Since fidget spinners were originally designed to help people manage their ADHD, BuzzFeed asked people with the condition to try out spinners for a week and report back on their experiences.

The more you know!

The YouTube channel Nerdwriter1 digs into the phenomenon of schadenfreude (“the pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune”) and what it can tell us about human psychology and the rise of Donald Trump.

Praise leaks. The Washington Post reports that special counsel Robert Mueller and his team are investigating President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice. The investigators have also been looking for possible evidence of financial crimes among Trump associates. If Trump did anything shady, he's probably getting very nervous right about now.This should all get interesting pretty quickly. Perhaps Trump will fire Mueller first, or maybe Trump will try and pardon himself, or he could just pull a Sarah Palin and just walk away from the job.(more…)

My twin brother and I grew up during World War II, and then in its long aftermath, when we lived with our military family in occupied Japan and Germany. WWII was the central pivot of the 20th Century. Before it, there were seven world powers; after, two.I later was a postdoc working with renowned physicist Edward Teller, who told me many inside stories about the Manhattan Project that built the nuclear (“atomic”) bombs. My natural, science fictional instincts tinkered with the many what-if notions about how the war might have been different, and one became concrete in my mind: what if we’d gotten the bomb earlier?(more…)

https://youtu.be/k27mr6p-yhYWhy do so many people repeatedly watch 2003's The Room, even though they think it's the worst movie ever made? Because "it's like a movie made by an alien who has never seen a movie but has had movies thoroughly explained to him," explains Tom Bissell. He's the co-author of a book about The Room, called The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made. Bissell himself says he has seen the movie more 100 times (but fewer than 150 times).People enjoy trash cinema for the same reasons they enjoy art cinema. It breaks rules and defies conventions.From Dean Peterson's article in Vox:

Hansel & Gretel opened this month in New York. The collaboration between artist Ai Weiwei and architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron is a noisy dystopian nightmare projected back to visitors and broadcast live to the internet. (more…)

https://youtu.be/BFVVvVLMr-EI'm pretty sure Snoop Dogg could narrate nearly anything and I would still laugh my head off. His Plizzanet Earth bit on Jimmy Kimmel's show last night was no exception. On it, he hilariously voiceovered that iconic and super-suspenseful Planet Earth II chase sequence where a newly-hatched marine iguana narrowly escapes from a bunch of racer snakes.

In CSS, the style markup that goes with HTML, colors are encoded as hexadecimal RGB values of either 3 or 6 letters. This means that certain words, such as EFFACE and FACADE, are legitimate CSS colors. Allow for substitutions, such as 0 for O, and a full gamut presents itself, with BIOTIC and OTITIS and so on. c0ffee.surge.sh is a beautiful collection of all the words that work.

If only I still had hair.

Beleaguered rideshare behemoth Uber is in hot water over an internal culture in which sexual and racial harassment ran riot. At a big company-wide meeting on Uber's sexual harassment problem, billionaire board member David Bonderman made what he later admitted was an “inappropriate” comment about women. Why are we not surprised?(more…)

Megyn Kelly, formerly of Fox News and now at NBC, interviewed Alex Jones, erstwhile conspiracy theorist and Sandy Hook truther. It hasn't been broadcast yet, but posted excerpts suggest a smarmy effort to elevate Jones to mainstream attention, an amoral stunt posed as casting sunlight on darkness. NBC's deployment of Jones' nasty brand of bullshit, where the parents of slaughtered children are liars working to destroy Americans' right to own guns, is not going down well, but Kelly has little patience for critics.The spectacle has many on the internet wondering where the bottom is. Spoiler: there is no bottom.

Today on John Scalzi's Whatever blog, Steven R Boyett (author of the classic fantasy novel Ariel) writes about Fata Morgana, the new alternate history/WWII novel he's just published with Ken Mitchroney. (more…)

He's not quitting or being fired, but Uber CEO Travis Kalanik won't be at the office next week, or any other week in the near future. Yesterday saw another top executive quit, amid an uninterrupted string of scandals at the ride-hailing company.

