Asian Boss interviewed a couple of young North Korean defectors, who talked about life in the nation-sized cult. Starvation, public executions where everyone over the age of 12 is commanded to watch, no electricity in winter except on days when Kim Il Sung gave his New Year's TV address, and soldiers standing in holes waiting to shoot people trying to escape across a frozen river, are a few of the highlights.

City buses, utility trucks, snowplows, and police cars get in on the action on this icy street in Montreal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7Q_jpINtqIdj BC writes, "My best Christmas mashups from the past decade are collected for this year's Santastic (previously) holiday music sampler. You can also dig on the site for the full albums from past years, our 'Menorah Mashups' Chanukah collection, and my chill instrumental album of holiday classical remixes. It's all free."

The human population reached 1 billion in its first 200,000 years. It took just 200 more years to reach 7 billion. This data visualization video from the American Museum of Natural History presents the explosive growth of our species.[via]

More than 800 American energy and Earth science researchers have signed a letter to Donald Trump outlining six steps they're urging him to take to address human-caused climate change to protect “America’s economy, national security, and public health and safety.” The letter is accompanied by a public change.org petition to "Tell Trump To #ActOnClimate." Here is that open letter:To President-elect TrumpWe, the undersigned, urge you to take immediate and sustained action against human-caused climate change. We write as concerned individuals, united in recognizing that the science is unequivocal and America must respond.Climate change threatens America’s economy, national security, and public health and safety. Some communities are already experiencing its impacts, with low-income and minority groups disproportionately affected.At this crucial juncture in human history, countries look to the United States to pick up the mantle of leadership: to take steps to strengthen, not weaken, this nation’s efforts to tackle this crisis. With the eyes of the world upon us, and amidst uncertainty and concern about how your administration will address this issue, we ask that you begin by taking the following steps upon taking office:1. Make America a clean energy leader.The vast majority of Americans - whether Republican, Democrat, or Independent - support renewable energy research and deployment5. Embrace the enormous economic opportunities of transitioning to an energy-efficient, low-carbon society. Use part of your $1 trillion commitment to infrastructure development to expand democratized clean energy, boost U.S. competitiveness, and put America to work8. Since 2008, the cleantech industry has created one out of every 33 jobs in the United States. “Wind technician” is the fastest growing job category in America, and the solar industry has hired more veterans than any other sector.2. Reduce carbon pollution and America’s dependence on fossil fuels. The majority of Americans are in favor of this5. Assure them that the policies helping to cut greenhouse gas emissions, curb air and water pollution, and accelerate clean energy growth, innovation, and jobs - such as the Clean Power Plan, renewable energy tax credits, and auto-efficiency standards - will stay in place. Continued funding and flexibility of federal agencies to address climate change, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, are key to achieving these goals.3. Enhance America’s climate preparedness and resilience. In the past 5 years alone, storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires caused over $250 billion in damages10. As climate change continues to increase the frequency and severity of these extreme events, so too grows the burden on all taxpayers to pay for disaster relief and recovery. Help protect and strengthen America’s communities, economy, and natural resources by investing in modern, climate-resilient energy, transport, building, and water infrastructure.4. Publicly acknowledge that climate change is a real, human-caused, and urgent threat. If not, you will become the only government leader in the world to deny climate science11. Your position will be at odds with virtually all climate scientists, most economists, military experts, fossil fuel companies and other business leaders, and the two-thirds of Americans worried about this issue.5. Protect scientific integrity in policymaking. During your campaign, you said that your “administration will ensure that there will be [scientific] transparency and accountability without political bias16.” Uphold these standards by appointing scientific advisors, Cabinet members, and federal agency leaders who respect and rely on science-based decision-making. This would exclude many of your Cabinet and transition team appointees to date, who deny the scientific realities of human-caused climate change.6. Uphold America's commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement. Reneging from this treaty - the product of 25 years of negotiations between almost every country on Earth - would undermine our best chance to avoid dangerous climate change. It would also poorly represent the American people, the majority of whom support US participation in the Paris Agreement19. The United States will lose its seat of influence at the international negotiating table, and will cede to China, the EU, and other countries its authority as a political, technological, and moral leader.You have the support of the majority of companies, military leaders, scientists, engineers, and citizens to respond to the threats posed by climate change by reducing carbon pollution and expanding clean energy. Many of America’s largest cities and states are already committed to doing so. We urge you to decide if you want your Presidency to be defined by denial and disaster, or acceptance and action.(via Scientific American)

reMarkable's 10.3" tablet has an e-ink display with a paper-like texture, a digital pencil with 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity, and promises to finally replace all that paper in your workspace. The pitch: read, write and sketch, all on one gadget. Unlike traditional paper, reMarkable connects to the digital world when you need it to. Your thoughts, whether they’re words or sketches, are instantly synced to reMarkable’s cloud service and made available on all your devices. Documents and ebooks are easily transferred for reading and reviewing with pen in hand. reMarkable connects to the internet for easy sharing and collaboration across devices. You can even take notes on one device and have it appear on a second device, in real time.It's 10.2" by 6.9" and a quarter inch thick. It weighs less than a pound, and the 1872 x 1404 pixel display works out at 225 pixels per inch. It runs Linux (not Android, though) and has an ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 512MB of RAM and WiFi.It claims a latency of 55ms and the demo video shows performance similar to the iPad Pro, which they say has 60ms latency. Wacom tablet hardware polls at ReMarkable's slate is $379 and they hope to ship in summer 2017. They've got the design right—listen to Gaius Baltar explain the cold pressed-style surface texture in the video. Now it just has to live up to the technical expectations and show up in timely fashion.Competition: the smaller but cheaper $200 Noteslate, which blew its original ship date this summer. Sony's $600+ Digital Paper looks very similar to reMarkable and has been out a few years, but is oriented more to institutional use and there's a general NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMERS vibe about how they're selling it. Has anyone tried the even-pricier Onyx? Or, indeed, the unnervingly cheapo $100 DigitalMemo?Note: "Your thoughts, whether words or sketches, are instantly synced to reMarkable’s cloud service." What a sentence. Make sure that's optional, guys!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naTxqt1wVxc

A mere $5,700 (as of current writing) gets you the 1974 first printing of the game that Tactical Studies Rules used to change the world(s). (more…)

"And I’m proud to say that when we get there, it will be as the Alt-Warmth. Just think: under the old name, we couldn’t even get anybody elected dogcatcher." (more…)

