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Eire we go, at last! The BBC reports that the Republic of Ireland will now permit same-sex couples to wed.It is not yet known when and where the first same-sex wedding will be held.But the first people to be affected are same-sex couples who have already wed legally abroad. Their marriages are now automatically recognised by the state.They include Orla Howard and her wife Dr Grainne Courtney, who were married in the United States in May 2013.The new rules follow a referendum in May in which Irish voters overwhelmingly supported the change.Ireland was late to the gay rights party, only decriminalizing homosexual acts in 1993. But now it is the first country to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. https://twitter.com/AodhanORiordain/status/602056053270913026This leaves Northern Ireland as the last holdout in the Atlantic Archipelagos; though about 70% of locals support same-sex marriage, conservative protestants in government have apparently used procedural measures to prevent the law being voted upon.1. Various wee UK tax shelters have yet to permit same-sex weddings, but all have signaled their legislative commitment to marriage equality.

Researchers are warning that ads could play coded sounds outside the range of human hearing to secretly communicate with other gadgets within earshot.The technique, which several companies are reportedly working on, would allow marketers to associate devices with one another and paint a privacy-cracking picture of the owner's interests and behaviors.Dan Goodin reports that cross-device tracking is already in use:Cross-device tracking raises important privacy concerns, the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote in recently filed comments to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC has scheduled a workshop on Monday to discuss the technology. Often, people use as many as five connected devices throughout a given day—a phone, computer, tablet, wearable health device, and an RFID-enabled access fob. Until now, there hasn't been an easy way to track activity on one and tie it to another."As a person goes about her business, her activity on each device generates different data streams about her preferences and behavior that are siloed in these devices and services that mediate them," CDT officials wrote. "Cross-device tracking allows marketers to combine these streams by linking them to the same individual, enhancing the granularity of what they know about that person."The trick hasn't been seen in the wild, but all the pieces are in place: we all know our smartphones and laptops might end up under someone else's control, but did you know television sets now default to collecting and sending data on what you watch?[via The New Aesthetic]

Gauntlet, Atari's 1985 dungeon-looting arcade game, came long after the heyday of its successful home console. But CDS Games has managed to pack a playable version of the complex action RPG into the primitive Atari VCS. [via] (more…)

It’s no secret that project management is one of the most valued and profitable skills today. Whether you develop proprietary tools for a tech company, or you regularly plan and execute tasks, this course is sure to improve upon your process. Gain a foundation of skills and concepts to double up on your project management skills.Learn to not only earn the Project Management Professional certification, but knock out projects on time and under budget in this must-take course. You’ll finesse the skills you learned in the previous course, and start building project dream teams that hit every milestone. Gain a leg up on your colleagues as you demonstrate your ability to improve profitability with each and every project.

The Womanizer is a new, $189 sex toy billed as a "clitoral stimulator." While woman reviewers universally hate the name and many dislike the leopard-spotted finish, they are universal in their acclaim of the Womanizer's ability to give them fast, powerful orgasms. (more…)

terror attacks in Paris, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump mocked France's gun control laws and the French ambassador described him as a vulture."Isn't it interesting that the tragedy in Paris took place in one of the toughest gun control countries in the world," Trump said on Twitter."This message is repugnant in its lack of any human decency," responded Gérard Araud. "Vulture."

"My grandfather's plane was reported lost in 1960 during the Algeria Independence War, days before the birth of his first child," writes Armel Gibson, in the introduction for his game, Oases. "This is what I like to think happened to him."Oases opens with a plane flying over a desert, its engines trailing dark plumes of smoke. But before it can crash, a hole opens up in the sky, and swallows the plane with in rings of color. On the other side, you find yourself soaring across gorgeous, surreal landscapes of tall trees, enormous trumpet-shaped fungi and waterfalls dripping from giant sculptures. It is a world where you can soar forever, and never crash.It's not the first game created to grieve the loss of a loved one, or make sense of their death—That Dragon Cancer comes to mind—but Oases addresses a very specific form of loss: How do you deal with losing someone when you don't know what happened to them, and probably never will?Gibson writes his own ending for his grandfather's story, and invites us to wander around in it. It's a lovely one too, where the only goal is simply to fly and find pleasure in the world around you.Created by Gibson and Dziff with music by Calum Bowen, Oases is pay-what-you-will on Itch.io for Mac and PC.https://youtu.be/K5gJVgIZgYQ[via Kotaku]

