Hal Varian, now Google's chief economist, wrote "How to Build an Economic Model in Your Spare Time," a classic paper, in 1994 while teaching at UC Berkeley (he's still an emeritus there). (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH_hEplhOMgThe 64 is a crowdfunded rebuild of the classic Commodore 64, to ship with an as-yet-unannounced collection of games and software from the beloved gaming platform. (more…)

In Evaluation of the potential for virus dispersal during hand drying: a comparison of three methods, published in The Journal of Applied Microbiology, researchers from the University of Westminster showed that viruses applied to rubber gloves were aerosolized by Dyson Handblade hand-dryers and spread further than viruses and other germs would be by conventional hand-dryers or paper towels. (more…)

Bruce Sterling's announced the first-ever English publication of his story for 25 minutos en el futuro. Nueva ciencia ficción norteamericana, a Spanish-language sf anthology of translated works by anglophone writers whose work is largely unknown in Mexico. (more…)

“I’m a bestselling author!” That’s a statement bound to elicit cheers . . . but what does that mean, exactly? Well, it means that your book sold better than a lot of other books. But in what category? Tracked by whom? Backed by what data?I am a bestselling author in the usual, traditional sense — on the New York Times bestseller list, Publishers Weekly, Wall Street Journal, USA Today. But there are a lot of other bestseller lists… and they keep proliferating. Amazon in particular has launched so many esoteric bestseller categories it’s hard to keep track of them. (Like the Steampunk Short Story Collections Featuring Vampires bestseller list. That’s not a real one… at least I don’t think so.)I am also a publisher, and my mid-sized house, WordFire Press, has released over 300 titles from 73 authors… and as such, I get to look at the actual numbers. One of our WordFire books was a #1 bestseller on the Amazon “holiday anthologies” bestseller list — a #1 bestseller! Wow! In actual numbers, that translated to about 80 copies sold. (But, hey, it’s still a “#1 Bestseller!” if I wanted to call it that.)But I am also the author, and publisher, of a lot of “invisible bestsellers” — books that actually sell more than many titles on even the major lists, but are released through non-traditional channels and thus are never tracked. Right now, in fact, we have eighteen titles this week alone that have sold enough copies to hit the New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists… but they are tracked by neither.An innovative way for indie authors and publishers to distribute their titles is via “book bundles,” the big daddy of which is Humble Bundle. Each bundle is a grab bag of titles – for instance, the current WordFire Press Sci-Fi Specials Humble Bundle has eighteen books. Readers choose the amount they want to pay (as little as $15 for the whole batch), and a portion of the proceeds goes directly to the designated charities — in this case the Challenger Learning Centers for Space Science Education and the Emergency Medical Fund for the Science Fiction Writers of America. All the authors in the bundle help to promote, in a grassroots effort, and the money gets divided up in the end.Last week, the WordFire Press bundle sold 5,000 copies. By contrast, in order to hit the current Publishers Weekly hardcover fiction bestseller list (which, unlike most lists, posts actual numbers), a book needs to sell only 2571 copies (as did The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr, landing on the PW list at slot #15). That means every single one of the books in the WordFire Sci-Fi Specials Humble Bundle sold nearly twice as many copies needed to hit the bestseller list. In fact, at those numbers, all eighteen titles in the bundle would have qualified to land between spot #8 and #9.But nobody tracks the sales of books via Humble Bundle or Storybundle or any of the other competitors, because the price is variable and because it goes through non-traditional distribution channels. (In my heart, as proud publisher, I still think they’re all bestsellers.)We don’t do it to hit the bestseller lists though – we do it to know that many thousands of people are reading the titles. And because we get the warm fuzzy feeling to know we’ve raised a significant amount of money for the Challenger Learning Centers and for the Emergency Medical Fund. (Since the company's launch in 2010, Humble Bundle has raised more than $71 million through the support of its community for a wide range of charities, providing aid for people across the world.)The WordFire Sci-Fi Specials bundle runs only for five more days, through April 20, 2016 at 11 a.m. Pacific time, after which it will no longer be available. And then we’ll find some other way to support our authors... whether or not the besteller lists notice us.

