Redditors' convention of tagging their sarcastic remarks is a dream come true for machine learning researchers hoping to teach computers to recognize and/or generate sarcasm. (more…)

Fox News co-president Bill Shine has resigned, Rupert Murdoch told employees today in an email. Some of the sexual harassment lawsuits involving Fox News say Shine enabled Roger Ailes’s behavior.(more…)

A state minister in India gave foot-long wooden bats that say "For beating drunkards" as gifts to nearly 700 brides during a mass wedding on Saturday. The bats, which are normally used to help clean dirty laundry, now have a dual purpose.When Gopal Bhargava handed out the gifts, he told the brides that they should first try to talk to their drunk husbands, but if reasoning doesn't work, “let the wooden paddles do the talking.” According to The Guardian:

This video is very hard to watch, and shows bulls getting stabbed and killed at the end. It was produced by an organization that aims to put an end to bullfighting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWYdQrDA8qM&t=329sMy friend Yasuo Amano, whose themed magic I've posted here before, visited The Tokyo Disney Resort for two days and sampled their seasonal Easter events. If you've only been to a Disney park in the United States, the incredible theming they do at the two parks in Tokyo will blow you away. There are Easter decorations everywhere at Tokyo Disneyland, a full Easter parade at Tokyo Disneyland and a special show at Tokyo DisneySea, hundreds of pieces of Easter merchandise, and even special food for the event.Amano not only shot a great montage of the Easter festivities (which continue for three months), but he also created some special Easter-themed magic and incorporated it into his visit.Above, an official video showing the Easter celebrations at the parks. Below is Amano's video of his personal visit and Easter-themed magic tricks.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuASROFkbko

Woe to any driver that follows the owner of this Jeep. It's equipped with a flexible hose that drains his urine on the road, reducing the need for breaks. There are times when I could have used something like this.

I've entertained my kids, nieces, and nephews by pretending to pull off my thumb. This guy's routine puts mine to shame. Thumbs and fingers pop off, pinkies grow and shrink, and the finale is spectacular.

Fast moving floodwaters slammed a car against a building wall. The water level started rising, and it was clear the car would soon be submerged, trapping the hapless occupants. Fortunately, they were able to get out of the back window in time.I don't know where this happened, but a reddit commenter said:

In the immediate aftermath of the Fyre festival debacle, co-founder Ja Rule tweeted, "I truly apologize as this is NOT MY FAULT..."(more…)

Ben Higgins takes us from blues rock through thrash, black metal, prog metal, and djent. You can even learn to play it yourself. Raise those horn hands high! (via Laughing Squid)

Tuker Murray, the 24-year-old assistant manager at a Jimmy John's Gourmet Sandwiches in Kansas City, MO, appears completely unfazed by the robber pointing a gun in his face last week. According to police, a suspect is now in custody. Interview with Murray below. (KCTV5)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yqxMDkj5kA

Something odd is happening in makeup-vlogger country: a wave of searing criticism of overpriced and useless cosmetics, and of consumerism itself. The Outline's Mehreen Kasana reports that "anti-haul" videos have gained a special status in the community.

Here's Wil Wheaton reading "Communist Party," the opening chapter of "Walkaway," my first novel for adults since 2009's "Makers." Wil is joined on the independently produced audiobook by Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Amanda Palmer (The Dresden Dolls), Mirron Willis, Gabrielle de Cuir, Lisa Renee Pitts and Justine Eyre. It was directed by Gabrielle de Cuir for Skyboat Media and mastered by John Taylor Williams for Wryneck Studios. You can buy the 15-hour DRM-free audiobook for $24.95 at my shop, or wherever DRM-free audiobooks are sold.

The checkbox, turning "There is NO OTHER CHOICE" into another choice, says it all.

The Ullim Tablet is the latest mobile device from North Korea to be subjected to independent analysis, and it takes the surveilling, creepy nature of the country's notoriously surveillant Android devices to new heights of badness. (more…)

Path of the Rabbit is another simple, addictive, beautifully-pixelled game from Daniel Linssen. Lay down the land for your lapine friend to leap across: it'll follow whatever line leads from the spot it stands. The trick is to arrange tiles to allow multiple leaps and to avoid the edge, from which the rabbit can't come back from, while keeping it regularly watered and occasionally beating up foxes to level up. It's surprisingly tough going, but I kept going back!

In this video, a man partially immerses a praying mantis in water, thereby forcing the hairworms possessing it to leave. That the mantis also dies, according to one commenter, is not because the videomaker left it in the water to drown alongside the infestors. [via]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQTC40oVqskZX Spectrum Next is more than just a cute retro-looking box or a glorified emulator. It is a new 8-bit computer, backwards-compatible with the 1980s' original, yet enhanced to provide a wealth of advanced features such as better graphics, SD card storage, and manufacturing quality control. It's made with the permission of IP owner Amstrad and has already blown past its crowdfunding target.It has a real goddamn Z80 in it, clocked to a blazing-fast 7Mhz! (And an optional 1Ghz co-processor for those times you want to strap your vintage snow sled to an intercontinental ballistic Raspberry Pi.)

In this really fantastic long-form essay published in the online magazine Strange Horizons, Erin Horáková digs into the weird way William Shatner’s James T. Kirk has been collectively misremembered by popular culture. As she writes:

Red Lava Toys is a Detroit-based startup that make super cool, low-cost custom Minecraft figs at a local makerspace: they CNC-milled their own injection molds for the body and joints, and have precision die-cut vinyl stickers that they print to order with long-lasting ink and cover with a clear adhesive coat, then place them on the body of the toy. (more…)

Periodic Stats is a dead-easy web-based Periodic Table to click around, showing all the stats and the history of each element. The only thing missing are illustrations of each one! [via Reddit]

I recently re-stumbled across John Hodgman's fantastic review of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus from 2008, which appeared in the New York Times.Kirby was known as the "King" of comics. He co-created Captain America in the 1940s, and went on to create or co-create the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, the original X-Men, Doctor Doom, Magneto, and Black Panther among others. Kirby and Stan Lee acrimoniously split up in 1970. Kirby went to Marvel's rival publisher, DC where he created another pantheon of less-well-known, but wonderfully odd characters.From Hodgman:

The fellow in Australia, who makes tools and shelters from his bare hands and natural materials, is back with a new video. This time, he made water-powered hammer. It's basically a log (hollowed out by fire) that pivots up and down when it receives and empties water from a stream.

Artist Brooke Barker uses her Instagram to document both sad animal facts and her delightful sense of humor. You can see some of my favorites below and learn more on her Sad Animal Facts website. (more…)

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is inaccessible in Turkey, with officials saying it was blocked as an "administrative measure" thereby explaining why the courts weren't involved. Turkish media says the government asked Wikipedia to take stuff down, but was ignored.

Few things are more annoying for cyclists than changing a flat, especially on a back tire. Non-pneumatic tires that have proven workable for off-roading and other vehicle prototypes are now getting tested for bicycles. (more…)

In this new upload, video essayist KaptainKristian explores the history of Wonder Woman as a progressive symbol.

Whether or not you’re a sun sneezer (I am!), this video from Veritasium is a fascinating explanation of the strange quirk that affects roughly 1 in 4 people.

If you're among the one in four people who sneeze when you move from a dark place into the sunlight, this nifty little explainer from a fellow traveler gives a great overview of causation theories over the millennia. Turns out it is just one transposed letter in the second chromosome that causes the effect. (more…)

The latest Wikileaks release of leaked CIA cyberweapons includes "Scribbles" -- referred to by the CIA as the "Snowden Stopper" -- a watermarking tool that embeds web-beacon style tracking beacons into secret documents that quietly notify a central server every time the document is opened. (more…)

High-Rise, directed by Ben Wheatley, brings J.G. Ballard's classic novel to the screen after a long wait.It's set almost entirely in a residential tower, a massive brutalist edifice inhabited by thousands of early-1970s Britons eager for a new life. The ultimate product of mid-century urban planning, the concrete building is designed to take care of all its occupants' needs: there's a supermarket, a swimming pool, even a primary school, all tucked away deep within its forty stories.Robert Laing, an introverted young doctor, moves in hoping to become an anonymous nobody amid this monument to the bland excellence of modern life. But he commits the critical error of making friends, and is slowly consumed by the building's odd psychic character, its microcosmic reflection of the divisions in society at large.He notices that the lower levels are first to suffer when the power fails; then that the higher echelons enjoy special amenities of their own. And then, when the lights go out, everything goes to hell.A little awareness of British life in the 1970s helps contextualise details that might otherwise baffle—in particular, skyscraper-happy Americans should know that residential towers there were always a controversial novelty, that garbage collecters were perpetually on strike, and that in British engineering, corners are always cut. But Ballard's sinister geometry of modernity, hiding an emotional suppression ready to explode into violence, is a language universal to all employed westerners.It's an intriguing, sophisticated and handsome movie made excellent by Wheatley's skill and its cast: Tom Hiddleston as the skeptical middle-class everyman driven to madness by his environment's awful sanity, Jeremy Irons as the tower's vicious yet uncannily humanist architect, Elizabeth Moss (Mad Men, The Handmaid's Tale) as society's hope, and Luke Evans (Bard from The Hobbit) as the agent of chaos.But there are some conceptual misteps, I think, that garble Ballard's anxieties—and the power of his storytelling.In particular, the movie counterposes superficial social realism against dreamy surrealism in an attempt to triangulate the novel's hyperreal quality with its period setting and the presumed ironic sensibilities of a contemporary audience. Clever as this is, the result has a weird 1980s artsy zaniness to it, as if directed by Peter Greenaway or Ken Russell or (sorry) whoever did the Pet Shop Boys movie. Ballard is about games that turn deadly serious, but this is just a deadly game. Among other things, it makes its cruelties (which often involve animals) seem self-satisfied and spiteful.Wheatley also tries to achieve too much though implication; even as a fan of the novel, I felt a little lost and could have done with an establishing vignette to establish the scenario. Motivations are often unclear, too. Though this is rather the point, the depraved psychic hygiene of the tower's world is only lightly sketched before it erupts. It's as if the movie is only interested in people who already understand its message.Ballard's writing is cold and sharp, yet lurid in how it draws out the entrails of our discomfort. This movie's script is just drawn out. I like the film, and it's full of arresting images. It is a tribute, a floating world of its own, but a metaphor too distant and too arch to draw much blood.Thumbs up, ish.High-Rise (2016) [Amazon]

