Thom from the Shadowbinders podcast writes, "Journalist Brady Dale from the New York Observer joins us this episode (MP3) as we talk about the changing business model of webcomics. Are webcomics 'dead' -- or just evolving? How will social media play into the business model of digital comics going forward? And what about the money -- where is the MONEY?!" (more…)

https://vimeo.com/67102223Canadians' data requests overwhelming flow through US cables, even when the communications are within Canada. Since the NSA takes the view that it is legally entitled to collect, inspect and retain foreign communications, this means that almost all Canadian communications are being spied on by a foreign power. (more…)

It took less than 48 hours for public outrage to convince Philips that updating its lamps to reject third-party lightbulbs was a stupid idea. (more…)

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is trying to use a Congressional loophole to push through two attacks on our Internet freedom in the 'omnibus' must-pass budget bill that Congress is expected to file tonight. He wants to include the final version of CISA which has been completely stripped of privacy protections. And he wants to include a rider that would undermine the FCC's ability to enforce the net neutrality protections we fought so hard to win this year. There's still time to stop this sneak attack, go to BattleForTheNet.com or call 1-832-YOUR-NET to call Congress now!

https://youtu.be/EQITm3cS8ZkIn 1968, I eagerly waited for this gasoline commercial to air. It featured people magically scooting around the street on their butts. It was likely the best thing on TV that year.

Taking psychedelic mushrooms just once can change your personality for the rest of your life, according to Katherine MacLean, a postdoctoral researcher at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. From LiveScience:The results, published today (Sept. 29) in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, revealed that while other aspects of personality stayed the same, openness increased after a psilocybin experience. The effect was especially persistent for those who reported a "mystical" experience with their dose. These mystical experiences were marked by a sense of profound connectedness, along with feelings of joy, reverence and peace, MacLean said.

Five hours of simmering Sith. (BenjaminApple, thanks Jordan Kurland!)

See sample pages of http://winkbooks.net/post/134912574252/the-field-guide-to-typography-typefaces-in-the at Wink.Typography is a rich, thought-provoking study with a deep, storied history. And yet, for most of us, it is an unremarkable aspect of modern life. We rarely stop to consider the fonts we use in our family newsletters; we do not question the availability nor the history of Times New Roman or Verdana. Typography surrounds us everywhere, every day, and yet we never see it.Peter Dawson's The Field Guide to Typography: Typefaces in the Urban Landscape seeks to change that by introducing the reader to real-world examples. The book is replete with glossy, full-color photographs paired with histories, category, classification, identifying marks, and everything else you would expect of a working dictionary or encyclopaedia. Additionally, one of the most interesting and aesthetically pleasing aspects of the book are the breakdowns of individual fonts. These illustrations identify and label the various components of a typeface (baseline, descender, etc.) along with suggested meanings and evoked images or feelings.Personally, I found this book while browsing art and design books and found myself captivated by its wealth of information and the stunningly clear way the book’s designers presented this heretofore ignored art that I could see all around me. For me, The Field Guide works not only as an invaluable reference book, but as an inspiration and work of art. I did not intend to write such a somber review. In fact, I had a few (terrible) jokes in mind - Sans serif? Sounds like a beach accident, am I right? - but in looking through the book again, I was struck by just how much I admire the designers and artists who put these typefaces together; their work deserves to be recognised and contemplated and The Field Guide is an excellent way to do exactly that.– Joel NeffThe Field Guide to Typography: Typefaces in the Urban Landscapeby Peter Dawson Prestel2013, 382 pages, 6.2 x 8.2 x 1.5 inches $24 Buy a copy on Amazon

Suzanna Quintan's ex-husband bought a Lifelock account in her name, which let him monitor virtually everything she did in realtime, and then the company stonewalled and refused to help her shut down his access and figure out what he'd learned about her using it. (more…)

The billionaires who bankrolled Mitt Romney and other Republican establishment candidates are becoming disillusioned with the political classes, who give them the mushroom treatment: keep 'em in the dark and shovel shit all over them. (more…)

