Boing Boing

South African photographer Paul Shiakallis produced a series of photos, "Leathered Skins, Unchained Hearts," of the "queens" of Botswana's heavy metal "Marok" scene, mostly in their homes. (more…)

Escape rooms are popular. I'm not surprised. I've been to three of them with my wife and kids, and have enjoyed them all. The latest one we participated in was called The Alchemist, at Escape Room L.A.. On Sunday afternoon the four of us went to a nondescript building on 8th Street in downtown Los Angeles and pressed the button on the intercom next to the locked door. We got buzzed in and rode up to the third floor, where we met the six other players we were going to be locked in a room with. After a staff member explained the rules (no phones, no bathroom breaks, no brute force attacks on combination locks) we were led into a small room with a long table and a wall of old books. The door was locked behind us. We had one hour to figure out how to unlock the door and get out.This is the smallest escape room yet, I thought. Were we going to spend an hour cramped together in here? I put the thought out of my head as I joined the others in going over the clues that would lead to the solving of the various puzzles. It didn't take long for us to crack the first puzzle. As soon as we did, one of the walls slid away to reveal a much larger room: the mysterious laboratory of of the Alchemist, an unseen evil being who was in the final stages of concocting a Philosopher's Stone to take over the world. It was our job to foil the Alchemist by solving a series of puzzles that would unite the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water and let us escape from the room before our time ran out.The Alchemist's lab was so cool looking that I wanted to just stand there and admire it for a while. There were shelves of potions, strange looking devices, and intriguing contraptions on the walls and ceilings. But the clock was ticking (or rather, the sand in the hourglass on a table was running out) so I went to work on the puzzles.Part of the challenge of an escape room is just trying to figure out what the puzzles are. Written clues are rare. Not everything in the room is part of a puzzle. Some items are just there for decoration, but it's not always obvious. It really helps to think out loud so everyone can work together. Linus's Law – "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" – applies in escape rooms!This was the first time I did an escape room with my 18-year-old daughter. She doesn't like playing games, but she surprised me by how much fun she was having and how much she was interacting with everyone else. She figured out quite a few puzzles that had everyone else stumped. A month earlier, she had been riding in a car that got hit head-on by a drunk driver going 110 mph. She broke her wrist, mangled her ankle, got deep cuts on her face and head, and got whiplash in her entire body. She hasn't felt right physically since the wreck. She has also been dealing with the psychological trauma of the event (her friend who was in the car with her suffered massive brain damage and has been in a coma for 37 days and it is very hard on her) so it was great to see her having fun. She told me that the best part of the escape room was the aha! experience of figuring out how to solve a puzzle and how it would lead to another puzzle, like a chain of surprises. For one hour, she wasn't thinking of anything else other than the strange new world we had entered. I felt the same way.It sure didn't feel like we were in the room for an hour. It felt like 15 minutes. It didn't even matter that we weren't able to escape in time (although we got really close by combining three of the four elements and solving all but one problem remaining to unlock the Fire element and the door out). A staff member went over the game, recapping what we did right, and showed us how to solve the parts we missed.We are going to make escape rooms a regular thing.For more information about The Alchemist visit Escape Room L.A.

