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A small ray of sunshine as the current Administration continues its war on journalism. A defamation lawsuit brought by former Vice-Presidential candidate and national laughing stock Sarah Palin, against The New York Times, has been dismissed.A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin against The New York Times, saying Ms. Palin’s complaint failed to show that a mistake in an editorial was made maliciously.“What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Mrs. Palin that are very rapidly corrected,” Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan said in his ruling. “Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.”Via The New York Times, natch.

I tried a bunch of pens that promised an opaque fine white line on dark paper, and the only one that had an acceptable result was the Uniball Signo Broad. It was in a class of its own, superior even to markers (too chalky) and gloopy paint pens (hardly even work.)I tried equivalent models from Sharpie (the water-based marker is too thick, and the metal-tube pen just doesn't flow well), Pentel (not remotely opaque), and Sakura (fine in a pinch.)It wasn't perfect, though, and you'll have to write with more care than normal gel pens. In particular, the pigment dries fast on the ballpoint -- even as you write -- which can result in smudgy or lost corners or thin parallel tracks instead of the expected bold line.I tried using it as white-out, too. It did OK over Pigma ink (not pictured), but was pretty rough over Higgins ink (below). Reinking over it with Pigma and Tombow pens was fine, but Higgins required a extremely light touch with a Hunt #102 nib. UPDATE: My results comport with those of others! Here's Jetpens with a more exhaustive and illustrative roundup that nonetheless confirms that the Uniball Signo Broad is the best. And here's a another roundup from Rachelle at Tinker Lab, which serves as an important reminder that craft store own-brand stuff is particularly terrible and that the best white pen is, you guessed it, sound the guns, stop the presses... the Uniball Signo Broad.So, just get the Uniball Signo Broad [Amazon link]P.S. the black Post It notes (Amazon) are hard to find in real life but I spotted them in Target last week, which is funny because Target doesn't sell any pens that will write on them.

When Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer launched their artist marketplace website, Witchsy, they found sexism got in the way of doing business. That is, until they created their imaginary third partner, Keith Mann.Before "Keith Mann" came on board, Gazin and Dwyer consistently dealt with condescending and sexist attitudes from people they were trying to work with, such as developers and graphic designers. According to Fast Company:Some hurdles were overt: Early on a web developer they brought on to help build the site tried to stealthily delete everything after Gazin declined to go on a date with him. But most of the obstacles were much more subtle.After setting out to build Witchsy, it didn’t take long for them to notice a pattern: In many cases, the outside developers and graphic designers they enlisted to help often took a condescending tone over email. These collaborators, who were almost always male, were often short, slow to respond, and vaguely disrespectful in correspondence. In response to one request, a developer started an email with the words “Okay, girls…”But recruiting Mr. Mann to help man the company changed everything for them.“It was like night and day,” says Dwyer. “It would take me days to get a response, but Keith could not only get a response and a status update, but also be asked if he wanted anything else or if there was anything else that Keith needed help with.”Dwyer and Gazin continued to deploy Keith regularly when interacting with outsiders and found that the change in tone wasn’t just an anomaly. In exchange after exchange, the perceived involvement of a man seemed to have an effect on people’s assumptions about Witchsy and colored how they interacted with the budding business. One developer in particular seemed to show more deference to Keith than he did to Dwyer or Gazin, right down to the basics of human interaction.“Whenever he spoke to Keith, he always addressed Keith by name,” says Gazin. “Whenever he spoke to us, he never used our names.”Dwyer and Gazin sold $200,000 worth of merchandise in their first year, and recently received an investment from Rick and Morty co-creator Justin Roiland. They are no longer using Mann as their frontman, and least not for now. Image: geralt/Pixabay

This mint condition 1969 Glass Enterprises "Bounty Hunter" dune buggy (Estimate: $30,000 - $50,000) will be a featured item at the upcoming Los Angeles Modern Auctions event on October 22. Painted in a shockingly bright yellow, the 1969 Bounty Hunter Dune Buggy demands attention. Having taken one year complete in 1969, builder and owner, Bill Lazelere made sure no detail went overlooked. From the chrome details throughout, to the gas cap under the hood, and 1965 Renault windshield, it is truly a modern design masterpiece. The car has remained in mint condition since its completion and is a timeless classic. The name ‘Bounty Hunter’ is a nod to Steve McQueen’s television show, ‘Wanted Dead of Alive,’ after one car’s designers met McQueen when the movie star ran out of gas. The Dune Buggy is estimated to go for $30,000- $50,000. Dune buggies originated out of Burbank, California in the mid-60s era and grew in popularity after being featured in Hollywood films such as The Big Bounce (1969). LAMA is excited to have such a time capsule piece of California pop culture to add to its already diversified 25th Anniversary Auction. The auction is set to take place October 22, 2017 at the Los Angeles Modern Auctions showroom at 12:00 p.m. 16145 Hart St., Van Nuys, CA 91406Mel Keys designed the "Bounty Hunter" dune buggy for Glass Enterprises. He was also one of the three men (middle in photo below) who made the original 11-foot model of the U.S.S. Enterprise that was used on the TV series:

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies announced that the FDA has granted MDMA (aka Ecstasy/Molly) a "Breakthrough Therapy" designation as part of a treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). From the journal Science:One of the main targets in the war on drugs could well become a drug to treat the scars of war. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has designated 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), better known as the illegal drug ecstasy, a "breakthrough therapy" for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a status that may lead to faster approval.The agency has also approved the design for two phase III studies of MDMA for PTSD that would be funded by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit in Santa Cruz, California. MAPS announced the "breakthrough therapy" designation, made by FDA on 16 August, on its website today; if the group can find the money for the trials, which together could cost an estimated $25 million, they may start next spring and finish by 2021.That an illegal dancefloor drug could become a promising pharmaceutical is another indication that the efforts of a dedicated group of researchers interested in the medicinal properties of mind-altering drugs is paying dividends. Stringent drug laws have stymied research on these compounds for decades. "This is not a big scientific step," says David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London. "It’s been obvious for 40 years that these drugs are medicines. But it’s a huge step in acceptance."

I am ready for a big dose of intrigue, weirdness, and true conspiracies from filmmaker Erroll Morris's new Netflix series Wormwood about the CIA's evil and bizarre 1950s experiments in LSD and mind control. Turn on, tune in, and get creeped out December 15.

Go back to the future with this amazing DeLorean sales pitch from 1981 used to convince car dealers to sell this fine automobile. (Thanks, UPSO!)

There was once a time when creating fire was an affront to the gods, but now all it takes is some spare change and a trip to the gas station. Disposable lighters are definitely convenient and available in basically any populated place, but you can do better than a Bic knock-off.The Plazmatic VEO Flameless Lighter makes the case for replacing butane with plasma. Most significantly, the flame is completely weatherproof. If you need to build a campfire in a sideways downpour, or light someone’s cigarette in the most futuristic way possible, this lighter’s electric beam can make a reliable flame in all conditions. It’s battery life provides up to 100 lights, and it only takes an hour for a full recharge using the same AC plug as your phone.Pick up a Plazmatic VEO from the Boing Boing Store for $36.99.

Nicely done.

Blow Me Up is an inflatable LED lighting fixture designed by Ingo Maurer and Theo Möller.From Core77:I currently have standard fluorescent lighting fixtures as house lighting in my photography studio, and the Blow Me Up is such a vast improvement over those. Consider that those fluorescent fixtures are metal, making them heavy; for safety’s sake they must be hung with chains connected to eye bolts mounted in the ceiling crossbeams, which limits their placement. On top of that the glass fluorescent bulbs are fragile, and anytime the large lighting boom is used in the studio, great care must be taken so as not to strike the fixture and potentially shatter a bulb.These inflatable lights could be hung anywhere in the studio using string and screws with anchors. If the boom strikes them, there’s no danger of falling glass shards. And they are of course easier to ship and transport than fluorescent bulbs.[via Core77]

In 1999, Dad will use his three-panel home computer to help him with his hobby of grafting fruit trees, Junior will watch his science lessons on a giant flat-screen TV and take quizzes on another computer (with a keyboard that has a bunch of paired X-Y buttons only), and Miltown-pacified Mom will take lunch orders from surly Dad and Junior through a video intercom and prepare the weekly meal plan with an AI health-conscious menu assistant piped in through a 110 baud connection to her three-display computer. It's easy to make fun of everything they got wrong here, but the thing they got right is how dependent we've become on interacting with screens all day and night long.From YouTube description:1999 AD was a film created by Philco in 1967. It was intended to celebrate the company's 75th anniversary by showing how electronics were going to change how Americans would live in a short 32 years... 1999 AD talked about other things in the future than just computing. It discussed things we'd recognize today as big screen plasma TVs, microwave ovens, and frozen food. Some of the things it didn't get right were the flying cars, modular homes, and the basic culture.[via Phil Are Go]