The board of directors at Mylan have rewarded former CEO Robert Coury with a $98m bonus as he steps into the executive chairman's role, having overseen a price-gouging scandal over the Epipens used by people prone to life-threatening allergic reactions. (more…)

Brian May, the lead guitarist and composer for Queen, is a multitalented guy. A Guitar World readers poll ranked him as the 2nd greatest guitarist of all time. He also has a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College London was on the science team for NASA's New Horizons Pluto mission. He also made his own guitar with his father in the 1960s, which he called The Red Special. Hackaday has the build notes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdFqheeMFiUTimothy from Creative Commons writes, "A few weeks ago Diego Gómez, the former Colombian student who's been prosecuted for sharing a research paper online, was acquitted of criminal charges.(more…)

Immigration police arrested three Chinese nationals in a raid on a rented room in Tambon Ban Mai Nongsai, charging them with work-permit violations and for "online trading of contraband goods." (more…)

Last October, the Dr Seuss estate used legal threats to halt a wildly successful crowdfunded Seuss/Star Trek mashup called "Oh, The Places You'll Boldly Go," whose contributors included comics legend Ty Templeton and Tribbles creator David Gerrold. (more…)

Amazon has a good deal on this four-pack of LED lanterns. They take 3 AA batteries and collapse to a compact size. With 350 reviews, they've got an average rating of 4.7/5 stars.

Science fiction writers have a long history of intervening/meddling in policy, but historically this has been in the form of right-wing science fiction writers spinning fanciful superweapon ideas like Ronald Reagan's Star Wars system, or the writers who pitched in with the GW Bush team after 9/11 to design the brutal, endless "War on Terror" we're currently mired in. (more…)

New York City's famous Shakespeare in the Park lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from Delta Airlines and Bank of America after conservatives complained that Caesar character is modeled after Trump. In the play, Caesar is assassinated, .From Vulture:

I bought a 50-pack of plastic centrifuge tubes for $14 on Amazon a couple of years ago. I was planning to use them to do geocaching with my daughter but we both lost interest. I left the tubes in a bag in the garage.A couple of weeks ago I needed a screw to fix something. I have a plastic bin filled with loose hardware - nuts, nails, screws, picture hangers, wire nuts, and so on. When I reached in, I poked my finger with a thumbtack. It wasn't the first time that a sharp thing in the box had poked me, so I decided to sort the stuff into separate containers. As I thought about what kind of containers I should use, I remembered the centrifuge tubes. I used those.I could have just kept the tubes in the same plastic bin that I'd used to hold the loose hardware, but since I have a new Original Prusa I3 MK2S 3D printer (which is amazing), I went ahead and made a wall-mountable tube holder. I used Tinkercad to design it. Here's the model.I used double sided foam tape to mount the tube holder on the wall. I'll need to print out 10 of these to hold all 50 tubes.

Rather than worry about robots overtaking us, it's more interesting (and realistic) to consider how we might collaborate with our machines. At Institute for the Future where I'm a researcher, we have forecasted how the real power of automation will come from "humans plus machines." BB pal Ken Goldberg, director of UC Berkeley's People and Robots Initiative, and his colleagues are making that real through their pioneering work on cloud robotics and human-centered automation. Forget the Singularity, Ken says. It's all about the "Multiplicity." From Ken's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

Listed as a Seymchan Pallasite Olivine Meteorite, this beautiful item is priced $18,000 but they're accepting offers.

Enjoy Paul De Graaf's gallery depicting the sedimentary layers deposited by 30 years of graffiti on a wall in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

Haven’t we all seen a lot of pigs on the parkway? You’re driving along and happen to notice that the person in the next lane has their digit buried halfway up their snout, digging for truffles. And don’t ask me about what happens next—I just can’t deal with it. I can understand when 3-year-olds engage in this type of behavior, but adults just should not be doing this.What you don’t expect on the parkway are real pigs … pink, porcine, and on the run!An unhappy situation on a Japanese highway: a truck full of big fat piggies are on their way to meet their destiny when—all of a sudden—jailbreak! The truck crashes into a stalled car and the pigs make a mad dash for freedom, little hooves tapping on the asphalt, except they’re on a busy highway and there’s no place to go. The scene was captured by an NHK News helicopter.https://youtu.be/0vhAiXE0MPgIn many countries there would be a grassy median in the center, or an easy getaway off to some grazing on the side of the road. But in Japan highways are often elevated, and since they pass directly next to homes, there are large sound deflecting walls on most of them. So, alas, the piggies were trapped and made the best of their few hours of freedom by lounging.No pigs were injured in the making of this post. All the rascals were rounded up and returned to a new truck, where their journey to the great beyond resumed.Via NHK News

The fine folks at Stop a Douchebag typically catch a lot of heat from the Muscovite scofflaws they bust driving on paths and sidewalks, but when behemoths from BodyMania go out on the street, compliance goes to 100% without a peep. (more…)

Stefan Kraft beat the world record on this attempt, 253.5 meters, which is over 831 feet. There was some discussion about whether he landed it legally, but he prevailed. Regardless, it's a mind-blowing feat. (more…)

Cooking steak can be a little intimidating for newbie chefs, but the YouTube channel Tasty makes the process a whole lot less daunting in this easy-to-follow video. Cooking a delicious steak comes down not only to what cut you buy, but also to how you cook it. So Tasty offers tips on producing the perfect steak at any price point.

In a new comic series for BuzzFeed, writer Zain Alam and artist Jason Adam Katzenstein share some basic tips on how not to be an asshole to your friends, classmates, or colleagues who are observing Ramadan this month (the Muslim month of fasting lasts from May 26 to June 24 this year). You can see a few panels below and check out the full series over on BuzzFeed.

If Apple’s AirPods are a bit too rich for your blood, or you know, you're an Android user, these discreet earbuds can be had for a fraction of the cost and will stay securely in place whether you're working out, commuting, or running between errands. Plus, with IPX4 water resistance, they can survive splashing water and sweat. Their noise- and echo-cancellation capabilities improve call quality as well as music playback, and they use the newest Bluetooth 4.2 to ensure a lag-free listening experience.To keep your music playing through your work day, the included charging case gives over 8 hours of battery life, and each bud can run standalone for up to 4 hours at a time. Get a pair of HomeSpot AirBeans X True Wireless Earbuds here for just $54.99.

Linux.MulDrop.14 is a Linux worm that seeks out networked Raspberry Pi systems with default root passwords; after taking them over and ZMap and sshpass, it begins mining an unspecified cryptocurrency, creating riches for the malware's author and handing you the power-bill. (more…)

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I'm on stage tomorrow at 11:30 with Mary Robinette Kowal (free tickets here) -- we'll be talking about my new novel, Walkaway. Can't wait to see you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izMGMsIZK4UNSA whistleblower Reality Winner may have been caught thanks to a hidden pattern of dots that color printers bury in every page they print, as an assistance to law enforcement agencies. (more…)

When American forces overran the Philippine island of Lubang in 1945, Japanese intelligence officer Hiroo Onoda withdrew into the mountains to wait for reinforcements. He was still waiting 29 years later. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll meet the dedicated soldier who fought World War II until 1974.We'll also dig up a murderer and puzzle over an offensive compliment.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Jen, an Instructables community manager, has combined regular ol' fresh-squeezed lemonade with capsules of activated charcoal to make her Black Lemonade.Refreshing, and goth af.She writes that activated charcoal has several health benefits but, (from what I gather from commenters on the recipe's page) not everyone can tolerate it. So, please, don't serve this to anyone without their knowledge. (Sorry, the mom in me totally just came out.)Still, it looks really cool.recipe(Foodiggity)Previously: No matter how cool superblack activated charcoal food looks, it's a bad idea

According to the Impossible Foods website:

Recomendo is a weekly email newsletter I do with Kevin Kelly and Claudia Dawson. We have 11,000 subscribers. Subscribe here! This week's recommendations:Kanji tutor:

http://gif87a-com.tumblr.com/post/161461427110 Closely matched in intelligence, a man and a refrigerator filled with explosives face each other on the battleground in a fight to the death. Only one can survive.

Shoppers in Saudi Arabia were treated to a miracle: a human being turned into a plastic ball. This is even better than the weightlifting snowman!Upon closer inspection, you'll find many other subtle differences between the photos. Is this the work of a disgruntled Highlights for Children editor or of ancient eldritch gods portending dire events yet to come?[via]

What puns can be made about a choir made of cans?Oh, so many!Seriously, I can't think of a single new one. Soda pressing.This brilliant display was spotted in the Netherlands.(Neatorama)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUJEp7oiI0MEarlier this week, Jerry Seinfeld rejected an on-camera hug from Ke$ha and people thought it was so funny, they wrote Seinfeld scenes about it. Here Seinfeld explains his perfectly reasonable rationale for the refusal."When you get to be my age and you've done a couple things, you have your own reality. In my reality, I don't hug a total stranger. I have to meet someone, say hello. I gotta start somewhere."

Police in China's Zhejiang announced that they worked with colleagues in four provinces to arrest 22 suspects in a data-theft ring that raided Apple's internal networks for Iphone owners' sensitive personal information ("names, phone numbers, Apple IDs, and other data") which they sold to criminals for as little as $1.50. (more…)

The Conservative Party had a startling collapse at the polls in the United Kingdom's general election, falling short of control of the House of Commons and forcing its leader, Prime Minister Theresa May, to cut a deal with the fringe Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland to muster enough MPs to govern and cling to her job.May called the snap election three years early, in hopes of turning a huge polling lead into a commanding political mandate going into forthcoming negotiations to leave the European Union. But instead of extending the party's slim majority, the Tories' shambolic campaign saw it evaporate as the opposition Labour party surged, led by an unexpectedly effective Jeremy Corbyn.The general consensus is that May's failure is too great for her to continue as Prime Minister, especially with the chaos of Brexit negotiations looming. But she moved quickly to shore up her position, striking a deal to form a new government with DUP support as Corbyn and others called for her to resign.With the count all but complete, the Conservaties won 318 seats, the Labour Party 261, the Scottish National party 35 seats, the Liberal Democrats 12 seats, the DUP 10 seats, and others 13. The far-right UK independence party did not win a single seat.

From 1991 to 2001, former software analyst David Joyner played the Barney on children's TV show, Barney & Friends. In this interview, he shares how he got the job and what it was like to be man inside the 70 lb. purple dinosaur costume for 10 years.Sweaty, for one. Zen-like, for two:

It's hard not to cringe when watching Senator John McCain question James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee. He seems slow and confused, spending almost the entire eight minutes asking about the Hillary Clinton email investigation, which ended last July, and at one point referred to Trump as President Comey.At one point McCain says, "We’re complete, the investigation of anything former Secretary Clinton had to do with the campaign is over, and we don’t have to worry about it anymore?”"I'm a little confused, Senator," Comey responded.Yes, I think McCain was confused as well.

https://youtu.be/7yFNTHvrOeMThe fellow shooting the video knew it was a mistake to try to push over this tree. "That branch [on another tree] is keeping it [the tree targeted for removal] from going into the ravine," he says (but not loud enough for the tractor operator to hear. "That thing's gonna come right back at him." And that's exactly what happened.

Befriending crows doesn't appeal to me much. Their dark and ominous ways freak me out a little. My neighborhood murder (which really says all you need to know, doesn't it?) perch in the tree outside my front door for hours at a time, squawking loudly, presumably at my indoor tabby cat who's imprisoned behind the front window.However, if YOU want to make friends with crows, be my guest.