Gummi Bear Anatomy Toys are coming...

Gummi Bear Anatomy Toys are coming...:



New York City based artist and designer Jason Freeny has released his colorful Gummi Bear Anatomy To..(Read...)

Sunset on Mars

Sunset on Mars:

Wrote Jon Mitchell, "Sunset on Mars, one of the most amazing photos I've ever seen — in 2..(Read...)

Americans Will Pay More for a Flour Wrap Than for a Tortilla [Food]

Pine Club - Dayton, OH

Pine Club - Dayton, OH: We owe John Catt big-time. Mr. Catt is a Roadfood enthusiast who wrote us several months ago to describe an eating trip he had taken up the coast of Maine. He said that he had found both The Clam Shack of Kennebunkport and Flo’s Hot Dogs of Cape Neddick to be spectacular, an assessment that proved his credentials as a man of excellent taste. So when he went on to recommend a restaurant to us, we took his tip seriously.

The place he recommended was in Dayton, Ohio, named The Pine Club. In his words, it served “phenomenal steaks in a no-nonsense old world naugahyde-laden pine room. No credit cards, no reservations, just great meat and potatoes. Kind of a Gene and Georgetti's run by, well, people from Ohio! For my money, there is no better steak in the USA and, believe me, I've done the research!”

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Catt. We visited the Pine Club and sure enough, it turned out to be paradise for steak-lovers. A true Midwest supper club (open only in the evening, until midnight on weekdays, 1am on Friday and Saturday), this is a place to which people come for highballs at the bar and splendid cuts of beef at the table. You have your choice of filet mignon, porterhouse, or sirloin, each cut and aged on premises and cooked on a grill so the outside gets crusty dark but the inside is still bursting with flavorful beef juices.

Start with a plate of scallops: sweet, firm nuggets with a pale light crust and smouldery sea taste. Brilliant tartar sauce comes on the side. All meals are served with a basket of dinner rolls, and steaks come with a handful of onion rings and choice of potatoes that includes Lyonnaise: an eight-inch pancake of shredded spuds woven with veins of sautéed onion. As for salad, although a mesclun mix was added to the menu a while ago, the traditional Pine Club salad is iceberg lettuce – cold, crisp chunks served “red and bleu,” which is French dressing loaded with enormous clods of dry blue cheese.

Dessert? There is none. If you’re in dire need of something sweet and don’t necessarily want a high-proof libation such as a grasshopper or a Golden Cadillac, you can step outside and go next door to the Ben & Jerry’s store.

Michael Phelps

Michael Phelps:

McDonald’s Tries To Open Up The Elusive 2 To 5 A.M. Breakfast Market

Please turn on two-factor authentication

Please turn on two-factor authentication:
You should read Mat Honan’s heartbreaking tale of a hack attack and the ensuing discussion on Techmeme. Much of the story is about Amazon or Apple’s security practices, but I would still advise everyone to turn on Google’s two-factor authentication to make your Gmail account safer and less likely to get hacked.
Two-factor authentication means “something you know” (like a password) and “something you have,” which can be an object like a phone. Here’s a simple video about how it works:



