Boing Boing

x6udpngx's x6ud is a single-purpose search engine that offers high-quality animal photographs for use by artists seeking reference material. It also has a 3D head that you can rotate Read the rest

What an amazing DIY castle playroom-bedroom for some seriously lucky grandkids. Truly epic, from IMGURian jshepherddesign2000.About the top image: “Mural and drawbridge bed. Chains are plastic and easily removed as well as breakaway from the top for safety.”The "curtain" and "stained glass" in the image below? Trompe l'oeil. “All one piece of art printed on fabric.”Wow. I'm an adult and I seriously want this!Original below.Our DIY Medieval Castle playroom/kids bedroom for our grandkids. Read the rest

The Apollo 11 documentary is premiering in theaters tomorrow. It makes use of a "newly discovered trove of 65mm footage," which is very crisp, making it look like it was shot yesterday instead of 50 years ago.Image: YouTube Read the rest

Measles is no joke. Anti-vaxxers are dangerously inviting infectious disease back into our society.NBC:In the Washington county that is home to one of the nation’s largest measles outbreaks, the effects go far beyond the 71 confirmed cases.The Seattle Times reports over 800 students considered exposed to the highly contagious disease in Clark County have been ordered to stay away from classrooms for up to three weeks, disrupting their education.Since January, field trips, after-school activities and an assembly honoring Martin Luther King Jr. have been canceled or postponed. Some students are doing homework off prepared handouts; others are using school-issued laptops to keep up. Read the rest

Full Frontal's Samantha Bee presents the Sackler family, "art patrons, cosmopolitans, and, believe it or not, almost single-handedly responsible for the nationwide opioid crisis."The Sacklers aren't just rich. They are rich. They have wings named after them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, an entire museum at Harvard, a center at the Guggenheim...So how do you get to have this many museums name shit after you? By having a fortune of $13 billion, which you, whoops, largely made by creating the opioid crisis. The Sacklers' family business, which they own in full, is Purdue Pharma, a company best known for developing OxyContin, one of the most prescribed and abused opioids in the United States. Read the rest

House Democrats have made good on their promise to introduce the Save the Internet Act, legislation mandating Network Neutrality, which would force the FCC to reinstate the policy that Trump's Chairman Ajit Pai used a string of dirty tricks and illegal maneuvers to destroy.Such legislation cannot pass without the support of Senate Republicans, but it's still a canny move by the Democrats, since many of those Republicans represent the largely rural states that are ground zero for the worst price-gouging and under-servicing by the telcoms industry, and Net Neutrality enjoys broad bipartisan support (83%!!), so forcing Senate Republicans to go on the record about the rule before the 2020 elections will do good for the Democrats' election plans even if they can't get the bill passed. The legislation is being lead-sponsored by Massachusetts Sen. Edward J. Markey in the Senate and Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Doyle in the House. Markey also tweeted out a copy of the bill on Wednesday, saying nearly every Democrat in the Senate had joined him to introduce it.Save the Internet Act [Ed Markey/US Senate]Democrats introduce 'Save the Internet Act' to restore net neutrality [Marrian Zhou/Cnet] Read the rest

Cynthia Newman, dean of the college of business administration at Rider University in New Jersey, has resigned from that position after her school denied Chick-fil-A a campus location "based on the company's record widely perceived to be in opposition to the LGBTQ+ community." (Newman will continue as a tenured professor though.) According to the university administrators, Chick-fil-A's "corporate values have not sufficiently progressed enough to align with those of Rider."I first suspected Newman stepped down because she loves Chick-fil-A's waffle fries so much, but she says she actually has "a problem with University leadership passing judgement on Chick-fil-A’s values which are reflective with the values of the Christian as well as other faiths.” “I endeavor every day to do exactly what Chick-fil-A puts forward as its overarching corporate value: to glorify God by being a faithful steward of all that is entrusted to me and to have a positive influence on all who come into contact with me," Newman said in her resignation speech.From CNN:Newman wrote that she asked administrators to apologize for offending Christians, but ultimately decided to step down after the university stuck to its original stance."While we respect Dr. Newman's personal decision, we maintain that the decision about choosing an on-campus restaurant franchise was in no way a judgment on religious values," Kristine Brown, a spokeswoman for Rider University, said in a statement to CNN."Rather, our intention was to foster a sense of respect and belonging of all members of the campus community, including those who identify as LGBTQ+."More in the Rider University newspaper: "Dean steps down from position due to religious beliefs" (The Rider News) Read the rest

