Sergei Skripal was convicted of spying by Russia in 2006.Russia-made nerve agents, chemical weapons of war, were used to poison a former spy who was living in the United Kingdom, and his daughter. That is the determination of the intelligence agencies of Britain, said Prime Minister Theresa May today from London.She says an inter-agency investigation found that the mysterious poisoning of Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, is being treated as a political assassination by Russia on British soil.Prime Minister May today said it was an “indiscriminate and reckless act against the United Kingdom.”Russian President Vladimir Putin in public comments last week obliquely seemed to take responsibility, while not addressing the event directly. “Those who serve us with poison will eventually swallow it and poison themselves,” Putin said, as news of the ex-spy's poisoning first broke.https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/973246358298791938Russia is known for bold and cruel assassinations—-by chemical agents-- of citizens it identifies as traitors to the state. But the audaciousness of this attack, on an elderly man and his adult child in a sleepy small town, was notable.https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/972943124166094848On MSNBC as the news broke this afternoon, U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul said, “This is outrageous, They went to a town and poisond a pensioner in Salisbury, Hundreds of people were poisoned and injured. Demands a response from Nato and EU and I hope the president will understand the negative consequences of not responding, because that makes him look weak in the eyes of Vladimir Putin.”https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/972911660582109184https://twitter.com/ZekeJMiller/status/973246422635175936https://twitter.com/peterbakernyt/status/973247007266656256https://twitter.com/KThomasDC/status/973246513957785600

Maker collective Hackerloop modified a Nerf gun into a bionic prosthetic for their friend Nicolas Huchet. He fires the gun via EMG (electromyography) sensors that detect when he tenses his forearm muscles."It all started with jokes about the fact that it was too easy for us to win over him in a nerf battle, as he’s missing his right hand," writes "tinkerer in chief" Valentin Squirelo.From Medium:

In September 1981, Stevie Nicks was sitting in Annie Liebovitz's studio for a Rolling Stone photo shoot just after the release of her first solo album Bella Donna. While Nicks is having her makeup done, someone plays an early demo of "Wild Heart." The rest is magic. (via Kottke)

Thousands of years ago in Hierapolis (now Turkey), tourists visited a temple named Plutonium built at a cave thought to be a gateway to the underworld. Magically, large and small animals would drop dead at the entrance to the cave while priest somehow survived. This isn't legend, it's reality. And now scientists have determined why. From CNN:

While the Trump administration is pushing for more guns in schools by arming school teachers and other school employees, Trump's son-in-law Jared's brother Joshua Kushner reportedly donated $50,000 to March For Our Lives, a planned gun control demonstration across the nation scheduled for March 24.According to Axios:

Are you at SXSW this week? On Thursday (3/15) at 12:30pm, I'll be on a panel about art and technology titled: "Why are artists vital to tech's future (and ours?)" Moderated by Heather Sparks of ScienceSparksArt, the panel also includes artist Rhonda Holberton and curator Aimee Friberg. I'll be speaking about the Voyager Golden Record as a futurist talisman at the intersection of science, art, and wonder. From the panel description:

Russian guitarist Alexandr Misko delivers another rousing fingerstyle guitar cover. This time, it's the turn of A-ha! Previously: George Michael's "Careless Whisper," The Cranberries' "Zombie," and so many more.

Back in 2012, we published a feature about Frank Cifaldi, one of the world's leading collectors of rare vintage videogames and related ephemera. Since then, Cifaldi founded the Video Game History Foundation, dedicated to preserving this vibrant art form's history and culture for the ages.(Vice)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwZiodYwXocNailed It is a forthcoming Netflix show that's apparently entirely dedicated to cake fails. Having watched this trailer I'm very eager to binge the season.

I think all modern computers should look like these vintage ones photographed by James Ball a couple of years ago. [via Wired]

ZNRenew enhances your old Sinclair personal computer with beautiful colored cases and, soon, a striking backlit version of its infamous rubber chicklet keyboard. https://twitter.com/ZXRenew/status/972544114712510464

Mapping Student Debt illustrates the grim strings attached to higher education in the USA—strings disproportionately attached to latino and black kids.

