Hayburner Guitars makes guitars from vintage oil cans, and they look as great as they sound. (more…)

Destin from Smarter Every Day just polted a cool video on his alt channel: a demonstration of triboluminescence that occurs when a Wint-O-Green Life Saver candy is crushed. (more…)

Aadhaar kicked off in 2009, linking each Indian resident's biometric data and sensitive personally identifying information to a unique 12-digit number. (more…)

Astroparticle physicist Sophia Nasr posted a gorgeous photo of Saturn's north pole, processed to account for a luminance layer. Instead of a reddish hue, it is a breathtaking cerulean blue. Jason Major replicated the results. (more…)

Reserachers at Lund Univeristy in Sweden have developed a camera that captures images at a rate equivalent to 5 trillion frames per second, quintupling the previous high mark. (more…)

Wikipedia: "Pomacea canaliculata eggs.Several apple snail genera (Pomacea, Pila and Asolene/Pomella) deposit eggs above the waterline in calcareous clutches. This remarkable strategy of aquatic snails protects the eggs against predation by fish and other aquatic inhabitants." [Source (via JWZ)]

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Chris Dodd (previously) was once a Democratic senator who decried politicians who became lobbyists; then he became one of the highest-paid and least competent lobbyists in DC, taking the helm of the Motion Picture Association on America and leading the organization to failure, catastrophe and irrelevance. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7JuHc-aobsRep Mo Brooks [R-Alabama] (DC: (202) 225-4801; Decatur: (256) 355-9400; Huntsville: (256) 551-0190; Shoals: (256) 718-5155; Twitter: @repmobrooks) gave a refreshingly candid interview to CNN this week in which he opined that sick people have themselves to blame for their illness, and shouldn't expect insurance pools paid into by people who've "done the things to keep their bodies healthy" to cover their care. (more…)

After receiving a report of a cat in a tree holding an assault rifle, the Newport Oregon Police Department attended the scene, and, after ascertaining that the gun was actually a stick, they issued a "verbal warning" to the offending cat. (more…)

Leonardo Faierman points us to an article he wrote for BlackGirlNerds about a crowdfunding campaign for a biopic on female punk rock icon Poly Styrene. The Indiegogo ends tomorrow and is very close to its goal at the time of this blog post. (more…)

“My wife and I welcome a new baby and it is quite a story,” late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel says. Watch him deliver a heartbreaking story about his infant child undergoing open heart surgery, and why we must protect 'Obamacare,' the Affordable Care Act. (more…)

You are welcome. (more…)

It's the end of an era, sort of: Fraunhofer IIS, the developers of the MP3 audio compression format, announced that they are ceasing their licensing program. In a blog post, spokesman Matthias Rose says that it's had a good 20-year run and is obsolete. But it's also true that the decoding patents expired last year, and the last encoding patents are soon to follow. So there's not much hope of selling any licenses in any case.

Rob Scallon performs ingenious and odd Metallica covers, including this new one, "For Whom The Bell Tools" played on bells of all kinds. Perhaps he could encore with a similar reimagining of AC/DC's "Hells Bells."

My wife is a PC person, and I am an Apple person. To my chagrin, Lauren keeps an old Dell desktop in our bedroom, a blight on our otherwise thoughtful decor, and any time she sits down at the thing I launch into a freeform lecture on the numerous merits of Apple. After all, is there anything that Apple can't do? Elegant stores made from glass? Simple white cords that get permanently dirty in four seconds? Cat entertainment? (Yes, it's true, our now-deceased family cat had its very own iPad app when it was alive: an animated koi pond that was permanently stocked with beautiful, digital fish. The good people at Friskies built the cat app, presumably as a marketing effort. Comparatively, the only time a cat has used a Microsoft product was when it was hooked up to a bunch of electrodes, an unwilling participant in some sort of Russian space experiment.)Jess Kimball Leslie is the author of I Love My Computer Because My Friends Live in It. Sometimes, though, as I lurk behind whatever Apple-branded miracle maker I'm using, I look over at Lauren's awful Dell and experience a very particular type of longing because I begin to miss an old friend of mine. I begin to miss Bill Gates.Unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates has never done anything that was simple or elegant. Bill Gates is approximately as artistic as a math teacher who once went on an affordable bus tour through Europe. If there is ever a simple or elegant way to do something, Bill Gates does it the other way. Accordingly, in the early days of computing, no Microsoft product ever "just worked" when you took it out of the box. You took their shit out of the package and braced your body for a whole world of hell. Windows 95 in particular should have arrived strapped to a box of Franzia. Instead, it came plastered with exuberant, highly reflective stickers written in their own patented mumbo-jumbo language — "Windows 95, now with Telecommunications® and Drawing ToolsTM!" — all of which was way too excited about the company's latest home-computing advancements.To be fair, the constantly-breaking-down situation wasn't entirely Microsoft's fault, as their software suffered the misfortune of running on Dell, Compaq, and Gateway computers. These were brittle, nervous machines that could be brought to their knees by almost any alteration in their physical environments. Despite owning a multitude of surge protectors, my family frequently lost hundred-dollar modems to Mother Lightning when I was a kid. I remember the way my father would bound up the stairs two at a time at the first thunderclap of a summer storm, racing to turn the computer off and save it from a debilitating unplanned shut-down. Sometimes he would immediately set to work trying to fix the thing as the thunder danced in the background, taunting him from afar. Once in awhile Dad would get lucky and manage to right the lightning-zapped modem in minutes; other times his repair attempts could last through multiple business quarters. We knew never to ask him "how it was going" and instead used our powers of deduction to quietly chart his progress for ourselves, like the children of novelists. While he worked, we three kids took turns sitting steadfastly by him night after night, our eyes glazing over as he did the same things time and again: route print, route print, ping 1.1.1.1. At approximate mealtimes one of us would ferry up from the kitchen cashews and orange juice or other combinations of his favorite snacks, hoping to keep his strength up. For days or weeks we would wait, hoping he would soon bring our mind-numbing computer games and treacherously slow Internet back to us, thus pressing restart on our normal life.During my early childhood there were always many computers in our house, but they were all what my father classified as "projects" — that is, inimitable heaps of an engineer's broken toys. My personal favorite from the early archives was a Toshiba laptop that came with its own branded metal suitcase. The monitor was a study in reds: there was a burgundy-colored screen background and a lighter, bright red color for the font. There was something deeply unsettling about only being able to view one's own writing in red, like you were Karl Marx toiling late into the night. Nevertheless, my dad loved that machine.My father is an engineer's engineer, so when he needs something, he makes it. He collects computers for components, scrap wood for furniture making, cars for parts, and old tools for construction. On an indulgent weekend he will savor the adventure of a good estate sale or a meandering trip to the dump. When eBay came to be, it was as if my father's personal prayers had been answered: the world's largest junkyard, brought to you by computers? Christ had welded all of my dad's interests together. The man basically hasn't set foot inside a brick-and-mortar store since 1997.At that time I was just as brazenly unappreciative of my do-it-yourself family and my father's myriad talents as any lucky child is of her own riches. By my logic the "best" families were the ones who bought things in stores, the way all of my classmates' use- less dads did. My friends' dads either sold insurance or were lawyers for guys who sold insurance. Comparatively, these chumps didn't know how to make toast, let alone rebuild a car engine. On weekends they wore the designer polo shirts their wives picked out for them at Filene's Basement, and they talked a lot about having joined the country club or wanting to join the country club. My father wore his grease-stained work clothes and running sneakers, and at dinner he talked a lot about whatever he wanted to learn next. He has always been one of those people who looks around at the planet and sees Hogwarts. Again, because children are horrible, I was embarrassed by my father's self-actualized resourcefulness and therefore lied to my classmates about the origins of our objects when they came over to visit."Look at that coffee table!" exclaimed some kid who'd never seen an unbranded good in his life. "It also holds pictures? That's so cool! Did your dad make that?""No," I said forcefully. "We bought that in a store.""Well, I've never seen anything that fancy in a store! That's just