Here's this year's complete Boing Boing Gift Guide: more than a hundred great ideas for prezzies: technology, toys, books and more. Scroll down and buy things, mutants! Many of the items use Amazon Affiliat links that help us make ends meet at Boing Boing, the world's greatest neurozine. Gadgets / Books / Toys and TriviaMark FrauenfelderIlluminated magnifierI bought this illuminated handheld magnifier on Amazon for $3 (free shipping) last year and I use it a lot. It's a great splinter and lice checker. I've gotten my $3 of value from it just looking at tiny bugs and skin abnormalities. It has two built in LEDs and uses two AA batteries.BUY SHARECory DoctorowSquatty PottySquatty Potty is a $28 footstool that slides away under your toilet; you use it to bring your knees up to a squatting position while you poop, which makes pooping much, much easier. The product was launched with the best viral ad campaign of all time, which threaded the seemingly impossible needle of making an ad about a poop-assistance product; I bought one and (without getting into detail) I can personally testify to its efficacy.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzNintendo NES Classic EditionWhat’s Christmas without price gouging on the hottest geek gift of the year! Don’t fret. Soon, the rationing will cease and a $60 NES Classic Edition will be just a click away. And then, Mario my old friend, we will ALL be playing with power.BUY SHAREXeni JardinCuisinart 14-Cup Food ProcessorThe latest model of the best food processor for people who are serious about broadening their happy foodie horizons. Shove entire fruits and veggies into the giant feed tube. Listen to the 720-watt motor fill a 14-cup work bowl with steel slicing and shredding discs. It still comes with a free recipe book.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaArduboyBeautiful 1-bit graphics in your wallet! Arduboy is an open-source platform to create and share games and the hardware is made to the dimensions of a business card. Best of all, this tiny toy is only $50. Want more? The PocketChip, at $70, plays Pico-8 games with a dazzling 16 colors; the dev community is more mature and there are countless games already.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerA Parker 51 Fountain PenThere is one Parker 51 available on Amazon, seems to be a re-issue with an Empire State cap. While the Parker 51 is my favorite pen ever, I do not know whom in New York I love enough to pay the near-patriotic price of $1775 to gift them one. BUY SHARECory DoctorowStar Wars tiki mugsSix 14 oz Star Wars tiki mugs, standing 6.5"-7.5" tall, with contrast-glazed interiors. They're $15 each or $73 for the set of six. They're not microwave- or dishwasher-safe.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzStylophoneInvented in 1967, the Stylophone is a small analog synthesizer that you play with a stylus. The curious, inexpensive synth has been used by Kraftwerk, They Might Be Giants, Pulp, and the late great David Bowie who played it to great effect on “Space Oddity.”BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerEase your bay area commute with a Sikorsky UH-34DPut this former Vietnam veteran to work! Available for a mere $80k this Skirorsky UH34D is a steal… imagine you, Face and BA riding in the back while Murdock pilots her. Typically, I’m pretty fixated on a G-21 Super Goose as the ultimate, practical gettin’ around town vehicle, but Platinum Fighters keeps turning my head. BUY SHAREXeni JardinApple iPhone 7sStill my entire creative studio and almost everything I need to do my work: it replaces my fancy camera, my audio gear and everything else I had to lug around. This thing really is everything. I go big on screen size and storage capacity, with that in mind: the Plus, and 128 GB. BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderLED headlamp with hands-free switch for $10The OxyLED LED Headlamp ($10 on Amazon) is a great deal for the price. The lamp is very bright (you can dim it, or make it strobe) and you can point the beam up or down. It's also got a motion activated switch so you don't gave to fumble for the button - just wave your hand in front of the beam to activate or deactivate it.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerWhat I’m giving Mark this yearThis looks relaxing, and he can practice card tricks through those handy slots. BUY SHARERob BeschizzaiPad Pro 9.7"The larger, pencil-equipped models are as close to being fit for heavy creative duty as tablets get, but the 12.9" model is so large it suffers by comparison to Apple's splendidly tiny 12" MacBook (and Microsoft's tablet PCs, to be plainly honest) for many tasks. But the 9.7" model is just perfect: big enough to paint on, small enough to not feel like you're carrying around a computer, but with all the power offered by its big sister. BUY SHAREXeni JardinBlack & Decker CHV1410L 16-volt Lithium Cordless Dust Buster Hand VacStill the best selling hand vac for keeping your office, home, workshop or hackerspace tidy. CHV1410L has strong suction, and a bagless dirt bowl that's easy to see and empty. Holds a charge for up to 18 months when it's off the charger. High efficiency Lithium ion chargers protect it by automatically shutting off when the battery is charged, so you can store it on the charger.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzOnzow Zerodust Stylus CleanerEvery vinyl collector needs this but just doesn’t know it. Dipping your stylus into this firm, gelatinous lump removes any dust or dirt without damaging the needle. It’s very satisfying. The plastic lid is a magnifier for a before and after view. Imported from Japan, complete with kanji on the packaging.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaSurface BookThe best convertible tablet PC by a mile, Microsoft's Surface is beautiful, powerful and well-designed, especially the balance between keyboard and display. RAM is limited to 16GB, and the custom GPU from NVidia really isn't up to snuff for gaming, but it's the second-best tool for fat-walleted artists wanting to move on from Wacom. (The best is the Surface Studio Desktop, but they're not shipping until the new year)BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderHand-crank LED lanternThis nifty collapsable lantern has a built-in lithium battery. You can charge it with a USB cable or by turning the crank. The manufacturer says you can also charge your phone in an emergency by turning the crank.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzPolaroid ZIP Mobile PrinterThis pocket-size mobile printer connects to your iOS or Android device via Bluetooth and spits out 2 x 3” color prints. There are no ink cartridges to run out. Each print using the Polaroid ZINK photo paper runs about 50 cents and has a peelable sticker backing. No need to shake the prints when they come out either because, well, that never did anything anyway.BUY SHARECory DoctorowAeropressI bought my first Aeropress in 2010; since then, I've been an out-and-out evangelist for them. Nothing makes a better cup of coffee, and you can literally buy a hundred of these for the cost of a midrange espresso machine. Every Aeropress cup I've ever made has been perfect. I keep one in my suitcase. I buy spare ones to keep at the houses of people I stay with on the road. I gave one to my parents. If you want to give a gift to a coffee-lover, give that person an Aeropress. Seriously.BUY SHAREXeni JardinBrondell O2+ Balance Air PurifierI bought the Brondell Source in 2015 and it alleviated allergy symptoms; here's the latest model, adding a touchscreen, remote control and an adjustable air quality sensor. Rids the air of dust and dander and tiny particles you don’t need to be breathing—but also filters volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Three-stage advanced purifier system includes certified True HEPA and Granulated Carbon technology. Glowing light indicator tells you when it’s working. One time my dog farted a particularly noxious plume and this thing kicked into high gear with an emergency red glow. That’s when I knew I’d be giving it a five star recommendation in our gift guide.BUY SHARERob Beschizza8Bitdo's Desktop Arcade Joy StickThis is the single most gorgeous example of practical retromania I've seen all year, a weird and wonderful mashing together of American decades. Sadly, it's not clear if it's a product yet or just a prototype; rich players can drop creators 8bitdo a line and see what's possible in time for Christmas. For the rest of us, their other clever retro recreations are quite inexpensive.BUY SHARECory DoctorowSuck UK Bell Jar LightThere is literally nothing in the world that isn't made cooler by being displayed in a bell-jar, and the addition of a diffused white LED base to the traditional jar in the Suck UK jar is a genius move that is obvious in retrospect.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderArduino clone project kit loaded with componentsThe Elegoo UNO Project Super Starter Kit comes with a bunch of different components, including sensors, a servo motor, a stepper motor, a joystick, a breadboard, and lots more. Most of the reviewers say that the Elegoo UNO is a good Arduino Uno clone. The one thing people have complained about is the tutorials. They say they are poorly written. That's not a problem because there are lots of great Arduino books, and I have a video class on getting started with Arduino on Skillshare that is highly rated. At $32, the components alone are worth the price.BUY SHAREXeni JardinShark Rocket Ultra-Light Upright Last year I recommended the larger, cheaper traditional upright, but the Shark Rocket is more compact and manoeverable. The wide, motorized head means it can handle a whole room, but it's a great gift that can be stashed in a desk drawer and whipped out for some vacuuming fun whenever the need arises. BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzAll-New Kindle E-readerFor $50, the All-New Kindle E-reader (the entry-level unit) is priced right, and comes in black or white! This model has a 6” display and the battery lasts for ages between charges. If you want to get fancy, go for the Kindle Paperweight with a built-in reading light so you don't bug bedmates. Load it with free classic books from Project Gutenberg before gifting! BUY SHAREXeni JardinReal Wax Flameless Candles w/Auto Timer Warm, comforting, light flickers from these ombre flameless candles--now available in gold and rose gold, to go with your gadgets. Set up an auto-timer with the flick of a button, and they turn on and off automatically every day at the same time from that day on. Better than actual candles for three reasons: a thousand hours glow time per battery pair, you don’t have to go around your house and light each one, and you don't have to worry about accidentally burning your house down. Each wax candle has a soft ombre design that fades from dark to light. They smell faintly of vanilla, in the nicest way.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaJapanese NES Classic MiniThe gift of 2016, Nintendo's reboot of its classic gaming console (complete with dozens of games) is hard to find at a decent price. Here's the Japanese model, which runs off USB power, looks awesome, and is a relatively reasonable $140.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerThe PacMan lunchboxPeople may sit farther away from you at lunch, as they suspect you have the fever.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzTeenage Engineering Arcade Pocket Operator P0-20The Pocket Operators are fantastically simple, absolutely delightful, and quite powerful synthesizer modules and sequencers in the form factor of (you guessed it) a pocket calculator. The PO-20 model is all about creating the bleepy, bloopy beats you’d hear in a videogame arcade of yore.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderClear plastic padlock and a set of lock picking tools John Edgar Park introduced me to the gentle art of recreational lock-picking. It's fun and potentially useful to know how to tickle tumblers in the right way to open door locks and padlocks. This $17 set comes with a clear plastic padlock and a set of lock picking tools so you can see the effects of your probing and prodding. Once you get started on lock picking, you might become hooked.BUY SHARECory Doctorow1 oz Calavera and Oracle coinsThe Calaveras Coin sports a pile of skulls on one side, and a grinning skeleton in a sombrero on the other. The Oracle Coin features a "YES" on one side, and a "NO" on the other, and "has the uncanny ability to answer any yes/no question with remarkable (50%) accuracy."BUY SHARERob BeschizzaRaspberry Pi 3The best $35 you can spend on a tony yet straightforward and accessible barebones computer, Raspberry's Pi is now in its third generation and lives atop a vast and growing ecosystem of accessories, cases and general craziness to have fun with. The latest flagchip model has a 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core CPU with twice the Pi 2's performance, integrated WiFi and Bluetooth, and backward compatibility with earlier models.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerFermentation Crock with weightsA fantastic gift for the budding home fermentor! This 5L crock comes with a set of fitted weights to hold your kraut, or other fermentables, under the brine, and is designed to move condensed water away from the ferment, to help minimize badness. Give the gift of probiotics!BUY SHARECory DoctorowThe WomanizerThe terrible name and the awful branding notwithstanding, this revolutionary sex-toy has changed the lives of many women since it was launched. Oh Joy Sex Toy's Erica Moen said "it forces your clit to get a raging erection without the usual arousal lead up, it's the closest I've ever empathized with having a spontaneous teenage boner." I wrote about it in November 2015 and have received many emails since from women who were delighted with their purchase and wanted to say thanks for my calling their attention to it.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerThe best automotive battery tenderHands down the best battery tenders I’ve ever had. I rotate two through my small fleet, and it keeps us spry. This pulsing, desulfating charger keeps the batteries in top share, and performing for years longer than normal use normally provides.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderFryDaddyI've been using my FryDaddy electric deep fryer ($22 on Amazon) like crazy after buying it earlier this year. I fill it with coconut oil and fry Brussels sprout leaves, sweet potato slices, and butternut squash fries.Lately I've been frying thinly cut slices of butternut squash. It's a bit tricky, because for five minutes it doesn't look like anything is happening, then suddenly the slices begin to brown, and about a minute later, they start to burn. There's a 30-second window where they are perfectly browned and on the edge of being crispy and chewy. With a little salt, they are one of the tastiest things I've ever eaten. BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerA Lotus C01 for the super hero who needs to look more badassI have no idea how this rides. The seated position looks painful. Tesla will probably have an electric, self driving version in a few years, thus ruining all motorsports forever. BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderRFID Blocking Leather Slim WalletI bought this leather wallet for $6 from Amazon a month ago. I liked it right away, and after having taken about eight flights since then, I have come to appreciate how great it is to be able to slide my driver license out of the clear plastic pocket (which has a hole so you can remove the card by sliding it with your thumb) and hand it to the friendly TSA officer at the security checkpoint. The wallet shows no signs of wear, and the cards and cash are held tightly in the three different pockets (in addition to the driver license pocket) so they don't fall out. It's probably my favorite wallet, and the least expensive. One of the pockets is advertised as RFID-blocking. I haven't tested it, nor am I concerned about it.BUY SHAREXeni JardinRaindrop Essential Oil DiffuserThis nebulizer/diffuser remains my pick as the best way to get scent from essential oils into the air, and the 2017 model now has a touch-sensor for controlling it with a swipe. Pure oils, no water needed: fantastic aromas throughout 800 sq. ft., with personal controls and timed cycles. Most diffusers are made of cheap plastic. This is glass and wood and looks beautiful.