Researchers at the ETH Game Technology Center of the Swiss national technical institute in Zürich, have applied their considerable talents to the critical problem of immersion in 2D side-scrolling, 8-bit era games. Witness in this video the splendor of a 360° projected Mario world that unrolls across the walls as players reveal each subsequent tile of the game map.Robert Sumner, founder of the GTC explains: ...we observed that the 8-bit era of gaming had a huge collective influence on so many people, but the actual gaming experience was typically an individual one. We wanted to turn this idea upside down, and elevate the NES console experience into a group experience where the game surrounds a large event, allowing multiple people to play in a collaborative setting. The panoramic stitching and 8-way controller multiplexing hardware were the main ways we accomplished this task.The group submitted the paper "Unfolding the 8-bit Era" to the European Conference on Visual Media Production, and then built the system to unveil at the Eurographics Conference. Utilizing a vintage 8-bit Famicom/NES system and a PC with a point-correspondence vision tracking algorithm, the researchers developed methods to detect the edge of each screen segment, adding it to a continuously expanding texture map in real-time. This panoramic texture is then seamlessly displayed on eight aligned projectors. The vision algorithm requires no prior knowledge about the game, so it is possible to play any side-scroller on this system, such as Super Mario Bros., Castlevania, Metroid, and the like.In order to increase the number of participants in the fun of this large-scale gaming spectacle, the researchers created novel eight-controller multiplexing hardware based upon Arduino that hands the controls from one player’s gamepad to the next at a fixed time interval. Knowing that you’re about to grab the reins and inherit the state in which the previous player has left the hero surely adds a new twist to venerable games.You can check out technical implementation details in the paper.

The Salvation Army has struggled to distance itself from its reputation for homophobia, but a 2014 memo on "LGBT issues" by midwest Commissioner Paul Seiler spells out a number of ways in which the organization discriminates against LGBT employees. (more…)

A film by Jake Rasmussen

Phil Demers worked as an animal trainer at Niagara Falls, Ontario's Marineland for 12 years before resigning because he believed that the animals in his care were being mistreated and he did not believe that his employers would listen to him or his colleagues' warnings about this. (more…)

[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer than he cares to remember. As part of his job, he must read all the weekly tabloids. For the past couple of years, he's been posting terrific weekly tabloid recaps on Facebook and has graciously given us permission to run them on Boing Boing. Enjoy! - Mark]Did Kim Kardashian lose 45 lbs in one day? This and other unassailable tabloid facts.While the rest of the world is over-indulging during the festive season, weighty matters obsess this week’s tabloids and celebrity magazines.Kim Kardashian “lost 75 lbs in 3 weeks” post-pregnancy, says the National Enquirer, while Star magazine says she lost 30 lbs in 20 days.They could both be right, if Kardashian lost another 45 lbs on her 21st day, which seems entirely plausible.Duchess of Cambridge Kate Middleton is the “Queen of Lean” and “starving herself to death” as her weight plummets to 98 lbs, says the Enquirer.Tabloid watchers will recall that only six weeks ago the Enquirer warned that Kate weighed 99 lbs and was “wasting away,” so clearly the loss of another 16 precious ounces is cause for grave concern.Meanwhile George Clooney’s wife Amal is “scary-skinny” says the Enquirer, though it doesn’t tell us how much she weighs because they’re too busy explaining how this brilliant human rights lawyer has transformed into "the wife from hell,” cutting Clooney off from old friends and making him sell off his former “love nests,” while she spends $4,695 on an Alexander McQueen dress and $4,000 on a vintage coat.If the Star magazine is right in claiming that Amal has been sobbing to friends that “her career has been on the decline since marrying George,” who could blame her?It seems that some folks just can’t win in the tabloid weight wars.Ice-T’s wife Nicole ‘Coco’ Austin gained a mere 13 lbs in her pregnancy and is now almost back to her pre-baby 137 lbs, she tells Us magazine, but complains of “body bullies” who have accused her of "everything from liposuction to faking her pregnancy.”People magazine piles on with a recipe for a California Almond Cake, which looks like it could single-handedly put back all of Coco's lost poundage in one sitting.How appropriate that the tabloids’ weight-obsessed readers can turn to NBC’s dubious new series, ‘My Diet Is Better Than Your Diet,’ starting on January 7.Meanwhile, Charlie Sheen gives an exclusive interview about his HIV status to the Enquirer - one can only imagine what fresh horrific scandal they unearthed to force him to such humiliation - while Us magazine celebrates Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s “Christmas reunion.”People magazine asks who burned alive 19-year-old Jessica Chambers in Courtland, Mississippi, over a year ago, which is a strangely belated and decidedly unseasonal cover story, as if they’re waited 12 months for the slowest celebrity news week of the year before running this.The Walking Dead actress Emily Kinney carries keys, lip balm and a Starbucks gift card in her purse – this exciting feature page never gets old, it’s always so full of surprises. Robin Roberts wore it best (which may be unwanted praise in an “ugly sweater edition”) and the stars are just like us: they play at the beach, chat on their cells, visit markets, run in pairs, and use caulk guns.Wait a minute – what self-respecting celebrity caulks their own floor fixtures, instead of having their personal assistant hire a minion for such menial work? Melissa Gorga, apparently, I had to Google “Melissa Gorga" to learn that she is one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey.Seriously, I think Us magazine is stretching the definition of the world “star” a bit too far here.Onwards and downwards . . .

