Norway is one of the few places cold enough to support the seasonal sport of frozen sand skateboarding. Worth a watch just for the gorgeous vistas with the sun on the horizon. (more…)

American penitentiaries, in idealized Quaker imaginings, were to be a place for reflective penitence followed by forgiveness. That's not how it worked out, especially for the poor. And the problem goes far beyond prison reform: (more…)

Tardigrades, the tiny creatures also known as water bears, are a house favorite at Boing Boing. Able to survive in the most extreme conditions, from alcohol immersion to empty space, their resilience poses difficult scientific questions. Scientists believe they've found the answer, and have published their findings in Molecular Cell.Wired's Matt Simon writes:

Every year, Bruce Sterling closes the SXSW Interactive Festival with a wide-ranging, hour-long speech about the state of the nation: the format is 20 minutes' worth of riffing on current affairs, and then 40 minutes of main thesis, scorchingly delivered, with insights, rage, inspiration and calls to action. (more…)

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Who are the wealthy Russian citizens who've invested a total of almost $100 million worth of properties owned by U.S. President Donald J. Trump? An investigative report by Reuters digs into that question.(more…)

In Washington today, members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee said they have scheduled a hearing on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election for March 30.(more…)

Well, that was awkward.(more…)

They're $65 each, handmade from "lava granules plus significant heat ceramic refractory," available in black and white. (via Geekologie)

I need to stretch out my hamstrings and lower back, a lot. This $9 PT strap helps.I ceased being super active and spent much of the last year or so in "avoid backpain" mode. Slowly, I lost more of my range of motion. When I did go and do supremely dumb things like ride a motorcycle 600 miles in 2 days, or nearly strand a VW bus in a not-so-dry Mexican lake bed, I hurt real, real bad for a real long time.I decided to start doing something about it! Fancy that. Stretching is job one. Refusing to use a pants belt, I got a strap just like the one I used in physical therapy. It helps. Having a dedicated stretching tool right where I'll use it is a good idea in my book.I will not recommend exercises! I use some my PT/pilates folks gave me a few years ago (before I stopped going and slowly began down the road to atrophy,) as I think you need to find what works for you and won't make things WORSE. Google and YouTube offer a ton of help, if you wanna go it alone.Next up is a spinning bike for lower-impact-on-the-back cardio that I enjoy.Therapist’s Choice Stretch Strap via Amazon

Economist Tim Harford (previously) traces the history of denialism and "fake news" back to Big Tobacco's cancer denial playbook, which invented the tactics used by both the Brexit and Trump campaigns to ride to victory -- a playbook that dismisses individual harms as "anaecdotal" and wide-ranging evidence as "statistical," and works in concert with peoples' biases (smokers don't want cigarettes to cause cancer, Brexiteers want the UK to be viable without the EU, Trump supporters want simple, cruel policies to punish others and help them) to make emprically wrong things feel right. (more…)

Another day, another Trumpwreck.The BBC:

From the newly-released archives.

Microsoft gives away (ie forces) upgrades to Windows 10, and the price (ie reason) is that it is now "infested" with advertising, writes Tom Warren. Ads in the file explorer. Ads in core apps. Ads for Microsoft's browser that pop up as system notifications when he uses Chrome.

World of Wonder did a wonderful interview with longtime Boing Boing pal and contributor Andrea James about being a transgender person in the time of President Donald Trump.(more…)

Yes, Destination Isolation has some lovely footage of Asher Pacey's surfing. But what make it great is "Pip, Pip Yeah" by Indonesian girl group Dara Puspita. (more…)

The WOOBI is a sad sign of the times. It's a toylike respirator system designed for the 300 million children living in severe air pollution. (more…)

The technology to create emotionless, plastic-faced "uncanny valley" animation is getting cheaper, and those placed in charge of using it are giving less and less of a fuck.https://twitter.com/Pepipopa/status/842436629746839552Another compendium here from xLetalis.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEc0sWXpSAY

Last fall, I wrote about the strange case of Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, a left-wing billionaire heir to the Target fortune who came to power and reversed his Republican predecessors' Reagonomic idiocy, instead raising taxes on rich people, increasing public spending, and creating shared prosperity for the people of Minnesota. (more…)

Goldfish-driven vehicles continue to make great strides since our previous coverage.Now they are higher up and on a sturdier wheelbase, allowing free movement around any gallery where this iteration resides.Quentin Destieu and Sylvain Huguet say:

Despite Trump's denial of climate change the the ghastly attacks on climate science and mitigation in the new proposed budget, the Carbon Bubble -- which overprices hydrocarbons and the industries that rely on them, as though we'll be burning all of them with impunity -- is about to pop. (more…)

