Wells Fargo got caught ripping off millions of customers by setting up fake accounts in their names, then billing them for "services" related to those accounts, sometimes tanking their credit-ratings, costing them jobs, even their houses -- but the company says you're not allowed to sue them because their employees fraudulently signed your name to a "binding arbitration" agreement that forces you to take your case to a fake judge whose salary they pay. (more…)

Carla and I took a one-week trip to Tokyo. It was my sixth visit to Japan's capital, and it was my favorite so far. For the next few days, I'll be writing about recommended things to do there. See them all here.After walking around peaceful Yoyogi Park, we crossed the street and entered one of the busiest pedestrian streets in the world: Takeshita-dōri. This youth-oriented strip has fashion boutiques, restaurants, candy and ice cream shops, and the (now commonplace in Japan) cat and owl cafes, where you pay by the hour to spend time with animals. The crowd on Takeshita-dōri is made up of about 20% tourists and 80% Japanese teenagers. There are long lines to get into some of the stores and restaurants. The longest line was for a place called Johnny's. At least 100 people were waiting to get in. Every person in line was a Japanese teenage girl. The line was broken up into two separate queues. One line was in front of Johnny's. And another line was down the street, next to Harajuku station. The girls were waiting patiently for a uniformed guard to escort them into the main queue in batches. We thought Johnny's was a clothing store, so we decided to go back in the afternoon when the crowds had thinned to see if there were things to buy for our daughters, but when we went inside it was just a big maze-like room with thousands of small photographs of teenage boys taped to the walls. The photos had numbers on them and the girls were all carrying clipboards as the studied the photos and made marks on the clipboard. As far as we could figure out, the photos are of teen idols, and the girls were choosing which photos to buy once they reached the cashier at the end of the line.For some reason, there was a long queue for the lackluster American chain restaurant, Eggs N Things:We wouldn't have eaten there even if there was no line. Instead, we walked a little further and found a place called Eco Farm Cafe 632 (open 9am - 11pm). It looked good inside. When we entered, the server asked if we didn't mind sitting in the smoking section, because the non-smoking section was full. As there were no people in the smoking section, we said OK. I'm surprised Japan still allows smoking inside restaurants.We ordered a set meal, which included coffee or tea, a croissant, ham, salad, and an egg in a bowl of polenta. It was delicious. The meal for the both of us cost about $15. They have a lot of tasty looking pastries. The coffee is roasted on the premises and the vegetables come from the restaurant's organic farm.We spent most of the rest of the day wandering around the streets between and around Omotesandō and Takeshita. The streets are small, twisty, and slightly hilly. Surprises in this quiet neighborhood -- which has a mix of houses, apartments, cafes, bookstores, antique shops, and clothing stores -- are around every corner. We found tiny stores with closed metal doors that you had to open to see what was inside. Some of the doors were only five feet high so we had to duck to get in. We visited Rockin Jelly Bean's art gallery, Erostika (12pm - 8pm), and a steampunk gothic lolita fashion store with custom outfits that looked like they weighed 20 pounds with all the hoses, straps, and brass things attached to them.In the same area is a place called Koffee Mameya (10am - 6pm) , which I'd heard about before we left the US. It's in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It's a black wooden box with a short door and no sign to let you know what it is. When you step inside, the box has another door that lead to a small, dimly lit room with two uniformed men behind a counter. The men are standing in front of small bags of coffee. There's an espresso machine, a grinder, and a pour over coffee set-up. The men spoke English and gave me a sheet of paper that had the different kinds of coffee available that day, arranged in order of how darkly they'd been roasted. I picked one in the middle and asked to have it served as espresso. It cost 500 yen (about $4.50). It was very flavorful, so I bought a 150 gram bag of beans for 2000 yen (about $18). The barista asked me what kind of grinder and espresso machine I have at home and he filled out a small form with information (weight of beans, water temperature extraction time) about how I should make the coffee using my equipment. Koffee Mameya was one of my favorite experiences of a day filled with wonder.For dinner, we went back to our neighborhood and ate at Tanbo, a wonderful and inexpensive place where you mix rice, grilled food, and green tea in a bowl. Read a review at the NY Times: In Tokyo, Lots to Eat For Very Little.Tomorrow - day 3!

