Phytophthora ramorum is a mold, related to the Irish Potato Famine pathogen, that causes some oak and tanoak trees to split open and bleed out all their sap, something called "sudden oak death." (more…)

https://youtu.be/Y2o8upCxcqAThe guys at This Old House are back to explain the many reasons why your home plumbing might not be draining water properly. You can play a drinking game by waiting for them to say "big slug of water" and "sewer gas."[via]

With Trump headed to an uncontested convention, high-paid conservative columnists like George Will have penned columns defending party bosses who might be planning to overrule the popular votes and hand-pick a more acceptable candidate for the GOP to front for president in 2016. (more…)

Rick Friday has been the editorial cartoonist for Farm News for 21 years, with a weekly slot in every Friday's paper. (more…)

Here's the AKAT-1 from Poland, "the first transistor-based differential equation analyzer, from 1959."From Retrothing:

In 1993, I started a radio station on the Internet, engaging in activities that later became known as podcasting and webcasting. I'm pleased to say that I've finished uploaded the archive of Internet Talk Radio to the Internet Archive.I ran the radio station from 1993-1996, and it was an exciting time on the Internet. Our flagship program was Geek of the Week, but we also were able to get one of the broadcast booths in the National Press Club to send out their luncheons, and joined the Public Radio Satellite system so we send out programs like TechNation. It was early in the digital world, so we were able to convince Harper Collins to give us Internet rights to Harper Audio, an amazing collection of people like Anne Sexton, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Frank Herbert and J.R.R. Tolkien reading their own work. We also managed to get official Congressional press credentials and ran tie lines into the basement of the Capitol to send out live feeds from the floors of the House and Senate.We also did a lot of special programs (check out John Perry Barlow, Cliff Stoll and the United Nations 50th Anniversary and published some really cool SoundBytes you could use for alerts and notifications, and had a thriving Christmas practice going until Santa got mailbombed in a nasty DDOS incident. I also uploaded some early press coverage and some of the presentations and letters in my files.We ran Internet Talk Radio as a nonprofit corporation called the Internet Multicasting Service. I was very lucky that UUNET, Sun Microsystems, and O'Reilly & Associates signed up as our charter sponsors and especially fortunate at the amazingly talented staff that joined me to run the operation, especially Brad Burdick who ran systems, and Marty Lucas and Corinne Becknell, our immensely talented audio team. I also remember fondly my good friend Luther Brown, who left a job producing the news for Tom Brokaw at NBC to work for me and passed away a few years ago. You can hear his amazing voice reading Twas the Night Before Christmas.I've been spinning the audio files on my servers continuously since 1993, but it is so nice to be able to upload this data to the Internet Archive where I know the data will live forever.

The votes in the Indiana presidential election primary tonight are still being counted, but GOP Party chairman Reince Priebus has already declared Donald Trump the “presumptive GOP nominee” after Ted Cruz dropped out of the race.Trump needs 1236 delegates to formally get the nomination, and he's well on his way. John Kasich hasn't ended his campaign, but he hasn't been seen as a credible contender for a while. Trump has dominated this election cycle in many ways.(more…)

After a brutal thrashing at Donald Trump's hands in Indiana's Republican primary election today, Ted Cruz is calling it quits. Trump, reports the BBC, is now almost certainly the party's nominee for president.

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, "In 1993, I started a radio station on the Internet, engaging in activities that later became known as podcasting and webcasting. I'm pleased to say that I've finished uploaded the archive of Internet Talk Radio to the Internet Archive." (more…)

A new scientific study reveals that air rage is much more likely on airplanes where inequality is obvious -- that is, airplanes where there's economy and first class sections. The University of Toronto researchers published their results in the journal Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences. From CNN:

In 2010, after years of bitter fighting, the French National Assembly passed "Hadopi," the worst copyright law in history, which provided for disconnecting whole families from the Internet if their network connection was implicated in an accusation of copyright infringement. (more…)