I love Guillermo del Toro: he’s a Renaissance man who makes deeply artful and emotional horror films and revels in his work. What’s not to like? His soul is bottomless as a well and seems to replenish itself from some miraculous underground source. The humanity in his Spanish-language films Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth plunges right to the heart. His viewpoint as a film maker is unique. His English-language films, on the other hand, have an entirely different sensibility — they’re more pulpy fanboy funhouse. Hellboy and Hellboy II are trippy; Pacific Rim is, well, dreck (sorry about that). Only Crimson Peak, a marvelously lush cinematic 19th century gothic melodrama — a genre extinct for a century — that has strong elements of the supernatural fits comfortably with his Spanish-language films. It was horribly mismarketed by the studio as a horror film, but movies in which the ghosts assist the protagonist are spooky melodramas and not “horror” per se. (more…)

Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, 2015 edition. [NBM Online via Waxy] (more…)

Old Book Illustrations is a search engine and browseable library of—you've guessed it!—the engraved illustrations and litho prints found in old books.Choose the type of illustrations you want to see: animals or people, landscapes, buildings, etc. Choose your favorite illustrators from a list: Gustave Doré, John Leech, Charles H. Bennett...[and] Find illustrations by the title of the book or periodical in which they were published: Æsop's fables, Punch, L'Illustration...The scans are high-resolution (though it appears the scanned items are sometimes worse-for-wear) and most come with lots of details about their original creation and printing.

Last year's New York Public Library podcast featured this wonderful reading (MP3) of A Christmas Carol by Neil Gaiman, reading from the last surviving copy of Dickens own annotated "prompt" text, which Dickens himself used to read from. A perfect, perennial listen for the Christmas season. (via Tor.com)

Widespread human trafficking is a big part of why Thailand is now one the world’s biggest shrimp providers, an Associated Press investigative series details. (more…)

Congressional auditors say The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda,” a violation of federal law, when it launched a massive social media campaign urging Americans to support the Waters of the United States rule. (more…)

A new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that a whopping 71% of Americans surveyed believe the many shootings and other acts of mass violence in we've seen in 2015 are now a permanent part of life in our country. (more…)

In 2008, the Red Cross was a dysfunctional mess, so it hired on Gail McGovern, an AT&T exec and Harvard Business School prof, who parachuted in a group of other AT&T alums to oversee a program of rigid, centralized control; mass layoffs;secrecy and funny accounting, an emphasis on "branding"; and a collapse in volunteer morale and public reputation for one of America's most respected charities. (more…)

La Fabrique DIY says, "I wanted to view the Eiffel Tower from my bed so I made a giant periscope with 2 mirrors in order to shift the view from my window."This only works if you live in Paris.

Philips makes a line of "smart" LED lightbulbs and controllers called Hue, that run the Zigbee networking protocol, allowing third-party devices to control their brightness and color. (more…)

In The Guardian, psychologist Tom "Mind Hacks" Stafford outlines five classic scientific studies that underpin much of today's thinking about how we learn things. One of Stafford's favorites is BF Skinner's 1930s claims that "with the right practice conditions – meaning that correct behaviour is appropriately rewarded – any task can be learned using simple associations." In 1995, Keio University researchers took Skinner's efforts further by training pigeons to discriminate between paintings by Monet and Picasso.Like (Skinner), they believed that we underestimate the power of practice and reward in shaping behaviour. After just a few weeks’ training, their pigeons could not only tell a Picasso from a Monet – indicated by pecks on a designated button – but could generalise their learning to discriminate cubist from impressionist works in general.For a behaviourist, the moral is that even complex learning is supported by fundamental principles of association, practice and reward. It also shows that you can train a pigeon to tell a Renoir from a Matisse, but that doesn’t mean it knows a lot about art."The science of learning: five classic studies" (The Guardian)And here's a PDF of the 1995 paper: "Pigeons' Discrimination of Paintings by Monet and Picasso"

Gaffer is a graph database "optimised for retrieving data on nodes of interest" developed by the notorious UK spy agency GCHQ, and now you can download, run and improve it because they've posted it to Github under the permissive, free/open Apache license. (more…)

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Special bonus: Trailer soundtrack by the Beastie Boys.

