Boing Boing

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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My cat absolutely loves these $8 cardboard cat scratchers. They go straight into the recycling bin, so why spend a penny more than necessary?I tried one of the $25 lounger-style cardboard cat scratchers and my picky cat wouldn't go near it. I put out a simple, flat and cheap one? Scratch city. My furniture and carpets are mercifully left alone while these get torn up every 4-6 weeks.Last night, as I was rubbing the catnip into a new scratcher, my cat decided he wanted to be pet. He ended up pretty covered in catnip and rocketing around the house for 20 minutes.AMZNOVA Cat Scratcher, Scratching Pad, Durable Recyclable Cardboard with Catnip via Amazon

Wired has done a fun job of documenting the history of “badday.mpg" -- which became a passaround hit in 1997, making it probably the first viral video of the Internet.Mind you, as the author Joe Veix notes, they didn't call it a "viral video" back then, because the very concept of "virality", as applied to culture, wasn't yet mainstream. Given how slow most people's Internet connections were back then -- and, frankly, what a small percentage of the population was online -- and given that there weren't any big social-networking tools, it's amazing the 5-meg video spread so wide. The origins of the video:Loronix was developing DVR technology for security-camera systems and needed sample footage to demonstrate to potential clients how it worked. So Licciardi and his boss, chief technology officer Peter Jankowski, got an analog video camera and began shooting.They filmed Licciardi using an ATM and pretended to catch him robbing the company’s warehouse. Licciardi decided he wanted to be a “disgruntled employee,” which gave his boss an idea. “It was pretty ad hoc,” Jankowski says. “We had some computers that had died and monitors and keyboards that weren’t working, so we basically set that up in a cubicle on a desk.”Jankowski directed the shoot, as Licciardi went to town on a broken monitor and an empty computer case. It took two attempts. “The first take, people were laughing so hard we had to do a second one,” Licciardi says.The video spawned fan sites and conspiracy theories, Veix adds, so it presaged even more of our modern online culture than mere virality.

Telcos despise community-owned broadband, and fight like mad whenever a city announces it's going to build its own network. Why?Because when communities provide their own broadband, it costs users way less than broadband from telcos.That's what the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard found in a terrific new study. They collected data on 27 community-owned broadband networks that offer at least 25/3 Mbps service, and compared it to the pricing of similar offerings from telcos serving those communities. This sort of comparison is hard to do, because it's tricky to find enough markets that have side-by-side offerings; but they found enough cases to see the trend, and it looks terrible for the telcos.In nearly every case, the community-own broadband was cheaper -- up to 50% cheaper -- and had more consistent, predictable pricing.The whole report is here, but here are the top-level findings:When considering entry-level broadband service—the least-expensive plan that provides at least 25/3 Mbps service—23 out of 27 community-owned FTTH providers we studied charged the lowest prices in their community when considering the annual average cost of service over a four-year period, taking into account installation and equipment costs and averaging any initial teaser rates with later, higher, rates. This is based on data collected in late 2015 and 2016.In these 23 communities, prices for the lowest-cost program that met the current definition of broadband were between 2.9 percent and 50 percent less than the lowest-cost such service offered by a private provider (or providers) in that market. In the other four cases, a private provider’s service cost between 6.9 percent and 30.5 percent less.While community-owned FTTH providers’ pricing is generally clear and unchanging, private providers almost always offer initial "teaser" prices and then raise the monthly price sharply. This price hike in the communities we studied ranged between $10 (20 percent) and $30 (42.8 percent) after 12 months, both imposed by Comcast, but in different communities(Image above courtesy the CC-licensed feed of the Blue Diamond Gallery)

An inebriated gentleman in Russia thought it was a good idea to steal an armored vehicle from a paramilitary driving school. While taking it for a spin – crushing a parked car along the way – the chap found he couldn't turn the daggum thing around on a narrow street, so he rammed it into a family-owned convenience store instead. He then climbed out of the vehicle and made his way through the broken window to steal a bottle of wine. The man, in his late twenties, was arrested.Here is the aftermath of his night on the town:https://youtu.be/Mh91wH2KODE

Working cryptography's pretty amazing: because of its fundamental theoretical soundness, we can trust it to secure the firmware updates to our pacemakers; the conversations we have with our loved ones, lawyers and business colleagues; the financial transactions the world depends on; and the integrity of all sorts of data, communications and transactions. (more…)

