Latte artist and barista champ Jaewon Choi at OUTRO NYC creates cute latte pop art that looks like it belongs on someone's wall or T-shirt rather than inside their coffee cup. Going beyond your typical coffee foam designs, Choi combines cute with color, as in his green Matcha teddy bear, red velvet Little Red Riding Hood, and purple Taro bunnies. This video was made by Mashable.

You may not have noticed, what with there being a cellphone in pocket of almost all Americans, but according to CNN, there's still 100,000 payphone in the United States. This is great news for Maroon 5, superheroes looking for a place to change and 1930s detectives calling into to their office to talk to a sassy secretary.For those of you too young to remember, before cellphones and smartphones were ubiquitous, staying in touch when you were out and about meant having to ask your bartender to use her phone or finding a payphone. Opting for the latter meant walking, maybe, a few blocks to find a bank of payphones or a phone booth. According to CNN, there were still two million payphones as late as 1999. Just under two decades later, that number has shrunk down to 100,000. As payphone became less profitable, the appeal for large telecoms to spend money on their upkeep lost its luster. Nowadays, when you see a payphone in the wild, it's likely owned by a smaller company with lower expectations of what an acceptable margin of profitability looks like.That anyone is interested in maintaining a network of payphone in operation is a lifeline to those who can't afford to own a mobile phone, who's smartphone ran out of juice at the worst possible time and during disasters. In the wake of an major earthquake or other major regional event, cellphone networks can often lock up from too many people attempting to access the system at the same time. Payphones? They just keep on keeping on.Image via Wikipedia

Over the weekend, Jeff Warren and his family spotted this mysterious sea monster washed up on the shore of the Wolf Island National Wildlife Refuge near Darien, Georgia. It is either:• Altamaha-ha (aka Alty), a cryptid, said to live near the mouth of the Altamaha river, that reportedly looks very similar to what's in the photo• A frilled shark, according to a marine science educator at the Tybee Island Marine Science Center• A basking shark, in the opinion of a Savannah State University marine scientist• Or a hoax, according to scientists at Georgia Southern University.Either way, the story ends well.“My son, who is twelve, thinks it is the child of the legendary Altamaha-ha and has now decided he wants to be a marine biologist,” Warren said.(Savannah Morning News)

This week, a self-driving Uber killed a pedestrian in Arizona, the first pedestrian fatality involving an autonomous vehicle; in his analysis of the event, Charlie Stross notes that Arizona's laws treat corporations that kill people with considerably more forbearance than humans who do so, and proposes that in the near future, every self-driving car will be owned by a special-purpose corporation that insulates its owner from liability. (more…)

Etowah, Alabama County Sheriff Todd Entrekin took advantage of a Great-Depression-era rule that lets the sheriff pocket any "excess" from the budget for prisoner meals (provided he makes up any shortfall from his own finances) and used $750,000 that had been allocated to feed prisoners to build himself a luxury beach house. When his gardener tipped off a Birmingham News reporter, the gardener was locked up in the Sheriff's jail on mysterious drug charges. (more…)

Today Mr. Rogers would have turned 90, and to celebrate, here's the trailer for the upcoming Mr. Rogers documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor.Via EW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JBi8L84BLcBack in January, a million people tuned in to Bernie Sanders' town hall on universal health-care; yesterday, 1.7 million people tuned in to watch Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Moore, and a panel of experts discuss inequality. (more…)

The Damned are responsible for a number of ear worms that routinely refuse to leave me alone. Formed the same year as I was born, they were raw, angry and too much fun. New Rose has been on constant rotation in my head, both as part of my internal soundtrack and while playing on my headphones for close to three decades. So, you can imagine my delight to find that The Guardian recently took a deep dive into how The Damned got together, wrote and recorded New Rose.It's a longer read, but a good one.

