After years of guesswork -- in which civil society groups and government stats bodies produced radically divergent estimates of killings by police in America -- the Bureau of Justice Statistics has finally released a report that validates the civil society groups, admitting that killings by police in America are 1,100-1,400/year, more than double the official figure. (more…)

A thirty year old joke by Will McLean in the first edition of the Dungeon Masters Guide features a group of fantasy adventurer types crowded around a table playing an RPG where they pretend to be "workers and students in an industrialized and technological society." (more…)

Noise cancelling headphones can be pricey, and the A-Audio Legacy Headphones are no exception. Retailing for $299, these headphones are currently on sale for just $79.99. You won't find a lot of quality headphones at this price, so they're definitely worth a second look.A-Audio's headphones are built with top of the line anti-vibration aluminum, 40mm drivers, and powerful circuitry that makes them stand out from the competition. In fact, with their patented 3-Stage Technology, the A-Audio Legacy Headphones allow users to switch between passive audio, bass enhanced, and active noise cancellation modes whenever they want.They even come with a detachable phone cord with a remote and mic for connecting to a mobile device. You can get the A-Audio Legacy Noise Cancelling Headphones in the Boing Boing Store for just $79.99, 73% off retail. For the price, you’ll get the headphones, a hard shell travel case, cleaning cloth, an adapter, a detachable phone cord, and more.

A guy named Guy emailed me to let me know about his web video series called Coolest Thing I've Ever Made, which "showcases regular people who built incredible things." The latest episode features "a guy in Toronto that builds a life size T-Rex out of balloons (it was a very long 18 hour shoot) and before we even shot he'd spent 2 days prior making the legs, head, tail, etc..."The other episodes look cool, too: an island made of plastic bottles, a 747 Pan Am replica, a backyard suspension bridge, and a Delorean hovercraft.

I just ordered a thermal cooker, they sound like wonderful camping tools. Anyone got recipe suggestions?(more…)

The United States intelligence community has promised lawmakers it will provide as soon as January 2017 a public estimate of the number of Americans whose digital communications were subject to surveillance under the pretense of capturing foreign espionage, according to a bipartisan group of congressional lawmakers' letter that Reuters saw and reports here.(more…)

Ghost sharks, aka chimaeras, are elusive relatives of sharks and rays that live in the black depths of the ocean, as far down as 2,600 meters. The Ghost Shark was captured on video by a remotely operated vehicle deployed on a geology expedition by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in waters off Hawaii and California. The scientists who analyzed the video think that it's a pointy-nosed blue chimaera (Hydrolagus trolli) that usually calls the waters off Australia and New Zealand home. This is the first time researchers have known this species to swim in the Northern Hemisphere. From National Geographic:

Lil Manlet had difficulty receiving a parcel that was being delivered by Hermes, so he made a short film about how awful Hermes was at helping him. Calls, emails, and web chats to Hermes all proved useless. It turns out a lot of people have trouble with Hermes. Here's a screenshot of a Twitter feed of unhappy people forced to deal with Hermes:

Are you meeting a romantic partner's family for the first time this Christmas and at a loss for a gift idea that will impress them with your suitability as a potential addition to the clan? Look no farther. (via Crazy Abalone) (more…)

James Earle spent a summer studying a single painting, Paris Street, Rainy Day, by Gustave Caillebotte, and made a short video about what he discovered.

My friend and Cool Tools business partner Kevin Kelly spoke at TEDSummit about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence. The talk is based on his excellent bestselling book, The Inevitable.

In The Personal Wealth Interests of Politicians and theStabilization of Financial Markets, researchers from the London Business School and Tillburg University demonstrate the likelihood of US members of Congress voting in favor of bank bailouts was correlated with those politicians' individual investments in banking stocks. (more…)

The ACLU of Northern California recently published a leaked email showing that Dataminr -- a Twitter-monitoring company partially owned by Twitter itself -- was selling access to US domestic surveillance "fusion centers" where local, state and federal agencies pool resources to spy on their targets. (more…)

Kirby Sloan writes, "The Fanac Fan History Project has posted a humorous video made in 1983 based around general science fiction fandom culture at the time. This was the time I was most active in all aspects of fandom. I know/knew many of the people in this video. I was going to at least 3 and sometimes 6 cons a year in the 80s." (more…)

Artificial Intelligence already has tons of applications in countless industries, making it an incredibly lucrative skill set. It’s an exciting time to get involved in AI, and this bundle is an excellent way to get familiar with a variety of machine learning concepts and techniques.(more…)

Animator Leigh Lahav and writer Oren Mendez created this wizarding world-salute to the holiday season.(more…)

AxiDraw is a computer-aided pen plotter that uses any writing instrument inserted in the device.The latest and greatest demo hints at just some of the possibilities. (more…)

This video from the sketch comedy show Studio C images a world in which a man’s face is the best possible volleyball block.

If you've ever played a car racing video game, some of these shapes may be familiar, but Matt Dunlop built on the work of several others to create this fascinating map of the world's famous motorsport courses.(more…)

The Camera Collector tells the story of a vintage camera collector who fell in love with cameras in the 1960s, against the wishes of his father. After saving all summer for his first Leica, his father was waiting when he returned home. "When he saw it was a camera, he started punching me."(more…)

With winter officially here, it’s time to revisit the unique practice that is “Chicago dibs.”(more…)

Check out this astonishing workmanship by mulletsaurus, who hand-painted The Black Knight from Kingdom Death. Here's the blank for comparison: (more…)

Presentation is usually the last thing on my mind when I’m making dinner, but if I had more patience, this rice bear would make for an adorable dinner companion. (more…)

Australian science fiction author Sean Williams writes, "I first met Kim Stanley Robinson in Hobart, 1995, when he was on his way to the South Pole. Stan suggested I look to the Australian Antarctic Division as a possible means of fulfilling my dream of visiting the great southern land. Over twenty years later, and thanks to the Australian Antarctic Division's Arts Fellowship program, that dream is about to come true." (more…)

John Park writes, "Check out what Tony D just posted at Adafruit after he visited the Living Computers Museum + Lab." (more…)

A jury in South Carolina today convicted Dylann S. Roof in the racially motivated killings of 9 black people in a church in Charleston. He faces the possibility of a death sentence.(more…)

Secure the News periodically checks in with news-sites to see how many of them implement HTTPS -- the secure protocol that stops your ISP and people snooping on it from knowing which pages you're looking at and from tampering with them -- and what proportion of them default to HTTPS. (more…)

Thomas writes, "Shortly after closing a post-election special session to fund relief for counties afflicted by flooding from Hurricane Matthew or mountain wildfires, North Carolina GOP legislative leaders announced a second special session to begin the same day with an open agenda. The docket was filled with 21 House bills, some of which stripped Democratic Governor Elect Roy Cooper of substantial control over the executive branch. This is a coup attempt, an effort to undermine the results of a highly scrutinized election." (more…)

During the Standing Rock confrontations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation got reports of police use of IMSI Catchers -- secretive surveillance devices used to gather data from nearby cellphones, often called Stingrays or Dirtboxes -- so it dispatched lawyers and technologists to monitor the situation, and filed 20 public records requests with law enforcement agencies. (more…)

The Opennews project has published a set of annotated links to digital operational security tutorials that are relevant to journalists looking to defend themselves against various kinds of attacks, covering two-factor authentication, password managers, phishing, first aid for malware infections, and related subjects. (via 4 Short Links)

From the CEO of Palm predicting that Apple would fail at making phones to IBM's chairman predicting that Walmart would crush Amazon, the history of technological upheaval is littered with the ironic dismissals of establishment executives predicting it would all amount to nothing. (more…)

https://vimeo.com/99889856The Mininch Tool Pen uses the "pop a point" mechanism used in mechanical pencils to hold and switch magnetic screwdriver bits; it's made from machined aluminum and weighs 93g with all six bits inside. It's $70 and comes in three colors and your choice of Imperial, Metric and EU bits. (via Wired) (more…)

Yesterday, California Governor Jerry Brown told an audience of scientists at the American Geophysical Union that the state would launch its own "damn satellite" and continue climate research if the Trump administration shut down federal research. (more…)

Shinzō Abe, the xenophobic, autocratic prime minister of Japan, has been dismantling Article 9 of the constitution, which forbids acts of war by Japan. (more…)

Putin had at least two reasons to interfere in the U.S. presidential election. First, he had a grudge against Hillary Clinton (she called him a "tough guy with a thin skin" in 2014). Second, he wanted to reveal corruption in US politics and to "split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," according to a high-level intelligence source.From NBC News

Are you an "artist, designer, biohacker, or other cultural practitioner" who's interested in synthetic biology? You could spend 4-6 weeks in Zurich at the Bioprocess Laboratory, where you will "actively engage with scientists working on a synthetic biology related project with focus on the design of antibiotics." (more…)

Myanmar has been a technologically backwards authoritarian state for much of the past 50 years, with less than 1% of the country connected to the net, until 2015, when the country held its first elections in decades, a moment that was swiftly followed by a relaxation in telcoms controls and widespread access to the internet via mobile devices. (more…)

Friends and loved ones told Adam Rosenberg he talked in his sleep. They were right.(more…)

Hazel Hayes is an Irish YouTuber and filmmaker, and she recently uploaded this sitcom excerpt called “Hot Mess” on her YouTube channel. (more…)

Barcelona-based sculptor Xavier Mañosa created Skate Fails, a series of ceramic sculptures that look like Dali-esque melted skateboards. (more…)

Jacob T. Swinney compares the short film "Whiplash" with the feature it became.It's an interesting study in the shot-for-shot remake. With the exception of the location and the switch to Miles Teller as Andrew, nearly everything else is the same.(more…)

College student Abby Jo Hamele shared this amazing email she sent to her philosophy TA while she was still loopy from the hydrocodone from her wisdom surgery:(more…)

As a final project for a photography class, 18-year-old Oregon college student Aria Watson created a series called #SignedByTrump.(more…)

The folks at HealthTrends.com put together this GIF that tracks Obama from childhood to present day.(more…)

Watching a real yule log burn is cool and everything, but Yule Log 2016 has outdone all previous years with 54 fantastical animations on a yule log theme.All proceeds go to Camp Interactive, a kids' coding camp.(more…)

Amazon Prime Air has delivered the first customer order by drone, in England.

Photo: Donald Trump speaks as PayPal co-founder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel (C) and Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook look on during a meeting with technology leaders at Trump Tower in New York U.S., December 14, 2016. REUTERSWith his children and Peter Thiel at his side, Predator-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday told Silicon Valley elites his regime will do "anything we can do" to help the same tech industry he mocked during his campaign.(more…)

DBO writes, "A new report by Deflect Labs tracks the complex ways that hackers have sought to take down the Black Lives Matter website. The attacks, which relied on harvesting Wordpress sites, increased in sophistication and left a murky, unsavory trail by actors who did everything from try to extort the website to taking it down entirely." (more…)

If you're an aging comic book fan, say in your late 40s or early 50s, Comic Book Fever will scratch the hell out of any nostalgic itch you've ever felt about the hobby. George Khoury's picture-heavy examination of comics and comics culture from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s triggers a flood memories.There are the comics themselves: Landmark runs of the X-Men, Teen Titans and Daredevil. And the artists: Frank Miller, George Perez and John Byrne. Not to mention all the ads, toys and snacks.Remember ROM Space Knight, Big Jim and Micronauts? And all those superhero ads for Hostess Twinkies? Or the classic Jack Davis-illustrated ad for Spalding basketballs featuring Rick Barry and Dr. J?Heck, this book even includes a feature on Grit, the family newspaper that lured generations of comic fans into selling its tabloid door to door with the promise of cash and prizes.There are also features on such classic stand-alone comics as Captain America's Bicentennial Battles by Jack Kirby; the first-ever DC-Marvel match-up, Superman Vs. Spider-Man, and the Neal Adams-illustrated Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali. They don't make 'em like that anymore. And that's the point.Comic Book Fever celebrates the mass-market popularity of comics even as this popularity was starting to fade. By the end of the period covered, comics were no longer something that every kid grew up on, but a hobbyist product available only in specialist comic book shops. The industry's move to direct marketing and emerging competition from other pastimes, such as video games, spelled the end of an era. The bright side was the emergence of the independent press and creator-owned series such as Elfquest, Love and Rocket and, ahem, the Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles, all also covered here.Now, of course, superheroes are again hugely popular thanks to the movies. And comics, in the form of collected editions and graphic novels, are widely available in bookstores. But the days of sipping a Slurpee at 7-11 and plucking comic books from the spinner rack are, sadly, gone forever. With the help of this book, at least, we've still got the memories.– John FirehammerSee sample pages from this book at Wink.Comic Book Fever: A Celebration of Comics: 1976-1986

One Shared House is a website/documentary about co-living, that is, unrelated people living together. It reminds of a visual 99% Invisible. You can pause at any time to read extra tidbits. Really cool.