Evoflux

Ahhhhh Hell Naw

What have you done science?  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE!!!

Zombie Alert Raised

Zombie Alert Raised 1 Level today.

Hide your kids!

How to buy stuff with scrap silver

WHO RUNS BARTER TOWN!

LA Riots

Iran riots for political reasons, we riot because its an excuse to burn stuff, fight, steal, and our team won a game.

Now with video. 

And this awesome article

Riots in Tehran

Link to the photos of some of the riots in Tehran

Edit:  Now With YouTube link

Like Chocolate and Peanut Butter

Not saying that girls would look better in this sort of thing, but I am not, not saying it either.

www.tacticalcorsets.com

Tactical Corset from BarCampLA 2009 from sean percival on Vimeo.

Left 4 Dead 2 : Too Soon?

Seems like it is too soon to release a new Left 4 Dead.  It will be just a year since the original was released. 

I will still buy it anyway. 

Screenshots

Attn: Darren

Darren has given up photography for the quiet life on the farm. 

Orwell’s 1984 First Published: 8th of June, 1949

On this day, the 8th of June, in 1949 George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 was first published. It wasn’t the first dystopian novel. It won’t be the last. It is worth the read.

Link to read 1984 online for free

Remembering Tiananmen Square 20 Years later

On June 4th 1989 the chinese government shut down pro-democracy protests being held by students at Tiananmen Square in China. Never forget what a few people tried to do for a bit of change and the lengths their government is doing to make sure everyone forgets about it.

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre (referred to in China as the June 4 Incident, to avoid confusion with two other Tiananmen Square protests) were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in Beijing in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) beginning on April 14. Led mainly by students and intellectuals, the protests occurred in a year that saw the collapse of a number of communist governments around the world.
The protests were sparked by the death of pro-market, pro-democracy and anti-corruption official, Hu Yaobang, whom protesters wanted to mourn. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, 1,000,000 people had gathered on the Tiananmen square. The protests lacked a unified cause or leadership; participants included disillusioned Communist Party members and Trotskyists as well as free market reformers, who were generally against the government’s authoritarianism and voiced calls for economic change [1][2] and democratic reform[2] within the structure of the government. The demonstrations centered on Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, but large-scale protests also occurred in cities throughout China, including Shanghai, which remained peaceful throughout the protests.
The movement lasted seven weeks, from Hu’s death on April 15 until tanks cleared Tiananmen Square on June 4. In Beijing, the resulting military response to the protesters by the PRC government left many civilians dead or severely injured. The number of deaths is not known and many different estimates exist.[3][4] There were early reports of Chinese Red Cross sources giving a figure of 2,600 deaths, but the Chinese Red Cross has denied ever doing so.[4] The official Chinese government figure is 241 dead, including soldiers, and 7,000 wounded.[3]

Link

I look forward to free energy or california evaporating itself

Really when you think about it, it is a win win situation.

The 9 Most Devastating Insults From Around the World

Cracked [dot] com has a nice list of insults for you guys to use this weekend.  Just incase you like that kind of thing.

9 most interesting insults

Eyreh be afass seder emmak

You like that!

He knows what you like.  He knows.

Even Hillary supporters know.

I can see you there

Read More...

Eat Slowly

In this study there is a correlation between the time it takes to eat and the obesity of different countries. Hey USA, drop the fast food habit. Anyone up for a multiple course 3 hour dinner?

Painfully obvious? Yes. But Catherine Rampbell has a graph to back it up. It looks like there’s a pretty real correlation between the time people in various countries spend eating and the rate of obesity in that country. That is, the more time people spend eating, the lower the rate of obesity. There’s a slow food endorsement if I’ve ever seen one.

Link (via Marginal Revolution)

Happy Hindenburg Day

It was 72 years ago today when the Hindenburg disaster occurred resulting in the deaths of 36 individuals of which all but one were on the ship. And to make it even stranger is the fact that 72 years later the conspiracy theorist still crawl out of the woodwork about why and how it happened. Don’t get me wrong. Knowing how it happened is a very important yet illusive fact. Just the fact that they argue the difference between static sparks versus sabotage should be enough to make people turn off their televisions for the entertainment value.

Link

Extreme Shepherding

Nothing more needs to be said. 

The Caffeinated Geek’s Guide to Storing Coffee Beans

Storing coffee beans for the long-term can mean very little kick in the taste and the caffeination effect for those of us who know the power of a good cup of joe. This is the reason why this article is so damn informative.

Once you have your coffee beans at home, the best indicator of freshness is aroma (at room temperature) and taste. A visual indicator is the amount of “bloom” when you pour the water over the coffee. Coffee roasting creates significant amounts of carbon dioxide within the bean. Grinding releases the CO2, which carries the aroma into the room. (Smells great, doesn’t it?) The remaining gas will be liberated as foam during brewing. Generally, the more bloom there is, the fresher the beans. (Geek note: the volume of CO2 varies among varieties. The range is three to 20 times the bean volume.)

All coffee is fresh when it comes out of the roaster. What happens later changes the freshness profile profoundly. The very best practice, of course, is to buy your beans weekly at a reputable shop that carefully monitors its inventories and refuses to sell beans past several days out of the roaster.

Link

The 7 Types Of Bad Bosses According To Star Trek

IO9 Has an article describing the the 7 different types of boss-archetype models using Star Trek characters. Some of them are pretty spot on. What would you characterize your boss as?

<

The queen bee. She claims it’s all about the group, and what’s best for the “collective.” It’s not about her at all — in fact, just pretend she’s not there. She’s just there to speak for the group. And then she insists on being all showy — ooh, look at me lowering my head and spine into my slinky new body! She has to be the center of attention, even while she’s pretending that she’s one small part of a huge collective. She enjoys seducing you into her group, but once you join, you’ll just be one of her bees. And if you ever get away, she’ll keep bugging you and showing up when you’re trying to chill in your regeneration alcove.

How to handle her: Take her at her word. Pretend you really do think she’s just one small piece of a huge organization. That way, it shouldn’t matter if you talk to one of her “drones” instead of her. It’s all the same, right? It’ll drive her crazy, and maybe she’ll expose some weakness.

Link

Tom Robbins’ ‘B is for Beer’

This isn’t a book review. This is an all-station bulletin. Tom Robbins has just released his new book ‘B is for Beer’. It is a children’s book for the young and old alike.

The Amazon.com page has a good Q & A with the arthur such as:

Q: So, Tom Robbins, you’ve gone and written a children’s book about an alcoholic beverage. First, why the ode to beer?

A: Why not? As ode fodder, its got to have at least as much potential as nightingales and Grecian urns…

link

Cablevision Challenges Verizon and Comcast on Internet Speed/Price

And how about a giant Boofuckityyah against Verizon and Comcast for their shitty capping and pricing. Unfortunately for all but a few of us this only applies to New York.

Cablevision, a cable ISP based in the New York area, claims to have taken the residential US Internet speed record by rolling out 101Mbps service across the New York area in the next two weeks. Just to sweeten the deal, Cablevision has priced the service at $99.95 per month—and won’t use explicit data caps.

Since other high-speed providers like Comcast and Verizon currently offer a maximum of 50Mbps speeds (and both charge about $140 for it, though Verizon offers a cheaper deal in Virginia and New York), the Cablevision rollout sounds like a great deal. It also shows the power of competition; while much of the country has zero or one 50Mbps option, New York will now have two.

The fact that the upgrade can be offered at far less than both Verizon and Comcast are charging, and that it can be done without the data caps Time Warner Cable said it needed in order to fund such upgrades, suggests that US Internet could be much better than it is.

The fact wasn’t lost on groups like Free Press, which have already praised Cablevision. “It does, however, beg the question why Cablevision can offer fast access with reportedly no caps or overage fees, when others claim such a plan would cause the sky to fall and an exaflood to break the Internet,” said S. Derek Turner, the group’s research director. “We hope this new announcement will put an end to the bandwidth bogeyman.”

Assuming the service works as advertised, it will certainly boost Cablevision’s image, which (among the much-loathed cable industry) is already pretty good.

The move also reminds us just how cost-effective these DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts have been. While Verizon has to lay new fiber to FiOS homes and AT&T runs fiber into the neighborhoods to power its U-verse system, cable companies have a monstrous hybrid fiber coax (HFC) pipe that requires inexpensive headend upgrades for far faster service.

Yes I was lazy and just copied it over for your convenience.

Link

Are Human Beings Organisms Or Living Ecosystems?

Since it’s the most interesting thing I’ve read this morning I’m just going to copy-paste this from Slashdot for those of you that missed it.

“Every human body harbors about 100 trillion bacterial cells, outnumbering human cells 10 to one. There’s been a growing consensus among scientists that bacteria are not simply random squatters, but organized communities that evolve with us and are passed down from generation to generation. ‘Human beings are not really individuals; they’re communities of organisms,’ says microbiologist Margaret McFall-Ngai. ‘This could be the basis of a whole new way of looking at disease.’ Recently, for example, evidence has surfaced that obesity may well include a microbial component. Jeffrey Gordon’s lab at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published findings that lean and obese twins — whether identical or fraternal — harbor strikingly different bacterial communities that are not just helping to process food directly; they actually influence whether that energy is ultimately stored as fat in the body. Last year, the National Institutes of Health launched the Human Microbiome Project to characterize the role of microbes in the human body, a formal recognition of bacteria’s far-reaching influence, including their contributions to human health and certain illnesses. William Karasov, a physiologist and ecologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes that the consequences of this new approach will be profound. ‘We’ve all been trained to think of ourselves as human,’ says Karasov, adding that bacteria have usually been considered only as the source of infections, or as something benign living in the body. Now, Karasov says, it appears ‘we are so interconnected with our microbes that anything studied before could have a microbial component that we hadn’t thought about.’”

It is definitely outside-of-the-box thinking and well worth the read.

Link

101 Last Suppers

In this fine (and apparently ever growing) collection of pictures there are currently 101 last suppers. I’m already a fan.

There’s nothing like a couple thousand years of of repetition and an iconic painting to get story to get lodged inside the heads of the creators of pop culture. Leonardo da Vinci’s 15th century depiction of Jesus announcing that one of his 12 disciples would betray him is so ingrained in our culture that it has been co-opted by those wishing to give weight to their parodies, tributes and caricatures.

Link

The J8 is the Vehicle of my Dreams

Although it’s definitely not for everyone I really one to take the J8 backcountry camping.

What you need is something that stands out, something that says you mean business and something that all but screams “Get the hell out of my way!”
Something like the 2010 J8 MILSPEC from American Expedition Vehicles. Oh sure, the J8 looks like a lowly Jeep J8 Expedition, but it’s hand-built to military specifications…

Link

DJ Spooky Performs Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica

Where has DJ Spooky (originally born under the handle Paul D. Miller) been? Why hasn’t there been anything new from the headmaster of illbient? He has been trudging through the snow of Antarctica with a ministudio.

“It’s all about hitting the reset button,” said Miller on the phone from New York last week. “I wanted to see how much we are conditioned by the urban setting, because when you think about it, hip-hop, techno are essentially urban narratives. So I decided to take it as far away as possible-Antarctica wasn’t really made for humans. I wanted to see how that world would sound.”

As of today this hasn’t been performed in public yet. Anyone close to Santa Barbara really should go see him tomorrow night.

Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica
When: Tuesday, April 7, 2009, 8 p.m.
Where: UCSB Campbell Hall, 574 Mesa Rd., Santa Barbara
Cost: $19 - $35
Age limit: Not available
Full event details

Link