Russian emigre -- and Putin opponent -- Keith Gessen writes at length and very well about the different guises that Vladimir Putin takes on in the imaginations of western political writers: genius, nothing, secret stroke survivor, KGB agent, killer, kleptocrat, a man with the suspicious name of "Vladimir." (more…)

Maybe the 11Foot8 bridge or the 10Foot6 bridge could invest in these nifty signs to stop inattentive drivers from using a bridge to give their trucks a moon roof. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQTlqIwvs8EPhilips has acquired Luciom, a French startup that makes Li-Fi products, which allow for very fast network connections over short distances by flickering an LED at speeds that are too fast to register on the human eye, and which can ever work in the dark by operating at low dimness settings the human eye perceives as "off." (more…)

M. David Weisman, a magistrate judge in Illinois's Eastern Division, denied a federal warrant application that would have allowed law enforcement officers to force suspects to unlock their mobile devices with a fingerprint, ruling that the suspects' Fourth Amendment (undue search and seizure) and Fifth Amendment (self-incrimination) rights protected them from being forced to unlock their devices. (more…)

In Even good bots fight, a paper written by Oxford Internet Institute researchers and published in PLOS One, the authors survey the edits and reverts made by Wikipedia's diverse community of bots, uncovering some curious corners where bots -- rate-limited by Wikipedia's rules for bots -- slowly and remorseless follow one another around, reverting each other. (more…)

My friend, the horror writer, Fortean investigator, and educator, Michael Hughes, has been circulating details for a series of occult rituals being planned to cast a "spell to bind Donald Trump and all those who abet him." The basic mission statement of the ritual:

We have Apple TV, Roku, and TiVo but I haven't used them in months. We use our Fire TV Stick for everything, because it just seems to work more smoothly (the Apple TV is the worst of the bunch), also we are Amazon Prime subscribers, so we get a lot of free shows (like the excellent Z, about Zelda Fitzgerald, starring Christina Ricci).Recently Amazon introduced the new Fire TV Stick, which is better in many ways than the old version. It has Alexa voice control built into the remote, so you can just ask it to play or search for a show. The new processor makes it run faster that the old version. It also has better WiFi.I'm going to bring the old one with me when I travel.

Redditor Vadermeer was in a local Goodwill Outlet and happened on a trove of files from Apple engineer Jack MacDonald from 1979-80, when he was manager of system software for the Apple II and ///. (more…)

https://youtu.be/3_qe9zQ0h_4Gavin Grimm is the transgender teen bringing the fight to use a campus bathroom that corresponds to his gender identity, to the Supreme Court. Arguments will begin in March.National Geographic and Katie Couric offer a personal glimpse into Gavin's story. Boing Boing favorite Andrea James served as a consulting producer on this segement.

Ken Norton is a partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures). In the post, he explains how he increased the number of books he read per year from 5 or 6 to 61. One smart thing he did was quickly abandon books that bored him.

Dwitter has a bunch of javascript one-liners (must be 140 characters or less) that display pretty animated graphics. The cool thing is that you can edit the code and see the changes immediately.

In 1965 the Sonics were on the road to punk rock.

My National guitar is a treasured personal artifact, but it was crusted with 17 years of crud. I tried a lot of stuff to get it clean, and in the end Simichrome did the job.(more…)

We love and celebrate the people who sneak into derelict themeparks and photograph their ruins! Beijing, Orlando, Sichuan, South Carolina, Japan, Berlin, New Orleans, even Walt Disney World! (more…)

Monopolies are a well-documented drain on the economy, holding back growth and raising prices to the benefit of the 1% and the detriment of everyone else, and for 100 years, the Democratic party was the party of anti-monopoly, fighting for vigorous anti-trust enforcement, trade unionism, and decentralized power. (more…)

Many insurers offer breaks to people who wear activity trackers that gather data on them; as Cathy "Mathbabe" O'Neil points out, the allegedly "anonymized' data-collection is trivial to re-identify (so this data might be used against you), and, more broadly, the real business model for this data isn't improving your health outcomes -- it's dividing the world into high-risk and low-risk people, so insurers can charge people more. (more…)

Ever since I read Laurie Penny's scathing, insider account of Milo Yiannopoulos and his schtick, I knew that she had his number like no one else -- and now that Yiannopoulos has been disbarred from his position as the useful idiot of the hard-right, I've been wondering what Penny made of the fall from grace. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JnIv5bUoH8&feature=youtu.beAn off-duty cop got into a fight with a group of children who walked on his lawn, dragged a 13-year-old unarmed boy into his yard, pulled his firearm, then fired a shot. Thankfully, he missed. The incident in Anaheim, California, was captured on camera and has already led to protests.

