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As she posted about on Instagram, Angela Dimayuga—the executive chef at Mission Chinese Food—was approached by a writer from Ivanka Trump’s website about doing an interview that spotlighted Dimayuga as a female entrepreneur. Dimayuga wrote this in response:Hi Adi,Thank you for thinking of me. I’m glad you are a fan of my work so much that you want to provide more visibility for my career to inspire “other working women.” However, I’m for women who actually empower other women.I don’t believe that IvankaTrump.com is truly “a non-political platform of empowerment for [women]”. So long as the name Trump is involved, it is political and frankly, an option for the IvankaTrump.com business to make a profit.I don’t see anything empowering about defunding Planned Parenthood, barring asylum from women refugees, rolling back safeguards for equal pay, and treating POC/LGBT and the communities that support these groups like second class citizens.As a queer person of color and daughter of immigrant parents I am not interested in being profiled as an aspirational figure for those that support a brand and a President that slyly disparages female empowerment. Sharing my story with a brand and family that silences our same voices is futile.Thank you for the consideration.Dimayuga also spoke to Elle about her response, explaining, “People, especially in marginalized communities are feeling more encouraged to speak and have their voices and narratives heard, and we all want to hear from them. We are beginning to be both more willing to share with no bullshit, and at the same time learning how to be better listeners.” You can see Dimayuga's message if you click through the Instagram below: https://www.instagram.com/p/BSuFjS-AaRd/?hl=en[Photo: Ali Shaker/VOA]

Eddy Gun is a tortoise keeper and a few weeks ago he shared this adorable video of his son feeding the family’s tortoise collection:https://www.instagram.com/p/BQ9hGinllE2/You can see a few more tortoise videos below and even more photos and videos on Gun’s Instagram.https://www.instagram.com/p/BQrPJk2FDfT/https://www.instagram.com/p/BSUtNWFlK_M/https://www.instagram.com/p/BQZXJpbgxUN/

It turns out ejecting a floppy disk in space is a little more complicated than it is on Earth. Here’s another perspective on the same problem:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMNw99Q8Ok0[Source: Gif87a.com]

It's not your imagination: Sony's Playstation 4 really is unusually vulnerable to cockroach infestation. The reasons why remind me of airline disasters: a combination of several individually-trivial mistakes that combine to form something awful. But the results are so gross Sony won't repair PS4s with roaches in them, writes Kotaku's Cecilia D'Anastasio, sending mystified owners into the arms of disgusted local repair shops.Matt Zieminski, who works for console repair suite IFixit, told me that most of the time, the consoles aren’t sent in for roach cleaning—the users don’t know they’re infested. The PS4s just stop working and the owners don’t know why. Turns out, the PS4’s internal power supply fries roaches onto its components, which can stop the PS4 from turning on. When the bugs have made little homes in there, and have little roach kids, those roach kids and their feces can melt onto the hardware.Zieminski knows a PS4 is infested because “Roaches leave traces,” he says. “Their poop color is distinct and has a certain smell to it. We kind of know right off the bat if there are poop stains on the vent of the fan—we assume it’s bug-loaded.”

Some people don't like Barbara Remington's cover illustrations for J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. I'm not one of those people. Her study is estimated at $20,000 - $30,000 at Heritage's upcoming auction. This landmark illustration was used for a trio of Ballantine Book covers for J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. The covers were designed so that laid side-by-side they create a panoramic scene. This 1965 edition was the first authorized U. S. paperback edition, and the books were issued in a slipcase, which also featured the same artwork as a wrap-around image. A hugely popular poster titled "Wilderness" has also been produced using this iconic image.

I like museums. I like having my mind blown. I am clearly part of the target audience for this book. Other things I appreciate about this book: It’s a manageable size, slightly larger than a postcard. It features a diverse range of museums, both major institutions and lesser-known, more eccentric collections. Its tone and faux Q-and-A format are breezy; the authors are like interesting friends who always have the best vacation stories. And like so many Lonely Planet books, it’s eminently flip-through-able. My favorite section is on quirky museums: those passion projects of eccentric individuals that produce, say, a Turkish collection of women’s hair, or the Japanese museum of instant ramen. I’d love to see this section expanded, at the expense of the more standard museum picks. Yes, the British Museum and the Acropolis are amazing destinations, but they’re also very widely known already. The Watermelon Museum? Less so.Another suggestion for the next edition, due out in 2020, is greater geographical reach. For one thing, the book includes only one museum in Africa. By 2020, I hope, I’ll have made it to all of the museums in this edition that I’ve bookmarked (or, more accurately, sticky note-d).50 Museums to Blow Your Mind by Ben Handicott and Kalya RyanLonely Planet2016, 128 pages, 7.0 x 0.5 x 4.7 inches, Paperback$8 Buy on AmazonSee sample pages from this book at Wink.

Maybe not Otis' best rendition of the song, but a very fun performance to watch.

Louis Rossmann is an independent service technician in New York City who has repaired Apple products for years. (more…)

A sad and infuriating lead sentence from the LA Times: "A 75-year-old woman who tried to sell a paperweight containing a speck of moon rock may try to hold a federal agent liable for detaining her for two hours in a public parking lot in urine-soaked pants, a federal appeals court decided unanimously Thursday." The good news is that she is going to sue NASA for the humiliating treatment.She decided to try to sell the paperweights and contacted auction houses without success. She finally emailed NASA for help in finding a buyer for what she called “rare Apollo 11 space artifacts.” She explained how her late husband had received them.Norman Conley, a special agent and criminal investigator for NASA’s Office of Inspector General, was assigned to investigate whether Davis really possessed a moon rock.He had someone pose as a broker and call Davis. During several conversations, all but one recorded, Davis explained how she obtained the moon rock and insisted she wanted to do everything legally. She also mentioned that she hoped to sell her late husband’s firearms.At no point was she informed that all lunar material is the property of the federal government and that possession was a crime, the court said.If the account in this appeal is accurate, the special agent Norman Conley is a jerk.

The Seventh Sanctum is one of my favorite places on the web to find generators: code that produces everything from the names of wacky gadgets to fascinating writing challenges. My favorite: unusual jobs for fantasy role playing characters.It's maintained by Steven Savage, a former software engineer who now writes on a variety of geeky matters.Seventh Sanctum started somewhere in 1999 when I joked that attacks in various anime sounded like various strings of words put together by computer. Having fooled around with such generators over the years, I decided it'd be fun to make one. Then another followed. Then another . . . until we end up here.I'm Steven Savage, an engineer turned Program Manager, speaker and writer on geek culture, and in the case of Seventh Sanctum, mad scientist. Or glad scientist. Whatever works.Seventh Sanctum was created as a place for me to experiment with randomized tools and provide them to people, though needless to say it got a bit bigger than I expected. Also, it's a lot of fun so after years of work on it, it's still going.

Here we go, "into the grayish brownish world of the early 80s..."

In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, researchers from UC Berkeley reveal that shoelace knots do not gradualy come loose, as was previously supposed -- rather, they fail catastrophically and suddenly, thanks to strange and surprising stresses that they must endure. (more…)

Graphical demos created with severe code-length limitations sometimes betray the techniques used to fit a world into a few kilobytes: tessellating textures, featureless fractals, repetitive sequences, and so on. Final Stage, by 0x4015, is not one of those demos. [via]Here it is rendered on a XEON x560 with a GTX 1070 video card and 24GB of RAM. Check out all the other uploads from the Revision 2017 demoparty.Eidolon, by Poo-brain, won in the 64k category:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bwLkEwLIgQ

By all accounts, German soundtrack composer Hans Zimmer's performance at Coachella last night was magnificent. Here he leads his talented orchestra in a rousing, tension-inducing Inception medley.

BlueBiscuits Studios posted a video tutorial illustrating how to make an incredibly realistic wolf animation in Blender. Even as a 2D "stills" artist, I think that guides like this are very useful: having watched it twice, I feel like I've gotten a new depth of insight into canine biology and motion.

Have you ever looked up at a small window in your Craftsman home and thought to yourself, "well, that's nice, but it'd be better if it had the golden arches of the McDonald's Restaurant logo on it?" Well, a Craiglist seller in Pittsburgh has the olive and burgundy transom of your dreams.I purchased this window at an auction over 30 years ago in Meadville PA after the restaurants underwent a restoration. It is stained glass with a wood frame. They were used as dividers between the booths. Excellent condition -- has always been indoors.The window measures 36" x 17" and priced at $150.

Artist Lucy Gafford has discovered inexpensive art supplies. Rather than letting shed hairs go down the shower drain, she creates Shower Hair Masterpieces, like this fancy azalea blossom. (more…)

A simple but elegant dessert inspired by the new Beauty and the Beast movie.

In this new video, Vox examines the physics behind the peregrine falcon’s dive, which can reach speeds of over 200 miles an hour.

It's fascinating to watch the trial and error as artisans led by Anna Miasowsky try to blow enormous cocoon-shaped sculptures large enough to fit a person inside. (more…)

I stumbled across this great Hello Giggles post highlighting a trend in which body-positive Instagrammers reveal just how different their bodies look in posed vs. relaxed photos taken moments apart. The side-by-side photos serve as an important reminder of just how manufactured our culture’s idea of “perfection” is. As Bodyposipanda puts it, “We sure as hell don't need to compare ourselves to anybody's highlight reel, after all, the model in the magazine doesn't even look like the model in the magazine most of the time.” Some of my favorite photos are below and you can see the rest on Hello Giggles.https://www.instagram.com/p/BP29w0IA1OQ/https://www.instagram.com/p/BROhx8IhqTK/https://www.instagram.com/p/BRjESbuBmRI/https://www.instagram.com/p/BPV9-cUA09D/https://www.instagram.com/p/BR6dvNzBqdm/

The smell of old books is instantly recognizable but hard to describe. Thanks to mass spectrometry and good old fashioned smell tests, University College London researchers have created a Historic Book Odour Wheel. (more…)

YouTuber Louise Pentland of SprinkleOfGlitter shares the books she reads to her six-year-old daughter that don’t drive her crazy.

Home security is important, but installing a full-scale security system can be some expensive overkill. For apartment dwellers, especially, that's a complete non-starter. However, if you're looking for a versatile home security solution or just need a simple way to make sure your dog (or teenager) isn’t wreaking havoc while you’re gone, the Oco camera offers excellent utility with minimal setup.This HD, WiFi security camera is easily installed with a screw-in magnetic mount, and can be up and running in under a minute. With real-time streaming via the free app, you can keep constant tabs on what's going on at home or the office. Not going to be near the app for awhile? Oco’s free cloud service stores footage automatically for remote access, or you can also add an SD card for local storage in case of network failure.Its 140-degree wide-angle view can capture most of a room in crisp, 1080p resolution, day or night so you're always in the know. The Oco WiFi Security Camera is currently available in the Boing Boing Store.Explore more best-sellers in the Boing Boing Store:Protect Your Internet PrivacyTigerVPN ($29)Burn That Old Disney VHS Collection Onto Your ComputerVHS Digitization Software ($21)Jumpstart A New CareerLearn to Code: 2017 Bundle (Average Price~$20)

Walls look so sad when they're bare, so we've put together a few prints in the Boing Boing Store that can help out a bedroom or dorm room so guests don't think you're a crazy person when they come over and just see white everywhere. This selection of detailed scientific and mechanical prints, and space imagery will make great strides to really tie the room together.Celebrate the spirit of human ingenuity with these high-quality posters printed on 100lb polar white paper. The collection includes:Exploded views of the famous WWII B-24 Bomber Enola Gay and an Auburn Boattail SpeedsterA graphic rendering of Einstein made from his quotesAstronaut artThe Apollo 11 Moon Landing Mission transcriptA brilliant photo capturing the Andromeda galaxyThese wall hangings come unframed, so you can decide how you want to show them off. For science buffs of all stripes, they make great decor for the home or office.You can check out the science and space collections in the Boing Boing Store.Explore more best-sellers in the Boing Boing Store:Protect Your Internet PrivacyTigerVPN ($29)Burn That Old Disney VHS Collection Onto Your ComputerVHS Digitization Software ($21)Jumpstart A New CareerLearn to Code: 2017 Bundle (Average Price~$20)

Tim from Windfire Designs writes, "We got excited about making our own stroller after getting sick of trying to choose between really giant expensive and clunky strollers, or putting up with cheap, throw away strollers. We made our own -- which is always great -- because we could decide what was cool, rather than being told and sold. This thing goes everywhere, and the kiddo loves it. This video should show others the path to not accepting the de facto standards in stroller design."

Ad-blockers begat ad-blocker-blockers, which begat ad-blocker-blocker-blockers, with no end in sight. (more…)

You'll laugh so hard, your sides will ache...Your heart will go pitter-pat!Watching Felix!The wonderful cat!It is fun just to type that out.

I thought maybe the trailer hitch was going to break off, but the tree had a sneakier form of payback in mind.

In the music video for her first EP “Intertwined,” British YouTuber and musician Dodie Clark pairs her melodic song with some darkly surreal Barbie-centric imagery. (more…)

In this video for Mic, comedian and actor Mamoudou N’Diaye auditions for the 11 roles black men are so often asked to play in Hollywood.

United CEO Oscar Munoz said that passenger David Dao was "disruptive and belligerent" when he was told that he was going to be kicked off the plane after he bought a ticket and too his seat. But this newly released video shows Dao to be quite calm and reasonable given the circumstances. In the end, Dao was beaten senseless, his nose was broken, teeth were knocked out, and he suffered a concussion. United filled the empty seat with one of its employees.From Teen Vogue: New footage shows a United passenger and law enforcement arguing moments before he was violently dragged off a flight after it was overbooked. Tap the link in the bio to read more. A post shared by People Magazine (@people) on Apr 12, 2017 at 1:40pm PDTOn Monday, a video clip surfaced of Chicago Department of Aviation security officials brutally dragging Dao down the aisle of the plane on Sunday night for refusing to involuntarily give up his seat on a United flight went viral on social media. Shortly after the incident, United CEO Oscar Munoz told employees in an email that Dao had acted “disruptive and belligerent," which, in his words, left officers with no choice. However, passenger Joya Cummings uploaded new footage to Facebook showing the moments leading up to the officers' assault on Dao, and it shows a very different story.“I’m a physician. I have to work tomorrow at 8 o’clock,” he told officers calmly in the video. "No, I am not going. I am not going."Soon after, officers threatened to "drag [him]" off the plane if he didn't comply. “Then drag me down,” Dao told them. “I am staying right there.”Also, it looks like United didn't have the legal right to ask police to remove Dao. From Inc:A United Airlines spokesperson said that since Dr. Dao refused to give up his seat and leave the plane voluntarily, airline employees "had to" call upon airport security to force him to comply. However, since the flight was not overbooked, United Airlines had no legal right to give his seat to another passenger. In United Airline's Contract of Service, they list the reasons that a passenger may be refused service, many of which are reasonable, such as "failure to pay" or lacking "proof of identity." Nowhere in the terms of service does United Airlines claim to have unilateral authority to refuse service to anyone, for any reason (which would be illegal anyway).

Franchesca Ramsey of MTV’s Decoded breaks down America’s incredibly complex immigration process.

Portland activist Carlos Enrique demonstrated how Pepsi’s tone-deaf protest ad would actually play out in real life by handing Mayor Ted Wheeler a can of Pepsi during a City Council meeting. (more…)

Yandy introduced a new line of Disney princess-inspired lingerie sets. The company doesn't name the sets after the princesses, but it's pretty obvious who's who. Will Disney let this stand?Redbook asked four women to wear the lingerie to bed and report their experience:Usually, getting ready for bed means a bulky sweatshirt and pajama shorts, so he was absolutely thrilled and got right down to business."He had zero clue that Disney princesses were involved in any way, even when I gently asked him if the lingerie reminded him of anything. His answer: "Sexy things." I prodded a little more, asking if it seemed like a character. "Is it Disney?" I was so excited and said, "Yes! It's a princess – can you guess which one?" I should point out that I look nothing like Snow White, so I was pretty impressed that he guessed Snow White right off the bat. "The colors made it obvious," he said.

