As a person who at least two to three nights a week doesn’t understand why we plan menus and grocery lists when we could just be eating an egg on toast, scrambled, crispy, poached or soft-cooked and smashed, I, too, would expect this site to have more frittata recipes than it does. (It has one. Sorry.) But I don’t make them much at all because they always feel like a lot of work for something that’s essentially a baked omelet with none of the 2-minute butter-drenched speed of a French one. (We’re also on an omelet kick.)
What really piqued my curiosity was the inclusion of “sugar”... Including only about four one-hundredths of a percent (i.e., 0.04%) of this additive protects or stabilizes the potassium iodide. If no glucose was present, the potassium iodide would eventually break down into its component parts - namely potassium and iodide ions. The iodide ions could then combine to form iodine that could actually vaporize and leave the salt.
Image cropped for size and color-corrected from the original.
The problem first came to light in a post on the DSL Reports Security Forum. DSLR member “Mike” from Pittsburgh got curious about the integrity of a USB drive that the ADA mailed to members to share updated “dental procedure codes” — codes that dental offices use to track procedures for billing and insurance purposes.
“Oh wow the usually inept ADA just sent me new codes,” Mike wrote. “I bet some marketing genius had this wonderful idea instead of making it downloadable. I can’t wait to plug an unknown USB into my computer that has PHI/HIPAA on it…” [link added].
Sure enough, Mike looked at the code inside one of the files on the flash drive and found it tries to open a Web page that has long been tied to malware distribution. The domain is used by crooks to infect visitors with malware that lets the attackers gain full control of the infected Windows computer...
In response to questions from this author, the ADA said the USB media was manufactured in China by a subcontractor of an ADA vendor, and that some 37,000 of the devices have been distributed.
I just watched this idiot reporter on KCAL questioning people who were protesting outside of the Republican State Convention in Northern California today.
They were, unsurprisingly, protesting Donald Trump’s rhetoric and message. They were largely younger people, and they were unhappy about his misogyny, bigotry, racism, and xenophobia.
So this stupid reporter, who either knows better and doesn’t care, or is so profoundly ignorant of what he’s reporting on he shouldn’t be there, starts asking the protesters, “Don’t you think Donald Trump has the right to free speech?”
Okay, stupid, let’s break this down for you because apparently any idiot can call himself a reporter these days and get hired by a network. The protesters aren’t government or law enforcement, or agents of the state, so they can’t abridge or prevent Trump’s speech. They aren’t using the apparatus of the state to interfere with his ability to say whatever he wants, so the question about his free speech is irrelevant.
This idiot is asking the wrong question because he’s lazy, stupid, unprepared, or being deliberately obtuse. The question is not “don’t you think Donald Trump has a right to free speech” the question is … well, just to pull three off the top of my non-professional-journalist head: “Why do you feel this way, why are you here, what do you hope to accomplish?”
This idiot did nothing to educate his viewers, and spread the false idea that challenging someone’s ideas has anything to do with that person’s constitutionally-protected right to free speech.
This stupid reporter has conflated Free Speech with speech free of consequence, which is something I’d expect from a 12 year-old, not someone who is allegedly a professional television reporter.
Teen Vogue recently featured seven young women of color in an illuminating video on its website about cultural appropriation. Daunnette Reyome, a 17-year-old Omaha model from Atlanta, was the sole Native American who made an appearance. In her brief interview, Reyome pushed back on stereotypes about indigenous people and discussed the spiritual significance of Native American cultural markers, like the eagle feather she wears in her hair.
i don’t understand why people don’t instantly respond to “what would your dream superpower be” with the ability to manipulate probability. think about it. what’s the chance someone will drop 1mil in front of me? 0%? let’s make that 100%. what’s the probability i’ll wake up tomorrow and be X gender? 100%. what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
as a casino employee I can confirm this would be terrifying as fuck
I still like teleport, no error, whether I’ve ever been there or not.
The superpower of
probability
is terrifying for other reasons.
what’s the probability my bathtub is filled with mac and cheese? 100%.
