Chiba-based sculptor Yoshitoshi Kanemaki carves wonderful, weird figures out of wood; the interstitial images that document his process are a fascinating glimpse into the way his imagination manifests itself in his medium. (more…)

Tony Berthelot is an oyster farmer on Ile de Re, an island off France's west coast; rather than task his family-members to staffing a roadside stand, he's invested in a refrigerated live-oyster vending machine that dispenses fresh bivalves 24/7. (more…)

The classic beatbox – not an expensive clone or a collection of cleverly-tweaked samples – is back. Roland's TR-08 directly models the original machine's analog circuits to recreate its sound as accurately as possible with modern digital technology, and joins revived versions of the TR-909[Amazon] and TB-202[Amazon] in the company's lineup of boutique boxes.The TR-08 brings the look, sound, and feel of the original 808 — with stunning accuracy — to the Roland Boutique format. From the instantly-recognizable red-orange-yellow-white markings, the shape of the sequencer buttons, switches and knobs are details that have been painstakingly reproduced to match the iconic recreation of sounds. Along with the aesthetic touches, the TR-08 contains new features like 16 sub-steps for fast rolls, independent trigger out track, compression/gain/tune for instruments and a selectable modified “long decay” bass drum for more of that legendary BOOM!https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=O5qVbJeranIUnpopular opinion time! The Boutique stuff is cute and it is best, but if you just want all the classic beats in convenient form on a modern drum synth, the Roland Aira[Amazon] seems a more pragmatic choice. Roland recently asked Propellerheads to quit selling Rebirth too, which seems hamhanded but at least suggests the company's taking a welcome interest in exploiting its own technical heritage. The cease-n-decisting of web-based tribute toys is sad and alarming.

If you owe someone money in China and kidnap them to get paid, the police are likely to treat the whole thing as a civil matter of "unlawful detention" and stay out of it (especially if the debtor is a foreigner and the lender is Chinese). (more…)

The Wayback Machine is the Internet Archive's indispensable record of the web itself, containing regular snapshots of a huge slice of the entire web that you can browse in order to see what a given page looked like on a given date. (more…)

Paul Manafort, who served as President Trump's campaign manager and is otherwise famous for shady dealings in Ukraine, was paid a visit by the FBI in recent weeks. The Washington Post reports that the "predawn raid" was in connection with the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 general election.Federal agents appeared at Paul Manafort’s home without advance warning in the predawn hours of July 26, the day after he met voluntarily with the staff for the Senate Intelligence Committee.The search warrant was wide-ranging and FBI agents working with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III departed the home with various records.The raid came as Manafort has been voluntarily producing documents to congressional committees investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. The search warrant indicates investigators may have argued to a federal judge they had reason to believe Manafort could not be trusted to turn over all records in response to a grand jury subpoena.Corresponds with when Trump started getting sweaty and shaky about Mueller.Photo: Reuters

Valve, publisher of legendary game series such as Half-Life, Portal and Team Fortress, announced a new game at The International, a convention for players of DOTA, one of its big hits. The hyped-up crowd's reaction to finding out that Artifact is to be a "DOTA card game" is quite something.It seems like a perfect conceptual faceplant, where two popular things are combined to form something comically unappealing. But is there an ironic angle? The völkisch consumerism of gamers got out of hand years ago, so it seems unlikely to be a joke at their expense. In any case, one hopes players have to pay for every single card: a good innovation would be a micro-transaction for every time a card is deployed.

Dr. Shigeaki Hinohara died last month at age 105. Over his long life, he helped many others achieve long lives by popularizing annual medical checkups and by sharing what he knew, which was one of his tips for longer living: (more…)

Vanilla Ice's legacy lives on through the Game of Thrones cast as they "sing" a portion of his 1990 rap hit, "Ice Ice Baby." This music video is apparently a promotion for the show by TV channel Sky Atlantic.And, what the heck, here's the original music video for comparison/amusement sake:https://youtu.be/rog8ou-ZepE(reddit)

Last Saturday on August 5th, the LA venue Rhabbitat held a special release party for the limited edition Adidas Skateboarding x Bonethrower footwear and apparel collection and gave people a chance to step into the trippy, sensational world of artist Bonethrower. Put together by Juxtapoz Magazine and Adidas Skateboarding, the event featured otherworldly sculptures, statues, and paintings by Bonethrower that seemed to come to life through changing, colorful lights and a funky DJ.Bonethrower was at the event and gave away Adidas Skateboarding x Bonethrower shirts as well as signed posters and skate decks. I had a moment to speak with Bonethrower, who told me that he wants people to have fun when they see his art and to interpret his work in their own way. His art was super fun and psychedelic to be surrounded by for an entire night. One of my favorite pieces at the event was an alien-like throne that people could sit in and put on masks. It was so cool to see everyone interacting and hanging out on this art piece. Be sure to also check out the 200th issue of Juxtapoz magazine which features Bonethrowers’ art.

After finding wet tea leaves in a garbage can, a SWAT team in Kansas City raided a family home looking for marijuana, terrorizing the family for hours. The cops found nothing, and when the family sued, the "federal district judge who heard the case dismissed it, declaring that the police had probable cause and had acted reasonably," reports to George Leef in Forbes.The family appealed to the Tenth Circuit:[T]he panel of judges ruled that the district judge was in error in his dismissal. Each of the judges wrote part of the opinion, but the sizzling stuff was penned by Judge Carlos Lucero. Rarely will you find an opinion in which a judge so reams out the police for misconduct.Judge Lucero begins, “Law-abiding tea drinkers and gardeners beware: One visit to a garden store and some loose tea leaves in your trash may subject you to an early-morning, SWAT-style raid, complete with battering ram, bulletproof vests, and assault rifles. Perhaps the officers will intentionally conduct the terrifying raid while your children are at home, and keep the entire family under armed guard for two and a half hours while concerned residents of your quiet, family-oriented neighborhood wonder what nefarious crime you have committed. This is neither hyperbole nor metaphor – it is precisely what happened to the Harte family in the case before us.”At no step in this investigation, the judge continues, was there any probable cause, “Not at the garden shop, not at the gathering of the tea leaves, and certainly not at the analytical stage where the officers willfully ignored directions to submit any presumed results to a laboratory for analysis.”Summing up this astounding case, Judge Lucero states, “The defendants caused an unjustified governmental intrusion into the Hartes’ home on nothing more than junk science, an incompetent investigation, and a publicity stunt. The Fourth Amendment does not condone this conduct and neither can I.”[via Ted Balakar]Image: Oregon Department of Transportation / Wikipedia

Rolling Stone reports that country legend Glen Campbell is dead at 81.Campbell was a rare breed in the music business, with various careers as a top-level studio guitarist, chart-topping singer and hit television host. His late-career battle with Alzheimer's - he allowed a documentary crew to film on his final tour for the 2014 award-winning I'll Be Me - made him a public face for the disease, a role President Bill Clinton suggested would one day be remembered even more than his music.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wOUFo4Lwf8

Even infants are seduced by the smartphone. Watch this baby throw a tantrum with kicking legs and loud cries every time an adult takes away the phone. Once the phone is returned, all is immediately well in the world again.

