The future is givin me a frighten.(more…)

https://youtu.be/o2e1x5IaO7k"Track your salt intake, stream your favorite music and set the dining ambiance with mood lighting!"Smalt is a game changer, people. They need your support on Indiegogo to make this dream a reality.

Seems legit.(more…)

Oops! A driver in Santiago, Chile made two stupid mistakes at once when she tried to park. First, she confuses steps leading into a building for a parking lot entrance. Then she either forgets to put it in park or to apply the emergency brake.(more…)

Machine learning algorithms have successfully identified plant species in massive herbaria just by looking at the dried specimens. According to researchers, similar AI approaches could also be used identify the likes of fly larvae and plant fossils. From Nature:

This German shepherd gives his minuscule companion a couple of chances to climb the stairs on its own, but eventually decides to take matters into its own mouth in the interest of expediency.(more…)

George Toubbeh of Fountain Valley, California is suing Heineken and grocer The Kroger Co. after allegedly finding two dead geckos in his 24-ounce beer can back in 2015. Apparently they weren't supposed to be in there. From the Los Angeles Times:

This crocodile didn't take kindly to a vehicle encroaching on its hard-fought territory, so it bit off a large chunk of intruder. What did the insurance company say when it saw the video. Are cars covered by croc attacks?

Artist Roman Booteen carved a Morgan dollar 1921 that bites any finger that tries to take the small gold coin within. It sold for US $10,101.00 on eBay.

Evolutionary biologist and "passionate rationalist" Richard Dawkins has a new anthology of essays out today, titled Science in the Soul. Over at Scientific American, John Horgan posted an interview with Dawkins in which the two discuss a range of topics, from A.I. to agnosticism. From SciAm:

Ugh, the “dog days of summer” are upon us. It’s hot, with cities in the Southwest and Pacific Northwest reaching record-breaking temps well over 100 degrees.(more…)

Someone snapped this astounding photo at a Walmart where one of their "Own the school year like a hero" marketing campaign signs was displayed on a case of rifles.Walmart's Charles Crowson told CNNMoney that they're "not happy" about this and is "working diligently" to make sure the sign is gone.The company initially stated that they identified the store location and removed the sign but according to Crowson, they were mistaken and actually still trying to find it.

Researchers from the Antarctic Heritage Trust turned up this 100-year-old fruitcake in a Cape Adare hut. From their report:(more…)

Here's a good puzzle from Martin Gardner's Mathematical Circus. The book is out of print but used copies are cheap.

Ojigi, or bowing, is an important part of Japanese social life. I don't know how to do it. Here's a video shows the three main ways to bow and how to use them in different situations. The video also shows how to exchange business cards in Japan.

One of the best tv themes of all time will be coming back, if they got the rights. Hipster jokes I can likely skip.

For 5 years, we've been tracking the tribulations of billionaire Silicon Valley VC Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems who, in 2010, bought land adjacent to a public beach in Half-Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, and then fenced off the beach and hired private security guards to chase swimmers and sunbathers off the public land. (more…)

Phil Agre's 1996 article "How to help someone use a computer" is full of eternal verities that hold up today: it starts with a section on putting yourself in the mindset of someone who's struggling with something you know how to do already ("Beginners face a language problem: they can't ask questions because they don't know what the words mean, they can't know what the words mean until they can successfully use the system, and they can't successfully use the system because they can't ask questions") and then moves on to practical tips for turning that empathy into successful advice ("Try not to ask yes-or-no questions. Nobody wants to look foolish, so their answer is likely to be a guess. 'Did you attach to the file server?' will get you less information than 'What did you do after you turned the computer on?'.") (more…)

Reading Brannon Dorsey's guide to cracking Wifi passwords is a good wake-up call to set a decent password for your own network -- it's pretty danged easy otherwise. (more…)

Only two people on the 30-seat FCC advisory panel come from city governments and have experience overseeing telcoms regulation; the other 28 members are executives, consultants, lobbyists and think-tankies from the telcoms sectors. (more…)

German painter Arnold Böcklin reimagined "Tomb Island" over and over, pursuing both the scene's dark mystery and its runaway commercial appeal: with the title improved by a canny agent, it became the first great fantasy art wall print. And soon you'll be able to explore each of the variations in virtual reality.There's precious little to tease the project beyond the trailer embedded above, but I always thought Tomb Island would be the perfect setting for a retro Myst-style mystery adventure game and it looks like I'm going to get exactly what I want.

If Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar is successful in winning the Democratic Party nomination to stand for governor of Illinois and then wins the election, he will: 1) commute all low-level drug offenders' sentences and free them from jail; 2) take educational oversight power from Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel and give it to the Chicago School Board; 3) fund schools out of a fairly distributed state pools, ending the system of funding based on local taxes, which disadvantages schools in poor neighborhoods; and 4) make access to paid sick leave and child care universal in the state of Illinois. (more…)

A few days after news spread that FBI agents raided Paul Manafort's Virginia home to seize possible evidence in the Russia investigation, there's news that the former campaign manager for President Donald Trump “has tapped a new legal team to represent him as government lawyers examine possible Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”(more…)

If you're going to burgle a home, be careful what leaves your behind.Andrew David Jensen apparently left a deuce in a toilet during an Oct. 7, 2016 burglary in Thousand Oaks, CA. Tests of DNA extracted from the fecal matter linked the crime to Mr. Jensen through the FBI's Combined DNA Index System. He has been charged with first degree residential burglary.

In this TEDx Talk, science writer and umbraphile (an "eclipse chaser") David Baron emphasizes the importance of witnessing a total solar eclipse firsthand (eye?) at least once in your lifetime.(more…)

This is the first thing Trump has said that made me laugh.(more…)

I've been replacing all the recessed light fixtures in our house with these recessed LED downlights. Amazon has a good deal on a 4-pack right now: $31.

"I want to know exact details, hard information about everything!" J.G. Ballard told an interviewer, in the pre-Internet year of 1982.(more…)

Standing in the Mütter Museum of medical oddities, contemplating a neat row of jars, each containing a malformed fetus with spina bifida, Riva Lehrer realized just how easily she, too, could have ended up a specimen in a bottle, an object of curiosity, pathos, and, yes, revulsion. "Their spinal column failed to fuse all the way around their spinal cord, leaving holes (called lesions) in their spine," she writes, in a New York Times essay so scarifyingly honest it feels like self-anatomization. "Some extrude a bulging sac containing a section of the cord. These balloons make the fetuses appear as if they’re about to explode. This condition is called spina bifida. I stand in front of these tiny humans and try not to pass out. I have never seen what I looked like on the day I was born."Born with Spina bifida, the survivor of scores of surgeries, Lehrer is "less than five feet tall." She writes, "I have a curved spine. I wear huge, clunky orthopedic boots." Yet as she notes in her Times essay, she no longer winces at her own reflection. Through her stunning, photorealistic portraits of people with disabilities—people like Mat Fraser, a.k.a. Sealo the Seal Boy from American Horror Story; Nomy Lamm, born with one leg smaller than the other; Lynn Manning, a blind actor and 1990 World Champion in Blind Judo shown brandishing his white cane like a katana—she has come to see "disabled bodies as unexpected and charming and exciting. Each one stretched the boundaries of what it meant to be human. They made the world big enough to include me"— and the rest of us into the bargain. Riveting, moving, powerful, profound, her essay as well as her art recall the well-known quote from the Roman playwright Terence: "Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto" (loosely, "I am human, and nothing human is alien to me")."Theresia Degener," by Riva Lehrer.A gallery of Lehrer's astonishing work is online, at her site, here.Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He has published widely on media, technology, pop culture, and American mythologies. His latest book is the essay collection, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. He is writing a biography of the artist and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey, due out from Little, Brown in 2018.Top image: Riva Lehrer, “66 Degrees,” 2016. 24″ x 36”, acrylic on wood panel. All rights reserved.

Below you’ll find an unhurried interview with Dr. Adam Gazzaley, who runs one of the West Coast’s largest neuroscience labs at UCSF. There, his team carefully crafts video games with the potential to cure a wide range of neurological ailments.A direct heir to Adam’s research is now up for final FDA approval as a treatment for ADHD – potentially providing millions of parents with a game-based alternative to medicating their kids. Autism is also in his sights. And his research first became prominent for blunting the awful effects of dementia. That work landed him on the cover of Nature magazine - which is to sciencists what a mid-70s Rolling Stone cover was to classic rock guitarists.This is the second episode of my podcast, which launched here on Boing Boing last week, and which is co-hosted by the inimitable Tom Merritt. Adam was a priceless resource to me as I researched the real science connected to my present-day science fiction novel After On. I should divulge that we became friends through that process, and that I’m now a minuscule shareholder in a company he created. I’m confident that that this didn’t bias my part of our interview, but do bear that in mind.In addition to his research, Adam and I discuss the roots of consciousness – a matter of much speculation amongst neuroscientists, and of great significance to my storyline. We also discuss the one New York City borough he hasn’t yet inhabited, the alphabet soup of modern brain scanning tools, and the science fiction tales that inspired him as a tot.Next week’s episode discusses government hacking and privacy in the digital age with Cindy Cohn, who runs the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A few weeks on, we’ll discuss terrorism with Sam Harris - one of the most outspoken and controversial commentators on this subject today. Other topics will include synthetic biology, quantum computing, Fermi’s paradox, and superintelligence risk. And if you’re interested in augmented reality, please check out last week’s episode.You can subscribe to the podcast within any podcast player. To subscribe via your computer on iTunes, just click here then click the blue “View on iTunes” button (under the square After On image on the left side of the page), then click “Subscribe” (in similar location) in the iTunes window. On your phone or other device, simply use your podcast app's search function (type in "After On"). Or, just follow the feed http://afteron.libsyn.com/rss

