I can't speak as to how good/sharp/functional these knives are** but they sure do look cool. This is the Cosmos Series by Chef's Vision and each knife in the set is printed with a "stunning color image of the unfolding universe." Incidentally, they're the number one "Amazon's Choice" for the search "knives for men."**A set of six of these knives costs $49.95, which I think tells you everything you need to know about their quality. (Geekologie)

My daughter and I saw the movie of Ready Player One last night. I really enjoyed it. One thing that stood out was how the villain of the movie, Nolan Sorrento (played by Ben Mendelsohn), seems to be a dead ringer for Scientology leader David Miscavige, complete with tight-fitting suit. They even have the same brash, gravelly voices (Mendelsohn is Australian and affected a North American accent in the movie). Coincidence?Am I the only one that thought Ben Mendelsohn's #ReadyPlayerOne villain was a sly swipe at Scientology's David Miscavige? With IOI's indentured servitude similar to Sea Org's billion year contract? Am I giving this movie too much credit? pic.twitter.com/7Q9OWf0oVN— Max Evry (@maxevry) April 1, 2018

Want to know if Facebook let Cambridge Analytica steal your person information? here's the company's form to check, but you'll need a Facebook login, so it won't work if you've already done the right thing (that is, #DeleteFacebook). (Image: hobvias sudoneighm, CC-BY) (via The Verge)

Actor T.J. Miller, who played Erlich Bachman in HBO's Silicon Valley, was arrested last night at La Guardia airport for calling in a fake bomb threat from an Amtrak train. He was released today on a $100,000 bond.On March 18, Miller called 911 and said he was on an Amtrak train traveling from Washington DC to Penn Station, New York. He claimed he was with a woman who was carrying a "bomb in her bag."According to CNN:Amtrak officials stopped Train 2256 at Green's Farms Station in Westport, Connecticut. Passengers were told to detrain before bomb squad members boarded and searched the train.An investigator then called Miller back, according to the DOJ press release, and he gave a different description of the woman.Miller is alleged to have also claimed the woman "kept checking her bag without taking anything out; kept asking the first-class attendant what the next stop was, and seemed to want to get off the train and leave her bag behind.Passengers who had been sitting near Miller said he seemed "intoxicated" and that he'd been "in hostile exchanges with a woman who was sitting in a different row from him in the first-class car."If convicted, Miller faces up to five years in the big house.Image: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America - T. J. Miller, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

2016 wasn't Cambridge Analytica's first rodeo; in 2014, they worked for Republicans in races across the country. (more…)

Sleeping should be a basic human right, but municipalities are enacting more laws that make it illegal to sleep in public. It's a cruel and financially dumb way to ignore the problem of homelessness. Steve Teare explores the issue in a comic in The Nib called "Sleeping Isn't a Crime."

For over 20 years, Santa Monica-based inventor Aaron Kramer has taken trash and turned it into art. His latest creation is a "Selfie Machine" which draws his portrait when he hand-cranks a knob. Should you want a "Selfie Machine" for yourself, Kramer sells custom ones starting at $10,000.(INSIDER)

There are 500,000 pieces of space junk orbiting the earth, many of which significantly endanger satellites and crewed space missions. Now there's a fascinating experiment underway to test various techniques of collecting and disposing of space junk: Orbital garbage collection!A European consortium launched the RemoveDEBRIS satellite last week, and it's already in space ready to be deployed for its tests in May. The satellite will test a couple of ways of capturing space junk, including firing a net around a junk satellite (producing enough drag so the junk begins spiraling towards Earthbound destruction), and -- more dramatically -- firing a harpoon at a target, to test whether space junk could be collected using space harpoons.To repeat: Space harpoons.Some more details from Smithsonian's Air and Space magazine:In the first test, a CubeSat released from the main spacecraft will maneuver to a distance of more than 20 feet, where it will unfurl a balloon (to provide a bigger target). A net similar to the kind used in commercial fishing will then be deployed from the main spacecraft to capture the CubeSat. Atmospheric drag should cause the netted CubeSat to burn up in the atmosphere in a matter of weeks, according to Guglielmo Aglietti, Director of the Surrey Space Centre at the University of Surrey, and the principal investigator for RemoveDEBRIS.For the second test, another CubeSat will be released to fly at a distance from the main spacecraft, where a camera and LIDAR will observe it to assess how well future trash-collecting satellites could judge the position and speed of a piece of debris.Then, to test a different method of snaring space trash, a standoff target—made of representative satellite materials—will be shot with a harpoon connected to a tether. Finally, a large sail will be unfurled from the main satellite to increase its atmospheric drag and cause it to burn up during re-entry, about a year and a half later. The project investigators expect to have all their tests wrapped up by the end of this year, says Aglietti.RemoveDEBRIS has produced the above video visualizing the experiment, complete with the requisite stirring space-opera soundtrack.

