TONIGHT: "The Squad" claps back at President Trump! #LSSC pic.twitter.com/AUzgmVdKbE— The Late Show (@colbertlateshow) July 17, 2019 Comedy shows have been our source of truth for too long. Read the rest

Fifty years ago today, a Saturn V rocket launched with Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins on board. On July 19, Armstrong became the first human to step onto the moon. Above is almost five hours of CBS News's coverage of the historic Apollo 11 mission to the moon. And that's the way it was.More: "Apollo 11 launch: Watch the most memorable moments from CBS News' coverage" Read the rest

Throwflame, the Ohio-based supplier of flamethrowers, announced the TF-19 WASP Flamethrower Drone Attachment designed for the DJI S1000 drone. The WASP contains a one gallon fuel tank for 100 seconds of flame with a 25-foot range. Why would you need a flamethrower, much less one that flies? According to Throwflame, here are some worthy applications:Prescribed agricultural burnsGround clearingSnow and ice removalIncinerating weeds and pesky insect hivesPyrotechnic events and movie propsFirefighting and trainingGrassland managementWhat could possibly go wrong? Read the rest

Endless casts of land crabs have invaded a neighborhood in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Apparently heavy rains have driven the crustaceans to seek shelter in people's homes. Groceries have reported a run on butter. (OK, that last part isn't true.)“My wife stands out here with a broom when I’m trying to back the car out to keep them from running into the garage because once they get in there there’s a million places they can hide and you only find them once they die,” Bill Paterson told WPBF. Read the rest

Orix Auto charges $4 to rent a car for 30 min. The car-sharing company has more than 12,000 parking places, so cars are readily available. Orix learned that a large number of its 230,000 users rent cars and don't drive them anywhere. So they looked into it and discovered that people were using them to take naps, eat lunch, do work, change clothes, recharge cell phones, and store things (when storage lockers at train stations weren't available).From Asahi:"I rented a car to eat a boxed meal that I bought at a convenience store because I couldn't find anywhere else to have lunch,"said a 31-year-old male company employee who lives in Saitama Prefecture, close to Tokyo.“Usually the only place I can take a nap while visiting my clients is a cybercafe in front of the station, but renting a car to sleep in is just a few hundred yen (several dollars), almost the same as staying in the cybercafe.”Easy accessibility is a big advantage of car-sharing services. Customers can reserve vehicles any time 24 hours a day on their smartphones for immediate use.Image: Orix Auto Corp.[via The Verge] Read the rest

Lou Cabron writes, "Jonathan Coulton re-visited his album/graphic novel 'Solid State' (previously) over the weekend with new comments about how it applies to today's world. 'When I started work on Solid State, the only thing I could really think of that I wanted to say was something like, 'The internet sucks now',' Coulton said in 2017 (in an epilogue to the graphic novel). So what does he think today?" "I feel like when I wrote it, we were still in a kind of slow motion cultural digital apocalypse. And then Trump was elected, and it made me think we were much further along than I had feared. Suddenly my worries about us being mean to each other on the internet felt a lot less pressing." But he still has a very hopeful and positive message for our current moment in time. "I think a lot of it still applies. Basically, the internet and social media are technologies that are way too powerful for us to use responsibly right now. This is a common cycle with tech of course, somebody makes a thing that breaks all the rules, people abuse it, it beats us up for a while, and eventually we figure out how to manage it better. I still believe we're in the middle of that kind of cycle. It's exposed how small and scared and nasty we all are, and my hope is that we will eventually see that and learn how to be better humans." Or, as Coulton says at the end of his graphic novel. Read the rest

In a Fox & Friends newsbrief, Thiel spurred President Trump to promise to look into baseless claim that Google committed treason.

