Here's how to make a cigarette dispenser out of a Coke bottle and some matches. File under DIWHY?

Of course Donald Trump's secretary wrote this.Based on the fact that I work for Donald Trump as his secretary -- and therefore know him well -- I think he treats women with great respect, contrary to what Julie Baumgold implied in her article … I do not believe any man in America gets more calls from women wanting to see him, meet him, or go out with him. The most beautiful women, the most successful women -- all women love Donald Trump.”Carolin Gallego December 7, 1992

Kodi boxes are commercial video-streaming gadgets that implement XBMC, a longstanding media-server free/open source project, in pre-packaged form, ready to accept third party plugins, including ones that access infringing streaming services, giving users access to practically every video, commercial and noncommercial, for free, with an easy search-interface. (more…)

Clara Venice adds some spooky theremin to the Stranger Things theme by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein.

The New York Times is now available as an "Onion Service" on the Tor network, at the address https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/ -- meaning that anyone with Tor access can securely and privately access the Times without giving away any information about what they're looking at, even to state-level actors who control the ISPs. (more…)

The total wealth controlled by the world's billionaires has reached $6,000,000,000,000, up nearly 20% from last year. There are now 1,542 dollar-denominated billionaires on earth. (more…)

MinutePhysics' Henry Reich works the whiteboard to map and categorize time travel in films like Back to the Future, A Christmas Carol, Groundhog Day, Looper, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

https://youtu.be/PFCapGQWfAwOver the last 30 years, I've been to Japan six times. The first time I went I saw a few people wearing medical masks that cover their face and nose. I was told they had a cold and didn't want to spread germs. On my subsequent visits to Japan, more and more people were wearing masks. The last time I went I saw masks everywhere I went. Every time I walked on the street, went into a shop, took a subway, or walked in the hills a mask-wearer was in view. In this video, people are asked why they wear masks. Reasons include: pollen allergies (one guy with pollen allergies was wearing a mask over his mouth but not his nose because he didn't want to fog his glasses. "I know it doesn't work, but I wear it anyway."), polyp in the throat, slight cold, to warm the face in winter, runny nose, "without make-up, my face looks ugly" (said by a man).

In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded "the bloop," a one-minute sound emanating 1,500 miles west of Chile's southern coast. The unexplained sound was never recorded again. (more…)

Before Chris Anderson bought it in 2001, the TED conference was like a hip indie band only the in-crowd knew about. It was cool, small, had incredible buzz, and always sold out its small-ish venue. An unabashedly for-profit jam, TED had never posted a video online (it was too early for that), and happened once a year in Monterrey, California.What a difference a decade and a half makes. TED videos are now viewed 2.5 billion times per year, and volunteer-organized TEDx events – many of them far larger than the main conference – take place somewhere on our planet ten times a day. And TED no longer funnels earnings to an owner, but pours every dime earned by its cash cow of a main conference into spreading ideas, free of charge, to anyone and everyone on Earth.Chris has strategized, managed, and overseen TED’s extreme makeover. We discuss it, Chris’s remarkable personal story, how evolution wired humans to transmit ideas via charismatic oratory, and much more in this week’s edition of the After On podcast. You can hear it by searching “After On” in your favorite podcast app, or by clicking right here:Links to interviews with other thinkers, founders, and scientists can be found here, with topics including Fermi’s Paradox, quantum computing, drones, the dangers of superintelligence, synthetic biology, consciousness & neuroscience, augmented reality, and more.Though I’ve known Chris for decades and have spent hundreds of hours in conversation with him, I learned quite a bit from this interview. I hadn’t realized he’d spent much of his childhood in a mud hut in Pakistan, heard the full story of shedding his once-fervent Christianity, nor gotten quite so deep into the evolutionary psychology of memes. I already knew most of what we touched on regarding TED – but I’m near the expert level on that topic, so most listeners will learn plenty from that discussion as well.Though he’s shed the religiosity he was raised with, Chris retains a certain missionary-like commitment and fervor. When this radiates through TED, some embrace it as idealism whereas others dismiss it as earnestness.But whatever your take on TED’s energy, it’s hard to be cynical about Chris’s generosity in connection to it. He bought the conference with money earned from his business career, which he sequestered into a foundation, which now owns and runs TED as a not-for-profit. He has since spent sixteen years working extreme hours in a highly stressful job for no salary, transforming TED into the idea-dissemination engine it now is.The episode runs about 80 minutes. For those in a hurry, here are timestamps of some highlights:0:07:50 – Turning TED into a not-for-profit (and the surprising operating advantages of this)10:40 – The amazing phenomenon (and astounding scope) of volunteer-organized “TEDx” events26:10 – Chris’s personal story, from mud hut to running TED42:29 – Deciding to give away the crown jewels that conference-goers pay vast sums to access by putting the TED talks online1:00:15 – The evolutionary psychology of charismatic oratory as a vector for memes.1:06:52 – The promise and peril of 2 billion or more people first getting online quite suddenly over the next few years

The global epidemic of Wannacry ransomware infections was the result of petty criminals fusing an old ransomware strain with a leaked NSA cyberweapon that was released by The Shadow Brokers, and the result was tens of millions of dollars' worth of economic harm. (more…)

Georgia's voting machines are among the worst, most hackable in the nation, and that's why a "diverse group of election reform advocates" including the Coalition for Good Governance sued the state to purge its hoard of 27,000 AccuVote voting machines, whose defects were not patched though the state was warned of them six months prior to the election. Accuvote machines do not keep any kind of paper audit-tape that can be used to compare the electronic total to a hardcopy. (more…)

My parents gave me a Hamilton Beach Electric Carving Knife about 10 years ago, and even though I use it just a couple of times a year, I'm glad I have it when I have to carve a large turkey. If you've never experienced the joy of using an electric knife, this is your chance. Amazon is selling it for $15, including the fork.

An anonymous security researcher has shown Motherboard evidence that they warned Equifax in December 2016, six months before its catastrophic breach, disclosing numerous elementary deficiencies in Equifax security that left all of its data vulnerable to being stolen. (more…)

The average donation to first-time socialist candidate for Minneapolis City Council Ginger Jentzen is $25, and she accepts no corporate money. She's running on a platform of citizen oversight of the police, rent controls, and a $15 minimum wage. She's outraised any other candidate in Minneapolis history. (more…)

The millimeter-scale RoboBee can fly, dive into water, swim around, and then take off into the air again. At just 175 milligrams, it's 1,000 times lighter than any other aerial-to-aquatic robot. Designed at Harvard's microrobotics laboratory, the RoboBee is outfitted with four tiny "floaties" and a chamber that converts water into oxyhydrogen, fuel that combusts to propel the robot out of the water.“The RoboBee represents a platform where forces are different than what we – at human scale – are used to experiencing,” says researcher Robert Wood. “While flying the robot feels as if it is treading water; while swimming it feels like it is surrounded by molasses. The force from surface tension feels like an impenetrable wall. These small robots give us the opportunity to explore these non-intuitive phenomena in a very rich way.”From Harvard:The gas increases the robot’s buoyancy, pushing the wings out of the water and the floaties stabilize the RoboBee on the water’s surface. From there, a tiny, novel sparker inside the chamber ignites the gas, propelling the RoboBee out of the water. The robot is designed to passively stabilize in air, so that it always lands on its feet.“By modifying the vehicle design, we are now able to lift more than three times the payload of the previous RoboBee,” said (researcher Yufeng) Chen. “This additional payload capacity allowed us to carry the additional devices including the gas chamber, the electrolytic plates, sparker, and buoyant outriggers, bringing the total weight of the hybrid robot to 175 miligrams, about 90mg heavier than previous designs. We hope that our work investigating tradeoffs like weight and surface tension can inspire future multi-functional microrobots – ones that can move on complex terrains and perform a variety of tasks.”"A biologically inspired, flapping-wing, hybrid aerial-aquatic microrobot" (ScienceRobotics)

An audit of Inmarsat's AmosConnect 8 (originally sold by Stratos Global, now an Inmarsat division) reveals that the ship-to-satellite internet product has a deliberate hidden backdoor -- and an accidental SQL code-injection vulnerability -- that allows anyone in the world to take over all, interrupt, and/or spy on the internet access on many of the world's largest ships and oil rigs. (more…)

Donald Trump is the least popular president to serve in US history, so it's no surprise that the call for mass, "J20 demonstrations" at his inauguration would be answered by massive crowds. (more…)

Reddit embarked on a purge of violence-advocating content today, the targets generally being Nazis and their friends, but also at least one animal abuse subreddit and one targeting white people.The newly banned and removed pages include r/NationalSocialism, r/Nazi, r/whitesarecriminals and r/far_right.Reddit's new policy says: "Do not post content that encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people."

