Brown Girl Magazine recently featured the work of my friend Tasneem Nanji, whose photographs of Muslim women in London and New York illuminate the lives of individuals consistently portrayed as one-dimensional "others" in media.
On August 8, the Prince Estate and Pantone revealed a new color to honor the Purple One.
Naturally, it's a shade of purple.
This official shade -- named "Love Symbol #2" -- was inspired by the specific color of Prince's custom-made Yamaha purple piano which was, according to the press release, "originally scheduled to go on tour with the performer before his untimely passing at the age of 57."
Princes association with the color purple was galvanized in 1984 with the release of the film Purple Rain, along with its Academy Award-winning soundtrack featuring the eponymous song. While the spectrum of the color purple will still be used in respect to the Purple One, Love Symbol #2, will be the official color across the brand he left behind.
Here's a look at that piano which, according to Yamaha Entertainment Group, was supposed to be the opening video for that tour he never got to take:
https://youtu.be/iJMvIlaMvK0
Helen Keller became deaf, blind and mute at the age of 19 months old due to an illness. Later in life, she remarkably learned to speak, though not as clearly as she would have liked, according to her own words in this video from 1954:
"It is not blindness or deafness that bring me my darkest hours. It is the acute disappointment in not being able to speak normally. Longingly I feel how much more good I may have done, if I had only acquired normal speech. But out of this sorrowful experience I understand more clearly all human striving, thwarted ambitions, and infinite capacity of hope."
Truly inspiring!
Here is a video on how she learned how to talk, narrated by her teacher Anne Sullivan (previously posted on Boing Boing):
https://youtu.be/KLqyKeMQfmY
If this is your kind of thing, go ahead and fall down this rabbit hole.
Think you're shopping boutique, albeit decently-priced, groceries by shopping at Trader Joe's? Well, think again.
According to this Eater article, much of the packaged foods you're buying at the grocery chain is (disappointingly, imo) mass-produced at third-party manufacturing behemoths like ConAgra, Snyders-Lance, and Pepsi (and its subsidiary, Frito-Lay Inc):
As a private brand, the California-based Trader Joes orders most of its products from third-party manufacturers (including giants like PepsiCo. and Snyders-Lance), which agree to sell some of their items under the Trader Joes label. Many of these brands sell the same or similar products under their own names for a higher price. The catch is that Trader Joes and its suppliers all but swear to keep the agreement secret. "Suppliers arent allowed to say they supply Trader Joes products, (former TJ crew member/author Mark) Gardiner says, and Trader Joes never willingly talks about who their suppliers are.
How then did Eater learn of their secret suppliers?
They simply made Freedom of Information Act requests to "obtain FDA and USDA recalls and alerts that mentioned Trader Joes in the last 10 years." These requests "revealed dozens of companies that have, at least at one point, supplied Trader Joes with food."
They also compared ingredients and held multiple taste tests with similar packaged items.
People dont think of this as generic, Gardiner says. [They think] its Trader Joes thats the brand, and its a special brand that you can only get here. The truth is that almost all of this is stuff that you can probably get at another store within a few miles of that Trader Joes in a different package with a different name.
Hand powered drilling tools and machines is a fascinating jaunt through the history of drills, from the dawn of man until the age of electricity. Oddly, it omits Push Drills, which are by far the best type of hand drill for small (less than 1/4") projects in wood and other soft material. Check it out:
https://youtu.be/up32TJt-w4w?t=1m28s
If you're just here looking to build houses off the grid or in the zombie apocalypse or after a Trump tweet triggers global nuclear catastrophe, get a decent metal geared drill; the cheap ones are glorified egg whisks.
JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive, early access to comics, extra comics, and other top-secret stuff.
GET Ruben Bollings new bestselling book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (Filled with wild twists and funny dialogue -Publishers Weekly) Book One here.Book Two here.
Somali pirates attempt to take over a ship under protection of the Russian Navy. It doesn't go well for the pirates. This video is from one of my favorite YouTube channels, Humans at Sea.
Why would anyone in Somalia turn to piracy? In this 2014 article from The Telegraph a former kidnap victim named Colin Freeman explains:
Young people get attracted into this business because there is very high unemployment here, almost 100 per cent, with no factories or industry, Mohamed Kalombi, Puntlands then interior minister, told me. But now they see the chance to make millions of dollars through crime. With their money, the pirates are buying weapons and even bribing the justice institutions so that they will not be caught.
Sure enough, down at Bossasos docks, local fishermen confirmed that piracy was a temptation. One told me that he earned just $5 a day if he was lucky enough to land a decent catch. By contrast, those who went out looking to catch ships, rather than tuna or swordfish, could earn tens of thousands of dollars from their share of any ransom deal.
This snazzy looking bipedal robot is off to a good start, but things go haywire in short order. It has trouble setting a package on a cart. Then it knocks things off the shelf, drops the package on the floor, knocks over the cart, and falls down. As one Reddit user said, "I would watch Gordon Ramsay yelling at a group of these things for hours."
