Off-Site Backup

7 years ago
The Rosetta Disc is now safely installed on 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: "Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation." [...]

So assuming the mission continues well, in 2014 the Rosetta Probe will land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will measure the comet's molecular composition. Then it will remain at rest as the comet orbits the sun for hundreds of millions of years. So somewhere in the solar system, where it is safe but hard to reach, a backup sample of human languages is stored, in case we need one.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

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Current Music: CoLD SToRAGE -- Body In Motion ♬

Tetris

7 years ago

Previously, previously, previously.

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Carpenter Brut had a very lackadaisical approach to cable management.

7 years ago
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Location: 37° 46' 15.17" N, 122° 24' 45.79" W

Genres

7 years ago
I refuse to acknowledge any new musical genres until IANA weighs in. The tables are full.

If you are starting a Working Group, ping me. I can help.

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Searching for "finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it" yields excellent results.

7 years ago

(An old Google Japan Apr 1 gag.)

Other fine specimens include:


And these bitches:
Of course I grew up with:

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

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Bald Eagles Eating Chickens

7 years ago
In a battle between a Bald Eagle and a chicken, the chicken is definitely the long shot.

And yet you can't help but root for the eagle. It is a magnificent creature, precision-built to do two things that reliably fill humans with awe -- fly and kill -- and it looks completely at ease doing both. Swooping down, the eagle unfurls its hand-like claws, scoops up a chicken, and sweeps up to a tree, whereupon the larger bird lays the smaller bird on a branch to allow for easy consumption. It's unclear exactly when the chicken dies, but the eagle's beak is quite effective at pulling out the other bird's meat. After a few minutes, all that remains is a clump of feathers and discarded viscera. These gory leavings splatter anything below the tall oaks at White Oak Pastures, a family farm in rural Georgia -- including, one morning, Jenni Harris's SUV.

Jenni's father, Will Harris, the fourth-generation owner of White Oak Pastures in the tiny town of Bluffton (population: 100), is laughing as he tells me about the gut-drenched vehicle. Jenni was unperturbed, he explains; she simply wiped the bloody goo off the windshield before driving away.

What else could she do? The slaughter here is relentless. White Oak is home to one of the largest pastured chicken flocks in the country; at any given time, 60,000 birds wander the land in accordance with pasture-raised parameters. As the next level beyond free-range, this farm never contains its adult birds indoors, instead allowing them to roam without restraint at all times. This also means that for the Bald Eagles that showed up a few years ago, White Oak is an all-you-can-eat buffet.

When I visited in January, at least 75 Bald Eagles were living on the farm, where they overwinter October to March. At that time, Harris estimated each raptor was killing up to four chickens a day, racking up a total of at least $1,000 in daily losses. Due to the birds' protected status under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and other federal laws, Harris had few options. He couldn't kill them. He could try to shoo them, but most methods would be costly and likely to scare the chickens before the eagles.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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David Icke knows the score

7 years ago
Today in the bar I was bitching to a friend about how HDMI is first a restraint and only second a means of moving bits from point A to B, because it was built with DRM from the ground up and therefore its designers notion of fail safe is that if there is any glitch at all, deliver black rather than accidentally delivering something unpermitted, it being a technology beholden to the media cartels, and if someone was trying to design something that does what HDMI actually succeeds at that thing would be called "ethernet", oh, wait, that actually exists.

You know... bar talk...

And this fellow comes in and tells me that he knows exactly what I mean, because the secret aliens who rule the world want to keep us helpless in bondage and they use these technologies to keep us distracted.

"Oh yeah?", I said. I was intrigued by this alien business.

And he went on at some length, and I can't say I really disagreed with any of it, except that where he said "aliens" the words I would have used would have been "corporations" or "Capitalism". Terminology, right? "You shouldn't worry about TVs", he said, "just put in a pool table and teach the drunks geometry." I mean, who can argue with that? "I very much enjoy geometry, but music videos are pretty cool too," I said.

I think They Live was a brilliant movie, but I suspect that where this fellow and I differ is that I don't think it was a documentary... no wait, I absolutely do think it was a documentary, I just think it was a metaphor.

Or maybe I'm just woozy, because for decades they have been turning our atmosphere into their atmosphere.

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Current Music: Pop Will Eat Itself -- Can U Dig It? ♬

Staten Island Ferry Disaster Memorial

7 years ago
The Staten Island Ferry Disaster Museum hopes to correct this oversight by preserving the memory of those lost in this tragedy and educating the public about the truth behind the only known giant octopus-ferry attack in the tri-state area.

It was close to 4am on the quiet morning of November 22, 1963 when the Steam Ferry Cornelius G. Kolff vanished without a trace. On its way with nearly 400 hundred people, mostly on their way to work, the disappearance of the Cornelius G. Kolff remains both one of New York's most horrific maritime tragedies and perhaps its most intriguing mystery. Eye witness accounts describe "large tentacles" which "pulled" the ferry beneath the surface only a short distance from its destination at Whitehall Terminal in Lower Manhattan. Nobody on board survived and only small pieces of wreckage have been found...strangely with large "suction cup-shaped" marks on them. The only logical conclusion scientists and officials could point to was that the boat had been attacked by a massive octopus, roughly half the size of the ship. Adding to the tragedy, is that this disaster went almost completely unnoticed by the public as later that day another, more "newsworthy" tragedy would befall the nation when beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated. The Staten Island Ferry Disaster Museum hopes to correct this oversight by preserving the memory of those lost in this tragedy and educating the public about the truth behind the only known giant octopus-ferry attack in the tri-state area.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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Cyberdeck64

7 years ago
Hosaka Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7. Gen 13 Maas-Neotek™ Biochip. Sendai standard dermatrode adapter. Sense/Net compatible Simstim.


This thing is glorious. And I need all of those stickers for my payphone.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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Current Music: Perturbator -- Technoir ♬

Palmer Luckey: The Facebook Near-Billionaire Secretly Funding Trump's Meme Machine

7 years ago
If this turd was a character on Law & Order it would be just more implausible, hack writing. How do people like this continue to exist?

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey financially backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America, a self-described "social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit" in support of the Republican nominee.

Luckey sold his virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014. The 24-year-old told The Daily Beast that he had used the pseudonym "NimbleRichMan" on Reddit with a password given to him by the organization's founders.

(This does not sound like a robust password management regime to me.)

Nimble America says it's dedicated to proving that "shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real," according to the company's introductory statement, and has taken credit for a billboard its founders say was posted outside of Pittsburgh with a cartoonishly large image of Clinton's face alongside the words "Too Big to Jail."

"We conquered Reddit and drive narrative on social media, conquered the [mainstream media], now it's time to get our most delicious memes in front of Americans whether they like it or not," a representative for the group wrote in an introductory post on Reddit. [...]

"I've got plenty of money," Luckey added. "Money is not my issue. I thought it sounded like a real jolly good time." [...]

Luckey first met the alt-right provocateur in Los Angeles about a year and a half ago, before Yiannopoulos began working on a charity to send white men to college. The Daily Beast later reported that the scholarship fund had resulted in zero financial distribution of the donations that had been made directly to Yiannopoulos's bank account. [...]

Along with Luckey, Nimble America was founded by two moderators of Reddit's r/The_Donald, which helped popularize Trump-themed white supremacist and anti-Semitic memes along with 4Chan and 8Chan. A questionnaire to become a moderator at r/The_Donald posted in March had applicants answer the questions "Is there a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy?" and "Was 9/11 an inside job?"

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

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