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Smooches
Smooches
THIS DAY IN HISTORY: JULY 6TH- KILLING A FRIEND, THE EXECUTION OF SIR THOMAS MORE
This Day In History: July 6, 1535
“Let not your spirits be cast down, for I hope we shall see one another in a better place, where we shall be free to live and love in eternal bliss.” – Sir Thomas More
It wasn’t just Henry VIII’s wives that bore the brunt of his ire. His closest pals also met untimely ends for rubbing His Majesty the wrong way. One of the most unexpected was his lifelong friend and confidante Sir Thomas More.
Born in London in 1478, More studied Law after serving as a page to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He showed great proficiency as a scholar, studying Latin, Logic, History, Mathematics and French. In 1497, More met renowned scholar and humanist Desiderius Erasmus and struck up a life-long friendship. …
Los Angeles Is a Very Different City After Dark
Photos show how the cityscape is remade each night.
South Main Street at 109th Street.
The sunny Los Angeles of popular imagination becomes a very different place after nightfall. After 2 am, the city’s poorer neighborhoods become especially desolate and unfamiliar. The number of stray cats easily matches that of people on the streets. I have visited these neighborhoods and their residents during the daytime for decades, witnessing their evolving forms in detail. But this time, I wanted to allow my imagination to play freely with the city at night, to experience these neighborhoods in the darkness, at a time when dreams and reality may merge.
A woman sleeps at Casa Shalom, New Hampshire Street.
A few of my encounters were with police officers. One was a very short, middle-aged Latino officer in Compton who stopped me and shined his flashlight from above to examine my eyes. Reassured that I was not drunk or on drugs, he asked me if I was the pastor of the church across the street. I felt a jump in my status from potential outlaw to a man of God. I could not help noticing his prominent set of false teeth, which gave an eerie feeling to the proceedings. Another time, seeing me standing on the roof of a car, a policeman driving by Broadway in South LA stopped and asked: “What are you doing there?” He then took a picture of me and left with a warning: “Somebody is going to come and steal your car.” …
A Brief History Of America’s Middle Class
A father plays with his children outside their house in 1952.
“The middle class is disappearing” has been a standard line during this election cycle. As it turns out, it’s not wrong.
Last year was the first recorded year that middle-income families no longer made up the majority in America, according to the Pew Research Center. What this actually means economically is a mixed bag, but “middle class” in the U.S. has historically stood for something less concrete: the American dream.
Between now and the election, All Things Considered will be looking at what it means to be middle class in America today.
Here is a brief timeline of how the concept and foundation of the American middle class has shifted over the past century:
April 1939: For the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co. commissions a one-hour film telling the story of a family called the Middletons. The Indiana family visits the fair and is won over by the Westinghouse exhibit’s futuristic display of middle-class lifestyle and leisure. …
10 World-Changing Events Last Month
Keeping up with the news is hard, so hard that most of us miss all but the biggest stories. In our new feature, we save you the hassle by rounding up the most mind-blowing events each month. Events that shocked us all and shook the established order to its core. Events that somehow changed the world. Events like . . .
10. Britain Voted To Commit Economic Suicide, Immediately Regretted It
The day June 23, 2016, will go down as the date the British took one look at their reputation for stability and rational thinking and decided: “Forget it.” In a nationwide referendum, the country voted by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent to leave the EU, tearing up 40 years of political consensus and redefining Europe.
The shockwaves of the vote caused the pound to hit a 31-year low against the dollar. The FTSE 100 (the British version of the Dow Jones) plunged, before stabilizing, plunging some more, and then shooting upward. Over $3 trillion was wiped off global markets in the biggest two day-rout in history. And that was just the economic impact. …
TRUMP, THE MAN AND THE IMAGE
His words increasingly signify his confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.
The presumptive Presidential nominee of the Republican Party—let’s call him Donald Trump, though “Donald Trump” is more like it—has a way with words, after a fashion. The mouth moves and stuff comes out. (“That could be a Mexican plane up there. They’re getting ready to attack.”) Except when he reads from a teleprompter, the words paradoxically seem both calculated and careless. Trusting a G.P.S. all his own, Trump is most at ease wandering syntactically all over the map until he spots an off-ramp: “Lyin’ Ted,” “Crooked Hillary,” “Goofy Elizabeth Warren,” “Build a Wall.” The result ain’t oratory. Still, the words entertain, wound, outrage, delight, bemuse, stupefy. More than a year into Trump’s candidacy, they also signify the speaker’s confusion about who he is and what he has got himself into.
Throughout the primaries, Trump rallies routinely featured his boasts about the most recent polling results. In the absence of plausible policy specifics, a coherent philosophy, a regard for nuance, or an acknowledgment of the exigencies of governance, this ritual seemed an end in itself. From there, he would ramble on about China, winning, losing, Islamic terror, Muslims, Mexicans, bigness, something about something that must be true because he read it or heard it somewhere, the disgusting lying press, and, inevitably, his fantastic super-successful incredibly intelligent self. The faithful could never get enough. One can imagine George Orwell trapped in a sea of waving “Make America Great Again!” signs when he found the poetry to define the design of political language: “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” …
Experts: Donald Trump Is Lying About His Fundraising Haul
After releasing fundraising reports that were anemic at best, Donald Trump’s campaign announced in one single email blast he had raised at least $3.3 million. If that figure seems impossible, that’s because it is.
If it only took one email for Donald Trump to raise more than $3.3 million, just think of the possibilities for the future of his campaign.
Of course, the operative word here is “if”—as in, if Team Trump’s boast about raising so much, so quickly were true. It’s probably not.
Donald Trump’s fundraising operation has been riddled with rookie errors—it’s been unsophisticated, untested and very small throughout his presidential bid, leading digital marketing experts to question whether it would be possible to actually raise the extraordinary figures he claims to have raised in a single fundraising email he sent last week.
“Throughout the entire election process, Trump has had the weakest effort in terms of sheer list size, the frequency of sending and the number of unique subject lines, which is an indicator of… sophistication. He really is vastly outgunned by political opponents on the Republican and Democratic sides,” said Jordan Cohen, the Chief Marketing Officer at Fluent, an advertising technology company that works with campaigns on both sides of the aisle. …
Top 10 Bizarre Festivals in India
India is a land of mysticism and spirituality with several local traditions culminating in exchanges of religious ideas. Deities, which emerged with only regional cult traditions eons back, have grown to be worshiped widely today.
Consequently, by absorbing various rituals and practices, devotees came up with creative and somewhat bizarre ideas to express devotion toward their chosen deity. Listed below are the most eccentric festivals celebrated with extravagant pomp in India.
While some might make us flinch, some festivals will have us wanting to pack our bags and head straight to India to witness this large variety of cultural traditions.
10. Puli Kali ~ Kerala
At the festival of Puli Kali in Kerala, thousands of tigers come to life, dancing and prancing around in the streets. But if you get too close, they won’t bite (hopefully) because they are simply devotees impersonating tigers.
Dressing as a tiger is a long, drawn-out process wherein the upper body of male devotees is covered in layers of paint, intricately designed as the animal down to the last whisker. The festival’s name translates into “play of the tiger,” and with men dressed as hunters, the devotee tigers play a game of hide-and-seek in which they try to avoid the hunters’ clutches. …
CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS VOTE TO ABOLISH F.B.I.
In a stunning rebuke to one of the nation’s oldest and most established law-enforcement agencies, House Republicans voted unanimously on Tuesday to abolish the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Unlike most House measures, which come up for a vote only after months or even years of sluggish effort, the bill to eliminate the F.B.I. was drafted in a matter of minutes on Tuesday morning, Republican staffers confirmed.
House Speaker Paul Ryan offered no specific reason for the Republicans’ sudden frenzy of activity to abolish the F.B.I., but said that the Bureau represented “big government at its worst.” …
The disturbing data on Republicans and racism: Trump backers are the most bigoted within the GOP
Racists are more likely to be Republicans — and the most extreme among them are Donald Trump supporters
Presumptive 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is a bigot. He wants to ban Muslims from entering the United States, believes that Hispanic and Latino immigrants come to America in order to rape and kill white women, uses anti-Semitic imagery to slur Hillary Clinton, and has been endorsed by white supremacists.
At present, the Republican Party is the United States’ largest white identity organization. There is a mountain of evidence in support of this claim. The Republican Party nurtures and cultivates hostility towards non-whites among its voters for the purpose of electoral gain. What is known as “The Southern Strategy” of racist “coded appeals” against African-Americans and other people of color has dominated Republican politics since (at least) the end of the civil rights movement. And during the Age of Obama, American politics has been poisoned by racist conspiracy theories such as “Birtherism,” lies that Barack Obama is a type of Manchurian candidate who actually hates America and wants to destroy it from within, efforts to rollback the won in blood gains of the Black Freedom Struggle, as well as unprecedented efforts by the Republican Party to abandon its basic responsibilities of governance in order to delegitimize the country’s first black president.
Donald Trump is not an outlier or aberration. In many ways, he perfectly embodies the racist attitudes and beliefs of the Republican Party in the post civil rights era. Likewise, Donald Trump’s supporters have enthusiastically embraced the Republican Party’s racism towards people of color, in general, and against black Americans, in particular. …
THE DAY JOHN LENNON MET PAUL MCCARTNEY
Much of the genesis of the Beatles is a bit nebulous and is often argued, but most Beatles historians cite the date, July 6, 1957, as the official beginning of the Beatles.
John Lennon, a neighborhood guitar-player (local trouble-maker, part-time shoplifter and full-time egomaniac) had been playing around at a few local gigs in the area for a year or so. John’s initial band was called “The Blackjacks”, consisting of a few of his mates from school. Soon thereafter, the band’s name was changed to “The Quarrymen”, in honor of their present school, Quarry Bank High School.
It was on July 6, 1957 that John and his ragtag band were playing twice at the St. Peter’s Church fête in the Woolton Parish. The Quarrymen, led by John, played on the back of a coal truck, giving one performance in the morning and another in the early evening. Several cameras were snapping shots of the fête, and the very brash Lennon took the lead vocals on a few of the popular rock ‘n roll songs of the day. …
New Mexico Defrauds The Poor Out Of Food Stamps, Whistleblowers Say
Despite working as a home health aide in New Mexico for nearly two decades, Kimberly Jones was struggling to get the hours she needed to make ends meet. She was living in a hotel room, and every day she had to make a choice.
“Do I eat or do I pay for the room? Or how can I squeeze them both? Because, you know, the hotel wants their money,” Jones says. “They don’t care if you eat or not.”
Jones applied for food stamps. She says the state worker she met with told her she was eligible for expedited assistance, and she’d get her benefits within a week.
But the money didn’t show up. Not for two months.
In a recent federal court hearing, nine employees of New Mexico’s Income Support Division — which oversees food stamps — took the stand to testify about fake assets being added to food stamps applications. …
Washington’s Hollow Men
The government/media power elite are spectacularly ignorant of the American people.
The Clintons attend a rally in Hooksett, N.H., February 9, 2016.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion.
– T.S. Eliot
In Merced or Dayton, if an insurance agent, eager to help his wife facing indictment, barged into a restaurant where the local DA is known to lunch, he would almost certainly be told to get the hell out.
But among the Washington elite, the scenario is apparently quite different. The two parties, in supposedly serendipitous fashion, just happen to touch down at the same time on the Phoenix corporate tarmac, with their private planes pulling up nose to nose. Then the attorney general of the United States and her husband, in secrecy enforced by federal security details, welcome the ex-president onto her government plane. Afterward, and only when caught, the prosecutor and the husband of the person under investigation assure the world that they talked about everything except Hillary Clinton’s possible indictment, Loretta Lynch’s past appointment by Bill Clinton and likely judicial future, or the general quandary of 2016.
There has been a lot of talk since Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump of the corrosive power and influence of the “elite” and the “establishment.” But to quote Butch Cassidy to the Sundance Kid, “Who are those guys?”
In the case of the ancient Romans or of the traditional British ruling classes, land, birth, education, money, government service, and cultural notoriety were among the ingredients that made one an establishmentarian. But our modern American elite is a bit different. …
The Creepiest Serial Killers (Who Still Remain At Large)
In western society, we sure do love stories about serial killers. But mostly, we love our serial killers in one of two flavors — dead, or in prison. That’s why we make movies about them — to see them get caught in the end (and hopefully shot by a rogue detective who doesn’t play by the rules). But in real life, there are absolutely serial killers who do their thing for years, or even decades, without ever getting caught.
#5. A Guy Poisoned Nearly 50 Vending Machine Customers, Got Away With It
In 1985, people all over Japan started falling victim to a wave of deadly poisonings. 35 people were hospitalized and 12 more were killed, all found to have been poisoned with the herbicide paraquat. Police were baffled about the source of the toxin, until they discovered the one thing every case had in common: The victim had recently drunk a beverage from a vending machine (not all the same one, though). This being Japan, the land of five vending machines per square foot, that hardly narrowed things down.
This tastes funny; call an ambula- Wait, never mind,
I accidentally got Mountain Dew.”
…
Scientists Taught a Robot to Hunt Prey
Google’s autonomous cars may look cute, like a yuppie cross between a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe and a sheet of flypaper, but to make it in the real world they’re going to have to act like calculating predators.
At least, that’s what a handful of scientists at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland believe. They recently taught a robot to act like a predator and hunt its prey—which was a human-controlled robot—using a specialized camera and software that allowed the robot to essentially teach itself how to find its mark.
The end goal of the work is arguably more beneficial to humanity than creating a future robot bloodsport, however. The researchers aim to design software that would allow a robot to assess its environment and find a target in real time and space. If robots are ever going to make it out of the lab and into our daily lives, this is a skill they’re going to need. …
Drivers are warming up to autonomous cars. Mostly.
The results of two new studies — one big, one really big — on what consumers want in autonomous cars have been released recently. The answer of both is, in a nutshell, we want to be able to let a car drive on its own when driving is monotonous or annoying, like during the daily commute. But we also definitely want to have the ability to take control of the car if something goes wrong. Or if we just want to drive the fun parts.
Volvo is a leader in the autonomous car race, with 100 autonomous-capable vehicles being deployed to customers in Sweden next year in its Drive Me program and ADAS of varying degrees of assistance in its vehicles currently for sale. It released the results of its “Future of Driving Consumer Survey,” which gathered responses from 50,000 people around the world. It turns out that 72 percent of drivers want to “preserve the art of driving,” according to the report. That would be the majority who still want to take on the twisty bits of road themselves. …
The Hazard of Tesla’s Approach to Driverless Cars
A fatal crash calls into question the car company’s approach to building autonomous vehicles—and underscores the stark contrast between its strategy and Google’s.
The interior of a Tesla Model S is shown in Autopilot mode in San Francisco
In the aftermath of a fatal crash that killed the driver of a Tesla Model S using a new feature called Autopilot, much of the focus has been on the driver.
It’s not known whether he was speeding—or perhaps even watching a movie—at the time of the collision, as some reports have suggested. More details will surely emerge as a federal investigation moves forward.
Better understanding the driver’s role in the crash may offer crucial context for an incident that could shape the future of autonomous driving. Though the Tesla vehicle isn’t technically a driverless car, Autopilot is arguably the most sophisticated partially-autonomous system on the roads. But the possibility of a technical failure isn’t all that’s at stake. Because even if the driver is deemed to be at fault, the man’s death highlights the extent to which Tesla’s approach to driverlessness differs from Google’s. Tesla may be asking itself: Did it make a strategic mistake? …
10 Fascinating Pre-Columbian Cultures
Thanks to the innate need of human beings to categorize things with seemingly arbitrary criteria and possibly some Eurocentric biases, the varied cultures of the Americas are divided by the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. Having said that, here are 10 interesting pre-Columbian cultures.
10. Chimu Culture
Occupying much of the northern coast of Peru, the Chimu culture is believed to have arisen sometime in the 10th century AD. Possibly descended from small remnants of the Moche culture, which had flourished in the area centuries earlier, the Chimu built one of the most notable archaeological sites in all of South America: their capital city of Chan Chan, the largest pre-Columbian city on the continent. However, the former great city is now uninhabitable, thanks to a severe lack of water. (A vast network of canals supplied the Chimu people living there with their water.)
Though much of their culture was derived from their agricultural prowess, in no small part due to their ability to create irrigation marvels, the Chimu were also quite proficient with metalworking, specifically with gold and silver. Their pottery has a unique look, a shiny black finish which has been attributed to firing the clay at high temperatures within a closed kiln.
However, as was always the case with smaller cultures, the Chimu were eventually subsumed by their larger neighbor, the Incas. Between the years of 1465 and 1470, consecutive invasions by the great Incan king Pachacuti and his son Topa (aka Tupac) ended the independent rule of the Chimu and they eventually faded out of existence. …
Amazon moves one step closer toward army of warehouse robots
Robotics competition prize for best warehouse-working ‘picker’ machine awarded to robot designed by Dutch team
Amazon’s progress toward an army of helpful robots is one step closer: a prize for the best warehouse-working “picker” machine has gone to a robot designed by a team from TU Delft Robotics Institute and Delft Robotics, both based in the Netherlands.
The competition was held in conjunction with Germany’s Robocup in Leipzig. Announced on Monday, the winners took home $25,000, while the university of Bonn’s NimbRo won $10,000 for second place and Japanese firm PFN was awarded $5,000 for third.
The contest, in Amazon’s words, “aimed to strengthen the ties between the industrial and academic robotic communities,” and ended with slightly fewer than half of the entrants scoring more than 20 out of 40 possible points, according to a report in TechRepublic. The technology is advancing quickly: all of those contestants would have surpassed the highest scorer in the previous Picking Challenge, held just three years ago. …
TP-LINK loses control of two device configuration domains
Security researcher Amitay Dan warns that tplinklogin.net, a domain through which TP-LINK router owners can configure their devices, is no longer owned by the company, and that this fact could be misused by malware peddlers.
What’s the problem?
In a post on the Bugtraq mailing list, Dan says that TP-LINK has confirmed that they no longer own the domain in question, and will not be trying to buy it from the unknown seller for now.
Instead, they intend to change the domain in the manuals to a newer one that’s already in use.
Michael Horowitz noted that, for a while now, TP-LINK has been directing users of its newer routers to a new domain for configuration – tplinkwifi.net – which is under the company’s control.
Unfortunately, the labels on older routers can’t be easily changed, and will still direct users to the old domain.
“If cybercriminals get their hands on this router configuration domain, it could become a significant tool for malware distribution using simple instructions, for example, to ‘download new firmware to your router,’” Lior Kohavi, CTO at CYREN, told Help Net Security. …
CARROTS USED TO BE PURPLE BEFORE THE 17TH CENTURY
Today I found out, before the 17th century, almost all cultivated carrots were purple.
The modern day orange carrot wasn’t cultivated until Dutch growers in the late 16th century took mutant strains of the purple carrot and gradually developed them into the sweet, plump, orange variety we have today. Before this, pretty much all carrots were purple with mutated versions occasionally popping up including yellow and white carrots. These were rarely cultivated and lacked the purple pigment anthocyanin.
It is thought that the modern day orange carrot was developed by crossing the mutated yellow and white rooted carrots as well as varieties of wild carrots, which are quite distinct from cultivated varieties. …
Video Goodnesses
(and not-so-goodnesses)
(and not-so-goodnesses)
Baby human learn how to use their hand. Baby elephant learn how to use their trunk.