The Canada Science and Technology Museum had the best worst idea of all time: they stripped the fur off a Tickle Me Elmo to show kids how it works.Bonus video: a classic of the little robot demon afire:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYGhmJD9LKc• Furless Tickle Me Elmo for Tinkering Activity (YouTube / Canada Science and Technology Museum)

On her YouTube channel PetitPlat, mixed media artist Stephanie Kilgast sculpts beautiful miniature replicas from polymer clay. Her videos double as tutorials for other artists and relaxing watches for everyone else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWL8A97JrTohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3egT64wg1cEhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxU6XTfIWOshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXzsNZqlSUYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_xsxsUi6Lg

Timothy from Creative Commons writes, "The purpose of copyright is to empower -- not frustrate! -- creativity and knowledge production. Nowhere is a balanced copyright more important than in education. But 15-year-old EU copyright laws don't take into account modern digital and online teaching methods, tools, and resources." (more…)

Etsy seller Tcustom is a carver who casts their small creations to make beautiful, detailed articulated keychains and pendants, the best of which use contrasting materials. Some of my favorites: Anatomical Human Head; Salamander Life Cycle; Mitochondria and Trilobite. (more…)

After trying lots of different phone mounts for cars, the type I've settled on attaches to an air vent and has a magnet on it. You have to stick a thin metal plate on the back of your phone, but it's unobtrusive. Your phone won't slide off. This mount is by far the most convenient kind. Amazon has a sale on air vent magnetic phone mounts. This 2-pack costs $6.39 with free one-day shipping.

There's only 8 days until the publication of Walkaway (stil time to pre-order signed hardcovers: US, UK), and Tor.com has just published a sneak peek at chapter 3: "Takeoff." (more…)

Candice Jackson, Betsy DeVos' appointee to help lead the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, opposes affirmative action and claims to herself have been victimized by 'anti-white discrimination.'TPM has the story:

Adam Pizurny's Tumblr is an endless font of stupendous and surreal GIFs. (more…)

Emil Ferris' My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is the diary of a 10-year-old's investigation into the monster-filled murder of her upstairs neighbor. (more…)

Stealing phones at Coachella is nothing new. My daughter had hers stolen a few years ago, and when I mentioned it to someone I ran into at the supermarket, she said her son's phone had been stolen that year as well. And then a stranger who overheard us piped in that her son had also lost his phone to an "Apple picker," as she referred to the thief.But this year, when a gentleman from New York swept through the festival picking phones from oblivious Coachella goers, a few people turned to Find My iPhone for help. The app led them to 36-year-old Reinaldo De Jesus Henao with a backpack stuffed with phones.According to NBC San Diego:

Kelly Jones, ex-wife of Infowars lunatic Alex Jones, is in a custody battle over their three children. She says Alex is "not a stable person.""He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin's neck," says Kelly Jones. "He wants J-Lo to get raped. I'm concerned that he is engaged in felonious behavior, threatening a member of Congress … He broadcasts from home. The children are there, watching him broadcast."Calm down, said Randall Wilhite, Alex Jones' attorney at a pretrial hearing. "He's playing a character. He is a performance artist."From The Week:

Star Wars Celebration Orlando 2017 has come to a close. For my husband and me, both Celebration virgins, the event did not disappoint. Sure, there were ridiculously early mornings trying to get wristbands for key panels, crowds of jostling people, long lines and the fact that one can only humanly do a fraction of what is offered--but the things we got to see and experience were totally worth it. [caption id="attachment_519388" align="alignnone" width="930"] Our first Star Wars Celebration experience.[/caption] (more…)

United Airlines employees are no longer allowed to forcibly remove seated passengers to swipe their seat. Instead, they must swipe seats before paying passengers board. "The airline has also raised the amount of money that supervisors can offer to compensate displaced passengers, from $1,350 to $10,000," says NYMag, "and announced that it will no longer ask law-enforcement officials to remove passengers from its planes unless they pose a security threat."

In Maryland, a rapist has the right to stop his victim from putting her child up for adoption. He can also legally involve himself in the child's (and thus mother's) life until the child turns 18 years old. Basically, because there is no law preventing it, a rapist has paternal rights. This madness could have ended last week with a bill, but a panel of five legislators, all men, hit their deadline without finalizing the bill's text. Rapists get to keep their rights.According to The Daily Beast:

BBC News has a 15 minute documentary about people who take regular tiny doses of psychedelics drugs to deal with mental health issues, improve productivity, or just better appreciate what life has to offer.From YouTube description:

I have no hair. But if you do, and it's long, consider this MTA Hairclip that doubles as a stainless steel multitool containing a screw driver, wrench, ruler, cutting edge, and trolley coin to unlock a shopping cart. It's also available in slightly different pink and black models that include a bottle opener. They're $9 from Amazon.

The supreme court in India rule that all bars, pubs and liquor shops must be at least 500 meters away from state and national highways. One bar in Kerala which is only 270 meters from a freeway, has built a 250 meter fenced maze in front of the bar. "Now it is 520 metres from the highway," says the bar's manager.

Artist Kelly Magleby, went into “the backcountry of Southern Utah with a knife and a buckskin for 10 days to try to learn about Anasazi pottery by doing it the way the Anasazi did it.” Filmmaker Steve Olpin made a short documentary called Earth and Fire, that shows how Magleby started a fire, made dyes, and baked clay pottery in hot coals.[via]

In 1968, Russian computer scientist Nikolai Nikolaevich Konstantinov and his colleagues at Moscow University created this computer animation of a cat using their Big Electronic Counting Machine (BESM). Their research, published in the scientific journal "Problems of Cybernetics, was pioneering in its use of mathematics to model complex motion. More about the research here, in Russian: Кошечка (etudes.ru via r/ObscureMedia)

Biohacker Josiah Zayner suffered from persistent digestive problems so he decided to undertake an extreme self-experiment: He isolated himself in a hotel room, took massive doses of antibiotics, and then gave himself a fecal transplant to transform his own microbiome. Mark Frauenfelder and I interviewed Josiah about biohacking, cheap genetic engineering kits, and, of course, his own full body microbiome transplant in this episode of For Future Reference, a new podcast from Institute for the Future:Please subscribe to For Future Reference: iTunes, RSS, Soundcloud

The unique 1-bit look of early Mac software—especially its games!—are now more easily revisited thanks to the Internet Archive's Macintosh Software Library. Check out Dark Castle, Lode Runner and Wizardry, then write up your thoughts in MacWrite!https://twitter.com/storiediapple/status/827341904287240194

It takes more than eight wooden planks to build a real-life Minecraft chest; it also takes longer than a click. But the results seem worth it, so I know what I'll be doing next weekend! [via r/DIY]Redditor dan2907 explains:

For decades, Wells Fargo pressured its employees to commit millions of acts of fraud against its customers, using threats and blackballing to terrorize low-level employees. (more…)

Donald Trump has vowed to crack down on immigration in America and has attempted to turn immigration cops into a kind of Praetorian Guard with flattery and promises of hiring bonanzas (the agencies have been very amenable to this sort of thing, ignoring judges and Congress and insisting that they will do anything Trump orders them to do). (more…)

John Fassold critiques the popular duo's songs about "how hard it is to be white and in love" the best way: by making more of them.And here's the classic "Four Chords" song, illustrating how formulaic much pop music is.https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4IPreviously:

If four years of life with your circumcision simulator has taken some of the bloom off the rose, you can refresh your collection of odd simulators with Inert's line of training gadgets for people combating suicide bombers, which include suicide vests, IEDs (including "person borne" IEDs), and complete training kits for gaming out guerrilla battles and/or multiple shooter responses, with fake guns, rocket launchers, balaclavas, grenades, etc. (more…)

Kicked off by a post from The Watcher, the RPG.Net forums made The Only Sci Fi Star Chart You'll Ever Need—a cartographic compendium of common space opera tropes.

You don't have to be an evil mastermind, but with the Maglev Globe sitting on your desk, it may look to your coworkers like you're overseeing some kind of global corporation with nebulous intentions in a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie.Thanks to the magic of magnets, this piece of desk art features a freely levitating globe suspended by a c-shaped stand. It even incorporates an array of LED lights so you can look up countries in the dark and imagine all sorts of conspiratorial thoughts.With its sleek, executive-class finish, everyone around you will be dying to know, “How does it levitate? How were you able to afford such opulence?” Only you will know the answer.Grab the Maglev Globe here for $39.99, and start practicing your evil - ahem, regular - laugh.Explore more best-sellers in the Boing Boing Store:

Landon Meier of Hyperflesh unveiled some crazy new masks at Monsterpalooza 2017: Trump, Putin, and Kim Jong-un masks that are so lifelike people do a double-take. (more…)

After Colin Dickey wrote about United CEO Oscar Munoz's nonpology for the savage beating of Dr David Dao, he was taken to task for accusing the CEO of writing in the "passive voice."The closer Dickey looked, the more he concluded that "passive voice" is not a good characterization of the style employed by corporate America; rather, the instantly recognizable "Bureaucratic Style" "makes use of both active and passive constructions, but its purpose is uniform: to erase and efface any active agent on the part of the bureaucracy."Dickey's essay on Bureaucratic Style is fascinating.

