These preachy fliers recently appeared in San Francisco's Bernal Heights neighborhood. And yeah, sure, I (mostly) agree with the sentiment but... blecch. The responses are fun though."Judgemental Signs Tell Bernal Neighbors How to Live" (Bernalwood)

A woman reacts as U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump works the crowd following a campaign event in an airplane hanger in Rome, New York April 12, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri (more…)

I haven't enjoyed the effects of dry pigments this much since Blue Man Group! (Kuma Films)

On April 29-30 at Cal State Fullerton, fans, scholars, authors, and artists will celebrate surrealist science fiction author Philip K. Dick with an extravaganza of talks, panels, and exhibits! Special guests include Dr. Ursula Heise, Jonathan Lethem, Tim Powers, and James Blaylock.Philip K. Dick Conference 2016

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Step outside, look in any direction, and you’re sure to spot some exquisite designs in nature: the vivid jewel-like symmetry found on the wings of a butterfly, the fractal branching of trees, the pointillist patterns sported by a snake, or the hexagonal nest of a wasp, just to name a few. And science writer Philip Ball has captured some of this beauty with over 300 stunning photographs that he includes in his latest book, Patterns in Nature.Categorized in chapters such as Symmetry, Fractals, Spirals, Cracks, and Flow and Chaos, Ball explains with both images and an accessible narrative how the most magnificent designs on the planet come from math, physics and chemistry, not human beings. He describes the various mathematics that create various patterns, and also points out parallels between similar patterns with seemingly unrelated sources. For example, the spots on a butterfly mimic the face of an owl. The “spots” on a giraffe look similar to cracked mud. Ball turns complex science into a fascinating read, and his gorgeous coffee table book is perfect for both the science and art minded alike.

https://youtu.be/HyF-11_QUOcA University of Delaware police officer forced a student to scribble over a drawing of a penis inscribed on a gigantic "free speech" beach ball because it doesn't "open up a conversation." He went on to lecture the students who had the ball on display about what kinds of free speech he would tolerate.

In the 1980s, Jerdon sold this, er, clever 357 Magnum Hair Dryer complete with holster. They can be had on eBay for around $100 to $300. YouTuber Rachell Tan gleefully demonstrates in the video below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LObaUw7k1g(Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Smithsonian Magazine reviews a free smartphone app called Flyover Country that makes it more fun to be in the window seat. No Wi-Fi needed.

Earbuds are almost as individualized as the people who wear them. Some offer premium sound for the audiophiles, some lean on stand-out features and compatibility for the tech geeks -- and some just make you LOOK cool. Thankfully, these three earbud options are a nice mix of all three approaches...and all come at a great price.Munitio NINES Tactical EarphonesRegular Price: $179The DEAL: $36.99 (79% off)The NINES pack a wallop across the board for any earbud buyer. The bass-enhancing chamber and deep, distortion free sound provide a top-flight audio experience, while the one button universal mic control allows you to talk and control your sound mix with expert precision. It works with virtually any smartphone, tablet, mp3 player or other portable device and - here’s the kicker - the earbud cables are reinforced with Kevlar, meaning you won’t get the fraying and splitting you see with cheaper earbuds. And at 79% off, they’re a premium item at a discount price.

You’ve heard of bitcoin. It’s a form of digital cash you can send to anyone, even a complete stranger. You may not have heard about bitcoin's digital ledger, called the blockchain, tracks and validates bitcoin transactions. Blockchain technology has enormous potential beyond bitcoin to automate every type of online transaction that requires a degree of trust. In this short video, produced by Institute for the Future, Olivia Olson (the voice of Marceline the Vampire Queen in Adventure Time) explains how blockchain technology can be used to launch companies that are entirely run by algorithms, make self-driving cars safer, help people manage and protect their online identities, and track the billions of devices on the Internet of Things.

