The mural by Eduardo Kobra on 25th Street at 10th Avenue in Chelsea in New York is a visually powerful recreation of the famous 1945 photo by American photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt of a couple kissing in Times Square on V-J Day.
The mural that brightens up the streets of Chelsea is a result of Kobra’s fascination for vintage photos. As a tribute to this lovely scene, the mural is located just steps away from the spot it took place in. The artist’s work is aimed at preserving the historical aspect of the city and to evoke a cultural memory- a lovely way to trigger powerful emotions. By giving a kaleidoscopic reinterpretation of old images, Eduardo Kobra brings them back to life, while also beautifying buildings that are otherwise deprived of personality.
The main poster is neighbored by other great remakes of vintage photos, portraying city life in an original way. The overall result is vibrant and highly captivating.
The Sleepless Goat, a downtown Kingston business staple for almost 24 years, will be closing its doors for good.
“Rent is super expensive where we’re at and we’ve fallen behind,” Christina Avery, member of the restaurant’s co-operative, said. “We don’t have the money to keep it up.”
The financial drain accumulated over the past couple of months. A lack of traffic is said to be largely to blame.
“I feel like the [Big] Dig really stops the flow of traffic,” Jessica Sebastiano, member of the restaurant’s co-operative, said. “I haven’t crunched numbers, but it’s something I would imagine that has affected it.”
In addition, The Sleepless Goat couldn’t afford to renew its liquor licence, affecting business, and there were mounting building maintenance costs.
“The weather has actually had a big impact on our business. There’s been lots of days that we weren’t able to be open,” Avery said. “People have been illegally downloading things on our Wi-Fi, so we’ve had to shut it off completely or face really huge fines. That was in the fall, and that certainly cut into our business. A lot of people studied and worked here.”
Just shy of a year ago, Flickr started offering 1,000 gigs of free storage to every user, along with an automatic uploader tool that would help you take every photo from your computer, your external drives, and SD cards, and dump them into one place. Flickr’s search engine was good, the new universal Camera Roll interface was great, and Flickr suddenly seemed to have a chance as a permanent archive of all of our photos. But then, this morning, Flickr announced that once again its best tools will only be available to paying users. It’s time to call it: Flickr is dead. Over. Kaput. In the search for a few more people willing to fork over $35 a year to fund more purple offices, Yahoo has killed its photo service.
Today’s announcements really only include one change of consequence: The desktop Auto-Uploadr tool is now reserved only for Pro users. That means there’s no easy way to upload big batches of photos all at once, into the same place, unless you’re a Pro member. The move feels a bit like ransomware, Yahoo forcing people who’ve already bought into the idea of Flickr as a permanent backup to start paying for the privilege. And it kills the notion that Flickr can be a useful, simple, automatic way to keep all your photos backed up in one place.
Where to go next? Well, I had always championed Flickr above Google Photos because of its ease of use, Magic View and search functionalities but now the latter seems like the next best option.
My colleague, Owen Williams, has said he is “totally and irrationally in love with Google Photos,” so now is definitely the right time to check it out.
Google Photos offers everything you can get from Flickr and it’s free, so that’s a bonus. It also has some quirky features, like automatically making GIFs from your images, as well as slideshows set to music from groups of photos around specific events, like New Year’s Eve or weddings.
Its search function is up to scratch as well, allowing you to search for pretty much anything, like ‘dogs’ or ‘beach’ and providing you with accurate results. There’s one caveat though, Google Photos only offers facial recognition in the US yet, so you’ll need to use a VPN to enable that right now. It is something that I’d expect to see rolled out globally in the near future.
"This is embarrassing," Elizabeth*, 26, told Mic over the phone, her voice shaking. She was talking about how she discovered her boyfriend was cheating on her after she found a dick pic on his phone.
To hear Elizabeth tell it, her boyfriend had never expressed interest in men before, so she couldn't believe he might be interested in having sex with them. "I knew something was up," she said. She needed answers but wasn't sure where to begin, so she pulled out her smartphone and downloaded Grindr for reconnaissance.
At first, Elizabeth pretended to be a man on her profile, asking around to see if any of the men in her area were sleeping with her boyfriend. "None admitted to it," Elizabeth told Mic. But even though she didn't find out whether her boyfriend was cheating on her on Grindr, something surprising happened after she ultimately broke up with him: "I actually started making connections."
Over time, Elizabeth started regularly hanging out with a few of the men she met on Grindr. "Once I told them I wasn't a guy, a lot of them blocked me. But after I explained [my situation] to the few who would listen, they were all really accepting of me," she told Mic.
While it might seem strange for a heterosexual woman to use one of the largest gay dating apps out there, Elizabeth is not alone. She is one of a number of people who have turned to the app for something other than sex: platonic friendship.
An ominous phalanx of helicopters is bristling with weapons, the lead chopper looming—and wearing a pink bow.
Auctioneers expect this little graffito, stenciled on a construction site in central London, to bring as much as $180,000 at a sale next month hosted by Julien’s in Los Angeles. It's by Banksy, whose work is poised to fetch even higher prices now that a scientific study is out supporting a theory of the anonymous street artist's identity.
Active since the 1990's, Banksy has never revealed himself or herself despite widespread speculation centering on Robin Gunningham, described by a British tabloid as a middle-aged man living in or near London.
“It turns out Robin Gunningham is a very good fit,” said Kim Rossmo, a professor of criminology at Texas State University who worked on the study, published March 3 in the Journal of Spatial Science. “Does that prove he’s Banksy? No, not at all. But if it was a criminal investigation, we would say, ‘Go talk to this guy first.’”
Regardless, the publicity could jack up the value of Banksy's work.
“I think when he’s found out, and if this really is him, his prices will not only be solid, but they will go higher,” said Darren Julien, founder of Julien’s Auctions, which has sold over 50 of Banksy’s works. Julien said Banksy prices could rise 20 to 40 percent this year.
A group of LGBT Conservative Party supporters say they’re making some headway in pushing the federal party to reverse its official stance against same-sex marriage.
LGBTory spent the weekend of March 6, 2016, speaking with hundreds of delegates at Ontario PC party convention, which together drew hundreds of participants from across the country.
Among the weekend’s successes, the group says, was hearing Ontario PC leader Patrick Brown voice support for same-sex marriage, despite opposing it a decade earlier.
“Today I’m proud to support equality in marriage,” Brown told the conference, saying all the federal parties have “evolved.”
In 2006, before entering provincial politics, Brown sat in Parliament and voted with the federal Conservative Party to reopen the same-sex marriage debate, a year after Canada legalized it. “That was part of the federal platform of the day,” Brown said.
Brown also noted he was the first Ontario PC leader to march in the Toronto Pride parade in 2015, in an effort to realign the party, away from social conservativism.
However, Brown has opposed the Ontario Liberal Party’s sex education reform, and also voted three times against initiatives to enshrine gender identity and expression in the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Nuclear thermal is but one flavor of nuclear propulsion. Rosatom did not respond to questions about their system’s specs, but its announcement hints at some sort of thermal fission. Which is to say, the engine would generate heat by splitting atoms and use that heat to burn hydrogen or some other chemical. Burning stuff goes one direction, spaceship goes the other.
The principle isn’t too far from chemical propulsion. The fastest chemical rockets produce thrust by igniting one type of chemical (the oxidizer) to burn another (the propellant), creating thrust. Chemical or otherwise, rocket scientists rate propulsion methods based on a metric called Specific Impulse, “Which means, if I have a pound of fuel, for how many seconds will that pound of fuel create a pound of thrust,” says Robert Kennedy, a systems engineer for Tetra Tech in Oak Ridge, TN, and former congressional fellow for the US House of Representatives’s space subcommittee. For instance, one pound of the chemical mixture powering the Space Launch System—NASA’s in utero rocket for the agency’s planned mission to Mars—produces about 269 seconds of thrust in a vacuum.
[. . .]
The engines the Soviets and Americans were developing during the Space Race, on the other hand, had at least double a chemical rocket’s specific impulse. Modern versions could likely do even better. Which means spaceships would be able to carry a lot more fuel, and therefore fire their thrusters for a longer portion of the trip to Mars (bonus: artificial gravity!). Even better, a thermal fission spaceship would have enough fuel to decelerate, go into Martian orbit, and even return to Earth.
Calling for a fission mission to Mars is great for inspiring space dreamers, but Russia’s planned engine could have practical, near-term applications. Satellites need to fire their thrusters every so often to stay in their ideal orbits (Also, to keep from crashing to Earth). Sokov thinks the main rationale for developing a nuclear thermal engine would be to allow for more of these orbital corrections, significantly increasing a satellite’s working lifespan. Fission power would also give probes more maneuverability. “One civilian application is to collect all the space junk,” says Sokov. “You are free to think of other, perhaps not as innocent applications.”
Russia may have the will to go nuclear, but it probably lacks the means. Rosatom has budgeted roughly 15 billion rubles on the project, which began in 2010 and is scheduled to have a launch-ready vehicle by 2025. That’s about $700 million: eyebrow-raisingly cheap for a 15-year long space project. For reference, just the rocket part of NASA’s Space Launch System is projected to cost nearly $10 billion.
And those 15 billion rubles don’t include the cost of launch, which could be why Rosatom made its 6-weeks-to-Mars announcement last week. “Going public can serve a number of purposes, including getting funding, increasing visibility, things like that from politicians, readers, and others who would like this visionary thing,” says Sokov. Rosatom plans to have a land-based test reactor by 2018.
We’re a long ways away from colonizing another planet—depending on who you talk to—but it’s not too soon to start understanding how we might do it when the time comes. Growing enough food will be one of the primary concerns for any future settlers of Mars. With that in mind, researchers at the Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands have created simulated Martian soil and used it to grow food crops.
This is actually the second experiment the team has performed with simulated soil, and the results were promising. The team harvested not only tomatoes and peas, but also rye, garden rocket, radish, and watercress. But it’s not just the edibles that were promising, it was the overall ability of the simulated soil to produce biomass in general. According to the researchers, the soil produced biomass equal to that produced by Earth soil, which was used as a control.
The team also grew crops in simulated Moon soil, to understand how that soil performed, but it produced much less biomass, and only the humble spinach was able to grow in it. The simulated Martian and Lunar soils were provided by NASA. The Martian soil came from a Hawaiian volcano, and the Lunar soil came from a desert in Arizona.
The soil used was not exactly the same as the soil you would scoop up if you were on the Moon or Mars. It was amended with organic matter in the form of manure and fresh cut grass. While this may sound like a ‘cheat’, it’s no different than how gardens are grown on Earth, with gardeners using manure, compost, grass clippings, leaves, and even seaweed to provide organic matter.
Of course, none of these soil amendments will be available on the Moon or Mars, and we won’t be sending a supply ship full of manure. Colonists will have to make use of all of the inedible parts of their crops—and human feces—to provide the organic material necessary for plant growth. It’ll be a closed system, after all.
[I]n the words of Melissa Amarello, a herpetologist and founder of Advocates for Snake Preservation, "they're shy, gentle creatures with rich family lives. They can have friends. They take care of their kids."
Snakes may be limbless, cold-blooded, and separated from us by a few hundred million years of evolution, but they're similar enough that we should feel empathy for them, says Amarello, who has launched a campaign against snake roundups.
Not too long ago, Amarello's plea could have been dismissed as well-meaning anthropomorphism.
Even among people open to the notion that many animals think and feel in deep, often complex ways, snakes—and reptiles in general—weren't thought to have much going on upstairs. Yet that wasn't quite fair.
Their lack of facial expressions and vocal communication, the very traits that humans rely upon to make sense of one another, predisposed people to consider snakes unfeeling.
Snakes' perceptual world, attuned to temperature and smell rather than sight, is so fundamentally different from our own that it was hard to test their intelligence.
That wasn't the snakes' shortcoming, though. It was ours.
Slowly but steadily, evidence of unexpectedly sophisticated snake behavior has accumulated. Amarello's own research used time-lapse cameras to document social interactions of Arizona black rattlesnakes. Some proved to be loners and others social, with a distinct preference for the company of certain conspecifics—or, in a less fancy word, friends.
Other researchers have described the attentiveness of rattlesnake mothers to their young, as well as a long-unrecognized complexity of social interaction.
Prior to Pierre Trudeau’s amendments, sexual legislation was a direct import from British colonial rule. Up until 1892, Canada aped Britain’s sodomy or buggery laws that, ever unhelpful, considered the crime so grave as to be unnamable and indefinable. Convictions for consensual sex between adult males were rare, as “sodomites” needed to be literally caught with their pants down.
After new “gross indecency” laws were written into British legislation, they were imported almost word for word by a young minister of justice to Sir John A. MacDonald, and eventual fourth prime minister of Canada, Sir John Thompson. At the time, members of Parliament admitted that the vagueness of the bill “might lead to consequences that he [Thompson] does not intend. Thompson responded: “I think it is impossible to define them any better, for the reason that the offences which are aimed at are so various. […] I think it is better to leave it in this form.” He pointed out, rather unhelpfully, that they were no more vague than their English origins.
But the rationale behind these indecency laws was to make a mockery of gay men, explains queer historian Tom Hooper. “It was never designed to populate prisons, it was never designed to gather fines. It was designed to make people an object of scorn, humiliation, and shame so that you can control society through your moral values,” he says.
Hooper’s work explores the infamous 1981 Toronto gay bathhouse raids and community reaction to the Metropolitan Toronto Police’s rounding up of more than 300 men in a single night. While Trudeau’s amendment partially decriminalized homosexual sex, it excluded acts not “committed in private if it is committed in a public place, or if more than two persons take part or are present,” making the raids technically legal. Owners of the bathhouses were also charged under common bawdy house laws, giving police room to maneuver their dubiously titled “Operation Soap.”
The 1981 Toronto bathhouse raids may be the most widely known, but are far from the only time the full force of the law was brought down on members of the gay community—including the 1978 Toronto Barracks bathhouse raids. One of the men arrested there was teacher Don Franco, who sought legal recourse and brought the issue further to the forefront.
“In the weeks after Franco was arrested in that raid, a staff sergeant named Gary Donovan called his school board and notified the school board that he had been charged,” Hooper says. “The police force disassociated themselves from this incident. It was not standard practice to do this, but it was nonetheless seen as a violation of their right to privacy.”
cial network analysis involves studying social structures through the use of networks and graphs, allowing sociologists to visualize and measure properties of the ties that connect individuals, groups, or organizations. Rooted in the formal sociology of Georg Simmel (e.g., dyads vs. triads), anthropology (e.g., kinship diagrams), social psychology (e.g., group dynamics), and mathematical sociology, social network analysis has been used to study friendship and acquaintance networks, terrorist organizations, criminal drug markets, disease transmission, and sexual relationships, just to name a few examples.
How does it work?
One way is to examine the measurable properties or metrics of a given network, including connections (e.g., number, type) as well as the way in which they are distributed (e.g., centrality, distance). For example, Stanley Milgram's (1969) "small world" experiment found that people are, on average, "six degrees of separation" from any other person, a finding that has been replicated more recently by Duncan Watts (2002) using email. Similarly, Mark Granovetter (1973) used social network analysis to learn how people find jobs; rather than through close, personal connections, he found that people tended to find information about job opportunities through acquaintances, a phenomenon he refers to as the "strength of weak ties."
Visual diagrams of social networks – or sociograms – can also be used to highlight structural properties or traits such as bridges and structural holes. Structural holes refer to gaps or the absence of a tie within a given social network, while bridges describe the way in which an individual fills a structural hole by linking two otherwise unconnected groups. Ronald Burt (2004), for example, likens structural holes to social capital; real estate agents, for example, profit from the distance created between home buyers and sellers, while car dealerships serve as middle-men between car manufacturers and consumers.
One of the more interesting applications of this method can be found at the website TheyRule.net which allows users to create interactive diagrams of companies' and organizations' board of directors. Along with some of the aforementioned studies, I also like to show students the connections that link various corporations and institutions. Given that a recent student newspaper article cited complaints with the university's food service provider, several students suggested we look at Aramark.
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