My longtime friend Jared Hirsch (previously) is an amazing mixologist (or as he humorously describes himself, a "cocktologist"). As a popular bartender at Sidebar in Oakland, he's always mixing up something new and creative for their menu. Now, with his business partner Absinthia, he's crowdfunding a new line of craft cocktail syrups. They did this once before with great success three years ago. Their Caged Heat syrup hit its goal in just seven days. This time they're rolling out three new flavors: Crimson Smoke, Cherry Bomb, and Fairy Dust (which is like an alcohol-free absinthe). Check all of them out over at Kickstarter.

Welcome Ed Piskor back to Boing Boing (previously), where he'll be offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. Here's page 2; read page 1 first — Eds.Director's CommentaryMy goal with X-Men: Grand Design is to take the thousands of pages that make up Uncanny X-Men issues 1-281 and try to make a complete, concise, and satisfying 240 page story which includes all the most important elements, but none of the fat, redundancy, or deus ex machina from the series . The X-Men and mutants, in general, are the quintessential marginalized underdogs of the Marvel Universe.I wanted to use this page to give readers the scoop on how mutants work in my version X-Men because it is slightly divorced from what's been established in the classic run. The Marvel comics of the early ‘60s grew out of the Atlas comics of the ‘50s which were the product of a post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki ‘40s. The Atlas magazines used nuclear, atomic energy and mad-science as a McGuffin to explain the creation of many of their monsters. It’s no stretch to imagine these ideas seemed to factor into the X-Men origin. The two best-known X-Men writers, Stan Lee and, Chris Claremont suggest that mutants were the 20th century product of nuclear testing, fallout, etc. I like the idea that mutation has always been a part of our world. Where would evolution be without it?Since mutants have always existed in my version of the X-Universe,I needed something more than simple physical aesthetics to act as a catalyst for the tremendous fear that “normal” humans have for them in our modern times. Something major was needed to get the hate-machine rolling or else why wouldn't mutants have been violently and strategically selected out of the gene pool thousands and thousands of years ago if the prejudice has always been aggressive and reactive? When Marvel decided that Namor, The Submariner was a Mutant it made sense that I could use the events in Human Torch #5 (1941) to create some major anti-mutant hysteria. Of course, in the conservative fashion of those old comics, all the people in NYC were able to evacuate before Namor’s tidal wave hit the city. That doesn't fly in my comic. Lots of casualties.I think it’s a good idea to firmly root the X-Men into the wider Marvel Universe as much as possible because I never want you to forget that it's a magical place where almost anything can happen. It'll help ease you into the far-out intergalactic stuff that will come up in the future. If you can buy a single mutant sinking New York, then you can buy a Phoenix Force adorning the shell of Jean Grey, but that's getting ahead of myself. More on that later.The first X-Men Grand Design collection is now available for purchase on Amazon! Stay tuned for another strip this time next week. You can pre-order X-Men: Grand Design, Second Genesis on Amazon today.

A friend was just telling me that jet skis are like motorcycles for water. Now here's a jet-ski... motorcycle. Some guy in the Netherlands put the shell of a Sea-Doo jet ski over a motorcycle and tooled around. He reports:I was driving my newly built jetski after a friend finished it this Easter. We build it because I woke up one day thinking about such a thing and I decided it had to happen. Now it's done and I haven't decided what to do with it.(Geekologie)

In a survey of 1,300 Android users, 89% percent said that they did not give Facebook consent to scrape their call and text history. Facebook has been allegedly scraping phone records since 2015.From TeamBlind:Last month, we surveyed our users, asking them if they planned to delete their Facebook accounts after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In just a few days, more than 2,600 users answered our survey, with 31 percent answering that they will delete their Facebook account.Shortly after news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, many Facebook users rushed to download their profile data, leading Android users to discover that the company had been collecting their call history records and SMS data. As Sean Gallagher of Ars Technica writes:This past week, a New Zealand man was looking through the data Facebook had collected from him in an archive he had pulled down from the social networking site. While scanning the information Facebook had stored about his contacts, Dylan McKay discovered something distressing: Facebook also had about two years’ worth of phone call metadata from his Android phone, including names, phone numbers, and the length of each call made or received.We surveyed over 1,300 Android users, asking if they granted Facebook permission to collect their call and text history. Overall, 89% answered ‘No.’Last week, Facebook announced that the company will reduce the amount of data collected from Android users. In a company blog post, Facebook CTO, Mike Schroepfer writes:Call and text history is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This means we can surface the people you most frequently connect with at the top of your contact list. We’ve reviewed this feature to confirm that Facebook does not collect the content of messages — and will delete all logs older than one year. In the future, the client will only upload to our servers the information needed to offer this feature — not broader data such as the time of calls.Portrait used in collage: Guillaume Paumier, CC-BY.

