Jon Yablonski has created a site that crisply illustrates the "Laws of UX" -- some well-known precepts of how people interact with on-screen information. One of my favorite laws, which you see in action all the time in the real world, is the "Serial Position Effect". As Yablonski describes it ...The serial position effect, a term coined by Herman Ebbinghaus, describes how the position of an item in a sequence affects recall accuracy. The two concepts involved, the primacy effect and the recency effect, explains how items presented at the beginning of a sequence and the end of a sequence are recalled with greater accuracy than items in the middle of a list. Manipulation of the serial position effect to create better user experiences is reflected in many popular designs by successful companies like Apple, Electronic Arts, and Nike.(Via Sarah Drasner)

A Quinnipiac poll of 1,212 voters taken last week found that Bernie Sanders was far and away the most viable Democratic candidate (76% approval), beating Oprah (69%) and Gillibrand (25%) -- and that moreover, his approval ratings were highest among women and people of color, putting a lie to the stereotype of "Bernie Bros" as young, middle-class white male political radicals who are oblivious to the more moderate preferences of others. (more…)

Buzzfeed has curated a list of old words that we should revive, because man, they seem to really fit modern life.Like "fudgel" -- "pretending to work while actually doing nothing at all." Or "ultracrepidarian": "Someone who gives opinions beyond their level of expertise".They're all taken from The Horologicon, a wonderful book by the writer and word-lover Mark Forsyth. My favorite is "uhtceare", which means "lying awake in bed before dawn and worrying about the day ahead". Forsyth's passage in The Horologicon about "uhtceare" is informative:Uht (pronounced oot) is the restless hour before the dawn, when Aurora herself is loitering somewhere below the eastern horizon, rosying up her fingers and getting ready for the day. But for now, it is dark. And in the antelucan hush you should be happily slumbering and dreaming of pretty things.If you are not, if you are lying there with your eyes wide open glaring at the ceiling, you are probably suffering from a severe case of uhtceare. There's an old saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. However, that's utter tosh. If you get out of bed and peek through the window, you will see a pale glow in the east. But don't, whatever you do, actually get out of bed. It's probably chilly and you'll never get your posture in bed (technically called your decubitus) quite right again. You'll just have to lie there and try not think about how horrid it all is. Ceare (pronounced key-are-a) was the Old English word for care and sorrow, emotions that have an annoying habit of striking during the uht. For some reason these early hours are the time when you remember all your sins and unpaid bills and, perhaps, the indelicate thing you did last night, and as each of these creeps into your mind your uhtceare grows more and more severe. For an affliction so common, uhtceare is a very rare word. It is recorded only once, in a poem called The Wife's Lament, which, surprisingly, isn't about how awful and messy her husband is, but about how he has been exiled to a far country and left her here with her uhtceare and her vicious in-laws. Old English poetry is almost universally miserable, and Old English poets should really have bucked up a bit, but they did give us uhtceare and for that we should be grateful.

A dolphin ate an octopus, but the octopus got its revenge -- it attacked the dolphin's internal organs, killing it in turn.From National Geographic:Stephens says that the 4.6-pound cephalopod appeared to have grabbed onto Gilligan's larynx with a tentacle, preventing it from reconnecting to the dolphin's breathing apparatus and effectively suffocating him to death."That octopus might have been, in theory, dead, but the sucker was still functional," Stephens says, adding that while nobody wins in a situation like this, "the octopus gets a bit of a last hurrah."There's a study in Marine Mammal Science detailing the entire grisly affair.For the fifteen years I've been blogging, I have really had only one consistent message: Do not mess with octopuses, people. They will cut you. They will cut you while they are inside you.(Image from Marine Mammal Science)

Previously: Arf.mp4Ergo...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UpeLPBKi1IMoreover, it is postulated that...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVk5m3lospk

