Countries Where

One of the Huffington Post's article on the GOP convention included this at the end.

Making a thread to help you educate all the "name one thing women invented" "women can't do science" "what have they ever contributed?" people

EVERYBODY READ THIS

Casa Sperimentale’ Ruins

Architect: Giuseppe Perugini

Location/Year: Via Porto Azzurro, 57, 00054 Fregane RM (Rome) Italie / 1971

Pictures/Source: Oliver Astrologo + Google / designboom 

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Methodology:

Characters were counted by hand based on UESP quest writeups. Characters were only counted if they were questgivers or involved in multiple quests. Only characters from the main quest or faction questlines were counted. Any expansions or DLCs have not been included.

Due to the incomplete documentation for ESO quests, that game probably has more margin of error than others, though it should be balanced out due to how many NPCs were counted overall. I realize that this is an imperfect process, especially considering the very different ways that each game handles quests. I think the overall patterns hold, though, even if the percentages might be off a few points were someone to repeat the process.

You’ll also notice that Morrowind, Oblivion, and ESO have two main quest graphs. The latter is for including characters who are also encountered in the other parts of the game. For Morrowind this is questlines where you must speak to all the house leaders to become Hortator, in Oblivion it is the Aid for Bruma questline where you must speak to the counts/countesses to gain their support, and in ESO this is the Weight of Three Crowns quest where the faction leaders convene on Stirk. Daggerfall, meanwhile, randomizes most of its quest, and the overall graph counts the main quest and nobles quests.

Sample sizes are as follows: Daggerfall (23 total, 10 main quest), Morrowind (82 total, 16 main quest, 34 with hortator), Oblivion (36 total, 9 main quest, 15 with Bruma allies), Skyrim (59, 11 main quest), ESO (278 total, 6 main quest, 10 with Stirk).

Conclusions and interpretations under the cut.

Keep reading

More Than Just Drawings

Artist and graphic designer Mike Okuda may not be a household name, but you’re more familiar with his work than you know. Okuda’s artistic vision has left a mark here at NASA and on Star Trek. The series debuted 50 years ago in September 1966 and the distinctive lines and shapes of logos and ships that he created have etched their way into the minds of fans and inspired many.  

Flight Ops

The Flight Operations patch has a lengthy history, the original version of which dates to the early 1970s. Having designed a version of the patch, Okuda had some insights about the evolution of the design.

“The original version of that emblem was designed around 1972 by Robert McCall and represented Mission Control. It later changed to Mission Operations. I did the 2004 version, incorporating the space station, and reflecting the long-term goals of returning to the Moon, then on to Mars and beyond. I later did a version intended to reflect the new generation of spacecraft that are succeeding the shuttle, and most recently the 2014 version reflecting the merger of Mission Operations with the Astronaut Office under the new banner Flight Operations.”

“The NASA logos and patches are an important part of NASA culture,” Okuda said. “They create a team identity and they focus pride on a mission.”

In July 2009, Okuda received the NASA Exceptional Public Service Medal, which is awarded to those who are not government employees, but have made exceptional contributions to NASA’s mission. Above, Okuda holds one of the mission patches he designed, this one for STS-125, the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

Orion

Among the other patches that Okuda has designed for us, it one for the Orion crew exploration vehicle. Orion is an integral of our Journey to Mars and is an advanced spacecraft that will take our astronauts deeper into the solar system than ever before. 

Okuda’s vision of space can be seen in the Star Trek series through his futuristic set designs, a vision that came from his childhood fascination with the space program. 

Learn more about Star Trek and NASA.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com 

Bacteriophage. This is one of a few pieces I’ve submitted to a gallery show I’m having with my friends/coworkers at Tr!ckster in Berkeley. Tried a somewhat different approach than my usual on this one, and I like it. 

Probably will have little prints available soon. 

2,200 years ago in Turkey, this insane rental agreement was inscribed in stone

Written in Greek, the lease allows renters to use slaves that come with the property

No ripping up this rental agreement. And the punishments for not looking after the property, not paying the rent, etc. Nuts. Plus new legal terminology. Great stuff.

De-automation is a thing | Robohub

We tend to assume that automation is a process that continues – that once some human activity has been automated there’s no going back. That automation sticks. But, as Paul Mason pointed out in a recent column that assumption is wrong.

Mason gives a startling example of the decline of car-wash robots, to be replaced by, as he puts it “five guys with rags”. Here’s the paragraph that really made me think:

“There are now 20,000 hand car washes in Britain, only a thousand of them regulated. By contrast, in the space of 10 years, the number of rollover car-wash machines has halved –from 9,000 to 4,200.”

The reasons, of course, are political and economic and you may or may not agree with Mason’s diagnosis and prescription (as it happens I do). But de-automation – and the ethical, societal and legal implications – is something that we, as roboticists, need to think about just as much as automation.

Several questions come to mind:

are there other examples of de-automation? is the car-wash robot example atypical, or part of a trend? is de-automation necessarily a sign of something going wrong? (would Mason be so concerned about the guys with rags if the hand car wash industry were a well-regulated industry paying decent wages to its workers, and generating tax revenues back to the economy?)

So, what I'm getting is metric vs. imperial is a states' right issue

The United States, much to my own surprise, does use the metric system. But only at the Federal level. The Drug Enforcement Administration seizes kilos of cocaine. Soldiers determine distance by “klicks” or kilometers. The Federal Government of the United States officially works in metric. Adoption of the metric system over the imperial system was left up to the individual state governments, who chose freedom (and not having to pay to re-survey all their land).