Because it’s the holiday season, Lady Parts Justice League is giving back by reminding us about the anti-choice forces responsible for creating these terrorists with a reinterpretation of a scene from the Christmas classic, “Love Actually”.When trying to make sense of these horrifying killing sprees, it's easy to lump the attackers into neat little boxes that give us peace of mind. When we look into those boxes, we don't see ourselves. There’s a box for the “religious extremist” (but only if it’s in the name of Islam) and one for the “delusional loner” (because if we keep pushing the “loner” idea then we don’t have to face the American epidemic of gun violence). But there is one mass murderer who doesn’t easily fit into any box: the abortion clinic terrorist.During his arraignment, Robert Dear said, “I am a warrior for the babies!” 17 times. There's no evidence presented that he had a psychotic episode, but we all hear the voices that dominate our airwaves and the national conversation. Certainly, the clinic terrorist may be a “religious extremist” or a “delusional loner.” What’s different about the abortion clinic attacker is that the voices in their head are not self-created delusions. Rather, they are the voices of mainstream politicians, mainstream religious figures, and mainstream media.

Angie Drobnic Holan, of the respected, nonpartisan factchecking org Politifact has an editorial in the New York Times about the record levels of falsehood in the GOP race, an outlier in a general increase in the literal factualness of political campaigns, thanks to fact-checking orgs like hers. (more…)

Matt Haughey (of Metafilter fame), explains his latest project: Why I can’t stop putting dildos into the hands of powerful conservatives.It’s been hilarious to see what I originally thought might be a tiny twitter art project that would hopefully crack up my friends spread like wildfire across social networks, and later to news sites, and eventually into many other languages. Mostly people see it for what it is, a silly way to express frustration at The United States’ current endless cycle of gun tragedy followed by inaction while leaders posture with their weapons in defiance of any changes.It's a perfect little mix of symbolism, with something for everyone: denial, pandering, sexual liberation, impotence, and the devil always having the best tunes.Of course, it being on the Internet, there’s a flipside reaction as well. I’ve been asked to meet people to see their guns, and perhaps to experience getting shot by them, I’ve had people on Twitter tell me all the things they want to do with a dildo to me, and I’ve even had a guy say he’d love to shove his gun up my ass and pull the trigger so I got the full idea of how powerful his weapons are. Usually I block or mute people on Twitter that tell me stuff like that so I don’t have to see it again.

Stephen Wolfram set out to find the truth about Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician hailed as the first computer programmer, and who died young. In "untangling the tale," he found a mystery much harder to unravel than he expected.Historians disagree. The personalities in the story are hard to read. The technology is difficult to understand. The whole story is entwined with the customs of 19th-century British high society. And there’s a surprising amount of misinformation and misinterpretation out there.But after quite a bit of research—including going to see many original documents—I feel like I’ve finally gotten to know Ada Lovelace, and gotten a grasp on her story. In some ways it’s an ennobling and inspiring story; in some ways it’s frustrating and tragic.Little-known until recent decades, her star rose with that of Charles Babbage and the mechanical computers he designed but was unable to construct. Which is to say that our understanding of her is clouded by his successes and shortcomings.Indeed, her death cheated us of the profound likelihood that Babbage's mechanical computers would have been constructed as a result of her efforts … and improved.What If…?What if Ada’s health hadn’t failed—and she had successfully taken over the Analytical Engine project? What might have happened then?I don’t doubt that the Analytical Engine would have been built. Maybe Babbage would have had to revise his plans a bit, but I’m sure he would have made it work. The thing would have been the size of a train locomotive, with maybe 50,000 moving parts. And no doubt it would have been able to compute mathematical tables to 30- or 50-digit precision at the rate of perhaps one result every 4 seconds.Would they have figured that the machine could be electromechanical rather than purely mechanical? I suspect so.Wolfram's is a striking portrait, well worth 20 minutes of your time.We will never know what Ada could have become. Another Mary Somerville, famous Victorian expositor of science? A Steve-Jobs-like figure who would lead the vision of the Analytical Engine? Or an Alan Turing, understanding the abstract idea of universal computation?

