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parislemon: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

parislemon:

A lot of people have asked for my take on The New York Times piece yesterday about the true cost of making Apple products in China. Let me first just say that it’s an important piece full of good reporting by Charles Duhigg and David Barboza. Parts of it are very sad — sickening, really.

But…

There’s now an egregiously hyperbolic tag-along linkbait article on Mother Jones now that is so beyond the pale in hyper-focusing on Apple that I don’t even have the words.

Is what Foxconn does a labor and humanitarian nightmare? Undoubtably. But honestly, could you see a Dell or a Sony forcing them to open their doors to oversight? Probably Microsoft, but I don’t see much overlap between the demographic making the noise and the one buying Gears of War.

laphamsquarterly: Proven: history loves GIFs. Thanks NYPL! doree: nypl: The Library has just launched Stereogranimator, a site that lets users turn our historic collection of stereographs into animated images like the one above. Read all about it in the Times and then go play! It’s the latest way we’re using technology to bring our collections to the public, following our What’s on the Menu, Biblion iPad app and map warping projects. Caturday will never be the same … So cool! Also, per the Times: “Stereographs, produced by the millions between the 1850s and the 1930s, were a wildly popular form of entertainment, giving viewers a taste of the kind of richly rounded images now readily available on screens of all sizes.” So really, people have ALWAYS loved gifs!

laphamsquarterly:

Proven: history loves GIFs. Thanks NYPL!

doree:

nypl:

The Library has just launched Stereogranimator, a site that lets users turn our historic collection of stereographs into animated images like the one above. Read all about it in the Times and then go play! It’s the latest way we’re using technology to bring our collections to the public, following our What’s on the Menu, Biblion iPad app and map warping projects.

Caturday will never be the same …

So cool! Also, per the Times: “Stereographs, produced by the millions between the 1850s and the 1930s, were a wildly popular form of entertainment, giving viewers a taste of the kind of richly rounded images now readily available on screens of all sizes.” So really, people have ALWAYS loved gifs!

discoverynews: Spectacular Aurorae Erupt Over Norway Over the weekend, the Earth’s magnetic field was struck by a coronal mass ejection (CME). The CME — a vast bubble of solar plasma that had erupted from the sun on Jan. 19 — took longer than expected to travel through interplanetary space, but on Sunday it made contact. keep reading Man, is it wrong that when I saw this, my first thought was: Skyrim sure is pretty.

discoverynews:

Spectacular Aurorae Erupt Over Norway

Over the weekend, the Earth’s magnetic field was struck by a coronal mass ejection (CME). The CME — a vast bubble of solar plasma that had erupted from the sun on Jan. 19 — took longer than expected to travel through interplanetary space, but on Sunday it made contact.

keep reading

Man, is it wrong that when I saw this, my first thought was: Skyrim sure is pretty.

(via npr)

Kill Hollywood, Not Movies

parislemon:

The fallout from the failure of SOPA and PIPA is just as interesting as the main topics themselves. First, many on the web with loud voices are finally waking up to how corrupt the lobbying/political system is in this country. Second, directly-related, there’s a quickly growing anti-Hollywood sentiment.

The most forceful stance has to be Y Combinator putting out a new RFS (Request for Startups) will one goal: Kill Hollywood. 

It’s an important statement and message given the bullshit the MPAA is up to. But it’s also important to separate film, the artform, from Hollywood, the industry.

Read More

Damn.

The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter… if it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he is evil. I think that the worst thing you could say is that he is, basically, an under-achiever. If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse. Woody Allen, in Love and Death (1975) I’ve been thinking about Woody Allen lately. More specifically, his prose. One of the texts we had to read in high school was, if I’m remembering correctly, The Kugelmass Episode. But I’m not sure. It’s weird how time plays with the mind — you know you’ve read something, but you’re no longer sure what. Or you know you’ve read an author, but you’re no longer sure what work the words that drift into your mind were actually coming from.  It’s been gnawing at the edge of my synapses lately, and I think I’m going to finally plunk down and buy the complete prose collection this week. (It also doesn’t help that I know for a fact we didn’t read Madame Bovary in my high school courses — I’m familiar with it more from reading snippets after seeing it referenced in one of my favorite comics.) That said, original source or not, I still find the New Yorker as stultifyingly impenetrable now as I did then. Last I picked up a copy at the doctor’s office, I inevitably started skipping through the comics, re-captioning them all “Christ, what an asshole”. Which, for anyone reading the New Yorker, is about right.

