“Today, Hiedar again has plans to build a robot, inspired by his , software development and “redheaded” women. His invention, which he calls Tena, was designed to rescue the injured from the line of fire. (Tena is named after a Swedish redhead he met on a plane once; Those few hours sitting next to her inspired a lifelong dream to build a robot bearing her name.)” — Cyber warfare: the Pirates of Aleppo | GlobalPost
“We Are Users Of Our Users.” — What Is A User? — waho cooooolllll — Medium
“a “conspiracy to commit espionage” charge—whether its against Julian Assange, James Rosen, or a New York Times reporter—is better characterized as “conspiracy to commit journalism.” — Virtually Everything the Government Did to WikiLeaks is Now Being DReporters | Freedom of the Press Foundation
As a result, the entire imaging room now looks like something straight out of the imagination of Walt Disney himself, and the sedation rate has plummeted from 80 percent down to ten. Dietz apparently always gets choked up when he tells the story of his creative journey and its results, including the fact that he once saw a little girl finish her scan, go up to her mother and ask, “Mommy, can we come back (again) tomorrow?” That’s the thing about overcoming scary stuff — it strengthens us and makes us more fearless over time. Bandura called the result “self efficacy,” or as Kelley describes it, “These people who had lifelong fears… ended up having less anxiety about other things in their lives; they tried harder, they persevered longer and were more resilient in the face of failure.” (via Touch a snake & slap a pirate | onesmartpoptart)
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It is the painting known as Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, by Francisco Goya, an image that has been imprinted on my psyche since I first viewed it in college, in 1969. Critics have called his Saturn a symbol of evil, a Satan, a monster, and that is how I first saw him—like a huge, mad Richard Nixon, devouring the young men of America through the Vietnam War: a cannibal father, jealous of our freedoms, determined to destroy us, our ideals, our hopes. (via “The Mystery of Goya’s Saturn” by Jay Scott Morgan)
With the series – 82 prints inspired by the Peninsular War – Goya broke an ages-old, iconographical tradition. Dating back to Assyrian reliefs and Trajan’s column, war art had always previously been commissioned by the winner, in celebration of his triumph. To the victor, the spoils – and the commemorative art. Disasters Of War, however, was commissioned by no one. It was Goya’s private project, which he never even published in his lifetime. Unflinchingly he depicts mutilation, torture, rape and many other atrocities besides – performed, indiscriminately, by French and Spanish alike. This art wasn’t partisan, it was a grim observation of man’s potential inhumanity to man; of the true barbarities of war. (via How Disasters Of War made Goya a ‘modern’ artist | Art | Agenda | Phaidon)
A key difference between those books and this one however is that the encyclopaedia was produced with the blessing of the soviet authorities, who valued the insight it provided into the criminal subculture within the camps. Drawings from the Gulag however was a secret work which Baldaev worked on in the days when the full horror of Stalin’s system had not yet been admitted to. It was a private defiance of forgetting from a man who had himself seen the cruelties of the system from both sides — for long before he became a prison guard his father had fallen victim to Stalin’s purges. Baldaev subsequently spent part of his childhood in an orphanage for ‘enemies of the people.’ (via Review: Drawings from the Gulag by Danzig Baldaev « The Dabbler)
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“No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.” — Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
38. Car density
It’s a real pain when you’re standing on the platform, and the car you always get on is full. So then you have to run to the next car, not knowing if it’s going to be full or not. And sometimes, you miss the train, causing even more tension & anger.
Live tracking, based on the weight of the cars, could determine this info. When you get to the platform, you can check the screen, and figure out where to stand. This results in better distribution of riders.
(Source: alexob)
A poll from Fidelity Investments earlier this week found 70% of graduates had at least some debt, and the average was $35,200. That figure is higher in part because it includes debt owed to family and credit-card balances. (via Number of the Week: Class of 2013, Most Indebted Ever - Real Time Economics - WSJ)
SCIENCE FINDS - INDUSTRY APPLIES - MAN CONFORMS (via Paleofuture - Paleofuture Blog - Technology and Man’s Future (1972))