As innocent people sat on a sidewalk bench in Beirut, pranksters walked by them, tripping over nothing. The pranksters were spaced out through the flow of pedestrian traffic, to make it seem more real. The people who saw the trippers were mystified. Read the rest

"The person who sends me a screenshot of the best manbaby fan reaction to this wins a chocolate fish," tweeted Sacha Judd, linking to a GQ article with the headline: "Actress Lashana Lynch Is the New 007 in the Upcoming James Bond." The manbabies did not disappoint, as you can see from the replies to her tweet.The person who sends me a screenshot of the best manbaby fan reaction to this wins a chocolate fish. https://t.co/DyJYHUJyTb— Sacha Judd (@szechuan) July 14, 2019Tag for this post swiped from @scalzi Read the rest

Mountain Dew made a place in the market by tasting like crap and having more caffeine than a handful of No-Doz. The flavors are all "SUGAR." They are nearly indistinguishable to an over 8-year-old palate. This new Dew, however, is for gamers and has a resealable lid because angry young men like to conserve!That said, this dude at Kotaku seems to know his Mountain Dew:That fancy resealable lid is a real pain in the ass to open. The directions are simple, but actually getting it to pop open was annoying and felt poorly designed for people with bigger hands or fingers. After struggling for far too long, I finally got it to pop open and my hand was covered in Game Fuel. It wasn’t a great experience. And then I finally tasted Game Fuel.I should say before I explain how awful this stuff tastes, that I drink a lot of energy drinks and used to drink a lot of soda. I like Mountain Dew, even if I avoid it these days to save my teeth. I even liked some of the Game Fuel flavors that existed years ago. I also have enjoyed Mountain Dew Kickstart and Black Label. I say all this to assure you that I am very well acquainted to overly sweet, sort of bitter and a little too dry sodas and soft drinks. Read the rest

Back in 2017, The Nation ran a superb, in-depth story on "heirs' property," a legalized form of property theft that allows primarily rich white developers to expropriate land owned by the descendants' of Black slaves.Now, an in-depth Propublica investigation returns to the American south and its landgrabbing white grifters, with a piece that blends the personalities of the brave Black landowners who are willing to serve long jail sentences rather than cave in to legalized theft (brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels are two of the longest-serving inmates for civil contempt in American history, having spent eight years in lockup for refusing to knock down their ancestral homes).To understand how heirs' property expropriations work, you have to place them in the context of Black expropriation, which starts with the expropriated bodies of kidnapped Black people who were enslaved, and continues through the ages: the (marshy or arid) properties deeded to formerly enslaved Black people who carefully worked the land and prospered until white mobs came and chased them away with arson, murder and threats; many of the ones who stayed were chased off with massive tax-hikes directed at Black landowners (in South Carolina, property taxes levied on Black lands went up as much as 700% in a decade; Hilton Head had thousands of acres of heirs' property and now it has fewer than 200). As the remaining property owners began to die off, they were (correctly) mistrustful of white southern lawyers, so they did not draw up wills, leaving their family land to their descendants through a regime called "heirs' property," under the incorrect view that this would keep the land in the family. Read the rest

Computer scientist Alan Turing, key to decoding Nazi communications during World War II, is to be the face of the new £50 banknote. The BBC:The work of Alan Turing, who was educated in Sherborne, Dorset, helped accelerate Allied efforts to read German Naval messages enciphered with the Enigma machine.Less celebrated is the pivotal role he played in the development of early computers, first at the National Physical Laboratory and later at the University of Manchester.In 2013, he was given a posthumous royal pardon for his 1952 conviction for gross indecency following which he was chemically castrated. He had been arrested after having an affair with a 19-year-old Manchester man.Also, artist Turner on the Twenty:The Jane Austen tenner entered circulation in 2017. Churchill's on the fiver. Queen Liz is, of course, on all of them.There hasn't been a £100 in circulation from the Bank of England for decades (The Bank of Scotland has one, with founder Archibald Campbell on it). They should do a run and put Ira Aldridge or Mary Seacole on it. Read the rest

The Social Security Administration has a tool for looking up deaths in the USA that took place within the past three years, but older deaths are in the Social Security Death Master File (aka Death Index); you can buy a limited version of that from the SSA for $2.3k + $3.4k/yr; the SSA has quoted access to the full version at $5.2k. Sai is crowdfunding to buy the full Death Index, which they will then publish online, for free, for all. As they say, "It is extremely useful for genealogical and medical research, preventing fraud, etc."They're also suing the SSA to just publish this themselves: Congress already ordered them to do so.The database includes "Name (first, middle, last, & suffix); date of birth & death; SSN; validation (Verified: Report verified with a family member or someone acting on behalf of the family / Proof: Death certificate etc observed by SSA); record update date; and record update code (add/change/delete)."Think this is a rather un-“open” approach to providing something that Congress required to be publicly available. We would like to start litigation — but also to also pre-pay the requested $5.2k as a surety, so that they cough up the database now and we have a non-hypothetical fee charging to litigate. It would be very interesting to see, for instance, how exactly they spend 150 hours “searching” for a single database file.We will make all received information publicly available, for free, both as flat files and through a Google BigQuery database. Read the rest