beautiful!""It's there if you look." Although my dad is a man carved in the shadow of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he's still a computer engineer by trade, and by 1995 the 1990s' fervent excitement over the ever-modernizing family computer had finally started chipping away at his minimalist morals. After all, this was his epoch: he had spent two decades believing computers would someday change the world, and it was finally happening. Television ads depicted kids happily doing their homework aided by the knowledge reserves of a CD-ROM encyclopedia. Businessmen booked plane tickets to Dallas and played countless rounds of poorly animated Blackjack just by clicking mouse buttons. Soccer moms dutifully organized their grocery lists by aisle with an Excel spreadsheet. It was a whole new universe."Want to come with me to CompUSA?" my dad asked me casually one morning in June, as if he had just asked me to help with yard work.I was already an active AOL addict at the time, but I was running a very old version of the software and Windows 3.1 on one of my father's former office computers and was years behind the setups of my closest online friends. No one else had a lousy 14.4K modem or a measly ten-inch monitor or a ribbon printer. I wanted a machine that could not only download Bette Midler pictures but scan them as well. Of course I wanted to go to CompUSA!An hour later my dad and I were standing in the hallowed parking lot, and as he moved his toolbox to make room in the trunk for a potential purchase, he warned me that we would have to be on the lookout for a very good deal. If there wasn't a good deal, then maybe we wouldn't get a computer today at all. I nodded to let him know I understood the gravity of the situation. I knew my dad, and I would fundamentally disagree on which computer to get, as I would want the most glittering, pointlessly expensive machine available, and he would want whatever "made sense." We had everything and nothing in common.Once in the store my father silently paced around the home-computing section for over an hour while an eager, commissioned sales kid tailed behind, attempting to decipher his emotions. When my dad is unhappy with his circumstances and trying to think his way out of them, he looks like he's trying to smell the air somewhere very far away. The computer cabana boy had no idea whether this expression was a good or a bad sign, but I knew my father well enough to identify his sentiment's exact makeup: it was part disappointment with prices and box retailer bundling strategies, and part resignation that he would most definitely be roped into paying for features he didn't even want. To my father, it seemed that the store delighted specifically in swindling computer engineers. He was pacing because he was attempting to make peace with himself; he was running through opportunity cost calculations in his head.Two hours later and without the sales boy's help, we left CompUSA with a gloriously huge box. My dad had settled on a Dell computer, and I couldn't believe this was happening to me. Back home my brother and sister had prepared welcome decorations for our newest, most beloved family member. A desk had been cleaned and printer paper located in the hopes that Dad was also bringing home a new printer (which he was). Upstairs, with the new computer settled in the study, my dad set to work. Back then, installing Windows 95 required loading and running dozens of hard disks in the right order: make a mistake, and you had to start completely over. It was like a Microsoft-sponsored edition of Chutes and Ladders. As usual, my brother, sister, and I took turns wordlessly sitting by our father while he watched an unreliable progress bar. "We're on disk ten of twelve," he announced gravely.The first game my dad installed to truly showcase our new machine's capabilities was called Myst. Myst billed itself as a fun and educational problem-solving game that families could play together. In its heyday Myst was a game so important that it was on the cover of international magazines. If you are too young or too old to have been gripped by an obsession with Myst, to us 1990s people it was as if Mozart and Da Vinci had risen from the grave and collaborated. What had they made? Why, a mystery-solving computer game, of course. And it was perfect. Watching the game's opening credit roll was an experience that took minutes to complete. Think about how much you hate waiting seconds for an app to open today. Now imagine waiting minutes. You'll then have some cursory understanding of the respect the 1990s world granted to Myst.Myst demanded that you use your mind to solve its riddles. The job of the player was to gure out the game's complicated puzzles to unlock more parts of the game's fictional "island" to explore. The instructional book accompanying the game suggested teasingly, "Why not take notes?" And that was just the beginning of the game's haughtiness: "If you're not sure what to do next, clicking everywhere won't help. Think about what you know already, ask yourself what you need to know, collect your thoughts, and piece them together."Myst quickly gave birth to a cottage industry of advice books about how to play the game. I believe there was even a volume of the great American "for Dummies" book series that was devoted entirely to playing Myst. Sure, you could skip to the end of such books like a chump, gathering all the secret codes you'd need to win, but that was not the kind of player Myst attracted. Myst got the dads like mine, who'd thumb through the game's official instruction book over a glass or three of wine. These dads would never, ever turn to some collection of cheat codes; instead, they would talk about their progress in the parking lots of Boy Scout meetings, each careful to never reveal any of the game's secrets to others who'd not yet earnestly discovered them on their own. Seriously, you can't make Connecticut up. As the family's dumbest and most impulsive child, I gave up on Myst almost immediately. My father and his two children with potential, however, spent hours postulating how to access the next part of the mystery."I think the books with the blue spines mean something," my dad told