Buried in Facebook's latest message to 87,000,000 users who had their data stolen by Cambridge Analytica is this eye-popping nugget: "A small number of people who logged into 'This Is Your Digital Life' also shared their own News Feed, timeline, posts and messages which may have included posts and messages from you." (more…)

After World War Two, the balance of wealth shifted dramatically: the super-rich lost so much capital during the two wars and the interwar period that their grip on power slipped, creating the space for a welfare state and other reforms. (more…)

During the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, Sir Earnest Shackleton was the man, or at least one of them. Other explorers of his day may have gathered more renown, but Shackleton's relentless drive and reputation for being cool under pressure made him a legend.During his career, Shackleton made four trips to the then mysterious continent. The first? Kind of meh. The second time around, he and three fellow explorers came home as a pack of bad asses, having traveled further into the Antarctic's interior than anyone else at the time and, while they were at it, scaling Mount Erebus.The third trip, which took place in 1915, didn't go so well. His ship, The Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and was slowly crushed, forcing Shackleton and his crew to abandon the ship. Despite his disastrous third sortie to the south pole, in 1921 Shackleton planned what would be his last trip to the frozen continent. But he never made it there: he died of a heart attack en route.Close to 100 years later, Shackleton's misadventure on the Endurance are still capturing the imaginations of readers, explorers and scientists. So much so that, next year, an international team of scientists will do their damnedest to discover the ship's final resting place.According to The BBC, in January and February of next year, a team of scientists will be studying the Larsen C ice shelf, near the area where the ship was noted by surviving members of the crew as having sunk. Given their proximity to where The Endurance sunk, the opportunity to search for for it was too much to resist:

This tiny bluetooth speaker has great reviews on Amazon. It's on sale for one day on Amazon for $7.49. It is about the same size as this mini speaker I bought last month, which now costs $13.

Phoenix-area mom Sharron Dobbins felt like her her teenaged son wasn't getting up quickly enough on Easter Sunday, so she tazed him in the leg while shouting "Get up! It's Jesus' day!" (more…)

Trump's cartoonishlyvhawkish national security adviser, John Bolton, "reportedly made a bewildering threat against a former Brazilian diplomat who was butting heads with the US on Iraq back in 2002," says Business Insider:

Kern County, California has the highest rate of killings by cops in the United States, and now we can see why. A just-released video from 2006 shows the county's current sheriff, Donny Youngblood (I kid you not), saying that it is "better financially" to kill people rather than simply injure them.“You know what happens when a guy makes a bad shooting on somebody and kills them? Three million bucks and the family goes away after a long back and forth,” Youngblood says. "Which way do you think is better financially – to cripple them or kill them – for the county?"A man offscreen answers, "Kill them."To which Youngblood responds, “Absolutely. Because if they’re crippled we get to take care of them for life. And that cost goes way up.”According to The Guardian:

Actor John Krasinski was in the cast of The Office and A Quiet Place. Someone took clips from an episode of The Office in which everyone was trying not to talk, and combined them with the trailer for the movie, A Quiet Place, where making the smallest sound could get you killed. The result is funny and creepy.

Police officer John Flinn of Gloucester Township, NJ has been charged with simple assault for hitting a 13-year-old girl twice in the head while handcuffing her.From NJ.com:

The four major credit card networks -- American Express, Discover, Mastercard and Visa -- say they will no longer require merchants to obtain customers' signatures.From the New York Times:

Non-disclosure agreements were designed to protect trade-secrets, but they've morphed into a system for covering up misdeeds, silencing whistleblowers, and suborning perjury -- often at taxpayer expense. (more…)

Guinness World Records just made it official: the title of "Oldest Person Living (male)" on earth goes to Masazo Nonaka from Japan, who is currently 112 years and 259 days old (when you're that old, every day counts). He celebrated with a piece of cake, which he said was "tasty!" He credits his longevity to "soaking in hot springs and eating sweets," according to GWR.The person who held the title of "Oldest Living Person Ever (male)" before Nonaka was Jiroemon Kimura, also Japanese, who died in 2013 at age 116 years 54 days.The oldest person ever was Jeanne Louise Calment, from France, who died in 1997 at age 122 years 164 days.Last year, the Oldest Living Person (female), Violet Brown from Jamaica, died at 117 years old. Guinness World Records is currently on the hunt for the new oldest living female to take the title.

