See sample pages from this book at Wink.Smart About Sharks by Owen DaveyFlying Eye Books2016, 40 pages, 9.2 x 11.5 x 0.5 inches $17 Buy a copy on AmazonI love children’s books that are as delicious for kids as they are for adults, and Smart About Sharks is exactly that. With a sumptuous textured cloth cover, an appealing gray-tinted palette of earth tones playfully punctuated by pink, and a retro encyclopedic design, Smart is filled with fascinating bite-sized shark facts that were completely new to me. Examples: sharks were here on earth 200-million years before dinosaurs; there’s a shark called a megamouth that has a glow-in-the-dark mouth; some sharks grow only to the size of a pencil. Smart About Sharks, just released today, is similar to illustrator Owen Davey’s other info-packed animal book, Mad About Monkeys, which came out almost exactly a year ago (363 days to be exact), and which I reviewed here on Wink. Everything from what sharks eat to their social life to their various shapes, sizes, and many different types (over 500 unique species in our oceans today!) is covered in this high-quality picture book. Rumor has it that this is the start of a series with Flying Eye Books. I hope the rumors are true!

Josh Spencer is the owner of The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles. I haven't been there yet, but after seeing this video I plan to visit asap.This video profile was directed and edited by Chad Howitt and produced by Matt Olson.This short documentary focuses on the life of Josh Spencer, owner and operator of “The Last Bookstore”, located in Downtown Los Angeles. Against the closure of massive bookstore chains and the rise of eReaders, Josh has been able to create a local resurgence of the printed word. We explore his life as a father, husband, small business owner, and paraplegic, as well as the store’s magnetic attraction of the community.[via]

Everybody knows that if you want to earn the big bucks these days, you need to learn how to code. Luckily, you don’t even need to spend thousands on grad school to make coding your career. The Entry-Level Python & JavaScript Programming Bundle is the easiest way to get started in programming in two of the most popular languages out there.One of the biggest mistakes budding coders make is learning outdated languages. Our advice: make yourself relevant with the right skills. This bundle packs four courses that teach you everything from the basics of JavaScript to the finer points of Python, so you’ll be a serious contender for top paying companies like Google and Amazon. And our favorite part? You’ll get a certificate of completion and lifetime access to the courses, so your resume will look legit and you can refresh your memory when it isn’t feeling as sharp as it used to be.Trust us, this will be the best $29 you ever spent on your career.

Elton Simpson is one of the two men who fired assault rifles at people gathered for a "Draw Muhammad" event in Garland, Texas before being shot to death by an off-duty police officer; in the weeks leading up to the attack, Simpson had corresponded with an undercover FBI agent who urged him to "Tear up Texas." (more…)

Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission has proposed issuing tracking-chips to all visitors to the country, which would allow the government to monitor the movements of all foreign nationals while in-country, in order to "locate them which will help if there are some tourists who overstay or run away (from police)." (more…)

Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack told an audience of flood victims that some people enjoy floods because it means they get insurance money."Frankly, over the years, and the many years I've been doing this... they frankly enjoy floods," he said. "They'd like to see a flood about every 7 years, because they want new cars, they want their homes redone."

An Australian fast food chain that sells "Chiko Rolls" (an Australian version of an egg roll - I had to look it up) has a special offer: send them two Chiko wrappers and they will send you a plastic hand to hold your chiko roll.

Backchannel's package on medical data and the health-tech industry profiles three people who were able to shake loose their own data and make real improvements in their lives with it: Marie Moe, who discovered that the reason she was having terrifying cardiac episodes was out-of-date firmware on her pacemaker; Steven Keating, who created a website with exquisitely detailed data on his brain tumor, including a gene-sequence that had to be run a second time because the first scan wasn't approved for "commercial" use, which included publishing it on his own site; and Annie Kuehl, whose advocacy eventually revealed the fact that doctors had suspected all along that her sick baby had a rare genetic disorder, which she only learned about after years of agonizing victim-blaming and terrifying seizures. (more…)

The HiRise imager in orbit around Mars shoots a continuous stream of data about its surface our way. Nasa's posted 44,000 images so far, each available in all sorts of formats and projections. You could have one a day as your desktop background and never run out.Gullies in Dunes Dubbed Kolhar.Yardangs South of Olympus Mons Crater-Exposed Rocks of Yalgoo Crater in Isidis Basin

The German newspaper Bild am Sonntag says that US investigators have discovered three more hidden cheat apps in a Volkswagen product line: these ones were discovered in 3-liter Audi diesels. (more…)

In the 2012 election, as it became clear Barack Obama was polling better than Mittens Romney, it was claimed the polls were "skewed" in favor of Democratic candidates. Turned out that the polls underestimated Obama's margin of victory. But with Donald Trump trailing Hillary Clinton in similar fashion four years on, the "unskewers" are back. (more…)

It's hard to say why The world's biggest asshole is worth watching without spoilering it, but Coleman Sweeney is at least an entertaining asshole—until he isn't.

Kottke nailed it when he said that the timelapse video of these colorful pills dissolving looks like "decaying clowns."

The parallels between the Bernie Sanders insurgency and the vicious UK Labour Party fight over its left-leaning, incredibly popular leader Jeremy Corbyn keep on coming: now there's a Labour analogue to Debbie Wasserman Shultz, the corrupt, hawkish, disgraced former chair of the DNC, who was forced to resign after the DNC email leak revealed her extensive dirty-tricks campaign against Bernie Sanders. (more…)

Vincent Riemer made a TR-808 drum machine that runs in the browser, complete with all twiddly controls, the classic turn-of-the-eighties color scheme, and all the cowbell you can handle.

VH1 has ordered a new unscripted series that will star Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, under the working title “Martha & Snoop’s Dinner Party.” (more…)

This is cool as hell. “While thousands turned out to watch NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) recently complete a full-scale test of its booster, few were aware of the other major test occurring simultaneously.” NASA’s High Dynamic Range Stereo X (HiDyRS-X) camera project captured the test like we've never seen before, and recorded propulsion video data in unprecedented detail. (more…)

I have a larger model of the Mpow motion sensing solar-charged LED outdoor light and it has performed well since I installed it earlier this year. The light is very bright and the motion sensor is sensitive enough to turn on the light when a person or coyote walks by, but doesn't turn on the light unecessarily. Right now, Amazon is selling a smaller, 8-LED model for $11 (use code PWAVPADF).

Imprisoned whistleblower Chelsea Manning is suffering from severe mental health challenges in prison, directly related to her treatment in prison. She isn't getting the care she needs, and she recently tried to take her own life. Chelsea is a transgender woman who, despite her gender identity being acknowledged by the world, is forced by the U.S. to serve out her sentence in an all-male maximum security prison. To be a woman imprisoned among men is a most gendered form of cruel and unusual punishment, but America's hatred and misunderstanding of trans people allows this to be the norm. (more…)

The world's first psychedelic computer enters the universal library. And it all runs in the browser, meaning you'll never have to hunt for Workbench disk images again.

At a rally in Detroit, Donald Trump said "titties" while attempting to say "cities." (more…)

Paper engineer Petrina Case creates miniature sculptures from business cards that, if so desired, may depict the profession listed on the card. She accepts commissions via her Etsy shop: Petrina Case Studio (via Neatorama)

"Scary Lucy," the freakishly grotesque statue of Lucille Ball by sculptor Dave Poulin that for several years stood in her hometown of Celoron, New York, was joined this weekend by artist Carolyn Palmer's lifelike statue."People gasped when she was unveiled and everyone looked so happy," Palmer said.In a 2015 letter to the Hollywood Reporter, Poulin stated that he meant no harm with his more creative depiction."I take full responsibility for 'Scary Lucy,' though by no means was that my intent or did I wish to disparage in any way the memories of the iconic Lucy image," Poulin wrote.According to Celoron Mayor Scott Schrecengost, Scary Lucy will stay put "because it has been such an attraction. "We've had thousands of people here over the past year from all over," he said. "...Even though the other statue is called 'Scary Lucy' or 'Ugly Lucy,' whatever the people want to call it, it's still artwork and not all artwork is beautiful."

Last month a 31-year-old Chinese man who was traveling through Germany realized he lost his wallet in Stuttgart, Germany. The tourist, whose name hasn't been disclosed, tried to ask authorities for a stolen goods form, but ended up filling out a refugee asylum application. This set "machinery in motion that he couldn't get out of," Christoph Schluetermannan, an official with the German Red Cross, told reporters. According to The Guardian:From there, he was sent to Dortmund in northwestern Germany and on to the refugee home in Duelmen. “He simply did what he was told,” Schluetermann said.Schluetermann said he quickly noticed the man because “he was different from the others – very, very helpless.”With help from a translation app and then from a translator at a Chinese restaurant, it became clear that the man wanted to travel on to France and Italy, not seek asylum.It took 12 days before the tourist was set free.

Last week, Andrew Tierney and Ken Munro from Pen Test Partners demoed their proof-of-concept ransomware for smart thermostats, which relies on users being tricked into downloading malware that then roots the device and locks the user out while displaying a demand for one bitcoin. (more…)

University of California San Diego nanoengineers developed a flexible, wearable sensor that measures the blood alcohol level of its wearer and transmits the info to a mobile device. From UCSD News:The device consists of a temporary tattoo—which sticks to the skin, induces sweat and electrochemically detects the alcohol level—and a portable flexible electronic circuit board, which is connected to the tattoo by a magnet and can communicate the information to a mobile device via Bluetooth. The device could be integrated with a car’s alcohol ignition interlocks, or friends could use it to check up on each other before handing over the car keys, he added.“When you’re out at a party or at a bar, this sensor could send alerts to your phone to let you know how much you’ve been drinking,” said Jayoung Kim, a materials science and engineering PhD student."Noninvasive Alcohol Monitoring Using a Wearable Tattoo-Based Iontophoretic-Biosensing System" (ACS Sensors)

Technology cheerleaders love to talk "leapfrogging," the idea that developing regions that haven't adopted traditional technology (like an electrical grid or banking systems) can jump straight to the newest, "better," thing more quickly. Occasionally, that's true, like in parts of Africa where empowering mobile phones took off long before most people had landlines. Now the big idea is that drones will negate the need for roads, and save lives in the process. The Economist presents a more measured view:...Such caveats hardly dampen the mood at business conferences in Africa, where you find hundreds of investors gushing about their plans to help the poor with new technology and make big profits while doing it. “Within the next few years you’ll really see leapfrogging taking off,” says Ashish Thakkar, a British-born, Ugandan businessman whose Mara Group, a business-services firm, is setting up tech businesses across the continent. Perhaps, but tech booms based on leapfrogging have been wrongly anticipated in the past. Americans who turn up in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam with millions of dollars hoping to buy startups that have risen as part of the so-called “Silicon Savannah”, an east African cluster, for example, frequently leave empty-handed because there isn’t all that much to buy.African tech types often think they can quickly copy rich-country products and sell them to the urban middle class. But then they discover that there is no getting around complex tax laws, a dearth of engineers and fragmented markets. The Western investors who back them have even less grasp of just how dysfunctional basic infrastructure can be, notes Ory Okolloh, a Kenyan investor and a political activist. All the evidence suggests that technology firms are no better at leapfrogging such hurdles than, say, a carmaker. The only part of the continent with a mature tech scene is South Africa: a country which also has good roads, reliable power and plenty of well-educated graduates.

Goat Story's 16 oz horn mug is designed to bring a little Viking to your morning cup, with a spillproof lid and a cross-body carry-strap that converts to a stand to allow you to balance your horn of plenty on your desk between swigs. (more…)

I'm still addicted to the Hydraulic Press Channel on YouTube (previously, previously), but am careful only to force you to endure the very best crushings. Here, a roll of duct tape.

Most states being large and empty, the most frequent answer to the question "what is the most common job in your state?" is "truck driver." For everywhere else, teachers and software developers prevail. And where even roads are rare, farmers. Hawaii, though...NPR's map is fascinating, though, in that you can jump back to earlier days. In 1978s, what did we all do before software development was the day job of millions?What's with all the truck drivers? Truck drivers dominate the map for a few reasons.Driving a truck has been immune to two of the biggest trends affecting U.S. jobs: globalization and automation. A worker in China can't drive a truck in Ohio, and machines can't drive cars (yet).Let's see about that in a decade.

"Wife of a Bears' lineman wins a bronze medal today in Rio Olympics," The Chicago Tribune reported Sunday. Sadly, the headline writers were unable to figure out her name before Tweet time, but they eventually did and later credited the wifehood (and the medal) to "Corey Cogdell-Unrein, the wife of Bears lineman Mitch Unrein." (more…)

Enjoy this remarkable montage of the Republican candidate for President of the United States flipping on virtually every position he's drawn breath to hold. His limited vocabulary makes it quite easy to find literal contradictions.

Gordon Tang and Huaidan Chen -- Chinese nationals who live in Singapore -- own a global property speculation and development empire whose US branch is called American Pacific International Capital Inc. They followed a recipe set out in a memo by Charlie Spies, a top Republican lawyer, in order to funnel $1.3M to Jeb Bush's PAC, then Tang offered a reporter for the Intercept $200,000 not to mention that he had been investigated for smuggling, tax evasion and bribery by the Chinese government. (more…)

This is a demonstration of Omote, a real-time face tracking and projection mapping system.

Two Muslim-American women were kicked off an American Airlines flight this week, basically for flying while Muslim. (more…)

Today, the EFF and a coalition of organizations and individuals asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to explore fair labeling rules that would require retailers to warn you when the products you buy come locked down by DRM ("Digital Rights Management" or "Digital Restrictions Management"). (more…)

Sometimes a round of drinks ends in late night karaoke, body shots, and waking up to a tiger in your hotel room. We get it. It happens. The important thing is that we never put ourselves in danger of a dreaded DUI or worse, put others in danger too. Take the guesswork out of it all together, and pick up the BACtrack Trace Pro Breathalyzer.This tiny gadget may look like the contraption your doctor sticks in your ear, but in reality, it's the same kind of breathalyzer cops use to check your BAC. It's quick and easy...just blow into the BACtrack and you’ll have a read on your blood alcohol level within seconds.The simple LCD display shows your results and is totally legible even after a few too many. We especially dug that the unit even holds the results of its last 10 tests for a fun walk down memory lane. We grabbed ours at 38% off the full retail price, bringing the price to just $79.99. That's a whole lot less than a DUI lawyer, so snag yours before this offer runs out.https://youtu.be/jSQctM1Z8m0

No Starch Press just released two nice books. Arduino Project Handbook by Mark Geddes has 25 beginner-friendly projects that use Arduino (a low cost electronic prototyping platform), including a Simon-like memory game, a weather station, and a wireless ID card entry system. Electronics for Kids, by Øyvind Nydal Dahl, starts with an easy-to-grok explanation of voltage and current, and has a lot of practical information about components and tools and instructions on how to use breadboards and a soldering iron. The projects look like fun, too. One is a musical instrument that makes sci-fi sounds, and another is a sunrise-activated alarm clock.Both books are full color throughout and beautifully designed.