Silverpush, a startup that's just received $1.25M in venture capital, uses ultrasonic chirps that are emitted by apps, websites, and TV commercials to combine the identities associated with different devices (tablets, phones, computers, etc), so that your activity on all of them can be aggregated and sold to marketers. (more…)

Dutch psych-rockers Shocking Blue's "Love Buzz," from their 1969 LP At Home. Far fucking out. Nirvana famously covered the song as their first single in 1988 and it later appeared on Bleach. Below, Shocking Blue play their hit "Venus" that topped the Billboard charts in February 1970. https://youtu.be/yHX0BjwwP8w

Albuquerque police officer Jeremy Dear was ordered to wear a body-camera after many of the city's residents complained about their encounters with him. Afterward, he routinely failed to plug in the camera. His camera was not running when he shot and killed a 19-year-old girl in 2014. (more…)

Craig Barnes, a grad student at Central St Martins in Kings Cross, London, bought and refurbished one of the last 60 Futuro houses, originally designed in the 1960s as modular ski chalets by famed Finnish architect Matti Suuronen. (more…)

I hope the teacher didn't mark it wrong. [via]

Makes me want to hop on a fucking plane to NYC right now. (mediocrefilms)

https://youtu.be/XwdUXS94yNkThis video was made by Finland-based Fragile Childhood, "an awareness-raising campaign, which aims to reduce parents' use of alcohol by helping them understand the harm it causes to children."Here's another:https://youtu.be/i46h9dAaDfoWhat if children could choose their parents?

Michael from Muckrock writes, "Mr. Russell Jones. Maybe the name doesn't ring any bells for you. On February 3, 1999, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation first ran their records on him, there were over a thousand people that made that match. In New York, there were 196. Another 164 of them turned up as living nearby in New Jersey. Perhaps you'd recognize him by another name. After all, there was only one Ol' Dirty Bastard. Today, on the 12th anniversary of his death, MuckRock takes a look at his voluminous files with the FBI. (more…)

A police officer pulled over a Google self-driving car yesterday because it was going only 24 miles per hour in a 35 mph zone. But the car had no driver, so he could not issue a ticket. The officer asked the human passenger why the car decided to drive so slowly.From CNN:In a Google Plus post, the Google Self-Driving Car Project pled guilty to slow driving."We've capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25 mph for safety reasons," the post said. "We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets."In the end, the officer determined the car had broken no law. No harm, no foul.And no ticket was issued -- not because there was no driver to whom to issue it but because the car had committed no violation.pic.twitter.com/3tKhtuxxr8— David E. Weekly (@dweekly) November 12, 2015