Rob and Annie one summer evening as the trio abstained from TV, attempting instead to beat a particularly challenging level of Myst."If you take the first letter of the second word on the first page inside each of the books, I think together it spells another message from those letters," posited Annie, who would later go on to receive her doctorate.After several months of Myst-ing, my father, perhaps sensing I was feeling left out, came home one night and announced that he wanted us to start spending time with a mysterious new idiot woman he suddenly liked—an international detective named Carmen Sandiego. Carmen Sandiego inhabited an even more educational world than that of Myst. Her game was peppered with questions that kids definitely did not know the answers to, such as "What country's currency is the rupee?" and "Which city is the capital of Iceland?" Unlike Myst and its lofty opening theme, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? introduced itself with a garbled song that sounded like the demo of a low-priced Casio keyboard. We looked at Carmen and her bright, obstreperous clothing — a pretty stupid choice for an undercover detective — and rolled our eyes. Carmen worked for a place called Acme, which we were supposed to believe was some sort of multinational, NASDAQ-listed conglomerate for the spying industry. Once Carmen arrived for her job at Acme, the computer screen turned into an explorer's desk equipped with a bunch of business tools that kids definitely did not know how to use. Memos? A Rolodex with contacts? Dossiers? Electronic mail? Are you kidding me? There was a moment, as we were first analyzing this screen, when we were at-out blown away by the Zack Morris phone, but we soon discovered that it only dialed the same group of maddening characters who offered factoid-laden bits of educational advice about where to next direct Carmen's plane."Take the ferry over, cross the Strait of Dover," read a standard suggestion in an "Evidence Report," one of the many types of documents that we children were supposed to find and read in order to get to the next level. The game's cultural references soared like eagles over our heads; no elementary school–aged child ever read the name Imelda Marcos and then threw her head back in a gale of knowing laughter.After we accepted that we were never going to be any good at Carmen Sandiego because we didn't want to learn about culture or geography, we resorted to torturing Carmen for fun. Thanks to a lack of real-world constraints, it was possible to put Carmen on a flight for no reason and at any time. When we were mad at her we took revenge by issuing her a grueling travel schedule. "You're going to Manila, stupid!!!" we'd shout triumphantly, just as she'd touched down in Shanghai. We liked to imagine a husband back home pacing the pixelated ground of their crappy apartment and nally deciding, at long last, to get a divorce.My siblings and I agreed that the real computer gaming action was in a holy trinity of Shareware games that my dad came to despise because they offered no educational value: Major Stryker, Commander Keen, and Duke Nukem. We determined immediately that we far preferred the fine art of killing people with our friend Duke Nukem to confusedly looking for clues with Ms. Sandiego. Were Mr. Nukem to meet Ms. Sandiego anywhere — an underwater cave, an Italian church, a place with or without rupees — Duke would most certainly respond to Carmen by shooting her several times in the gut. The thought gave us comfort.My dad was constantly deleting our copies of these nefarious games, hiding them in different parts of the hard drive, or changing passwords that blocked us from them. Because of this, my brother, a nine-year-old who looked like he was on a hunger strike, could sit down at your computer and repartition your entire hard drive: "Open a prompt, you're in C:\. Enter DIR, that means directory — see, here's a huge list of files and folders. DIR /p, and you can flip through page by page. Oh right, he put it in Program Files. That was obvious. CD [change directory] Progra~1. CD id. CD doom. dir *.exe. doom.exe. I found Duke Nukem. It's right here." Today, attempting to find your computer games or fix your hardware for yourself is unheard of. All Apple products are sealed in cases that are almost impenetrable to their human owners. Back in 2007 not being able to open a backdoor to your phone's innards was a huge, huge issue. "What?!" the tech reviewers cried in unison. "We can't open the iPhone and dick it up all by ourselves?!" After all, they reasoned, it was your goddamn phone: if it broke, you should be able to open it up and stick fingers or glue or rice or sand or crackers or whatever the hell you wanted inside it to fix it. Nowadays my kid doesn't even know that at-home device repair was ever an option to mankind. "This is broken!" he confidently shouts as soon as our iPad runs out of juice and stops letting him cut fruit in half.The critical difference in today's games is not in how realistic they now look but in how infrequently they break. When something works almost all the time, we become immune to its complexity and the beauty of its simplicity. We forget that computers are nothing more than brilliant combinations and permutations of zeros and ones. Modern-day computer users no longer require a working knowledge of command-prompt language just to connect to the Internet or uninstall a piece of malfunctioning software. No longer do we experience that gorgeous, raw moment of "pinging" a website—the computer code equivalent of saying "Are you out there?" — and seconds later seeing that website ping us back: "Yes, I am." The most magical things I ever saw on computer screens were things like that, like the working ping: the things that happened in gray or green type against a dark black background, the Internet at its barest and best.My 2015-issued MacBook is great in its slick practicality, for sure. But when I look over at Lauren's monstrous PC, I'm taken back to those halcyon days of computers when I couldn't help but get kind of excited when our ugly old Gateway suddenly didn't turn on and my dad sat down to the work of wondering why, with us three kids at his side.

