Boing Boing

While light on rocks, you can certainly lift a box with Luke and the Force at LEGO Yoda's Hut. (more…)

The BBC posted an online archive of many of its sound effects. The nature scenes and peculiar things of historical interests are wonderful, though the broad focus seems to be components for radio plays and the like: footsteps, actions, incidental moments. The BBC license isn't free and has odd stipulations, but the point of the project and its accompanying rules is remarkable: "RemArc, or Reminiscence Archive, is designed to help trigger memories in people with dementia using BBC Archive material as stimulation. "

In 1853, the U.S. Government bought a 29,670 square mile chunk of dirt in a deal that, as history buffs will tell you, ended up being called the Gadsden Purchase. It was a dick move: purchasing the land meant bisecting the territory of the area's indigenous Tohono O’odham Nation. This left half of the Tohono O’odham in Mexico and the other half in the United States. Today, the Tohono O’odham are a federally recognized tribe, with somewhere around 34,000 members. This number includes around 2,000 Tohono O’odham who live in Mexico. It's not uncommon for the tribe to cooperate with Homeland Security where protecting the border is concerned. But guess what? A tribe that had their lands split up by the Federal government once isn't crazy about having it done again.According to Splinter, the Tohono O’odham Nation controls the second largest land base in the United States. This includes a full 75 miles of the U.S./Mexico border. Given that members of their tribe live on both sides of the border, they're less than chuffed with the notion of allowing the National Guard onto their lands to surveil their territory or to allow a border wall to be built on their property. The reasons for their objections are sound: Having a wall thrown up in the middle of their land would keep members of their tribe from easily traveling to participate in culturally important events on their own frigging land.From Splinter:Tohono O’odham chairman Edward D. Manuel recently went on a local radio station to tell members of the tribe that no National Guard or military personnel were welcomed on the land, according to a spokesperson for Manuel’s office. The tribe also released a statement announcing the Border Patrol has agreed to not send military personnel to its land. (Border Patrol officials in the Tucson Sector, which covers the area where the tribe lives, did not respond to a request for comment.)It'll be interesting to see, should the Trump administration ever get its shit together and sort out the funds for a border wall, how things shake out with the Tohono O’odham. I'd love to think that they'd be successful in keeping the Feds off of their soil. But the pessimist in me feels that their desire to freely traverse their own lands could fall by the wayside in favour of the ineffectual security plans of the current Administration.Image via Wikipedia Commons

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, the crew of an American seaplane were caught off guard near New Zealand. Unable to return across the Pacific, they were forced to fly home "the long way" -- all the way around the world. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the adventures of the Pacific Clipper on its 30,000-mile journey through a world engulfed in war.We'll also delve into the drug industry and puzzle over a curious case of skin lesions.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

So, there's this skeleton that archaeologists discovered in Italy during the mid-1990s. They reckon the man, who became the skeleton, was alive somewhere between the sixth and eighth century. Those were hard times. Life was short and seldom sweet. In the case of our man the skeleton, somewhere along the line, he lost his hand. Archaeologists say that it was taken off with a single blow. Maybe it was because he was involved in a war or being punished for a crime. It could have been removed for medical reasons. Anyway, BOOM, gone. It's amazing, in an era where antibiotics didn't exist, that someone would survive an amputation. Sure, it happened but it was rare. The recovery process must have been terrible. But did our pal from so long ago allow the lose of a hand and acquisition of a new stump get him down? Hell no. He did what I'd like to believe anyone of you reading this would do: HE REPLACED HIS LOST HAND WITH A FRIGGING KNIFE BLADE.According to a paper published in the Journal of Antrological Sciences by Ileana Micarelli, Robert Paine, Caterina Giostra, Mary Anne Tafuri, Antonio Profico, Marco Boggioni, Fabio Di Vincenzo, Danilo Massani, Andrea Papini and Giorgio Manzi (something something Too Many Cooks.) Once the Middle Ages bad ass healed up, he found a way to lash a knife blade to his stump using a leather mount that he tied in place with his teeth. The paper makes for pretty dense reading, but Gizmodo's George Dvorsky does a great job of digging into it:Further analysis of the man’s bones points to the use of a prosthesis. Bony healing tissue called callus formed around the ends of the bone, which likely formed as the result of frequent biomechanical force. Supporting archaeological evidence exists in the form of a knife, a cap on the stump, and a D-shaped buckle with decomposed organic material around it, likely leather. Other male skeletons found at the site were buried with their arms by their sides, but T US 380 had his right arm placed across his torso, and a knife blade with the butt aligned with his amputated wrist.It's not clear what the man may have used the knife for when he was alive, but I need to believe it had something to do with fighting Deadites and the possibility of securing an ancient magical book, charged with the power to send him to the future.Image via Pxhere

