Riunite. On ice. Who were they trying to sell this wine? These ads had me cracking up as a child. Were yodelers, robots, and folks with made-up but pretty racist accents really lacking the right choice in pink wine?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMi10I_FCCgWine on ice is a thing I rarely see, but when I do the people drinking it are generally on an airplane and headed to a good time. The 1980s jingle is the one that seems to come to mind with my contemporaries. Evidently the Box Wine Revolution did not kill Riunite. They have a website and show some fairly recent awards from San Diego! San Diego is a city revered for their ComicCon, large warships, and proximity to Tijuana, Mexico! So, lets drink up!

Last year, the team behind B5 Books put together a The Babylon 5 Encyclopedia a thoroughly researched, lovingly crafted set of volumes on the universe of the 90's Sci-Fi series Babylon 5.I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of this edition when it came out, and have referred to it repeatedly when rewatching the series recently. It's an amazing one-of-a-kind resource for fans of the show.

This Arduino clone starter kit, at $28.34 on Amazon, is a really good deal. Besides the Arduino Uno clone itself, it has a full size solderless breadboard, a servo motor, a power supply, a distance sensor, a DC motor, jumper wires, a 4-digit 7-segment display, a stepper motor, a joystick, transistors, resistors, and a lot more. It comes in a nice plastic carrying case, too.

While an Uber driver was shuttling two passengers in Georgia last Sunday, he was arrested for attempted rape, sexual battery, and aggravated burglary. Looks like Uber did a real good job in vetting the man before taking him on as a driver.According to Gizmodo:

Over at Make, Gareth Branwyn reported on his personal highlight of Maker Faire Bay Area last weekend -- a presentation by artist Danielle Baskin, who made sweaters for drones and then sent the drones on real Tinder dates. I saw the presentation too and was literally laughing for much of her talk.

In the early 1990s Dragon magazine published AD&D stats for various cartoon characters. Bugs Bunny is a 15th-level illusionist with a chaotic good alignment. Popeye is Lawful Neutral and he is either a 9th-level fighter or an 18-level fighter. Rocky and Bullwinkle are an inseparable pair of fighters, with Rocky providing the brains and Bullwinkle providing the brawn.

For your summer reading pleasure, Bill Gates recommends:

Why do people have these infernal contraptions in their homes?

A couple in Portland is accusing Alexa of doing exactly what many people have feared she might do. They say she listened in on a conversation and sent it to a random contact of theirs – one of her husband's employees.The woman, whose name is Danielle but whose last name hasn't been disclosed, says that two weeks ago she got a call from her husband's employee, who said, "Unplug your Alexa devices right now. You're being hacked."According to KIRO-7 in Seattle:

For six months, a Weezer fan named Mary (@weezerafrica) has been rallying support for her request that Weezer cover Toto's "Africa." It started as a joke but now is now very, very serious. (Kinda. Not really.) Anyway, Weezer finally responded by covering Toto's... "Rosaanna."

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For most of a century, AT&T ripped off its customers by requiring them to rent their phones, meaning that over the life of your phone subscription, you would buy your phone thousands of times over. (more…)

I taught myself After Effects a couple of years ago so I could make this Blockchain explainer video. From the perspective of my limited skillset, I was blown away by what filmmaker Stu Maschwitz was able to do entirely within After Effects: a short film called Tank, that pays homage to the classic Atari arcade game from 1980, Battlezone. Above, the film. Below, how he made it.https://youtu.be/WRkYP7wnD40

This is "Stickman," a robot acrobat that Disney Research scientists presented at this week's IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. From the abstract of their technical paper:

Jordan Peterson is really easy to make fun of -- what with the mystical nonsense and the pseudoscientific evolutionary biology -- but there are millions of (largely white, largely young, largely male) readers who've found his "12 Rules for Life" to be a balm for their souls and a rallying cry for a movement that has legitimized the most murderous strains of toxic masculinity. (more…)

Steve Mould offers a couple of explanations for the flashed face distortion effect. I've seen this before and it's very strange. When you put pictures of two different people side-by-side and flash several pairs, the faces look like gross caricatures. By way of explaining it, he also presents a couple of other cool visual effects.