Yesterday, Congress voted to bar the FCC from ever making a rule that limits how your ISP can spy on you and sell your data, without your permission. (more…)

Enjoy Joe Pitzo's charming, verge-of-tears tour of a house he recently inherited. Vertical video is surely the least of his NSFW sins. Now, it's true that one can never be sure anyone is who they say they are on the internet, but as a man of Italian descent, I do recommend a home inspector who has a nice ground-penetrating radar. We all cope in different ways.

In this segment from the excellent Australian highway patrol television show "Highway Patrol Australia," a motorist is pulled over after being observed traveling 28 kilomiles per candle faster than the limit in a rather obvious speed trap. Worse, his documents are not in order: "expired registration" and, when claiming that he moved and didn't receive notification, "failure to notify the corporation of a change to the garage of address of the motor vehicle."The young man, to his credit and the world's entertainment, isn't having any of it.

Police who rely on vulnerabilities in crooks' devices are terminally compromised; the best way to protect crime-victims is to publicize and repair defects in systems, but every time a hole is patched, the cops lose a tool they rely on the attack their own adversaries. (more…)

M.C. Escher: Adventures in Perception (1971) is a 20-minute Dutch documentary about the artist and includes scenes of him working in his studio. From Open Culture:

One of the music industry's dumbest, most pernicious talking-points is the "value gap" (AKA the "value recognition right") which is code for, "Online platforms should employ an army of copyright lawyers to assess everything that users share for copyright compliance." (more…)

The EVATAR is a working model of a reproductive system made from a mouse ovary and bits of a human uterus, cervix, vagina, fallopian tubes, and liver. Developed by Northwestern University researcher Teresa Woodruff and her colleagues, the EVATAR is intended to help better test the effects of medicines and toxins on women. And now it's completed its first full menstrual cycle. From National Geographic:

What's left in life after creating the World's Slowest Saw? YouTuber DangerousAndAwesome took his dream to new heights with a battery pack, Arduino display, and a sinister scene where the saw cuts a rope in epic Damoclean fashion. (more…)

For a generation, Americas anti-trust enforcers have walked away from their duties, gripped by an ideology that says that bigger companies mean more profits (which benefit the rich) and lower prices (which benefit everyone else). (more…)

I get a huge kick out of the videos of the always-entertaining nerd whisperer Jenny Nicholson. If you haven't seen her channel, check it out and watch as she sits on her bed, surrounded by sci-fi plushies, and shares her quirky, sometimes labyrinthine, and often convincing theories and opinions on sci-fi and fantasy films, comic books, novels, and other nerd media fodder.In her latest video, she answers many requests she's apparently had for doing ASMR videos by explaining ten reasons why her answer is no. But she delivers her ten reason AS an ASMR video, right down to tapping, scratching, and scrunching things as she talks. One of her ten reasons made me laugh out loud:"I just don't know how I'm supposed to take myself seriously when I'm crinkling bags for an hour."For those unfamiliar, ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is an intense tingling sensation some people claim they experience when they hear certain soft voices, pleasant repetitive sounds, or while watching someone doing a particularly mundane, repetitive activity.I'm sure Jenny is going to get a lot of grief from ASMRtists for seemingly making fun of them, but I would hope they'd have a healthy sense of humor about it all. Several commenters who claim to experience ASMR said that they laughed at her reasons for not doing it. I do not have ASMR, but I do enjoy listening to some ASMR audio as I'm going to sleep and I'm fascinated by the whole phenomenon and the numerous, surreal, and just plain bizarre videos people are producing in the genre. An hour of nothing but crinkling bags? Andy Warhol would be so proud.

(more…)

Gallup's latest poll reveals that Trump's approval rating is at an all time low of 36%. This is probably his bare rock base, who would cheer him for repealing the Bill the Rights (except for the 2nd Amendment) on the grounds that it was Unconstitutional.

Somehow I ran across this music, I liked it, and it wasn't recorded 30+ years ago!I've been enjoying Halestorm's 2015 release Into the Wild Life.

Ross Marquand (Walking Dead) is also a great voice impressionist. Here he is impersonating actors delivering lines for movies they never appeared in: John C. Reilly in Taxi Driver, James Gandolfini in The Godfather, Jack Nicholson in Taken, Brad Pitt in Jaws, and so on.

Over at Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix has just written an incredibly in-depth history of the hula, from its roots as a sacred dance to its kitschy personification as a dashboard doll. For her piece, Hix spoke with Constance Hale, a hula dancer herself, whose new book, The Natives Are Restless, focuses on authentic, 21st-century expressions of the hula.Snip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-W4-BIqFwsAfter an escalator malfunctioned and reversed its course at high speed, sending shoppers sprawling into a mall concourse, two engineers called in to investigate were themselves arrested and charged with tampering with evidence.

Tourist Maykool Coroseo Acuña, 25, was lost in the Bolivian Amazon for nine days. He says that he was only able to survive thanks to "a group of monkeys, who dropped him fruit and lead him to shelter and water every day." And that isn't even the strangest part of the story surrounding Acuña. From Elizabeth Unger's fascinating article in National Geographic:

(NSFW language)Funny: In Florida, it's unlawful to have sex with a porcupine. Sad: In Russia, it's illegal to tell minors that gay people exist. (Sam O'Nella)

A weirdly fascinating single-serve site: How many places are named Pittsburgh? (Spoiler: three!)There are 15 New Yorks, 29 Londons, 53 Parises, 248 San Franciscos and 320 San Antonios. But there is only one Truth or Consequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oBHeoF2nOcThis is presented on the viral internet as a clever 1991 cigarette commercial for "Sutaffu" cigarettes, but it appears to be from Topknot Detective, an Australian entry in the annals of Steve Oedekerk-style problematic remix humor. Note: includes child subjected to offscreen slapstick violence.Here is an indisputably real Japanese cigarette commercial from 1991, introducing Sir Charles Sheen as himself:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc21PlNtthU

What could be more fun than a slingshot that shoots tiny airplanes? A slingshot that shoots tiny glowing airplanes of course! These toy planes are outfitted with ultra-bright LEDs, so you can fly all night without losing them in the trees.Whether you are a regular-sized child, or an overgrown adult one, these light-up flyers offer endless entertainment. With three included, you can get into some midnight shenanigans with your two best friends (or with kids if you're into sharing or whatever). Launch them through the air with the rubber band sling, or just toss them by hand to see who has the strongest aviator arms.Each member of the fleet is complete with red-hot flame decals to ensure that you’ll be the reddest baron at the park. Pick up these LED Toy Planes for $19.99, reduced from $24.99.Explore other Best-Sellers in our store:

NASA has always been an early adopter of technology like virtual and augmented reality for training. Here's a cool glimpse into how they train future ISS and landing party astronauts. (more…)

Over the weekend, two episodes of Mister Roger's Neighborhood "Conflict" series unexpectedly appeared on YouTube after being unavailable for three decades. YouTube quickly removed them, but to many, the timing felt related to Trump's plans to defund PBS. (more…)

Call it The Landmaid's Tale: two girls were barred from boarding a flight by a United Airlines agent Sunday, and the airline confirmed that leggings are against a dress policy it applies to people traveling on passes issued to employees and their dependents.

It's not just Mexican cement giant Cemex that's refusing to bid on the Great Wall of Trump; many of the firms in the super-concentrated large-scale construction sector are signalling their unwillingness to participate in the wall's construction. (more…)

Are you an urban police force thinking about how to control your fellow humans? Look no farther! Your pals at Bozena have an all-new RIOT system, a crowd-control killdozer for all your protest-suppressing needs! (more…)

Trumpcare went down in flames yesterday, and the flames smelled faintly of burning Trumphair. But the president's personal humiliation was shared with adviser Steve Bannon, according to reports, whose behavior around conservative Republicans made a joke of Trump's ultimatum.Mike Allen quotes him thus:

Some pretty good action sequences in this sendup of John Wick, with hot lead replaced by pliant foam projectiles. (more…)

If Mythbusters and Jackass had a brother they kept in the attic and never talked about, he would be FarmtruckandAZN. Farmtruck, the brains of the outfit, invented the Nitrous Chair. (more…)

The use of "them" as a gender-neutral pronoun goes back hundreds of years, but the weaponizing of grammar as a way to tell people how to talk (rather than a way to understand what speakers are saying) made the practice anathema, creating strong headwinds for people looking to adapt usage to accommodate a spectrum of gender identities. (more…)