A ruling about a DC university held that posting course videos to the open web without subtitling them violated the Americans With Disabilities Act (while keeping them private to students did not) (I know: weird), and this prompted UC Berkeley to announce the impending removal of 20,000 open courseware videos from Youtube. (more…)

Buzzfeed's Jesse McLaren created this important educational video, in which Trump spokesliar Melissa McCarthy, I mean Sean Spicer, shows everyone what happens when you wear a green tie on television.(more…)

https://youtu.be/Bxg_QRyGlx0Sassy Trump is back, this time giving a beautiful, very beautiful speech at a spectacular auto-mo-bile business factory in Mitchigan, as he pronounces it.(more…)

I'm one of those people who has trouble writing at length on my main machine, because of all the distractions it offers. Email and messaging and social networking: they all combine to form the "ludic loop" that Mark recently blogged about.I've tried various things over the years to help keep me focused, from simple full-screen word processors such as WriteRoom and FocusWriter to gadgets like the Alphasmart and Freewrite. But apps are a tab away from fun, and glorified typewriters tend to expose their limitations in odd and frustrating ways.After a lot of experimentation, I've arrived at a best-of-both-worlds option: proper apps running on a tiny old iMac from when Apple switched to Intel chips. It's modern enough to run good software, play music and hook up to useful services like Dropbox, but so old (and tiny) that there's not much else you can do on it except work. And it's immobile, too, so it creates a space just for that one task, which I think helps.Even web browsing is just right: the older OS X 10.6-compatible version of Firefox it runs will access research resources well enough, but the media load on dangerously interesting sites (including Twitter and Facebook) renders them almost unusable.There are dangers to this approach. If I were cunning I'm sure I could rebuild the ludic loop on this, by hitting the mobile versions of websites and exploring what other apps work on Snow Leopard. But its age (and adorable low-res 17" display) are so far dissuading me from trying. I'm writing more.People keep asking about this keyboard! It's the Planck ($100 on Massdrop). I made the wrist wrest myself out of a plank, to go with those old KLH Model 19 speakers. I'm not entirely convinced the Planck is for me, but fans swear by them. I'll probably switch to something just as compact but a little more traditional, such as the MiniVan.

Owners of Google Home smart-speakers got a surprise today when their personal assistants finished the "daily briefing" (a rundown of weather, calendar reminders an traffic info) with a plug for Disney's new Beauty and the Beast movie: ""By the way, Disney’s live action Beauty and The Beast opens today," followed by a long spiel for the movie. (more…)

Like an app-controlled faucet or a WiFi-enabled fire extinguisher, the words “Bluetooth Cooler” might make you think of a rejected internet-of-things concept. But trust us, adding wireless technology to products isn’t always "innovation for the sake of innovation."(more…)

In its 1970s heyday, Detroit-based music magazine Creem was home to seminal editors/writers/photographers like Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus, Patti Smith, Bob Gruen, Jenny Lens, and so many more. Indeed, it was in its pages that Dave Marsh coined the term "punk rock" in 1971. Creem's content was superb. It was unabashedly critical of fame, didn't take itself too seriously, and documented the more underground artists, bands, and scenes of the time, from the MC5 to Alice Cooper, New York City's glam rock culture to the proto-punks of the US and UK.Boy Howdy! is director Scott Crawford's forthcoming documentary about Creem and I absolutely can't wait to see it. Until then, I'll proudly wear the fantastic t-shirt below, scribbled by my pal Jess Rotter! And yes, they're also selling Creem's classic Boy Howdy! t-shirt, handsomely modeled by John Lennon below.Boy Howdy! and Creem magazine merch

Rolling Stone's Mac McClelland tells the story of the physicians bravely breaking the law by treating patients with MDMA, ayahuasca, DMT, LSD, and other hallucinogens. From RS:

We all did so well keeping our kids away from obvious traps like 4chan, but it turns out that during those endless unsupervised hours watching Minecraft videos and Twitch streams, their hosts were muttering on about anime and black IQs and what to do about The Jews. And now our kids are hitting their teens, it's coming out of them like the first belches of sewage from a blocked toilet, and, well, here we all are in 2017!

The Flexi-Pen is the writing utensil of choice in prisons because it can't be used to shiv someone. I bet it's fun to fidget with too. Amazon sells a five pack for $13.

On Monday, Goodwill workers in Monroe, Washington opened a donated cooler and found five bags of weed inside. (That's 60 times the amount that's legal to possess in Washington.) If the donation was intentional, that's some very good will. However, Debbie Willis of the Monroe Police Department said that the stash is currently "waiting yearly burn of that type of evidence.""There are many people on social media claiming it's theirs, but we have yet to have one walk through the door," she told CNN.

Over at the Stanford Social Innovation Review, my friend and Institute for the Future colleague Marina Gorbis looks back at Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th century invention of the printing press and the unintended consequences of our own "Gutenberg Moment":

Underground comix cartoonist Jay Lynch, perhaps best known for Bijou Funnies and his contributions to the Garbage Pail Kids trading card series, died March 5, reports the New York Times..

Former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli became famous for hitting AIDS patients with a price hike in a life-saving drug—and then for the fraud charges for which he awaits his day in court. But he's also a bit of an odd duck, eating shit on campus and getting kicked off Twitter for harassment. Now he's been noticed snapping up web domains that include critics' and enemies' names.

McD's claims their official account was hacked, and the tweet has been deleted, but the internets are skeptical.

A woman in Avondale, Alabama, was recorded on a gas station's security cameras leaping from a moving car to escape a man who had kidnapped her and stuffed her in the trunk.

My latest Publishers Weekly column announces the launch-date for my long-planned "Shut Up and Take My Money" ebook platform, which allows traditionally published authors to serve as retailers for their publishers, selling their ebooks direct to their fans and pocketing the 30% that Amazon would usually take, as well as the 25% the publisher gives back to them later in royalties. (more…)

Trump went full berzerker last night after a judge in Hawaii shut down his new Muslim ban before it could go into effect, but he's only got himself to blame. (more…)

Privacy International interviewed 57 sources for their report on the link between surveillance and torture and murder in Kenya, including 32 law enforcement, military or intelligence officers with direct firsthand knowledge of the programs. (more…)

I'm staying in a hotel with nothing but paper cups in the room, and I'm not travelling with my usual suitcase in which I stash my emergency polypropelene folding cup, so I'm reduced to making my hotel coffee using the awkward hold-the-sleeve method, in which you grip the sleeve as hard as you can with your left hand while pushing down on the piston with your right, supporting the press so you don't crush the paper cup beneath. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ierqMW_FxfEIn 1987, Skid Roper and Mojo Nixon posed the musical question: What happened to my Lincoln Logs? At last: an answer! (more…)

Donald Trump reacted to a Hawaii court's smackdown on his “watered-down” (his words) travel ban with a full-on fascist rant in Tennessee, where he rallied the crowds into screaming “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, then attacked the U.S. judicial system.(more…)

It’s hard not to use a word like “groovy” when it comes to describing Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie. There’s the setting: a crumbling estate in swinging London, where David Bowie, his wife Angie, and assorted others are living and creating in the late ‘60s. There’s the loose, freewheeling quality to both the lettering and drawings, which use simple outlines and pops of color. And there’s the sly humor, which comes through in both the dialogue and breaks from the main story (which show us how to be a music snob, how to be a fashionista, etc.) One of the joys of this book is seeing the time period come to life. People like producer Tony Visconti, T. Rex frontman Marc Bolan, original Pink Floyd member Syd Barrett, and dissatisfied Beatle John Lennon pass through these pages. They worry about their music, experiment with sexual identities, and try to fend off feelings of creative envy. And, if they’re Bowie, they develop their most iconic persona (Ziggy Stardust) while dealing with poignant family issues (the hospitalization of his schizophrenic brother Terry). This book is a delight. I learned plenty about Bowie despite having already read a biography, but Haddon Hall doesn’t feel educational. It shows in its not-too-serious way that creativity can be a grind, and that none of us — not even David Bowie — was born a fully formed artist.Haddon Hall: When David Invented Bowie

Back in September 2014, I wrote about the design package for Grady Hendrix's horror novel Horrorstor - a classic haunted house story set at an IKEA and designed like an IKEA catalog.Via Quirk Books:

An Amtrak train pulls into a station somewhere up east. The only problem? The tracks are already occupied by snow, piled a good six inches higher than the platform itself. Commuter Nick Colvin knows what's about to happen and has his iPhone set to record slow-mo footage, but as he writes, there was "a more spectacular arrival than expected."

"Mean Bean" isn't coming to theaters this summer, but it might be coming to your nightmares tonight. John Loberger's recut of Rowan Atkinson's "great TV, ghastly movie" classic becomes genuinely terrifying when you're invited to take his antics seriously.Previously: 50 Shades of Bean.

What political insights can we glean from this map of favorite Disney princesses in each US State?From Decluttr: