Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, rewrote U.S. President Donald Trump's 'MAGA' campaign slogan today in protest of the administration's absurd withdrawal from the Paris climate accords. "Make Our Planet Great Again," says Macron. We're in alignment with Nicaragua and Syria, says Trump. (more…)

Here's a very clever eject button that fits into most automobile cigarette lighter sockets. Unfortunately, the product listing clearly states that it's "designed for show only." It is a functional cigarette lighter though so I guess they mean it won't actually trigger your ejector seat."Kei Project Red Eject Ejection Seat Push Button Car Power Plug Cigerette Lighter 12-volt Accessory Fits Most Vehicles" (Amazon via Dangerous Minds)

Hungarian artist Flora Borsi composited colorized photos of real immigrants from the early 20th century into contemporary photographs of New York City.“I would like to draw attention to the immigrants who wanted to live a better life in America,” Borsi writes. "I tried to connect past and present with visualising these people in today’s environment."The series is called Forgotten Dream. (via PetaPixel)

https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/kingfirley/playlist/2EOmcCja09zTPTYQ0SagEhScott Harding's 11-hour Spotify playlist of punk rock starts in 1965 with "Goo Goo Muck," by Ronnie Cook and the Gaylads (I thought The Cramps wrote it until now), follows with bands like ? & The Mysterians, the Stooges, MC5, the Velvet Underground, The New York Dolls, and others before moving onto familiar names. Lots of good stuff in here.[via Open Culture]

It's within the realm of possibility that Trump will be impeached in the coming months. The Republicans in Congress have the power to do it. Lee Drutman of Vox presents the pros and cons for impeaching Trump that Congressional republicans are weighing. (more…)

If the ads in the ‘National Enquirer’ are any indiction, its readers are overweight Elvis and KISS fans with hairy legs, have drug addicted kids, can’t get into their bathtubs unaided, are afraid of falling over and not getting up, and collect statues of the Virgin Mary, Donald Trump and the Wicked Witch of the West.Judging by the number of weight loss ads, I’m guessing they’ll swallow anything - even what passes for news in this week’s fact-challenged tabloids.“Megyn Kelly: What She’s Hiding!” screams the cover of the ‘Enquirer,’ claiming to reveal her “criminal past & bitter divorce!” But she’s not hiding either. The former Fox News anchor confessed on air back in 2011 to shoplifting at Kmart when she was 12 years old, when her mother made her take purloined earrings back to the store and apologize to the manager. And how is she “hiding” her divorce, when it’s in public court records and has been widely reported? She has also undergone a “$1.4 million plastic surgery transformation” claims the ‘Enquirer,’ based on an “expert” who believes she has had a boob job, nose job, and facial fillers. I haven’t done the math, but I suspect she’d have to have those same procedures every month for four years to rack up that sort of medical bill. Evidently quitting Fox for NBC has made it open season on Kelly.Pamela Anderson, meanwhile, has had her face “destroyed by plastic surgery,” claims the ‘Enquirer,’ despite looking as beautiful as ever.The ‘Enquirer’ also claims that Val Kilmer is suffering a “new cancer horror,” which turns out to be based on the fact that because he once had cancer, he could get it again. Horror indeed.Beleaguered comedian Bill Cosby “has been found guilty” by a jury in his sex assault trial, reports the ‘Enquirer.’ Except there has been no trial: it’s just a “jury” of 12 random folk questioned by the ‘Enquirer,’ without hearing all the evidence. What could be more fair and balanced than that?Based on “expert” assessments by doctors who have never seen the patients, the ‘Enquirer’ also reports that Tom Cruise has been getting hair plugs, Eva Longoria has gained 40 lbs, and Jennifer Lopez is trying for a baby with A-Rod (you can tell just by looking at them.)On the political front, the ‘Enquirer’ claims that fired FBI chief James Comey “obstructed justice” by killing a probe into “Obama wiretaps on Trump.” This dubious story is based on tenuous allegations by former NSA tech Dennis Montgomery, whose former attorney called him a “con artist” and “habitual liar engaged in fraud,” and is promulgated by his current attorney Larry Klayman, whose anti-Islamic neocon Freedom Watch advocacy group was a long-running antagonist to presidents Clinton and Obama. Seems like a reliable source to me.The ‘Globe’ devotes its cover to a story it has told many times before over the past decade: a pregnant Princess Diana was allegedly killed by Britain’s MI6 spy agency and SAS special forces acting on the orders of Prince Charles. The ‘Globe’ conveniently ignores the fact that Britain's Royal Family has no control over spy agencies or the military, and Prince Charles has control over less than anyone. But Princess Diana continues to sell magazines, so she’s back on the cover.“New Boobs for Cougar Susan” reads the headline over a photo of Susan Sarandon looking voluptuous - as she has in almost every photo for the past 30 years. She looks the same as ever, but a “top cosmetic surgeon” is wheeled out to suggest that she “appears to have had breast enhancement.” Why do the tabloids never bring out a "women’s underwear expert” to opine: “She appears to have bought a new push-up bra,” I wonder?The favorite new toy at the ‘Globe’ continues to be BioAcoustic Biology’s purported ability to diagnose illnesses just by listening to a patient’s voice, this week determining that Bill Cosby has “brain damage.” Or perhaps he’s just been reading too many tabloids.‘Us’ magazine reveals how singer Pink “Saved her Marriage" (take breaks and persevere) while ‘People’ magazine reveals Jennifer Garner’s “Life After Heartbreak” (she’s moving on, working, and “seems happy,” says a friend. Well, don’t we all?)Fortunately we have the investigative team at ‘Us’ to tell us that Elizabeth Olsen wore it best, Jamie Chung (Who she, Ed?) has a phobia for “hairy spiders,” Danay Garcia carries granola, headphones and Ferrero Rocher chocolates in her Moleskine bag, and that the stars are just like us: they shop, eat ice cream, take cabs, fish and surf.The ‘National Examiner’ brings us John Wayne’s granddaughter revealing “The John Wayne you never knew,” which is certainly true if you never actually met the actor. I think we could all have guessed that his granddaughter would say that Wayne “was really an old softie and devoted family man.” But the two-page feature loses a little of its impact when you learn in the final paragraph that Wayne’s granddaughter Annie is aged 30, meaning that she was born eight years after the Duke died - and she never knew him either.As for those ‘Enquirer’ ads, the Virgin Mary statuette will set you back almost $60, while the Wicked Witch is a hefty $140, though to be fair that includes a flying monkey. But for a mere $50 you can get Trump - like the Wicked Witch with his right arm raised in triumph, a disturbing smile on his face, and his hands looking smaller than ever - but without the flying monkey. No doubt those qualify as undesirable immigrants on Trump’s no-fly list.Onwards and downwards . . .

I have a bluetooth OBD2 Scanner for my car, but this integrated, corded device looks pretty convenient. Its function is to determine the cause of the check engine light when it appears on your dashboard. It's on sale for the next hour on Amazon for $10.

Brett Gaylor writes, "As part of the Mozilla Privacy Arcade project in this year’s Global Sprint, Mozilla is inviting activists, artists, designers, educators, gamers, storytellers, and technologists of all backgrounds to invent new privacy-themed adventures for the role playing game Cryptomancer." (more…)

The entire nation of Ethiopia -- a corrupt, oligarchic state with the distinction of being "the world's first turnkey surveillance state" where spy technology from the "free world" is used to spy on the whole country -- just dropped off the internet. (more…)

Gal Gershovsky, Felipe Fournier and Danny Flam perform Koji Kondo's classic Super Mario Bros. theme on the MalletKAT, a MIDI xylophone.We bought a malletKAT (which is a midi xylophone) and we took it for a test drive - we used gameboy samples from the impactsoundworks super audio boy and rearranged them in Kontakt so the top keys on the MK are drum samples and the rest of the keys gameboy sounds. So this is the result! (this is after first rehearsal and you can hear Danny screwing up his part lol)

If the Trump administration makes good on its promise to pack all potentially explosive laptops together in a blast-multiplying steel case in the plane's hold, it will be good news for would-be bombers -- and bad news for your data security. (more…)

CNN reports today that Patrick Leahy and Al Franken, two democratic senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked former FBI Director James Comey to investigate Attorney General Jeff Sessions over concerns Sessions may have had an undisclosed private meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. (more…)

Nesta's Juan Mateos-Garcia proposes that "entropic forces" make algorithmic decision-making tools worse over time, requiring that they be continuously maintained and improved (this is also a key idea from Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction: a machine-learning system is only honest if someone is continuously matching its predictions to reality and refining its model based on the mistakes it makes). (more…)

As part of its “Barbie Vlog” series, the official Barbie YouTube channel uploaded a video last year in which Barbie discusses her struggles with depression, or, as she puts it, “feeling blue.” Barbie shares some tips and tricks for getting out of a funk (going on a walk, talking to someone, etc.), but she also emphasizes that it’s okay not to feel happy all the time. As she puts it:Sometimes I still feel blue. And then I feel guilty about feeling sad because I am supposed to be the upbeat positive one all the time. I mean, I am known as being an upbeat person… But I’m not always. And I started to think, maybe I’m just being really unfair on myself. You know? I don’t always have to be upbeat and positive. And to expect that of myself, it isn’t fair. To camouflage myself to fit into a mold of what I think I should act or feel or think, well that doesn’t help anyone. And it just gets you lost.The video is powerful, not only because it normalizes discussions of mental health issues, but because its specifically aimed at young girls, who are at a much higher risk of depression than their male peers. In fact, a new study suggests that more than a third of teenage girls will experience depression by the time they’re 17. While the Barbie video may be just a small part of combating that problem, the ubiquity of Barbie as a cultural icon also gives her message a lot of power. Or as writer Jenny Trout puts it:https://twitter.com/Jenny_Trout/status/869926906807939073

Crows in D experiments with the cymatic patterns of bird wings, pairing up the waveforms of audio tones with the wing cycles of crows arranged end to end. (more…)

Artist Jada Fitch creates impossibly cute bird feeders that attach to windows, allowing viewers to enjoy the sights of birds inside what looks like a tiny home. (more…)

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The Sinji Panoramic Smart WiFi Camera offers 960p HD real-time streaming and supports up to 128GB of video recording space with a microSD card. Its 165-degree wide angle lens can see everything in a large room, and it will send a notification to your phone every time it picks up new motion. This camera also provides two-way audio communication, just in case you need to scold your dog for digging through the trash, or scare off any uninvited guests.Multiple Sinji cameras can be viewed from the same app, so you can watch several areas at once for total home surveillance. The Sinji Panoramic Smart WiFi Camera is usually $139.99, but you can get one here for $59.99.

The image you see here is a still frame from a splendid cinemagraph—a seamlessly-looping short video or GIF—that does not do the original justice. Atlas Obscura's Anika Burgess writes on the strange majesty of Ray Collins and Armand Dijcks' cinemgraphs of waves, where the captured natural beauty becomes weird, even threatening, in the eternally-recurring moment. “The idea was to stretch out the 1/8000th [of a] second during which the image was created into infinity. In a lot of my work, I like to mess with people’s minds a little, and this contrast between a very short time span being stretched infinitely long, and between motion and stillness is a perfect example of that.”

A noose was found inside an exhibit on segregation at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the nation's capital today. (more…)

Spicer was ridiculously forced to cover the boss's latest tweeting-of-himself-in-the-foot. (more…)

A labor activist who was investigating labor conditions at a Chinese factory that makes shoes for Ivanka Trump’s brand was arrested by police, and has now disappeared, say his wife and a China labor rights group. Two other activists are also missing, and are also presumed to have also been detained by Chinese authorities for nosing around in Ivanka's supply chain. (more…)

The House Intelligence Committee issued seven subpoenas today, as separate House and Senate investigations involving the 2016 U.S. presidential election accelerate and expand in scope. Four of the House subpoenas reported today are related to the Russia investigation, and three focus on the so-called ‘unmasking’ controversy, say unnamed sources cited in stories out today by the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, among other news organizations. (more…)

No, she's not running for president again. In an interview with Kara Swisher at the RECODE conference, Hillary Clinton was in full zero hecks given mode. (more…)

Everything about this 1960s combination map and fan is fantastic: the Asia-centric map, the gold foil edges, the delicate wooden handle, and the beautiful illustrations. Lovely and doubly practical! (more…)

Embroidery artist Sheena Liam transforms simple thread and cloth into evocative portraits she posts on her Instagram. Here are some of my favorites: https://www.instagram.com/p/BTa2Zw9FPgd/https://www.instagram.com/p/BThNod3FuY-/https://www.instagram.com/p/BTVrSYoljt0/https://www.instagram.com/p/BUI-3pwFzJu/https://www.instagram.com/p/BTVsls4Fl7G/https://www.instagram.com/p/BTVsWKeFqWc/https://www.instagram.com/p/BTpQo0JFtaW/https://www.instagram.com/p/BTuy1yrF12x/https://www.instagram.com/p/BUisv68lXEn/You can learn more about Liam and her work in this interview/slideshow with Teen Vogue.

My daughter and I set up our home maker space over the weekend. Instead of a power strip, we're using a PowerSquid to supply power to our 3D printer, CNC router, soldering iron, and lamp. This thing has "tentacles" to accommodate bulky AC adapters that would cover up outlets on a power strip. The PowerSquid 5 Outlet Flexible Outlet Multiplier is $17 on Amazon. If you need one with a surge protector, try this one for a few bucks more.

The former FBI director James Comey will testify in open Senate hearings as early as next week “to confirm bombshell accusations that President Donald Trump pressured him to end his investigation into a top Trump aide's ties to Russia,” CNN reports Wednesday. (more…)

Are you going to lose your job to a robot? This interactive website will tell you the percentage probability of automation.In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne published a report titled "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?”. The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation, by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier.According to their estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. Although the report is specific to the US job market, it is easy to see how this might apply all over the world.We extracted the jobs and the probability of automation from the report and have made it easy to search for your job. We’ve added some additional information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to provide some additional information about the jobs.

For NBC’s Red Nose Day charity fundraiser, the cast of Love Actually revisit their iconic Christmas characters. It’s a charming trip down memory lane for fans of the original film.

People often do things that make them miserable. CPG Grey presents seven of the most effective misery makers:Stay still - don't go outside, don't exercise.Screw with your sleep - vary your bedtime and sleep in a day or two a week. Never sleep or wake up at the same time.Maximize your screentime - let the screen keep you awake. Let a screen be the first thing you look at when you wake up.Use your screen to stoke your negative emotions - feed your anxiety and anger about things over which you have no control.Set v.a.p.i.d. goals - vague, amorphous, pie-in-the-sky, irrelevant, delayed. Do not set s.m.a.r.t. goals, which are specific, measurable, actionable, (goals for which you are) responsible, time-bounded.Pursue happiness directly - Expect that unending bliss is possible.Follow your instincts - do what makes you immediately happy even when you know it will make you sadder in the long run. The video is based on Randy Paterson's book, How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use.

TPM's Josh Marshall shares how Occam's Razor is coming into play, and the worst case scenario of corruption and scandal is quickly becoming the most likely. The simplest explanation of Kushner's alleged behavior is money from Russia, with love.Via TPM:We’ve heard it claimed that this secret channel to Moscow Kushner and Flynn wanted to set up was to discuss the situation in Syria. That is simply not plausible. At least it couldn’t have been just about Syria as there are numerous legitimate ways to do that. If the conversations were about Syria and ISIS, which I find dubious, they must have included other topics which had to be hidden from the US government, the intelligence agencies and US military.The most plausible ‘bad’ story behind the Trump/Russia mystery has always been some kind of financial preferment to members of the Trump family in exchange for lifting the sanctions put in place after the Russian annexation of Crimea and subsequent low-intensity incursions into eastern Ukraine. This wouldn’t come out of the blue. It would probably come in the context of some ‘deal’ over Syria or Ukraine or perhaps some agreement about global counter-terrorism cooperation. As I’ve written, there is a more ‘innocent‘ explanation as well. It may not be any quid pro quo. It could simply be years of doing business with Russians and people from other parts of the former Soviet Union which has made Trump inclined to see their needs in a sympathetic light. His hostility toward the sanctions regime could also be driven by the fact that, with his dependence on Russian and FSU investments and purchases, they likely hurt him directly.This chart, let me be clear, is not a statement of fact. It is an effort to illustrate a series of patterns which are the subject, the subtext, of many of the reports about the Trump/Russia story and indeed the investigation. It looks at what each side wants, what each side seems to be getting. President Trump’s efforts to destabilize NATO and the EU are the most clear. These things are happening. The election hacking and subversion did happen. We know the Trump Organization has taken vast sums of money from Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union over the last twenty years. Whether there’s any explicit quid quo pro today is what we don’t know. When people talk about collusion, this is the pattern of actions they’re looking at and trying to confirm.

Microdosing is the term for taking a sub-perceptual dose of a psychedelic drug. Anecdotal accounts of the mental health benefits are informing hypotheses on the possible psychological effects of microdosing. Janet Lai Chang, a businesswoman, endurance athlete and psychedelics biohacker, will report on her year of psilocybin microdosing at the upcoming Quantified Self Conference in Amsterdam, June 17-18. She says, "I’ll share data from my 12+ month experiment with sub-perceptual doses of psilocybin for the purposes of increasing social skills through decreased anxiety and elevated mood, empathy, and verbal fluidity."Above, a video from Chang's 2016 talk about her experiences with microdosing.

Wired asked Biologist Neville Sanjana to explain CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) gene editing to a 7 year-old, a 14 year-old, a college student, a grad student and a CRISPR expert.

Musician Max Cooper collaborated with artist Sabine Volkert to create the accompanying video, which features symmetrical delightful creatures morphing and overlapping. Volkert's hand-drawn style makes it a fine complement to the music. (more…)

Don't you just hate finding that the toilet paper in your exotic luxury hotel is like sandpaper? Now you can travel with the comforts of a Happy Mutant home by bringing along your travel bidet!It literally chaps my ass to find the TP in a really expensive luxury place is going to make a lot of walking unpleasant. To make matters worse, I've been following Mark's advice regarding personal hygiene and I no longer like to wipe my hiney, I prefer to spray it clean! Luckily, I found this amazing, hand pumped bidet! Now I can feel my best regardless the torturous papel supplied in most Central American bathrooms.Remember, fill this with warm but not blazing hot water! You'll know via the temperature of the squeeze bulb if the h2o is too hot. You may also want to get a hand exerciser, to help up your power. Portable Bidet Travel Cleaner with Collapsible Nozzle for use Anywhere-At Home, Hotel, Vacation, or Office! via Amazon

In 1824 the viceroy of Egypt sent a unique gift to the new king of France: a two-month-old giraffe that had just been captured in the highlands of Sudan. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the 4,000-mile journey of Zarafa, the royal giraffe, from her African homeland to the king's menagerie in Paris.We'll also visit Queen Victoria's coronation and puzzle over a child's surprising recovery.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Four minutes of video. 100 years of movie makeup.

A pod of orcas, aka the a-holes of the ocean, got recorded by a drone as they harassed a blue whale that was minding its own business. (more…)

Just days ahead of the premiere of the new Wonder Woman movie, the YouTube channel VariantComics shares some of Diana Prince’s most awe-inspiring comic book moments.

MetaLimbs is a robotic system that provides the wearer with an extra pair of arms. The mechanical arms are controlled by the user's legs, feet, and toes. The researchers from Keio University and the University of Tokyo will present their work at next month's SIGGRAPH 2017 conference in Los Angeles.

Black mambas are among the deadliest snakes in the world, but when they fight each other, it's more like an MMA match than a use of deadly force, called plaiting combat by scientists. National Geographic posted this remarkable drama that unfolded on a South African golf course. (more…)

Over the past year, I've bought a lot of extraordinary bottles of spirits -- a move from London to the wide-open spaces and warm climes of Burbank have afforded many more opportunities to entertain and thus to sample the output of the world's distilleries. (more…)

Most portable Bluetooth speakers don’t do much to stand out beyond coming in different colors or futuristic speaker grille patterns. If you want to liven up your audio setup with something a bit more eye-catching, the Glowbar is wrapped with a dense band of animated LEDs.This speaker’s illuminated body reacts to the rhythm of its audio source to put on a mesmerizing light show that syncs up with your music. Aside from the visuals, the Glowbar is certainly loud enough for a party; this speaker tube puts out 12 watts of crystal-clear audio for up to 3 hours on a single charge.You can get the Glowbar in our store for 61% off the usual price at $35.

After video of Trump admitting to a string of sexual assaults appeared last October, his approval rating bottomed out; a month later, it had recovered -- and he was the President. (more…)

The 2017 UK Labour Manifesto has been hugely popular since it was leaked early last month, and young Britons registered to vote in droves after it got out. But what does it actually say? (more…)

Sadly to be deleted. But not yet.https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/869766994899468288The domain covfefe.com was registered within minutes, but has yet to be put to use. UPDATE: It's been up for a couple of hours now and the dumb orange bastard still hasn't fixed it. Surely he's not the only one with access to the account? Or maybe he just fired everyone else who does. Maybe courtiers are hovering outside the imperial bedroom, fearfully debating whether to wake him. (Note that Trump must archive his tweets for posterity, but often deletes them.)https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/869790197961154560

Nick Russell took a close look at contemporary samurai accounts of a strange ship that landed at Mugi port in 1830, and found it corroborated the celebrated legend of convict pirate William Swallow, who led an escape from Tasmania via a mutiny on the brig ship Cyprus. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x88Z5txBc7wAnimaniacs was part of a lineage that includes the best animation of the 1990s (including Freakazoid and Pinky and the Brain), and now creator Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment are reportedly mooting a reboot, which would be a most welcome development! (more…)