NASA reports that its first ever asteroid sampling mission launched into space at 7:05 p.m. EDT Thursday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, “beginning a journey that could revolutionize our understanding of the early solar system.”OSIRIS-REx, which is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, is headed to the near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. The probe's job: Touch the asteroid (after asking consent first, and with a platonic vibe) so we can bring a small sample back to Earth for study. If all goes as planned after today's launch, the spacecraft will reach Bennu in 2018 and return a sample to Earth in 2023. (more…)

John Williams' original score for the first Star Wars movie has been reissued as two picture-discs: the Death Star, Vader, Tie Fighters and Chewie and Han; it's $35 to pre-order for shipping on Sept 30. (via Bonnie Burton) (more…)

“So I've been drawing sidewalk signs for my friend's bar for almost a year,” says IMGURian Ollie Wolff Pruitt aka littlewolff4h. (more…)

A Walmart in Panama City, Florida removed this display after the photo circulated on Twitter, infuriating a lot of people. The World Trade Center was made from stacked cartons of Coke Zero. The American Flag consisted of cans of Coke, Diet Coke, and Sprite. "We hold this moment in our country’s history in the highest regard, and there was nothing disrespectful intended by the display," Walmart said in a public statement.(CBS News)image from: @online_shawn

Public Knowledge's new report, Captured: Systemic Bias at the US Copyright Office makes a beautifully argued, perfectly enraging case that the US Copyright Office does not serve the public interest, but rather, hands out regulatory favors to the entertainment industry. (more…)

You may not love the Gipper, and you probably have good reason. His recipe for Macaroni and Cheese, from the White House Family Cookbook, by Henry Haller, however is amazing! Really, I mean AMAZING! (more…)

America imprisons more people than any other country in history, in both absolute and relative terms. American prisoners -- disproportionately racialized and poor people -- are held in inhumane conditions that include long periods of solitary confinement, in violation of international protocols against torture. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Big Trouble in Little China Vol. 1 by John Carpenter (author), Eric Powell (author) and Brian Churilla (illustrator)BOOM! Studios2015, 128 pages, 8.6 x 10.2 x 0.4 inches (softcover) $11 Buy a copy on Amazon(Do I really need to give a spoiler alert for a movie that came out in 1986?)“Have you paid your dues Jack? Yessir, the check is in the mail.” After shaking the pillars of heaven and defeating Lo Pan, Jack Burton drove off into the night with a monster sneaking up on him from the back of his truck. That’s sadly where this incredible movie ended. It joined the ranks of other cult '80s movies bold enough to tease a sequel that would never come to be. Thankfully much like Lo Pan was in the film, this story isn’t quite dead yet. The comic picks up right where the movie ended with Jack driving his semi, the Pork-Chop Express, in the rain monologuing into his CB. From there it spirals into ninja punching, demon spewing, and Jack Burton awesomeness. What makes me especially happy is that this is a true extension of the story, as the film's director John Carpenter is back, working with the Goon’s Eric Powell, with Brian Churilla doing the artwork. It’s an awesome creative team up. Comic Jack is a caricature of his Kurt Russell counterpart, which seems oddly fitting and adds to the zaniness of the world. Fans of the movie will definitely be into this comic. If you’re not a fan, I guess you can go enjoy eating some celery or something, while the rest of us hear tales of ancient mysticism and armed monkeys. The story dips back into the cheesiness that made the movie so enjoyable, while still bringing some new character development to the table. While not spoiling it, Vol. 1 does leave you wanting more, but thankfully you won’t have to wait 30 more years for the next installment. Vol. 2 and Vol. 3 are out, and more are on the way. – JP LeRoux

Todd Hobin demonstrates the technique every roadie, gaffer, and electrician will teach you the first day of the job: how to wrap cables. If you deal with long cords, ropes, or cables, this will change your life! (more…)

I'm a huge fan of Amazon's cheap tablet computers. Amazon's Android-based tablet OS is breeze to set up for my 9 year-old, but their proprietary paywalls blocked me from getting everything I wanted installed on mine. Luckily, rooting most Android devices is pretty easy. (more…)

Tens of millions of unionized public sector workers walked off the job last Friday in a one-day strike against PM Modi's plan to privatise public industries and increase foreign investment. It was one of the largest strikes in human history, if not the largest, and took place over Labour Day weekend. (more…)

Ka-Bar's Tactical Spork is ideal for the most extreme KFC eaters.The Tactical Spork, which is made from food and water approved Grilamid, is equipped with a fork/spoon combo and has a serrated knife hidden in the handle. The knife is accessed by pulling the spork in opposite directions from each extreme endKa-Bar Tactical Spork (Amazon)

Ursula Vernon's amazing, wry poem, "This Vote Is Legally Binding," is a double-barreled, remorselessly funny blast at the mansplainers, man-babies, and political correctness whiners of the world, written "In response to all those articles about talking to women with headphones." (more…)

The Guardian's published a long excerpt from Cathy O'Neil's essential new book, Weapons of Math Destruction, in which O'Neil describes the way that shoddy machine-learning companies have come to dominate waged employment hiring, selling their dubious products to giant companies that use them to decide who can and can't work. (more…)

Enjoy the cheapest and best Ian Curtis joke the internet will ever supply.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYFcwSWOZfwOne must be of a minimum age (or at least obsessed with vinyl) to have experienced the normality-shattering revelation of playing a record at the wrong speed. Youtube, however, offers a great many classic tracks slowed down in exactly the manner of a 7" single played at the slower turntable speed usually reserved for LP albums.Above, Cyndi Lauper has fun as a languid contralto. Below, Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song is transformed into sleazy industrial disco.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xCWT9BhhzE

Matt Mihaly shares the beautiful David Bowie tribute video compiled from footage Mihaly shot at Burning Man 2016. (more…)

Astronomers at Caltech have created the most detailed computer simulation yet of how our Milky Way galaxy was formed, from inception billions of years ago as a loose collection of matter to its modern state as a massive, spiral disk of stars. (more…)

I'm going to Cincy Comicon (September 9-11) at the invitation of Walking Dead artist and co-creator Tony Moore. I'll be at Table W-19 if you want to come by and say hello. The guest line-up looks terrific!I've also donated a ukulele I made for the Art Auction Party that takes place on Saturday night (Sept 10), directly after the show, upstairs in the convention hall. The image above is Tony Moore's contribution to the auction - an amazing zombie painting.Buy tickets here. It's going to be a great event!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSrNQ9VS2oKickstarter veterans Matthew and Mark McLachlan have raised nearly $1M for Fidget Cube: gadgets that you can switch, twist, click, glide, and roll when you want to do something with your hands. (more…)

“Frigid alien landscapes” are coming to light in new radar images of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, captured from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. (more…)

A photo by Dallas Morning News' Jae Lee removes all doubt that spirits walk among us, and that they like to play football.

Car racing billionaire Bernie Ecclestone, 83, was accused of paying a $44 million bribe to a German bank. But a German court agreed to end his trial when Ecclestone offered to pay the court $100 million.Via BBC:The ruling means he walks free from the district court in Munich and can continue running the sport. It also means Mr Ecclestone is found neither guilty nor innocent.His personal wealth is put at $4.2bn by Forbes, which ranks him as the 12th richest UK billionaire. If found guilty, he could have faced a 10-year jail term and the end of his decades-long dominance of motor racing.

My divorce was rough, but come on.Via the Everett Herald:According to court documents, Ripple handed a teller a note that read, “I have a gun, give me money.”The teller complied.But instead of fleeing, Ripple took the money and then took a seat in the bank lobby, according to the documents.When a bank security guard approached him, Ripple told the guard, “I’m the guy you’re looking for.”The guard took the money from Ripple and held him until police arrived, which wasn’t long, because Kansas City, Kansas, police headquarters is on the same block.When he was questioned later by investigators, Ripple told him that he and his wife had argued and he “no longer wanted to be in that situation,” according to the documents.“Ripple wrote out his demand note in front of his wife … and told her he’d rather be in jail than at home,” an FBI agent wrote in the affidavit filed in support of the robbery charge.

Woolly mammoths became extinct (from hunting and/or habitat shrinkage) 4,000 years ago. But you can buy remains for a reasonable price. This hair sample, for instance, is $15 on Amazon. You can also purchase pocket knives with handles made from Siberian Woolly Mammoth teeth for a couple of hundred bucks.A full skeleton runs about $400,000.

Over the weekend, the mother of Lupita Gonzalez heard from a family member in Shafter, California who was concerned that Lupita had died. Apparently, the person had spotted a donation jar emblazoned with Lupita's photo and a request to help send the woman's remains back to Mexico for burial. Lupita is just fine and lives in the next town over. The photo had been grabbed from Gonzalez's Facebook page and taped to at least three jars placed on store countertops."It's a scary feeling," Gonzalez said. Bakersfield Now reports that the "jars had a sob story about a girl named 'Enriquetta Nunez' who had died and whose family needed money to bring her remains back to Mexico."Police are investigating.

Are your notes to pals and co-workers lacking gravitas? Sir Sean Connery, star of such films as Zardoz and The Rock, has just the e-card generator for you.The link is tucked away at the bottom of Sir Sean's website. Andrea's post earlier led us to this fantastic service.(Thanks, David Wolfberg!)

According to Stanford University researchers, a primary circuit in the brain's reward involving the chemical "feel-good" chemical dopamine, is also essential for controlling our sleep-wake cycles. “Insomnia, a multibillion-dollar market for pharmaceutical companies, has traditionally been treated with drugs such as benzodiazepines that nonspecifically shut down the entire brain," says psychiatry and behavior science professor Luis de Lecea "Now we see the possibility of developing therapies that, by narrowly targeting this newly identified circuit, could induce much higher-quality sleep.” From Stanford:It makes intuitive sense that the reward system, which motivates goal-directed behaviors such as fleeing from predators or looking for food, and our sleep-wake cycle would coordinate with one another at some point. You can’t seek food in your sleep, unless you’re an adept sleepwalker. Conversely, getting out of bed is a lot easier when you’re excited about the day ahead of you...The reward system’s circuitry is similar in all vertebrates, from fish, frogs and falcons to fishermen and fashion models. A chemical called dopamine plays a crucial role in firing up this circuitry. Neuroscientists know that a particular brain structure, the ventral tegmental area, or VTA, is the origin of numerous dopamine-secreting nerve fibers that run in discrete tracts to many different parts of the brain. A plurality of these fibers go to the nucleus accumbens, a forebrain structure particularly implicated in generating feelings of pleasure in anticipation of, or response to, obtaining a desired objective.“Since many reward-circuit-activating drugs such as amphetamines that work by stimulating dopamine secretion also keep users awake, it’s natural to ask if dopamine plays a key role in the sleep-wake cycle as well as in reward,” Eban-Rothschild said. "Investigators identify brain circuit that drives sleep-wake states" (Stanford)

Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, has completed her first graphic novel, Angel Catbird, with Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain, about a superheroic anthropomorphic winged feline. It's bonkers, but......to Atwood, it isn’t strange at all. Before she a venerable elder stateswoman of literature and the winner of the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, she told me, she was a comic book fan who grew up devouring superhero books about heroes like Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel.“I’m a child of the ‘40s and that’s when superhero comics were really, really big,” said Atwood. Nor is she a stranger to making her own sequential art; she wrote and illustrated a children’s book called Up in the Tree in the 1970s, and published an intermittent series of autobiographical strips called “BookTour Comix” on her website. “I’ve been making my own comics since I was little, A wonderful quote: “I’m so old. Why do anything that isn’t fun?”

If you're looking for a little creative inspiration, this clip from George Carlin: 40 Years of Comedy has some great lines about how Carlin approached his craft. It also feels like a living link in the history of American comedy. (more…)

The dryly-named C64 Charset Logo Generator lets you do something old-school that the new school forgot years ago: type using colorful bitmap fonts, as found in old video games of the Commodore era. As the name suggests, it uses the gloomy Commodore 64 palette, but you can edit it with the provided controls, which also include kerning tweaks and many choices of lettering. [h/t Stijn Peeters]C64 Charset Logo GeneratorIdea and code by Chris 'Cupid' Heilmann (@codepo8) - ported from the original tool written in PHP using gdCharset ripping and credit research by Dejan 'Nucleus' PetronijevicCharset cleanup and transparency adding by Daniel 'Deekay' Kottmair

For Film Riot’s “Monday Challenge,” filmmaker Ben Hess enlisted Joseph Baena (a.k.a Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son) to remake one of his father’s most famous Terminator 2 scenes. It's pretty spot on. Here's the original for comparison:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olXilz8r4uU&feature=youtu.be&t=130[via Nerdist]

Some folks receive an odd letter in the mail from a law firm in Canada telling them that items are shortly to be bequeathed to them from a long-lost relative. Included is an old newspaper clipping wherein my relative (yes, it really is my relative) is reported to have found an item of great significance at an archaeological dig. (more…)

RetroConnector (aka Charles Mangin) makes tiny Raspberry Pi cases in the form of mininature reproductions of Apple IIs, Lisas and Atari XLs—and more besides. The pitch is simple: "Connect your old Apple computer to new computers and peripherals. Outfit your desk with nostalgic miniatures." (more…)

Wait for it. (more…)

From r/Reminds me of my dog. [Reddit/IMGUR]

A feral kitten with its head stuck in a jar is rescued by a jolly hammer-wielding Azerbaijanian. It takes a few whacks to free the poor little critter.

