Nearly 2 weeks ago, 17 million Britons (mostly poor) voted to leave the EU in what amounted to a plebiscite on austerity, finance capitalism, and the widening gap between the increasingly wealthy and the increasingly poor. In response, the Conservative government says it will tempt corporations to come to the UK by making the rich get even richer and the poor even poorer. (more…)

Sulfur, useful as it is, is produced in such vast quantities as a byproduct of energy production that it is of little value. There's so much of it that Canadian oil company Syncrude's storage site is slowly turning into an enormous pyramid of sulfur.Google Maps reveals that there are in fact three of them, a Gizeh of The North!Here's a photo by Jason Woodhead, released under the Creative Commons.If they keep going, it'll eventually be far larger than the Great Pyramid in Egypt.

Quartermaester is a "speculative" but extremely complete interactive map of Westeros and Essos, the two continents across which Game of Thrones' action sprawls. Character paths and noble constituencies are among the available overlays—surprisingly useful for anyone trying to get the complex series in mental order. Note: it follows the books, not the show.Update: I just bought this collection of poster-sized maps (HD scans are here) for $25. Far more delicious detail of the Thrones world, if not of the characters themselves.

There are few things as irrationally infuriating as knocking your earbuds out of your ear while you’re running. Thankfully, Acesori is here to curb your rage! These sleek A.Buds Bluetooth earbuds are explicitly designed for exercise, magnetically connecting to one another and resting safely away from your pumping limbs. Exercise in peace. Please.Connect the earbuds behind or in front of your neck and control volume, answer or refuse calls, and change tracks right on the earbuds. For only $29.99 you can run, lift, dance - whatever! Your earbuds will finally stay in your ears.

Eirik writes, "I like those old charging docks for mobile phones. But the problem is that you need to buy a new one every time your phone change. And it won't fit if you use a cover on your phone. So I just designed a dock that can be adapted to almost any phone." (more…)

WARNING: A person gets stabbed in the hand in this video.This has happened again.Previously:Here's how the spike trick is supposed to work: a magician shows the spectator a large nail mounted on a block of wood. He sets it on the table so the nail is pointed up. Then he covers the nail with a paper bag. He places three identical paper bags next to the bag covering the nail. He turns his back and asks the spectator to shuffle the four bags around on the table so that the magician has no idea which one has the nail. The magician turns around to face the bags, then slams his hand down one a bag. It was empty. He repeats the process until only one bag is left. He lifts the bag to reveal the nail. It's a nerve-wracking trick.Recently a magician performed the trick and made a bad mistake, driving the nail through his hand. You can see the photos here. Fortunately, he's going to recover.And here's a video from 2007 that captures another magician stabbing himself. It's not too graphic, but it is hard to watch anyway because you know what's coming.I have no interest in performing this trick.

For the first half of the 20th Century, it was common for New York's libraries to have live-in superintendents, whose families would live on-site in hidden apartments -- the last one of these apartments wasn't vacated until 2006. (more…)

Pavel Astakhov -- celebrity lawyer, courtroom TV star, crime novelist, reciter of impromptu religious poetry -- has finally met a scandal he couldn't laugh off: when he met with the children who'd survived a boating accident that killed 14 of their friends, he opened with "So, how was the swim?" (more…)

More than 48 tons of trash were left by fans of Kenny Chesney attending a concert this week in Pittsburgh—something of a tradition for the country singer. The piles are staggering, the smell appalling: an aftermath so disgusting it has some speculating on how it's even possible to generate so much trash in such a short amount of time. It's almost as if it was trucked in and left there to make a point...

Reuters' largest poll of 2016 on the racial attitudes of supporters of various political candidates found that Trump supporters are seriously racist, Clinton supporters are a little less racist than the average respondent, but Sanders supporters are less racist than the supporters of any other candidate. (more…)

Become a job-ready developer by building a portfolio of real-world apps and interacting 1-on-1 with the best mentors in the field. This training is as robust as it gets, including live instruction and job-hunting assistance, on top of 33+ hours of top-notch video courses from such prestigious institutions as Stanford and Harvard.Study front-end development with HTML, CSS, Javascript, jQuery & frameworks like AngularJS, along with learning back-end development with Ruby on Rails, Node.js, e-commerce, databases & more.Jump into this 12-week curriculum for 92% off, and discover a high-paying, flexible new career path!

