El Pais reports that a mother and her daughter were arrested after hiring a man to kill a swindler, then complaining to police when he failed to do the job.To be able to start working on the operation and locate the target, the fake spy requested a kind of deposit, of €7,000. This, he claimed, was the money needed to pay his informants and locate hitmen who could carry out the operation. But time passed, and the hit did not take place.The fake hitman was also arrested and charged. The alleged swindler was finally found—to ensure he lives—and may finally face charges of his own in what Spanish police have named "Operation Kafka."Photo:Shutterstock Read the rest

Paper Girls is Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang's outstanding, Stranger Things-esque all-girl time-travel adventure comic, and after four years, the pair have completed the story, tying up the increasingly complicated braided timelines of their tale in a fantastically satisfying bow.Paper Girls tells the tale of a group of young girls who deliver a local newspaper in 1980s Cleveland, facing down bullies, sexism, and parents, but whose lives change when, one morning, they are catapulted into a time-travel adventure that has them ranging up and down the timeline from the human race's earliest days to the very last moments of our planet, as they become pivotal figures in an existential war between time-travelers from different eras.On the way, they encounter their older selves (and clones of themselves) as well as dinosaurs, mecha warriors, hotshot space pilots, and all manner of treachery and skullduggery, as well as romance, bravery, self-sacrifice, and crises personal and global.Vaughan and Chiang get into some varsity-level time-travel weirdness, too, with lots of braided timelines that they need to tie up in this final volume, something they accomplish with virtuoso flair, across a series of multi-page spreads divided into horizontal slices that show the protagonists in four different times and places at the story's climax, a piece of dazzling visual storytelling that is worth all six volumes on its own.Paper Girls won Best New Series when it debuted in 2015, and it's lived up to that promise. Now that the tale is complete, it's a perfect time to re-read it from start to finish (the six collections' covers piece together to make a single, giant image, hinting at lots more premeditated goodies that will pay off now the project's over), or to gift the set to a friend. Read the rest

A coroner's report seems to suggest that two English rugby players who died of a heroin overdose were seeking brown sugar in the wee hours of the morning in Sri Lanka, but accidentally purchased a kind of heroin nicknamed "brown sugar." From The Guardian:An inquest at Crook coroner’s court heard that the two men, who were “not habitual drug users”, had taken a substance known locally as “brown sugar”, a cheap version of heroin....The coroner, Crispin Oliver, said the men purchased the drug on the way home from the nightclub. He said: “They had no prior knowledge of this substance. They would not have known that it was heroin.“I am satisfied that these were not drug users, I think this was a one-off occasion, it was certainly a mistake and it was certainly an accident.”Crispin added: “I hope this serves as a warning to people when they travel to far parts of the world that they have to be very careful about what they are encouraged to purchase and take.”Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash[Thanks, Julian] Read the rest

Kiyo Yamauchi retweeted a tweet written in Japanese, which has a photo of an acorn. He said, "The tweeter found an acorn at a shopping mall and he brought it to the lost and found just in case a child has dropped it. At the lost and found there was the mother and the daughter who were there looking for it."The story takes a huge turn as the mother had a Twitter account and found his tweet. She sent a DM to him saying that the daughter can't stop talking about him and wants to be his wife one day. The original tweeter says it was his first time he got a marriage proposal. So cute.— Kiyo Yamauchi 🍱 (@kiyotoshi_y) October 2, 2019 He followed up with this: "The story takes a huge turn as the mother had a Twitter account and found his tweet. She sent a DM to him saying that the daughter can't stop talking about him and wants to be his wife one day. The original tweeter says it was his first time he got a marriage proposal." Read the rest

Elena Botella worked at Capital One -- one of the US's leading issuers of subprime credit-cards -- for three years; in a fascinating first-person account, she describes how Capital One's youthful, smart, principled and caring staff created a culture in which the lives they were ruining were replaced by obfuscating jargon and interesting mathematics puzzles.It's the predatory lending version of The Banality of Evil, in which the poorest Americans generated $23b/year in revenue from interest alone, which was funneled into good, challenging, well-paid jobs for everyday people who managed to never think about the harms they were doing.She calls it "a conspiracy of silence" but it wasn't silence so much as metaphor and abstraction: by obsessing about the "physics" of debt and the mathematics that described it, the 3,000 white-collar workers at Capital One HQ were able to think of their work as an experimental science, in which they were using interventions (like randomly increasing the credit limits for some cardholders who were already struggling to make payments and measuring the total revenues that resulted) to uncover truths about the universe, not new techniques to ruin peoples' lives.Capital One’s culture of experimentation also acted as a kind of buffer. Fast Company has reported that Capital One runs 80,000 experiments per year. As Christopher Worley and Edward Lawler III explain in the journal Organizational Dynamics, a bank like Capital One can randomly assign differing interest rates, payment options, or rewards to various customers and see which combinations are most profitable for any given segment of people. Read the rest