Who can forget where their jaw was in mid-December when celebrity chef Mario Batali ended his sexual misconduct apology letter with a recipe for his "fan-favorite" Pizza Dough Cinnamon Rolls? Breezily contrite and self-promotional!Well-known blogger, Geraldine DeRuiter, of The Everywhereist, decided to try her hand at the ill-timed recipe and found the results as gag-worthy as Batali's ham-handed apology. There are some hilarious lines in here. And the whole piece, intercut with DeRuiter's own harassment memories, is quite effectively snarky and intense.The base of the rolls is pizza dough – Batali notes that you can either buy it, or use his recipe to make your own.I make my own, because I’m a woman, and for us there are no fucking shortcuts. We spend 25 years working our asses off to be the most qualified Presidential candidate in U.S. history and we get beaten out by a sexual deviant who likely needs to call the front desk for help when he’s trying to order pornos in his hotel room.Donald Trump is President, so I’m making the goddamn dough by scratch.The pizza dough does not mix well with the sweetness. The icing is sickly sweet, the rolls themselves oddly savory. I was right about the texture – the dough is too tough. I hate them, but I keep eating them. Like I’m somehow destroying Batali’s shitty sexist horcrux in every bite.Because I’ve rolled them too tightly, the middle pops up and out of one of the rolls.One of the cinnamon rolls has a fucking erection.Read the entire piece on The Everywhereist. Image: The Everywhereist

If faced with a dangerous traffic situation, this is the driver you want behind the wheel. When the car switches into the same lane that another car has just entered, watch how it seamlessly spins away across three lanes, drives in reverse for a bit, and then smoothly curves around and resumes its drive as if it's all one graceful performance. Bravo.

Fashioned after real full-sized galvanized steel dumpsters, these miniature desktop Dumpsty's stand in at just 10 inches tall and 11 inches wide (which is big enough to hold magazines). The blank models come in a variety of body and lid colors and are ready to be customized (or not). Priced at $195 each, they ain't cheap. But, wow, what a cool conversation piece. Beautifully pre-designed one-of-a-kind editions are available too, like this one by street artist Jimbo Phillips ($495):Or this one by Burn353 ($395):Check out their Instagram for more inspiration.(DudeIWantThat)

My pal photographer John Curley is visiting the beautiful seaside village of Sayulita, Mexico right now. Today, on Facebook, he shared this photo he took of a display of hand-woven anti-Trump bracelets with the message, "the beach vendors are muy inteligente here."

How are the feathers of Papua New Guinea's "birds of paradise" so freakishly black?Because, man, they really are. Crows and blackbirds look, y'know, black-like ... but birds of paradise look like a hole has been punched in reality. It's like they've been coated in Vantablack, the freakily engineered substance you can coat on objects to make them superdark. The birds also often have striking colors, of course; but the parts of them that are black are inkily so.A team of biologists have finally published a paper unraveling the secret: The feathers, it transpires, are essentially covered in light-trapping nanotech. As the Atlantic reports:A typical bird feather has a central shaft called a rachis. Thin branches, or barbs, sprout from the rachis, and even thinner branches—barbules—sprout from the barbs. The whole arrangement is flat, with the rachis, barbs, and barbules all lying on the same plane. The super-black feathers of birds of paradise, meanwhile, look very different. Their barbules, instead of lying flat, curve upward. And instead of being smooth cylinders, they are studded in minuscule spikes. “It’s hard to describe,” says McCoy. “It’s like a little bottle brush or a piece of coral.”These unique structures excel at capturing light. When light hits a normal feather, it finds a series of horizontal surfaces, and can easily bounce off. But when light hits a super-black feather, it finds a tangled mess of mostly vertical surfaces. Instead of being reflected away, it bounces repeatedly between the barbules and their spikes. With each bounce, a little more of it gets absorbed. Light loses itself within the feathers.The feathers absorb up to 99.95 percent of all incoming light, which, as it turns out, is pretty close to Vantablack itself, which captures 99.965 percent.The paper's here. Wallace Steven's poem is here.