Robyn Doolittle was the reporter who did most of the legwork investigating Toronto's crack-smoking mayor Rob Ford. But in the movie about his downfall, a man – a hotshot cub reporter to be played by Ben Platt – gets to be in her hotseat."I'm glad they're rewriting the fact that it was a female reporter who investigated Rob Ford," Doolittle wrote Tuesday. "Why have a woman be a lead character when a man could do it?""I have the utmost respect for your accomplishments," Platt responded on Twitter. "I play a totally fictionalized character, an entitled, incapable entry-level reporter (my boss is played by Jennifer Ehle) at a fictional competing newspaper. The film alludes to the successful reporting from the Toronto Star."https://twitter.com/robyndoolittle/status/983738054589538304It's not just that Hollywood can't read the room. It's a black hole of blind incomprehension and any appearance otherwise is just radiation emitted at its event horizon.

With guns on the public mind, now might be a good time to read Melancholy Accidents: Three Centuries of Stray Bullets and Bad Luck, an anthology of newspaper accounts of accidental shootings, mostly fatal, compiled by Peter Manseau. Spanning 1739 to 1916, they’re brief, only a half-page on average, but their old-fashioned diction, formal as a wing collar, and the ironic distance between their deadpan recitation of the facts and the mayhem they recount gives them a prosaic poetry. They uncover the matter-of-fact madness of what Manseau calls “a nation that fancies itself created and sustained by guns, yet remains resigned to being culled by them with unnerving frequency.” Some of the book’s entries have a Fortean absurdity that splits the difference between tragic and comic, like the February 13, 1739 item from The New England Weekly Journal about some men trying out a new firearm on the broad side of a barn. As fate would have it, “one of the Bullets struck upon some piece of Iron and split it (the Bullet) in two, one piece of which flew to a considerable Distance from the Barn.” A Doctor Rice was traveling along the road; it cut him down. The other half came to rest near a cluster of people but “did no Hurt.” One of them, the Reverend Mr. Sterns, “sent the piece to the Men who were firing, with a desire that they would take more Care for the future.” Other reports are contenders for the Darwin Award, testimonials to the stupidity of the species. The July 26, 1759 edition of The Pennsylvania Gazette reports the story of a man who grabbed his gun by the muzzle to shake a recalcitrant cartridge into place. Right on cue, “it went off, and mangled and tore away [a] great Part of his Belly, so that his Entrails fell out.” Some of the stories have a distinctly gothic undertone, like the account of a deer hunter named Sherron shot dead by a deer-hunting neighbor who mistook him for quarry. “It is remarkable,” the reporter notes, with sinister suggestiveness, “that this said Sherron was shot at by the same Person twice before and badly wounded, but through Mercy escaped with his Life.” Manseau is the religion curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, so it’s no surprise that he reads these tales of “melancholy accidents,” as they were called, as parables for a nation that has grown up with a bible in one hand and a firearm in the other. To Americans, “the gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate,” writes the cultural historian Garry Wills. “It is an object of reverence. … Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned.” Manseau quotes these lines to underscore our veneration of the gun as a tribal totem and our embrace of the Second Amendment as holy writ, brought down from Mount Sinai by Charlton Heston. Then he complicates that relationship by noting that, paradoxically, injuries and fatalities like the ones anthologized in Melancholy Accidents have “presented to a largely religious nation blasphemous evidence of divine indifference.” American history has at least two possible futures. Shamed by the moral courage of the teenaged survivors of the Parkland shooting, we can snap out of our three hundred years’ trance and stop making sacrifices to the God of the Gun (38,658 of them in 2016 alone, according to the CDC ). Or we can double down on the American death cult, take it seriously as the religion it is. Build megachurches, black as gunmetal, with spires modeled on rifle cartridges. Ordain a clergy to officiate over masses where the cross has been replaced by the crosshairs and the communion chalice brims with real blood. The priest’s benediction will be a malediction, beginning, as Manseau’s book does, with a line from the Russian journalist Svetlana Aleksievich: “People shoot, but it’s God who delivers the bullet.” Melancholy Accidents [Amazon]— Mark Dery is a cultural critic and the author of several books, most recently the essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams . His biography of Edward Gorey, Born to Be Posthumous (November 2018; Little, Brown), is available for pre-order now.

