Talk a little to your delivery guys. Get to know them. Ask them if the credit card tips are getting to them, and if not, complain at the restaurant and at Seamless, because that shit ain’t right. But mostly, just tip in cash.
Talk a little to your delivery guys. Get to know them. Ask them if the credit card tips are getting to them, and if not, complain at the restaurant and at Seamless, because that shit ain’t right. But mostly, just tip in cash.
You want to make metro areas of 6 million people prepared for things like this? Stop subsidizing the automobile. Stop making it so damned easy for us to build a society that’s so fragile, that’s so close to the breaking point, that the world ends and we have to sleep in our offices when we’re seven whole miles from home (as one tale had it). This isn’t solved by various Atlanta area regional governments providing more services, more salt and plow trucks, or even more transit facilities. This is solved by not subsidizing a lifestyle that makes it completely impossible to have any sort of resilience.
The people who say that are idiots. Blogging was never alive. It’s the people that matter. There will always be a small number who are what I call “natural born bloggers.” They were blogging before there were blogs, they just didn’t know what it was called. Julia Child was a blogger as was Benjamin Franklin and Patti Smith.
I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.
So I was asked to be on Roger Ailes’ television program and the moment we sat down I said, “Mr. Ailes, I’m the most conservative person you’ve ever interviewed.” (laughs) And he was surprised, said, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, most conservatives just want to turn the back the clock 100 years, but I’d like to turn back the clock thousands of years, to when we lived in small communities and took care of each other.” He said, “Well, isn’t that just romantic?” And I said, “No, I don’t think the human race will survive unless we do something like that.”
New Zealand School Find Less Structure Improves Children’s Behavior
Ripping up the playground rulebook is having incredible effects on children at an Auckland school.
Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal says.
The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.
Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment.
"We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over."
Letting children test themselves on a scooter during playtime could make them more aware of the dangers when getting behind the wheel of a car in high school, he said.
"When you look at our playground it looks chaotic. From an adult’s perspective, it looks like kids might get hurt, but they don’t."
Swanson School signed up to the study by AUT and Otago University just over two years ago, with the aim of encouraging active play.
However, the school took the experiment a step further by abandoning the rules completely, much to the horror of some teachers at the time, he said.
When the university study wrapped up at the end of last year the school and researchers were amazed by the results.
Mudslides, skateboarding, bullrush and tree climbing kept the children so occupied the school no longer needed a timeout area or as many teachers on patrol.
Instead of a playground, children used their imagination to play in a “loose parts pit” which contained junk such as wood, tyres and an old fire hose.
If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they could have charged me with a felony.
The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users.
An Open Letter from US Researchers in Cryptography and Information Security
I’m almost surprised the stock market hasn’t crashed yet.
Roger said that he didn’t know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: “This is all an elaborate hoax.”
Its About Time. A Victory - Unlawful Mass Arrests During 2004 RNC
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from  Holy Scrap.
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How the iPhone 5S replaced my Fitbit
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from  iPhone Atlas: Apple iPhone tips, how-tos, troubleshooting, and news - CNET Reviews.
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I’ve stopped carrying my Fitbit, now that the Fitbit app can track my steps using the iPhone 5S’s built-in motion tracker.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)I haven’t charged my Fitbit Ultra in over three weeks. And I doubt I ever will again.
Ever since I bought an iPhone 5S, I’ve kept an eye on how the embedded M7 motion coprocessor co-processor chip, which can track and store motion information, would be used. It wasn’t clear when the iPhone 5S was launched exactly how the M7’s data would be available, but after a few months, fitness apps like the Nike+ Move starting adding support for basic step-counting functionality.
While I started tracking my steps with both my Fitbit and Nike’s app at first, the clincher for me was when the Fitbit app for iOS was updated at the end of 2013, allowing the standard Fitbit app to track steps using the iPhone 5S’s internal hardware. Now I could get nearly the same activity tracking us… u… [Read more]
    
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Probability that computerisation will lead to job losses in next two decades, The Economist, 2013 (via Twitter / Malbonnington)
How to live like a king for very little
I totally screwed up #5, but this is some great advice.
PAPERMAG: New Documentary Perfectly Captures NYC In the 90s
I’ll always be drawn to New York like a moth to a flame.
An abridged history of Miss Officer and Mr. Truffles
A photo of a Canadian RCMP officer taking a pic of a young bear makes the news in 2011.
The photo gets famous on Tumblr in late 2013. Someone in the reblog suggests that it’d make a great cartoon:
An artist (lemonteaflower) creates single pane art of the imagined cartoon…
A Rare Connection: My Photo Shoot with John Schneider
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from  PetaPixel.
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I recently got asked to shoot photos for a show called “The Haves and HaveNots” for the Oprah Winfrey Network. I’ve shot many shows in my career and I always enjoy these shoots because there are so many challenges involved.
There’s tons of “talent” aka celebrities involved, all their teams, all the hair, makeup and wardrobe involved, there’s very limited time, there are tons of shots to create, there’s an immense pressure to “nail” the creative concept and obviously there is usually lots of money involved. These are high budget, high-pressure shoots. It’s diving into the deep end for sure, as far as photography is concerned. And I love that challenge. I love stepping up to the plate and going for the homerun.
But one of the things I DON’T love about these shoots is that I never really get to connect with the people I’m shooting. They’re in and out in minutes. Sometimes I literally am only able to take a few pictures before they’re wisked away.
This is one of those VERY few rare occasions where I was able to connect. And I have my subject to thank for allowing me into his story.
One of the cast members was John Schneider. You might know him from his work on “Dukes of Hazard” or “Smallville”. John was one of my many subjects that day and like the rest of the cast, he was extremely professional, humble and a lot of fun to work with. He was killing his portraits… smiling, goofing off and he even threw in several impressions of famous actors and presidents. I was very impressed by his talent and good-natured humor. You can see some of those portraits below.
Towards the end of his session, we brought in one of the female cast members to interact with. They were dancing, laughing and having a great time. Again, I was very impressed by his ability to light up the camera and have a good time.
Once we wrapped up his session, the female walked off set and John came to me and whispered in my ear “Hey can you sneak a few more portraits of me?” and I said “sure of course”. He said “there’s something going on and I just need a photo.”
So I grabbed my camera again and John walked back on set.
He immediately began weeping. Legitimately crying. He was so good at impressions that I thought this was another impression and I thought “wow, what an acting talent.”
But then after a couple of frames, I could tell that this wasn’t an act. He was really somewhere else.
Finally, I put my camera down. This was too real. It didn’t feel right to keep shooting.
So I walked up to him and hugged him.
He whispered in my ear “My Dad died about an hour ago. I found out during our lunch break. And I wanted you to capture that for me.”
Then he walked up to my screen, looked at the portraits and pointed to the last one (seen above, last) and said “That’s it. That’s my Dad.”
“I’m so sorry.” I said. I was stunned. Shocked. And deeply moved, obviously.
I didn’t want to ask any further questions out of respect.
John took off shortly thereafter to go back home to plan the next steps with his family.
I’ve since received official permission from John to share this story and these portraits with you. I will never forget this moment. And I want to thank John for inviting me into his story, even just for a moment and for allowing me to capture this for him.
As a father myself, I wept for him. We all did that day.
About the author: Jeremy is a Celebrity Photographer, Entrepreneur and a Humanitarian. He founded a global photography movement called Help-Portrait and recently launched an iPhone App/Social Network called OKDOTHIS. His goal in life is to use his platform, ideas and creativity to inspire and help others in need. You follow him and see more of his work on his website, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and OKDOTHIS. This article was originally published here.
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The future is so great!
FUCK
Sigh.
Our quote “Defense of the free world” is an aggressive hypocrisy that has damaged the very planet’s chance of survival. Now we have spent thousands of billions on offensive War in decades, and half the world is starving for food. The reckoning has come now for America. 100 Billion goes to the War Department this year out of 300 Billion Budget. Our militarization has become so top heavy that there is no turning back from Military Tyranny. Police agencies have become so vast – National Security Agency alone the largest police bureaucracy in America yet its activities are almost unknown to all of us – that there is no turning back from computerized police state control of America.
Allen Ginsberg
London Mantra
Sloow Tapes – CS 45
Solo recordings of Allen Ginsberg playing a small hand-pumped harmonium from India and singing mantras and songs to the cosmos. These recordings were made in the early seventies by the American poet and bibliographer George Dowden. From the vaults of Gerard Bellaart’s Cold Turkey Press (who also made the cover). 100 copies.
We can assume that people like to notice when their phone is ringing, and that most people hate missing a call. This means their perceptual systems have adjusted their bias to a level that makes misses unlikely. The unavoidable cost is a raised likelihood of false alarms – of phantom phone vibrations.
How to make your soup wonderful: Wild food soup stock
via sudama’s blurblog
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"The Male Gazed: Surveillance, Power, and Gender” By Kate Losse at Model View Culture
Government surveillance within social networks didn’t arise out of nowhere; instead, it is a product of longstanding inequalities in power in technology that have historically privileged white men above all, who have been much more likely to control surveillance technologies than be targeted by them. The outrage over NSA surveillance has occurred and received massive coverage not because the deployment of technology for citizen surveillance is new but because white, technical, American men have finally become targets of the surveillant gaze rather than its aloof masters.
I think I’m looking at something Orwellian. It’s a government, many-tentacled operation to gather daily information on what everybody in the country is doing. Your daily transactions on the Internet can be monitored with this kind of system, not just your Web surfing. All kinds of business that people do on the Internet these days — your bank transactions, your e-mail, everything — it sort of opens a window into your entire private life, and that’s why I thought of the term “Orwellian.” As you know, in [George] Orwell’s story [1984], they have cameras in your house, watching you. Well, this is the next best thing. …
