Chili Cook-off Brings The Heat In Old Town Tustin

A committee largely signed off Tuesday on a plan to give Gov. Scott Walker broad authority to sell state property, but stipulated that lawmakers must sign off on any sale.

Most U.S. high-tech companies would not be required to offer jobs to Americans before hiring foreign workers under a compromise worked out Tuesday by Senate negotiators on an immigration reform bill. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the deal, which came as amendment to the immigration legislation, to satisfy concerns from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), whose support is seen as crucial to building strong bipartisan momentum. Read full article >>    

Over 10,000 Facebook users have joined forces in an effort to help return items lost during this week's Oklahoma tornadoes to their rightful owners.Read more    

Angry man with jet-black hair and protruding chin (Onformative) Have you ever looked up into the sky and seen a cloud that vaguely resembles your mother? Or gazed at the twisted trunk of a tree, only to see an old man gazing back at you? Then you have experienced pareidolia, the human mind's tendency to read significance into random stimuli. You have learned what children and poets already knew: that anything -- any place -- can be a canvas for a human face. Computers are learning the same lesson. Only they're doing so with the help of some ingenious humans. The generative design studio Onformative combined facial recognition software with Google Earth images to create "Google Faces," a search agent "that hovers the world to spot all the faces that are hidden on earth."The project has found, for example, this:  Squinty eyes, button nose, pointy palate (Onformative) And this: Teddy Roosevelt, with a blocklike nose, doing a duckface (Onformative) And this: The software in action (Onformative)] As Onformative explains of the project: The way we perceive our environment is a complex procedure. By the help of our vision we are able to recognize friends within a huge crowd, approximate the speed of an oncoming car or simply admire a painting. One of human's most characteristic features is our desire to detect patterns. We use this ability to penetrate into the detailed secrets of nature. However we also tend to use this ability to enrich our imagination. Hence we recognize meaningful shapes in clouds or detect a great bear upon astrological observations. Despite all this, sometimes it's hard (for this human, at any rate) to see the faces the software seems to be seeing. All I get is Earth. But when the project works, it really works. And it offers a whole new way to know the faces that lurk on the surface of the planet -- faces of inhuman humanity, waiting to be discovered. Hat tip Animal New York via Ashley Fetters