The Social Security card has become the de facto national ID in the USA. What is the history of the Social Security system, how has the function of the Social Security number changed, and why is it so easy to steal your SSN? CGP Grey explains it in this video.

Seedship is a text-only game of interstellar exploration and settlement. You're the sentient AI of a generation ship containing 1000 humans fleeing a doomed Earth, and you must deal with threats in deep space and evaluate target worlds for suitability. There are always tradeoffs: a world with breathable air and charming wildlife may guarantee comfort, but without resources will end in a genteel return to the stone age. A barren world rich in minerals and alien ruins means advancing human technology and culture, but at the cost of being enslaved to whomever owns the water generation plants. If the aim is to find the best world for mankind, the fun is found subjecting it to the most punishing hell planets the cosmos offers. When I came across this total nightmare, I knew we had found home:Things didn't work out. Most colonists died and the rest descended to savagery. I haven't found a perfect world, but the following one got me to 10,000 civilization points, which feels like the threshold for success:Every compromise matters. Even with such a lush world, its ecological exhaustion (presumably thanks to whatever left the monumental ruins) resulted in a technological collapse described as "bronze-age cosmic enlightenment." If it were an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we would most certainly be wearing textured earth tones.Each combination is worth exploring, to find what sort of environments get you to theocracies or into endless war with natives. When I spotted the following world, I immediately thought "cyberpunk corporate dystopia!" and was not disappointed by the results:Created by SF writer John Ayliff (Twitter, Patreon), it's incredibly addictive, and a great example of Twine's potential for offbeat games where generative elements combine with handwritten storytelling. I was up to 2 a.m. last night exploring!Two criticisms. First, the perils of space, which limit your ability to scan worlds and your potential to successfully colonize them, create gameplay but cut the drug. (What if we assumed we get there in one piece, traveling on Battlestar Kishōtenketsu?)Second, the stories generated, by their nature, become repetitive. Posed as historical footnotes, they create an appropriate atmosphere of clinical, encyclopedic distance, but it can only tickle the imagination for so long. Games like this often come down to Attribute Bingo: hunting for particular combinations in search of a story one expects to find there. I understand a little about the use of grammars and madlibs in code, though, and appreciate just how skilfully Seedship embodies its own ambition. The next level—telling generative stories with characters and details that truly engage us—lies over a vast gulf of complexity and cost. We might need generations, and a powerful AI, to get there.

Julio writes, "A Spanish woman was sentenced yesterday for tweeting jokes about the 1973 assassination of Carrero Blanco (the appointed successor or General Franco). She was 16 at the time of her tweeting." (more…)

"This web page needs to be interrupted by a lightbox effect and a modal dialog asking me to sign up for a mailing list," said no one ever. (more…)

Amanda Rousseau's self-learning materials for her Malware Unicorn workshop are a fantastic introduction to understanding and analyzing malware, covering the techniques used by malware authors, reverse-engineering tools, and three kinds of analysis: triage, static and dynamic. (more…)

"Appflash" will come pre-installed on all Verizon Android handsets; it's a Google search-bar replacement, but instead of feeding telemetry about your searches, handset, apps and activities to Google, it will send them to Verizon. (more…)

Seletti's Hybrid Collection "reflects on the historical production of Chinese and European Bone China and its influences between Western and Eastern aesthetics" -- they're made in Italy and they ain't cheap, but they really tickle my aesthetic sense. (more…)

A new Transparency International report ranks the world's most superheated urban property markets to find the most corrupt and finds that Australia is a playground for offshore criminals looking to launder their money, because "real estate agents are not subject to the provisions of the Anti-Money Laundering and CounterTerrorism Financing Act 2006," thus, "70 per cent of Chinese buyers pay in cash and they represent the largest proportion of foreign purchases in the country." (more…)