Blocking the dividing line with a pencil or your finger will help.

This tiny drone is a mighty flyer. (more…)

You may have noticed that Scott "Dilbert" Adams is a colossal asshole. (more…)

A man in the Washington, DC area caught some housecleaners he'd hired through Handy.com photographing documents and rifling through his papers, presumably to commit identity theft. Or, who knows, maybe they were also document archivists and wanted to be very very certain that along with the rest of the house, these papers were very very clean. (more…)

Justin Kozisek, a staffer for the Star Wars Action News podcast, bought a $6.94 Rey toy at Walmart and posted a photo of it to Facebook, and he and his SWAN colleagues were surprised to get a DMCA notice from Disney/Lucasfilm claiming that they had infringed copyright by posting a photo of their toy. (more…)

September's court ruling that Warner Chapell Music didn't hold the copyright to "Happy Birthday" was swiftly followed by a claim from the Association for Childhood Education International, a nonprofit established to administer the money that Warner Chapell extorted through its fraudulent claims. (more…)

25 years into creating my comic strip “Tom the Dancing Bug,” I’ve just embarked on another venture: writing books for kids. My series of books, The EMU Club Adventures, began in April with Alien Invasion in My Backyard, and the second installment, Ghostly Thief of Time, was released last month.Now, “Tom the Dancing Bug” is certainly not for kids, but writing for kids was something I’ve always wanted to do. I love kids’ literature and culture, and I love kids; if I’m at a gathering of friends and family, you’ll probably find me laughing it up with the kids. But as I started this new task, I was kind of worried about whether I could write for an audience that wasn’t me. My comic strip is pretty much what I would want to read – would consciously writing for another audience render the work stilted, off-target, or even pandering? I once saw Maurice Sendak, one of the very greatest children’s authors ever, tell Stephen Colbert in an interview, “I don’t write for children. I write – and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’”Well, I’ve spent a lot of years showing myself what I write, and it’s usually satirical or absurdist takes on things like income inequality, religion, and the new economy. None of which a kid with any good sense would have any interest in. As I began my project, I happened to go to a panel discussion of children’s authors at the New York Public Library, because some of my kids’ favorite authors were participating. A question was posed to the panel: “Do you write for yourself, or for children?” One after another, these accomplished authors repeated Sendak’s sentiment: they write totally for themselves, and then, lo and behold, it is children who enjoy the product. It struck me as kind of odd, because one of them had even written an ABC book. Is that really the book she would have written, regardless of intended audience? When the question came to Jules Feiffer, a legendary cartoonist/playwright for adults who became a children’s book author later in life, he gave the very simple answer that blew my mind and became my North Star in writing my books. He answered: “Both. I write for the kid in me.”Maybe it’s the very reason I wanted to write kidlit, but I happen to have a kid in me, and I don’t have to dig very deep to find him.I ended up writing exactly the books I would have liked when I was a kid: funny adventure stories about a gang of kids in fantastic situations, full of plot twists and surprises. Secret tunnels, ghostly visions, aliens and robots.And they are exactly the books that the kid currently in me likes.In addition, I realize now that when I write “Tom the Dancing Bug,” I’m not really writing for some abstract, whole “me.” I’m writing for the adult in me – that part of me that is interested in sketch comedy, absurdist humor and political and social satire.But, speaking of plot twists, here’s the M. Night Shyamalan-type kicker at the end of the story: It turns out that even as I wrote my very grownup comic strip for 25 years, I’ve been also writing for the kid in me the whole time!When I want to write about income inequality, I use “funny animal” Carl Barks-like comic book characters.When I use strange, absurdist humor, it’s often contrasting something dark or ridiculous against a children’s medium, such as daily comic strips.When I want to write about religion, I use a brightly colored, caped superhero.When I want to write about the new economy and its effect on employment, I use a Richard Scarry picture book format.One of my main (maybe only!) techniques as a satirist is to juxtapose the innocence of children’s culture with a darker point about adult world. The difference is that in my kids’ books, I don’t subvert kid-culture, I create it. I play in it.Writing these books was one of the most joyful experiences of my career. Like my three kid characters, I’ve been on a brand new adventure, looking at the world in a different way and taking risks.I feel like a kid again.Ruben Bolling’s “Tom the Dancing Bug” premieres on Boing Boing every week.

