Can a "griefbot" help you mourn?In recent years a few computer scientists have created chatbots of deceased loved ones, by training AIs on transcripts of the deceased's online utterances. There's the case of Roman Mazurenko, a Russian man whose friends created a chatbot based on his texts; there's Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, who similarly constructed a bot of his father so that his children would have some sense of what it was like to talk to him.It's a form of mourning and remembrance that's quintessentially modern, and raises interesting questions about what the shape of grief will look like in the years to come. These experiments in griefbots thus far have all been bespoke, but I doubt it'll be long before we see one-click bot-creation – where you feed a service the various screen names and accounts of the deceased, and it's all autoscraped and assembled quickly into something you can chat with.But what's the emotional impact of talking to a chatbot version of someone when you know it's just a bot? My friend Evan Selinger is a philosopher who writes frequently and thoughtfully on the moral implications of tech, and in a recent essay he suggests an intriguing parallel: The "empty chair" technique ...

Watch an 11 year-old give a powerful speech. I cried.

Fred Rogers is the subject of a documentary and a biopic starring Tom Hanks, both out later this year. Though most Americans assume he's a national treasure, he's widely loathed by conservatives who center him in their myth of "participation trophy" culture.I remember one columnist describing him as a saccharine man whose job was to help the education industry tell stupid children they were special—one of the more enduring impressions I got of American conservatives after moving here in the 2000s. (Another: turning on the radio to hear someone muttering, barely in control of his rage, about how much be hates bisexuals, intoning the word "hate" over and over. At first I thought it was a theatrical performance, a character in a radio play, but it turned out to be The Michael Reagan Show.)Anyway, here's Fox and Friends complaining that young people are entitled and useless because Fred Rogers stressed the importance of love and its absense in their lives. The veneer of mirth makes it seem ironic, humorous even, but even that has a stone-cold purpose, as explained here by a less moderate right-winger, Andrew Anglin:

If you want to express a uniquely compelling mix of superficial happiness and deep melancholy, there is nowhere better to go than Manchester, England. "Hide the Pain" Harold (AKA Hungarian model András Arató), internet-famous as the star of the meme by that name, seemed to have a nice time traipsing around the city, enjoying its legendary footballing culture: "I think the red side needs some help to hide the pain."Also, wait, is that square video? Hell for every orientation.

Matches that will light just about anyplace there is oxygen can come in really handy.https://youtu.be/BQAkZYYdXkUKeep this waterproof case of storm matches in your survival kit. I have one in my camper and another in my emergency bag. As long as there is still phosphorus on the matchstick, these suckers will light and burn. The plastic case comes with an o-ring and extra striker pads, so you can buy a box of extra matches and refill it.UCO Stormproof Match Kit with Waterproof Case, 25 Stormproof Matches and 3 Strikers via AmazonUCO Stormproof Matches, Waterproof and Windproof with 15 Second Burn Time - 50 Matches via Amazon

Jimmy Kimmel turned 50 recently, the age when men and women are encouraged to get their first colonoscopy. Instead of having the exam done privately, he chose to do it on camera in the hopes of encouraging more people to get screened.Katie Couric asked to join Kimmel to the hospital because she's passionate about this cause. In fact, after her husband died of colon cancer at age 42, Couric went on national television herself and had a colonoscopy. After it aired, there was a 20% increase in the screenings. That jump has been called the "Couric effect." Now they're hoping for a similar outcome, ie. the "Kimmel effect."Yes, you do get to see up Kimmel's ass but it's not (too) gross. It's for a good cause, and worth a watch.

Surprise! The hacker who delivered all those stolen Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks turns out to be a Russian intel officer.The Daily Beast has the story:

Back in 2010, the video-game designer and scholar Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, a withering satire of Farmville and other clicker games that were, at the time, wildly popular on Facebook. (Wired wrote an excellent story about it, worth reading.)As he developed Cow Clicker, Bogost quickly discovered something: Facebook gave app developers a lot of data about users. He was able to get each user's unique Facebook ID (Zuckerberg's is"4", as it turns out); and without even him asking for it, Facebook sent him "affiliation" info about users' schools, workplaces, and other organizations they belonged to.In essence, Facebook at that time outgassed info so readily that it was almost hard to avoid building profiles of people. But of course, it made it insanely easy for something like Cambridge Analytica to happen, as Bogost notes.He wrote an engrossing piece for the Atlantic about the experience, and it's the best thing I've yet read that walks you through how Cambridge Analytica got its hands on so much data. You hear phrases like "50 million Facebook profiles", but it can seem awfully abstract. When Bogost describes precisely what Facebook offered him as he developed his Facebook game, you understand much more deeply what's at stake.And of course, as he notes, a) there were oodles of people developing apps and games at that point for Facebook, and b) they probably all still have that data, as he does:

I love Yuri Shwedoff's subdued, atmospheric renderings of vestigial technology and the people who still see it, still wear it. The lansdcape wears it, too, and it evokes for me a deeper relationship with technology rather than the darker one often implied by postapocalyptic art. Here it's not disused. If anything it's less alien. It just fits somewhere else in the human imagination. https://vimeo.com/168107529 (more…)

Dance like America's watching, Oscar! ('Cause they are!)This is from the Steve Harvey-hosted show, Little Big Shots.

Contrary to what you might think, you don't need to be a scientist or programming prodigy to create robots and DIY electronics. Thanks to the Arduino platform, anyone can get their feet wet building wearables, R/C robots, and the like, provided they have some basic training. The Pay What You Want: 2018 Arduino Enthusiast E-Book Bundle nets you ten e-books that will get you started creating your own projects, and it's yours for a price you choose.Here's how the deal works: Simply pay what you want, and you'll unlock one of the collection's ten e-books. Beat the average price paid, and you'll get the remaining nine at no extra charge.From diving into C programming to creating a GPS tracker, this collection's e-books pack fun projects to help you bolster your scientific knowledge. You can learn how to build your own spy gadgets with the Arduino for Secret Agents e-book, engineer your own Bluetooth wearables with the Arduino Wearable Projects e-book, and much more for a price you choose.Simply name your price, and you can get started with the 2018 Arduino Enthusiast E-Book Bundle.

The London offices of soi-dissant Facebook mind-control sorcerers Cambridge Analytica were raided by the UK Information Commissioner's Office, after a judge issued a search warrant for material related to the illegal acquisition of 50,000,000 Facebook profiles by the company. (more…)

In close to a decade of work as a full-time journalist, I can't recall a single instance where I referenced my work for one outlet at another. There's a few reasons for this.First, outside of an occasional mention of something I've written on Twitter, self promotion's always felt awkward and kind of gross to me. When I'm not online, I live a quiet, nomadic life. I don't like a ton of bother and my Imposter Syndrome assures me that I'm not worth it. Second, the moment my work's approved by an editor for publication, I cease to consider it mine. As a freelancer, I'm employed on a pay-for-work basis. I don't own the words I write for Macworld or USA Today. They do. I take pride in the work I do, but most of the companies I work for have talented social media specialists that do a better job at getting the word out about something that I penned than I ever could. So, I leave it to them.That said, I wrote something that I thought was much more interesting than the work I typically get asked for by joints aside from Boing Boing. So, here I am, sharing it with you.Earlier this month, I interviewed officials from the Department of State and an ethical hacker for AFAR Magazine to get the skinny on what the hell's actually on a passport's RFID chip, who can read it and whether it's being read is anything we need to be worried about. Along the way, I found out a ton about where U.S. Passport books get made, how many of them are out there and the fact that, somehow, people lose an absolute shit-ton of the things every year.I don't get paid any extra for promoting my work (that'd be pretty sweet, though) and as the work I do for AFAR is assigned, not pitched, I'm pretty sure that the number of visits that the story gets won't dictate whether I write for them again or not. So, check it out or don't--it's cool.I just thought that what I learned was really interesting. I thought that maybe a few of you might think so, too.Image via Flickr courtesy of SwimParallel

Self-proclaimed tomboy surfer Mel Wells of Portland, Oregon was inspired by the modest, one-piece bathing suits from the twenties to create her own line of similarly-cut swimwear. Her company is called Beefcake and her genderless swimsuits are for any body.After a successful crowdfunding campaign for the suits last year, she told PopSugar in an interview:

Landslides are bad news. In parts of the world where heavy, sustained rains can rapidly give way to flash flooding, they're responsible for tragic loses of life, property and transportation infrastructure. That the latter can wind up under hundreds of tons of mud and debris makes it far more difficult for first responders to do anything about the former--if you can get to people, you can't save them. Since we can't change the weather, we can't stop landslides. But NASA's churned out new tech that could make the difference between an evacuation and a recovery effort.According to Space.com, NASA's got a hot new computer model designed to identify landslide hazards around the world, every 30 minutes:

This is what separates us from the animals: tutti-frutti flavored lollipops in our likeness.The Face Licker is the latest bespoke product from quirky UK online retailer Firebox who also makes face cushions and face luggage.

The New York Times reports that Uber's autonomous vehicles require human intervention every 13 miles, on average, while Google's go 5,600: they were "not living up to expectations months before a self-driving car operated by the company struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz."

Ramy Khuffash takes us on a journey through the dark patterns, emotional manipulations and annoying hurdles Facebook uses to prevent users from deleting their accounts.

I have three or four of these Lighted Hand Held Magnifiers. And at just $2.16 including shipping on Amazon, why not. It works with 3 x AAA batteries (not included) to power the two bright white LEDs, and even comes with a fake leather case with a snap button. I use mine mainly to read the tiny numerals and letters on electronic components and printed circuit boards, but it's also useful for looking at splinters, markings on pills, laundry labels, and anything else with tiny printing. I just bought another for my travel kit.

Judge William Alsup in San Francisco is presiding over a case in which California cities are suing the big oil companies over the climate-related disasters they're experiencing; Judge Alsup asked for a "tutorial" session in which experts for both sides would be asked to explain the underlying science, something he's done in earlier cases that turned on technical questions, including a DACA case and a case on lidar and self-driving cars. (more…)

Before Max Headroom shilled for Coke and collaborated with the Art of Noise (below), he starred in this fantastic and prescient 1985 UK TV movie about a dystopic future. This brilliant bit of cyberpunk science fiction feels even more relevant today than it did back then.Previously: "Max Headroom, the full story"(Thanks, UPSO!)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6epzmRZk6UU

A life-size animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex at a Colorado dinosaur theme park went down in flames yesterday. Zach Reynolds, co-owner of Royal Gorge Dinosaur Experience, says it was probably caused by an electrical malfunction.Although the 24-foot-tall T-Rex is a big loss to the park, Reynold's had a sense of humor about it when he joked, “We knew he had a temper, but today he blew his top.” He added, "it made for some spectacular imagery along the way."The good sport hopes a new dinosaur will take its place by this summer.Via AP

"I INHABIT IMAGES" is the Instagram bio chosen by David Henry Nobody Jr., the playful yet apt moniker of New York artist David Henry Brown Jr. Nobody's artwork often involves being totally engulfed by food, pigments, advertisement cutouts, or household items, sometimes to the point where he is only recognizable by a glaring eye or wide smile. While this project has been documented on Instagram and ongoing for three years, David Henry Nobody Jr. has always been fascinated with ideas of representation and identity.In 1999 Nobody, disguised as a fan, made it his mission to follow and meet Donald Trump as many times as possible over the course of a year. He totaled six interactions but decided to stick with the theme of impersonation for a new project in 2000 where he adopted the identity of Alex von Fürstenberg, VIP son of the fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg. During this time, "Alex" was documented at numerous celebrity parties among figures like Puff Daddy and Bill Clinton.Nobody's current Resemblagè art, from the terms "resemble" and "collage", is a series of images and videos posted to Instagram that record performances of the artist covering and immersing his face in foods, paints, magazine cutouts, toys, and other objects. His inexhaustible creativity keeps the posts new and exciting by exploring new objects and textures, or ways to affix and camouflage himself with his art. These Resemblagès reflect the landscape of social media itself and toy with conceptions of self image, intimacy, and reality while also highlighting its far-reaching and immediate influence. As the ultimate subversion of the selfie, David Henry Nobody Jr.'s Resemblagè art is equally fun as it is thought provoking and hard-hitting.Sarina: Now that Trump is the president, what is it like to look back and reflect on your year-long project where you stalked and met him six times?Henry: It's really fascinating and really nauseating simultaneously for me. In one sense, I predicted the future! He's so much more extreme than he was back then, so extremely right wing. He was already kind of insane in 1999 but he's definitely much more out of his mind now as President.In 1999, it was still well before the Apprentice or anything like that, it's before reality TV, I just thought Trump was so cheesy, and I just loved really cheesy people in the 1990s, still do. Except when they're really, really scary right winged people. By right wing, I mean he lives the American dream as a fantasy and is oblivious to the dark side, like exploitation of people, and environmental destruction, and objectifying women, and shit like that... I don't play up the project that much, as much as I could I guess, because I think he's such a fucking douche bag. It has certainly become an important body of work for my art. I think of it as having fired an intuitive warning shot about Trump to the world.In 1999 and 2000 I had a much bigger project going than Trump. I was going out at night in NYC and crashing VIP parties as Alex Von Furstenberg, an actual real rich guy, for a year undercover. By turning myself into an illusion, I was able to crash hundreds of VIP parties and meet and get photographed with the rich and famous. Sixty photos document Alex's adventures and became my first major solo show in NYC in 2000.So Alex Von Furstenberg took over my life more than Trump at the time. I did the Trump project for a year, and there's five photos of us together. I met him five times and then I met him a sixth time at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic city, where I shot a video at a pro-Trump rally where he was looking into running for President. I went down there with a video camera and I got all five of my 8x10 photos autographed in a gold paint marker by The Don. I met and documented a lot of weirdos that would vote for him. At a later time I made a "Trump For President 2000" sign and campaigned for Trump to probe the public's reaction down near Wall street in NYC. My stalking Trump project was covered last year by a video by Vice and also an article in The Huffington post.I actually showed those signed photos to an art dealer recently and he said, "You better hold on to that stuff. That's like getting your picture taken with Hitler and having it autographed." For both Alex and Trump I was immersed in ideas about celebrity fanaticism and fanatical behavior, and the dynamics of capitalism, and how we believe in things, and what that means to me. I wanted to explore it myself and become a believer in the illusion and try to understand the forces at play that drive how I see reality. I still think that if you're a white male from America, there's a part of you that is Donald Trump. I feel that his supporters are, in fact, in awe of their Oppressor.Sarina: I've heard you say that Donald Trump is a performance artist, and that he's totally Dada. Could you talk about this?Henry: Yes, firstly, by making such a claim, I'm moving against a lot of what's happening in the New York art world right now (that art should separate from society). I disagree philosophically with the notion of separation! The idea of Trump as performance art comes out of my interest in bridging different areas of society, and comparing and contrasting them with the construct of art. I am comparing and contrasting the Dadaists, Duchamp, John Cage, and all the history of conceptual art and pop art to consumerist culture. Consumerism is very conceptual, we're living in simulacra, which is pictorial space, like a painting. Trump is so fake and so delusional and "basic" that as a construct it closely resembles the illusionism of pictorial space in a painting or drawing. Performance art comes out of painting and drawing and sculpture. Trump is a Readymade performance artist. He should have R. Mutt tattooed on his forehead to complete the cycle of art, consumerism and fascism all in one! Trump is so fucking absurd as President that it Trumps Dada itself. Capitalism is now the snake swallowing its own tail.Sarina: You refer to yourself as a reality hacker. I'm intrigued by this concept, and I'm wondering why you think it's important to hack reality, and which one of your projects has hacked reality the most?Henry: I think it's important to hack reality in order to examine what we might often take for granted in our lives, to pull back the curtain of our consciousness by disturbing and sabotaging and recreating reality through living art works.I would say Alex Von Furstenberg went the farthest. David Nobody on Instagram right now is another reality hack and is currently better known than Alex. @davidhenrynobodyjr is a work in progress that my followers can observe and influence by their actions and comments. David Nobody is a character, but everybody thinks that's me. It is and it isn't. There is increasingly a gray area between me and the characters in my work. I generate a character that performs and makes objects for a couple of years. Then I change and move into a different period and I create a new character to do this. I have been hacking my art and hacking reality for the last 25 years.Alex went really deep because it became a solo show and because the story was highly relatable not only as art but as mythic Americana. Alex was on national TV, and it was on the front page of The New York Observer, which was a big deal at the time. The project created a pretty good scandal in the media. My friends called me up from my college days. They're like, "Dude, like, I was at the airport, and like I fucking saw you on TV."As much as I impersonated Alex, the project went deep into my world, things got delusional. I began to really obsess over celebrities. My encounters with them were like fetishistic experiences. I would really say that Alex kind of drove me insane. I stayed undercover for a year but once I outed the project to the press and had a solo show, everywhere I went in New York people were like, "That's that guy that poses as Alex von Furstenberg." They had all these really crazy ideas that I had become rich, and was selling my work like crazy. In reality, I was really broke. Alex von Furstenberg exposed the illusions we live inside and it tore me apart. It became a hallucination machine and a propaganda machine.Alex drove me nuts and I started acting out and getting weirder and weirder with my friends in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in my off time. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the groundwork for the art of the future was being laid by my homies and myself in our nightlife. I was going out as my weirdo hipster self and hitting the dance floor all over nyc and enjoying the nightlife/after hours scenes in order to blow off steam. The double agency of my life drove me in my down time to doing more drugs, and just living like a lunatic Fantastic Nobody. (It's like I hack reality, and then reality hacks back into me.) When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. However, in this abyss, me, along with my collective, the Fantastic Nobodies (2003-2013) started a freeform ongoing creative lifestyle of late night after hours weirdness which I began to document more and more. The crazy costumes and masks that we actually wore out in public constantly and in our gallery shows became one strand that influenced the character of David Nobody. It was a fucked up time that intermingled with the twisted and tragic history of 9/11. I stayed as creative as possible until the drugs overtook me and almost destroyed me. Luckily through my resolve and the strength and the love of my family, I quit the heavy partying in 2003 and walked out of the apocalypse intact.Sarina: So when you take on a new identity through an art project, do you feel like you actually start to become that person? Like with Alex von Furstenberg?Henry: Yes most definitely I do, or at least my subconscious takes command of the character and takes over my decision making, kind of like brainwashing yourself. It is tricky to be the character and to keep a conceptual and abstract detachment simultaneously, a slippery slope. It is with this schism of the self that I am most creative. All this role playing is to engender more creativity in my life. The art flows from this fountain.Sarina: How long has the Resemblagè project been going on?Henry: I came up with the word Resemblagè three years ago. It describes the combination of the words resemble and collage. It means physically collaging upon your body or someone else's. The idea of Resemblagè has been an ongoing strand in my work and collaborations for a long time. It has not been until I started using social media as a medium that the idea clicked more fully. The technology had to grow into my work to allow a greater ease of production and sharing with an audience.Sarina: What's it like to use Instagram as your platform for the Resemblagè ? Does it make taking on a new identity easier in a way?Henry: For sure it's easier to create an identity on social media, I mean to some extent everybody is doing this. It's practically like the ideas of masks and social masks from art and ancient human cultures became widely available to anyone. A revolutionary digital democratization of identity, a digital mask, has merged with consumerism and the internet. I evolved my understanding of this by experimentation and trial and error on Instagram. I started using myself in my work in 2014 more and more, just face painting at first and noticed the uptick of reaction/likes and new followers. I began to online-befriend other creatives and we influenced each other. I saw more and more apps and animators that were hinting at describing the kind of self image vertigo and altered body sense and identity that I felt now spending a massive amount of time on my phone as an Instagram artist. I began to extremify the