Oriental Rat Flea(Xenopsylla cheopis)SIZE: Up to 1/6 in (4 mm)FAMILY: PulicidaeHABITAT: Near rats, their primary food sourceDISTRIBUTION: Worldwide, particularly tropical and subtropical climates, but some temperate zones as wellMEET THE RELATIVES: The cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis, is a relative, as is the dog flea C. can is—but in the United States, it is primarily the cat flea that preys on both cats and dogs. They are known to transmit tapeworms.Excerpted from Wicked Bugs (Young Readers Edition): The Meanest, Deadliest, Grossest Bugs on Earth by Amy Stewart, illustrated by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. © 2017 by Amy Stewart. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Young Readers. All rights reserved. Available from Amazon.On an autumn day in 1907, two brothers in San Francisco found a dead rat in the cellar. Inspired by their father, an undertaker, they decided to find a coffin for the rat to give it a proper funeral.When they ran home for dinner that night, the boys brought along a souvenir of their adventures—bloodthirsty fleas, starved for a meal after their rat host had died. Along with the fleas came a deadly disease—the plague. The rat flea would prefer to leave humans, cats, dogs, and chickens alone, but when rat populations experience a massive die off—as they do during epidemics of the plague—the fleas turn to other warm-blooded creatures for their food. This is exactly what happened to those two unfortunate boys. Within a month, the plague had killed their parents but spared the boys, leaving them orphans.This particular rat had died during an outbreak of the Black Death that began just after the turn of the twentieth century. A steamer called the Australia left Honolulu, Hawaii, and passed through San Francisco’s Golden Gate with its load of passengers, mail, and plague-ridden rats. The rats made their way through the city, which, at that time, was not a clean place. Garbage piled up,and makeshift sewers allowed germs and rodents to multiply. The rats felt right at home. Soon, a few people exhibited the dreaded symptoms of the plague—severe fever and chills, headaches and body pain, and telltale red lumps the size of boiled eggs in their armpits and groins. Before long, bleeding would give way to enormous black bruises, and death would not be far behind.The flea’s role in this dreaded disease had been discovered in the late 1800s, but the exact mechanism was still a mystery. It was not until 1914 that scientists realized that the gut of the flea held clues as to how it managed to spread the plague so swiftly and efficiently. They discovered a phenomenon called blocking, in which the plague bacteria build up in the gut of a flea to such an extent that the flea can barely swallow. Instead, it is only able to draw the host’s blood into its esophagus, the part of the body that runs from its throat to its stomach. There the blood mingles with live plague bacteria. Unable to swallow because it is so full of plague itself, the flea regurgitates the blood and the bacteria back into the host’s bloodstream. Flea vomit is the true culprit in a plague epidemic.But that’s not all. The fleas are so hungry because of their inability to digest a blood meal that they feed voraciously, moving from host to host in a desperate attempt to fill their bellies. Ultimately, the fleas die of starvation and exhaustion—if the plague itself doesn’t kill them first.The Oriental rat flea is just one of over eighty species of fleas that transmit the plague. The disease would have killed many more San Francisco residents during the so-called Barbary Plague except for one lucky fact: Oriental rat fleas were in the minority during this outbreak. The species most often found during the San Francisco plague were less likely to engage “blocking” and less likely to regurgitate plague bacteria.The plague appears to have evolved from a more benign gastrointestinal bug about twenty thousand years ago. It has run its destructive course through human civilization several times, reputed to have killed more people than all wars combined in the course of human history. An African and European pandemic in the sixth century known as Justinian’s plague killed about forty million people, which represented about a fifth of the world’s population at that time. When it reappeared in Europe in the Middle Ages, the plague was called the Black Death. For two centuries, it ravaged Europe, killing another one-third to one-half of the continent’s population.Doctors at the time believed that the plague circulated in the air. They ordered patients to keep their windows closed and refrain from bathing, which they believed would expose the skin to the sickening air. Keeping the windows closed wouldn’t stop the plague, but it might have stopped the stench of the dead and the dying. In large cities like London, there was no choice but to pile bodies in thinly covered mass graves. The rat population thrived in such a horrific mess. And because cats were believed to be witch companions in the Middle Ages, they were killed, nearly eliminating one of the rat’s natural predators just when Europeans could have used the cats’ hunting skills the most. The plague then moved from China to India to the United States in the early twentieth century. Today, cases of the plague still occur from time to time in the American Southwest, but modern antibiotics can usually treat a case that is caught early.