The first 100 days of Trump's presidency were a shambolic festival of incompetence and looming catastrophe. But it's not all about beltway politics, you know! Because the intense (and reasonable) focus is upon on the media-friendly dimensions of his buffoonery, we sometimes miss how it affects specific aspects of American life. The Verge took a look at what's already happening to the technology business, from the threatened end of net neutrality to immigration lockouts. If you had hoped tech might have gotten through unscathed, somehow, perhaps you aren't paying attention to how much his corner of the establishment hates it.

Megabattie posted a video of a female grey-headed flying fox who is "happy to stuff her face" with grapes.

I've had this AWS 100g x 0.01g Digital Scale ($10) digital scale for a couple of years, and I used it twice a day when I'm home to weigh supplement powders (and sometimes loose leaf tea and coffee beans). It's about the size of an iPhone. It measures up to a limit of 100 grams in 0.01 gram increments. (more…)

A pair of New York's finest posed with 100 tiny bags of pot, tweeting, "One less marijuana dealer on our streets thanks to Officers Sardone and Winter." The twittersphere was not impressed.

On the heels of the Daily Grail's new essay anthology Spirits of Place -- featuring Alan Moore, Maria J. Warren Ellis, Gazelle Amber Valentine, and many more writers and thinkers -- the Grail's Greg Taylor conducted a deep interview with Moore about populism, time, language, science, and other heady topics. From the Daily Grail:

Pearl Fryar of Bishopville, South Carolina created this incredible garden mostly from plants he saved from a local nursery's compost dump.Ironically, according to Great Big Story, "When he first moved to the small town in the 1980s, he was almost unable to build his house because neighbors feared that as an African American, he wouldn’t keep up his yard."

Teller, the silent half of the Penn & Teller magic act, explains seven cognitive biases that magicians exploit in order to "alter the perceptions" of their audiences and achieve impossible-seeming feats. (more…)

Chester (or Shasta?), a Red Labrador, has figured out a way to deal with the Roomba that's more efficient than barking at it or biting it: turning it off. [Thanks, Heather!]

TED-Ed host Kenny Coogan and animator Anton Bogaty offer a crash course on sloth evolution. Interestingly, it turns out we might not have avocados without them.

Saturn's moon Atlas is said to look like a flying saucer. The Cassini probe took a close look on its way to Titan, whizzing 7,000km from the tiny world. To me it looks like one of those soft, dusty banana-flavored chews you get in the very cheapest candy bags.

Data scientist David Robinson tracked the proximity of verbs to gender across 100,000 stories. She screams, cries and rejects. He kidnaps, rescues and beats.

Dmitry Chernysh found a soul mate who likes climbing towers as much as he does, so they upped the ante and took a 360-degree camera along for their latest climb. (more…)

MinutePhysics explains how to chart the rate of expansion of the universe.

Yesterday I went to FedEx.com to order some printed fliers from my desktop. Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. Along with other idiots committed to proprietary Flash UI, FedEx is one of the last holdouts who won't let customers give them money unless they install Flash. So VistaPrint got my business. (more…)

A copy of Look Magazine from July 4, 1939 will cost you $950, because it has a a six-page photo-illustrated feature by William P. Hitler, called "Why I Hate My Uncle."

“The world’s smartest film about the world’s dullest premise.”

Poli'ahu, the Hawaiian snow goddess who lives atop Mauna Kea, is the namesake for this stunning and inspiring footage from Sunchaser Pictures. (more…)

The Treasures in the Trash Museum in East Harlem is at turns delightful and sad. Curator Nelson Molina is a city sanitation worker with a nice eye and ear for hidden garbage gems. The whole museum demonstrates how utterly wasteful humans are. (more…)

Making English versions of foreign-language games is a complex process requiring cultural sensitivity and originality. In contrast to literary translation, it involves audio, visual arts, and careful technical edits as well as the words. When a localizer working on Japanese title Akiba Beat was displeased by one edit, he cried foul and demanded to be removed from the project's credits.The "egregious change," as Tom Lipschultz called it...