A staggering eight million tons of plastic trash is dumped in our oceans each year, according to a 2015 Science report.As a way of putting a spotlight on the issue, Spanish designer Adolfo Correa created the art for The Paradise? Shirt, a Hawaiian-style shirt that, at first glance, looks standard-issue. Look closer and you'll see he's put plastic waste -- like toothbrushes and six-pack rings -- into the design. The shirt was a collaboration between Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam, Corona and Parley for the Oceans, created for World Oceans Day (June 8). The limited-edition shirts were being sold at the World Surf League Store for $69/each but have already sold out.https://vimeo.com/274255636images via Adolfo Correa(Dezeen)

A group of elite Google Cloud engineers simply refused to put any work into an airgap system designed to let the company bid on sensitive military contracts, which undermined the company's ability to seek military work. (more…)

What's in the water in one Canadian city? Uncooked hot dogs, apparently.Last weekend, a reality-hacking hero offered bottles of unfiltered, "keto-compatible" "Hot Dog Water" at a Vancouver street festival for CAN$37.99 (~US$28) a pop. The vendor, performance artist/"foodie-troller" Douglas Bevans, claimed his special water (which included a real hot dog inside each bottle) had health benefits."Several" people "bought-and-consumed" his expensive meat water though his hilarious venture didn't turn a profit, according to the blog Vancouver is Awesome. The blog also shared Bevans' reason for selling it in the first place, which appeared at the bottom of the health claim:

Spring came and went, but we're not here to judge if you didn't get around to cleaning up your living space. After all, taking the time to vacuum your floors can stretch out into a lengthy task when you're constantly switching between power outlets and trying to jam your machine into those tight corners. With the Dyson V6 Bagless Cordless Handheld Vacuum with HEPA Filter, you can sidestep the vacuum hassles and finally catch up on your spring cleaning. It's available today for $179.99.Powered by Dyson's digital V6 motor and armed with cyclonic technology, this bagless, cordless, handheld vacuum uses cyclonic technology to separate dirt from the air and deliver more than 3x the suction power. Its rinseable HEPA filter traps dust, pet dander, and pollen while you clean, preventing it from escaping back to the air. And, with the included crevice and combination tool, you can easily get dirt out of those troublesome corners.The Dyson V6 Bagless Cordless Handheld Vacuum with HEPA Filter is available in the Boing Boing Store for $179.99.

Johnny Depp as Captain Jack SparrowAfter "a month and almost 200 e-mails," Rolling Stone writer Stephen Rodrick succumbed to an interview with Johnny Depp at his London home to discuss how the 55-year-old actor lost nearly all of his $650M fortune. The piece was devised by his lawyer in an effort to put Depp and his financial woes in a positive light, instead Rodrick compared Depp to a late-stage Marlon Brando and detailed the eccentricities he witnessed over a 72-hour period. The longform interview is a brutal portrait of a man who's suing the people who once handled his money.

Kris Kobach (previously) is a racist shitbag who engineered Red State America's voter suppression campaign; he is also (predictably enough) the Kansas Secretary of State, in which capacity he has been representing his office in a lawsuit over his unconstitutional voter ID law. (more…)

The New York Times doesn't like to call Donald Trump (who is a compulsive liar) a liar; they deploy the squeamish euphemism "falsely claimed" in place of "lied" -- with Gabriel Gironda's NYT Speak Chrome extension (source code here), you can remedy this situation. (Thanks, Gabriel Gironda!)

The keen retro wall clock I bought in January is back on sale on Amazon for $7.50. It's worked like a champ and I haven't had to change the batteries or adjust the time yet.

Stonehenge has been stuck in my head like an ice pick during every summer solstice for as far back as I can remember. I'm a day late with it, but now my pain/joy is yours.

A report published in The Lancet by a team of medical researchers shows that when cops in the United States murder unarmed black people, it messes with the mental health of black people who live nearby. (more…)

An internal document shows the U.S. Navy has developed a plan to construct 'austere' tent cities capable of holding tens of thousands of immigration detainees on remote bases in California, Alabama and Arizona.(more…)

Paul McCartney took a very lucky James Corden on a terrific car tour of Liverpool, they sang Beatles songs, checked out Paul's old haunts (including his childhood home), and generally enjoyed themselves. Corden was so overcome at one point that he started crying. It concludes with a surprise performance at a pub.Image: YouTube/The Late Late Show with James Corden