As the Panama Papers story unfolds and we learn more about the systematic world-scale corruption of offshore tax-havens, the usual suspects have mounted a charm-offensive top defend anonymous offshore bank accounts as critical to democracy and a check against the rise of fascism (no, really). (more…)

A friend, who purports to be a famous chef in the Seattle area, introduced me to Chicken Salt. After discussing his great love of transglutaminase, and MSG, he told me about Chicken Salt. This Australian seasoned salt was, in his opinion, where I had to adventure next.He sent me this recipe on Lucky Peach. It involves the roasting and toasting of chicken breast skin in a manner to maintain chicken-y flavor and not create carbon dust. You then grin that chicken skin into dust, in a mortar and pestle, and mix it with seasoned salt. Adding baked down chicken fat as if it were nitrous to the muscle car of flavor, salt.This seemed like a lot of work for me, at the time, so I thought I'd just buy some online. When it arrived at home, I tried it on some homemade potato chips, fried in rendered duck fat. I suggest lightly salting the chips on their way in and out. It totally added a delicious chicken-y, and salty flavor!Then I looked at the can, and there was no chicken in there. It says VEGAN right on the label. I was confused. So, I asked a friend, who claims to have been born and raised in Australia, if Chicken Salt needed chicken to be authentic. She laughed and laughed. Evidently the Lucky Peach recipe is a bit more lower eastside than down under. She assures me the OTC stuff is authentic, and suggests the next time I want an Australian seasoning, I not ask a Seattle Chef for a recipe from New York. Evidently this is a seasoning for Chicken, and the chicken-y flavor is due to the blend of spices? Witchcraft.I'm enjoying Chicken Salt. Know what makes it even better? Adding some MSG, thats science.Chicken Salt - Vegan, Kosher, NO MSG, Gluten Free, Australia's #1 All-Purpose Seasoning,4.5 oz via Amazon

In light of Flint lead catastrophe, John Oliver gets the cast of Sesame Street to update their 20-year-old segment warning kids to steer clear of lead paint, making it over into an economic parable about moral hazard and aligning incentives.(via Rolling Stone)

California's kelp forests are disappearing from the north coast. These formerly lush, dense jungles of sea weed provided shelter, food, and in many cases home, for many, many marine creatures. Without this important resource the ecosystem is in big trouble.From the Sonoma Press Democrat:

The Authors Guild has been trying to get a court to shut down Google's book-scanning/book-search program for more than a decade. (more…)

More than four years ago, I blogged about how former federal prosecutor Ken White had tracked down a con-artist who sent a fake invoice to his firm. Now, finally, the scammer has been indicted. (more…)

Rumors have it that the fabled third Bill and Ted movie will be filmed in the United Kingdom, where they know nothing at all about time traveling phone booths.Wyld Stallyns!https://youtu.be/sFy17auuK08Via the Irish Examiner:

In Hacking Team Malware Para La Vigilancia en América Latina, a new report from Derechos Digitales, we learn how Hacking Team, the hacked-and-disgraced cyber-arms dealer (previously) supplied weapons to corrupt state actors in latinamerica who used them to spy on political opposition, journalists and academics. (more…)

Rocket Lee writes, "In Bloc by Bloc: The Insurrection Game, players struggle together to overthrow a repressive government and liberate a randomized city that changes with each game. To win, players must build barricades, loot shopping centers, occupy strategic locations, clash with riot cops and defend liberated zones before time runs out and the military arrives. Each player is also dealt an individual faction agenda and those with Vanguardist or Nihilist agendas are secretly playing to win the game alone." (more…)

Johnny Scuz combined two awful things: the new PowerPuff Girls cartoon and the "it's time to stop" meme. If you want a picture of the future, Winston, imagine beloved things being drowned in irony, lame topicality and imitation of things young people don't even do anymore, forever.

The US Farm Security Administration commissioned hundreds of thousands of photos in the 1930s and 40s, representing an unparalleled record of the times. Unfortunately, as revealed in an exhibition curated by Bill McDowell, many of the shots were badly damaged with hole punches. The results are an unsettling, inadvertent commentary on the depression and the lives it ruined – and also an incredible challenge for photoshoppers.Easy mode (Five-bedroom house, Meridian Homesteads, Mississippi, 1935)Hard mode (Mr Tronson, farmer near Wheelock, North Dakota, 1937)

The room is bland and off-white. Could be anywhere. Daylight seeps through curtains that could have been manufactured at any time since the Second World War. The convicts look down at a camera. They're disheveled and maybe afraid. The camera is a cheap one, probably a cellphone. They aren't political prisoners in North Korea, though; it's Johnny Depp and Amber Heard in Australia. In the recording, made for an Australian court after the two snuck their pet dogs into the country, however, they do confess their crimes – and render a eulogy to biodiversity.

I had to remove the SSD from an elderly MacBook Air, but the tiny little screw on it was stuck on good. The appropriate Torx driver stripped it, and two flatheads snapped in the hole that remains. Here's the easy way. (more…)

Retro Report did a short feature on the moral panics about D&D in the 1980s. It's a fun, 13 minute look back at the moment when D&D totally changed a bunch of kids' lives, only to be vilified and literally demonized by opportunistic members of the religious right. (more…)

A few years back, on a whim, I bought a Breville citrus juicer. This monstrous, stainless-steel, $200 boat anchor takes up a ton of space, weighs more than I really want to move around, and is an absolutely meditative pleasure to use!Every weekend I buy a 10 pound bag of oranges. I then move this 10 pound juicer from the pantry to the counter top, and spend 30-45 minutes slicing oranges in half and juicing them. You put the half orb on the juicing element, and crush it in the press. When the press is shut, the juicing element will begin to turn and wring nearly every last drop out of the orange, lemon or grapefruit half. The turning element is also important, it whips up the pulp-y mass that gathers and allow it to drain.There are several different sized pulp baskets. My daughter prefers the least pulp-y of them all, and I do too, it still lets an awful lot through. The juice tastes amazing.I find it pretty mellow to stand there and just squash a bunch of oranges. I tend to get enough juice to get my daughter and I through a week. Sometimes I listen to a podcast, other times just the whirring of the motor.Make sure you have space in your kitchen, or someplace to store this juicer. If you are going to put it down low, know that it is heavy and an odd shape to be picking up. I use the 8-year-old to get it from ground level to around 3 feet of elevation. Insanely, I have this AND a juicer for other stuff like carrots, kale and apples! That one comes out when its time to liquify the leftovers from my CSA.Breville 800CPXL Die-Cast Stainless-Steel Motorized Citrus Press via Amazon

Daniel McCall of Liberty Maniacs, an online jokey t-shirt and mug shop, received a nastygram from the Sander's campaign. It would appear Sanders is turning to intellectual property thuggery in an attempt to silence voices it does not like, even cute pictures with Karl Marx.McCall's lawyer has answered the Bernie 2016 folks with a letter of their own.Via BuzzFeed:

Beginning in July 2014 and continuing to April 2015, someone (possibly Ian Bogost) maintained an obsessive Tumblr site about whether Ian Bogost, an eminent and brilliant video games critic and editor of a spectacular series on everyday objects, would buy a pressure washer, and if so, which one. (more…)

99 Cents Only store magnate Howard Gold lives next to George Clooney. On Saturday night, both of them threw political fundraisers for would-be 2016 Democratic presidential candidate. (more…)

Ian's Shoelace Site has a perfectly simple guide to lacing 45 different ways, with succinct descriptions of the benefits of each.Previously:

In Jack Hunt's 'The Renegades,' a small team of High School students survive the zombie apocalypse. At no point, however, will you be crying out "Wolverines!"Castle Rock, Nevada has nothing going for it but an annual halloween-time zombie run. Naturally, several of the local High School's less-fitting-in sort have named themselves, titularly, "The Renegades" and are quite good at making it past all the fake zombies. The world has changed, and finally these bozos have a useful skill. Rapid fire teenage jokes and abuses result.Hunt's story is someplace between Red Dawn and the Bad News Bears, except it needs Buttermaker. The Renegades filled a void I didn't know I was missing, sort of 'what would a John Hughes zombie story be?" Probably, something like this but with less poop jokes.This is immature, but fun zombie comedy.NOTE: The author of this post has only seen the 1984 Patrick Swayze 'Red Dawn' and not the 2012 re-make.The Renegades (A Post Apocalyptic Zombie Novel) via Amazon

China's Internet censors have ordered the country's social media companies to block further sharing of a viral video that shows a toddler threatening members of the notorious urban management police squad with a long pole, telling them to leave his grandmother alone. (more…)

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Jesper is offered as "the ultimate minimalist watch," reducing the psychological baggage of personal timekeeping to the simplest possible state by "opting out of telling time altogether."