New York's cyclists and bus-riders are certain they're being slowed and endangered by an epidemic of illegal lane-obstructions from delivery vehicles, taxis and Ubers, but policymakers have refused to do anything about it, saying that the evidence is all anaecdotal. (more…)

After several attempts to get something drinkable out of the Ekobrew Classic Reusable Filter, I figured it out: just grind it finer than the normal stuff in a k-cup and tamp it down a bit. The results were everything I dreamed of and was promised: a k-cup that must be laboriously cleaned after every use, a return to the messy and time-consuming rituals of coffee production that Keurig machines otherwise obviate, and a brew that somehow makes a $20-a-bag Kona blend taste like Maxwell House.I'd say it's the worst of every world, but the the resulting coffee is still better than a lot of k-cup brews. I suppose the appeal is that I'm not putting k-cups into the trash every day. But that seems a trifling greenwashy thing to begin with that surely has no impact on the general environmental failings associated with coffee consumption. I admit this is a half-brewed thought but in any case I'm going to suggest you just get an Aeropress [Amazon].BEFORE: I found the worst K-Cup coffee

Tobacco heir Johann Rupert is worth $7.5B; he's head of Cartier, Montblanc, Chloe and other luxury goods labels, having returned to the helm of his Richemont holding company after a year-long fly-fishing sabbatical; in a speech to the Financial Times Business of Luxury Summit in Monaco he revealed that he no longer sleeps at night because he is worried that "envy, hatred and social warfare" will destabilize the world. (more…)

Why can't you flick a tick off you or your pet's skin? The answer is in the tick's mouth that's covered with hooks evolved so the tick can hang on for a several day feast of delicious blood. From KQED's Deep Look:

The debate over whether Cambridge Analytica's harvesting of tens of millions of Facebook profiles was a "breach" turns on the question of whether Cambridge Analytica did anything wrong, by Facebook's own policies. (more…)

In June 1863, a Union shipment of 52 bars of gold now worth $54 million was said to be lost near Dents Run, Pennsylvania. Over the years, many treasure hunters have tried to locate the cache but the area is state land and it's illegal to dig without permission. Apparently though, FBI agents and state officials were just seen digging in the area. From CNN:

I never cease to be amazed when I put one of these flimsy, plastic-feeling mats on my charcoal grill to cook chopped vegetables. Somehow, it withstands the heat of the red hot coals just inches below. They are great for grilling corn, zucchini, peppers, mushrooms, etc. I pour a little olive oil on the mat and salt to taste. I bought a 4-pack of mats last year for $8 on Amazon and all four mats are working perfectly after many uses. I now consider them an essential part of my grilling equipment now.

Unilever founder John Wanamaker famously said, "I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. My only problem is that I don’t know which half." It's an odd testament to the power of advertising, an industry whose executives are incredibly effective at selling their services to other executives, even if they can't prove they're any good at selling their customers' products to the public. (more…)

Anna Campbell, from Lewes, England, has died fighting in the Kurdish Women's Protection Units ("YPJ") in Syria; she was likely killed by a Turkish airstrike. She was 26. (more…)

Seemingly in hiding these last few days, Mark Zuckerberg's plans are anyone's guess. But a committee chairman in the UK's House of Commons would like a word. He doesn't have to go, obviously, but just for reference, Rupert Murdoch did. [via]

YouTube channel Squirrel Monkey has imagined what it would be like to stream movies through Netflix on a 56K modem in 1995. It's a hoot, whether you lived through the ancient days of early computing or not.Previously: If Siri existed in the 1980s

Fandom has a description of this funny video starring the Cookie Monster and a talking coffee machine.