types of things I put on my body and face in my work, to make it more shocking and more absurd and more perplexing. I wanted to physically wear the expression in order to better understand it, to create a dissonant but physical empathy with my work. I began to see that the recording of something was more important than the real thing, thus the recorded self becomes more emotionally real than actual life at times. Like all my past bodies of work, the only way to deal with the problem is for me to wear the problem/to perform it. David Nobody wears the hypocrisies of society and the issues of society that confound me so that I can create a call and response with an audience, a creative dialogue, an understanding, an expansion of consciousness. I find that we live in a very, very surreal time where differentiating between what is real and what is not is a fucking slippery slope. I want David Nobody to reflect this view in a grotesque and unsettling yet beautiful way.Sarina: What is the last book you read that influenced the way you think about things?Henry: I really do constantly read the news but I'm not currently reading any books, I just find I don't have time. I'm kind of addicted to the news drug/disinformation/junk cycle, like everybody else. So I'm constantly influenced by what's happening. There was a very good article by the author of American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis. He wrote a New York Times op-ed like two years ago that's about your online identity and its relationship to one's sense of self-worth.Basically he said that there was no real economy anymore for the masses, all the ultra wealthy stole all the money. There was only this simulated economy of self perception/self worth where you were rated online and this sense of rating becomes your "economic" value. He said it produced a very conservative and paranoid society who were solely concerned with their only asset, their reputation. I definitely agree with a pretty Marxist type deconstruction of Capitalism as far as creative perspective. In that vein, I would say Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle is probably the most critical piece of text for me, and I think it's historical influence cast a really long shadow. It certainly influenced the feel of punk bands that I grew up with like the Sex Pistols and Joy Division.In 1967, Debord basically predicts Facebook and Instagram, i.e., that the mediated representation of social interaction/self will replace actual social interaction. You don't really talk to each other that much anymore, you just make symbols about it in media, you know what I mean? It's a total deconstruction of capitalism, and it talks about the dehumanization of late capitalism on the individual, and that there are no real emotions left. That we are commodities. It's brutal, it's fucked up and kind of scary. I would certainly relate this harrowing portrayal of modern life to George Orwell's books, most notably 1984. This is why David Nobody's creations look the way they do. It took many years for me to synthesize society and art and politics and my life into one flow chart of thought/performance.Sarina: Is there a reason that you use food more than other objects in your David Henry Nobody series?Henry: I do use food pretty consistently in my Resemblagè portraits and performances. It is beautiful and visually pleasing, especially the unhealthy junk food I use. I like the deceptive visual appeal of junk food. It certainly does get quite a reaction on Instagram, it gets into irrational expression. I think it playfully confuses the observer, because it's kind of flipping the script. It makes me look vulnerable, as if you might want to eat me. We are predatorial by nature, but there also exists in most humans a strong sense of empathy. The idea that the things we eat might look back at us, I think it's profound to cross these wires. There is the neurosis of food and the germaphobe element that is very exploreable. I use food to portray excess and greed and waste, classic hallmarks of American culture. It can be really fucking gross looking. It feels very interesting and sexual, orgiastic even, to physically wear food for David Nobody. Food is attraction and repulsion at times. Food is a metaphor for emotions and the body.I have a long history with with food spanning many bodies work for the last 25 years. For example, here in my live-work space in Brooklyn, I'm standing next to a huge display case of deep fried objects from 1994, where I deep fried all these fake butterflies, and fake flowers and huge brassieres and stuff which is all lit up with incandescent lights, behind glass. It's really big. Deep Fried Objects is one of the few nicer large sculptures that I kept from the earlier 1990s. It has magically stayed in great condition for 24 years despite being deep fried!Between 2007 and 2010, I made a whole body of work called Pizza Infinity about pizza as a religion in the form of felt fabric banners combining the human figure with Pizza, and also some performances. Again, food. In the Fantastic Nobody's Collective, I was often trying to put food all over myself. It just comes up again and again. I think like, food for thought, on one hand, and food as the body, and food/body as the economy.I was also a major class clown as a kid in addition to being really into art. I loved to start food fights and gross other students out. I was bad and I got in trouble a lot. I got caught for all kinds of things. I destroyed stuff, vandalized things, sabotaged school, everything. Fortunately, I'm glad I became an artist because I had a lot of issues with society, but I didn't understand how to voice it, so I would just act out. My art has kind of given me a platform that proves that my childhood intuitions were actually critical by instinct, but misguided. The way I acted out as child form the seeds for my art as a (reluctant) grown up.

Silversea Cruises has sliced their massive Silversea ship in half so that they can inset a 15 meter (50 feet) extension and increase the ship's capacity by 15 percent. While this kind of thing is commonly done to convert regular automobiles into stretch limos, the company describes this undertaking as a "rarely performed feat of maritime architecture." From CNN:

I feel kinda bad about enjoying this video of kids smashing trikes into things, and other minor mishaps. This did not stop me from watching it, however.

RC Lover San built this killer model rocket that uses a standard engine to launch before firing up its nose cone quadcopter to stick a vertical landing."Landing a Rocket Vertically, Without Being a Billionaire Aka Rocket Drone" (Instructables via MAKE)

This wonderful litter trapping pad keeps litter from being scattered all over my home.I figured out my cat needed a 2nd litter box, and felt pretty smart. A few days later my home office was full of litter that had escaped the box on his paws and fur, I had forgotten to put a pad under the front of the box. I felt pretty silly. I tried a towel, because towels are pretty useful, but it didn't really help much. This rubber mat does the trick.Cat Litter Mat | XL Super Size | 35" x 23" via AmazonImage via my home office

Rodney Brooks is the father of the Roomba, the founder of iRobot, and the creator of both the Baxter and Sawyer product lines from Rethink Robotics. He’s arguably the world’s most accomplished roboticist. And if he’s not – and I personally can’t think of who could challenge him for that crown – he’s definitely the top roboticist to be profiled in an Errol Morris documentary (1997’s Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control).When Rodney left Australia for the region that would later become known as Silicon Valley, there were quite literally 3 mobile robots of consequence on the entire planet. Years later, he founded a company which has since brought tens of millions of these critters into the world. His products have saved countless lives. They have also liberated thousands of acres of carpeting from dust crumbs, dog hair, and other detritus.Amazingly, Rodney’s tenure and credentials are every bit as significant in a second high tech field: artificial intelligence. He founded the leading developer of AI coding tools throughout the 80s and early 90s. And somehow he squeezed his robotics and AI entrepreneurship in while building a storied academic career – largely at MIT, where he spent a decade running one of the two largest and most prominent AI centers in the world.Rodney is my guest in this week's edition of the After on Podcast. You can listen to our interview by searching “After On” in your favorite podcast app, or by clicking right here:As you’ll hear, Rodney diverges from fashionable narratives on several tech-related topics. They include super AI risk; the extent to which jobs will be imperiled by automation (he’s more worried about a labor shortage than a job shortage); and the timeline of the rise of self-driving cars (this being intersection of his two domains of foundational expertise: robotics and AI).Few can match the breadth, depth, and duration of Rodney’s purview on the tech industry – which makes for a truly fascinating conversation.Image: Jeff Green/Rethink Robotics - Rethink Robotics, CC BY 4.0, Link

The Imagine Village is what you'd call a super group.Over the years, its lineup has included members of the United Kingdom folk music royalty such as Billy Bragg, Eliza & Martin Carthy, Simon Emmerson, The Trans Global Underground, Chris Wood and dhol drum master Johnny Kalsi. Each of the musicians comes to the collective with decades of musical excellence under their belts and an extensive catalog of tunes of their own. The re-imagination of English folk standards is the Imagined Village's game: they color well-worn chestnuts with musical traditions from around the former British Empire, occasionally updating the lyrics to reflect the current conditions and mood of the United Kingdom's citizens.If it sounds like a familiar formula, it's because you've maybe seen it done before by the Afro Celtic Soundsystem. Both bands share guitar/cittern player Simon Emmerson as a driving force behind their music. This isn't appropriated music. It's multicultural music that draws together players from a myriad of traditions to honor the music of the past in a manner that's both exciting and new.While "Cold, Hailey, Rainy Night" comes from a long tradition of "Night Visit" songs – music that features some dude whinging to a young lady that everything is terrible outside so she should let him in to warm up and uh, have sex. You'll hear it being kicked about the folk world, under various regional titles, around the world. This version, recorded in 1971 by by Steeleye Span, is likely one of the most recognized versions of it.

Well, can you feel it?

“Every classroom has been equipped with a five-gallon bucket of river stone," says David Helsel, superintendent of the Blue Mountain School District, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. "If an armed intruder attempts to gain entrance into any of our classrooms, they will face a classroom full students armed with rocks and they will be stoned."From WNEP:

I met science illustrator Paul Mirocha through a personal Discord server I set up and when Paul started posting his illustrations in the "Show your creations" channel, I was blown away. His style reminds me of the old Giant Golden science books, which I love. Paul's illustrations celebrate both the diversity and the surprising strangeness of nature. He lives in the Sonoran desert in Tucson, Arizona.I asked him to tell me a bit about his work:

This cool geometry teacher didn't take offense when a student told him his class was boring. Instead, he asked her, "Would it help if I breakdanced?" She said "Yeah," and even offered to bake him a caramel apple pie if he did. So he got down on the floor and showed off his breakdancing moves to delighted students. Now give that man his pie!

Zarinah Agnew lives at the Red Victorian, a modern-day commune in San Francisco's Haight neighborhood. Six months ago, as an experiment, she and her roommates thumbtacked $80 in cash on three different corkboards (at the Red Vic and another local intentional community called The Embassy). They then attached small pink signs that read, “Take what you need, leave what you don’t!”They called each of their experimental corkboards, the "Great Wall of Money."Here's what happened next, according to Agnew:

Strip the funky music from this Spider-Man 3 scene, add some more "realistic" audio, and Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) just seems like a cocky douchebag strutting down the street. Awkward.Ok, he seemed douchey with the music too:https://youtu.be/SPN1BvR02XoSpider-Man 3 Dance Scene with "Realistic" Audio - (No Music) by Mix Minus (2016)(reddit)

