Adding a sheen of legitimacy to his Presidency, Trump will soon begin to tweet uncontrollably from the @POTUS account. Recode shares the story:

With countless applications for modern life, artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most in-demand fields of study in tech. Beyond modelling human decision making processes and learning abilities, AI can be used to analyze massive volumes of data and create complex interactive systems.This Machine Learning & AI for Business Bundle made mastering these concepts possible for me in an easy to follow way. With 31 hours of content spread across 164 lectures, you will build a foundation of knowledge in a variety of subjects. By learning the R programming language, you will understand the tools used in business analytics that keep companies performing smoothly.Additionally, you will explore the powerful capabilities of Machine Learning to gain insight into advanced topics, including self-driving cars and speech recognition technology.Access to these courses lasts a lifetime, and I still use them as reference material. Get this Machine Learning & AI for Business Bundle for 96% off—just $39 for a limited time only.

366 Weird Movies is a selection of the best (for various definitions of "best"), each reviewed with a clear eye on its weirdness. The descriptions are complete with bullet-point lists of oddities and trivia and an "indelible image" for each flick. [via MeFi]It gets them right, too. For example, it selects Dean Stockwell lip-sync "Candy Colored Clown" for Blue Velvet instead of Frank Booth inhaling rage through an oxygen mask.

ASMRion generates relaxing "Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response" soundscapes for you. There are ten sigils with sliders underneath them, each representing a particular sonic ingredient—"leaves rustling in the wind," "barbershop haircut," "whispering psychopath," etc—that allegedly trigger the vaunted ASMR response. Previously.

City-compare does exactly as its name suggests: select two U.S. cities and it will display various charts and statistics by way of comparison, all cleanly laid out and easy to absorb. For example, you can see at a glance why people call Pittsburgh "The Paris of Appalachia" but Cleveland a "giant Scooby Doo ghost town"

An apartment-dweller in Tver, Russia installed a video camera on his or her front door, looking out into the stairwell, then uploaded a compendium of amusing and/or interesting moments to YouTube. The neighbors seem generally hostile to surveillance, though some of them are in no condition to notice it.Google Translate suggests the following caption: "Pensioner, hammer and inadequate man camera shot war neighbors in apartment building in Tver."Tip: use stickers. Legal, easily carried, completely effective, no damages.

This entry in Reza Farazmand’s ongoing Trash Bird series explains the secret to happiness. You can read more Trash Bird comics on Webtoon.

When the Scottish writer William Sharp died in 1905, his wife revealed a surprising secret: For 10 years he had kept up a second career as a reclusive novelist named Fiona Macleod, carrying on correspondences and writing works in two distinctly different styles. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll explore Sharp's curious relationship with his feminine alter ego, whose sporadic appearances perplexed even him.We'll also hunt tigers in Singapore and puzzle over a surprisingly unsuccessful bank robber.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!Image credit

In this video for Mic, former Congressman Steve Israel explains the best way to get your representatives’ attention. Calling is good, but talking to them in person is better.

Boing Boing previously posted about YouTube user William Forsche, who had the forethought to bring a tape recorder to the movie theater back when he was a kid in order to capture the audience’s reaction to the original Star Wars. Well, YouTuber user Homer Thompson took that raw audio and put it alongside the visuals from the Star Wars climax, which provides a much better sense of what the audience is responding to. Han’s appearance gets the most applause, although the audience is pretty jazzed about the Death Star’s destruction too. The whole thing is a reminder of just how mindblowing the original Star Wars was when it first came out.

I believe this may be photoshopped, or perhaps clipped from a forthcoming blockbuster reboot of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. [via]

In this new Vlogbrothers video, John Green tries to put human history into perspective.