Meet Will. The music is from The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose life's work is to take funds out of public education and give it to private religious charter schools, struggled to explain her philosophy on 60 Minutes last night. It was a funny journey into the exciting new mode of conservative thinking that everyone's talking about. When the desire to do something isn't backed by a coherent ideology (or one you dare to explain), describing it becomes a deer-in-headlights nightmare of fixed smiles and random thoughts springing into life and evaporating almost before an interviewer can pop them with simple, unchallenging questions.

Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness is awesome: She's trained neural nets to invent all sorts of hilarious material, from the names of new colors to odd new food recipes to original Dungeons and Dragons spells.Recently she decided to train a neural net on knitting patterns, and it began spitting out new ones. They were predictably strange, and to get a sense of precisely how strange, the fine folks at Ravelry -- a discussion site for those who knit, crochet, weave, and the like -- offered to actually produce some of patterns IRL. They've dubbed it "Skyknit".If you belong to Ravelry you can see the results in the thread, but in case you aren't, behold pix of some of the creations above and below. The one above was knitted by MeganAnn, and it looks vaguely... organic? You can see some repeating patterns in it, but mashed together in a pretty strange fashion.Here's another one knitted by MeganAnn ...That one looks a bit more like a human-crafted pattern. Here's a really strange one made by datasock ...... and winding-serpent pattern crafted by michaela112358 ...Here's a pretty one by BellaG:A sort of ... undersea creature? Created by also by michaela112358 ...... and some that are pretty normal-looking! Like this one by geckogirl ...... or this one by booksprink ...... or this last one, by Farah Colchester:Janelle Shane did a tweetstorm where she talked about the experience of watching the Ravelry crowd bring these things to life. As she noted, the AI's output sometimes included errors, but the knitters are awfully good at debugging. This is no surprise to anyone who knows knitters or weavers: It's a deeply algorithmic mode of thinking -- to the point where weaving produced the first punch-card-fed instruction-following machines (the Jacquard Loom) -- and these days there's quite a lot of coder-knitters:https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/964942759881666560(All pictures above used with the permission of their photographer)Previously: An algorithm that converts 3D meshes into machine-knitting patterns

Skinner, a "psychedelic nightmare painter," created a pop-up edition of HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon, available in a $50 Earth-Dweller edition and a $200 Elder God edition (with embossed foil casewrap, around a custom, laser-engraved acrylic slipcase and an art-print). (more…)

Kate Wilhelm, author of many of science fiction's seminal books and stories (e.g. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang), would have been a titan in the field if she had only written; but Wilhelm's prodigious authorly accomplishments are matched by her influence on the generations of writers trained in the Clarion Workshops, which she co-founded with Robin Scott Wilson and her husband Damon Knight. (more…)

The annual Foilie Awards are out; the Electronic Frontier Foundation hands out these sardonic "awards" to the government entities whose Freedom of Information Act responses were the most heel-dragging, kakfaesque, and pointless. (more…)

If you need context, and you don't, here it is! [via r/videos]

Zeynep Tufekci was researching Trump videos on Youtube back in 2016 when she noticed something funny: Youtube began recommending and autoplaying increasingly extreme right-wing stuff -- like white-supremacist Holocaust-denial videos.So she did an interesting experiment: She set up another Youtube account and began watching videos for the main Democratic presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The result? As Tufecki writes in the New York Times:

40+ years ago a pair of Danish scientists acquired the mistaken belief that Greenlanders had a very low incidence of heart disease (turned out that people who live in extremely rural conditions without access to modern medicine just have a low incidence of reported heart disease); they concluded that the Omega-3s in their diet was responsible and a thousand nutritional supplement fortunes were born. (more…)

Like many of the most popular websites, Wikimedia -- which oversees Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons among other sites and services -- publishes a transparency report in which it details commercial and governmental requests for surveillance and content removal. (more…)

My wife and I love Shakey Graves. Love. Him.His music is in constant rotation in our motorhome, no matter whether we're parked or on the move. He fills our ears when we're out for groceries or driving our pooch to the park. After years of listening to him from afar, we finally had the opportunity to catch him live this past November. The show was in San Antonio, Texas. The doors opened 90 minutes before Shakey hit the stage. We were surrounded by people half our age. The concrete pad we were standing on and a chill in the air had everyone there uncomfortable in feet and temperature. Everyone drank $10 mixed drinks and buckets of canned beer in a misguided attempt to stay warm. Some folks partook in left-handed cigarettes. Those people were kicked out. The wife and I re-upped our cups with hooch from the flask I'd snuck past the doormen. She and I discovered that maybe we're getting too old for going to outdoor gigs. She and I agreed that maybe we were even too old to bother with any venue that doesn't come with theater seating. Our feet and knees hurt for a days, afterwards.But it was totally worth it.I've seen a lot of performers in my time. I used to be one myself. Some are terrible. Some, like me, are capable but have no presence on stage--ham and eggers looking to make a living. Others are all show and no real talent--they rely on a skilled band and tricks of the trade to sell songs and tickets. On a few rare occasions, you run into a musicians who get it. They play with a style that's immediately recognizable as something unique. Their lyrics catch you and the interplay between them and their audience feels just a little culty without feeling at all creepy. Shakey Graves has that going on. In San Antonio, he came on stage twenty minutes before he was set to start playing. The lighting crew wasn't ready for him. He made it work. With nothing more than a smile, a kick drum built into a frigging suitcase and his guitar, he made us love him more than we already did. The cold, overpriced drinks and the feeling that maybe we were too old to be anywhere near cool enough to be there were all quickly forgotten. It was a great night. He mentioned that he's got a new record coming out this year. His webpage says it'll drop on May 4th (Star Wars Day, if you partake.)I can't wait.

President Donald Trump's fantasy war parade will come to life on Veterans Day, and you're paying for it.(more…)

A museum's worth of prototype Apple devices--computers, ipods and more--is being auctioned on eBay.

Ben at PressTube has branched out from squishing things in a hydraulic press to other impressive metalworking, like this project to shred and melt soda cans into ingots of aluminum. (more…)

Kelda Roys is running for governor in Wisconsin. She's also a mom, small business owner, and attorney. In the middle of her campaign ad, in which she talks about helping Wisconsin become the first state to ban BPA when she was in the State Assembly, her baby starts to cry. Her husband, who can't help the hungry infant, walks on set and hands his daughter to Roys, who casually starts feeding the baby while continuing her discussion. What an awesome way to normalize breastfeeding in public (not to mention proving how adept she is in the art of multi-tasking!). If you're uncomfortable watching a woman breastfeed, she suggests you "don't watch the video."According to parenting site Scary Mommy:

The Logictech Create iPad Pro keyboard (on sale for $81 on Amazon) has changed the way I use my iPad. Mainly, I'm using my iPad much more often, now that I can enter text with a keyboard. If I'm on a short trip, I'll often take it with me instead of my bulkier MacBook Pro. It works well with Google Docs, which is how I do most of my work.It has a backlit keyboard, which is essential. The keyboard is smaller than a standard keyboard, but it's not so cramped that I resent it when I have to do a lot of writing. I appreciate that it is powered directly from the iPad Pro via the Apple smart connector, because I don't need to remember to charge it. It also doesn't need Bluetooth pairing -- just insert the iPad into the case and start using it.The top row of keys have controls for common things like one-tap to home, screen brightness adjustment, search, language switch, keyboard backlighting adjustment, media controls, volume controls, iPad on/off sleep/wake.The case itself is textured so it won't slip easily when I carry it, and when closed the entire iPad is protected.It's surprisingly thin and light, too. I wish I'd started using it sooner!