The mysterious tragicomic hacking group The Shadow Brokers continues to dump incredibly compromising cyberweapons and internal information looted from the NSA, accompanied by Borat-compliant gibberish that reads like someone trying to make you guess whether there's a false flag in play, and if so, who is waving it. (more…)

The last time we wrote about the Casio F-91W digital watch, it was to note the odd connection between the timepiece and suicide bombing, but that's not the only extraordinary activity pursued by aficionados of the watch: they also love to mod 'em. (more…)

Joi Ito, the MIT Media Lab director, has an interesting proposal for managing his "partial attention problem during meetings." Joi spends between 2-3 hours on email in the morning, and another 2-3 hours at night. In addition to that, he "must diligently triage email during the day." He also has a lot of meetings, and some of those meetings do not require his full attention. He needs to attend only to answer occasional questions or make decisions. So he proposes two kinds of meetings: "full attention" and "partial attention," which can be scheduled as such.

Oklahoma GOP congressperson Markwayne Mullin demonstrated that he has absolutely no clue how our government works. In belligerent statements, where he swore at his constituents, Mullin claims that having once paid taxes he is somehow exempt from having to represent the people in his district.Via TPM:

I just had my morning cup of this flavorful, aromatic organic ​darjeeling​ black tea. Vahdam says to use 2 grams for an 8-ounce cup, but I use 5.5 grams in 10-ounces if water. Amazon has a lightning sale on the tea right now $15 for a one-pound bag. I paid $28 on the last bag I bought in February. I just ordered another!

Whenever I leave town I put the can on my kitchen counter.Loftus Three Snakes in a Can - King Deluxe Mixed Nuts Prank via Amazon

If Huntsville, Texas sounds like the kind of place you'd like to kick your boots off and sit a spell, you might rent this beaut of a boot, featuring two bedrooms, a bath, and an open-air deck on the top.(more…)

On its opening day, the annual Star Wars convention in Orlando, Florida shared this lovely tribute to the late, great Carrie Fisher.

Prominent lawyer Thomas Demetrio lambastes United Airlines – as well as all airlines and big corporations in general – for their bully culture in this outstanding speech at a press conference.About airlines, he says, "They have the highest duty of care to provide protection and safety to its fair paying passengers. That was not done.""For a long time, airlines – United in general – have bullied us. They have treated us less than we deserve."Demetrio then describes what we should expect from airlines. "Here's what we want as a society: We want fairness in how people treat us. We want respect. And we want dignity. That's it! It's not a big deal. This seems so simple. Forget the law for a minute that requires common decency and treatment of passengers. Just treat us with respect like your really care."This is the kind of speech that movements are made from.The above is a ten-minute clip. Click here for the full hour-length speech.

In 1937, Polish bricklayer Jan Gwiżdż made a matchstick violin that traveled Europe as a curiosity. When Jan's grandson Hubert Gwiżdż took possession of it, he decided to get it rated for concert performances.(more…)

Constructive Interference is a laser-cut sculpture that demonstrates the "double slit" phenomenon that causes periodic wave patterns. I've posted about the math involved previously.(more…)

Japan-based food vloggers Simon and Martina try the only Frappuccino drink that comes with its own pie crust lid.

Melissa Ng wanted to make some cool armor, so she ignored all the guys who told her what women's armor is supposed to look like and spent 518 hours researching, designing and creating this masterpiece. (more…)

Welcome to Sesame Street, Julia!In March, Sesame Street announced plans to bring Julia—a muppet character with autism who’s appeared in books, apps, and other supplemental material—onto its flagship show. And she finally made her official debut on the iconic block this week. In her first appearance, which you can watch above, Big Bird meets Julia for the first time and learns about the many things that make her special and unique. Vox’s Dylan Matthews, who is autistic himself, has a great piece explaining the many subtle but important choices Sesame Street made in how to introduce Julia. And he points out one or two areas in which the show could potentially improve its autistic representation in the future too.Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at Julia’s creation:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw0_KMBC9-M

Who needs anesthesia when you have a sharp rock and some naturally-occurring asphalt to fill a cavity? Archaeologists found evidence of Paleolithic dentistry. (more…)

How can watching dominoes fall be more delightful? How about if it's filmed in 360 degrees? This ingenious circular tower by FlippyCat makes great use of the fancy camera.(more…)

Wikipedia on composer Alvin Lucier's I am sitting in a room (1969):

NASA's JPL is counting down the days to the scheduled end of Cassini's mission in September. Erik Wernquist created this awe-inspiring overview of Cassini's final months of existence.(more…)

The meow you know!

Advances in Atmospheric Sciences reports that flying is going to get more and more turbulent, even at cruising altitudes, because of climate change:(more…)