Author Timothy Ellis really enjoyed his time in the 1980's, and his Hunter series certainly pays homage. This, riddled with 80's references, space opera feels like it shouldn't work, but I've had a hard time putting down my kindle.Backwater bumpkin, 16-year-old Jonathon Hunter, leaves his isolated world of Outback, in the Australian sector of space, and is instantly thrust into the spotlight! Hunter barely saves himself, and mistakenly saves a bunch of other folks, during a pirate attack on his Uncle's space ship. Thus starts a Keystone Cops like avalanche of unbelievable space adventure. Hunter can't make a mistake, women nearly twice his age fawn all over him, and he gets a cat.I had a lot of time on my hands this weekend, while my daughter played with her grandparents, and I read 6 of this 9 book series. Ellis wrote manuals for the X video game series, and I think relies on this game, which I've never played, for some of his physics and backstory. He also evidently writes some spiritual guide books as well. Both are minutely present in these novels, but don't get in the way. However, the portrayal of women as mostly the same character, with different names and physical descriptions, does get a bit boring after a while, even the AI is just another mid 20s woman who wants to dance to electronica.Mostly, these books are fun space pirate, and then space religious zealot, smashing action scenes. Relying on his video game background, Ellis writes some great space combat. Ellis also, always, makes sure Hunter is in the best, fastest ship, with the newest technology. No one can stand in his way, and the baddies fall like dominoes. Hunter is one infallible, insufferable 16 year old.In addition to the 9 novels in the main series, there are a few additional ones focusing on characters other than Hunter, the ships AI Jane is one. I tried but didn't find the first interesting, regardless it being a detective novel.I've read them all via Kindle Unlimited.The Hunter Legacy (9 Book Series) Kindle Edition via Amazon

Ferguson's cops aren't just notorious for being an invading domestic military force: long before that, they were notorious for "failure to comply" arrests, where (mostly brown) people who were minding their own businesses were arrested for refusing to show ID, move along, or following other orders from uniformed officers. (more…)

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is a secret court that hears warrant requests from America's spy agencies when they want to wiretap people in the USA. (more…)

Swiss artists Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger recreated iconic photos from history in miniature, from cardboard, cotton wool, and other craft supplies. Above, "Making of AS11-40-5878 by Edwin Aldrin, 1969, 2014.""Making of Nessie by Marmaduke Wetherell, 1934, 2013":"Making of Concorde by Toshihko Sato, 2000, 2013":"Making of Tiananmen by Stuart Franklin, 1989, 2013":"War and fleece: DIY recreations of iconic photographs – in pictures" (The Guardian, thanks Plastic Ants!)

Further Future is a desert festival created by wealthy Burning Man attendees who want to get rid of the conference's DIY/participatory ethic and replace it with a pampered weekend where poor people wait on them while they strut around the desert, "networking." (more…)

University of Cambridge researchers have built the world's smallest working engine. The device, powered by light, could be the basis of future nanoscale machines that are just billionths of a meter in size. Fantastic Voyage, here we come! From the University of Cambridge:

Burn the witch. (Radiohead)

Shiv Integer is a bot created by artists Matthew Plummer-Fernandez and Julien Deswaef; it downloads Creative Commons-licensed models from Thingiverse, mashes them up into weird and often amazing new shapes, adds machine-generated titles and descriptions to them, and posts them. (more…)

The first McDonald's in Quetta, Pakistan has opened in Millennium Mall, in the militarized Police Lines neighborhood, prompting an official position from the Taliban. (more…)

Paolo Bacigalupi's new short story "Mika Model" is a detective tale about a murdering sexbot. (more…)

I'm a research director at Institute for the Future, and I interviewed author Douglas Rushkoff about his latest book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. It's a terrific look at the way the current system of wealth creation is rigged against everyone but the financial gatekeepers at the top of the food chain. More importantly, he offers some great suggestions for ways to make the system more fair for everybody.

The TSA gambled on millions of wealthy Americans opting out of its pornoscanner-and-shoe-removal process and signing up for its Precheck policy, which allows travellers to pay for the "privilege" of walking through a metal-detector with their shoes on, while their laptops stay in their bags. (more…)

Authors of a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America titled "Physical and situational inequality on airplanes predicts air rage", found that air rage occurs more frequently on planes that have fist class cabins, and especially on planes where coach passengers board by walking through the first class cabin.Mashable:

See sample images from this book at Wink.The Collector

After Daniel Ellsberg's astonishingly courageous release of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, he waited 40 years to meet someone like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, someone else inside who risked everything to expose the wrongdoing they had sworn to oppose. (more…)

Over at Cool Tools, Kevin Kelly and I interviewed Joshua Schachter, the creator of the social bookmarking site, Delicious, the creator of GeoURL, and the co-creator of Memepool. He's a fascinating person!Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single page

Copyright protects creative expression, but not utilitarian forms: that's why the silkscreened art on your t-shirt is copyrightable, but the t-shirt's design itself is not. (more…)

Archilogic, an online architecture viewer/editor designed to be easier for laypersons to use and share from than Sketchup, is spectacular stuff... at least on a fast computer. You can upload plans and convert them to 3D, move and replace furniture, mess around with the layout, push the results to friends or real estate agents, and so on. Some of the demos posted to the company's blog are fascinating: exploring Don Draper's apartment in the first-person is eerily voyeuristic. An unbuilt Frank Lloyd Wright design is more majestic and less, well, sleazy.Now do the Overlook Hotel!