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Free Press: Underground and Alternative Publications 1965-1975 by Jean-François Bizot (editor)Universe2006, 264 pages, 9 x 1.1 x 13.5 inches (softcover)$17 Buy one on AmazonThe mid-1960s were an exciting time for art, music, youth culture, society, and politics, all of which were transforming at dizzying speed. The left wing underground press of the time reflected these mind-boggling changes in their design, content, and distribution methods. Underground newspapers from around the world joined the Underground Press Syndicate, sharing articles and illustrations free of copyright restrictions.These papers gleefully taunted the establishment by promoting recreational drugs, recreational sex, black power, gay rights, women’s liberation, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-war activism. The covers of the papers were bold, experimental, and subversive. When I was designing bOING bOING (the late 1980s/early 1990s zine) I was inspired by the precious few samples of The East Village Other, The Realist, and The Gothic Blimp Works that I could find in used bookstores. I wish I’d had a copy of Free Press back then! Almost every page of this book has a full-color photo of a cover or interior page from dozens of well-known and obscure newspapers from the era. Though much of the design is amateurish and ugly, there are examples of brilliance, too, making this a worthy reference for designers.

Bonnie Burton (previously) is a favorite around these parts, thanks both to her keen eye for awesomeness, and her next book, Crafting with Feminism: 25 Girl-Powered Projects to Smash the Patriarchy (Oct 18), looks like a big ole ball of perfect. (with a foreword by Felicia! Day! (never weird!)) (more…)

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

In 2014, undercover Congressional investigators set out to test the countermeasures put in place to test the regulatory system that is supposed to detect and interdict terrorists who are assembling a dirty bomb -- countermeasures set in place after a red team found that it would be easy to do just that in 2007. They found that it was still very easy to beat all the detection systems. (more…)

When computer security expert and hardcore traveller Przemek Jaroszewski found that he couldn't enter an airline lounge in Warsaw because the automated reader mistakenly rejected his boarding card, he wrote a 600-line Javascript program that generated a QR code for "Batholemew Simpson," a business-class traveller on a flight departing that day. (more…)

Japanese architect Daigo Ishii's “Worldwide Tokyo-lization Project” applies a "Tokyo skin" to cities and localities around the world.From Spoon & Tamago, which has more examples:The fascinating project takes elements of Tokyo and applies them to 6 global cities: New York, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Paris, La Paz and Venice. The project, originally produced as a video work, is on display at the 2016 Venice Biennale through November 27, 2016.

Phillip Turner was on his way to court to fight a traffic citation when he noticed a Texas State Trooper speeding past him. Turner followed him, flashing his headlights at the trooper until he pulled over. The trooper apologized to Turner, who recorded the encounter.Turner said on YouTube:I will say this officer was very respectful, honest and owned up to the mistake. He was very professional and I strongly believe this is how officers should behave when they are confronted for doing something wrong. However, the issue I have is that people get citations for speeding all the time I think everyone should be held to the same standards. Throughout all my encounters with police, I believe more cops should mirror his professional attitude.Turner is a police accountability activist. From MyStatesman:Turner typically records police activity for the police accountability news site Photography is Not a Crime. Earlier this year, Turner’s footage helped direct police to a man who Turner saw grip what appeared to be a handgun during a fight downtown on the last night of this year’s South by Southwest Music Festival.Turner is also suing the city of Round Rock and several Round Rock police officers who arrested him for not identifying himself while he was recording in front of the police station.

15 years ago, uptalk was ruining women's speech; five years ago, it was vocal fry (with accompanying, science-free warnings about damage to the larynx and vocal apparatus); in the First Century BC, Romans used the term "Afrania" to refer to unpleasant women: the term was taken from Caia Afrania, the first woman to be allowed to speak before the Roman Senate (Valerius Maximus called it "unnatural yapping," a "bark," and a "constant harassment of the magistrate"). (more…)

Just when you think you've absorbed the full horror of each scene, you notice something new: a plastic eagle or floral linoleum tiles, perhaps, or an electric range with a built-in sink. Wallpaper on the ceiling.

Brother Phil writes, "The Public Defender's Office in Missouri is chronically underfunded by a governor who can always find money for his pet projects. However, they do have the power to draft any lawyer to serve as the defense in a case if they don't have one spare.Guess who just happens to be a lawyer..." (more…)

Kudos to this guy for all the work he had to do to come up with a way to park his car. He is stuck with the particular car model for life, though, because it fits like a glove.

THIS is CNN. (Thanks, UPSO!)