“We appreciate that there are times when secrecy around a government warrant is needed,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post Thursday. “But based on the many secrecy orders we have received, we question whether these orders are grounded in specific facts that truly demand secrecy. To the contrary, it appears that the issuance of secrecy orders has become too routine.”(more…)

In the documentary film Traceroute, Johannes Grenzfurthner stuffs 40 years of his life as a nerd into a fast-paced road movie. The result is a brilliantly careening biography of a highly enigmatic species. Thomas Kaestle had the opportunity to see the upcoming film. And then he talked to the filmmaker about passion, references and the whole rest.“A brilliant lunatic of surpassing and delightful weirdness.” Anybody who is characterized with such enthusiasm by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing doesn't really need the small print any longer. And yet it is still worth going to the trouble. Precisely for the reason that Johannes Grenzfurthner has been living the heterogeneous and yet wondrously contingent life of a model nerd since his earliest childhood. Born in the Austrian provinces, he spent his first 17 years as an author, director and actor of secret agent and science fiction films, as a constructor of time machines, and as a consumer and producer of cyber and punk.Then he founded monochrom as an alternative magazine for art, technology and subversion, on the quest for the “most effective weapon of mass distribution”. That was way back in 1993. He rapidly conquered all the media that could be conceived of at the time, and he became a pioneer of urban hacking and coined the concept context hacking. He teaches at the art universities in Graz and Linz, directs productions at the Vienna Volkstheater and makes feature and documentary films. He heads the festival Arse Elektronika (conference for sex and technology) and is co-organizer of Roboexotica (festival for cocktail robotics). He splits his time between Vienna, Colorado and anywhere else he happens to be.The basic idea behind Traceroute is as simple as it is effective: Johannes Grenzfurthner travels through the USA from the West to the East Coast – on the trail of people and things that made a mark on his life as a nerd. Aliens, dinos, meteorites and rockets. Film locales, graves and no-go areas. Authors, collectors, tinkerers, outsiders and nuts. Nerds of every sort and color. Traceroute is radical individual empiricism, a narrative biographical puzzle and an experimental projection matrix. Despite continual stimulus satiation, it is wonderful fun: the film tickles the synapses with a perfectly mixed cocktail of collectively shared context and a quirkiness that takes some getting used to. Whoever might be proud of having been able to interpret all of the film's cinematic references has perhaps just missed the next pop-culture innuendo in the soundtrack. Traceroute is at once playful, challenging, encyclopedic: and it is a sentimental journey to boot. As a documentary it is constructed with unusual cleverness. And as a narrative it is universally compatible – at least it will capture the hearts of avowed nerds everywhere, and touch the rest of us who need a little explanation.

Just look at it.

In September, Piers Morgan interviewed John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) for a one hour special. Lydon was smart, funny, and very entertaining.He was entertaining when Tom Snyder interviewed him in 1980, but in an entirely different way:https://youtu.be/Y0q98NlzvCQSomeone with more editing skills than me should make a video of the old and new Lydon having conversation with himself.

The "super-injunction" (previously) is a weird feature of English and Welsh law through which the very wealthy can hire bulldog lawyers to get judges to pass an order prohibiting any newspaper or journalist from disclosing true facts about them, on pain of jail-time. (more…)

Remember how, in the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks on Brussels last month, authorities all over the world declared that the world was critically endangered by cryptography, insisting that crazy, far-reaching crypto-bans were necessary to prevent another attack? (more…)

From the makers of the innovative word processing-task management program Scrivener, Scapple is unlike any software you’ve ever used. Got a project you’re noodling over? Just start jotting down notes on Scapple’s freeform, type-anywhere canvas...and before too long, your assignment begins to take form. You’ll start adding arrows and connections, tying one thought to another in a broadening portrait of a project heading toward completion. You can move items independently or in groups, highlighting and reorganizing as you go. Watch as your seemingly unconnected ideas begin weaving themselves into a unified, cohesive mosaic.You can even allow your mind-mapping adventure to begin including images and graphics, all easily shareable not only within your project frame, but with others you invite into a collaborative process. It’s jazz for the cyber age...let information morph and shape itself into whatever form you think and feel.Try out Scapple now at 40% off its regular price. Choose a Mac or PC version, install and let your ideas run wild.AND DON’T FORGET...you can also pick up Scrivener 2 and take your writing assignments to the next level as well -- right now, it’s 50% off in both Mac (Scrivener 2) and Windows (Scrivener) formats.

If you need any proof, look no further than this thread on b3ta's Add an animal challenge. (more…)

Senators Richard Burr [R-NC] and Dianne Feinstein [D-CA] finally introduced their long-rumored anti-crypto bill, which will ban US companies from making products with working cryptography, mandating that US-made products have some way to decrypt information without the user's permission. (more…)

I enjoy setting up Christmas lights outside our house during the holidays I've been wanting to get a laser landscape projector for a while. They project sparkling colored dots and your house, trees, and bushes without having to string up lights. The effect is really cool. I just found this good deal on Amazon. If you use code USSR8Q9U, you can get it for $20, instead of $40.

The crowdfunded, critically successful fan-film Prelude to Axanar has been in Paramount's cross-hairs since late last year, when the studio filed suit against the film's producers.(more…)

University of East London pysch professor Tim Lomas has assembled a list of words referring to emotional states from the world's languages that have no correlate in English. (more…)

See more sample pages from this book at Wink.Home, the quirky triumphant solo debut of Carson Ellis, might look oddly familiar. You’re not mistaken – you’ve seen this charmingly wholesome artwork before. And it’s not because it looks as if it fell out of a Wes Anderson movie set and into your lap. Carson Ellis is the illustrator for children’s classics like Lemony Snickett and The Benedict Society. She’s also well known for her artwork in Wildwood, a children’s fantasy novel written by her husband, Colin Meloy, the lead singer for the Decemberists. You’ll recognize Carson’s contributions on the band’s album covers and merchandise, full of blossoming colors and quaint patterns.Home is an ode to the many structures across the world that we dwell in, from the messy riotous nest of a sparrow to the peaked roof of the artist's own humble abode. Carson gives a nod not only to the cheerful graffiti and clustered bricks of urban sprawl but also the domed turrets of white marbled eastern palaces and the cozy cottages of the countryside. She indulges in the silly and the fantastic at every turn, with houses fashioned out of shoes that spill mischievous children across the yard or the Spartan spatial quiet of a lunar landscape. Peculiar characters people her pages; knights in armor astride seahorses, a Norse god in a winged, gold helmet, and a Slovakian duchess peeking grimly from beneath her hat while anchoring twins in her iron grasp. The final page is a culmination of the detailed illustrations that have preceded it, with an element from each scene included as a component of the artist’s own studio. – Kaz Weida

The New York City’s Employees Retirement System has $51B in assets, $1.5B of which is lodged with hedge funds -- but maybe for not much longer. (more…)

Watch nature's little recyclers completely hollow out two fish in this beautifully-shot timelapse video from BBC.[via]

Got dust inside your expensive camera body? Tired of taking cameras to the shop, and paying $50-75 to get the CCD cleaned, I've started using these sensor swabs, some cleaning fluid and a whole lot of patience.My pets shed a lot and I keep finding Great Pyrenees hair inside my Nikons. Sensor Swabs are a non-abrasive Pec*Pad wrapped around a 24mm wide plastic stick. This "Type 2" sized stick is designed to be wide enough for a DX sensor, but you can easily use them on FX ones as well (I do.) There is a "Type 3" sized for FX sensors, but a gentleman at my local camera shop told me its too flimsy and not as stiff as using the "Type 2." The pads are aligned so the grain of the wipe is aligned with the direction you'll sweep the sensor off.Last night I gave it a try and am extremely happy with the result. I started out with an old Nikon D70, one of their earliest dSLR models, and blew as much dust off the sensor as I could. Then I added a few drops of cleaning fluid to a swab and with as little pressure as I could muster swept the CCD off, working in one direction only. On the D70, with a smaller DX sensor, I naturally got everything in one pass. I then repeated the process on my D800 with an FX sensor. I had to make several passes, but ended up with great results.To reuse the swabs, save the sticks and put clean Pec*Pads on them, using the same rubber band that is holding the old ones on. The stick should last forever, which is good as the box costs nearly $50.While not insanely dangerous for you, or your camera, CCD cleaning is not for the faint of heart. You do not want to scratch your CCD and a shop can do it for you.Be careful!Sensor Swabs Type 2 (Box of 12) via Amazon

This pizza box is cleverly designed to let you make a weed pipe before you eat the pizza. The little "pizza saver" that keeps the box top from smushing onto the pizza is made from ceramic, and serves as the pipe's bowl.(more…)

Illustrator Peter Berkowitz published an editorial in the Guardian explaining why he chose to spend $400 to live in a (cozy) wooden "pod" he made with the help of a friendly designer and another friend who was a woodworker, assembling it in the living room of a pal who charged him $400/month to house the pod (tl;dr: The rent's too damn high, with a smattering of anti-regulation philosophy) (more…)

Boots the Chemist started out as a family-run business whose Methodist founders believed in civic duty and public service, spreading across the country and providing front-line medical services to Britons, making 40% of their revenues from government compensation for NHS service. (more…)

https://youtu.be/VigasPzSik0Two men, possibly inebriated, exchanged boasts and insults and lawsuit threats on a JetBlue flight from Long Beach to Sacramento last Friday.From Fusion:

See video of the bellicose bird bullying itself here.

When Dale Grimm, owner of four Ohio papers -- the New Carlisle News, the Enon Eagle, the Tippecanoe Gazette, and the Troy Tribune -- was queried on Facebook by high-school students about why some of their student assignment articles were published in his papers, but the ones about the school's Gay-Straight Alliance and a trans student weren't, the proprietor answered, "We do not print articles of that nature." (more…)

Eight months ago, Thebearpoker received a text message photo from someone he didn't know. He decided to play along, not realizing he'd embarked on a long, strange trip.Thebearpoker says, "At this point I rejected a phone call from her." Here's the voicemail she left:Hey (Name on my VM) Why don't you answer your phone? This is Dawn. I know you know Bobbie and Travis. Its too coincidental. I am forwarding all the messages that I forwarded to you, to Bobbie's phone. But I do know that you know them, cause its the same area code, the same prefix as Fort Myers FL. I'm not stupid. If you have the guts, call me back (Insert her phone number here). You are a friend of both of them. I'm not stupid.Here's the text exchange that followed:http://cdn.someecards.com/posts/longtext2-urC4hf.jpg

Kozē is a giant, doubled-up parachute-nylon dry-bag that you wave around to inflate, then clip shut, turning it into an instant hammock-style sofa. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_RsMvgWbpMThe Critter Catcher is a long rubbery picker-upper gadget, enabling the user to easily pick up and evict spiders without harming them or having to get too close. You can buy one for $17 (a generic clone is $20 on Amazon). I'm buying one to serve hors d'oeuvres at an unpleasant party I intend to host.

Igor Chubin's wttr.in shows the weather in non-proportional ASCII-art form. It's beautiful, clean and completely legible, unlike almost every modern weather service on the web. On my terminal (Windows, Chrome) the rendering of Lucida Sans Typewriter seems not quite perfect: a pixel too wide here and there. I think it's because of the unicode directional arrows for the wind, perhaps in combination with me browsing on Windows. (more…)

On Wednesday, former Reuters.com social media editor Matthew Keys received a two year prison sentence for computer hacking. That's a sentence of 24 months, for a website defacement that lasted only 40 minutes, which Keys himself didn't even execute.Earlier today in an unrelated high-profile case, the "affluenza teen" who actually murdered people also got two years in jail.(more…)

The FBI accessed the contents of a San Bernardino terrorist’s phone after receiving help from professional hackers who “discovered and brought to the bureau at least one previously unknown software flaw,” the Washington Post was first to report today.(more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zalFUecsNXQ&feature=youtu.beBecky Stern writes, "I recently investigated my building's new smart radiator cover installation and found a company bringing steam heat into the 21st century and allowing residents to keep their windows closed when the heat is on!"

Amazon's usual price for this highly rated 8-inch Winco chef's knife is $14, but it's on sale right now for $10. I just ordered one.

In An Exploration of the Structure of Effective Apologies, written by business school academics from Ohio State and Eastern Kentucky U and published in Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, the authors report on two studies that trace the reactions of 755 subjects to apologies based and report on the six factors most likely to assuage a wounded party. (more…)

On April 7 David Perel posted a video to YouTube, writing: "Drone Smashes Through My 5th Floor Window and Into My Head! While sitting at my desk I heard what sounded like a missile followed by a huge bang and glass all over me. Turns out someone lost control of their drone. Lucky to be uninjured!"A lot of people didn't believe Perel. On Medium, he wrote about the angry deniers who posted mean comments on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram about the video:

Once again the MPAA has released its box-office numbers for the year, and once again, this year has smashed all records (as has been the case throughout our young century) (really!). As always, the astronomical rise-and-rise of their fortunes is somehow used to launch a call for more publicly subsidized enforcement against "piracy." (more…)

Eddie Tipton, the 51-year-old former security director of the US Multi-State Lottery Association, was convicted last year of hacking a random number generator to fix a $16.5 million lottery prize in Iowa. Now it looks like he could have pulled the same trick Colorado, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Kansas, too. Tipton is in Texas, free on bond pending an appeal, and fighting extradition charges.Wikipedia's description of how Tipton hacked the random number generator reads like the script from a crime drama:

I prefer to do my cooking on cast iron cookware. Cast iron is an astonishingly effective non-stick surface. It heats evenly and is super simple to clean. I can think of only two negatives: it is heavy, and maintenance is very different from my other pots and pans.I have a set of more-common-today stainless/copper cookware. After using a pot or pan, I scrub it out in the sink with hot soapy water, dry and put away. Sometimes, when I'm lazy or just so inclined, I even put it in the dishwasher. It is what most people are used to now.Because cast iron is seasoned to create its non-stick properties, and to keep it from rusting away, it needs different cleaning and maintenance. The coating of seasoning on your pan is a layer of polymerized oil. It's tough, and keeps air, water and food from ever coming in contact with the highly reactive iron surface. Most of the time cleaning it is super simple: while the pot or pan is hot, throw in a large handful of kosher salt, and using a wadded up paper towel, you scrub the sucker out.You toss away the salt, wipe out the dusty remains, and let the cookware cool. If you want, and I do every 3 or 4 uses of an item, you can wipe it down lightly with your cooking oil of choice. I recommend wiping it off as much as you can, so the layer is just super thin, and heat the pan until it smokes.On the rare occasion that stuff gets too cooked, baked or burnt on, and scrubbing it out with salt won't clean it enough, you can fill the pot or pan with water and boil it for a few minutes. Most everything cooked on will come free, or be easy to scrub loose after.Sometimes I do the scrubbing with a chainmail scrubber, other times with a heavy duty kitchen sponge. The seasoning can take it, just make sure to completely dry the pot or pan, perhaps giving it a light coat of oil and some heat, as above.Boiling, or just washing out in the sink with hot, soapy water, can temporarily discolor your seasoning. You should feel absolutely free to do either, however. If you are concerned, wipe the object down with cooking oil and re-season it. Simply put the lightly oiled iron in a cold oven, turn the oven to 400ºF and let it bake for an hour after the oven reaches temperature. Turn off the heat and leave the object in the oven until it is cool. The color should be pretty even again. Give it a light coat of oil and wipe off, it'll look fine.Over time, regardless how hard I work to keep one particular skillet clean, a tacky film forms on the outer sides. If ignored this layer of soon-to-be-rancid-fats gets gross. The layer is formed by oils that heat up on the cast iron, but not hot or for long enough to polymerize. If they did, they'd add to the layers of seasoning. Generally, as you cook, fats on the cooking surface will continue to bond to the seasoning, and undergo the same chemical reaction as the initial seasoning. This stuff isn't making the jump, and salt takes a whole lot of effort to get it completely off. There is a better way. Just follow the directions above to re-season it, but let it sit in the over for 90-120 minutes. The extra time is needed to bake down the thicker, gummy stuff.Really, almost any time I get in trouble with cast iron I'll just pop it in the oven and cook the bad stuff off. Cast iron waffle irons are really lovely and fun to learn to use, but mistakes can be hell to clean out. I just scrape as much out of the waffle pattern as I can put the waffler in the oven (remove any wooden handles, please) and bake off the failed breakfast treat. I also find the waxy, gummy buildup forms fast on the waffle iron stand.Finally: never put cast iron in the dishwasher. Any time you get it wet, make sure you completely dry it. I put it on the stove and heat it up to ensure it is dry. While the seasoning is tough, anything beyond a few minutes exposure to water will start taking it off. If this happens, don't panic. Just re-season it.Great thing about cast iron is the more you use it, the better it gets.

Eleanor Lutz used files from the Protein Data Bank to model the molecules comprising the viruses that are the scourge of our human race. (more…)

Officers acting on behalf of the attorney general of Panama raided Mossack Fonseca's office on Tuesday. Ramon Fonseca, the company's co-founder, insists that the firm had "broken no laws, destroyed no documents, and all its operations were legal." (more…)

I'll bet when Pennsylvania cops pulled Kimberlee Carbone over for not using her turn signal she didn't think it would result in her being shackled by her wrists and ankles to a hospital bed to get an internal inspection of her vagina and rectum.

Lots of cloud services use URL shorteners to allow their users to share access to networked folders, but with only six characters to brute force, it's possible to scan all the URLs associated with a cloud service, locate the open shared folders, and poison them with malware while you plunder them for secrets. (more…)

The staff of Half Moon pub in Herne Hill in south London maintain a pseudonymous list of customers who are permanently banned from the premises; their colorful descriptions are a thing of beauty. (more…)

The idea of a "Cyber-Underwriters Laboratories mark" is really in the air; in the past six months, I've had it proposed to me by spooks, regulators, activists, consumer protection advocates, and security experts. But the devil is in the details. (more…)

The Sun, a Murdoch-owned UK tabloid, accused the socialist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (previously) of dodging his fair share of taxes, claiming he understated his income from speeches by £450. After closer examination, it transpired that Corbyn overstated his earnings by £270 and paid tax on the full amount. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2fSXp6N-vsCassetteboy, last seen with this amazing video about David Cameron's relationship with dead pigs, is back with a new video that mashes up the UK Prime Minister and Home Secretary/Sith Lord Theresa May describing the real powers in the notorious Snoopers Charter (a far-reaching spying bill), set to the Police's "I'll Be Watching You" (what else?). (more…)

Ed Tannenbaum animated Digital Dance in 1982. The post-disco music is by Might Dog (anyone know anything about it?), the dancer is Pons Maar, and Jim Wiseman shot the footage. Once again, I'm struck by how much glitch aesthetics are about creating memories, not deconstructing technology.