This looks like a worthy cause -- Sesame Street is seeking $75k to fund its Autism Initiative to prevent bullying.We’ve mapped out a multi-step plan to address bullying as it affects the autism community – starting with an enhanced digital storybook. Drawing on an extensive body of research, we’ll create a kid-appropriate story about understanding differences using everyday activities and play. Like our other Julia storybooks, it will offer parents and caregivers a safe and accessible starting point for deeper conversations with their children.Contributions to the campaign will fund:Rigorous work with expert advisers across some of the 250 autism organizations that helped us build the See Amazing initiative, ensuring that we’re telling the right story in the right way Writing, editing, and illustrating an uplifting story that models inclusive play, starring the beloved Sesame Street MuppetsSupplementary materials for kids and adults, including articles for parents and caregivers that will address bullying in a direct and empowering wayRecording sessions with the Sesame Street cast to provide audio for the digital storybook Translation work and additional recording sessions to version the storybook, articles, and other materials in Spanish (and potentially other languages) adjusting for cultural and linguistic nuancesOur initial goal of $75,000 will allow us to do the above. But there's more we can do, too. If we reach our first stretch goal — $150,000 — we’ll be able to create a printed storybook version of the story that we’ll distribute free of charge to 40,000 kids via our growing network of partner organizations. We’ll get all these resources in the hands of kids and families by April 2019.

AmazonBasics makes a good Nintendo Switch carrying case, with a pocket to store cables and a place to hold up to 10 game cartridges. I bought one a couple of months ago for $12, but right now ">Amazon is selling it for just $4 with free same day shipping for Prime customers.

The folks at Great Big Story went to Madrid to find a hidden Chinese restaurant known as "The Underground."Underneath a plaza in Madrid lies one of Spain’s greatest culinary secrets. Cafetería Yulong Zhou is home to some of the best Chinese food in the country. Getting there, however is another story. With no exact address or email, trying to find the restaurant takes some expert sleuthing. With the help of a friend and a hint, we embarked on the journey. Spoiler alert: the dumplings made the trek totally worth it.

Stanley Kubrick had a lot of trouble getting the right voice for HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He initially used the Oscar-winning actor Martin Balsam, but his Bronx accent wound up making HAL sound "a little bit too colloquially American," as Kubrick later decided.So Kubrick turned instead to Douglas Rain, a Canadian stage actor who was a veteran of dozens of plays. It worked -- Kubrick got the weird, calm, eerie affect that made HAL so unsettling.Part of what made things work? Apparently it was Rain's Canadian tonalities:Kubrick was attracted to Mr. Rain for the role partly because the actor “had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right for the part,” he said in the 1969 interview with Mr. Gelmis. But Mr. Rain’s accent isn’t mid-Atlantic at all; it’s Standard Canadian English.As the University of Toronto linguistics professor Jack Chambers explained: “You have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place. Standard Canadian English sounds ‘normal’ — that’s why Canadians are well received in the United States as anchormen and reporters, because the vowels don’t give away the region they come from.”As a Canadian myself, this tickles me to no end. There are plenteous other trippy details in that piece, including the fact that since HAL's performance was recorded after all the other scenes were in the can, Kubrick got Stefanie Powers to read HAL's lines during the shoots! And then this ...Anthony Hopkins has said it influenced his performance as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Douglas Rain himself has never seen “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For the retired actor who spent decades at the Stratford Festival and turns 90 in May, the performance was simply a job.