Person of the Year so far in 2017? The Angry Constituent.(more…)

Not since the Reagan era cold war with Russia has apocalyptic awareness been so forefront in the public’s mind. Disturbing incidents ranging from nuclear football Facebook selfies to alarming North Korean military activity now accrue weekly. Sometimes hourly. What can one do besides scroll through Twitter before bedtime and let the news populate our nightmares?The distractions and details are addictive: political murders via improv and a spray bottle, daily revelations of Russian infiltration in US elections and government, and today the president is yelling at Sweden. Tomorrow it might be Ireland. Who knows. We watch the global breakup like helpless children realizing that mom and dad are really getting a divorce. Right now, the sitting US president is not even welcome in the British Parliament, but he regularly tweets flattering sentiments to Russia. But there is a larger story that needs telling--and action.Lost in the noise was the recent breakage of a mile-long stretch of West Antarctica, due to warmer ocean water. It was part of one of the largest glaciers within the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which scientists predict will collapse in the next 100 years. NASA caught the images of the event earlier in the week, but the story broke just as Scott Pruitt was confirmed as head of the Environmental Protection Agency--making it seem as if the Earth did the planetary version of a spit take at the news. Timing aside, it was a big deal.In the distraction of every new development, tweet, or outrage, it’s hard to get a bird’s eye view of what the hell is going on in the literal world. Luckily, Laurie Penny of The Baffler has done that for us, in a brilliant new article that should be required reading for the human race: The Slow Confiscation of Everything: How to think about climate apocalypse. Referencing the daily outrages, legislative battles, and civil division, she writes:

Bob Marley and the Wailers, 1973. The full live set is below, recorded in-studio for the BBC.(more…)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAuI97l3BcY&w=560&h=315]A book of John Wilcock comics is now available

Amazon is giving away three different programming guides (regularly $5 each): HTML & CSS For Beginners, Python Programming, and Java Programming. They are all highly rated.

https://youtu.be/WXJxYNUoJKsThe Clash recorded "Police On My Back" for Sandinista! in 1980, but The Equals (fronted by Eddie Grant) did it on 1967. Here's the Richard-Lester-meets-the-Keystone-Kops video.Here's The Clash's cover:https://youtu.be/Sq_HtgGOIfEBoth are great. I like the Clash's version better.The Clash also covered Toots & The Maytals "Pressure Drop."https://youtu.be/6rb13ksYO0shttps://youtu.be/ZjP8sbdQaq8Both are great. I like Toots & The Maytals' version better.[via]

Stanford history and classics professor Walter Scheidel writes in the Atlantic that the only reliable ways for unequal societies to become more equal is to suffer catastrophes that upend the order of things; Scheidel concludes that our modern, unequal state may not be able to avail itself of a convenient catastrophe for this purpose because "Technology has made mass warfare obsolete; violent, redistributive revolution has lost its appeal; most states are more resilient than they used to be; and advances in genetics will help humanity ward off novel germs." (more…)

TRAPPIST-1 is a star that's 39 light years away from us. The journal Nature reports that it has seven warm, Earthlike planets orbiting it.From Washington Post:

KSU plant biochemical geneticist Raj Nagarajan describes the properties of Thaumatin, Monellin and Brazzein, all found in west African plants that are generally considered safe for consumption; each is a protein, and they are, respectively, 1,000x, 2000x, and 3000x sweeter than sugar. (more…)

Andrew Huang created a MIDI unicorn: a short musical piece that appears as a unicorn when represented in linear musical notation. You can download the MIDI file itself. (more…)

The machine knows what cat parts are and knows where they go, and can glue them together to fit drawings of cats that you provide. Whether the results charm or horrify you might depend on whether you, yourself, are part of the simulation. The Next Web interviews creator Christopher Hesse. (more…)

Police in Malaysia said Wednesday they want to question a senior diplomat from the North Korean embassy in their ongoing investigation into the recent killing of Kim Jong-nam. This twist suggests the possible involvement of the North Korean government in the deadly poisoning of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's estranged half brother.(more…)

A stunning new ad campaign from Nike “pays homage to Middle Eastern athletes and explores the challenges young Arab women aspiring to a professional sporting career may face,” per Vogue.(more…)

My wife, daughter, and I went to see La La Land yesterday. (I'd give it 4.5 stars, Carla gives it 3.5, and Jane gives it 4.) The opening scene was a one-take song-and-dance number shot on a freeway on ramp and it alone is worth the price of admission. Here's an iPhone video shot by Damien Chazelle of a rehearsal of the scene.[via]

Jackie DeShannon's 1969 hit.

This has been one heck of a rainy winter! Touching up spots where lots of water has washed the finish off my aging Belstaff Trialmaster is easiest when done with a bar of Otter Wax.(more…)

The incessant rain in California for the last several weeks is just a taste of what's to come in the formerly drought-plagued state, says Rachel Becker in The Verge.Snip:

Cartoonist Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) says he has forgiven Shia LaBeouf for plagiarizing him because LaBeouf has created an anti-Trump installation.From Daily Beast:

Texas and Chile have remarkably similar flags (though Chile got theirs first, by a matter of decades) and Texas doesn't have a Unicode-defined emoji for its flag (just a sprinkling of proprietary ones that do not cross platforms gracefully), so Texans have taken to using the Chilean flag emoji as a shorthand for the longhorn state. (more…)

Toros Köse created mesmerizing visuals to accompany some of Neil deGrasse Tyson's thought-provoking ideas. The result, Into the Bright Unknown, is a nice way to do a quick reset of your priorities and worries. (more…)

Sculptor Chuck Williams is Kickstarting a naked Trump troll doll with uncannily accurate eyes and hair that's enduring a Beaufort 10 gale. As for the remaining anatomical accuracy... (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5L9ExoOIpcArtisan Daniele Barresi can carve anything into beautiful sculpture: broccoli, papaya, mushrooms. For more lasting works, he creates beautiful sculpted and intaglio soaps:Check out his Instagram and Facebook for more cool creations.• Papaya Orchid - Daniele Barresi (YouTube / Dany's Art Show via Bored Panda)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xMXQLoEGCgRemixers start your engines: "Who knew Alex Trebek could flow?"

The Acoustician performs excellent acoustic, instrumental guitar covers of classic rock songs. See the solo training videos too.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0A3cgV8Ios

Punkt's MP01 is a minimal treat for people wanting a simple but flawless phone—and willing to pay top dollar for a few details done very well. (more…)

Some of these questions are just completely bonkers.Make sure the current administration hears your opinion, as they consider "holding accountable" the free press.

The Russian Foreign Ministry reports today that Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, died suddenly today in New York. He died on Monday age 64, just one day before his 65th birthday.(more…)

This debate is always worth watching again.Revered poet, playwrite and social activist James Baldwin debated a young William F. Buckley at The Cambridge Union in 1965, the question was "Is the American dream at the expense of the American negro?"The students voted 540-160 in favor of Baldwin's thesis. Buckley demonstrates early moves to couch racism and bigotry as States Rights issues.Here is a transcript of Baldwin's speech.

I prefer Noodler's ink, and they have so many varieties I never seem to run out of new ones to try. Depending on what I'm writing, or who I am writing to, I like to change my ink and pen kinda frequently.(more…)

When you meet someone new, do you know what to say but still say the wrong thing? How much do you overanalyze everything that’s happening in your relationships? What do your brain, your heart, and your uterus think when their expectations of you are too high? Adulthood is a Myth explores these questions and more in over 100 comic strips. Writer and artist Sarah Anderson compiled the best of her work from the online “Sarah’s Scribbles” collection and created plenty more comic strips to explain the insecurities and set back introverts face as they come into adulthood. These crisp black-and-white comic strips cover stressful situations like trying on clothes, being in crowds of people, obsessing over your flaws, and making the inevitable but always ill-advised comparisons to people who have figured out more than you have. Other comic strips show the unnamed main character having fun with her body fat, embracing her imperfections, and finding pleasure in little things like lying on warm laundry, wearing men’s hoodies, and embracing holiday costumes. If the title doesn’t make you want to pick it up, the fuzzy sweater on the cover might convince you. Read it all in one sitting or start wherever you’d like as you linger over the expressive drawings, wonder about the talking rabbit, and generally relax with the knowledge that the things that made you think you were weird and alone are universal among introverts.– Megan HipplerAdulthood is a Myth: A Sarah's Scribbles Collection