A new report from Data & Society (previously) goes into depth on the ways that employers are increasingly rolling out workplace surveillance and monitoring technologies that "exert greater control over large workforces, rapidly experiment with workflows, detect deviant behavior, evaluate performance, and automate tasks."While some of these technologies offer legitimate solutions to real problems, they're more often deployed in ways that simultaneously make life harder for workers and make it harder for workers to push back against employer overreach.The report is a neat illustration of what I've called the adoption curve for oppressive technology, which goes, "refugee, immigrant, prisoner, mental patient, children, welfare recipient, blue collar worker, white collar worker." Remote monitoring and time tracking through GPS-location, computer monitoring software, app-based activity trackers, and remote sensors allow managers or clients to manage large groups of workers indirectly. Many workers on platforms are classified as independent contractors despite the company having significant control over worker actions. Gig platforms like Handy.com and Uber, for example, use apps to decentralize their control of worker activities, but still collect detailed data about trips, communications, and pay. This information can allow companies to nudge workers in ways that advantage the company, but not necessarily the worker (such as directing workers to perform a poorly compensated task that they might not accept if given more information). Recently, Instacart came under scrutiny for using tips that drivers receive in order to supplement pay when they didn’t earn enough to meet the minimum wage. Read the rest

An hero cat of unknown origin bravely fights off invisible attackers.Hang in there kitteh, you can do it.Fighting off your dream attackers.[via] Read the rest

If someone wants to steal your phone number -- say, to intercept the two-factor authentication SMSes needed to break into your bank account or other vital service -- they hijack your SIM by impersonating you to your phone company (or by bribing someone at the company to reassign your phone number to them), and this has made the security of phone numbers into a top concern for security experts and telcoms companies, as there are millions of dollars at stake.Enter Comcast, all-time champion "most-hated company in America," whose Xfinity Mobile cellular service assigns the same unchangeable PIN to every customer: 0000.But don't worry, Comcast says that this only puts you at risk if you recycle user-names and passwords, and nobody does that.Because of that 0000 PIN, getting a victim's Xfinity Mobile account number was the main obstacle for attackers. A Comcast spokesperson told Ars that this account number is available only by logging into the Xfinity Mobile Web portal and is therefore protected by a Comcast's user's password. Comcast told Ars that it does not send out paper bills for Xfinity Mobile and does not include that account number in emails to customers, cutting off two potential ways that attackers could get the account number.Comcast indicated that the number-porting attack affected only customers who reused passwords across multiple sites.Comcast set mobile pins to “0000,” helping attackers steal phone numbers [Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica](Image: Specious, CC-BY-SA)(via /.) Read the rest

Samsung and Huawei wowed early-adopters (and their creditors) this week with cutting-edge designs for foldable tablet-phones. LG's genius answer is to just clip two screens together. The BBC:It has created a second display as a detachable accessory. The end result may look less elegant thanks to the gap between the screens, but it is likely to cost less. The 6.2in (15.7cm) V50 ThinQ handset and its matching Dual Screen add-on both use OLED (organic light-emitting diode) technology. Read the rest

Ken Gude, senior fellow at Center for American Progress in Washington DC, wrote a Twitter thread listing all the felonies Trump may have committed, based on Michael Cohen's congressional testimony yesterday.Thread by @KenGude: "I don't think people have appropriately processed the incredible number of felonies that Cohen directly implicated Trump in today. And its u […]"Image: Federico Fazzini/Shutterstock Read the rest

40+ years ago, extremists from the Chicago School of Economics destroyed antitrust law, pushing a bizarre theory that the antitrust laws on America's books existed solely to prevent "consumer harm" in the form of higher prices; decades later, we live in a world dominated by monopolists who use their power to crush or swallow competitors, suppress wages, reduce choice, increase inequality and distort policy outcomes by making lawmakers and regulators dependent on their lobbyists for funding and future employment.The Federal Trade Commission recently solicited comments on how it could update the Consumer Welfare Standard for the 21st century -- a move that represents an odd alliance of left-wing, latter-day trustbusters, and right wing operatives who woke up one day to discover that being blacklisted by 5 companies would make them disappear from the public eye forever.The Electronic Frontier Foundation submitted an excellent and cogent set of comments to the FTC on the subject, and in a highly readable, plainspoken post, EFF activist Shahid Buttar and EFF lawyer Mitch Stoltz explain the substance and background of the comments (disclosure: I am a special consultant to EFF).EFF makes two main points here: first, that even if you're going to limit your antitrust analysis to "consumer welfare," that the power of the Big Tech platforms to surveil users, influence their behavior and censor their speech should be factored into "consumer welfare," because all of these activities materially and measurably reduce the welfare of the users of these services. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH good ol' Howard Schultz gets called a blockhead

Last October, Bloomberg published a blockbuster story claiming that some of the largest tech companies in the world, as well as sensitive US government and military systems, had been attacked through minute hardware implants that had been inserted at a subcontractor facility during the manufacture of servers from the world's leading server company, Supermicro.The story immediately drew forceful -- and unprecedentedly detailed rebuttals -- from many of the companies involved, creating a mystery that is still being debated: if Bloomberg sourced its story as carefully as it claimed, then how to explain all these detailed rebuttals? And if the rebuttals are to believed, then how to explain the dozens of people from different companies and agencies who would have had to collude to trick Bloomberg's reporters into publishing the story?Enter Andrew "bunnie" Huang (previously), one of our era's greatest hardware hackers (his book on hardware hacking is one of the best technical books I've ever read, period).Bunnie presented a 45 minute talk on supply-chain attacks earlier this month at Microsoft's Blue Hat conference in Tel Aviv (he pitched the talk before the Bloomberg story broke, but the timing was indeed fortuitous).I appreciate that 45-minute blocks of time are few and far between for most of us, but this is 45 minutes well spent. Huang walks through several techniques for sabotaging and compromising hardware, and uses his deep expertise in arranging and overseeing electronics manufacture to describe how you could pull these off in the real world, and what difficulties you'd encounter. Read the rest

For a couple of bucks, this illuminated magnifier is a great deal. I use mine all the time, especially when reading values on tiny electronic components. Read the rest

In Fort Pierce, Florida, police officer Doug McNeal arrested Zachery Moellendick, 23, and Krista Leigh, 24, for shoplifting and put them in the back of his squad car. The couple started making out so McNeal played Barry White's "Can't Get Enough Of Your Love." Later, he allowed Leigh to smoke a cigarette in the car. In the police report, McNeal admitted to seeing them kiss and "was fine with it."According to Florida Today, "The Fort Pierce Police Department said it suspended Officer Doug McNeal for 20 days without pay for the ride, which captured the couple's backseat actions on video..." Read the rest

Trailblazing filmmaker Spike Jonze made this short film, titled "The New Normal," about how America's relationship to cannabis has changed from the days when George Washington grew hemp. Read the rest

Article 13 is the on-again/off-again controversial proposal to make virtually every online community, service, and platform legally liable for any infringing material posted by their users, even very briefly, even if there was no conceivable way for the online service provider to know that a copyright infringement had taken place.This will require unimaginable sums of money to even attempt, and the attempt will fail. The outcome of Article 13 will be a radical contraction of alternatives to the U.S. Big Tech platforms and the giant media conglomerates. That means that media companies will be able to pay creators less for their work, because creators will have no alternative to the multinational entertainment giants.Throwing Creators Under the BusThe media companies lured creators' groups into supporting Article 13 by arguing that media companies and the creators they distribute have the same interests. But in the endgame of Article 13, the media companies threw their creator colleagues under the bus, calling for the deletion of clauses that protect artists' rights to fair compensation from media companies, prompting entirely justifiable howls of outrage from those betrayed artists' rights groups.But the reality is that Article 13 was always going to be bad for creators. At best, all Article 13 could hope for was to move a few euros from Big Tech's balance-sheet to Big Content's balance-sheet (and that would likely be a temporary situation). Because Article 13 would reduce the options for creators by crushing independent media and tech companies, any windfalls that media companies made would go to their executives and shareholders, not to the artists who would have no alternative but to suck it up and take what they're offered. Read the rest

#OSCARS realness.

Volante Design (previously) has two new pieces: the Augment blazer and jacket, shipping on March 15 and available for pre-order today (Vest, $195: Men/Women; Blazer, $270: Men/Women), in men's sizes 37-51 (vest also in 55) and women's sizes 33-45.I'm a total sucker for contrast stitching, seams and piping and these pieces are so up my street, like a bit of golden-age Cyberdog, but straight enough that you could just squeak by wearing them to a wedding or a big day at work. Read the rest

I'm fascinated by this PDF, by Bram Lambrecht, describing the difference (with examples) between legal and illegal Lego builds. [via MeFi]In it, Lambrecht describes "the model that forever changed LEGO," an Audi TT that was difficult to put together, required the user to deform components for them to fit, and came with no instructions. As a direct result of this set, all models now produced by the LEGO Group must go through the Design Department. This ensures that nothing gets released without first being approved by a Model Committee. Sometimes lasting up to 2 or 3 days, this review allows representatives from building instructions, senior designers, engineers and the designer sit down together and build the model. The goal is to maintain an ‘only the best is good enough’ approach to our design process. A final heat test then highlights further weaknesses that must be changed before the set can be launched out onto the market. Read the rest

Are you a collector of groovy 70s decor? If so, you may have the missing pieces to the nearly-renovated Brady Bunch house. The home that served as the exterior shot for the Brady Bunch is currently being gutted and rebuilt. HGTV and the Brady kids (who are, of course, now adults) are renovating the Studio City-based property to make its interior match what we saw on television. A Very Brady Renovation, the renovations' web series, is being shown on Facebook and a call was recently put out to locate some very specific furnishings that match ones from the original set. Specifically, they are looking for the living room's credenza and the horse statue that sat on top of it (both shown above). They're also looking for the kitchen's double oven, the kitchen fridge/freezer, two fish trivets, the dining room's curio cabinet, the living room's massive table lamp and floral sofa, the antique radio from Greg's groovy pad, Alice's bedroom set, and the giraffe plushie from the girls' room. The wish list with photos is available at HGTV. Previously:-- For Sale: The real-life Brady Bunch house-- Here's the story of how 'N Sync's Lance Bass won and then lost the Brady Bunch house-- HGTV not saying how much it paid for the Brady house ($3.5M)-- All six Brady kids reunite at their TV home Read the rest

In his first U.S. TV interview, Ren Zhengfei describes Huawei as “a tomato” crushed between two superpowers.

First, Carvel made ice cream. Then came ice cream cakes. Many years later, they created a stout based on one of their most celebrated ice cream cakes, Fudgie the Whale. A collaboration with craft microbrewery Captain Lawrence Brewing Company in Elmsford, New York, Fudgie the Beer was released last Father's Day with great success.Their latest offering? Cookie Puss the beer, a limited-edition "Milkshake IPA." But, wait, it doesn't end there. There's also Cookie O' Puss the beer. A "Pastry Stout," you know, for St. Patrick's Day.Both are brewed by Captain Lawrence Brewing and will be available starting on February 26 in select East Coast locations. Fun fact: Cookie Puss is a space alien born on Planet Birthday (and it's Carvel's 85th birthday this year).For nostalgia's sake: Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Gavin Smythe, of Chagrin Falls, USA, needs his iPhone battery replaced

The FDA has issued a warning advising Americans not to engage in the practice of infusing plasma taken from young people's blood, a "treatment" promoted to treat "normal aging and memory loss... dementia, multiple sclerosis, heart disease and post-traumatic stress disorder."The advisory "strongly" warns Americans not to buy these treatments, saying they are neither "safe" nor "effective," and adding that "There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent these conditions, and there are risks associated with the use of any plasma product.""Clinics" that offer plasma advertise that it is taken from children as young as 16 and charge as much as $8000 for a "treatment."One example is Monterey, California-based Ambrosia. (In Greek mythology, ambrosia is the food or drink of the gods and confers immortality.) It was founded by Jesse Karmazin, a graduate of Princeton University and the Stanford School of Medicine, and the company's website refers to plasma as a "medical treatment.""Young plasma treatments are intravenous infusions of plasma from young donors, who are in the age range of 16 to 25," Ambrosia's website said. The company, which notes that it treats patients who are 30 or older, boasts locations in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Tampa, Omaha and Houston. It charges $8,000 for a liter of young plasma and offers 2 liters at a rate of $12,000."Young plasma is the result of research into the science of blood," the website reads. FDA warns against using young blood as medical treatment [Susan Scutti/CNN](via /. Read the rest

Fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is dead at 85, reports the BBC.The German designer, who was the creative director for Chanel and Fendi, was one of the industry's most prolific figures, and worked up until his death.Lagerfeld also designed collections for his own brand and collaborated with high street brand H&M."I am like a caricature of myself, and I like that." — KL Read the rest

Just the other day I remarked that the fashion industry picked the worst possible year to try and make racist imagery cool, even as it's obvious why such an insular and privileged culture would think it clever and edgy. Hot on the heels of Katy Perry's blaceface shoes we have Vogue exec Donata Meirelles "on a throne with two black women in traditional dress standing either side of her." She quit when the photo got out.It has been suggested that the black women's clothes were similar to those worn by slaves, while the throne resembled a cadeira de sinhá - a chair for slave masters.Other pictures from the party, in Salvador de Bahia in northeast Brazil, show traditionally-dressed black women welcoming and ushering guests.Rita Batista, a TV presenter, posed the picture with an 1860 photo of a white woman sitting next to two slaves to make the implication clearer. Read the rest

New rules limiting internet freedom could be imposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government any time after Thursday night.