Bird Scooter really is the Uber of scooters: vastly overcapitalized, vastly overvalued, incapable of turning a profit...ever.According to a report in The Information, Bird lost $100m in the first quarter of 2019 (the company denies this); and is now seeking an additional $300m in investment capital. (Xeni wrote about this on Thursday)Bird's business model (such as it is) involves flooding cities with unlicensed, illegal, dangerous (really dangerous) electric scooters that block sidewalks and impede wheelchairs, strollers and pedestrian traffic. The scooters themselves are so flimsy that they are prone of wearing out before Bird can break even on their purchase price, which is why Bird does not pay to recover its impounded scooters from city property. Unfortunately for Bird, this means that people who want a cheap scooter can buy one for pennies on the dollar at a city auction and then cheaply swap in their own control unit (this fact is so distressing to Bird that they threatened to sue me in a failed attempt to censor my reporting on it).There is no way this can ever be profitable, not even by paying starvation wages to the gig-economy workers who drive around and around, humping scooters back to their charging stations.Bird has already raised $718,000,000 from investors. If The Information's report is true, the company has burned through most of that, which means that the auctioneers might soon be able to give you a stellar deal on a Xiaomi Mi Electric Scooter. Read the rest

Back in 2010, It Books published Mary-Lou Weisman's biography of MAD Magazine icon Al Jaffee: Al Jaffee's Mad Life: A Biography; I missed it then but happened upon Arie Kaplan's 2011 writeup in The Jewish Review of Books this morning and was charmed by the biographical sketch it lays out.Jaffee previously) invented some of MAD's most enduring regular features, including the iconic back-page fold-ins and the "Snappy answers to stupid questions" section. But his story starts in Zarasai, Lithuania, where he grew up with his mother and younger siblings. Jaffee had been born in Savannah, Georgia, but his mother brought him back to the shtetl and left his father behind in the USA. Jaffee's mother was neglectful and indifferent, and when he could, he returned to America without her at the age of 12 -- she is believed to have been murdered by Nazis a few years later.Jaffee's father, meanwhile, used to send him American comic strips rolled into cardboard tubes, inspiring his love of the form. In 1936, Jaffee's teachers at the Bronx's Herman Ridder Junior High School tested Jaffee's class for arts aptitude, and sent him on to art school, along with his classmate, Wolf William Eisenberg -- who would later change his name to Will Elder.The Jewish Review of Books article examines Jaffee's relationship with Judiasm: he was an atheist who still drew illustrations for publication in Orthodox newspapers (he did it out of a fondness for "the kind and gentle souls of the people of Orthodoxy . Read the rest

Acosta calls his role at the Labor Department "the honor of a lifetime."

If you're going to Starbucks to have some coffee and read the newspaper, BYON: Bring your own newspaper.On Friday, the Seattle-based coffee chain said it's going to stop selling The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today at its 8,600+ coffeeshops around the U.S.Why? Starbucks says too many people read the paper without paying for a copy.The New York Post cites a source at Starbucks, saying the company is removing newspapers and other goods from retail shelves in part because of “shrinkage,” what people in the industry sometimes say when they mean goods that tend to be shoplifted.“We will also remove shelving fixtures that display whole- bean coffee and different grab-and-go snacks,” a Starbucks spokeswoman told the New York Post.Excerpt:Starbucks has been selling the papers in its stores for nearly two decades, starting with the Times in 2000 and expanding to add the Journal and USA Today in 2010. But many Starbucks customers take them off the rack, read them while they finish their lattes, and then either leave them on the table or walk off with the daily paper without paying.“Some may have thought it was free, like USA Today in hotels,” said one industry insider.Starbucks confirmed the decision on Thursday.“As part of our continuous efforts to enhance the overall experience in our stores for both partners and customers, we are removing select fixtures from our retail lobby in September,” a Starbucks spokeswoman said.Starbucks will stop selling newspapers in September [Keith J. Read the rest

We've been living, full-time in a 40-foot motorhome for a few years now! It's been great! But we're thinking seriously about downsizing. While we've got all of the room that we could want, our 2004 Newmar Kountry Star is less than ideal for getting into some of the rougher terrain terrain that we like'd like to explore and enjoy. If money was no object (which it is) and I could have any RV I wanted (which I can't), I'd love to get my hands on an Earthroamer. Based in Colorado, Earthroamer specializes in creating made-to-order expedition vehicles designed to allow a few happy campers to live off-grid, in the lap of luxury for long periods of time. Unless I write multiple New York Times bestsellers which get optioned into feature films and sell illicit street drugs in my spare time, it's not going to happen. But a fella can dream.Image via Earthroamer Read the rest

Jimmy Kimmel hosted a game show called "Let's Make a Dope Deal" with customers at a weed store drive-thru in Las Vegas. People who correctly answered questions won not-so-fabulous prizes, like snow globes and Hot Pockets. Read the rest

Oddly, convicted sex offender didn't ask feds to return his child porn stash

A company in Japan has made t-shirts that give the illusion that you can -- kind of -- see through them. The one for women hints at a busty chest in a lacy bra, and the one for guys suggests six-pack abs. The "delusional mapping T-shirt with a faint view of the valley" and the "delusional mapping T-shirt with faint muscles" (loosely translated) each cost approximately $36 (Â¥ 3,888).(Oddity Central) Read the rest

This video from Bohemian Browser Ballett on Germany's public broadcaster Funk is absolutely genius: a comic dialogue between a literal uniformed Nazi officer outraged that someone had the temerity to call him a Nazi: "Just because someone doesn't share mainstream opinion it doesn't mean he's a Nazi. Maybe I'm a concerned citizen who is afraid of foreign domination!" (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

Billy Green writes, "This is video I shot at the Boing Boing Picnic in 2010. Music by Dr. Popular recorded live at the picnic." Such fantastic footage! Read the rest

In Social Connectedness in Urban Areas (Sci-Hub mirror), a group of business and public policy researchers from Facebook, NYU and Princeton study anonymized, fine-grained location data from Facebook users who did not disable their location history, and find that the likelihood that New Yorkers will remain friends is well correlated with the ease of commuting between their respective homes on public transit.The negative effect of distance on friendships is both intuitive and validated through empirical research, but the paper finds that the effect size for longer commutes is much more pronounced than mere distance: while a 10% increase in distance correlates to a 10% decrease in a reduction in Facebook friendship, a 10% increase in commute times correlates to a 15% reduction in friendships.For now, the researchers haven’t done work to suggest that the relationship between friendship and public transportation travel time holds for places outside of New York City. And it’s true that in the US, New York is sui generis—no other city has such a well-developed and widely used transit system. But researchers think it’s possible that transportation determines “friendships” elsewhere, too. “I think if you did this for a city that’s not New York, public transit wouldn't matter, but road routings would matter,” says Leah Brooks, an economist at George Washington University who has studied cities and transportation systems. It’s very possible, she says, that two neighboring suburban areas might not have a lot of social connections if there’s not an easy way to get between them. Read the rest

Hardly a day goes by that I don't use my Instant Pot to make chili, curry, soup, or yogurt. I paid about $100, but right now this 6-quart model is just minus another $10 when you click the coupon button on Amazon's product page. Read the rest

YouTuber Tom Scott created a 15-part series on how to create a smartphone app - not really the tech details, more like the foundations and basics you need to know. He spends a lot of time telling you why you probably shouldn't make an app and why you will regret it if you do. Tech support, for instance, is a nightmare.In the first episode, he interviews the Adrian Hon, creator of Zombies, Run!, which has been downloaded over 4 million times. Read the rest

"All work and no play makes Jim a dull boy."Another top-shelf deepfake from Ctrl Shift Face. Read the rest