Sadly, it appears that the decomposed latex Leonardo suit from 1993's TMNT III failed to sell at its auction earlier this week, despite the low low estimate of £10,000-£15,000.Leonardo's (Mark Caso) costume from Stuart Gilard's family adventure sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. When their friend April O'Neil (Paige Turco) was magically transported back in time to 17th century Japan, Leonardo and his fellow turtles followed in an attempt to rescue her.This costume includes a green turtle bodysuit consisting of foam latex cast elements over a spandex base, with dense-foam chest and shell elements, leather knee and elbow pads, and a leather sheath setup for Leonardo's swords. The head included is a stunt version, also utilizing a foam latex skin over a spandex base, with cast resin teeth, high-quality eyes, a fabric bandana, internal helmet liner shell for the performer, and a zipper at the back to allow the piece to be closed. Both the body and head of the costume show substantial breakdown to the foam latex elements and require restoration. The body is currently filled with some stuffing and rests on an oversize clothing hangar -- additional work is needed to make the piece stand. Dimensions (Head attached): 185.5 cm x 81.25 cm x 38 cm (73" x 32" x 15")Keep your eyes peeled on eBay! Read the rest

Machine learning systems are pretty good at finding hidden correlations in data and using them to infer potentially compromising information about the people who generate that data: for example, researchers fed an ML system a bunch of Google Play reviews by reviewers whose locations were explicitly given in their Google Plus reviews; based on this, the model was able to predict the locations of other Google Play reviewers with about 44% accuracy.This has grave implications for privacy, as it can be used to de-anonymize or re-identify anonymized data-sets (for example, some of these statistical methods are used to make very accurate guesses about which pages are being transited through encrypted Tor connections). But machine learning systems are also plagued by adversarial examples: tiny preturbations in data that would not confuse humans but which sharply decrease the accuracy of machine learning systems (from fake roadsigns projected for an eyeblink to changes to a single pixel in an image.Wired's Andy Greenberg reports on two scholarly efforts to systematize a method for exploiting adversarial examples to make re-identification and de-anonymization attacks less effective. The first is Attrigard, which introduces small amounts of random noise into user activity such that "an attacker’s accuracy is reduced back to that baseline." The second is Mockingbird, designed to make it much harder to guess which encrypted pages and sites are traversing the Tor network, though Mockingbird requires a much larger injection of noise, incurring a 56% bandwidth penalty in Tor's already bandwidth-starved environment. Read the rest

The tldr; of Thomas B. Edsall's alarming New York Times opinion piece: Senate Republicans, Fox News, and loyalists in the military will see to it that Trump spends out his life in office.Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and one of the authors of How Democracies Die, warned that a dangerous situation could emerge if the outcome of the 2020 election is very close, “one that, broadly like 2000, hinged on one or maybe two contested states.”In that case, Levitsky wrote, "it is possible that Republicans would close ranks behind Trump, resulting in a constitutional crisis. If right-wing media and the G.O.P. politicians were to remain solidly behind Trump, as they largely have thus far in previous scandals, there would be no easy constitutional exit."Source photo by David Everett Strickler on Unsplash Read the rest

Senator Bernie Sanders is off the campaign trail "until further notice" after physicians discovered a blockage in one of his arteries and inserted two stents. He had experienced "chest discomfort" last night. From CNN:"Sen. Sanders is conversing and in good spirits," (said senior adviser Jeff Weaver.) "He will be resting up over the next few days. We are canceling his events and appearances until further notice, and we will continue to provide appropriate updates..."Sanders, who is 78 years old, felt the "discomfort" during a campaign event. Despite his age, he has been one of the most active campaigners in the 2020 Democratic primary field. Read the rest

This clip is from 2007. I have yet to prepare Christopher Walken's upright chicken with pears but I have enjoyed this video several times.(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

A: This clip is an example of a certain genre of Internet video.Q: What is a supercut?Bonus video below, the time Boing Boing was part of a clue on Jeopardy! Read the rest

A truck was traveling across the Nanfang’ao Bridge in Taiwan this morning when the bridge collapsed. According to Mashable:A truck can be seen passing over the span as it falls, almost making it to the other side before being dragged down. The tanker caught fire when it landed, according to the New York Times. The driver was injured but survived. According to reports, five people are still missing after the accident. At least 12 people were injured, including the truck driver, two rescue workers, and several people in fishing boats.And via The New York Times:Maintenance consultants responsible for the bridge had in previous years found rusted cables, and several connected points had been hit by vehicles and damaged, according to The Liberty Times.The consultants had reported the problems several times to the harbor administration, but did not receive a reply, the newspaper reported. The public affairs office of the Su’ao Port branch office of the Taiwan International Ports Corporation declined to comment on the report. Read the rest

Lospec offers various tools and tutorials for creating "digitally restrictive art", typically pixel art that restricts the pallette and resolution in honor (or explicit imitation) of retro computer hardware.The biggest collection of pixel art tutorials on the net! Search by topic, author or medium to find the perfect article, video, image or book for you.A searchable collection of palettes for pixel art. Every palette can be downloaded in 6 different formats, and imported into nearly any software used to create pixel art.The Lospec Pixel Editor is a free, easy to use tool for creating pixel art that you can use right in your browser.It's the work of Sam Keddy, who operates a patreon that you can pledge to to help further develop the site. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH spunky little Donald is harassed by the most unfair witch hunt in history just because he got caught being doing crime