Originally published in 1978, Will Eisner’s A Contract With God “existed in its own continuum, patiently waiting for the rest of its kind to quietly arrive…” says Scott McCloud in his introduction to the hardcover edition, released in celebration of what would have been Eisner’s centennial year. McCloud’s intro, the publisher’s following “Brief History,” and Eisner’s own preface firmly contextualize the work and its creator within its time and the larger comics scene to which Eisner was so integral. With or without the history, it is nearly impossible to imagine a reader not being blown away by this collection. A Contract With God explores the everyday extremes of human experience through the tenement building at 55 Dropsie Avenue. Residents strive, struggle, and schlep through the graphic short stories. Eisner explores the themes therein on multiple levels, with text and illustration that are cuttingly resonant. His characters fall in and out of faith in God, man, and love. Some are blindly optimistic and others rawly matter-of-fact in their realism. Some are both. The stories are a fictional fleshing-out of Eisner’s life. The title story stems from his own experience of losing a child, The Street Singer and The Super from imagined realities of the characters in and around his own tenement, and my favorite, Cookalein, in some ways the most complex story in its interconnected and contrasting experiences of class, romance, and sex across its cast of characters, is what Eisner calls “a combination of invention and recall.” All the stories, in all the ways they are told, are violent, sad, intense, and beautiful.A Contract with God: And Other Tenement Stories by Will Eisner, Scott McCloudW.W. Norton & Company2017, 224 pages, 7.3 x 0.9 x 10.3 inches, Hardcover$15 Buy on AmazonSee sample pages from this book at Wink.

A Canadian man has been ordered to surrender his Star Trek-themed license plate. The plate read "ASIMIL8." (Thanks, Matthew!)]Via CTV News:Troller got a phone call Wednesday from someone at Manitoba Public Insurance, who he says told him two people had complained that the word “assimilate” is offensive to indigenous people.The dictionary definitions of assimilate include “to absorb into the cultural tradition of a population or group” and “to take into the mind and thoroughly understand.”Troller disagrees that it’s offensive.

Salma Hayek offers this handy guide to understanding our neighbors.Please remember: the 5th of May celebrates a Mexican victory over the French, not Mexican Independence Day which is September 16th.(h/t POCHO)

Why are bidets so great? Have you ever tried to wipe peanut butter out of a shag carpet? That's why. I now have one of these simple to install bidets in both of our bathrooms. Like I wrote earlier, it is a game changer. Amazon has them on sale today for $18.73. Buy one and level up your lifestyle.

Shocking the bejeezus out of my lower back led me to the fastest recovery I've experienced yet from periodic bouts of debilitating back pain. For me, this inexpensive TENS unit is a winner, and was as effective as a higher-priced comparison unit I tried. (more…)

I could watch this all day.

Not even remotely adequate.

The owners of John Lennon's former home found an old sketchbook containing this tiny sketch of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. It's up for auction with an estimated selling price of $40k-$60k which seems oddly low for such an artifact. From Julien's Live auctions:An ink on paper sketch by John Lennon of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover with Lennon’s handwriting of the album’s title on the central bass drum in the image. The drawing was found in a sketchbook left in Lennon's former home, Kenwood in Surrey, England, and recovered by the new owners. The design of the album cover is known to have been executed by artist Peter Blake based on drawings provided by Paul McCartney. All of The Beatles contributed to the design of the cover in some way. It is unknown how this undated drawing figures into the history of the album cover and Lennon’s involvement.

The filmmaker was diving off Gansbaai, Western Cape, South Africa. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwfWfVCSJcgThe Doritos' Guardians of the Galaxy 2 chips sold with a MP3 player containing the movie's full soundtrack, a pair of retro headphones of the sort that airlines used to hand out for free, even in coach, and a USB charging cable. (more…)

Google often boasts about the 10,000 skilled raters who test its results, reporting weird kinks in the ranking algorithms and classifiers that the company uses for everything from search results to ad placement to automated photo recognition. (more…)

The Australian reports on a leaked memo -- described but not published -- marked "confidential" and created and distributed internally by Facebook that describes how the system's surveillance tools can identify children and teens in "insecure" moments when they "need a boost," explaining that they had identified markers to tell them when a young person was feeling "stressed", "defeated", "overwhelmed", "anxious", "nervous", "stupid", "silly", "useless", and a "failure." (more…)

Brexit is not the cause of Britain's renewed interest in its weird folk heritage, in the joys of cults and pagan sex. But the sudden veering into that world's darker side, where violence and groupthink and human sacrifice rule, seems guided by its anguish and sickly glee. Here's Michael Newton on the new flowering of folk horror.Folk horror, which is the subject of a new season at the Barbican, presents the dark dreams Britain has of itself. The films pick up on folk’s association with the tribal and the rooted. And our tribe turns out to be a savage one: the countryside harbours forgotten cruelties, with the old ways untouched by modernity and marked by half-remembered rituals. ...They may lurch into the ludicrous, but with surprising earnestness these films nonetheless play out a three-way philosophical debate: between enlightened rationalism, orthodox Christianity and renewed paganism. Sex is at the heart of this debate: just as these films both adore and recoil from natural beauty, so human loveliness entrances and repels them.The anxiety comes from an unsettled telepathic quality of exurban British life, where eccentricity is adored so long as privacy is abdicated, and the heightened empathy of the village lurches to the crowd's destruction of individuals. Newton notes that a key theme of British folk horror is that the supernatural is never so vulgar as to show itself: the darkness is in people. And by the time you get to see it, you are thrillingly both participant and victim: "The pagan rite we are witnessing is the film itself."

