My friend sent me a photo of his uber tuff tactical Spork.Perhaps it is the burlap couch upholstery, but my aged eyes missed the KABAR and thought this was a handcrafted Spork that some Seattle-area artist must have designed just for my pal. Because who doesn't want a super cool Spork?I was told to wait for it. Then I was sent this photo and it became clear the Spork was made by famed US Military hardware enthusiast fan-favorite Ka-Bar, and not some artisanal Spork maker.I am sort of disappointed the fleetingly imagined trend where Game of Thrones enthusaists are all eating with their own custom version of a Casterly Rock Spork, just like Tywin used, died so quickly. I am ordering a KaBar Spork for my camper van.Ka-Bar Tactical Spork via Amazon Read the rest

"Ocular dominance" is defined as "the priority of one eye over the other as regards preference of use or acuity of vision." Awareness of your dominant eye is important for photography, golf, baseball, and archery. The above video explains how to conduct the Miles test to determine your dominant eye. (via Weird Universe) Read the rest

A significant drop, but no worse than he's been before, reports Politico's Steven Shepherd.“President Trump’s approval rating has dipped to its lowest point of his term in the immediate aftermath of the redacted Mueller report release,” said Tyler Sinclair, Morning Consult’s vice president. “This week, 57 percent of voters disapprove, and 39 percent approve of the president’s performance — a net approval rating of –18 percentage points, compared with 55 percent who disapproved and 42 percent who approved — a net approval rating of –13 percentage points — one month ago in the aftermath of Attorney General [William] Barr’s summary of the Mueller report to Congress.”I'm amazed it dropped under 40%, to be honest. Accepting that four in ten American voters are unequivocally, non-negotiably, unarguably with Trump is the basic political challenge for everyone else. Read the rest

Seasoned chefs have a bit of a love-hate relationship with their cutlery. A really good set of knives has to prove its worth by being put through the wringer - and if they're really good, they'll still look great afterward. So it is with the Damasukasu Japanese 3-Piece Master Chef Hanshu Knife Set.Sitting in their reverent, minimalist case, they really do look too good to actually be used. But pick one up, and you'll want to start cutting immediately. They're made from subtly patterned carbon-rich steel, triple-riveted with a full tang and nitrogen cooled. Science aside, they're essentially made with the same techniques used to forge Japanese samurai swords, with a 12-degree cutting edge and Rockwell hardness rating of more than 62. Each one is precision-balanced, stain and rust resistant.Each set contains a 7-inch Nakiri vegetable knife, 8.5-inch slicing knife, and 5-inch utility knife. The full Damasukasu Japanese 3-Piece Master Chef Hanshu Knife Set is now $69.99, a drop from the previous sale price of $199.99. Read the rest

The Netflix doc Knock Down the House debuted at Sundance earlier this year, winning the Audience Award for U.S. Documentaries. Directed by Rachel Lears, it follows the midterm Congressional campaigns of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amy Vilela, Cori Bush, and Paula Jean Swearengin. Knock Down the House comes to Netflix May 1st. (Photo: YouTube Screenshot) Read the rest

Police were forced to restrain the Easter Bunny this weekend after he landed a series of blows on a man during a street brawl in Orlando, Fla.[The Easter Bunny] said he was out bar hopping with friends when he saw a man and woman fighting. He said he jumped in and tried to pull the man off the woman.Lindsey Edwards, who provided WESH 2 News with cellphone video of the fight, said that just before the bunny jumped in he saw the man spit on the woman he was fighting with.Police arrived seconds later and dispersed the crowd. No arrests were made. Read the rest

Tim of Grand Illusions shows his collection of objects that refer to themselves in one way or another. My favorite is the can opener that comes in a sealed can.My second favorite is this label: Read the rest

National Geographic's Hostile Planet series focuses on the "world’s most extreme environments to reveal the animal kingdom’s most glorious stories of survival on this fast and continuously shifting planet." This Boing Boing exclusive excerpts beautiful and creepy time-lapse videos of day-glo colored slimes and glistening tentacled mushrooms as they erupt, spread, and decay. The highlight of the video is the tragic fate of an ant that gets infected by a cordyceps fungus spore, which highjacks the ant's nervous system, causing it to climb to the top of a stem, where it freezes in place. In a few days, a cordyceps mushroom bursts out of the ant's head, and begins to produce spores that will eventually infect other ants.Image: YouTube Read the rest

Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is the first 2020 presidential candidate to call for Donald Trump's impeachment as a result of the findings in the redacted Mueller Report released yesterday. Warren going on the record means every candidate will be put on the spot this weekend regarding impeachment. Things are about to get interesting. (Photo: Flickr/ElizabethforMA) Read the rest

Black women have long complained that they get flagged for secondary screening at TSA checkpoints after passing through a full-body scanner; after years of complaints, the TSA has admitted that its scanners struggle to with curled hair, and are prone to flagging anyone wearing an afro, twists, locks, braids, or other hairstyles predominantly found among Black travelers (though white travelers with long curly hair have also reported being flagged for secondary screening).Black women complain that the TSA's secondary screening of their hair is invasive and humiliating, and also leaves carefully maintained hairstyles in disarray.The TSA has officially asked the scanner manufacturers to suggest ways to modify their products "to improve screening of headwear and hair in compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act."Propublica's excellent story on the problems with the machines quotes an anonymous TSA screener who admits that the body scanners also struggle with turbans and wigs, singling out people who wear them for additional screening. The TSA will not say whether it has ever found a dangerous object in a traveler's hair.The TSA is one of the US government's most diverse agencies; many TSA screeners are people of color. Nevertheless, the number of complaints alleging racial profiling in hair searches has increased sharply in recent years, rising from 73 in 2017 to 105 in 2018. The TSA also maintains the right to search travelers' hair even if nothing suspicious appears on scans, leaving who to search and how to search them up to screeners' discretion. Read the rest

Every month, Tor Books' free Ebook Club gives away a different novel to people who have signed up; this month, the selection is my most recent novel, Walkaway! Sign up between now and the 20th to get your free copy (this only works in Canada and the US; different publishers have the rights in other countries and I'll be sure to let you know when/if they do their own giveaways). Read the rest

You're gonna want to unmute this.Vegan-friendly.The last cherry tomato in your salad!SOURCE: The last cherry tomato in your salad![imgur.com] Read the rest

Holy hell. Read the rest

Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data—maybe yours?—to crush rivals and aid allies, leaked documents show.

Helvetica Now is Monototype's new typeface created for today's screens. From Monotype's press release, here are two testimonials from experts whose opinions mean something:“Helvetica Now is the tummy-tuck, facelift and lip filler we’ve been wanting, but were too afraid to ask for,” said Abbott Miller, partner at Pentagram. “It offers beautifully drawn alternates to some of Helvetica’s most awkward moments, giving it a surprisingly, thrillingly contemporary character.”“This is the typeface Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann would have designed back in 1957 if they had known about offset printing, small screens, browsers, digital design tools and UI designers.” – Erik Spiekermann, founder and partner, Edenspiekermann Read the rest

'Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook.'Welp. That didn't work.The May issue cover story of WIRED Magazine is a 12,000-word rip-snorting takedown of Facebook. Never would have predicted this more than a decade ago, when I first wrote about Facebook--- it was still a college networking website-- and I was a contributor to Wired. The future is weird.For the past year, the biggest story in tech has been the meltdown and mayhem at Facebook. So @fvogelstein and I dug in, spoke with 65 current + former employees there, and learned some rather interesting things. https://t.co/3UuFVtMdZz— Nicholas Thompson (@nxthompson) April 16, 2019The magazine hits newsstands April 23, and I'll be wanting a paper copy of this one.WIRED's editor in chief Nicholas Thompson and editor at large Fred Vogelstein spoke to 65 current and former Facebook employees for this story about life and work there over the past year. Plenty of new information, including previously unreported dirt on the split between Facebook and Instagram. Sheryl Sandberg comments here on Cambridge Analytica, which is noteworthy.“It’s ultimately a story about the biggest shifts ever to take place inside the world’s biggest social network,” Thompson and Vogelstein say in a statement sent around to media today, touting WIRED's big story. “But it’s also about a company trapped by its own pathologies and, perversely, by the inexorable logic of its own recipe for success.”Excerpt:TRUSTWORTHINESSWhy would a company beset by fake news stick a knife into real news? Read the rest

In a delightful short video, Klara Sjöberg demonstrates the extreme and alarming freakout that you can trigger in a mechanical calculator by trying to divide a number by zero; in a followup, Lynn Grant tweets "That is why the old Friden calculators had a 'Divide Stop' key." What happens with you divide by zero on a mechanical calculator. pic.twitter.com/CLfeoSzqzX— Klara Sjöberg (@klara_sjo) April 13, 2019 Read the rest

Ford CEO Jim Hackett -- formerly head of the company's autonomous vehicle division -- publicly announced that the company had "overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles" and that the vehicles, when they did arrive, their "applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex."Hackett confirmed that the company still planned to launch self-driving vehicles in 2021. The company has spent more than $4b trying to develop autonomous vehicles.This is particularly grim news for rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft, who have insisted all along that they will stop losing billions of dollars once autonomous vehicles come along and they can fire all their drivers.Even though Hackett walked back immediate hopes for autonomous vehicles, he made it clear that he believed in the technology's potential. "When we bring this thing to market, it's going to be really powerful," Hackett added.Ford CEO says the company 'overestimated' self-driving cars [Amrita Khalid/Engadget](Image: Gartner Group) Read the rest

Ahead of our panel at the LA Times Festival of Books on Sunday, John Scalzi interviewed me about my new book Radicalized for his column in the Times.John tells the story of how I was the first writer he met after he embarked on his career -- it was at the Toronto Worldcon -- and then we delve into the nature of dystopia, hope, and the role of science fiction in informing our policy debates:Q. You write fiction and you’re also a public advocate for tech, privacy and current cultural issues, and you’ve been adept your entire career in using the former to advance the latter. What is it about fiction that makes it an effective vessel for talking about the issues that drive you? How do you find the balance for entertainment and argument?A. I think that fiction is a superb way to put flesh on the dry, abstract bones of technical and policy debate — a fly-through of an architect's rendering of the emotional lived-experience of the consequences of our policy choices.Technological problems are pernicious — in a manner similar to climate change, the consequences of bad technological choices often manifest a long time after the choices themselves, and it's hard to get people to act on these issues with the right degree of urgency given the long fuse that's burning on them. Fiction can make the detonation more visceral and immediate, and possibly spur us to action when the problems are still manageable rather than when they're so pernicious that they can't be denied, but also might be too far along to do anything about. Read the rest

Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg unpack the tale of Human Torch creator, Carl Burgos's, bitter attempt to agitate the mainstream comics publishers of the 1960s with his very own Captain Marvel character (and Plastic man, Dr Doom, Dr. Fate, and The Bat).For further reading:Marvel, The Untold Story, By Sean Howe. Subscribe to the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel for future episodes Read the rest

Indian animal adoption campaign World for All commissioned these excellent posters in 2017 to promote the cause. [via] Read the rest