For more than four years, we've chronicled the sleazy story of Prenda Law, a copyright troll whose extortion racket included genuinely bizarre acts of identity theft, even weirder random homophobic dog-whistles, and uploading their own porn movies to entrap new victims, and, naturally, an FBI investigation into the firm's partners' illegal conduct. (more…)

Fintan O’Toole is on fire in analysing the nature of Boris and Trump's pitches for (respectively) Brexit and a ban on Muslim migration to the USA: they're meant as fantasies, deliberately unrealistic, to be voted for as an act of political daydreaming in a truthy age where no one holds politicians accountable for bald-faced lies. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onFv48ju9MQAmerica is in the grips of one of the worst housing crises in its history, with 1 in 3 households spending more than 30% of their income on mortgage or rent payments; the US government has two kinds of housing subsidy, one for poor renters and the other intended for middle-income mortgage payers, but guess who gets most of the money? (more…)

I wrote it to get rid of a mood by condensing it and writing it down: the fascinated, uneasy sense of having relocated into the Uncanny Valley without quite meaning to, and the landscape does listen, and didn't we use to have winters? As catharsis it proved an utter failure, but I think it works as a (partial!) commonplace book of things we're doing we probably, by and large, should not.LessonsI can't tell my son how every rich city first envied, and then bought, the ubiquitous automated gun networks the military developed to make occupations safe for the occupiers.I could explain that the guns were taught, he has lived all of his life with machines that learn, but how could I explain that they were taught in a place where kids are seen as potential security threats?All I can do is hold him tight when he mourns his classmates, and tell him his teachers are right, he should never run when there's a security alarm.The Black ShipsThey are painted white to help cool down the containers, but everybody calls them the Black Ships, just like everybody knows their flags are meaningless. The money for the retrofitted container ships is American and European, and the reason they anchor near the coast of every war and disaster is that they will take passengers for free, but not to either place.Nobody knows where they take them. But they know what they are running from, and when the containers are nearly full they push their children aboard however they can, and remain on the rafts watching them leave.The Lotus ClauseThey didn't take my car; they made it forget my hand. For years it had opened to my touch, and only mine.I sat on the curb and cried.One day, months later, the bus ignored my face and demanded cash,. The people behind me looked away, embarrassed.Now I'm standing at the front door of a house that's asking who I am.Only the street cameras know me, but they couldn't care less. I take my gun and try to make them.But the gun lies inert in the unrecognized palm of my hand.The GunslingersThe two of you are covering the door, guns steady. Only somebody desperate robs a store in an CrowdCop zone of Austin, but this situation is what you downloaded the app for: be close to a crime, respond quickly, protect lives, make a buck.Somebody runs through the door, and you almost shoot before seeing it's a fleeing woman, but the other man has already fired. The woman falls. It takes five seconds for your phone to beep: you know what for, but the other man takes one second too long to realize.This time you shoot first.DirgeThey say the last whale wasn't harpooned: when she knew herself the last, she sang one last song and let herself drown. The last whaler sold a single copy of that song.Having lost them, we still had recordings, and eventually reconstructed their language. Not one of things but of flowing seas and growing fear. Understanding broke our hearts.The last song was, appropriately, translated last. I had bought and kept it secret, so I would be the first to know its meaning. After I did I destroyed it and told no-one.It was a command: Hide.

How can Chinese novelists convey the sense of unreality of living in a country where raids on the homes of civic officials uncover so much cash that it burns out four bill-counting machines when the police try to tot it up, or when it needs to be weighed by the ton to approximate its value? (more…)

The plan is actually surprisingly detailed and well-thought out compared to the guff that usually emerges from the Brexit crowd. I'm beginning to think England will endure!

(more…)

As I write, the aftermath of Brexit is being felt around the world -- Britain’s historic exit marking an end to the forty-year membership of the European Union. It’s ironic that this should coincide with the launch of The Medusa Chronicles, because the EU, a voluntary nation-states, is a kind of regional prototype of a world government of the kind which we feature in Chronicles, and which featured prominently in Arthur C Clarke’s own thinking, and his writing.Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds The Medusa Chronicles is available from Amazon.A world government is there in the background of A Meeting with Medusa, the 1971 novella which we took as our starting point. By the 2080s, we’re told, humanity enjoys a "secure and prosperous global society." When Howard Falcon plans his mission to Jupiter it is under the sponsorship of a directorate of "Long Range Planning" and a "Bureau of Astronautics." We extended this model in our sequel - even though our utopian world government ultimately crumbles under the pressure of an existential war. Clarke, however, had been writing of world governments at least as far back as books like The Deep Range (1957).A future world government was a common assumption in post-Second World War SF, presumably inspired by the multinational institutions that emerged after that war – the UN, the EU. Their purpose was to prevent a war between countries armed with atomic weapons, and to manage such challenges as poverty on a wider scale than the nation-state. You could even find it in children’s fiction. In Gerry Anderson’s space-opera TV puppet show Fireball XL5 (1962-3), the heroic Colonel Steve Zodiac serves in a World Space Patrol. "We now had the United Nations and I imagined, rightly or wrongly, that there would be a World Government in the future," Anderson said.But the idea of a world government has a longer history. In the nineteenth century Prince Albert, Consort of Queen Victoria, was one perhaps surprising advocate: "We are living at a period of the most wonderful transition, one which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end to which all history points – I mean, of course, the realization of the unity of mankind." His way of achieving that aim was to tie together the empires of Europe with bonds of royal marriage, as if one sprawling dynasty ruled all. To that end he arranged the marriage of his eldest daughter "Vicky" to "Fritz," heir to the throne of Prussia, the most militant of the German states. But in the 1870s Chancellor Bismarck dismissed Albert’s dynastic fancies; he unified Germany under Prussia by leading it into war with France. Later the First World War slaughtered millions, even though the monarchs of Britain, Germany, Russia and the rest were all related.HG Wells’s Modern Utopia (1905) depicted a world state with unified travel and economic management – but it was not truly democratic, being governed by "Samurai," a self-selecting elite class. Churchill was an early opponent of this idea, arguing that government should never be left in the hands of "experts." And this kind of dream of scientific control would, unfortunately, have ghastly echoes in Nazi Germany.In the modern world nations are driven to cooperate because we face threats which cross national boundaries, such as the impact of nuclear weapons or climate change. Looking further ahead, space advocates argue strongly for unified governance on Earth before we move into space; a war waged with the huge energies available to interplanetary travellers could wipe out our civilization altogether. But some academics think that even without such external pressures we are naturally evolving towards a world government, as the nation states weaken and barriers between them become porous electronically. The big problem, as HG Wells depicted and as has been played out in the EU, will be democratic accountability.And this is roughly the position taken by Arthur C Clarke.It was in 2061: Odyssey Three, the third book of the Space Odyssey sequence (1987) that Clarke described most specifically this might come about. From the coming of the jet age and of global communications, "the human species . . . was merging together, as the old linguistic and cultural divisions began to blur." The presence of multitudes of each nations’ citizens in foreign countries is another binding factor, and a disincentive to war.A minor nuclear conflict requires the big powers of China, the US, and the USSR (the book was written before the fall of the Berlin Wall) to cooperate to contain it. A major nuclear war becomes unthinkable for its sheer devastation, and in an "Age of Transparency" from the 1990s, with global surveillance by governments and private organizations, it is no longer even possible to plan a major war.By 2060, "there was surprisingly little opposition when that popular monarch, Edward VIII, was elected the first Planetary President." An immediate benefit is an economic boost from the 'dismantling of the vast and wholly parasitic armaments industry’ -- just as the founding of the European Community put a stop to the cost, as well as the destructiveness, of war in Europe. And a united mankind turns to the exploration of space as a new grand venture.It’s an entrancing idea that world government could simply come about as we become more sane – and after all the Berlin Wall did fall more or less painlessly, putting an end to the nightmare of the Cold War. HG Wells foresaw this too, in his own flawed utopian vision: "It is not by assimilation . . . but by understanding that the modern utopia achieves itself."It may be that under the pressure of technological change and global issues, when it comes to a world government, ultimately we may not have much choice, and some day we may wake up and realise it. Maybe Arthur C Clarke had it right after all.Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool, England, in 1957. He holds degrees in mathematics from Cambridge University, engineering from Southampton University, and business administration from Henley Management College. Since 1987, he has become one of the most preeminent science fiction writers of his generation, having published over 40 books and 100 short stories. A world-renowned bestselling author, Baxter has won literary awards in the United Kingdom, United States, Germany and Japan, including the British Science Fiction Award. He now lives in Northumberland with his wife. His latest novel, The Medusa Chronicles, co-written with Alastair Reynolds, and called “a resounding sweep of a story with rich seams of science and speculation” by Tor.com, is available now from Saga press. Follow Steve on his site.

Steve Dobbs grew up near the present-day site of Disneyland and was profoundly influenced by watching the park get built while he zipped by on his bike; today the reitred aerospace engineer has built a charming miniature Disney-inspired theme-park in his backyard in Fullerton, CA. (more…)

A very good piece by Tom Simonite in the MIT Technology Review looks at the implications of Intel's announcement that it will slow the rate at which it increases the density of transistors in microprocessors. (more…)

When Bruce Sterling wrote his seminal book The Hacker Crackdown -- a history of the rise of hackers, the passage of the first anti-hacking laws, and the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- most of the hackers he chronicled had handles that were a combination of playfulness and menace, like Phiber Optik, Scorpion and Acid Phreak. (more…)

Gay Talese's forthcoming book The Voyeur's Motel tells the allegedly true story of Gerald Foos, a Colorado motel owner and voyeur who claimed to have conducted "research" on human sexuality by spying on the sex lives of his guests through strategically placed ceiling gratings that let him covertly watch them from the motel's attics. (more…)

Akinori Goto designed and 3D printed this magnificent zoetrope where it won awards at the recent Spiral Independent Creators Festival in Tokyo.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uun1liGAN6Q(via This Is Colossal)

From her prison cell, whistleblower Chelsea Manning has written a beautiful piece for the Guardian about the Pentagon's announcement that it will end a longtime ban on transgender people serving in the Armed Forces, and the implications this has for ordinary trans Americans who serve our country, just like her.(more…)

In celebration of Independence Day weekend here in the U.S., Robert E. Jackson, esteemed collector of vernacular photographs, shares a selection of wonderful and odd patriotic vintage snapshots."I hope these photos from my collection give a brief, optimistic pause during this patriotic holiday and show a positive and somewhat humorous side to patriotism," writes Jackson.See more at the Humble Arts Foundation blog!

The world's first amphibious centipede has just been confirmed. It swims, and unlike other centipedes who hunt on land, this one hunts in water. It has super long legs to help it swim and, like all centipedes, is carnivorous. It also has a powerful bite, causing excruciating pain.The discovery started in 2001, when entomologist George Beccaloni from the National History Museum in London was on his honeymoon in Thailand. He turned over a rock near a stream, and was surprised at what he found. According to National Geographic:

See sample pages from this book at Wink.'Moleskine Cahier Journal (Set of 3, ruled)

Mexico City-based artist Pablo Dávila's "Living in time believing in the timeless" is a beautiful, compelling installation in which the UNIX timestamp triggers drumsticks, via an Arduino and custom code, to ping crotales (aka antique cymbals). It makes the ephemeral (and digital) visceral. The work is simultaneously jarring and meditative, a rather odd and provocative state to maintain."As each second of UNIX code is inherently unique, the drumming pattern of 'Living in time believing in the timeless' never repeats," Dávila says. "The UNIX timestamp will end on the year 2038, and the sculpture will die with it – a conflation of past-future time."Dávila's work -- from light installations to kinetic sculpture -- lies at the intersection of science, technology, and wonder. You can experience his first solo exhibition in the United States, including "Living in time...," at San Francisco's CULT Gallery through next week. The show, curated by Aimee Friberg and featuring Dávila's magnificent works inspired by the thinking of Marshall McLuhan, Tibetan Buddhist and yogi Milrepa, and minimalist composer Steve Reich, is titled "Ladies & Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space.""Light rays manifest themselves in a way in which our brain must process what is captured by our eyes for us to comprehend what we are seeing," Dávila says. "I believe we are disoriented in our comprehension and perception of time and space, I am attracted to particular objects that confront this deception and speak to me to me with distinct speeds, aesthetics and spaces."PABLO DÁVILA, Ad libitum (piano phase), 2016, Print on cotton paper, aluminum frame, LED’s, 35 x 158 x 6 cm, 13.75 x 62 x 2.5 in (Triptych), Edition of 2 + 1 AP:PABLO DÁVILA, Constant (phase), 2016, Video projection on canvas, 175 x 175 x 5 cm, 69 x 69 x 2 in, Edition of 2 + 1 AP:PABLO DÁVILA, Living in time believing in the timeless, 2016, Drumsticks and custom electronics, 85 x 147 x 13 cm, 33.25 x 58 x 5 in:

The longer you look, the better the effect.

https://youtu.be/CHWHXmLg7YEI love Grand Illusion videos, especially the host Tim, who demonstrates ingenious human-made curiosities. In this video, his friend plays a mischievous trick on him.

Make: recently posted a series of fun projects to their website that are also featured in Volume 52 of the magazine, their forthcoming DIY Virtual Reality issue. I really love some of these and wanted to share a few of my favorites here. (more…)

This video of a ball hitting a pane of glass was shot at 10 million frames per second with a HyperVision HPV-X camera.

A couple of days ago I wrote about one of my favorite SF and mystery writers, the late Fredric Brown. I just found out that you can get a a kindle edition called The Fredric Brown Megapack (2 Book Series) for $2, which includes 60 of his stories, many of which have great surprise endings. I bought it and I see many of my favorites here, including "Arena."From Wikipedia:

Nancy Grace's TV show popularized a modern media trend: inane rage built on bullshit that's too satisfying to fact-check. But now she's leaving HLN, and The Daily Beast bids "good fucking riddance" and tallies the worst moments from her career.

“So my daughter has been posting sexy selfies of herself and instead of telling her to stop, well, I thought of something better,” a dad from Washington state wrote on Instagram.Cassie Martin’s dad Burr re-created one of Cassie's photos, presented the images side by side, and posted the double image on Instagram. A meme was born.(more…)

Gary Johnson and Bill Weld hit small-l progressive talking points harder than big-L Libertarian ones in their campaign ad, which is nice. As a Briton and freshly-minted U.S. citizen voting for the first time, this is strangely exciting! But something about it—perhaps Bill grunting "Come onnnn!"—makes me feel like a virgin being cajoled into a threesome I may not enjoy.

https://youtu.be/JB1x0O-bhrwAdam Savage ha taught me a lot about cooking. In this video from Tested, he learns about grilling steaks.

When you’re attacked by an alligator, the National Enquirer has some great advice for you: “Run!”That’s just one of the really useful survival tips in this week’s helpful tabloids.Don’t drive - “driving can be hazardous to your health,” the Enquirer claims, noting a medical study that found motorists who drove more than an hour daily were on average six pounds heavier.“Sleep for health,” advises the National Examiner, which also offers “10 ways to beat menopause” and how to live with “losing a limb.” Is this a problem among their sedentary readership, or has Oscar Pistorius bought a life-time subscription?But what’s the point of staying healthy, since the world will be ending soon?“Humans and robots are on a collision course for a war that could break out by the middle of the century," according to the Examiner, which cites experts ranging from a Canadian novelist to Stephen Hawking. Maybe now is a good time to make sure that robots have a five-day waiting period before buying guns - or might the NRA object to that?The Globe continues its obsession with fat-shaming celebrities who dare gain an extra ounce or two. Candice Bergen is branded a “blue whale,” Jeff Bridges is “fat and sassy,” country singer Blake Shelton is suffering “fat shame” about his “soft belly and man-boobs,” and actress Tara Reid sports a “belly bulge.” “Diet lowers cancer risk” and “teen pounds are lethal,” state two articles on the Globe’s health page, all of which makes me hunger for People magazine’s recipes this week for eggs Benedict, strawberries & cream parfait, and apple rhubarb scones.The Globe’s elite informers inside Buckingham Palace report on the British Royal Family: “William tells Charles: It’s okay if you’re gay,” claiming “He wants Dad to stop hiding taste for men.” Despite his rather public marriages to Princess Diana and Camilla, Prince Charles allegedly “has desperately tried to hide his gay secret for decades.” So kind and caring of the Globe to share his “secret” with the world.The Enquirer returns to its favorite theme of “Crooked Hillary” with a cover emblazoned: “CORRUPT!” An Enquirer investigation claims that Hillary accepted $139 million for political favors, and used the Clinton Foundation as a slush fund for “fraud & bribes,” concluding: “Money-grubbing Hillary Clinton should be disqualified from the presidency!” It makes Fox News actually seem fair and balanced.Fortunately we have the crack investigative team at Us magazine to tell us that Heidi Klum wore it best (compared to Courtney Love . . . is that even a fair fight?) and that soul singer Maxwell ”would love a pet,” Nia Long carries Dior mascara, Nivea Creme and dental floss in her Street Level vegan leather tote, and that the stars are just like us: they ride bikes, buy in bulk, play musical instruments and climb ropes (though I can’t recall the last time I climbed a rope or played an instrument, so maybe the stars are different after all.)Us mag worries that TV’s ‘Bachelorette’ suitor JoJo is “falling for a fraud” in handsome smooth-tongued Jordan - a topic that is undoubtedly troubling more Americans than is the fall-out from Brexit. Us mag also declares that Taylor Swift’s latest beau, actor Tom Hiddleston, is “the one,” though I can’t help felling they said the same about Calvin Harris, Harry Styles, John Mayer, Taylor Lautner, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Swift’s past lovers ad infinitum.“The mysterious case of a missing 2-year-old” dominates the cover of People magazine, noting toddler DeOrr Kunz’s disappearance in the remote Idaho mountains, and asking: “Are his mom & dad hiding something?” Apparently there’s nothing like a national magazine implying that you murdered your own child to bring a family comfort and closure at a time of crisis. It’s not as if they took their son to Disney World and made him swim in an alligator-infested lagoon.As for your best options when faced with an alligator that doesn’t realize it would be better off as a handbag holdings the lipgloss, sunglasses and car keys of a celebrity featured in Us mag, “Don’t try to fight it,” and “Don’t climb a tree,” advises the Enquirer, which urges you to “Run!” and “Make noise!” In other words, flee screaming. That’s advice that could save your life the next time you visit Disney World - it’s certainly my standard reaction whenever I see a life-size Mickey Mouse or Goofy approaching, though I must confess that the urge to fight them is often overwhelming.Onwards and downwards . . .

A Maryland judge today granted a retrial to Adnan Syed, whose conviction for the 1999 murder of his former girlfriend was the subject of the first season of the popular podcast “Serial.”Syed’s lawyer C. Justin Brown announced the news Thursday afternoon via Twitter, and confirmed to reporters later that the motion for a new trial was granted by Judge Martin Welch.(more…)

The OxyLED LED Headlamp ($10 on Amazon) is a great deal for the price. The lamp is very bright (you can dim it, or make it strobe) and you can point the beam up or down. It's also got a motion activated switch so you don't gave to fumble for the button - just wave your hand in front of the beam to activate or deactivate it. https://youtu.be/9tfNhL_R_rI

After 12 years of true-crime bullshit and an official twitter account so demented as to be indistinguishable from parody, Nancy Grace is out at CNN sister network HLN.

It's been a day of “intrigue and betrayal” in UK politics, as the New York Times puts it. The man widely predicted to be a solid candidate as the next prime minister of Britain, Boris Johnson, says he won't run. This appears to be a response to today's unexpected news of a candidacy launch by Michael Gove, a key Boris ally in the Brexit campaign. It's hard to keep up, I know.(more…)

Eye-Fi makes clever wifi hotspots in the shape of SD cards; your camera sees them as SD cards but you can mount them on your network and automatically feed the images captured by your camera to a nearby laptop. But to make all this work with some models, you need an account on "Eye-Fi Center," a cloud service run by the company that sends configuration data to your card. (more…)

The Smithsonian has restored and put the studio model of the NCC-1701 back on display! This video is full of awesome information, and shot vertically so people can complain! There is also a fantastic blog post about the process, and the small modifications they've made.Via the National Air and Space Museum's blog:

A new federal report shows that the number of surveillance requests skyrocketed in 2015, and that courts approved every single one of them. That's right, not one single wiretap request was rejected during 2015.(more…)

Wonder what kind of NSA commander-in-chief Donald Trump would be? Well, he had a phone console near his bed that could connect to every phone in his Mar-a-Lago estate, reports Aram Roston at Buzzfeed. Several workers told Buzzfeed that Trump used the equipment to secretly listen in on phone calls in the mid-2000s.(more…)

In a new scientific study, McGill University researcher Jay Olson combined stage magic with psychology to make people think that an fMRI machine (actually a fake) could read their minds and implant thoughts in their heads. Essentially, Olson and his colleagues used "mentalist" gimmicks to do the ESP and "thought insertion" but convinced the subjects that it was real neuroscience at work. The research could someday help psychologists study and understand why some individuals with mental health problems think they are being controlled by external forces. Vaughan "Mind Hacks" Bell blogged about Olson's research for the British Psychological Society. From Vaughan's post:

The recent double murder of her two daughters, by mentally ill gun-enthusiast Christy Sheats was evidently meant to punish her husband for their impending divorce.Houston Chronicle:

A priest at St. Christopher Parish in Rocky Hill, Ohio says a man resembling this police sketch reportedly gave confession while pointing a gun at him the entire time. The fellow is still at large."He just came in, you know, to go to confession, and before he sat down, he pulled out this gun from behind his back," the priest said in a call to 911 after the incident. "So I did confession at gunpoint."The question is, what did he confess? Well, that's between him and his priest, and the man of god isn't breaking "the sacred seal of confession."(ABC News)