Martin Shkreli, the entrepreneur famous for hiking the price of a life-saving medicine and defrauding hedge fund investors, was sentenced Friday to serve 7 years in prison.Convicted in August on securities fraud charges, Shkreli was a sneering, smirking presence in interviews, Capitol Hill hearings and on the internet—at least until the judge tired of his antics and threw him in jail to await sentencing.At Friday's hearing, the Wall Street Journal's Rebecca D. O'Brien wrote that Shkreli's own defense lawyer said "There are times I want to hug him...There are times when I want to punch him in the face."Added Ben Brafman, the lawyer: "Quite frankly, I've got my begging voice on."It was all to no avail, even after Shkreli wept and promised that he was a changed man. Judge Kiyo Matsumoto said the lengthy sentence had nothing to do with Shkreli's reputation or price-gouging. He faced up to 20 years in prison.Now 34, Shkreli became well-known after raising the price of Daraprim, a pill used by HIV patients, from from $13.50 to $750. He was arrested on securities fraud charges over an unrelated hedge fund swizz: the prosecution contended he pilfered funds to start another company, while his defense noted he made good on the investments in the long run.He was banned from Twitter after harassing a woman journalist there; he also fell into the habit of buying internet domains that include the names of journalists who wrote about him, including me.Believing Shkreli to be cash-broke, the court already ordered him to sell off assets to pay fines, including his Wu-Tang Clan record collection.

A team of MIT researchers "analyzed every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence" and found that "fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories," reports The Atlantic. Why? The MIT team has two hypotheses:

In I Am Here , director Eoin Duffy addresses the strange sensation when we realize our entire lives have led up to one fleeting moment. (more…)

Machine learning models use statistical analysis of historical data to predict future events: whether you are a good candidate for a loan, whether you will violate parole, or whether the thing in the road ahead is a stop sign or a moose. (more…)

Maciej Ceglowski (previously) is one of Silicon Valley's sharpest critics, admonishing technologists for failing to consider ethics as they build and deploy products; one of his post-Trump initiatives is the Great Slate, a fundraising effort that urges techies to contribute to the campaigns of Democratic hopefuls in "less-affluent, often rural Republican-leaning districts," where the DCCC won't direct resources because candidates can't raise money of their own. (more…)

An MIT research team has published a paper in Science detailing their analysis of the virulence with which truth and falsehood spread on Twitter; they analyzed 126,000 stories tweeted by 3m people 4.5m times, characterizing the stories as true or false according to consensus among a pool of independent fact-checking organizations, and concluded that "falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information." (more…)

John Sulston has died at the age of 75; I worked with him through the Wellcome Sanger institute, where he undertook the Human Genome Project, where a fully sequenced human genome was decoded and published as open-access science that anyone could study and use. (more…)

Former President Barack Obama is in the late stages of negotiations with Netflix to produce a series of stories with his wife and former First Lady Michelle. The Obamas would be paid for exclusive content, which they say would not directly challenge Trump and the GOP, but instead would be inspirational. Stories might include moderated conversations on topics such as health care, voting rights, nutrition and climate change.According to The New York Times:

Spanish artist David Moreno draws, 3D renders, and even sculpts thin wire-like material into striking floating cities, sculptures that have an architectual feel. (more…)

Leaked footage of a police officer repeatedly punching a pedestrian led to charges for Christopher Hickman, the Asheville, NC cop who also lost his job after the attack on August 24 last year. Hickman claimed that Johnnie Jermaine Rush was jaywalking and had assaulted him when challenged, but bodycam video showed a more sinister incident in which Hickman, who is white, told his black victim "you are going to get fucked up hard core", chokes him, repeatedly strikes his head with his fist, then tases him."I beat the shit out of his head," Hickman says on the recording. "Not gonna lie about that."The police chief, Tammy Hooper, has also offered to resign.

Hamilton has traveled to the city of my birth, Denver, Colorado. I don't know either of the gentleman who wrote letters to the Denver Post expressing their displeasure about the cast and costumes, but they sure are crabby.Excerpts:

People who look like they're fishing on ice suddenly shout and scramble to safety as a wave underneath them creates wide cracks, breaking up the ice into large pieces. Yikes!

Championship gymnast Bradley Burns, 20, is reportedly one of only two people in the world who can do this trick. I am not the other.