https://youtu.be/6GYc0ragGOIA Virginia man who died in police custody was tased 20 times in 30 minutes, according to a civil rights lawsuit filed by his sister.Linwood Lambert, 46, was tased 10 times within 2 minutes at one point during his arrest, racking up a total of 87 seconds of electrical discharge: enough, according to federal guidelines, to inflict serious injury or death.Lambert was detained after officers responded to a noise complaint and found him to be delusional, according to police reports. Transported to hospital, however, he became aggressive, kicking out a car window and "sprinting roughly 20 feet towards the ER entrance and crashing into the building’s glass doors."Video footage acquired by MSNBC shows what happened next: the officers tased him over and over again, then decided to arrest him and leave instead of taking him into the hospital.During the incident, Lambert appears subdued on the ground and tells police he used cocaine earlier in the night. As Lambert lies on the ground outside of the hospital, police arrest him for disorderly conduct and destruction of property. Instead of taking him into the hospital to receive care they put him back into the police car.During the incident Lambert repeatedly asked police to stop. "Why are you trying to kill me man," Lambert said in the video. "Please don't do this to me."During the ride to the police station, Lambert appears to be unconscious and the officers realize he is in distress. An ambulance is called to take him back to the hospital and he is pronounced dead at 6:23 a.m., according to MSNBC. The medical examiner ruled that he died of a cocaine overdose, despite an autopsy finding "less than 0.01 mg/L" of the drug in his system. No-one has been disciplined or charged in connection with his death.Police video shows Lambert shackled and subdued in the car, apparently restrained, as officers warn him again and tell him to sit up.“Act like you got some sense,” says one officer. Another warns, “sit up or I’m going to tase you again.” Reaching into the car with two Tasers, the officers tase Lambert as he slumps down in the seat.… In addition to the video, nurses on the scene say they saw “three officers” tasing Lambert “at one time,” according to hospital records obtained by MSNBC.South Boston Police Chief James Binner wrote that it was an appropriate use of force."The deployments of Tasers when a subject has become violent, causing damage to property and placing the safety of persons at risk, as was the case with Linwood Lambert Jr., is appropriate and necessary use of force," according to [his] response.

Global Justice Now's "Corporate Monopoly" is an excellent piece of information design; it's a playable boardgame adapted from Monopoly (itself originally designed to teach the evils of capitalism), in which a shoe (the 99%) and a top hat (obvs) take it in turns to go round a familiar board whose squares tell stories about real-world class war, centred around UK policies and business. (more…)

c-90.org is a thing of wonder, not least for the Catalogue of Tapes, each lovingly photographed and organized by brand.This page is dedicated to cassette tapes. Here you won't find any kind of scientific research, technical data or things like that. The authors' only message is just to give a visitor something interesting to look at. The era of this particular medium is slowly passing, and here we are trying to turn back time for 60 minutes, or, maybe, for 90...Pictured above is the Sony C-1C Head Cleaner. Sadly, the image sizes are rather small.

The EDC Card [via] is exactly what its name promises: a multitool designed to fit into a wallet and be carried around every day, just in case you run into an opportunity to show off your EDC Card.This Special Edition model comes with a weapons grade ceramic coating applied, to create a non-reflective surface for a discreet look. The back of the Special Edition EDC Card has laser etchings to designate tool sizes.Inspired by high-end outdoor/military knives, the Everyday Carry Card follows the EDC credo of usefulness, minimalism, quality, and high versatility—all in a handheld package that consumes little space.It is TSA-safe, $80 and, the makers stress, made of blade steel, not titanium, which is soft.

Donald Trump unloaded on fellow presidential candidate Ben Carson last night, describing his rival as "pathological" and comparing his behavior to that of a child molester.The Donald's wrath fell only hours after sales figures showed Ben Carson's A More Perfect Union surpassing his own Crippled America at the top of the New York Times bestseller lists.NBC News:"He wrote a book and in the book, he said terrible things about himself," Trump said of Carson. "He said that he's pathological and he's got basically pathological disease ... I don't want a person that's got pathological disease."Trump first compared the two conditions on CNN and repeated them to a 1,500-person crowd at Iowa Central Community College: "I said that if you're a child molester, a sick puppy, a child molester, there's no cure for that - there's only one cure and we don't want to talk about that cure, that's the ultimate cure. No there's two, there's death and the other thing. But if you're a child molester, there's no cure, they can't stop you. Pathological, there's no cure."At one point in what observers described as a rambling, 90-minute rant, Trump flipped over his belt buckle in an effort to mock the former neurosurgeon, who recently took Trump's top spot in polls of Republican voters, too.CNN:Donald Trump on Thursday told Iowa's voters that those who support Ben Carson are "stupid" to believe the "crap" that is his life story, part of a stunning 95-minute tirade that included his most aggressive attack yet on his closest competitor.The real estate mogul's pugnacious demeanor was a stark departure from the far more restrained Trump on display at Tuesday's debate, when he declined to attack Carson while standing right next to him. He criticized the retired neurosurgeon repeatedly, said Hillary Clinton is playing the "women's card big league," ridiculed Marco Rubio as "weak like a baby" and vowed to "bomb the shit out of (ISIS)."Both men hope to become President in 2016.

"Fordite" is an anthropocenic mineral "formed from the built up of layers of enamel paint slag on tracks and skids on which cars were hand spray-painted (a now automated process), which have been baked numerous times. In recent times the material has been recycled as eco-friendly jewelry."(via JWZ)

Calling all writers! Wink Books is looking for writers to review books. Reviewers also need to take some photos of the books they review. If you’re interested, check out our site, and then email me (carla@boingboing.net) for more information. If you have writing experience please let me know.

On November 4, 1975, David Bowie performed "Golden Years" on Soul Train. Sure, he was lip-syncing, but who cares. The Thin White Duke's got soul. The Bowie Golden Years site has more background on the appearance.

https://youtu.be/SclN-2CteXMI could literally watch this all day. (more…)

There's no one else on Earth who's more familiar with the surveillance capabilities of governments, spy agencies and criminals who is also willing to discuss those capabilities. Edward Snowden's wide-ranging conversation with the Freedom of the Press Foundation's Micah Lee on operational security for normal people is a must-read for anyone who wants to be safe from identity thieves, stalkers, corrupt governments, police forces, and spy agencies. (more…)

Courtney Brown's sculpture "Self Organization" adds gorgeous brass tentacles to an Underwood Noiseless typewriter, for an effect that's fantastic, seeming to surface some latent, Naked Lunch-ish truth about the hard-carapaced writing machines of the past. (via Colossal)

While visiting a friend recently, I stayed at a local hotel and got a chance to try out the Quickcakes Popcake PC-11 Pancake Extruder. About a yard wide, it has a single button on it, a small monochrome display, and is emblazoned with a decal stating "PANCAKES IN A MINUTE FLAT." (more…)

Giant multinational offshoring firms have figured out how to game the H1-B system, flooding the application queue with thousands of requests the instant the process opens each year. It's transformed the H1-B Visa category from a lifeline for companies who need to bring in critical foreign talent into a way to shut down whole departments in the USA and replace them with lower-cost overseas workers who are exploited far from home. (more…)

Wow. @CarnegieMellon is America's Shanghai Jiaotong. https://t.co/UAtaAgJvJh— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 11, 2015Documents published by Vice News: Motherboard and further reporting by Wired News suggest that a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University who canceled their scheduled 2015 BlackHat talk identified Tor hidden servers and visitors, and turned that data over to the FBI. No matter who the researchers and which institution, it sounds like a serious ethical breach.First, from VICE, a report which didn't name CMU but revealed that a U.S. University helped the FBI bust Silk Road 2, and suspects in child pornography cases:An academic institution has been providing information to the FBI that led to the identification of criminal suspects on the dark web, according to court documents reviewed by Motherboard. Those suspects include a staff member of the now-defunct Silk Road 2.0 drug marketplace, and a man charged with possession of child pornography.It raises questions about the role that academics are playing in the continued crackdown on dark web crime, as well as the fairness of the trials of each suspect, as crucial discovery evidence has allegedly been withheld from both defendants.Here's a screenshot of the relevant portion of one of the court Documents that Motherboard/Vice News published:Later today, a followup from Wired about discussion that points the finger directly at CMU:The Tor Project on Wednesday afternoon sent WIRED a statement from its director Roger Dingledine directly accusing Carnegie Mellon of providing its Tor-breaking research in secret to the FBI in exchange for a payment of “at least $1 million.” And while Carnegie Mellon’s attack had been rumored to have been used in takedowns of dark web drug markets that used Tor’s “hidden service” features to obscure their servers and administrators, Dingledine writes that the researchers’ dragnet was larger, affecting innocent users, too.No official word yet from the FBI on any of this.[caption id="attachment_433904" align="alignnone" width="800"] shutterstock[/caption]Here's the Tor Project's statement in full this afternoon:The Tor Project has learned more about last year's attack by Carnegie Mellon researchers on the hidden service subsystem. Apparently these researchers were paid by the FBI to attack hidden services users in a broad sweep, and then sift through their data to find people whom they could accuse of crimes. We publicized the attack last year, along with the steps we took to slow down or stop such an attack in the future.Here is the link to their (since withdrawn) submission to the Black Hat conference, along with Ed Felten's analysis at the time.We have been told that the payment to CMU was at least $1 million.There is no indication yet that they had a warrant or any institutional oversight by Carnegie Mellon's Institutional Review Board. We think it's unlikely they could have gotten a valid warrant for CMU's attack as conducted, since it was not narrowly tailored to target criminals or criminal activity, but instead appears to have indiscriminately targeted many users at once.Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users.This attack also sets a troubling precedent: Civil liberties are under attack if law enforcement believes it can circumvent the rules of evidence by outsourcing police work to universities. If academia uses "research" as a stalking horse for privacy invasion, the entire enterprise of security research will fall into disrepute. Legitimate privacy researchers study many online systems, including social networks — If this kind of FBI attack by university proxy is accepted, no one will have meaningful 4th Amendment protections online and everyone is at risk.When we learned of this vulnerability last year, we patched it and published the information we had on our blog.We teach law enforcement agents that they can use Tor to do their investigations ethically, and we support such use of Tor — but the mere veneer of a law enforcement investigation cannot justify wholesale invasion of people's privacy, and certainly cannot give it the color of "legitimate research".Whatever academic security research should be in the 21st century, it certainly does not include "experiments" for pay that indiscriminately endanger strangers without their knowledge or consent.Remember when researchers abruptly cancelled a talk at Def Con on de-anonymizing Tor users? This might explain it. https://t.co/ofTSi5LDPq— Lorenzo Franceschi-B (@lorenzoFB) November 11, 2015The likely absence of IRB approval of CMU Tor research is even more problematic now that it looks like they turned user data over to the FBI— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) November 11, 2015Journalists following up on CMU/FBI story: Call the CMU General Counsel. Ask if Tor team got IRB approval for research. If not, why not.— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) November 11, 2015

I often think about the fact we don't really have 'online lives' any more. When I was small, to have a 'handle', to get on the Information Superhighway, was like attending a masquerade ball on a brand-new planet. All of you were suddenly someplace else, strange and new. (more…)

Our Magic from R. Paul Wilson on Vimeo.The documentary Our Magic by filmmaker R. Paul Wilson lifts the curtain behind which magicians have worked for a century and a half. Our Magic, however, does not explain how tricks work — that’s not the real point of magic. How magicians work, how their childhood experiences feed into what makes them seek such a specialized field of endeavor, is the real secret. Watch Wilson’s award-winning short film The Magic Box to get a taste of not only his talent as a filmmaker, but what makes magicians tick.https://youtu.be/DyfM7oLIlp0Few people who love magic do not feel the well of emotion which The Magic Box (above video) evokes. But why? What makes a grown man (or woman) teary-eyed by watching a short film about something so seemingly inconsequential as a magic trick? The documentary Our Magic answers that question, and does so in an entertaining and artistic manner. Most of the world’s best magicians participated in the project, and with the help of Kickstarter, R. Paul Wilson has created a unique piece of cinema. Happily, Our Magic is now available via Vimeo on Demand either to rent or download and own. The price is startlingly low, and readers of Boing Boing can get a 66% discount by entering the code “BoingBoing” in the appropriate spot.

[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]“Hitler escaped” in a secret tunnel and fled to Argentina, "there really are vampires among us,” and Robert Wagner is “going to jail” for killing Natalie Wood.It’s another fact-free fest in this week's soaring supermarket tabloids and scintillating celebrity magazines.Frank Sinatra is this week’s punching bag. Ol’ Blue Eyes was a “cocaine gang overlord” according to the National Enquirer (which makes me view ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ in a completely new light) and “asked mob to whack Woody” Allen after the director cheated on Mia Farrow, according to the Globe.So good to have a week when the tabloids aren’t giving us breaking news about who Sinatra was sleeping with 60 years ago.Fortunately investigative journalism is still alive and kicking at Us magazine, with the startling revelations that Selena Gomez wore it best, TV’s ‘Minority Report’ actress Meagan Good carries Post-it notes, green tea and a miniature teddy bear in her handbag, and the stars are just like us: they exercise together, indulge in ice cream, and volunteer for charity (the latter proving that Us mag considers former president Jimmy Carter “a star.”)Hitler’s escape and America’s plague of real-life vampires come courtesy of the National Examiner, whose reporters never met a conspiracy they didn’t like. It seems reasonable to assume that Hitler may have been killed by Argentinian vampires - I’m just guessing here, which seems to be the standard of proof the tabloids require before going to print - but is Robert Wagner really headed behind bars?The Globe seems to think that a “secret FBI file” reveals his “motive for murder” after a “shocking 34-year cover-up.” Or as an FBI spokesman might say: a probe into Natalie Wood's financial dealings was closed in 1980 without charges, and has gathered dust in an archive since then. Just because the Globe has noticed the antique file doesn’t make it any more of a “secret file” or smoking gun than it was when first shelved over three decades ago.Elvis Presley’s ex-wife Priscilla “is telling all before she dies,” says the Enquirer. Or cynics might say she’s just giving interviews to coincide with the release of the new Elvis album ‘If I Can Dream.’Angelina Jolie has had her nose surgically slimmed, alleges the Enquirer, displaying “before” and “after” photos that seem virtually identical. “Surgery’s so subtle hardly anyone would notice!” it adds. I couldn’t agree more.Us mag splashes with the claim that Gwen Stefanie’s marriage collapsed after she caught hubby Gavin Rossdale cheating with their children’s nanny. Evidently the childcare cutie sent naked selfies to Rossdale that turned up on the kids’ iPad. Grounds for dismissal, no doubt.People mag devotes its cover to a Duggar baby exclusive, though it seems this TV family of Biblical proportions births a new member every week, so this can hardly be news. “I can’t believe he’s really ours,” says Jessa Seewald (she’s not even a Duggar since marrying) who perhaps thinks that the nurses accidentally switched babies in the neo-natal ward.Actress and Food Network host Valerie Bertinelli’s recent weight gain is poised to divide America, it seems. “Valerie loses food fight!” screams the Globe. “Val Vows To Stay Big!” shouts the Enquirer. You decide.Literary awards of the week go to the Enquirer for its headline above bikini photos of Blake Lively, proclaiming “Blake’s Chest Amazing . . .” and for its headline above a photo of a slightly plumper Ben Affleck, touting: “Affleck’s New Role: Fatman.”I hope the Pulitzer judges are watching.Onwards and downwards . . .

A 1968 memo from Paramount producer Robert Justman to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry reports on the sad state of the show's hairpieces, which had gone missing in great number. (more…)

Journalist/educator Lisa Rein is looking for $20,000 to complete a documentary called "From DeadDrop to SecureDrop," which chronicles the development of the last technology project that Aaron Swartz worked on: a tool to help whistleblowers and journalists communicate and exchange documents in secret. (more…)

Floral/fruity scents have long been characterized as attractive to mosquitoes, so it's natural that New Mexico State’s Molecular Vector Physiology Lab researcher Stacy Rodriguez tested a floral/fruity perfume against DEET in a lab trial. (more…)