Scientific American dedicates its September issue to The New Science of Sex and Gender, and sociobiologists haven't been in this kind of tizzy since the Emmy-nominated Bill Nye episode about sex and gender. (more…)

If an artificial intelligence reviewed your favorite logo, how would that logo fare? now you can find out with Logo Rank, a nifty tool by the guy behind Brandmark. (more…)

MSNBC host Katy Tur asks Senator Ted Cruz what he has to say about voting against relief aid for the catastrophic Hurricane Sandy back in 2012, but now asking for Hurricane Harvey relief aid, which happens to be in his own state of Texas. Cruz tries to swat away the question with a lame response: "There's time for political sniping later."But Tur doesn't let it go. "It's not really political sniping, Senator. These are people who needed money and who needed funding after that storm... Many of those people, just like in Houston, lost everything they owned."Cruz then comes up with a whopper, saying he "enthusiastically" supported aid to Sandy. Funny, it sure didn't seem that way. Fortunately the areas affected by Sandy did get the relief aid they needed, just as we should hope and expect that those affected by Harvey will get the relief aid that they need.

This darling gift kept me chuckling all the way through! Anyone who drinks can use the Fireside Grown-Up Guide to the Hangover!In the vein of an old Golden Book, Fireside Grown-Up Guides are sarcastic, sardonic and just plain good fun. The humor and the art work are spot on perfect!I've known about the actual cure for hangovers for years, but we aren't allowed to have Solpadeine Plus in the US for some reason. Could be the massive problems they had with OTC codeine in the UK. Oh well!The Fireside Grown-Up Guide to the Hangover via Amazon

Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump with organized crime ties, promised in a 2015 email to “engineer a real estate deal with the aid of the president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, that he said would help Mr. Trump win the presidency,” reports the New York Times today. (more…)

If you're in Kenya, don't be caught with a plastic bag. Starting today, using a plastic bag, whether for groceries, lining a trash can, or anything else you can think of, will cost you the equivalent of a $38,000 fine or land you in jail for up to four years. According to NPR:"It is a toxin that we must get rid of," Judi Wakhungu, the country's Cabinet secretary for the environment, told reporters. "It's affecting our water. It's affecting our livestock and, even worse, we are ingesting this as human beings."But the new law is controversial.The Kenyan Association of Manufacturers, which challenged the ban in court, said nearly 3 percent of all Kenyans are directly employed by the 176 plastic manufacturers in the country. The ban, they argued, will cost cost Kenya tens of thousands of jobs.Then there is the issue of convenience. When I visited Kibera in June to report on the proposed ban, residents overwhelmingly opposed it...Kenneth Okoth, a member of Parliament who represents Kibera, opposed the ban because he said it would affect his poor constituents the most. In Kibera there is little running water, no toilets or outhouses, but the ban will affect the so-called flying toilets — plastic bags residents use to defecate and urinate in."It may look very fashionable in international circles," he said. "But in reality, in a place like Kibera, we still need those plastics."It's only been a day, but so far no one has been busted for using a bag.Image: Trosmisiek

This is the best price I've seen for these 15.5" x 12" microfiber cleaning cloths -- 24 for $8.52. We use them to clean our brush steel refrigerator and kitchen trash can with water only. They leave no streaks.

Tuukka Ojala is a blind software developer in Finland. When he works, he keeps his laptop closed (it has an external keyboard attached to it). In this fascinating interview on Vincit, he explains how he works:How do you use the computer?The computer I use is a perfectly normal laptop running Windows 10. It's in the software where the "magic happens". I use a program called a screen reader to access the computer. A screen reader intercepts what's happening on the screen and presents that information via braille (through a separate braille display) or synthetic speech. And it's not the kind of synthetic speech you hear in today's smart assistants. I use a robotic-sounding voice which speaks at around 450 words per minute. For comparison, English is commonly spoken at around 120-150 words per minute. There's one additional quirk in my setup: Since I need to read both Finnish and English regularly I'm reading English with a Finnish speech synthesizer. Back in the old days screen readers weren't smart enough to switch between languages automatically, so this was what I got used to. Here's a sample of this paragraph being read as I would read it:[audio mp3="https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/mpsample.mp3"][/audio]And here's the same text spoken by an English speech synthesizer:[audio mp3="https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/essample.mp3"][/audio]A mouse is naturally not very useful to me so I work exclusively at the keyboard. The commands I use should be familiar to anyone reading this post: Arrow keys and the tab key move you around inside a window, alt+tab changes between windows etc. Screen readers also have a whole lot of shortcuts of their own, such as reading various parts of the active window or turning some of their features on or off.It's when reading web pages and other formatted documents that things get a little interesting. You see, a screen reader presents its information in chunks. That chunk is most often a line but it may also be a word, a character or any other arbitrary piece of text. For example, if I press the down arrow key on a web page I hear the next line of the page. This type of reading means that I can't just scan the contents of my screen the same way a sighted person would do with their eyes. Instead, I have to read through everything chunk by chunk, or skip over those chunks I don't care about.Speech or braille alone can't paint an accurate representation of how a window is laid out visually. All the information is presented to me in a linear fashion. If you copy a web page and paste it into notepad you get a rough idea of how web pages look to me. It's just a bunch of lines stacked on top of another with most of the formatting stripped out. However, a screen reader can pick up on the semantics used in the HTML of the web page, so that links, headings, form fields etc. are announced to me correctly. That's right: I don't know that a check box is a check box if it's only styled to look like one. However, more on that later; I'll be devoting an entire post to this subject. Just remember that the example I just gave is a crime against humanity.I spend a good deal of my time working at the command line. In fact I rarely use any other graphical applications than a web browser and an editor. I've found that it's often much quicker to do the task at hand on the command line than to use an interface which was primarily designed with mouse users in mind.

They don't come as a set, sadly, but these unicorn-shaped power banks are offered in white and black for $15 each. About three inches wide and one deep, they've got good reviews from buyers, so aren't doomed to become paperweights after the second recharge cycle. White Unicorn USB Power Bank [Amazon]Black Unicorn USB Power Bank [Amazon]

As tomatoes move down a conveyor belt and into a hopper, the machine identifies the green tomatoes and actuates a lever to kick them out.Only reds allowed from interestingasfuck

Macs typically don’t require much maintenance. But system updates and third-party software have been known to create junk, and your OS isn’t always capable of cleaning up after itself. CleanMyMac 3 helps you free up some space on your disk, and you can grab a discounted license from our store for $27.99.This app has a keen eye for superfluous files. It keeps track of the usual places garbage accumulates, and offers a one-click delete for your Trash, downloaded email attachments, and application caches. If your photo library is taking up more space than it should, or you found some mysterious blobs in your system folder and don’t want to lose anything important, CleanMyMac makes painstaking file purges a thing of the past.You can get CleanMyMac 3 here for $27.99.

The Atlantic's Marina Koren wrote about the Voyager Golden Record vinyl box set that I co-produced with Tim Daly and Lawrence Azerrad. From Koren's article, titled "Forty Years Later, the Golden Record Goes Vinyl":Even though they had the tapes, Pescovitz and the rest of the team still needed to secure permission to use copyrighted material. Getting the rights to songs from major record labels or images from national publications was easy, since such institutions usually have a process in place. Tracking down the owners of some of the more obscure content, like melodies by indigenous groups, proved more difficult, Pescovitz said. Notes from the time of the record’s original production were sometimes lacking or wrong, and online searches for some of the names listed turned up obituaries instead of contact information. “It came to the point where I was calling Papua New Guinea at 2 o’clock in the morning, and working with amazing ethnomusicologists around the world to try to track down as much information as possible, to find out about who these people were, what the music was, who collected it and when,” Pescovitz said.The owner of one musical piece featuring panpipes was listed as the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, so Pescovitz called. The staff didn’t know the name of the song or who played it, but a young woman who was at the radio station overheard them talking about it (and told them the music came from her village and her grandfather would know the players. He spoke with the group's leader and the surviving musicians are now working on getting a bank account so Pescovitz and the team can pay them royalties.)The team started shipping the vinyl records to their Kickstarter backers this week, in time for the Voyager mission’s 40th anniversary. The gold-plated versions, meanwhile, are hurtling away from Earth are more than 35,000 miles per hour, looking for an audience. They may go unheard forever. But that doesn’t really matter to Pescovitz.“Yes, the Voyager record is a gift from humanity to the cosmos, but it’s also a gift to humanity,” he said. “It’s a manifestation of what we can accomplish through creativity, passion, and science. It instills a sense of hope and possibility in people.”"Pre-order the Voyager Golden Record on vinyl and CD" (Ozma Records)

Pioneering horror filmmaker Tobe Hooper, who died on Saturday, on the source of his inspiration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre:It came to him, he said, in the hardware department of a Sears-like store during a busy Christmas season, with his low tolerance for crowds as a catalyst.“I was kind of freaking, just wanted to get out of there, get out of the crowd,” he said in the documentary. “And so I found myself in front of a chain-saw display in the hardware department, and that’s where the idea came from — ‘Well, if I pick this damn thing up and start it, they’ll part like the Red Sea and I can get out of here.’”"Tobe Hooper, Director of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,’ Dies at 74" (New York Times)

Kikkerland's Magnetic Hourglass is like any other, except that the sand is replaced with iron filings. This results in eyecatching structures and stalagmite-like prominences forming and collapsing upon the magnetic base. Check out this video they posted to YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vErFLDzVFkIt's set for a one-minute countdown, measures six inches tall—a little more with the stand!—and is so lovely I can't even think up one of those weirdly despairing J. Peterman-style catalog descriptions that starts out comically enthusiastic but slowly descends into liminal terror at mankind's savage vicissitude and the imminent failure of the American state and way of life.$18 and you better like maple.Magnetic Hourglass [Amazon]

Great stuff, nice and mellow and melancholy going into the weekend. It's from the a album, Midnight Signals, coming later this fall. (Bandcamp)Previously: Starcadian, HE^RT and Chinatown

https://youtu.be/3sEOwMfF7MA?t=1m18sMy favorite air disaster documentarian, Allec Joshua Ibay, recreated last month's SFO taxiway near-miss, complete with real radio traffic. I skipped the scene-setting in the above embed: an inbound pilot mistaking a taxiway, with a bunch of loaded planes on it, for the runway. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJzL_wyMahUWeird and unsettling UK sitcom League of Gentlemen is to return to our screens as a series of specials, reports the BBC.The three episodes will once again star Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton and Mark Gatiss, who have written the new scripts alongside co-creator Jeremy Dyson. Filming will begin in Manchester and the Peak District next month.The BBC confirms: "After a 15 year absence from television screens, once again the team will be playing dozens of characters, the local denizens of the isolated Northern town of Royston Vasey."Embedded above is a typically horrific example of a scene featuring the incompetent veterinarian Dr. Chinnery. Do not watch if you cannot abide the suffering of tortoises.

"Two handsome master criminals are trying to pull off a big heist so they're putting together the most incredible heist team that has ever heist teamed before." (more…)

First dates are often cringey, so a first date with cameras rolling will be next-level cringe. To take it to the next level, ask one date participant wear eye-tracking goggles. Enjoy! (more…)

President Donald J. Trump today pardoned the lawless racist and former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio. He was found guilty of criminal contempt in a case about racial profiling. Of course he was Trump's first pardon. (more…)

The racist bigots planning to rally in San Francisco's Crissy Field have cancelled their event, citing fear of violence and the fact that they'd be far out-numbered.Joey Gibson, the rally’s organizer and the founder of the conservative group Patriot Prayer, said that he believed that “tons of extremists” would be coming to his event and that it could become dangerous.“We’re not going to have a rally at Crissy Field,” Gibson said in a Facebook Live broadcast. “It doesn’t seem safe. A lot of people’s lives are going to be in danger tomorrow.”Another rally in Berkeley on Sunday will go on, Gibson said, citing a conversation he had with Amber Cummings, the organizer of that event. “We’re excited to go into Berkeley. We’re going to put our effort and our resources into Berkeley,” Gibson said.He blamed politicians like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee for characterizing the San Francisco rally as a white nationalist event, which he said would attract people with extreme views.“After several conversations with the police and understanding the situation of what’s going on, we’ve decided that tomorrow really seems like a setup,” Gibson said. “We decided to go ahead and take the opportunity to not fall into that trap.”And some protesters could still show up at Crissy Field on Saturday even with the official event called off.The “free speech” rally had attracted a broad backlash from residents and local leaders since deadly violence broke out at a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month. While organizers with the Portland-based Patriot Prayer insisted they denounced white supremacy, past events organized by the group have attracted neo-Nazis and devolved into violence.The organizers said they would hold a news conference Saturday at 2 p.m. in San Francisco’s Alamo Park and that they wouldn’t talk more about their reasons for canceling the event until then.Via the Mercury NewsGo home, bigots.

North Korea has launched what is likely to be multiple short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast into the Sea of Japan, according to South Korea's military. (more…)

I've always wanted one of these, and now I can get one pretty cheap! The KABB Modern Digital Flip Clock is $44, comes with black or white number flaps, and runs off a single D battery. It looks a bit cheap in the photos—I certainly don't think it'll pass for a vintage Bomba—but that hardly matters, as it's just another totem of my anxious and obsessive grasping at nostalgia for a technological age I am too young to have experienced, a timeless jumble of false comfort doomed to be discarded in a convulsion of minimalism that is itself merely another manifestation of the deracinating consumer identities to which we are all measured against and fed to like krill.Nice gift for dad, though!

Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of investigators are looking into whether former Trump cabinet member Mike Flynn may have been part of an effort to get a hold of Hillary Clinton’s emails, hacked by Russia. (more…)

Audio plugins are renowned for their insane efforts to mimic real-life hardware UI, right down to 70s'-style dials and warped burl paneling. If they could smell of sweaty pleather, they would. John Lagomarsino takes us through his favorite ones and tries to figure out why on Earth all this is so.Alone, each plugin is hideous in its own unique way. A panel of 3D knobs here, a pixelated oscilloscope there. But when a project really gets cooking, one can amass eight or ten of these interfaces overlapping each other on the screen at once, and that's when skeuomorph hell really comes into focus. I don't know why audio software has looked like this for the better part of two decades, but I'd like to honor these sins of UI with a tour of some of the most egregious examples.

I am become death, destroyer of worlds.https://twitter.com/PopTartsUS/status/890261476266696704Behold my works! Corinthian Leather: the collected political nightmare photoshops.

My guest on the Cool Tools Show podcast this week is my friend and former Wired editor, Louis Rossetto. Louis co-founded Wired with his life partner Jane Metcalfe. During his five years directing Wired, it won the National Magazine Awards for General Excellence twice and was Adweek's Hottest Magazine of the Year. Wired also pioneered commercial web media, launching HotWired the first website with original advertising and Fortune 500 advertising. Since Wired, he's pursued different obsessions from real estate to helping start and run the high end chocolate company TCHO, to writing his new novel Change is Good. (more…)

Sixty years ago, North Korea and South Korea were one country. Jacob Laukaitis recently spent a week in each country and made a video of the differences he saw. His guide in South Korea was a man who escaped from North Korea. He told Jacob that only the most privileged North Koreans get to live in the capital of Pyongon. He paid human smugglers $30,000 to take him out of the county. He spent three years working on a farm in China to pay off the debt.

People prefer products that have faces on the packaging, especially when they are lonely, according to a study published online this month in the European Journal of Social Psychology.From University of Oregon:This finding, published online this month in the European Journal of Social Psychology, is rooted in people’s fundamental need to belong and their desire to form and sustain relationships. When humans lack these social connections, they often attempt to fill the void in other ways, including through their purchasing habits. “Previous research linked our need for social connection with consumer behavior and judgment, but very little was understood about the role that visuals play in social connection and brand likability,” [Prof. Dr. Ulrich] Orth explained. “Our study builds on prior research by demonstrating that seeing a face in a brand visual increases a consumer’s liking of the brand, especially if they feel lonely.”To be effective, the face on the label does not need to be as obvious as the one smiling back at [University of Oregon professor Bettina] Cornwell from the bag of potato chips in the hotel gift shop. Consumers often imagine humanlike characteristics in nonhuman visuals, a process also known as anthropomorphism. Orth explains that loneliness can enhance people’s tendency to exhibit this kind of “wishful seeing” and is most apparent in the case of faces.“A lack of interpersonal relationships motivates people to actively search for sources of connection,” Cornwell said. “Individuals who are lonely are more likely to find faces in visuals because they so greatly desire this social connection.” Image: Kevin Harber/Flickr

https://youtu.be/iTPuZYVuGd0Less musically inclined than the average bear?

A fellow who goes by the handle beaston02 wanted to see how unlimited Amazon's "unlimited" cloud storage plan was, so he uploaded 293 years' worth (2 million gigabytes or 2 petabytes) of PornHub videos to his account. (more…)

A Pew Research study found that "younger adults are more likely than their elders to read the news," but there are other ways of seeing the data.Overall, more Americans prefer to watch their news (46%) than to read it (35%) or listen to it (17%), a Pew Research Center survey found earlier this year. But that varies dramatically by age. Those ages 50 and older are far more likely to prefer watching news over any other method: About half (52%) of 50- to 64-year-olds and 58% of those 65 and older would rather watch the news, while roughly three-in-ten (29% and 27%, respectively) prefer to read it. ... our research also reveals that, in the digital realm, [younger adults] often get news at equal or higher rates than older Americans, whether intentionally or not.The most literate and literary people in human history.

Half-Life 3 is a running joke (or tragedy) among fans of the series who waited more than a decade for it to exist. With publisher Valve's business shifting to its Steam platform and key writer Marc Laidlaw leaving the company, the writing seemed on the wall. Turns out, though, it's on his blog: Epistle 3 is a lightly-cloaked synopsis (already edited by fans to remove obfuscating elements) of what was, in another world, the greatest game of 201A.a Certain Sinister Figure appeared, in the form of that sneering trickster, G-Man. For once he appeared not to me, but to Alyx Vance. Alyx had not seen the cryptical schoolmaster since childhood, but she recognized him, instantly. "Come along with me now, we've places to be and things to do," said G-Man, and Alyx acquiesced. She followed the strange grey man out of the Borealis, out of our reality. For me, there was no convenient door held open; only a snicker and a sideways glance. I was left alone, riding the weaponized research vessel into the heart of a Combine world. An immense light blazed. I caught a cosmic view of a brilliantly glittering Dyson sphere. The vastness of the Combine's power, the futility of our struggle, blossomed briefly in my awareness. I saw everything. Mainly I saw how the Borealis, our most powerful weapon, would register as less than a fizzling matchhead as it blew itself apart. And what remained of me would be even less than that.Laidlaw describes it as "fanfic":https://twitter.com/marc_laidlaw/status/900960760481726464"Isn't everything you have written about half life technically a fanfic?" a twitter user asks. "Psych!" Laidlaw replies.

"Got it!"

Yes, please! Take my money. (more…)

North Korea must be hard up for cash, as they are now promoting themselves to Russians as a tourist destination. In their promotional pitch, they claim that visiting North Korea is "safer than an evening walk in London." (Sounds like one of those exaggerated claims that Trump would say!) They also state that the guests must be "checked" before the trip and will constantly be monitored for "adequate behaviour of the tourist and guarantee his safety," according to The Telegraph. Furthermore, it's "not recommended" to chat with the locals, and taking photos of military facilities is prohibited. Sounds fun!According to the Telegraph:Nkorean.ru, a Russian company licensed by North Korea's government, offers organised tours for groups of up to 10 people or individuals "to show the travellers the multi-faceted life of this most closed of countries"...The most pricey tour, 15 days "full immersion in the culture of North Korea" costing 118,090 roubles (£1558), includes visits to a farm, a mineral water factory, a Buddhist temple, walks in the mountains and an introduction to national cuisine. Visits to numerous museums to founding leader Kim Il-Sung are also on offer.Other less demanding tours include relaxation on a beach, an aviation show and even a beer festival.Uh, I think I'll take my adventure vacation elsewhere thank you very much.Image: Stefan Krasowski

On August 24, 1967, guerilla theater activist Abbie Hoffman and his pals dropped a slew of dollar bills off the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange onto the trading floor below. As Hoffman later said, "“If you don’t like the news, why not go out and make your own?” From Smithsonian:Participant Bruce Dancis recalled, “At first people on the floor were stunned. They didn’t know what was happening. They looked up and when they saw money was being thrown they started to cheer, and there was a big scramble for the dollars.”The protesters exited the Stock Exchange and were immediately beset by reporters, who wanted to know who they were and what they’d done. Hoffman supplied nonsense answers, calling himself Cardinal Spellman and claiming his group didn’t exist. He then burned a five-dollar bill, solidifying the point of the message. As Bruce Eric France writes, “Abbie believed it was more important to burn money [than] draft cards… To burn a draft card meant one refused to participate in the war. To burn money meant one refused to participate in society.”For Hoffman himself, the success of the stunt was obvious. “Guerrilla theater is probably the oldest form of political commentary,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Showering money on the Wall Street brokers was the TV-age version of driving the money changers from the temple… Was it a real threat to the Empire? Two weeks after our band of mind-terrorists raided the stock exchange, 20,000 dollars was spent to enclose the gallery with bullet-proof glass.”"How the New York Stock Exchange Gave Abbie Hoffman His Start in Guerrilla Theater" (Smithsonian)