Facebook is about to undergo a dramatic overhaul, company-wide, to prioritize "“meaningful interactions” between friends and family, starting with the news feed. The change also implies they'll be killing publishers' reach. What does this mean? If you get your daily dose of our Boing Boing goodness on Facebook, in other words, you may be seeing less of us there because Facebook turned some dials. Never trust Facebook, my independent publisher friends. (more…)

On January 11, the House passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act bill which renews a controversial NSA surveillance program that allows the spy agency to intercept the communications of Americans without a warrant. (more…)

Punk rock never dies. (more…)

It's been seven years since I started following Ken "Popehat" White's relentless pursuit of a con artist who sent his company a fake invoice. (more…)

An indictment in the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio's Eastern Division alleges that Phillip R Durachinsky created a strain of MacOS "creepware" called Fruitfly, which was able to covertly operate the cameras and microphones of infected computers as well as capturing and sharing porn searches from the infected machines; the indictment alleges that Durachinsky used the software for 13 years, targeting individuals, schools, and federal agencies including the Department of Energy. (more…)

Photographer and 21-year playa veteran Phillippe Glade saved me about a grand for a ticket (plus expenses and brain damage) with this beautiful, cloth-covered photo book surveying the domestic and communal architecture of the annual temporary city of 60,000 souls in the Nevada desert. I've been following Glade's blog for a few years, and bought his book, Black Rock City, NV The New Ephemeral Architecture of Burning Man ($40), because I live in the Southern California desert and have a more than casual interest in durable shade structures. However I was just as fascinated to learn about the urban planning of the city, with its fantasy-novel semi-circular grid of streets: [its designer] "Mr. Garrett was one of a short list of city planners who get to see their ideas realized in their lifetimes". The book contains almost 200 photos spanning several years, with useful captions, interior shots of many structures and a handful of informative essays. Glade writes about the most common types of personal shelter – tents, hexayurts, monkey huts, parachute shades, domes, etc – and discusses the pros and cons of each: "...parachutes are tempting [but] they wear out quickly on even dull edges and balloon with the slightest breeze [...] they exert tremendous wind pressure on the structures and trap heat without any UV protection". Glade contends that the harsh conditions of the Playa have created a "vernacular architecture that rejuvenates the world of camping" and is relevant to those designing emergency shelter.Despite favourable reviews in Wallpaper, Architectural Digest and Wired, only around 300 copies have sold. Glade is soon closing up shop and leaving the county, so get yours while you can. This book would make a great gift for those interested in architecture, urban design, desert living, emergency shelter and/or Burning Man.

Shoaib Ahmed is a Bangladeshi asylum seeker whom ICE has imprisoned in the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, a private prison run by CoreCivic (formerly the notorious Corrections Corporation of America, where he has been placed in solitary confinement -- a form of torture -- for refusing "voluntary" labor. (more…)

Runaway Match, aka Marriage by Motor, a 1903 silent film directed by Alfred Collins, features the first car chase in a movie. For a directory of movie car chases, zoom on over to VARACES: the Car Chase Community.

There’s a scene in the movie Samsara (2001): a young monk is struggling to focus on his meditation, and an older monk shows him some erotic scrolls. When he holds the images up to the firelight, an underpainting reveals grotesque decaying skeletons in place of the lovers. I often think of this scene when I look at plastic things. I moved to the Mojave desert of Southern California six years ago. Living here has taught me about the impermanence of plastic in a visceral way. Most common plastic items -- bags, toys, clothespins, tarps, ropes, small appliances - - will, if left outdoors, degrade from brand-new to useless over the course of one or two of our six-month-long summers, thanks to the deserts baking temperatures and relentless sunshine. Plastic bags shred into tiny fragments and blow away on the breeze. That “bomb-proof” webbing on your backpack turns to powder and sticks to your fingers. Milk crates and five gallon buckets shatter and collect in the sand. Toys crack, cave in, leaving residues of powdered color on your hands. Elastic in clothing quickly loses the power to rebound if stored in a shed. Our harsh climate accelerates the inevitable. Poor folks take their garbage out to the desert and dump it rather than pay fees at the landfill. It’s illegal –- and reportable -– but judging by the piles of trash I find whenever I go for a walk out in the desert, it’s also fairly common. These indignities flash before my eyes as I roam the fluorescent lit aisles of big box stores, or browse Amazon. How will it look bleached by the sun? The acre of land we live on previously hosted a backyard auto chop shop and probably other things we don’t want to know about. Our sand -– full of fragments of plastic, glass, nails, sequins, beads, foam – will never be clean again. In other climates, opportunistic greenery ("weeds") quickly grow over the mess, disguising it, but here the sand hides nothing. It isn’t just plastic, of course. Broken glass and rusted metal are also common landscape pollution, but plastic is the ugliest; the terrible power of plastic is that it quickly becomes useless but never goes away.

After completing a ship in a bottle kit, screenprinter Jake Sadovich of Garden City, Idaho decided to make a LEGO one. Soon after, he submitted his model to LEGO Ideas where it quickly gained the community support it needed to be reviewed to put it into production and sold around the globe. In an interview with LEGO Ideas, he was asked how he felt about getting the "magic 10,000 votes" from the community, "Awesome and kind of strange. Excitement at reaching the 10K mark, and in just 48 days! A great feeling of satisfaction that so many people liked my creation and gratitude that they took the time to support it and make this happen."The 962-piece Leviathan will hit stores on February 1 for $69.99.Continue a nautical tradition when you build this LEGO® Ideas 21313 Ship in a Bottle, featuring a highly detailed ship with the captain’s quarters, cannons, masts, crow’s nest, flag and printed sail elements. Place the ship inside the LEGO brick-built bottle with a buildable cork, wax seal element and water-style elements inside, then showcase it on the display stand featuring the ship’s ‘Leviathan’ nameplate, globe elements and a built-in ‘compass’ (non-functioning) with compass rose and spinning needle. This wonderfully nostalgic construction toy also includes a booklet about the set’s fan creator and LEGO designers.Photos of Sadovich's original design can be seen at his Facebook page.(The Awesomer)

It's said that dogs look like their human companions (or vice versa) but how easy is it for a stranger to make that match cold? The Cut's latest Lineup video takes a stab at answering that question. If you want to play along, there's plenty of time for you to try and figure out the answer before the big reveal at the end.

Harvey Weinstein was at a restaurant in Arizona with his sober coach when a customer from another table walked up to him and quickly slapped him twice with the back of his hand. He then proceeded to tell Weinstein that he was "a piece of shit" for what he did to those women, referring, of course, to the dozens of women who have recently accused him of sexual misconduct and rape.The sober coach tries to block the camera with his hand, while the customer has more choice words to say to Weinstein, such as "You're a fuckin' piece of shit, Weinstein." The coach and Weinstein skedaddle, heading straight for the exit. The video, obtained and released by TMZ, was taken by the customer's friend.Via ABC

The US defense contractor AECOM is known to operate a mysterious, classified airline called Janet that mostly flies between a terminal at Las Vegas's McCarran International Airport and the Nevada National Security Site, including Area 51. Janet's fleet includes a half-dozen Boeing 737-600s and five executive turboprop planes. Of course those planes need flight attendants to bring coffee, tea, and milk to the Men in Black. (The ETs prefer to fly their own craft.) Sound like fun work? Well, AECOM is hiring flight attendants! The job description sounds rather traditional except for this key requirement: "Must qualify for and maintain a top secret government security clearance and associated work location access. ""Flight Attendant, Las Vegas, Nevada" (AECOM via Mysterious Universe)

University of Oxford’s Malaria Atlas Project just published new research showing that 80.7 percent of the world's population live an hour or less from a city. (In the visualization above, "d" stands for "day" and "h" is for "hour.") The map takes into account transportation infrastructure across the globe. From Nature:...New data sources provided by Open Street Map and Google now capture transportation networks with unprecedented detail and precision. Here we develop and validate a map that quantifies travel time to cities for 2015 at a spatial resolution of approximately one by one kilometre by integrating ten global-scale surfaces that characterize factors affecting human movement rates and 13,840 high-density urban centres within an established geospatial-modelling framework. Our results highlight disparities in accessibility relative to wealth as 50.9% of individuals living in low-income settings (concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa) reside within an hour of a city compared to 90.7% of individuals in high-income settings. By further triangulating this map against socioeconomic datasets, we demonstrate how access to urban centres stratifies the economic, educational, and health status of humanity."Accessibility to Cities"

