(more…)

It's not uncommon for legal opinions from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to be classified; whenever the President wants to do something nefarious -- like authorizing the CIA's program of torture -- he'll get a memo out of the OLC, and then classify the whole thing: the action and its justification. (more…)

In Goldman Sachs's April 10 report, "The Genome Revolution," its analysts ponder the rise of biotech companies who believe they will develop "one-shot" cures for chronic illnesses; in a moment of rare public frankness, the report's authors ask, "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" (more…)

President Donald Trump appeared on television tonight to announce that the United States military is now striking 'chemical weapons sites' in Syria by air, with coordination from the military forces of France and Britain.(more…)

Madeline Cameron's Tube is a minimalist YouTube search engine: no recommendations, no nonsense, just a search bar, a list of results with thumbnails, and clean chromeless full-screen video embeds. [via]

The Cramps got together in the same year I was born. I didn't discover them until I was 15 years old: the kindly middle-aged punk who ran a record shop in my hometown told me to check them out or he'd lay a whooping on me. I've never been so happy to have been afraid for my life: their love of trashy 1950's pulp culture, pinups and catchy surf guitar licks never fails to make me happy. Also, the band's guitarist, Poison Ivy, had some of the best damn hair in the history of music. I'll fight you on that.The Cramps played, in one form or another, until the band's lead singer, Lux Interior, died of heart failure in 2009.From the New York Times:

The Mercury News obtained and released a 30-minute captioned bodycam video of police interacting with Nasim Aghdam as she slept in a Walmart parking lot a few hours before shooting three people and killing herself at YouTube headquarters. (more…)

Time for a bit of folklore.Benandonner was a giant from Scotland. He was something of a tool and constantly threatened to lay a beating on Ireland.Fionn mac Cumhaill was a giant too. He resided in Ireland. Fionn wasn't down with Benandonner's wanting to put a hurt on his homeplace. In fact, Fionn was so bent out of shape about it that he decided to rip up chunks of County Atrim and throw them into the sea in order to build a causeway to Scotland. The causeway would make it possible for Fionn to travel and beat Benandonner's ass.With the Giant's Causeway built, Fionn stomped off to Scotland to get down with his island's adversary. He didn't stay long though: Upon reaching Scottish soil, Fionn discovered that Benandonner was frigging huge – like, giant, even for a giant. Afraid of having his ass handed to him, Fionn hightailed it back to Ireland. When the larger giant heard that Fionn had come to Scotland to fight him, but turned coward at the last moment, he set out for Ireland across the causeway to lay a curb stomping on poor Fionn.Seeing that her husband was in trouble, again, Fionn's wife, Oonagh, bundled her husband up in swaddling clothes, disguising him as a baby. Benandonner came upon Oonagh and saw the enormous baby. He freaked out: if Fionn's child is that big, even as a toddler, Fionn himself must be HUGE. Benandonner crossed the causeway once more, back to Scotland and safety.That's the story of how the Giant's Causeway was created, as it was taught to me.According to The Guardian, a team of volcanologists have declared that they've got another theory on how the Causeway's 40,000 (give or take) hexagonal columns were created:

In an effort to save its members from being exploited, sexually assaulted or be otherwise forced to spend time with human turds in a private setting, the Screen Actors Guild has put the kibosh on holding meetings in "high-risk" locations.According to The Guardian, the Screen Actor's Guild, which functions as a labor union for actors who appear on TV and in movies, has laid down the law, declaring that it's no longer cool for movie executives to set up meetings with actors in private locales such as hotel rooms or at someone's home address. Moving forward, if you want to yap with a member of SAG, it's gotta be in a workplace setting. The new measure comes as a result of handsy pricks like Harvey Weinstein and other high-powered executives in the entertainment business taking advantage of their position and the protection that Hollywood's elite formerly afforded them when it came to their sexual transgressions.According to The Guardian, since accusations were first leveled against Weinstein this past October, SAG representatives have been hearing an average of five reports of sexual misconduct from its members, per day.As a tech journalist, I'm sometimes brought to a hotel room by PR types from small to mid-sized firms to see a new product that they're representing. It usually happens during a trade show as the larger meeting rooms at convention centers and hotels are typically spoken for by large companies. I can't recall a single time that I've ever entered a hotel room, for work, where there weren't at least three or four people in the room with me. Having that many bodies in there is really the only way to make a private space, like a rented room, safer for everyone there. That a professional organization like SAG is only now getting around to creating policy to keep their members safe feels incredibly irresponsible.Image via Pixabay, courtesy of davidlee770924

President Donald Trump endorses letting states decide how to regulate marijuana, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said today.(more…)

Wells Fargo, America's dirtiest bank, has proudly announced that it will continue to lend money to gun manufacturers, unlike its competitors at Citi and Bank of America. (more…)

If a gun toting mad-person enters a classroom in Pennsylvania's Mill Creek Township school district they'll find themselves challenged by an army of billy club wielding school teachers!Pennsylvania will soon likely have a shortage of school teachers and a lot of extra billy clubs laying around.Via CNN:

Four days after FBI agents raided Michael Cohen and seized loads of potential evidence, President Donald Trump called his longtime personal lawyer just “to check in” and see how things were going, no big deal.“Defense lawyers often caution witnesses and subjects to no talk during an ongoing investigation because it appears like they may be conspiring together,” says the New York Times' Michael Schmidt about the story.(more…)

https://youtu.be/IPSbNdBmWKEThe Institute of Network Cultures' Facebook Liberation Army Link List (compiled by Geert Lovink & Patricia de Vries) is a thoroughly useful document: (more…)

Behold the Mary River Turtle (previously!), which has, alas, recently joined the endangered-species list maintained by the Zoological Society of London.Apart from sporting a totally rad green mohawk, the turtle breathes through its genitals. As CNN reports:

"[T]he virtuous & forthright Comey resembles the degenerate & deceitful Trump. Both are the main characters in their own cinematic dramas... a mindset that blinds each of them to the consequences of their actions on other people." Adam Serwer brings the truth in this Atlantic piece on the James Comey book everyone's losing their goddamn minds about this week.(more…)

A large-scale, long-term double-blind study found that low testosterone levels were far, far lower than previously suspected, and showed that taking testosterone supplements didn't confer most of its reputed benefits -- no memory improvement and no physical vitality. (more…)

This $33 Bengoo stereo gaming headset is every bit as nice as my $100+ one.Gaming and marijuana do not mix. I break headsets and controllers pretty regularly, every few months something gets dropped hard, or yanked off my head by a dog running past and catching the cable (OUCH!!!) I get tired of replacing them.This Bengoo headset feels every bit as nice as the expensive SkullCandy set it is replacing. The plastic is just as plastic. The ear cups and padding are plenty comfortable. The sound and volume control seems very much the same.The headset has a very nice cable that annoyingly has permanently affixed stereo and USB jacks. I have used the velcro cable tender that came with to hold the un-used cable end (USB for me) out of the way. The volume and mute controls are super functional and in a good place on the cable.The mic works well. Adjust the sensitivity if it is not picking up your clear and cogent call-outs.There is minor price variation based on the color you pick. The unit is labeled "Kotion" who appears to be the manufacturer. I am not sure what a Bengoo is, a Benji is my brother.I can direction-ally identify footsteps in Fortnite again.BENGOO G9000 Stereo Gaming Headset for PS4, PC, Xbox One via AmazonImage via Amazon

Steven Melendez discovered some public domain government documents in Google Books that the service wouldn't let him download because they had been misclassified as copyrighted; he filled in an online form and less than a week later, a human had reviewed the documents, agreed that they had been misclassified and removed all restrictions. (more…)

In Economic Consequences of the U.S. Convict Labor System, UCLA economist Michael Poyker uses data on prisons and their surrounding areas from 1850 to 1950 to examine the role that free/extremely low-waged forced convict labor had on wages. (more…)

