Beyoncé Debuts At #1, Makes Billboard History Bow Down: The Queen Bey #1 on the charts after just three days of sales.

Spoiler alert: Beyoncé has the #1 album in the country.

That's not exactly a surprise, given the copious coverage and frenzied sales projections her self-titled album has generated since being released out of nowhere at midnight on Thursday. But the number of copies she managed to sell — more than 617,000 — in such a short amount of time (Nielsen SoundScan's sales week concluded on Sunday, December 15, giving Bey just three full days to rack up sales), well, that was definitely shocking.

All Hail The Queen
Beyoncé's first-week numbers were not only the best of any female artist in 2013, easily outpacing Katy Perry's Prism, but they give her the fourth biggest debut of the year, trailing only Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience, Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP 2 and Drake's Nothing Was The Same. And again, she did it in just three days.

It's also her fifth-consecutive #1 debut, making her the first female artist to have her first five albums bow atop the Billboard charts. She's also the third artist to ever accomplish that feat, along with DMX (!) and the Kingston Trio. The 617,000 copies Beyoncé sold are also the most she's ever sold in a single week, eclipsing the 541,000 she sold when B'Day premiered in 2006.

And there's a pretty good chance she'll remain at #1 next week too, as Beyoncé will finally have a full week of sales to count.

Via MTV

Mom's memory lives on in sweet dad, daughter photos

When a loved one passes away, we often use photographs as a way of keeping that person's memory alive. One Ohio family took the process a step further, creating a unique set of photos that serves as both a touchstone of the past and a reminder of how life moves forward.

In 2011, 31-year-old schoolteacher Ali Nunery passed away from a rare form of lung cancer, leaving behind her husband Ben and a 1-year-old daughter named Olivia.

This November, after two years on "a rollercoaster of emotions," as Ben described it, he and Olivia were ready to move out of the Cincinnati home they'd shared with Ali. But before they left, Ben wanted a way to remember the happy times they'd shared in the house. So he asked his sister-in-law Melanie Pace, a professional photographer, to take photos of him and his now 3-year-old daughter in their home.

"I was just really looking for a way to say farewell to the house, and have some things that Olivia and I can have to...remember the house," Ben told TODAY.com. "When Ali and I got married, we closed on the house the day before our wedding, so we did wedding photos in the empty house."

All photos here VIA Today Show Story here.
 

Photos: Hugh Hefner in His Pre-Pajama Years

There's a giant cloud of mystery (and straight-up confusion) that follows Hugh Hefner wherever he treads in his velvet bedroom slippers. The wealthy founder of Playboy has lapped up the attention since he created the publication in 1953, by throwing extravagant fetes in his mansion, juggling multiple girlfriends at once, and cementing his image as a smoking-robe-clad octogenarian never without a "bunny" in his arms.

But in Taschen's upcoming six-volume anthology dedicated to Playboy's first 25 years and its founder, aptly titled Hugh Hefner's Playboy, readers get an intimate, illustrated look at Hefner before he became the over-the-top men's magazine mogul he is today. Included in the 3,506 pages: cartoon drawings from Hef's childhood and early career; famous interviews published in the magazine with Martin Luther King and John Lennon; writing by Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Gore Vidal; personal photos; and Hefner's own autobiography — in which he recounts his youth, cartoonist years, romantic relationships, and more. The books will be hitting shelves in September. Until then, click through the slideshow to see a different side of Hugh Hefner and the many ladies (and famous companions) who stood by his side.

More Via NYMag

In other pointless news..Eminem slams Khloe Kardashian in new single 'Berzerk,' calls her ‘the ugly Kardashian’

In Eminem's latest single. “Berzerk,” off his upcoming eighth album “MMLP2,” the 40-year-old rapper puts Khloe Kardashian on blast by mocking the 29-year-old reality starlet's look

“They say that love is as powerful as cough syrup and Styrofoam. All I know is I fell asleep and woke up in that Monte Carlo with the ugly Kardashian," he raps on the track.

Eminem even makes a jab at Kardashian's husband, Lamar Odom,  in the track saying, "Lamar O, sorry, we done both set the bar low."

Kardashian, 29, and Odom, 33, now join the list of stars who Slim Shady has famously dissed, including Christina Aguilera, Carson Daly, Limp Bizkit and Moby.

The timing could not be worse for the reality star couple as their nearly four-year marraige is on rocky terrain due to the NBA star's alleged struggles with substance abuse.

Read more VIA NYDailyNews

Top 25 Tours of 2013

1. Bon Jovi

Total Gross: $205,158,370

Total Attendance: 2,178,170
Total Capacity: 2,178,170
No. of Shows: 90
No. of Sellouts: 90

t was just announced that the 51-year-old rocker and his band Bon Jovi had the highest-grossing world tour in 2013. Amazing!

The tour grossed $205 million over ninety shows, which were all sold out and had a total attendance of 2,178,170, according to Billboard.

Rounding out the top five of the top tours of the year were Michael Jackson The Immortal World Tour, Pink, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, and Rihanna.

Via B

Kanye West Discusses His Arrogant Ways, and its all for you......Thank you?

Kanye West is painfully aware Kanye has a gigantic ego, but claims it's not because Kanye is into himself ... it's all for his fans. What a giver. 

Ye went on a rant over the weekend in Anaheim, telling fans the media has him all wrong when they say he acts out because he wants to look "doper." 

The ever-humble fiance of Kim Kardashian added, he doesn't "give a f**k about looking cool" or being dope ... because he's been dope "since age motherf**king 5."

But you gotta hear his excuse for acting like an arrogant jerk ... because, basically, he's saying it's your fault.

Video and more HERE

Festive Middle Finger Goes Up, Thanks to ACLU

The woman who last year won the case regarding her first amendment right to display a middle finger in Christmas lights on the roof of her Denham Springs home is back at it again this year.

 Sarah Childs claims she is continuously harassed by a neighbor, Kayla Weldon, so this is the way she is choosing to express her anger.

"You know lots of people just resort to violence," says Childs. "Look at road rage, people flip each other off all the time. I really don't see what the big deal is."

This incident sparked national media attention last year when law enforcement officials forced Childs to remove the lights, but later the ACLU stepped in and sued the city.
Denham Springs eventually dropped the matter. Weldon accuses Childs of putting the lights up on the roof of her Starlite Drive home for the attention and says it's angered and offended every single person in their neighborhood.

"She's crazy! She thinks she's going to get famous from all of this crap," Weldon said.

Childs says the feud between she and Weldon is extremely intense and she feels "the bird" is an appropriate expression.

"I'm not doing this for publicity," says Childs. "What other way do I have to express my angst? People have feelings and emotions. And she's still slandering me all over Facebook."
Weldon says Childs' home is currently empty; she doesn't live there anymore.
"And she's putting another finger on the roof? Are you serious? She's only coming over here to antagonize me and bring up old sh*t," says Weldon. "She just wants attention. That's all this is about."
Childs says the house is half hers and she plans to keep the display up.
Weldon says the argument between them was initially ignited because Childs accused her of stealing her dog, a claim she vehemently denies.
An earlier middle finger display was cut down and destroyed according to Childs, an act which Weldon says she was accused of doing. "She can accuse me of getting up there and cutting her lights down all she wants but that's definitely not the case. I didn't climb my ass on no roof and cut her lights down," Weldon said. "There are plenty of other people in the neighborhood who can't stand it."

VIA louisianaradionetwork.com

Prove those antibacterial soaps are better and safe, FDA tells makers

Antibacterial soaps don’t seem to add any germ-killing power to plain old soap and water and in fact may have some health risks, the Food and Drug Administration said Monday.

So the agency is proposing a new rule that would force soap makers to prove that products with added antibacterial ingredients such as triclosan are safe and effective —something certain to be highly controversial.

They'll have a year to prove it, the FDA says. And they're encouraging public comment, too. 

"To put it simply, we need to collect additional information from the companies that make these products so that consumers can be confident about their effectiveness and about their safety," the FDA's Dr. Sandra Kweder told reporters in a telephone briefing.