Macro Room made a simple and beautiful video of inksquirts: "This time we dived into the hypnotising beauty of colored ink in water and the interaction of this substance with different elements." I love how their videos are carefully devised to show both sides of the curtain. Here's another:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNbSjMFd7j4

Would you like to play the same instrument Wendy Carlos used for Switched-On Bach? Moog announced it is making a limited run of just 25 of the Synthesizer IIIc and it looks really cool. (more…)

Ian and Emily Pfaff took a couple of Little Tykes Cozy Coupes and turned them into the most awesome Mad Max-inspired vehicles this side of Fury Road. They even made little cosplay outfits for their two kids. (more…)

For about 30 years, CareerCast has ranked jobs. Their best jobs in 2017 include analysts, engineers, scientists, and a few surprises like dieticians and speech pathologists. The crappiest job is newspaper reporter, which barely edged out broadcaster. (more…)

Like me, you may have taken an interest in mechanical keyboards only to uncover a world of baffling options. "Can I have a clicky one, please" is like asking for a drink in a pub: they'll stare at you for a moment then say "which one, mate?" Brandon West reminded me that Input.Club is the best guide to all the options available, so when someone asks you if you want your Cherry Yellow or a nice Lubed Zealio, you'll know to slap them hard across the chops and say, "How dare you. 55g Topre Realforce Linears or nothing."

Canadian artist Maud Lewis lived in a tiny house covered in her paintings, which she sold door to door in Nova Scotia. A biopic of her life, Maudie, is a surprise hit in theaters, reports the BBC.The film's success has also been spurred by a rather serendipitous find: an unknown Maud Lewis painting found in a thrift shop is being auctioned off for charity, with bids topping C$125,000 ($91,500, £70,685). The work was authenticated by Mr Deacon, a retired school teacher who is now somewhat of a Maud Lewis sleuth. ... Typically characterised as a "folk artist", Lewis was self-taught and lived her whole life in poverty. Unable to afford things like canvas, she'd paint on anything from scraps of wood and plywood to thick card stock. Her subjects were the things she saw in her everyday life - fishermen, wildlife, flowers and trees."Maud was not a person who travelled to other galleries or saw other art, so there's a kind of naivete to it," Noble told the BBC.Here's the trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCJO6Ax_ev8

Vintage Geek offers a list of miscconceptions people have about pulp-era science fiction, whose legacy has warped in the public imagination moreso even than Captain James T. Kirk's. [via MeFi]“Pulp-Era Science Fiction was about optimistic futures.”“Pulp scifi often featured muscular, large-chinned, womanizing main characters.”“Pulp Era Scifi were mainly action/adventure stories with good vs. evil.” “Racism was endemic to the pulps.”“Pulp scifi writers in the early days were indifferent to scientific reality and played fast and loose with science.”All these things are true, of course, but what better time to search for counterexamples than now?To be fair, science fiction was not a monolith on this. One of the earliest division in science fiction was between the Astounding Science Fiction writers based in New York, who often had engineering and scientific backgrounds and had left-wing (in some cases, literally Communist) politics, and the Amazing Stories writers based in the Midwest, who were usually self taught, and had right-wing, heartland politics. Because the Midwestern writers in Amazing Stories were often self-taught, they had a huge authority problem with science and played as fast and loose as you could get. While this is true, it’s worth noting science fiction fandom absolutely turned on Amazing Stories for this, especially when the writers started dabbling with spiritualism and other weirdness like the Shaver Mystery. And to this day, it’s impossible to find many Amazing Stories tales published elsewhere.

Once the tallest building in Changzhou, Jiangsu, China, this tower went down in eight seconds on April 25.This angle gives an excellent impression of the local government's appreciation of modern public safety standards:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu2V1v_ZEV0https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/857172436353138688/

Wolfen stars Albert Finney as Dewey, a grizzled NYC detective assigned to figure out why a rich developer gentrifying the Bronx got mutilated and spread over an acre of Battery Park. Set at the turn of the 1980s, it was the first movie with a clear vision of what should be done with Donald Trump. (more…)

TheScreamingFedora sharpened a joke more tamely made here. Previously: Biggie Smalls the Tank Engine