Alabama governor Robert Bentley left his wallet in Tuscaloosa when he headed off for his beach house. So his aides sent a state police helicopter to fetch it, at a public cost of about $4000.

I have one bag of clothes, one backpack with a computer, iPad, and phone. I have zero other possessions.Today I have no address. At this exact moment I am sitting in a restaurant and there’s no place for me to go to lie down.By tonight I will find a place to lie down. Will that be my address? Probably not.Am I minimalist? I don’t know. I don’t care. I don’t like that word. I live the way I like to live no matter what label it has.At any moment, you are exactly where you want to be, for better or worse.A lot of people get minimalism confused.This story is from James Altucher's website. He let us run it after we asked nicely.It’s not necessarily a good way to live. Or a free way to live for many people. It’s just the way I like to live.I like to be a wanderer. Without knowing where I am going to end up. To explore with no goal. To love without expectation.For now. Maybe not for later. Maybe not yesterday.“Does minimalism mean not having a lot of possessions?”No, not at all. I think minimalism means having as little as you require. That means different things to everyone.For me, having little means I don’t have to think about things that I own.My brain is not so big. So now I can think about other things. I can explore other ways of living more easily.Some people don’t like that. I know many people who love roots. Who love being sentimental towards items. This is fine. Who am I to judge?The other day I threw out my college diploma that was in storage. I threw out everything I had in storage. The last objects left in my life.At 48 years old I have nothing and nowhere. Other than the people I love and the experiences I love.A friend asked me, “You worked hard for that diploma. Are you sure you want to throw it out?”Yes. I’ve worked harder for other things since then. I don’t keep all of these things around either. They are gone.Society tells us a diploma is a special life achievement. It isn’t. It’s yesterday. I don’t hold onto all the things society tells me to hold onto“How do you deal with kids if you are a minimalist?”Like 50% of Americans or more, I’m divorced. I have two beautiful children with my first wife. I love my children very much.I miss them almost constantly. I’m not minimalist if minimalism means having zero attachments. I’m attached to my kids.I see them as much as I can. Sometimes they visit me (wherever I am) and sometimes I visit them. And some times they stay with me for an extended period of time.I hope to talk to them every day for the rest of my life. If they lived with me I probably wouldn’t be able to live the way I do and I probably wouldn’t want to.But life has delivered me to this shore. So I pick myself up and explore the jungle on this new island.“Do you have to get off the internet to be a minimalist?”Sometimes. For four million years we were “disconnected.” For 20 years we have been “connected.”I have 238,795 unread emails in my inbox. Emails are a suggestion but not an obligation.Love and spirituality and gratitude are found in personal connection. Not in an email response.Sometimes I might return an email ten years later. Those are fun. I pretend like I just got the email a second ago and I return it, “Sure I’ll meet you for coffee tomorrow!” I get fun responses.I never answer the phone. I have no voicemail. My phone number is 203-512-2161. Try it and see.I go on Twitter one hour a week to do a Q&A every Thursday from 3:30 – 4:30 EST. I’ve been doing that for six years.. I post articles on Facebook but don’t really use it for anything else.I have a kindle app on my iPad mini and read all of my books there.I understand real books are beautiful. So I go to bookstores for hours and read them. But I won’t own them because they won’t fit in my one bag.I never read random articles on the Internet unless they are by people I know. Mostly I read books I love.A friend asked me, when he heard all of this, “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to miss some information?”I asked him, “What information?”99% of information we read, we forget anyway. The best way to remember is to “DO.”Otherwise, I look at nothing online.Experiences happen when you disconnect. And I choose experiences over goods or information.“Does minimalism mean having few emotional attachments?”I love my friends. I love my children. I love talking to people at a party or a dinner or an event and learning from them.Love is minimalism. Desire, possession, and control are not minimalism.Minimalism of things? No. Minimalism of fear, anxiety, stress, mourning.I don’t like any intrigue. I don’t like to gossip about people.When I do that, I feel like I am carrying those people in my backpack. So the more I gossip, the heavier my baggage is.I don’t like feeling bad if someone doesn’t like me. That’s also baggage. I try to leave that behind.And we’re all different. You never really know why someone is doing the things they are doing.Sometimes its for deeply sad reasons. Sometimes they are projecting. Sometimes they had a bad day, or a bad life. Sometimes It’s for reasons we’ll never understand.“Why did they do this?” or “Why is this happening to me?” won’t fit in my one bag.Did I check the box on physical health, emotional health, creativity, and compassion today?Those items don’t need to fit in my bag. They are gone by end of day. I’ll find them again tomorrow.How do you get rid of an attachment that is in your baggage? I don’t really know.I certainly carry around extra baggage. So I just get back to the four items I said above starting with physical health.Then I always find my baggage is a little lighter.“Does minimalism mean having no accomplishments?”No. If anything, the more you accomplish, the more you can afford to get rid of the things society uses to hold you down.Or, the reverse. Either way.“Is minimalism healthy?”Yes. Sometimes. For instance, I don’t like to eat more than I need. Although going extreme on that becomes an obligation to carry around.I don’t like to have experiences that are unhealthy.For me, experiences are always more important than material goods. A story is more important than a gift.A material good might not fit in my bag. But a joyful experience is lighter than an atom.I get to look forward to it beforehand. I get to have it. I get to remember it forever afterwards and learn from it and love it. And it weighs nothing.What if an experience is not so joyful.One thing I know: joy is a choice inside and not an emotion given to you.Sometimes I make the wrong choice. I can’t help it. But sometimes I make the right one. I hope today I will.“What are minimalist emotions?”Love, joy, wonder, curiosity, friendship connection. These are things you give away. Not take from others.Emotions that can’t fit in my bag: possession, control, anxiety, fear.I don’t include anger. Anger is just fear clothed. When I’m angry I try to find the underlying fear. Get naked with it.Am I good at this? Not really. I try to get better.If I judge myself for something I did wrong then I just did two things I don’t like to do: the wrong thing, and the judging.Minimalism is about not judging yourself or others.“You have to have goals to succeed! How can you be a minimalist with goals?”Goals are ways the mind tries to control you. “I need X to be happy.”When I feel like I need something outside of me to be happy, I have to make room in my bag for it.I don’t have enough room. I have some shirts and pants and toothpaste and a few other things. Goals don’t fit.I have interests and things that I love to do. If I get better at those things each day (or try to) I feel good.When I have less things in my bag, I feel more free. Did I get 1% more “free” today, whatever free means?When I spend time with friends, I find joy in the connection. Sometimes the only thing we need in life is not a goal achieved but a hand to hold.These three above items catapult me to achieve every goal I never had.It’s magic.“Should I sell my house and get a smaller house?”No. Or…I don’t know. Don’t do it for a label. If you like your house, keep it. If you like your job, keep it.Figure out the 10-15 things you want in your bag before you die tomorrow.“What’s the first step I should take? Should I throw things out?”I have no clue.This is the problem with self-help books. They seem to be written by someone on a pedestal giving advice without having any blemishes.I have too many blemishes to give advice. I am a homeless man with no address, with some failures and some successes and no possessions.Today I can start over. Or today I can ask too many times: “Why?”But there’s one thing I can do: I can always help someone else. That makes my day and life lighter.Anyone can have miracles in their life.Miracles don’t happen. Miracles are given.“If you are a minimalist how come sometimes you have really long articles?”Because I don’t care what you think about me.[Read James' follow-up post, where here reflects on the feedback he's received so far on this essay.]

We didn’t all go to Wharton or Harvard Business School. Sometimes the entrepreneurial bug bites long after your collegiate days have passed. But just because you didn’t get a business degree from some super-prestigious, ultra-expensive commerce-focused proving ground doesn’t mean you’ll never learn what it takes to succeed in the world of dollars and cents.In fact, you can tap into ELearning’s all-inclusive Startup School 2016 bundle of courses and learn exactly what it takes to make some real money wheeling and dealing online. Get the high-priced training that an MBA candidate spends years accumulating - for only $49 right now in the Boing Boing Store.Across 60-plus hours of expert tech and business instruction, you’ll learn:

I've written about melamine foam (sold as Magic Erasers) before. They are great for getting rid of mars and stains on almost any surface. The last time I reviewed them, a box of 30 cost $7.89 on Amazon, which was a great price. Today I learned that the price has dropped to $3.49 for 30.https://youtu.be/VkBSlD60rDA

A chimp named Chacha escaped from his enclosure at the Yagiyama Zoological Park in Japan and ran around a neighborhood for two hours. He was shot with dart from a tranquilizer gun and fell from his perch on a telephone poll. It looked like quite a fall, but zoo officials say he is OK.NY Times:

Apple's signaled that its desktop operating system is to be renamed MacOS, making the questionable search string "OS X" a thing of the past. The new brand turned up on an environmental webpage at its site (an official manifestation of hints already found in technical documents), though it was soon replaced by the currently-official name. (more…)

My sole attempt at hydroponic anything at home was gardening in an Aerogrow kit. Jay Cheeba's Big Buds encouraged me to consider firing up the grow lights for something far better than meh tasting tomatoes!Everything you need to know about indoor cultivation of marijuana seems to be in Mr. Cheeba's free-to-kindle-unlimited-readers tome. There are sections on everything about growing the plant, from lighting systems and hydroponics, to trimming, and nutrients, and there are sections on harvesting, and preparing for use. This is a very step-by-step guide, and while short, only around 60 pages, I feel pretty confident Cheeba has given me enough information to successfully cultivate a crop of some pretty good weed at home.I think, however, it is easier to go to a dispensary and my home would smell far less bad. The Aerogrow kit, with just tomatoes, made the house pretty pungent. Sometimes it was nice, sometimes it was chemically. I have serious worries, as a friend's single plant in a pot really destroyed their apartment, once, long ago.Even tho I won't be growing, for .99 cents via the Kindle Store, or free via Kindle Unlimited, this is a fun read.Marijuana: Big Buds, Growers guide to get the biggest yields from your plants (Growing Marijuana, Marijuana Cultivation, Cannabis, Medical Marijuana) by Jay Cheeba via Amazon

In last night's Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton defended her enormous super PAC fundraising machine by saying, "President Obama had a Super PAC when he ran. President Obama took tens of millions of dollars from contributors. And President Obama was not at all influenced when he made the decision to pass and sign Dodd-Frank, the toughest regulations on Wall Street in many a year."(more…)

Artist Kiersten Essenpreis has a kid who loves garage doors and she isn't shy about encouraging their passion. (more…)

Catherine Buni and Soraya Chemaly report on The Secret Rules of The Internet: the mass-scale moderation practiced by social networks. (more…)

Jarre tapped the whistleblower for vocals on "Exit," a track from Electronica 2: The Heart of Noise, a new electronic music album that drops in three weeks. (more…)

Uber and Lyft are only economically viable because they offload their cost of capital -- the investment and depreciation on cars and the cost of keeping a driver fed and healthy -- onto the drivers, who are only willing to accept such a bad deal because the labor market sucks. (more…)

Architects love to render their buildings covered and ringed in trees: trees that sprout from balconies, dot roofs, climb walls. (more…)

After several false starts, including one that involved Terry Gilliam and a groat, Neil Gaiman has announced that he will personally adapt he and Terry Pratchett's oustanding, comedic apocalypse novel Good Omens as a six-part TV series. (more…)