Between 1988 and 1990, Tacoma musician John Purkey says Kurt Cobain gave him demo tapes. Now, he's shared those early Nirvana cassettes on YouTube.Spin reports:One tape includes Bleach demos recorded during the band’s first ever session in 1988 at Reciprocal Studios in Seattle, with Melvins drummer Dale Crover on the drums. Another features Nevermind demos recorded with Crover’s short-lived replacement Chad Channing, who left the band during the making of the project and was replaced by Dave Grohl.The audio is raw, and many of the demos have seen the light of day via the numerous Nirvana compilations released after Cobain’s death, but the collection and backstory is interesting. Purkey played in several Tacoma bands during Nirvana’s early years and watched the band develop from scratch. He kept the cassettes in a metal box, hidden inside a second metal box, for years, he says in an accompanying video. https://youtu.be/yeNoZw0T1KQhttps://youtu.be/a72afxjLEYQhttps://youtu.be/PZG22Oy1anIhttps://youtu.be/5b5BaDWQl0c(Dazed)

Somehow I missed the successful kickstarter for a tiny bluetooth vinyl needle-in-a-box that powers 'round and 'round in circles along the grooves of a stationary record, obviating the need for an actual turntable. Now I've seen the Rokblok in action, I have to have one. Here's another video:https://youtu.be/LPIJVdQkb1Q?t=3m30sThis popular device is normally $90, but sold out at the official website. Amazon has them for $200.

Ever thought of whipping out two thick fleshy dildos and banging out a drum cover of Metallica's hit "Enter Sandman"? Well, don't kill the messenger but, YouTuber 66Samus has beat you to it. Watch him rock out with his, er, cocks out in this rousing video he shared Tuesday Commenter Gear Gods quips, "Now we know what it was that entered the sandman."Ba-dum tss...(Dangerous Minds)

Even by the standards of "storm-buffeted planes landing without incident", this is astounding: a small jet turboprop all but spinning in circles as it comes in, only to plop perfectly onto its wheels at the last moment. According to the video, there were 110 km/h (68 mph) crosswinds. (more…)

Master woodworker Matthias Wandel made this demonstration safe lock. He sells the plans for $7 here.

When Rep Tim Murphy resigned in shame after he was outed for pressuring his mistress to get an abortion while serving on the "House Pro-Life Caucus," it triggered a special election in Pennsylvania's 18th, a rustbelt district in the southwest corner of the state, where a strong Democrat candidate named Conor Lamb is polling high against his Republican opponent, torture advocate Rick Saccone, who served as an Army intelligence support consultant at Abu Ghraib prison after its torture scandal. (more…)

Donald Trump, President of the United States, is apparently rewriting the laws of human biology and procreation now. Yep, he really said this. (more…)

https://youtu.be/SdqKEHqt94gPianist Scott Bradlee gives the old ragtime treatment to Super Mario Bros. It's as if the music was always meant to be played that way.Here's the obligatory death metal version from the Bowser Castle music:https://youtu.be/NBgMk4X9MzA

"Steamin -- one of our hundred thousand words for being drunk." Actor Gerard Butler teaches us many colorful examples of Scottish slang.

Britain's Intellectual Property Office admits that its cartoon informing children about copyright infringement is "dry and niche," despite exciting scenes such an old man in a suit explaining intellectual property and a goatlike charicature of popular singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran.The Intellectual Property Office is leading the government's efforts to crack down on internet piracy and protect the revenues of Britain's creative industries.The government agency is spending £20,000 of its own money on the latest Nancy campaign, which is part-funded by the UK music industry.Catherine Davies, head of the IPO's education outreach department, which already produces teaching materials for GCSE students, admitted IP was a "complex subject" for small children and something of a challenge to make accessible and entertaining.Some fear, the BBC reports, that the campaign is so numbing and heavy-handed its message about piracy "could backfire." [via Tim Cushing]

Last week, cowards from both sides of the aisle caved into America's lawless spy agencies, and today bipartisan senators reprised that cowardice to ensure that the Senate would not get a chance to vote on amendments to the renewal of Section 702, the rule that has allowed the NSA to conduct mass, warrantless surveillance on Americans in secret, without meaningful oversight or limits. (more…)

For more than a century, National Geographic has continued to "believe in the power of science, exploration and storytelling to change the world." I still want to believe.