The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter… if it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he is evil. I think that the worst thing you could say is that he is, basically, an under-achiever. If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse. Woody Allen, in Love and Death (1975)

I’ve been thinking about Woody Allen lately. More specifically, his prose. One of the texts we had to read in high school was, if I’m remembering correctly, The Kugelmass Episode. But I’m not sure. It’s weird how time plays with the mind — you know you’ve read something, but you’re no longer sure what. Or you know you’ve read an author, but you’re no longer sure what work the words that drift into your mind were actually coming from.  It’s been gnawing at the edge of my synapses lately, and I think I’m going to finally plunk down and buy the complete prose collection this week. (It also doesn’t help that I know for a fact we didn’t read Madame Bovary in my high school courses — I’m familiar with it more from reading snippets after seeing it referenced in one of my favorite comics.)

That said, original source or not, I still find the New Yorker as stultifyingly impenetrable now as I did then. Last I picked up a copy at the doctor’s office, I inevitably started skipping through the comics, re-captioning them all “Christ, what an asshole”. Which, for anyone reading the New Yorker, is about right.

socialsociety: BLACK WALL STREET is not a record label started by The Game. Black Wall Street was the most prosperous black community in America during the 1920’s located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was known as “Little Africa” or “Black Beverly Hills”, a prime example of racial nationalism. To put into perspective of how money flowed in Black Wall Street, a dollar took 365 DAYS to leave the community, now a dollar leaves an African American Community every 15 MINUTES. The community had hundreds of businesses all negro owned and their motto was “To educate every child”.  June 1, 1921 white supremacists bombed BLACK WALL STREET and killed over 300 people and destroyed over 600 businesses. 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores, a hospital, bank, post office, and most schools were destroyed. The dead were buried in unmarked graves. It wasn’t till 1997 that Oklahoma decided to pass the “1921 Race Riot Reconciliation Act” which provided decedents of that area a free college education. SMH AT AMERICAN HISTORY

socialsociety:

BLACK WALL STREET is not a record label started by The Game.

Black Wall Street was the most prosperous black community in America during the 1920’s located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was known as “Little Africa” or “Black Beverly Hills”, a prime example of racial nationalism. To put into perspective of how money flowed in Black Wall Street, a dollar took 365 DAYS to leave the community, now a dollar leaves an African American Community every 15 MINUTES. The community had hundreds of businesses all negro owned and their motto was “To educate every child”. 

June 1, 1921 white supremacists bombed BLACK WALL STREET and killed over 300 people and destroyed over 600 businesses. 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores, a hospital, bank, post office, and most schools were destroyed. The dead were buried in unmarked graves. It wasn’t till 1997 that Oklahoma decided to pass the “1921 Race Riot Reconciliation Act” which provided decedents of that area a free college education.

SMH AT AMERICAN HISTORY

Don't Be Evil*

parislemon:

*except if evilness is good for business.

The basics: Google, by way of their Getting Kenyan Business Online initiative, stole customers (and data) from rival Mocality. 

Mocality uncovered as much in a clever sting operation, not unlike the one Google itself used to catch Bing “borrowing” search results last year. 

What a fucked up situation. Google has fessed up to it, but is distancing themselves — “a team of people working on a Google project” sure is a funny way of saying “Google employees”. Not good. 

This really isn’t getting enough attention online. There’s a good article over at Ars, but as usual the apologist come out in the commentary.  “If it was a small group that found a way to use the company to run their own scam? No, I’d blame the employees.” Right, because if there’s anything an upstanding, civic-minded company that does ‘no evil’ wants, it’s plausible deniability. Pfeh.