It’s mid-December folks. Like a bullet train. White knuckle time. With parties in motion and merry children abound, it’s time to jump on the fast track with those holiday gifts. And Wink’s gift guide is your golden ticket. The fun stuff on this week’s list focuses on the kiddos in your life. (For grown-ups, check out Gareth Branwyn’s Picks and Cheapies But Goodies Under $20.)JuxtaboAges 6 and up$30Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesMuch like a colorful, 3D version of dominoes, Juxtabo has simple rules that allow children as young as six years old to play. The strategy encourages development of quick pattern recognition, but also flexibility as you plan, since the "board" changes with every turn… Juxtabo is the recipient of the 2015 Academics' Choice Brain Toy Award …avid puzzlers beware – Juxtabo just may prove addictive! – Chloe QuimbyHarry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: The Illustrated Editionby J.K. Rowling (author) and Jim Kay (illustrator)(Arthur A. Levine Books)$24Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesYou may have read Harry Potter before, but you've never read it like this. Almost every page features some kind of full-color illustration by artist Jim Kay. Illustrations come in a wide variety of forms, ranging from small page ornamentations to whole page spreads. The full-page illustrations have a ton of detail and color and will likely make you stop mid-page to appreciate them. It never occurred to me that Harry Potter required illustrations, but after reading this it's clear why someone thought they would make for a good experience. – Alex StrineThe Sneaky Snacky Squirrel GameAges 3-7$15Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesA children's game where the first squirrel to forage enough acorns to fill up their log before winter wins!… While luck plays a large role in this game, there are some simple strategies which young players will quickly learn to impede other players or increase their chances of winning. The game is a fun way to practice color matching, sorting, and turn taking… The Sneaky, Snacky, Squirrel Game is at the top of my recommendation list for fun preschool-aged games that the whole family will love to play. – Mike EvansStar Wars Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxyby Matthew Reinhart(Orchard Books)$20Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesPop-up artist Matthew Reinhart captures the brilliance and excitement of Star Wars with this pop-up Guide to the Galaxy. The intricate renderings of Star Wars characters, creatures and vehicles are truly a work of art, and the book's cool interactive goodies like 3D pull-outs and a map of the galaxy are just plain fun. The grand finale battle between rebel hero Luke Skywalker and Sith Lord Darth Vader is complete with illuminated (really!) light sabers… This book is a fantastic gift for a Star Wars fan of any age. – Mary WozniakZOOBAges 6 and up$25Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesZOOB is the first construction set I've seen that encourages organic, free-flowing builds. There are five basic ZOOB shapes centered on a ball-and-socket connection. When you click them together you have full 180-degree freedom in how the connection is oriented, leading to creations that are curvy, complicated, or ones that repeat like vertebrate in a spine, or carbons on a chain, or even amino acids on DNA… The plastic pieces are largish, unlike lego, so the finished forms can be quite hefty. – Kevin KellyCabinet of Curiosities: Collecting and Understanding the Wonders of the Natural Worldby Gordon Grice(Workman Publishing)$17Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesThe term "cabinet of curiosities" means different things to different people. For the author of this wonderful book for kids, it was a cigar box full of treasures that he started accumulating at the age of six, beginning with the found skull of a skunk… This book focuses on the natural wonders only, and, specifically, those waiting out there to be found by the young scientists, collectors, and curators of tomorrow…This is a beautifully illustrated book that will undoubtedly spark the curiosity in any kid who reads it. – Aaron DowneyBrock MagiscopeAges 5 and up$178Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesAfter several years of looking for a microscope suitable for a busy family I found one: The Brock Magiscope #70. It has a single-moving part that my 5-year-old son could handle. He could put a leaf in and focus it right. The viewing field is amazingly bright and clear, good enough for high school work… We can press the lens of a smart phone to its eyepiece, and get pretty good microphotography shots. Best of all it is practically indestructible. The thing is simple and rugged as a hammer. It was built for the abuse of K-12 classrooms, which is probably as grating as a war. – Kevin KellyBuild Your Own Gotcha Gadgets: Electronic Gizmos to Play 20 Tricksby Ben Grossblatt(Klutz)$21Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesBuild Your Own Gotcha Gadgets comes with a multifunction electronic circuit, wires, and sensors that kids can use to build a variety of pranksterish devices: A cookie jar that sounds an alarm when the lid is removed, an electronic whoopie cushion, an intrusion detector, a fake lie detector, and more. Once you try a few projects from the book, it wouldn't be hard to come up with other ways to use the components, both mischievous and mild. – Mark FrauenfelderOlympian's Boxed Setby George O'Connor(First: Second)$44Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesThe author and publisher definitely designed these books to be taught to young people… The six volumes come in a handsome slipcase, which also includes a large full-color poster of the pantheon on one side and an extensive Olympian family tree on the other. Although these books are in comic book form, with spare dialog, they still manage to pack in a lot of story and paint a fairly complete portrait of each god. I wish I'd had these books when I was a kid. – Gareth BranwynMini OgoSport DiscsAges 4 and up$25Buy on Amazon • Full review and more imagesLike miniature portable trampolines, these 12-inch discs can send the "ball" (a rubber stringy pom) bouncing higher than a hundred feet and are perfect for a game of Ogo-style volleyball (volleying without a net or formal rules). You can also throw a disc like a Frisbee, or play it like paddle ball without the attached elastic string. Fun for all ages! – Carla Sinclair

