Here's a wonderful feature about my favorite constellation and the galaxy's most awesome telescope (at least one of them!) from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. (more…)

In this time of national trauma and political chaos where everyone is being a total shit to each other and the only thing all the sides can agree on is that they can’t agree on anything - we need something to unify us. Something that, as a country, we can shed partisan differences and rally behind. Something like building the railroads, sending a man to the moon. Something that crosses party lines and is pure and perfect, like inside plumbing and laughing at people who call soccer football. Here, our politicians and political parties have failed us. My friend Morgen and I have an answer. Turn Oklahoma into a lake. (more…)

The publication ban has been lifted on beloved conservative hero and former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford smoking crack and babbling incoherently. He seems familiar with the use of a crack pipe.From The Toronto Star:Nothing apart from that illness — not documented substance abuse, or allegations of drunk driving, racism, homophobia or a lack of political control over council — kept Ford from mounting a real challenge to return to the mayor’s chair in 2014.He was never charged. He never testified. Those on the periphery of the whirling saga, like Lisi, who still declare loyalty to the late Ford, faced criminal charges. Ford’s former staff and friends were interviewed by police and compelled to tell their version of the story under oath.When news of the video’s existence was first published by the Star and Gawker in May 2013, it soon reached nightly international talk show levels.It’s a video the late Ford tried to deny was real, facing an onslaught of questions as mayor of Canada’s largest city. At first, Ford said he could not comment on a video “that I have never seen or does not exist.”Months later, Ford would admit to smoking crack (once, in one of his “drunken stupors”).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeUE4kHRpEkThe promise of self-driving cars is to take our vehicle fleets from 5% utilization to near-100% utilization, reducing congestion, parking problems, emissions and road accidents. But what if the cheapest way to "park" your autonomous vehicle is to have it endlessly circle the block while you're at work? What do we do about the lost jobs of bus-, truck- and cab-drivers? How will we pay for roads if gas-tax revenues plummet thanks to all-electric fleets? (more…)

An essential parenting skill (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

In this 1915 photo, the children appear to be raising their arms in a siege heil salute of the American flag. Actually, this gesture was part of the Pledge of Allegiance ritual for decades. Then, um, Hitler happened. From Smithsonian:Originally known as the Bellamy Salute, the gesture came to be in the 1890s, when the Pledge of Allegiance was written by Francis J. Bellamy. The Christian socialist minister was recruited to write a patriotic pledge to the American flag as part of magazine mogul Daniel Sharp Ford’s quest to get the flag into public schools.At the time... Bellamy and his boss both agreed that the Civil War had divided American loyalties and that the flag might be able to bridge those gaps. His campaign centered around the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the new world. He published his new Pledge as part of a unified Columbus Day ceremony program in September 1892 in the pages of the Youth’s Companion, a popular children’s magazine with a circulation of 500,000.“At a signal from the Principal,” Bellamy wrote, “the pupils, in ordered ranks, hands to the side, face the Flag. Another signal is given; every pupil gives the flag the military salute—right hand lifted, palm downward, to a line with the forehead and close to it. Standing thus, all repeat together, slowly, 'I pledge allegiance to my Flag…'”Then in the 1930s, Hitler reportedly saw Italian Fascists doing a similar gesture, likely based on an ancient Roman custom, and adopted it for the Nazi party.

This looks like it could come in handy - the Jackery Jewel is a MFU-certified Lightning-to-USB charging cable with a built-in 450 mAh battery. It's $16 on Amazon with promo code JERJEWEL. I just ordered one.

See sample pages from this book at Wink.We Stand on Guard by Brian K. Vaughan (author), Steve Skroce (artist) and Matt Hollingsworth (artist)Image Comics2016, 160 pages, 7.3 x 11.1 x 0.6 inches (hardcover)$17 Buy a copy on AmazonYou know those cheeky jokes about the United States invading Canada? No one is laughing in Brian K. Vaughn’s We Stand on Guard, an extremely tense, often brutal, military sci-fi thriller with an obvious political point to make. Some 100 years in the future, an allegedly Canadian drone strike on the White House destroys it, killing the president. The US responds with everything it’s got while Canada screams false flag attack, an excuse for the US to come after Canada’s precious water resources (which, surprise, the US is plumb out of). The US deploys its immense drone arsenals, including giant, stompy mecha robots, and “hoser ships,” aerial tankers that fly over Canada sucking up all of her water. The story in the book revolves around a group of Canadian guerilla fighters trying to repel the US occupation. While the subject matter is intense and the pacing of the book rarely lets you catch your breath, there is levity, too. There are plenty of insider Canadian jokes, a character from Quebec whose French dialog is never translated, and an ongoing bit about Superman having Canadian roots (he was co-created by Canadian artist Joseph Shuster). And while there is plenty of action, with everything from skirmish combat to giant, all-out battlefield hellfire, this is a very dialog-driven book and a book that is chalk full of interesting speculative tech and a believable near-future world. A country being occupied by a vastly superior high-tech military, with questionable evidence to justify its actions, and irresistable natural resources that just happen to be sorely needed by the invaders... Hmmm, where have we heard this story before? Having the enemy be Canada, not Iraq, definitely changes the way that you relate to the guerillas and your shifting allegences to who the “good guys” actually are.

 This hardcover edition, collecting the first six issues of the series, is beautifully produced. Besides the series, there is a sketchbook in the back showing dozens of artist Steve Skroche’s sketches and pre-colored panels. – Gareth BranwynBTW: I found that this book had a lot of thematic and stylistic similarities, as well as a similar level of white-knuckled ferocity, to Letter 44. If you enjoyed that series, you’ll probably want to check out We Stand on Guard.

Charlie Warzel of Buzzfeed has written a long piece about Twitter's apparently inability to prevent neo-Nazis, rape apologists, death threats, and racism from flourishing on the platform. In 2013, Caroline Criado-Perez launched a campaign to put Jane Austen on UK currency and quickly became the target of more than 50 rape threats per hour — which forced Twitter to roll out a “report abuse” feature for individual tweets. The feature came roughly six years into the company’s history and more than five years after [Ariel] Waldman’s ordeal. “It feels like, not only did they have opportunities early on to tackle this, but they had the ability to step up and be a leader in this space — to be proactive instead of reactive,” Waldman said. “That they haven’t done that is beyond me and it’s reckless.”Around that time, high-profile harassment cases became a weekly, if not daily, occurrence, especially in the UK. Sinéad O’Connor was driven off the service in 2011; she later told the Daily Mail she was “getting too much abuse.” Downton Abbey actor Lily James quit after she became the target of hundreds of hateful tweets about her appearance. Actor Matt Lucas had to shut down his account after trolls wouldn’t stop harassing him after the death of his partner.In the US, stories of Twitter harassment of women, people of color, and religious minorities appeared with increasing frequency, coming to a head in August 2014, when Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda was forced to quit Twitter after trolls flooded her mentions with photoshopped images of her recently deceased father. Williams’ departure from Twitter went viral and prompted Twitter’s Trust and Safety head, Del Harvey, to condemn the attacks. “We will not tolerate abuse of this nature,” she said, noting that the company would work to find policy fixes to prevent cases like Williams’.It was also around this time that Twitter began broadcasting grisly ISIS beheadings and Gamergate’s multipronged misogynist harassment campaign toward female gamers. Harvey’s team rolled out more streamlined forms for reporting abuse, dispensing with its cumbersome nine-part questionnaire and adding back-end flagging tools for Twitter’s Trust and Safety team. One month later, Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist writer and video game critic, took to her Tumblr page and posted 157 of examples of misogyny, gendered insults, victim blaming, incitement to suicide, and rape and death threats she’d received in a recent six-day stretch on Twitter. Despite the overtures from Twitter, the trolls were winning.

PETA and Morissey released This Beautiful Creature Must Die, an anti-meat game where the goal is to save animals from slaughter. Play it below. The soundtrack is a chiptune version of, you guessed it, The Smith's "Meat is Murder.""This game is the biggest social crusade of all, as we safeguard the weak and helpless from violent human aggression," Moz said. "You don't get that from Pokémon Go."(Rolling Stone)

Facebook is at war with users who block ads, and battle proceeds apace. Just two days after boasting that it could serve ads that were undetectable by adblockers, Facebook got a rude awakening in the form of updates to AdBlock that detected them just fine. But it isn't giving up, and has already adjusted its code to once again circumvent the blocks.A source close to Facebook tells me that today, possibly within hours, the company will push an update to its site’s code that will nullify Adblock Plus’ workaround. Apparently it took two days for Adblock Plus to come up with the workaround, and only a fraction of that time for Facebook to disable it.Update: A source says Facebook is now rolling out the code update that will disable Adblock Plus’ workaround. It should reach all users soon.]Still, the cat-and-mouse game is sure to rage on.AdBlock is at a disadvantage due to Facebook's engineering resources and ability to update its site on-the-fly. That said, Facebook loses more money from each lost ad than AdBlock pays to remove it, which creates an asymmetrical fight. AdBlock is, of course, not a noble venture—it dominates the ad blocking market and whitelists ads from publishers that pay it protection money.Adblockers generally distinguish ads from content by looking at how web pages are structured and where they come from. To those unfamiliar with HTML, web pages are a nest of boxes, each tagged as a <p>aragraph or a <div>ision or an <article> or what-have-you, with each identified or classified so that other code can decide what it looks like, where it goes, or what content gets pasted into it as the page renders.If an ad blocker spots a suspicious-looking box (say, <div id="ads">) that just happens to be populated with code from a different domain to the website, (say, Google's ad servers) the chances are pretty good that its an ad! It gets blocked.Facebook's strategy appears to be to mix the ad and content together, making the identifiers as obscure as possible, sending them from the same servers, in the same data response, and so on. In short, to make advertising and content as structurally indistinguishable as it can.It's like native advertising—ads designed to look like content—but for machine vision instead of humans.If Facebook thought that cracking this nut was "game over" for ad blocking, though, it was in for a surprise. It looks like AdBlock was able to score a shock (if brief) reversal because it did something Facebook didn't expect: it didn't give a shit about blocking user content along with ads.Facebook is accusing it of ensnaring legitimate content from friends and Pages ... “We’re disappointed that ad blocking companies are punishing people on Facebook as these new attempts don’t just block ads but also posts from friends and Pages. This isn’t a good experience for people and we plan to address the issue. Ad blockers are a blunt instrument, which is why we’ve instead focused on building tools like ad preferences to put control in people’s hands.”If Facebook prevails in its quest to make ads and content technically indistinguishable to machines, tomorrow's ad blockers will nail content directly. This will be fun for a while, and then it will be unpleasant.If code can't tell ads from nads, the obvious move is more sophisticated and elaborate versions of another common tool in the user's arsenal: keyword blocking. This is often used to censor naughty or triggering words, but can just as easily take aim at brands and products.Right now, keyword filters are already widely available (including in some ad blockers) but are rudimentary and mostly for one-off things of a highly unpleasant nature. For example, here's a plugin to remove all mention of Trump from the web. What's not been perfected so far is a killer brand-blocking app: something that focuses first and foremost on the semantics of advertising, aggregating many well-known brands and products to be broadly scrubbed, contextually understanding how keywords fit within page layouts, and efficiently hiding the "containers" from view with a seamless UI.This approach could empower users in other ways—for example, blocking abuse. And the specifics involved ("Don't show me clothing brands" or "don't show me Coca-Cola") would be more human than the technical knowledge about web structure one must at least be familiar with to significantly customize most ad blockers.I'm not saying this is doomed to be a good idea, though! If online services successfully make ads and content indistinguishable to attempts to block them, content becomes the only target to work on.A blunter tool than ad blocking as it mostly works now (if you let it block 𝓫𝓻𝓪𝓷𝓭, you'd never see your friends talking about 𝓫𝓻𝓪𝓷𝓭), this has far greater potential for censorship and other unpleasantness, once a successful provider ends up in a middle-man position akin to the one Ad Block currently has.Imagine how easy it would be for Ad Block 2020 to influence an election if it had evolved to understand the political meaning of any given block of content—having long ago established the legitimacy of this approach by backing user-end controls in Facebook's war on them.The state finds its own uses for things, too.Facebook's move to make adblocking impossible isn't just a fuck you to Ad Block and its users; it's a dangerous investment in deception and obfuscation.

Though 1967's Outer Space Treaty says no country can lay claim to the moon (and thus no person can get a deed to lunar territory), the treaty does allow for commercial and scientific installations on Luna, and there are some very small, very valuable bits of crater rim that could be squatted in this way, to the enormous benefit of whomever gets there first (and the detriment of all others). (more…)

https://youtu.be/BzNzgsAE4F0BTW: The folks at DeepMiningCorpAssoc sound like assholes.From YouTube:The shepard tone is an audio illusion which seems to get forever higher but never really does.Whoever DeepMiningCorpAssoc is, STOP TRYING TO COPYRIGHT THIS! It doesn't have a single bit of your music in it!Source of sound graph.All sounds and images in this video are in the public domain and not copyrighted, feel free to use it! Shepard tone sound was downloaded from Soundcloud (sound not copyrighted), (Thanks to a guy in the comments.)From Wikipedia:A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower. It has been described as a "sonic barber's pole".

If you’ve ever tried to quickly share a file with someone, you know there’s nothing actually quick about it. Between permissions, log-in credentials, size limitations, and download issues, it’s a miracle if you’re ever able to share the document at all. That’s why we think Droplr Pro is so essential.Droplr Pro lets you quickly, easily, and safely share files with anyone. It’s as easy as dragging a file to the Droplr icon on your desktop—your file is then automatically loaded to a remote server, and you receive an easy link to share with whoever.You can view and work on anything, from small files (Word documents) to larger files (videos and images) that are too big for simple email sends. This app saves us tons of time, not to mention it allows for unlimited storage unlike its competitors.Droplr Pro even got 5 stars on CNET. You can get your license for just $21.99 today, rather than paying the normal $9.99 monthly fee. It's a small investment for a huge productivity boost to your day-to-day.

At the Olympic games in Rio, The Mercury News reports that top U.S. swimmer "Michael Phelps shares historic night with African-American."The subject of The Mercury News's unspecific racial disinterest is in fact Stanford junior Simone Manuel, who not only has a name and is neither Phelps' sister or wife, but is the gold medal winner in the 100-meter freestyle event.The Mercury News later apologized for its "insensitve headline."

Here's a good collection of tips for playing Pokemon Go. I didn't know any of them.[via]

On August 9, Facebook announced that it had defeated adblockers; on August 11, Adblock Plus announced that it had defeated Facebook. (more…)

In 2001, Steven Soderbergh rebooted the 1960 Rat Pack classic Ocean's 11, kicking off a string of sequels of varying success (the good ones are very good, the bad ones aren't utterly terrible). Now, Gary Ross is making Ocean's Ocho, an all-female "spinoff." (more…)

A USA Today investigation has discovered a network of paid informants working for Amtrak and nearly every US airline who illegally delve into passengers' travel records to find people who might be traveling with a lot of cash: these tip-offs are used by the DEA to effect civil forfeiture -- seizing money without laying any charges against its owner, under the rubric that the cash may be proceeds from drug sales. One Amtrak secretary was secretly paid $854,460 to raid her employer's databases for the DEA. (more…)

Last week, freaky photos appeared online of a strange person dressed in a filthy clown costume and carrying black balloons wandering the night streets of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Turns out, "Gags the Clown," as the character was known, turned out to be a hoax by indie filmmaker Adam Krause. He hoped the online freak-out would help market a new short horror film that he plans to complete in the next few months. It worked. From the Green Bay Press-Gazette:Krause and his film crew had wanted to keep Gags' secret for a little longer and include four more Gags sightings in Green Bay to promote the film. However, according to Krause's post, some actors who did not get parts in the film "felt it was their civic duty to inform the media of what was really going on.""Green Bay's creepy clown was marketing ploy"

On Tuesday, the Maria Lenk Aquatics Centre's diving pool turned green. Yesterday, the water polo pool followed suit. Various reasons have been, er, floated, depending on who is doing the blaming, I mean explaining:• It's a change in alkalinity, says Mario Andrada of the Rio 2016 local organizing committee. "We expect the color to be back to blue soon," he said. "...There is absolutely no risk to the athletes or anybody."• No, actually heat and still air caused an algae bloom, according to the Olympic organizing committee.• More likely, says FINA, the International Swimming Federation, is that the water tanks "ran out some of the chemicals used in the water treatment process." (CNN)

Maker Evan Booth transformed a Keurig K350 coffeemaker into a "bionic" hand. As William Gibson once wrote, "the street finds its own uses for things."

The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that present 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do. Think carefully before making your choices, because one of the goals of the website is to crowd source the behavioral rules for self driving cars in the future. By participating, you could affect the outcome of who lives and who dies.From self-driving cars on public roads to self-piloting reusable rockets landing on self-sailing ships, machine intelligence is supporting or entirely taking over ever more complex human activities at an ever increasing pace. The greater autonomy given machine intelligence in these roles can result in situations where they have to make autonomous choices involving human life and limb. This calls for not just a clearer understanding of how humans make such choices, but also a clearer understanding of how humans perceive machine intelligence making such choices.Recent scientific studies on machine ethics have raised awareness about the topic in the media and public discourse. This website aims to take the discussion further, by providing a platform for 1) building a crowd-sourced picture of human opinion on how machines should make decisions when faced with moral dilemmas, and 2) crowd-sourcing assembly and discussion of potential scenarios of moral consequence.

This is without question both the best cat video and the best thug life video.

Martin O'Leary not only made a cool fantasy map generator, he's giving away the source code and has described the process at a high enough level for an idiot like me to partly understand how it works.I wanted to make maps that look like something you'd find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to.At the same time, I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different.It's an odd feeling to look at these instantly-generated, detailed maps and realize that they represent nothing. I feel like I'm being wasteful pressing the "Generate high resolution map." The Uncharted Atlas is a twitterbot that posts a new map every hour.

A person who goes by the moniker The Herb Puffer on Reddit snapped this photo of a Hershey Chocolate Bar bearing Riteaid's latest shoplifting deterrent technology - an RFID sticker with a printed warning.Calm down Rite AidThe website Explain That Stuff explains how that stuff works:If you walk through the doorway without paying for something, the radio waves from the transmitter (hidden in on one of the door gates) are picked up by the coiled metal antenna in the label. This generates a tiny electrical current that makes the label transmit a new radio signal of its own at a very specific frequency. The receiver (hidden in the other door gate) picks up the radio signal that the tag transmits and sounds the alarm. Why doesn't the alarm sound when you pay for something? You may have noticed that the checkout assistant passes your item over or through a deactivating device (sometimes it's incorporated into the ordinary barcode scanning mechanism, and sometimes it's completely separate). This destroys or deactivates the electronic components in the RF label so they no longer pick up or transmit a signal when you walk through the gates—and the alarm does not sound.

