What you will learn from watching Fox News:

Mike Boyd is started a lecturing job, and he wanted to teach himself how to draw dotted lines on a chalkboard. He learned in just six minutes. The trick is pressing the piece of chalk at an angle so it skips across the board.

One of the consistently underreported elements of Brexit and all that's come after it is that leaving the EU will also let the UK -- the world's most prolific launderer of filthy criminal money -- escape the tightening noose of European anti-money-laundering measures. (more…)

Gabriella Corley is a 9 year old with Type I diabetes who's allergic to the insulin covered by her low-income parents' healthcare; to live, she must take Sanofi's proprietary Apidra brand insulin, which has increased in price by 1,123% since 1996, and which is only covered to 25% by her insurer's Pharmacy Benefit Manager, CVS. (more…)

Why do people forget what they were going to do when they walk into a room? This video explains the "location updating effect," and how you can work it to your advantage.

I had forgotten how goofy the monster noises were in the epic Kirk vs Gorn battle. With this excellent mask and a few groans you too could rough up Starfleet's more daring Captain.https://youtu.be/4SK0cUNMnMMEvidently you'll need to make your own body suit, but the mask looks nicer than the actual prop.Star Trek Classic Gorn Deluxe Latex Mask via Amazon

Fox News' Jesse Watters thought it was the perfect time at Fox News to make a sexual joke at a woman's expense. And he earned a three-day vacation for his on-air blowjob joke about Ivanka Trump after saying, "I really like how she was speaking into that microphone."From Digg:

Here is The Simpsons' take on Trump's 100th day in the White House, which includes Sean Spicer hanging himself with a sign that says, "I Quit!" and a strangling match between Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon. We also get to see Trump in his jammies, lying in bed with a remote in his hand. An aide comes to his side and asks him to read a bill that will lower taxes for Republicans. "Can't Fox News read it and I'll watch what they say?" the president asks.With the 100th day hitting us this Saturday, thank god for comic relief!

Activated charcoal makes for some cool-looking chow, like the superblack soft-serve at LA's Little Damage, and you might think that since activated charcoal is given to people with acute poisoning, it's safe to eat. (more…)

An EU court ruled against a seller of customized set-top boxes this week, with the judge saying that his preinstallation of certain Kodi Add-Ons makes the boxes illegal to offer.

When long-lived websites close down, they often give little notice, sending archivists scrambling to rescue its work for posterity. About.com, the venerable topic-mining hive abruptly put to death, seems to be a counter-example: a faceless mountain of bland, undifferentiated, half-plagiarized content that no-one seems sad to see vanish. Even its own CEO is plainly contemptuous of it.

SWISH is a lovely portable stool created by feeding inputs into design software and seeing what the software generated. Carlo Ratti Associati debuted this prototype at Milan Design Week 2017. (more…)

A Canadian goose declared it open season on cops, as this Clarksville, Tennessee detective found out. This cop-hating honker takes a gander at this cop, then puts him down. Just when the cop's goose is cooked... (more…)

Probably not much, as Brad Jones learned over Easter when a neighbor allegedly blasted his DJI Phantom. Even if his prime suspect confessed, there's not much precedent for prosecutions. (more…)

Foodie Dan Pashman of You’re Eat It Wrong shares tips and tricks for mastering the all-you-can-eat buffet.

If you want to work in tech, but don’t have any desire to code web apps to help businesses sell things to other business, you might want to consider a career in cybersecurity. Judging from the apparent complete infiltration of Russian hackers in American cyberspace, it seems fair to speculate that there’s a major shortage of talented penetration testers. Is it because “learn to code” is a more catchy slogan than “secure an organization’s information systems”? Perhaps. But you can use that to your advantage—and get a head start learning a highly in-demand skill set--with the Ethical Hacking Bootcamp.Some of the topics you'll cover:

The President of the United States earlier today said these very words. Peter Serafinowicz just sassified them.(more…)

Ajit Pai, the newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under Donald Trump, today announced his plans to undo government oversight of broadband ISPs, and destroy Net Neutrality.(more…)

Vietnam's government today said Facebook has promised to work with the communist nation to prevent the publication and distribution of banned online content.(more…)

A woman in Newport Beach was raped by her Uber driver on the way home from a social gathering, according to charges filed by prosecutors in Southern California on Wednesday.(more…)

I loved helping PaRappa win the heart of Sunny Funny. PaRappa the Rapper remains one of my favorite console games of all time.Ellen Steuer probably remembers all the lyrics!

