The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:
1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service
Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim - ironically because it leads to bad customer service.
Early 2000s MTV style music video for a song with lyrics that matter. The Hold Steady is a band that constantly produces songs that are catchy, but the lyrics are far more serious than those of similar/contemporary rock bands. A lot of their songs are timeless yarns regarding youth scenes, parties, and the things that happen around those environments when youthful exuberance is taken to the extreme. In addition, these lyrics don't seem to be at all related to the video. Strange but interesting juxtaposition. It's as if the director didn't care at all about the song's story, but instead just wanted to make a video that would catch MTV's eye. And apparently the video was banned?
It's not all terribly far-fetched, though is it very idealistic. The stuff about computers in particular is pretty on point. The part about transportation, though? Totally fucking out there.
IT’S 8 a.m., Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2008, and you are headed for a business appointment 300 mi. away. You slide into your sleek, two-passenger air-cushion car, press a sequence of buttons and the national traffic computer notes your destination, figures out the current traffic situation and signals your car to slide out of the garage. Hands free, you sit back and begin to read the morning paper—which is flashed on a flat TV screen over the car’s dashboard. Tapping a button changes the page.Her doctors smiled with pride. The surgery lasted 15 hours and was one of the first to involve taking so many organs out of the body: the stomach, liver, pancreas, spleen, small intestine and two-thirds of the large intestine.Full story Read Full Post »
Dr. Tomoaki Kato, a transplant specialist who led the team of at least nine doctors, said he hoped the procedure would be duplicated for other cancer patients and those with aneurysms or other problems associated with the abdominal aorta.
It remains unclear how often it would be needed; tumors like Ms. Zepp’s are rare, and in most abdominal surgeries, organs can be lifted or held aside.
But in the case of Ms. Zepp, 63, there was no other way to reach the tumor. After she received a diagnosis in May, doctors discovered that the cancerous tissue was entwined with several blood vessels and buried deep within.
“It wasn’t so big, but it was in a very strategic location,” said Dr. Andreas Tzakis, director of the hospital’s Transplant Institute and a member of the operation team.
Dr. Tzakis said doctors essentially had to empty Ms. Zepp’s abdomen. Then they cut out the tumor and its attached blood vessels in a matter of minutes.
The condition began to take its toll on Coler when he was a little boy. As it progressed, he says, people would faint when they saw him. After 24 years of suffering, Coler was given a new face.
"At first we were quite frightened to do the transplant," said Lantieri. "We didn't know how the patient would tolerate the fact to have a new face."
Doctors cut his skin away and replaced it with the face of an unnamed donor, painstakingly connecting arteries, veins and nerves.
When his mother and sister saw his new face, Coler said, "both burst into tears of absolute happiness. It was one of the happiest days of their lives."
But Coler does not look like the anonymous donor.
"It is not like the movie 'Face Off,'" said Lantieri.
This one’s for all the wolves out there. Stay scheming on those piglets with the Huff and Puff Zip Up Hoody. This piece features an 80% cotton 20% polyester composition, and wolf detailing throughout. Stay scheming!One positive thing I can say is that I guess it's good that they targeted the copy toward their audience. Where is the J. Peterman of streetwear?
Despite collecting an estimated several hundred million dollars in P2P related settlements from the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt, prominent artists’ managers are complaining that so far, they haven’t received any compensation from the labels. According to a lawyer, some are considering legal action.Full article at TorrentFreak
Record label sources said corporate bosses are still deciding on how best to split the money. In determining the payout, they said not every artist is owed money and it must be calculated with regard to the level of copyright infringement for each artist.Full article at NY Post
What's more, these sources said that after the labels recouped their legal expenses, there wasn't much left to pass along to the artists.
Each of the tiles in the mosaic is an arithmetic average of images relating to one of 53,464 nouns. The images for each word were obtained using Google's Image Search and other engines. A total of 7,527,697 images were used, each tile being the average of 140 images. The average reveals the dominant visual characteristics of each word. For some, the average turns out to be a recognizable image; for others the average is a colored blob. The list of nouns was obtained from Wordnet, a database compiled by lexicographers which records the semantic relationship between words. Using this database, we extract a tree-structured semantic hierarchy which we use to arrange tiles within the poster. We tessellate the poster using the hierarchy so that the proximity of two tiles is given by their semantic distance. Thus the poster explores the relationship between visual and semantic similarity. For a large part of our language the two are closely correlated as shown by the extent of visual clustering within the poster. The large-scale groupings correspond to broad categories such as plants or people. Within the plant cluster, for example, tighter semantic groupings are visible such as flowers or trees. In turn each of these clusters contains further groupings all the way down to individual, highly specific nouns.
At Christmas time in 1979, I spotted a strange looking guy on a Fiorucci postcard, which read, “Klaus Nomi." I thought it meant ‘Merry Christmas’ in German, and bought the card. In December of 1979, I was in the studio for Bowie’s Saturday Night Live rehearsal. My dad (a VP at WNBC television) apologized for not getting me a seat inside the studio, but in the control room instead. This was even better, since it was right outside the dressing rooms!Read more
The studio was buzzing with excitement. Jane Curtin and Larraine Newman were jumping around yelling, “Bowie is in the building!!!” I suddenly recognized Joey from Fiorucci in the hallway. He excitedly explained that Bowie had asked him to sing back-up on the show! Bowie stood with a weird little guy dressed in black, and introduced him to me as ‘Klaus Nomi’ (Joey Arias turned out to be a member of Klaus Nomi’s band). I was actually more excited to see my postcard photo come to life than to actually meet the legendary Bowie! I was enraptured by this elfin creature in exquisite makeup, pointed hair style and costume with a German accent. Klaus smiled sweetly and kissed my hand. He wore the softest black leather elbow-length gloves - quite glamorous! I asked who did their fabulous makeup (the meticulous details were not visible on TV). They boasted that they’d done each other’s makeup, “Joey did mine and I did his, and we did David’s!” Boys will be girls!
First they performed “The Man Who Sold The World." Joey and Klaus carried Bowie on stage because his bizarre Dadaist costume encased his legs.
Klaus Nomi was a German minimalist with the most amazing voice and stage aptitude. He could not only block a scene as a director but inject himself as the star without forcing stardom on his subordinate players. The following video, The Cold Song, shows Klaus at his diva best for not only does he know, but the orchestra knows as well, they're bit players in this performance.Quoted. Referent video:
Step outside the performance and watch him. In other words, turn off your sound and look at how he carries himself. His outward caricature of robotic stiffness is in complete contrast to his vocal range of pure emotion. Watch it with the sound off, then watch it again with the sound on, then play it again with your eyes closed. The man has a sense of presence in complete opposition to the populist Three Tenors.
This is kind of old now (in Internet time -- it is less than two months old in actual time) but some of the concepts it introduced me to popped into my head today. I think the author discusses some powerful concepts in it; concepts that, should the Internet retain its current level of popularity or see continued growth, will be important for anyone who honestly wants to share things of value using it.
The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.
Yes, this is a horse fight. Whichever horse wins is the one you should imagine me as in this fight.We as a species know a relatively small amount about our environment, and it is possible that there won't be words or symbols to explain much of it for a very very long time. In fact, humanity might never be able to understand absolutely everything. In addition, at the rate we're going we might not last long enough to figure it all out.
That being said, I wish people would stop taking advantage of others who buy...heavily, into certain constructions of the unknown.
...now he's a star again. also: i mean star in the colloquial sense.After the album was released, Frusciante played three small performances, and participated in a few magazine interviews to promote the album; explaining in one interview that people would only be able to understand his work if "their heads are capable of tripping out". At one point shortly after release, Frusciante began searching for a string quartet to play the album with him on tour. The idea was eventually discarded when he could not find a band that "understands why Ringo Starr is such a great drummer, can play Stravinsky, and also smokes pot."
Niandra Lades and Usually Just a T-Shirt:
@ Wikipedia @ SendSpace
SYSTEMS work, PEOPLE fail... It's that simple!!
This is the sort of thing where the actual information is spread out across all four corners of the Internet and can rarely be found in one place cohesively. I aim to change that.
Insert some sort of meta-commentary about desktop aesthetics here Gnome's Appearance Panel does a pretty good job of standardizing icons for a theme you select, but it doesn't get absolutely everything. Those little icons in the top left corner of the window, for instance. Or if you use Compiz or Avant Window Navigator (AWN), many of the icons pulled from the system for usage within those programs. AWN allows you to select custom icons, but those don't always "take" properly. Compiz does not give you this option at all. The result is the ruination of an otherwise seamless experience when you hit alt+tab by way of the wrong icons appearing in the application switcher. Maybe some will be small, and others will be twice as big. Some will be pixelated because they're stretched out; others are crystal clear. The purpose of this guide is to give you a little extra knowledge so that you might create for yourself a more seamless desktop experience. Eye candy certainly isn't everything, but it can make long sessions in front of the computer a lot more pleasant.
This guide should apply to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) and 8.04 (Hardy). It may work for other distros and other versions of Ubuntu. Alternatively, it may not work for any computer except my own. If that is the case, sorry!
Things you'll want:
I thought 8MM was so edgy when I was 14...
Joel Schumacher trivia @ Wikipedia
- In "Legends of the Dark Knight", an episode of The New Batman Adventures, three teenagers discuss their ideas about what Batman is really like. They briefly meet an effeminate youth called Joel (in front of a shoemaker's shop, no less) whose idea of Batman consists mainly of a fascination with the tight rubber suits and a Batmobile that can drive up walls (as seen in Batman Forever). The other three kids treat Joel's ideas with utter disdain. The piece received mixed reviews from Bat-fans; some love what was done, while others consider it a "low blow" from the producers of the animated series. Schumacher has since reaffirmed that he wanted to produce an adaptation of Batman: Year One. The animated series' creator Bruce Timm stated in the DVD commentary for the episode that Batman Forever is one of his favorite Batman films, however this is said as a joke, as he has stated elsewhere that he dislikes the film.
- In another episode of Robot Chicken, Joel Schumacher pitches his idea for a Batman Begins parody, Heimlich Begins (based on the Heimlich maneuver) in which Heimlich battles a villain called "The Choker" (a parody of Batman villain Joker), who attacks with animated sausage links. At the end, the entire sketch is revealed to have been described by Joel Schumacher. The skit ends with a reference to Schumacher's sexuality: "It's always sausage with you, isn't it?"
- In Episode 4 of Clerks: The Animated Series, Randal demands his money back from Joel Schumacher after seeing Batman and Robin, saying, "Man, Batman and Robin was so gay!", with Schumacher wearing the nipple batsuit.
Image by Dean Hollingsworth/DMN
The hamburger robot here hits peak speed at three burgers a minute; a busy restaurant needs to produce 20 to 30 burgers a minute, Mr. Schowalter said. In addition, he said: "Fast-food operations are fighting each other with diversity of product. Sure, you can make a hamburger" using a robot, he said, but he added: "What can you do it if suddenly it's the croissant that is moving this year?"
David L. Brenholt, the president of Translab in Menomonie, which designed and built the hamburger-flipping robot at a cost of $20,000, said that although the machine can make only hamburgers, it can be reprogrammed to make various kinds, like ones with multiple patties.
The robot looks like a flat oven with conveyor belts running through and an arm attached at the end. A red light indicates when a worker should slide in a patty and bun, which bob along in the heat for 1 minute 52 seconds. When they reach the other side of the machine, photo-optic sensors indicate when they can be assembled.
A grandfather who wanted to end his life built himself a gun-toting robot with plans downloaded from the Internet and used it to kill himself.
The bizarre suicide machine was set up to remotely fire a .22 semi- automatic pistol - and when the 81-year-old man activated it he was hit several times in the head.
Police refused to name the man, who lived on Queensland's Gold Coast, but last night confirmed the death and that an 'unusual device' had been used.
It is believed that based on internet plans he devised a method of setting up the gun on a platform and then used a remote control which activated the trigger on the gun.
He had positioned himself in front of the weapon in his driveway so that when it fired he knew he would be struck in the head.
BostonDynamics' BigDog quadruped robot is an advanced prototype under development for DARPA. The robot walks, runs and climbs on rough terrain (including mud and snow). Once BigDog is ready for field duty, it will help soldiers carry the many pounds of equipment needed in modern warfare. A typical load for a field solder is 65+ pounds; BigDog has so far carried 120 pounds. The robot itself is the size of a large dog, and weighs 75 kg.Read more + Official Site
AllHipHop.com: When y'all look out into the crowd who are your fans?
Malice: College kids, hipsters....
Ab-Liva: It depends on where you at. Depends on where you're performing at, we done been to the mountains and scene, where was we at?
Malice: Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Ab-Liva: Jackson Hole, Wyoming 'cuz. Nothing but ski slopes and deer, that kind of s**t. When it was time to perform that thing was poppin'. I mean this was an all white crowd who looked like they definitely didn't rock to what I felt I wrote, but the fans range crazy. I can't put a particular face or region on a fan. Wherever we go, it's love. If we're in the hood, you'll see hood. When it's mountains, it's mountains.
Sandman: You'll see a thug next to an Internet junkie. It runs the gamut, our fans. We appreciate that because we know they listening to our music and loving it overall.
AllHipHop.com: Seems like groups always have turmoil, just sittin' here looking at y'all there is no hint of that.
Malice: Harmonious!
AllHipHop.com: Right, right, so what do y'all attribute that to?
Malice: I attribute it to just a mutual respect. Everybody is their own boss. Everybody is their own man. These dudes been rhymin’ forever, they come light the fire to us sometime because they definitely in the trenches and rhymin even’ when....you know I'll do a mixtape or I'll do an album but these guys like, rhyme. That's what they do and it puts that fire back in you because I was definitely getting very uninterested in what was going on in Hip-Hop and being around the family, the Re-Up Gang, it takes you back to '88 or when you was younger and it was all about coming up with them hot verses and in this atmosphere this is how I feel. And we all want to see each other do well, so...and we're brothers [points to Pusha-T] so that's half the battle right there, but we all brothers.
Pusha-T: Not even that but this whole Re-Up Gang s**t was started off just straight love for everybody's talent. We were the Clipse but we was putting Lord Willin' together and met Liva and I'm talking about Arista's budget's open, [we] could have picked anybody in the world and paid 'em to get on that s**t, but went and found Liva. This guy was busting.
Hoping his casket is shaped like a monolith.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 books on space, science and the future, died Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.
Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 a.m. after suffering breathing problems, aide Rohan De Silva said.
Co-author with Stanley Kubrick of Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey," Clarke was regarded as far more than a science fiction writer.
He was credited with the concept of communications satellites in 1945, decades before they became a reality. Geosynchronous orbits, which keep satellites in a fixed position relative to the ground, are called Clarke orbits.
He joined American broadcaster Walter Cronkite as commentator on the U.S. Apollo moonshots in the late 1960s.
Clarke's non-fiction volumes on space travel and his explorations of the Great Barrier Reef and Indian Ocean earned him respect in the world of science, and in 1976 he became an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
But it was his writing that shot him to his greatest fame and that gave him the greatest fulfillment.
"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."
