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Nice Kitty
Nice Kitty
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: JULY 3RD- JIM MORRISON’S DEATH
This Day In History: July 3, 1971
While most everyone else was singing about incense and peppermints and feeling groovy in the 1960s, there was one group that dared to explore the darker side of the human experience. Their leader – though he would bristle at being called such – was a poet, a clown, a genius, a drunk, and a reluctant rock star who deliberately delved deep into the murky waters of the collective unconscious like a Dionysian puppet master. When his muse called him from Los Angeles to Paris, he left the public eye. On July 3, 1971, he passed from this earth all together.
By 1971, Jim Morrison was unrecognizable from his lean Lizard King days when he prowled the bars and nightclubs of L.A, in tight leather pants. He had put on a great deal of weight and his once chiseled features were hidden under a layer of bloat. He easily looked 10 years older than his 27 years. He decided to pursue his first love – poetry – and moved to Paris with his girlfriend Pamela Courson. …
‘Trying to deal with the pain’: Orlando survivors face long road to recovery
Doctors say high-velocity ammunition used by Omar Mateen caused injuries that are ‘much more difficult to repair’ than other wounds
Nurses comfort each other at a memorial near the Orlando Regional Medical Center in Orlando, Florida.
Angelique Caro was pulled from the Pulse nightclub with her right arm shattered. Another round from Omar Mateen’s assault rifle had torn through a lung and settled underneath her collarbone. She was dazed and unable to move, she remembers, when somebody picked her up and carried her to safety. Whoever it was pleaded with paramedics to stay with her in the ambulance.
As a survivor of the attack three weeks ago that killed 49 and wounded 53, Caro knows she is fortunate to have her life despite the devastating wounds she received.
Yet by his choice of weapon, a semiautomatic Sig Sauer MCX rifle, and particularly the high-velocity .223 caliber ammunition designed to cause maximum trauma to the human body, Mateen condemned Caro and many like her to months, years and in some cases a lifetime of suffering. …
Machine Guns Are Not Protected By The Second Amendment, Appeals Court Rules
Consistent with prior precedent, the court found machine guns to be “dangerous and unusual” weapons.
A Texas man who sued the federal government because it wouldn’t approve his application to manufacture a machine gun doesn’t have a constitutional right to possess the automatic weapon, an appeals court ruled.
Jay Hollis sought permission to convert his AR-15, a popular semi-automatic firearm, into an M16 — an automatic firearm that is banned under federal law, except for official use or lawfully obtained pre-1986 models.
After he was rejected, Hollis mounted a constitutional challenge to the Gun Control Act of 1968 — which Congress amended in 1986 to make it illegal to possess or transfer newly manufactured machine guns. Among other things, he argued that an “M-16 is the quintessential militia-styled arm for the modern day.”
In a unanimous ruling issued Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected Hollis’ arguments, categorically noting that “machine guns are not protected arms under the Second Amendment.” …
QUESTION: Why the hell are assault rifles protected under the 2nd Ammendment? Paul Ryan: DO YOUR FUCKING JOB!
10 Heartbreaking Accounts Of Child Suicide
Suicide is a difficult subject to address. There are far too many tragic stories of people who felt the only way to escape their troubles was to take their own lives. When the people at the center of these events are children, the dreadful emotions we feel are amplified. In this list, we’ll look at some of the shocking motives and piteous stories of children who ended their own lives, horrifically from as young as 6 years old!
10. Ryan Halligan
On the night of October 7th, 2003, the lives of John and Kelly Halligan were changed forever when they discovered that their thirteen year old son, Ryan, had committed suicide by hanging.
Traumatized by the horrific and tragic situation they’d been thrown into, the parents of Ryan searched desperately for answers as to why their son would feel so lost, that he felt suicide was his only option. Ryan had been described as a lovely child, who was able to always make people smile. Why such a sweet and happy seeming child would commit suicide, was a huge mystery to all.
Between the fifth and seventh grades Ryan began to suffer intense bullying from his schoolmates leading him to confess a fear of going back to school. His parents advocated the seemingly-reasonable approach of talking to the headmaster, an idea opposed by Ryan who feared it would make matters worse. Ryan, instead, began to learn how to fight and consequently used his new skills to defend himself. This seemed to finally solve the problem. …
If Some Homeowner Trends Continue, Signs Of Another Housing Bubble Ahead
Double-digit price rises, easy credit and no money down — these all led to a housing bubble a decade ago. NPR’s Rachel Martin asks UCLA economist Stephen Oliner if we are headed for disaster.
I’m living like a college student at 44
Madeline Kent and Jordan Brown co-live with another couple, but say privacy isn’t a problem.
Forget partitioned apartments, Craigslist roommates and Ikea furniture.
Increasingly, New Yorkers are turning to slick, luxurious communal-living setups. In the dormlike buildings, adults well out of college share kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms, and everything from toilet paper to coffee to a cleaning service is included in the rent.
“All the little stuff that you would have to go out for and plan and think about, you don’t have to think about,” says James Jackson, 27, a Web developer who lives in a new communal building in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, operated by the co-living company Common.
Common’s Williamsburg property is its third and largest. It operates two other buildings in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and has space for 100 residents across the three properties. Since launching in October the company has received 6,000 tenant applications. …
Top 10 Misconceptions About Henry VIII And His Court
The reign of Henry VIII is one of the most romanticized periods in history. Full of religious upheaval, murder, mayhem and larger-than-life figures, there are plenty of myths and misconceptions that have taken the place of real history when it comes to Henry, his many wives, the Royal Court, and his world-changing laws.
10. Henry Likely Never Had Syphilis
Change the religion of your entire country so you can divorce your wife and upgrade to a more fertile model and you are bound to have all sorts of rumors start circulating about what goes on in the royal bedroom—and what kinds of consequences you might be subject to. One of the long-standing rumors about Henry VIII is that he was suffering from syphilis, but there is not much that suggests that was actually the case.
When it comes to Henry’s health, we have quite a bit of information. Absolutely none of it is from his personal physicians, who likely did not keep records of the king’s health for their own peace of mind (and safety). However, historians do have state documents, dispatches, and documents written by visitors to the court that detail some of the illnesses that plagued the king. In 1514, Henry suffered from what was either smallpox or measles, and he came down with malaria in 1521. His love of sport and hunting meant that there were quite a few injuries, but until he started gaining the weight he was later famous for, he was fairly healthy.
What we do not have is any record of Henry exhibiting any of the signs of syphilis—which was well recognized at the time, and treated with a 6-week course of mercury. …
Rise of the cyborgs: ‘I can feel events in Japan when I’m in New York’
As a cyborg you can have colors beamed to your brain and wear earrings that sense what’s behind you – and more and more people are getting involved
What’s a cyborg to do when customs officials ask him to remove his antenna for a passport photo? Or when the same antenna is damaged by a Barcelona cop who mistakes it for a video camera? If you’re Neil Harbisson you fight back, which is why he formed the Cyborg Foundation in 2010 along with collaborator and fellow cyborg, Moon Ribas.
“It’s basically to promote cyborg art and cyborgism as a social art movement, to help people become cyborgs and to identify cyborg rights – so the right to have surgery and the right to be identified as being technology,” he explains from their home in New York.
According to the foundation a wave of new cyborgs will be breaking at the end of the summer – and now you can be one, too. The foundation’s sister organization, Cyborg Nest, is currently taking orders for North Sense, an implant that detects magnetic north, which will become available in September for roughly $300. If this sounds nutty to you, perhaps it’s your age. According to Harbisson, young people are flocking to the idea of enhancing or adding to their senses through technology. …
How AWS came to be
There are lots of stories about the formation of AWS, but this much we know: 10 years ago, Amazon Web Services, the cloud Infrastructure as a Service arm of Amazon.com, was launched with little fanfare as a side business for Amazon.com. Today, it’s a highly successful company in its own right, riding a remarkable $10 billion run rate.
In fact, according to data from Synergy Research, in the decade since its launch, AWS has grown into the most successful cloud infrastructure company on the planet, garnering more than 30 percent of the market. That’s more than its three closest rivals — Microsoft, IBM and Google — combined (and by a fair margin).
What you may not know is that the roots for the idea of AWS go back to the 2000 timeframe when Amazon was a far different company than it is today — simply an e-commerce company struggling with scale problems. Those issues forced the company to build some solid internal systems to deal with the hyper growth it was experiencing — and that laid the foundation for what would become AWS. …
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: JULY 3RD- TAKING COMMAND
This Day In History: July 3, 1775
Just a couple of weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill, there was an uneasy stalemate between the British troops and the American colonists as both sides took their measure and regrouped. The British stationed at Bunker Hill had a lovely view of the 20,000 Colonial troops and their sturdy fortifications across the Charles River. This would not be an easy rebellion to put down.
Flyers circulating among the British soldiers distributed by the locals accusing them of “shedding the blood of your fellow subjects” and urging them to join their cause did little to help morale. They were short on provisions as well. But things could – and would – get a whole lot worse.
On July 3, 1775, General George Washington rode out to the front of the American troops assembled in Cambridge MA and drew his sword, formally taking command of the Continental Army, a post he had agreed to a couple weeks before. He also agreed to take the job without regular compensation, only asking for reimbursement of future expenses incurred during his time as commander. …
Big Business Could Eventually Dominate the Marijuana Industry — Here’s Why
Legal cannabis supporters probably aren’t going to like this.
The growth of legal marijuana over the past two decades has been nothing short of phenomenal. Following the lawmaker-led legalization of medical marijuana in Pennsylvania and Ohio, half of all U.S. states now have laws on the books supporting a legal medical marijuana industry. Another four states (Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska) have also legalized the sale of marijuana for recreational purposes.
In the roughly two years since recreational marijuana hit pot shop shelves in Colorado, sales have soared to more than $1 billion on a trailing 12-month basis. In 2015 alone, Colorado wound up raising approximately $135 million via legal marijuana tax revenue and licensing fees. The industry as a whole, according to cannabis market research firm ArcView Market Research, hit an estimated $5.4 billion in sales in 2015 and could grow at an annualized rate of about 30% through 2020. You’d struggle to name other industries with growth potential on par with legal cannabis. …
240 years of US energy use
Biomass and renewables surge, coal use plunges.
With the 4th of July weekend about to begin, the US Energy Information Administration decided to look back to our nation’s founding. So it plotted the country’s energy use starting from 1776. Most of the result isn’t a surprise: biomass had a long run before fossil fuels took over and stayed on top. But recent years have seen the biggest change since nuclear was added to the mix.
Biomass spent nearly a century on top of the US energy mix before being displaced by coal, although it never went above providing four quadrillion Btus (each Btu is a bit over 1,000 Joules). But biomass never entirely went away, and its resurgence this century puts it at its highest level ever. With nuclear holding steady and renewables surging to nearly the same level as hydropower, fossil fuels are on the verge of dropping below 80 percent of the US’ energy mix.
Fossil fuels haven’t been that low a percentage for over a century. …
Raped On The Battlefield: What Male Veteran Survivors Know
One of the biggest contradictions in America is the fact that, while we’re happy to talk about supporting our troops, we vanish like we just remembered that we left our house on fire as soon as they have an uncomfortable problem. And there’s perhaps no issue that makes us more uncomfortable than the sexual assault of men in the military.
Rape is an awkward enough topic as it is, let alone when it happens to men we picture as muscular heroes willing to take a bullet for us — every societal stereotype comes crashing down at once. But that’s part of why military rape keeps happening. So we talked to five male veterans about their experiences. They said …
#6. Lines Get Blurred When You Send A Bunch Of Young Guys To A War Zone
In war movies, American soldiers usually look like 30-somethings who spend all of their downtime at the gym.
“Bro, do you even airlift?”
But many American soldiers are in fact kids fresh out of high school:
It’s a lot harder to look like the movies when someone isn’t buffing
up your shoulders in post.
That’s what the military prefers; they’re at the peak of physical fitness, and they’ve spent their whole lives following orders at school and home. The only downside is that, like every 19-year-old in history, they’re usually not emotionally mature at all. That’s how you end up with comrades playing “gay chicken,” as Roger, a former marine who fought in Iraq, told us. “Who can do the gayest thing?” …
FIRST 2017 FIAT 124 SPIDER ROADSTERS ARRIVE IN U.S.
Coming to dealerships next week
Click image to embiggen
After a 30-year hiatus, the Fiat 124 Spider has finally returned to our shores. Fiat has shipped the very first batch of new 124 Spider roadsters to the U.S.
The 2017 Fiat 124 Spider roadsters arrived at the Port of Baltimore and the Port of San Diego, and will soon make their way to showrooms in North America. The very first copies will arrive at dealerships next week.
Mazda is producing the 124 Spider for Fiat at its plant in Hiroshima, Japan. The Fiat roadster shares its underpinnings with the Mazda MX-5 Miata. But in place of the Miata’s 2.0-liter naturally aspirated four-cylinder engine, the Fiat 124 utilizes a 1.4-liter turbo with 160 hp and 184 lb-ft of torque. An Abarth version gets an additional 4 hp and is estimated to hit 60 mph in 6.8 seconds. …
Android’s full-disk encryption just got much weaker—here’s why
Unlike Apple’s iOS, Android is vulnerable to several key-extraction techniques.
Privacy advocates take note: Android’s full-disk encryption just got dramatically easier to defeat on devices that use chips from semiconductor maker Qualcomm, thanks to new research that reveals several methods to extract crypto keys off of a locked handset. Those methods include publicly available attack code that works against an estimated 37 percent of enterprise users.
A blog post published Thursday revealed that in stark contrast to the iPhone’s iOS, Qualcomm-powered Android devices store the disk encryption keys in software. That leaves the keys vulnerable to a variety of attacks that can pull a key off a device. From there, the key can be loaded onto a server cluster, field-programmable gate array, or supercomputer that has been optimized for super-fast password cracking.
The independent researcher that published the post included exploit code that extracts the disk encryption keys by exploiting two vulnerabilities in TrustZone. TrustZone is a collection of security features within the ARM processors Qualcomm sells to handset manufacturers. By stitching together the exploits, the attack code is able to execute code within the TrustZone kernel, which is an enclave dedicated for sensitive operations such as managing cryptographic keys and protecting hardware. …
10 Moons Humans Could Colonize
When we talk about human colonies being established in space, many of us probably think of Mars, and with good reason. We’ve been fascinated with the red planet for thousands of years, and both NASA and several private companies are making serious attempts to colonize it within decades.
However, there are several moons throughout the solar system that are seemingly well-suited for us to set up colonies, and with signs of liquid water being present on some of them, we may find life is already there, albeit in microbe form. Whether they could host a small permanent base to launch further missions or a full-fledged colonized society, here are ten moons that human beings may very well call home in the future.
10. Europa
Not only is there a good chance that humans would be able to live on Europa, but it’s also possible that life may already exist there. One of Jupiter’s many moons, Europa has a thick icy crust, but a vast ocean is believed to be underneath it. It also has a rocky inner core, which could help to produce the correct environment to support alien life, be it simple microbes or more advanced living creatures.
Studies of the expected ocean and how it cycles oxygen and hydrogen will be a good indicator for the real chances of life on Europa as well as how real the possibility of humans being able to colonize it actually are. NASA hopes to determine whether the water reacts with the rocky core of the moon and then see if this reaction creates both heat and hydrogen, as the process does here on Earth. The study of oxidants in the icy crust will be an indicator of the amount of oxygen produced and how much of it is “pushed” into the ocean below. …
How research into glowing fungi could lead to trees lighting our streets
Bioluminescence, the peculiar ability of some organisms to behave like living night-lights, could be the key to some remarkable advances
On a moonless night deep in a Brazilian rainforest the only thing you are likely to see are the tiny smears of light from flitting fireflies or the ghostly glow of mushrooms scattered around the forest floor. Both effects are the result of bioluminescence, the peculiar ability of some organisms to behave like living night-lights.
Bioluminescence has been “invented” dozens of times in evolutionary history and serves a variety of purposes, from attracting mates and luring prey to warding off predators. Its existence in fungi – a rare if not unique case of bioluminescence outside the animal and microbial worlds – has posed more of a mystery. But scientists may now be able to explain not only why certain mushrooms glow in the dark, but how – and in doing so they could be nearer to creating glowing trees as a novel form of street lighting.
Aristotle in 382BC and the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder writing three centuries later both observed the effect of fungal bioluminescence when they described the glowing light of the cold “fire” of damp wood. The ghostly glow later became known as “foxfire”, probably from the Old French word fois meaning “false”, and the phenomenon appeared in many works of literature, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn when Tom Sawyer used it to light up a tunnel. …
Library Cat’s Job Is Saved
Why the city council of White Settlement, Texas, decided to fire Browser, mascot and rodent hunter of the public library is not clear, but the vote two weeks ago was 2-1 to banish Browser. Friday, under an avalanche of complaints, the council members decided unanimously that Browser could stay.
Browser got his job six years ago when the library had a problem with rodents. By all accounts, he was a big success and nestled into library-goers hearts.
The Dallas Morning News elaborates on Browser’s job:
“Like most felines, Browser spends a good deal of time napping, lounging and sneaking out the door — but he also attends the library’s GED classes and has an honorary diploma, the library says. And each year, the library sells a calendar full of pictures of Browser as a fundraiser.”
…
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SCOTCH WHISKY
Scotch has been referred to as “the water of life,” and to many who know its allure today, they can understand why. Yet the chronicle of this sometimes, smoky, often nutty, occasionally fruity elixir is poorly known, and in fact, its precise origin is lost to the mists of time (or more likely, drinking Scotch).
What is Scotch?
Essentially, Scotch is malted barley that is fermented and distilled (twice), then allowed to age in oak barrels. In Scotland, Scotch must mature in its barrel for at least 3 years, although most age in the range of 8 to 20. Scotch made in its homeland, Canada and England is called Scotch Whisky (no e), while that made in Ireland and the U.S. is Scotch Whiskey. …
Video Goodnesses
(and not-so-goodnesses)
(and not-so-goodnesses)
English animator Cyriak Harris, who has become famous for his surreal and disturbing animated short films, just released his latest film titled 7 Billion
When I first had the idea for this video there were 7 billion people in the world, and I wanted to see what 7 billion of something actually looks like. I’m not entirely sure if I managed to create that many rabbits as I gave up counting them, and meanwhile 400 million new people appeared, so perhaps my work will never be done.