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The Life of Dad posted a challenge: how many cheerios can you stack on your sleeping baby? It looks like 18 is the record. A video posted by Angelica Evans (@iam_angelicaa_mua) on Jun 17, 2016 at 8:00am PDT A photo posted by Life of Dad (@lifeofdad) on Jun 16, 2016 at 8:32pm PDT A photo posted by Life of Dad (@lifeofdad) on Jun 17, 2016 at 6:32am PDT A photo posted by Lorena Ruiz (@lorena592) on Jun 16, 2016 at 9:16pm PDT A photo posted by Joe Noack (@joenoack) on Jun 17, 2016 at 7:07am PDT "Challenge accepted. 17 Cheerios and 17 hours in the making / photo capture!! #cheeriochallenge" - #LifeofDad user, Craig Stanley A photo posted by Life of Dad (@lifeofdad) on Jun 17, 2016 at 10:17am PDT A photo posted by @tmitasha on Jun 17, 2016 at 8:26am PDT

Despite a couple of recent outliers, Donald Trump's polling is grim: 94% unfavorability among black voters being one new number doing the rounds. It's so dire, in fact, Hillary appears set to win in a landslide despite her own shortcomings. Jeet Heer:Trump’s manic, narcissistic, and immature response to the Orlando massacre has been a key turning point—or, looked at another way, a final straw. Just as Republican elites were learning to live with Trump, so long as he kept his promise to act more “presidential,” he’s now made it clear that he’ll continue to be the same old Trump the world has known for decades. The result is that elected Republican officials are starting to un-endorse Trump or say they won’t back his presidential bid. Republican governors in Maryland, Michigan, and Massachusetts have all said they won’t vote for Trump.

Compare Fruits is your one-stop shop for comparing fruit. Whether you are comparing bananas with plantains, lemons with limes, or, indeed, apples with oranges, it has all you need for your fruit-comparison needs. (Warning: nutritional woo, but no worse than gadget spec woo) [via]

"The UroClub is the discrete, sanitary way for your urgent relief. Created by a Board Certified Urologist, it looks like an ordinary golf club, but contains a reservoir built into the grip to relieve yourself. The UroClub is leak proof, easy to clean and no more embarrassing moments."

Takehito Etani made a beeping artistic contraption called The Masticator that tracks his food chewing. In 2005, he used it at an Arby's, drawing funny looks from from fellow restaurant patrons.

Luggage is fine...but having the right duffel? That’s key. If you’re on the go, the portability, durability and versatility of slinging a good ol' duffel over your shoulder can’t be beaten. There's a reason the Bomber Barrel Duffel Bag was Kickstarter’s most funded bag ever. Find out for yourself with a Complete Bomber Barrel Duffel Bag Set, on sale now for just $59.99 (70% off) in the Boing Boing Store.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hoq4bGnHjqY&w=560&h=315]The lightweight design sports weather-resistant material, waterproof zippers, military-grade clips, and rivet-reinforced carry handles. It'll take everything the world throws at it...and come back for more.Its design features inner and outer pockets for securing both big and small essentials, as well as a padded quick release shoulder strap. Plus, the bag comes with an accompanying travel kit for shorter excursions.Own a duffel as reliable as it is functional for a whopping 70% off its retail price while this deal lasts. And while you're at it, enter to win an absolutely free Macbook to go inside your snazzy new duffel. Act fast for your chance at a premium laptop worth almost $1,300 (you know you want to).

Lam Wing Kee, one of the dissident Hong Kong booksellers who was kidnapped to the mainland by Chinese spies, only to surface on TV confessing to "illegal trading," now says he was forced into the confession. (Image: BBC)

In 2013, the Supreme Court heard Kirtsaeng, a copyright case brought by the publisher Wiley, who argued that legal books became illegal when brought into America, because their copyright licenses were nation-specific. (more…)

As the fight over the FCC's Unlock the Box plan heats up, the cable and satellite TV companies have pulled out all the stops in a bid to force you to continue spending more than $200/year to rent an insecure, power-hungry, badly designed set-top box, rather than introducing competition by letting you buy your cable-box on the open market. (more…)

If youth unemployment -- and the lack of good entry-level jobs for college grads -- was being driven by workplace automation, American productivity (value created per hour worked) would be soaring, rather than stagnating. (more…)

