Since George Osborne set the trend in 2015, UK Tory politicians have been posing for photos in a legs-too-wide stance laughably called the "power pose." (more…)

Here’s a provocative question to ponder: Do you believe in luck?We generally believe we’re in control of our lives; we proudly take credit for our achievements and tell compelling stories about our intentionally designed successes. And that’s all nice and good — we indeed should enjoy our share of merit. However, the larger picture reveals that no matter how carefully and meticulously we plan our lives, we are all subject to unforeseeable, unexpected, uninvited, uncontrollable events that can make or break the day. In our complex world, Joseph Conrad's words sound truer than ever: “It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.” Luck is indeed a slippery notion, loaded with emotional, philosophical, and mystical connotations.Better Lucky or Talented?A few years ago, Nassim Nicholas Taleb packed two strong punches to our collective ego. With his influential books The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, he brought to wide attention how deeply randomness and unpredictability affect our lives and reality. This notion is confirmed in the recently published Scientific American article "The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized: Are the most successful people mostly the luckiest people in our society?"Physicists Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Rapisarda, together with economist Alessio Biondo, attempted to quantify the roles that luck and talent play in successful careers, using a mathematical model simulating the evolution of careers in a collective population over many years.The results: “Even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune. ...In complex social and economical context where chance is likely to play a role, strategies that incorporate randomness can perform better than strategies based on the 'naively meritocratic’ approach. ... A growing number of studies based on real-world data, strongly suggest that luck and opportunity play an underappreciated role in determining the final level of individual success.”Such conclusions may sound brutal to die-hard meritocrats, self-proclaimed self-made persons or delusional egomaniacs. For the rest of us, we can decide to play along and, while sharpening our axe, consciously incorporate chance into our lives. So here follows a favorite game of mine, that can be played alone or with others; all that is required is a six-sided die. Called The Dice Man, it is inspired by the 1971 book of the same name.The Dice Man by Luke RhinehartA modern cult classic, The Dice Man is a zany, funny, existentially subversive novel. It tells the story of a psychiatrist living a bored and unfulfilled life who begins making decisions based on the roll of a die — leading him to a happier, more joyful life. The lucid perversion of using dice to navigate life, part of his crusade to liberate himself from the illusion of choice and control, was meant to hack his ego and undermine his personality. The Dice Man Game goes like this:1. The next time you face a situation with multiple options available, compile a list of six actions you might potentially do. According to The Dice Man: “We all have minority impulses which are stifled by the normal personality and rarely break free into action.” Writing down a few different options is a way of acknowledging and recognizing the potential of the "minority impulse" that, in the end, may be a better choice than your ego can admit. Give yourself permission to explore some wild and far-fetched crazy shit.2. Shake the die, roll it, and see which choice is decided. Then just go and do the action dictated by the die. See? It’s pretty simple. There’s a catch though: if you decide to roll the die, you have to actually perform the option the die indicates. Otherwise, don’t bother to seek the Wisdom of the Die. Thus speaks The Dice Man.Sounds like a dangerous idea, doesn’t it? A bit like playing a prank on yourself or fooling around when something serious is at stake. But it’s an alluring game, imbued with a sense of risk and adventure. Generating a random option can be liberating! It can spice up a routine and surprisingly make your day. A branching multiverse is just a dice roll away. Good luck.Image: pxhere

It's May Day, and McDonald's workers in Manchester, Watford, Crayford and Cambridge have walked out, demanding an end to zero-hours contracts and a £10/hour living wage. (more…)

Dearborn Catholic high school in Michigan has a warning for its girl students -- "If your dress does not meet our formal dance dress requirements — no problem! We’ve got you covered — literally. This is our Modesty Poncho, which you’ll be given at the door."From Patheos:

For ten years a band of locals hijacked a Tribeca public dog park and charged for access.In 2008 the NYC Parks Department partnered with a local dog owners group to help manage the Warren Street Dog Park. Dog Owners of Tribeca (DOOT), decided to turn the public park into a private one and charge fees for its use. They also established a Fight Club-style list of rules to keep their utopia private.Via the NY Post:

https://youtu.be/CeEiq_C6j3cMany Republicans and Democrats were offended by comedian Michelle Wolf's performance at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Professional liar Sean Spicer said it was a "disgrace." New York Times writer Maggie Haberman falsely accused Wolf of "intense criticism" of Sarah Huckabee Sanders' physical appearance.Masha Gessen of the New Yorker has a different take. "Through her obscene humor," she writes, "Wolf exposed the obscenity of the fictions—and the fundamental unfunniness of it all."