There’s a new Genius Bar in town, and it’s serving up the good stuff. (more…)

In 1981, Harvard law professor Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, published a thought experiment in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: what if the codes to launch nuclear war were kept inside the chest-cavity of a young volunteer, and the President would have to hack them out of this young man's chest before he could commence armageddon? (more…)

This week's Radio Motherboard podcast (MP3) talks with Matthew Mitchell, a former data journalist who organizes Harlem Cryptoparty, a regular training meeting for black activists who want to learn to defend themselves against the burgeoning police/DHS practice of racially profiling black activists through targeted surveillance.Though social media surveillance is a modern phenomenon, the US government has a long and shameful history of surveilling black activists (see, for example, the FBI's attempt to convince Martin Luther King to kill himself). Harlem Cryptoparty is an attempt to help black people armor themselves against everyday surveillance, promoted through barbershops, hair salons, black churches and flyers in the neighborhood.2:24 Mitchell explains why a cryptography meetup makes sense in Harlem.5:05 In order to reach the Harlem community, you have to recruit offline.7:55 Cryptoparties and privacy events are still rare in the inner city in predominantly black and Latino communities, even though it’s not just a hypothetical threat. “You’re worried about, hey this guy threw me against a wall, flashed a badge at me, took my phone, he said if I gave him the phone he’ll let me walk, otherwise I have to do paper work. What was he doing with it?”9:40 Nusrat Choudury from the ACLU’s Racial Justice program joins us. She wrote this piece, “The Government Is Watching #BlackLivesMatter, And It’s Not Okay.”12:40 There is a pattern throughout history of the government using the fear of threats to conduct surveillance on “people who look or act different.”15:30 A private security firm called Zero Fox collected information on protesters in Baltimore and labeled some “high severity physical threats.”The Black Community Needs Encryption [Adrianne Jeffries/Vice]