More N

Seeing The Trolly Finally Roll on The Track Is Like Seeing a Ghost

Uploaded by Kurt Raschke on 2013-12-15.

Listen Up: Lorde - Royals (African Tribal Cover) Alex Boye' [VIDEO]

Download song on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/royals-single/id778879684 https://alexboye.bandcamp.com/track/royals I take pop music and give it an african twist. Love from your "Peponi Boy" -Ubuntu Its amazing what you can do with a $12 dollar wreath and some face paint from walmart. Video Production Credit: Zac Durrant Urban Tent zac.durrant.films@gmail.com

A Nice Little Good Morning To You w/a Holy Sh*t Cyclist Video

Road Bike Party 2 is here! Martyn Ashton, Danny MacAskill and Chris Akrigg take you on a new journey with a new bike in RBP 2. Follow GCN on YouTube: http://gcn.eu/gcnsubs RBP2 has incredible stunts and amazing tricks all completed on a £15,000 Colnago C59 Disc.

Listen Up: Busta Rhymes & Q-Tip 'Butch & Sundance' [Download]

Busta Rhymes & Q-Tip - "Butch & Sundance"

Busta Rhymes and Q-Tip come together again. A combination like this is always worth respecting, but not always something to get excited for. For their new mixtape, The Abstract and The Dragon, Busta and Tip don't just command respect, they make us genuinely happy to be hearing from them again. They sound great, and hearing the old and the new makes this mixtape one of the most fun listens of 2013. -pigeonsandplanes.com

How Facebook's New Machine Brain Will Learn All About You From Your Photos

Facebook poaches an NYU machine learning star to start a new AI lab that may very well end up knowing more about your social life than you do.

Facebook users upload 350 million photos onto the social network every day, far beyond the ability of human beings to comprehensively look at, much less analyze. And so that’s one big reason the company just hired New York University (NYU) machine learning expert Yann LeCun, an eminent practitioner of an artificial intelligence (AI) technique known as “deep learning.” As director of Facebook’s new AI laboratory, LeCun will stay on at NYU part time, while working from a new Facebook facility on Astor Place in New York City.

“Yann LeCun's move will be an exciting step both for machine learning and for Facebook, which has a lot of unique social data,” says Andrew Ng, who directs the Stanford Artifical Intelligence Laboratory and who led a deep-learning project to analyze YouTube video for Google. “Machine learning is already used in hundreds of places throughout Facebook, ranging from photo tagging to ranking articles to your newsfeed. Better machine learning will be able to help improve all of these features, as well as help Facebook create new applications that none of us have dreamed of yet.” What might those futuristic advances be? Facebook did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

“The dream of AI is to build full knowledge of the world and know everything that is going on.”

Aaron Hertzman, a research scientist at Adobe whose specialties include computer vision and machine learning, says that Facebook might want to use machine learning to see what content makes users stick around the longest. And he thinks cutting-edge deep learning algorithms could also be useful in gleaning data from Facebook’s massive trove of photos, which numbers roughly 250 billion.

“If you post a picture of yourself skiing, Facebook doesn’t know what’s going on unless you tag it,” Hertzmann says. “The dream of AI is to build full knowledge of the world and know everything that is going on.”

To try to draw intelligent conclusions from the terabytes of data that users freely give to Facebook every day, LeCun will apply his 25 years of experience refining the artificial intelligence technique known as “deep learning,” which loosely simulates the step-by- step, hierarchical learning process of the brain. Applied to the problem of identifying objects in a photo, LeCun’s deep learning approach emulates the visual cortex, the part of the brain to which our retina sends visual data for analysis.

By applying a filter of just a few pixels over a photo, LeCun’s first layer of software processing looks for simple visual elements, like a vertical edge. A second layer of processing deploys a filter that is a few pixels larger, seeking to assemble those edges into parts of an object. A third layer then builds those parts into objects, tested by hundreds of filters for objects like “person” and “truck,” until the final layer has created a rich visual scene in which trees, sky and buildings are clearly delineated. Through advanced training techniques, some “supervised” by humans and others “unsupervised,” the filters, or “cookie cutters,” dynamically improve at correctly identifying objects over time.