Trump and his fan base became upset when a man at a June 2018 rally held up a photo of a smiling Donald Trump with his old friend, sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump ordered the man to be removed, delivering a scorching witticism as the protester was being hauled away by security: "Was that a man or a woman? Because he needs a haircut more than I do"A protester was kicked out of this Trump rally in June of last year for holding a photo of the president and Jeffrey Epstein pic.twitter.com/wXdpSrA816— NowThis (@nowthisnews) July 9, 2019Image: Twitter Read the rest

When asked how his school taught The Holocaust, Spanish River High School principal William Latson said that "I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event" and that “you have your thoughts, but we are a public school and not all of our parents have the same beliefs.”After a year of anger in Boca Raton, Florida, Latson was finally removed from the job, reports CBS News.The school district did not initially punish Latson for his comments. Instead, he received counseling and was encouraged to expand his school's Holocaust curriculum, according to CBS West Palm Beach affiliate WPEC-TV. The district said Latson also visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum to increase his "personal knowledge" of the genocide. But the district announced Monday that Latson would be immediately reassigned because "his leadership has become a major distraction for the school community." ... The district said Latson had "made a grave error in judgment in the verbiage" of his email to the parent. Read the rest

I occasionally need to use an Android device to get things done for my day job. I like the flexibility of the operating system: I can tweak to my hearts content. An Android phone often runs cheaper than a handset from Apple and, in some cases, boast photo snapping capabilities that kick the bejesus out Apple's Designed in Cupertino camera app and optics. But when I read shit like this story from The Verge, I'm reminded, once again, about why I put up with the walled garden and stuffy familiarity of iOS.From The Verge:Even if you say “no” to one app when it asks for permission to see those personally identifying bits of data, it might not be enough: a second app with permissions you have approved can share those bits with the other one or leave them in shared storage where another app — potentially even a malicious one — can read it. The two apps might not seem related, but researchers say that because they’re built using the same software development kits (SDK), they can access that data, and there’s evidence that the SDK owners are receiving it. It’s like a kid asking for dessert who gets told “no” by one parent, so they ask the other parent....That’s in addition to a number of side channel vulnerabilities the team found, some of which can send home the unique MAC addresses of your networking chip and router, wireless access point, its SSID, and more. “It’s pretty well-known now that’s a pretty good surrogate for location data,” said Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security and Privacy Group at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), when presenting the study at PrivacyCon. Read the rest

Police banned a woman from a Walmart in Wichita Falls, Texas after she allegedly ate half a cake while shopping and then, at check-out, insisted that she should only pay half-price for what was left. This follows on another unusual Wichita Falls Walmart incident a few months back when a different woman spent several hours zipping around the store parking lot while gulping wine from a Pringles can. She, too, was banned.(My9nj) Read the rest

As Bruce Lee once said, "Showing off is the fool's idea of glory." Read the rest

In early June, protesters surged into Hong Kong's streets to protest a change to the country's extradition rules that would allow the Chinese state to demand the extradition of political dissidents to the mainland; as the protests grew, Hong Kong's puppet government had no choice but to withdraw its proposal -- but that wasn't enough, and millions of people poured into the streets, demanding the resignation of administrator Connie Lam and the release of imprisoned demonstrators.The protests are not abating: ever-larger crowds are packing the streets, staging careful and measured acts of vandalism whose delightful details made them darlings of popular sentiment.The state has seized on the vandalism as a pretense for a militarized crackdown, which has not kept the protesters down but it has moved public sentiment -- in favor of the protesters, who continue to demand the executive's resignation.Sum Lai, a 53-year-old housewife and mother of two, said those who condemned the youngsters for vandalising the Legco building did not understand them.“Did the government even raise an eyebrow when a million or 2 million people took to the streets?” she said, referring to two mass rallies in June. “The young people didn’t want to storm Legco but the government was pushing them too hard.”After organisers announced the end of the protest at around 7.30pm, hundreds continued to linger outside West Kowloon station, while hundreds more spilled out onto Canton Road again, saying they were “going shopping”.They taunted and abused police officers trying to reopen the road, targeting and surrounding Chief Superintendent Rupert Dover in particular as one of the commanders on the ground when tear gas was first used against extradition bill protesters on June 12. Read the rest

This easy to set-up canopy is cheap AND actually easy to set up.I am spending most of my summer camping with my dogs. Shade became very important on day 2 when I realized that not having shade on day 1 toasted the back of my neck. Despite liberal smearing of 60 SPF broadspectrum sunscreen, I had to find a solution that'd work for me.I largely travel without human companionship, and when I do it tends to be of the 12-year old variety (less-than-helpful.) I needed a canopy that'd easily go up, and I wanted to be able to quickly tear the thing down if wind unexpectedly kicked up. I am trying to stay to beaches and coastal campsites, where wind can be an enemy.This EzyFast 6x6 shade does the job! It is fairly light, the manufacturer says 17lbs, and very simple to put up by my ownself. The frame is a single unit that practically expanded itself when I took it out of the bag the very first time. Once the frame is out and locked into place with handy built-on locks, you put the cover on and then extend the legs. You can weigh it down by putting stuff in the weight pockets built into the cover.The cover material is a bit thin, but it'll do. The stakes the unit came with are nearly useless, but with additional weigh in the cover it seems to stay in place just fine. If it gets windy out, however, I will lower the legs, remove the cover and go hide in the camper. Read the rest

Back in 2015, the great state of Texas passed The Compassionate Use Act, making the use of cannabis for medical purposes totally cool... in a small number of instances. Only those with epilepsy are allowed to use the plant's properties to ease their symptoms and the cannabis that they're allowed to use must contain minuscule amounts of THC. This left Texans who'd like to turn to cannabis to help ease their way out of opioid use or deal with chronic pain, to saddle up and move to a less restrictive state or risk being arrested. Recently, the state's lawmakers looked to reforming the restrictive act, Once again, too small a group of folks wound up being told that they're cool to roll with a bit of cannabis in their lives. One of the biggest groups excluded: individuals suffering from PTSD.From The Texas Observer:Activists say opposition to cannabis reform is partially based on fearmongering over alleged dangers of marijuana by Republicans and law enforcement officials, a powerful group at the Lege. False claims and junk science often go unchallenged in a vacuum created by the lack of research into cannabis. (Marijuana’s status as a Schedule I drug is a significant barrier to studying the plant’s uses.) For three sessions, the Rural Sheriffs Association of Texas has peddled its report that falsely claims pot lowers IQ scores, is addictive and increases criminality. In March, Plano Police Sergeant Terence Holway told lawmakers in a committee hearing that “all drug addicts … started with marijuana.”Brian Birdwell, a GOP state senator and Desert Storm Army veteran, spoke about his “highly guarded sense of danger” about marijuana for more than 20 minutes during the Senate debate of HB 3703. Read the rest

In Technology Review, author and essayist Chuck Klosterman delivers a short introduction to the stars of space rock, from Pink Floyd (above) to Hawkwind to Spacemen 3:Space is a vacuum: the only song capturing the verbatim resonance of space is John Cage’s perfectly silent “4'33".” Any artist purporting to embody the acoustics of the cosmos is projecting a myth. That myth, however, is collective and widely understood. Space has no sound, but certain sounds are “spacey.” Part of this is due to “Space Oddity”; another part comes from cinema, particularly the soundtrack to 2001 (the epic power of classical music by Richard Strauss and György Ligeti). Still another factor is the consistent application of specific instruments, like the ondes martenot (a keyboard that vaguely simulates a human voice, used most famously in the theme to the TV show Star Trek). The shared assumptions about what makes music extraterrestrial are now so accepted that we tend to ignore how strange it is that we all agree on something impossible.The application of these clichés is most readily seen in the dawn of heavy metal. The 1970 Black Sabbath song “Planet Caravan” processed Ozzy Osbourne’s vocals through a Hammond organ to create a sprawling sense of ethereal distance. Deep Purple’s 1972 “Space Truckin’” used ring modulation to simulate a colossal spacecraft traveling at high speed. The lyrical content of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” is built on Norse mythology, but the dreamlike drone of John Paul Jones’s mellotron and Jimmy Page’s ultra-compressed guitar mirrored the sensation of exploring an alien landscape. Read the rest

Directed by Topper Carew, "Breakin 'n' Enterin'" (1983) documented the Los Angeles B-boy scene emerging at Venice Beach and MacArthur Park's Radio-Tron nightclub. Keep your eyes peeled for a young Ice-T, Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers, and Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones who all appeared the following year in Breakin'. The dancing in this documentary is much better than in the feature film though -- more complex, raw, and aggressive. Read the rest