From a very young age, the illusion of motion fascinated me.I would spend hours and hours destroying the books in my parents' library by creating crude, hand-drawn flipbooks in the margins. Pictured below is a rare 1890s sketch of my hands at work during the creative process.This sort of activity helped set the stage for what would be a career-long pursuit. I tinkered with countless pieces of art that would make up just a moment of entertainment for anyone willing to take notice.We're all enticed by beautiful patterns, pleasing repetitions and a concisely-delivered story. Here are a few tales that are told in just 12 frames apiece. My favorite is the 3 horizontal strip from the top. It’s the one of the man happily dancing in place, while passing his severed head to his clone, who does the same ad infinitum.It is, as all of these are, simply beautiful!And that brings me to the Zoeflix, which hits the nerve of what I love in so many ways.1) It’s beautiful to look at and hold2) It’s made of wood and not plastic3) It moves and operates by my own force4) It’s an artistic platform where I can make my very own 12 frame animations5) It has a great historyThe Zoeflix is essentially a Zoetrope device that, when spun, produces an illusion called the phi phenomenon. This is the optical illusion of perceiving a series of still images as a continuous motion when viewed in rapid succession.https://youtu.be/nGoXYhmmiVsThe Zoetrope has had many names over the years and I’m going to explore a few of them here. Firstly, the word zoetrope has Greek roots with the words zoe, “life” and tropos “turning”. Because of this, it became known as the “Wheel of Life”.The faster you spin the device, the smoother the illusion becomes—and the name “Wheel of Life” is perfect for obvious reasons.But the Zoetrope was first called a daedatelum by its inventor, George Horner, in 1834. The name was a reference to Daedalus, the most amazing sculptor/inventor in Greek mythology. He famously carved figurines so lifelike that people thought they could and would move.In the same way that Daedalus was thought to bring life to the inanimate, so did George Horner with his invention. Back then, the device was known as “The wheel of the Devil”. His invention didn’t become widely known until after his death, when a man named William F. Lincoln promoted the device in America as the Zoetrope. Changing the name was a smart move since any campaign around selling a product with the devil as its mascot might be seen as off putting.But then again, who could forget the famous Underwood Deviled Ham campaign of 1953? I Certainly can’t!You may remember from your Greek Myth class that Daedalus caused the death of his only son. Daedalus lived in Crete and was the lone man who knew the layout of the labyrinth he created to contain the Minotaur for King Minos.Because of this special knowledge, he was shut up in a tower with his son, Icarus, so that the secret would not be revealed.To liberate themselves, Daedalus fashioned a set of wings with feathers, string and wax and learned to fly. Upon their escape, Icarus flew too close to the sun, which made the wax on his wings melt. As a result he fell into and drowned in the sea.Daedalus became horrified at this and cursed his own inventiveness. Athena took pity on the now devastated Daedalus and visited him. As his reward for killing his only son, she gave him real wings so that he could fly like a god… which was nice. I guess she felt that he needed a constant reminder of what he’d done.With that, it’s very clear what my first Zoeflix animation will be! It’ll be of Daedelus forever hovering in the air while gently flapping his wings - the reason will be our little secret.I'm convinced that anyone who touches this device will fall in love with it, and unlike an old View-Master where only one person at a time can partake in the magic, a Zoeflix animation can be viewed from 360 degrees.The $49.00 package comes with 14 different animation sheets and a beautiful light fixture on the bottom of the lid that makes viewing in the dark even better.The folks at the Ancient Magic Art Tools website have a $14.99 option for those who want a cheaper option.

Late on Thursday, a jury found a former Oklahoma City cop accused of sexually assaulting and raping 13 women guilty of rape and sexual battery.Daniel Holtzclaw, who turned 29 on Thursday, cried as the guilty verdict was read in the courtroom. (more…)

https://youtu.be/wZYa9ZKZeDkYou can now view NASA rocket launch videos in 4K high-definition glory, online. (more…)

Redditor ShayGoes2Work posted this amazing shot of “Zane, 10 year old rescue dog,” wishing you a Merry Christmas.

Whatever you think of guns control, Obama's assertion that "Closing the No-Fly List loophole is a no-brainer" is pretty brainless. (more…)

A new Pew report analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors finds that America's middle class has shrunk to the smallest share of the US population for the first time in four decades; while the share of national wealth owned by the middle class has dwindled and the share of wealth controlled by the rich has grown. The number of poor Americans has also grown, as middle class families slip into poverty. (more…)

"Chakra the Invincible" is the third installment in a series from the UNICEF-backed Comics Uniting Nations. It's aimed at kids and young people, and presents a diverse global perspective on the causes and results of climate change. (more…)