Eric Bradly says:An unopened copy of Super Mario Bros., the classic video game released by Nintendo in 1985, set a world record for a graded game when it recently sold for $100,150.“Beyond the artistic and historical significance of this game is its supreme state of preservation,” says Kenneth Thrower, co-founder and chief grader of Wata Games.Due to its popularity, Nintendo reprinted Super Mario Bros. from 1985 to 1994 numerous times, resulting in 11 different box variations (according to this visual guide). The first two variations are “sticker sealed” copies that were only available in the New York and L.A. test market launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985 and 1986. Of all the sealed copies of Super Mario Bros., this is the only known “sticker sealed” copy and was certified by Wata Games with a Near Mint grade of 9.4 and a “Seal Rating” of A++.“Not only are all of NES sticker sealed games extremely rare, but by their nature of not being sealed in shrink wrap they usually exhibit significant wear after more than 30 years,” Thrower said. “This game may be the condition census of all sticker sealed NES games known to exist.”A group of collectors joined forces Feb. 6 to purchase the game, including some of the biggest names in video games and collectibles as a whole. The buyers include Jim Halperin, Founder and Co-Chairman of Heritage Auctions of Dallas, Texas; Zac Gieg, owner of Just Press Play Video Games in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Rich Lecce, renowned coin dealer, pioneering video game collector, and owner of Robert B. Read the rest

Kashmiri saffron is the best in the world, selling for $1550 a pound. But as a result of "ongoing regional violence, droughts, and the still-unfolding effects of climate change on the land, Kashmiri saffron has slowly begun to disappear," writes Sharanya Deepak for Eater.“The saffron flower has three parts,” says Raqib Mushtaq Mir, a saffron merchant. “There’s the flower petals — that goes in for medicine, then there’s the yellow strands, which aren’t much use. The red strands, right in the middle, are pure saffron, which is what we’re looking for.” A single flower produces just three red strands; one gram of saffron is made from around 350 strands. For a kilogram of the spice, more than 150,000 flowers are sifted and scanned, and the rarity of the red strand can lead to shortcuts from less scrupulous merchants. “Often, in the market,” Mushtaq Mir says, “the yellow are colored with red and mixed into the bunch.”Image: Philippe 1 bo/Shutterstock Read the rest

A new paper by a business professor and a contract law professor evaluated the terms and conditions of 500 leading websites and found that the 99% of them required at least 14 years of education to truly comprehend, far more than the majority of US adults have attained.US courts have held that clickthrough contracts are enforceable whether or not they have been read before clicking "I Agree," but the authors propose that courts should consider whether these contracts could be read and understood in evaluating whether they are enforceable.The paper uses standard measures of readability to evaluate clickthroughs, like the Flesch-Kincaid and Flesch Reading Ease scales, and found that almost none of the agreements we are made to click through to use the internet are within the generally accepted range for contractual documents that are presented to the general public. Instead, the authors compared the contracts' readability to scientific or academic journal articles.The authors also call into question "plain language" summaries of clickthrough agreements, raising the question of which version of a text is enforceable: the version that was intended to be read and parsed by everyday users, or the fine-print it allegedly summarized?The use of deceptive and overreaching fine-print is a hallmark of grifters, and the online world is a world of grifter capitalism, where actions that are plainly unfair and immoral somehow attain the protection of the law, while any steps you take to avoid these abuses are somehow illegal.Many scholars have suggested that consumer contracts are indeed written in a way that dissuades consumers from reading them. Read the rest

Sir Patrick Stewart doesn't play the Reskian flute, or any flute for that matter. The trick worked on me at least, because I hadn't noticed even after seeing this episode several times over the last 26 (!) years. From Wikipedia:...As neither Stewart nor Hughes could play their instruments, it required a number of camera techniques to be used in order to disguise the musicians playing just off screen. Husband and wife duo Natalie and Bryce Martin played the piano and tin whistle respectively to portray Daren and Picard's abilities. Bryce had played his instrument to represent Picard's Ressikan flute since it first appeared in "The Inner Light". However, while Stewart did the majority of his flute fingering, he was doubled in several scenes by Noel Webb and John Mayham. Webb also doubled for Brent Spiner early in the episode when Data was playing Frédéric Chopin's trio in G minor.In TNG, Picard has a flute he sometimes plays. The only problem is that Sir Patrick Stewart cannot play the flute. So they have someone else's hands pretend to play it while he makes silly facial expressions, and they dub in music later.Once you see it, you can't unsee it. pic.twitter.com/5dbtyvOqjy— foone (@Foone) February 12, 2019 Read the rest

The Telegraph reports that Theresa May saves money by scraping mold off preserves and eating the untainted remains. The prime minister’s admission emerged during cabinet meeting discussions on how to reduce food waste. Ms May is said to enjoy cooking, and has a particular penchant for jam, even giving a jar to Melania Trump as part of a hamper in 2017.The cabinet meeting was at the centre of controversy on Tuesday as some government insiders complained afterwards that Brexit had not featured heavily enough in discussions.On the contrary, there has never been a cabinet discussion more clearly about Brexit.When they make the Brexit movie this is going to be the understated yet shimmeringly metaphorical scene where the full horror of what is happening finally sinks in for the viewer. pic.twitter.com/pbA4V2AWUF— Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) February 13, 2019 Read the rest

Good luck escaping from this one.

The Taihe Gemini is a slim, battery-powered 15.6" touchscreen display that's raised more than $1m at Kickstarter. The Verge's Sam Byford took it for a spin.The pre-production version I tested has a matte 1080p touchscreen. It’s not the most beautiful display in the world, with pedestrian color reproduction at 72 percent of the NTSC gamut, but it is at least an IPS panel with solid viewing angles. There’s also a 2mm-thicker 4K model that omits touch functionality but achieves a claimed 100 percent of Adobe RGB coverage. I wasn’t able to test that version, so I can’t speak to its supposedly better color performance.The touch functionality on the 1080p model sadly doesn’t extend to its janky button-operated settings menu, but it’s actually pretty cool if you have a compatible phone with a desktop mode, like a Samsung Galaxy Note with Dex or a Huawei device that supports Easy Projection.I'm quite eager to see this myself: sounds perfect for using in portable MAME cabinets, retrofitting into dead terminal monitor cases, and other assorted witchcraft. Read the rest

Dan Mallory is the latest in a long line of people — otherwise middling in talent, white of skin and surburban of origin — to make it big in publishing by fabricating their life's travails and tragedies. "Want to sell a book?" writes Jessa Crispin. "Start lying."But there is another story these fakes are telling that we want to hear: the story of redemption through the written word. Even if you come from the most hardscrabble of circumstances, even if you have been wiped out by the tidal waves of fate, you can better yourself and your life through literature. It’s the literary version of the American dream, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, but in this case, your bootstraps is your manuscript. Read the rest

In this 1939 newsreel, the great Lucille Ball demonstrates the Sonovox, a device that brings amplified sound effects from vinyl records into the throat where the tongue and lips modulate it. Here's the patent for the Sonovox, invented by Gilbert Wright and used in TV advertisements, the movie Dumbo (1941) for Casey Junior the train's voice, and the "days of the week" radio jingle that was included on The Who Sell Out (1967).Of course the Sonovox begat the "talk box" that routes an amplified instrument's sound from a small speaker into the musician's mouth via a rubber tube so they can shape the tone as if they're speaking. In the rock arena, Peter Frampton made the talk box famous on the track "Do You Feel Like We Do" (1973).More on all this in my post last year featuring Pete Drake's beautiful pedal steel "talk box" tune "Forever" from 1963, long before Peter Frampton showed us the way.(via r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

Scientists wanted to know how maggots devour food so quickly, so they conducted an experiment. They fed 10,000 maggots a cheese pizza, which disappeared in 2 hours (but only about 30 seconds in this sped-up video) and noticed an interesting "fountain" pattern of movement amongst the fly larvae that allows them to burn through food at a fast clip. According to ScienceMag.org:The team searched for patterns in the squirming mass by tracking the flow of individual maggots with software used to model the movement of fluids. Despite the appearance of chaos, the larvae moved like water being pumped through a fountain, the researchers report today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Hungry maggots pushed toward the food from the bottom, and satiated larvae were pumped up and over the top of the pile to the back of the line.This fountain of larvae allows hungry grubs to replace the ones surrounding the food that have stopped feeding, which keeps the eating machine humming. The researchers say better understanding the process could help grub farming companies scale up and turn even more food waste back into food. Read the rest

Here are three lateral thinking puzzles that were new to me. They're from the book, Lateral Thinking Puzzles (1991), by Paul Sloane.Death in the FieldA man is lying dead in the field. Next to him is an unopened package. There is no other creature in the field. How did he die?Death in RomeMr. Jones is reading his daily newspaper. He read an article with the following headline: “Woman dies in holiday accident.“ It goes on to say, “Mrs. Rigby-Brown, while on holiday with her husband in Rome, fell to her death from the balcony of her seventh-floor room.“Mr. Jones turns to his wife and says “That was not an accident. It was murder.“ He had never met either of the Rigby-Browns, so how could he know it was murder?Image by S.Borisov/Shutterstock Read the rest

Regulators in Germany ruled that Facebook must cut the data it gathers about people who aren't using its app or website or get their consent. Facebook says it intends to appeal the ruling.The watchdog has carried out a probe into the social network following concerns that members were unaware of the extent of the firm's activities. It covered data gathered from third-party sources as well as via Facebook's other apps, including Instagram.The US firm has said it will appeal. Specifically, the FCO has ruled that:• Facebook's various services can continue to collect data, but they cannot combine it with the user's main Facebook account unless the member gives their voluntary consent• collecting data from third-party websites and assigning it to a Facebook user's account is likewise only allowed if that member has given the firm permissionFacebook hitches a ride into browser sessions through like buttons, sharing widgets, ads and other non-obvious page elements. Like certain Google services, it's essentially unavoidable without installing browsers plugins to control them. Read the rest

A college student in North Carolina heard rattling in her closet that sounded like a raccoon, but she thought it was a ghost. She'd had other strange things happen in her apartment, like finding strange handprints in her bathroom, and having some of her clothes disappear. She worked up the courage to ask through the closet door, "Who's there?" And someone answered back, "Oh, my name is Drew." Turns out a 30-year-old gentleman was hiding in her closet, wearing her clothes.According to Vice:As horrifying as the whole thing might be, Maddie—who has declined to reveal her last name—apparently didn't think [Andrew] Swofford posed any sort of immediate threat. She reportedly kept up a conversation with him and let him roam around her home while she called for help.“He tries on my hat," she said. "He goes in the bathroom and looks in the mirror and then is like, ‘You’re really pretty, can I give you a hug?’" According to Maddie, he never actually tried to touch her.When Maddie's boyfriend arrived, Swofford took off, but was arrested at a gas station shortly after. Strangely enough, this wasn't the first time she's had an intruder in her place. In December she found two men in her living room. This might explain the mysterious handprints and missing items. And in both cases there were no signs of entry. I'd say it's moving time.This is Andrew Swofford. A UNCG junior got home on Saturday, to find him in her closet, wearing her clothes. Read the rest

Is Facebook following government orders in Myanmar?

MIT researchers developed a robot that can play Jenga based on a novel approach to machine learning that synthesizes sight and touch. From MIT News: Alberto Rodriguez, the Walter Henry Gale Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, says the robot demonstrates something that’s been tricky to attain in previous systems: the ability to quickly learn the best way to carry out a task, not just from visual cues, as it is commonly studied today, but also from tactile, physical interactions.“Unlike in more purely cognitive tasks or games such as chess or Go, playing the game of Jenga also requires mastery of physical skills such as probing, pushing, pulling, placing, and aligning pieces. It requires interactive perception and manipulation, where you have to go and touch the tower to learn how and when to move blocks,” Rodriguez says. “This is very difficult to simulate, so the robot has to learn in the real world, by interacting with the real Jenga tower. The key challenge is to learn from a relatively small number of experiments by exploiting common sense about objects and physics.”He says the tactile learning system the researchers have developed can be used in applications beyond Jenga, especially in tasks that need careful physical interaction, including separating recyclable objects from landfill trash and assembling consumer products.“In a cellphone assembly line, in almost every single step, the feeling of a snap-fit, or a threaded screw, is coming from force and touch rather than vision,” Rodriguez says. Read the rest

Not much detail on this patented houseplant and its terrifying license "agreement": redditor GooberMcNutly posted it a few hours ago and hasn't said anything else about it. Plants are patentable, and in theory patents reach into private conduct. Whatever the story, this is some primo late-stage capitalism right here. Read the rest

Last month, it seemed like Europe had been saved from a dangerous attempt by corporate lobbyists to hijack copyright legislation in order to add a few points to their balance sheets, at the cost of a free, fair, open internet. Now, thanks to Germany's decision to turn its back on small European tech companies, the EU is poised once again to hand permanent control over Europe's internet to the United States’ Big Tech sector, snuffing out the small- and medium-sized enterprises of Europe.The new European Directive on Copyright in the Single Market is a grab-bag of updates to EU-wide copyright rules, which have been frozen in time since their last refresh, in 2001. But the Directive been imperiled since last spring, when German MEP Axel Voss took over as rapporteur, and promptly revived two controversial, unworkable clauses.To remain credible, the EU must reject this haggling between giant commercial interests—and put the public good first.Voss's deadly pet ideas were, first, a proposal to let news sites decide who could link to them and to charge for the privilege (Article 11); and second, a proposal to require every platform for public communication to invent and deploy copyright filters that would prevent any user from infringing copyright, even momentarily, by suppressing any communications that appeared to contain a copyrighted work of any kind (Article 13).The response was swift and decisive: more than a million Europeans promptly wrote to their MEPs to demand that the Directive be voted on clause-by-clause, allowing for Articles 11 and 13 to be amended. Read the rest

The difficult decision of whether or not to store your priceless art collection on your super-yacht just got easier: after a series of high-profile debacles in which multi-million-dollar paintings were damaged by poorly trained yacht crews (like the ham-fisted swabbies who didn't use the correct technique to clean a $110.5m Basquiat after the fruit of His Lordship's loins covered it in breakfast cereal), a boutique industry of specialist consultants has emerged to train your yacht's crew in art preservation.At £295/day, it's a steal.There are superyachts with “better collections than some national museums,” Mather-Lees said, describing one yacht with more than 800 pieces of art that are worth more than double the vessel itself. “Obviously they [the owners] want to show off their art collection when guests come on board … It acts as an icebreaker, and says volumes about their taste,” she told an audience of more than 100 people at the Superyacht Investor conference in the Landmark Hotel. “But yachts are not art galleries and when something goes wrong it’s obviously very unfortunate and a big burden on the crew and the owners become very unhappy.”Discretion is required in both the art world and on superyachts, but Mather-Lees said Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the owner of Manchester City and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, has several hundred pieces aboard his £350m superyacht Topaz.A reporter looking in the windows of Joe Lewis’s £200m superyacht Aviva, when it moored on the Thames last year, discovered Francis Bacon’s Triptych 1974–1977 was hanging in gold frames on the lower deck. Read the rest

The latest XKCD strip, "Sharing Options/#2016" is a brilliant and trenchant surfacing of the hidden rhetoric of social media, where your options are "permanently share with billions of people, including internet scammers, random predatory companies, and hostile foreign governments" or "a small set of 300 or so approved friends," and when this is questioned, the social media companies profess an inability to understand what other options could exist.To which the voice of XKCD replies: "I mean...there are numbers between 300 and one billion."The thing I love about this is the way it exposes how demands are disguised as observations: just as when Zuckerberg says that "privacy is no longer a social norm," he means "I demand that you extinguish the social norm of privacy," when a company says "it is impossible to implement a sharing setting that sits between 'trusted friends' and 'the world, forever," they mean, "I demand that you choose among those two options, because a company with just those two options is more profitable and easier to operate."This is a cheap and obvious rhetorical trick, but it's surprisingly effective: think of Margaret Thatcher's pronouncement that "there is no alternative," which really meant "stop trying to think of alternatives."What's more, this trick poisons the well. There are, in fact, things that seem plausible if you don't understand technology but which are obviously impossible if you do understand it (making crypto that works except when the police need it to stop working; making computers that run all programs except the ones you don't like; making filters that stop copyright infringement but not legitimate speech). Read the rest

When Melissa Elmira Yingst and Socorro Garcia checked in for their flight at Detroit, they were told they'd get a seating assignment together. But at the departure gate, the request was denied—and they claim the gate agent would not communicate with them except by talking at them. Thing is, they're both deaf.The gate agent rolled her eyes at us. Melissa asked for her to write. After a few moments, she finally wrote on a piece of paper and said, the flight is full and can’t book us together. I wanted to continue to communicate and decided to try and write on that same paper but instead of giving us the paper we asked for, she crumbled it in front of us and threw it in the trash.”Yingst says she pleaded with the agent — who allegedly refused to give her name but whom they identify as “Felicia” — to write down her end of the conversation, arguing that she was “denying us our communication access” by not doing so.Here's where they story diverges: one of the women says "Felicia" pushed her when she tried to retrieve the note. But "Felicia" claims she was assaulted. In any case, "Felicia" summoned airport security and the women were removed from the flight.Delta is backing its gate agent, stating that the women were barred from the flight because Garcia went behind the gate desk and "pushed" the gate agent when trying to retrieving the crumpled up paper. The women deny this and say Delta falsely told the media it had reimbursed them. Read the rest