Everybody's an expert when it comes to packing before a vacation. It's great that you squeezed all that stuff into a carry-on. Now, what happens when you find that must-have pair of shoes or holiday gift? Your options are paying to ship the items or getting an extra bag, and neither of those is ideal.Turns out there's a travel bag that solves that problem so easily, it's kind of embarrassing that no one's done it before. At least, not as well as the Rollux 2-in-1 Expandable Suitcase:The simple folding design means you can convert this carry-on bag into a full-size suitcase, more than doubling its carrying capacity in seconds. It's intuitive enough for even the busiest traveler to collapse or expand without instructions, and that extra space can be a godsend for long trips. When you get to your destination, just fold it up and save yourself extra space in the hotel closet. While in its carry-on mode, it can even be worn as a backpack if you're hoofing it for awhile.This isn't a one-trick pony, either. There's plenty of thought put into the polypropylene material, which has durability and flexibility to spare. Need to pack a few extra shirts in? Feel free to stretch it out. And it's water-resistant, too - a big plus for long hikes in unfamiliar territory.The modular design doesn't stop with the interior. The wheels are sturdy but can be easily removed if you need that extra inch or two of space in the overhead compartment. Read the rest

If you're looking to refresh your social media avatars for Halloween, use this generator by Olivia Haines to create ghosts, vampires, witches and more. I went with bloody mummy:(Via Kalonica.) Read the rest

The verification requirements on the neighborhood app Nextdoor effectively make the app an unwelcome place for homeless people. If you do not have a fixed address, you cannot complete the verification process to use the service. Because homeless people are excluded from neighborhood discussions on Nextdoor, echo chambers that demonize the homeless seem to proliferate on the platform.From Rick Paulas at OneZero:Search for the word “homeless” in your own Nextdoor neighborhood forum, and you’ll almost certainly see similar sentiments posted: The homeless are causing a problem, and they must be dealt with.Other social networks often contain their fair share of anti-homeless sentiment too — the Twitter hashtag “cleanupSF” has become a shorthand call to push out San Francisco’s homeless population, and “neighborhood watch” Facebook groups are common forums for similar conversations. But Nextdoor stands out. For one, homeless individuals without mailing addresses cannot join Nextdoor, even if they’re permanent residents of the neighborhood. For another, the platform’s private setting means that posts simmer and boil over into a mob-with-pitchforks mentality. It has all created an environment where landlords, homeowners, and renters feel safe to vent their frustrations and unfounded suspicions — actions that can have direct consequences for the homeless.Nextdoor, launched in 2011, has always been defined by a user’s identity and location. To sign up for a Nextdoor account in the U.S., users must verify that they have a physical address located within one of the over 202,000 chunks of land that have been designated as a “neighborhoods.” Once verified, users have access to a private forum populated by others living within the same designation. Read the rest

Tea time, happy mutants! PG Tips 'Extra Strong' is not as pitifully weak as PG Tips 'Gold' offering. Belly up to the bar and get your tea on!Over the course of the last year, I've mostly leaned into coffee and espresso to make life liveable. They supply the necessary energy to do that which must be done. 5-6 double shots of espresso on my Rancilio Ms Silva was a normal morning until I packed that darling machine into storage. 32-64 oz of french pressed medium roast was my ritual whilst living la vida #vanlife. Now-a-days its been liters of drip coffee.A recent day where I unintentionally skipped the coffee nearly crippled me. Shit man, that was some bullshit withdrawl symptoms. Coffee isn't nearly as much fun as things that are far easier to kick.I have said it before and will say it again: There is no room for amateurs in the drug culture.I couldn't find the best tea in the universe, Barry's Gold Blend, in any local market. I did not want to wait for Amazon to deliver it. I bought a box of PG Tips 'Extra Strong' and it gets the job done!PG Tips 'Extra Strong' is only extra strong if you are in the UK. This is a dark black tea that is a lot like Barry's but has a bit more of a malty tone to it. It is not like "Whoa, existential crisis!" black, but PG Tips 'Extra Strong' is someplace between deathrock and skate punk. Read the rest

Whenever I'm in Japan I marvel at the efficient, clean, quiet, and comfortable trains. The passengers are polite, and the train employees bow when moving from one car to another. Right now there is some kind of international sports-ball tournament going on in Japan, and a Japanese woman shot a video of some obnoxious French soccer fans acting like jackasses on the train. They are lying in the aisle, carrying each other, yelling, bumping into other people, and putting their dirty shoes on the seats. This Logan Paul-like idiocy would be looked down upon even on a European train, but in Japan it's unthinkable.In this video That Japanese Man Yuta shows the video and the Japanese reactions to it on social media. Read the rest

In case you missed it, some frustrated residents in the Clinton Park neighborhood of San Francisco chipped in a few hundred bucks each to purchase giant boulders to keep homeless people off their street ("anti-homeless architecture," as it's called). Boulders that the city of San Francisco aren't going to remove.Well, BB friend Danielle Baskin, who lives on that small street, thinks the rocks are "barbaric," so she did something about it.She tweets:Some neighbors pooled together $2000 to dump 24 boulders into the sidewalk as a form of “anti-homeless decoration”.The city won’t remove them, so I put their rocks on the Craigslist free section.The post was flagged and removed, of course. But she didn't stop there. She then tried to sell the rocks for $5 each and that post was also flagged and removed. The boulders belong in parks & gardens, not intercepting people trying to go about their day. pic.twitter.com/FEcMV9fgyb— Danielle Baskin (@djbaskin) September 27, 2019“Can I leave my other boulders here?” This person is either playing along or also hates sidewalks.I’m asking him if I can borrow his truck. pic.twitter.com/H0wb5yfUSn— Danielle Baskin (@djbaskin) September 27, 2019In another variation on my Craigslist post, I tried to sell the boulders for $5/each. Then I‘d give away the money to people sleeping nearby.This post was also flagged and removed. pic.twitter.com/S30bflEjK3— Danielle Baskin (@djbaskin) September 27, 2019The latest? On Friday night, the boulders were pushed into the street! Read the rest

Melvil Dewey created the Dewey Decimal system, established the first school for instruction of librarians, and was one of the founders of the American Library Association. But in June, the ALA voted to strip his name from the ALA's annual award for "creative leadership of high order." Why? The ALA cited Dewey's racism, antisemitism, and serial harassment of women. Although the decision to strip his name from the award is new, it wasn't based on a modern view of Dewey's behavior.Dewey owned a private club in New York that expressly excluded Jews and African-Americans. When that policy was publicized, Dewey received a public rebuke from the New York State Board of Regents, and ultimately resigned his position as State Librarian in 1905. Around that same time, he was also censured by the ALA for his serial harassment of women:several women complained about his improper behavior toward them—including unwanted kissing, hugging, and caressing in public. Dewey’s daughter-in-law even moved out of his home because she was uncomfortable around him.Wikipedia notes:Reports, allegations, and an investigation of Dewey's inappropriate and offensive behavior directed at women continued for decades after his departure from ALA. In 1930, he paid $2,000 to settle a lawsuit by a former secretary alleging sexual harassment.In an understatement, the Library of Congress simply notes, "His legacy is complex."Slate has much more on Dewey's history, including the problematic nature of the Dewey Decimal System itself.(Image courtesy of the Provincial Archives of Alberta.) Read the rest

I stared at this a while in Target and a staff member eventually asked if I needed help and I slowly turned to them and whispered "kratom ranch."Kranch Saucy Sauce [Amazon] Read the rest

Annalee Newitz (previously) just published her second novel, The Future of Another Timeline, a madcap feminist time-travel novel that pits incel extremists who are trying to snuff out feminism before it can get started against a secret liberation army of feminists inspired by the (alternate history) Senator Harriett Tubman.I reviewed the book in today's Los Angeles Times.The darkness also comes through in Newitz’s misogynists, whose creepiness is never as absurd as it might be. Newitz’s Comstockers are far too real and present to be mere satire. That’s because so much of their ideology is lifted verbatim from men’s rights message boards, murderous incel (“involuntarily celibate,” a bizarre, violent eugenic conspiracy theory that blames women for men’s lack of sex) cults and “Dark Enlightenment” self-parody.The upshot is a book full of heart, consequences, stakes, action and surprises. Newitz blends exquisitely rendered historical research with a complex science fiction, the time-travel premise whose internal logic is well-thought-through, throwing up all kind of hard puzzles for her characters to solve.This is a hell of a book from start to finish and could not be more timely.'The Future of Another Timeline' pulses with a daring punk-rock, time-travel tale [Cory Doctorow/LA Times] Read the rest

Carla and I watched all 12 episodes of Fleabag in 4 nights. If you haven't seen it yet, it's a British dramedy about a London cafe owner (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) dealing with a tragedy, a neurotic sister, and a newly-widowed dad and his passive-aggressive girlfriend. It ran for two seasons and won multiple Emmys: Outstanding Comedy Series, Lead Actress - Comedy Series, Supporting Actress - Comedy Series (Olivia Colman), and another Supporting Actress - Comedy Series (Sian Clifford)I just found out Fleabag began as a one-woman show, written and performed by Waller-Bridge, funded in 2013 on Kickstarter. The campaign raised £3,955.You can watch the Kickstarter video here. Read the rest

In 74% of US counties, the average worker can't afford the median home. It's getting worse: Six months ago, it was 71% of counties. The results come from Attom's new survey of house prices.Not owning your home is a worse deal than ever, too: as private equity takes over the rental market, rents and evictions are skyrocketing, while the safety and quality of rental housing is plummeting.What's more, the monopoly rents that hedge funds extract from tenants are used to fund incredibly high-priced, intensive lobbying campaigns to restrict tenants' rights. “Prices are going up substantially faster than earnings in 2019 without any immediate end in sight, which continues to make home ownership difficult or impossible for a majority of single-income households and even for many families with two incomes,” Todd Teta, chief product officer with Attom Data Solutions, said in the report.The major factor driving home prices higher as of late for most of the country has been the lack of homes for sale. After the recession, home-building activity was slow to rebound and mostly concentrated in the most expensive tier of the market for single-family homes.As newer homes didn’t come on line to meet the growing demand, particularly for cheaper starter homes, competition for properties heated up, and bidding wars pushed home prices even high across much of the country. There are precious few places in America where the average worker can afford a median-priced home [Jacob Passy/Marketwatch](via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

YouTuber John Mollusk took Greta Thunberg's biting address to the U.N. and turned it into Swedish Death Metal. And, of course, it's EPIC! Read the rest

The bayonet on the MAS-36 rifle seems a straightforward, no-nonsense design. But there's a problem with it: bored soldiers. Read the rest

