I've been deaf since birth and there are lot of "sound words" that I read a lot but don't really know what they mean, and dictionary definitions often just refer to other sound words. It's never mattered to me before, but now I'm trying to write a novel with one hearing narrator and every time I use a sound word I'm not sure I'm using it right. I posted awhile ago to [1] /r/writing about "scream", "shout" and "yell" but I've generated a list of questions so I thought I should take it to a larger audience.

Websites won't risk a fine by failing to meet new cookie rules, the Information Commissioner's Office has said.

"This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides," said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We've never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn's thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you'd expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is."

This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.

In a market where books and games are close rivals for the most popular category on app stores, what happens when today's new gamers are hungry for something more than word puzzles?

It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.

One last thing: If I could trouble someone out there to do me a small favor, I’d like you to contact the manager of my apartment building. Or I guess you could call the Seattle PD. It doesn’t matter. I just don’t want to sit in here too long without being discovered and I’d like for my cats to be rescued.

These two kids saw the GOTYE music video SOMEBODY THAT I USED TO KNOW and fell in love with it. They started requesting the song every time they’d be riding in the car, singing along, of course. One day, their parents set up a go camera behind their seat and taped them over a few car rides. Awesome.

BORN IN DENMARK 1978. I WRITE AND DIRECT TELEVISION SHOWS FOR KIDS. I HAVE A SET OF TWINS AND NOT MUCH TIME FOR ANYTHING. BUT WHEN I HAVE TIME I DRAW MONSTERDRAWINGS ON POST-IT NOTES... IT IS A LITTLE WINDOW INTO A DIFFERENT WORLD, MADE ON OFFICE SUPPLIES.

Needless to say, this part of WWII history doesn't quite fit with the image that us Dutch would like to have as ourselves as innocent victims of the Nazi occupation, where after the war everybody had been in the resistance.

You know what? I'm sick of pretending. I went to art school, wrote a dissertation called "The Elevation of Art Through Commerce: An Analysis of Charles Saatchi's Approach to the Machinery of Art Production Using Pierre Bourdieu's Theories of Distinction", have attended art openings at least once a month for the last five years, even fucking purchased pieces of it, but the other night, after attending the opening of the new Tracey Emin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, I'm finally ready to come out and say it: I just don't think I "get" art.

Those other computers were good and they were popular, but - on a national, social and for me, personal level - the Spectrum was a phenomenon. It was a mercurial presence, a flashpoint, and it changed everything. It changed me.

The liberal/neoconservative alliance is responsible for most of America's major military interventions of the past two decades, as well as other key initiatives like NATO expansion. By contrast, realists have been largely absent from the halls of power or the commanding heights of punditry. That situation got me wondering: What would U.S. foreign policy have been like had realists been running the show for the past two decades? It's obviously impossible to know for sure, but here's my Top Ten List of What Would Have Happened if Realists Had Been in Charge.

This is an unofficial list of well-known unsolved codes and ciphers. A couple of the better-known unsolved ancient historical scripts are also thrown in, since they tend to come up during any discussion of unsolved codes. There has also been an attempt to sort this list by "fame", as defined by a loose formula involving the number of times that a particular cipher has been written about, and/or how many hits it pulls up on a moderately sorted web search.

To begin with, if you remember nothing else, remember this: A book is a machine. For all the magic, mystique and awe that may surround it, the bound book is a machine. And like all machines, it will obey the laws of physics that have been built into it, whether or not they were what the binder intended. If a book was bound, rebound or repaired without regard to how all the parts work together to make the machine work, the laws of physics will relentlessly tear it apart, even while it is sitting quietly on a shelf. If a binding structure was made aesthetically pleasing, but too weak to support the textblock, gravity will do its job. If a hinge is not properly made, or repaired, it will not be a hinge and do what hinges do, which is to open and close the book. It will instead be a lever, and it will do what levers do, which is to pry apart the book.

Bill Buxton has spent most of his career getting between humans and computers. While his initial focus was on music and digital instruments, that eventually led to an interest in human-computer interaction, and pioneering work with multitouch systems and other user interfaces. He worked with the famed hotbed of innovation Xerox PARC in the late 1980s and early 90s, and was later Chief Scientist for software firm Alias Wavefront before claiming the same title at SGI Inc. when that company acquired the former in 1995. After a time running his own Toronto-based design and consulting firm, he moved on to Microsoft Research in 2005, where he continues to serve as the organization's Principal Researcher. We recently had a chance to pick his brain and get his thoughts on a range of issues, including state of design at Microsoft, the future of natural user interfaces, and whether we're really entering a "post-PC" era.

The ZX Spectrum can boast some 15 thousand titles, which is about ten times more than what is currently available for either GBA or NDS alone. This is quite a lot of games to choose from. To put it into perspective, if you try out one title each day, it will keep you occupied for more than forty years. So, where do you start?

IBNIZ is a virtual machine designed for extremely compact low-level audiovisual programs. The leading design goal is usefulness as a platform for demoscene productions, glitch art and similar projects. Mainsteam software engineering aspects are considered totally irrelevant. IBNIZ stands for Ideally Bare Numeric Impression giZmo. The name also refers to Gottfried Leibniz, the 17th-century polymath who, among all, invented binary arithmetic, built the first four-operation calculating machine, and believed that the world was designed with the principle that a minimal set of rules should yield a maximal diversity.

There are three episodes left for season four (teaser for 4x20, "Worlds Apart") and if Fox doesn't give Fringe a possible thirteen-episode fifth-season renewal, they have shot two different endings for season four.

It seems that games and the people who play them are growing up at the same time. While there is still a seedy, immature underbelly of niche gaming (one that reveals itself in incidents like the inflammatory hailstorm of verbal abuse against Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler), there is also every indication that there is a generation of “gamers” who are able to examine, and understand, the medium that they love. There is no doubt IGN will still throw cringe-inducing taglines into their RSS, and that mainstream videogame news coverage (FOX News, etc) will demonize video games in order to drive ratings. These monolithic structures are, at this point, as inevitable as they are unfortunate. However, something exciting has happened in their shadow; out of the dankness of that ground a generation of darn good writers has taken root and started to grow.

There’s been a lot of talk as to when video games are going to have “the Citizen Kane of videogames,” some sort of overwhelming magnum opus that makes non-gamers respect the medium. I have a more pressing and reasonable goal – when will we get our “Roger Ebert” of video game criticism? As Dave Thier recently put it, the people who write game reviews seem to be less “game critics” than they are “game enthusiasts.” They love games, and they want games to be great. They’re exceptionally optimistic about the future of video games. They’re eagerly anticipating the day that video games are the predominant form of media, eclipsing television and movies.

Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages. Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence. Choose from two different modes: novice, where the computer learns to play from scratch, and veteran, where the computer pits over 200,000 rounds of previous experience against you.

Overheerlijke Marokkaanse en andere Arabische gerechten met daarnaast lekkere recepten uit verschillende keukens

This video essay explores the style in the television series The Wire.

It’s been a fantastic year for Roguelikes, with continued development of the stalwarts and plenty of releases that have toyed with the formula, sometimes reshaping it until it’s almost unrecognisable.

An Associated Press story that ran Wednesday morning told the tale of a North Korean press bus that took a wrong turn into a part of Pyongyang usually shielded from reporters. Woops!

After decades spent battling gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace, the feminist movement underwent a high-level shake-up last month, when 53-year-old management consultant Peter "Buck" McGowan took over as new chief of the worldwide initiative for women's rights.

A curated stream of interesting articles.

Je bent nergens meer veilig, niet in het verkeer, evenmin thuis en zeker niet op een boot. Dat heet toeval of noodlot en hoeveel blauw ook op straat, of hoe streng de straffen: het zal altijd blijven gebeuren. Heden mosselen, morgen gij.

Millions are annihilated, every major city has been destroyed, but nobody you really like has died. It’s a Hollywood ending in that way, too.

“Girls can learn how to play just as well as boys,” Susan says. “But they often approach the game differently. Girls would rather solve chess puzzles than play against one of their friends,” she says. Boys will always choose to compete.

Shocking, Horrifying, Fascinating The full documentary.

What if we could compile a list of the best textbooks on every subject? That would be extremely useful. Let's do it.

Suzanne Ciani working on the music and sounds for the Xenon pinball game from the Omni televsion show. hypnotic in places

Boston Dynamics is getting close to mastering quadrupedal motion with Big Dog and Cheetah (previously). And are working on bipedal motion with Petman (previously), but how about a robot that is able to leap (up to the top of) tall buildings in a single bound? Sand Flea!

Here we spent the year reading books and emulating great writers, constructing leads that would make everyone want to read our work, developing a voice that would engage our readers, using our imaginations to make our work unique and important, and, most of all, being honest. And none of that matters. All that matters, it turns out, is that you cite two facts from the reading material in every answer.

Yup. I am SO buying this book.

That we parted too suddenly and unexpectedly with the great leader Kim Jong Il last year was the greatest loss our nation had suffered in its 5 000-year-long history and the bitterest grief our Party and people had experienced.

find out how sex toy recycling works

What happened when one of the world’s most unusual, and beloved, computer programmers disappeared.

Because the Barsoom books were so influential to cinema's greatest sci-fi auteurs, just about everything in it had already been plundered and reused by other hits. And as a result, the more that was revealed of John Carter, the more derivative it looked, even if its source had originated these ideas. Look at what George Lucas took from Burroughs for his Star Wars movies alone: In his movies, the Sith are evil Jedis; in the world of John Carter, the Sith are evil insects. Star Wars had Princess Leia; John Carter has Princess Dejah. Leia’s infamous bikini in Return of the Jedi? Worn by Princess Dejah first. That flying skiff she’s standing on next to Jabba the Hutt? Carter again. Even those banthas in the Star Wars were culled from the John Carter books, which are populated with similar-looking beasts of burden called banths. Looking beyond Lucas, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry famously pillaged the books, as did James Cameron, who in numerous interviews called Avatar “almost an Edgar Rice Burroughs kind of adventure.”

Liberals tend to underestimate the importance of public discourse and its effect on the brains of our citizens. All thought is physical. You think with your brain. You have no alternative. Brain circuitry strengthens with repeated activation. And language, far from being neutral, activates complex brain circuitry that is rooted in conservative and liberal moral systems. Conservative language, even when argued against, activates and strengthens conservative brain circuitry. This is extremely important for so-called "independents," who actually have both conservative and liberal moral systems in their brains and can shift back and forth. The more they hear conservative language over the next eight months, the more their conservative brain circuitry will be strengthened.

Cette série de cartes imaginant l’avenir des femmes dans différentes professions a été éditée par l’imprimerie A. Bergeret de Nancy en 1902.

It's rare that two obnoxious phenomena completely jump the shark at the same time.

Met de dood van de Franse stripmaker Jean Giraud, die ook publiceerde als Moebius, verliest Europa een van zijn invloedrijkste auteurs.

The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.

JALOERS.
"One day I’m sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves. But because I’ve been interested in data for a very long time, I started doing this long ago. I actually assumed lots of other people were doing it too, but apparently they were not. And so now I have what is probably one of the world’s largest collections of personal data. "

I couldn’t even bring myself to fight back. I just stood there. I was one of the few true Dark Jedi Masters, and I let him kill me. That very act illustrated perfectly what SOE did wrong. Those of us who had faithfully put in the hours and weeks and months required to earn those lightsabers were spit on and betrayed by the very architects of the game we loved.

Catherin Tate vindicated! Redheads have a reputation for being feistier than others, and there may be some truth in this. Scientists are gradually piecing together a picture which seems to indicate that redheads are constituted differently to other people.

Santiago Caruso is an Illustrator from Buenos Aires who sometimes refers to himself as a graphic journalist. He has illustrated books and both album and book covers.

THE danger may have passed for the residents of Wagga Wagga, but spare a thought for these little guys and gals.

Many of us remember Andrew Huang‘s DIY sci-fi short, “Doll Face“, which went viral on YouTube in 2007, boosting the USC graduate’s professional career. Huang’s most recent work, this short film called “SOLIPSIST“, is nothing short of a vibrant, sensual revelation. It earned the multi-disciplinary artist and his team the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short at Slamdance 2012.

Aggravure is an ongoing series of large wall installations by Baptiste Debombourg. His latest, Aggravure III, was inspired by drawings from 16th century engravers Hendrick Goltzius, Jan Harmensz, Cherubino Alberti and utilizes nearly a half million metal staples tacked to a wall, taking 340 hours to complete.

There are a few real problems with the audio quality and 'experience' of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we're not going to see any actual improvement.

Increasingly, projects are websites.  You don’t have to be a power programmer; you can cut-n-paste Javascript and run node.js and then you go get mongoDB or Redis as a backend and you’re thinking you’re scalable!  Get with the movement!

The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012 (2012-02-22)

Karen Carpenter’s voice takes me to that happy safe place when I was young and everything seemed possible.

Afghan Jewry may date back 2700 years. Today, there is but one: Zablon Simintov. Zablon, of Turkmen-Afghan descent, is a carpet trader and the caretaker of the only synagogue in Kabul. Zablon had a feud with Ishaq Levin, the second-to-last Jew of Afghanistan.

Daily Dispatches from the Internet's Worst Reviewers

What do you do when orphaned baby sloths are afflicted with mange? Shave them, rub them with lard, and wrap them in sloth pajamas.

Use more than one finger, and wiggle them a little to “tickle” the gag reflex. i personally use three…makes me feel like i am choking and everything comes up.

Nothing more need be said. Gawk in silence

Creating iOS apps is fun and rewarding, and if you're a new developer you might be wondering where to begin. This road map provides the perfect starting point for iOS app development. On your Mac computer, you can create iOS apps that run on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. Follow this road map to learn where to get the tools you need, understand the major concepts and best practices, and see where to find more information.

Social segregation, cultural appropriation: the six-hundred-year history of the European Roma, as recorded in literature and art, represents the underside of the European subject's self-invention as agent of civilising progress in the world, writes Klaus-Michael Bogdal.

In 2006, I launched a show called "The Show With Ze Frank." It was one of the most strange, exciting, difficult, and amazing things I have done so far. I think it is time to do something similar, what with the economy in the crapper and the election coming up. If Newt can do it, so can I. So can we.

That's the most surprising thing about Mountain Lion. Not what Apple did, but that it makes clear a startling reality: Microsoft is the new Apple, thinking of ways to make a better, more productive experience for users. Sure, MS might fail, but at least Redmond is breaking new ground and trying to push computing forward.

Think about that for a second: Mountain Lion is conservative and boring—even gaudy at times. Meanwhile Microsoft is pushing the envelope and being innovative and elegant in its approach to user interface.

Hell. It froze.

It’s time to apologize to Sinéad O’Connor.

In many ways the mobile platform war feels like the desktop race of the early ’90s. Apple had a huge lead, refused to license and is now about to be overtaken by hordes of nondescript clones. But in this race the main competitor is Google rather than Microsoft and the devices are smartphones instead of beige desktops. It’s just a matter of time until Android overtakes iOS now.

Since Metro-style applications for Windows 8 should all have a touch-first experience, Microsoft has recently released a brief but useful “Windows 8 Touch Guidance” documentation on how developers should think about touch in their applications. The four-page PDF touches (pun) on some interesting touch characteristics of Windows 8 – including but not limited to drag-down/up for select/deselect, semantic zoom and panning and swipe from edge.

The first, but maybe the most important, of many changes that will allow PHP to achieve a more elegant feel is to remove that symbol so beloved by the US and replace it with something altogether more refined. More solid. More ... sterling.

In other words, the United States Army had successfully developed the technology to transmit voices into a person's head.

If Romney is a scripted automaton who could make it through a year's worth of marital coitus without one spontaneous utterance, Gingrich is his exact opposite – taken prisoner in war, Newt would be blabbing state secrets without torture within minutes, and minutes after that would be calling his guards idiots who lack his nuanced grasp of European history, and minutes after that would be lying to two of his captors about an affair he had with the third.

Try any of that on a Windows box and Cutler tells you where to get off. But in the world of Apple there is no sanity checking whatsoever: any line of rogue code in any program written by any programmer in the world can contain a bug that hoses the entire system. And that bug can be prevalent or latent and only once in a great while manifest itself. And users can go on for the longest time blissfully unaware.

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result – my address book was in Path’s hands.

Patrick Stewart's very moving article on domestic violence.

The case against burning wood is every bit as clear as the case against smoking cigarettes. Indeed, it is even clearer, because when you light a fire, you needlessly poison the air that everyone around you for miles must breathe. Even if you reject every intrusion of the “nanny state,” you should agree that the recreational burning of wood is unethical and should be illegal, especially in urban areas.