Doctor Emmett Lathrop Brown was one hell of a blacksmith, tho he reminds me of Klingon Commander Kruge. Read the rest

In all but a few of the most expensive cities in the USA, median rents on one- and two-bedroom apartments have fallen, sometimes quite sharply (for example, in NYC median asking rents on a one bedroom are down to $2940, a 12.8%/$430 decline from their peak in March 2016; while in Honolulu, rents are down 21.6% from their peak in Mar 2015, down to $1670 from $2130).The glaring exception is San Francisco, which hit an all-time high in June: $3720 asked for the median one-bedroom (but even in San Francisco, two-bedroom rents have declined, down to $4800 from the peak of $5000 in October 2015). The decline in rents in major cities is offset by skyrocketing rents in some of America's smaller cities, like Chandler, AZ; Fresno, CA; Glendale, AZ; Denver, CO; Reno, NV; Spokane, WA; Scottsdale, AZ; and Gilbert, AZ. On the Media's excellent, just-completed series on the eviction epidemic explains that while we think of the eviction crisis as a big-city phenomenon driven by gentrification, the real meat of the crisis is evictions in smaller, poorer cities, some of which have had large swathes of rental stock purchased by Wall Street hedge-funds who have chosen to perfect the art of speedy eviction rather than the art of maintaining liveable homes.Meanwhile, the cities experiencing the steepest decline in rents are something of a mixed bag: Philadelphia (down 12.7%!), Baltimore, Columbus, Akron, Madison, Nashville (which is regressing to the mean after a record-setting surge last year), Seattle, Des Moines and Portland, OR. Read the rest

Following the Supreme Court's determination that there was no good reason to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, the Trump administration has abandoned its pursuit of the project.The census is key to establishing congressional districts and to apportioning federal funding. The Trump administration had hoped that by adding a question about citizenship amid its racist war on migrants, it could intimidate both documented and undocumented migrants into hiding from census officials, resulting in undercounting of non-native-born and racialized US residents.The citizenship question was being proposed by running joke/Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross (previously), whose shitty excuses for the move were dismissed by Chief Justice Roberts as "contrived." Then Republican strategist/archvillain Thomas Hofeller (architect of the citizenship question) died, and his computer's hard drive yielded a study of Hofeller's that concluded that "a citizenship question could increase Republican political power by excluding noncitizens and underage American citizens from the census data."It's another great example of the administrative incompetence and emotional incontinence of Trump and Co, who are so convinced that they are the smartest guys in the room (believing as they do that markets reward intelligence, rather than sociopathy) that they routinely put their secret masterplans in writing (or publish them on Twitter), so that whenever they're hauled before a judge to mumble half-assed excuses about why they're doing something that is so evil you can see it glowing from orbit, the judge inevitably is presented with the Trump regime's own explicit admission about its true motives. Read the rest

I have a few different LED headlamps, but this one is by far my favorite. It features a band of LEDs that throw light in a wide area in front of you. It lights up the entire area around you, as opposed to LED headlamps that illuminate just a spot. It uses 3 AAA batteries and has an easy on-off touch sensor switch. Read the rest

When dozens of Jewish activists were preparing to be arrested for blocking the ICE facility in Elizabeth, NJ, they heard singing and shofars — as dozens and dozens more arrived to join the line.@NeverAgainActn #JewsAgainstICE#NeverAgainMeansNeverAgain pic.twitter.com/ShYOumrDIs— John Nichols (@NicholsUprising) July 1, 2019 A group of young protestors, many of whom appear to be Jewish, lock arms to block an ICE facility as an army of likeminded folks arrive blowing shofars and singing songs. Read the rest

The John Maddox Prize previously is awarded annually by the UK organisation Sense About Science (previously) for "individuals who promote sound science and evidence on a matter of public interest, facing difficulty or hostility in doing so."The open call for nominations seeks recommendations for individuals who made contributions to: * Addressing misleading information about scientific issue (including social science and medicine). * Bringing sound evidence to bear in a public or policy debate.* Helping people to make sense of a complex scientific issue.John Maddox Prize 2019 nominations [Sense About Science](Thanks, Marcos!) Read the rest