Walt Disney World is apparently planning to allow guests who stay at their most expensive resorts with "club level" service to buy cut-the-line ride Fastpasses for $50/day, according to WFTV's Chip Skambis. This privilege would be only for those who stay three nights in club-level rooms, which seem to go for about $800/night and up (way up).Disney has long tried to seem egalitarian in the way it treats ride lines. The Universal Orlando theme parks down the road have no such compunctions -- they allow anyone willing and able to pay $170 - $190 per day to cut past every poor slob who could only afford the $110/day admission price. But Disney has avoided this overt wealth-pandering, basically having everyone play by the same line-waiting rules. Sure, Disney has had its “VIP tour service,” in which, for $425-$600 per hour (that’s not a typo: per HOUR) you can hire your very own line-cutting top-flight Disney “cast member,” but that's clearly for the super-rich, and who wouldn't cater to that group? Not even the most militant Marxist would want to see Mark Zuckerberg and family among the crowd waiting in line for Peter Pan’s Flight.But I just came from Disney World, and I could see the writing on the wall.First of all, the nature of these Fastpasses has changed. When they got their start, they were a way for people to show up at a ride, and then, instead of waiting on the line, get a slip of paper to show up at a later time and get right onto the ride -- essentially allowing them to do other things during the time they would have otherwise been waiting on the line.I can tell you that Fastpasses have now evolved into a form of cut-the-line currency, totally divorced from any logistical problem-solving. You are basically allotted three per day on your electronic wristband, and you don’t need to appear at the ride to obtain them anymore; they can be obtained on an app before you even show up at the park (60 days in advance, in some cases).But (as I just learned from this article) extra Fastpasses are also currently issued to people who purchase certain “vacation packages,” and also to people who attend a hard-sell Disney time-share sales presentation. I saw Fastpasses given out as prizes to audience participants in shows.So I was unsurprised to see this report of a planned sale of the new Fastpass currency to Disney’s most lucrative guests.The 20th century idea of everyone going to places like Disney World and having basically the same experience is just too quaint for this new have-and-have-not world. It seems to me that not only do the rich expect a way to pay out of every inconvenience ordinary people suffer, but ordinary people fully expect that this is the way things will work.Disney does love its princesses.h/t Laughing Place

My daughter is a California baby and has never known the anticipation and excitement of waiting for the "no school" announcement on a snowy day. But I do. I grew up in Massachusetts and can vividly remember getting up early and sitting by the radio listening impatiently for the good news. New Jersey's Hopewell Valley Regional School District took a different, and much more fun, approach to delivering the much-anticipated news. They prerecorded their elementary school's chorus and band singing "Snow Day" to the tune of the Lumineers' "Ho Hey." Their superintendent Tom Smith got in on the fun too by making an appearance and telling a hokey joke. On January 4, winter storm Grayson gave them their "Snow Day," allowing the district to share the video on social media.This isn't their first. The school district has a long history of unusual announcements.(NJ.com)

I love this concept of a "measuring cube" for cooking -- where each side is indented with different measurements. It's downloadable for 3D printing from Thingiverse, and posted by the designer iomaa.

Martin from Antique Typewriters writes, "The Alexis typewriter is the result of a small town inventor with the desire to design and manufacture his own typewriter. James A. Wallace (1845 - 1906) was born in Alexis, Illinois (pop. 900) where he is now buried. He was a dynamic man with various occupations including bicycle repair, writer, and photographer (see his portrait below). He was also an avid musician. The Alexis is a superb example of a unique typewriter from the 'Wild West' of typewriters during the 1880s & 1890s when all sorts of ingenious designs came forth. Some ideas were better than others though and there were many successes and failures." (more…)

In the 1970s, the CIA created a dragonfly-shaped drone that carried a microphone, with the goal of using it to snoop on remote targets. It was a pretty ingenious piece of engineering: propelled by a liquid fuel and guided by a laser, it actually achieved flight in a few tests. The CIA has released footage of one here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ3spmVqncoThe drone didn't maneuver very well, though, as IEEE Spectrum notes:Unfortunately, even the gentlest breeze blew the 1-gram Insectothopter off course. It’s unclear if the laser guidance and data link were ever implemented. In any event, the UAV never flew an actual spy mission.Why fashion it after that particular insect? Dragonflies are nimble aerialists, able to hover, glide, and even fly backward. They can turn 180 degrees in three wingbeats. The Insectothopter’s 6-⁠centimeter-long body and 9-cm wingspan were well within the range of an actual dragonfly’s dimensions. Plus, dragonflies are native to every continent except Antarctica, so their presence would be unremarkable, at least in the appropriate season.Me, I wonder if the CIA designers had another influence: The sci-fi YA novel Danny Dunn, Invisible Boy. It came out in 1974 -- right around the time that the CIA was making that invention -- and it's the story of an inventor who creates a dragonfly-shaped drone that contains a tiny camera and microphone, and is piloted by a user who wears a VR-style headset. I wrote about the novel a few years ago, because it was amazingly prescient about the civil dangers of omnipresent high-tech governmental spying ... which makes it all the more eerie, of course, that the real-life CIA was pursuing precisely this tech.(Images via the CIA Museum)

Ken Shirriff decided to mine bitcoins by hand, to illustrate what cryptocurrency math looks like in practice. As he notes, the calculations aren't terribly complicated -- but going by hand, it's pretty slooow:Doing one round of SHA-256 by hand took me 16 minutes, 45 seconds. At this rate, hashing a full Bitcoin block (128 rounds) would take 1.49 days, for a hash rate of 0.67 hashes per day (although I would probably get faster with practice). In comparison, current Bitcoin mining hardware does several terahashes per second, about a quintillion times faster than my manual hashing. Needless to say, manual Bitcoin mining is not at all practical. Ah, but what about the energy consumption? Would bitcoins mined by hordes of humans be more energy-efficient than the current power-use trajectory, which is trending rapidly towards Dyson-sphere-construction?Nope. Humans aren't a very efficient way to do math en masse:There's not much physical exertion, so assuming a resting metabolic rate of 1500kcal/day, manual hashing works out to almost 10 megajoules/hash. A typical energy consumption for mining hardware is 1000 megahashes/joule. So I'm less energy efficient by a factor of 10^16, or 10 quadrillion. The next question is the energy cost. A cheap source of food energy is donuts at $0.23 for 200 kcalories. Electricity here is $0.15/kilowatt-hour, which is cheaper by a factor of 6.7 - closer than I expected. Thus my energy cost per hash is about 67 quadrillion times that of mining hardware. It's clear I'm not going to make my fortune off manual mining, and I haven't even included the cost of all the paper and pencils I'll need.

Harry Connolly's Twenty Palaces series is one of my favorite new storylines in science fiction. After a several year hiatus Harry has brought back Ray Lilly, and all the magic in The Twisted Path.The Twenty Palaces series tells the tale of Ray Lilly, a former convict turned into a magician's decoy, or Wooden Man. It is Lilly's job to distract evil creatures from the deep and dark, while his master Annalise burns them with primal green fire. They keep on saving the world from some pretty nasty demons that have crossed over. Wooden Men aren't supposed to last more than one mission, but somehow Ray keeps on surviving. The Twenty Palaces Society has taken notice and calls Ray and Annalise to Europe, this does not bode well.Connolly's Lovecraft-ian/Geiger-style lore and world building is amazing. I have enjoyed all of his novels and novellas, but none have been as anticipated as The Twisted Path. If you are new to this series, I highly recommend starting with Child of Fire, the which was also Harry's debut novel.Ray and Annalise' return is every bit as exciting as I'd hoped.The Twisted Path: A Twenty Palaces Novella by Harry Connolly via Amazon

Just watching this video makes me seasick. A Norwegian Cruise Line ship, the Breakaway, heading from the Bahamas to New York, sailed right through the "bomb cyclone" last week, with 4,000 passengers aboard, even though weather forecasters, according to Mashable, had predicted a "storm of potentially historic proportions." Via Mashable: This storm and its intensity should not have been a surprise to the ship’s captain or crew. In fact, it's clear that the cruise line made a decision to proceed despite the storm, rather than being surprised by it...By the time the Norwegian Breakaway's crew decided to head through the storm and on to New York, the forecast was clearly calling for a dangerous event with high winds, building waves, and other hazards. They may have thought that cruising along the western side of the storm would minimize the waves, since the highest waves built ahead of the low pressure area, but computer models were consistent in showing an area of hurricane force winds on the backside of the storm as well.According to the video's YouTube page, the ship consistently rocked for three days, people were sleeping in the hallways because water was leaking into their rooms, and some were walking around the ship wearing life jackets. In the video you see water everywhere – drenched carpets, water dripping from elevators, water splashing into the ship's windows. A sign rocks back and forth, people walk at angles because of the tilt, upside-down outdoor furniture is chaotically piled, doors swing open on their own, and once the ship is out of the storm, it's covered in ice. Via CBS:With billowing waves and blustery winds, sailing back to Manhattan from the Bahamas was anything but unwinding for passenger Christina Mendez."It was hell for me," Mendez told CBS News York...Mendez says all she's heard from the cruise line since the experience was an email soliciting feedback. Meanwhile, she says her children are still having nightmares."They're gonna remember when they saw a lady fall from the ceiling," she said. "They're gonna remember puking everywhere. They're gonna remember everything they heard and saw."

Henry Holt is a division of Macmillan (owners of Tor Books, who publish my novels); they're the folks who published Michael Wolff's bestselling Fire and Fury, which has so thoroughly embarrassed Donald Trump that the President of the United States has threatened to sue them. (more…)

From a 1906 issue of Punch magazine, as described by The Globe and Mail:Under the headline, "Forecasts for 1907," a black and white cartoon showed a well-dressed Edwardian couple sitting in a London park. The man and woman are turned away from each other, antennae protruding from their hats. In their laps are little black boxes, spitting out ticker tape.A caption reads: "These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady is receiving an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results."

It's typical for astronauts in space to grow in height up to two inches. But 3-1/2 inches? Not so common, according to NASA.However, Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai, who is currently at the International Space Station, tweeted this morning that he's grown 9 centimeters, or 3-1/2 inches, in space, and that he's "a little worried" that he won't be able to fit into the tight quarters of the vehicle used to transport him from the ISS back to Earth's atmosphere. “Good morning, everyone. Today I share some serious news. Since coming to space, I have grown 9 centimeters. This is the most I’ve grown in 3 weeks since junior high school. I am a little worried I won’t fit in my seat on the return trip on Soyuz." [This translation is from The Washington Post.]みなさま、おはようございます。今日は重大なご報告があります。実は、宇宙に着いてからの身体計測があったのですが、な、な、なんと、身長が9センチも伸びていたんです！たった3週間でニョキニョキと。こんなの中高生のとき以来です。帰りのソユーズの座席に体が収まるか、ちょっと心配です。— 金井 宣茂 (@Astro_Kanai) January 8, 2018Kanai is mostly likely just kidding about being too tall to travel back to Earth (Hollywood, take notes for your next screenplay!), but growing too many inches in space could potentially cause problems for astronauts once its time to head back home. According to the Washington Post:While it is temporary, and astronauts return to their normal height when they slip the bonds of space and return home, the height difference has an immediate impact on the dimensions of space suits, stations and vehicles.Space is a premium in, well, space, with each inch scrutinized to pack in instruments, tools, plants and insects for experiments and other essentials like food and water. That means living and working quarters are tight. On the Russian Soyuz TMA spacecraft station, the vehicle used to get astronauts to and from the ISS, personnel are limited to 6 feet 3 so they can fit inside the seats. That means anyone at that limit on Earth would be restricted from ISS operations.“I am a little worried I won’t fit in my seat on the return trip on Soyuz,” Kanai said, though he was probably joking. Each seat liner on the vehicle is customized and molded to the body of each astronaut and taken to the Soyuz to ensure a tight fit during the violent reintroduction to gravity. Image: NASA

A year after Hunter S. Thompson published his pioneering gonzo journalism book "Hell's Angels," he appeared on the wonderful TV game show "To Tell The Truth." Bud Collyer hosted with a panel of actors/entertainers Tom Poston, Peggy Cass, Barry Nelson, Kitty Carlisle. On the show, three people claim to be a particularly interesting or notable person described by the host. One is really that person, the other two are imposters. The panelists must ask questions to identify who isn't lying.

Back in 2016, the EU passed the General Data Protection Regulation, a far-reaching set of rules to protect the personal information and privacy of Europeans that takes effect this coming May. (more…)