Comcast is America's perennial most hated company, so it's hard to imagine how it could get even less popular, but you've got to give the company credit: on the way to growing to never-seen size and profitability, it continues to lead its ever-more-unpopular industry in customer dissatisfaction! (more…)

Writing code is a lot easier than fixing code! For a lot of well-understood reasons, code requires a lot of debugging to run safely and property, and different code structures and practices make debugging harder or easier. S. Zayd Enam, an AI researcher at Stanford, writes about the specific problems of debugging AI code, which is extremely difficult. (more…)

VPNFilter is a virulent, sophisticated, multistage worm that has successfully infected 500,000 home routers, leaving them vulnerable to both surveillance (the malware snoops network traffic for passwords) and region-wide internet shutdowns (VPNFilter can brick the routers it infects, and an attacker could shut down most or all of the home/small business internet access in a region by triggering this). (more…)

Last Wednesday, soccer champion, equal pay/LGBTQ activist, and badass extraordinaire Abby Wambach delivered the keynote for Barnard College, an all-women's liberal arts college in Manhattan. She shared with the graduating class, who she deemed the "Wolf Pack," the four rules she used to unite her own soccer team "pack," the team which went on to win Olympic gold.Here's the first rule, "MAKE FAILURE YOUR FUEL":

There are a so many points of apparent correspondence here I can't believe it's not edited! [By HappyOrange, via via]P.S. You can buy the Doom soundtrack (by Mick Gordon) on vinyl at Amazon.

Fox 47 News reports on a fast cat, left atop a car as it speeds down an interstate highway: "How that cat held on at high speed is amazing," says a local Humane Society rep.

https://youtu.be/8985Of40hTo?t=49WKYC Channel 3 in Canton, Ohio, posted footage of police smashing a car window, dragging out the driver and setting a dog on him after he very politely refused to answer questions. The driver, Ronald D. Wagner II, appears to be a "sovereign citizen" type who refuses to screw the number plate on their car for arcane constitutional reasons. Their excuse? The car's registered owner had a concealed carry permit, so they were frightened for their lives: "Stop fighting the dog"Listen to his screams and ask yourself if America is great again.

Pianist Lord Vinheteiro's latest tracks selections of meme music from the year 1500 AD to now. You'll hear "Greensleeves," Beethoven's "Symphony No. 9," The Village People's "YMCA," Rick Astley's rickroll hit "Never Gonna Give You Up," and lots more.It's a fun playlist. Still, why must he stare into our souls?Previously: The evolution of music from 1680 to 2017

In the last few years, the subway in New York has become clotted with delays. For just as long, the MTA -- the agency that runs the subway -- has claimed the reason was underfunding, rising ridership and overcrowding. Underfunding is a real thing, but ballooning riders isn't. Ridership has been mostly flat for the last five years.So what's really the uptick in delays? Adam Pearce at the New York Times offers a better explanation: The MTA changed the rules of how trains run -- in a way that created gnarled, cascading slowdowns.One rule: The spacing between trains had to be increased, because screwups in the signaling system made it hard to know precisely where the trains are. The second rule: If workers are at work on a line, the parallel lines running next to them have to slow down so they don't endanger those workers.It's simple to state -- but hard to visualize. So the Times produced an amazing set of animations in their online story to show how these changes slow things down. About halfway the page, they really bust it out with an interactive element that lets you increase or decrease the number of temporary slowdowns on lines, so you can see how it causes ripple effects throughout the entire system.Go check it out now if you can -- it's truly gorgeous and eye-opening.I'm a huge fan of this sort of interactive stuff. Twenty years ago, during the first blush of Flash -- then the go-to tool for producing online animations -- I interviewed the head of the animation department at Sheridan College in Toronto, one of the world's top animation schools. He argued that we were about to see a renaissance in animation, because the tools for generating it were becoming easier (as with Flash, and today, with oodles of Javascript libraries and SVG elements) -- and the distribution was now global and instantaneous, via the intertubes. So the rhetorical power of animation, which had previously been limited to big animation houses, was going to start to spread out into everyday life.He was insanely correct, and we're now beginning to see the fruits of that renaissance.Major news organizations have long been fluent in wielding text, pictures and video. They've been using them for decades (centuries, in the case of text). They know their particular rhetorical strengths. But it's taken them longer to figure out the enormous explanatory force of a good interactive animation -- to wit, the ability to let people see, and muck around with, a complex system. But I see more and more of these wonderful experiments these days, and it's awesome.(Thanks to Debbie Chachra for pointing this one out!)

