Post a news story, entertain me!

bnpederson wrote:

Eh, the idea that the government banned specific plants has always been absurd.

Couldn't agree more.

Take a polar bear. Take a lion. Mash them together and chuck them in a time machine, sending them back 22 million years to what’s now Kenya and you’ve got the massive carnivore Simbakubwa kutokaafrika.

IMAGE(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/deadthings/files/2019/04/simbakubwa-and-human-silohuette-1024x641.jpg)

Mega Carnivore Hiding In A Museum Drawer

That man is remarkably calm.

bnpederson wrote:

That man is remarkably calm.

That's because it's not really a man. It's an extradimensional being that preys on Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. The part that looks like a man is just its lure.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Snakes force Liberian President George Weah out of office

Don't go giving us ideas, Liberia.

The Racial Bias Built Into Photography

Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions. Light skin became the chemical baseline for film technology, fulfilling the needs of its target dominant market. For example, developing color-film technology initially required what was called a Shirley card. When you sent off your film to get developed, lab technicians would use the image of a white woman with brown hair named Shirley as the measuring stick against which they calibrated the colors. Quality control meant ensuring that Shirley’s face looked good. It has translated into the color-balancing of digital technology. In the mid-1990s, Kodak created a multiracial Shirley Card with three women, one black, one white, and one Asian, and later included a Latina model, in an attempt intended to help camera operators calibrate skin tones. These were not adopted by everyone since they coincided with the rise of digital photography. The result was film emulsion technology that still carried over the social bias of earlier photographic conventions.

As someone with a photography degree I can say that photographing people of different skin tones can be very, very tough. While at college I was part of the photography club and we were talked into doing photos at this spring dance that the black student association was hosting. We had studio lighting setup and were using automatic exposure bracketing on a digital camera (this was before digital was mainstream, thank god we had one) and it was still very tough to get good photos, especially when the couple or group we were photographing had very different skin tones. Shooting in RAW with an HDR camera would have helped, but that wasn't a thing at the time.

It's fascinating to hear from someone with real world experience related to this story. My experience with photography and digital image processing came from working for a couple years on Apple's QuickTime VR team back in the '90s. Digital image processing had been a hobby of mine since becoming addicted to using the Atari software lab's ST computers to do distributed raytracing in the late 1980's.

Even digital cameras use software color balancing, and that software has its own biases baked in, the same way that color film emulsion chemistry does. Older digital cameras that didn't support RAW capture had to choose which bits to throw away, because there were so many that either the camera's processor couldn't keep up with the data bandwidth, or the camera's storage couldn't hold all the data. Bracketing can help to an extent, but if the algorithm is more sensitive to tonal changes in lighter colors and less sensitive to tonal changes in darker colors, you're always going to have trouble with the latter.

One of the things I found most interesting (and most depressing) about the article was the revelation that it wasn't complaints from people of color that made Kodak address the issue. It was complaints from chocolate manufacturers and manufacturers of wooden furniture.

The market is betting on climate change

You could potentially become extremely wealthy betting against climate change on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Curiously, nobody is doing that.

BadKen wrote:

The market is betting on climate change

You could potentially become extremely wealthy betting against climate change on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Curiously, nobody is doing that.

Seems a great way to take other people's money. Let me invest your money against climate change for you! And then just keep it.

Well, yeah, but not even climate change deniers are betting against it.

BadKen wrote:
Take a polar bear. Take a lion. Mash them together and chuck them in a time machine, sending them back 22 million years to what’s now Kenya and you’ve got the massive carnivore Simbakubwa kutokaafrika.

IMAGE(http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/deadthings/files/2019/04/simbakubwa-and-human-silohuette-1024x641.jpg)

Mega Carnivore Hiding In A Museum Drawer

You can't fool me. That's just a Tasmanian Devil on African Safari.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/sbaMWUa.gif)

I may be stretching the limits of "news", but if this doesn't entertain you...

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/r...

vypre wrote:

I may be stretching the limits of "news", but if this doesn't entertain you...

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/r...

Oh it's like they made a game show out of the beginning of Swordfish, except without the gun.

Young Seattle residents unsatisfied with nearly everything about the city, new survey finds

However:

Still not convinced that Seattle has become the capital of kvetch? Then explain this:

The survey asks respondents to rate their level of satisfaction with different types of local taxes. In Seattle, we gave ourselves below average scores across the board — including for income tax.

Newsflash: We don’t have an income tax in Washington, folks.

That’s right — Seattleites somehow find a way to complain about a tax that we don’t have to pay.

Being a professional game master is probably worth at least that much.

Also, my players clearly don't appreciate me enough.

Ravens are born at the Tower of London for the first time in 30 years.

EDIT: It occurs to me that not everyone likes historical stuff about England as much as I do, nor has been to the Tower, so here's an explanation of the ravens at the Tower of London:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravens...

A teacher is gunned down on a sidewalk in a Western Pennsylvania former steel town.

I'm posting this because it's a pretty f*cked up story, apparently involving a police corruption investigation, and it happens to be my hometown. The town is generally not great on crime - a girl who rode my school bus was killed in a murder-suicide my junior year of high school, and a cop was murdered on a street along my school bus route - but the area where this teacher was murdered is actually considered one of the nicer areas.

This week's episode of 48 Hours is about this.

Guess which parody site posted this:

Patagonia Triggers a Market Panic Over New Rules on Its Power Vests: The sportswear company announced restrictions on its custom-branded vests to firms that “prioritize the planet,” leaving aspiring tycoons out in the cold

Wall Street faces a crisis that touches the very core of its largely male workforce.

In a panic-inducing announcement, Patagonia set new limits on the sale of its custom fleece and down vests, a de rigueur centerpiece of the modern three-piece suit.