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» blog4nature: McLaren Bioblitz success!
On May 11, about 60 nerds gathered in SF’s McLaren Park to use their smartphones for science — logging almost 1300 observations of plants and animals from almost 250 species. Wow! It went so well that both the California Academy of Sciences and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area are…
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Five times the media took sides in the Steubenville rape case and painted the assailants in a positive light.
UPDATE: A petition with 34,000+ signatures calls on CNN to apologize
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So I wrote to every single Arkansas Senator and this was Senator Alan Clark’s thinly-veiled contemptuous response. He is clearly unwilling to be civil in a discussion about his legislation and very ready to jump to conclusions and force words into other people’s mouths. It’s interesting that he should be “representing” anyone.
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“You worry it s your fault you re not making candles and you re the only person”
“Don’t you make candles?” This question haunts my dreams at night.
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"This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72 (via uselesschildren)
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![new-aesthetic:
A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.
A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an “extreme-scale analytics” system created by Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.
But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.
The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.
The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a “Google for spies” and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.
Software that tracks people on social media created by defence firm | World news | The Guardian [Video]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/193d1ee0066221f4123bfde5a506ed80/tumblr_mi3ysiRsOx1qjjis9o1_500.jpg "new-aesthetic:
A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.
A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an “extreme-scale analytics” system created by Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.
But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.
The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.
The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a “Google for spies” and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.
Software that tracks people on social media created by defence firm | World news | The Guardian [Video]")
A multinational security firm has secretly developed software capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites.
A video obtained by the Guardian reveals how an “extreme-scale analytics” system created by Raytheon, the world’s fifth largest defence contractor, can gather vast amounts of information about people from websites including Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.
But the Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.
The power of Riot to harness popular websites for surveillance offers a rare insight into controversial techniques that have attracted interest from intelligence and national security agencies, at the same time prompting civil liberties and online privacy concerns.
The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a “Google for spies” and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.
Software that tracks people on social media created by defence firm | World news | The Guardian [Video]
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» Mister Tumbles: The Dungeon Master and the Story Circle: The story of Harmontown
I’ve spent the last few weeks all over the country, and often in a few places simultaneously. When I was in Park City, I was in Somerville. When I was in Fort Lauderdale, I was in Denver. To be fair, when I was in Brooklyn, I was in Brooklyn - but I was always in Harmontown.
Harmontown…
This is a really spot-on write up.
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» 10 reasons why we won't stop climate change
List by Tom Giesen, an adjunct professor at University of Oregon. I edited it down some, for the entire post, visit here. I’ll add that, generally, I personally cannot see how we’re going stop the climate from changing. Too many people in the world are starting to want - and get - TVs, laptops, cars, and a single family home. Who are we to deny them?
1. Delayed consequences. Warming is a current phenomenon, but most of the damage is in the future, like a time-delayed bomb – we emit now and suffer the consequences later. Because it is a future event, neither citizens nor politicians feel sufficient urgency.
2. Belief in the necessity of growth! The sanctity of growth in the economy and in population is the real American religion. What all cities/communities want is more economic and population growth. But growth is now impossible without cheap and abundant fossil fuels, and they are finite and becoming prohibitively expensive – causing recessions.
3. Energy cornucopia! The “booms” in oil and gas are mostly just Wall Street bubbles like the real estate and internet bubbles of recent years. Conventional (cheap) fossil fuels are declining resources, and fracked, deep water, oil sands and arctic sources are prohibitively expensive. But no matter – the press is still full of empty chatter about the US out-producing Saudi Arabia and being energy independent.
4. Individualism. Devotees of individualism dislike cooperative processes, preferring go-it-alone methods. Cutting emissions requires a globally cooperative effort, and such cooperative projects might feel to individualists like unacceptable collectivism, and hence resisted.
5. Anti-intellectualism. Many in America have not moved beyond medieval science. Rationality does not often apply in scientific issues with political overtones, or with personal preferences, and hence global warming, the end of cheap oil, and other issues are falsely labeled as scientific frauds by opponents of science.
6. American exceptionalism. We imagine we are different from other nations, and many Americans accept that we are not subject to the same rules as other nations.
7. Failure of international cooperation. It is nearly universally believed that the solution to the problem of warming lies in global treaties involving all nations and dealing with emissions reductions and related equity/financial issues. It’s now 25 years since James Hansen warned Congress, and we have done nothing. Nothing.
8. Difficulties of monitoring and assuring compliance. How do you closely monitor emissions of a gas which quickly diffuses globally in the atmosphere? How do you closely monitor all production and use of fossil fuels? How do you monitor and control land use change (deforestation) before the deed is done? Etc.
9. Greed. Greed permeates political life: worldwide, governments’ subsidies to fossil fuel producers now total $100,000,000,000 a year, and subsidies to consumers are $675,000,000,000. The subsidies are like crack cocaine – the addiction is extremely difficult to treat.
10. Disinformation. The fossil fuel industry lavishly funds global warming deniers and skeptics – the “lavish” funding is chump change in view of current profits.
If we follow the path we are on, the path of no cutting back on emissions, and in fact the path of continued increases in the rate of increase of emissions, our civilization will very possibly collapse.
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blua:
Left: Store mannequins in H&M, Sweden
Right: Store mannequins in Macys, USA
SWEDEN, YOU KEEP DOING EVERYTHING RIGHT. YOU SHOW THE WORLD HOW TO DO THINGS. YOU GO SWEDEN.
To Sweden!
FOUR FOR YOU, SWEDEN! YOU GO, SWEDEN!
I literally just got a half boner at the Swedish mannequin
About me
just messing around for now
Likes
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~ A Manual of Etiquette with Hints on Politeness and Good Breeding, by...
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Battle Royale by pongelektro
