[ LISTEN ] ONE day before the Democratic National Convention opened, Wikileaks released a trove of hacked DNC emails that became a viral political firestorm involving odd bedfellows Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin--and Guccifer 2.0, and Julian Assange.(more…)

https://youtu.be/x6VlWR5zQuMThe speech Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave tonight in accepting her party's nomination blew this American woman's mind. I never thought I'd live to see the day a woman had a real shot at becoming President. I watched the speech on one screen, and the reactions of female friends and peers on the internet on my iphone, and wept.(more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RwY9iwEaSkMagicPeaceLove writes, "The word 'inspiring' gets thrown around a lot but my pal Mahdi Gilbert (previously) really deserves it. (more…)

Last night, my wife and I stumbled on the Red Truck Gallery on the edge of New Orleans' French Quarter, and today we're going back to buy some art, and admire the pieces we can't afford for a while longer. (more…)

President Obama, in his speech at the DNC, used the phrase "That is not the America I know." Donald Trump Jr. claims this was plagiarism, as he had used the same line in a speech he delivered last week. (more…)

Artists Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown explore cymatics, the study of wave phenomena and how they are represented visually. Using black-colored water, a laptop computer, and a modified guitar amp, they captured "portraits" of the 12 notes in the chromatic scale. From my sister-in-law Heather Sparks's profile of their project in Nautilus:

In the last decade, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere have launched new studies investigating whether psychedelic drugs, from shrooms to LSD to DMT, can treat mental disorders ranging from depression and PTSD to anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Vox reporters German Lopez and Javier Zarracina surveyed the state of medical research on hallucinogens:

College student Ryan Willsea captured this video a few weeks ago while on a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico.

Thirty years ago today, REM released the magnificent "Lifes Rich Pageant," an iconic alternative rock album of the 1980s, and forever. The source of the title is the 1964 film A Shot in the Dark:

Allec Joshua Ibay's flight sim recreation of United Airlines Flight 232's loss of all flight controls doesn't skip a second. The unadorned, tick-tock quality of the video makes it surprisingly gripping, not least because of the incredible solution the crew found to their predicament: controlling the plane entirely by raising and lowering thrust from the engines. Even then, they couldn't turn left at all, meaning the slightest overturn right would require an entire 360-degree swoop to get back on target.Then they had to land it. (more…)

Davis had been with MAD since its first run in 1952, and his illustrations helped define the look of satirical art for generations. (more…)

Those of us who love music wish we could listen to it 24/7. But it's impossible when we're trying to converse with our friends, or when are swimming in the local pool.That is, until now. The KOAR Bone Conduction Bluetooth Headset, now 48% off, has changed the audio game.Made with lightweight titanium memory metal, this headset boasts patented bone conduction technology to transport sound directly to your inner ears. This means you’ll still be able to hear your surroundings even as your music is playing.There’s a built-in mic so you can talk hands-free, and the Bluetooth technology lets you wirelessly listen to audio from all compatible devices. Plus, the headset is resistant to water and sweat, so you can bump your beats even if you want to take a dip.Go ahead and get your groove on, no matter where you are—the KOAR Bone Conduction Bluetooth Headset is now 48% off the regular price of $149.99 (just $76.99).

Yesterday's science-by-press-release announcement that a research team had made a "breakthrough" in treating ALS thanks to funds raised in last year's viral ice-bucket challenge turns out to be vaporware: the gene identified was already known to be implicated in ALS, but only affects 3% of cases, and the new refinement in the research suggests some avenues for further work, but has no immediate therapeutic value. (more…)

What to do if you've just signed up to work in one of the most expensive real-estate markets in the world, with almost all of your net worth tied up in illiquid shares in your employer's company? Just ask a Silicon Valley bank for a 100% mortgage, which they'll cheerfully supply on 24 hours' notice, with all the "white-glove service" trappings you could ask for. (more…)

Former U.S. congressperson Gabrielle Giffords pictured with her lovely /5 toaster.

My people raised me on the greatness of Voltron Lion Force. So when I discovered there was a remake on Netflix, I was excited. Scared. The bland unpleasantness of the Thundercats reboot lingers still with me. Last night I caught the first episodes, and I have to say I 👏 was 👏 pleasantly 👏 surprised. (more…)

Unified Patents raises money from companies that are the target of patent-trolling and then uses it to challenge the most widely used patents in each of its members' sectors: now it's going for the gold. (more…)

It's been more than 16 years since faulty voting machine technology called into question a US presidential election, and in the ensuing 1.6 decades, the voting machine industry has used bafflegab, intimidation and salesmanship to continue selling faulty goods, whose flaws surface with despressing regularity. (more…)

I've had a great experience with Western Digital portable hard drives. I own six 1TB models and use them to store and backup media. They are very quiet and run on USB power (the same USB cable for the data). I'm upgrading to 2TB drives, which are on sale on Amazon for $70. I also bought a case for $5.

Here's part two of local news program reporters doing what they do best – blurting out embarrassing thoughts projected directly from their ids. (Here's part one)

tldr; The GOP was founded by anti-slavery activists in the North in 1854 and White in the South were in favor of slavery so they stuck with the Democratic party. A lot of Republicans became wealthy from the civil war, and in an effort to retain power, decided that fighting for black rights wasn't in their best interest and stopped trying to reform the South allowing white Democrats to rise to power in th South. The Great Depression halted Republican power, putting big-government-advocate FDR in the White House. Republicans fought back, advertising themselves as champions of small government. In the 50s and 60s the civil rights movement divided the country again. In the North, 96% of Democrats and 84% of Republicans were in favor of civil rights, while in the South, 7% of Democrats and 0% of Republicans supported civil rights. In 1964, Democrat LBJ signed the Civil Rights act, which helped white Southerners get over the hatred of Abraham Lincoln enough to jump ship and start joining the GOP. The GOP's small government pitch, along with its support of school prayer and anti-abortion platform, appealed to Southerners. Black Southerners, meanwhile, moved en masse from the GOP to the Democratic party. The GOP started losing elections because minorities won't vote for it. Some GOP senators attempted to pass and immigration amnesty bill, which angered white GOP voters. They turned to Trump whose anti-immigrant rhetoric appeals to them.[via]

Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman has bankrolled an experimental, one-time prize of $250,000 that the Media Lab will award for research that harnesses "responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging the norms, rules, or laws that sustain society’s injustices?" (more…)

In this homophobic NSFW rant, a young gentleman who had lost a game of NBA 2K16 explains to his team-mates why the outcome demonstrates the need for Trump in America.Illustration: Veciits

Nick Kapur spotted this gem in an old newspaper: "A Wal-Mart store pulled a popular T-shirt proclaiming “Someday a woman will be president” off its shelves, saying it was offensive to some shoppers."

In Philadelphia today at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, an emotionally overwhelming moment for Bernie Sanders as Democrats Abroad cast their votes for the party's 2016 presidential nominee.(more…)

The Ripchair 3.0 is an electric off-road wheelchair (actually, a "track chair") that enables you to roll your regular wheelchair or powerchair into the chassis, dock it into place, and take off. It's outfitted with a 19 horsepower, 4 stroke engine, construction grade hydraulics and tracks, joystick or lever control, cup holder, and a mount for your fishing rod or hunting rifle.Ripchair 3.0 (via Uncrate)

Kyle Chayka hates minimalism, a consumer product like any other, a class signifier, a "slightly intriguing perversion, like drinking at breakfast" for the insincere global elite.

TMZ reports that Miss Cleo is dead at 53. The TV psychic, also known as Youree Harris, was famous for the character's faux-Jamaican accent and the bizarre Tarot-themed advertising campaigns exhorting Americans to call in for a reading.You couldn't fool Miss Cleo, went the catchy 90s' tagline, but the entertainer could not fool the FTC, either: her Psychic Readers Network collapsed after the government charged it with deceptive advertising, billing and collection practices. Harris went on to perform as an actress and a spokesperson.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxopPDMq7rs"It's the one who is really unpleasant. That's the daddy."

You can save it, you can buy things with it, you can watch its value fluctuate, but according to a Miami court judge, "bitcoin has a long way to go before it is equivalent of money."Judge Teresa Mary Pooler ruled yesterday that defendant Michael Espinoza, who was charged with laundering bitcoins, was not guilty, and then declared that bitcoin isn't money. According to The Guardian:

I really dig the design of this 1966 portable record player! If I had one, I'd play Manfred Mann's "Pretty Flamingo" on it too.

Paolo Defendini writes, "Fireside Fiction Company has released a report detailing the dismal stateof representation of black writers in the science fiction and fantasy shortfiction market .Despite increasing efforts to boost representation of people of colorgenerally, the prospects for black writers, specifically, have not beenimproving. According to the data (which is available in a publiclyaccessible Google spreadsheet),out of 2,039 stories published in 2015, only 38 were written by blackauthors. The report is accompanied by a series of essays in reaction to thereport by Nisi Shawl , TroyL. Wiggins , MikkiKendall , JustinaIreland ,and TobiasBuckell ; aswell as an interview with N.K. Jemisin.Fireside's editor, Brian White, has also written an editorialdetailingsome steps that Fireside is committed to taking to counter our own biasesand help fix this huge problem." (more…)

A 61-year-old New York state woman was ticketed for driving in a carpool lane with a pillow as a passenger. "The department said the woman was pulled over when an officer noticed her passenger was composed of a pillow wearing a vest and a baseball cap while holding a briefcase on its lap," reports UPI.

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President, has announced plans to do an AMA on Reddit. Unlike most "ask me anything" events, however, this one is unofficial and unmoderated by Reddit's usual team on the r/IAMA subreddit. Instead, it will occur in a fan group, r/The_Donald, notorious for its users' fractious behavior and general abundance of seething meme-fueled pretend-laughter. (more…)

In Brazil, racial discrimination against darker-skinned people is rife; and the famous unequal society is especially tilted against black Brazilians, who are subjected to horrific summary executions by police in the favelas (squatter neighborhoods). (more…)

Did Vladimir Putin order the Russian government to hack the Democratic National Committee, obtaining emails that Wikileaks has since released, to take down Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential elections? That’s the theory that emerged rapidly inside American intelligence and law enforcement agencies since the 20,000 leaked internal DNC emails spread throughout the internet, just before the beginning of the party's convention in Philadelphia.(more…)

That feel when FedEx, UPS, DHL, or your local postal service tries to "hide" your package delivery in the lamest, most half-assed way imaginable. Or leaves one of those “signature required” things that mean you have to go drive to the shipping center and pick it up yourself even when you were there the whole time aughhhh. Thanks. Thanks a lot, delivery guy (or gal or x).(more…)

5 Worlds is a young SFF project that's been a hard secret to keep these past years! It's a five book series, 250 pages each, full color. It has five worlds and there are five of us working together on it. The story involves an impossible quest to light these ancient beacons left behind by an older civilization of Feline gods. The heroes are Oona Lee, a clumsy practitioner of a magical dancing art, An Tzu, a little boy from the toxic slums, and Jax Amboy, a superstar athlete known to everyone in the five worlds. And as they're thrown together they and their worlds go through some surprising transformations. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Infuse: Oil, Spirit, Water demystifies the art of infusingInfuse: Oil, Spirit, Water

After the July 3 suicide bomb that killed 300 people in Baghdad, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi banned the use of the ADE 651. a fake bomb detector made by British fraudsters, who claimed the gadgets could detect bombs, ivory, drugs, and golf balls. The Iraqi military had purchased $60 million worth of the bogus devices. The founder of the company that made the useless devices is in prison serving a ten-year sentence. I think he should spend a lot more time than that behind bars, since a great many people died by putting their trust in the devices.ABC News

After a Pokémon GO player (known on YouTube as The Grand Spatula) noticed that a bunch of kids liked playing the game outside her apartment, the baker created these cute Pikachu and Poké Ball cake pops for them – and shows us how. A great excuse for a Pokémon GO party!

Bruce Schneier warns us that the Internet of Things security dumpster-fire isn't just bad laptop security for thermostats: rather, that "software control" (of an ever-widening pool of technologies); interconnections; and autonomy (systems designed to act without human intervention, often responding faster than humans possibly could) creates an urgency over security questions that presents an urgent threat the like of which we've never seen. (more…)

Osprey Publishing, the UK-based military history publisher beloved by wargamers and toy soldier nerds for their amazing Men at Arms series (which lovingly details the uniforms and accoutrements of war), has been expanding into gaming in a big way recently. They've been responsible for the increasingly popular skirmish-level dungeon-delving miniatures game, Frostgrave, the hugely popular Bolt Action (which they distribute through a publishing partnership with Warlord Games), and a growing number of excellent miniature rules sets covering everything from historicals to fantasy, sci-fi, and horror.Another notable thing they've been doing is re-vamping existing games that had a lot of promise but had some rules problems, or component issues, or some other crippling flaw that limited their appeal on their first release. They've been re-doing these games in gorgeous new editions. One such game is Odin's Ravens, which I previously reviewed here. They also recently released a lovely, revamped edition of the very trippy The Ravens of Thri Sahashri, a Japanese cooperative card game where players enter the mind of a character and try and repair her memories and guide her to safety before she goes insane with ravens eating her mind. Another notable example of this revitalizing of a promising title is their recent "Ultimate Edition" of Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space.[caption id="attachment_473200" align="alignnone" width="2016"] The lovely and unusual components and packaging of Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space.[/caption]Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space is a card-based hidden movement, hidden identity game of deception and bluffing. This "Ultimate Edition" is a significant upgrade to the original which launched in 2010. To keep track of your movement in the game and to try and work out where other players might be within the corridors of your badly damaged space station, you make notations on a map of the ship. The original version had paper pads of the ship maps and came with marking pencils. The Osprey edition upgrades this with 8 handsome wire-bound erasable map booklets (with 8 different ship maps to choose from) and 8 dry-erase markers. There are also 90 evocatively-illustrated cards which depict the players, escape pod cards, dangerous sector cards (which alert players to what's going on in the station as you explore it), and item cards which give human players various tools and game conditions that they can utilize.The premise of Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space is simple. An alien virus aboard an orbiting research station is turning medical test subjects and the crew into human-devouring monsters. At the beginning of the game, a blind draw determines who among the players are humans and who are aliens. As the human players try to move as silently as possibly through the power-dark and damaged space station, the alien players try to sniff them out on the map, attack, and kill them. Each human player is trying to make it to escape hatches indicated on the maps. If they can make it to a pod (and the pod is still functional), they get to leave the ship and are safe. The goal of the alien players is to kill all humans. When a human dies, it is sent to the alien spawning sector depicted on the map and plays through as an alien. When an alien dies, that player is out of the game. Every human that escapes is declared a winner. The alien(s) win if they eliminate all of the humans on-board the ship.[caption id="attachment_472854" align="alignnone" width="2607"] My son, Blake Maloof, playing Escape with me and his GF. [/caption]Game play is very simple, with each player taking turns moving in secret, recording where they are on their private map booklet (and taking notes on where others might be). Different sector spaces require the arriving player to announce different things to the other players, draw cards that dictate what they have to do there, or (for human players), potentially pick up items that can used to fight or defend against the aliens. There is much bluffing involved here. When aliens land in a sector where where they think a human is hiding, they announce an attack, and if they are correct, the human is defeated. Other lurking aliens caught in an attack are also killed.Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space is obviously trying to evoke that creepy adrenaline rush from films like Aliens, of being plunged into the darkness of a tight space knowing that terrifying monsters are methodically hunting you down to try and eat your face off. Cleverly, all of the artwork on the box, on the cards, looks like frozen frames of the gristly action, as perhaps seen through the stroboscopic lights of an emergency warning system or the muzzle flash of an assault rifle.I really like what they were going for here. I love the box design, the use of the dry-erase map pads, and the card illustrations. And I like the way they tried to engineer a mechanic that would generate feelings of fear and claustrophobia. They obviously designed the art to further convey these emotions. I've heard this game has generated such intense reactions in some players, but not for me. I enjoy the game and am recommending it, but I just wish it had felt more engaging, produced more tension in me and my game mates. The white map boards feel a little too minimal and stark and the game production overall could have benefited from more immersion in the game's alien horror theme. Besides the cards, the rest of the components are minimal in design. It almost feels like the cards and the rest of the components come from two different games.I'm fascinated by "gimmick games" and would count Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space as such a game. I can't say that they succeeded for me in the obvious design goal of creating a game that really makes you sweat. But it still is an entertaining game with lovely artwork, high production values, and a fun and unique hidden movement mechanic. It takes about 30 minutes to play, so it's a fun lunch break game or something fun and different to pull out as an appetizer at your next gaming group.

Paul Elkins built a bike-towed micro-camper for $150 and has made the plans available.From YouTube:

December 29, 2014: a windy day during the Australian summer. On a small country road in central Victoria, the storm batters trees looming over the passing vehicles, until the inevitable happens: "This is a great educational video showing the dangers of traveling in the bush during periods of high wind."

According to one financial services company, Brexit bites—and it hasn't even been officially announced yet. According to Markit (good enough for fussy Tory broadsheet The Telegraph), economic shit's back to 2009 levels already, yo.

Twenty-one years ago, Yahoo became the soul of the nascent web. Now it's telco food, to be eaten by Verizon for $5bn.Verizon is also the proud owner of AOL, snagged last year for $4.4bn. At their height, the two lynchpins of the 90s' WWW were worth about $350 billion—at least to those unlucky enough to buy tech shares in 2000.Verizon plans to unite the two companies to create a Facebook-killer made of nostalgia and its own users' personal information—and the zoo of startups and internet publishers the two companies gobbled up in their dying years.

The irreverent adventures continue! In Knights of the Apocalypse, Benjamin Wallace's former librarian is back and bumbling through the wreckage of civilization!Jerry, Erica and their massive massif Chewy, have wound-up broken-down in the Kingdom of the Five Peaks. Southern Colorado's new ruler King Elias offers our post-apocalyptic nomadic warrior a chance to live, but there are always challenges. Cannibals, the power of steam, and a legion of knights all stand in their way. Watch Jerry mess it all up!I've really enjoyed Wallace's Duck and Cover adventures. He takes some of the most fun tropes in post-apocalytpia and twists them on their side.Knights of the Apocalypse (A Duck & Cover Adventure Post-Apocalyptic Series Book 2) via Amazon

Home audio has taken some big leaps forward in recent years--not just in terms of sound quality, but also in the style department. The FRESHeBAR Leather Soundbar, now 56% off in the Boing Boing Store, is proof.The FRESHeBAR comes packing almost all the options you’d ever need for a home sound system, including Bluetooth streaming capabilities.The unit’s 90 watts pump out crisp, clean sound, and the accompanying remote control allows you complete control from anywhere in the room.It's also compatible with your TV, gaming console, stereo system, and more, allowing you to seamlessly interweave all your equipment into a power-packed package. That, coupled with its compact 2-feet-long size and various leather-encased color options, help it seamlessly blend into any home setting.Get an audio device that looks as good as it sounds with the FRESHeBAR Leather Soundbar, now just under $110, or more than 50% off MSRP for a limited time only.