The Mophie Sync/Charge Lightning/USB cable ($10 on Amazon) is the perfect short cable for charging an iPhone from a portable charging battery. It twists and bends and holds its shape. It's now part of my travel kit.

ARQ is a Netflix original movie about a guy who invents a free energy device, gets killed by intruders, then wakes up unhurt. The next day, the same thing happens again (and again), but he can remember what happens, and has to figure out how to break the loop, a la Groundhog Day. It premieres September 16th.

Take one trip to the grocers, add a couple passes through Google's psychedelic Deep Dreaming AI-based apophenia algorithm, and voila! You've materialized the extraordinary latent in the mundane. (via Beyond the Beyond)

Princeton computer science researchers Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan (previously) have just published a new paper, Online tracking: A 1-million-site measurement and analysis, which documents the state of online tracking beyond mere cookies -- sneaky and often illegal techniques used to "fingerprint" your browsers and devices as you move from site to site, tracking you even when you explicitly demand not to be track and take countermeasures to prevent this. (more…)

If you've read Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction (you should, right NOW), then you know that machine learning can be a way to apply a deadly, nearly irrefutable veneer of objectivity to our worst, most biased practices. (more…)

Now You See It looks into the use of jump scares in movies, and why they generally suck.[via]

Psychobook: Games, Tests, Questionnaires, Histories by Julian Rothenstein (editor)Princeton Architectural Press2016, 192 pages, 8.9 x 12.1 x 0.9 inches (hardcover)$40 Buy a copy on AmazonI am not afraid of toads. I do not like to see men in their pajamas. Someone has been trying to get into my car. I think I would like the work of a librarian. I do not always tell the truth.The above statements are examples of what could appear on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a “psychometric test” in which psychology patients must answer with only a “yes,” “no,” “true,” “false,” or “cannot say.” There is no place on the test to expand or explain your answers. The results of the exam help determine whether a test-taker is “normal” or “deviant.” This test has been helping to sort out the “crazies” from the “normals” since 1943, and yes, according to Psychobook, it’s still being used by some doctors today! Psychobook, just released today, is a fun, fascinating, image-heavy book that looks at all kinds of ridiculous psych tests used throughout the centuries (some cancelled long ago, others still quacking along). Read about mental test kits such as: Lowenfeld Mosaic tests (make a design with colorful geometric toy pieces to see how carefree, thoughtful or anxious you are); the Szondi Test (see how your mind works by looking at portraits of men and guessing whether they’re homosexual, a psychopath, a maniac, or some other such type); Pictorial Completion Test (find out if your kid has delinquent tendencies by having them fill in a drawing with objects that are missing from the scene), and dozens more. Psychobook even offers lots of tests you can take right from the book. Nervously, I took the Rorschach inkblot test (staring at a blob on a page that’s been folded in half so that it becomes symmetrical, and imagining what the image might be). I passed with flying colors, as my reading said I was “highly capable, to put it mildly...you master everything you turn your hand to...” I guess some of these psychotic tests really do work!

It turns out that asking a piece of software to decide which websites should be censored and which ones are legitimate has some problems, which I think comes as a surprise to all of us. (more…)

When best friends Corinne and Erica are killed in a car accident, their ghostly lives turn out to be just as mundane as their old ones. But at least they can fly now! (more…)

Look at this cute little T-shirt printing machine that artist Devin Smith made.[via]

Five years ago Christopher Robinson's $1.6 million house in New Zealand burned down. He was 400km away when it happened. The house was insured by IAG, which has not paid Mr. Robinson because it says he started the fired using a chain-reaction machine that was controlled by a remote computer.From The Independent:IAG’s fire investigators believe Mr Robinson set the fire himself - from remote.Sifting through the remains of the home, they found an Acer desktop computer which, forensic tests showed, had been remotely accessed on the night of the fire.They also found the burned-out remains of two printers, which were connected to the Acer, and tell-tale burn marks to suggest the fire had involved the use of an accelerant such as petrol.The investigators’ theory, according to Stuff, is that Mr Robinson used his Macbook Pro in Hamilton to log in to the Acer remotely. The Acer then (according to the theory) sent a command to the printer, which pulled through a piece of paper, which pulled a piece of string, which was attached to a switch. The switch would then turn on a 12V battery, heating an element that would light a match, setting alight a flammable liquid and, finally, bringing down the whole house.