Everyone hates Nazis. For decades they've been the go-to villains for movies that need bad guys. With the modern sensitivity toward Native Americans, Russians and other traditional villains of American screenwriting, I predict we will see a resurgence in film and television with lots more nasty Nazis. The Man in the High Castle, anyone?So what could be more fun than a gift whose function perfectly follows its form than this candle of that nasty Nazi rat-bastard SS agent Arnold Ernst Toht, Gestapo agent? The little weasel gets his well-deserved comeuppance in perfect style when his face melts off like hot butter, when the hell hiding in the Ark of the Covenant is unleashed at the end of first Indiana Jones flick Raiders of the Lost Ark.You gotta love this candle! Let's watch his soul get sucked out of his stinking Nazi skull with the flick of a match. Available from Firebox for a mere $28.39 in the UK (hence the odd price), I really have to buy two: one to keep, and one to melt.

Mein Kampf was about to enter the public domain in Germany, removing the country's preferred copyright-based method for keeping it away from readers' hearts and minds. There's no chance of them just letting it be available (as is done in the UK, US and Israel), but they didn't want to ban it outright, martyring Hitler afresh. Instead they favored what the BBC describes as "a heavily paternalistic approach": publishing a nigh-unreadable "critical edition" in the hopes that it would be too cumbersome to be popular. This not only failed, but ensured a constant stream of discussion and drama to keep it on the bestseller list.[The publishers'] director, Andreas Wirsching, declared that it would be irresponsible to hand over Mein Kampf "free of copyright and commentary", because in that case everybody could do whatever they wanted with Hitler's book. ...If anything public interest in the book was fanned unnecessarily by keeping the aura of the forbidden alive.By mid-April, Mein Kampf had managed to move to the pole position of Germany's influential Spiegel bestseller list, where it remained for several weeks.Even now it stands in 14th place, though many bookshops do not have the book on display and others only order the book on request.This renewed calls to stop being so controlling and just let Hitler's long, boring rant die in the public domain.

Illustration of a microburst The air moves in a downward motion until it hits ground level. It then spreads outward in all directions. The wind regime in a microburst is opposite to that of a tornado." srcset="http://i2.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Microburstnasa.jpg?w=641 641w, http://i2.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Microburstnasa.jpg?resize=300%2C232 300w, http://i2.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Microburstnasa.jpg?resize=600%2C464 600w" sizes="(max-width: 641px) 100vw, 641px" />https://youtu.be/b_WmjWAGkLIAccording to Wikipedia, a microburst is a "small downdraft that moves in a way opposite of a tornado." This video shows a microburst causing two small glider planes to spontaneously take to the air, causing the fellows in the air traffic control tower to use naughty words. I wish I could find out more information about the incident.

In a new Tested.com video, Adam Savage celebrates the upcoming National Week of Making that the White House is hosting again this year. To kick off his week in the sort of unique way that only Adam Savage can, he has been asking his social media followers to tag pictures of their personal workspaces, the happy places where they go to create something from nothing.In the video above, he shows off a number of these wonderfully diverse shops (see a few below) and talks passionately about the joys of making and how we should all yield to the hands-on imperative.The National Week of Making kicks off on Friday and includes the second annual National Maker Faire, which will take place on Saturday and Sunday at the UDC-Van Ness campus in the District of Columbia. This is one of Maker Media's full-blown flagship events, joining the long-running Maker Faire Bay Area and World Maker Faire in New York. Unlike those events, the National Maker Faire is free to the public. You can find out more about the National Week of Making and how to get involved on the event's official website.

Last month's research report on work-hours for high-paid salaried workers from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth paints a picture of a nation where even the winners are losers. (more…)

MONSTRUM founders Ole Barslund Nielsen and Christian Jensen create imaginative story-based playgrounds in their native Denmark and around the world. A few examples below: (more…)

Ryan Holiday's Ego is the Enemy is available from Amazon.A few months ago, Chief Medicine Crow, one of the last remaining links to the Indian tribes of the wild west died at age 102. He had grown up hearing stories about George Armstrong Custer from his grandfather, who'd been a scout for the doomed general at Little Bighorn in 1876. A soldier himself in the Second World War, Medicine Crow was one of the last Crows to ever accomplish the four deeds required to be considering a war chief (command a war party, steal an enemy horse, touch an enemy without killing him and taking an enemy's weapon).He was a fascinating man, not just for what he did but also for what he represents to us now. He was, to use a phrase coined by Jason Kottke, a "human wormhole." His unusual and long live is a reminder to how connected the past and present really are. A curator at the Smithsonian described meeting Medicine Crow as "you're shaking hands with the 19th century." Which an amazing concept. A few intrepid historians on reddit recently discovered an even more amazing one, calculating that it would take a chain of just six individuals who shook hands with one another to connect Barack Obama to George Washington across the centuries (Obama ->Queen Elizabeth II -> Herbert Hoover -> William H. Taft -> Benjamin Harrison -> William Henry Harrison -> Benjamin Harrison V -> George Washington).I've become fascinated with discovering and tracking some of these reminders. For some time now, I've kept a file of them on 4x6 notecards in my house. My friends and I email these moments to each other as we find them -- some absurd (Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman may have hooked up), coincidental (Orson Welles claimed to have been in the Biograph Theater in Chicago where John Dillinger was killed by the FBI) and some that are so unbelievable that they might just blow your mind (there's a video from a 1956 CBS game show, "I've Got a Secret," with a very old guest whose secret was that he was in Ford's Theatre when Lincoln was assassinated. Appearing with him on the show? Lucille Ball.)Here in modern life, it's easy to think the past is dead and distant, until we bump up against the reality of Faulkner's admonition that it's not really even past. England's government only recently paid off debts it incurred as far back as 1720 from events like the South Sea Bubble, the Napoleonic wars, the empire's abolition of slavery, and the Irish potato famine -- meaning that for more than a decade and a half of the twenty first century there was still a direct and daily connection to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (The US is still paying pensions related to both the Civil War and the Spanish-American War.)I'll share a few more wormholes before I get to my point -- because I promise there is more to this than just strange trivia. Did you know that Tom Pratt, a football coach whose team the Arizona Cardinals narrowly missed going to the Super Bowl in 2015, was also on the coaching staff for the Kansas City Chiefs in the very first Super Bowl fifty years ago? Or that there are whales alive today who were born before Melville published Moby Dick? Or the world's oldest tortoise, Jonathan, lives on an island in the Atlantic and is 183 years old? Or that President John Tyler, born in 1790, who took office just ten years after little Jonathan was born, still has living grandchildren?War is perhaps the strangest source of these anomalies. Did you know that Winston Churchill and James Bond creator Ian Fleming's father fought in the same unit in WWI? When Fleming's father was killed, Churchill wrote his obituary. General Simon Bolivar Buckner was a Confederate general in the Civil War (he surrendered to Grant at Fort Donelson). His son Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr also became a General, and he died at Okinawa some 83 years later. General MacArthur -- his father, Arthur MacArthur, Jr. -- was a Civil War hero for the Union. Stonewall Jackson had a granddaughter who lived to be 104. She died in 1991. In high school, a promising young student at the Virginia Military Institute named George Marshall petitioned the president for a military commission. Which President did the creator of the Marshall plan petition? William McKinley (just months before man's life was cut short by an assassin's bullet.) And most unbelievably, what of the fact that Robert Todd Lincoln was present as his father died of assassination, was at the train station with President James Garfield was assassinated, and was in attendance at the event in which McKinley was assassinated? Three assassinations, spread out over 40 years. Robert Todd Lincoln himself lived to be 82, dying in 1926. He could have read stories published by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He drove in a car. He talked on the telephone. He would have heard jazz music.And these are just the events of the so called modern history. We forget that woolly mammoths walked the earth while the pyramids were being built. We don't realize that Cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did to the construction of those famous pyramids that marked her kingdom. We forget that Ovid and Jesus were alive at the same time. When British workers excavated the land in Trafalgar Square to build Nelson's Column and its famous bronze lions, in the ground they found the bones of actual lions, who'd roamed that exact spot just a few thousand years before. The effect of these stories -- after the novelty wears off -- is an intense humbling. We like to think that we are special -- that we live