“They mutually thrashed their softest, most vulnerable parts about in a horrifying normal attempt to seek pleasure at the other’s expense.”

“Their mouths, which mere minutes before had been employed in the process of demolishing and ingesting various foodstuffs, were now jammed up damply against one another while still being used for breathing, which must have been more than a little uncomfortable.”

“Bits of one jammed into bits of the other, dangerously close to some of the weakest and most important internal organs.”

“With absolutely no regard for personal space, the two of them created an unnecessary amount of friction, generating sweat in the process.”

“Some sort of gel emerged.”

“One sat upon the other, like furniture that sneaks inside of your body.”

“Her genitals engulfed his for some arcane purpose.”

“One of them put their teeth-cave directly over the other’s fleshiest appendage, but did not bite it.”

“His genitals emerged from his body with no protection whatever, so that any passing bird could have easily swooped down and carried them off in its beak.”

“They licked one another as if they were food, but they were not food.”

“They took off their clothes, leaving their soft and hairless skin exposed to dust, wind, cold, and various other deadly elements.”

“Jostling occurred for an extended period of time, then silence.”

“Everything was just a mess.”

“Various parts inched forward, then retracted, rather as turtles do.”

“Together they put all of their clothes in a pile on the floor, where the dog lives.”

“Only hours before he had used the very same appurtenance to urinate. He had not washed it in any significant way before inserting it into the other human’s body.”

“They writhed together like a Chinese finger trap.”

Read more Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body at The Toast.

Today marks the release of version 4.0 of the NewsBlur iOS app. To illustrate the significance of this release I’d like to talk about where the app has been.

The first version of the NewsBlur iOS app was actually just an iPhone app. It launched in October 2011 and only allowed you to read your feeds individually. Within months the river of news (reading by folder) was added, along with better sharing controls, intelligence training, sharing to your blurblog, and the May 2013 re-design.

But similarly to the web, I wasn’t particularly proud of the app until I hit a major milestone. On the web, I hit that milestone with the May 2013 re-design. In the blog post announcing the wide ranging re-design, I wrote:

Not to say that NewsBlur was ugly before today, but it certainly didn’t have the loving embrace of a talented designer. So without waiting another moment (or month) I proudly present the NewsBlur redesign.

Fast forward to today where I am finally releasing an iOS app that I’m proud of. This one comes with a ton of great features, both for iPhone and iPad.

• New dashboard for the iPad app: All Site Stories are now on the dashboard for easy access to stories. More to come with this new dashboard.
• Tons of new gestures: double tap, 2 finger double tap, long press.
• New gestures for the iPad app: swipe to dismiss the original story view.
• Brand new sharing controls work with Facebook, Twitter, Email, iMessage, Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, App.Net, Pinboard, OmniFocus, Safari, Chrome, and Airdrop.
• Inline images show a preview of the story in the story title.
• Inline descriptions show a preview of the story’s content in the story title.
• Improved landscape support for the iPad app.
• Improved video support: videos are now fit better for each device.
• Numerous bugs fixed resulting in speed improvements and cleaned up code.

If you want to tweet something along the lines of “Holy crap, the NewsBlur iOS app is nice! Only took four years” that would be alright. Download the free NewsBlur iOS app, and if you find yourself enjoying it, please leave a positive five star review on the App Store.

The reporting that Dan Kane started in 2010 is finally garnering some national attention from non-sports outlets. Last week, the The NY Times, and today, BloombergBusinessweek:

The corruption of academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus could turn into the most revelatory of all of the undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning three years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and faculty signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate campaign to keep elite basketball and football players academically eligible to play.

After belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in this recent dispatch, I’ve decided the still-developing story deserves wider attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the excellent reporting already done by the News & Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of North Carolina.

The rot in Chapel Hill undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest public institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used to inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black history and culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of college athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been criminally indicted for fraud.)

…

Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s lead investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task for which Kane has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state disloyalty. As he wrote last month, the six official “reviews” and “investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed to connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and months, I hope I can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some long-distance perspective. Valuable tips from concerned local people, some of them UNC alumni, are already pouring in, and that’s part of the reason I’m going to pursue the story. Keep those e-mails coming.

One source of insight is Jay Smith, a professor of early modern French history at UNC. A serious scholar who understands the university’s sports-happy culture, Smith has developed a powerful distaste for the way his employer has obfuscated the scandal. “What’s going on here is so important,” he told me by telephone, “because it’s emblematic of what I think goes on at major universities all across the country,” where the business of sports undermines the mission of education. That sounds right to me.

I suspect there are folks in the administration who will go to great lengths to prevent Jay Smith’s book from being published, and then go to even greater lengths to discredit him after it is released.

Hopefully Smith will answer the question about Nyang’oro’s motivation, because without proper incentive for the chronic, rampant fraud, his actions are wholly irrational.

The post BloombergBusinessweek: UNC fraud just the start appeared first on StateFans Nation.