"Midgets" dressed in camouflage. Worms emerging from the car floor. Possums jumping out of the microwave. People jumping out of the refrigerator. I don't blame Brandon Terry and Casey Fowler of Spartanburg County for calling 911 five times to report these unusual events taking place in their home. Finally, a deputy arrived to investigate. From WYFF:The deputy said Terry showed him several pictures of a basketball hoop and tree. Terry and Fowler told the deputy that there was a person standing beside the tree in camouflage. The deputy told Fowler he could not see the person and Fowler told the deputy it was because only he could see them.Officials said Terry had six felony warrants for narcotics charges and was put in investigative detention, the report said.Terry agreed to a field sobriety test. During the test, Terry stopped and said the deputy was touching his eyes, according to the report. The deputy told Terry he was not and restarted the test.Terry and Fowler were charged with unlawful use of 911, and Terry received an additional charge for being a fugitive from justice.[via]

House Bill HR1737 will create penalties for auto-lenders who substantially overcharge black and latino customers through gouging on dealer markups. (more…)

From KQED Science: Surface tension is the property of any liquid that describes how its particles stick together. In the case of water, surface tension is especially strong, enough to form a kind of film where it meets the air, whether at the surface or in a bubble...If you’re a bug the size of a paperclip... surface tension makes a difference. Harnessing it, some aquatic beetles carry the oxygen they need underwater in the form of a temporary bubble, sort of like a natural scuba tank. Others encase themselves in a layer of air and draw oxygen from it their whole lives."Nature’s Scuba Divers: How Beetles Breathe Underwater" (Deep Look)

https://youtu.be/I906a5msynw?list=UUeecKs0KQxT7ejAHkoQ4wUwRhizome takes a look at the world of Black Midi, compositions with so many notes that to print them as musical notation would result simply in a giant blob of ink on the page. We've previously written about Circus Galop, an inhumanly-polyphonic test suite for automatic pianos. This stuff makes it look rather minimalist. [via]https://youtu.be/FfhDzEgYZug

She is reading a copy of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine.Jacket copy:Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named "post-race" society.From Vic Berger IV's Vine.

We've all encountered what people today call Black Memorabilia — a Mammy cookie jar, a racist postcard — but have you ever wondered where these depictions came from, and why they are so common? In her latest article for Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix interviewed Dr. David Pilgrim, author of Understanding Jim Crow, to get some answers to these and other questions. Hix learned that Black Memorabilia was popularized by post-Reconstruction whites to dehumanize African Americans, and that while slavery may have ended in 1865, Jim Crow has persisted in various forms and guises to this day, which helps explain why the presence of an African American family in the White House has not been enough to put America's racial history behind us.Stock caricatures such as Mammy, Uncle Tom, Sambo, pickaninny children, coon, Jezebel, Sapphire, and the black brute were employed to spread these messages to millions of people. Companies mass-produced these images in every form — including postcards, cleaning products, toys and games, ceramic figurines, ashtrays, cast-iron banks, children’s books, dinnerware, songbooks, tea towels, cookie jars, matchbooks, magazines, movies, gag gifts, salt-and-pepper shakers, planters, fishing lures, trade cards, ads, records, and tobacco tins. If you lived during the Jim Crow era, you’d encounter such caricatures everywhere, in your newspaper, on restaurant walls, on the shelves at stores, and at the cinema or live theater.“If you believed that black men were Sambos, childlike buffoons, for example, then why would they be allowed to vote?” Pilgrim says. “Why would they be allowed to hold office, serve on a jury, or attend public schools with whites? If black men were brutes who were a threat to white women, why would they be allowed to share beaches, public-school classes, or taxicabs? If black women were Mammies whose best roles in life were serving white families, why would they be allowed in other occupations when the society needed them for that? So the caricatures, and the stereotypes which accompanied them, became rationalizations for keeping blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. Perpetuating these caricatures was a way to make sure you didn’t have to compete against black people economically. In short, it was a way of sustaining white supremacy."