Laurie Penny's red pen of justice (previously) is gouting unstoppable fire today in her column on the relationship of cruel austerity to Brexit: the decade during which Conservative ideologues gutted the nation to make the banks whole again after the financial crisis, creating a lost generation, quietly murdering disabled people, leaving the poor standing in breadlines not seen since the Victorian era -- all the while invoking the spirit of the Blitz and insisting that "we're all in this together." (more…)

Pennywise and his real-world imitators may be thanked for putting an early end to the Pokemon Go fad last year, but the real fruit of It's labor is the forthcoming TV film version of Steven King's classic horror book. Here's the trailer.There's a high bar to meet, but it's worth remembering that the original miniseries was pretty dull when Tim Curry wasn't on-screen.

"The Hill Fights" is a clip from Jacques Menasche's film on the life and work of Catherine LeRoy, best known for covering the Vietnam War in all its unvarnished horror. (more…)

You’re in LA, sniffing around for something to do, can’t get into The Magic Castle or looking for something less expensive? There’s a new place in town: Black Rabbit Rose.LA Magazine writes:An extraordinary new magic-themed nightclub called Black Rabbit Rose is … on Hollywood Boulevard, and it looks spectacular. The latest enterprise by the Houston Brothers (the twins behind La Descarga and numerous other theme bars) includes a 40-seat theater, a Thai-Chinese dinner menu, and a cocktail lounge featuring roaming magicians, exotic variety acts (think sword swallowing), and burlesque dancers. The club was custom built with rooms that might suddenly come to life during performances.The rooms are filled with tributes to 19th century magicians and tucked into a century-old apartment house. The flamboyantly ornate interior, dripping with gilt and velvet, may even remind you of the Magic Castle, less than a mile away. In a genius move, the club secured the services of longtime Castle favorite Rob Zabrecky as entertainment director and occasional performer. Charles Addams could not have cast the role better. Zabrecky’s cadaverous pallor and aura of foreboding create the gravitas that his spellbinding performance deserves. If you see his name on the bill, hotfoot it over to the Boulevard immediately. Black Rabbit Rose [is] open Tuesday through Saturday with ticketed shows ($25-$40) on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.The Hollywood Reporter writes:[Black Rabbit Rose] is a new-school twist on Hollywood's famed Magic Castle, catering to the fantasies of the A-list millennial crowd. … At Black Rabbit Rose, bartenders serve complicated cocktails with a side of sleight-of-hand tricks. A classic Zoltar machine is rigged for staffers to tell fortunes remotely. And in the back, a 40-seat theater has been engineered with shaking floors, false walls and trick lighting for performances ($25 to $40) booked by magician Rob Zabrecky, whose work hosting the live show Brookledge Follies inspired Ryan Gosling to cast him in his directorial debut, Lost River. "It's amazing, the trouble they went into with this space—the details permeate every beat," says Paul Reubens (he and friend David Arquette consulted on the project).Black Rabbit Rose, 1719 N Hudson Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90028Phone: (323) 461-1464Web: blackrabbitrose.comPhotographs By Jakob LaymanVia LA Magazine and The Hollywood Reporter

This peppy little cover by Postmodern Jukebox turned out quite nicely. (more…)

Watch this inspiring summary of Rob Pyers' journey from laid-off grocery bagger to major player in following the money in California politics. (more…)

This short animated confection exploring patterns is a charming diversion, but the director's notes are a fascinating glimpse into all the work it took: (more…)

Ivanka Trump, daughter of president Donald Trump, is to take an official, unpaid job as his assistant. That's Assistant to the President, not Assistant President.In a statement, the White House said it was "pleased that Ivanka Trump has chosen to take this step in her unprecedented role as first daughter".Ms Trump said in her statement that she had been "working in good faith with the White House Counsel and my personal counsel to address the unprecedented nature of my role".Ethics experts cried foul when it emerged last week that Ms Trump was to be given a West Wing office and security clearance, without formally joining the administration.You're wondering where the bottom is. There is no bottom.

Amir Taaki is a well-known anarchist bitcoin hacker whose project, Dark Wallet, is meant to create strong anonymity for cryptocurrency transactions; when he discovered that anarchists around the world had gone to Rojava, a district in Kurdish Syria on the Turkish border, to found an anarchist collective with 4,000,000 members "based on principles of local direct democracy, collectivist anarchy, and equality for women," he left his home in the UK to defend it. (more…)

East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, were the most aggressive surveillance force of their day -- at the Stasi's peak, one in 60 East Germans was snitching for the agency. (more…)

The exciting field of "battlefield acupuncture" involves training soldiers and medics to perform what amounts to a "theatrical placebo" involving jamming glorified thumbtacks into fellow soldiers' ears and leaving them there until they fall out. (more…)

Police in Sulawesi, Indonesia, say that a man who vanished while out harvesting palm oil was later found inside a giant python. The man was dead.Village secretary Salubiro Junaidi told The Jakarta Post: "People had heard cries from the palm grove the night before Akbar was found in the snake's stomach."When the snake was captured, the boots Akbar was wearing were clearly visible in the stomach of the snake."Resident[s] cut open the belly of the snake and Akbar was lifeless."

These Japanese robots' performance of "Robot's Delight" -- an extended, braggadocios riff on the state of AI learning-through-imitation research, with break-dancing -- won Best Video at the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction. (via 4 Short Links)

In a newly revised paper in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, a group of French and Swiss computer science researchers show that "a very small perturbation vector that causes natural images to be misclassified with high probability" -- that is, a minor image transformation can beat machine learning systems nearly every time. (more…)

You might think that when companies impose crappy, abusive terms of service on their customers that the market could sort it out, by creating competition to see who could offer the best terms and thus win the business of people fed up with bad actors. (more…)

A young man and a 6-year-old were stuck in an elevator at St. Lucia's Royalton hotel. Maintenance staff were summoned to get them out, but didn't arrive within 10 minutes. A minor rampaged commenced, which, along with the phrase "There's no cameras, right?", was captured on camera.Based upon the findings on display in this video, I've created a useful guide to getting people out of a stuck elevator.• Declare "I'm recording this, and posting this."• Pull the fire alarms. Pull every fire alarm possible.• Scream "We're not worrying! It's not your fucking kids! We've been having problems with you fucking people! Fuck off!" at staff.• Fantasize about busting the doors open with your bare hands.• Fetch a tool that might actually break open the doors from the outside, then begin to do so.• If you are trapped in the elevator, yell "Just break these fuckin' doors, pussies! Get me out this fuckin' thing!"• When freed, threaten to kill the staff.• Upload all the above the internet so the public may watch it.Previously: How to behave in an elevator.

The great Ray Manzarek makes magic on the Fender Rhodes as he reveals the musical evolution of the classic Doors song. (Don't blink or you'll miss guitarist Robby Krieger.)(via Laughing Squid)

An oldie but goodie. I was expecting the GoPro logo to pop up at the end."Camera falls from a sky diving airplane and lands on my property in my pig pen. I found the camera 8 months later and viewed this video."(via Kottke)

This makes me like one of the songs a bit more and dislike the other a bit less.

Get ready to fall into a black hole of non-productivity once you open NASA's new Image and Video Library. Lots of great tags and captions to find what you want! (more…)

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more. GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”A book for the curious and adventurous!” -Cory Doctorow) Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Aryeh Nirenberg captured a remarkable sight for the rest of us to enjoy while on vacation: the northern lights as they appeared from a plane window on New Year's Eve. Better than any fireworks! (more…)

https://www.instagram.com/p/BSHUKxagwz4/?taken-by=flips.9As the bottle-flipping craze mutates, more impressive entries are popping up in the flipper community. Watch this doozie by Instagrammer Flips.9, a pencil flip that lands upright. (more…)

Maybe it’s entirely because of podcast ads, but drag-and-drop tools like Squarespace have gotten immensely popular in recent years. While it’s definitely a great tool for any non-coders who want to get a small website up and running quickly, managing content with a primarily visual interface can become a pain once you have more than a few pages’ worth of stuff to show off. Anything beyond a simple portfolio site is best supported by a full-fledged CMS, and WordPress is one of the most preferred platforms for solo bloggers, online store owners, and large publications alike.To take full advantage of the power of WordPress, you may have to write some code, but you can also do a whole lot without coding as well. Fortunately for you, you can learn everything - across the spectrum of technical expertise - you need to know to build a fully functional site with this WordPress Hero Bundle. With seven immersive courses, you’ll pick up a ton of web development skills, including:Installing WordPress on a web hostDesigning and modifying graphical assets for webpagesBuilding full, mobile-friendly websites from scratchCoding WordPress plugins and themes in PHPManaging online stores with eCommerce platformsAfter this comprehensive coursework, you’ll be a web developer capable of running a business on the web. Pay what you want for this WordPress Hero Bundle to lock in a great price on these essential instructional materials.Explore other Best-Sellers in our store:Coding + DevelopmentLearn to Code 2017 Bundle (Pay What You Want)Accessories Twisty Glass BluntD-I-Y CourseRaspberry Pi 3 Course

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I use this rocker garlic crusher several times a week. To use it, you just put a peeled clove of garlic under the crusher and rock the crusher over it a few times. It will smash the garlic through the holes, which you can then add to your food or skillet. When you are done, you can rub the stainless steel rocker underwater and "wash" your hands to remove the garlic smell from your skin. I like using this a lot more than a traditional garlic press, which seems to "juice" garlic more than mince it, as this rocker does. It's $15 on Amazon and will last forever. Here's a cheaper version (which I have not tried):

Archilogic made this interactive 3D model of the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin from The Office. You can scan over the entire space under "floor plan view," starting off with Pam’s desk and the office of Michael Scott. Then head past the galley kitchen and men’s and women’s bathrooms.You can zoom in and get up close into all the nooks and crannies. It’s so accurate even the pictures on the walls are the same. And notice how everything is so perfectly placed, like the scattered coffee mugs and boxes of printers stacked on top of the storage cabinets. If you’re a true fan, you’ll recognize the model is based off the show’s final season (hint: the Cornell flag).

"I wuv you, wobot."

In 2011, the Canadian Conservative government rammed through Bill C-11, Canada's answer to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in which the property rights of Canadians were gutted in order to ensure that corporations could use DRM to control how they used their property -- like its US cousin, the Canadian law banned breaking DRM, even for legitimate purposes, like effecting repairs or using third party parts. (more…)

Every time you think that this TSA guy has finished rubbing every square inch of a boy's body, he comes back for another rubbing. It seems likes he's trying to discover a bobby pin the boy might have hidden in the seam of his clothing. The boy's justifiably upset mom taped the rubdown, which occurred at the Dallas Fort-Worth airport over the weekend. The TSA told Fusion it's all good:TSA allows for a pat-down of a teenage passenger, and in this case, all approved procedures were followed to resolve an alarm of the passenger’s laptop.The video shows a male TSA officer explaining the procedure to the passenger, who fully cooperates. Afterward, the TSA officer was instructed by his supervisor, who was observing, to complete the final step of the screening process.In total, the pat-down took approximately two minutes, and was observed by the mother and two police officers who were called to mitigate the concerns of the mother.The passengers were at the checkpoint for approximately 35 minutes, which included the time it took to discuss screening procedures with the mother and to screen three carry-on items that required further inspection[via]

Like being on a planet with 3X Earth's gravity.

