Between 2011-2015, there were more than 800 individual UK police personnel who raided official databases to amuse themselves, out of idle curiosity, or for personal financial gain; and over 800 incidents in which information was inappropriately leaked outside of the police channels. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5DwPgYp6vkA master minecrafter has given us the recursive video gaming experience we didn't know we needed! Amazingly he has made a working GBA emulator, inside Minecraft! The Gameboy works well enough to play "Pokemon Fire Red."Via TechTimes:Nevertheless, it is still very much surprising when gamers continue to find ways to push the limits of Minecraft, and the latest achievement even gives a nod to another popular video game franchise that is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.A YouTuber who goes by the name Reqaug has built a fully functional Gameboy Advance within Minecraft, with the virtual mobile gaming console also capable of playing Pokémon Fire Red.

As Herman Yung says, Sung Jin Jang's animated version of pig processing is "a combination of cute and cuddly and disgustingly horrifying."

Voice actor Scheiffer Bates does uncanny impersonations of your favorite male characters from the Game of Thrones TV series.

In 1996, Finland invented, but never adopted, a harpoon device to stop drivers evading police.It latched onto a fleeing car and, if necessary, released tear gas into the car.

Suddenly camelAfter I saw this gif of a camel biting a news reporter's head, I took a look at other camel videos. A lot of videos on YouTube are about biting camels. Example:https://youtu.be/BHG1l-4ML2sMany videos are even worse.This camel, which is treated with love, has no desire to bite its human friend:https://youtu.be/K9X7zQ6Cb1A

At The New York Times, Peter Wehner is angry at evangelical leaders who rationalize their support of Donald Trump, a faithless huckster who talks of "Two Corinthians" and mocks the disabled.This fulsome embrace of Mr. Trump is rather problematic, since he embodies a worldview that is incompatible with Christianity. If you trace that worldview to its source, Christ would not be anywhere in the vicinity.Time and again Mr. Trump has shown contempt for those he perceives as weak and vulnerable — “losers,” in his vernacular. They include P.O.W.s, people with disabilities, those he deems physically unattractive and those he considers politically powerless. He bullies and threatens people he believes are obstacles to his ambitions. He disdains compassion and empathy, to the point where his instinctive response to the largest mass shooting in American history was to congratulate himself: “Appreciate the congrats for being right.”What Mr. Trump admires is strength. For him, a person’s intrinsic worth is tied to worldly success and above all to power.But that is evangelical Christianity in practice, isn't it? Dobson and Falwell and co., stripping naked at the slightest promise of money or political influence, is what they always do. Whether or not he has read a word of Nietzsche (I’m guessing not), Mr. Trump embodies a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one. ... It celebrates the “Übermensch,” or Superman, who rejects Christian morality in favor of his own. For Nietzsche, strength was intrinsically good and weakness was intrinsically bad. So, too, for Donald Trump.Attributing Trump to Nietzsche? Good Lord. If Christianity is shriveling on the right, is there any question why? Even their pigeonholes are rotten.

(more…)

Helicopter parenting vs. free range parenting? Discuss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2YYEceo1HIOne of Frederick Douglass's most famous speeches was his 1852 "The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro." (more…)

New Jersey public transit was forced to remove the bugs it had installed on its light rail system after a public outcry, but Baltimore's buses and subways remain resolutely under audio surveillance, while in Oakland, the cops hid mics around bus-shelters near the courthouses to capture audio of defendants and their lawyers discussing their cases. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOMLtMSljyANigel Farage, a stock broker who spent years pretending to be a working class lad in a flat cap, has announced that he is quitting as leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party because now that he has "[his] country back" he wants to "get [his] life back." (more…)

I like Primitive Technology (previously) because his videos are completely free of blather, music and tricky editing. (Here's an interview with the "mysterious bushman.") (more…)

As this poll has it, with the margin of error taken into account, Trump may receive minus 1.4% of the black vote. [via]

Oslo wanted to host the 2022 Winter Games, but has decided against it because of the International Olympic Committee's demands for special treatment. The IOC's imperial arrogance and opulence would be amusing—were it not the tip of an iceberg of corruption and despotism that floats from city to city every two years.• They demand to meet the king prior to the opening ceremony. Afterwards, there shall be a cocktail reception. Drinks shall be paid for by the Royal Palace or the local organizing committee.• Separate lanes should be created on all roads where IOC members will travel, which are not to be used by regular people or public transportation.• A welcome greeting from the local Olympic boss and the hotel manager should be presented in IOC members' rooms, along with fruit and cakes of the season. (Seasonal fruit in Oslo in February is a challenge ...)• The hotel bar at their hotel should extend its hours “extra late” and the minibars must stock Coke products.• The IOC president shall be welcomed ceremoniously on the runway when he arrives.• The IOC members should have separate entrances and exits to and from the airport.• During the opening and closing ceremonies a fully stocked bar shall be available. During competition days, wine and beer will do at the stadium lounge.• IOC members shall be greeted with a smile when arriving at their hotel.• Meeting rooms shall be kept at exactly 20 degrees Celsius at all times.• The hot food offered in the lounges at venues should be replaced at regular intervals, as IOC members might “risk” having to eat several meals at the same lounge during the Olympics

My latest Locus column, "Peak Indifference", draws a comparison between the history of the "debate" about the harms of smoking (a debate manufactured by disinformation merchants with a stake in the controversy) and the current debate about the harms of surveillance and data-collection, whose proponents say "privacy is dead," while meaning, "I would be richer if your privacy were dead." (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.What is a Witch by Pamela Grossman (author) and Tin Can Forest (artists)Tin Can Forest2016, 36 pages, 9.0 x 11.75 x 0.25 inchesFrom $20 Buy a copy hereThere are few ideas and words in the popular zeitgeist more mercurial than “witch.” Whether coming from the world’s mythologies, religions, folk tales, the realms of fiction, or from those who embrace it as a real-world religious identity, witch can mean myriad things. There are probably few archetypes more simultaneously romanticized and demonized.This dizzying dream of character and identity is uniquely and creatively expressed in What is a Witch, a sort of comic book grimoire on the subject by witch and author Pamela Grossman and Canadian’s comic-art occultists, Tin Can Forest.

 In just under 40 pages of lush, saturated black art and text, What is a Witch serves as something of a witch’s manifesto. The dreamy, free-form text, interwoven amongst equally dreamy art, attempts to cast a spell over the reader, to bring this complex character more vividly to life. In doing so, it doesn’t really answer the question (note that it’s not posed as one) of what a witch is, but instead, plays with her mercurial identity, dipping in and out of fictional and real-world conceptions and how witches are experienced and self-identified.

 The art and production are really lovely and work to deepen the spell that the book is attempting to cast. The effect of Grossman’s free, often trance-like prose reminded me somewhat of Jack Parson’s famous “We are the Witchcraft” manifesto, another attempt at a poetic conjuring on the identity of the witch. What is a Witch feels like a captured dream to me, one in which the author and artists dutifully recorded what they experienced and shared the results with us. And those results definitely feel touched by magic.

Iain ("an ex-physicist currently working as a data scientist") scraped Dark Lyrics and built a dataset of lyrics to 222,623 songs by 7,364 metal bands, then used traditional natural language processing techniques to analyze them. (more…)

Macedonia's laws define vandalism as a misdemeanor which puts a limit on the jail time faced by participants in a political movement whose symbol is splashes of brightly colored paint. (more…)

Virtual reality gaming and exploration doesn’t have to cost a fortune...you can enjoy a ridiculously cool VR experience for under $20 with the VR Box Virtual Reality headset on sale for $18.99 - 36% off - in the Boing Boing Store.VR Box creates a comfortable headset unit that’s compatible with most smartphone models - just slip in your phone, adjust the easy-to-use Optical Axis Sliding Control to maneuver your 42mm-diameter resin lens and start enjoying VR gaming, apps and videos that immerse you in a 3D world.The unit includes plenty of padding for a comfortable fit on your face with high-quality lens that won’t fatigue your eyes like many other VR headset models.You’ll even get a game controller that connects to your phone and headset via Bluetooth, offering loads of gameplay options that will definitely take your Google Play or Apple Store games to the next level.Usually priced at $30, pick up the VR Box Virtual Reality headset now for the discounted price of just $18.99 before this offer expires.

Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner, a prolific author, and an outspoken activist for peace and human rights. He died Saturday, at 87 years old. (more…)

Hannah Cohen is a 19 year old who is being treated for a brain tumor at Memphis's St Jude's Hospital, who is "partially deaf, blind in one eye, paralyzed, and easily confused" -- and who was subjected to a violent beating during a secondary TSA screening while flying home to Chatanooga, TN for the holidays. (more…)

A Russian home-buyer pulled out of a "agreed offer" of £6.95m for a six bedroom Kensington flat, now it's listed for £6.75m; a three-bedroom in Swiss Cottage is down to £1.05m from &pound1.5m; a £1.1m 2-bedroom in Whitechapel is now £720,000; a 2bm maisonette in Notting Hill fell from £1.59m to £1.35mk; a £1.3m 5br in St. Reatham is down to £850,000 and estate agents have mutually agreed to go back to calling it Streatham. (more…)

No, you can't kill civilian noncombatants with them. We only sell happy fun drones. (more…)

Gawker's Ashley Feinberg reports on rumors that Donald Trump, presumptive Republican candidate for U.S. President, is on "cheap speed."...according to a source with knowledge of Trump’s current prescriptions, that letter isn’t telling the whole story. Most notably: Donald Trump is allegedly still taking speed-like diet pills.Rumors of Trump’s predilection for stimulants first started really popping up in 1992, when Spy magazine wrote, “Have you ever wondered why Donald Trump has acted so erratically at times, full of manic energy, paranoid, garrulous? Well, he was a patient of Dr. [Joseph] Greenberg’s from 1982 to 1985.” At the time, Dr. Greenberg was notorious for allegedly doling out prescription stimulants to anyone who could pay.Previously: Hitler was injected with all sorts of crazy drugs

Elizabeth Warren is on fire in this speech at a New America Open Markets conference on monopolies this week in DC; Senator Warren is pitiless, lucid and laser focused on the way that corruption creates monopolies, and monopolies suborn corruption. (more…)

At Blue Hill, Maine's George Stevens Academy, there lies a Twinkie that was the subject of teacher Roger Bennatti's 1976 science lesson on chemical preservatives and shelf life. Now the immortal snack cake sits in a glass case on the desk of the school's Dean of Students Libby Rosemeier who was a student in the class when the experiment began. “It’s really funny that we’re this wonderful coastal community in Maine, and we have this school of 325 kids that is a gem and we’re doing great things and kids are going to great colleges, and the thing people know about us is this 40-year-old Twinkie,” Rosemeier told ABC News.Hostess did not respond to ABC News's request for a comment on the miracle of the everlasting golden spongecake with creamy filling.(via Weird Universe)

The US imprisons more people than any other country in history, both as a total number and as a proportion of its population; a White House data-mining effort proposes to set free prisoners who are "low risk," which is something we can all get behind. (more…)

One would hope that if a two-year-old child spit on a stranger, his or her parents would swiftly apologize and take the child out of spitting range from any other human in the vicinity. But this wasn't the case on a flight from Spain to Liverpool, England. The boy, who was with his parents and siblings, began spitting at people who were ready to board the Ryanair flight from Spain. His parents looked the other way. Then the boy's "unruly" behavior continued on the plane, and when passengers complained, the boy's mother became aggressive and unruly as well. According to Liverpool Echo:“At the baggage carousel, passengers were telling us how a boy had been spitting at people in the Barcelona departure lounge, they’d asked the parents to intervene, and the mum took exception to that.“This behaviour carried on when on the plane, threats were made by her, and there was aggression towards the Ryanair stewards.“It was all pretty surreal.”When the plane landed, the family of five was escorted off the plane by police, and the mother was given a "strongly worded warning" from Ryanair officials. Nobody was arrested, but the mother was banned from flying Ryanair again.

In the early 1970s, Princeton University physicist Gerard O’Neill became a space activist touting plans to build human colonies in outer space. He argued that humans could escape (while helping alleviate) the environmental damage we are causing on Earth by migrating to space habitats housed in cylinders that would be suspended 250,000 miles from Earth at LaGrange Point 5, a spot where the gravitational forces enable objects to just hang there. O'Neill's ideas, while controversial, were mostly sound from a scientific and engineering perspective. After the New York Times published a front page article about O'Neill, he became a media sensation and quickly developed a very vocal following of space geeks, (some) environmentalists, heads, and future-minded scientists. NASA even jumped in, supporting studies based on O'Neill's research and commissioning the incredible illustrations seen here. O'Neill's specific concepts influenced countless science fiction books and movies and were the seed of bOING bOING patron saint Timothy Leary's plan for humanity's future, SMI2LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension.) His book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space is still in-print and captures the wonder and sense of possibility that permeated our culture after the first moon landing and into the 1970s. It's my hope that today's myriad private efforts to make space accessible will re-ignite that desire in everyone to explore and experience what lies beyond our home planet.The fantastic podcast 99% Invisible told O'Neill's story in an episode titled "Home on Lagrange":

The Obama administration today “partially lifted the secrecy that has cloaked one of the United States’s most contentious tactics for fighting terrorists,” as the New York Times puts it, and revealed that it believes U.S. airstrikes conducted outside established war zones like Afghanistan have killed as many as 116 civilian bystanders. The administration says it also killed an additional 2,500 people in those non-war-zones who were members of terrorist groups. (more…)

I think this truck is owned by Tyme Sefari, Inc.

Here's a gallery of stuff people bought online, only to receive something that was too small, too crappy, or completely unexpected.

Apple has rejected Spotify's latest app for inclusion in the Ios App Store, citing its rules against app vendors processing their own payments; Apple requires software vendors to pay to use Apple's own payment processor -- which collects hefty commissions -- in their apps. (more…)

When it comes to accessing public websites, Tor has an intrinsic security problem: though the nodes between your computer and the public internet are unable to see where the traffic is coming from or going to, the final hop in the network (known as an exit node) gets to know what webserver you are connecting to. (more…)

Amnesty International reports a "huge increase" in the number of people killed by police in Rio de Janeiro in the run up to the Summer Games.According to new figures from Brazil’s Public Security Institute, in the city of Rio alone 40 people were killed by on-duty police officers in May: an increase of 135% on the same period last year, when 17 were people killed by police. Across Rio state as a whole, police killings almost doubled, from 44 to 84.The 2016 Olympics are shaping up to be quite the trainwreck: a government meltdown, a doping scandal that may see Russia's entire team banned, and a public health crisis likely to convince many athletes, media and tourists to stay away.

Kokichi Sugihara's Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion was a finalist of the Best Illusion of the Year Contest 2016. Do you know how it works? Here's the explanation, via a guy with a 3D printer:https://youtu.be/SKpOKXAVjGoYou can even buy one!

David McCandless, a data-journalist, information designer, and author of several terrific data visualization books, created this infographic that dispels over 50 oft-repeated myths.[via]

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the state lacks the authority to limit a woman's reasons for ending pregnancy.Judge Tanya Walton Pratt granted an injuction against an Indiana law that banned abortions sought because of fetal abnormalities, and which mandated funeral rituals for aborted fetuses.Pratt said the Indiana law would go against U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have declared states may not prohibit a woman from seeking an abortion before a fetus is able to live outside the womb. She also said the state had not cited any exceptions to that standard."This is unsurprising given that it is a woman's right to choose an abortion that is protected, which, of course, leaves no room for the state to examine the basis or bases upon which a woman makes her choice," Pratt wrote. ... The lawsuit also challenges the law's provision requiring that aborted fetuses be buried or cremated. Planned Parenthood currently disposes of remains by incineration, as with other medical tissue. Pratt's ruling blocks the burial or cremation requirement from taking effect.It's been a rough week for anti-abortion campaigners: the Supreme Court also struck down a Texas law requiring clinics to meet hospital criteria.

It's hard to tell. Or, it could be Gallagher with a watermelon.

"We don't believe this is a gun issue, this is a terrorism issue and this is an act against American citizens," says Bert Irslinger, Jr., owner of Second Amendment Sports, a gun shop in McHenry, Illinois. Irslinger said he is going to donate $2,000 in addition to the raffle sales for an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle raffle to the OneOrlando Fund. The mass murderer used an AR-15 to kill victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre.From ABC 7:Kathleen Larimer of Crystal Lake is also upset. Her son John was among the 12 people shot and killed in the 2012 Colorado movie theater massacre."If you lose somebody to drunk driving, you wouldn't raise money by raffling off cases of alcohol. It's just, it's wrong. It's in poor taste," she says.

Madagascar, one of the world's poorest nations, is led by president Hery Rajaonarimampianina, who infuriated his people by insisting that the economy was doing well and that naysayers couldn't "provide evidence that the country was getting poorer." (more…)

Twitter user LDLDN posted this image of a racist National Front poster on a lamppost in Camden, a neighborhood in north London -- a relatively affluent, diverse neighborhood dominated by a giant subculture market, two huge train stations (St Pancras and King's Cross), a university, and the British Library. (more…)

Why would Alcott Smith, at the time nearly seventy, affable and supposedly of sound mind, a blue-eyed veterinarian with a whittled-down woodman’s frame and lupine stamina, abruptly change his plans (and clothes) for a quiet Memorial Day dinner with his companion, Lou-Anne, and drive from his home in New Hampshire to New York State, north along the western rim of a wild lake, to a cabin on a corrugated dirt lane called Porcupine Hollow? Inside the cabin fifteen men quaffed beer, while outside a twenty-five- inch rattlesnake with a mouth full of porcupine quills idled in a homemade rabbit hutch. It was the snake that had interrupted Smith’s holiday dinner.Excerpted from Ted Levin's America's Snake. Available from Amazon.Because of a cascade of consequences there aren’t many left in the Northeast: timber rattlesnakes are classified as a threatened species in New York and an endangered species everywhere in New England except Maine and Rhode Island where they’re already extinct. They could be gone from New Hampshire before the next presidential primary. Among the cognoscenti it’s speculated whether timber rattlesnakes ever lived in Quebec; they definitely did in Ontario, where rattlesnakes inhabited the sedimentary shelves of the Niagara Gorge but eventually died off like so many failed honeymoons consummated in the vicinity of the falls.That rattlesnakes still survive in the Northeast may come as a big surprise to you, but that they have such an impassioned advocate might come as an even bigger surprise. Actually, rattlesnakes have more than a few advocates, both the affiliated and the unaffiliated, and as is so often the case, this is a source of emotional and political misunderstandings, turf battles and bruised egos. As you may have guessed already, Alcott Smith is a timber rattlesnake advocate, an obsessive really, who inhabits the demilitarized zone between the warring factions. How else to explain this spur-of-the-moment, four-hour road trip?By the time Smith arrived, the party had been percolating for a while. Larry Boswell opened the door. As he spoke, a silver timber rattlesnake embossed on an upper eyetooth caught the light. Boswell owned the cabin and access to a nearby snake den, a very healthy one, where each October the unfortunate rattlesnake outside, following its own prehistoric biorhythms, had crawled down a crevice and spent more than half the year below the frost line dreaming snake dreams. Porcupines also favor sunny slopes, which likely is how the two met, one coiled and motionless and the other blundering forward.You’d think that after thousands of years of cohabitation on the sunny, rocky slopes of the Northeast, rattlesnakes and porcupines might have worked things out, but not so. No doubt, both animals instinctually took a defensive stance, and whether the snake struck and quills came out, or the startled porcupine lashed the snake with its pincushion tail both had been severely compromised. Without Smith’s help, the rattlesnake might have been doomed to starve as the quills festered. Ailing snakes die slowly, very slowly. One western diamondback is reported to have survived (and grown longer) in a wooden box for eighteen months without food and water, and a timber rattlesnake from Massachusetts lived twelve months (in and out of captivity), with its face consumed by a white gelatin-like fungus, a Quasimodo in the Blue Hills.The cabin was small, dank, poorly lit. There wasn’t a sober individual in the group. Lou-Anne thought of Deliverance, and all evening she stood by the front door. Smith examined the snake and found fifteen quills embedded inside its mouth, which curled back a corner of the upper lip and perforated the margin of the glottis, gateway to the lungs, compromising both the snake’s breathing and its eating while protecting the outside world from the business end of the fabled, hollow (and grossly misunderstood) fangs. Essentially, the snake’s mouth had been pinned open. Although this was a rattlesnake-tolerant (if not friendly) group, Smith wasn’t about to trust any of their less-than- steady hands to hold the animal. With imaginary blinkers on, Smith worked on a cleared-off coffee table in the middle of the cabin, with the overly supportive crowd keyed to every nuance. Smith gripped the head with one hand and pulled quills with the other, while the snake’s dark, thick torso sluggishly undulated across the coffee table. Slowly, methodically, he plucked each quill with a hemostat, and the men, who had tightened into a knot around the coffee table, cheered, toasted, chugged. After the last quill was pulled, the ebullient crowd roared approvingly, and the snake was returned to the hutch. Eight-years later, Lou-Anne, still jazzed by the potpourri of emotions, intensity, and images of that night, remembers feeling “relieved to have left there alive” as the couple returned home on the morning side of midnight.The timber rattlesnake had been discovered several days before the tabletop surgery. Three of the unaffiliated herpetological adventurers—a couple from Connecticut and a man from northern Florida—had concluded an annual spring survey of the bare-bone outcrops behind the cabin. There, in the remote foothills above the shores of a narrow valley, where a wild brook strings together a series of beaver ponds, is one of the most isolated series of rattlesnake dens in the Northeast, perhaps in the entire country. (The word infested might come to more discriminatory minds.) For me, seeing those small, gorgeous pods of snakes basking in the October sunshine is stunning, a natural history right of passage, sort of like a bar mitzvah without the rabbi.Beside the rattlesnakes, the trio found a fresh porcupine carcass in the rocks, unblemished, and on their way back down the mountain, they found the quilled snake, coiled loosely in a small rock pile one hundred fifty feet behind the cabin, last snake of the afternoon. The rock pile was at the base of a corridor, a bedrock groove in the side of the mountain that rattlesnakes use as a seasonal pathway from the den to the wooded shore and back. The cabin’s unkempt backyard is a veritable (and historic) snake thoroughfare. One of these three, a man who calls himself Diamondback Dave, thought he could pull the quills. Well known in the small, fervid circle of snake enthusiasts, Diamondback Dave maintains the website Fieldherping .com, where, among scores of photographs posted of himself (and a few friends) holding various large and mostly venomous snakes, you can view a full-frame picture of his bloody hand, the injury compliments of a recalcitrant banded water snake. You can also read synopses of field trips and random journalistic entries like this one:I had a meeting with the director of a wildlife conservation society to discuss strategies on protecting rattlesnake populations in Eastern North America. What turned out was a weird combination of trespass warnings and a lengthy and unnecessary lecture on going back to school and finishing my degree, so that I could make 80,000 a year . . . welcome to the new age of Academic Wildlife Exploitation! . . . Business as usual.Although in the spring of 2003, Diamondback Dave had never “pinned” a snake, a term that means immobilizing a venomous reptile’s head against the ground using any of a number of implements—snake hook, snake stick, forked branch, golf putter, and so forth—heconvinced his two friends that he knew what he was doing. He did. Once the rattlesnake was pinned, Diamondback Dave directed his female companion to hold the body. Three visible quills protruded several inches from a corner of the snake’s mouth, fixed like miniature harpoons with their barbed tips. Dave’s efforts to pull them proved fruitless, however; not wanting to risk further injury to the snake, he released it.On their way back to the car, they reported the incident to Boswell, who returned the following day and transferred the rattlesnake from rock pile to rabbit hutch. In his spare time, Boswell taught police officers and game wardens how to safely catch and relocate nuisance snakes, and he had been issued a permit by New York Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) to harbor them on a temporary basis. This snake needed more than he could offer, though, so the next afternoon, Boswell phoned Alcott Smith.After surgery, the timber rattlesnake recuperated in the hutch on Larry’s side of the bed. Three weeks later, when it was able to swallow a chipmunk, the snake was returned to the rock pile, where it immediately disappeared into a jumble of sun-heated stones. Today, the quilled snake can be found on Dave’s glitzy website among a host of other photographs. Just scroll down to the image labeled “Spike.”