The Washington Post takes a fond look back at 15 people who became briefly infamous for one reason or another. Some of these villains are new to me, like prankster Sam Pepper, who pretended to execute a man in front of the man's best friend. Others aren't villians at all, such as Ellen Pao, who was harassed out of her job as Reddit's CEO for helping shut down a number of hate speech subreddits, such as r/fatpeoplehate, r/transf*gs, and and r/shitni**erssay.10. Belle Gibson The villain: The 24-year-old Australian blogger and entrepreneur behind “The Whole Pantry” app. The offense: Rose to fame, in large part, by claiming that a healthy diet and alternative medicine had cured her metastatic cancer — when, in fact, she’d never been ill. Gibson also repeatedly said that a portion of the sales from her app, The Whole Pantry, and its accompanying cookbook went to charity, though later investigations suggested that she’d pocketed those funds. Gibson’s fan base imploded almost overnight, and both her former fans and outside observers began demanding explanations. Where she is now: Since March, Gibson has been under investigation by a regional Consumer Affairs department, which, per the Herald Sun, is looking into claims about her fraudulent fundraising practices. Gibson’s publisher has withdrawn her cookbook and Whole Pantry is gone from the app store. In a June interview, she told 60 Minutes she had “lost everything” — an admission for which she was reportedly paid $45,000 AUS.

“They need to get some fucking empathy,” says Tanya dePass, a campaigner for better representation inside game worlds and among those who create them. She curates websites, hosts podcasts, maintains the #INeedDiverseGames tag on Twitter, works as a diversity consultant and speaks at conventions and panels. Work is steady, but change is slow. For critics and activists, the pushback on inclusion is constant, from other gamers and the industry itself. DePass finds it baffling: “why don’t you all like money?” she asks. One of many black women disrupting an insular culture, DePass critiques games and offers an alternatives to often-toxic online communities. Hashtag activism this is not. As DePass notes, “change needs to happen from the ground up.” Lauren Warren is a contributor to Black Girl Nerds, an online community “devoted to promoting nerdiness and Black women and people of color.” In addition to panel appearances, cosplay showcases, TV spots and endorsement by Shonda Rhimes and others, BlackGirlNerds launched two new series profiling women and people of color.“I hope that the Women in Gaming and Diversity in Gaming series reach people who are interested in pursuing careers in the games industry, but may be hesitant because they don’t “see” themselves fitting into the existing corporate culture," Warren writes. "It’s no secret that our presence is lacking behind the scenes on the game development side, on streaming sites and at major industry events and publications. The larger the community, the more visibility we have and the bigger our impact will be in the future.” Warren says that substantive progress towards inclusion requires changing corporate culture, but also its perception by prospective employees. It’s cyclical: the more resistant toward change the industry becomes, the less that women and people of color will want to invest their time and energies into a potentially unwelcoming space. This breeds further insularity. The cycle continues—unless it’s disrupted. Samantha Blackmon is one of the creators of Not Your Mama’s Gamer, a feminist gaming community made up of podcasts, livestreams, critical essays and their latest project, Invisibility Blues, a video series exploring race in gaming.Blackmon told me that issues have gotten better over time, but many mistakes are still being made. “When I look at playable women of color in games now I have more hope, but I still cringe at the characters that fall back on old racist stereotypes and add things like “tribal” costumes and “urban” language patterns," Blackmon wrote, "or some clueless writer’s take on what those language patterns are."Color has meaning. And without people of color involved in the designing process, games are routinely unaware of these meanings. For Black women, this problem arises in a very specific way. DePass used the phrase ‘fantasy-black’ to describe the “not too black” design trope in games. As DePass notes, women in gaming designed to read as “Black” frequently have blue or green eyes, straightened or silver hair, or lightened or red-tinted skin. Preferencing black women who read as biracial or display some otherwise exoticized trait has troubling overlaps with colorism, discrimination based on skin color. Colorism is a serious societal issue, evinced both by the disparity in punishment for black girls with darker or lighter skin and the huge industry of harmful skin-bleaching creams. So while all women in games are subject to staid metrics of desirability, black women have their blackness negotiated in a way that assumes blackness itself is undesirable. (Conversely, black men in games are almost uniformly depicted as having very dark skin—their color is ostensibly measured according to metrics of threat and physicality.) “I know the lack of options is often the result of a lack of diversity amongst the development teams and there is no one present to advocate for creating and pushing these choices," writes Warren. "Real change would need to start there and then consumers will ultimately reap the benefits of having more realistic images to choose from in their gaming experience.” But instead of a robust and dynamic experience, players are instead faced with repetitive, one-dimensional and largely overlapping portrayals of Black women. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the overreliance on the “strong Black woman” trope. This derisive meme limits portrayal of black women in pop culture to, as author Tamara Winfrey-Harris writes, “indefatigable mamas who don’t need help [and] castrating harpies.” Black women in games are the no-nonsense arbiters of sass, toughness and attitude, but their emotional complexities are elided in order to present them as “strong.” This portrayal, as contrasted with portrayals of white femininity in gaming, is expounded upon in Winfrey-Harris’ exploration of the strong black woman: "Society remains uneasy with female strength of any stripe and still prefers and champions delicate damsels—an outdated sentiment that limits all women. But because the damsel’s face is still viewed as unequivocally white and female, it is a particular problem for black women. As long as vulnerability and softness are the basis for acceptable femininity (and acceptable femininity is a requirement for a woman’s life to have value), women who are perpetually framed because of their race as supernaturally indestructible will not be viewed with regard."And although it’s great that characters like Rochelle, Vivienne, or Jacqui Briggs are never damseled, this privileged status belies an assumption that black women never need help or need saving. This double bind is best summarized by Sofia Quintero, creator of the Feminist Love Project, who said the meme of being a “strong black woman” is “a way to practice resiliency and protect myself [but also] allows little space for me to be vulnerable, seek support, and otherwise be fully human.” In video games, where we demand our heroes be independent, both physically and emotionally strong and easily able to compartmentalize their private vs. professional lives, it’s very easy for developers to re-create the superwoman parameters of black femininity rather than challenge them. So what is gaming’s next step in diversifying its portrayal of black women? Latoya Peterson, Editor at Large of Fusion, recently launched The Girl Gamers Project, a web series interviewing women about gender, womanhood and games. Peterson says games need to focus not just on strength but on full personhood for black women.“I don't think it's accurate to paint all black women with [the same] brush of hero - we're complex, and the most fun characters to play are complex," Peterson wrote via email. "Being Mary Jane is a hit because Mary Jane Paul isn't perfect. Games haven't allowed me to explore a black woman in depth - the latest Assassin's Creed is on my list but I haven't played it yet. I think the best way to show the real lives of black women is to dive deeply into backstories. I loved playing as Karin from Shadow Hearts - something like that. Or 355 from Y: The Last Man, just playable. I want to see black women characters focus on their full personhood, the way that Drake, and Max Payne, and Niko get to be funny or quirky or dark.” Heroes aren’t human. And as Black women continue impacting this industry through criticism and community building, they open more and more spaces and opportunities not just to fulfill a role that counts as “diverse,” but to illustrate the diversity of blackwoman hood. In fact, many have turned to space itself as an inspiration.Catt Small’s Prism Shell was influenced by Alien, and Sophia Chester’s Cosmic Callisto Caprica Space Detective was influenced by 50’s b-movies and Mad Men. As gaming continues to evolve, hopefully we’ll see more black women as alien hunters, space detectives, wasteland explorers and—at long last—human beings.Illo: Rob Beschizza

Each of the 12 discs comes with a rich illustrated book, featuring new art by Lorelay Bove. The books include liner notes in which composers, musicians, animators and other production personnel recount previously untold oral histories of the music that underpins Disney's animation, unifying it every bit as much as the storytelling and art styles.There's more than 47,000 words of liner notes in those pages, and more than 20 hours' worth of audio on the discs. Listening to the demos in which the legends of Disney music, from Ashman and Menken to the Shermans give notes to singers whose music I've thrilled to literally all my life is an incredible experience, like getting in a time machine. The archivists who produced this collection went beyond all reason and commercial consideration in pulling this together (I know a few of them). They are part of the trufan machine at Disney who gild releases that celebrate craft and pride, spending money that isn't needed to maximize profit, but is definitely required to maximize art. Disney is full of those people, they're like the people who joined Google because "don't be evil" mattered to them. Like those googlers, these Disney personnel don't harbor any illusions about the company's complement of people who don't share their beliefs (or at least, wouldn't let them get in the way of profits). But they're there because they believe it and it matters to them. People with a sense of mission make everything worth caring about in this world.The 20 hours of audio in this collection tell a story. Not the story in the movies -- the story of the movies. The story of how successive generations of composers, musicians and storytellers taught their progeny all they knew, and of how their progeny ran with that knowledge, expanding the art, bringing in material from the stage and other studios and pop. (more…)

The record industry insists that all unauthorized copies represent lost sales. So Peter "brokep" Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has built a machine that makes 100 copies per second of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," storing them in /dev/null (which is to say, deleting them even as they're created). (more…)

In episode three of Lyssue Paper, Lyss shows us how to make happy holiday sweaters out of tissue paper and pipe cleaners.

Port St. Lucie, Florida police arrested Dawn Meikle after she allegedly attacked her husband, Donald Fitzroy Meikle, for farting too much in bed. When he broke wind, she apparently elbowed him and then kicked him out of their bed. After she allowed him to return, he again passed gas, spurring her to kick and hit him. According to CBS12, Donald Fitzroy Meikle "said he held his wife for his own safety. During the struggle, she suffered a broken lip and he suffered a lot of scratches across his chest." Police stated she also sprayed pepper spray to, er, block him from getting to the bathroom?

Organizers of a demonstration in protest of the police shooting of Jamar Clark by Minneapolis police have been hit with a lawsuit by the Mall of America, which is seeking a court order requiring them to tweet and text a message announcing the cancellation of their protest. (more…)

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Numerous research studies have correlated higher IQs with longer lifespans. Why? One reason could be that smarter people apparently don't do as many dumb things that could kill them early. In Scientific American, Michigan State University psychologist David Z. Hambrick looks at the latest research in cognitive epidemiology:One possibility is that a higher IQ contributes to optimal health behaviors, such as exercising, wearing a seatbelt, and not smoking. Consistent with this hypothesis, in the Scottish data, there was no relationship between IQ and smoking behavior in the 1930s and 1940s, when the health risks of smoking were unknown, but after that, people with higher IQs were more likely to quit smoking. Alternatively, it could be that some of the same genetic factors contribute to variation in both IQ and in the propensity to engage in these sorts of behaviors. Another possibility is that IQ is an index of bodily integrity, and particularly the efficiency of the nervous system."Research Confirms a Link between Intelligence and Life Expectancy"

Business Insider's Jim Edwards got a letter from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch informing him that they'd instructed Twitter to remove two of his tweets on the grounds that they violated B of A's copyright. (more…)

The 82-year-old caller to Brown Deer, Wisconsin police said that she could hear someone in the throes of sexual ecstasy chanting "ISIS is good, ISIS is great" on the 4400 block of Dean Road. (more…)