In the latest in its ongoing series about objects the world once considered indispensable but has somehow managed to live without, Collectors Weekly turns its attention to match holders, which were popular from around 1826, when the friction match was invented, until the 1920s, when matchbooks and lighters rendered them obsolete. For its story, CW turned to one of the definitive works on the subject, Match Holders: First-hand Accounts of Tinderboxes, Matches, Spills, Vesta Cases, Match Strikers, and Permanent Matches, which is filled with photographs taken by New Zealand collector Ian Spellerberg and diary entries written by his late match-holder mentor, John McLean.Snip:Match Holders begins with a chapter on tinderboxes, which were a popular form of portable fire-making prior to the invention of the friction match by an English pharmacist named John Walker. Tinderboxes consisted of three basic ingredients—a piece of steel, often called “fire steel”; a stone flint; and tinder, usually some dried fungi or charred linen. “With practice and patience,” McLean writes, “sparks could indeed be produced by striking the steel against the stone flint. If a spark landed in the dry tinder, care was needed to coax the spark into a smouldering piece of tinder then a flame.” As McLean recounts, the clink, clink, clink of steel coming in contact with stone was once a common early morning sound, as must also have been the curses that bounced off the rafters when cold, numb hands caused a hard chunk of steel to miss its mark. Little wonder, McLean writes, “that some domestic fires were kept permanently alight.”

If you like David McRaney's You Are Not So Smart podcast, which explores human psychology in all its quirkiness, I think you'll enjoy his book, You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself.You believe you are a rational, logical being who sees the world as it really is, but journalist David McRaney is here to tell you that you're as deluded as the rest of us. But that's OK- delusions keep us sane. You Are Not So Smart is a celebration of self-delusion. It's like a psychology class, with all the boring parts taken out, and with no homework.Based on the popular blog of the same name, You Are Not So Smart collects more than 46 of the lies we tell ourselves everyday, including:Dunbar's Number - Humans evolved to live in bands of roughly 150 individuals, the brain cannot handle more than that number. If you have more than 150 Facebook friends, they are surely not all real friends.Hindsight bias - When we learn something new, we reassure ourselves that we knew it all along.Confirmation bias - Our brains resist new ideas, instead paying attention only to findings that reinforce our preconceived notions.Brand loyalty - We reach for the same brand not because we trust its quality but because we want to reassure ourselves that we made a smart choice the last time we bought it.Packed with interesting sidebars and quick guides on cognition and common fallacies, You Are Not So Smart is a fascinating synthesis of cutting-edge psychology research to turn our minds inside out.Image: W.H. Calvin / Wikipedia

Forty years ago this month, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, on a grand tour of the solar system and beyond, into the mysteries of interstellar space. Mounted to each spacecraft is a golden phonograph record, a message to introduce our civilization to extraterrestrials, perhaps billions of years from now. The Voyager Golden Record tells a story of our planet expressed in sounds, images, and science. The Voyager Golden Record is a gift from humanity to the cosmos, but it’s also a gift to humanity. It lies at the intersection of science and art to spark the imagination, and delivers a dose of hope that so many of us are jonesing for these days. Two years ago, my friends Timothy Daly, Lawrence Azerrad, and I embarked on a long journey to release the Voyager Golden Record as a box set of vinyl LPs so those on Earth can hear it as it was meant to be played. We were humbled by the incredible support our project received. (You can read about our experience in the project updates here.)Ten months after our Kickstarter ended, the enthusiasm and excitement around the Voyager anniversary and the golden record continues to increase. We feel very fortunate that the story of this historical artifact resonates with so many people! As promised, we will never reproduce the Kickstarter "40th Anniversary Edition" box set again. Our Kickstarter backers took the journey with us and we are deeply grateful. However, for those who were not able to participate in the Kickstarter, we have decided to repress the Voyager Golden Record in a different edition than the one our Kickstarter backers will receive. This elegant second edition will include a full-color softcover book, three 140 gram vinyl LPs, metallic gold-printed sleeves, and the Voyager Trajectories turntable slipmat housed in a deluxe metallic gold-printed box. (And based on a surprising number of requests, we're also offering a hardcover book/2xCD version of the Voyager Golden Record.) You can pre-order the vinyl box set and CD/book for delivery before Christmas. Pre-orders of the vinyl box set directly from our label, Ozma Records, will include a free Voyager Diagram Pin. Ad astra!Pre-order the Voyager Golden Record (Ozma Records)

Seth Fishman and Isabel Greenberg (previously) have a forthcoming picture book called A Hundred Billion Trillion Stars, which uses masterful illustrations and text to convey the magnitude of the universe and its myriad significant things; in an accompanying Kickstarter, the pair are offering up a "growth chart" to help your kids record their progress while instilling a sense of the profundity and infinitude of our glorious universe. (more…)

A self-driving van was spotted tooling around in Arlington, Virginia. But when local News4's Adam Tuss spotted the vehicle and approached it, he realized that it was actually being operated by a person disguised as the car seat. The driver ignored Tuss's questions. From News4:After multiple inquiries by News4, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute said Monday afternoon that the van and van driver are part of a study they are conducting on driverless cars. The worker was wearing the uniform he was supposed to wear. "The driver's seating area is configured to make the driver less visible within the vehicle, while still allowing him or her the ability to safely monitor and respond to surroundings," a statement from the institute says. (via Laughing Squid)This is one of the strangest things I've ever seen @nbcwashington @ARLnowDOTcom pic.twitter.com/8ipKEnkeiq— Adam Tuss (@AdamTuss) August 7, 2017

Magician and optical illusion artist Victoria Skye created the mindbending riff above on the classic "Cafe Wall" optical illusion.(via @martinsytaylor)

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey and legendary free software creator Brian "bash" Fox took to the New York Times's op-ed page to explain that proprietary software and voting machines don't mix, because unless anyone who wants to can audit the software that powers the nation's elections, exploitable bugs will lurk in them, ready to be used by bad guys to screw up the vote-count. (more…)

South Carolina legislator Chris Corley, who was recently elected to a second term, is well-known for his support of the Confederate flag. When the flag was taken down from the Statehouse in July 2015 in response to the slaughter of nine black churchgoers by a Confederate flag embracing domestic terrorist, Corley sponsored a bill for a statewide vote to return the flag. The bill failed.Corley is no longer a South Carolina legislator. Yesterday he pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal domestic violence, which carries a sentence from probation to 10 years in prison. The judge was lenient, giving him probation. From AP:[A]uthorities say he attacked his wife during an argument over his infidelity the day after Christmas. In a police report, authorities said the couple's young children were present when Corley attacked his wife, biting her nose bloody and pointing a gun at her. "Just stop, Daddy. Just stop," his children can be heard on a 911 call. "Daddy, why are you doing this?" Corley's wife said he stopped hitting her only after noticing she was bleeding and hearing the children screaming, authorities said. Prosecutors said he took away his wife's cellphone to keep her from summoning help, but that she managed to call 911 on her Apple Watch. Authorities said that after Corley threatened to kill her and then said he'd kill himself, his wife took the children to her mother's house across the street.

Robert Douglass writes, "You have graciously covered the Open Goldberg Variations and the Open Well-Tempered Clavier projects on Boing Boing in the past, and it has resulted in these works being the most discoverable and obtainable examples of Bach's work on the internet (reading Wikipedia? You'll find these recordings. Searching Google or YouTube because you're curious about Bach? You'll find these recordings. Both recordings have also received lavish critical praise from the classical music industry's leading reviewers, eg Gramophone magazine." (more…)

“The (Federal Constitution) does not mention atheists. It goes against the Constitution and human rights," Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Seri Shahidan Kassim told the Malaysian Parliament today. “I suggest that we hunt them down vehemently and we ask for help to identify these groups.” From Yahoo News:A photo of the gathering by the Kuala Lumpur chapter of Atheist Republic, or “consulate”, has caused uproar from some in the Muslim community recently after it was highlighted by pro-Islamist blogs, leading to violent and death threats on social media.Deputy minister in charge of Islamic affairs Datuk Dr Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki said yesterday Putrajaya [the federal administrative centre of Malaysia] will investigate the local group, even roping in the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, as it allegedly involved the faith of Muslims in the country.Image: Sledge hammer of God / Wikipediaedia