Stilgar: Usul, we have wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen.Paul: Streuth!Say hi to Digaster longmani , an enormous earthworm reported on by 7 News Queensland in Australia. Adds Fox News:Robert Raven, Head of Terrestrial Biodiversity at the Queensland Museum, told the news site the earthworm in Mace’s photo could measure up to three feet long once it relaxes and stretches out.“In the 1970s, I was walking through Lamington National Park and could hear them beneath me as they gurgled through some water,” Raven recalled. “Seeing them is a sign we are getting good rain.”

After criticizing Trump, former president George W. Bush now enjoys a high favorability rating among Democrats. Fifty-one percent of Democrats in the Economist-YouGov survey say they have a somewhat or very favorable view of the 43rd president, while 42 percent hold a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Bush. The results come just under one week after Bush delivered a blistering rebuke of President Trump’s policies. While Bush did not mention Trump by name during the speech, he criticized foreign polices that do not combat security threats head-on and domestic policies that rebuff immigrants.https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/923372396500877313

Former NASA-JPL engineer Mark Rober explores carnival scam science and has a few tips on how to win, at least occasionally.

Kaspersky -- a respected Russia-based security company -- has been under a cloud since they were accused of stealing NSA cyberweapons on behalf of the Russian government. But the company has a perfectly innocent -- if complicated and at times bizarre explanation for how it came to be in possession of the NSA's crown jewels. (more…)

The NAACP issued a warning today advising black people not to travel on American Airlines due to a "pattern of disturbing incidents" reported by African-American passengers and unique to the carrier....booking and boarding flights on American Airlines could subject them disrespectful, discriminatory or unsafe conditions. This travel advisory is in effect beginning today, October 24, 2017, until further notice.The series of recent incidents involve troublesome conduct by American Airlines and they suggest a corporate culture of racial insensitivity and possible racial bias on the part of American Airlines.1. An African-American man was required to relinquish his purchased seats aboard a flight from Washington, D.C. to Raleigh-Durham, merely because he responded to disrespectful and discriminatory comments directed toward him by two unruly white passengers;2. Despite having previously booked first-class tickets for herself and a traveling companion, an African-American woman’s seating assignment was switched to the coach section at the ticket counter, while her white companion remained assigned to a first-class seat;3. On a flight bound for New York from Miami, the pilot directed that an African-American woman be removed from the flight when she complained to the gate agent about having her seating assignment changed without her consent; and4. An African-American woman and her infant child were removed from a flight from Atlanta to New York City when the woman (incidentally a Harvard Law School student) asked that her stroller be retrieved from checked baggage before she would disembark.In order to help American Airlines adapt to the reality of changing circumstances, I've made a slight change to their logo and name to better represent their preferred customer base.

American cities have some of the slowest, most expensive internet access in the world, and the biggest, wealthiest cities are some of the worst-provisioned, including San Francisco, ground zero for the tech revolution and home to a cable/telco duopoly whose underperforming infrastructure is especially galling for the city's techie residents. (more…)

This KitchenAid 1.25-Liter Electric Kettle is by far the best-looking electric kettle ever made. Carla got me the pistachio colored one for Christmas last year. It heats up quickly (under five minutes when full) by setting it on the base and has an auto-shutoff. It has a lime scale filter so your hot water doesn't end up with little flakes in it. Other kettles cost less, but they aren't as cute as this.

The Constitution requires the government to undertake a census every ten years, and the results of this census are key to everything from drawing up electoral maps to allocating funding to deciding on zoning: what you measure, you treasure. (more…)

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more. You can also now join through Patreon!GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”Filled with wild twists and funny dialogue” -Publishers Weekly) Book One here. Book Two here.

Architecture firm Snøhetta released its design concept for Under, a restaurant planned for the coast along Norway's southernmost tip. (more…)

Hurricane Irma's blackouts reminded locals of what their gorgeous night skies look like with no light pollution. That reminded me of the cool Darkened Cities project by Thierry Cohen. (more…)

A doggo named Ajax has been specially trained to sniff out the kea, an endangered bird endemic to New Zealand. Watch this charming short as they roam the mountainous South Island. (more…)

Cartoonist Reza Farazmand of Poorly Drawn Lines fame has a book that came out today, called Comics for a Strange World. Filled mainly with single-page stories consisting of four panels each, Farazmand's comics make fun of humankind's tendency towards pessimism, apathy, absurdism, gullibility, group-think, and envy. It's one of the funniest books I've read this year. Here are a few sample pages:

In the late 1970s, experimental composer Bruce Haack released "Electric Lucifer," two strange and fantastical electronic psychedelic music albums that embody the high weirdness of the era. The two albums employ Moogs, guitar, voice, and a DIY vocoder to tell an epic story of the battle between heaven and hell. Now, theater director Jim Findlay is transforming Electric Lucifer into a rock opera for the stage. It will premiere at The Kitchen in New York City on January 9, 2018. Support its production via Kickstarter. The campaign has just a few days left!In the album liner notes, Bruce Haack writes that The Electric Lucifer is a redemption story about a power so strong it can redeem even Lucifer. I took that as gospel and this piece is about redemption right now-2017. How can we redeem even the worst of 'us'? When I look around the question is harder than it seems. Who is us? Whose suffering needs redeeming? And how do we find the power to rise above our "hate and pain and fear" and move toward a real redemption. Not just for others but for ourselves. This project promises a fresh new vision of Bruce’s world and music by taking his Electric Lucifer concept albums and re-imagining them as a fully realized electronic rock opera with live musicians and performers. Seeing Haack’s previously un-staged vision as a gloriously wild live performance will be a treat for Haack fans and a revelation for those who were unfamiliar with his work and influence.photo: Paula Court

A survey by the Military Times found that nearly a quarter of US servicepeople see "white nationalism" among their peers, and believe that the white nationalist agenda is more of a national security threat than "Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan." (more…)

The first "wearable" computer I ever tried was a wrist-strap that let me wear my Palm Pilot like a huge, ungainly wristwatch; I tethered it with a thick cable to a CDMA phone that could emulate a 9600 baud modem and used it to dial into the WELL. (more…)

I live in Los Angeles, and it seems like half the billboards in the city are advertising a movie called Daddy's Home 2. I didn't even know there was a Daddy's Home 1, so I was planning on seeing it anyway, but when I saw that it was co-starring the misogynist antisemite homophobe Mel Gibson, I did a double take. Who would want to see that miserable creep's face on the screen. It turns out that Ira Madison III of the Daily Beast is wondering the same thing as me.From his piece, titled, "What the Hell Is Mel Gibson Doing in the Family Comedy ‘Daddy’s Home 2?’:In the wake of at least 40 women accusing him of sexual harassment or assault, Harvey Weinstein lost attorney Lisa Bloom, but has gained a new one: Blair Berk.A powerful Hollywood lawyer, Berk has represented stars like Kanye West, Ryan Seacrest, Heather Locklear, Kiefer Sutherland, and Lindsay Lohan in their paparazzi scuffles, stalking problems, and DUI arrests. But one of Berk’s most infamous clients was Mel Gibson. She represented Gibson when tapes were released exposing an anti-Semitic rant against a police officer, a subsequent recording of racially charged threats against his ex-girlfriend and mother of his child Oksana Grigorieva, and her domestic-violence accusation against him. She’s damn good at her job. That’s why, despite the damning audio—and Grigorieva’s claim that the actor-filmmaker knocked her teeth out -- Gibson managed a comeback tour at the Oscars this year for his war drama Hacksaw Ridge, and is now, inexplicably, starring in the purported family comedy Daddy’s Home 2.TMZ provided a transcript of the rant in 2006, when Gibson was pulled over for driving drunk in Malibu and told a male deputy, who is Jewish, “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” He then is alleged to have turned to a female sergeant and said, “What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?”In the rant against Grigorieva, portions of which leaked online, he got even more explicitly racist and misogynistic: “You go out in public and it’s a fucking embarrassment to me. You look like a fucking bitch in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of n-----s it’ll be your fault. All right? Because you provoked it. You are provocatively dressed all the time with your fake boobs.” In 2011, Gibson pleaded no contest to battery charges against Grigorieva.

The FBI published 160 pages of its files on inventor Nikola Tesla last year, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request. It's gone viral, perhaps due to the slavering anticipation of the forthcoming JFK Assassination files release.[via] Yes to Peace Rays!

