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By the end of the year, Bill Murray and his five brothers are set to open a 6,000-sq. ft Caddyshack-themed restaurant near their Illinois hometown of Wilmette. The new restaurant will be located in Rosemont, a village just north of Chicago.Interestingly, it's not the brother's first eating establishment. In 2001, the six Murray brothers -Bill, Andy, Brian, Ed, Johnny and Joel- opened the inaugural Murray Bros. Caddyshack restaurant in St. Augustine, Florida. Rolling Stone reports: Bill's older brother Brian Doyle-Murray wrote the classic movie, which stars Bill as Carl Spackler, the loveably messed-up greenskeeper who's in constant hot pursuit of an elusive, mischievous gopher. Brian found inspiration for the film when he worked as a caddy at Indian Hill Club in Winnetka. Its flagship restaurant and bar in Florida pays homage to its namesake, with a golf-themed menu that includes crispy potato golf balls, salads aptly listed under "the greens" and items from "the front nine" and "the back nine."The restaurant's slogan is "Eat, Drink and Be Murray."

In 2014, 43 students from Mexico's Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, in the state of Guerrero: they had been detained by police, who turned them over to a criminal militia, who are presumed to have murdered them. (more…)

Remember the helicone toy that changed from a helix to a pine cone? A mathematician just upped the ante with the colorful lollipopter. (more…)

NYMag's David Wallace-Wells breaks it to us ungently: the Paris Climate Accord, torn up by Trump, was already a compromise that likely condemned much of the equatorial belt to crippling heatwaves. Without it, climate change will only be worse.Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still.

https://youtu.be/_bz_GSgxS3wIn six months, a large asteroid is going to hit Earth. It's likely that everyone is going to die. Only a few people know about it, and they are desperately trying to stop it from slamming into the planet. That's the premise of Salvation, a new suspense thriller TV series premiering on CBS this Wednesday, July 12, 2017. Carla and I got an early look at the first episode, and we both loved it for the premise, sense of urgency, moral issues explored, and hints that more is unfolding than meets the eye. Our friends Elizabeth Kruger and Craig Shapiro created the show, so I grabbed them for a quick interview to ask them about what went into making a series that deals with people secretly trying to save humankind.Mark: What's the conflict in Salvation?Liz: An asteroid is going to collide with Earth in 186 days, and if our government and/or others don't come up with new technology to solve the problem, we're going to go the way of the dinosaurs. Adding to that conflict is other countries that are also looking into how to solve the problem, and what do you do if the world itself cannot agree on how to solve a problem? And if you solve it on one side of the world what problems does it create for the other side of the world?Mark: So if the different countries' solutions don't necessarily work in harmony with each other, they could actually conflict with each other.Craig: Well sure. This research just came out last week, and I find it so interesting -- that asteroid that killed all the dinosaurs, had it landed 30 seconds earlier or 30 seconds later there would still be dinosaurs on Earth. It just hit in the exact wrong spot. So we're in the same situation here, which is, what if you could control the asteroid, by slowing it down a thousandth of one percent so it hits 10 minutes later? You could really control where it ends up. That means you've got an unbelievably powerful weapon at your disposal, and nobody can stop you from using it unless they have similar technology.Mark: So one country could save itself at the expense of another continent going kablooey.Craig: That's right, and you know what? That doesn't necessarily make you a ... if you had that moral choice, that's not an easy choice to make, because there's not necessarily a right answer.It's like Scylla and Charybdis, the Greek myth. If you could sacrifice a few to save almost everybody, maybe you should do it. I mean, Odysseus actually chose to sacrifice the few so that everybody else could live. If you go the other way you could lose the whole thing.Mark: I saw the pilot episode of Salvation and I loved it, and one of the things that you learn is that the people who do know about the asteroid, absolutely don't want the public to know, and they'll go to almost any length to keep word from getting out.Liz: Yeah.Mark: Are you just running off your instincts, since you know that it would be a bad thing if the public found out, or did you do some research about how the government handles impending disaster control?Liz: Well, a little of both. We talked it through, we read a lot of different scenarios, and ultimately we thought, okay, if the government gets this information, then all the people on this planet are going to act as if every day is their last. It would create chaos and since no one could do anything to stop it anyway, it makes good sense that the government would not release this information.Craig: What value is there in freaking everyone out, because it doesn't help solve the problem?Liz: Strategically, they need the masses to remain calm because they can't start pouring resources into the world running amok. So we ultimately believed that the government doing this was not just paternalism, but that it actually makes sense in the context of the story. Our characters come around to understanding the value of this. A related question we explore is: if you have this secret, would you tell your loved ones? If you worked for the Pentagon like [Salvation character] Grace Barrows does, and you had this information, if you tell your friends or family members, you've destroyed their life. So is there a value in keeping the secret from them if they can't do anything about it?Craig: It's like the Matrix. Once you know, you can't unknow it.Mark: We are friends, so I know that you have the same feeling I do about governments doing things in secret -- we don't like it. But in certain cases like this one, it absolutely is harmful to let everyone know that there's going to be an asteroid that's going to hit Earth and probably kill everybody.Liz: We looked at it from a philosophical perspective, and we have the characters really examine this.Craig: Wrestle with it.Liz: Because carrying the burden, as one of our characters says, sucks. Everyone around you is living in blissful ignorance and they're allowed to be happy every day, but you know the secret and you can't enjoy the time you have left. So we wrestled with it, and we thought yeah, transparency as an ideal, absolutely, but when you think about the ramifications, and whether it's selfish or selfless to be transparent in the situation ... we looked at it from a philosophical perspective, not a political one.Mark: So these government agents in the show who are assassinating the people who know about it -- I thought of them as the bad guys -- but now I'm thinking, they're like the people in the basement that have to make the decision to smother the crying baby so the Nazis upstairs don't discover everyone hiding below.Liz: Well, I don't want to give away who dies in the pilot, but the story has tentacles, as you will discover, that go much further than the asteroid problem.Craig: The show does ask the question in many different ways and forms, which is: if you knew that the world might be coming to an end, what would you, personally, be willing to do to try to save it? People in the show are going to be tested in ways that they never would have imagined, but they find themselves either rising to places they never knew they could go, or flaming out. Failing.Liz: Right, and also questions we asked ourselves are, okay, so you, Mark Frauenfelder, or me, Liz Kruger, we've never killed a person, but what if you had to kill a person in order to save the world?Mark: Right.Liz: Suddenly all the rules change. You've gotta do things you didn't think you were capable of. It's like being in war, I guess, where suddenly all the rules change. But the thing that's super complicated about the show is the rules change, but not everyone knows they've changed, so now if you do something that goes outside the rules, you may still be held to the consequences for breaking those rules, even though you know that you had to do this in order to-Craig: And to the rest of society you would just seem like you've gone crazy.Mark: You've done a lot of research into asteroids. Do you think that, with today's technology, we would could mitigate the harm of an asteroid on a crash collision path with Earth?Liz: Well, if you found out about it soon enough in order to combat the problem. One problem is that while we know about 90% of near-earth objects, there's 5-10% that we don't know about. There was an asteroid in 1908 that hit a remote area in Siberia. It came in with the force of many nuclear bombs and devastated a huge area. If it had been a populated area - Craig: It would have wiped out a city.Liz: That's right, and so that threat's out there. There are people working on the same kinds of technology that we are dealing with in this story -- gravity tractors and kinetic impactors. In Salvation we take the developing technology and advance it.Craig: We treat it like the Manhattan Project? They always theoretically thought they could build a bomb to save the world if they had to, but they didn't put the resources into it, because they didn't have to, and technology wasn't there yet. But when faced with essentially an extinction level event like World War II, they threw all the resources they could at it, and they did 10 years of work in two years to figure out how the bomb would work and get it in production. We're in the same situation here -- we're taking technologies that are theoretical right now or just in the testing phase, and moving them ahead. There was an article yesterday on space.com about NASA launching a kinetic impactor to see what happens. Mark: What's a kinetic impactor?Craig: If they launch something at an asteroid that basically slams into it, how much can it change the trajectory? We're also looking at a gravity tractor, which uses gravitational pull from a probe's own mass to create a tiny gravitational field. If you could do this far enough in advance of the impending impact -- months, preferably years -- you could theoretically pull an asteroid or comet off course.Liz: Just enough to deflect it so that it doesn't hit Earth.Craig: Right. So all these things are theoretically happening right now. We are speeding up the science because frankly we have to or we're all going to die. We're also working on other kinds of really interesting technology.Liz: Have you ever heard of the EmDrive, the electromagnetic drive?Craig: If you go look it up, you'll be like, "Holy shit, this is unbelievable." It's going to change space travel if they can get it to work.Liz: It's theoretical right now, but people claim that they've seen it work.Craig: It's propulsion without fuel. It defies Newton's third law, which is why some people say it's impossible, but other people say, "Well, it works, we just don't know yet why it works." It's not very big. It uses electromagnets powered by tiny solar panels, and it produces a minuscule amount of thrust, like one Newton. But if you do this in space, you will be continuously accelerating forever. The speculation is you could be at the Moon in like four hours, and you could be at Mars in like four months. So this is unbelievable if they could make it work. Supposedly the Chinese are ready to try it in space now, and there have been experiments here on Earth.Liz: NASA did a paper on it, so we've taken the EmDrive and that concept and our characters are advancing the technology. Mark: We've been talking about the science in the show, but that's not really what it's about, is it?Craig: We treat the science seriously, but it's really about the human endeavor to beat the asteroid, and not so much the nuts and bolts. In the end we're saying, "This is a very human side to science, and we must problem-solve at the highest level that humans can problem-solve if we're going to save the planet." We've spent a lot of time trying to make the science believable and realistic, and interesting, and fun, but mostly just very human.Pictured: Santiago Cabrera. Photo: Ben Mark Holzberg/CBS ©2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved

Espionage Cosmetics has your nerdy nail-art needs covered with the D20-themed $10 Critical Hit nail wraps, circuit board wraps and tentacle wraps. (via Geeky Merch) (more…)

Any time a trader at Enstar Capital's new London Soho offices fancies sushi and Champagne delivered to their desk, they can press a dedicated "Champagne" button that's being installed at each workplace, as a kind of grotesque, guillotine-inspiring homage to Amazon's Dash button, which lets mere mortals order laundry detergent. (more…)

Python is one of the most robust programming languages around, but that doesn’t mean it’s strictly for experts. Thanks to its versatility and elegant, human-readable syntax, Python is a great starter language for novices, and has significant applications for data scientists and web developers alike. To get up to speed with this powerful language, or start your coding journey from the absolute beginning, this Python Programming Bootcamp is currently available in the Boing Boing Store.These nine courses will teach you everything from programming basics like data structures and control flow, to advanced topics like machine learning and data visualization. Here’s the full syllabus:Fast Track Python for NewbiesLearn Python Image Processing by Making Instagram-Style FiltersCreate a Raspberry Pi Smart Security Camera with PythonMaster Data Visualization with PythonThe Complete Python Programming Boot Camp: Beginner to AdvancedLearn Python with 70+ ExercisesPython Programming for Beginners: Learn Python in One DayMachine Learning with PythonPython for Finance: Investment Fundamentals & Data AnalyticsGet this comprehensive bundle in the Boing Boing Store for $39.

Paul Ryan ally Rep. Mike Conaway [R-TX, @ConawayTX11, +1 (202) 225-3605] is the proud owner of $30,000 worth of stock in UnitedHealth, who stand to benefit enormously from Rep Conaway's efforts to destroy Obamacare and replace it with a system that allows insurers to charge more and kick more than 22,000,000 Americans off their insurance. (more…)

Yougov's latest poll numbers put the "unelectable" Jeremy Corbyn and his "unrealistic" "unworkable" political platform eight points ahead of Theresa May and her Conservative Party, who were only able to form a government by allying themselves with the terror-supporting young-Earth creationists of the DUP. (more…)

Although the iPhone 7 and rugged Android devices like the Samsung Galaxy S8 can survive a dunk in the pool, their ergonomics make it difficult to bring them into the shower without risking a shattered screen. That's why the Bluetooth Shower Speaker continues to be awesome.This water-resistant wireless speaker is designed to fit anywhere in your bathroom, thanks to a strong suction cup on its backside. Its playback controls are front and center to let you easily skip tracks and adjust the volume, even when soap gets in your eyes. It can also answer (or reject) phone calls, so you’ll stay just as connected as you want to be.This Bluetooth Shower Speaker is back in the Boing Boing Store for $9.99.

It's invariably the cheapest on the shelf, but the Taylor/TruTemp 3516 I got at Target fell apart the first time I pushed the button. It's the shabbiest piece of electronic tat I've bought from a major U.S. retailer. Don't buy it! A different brand is only $4 at Amazon, has good reviews, and isn't held together by the clasping pressure of a plastic cap that will obviously expand when pushed.I even tried gluing it on with superglue. Then it stopped working altogether. Then I threw it in the trash.

My daughter erupted in smiles when I told her I'd gotten her a few latch hook kits for our upcoming roadtrip.While I'm sure a Smartphone isn't enough to help my kid stay sane for hours, I'd have given my brother for one. While Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies won't be enough to entertain her, latch hook surprisingly will!Buy your own hook! Frequently the kits don't come with them!I am looking forward to having this 70s style shag heart for our VW Camper, as we go visit some National Parks. WORK FASTER CHILD!Wonderart Shaggy From The Heart Latch Hook Kit, 12" X 12" via Amazon6.5in. Wooden Latch Hook Tool via Amazon

More than 1 million people have been non-fatally shot in the USA since 2000: all of them would have uninsurable pre-existing conditions in the eyes of insurers if Trumpcare passes. (more…)

Dronestagram's fourth annual International Drone Photography Contest had to be tough to judge, given how many great shots made the finals. Above: "Waterlilly" by helios1412. Below: "Two Moo" by LukeMaximoBell. (more…)

Years ago, someone found a turtle hit by a car and brought it to Hocking Hills Animal Clinic, where they applied a fiberglass shell and released it in the wood. Years later, guess who the vet found while walking in the woods? (more…)

Duncan Skiles created a short but perfectly wonderful tribute to scenes in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies where something that is obviously not Arnold Schwarzenegger is presented as Arnold Schwarzenegger.Previously: INFINITE Schwarzenegger.

Trump is an infamously domineering handshaker, who uses the gesture to impose and humiliate. Sometimes, a wily Trudeau or muscular Macron will get the better of him, but they're still playing his game. Agata Kornhauser-Duda isn't, drifting right past his outstretched l'il smokies to greet Melania Trump instead, only turning to the orange morgellons monster once she had dealt with its much better half.https://twitter.com/marv_vien/status/882982124063563776

https://vimeo.com/220291411Designer Dani Clode's Third Thumb is a 3D printed robotic prosthetic thumb that goes on the pinky side of your hand, created a motorized, opposable additional thumb that you can use to play the guitar, pick up objects, or crack an egg. (more…)

https://vimeo.com/209070629Magali Barbé's short film Strange Beasts depicts a futuristic augmented reality product for kids and parents -- a piece of design fiction with a serious sting it its tail. (via Beyond the Beyond)

My latest Locus column is "Be the First One to Not Do Something that No One Else Has Ever Not Thought of Doing Before," and it's about science fiction's addiction to certain harmful fallacies, like the idea that you can sideline the actual capabilities and constraints of computers in order to advance the plot of a thriller. (more…)

Unable to secure equal pay, Hawaii Five-O stars Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park have quit the show.Members of Hollywood’s small but vocal Asian-American community are speaking out in support of former Hawaii Five-0 stars Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park, who have left the series after failed contract negotiations with CBS and CBS Television Studios.“Unfortunately, the racial hierarchy established in the original 1968-1980 series remained intact in the 2010 reboot: Two white stars on top, two Asian/Pacific Islander stars on bottom,” Guy Aoki, founding president of Media Action Network for Asian Americans, wrote in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter.News of Kim's and Park’s departures broke Friday before the Independence Day holiday, with sources confirming to THR that Kim and Park had requested and been denied pay equity alongside fellow original castmembers Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan. In a lengthy Facebook post Wednesday, Kim noted that he based his decision to leave on the inability to reach an agreement on a new contract, and added, “The path to equality is rarely easy.” Sources say that Kim and Park asked to be compensated on par with leads O’Loughlin and Caan, who also receive a cut of the series’ back-end profit.Via the Hollywood Reporter

Volvo, the tank-like Swedish station wagon of yesteryear, is giving up on gasoline. By 2019 all new Volvo automobiles will be powered by electricity.Volvo plans to build only electric and hybrid vehicles starting in 2019, making it the first major automaker to abandon cars and SUVs powered solely by the internal combustion engine.CEO Hakan Samuelsson said the move was dictated by customer demand. It means that in two years, all new Volvo vehicles will have some form of electric propulsion.Via SF Chronhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTJZEK4JP0k

Elite European sophistication prevails once again over vulgar American exports.

Readers familiar with music theory, riddim, or any other aspect of music deeper than a four-chord pop song may already be itching to leap into the comments to explain of course it does, that any bouncy predictable track can back any lines hitherto laid over any other bouncy predictable track.But just as there is a weird power in Thomas the Tank Engine, there is an uncanny magic to Mike O' Donnell and Junior Campbell's theme.Previously: Biggie Smalls the Tank Engine.

With Coco Loko you can snort chocolate, sorry, raw cacao infused with a "special energy blend." The entrepreneur behind this product, 29-year-old Nick Anderson, said he was inspired by Europe's "chocolate-snorting trend." He told the Washington Post, “At first, I was like, ‘Is this a hoax?' And then I tried it and it was like, okay, this is the future right here.” He then invested $10,000 into creating his own.The Washington Post reports:It took about 10 tries over two months to come up with the mixture, which was created by an Orlando-based supplement company.“Some versions, they just burned too much,” Anderson said. “Other times they looked gray and dull, or didn’t have enough stimulants.”The effects of the cacao-based powder, he said, last about 30 minutes to an hour, and are “almost like an energy-drink feeling, like you’re euphoric but also motivated to get things done.”Wondering if it works? Watch this guy's video first:https://youtu.be/3g8GQWTaU_IGotta have some of that sweet, sweet (well, not that sweet) raw cacao snuff? One 1.25 oz. jar will set you back $19.99.(Sean Bonner)

Spotted in Tulsa, Oklahoma by Jerrinq, these distracting traffic signs seem to contradict their messages. (Miss Cellania)

In the wake of CNN threatening to out a critic if he does not limit his speech in the future, former federal prosecutor and First Amendment champion Ken White has published an eminently sensible post about the incoherence of the present moment's views on free speech, and on the way that partisanship causes us to apply a double standard that excuses "our bunch" and damns the "other side." (more…)

Here's a vegetable gardener who didn't want to share his bounty with slugs and snails, so he strung an electric barrier around the perimeter of his raised bed garden. Anytime a voracious mollusk attempts to enter the garden, it must first crawl over a pair of electrified wires, where it receives a mild shock sufficient to thwart its plans. The gardener has kindly posted instructions for others interested in making a 9 volt electric snail/slug fence.

When a bolt or screw is stripped, I drill it out with this extractor set.When working on old motorcycles, or just my old VW bus, I encounter a lot of stuck screws and bolts. Frequently prior mechanics have left fastners completely rounded off. When these things happen, I grab my drill.These extractor bits both burnish the stripped head, and then screw into it and extract it. They are not simple to use, and it takes a very steady hand -- something I don't always have -- but slow and patient work generally produces good results.Speed Out Extractor HSS Broken Bolt and Damaged Screw Extractor via Amazon

Chet Phillips's Monster Zen is a book of 16 beautiful, "Japanese-styled" drawings of monsters, accompanied by haikus by the artist -- you can get the book for $24 or get individual prints. (more…)

From 1993 to 2001, this Serbian middle-school biology textbook sported a cutout of a still from Raising Arizona in which Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter cradle their stolen baby. (more…)

According to this New York Times article, the Secret Service needs more members:...John Roth, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, said last month as he laid out the Secret Service’s personnel shortfall at a hearing on Capitol Hill. Mr. Roth estimated that the agency needs to increase by 1,700 employees in five years, to 8,200, if it is to properly perform its investigative and better-known protection missions.To show exactly what it takes to become (and remain) an agent, the Times went into a Secret Service training facility in Maryland. They filmed recruits performing the five rigorous training exercises they must pass: Physical training, control tactics, firearms (this course alone is 104 hours long), K9 and emergency response, and protective driving. The video is another one of those 360 degree ones.

On Thingiverse, Gentlegiant's beautiful, faithful model of the Haunted Mansion front-gate sign to 3D print at any size or remix into your other designs.

Belgian artist Jan Pypers created NIGHTGARDENERS, a series of evocative photorealistic illustrations depicting nighttime scenes that are both recognizable and foreign. Each invites the viewer to make up a story. (more…)

A few months ago my friend Joshua Glenn asked me to contribute a short piece to a series of true stories "about objects that are lucky, magical, kept on your person or close by at all times." The series is called Talismanic Objects. You can read all the stories at Hilobrow. Here's mine:As a little kid in the 1960s with limited access to television, my role models were my friends’ big brothers. My friends certainly weren’t role models — they were dweebs like me. And grown ups — they might as well have been a different species, with a way of thinking that made them impossible to relate to. Big brothers were still kids, but infinitely more sophisticated and wiser than 6-years-olds like me (who big brothers regarded with indifference at best and as sticky-fingered pests at all other times).It was a thrill to walk past a big brother’s open bedroom door and sneak a glimpse in their rooms to find Aurora Monster Models, Mars Attacks trading cards, black light fluorescent posters, MAD magazines, Green Hornet’s Black Beauty model car, Cowsills LPs, Lost In Space View-Master reels, Super Balls, Sixfingers, and Ka-Bala game boards. To me, these treasures will forever be imbued with big brother mojo.I have a talisman that I can use to summon big brother mojo. It’s a Martian Fink ring — a little armless vinyl creature with pointed ears, antennae, square feet, and a long tongue curling from its leering mouth. It’s attached to a plastic ring so I can wear it on my finger (I don’t).The Martian Fink is a knock-off of the much more popular Rat Fink character created by custom car builder Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. It was manufactured as a gumball machine novelty in 1965 by the Henal Novelty and Premium Co. Anyone with five cents could buy one, but I didn’t know that at the time. I was too dense or shy to ask my friend’s big brother, who had one in 1967, where he got his. As a big brother, he simply had access to cool stuff that I could only dream about.I bought mine on eBay 15 years ago, and keep it in a box in my bed table drawer. I try not to look at it too much, because I don’t want the magic to run out.

Exhibit A: (above) Joel Carroll (@joelcarroll) hypothesizes a many-legged parasite that replaces the internal mechanics in the manner of Cymothia Exigua, the tongue-replacing fish louse. Buy the T-shirt.Exhibit B: (below) Yui Abe hypothesizes a giant man literally confined within the chassis of the engine (via); the tees are sold out; presumably a collector's item.

The 555 timer integrated circuit was invented in 1971. Over a billion are made every year, because they are so versatile. Charles Platt wrote of the chip:It has turned out to be the most successful chip in history, both in the number of units sold (tens of billions, and still counting) and the longevity of its design (fundamentally unchanged for almost forty years). Even now, about a billion 555s are manufactured each year.In Make: Electronics, I decided to include the 555, because it remains so fundamental. It’s also a wonderful teaching tool, since it can be used in so many ways. If you want to build, say, a reaction timer, using a counter and a couple of logic chips, you’re going to run it with a 555 timer, and you may end up adding a couple more 555s to take care of functions such as delaying the start of the count and locking the display until a reset button is pressed. You can also run a 555 fast enough to generate audible tones, which can be incorporated into a burglar alarm, or you can use it in a combination lock. All three of these projects are included in the book.Make magazine celebrated the 555 timer and its creator, Hans Camenzind, a few years ago when it featuring a 555 Week on its website.555s are dirt cheap, too. Ebay sells 100 for $4.Because the 555 is so fundamental electronics, people honor it by making giant size versions of it. In the photo above, you can see the 555 storage ottoman Ross built.Here's a similar project -- a 555 timer stool:I also like the 555 footstool that Windell and Lenore of Evil Mad Science built:

Starting in October, Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social media companies could be fined up to nearly $57-million by Germany for hateful messages posted on their site. The new law, which passed Germany's parliament on Friday, will give a company 24 hours to delete a post that has been flagged as racist, defamatory, or hateful before fining them.According to The Washington Post:The measure is seen as a test case in the battle against fake news and online hate, problems bedeviling governments across the West. But Germany's muscular approach has human rights groups worried about a chilling effect on free expression...Germany has staked out a stance that's among the most vigorous in the world against spurious posts and comments on social media. It also has some of the strictest laws regulating forms of expression seen as encouraging violence. Denying the Holocaust and stirring hatred against minorities are punishable with prison time.Under the new measure, which takes effect in October, companies have 24 hours to erase illegal content after it is flagged. They have another seven days to sift through messages marked as offensive but not necessarily criminal under German statute. Fines for consistently failing to respond begin at 5 million euros, about $5.7 million, but may go as high as 50 million euros.According to Germany’s justice minister, Heiko Maas, hate crimes have increased by 300 percent in the past two years, which explains the thinking behind the aggressive new law. But Facebook, critical of the new law, says it “will not improve efforts to tackle this important societal problem.” One thing it does do is destroy free speech, and Germany could set a global trend if their law is deemed "successful." Image: Max Pixel

https://youtu.be/dKOnTziBtLMArtist Eirik Brandal makes sculptural electronic circuits that generate music. Above, "composition #11"Interactive sound sculpture, 2016+12V, self-suppliedTwo proximity sensors trigger and control the frequency of sine waves. The design is inspired by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, hence the title, ‘Composition #11’. Exhibited in De Fabriek, Eindhoven, 2016.He makes neat synths, too!

Here's another one to add to the gallery of off-label fake butter brands.I sure hope so

Last Monday, a Chinese woman named Zhang was munching on what she thought was an aloe vera plant for her live vlog, in which she eats unusual foods for her audience of a few hundred. But after two bites she realized she'd made a mistake. After the first bite, the 26-year-old vlogger said, "This is great. Yum." But after the second bite she says, "Oh, that's bitter. That's really bitter." The camera then shut off.Off camera, Zhang's mouth quickly became numb, and her throat felt like it was on fire. She was also losing her voice. Severe rashes and blisters began to cover her body. She rushed herself to the hospital and recovered after having her stomach pumped. According to The Mirror:Her "Aloe Vera Feast" - as her channel's stream was title - turned very bad, very fast as she actually ate the leaves of a century plant - which is also called the agave Americana. The poison desert plant from the Americas, which resembles aloe vera, is sold in China as an ornament, and its likeness to aloe vera is thought to have fooled the woman.

These days, a conveyor belt can be so much more than a belt. Omnidirectional belts are programmable, allowing items to be rotated, aligned, and even transferred to other belts as they zip along. (more…)

Coming after improvements to Firefox and continued unease at Google's life-pervading insight, this image is outperforming the ███████ ████ Virality Control Group today (via). It got me thinking about all the promises that were made. Here's the earliest article in Google News to contain "Big browser" in its headline, published by Time Magazine on Nov. 18, 1994.World Wide Web die-hard surfers -- many of whom tend to be privacy-rights absolutists -- have been horrified to learn that the software that guides them through the Internet could pose huge Orwellian problems. Over the last week or so, a growing number of heads-up E-mail dispatches have warned that some "browsers," including free and commercial copycats of the popular Mosaic program, quietly supply the Internet E-mail addresses of Net site visitors. These lists, critics argue, could soon be sold to the highest bidder --or even to government snoopers. "You'll go into a bulletin board that has an ad, and in a little bit of time, the manufacturer can start sending you junk mail," David Farber, a University of Pennsylvania computer science professor, told TIME Daily. The next step, Farber and others theorize, is a credit-card-like record of what you've bought over the Net and which political discussion groups you've perused. Web programmers, who never intended such consequences, are now talking about creating either "privacy buttons" or warning labels.The concerns isolated:• Browsers secretly collect and share personal data.• Aggregated data could be sold or shared to marketers and the government.• The technology to do this will be tunneled within advertising.• Individual preferences graphed, especially political ones.• Privacy controls and warnings.Damn! They even predicted our empty gestures of resistance!

My quest for an inflatable tardigrade is yet to yield results, but they say the journey is the destination and I have discovered a plethora of inflatable unicorns along the way. This one is the best. It's quite expensive, at $43 shipped, but you can't cut corners when it comes to quality inflatables.P.S. The inflatable unicorn wall head is just incredibly nasty, thanks to the uncannily realistic horse photo printed on it. Unless you're putting it in someone's bed as a warning, avoid.

The WiFi232 is a traditional old-timey old-schooley Hayes-compatible 300-115200 baud modem, no wider than its own parallel port. Automatically responds with a customizable busy message when already in a call.The killer app seems to be using it to get internet onto ancient retro portables like the TRS-80 Model 102, but it's been put through its paces on various 16-bit Commodores, Ataris and Apples too. Here's Blake Patterson:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92RIT_L-8jAThe purpose of the device is to act as a bridge between your serial port and your local WiFi router. It has a 25-pin RS-232 data interface and a Mini-USB connector for power — it should work with any computer sporting a standard serial port.The WiFi232 is configured by connecting to the device’s built-in web server and loading the configuration page or by issuing extended AT configuration commands. For example,AT$SSID=MyWifiHotspotNamepoints the device to your WiFi hotspot. Once things are configured (it supports 300 to 115,200 baud), just load up your favorite terminal program, type:ATDT bbs.myfavbbs.comand the WiFi232 “dials” into that telnet BBS. Your vintage computer thinks its talking on the phone.It's $33 as a pile o' parts or $49 assembled, but there's a waiting list.

In 1987 or so, the Welsh island of Anglesey, legendary redoubt of the druids, hosted a similarly legendary gathering to which only people with fish-themed surnames were invited. In Fish Story, Charlie Lynn (with the help of one Caspar Salmon) sets out to unravel "the truth behind a fishy tale."

Immersive 3D sound is usually only possible with an array of surround-sound speakers, or by using headphones with Binaural audio content. And since most readily-available media is mastered for generic stereo, your Dolby 5.1 setup won’t automagically add an extra dimension to your listening experience. But you can still simulate a rich audio environment with Boom 3D’s spatializing equalizer.Using only your Mac’s built-in speakers, Boom 3D adds a remarkably convincing 3D effect to your media playback. It’s specifically tuned to get the best sound out of your Apple hardware, and offers helpful EQ presets for a wide variety of contexts and content. You can boost the volume of specific applications, and enjoy easy access to smart system audio controls.Boom 3D also includes a built-in media player to get the most out of your music library. Right now, you can get a discounted license for this powerful audio utility in the Boing Boing Store for $9.99.

The seven-foot tall sad clown with the golden voice is at it again. Per his fan's request, Puddles Pity Party covers David Bowie's "Life on Mars." He wrote on his Facebook page:Ya know, David Bowie is very near and dear to me and I gave this one all I got. I took some unintentional liberties with the lyrics while I was in the "flow". I hope ya don't mind.Don't mind at all. Wow, that 1:50 mark... chills.Previously: Puddles the clown takes no prisoners on America's Got Talent

Dutch artist Germans Ermič crafted this lovely ombré glass chair, an update of the classic laminated glass chair created by Shiro Kuramata in 1976. (more…)