By now, every sane person realizes that Facebook is horrible. It uses your personal data in unsavory ways. It sells your data to unscrupulous companies. It encourages businesses to build their online headquarters on Facebook and then ruins those companies by changing its algorithm. And, maybe worst of all, it has one of the ugliest and most confusing interfaces ever made. I deactivated my account a long time ago, but this week's news about Facebook's relationship with the ultra sleazy data mining firm Cambridge Analytica prompted me to permanently delete my account. Wired has an article that shows you how to do it:

Most of us have enjoyed the soothing, soft-spoken art instructions of public TV painter Bob Ross, but how many of us have actually tried to paint using his methods?I guessed "not many" but I was wrong. On YouTube, there's this "Bob Ross Challenge" which means lots of folks are taking a stab at creating their own "happy little trees," with mixed results.In the Buzzfeed video from 2017 (above), watch as three beginning painters fearlessly try their hand at following the master.Then, watch these two brave souls do the same thing:https://youtu.be/EVmtSBoLq8Mhttps://youtu.be/WM-kgyoagn0Previously: Zen out on Bob Ross peeling off contact paper(Neatorama)

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Note the early tastes of breakdancing, here and there. The exaggerated fraternity of nations is nice, too!The event took place at the Empire Ballroom in London; the winner was Julie Brown . This appears to be the UK TV broadcast of the same highlights, with the original audio:https://youtu.be/c9QcwSnp25M

A little birdie sent me this photo and said I couldn't reveal its source. It's the recipe** for the new Crystal Ball Frappuccino drink, which debuts in Starbucks shops March 22.https://www.instagram.com/p/Bgg9aCtA-kJ/?taken-by=lynbrook_starbuckshttps://www.instagram.com/p/BggQ8XNgfDJ/?tagged=crystalballfrappuccino**Well, most of it. You'll need an actual crystal ball to fill in the details on the rest of the page.Thanks, little birdie!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQauv_eK8d0&t=141shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrCLi9lxjhEFrom an ongoing biography of John Wilcock, by Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall. (See previous Boing Boing posts)Ethan Persoff is currently working on a daily comic book/audio series called The Bureau. Listen to a complete playlist of all current tracks:[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/412720763" params="color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]Scott Marshall is currently working on a comics adaptation of Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

So, in the famous Grant Wood painting "American Gothic", there's a little white farmhouse in the background.It turns out you can rent it and live in it. That's what the writer Beth Howard did from 2010 to 2014 -- and the rent was only $250 a month!She wrote a piece describing what it's like to live in such an odd piece of artistic history:

Here's a piece of tech history that was new to me: Apparently Thomas Dolby played a crucial role in the development of the first polyphonic ringtones.Tedium has a great piece on the history of ringtones; it goes back to 1902 -- when the Spanish guitarist Francisco Tárrega composed “Gran Vals,” decades later the inspiration for the “Nokia Tune” ringtone -- and delves into the fascinating 1960s/70s fights over the deregulation of the telephone industry, which made it possible for third parties to create customized phone-ringers, and thus, eventually, ringtones.But then Dolby enters the picture. It turns out that in addition to being a superb musician and songwriter he ran a software firm ...

Executives at Cambridge Analytica, the data mining firm that worked with Facebook to develop a microtargeted propaganda campaign that helped Trump get in office, were secretly recorded boasting about entrapping politicians through the use of bribes and blackmail involving prostitutes.From the UK's Channel 4:

This Google Earth image of Antarctica's South Georgia Island depicts either a UFO that crashed and skidded across the snow or a hunk of ice that rolled along after an avalanche. According to this YouTube video from Secureteam, with 2.5 million views, it's definitely the former. Keele University physical geographer lecturer Richard Waller suggests it's the latter. Below, a zoomed-out view of the area. (Space.com)Previously: Another UFO found in Google Earth image of Antarctica

In August 2016, 28-year-old Sayed Asadullah Poya and his wife Jamila from Afghanistan had a newborn baby to name. Sayed had just read Donald Trump's book, Trump: How to Get Rich, and when he saw that his baby had blonde hair, the name Donald Trump sounded like a real good choice. He thought the name would bring "good fortune."But so far, the name has been as crummy for the family as it has for the U.S.For starters, Sayed's parents were livid about their grandson having a non-Muslim name. “Every day the situation got worse,” Poya recalled, according to Oddity Central. “Every day in the house, when I was calling my son Trump, my father got angrier and angrier, until finally my father couldn’t tolerate it anymore.”The local Imam was also disgusted, and spent an entire sermon talking about the insult to their religion. The pressure from friends and family forced the Poyas to move to Kabul. But things didn't get better for them.Via Oddity Central:

Gourmet charcuterie expert Elias Cairo of Olympia Provisions knows from good meat. I still like Oscar Meyer bologna.