I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio," Trump told Fox News on Sunday. "He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. Hes a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him.
Yesterday, Merck CEO Ken Frazier quit Trump's advisory council and today the CEOs of Intel and Under Armor joined him, which raises the question: why were these guys on the advisory council for an avowed white supremacist who campaigned on a platform of racial discrimination against Mexicans and Muslims?
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Parents of students enrolled in Lawton Chiles Middle Academy in Polk County, Florida got an orientation package offering their kids the right to skip to the front of the lunch line in exchange for a $100 donation to the Parent-Teacher-Student Alliance.
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Kottke says: "This is perhaps the best on-the-ground view of what went down in Charlottesville over the weekend. Its graphic in spots. Prepare to get angry and sad and frustrated and scared."
On Saturday hundreds of white nationalists, alt-righters, and neo-Nazis traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia to participate in the Unite the Right rally. By Saturday evening three people were dead one protester, and two police officers and many more injured.
VICE News Tonight correspondent Elle Reeve went behind the scenes with white nationalist leaders, including Christopher Cantwell, Robert Ray, David Duke, and Matthew Heimbach as well as counter-protesters. VICE News Tonight also spoke with residents of Charlottesville, members of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Charlottesville Police.
From the neo-Nazi protests at Emancipation Park to Cantwells hideaway outside of Virginia, VICE News Tonight provides viewers with exclusive, up close and personal access inside the unrest.
UPDATE 8/15/2017:Independent documentary photographer Daniel Hosterman wrote: "I think the Vice piece did a reasonable job showing on very small slice of what happened in Charlottesville and in the typical Vice, sensationalist style. It definitely showed a lot of the extremist language and ideology of the white supremacist contingent and showed how they can be terrifying. Those of us on the ground -- who have been to events like these before -- already knew that.
What the Vice video did not show was the nature of the folks resisting these white supremacists, the utter disregard of law enforcement for the safety of the citizens of Charlottesville, and the really powerful displays of bravery I witnessed over those couple of days.
I've got a lot of thoughts on a series of photographs at my Instagram account (@dhosterman), and many more I'm still trying to process now that I'm home. I really appreciate your reporting and just want to be sure this Vice piece doesn't become your canonical view of the events in Charlottesville.
The World Wealth and Inequality project's latest white-paper, co-authored by Thomas "Capital in the 21st Century" Piketty, painstaking pieces together fragmentary data-sources to build up a detailed picture of wealth inequality in Russia in the pre-revolutionary period; during phases of the Soviet era; on the eve of the collapse of the USSR; and ever since.
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Sharpie pens are a treat to use. I love the design of the pen itself, not to mention the boldness of the ink. I use them for card magic because nothing else works as well for "signed card" tricks. Right now, Amazon is selling a dozen for $5.39, so I ordered a box.
US court records are not copyrighted, but the US court system operates a paywall called "PACER" that is supposed to recoup the costs of serving text files on the internet; charging $0.10/page for access to the public domain, and illegally profiting to the tune of $80,000,000/year.
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Silly Putty has an interesting property. It's soft when you squeeze it slowly, but rock hard if you hit it with a hammer. Someone came up with the good idea of making speed bumps (or "sleeping policemen," as they cleverly call them in the UK) out of a Silly Putty like substance. That way, slow drivers get a smooth ride, but the faster you go, the more the bump punishes you. It would be fun to design the speed bump in such a way that it rips the undercarriage out of any car going twice the speed limit.
Psych scholars from San Diego State and U Georgia used Google Books to systematically explore the growth of swear-words in published American literature: they conclude that books are getting swearier and that this is a bellwether for a growth in the value of individualism: "Due to the greater valuation of the rights of the individual self, individualistic cultures favor more self-expression in general (Kim & Sherman, 2007) and allow more expression of personal anger in particular (Safdar et al., 2009). Thus, a more individualistic culture should be one with a higher frequency of swear word use."
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A car pulls into a driveway. A woman steps out of the front passenger side car to greet her dog. Seconds later, another car drives up behind her and a masked man with a gun jumps out and runs towards her. In the nick of time, she gets back in the car and the car backs up very quickly, away from the car jackers. The dog was uninjured.
Sen. John Cornyn [R-TX, @JohnCornyn, +1 202-224-2934] introduced the Building America's Trust Act as a "long-term border security and interior enforcement strategy" but refused to release the bill's text, which has now leaked.
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I just pre-ordered my copy of Wired founder Louis Rossetto's forthcoming novel, Change Is Good, on Kickstarter. I was at Wired in the early years (1993-1998) and every day was a thrilling adventure.
In the 1990s, they came from all over the world. Young people with fire in their eyes and big dreams in their hearts flooded into South of Market, San Francisco, the epicenter of the Digital Revolution that was changing everything.
We now live like settlers in the world these young pioneers created. But for those young revolutionaries, the future was uncharted, full of wonder and risk. In the face of insurmountable opportunity, they had only their optimism, their grit, and each other.
Change Is Good is the novel that tells their story at the precise moment when their utopianism was turning into the orgy of the Dotcom Bubble.
Written by Louis Rossetto, the co-founder and editor of Wired, the self-proclaimed Mouthpiece of the Digital Revolution, Change is Good is a labor of love, written over the past 12 years to reconnect to and celebrate the optimism and courage of the young pioneers who changed the world forever.
In many ways, the Digital Revolution perfectly parallels the ferocious disruption and explosion of knowledge birthed by the start of the Information Age an age made possible by a then revolutionary new technology: the Gutenberg printing press.
What better way to release an iconic story of the Digital Revolution than to print it on a classic letterpress using a revolutionary new printing method: Post Digital Printing.
Change Is Good is a book. In many ways, the best quality book ever printed. Its also the start of a new printing revolution the first book Erik has published using Post Digital Printing that marries the advances of modern typography & design with the quality & artisanship of letterpress.
By supporting this project, youre honoring the heroes of the past, helping support the future of printing, and claiming a piece of history with this Limited Collector's First Edition.
A white moose is rare, with only about 100 of them in Sweden. But Hans Nilsson, who has been tracking them for three years, according to Inhabitat, caught this moose on video on August 11 in Varmland, Sweden. The moose is not an albino, but its white fur is a genetic mutation. Or magical, to be more exact.
Josh writes, "This morning Fight for the Future launched crowdfunded billboards targeting members of Congress who have publicly supported FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to gut net neutrality."
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This is neat: "A free, one-hour online class anyone can take to learn everything they need to know about the eclipse. Its part of a real college course at University of Colorado, Boulder taught by Prof. Douglas Duncan, a professional astronomer and director of the Fiske Planetarium."
A total eclipse is one of the most spectacular sights you can ever see! It looks like the end of the world may be at hand. There is a black hole in the sky where the sun should be. Pink flames of solar prominences and long silver streamers of the sun's corona stretch across the sky. It gets cold, and animals do strange things. People scream and shout and cheer, and remember the experience their whole life. But total eclipses are important scientifically as well. They let us see parts of the suns atmosphere that are otherwise invisible. A total eclipse presented the first chance to test Einsteins prediction that matter can bend space like near a black hole. The best total eclipse in the United States in 40 years happens August 21st, 2017.
This course has two primary goals:
1) to get you excited for the total solar eclipse coming in August 2017 and prepare you and your community to safely view it
2) to provide an inviting overview of the science of the sun and the physics of light
If you are most interested in preparing for the eclipse, you can hop right into Week 5! If you want the full course experience, and to get some fun scientific context for what you'll be seeing on August 21st, start with Week 1 and move through the course week by week!
[Note: if you start with Week 1, you can skip through some of the repeated material once you get to Week 5.]
Overall this course will prepare you to...
* Safely view the total or partial solar eclipse
* Help others watch safely and even make money by leading a neighborhood watch of the eclipse
* Review fundamental sun science, including the physics of light, how astronomers study the sun, how it formed, how we know whats inside it, and where the energy that supports life on earth is generated
On one side is Americans. On the other side is Nazis. Trump told reporters there were "very fine people on both sides" at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally.
After last week's threats from North Korea that it was planning to create an "enveloping fire" around the US territory of Guam, Guam's Office of Civil Defense issued a set of just-in-case guidelines which you can also find here - on how to stay safe after a nuclear attack. There's a lot of interesting tips and warnings in these guidelines, but one that sticks out is:
"Wash your hair with shampoo or soap and water. Do not use conditioner in your hair because it will bind radioactive material to your hair, keeping it from rinsing out easily." This is especially important if you haven't been able to immediately find inside shelter.
If you shower carefully with soap and shampoo, Karam says [Andrew Karam, radiation expert], the radioactive dust should wash right out. But hair conditioner has particular compounds called cationic surfactants and polymers. If radioactive particles have drifted underneath damaged scales of hair protein, these compounds can pull those scales down to create a smooth strand of hair. "That can trap particles of contamination inside of the scale," Karam says.
These conditioner compounds are also oily and have a positive charge on one end that will make them stick to negatively charged sections of a strand of hair, says Perry Romanowski, a cosmetics chemist who has developed personal hygiene formulas and now hosts "The Beauty Brains" podcast on cosmetics chemistry.
"Unlike shampoo, conditioners are meant to stay behind on your hair," Romanowski says. If the conditioner comes into contact with radioactive material, these sticky, oily compounds can gum radioactive dust into your hair, he says.
For that matter, Romanowski says in the event of a nuclear blast, you might want to consider forgoing most personal care products that are sticky or oily. "Skin lotions or moisturizing lotions or color cosmetics that have oils these go on your skin and can attract dust or radiation particles from the air. So that would be a concern," he says.