The Little Damage ice-cream shop near downtown LA has unveiled a new, superblack soft-serve flavor called "Almond Charcoal" whose coloring comes from activated charcoal. (more…)

Spring is here, time to toss the ratty old hammock and get a new one! This $15 replacement hammock fits my stand well.Couple years back I reviewed this fantastic hammock stand and hammock. I live in a harsh marine environment to say the very least, and the stand has held up amazingly well. It shows some patina but no real rust. I think I'll happily be using it for years to come. Hammocks themselves are a different story. Normal wear and tear, forgetfully leaving them outside overnight, washing them in a machine washer and dryer, all destroy a hammock pretty quickly. Once every year or two I need a replacement. This $15 hammock is just great and will help make my Spring, Summer and Fall 2017 wonderful.Double Wide Hammock Cotton Soft Woven Bed for Supreme Comfort Fabric Travel Camping Hammock 2 Person for Backyard, Porch, Outdoor or Indoor Use (Green & Blue Stripes) via Amazon

I feel bad for that vulture. Well, I think it either was a vulture or turkey buzzard.

I bought this $11 remote-control dimmable multicolor LED lightbulb for my daughter in January 2015 and she still loves it. It hangs from a cord over her bed, and she changes the color frequently, using the included wireless remote. It's not super bright, but she likes it that way. Here's one that's brighter and only $10 but I have not tried it.

Ann Coulter was supposed to speak at UC Berkeley tomorrow night, but is canceling after the conservative groups who were sponsoring her, Young American's Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans, backed out. Both groups say the atmosphere surrounding her visit has grown too hostile."It's a sad day for free speech," Coulter told The New York Times. But administrators at Berkeley see it differently.

Adding to the controversy surrounding hyper-sensitive, Nazi-affiliated medal wearing "deputy assistant" to Orange Julius, Sebastian Gorka is now a credible claim he faked his PhD.Gorka has unsuccessfully attempted to assuage fears that he is a yet another Nazi enthusiast in the Trump Administration. Now, suspicions have arisen that he has faked his degree. Andrew Reynolds, a professor of politican science at the University of North Carolina did some digging.It looks bad for Gorka.Via Andrew Reynold's website at UNC:

The Echo Look is the next version of the Alexa appliance: it has an always-on camera hooked up to a computer vision system and the first application for it is to watch you as you dress and give you fashion advice (that is, recommend clothes you can order from Amazon). (more…)

Wait for it.

This week on Maker Update: an autonomous beach-roving art bot, Kickstarter wants your ideas, a project that makes kits for other projects, GUIs for Raspberry Pi, stipple ceramics, and Donald Bell shows you why digital calipers are cool. Show notes here.

My publicist just found an extra box of the cool promotional Walkaway multitools, and she's generously offered to give them to the next 100 people to reserve tickets to the May 7th Walkaway event at Chicago's Royal George Theater, where I'm presenting with CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY creator Max Temkin (current ticket-holders, don't worry, you get one too).

In this new video, YouTuber and fandom expert Jill Bearup digs into the history of the fanfiction “Mary Sue” and offers a compelling defense of the much-maligned character archetype. The video is part of Bearup’s ongoing “History Of Fanfiction” series, which started with her delightful argument that Virigl was a Homer fanboy:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAkvQr_lVpEBearup also uploads all sorts of great videos about pop culture, fandom, and feminism, like this exploration of whether or not you can slut-shame fictional female characters:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_BWyOAUJ58

This great World Penguin Day piece comes from London-based artist Ruby Elliot of Rubyetc. You can purchase her work on her Society6 page and follow her on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram. She's also published a book called It's All Absolutely Fine, and a few more of her illustrations are below:https://www.instagram.com/p/BTJMqq2Apb4/?hl=enhttps://www.instagram.com/p/BS0tyMQAXTH/https://www.instagram.com/p/BRvL6ZFgqrE/https://www.instagram.com/p/BNZTbzrDYJN/?hl=en

To demonstrate the Magnus effect, YouTuber PeterSripol grabbed a couple of KFC buckets and tricked out an RC plane. The resulting trial and error is mostly the latter. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13T7D8pAzKUCarol from Cheapass Games writes, "In our continuing quest to bring back the very best classic Cheapass Games, we're creating a new boxed set of Button Men, our strategy dice combat game. This time around, the characters will appear on cards, rather than pin-back buttons, but since they're all 1950s era gangsters, the 'button men' name still works! The new format lets us provide 48 characters - and 30 high-quality polyhedral dice - in one affordable package. We'll also make the old-style pin-back buttons available as game accessories. Button Men won two Origins awards back when it was originally published in 1999, and it's one of our favorites."