Yesterday's bombshell article in the Guardian about the way that Cambridge Analytica was able to extract tens of millions of Facebook users' data without their consent was preceded by plenty of damage control on Facebook's part: they repeatedly threatened to sue news outlets if they reported on the story and fired the whistleblower who came forward with the story. (more…)

Oklahoma spent eight years under full GOP rule, with Republicans controlling the governorship and the legislature, passing a fully ALEC-compliant slate of laws that benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor; the result has been a catastrophe for the party's fortunes in Oklahoma, to say nothing of a catastrophe for Oklahomans, whose schools are running four day weeks so teachers can made ends meet by getting a day's work at Walmart (no wonder they're on the verge of striking); while Republican lawmakers have run amok, introducing bills demanding that creationism be taught in schools; or that protesters be bankrupted for peaceful assembly; and making the state a haven for forced-labor camps masquerading as drug rehab centers. (more…)

A reminder that this Thursday (3/22), Institute for the Future, the nonprofit thinktank where I'm a researcher, is hosting an event celebrating the Voyager Golden Record at our Palo Alto, California offices/gallery! Joining me in conversation will be legendary astronomer Frank Drake, the father of the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence and technical director of the original Voyager Record in 1977. Tickets are $10 and RSVP is required: "The Voyager Golden Record: Celebrating a Journey Through Space and Time" I hope to see you there!Image above: Frank and I scrying with the Voyager Record cover.Here's the full announcement...

By design, data placed in the blockchain is visible to everyone in the world and can never be removed; everyone who mines bitcoin makes a copy of the blockchain, and so any illegal content stashed in the blockchain ends up on the computers of every miner. (more…)

Machine learning is often characterized as much an "art" as a "science" and in at least one regard, that's true: its practitioners are prone to working under loosely controlled conditions, using training data that is being continuously tweaked with no versioning; modifying parameters during runs (because it takes too long to wait for the whole run before making changes); squashing bugs mid-run; these and other common practices mean that researchers often can't replicate their own results -- and virtually no one else can, either. (more…)

Kurzgesagt, the maker of the world's best explainer videos, is back with an explain about the "selfish argument for making the world a better place." The entire video is worth watching but the gist of it is this: Innovation is driven by supply and demand. Supply goes up when more people around the world are educated and become inventors, scientists, engineers, and thinkers. Demand increases as people's wealth increases and they have the means to buy new solutions to their problems. The increased supply and demand result in more innovation. So if you want nice things for yourself, you should start by helping everyone on the planet be able to have nice things, too.

I needed a new cordless handset for my home POTS line. I wanted no-frills, just a phone. This works wonderfully.Every decade or so I need a new phone for my landline. My former AT&T model's reception had degraded so badly, from drops of both the base and handset, that I couldn't move around the house while I talk. I like to pace. Pacing is how I can talk in the phone. I needed something new.Most of the units I was seeing had VOICEMAIL built-in. I do not want VOICEMAIL built in. I hate VOCIEMAIL and rarely listen to recordings from even my best friends. My cellphone and phone service both offer highly entertaining and wildly inaccurate transcription of messages left on them, why the hell would I want to listen to a message. Most messages are offering me time-shares or other bullshit. Lately I've been receiving fake threats that the government will be placing me in physical custody. Voicemail... ANYWAYS... this unit has no recording service.The handsets are light. The sound is great. The range is as far as I want to go inside my tri-level home, and I can walk around my deck and garden with no problems. I've even gone the 100 fairly obstructed yards or so to my car in the drive way and could hear my Mom the whole time. The rechargeable batteries are absolutely replaceable, but should hopefully last a year or two between swapping out.The phone doesn't have the most awesome set of ring-tones ever, but who cares. The find my phone button from the base station is the only button on it! Makes life pretty easy, so long as your daughter doesn't hide the handsets under her bed and then leave for her mother's house.Anyways, I can talk on the phone again!VTech CS6719-2 DECT 6.0 Phone with Caller ID/Call Waiting, Silver/Black with 2 Cordless Handsets via AmazonImage via Amazon