Macarthur "genius prize" recipient Octavia Butler (previously) is one of science fiction's most important figures, an author who wrote cracking, crackling, accessible and fast-moving adventure stories shot through with trenchant and smart allegories about race, gender and power (I like to think of her as "woke Heinlein"). Grand Central has just published a new edition of one of her most important books, Parable of the Sower, the first of a two-volume set that tells the tale of a young Black girl in southern California during a time of environmental and economic collapse and the rise of authoritarian rule; about how she leads a band of refugees, founding a new religion grounded in solidarity and stewardship, and how she triumphs over lunatic gangs; corrupt, militarized cops; and the logistical challenges of flash-fires, starvation and disease. The new edition features a brilliant introduction by NK Jemisin (previously), whose Broken Earth trilogy made Hugo Award history last year when all three volumes won the prize for Best Novel.Jemisin's introduction describes how she read Butler's novel at three times in her life, and how each read evinced a very different reaction from her -- once in the roaring nineties when the economy was booming and the internet promised democratization of culture and communications; once in Jemisin's thirties when she was was a grad student researching the theory of Black liberation and the nature of white supremacy; and now, in the Trump era, when stories about authoritarian rule, mass inequality, and climate devastation don't feel nearly so allegorical and have taken on the tinge of description instead. Read the rest

What an incredibly powerful piece of writing from Utah Jazz basketball player Kyle Korver on playing in the NBA, on coming to understand his own racial justice blind spots, and -- beautifully -- the difference between guilt and responsibility.Excerpt from 'Privileged' at theplayerstribune.com:Two concepts that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately are guilt and responsibility.When it comes to racism in America, I think that guilt and responsibility tend to be seen as more or less the same thing. But I’m beginning to understand how there’s a real difference.As white people, are we guilty of the sins of our forefathers? No, I don’t think so.But are we responsible for them? Yes, I believe we are.And I guess I’ve come to realize that when we talk about solutions to systemic racism — police reform, workplace diversity, affirmative action, better access to healthcare, even reparations? It’s not about guilt. It’s not about pointing fingers, or passing blame.It’s about responsibility. It’s about understanding that when we’ve said the word “equality,” for generations, what we’ve really meant is equality for a certain group of people. It’s about understanding that when we’ve said the word “inequality,” for generations, what we’ve really meant is slavery, and its aftermath — which is still being felt to this day. It’s about understanding on a fundamental level that black people and white people, they still have it different in America. And that those differences come from an ugly history….. not some random divide. Read the rest

The book Detective Comics: 80 Years of Batman commemorates the 1000th issue of Batman comics; my contribution is an essay called Occupy Gotham, about the terror of letting a billionaire vigilante decide who is and isn't a criminal (featuring Lessig and Piketty jokes!). Read the rest

A Morning Consult poll of Hispanic voters shows 33% for Bernie Sanders, more than any other candidate from any party -- Joe Biden is polling at 24% and Beto O'Rourke is at 13%, with other Democrats trailing far behind. Three early primary states have large concentrations of Hispanic voters: California, Texas and Florida (California and Texas are also "delegate rich," with a significant impact on candidate selection within the national Democratic party). The majority of Sanders' campaign staffers are women, and 40% of the staff are people of color. Sanders outraised every other candidate, and I am a Sanders donor (I also donated to Elizabeth Warren's campaign). Read the rest

Dune is arguably the best-selling science fiction novel of all time. A first edition copy of Frank Herbert's 1965 epic novel of adventure, betrayal, and palace intrigue on the planet Arrakis is worth $10,000. Here's your chance to get the Kindle edition at a lower price.Image: kamin Jaroensuk/Shutterstock Read the rest

Time 4 Machine is a Ukrainian design shop led by Denis Okhrimenko; their latest project is "The most beautiful construction set in the world", a set of thin steel parts that you bend together to make (yes) beautiful mechanical models: a business-card case, a tractor, a working clockwork timer, a vintage sportscar, a springpowered cabriolet, a sedan, a Hercules eight-motor aircraft and a dieselpunk steamliner engine. Each model is assembled with two fine-nosed pliers, and features mechanical linkages, gears and hinges to animate it. The project's creators designed and fulfilled a similar project in 2017, which bodes well for backers of this one.The models range in price from $18 (card case) to $112 (steamliner) with breaks for quantity: the full set will cost you $432. They are fully funded. The most beautiful construction set in the world [Time 4 Machine/Kickstarter](Thanks, Katia!) Read the rest

In the 1960s and 1970s, Los Angeles's Laurel Canyon neighborhood was flowing with sex, drugs, and folk-rock and roll. Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, Jackson Brown, Carole King, the Mamas & The Papas, and countless other musicians made the scene or had homes in the hills. Echo in the Canyon is a new documentary about that magical moment and the influential sound that emerged. The trip back in time to this "legendary paradise, as Tom Petty called it, was directed by Andrew Slater with Jakob Dylan as executive producer. “The best test of songwriting is that it transcends its moment in time,” Dylan said in a statement. “And there is no doubt that the songs we explore in this film are as powerful today as they were in 1965.”Echo in the Canyon will see a national release in June.(Rolling Stone) Read the rest

The preachersnsneakers Instagram is 🔥🔥🔥.We've long chronicled the excesses and corruption of megachurch preachers, including those who threaten violence against the news organizations that dig into their apparent grift and curious financial arrangements.But whoever is behind this preachersnsneakers account does it as best as anyone can. Juxtapositions of megapreachers and the insanely expensive kicks they're wearing as they spout bogus god bullshit.[via Christian Nightmares] Read the rest

The Mexican media company Cultura Colectiva and an app called "At the Pool" used their access to their users Facebook data to make local copies of it, then left that data exposed, in the clear, without a password, on the public internet -- 540 million records in all, stored in publicly accessible Amazon S3 buckets.The leaks include "comments, likes, reactions, account names, FB IDs and more." The At the Pool leak also includes user passwords, presumably for the app (but many users recycle passwords); as well as 22,000 passwords for Facebook itself, stored without encryption.At the Pool has been shuttered since 2014, implying that its data has been exposed for many years. After a formal notification email, someone took its user data offline.Cultura Colectiva -- which is still in business -- has been repeatedly notified about its breach (both by the security researchers at Upguard, who discovered the breach, and by Amazon, after they were notified by Upguard) but has not replied nor did it take any steps to protect its user data until it was sent a query by Bloomberg news, months later.These two situations speak to the inherent problem of mass information collection: the data doesn’t naturally go away, and a derelict storage location may or may not be given the attention it requires.For app developers on Facebook, part of the platform’s appeal is access to some slice of the data generated by and about Facebook users. For Cultura Colectiva, data on responses to each post allows them to tune an algorithm for predicting which future content will generate the most traffic. Read the rest

A new bill from Senator Elizabeth Warren proposes personal, criminal liability for top executives of companies turning over more than $1B/year when those companies experience data breaches and scams due to negligence (many of the recent high-profile breaches would qualify, including the Equifax giga-breach, as well as many of Wells Fargo's string of scams and scandals).It is part of a raft of excellent policy proposals that Warren has introduced in conjunction with her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (I am a donor to her campaign, as well as the Bernie Sanders campaign): lowering drug prices with federally commissioned generics, an annual wealth tax on family fortunes over $50m, antitrust breakups of Big Tech, an end to the Electoral College and a national Right to Repair law for farm equipment. I believe that the major distinction between Warren and Sanders is that Warren believes that a market-based distribution system will work so long as the state corrects its failures, while Sanders believes that at best, markets are tools to solve the odd allocation problem.My sympathies are more with Sanders than Warren, but I'm consistently impressed with Warren's extensive, specific policies.I also think that Warren is laying a trap here. Plenty of people will say that no CEO can possibly oversee the operations of a billion dollar company well enough to prevent it from engaging in widespread fraud or suffering catastrophic breaches, but of course, the natural rejoinder is that this means that we shouldn't have companies that are too big to effectively oversee (let alone too big to fail). Read the rest

Florida Man is the inaugural kickstarter from Los Angeles's incomparable comics store Secret Headquarters (previously): it challenges players to fill in the blanks from hundreds of cards capturing actual headlines about actual Floridians, creating hilarious, Cards Against Humanity-style madlibs. $20 gets you a game (early bird, rising to $25), $50 gets you a game and expansion pack, and there are tiers with tons of swag and of course a retailer bulk-discount pack. Read the rest

Christina Ward has a new book out called American Advertising Cookbooks: How corporations taught us to love Spam, bananas, and Jell-O. It's beautifully designed book with lots of color photographs from mid-century food corporation cookbooks that takes a deep dive into the sociological and geopolitical implications of American eating in decades past.Here's an excerpt (PDF): Good Housewife photo section from American Advertising Cookbooks Ward for boingBoingBackground image: By dexterous simpson/Shutterstock Read the rest

I'm not a Las Vegas fan, but I wish I could plop myself at the Bellagio hotel for just four minutes one night this week to watch their Game of Thrones water show, which began last night. It looks spectacular.From Las Vegas Review Journal: A medley of the theme for HBO’s “Game of Thrones” and the song “Winter Is Here” from the show premiered at Bellagio Fountains water show on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday night. The new number will run at 8 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. daily, in rotation through April 13. The final season of Game of Thrones premieres April 14th. Read the rest

Researchers from Tencent Keen Security Lab have published a report detailing their successful attacks on Tesla firmware, including remote control over the steering, and an adversarial example attack on the autopilot that confuses the car into driving into the oncoming traffic lane.The researchers used an attack chain that they disclosed to Tesla, and which Tesla now claims has been eliminated with recent patches.To effect the remote steering attack, the researchers had to bypass several redundant layers of protection, but having done this, they were able to write an app that would let them connect a video-game controller to a mobile device and then steer a target vehicle, overriding the actual steering wheel in the car as well as the autopilot systems. This attack has some limitations: while a car in Park or traveling at high speed on Cruise Control can be taken over completely, a car that has recently shifted from R to D can only be remote controlled at speeds up to 8km/h.Tesla vehicles use a variety of neural networks for autopilot and other functions (such as detecting rain on the windscreen and switching on the wipers); the researchers were able to use adversarial examples (small, mostly human-imperceptible changes that cause machine learning systems to make gross, out-of-proportion errors) to attack these. Most dramatically, the researchers attacked the autopilot's lane-detection systems. By adding noise to lane-markings, they were able to fool the autopilot into losing the lanes altogether, however, the patches they had to apply to the lane-markings would not be hard for humans to spot. Read the rest

Teslas are incredibly data-hungry, storing massive troves of data about their owners, including videos of crashes, location history, contacts and calendar entries from paired phones, photos of the driver and passengers taken with interior cameras, and other data; this data is stored without encryption, and it is not always clear when Teslas are gathering data, and the only way to comprehensively switch off data-gathering also de-activates over-the-air software updates for the cars, which have historically shipped with limited or buggy features that needed the over-the-air updates to fix them.Tesla has a history of being secretive about the data its cars collect, fighting customer attempts to recover data from their cars, and selling a special cable needed to access limited car telemetry for $995. Tesla employees told CNBC that the company uses telemetry to secretly identify Tesla owners who tinker with or investigate their cars, and flags them for late software updates.Two pseudonymous security researchers called GreenTheOnly and Theo recovered "hundreds" of wrecked Teslas from scrappers and junkyards and systematically investigated the data left behind on the cars. Much of the data that these junked Teslas store is not unique -- other manufacturers' "smart" car systems store mountains of driver data in the clear (this is especially a problem for rental and fleet cars, which harvest data from many different drivers). But Tesla does store more data than its rivals, and goes further than other manufacturers in disincentivizing independent security research through its alleged blacklisting system; the fact that Tesla also operates a robust bug bounty system reveals a deep ambivalence about independent scrutiny about its products. Read the rest

Watch CNN's @ryanobles try to ask Betsy DeVos about proposed federal cuts to the Special Olympics. pic.twitter.com/69yzJsq5Hy— Daniel Lewis (@Daniel_Lewis3) March 28, 2019This week inherited wealthy person and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos tried to cut all Federal funding to the Special Olympics. Watch as she smirks and smiles while ignoring CNN's Ryan Nobles. Read the rest

Belka and Strelka, who both survived their trip to orbit, are immortalized here on a pair of shoes. Soviet Space Dog Shoes [$59, octophant.threadless.com] Read the rest

Wait for it. Wait for the mlem.:PHere it comesThere it is.:P:P[via] Read the rest

Office Depot, OfficeMax and other retailers will pay $35 million to the FTC over their use of fraudulent software that falsely reported malware infections on customers' PCs.Customers who took their computers in for a free “PC Health Check” at Office Depot or OfficeMax stores between 2009 and November 2016 were told their computers had malware symptoms or infections — but that wasn’t true. The FTC says Office Depot and OfficeMax ran PC Health Check, a diagnostic scan program created and licensed by Support.com, that tricked those consumers into thinking their computers had symptoms of malware or actual “infections,” even though the scan hadn’t found any such issues. Many consumers who got false scan results bought computer diagnostic and repair services from Office Depot and OfficeMax that cost up to $300. Suppport.com completed the services and got a cut of each purchase.It's likely that anyone reading this knows that handing over your computers to teenagers at big box stores is the exact opposite of computer security and the temptation to victim-blame will be overwhelming. Instead, consider this: if a human was held responsible they'd be jailed, but the humans who did this won't be getting in any trouble at all. Read the rest

In January on Twitter, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now, shared 13 tips for writing:Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why?Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.Don’t go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like “approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency,” and “variable.”Let verbs be verbs. “Appear,” not “make an appearance.”Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.Omit needless words (Will Strunk was right about this).Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.Save the heaviest for last: a complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence.Prose must cohere: readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it’s not obvious, use “that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless,” or “despite.”Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose.Read it aloud.Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus. Read the rest

Buzzfeed's Julia Reinstein reports that Yale “has rescinded admission for a student whose family allegedly paid $1.2 Million to get her into the school.”This is believed to be the first such rejection of a student by an American college since the admissions scandal broke over the past few weeks. Dozens of parents, coaches, and university administrators were indicted in a series of interconnected scams.From her report:As part of the scandal, former Yale women's soccer coach Rudy Meredith, was charged with accepting bribes in exchange for designating two applicants as soccer recruits to get them admitted.According to the school, one applicant was rejected despite Meredith's endorsement, but the other was granted admission."Yale investigated the allegations, and the admission of the student who received a fraudulent endorsement has been rescinded," the school said in a statement posted to their website.The school did not disclose the student's identity due to federal privacy laws and university policy.According to the indictment, the family of the admitted student paid $1.2 million to William “Rick” Singer, the ringleader of the admissions operation, who sent Meredith a $400,000 check.In exchange, the coach helped to falsely present her as a competitive soccer player, including lying that she was co-captain of a prominent soccer club.Yale said today the Department of Education has launched a preliminary investigation into Yale and seven other schools as part of the scandal.[IMAGE: An aerial view of the Yale University campus, via yale.edu.] Read the rest

I bought this Tacklife cordless driver/drill earlier this year and really like it a lot. The speed can be varied with the trigger button and it has adjustable torque. It comes with the battery pack and a charging station. Use code A5YBDAL5 to get it for a low price. Read the rest

I use the idea of peak indifference to describe the moment when activists no longer have to try to convince people that a problem is real (the problem does that itself, by ruining ever-more-people's lives), and then the job switched to convincing people that it's not too late to do something about it (if the day you finally decide to take rhino population declines seriously is the day they announce there's only one rhino left, there's a powerful temptation to shoot that rhino and find out what it tastes like).Ove Wired, Boing Boing contributor Clive Thompson (previously) asks whether we're at that point, and, if so, what can be done to avert the nihilism that so often follows from denialism.That means the current political moment is incredibly interesting. Anyone who wants to deal with climate change may have only a brief window to sell the public on a plan. In his new book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, the writer David Wallace-­Wells talks about the value of panic to pushing collective action; Doctorow says it’s the point “where you divert your energy from convincing people there’s a problem to convincing them there’s a solution.”This is why the stakes are so high in the debate over the Green New Deal that Democrats recently introduced in Congress. The young environmental activists of the Sunrise Movement flooded DC this winter to push for a resolution. Six Democratic presidential candidates now support it in principle. And the Yale–George Mason survey found 81 percent of all Americans support the general concept, including—remarkably—57 percent of conservative Republicans. Read the rest

Hudson Yards is a notorious (and spectacularly badly timed) new "luxury housing development" in New York City: a massive, gated, privatized "neighborhood" in Manhattan, a city that has been literally hollowed out by runaway luxury real-estate speculation, to the exclusion of working people and mere millionaires alike.Hudson Yards's capstone is a piece of monumental "public" architecture called "The Vessel" (also known by less flattering nicknames, like "the giant shawarma," "the beehive," "the pinecone," and "the wastebasket." The open-air structure is composed of staircases and landings that visitors can trudge up and down for the purpose of taking selfies. In true grifter capitalism style, the trudgers of the Vessel, agree, by passing under a series of threatening legal notices, that they are assigning a perpetual copyright license to the Vessel's corporate owners for any of those photos (this being an improvement on the original legal regime, in which visitors surrendered title to their copyrights, even to images taken later from distant places from which any part of the Vessel could be discerned). Oh, and you also "agree" to be recorded and to have the recordings retained indefinitely and used as the Vessel and its corporate managers see fit.Enter Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner (previously), the century's most acerbic and delightful critic of late-stage capitalism's architectural excesses. In a perfectly delightful column in The Baffler, Wagner lays out the case for The Vessel as a perfectly encapsulated symbol of all that is wrong with our economic moment and its intrusions into our built environments. Read the rest

I got one of these RAVPower portable chargers for my nephew a couple of years ago, and he told me it was great to use with his Nintendo Switch, because he could play the Switch with the charger connected and the battery charge would increase at the same time. This newer version is available at a discount when you use the promo code LKWZQ4C3. Read the rest “Good deal on USB C portable charger that can charge a MacBook and a Switch”

John Oliver shows how innocent people's lives can be destroyed by unwarranted public shaming. As an example, he gives the example of the woman who "sued her nephew" for injuring her by hugging her too hard. The real story is more complicated - the woman was forced to sue her nephew to get the insurance company to pay her bills (and her nephew and her parents were happy about it). As a result of the public shaming online, no one would hire her, and she had to change her identity. He also interviewed Monica Lewinsky about her thoughts on public shaming, having been a victim of it for years. Read the rest “John Oliver looks at public shaming on the internet”

Pioneering psychonaut Ralph Metzner who co-led the seminal psychedelic research at Harvard University in the early 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and co-authored The Psychedelic Experience, has died at age 82. (Above image, Metzner at left with Leary.) Through his life, Metzner helped a great many people through his psychotherapist practice, spoke frequently on eco-consciousness, and also composed visionary ballads. (Erowid)Pioneering psychedelic researcher Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., passed away yesterday at the age of 82. We are thankful for his lifelong dedication to providing the world with new insights and discoveries about the scientific and medical potential of psychedelics. https://t.co/XOPfk3t8xt— MAPS (@MAPS) March 15, 2019I'm sorry to learn of the death of Ralph Metzner intrepid explorer of consciousness, author, environmentalist & part of the original Harvard psychedelic project w. Timothy Leary & Richard Alpert/Ram Dass. He used to drop by the Mondo house occasionally. A lovely gentle presence.— MONDO 2000 (@2000_mondo) March 15, 2019 Read the rest “Psychedelics pioneer Ralph Metzner, RIP”

"Consciousness is what allows us to be aware of both our surroundings and our own inner state." In the first of a three part video series, "Kruzgesagt - In a Nutshell" examines "how unaware things come aware." Stay tuned for theories of consciousness that of course may be as much about philosophy as they are neuroscience. Sources here. Read the rest “Where does consciousness come from?”