In a new paper in Science (paywalled), Nicholas J. Matzke from the National University of Australia demonstrates the evolutionary connection between anti-evolution bills introduced into US state legislatures in a series of iterated attempts to ban or weaken the teaching of evolution by natural selection and to promote Biblical creationism in various guises in its stead. (more…)

From 1966, René Jodoin's beautiful minimalist animation of a geometric ballet, "Notes on a Triangle." Jodoin, who died earlier this year, was founder of the National Film Board of Canada's animation studio. "Note on a Triangle" was only one of several films meant as an introduction to geometric forms. See more here.

"Test conducted in 1946 where a human subject was exposed to blasts of air. The test was performed at (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics' Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, now the) NASA Langley Research Center's 8 ft High Speed Tunnel."(from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, cleaned up by Quickfound)

Ah, the power of music. Original trailer below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhInIOKwGXU

https://vimeo.com/42372767With New Year's Resolution season on the doorstep, it's time for end-of-year articles about self-improvement, and despite the cliche and improbability of that species of endeavor, I'm recommending that everyone read "Secrets to Long Haul Creativity." (more…)

The Interapp from Tel Aviv's Rayzone Group is an intrusion appliance that uses a cache of zero-day exploits against common mobile phone OSes and is marketed as having the capability to infect and take over any nearby phone whose wifi is turned on. (more…)

"Bro network" an (unfortunately named) open/free IDS that turns all your network traffic into events that can trigger scripts you write. As Nat writes, "Good pedigree (Vern Paxson, a TCP/IP elder god) despite the wince-inducing name." (more…)

John and Julie Gottman are a husband and wife psychologist team who run a hugely successful couples therapy practice that encompasses books, seminars, research, and one-on-one sessions. In a massive, engaging essay, Eve Fairbanks describes how their love inspired their work, and what she learned when she followed their teaching. (more…)

To enter Nanogenmo, you have to write a program that generates a novel, then post it, along with the novel and the training data used to produce it. 500 teams' entries have been posted to Github. (more…)

The plaintiff-friendly East Texas district has long been patent trolls' favorite place to file lawsuits, but one was so egregious that even their favorite judge has not only shut it down, but awarded costs against them.Ars Technica's Joe Mullin reports that US District Judge Rodney Gilstrap, "who hears more patent cases that any other federal judge," ordered that eDekka's behavior was exceptionally bad and that the it should pay the legal fees of the companies it sued.…until this order was issued, Gilstrap had never before ordered any patent plaintiff to pay up for filing massive numbers of lawsuits, even after it became the easier to win such awards after the Octane Fitness case.These changes in the patent trolling landscape made the court's friendliness to them seem more explicit. Perhaps it just took a while to sink in?

It has only nine pieces, but each is a sprawling, intersecting fractal nightmare: "you can provide people with the solution and they still can't solve it."The creations of Oscar van Deventer (check his youtube channel for all his puzzle designs) you can buy them at Laser Exact for fifty euros.It's weirdy satisfying watching the pieces disappear into the pattern:

My Canon 9000 died last year after many years of infrequent but dutiful service. The Epson SureColor P600 isn't just an upgrade on cheaper wide-format photo printers; the prints are significantly better than the aging model that it replaced.At $720 on Amazon, it's significantly more expensive than even well-reviewed photo inkjets, but the upgrade rationale is clear: large 13"-wide (e.g. 13x19" or A3) fine art and photo prints of "exhibition" quality. It's for artists and photographers who want to sell copies of their work without trusting it to third-party services and without compromising on print quality—but who aren't churning prints out at a pace where dropping four-figures on a large-tank commercial model makes sense. It uses nine 25.9ml ink cartridges (each are about $35 to replace), though not all will be used on every paper type (switching between photo and matte blacks is automatic, but triggers a cleaning of the black feed that apparently costs about a dollar's worth of ink.)It's 22 x 30 x 17 inches and about forty pounds, so you'll need space for it. It also has a touch-sensitive screen, which seems superfluous, but does ease the UI nightmare that printer setup usually is.A wide variety of art and other specialty finish papers are offered by Epson. A note of caution: the Mac instructions tell you to set it up with Bonjour, but if you do, the print dialog doesn't have any of the Epson-specific options. When setting it up, wait until it autodetects the "IP" connection and pick that one instead. It comes with a roll-feeding attachment: think 13"-wide signs or panoramas, as long as you please. I've had it about six months without a problem, including a two-month spell without use: no clogs!Output's been impeccable. The blacks in particular are noticeably richer and deeper than the model it replaces, a fact confirmed by other reviews. I haven't looked much at recent models from competitors such as Canon, though. Print speed's good, about three minutes a print. Don't forget that if you switch between matte and glossy, it'll spend five minutes or so flushing the black feed.Need more technical details? This particularly in-depth review cautions that "the days of massive leaps in performance with almost all new printer (and camera) models are behind us" but that, as I found, it's a worthwhile upgrade on older models.Finally, if you're committing to gear like this, figure out the color management stuff and don't use shit third-party ink.Epson SureColor P600 [Amazon Referral Link]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM71NPrb5iMHere's your chance to give back to the Internet's library of everything, home of the Wayback Machine, and friend to all Internet people, everywhere. They're livestreaming until 12h Pacific today. If you're in San Francisco, you can also drop by 300 Funston and join the audience.

The City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit's breathless press-release about their raid on a "gang suspected of uploading and distributing tens of thousands of karaoke tracks online" obscures the truth: they busted three middle-aged dudes who loved singing, so they hunted down otherwise unavailable tracks and shared them with other karaoke fans, not making a penny in the process. (more…)

If you’re a tech professional—or looking to become one—this is the bundle for you. Earn up to 93 certificates in project management, finance, IT, agile and scrum, data and analytics, quality management, and Microsoft. eduCBA’s courses offer the most pertinent certification topics for techies, like SQL Server Training and Excel, CFP training, SAS Base Programmer trainer, a hacking training course—and much, much more. There’s no excuse not to become an expert on any of these topics: eduCBA is the one-stop shop for all of your tech certification needs. (more…)

The Omnibus Budget Bill passed this week, and Paul Ryan managed to cram the domestic mass surveillance law CISA into it, but that's just the appetizer in a banquet of corrupt DC horsetrading embodied in 2,000+ pages that indicts the entire US legislative system. (more…)

The US government has tried to apply its arms export control rules to 3D model files that describe firearms, and declare that publishing those files is the same thing as exporting guns, and is therefore prohibited. Whatever you think about 3D printed guns, love 'em or loathe 'em, that's a terrible way to deal with them. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca6mWRkcSd0Yasuo Amano, webmaster of the Hey Presto blog often creates specialized versions of magic tricks devised by the Tenyo company of Japan based on the seasons or holidays. I guess he must be a Star Wars fan because, in honor of the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, he has combined a number of Tenyo's magical effects into Star Wars themed fun.

These are the "walking palm trees" of Ecuador. Each year, they could walk as much as 20 meters. Slower than the Ents from Lord of the Rings but, well, real.“As the soil erodes, the tree grows new, long roots that find new and more solid ground, sometimes up to 20m,” Peter Vrsansky, a palaeobiologist from the Earth Science Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences Bratislava, tells the BBC. “Then, slowly, as the roots settle in the new soil and the tree bends patiently toward the new roots, the old roots slowly lift into the air. The whole process for the tree to relocate to a new place with better sunlight and more solid ground can take a couple of years.”Tragically, the incredible Sumaco Biosphere Reserve where they live is being chopped down. “This [cutting] is a shame, as Ecuador is one of the world countries with the highest partition of protected areas," Vransky says, But the trees can’t walk fast enough to escape the chainsaw and the machetes backed by current legislation."