When a corporation is investigated for malfeasance -- cheating or hurting customers or workers, say -- the DoJ sometimes allows it to enter in a deferred prosecution agreement (DPAs) or a non-prosecution agreement (NPAs): the company admits wrongdoing, pays a fine, and promises not to do it again; after 2-3 years of good conduct, the charges are dropped.The DoJ's theory is that this is a cost-effective, efficient way to reform bad corporate culture, but Public Citizen's in-depth investigation reveal that corporations view these agreements as just part of the cost of doing (dirty) business, and that, far from reforming their ways, the large multinationals that enter into these agreements simply reoffend -- again, and again, and again.Meanwhile, the DoJ has all but given up on actual prosecutions for corporate wrongdoing, especially when it comes to the very largest multinations, who make the up a disproportionate amount of reoffenders, like Jpmorgan, Deutsche Bank, Pfizer, HSBC, and Standard Chartered Bank. The companies that make the largest political campaign contributions are also the most likely to received these DPAs or NPAs.Things went from bad to worse under Obama, and then from worse to much, much worse under Trump, with the creation of rules that limit the ability of other agencies or jurisdictions to punish corporations once they settle with the DoJ.When corporations do reoffend are are punished by the DoJ for it, the terms of those punishments are a secret, as are the related proceedings. Meanwhile, corporate wrongdoing is on the rise, both in frequency and scale, with a rogues' gallery of corporations from Boeing to Johnson & Johnson to Goldman Sachs currently under criminal investigation by the DoJ, which will get to decide whether to go to court, or just offer a get-out-of-jail card in the form of a DPA or NPA. Read the rest

There's a video purporting to be the legendary Donald Trump piss tape going around. It's perfectly executed, starring a great lookalike Trump and filmed in the right $18000-a-night hotel room or a perfect replica thereof, yet fakeness seems built-in at a level somehow beyond apparent realism. Ashley Feinberg writes that "what makes it most unreal is how believable it is." The more I tried to prove to myself it wasn’t real, the less confident I became in my own skepticism.This was, however, also a very, very powerful reason to keep believing it was fake: that the most extraordinarily damaging piece of evidence against the president could just be waiting there, in plain sight, with no one doing anything about it. If there are any lessons we should have learned by this point, in 2019, they’re that nothing could ever be that easy, and that few enough things are real. Pixel telling time! I think it's fake because of two specific things:1. The quality and light level are as high as they could be without revealing details of "Trump's" face and hair, or other trickery.2. The shaky zoom in and out of Trump, a "mockumentary" cliche. But those are both meta things. Feinberg sleuths out a killing blow to its credibility. Read the rest

You already take your games and movies on the go. Why not share them? Thanks to the PIQO Powerful 1080p Mini Projector, you can have that communal, drive-in movie experience anywhere on your own massive screen.This gadget packs a lot of functionality into a roughly 2" square package. First and foremost, it's got a 200-lumen bulb that's capable of throwing up an image onto nearly any surface - day or night - at 240 inches across. That's in HD, 1080p quality accompanied by sound from built-in hi-fi speakers.Where those images come from is up to you. It's got wi-fi or Bluetooth connectivity that enables it to connect to any Android, iOS, Mac or Windows devices, or you can simply use the interface on the device itself. Stream from Netflix, YouTube or any number of apps from a home screen that's quick and easy to navigate, then sit back enjoy up to 5 hours of showtime on a single charge (or 50 hours if you're using it for audio only).You can pick up the PIQO and a remote charging unit now for a 64% discount off the MSRP. Read the rest

I travel a lot and wherever I go, I bring an Aeropress, because life is too short for shitty coffee.As much as I love traveling with an Aeropress, I am the first to admit that it's a bit ungainly in the suitcase: not only does the flange around the press make it an awkward fit, but it's very hard to get an Aeropress to work with either the small (and regrettably fragile) water-glasses in the hotel bathroom or the flimsy paper cups in the "coffee" maker. I make do by traveling with a clever and indestructible flatpack coffee-cup, which works reasonably well, but even that reliable accessory has occasionally catastrophically unfolded itself while I was pressing a shot into it.Now, perhaps, there is a better way. Aeropress has announced a travel-sized version of its amazing and versatile coffee-maker, the $32 Aeropress Go, which is shorter and narrower, and fits inside its own rigid mug; it comes with a folding stirrer and scoop that fit inside the press (which fits inside the mug) as well as a little plastic safe for the paper filter (or you can switch to a reusable metal filter).The company is taking pre-orders for a "late October" ship-date, and -- suspiciously -- there are no photos of the thing (including photos that might show its true scale/size), only 3D renders.That said, I've pre-ordered mine. The problem of traveling gracefully with an Aeropress is actually a serious comfort and self-care issue for me, and the company has earned a lot of trust from me over the years. Read the rest

Underground comics artist Lynda Barry (previously) is one of this year's class of $625,000 Macarthur Foundation "genius grant" recipients, and it's so deserved.Barry is best known for her longrunning indie comic strip, Ernie Pook's Comeek (collected in The Greatest of Marlys, a must-have for any comics fan), and is also a brilliant novelist, whose Cruddy is one of my all-time favorite books.She is also a talented teacher: we both taught the same Clarion class a few years back and the profound effect she had on our students shone through in their work. In early November, Drawn and Quarterly will publish Making Comics, which anthologizes her teaching exercises and her pedagogical method, honed in her years as an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison art department and at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (it's a companion volume to her 2014 book Syllabus).I could not be more pleased by this development. As always, the entire group of Macarthur Fellows is remarkable, a cross-section of some of the world's most exciting activists, creators, and practitioners, from restorative justice practitioner sujatha baliga to historian Saidiya Hartman to poet Ocean Vuong.“The thing that I was flooded with was this realization that I was really going to get to apply myself to this work I’ve sort of been chasing after for 20 years," the artist said, “which is this whole thing about images and how they travel between people and why we use them.”Key to that has been working with four-year-olds, she said, because she considers them on an important developmental cusp, before drawing and writing start being identified as separate forms of communication. Read the rest