___________When it comes to eliciting empathy, it’s the back of line for rattlesnakes, creatures seemingly with, face it, not much personality. One could argue that our squeamishness at the sight of a snake began with the story of the Garden of Eden in the book of Genesis, but it also may be coded in our genes, suggests Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson. Humans, says Wilson, could be hardwired to fear snakes. In Africa, where our closest primate kin have multiple predators to fear, chimpanzees have been observed shadowing dangerous snakes at a safe distance, staring and hollering. Charles Darwin even weighed in on the issue of ophidiophobia: “I took a stuffed snake into the monkey-house, and the hair on several of the species instantly became erect,” he wrote in 1872 in The Descent of Man. Though timber rattlesnakes rarely harm humans or domesticated animals, Americans nevertheless have a long history of organized efforts to collect and eliminate them.In 1680, a Massachusetts hunter could earn two shillings a day killing timber rattlesnakes, and beginning in 1740, Massachusetts chose one day each fall for a community-wide hunt, called a rattlesnake bee, which took place in towns across the state. In 1810, hunters in Pennsylvania strapped powder horns to rattlesnakes, lit them, and released them back into their dens; in 1849, in Madison County, Iowa, teams competed for the most snakes killed. The prize for the winning team: two bushels of corn. Bounties were paid for rattlesnakes in New York and Vermont into the early 1970s.Twenty-five years ago, I visited a Vermont town clerk to examine old bounty records. “Why,” she asked, “would anyone care?” That was a hard question to answer. I had just driven an hour and a half to learn something about the snakes and the people of western Vermont, maybe something about the hard-rock ledges. I found it difficult to articulate what I was after. She pressed me again.“It’s not every day someone comes here to talk about snakes. Idon’t even know where that book is.”She apparently found it hard to say the word rattlesnake.“I saw one this spring, crossing the road near the Blatsky River. I can’t stand to look at ’em.”A man in a three-piece suit walked into the clerk’s office. He was in a hurry.“Hey, Bob,” the clerk said, “This guy wants to know about rattlesnakes.” Finally, she had said the word, hanging on to the a’s and t’s as though she were shaking a castanet. (Until that moment, I hadn’t thought of the word rattle or rattlesnake onomatopoetically.) Bob apparently didn’t like rattlesnakes, either. He said he had killed one in East Steeple, not far from Crystal Lake, a couple years previously. Whacked off its head with a hoe.No one wanted to touch the bounty book, so I collected it myself. What I found was that between 1899 and 1904, two hundred forty-one timber rattlesnakes were bountied, a dollar a piece. The earliest bounty was paid on May 9, and the latest on October 19. Of the two hundred forty-one snakes listed, sixty-two were killed between May 9 and May 31, and one hundred fifty-four after August 21, when the snakes, including the neonates, had returned to their dens. This seasonal pattern confirmed that timber rattlesnakes go to bed early and wake up late.One snake hunter, Andy Howard, collected the one-dollar bounty on one hundred ninety-six rattlesnakes during that five-year period. According to the town clerk, Andy liked liquor, and the bounty payments warmed the long, cold winters, so he made it his business to find snake dens. On September 13, 1902, he killed thirty-seven rattlesnakes.Only twenty-five snakes were bountied from early June to mid-August. This is not too surprising. Timber rattlesnakes need the ice to melt and the soil to warm before they are ready to expend energy on growth, to leave the vicinity of their dens for the wooded ridge, where they lie in wait for mice and chipmunks. To find one in summer is a matter of chance. Great chance.There were no records from 1905 through 1947. After 1947, sixty-four snakes were killed in a twenty-year period, ending in 1967. With so few snakes to record, the bounty book began noting the length of each snake and the number of rattles segments: the longest was four-and- a- half feet.In some regions of the country snake killing is still sanctioned. As recently as 1989, Clairemont, Texas (now a ghost town), held its forty-first and final Peace Officers Rattlesnake Shoot, in which law-enforcement officials and other contestants competed for points by shooting live rattlesnakes. A shooter was awarded ten points for a head shot, five for a body shot; prizes were given for five categories: masters, first place, second place, third