Nineteen-year-old Cedella Roman, a French citizen staying in Canada, was jogging in White Rock, B.C. when she was stopped by two U.S. border patrol officers. They told her she'd illegally entered the United States. Roman told them she hadn't seen signs on the dirt trail she'd been running on. They put her in a caged vehicle and drove her 200 kilometers to the Department of Homeland Security's Tacoma Northwest Detention Centre and held her there for 2 weeks.From CBC:

MTV is reviving two of the greatest shows to ever appear on the channel: Daria and Aeon Flux. The latter will be a live action reboot. Daria, a spin-off from Beavis and Butt-head, was a brilliant black comedy cartoon about a misanthropic teen. Aeon Flux was a fantastically strange animated science fiction series created by Peter Chung that aired as part of the seminal Liquid Television animation showcase produced by the pioneering Colossal Pictures for MTV. From Rolling Stone:

Last month, three gentlemen were arrested in Lebanon, Maine for trying to steal a 25-foot-long shed from a foreclosed property. They had tied the shed to the back of their pickup truck and were tugging it down the road when cops arrived. I'd guess there was no high-speed chase. According to the Portland Press Herald, police also busted one of them for meth and prescription pills that didn't belong to him. Other charges for the men include unauthorized taking or transfer, reckless conduct, and criminal mischief. (via Weird Universe)

In 1992, University of Melbourne researchers TT Lim and TB Nickels wrote a scientific paper titled "Instability and reconnection in the head-on collision of two vortex rings." The research so inspired Smarter Every Day's Destin Sandlin that he launched his own research effort to study the phenomenon and capture it using high-speed video. Four years later, he's shared this magnificent video above. You can also watch all 12 hours of the 1x speed video below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9l8-qngjM

A team at MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have created a set of foldable, 3D printed robots that are doped with magnetic particles that are precisely aligned during printing; when triggered by a control-magnet they engage in precise movements: grabbing, jumping, rolling, squeezing, etc. (more…)

The Supreme Court has ruled in the closely watched Carpenter v. United States case, which questioned the constitutionality of warrantless location surveillance, a widespread practice among US law enforcement and surveillance agencies. (more…)

"On Monday, April 20, 2015, I opened a new spreadsheet on my laptop," writes Laura Vanderkam for Fast Company. I put the days of the week along the top. I put half hour blocks, from 5 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. along the left side. I began recording what I was doing on this time log: work, sleep, drive to train station, make kids breakfast."She learned that being aware of how she was spending her time did two things: it helped her make more rewarding choices about how she spent her time, and it made her realize she has more time than she previously thought.

Stranger Things special effects producers Paul and Christina Graff explain the season two VFX of the Upside Down, the demodog Dart, and that shadowy motherfucker from the finale.

In this Washington Post video, Karen Attiah shows that America has a long history of doing terrible things to families of migrants, Native Americans, slaves, Japanese Americans, and others.

Hello. My name is Gareth Branwyn and I am a hot food addict. As I type this, I am horking my way through a can of tuna iced with a generous layer of Sriracha sauce. But as my mouth and tongue are ablaze with the beloved rooster sauce, I know this level of heat is kid's play. Sriracha is a paltry 2,2000 SHU on the Scoville scale (a measure of capsaicin concentration in hot foods).What might it be like to eat food in the 500,000-600,000 SHU range? And then answer provocative interview questions? That is the premise of the hit YouTube show, Hot Ones, now in its 6th season.When I first happened upon this show a few years ago, I wanted to hate it. I thought it was a goofy premise and I'm generally not a fan of shows that create fear, pain, or deep embarrassment in other humans for my cheap entertainment. But as Stephen Colbert says below (he's a fan and had Hot Ones host Sean Evans on as a Late Night guest last year), the whole spicy interview process is fascinating and lends itself to some funny, strange, and sometimes quite insightful interviews.Anyone who's ever eaten peppers in this heat range knows how darn-near consciousness-altering it can be. I'm always amazed at how composed and physiologically unaffected many guests of the show are. Colbert's obvious struggle, as over a million SHUs of capsaicin light up the sensor neurons in his head, is more of how I imagine handling it.https://youtu.be/zF2QwHnk3EEhttps://youtu.be/Da8-QfGemgohttps://youtu.be/ldm8mnn-ULIhttps://youtu.be/ZgQMW4eVrzwhttps://youtu.be/Dyrmfv0JbIU

Canadian border guards' terminals give them secret access to Tuscan, a database maintained by US spy agencies of suspected terrorists; the database has some 680,000 names in it and if you match one of those names, Canadian border and immigration officials are empowered to "detain, interrogate, arrest and deny entry" to you. (more…)

Atlas Obscura just added an interesting new section on strange and wondrous foods, like salt-rising bread leavened with bacteria that cause gas gangene. (more…)

YouTuber thepeterson makes video montages that pull together clips from pop culture days of yore, highlighting what movies and TV shows the masses were watching, what they were listening to on the radio, and what video games they were playing. In the latest one, June 1998 is put into the spotlight. Prepare to take a (possibly nostalgic) trip down memory lane to see what was "in" twenty years ago this month.(Tastefully Offensive)

One.It's weird to think that if he got struck by lightning a couple of feet short of the top, and you were being sent up to fetch the charred remains, you would obviously take a light bulb with you.

Wayne Easton braved the elements to capture an interesting natural phenomenon: the Mahlongwa River in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa breaching its bank and cutting a channel to the Indian Ocean. Part two is below: (more…)

On Wednesday, the Legislative Committee of the European Union narrowly voted to keep the two most controversial internet censorship and surveillance proposals in European history in the upcoming revision to the Copyright Directive -- as soon as July Fourth, the whole European Parliament could vote to make this the law of 28 EU member-states. (more…)

Wednesday's vote to press ahead with mandatory copyright filters for the European internet is catastrophic for the web: starting a new business just got $60-100 million more expensive, because building filters for every kind of copyrighted work ain't cheap. (more…)

Enjoy this surprisingly dramatic and gripping YouTube mini-documentary about one of gaming's strangest and most obsessive cults: racing around Mario Kart 64's Choco Mountain track. Thanks to glitchy shortcuts, racers winnowed times down to just a few seconds. But getting the trick right for all three laps of a time trial? 20,000 attempts later...

Many people have equated Stewart Brand to the mythical “World’s Most Interesting Man,” who was featured for years in those Dos Equis commercials. Enough people that the comparison’s a bit of a cliché. But like many clichés, there is something to it.Stewart was among the most culturally catalytic people in the turbulent years of the late 1960s - although back then, he did a lot of his catalyzing behind the scenes. He went on to become a rather visible founding figure of the environmental movement of the early 70s. Later, he created one of the earliest and most influential online communities, which he named The Well. He convened history’s first hacker’s conference, then later co-founded one of the world’s premiere centers of truly long-term thinking. He’s still running that today, and is also helping the renowned bioengineer and genomicist George Church resurrect extinct species, like the wooly mammoth.If this makes you think Stewart might be something of a historic figure, you’re not alone. He showed up for his interview at my apartment with a production crew, who were filming a documentary about his life. Meanwhile John Markoff - who for decades at the NYT was among the world’s most influential and well-regarded tech journalists - is writing a biography about Stewart.For the same reasons that Stewart attracts this sort of attention, I’m taking an unusual approach to this episode. Rather than focusing solely on a single deep and complex aspect of his work, Stewart and I speak broadly about the sweep of his experiences, and the unique perspective they’ve given him on technology, the environment, and our prospects of navigating the coming century.The interview is right here:If you enjoy this interview, please consider checking out The After On Podcast. I publish new episodes every month – and my archive features dozens of unhurried conversations with world-class thinkers, founders, and scientists. Their fields include neuroscience, synthetic biology, quantum computing, space archaeology (seriously - it’s a thing!) and much more.Image: Door of Perception

Now that's a pretty comet. ESA:

The Community Microscope is a fully-funded, crowdfunded open source microscope hardware kit built around a digital camera: it costs $39 and snaps together in 15 minutes. (more…)

Lo, how the mighty have fallen.(more…)

Dan Mancina of Livonia, Michigan began to lose his sight as a teenager due to two disorders of the eye. Now he's 95 percent blind. And he's a killer skateboarder. From a Red Bull interview with Mancina:

On display in Copenhagen, Denmark's Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek art museum is this glass display case filled with noses of myriad shapes and sizes. Why?According to curator Anne Marie Nielsen, noses on 19th century statues are notoriously fragile and would frequently break off. So the owners of the statues (or perhaps even prior museum curators) would replace them with marble or plaster replicas. Nowadays though, the museum removes any replacement noses because they only want to display the original sculptures, faults and all.“About 20 years ago, the museum had a box filled with noses [in our archives], and we weren’t sure what to do with them,” Nielsen tells Smithsonian.com. “We decided to group them together and put them [on display].”

Over at Mondo 2000, our old pal RU Sirius interviewed Douglas Rushkoff, Jake Dunagan, and I about the "The Biology of Disinformation," a new research paper we wrote for Institute for the Future about how media viruses, bots and computational propaganda have redefined how information is weaponized for propaganda campaigns. While technological solutions may seem like the most practical and effective remedy, fortifying social relationships that define human communication may be the best way to combat “ideological warfare” that is designed to push us toward isolation. From Mondo 2000:

Piers attempts to embarrass UK reality TV star Hayley of "Love Island" by asking her, "Do you know Pythagoras's theorem to the nearest five decimal place?" Um... wut?

Reality Winner, 26, is the whistleblower accused of releasing an NSA document on Russia's attack on U.S. voting systems to reporters at The Intercept. (more…)

This very satisfying drone footage shows an innovative plan to reduce temperatures in Los Angeles by sealing streets with a reflective sealant. (more…)

Donna Minkowitz wrote one of the most important pieces about the murder of Brandon Teena, the transgender man depicted in the film Boys Don't Cry. A quarter century later, she does what few journalists have the courage to do: she acknowledged the botched the story with biased reporting. (more…)

The recent Trump-Kim man-child summit in Singapore was already awkward and now Bad Lip Reading has made it even more so by redubbing some of their conversations.

Last winter, Samm Sheperd took another stab at skiing with a propeller backpack (his first try overheated). The first four minutes show the build for those who want to jump to the testing. (more…)

There’s only one problem with the National Enquirer's photograph of the convicted pedophile who allegedly kidnapped British three-year-old Madeleine McCann, snapped in Bulgaria on June 15, 2018, according to the magazine’s cover under the screaming headline: “SOLVED!”It’s a small, but niggling issue: the pedophile considered by Scotland Yard a “person of interest” in the toddler’s disappearance in Portugal 11 years ago has been dead for more than a year. The blurry photo of a man in sunglasses, baseball cap and smoking a cigarette could be anyone, but the Enquirer gleefully adds the front page caption: “This man kidnapped little girl & sold her into slavery!”This story is also woefully old – Scotland Yard announced they were seeking a “person of interest” more than 14 months ago, and when detectives later visited Bulgaria in November 2017, a source said of the convicted pedophile and his wife, who had been in the Algarve region at the time of the kidnapping: “There is no evidence they were involved, but it would be good to eliminate them from the investigation.”“She’s still alive” adds another cover headline about the missing child, based on zero evidence. It’s just one among a slew of outrageous fake news stories this week.Tom Cruise’s “sick $8 million plot to win back” ex-wife Katie Holmes is exposed by the Enquirer. What’s his fiendish plan? His favored Church of Scientology is allegedly planning to build an $8 million facility in Detroit, Michigan, “less than an hour’s drive” from her parents' home, “where she often visits.” Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that Holmes has a home in Los Angeles, just minutes drive from the Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Center. Cruise is supposedly “masterminding” the Detroit construction plans, and then plans to lure Holmes and daughter Suri to the new church, where “they’d both be subjected to mental re-programming!” If that sounds more complex than any caper in Mission Impossible, that’s because it is.“The honeymoon’s over!” screams the Enquirer headline above its “world exclusive” claiming that “Harry Storms Out On Meghan!” The newlywed Prince reportedly “ripped off his wedding band” and stormed out of Kensington Palace because Meghan Markle “refuses Royal duties.” Yes, that’s the Meghan you’ve seen for the past few weeks at Prince Charles’ birthday celebration, touring Britain with the Queen, and attending Royal Ascot with Prince Harry. Has their marriage “hit the rocks” as the Enquirer reports? No – Harry was just going to the gym, and took his ring off for the workout.The Royal newlyweds get hit with both barrels from the Globe, which exposes an alleged “Plot to Kill Harry & Meghan,” claiming with their usual grammatical panache: “Traitor Infiltrates security team!” While it’s true that Harry and Meghan, like any member of the British Royal Family or prominent public figure, might be considered a potential terrorist target, there is no evidence of a credible plot, and certainly no evidence of “a Muslim convert – who turned traitor to Britain...discovered embedded in their protection team.”The Globe also promises to take readers “Inside Area 51!” but shows only long-distance arial shots of hangers, accompanied by a former US Marine pilot who claims that the air base houses a flying saucer – “and he flew it!” Evidently the spaceship had no controls, because “the craft was controlled telepathically.” Naturally, without the slightest training, former pilot Robert Miller flew the spaceship “simply by thinking about it.” Right. Other “UFO experts” claim that Area 51 houses “alien corpses and their crafts.” Well, they’re experts, so they must know what they’re talking about.“The War Explodes!” screams the cover headline in Us magazine. But it’s not the war in Afghanistan, or the war on drugs. It’s the Pitt-Jolie “bitter custody battle” as “Brad & Angie’s Kids Take Sides.” The cover touts their children’s “Secret phone calls to Dad.” Yet the four-page story never mentions the six children making any secret calls to Pitt. Far from it, all the children’s calls to Pitt were reportedly made while Jolie listened in the same room – so the calls weren’t a secret to anyone. Nice headline, though.“The truth about those Jen rumors,” promises the Us cover. So what’s the reality about Pitt supposedly reuniting with former wife Jennifer Aniston, who, according to some tabloids, is pregnant with their child? “All of those stories about Brad and Jen are completely fabricated,” says her spokesperson. Okay – but not too fabricated to put on the magazine’s front cover, evidently.People magazine devotes its cover to “100 Reasons to Love America!” #1: country music couple Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, who reveal “How We Make Our Love Last.” No, it’s not tantric sex. Apparently, watching the duo perform “is like two hours of total foreplay,” says music writer Holly Gleason. Whatever turns you on. Faith and Tim are certainly the #1 reason I love America, give or take a few thousand other reasons.Why else love America? According to People, #2: Meghan Markle & her mom, Doria. #4: Costco. #16: Pumpkin Spice. #40. Succulents (seriously!) #66. Popeye Chicken. #89. Mary Kate & Ashley Olsen. Heaven help us.Fortunately we have the crack investigative team at Us mag to tell us that Sienna Miller wore it best (and still looked a mess), that Alfre Woodard “spent one night with Yugoslavian bandits” in 1972, that author Emily Griffin carries a Buckingham Palace keychain, Tata Harper Aromatic Irritability Treatment, and a tape measure in her Delvaux saddle bag, and that the stars are just like us: they bicycle, drink vegetable juices, sample perfumes, ride Jet Skis, hail taxis and wait for valets. Thrilling, as always.The National Examiner carries a helpful feature telling readers how to “Spot a liar immediately!” Face touching and fidgeting are “pretty good indicators,” as are somebody oozing confidence, thinking fast, and having a voice that rises in pitch. But the magazine misses the most obvious way to spot a liar – when someone introduces themselves and says: “Hi, I’m a tabloid reporter...”Onwards and downwards . . .

Over five days, a 32-year-old woman in Russia took selfies to document a strange lump on her face that moved from under her left eye to above it and then later to her lip. She finally visited a physician who reported a "superficial moving oblong nodule at the left upper eyelid." Turns out, she had a particular kind of parasitic worm, Dirofilaria repens, living under her skin. From Live Science:

If it wasn't for the barrier of hard air, this guy would have been lunch for this stealthy tiger.

Sara Netanyahu, wife of scandal-plagued Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been charged with misusing state funds. She was indicted this morning.From CNN:

Tech Crunch visits Creator, a San Francisco fast food joint that uses a factory-style "burger bot" to assemble its $6 hamburgers. Owner Alex Vardakostas says his burger-making machine, which he built himself, makes a better burger than any human could do. But doesn't a mini burger factory displace jobs? Nah, not according to Vardakostas. He says he's got a decent size staff, who make $16/hour, and they each receive "5% time" on the clock during which they can read a book or do anything else enjoyable while the robot keeps up its nonstop pace. (My calculations determine that 5% time on the clock is only 3 minutes per hour. I assume that's on top of standard breaks and a lunch break!)According to Bloomberg, Creator will open its doors on June 27th.

https://youtu.be/I9I_QvEXDv0Koko, the famous western lowland gorilla who communicated with humans through sign language, died in her sleep Tuesday. She was 46.From NPR:

That time Robin Williams hung out with Koko in 2001.Sad news out of Woodside, California:Koko, the western lowland gorilla who mastered American Sign Language, passed away Wednesday in her sleep at the age of 46.The Gorilla Foundation, an organization founded by Koko's beloved caretaker and teacher Dr. Penny Patterson and Dr. Ronald Cohn, released a statement: