Everyone's angry today about a sexist guide to "approaching women with headphones on" which encourages socially awkward men to ignore this obvious social cue and harass women in public. Nasty tips include "don't allow her to ignore you" and "don't allow her control the interaction." Typical pickup artist griftbait, in other words: selling an idea the reality of which will only make things worse in the long run for the losers being grifted. For the record, here's a better guide to talking to women (or anyone else) in public with headphones on: (more…)

It's just another day in Greenville, S.C., where a clown reportedly tried to lure children into the woods near an apartment complex.8/24/2016To The Residents of Fleetwood ManorThere has [sic] been several conversation [sic] and a lot of complaints to the office regarding a clown or a person dressed in clown clothing taking children or trying to lure children in the woods. First and foremost at Fleetwood Manor Apartments children's [sic] safety is a top priority. At no time should a child be alone at night, or walking in the roads or wooded areas at night. Also if a person or persons are seen you are to immediately call the police. Greenville County Police Department is aware of the situation and have been riding [sic] the property daily. Remember there is a 10pm curfew for the property so to ensure your children's [sic] safety please keep them in the house during night hours and make sure at ALL times children are supervised. Anymore information that becomes regarding this issue will be sent out to all residents.Thank you,Property ManagerA number of youngsters and at least one adult saw the clown in the woods, according to Fox News Carolina, and another spotted a "large-figured clown with a blinking nose" near a trash dumpster.Deputies spoke with children who told them clowns tried "to persuade them into the woods further by displaying large amounts of money." The children advised they believed the clowns lived in an old house near a pond, accessible via a trial behind the apartment complex.The house near the pond was located, but deputies said they found no signs of suspicious activity or clowns.Mass hysteria? Pranksters? Either way, the remake of Stephen King's IT recently got its Pennywise, so expect more evil clowns!

Ireland offered Apple huge tax breaks, but didn't give other companies the same deal. The European Commission concluded this was illegal and the company must pay up the €13bn it would otherwise have owed in taxes.The Commission said "selective treatment" allowed Apple to pay tax rate of 1% on European Union profits in 2003 down to 0.005% in 2014.The findings are a result of the culmination of a three-year investigation by Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager into tax arrangements for Apple, dating back 25 years.In a statement, the EC said the benefit is "illegal under EU state aid rules, because it allowed Apple to pay substantially less tax than other businesses. Ireland must now recover the illegal aid."That's 5 cents for every thousand dollars made.

Sea otters. Cute little sea otters. Someone is shooting sea otters along California's central coast. Via the LA Times:California wildlife officials are offering a $10,000 reward to find whoever is responsible for fatally shooting three Southern sea otters along the Central Coast over the last month.The two juvenile males and one adult male otter were killed between late July and early August, and washed up between Santa Cruz Harbor and Seacliff State Beach in Aptos between Aug. 12 and 19, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife said Monday.The animals are protected under the Endangered Species Act and state law. Killing a Southern sea otter is punishable by up to $100,000 in fines and jail time, authorities said.If you have any information, rat that fucker out! Give the $10,000 to the Marine Mammal Center, where I have been known to volunteer. Also, gun ownership regulation as soon as possible please. Anyone with information about the killings can call (888) 334-2258.

Brock Turner is scheduled to be getting out of jail this week, three months early. (more…)

Want to get Cool Tools' Recomendo a week early in your inbox? Sign up for the Sunday newsletter here.Travel Tip:A Global Entry pass is a true bargain if you do any international travel. You don’t need to wait in line for immigration at reentry to the US. But it also serves as validation for the TSA Pre-check short-cut for security screening at most major US airports. Much shorter lines. To get in the program requires an appointment to get fingerprinted and $100 every five years. Well worth it. — Kevin KellyEdible:Before I take a flight, I toss a few Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt Kind bars into my travel bag. The crunchy bars are gluten free and have just 5g of sugar. The perfect snack for plane or hotel room. — Mark FrauenfelderDestination:If you’re in Northern California and have yet to visit Amador County, I could not recommend it more. The county is steeped in Gold Rush history and offers 40+ wineries, romantic B&Bs and historical small towns, all within a short drive of one another. Side note: I was once the Lifestyles Editor for the county newspaper, which might make me a bit biased, but I also have enjoyed enough time there to know it makes for a magical getaway. — Claudia LamarReadable:The Library of America publishes high-quality hardbound books with multiple novels per volume. I’m reading Ross Macdonald: Three Novels of the Early 1960s, which contains three excellent novels about fictional Los Angeles detective Lew Archer. These tightly-written page-turners have kept me up way past my bedtime. — MFEnjoyment:I’m more audio book than podcast listener, but On Being with Krista Tippett is one of my favorite things ever. Her guests vary from artists, scientists and activists, and the conversation is always centered around the intangible aspects of life. It’s philosophical without being pushy, and I’m quickly working my way through the archives. — CLFollow:The best photographer blog and/or photo magazine for both pros and newbies, and for all photographers in between, is on the web as PetaPixel. Sure, they have the latest nerdy camera gossip, but they also have plenty of features about the million different ways people actually capture and use images. Every day I am amazed and informed. Add it to your RSS feed. — KK

Actor Gene Wilder, best known as the leading genius of classic films "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory," "Blazing Saddles," 'The Producers,' "Young Frankenstein," and more, has died at 83 years of age. (more…)

In Gregor's Run a young man with a mysterious past is on the run from two of the universe's most powerful organizations. Generally broke, and with no idea of who he is or what the bad guys want, the titular Gregor just wants to get drunk. This was a fun, fast and poorly edited Kindle Unlimited recommendation! Packed with the requisite action and adventure, Gregor's Run tells a witty and entertaining version of a familiar story. The backstory and world building are well done, and the characters interesting, Gregor is certainly a different hero.Not-safe-for-the-grammatically-nitpicky, this remains a fine example of Kindle Unlimited fare.Gregor's Run: The Universe is too Small to Hide via Amazon

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Awkward Zombie: We're Going To Be Richby Katie Tiedrich2012, 164 pages (softcover)From $10 Buy a copy on AmazonOr $19 from Level Up StudiosAwkward Zombie is one of my favorite webcomics. Creator Katie Tiedrich writes a comic that focuses on parodying video games of all kinds, with the occasional strip drawn from poking fun at her own life. Fans of video games will find a lot to laugh at here. We’re Going to be Rich! collects the first 100 comics originally posted to Tiedrich’s website, Awkward Zombie, and is available in softcover or special edition hardcover format.In this first volume, Tiedrich primarily writes about Nintendo games like Super Smash Bros and various entries in the Legend of Zelda series, with other games popping up occasionally. If you’re a fan of those games you’ll likely love every panel, as Tiedrich has a great ability to point out the funny logical problems present in these games. One of my favorite such comics makes a joke about the potential difficulties with surfing in Pokemon. Even if you’ve never played a particular game she’s referencing, the jokes tend to be broad enough to understand by more general video game fans. You may have never played World of Warcraft, but if you’ve played any role-playing game you may understand the humor in a large character trying to fit into stolen armor that logically should be much too small for them.Tiedrich’s art stye is perfectly suited to the sort of sideways world parody she excels at. The first couple of comics may seem crude, but they become more refined as the book progresses. It’s kind of funny actually because as Tiedrich develops her own style and the characters begin to resemble each other, she even further exaggerates the physical attributes that make them unique. Being a parody, each character resembles the character it parodies just enough to get the idea, but it isn’t as if Tiedrich is trying to do copies of those characters. She usually makes them even more cartoony than they already are, with fun results (look at how goofy Luigi looks, but it is still clearly Luigi).One thing I wish was translated into the book a bit more frequently is Tiedrich’s tendency to explain the comic with a note underneath. She self-deprecatingly references this in one of the comics, but it only pops up a few more times after that. Tiedrich seems to think it’s a hokey device, but those are some of my favorite bits of comedy and I miss them here.If nothing else, it is my hope that you may read this book and follow Tiedrich’s work on her site. She has many more comics available and updates semi-regularly. Fans can even suggest comic ideas on her forum, which she periodically produces. Sadly, We’re Going to be Rich! is the only book she’s released so far, but hopefully there will be more to come.– Alex Strine

One of my favorite books last year (and this year, because I'm re-reading it) was Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, an immensely readable history of the myths humans have invented in order to survive in tribes of millions and billions of people. Those myths include religion, money, politics, corporations, laws, and morality. Harari's follow-up book is, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and will be released in February 2017. David Runciman of the Guardian got an advance reader's copy and reviewed it.The evidence of our power is everywhere: we have not simply conquered nature but have also begun to defeat humanity’s own worst enemies. War is increasingly obsolete; famine is rare; disease is on the retreat around the world. We have achieved these triumphs by building ever more complex networks that treat human beings as units of information. Evolutionary science teaches us that, in one sense, we are nothing but data-processing machines: we too are algorithms. By manipulating the data we can exercise mastery over our fate. The trouble is that other algorithms – the ones that we have built – can do it far more efficiently than we can. That’s what Harari means by the “uncoupling” of intelligence and consciousness. The project of modernity was built on the idea that individual human beings are the source of meaning as well as power. We are meant to be the ones who decide what happens to us: as voters, as consumers, as lovers. But that’s not true any more. We are what gives networks their power: they use our ideas of meaning to determine what will happen to us.

A woman has been arrested in Jerusalem for lighting a man's car on fire at a gas pump after he denied her request to give him a cigarette.From NBC News:The woman was arrested after the incident Tuesday and denied having set the blaze intentionally, Micky Rosenfeld, foreign spokesman for Israel's police forces, said in a statement.Man at a gas station refuses to give woman a cigarette, so she sets his car on fire.

This is why I hardly ever watch network television.From Variety:Before the show was picked up by AMC for domestic and Fox for international, its creator Frank Darabont presented the first version of the script to NBC, with whom he had an overall deal. According to [Gale Anne Hurd, executive producer on The Walking Dead] their response was, “Do there have to be zombies [in it].” NBC then asked Darabont if the show could be a procedural in which the two main protagonists would “solve a zombie crime of the week,” she said.

https://youtu.be/IwHxfrZyYhYAre they happy, mad, or experiencing an emotion that's utterly alien to us?

Heritage Toronto has curated a cool Instagram account (graffitialley.to) that documents Toronto's Graffiti Alley. It works best on a phone, but it's OK on other screens if you don't mind turning your head 90 degrees. (more…)

The Republican Party spent decades telling its base to hate and mistrust the mainstream media. But now conservative outlets are lurching to the far right, taking the base with it and leaving the party and its brand of conservatism stranded in political no-mans land.As [former George W. Bush speechwriter David] Frum predicted and we’ve witnessed over the years, there is not much the Republican Congressional leadership can do to satisfy these folks in the right wing media because their ratings rely on fomenting anger and threats to “blow shit up!” I suspect this is precisely why Paul Ryan resisted taking on the role of House Speaker after John Boehner was ejected from his leadership position. He knows that he is now the target and this won’t end well.Four years ago, I wrote "this is American conservatism's immune system going into anaphylactic shock. Fun to watch, while it lasts!" It's not fun anymore.

Last Wednesday, Amy Sharp, 18, on the run after escaping a Sydney, Australia correction center, requested on Facebook that police replace a posted photo of her with a different one that she preferred (below). They nabbed her on Friday.(The Guardian)

Benjamin Cheh and Jeffrey Kong made this prototype Lego typewriter a couple of years ago: "a perfect example of how LEGO elements can pack so much detail in something so small. A retro creation for both the young and the young at heart – imagine this typewriter on your desk!" Their site's a treasure trove of Lego creations. [more, more]

The right wing of American politics has long been a grifter's paradise, but Ian Hawes raked in $1m in a matter of weeks with Facebook ads promising dinner with Donald Trump. Politico reports that the supposed political action committee behind it is designed to resemble the official campaign site, has spent none of its takings promoting his candidacy, and that no-one has had dinner with Trump.One is at donaldjtrump.com; the other is at dinnerwithtrump.org. The first belongs to Trump’s campaign. The second is a scheme run by Ian Hawes, a 25-year-old Maryland man who has no affiliation with Trump or his campaign and who has preyed on more than 20,000 unsuspecting donors, collecting more than $1 million in the process. ... “I feel ripped off and taken advantage of. This is horrible. That was not my intent,” said Mary Pat Kulina, who owns a paper-shredding company in Maryland and gave $265 to Hawes’s group. Kulina thought she had given to Trump’s campaign until told otherwise by POLITICO. “This is robbery,” she said. “I want my money back and I want them to add up what they stole from people and give it to Donald Trump.”It's not the only lookalike site he's operating either. The fact that there is no real Trump campaign organization makes it easy for people to fill the gaps like this: there's simply no official competition for attention in the venues where actigrift takes place.

Mercifully there is yet to be footage of slugs devouring baby birds, but the fact that it happens has been confirmed after years of suspicion.“The actual moment of slugs predating on nestlings isn’t easy to observe,” says Katarzyna Turzańska at the University of Wroclaw in Poland. “You are more likely to come across the traces of the ‘tragedy’: dead or alive nestlings with heavy injuries, covered in slime – and often slugs’ droppings found nearby.”She and Justyna Chachulska, a colleague at the University of Zielona Góra in Poland, were studying common whitethroat birds near Wroclaw, in Poland, when they spotted a slug of the Arion genus in a nest with newly hatched chicks. The next day, the slug was gone, and the chicks were dead with severe injuries on their bodies that hinted at the slug as the culprit.They were gobsmacked. “We couldn’t believe that the slug had killed the nestlings,” says Turzańska. “We talked to many experienced ornithologists, but none of them had observed slug predatory behaviour towards birds before.”For your enjoyment, the Trailer to Slugs (1988).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3QEjMq6e68

Fred Trump, the father of millionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump, was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally as a young man, according to a 1927 New York Times story. Vice put in the legwork on corroborating the nearly-century-old one-sentence report. They not only found other reports of his arrest, but the startling fact that those arrested were "berobed".The [Queens County Evening News] mentions Fred Trump as having been "discharged" and gives the Devonshire Road address, along with the names and addresses of the other six men who faced charges. Yet another account in another defunct local newspaper, the Richmond Hill Record, published on June 3, 1927, lists Fred Trump as one of the "Klan Arrests," and also lists the Devonshire Road address.Another article about the rally, published by the Long Island Daily Press on June 2, 1927, mentions that there were seven arrestees without listing names, and claims that all of the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire. ... While the Long Island Daily Press doesn't mention Fred Trump specifically, the number of arrestees cited in the report is consistent with the other accounts of the rally. Significantly, the article refers to all of the arrestees as "berobed marchers." If Fred Trump, or another one of the attendees, wasn't dressed in a robe at the time, that may have been a reporting error worth correcting.

Around 9pm local time here in Los Angeles, reports began popping up of a shooting at the Los Angeles International Airport, LAX. Within about 30 minutes, LAPD confirmed that there had been no shooting, no victims, and the emergency was called off. (more…)

In this episode, psychologist Per Espen Stoknes discusses his book: What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming.Stoknes has developed a strategy for science communicators who find themselves confronted with climate change deniers who aren’t swayed by facts and charts. His book presents a series of psychology-based steps designed to painlessly change people’s minds and avoid the common mistakes scientists tend to make when explaining climate change to laypeople.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudThis episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries taught by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Everything we now know about the universe—from the behavior of quarks to the birth of entire galaxies—has stemmed from scientists who’ve been willing to ponder the unanswerable. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.There is no better way to create a website than with Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrange your content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for a year. Start your free trial today, at Squarespace.com and enter offer code SOSMART to get 10% off your first purchase.This episode is also brought to you by Mack Weldon who believes in smart design, premium fabrics and simple shopping. All of their products (shirts, socks, sweats, underwear) are naturally antimicrobial (which means they eliminate odor). They want you to be comfortable, so If you don’t like your first garment, you can keep it, and they will still refund you. No questions asked. Go toMackWeldon.Com and get 20% off using promo code SOSMART.Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.Links and SourcesDownload – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudPrevious EpisodesBoing Boing PodcastsCookie RecipesThe Leadership LABPer Epsen Stoknes WebsiteWhat We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global WarmingImage Source: Wikimedia Commons

The official video for Nobody Speak, by DJ Shadow and Run The Jewels, was directed by Sam Pilling and stars Igor Tsyshkevych and Ian Bailey as very NSFW diplomats on a tear.The video depicts a meeting of leaders that quickly descends into chaos, a scene not unlike what is unfolding in governments around the globe... Says DJ Shadow: "We wanted to make a positive, life-affirming video that captures politicians at their election-year best. We got this instead.”

Oddly enough, we don’t know very much about how to change people’s minds on social issues, not scientifically. That’s why the work of the a group of LGBT activists in Los Angeles is offering something valuable to psychology and political science – a detailed map of uncharted scientific territory.Over the last eight years, and through more than 12,000 conversations, The Leadership LAB has developed a new kind of persuasion they call deep canvassing. Volunteer’s go door-to-door, talking to strangers, and often change their attitudes about things like same-sex marriage and transgender rights.Unfortunately, the first scientist to measure the technique’s effectiveness also committed scientific fraud by copy/pasting some data from another study and cutting corners in other ways, creating a wave of negative publicity that threatened the reputation of the people who created the technique, even though they were just the subjects of the study and not involved in the wrongdoing.In the show, you will meet two scientists who uncovered the fraud and got the paper retracted, and then decided to go ahead and start over, do new research themselves, and see if the persuasion technique that the original researcher was supposed to be studying truly worked.Can you reduce prejudice with a single 20-minute conversation? Can you flip people’s opinions in just one encounter? Learn what the latest science has to say about deep canvassing in this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudThis episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries taught byNeil deGrasse Tyson. Everything we now know about the universe—from the behavior of quarks to the birth of entire galaxies—has stemmed from scientists who’ve been willing to ponder the unanswerable. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.This episode is also sponsored by Casper Mattresses. Buying a Casper mattress is completely risk free. Casper offers free delivery and free returns with a 100-night home trial. If you don’t love it, they’ll pick it up and refund you everything. Casper understands the importance of truly sleeping on a mattress before you commit, especially considering you’re going to spend a third of your life on it. Get $50 toward any mattress purchase by visiting www.casper.com/sosmart and using offer code “sosmart.” Terms and Conditions Apply.This episode is also brought to you by Mack Weldon who believes in smart design, premium fabrics and simple shopping. All of their products (shirts, socks, sweats, underwear) are naturally antimicrobial (which means they eliminate odor). They want you to be comfortable, so If you don’t like your first garment, you can keep it, and they will still refund you. No questions asked. Go to MackWeldon.Com and get 20% off using promo code SOSMART.Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.Dave Fleischer has been a professional mind changer for more than 30 years, and has directed the Leadership LAB since 2010. Previously, he created the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and worked as an organizer for the National LGBTQ Task Force.Joshua Kalla is a PhD student at the University of California Berkley. He studies political science and how voters make and change their minds.David Brookman is an Assistant Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and studies political science as well as persuasion and perspective taking.Laura Gardiner (at the time of this recording) was the national mentoring coordinator for the Leadership LAB and helped manage their experimental persuasion canvassing project. Laura spent eight years with the team before moving on to other pursuits.Steve Deline is a field organizer at the Leadership LAB. He started as a volunteer in 2009 and helped create the LAB’s video documentation project, which, according to their website, “has since captured more than 2,000 conversations between canvassers and voters on film and become integral to the team’s ability to develop new approaches to persuasion.”In every episode, after I read a bit of self delusion news, I taste a cookie baked from a recipe sent in by a listener/reader. That listener/reader wins a signed copy of my new book, “You Are Now Less Dumb,” and I post the recipe on the YANSS Pinterest page. This episode’s winner is Deanna Klingbeal who sent in a recipe for chocolate waffle cookies. Send your own recipes to david {at} youarenotsosmart.com.Links and SourcesDownload – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudPrevious EpisodesBoing Boing PodcastsCookie RecipesThe Leadership LABDavid BrookmanJoshua KallaIrregularities in LaCour 2014Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassingVideo: Watch a Voter Change Her MindImage courtesy of The Leadership LAB, screenshot of video linked above.Music:• Espanto• Dr. Tikov• Twin Musicom• Fin Taylor• Banjopocalypse• Caravan Palace• Mogwai

If you’re like us, you occasionally get ambitious with your dinner and try to cook multiple sides plus a main dish. These efforts usually end as a cold meal plus a pile of dishes to wash.MasterPan Multi-Sectional Meal Skillet makes it super easy to make multiple dishes at once without the hassle. This heavy gauge bottom pan is divided into five sections and is specifically designed to distribute heat flow so you can cook multiple dishes at once, all on the same burner.Now you can spend less time cooking, less time cleaning, and way more time eating. Plus, there are no heavy metals, lead, cadmium, or PFOA in the pan, meaning your food won't be full of toxins. For a limited time, you can get free US shipping and 50% off the MasterPan in the Boing Boing store.

Never heard of Nibbler? You’re not alone. Nibbler was one of a handful of arcade games produced in the early 80’s by Rock-Ola Manufacturing Company, a company better known for its stylish jukeboxes. Designed by programmers Joe Ulowetz and John Jaugilas, Nibbler is the bastard lovechild of the Pac-Man and the cell phone game Snake, which you may remember playing on your 2001 Nokia handheld. Oft-maligned by classic arcade gamers as less worthy than games like Donkey Kong, Dig Dug or Defender, Nibbler is actually a fun and fairly addictive game which starts out easy and steadily ramps up difficulty as the player advances through levels of mazes. Since only about 1,500 Nibblers rolled off of the assembly line, it was a somewhat rare find in the arcade scene of the day, especially when compared to the hundreds of thousands of Pac-Man cabinets that proliferated, yet interest in Nibbler has endured into the modern era, spearheaded by a coterie of die-hard Nibbler fanatics. You see, what made Nibbler special is that it held a secret, it was the first game of its era that could be played to one billion points and beyond.The secret was discovered by Tom Asaki, who at the time was an undergraduate at Montana State University studying physics. The founding member of the “Bozeman Think Tank,” Tom had been one of the early arcade pioneers who cracked Ms. Pac-Man (on which he held world records) and he quickly mastered Nibbler. Tom soon noticed that the score counter kept adding places and noticed that the game could hold at least nine digits. This meant that a score of 999,999,999 (or more) would be possible on Nibbler. Tom decided to see how high he could get on the game and realized that reaching the billion point mark on Nibbler would require a nearly two day, non-stop marathon (on a single quarter of course). Tom embarked on a quest to become the first player to score one billion points on a video game and made several grueling attempts at the billion. Unlike today’s console games, the arcade games of yore could not be paused, so in order to take a bathroom break he had to build up a large reserve of extra lives and then dash off and return to the controls before his last man died off. Because of the pain in his elbows, Tom was forced to soak his arms in ice buckets to help reduce the swelling and discomfort that came with his billion point attempts.During one such record attempt, while playing at the famous Twin Galaxies arcade in Ottumwa Iowa, a sixteen-year-old local farm boy named Tim McVey noticed a crowd gathered around Tom and the Nibbler cabinet. Curious as to why Tom was receiving all the attention, he soon learned that Tom was going for a billion points on Nibbler. Though Tom failed that day, Tim decided to stick a quarter in the game that everyone was making a fuss about. Soon, he too was hooked and realized that he had a talent for playing Nibbler. With some tips from Tom and encouragement from arcade owner Walter Day, Tim decided to go for the billion points himself. The prize for such an achievement? Life-long bragging rights and a Nibbler arcade game of his very own….***I discovered Nibbler around 2007, it was one of a trove of games housed in a MAME (arcade emulation) cabinet, dubbed “the Ultracade” that I built from scratch and then surreptitiously smuggled onto the lot at Universal Studios where I was editing Battlestar Galactica. Working late into the evenings, doing my part to help a rag tag fleet of humans find a mythical planet known as “Earth,” arcade gaming turned out to be a perfect way to blow off steam for 10 or 15 minutes at a time. I soon learned that everybody of certain age has “their game." It could be Asteroids, or Joust, Space Invaders or Pac-Man, Centipede or Dragon’s Lair, but everyone has a game they remember and enjoy playing. For me that game was Robotron, an action packed frenzy of a game in which robots rise up to destroy the human race, very fitting for the show I was working on.During season three, when editor Tim Kinzy joined our team, I found a kindred spirit who, like myself, had a come of age in the 80s and had a nostalgia for retro gaming and 8-bit graphics. We soon started to plumb the depths of the Ultracade, seeking out lost classics and having weekly high score competitions on various games. Then one day, while scrolling through the list of rom titles, we stumbled upon Nibbler. There was something about the 8-bit snake, slithering through a Pac-Man style maze that caught our eye and we soon found ourselves competing for the Nibbler title during lunch breaks.Our wrists and shoulders ached as we traded high scores, struggling to crest the 100,000 point mark. A few days later, returning to my editing room, I discovered a strange flyer taped to my door. It was a grainy black and white poster of a sullen looking teenager standing next to a Nibbler game with the text “Tim McVey Day” in a large type and below “congratulations for scoring 1,000,000,000 points.” The whole thing looked utterly preposterous, but a quick Google search revealed some startling details. It turned out that in 1984, a Tim McVey of Ottumwa, Iowa had in fact earned over one billion points on the game we were struggling to get one hundred thousand on. Snatching the poster off the door, I walked into our break room, where Tim Kinzy was sweating away, trying to break my Nibbler high score. Tim admitted that, in an act of desperation, he had turned to the internet looking for Nibblergame play tips and had stumbled upon the Tim McVey Day poster.So there it was, the first-billion point game. It had all hallmarks of a classic coming of age story, of the small town local kid achieving the seemingly impossible and I wanted to know more. What had become of Tim McVey, the stalwart teenager who battled Nibbler for two days in an effort to reach the pantheon of video achievement? With all that drive and determination, what had he gone on to do; who had he become? We decided to see if we could track him down. Surprisingly, a Google search turned up quite a few Timothy McVey’s in Iowa and we proceeded to call them all — it felt kind of like the Terminator searching for the right Sarah Connor. Eventually we located Tim, the Nibbler God, and found that he was an ordinary, all-American, humble, blue collar guy, still living in Iowa, just one town over from where he grew up. We hatched a plan to fly out to Iowa and conduct a round of interviews with Tim, arcade owner Walter Day and Tim’s childhood friend (and billion-point witness) Mark Hoff, with the intention of gathering material to tell the story of the first-billion point game. We figured, one weekend, a little bit of editing and a 5-10 minute video documenting the first billion-point game for YouTube.Footage in hand, we returned to Los Angeles and our busy day jobs, filing away the tapes until we had a free moment to edit them. Several months later, Tim called us to let us know that he intended to go for the record again. You see, at some point in the late 80s, a rumor of a higher Nibbler score had surfaced in Italy, though never officially verified, the rumor had cast doubt on Tim’s epic achievement and had always troubled him. So now, despite the passing of twenty-five years, an older, less fit Tim McVey was going to embark on a quest to once and for all lay claim to the Nibbler world record title and dispel all doubt. It struck us that there’s something universal about the story of man attempting to recapture the glory of his youth and there would be inherent drama in the two days of grueling game play that setting a new record would require. So we decided to grab our cameras and document Tim’s quest. Little did we realize that we were about to embark on a multi-year filmmaking odyssey during which we would discover other die-hard Nibbler players, including the long lost Italian and learn more about Nibbler than we ever thought possible. In the end, Tim’s journey would take him down a long and twisting road full of ups and downs and surprises and along the way we became what I like to call “accidental documentarians.” I don’t want to spoil the film for you, but the end result is a lot of fun and surprisingly inspirational, so if your interested in learning more check out the full-length film, MAN VS SNAKE.Andrew Seklir is a producer, director and Emmy-nominated editor whose credits include WESTWORLD/HBO, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA/SyFy and ATARI: GAME OVER/Xbox Studios.

As the former editor-in-chief of the technology project magazine MAKE, I’ve learned that makers don’t limit themselves to simply making things. Their urge to be an active participant in the world around them means that they also have a strong desire to make the tools, processes, systems, and organizations that empower other people to do the same. One example is Safecast, a global volunteer-centered project that developed a low cost collaborative monitoring network to measure radiation levels in Japan after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Safecast has not only generated the world’s largest open dataset of background radiation measurements, it has also established a standard for collaborative environmental data measurement projects. Similarly, another program benefiting from maker enthusiasm is the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a non-profit collaborative organization consisting of a large number investigative groups and media from around the world. The chief technologist of OCCRP is an astonishingly prolific activist and maker named Smári McCarthy. A short version of McCarthy’s resume includes co-founding Iceland's Pirate Party and the Icelandic Digital Freedom Society, doing pioneering work in the field of digital fabrication, and helping establish Iceland’s first Fab Lab. It was at the OCCRP where McCarthy co-developed, along with OCCRP executive director Paul Radu, something called the Investigative Dashboard Project, a web-based tool to help journalists conduct forensic research across millions of documents and scraped databases, including the ones from the Panama Papers, the mind-bogglingly massive leak financial and legal records that revealed the hidden offshore holding companies used by corporations, wealthy individuals, and criminals to hide their money, evade taxes, and conduct illegal business transactions. Like Safecast, OCCRP makes all the data is has collected available to the public at no cost. Earlier this year, Institute for the Future invited McCarthy to come to its public gallery in Palo Alto and share with a standing-room-only crowd what he’s learned about global corruption. There’s enough bribery, assassinations, money laundering, treasury embezzlement, mob shoot-outs, and poisonings in his talk to fill the pages of an espionage thriller. The only difference is it’s all true, and it’s still happening.

My wife has been using this wine saver vacuum pump for several years now. It creates an airtight vacuum in the bottle to preserve the wine.The pump comes with two rubber stoppers with one-way valves. You insert the stopper into a partially full wine bottle, then suck the air out with the pump. It looks like a little bike pump. After several strokes, you'll hear a "click," which means you've drawn out as much air as you're going to be able to remove. At $8.50 am Amazon, it's paid for itself many times over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlJ5gkJujYkDespite its name, Manbang is not a gay male pornography service. Kim Jong-un's regime unveiled the service today as a propaganda-filled streaming service delivering on-demand videos to televisions through a set-top box. (more…)

"The architect's name was Evo Shandor. I found it in Tobin's Spirit Guide. He was also a doctor, performed a lot of unnecessary surgery. And then in 1920, he started a secret society... " -- Dr. Egon SpenglerIf you are a Ghostbusters fan, you've been hoping, since 1984, to get your hands on a copy of Tobin's Spirit Guide. Here it is!Fantastically illustrated by Kyle Holtz, and written by Erik Burnham, Tobin's Spirit Guide shares the backstory of many familiar Ghostbusters ghosts and demons. From Class 5 Free Roaming Vapors to Vigo the Carpathian, they're all here! Certainly a fun book to have in your collection!Tobin's Spirit Guide via Amazon

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Bone: Coda (25th Anniversary Special) by Jeff Smith Cartoon Books2016, 136 pages, 6.4 x 8.9 x 0.5 inches (softcover)$13 Buy a copy on AmazonIf you haven’t read Jeff Smith’s Bone series, just stop. Stop reading right now, mid sentence, and go pick up his masterpiece. It’s wonderful. Quite possibly one of the greatest fantasy stories ever told. Once you’ve read that and fallen in love with Smith’s humor and characters, then you can appreciate this follow-up that gives you a reason to revisit the Bone Brothers. If you aren’t familiar with the Bone series, this coda won’t interest you. It’s a companion piece that includes interviews of Smith, an oral history by comic historian Stephen Weiner, and early illustrations of the Bone characters. I found it compelling to hear that Bone was a story that almost wasn’t. But through determination, some luck, and careful maneuvering, Smith was able to get the comic off the ground. It’s great inspiration for any independent artist out there. But the best part about this book is that there’s a new Bone story to be had! The brothers and Bartleby are still in route back to Boneville, when in true Bone fashion things go awry. It’s not a long story, or a deep one, but it’s a reminder about everything that was so great about this series. It’s a little heartbreaking that Smith makes a point to define coda as “the concluding passage of a piece or movement, typically forming an addition to the base structure.” Hopefully we’ll see more from this world, but for now this is a pretty good sendoff. If you’re a completest, you’re going to need to pick this up. – JP LeRouxAugust 26, 2016

Raymond Mazzarella of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania thought he would teach a tree a lesson. The tree was in his neighbor's yard and had dripped sap on his parked car. He retrieved his chainsaw and went to work on the 36-inch wide trunk. The tree landed on his apartment building.The apartment building was condemned and evacuated. Mazzarella was sent to the hospital. Upon his release Monday afternoon, a neighbor saw Mazzarella trespassing near the apartment house and called police. When the neighbor confronted him, Mazzarella punched him. The neighbor pulled out a stun gun to protect himself. Mazzarella then started hitting him with a baseball bat.Mazzarella is charged with assault and harassment and is locked up in the Luzerne County jail on $10,000 bail.[via]

“We don’t get it. First we were poisoned and then sacrificed an animal for God as a sign of gratitude for gaining our health back. Then we were poisoned once again, as well as the neighbours. May God save us from the worst. Food poisoning became our nightmare.” -- Alattin Erdal, one of more than 20 people who were hospitalized after eating a tainted animal at a feast meant to celebrate their recovery from a bout of food poisoning.[via]

A person claiming to be a law enforcement officer sent this video to The Sasquatch Chronicles, with the following message:I will make this as short as possible. I have a video from a trail cam which appears to show a bigfoot. The video is not conclusive as it doesn’t show the face. Here is the history of the video. I am a 20+ year Law Enforcement Officer, three of which were done as a Game Warden. I received this video from a collage of mine. He was assigned to a federal task force working gorilla grown Marijuana. This group would go into remote areas of Northern California and set trail cams in an attempt to catch the growers on film. This particular trail cam was 27 miles back in the Sequoia National Forest, not accessible by vehicles only ATV then foot. He retrieved the trail cam and found the attached video. He did not know what to do with it as he was afraid of repercussions etc. I openly speak about the subject and my beliefs and another officer referred him to me and he provided me the video. I only ask we discuss what to release about the video before sharing if you decide to.I also have experienced events, i.e. tree knocks, footsteps, and extreme fear for unexplained reason. I have also found a few footprints.Comment from The Sasquatch Chronicles:I spoke to the Law Enforcement Officer today and he said that gamecam appeared to be ripped off of the tree and this creature had buried it in leaves. I spoke to the officer today and he said the camera's are in such remote locations that they are only set to record 5-10 clips so that guys do not have to go out constantly to replace SD cards. They setup the camera's to bust drug trafficking.The officer did not make any claims as to what it is but he severed as a game warden for many years and says "it is not a bear."

In 1917 a pair of Allied officers combined a homemade Ouija board, audacity, and imagination to hoax their way out of a remote prison camp in the mountains of Turkey. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the remarkable escape of Harry Jones and Cedric Hill, which one observer called “the most colossal fake of modern times.”We'll also consider a cactus' role in World War II and puzzle over a cigar-smoking butler.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Another successful SpaceX mission to resupply the ISS ended today with a splashdown in the Pacific, southwest of Mexico's Baja Peninsula. Here's an update from NASA. (more…)

Try it for yourself. Blankwindows is a creation of NYC-based artist Rafaël Rozendaal. And don't miss newoldhotcold.com and somethingopen.com.

Manygolf is similar to Desert Golfing, in that it presents a random two-dimensional course and simple controls to angle and power shots. But it's also multiplayer, which means there's always someone annoying you by proving an "impossible" shot is anything but. There's no nonsense: as soon as the page loads you're assigned a name and thrown into the slowclap-worthy action.The creator, Thomas Boyt, has an official Twitter account for the game at @manygolf; he's published the source code and his dev notes.manygolf is a massively multiplayer golf game. everyone plays together, simultaneously, in the same session. Whoever wins the round in the fewest number of strokes wins. in the event of a tie, the player who scores the fastest wins.EDIT: Updated the pic now it's nice and busy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl-PRUQ1r6kI'm about to switch off my email until September 5 and drive to Black Rock City for 10 days of incinerating the dude. (more…)

Jesse Singal requested this shoop, and I delivered. After all, who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone. (I've uploaded this to Redbubble if you'd like a poster—of course, you can just as well pirate it.)