Here's an interesting experiment: Using mouse-movement as a lie-detection technique.Cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have long noted a big "tell" in human behavior: Crafting a lie takes more mental work than telling the truth. So one way to spot lies is to check someone's reaction time.If they're telling a lie, they'll respond fractionally more slowly than if they're telling the truth. Similarly, if you're asked to elaborate on your lie, you have to think for a second to generate new, additional lies. "You're from Texas, eh? What city? What neighborhood in that city?" You can craft those lies on the fly, but it takes a bit more mental effort, resulting in micro hesitations.So a group of Italian researchers wondered -- hey, could you use mouse movement as a proxy for reaction time?In an experiment, they took two groups of subjects and asked them to respond to questions about their identity using an online form. One group was instructed to tell the truth; the other was to lie. The liars were given a package of information about their identity, so they could rehearse their fake persona.But! The test also included some tricky questions which the liars hadn't rehearsed, but which were logically consistent with their fake persona. For example, if they were told you were born in January 1970, they'd be asked something like are you 48 years old now? In essence, the scientists wanted to see whether they could detect -- in the mouse movements -- the hesitation of someone concocting a lie.Turns out ... they could. The truth-tellers moved the mouse quickly and precisely to the true answer. The folks who were lying jiggered around the screen for a bit, in a sort of hemming-and-hawing adaptation of Fitts' Law. Here are some screen-shots of a sample truth-teller (left) versus a sample liar (right):As the scientists conclude:

Do not mess with a Dromedary camel. Their mouths are adapted to eat whole pieces of prickly pear cactus, six-inch long needles and all. Watch this video by Camels and Friends if you don't believe me.A zoologist on reddit chimed in on how this is possible:

The creator of The Simpsons and Futurama, Matt Groening, has a new animated series for adults called Disenchantment. The "medieval adventure" debuts August 17 on Netflix and "follows the misadventures of a hard-drinking princess, her feisty elf companion and her personal demon."The Guardian reports:

It’s hard to believe that President Donald Trump didn’t personally edit the supermarket tabloids this week.They ignore facts, present opinions as reality, leap to improbable conclusions, and claim to be doing it all first and best – just like a certain occupant of the Oval Office. Trump and the tabloids, entwined in dewy-eyed mutual admiration – the rags insist he is making America great again; he has said they deserve a Pulitzer prize – are a marriage of minds, as this week’s fact-challenged, reality-flouting, self-serving stories demonstrate.Let’s begin with the National Enquirer cover story under the screaming headline in giant print: “Hoda Fired!” referring to NBC’s Today show anchor Hoda Kotb, reportedly axed as audience ratings fall. Except you may have seen her on the Today show this morning, because she hasn’t been fired. The cover is a lie, as the story inside retreats to merely say: “Hoda’s "Todays" Are Numbered!” Aren’t everyone’s?The Enquirer throws logic out the window with another flight of fancy: “Revealed! The radical plan to rehire Matt Lauer!” Sure, the news anchor ousted in November amid sex harassment allegations is returning, just as the #MeToo movement gathers steam? Let’s see.“Flight 370 Wreckage Found!” yells another Enquirer cover headline. No, the missing Malaysia Airlines flight has not been found after four years. Wing fragments were discovered off the coast of Africa more than 18 months ago, but the plane remains missing.That doesn’t stop the Enquirer from claiming: “It was Murder!” blaming “deranged and depressed” pilot Capt. Shah for deliberately crashing the plane after his wife allegedly claimed she was ending their marriage. It’s a theory based on rumor, supposition and circumstantial evidence at best, dismissed by aviation officials who cite the difficulty of flying an aircraft at 40,000 even if the pilot donned an oxygen mask while the remaining crew and passengers passed out, while enduring the decompression sickness that would have stuck as the depressurized jet soared quickly to cruising altitude.“New Pam Anderson Health Horror!” cries another Enquirer headline claiming that treatment for hepatitis “has ravaged her body almost beyond recognition!” And to prove it the Enquirer shows three photos of the former Baywatch actress looking sensational for any 50-year-old, her hair lustrous, skin glowing and smooth, her figure still centerfold-worthy.“She looks unnaturally aged and gravely ill,” New York internist Dr. Stuart Fischer, “who has not treated Pam,” tells the Enquirer. You have to wonder: has Dr. Fischer even seen these stunning photos of Anderson? The Enquirer is basically telling its readers: You see these beautiful pictures of Pam Anderson? Don’t believe your eyes. She’s really ravaged. Right.Like Trump, the tabloids’ self-promotion knows no bounds.Under the tag-line “First to Know,” comedian Robin Williams’ “perverted pranks” are “Exposed!” in an “Enquirer Exclusive.” Yet this story is lifted wholesale from Dave Itzkoff’s new biography, Robin, as the rag proudly proclaims: “The National Enquirer has obtained an explosive new biography of the actor . . ." Yes, that’s the same biography that you or I could obtain when it went on sale on May 15, eight days before the Enquirer claimed to have its “exclusive" story.The National Examiner brings us its more modestly ambitious “Examiner Exclusive” – “The untold story behind Robin Williams’ Suicide.” Unsurprisingly, it’s the oft-told story of his struggle with Lewy body dementia, sourced to “a new biography, Robin, by Dave Itzkoff . . . “This word “exclusive,” it does not mean what you think it means.“World Exclusive” tags the Globe pictorial spread of actress Helen Mirren falling while at the Cannes Film Festival. Yes, it’s the same photo you’d have seen days earlier on TMZ, in The Daily Mail, The Sun, Daily Express, and in publications and media outlets worldwide. It’s a truly Trumpian proclamation, to brazenly claim a “world exclusive” in the face of all evidence to the contrary – and many readers won’t know any better.The Royals continue to preoccupy the tabloids, and this week the Globe dedicates its cover to Prince Harry’s newlywed American bride Meghan Markle’s alleged “Revenge on backstabbing Camilla!” Do they really have a spy within Royal quarters at Kensington Palace who eavesdrops and reports on private conversations between the Royals? Of course not.The Globe was presented with the undramatic scene of Meghan and Harry at their first post-nuptial public event happily sharing the limelight with Prince Charles and Camilla. How does the Globe choose to explain this quartet wreathed in smiles? By claiming that Camilla wanted to shove Meghan into the background, sneering: “You’re a nobody, a commoner who thinks she’s latched on to the royal gravy train.” It’s the stuff of soap operas, and in the Globe imaginary palace, Meghan hit back, refusing to be side-lined. It’s frankly astonishing that the Globe didn’t report Meghan saying: “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”People and Us magazines naturally devote their covers and acres of newsprint to the Royal wedding. People gives up 38 pages to this story in its “special collector’s issue” under the glaringly obvious headline “A Fairytale Wedding!” and Us tells us that the wedding is “Changing The Royals Forever” while making the unverifiable promise of “every spectacular photo inside.” If five hours of live TV coverage didn’t sate your appetite for Meghan and Harry, this week’s Us and People will certainly do the trick.Fortunately we have the crack investigative team at Us magazine to tell us that Jennifer Garner wore it best, singer Teyana Taylor’s favorite things about her NBA star husband Iman Shumpert “are his height and his man parts,” that Olivia Culpo carries M&Ms, a book of poetry and lipstick in her Tod’s Gommino purse, and that the stars are just like us: they snack on fruit, play pool, and use their cell phones on the beach. Riveting, as ever.But what are the tabloids for if not to tell us how wonderful President Trump is, and this week the sycophantic Enquirer finds a new way to say so. Its two-page feature on “15 Strange Presidential Facts!” looks at the embarrassing or bizarre foibles of past Oval Office holders: George Washington was allegedly a “whiskey mogul,” Abraham Lincoln used to be a bartender, Jimmy Carter claimed he saw a UFO, and Barack Obama once had a pet turtle.And what bizarre detail does the Globe offer about Donald Trump? Not his sleazy affairs, nor the many allegations of his sexual harassment, his alleged rape of his first wife Ivana, his numerous bankruptcies, or his four-dimensional soufflé of hair. No, the Enquirer instead tells us that in 1987 Trump paid $29 million for the world’s third-largest private yacht, with 11 luxury suites and 50 crew members, but never spent a night aboard, confessing: “It makes me nervous to relax.”It’s ironic that now the world gets nervous when Trump can’t relax.Onwards and downwards . . .

A New York federal judge has ruled that Donald Trump can't block people he doesn't like on Twitter, because he uses Twitter to communicate his edicts and policies as President of the United States, and the US government can't exclude communications based on viewpoint, as this violates the First Amendment. (more…)

George Goldsmith and Katya Malievskaia are a married couple whose startup – Compass Pathways – will soon launch the largest triple-blind clinical trial ever of a psychedelic drug. The drug is psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms. And the condition is treatment-resistant depression. This awful malady plagues over a hundred million people worldwide. And as the term “treatment-resistant” implies, it lacks a cure.Now, if that sounds a bit implausible, consider who George and Katya have drawn to their company. Their Board of Directors includes Thomas Lonngren, who spent ten years running Europe’s equivalent of the FDA (the European Medicines Agency). Also on their board is the former Chief Medical Officer of Bristol Meyers Squibb - one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. Plus, they’ve raised roughly $20 million for their company from some extremely savvy investors.As you’ll learn from our conversation, Katya & George are both deeply experienced in medical research. They’re perhaps even more plugged into drug approval process, and have designed their trial in consultation with the top drug regulators of multiple countries. The full interview is right here:As you’ll learn from our interview, they have a very personal grudge against treatment-resistant depression, because of the way it afflicted someone very dear to them. We’ll talk about Katya and George’s backgrounds & motivations, as well as the trial they’re architecting, and their company Compass Pathways. We’ll also discuss the long clinical history certain psychedelics and other recreational drugs have had, and the major promise several of them are now showing against a diversity of afflictions.Image: Kichigin/Shutterstock

VPNFilter is a sophisticated, multi-stage malware package, part of the new breed of boot-persistent malware (software that can survive a reboot); it targets home routers and network-attached storage devices, then steals passwords and logins that traverse the network and exfiltrates it to the creators' servers. (more…)

The FBI has been trying to ban working cryptography since the Clinton years, a losing battle whose stakes go up with each passing day as the number of devices that depend on working crypto to secure them and their users goes up and up and up. (more…)

I appeared on the O'Reilly podcast this week to discuss my upcoming keynote at the O'Reilly Fluent Conference. (more…)

New York federal judge Naomi Reice Buchwald ruled that president Donald Trump is violating the Constitution when he blocks people on Twitter."We hold that portions of the @realDonaldTrump account -- the 'interactive space' where Twitter users may directly engage with the content of the President's tweets -- are properly analyzed under the 'public forum' doctrines set forth by the Supreme Court, that such space is a designated public forum, and that the blocking of the plaintiffs based on their political speech constitutes viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment," Buchwald ruled.From CNN:

Senior NASA photographer Bill Ingalls apparently set up his Canon EOS 5DS at an unlucky spot near yesterday's SpaceX rocket launch. The camera was outside the pad perimeter and the launch sparked a small brush fire that cooked the camera. "I had many other cameras much closer to the pad than this and all are safe," Ingalls wrote.Fortunately, the SD cards didn't melt and he was able to access the final photos taken by the camera before its untimely death. Two of them are below.

Stacey Abrams has won a bitterly contested primary for the Democratic candidate in Georgia's upcoming gubernatorial race; Abrams aims to be the first Black, woman governor in US history, and she plans on taking that office with an "unapologetic progressive" platform of gun control, financial aid for low-income families, and marijuana decriminalization. (more…)

For €105, the delightful and enchanting silver Neuron Necklace is yours. Its just one of a number of clever items offered by science-inspired jewelry, which include brains, fetuses, spines and thyroid hormones. [Thanks, Heather!]