A new bus line called Cabin is positioning itself as a "hotel on wheels." For $115 you get a sleeping pod on a bus that goes between LA and San Francisco (the trip takes 8 hours). Each pod has a power outlet and the bus has WiFi. It also has an espresso bar and an attendant to assist you. Lexy Savvides of CNet took a ride on Cabin, and interviewed Gaetano Crupi, co-founder and president of Cabin.

Mine wears a bow-tie, but I'd bet he's into a Princess Leia halloween!Look at this poor cat!Star Wars Princess Leia Hood For Pets

Randy Gamel-Medler, his husband, and their son moved to a small town in Oklahoma. Town leaders treated them abusively and threatened them on a number of occasions.The threats were made good when Gamel-Medler's home was vandalized, set aflame, and then Fire department did not react. The home was located just a few blocks from the Station, but burnt to the ground.Gamel-Medler is suing the lot of them in Federal court.

Not a good day for a semi-truck carrying candy in Locust Grove, GA. The truck gets stuck on train tracks when a train then comes along and plows right through it. Luckily no one was hurt!Thanks WSB-TV!

Vertu, the "luxury" cellphone maker whose handsets look like drug cartel handguns and are always comically obsolete, went out of business last month, reports the BBC. It is to auction off its inventory. Bids start at $26,000.Thuy Ong:

Erik Prince is the creepy-rich war criminal/ex-CIA agent who founded Blackwater and put John Ashcroft in charge of its ethics department (no, seriously), whose rap-sheet includes reckless, corrupt, murderous, genocidal violence, conducted with near-total impunity. (more…)

The mystery of yesterday's India-wide censorship orders which blocked the Internet Archive from the world's largest democracy has been solved: it was the result of complaints by two Bollywood studios, Prakash Jha Productions and Red Chillies Entertainment, who chose to target infringing copies of their movies by securing an injunction at the High Court of the Judicature at Madras, rather than sending the Internet Archive a takedown notice. (more…)

Contains mild spoilers. A good Thrones mashup, from zouru. Dany and her counselors try to plan the war ahead as Jon Snow mines the island for dragonglass.

I love space saving gadgetry when camping. I fell for this collapsible silicon kettle.This silicon kettle folds down for easy storage. I can boil water in a pot, but this adds just the missing touch to morning tea while camping.LevelOne Collapsible Silicone Outdoor Camping Kettle via Amazon

"Terminal Communication"(2007) is a film made from found security camera footage, accompanied by accordion music that drives home the idea that life is absurd.From the YouTube description:

Here's a good lesson for anyone thinking about asking for a raise. In his biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future," author Ashlee Vance tells us what happened when Musk's assistant, Mary Beth Brown, asked for a big raise after working for him for 12 years.According to Business Insider:

IKEA offers the soothing sounds of its products gently purring, racheting, and rubbing against each other, narrated by a soft-voiced narrator in this 25-minute tingle-inducing ASMR video.

Japanese actor Haruo Nakajima who rocked the Godzilla suit in a dozen movies died on Monday at age 88. Above is the last video of Nakajima as Godzilla for a 1983 photo shoot. From Nakajima's obituary in the New York Times:

AquaBounty GMO salmon is a huge hit in Canada. Five tons have been sold since it came on the market a few months ago, reports The Guardian.

The Solano County Sheriff's Office wants to spend $2M on a network of vehicle surveillance cameras, a program it calls "Project Skynet." (more…)

Foxconn has wrung a promise of $3 billion in corporate welfare from the state of Wisconsin, but even that is no guarantee that it will open a factory there, even if it swears up and down that this is in the cards. (more…)

U Thant, or Belmont, is a tiny artificial island in the East river made from the detritus drilled out for the 7 train's tunnel. Leased to a religious sect since the 1970s, it was designated a bird sanctuary in the 2000s after a protestor occupied it and declared it a micronation. Since then, no humans, please. [via Metafilter; Photo: Pacific Coast Highway]

It takes a steady hand to pilot a drone so smoothly that the images can be used for a timelapse. Behold Matt Dutcher's aerial ode to Los Angeles. (more…)

It's astonishing that these kayakers survived, let alone navigated a slalom course as they plunged down the class IV+ – V rapids of Norway's lower Myrkdalselva. (more…)

Vancouver makeup artist Mimi Choi creates amazing trompe l'oeil illusions on the faces and bodies of herself and others. (more…)