in blessed, unprecedented times. It's this self-absorption that disconnects us from the universe we belong to. It's unthinking ego that makes us assume that because the photos of the past were in black and white, that the past itself was too. Obviously, it wasn't -- their sky was the same color as ours (in some places brighter than ours), they bled the same way we did, and their cheeks got flushed just like ours do. "Think by way of example on the times of Vespasian," wrote the wise Marcus Aurelius some 1900 years ago, "and you'll see all these things: marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, wars, holiday feasts, commerce, farming, flattering, pretending, suspecting, scheming, praying that others die, grumbling over one's lot, falling in love, amassing fortunes, lusting after office and power. Now that life of theirs is dead and gone... the times of Trajan, again the same... "Again the same for us now. However much we celebrate our own exceptionalism. In Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (which was a favorite of Napoleon's) there is a scene in which Werther writes to a friend about his daily trip to a small, beautiful spring. He sees the young girls coming to gather water and thinks about how many generations have been doing that -- have come and had same thoughts he is having. "When I sit there the patriarchal ways come vividly to life about me," he says, "and I see them all, the ancestral fathers, making friends and courting by the spring, I sense the benevolent spirits that watch over springs and wells. Oh, anyone who cannot share this feeling must never have refreshed himself at a cool spring after a hard day's summer walking."That's the feeling most of us miss. Even if we don't see it, it's there. The whispers and the smoke and remnants never disappear. Goethe was born in 1749, wrote his first bestseller which contained those words in 1774 before America was a country, and would live well into the 19th century (overlapping briefly with Jonathan the Tortoise). A hundred years after that, another famous German writer, Stefan Zweig, would be stunned to find that his elderly upstairs neighbor was the daughter of Goethe's doctor, who had vivid memories of meeting Goethe as a young girl. In fact, Goethe had attended her christening. Sorry, I'm getting distracted. I have too many of these wormholes and I don't know where to put them all.Back to the point, Ernest Hemingway opens The Sun Also Rises with a bible verse: "One generation passeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose." It was this passage, his editor would say that "contained all the wisdom of the ancient world." And what wisdom is that? That we all flow into each other as part of an endless stream (slavery, Louis C.K. observed is just two old ladies back to back). It seems slow and long to us because we're in it. It seems distant to us because it wasn't our problem, it wasn't us that did that terrible deed we'd like to forget. In fact, time whips by in a blur. Wounds barely have time to heal. They don't recognize the passing of generations. Because generations don't really exist. It is instead an endless parade. When I lived in New Orleans, my apartment was partitioned out of 19th century convent. When I would head uptown to write what became my first book, I'd hop on the longest continually running streetcar in the world -- some 181 years it had been traveling the same tracks. How many millions of people had ridden those same rails? Sat, even, in the same seat. Tennessee Williams, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, George Washington Cable, Edgar Degas -- could have looked out these very windows. They, along with so many others not as easily remembered -- but who lived and hustled and struggled just as I was trying to. In moments like that, one cannot help but know what Pierre Hadot has referred to as the "oceanic feeling." A sense of belonging to something larger, realizing that "human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity." And when one gets this feeling, we ask ourselves important questions about who we are and what we are doing. On the other hand, nothing draws us away from those questions like material success -- when we are always busy, stressed, put upon, distracted, reported to, relied on, apart from; when we're wealthy or told that we're important or powerful. Ego tells us that meaning comes from activity, that being the center of attention is the only way to matter. When we lack a connection to anything larger or bigger than us, it's like a piece of our soul is gone. Like we've detached ourselves from the tradition we hail from -- forgetting that we're just like the people who came before us, and we're but a brief stopover until the people just like you who will come after. The earth abideth forever, but we will come and go.History on the other hand, gives us perspective. As I said, it has the power to humble us. Specifically, these wormholes -- illustrating the "great span" as they do -- are instant humility in bite-sized pieces. It's proof that others have been here before you, generations of them, and that they can almost reach out and touch you. In those moments, we have a sense of the immensity of the world and also its smallness. Ego is impossible, because we realize, if only fleetingly, what Emerson meant when he said that "every man is a quotation from all his ancestors" or what John Muir tried to convey to us about his epic experiences in nature. Yes, we are small. We are also a piece of this great universe and a process.Baldwin wrote that "if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too." I actually think it's the reverse. If you can examine and face the connection between other lives, and other eras, only then can you begin to understand and appreciate your own. Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of Ego is the Enemy and three other books. His monthly reading recommendations which go out to 50,000+ subscribers are found here.