NYT publisher calls Trump's anti-press rhetoric 'global threat'

Cartoonist Scott Adams is famous for "Dilbert", for his right-wing commentary, and most recently a nauseating attempt to promote an app after the Gilroy massacre. On Twitter, journalist John Cook mocked him as "the louis farrakhan of incel white nationalists." Adams threatened legal action."No wonder your piece of shit Gawker publication got its balls cut off," Adams wrote. "My lawyers will be contacting you."Adams would be unlikely to prevail should he follow through with the implied lawsuit, as libel concerns false statements of fact, not insults. But the threat of lawsuits—especially the cost of defending them—is a time-honored method of silencing critics and mockers. Read the rest

Comscore is a lynchpin of online "metrics", the practice of measuring web traffic and assigning human interest and engagement to it. The SEC announced today it charged the company and its former CEO with fraud.from February 2014 through February 2016, Comscore, at the direction of its former CEO Serge Matta, entered into non-monetary transactions for the purpose of improperly increasing its reported revenue. Through these transactions, Comscore and a counterparty would negotiate and agree to exchange sets of data without any cash consideration. Comscore recognized revenue on these transactions based on the fair value of the data it delivered, which had been improperly increased in order to inflate revenue. The SEC's orders also find that Comscore and Matta made false and misleading public disclosures regarding the company’s customer base and flagship product and that Matta lied to Comscore's internal accountants and external audit firm. This scheme enabled Comscore to artificially exceed its analysts' consensus revenue target in seven consecutive quarters and create the illusion of smooth and steady growth in Comscore's businessNone of the charges were about the eyeballs it reports to advertisers and publishers. It is left to our imagination whether Comscore's lies concern only such numbers as the SEC is interested in. Read the rest

Oh shit, Atlas, "one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever built" according to DARPA, is now doing a gymnastics routine, and it's really good. Launched in 2013 by BostonDynamics for DARPA, this robot gets more and more human by the year. Both eerie and spectacular.From BostonDynamics on YouTube:Atlas uses its whole body -- legs, arms, torso -- to perform a sequence of dynamic maneuvers that form a gymnastic routine. We created the maneuvers using new techniques that streamline the development process. First, an optimization algorithm transforms high-level descriptions of each maneuver into dynamically-feasible reference motions. Then Atlas tracks the motions using a model predictive controller that smoothly blends from one maneuver to the next. Using this approach, we developed the routine significantly faster than previous Atlas routines, with a performance success rate of about 80%. For more information visit us at www.BostonDynamics.com.Here is Atlas going for a walk on a winter day in 2016:And Atlas presented to us in 2013: Read the rest

Spot, the robot dog from Boston Dynamics, is now for sale. Sort of. From IEEE Spectrum:But don’t pull out your credit card just yet. Spot may cost as much as a luxury car, and it is not really available to consumers. The initial sales, described as an “early adopter program,” is targeting businesses. Boston Dynamics wants to find customers in select industries and help them deploy Spots in real-world scenarios.“What we’re doing is the productization of Spot,” Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert tells IEEE Spectrum. “It’s really a milestone for us going from robots that work in the lab to these that are hardened for work out in the field.” Read the rest

Citizen Lab (previously) is one of the world's top research institutions documenting cyber-attacks against citizen groups, human rights activists, journalists and others; ten years ago, they made their reputation by breaking a giant story about "Ghostnet," malicious software that the Chinese state used to convert the computers of the world's Tibetan embassies into spying devices.A decade later, Citizen Lab has published a new report that painstakingly documents the new ways in which a hacking group Citizen Lab calls "Poison Carp" (presumably, Chinese state hackers or contractors) have targeted Tibetan activists, the Tibetan government in exile, and Tibetans living in Chinese-occupied Tibet.The new attacks, dubbed "Missing Link," are "one-click mobile exploits" -- Whatsapp chat URLs that are targets are tricked into clicking, which then take over the targets' mobile devices, turning them into roving bugs that expose the targets to the intimate, pervasive, continuous surveillance.The exploits used by Poison Carp are the same zero-days that were deployed in "watering hole attacks" on Uyghur Muslims in China's Xinjiang province.To address these challenges, Tibetan groups have recently formed the Tibetan Computer Emergency Readiness Team (TibCERT), a coalition between Tibetan organisations to improve digital security through incident response collaboration and data sharing. In November 2018, TibCERT was notified of suspicious WhatsApp messages sent to senior members of Tibetan groups. With the consent of the targeted groups, TibCERT shared samples of these messages with Citizen Lab. Our analysis found that the messages included links designed to exploit and install spyware on iPhone and Android devices. Read the rest

Whatever fond memories you might have of high school, Texas Instruments' TI-84 is an obsolete piece of crap: a 1980s design updated to 1990s technology made with 2000s penny parts and sold for more than $100 a pop to children all but forced to buy them. TI is a notorious lobbyist and has sought laws big and small to maintain this status quo, from mandatory Algebra courses with mandatory TI-84s to examination rules that allow its devices and no others. But the racket is falling apart under pressure from superior alternatives and growing resentment among teachers and students.While tutoring low-income students in 2011, a Yale math grad named Eli Luberoff began to notice a “horrible inequity” in the system.“A lot of families simply couldn’t afford to spend $100 on a calculator,” he says, “and it was creating a huge imbalance in access to math tools.”So, Luberoff created Desmos, a free graphing calculator application for desktop and mobile. He didn’t expect it to turn into a company — but today, more than 40m students and teachers use it.“Our business model is the exact opposite of TI’s,” says Luberoff: “Their model has always been to give [tech] away for free to textbook companies and force families to buy it at a premium price; our model is to give [tech] away for free to students, and charge textbook companies to integrate it.”In four years, TI's "other devices" sales have slumped from $2.2bn to $1.4bn, an indicator that it calculators are not selling well. Read the rest

The Advocate in Baton Rouge reports that a Florida woman crawled into a camel enclosure at a roadsize zoo, the camel sat on her, and that she bit the camel's testicles "to escape".The investigation found that the couple had provoked the camel before it sat on the woman. "The camel did nothing wrong," Hamilton said. "They (the couple) were aggressive. The camel was just doing its normal routine."The truck stop, located 20 minutes outside of Baton Rouge, keeps a camel named Caspar and for many years controversially kept a tiger for visitors to see on-site. The couple, who weren't identified, stopped at the truck stop to let the dog out.The couple were cited with a leash law violation (they also let their dog into the camel enclosure) and criminal trespassing. Read the rest

Today, Wired advises you to "Stop Renting E-Scooters Every Day and Just Buy One Already!", which may or may not be good advice in terms of your own safety and the safety of others, but if you like the idea, you don't need to spend $1000-$1600 to risk your neck and the necks of everyone else on your commute.Many cities have banned e-scooter short-hire vehicles and are impounding them, and in other cities, repo men have been busily seizing scooters left on private property, and the e-scooter companies, who already lose money on every scooter (they're making it up in volume!) just abandon their scooters to rust away in impound lots and turn into e-waste.Which means that you can pick up scooters for pocket-change in municipal auctions! There's only one problem: the control units of these scooters only take orders from companies like Bird and Lime, so even after you own one of these things, you can't ride it without paying an overcapitalized bezzle for the privilege.That is...not unless you swap out the control unit! For $30 or less, you can get a conversion kit that swaps in with just a few screws' worth of fiddling. Once you do that, that city impound scooter becomes your scooter, at a price so cheap you can buy two!This strategy is totally legal, and totally toxic to Bird and Lime's business model, and boy do they know it: last year, Bird threatened to sue me for writing about this in a bid to keep the news from spreading. Read the rest

The grand prize winner at the 2019 D23 Mousequerade, here's Tina Elliott's "Grim Grinning Gown" with moving ghosts and 3D-printed doom buggies:You can see the other prize winners here, including this homage to Disneyland's Indiana Jones Adventure by Emily and Nathan Mebust:(Via Cosplay in America.) Read the rest

I have an op-ed in today's Globe and Mail, "Why do people believe the Earth is flat?" wherein I connect the rise of conspiratorial thinking to the rise in actual conspiracies, in which increasingly concentrated industries are able to come up with collective lobbying positions that result in everything from crashing 737s to toxic baby-bottle liners to the opioid epidemic.In a world where official processes are understood to be corruptible and thus increasingly unreliable, we don't just have a difference in what we believe to be true, but in how we believe we know whether something is true or not. Without an official, neutral, legitimate procedure for rooting out truth -- the rule of law -- we're left just trusting experts who "sound right to us." Big Tech has a role to play here, but it's not in automated brainwashing through machine learning: rather, it's in the ability for conspiracy peddlers to find people who are ripe for their version of the truth, and in the ability of converts to find one another and create communities that make them resilient against social pressure to abandon their conspiracies.Fighting conspiracies, then, is ultimately about fighting the corruption that makes them plausible -- not merely correcting the beliefs of people who have come under their sway.They say that ad-driven companies such as Google and Facebook threw so much R&D at using data-mining to persuade people to buy refrigerators, subprime loans and fidget-spinners that they accidentally figured out how to rob us of our free will. Read the rest

Unmute this one.From Redditor @carolyn_collier_."Would you like to play a game?" Read the rest

Do androids dream of electric sashimi? University of Virginia engineers and Harvard biologists built a robotic fish based on the high-performance swimming of tuna. Above, a visualization of the robot's motion data. Eventually, the Tunabot could be outfitted with a variety of sensors and wireless communication. From UVAToday:The aim of (mechanical engineering professor Hilary) Bart-Smith’s project is to better understand the physics of fish propulsion – research that could eventually inform development of the next generation of underwater vehicles, driven by fish-like systems better than propellers.Underwater robots also are useful in a range of applications, such as defense, marine resources exploration, infrastructure inspection and recreation...The eyeless, finless replica fish is roughly 10 inches long; the biological equivalent can get up to seven feet long. A fishing line tether keeps the robot steady, while a green laser light cuts across the midline of the plastic fish. The laser measures the fluid motion shed by the robot with each sweep of its fabricated tail. As the current of water in the flow tank speeds up, the Tunabot’s tail and whole body move in a rapid bending pattern, similar to the way a live yellowfin tuna swims."Tuna robotics: A high-frequency experimental platform exploring the performance space of swimming fishes" (Science Robotics) Read the rest