This footage of an "illegal rave" – UK tabloid-speak for a barn party with chemically-stimulated youths in attendance – is so high-quality it seems like a recreation or out-takes from a movie set. I thought maybe that it's shot on film rather than video, but it looks like video?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOLE1YE_oFQ

A state judge in the Brazilian state of Sergipe has ordered all mobile phone operators in the country to block Facebook-owned WhatsApp for 72 hours, nationwide. Those five telecom providers put the ban into effect today, and it affects about 100 million people. In Brazil, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app.(more…)

Whenever I go to a restaurant and learn that salmon grilled on a cedar plank on the menu, I order it. The flavor of the cedar mixed with the salmon is incredible. I never put much thought into making salmon this was myself, until I had dinner at a friend's house and served salmon on a cedar plank. He said it wasn't hard to do. So I bought come cedar grilling planks (12 for $20) and gave it a try last night. Here's the recipe I used.I grilled the salmon in my Weber charcoal grill. I used hardwood lump charcoal, which takes a long time to heat up completely, but once it's going you get steady heat for a long time. I soaked the planks in water for a couple of hours before use.The results were as good as I hoped! The salmon dinner last night was excellent, and the cold salmon salad I had for lunch today was even better.Image: Shutterstock

Spencer Chen, VP of marketing and business development at Alibaba Group, has responded to complaints that AliExpress has hosted design pirates by tweeting images from a 1989 book called Trademarks & Symbols of the World: The Alphabet in Design. Do they look familiar?

https://youtu.be/LIwdVsNM02EA disagreement between two Florida gentleman ended amicably, with one of them getting a free ride on the hood of the other's car.

"You’ll be dealing with terrorists, you’ll be dealing with hybrid armies, you’ll be dealing with little green men, you’ll be dealing with tribes, you’re going to be dealing with it all, and you’re going to be dealing with it simultaneously,” United States Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said in a speech last week at Norwich University.(more…)

The proposed nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK is estimated to cost $35 billion. The BBC compares the price tag to other big ticket items:

https://youtu.be/zZA5G2Z06uEThis vehicle picks up and stores traffic cones at nearly half the speed, 10 times the noise, and 20 times the expense of a human crew. But it looks cool.

On Saturday, Franky Zapata took his prototype Flyboard Air hoverboard for a rather impressive flight, three miles on the French coast. It's based on Zapata's previous water-powered hoverboard.When the first short flight video went up last month, The Verge interviewed Zapata:

'Songs of Consolation,' performed at Pembroke College Chapel in Cambridge last month, was the first airing in a 1000 years of a medieval tune the way it would have been.

We're huge fans of portable power gadgets, but this one isn't going in my pocket to help me keep my phone topped up after lunch. Anker's Powerhouse is the size and weight of a concrete construction brick, and at $500 and 120,000mAh, by far their largest power pack yet. It'll charge your laptop 15 times over, power CPAP machines and broadcast video cameras, and double as a bear club should a camping trip go awry. There's multiple USB ports, a 12v car socket and mains power.Jeff Beck already got one and quite likes it.

Almost everyone has their smartphone in a case of one kind or another. Beyond simple protection, finding a case that can charge your phone on its own, but doesn’t feel like it’s also adding a couple pounds to the phone’s weight is the tricky part. Billed as the world’s thinnest battery case, the ThinCharge iPhone 6/6S Battery Case not only cuts a slick profile, it also offers amazing power and versatility in that tiny body - and now, you can get this piece of slim-tech for $56.99 - 55% off - in the Boing Boing Store.Once you’re charged up and ready to go, you’ll have ultimate traveling peace of mind, knowing the ThinCharge can offer up to 200% battery life while you’re out and about. Just plug in your iPhome 6 or 6s and punch the battery activation button and ThinCharge’s 2600mAh output will get your phone back up on its feet.Handy LED indicator lights let you know when the charging is underway or finished; and the unit’s pass-through charging feature allows current to juice up the phone before it starts replenishing your battery.But they don’t call it the world’s thinnest battery case for nothing, so ThinCharge’s true calling card is right in its name...the way you forget you’ve even got it in your pocket. With no additional weight dragging you down, feel free to have it on your phone at all times, ready to offer that powerful surge to get you out of trouble at a moment’s notice.The case comes with rounded edges to help protect against unfortunate drops and scratches, cutouts to use the phone’s speaker and camera without interruption and the ThinCharge even sports different colors for your various moods.The ThinCharge will usually run you almost $130, so get in right now and lock in the world’s thinnest battery case for over half-off.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYc8x5cSygc&w=560&h=315]

Our pal (and former Artist in Residence at Walt Disney Imagineering) Derek DelGaudio's new show In and of Itself is opening at the Geffen Playhouse on May 3rd and it will be stupidly great. His last show Nothing to Hide (directed by Neil Patrick Harris) is literally the best magic show I've ever seen, and I think this one will be better. It's not a magic show in any traditional sense. It's something new - something different and better. It's conceptual art but without pretension or self-indulgence and it happens to have incredible magic in it. Frank Oz is directing and Mark Mothersbaugh is writing original music for it.

https://youtu.be/WzbHi7Lbz00I'm ashamed to admit that I never learned much about the International Space Station. But after seeing the IMAX 3D documentary A Beautiful Planet, I feel like I spent 45 minutes in it, and it was emotional and thrilling. I'm normally not a big fan of 3D movies, but the quality was so high that it didn't bother me and instead made the experience of learning about life inside the ISS that much better.I was enthralled the entire time I watched the movie. I felt like I was floating in the ISS, observing the astronauts right in front of me as they ate, cut their hair, made espresso, helped each other get into their spacesuits, and played the bagpipes. I remember reading somewhere that one of the requirements of being an astronaut is that you can't be arrogant or have a big ego because those aren't good traits to have when you live in close quarters for months on end with other people. The astronauts on the ISS all seemed very smart, good natured, and kind. I wanted to hug them all.The movie, which is narrated by Jennifer Lawrence, is called A Beautiful Planet because the main star of the show is our planet as filmed by crew of the ISS. We've all seen images of the Earth from space, but to see them in 3D on giant screen in crystal clarity is another experience altogether. My 13-year-old daughter was shocked by the nighttime footage of South and North Korea. South Korea is brightly lit and North Korea is in total blackness, except for a faint spot of light from Pyongyang. After we got home, she began reading about North Korea and its cultlike dictatorship.I left this powerful movie with a feeling very humbled and with a great respect for the people and countries who worked together to design, construct, and maintain the ISS.

You never know when new projects, ideas or opportunities can drop into your lap at a moment’s notice. That may require you to learn a new programming language like Python. Or maybe you need a primer on 3D game development. Or you might realize you could use a serious brush-up on iOS mobile creation.Point is, it’s always uncertain what you may need to learn - or master - tomorrow. Thankfully, online training leader Stone River Academy is opening their doors wide with a lifetime subscription to their overflowing catalog of tech training courses at 93% off its regular price.Stone River Academy boosts more than 90 courses and more than 2,000 hours of online training, ready to get you up to speed on almost anything needed to take your career or hobby passions to the next level.Check out tutorials on a host of web disciplines, including web and mobile programming, web design, game app creation, 3D animation and more. Or get more specialized training in some of the most popular and valuable programs and development platforms out there like Bootstrap, Unity 3D, Java, Python, MySQL, node.js, CSS and others.With two to five new courses joining Stone River Academy’s roster every month, you’ll never be at a loss for what to learn next.If you’re chasing a new job or thinking of a career change, you’ll undoubtedly find a 3-to-8 hour course here to help you land it. Or if you’re just an uber-overachiever...just dive in...there’s plenty to keep you busy.At just $89 for the package, a savings of more than $1,300, that’s pennies a month for complete access. Do it now![youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_wIIcScp6E&w=560&h=315]

And you thought debt collection tactics in the United States were bad.“They have stripped and sexually abused a woman, severely burned a toddler by firebombing a house and broken a woman’s pinkie as a warning.”(more…)

His name is Mister Bentley, and he's an English Bulldog, and yes these incredible photos of this dog flying in a helicopter over the most beautiful wilderness along Canada's western coast are real.Bradley Friesen is a helicopter pilot based in Vancouver, Canada. His YouTube channel and Instagram feed are full of delightful images from the air, with this wonderful pup as his co-pilot. Who's a good doggie?(more…)

Switzerland is a haven for internet piracy, the Obama Administration's global trade rep says. The European nation famous for Swiss Alps, Swiss Cheese, Fondue, and being a long-term U.S. political ally since WWII is now on America's annual intellectual property shitlist.(more…)

Leaves of Grass? He probably ate them now and then.A scholar at the University of Houston in Texas has discovered a 13-part, 47,000-word series by Walt Whitman, published by the New York Atlas in 1858, under the pseudonym Mose Velsor.Under that most macho of aliases, “Manly Health and Training” amounts to a "part guest editorial, part self-help column," a “rambling and self-indulgent series” that reveals Walt Whitman's thoughts on a variety of manly-man topics. Including sex.(more…)