place, and guest._________Several years ago, Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, New Hampshire, exhibited the watercolors of George Catlin, a native Pennsylvanian who traveled throughout the nineteenth-century American West painting the lives of Plains Indians. Catlin’s subjects engaged the landscape—hunting bison, praying and dancing, preparing food, pitching tepees in the shadows of great mountains and along the shores of winding rivers.Not all the watercolors in the exhibit celebrated the West, however. In one painting, Catlin depicted his own home ground, the green woods and rocky ledges above the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania. The time is early May. Dozens of timber rattlesnakes lounge on the rocks, basking in the sunshine, while two men attack them with clubs and guns. A boy, perhaps the artist himself, stands in the background, screened by foliage, watching, waiting his turn.Catlin’s chance eventually came. On another occasion, the artist, known for his sensitivity to vanishing cultures, allegedly destroyed a Pennsylvania den by strapping a powder horn to the tail of a rattlesnake. He lit the fuse and released the snake into the talus, towing the bomb behind it.More than one hundred fifty years have passed since Catlin painted the snake hunt, yet these timid serpents still evoke the same fear and loathing that motivated the destruction of America’s other predators. We’ve since made our peace with most of these—bald and golden eagles, wolves, and catamounts, the alligators and crocodiles, the silver-tipped grizzlies. Why not with the rattlesnake Decades ago, we stopped slaughtering hawks and owls. We welcomed gray wolves back to Yellowstone, red wolves to South Carolina, and black-footed ferrets to the Northern Plains. Today, we celebrate jaguars in Arizona, ocelots in South Texas, and great white sharks off Cape Cod, and we commiserate with the plight of polar bears swimming to exhaustion in the Beaufort Sea. But when the subject turns to timber rattlesnakes, we are collectively and decidedly pigheaded about their future; trying to sell an ophidiophobe the merits of rattlesnakes is as difficult as trying to convince a member of Red Sox Nation on the merits of the Yankees. Timber rattlesnakes are perceived as bad to the bone. Even those who care can’t agree on the best way to ensure survival of the snakes; worse, it is difficult for the different factions even to hear each other’s concerns.Forty years after Kauffeld’s death, timber rattlesnakes, which are not inherently aggressive—just unforgiving of being mishandling—are still pursued by both collectors and persecutors, and face a litany of other problems ranging from isolated colonies, depleted gene pools, and inbreeding—a prescription for local extinction—to fatal fungal infections, climate change, automobile traffic, and political paralysis. Timber rattlesnakes, which are as American as apple pie, still live a short drive from Boston, Hartford, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Richmond, Saint Louis, and Minneapolis, which says something about their passive nature, their secretive ways, and the breadth of their evolutionary adaptations, which allows them to count among their immediate neighbors, animals as geographically disparate as peccaries, alligators, and moose.The story of the timber rattlesnake (America’s snake) is as much a story of human attitudes—good and bad, but rarely indifferent—and of places—pockets of wildness between the Atlantic and the west bank of the Mississippi—as it is the story of a snake.A former Bronx Zoo zoologist, Ted Levin is the author of Blood Brook: A Naturalist’s Home Ground, Backtracking: The Way of the Naturalist, and Liquid Land: A Journey through the Everglades, which won the Burroughs Medal in 2004. He has written for Sports Illustrated, Audubon, National Wildlife, National Geographic Traveler, and other publications.

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Ganked from Kilomonster on imgur: [Enjoy my massive, steamy doodle-gif dump!]. There are 253 doodle GIFs in the original imgur gallery. (more…)

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) today said it is opening a preliminary investigation into 25,000 Tesla Model S cars, following the death of a driver who was killed using the vehicle's Autopilot mode. (more…)

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Today, The Intercept published leaked documents that contain the FBI’s secret rules for targeting journalists and sources with National Security Letters (NSLs)—the controversial and unconstitutional warrantless tool the FBI uses to conduct surveillance without any court supervision whatsoever. (more…)

Dangerous Minds posted Jordan Peele's amazing word-for-word, gesture-for-gesture re-enactment of James Brown's infamous drug-and-or-boozed enhanced CNN interview from 1987.Here's the original:https://youtu.be/9tfNhL_R_rI