University of Cambridge lecturer Jason Scott-Warren was looking at an original 1623 folio copy of Shakespeare's plays, when thought he recognized the handwriting in the margins: John Milton. Was it possible that he'd identified Milton's personal copy of Shakespeare? It was jammed full of marginalia, and scholars for years had wondered who had written those scribblings. If it was Milton, then they had a record "of arguably the second-greatest 17th-century writer reading the first."So Scott-Warren went to his blog and wrote a post arguing his hypothesis, hit "publish" -- and the world of 17th-century English literary studies went faintly nuts. Turns out they agreed with him and now they're all flipping out with excitement.One of the best parts about Milton's notes is that he keeps on suggesting corrections and improvements to Shakespeare. As the Washington Post writes (my apologies if this is paywalled):Milton’s marginalia range from line-editing — crossing out an adjective and offering an alternative — to flagging preferred passages to fixing Shakespeare’s meter, ensuring it conforms perfectly to the rules of iambic pentameter. At one point, Milton rewrites the title of what may be Shakespeare’s most famous work: The play becomes “Juliet and Romeo,” not vice versa. [snip]Bourne came to cherish particular edits. For example, the time the commenter suggested “wicked tongue” instead of “idle tongue” in Hamlet. Or the time he proposed that Juliet was “past hope, past cure, past help” instead of “past hope, past care, past help” in “Romeo and Juliet.” [snip]It’s unclear why Milton may have made the marginalia and revisions. Read the rest

In a rural Nevada desert town, people who get all jazzed up about UFOs on the internet have begun to arrive for a UFO-themed meetup that locals would rather not be hosting.This area of the desert is home to a U.S. military installation long known as Area 51, which has been the focus of conspiracy theories involving alien life for some time.In June, Matty Roberts, a college student in California, posted a silly post on Facebook inviting all comers to run into Area 51 on foot to “see them aliens.”In early September, young mister Roberts disassociated himself from the event that is today descending on Rachel, Nevada, saying it was poorly organized, and that he was afraid it may turn into a public safety crisis.Hope that doesn't happen.Excerpt from today's Reuters filing from Rachel, Nevada, a remote desert town of 50 people about 12 miles outside that military base:When more than 1 million people expressed interest, the U.S. Air Force admonished curiosity seekers not to breach the gates at the military base, which it said is still used to test combat aircraft and train personnel.Roberts instead helped stage an alternative Alienstock set to take place Thursday night 150 miles (240 km) away, in Las Vegas. Beer brand Bud Light signed on as a sponsor and designed limited-edition, green beer cans featuring alien heads.About 40 miles (64 km) east of Rachel, another small town, Hiko, Nevada, planned a separate event called “Storm Area 51 Basecamp” at a gift shop dubbed the Alien Research Center. Read the rest

In 1969, visionary designers Charles and Ray Eames directed this cinematic ballet of more than 100 spinning tops from around the world. The score is by famed Hollywood composer Elmer Bernstein (The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, Airplane!, etc.). From the Eames Office:Tops had its genesis in an earlier film produced for the Stars of Jazz television program in 1957. The Eameses decided to make a longer, color version in 1966, which they worked on in spare moments between other projects.The film is a celebration of the ancient art and craft of top-making and spinning. One hundred and twenty-three tops spin to the accompaniment of a score by Elmer Bernstein. Using close-up, live-action photography, the film shows tops, old and new, from various countries, including China, Japan, India, the United States, France, and England. Charles’s fascination with spinning tops went back to his childhood; in this film he found a perfect vehicle for demonstrating their beauty in motion and for making visual points about the universality of tops, the physics of motion (MIT physics professor, Philip Morrison, often showed the film to students and colleagues), and the intimate relationship between toys and science. (via Aeon) Read the rest

A young gay Christian man in Oklahoma says his fellow church-goers tackled him, pinned him down, punched him in the face, and tried to ‘pray the gay away,’ because he and his boyfriend are “guilty of homosexuality, an “abomination of a sin.”Sean Cormie, who is 23 and still both queer and Christian despite the attack, says the Sunday service started out normally but got weird fast when the pastor started preaching about homosexuality as a “sin.”Sean was there on September 8 with his partner, Gary Gardner. Sean's mom and stepdad are youth pastors at the First Assembly of God in Blackwell, Oklahoma, where Sean says Pastor Bill McKissick was pacing around the room, fuming, and saying that someone present in the church at that moment was “guilty of homosexuality,” an “abomination of a sin,” Sean says.In a Facebook post, Sean wrote that the gay-condemning pastor then pointed his finger at Sean and Gary. At that point, congregation members all got up and rushed them, pinning the two guys to the ground and “praying the spirit of homosexuality out of us,” wrote Sean in the post.They were yelling and crying, trying to “pray the gay away,” he said.“I was so embarrassed,” Gardner told NBC affiliate TV station KFOR in Oklahoma City. “I felt about two inches tall when this started.”Sean Cormie, 23, came out as gay in the spring. Since then, he said his family has asked him to go to church and bring his partner, Gary Gardner. Read the rest