Mark of Future Forms takes gorgeous photos of his collection of "space-age" electronics from the 1960s to the 1980s, many of which are for sale or rental. You can search by color, brand, or category. I got lost and then found again in "novelty" and then disappeared altogether into "orange." (more…)

I've never understood the need for an advent calendar, as if children needed help remembering Christmas. As my daughter celebrates the gift giving traditions of several cultures, however, I'm left looking for a happy middle ground. We will both enjoy 24 days of Star Wars surprises.This LEGO Star Wars calendar promises to include some minifigs, space craft and some holiday themed droids. I'd love to see C1-10P in an ugly sweater.2015 LEGO Star Wars 75097 Advent Calendar Building Kit

Allen Touissant, a deeply influential New Orleans rhythm and blues musician and producer, has died. He was 77. Touissant suffered a heart attack shortly after a performance in Madrid, Spain. Touissant's work influenced generations of artists, from the Rolling Stones and The Who, who covered his songs, to collaborators like The Meters, Harry Connick, Jr., and Elvis Costello, with whom he recorded a post-Katrina album. From the New York Times:Mr. Toussaint was born in 1938 in Gert Town, a humble, working-class neighborhood of New Orleans, where he taught himself piano. He began his career as a teenager in the 1950s, releasing his first album in 1958 under the name Tousan. In 1960, he became the house producer, arranger and songwriter for the Minit label, working on songs like Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother in Law,” Lee Dorsey’s “Ya Ya” and Jessie Hill’s “Ooh Poo Pah Doo.”Throughout his career, Mr. Toussaint embodied the traditions of the New Orleans R&B scene, working as one of the city’s most prolific and influential songwriters and producers during the 1960s and 70s. Even in that fertile period of New Orleans music, Mr. Toussaint’s work stood out for its humor, jaunty style and arrangements with piano flourishes that showed the influence of Professor Longhair.After a brief stint in the United States Army, Mr. Toussaint returned to music in 1965 and continued to work with a range of New Orleans musicians, including the early funk group the Meters. He co-founded Sea-Saint Studios in 1972, which attracted Paul Simon, Paul McCartney and others.https://youtu.be/VBvolXWOaxs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRlRAyulN4oA video of a protest at the University of Missouri shows a professor of mass media blocking a student reporter from reporting. (more…)

Two Louisiana cops who killed a 6-year-old boy have been charged with murder after bodycam footage showed that his father had his hands up when they opened fire.Derrick Stafford, 32, and Norris Greenhouse Jr., 23, were also charged with attempted murder after firing upon a vehicle at what Louisana State Police described as "the conclusion of a pursuit."Jeremy Mardis was shot five times, according to the Avoyelles Parish coroner's office, and his father, Chris Few, was also critically injured.Police have not yet released the footage.The head of the Louisiana State Police earlier said that video of the shooting is one of the most disturbing things he's ever seen, CBS News' David Begnaud reported."This was not a threatening situation for the police," Mark Jeansonne, the attorney for Chris Few, told the Associated Press after a closed hearing for the marshals.Few remained hospitalized, and he was unable to attend the family's funeral for his son, 6-year-old Jeremy Mardis.Questions are also swirling about the claim of a pursuit, with CBS's Bergnaud describing the answers he's receiving as the strangest he's received in 15 years of reporting."That is one question I've been trying to ask for three days, and the answers I've been getting are some of the most bizarre I've ever gotten," Bergnaud said. "There was no warrant, there was no 911 call… there was nothing to indicate why these 2 officers moonlighting as deputy marshals at the time would have pulled over his man. Nothing to indicate why they would have turned on their lights in Marksville and pursued him down the dead-end road that led to the shooting."Huffington Post reports that at least 18 rounds were fired into the vehicle.Police initially said the marshals were attempting to serve Few a warrant when he attempted to reverse his SUV into the officers. Edmonson, however, said there's no evidence of a warrant for Few and couldn't confirm that Few attempted to back into the officers. The state police leader also said no gun was found that could be linked to Few.Jeremy, a first-grader in elementary school, died at the scene from head and chest wounds, Avoyelles Parish Coroner Dr. L. J. Mayeux said last week.

Wired recommends the Mrice E300 earbuds, a cheapie ($17-25) option that outperforms many headphones that cost over $1000 (!). (more…)