Quelli che il Calcio (That which is Football) is one of Italy's top sports broadcasts and it is played in the country's prisons; it has a ticker that you can send SMSes to that then show up on screen. (more…)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation surveyed hundreds of American kids, teachers and parents about privacy and the "ed-tech" sector, which is filling America's classrooms with Chromebooks and cloud services and mobile devices that ingest kids' data wholesale without any meaningful privacy or data retention policies. (more…)

With a (symbolic) (but it's a potent symbol) election looming in Iran, the global Persian diaspora is not lacking for news organs that are producing the kind of unfiltered political news that would get you jailed or killed in Iran. (more…)

How do you explain an abstract concept to children? Kid lit is filled with depictions of good manners, sharing, and other physical acts that lend themselves well to visual representation, but until now I haven't read a book that tackles the very notion of idea itself. The fact that What Do You Do With an Idea? does it so effortlessly is even more impressive. We’re given the story of a young child (interestingly, you can’t tell if they are male or female, and a case could be made for either) who one day has an idea. The idea visually takes the form of a small golden egg, which is the beginning of a great, easy to understand metaphor. We follow the child as they try to ignore the idea, then are afraid of the idea, and eventually embrace the idea, all while this visual metaphor expertly tells the story. I could say more, but it’s such a treat to experience the first time that I suggest finding a copy and discovering it for yourself. The companion book What Do You Do With a Problem? follows a similar structure, in which a child discovers they have a problem, tries to ignore it, and has to confront it, this time learning the value of overcoming our problems. A new, clear visual metaphor again tells the story, but this time the story delves a bit more into what a problem actually is. Given that people tend to fear problems a bit more than they fear ideas, Problem is a bit darker than Idea, which is good for keeping it from being repetitive.Together, the What Do You Do books are truly great picture books that explore in an easy, kid-friendly tone how you can nourish ideas, and what you can learn from problems. The artwork is among the coolest I’ve seen in any picture book, with Problem featuring the more detailed drawings, added colors, and an even more expressive visual storytelling element. Artist Mae Besom has created a unique look that feels almost like it was scrawled on ancient parchment and passed down through the ages. It is a suggested fantasy world that feels entirely its own, yet comfortably familiar. That could be the perfect explanation for the books themselves; completely new, yet utterly classic.What Do You Do With an Idea?

Starting in 1938, San Francisco's Westin St. Francis Hotel began washing all of the change that flowed through the business. Hotelier Dan London initiated the process to prevent grimy coins from dirtying the fancy white gloves worn by women visiting the establishment. These days, the responsibility belongs to one Rob Holsen. From a 2010 SFGATE article:

Humans discard a trillion single-use plastic bags every year. If you were a wax worm, this statistic would make you drool. The caterpillar loves to eat them.From Atlas Obscura:

I've written about Lindt 90% cocoa chocolate before. I try to take some with me on every trip (along with macadamia nuts and beef jerky). Like I wrote earlier, his dark chocolate is surprisingly smooth for a high-cocoa chocolate, and a 40g serving has just 3g of sugar (by comparison, a 40g serving of a Special Dark Hershey bar has 20g of sugar).It's usually $30 for a 12-pack, but Amazon has a lightning deal right now for $22.19, and the deal is already 53% claimed. I just bought some!

Mozak is a game where you score points for participating in the mass-scale, crowdsourced mapping of dendrites in scanned brains of humans, rodents, and other organisms. (more…)

The House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R) and ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings said today that there is no sign that Trump's former national security advisor complied with the law when he failed to disclose payments he received from Russia.From CNN:

It's easy to squeeze the juice out of a Juicero juice bag with your bare hands. But for some reason, the $400 Juicero machine was built to squeeze charcoal briquettes into diamonds. Ben Einstein, a product designer and venture capitalist, took one apart to see what was inside.Excerpts:

Last December, anyone who searched Google for “did the Holocaust happen? would see a white supremacist website at the top of the results. To counteract these kinds of problems, Google updated its Search Quality Rater Guidelines to devalue “misleading information, unexpected offensive results, hoaxes and unsupported conspiracy theories,” says Google vice president of engineering Ben Gomes.In addition to changing its algorithm to reduce "offensive or clearly misleading content," Google is also giving users the ability to rate and flag Autocomplete offerings and Featured Snippets results:

Since the earliest days of ecommerce, analysts have predicted that retailers would use their estimations of their customers' willingness to pay to invisibly, instantaneously reprice their goods, offering different prices to each customer. (more…)

UK retailer TopShop is selling clear plastic jeans. They're $100 and come waist sizes from 24 to 34.

YouTube host Tom Scott explores the “Mars Yard” at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where NASA simulates what it’s like on Mars for its rovers.

Cut enlisted an illustrator to help kids bring their personal images of God to life.