Our guest this week on the Cool Tools Show is Danielle Applestone. Danielle is a material scientist, co-founder and CEO of Other Machine Co., the leading manufacturer of high-precision desktop CNC milling machines. Formerly, Danielle ran a DARPA project to develop digital design software and manufacturing tools for the classroom. Danielle's team took that technology and launched Other Machine Co. in 2013.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageShow notes:Monarch Instrument Examiner 1000 ($1,200)"I came across this electronic stethoscope as part of our manufacturing process. We would get motors from a manufacturer that looked balanced and met a spec, but once we put the whole machine together, sometimes a machine would have a lot of vibration and we didn't know how to quantify that vibration or to know what was good or what was bad. … There’s a lot of intuition when you're putting something complicated together like "Well, it feels right," or "It doesn't feel right." That's really hard to do so we found this amazing thing, which cut a ton of time out of our manufacturing process and now we have beautiful graphs of everything. We know exactly what things vibrate and which ones don't. You can use it on musical instruments. It's an amazing tool. Once you have one you realize how much you needed one in your life.”Bicycle inner tubes with holes in them"I came across bicycle inner tubes with holes in them through a friend who had made a sail boat that was attached only with these bicycle inner tubes —it was a catamaran. The reason why they’re so important is they are waterproof, they stretch, and you don’t have to tie them in knots, so you can latch things together really quickly and then undo them, and make a new configuration. … They’re used a little bit like a bungee cord, but bungee cords are really expensive and you have to make do with the hooks whereas if you take a long inner tube that has a hole in it — you’re not going to use it anyway — slice it up into strips. It’s like a variable length bungee cord, but it also doesn’t have the hooks so you can just wrap it around itself and tuck it under and it’ll stay put.”The Encyclopedia of Country Living ($20)"This is a great tool. This is so comprehensive for every little thing. I moved out into Kentucky and lived on 1200 acres for a while and didn't have much. It was the go-to for, "Okay, we need to build a shanty for chickens. We need to learn how to clean a chicken." It has everything, like “How to bury your own dead.” … The thing that’s magic about this book is it has the right level of detail, just enough to get yourself in trouble. … It’s just enough to get you going and then you can kind of DIY the rest. I still use it. The pages are all rained on, and moldy, and whatever, but it’s well loved.”X-ray Photoelectron Spectrometer“Yeah, well we just went from just about the lowest tech to the highest tech thing I’ve ever laid my hands on. … What's great about this tool is it's super useful for telling what's on the surface of materials. I used to be a material scientist and I worked on lithium ion batteries. The surface is where all the action is. There's not a lot of techniques out there that are nondestructive. Usually, if you invent a material, you have a sample, you have to crush it up or put it on a slide, you have to do something to it that mixes the surface in with the bulk. Sometimes, you don’t want that. … The X-ray Photoelectron Spectrometer is amazing because you can just put a sample in and it’s nondestructive …. How it works is you take a beam of x-ray, so you shoot photons at the surface of your material and those photons have enough energy to pick off electrons. A photon goes in, ejects an electron, and then there’s a collector that collects that electron and measures the kinetic energy, measures how fast it was moving. Then, if you know the energy of your x-ray going in, and the energy of that electron that you caught, you can just subtract and figure out how tightly bound was that electron to my surface. What's cool about that is if you know how tightly a molecule was hanging onto it's electron, you can tell what that molecule was. Whether it was a sulfur dioxide, or sulfur monoxide, the electrons that are swimming around those molecules will be held differently depending on what those molecules are. … The place that I used one was at the University of Texas at Austin. They’re quite common, but they’re usually at universities, or national labs … They’re millions of dollars.”

A better understanding how a sperm swims its way toward an egg could help inform new treatments for male infertility. Researchers from the University of York have now come up with a mathematical formula to model how large numbers of moving sperm interact with fluid they're swimming through. From the University:

It's not even clear where it's from, but alongside various stories about Trump's healthcare legislation woes, it's been on the BBC News homepage for what, two days now? For this morning's one, they've started zooming into it. By tomorrow, if the legislation has yet to pass, we'll be inside his weird angry tired mouth.If someone could figure out the source (it doesn't seem to be Reuters) that would be fabulous. I've used a fractal image enhancement application to make this 2600-pixel wide enlargement, but it's just not the same as a nice raw wire shot.

The latest poll emailed by Trump HQ to its mailing lists asks supporters to click based on whether they "stand with President Trump" or "believe Democrats and Fake News": click the former and you're taken to a donation solicitation, click the latter and you are taken to a page where you're informed that "Democrats, the media, and the entire opposition have tried to take down President Trump by attacking him, spreading fake news and fake polls, and spreading fake news." (more…)

Custom coffee vessels are the perfect piece of office flair, but it’s just a matter of time before your VOTE FOR PEDRO mug will start to lose its relevant wit. Why not have a new one every day, with whatever silly nonsense you want sticking off the sides? You can save big on your novelty coffee cup budget with the Build-On Brick Mug.Do you want Batman villains sticking feet-first out of your mug? A blocky medieval chalice? A second coffee mug attached to your coffee mug? A mug on wheels? The possibilities are endless! When the boss gets wind of your constant creative output, you’ll be running the place in no time.Made from BPA-free plastic, this cup holds 12oz of liquid, so yes it does have utility beyond fun. Get the Build-On Brick Mug for 50% off the sticker price—just $19.99.Explore other Best-Sellers in our store:

Dr Gale Ridge is a public entomologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, where an average of 23 people a day call, write or visit; an increasing proportion of them aren't inquiring about actual insects, they're suffering from delusional parasitosis, and they're desperate and even suicidal. (more…)

Time's cover-story about Donald Trump features a long interview with the president, in which he insists, over and over again, that he is not a liar. It is full of lies. (more…)

With the shambolic FARC peace deal finally in place, the Colombian government is hoping to shift the country's farmers from Colombia's major cash crop: the coca leaves that are refined into the world's cocaine supply. Perhaps with the guerrillas no longer defending the crops they relied on for operating capital, Colombia can put coca behind it. (more…)

I hate to travel, but Roku's Streaming Stick lets me take my home TV viewing experience with me.While we've tried AppleTV, Xbox One, and a Google Chromecast stick, my daughter and I both prefer Roku. We've got all the apps we like loaded, and our profile's and linked devices keep everything current.The stick is just too handy. I plug it into the back of my hotel room's TV and magically all my media appears.Roku Streaming Stick (3600R) (2016 Model) via Amazon

A sharp increase in right-wingers pretending to be black on Twitter as they troll people has been noted.

In 1991 the crew of the MTS Oceanos abandoned the ship and its passengers to disaster. Overcome by bad weather, and bad decision-making, I believe no lives were lost.

Season three of Star Wars Rebels has been fantastic! This week promises an epic showdown.This season we've seen Mon Mothma bring the rebel fleet together, the Mandalorians begin to throw off the yoke of the Empire, and Obi-Wan dispatched an old evil in pure Kenobi style. Now, Grand Admiral Thrawn is set to spring his trap, destroy Phoenix Squadron and cripple the Rebellion.We may know how this works out in the end, but watching them get there is a lot of fun.

Amazing sculptor and automata creator Thomas Kuntz, legendary pin-up artist Olivia De Berardinis, and master event creator Bob Self, have teamed up to create an occult cabaret and bohemian art salon where practitioners and connoisseurs of the darker things in life can meet, mingle, and create!They call it Spirit Drawing, and you can join them on June 3rd, 2017 in Los Angeles.From the Spirit Drawing kickstarter:

Tonight (Thursday, 3/23), San Francisco's magnificent contemporary dance company ODC launches their 2017 season that includes two world-premiere dances, live music, and reprises of Brenda Way's Walk Back the Cat and Kate Weare's Giant. Every year, ODC astounds me with creativity, freshness, and compelling narratives told through sublime motion.Tickets available here.More: "ODC show examines what we hold on to, through dance" (SFGATE)https://vimeo.com/209625112https://vimeo.com/201354863https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZqKt95x2sM

Poking a golden tortoise beetle ("goldbug") triggers the insect's color to change from gold to a red-orange. Inspired by the natural system underlying that insectoid superpower, MIT researchers have developed flexible sensors circuits that can be 3-D printed. Eventually, the technology could lead to sensor-laden skin for robots. From MIT News:

The perfect plot flow fires me up even as Uncanny Valley Leia brings a tear to my eye. (Barre Fong)

Emmy Jo heated up my daydreams.

Libretaxi is an open source project that lets anyone become a rideshare driver in less than a minute; it has more than 20,000 users worldwide, and is maintained by Roman Pushkin, who started the project in December 2016 and is now planning to quit his job and work on it full time. (more…)