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderPokemon Pokeball weed grinderThe Pokemon Pokeball weed grinder is $8 on Amazon. Gotta catch it before Nintendo stops them.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaBlue RaspberryUSB microphones are a maturing genre, and the Rasberry excels on several fronts: the audio quality is excellent in its class, it's much smaller than similarly good models such as the Rode NT-USB and Blue's own Spark, and it is absolutely zero-fuss, coming with a monitoring jack, mute button, detachable stand and even a lightning adapter for use with Apple mobiles. BUY SHAREXeni JardinFagor LUX Multi Cooker, 6 quartI use my Fagor every day now, at least a couple times a day. This device is my primary cooking tool. Oats in the morning, beans or grains or veggie stew in maybe 10 minutes from scratch for lunch or dinner. Brisket, ribs, a whole chicken, whatever: total prep and cooking time for each under 30 minutes. Paleo bone broth in an hour or less. Experiment with molecular gastronomy techniques, rev up your Maillard reaction. Cook perfect rice. It's fantastic for travel or hot weather cooking, perhaps a student or someone who's moving (you don't have to heat up your kitchen, or have a kitchen at all).BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzAudio Technica AT-LP60Forget those vinyl-destroying, vintage-inspired all-in-one units. They're all crap. The Audio Technica AT-LP60 is a fantastic beginner (or revivalist) turntable for the price. Its built-in pre-amp means all you need to do is plug it any powered speakers with an audio input.You won't find a better turntable than this for under $100 unless you hit the second-hand market. BUY SHARECory DoctorowDatamancer Sojourner KeyboardThough Richard "Datamancer" Nagy died unexpectedly in 2013, his business partner and family continue to fabricate the extraordinary steampunk designs he pioneered.Among the creations still available is his classic Sojourner keyboard, machined from brass and elegantly designed. I own one like this (bought from Richard himself around 2008) and wrote two novels on it -- For the Win and Rapture of the Nerds -- and it's a delight to write upon.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderMagnetic phone mountI started using a magnetic phone mount for my car over a year ago, and I think it is the best way to secure my phone to the dashboard. I've tried lots of other kinds of mounts, and this is the most convenient. The only downside is that you have to apply a thin metal plate to the back of your phone or phone case so it will stick to the the magnet on the mount. But the plate is very thin and it's not a bother.The magnetic mount attaches to an air vent on your car. This could be another downside, but since I live in Los Angeles, I'm almost always running the air conditioning so it keeps my phone from overheating when the sun is on it. That makes the air vent mount an upside for me. (With other mounts, the phone would get so hot that the safety shutdown would sometimes activate to prevent damage to the phone.)BUY SHARECory DoctorowVintage Teasmade and Alarm ClockThe iconic UK Teasmade alarm-clocks (which automatically brew a cup of tea using an improbable, Wallace-and-Grommity/Heath Robinson set of mechanical actions) have been reissued in a model that runs on US current. The Teasmade reboot sells for $80, and scores top marks with reviewers. The company kept the classic styling of one of the late-original models -- I'm sure I saw one that looked practically identical at the Victoria and Albert Museum -- and designed it for bedside use, so you don't even have to stagger into the kitchen to get your first readymade cup.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaElf ear earbudsTaobao offers prosthetic pointed ears with built-in earbuds, for elves who can't quit their record collection even for a moment. Sadly only available in lily white. They're cheap, at $15, but good luck figuring out ordering a pair from China!BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderGerber ShardThis little blade-less multitool called the Shard is TSA safe (depending on the mood of the TSA behavior detection officer who is inspecting your baggage and scanning your brainwaves). It's got a pry bar (for opening paint cans and the like), a wire stripper, two flat blade screwdrivers, and one Phillips head screwdriver. And it's only $5, so if the TSA behavior detection officer determines you plan to use it to pry open the airplane window, crawl out, and unscrew the engines from the wing while the plane is aloft, he can take it from you without much damage to your net worth.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerWho will get the Evel Knievel stunt cycle?How can you expect your kid to enjoy life without having had their very own Evel Knievel stunt cycle? There must be one awesome parent out there that knows the suspicious price of $419.99 is nothing compared to the AWESOME you’d introduce into your child’s development. BUY SHARECory DoctorowSmith Knowledge Turbo Fan OTG GogglesAs someone who wears glasses -- and not contacts -- there always comes a point at which I have to choose between being able to see and being warm. Whether it's having my nose/cheeks covered with my scarf (which blows my breath up over my goggles) or having my hat low over my forehead (which blocks the vents), I end up being miserable and half-blind. It's not just uncomfortable, either -- it's dangerous. Skiing without being able to see isn't a thrill, it's a terror.I've tried every conceivable anti-fog solution, from waxes to sprays to special coatings to cloths, and none of them can deal with the brutal reality of subzero temperatures and my warm, foggy breath.Finally, this year, I broke down and bought goggles with the dumbest-imaginable gimmick: a little fan built into them.It actually worked. Really, really worked. The fan, which you turn on before you leave for the day and turn off when you get back, and which has a "turbo" mode for bad fog -- runs on a pair of AAA batteries that lasted for eight full days of skiing without flagging.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitziRingThe iRING turns your mobile phone into jewelry. Sort of. It’s an ingenious little gadget for keeping your device secure in your hand. And it doubles as a stand for video viewing. This is a perfect little gift for clumsy people, especially those (like me) who have accidentally dropped their phone in the toilet.BUY SHAREXeni JardinSport-Brella XLPortable wind, sun, and rain shelter that's easy to set up. Can you open an umbrella? Can you drive a couple stakes into the ground? You got this, then. Haul it to the beach, outdoor gatherings or events, camping, sports, and you feel like you have a little private room outdoors. Comes in 6 different colors. Provides UPF 50+ shade. Opens to 9 feet wide, has a metallic undercoating for additional sun protection, internal pockets for stakes, valuables, and gear, plus top wind vents and side zippered windows for efficient airflow. Water resistant, weighs only 11.5 pounds. I first saw someone else on our local beach use it, and asked them where they bought it. Amazonned one for myself. Now I use it nearly every weekend, and love it.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerMake sous vide an every day technique with the ChefSteps Joule Sous vide is an amazing cooking technique, precisely cooking foods though immersion in a controlle temperature water bath. The results are always stellar, and ChefSteps Joule is thouhgtfully engineered to fit into even the smallest kitchen. With its brilliant-in-its-simplicity magnetic mount, and use of your smartphone or tablet as a display, this compact unit is the must have sous vide circulator.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzWaring Pro WPM28 Kettle Popcorn MakerMy 7-year-old daughter is addicted to popcorn and this miniature movie theater-style popcorn maker was her favorite gift during the last holiday season. It makes perfect popcorn every single time. We still use it several times a week, in part because it’s super-easy and quick to clean. Popcorn pro tip from my daughter: Mix in a handful of M&Ms BUY SHARECory DoctorowLittle Black Gun earringsEnreverie's $20 "Little Black Gun" earrings are studs made from shells have have been fired, affixed to surgical steel posts, nickel-plated and set with Swarovski crystals. BUY SHARERob BeschizzaiPhone SE / Xperia X CompactSmall is beautiful. Apple's iPhone SE is its cheapest current model, the camera's almost as good as what you get on the twice-the-price iPhone 7s, and the custom chipset means impeccably smooth performance. The equivalent Android is Sony's gorgeous Xperia X Compact; reviewers warn, though, that for all that's great about it, the camera app is slow to start.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderMicron pens for drawingMy daughter introduced me to Micron pens. I loved using them. The ink is very dark and was perfect for practicing cross-hatching and the other rendering techniques. They are inexpensive, too. A set of six Micron Pens, with line widths ranging from 0.20mm to 0.50mm, costs $7 on Amazon.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzUseless BoxA classic. Switch it on and it immediately switches itself off. That's all it does. And somehow, it's incredibly compelling. Build your own with this satisfying kit. BUY SHAREXeni JardinHydro Flask Insulated Wide Mouth Stainless Steel Water BottleDon't drink from plastic bottles or disposable cups. You're ingesting who knows what chemicals with who knows what effect, over time. Carry your own water, tea, coffee, or whatever warm or cool or icy cold beverage you like in this BPA-free insulated metal bottle. Everyone on your list could use one, and they come in a bunch of nice colors, or brushed metal. Powder-coated matte finish exterior that never sweats. Lifetime warranty.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaDell XPS 13 & 15Put simply, Dell's XPS 13 and 15 are the most interesting and capable laptops going, the first to really make Apple's models look tired. Almost as sleek, but lighter and more powerful, the real joy is Dell's absolutely stunning edge-to-edge 4k display. The XPS 13 is somewhat limited performance-wise (somewhere between the 12" MacBook and the 13" MacBook Pro) but the 15 is beefier than anything Apple offers and is good for gaming too. And both are much cheaper. BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerJason’s 2016 Most satisfying gift to give the 4-8 year old child of someone you hateNo horsing the fuck around here, kids! This air raid siren has a satisfying hand crank, so your young compadre will feel the power as they loose 110 decibels of terrifying alarm upon a neighborhood. Yes, a neighborhood. Even country folk with neighbors up to .5 mi distant will feel the spitefulness of your gifting ability. BUY SHAREXeni JardinThe New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of ColorblindnessMichelle Alexander and Dr. Cornel West's book directly challenged the notion that Barack Obama's election win represented a new era of colorblindness. The authors theories were proven correct with Trump's racist and successful campaign.With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to a permanent second-class status—even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzWhat's It Like in Space? Stories from Astronauts Who'Ve Been ThereWritten by Ariel Waldman, creator of Spacehack, and illustrated by Brian Standeford, "What's It Like in Space? Stories from Astronauts Who'Ve Been There" is a fun collection of astronaut anecdotes about everything from sneezing and farting in zero gravity to weird frights and the necessity of Sriracha in space. A delightful gift for space geeks and science nerds of any age.BUY SHARECory DoctorowCrafting with Feminism: 25 Girl-Powered Projects to Smash the PatriarchyWhat an absolutely delightful read: the projects are nicely staged, moving from the very simple to the very ambitious, and always seasoned with clever suggestions for variations. Burton provides advice on setting up crafting parties with your friends, including suggested feminist holidays to celebrate (Joan of Arc's birthday; Ruth Bader Ginsburg's birthday; anniversary of Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech; Thargelia, Festival of the Goddess Artemis) all the way down to suggested playlists for the day.Burton's provided us with a selection of the projects for your delectation: as you'll quickly see, these are the fun, potent defiant tonic that we all need in this season of fragile masculinity, rape culture, and Gamergating.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerDown and Out in PurgatoryTim Powers has mastered mingling our present with elements of the fantastic, creating stories so immersive and believable I'm always disappointed when they end. Down and Out in Purgatory is a new, incredible example.Shasta DiMaio fell for the wrong guy, and it killed her. Her rejected lover Tom Holbrook still carries a torch, however. If Tom can't have Shasta he'll kill the man who took her heart, and her life, even if he's already dead. Powers has focused on ghosts, and had them as major characters in other works, but this novella gives us a glimpse into their world! His purgatory is a spinning, wild place where we learn a bit more about what death really means. While the characters are fun, the real joy of this was the mechanics, and lore Powers shares about the afterlife. If you loved his Fault Lines trilogy, you won't be disappointed.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderMake: ElectronicsWhen Make: Electronics was published about five years ago, it was widely hailed as the greatest book about learning electronics ever written. With beautiful photos, easy-to-read schematics, clear, jargon-free text, and dozens and dozens of fun and educational projects, author/illustrator Charles Platt made a book that has ended up in every makerspace and library I've visited. A few weeks ago the Second Edition of Make: Electronics came out, and it's even better than the first edition. Charles rewrote the text, replaced the photos of breadboarded circuits with diagrams showing component placement, included new projects, added new photographs with a ruled background to indicate the scale of tools and components, and included a chapter on Arduino. This is the book to get if you want to learn electronics.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaStories of Your Life and OthersTed Chiang's writing is rare and precise, weaving threads of science fiction into something so haunting and humane I've woken up dreaming about it more than once. Here you can read most of his published work, including the novella that was recently filmed as Arrival and is currently in U.S. theaters. But my favorites are the Borgesian "Tower of Babel," about an engineer breaking through the vault of heaven, and "Division by Zero."BUY SHAREXeni JardinThe Forager's Feast: How to Identify, Gather, and Prepare Wild EdiblesIntended "as much for the cooking enthusiast as for the survivalist," Leda Meredith's book includes recipes that make weeds into gourmet meals.Dandelion flowers become wine, Japanese knotweed becomes rhubarb-like compote and tangy sorbet, red clover blossoms give quick bread a delightfully spongy texture and hint of sweetness. 75 color photographsBUY SHAREDavid PescovitzEngland's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground by David KeenanFinally reprinted, this classic and rare tome about the fascinating 1980s British occult/art scene surrounding seminal industrial bands Coil, Nurse With Wound, and Current 93 who looked backwards for inspiration from the likes of Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, and Arthur Machen. Lovingly published by Strange Attractor Press, this new edition is illustrated with unseen photos and contains two fresh chapters pulling the fascinating thread of occultural transgression through to the present.BUY SHARECory DoctorowAusterity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff"Radical ecology" has come to mean a kind of left-wing back-to-the-landism that throws off consumer culture and mass production for a pastoral low-tech lifestyle. But as the brilliant science journalist and Marxist Leigh Phillips writes in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, if the left has a future, it has to reclaim its Promethean commitment to elevating every human being to a condition of luxurious, material abundance and leisure through technological progress.Phillips is a brilliant writer and an incisive scientific thinker with impeccable credentials in the science press. He's also an unapologetic Marxist. In this book -- which is one of the most entertaining and furious reads about politics and climate you're likely to read -- he rails against the "austerity ecology" movement that calls for more labor-intensive processes, an end to the drive to increase material production, and a "simpler" life that often contains demands for authoritarian, technocratic rule, massive depopulation, and a return to medieval drudgery.It wasn't always thus. The left -- especially Marxist left -- has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity's woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute to whatever extent they can, right up the point where the fines outweigh the savings.