Fun fact: trilobites were able to see thanks to eyes made of calcite instead of soft tissue. YouTuber Thunderf00t shows off a cool fossil and explains the phenomenon. (more…)

In the early fifties, the Airstream company was growing fast and decided to move its factory from Los Angeles to Jackson Center, Ohio. Nearly 66 years later, they're still building their iconic silver "canned hams" there.In this promotional timelapse video, you can see how they get assembled. One thing to note is that they put all the rivets in by hand. (You may want to turn off the music though, it doesn't seem to be a good fit for the content. Shouldn't it be something more... vintage?)By the way, if you're in the Jackson Center area, you can go take a free tour of the Airstream factory. Every weekday at 2 PM they offer them.Also, in the springtime, Airstream hosts Alumapalooza at the grounds surrounding the factory. It's a fun camping event for travel trailer enthusiasts and owning an Airstream is not required. This year's event is May 29 to June 3, 2018.(The Kid Should See This)

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Lead sponge, like other metal sponges, is a phenomenon where a metal reacts with a solution to create a soft sponge-like material, as YouTuber NileRed found out by accident. (more…)

Everyone loves sloths, and that has led to a huge black market in their capture for use in "safari selfies," where eco-tourists travel to exotic locales and pose for social media posts with local fauna. (more…)

YouTuber NightHawkInLight got his hands on some thick copper plates and some neodymium magnets, then showed some of the strange ways the two materials interact. (more…)

Here's a terrific set of music from Laura Jean Anderson & Friends, which was performed last year at Deep End Ranch in Santa Paula, California. She's got a beautiful voice.

Roxy the dog lives in Riverton, Australia.(more…)

"There is, and ought to be in this great country, the freedom to say goodbye." (more…)

David Pescovitz, co-founding editor of this very blog, won the Grammy Award for best boxed or special limited-edition package for his work on The Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition, along with Tim Daly and Lawrence Azerrad.

I am a great admirer of Terry Gilliam's cut-out animations in Monty Python's Flying Circus. They were an inspiration when I animated this blockchain explainer video for Institute for the Future:https://youtu.be/r43LhSUUGTQIn the above video from 1974, Gilliam shares how he made his animations. It's a complete course in cut-up animation in 15 minutes! I wish I'd seen this many years ago.Via Open Culture.

The journal Diabetologia published a study that "found that people with high blood sugar had a faster rate of cognitive decline than those with normal blood sugar—whether or not their blood-sugar level technically made them diabetic. In other words, the higher the blood sugar, the faster the cognitive decline.From The Atlantic:

In what has become an annual tradition, President Donald Trump is once again suing the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser over the valuation of his Trump National Golf Club. Publicly, he boasts of massive success. But in the court papers, he demands that county officials in Palm Beach lower their valuation of the Jupiter, Florida property.(more…)

Talk about instant karma.(more…)

When I was a mechanical engineer in the late 1980s, I worked at a disk drive company in Longmont, Colorado, owned by Fujitsu. It was my job to design the motor that spun the platter of disks.(more…)

When Unix co-inventor Ken Thompson won the Turing Prize for his work, he dropped a bombshell in his acceptance speech: as an exercise, he had buried a back-door so deeply into the Unix infrastructure that no one had ever found it (to his knowledge). (more…)

Under increasing pressure from President Donald Trump, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe is leaving his post effective today, multiple news outlets are reporting this morning.(more…)

A leaked White House Powerpoint deck published by Axios reveals that some elements in the Trump administration are trying to sell a plan for the US government to build the nation's "5g" wireless infrastructure, hardened against Chinese surveillance and attacks, and then lease access to the private telcoms sector; the network architecture could then be reproduced and given to US allies to help them defend themselves against Chinese attacks. (more…)

Getting ready for Valentines day? Just like candy? This five pound bag of Haribo Gummy Bears is pretty darn AWESOME.The pace at which my daughter and I can finish this giant bag of gummies is impressive... or maybe gummy bears just never, ever go stale.I like the pineapple ones.Haribo Original Gold-Bears Gummi Candy, 5-Pound Bag via Amazon

Cornell archaeobotanist Natalie Mueller harvests "weeds" from across North America, seeking the remnants of "lost crops," the plants cultivated by the people who lived here 2,000 years ago. (more…)

Strava is a popular fitness route-tracker focused on sharing the maps of your workouts with others; last November, the company released an "anonymized" data-set of over 3 trillion GPS points, and over the weekend, Institute for United Conflict Analysts co-founder Nathan Ruser started a Twitter thread pointing out the sensitive locations and details revealed by the release. (more…)

Apple's podcast feature in Itunes is probably the most successful podcatcher extant, and it's long been understood that the app gathers extensive data on listeners' habits: what they listen to, when and where, and how they listen (skipping ads, increasing playback speed, etc). (more…)

Alan Gogoll put a camera inside his guitar to record Stringscapes, a lovely set of short songs with a beautiful sunset vista visible outside the sound hole. (more…)

Rotary car dumpers (aka wagon tipplers) are used for quickly emptying coal and ore from hopper cars. Traditionally, hopper cars emptied from the bottom.Enthusiast Chester Hill praises Pittsburgh-based Heyl & Patterson, who build these behemoths:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dasharez0ne/da-share-z0ne-the-devils-level-card-gameTHE DEVIL'S LEVEL is the official card game of Da Share Z0ne, Twitter's most bad-ass meme machine. Contributors inclue Natalie Dee, Dril, Oliver Leach and Drew Fairweather, so you have... NO EXCUSES.

Metal detectorist "Iron Mike" finds all sorts of interesting things, like this anti-tank mine among a treasure trove from the Eastern Front of World War II. (more…)

Time crystals, a theoretical phase of matter proposed in 2012, can now be reliably created and measured, thanks to researchers at UC Berkeley. Above: a great primer on time crystals.The discovery built on the work of several teams of researchers:

Donning a much-glitzier version of the black western bowtie and white suit that Colonel Harland Sanders is famous for, country music legend Reba McEntire is now playing an androgynous version of KFC's iconic founding father in a new ad campaign.Yep, for the first time in the fried chicken company's history, a woman is playing the Colonel.KFC Chief Marketing Officer Andrea Zahumensky said in a press release,

While wearing eye tracking glasses, seven young people and three professional artists each donned eye tracking glasses and drew the same scene, and some interesting patterns emerged. (more…)

I've just learned about the Art Rangers program. It's a cool non-profit, founded by Oscar Nilsson and Alex Tatem, that allows artists to donate fine art photo prints inspired by the National Parks. Folks can then buy the prints to help save our park, as all of the proceeds benefit the National Park Foundation. You can look at the art here and you can become an Art Ranger yourself here.(The listserve)

More A-grade sneering from Rob Wolchek of Fox 2 News Detroit, called in by professional photographer Kelly, who tracked down the guy flogging her stolen gear on eBay.WOLCHECK: Where'd ya get all the stuff in your ebay store?

Craig Evans, accompanied by his dog Llew and his son Dafydd, mosey around a beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, picking up everything worth eating and finally enjoying a delicious December meal.

Variety is reporting that previously unreleased music by Prince will soon be available:

Not sure what Yankee Stadium food vendors wear now but, apparently, sometime in the late sixties or early seventies they donned this far out, font-heavy number. Baseball photo historian Baseball by Bsmile shared this recently on Twitter and points out that the shirt was designed with ketchup/catsup and mustard colors.A 2008 Uni-Watch (a site that follows sports teams aesthetics) article shares:

In an effort to make plastic drinking straws extinct, Chelsea Briganti and Leigh Ann Tucker of Loliware have invented the "world’s first edible, hypercompostable, marinedegradable straw." They hope their eco-friendly Lolistraw will replace the 500M plastic straws that are currently being used in the United States every day. Fast Company reports:

Your dreams of captaining your own tiny-but-shiny electric boat are about two grand and a fair amount of elbow grease away.Donald Bell (previously) of Maker Project Lab shared Rapid Whale's Mini Boat with me yesterday and I'm already sourcing a captain's hat.The Mini Boat is a kit you can buy for $950 and then assemble with cable ties and epoxy. No, really, look...It'll cost you another $510 to $1140 to complete it. From there, it's all smooth sailing. https://youtu.be/_cstE6jBdUMphotos by Rapid Whale

"The Gentle Author" is the maintainer of Spitalfields Life, a blog that has featured a brilliant and moving series of essays about the history of East London; Author is also sharply critical of the plans by giant property developer Crest Nicholson to redevelop the site of a Victorian chest hospital and dig up an ancient tree called the Bethnal Green Mulberry. (more…)

London has fatbergs: glistening, multiton agglomerations of fat, sanitary napkins, "flushable" wipes, human waste, dirty diapers, used condoms, and delicious strawberry jam; New Orleans has 93,000 pounds of plastic Mardi Gras beads. (more…)

When Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkish government took reprisals against hundreds of thousands of people suspected to have been involved in the failed coup of 2016, one of the criteria they used for whom to round up for indefinite detention as well as myriad human rights abuses (including torture) was whether people had a cookie on their computers set by a 1x1 tracking pixel served by Bylock, which the Erdogan regime says is evidence of support of exiled opposition leader Fethullah Gülen. (more…)

After an audit found that the Department of Defense couldn't account for $6.5 trillion in non-black-budget spending, Michigan State University State and Local Government Finance and Policy Chair Mark Skidmore assembled a team to audit the Housing and Urban Development agency, uncovering $21 trillion more in "undocumented adjustments" to HUDs spending since 1998. (more…)

Whenever we drive on the Ronald Reagan Expressway, my daughter asks me to remind her what Reagan was famous for, and I have to recount as much as I can recall: brought us to the brink of nuclear extinction, murdered a generation through homophobic indifference to the AIDS crisis, put the War on Drugs on overdrive, funded terrorists throughout Latin America, grew the national debt by trillions, and literally allowed astrology to steer the course of the nation. (more…)

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker -- whose reign has been haunted by scandal and propped up by out-of-state dark money -- has announced that he will not call special elections to fill seats in the Wisconsin legislature, following on from Democratic upsets in state Republican strongholds. (more…)

Writing in the Baptist News, Miguel De La Torre -- a progressive professor at Denver's Iliff School of Theology -- denounces evangelicals who "forgive" Trump for his myriad sins and support child-molesters like Roy Moore, saying that they embrace a faith that "fuses and confuses white supremacy with salvation." (more…)

I'm appearing at UCSD on February 9, with a talk called "Scarcity, Abundance and the Finite Planet: Nothing Exceeds Like Excess," in which I'll discuss the potentials for scarcity and abundance -- and bright-green vs austere-green futurism -- drawing on my novels Walkaway, Makers and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. (more…)

Kimberly Clark, makers of Kleenex and Huggies, says it will lay off 10-12% of its US workforce and divert the savings to shareholder dividends and capital investment (presumably robots to replace the workers, or infrastructure to import finished goods from lower-cost offshore labor markets), and it says that action was triggered by Trump's tax-cuts, which freed up the cash needed to effect the changes. (more…)

A group of activist lawyers/documentarians have made a vocation of fighting copyfraudsters in the courts, first forcing Warner Chapell to relinquish its bogus claim over "Happy Birthday" and then targeting Ludlow Music Inc. and The Richmond Organization who had spent decades fraudulently collecting licensing fees for the public domain civil rights hymn "We Shall Overcome." (more…)

San Francisco-based fashion brand Betabrand sent me an important email today. The subject line, "Sasquatch Conquers All!," immediately caught my attention. Inside was a promotion for their new, totally out-there Sasquatch: Apex Predator Shirt:

After suggesting the New York Times cooked up its story about President Trump trying and failing to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity was forced into a humiliating on-air backpedal. But then something magical happened: Hannity vanished from Twitter. Usually a vigorous, if barely-literate presence on the social media platform, Hannity's account no longer existed, and was therefore unable to receive the ridicule being heaped upon it. It was gone only for an hour, though, back up at midnight with the bizarre tweet: "Form Submission 1649 | #Hannity"https://twitter.com/seanhannity/status/957127637121445889Hypothesis: Fox News (or Hannity himself) has merely created a custom Twitter app or interface and it's a bag of crap.(Or, as one Trump supporter writes: "Make no mistake, Sean Hannity’s Twitter is down because he is extremely close to blowing up the whole deep state")

Feeling a certain way, but not quite sure of the best word for it? The wheel of feelings is a literary (or thereapeutic) tool for lending precision to fear, anger, disgust, sadness, happiness and surprise.

I grew up in a family where competition and winning meant everything. Throughout my childhood, my sister and I were pitted against each other in games of chance and skill, with prizes of heavily salted snacks for the victor. Over the years, we fine-tuned our gamesmanship, for whomever won was punished rather than rewarded. Decades later, we have a whole new generation of competitors in our family, but this year my sister and I tried something different. We introduced a trojan horse for fitness called the Stealth Core Trainer.The trainer is just a device on which to plank upon, but its competitive nature makes it fun. For those who don’t know, a plank is an exercise where you hold your body up by your forearms and toes as straight as possible.Planking exercises different parts of your body, but to someone who’s just been given a Nintendo Switch for Christmas, it’s rather boring. Below is an image of my nephew multitasking in his natural habitat. Note that he's eating cereal while video chatting with a friend WHILE playing a networked game with yet another friend.It's a ridiculous site to behold and a difficult one to tear him away from. Luckily, the Stealth Core Trainer [Amazon link] turns the once static planking exercise into a digital, competitive game by combining the built in gyroscope of their own phone with exercise.In the end, it's simply a sturdy block of well-designed plastic and rubber that’s balanced on a round object.To play, each participant is invited to rest their arms on the trainer and hit the play button on their phone to launch their physical challenge. It’s sort of like the old game of Snakewhere you’re tasked with traveling around a screen to pick up pellets by leaning in different directions while planking. As you advance, the pace of the gameplay gets faster and faster and the experience always ends with sore abs and the desire to get a higher score next time. Below is an action shot of my 72 year old Mother tearing up her abdominals.In a social setting, the game brings about laughter, and makes you feel like you’ve done something productive. And everyone who sees it in person seems to want to give it a go.The game doesn’t have fantastic graphics but it doesn’t need them because it’s more about how you feel afterwards.In December, I brought the Stealth to Michigan for my nephew and he’s been using it ever since. It’s a bit pricy at $199.00 but it has encouraged him to exercise instead of being glued to his Nintendo Switch.Just look at that form! When Ryan started using the Stealth he couldn't support himself enough to have his knees off the ground, and in just a few weeks he has mastered the plank.Go nephew!Stealth Core Trainer [Amazon link]