In Spending Blind:The Failure of Policy Planning in California Charter School Funding, Gordon Lafer -- a University of Oregon prof who also works for Oakland's The Public Interest -- finds "hundreds of millions of dollars ... spent each year without any meaningful strategy... on schools built in neighborhoods that have no need for additional classroom space, and which offer no improvement over the quality of education already available in nearby public schools. In the worst cases, public facilities funding has gone to schools that were found to have discriminatory enrollment policies and others that have engaged in unethical or corrupt practices." (more…)

Andrew Freeman from Immortal Masks (who make some beautiful masks indeed) and then wisely gave them to Adam Savage to play with on his Tested Youtube channel. Hubba hubba!(via Neatorama)

Without any forethought or preparation, Christopher Knight walked into the Maine woods in 1986 and lived there in complete solitude for the next 27 years, subsisting on what he was able to steal from local cabins. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the North Pond hermit, one man's attempt to divorce himself completely from civilization.We'll also look for coded messages in crosswords and puzzle over an ineffective snake.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Your brain does something weird when you imagine yourself in the future. FMRI scans reveal that your brain "stops acting as if you’re thinking about yourself," writes Jane McGonigal in Slate. "Instead, it starts acting as if you’re thinking about a completely different person... your brain acts as if your future self is someone you don’t know very well and, frankly, someone you don’t care about."Jane is my friend and colleague at Institute for the Future (IFTF), where we encourage people to think deeply, broadly, and creatively about their future selves. IFTF recently conducted the first major survey of future thinking in the United States, and the findings were surprising: The survey found 53 percent of Americans say they rarely or never think about the “far future,” or something that might happen 30 years from today. Twenty-one percent report imagining this future less than once a year, while the largest group of respondents, 32 percent, say it never crosses their mind at all.Likewise, 36 percent of Americans say they rarely or never think about something they might personally do 10 years from now. The largest group of respondents, 19 percent, think about this 10-year future less than once a year, while another 17 percent say they never think about it at all.If you'd like to get better at thinking about the future (so you can make better decisions today on how to shape it), Jane has tip:Make a list of things that you’re interested in — things like food, travel, cars, the city you live in, shoes, dogs, music, real estate. Then, at least once a week, do a google search for “the future of” one of the things on your list. Read an article, listen to a podcast, watch a video — and get some specific ideas of what the future of something you care about might be like.

If you're about to order a fine meal at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's fancy club-turned-winter-White-House, make sure to steer clear of the fish. And the meat. And you might want to offer the server some hand sanitizer while you're at it.Restaurant inspectors recently found 13 violations at the private Palm Beach, FL club. Among them, according to Miami Herald: ▪ Fish designed to be served raw or undercooked, the inspection report reads, had not undergone proper parasite destruction. Kitchen staffers were ordered to cook the fish immediately or throw it out.▪ In two of the club’s coolers, inspectors found that raw meats that should be stored at 41 degrees were much too warm and potentially dangerous: chicken was 49 degrees, duck clocked in a 50 degrees and raw beef was 50 degrees. The winner? Ham at 57 degrees.▪ The club was cited for not maintaining the coolers in proper working order and was ordered to have them emptied immediately and repaired.The other violations weren’t so serious. Water at the sink where employees wash their hands was too cold to sanitize hands. And Mar-a-Lago was also written up for keeping rusted shelves inside walk-in coolers.This is the most violations the kitchen has ever received. In the past, Trump used to check in on the kitchen to make sure things were running smoothly, and inspections came out pretty clean. But since he turned Mar-a-Lago into his political office (ethics conflict, but save that for another story), inspection results have soured. And this is a club that charges $200,000 just for initiation fees. Image by tommietheturtle

When the sun is directly overhead in Hawaii, it looks like a bad video game renderThe sun is exactly overhead twice a year in Lahaina, Hawaii, once in May and once in July. Poles don't cast shadows, giving the urban landscape an eerie appearance. Hawaii is the only state in the US where the sun's rays are perpendicular to the surface of Earth. It's called a subsolar point.Image: Flickr/Daniel RamirezCaelus5 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, LinkHere's Isamu Noguchi’s “Skygate” sculpture in Hawaii that makes a perfect ring during the Lahaina Noon:This is SkygateMore photos here and here.Here's a real-time map showing the current subsolar sublunar points.https://youtu.be/7J3E4wNDNZohttps://youtu.be/JCjEyITpRAI

In a new paper in International Studies Quarterly, John Quiggin and Henry Farrell argue that politicians get in trouble when they buck a consensus among economists, but when economists are divided, they can simply ignore the ones they disagree with -- so politicians spend a lot of time looking for economists who agree with their policies, then elevate them to the same status as their peers in order to create a safe, blame-free environment to operate in. (more…)

Watch it - if you're not beat up in a United Airlines seat, you might get stung. At least that's what happened to Richard Bell, a passenger flying from Houston to Calgary on Sunday, when a scorpion dropped from the overhead bin, landed in his hair, fell onto his tray table, and then zapped him.This mishap occurred on the same day United passenger David Dao was beaten up on another flight for not "volunteering" to give up the seat he paid for. He was then dragged off the plane while unconscious.Luckily, the scorpion did much less damage to Bell – he only suffered pain that "felt like a wasp sting." Other than that he was fine. And as for the scorpion? It was flushed down the toilet in the aircraft.Read the full story on The Washington Post.Image by Papypierre1

Aga is an iconic European over-maker famous for a longstanding, ostentatious design that required the owner to burn fuel around the clock to maintain temperature across the cooker's titanic thermal mass, so much so that owners of British country homes integrated them into their household heating systems. (more…)

These margarines are for people who really, really want to eat butter, but not enough to eat it:I refuse to believe that that is mainly emulsified vegetable oil and water.Move over butter! Make way for the cow rolling a big white sphere of grease across the pasture.If you spread this on your body, you will Taste Like Butter.Anger issues.And you are right -- it's "butter."Is it butter? We're not sure ourselves."Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water... polluted the soil. Decimated plant and animal life. Why, in my day, you could buy meat anywhere. Eggs. They had real butter. Fresh lettuce in the stores.""I know, Sol. You told me before.""How can anything survive in a climate like this? A heat wave all year long. A greenhouse effect. Everything is burning up."Okay, wise guy. Eat some Soylent Green and calm down."Could it be butter? We were drinking when we made it, so we can't remember.You'd think it was butter. But we know better.Finally, truth in advertising. Too bad this tub of fake butter is fake.[via]

CNN is reporting that President Trump is now implementing the “bomb the shit out of them” portion of his campaign promises. (more…)

I bought this string of 100 LEDs with a solar charger a couple of years ago to put on our front gate. I set it to blink and it was a nice way for people to find our house at night. But a couple of months ago we had some work done on the gate and the guy severed the wires. So I bought a new one. The solar panel has a built-in battery and I used Sugru to mount it to the gate. It works really well. Amazon has this on sale right now for $10.99.

When a new Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell explainer video comes out, I stop what I'm doing and watch it. The latest one, about the European Union, asks, "Should we double down or give up and go our separate ways?"This video will probably not make everybody happy. Probably for completely opposite reasons. Some people want less political and economic integration, some want more of it. Some want to stop immigration, others want better integration instead. Some want an EU army, others want to disband Nato. And most will have a collection of different opinions about all of that. It’s the same for our team, we don’t all share the same vision for Europe and the world. We tried our best to present different sides and view points, while being fair and as neutral as possible. But obviously we can’t go into too much detail in a video that is only 7 minutes long. We also clearly marked where we are stating our opinion. The sources we used are in the video description.The last year has taught us that we have to try our best to get everybody back to the table again and stop screaming at each other. We all could have done a better job at this in the past, Kurzgesagt too. Everybody comes from a different place and has different ideas of where the world should go and how to tackle our problems. And as long as we are trying to base our opinions on facts then that is completely fine. In the end we all have to share this planet with each other.