For the uninitiated, Cisco is a worldwide leader in networking systems and solutions, and, as such, carrying a certification backed by them can fast-track your way to a coveted IT position in virtually any company. Of course, passing any of Cisco's certification exams is no easy feat, but the Ultimate Cisco Certification Super Bundle can make the journey easier. It's currently on sale, lowering the final price to $49.This nine-part collection features training on the concepts and ideas you're likely to be tested on during a host of Cisco certification exams, including the valuable Cisco Certified Network Associate Security (CCNA Security) exam. You'll foster an understanding of core techniques and ideas, like setting up security infrastructures, supporting enterprise networks, and more. Plus, with lifetime access, you can work through the collection at the pace that's right for you.The Ultimate Cisco Certification Super Bundle retails for $3,285 and was on sale for $59, but you can get it at a new, lower price of $49 for a very limited time.

Amid the chaos of Trump's illegal ban on refugee claimants and other migrants from Muslim-majority nations, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted "To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada." (more…)

The House of Commons Library has published research projecting the post-2008 growth of inequality until 2030, arriving at an eye-popping headline figure: at current rates, the richest 1% will own two thirds of the world's riches by 2030. I think that number is too low. Here's why. (more…)

Those thousands of drawings in the desert of southern Peru that we call the Nazca Lines? They're so yesterday. According to National Geographic, all of the cool kids know that the geoglyphs worth paying attention to are those new ground etchings that archaeologists recently grokked in Peru's Palpa province.Through the use of drones and satellite imagery, 50 new examples of geoglyphs were discovered by archeologists. Many of the ground drawings were so fine or well hidden that they are almost too obscure to see with the human eye:From National Geographic:Some of the newfound lines belong to the Nasca culture, which held sway in the area from 200 to 700 A.D. However, archaeologists suspect that the earlier Paracas and Toparácultures carved many of the newfound images between 500 B.C. and 200 A.D.Unlike the iconic Nasca lines—most of which are only visible from overhead—the older Paracas glyphs were laid down on hillsides, making them visible to villages below. The two cultures also pursued different artistic subjects: Nasca lines most often consist of lines or polygons, but many of the newfound Paracas figures depict humans.More likely than not, the new geoglyphs might not have been found at all, were it not for the fact that the nearby Nasca lines are currently undergoing restoration to sort out the damage caused by a Greenpeace publicity stunt in 2014 and this guy, earlier this year. While mapping out the damaged areas of the lines, volunteers from GlobalXplorer noted the previously undiscovered line work.Well, the folks that drew the lines knew that they were there, but you know what I mean.If you're interested in participating in the restoration project, reducing looting of the world's natural resources and heritage sites, once you've checked out the National Geographic story on the new geoglyphs in Peru, check out Globalxplorer.orgImage via Flickr, courtesy of ilkerender

In some ways, there's never been a better time to be an insurer: every business wants cybersecurity insurance, and the market is willing to tolerate crazy annual premium hikes -- 30% a year for the past five years! (more…)

People who'd corresponded with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg contacted Techcrunch to say that Zuck's messages were missing from their inboxes -- but the replies to his messages lived on as proof that something had been deleted. (more…)

stuffin.space is a real-time 3D map of all the crap floating in circles around planet Earth, much of it put there by us.The website updates daily with orbit data from Space-Track.org and uses the excellent satellite.js Javascript library to calculate satellite positions.About the authorMy name is James Yoder; I'm an alumnus of FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 624 and an incoming Electrical and Computer Engineering freshman at the University of Texas at Austin.

William Blake 1460, $150The summer after I graduated high school, I went to London with a friend. We visited the Tate and I became smitten with William Blake's art. I didn't have a lot of money to spend on that trip but I did buy a bunch of postcards of his art as souvenirs. About five years later, when I landed in California from the East Coast, I got into a heated discussion with a friend's husband. He mentioned that he was a fan of Blake's poems. I said that I was a fan of Blake's art. He said I must be mistaken, that Blake didn't make art. I insisted that he did. (Now, keep in mind, this was the mid-1990s and there wasn't an instant way to verify who was right.) We tabled that discussion, and our relationship, indefinitely. Now I see that the Tate has collaborated with Dr. Martens, bringing William Blake shoes to market. Shoes covered in his art.The first one is the 1460 boot which is printed with Blake's "Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils" and the second is the three-eyed 1461 shoe which is covered in "The House of Death."William Blake 1461, $130It took 23 years but I feel tremendously vindicated.(Dangerous Minds)

Most songs aren't as good when the instrumentals are stripped out, but Marvin Gaye's vocals in "I Heard it Through the Grapevine" are so powerful and haunting that they don't need accompaniment.From Open Culture:Marvin Gaye’s mega-hit, "I Heard it Through the Grapevine," turns 50 this year.Smokey Robinson and Gladys Knight got the first cracks at the now iconic Barrett Strong-Norman Whitfield tune, but Gaye’s 1968 rendition is the famous one, the bestselling Motown single of the decade.Gaye’s former brother-in-law, Motown Records founder Berry Gordy, is perhaps the only one who wasn’t impressed, refusing to believe it could be a viable single until its enthusiastic reception by radio DJs and the listening public convinced him otherwise. In short order, In The Groove, the 1968 album on which it first appeared, was retitled with the name of its monster hit.