Portland, Oregon's MSHO not only takes baths with his cat "DJ Ravioli" (which seems like a terrible idea, but let's overlook that for now), but raps to him in the process. It's pretty cute if you aren't watching and waiting for the other claw to drop.https://youtu.be/SDfV-6UfvAkMSHO (aka the Cat Rapper) doesn't just make cat videos in the bathtub, he's got a whole YouTube channel of him singing, on dry land, about his five cats. (reddit)

Amazon was the last major tech company to issue a "transparency report" detailing what kinds of law-enforcement requests they'd serviced, and where; when they finally did start issuing them, they buried them on obscure webpages deep in their corporate info site and released them late on Friday afternoons. (more…)

In the UK, many people who live in multiunit buildings -- the sort of thing that would be a condo or co-op in the US -- live under the leaseholder/freeholder system, a relic of feudalism that has been updated for the age of inequality thanks to hedge funds and other socially useless financial engineers. (more…)

David Shtorm (aka Candy King) has a black light cotton candy maker, and he creates edible animal sculptures like this elephant that are a big hit with the kids. (more…)

On Saturday, Lucy Schultz of Denver, Colorado shared touching, intimate photos of her childbirth. Well, not technically. What she shared was a hilarious album of her pretending to give birth to the baby kitten she and her boyfriend Steven recently adopted. The new mom wrote:On 1/10/18 we welcome our first baby kitten, a neutered male DLH. He is 22" long and weighed 6 pounds 7 oz. He is already eating solid food. Name to be announced. We are so in love <3A professional photographer herself, Shultz told Denver's 9News:“So I’ve been thinking of this idea for a while because I’m totally a crazy cat lady who didn’t have any cats. So, I decided as soon as I got a cat, it’s a big milestone for me and sort of like the hallmark of me settling down and starting my menagerie of future cats, and so the first one is pretty special.”Without further ado, here are some of their (mildly NSFW) photos:The full set of 28 photos, taken by Elizabeth Woods-Darby, has, of course, gone viral. As of this writing, the album has been shared nearly 75K times.(HuffPost)

Isaiah Odhner has recreated MS Paint in javascript. JS Paint! You can try it out here -- and the code's on his Github account.This is too much fun. As he writes:Ah yes, good old paint. Not the one with the ribbons or the new skeuomorphic one with the interface that can take up nearly half the screen. And sorry, not the even newer Paint 3D.Windows 95, 98, and XP were the golden years of paint. You had a tool box and a color box, a foreground color and a background color, and that was all you needed.Things were simple.But we want to undo more than three actions. We want to edit transparent images. We can't just keep using the old paint.So that's why I'm making JS Paint. I want to bring good old paint into the modern era.

When an alert went out warning Hawaiians they were about to get nuked, they immediately stopped fapping. Upon realizing it was a false alarm, masturbation recommenced, and then some! And within 45 minutes, life at Pornhub had returned to normal. [via]

Nope, definitely not a sign from the angry gods. (more…)

I first met Aubrey de Grey over ten years ago, when he presented at a conference I attended. And his core message blew my mind. It was -- and remains -- that it should soon lie within technology’s reach to eliminate the scourge of human aging. Not merely to arrest it -- but even to reverse it. We discuss all of this and more right here:People have been making these sorts of claims from time immemorial. But they usually have a service, some goop, or a religion to sell, and Aubrey’s peddling none of the above. The charlatans also typically lack Aubrey’s professional validation -- which include a Cambridge Ph.D, any number of academic publications, and dozens of scientists pursuing his agenda with full or partial funding from the organization that he founded and runs.Aubrey is charmingly indignant about the lack of urgency most of humanity has about ending aging. He attributes this to a mindset he calls the “Pro-aging Trance,” which we discuss in detail at the start of our interview. Its roots include the instinctive conviction most of us have that death and mortality are immutable realities. To which Aubrey would reply that many instinctive convictions -- such as belief in an Earth-centered universe, or the impossibility of human flight -- have gone the way of the dodo bird. And he would of course add that there’s no reason for us to go that way ourselves.Aubrey maintains that while life itself is -- for now -- unfathomably complex, as are most disease states, virtually everything that causes us to age and die stems from seven discrete categories of damage, which steadily accrue throughout our lives. And vitally, we don’t need to fully understand this damage in order to fix it. So by all means, he argues, let’s start fixing! He lists seven major repair vectors, which he believes can collectively end aging. We discuss two in detail in our interview, and I survey the other five in my concluding remarks.One final note: when you hear about a research program like Aubrey’s, it is not unreasonable to ask, is this guy nuts? Personally, I like Aubrey, I loved his book (which we also discuss), and I sure hope he’s right about everything, because I quite enjoy being alive! But I categorically lack the background necessary to assess his claims scientifically. In light of that, as well as the pro-Aubrey biases I just confessed to, I was careful to vet him as a guest with multiple scientists who are familiar with his work -- most of whom also specialize in aging and its attendant diseases.The strong consensus from this informal advisory group is that Aubrey is the real deal. He’s viewed as being extremely smart, entirely serious, and not even slightly bonkers. Now, that doesn’t mean a majority or even a large minority of scientists agree that defeating aging during the next few decades is largely a matter of adequate funding. That’s still a rather fringe viewpoint. But it’s a viewpoint a scientist can now espouse and retain the respect of his peers - which I doubt was the case until quite recently. No doubt Aubrey’s own work has had something to do with that.Image of Aubrey de Grey by SENS Foundation/Flickr, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

As of Monday, there is a new kind of "DUI" in New Jersey: Droning Under the Influence. On his final day of being New Jersey's (incredibly unpopular) governor, Chris Christie signed a law making it illegal to fly an unmanned drone aircraft drunk or under the influence of drugs. Reuters reports:The law prohibits flying a drone with a blood alcohol content of 0.08 percent or higher, the same as for driving a vehicle, or while drugged. Violators face up to six months in jail, a $1,000 fine or both.The measure, which passed the Democratic-controlled state legislature earlier this month, also bars flying a drone near a prison or in pursuit of wildlife.The drone measure was among 109 bills that Christie signed into law on his last full day in office, spokesman Brian Murray said by email. Christie’s successor, Democrat Phil Murphy, is to be sworn in on Tuesday.photo by Andrew Turner

Tristan Harris a former "design ethicist" at Google, says today's candy colored interfaces are addictive. One way to make your phone less appealing, it to make the display grayscale. (more…)

“Making you angry, making you afraid, is really good for Facebook's business. It is not good for America.” (more…)

The force prefers nearly trimmed facial hair, according to this Norelco line of Star Wars shavers.Star Wars: The Last Jedi shared my perfect idea of a Jedi: Luke living on a windswept cliff over the sea, wearing comfortable robes and to hell with beautycare. Cranky old failed Jedi have bushy beards. R2D2 never had a beard trimmer attachment.Now that Finn is out of the storm trooper helmet and has paid a visit to Maz' funky club, maybe'll give us some great 70s action hero hair! If this trimmer is anything like a Storm trooper, it'll miss all the hair anyways.Who is the person who really wants a Snokes-personal-guard-themed beard trimmer? What is wrong with them? Kylo can't even grow one!Is there an Ewok sculpting attachment?Poe Dameron is a war criminal. Dameron did more to kill the Rebellion/Resistance than Palpatine and Vader combined.Am I the only person who remembers General Jan Dodanna's awesome hair?Obi-Wan Kenobi had the best beard in all of Star Wars.

A woman in Texas provides exciting color commentary as cars and trucks struggle to make it over the crest of an icy incline in Texas. One semi makes a valiant effort, but it loses traction and slides back down the hill, bashing into a stop light.

This calm and relaxing video depicts Li Ziqi making paper by slicing and drying tree bark, soaking it in water, slow-boiling it with ash under burlap, fastidiously cleaning it, crushing it, chopping it up, muddling it with a gigantic mortar and pestle, then smoothing the resulting cellulose slime on a floating mesh rack. Paper! There's even a funny twist ending.Li Ziqi's channel has many other beautifully-shot videos of things -- mostly simple but laborious meals -- being prepared from scratch.

If you have sensitive information on your computer, you should back it up online. Just about everyone understands this, including malicious cybercriminals. That's why it's important to ensure you choose a cloud storage solution that keeps your data under digital lock and key, like SpiderOak ONE. Now, you can sign up for 2TB of secure cloud storage for a year for $39.99.Toting end-to-end encryption, ONE protects all of your data before it even leaves your computer, and is encrypted again while in transit, and at rest on SpiderOak servers. With SpiderOak, you don't have to worry about data loss or ransomware thanks to its built-in data recovery feature. Plus, SpiderOak lets you seamlessly sync data between all of your devices, regardless of operating system, and share files securely with others through a web-based interface, giving you ultimate flexibility.You can sign up for a 1-year subscription today for $39.99.

President Trump weighs 239 pounds (One pound less than would count him as "obese" under the most popular measure for his height) and is mentally and physically fit to govern. One reporter asked how Trump could eat so much fast food and drink so much Diet Coke and still receive a good bill of health.“It’s called genetics, I don’t know. Some people have good genes,” Jackson said. The president is taking several other medications, including a low dose of Aspirin for heart health, a cream for rosacea and a multivitamin. Liberal Twitter just doesn't believe it--especially the suggestion that Trump has lost a significant amount of weight while in office. But surely there are more significant mysteries to unravel...https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/953388765409566720

The U.S. Justice Department under President Donald Trump has just announced that it will seek a direct Supreme Court review of the DACA order. (more…)

Honolulu Civil Beat tweeted this image of the menu page where an Emergency Management Agency employee accidentally clicked the wrong item and triggered a public emergency missile alert. According to Honolulu Civil Beat, "The operator clicked the PACOM (CDW) State Only link. The drill link is the one that was supposed to be clicked... The BMD False Alarm link is the (newly) added feature to prevent further mistakes."

On February 14, 1995, The Cranberries performed this searing rendition of "Zombie" on MTV Unplugged. Dolores O’Riordan, RIP.

Here's part two of my reading (part one here) of The Man Who Sold the Moon, my award-winning novella first published in 2015's Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, edited by Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. It's my Burning Man/maker/first days of a better nation story and was a kind of practice run for my 2017 novel Walkaway.

Romy McCloskey of Faden Design Studios (Instagram, website) makes stunningly gorgeous costumes for movies, television, and private commissions. She also is interested in butterflies, and so she put her talents and interests together to repair the badly damaged wing of a monarch butterfly. She glued the intact wing of a dead monarch onto the butterfly, and allowed it to recover overnight, feeding it homebrew nectar. The next day she released it and it flew away.Images: used with the permission of Romy McCloskeyHere's a video from the Live Monarch Foundation on how to fix broken butterfly wings:https://youtu.be/ah0SBALIc0o

Yuzu is an experimental emulator for Nintendo's Switch console. No, it does not run commercial games.It is written in C++ with portability in mind, with builds actively maintained for Windows, Linux and macOS. The emulator is currently only useful for homebrew development and research purposes. yuzu only emulates a subset of Switch hardware and therefore is generally only useful for running/debugging homebrew applications. At this time, yuzu does not run any commercial Switch games. yuzu can boot some games, to varying degrees of success, but does not implement any of the necessary GPU features to render 3D graphics.

The true-story radio program, This American Life, began in 1995. (My friend and Cool Tools partner, Kevin Kelly, was the subject of the very first episode!) For over 20 years, the show has used the same logo, which is tall and breaks the word American into two words, AMER and ICAN. As part of a substantial site redesign, it commissioned a new logo. It's by Erik Jarlsson. Gone is the dark purple color. The new logo has an all red simplified US flag with a speech bubble indicator and a no-nonsense "This American Life" on one line and in black.

I initially felt bad for Tony Giles when I watched his story on the BBC Travel Show. I caught the episode part way through and saw him walk right into a turnstile while crossing a security checkpoint into Palestinian territories. Giles, from England, is completely blind and severely deaf, but he travels all over the world by himself and occasionally stumbles into people willing to guide him a bit. When I found out he’s visited over 120 countries, including all seven continents and every state in the US, I realized I don’t feel sorry for Giles. I’m jealous of him and I’ll continue to feel sorry for myself. Giles can make any argument his disabilities limit him from traveling or excuse himself from any barrier at all. We’d all understand. Yet, he’s experienced things people probably don’t even waste time dreaming about. Photos on Giles’ personal website show him taking a mud bath near the side of the Dalyan River in Turkey and playing the kora in Senegal. I assume many of us, disabled or non-disabled, would come up with hundreds of reasons why we couldn’t travel and explore the world. Giles just does it.

A group of Princeton and Purdue researchers have demonstrated a successful acoustic attack against mechanical hard-drives where low-frequency noise keyed to the resonant frequency of the drive components is played nearby, causing the drive to vibrate so that the drive can neither be read nor written to. (more…)

If you enjoyed British supermarkets' bleach-dipped rotten turkeys, perhaps you like to try their antibiotic-resistant superbug-infested chickens.The FSA has also noted that the proportion of campylobacter-infected chickens which showed resistance to key antibiotics, in this case ciprofloxacin, “has increased significantly” compared with a previous survey of chickens sold at retail 10 years ago. More than 4,000 samples were tested, then samples of smaller numbers exhibiting campylobacter infections retested to detect whether they carried bacteria resistant to the key antibiotics. Ciprofloxacin resistance was identified in more than half of the samples of one form of campylobacter tested, 237 out of 437 tests on Campylobacter jejuni, and in nearly half (52 out of 108) of another strain, Campylobacter coli.The results were taken by experts to show that the use of antibiotics to treat farm animals is giving rise to the spread of resistant bacteria, which can have major effects on human health because one of the main methods of transmission to many strains of resistant bacteria is through contact with livestock in the food chain. While proper hygiene practices and thorough cooking can kill the bugs, any lapses can result in serious infection.The paper: "A Microbiological survey of campylobacter contamination in fresh whole UK produced chilled chickens at retail sale".Post-Trump/Brexit omni-deregulation shall be a splendid affair.Photo: Bertie Charman

The New York Times published a carefully compiled and sourced list of Donald Trump's racist utterances and acts, going back to his refusal to rent homes to black people in the 1970s and ending, for now, with whatever shit he tweeted this weekend. There's one section titled "Other Assorted Racism."

In the video above, The National Geographic explains chromatophors, the pigment-changing cells in certain species of octopus.The blue-ringed octopus is venomous and entirely willing to let you know before you get too close. Karel Mestdagh shot this video on a Samsung Galaxy S4 in a waterproof case:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Bt1LvpZ1OoOctopuses' camouflage is a behavioral as well as colorful performance, mimicking other sea creatures from lionfish to cuttles:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgDGTLRcwa8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=123RGfEWhI4

While plenty of people have evinced a belief that delivering a single speech qualifies Oprah to be president (presumably with Dr Oz as Surgeon General and history's smoothest selljob for invading other countries on flimsy pretenses), the young, motivated Warren-Sanders wing of the Democratic party are a lot less enthusiastic. (more…)

When Congress voted last week to renew the NSA's controversial Section 702 powers, which gives the spy agency the power to conduct mass, secret, warrantless surveillance on Americans, they also voted down a bipartisan amendment that would have limited the president's ability to abuse these powers, injecting the barest minimum of accountability and proportionality into a system that Republican and Democratic presidents alike have abused for decades. (more…)

Libertarian wisdom holds that "the answer to bad speech is more speech," but if you're a Peter Thiel libertarian (that is, the kind of "freedom lover" who doesn't think women should vote, wants to spy on everyone in the world, and secretly wields power to censor the free press), then "the answer to bad speech is secretly backing lawsuits by washed-up pro-wrestlers in order to kill a media outlet whose reporting you don't like." (more…)

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