Joseph Pollack creates digital artwork—or, rather, he codes software that does. Animated, too! Check out his github for a peek at the code. [via r/proceduralgeneration]...these were made by a program I've been writing in C++ and OpenGL. ... If you've never done ANYTHING with 3D, I'd recommend starting with a basic 3D modeling program like blender, maya, or 3D max. Get familiar with digital modeling in general. You eventually realize there are really 3 main components to 3D Graphics: geometry, lights, and to a lesser extent, the camera. Try to understand why each of these are so important, and more importantly, how you can mess with each to accomplish a certain look or quality.Once you get more comfortable with the concept of digital modeling (or if you already are), you get into more spooky territory. If you only care about making something interesting, you can get away with a pre-made game engine like unity or unreal. If you want to get your hands dirty and go the low-end, rewarding-but-frustrating route, you'll look at something like OpenGL or DirectX. Working with OpenGL is essentially programming on the CPU and the GPU, so it can be a real pain in the ass. For someone like me that started using it without a lot of programming experience to begin with, the learning curve can be brutal. Not sure I'd recommend it for someone that just wants to mess around with graphics.All of my code is on github, but since this is a one-man project, it's a hot mess, haha. If you really want to see it I'll pm you the link, but it comes with the disclaimer that the code base is really all over the place and not very tidy. That being said, I don't mind explaining any part of it.

Carla and I just started watching the Netflix science fiction show, Stranger Things, which stars Winona Ryder and is set in 1983. We like it! We also like the title sequence at the beginning, which has a 1980s vibe. Art of the Title is a website about the art of TV show and movie titles, and they recently interviewed Michelle Dougherty, the Creative Director of Imaginary Forces, which produced the title sequence for Stranger Things. The first meeting was set up by Shawn Levy, one of the executive producers and a director on the show. He told us we’d be working with these amazing creators, the Duffer Brothers, and got us on the phone. After talking with them I could see what he was talking about. They had this incredible vision!The initial call was them talking to us about some of the film titles that they liked. They referenced Richard Greenberg and all the greats that he’d created — The Goonies, Altered States, Alien, The Untouchables, The Dead Zone, just to name a few. That was great to hear because we understood where they were coming from. That was really refreshing — and pretty surprising — that these creators knew so much about title design.After that call they sent over some book covers that they liked, from books that they’d either read or seen as children. Most of them were by Stephen King, so we knew they were looking for something that felt ’80s and tapped into this nostalgia by using that typography.Previously: Supercut of 1980s film references in Stranger Things

At a rally last night in Ft. Lauderdale, and repeated this morning, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said that President Barack Obama was the "founder" of terrorist group ISIS and that rival Hillary Clinton was its "co-founder."... Trump also said that ISIS "honors" Obama -- who the GOP nominee referred to as "Barack Hussein Obama.""Normally you want to clean up; he made a bigger mess out of it. He made such a mess. And then you had Hillary with Libya, so sad," Trump said."In fact, in many respects, you know they honor president Obama. ISIS is honoring President Obama. He is the founder of ISIS. He's the founder of ISIS, OK? He's the founder. He founded ISIS."Challenged on whether it's a joke, he made clear that it is not. It's just the unhinged not-quite-metaphorical blathering of the day from Donald."He was the founder of ISIS, absolutely," Trump said. "The way he removed our troops -- you shouldn't have gone in. I was against the war in Iraq. Totally against it."https://twitter.com/joshtpm

I love Martin Gardner's puzzle, math, magic, and philosophy books. I just learned from visiting Clifford Pickover's website about a Gardner book that's new to me: Logic Machines & Diagrams (1958). From the introduction:A logic machine is a device, electrical or mechanical, designed specifically for solving problems in formal logic. A logic diagram is a geometrical method for doing the same thing. The two fields are closely intertwined, and this book is the first attempt in any language to trace their curious, fascinating histories. I think I need the hard copy.

Update, 5:51pm ET: This purports to be a video produced by the man who climbed Trump Tower in Manhattan earlier today. The stunt drew immediate response from passers-by, and from NYPD and NYFD and EMS crews. (more…)

Tea Party-dominated states across America passed laws banning cities from providing high-speed internet access to their residents, even in places where the cable/telco duopoly had decided not to sell broadband; last year, the FCC issued an order stating that these laws were null and void. (more…)

You may have heard about Nauru on a recent This American Life episode: the tiny Pacific island that was stripped of all vegetation and made virtually uninhabitable by phosphate mining, then turned into an international pariah by its desperate practice of selling citizenship to crooks, now an offshore detention centre for people seeking asylum in Australia, where cruelty and abuse are legendary. (more…)

In past years the New York Daily News has supported the police department's use of "stop-and-frisks." Three years ago a federal judge ruled that they were unconstitutional. The number of stop-and-frisks fell 97%, from 685,700 in 2011 to 22,900 in 2015. Yet, crime did not rise as the paper and police department predicted. In fact, it fell to "record lows."The murder count stood at 536 in 2010 and at 352 last year — and seems sure to drop further this year. There were 1,471 shooting incidents in 2010 (1,773 victims). By 2015, shootings had dropped to 1,130 (1, 339 victims).The Daily News said, "We are delighted to say that we were wrong," adding " there can be little doubt that the NYPD’s increasing reliance on so-called precision policing — knowing whom to target, when and where — has played a key role."

When the mood strikes you and you’re looking to light up, you shouldn’t have to hunt around for all the things you need: your pipe, your grinder, your favorite munchies, and so on. And with the Happy Kit, you won’t have to.This compact black case houses everything you need, including a grinder, a glass pipe, a one-hitter, rolling paper, and tips. Believe us, we know how annoying it is when you just can’t find the one thing you need, or when you’re out and about without your pipe on hand.Since the Happy Kit can go wherever you go, you’ll never have to worry about that again. The Happy Kit’s case is waterproof and smell-resistant so it keeps things discreet when you need them to be discreet.We love our Happy Kit, and we know you’ll love yours too for $24. Because as they say, "where there's smoke, there's a happy kit".

In 2007, Trump was suing a reporter who exposed unflattering facts about his true level of wealth. The Washington Post reports on a 2007 deposition, related to Donald Trump's failed lawsuit over the expose, in which he was nailed to a series of "falsehoods and exaggerations" remarkable in just how pointless and stupid they were.The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.Thirty times, they caught him.Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.That deposition — 170 transcribed pages — offers extraordinary insights into Trump’s relationship with the truth. Trump’s falsehoods were unstrategic — needless, highly specific, easy to disprove. When caught, Trump sometimes blamed others for the error or explained that the untrue thing really was true, in his mind, because he saw the situation more positively than others did.A "routine and habitual fabulist," is how L. O’Brien, the author Trump had sued, describes him now. The viral video of Trump contradicting himself on every major issue is amusing, but it doesn't get at the man revealed in the deposition. He lies constantly—and is terrible at it.

Lewis from Birmingham, UK is a young man who makes videos about tech support scammers. In this video, he interviews a scammer from Delhi, India who tells Lewis that he works in a call center with 50 or 60 other scammers. He says he is forced to do this crooked work because he signed a 5-year contract. He says he swindles about 10 people a day, and makes a better living than average. His dream is to move to the United States and get a legitimate job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcH9EDlTW8UAh da dah dahr rah, escrong, ryahh, hrheh, sigit, i-wahn i-dinninumm. If Kanye is smart, he'll package these up a la George Clinton's three volume Sample Some of Disc, Sample Some of DAT. (via Kottke) (FUTURE PRESIDENT, YE!, AlinBoss12, CC-BY-SA)

The LA Times investigates the many, fragmentary, much-revised storyline of the Haunted Mansion, the greatest ride that Disney ever built (though Walt himself had to die before the constraints he imposed on the ride could be set aside and the ride finished). (more…)