Behold the Brain Coat, which is not a tinfoil hat but rather a silver-coated nylon skull cap with ear flaps. It's lightweight, breathable, and claims to be effective at shielding the brain from radio waves while remaining comfortable even if worn with other headgear. Microwave Shielding Effect: 35 dB at 1-10 GHzSurface resistivity: Read the rest

This unrecorded gem has been playing in my head for the last 300 miles of a 500-mile road trip. Read the rest

Rob Smith is an eminent computer scientist and machine learning pioneer whose work on genetic algorithms has been influential in both industry and the academy; now, in his first book for a general audience, Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All, Smith expertly draws connections between AI, neoliberalism, human bias, eugenics and far-right populism, and shows how the biases of computer science and the corporate paymasters have distorted our whole society.Smith's book weaves the history of science and mathematics' contribution to our understanding of probability and uncertainty, the philosophical quest for an understanding of the true nature of reality and its relationship to our perceptions and ruminations, the inextricable stories of evolutionary theory and eugenics, and the long project to design a thinking machine to show how the imperatives of neoliberalism and its way of valuing (and discounting) people combined with some of computer science's most ill-advised and habitual simplifications to produce a form of statistical tyranny, one that tries to force humans to simplify their behaviors to suit the models, rather than adapting the models to suit the humans.On the way, Smith shows how the parts of machine learning that do work refute some of the uglier philosophical ideas that have risen in currency as algorithms have taken over our society -- just as the Victorians had their "blind watchmaker," the rise of evolutionary algorithms has given a new lease on life to eugenic theories about survival of the fittest and the need to purify and protect the "best" among us. Read the rest

I lived in the county of Essex for two years as a teenager. It's unique in the English imagination, a place once rural but colonized by Londoners fleeing Germans during the war and Immigrants after it. A sprawling exurban development park, it's held to be trashy yet conservative, its villages surrounded by shabby modern projects and its market downs gutted by them, all inhabited by criminals, sluts and people so stupid their behavior dances on the margins of sanity. That's the nasty charicature, anyway, immortalized in the 1990s by the novelty song embedded above. Tim Burrows narrates the history behind this myth of Essex, "the crudest, stupidest symbol of Englishness."...before Essex was a punchline, it was a dream. A place that offered hope to working-class Londoners in the form of “new towns” such as Basildon and Harlow, which were built by the state to meet dire housing, sanitation and civic needs after the second world war. As the century progressed, however, parts of Essex came to represent the dismantling of this dream, as Thatcherism, the UK arm of the global new right movement that believed in lower taxes and lower public spending alongside deregulation and privatisation, became indelibly linked to the county. In 1990, a new term, “Essex man”, was coined by the Sunday Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer, to describe a new type of voter: a “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren” worker in London’s financial centre, whose roots lay in east London, and whose political views were “breathtakingly rightwing”. Read the rest

Methodist University Hospital in Memphis is a nonprofit: it pays virtually no local, state or federal tax; but unlike other Methodist hospitals, Methodist University Hospital is relentless in pursuing medical debts from indigent patients. The hospital owns its own collection agency, and is one of the leading litigants in Tennessee's debt courts.At issue is Methodist University Hospital's policy of requiring patients to cover any expense excluded by their insurers, no matter how high that deductible or excess is and no matter how poor the patient is. And since Obamacare's lowest-cost plans carry incredibly high deductibles and excesses, and exclude many forms of care, the poorest patients at Methodist University Hospital are also expected to pay the highest bills.There are a lot of poor people in Memphis, which is the second-poorest city in America, with more than 40% of the city's workforce earning less than $15/hour. The poor people of Memphis include Methodist University Hospital's own staff, many of whom have been sued by Methodist University Hospital because they couldn't afford their medical bills on the salary the hospital paid them. In addition to suing dozens of its own employees, Methodist University Hospital has garnished the wages it pays to more than 70 of its own workers.Memphis's inequality closely tracks with race, with Black people carrying a much higher risk of poverty.Methodist University Hospital's management -- including CEO Dr. Michael Ugwueke, who was paid $1.6 million in total compensation last year and former CEO Gary Shorb, who draws $1.2m/year to serve as Ugwueke's advisor -- are apparently pursuing this agenda on their own. Read the rest