Spotting a semi truck with its container raised, a car driver noted its impending doom and began filming. And following it rather too closely. (more…)

The Atlantic sparked anger by hiring columnist Kevin Williamson, who likened a black child to a primate and wrote that women who have abortions should be hanged. His hiring was defended by Atlantic chief Jeffrey Goldberg, and various conservative colleagues of his, who all agreed that it was just a bad tweet that didn't reflect his true beliefs. In a contemporaneous audio interview, however, Williamson reiterated and explained why he thinks women who have abortions should be hanged.KEVIN WILLIAMSON (CO-HOST): And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, “If you really thought it was a crime you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.” And I do support that, in fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging.... Later in the same episode of the podcast, Williamson continued that when it came to punishment for those who had abortions, he “would totally go with treating it like any other crime up to and including hanging” -- going so far as to say that he had “a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment” because “if the state is going to do violence, let’s make it violence. Let’s not pretend like we’re doing something else.”Listening to him smack his lips, after saying that, it struck me that no U.S. state hangs its killers. It's a legal execution method in two or three, but no one's been hanged here in decades. Critics have been making a mistake about Williamson's self-described "very serious animus" concerning women who have abortions. He didn't say "executed" for a very simple reason: he knows the state does not do the thing he has a taste for. What he wants is to see the women get lynched.

Facebook admitted Wednesday that 87 million users' data was harvested by Cambridge Analytica--about 74% more than previously disclosed.The new figure sharply increased the company’s previous estimate of how many users’ information was harvested by Cambridge Analytica. For weeks, Facebook had said that the data of about 50 million users was at issue.Facebook released the revised estimate of affected users as part of an extended statement about its plans for handling personal data. The company said it would start alerting users on April 9 about whether their information may have been shared with Cambridge Analytica.Another day, another numbingly obvious example of "dumb fucks."

Thanks to a recent court filing, we may soon see who's responsible for funding the bigoted neo-nazi bullshit machine we all loathe and know as The Daily Stormer. (more…)

Weird Al Yankovic co-authored today's New York Times crossword puzzle. His collaborator was crossword constructor Eric Berlin who writes in the puzzle notes:We batted around a few theme ideas, some of which seemed worth developing but none of which made it to the finish line. I suggested “The ____ Film Festival,” with that blank to be filled in with whatever struck Al’s fancy. He replied with a long list of cheese/movie puns, and I had no doubt that we had a winner. My very first attempt at the grid included one of my favorites from his list, QUESOBLANCA. I was under the misapprehension that queso is not just the Spanish word for cheese but also a specific kind of cheese. Whoops, not quite. (This was entirely on me, I should note — Al, not knowing during his brainstorming that the end result would be restricted to specific cheeses, had several cheese-adjacent puns in his list, including FONDUE THE RIGHT THING and CHEESY RIDER.)Download a PDF of the puzzle here.

Back in 2016, the ACLU and First Look (the publishers of The Intercept) sued the US government to force it to clarify that the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act -- the overbroad statute passed during over a panic sparked by the movie "Wargames" -- does not prohibit violations of terms of service. (more…)

Apple's education-centric new Ipad is meant to be used in rambunctious classrooms where drops and other abuse will be commonplace; it is also meant to compete with relatively easy-to-service Pixelbooks that school district IT departments can fix themselves or get repaired by a wide variety of independent, local service depots whose community-based technicians do repairs onsite and also keep local tax dollars circulating in the community. (more…)

The imminent implementation of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been hailed as a victory for global privacy advocates; since the regulation severely limits the collection of data on Europeans -- even when they're communicating with non-Europeans -- services like Facebook would risk running afoul of the GDPR if they collected data on anyone in a way that violated EU rules, and since the penalties for violating the GDPR are incredibly draconian, the benefits of such surveillance would surely be outweighed by the risk of getting it wrong. (more…)

On August 2, 2017, security researcher Dylan Houlihan contacted Panera Bread to warn them that their customer loyalty website had a serious defect that allowed attackers to retrieve the names, email and physical addresses, birthdays and last-four of the credit cards for up to seven million customers. (more…)