Designer Irina Blok lives in Silicon Valley and is the creator of Google's now-iconic green Android logo. A couple of years ago, she started producing Only in Silicon Valley, a line of on-point greeting cards for "geeks."She writes that the cards are designed to "celebrate tech culture of Silicon Valley, without taking ourselves too seriously."Take a look...She's got lots more over at Zazzle. Cards are $2.96 each.Previously: Modest Silicon Valley home breaks record for highest price paid per square foot

There's a new TV show where celebrities lip synch to other people's songs, and they've put out a clip of Michael Bolton uneasily mouthing Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise to offer a taste of what's in store. It's not really my cup of tea but do wake me up when Dean Stockwell goes on.

Los Angeles-based food entrepreneur Emily Williams is hoping that the next best thing since sliced bread is... sliced ketchup. With her business partner Thac Lecong, she's currently crowdsourcing funds to bring her Bo's Original Slice of Sauce ketchup singles to market.

When legendary (and deeply private) New York Times street style photographer Bill Cunningham died in 2016, he left behind a photo archive valued at $1M. His family soon discovered he left the world another gift, a photo-filled memoir he penned secretly. It's titled Fashion Climbing and is due to be published in September.The New York Times reports:

The personals section of Craigslist was shut down indefinitely by its management on Thursday, a response to Congress’s passage of a law that holds websites liable for users who misuse personal ads.That means no more "casual encounters" or "missed connections" (or anything under the “personals” umbrella) for anyone until much-further notice. It's all just gone.Here's what it now reads when you try to click on any of the personals links:

This is the darkest imaginable timeline.(more…)

The military-grade nerve toxin attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia may have left the victims with 'compromised mental capacity,' a British judge said on Thursday. It is unclear whether the former Russian double agent and his adult child will recover from being poisoned with what the UK says was a Russian chemical weapon known as 'Novichok.'(more…)

This is Ata, a bizarre, tiny mummified skeleton found in a deserted mining town in Chile's Atacama Desert in 2003.(more…)

Earlier this week, YouTube updated its policies surrounding what sort of gun-related nonsense people are allowed to get up to while using their services. Selling gun parts? Outta here. You wanna show folks how to build a gun? Take it outside. Are you a bumpstock or a semi-automatic to fully automatic modification enthusiast? Not around here you ain't. What's a group of gun oil-huffing video makers supposed to do?Wind up in cahoots with pornography peddlers, apparently.According to the BBC, video makers who once leveraged YouTube to educate the masses on how to make their own suppressors or illegally modify firearms are now looking to Pornhub as a new home for their gun-related videos:

Nadiya Savchenko's worn a lot of hats (including furry ones) over the past few years. She was military pilot in the Ukraine Air Force and a training officer for a volunteer Ukrainian infantry unit during the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. Captured by enemy forces in the early days of that conflict, she became an illegal detainee and eventually a prisoner of war. After being set free as part of a prisoner swap agreement set up between Russia and Ukraine, she became a war hero and was awarded the Star of the Hero of Ukraine. Soon after, she left the military behind to join the Ukraine government as a lawmaker.Now, according to Reuters, she's been detained by the country that she served so honorably over allegations that she may have been planning a coup. Savchenko, who's been pretty vocal about her displeasure with corruption in the current Ukraine government, hasn't denied the charges being leveled against her.During a session of the Ukraine parliament earlier this week, she was detained after her governmental colleagues voted to remove her parliamentary immunity to prosecution. The vote came in light of some pretty damning evidence that suggests that she was planning a violent overthrown of the country's government, including undercover video footage of her trying to persuade Ukrainian military personnel to join her cause. Instead of responding to the allegations, Savchenko accused the Ukraine government of betraying the spirit and ideals of Ukraine's 2013/2014 pro-western European uprising:

At the Nuremberg Castle in Bavaria, Germany, there is a 50 meter (165 foot) well. The delay between when water is poured into it and its splash at the bottom delivers a surprising thrill of anticipation. (via r/videos)

Neuroscience researcher Roland Griffiths at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is leading a scientific study on "the experiences of people who have had encounters with seemingly autonomous beings or entities after taking DMT." If that's you, fill out the anonymous survey! Just say know.From the Daily Grail:

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