Qais F

Hell is Other People, an experiment in anti-social media. It uses FourSquare to track your 'friends' and calculates optimal locations for avoiding them.

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What, pray tell, is this remarkably versatile piece of utilitarian jewelry? It’s a “chatelaine,” which bore all the accessories most useful to an extremely fancy woman living in the 19th century. They held all sorts of things, from whistles to thimble buckets, and the really well-made chatelaines were minor aesthetic miracles.

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Buzzfeed: This Music Video Takes Twerking To A Whole New Level:

“This video invites you to drown in a sea of butts — male and female — while enjoying the balls-out vocal stylings of a rapper who, unlike Lady Gaga, isn’t going to “follow you until you love me,” but instead “until you fuck me.” This lyrical update to “Paparazzi” is reflective of Nicky Da B’s whole style in “Go Loko” — he’s elevating the idea of a dance party track to a fabulously extreme (and sexxxy) level.” (via Rusty Lazer)

At this point, we'd all do better to quit our day jobs (or night jobs, if you're me) and start writing Twilight fanfic. Who's in? More »

makeup by dina day

bestmadeco:

Gift Guide: The Famous Red Collection

It’s that time of year, and so to the Don Quixotes, and the Holly Golightlys: we salute you, and we pay our respects with a short & sweet “Famous Red” curation — essential tools in the timeless art of seduction. He will never expect a first aid kit, and she will never expect an axe: thus ensuring the element of surprise to be your advantage…

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One thing was abundantly clear at this afternoon's city council meeting on Seattle's police drones (insert joke about the city council droning on here). Nobody likes them very much.

The ACLU doesn't like them, the public really doesn't like them, council members are skeptical about them (some more openly than others), and even assistant police chief Paul McDonagh kept a measured tone when talking about the latest, flashiest tool in crime-fighting technology.

Which makes all the political sense in the world: since the city found out that the police department acquired two drones with a federal homeland-security grant in 2010 (without telling anybody), the public response has been overwhelmingly negative.

This afternoon, the city council's committee on public safety, civil rights, and technology (Bruce Harrell, Mike O'Brien, and Nick Licata) met to discuss a proposed bill regulating how the SPD can use its two drones. Also at the table: representatives from the ACLU, the SPD, and the Seattle Human Rights Commission.

Towards the end of the meeting, council member O'Brien pointedly told assistant chief McDonagh he was "disappointed" that it was a "beg-forgiveness, not ask-permission conversation." In other words, not a meeting about whether Seattle police should have drones, but how they should be used.

During the public-comment period, speakers (11 in all, roughly a third of the attendees, not counting journalists) also complained about the fait accompli nature of the conversation. The afternoon's loudest applause went to O'Brien after he offhandedly mentioned the possibility of forcing the SPD give the drones back.

Still, we've got them. And committee chair Bruce Harrell sees an opportunity—to become the first city in the country to pass a law defining how and when police drones can be used.

At the meeting, council staff member Christa Valles said the federal government has issued hundreds of licenses for agencies to use drones, but there's almost no data, research, or community regulation of how and when they get deployed. (Though the city council of Charlottesville, Virginia voted this week to ban drones outright.)

If Seattle can pass a good, restrictive bill—courtesy of council member and current mayoral candidate Bruce Harrell—it could set a national precedent. And make a nice-looking feather in Harrell's cap.

But besides Harrell and assistant chief McDonagh, pretty much everyone else in the room (including Licata and O'Brien) seemed to fall somewhere between deeply skeptical and outright hostile to the idea that such a bill could be written and enforced, much less insure that police wouldn't succumb to the temptations of mission creep—today's tool to save an innocent baby held hostage by a mad gunman could be tomorrow's tool for unconstitutional surveillance.

And even if the city wraps a tight girdle around SPD's drones—what kind of data they can collect, when and how they can collect it, how long they can keep it before deleting it, when it is or is not admissible in court—what's to prevent the FBI or another federal agency from seizing that data and using it however they like? We've already seen what kind of batty undercover projects the FBI and the SPD have collaborated on.

Even the strictest city guidelines will inevitably become a Pandora's box and will inevitably be broken and abused.

And yet—the drones are here. And they're spreading. Even if Seattle throws its two in the trash, some politicians somewhere are going to have to make some rules.

The major points of the proposed bill, as described during today's meeting:

(1) It prohibits the SPD from buying more drones, or swapping or borrowing other drones, without the city's permission.

(2) Drones can only be used for data collection on a specific "target"—that can't just fly over crowds and collect general surveillance.

(3) Data gathered by the drones that isn't pertinent to some case must be deleted in 30 days.

(4) SPD must obtain a warrant to use its drones, except in "exigent" circumstances—search and rescue, hostage crises, etc.

(5) SPD's drones can use facial recognition and other biometric tools but only to identify their specific "target."

(6) Drones are not allowed to fly at night (already a federal regulation).

(7) Drones are not allowed to fly over heavily populated areas.

(8) There will be publicly available "compliance" audits and annual reports on drone usage.

Council members, along with their guests, debated some of these points. Council member Licata made the excellent points that (a) drones are being pushed on law-enforcement organizations by the growing drone industry and (b) that the devil is in the "exigent" exemptions on the SPD having to get a warrant. If those rules aren't iron-clad, there might as well not be any rules at all.

He pointed out that, at one time, the FBI identified Martin Luther King as the gravest danger to America. "If the FBI was in charge," he said, "they would be following him with drones."

Then the committee adjourned. It will meet again in a few weeks.

As assistant chief McDonagh stepped out of city hall onto the wet sidewalk, a portly man in a suit—who wasn't at the meeting but seemed to know him—said hello.

"It's not often that you see chief McDonagh and the ACLU under the same roof!" the man joked. Assistant chief McDonagh gave a small, perfunctory smile.

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A look inside Katrina van Grouw's stunning The Unfeathered Bird: An Illustrated History of Avian Anatomy.

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My husband read about San Francisco based interior design firm O + A in an issue of Fast Company magazine. Their focus is workspaces, and let me tell you, I'd give anything to be able to spend my days in environments like this (instead of staring at row upon row of dreary cubicles and industrial carpeting). Lots of cool ideas here that can translate to residential spaces.

George Hart's Snarl Wood is made from twenty identical pieces...

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Geoffrey Lilge, Box Series, Walnut (2013) 

www.onourtable.ca

3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more, but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human embryonic stem cells. Using stem cells as the "ink" in a 3-D printer, researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a specific pattern. More »

We all know the things that deal a blow to our voices. Anything that injures the throat physically, like a hit or a physical constriction, will leave us croaking. Same with infections, or excessive use of the voice, or sometimes just plain stress. We've all experienced the strange semi-choking sensation of not being able to make a sound. For some few, roughly four out of every hundred thousand, that first spasmodic chocking of the vocal cords never goes away. These people are generally aged thirty to fifty, and have no family history of voice disorders, but their vocal cords physically never recover, continually going into spasm, sometimes after every sentence, and sometimes after every other word. This is spasmodic dysphonia. More »

The absolute best part of the so-garbage-it's-good feature film Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters was the vast collection of lady witches, a.k.a. "arrow fodder.". Character designer Ulrich Zeidler has released his collection of horned-head witches and boil-necked beauties for your ogling pleasure. They are so hideously gorgeous we want them to start a band. More »

Mary River Turtle photos by Chris Van Wyk

Kickin’ it in the Mary River in Queensland, Australia, the Mary River turtle was discovered in 1995 but almost immediately went on the endangered species list and when photographer van Wyk snapped these underwater shots of one of the Mary River turtles sporting a punky green algae-hawk, the images were used to help support opposition to a proposed dam that would affect the turtle’s habitat. It also personally gave me inspiration to hit up my hair stylist and ask for the “Mary River”.

Photog: Flickr (additional info: TreeHugger)

scoutsma:

#what

Cartoonist Rube Goldberg drew out comically complex machines that satirized the inventor's zeal to make modern life more convenient. Here, parkour practitioner Jason Paul throws himself in the middle of a warehouse-sized Rube Goldberg machine, complete with life-threatening tumbles and falls. More »

If you live in a home where you don't have the room for a full-sized desk, but don't want to settle on a small table to work from, Ikea Hackers shows off a build of an "office in a box" that folds down so it can be stored just about anywhere. More »

This DIY toy sol­dier cos­tume is one of the coolest Halloween costumes I’ve seen yet.

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