Massachusetts is one of the few places in high-tech America where non-compete agreements are enforceable, a factor that scholars have pointed to in explaining why the state's tech industry has stayed so small relative to California, where the best workers can always move to the best companies. (more…)

A new Kaspersky report analyzes an online hacker marketplace called xDedic, where access to 70,000 hacked servers -- multiplayer game servers, billing servers, cellular/ISP servers, dating servers, betting servers, government and university servers -- in 173 countries can be bought for $6 and up. (more…)

You can type Mx instead or Mr and Ms to denote someone whose gender is unknown or nonbinary, "Latinx" is a gender-neutral and nonbinary-friendly version of Latina and Latino -- it's part of a wider trend to backforming gender neutrality into a language that assumes gender is a binary instead of a continuum. (more…)

A new study in Nature by University of Bath chemist Christopher Hendon and colleagues from various universities and coffee shops finds that cryogenic freezing of coffee beans prior to grinding them produces a more uniform grind that allows for optimal extraction. (more…)

It's fascinating to see and hear the distinctive personalities of the different sorting algorithms in this 5-minute video. My favorite is the bogo sort at the end, which sounds the best but seems to do a poor job of sortingVisualization and "audibilization" of 15 Sorting Algorithms in 6 Minutes.Sorts random shuffles of integers, with both speed and the number of items adapted to each algorithm's complexity.The algorithms are: selection sort, insertion sort, quick sort, merge sort, heap sort, radix sort (LSD), radix sort (MSD), std::sort (intro sort), std::stable_sort (adaptive merge sort), shell sort, bubble sort, cocktail shaker sort, gnome sort, bitonic sort and bogo sort (30 seconds of it).Sorting videos are popular on YouTube. I like these ones that show robotos competing to sort balls from darkest to lightest:https://youtu.be/es2T6KY45cAhttps://youtu.be/H5kAcmGOn4Q

Dental regulators in Canada are trying to stop a DIY toothmaker from selling false teeth made of craft store modeling clay. Matthew Ronald Block has been making false teeth in his apartment and selling them for $100.From CBC:According to documents filed in the case, Block came to the authorities' attention last August after boasting in a Craigslist ad of having "invented a temporary flipper type false tooth" to help his girlfriend overcome a dental abnormality."She is able to do everything she would with a normal smile like eat, kiss, sing etc," the ad said."The idea that others may be in similar situations and would benefit from my assistance has been in the back of my mind for several months."The ad, which has since disappeared, offered to sell individually fitted teeth for $100 each.

Alex Xiao's video of a flexible jellyfish-inspired LED configuration hints at the artistic possibilities for these programmable displays. (more…)

Janet Waldo, who died Saturday, voiced many iconic young women for Hanna-Barbera in her 40s and 50s, including Judy Jetson, Penelope Pitstop, and Josie from Josie and the Pussycats. (more…)

"Of course, you're aware of the balisong," intones the deep-voiced narrator, "... or butterfly knife."Awesome, terrifying, paranoid and goofy, Surviving Edged Weapons is a relic of another era, an age of fishhook earrings and razor blade-impregnated ballcaps, where reality itself stars Charles Bronson. Which, of course, it did. (more…)

Little-mentioned but often-said is Trump's other catchphrase: "there's something going on." It's used to insinuate a conspiracy, to trigger feelings of paranoia and fear in his audience without committing to specifics. He screwed up over the weekend and attached it to a too-concrete suggestion that President Obama was somehow involved in the Orlando nightclub massacre. In the fallout, he ended up withdrawing the Washington Post's credentials to cover his rallies and press events after the newspaper reported plainly on his remarks. So who better than them to explain that now-obvious phrase's meaning?That phrase, according to political scientists who study conspiracy theories, is characteristic of politicians who seek to exploit the psychology of suspicion and cynicism to win votes.The idea that people in positions of power or influence are conspiring to conceal sinister truths from the public can be inherently appealing, because it helps make sense of tragedy and satisfies the human need for certainty and order. Yet politicians hoping to take advantage of these tendencies must rely on vague and suggestive statements, since any specific accusation could be easily disproved."He's leaving it to the audience to piece together what he's saying," said Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami, in a recent interview.

“For the first time, an instrument onboard an orbiting spacecraft has measured the methane emissions from a single, specific leaking facility on Earth's surface,” NASA announced Tuesday. (more…)

This high quality paperback reproduction of the Voynich Manuscript is lovely. You, and your guests, can take a stab at decoding this mystery!Purchased 1912 by book dealer Wilfred Voynich, this 15th century manuscript remains a mystery today. The meaning of this manuscript has puzzled codebreakers for the last century. The 240 remaining pages are available for viewing online via the Yale Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but this $40 edition gives me something to sit and enjoy without staring at a screen.The online scans are higher resolution than the print edition.The Voynich Manuscript: Full Color Photographic Edition (Paperback) via Amazon

Sweet Valley High cover illustrator James L. Mathewuse still takes commissions on his site. Imagine you or your friends rendered in glorious 80s pastels or oils! (more…)

In this episode, we take on a doomsday future: all the active volcanoes in the world erupt. At the same time. Kaboom. This is not good for us. What happens to humans and our planet? Who survives? How? Flash Forward: RSS | iTunes | Twitter | Facebook | Web | Patreon | RedditWe talk about the basics of a volcanic eruption, what makes something an active volcano, and all the terrible things that would happen if all 1,500 active volcanoes erupted at once. ▹▹ Full show notes

Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has juxtaposed a series of modern outdoor and indoor sculptures at the Palace of Versailles through October 30. Above: "Waterfall." (more…)

The unfamiliar track is "Heemi Lheemey," a quirky tune that Anthony Kiedis and Flea wrote when they were 15-years-old and "smoking large quantities of marijuana" in the Sierra Nevadas.(The Late Late Show via Rolling Stone)

Still rates as better than an episode of Mr. Belvedere.(Thanks, Leo!)

We all love our iPhones and iPads. But if there’s one thing about them we don't like, it's their dang charging cables. It seems like they’re barely out of the box before they’re peeling, frayed, and ultimately unusable. Replacing any Apple product - even charging cables - usually comes at a premium price. Thankfully, we're looking out for your wallet: you can pick up a pair of two-meter MFi-certified Lightning cables for only $12.99, or 77% off MSRP.These cables look and feel just like the official Apple versions, but without the price tag. These cables stand ready to handle all your syncing and charging needs, while their two meter length offers extra reach for handling those critical functions.At $12.99 for a pair, it’s worth stocking up on these Lightning cables for emergencies. Jump on this deal now, while supplies last!

In 2006, western leaders decided that Gaddafi's oil was more important than his human rights record and complicity in terrorism and lifted sanctions against Libya, creating a massive pool of cash for the country that it turned into a sovereign wealth fund whose business was aggressively courted by Goldman Sachs. (more…)

Charter is trying to buy Time-Warner for $79B, and the FCC says the merger is conditional on Charter expanding its service to compete with existing cable operators in various markets around America. (more…)

Music video: Goldfrapp performing 'Strict Machine.' Trips me out to realize this song is 13 years old. It never aged, for me, and I'm enjoying it again today. Here's a Vimeo link if you prefer.I'm dressed in white noiseU know just what I want so pleaseWonderful electric, wonderful electricWonderful electric, cover me in u

Every day for a year, Niall Brady attempted to flip a spoon over his shoulder into a coffee mug. One attempt each day, most of which he captured on video. The joy when he succeeds is palpable.

In 1925, Kentucky caver Floyd Collins was exploring a new tunnel when a falling rock caught his foot, trapping him 55 feet underground. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the desperate efforts to free Collins, whose plight became one of the first popular media sensations of the 20th century.We'll also learn how Ronald Reagan invented a baseball record and puzzle over a fatal breakfast.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

The Bellevue, Ohio Police Department reported that Ashley England, Mary Jordan, and Sammie Whaley were arrested on June 8 for assaulting a female McDonald's employee in the parking lot "because she was working too slowly when dealing with three woman and their family and friends from Sandusky Ohio." Jordan (left) and England (right) hammed it up during the mugshots. All three women have pleaded not guilty multiple charges.England was charged with assault, theft and child endangerment. Jordan was charged with assault and child endangerment. England and Jordan's child endangerment charges are due to the fact they had their children present with them and participating in the incident. Whaley was also charged with assault.

