A billboard mysteriously appears in St. Paul, Minn. in which God offers a special message to noted crazy ex-congresscritter Michele Bachmann. Hope she obeys The Lord.(more…)

https://youtu.be/F8JCh0owT4wMotherboard's short documentary, "Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech's Repair Monopoly" is an excellent look at the absurd situation created by John Deere's position that you can't own your tractor because you only license the software inside it, meaning that only Deere can fix Deere's tractors, and the centuries-old tradition of farmers fixing their agricultural equipment should end because Deere's shareholders would prefer it that way. (more…)

We can't have nice, ancient things.Peru's Nazca Lines have so much historical and cultural significance that the United Nations declared the Peruvian coastal plains where they're located to be a World Heritage Site back in 1994. Created somewhere between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D., they're one of the finest examples of ancient geoglyphs still intact today. Depicting plants, animals, culturally significant figures and yes, maybe space aliens, the drawings, which take up 425 square kilometers of space, are so massive that they can only be fully appreciated when seen from the air. They're a beautiful mystery, carved into the face of the earth generations ago; an echo of a vibrant past.So of course, someone drove a semi-truck through them.According to Andina, a news outlet owned by the Peruvian government, the driver of the truck, Jainer Jesús Flores Vigo, left a nearby highway, steering his rig 50 to 100 meters into a nearby section of the geoglyph and left deep wheel ruts in it before coming to a stop. The New York Times says that Vigo faces a criminal charge of "attack against cultural heritage" for his off-road adventure. Thankfully, only a small section of the Nazca Lines was damaged, and the Peruvian Government says that they'll be stepping up surveillance efforts in the area in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the site.Why anyone would decide to build a highway through such a priceless link to our past, making incidents like this possible, is anyone's guess.Image via Flickr, courtesy of ilkerender

Tim Hortons might have over 500 locations in the United States, but I tells ya, it's a Canadian thing.(more…)

For a couple years now, I've been collaborating with EFF to produce a Catalog of Missing Devices: products that do something legal and useful and desirable, but don't exist because to make them, you'd have to break DRM, something US law bans. (more…)

I grew up playing a number of instruments associated with Irish and Scots traditional music. I speak enough Gaelic to be dangerous and sang my way through university in a Celtic-tinged bar band and at kitchen sessions to help pay the bills and melt away stress. As I grew older, I started farting around with the traditional music of other cultures as well. My love for middle eastern, Balkan and klezmer tunes knows no bounds.If you're interested in sampling the music that other cultures have to offer, one of the best ways to have at it is to start with something familiar. Ahmed Alshaiba's moody cover of the Interstellar Theme is an awesome example of this. In the above video, Alshaiba plays the oud: a badass 11 or 13-stringed instrument used widely in North African and Middle Eastern music. Accompanying himself on percussion, keyboards and guitar, Alshaiba's created a glorious stripped-down iteration of Hans Zimmer's instantly recognizable orchestral score.If you like what you hear, Alshaiba's YouTube channel is full of pop songs he's tweaked with a decidedly middle eastern bent.

Japan is home to the only museum in the world that is dedicated to rocks that look like they have faces. The owner started the museum because her father was an avid collector of rocks with faces, and when he died she wanted to carry on the tradition. She finds many of the rocks herself on a nearby beach, but now people from around the world send her rocks with faces. There are about 1000 specimens in the collection.

Survey says... This is weird!(Thanks, UPSO!)

Rick Saccone (@Saccone4PA18) is the Republican challenger for the seat vacated by Tim Murphy, the Pennsylvania anti-abortion Congressman who resigned after being outed for pressuring his pregnant mistress to get an abortion. (more…)

Emma Byrne, a science writer and artificial intelligence researcher, has just published a new book called Swearing is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language and it sounds fucking great. "If you ask people what they think about swearing, they tend to insist that it diminishes the speaker’s credibility and persuasiveness—-especially if the speaker is a woman," Byrne writes. But actually, a presenter's swears can sometimes make them damn more convincing. From Smithsonian:

https://youtu.be/UjtOGPJ0URMWhy would the discovery of extraterrestrial life be horrible for life on earth? The latest Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell video says there are 10 billion earth-like planets in the Milky Way. If they have or had life on them they should have colonized the galaxy. The fact that they haven't means that either we are alone in the galaxy or there is some kind of deadly "filter" (nuclear war, nanotech, AI, resource depletion) that wipes out advanced life before it's able to colonize the galaxy.

I used my LED headlamps a couple of nights ago to grill chicken in my backyard. I also use them for evening strolls (no streetlights in my neighborhood). Right now they are on sale on Amazon for $6.35, batteries included!

Researchers at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile trained an orca named Wikie to mimic words like "hello," "bye-bye," and other human speech sounds. John Lilly, I wish you were around to be part of this conversation. From the New York Times:

For the first time ever Facebook usership declined in the US and Canada, from 185 million in Q3 of 2017 to Q4 of 2018.Could it be that people are wising up to the fact that Facebook is a depressing, computational-propaganda-spewing, personal-data-abusing, walled-in cesspool of little value to anyone but shareholders, advertisers, and election throwers?[caption id="attachment_570549" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Image: Recode[/caption]From Recode:

Every year, Locus Magazine's panel of editors reviews the entire field of science fiction and fantasy and produces its Recommended Reading List; the 2017 list is now out, and I'm proud to say that it features my novel Walkaway, in excellent company with dozens of other works I enjoyed in the past year. (more…)

The Act of ReadingIt's been 10 years since the writing of The Atlantic's now classic essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? in which Nicholas Carr addressed how our reading habits (and our cognition in general) have been collectively affected by the use of the Internet. Carr observed his own scattering of attention, a lessening of concentration for extended periods of time, which overall makes the act of reading more and more fragmented, impoverished and shallow. To quote Carr's eloquent metaphor: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” And over the past decade, our nearly ubiquitous access to the World Wide Web has made things worse.The conspicuous consumption of our daily reading is a steady stream of piece meal information coming from a medley of screens: we endlessly scroll through posts, comments and messages, nervously bouncing from site to site, skimming, browsing and searching, jumping from our latest email or text to social media chatter, compulsively trying to satisfy our information craving. Reading is not what it used to be, and that's that.But reading comes in different shapes and forms, and is not only for absorbing content. Imagine this: take a few minutes to sit down quietly with someone you care about. Choose a piece of writing you like, and share that piece of writing—reading it loud to the other person. You’ll find something uncanny going on.Human MomentsReading aloud to another person is indeed a peculiar experience, something we are not used to, or if we are, it's mostly for children. In the past, reading aloud—and listening—was a widely enjoyed leisure activity, as well as a way of giving and receiving advice. Going far beyond a simple sharing of valuable content, the spoken word casts an enchanting magic spell, becoming a transformative force to alter consciousness.In fact, reading aloud breeds human moments. A notion coined by Harvard lecturer Edward M. Hallowell, a human moment refers to the psychological encounter that can happen when two people share the same physical space, actively listening to one another. During a human moment people are totally present—physically, emotionally and intellectually—offering each other undivided attention, concentrating on the here and now, with no desire to be anywhere else or in any hurry to move on. Such moments foster connection and intimacy, and are vital to our mental health and general wellbeing. Yet we have fewer and fewer of these moments, even with our closest friends and family. And that sucks!To Read AloudTo take a crack at this kind of reading/listening experience, we have a portal straight to that Middle Earth where magic happens: To Read Aloud - A Literary Toolkit for Wellbeing by Francesco Dimitri. Born and raised in Italy, Dimitri is one of the most successful and popular Italian fantasy authors. A writer of both fiction and non-fiction, he moved to London at the peak of his career to find a bigger pond, and started writing in English.To Read Aloud is a refined example of the literary self-help genre (it is noteworthy that Dimitri is on the faculty of The School of Life, an outstanding literary/philosophical establishment founded by philosopher Alain de Botton). The book is a curated selection of 75 extracts from heroes of Western literature: Epicurus, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Giacomo Leopardi, Aleister Crowley, Oscar Wilde, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, Neil Gaiman.The book is divided into thematic sections—Love, Loss, Lightness, Pleasure, Work, Nature, Change, Chaos, Wonder—with each piece acting as a probe for existential exploration, shedding light upon timeless and eternal aspects of the human experience, deepening the knowledge and understanding of our existence. Each section opens with a piece written by Dimitri himself, deftly interpreting tales from Greek mythology with amusing wit, irony and lightness.Overall, To Read Aloud is a goldmine of a collection: each literary gem can be savored independently, yet are woven together to form a rich tapestry of beauty and meaning. This treasure will crack your mind—and soul—open, both when read aloud and otherwise.

"Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle don’t hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it; that’s the way a woman most always does, but a man always does t’other way." -- Huckleberry FinnHere's an even easier way:

Dern tootin', Reese! (Vanity Fair)

Jamie Zawinski (previously), who owns San Francisco's amazing DNA Lounge venue, does a postmortem on the announcements from Slim's and the Great American Music Hall that they have "partnered" with Golden Voice, a division of Anschutz Entertainment Group, a $8 billion company that is the world's largest owner of sports teams and events; owns Coachella and ten other large festivals, and is in turned owned by a Fundamentalist, homophobic, climate change denier. (more…)

It takes a lot of barking, jumping, and prodding to awaken this sleeping hog, and when the dog finally succeeds, it seems to wonder if it was a good idea.

This rat does a better job of soaping itself up than I do. Video was shot in a bathroom sink in Huaraz City, Ancash, Peru.

Bauer Media's Teen Boss is a new quarterly magazine, launched last summer for "Gen-Z entrepreneurs" aged 8-15 who want to pursue careers as "influencers." (more…)

Toto's got a new greatest hits album and is going on tour which is probably why they are popping up in my feed so much lately. On Wednesday, I posted the story behind their hit song "Africa" as told by the man who wrote it, the band's David Paich.Today I noticed that the Floppotron (previously) has covered the song. Yes, love it. Everything's turning up Toto!

I tested the capacity of two USB battery packs using two different USB multi-meters. The results did not surprise me.I recently acquired two $10-each USB multi-meters, the Powerjive and a DROK . The Powerjive is "easier" to use. The DROK handles more complex advanced charging protocols like Qualcomm 2.0 quick charging, and is less intuitive. The DROK read-out is brighter and the red/blue LEDs are easier to read, but there are several different screens to click thru to pretty much get the same results as the PowerJive's one dim screen.I have two USB battery packs that I love. My 10k pack is 3 years old and has shown some loss of capacity on my "Hey, this isn't lasting as long as it used to" meter. I had estimated the battery lost 30% of its capacity. The 15k unit is new as of last month and should be capable of its marketed capacity.I drained each battery pack by playing endless streamed video on my Fire HD 10 tablet, and my iPhone 7+. On the 10k unit this involved the blue lights going dead. The 15k brick will flash a single blue LED to indicate "charge me" without draining the battery. You may also use the USB multi-meters to measure how quickly a device burns through the pack. The Amazon tablet is pretty damn efficient, and I got hours and hours of video out of the 15k unit.I charged each battery from "empty" until the mAh counters on the respective USB meter stopped ticking up. Once the battery packs were full, I drained them again and repeated the exercise with swapped USB meters to see if the results were similar.The three year old 10,000 mAh battery pack takes a 6356 mAh charge according to the Powerjive unit, and a 6399 mAh charge per the Drok. This would represent around a 2.35 charges for my iPhone 7+ and its reported 2700 mAh capacity-left battery. Feels about right based off my experiential meter. I've been getting around 3 charges off it and I rarely start from zero on the phone.The new 15,000 mAh battery was showing 13,235 mAh from the Powerjive and 13,350 on the Drok unit. This battery pack never goes completely flat, so I suspected it wouldn't take a full charge but I didn't expect around 1500 mAh to apparently be reserved to protect the lifespan of the unit, or just to not be there. Regardless, this 15,000 mAh unit gets me almost 5 full charges for the iPhone 7+ and I'll be holding on to it.I was hungry for data, I guess. None of these results are surprising or will change how I use the battery packs.PowerJive USB Voltage/Amps Power Meter Tester Multimeter via AmazonDROK USB 2.0 Digital Multimeter, Ammeter Voltmeter Capacitance and Watt Meter, 7 Modes Multi Tester via AmazonKMASHI 10000mAh Portable Power Bank with Dual USB Ports 3.1A Output and 2A Input via AmazonKMASHI 15000mAh External Battery Power Bank, Portable Charger with Powerful Dual USB Output and 2A Input via Amazon

Edtech Strategies, "a boutique consultancy focused on providing strategic research and counsel on issues at the intersection of education, public policy, technology, and innovation" has published a report detailing the dismal state of America's state education agencies web-practices, where encrypted connections are hard to find and adtech trackers are everywhere. (more…)

The amazing and frightening thing about the Mirai botnet's reign of terror wasn't that it was a super-sophisticated cyberweapon: rather, it was a clumsy, amateurish fuggly hack that turned out to have been produced by a couple of dum-dums with a Minecraft racket. (more…)

Behold, the glory of the compound noun: Fernweh ("the feeling of wanting to be elsewhere, anywhere but where you are at this moment"); Weltschmerz ("the state of weariness one feels at the state of the world"); Fuchsteufelswild ("a state of unfiltered, primal rage"); and of course, the indispensable Backpfeifengesicht.

In a textbook example of the use of big data to create a digital poorhouse, as described in Virginia Eubanks's excellent new book Automating Inequality, the Australian government created an algorithmic, semi-privatised system to mine the financial records of people receiving means-tested benefits and accuse them of fraud on the basis of its findings, bringing in private contractors to build and maintain the system and collect the penalties it ascribed, paying them a commission on the basis of how much money they extracted from poor Australians. (more…)

Inspired by the Purple One himself, this cookbook is the work of Cat Food, a "super small, super busy, super tiny bakery" in South East London. Inside its pages you'll find Prince-ly recipes for Purple Rain ombre cakes, Raspberry Beret tarts, Darling Stikki toffee puddings, Most Beautiful Swirl in the World brownies, and more.The book is available to preorder now for £9.00 from Belly Kids. It's set to ship in March.I have to wonder though, as cute as this is, how long it will be before the Prince estate shuts it down?Purple Rain ombre cakeLittle Red Velvette cupcakesPreviously: Prince and his purple piano inspired this new Pantone Color(Nerdist)

Looking incredibly hip and youthful in a bright blue hoodie, comedian Jim Gaffigan had way too much fun swiping right and trolling potential suitors through someone else's Tinder account. Watch in the video as he hijacks the Tinder of Blair, a brave female Vanity Fair staffer. It starts off a little slow but gets much funnier when the guys start responding to Gaffigan's oddball messages.Gaffigan is starting a worldwide tour on February 8.

My pal Moe went to go see W. Kamau Bell at the Punch Line comedy club in San Francisco on Tuesday night and noticed something unusual on the drink menu: a cocktail made with cannabis-infused vodka. I had to investigate.The $14 drink is called the "Drug Mule" and it's a take on the Moscow Mule (which they offer for $14 too).Yes, recreational weed is legal now here in California but I wondered if the club needed a license to have this on the menu. So, I tried calling them. It went right to voicemail.Then I sat here wondering if it actually had THC (the psychoactive part of pot) in it at all or if it was only CBD (which won't make you feel stoned). After shooting off a note to a friend in the local cannabis business to find out, I realized that "Humboldt's Finest" wasn't just a boastful descriptor but the actual brand name of the vodka. Digging further, I discovered that Humboldt's Finest vodka is both THC-free and legal in all 50 states.They use hemp which has no more "than 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis" of THC.As this 2016 Mashable article reports, "Although this isn't enough THC to get you high, the 40% alcohol will surely get you drunk."Then why drink a "cannabis-infused" beverage at all? Well, the same article explains:

My Esel is an interesting design concept: It's a bike where the frame is made out of wood, with each cut bespoke to the dimensions that best fit the rider's body.As this piece in Bikerumor describes it:

Fejetlenfej posted a set of maps of european forest cover to imgur, with posters available on Etsy. Though cover is distressingly spase in places such as Denmark and England, check out the places that seem picked clean, as if trees were a menace to be exterminated without remorse. Is there so much as a shrub in Italy's Po Valley?

Local58 is a YouTube channel for a news affiliate that does not, thankfully, exist. Written and edited by Kris Straub, each video depicts increasingly alarming emergency broadcast interruptions and test cards, all implying invasion, revolution or government mindfuckery. (NOTE: "Contingency" instructs the viewer to kill themselves and others).My favorite, though, is You Are On The Fastest Available Route (embedded above), three minutes of creepy dashcam perfection based on an idea by Mikey Neumann.

Artist Anne Eichhorn shows how she uses watercolors, pen, and typewriters to create charming little pieces of art and jewelry from used teabags. (more…)

Valentine's Day is around the corner, which means significant others everywhere are bracing for the financial wallop that comes with paying for a nice date and, of course, flowers. But, there are ways to mitigate the damage. The Bouqs Deluxe Bouquet: Valentine's Day Special lets you bypass crowded lines at the florist and score a $50 credit good for any bouquet in a specially curated selection. Except you only have to pay $29.99 to get it.These flowers come from eco-friendly, sustainable farms, or are sourced directly from artisan florists, so your loved one can get them in as little as two hours. The flowers include The Bouqs Company’s Happiness Guarantee.The Bouqs Deluxe Bouquet: Valentine's Day Special is available to Boing Boing readers for $30, netting a savings of 40 percent.

Ebay, which separated from PayPal in 2015, plans to ditch it entirely. By 2020, Ebay says, most of its transactions will be handled by Adyen, a Netherlands-based payment processor. PayPal will remain a checkout option until at least 2023.

Artist Dimitris Ladopoulos ran a favorite Rembrandt painting through an algorithm he's used for abstract work and generated a cool RGB-value dimensional output that resembles a blocky paint by numbers. (more…)

What follows is the most mind-altering first chapter I've read in a long time, from biomechanist Katy Bowman’s latest book Movement Matters: Essays on movement science, movement ecology, and the nature of movement.

Nancy Holten moved to Switzerland 34 years ago as a child, but she's just been denied a Swiss passport because her campaign to end the tradition of Swiss cowbells is "too annoying." (more…)

From afar, and even from its own dark and derelict lower floors, this abandoned paper mill in Sweden is much like any other disused factory. But found upstairs, on the second level up, is an amazing "garden" space, half-recovered by nature. Redditor IEatBasil, posting in the marvelous Abandonedporn forum, describes it as "probably the most beautiful place I've ever been to."

It's just like using a camera! But instead of your finger turning the shot into a dark blot, your shot turns your finger into a dark blot. [via]

San Francisco plans to retroactively apply California's new marijuana legalization laws to thousands of pre-existing pot related convictions, the SF district attorney's office announced Wednesday. Thousands of misdemeanors and felonies dating to 1975 will either be expunged or reduced, and the lives of people convicted of those crimes will be changed for the better.(more…)

Alex Balk: The Awl, 2009-2018.

Kevin J Davis is the leader of the Council for the London Borough of Kingston-Upon-Thames; his son Cameron Davis's Linkedin profile shows that he is now a Trainee Development Manager at CNM Estates, a major contractor to the Borough of Kensington. (more…)

Simon Rogers, a data journalist and data editor at Google, created a series of maps showing the regional popularity of certain kinds of restaurant.

Pixel Chart splits images into their constituent pixels, then organizes them in various interesting ways that you can define. [via]

It's El Sol in Harrisonburg, Va., according to Bombaskos on Reddit. [via]

"A recent study conducted by Hasbro revealed that nearly half of game players attempt to cheat during Monopoly games, so in 2018, we decided it was time to give fans what they've been craving all along - a Monopoly game that actually encourages cheating," Jonathan Berkowitz, senior vice president of Hasbro gaming told Insider.

A decade ago, J.K. Rowling famously told the world that Dumbledore was gay. Just don't expect it to be shown any time soon.