Wayne Kramer, founder guitarist of proto-punk band MC5, is heading on the road this fall to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band's seminal debut album "Kick Out the Jams." Of the original five members of MC5, the only living members are Kramer and drummer Dennis Thompson who won't be joining the tour. For the tour, Kramer's band will include Soundgarden's Kim Thayil (guitar), Fugazi's Brendan Canty (drums), Dug Pinnick of King's X (bass) and Zen Guerrilla's Marcus Durant (vocals). "Today, there is a corrupt regime in power, an endless war thousands of miles away, and uncontrollable violence wracking our country," Kramer said. "It's becoming less and less clear if we're talking about 1968 or 2018. I'm now compelled to share this music I created with my brothers 50 years ago. My goal is that the audience leaves these concerts fueled by the positive and unifying power of rock music."Kick out the jams, motherfuckers.(Rolling Stone)

Ronald Reagan created the Lifeline program, which gives low-income Americans a $9.25/month subsidy to spend on one of: landline, broadband, or wireless access. (more…)

Musician Anna Henry suffered from essential tremor, a movement disorder that causes shaky hands. As the conditioned worsened, it interfered with her flute playing. So she underwent a surgical procedure called deep brain stimulation to cure it. The Texas Medical Center surgeons implanted a battery pack in her chest that delivers tiny voltages to the brain's thalamus, a key region responsible for controlling movement. She was kept awake during the operation, a common practice to test the device and avoid brain damage. The procedure worked. From the Texas Medical Center:The result was like flipping a switch. Prior to the surgery, Henry’s neurologist, Mya Schiess, M.D., of the Mischer Neuroscience Institute at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center and UTHealth, ran a few motor control tests. Henry could barely sign her name, let alone hold a pen. When handed a cup of water, her hand shook so intensely that the water splashed inside the cup.But after the electrodes were placed in her brain and the thalamus was stimulated, Henry’s hand was still and stable, without a single detectable tremor. When she signed her name a second time, each pen stroke was smooth and clean. Her handwriting was legible for the first time in decades.The surgical team handed Henry her flute to test if her hands were stable enough to play. As she remained on the operating bed, she lifted her flute to her mouth and treated everyone in the operating room not only to a sweet melody, but the joy of seeing her tremor disappear.“[Deep brain stimulation] works amazingly well,” Schiess said. “If you have a tremor that is truly interfering with hand function, lifestyle, head or voice, honestly, there isn’t a medicine out there that’s going to really put you in a better state.”For Henry, deep brain stimulation helped her get back to doing what she loves. Although her tremor had interfered with her quality of life and nearly put an end to her musical career, she refused to quit.“My folks lived through the [Great] Depression,” Henry said. “If there’s anything they taught me, it was that an obstacle is not something that stops you; it’s something you find a way around.”(via Laughing Squid)

15 or 20 year ago Japanese schoolkids started making shiny balls out of mud (dorodango). Now people have figured out how to make shiny balls out of aluminum foil. They look very cool! To make one, you crumble up an entire roll of aluminum foil, then compact it with a hammer. After that, you have to polish it with increasingly finer sandpaper and polishes. It's a lengthy process, but that's the point.

Pecos Hank has seen his share of storms, as evidenced by his cool footage of ominous green-hued clouds. He explains the science behind why massive thunderstorms can "go green," as they say in stormchaser parlance. (more…)

Five years ago, Steve Ballmer said "we can make Windows devices once again the devices to own." Last week, Microsoft announced that Windows will no longer be a standalone unit at Microsoft, ending a division dedicated to personal OS that started in 1980. Via Ben Thompson at Stratechery: (more…)

Donald Trump's budget sought to punish blue states by removing income tax deductions for mortgage interest on high-ticket real estate; this was enough to prick the Manhattan property bubble, with co-op and condo sales volume dropping 25% year-on-year for Q1/18; the majority of red ink is in the luxury property market, where Q1 prices fell 15% year-on-year. (more…)

In 1981 Howard Phillips got a job at a Nintendo arcade game shipping warehouse in Seattle. One the the perks of the job was being able to play the games without spending quarters. As a result, Phillips became an expert at the games, and Nintendo management soon realized the enthusiast warehouse worker could become its gateway into the zeitgeist of US market. They hired him as a "gamemaster" and solicited his advice on which games to introduce into the US. He was presented to the media as Mr. Nintendo and became a famous face to gamers all over the country. Here's a six-minute profile of Phillips, in which he reflects on his period of fame.

George Church's Harvard lab is one of the most celebrated fonts of innovation in the world of life sciences. George's earliest work on the Human Genome Project arguably pre-dated the actual start of that project. Subsequently, he's been involved in the creation of almost a hundred companies - 22 of which he co-founded. Much of George's most recent and celebrated work has been with a transformationally powerful gene-editing technique called CRISPR, which he co-invented. George and I discuss CRISPR and its jarring ramifications throughout this week's edition of the After on Podcast. You can listen to our interview by searching "After On" in your favorite podcast app, or by clicking right here:Our conversation begins with a higher-level survey of the field -- one which cleanly and clearly defines CRISPR by placing it into a broader, and also a quite fascinating framework. We cover four topics, which I'll now define up-front for you, so as to make the interview more accessible. We begin by discussing genetic sequencing. "Sequencing" is a fancy (and rather cool way) of saying, "reading." Your genome is about three billion characters long. It's written in a limited alphabet, of just four letters: A, G, C, and T. And if someone sequences your genome, it simply means they've read it. They haven't modified it in any way. They haven't have cloned you. They've just gotten a readout (kind of like determining your blood type -- only a few billions times more complicated). George and I next discuss gene editing. As the word suggests, editing the genome of a person, bacterium, or virus involves changing some of its letters. This can significantly change an organism's function -- perhaps causing a small critter to produce something useful, like a medicine, or a biofuel. Or, perhaps someday giving people or animals superpowers. CRISPR is a form of editing. But it's not the first one. It's the tenth one -- in a lineage that goes back decades. CRISPR's better than most editing techniques at many things. But it's not better than all techniques at all things. And it's definitely not the last form of editing. There's massive headroom for improvement in genetic editing, and CRISPR will be superseded many times by more powerful approaches in the future. The third thing we discuss is DNA synthesis. Specifically, the creation of relatively small, customized units called "oligos." These are short sequences of DNA, which typically run from a couple dozen letters to a couple hundred letters long. That's obviously tiny in relation to your 3-billion-letter genome. It's also tiny in relation to bacterial genomes, which often range in the millions of letters; Or viral genomes which often range in the 100,000's. Oligos are building blocks, which are made to order in specialized labs. Like sequencing, DNA synthesis has gotten radically cheaper in recent decades, and continues to get cheaper every year.Our fourth topic is DNA assembly. This is the process of stringing those oligos together into long strands. In theory, there's nothing to stop scientists from linking several million oligos into a strand as long as a human genome. But practice, errors creep into the process -- both as the underlying oligos lengthen from dozens to hundreds of letters, and as the number of oligo links in a final assembly rise. As a practical matter, things start getting tricky well before 100,000 letters, and the days of a fully synthesized, error-free, human-length genome are still many years off. So that's the table of contents of the first half of our interview: Sequencing, editing, synthesis, and assembly. With those foundations in place, George and I then talk about the astounding things that this integrated set of rapidly improving, and mutual reinforcing fields are enabling. Please join us!

The audio work makes it funny; the original, narrated by Morgan Freeman, is just uncomfortable, even as it smooths over the fact you're watching Zuckerberg eat plain toast right out of the toaster while nodding mechanically.

Smart home speakers are nothing new, but Apple has finally gotten into the game with its HomePod speaker. Blending Apple Music and Siri together, this innovative speaker makes it easy to handle everyday tasks while blasting your favorite tunes. The HomePod retails for $349, but you can get your own without spending a dime by entering into the Apple HomePod Giveaway.Absolutely free to enter, this giveaway nets you a shot at taking home Apple's HomePod speaker. Ideal for the music aficionado, this device learns your taste in music and allows you to play whatever you want just by saying it out loud. Its intelligent sensors know how to deliver the sound based on the size of your surroundings, and it's still capable of controlling the smart features in your home.Simply sign up, and you'll be one step closer to taking home your own HomePod for free with the Apple HomePod Giveaway.

