BCX Kraken Unleashed — via Base Camp X
My brother Danny lost his virginity at age 25. To a call girl named Monique. Hired by our mother.
My mother didn’t bother asking Danny for his permission before engaging Monique’s services. She didn’t ask my father to condone the transaction. Nor was she troubled by social mores or laws against solicitation. She deserves a Mother of the Year Award.
There was a reason for my mother’s taboo-busting parenting. Danny was born with a rare, incurable genetic disease that affects the development and function of the nervous system. The typical lifespan for children born with Familial Dysautonomia was then about five years. My mother rolled up her sleeves, strapped on her stilettos, and ignored the statistic. A parent now myself, I wonder if I have half my mother’s grit and grace — via redwolf.newsvine.com
On a normal weeknight, Netflix accounts for almost a third of all Internet traffic entering North American homes. That’s more than YouTube, Hulu, Amazon.com, HBO Go, iTunes, and BitTorrent combined. Traffic to Netflix usually peaks at around 10.00pm in each time zone, at which point a chart of Internet consumption looks like a python that swallowed a cow. By midnight Pacific time, streaming volume falls off dramatically.
As prime time wound down on 31 January, though, there was an unusual amount of tension at Netflix. That was the night the company premièred House of Cards, its political thriller set in Washington. Before midnight about 40 engineers gathered in a conference room at Netflix’s headquarters. They sat before a collection of wall-mounted monitors that displayed the status of Netflix’s computing systems. On the conference table, a few dozen laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other devices had the Netflix app loaded and ready to stream.
When the clocks hit 12.00am, the entire season of House of Cards started appearing on the devices, as well as in the recommendation lists of millions of customers chosen by an algorithm. The opening scene, a dog getting run over by an SUV, came and went. At 12.15am, around the time Kevin Spacey’s character says I’m livid,
everything was working fine. That’s when the champagne comes,
says Yury Izrailevsky, the vice president in charge of cloud computing at Netflix, which has a history of self-inflicted catastrophes. Izrailevsky stayed until the wee hours of the morning—just in case—as thousands of customers binge-watched the show. The midnight ritual repeated itself on 19 April, when Netflix premièred its werewolf horror series Hemlock Grove, and will again on 26 May, when its revival of Arrested Development goes live — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Death by Skottie Young — via Neil Gaiman
This is a very simple FLORA project with no soldering — a single NeoPixel lights up on an embroidered angler fish on a pair of shorts. The main board is stitched on the front of the design, in the belly of the fish. A snap is used on the fin as a digital switch, triggering a colour change in the pixel in the angler’s lure. Follow the circuit diagram to stitch up this circuit, and tuck the battery in the pocket — via Adafruit Learning System
During the past few weeks the US Ambassador to Australia has courted controversy with his opinions of those who download Game of Thrones without paying. Now it’s been revealed that he has more than just a passing interesting in copyright infringement.
Last month US Ambassador Jeffrey L Bleich kicked up a storm when he jumped aboard the Game of Thrones downloading controversy. He singled-out citizens in Australia and appealed to them to stop stealing
the show.
Then just a few days later Bleich was back, responding to criticisms from people who felt that an ambassador should have better things to do than worry about a bit of downloading.
Actually, given the overwhelming response to the topic, maybe I haven’t talked about internet piracy enough,
he said at the start of a second lengthy Facebook posting on the issue.
Now, thanks to News.com.au, we have a clearer idea why Bleich might have such a keen interest in the issue of illegal downloading — via redwolf.newsvine.com
American graphic designer and filmmaker, Saul Bass, has been given a video Google Doodle to mark what would have been his 93rd birthday.
Bass was best known for his cinema title sequences and movie posters, working with such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. The video showcases some of his best work from a prolific Hollywood career which spanned five decades.