The first Pomera designed for English use looks like the e-ink typewriter I've always wanted, and even has a cleverly-folding full-size keyboard so the whole thing fits in a pocket. Two AA batteries will power it for 20 hours of continuous use, the simple operating system also has a calender and spreadsheet, and there'll be an SD card slot (and QR-code reading app) for transferring files.https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2132003782/pomera-pocket-typewriter-with-e-inkA Kickstarter project is underway, seeking $90k to get production rolling.pomera : Pocket Typewriter with E Ink [Kickstarter]

David Gerard is a technically minded, sharp-witted, scathing critic of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies; his criticism is long, comprehensive and multipartite, but of particular interest is is critique of "proof of work" (an idea that is central to the blockchain, but which many cryptographers are skeptical of). (more…)

Right now, the eugenics-happy alt-right are also climate deniers; but climate denial has a short half-life -- its undeniability will only grow, as the world gets hotter, more dangerous, drier, wetter, colder, stormier, more becalmed -- more uninhabitable. (more…)

Available as an add-on item on Amazon, this Kuru Toga pencil has a cool feature that rotates the lead incrementally every time you press it down on paper. That way, the tip stays nicely rounded. Here's a video of the spring-loaded clutch mechanism in action:https://youtu.be/VjQ68v0ZAnUThe pencil also has a metal sleeve that protects the lead, sliding into the pencil as the lead gets shorter. The sleeve retracts completely so you can lug it in a bag without having to worry about it getting bent or breaking off.

If you’re a cop who calls for backup to save you from drug-induced hallucinations, you’re going to have a bad year.This past January, Toronto Police Service Constable Vittorio Dominelli and his partner, whose name has yet to be released, were on duty when, allegedly, they decided to chow down on some marijuana-laced edibles. Apparently, they snatched up the Scooby snacks during a raid on a pot dispensary.It is here that Toronto radio station News Talk 1010 reported that shit began to get weird:

Math 4 Love founder Dan Finkel writes:

Remember when 15 US government workers in Cuba got sick from some kind of unknown "sonic attack" a couple of years ago? Well, today it was reported that a US consulate staffer in China was the victim of a “medically similar” attack.Via Reuters:

In 1708, British ships sunk a Spanish galleon called the San José that contained a cargo of gold, silver, and emeralds believed to be now valued at billions of dollars. Now it's been revealed that in 2015, a robot found this "holy grail of shipwrecks" off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia. The efforts were led by Maritime Archaeology Consultants with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists using an autonomous underwater vehicle named REMUS 6000.REMUS 6000 had previously located the wreckage of Air France 447 off the northeastern coast of Brazil and in 2010 mapped and captured images of the Titanic wreckage. The Colombian government will build a museum to display and protect the wreckage and its cargo. From the Boston Globe:

For more than a century there have been reports of a strange sea "monster" living in Loch Ness yet hard evidence is, er, lacking. Now, evolutionary biologist Neil Gemmell of the University of Otago is hoping that DNA testing could perhaps shed some light on what people claim is Nessie. For two weeks, Gemmell and his team will collect skin and scale samples from Loch Ness and compare those DNA sequences against known animals. Here's what Gemmmell told the BBC News:

When parents ask their daughters why Prince Harry is getting married, the younger of the two says, "Harry is getting married because they want to get married." But when asked what you do when you get married, the younger girl is stumped. That's when her older sister jumps in with a hand gesture that could be interpreted as crude.She points her index finger with one hand and sticks it into a circle made with the other hand. "Don't do that!" a man – presumably her father – says. "Whoooa! What are you doing?" a woman – presumably her mother – says.The girl responds with a heartwarming, logical and very innocent answer. Or, maybe the girl is just really great at thinking on her feet.

An irate gentleman wearing shorts and a lime green shirt was caught on a security camera attacking an SUV – and then a passenger – with a sledgehammer.He followed the SUV into a parking lot, and when the SUV stops, the enraged man jumps out with a sledgehammer in his hand, which he uses to whack at the driver's window. The SUV starts to drive away, when someone on the passenger side falls out. The SUV keeps going while the passenger limps towards it. The madman looks like he's finished and huffs back to his pickup truck, but then decides he's still angry. He whacks the passenger, and then for good measure swings at the SUV one more time.The motive? One witness heard the attacker shouting, "You're cheating on my girlfriend," according to NBC10. Also from NBC:

This episode of Pop Culture Detective is called Stalking for Love, and explores the movie trope about "nice guys" who relentlessly stalk and harass women they are obsessed with. It's remarkable how frequently this trope appears in movies.