The greatest break in snooker history is Ronnie O'Sullivan's legendary 147 at the 1997 World Championship. He not only sank every ball with unmatched grace and force, but did so in a record-breaking 5:20s, some two minutes faster than the previous record. But Deadspin's Ben Tippett proves it was executed even faster than the books show.The famous 147 break had everything: The white ball obeyed O’Sullivan’s every command, every shot looked easy because he made it so through his honeyed cueing and Juno-level precision positional play, the break was fast—the fastest maximum break ever, by a long way—and yet he looked like he had oodles of time. O’Sullivan said at the time that he knew a maximum was on after the second red, and the result never looked in doubt. O’Sullivan moved around the table with grace and ridiculous ease, like a concert pianist preparing breakfast in his kitchen.The 5:20 time was human error, based on the BBC's primitive chess-clock technology from the time. The Guinness Book of Records' bizarre retcon to make it work -- the next player's break starts when the previous player's white ball last touches a cushion -- is so weak it requires an event that doesn't even happen on many shots. So Tippett offers two options as to when a player's shot (and therefore any resulting break) starts, yielding two possible times of O'Sullivan's still-unbeaten break:1. 5m 06s : When the player takes his shot.2. 5m 15s : When the previous player's shot comes to rest.

These smiling assassins enlisted as snipers when Germany invaded Russia in 1941. "We mowed down Hitlerites like ripe grain," said Lyudmila Pavlichenko aka Lady Death, one of many elite snipers whose photos were colorized by Olga Shirnina aka Klimbim. (more…)

Convenience always carries costs. In the case of e-commerce, the surge in residential deliveries is causing in urban gridlock. Citylab goes out on delivery routes for their interesting report: (more…)

Justin Rhodes profiles an urban market gardener who leases other people's residential yards for planting produce, which he harvests and sells up and down the east coast of the United States. He makes over $5,000 a month. (more…)

26 years ago.

The Book of Miracles (also known as the Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs) is a compendium of beautiful 16th-century illustrations of cosmic anxiety and apocalyptic surrealism. The new edition from Taschen, edited by Till-Holger Borchert and Joshua P Waterman, is a perfect introduction to the Renaissance obsession with signs, portents and the damned weird. (more…)

The Neural Parametric Singing Synthesizer is a voice synth with a difference: it soars! It's perfectly uncanny; any better and you'd not even suspect it might be a robot, any worse and it would just sound bad. Previously: I feel fantastic.

I love Alex Schaefer impasto works depicting branches of Chase bank going up in flames in daytime. They were from a series by him called "Disaster Capitalism," and apparently the banks (and cops) would pretend he was planning acts of arson to try and make him stop painting. [via mutantspace, via Janie]On July 30, 2011, Alex Schaefer set up an easel across the road from a Chase bank and began painting the building in flames. However, before he had finished the police arrived, asked him for his information and if he was planning on actually carrying out an arson attack on the building. Ridiculous. Later they turned up on his doorstep asking about his artwork and looking for any signs that he was going to carry through an anarcho – terrorist plot based on his paintings. If this wasn’t bad enough a year later he was arrested for drawing the word ‘crime’ with a Chase logo in front of an LA bank.

Rancher Adrienne Ivey noticed her 150 heifers were all bunched together, and headed over to find them being herded by a "furry little beaver."“It wasn’t until we got to the very front of the herd, that we could see what all the commotion was about.”Ivey said it was “really quite cute,” and “the most Canadian moment of all moments.” Ivey shot video of the curious cattle drive and posted it online, where viewers have been watching the cows trailing closely behind the buck-toothed creature, with their heads lowered. When the beaver stops, the cattle stop, too, only to proceed when the furry animal continues on.The beaver was probably just trying to get from one bit of swamp to another, apparently, when the cows put it in charge.

I don't play a lot of games, but my friend Craig loaned me his BioShock discs for Mac couple of years ago and I enjoyed it. The super creepy dystopian universe is a critique of Ayn Rand's simplistic political and economic ideas based on the concept of "rational self-interest." Amazon has a sale on all three BioShock games in the series for the Xbox One and PS4 for $30. If you don't already have this game, this is a good time to get it.

A time-lapse radar loop from Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch shows today's storms billowing like a fire dancing over gasoline. The image (and the storms) cover the U.S. from West Texas to Pennsylvania. [via]