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Welcome Ed Piskor back to Boing Boing (previously), where he'll be offering an annotated page-by-page look at the first part of X-Men: Grand Design, his epic retelling of how Marvel comics' pantheon of heroes came to be. — Eds.My work on X-Men would never have been possible without the popularity my work has achieved thanks to Boing Boing publishing Hip Hop Family Tree for four and a half years. It's a pleasure to bring the Marvel mutants to the Happy Mutants for this limited serialization of X-Men: Grand Design. I created each page to function as its own unique and complete episode/strip that, when read in total, would tell a bigger story. Over the course of the next few weeks I'll be posting a page at a time, and providing a director’s commentary with every strip, to give you some insight into where my mind was when while creating the whole tale.Strip 1One of my cardinal rules for purchasing comics as a lad was never to buy a story that was halfway through being told. If I saw “Part 3” on the cover or splash page I was out. This left few options, but one consistent purchase was Marvel’s What If… volume 2 (early 1990s). The conceit was that Uatu The Watch would stand-in as defacto EC horror host, a la The Crypt Keeper, and give us an alternative-reality tale of a famous Marvel story (Example: What if...The Fantastic Four fought Dr. Doom without their powers?). I always held a personal geek-theory that Uatu was the narrator of all those ethereal caption boxes that permeated the pages of Marvel comics. In X-Men: Grand Design I used the opportunity to make this theory into law. Using The Watcher is also the perfect device for jumping around through the complicated X-Men lineage to connect dots and make correlations along the way.Panels 1 & 2 are silent because I want the reader to decide the exact amount of time that Uatu has been standing on that rock observing the happenings on Earth. The time that transpires between panel 1, 2, and 3 can be seconds, minutes, years, decades, centuries, millennia, etc. Your call. This illusion would have been destroyed if I had any dialogue in those panels as it would imply that the image exists as a moment that lasts only as long as it takes to read the text within.Panel 3 and the rest: The Recorder! My introduction to the Recorder was from his cameo in Uncanny X-Men 137 and he was drawn so tiny >(and kind of unclearly) that there was plenty left up to the reader’s imagination. I didn’t realize he was a classic Jack Kirby character until much later. My version of The Recorder here is how I imagined him to look before I read the Kirby Thor comics where he was introduced. It was the ‘80s when I saw that classic issue of X-Men which would explain why the recorder uses analog means for warehousing data as opposed to solid-state media. One last formal thing worth noting is that when you look at Uatu’s positioning in every panel I wanted to imply that he was slowly orbiting the earth while conducting his observations. He’s not up there statically in place. He looks at the story in all angles.The first X-Men Grand Design collection is now available for purchase on Amazon, with X-Men: Grand Design, Second Genesis already up for preorder. Stay tuned for another strip this time next week!Comment on the BBS

Following a crowdfunded restoration, the film of Hugo Bettauer's eerily prescient novel will tour Europe again as anti-Semitism is on the rise. At the film's release, Bettauer was doxxed by local media and murdered by a young Nazi soon after. (more…)

According to the Vatican, demonic possessions are on the uptick. In order to meet the rising demand for assistance by those assailed by the demonic, the Vatican-backed International Association of Exorcists will be holding a training course for Priests interested in fighting the demonic. According to The Guardian, the course will held at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome between 16-21 April.The announcement of the upcoming Vatican course comes at a time when concerns over whether the rite of exorcism could be seen as a form of spiritual and physical abuse are being raised.From The Guardian:Last year, the Christian thinktank Theos reported that exorcisms were a “booming industry” in the UK, particularly among Pentecostal churches.But some warn that “deliverance ministry” can be a form of spiritual abuse. Critics also say LGBT people and those with mental health issues are targeted for deliverance in the belief that their sexuality or psychiatric problems are the result of demonic possession.For their part, the Vatican, as well as the Anglican and Orthodox churches, acknowledge that medical care and psychological assessment of anyone asking for exorcism is a must--mistaking a medically treatable condition for spiritual affliction doesn't help anyone. Of equal importance is the fact that, as part of an exorcist's training, it's reinforced that unwanted touching or unrequested exorcisms should not take place.No matter where your beliefs (or lack thereof) fall on the issue of exorcism, having more trained exorcists rolling around out there will likely be a good thing for those who feel that their only recourse from torment or spiritual danger is through a cleansing rite. Desperation always draws sharks. As it stands, the shortage of recognized clergy that have been trained in the rites of exorcism has led to a cottage industry of shady independent exorcists practicing their craft across Europe, sometimes at a cost of up to 500 euros per session.That's a high price for people to be forced to pay for help with their assumed or legitimate spiritual woes.Image by follower of Hieronymus Bosch - Sotheby's London, 14 April 2011, lot 5, Public Domain, Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fB0GBwJ2QAJohn Oliver is in very good form in this 18-minute explainer on America's ghastly immigration courts, where "we try death penalty cases like it was traffic court," forcing refugee claimants (even children as young as three years old) to represent themselves in deportation proceedings where their very lives are at stake. (more…)