Who is Lord Birthday?He’s a brilliant cartoonist who has a new book that just came out, How to Appear Normal at Social Events. But it’s more complicated than that.His cartoons started on an Instagram account in 2015, and as their popularity grew to become a sensation, drawing a following that’s now up to 184k, his real identity remained a closely guarded secret. No one knew who Lord Birthday was except he and his wife.The cartoons themselves reflected this mystery. They are hilarious and fascinating, but cryptic and absurd, with a cartooning style that is reminiscent of outsider art. They seem weird and oddly authentic, and you could imagine their creator as someone living on society’s fringes.Then in 2017, with a book deal done and publication looming, Lord Birthday very reluctantly revealed himself on a podcast, Invisibilia. The link is here, and the segment on Lord Birthday starts at 20:00.He’s Chad Murphy, a business school professor at Oregon State University, described as “the squarest man on Earth,” raised a Mormon, and he talks about the “birth” of Lord Birthday as though it was something that was visited upon him very suddenly. As though another personality suddenly appeared to him, and within moments he was drawing these strange pictures and making absurd word combinations.He’s now apparently coming to terms with the secret coming out. As a fellow pseudonymous cartoonist whose personality seemed to be split in two, I can relate.Not only does he have to incorporate the existence of Lord Birthday into his professional life, but also into his family. His father is former All Star major league baseball player (and should-be Hall of Famer, but that’s another story) Dale Murphy.If there was any doubt how Chad’s two-time MVP father would react to the revelation of this eccentric, artistic side of his son (and I have no idea if there was), it was erased with this touching endorsement Dale made on Twitter:These cartoons are wonderful and weird, and I’d recommend this book, and not in the least because of this fascinating backstory.

Nayan and Vaishali originally planned to make one piece of miniature art daily for 30 days, but following a great response for the first month, they decided to go for a full year. Lucky us! Above: a Baya Weaver Bird. (more…)

DEVO's Mark Mothersbaugh has a line of fantastic spectacles for booji boys and girls. Guaranteed to help you stay focused on the smart patrol! Here's Mothersbaugh on how eyeglasses improved his vision, and his life:

"Wanna try it?""No."

Valerio Sommella just won a 2018 design award from The German Design Council for these disorienting centerpiece plates he created for Il Coccio. (more…)

When a company is considering pushing forward with a significant initiative, like a rebrand or new product launch, they're likely to consult insights from their business data first. That's why companies need professionals skilled with today's data analysis tools, like Microsoft Excel and Access. The Microsoft Data Analysis Bundle can help you get up to speed with these programs, and it's on sale in the Boing Boing Store for $29.This 4-course collection features more than 30 hours of training in Microsoft Power BI, Excel, VBA, and Access. First, you'll learn about Microsoft Power BI, an intuitive tool handy for working with corporate information and extracting meaningful reports. From there, you'll leverage Microsoft Excel, VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), and Access to automate and organize raw data.The Microsoft Data Analysis Bundle is on sale for $29 in the Boing Boing Store.

Imagine being a bug or small bird who spots a beautiful orchid, only to learn upon closer inspection that it's covered in bugs who want to eat you. (more…)

George Nader, the international businessman of mystery who is now cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller, was indicted in 1985 on obscenity charges involving child pornography.Nader is a political operative who was seen frequently at the White House during the early days of the administration of President Donald Trump.(more…)

This is fascinating: Millions of clocks across Europe have lost time, because of a dispute over electricity generation.Citizens across Europe had been noticing that clocks in certain devices -- LED-style alarm clocks, stoves, and microwaves -- had been gradually losing time over the last few weeks. Why? Because those devices keep time based on the frequency of the European electrical grid, which is normally 50 hertz.But in the past few weeks, the frequency of the grid has dropped slightly -- it's down to 49.996 hertz. So all those clocks have gradually run more and more slowly. People had noticed ...https://twitter.com/allan_howe/status/971418087366037504Okay, so ... why has the grid's frequency dropped? As NPR explains, it's because of a political fight: