A new map from Reddit user Alexandr Trubetskoy (a.k.a. atrubetskoy) is sure to stoke this regional competition. Using data “taken from hundreds of various points from user responses…interpolated using NOAA’s average annual snowfall days map,” Trubetskoy made a map showing how much snow it typically takes to close schools in the U.S. and Canada. Notice that for much of the southern U.S., all it takes is “any snow” to shut schools down. For the Upper Midwest and Canada, two feet of snow are required for a closure.
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Nintendo, which is based in Kyoto, Japan, said revenue in the first three quarters of the current fiscal year, or through December, fell to 499 billion yen, or $4.83 billion, from ¥543 billion a year earlier.
Nintendo’s president and other executives said they would take a pay cut for five months to take responsibility for the poor performance. The pay of the president, Satoru Iwata, will be cut in half.
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“But anyway, did you hear about the time Beyoncé rejected a work by Lena Dunham’s mom? A fun anecdote: Jay Z wanted to buy “Walking Gun,” one of the most famous images by noted feminist artist Laurie Simmons, which depicts doll legs sticking out of the end of a pistol. (And you thought Tiny Furniture wasn’t autobiographical!) But once it arrived, Beyoncé promptly shipped it back, opting for a less gun-glorifying piece with a perfume bottle on it.”
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As society has reached a consensus that there’s no way to control everything children see, the number of indecency complaints has decreased significantly. When Miley Cyrus twerked at the Video Music Awards last summer, the FCC received only 161 complaints (of course, as a cable channel, MTV doesn’t answer to the commission anyway). The moment became fodder for celebrity bloggers and morning show chatterboxes but was never treated as a problem that needed to be legislated away. The PTC dutifully issued a statement denouncing MTV for “sexually exploiting young women,” but no national outcry resulted. Perhaps not coincidentally, CBS never actually paid a fine in connection with Nipplegate — an appeals court ruled in 2008 and again in 2011 that CBS could not be held liable for the actions of contracted performing artists and that the FCC had acted arbitrarily in enforcing indecency policies. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2012.
So for Powell, the halftime show represents “the last great moment” of a TV broadcast becoming a national controversy — the last primal scream of a public marching inexorably toward a new digital existence: “It might have been essentially the last gasp. Maybe that was why there was so much energy around it. The Internet was coming into being, it was intensifying. People wanted one last stand at the wall. It was going to break anyway. I think it broke.
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“The battle over the merit of trap isn’t about quality control. It’s really a collision of differing sets of criteria for what makes a good MC. Much of the objection to the Futures, Keefs and Flockas stems from the prevailing view that they can’t rap. This is a line of thinking steeped in a very specific and restrictive idea of what makes a good MC. It prizes lyrical dexterity almost to abstraction. Rhyming words really quickly is an important building block of good rap, but awful rap has come along that treasures it, and great rap has happened in its absence. Eminem’s last three solo albums are master classes in wordplay whose soullessness and stringency make them hard to listen to. Flockaveli’s lyricism is chantlike and methodically simplistic, but it is the gold standard for modern aggressive party rap. There’s more than one axis for measuring good rap, and classifying a Keef as awful just because he doesn’t stack up on the lyrical miracle axis ignores the terse and subtly influential brand of pop rap songwriting he mines on Finally Rich.”
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“While EA Sports has an exclusive license to use names, plays and other elements of the league, the N.F.L. has editorial oversight. Mr. Langley and others vet thousands of pages of recorded scripts and delete inappropriate dialogue, like the harshest trash talk. Chop blocks, helmet-to-helmet hits and other illegal plays are not permitted in the video game — even with accompanying penalties — despite the other efforts at realism. This stems not only from the league’s fastidiousness about its image but also from Mr. Madden’s insistence that the game be exciting and educational.”
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Hot sauce is having more than just a moment; it’s having a decade.
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Two broadcast television stations in Los Angeles will become the first participants in a pilot test of the government’s plans to eventually free up and auction off more airwaves for use in wireless broadband, officials said on Tuesday.
The stations, KLCS, a public broadcaster, and KJLA, a small multilingual programmer, will participate in a channel-sharing experiment that is being devised with the trade association for wireless phone carriers. The wireless companies are eager to get broadcasters to give up airwaves so they can buy them and use them for high-speed wireless Internet connections.
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More crucially, the rap awards are given out before the broadcast begins. This is odd. Many, many people enjoy rap. (The opening of the official ceremony was a performance by Beyoncé, who was accompanied by a rapper named Jay Z, who is now of note mostly because he is Beyoncé’s husband, and he got to stand near her while she performed “Drunk in Love”; she set the bar unpleasantly high for the rest of the night by melting people with her voice and presence.) But all three rap Grammys went to the Opie Taylor and Andy Griffith of rap, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Macklemore’s “American Graffiti” hairdo and crushing earnestness make him very easy to mock, but it is almost impossible to indulge that feeling because the song that made them famous, “Same Love,” a duet with Mary Lambert, is a clever, well-crafted song about homophobia—particularly, that within the hip-hop community.
“Same Love” is a tough one—it’s basically impossible to be against this song, as cheesy as Macklemore and the song and the untempered sincerity of the project are. Hip-hop’s problem with homophobia is more than minor, genetically linked to thousands of bias crimes, reported and not, and when you’ve got teen-agers growing up listening to hip-hop (I do), it’s not so bad to have a straight guy stand up and say homophobia is uncool, and to be celebrated for it. So I am happy Macklemore is there, and for this song. But he didn’t need to win all three rap awards, or, at the official ceremony, be awarded Best New Artist over the m.c. Kendrick Lamar or the country singer Kacey Musgraves, both of whom will be relevant long after Macklemore has left music for talk radio.
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Why would so many talented mathematicians forsake academia to write outrageous stories and gags for an animated TV show? After all, the contrast between the elegant abstractions of higher mathematics and the foibles of the imbecilic Homer Simpson could hardly be greater.
But perhaps the similarities are closer than it appears. Think of it this way: To write an episode of “The Simpsons,” one begins with a known set of characters — Homer, Bart, Lisa, Marge — and confronts them with a problem. The rest of the episode follows the characters through a complicated series of moves until the problem is resolved.
And while the show certainly allows for a wide range of improbable turns (Homer disappears into the third dimension, Lisa is rescued from an angry mob by Stephen Hawking), not everything is allowable: The characters must remain true to their personalities and the stories must follow their own inner logic, for a story free of the constraints of personality, logic and motivation is no story at all.
Now think of proving a geometric theorem: Once again, one has a certain set of elements — points, lines, triangles, circles — and is confronted with a problem. What is the sum of the angles of a triangle? What is the area of a polygon? The proof then consists of a series of moves that leads to a resolution of the problem.
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shaun james bockert 