A 7-11 in Modesto, California has found a solution to reducing loitering near its front doors. It plays classical music in front of the shop.The store started its musical program last summer when it installed two speakers outside in front. "The music is part of a 7-Eleven program that uses non-confrontational methods to reduce loitering and similar behavior," said store owner Sukhi Sandhu, according to The Modesto Bee.Apparently, the music is too loud to make chatting between loiterers any fun, and yet customers enjoy the sound of classical music as they enter the store."This is a win-win situation. I'm hearing nothing but positives," Sandhu told the Modesto Bee. He plans to crank classical music in front of two of his other 7-11 stores soon.Image: stevepb/pixabay

Former New York congressman Michael Grimm is running for re-election and his constituents couldn't be happier about it. What are the qualifications that make this law-breaking lawmaker so special in the eyes of the GOP? Here's a brief list:

Fortnite Season 4 has arrived, and the meteor has finally struck our island! (more…)

Years and years of pet ownership have led me to declare Folex as the absolute best for cleaning up messes on a carpet or piece of upholstered furniture. (more…)

An ornery pelican caused quite a scene at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California on Saturday when it crashed a graduation ceremony. First it landed in the audience, bouncing around the seats that people were trying to claim as their own. It then landed on the red carpet, snapping at anyone who tried to steer it away as students about to receive their diplomas looked distracted and hesitant as to how to proceed. "Keep going, keep going!" someone from the school faculty told them. This pelican wasn't letting anyone shoo it away or tell it what to do, and didn't leave until it was good and ready.

Not just a place where people mistakenly believe the US Constitution provides free land to cattle ranchers, Oregon is also home to Eugene's Emerald City Roller Derby. Once a year ECRG hosts a tournament mysteriously named The Big O.The best derby competitors from around the world fly to Eugene for this tournament. Very few take the Animal House tour. Via ECRG.com:

The Vatican Secret Archives sound like a joint that'd give Illuminati conspiracy junkies feverish wet dreams. The site, which sits kitty corner to the Vatican's Apostolic Library, is a treasure trove of Catholic Church documents: over 50 linear miles of that letters, books and papal bulls, some of which date back to the eighth century, to be exact.Too bad that you could jam the number of scholastically accessible information in the VSA could be jammed up a gnat's ass and it'd look like a BB in a boxcar.Y'see, most of what's there is priceless. You'd be a nut to allow folks in to view it on a regular basis, for fear of it being damaged. Those responsible for the VSA have, in the past, made half-assed attempts to scan and translate a small number of the Archive's documents. But remember, we're talking OVER 50 MILES of shelves chockablock with missives, notes and tomes. It'd take a fortune (which the Vatican totally has, I suppose) and an unknowable amount of time to collate, translate and scan everything into a usable format.According to The Atlantic, computer scientists love challenges like this. A new project called In Codice Ratio is working towards using Artificial Intelligence to understand and translate the Archive's contents using OCR so that the information can be plopped into text documents for humanities scholars to use in their studies. It's tough to do! OCR is notoriously bad at translating handwriting, let alone script which, in some cases, was written in a dead language. But the In Codice Ratio thinks they have some tricks up their sleeves that'll sort it all out... eventually.From The Atlantic:

Universities -- especially public universities -- are never, ever supposed to cede their academic independence to their donors, who might otherwise use their departments as glorified think-tanks, laundering their ideology and giving it the veneer of objective, scholarly credibility. (more…)

It's 2018, and the Open Access debate has been settled: institutions, researchers, funders and the public all hate paywalled science, and only the journal publishers -- whose subscription rates have gone up several thousand percent in recent decades, despite the fact that they don't pay for research, review, editing, or (increasingly) paper -- like locking up scholarship. (more…)

What's the longest straight-line route over land or water, uninterrupted by a shoreline? It's a question that gets complicated as soon as you recall that map projections are lies: no matter how straight you think you're going, you're always walking in circles. Computer scientists have answers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDbx1uArVOMMichelle Wolf delivered the best White House Press Corps monologue since Colbert's amazing 2006 performance, and it has made the right (as well as establishment handwringers) really angry! (more…)

Atari's retro game console, annoying given the same name as the 1977 original, won't be showing up until 2019, reports Andrew Tarantola. But you'll be able to pre-order it soon anyway.

Will Millard visited the jungles of West Papua to hang out with the Korowai, a local group of hunters and gatherers late to the uncertain benefits of modernity. They reportedly use small grubs to clean their ears, and in this video Tribesman Markus offers him a hungry one.In filming its new documentary, the BBC learned that earlier ones about the Korowai (including one of its own) contained fabricated elements.Also:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i42Smtbmeg

France.com was a popular travel site owned and operated by a U.S.-based French expat. Jean-Noel Frydman registered a trademark, had hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, and loved his birth country. For years, the French government was happy with it, even giving Frydman an award. In 2016, though, it decided it wanted his domain for itself. Though the .com top-level domain is administered in the U.S., they didn't have to go to court in America to get it. That's because the domain registrar, web.com, gave it to them.

Fact: The only thing that smells worse than your poop is tons of other people's poop. If you don't believe me, take a road trip to the town of Parrish, Alabama. They'll back me up on this one: According to the Associated Press, the citizens of Parrish were forced to endure the stench pouring off a train full of sewer sludge from New York and New Jersey for close to two months.It's not unusual for trains full of human waste to pass through the town of 982 people: there's a landfill complex that treats and disposes of the excrement another 20 miles further down the track. Having the train stop in town to share its intoxicating perfume for two months? That's both unreasonable and unusual. It seems that another county in Alabama blocked the train's passage, making it impossible for it to reach its final destination. So, there it sat in Parrish: like a man in the bathroom after a large, questionable meal, full of poop, making everything terrible for everyone. NPR states that the train was stopped near a local park. The odor coming off of it was so bad that little league games had to be cancelled.After two months of having to put up with the stench ruining the lives of everyone in the town, in mid-April, the Mayor of Parrish was finally able to tell her constituents that it was finally moving on. The town's administration will be looking into passing a series of by-laws to keep similar incidents from happening again.This is a terrible/fun story, but there's a big issue behind it: Alabama is a state without a lot of money. A combination of the state's loose-goose zoning laws and cheap land, make it an attractive place to set up businesses that require massive amounts of acreage to operate: like a landfill, for example. With it being illegal to dump raw sewage into the ocean, shipping it out to be disposed of is pretty appealing to regions that have the money to afford it.It's just another example of affluent taking advantage of the poor. Be it a country, city or a person, where there's a lot of money involved, someone's going to get screwed.Image via Wikipedia Commons

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Hey, remember few weeks back when The Trump Administration, with its dickery engines revved up to 126%, declared that transgendered personnel would no longer be in welcome in the United States military? One of their bullshit excuses for why this should be the case was that, apparently, transgendered individuals were bad for unit cohesion and terrible for morale. Well, the heads of all four branches of the American military have all gone out of their way, on the record, to say that this simply is not the case.From the Military Times:

This Wednesday at 1145am, I'll be giving the IDE Lunch Seminar at MIT's Sloan School of Management, 100 Main Street. (more…)

Every year, the readers of Locus Magazine collaborate with its editorial board to nominate and vote on their favorite science fiction and fantasy works; this year's finalist list came out today, and I'm pleased to see my novel Walkaway among some very good company indeed. (more…)

Chief of Staff John Kelly is said to have referred to President Trump as an idiot. Accurate.(more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iApE28eq7I4Frank Wu writes, "Brianna Wu, progressive Democrat and cybersecurity expert, is running for Congress in Massachusetts District 8. She has just released a set of three short videos to explain three complex technical issues." (more…)

The Defense Department’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program has demonstrated the Radio Frequency Vehicle Stopper, an experimental "direct energy weapon" that causes car and boats' electronic engine control units to enter into an endless cycle of rebooting, immobilizing the vehicles until the weapon is switched off. (more…)

Journalist and advertising consultant B.J. Mendelson (author of Social Media is Bullshit) was interviewed in the C-Realm podcast about the ineffectiveness of using social media to promote your book or small business. Root Simple has a summary of Mendelson's findings:

Eric Lundgren is the PC recycler who is going to jail for 18 months for having a Chinese factory duplicate the obsolete Windows restore CDs Microsoft lets you download for free and authorizes recyclers to distribute. (more…)

Stormy Daniels has filed a lawsuit against US President Donald Trump for his defamatory comments on Twitter.(more…)

In 1998, the US Congress retroactively extended the copyright on US works, placing public domain works back into copyright and forestalling the entry into the public domain of a great mass of works that were soon to become public domain; now, 20 years later with no copyright term extension in sight, the US public domain is about to receive the first of many annual infusions to come, a great mass of works that will be free for all to use. (more…)

German sociologist Franz Carl Müller-Lyer (1857-1916) created an optical illusion that showed how changing the direction of angle brackets on line segments can make the segments look longer or shorter than they actually are. Artist Gianni A. Sarcone made a animated versions of the illusion and the effect is even more pronounced.[via Evil Mad Scientist]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4TaVt7R7vkThe "Last Straw" is a cleverly named, cleverly engineered reusable drinking straw that folds down into a package small enough to use as a keyfob (including a little squeegee for cleaning the straw after use). (more…)

My Institute for the Future colleagues Douglas Rushkoff, Jake Dunagan, and I wrote a research paper on the "Biology of Disinformation" and 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. As Rushkoff says, "adding more AI's and algorithms to protect users from bad social media is counterproductive: how about increasing our cultural immune response to destructively virulent memes, instead?" From The Biology of Disinformation:

Steve Mould made a video to teach you the essential skill of moving one eye independently of the other. You'll also learn interesting things about the mechanics and neurology of eye movement.

The Interception of Communications Commissioner was a watchdog created by the UK government to produce annual reports on the government's use of its surveillance powers; in September 2017 that function was folded into the Investigatory Powers Commissioner Office (IPCO) as part of the Snoopers Charter, and the UK government let the iocco-uk.info domain lapse. (more…)

When I was in elementary school, one of my classmates liked yanking the legs off Daddy longlegs spiders and popping the body into his mouth. He would likely enjoy the tarantula-topped cheesburger available on a limited basis at Durham, North Carolina's Bull City Burger and Brewery. Apparently the arachnid adds a pleasant crunch to the burger. Proprietor Seth Gross (yes, that's his last name), says his restaurants exotic meat offerings have "always been about diversity and teaching people about different types of cuisines and maybe other diets around the world." From Fox13:

Scottish Limited Partnerships are a preferred money-laundering tool of the world's criminals, looters and oligarchs, especially favored by criminals from the former USSR, who have pumped an estimated $80B through them in the past four years alone. (more…)

Brazilian surfer Rodrigo Koxa set a new Guinness World Record for riding the biggest wave ever sufed, an 80-footer in Nazaré, Portugal.“I try to surf big waves all my life, and I had a huge experience in 2014 where I almost died at Nazaré,” Koxa said. “Four months later, I had bad dreams, I didn’t travel, I got scared, and my wife helped me psychologically. Now, I’m just so happy, and this is the best day of my life."Now he and Mick are planning to wing on over to London and jam with the Stones.(Sports Illustrated)

Creative Beats is a single-serving music box designed to show how easy it is to create things when simple, effective tools are available. I reviewed a Novation Launchpad once and could barely figure it out, but I'd gotten something out of this within a couple of minutes:https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/My-Recording_01.mp3It's inspired by a book project by Questlove, and made with Glitch. If the foolproof scale and single kick drum prove too limiting, there's plenty out there to graduate to.

In Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, he advances a theory that as the rich acquire a critical mass of the national wealth, they are able to influence policy in ways that diverts even more of the national wealth to their benefit, getting even richer, and giving them more opportunities to buy policies that increase inequality. (more…)

The Etienne Terrus Museum in France learned that 60 percent its collection was forged. Etienne Terrus worked a century ago and died in 1922; it's not clear how the local gallery dedicated to his memory came to such a bizarre end, only that the acquisitions were recent: "It’s a catastrophe for the municipality,” writes one expert.

AC-- on Reddit used IMDB's dataset to create a good old-fashined word cloud of the most common words in movie titles. The inevitable Vader movie should clearly be titled "One Big Black Love: Sex and Blood on the Death Star" [via]

Obvious Plant's Jeff Wysaski made some knockoff Avengers action figures and they're perfectly hilarious in their bootleggedness. See them all here. He put a few for sale, but they've already sold out.Previously: 'Walmart yodeling kid' becomes a one-up action figure

I was expecting to see an explosive worst-case scenario, a can-opener at 30,000 feet. But this simulation of a less explosive leak has a nightmare quality all of its own.

Here's yet another reason to install a dashcam. Joshua was rolling through Brooklyn around midnight when an undercover cop car ran a red light as he was turning left from the opposite direction. He's then treated to a lot of lip by the officers as he protests his innocence while pulled over. (more…)

Loki the Sphynx is eight years old, but he looks like a grumpy old man. His resting grump face is quite possibly grumpier than his furrier and more famous rival Grumpy Cat. (more…)

Apparently in China people can get discounts on their health insurance (and avoid punishment) if their phone hits 10K steps a day. That's nearly five miles of exercise they're expected to get every day.Well, if there's a way to cheat something, someone will figure it out. And someone did.Canadian-born Mark Rowswell, aka Chinese comedian Dashan, tweeted that a restaurant in China is offering a "swinging cradle" for its patrons to hit their daily steps quota while dining, drinking, and smoking. https://twitter.com/akaDashan/status/990054109855141888I dug around a bit. It seems these clever devices (called "摇步器") have been around since at least 2016, as evidenced by this video:https://youtu.be/gNAIUzN7PJIPreviously: Is China's social credit system becoming a Black Mirror episode?(Super Punch)

The Cambridge Analytica affair wiped billions off of Facebook's valuation and prompted millions of users to #DeleteFacebook, but inevitably, the company bounced back, reporting high earnings in its quarterly investor disclosures. (more…)