For the past couple of years, I've been making the case, at HILOBROW and in the UNBORED books I've co-authored, that the Sixties (1964–1973, according to my non-calendrical schema) were a golden age for YA and YYA adventures.In no particular order, here's my list of the Best YA and YYA Lit of 1967. Happy 50th anniversary! (more…)

Sick of people whitewashing Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, artist Daniel Rarela created this series featuring quotes from King's “Letter From A Birmingham Jail.” The accompanying images are both historical and contemporary. As Rarela told Mic: “As a graphic designer, I wanted to shatter this false image of a Martin Luther King who everyone loved, never got arrested, was universally popular and made zero privileged people feel uncomfortable or angry enough to want to kill him.”https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/821104350952976386https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/821104554540339200https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/821104214520627200https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/821011711582842880https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/821011578346557440https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/821011230458462209https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/820689131885858816https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/820688893661974528https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/820663958486953984https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/820661819496796160https://twitter.com/DJRarela/status/820660082639716352

I have a giant dog. Nemo is a Great Pyrenees. Finding toys that'll entertain him, without becoming shredded or hazardous, is challenging.This rainy season we've been trapped inside quite a bit. Nemo gets a bit of nervous energy when this happens, and if I don't channel it into fun toys and distractions I'll be calling a carpenter.Starmark's Wheeler is the longest lasting and most durable in their Everlasting Treat line. These toys allow a fitted, dense chewable to be inserted into a toy with the idea of making the treat accessible but still require work to chew. Nemo loves the Chicken and Bacon flavored treats, and one of either will last 2 days of chewing at it, or more. After several months of use The Wheeler itself has some small tears, but it has withstood multiple hours of chewing. Nemo frequently carries it around the house with him, keeping the Wheeler close at hand incase he wants to start working on it again.The Amazon price on the treats is around 60% less than what I was paying at my local petshop.Nemo's other favorite rainy day distraction these days, aside from barking, is his trusty old XXL KONG Extreme. I've only had to buy one. This sucker lasts, and lasts. My smaller dog, Pretzel, is the second generation of Cavalier King Charles Spaniel to chew hers. These toys have not even got teeth marks on them, after years of abuse. The KONG is one of the easiest toys I've found to distract a dog for 30-45 minutes. Slime some peanut butter (and bacon bits) into it, and away the dogs go.Starmark Everlasting Treat Wheeler Dog Toy via AmazonEverlasting Treat Chicken via AmazonKONG Extreme Dog Toy, Black via Amazon

https://youtu.be/cBQ2e7KR9B0High school teacher Joe Howard (the guy who made the "How loud would it be if all of the cats in the world meowed at the same time?" video I posted a couple of weeks ago, is back. This time, he shows how to come up with a formula to determine how long would it take a pay-it-forward chain to reach 7.4 billion people

Palestinian-American Muslim activist Linda Sarsour is one of the co-chairs of the massive Women’s March On Washington D.C. on January 21. And Vox shared this profile of one of her biggest achievements: Getting New York public schools to recognize Muslim holidays.

From Geopolitical Futures via Joshua Landis. Seems rough on details. If Islamic State gets wee satellites down in Yemen, you'd think the Sinai Insurgents would at least get some diagonal shading! (more…)

On his Instagram, photographer Jorge Saenz spices up his travel photos with the help of some dinosaur friends. You can see all the images on the #dinodinaseries hashtag.https://www.instagram.com/p/BNJkAC7hGMy/https://www.instagram.com/p/BNg2eq1hZr_/https://www.instagram.com/p/BNuActvhxa-/https://www.instagram.com/p/BN6p1-HBvYE/https://www.instagram.com/p/BOaBGpbBa0B/https://www.instagram.com/p/BOzb7N3hyNi/https://www.instagram.com/p/BPKebHYD0ti/https://www.instagram.com/p/BAW_ia3EHNn/https://www.instagram.com/p/-eu6uVkHDT/https://www.instagram.com/p/9o3a-8EHKm/https://www.instagram.com/p/9Vsv13kHGg/https://www.instagram.com/p/7frkkpEHPM/

[via Imgur]

Beautifully edited by David Garuchava of The Garo Studios, this video celebrates the bravery and selflessness of Doctor Who’s Doctor.[via The Laughing Squid]

If you're a California state employee -- including an employee in the UC system -- no longer use California state funds travel to Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina or Tennessee, or any state "that has passed a law that (1) authorizes discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, or (2) voids or repeals existing state or local protections against such discrimination." It's hard to imagine any major academic conferences being held in those states anymore.

Five years ago, we won an unprecedented victory: spurred on by blackouts of more than 50,000 sites, more than 8 million Americans called Congress to object to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a brutal internet censorship bill that would have been a stake through the heart of the open net. SOPA, which had been tipped to sail through Congress without any fuss, died an unprecedented death. It set a precedent. (more…)

Opponents of Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa -- himself a prolific and shrewd social media campaigner -- have had their social media accounts hacked and used to dump embarrassing transcripts purporting to show their party in disarray and romantic scandals in their personal lives. (more…)

The next installment in the extraordinary lecture/reading series features Hugo-winning environmentalist author Kim Stanley Robinson and prolific historical novelist Cecelia Holland: $10 donation at the door, no one turned away for lack of funds. (Images: AllyUnion, CC-BY-SA; Other Change of Hobbit)

My friend Clayton Cubitt has taken a phenomenal series of portraits for the Women's March on Washington.(more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McOGxK5JcEUIn ye olden days, a telephone user had to ask the operator to call the desired party and make the connection. Then the dial telephone empowered us all to, er, reach out and touch someone. This 1927 instructional film from the telephone company explains the basics: "The ringing signal is an intermittent burring sound telling you the bell of the called telephone is ringing." (via /r/obscuremedia)

In 1971 Neil Young went to a record store and discovered they were selling bootleg LPs of his music. Young asked the clerk why the record store was carrying the bootlegs. The clerk played dumb ("I don't listen to records, so I don't know. I listen to tapes.") Young didn't like it and called the owner and told him he planned to take the LPs without paying for them.

The LA Times has featured our good friends at The Village Studios. Housed in a former Masonic temple, and once the west coast capital of transcendentalism, The Village Studios is a creative community workspace like no other, and the model of what creative spaces can and should be.I especially enjoy that the Times spares no ink attributing The Village's amazing sense of community, and environment of creativity, to studio CEO Jeff Greenberg. We are big fans at Boing Boing as well, and have found the Village an amazing place to work, and a lot of fun to hang out in!From the LA Times:

"If water rates continue rising at projected amounts, the number of US households unable to afford water could triple in five years, to nearly 36 percent." That's the conclusion from a study by Elizabeth Mack, an assistant geography professor at Michigan State University, which looked at water consumption, pricing, and demographic, and socioeconomic data.

A building council in Vancouver, BC commercial building are reportedly refusing to allow one of the building owners to lease to Moby Dick's Restaurant, a fish-and-chips franchise, in part because of its name. According to a lawsuit, the building council claims that “that the word ‘Dick’ in Moby Dick was an offensive term" and "also claimed a Moby Dick sign would hurt the value of neighboring properties, and that the restaurant would bring increased litter and violate city laws on odor." From Courthouse News Service:

Astronaut.io randomly plays new YouTube video that have close to 0 views. It plays a few seconds of each video before moving on to another random video. If a certain video catches your attention, click the dot below the video to see the whole thing. I could waste a lot of time here.

This is the first of three You Are Not So Smart episodes about the "backfire effect." In it, I interview a team of neuroscientists who put people in a brain scanner and then challenged their beliefs, some political and some not, with counter-evidence and then compared which brain regions lit up for which beliefs. The crazy takeaway was that for political beliefs, but not for others, people seemed to react as if their very bodies were being threatened by the challenging evidence.We don’t treat all of our beliefs the same.If you learn that the Great Wall of China isn’t the only man-made object visible from space, and that, in fact, it’s actually very difficult to see the Wall compared to other landmarks, you update your model of reality without much fuss. Some misconceptions we give up readily, replacing them with better information when alerted to our ignorance.For others constructs though, for your most cherished beliefs about things like climate change or vaccines or Republicans, instead of changing your mind in the face of challenging evidence or compelling counterarguments, you resist. Not only do you fight belief change for some things and not others, but if you successfully deflect such attacks, your challenged beliefs then grow stronger.The research shows that when a strong-yet-erroneous belief is challenged, yes, you might experience some temporary weakening of your convictions, some softening of your certainty, but most people rebound and not only reassert their original belief at its original strength, but go beyond that and dig in their heels, deepening their resolve over the long run.Psychologists call this the backfire effect, and this episode is the first of three shows exploring this well-documented and much-studied psychological phenomenon, one that you’ve likely encountered quite a bit lately.In this episode, we explore its neurological underpinning as two neuroscientists at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute explain how their latest research sheds new light on how the brain reacts when its deepest beliefs are challenged.By placing subjects in an MRI machine and then asking them to consider counterarguments to their strongly held political beliefs, Jonas Kaplan’s and Sarah Gimbel’s research, conducted along with neuroscientist Sam Harris, revealed that when people were presented with evidence that alerted them to the possibility that their political beliefs might be incorrect, they reacted with the same brain regions that would come online if they were responding to a physical threat.“The response in the brain that we see is very similar to what would happen if, say, you were walking through the forest and came across a bear,” explains Gimbel in the episode. “Your brain would have this automatic fight-or-flight [response]…and your body prepares to protect itself.”According to the researchers, some values are apparently so crucial to your identity, that the brain treats a threat to those ideas as if they were a threat to your very existence.“Remember that the brain’s first and primary job is to protect ourselves,” explains Kaplan in the show. “The brain is basically a big, complicated, sophisticated machine for self-protection, and that extends beyond our physical self, to our psychological self. Once these things become part of our psychological self, I think they are then afforded all the same protections that the brain gives to the body.”How does the brain take something that is previously neutral and transmutate it into a value that it then protects as if it were flesh and bone? How do neutral, empirical facts about temperature and carbon emissions become politicized? How does an ideological stance on immigration reform become blended with personal identity? We explore those questions and more on this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud—This episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with Your Deceptive Mind taught by neurologist Steven Novella. Learn about how your mind makes sense of the world by lying to itself and others. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.This episode is also sponsored by Casper Mattresses. Buying a Casper mattress is completely risk free. Casper offers free delivery and free returns with a 100-night home trial. If you don’t love it, they’ll pick it up and refund you everything. Casper understands the importance of truly sleeping on a mattress before you commit, especially considering you’re going to spend a third of your life on it. Get $50 toward any mattress purchase by visiting www.casper.com/sosmart and using offer code “sosmart.” Terms and Conditions Apply.

Shepard Fairey's updated his iconic Obama HOPE poster with a set of inaugural posters featuring women of color and slogans of solidarity. (more…)

Charles Martinet has been the voice of Nintendo's Mario, Wario, and Luigi for 26 years. (Great Big Story)

Millionaire president-elect Donald Trump tweeted at @Ivanka, but that ain't his daughter. Even better, Ivanka Majic smacked him down for good measure.

We’ve all been there, Mo.[via The Laughing Squid]

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.NOW MORE THAN EVER, join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more.AND FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON, GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”A book for the curious and adventurous!” -Cory Doctorow) Book One here. Book Two here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

In this sneak peek from an upcoming episode of Mark Hamill’s Pop Culture Quest series, Hamill gets the chance to reunite with his old lightsaber thanks to prop collector Brandon Alinger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZPv-wro-O8Of 1700+ known acts of global power-grid sabotages, affecting some 5,000,000 people, 879 were caused by squirrels; between 0 and 1 were caused by Russia, and another 1 was caused by the USA (Stuxnet). (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQUlJLjGl9UVince Weaver is reimplementing Portal -- "the cake acquisition simulator released in 2007" -- to the Apple II series of computers, bit by bit -- inspired by the fact that the Apple II hires mode has "the perfect Aperture Science orange and blue colors." He's released a disc image of the game in Apple Basic, as well as sourcecode. (more…)

Last week a software platform used by 1,000 cannabis businesses crashed. The CEO of MJ Freeway says the outage was caused by an "unprecedented, malicious attack."From Fortune:

In Dalton, GA, a bunch of people driving in a convoy showed their feelings about MLK day by flying Confederate flags from their trucks. About two-thirds of the way into the video, one truck plows into the one ahead of it, causing a chain reaction.

"We leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind." These were the last words Eugene Cernan said upon leaving the surface of our moon, at the end of Apollo 17.Cernan (shown below at the beginning of EVA 3) was the last man to walk on the moon. He died Monday, Jan. 16, surrounded by his family.(more…)

I think someone on the BBS mentioned that Manifold was a fun origami puzzle challenge (thank you, whoever you are!). I ordered it on Amazon for $8. It's a pad of 100 square sheets of paper, printed with white and black squares on one side, and nothing (except folding guides) on the other side. The object is to fold each sheet so that all the white squares are on one side, and all the black ones are on the other. I just did two of them, and it was so much fun that I'm saving the rest for a long flight I have coming up.Here's a PDF you can print out to try five puzzles.

Atmosphere just about drips off these pages. There’s a haunted quality to the images in The Return of the Honey Buzzard: lots of shadows, uncluttered panels, remote locations, and big eyes.This mood is appropriate because the main character is haunted by an incident from his childhood, and the book builds toward this reveal. The dialogue and the drawings work seamlessly together to craft a sense of isolation and loss, crying out for a resolution.Many of the pages don’t contain any text at all. Especially in these places, the simple but expressive drawings do a masterful job of communicating a mood, a sequence of events, or even the passage of time. It might be surprising for a graphic novel set partly in a bookshop and partly in a library, but The Return of the Honey Buzzard suggests that images can indeed say more than words.The Return of the Honey Buzzard

The format for Scot Nery’s weekly BoobieTrap show is the wackiest I’ve ever seen. It’s vaudeville on steroids with Nery as the amped up and kooky ringmaster. The performers range from jugglers to contortionists, magicians and poets – but the first time I attended, the standout talent was a wooden dummy named Joey and his human named Karl Herlinger. I’ve seen ventriloquist acts before, but these two had an edge that kept me thinking for days on end, and at times I forgot about who was controlling whom. If you stop and think about it, the very idea of ventriloquism is pretty darned crazy. These performers choose to get in front of theaters full of people and have heated conversations and arguments with themselves. It’s hard enough to captivate an audience with story, dance, or musical talent when all you have to worry about is yourself, but imagine having to simultaneously play the role of two distinctly different personalities, while controlling a hidden levers that create the illusion of emotions in a wooden dummy. The strange combination of skills that must come together to pull something like this off has to be the reason we don’t see more great ventriloquists. This is a difficult and dying art. I’ve hung out with Karl a few times since I first saw his show and I appreciate that his abilities go far beyond controlling inanimate objects and throwing voices. There’s definitely meat on the bones here and though his lip control and manipulations are very, very good, it’s the storytelling that makes you want more. After 35 years of honing his craft, Karl pushes himself with the question of how small he can make the show and still have it resonate. He knows that if the base story is strong, people will forgive a lack of props and complex manipulations. Karl says that anyone can learn to throw voices and “work a puppet’s guts” but not everyone can give a story heart. I’ve seen plenty of performers do amazing things with their craft but simply appear mechanical – like a juggler who can keep may balls in the air but tells no visual story while doing it. Scot Nery is a great example of a fant juggler who can keep many balls aloft but what he’s really know for is juggling one item at a time – a real pancake. He takes the audience on a hysterical journey as he cooks the pancake in front of you and then flips it around the stage in unimaginable ways. Again, it’s only one object, but the show is much better than a juggler who can keep 10 balls in the air for any length of time. And back to Karl’s question: “How small can I make my show and still have it resonate?” He answers himself by swapping out the Joey puppet all together, fixing googly eyeballs to his fist and calling him Larry. The new show slays audiences and his new character is more real than anything he’s done before. This is a clothed version of Larry with bunny slippers and a set of googly eyes on his own hand. Larry seems human, and real because Karl is a master of his art and the dialogue is touching, you will want to hug him. By night, Karl performs around the world and by day, he’s a graphic designer, writer, actor, husband and father of 2 who lives by these simple rules:

Watch Canadian artist Annette Labedzki turn her “paint flower” back into paint. She’s got plently more oddly satisfying paint videos on her Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/p/BPTq_4hhs2N/https://www.instagram.com/p/BPLJO_4BCk7/https://www.instagram.com/p/BPS2ofEBssC/https://www.instagram.com/p/BPQgDLuBCUy/

On the Instagram run from her perspective, Princess Pickles The Frenchie “shared” this adorable video of her first encounter with sand: https://www.instagram.com/p/BNEUKHnh80R/Pickles' Instagram is full of more adorable videos and photos:https://www.instagram.com/p/BPB88EQhbs7/https://www.instagram.com/p/BO8Fih0BC8B/https://www.instagram.com/p/BOx1ujShnpj/https://www.instagram.com/p/BO5iNvXBRgI/https://www.instagram.com/p/BOof-COBqLT/

Set off in Zurrieq, Malta late last year, this impressive chain-reaction firework is believed to be the biggest single firework ever, although it’s rivaled by a display in Kounosu, Japan from 2014. The Daily Mail has more details about the Matla display. YouTube user Janet Reed originally captured the massive single firework as well some of the show around it (the single firework begins at 1:36):https://youtu.be/iail1vqS4MM[via maria-ruta.tumblr.com]