Consider all the unlikely things that must occur in just the proper sequence for this to happen. It’s not just wishing 50 gallons of mac & cheese into existence – that’d be a different superpower.
No, we’re talking about some serious reality bending here.
Like maybe: an 18-wheeler hauling a load of instant Kraft macaroni & cheese collides with a tanker truck filled with water outside your home. Both vehicles erupt into flame, which cooks the combined noodles & cheese mixture within a small non-nuclear mushroom cloud of an explosion.
The cooked mixture of mac & cheese (and burning fuel!) rises into the air on thermals a hundred feet above your house, exactly above your bathroom.
At just the right moment, as the starchy cloud of cheesy noodles reaches the apex of its hideous arc, a freak storm causes a lightning bolt to crash down out of the blue, blasting a hole in your roof above the bathtub.
Shingles and plywood explode away from the roof and are diverted to the side by sudden 50 mph crosswinds… which, because of freak weather conditions, are perfectly timed to whisk away the roof debris but stop just as suddenly before the descending cloud of mac & cheese can be blown aside.
Four seconds later there is a moist mighty THLUPPPPnoise as ~50 gallons of half-cooked, badly mixed mac & cheese & diesel fuel land in a soggy mess within your bathtub.
Ding! Your bathtub full of mac & cheese? Probability 100%.
Also: two dead truck drivers, untold collateral damage from the explosion, a wrecked roof, dangerous storms trashing the neighborhood, and a disgusting inedible mess in your bathroom.
Oh wait, you wanted it perfectly cooked, ready to eat? Too bad… you didn’t specify that. And if you had, imagine the FURTHER ridiculous unlikely events required to make that happen.
Because you’re not just wishing shit into existence. You’re shifting realities.
Which, if you’re selecting for a very improbable circumstance means moving a LOT of existing reality out of the way – which takes energy. Because reality has inertia & momentum just like a river does, and does not want to be diverted.
This might be the most terrifying super power ever, just from its side effects.
Microscale master Paul Wellington recreated the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh’s campus library at the University’s request. Paul used approximately 4800 individual LEGO pieces to achieve a convincing scale replica of the building and surrounding greenery. Some of the excellent microscale techniques on display here include vertical tiles set into the base as columns, and the trees (a similar style to those seen in Rocco Buttliere’s Palace of Westminster).
See more of Paul’s microscale work on his Flickr page.
Jeffrey Cranor is a writer for the podcast, Welcome to Nightvale (I listen to it, it’s entertaining). And he gets messages.
I was just about to listen to Episode 3. If you continue to advertise “trigger warnings”, I will no longer listen to your podcast and will advise every person whom I know not to listen.
The clarification that the podcast contains a description of someone being assaulted is pathetic. Stop it or lose listeners.
You know what’s pathetic? The people who get upset that a writer might show a little courtesy to someone who has had a more traumatic experience in their life than they have had; that a writer or a professor can recognize that the people listening to them are not blank, passive ciphers but have also brought their own history with them, and that what is merely an entertaining or academic exercise for us may actually be a lived experience for our audience.
So we give a small nod to those listening. We say, in effect, “I’m going to tell you a story, but I appreciate that it may bring back unpleasant echoes to some of you.” It’s saying that we respect the audience and understand that there are deeper contributions that some of them may make to some parts of what we’re telling them.
And then, of course, there are some members of the audience who are blank, passive ciphers and have never had a stressful experience…or they have, but they never learned from it. And they resent being reminded that there are other people present who have had more complex lives than they have had — and they don’t like being reminded that they are privileged little puddings. So they complain. Their lives are so fortunate to them, that having to listen to a 20 second warning message that a story includes a description of an assault is more traumatic to them, by their accounts, than an actual assault was to someone else.
It’s no surprise that the same people who are aggravated by trigger warnings are also the people who deplore codes of conduct at conferences. How dare you tell me that others might suffer from my actions? Freedom! Freedom excuses everything!
Of course, Cranor is a professional writer, while I’m just a guy with a blog. So what took me several paragraphs to explain, he can whip off in a line. A perfect line:
Grow up, you whiny little shit.
I’ll have to remember that. My usual response is to just roll my eyes, but that lacks the verve of a good punchy dismissal.
According to the report, three people suffered minor injuries in the accident, including the bus driver. A Dudley DeBosier representative declined to comment on whether the firm is now representing any of those people, but if they aren’t, then I’d have to question the effectiveness of bus advertising.
This lovely towerblock by delayice is a great piece of microscale building. The blue and grey color scheme creates a sense of modernity and style, and there’s good details in the lower lobby building at the tower’s base. Check out the offset “headlight brick” providing wall texture and window detailing — nice work.
There’s a real art in depicting decay and dilapidation in LEGO. The solid colors and straight lines of our favourite construction system tend not to lend themselves well to such subjects. But Maciej Drwiega has nailed it with this rusting rail truck. Smart color combinations and a clever sideways construction technique have created a convincing impression of battered and bruised metal.
Whilst I’m not really a train guy, I’d heartily recommend a visit to Maciej’s photostream, where you’ll find excellent photos of more lovely railway models and layouts. I particularly like the images shot with tilt-shift.
One excerpt from an extended biography of a potential First Lady:
Melania is as fastidious a wife as she is a mother, which Donald appreciates. Things come easy with her. “I work very hard from early in the morning till late in the evening,” Donald told Larry King in 2005. “I don’t want to go home and work at a relationship.” To the twice-divorced Donald, Melania is terrific. He’s never heard her fart or make doodie, as he once told Howard Stern. (Melania has said the key to the success of her marriage is separate bathrooms.) He can trust her to take her birth control every day, he boasted to Stern; she’s just amazing that way. She has the perfect proportions—five feet eleven, 125 pounds—and great boobs, which is no trivial matter. Stern once asked Trump what he would do if Melania were in a terrible car accident, God forbid, and lost the use of her left arm, developed an oozing red splotch near her eye, and mangled her left foot. Would Donald stay with her?
“How do the breasts look?” Trump asked.
“The breasts are okay,” Stern replied. Then, yeah, of course Trump stays. “Because that’s important.”
It is the unique entity in the genus Chrysocyon. "There are no known extant or extinct species that come close" (because it's the only one that survived the mass extinctions of the Pleistocene).
Addendum: The evolutionary advantage of those long legs can be seen in this video of it in its natural environment (hat tip to Brazilian reader Binho).
China is on a collision course with the world’s leading powers over excess steel output after it refused to sign up to an emergency global plan to cut capacity and eliminate subsidies. The clash comes as fresh data confirms fears that China is still cranking up production and even reopening shuttered plants supposedly due for closure, despite the massive glut on the world market. Chinese mills produced a record 70.65m tonnes in March, 51pc of global output and five times as much as the whole EU...
“The scale of the emergency in the sector means it is now life or death for many companies,” said Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU trade commissioner... Brussels has been slow to roll out anti-dumping sanctions, partly due to pressure from Britain and other states courting China for their own political reasons. While the US has imposed penalties of 266pc on Chinese cold-rolled steel, the EU has acted more slowly and stopped at 13pc...
Emmanuel Macron, the French economy minister, said Europe can no longer tolerate the flood of Chinese supply. “You do not respect the rules of world trade. Your steel output is subsidised, and the excess capacity is dumped below cost. It is destroying our productive capacity, and it is unacceptable,” he said...
“The American steel industry faces the greatest import crisis in modern history,” said Tim Murphy, head of the Congressional steel caucus. “We’re at the tipping point, with US mills averaging only 70pc of capacity utilisation, a level that is simply not sustainable. We are in real danger of losing this industry and becoming dependent on foreign countries. We can’t let that happen.”..
“China is still selling steel in the EU market at prices below its own production costs, and that does not even take into account transport...”
Yet any sanctions risk setting off tit-for-tat retaliation, and a slide towards 1930s-style protectionism.
Earlier this year Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios filed a lawsuit against the makers of a Star Trek inspired fan film, accusing them of copyright infringement.
The dispute centers around the well-received short film Star Trek: Prelude to Axanar and the planned follow-up feature film Anaxar.
Among other things, the Star Trek rightsholders claim ownership over various Star Trek related settings, characters, species, clothing, colors, shapes, words, short phrases and even the Klingon language.
The makers of the fan-spinoff responded to several of the allegations last month. Among other things, they argued that the Klingon language is not copyrightable because it’s not more than an idea or a system. They therefore asked the court to dismiss or strike the copyright claims in question.
Paramount and CBS disagreed. In their reply the rightsholders called the argument absurd and among other things, they pointed out that the language system is not very useful if there are no real Klingons to communicate with.
Considering the stakes, the lawsuit has drawn the attention of the Language Creation Society (LCS), a non-profit that aims to promote the art and craft of language creation. The group submitted their opinion to the court yesterday, siding with the makers of the fan-film.
In their amicus brief, which actually uses Klingon language, the LCS points out that it’s understandable that Paramount Pictures feels that they own the language. After all, they commissioned Linguistics professor Marc Okrand to create some of the language thirty years ago.
However, this doesn’t mean that the copyright claims hold ground.
“Feeling ownership and having ownership are not the same thing. The language has taken on a life of its own. Thousands of people began studying it, building upon it, and using it to communicate among themselves,” the LCS notes.
“As the Klingon proverb says, we succeed together in a greater whole,” the brief adds, with pro-bono attorney Marc Randazza writing in Klingon.
The brief, partially in Klingon
The Language Creation Society lists many examples of how Klingon has evolved, and it specifically disputes Paramount’s earlier claims that there are no human beings who communicate using the Klingon language.
“In fact, there are groups of people for whom Klingon is their only common language. There are friends who only speak Klingon to each other. In fact, at least one child was initially raised as a native speaker of Klingon,” LCS writes.
“Now that Klingon has become an actual living language, Paramount seeks to reach out and stake its ownership by using copyright law. But, as ‘Klingons do not surrender’, neither do those who speak Klingon,” they add.
As such, Paramount should not be allowed to claim copyright over the entire Klingon language, both in written and spoken form. The language is a tool for people to communicate and express ideas, something people should be allowed to do freely under U.S. law, LCS argues.
If Paramount is allowed to claim copyright over the language, they would be able to silence the free expression of thousands of people, many of which helped it to evolve in recent years.
“Klingon gave Star Trek characters convincing dialogue. But, it broke its chains and took on a life of its own – a life that the Copyright Act has no power to control. Klingon, like any other spoken language, provides tools and a system for expressing ideas,” LCS writes.
“No one has a monopoly over these things, effectively prohibiting anyone from communicating in a language without the creator’s permission. This is not permitted by the law, and it is not why the Constitution allows Congress to provide copyright protection,” they add.
Summing up, the Language Creation Society sides with the makers of the Star Trek spin-off, asking the court to dismiss the copyright claims over the Klingon language, so it can be used freely and continue to evolve.
It is not up to the California federal court to decide whether the ‘Klingons’ can prevail or not.
This is really common and it makes me want to scream.
Dear way too many companies: You don’t get a cookie for publicly noting that your industry or sector has problems with hiring and retaining PoC, women, and/or LGBQ and trans folk, and then expect them to volunteer to fix it. Put your damn money where your mouth is.
You want people to spend their own time, away from family, friends, and home, to develop initiatives that will bring better talent into your company, improve employee retention and loyalty, and be great for social perception, and then you want them to be thankful for the opportunity to do so for free? Fuck that.
Look, a lot of us do free activism work. And yes, some of us do free private sector activism work. But at its root the resistance to appropriately compensate diversity activists within companies is the message that diversity is, itself, worthless.
So if you want people to help bring value to your company, you need to value the people who are doing so. Make it part of their jobs. Bake it into the structure of your organization.
I see so many places that are willing to spend money on big, visible ‘awareness’ events, conferences, speakers, ads… and stop at the line of paying the people that organize this work. The message is clear: the value to the company for diversity is advertising.
Now, I’m not accusing these places of being totally evil, like this is some giant, conscious plan. I don’t even think they often know that they’re doing this. Social awareness on both an individual and institutional level tends to default towards the visible rather than the introspective – for example, many white folks (of which I am one, of course) are very concerned with not being seen as racist, rather than working on internal racism (hence the tendency towards weird defensive anger when one of us gets called-in on something).
So I’m totally willing to believe that most companies, when they start these kinds of initiatives, are really truly believing they’re addressing the problem. But the work most be addressed on multiple scales, both the social and visible (events) and the individual (compensation). If you say you value your marginalized and minority employees, then for fuck’ s sake, actually value them.
I love his books. But there he goes, getting all naive and narrow:
Novelist Ian McEwan recently summed up the impulse to see two categories: “Call me old-fashioned,” he told an audience, “but I tend to think of people with penises as men.”
I’m 9 years younger than McEwan, which I guess makes me one of those young whippersnappers. I’m still kind of peeved at this tendency to ascribe certain regressive views to entire generations, as if old people get excused from simple humanity, and are all done with learning and growing. I’m not planning on turning into a simple-minded fool in the next few years (not that it can’t happen!).
But right now I can say I don’t think like Ian McEwan.
I tend not to think about people’s penises, or lack thereof.
I’ve met thousands of people, and so far, none of them have introduced themselves by showing me their genitals. I don’t think that would be a particularly helpful revelation, anyway; I’ve found a bit of conversation to be far more revealing.
I tend not to characterize people into one of two groups by the degree of enlargement of their embryonic genital tubercle, either. That seems a kind of crude and useless taxonomy. In general, lumping humanity into men on one side and women on the other seems like a useless distinction that ignores a tremendous amount of nuance.
I’m going to start thinking of people in terms of their blood groups. I really should start hanging out with more type O people, in case there is a tragic accident and I need a transfusion. I’m incompatible with those A and B people, and those ABs, just forget it. But at least I’ve divided humanity into four arbitrary subsets, rather than a mere two.
Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of type O people as potential blood donors.
When I saw this sculpture by Chris Maddison, I didn’t think it was possible for all the pieces to be freestanding and connected. Even if supports were used, I couldn’t imagine how they could be Lego parts given the haphazard angles that the cubes were positioned. Even zooming on the photo and examining the gaps between the bricks revealed that each small cube is supposedly made out of a plain 2×2 brick sandwiched between a plate and tile. Just when I (and many others) thought the sculpture was impossible, Chris revealed the solution to this wonderful illusion.
Ah, Republican hypocrisy. Ripe and pungent, flowing everywhere. While they’re flailing across the land to gin up a new moral panic over transgender people needing to pee, they’re also rushing to defend a convicted child molester who was one of their own. Dennis Hastert, form speaker, is guilty of sexually abusing children when he was a wrestling coach, and is about to be sentenced. His pals have written letters begging for leniency, and those letters have been made public, because the judge refused to accept them unless they were made openly.
So here’s the verminous Tom DeLay:
So I know his heart and have seen it up close and personal. We all have our flaws, but Dennis Hastert has very few. He is a good man that loves the lord. He gets his integrity and values from Him. He doesn’t deserve what he is going through. I ask that you consider the man that is before you and give him leniency where you can.
So we get a heavy dose of Christian hypocrisy, too. If Hastert gets his integrity and values from Him, that really puts an insidious twist on Matthew 19:14 (Suffer the little children to come unto me).
I also have to ask: do transgender men and women deserve what they go through?
“The scale of the emergency in the sector means it is now life or death for many companies,” said Cecilia Malmstrom, the EU trade commissioner... Brussels has been slow to roll out anti-dumping sanctions, partly due to pressure from Britain and other states courting China for their own political reasons. While the US has imposed penalties of 266pc on Chinese cold-rolled steel, the EU has acted more slowly and stopped at 13pc...
Earlier this year Paramount Pictures and CBS Studios filed a lawsuit against the makers of a Star Trek inspired fan film, accusing them of copyright infringement.