Passengers confined for two hours on a grounded Monarch Airlines were not given food, apparently because the food items had been locked away with duty free items. The passengers included young children, and some passengers tried to walk off the flight.The Independent’s economics editor Ben Chu, 36, said the situation was “idiotic” as some passengers threatened to walk off the flight.He told the Standard: “The crisps and sandwiches have been padlocked with the duty free items and because they’ve been sealed we’ve been told we can’t eat them.A Monarch Airlines spokesman told the Standard: "Due to customs law crew are not able to serve food or drinks on board whilst the aircraft was grounded at Luton airport. Customers who asked for drinks were offered tap water where available.

Real cowboy Robert Borba was in the parking lot at an Eagle Point, Oregon Wal-Mart when he heard a woman yelling that someone was riding off on her bicycle. So Borba grabbed his trusty steed Old Grey from his trailer and took off after the suspected thief. “I just roped him and the rope went down around his feet and I just rode off like I would if I’d roped a cow or something by myself...” Borba told KOBI-TV news. "Stealing ain’t right so I figured get him stopped you know?”Police arrested the suspect, Victorino Sanchez, and charged him with theft.

Justin McCrory of Nashville sold his house to Tamara Holloway, and was supposed to vacate on June 1, but he refuses to leave. When a TV news reporter when to the house to ask McCrory why he is living in a house that is no longer his, he first told her to "get off my property." When the reporter reminded him that the house was no longer his property, he warned her that she might get run over by the big pickup truck he was driving. When she continued to ask questions, he became angry and told her, "You need to learn to take orders."

With 147 day to go until election day, Trump's imagination has hardly been tested. David A. Graham at The Atlantic reports that the top Republican suggested President Obama is "involved in the Orlando shooting." Somehow!In an almost entirely unprecedented moment, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, suggested in interviews Monday morning that President Obama may have somehow been involved in Sunday’s massacre in Orlando. ...“He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands—it’s one or the other and either one is unacceptable,” Trump said on Fox News. He had already called in a statement Sunday for Obama to resign from office. Trump added on Monday:"Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind. And the something else in mind—you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on."

Look, it can’t always be about work. Sometimes, you’ve got to go outside and catch some rays. Of course, once you’re out in the great outdoors, you still need a place to sit down.The Loungr Inflatable Chair (on sale for just $69 in the Boing Boing Store) has you covered. Find a nice spot, extract and inflate the Loungr, and you’ve got a comfortable lounge chair in which to relax. The Loungr’s durable ripstop nylon protects your chair from rough surfaces, so whether you’re on sand or gravel, you’re safe from punctures.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gczT6JgPXgk&w=560&h=315]No pump or valve concerns with the Loungr: just sweep it through the air to fill it up, seal off the end, and you’re good to go. Your carrying bag even comes with a bottle opener so you can enjoy your surroundings.Grab a Loungr Inflatable Chair now, now just $69, before this offer expires. That's 22% off the MSRP for a limited time only.

Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) trained a neural network to recognize materials (e.g., metal grate, plants, concrete sidewalk) being hit with a drumstick, and synthesize sounds to accompany the actions. It did well enough to fool humans into thinking the sounds were real.From the abstract:Objects make distinctive sounds when they are hit or scratched. These sounds reveal aspects of an object's material properties, as well as the actions that produced them. In this paper, we propose the task of predicting what sound an object makes when struck as a way of studying physical interactions within a visual scene. We present an algorithm that synthesizes sound from silent videos of people hitting and scratching objects with a drumstick. This algorithm uses a recurrent neural network to predict sound features from videos and then produces a waveform from these features with an example-based synthesis procedure. We show that the sounds predicted by our model are realistic enough to fool participants in a "real or fake" psychophysical experiment, and that they convey significant information about material properties and physical interactions.[via]

For many years, Tenyo's clever "self-performing" magic gimmicks have been a delight to amateur magicians and a bugaboo of professionals, who sneered at them as being obvious, hackneyed and, well, gimmicky. (more…)