In the wake of the latest Facebook data breach catastrophe, Josh Constantine rounds up more than a decade's worth of major catastrophes wrought by Facebook's recklessness, greed, and foolishness, from Beacon to the "Engagement Ranked Feed" to the "Engagement Priced Ad Auctions" to the choices that created spamming games like Zynga's offerings, to the mass overwriting of privacy preferences, to "ethnic affinity" ad targeting, to the Real Names policy and the stalkers it abetted to Facebook's global anti-Net-Neutrality campaigns; to self-serve ads; to developer data access and the gift it handed to crooks like Cambridge Analytica. (more…)

When Gary Cohn left Goldman Sachs to to work for Donald Trump, he was required to sell off his Goldman Sachs stock, but he didn't have to pay capital gains tax on that sale, saving him a cool $150,000,000; a year later, he was out of the Trump administration, and he still gets to hang onto those tax-free hectabucks. (more…)

To show off the Magnus effect, again, 5 balls of varying size are thrown off a 200m cliff. Fun ensues.

The Dodd-Frank act mandated that publicly listed companies would have to publish an annual figure listing the ratio between their CEO's pay and their median worker's pay: now, after nearly a decade of stalling tactics from corporate lobbyists, those figures are emerging, and they're equipping cities with the tools they need to crack down on the most unequal companies in the world. (more…)

Sara Elizabeth Williams' long, beautifully written profile of the merchants who established illegal storefronts on the Champs-Élysées, a stretch of road in Jordan's Za’atari refugee camp -- home to 93,000 Syrian refugees -- is a lens on the crisis created by decades of western complicity in the brutal Assad regime, followed by a global proxy war fought on Syrian soil, with no compassion or regard by any of the belligerents for the civilian costs. (more…)

If you add Chirpss to your website, it will make a chirping noise whenever anyone comes or goes. You have to have Google Analytics installed (it relies on the realtime tracking GA provides) and the willingness to revisit the golden age of hit counters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlvbcZEaIB4Exploring a disused and marvelously creepy building, urban spelunker shiey runs into a still-functioning PBX room. The environment isn't so decrepit that it comes across as as impossible or supernatural--the building has power, obviously--but it's definitely weird to find the place between presence and abandonment, where the humans are gone but our footsteps are still talking.

It's obvious when comparing an untunable yet adorable craigslist clunker with a high-quality modern piano, but I was surprised to find myself noticing the difference between a $15k grand and a $50k one, too. There was, it must be said, a big difference in age. I wonder how "cheaper" modern Yamahas (the GB1K comes in at a trifling $14k or so, and then there are the uprights...) sound compared to the big grands.

The Twitter account of upscale retailer Nordstrom confirmed this weekend that it did not "like" a tweet that claimed the "DS" in "Nintendo DS" stood for "dick suck."Another twitter user had reported that the offensive remark appeared in their feed because Nordstrom liked it, but it appears now that this report was itself mistaken. "The DS in Nintendo DS stands for Dick Suck," wrote Nick Wiger, a Twitter japester with 32k followers on the popular social network. "The idea was, playing it was as fun as gettin your dick sucked. 3DS, as fun as 3 dick sucks.""Um, this appeared in my feed because @Nordstrom liked it?," replied Katie Metz of St. Louis, or at least an account using that identity, concluding her tweet with a skeptical frowny face emoji and the hashtags #nordstrom and #fail."Sorry for the confusion, Katie," Nordstrom responded three minutes later. "We can confirm we have not liked this tweet."At press time, Twitter had not yet responded to an inquiry concerning why the site was still free.Photo: Mike Mozart (CC-BY-3.0)