[via]

Ten years ago, a group of engineers and media executives sat down to decide what was, and was not, a real family. The results were predictably terrible. (more…)

Stuck in an East African prison camp in 1943, Italian POW Felice Benuzzi needed a challenge to regain his sense of purpose. He made a plan that seemed crazy -- to break out of the camp, climb Mount Kenya, and break back in. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow Benuzzi and two companions as they try to climb the second-highest mountain in Africa using homemade equipment.We'll also consider whether mirages may have doomed the Titanic and puzzle over an ineffective oath.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Texas State University's Body Farm (AKA Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State University or FACTS) is a 45-year-old facility where the corpses of medical body donors are left to decompose so that researchers can observe the rate at which human remains are consumed by the elements, scavengers and microbes, allowing them to accurately date the bodies of murder victims and those who died accidentally. (more…)

Any well-designed self-driving car will be at pains to avoid killing people, if only to prevent paperwork delays when they mow someone down. (more…)

Connecticut, home to the richest hedge-fund managers in America, is going broke, cutting services and gutting pension plans to try and fill its $1.8B budget hole -- a hole it plans on filling by taking away $1.5B from the state's workers. (more…)

Software can be thought of as a system for encapsulating the expertise of skilled practitioners; translate the hard-won expertise of a machinist or a dental technician or a bookkeeper into code, and people with little expertise in those fields can recreate many of the feats of the greatest virtuosos, just by hitting Enter. (more…)

Enjoy this simple and surprising tale from The Games Room Company, who were tasked with restoring a roulette table operated in Chicago throughout the 1930s: "we found that it had been completely rigged to defraud people and increase the odds of the house during play."A button disguised as decorative screw, accessible to the croupier, would cause a tiny pins to emerge from the ball track's surface, deflecting balls toward house-friendly ball pockets. Powered by batteries hidden in the legs (and dated by the newspaper used as dampers) the mechanism and its results would be undetectable at speed.

The operators of the ocean-floor exploring vehicle E/V Nautilus chanced across this absolutely adorable googly-eyed purple cuttlefish, so what they they do? They spent the next five minutes making fun of it! [via Reddit]The team spotted this Stubby Squid off the coast of California at a depth of 900 meters (2,950 feet). The stubby squid (Rossia pacifica) looks like a cross between an octopus and squid, but is more closely related to cuttlefish. This species spends life on the seafloor, activating a sticky mucus jacket and burrowing into the sediment to camouflage, leaving their eyes poking out to spot prey like shrimp and small fish. Rossia pacifica is found in the Northern Pacific from Japan to Southern California, most commonly seen up to 300m deep, but specimens have been collected at 1000m depth.E/V Nautilus is exploring the ocean studying biology, geology, archeology, and more. Watch http://www.nautiluslive.org for live video from the ocean floor. For live dive updates follow along on social media at http://www.facebook.com/nautiluslive and http://www.twitter.com/evnautilus on Twitter. For more photos from our dives, check out our Instagram @nautiluslive.Someone should remix this so that when the scientists are mocking it ("it looks like a child's toy!") the camera lurches up to see a giant purple Cthulhu looking in the murk above them. Cthulhu booms: "don't talk to me or my son ever again."

When you can’t wait for the world’s longest meeting to end, the mindless leg bouncing makes your boredom obvious and just annoys everybody else. Everyone knows the TPS reports need the damn cover sheet, but some sadistic colleague keeps forgetting, probably on purpose just to eat into your lunch hour. Enough is enough!While serving a sentence in the conference room can be hellishly dull, you can zen it out by keeping your hands busy under the table (not that kind of busy, gross). This Stress Spinner helps you refocus on what matters most—that weird mole on Dave’s neck. Ahem, productively getting through the meeting, that is. With a smooth ceramic center bearing, you can spin it silently to help ease your wandering mind and hone back in on the waves of corporate synergy.After enough practice, you’ll be able to pull it out of your pocket already spinning without missing a beat. Pick up this Stress Spinner for 66% off, just $19.99.Explore other Best-Sellers in our store:Coding + DevelopmentLearn to Code 2017 Bundle (Pay What You Want)Accessories Twisty Glass BluntD-I-Y CourseRaspberry Pi 3 Course

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