Quickly performing these many layers of repetitive filtering makes massive computational demands. For example, LeCun is the vision expert on an ongoing $7.5 million project funded by the Office of Naval Research to create a small, self-flying drone capable of traveling through an unfamiliar forest at 35 MPH. Unofficially known as “Endor.tech,” and profiled in Popular Science in 2012, the robot will run on a customized computer known as an FPGA, capable of roughly 1 trillion operations per second.

“I’ll take as many [operations per second] as I can get,” LeCun said at the time.

That robot will analyze 30 frames per second of video images in order to make real-time decisions about how to fly itself through a forest at 35 MPH. It’s not hard to imagine similar algorithms used to “read” the videos that you upload to Facebook, by examining who and what is present in the scene. Instead of targeting ads to users based on keywords written in Facebook posts, the algorithms would analyze a video of say, you at the beach with some friends. The algorithm might then learn what beer you’re drinking lately, what brand of sunscreen you use, who you’re hanging out with, and guess whether you might be on vacation.

VIA Popular Science

How did we end up so dependent on vitamins?

In 1602, a Spanish fleet was sailing up the Pacific coast of Mexico when the crew became deathly ill. “The first symptom is pain in the whole body that makes it sensitive to touch,” wrote Antonio de la Ascensión, a priest on the expedition. “Purple spots begin to cover the body, especially from the waist down; then the gums become so swollen that the teeth cannot be brought together, and they can only drink, and finally they die all of a sudden, while talking.”

The crew was suffering from scurvy, a disease that was then both bitterly familiar and deeply mysterious. No one knew why it struck sailors or how to cure it. But on that 1602 voyage, Ascensión witnessed what he considered a miracle. While the crew was ashore burying the dead, one sick sailor picked up a cactus fruit to eat. He started to feel better, and his crewmates followed his example.

“They all began to eat them and bring them back on board so that, after another two weeks, they were all healed,” the priest wrote.

Over the next two centuries, it gradually became clear that scurvy was caused by a lack of fruits and vegetables on long-distance voyages. In the late 1700s, the British Navy started supplying its ships with millions of gallons of lemon juice, eradicating scurvy. But it wasn’t until 1928 that the Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi discovered the ingredient that cured scurvy: vitamin C.

Szent-Gyorgyi’s experiments were part of a wave of early-20th-century research that pulled back the curtain on vitamins. Scientists discovered that the human body required minuscule amounts of 13 organic molecules. A deficiency of any of the vitamins led to different diseases — a lack of vitamin A to blindness, vitamin B12 to severe anemia, vitamin D to rickets.

Today, a huge amount of research goes into understanding vitamins, but most of it is focused on how much of them people need to stay healthy. This work does not address a basic question, though: How did we end up so dependent on these peculiar little molecules?

Recent research is providing new answers. It appears that vitamins were essential to life from its earliest stages some four billion years ago. Early life-forms could make their own vitamins, but some species — including ours — later lost that ability. Species began to depend on each other for vitamins, creating a complex flow of molecules that scientists have named “vitamin traffic.”

Read more The

Downton Abbey Butler Plays Christmas-Cancelling Santa In This Scary Greenpeace Video Read more: Christmas: Downtown Abbey Butler Cancels Christmas in Greenpeace Video

HO HO HO...........

Sorry, kids, Christmas is canceled! At least according to this frightening new video from Greenpeace.

The clip features a dirty, bedraggled and beaten down Santa Claus — played by everyone’s favorite butler, Jim Carter of Downton Abbey fame — announcing the end of Christmas due to global warming and oil drilling in the Arctic.

“Dear children I regrettably bring bad tidings,” Santa warns in the video. “For some time now, melting ice here in the North Pole has made our operations and our day-to-day life intolerable and impossible and there may be no alternative but to cancel Christmas.” Santa explains that he wrote letters to world leaders, but no one believed his warning: “Needless to say these individuals are now at the top of my naughty list.”

Read more Via Time.com

WATCH HERE: Beyoncé's seventeen videos from surprise self-titled album

View All Videos HERE Via Daily Mail

Because all bad/crazy/stupid/trash eminates from Florida

Dupree Johnson Charged With 142 Felony Counts After Cop Sees His Instagram Page

Criminality and social media have rarely had a harmonious relationship. There are several obvious reasons, but the most important is this: Cops have Facebook. And Twitter. And -- it has surely dawned upon 19-year-old Dupree Johnson -- Instagram.

Dupree Johnson, who's evinced an iron dedication to crime, racking up five felonies despite his youth, got down and dirty with Instagram last week, depositing some holy-mother-of-God-are-you-kidding-me images.

A Palm Beach County sheriff's deputy came across the fracas; noted that Dupree had a rap sheet including grand theft, burglary, and felony possession of a firearm; and looked more closely at the pictures.

More information here via miaminewtimes.com

Lady Gaga and Kanye West Need to Go Away … So They Can Have a Comeback

With an 82% drop in its second week, from 305,280 to 45,536, “Artpop” is so stiff, you could iron a shirt on it.

And everybody knows.

Nobody wants to go to a show no one else is attending.

Heat. That’s what gets people to go; when your friends are going, when it’s the place to be and you don’t want to be left out. But you’re not missing anything if you stay home. Hell, you’ve already seen it all on TV. And that’s enough for most people.

Lady Gaga needs to reinvent herself. She needs to follow in the footsteps of Christina Aguilera, of all people. Christina’s album was dead as a doornail, so she stayed home, with some lame excuse I can’t even remember, and that’s just the point. Then she burnished her image on “The Voice,” dieted down and went from being the scourge of the tabloids to their darling.

Gaga needs to make a similar transition. She’s got no manager — and not only does a manager run interference, he or she gives you guidance from outside the bubble. Gaga believes if she just keeps spinning faster, doing more, changing outfits multiple times a day, we’ll care. But we don’t.

Fallout for Kanye
Is Kanye West killing his career, or will he be able to recover?

Kanye has an advantage over Gaga and most acts. He was never a man of the people, never on their side. So he doesn’t have to worry about losing their trust so much as being ignored.

He has yet to cure cancer or create Google. But he keeps telling us he’s an oppressed genius. It’s tough being a black man in America, but the last time I checked, the president was African-American, and although racism is still rampant, is that what’s truly holding Kanye back, or is it that he’s not paid his dues and demonstrated skills in areas other than music? Michael Jordan couldn’t make it in baseball, despite being a much better player than the average Joe. Why is it those who win in one sphere automatically believe they can in another?

Furthermore, Kanye’s lost track of the narrative. His album had very little impact, and now it’s all fiancee Kim Kardashian, all the time; she may be rich but she’s a borderline laughing stock. “SNL” skewered her so sharply she’s shish kebab, and almost impossible to take seriously.

Oh, that’s right — we never did. Her skill was being a tabloid train-wreck, a role she plays well.

Now Seth Rogen and James Franco are making fun of Kanye. Used to be he was off limits. Now he’s a punching bag, like Gaga. Then again, who wouldn’t make fun of his inane sex-on-a-motorcycle video? It’s so ridiculous you can only laugh — at him.

Is this the end of Kanye?

Like I said, the public was never on his side. If he releases great music, he can climb back up, especially in the modern era where the cycle is so fast that what happened today is forgotten next week. But trends have changed. Radio and the critics have embraced Lorde, who is not only not hip-hop, but rails against the trappings of blowhard, hedonistic, materialistic celebrities in her monster hit “Royals.” In other words, do we really care about Louis Vuitton, never mind leather jogging pants? Is Lorde ushering in an era of what’s inside as opposed to outside? One that’s no longer about surface trappings but thought?

We’re ready for it.

Not that the public will give up reading the tabloids any time soon. But right now, the only place Kanye lives is in gossipland. And that’s a hell no musician wants to endure.

If you don’t lead with your music, you’re on the way out.

Via Variety