Flamenco is a style of music and dance, and it also means – and sounds like – flamingo in Spanish. So it's easy to see how Wheel of Fortune's contestant, Jonny, made a $7,100 goof yesterday.Jonny had all the right letters up in front of him, all in the right order, which read "flamenco dance lessons." But when host Pat Sajak said, "Carefully, what's up there?" poor Jonny said, "Flamingo dance lessons!" Bzzz. Wrong answer.Contestant Ashley then swoops in with the correct pronunciation, "Flamenco dance lessons" and wins the cash prize.Jonny looks utterly confused, and Sajak, who looks a bit surprised himself, sputters, “So t-to explain, wh-what we all heard was, and I don’t even know [how] to say it but you gave us a ‘g’ instead of a ‘c’.”To make sure all was kosher, Sajak said they would look things over during the commercial break, but after the break it's decided that indeed, Jonny mispronounced the word, lost the round to Ashley, and thus lost his $7,100 and trip to Europe. Might not seem fair, but them's the rules.Via Time

There are so many incredibly ridiculous pool floats out there now. I recently spotted one that looks like a whoopee cushion. And also one that looks like a baby bottle (why?!). But the one that really caught my eye is by British artist David Shrigley.It's called the Ridiculous Inflatable Swan-Thing and it's kind of like a swan but with a meh face. I think it's glorious!It's available from Australian retailer Third Drawer Down for A$55 (approx. $42.33).Are you sure you want to buy this rubbish?

The lifecycle of technology is fundamentally parasitic: successful technologies are ones that colonize their predecessors, devour them, and burst out of their limiting skins to and grow into new, more ambitious tools -- until they, too, are colonized by a more-evolved successor. (more…)

NASA posted this high-definition tour of the Moon, a perfectly serene antidote to the noise here on Earth.

Páraic McGloughlin's Arena is "brief look at the eart from above" mesmerizes us with the shapes we made upon it, culled from satellite imagery then ordered frame-by-frame to give the uncanny appearance of a single plot of land rapidly changing.

(more…)

Last month, Tina Roth Eisenberg (@swissmiss) tweeted "No is a complete sentence." This month, designer Debbie Millman put it on a t-shirt. It's currently on Cotton Bureau for $32. I give it a big "yes!"

Sad to hear my pal, Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, has been hospitalized since last Wednesday.Burning Man's official blog The Burning Man Journal made the announcement Monday:

During a Fox news segment in which Republican strategist Frank Luntz thought the media should give Trump more credit for the nation's economic "clear recovery," someone behind the scenes made a boo boo.When host Howard Kurtz asked for a poll to be put up on the screen that asks if the media reports fake news, viewers got a look at the wrong poll – one put out by Monmouth University that asks people which network they trust more, CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News.Not surprising but a knee-slapper nonetheless, the graphic for the poll showed that people trusted CNN most, at 48%, followed by MSNBC at 45%. Fox came in last place with a mere 30% of those polled thinking that the network was trustworthy.Kurtz quickly said, "This is not the graphic we're looking for – hold off. Take that down please!"

Today the FBI raided the office of Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen. They seized various documents, including information related to porn actress Stormy Daniels, aka Stephanie Clifford.According to the New York Times, who first reported on the story:

As Rick James would be the first to tell you if he weren't dead, cocaine's a helluva drug. Aside from providing an intense high that can be followed by an even more intense bout of depression, tons of fun paranoia, anger, breathing issues and maybe if you're really into the stuff, death. Until today, I have to admit that I was unaware that it also has the power of flight.According to the New York Times, Floridian (of course she's from Florida) Kennecia Posey was found by officers from the Fort Pierce Police Department to have a goodly amount of marching powder in her purse. The pouch of nose candy was discovered during a traffic stop after seeing the car that Posey was a passenger in was swerving all over the road. The cops decided to search Posey's purse after smelling marijuana in the car. I can't tell you what Posey had to say about her left-handed cigarettes, but her theory on how the bag of rail ended up in there is amazing: she claimed that with it being a windy day, the stuff must have blown in there.I guess it goes without saying that Posey is getting dinged up on charges of cocaine possession and a misdemeanor count of marijuana possession. I really hope that she fights the charges in court – hard. I want expert witnesses called in to able to talk about the flight qualities of a bag of blow. I demand to hear the arguments over the aerodynamics of an ounce of Yeyo.If the snow ain't flitting, you won't be acquitting.Image via pixabay courtesy of stevepb