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzThe Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager MissionIn 1977, NASA launched two twin spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, on a grand tour of the solar system and beyond into the mysteries of interstellar space. Mounted to each of these spacecraft is a stunning golden phonograph record containing sounds and images to introduce our civilization to any extraterrestrials who might encounter them. Get ready for Voyager’s 40th anniversary next year with this marvelous, personal biography of the space probes and the brilliant people who made the mission happen. Author Jim Bell is a renowned planetary scientist at Arizona State University, Distinguished Visiting Scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and president of the absolutely amazing Planetary Society, founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman to "empower the world's citizens to advance space science and exploration." BUY SHARERob BeschizzaStrange Fascination: The Definitive Story of David BowieBowie loved books more than he loved music, but he disliked biography and never produced an autobiography. In his wake, then, we're left with pictures and unauthorized, often tabloid-hinted exposes of a life largely kept private. The best of them is probably David Buckley's Strange Fascination, described as "the most complete account of Bowie's impact on pop culture." Buckley's enough of a fan to love the man and the work, but enough of a skeptic to make it count.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerMartin Gardner's 'Science Magic,' fun tricks you can try at homeMartin Gardner's 'Science Magic: Tricks and Puzzles' teaches fun and easy experiments to demonstrate physics. I'm thrilled with the new tricks I'm learning! Gardner shares exciting, and generally simple, science experiments with engaging, sometimes astounding results. Play with the adhesion and cohesion of water, magnetism, volume and mass, friction, stiction, pressure, and tons of other fascinating scientific properties, to both learn and amaze. Some simple effects, like 'three jets' are pretty simple, where you drill holes in a milk carton at different levels to show changes in water pressure, however some are not for younger kids to try on their own. 'The electric pickle' is one that requires adult supervision. A glowing pickle is certainly cool, but spiking a cucumber, and plugging it into a wall socket via a cut extension cord, is something I'd prefer an adult be present for. My kid and I are having fun playing with 1-2 of these experiments each week. A few of the presentations may become magic tricks I use with friends.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderAutomate the boring stuff with PythonWhen I was a mechanical engineer in the late 1980s I used Microsoft QuickBASIC to write and create simple programs for work. I loved it. It was a compiled BASIC, too, so it was speedy. I used it to recreate a lot of the programs from Rudy Rucker's Chaos software from Autodesk. I got pretty good at writing programs in BASIC, just as I got pretty good at nodding my head when my smarter programmer friends would tell me that BASIC was not a real programming language. I never learned any other languages, but recently I've started using Python and it is easy and fun. One thing I did with Python was write a nontransitive dice simulator to prove to myself that these confounding dice really worked as described. I just got my hands on a new book called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners by Al Sweigart, and it looks like it is exactly what I need: a book for beginners and with lots of ideas for programs that are actually useful. Examples:Search for text in a file or across multiple files Create, update, move, and rename files and folders Search the Web and download online content Update and format data in Excel spreadsheets of any size Split, merge, watermark, and encrypt PDFs Send reminder emails and text notifications Fill out online formsBUY SHAREXeni JardinThe Underground RailroadColson Whitehead's National Book Award Winner and #1 New York Times bestseller is a “Magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.”BUY SHARECory DoctorowAstro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance Laura Poitras, whose 2014 Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour won the Academy Award for best doc, has a show on at NYC's Whitney Museum called "Astro Noise," which attempts to capture the sense of overwhelming surveillance she's lived under since the US government targeted her while she was shooting a documentary in Iraq.Poitras is an accomplished person: winner of the Macarthur "genius" grant and the Pulitzer in addition to her Oscar. She returned from exile in Germany last year, and edited a book, Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance, to accompany the show. The book includes contributions from the likes of Dave Eggers and Ai Wei Wei, as well as an original, unauthorized Sherlock Holmes story I wrote based on new Snowden docs.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderThe best book of physics brain teasersI bought Thinking Physics, by Lewis C. Epstein in 1984. It's one of my favorite books of brain teasers. They are designed to help you gain a qualitative, intuitive sense of physics. The author stresses that after you read each of the many charmingly illustrated problems in the book, you should put the book away and take your time running a simulation of the problem in your head. This is great advice. The book is broken up into sections: Mechanics (kinematics, Newton's Law of Motion, momentum and energy, rotation, gravity), Fluids, Heat, Vibration, Light, Electricity and Magnetism, Relativity, and Quanta. If you've never seen this book before, you're in for a treat.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzI’m BoredIf the Zap Comix collective hung out in Gary Larson's basement rolling numbers on psychedelic record covers while giggling about those motivational calendars where you tear off one earnest aphorism each day, and the internal awkwardness that all of us experience, the comix that emerge would likely fit into I'm Bored, the surreal and wonderful new book by illustrator Jess Rotter with a foreword by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte. You likely recognize Jess's art from her inspired illustrations for vinyl and apparel projects from Rodriguez, the Grateful Dead, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Best Coast, Light in the Attic Records, and her bimonthly "Songbird Stories" column for Lena Dunham's Lenny Letter. I'm Bored is Jess's first book and I'm already ready for the next trip.BUY SHARECory DoctorowThe Birds in the SkyAll the Birds in the Sky is everything you could ask for in a debut novel -- a fresh look at science fiction's most cherished memes, ruthlessly shredded and lovingly reassembled.It's odd to call Charlie Jane Anders, editor of IO9 and celebrated short-story writer and editor a "debut novelist," but All the Birds in the Sky is her first science fiction novel for adults, and it embodies all that's best about debut novels -- a lifetime's worth of creativity, frustrations and inspirations crammed into a single set of covers, bursting with wild promise.Patricia is a witch. One day while hiding out in the woods from her dysfunctional family -- psychotic sister, dead-eyed overachiever parents -- she discovers that she can speak to animals, and finds herself in the presence of the Parliament of Birds, who ask her a riddle. She blacks out and awakens in her family house and facing punishment.Laurence is a geek. He has successfully managed many of the serious challenges to attaining full geekdom -- building his own GNU/Linux box and successfully decoding the notoriously cryptic instructions for building a two-second time-machine, you know, one of those watches that makes you jump two seconds into the future? He is the goat of his school and a perennial disappointment to his violently normal parents.Of course they become friends, and enemies. At their awful school, both are targeted for vicious bullying, and they try to have each other's backs, though they can't, exactly. Especially Laurence, who's a bit of a dick. It doesn't help that the school guidance counsellor is a psychotic assassin who's had a vision of Patricia and Laurence growing up to destroy the human race, and who is doing his best to kill them both, though the assassin's guild rules prohibit him personally slipping in the knife.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaThe Complete Elfquest Vol. 3Fresh out in November, this volume contains some of the most exquisite and touching episodes of Wendy and Richard Pini's Elfquest saga, a great alternative to genre fantasy and its grim 'n' gritty modern counterparts. One of America's best indie comics, it's illustrated by Wendy's wonderful artwork – even at its most lighthearted, unanswerable questions of identity, family and freedom lurk between the lines. (Newcomers should not feel they have to start at the beginning, but it sure helps.)BUY SHAREJason Weisberger'Unhappenings' is a fantastic time travel novelEdward Aubry's Unhappenings is a smart and satisfying time travel novel. I love stories about paradox created by folks moving around in time, and this novel has it in spades. At age 14 Nigel Walden starts to experience the titular Unhappenings, mundane things in his life seem to random change. The color of his bicycle changes, and conversations he thought he had never occurred, but then his first girlfriend disappears as if she never existed. Every time Nigel gets close to someone, he seemingly causes a catastrophe that leaves the relationship never having happened. As he reaches college, Nigel realizes he must be involved in some sort of time travel. Things only get more complicated. Aubry's writing is clear, simple and telling. I felt Nigel's emotional traumas and the difficulty of growing up so different, the slower pace of this novel is well employed.BUY SHARECory DoctorowFlying Saucers are Real!Jack Womack is an accomplished science fiction writer and part of the first wave of cyberpunks; he's also one of the world's foremost collectors of flying saucer ephemera: the zines, cheap paperbacks, and esoteric material associated with the saucer-craze, a virtually forgotten, decades-long global mania that features livestock mutilations, abductions, messages of intergalactic brotherhood, claims of both divine and satanic origins, and psychic phenomena.Womack's collection has found a permanent home at Georgetown University's library, and Womack has lovingly curated a spectacular, 283-page anthology of the most fascinating material from the collection, accompanied by his notes and an introduction by William Gibson, whose own mother once saw a saucer.Flying saucers are like hot sauce: whatever you love best, you might love it better with a few dashes of saucers. Womack's thematically organized collection traces how saucers worked their way into Christianity, Satanic panics, Red scares, belief in psi powers, military conspiracy theories, hollow Earth conspiracies, New Age reboots of Tibetan mysticism, conspiracies about Nazis (and Hitler), and, of course, radical, unhinged theories about Elvis Presley.Womack presents his material with bone-dry wit -- if you've ever heard him speak, I guarantee you'll be able to hear his urbane, deadpan delivery in every sentence. He's not exactly making fun of his subjects. Oh, OK, sometimes he is, but just the most naked of hucksters and scammers -- but when it comes to the true believers, Womack has a mix of compassion and wonder at their ability to believe what they believe -- and convince others of their beliefs.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderThe Official ScratchJr BookYou're probably familiar with Scratch, the introductory programming language that allows kids (and adults) to create interactive stories, games, and animations. Scratch doesn't require lines of code to write programs. Instead, you build programs by snapping together colored blocks. (My book, Maker Dad, has an introduction to Scratch that shows how to make retro-style video games). Scratch is perfect for kids 8 and up. Recently, MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Lab announced the release of ScratchJr, an even simpler programming language for young children (ages 5-7) to create interactive stories and games. It's free and runs on iPads and Android tablets. Mitchel Resnick, who runs MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten Lab, and Marina Umaschi Bers, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University, have a new book out called, The Official ScratchJr Book: Help Your Kids Learn to Code. The publisher sent me a copy, and it looks like a great way for parents to learn about ScratchJr so they can get their kids up to speed and let them go off on their own. With full color screenshots on every page, it provides a thorough overview of everything ScratchJr is capable of doing. MoreBUY SHAREXeni JardinBetween the World and MeA master class on race from Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of America's most bold voices. Really all you need to know. Read it.BUY SHARECory DoctorowSigned Walkaway (pre-order)It took most of a week to sign all 2,800 "tip-in" sheets that are being bound into a special, limited-edition version of Walkaway, my first novel for adults since 2009, but it was worth it! You can pre-order one from the good fellows at Barnes and Noble.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerMary and Vincent Price's incredible recipe bookWandering through a used book store yesterday, I came across a book with an unremarkable title: A Treasury of Great Recipes. Normally this would not catch my attention, but the book's co-authors were Vincent and Mary Price. I had no idea that the horror film star and his wife were so amazing! In addition to both being world famous for their careers, thespian and costume designer respectively, they were also world travelers, collectors of art, and evidently lovers of fine food. Vincent and Mary are said to have begged, flattered and connived to acquire their favorite recipes from the the world's most famous restaurants. This book is as much an adventure as it is a collection of recipes. Vincent and Mary. Published in 1965, it contains personal stories from Vincent and Mary, and descriptions of the restaurants. It is also full of photographs of the couple and their friends enjoying the restaurants, reprints of the restaurant's menus, and a most importantly, a collection of recipes that Vincent and Mary used to recreate the dishes at home, for their guests. The written descriptions of each item show you just how awesome this couple was. Try this description of New England Clam Chowder, from Boston's famous Locke-Ober's: This is the true, the authentic clam chowder invented and relished by seagoing New Englanders, and a favorite there for generations. There is something called Manhattan Clam Chowder made with tomatoes and therefore a ruddy color, but your proper Bostonian will have nothing to do with that aberrant form. Locke-Ober's recipe is for the pale cream-colored soup to which you may add a dusting of paprika for color, no more. As far as flavor is concerned, it doesn't even need that. The voice throughout is direct, refined, and clearly reflects their passion for the subject at hand. This amazing collection is filled with gems: Breakfasts from the Super Chief, dinners from Rivoli in Mexico City, and fantastic German fare from Lüchow's in New York are but a few of the locations that grabbed my interest. I have big plans for this tome. I'm going to start having friends over for a series of Vincent and Mary Price meals. This Friday may include clam chowder. The cream-colored variety, of course. I found this book at my local used bookstore in wonderful shape for $35. Clearly the Amazon vendors want more. But it's worth acquiring, however you go about it, and whatever price you pay.BUY SHARECory DoctorowWeapons of Math DestructionDiscussions about big data's role in our society tends to focus on algorithms, but the algorithms for handling giant data sets are all well understood and work well. The real issue isn't algorithms, it's models. Models are what you get when you feed data to an algorithm and ask it to make predictions. As O'Neil puts it, "Models are opinions embedded in mathematics."O'Neil calls these harmful models "Weapons of Math Destruction," and not all fault models qualify. For a model to be a WMD, it must be opaque to its subjects, harmful to their interests, and grow exponentially to run at huge scale.These WMDs are now everywhere. The sleazy for-profit educational system has figured out how to use models to identify desperate people and sucker them into signing up for expensive, useless "educations" that are paid for with punitive student loans, backed by the federal government. That's how the University of Phoenix can be so profitable, even after spending upwards of $1B/year on marketing. They've built a WMD that brings students in at a steady clip despite the fact that they spend $2,225/student in marketing and only $892/student on instruction. Meanwhile, the high-efficacy, low-cost community colleges are all but invisible in the glare and roar of the University of Phoenix's marketing blitzkreig.