Pipe Guy

Nice to see flip flops have a better use than to just fall off feet while walking.

Maude White Art

Handcut paperworks by Maude White. I am in awe, as no matter how closely I attempt to cut correctly, inevitably, I'm going to cut through a line.

I Confronted the Man Whose Crime Put Me in Prison

He told me he would “be facing 99” if he turned himself in, as if I needed to be reminded of that fact. “You just put yourself in my shoes in a situation like that,” he told me. “I mean, I can understand how hurt you is, and I can understand the part of your life that you lost because I had went through the same thing.”

That was too much for me to take. “But you didn’t lay in a prison bed day in and day out being innocent for a crime you didn’t commit,” I told him. “No. You have not been in my position. Because all the positions you done been in, you brought that on yourself.”

It felt real good to tell him that. And I kept talking. I told him about the years I spent away from my kids. I cried at that point and was glad he got to see that. And I told him I would never recover from what he did to me. I told him that I wish he had been given life in prison for the crime, instead of getting a deal that only added five years to his sentence.

Alonzo just responded each time, “I understand.” He never apologized.

Texas justice at its best.

Computer Vision Correction

New technology under development at the University of California-Berkeley and MIT automatically corrects people's vision defects without glasses. Plug a glasses prescription into the new software, and the system calculates how to display the image so it won't look blurry. Basically, by adjusting the light from each pixel on a device and then passing it through a tiny mesh attached to a monitor or phone screen, the system personalizes the image so it's crystal clear.

I wonder how that would work with astigmatisms.

Word of the Day

Taphophile:

Tombstone tourist (otherwise known as a "taphophile", "cemetery enthusiast", cemetery tourists or "grave hunter" or "graver") describes an individual who has a passion for and enjoyment of cemeteries.[1] This involves epitaphs, gravestone rubbing, photography, art, and history of (famous) deaths. The term has been most notably used by author and biographer Scott Stanton as the title of his 2003 book and his former website[2] on the lives and gravesites of famous musicians.

..via Wikipedia

Kindness

Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common...?

Contempt, they have found, is the number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of positive things their partners are doing and they see negativity when it’s not there. People who give their partner the cold shoulder—deliberately ignoring the partner or responding minimally—damage the relationship by making their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not valued. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner's ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships.

How to Clean Your House in 10 Easy Steps

Step Three: Toss in some laundry. I hate laundry. Hate isn’t even a strong enough word for it. I have to do 4 loads of laundry every day. Every. Single. Day. Don’t bother sorting. Who cares about sorting. Just toss in as much as will fit in the damn washer, because girl, you are running out of time. Caillou is about to come on and you will lose your shit if you hear that whiney voice belting out of the TV. You gotta hustle and get the next kid friendly distraction ready.

Is it irrational to hate laundry just as much without kids? Or Caillou?

Shelter

Much more humane idea than installing metal spikes to keep homeless people from having places to sleep. Considering as a society we already like to pretend that all homelessness is due to personal choices and they should be punished for it, it is nice to see a city take even a small measure to make that less of a hardship for the person on the street.

Math Nerd or Bookworm?

Here, teachers are a bit like farmers, Detterman says. And children are a bit like corn. "You have corn plants that do well in certain environments, and don't in others. And the farmer's job is to get the corn plants into the right soil."

Article doesn't really highlight anything particularly surprising, but for that quote, it had to be shared. Make Children of the Corn a much different concept.

Drone Flying in Fireworks

Definitely a better show than what I watched last night. Plus, you get the 'bonus' of Andrea Bochelli, and who can ever have enough of listening to this song over and over again?