The Auschwitz Memorial Archives preserves 38,916 photos of registered prisoners: 31,969 photos of men & 6,947 photos of women. These photographs were taken from the first quarter of 1941 until spring 1943. In total, 400,000 people were registered as prisoners of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The math on this suggests that we've got photos of less than 10% of the prisoners that were held, murdered, or, if they were very lucky, survived the camp. The lives of each and every one of these individuals deserves to be honored. In collaboration with photo restoration and colorization specialist Marina Amaral and the Auschwitz Memorial Museum, I'm working on a project that aims to do exactly that.Faces of Auschwitz is a project that will tell the story of each of the 38,916 registered prisoners that we have photos of, based on what records of their lives we have. Each week, we'll talk about the story of another prisoner of Auschwitz. Some will have survived. A few managed to escape. Most of those we profile will have died behind the barbed wire perimeter of the concentration camp. Marina's talents in photo restoration and colorization will breathe new life into the fading pictures of prisoners, bringing their faces into the modern era, while at the same time, ensuring that the colors used in the process are historically accurate.While the Auschwitz Concentration Camp is infamously known for its role in Nazi Germany's plans to eradicate European Jewry, homosexuals, political prisoners, members of the intellectual elite, priests, the mentally ill and gypsies were tortured and senselessly murdered inside of the camp's walls as well. We'll be telling their stories, too.For my part, I'll be serving as an editor on the project. It's my job to create a coherent, readable story out of the material gleaned from the Auschwitz Memorial Archives. It's a passion project for me: I had family murdered in the back of vans in Minsk during the war. Their only crime was that they were Jewish. I volunteered my services to the project in order to honor my family and to ensure that the senseless hatred of the Nazis and their co-conspirators is never forgotten.Faces of Auschwitz is a huge undertaking: a dedicated website is in the works, but for now, you can find the first two restored photos and the stories of the people in them on Marina's Website, here. Neither I nor Marina are being paid for our work on the Faces of Auschwitz. We serve the dead that the living might remember them.Earlier today, we were proud to announce that Faces of Auschwitz will be sponsored by the Michael Frank Family Foundation. The Foundation's generous contribution to our work will allow us to expand the scope of the project beyond what we can accomplish with a webpage and on social media: a book, talks surrounding the project, and an educational component are all in the works. I can't think of a greater responsibility or a greater honor than being a part of what we're creating.Once the site is up and running, I'll drop you a line.Images courtesy of Marina Amaral & the Auschwitz Memorial Museum.

You'd be nuts not to watch this video: after finding a red squirrel with its front legs caught in an animal trap, a team of veterinarians and volunteers came together to give it a new lease on life... and a new set of wheels.

The Second World War came to an end 73 years ago. The men and women who served during the war are rapidly succumbing to the ravages of old age. In my lifetime, I know I'll mourn the loss of the last surviving WWII soldier, as I did the loss of Florence Green, the last surviving veteran of the First World War, in 2012. What the veterans of these horrific conflicts saw and in many cases, were forced to do in combat, should never be forgotten: their deeds and memories give color to every discussion we could have about why war should be avoided at all cost. While there's no stopping their deaths, one man has dedicated his life to preserving as many of the life experiences that the veterans of the Second World War lived through as possible.The CBC recently ran a fascinating profile on Rishi Sharma. He's a 20-year-old man from California that's dedicated years of his life to interviewing the surviving veterans of World War II. According to the CBC, Sharma has conducted over 870 interviews with U.S. veterans in 45 American States. Recently, he made his way to Canada to hear what our old soldiers had to say about their time at war.From the CBC:

Marketing companies frequently "anonymize" their dossiers on internet users using hashes of their email addresses -- rather than the email addresses themselves -- as identifiers in databases that are stored indefinitely, traded, sold, and leaked. (more…)

The Daily Beast and Property of the People used the Freedom of Information Act to force the National Labor Relations Board to release the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas employee handbook, which was introduced into evidence during a 2015 lawsuit over union busting. (more…)

Sitting on a commercial sidewalk in Monroe, Washington can land you in jail for 90 days as well as set you back $1,000. If you need a sit-down, play it safe and find a public toilet or park bench.On March 6, the Monroe police department proposed the new law, obviously as a way to move homeless people away from commercial businesses, and the City Council unanimously approved it. The only time you can touch your butt to a city sidewalk within 100 feet of public doorways is between the hours of 2am-6am.Monroe, 30 miles northeast of Seattle, isn't the first city in Snohomish County to pass this kind of law – nearby Marysville has had a similar law for 20 years.Opponents of the law says it's a violation of human rights.Via The Seattle TimesImage: Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Berkeley's "Foundations of Data Science" boasts the fastest-growing enrollment of any course in UC Berkeley history, and now it's free on the university's Edx distance-education platform. (more…)

File under "what were they thinking?" -- @disney removed its tweet showing an unresponsive Pinocchio marionette receiving a sparkly spell from a magic wand, with the caption, "When someone compliments you, but you're dead inside."From Digg:

Two pranksters placed a remote control lawnmower in a grassy field and steered it from a distance, unseen. One man (the property owner?) made several attempts to climb on it and disable it, but the pranksters would speed up the lawnmower and veer off in another direction whenever he tried. "I think if he fell off and got hurt, we probably could get in trouble," muses one prankster, but the observation does not stop the inanely giggling duo from driving the mower around the field until peace officers arrive.

Taking a stand against Facebook for repeatedly and willfully violating the privacy of its users, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is deleting his account."Users provide every detail of their life to Facebook and ... Facebook makes a lot of advertising money off this," he told USA Today. "The profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back... Apple makes its money off of good products, not off of you. As they say, with Facebook, you are the product."Recently, Elon Musk also deleted his personal and Tesla pages from Facebook.Image by Gage Skidmore/Flickr. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is scheduled to give Mark Zuckerberg a public drubbing on Wednesday morning, sticking up for America and sticking it to the reckless, feckless CEO of a giant digital monopolist who has distorted our discourse to sell us soap and only grudgingly feigned surprise when he was informed that his machine had also been used in an attempt to win an election by trickery. (more…)

Austin Kleon, author of ">Steal Like an Artist, reported that his young son drew stick figures on some couch cushions. His wife cleverly dealt with the issue by embroidering the marker art.

When Bloomberg spotted a Department of Homeland Security RFP for a database of journalists and sources, classified by how friendly or hostile they were to the DHS, it struck many of us as sinister, especially under an administration whose official, on-the-record position is that the free press is an enemy of the USA. (more…)

A topless woman with "women's lives matter" written across her chest jumped over a barrier and ran towards Bill Cosby, who was on his way to the Montgomery County courthouse this morning. The protester, who was with around six other protesters, was handcuffed and taken away by police.Cosby, who has been accused by over 50 women for sexual assault (and has denied everything), is in court today for a retrial, charged with "three counts of aggravated indecent assault," according to the Huffington Post.

You have probably seen sushi restaurants where plates of different kinds of sushi move past you on a conveyor belt. These kinds of places are called kaitenzushi. Here's one where you order sushi on a touch screen and the sushi arrives on a little rail system, stopping right in front of you. I want to go and see how it works.

Meshpoint is a Croatian open source hardware company that turns out rugged, meshing, battery-powered wifi hotspots that get their backhaul from cellular networks; they're based on the widely used DD-WRT free/open wifi routing software, and use open source hardware designs that are intended to stand up to punishing field conditions like those found in refugee camps. (more…)

Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines has outdone himself with his latest machine. It's an incredibly complex Rube Goldberg machine that took him three months to make called "The Cake Server" and it does just that... serve cake. The "cherry on top" is literally a cherry on top. Watch!Now watch the behind-the-scenes video:https://youtu.be/oMWUvNVb7z0Previously: A useless machine that wraps gifts in 10 seconds

The subprime car-lending industry -- charging exorbitant rates for car-loans to people least suited to afford them, enforced through orwellian technologies, obscuring the risk by spinning the debt into high-risk/high-yield bonds -- is collapsing. (more…)

Almost ten years ago, I interviewed Mike Brickley, an inventor who'd designed a new architecture for an internal combustion engine -- one that he predicted would produce 35 per cent less friction than a typical ICE, and 20 per cent better fuel mileage. (Mark blogged about it for Boing Boing back then too.)Pretty rad specs, if he could pull it off! As I described the design back then ...

My fourth-favorite ASMR fad is dogs eating popcorn. Lots of treats for pups lately! Sadly, the wave has already crested and the garbage YouTuberati is burying the good stuff with rented animals and 7 minutes of titles, music, jibber-jabber and other monetization padding. A good rule is to only click on videos uploaded by actual dogs.

Back in 2011, Sara Hendren -- a design and disability-studies researcher -- teamed up with the graffitti artist and philosophy professor Brian Glenney to redesign the International Symbol of Access. Often known as the "Wheelchair Symbol", it had been around for almost 50 years, but Glenney and Hendren thought the symbol -- a blocky, immobile figure -- was too passive.So they designed the icon you see above, one that makes the figure much more active. Then they engaged in a street-art campaign, printing up 1,000 of the icons as transparent stickers that were pasted onto old-school Wheelchair-Symbol signs around Boston. Since you could still see the old sign through the transparent overlay, Glenney and Hendren's goal was to make passersby think about the meaning of that old symbol.The new "Accessible Icon" -- as it's been called -- grew so famous that it's been informally adopted in locations around the world, employed by a US Department of Treasury sign, and included in MOMA's permanent collection. (The final version, above, was tweaked by graphic designer Tim Ferguson Sauder to make the icon comply with professional standards.)As it turns out, though, people with disabilities disagree over whether the new symbol is better than the old one. Atlas Obscura has a fascinating piece outlining the various views:

William Russell was fortunate and fast enough to capture footage of Sakajurajima's eruption, but his hand wasn't steady and his lens wasn't wide. Thanks to modern video-editing software, though, and his own extreme patience, Russell could stabilize his shot and superimpose it on a panoramic view of the volcano. The result is quite epic, very machine, and just a little surreal.

There are various apps that purport to generate white noise, but the free ones I've tried have all been strange or skeevy, and YouTube's a minefield of allcaps woo and bad ads. Turns out that the best place to get it is a website: NoiseMachines.The white noise generator is perfect, with an equalizer, presets and options to save and share your own. (Here's one I made for you that I'm calling "24 hours of bridge noise but something's very wrong with the spaceship")But there's also lots of sample-based blends of noise, too, such as thunder, vinyl scratches, generative piano music (my setting), data centers, binaural beats, etc.The creator is Stephane Pigeon, a sound engineer with various other similar projects to enjoy.

The gimmick here is that the jeans have the emblem of Shadaloo -- the criminal syndicate operated on the side by Street Fighter II's evil dictator M. Bison -- sewn on them. $200 is quite normal for fancy denim but I'm not shoryuken expect this purchase to be respected by even the most committed fans.

This week and next, I'll be visiting the Sonos stores in New York City (4/12) and London (4/17) for a free listening party celebrating the Voyager Golden Record, the iconic message for extraterrestrials launched into space 40 years ago. I'll do a short multimedia presentation about this inspiring artifact and we'll play the first ever vinyl release of the Voyager Golden Record that I co-produced with my friends Tim Daly and Lawrence Azerrad. Admission is free. No tickets remain for the New York City event but depending on the number of "no shows," there may be availability at the door. And if you're in London, please do RSVP right here! I hope to see you!The Voyager Golden Record: A Journey Through Space and TimeSonos New York: Thursday, April 12, 7:30pmSonos London: Tuesday, April 17, 6:30pmThe Voyager Golden Record 3xLP Vinyl Box Set and 2xCD-Book edition is now available from Ozma Records, Light in the Attic, or your local independent record store!