I often hear the same questions or objections when I recommend two-factor authentication. Jeff Atwood has done a good job of debunking common misperceptions–check out his post, which even has pictures. But here are some misconceptions that I hear, along with the reality:
Myth #1: But what if my cell phone doesn’t have SMS/signal, or I’m in a foreign country?
Reality: You can install a standalone app called Google Authenticator (it’s also available in the App Store), so your cell phone doesn’t need a signal.
Myth #2: Okay, but what about if my cell phone runs out of power, or my phone is stolen?
Reality: You can print out a small piece of paper with 10 one-time rescue codes and put that in your wallet. Use those one-time codes to log in even without your phone.
Myth #3: Don’t I have to fiddle with an extra PIN every time I log in?
Reality: You can tell Google to trust your computer for 30 days and sometimes even longer.
Myth #4: I heard two-factor authentication doesn’t work with POP and IMAP?
Reality: You can still use two-factor authentication even with POP and IMAP. You create a special “application-specific password” that your mail client can use instead of your regular password. You can revoke application-specific passwords at any time.
Myth #5: Okay, but what if I want to verify how secure Google Authenticator is?
Reality: Google Authenticator is free, open-source, and based on open standards.
Myth #6: So Google Authenticator is a free and open-source, but does anyone else use it?
Reality: Yes! You can use Google Authenticator to do two-factor authentication with LastPass, Amazon Web Services, Drupal, and DreamHost, or even use a YubiKey device.
One last tip: use a different password on Gmail/Google than on other services. If you reuse a password and a hacker cracks into one company, they can use the same password to crack into your Google account.
Please don’t wait to turn on 2-step verification. It’s not that hard, and it will really protect your account. Why not set up two-step authentication right now?

The Reading Glitch [Comic]

PTA Thrift Shop Receives Grant For Building Expansion

The Root Beer Stand - Sharonville, OH

The Root Beer Stand - Sharonville, OH: The Root Beer Stand brews its own, and it is fine – served in thick glass mugs, not too sweet, with a spearmint twist to the spice of the cream-smooth dark soda. You can get your root beer in sizes from small to large, by the pitcher, quart or gallon. And you can also get it drawn (from the tap, of course) into a large disposable cup that is used for floats. Two dips of ice cream is considered a normal float, or you can pay fifty cents extra for a third dip. Large, quart-size floats automatically come with three dips.

To eat with your root beer, we recommend a hot dog. Six-inch dogs and foot longs are generally presented under a heap of chili and a pile of bright orange grated cheese, plus raw onions. “The Timmy Dog” is a foot-long extravaganza piled with chili, cheese, chopped raw onions, cole slaw, sauerkraut, mustard, ketchup, relish and hot sauce. Daunting in a different way is “Dogzilla,” the sign for which above the counter asks Can You Tame the Beast and notes that one Dogzilla is the equivalent of four regular hot dogs. This being Cincinnati, where regular hot dogs are virtual fingerlings, a quadruple-size one isn’t quite as awesome as you might expect. But by any measure, it is one grand tube steak.

Also listed on the menu are hamburgers, double burgers, triple burgers, and King Burgers (double quarter pounders), “pizza steak” (spicy meat with mozzarella inside), and wonderful chili-cheese sandwiches that are just like hot dogs with the works … only missing the sausage inside.

Geoffrey Hughes 07/27/2012

Geoffrey Hughes 07/27/2012: English actor Geoffrey Hughes dies in his sleep on the Isle of Wight from the effects of prostate cancer.

That ball kidnapped my family

Do Olympic Swimmers Pee in the Pool?

Doctor Who Season Seven Trailer is Online

Doctor Who Season Seven Trailer is Online:

The trailer for Season Seven (or Series if you are in the UK) of Doctor Who is now online.
The preview shows snippets of the upcoming season instead of just the first episode, and this being the Doctor’s 50th Anniversary, each of the 14 episodes is promised to be “blockbuster movie” length.

Seems there is a lot of everything in this upcoming season. The Doctor is still dealing with the exponential consequences of his actions (or inaction as he suggests) and some favorite enemies are set to return. Obviously Daleks return as well as the ever popular weeping angels. I like the idea of Dinos on a Spaceship too, and I am really curious to see The Doctor in the Wild West (because Stetsons are cool!)
The primary teaser image shows the Doctor seemingly cradling a dead or uncoscious Amy Pond, and at this point I think the only way to honestly let her leave the show is dead.
The Doctor has never been this closely tied to a companion as much as he is with Amy. If you don’t know why, I won’t spoil it for you here. She’s my favourite companion, but I think that her story has already been told and there is little more we can do with her.
I am excited to see what they do with Jenna-Louise Coleman as the new companion, which may well show up after the midseason break and Christmas Special.
No related posts.

The Calendar as a Meme: A Brief History of Timekeeping

The Calendar as a Meme: A Brief History of Timekeeping:
“To be human is to be aware of the passage of time; no concept lies closer to the core of our consciousness.”
For millennia, humans have sought to make sense of time, to visualize it, to ride its arrow, to hack it, to understand biological connection to it. “Time is the very foundation of conscious experience,” writes Dan Falk in In Search of Time: The History, Physics, and Philosophy of Time (public library). “To be human is to be aware of the passage of time; no concept lies closer to the core of our consciousness.”
And yet that awareness has a long history of friction — to mark and measure the passage of time has proven remarkably challenging. For instance, Falk traces the evolution of the calendar, our dominant system for collectively experiencing time:

The Gregorian calendar is one of the most successful ideas in the history of civilization. (Richard Dawkins might call it a successful ‘meme’ — a unit of cultural information that propagates over time.)
The Gregorian calendar is not the only timekeeping system invented by humankind — nor, as we’ll see, is it even (by some measures) the most accurate. But its story is a noteworthy one, an achievement centuries, even millennia, in the making. We saw in the previous chapter how early humans were captivated by — and began to follow — the regular motions of the night sky. By the time of the great ancient civilizations, such systematic observation had become a virtual industry; every culture would develop some sort of calendar for mapping out the year, based on their observations of the heavens and their own particular needs and priorities. The one that rules today — the Gregorian Christian calendar — exploits ideas from many different cultures, each with a unique perspective on the significance of the heavenly bodies and unique solutions to the problem of tracking their motions. In this chapter we’ll take a look at some of the challenges confronting would-be calendar makers through the ages, as they tried to tame the myriad of motions displayed by the sun, moon, and stars.

Like much of knowledge, the contemporary calendar, it turns out, is an additive innovation:

The first rudimentary steps toward tracking those celestial motions, as we’ve seen, may have occurred as early as the Paleolithic period. But it is only with the rise of the first civilizations — marked by complex, agriculture-based urban settlements with full-blown writing systems — that we can be certain that people were keeping track of days, months, and years. Making sense of those celestial cycles, however, is complicated by the fact that neither the number of days in the lunar cycle nor the number of lunar cycles in a year is a nice round number (indeed, not even a whole number). The lunar month, as mentioned earlier, is about 29 ½ days long (actually 29.5306); the average solar year (also known as the “tropical” year) is about 365 ¼ days long (actually a smidgeon less, at 365.2422 days). That these cycles did not fit neatly into one another was well known: back in the fifth century B.C., the Greek poet Aristophanes, in his play The Clouds, had the moon complaining that the days refused to keep pace with her phases.

These incongruent cycles is where it gets interesting:

Try dividing the length of the year by the length of the lunar month, and again you get a fractional number, greater than 12 but less than 13 — the true figure is close to 12.3683. Over the millennia, different civilizations tried every possible trick for reconciling these incongruent cycles. Some simply rounded the length of the month up to 30 days, a practice adopted by the ancient Sumerians; 12 such months yield a 360-day year, just 5 days (roughly) short of the true solar year. Others used a more precise length for the lunar cycle and then assumed there were exactly 12 months in a year: the result is a year that is 354 days long — 11 days short (roughly) of the true solar year. Adopt such a calendar, and each New Year’s celebration will be 11 days earlier than it was the year before. A midsummer celebration would become a midwinter celebration after just 16 years.
Any calendar system that uses the phases of the moon to track the months but also attempts to reconcile those months with the cycle of the seasons is called a luni-solar calendar. The Babylonians adopted one such system. A new month was determined by the first sighting of the crescent moon in the western sky — a practice that continues in Muslim nations to this day (notice how many Muslim nations feature the crescent moon on their flag). To keep the months in step with the solar year, the Babylonians employed a cycle in which seven 13-month years alternated with 12 years of just 12 months. The result was a 19-year cycle known as the Metonic cycle, after the Greek astronomer Meton of Athens, who lived in the fifth century B.C. (Meton discovered that 235 lunar months amount to almost exactly the same interval as 19 solar years; a calendar based on this cycle would deviate from the true solar year by just 1 day every 219 years.) Beginning in the second millennium B.C., the extra month would be added — “intercalated” — following either the sixth month (Ululu) or the twelfth month (Addaru) of the Babylonian calendar. We have a record dating from the nineteenth century B.C. of King Hammurabi’s decree on just such an adjustment:

This year has an additional month. The coming month should be designated as the second month Ululu, and wherever the annual tax has been ordered to be brought in to Babylon on the 24th of the month of Tashritu it should now be brought to Babylon on the 24th of the second month of Ululu.

 
The Jewish calendar is closely modeled on the Babylonian. (The mutual influence of the two cultures can be traced back to the sixth century B.C., when Babylon, under Nebuchadnezzar II, conquered Jerusalem; the Jewish people spent the next 70 years or so in exile.) The Jewish calendar, like the Babylonian, is built on the nineteen-year Metonic cycle, with its combination of 12-month and 13-month years. Within that cycle, the lengths of certain months can also vary, so that a “regular” year can be 353, 354, or 355 days long, while a leap year (containing an extra month) can be 383, 384, or 385 days long. (This is why the date of Jewish holidays such as Hanukkah leaps around so much with respect to the Gregorian calendar.)

The rest of In Search of Time, a fine addition to these essential books on time, is just as fascinating an untangling of the basic fabric of our existence, exploring everything from the science of time travel to the persistence and mechanisms of memory to the inevitability of impermanence.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

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First-Time Visitors to U.S. Surprised by 'Convenience Culture,' Poverty, Lack of Ross/Rachel Drama [Traveling]

First-Time Visitors to U.S. Surprised by 'Convenience Culture,' Poverty, Lack of Ross/Rachel Drama [Traveling]:

The Atlantic's Max Fisher compiled a bunch of observations from first-time U.S. visitors, gleaned from both his own international friends and Quora users, and the results are both amusing and depressing. A few things that surprised foreigners: More »

Star Wars theme settings on washing machine

Star Wars theme settings on washing machine:

"If you leave your husband home alone.... sooner or later he will need to figure out how to use..(Read...)

If You Want To Succeed, Start Lying to Yourself [Games People Play]

two roads

Feds Ban 'Buckyballs' Magnets

Challenge: What's the Connection Between President McKinley and "Free Love"? [Search Research]

Pizza Peddler

Pizza Peddler:

Pizza Peddler is a clever and funny pizza cutter that depicts a monkey riding a unicycle. The best p..(Read...)

Anti-Suffragette Postcards from the Early 20th Century

Anti-Suffragette Postcards from the Early 20th Century:
A brief pictorial history of socially sanctioned sexism.
Among February’s vintage Valentine’s Day postcards from the early 1900s was some anti-suffragette propaganda. That brand of misogynist messaging, it turns out, wasn’t reserved just for Cupid’s favorite holiday — in fact, as the suffrage movement swelled into a groundswell in the early 20th century, the picture postcard industry was enlisted in producing propaganda that discredited and denigrated women fighting for the vote. Here are a few more anti-suffragette postcards from the period, a reminder at once amusing and appalling of our culture’s history of socially sanctioned bigotry. (No doubt, Tea Party signage on marriage rights and immigration will appear in similar contexts in the cultural criticism of tomorrow.)







If this wasn’t amusingly appalling enough for you, up the ante with this Victorian list of don’ts for female cyclists, but then lift your spirits with a look at how the bicycle actually emancipated women.
History Extra @matthiasrascher

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

Men Usually (and Wrongly) Think Their Female Friends Are Crushing on Them [Relationships]

warehouse 13 comic-con 2012 Reel

warehouse 13 comic-con 2012 Reel:

submitted by Gamerchick17 [link] [2 comments]