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzThe Record Store of the MindJosh Rosenthal is the cratedigger and DIY musicologist behind such fantastic collections as the Grammy-nominated "He Is My Story: The Sanctified Soul of Arizona Dranes," "Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard : Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music : 1923-1936," and dozens of other fine releases on his own Tompkins Square Label. Rosenthal recently self-published a combination memoir and musical history, Record Store of the Mind, that tells his own personal story through the lens of the artists he loves and has championed, from 1950s country pioneer Charlie Louvin to Big Star's Alex Chilton to finger-picking folk guitar master John Fahey. It's a wonderful read and a great reminder that no music streaming service could ever replace the magical moment of visiting your local record store and flipping through the bins to uncover the music that moves you. BUY SHARECory DoctorowToo Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota)Ada Palmer's 25th century is in the midst of a long and carefully maintained peace, a peace that came only after the Church Wars, when religion nearly destroyed the world. Religions have been abolished, no grouping of more than three people may discuss religious subjects. The advent of ballistic, supersonic flying cars have eliminated space as a constraint on human grouping, all but abolishing nation-states in the process.Humans belong to post-geographic affinity groups, some very large (Humanists, Utopians, Mitsubishi, Masons, and more), others much finer-grained: fans of a given sports-team, adherents to a philosophy, members of a trade guild or a hobbyist association. Every person is a minority of one, and majority has been abolished, taking with it the oppression of the many over the few. Even gender has ceased to be a meaningful category, though certain perverts insist on the use of gendered pronouns to describe themselves. Families are gone, replaced by group houses called bash'es, where child-rearing and other familial functions are shared by many adults and their children. Also all but gone is the penal system: instead of sending those who steal and murder to prison, they are turned into work-servants, "Servicers," whom any person may command, and who may only eat food given to them in return for their service.Mycroft Canner, the book's protagonist and narrator, is one such criminal -- in fact, as we learn, he is a contender for the most notorious criminal of his age, whose brilliance and savagery has made him the confidant of every leader of every strat, and a trusted helper for the most important bash', the elite family who manage the flying cars whose smooth running is critical to the literal survival of 25th century society.Palmer writes science fiction like a historian, maneuvering vast historical forces deftly, plunging effortlessly into their minutae and detail, zooming out to dizzying heights to show how they all fit together. Her acknowledgements cite Alfred Bester as an influence, and that's no surprise -- few writers can trump Bester for the sense of a world that contains within it all the other worlds of all its inhabitants. Palmer, though, may have exceeded the master.BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerThe Totally Awesome 80s TV Trivia Book A great way to distract your family from talking about politics this holiday season!BUY SHAREXeni JardinDeep Run RootsRural North Carolina reminiscing and cooking, by Vivian Howard. BUY SHARECory DoctorowEverything Belongs to the FuturePenny's story -- a novella from the Tor.com imprint -- is set in the last years of the 21st century, just as the very first ageless immortals are approaching their centenary. They are the beneficiaries of a drug that halts aging, a $100/day pill that you need to take every day -- a pill that revolutionizes the relationship of wealthy elites to the world. Once it's clear that the rich can live forever, patent law is immediately amended to provide for eternal royalties to the pharma company behind the drug, and climate change is suddenly a deadly serious business, with no expense spared for remediation. Inheritance laws and the relationship of rich children to their parents become very different indeed, and then there's the rest of us.What if you don't have $400K/year to spare on anti-aging meds? Well, you could apply for a grant. The smartest scientists, the most successful artists, the people who amuse and assist the hyper-wealthy are all eligible for permanent, endless, lifetime supplies of the drugs. If you don't fit the bill, well, it's a meritocracy, isn't it? Try and raise some kids who amuse and entertain the super-wealthy and maybe they'll bud off a new immortal line. Follow your dreams, kids!Penny's protagonists are a ragtag group of protesters, anarcho-syndicalist crustypunks who steal anti-aging meds from the rich students and dons of Oxford University and hand them out for free in the slums where the caretakers and janitors and waiters and sex-workers live. Unbeknownst to these resistors, one of their number is actually a police undercover agent, a snitch who's much older than he seems -- thanks to the anti-aging meds he receives as part of his compensation -- and who is sexually involved with one of them, besotted with her, planning to take her with him into a life everafter just before the police sweep in an take the rest of them into custody.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzArt of AtariThis glorious hardcover celebrates the wonderful illustrations of the iconic videogame company's packaging, catalogs, and other artwork that, according to the book's introduction written by Ernest "Ready Player One" Cline, was "specially commissioned to enhance the Atari experience to further entice children and adults to embrace the new era of electronic entertainment." Speaking from personal experience, it totally worked. By Tim Lapetino.BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzGroovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture In the late 1960s and 1970s, the mind-expanding modus operandi of the counterculture spread into the realm of science, and shit got wonderfully weird. Neurophysiologist John Lilly tried to talk with dolphins. Physicist Peter Phillips launched a parapsychology lab at Washington University. Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill became an evangelist for space colonies. Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture is a new book of essays about this heady time! The book was co-edited by MIT's David Kaiser, who wrote the fantastic 2011 book How the Hippies Saved Physics, and UC Santa Barbara historian W. Patrick McCray.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaHip Hop Family Tree Book 4Ed Piskor's comic history of Hip Hop debuted here at Boing Boing, but there's no substitute for print, especially given Fantagraphics' perfect execution of Ed's meticulous, retromaniacal layouts. The latest volume hits the mid-80s and success for Dr. Dre, Salt-N-Pepa and others; the mainstream media takes notice and starts getting thirsty. Ed's storytelling wizardry makes it impossible to stop.BUY SHAREXeni JardinNeurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity Steve Silberman's definitive book for better understanding autism, and the members of our human family who are different because of it. NeuroTribes considers the idea that neurological differences such as autism, dyslexia, and ADHD are not errors of nature or products of the toxic modern world, but the result of natural variations in the human genome. This groundbreaking book will reshape our understanding of the history, meaning, function, and implications of neurodiversity in our world.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderAstonish Yourself: 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday LifeIn his introduction, Droit says the purpose of the experiments is to "provoke tiny moments of awareness," and to "shake a certainty we had taken for granted: our own identity, say, or the stability of the outside world, or even the meanings of words." Most of the experiments require about 20 minutes to complete, and often involve nothing more than merely thinking about something. Some of the experiments you'll probably want to try when you are alone at home (like calling your name repeatedly for 20 minutes, or repeating some other word to drain it of its meaning), but others can be performed anywhere (like imagining that the world was "created from nothing, just an instant ago" and will vanish "like a light going out" in 20 minutes). Some of the experiments you can't really plan in advance; they'll happen by accident, like when you wake up without knowing where you are -- a magical experience I love having, but Droit explains how to make the best use of this five-second-long "delicious lightness of a mystery without menace" the next time it happens: "What you do not know, for a tiny interval of time, is what the place is called, where it is, and you you are doing there. But you're certain that you are somewhere, and will find out very soon... try not to lose hold of this rare moment of perfect suspension between doubt and confidence, certitude and ignorance, anxiety and satisfaction." One of the things I've learned from doing just a few of the exercises in this book is how hard it to stop being so busy and slow down enough to do the experiments. I don't want to stop sitting in front of my computer, playing games, reading a book, tending to chickens, tidying the house, or a million other things that tug at me, but a few minutes after getting started with one of Droit's exercises, I feel good about taking a break from those habitual behaviors. BUY SHAREDavid PescovitzThe Art of The Lord of the RingsThese are the drawings, maps, diagrams, and sketches that Tolkien drew to help him navigate Middle-earth, and the entire complex universe he created for his novels. Edited by Tolkien scholars Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, the hardcover book contains nearly 200 images, the majority of which have never been published before. According to the editors, the “Inscriptions in runes and Elvish script, and ‘facsimile’ leaves from the burned and blood-stained Book of Mazarbul, support Tolkien’s pose as an ‘editor’ or ‘translator’ of ancient records.” So, the map is the territory after all.BUY SHARERob BeschizzaTales from the LoopSimon Stålenhag’s paintings are nostalgic yet unsettling, depicting futuristic technology looming over rural landscapes at some indistinct moment in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though superficially technical and straightforward, his style grows in atmosphere and depth the more you look at it; like a set of paded polaroids found in an old drawer, they expose a haunting sense of humanity and technological chaos. A follow-up, Tales from The Flood, just hit shelves.BUY SHAREMark FrauenfelderThe Complete EightballOf all the great comics from the late 1980s and early 1990s -- Love and Rockets, Weirdo, Hate, Acme Novelty Library, Optic Nerve, The Rocketeer -- my favorite is Daniel Clowes' Eightball. Each issue included one chapter of a serious graphic-novel-length story, and several pages of misanthropic, funny, bizarrely imaginative shorter comics. I loved both sections. One of long stories in Eightball ("Ghost World") and one of the shorter pieces ("Art School Confidential") were turned into movies, with Clowes writing the screenplays for both. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Eightball Fantagraphics released a slipcase 2-volume facsimile edition of Eightball that includes the first 18 issues of the comic book. It's stunningly gorgeous, and Fantagraphics went all out to create a package that will please people like me who read Eightball in its single issue format as well as people who are new to his early work.BUY SHAREXeni JardinThe Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks“To discover the true role of black women in the creation of American, and especially southern, cuisine, Toni Tipton-Martin has spent years amassing one of the world’s largest private collections of cookbooks published by African American authors, looking for evidence of their impact on American food, families, and communities and for ways we might use that knowledge to inspire community wellness of every kind.”BUY SHAREJason WeisbergerA collection of James P. Blaylock's short storiesI love reading James Blaylock's novels. His take on humanity, and the super natural, always thrill me. This collection of short stories made my rainy weekend. This collection of 16 stories is wonderful. Blaylock often tells tales where hope is covered in a dark sheen of barely contained evil, hiding in everyday California. I'm addicted! Included in this, his only collection of shorts, is Blaylock's award winning 13 Phantasms, the story of a man who follows an ad back into the golden age of science fiction. Steampunk, classic sci-fi, and a few new Langdon St. Ives adventures (one of Blaylock's best known characters,) are gripping!BUY SHARERob BeschizzaThe Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy TalesWritten by Franz Xaver von Schonwerth in the 19th century and edited by Erika Eichenseer in the 21st century, this body of fairy tales surfaced only recently and can be encounted free of the Hollywood trappings that have long veiled more familiar folk stories. Fascinating, florid and "grimmer than Grimm," this book is a thoroughly Germanic fantasy landscape and far more entertaining than you probably expect it to be. BUY SHARECory DoctorowLovecraft Country: A NovelHP Lovecraft, father of the Cthulhu mythos, was, even by the disgusting standard of his day, a scumbag racist pig. Seriously. Even Robert Howard couldn't let Lovecraft's vicious invective pass without comment. David Nickle's novel Eutopia pulled down Lovecraft's pants and showed us all his shame.Lovecraft Country doesn't stop at the clothing.The novel involves a large, extended, accomplished African-American family living in Jim Crow Chicago. These characters -- a young soldier, a radical printer, a grifter's daughter turned landlady, a travel agent, a budding comics creator, and many others -- don't need Elder Gods to experience horror. They live it in their daily lives, through harassment, violence, expropriation, and the legacy of slavery that is anything but ancient history for them.Each character gets their own novella, a series of linked tales that both illustrates, at a visceral level, the terrors of the black American experience, and the f

It's been six years since I quite Facebook and not a day goes by that I don't realize that my life is better for it. (more…)

Soon-to-be-former Italian PM Matteo Renzi just lost a referendum he called on a set of reforms to Italy's constitution, promising to resign if he lost, which he did; many of Italy's far-right, trumpist and berlusconian elements latched onto the No side of the referendum and pitched it as a kind of Italian version of Brexit, a poll on whether Italy would be another stronghold of gamergate-inflected neo-fascism. (more…)

Many "progressives" looked the other way while the Obama administration asserted unprecedented presidential powers, like the right to murder anyone the president feels like, anywhere in the world, using drones and other technologies; and the right to spy on everyone, all the time. Now that Donald Trump is about to inherit those powers, the Obama administration has released a 61-page report insisting that the president's powers should be drastically curtailed and made accountable and transparent. (more…)

Holiday shopping is in full swing, and the Striiv Touch is one of the best gift ideas I've landed on. Its simple design works for females and males, and its wide range of features makes it suitable for even the non-fitness enthusiasts in your life.Unlike traditional fitness trackers, the Striiv Touch also acts as a smartwatch. It will receive alerts for incoming calls, texts, calendar reminders, and emails. For the friend or family member that does love working out, it also tracks a variety of different activity and sleep stats. It logs everything from steps taken to calories burned. It even monitors the duration and quality of sleep, and is really great for those us with a hard time getting the full 8 hours. Plus, the Striiv Touch is so nicely designed that even fashion-conscious friends will approve.And the best part is, this amazing gift will make you look like the best gift-giver ever without breaking the bank: for a limited time, it’s 70% off at $29.99.

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Elite engineering and robotics design firm Boston Dynamics released this holiday video for the holiday 2015 season, and it holds up well in the weird year that followed. [via Laughing Squid]

https://youtu.be/3vcqwq1fnHURoux the Pomeranian is best known for spectacular sneezes. (more…)

I'm looking for feedback on this solar panel. I am looking to charge a 37 qt ARB portable fridge while rolling about Baja in my Vanagon. I believe this panel, with good sun, should out put more than enough power to run the fridge. The Dometic fridge that has been in my VW for 29 years has sucked for 29 years. It barely gets cold enough for cans of soda.Forums on line claim the fridge peaks around 1.5Ah use on hot days, and this panel should deliver (80w/18v) 4.4Amps. My smallish deep cycle battery is a 44Ah unit. I'm hoping that 6hrs of strong sun a day will get me to just around 24hrs of power. Unless I get flagged off in the comments, I'm going to order one tomorrow or the next day, and run a test load on the system at my house this weekend. I can't be sure to have strong sun in the SF Bay Area, however. ALLPOWERS 80W Foldable Solar Panel Sunpower Solar Charger with iSolar Technology via AmazonARB 37 Quart Fridge/Freezer via Amazon

We have a large tree in our front yard. For the holidays I usually wrap a couple of strands of colored LED bulbs around its trunk. I can't put lights into the branches because my ladder isn't long enough, and even if I did have a taller ladder, I would be too scared to climb much higher.This year I tried one of those laser landscape projectors. It has a red laser and green laser that shines through a piece of film that breaks the light into hundreds of beams. I put the projector near the tree and pointed it up at the branches. At night the effect was amazing. It looked like the tree branches were filled with hundreds of colored lights that would have taken hours and hours of dangerous work to install. I called out Carla to look. She didn't know I bought the projector. I told her that I had climbed the tree and strung the lights in the branches forty feet overhead. She even believed it for a second, until she remembered that I don't like climbing trees.It looks so good I bought another last night so I could use it on another tree.

Look, it’s Indian design! Everyone has heard of Japanese and Scandinavian design, but few know that India also has a long history of design. It doesn’t permeate the culture as deep as Japan or Scandinavia, but I know from living there that India does have a critical mass of distinctly unique objects. To help pin down the essentials of that style, this catalog of India design examples makes a case that there is a very functional design approach both in historic and modern India. This is the first book I know of that presents that style in one place.Sar: The Essence of Indian Design by Swapnaa Tamhane and Rashmi VarmaPhaidon Press2016, 304 pages, 8.2 x 1.0 x 10.6 inches, Hardcover$52 Buy one on AmazonSee sample pages from this book at Wink.

This oft-seen wonderfully weird photo depicts Hugo Gernsback wearing his "teleyeglasses" in 1963. Gersnback, an inventor of such innovations as a combination electric hair brush/comb and a battery-powered handheld illuminated mirror, is best known to science fiction fans as the founder of Amazing Stories magazine! Gernsback coined the term "science fiction" and the Hugo Awards are named in his honor. But back to the history of his teleyeglasses, as discussed in IEEE Spectrum:A Life magazine profile of Gernsback in July 1963, when he was 78, described his “teleyeglasses”:He now invents only in broad outline, leaving the actual mechanics of the thing to others. His television eyeglasses—a device for which he feels millions yearn—constitute a case in point. When the idea for this handy, pocket-size portable TV set occurred to him in 1936, he was forced to dismiss it as impractical. But a few weeks ago, feeling that the electronics industry was catching up with his New Deal-era concepts, he orders some of his employees to build a mock-up.The teleyeglasses weighed about 140 grams and were built around small cathode-ray tubes that ran on low-voltage current from tiny batteries. (The user faced no danger of being electrocuted, Gernsback promised.) Because there was a separate screen for each eye, it could display stereoscopic images—much like today’s 3D virtual-reality glasses. Noting the massive V-type antenna protruding from the teleyeglasses, Life described the effect as “neo-Martian.”"The Man Who Invented VR Goggles 50 Years Too Soon" (IEEE Spectrum)

This little dog patiently waits for its treat, but its impish human companion would rather trick it.

Amazon Go, an 1,800-square foot min-supermarket in Seattle, doesn't have human cashiers or checkout lines. Sensors and cameras see everything you add to your cart or bag and charge your account when you walk out the door.Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Our Just Walk Out technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.

Enjoy this "creature featurette" with director Gareth Edwards and Creature Effects Supervisor Neal Scanlan introducing us to the strange characters in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

Rev. Peyton of the Big Damn Band plays a three-stringed "Guitgun" that he designed and Bryan Fleming fabricated.

"Information Doesn't Want to Be Free" is my 2014 nonfiction book about copyright, the internet, and earning a living, and it features two smashing introductions -- one by Neil Gaiman and the other by Amanda Palmer. (more…)

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an amazing, long-running open standards body that has been largely responsible for the web's growth and vibrancy, creating open standards that lets anyone make web technology and become part of the internet ecosystem. (more…)

Eric Heisserer adapted Ted Chiang's novella Story of Your Life as the screenplay Arrival. Both are brilliant, but in different ways. It wasn't easy.In all my draft work on the adaptation, I spent the most time on the intellectual and political challenges of the story. But if I ever encroached on the intimate, emotional through-line of Louise’s journey, the story fell apart. Other scenes could be sacrificed, reworked, moved, or cut to the bone. But director Denis Villeneuve and I found a bare minimum of steps to Louise’s personal journey, and that became our Alamo; our hill we would die defending. Denis had a knack for visuals that spoke on an emotional level while also dovetailing with the intellectual challenges our characters faced. Marrying those two, sometimes in a single line of dialogue or image, made the film come alive. It made us feel the story. And at the end of the day, what drew me most to Ted Chiang’s story was the way it made me feel, and above all else we wanted to transport and share that feeling with audiencesIt's always fascinating to see how the sausage is made. Screenwriters must write for several audiences--the author being adapted, producers, directors--at different stages of the process, while keeping moviegoers in mind all along. You can see here how a master makes his script align with each on its journey to the screen, somehow without alienating everyone.Also interesting is the fact Final Draft, the expensive and mandatory screenplay production software package, can't handle images—an unusual but unavoidable requirement for a movie full of alien logograms to be deciphered. Your first thought is probably to marvel at Hollywood's cultish traditionalism and what happens to software when a market gets locked in. But it strikes me that screenplays are like code or markup, a form of plaintext tightly attuned to an expensive technical process. Embedded graphics would tend to be a disruptive amateurism, at war with functions of the document that aren't easily visible to observers.I saw the movie this weekend. It's great: moody, beautiful, sweeping, fascinating and touching science fiction that honors Chiang's original while borrowing heavily from Contact to generate dramatic tension and scope. It literalizes the novella's key theme--the immanence of time--in a way that I thought was too on the nose. Removing just one scene, where a Heptapod literally explains the movie (with English subtitles!), and we'd have been left with Louise's visions and her encounter with General Chiang to do the same work--a more mysterious and ambiguous movie, perhaps.