The welded scrap-metal bugs of Green Hand Sculpture are gorgeous, intricate, labor-intensive, and therefore expensive, but surely worth ever cent: Preying Mantis, Holly Blue Butterfly, Woodlouse, Peacock Butterfly and the Peacock Butterfly (chainsaw variation). -

The Star Wars fever is alive and well, and it’s time you joined in on the fun. These extremely high-quality posters will elevate any room in your house to a true fandom tribute. The materials are archival-quality with crisp colors that pop.Printed on 100 lb white polar paper for a professional touch100-year archival qualityArtwork designed by Devin SchoefflerHere's the Rebel Fighter Print: Here's the Snowy Walker Print: And the Swamp Encounter Print:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMU5nhpb4LETwo of our happy mutants: the science writer Stephen Johnson and the oblique strategist Brian Eno on the nature of art, literature, and science. (more…)

Lifelock, the tragicomically awful identity-theft protection service, has settled the FTC's suit against it, agreeing to pay a $100M fine for violating its 2010 promise to end its deceptive advertising practices. (more…)

“Elliot likes to tear up cardboard boxes.” (more…)

A man from El Salvador who survived over an entire year lost at sea is reportedly being sued for $1 million over accusations he ate the other occupant of his boat. The grieving family of his shipmate, who died one way or the other on the ill-fated voyage, claims the survivor survived by cannibalizing his companion. (more…)

Early this morning, FBI agents arrested pharma-hedge-douche Martin Shkreli for securities fraud at his apartment in NYC; Reuters photographers were on-hand at the arrest to photograph his "perp-walk" in handcuffs. (more…)

Jazz pioneer Charles Mingus (1922-1979) had a secret recipe for eggnog that by all accounts was delicious, and incredibly potent. He shared the recipe with biographer Janet Coleman who published it in her book Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs. Here's the brew below, followed by Mingus's "Moanin'."Charles Mingus's Egg Nog* Separate one egg for one person. Each person gets an egg.* Two sugars for each egg, each person.* One shot of rum, one shot of brandy per person.* Put all the yolks into one big pan, with some milk.* That’s where the 151 proof rum goes. Put it in gradually or it’ll burn the eggs,* OK. The whites are separate and the cream is separate.* In another pot- depending on how many people- put in one shot of each, rum and brandy. (This is after you whip your whites and your cream.)* Pour it over the top of the milk and yolks.* One teaspoon of sugar. Brandy and rum.* Actually you mix it all together.* Yes, a lot of nutmeg. Fresh nutmeg. And stir it up.* You don’t need ice cream unless you’ve got people coming and you need to keep it cold. Vanilla ice cream. You can use eggnog. I use vanilla ice cream.* Right, taste for flavor. Bourbon? I use Jamaica Rum in there. Jamaican Rums. Or I’ll put rye in it. Scotch. It depends.See, it depends on how drunk I get while I’m tasting it."CHARLES MINGUS' SECRET EGGNOG RECIPE WILL KNOCK YOU ON YOUR ASS" (Village Voice, thanks Jordan Kurland!)https://youtu.be/WyOlc8BaR0A

"Why should we base the validity of all of our life's beliefs on a theory?" I'm not even sure what that question means, but the UC Berkeley student who asked it to Dr. White didn't look pleased by his fact-based answer.From Wikipedia: Timothy Douglas White is an American paleoanthropologist and Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. He is most famous for his work on Lucy as Australopithecus afarensis with discoverer Donald Johanson.

Rob beat me to the blog this morning with a post about Star Wars Minus Star Wars, a stupendous video in which Kyle Kallgren retells the entire story of the first Star Wars movie with footage that either inspired George Lucas or was inspired by him after the movie's release. (more…)

The Intercept has obtained a secret government catalog that law enforcement agencies use to source even-more-secret cellular spying devices, mostly variants on the Stingray/Dirtbox, which pretend to be cellular towers in order to harvest the subscriber details of all the people within range (up to an entire city, for the airplane-mounted Dirtboxes). (more…)