Five years ago, a patent troll called "Personal Audio" started demanding money from podcasters, claiming that their patent on mailing cassette tapes of people reading magazines (a ridiculous patent on its face) also covered podcasting. (more…)

Security researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis wanted to demonstrate that the horrific stories of insecure networked sex-toys (and other Internet of Things devices) was the result of manufacturers' negligence, not the intrinsic limitations of information security. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4KvOJlu5XoThe oil industry is mired in a recruiting crisis because its workforce is aging out and millennials don't want to work for an industry that is destroying the planet they were hoping to live on. (more…)

Your "waste an hour on YouTube" YouTube channel of the day is Zeus the Stubborn Husky. And unlike the other dog video going viral at the moment, you won't have to watch it squirt salt water out its arse every time it barks.

Cindy Sherman is posting publicly on Instagram as _cindysherman_ after having her account set to private under a different account name. Many recent images use distortions and filters. (more…)

LilyPichu went to IndyPopCon with a melodica, then followed random cosplayers around while playing the songs from their game, film, or show. The different reactions are priceless. (more…)

Over at Imgur, user Q1s2e3 posted a timeline of women's high fashion from 1784 to 1970, focusing entirely on trends in Europe and North America. In fact, it's interesting that the switch in representation to American-style looks happened in the early 20th century. (more…)

This summer, two of the west coast’s largest metropolitan areas—Seattle and California—took major steps to curtail secret, unilateral surveillance by local police. These victories for transparency and community control lend momentum toward sweeping reforms pending across California, as well as congressional efforts to curtail unchecked surveillance by federal authorities. (more…)

Presidio Terrace is a "block-long, private oval street lined by 35 megamillion-dollar mansions" dating to 1905, where the homeowners are obliged to pay the city $14/year for property tax on their sidewalk, road and traffic islands. (more…)

On July 28, 1851, Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski took what's thought to be the first photograph of a solar eclipse. The Royal Prussian Observatory in what's now Kaliningrad, Russia, had mounted a six-centimer refracting telescope to a 15.8 centimeter Fraunhofer heliometer used to measure the sun's diameter. Berkowski made an 84 second exposure to create the daguerreotype seen above and below.(PetaPixel)

This Owl helped make a recent road trip a lot more fun!Simple to construct by following the numbers, this is a cute Owl-y way to pass some time.3D Wooden Owl -- $8 via Amazon

People are 113 times more likely to catch a cold when they're on an airplane, according to a 2004 study in the Journal of Environmental Health Research. Why? Because the inside of a plane is a cesspool of germs, that's why. (more…)

An "adversarial perturbation" is a change to a physical object that is deliberately designed to fool a machine-learning system into mistaking it for something else. (more…)

People with certain kinds of obsessive-compulsive disorder feel a need to repeatedly perform certain physical rituals or routines, such as washing their hands, to gain relief from obsessional thoughts. Now research suggests that when we see someone else perform an action, it triggers the same regions of our brains as when we do the action ourselves. (more…)

Why is it so hard for so many Americans to get their heads around the science behind climate change? Well, according to Rebecca Onion, it may be because of the way we have historically applauded little boys for their interest in physics and chemistry, but view these same little boys with a certain amount of suspicion when they grow up to be actual scientists, many of whom have been depicted in popular culture as "mad" and—wait for it—Russian. Over at Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix spoke to Onion about her recent book, Innocent Experiments: Childhood and the Culture of Popular Science in the United States.After World War II, Americans embraced the bounty of wartime scientific advances and a thriving economy: They now had cheap goods made out of high-tech plastic, streamlined appliances, and home TV sets. But they were also haunted by the specters of the A-bomb and the H-bomb. The burgeoning Cold War with the U.S.S.R. raised fears that workaholic Soviet scientists, laboring relentlessly under Communism, were making progress faster than American scientists, a competition that played out in the Space Race. Mainstream American pop culture attempted to assure people with images of the perfect suburban family defeating Communism through consumerism. However, American B-movies, comics, and pulp fiction were overrun with evil robots, monsters from space, radioactive mutants—and “mad scientists.” All of this affected how Americans regarded scientific education.“The fears spiked in Postwar America at particular moments,” Onion says. “When Sputnik became the first spacecraft launched into orbit in 1957, Americans panicked, like, ‘Oh my God, the Soviets have it over us. Whatever the great powers of science and technology are, they’re better at them.’ That launch created a lot of apprehension and fear that kids absorbed and processed. Tons of postwar popular culture addressed that combination of wonder and fear, especially about nuclear technology and space travel.”

Benjamin David was tired of the car traffic during his morning commute in Munich, Germany. So now he jumps into the Isar River and swims the two kilometres to his job. He packs his clothes, laptop, and phone in a waterproof floating bag. "You kind of really are in a natural, almost wild river in a very urban context, so there's lots of green and pebbles and what not, kind of pebbly beaches, and that's where I start," David said."And once you get further into the city … it becomes more like a pool actually, the atmosphere, and there's beautiful historic buildings to the right and left of the river, and I just drift by those and enjoy the view."(CBC.ca)

With 200 coins and a steady hand, you can build this stack of overhanging coins. [via The Kid Should See This]

Last January, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan published a 24,000-word article in the Yale Law Journal unpicking a half-century's shifts in anti-trust law in America, using Amazon as a poster child for how something had gone very, very wrong -- and, unexpectedly, this law student's longread on one of the most technical and abstract areas of law has become the centerpiece of a raging debate in law and economics circles. (more…)

Inspired by how Michigan artist Paige Breithart planted flowers in potholes in 2015, people around the world are doing the same. Open Culture has a photo gallery.Terry Bartrug shares this giant pothole that he filled with flowers along 8 mile road in Wetzel county near Reader. pic.twitter.com/jZiDlZ47U7— Jeff Oechslein (@JeffWTOV9) May 8, 2015Missoula vigilante draws praise, concerns for filling potholes with flowers https://t.co/kzLAX0WEbb pic.twitter.com/erwQpttK7k— KULR-8 News (@KULR) June 22, 2017

Last week a car was stopped for speeding near San Jose, CA. The officer, from the Campbell Police Department, asked for a license and registration paperwork, but when the passenger, a black man who was on his way to work, went to get paperwork, which was under his seat, the cop pulled out his gun and told the man to keep his hands where he could see them. He then called for backup. This video shows the passenger trying to talk some sense into the officer, telling the cop he was only trying to get what the officer had asked for, but for the nine minutes that was caught on video, sense doesn't make sense to this frightened cop.“Wow,” the passenger says in the video, laughing. “We’re looking for the f—ing paperwork, bro. Oh my God.”“I understand that,” the officer replies. “Don’t move, all right?”The passenger sounds indignant as his hands remain on his lap. “Why are you still pointing that gun at me, bro?” he asks the officer. “Why are you still pointing the gun at me, though? Record this sh-t. Why are you still pointing the gun at me, bro? My hands are right here.”“I understand,” the officer says.“No, you don’t understand,” the passenger protests, as the officer tells him to relax. “No, I’m not going to relax. Get the f—king gun off me.”More details in The Washington Post.

https://youtu.be/ZCKwAI-c1jUFor this fellow, finding a six-pound mushroom is equivalent to witnessing a double rainbow. It looks like a king boletus.

Shahak Shapia reported hundreds of racist, sexist, abusive or otherwise hateful Tweets. Twitter didn't delete them, so he sprayed them on the pavement outside the company's offices in Germany.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abjoYDzG8mA&feature=youtu.beOtter Wolrd (sic) has dozens of videos featuring otters doing cute ottery things, but the one embedded here shows a man drawing things in a sleeping otter's furry belly. [via Metafilter]