Detectives from Scotland Yard's cybercrime unit decided the easiest way to get around their suspect's careful use of full-disk encryption and strong passphrases on his Iphone was to trail him until he made a call, then "mug" him by snatching his phone and then tasking an officer to continuously swipe at the screen to keep it from going to sleep, which would reactivate the disk encryption. (more…)

In SoundNet: Learning Sound Representations from Unlabeled Video, researchers from MIT's computer science department describe their success in using software image-recognition to automate sound recognition: once software can use video analysis to decide what's going on in a clip, it can then use that understanding to label the sounds in the clip, and thus accumulate a model for understanding sound, without a human having to label videos first for training purposes. (more…)

The Intercept's Sam Biddle asked nine tech companies if they would help authorities create a national registry of known muslims—one of president-elect Donald Trump's campaign suggestions. Only Twitter would go on the record to state that it would not co-operate with such a list.Twitter: “No,” and a link to this blog post, which states as company policy a prohibition against the use, by outside developers, of “Twitter data for surveillance purposes. Period.” which states as company policy a prohibition against the use, by outside developers, of “Twitter data for surveillance purposes. Period.”Bravo. It takes courage and planning for publicly-traded businesses to take a hostile stand on hot potatoes like this, and Twitter bothered. Compare to IBM, whose CEO wrote Trump a slobbering mash note promising the services of her company.Seven of the other companies didn't respond at all. Microsoft responded with "We’re not going to talk about hypotheticals at this point."We're asking if tech firms are going to cooperate. But when it comes to inferring affiliations from the mass surveillance of private data, it's just the sort of thing whistleblowers warn us is already going on. Trump's off-the-cuff blather about official registries isn't about what is known, but about making it acceptable. That said, Biddle's post was met this weekend by dismissive sneering from the Gilfoyles: a good reminder that Silicon Valley is cynical and willing, and that fatalism is the best policy.Update: Duped Cory.

As things stand now, something nearly miraculous has happened: the protesters have won, indigenous people will not be forced at gunpoint to allow a danger to their drinking water that their settler neighbors had rejected, and the pipeline may die. Despite a media blackout and brutal suppression, native people have won an historic and just victory through bravery and humbling perseverance, and that victory has also struck a blow for a world where preventing climate change and preserving our common home takes precedence over enriching the tiny minority of investors in the oil industry. (more…)

“I look at this election not as a victory for Mr. Trump, who wins the election as the most unpopular candidate in perhaps the history of our country, but as a loss for the Democratic Party." -Senator Bernie Sanders, speaking to a sold-out crowd in San Rafael, CA. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTAIndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an authoritarian war criminal who is part of the worldwide surge of trumpist leaders and hopefuls, including Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte; Hungary's Viktor Orbán; Russia's Vladimir Putin; South Korea's Park Geun-hye; France's Marine Le Pen; the UK's Nigel Farage, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and others -- bound together by xenophobia, a lack of transparency, violent suppression of opposition, and savvy use of the internet. (more…)

Yesterday, Wesley Clark Jr -- son of retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark -- met with North Dakota law enforcement officials on behalf of the 2,100 members of the Veterans Stand for Standing Rock group, who have pledged to come to the conflict site and build barracks to shelter the water defenders fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline. (more…)

5 years ago, Boing Boing described James Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood as "a jaw-dropping tour de force history of information theory... The Information isn't just a natural history of a powerful idea; it embodies and transmits that idea, it is a vector for its memes (as Dawkins has it), and it is a toolkit for disassembling the world. It is a book that vibrates with excitement, and it transmits that excited vibration with very little signal loss. It is a wonder." (more…)

James Delingpole is an invective-hurling anti-climate science columnist who has candidly admitted that he doesn't bother to read scientific papers, calling himself a "an interpreter of interpretations." (more…)

"How am I gonna get this in there? Gimme my glove back!"

Steven Mnuchin, Trump's pick to lead the Treasury, worked for Goldman Sachs for 20 years. In 2008 Munchin and his partners founded a bank (funded in part by George Soros) that tried to evict a 90-year-old woman from her home because she underpaid a bill by 27 cents.From Fusion:After some confusion about her insurance coverage two years back, a subsidiary of OneWest sent Ossie Lofton, of Lakeland, Florida, a bill for $423.30. Lofton sent the bank a check for $423, and got another bill for the remaining $0.30. The woman–who, it’s worth emphasizing again here, is 90 years old–mailed in a check for $0.03.The mix-up was enough to trigger foreclosure proceedings. Lawyers at the non-profit Florida Rural Legal Services asked the court for a jury trial.Don't worry about Mnuchin's failure to successfully foreclose on the property. He reportedly received $11 million when his bank merged with CIT Bank last year.From Politico:That payout has been a lightning rod for OneWest critics, even though the bank and its successors absorbed $3.4 billion in losses that the FDIC didn’t cover.Despite those losses, Mnuchin came out ahead. Last year, OneWest closed on a $3.4 billion, hard-won deal to merge with CIT Bank, overcoming challenges from fair-housing advocates, civil rights groups and homeowners. Mnuchin took a reported $10.9 million payout and remains on CIT’s board.“Investors in the bank, including Mr. Mnuchin, profited handsomely at the expense of thousands of working people across our state,” said Kevin Stein, deputy director of the California Reinvestment Coalition.

Here's a Tumblr of tweets from Trump voters who are surprised that their President Elect is already breaking the promises he made to them. Some are angry that he is not prosecuting Hillary. Others are mad that he is going to take away their Medicare and Social Security. Still others are mad that he wants to hire someone from Goldman Sachs.

Every year, the Religious Liberty Project puts Festivus poles on the lawns of public buildings that sport Christian religious holiday symbols; this year, RLP's Chaz Stevens put a "Distrestivus" pole adjacent to a nativity scene on Deerfield Beach, Florida public land. (more…)

Turns out that long stints in outer space affect levels of cerebrospinal fluid. That explains why many astronauts who had 20/20 vision before space missions needed glasses upon return, according to a paper presented this week. (more…)

https://vimeo.com/71952791What happens if you allow a group of onlookers to do anything they want to you for six hours? Marina Abramovich found out in 1974 when she laid out dozens of items on a table, including a gun with one bullet, and allowed strangers to use the items on her however they saw fit. (more…)

Google's Earth Outreach just published a series of nifty decades-long views of how world landmarks of changed, like this one of the Aral Sea from 1984 to present. Some of them are like watching slime molds grow: (more…)

VP-elect Mike Pence's political career has consisted of a series of attacks on the rights of LGBTQ people and women, and his new neighbors in the navy blue precincts of DC know it, and they want him to know that his medieval views are considered aberrant by good people, so they've festooned their homes with rainbow flags that he'll have to pass during the transition -- until he gets to move into the new VP's residence in the basement of Trump Tower. (more…)

The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab (previously) continues its excellent work, this time with a deep investigative piece on a sneaky form of censorship in China's popular We Chat service, where messages posted to group chats that contain words on a government blacklist are made invisible to other participants in the chat, while the original poster still sees it, giving the illusion that everyone's read the controverial message but no one found it worth commenting upon. (more…)

Last February, Carrier announced that it was offshoring its US air-conditioner manufacturing jobs to Mexico, despite having made a $7.6B profit that year, despite having received more than $6B in US military contracts, despite having recved a $50M tax-break, despite having paid its retiring CEO a $172m bonus, despite having spent $12b on stock-inflating accounting tricks. (more…)

Hinterland's Pink Sea Urchin Jellyfish are a $13 set of three air plants (Oxacana, Scaposa, Medusa) set in 2-3.5" sea-urchin shells that you hang in a way that simulates jellyfish -- keep 'em misted and they'll remain jauntily decorative! (via Interesting Finds)

A pair of data-scientists in Washington State are convening a meeting of "Data Scientists, Data Science Enthusiasts, and Advocates for Civic Liberties and Social Justice" who want to figure out how "Data Scientists & IT Professionals use their expertise to help answer the current human questions which social and policy-based organizations are currently struggling to address?" (more…)

Lin-Manuel Miranda's smash Broadway musical Hamilton -- which recounts the events of 240 years ago -- keeps looming large in our very current political discourse, from Hamilton's role in the establishment of the Electoral College to Mike Pence's night at the theater and the ensuing Trumpian call for a safe-space for vulnerable politicians who have only their status as the second-most powerful man on the planet to defend themselves from the terrifyingly mild petitions delivered by actual, globe-striding singing fellows. (more…)