Trump's longtime strongman got benefits we're just beginning to learn about. Wonder why he needed legal representation? (more…)

Congratulations, America! The electronic federal tax filing system offered by the Internal Revenue Service so you can file your taxes today just crashed. (more…)

Russia's communications regulator says it has blocked IP addresses owned by Google and Amazon because Moscow claims the internet addresses are used by the Telegram messaging service that was banned by Putin's regime this week. (more…)

T-Mobile didn't want its rural users to know how shitty its service was, so when the company couldn't connect a call, it would play fake "ring tones" to the caller that made it sounds like the person on the other end wasn't picking up. It did this "hundreds of millions of times" per year. (more…)

A group of Belgian academic security researchers from KU Leuwen have published a paper detailing their investigation into improving the security of neurostimulators: electrical brain implants used to treat chronic pain, Parkinson's, and other conditions. (more…)

Magician David Copperfield is about to take the stand in a trial brought by a man who says he was left with a traumatic brain injury after volunteering in one of Copperfield's magic tricks at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.The accident happened during a stage trick called "Lucky 13" in which 13 people sit in a raised cage on stage. Copperfield pulls a curtain around them, and then quickly rips it open to an empty platform. The volunteers have been instantly "transported" to the back of the audience. Over 55,000 people have volunteered for this trick over the last decade, but on one unlucky night five years ago, volunteer Gavin Fox, now 58, slipped and fell when he was behind the scenes.According to NBC:British tourist Gavin Cox, 58, said he was at a Copperfield show at the MGM Grand Resort and Casino for his birthday in 2013 when he was randomly plucked from the audience for the vanishing act — part of the grand finale.Benedict Morelli, an attorney for Cox, said in an opening statement Friday that his client didn't realize what he was in for and was told during the trick, "'Stand up, come with me.' And Mr. Cox describes it as a rabbit coming out of a rabbit hole."The participants were hurried out of their seats while the curtain was up and ushered through a secret passage of hallways and an outdoor area that led them back into the theater. It was then that Cox said he fell.The route was dark and unfamiliar to the participants, who also had to contend with an incline and general dust and debris from construction, Morelli said. Parts of the MGM Grand were under renovation when the fall happened, he added. Cox claims that at first he suffered a dislocated shoulder, but later began having chronic pain that he learned was from a lesion on his brain that was caused by the fall. He says he's paid over $400,000 in medical bills. Here's a video of the trick performed in 2010, three years prior to the accident:https://youtu.be/K0jfXUsncAEImage: Homer Liwag - C88-46.jpg (file in Wikimedia Commons repository), CC0, Link

In 2016 a bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic was discovered at a dump in Japan. Scientists who were studying the bacterium say that when they tweaked the bacterium's plastic-eating enzyme to better understand how it evolved, they accidentally created an even more voracious plastic-eating enzyme.From The Guardian:“What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a real finding.”The mutant enzyme takes a few days to start breaking down the plastic – far faster than the centuries it takes in the oceans. But the researchers are optimistic this can be speeded up even further and become a viable large-scale process.“What we are hoping to do is use this enzyme to turn this plastic back into its original components, so we can literally recycle it back to plastic,” said McGeehan. “It means we won’t need to dig up any more oil and, fundamentally, it should reduce the amount of plastic in the environment.”Image: DutchScenery/Shutterstock

Alt-right hero Alex Jones claims the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax perpetrated by the federal government to give it a reason to repeal the second amendment. (more…)

Ben Cartwright-Cox observed that he could modulate the bass frequencies in electronic dance music/dubstep in a way that was easy to detect with a signal processor and inaudible to his unaided ears, so he wrote some code to hide messages in the wubwubwub. (more…)

While presenting the award for Best Instagram Brand at the Shorty Awards, a dishevelled Adam Pally seemed to have an epiphany about the banality of evil that is the Shorty Awards, which he called the "waiting at the DMV of award shows." (more…)

Mussolini commissioned this enormous scale model of Ancient Rome and it took 4 years to build. Surely, much of this is guesswork? [via]At the Museum of Roman Culture resides a 1:250 recreation of imperial Rome, known as the Plastico di Roma Imperiale, which transports viewers not just through space but time as well. "To commemorate the birth of Augustus (63 BC) two thousand years earlier, Mussolini commissioned a model of Rome as it appeared at the time of Constantine (AD 306-337), when the city had reached its greatest size," says Encyclopedia Romana. Constructed by Italo Gismondi between 1933 and 1937, then extended and restored in the 1990s, it takes as its basis Rodolfo Lanciani's 1901 atlas the Forma Urbis Romae.There are more scale models of cities at io9. Someone should make three-dee scans of all these, to the finest grain!

Andy Baio points us to "Multiplayer Minesweeper — you probably need the distraction right now." From Wikipedia:The objective of the game is to clear a rectangular board containing hidden "mines" or bombs without detonating any of them, with help from clues about the number of neighboring mines in each field...Minesweeper has its origins in the earliest mainframe games of the 1960s and 1970s. The earliest ancestor of Minesweeper was Jerimac Ratliff's Cube. (via Waxy)

A resident of Santa Fe, Argentina snapped this photo of a horrific beast that allegedly is killing dogs in the town. It's said to be 7-feet-tall and resemble a cross between a horse and El Chupacabra. YouTube channel UFOmania reported on the creature so perhaps the most reasonable explanation is that it's an evil extraterrestrial that hates doggos.(iHeartRadio via Fark)

Actor Harry Anderson, best known for presiding over NBC's 'Night Court,' has died. He was 65. (more…)

I have a lot of kitchen gadgets that I like and use (and almost every time I write about them, an Alton Brown devotee will explain why my opinion is wrong in the comments). In this video, the famous YouTuber Crazy Russian Hacker tries out eight kitchen unitaskers. Some of them, like the cantaloupe cutter, are junk, but others, like a leftover pizza crisper, is a winner.

TechCrunch's Veanne Cao reviews Apple's iMac Pro. It's a beautiful, powerful machine, Veanne writes, but when it comes to high-end video work the price premium over a similarly-specced Windows box makes it a hard sell.There’s a period of zen we reach as editors when we’re plowing through an edit, when we’re so consumed by whatever project we’re working on that hours will pass before we realize we’ve forgotten to eat, sleep, pee. ... With the iMac Pro, I’m reminded of how enjoyable video editing can be.But...I definitely can’t justify its price tag to my corporate overlords. My two friends who run production companies with teams of 14 and 28 echoed the same sentiment: “It doesn’t make sense, business-wise, with that many employees.” And my freelance colleagues, even the ones consistently landing high-paying gigs, all but one said it wasn’t worth the price, “I’d rather spend the extra few thou on lenses or a new body.”I would still buy it if I were doing lots of high-end pro work. Why? Because Windows is hinky.It's not a platform for taking pleasure in one's work, unless you're lucky enough to be working in a field that requires only one particular well-made app to get it done. Windows is a platform for disinterested drudgery and games. Just last week, Microsoft pushed out a "Windows Ink" update that broke my Wacom gear, with no obvious or easy workaround until Wacom published a hacky command-line fix. Mac OS is far from perfect, but at least it doesn't force on me Microsoft's drivers for its own comically low-end tablet PCs.

"How could this happen? We started out like Romeo and Juliet but it ended up in tragedy!"Lucien Hughes created this Simpsonwave clip for the Goody Grace track "210 Lilac Sky."

Billy Mitchell is an infamous game champion whose Donkey King high score was long the record. But video of his current best time was apparently recorded using an emulator rather than real arcade hardware, making it easier to cheat and ultimately losing him his place in the record books. Now he's speaking out, promising to show that everything was done according to the rules: "witnesses, documents, everything will be made available."It's amazing how they caught Mitchell, by spotting subtle discrepancies in how MAME emulation software and original hardware refresh the screen. The top image (below) is video of a bona-fide Donkey Kong cabinet, and the bottom image is Mitchell's provided video, now thought to be recorded by connecting an emulator to an arcade CRT monitor. Each GIF covers 1/60th of a second or thereabouts, and is slowed to show the game's girders being drawn out of the usual order.Another famous game champ, Todd Rogers, was likewise put to pasture recently. Modern hardware analysis made his claimed times and scores too incredible to believe, and he could not produce evidence of having made them.

Stock buybacks are a form of economically useless, business-starving financial engineering that makes rich people much, much richer. (more…)

Stephanie Kilgast makes lovely sculpted work with environmental and nature themes, like this old can she painstakingly covered with brightly-colored sea creatures, flowers, and mushrooms. (more…)

https://youtu.be/5TNhS81w4bM?t=24sR. Lee Ermey, the retired U.S. Marine whose portrayal of shrieking, sadistic Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket became the gold standard for movie drill instructors, is dead at 74. The magic show is yet to be scheduled.The Kanas native was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for his memorable performance in “Full Metal Jacket,” immortalizing lines like “What is your major malfunction?” He also voiced the little green army man Sarge in the “Toy Story” films and played a helicopter pilot in “Apocalypse Now,” among many other roles.

I enjoyed watching Steve Schoger make changes to a poorly designed website, explaining why he made the changes as he made them.Before:After:

A court filing in the case of President Donald Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen shows that prosecutors obtained “covert” search warrants on multiple email accounts belonging to Cohen. An early report says “Cohen is in fact performing little to no legal work,” according to sources, and “zero emails were exchanged with President Trump.”If that's the case, attorney-client privilege doesn't apply.According to all that is publicly known, Trump does not use email, personally. Others may read out the contents to him, or print out the messages. But he doesn't email. https://twitter.com/ShimonPro/status/984869558535286786https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/984866543740825601https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/984866002797236224https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/984860858177216512https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/984867684448980995https://twitter.com/ambiej/status/984867691054944256https://twitter.com/joe_in_nyc/status/984867508460163072https://twitter.com/normative/status/984867429909135361https://twitter.com/jimsciutto/status/984869116656963589https://twitter.com/mviser/status/984869001040973824https://twitter.com/RyanLizza/status/984868939862806528https://twitter.com/nycsouthpaw/status/984869388108161025https://twitter.com/yashar/status/984867269992960001https://twitter.com/justinjm1/status/984869745508921344

Earlier this week, residents in the middle of Stockholm, Sweden were greeted with a giant blue penis painted on the side of a 5-story-high building. The mural, titled "Fuck the World," was meant to stay up for six months, painted by artist Carolina Falkholt on a wall meant for graffiti artists who have permission to paint whatever they want. But because of a local public reaction that's been both angry and repulsed, her painting's days are numbered to less than a week.Falkholt, "one of Sweden's most renowned graffiti artists," told The Local that phallophobes "should consider what it is they are so upset about and then talk about it...Sex is so important, but it’s always been too dirty to discuss." According to The Guardian:The company that owns the block, Atrium Ljungberg, told Aftonbladet it had seen the work by the artist Carolina Falkholt for the first time on Wednesday morning – along with other residents of the Swedish capital’s central Kungsholmen island.“Culture and art are important in developing interesting urban environments,” Camilla Klimt, the company’s marketing manager, told the paper. “Of course, we care about artistic freedom. But at the same time, we must respect neighbours’ opinions.”Klimt said the work would stay up for a short while so everyone interested could experience it. Although some people had welcomed the penis as an “important part of the debate about sexuality, body and gender”, others – especially neighbours – had “received it less well and perceived it as offensive”, she said.This isn't Falkholt's first controversial penis painting. According to The Local:Falkholt caused uproar in New York in December when she painted a similar giant erection — this time in pink, orange and red — on a wall in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. That painting was erased after only a few days, rather than the three weeks intended, following heavy media coverage and vociferous complaints from residents. "I usually paint giant vaginas, pussies and cunts," Falkholt told The Guardian newspaper in December. "And since I had just finished one on the side of a five-storey building, I felt like a dick was needed. The wall space on Broome was a perfect fit for it. To paraphrase [the artist] Judith Bernstein, if a dick can go into a woman, it can go up on a wall." https://youtu.be/sCEHx7j79Ew

"Weird Al" Yankovic is currently traveling North American performing for his Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, one that he promised would not be business as usual. Living up to that promise, he recently performed Billy Idol's 1983 hit "Rebel Yell" live in Carmel, Indiana. No, not a parody of it, the actual song.(He's also been playing Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird"!)(The Awesomer)

A French company has made it possible to take ordinary kicks and turn them into roller skates. Flaneurz' On Wheelz can put a set of wheels on sneakers (or other shoes like Doc Martens) simply by clicking them on. (Well, that's after you send your shoes to the company to be modified so the wheels can be simply clicked on. Or you can buy one of their pre-modified pairs.)https://youtu.be/z6Q80AbUWE4Voila! Insta-skates.Something this cool doesn't come cheap. A set of On Wheelz with modified shoes costs between 380-475 euros (that's about $467-$588).(Ufunk)

Behold a photo of a massive lava bubble, taken by the United States Geological Survey in 1969.It's from the long eruption of the Kīlauea volcano in Hawaii, which began on May 24, 1969 and went on for a remarkable 1,774 days. That bubble above is about 65 feet high, but apparently other bubbles were as huge as 246 feet!As Smithsonian, via Live Science, reports:Lava fountains erupt either from isolated vents in lava lakes, or from lava tubes that are penetrated by water, according to the USGS. The formation and expansion of gas bubbles in molten rock pushes powerful streams of lava into the air—typically in a haphazard fashion, with the fountains spurting every which way. It is rare, the USGS notes, for the fountain to take the shape of a dome, like the one seen at Mauna Ulu.In a 1979 report, the USGS wrote that the dome fountain appeared frequently during the October event, which “lasted for 74 hours, nearly twice as long as any other fountaining episode of the eruption.” The report also notes that the dome had a mottled surface, caused by solidified crust getting mixed with liquid lava. As part of the dome slid away, experts could see a lava core inside, indicating that the dome was “not simply a large bubble.

Shadow Profiles is the industry term for the dossiers that Facebook compiles on billions of people, including people who don't have Facebook accounts, merging data from Facebook Like buttons and tracking pixels, outside data brokers, and data entered by Facebook users about their friends, including harvested address-books, tagged photos, and other personal information that can pertain to Facebook users and non-users alike. (more…)

National Geographic reports exclusively on a project in Peru using low-altitude drones to identify dozens of ancient geoglyphs undetectable by the unassisted human eye. (more…)

Paintschainer attempts to intelligently colorize artwork that you upload. It's very good at tight line art (such as the flowery anime portraits provided as samples) and can color them in several different styles, but the results get abtract and "computery" when it has to deal with loose pencils and shading.I sketched a little cartoon pirate and it did OK, but seems to have some trouble distinguishing "objects" to colorizeHere's what it made of a cut-through sketch of a hollow tree:I like it! It turned it into a weird blob of living flesh.This abstract landscape sketch of mine came out like a psychedelic watercolor:

House Speaker Paul Ryan, an asshole, is quitting his job. (more…)

A Connecticut man tried to tell Taylor Swift that You Belong With Me by robbing a bank.Call It What You Want, but according to the Associated Press, Rhode Island police believe that it was in bank robber Bruce Rowley's Wildest Dreams to propose to Swift, showing his devotion by committing a federal crime.After robbing a bank, Rowley's End Game was to head over to Swift's place in his Getaway Car and throw his ill-gotten gains over the fence of her Rhode Island home to impress her.You should know that the total sum of Rowley's score amount it around $1,6o0: a princely bounty that, as any love-starved misogynist will tell you, is guaranteed to attract the affections of any woman, no matter she is or how much of a loon you might be.Rowley's belief in the fact that Two is Better Than One wasn't long lived, however. After figuring out Rowley's plan, cops from Rhode Island chased him all the way to Connecticut and placed him under arrest. I'm betting that Rowley falsely believed that by crossing the state line, he'd be able to evade the police and wind up Safe and Sound. But the Highway Don't Care. Love Story or not, the cops got their man.So yeah, if you're thinking of pulling some creepy stalker bullshit, maybe don't.Image: Eva Rinaldi - Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

A reader writes, "A couple years ago MIT changed their dorm security/student trackingpolicy. They hired security contractors to work in dorms and requiredeveryone to tap their RFID cards upon entry (no vouching forfriends/guests). Most students complied. Some moved out. Some got introuble ;)" (more…)

My Great Pyrenees gets thirsty on long hikes. This dog-walking water bottle keeps him peppy and moving, cause when he decides to stop walking things get rough.Great Pyrs do this thing when they get tired of walking where they become one with the Earth. My 120lb buddy, Nemo, just lays down and hugs our planet when he wants a break. Usually, he is thirsty, warm and just wants to cool off for a bit. I want to keep walking. Giving him a few laps of water from this portable dog watering bottle often does the trick, and he will slowly get back up and we get on our way.Before I figured out Nemo wants water there would be very long, very frustrating for me but hilarious for other hikers, sessions of begging him to get up and go.The Gulpy is easy to use.Gulpy Water Dispenser, 20 oz. via AmazonImage via Amazon

The ACLU said the FBI search of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's office was not a violation of attorney–client privilege. In fact, it said in a statement written by ACLU Legal Director David Cole, "all indications thus far are that the search was conducted pursuant to the rule of law, and with sign-offs from Trump appointees."We don’t say this lightly. The ACLU is the nation’s premier defender of privacy, and we’ve long maintained that the right of every American to speak freely to his or her attorney is essential to the legal system. These rights are protected by the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, and we are second to none in defending them — often for people with whom we fundamentally disagree.But we also believe in the rule of law as an essential foundation for civil liberties and civil rights. And perhaps the first principle of the rule of law is that no one — not even the president, let alone his lawyer — is above the law. And no one, not even the president, can exploit the attorney-client privilege to engage in crime or fraud.Image by IowaPolitics.com/FLickr. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Social scientists often promote the value of public provision of infrastructure as a sound, long-term investment in development and prosperity, pushing back against the neoliberal tendency to abandon public goods in favor of private development. (more…)

Suffolk County District Judge Robert Cicale is facing up to 15 years in prison after he was caught breaking into the home of a neighbor and stealing a 23-year-old woman's dirty underwear; the judge says he was gripped by an "urge," and his lawyer assured the press that his client's "reputation throughout the court is stellar. Every judge, every lawyer respects him." (more…)

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.