide is up to us.
In an age of information, we rely on hard facts. Each of the shapes
you see here come directly from poll data collected by Gallup. This
data reflects approval ratings for each GOP candidate among registered
Republican voters from December 10, 2011 to April 1, 2012.
Each shape’s girth is a reflection of popularity while their height is a
reflection of time.
The contours of these delightful shapes conjure up the waves of
amber grain and those lapping at the rim of our great nation spanning
from sea to shining sea. As the battle for the Presidency rails
on, we must remember that Americans may may have achieved
freedom through war, but they are also a people of love. After all, in
the end all we have is each other.
Redditor Surprisemailbox posted this image of a note left by a seven year old for her parents, regarding security policies at home: "If you put a pasword on that I will make your life a nitmare."
The day Poesy leaves me a comparable note, I will have validation that all my parenting was not in vain. (Of course, that's assuming she doesn't just shoulder-surf the password and leave me in a fool's paradise.)
Starbucks generates 4 billion paper cups a year, or 12 cups for every man, woman and child in America. The coffee giant knocks ten cents off beverage price for customers who bring in their own mugs, but Mark Gunther writes: "If Starbucks really wanted to save trees, it wouldn’t offer discounts to people who bring mugs. It would charge a dime to everyone who does not." — Xeni
The joint JAXA/NASA Hinode mission captured this image of the January 6, 2011 solar eclipse.
On May 20-21 (this coming Sunday night through this coming Monday morning), sky-watchers in Asia and much of the U.S. will be able to view a “ring of fire” eclipse or a partial eclipse of the Sun, depending on their location. The rest of the world, including our readers along the East Coast of the US, will have to settle for viewing this special celestial event online.
The shadowandsubstance.com astronomy website has a totally awesome animated map showing how the eclipse will look to viewers in each U.S. state. But more importantly, he gives the best eclipse advice you'll get anywhere:
The safest way to view this event is to attend a planetarium, observatory or local astronomy club on May 20th.
The NYT's Nick Bilton compares Facebook and Twitter to the tortoise and the hare. "Facebook exploded because it slurped up endless amounts of data about its users," writes Bilton. "This race is not judged by speed, but a stopwatch with a much longer lifespan, one that is tied to trust." — Xeni
An excellent long read in the new Wired magazine: Jamming Tripoli: Inside Moammar Gadhafi's Secret Surveillance Network. Matthieu Aikins examines how activists suffered "greatly at the hands of Gadhafi’s spy service, whose own capabilities had been heightened by 21st-century technology."
By now, it’s well known that the Arab Spring showed the promise of the Internet as a crucible for democratic activism. But, in the shadows, a second narrative unfolded, one that demonstrated the Internet’s equal potential for government surveillance and repression on a scale unimaginable with the old analog techniques of phone taps and informants. Today, with Gadhafi dead and a provisional government of former rebels in charge, we can begin to uncover the secret, high tech spying machine that helped the dictator and his regime cling to power.
Wired's David Kravets reports from the Copyright Office's triennial hearings on exceptions to the DMCA's rules against breaking DRM. Every three years, public interest groups supplicate themselves before the Copyright Office and beg for our right to jailbreak our devices and look inside our own property. Every three years, entertainment lawyers show up and demand that nothing of the sort come to pass, because their clients can only survive if it's illegal for you to decide what programs you get to run on the devices you buy. It's all rather revolting, legal sausage-making at its wurst.
Christian Genetski, general counsel of the Entertainment Software Association, told the Copyright Office, whose panelists included its top attorneys and Maria Pallante, the register of copyrights, that freeing Americans to bypass access controls on videogame consoles would decimate the gaming business.
“It will gut videogame consoles’ piracy protections,” he said. “We’re here today because our copyright interests are at stake.”
Allowing such jailbreaking, Hofmann countered, would allow the so-called homebrew community of game developers to play their games on the machines, while also allowing researchers to use the consoles like computers in the furtherance of science.
But the regulators were not clear whether the videogame hack was necessary. They suggested scientists could use computers for their research, and homebrew gamers can play those, too, on their computers.
Robert Kasunic, deputy general counsel of the Copyright Office, suggested that the benefits don’t outweigh the tradeoffs to piracy.
“How do you balance, for instance, the use of being able to put Pong on a homebrew system with the numbers we are aware of in terms of videogame piracy?” he asked, noting that millions of videogames are already being shared without authorization on The Pirate Bay.
So yeah, the Copyright Office generally believes that your rights to your actual, physical property are trumped by multinationals' metaphorical property rights in the things they sell you.
Earlier today, a mysterious report from Thailand simply noted that a man was arrested for "possession of a foetus." The Telegraph has more:
Six human foetuses which had been roasted and covered in gold leaf as part of a black magic ritual have been seized from a British citizen in Bangkok, Thai police said today.
Chow Hok Kuen, 28, who is of Taiwanese origin, was arrested with the grisly haul in the city's Chinatown yesterday, police said. The corpses had been packed into luggage and were set to be smuggled to Taiwan.
Police say he planned to sell the foetuses, which bring good fortune to the owner.
Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seen on a screen televised from their headquarters in Menlo Park moments after their IPO launch in New York. (REUTERS)
Shares of Facebook (FB) opened at $42.05 on today, up about 11 percent from the IPO price of $38. At this valuation, the company is worth around $115 billion. But shortly after the open, despite all the bubblicious hype leading up to FB's debut: share price dropped. At the time of this blog post, the price is hovering around $38.
The WSJ reports that trading volume was more than 375 million in first three hours of listing, more than 6.5% of total market volume. Trade volume is expected to set a new record in trading volume on IPO day.
STOCKENFREUDE (n): That feeling you get, as someone who loathes Facebook, seeing FB shares crap out on IPO day.
Indie band Here We Go Magic is driving across America on tour. Earlier this week, they spotted legendary director John Waters hitchhiking by the side of the road with a hat that said "Scum of the Earth." DCist has the story, and a followup interview with the band.
So what happened once the car pulls up alongside him and he gets in the van? We pulled up and we saw him and everyone went, "That's definitely John Waters." We opened the door and I said, "Hello how you doing? Where ya coming from?" And he said Baltimore. We were like, "Uh huh," totally knowing that he was from Baltimore. So we said, "Come on in!" He got in the van and he got all tangled up in the seat belt, it was really adorable. That was the first thing that happened. We're traveling in a van and there are all these seat belts that block your way. You know, the ones that go from the side to the seats in the middle.
So he was totally tangled and he didn't even remove himself. He just sort of sat down, entrenched in seat belts. He was a perfect gentlemen. We addressed the fact that we knew it was John Waters and he very calmly accepted that information. It sort of rolls on from there. The shock of the event wore off pretty quickly in exchange for the warmth and the kindness and cleverness of this human being that's now sitting next to you. He became a human being very quickly. He answered every single question and he was even a little shy about photos. Finally it was like, "My mom wants a picture" and "Do you mind if I Tweet this" and he was fine with it. We were like, "What on earth are you doing this for?" He was like, "I have a lot of control in my life and I just wanted to let go of the reins a little bit, have an adventure." He's such a true artist and it's so cool!
Grand Old Party demonstrates that as a people united, our opinion
has real volume. When we approve of a candidate, they swell with
power. When we deem them unworthy, they are diminished and left
hanging in the wind. We guard the gate! It opens and closes at our
will. How wide is up to us.