The "State Policy Network" is a coalition of 66 far-right organizations who've been given $80M by a small number of billionaires, including the Walton family (heirs to the Walmart fortune), the Koch Brothers, and Betsy DeVos; they're terrified of the teachers' uprising, in which wildcat strikes have raced across America because teachers whose unions were neutralized have been put on starvation wages in underfunded facilities. Without any union bosses to keep them in check, the teachers have demanded the world -- and they're getting it. (more…)

On Monday the FBI raided Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's office and home, and now some in the Trump camp worry that Cohen could have had tapes between himself and Trump.After all, Cohen "had a reputation among campaign staff as someone to avoid, in part because he was believed to be secretly taping conversations," according to the Washington Post. He is known as someone who tapes conversations, stores them, and then plays them back to colleagues.“We heard he had some proclivity to make tapes,” said one Trump adviser, according to the Washington Post. “Now we are wondering, who did he tape? Did he store those someplace where they were actually seized? . . . Did they find his recordings?”

The police in Durham, England bought a license to the "Mosiac" dataset from the credit bureau Experian, which includes data on 50,000,000 Britons, in order to train a machine learning system called HART ("Harm Assessment Risk Tool") that tries to predict whether someone will reoffend. (more…)

Human beings have a weird, poorly-understood ability to pick a single conversation out of a noisy room, it's called the "cocktail party effect" and while its exact mechanism isn't totally understood, researchers do know that vision plays a role in it, and that being able to see the speaker helps you pick their words out of a crowd. (more…)

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is one of very few (and apparently the most populous) to publish data on its dog registrations. Nathan Fulton, a student at CMU, offers a summary of Pittsburgh Doggos By the Numbers, though it should be noted that it excludes those within city limits. (With 300k humans in town and a million more out in the burbs, assume we're missing at least a quarter of the doggos)

Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is trying to stop the government from using information found in the FBI raid that occurred on Monday in his office and home.Cohen is asking a federal judge for a restraining order today at a US District Court hearing.According to CNBC:

Ben Gurion university's Mordechai Guri is a master exfiltrator, a computer scientist who's devised a bewildering array of innovative techniques for getting data off of "airgapped" computers that have been fully disconnected from any kind of network. (more…)

The Atlantic posted a big-picture gallery of unusual homes from around the world. My favorite is this profusely overgrown shack built on top of a high-rise tower in Guanghzhou. The owner has evaded legal service for 10 years. Photo: Reuters / China Daily

(more…)

This is a compilation of time-lapse storm video shot by Ryan McGinnis in Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas. The music is by Hanu Dixit.

Introducing the worst video thumbnail image in Boing Boing and perhaps world history. [via]

David Bowie and his bulge will be viewable on big screens nationwide come April 29, May 1, and May 2. Fathom Events' three-day fan celebration will bring back Jim Henson's 1986 fantasy Labyrinth to select cinemas. Audience members are encouraged to wear costumes.

"Forced rhubarb" is rhubarb grown to maturity in complete darkness -- during which it grows so rapidly it produces incredibly cool, weird sounds.If you listen to that video above you'll get an earful: Rapidfire clicks and pops that sound like somebody irregularly whacking a couple of wet sticks together.The process of "forced rhubarb" -- a term I am using for my next band name obviously -- is outlined nicely in this story on Atlas Obscura:

President Donald Trump plans to pardon Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, reports ABC News citing 'sources familiar with the president’s thinking.'(more…)

Lots of students like to listen to music while studying or taking tests. So when a high school teacher told students they couldn't have their phones with them during their physics exam (to avoid cheating), one student intent on using his headphones brought in a portable record player – along with a Kanye West album.The teacher, Eric Saueracker from Hudson’s Bay High School in Vancouver Washington, snapped a photo and shared it on Twitter:

I just bought this hanging wallet shelf because it's just $11 when you use the promo code AGKZWGAV. I'm using it to store my shoes and boots. It will replace a falling-apart shoe rack contraption the previous owner added to my closet.

Credit card fraud is a $24 billion business. Vice convinced a credit card scammer to be videotaped as he goes about his business.(more…)

Hassan al-Kontar doesn't know when he is going to get out of the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Syrian man understandably doesn't want to go back to Syria, but no other country is willing to take him. He sleeps under a staircase in Terminal 2, and subsists on prepackaged airline rice and chicken meals. He washes up in the airport washrooms.From The Washington Post:

Two cats facing each other on a narrow ledge want to pass each other, but it isn't easy.(more…)

The world is dependent on a steady supply of rare-earth elements such as yttrium, europium, terbium, dysprosium. They go into computers, phones, electric cars, solar panels, batteries, and electronic equipment. China is the world's biggest supplier of rare-earth elements, and uses its monopoly position as an effective bargaining chip. But Japan just announced that it has discovered a massive lode of rare earth materials that could satisfy the world's requirements on a "semi-infinite basis" (love that term).From CNBC:

Dirar Abohoy has been walking on his hands since he was nine years old. Now the Ethiopian man is 32 and walks on his hands for three hours in the morning, and another three hours at night. He can do just about anything on his hands, like pulling a tire with a rope, carrying a man down a hill, riding on a camel, walking down stairs, and carrying a weight on the back of his neck. He hopes to set a Guinness World Record, which, by the looks of this video, should be easy enough for him to do.Via BBC

Sean Simpson is a teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who had expressed an openness the idea of arming teachers to prevent school shootings. (more…)

In filmmaking, they say you make three films: the film you write, the film you shoot, and the film you screen. YouTuber Script to Screen takes bits of iconic films to show how the as-produced scene differs from the original screenplay. In some cases, actors might ad lib a great line; in others, the scene may use an alt take for time or simplicity. (more…)

Do you live in New York City? Do you like cookies? Are you into cookies so hard that you carry cash with you, just in case the opportunity to buy cookies arises while you're going about your day?If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, read on.The girls of Girl Scout troop 6,000 all have one thing in common: They all live in homeless shelters in New York City. Troop 6,000 came into being back in March of 2017 thanks to a partnership between the Girl Scouts of Greater New York and New York City's Department of Homeless Services. Currently, troop 6,000's membership includes kids from 15 different homeless shelters in the NYC area. This year, the girls of the troop are selling Girl Guide cookies for the first time:From Eyewitness News 7 NY:

European jet manufacturer Airbus is going to add bed modules to the cargo hold of its Airbus A330 widebody jet starting in 2020. I'm getting sleepy just looking at the photo on Bloomberg.

Mark Zuckerberg snuck an amazing Easter Egg into his Congressional testimony, feigning ignorance of the most basic questions about his own company a whopping 42 times, in tribute to Douglas Adams and his classic work of comedic science fiction, "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy." (more…)

Missing my favorite Doctor, the War Doctor, this set is remains amazing and a must have.Lovely and fairly accurate, these "not-a-minifig" fit just fine on my my Lego brick mug. My daughter likes building, I just like collecting mini-figs.I understand there are a few new Doctors, but I stopped watching after the War Doctor.Doctor Who Eleven Doctors Micro-Figure Set by Underground Toy via Amazon

On paper, America's bailed-out banks learned their lessons from the crash of 2008 and got rid of their exposure to subprime debt, especially "deep subprime" loans to people who are so broke that it's basically impossible that they'll ever pay their loans back. (more…)

Pentatonic is a high-end furniture company that turns consumer trash into well-designed treasures. For example, they take fashion industry waste and cover their chairs' seats with it. Now they're branching out and repurposing old smartphone screens by turning them into drinking glasses.They call them the Handy Glass and a set of four costs between $49-$59, depending on the size of the glass itself. (The World's Best Ever)

The Las Cruces Sun News reports that a woman was charged with aggravated assault after shooting out her own car window after things got hot with another motorist. UK tabloid The Mirror spotted that she was fresh to gun ownership and had argued about it online with friends. (via green_bakelite)Exhibit A:Exhibit B:Exhibit C: "Oh No"