The best part is when it gets to its desired depth and ejects a stream of sandy water. Bivalves! (via JWZ)

It's from 2012, but National Geographic's article about a Beluga whale imitating human speech is not to be missed. Embedded above is a recording of Noc, who pretty much sounds like he's taking the mickey out of us.Researchers first noticed something peculiar back in 1984, when they heard people talking around NOC's enclosure when no one else was nearby."You could hear there was a conversation, but you couldn't make out what they were saying," said study co-author Sam Ridgway of the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program in San Diego.The source of the chattering was later confirmed when a human diver thought someone had told him to get out of the whale's tank—it turned out to be NOC, repeating a sound like the word "out."Doo doo do doooo (*muttering*) stupid humans DO DAAA DOD DOOOO!

"With fast music playing, the Dallas grocery store did about $12,000 in sales each day. With slow music: $16,000. Interestingly, most of the shoppers, when asked upon leaving the store about hearing music, didn’t recall whether or not they heard music. " (more…)

This flowchart will help you decide. (Previously)

On the October 8, 1997 students and faculty at Cornell University noticed an unusual addition to the tip of McGraw Tower: a pumpkin. To this day, no one knows who put it there, or how they were able to do it.From Atlas Obscura:“One day, there was this thing at the top of the tower,” remembers Oliver Habicht, at the time a recent graduate working for the university IT department. It was way up at the top, impaled on the spire. It was round, and about the size of a beach ball. Was it… was it a pumpkin?It was. Someone, somehow, had apparently carried the gourd up hundreds of steps. They had snuck it silently through the tower’s bell cage—a structure criss-crossed with cables that, if tripped, would have let out an immediate BONG—and gotten it up to the top of the very steep roof, all without being noticed. Not only that, but they had affixed it well enough that it stayed put until springtime, enmeshing itself in campus culture and becoming its own type of steady, albeit slowly rotting, beacon.[via Clive Thompson]

The 2018 "superdelegates" to the Democratic National Convention will include lobbyists for Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, CITGO petroleum, Citigroup, and other large corporations. (more…)

I wanted to try whittling. This knife is my tool.I dreamed of carving my own cute wood trinkets in all the spare time I have, so I asked a pal what knife he uses when he whittles. He suggested I start with a "sloyd" knife, a traditional Swedish carving blade.This video may help:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSxNpAxgPmcI also ordered the recommended starter wood: basswood chunks, and after cutting myself I'm awaiting a THUMB GUARD.Get a thumb guard first.BeaverCraft, The Best Wood Carving Sloyd Knife for Whittling via Amazon

Readspike is a simple news aggregator: just the headlines, with no social networking or other bullshit getting in the way. It's by Blackspike, a British design agency.The best yet in its class, beautiful and simple, with a good taste in sources. But I find something about it hard to read. It might be too beautiful, if you see what I mean? News aggregation is a complex design problem. Multiple columns, in particular, serve a different god.People often say this sort of site is like RSS without all the things that make RSS useful, but I think it's like RSS without all the things that make RSS painful. The next step here, though, would surely be the ability to pick your sources.

Lukas F. Hartmann grew up on PCs like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amiga 500, and while he appreciates the power and portability of modern laptops, he missed the character and invitation of experiment in these classic PCs. (more…)

This innovative, ultra-portable display system combines a tablet, an HD projector, and a 13200mAh power bank, and it’s currently being offered in the Boing Boing Store.https://www.youtube.com/embed/4wyrTQn0rOkProjectors allow you to instantly turn any dimly-lit room into a movie theater or presentation space. But ensuring device connectivity usually means maintaining a collection of video dongles. To simplify the whole process, the iBeamBLOCK hands over media playback duties to an integrated tablet. Despite it’s small size, the tablet section is actually a full Windows 10 PC that’s capable of playing anything a normal desktop can. It wirelessly streams video straight to the projector, so you can sit back and browse media without worrying about cable clutter. Additionally, it works with other PCs over HDMI, and includes a host of options for hooking up external storage: USB, MicroUSB, MicroSD Card, and WiFi.The battery section of the iBeamBLOCK provides up to 2 hours of playback time on a single charge, making it perfect for outdoor movies or unexpected power outages. You can pick up this modular video projector here for $699.