He designed the title sequences for Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960), and his work also included Spartacus (1960), West Side Story (1961), The Shining (1980), Goodfellas (1990),Cape Fear (1991) and Casino (1995) — via redwolf.newsvine.com
I started drawing in my Walls Notebook. I had to cut off the back half of the picture (wouldn’t fit in my scanner). It’s okay though. It wasn’t much more than a few legs from the tentacled monster and the front guys left dr seuss hand, hehe. Photography by: Sherwood Forlee — via deviantART
Nudibranchs, also known as sea slugs, are small brightly coloured animals that come in endless variations. This pendant is modelled after the hermissenda crassicornis species. This is made from translucent polymer clay and has orange spikes tipped with tiny flecks of white clay, a subtly blue tinted body, and the distinctive yellow stripe down it’s centre — via Etsy
Supercomputer maker Cray had been hinting that it would deliver a new cut-down version of its Cascade
XC30 system, and the machine is being unveiled on Tuesday at the Cray User Group meeting in Napa Valley, California.
The XC30-AC machines go into more standard cabinets like those used with the XE5 and XE6 predecessors to the Cascade boxes, but are based on the same Intel Xeon E5 processors and Aries
Dragonfly interconnect that the larger XC30-LC machines that were announced last November. The LC is short for liquid-cooled, and you will recall that the big bad Cascade boxes had liquid cooling in the racks and an interesting transverse cooling
system — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Visual effects master Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion wizardry graced such films as Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, has died aged 92.
The American made his models by hand and painstakingly shot them frame by frame to create some of the best-known animated sequences in cinema.
His death in London was confirmed to the BBC by a family representative.
“Harryhausen’s genius was in being able to bring his models alive,” said an official statement from his foundation.
Whether they were prehistoric dinosaurs or mythological creatures, in Ray’s hands they were no longer puppets but became instead characters in their own right
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
An iconic design that evokes memories from childhood. These brightly coloured space invaders cheer up any interior space — via Bouf
The Clouded Leopard cubs born at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute-Front Royal recently turned 2 months old, which means they’re big enough to have access to a larger enclosure with big climbing structures. Keepers report that the cubs spend most of their time playing and like to climb as high as they can! They’ve also mastered eating solid foods and are steadily gaining weight. The male weighs just over 4.5 pounds, and the female weighs about 3.5 pounds — via ZooBorns
I went and wallpapered the fridge. Annnnnnnnd it’s amazing. I take no credit in this because I didn’t make the stuff, I just stuck in on there, but wow, this is a good thing. A very good thing. I mean, I have a lot of weird and wonderful things in my kitchen but this sucker is a show stopper. You walk in the room and it hits you like a bag of Thunder Cats. Hey now that is a fridge! — via Aunt Peaches
Rebecca from Sew Festive Handmade shows you how to make this pretty Pintuck Pillow with an easy smocking technique — via Sew,Mama,Sew! Blog
Are drugs addictive? As odd as it might sound, one scientist believes that they weren’t — at least not to the degree most people insisted. He thought it had more to do with overwhelming misery and depressing environments, and to prove it he created the ideal environment… for rats.
In the late 1970s, Canadian psychologist Bruce Alexander was distressed by the laws and policies pertaining to opiate drugs. He didn’t approve of the harsh penalties dealt out to people in the name of addiction prevention. Generally those penalties were applied in order to prevent drug dealers from pushing their product on new people — at which point the addictive nature of drugs caused people to be hooked.
When Alexander looked at the studies indicating the addictive properties of drugs, he found what he believed to be insufficient evidence. There were plenty of interviews with drug users who self-reported themselves as being addicted, but Alexander reasoned that they had reasons of their own to declare that their affinity for drugs was beyond their control. Meanwhile, the relatively few studies done on addiction were highly technical and all relied on one thing: they were conducted on rats that lived and died in miserable, cramped cages.
It seemed to Alexander that the reported increased rates of addiction in economically depressed areas might have something in common with the consistently high rates of addiction in studies done on rats in distressing environments. Drugs provided relief from pain, and if it was the only relief available, it was no wonder that anything — animal or human — would turn to it with the fervour of an addict. Alexander began to put forward a new hypothesis. If rats were given a beautiful living area that allowed them a relatively happy life, they would not become addicted — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The installation was created by Netherlands-based artist John Breed, and incorporated 145 shoes and legs in total, in conjunction with German shoe salon Breuninger — via io9
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