As the highly controversial deaths of black people at the hands of American law enforcement officers has crept into our public discourse this decade, so too has the revelation that no federal agency maintains statistics on killings by police officers, prompting The Guardian -- a UK-based newspaper -- to launch The Counted, a project to piece together a national picture of death-by-cop from the fragmentary evidence of press reports and open records requests. (more…)

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FOLLOW @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook for inane, hastily composed observations.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and other stuff, which is sort of okay. BUY Ruben Bolling’s new book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures, which is actually pretty good and kids love it. Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Swingify attempts to turn any song into a swing version of itself. Upload an audio file, select the hardness of swing you prefer, and listen. (more…)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "I just got back from the big debate on is free law like free beer that has been brewing for months at the American Bar Association over the question of who gets to read public safety codes and on what terms." (more…)

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump hit a new low today by suggesting at a campaign rally that “The Second Amendment” could prevent Hillary Clinton from choosing Supreme Court Justices as President of the United States. (more…)

My wife Kelly Sparks is design director at Epic Sky, a new fashion brand that's all about empowering young teen and tween girls. Rather than just trying to guess what young people want in clothes, Epic Sky is working with hypertalented teenage designers to develop the collections, and a wide network of teens and tweens to vet the products and contribute content to their site. This past Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a big spread about the company. Congrats to co-founders Monika Rose and Marian Kown, Kelly, and all the badass women at Epic Sky! From the SF Chronicle:“We’re all about empowerment and positivity,” says Kwon. “There are a lot of media messages about girls being perfect — that they’re not smart or pretty enough, while our mission is to inspire the epic in every girl. You don’t have to have a perfect body or be the most athletic, which is the pressure a lot of middle school girls face. Snapchat and Instagram put a lot of pressure on girls, too.”“We offer clothes that fit girls and go beyond stereotypes,” says Rose. “As a mom, I want a brand I can say yes to — clothes that are appropriate for girls’ changing bodies and don’t promote early sexualization. On the market now, you go from a one-piece Speedo to a Brazilian thong, and there’s no option in-between for these girls.” Whereas Epic Sky bikinis, designed by Sausalito 17-year-old Antje Worring, actually look like they’d be comfortable and fun to swim in, not just lie around and look glamorous...The way this crowd-sourced model works is that girls ages 10 to 18 from anywhere submit designs to Epic Sky, and every two weeks the team reviews the submissions. Once a design is chosen, “We bring them in, work with them, and they work with our designer to come up with a prototype, and the girls learn how to bring a product to market,” Kwon explains. “They bring the creativity, and it becomes a co-creation.”"Epic Sky’s girl-powered fashion" (SF Chronicle)Epic Sky (EpicSky.co)

UC Berkeley, birthplace of the Free Speech Movement, installed an emergency exit door between Chancellor Nicholas Dirks’ office and his conference room so he can escape if protestors violently storm his suite. From the Daily Californian:Construction of the door was requested about a year ago in response to a protest in April 2015 when protesters stormed the chancellor’s suite (photo above).During the protest, students staged a sit-in outside Dirks’ office where they banged on desks and chanted loudly. They were eventually escorted out of the building, some in handcuffs, by UCPD officers.Later that day, protesters marched from Sproul Hall to the area in front of University House, the chancellor’s residence.ASUC Senator-elect Chris Yamas said there have been many protests on campus throughout the tenure of several different chancellors, but no instances when a chancellor was physically harmed.“There has to be other ways to handle student concerns and protests than simply building ways to avoid them,” Yamas said. “The chancellor seems elitist and out of touch and inaccessible to the students.”

https://youtu.be/3wp0LIbGmcIFarkle is a simple dice rolling strategy game that we sometimes play. If you have Yahtzee or Tenzi at at home, you can use the dice and these rules. If you don't have dice, Amazon is selling the Farkle dice game for $5. For that, you get five dice, a plastic cup, rules, and a scoring pad.