Here is a logic puzzle created by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.“Linda is single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with the issue of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in demonstrations. Which of the following is more probable: Linda is a bank teller or Linda is a bank teller AND is active in the feminist movement?”In studies, when asked this question, more than 80 percent of people chose number two. Most people said it was more probably that Linda is a bank teller AND active in the feminist movement, but that’s wrong. Can you tell why?This thinking mistake is an example of the subject of this episode – the conjunction fallacy. Listen as three experts in logic and reasoning explain why people get this question wrong, why it is wrong, and how you can avoid committing the conjunction fallacy in other situations.This episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast is the ninth in a full season of episodes exploring logical fallacies. The first episode is here.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudThis episode is sponsored by Bombas – game-changing socks. Bombas decided to take socks seriously, by designing the most highly engineered, best-fitting, comfortable socks humans have ever imagined – and they look cool too. Go to Bombas.com/SOSMARTfor 20% off your first order.This episode is also sponsored by Squarespace. Creating your website with Squarespace is a simple, intuitive process. You can add and arrangeyour content and features with the click of a mouse. Squarespace makes adding a domain to your site simple; if you sign up for a year you’ll receive a custom domain for free for that year. Head to Squarespace.com and use the offer code “SoSmart” for 10 percent off your first order.This episode is also sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Fundamentals of Photography filmed in partnership with The National Geographic and taught by professional photographer Joel Sartore. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.Bob Blaskiewicz is an assistant professor who teaches, among other subjects, critical thinking at Stockton University. He also writes about logic and reasoning at skepticalhumanities.com, and is a regular guest on the YouTube show The Virtual Skeptics.Julie Galef is the president and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, a non-profit devoted to training people to be better at reasoning and decision-making. She is also the host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast and writes for publications like Slate, Science, Scientific American, and Popular Science. This is her website.Vanessa Hill is an Australian science writer and stop-motion animator who hosts BrainCraft, a PBS series exploring psychology, neuroscience and human behavior. She previously worked for Australia’s national science agency, as a science reporter for ScienceAlert, and has appeared in TIME,The Huffington Post,Scientific American, and Brain Pickings. Her Twitter page is here.In every episode, after I read a bit of self delusion news, I taste a cookie baked from a recipe sent in by a listener/reader. That listener/reader wins a signed copy of my new book, “You Are Now Less Dumb,” and I post the recipe on the YANSS Pinterest page. This episode’s winner is Justin Near who sent in a recipe for Monster Cookies. Send your own recipes to david {at} youarenotsosmart.com.Links and SourcesDownload – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudPrevious EpisodesBoing Boing PodcastsCookie RecipesBrainCraftCenter for Applied RationalitySkeptical Humanities Your Logical Fallacy IsPBS Idea ChannelA Guide to Logical FallaciesExtensional versus intuitive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment.Looking at “Linda”: Is the Conjunction Fallacy Really a Fallacy?The Conjunction Fallacy at Bias123

Hydraulic Press Channel shows why carbon fiber and variants like carbon nanotubes have so many uses: depending on the configuration, they can hold up against the hydraulic press. (more…)

Business Insider's Chris Weller asked me to draw from our work at Institute for the Future, where I'm a research director, to take a long-distance look at the far future of what libraries could become:In 50 years' time, Pescovitz tells Business Insider, libraries are poised to become all-in-one spaces for learning, consuming, sharing, creating, and experiencing — to the extent that enormous banks of data will allow people to "check out" brand-new realities, whether that's scaling Mt. Everest or living out an afternoon as a dog....The definition of a library is already changing.Some libraries have 3D printers and other cutting-edge tools that makes them not just places of learning, but creation. "I think the library as a place of access to materials, physical and virtual, becomes increasingly important," Pescovitz says. People will come to see libraries as places to create the future, not just learn about the present.Pescovitz offers the example of genetic engineering, carried out through "an open-source library of genetic parts that can be recombined in various way to make new organisms that don't exist in nature.""Libraries of the future are going to change in some unexpected ways" (Business Insider)(image: "The Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin")

This silicone ice cube tray creates nine Moai statue ice cubes at a time. Even better, you can make chocolates and soap with it, too. Amazon has it for $10.

From MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder to Ketamine for beating depression, there's a psychedelic revival afoot, one that is firmly rooted in science and medicine. In High Times, Natalie Lyla Ginsberg, policy manager of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), writes about the "Mainstreaming of Psychedelics":“What brings you to Canada?” the Border Patrol asked Dr. Michael Mithoefer in the spring of 2015. Mithoefer, a psychiatrist, and his wife Annie, a psychiatric nurse, are pioneers in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Mithoefer had been invited to Toronto to address the largest gathering of psychiatrists in the world—the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association—on the results of their research into treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using MDMA.Needless to say, if there’s ever a time to avoid ruffling feathers with the mention of psychoactive substances, international border-crossing fits the bill. Mithoefer succinctly explained that he was presenting his PTSD research at the APA conference.“PTSD? Did you know that researchers are using MDMA now to treat war veterans?” the border agent asked him incredulously.Mithoefer recounts this story to me with delight after he arrives at the APA conference. It’s a sign of how much the times are changing: Not only is the famously old-fashioned APA hosting a panel on the use of psychedelics, but a recognition of their therapeutic value seems to be seeping into the public consciousness.

See sample pages from this book at Wink.How to Wrap Five Eggs: Japanese Design in Traditional Packaging by Hideyuki Oka (author) and Michikazu Sakai (photographer)Harper & Row1967, 203 pages, 10 x 11.6 x 1.2 inches (hardcover)From $35 Buy a copy on AmazonThis book is a museum of traditional packaging artifacts from Japan. Before the age of plastic, the Japanese perfected the art of packing consumables in incredibly ingenious ways. They excelled in using natural materials such as paper, straw, clay, and wood. Much of the packaging looks astonishingly modern, even though the form may be hundreds, if not thousands of years old. In fact, packages in Japan today often are wrapped in the same way. I recently received a gift from Japan that contained seven layers of boxes within boxes, wraps within wraps, each layer its own exquisite art, the packing at least equal to the cost and worth of the gift inside. There is a mesmerizing variety of packing collected during the last years of traditional Japan on display here. Each artifact is featured in stunning black and white photographs. It is a real inspiration for both designer and maker. Long out of print, this masterpiece of design was first published in 1967; used copies can be found today at rare book prices. It has also been republished in a modified paperback form, that contains some of the original content at a smaller scale.

Raven asks to drinkA polite bird asks a human to give it a drink from a bottle of water.[via]

The only person who wouldn't approve of this doctor is Jenny McCarthy.