Boing Boing

In an effort to get more people reading, the New York Public Library set out to take advantage of Instagram's huge user base. Mother New York designed "Insta Novels" as a way to read entire novels in Instagram Stories. The books feature carefully selected fonts, beautiful animations, and some clever hacks to allow such an unorthodox use of the Instagram app:one challenge was that the pages would turn themselves after 10 seconds. But the solution of the Thumb Rest gave us a simple way-finding element and let us add illustrations to every page for a more engaging reading experience....Knowing the active story would only be live for 24-hours, we also launched a teaser post with each title to let readers know they could find a new title in our highlights. These posts served as mini-movie trailers for each book to bring the audience to the title.You can read Alice in Wonderland, A Christmas Carol, The Raven, and more now. Read the rest

Folio Society has produced a special illustrated edition of Philip K. Dick's novel Ubik, featuring several illustrations and a foreword by Kim Stanley Robinson: This video describes the creation of the edition, including hiding a secret in the slipcase: Read the rest

Four or more top U.S. national security officials were so upset by Donald Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine for Joe Biden dirt that they spoke to a White House lawyer with their concerns “both before and immediately after President Trump’s July 25 call with that country’s president,” the Washington Post reports tonight citing “U.S. officials and other people familiar with the matter.”“The nature and timing of the previously undisclosed discussions with National Security Council legal adviser John Eisenberg indicate that officials were delivering warnings through official White House channels earlier than previously understood — including before the call that precipitated a whistleblower complaint and the impeachment inquiry of the president,” report the WaPo's Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe late Thursday:Those concerns soared in the call’s aftermath, officials said. Within minutes, senior officials including national security adviser John Bolton were being pinged by subordinates about problems with what the president had said to his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. Bolton and others scrambled to obtain a rough transcript that was already being “locked down” on a highly classified computer network.“When people were listening to this in real time there were significant concerns about what was going on — alarm bells were kind of ringing,” said one person familiar with the sequence of events inside the White House, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “People were trying to figure out what to do, how to get a grasp on the situation.”It is unclear whether some or all of the officials who complained to Eisenberg are also the ones who later spoke to the whistleblower. Read the rest

Authorities say haul worth $600,000 or more

The owners of the copyright for the theme song to the “Charlie Brown Christmas” TV special are suing Dolly Parton's 'Dollywood' in federal court for copyright infringement.The complaint is reported to charge Dollywood with having used the song without permission in live Christmas performances at the Tennessee theme park since 2007.From the Associated Press:The lawsuit says Los Angeles-based Lee Mendelson Film Productions owns the copyright and is asking for $150,000 for every time the song has been used.According to the suit, “Christmas Time is Here” was written by Lee Mendelson and Vince Guaraldi for the 1965 television special “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”AP says Dollywood “is aware of the lawsuit,” no comment on pending litigation. Read the rest

In New Mexico, a football coach was fired and now faces criminal charges after authorities say a student captured the coach on cellphone video taking money from a student player’s wallet.Miyamura High School coach John D. Roanhaus was on Saturday by state police after reviewing the cellphone video that showed Mr. Roanhaus entering the locker room and removing $40 from the student's wallet, say the court documents.From AP:According to an arrest warrant, a police officer was contacted by a student’s mother who showed the officer the cellphone video. The video showed Roanhaus walking into the school’s locker area, taking two $20 bills from a black wallet and stuffing the money in his sock, Officer Nathaniel Renteria wrote in the arrest warrant.Roanhaus had been the head football coach at the high school in the small, New Mexico western city of Gallup since 2018. He is the youngest son of New Mexico Hall of Fame coach Eric Roanhaus, who retired in 2016 as head football coach at Clovis High School after recording 343 wins, the most in state history.The mother told Renteria it wasn’t the first time that players had experienced thefts in the locker room.Roanhaus, 42, has been charged with larceny and non-residential burglary and ordered held on $2,000 bail. Police: High school coach lifted $40 from player's wallet Read the rest

Could an arrest be imminent? Was he planning to fly to Vienna, too? So many questions.

Giuliani dealings with associates scrutinized in ongoing investigation

Democratic House committee leaders have issued a subpoena to Donald Trump's Energy Secretary Perry for "key documents" as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.Three House chairmen sent Perry the subpoena.Here's a copy.[via NBC News, image: shutterstock]Dems are asking for a host of documents by Oct. 18, including over communications he had with Rudy about Ukraine. CNN reported this earlier: https://t.co/6ug3RFWTos— Manu Raju (@mkraju) October 10, 2019Oh hell, one more time. https://t.co/pZ0d3m6kFh pic.twitter.com/nMheaG9CQG— Schooley (@Rschooley) October 10, 2019 Read the rest

A judge today approved a $1 million bond in property and business for two associates of President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph Giuliani, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, along with mandatory home confinement and GPS monitoring.Parnas and Fruman remain in custody until those conditions are met.Their next hearing date is set for next Thursday afternoon in SDNY. They were been arrested on charges of conspiring to funnel money to U.S. politicians from overseas, and attempting to manipulate U.S.-Ukraine foreign relations, the just-unsealed indictment reveals.New filing in Fruman and Parnas case: Order to Unseal Indictmenthttps://t.co/96mTmqQKQH pic.twitter.com/VFxSKi4Lva— Big Cases Bot (@big_cases) October 10, 2019[Read the indictment: U.S. vs Lev Parnas et al.]Parnas and Fruman have reportedly been working with Giuliani to cook up opposition campaigns against Democratic presidential candidate and former VP Joe Biden, and The Washington Post reports the two men were arrested “Wednesday evening at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C., where they had one-way tickets on a flight out of the country.”Excerpt:The pair have been under investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. At an initial court appearance Thursday afternoon in Alexandria, Va., prosecutors said they were concerned Parnas and Fruman were flight risks, but that they would negotiate with their lawyers about a possible bail package.Wednesday’s arrests mark the first criminal charges to emerge out of the U.S. government’s suddenly controversial relationship with Ukraine — tying discussions about diplomacy to alleged violations of campaign finance law. Read the rest

Law school grads routinely go to work for crusading nonprofits and even those in private practice do pro bono work, thanks to a widespread understanding that lawyers have a professional duty to work for the public interest -- after all, understanding and navigating the law is a necessary precondition for freedom and fairness.Technology is another form of law, and a failure to understand tech can get us into real problems, especially at the policy level, where politicians' failures to come to grips with tech (sometimes deliberately, and sometimes due to a lack of good advice) produces all kinds of terrible outcomes.Bruce Schneier (previously) wants us to think about becoming "public interest technologists," who work for the public good, by advising lawmakers and policymakers, and by pursuing public interest goals in our technical work. Schneier defines the term and collects resources on the subject on public-interest-tech.com. You can hear him discuss it in depth with Mike Masnick on the Techdirt podcast.Schneier gave a brief, stirring talk on the subject at the Royal Society last month: it's 15 minutes long and well worth your time. Read the rest

Early versions of the free/open Unix variant BSD came with password files that included hashed passwords for such Unix luminaries as Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Eric Schmidt, Brian W. Kernighan and Stuart Feldman.Leah Neukirchen recovered an BSD version 3 source tree and posted about it on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, revealing that she was able to crack many of the weak passwords used by the equally weak hashing algorithm from those bygone days.Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie's was "dmac", Bourne's was "bourne", Schmidt's was "wendy!!!" (his wife's name), Feldman's was "axlotl", and Kernighan's was "/.,/.,".Four more passwords were cracked by Arthur Krewat: Özalp Babaoğlu's was "12ucdort", Howard Katseff's was "graduat;", Tom London's was "..pnn521", Bob Fabry's was "561cml.." and Ken Thompson's was "p/q2-q4!" (chess notation for a common opening move).BSD 3 used Descrypt for password hashing, which limited passwords to eight characters, salted with 12 bits of entropy. Descrypt limits passwords to just eight characters, a constraint that makes it all but impossible for end users to choose truly strong credentials. And the salt Descrypt uses provides just 12 bits of entropy, the equivalent of two printable characters. That tiny salt space makes it likely that large databases will contain thousands of hash strings that attackers can crack simultaneously, since the hash strings use the same salt.Jeremi M. Gosney, a password security expert and CEO of the password-cracking firm Terahash, told Ars that Descrypt is so weak and antiquated that one of his company’s 10-GPU Inmanis appliances (price: almost $32,000) could besiege a Descrypt hash with 14.5 billion guesses per second (the rigs can be clustered to achieve faster results). Read the rest

Attending todays Trump Minneapolis rally sounds like a really scary time.City Pages:So Republicans will be escorted to and from their cars. That duty will fall to Oath Keepers, a “patriot” group whose members fancy themselves as “guardians of the republic.” Or as the Southern Poverty Law Center calls them, “one of the largest radical anti-government groups in the U.S. today.”They are not the kind of people you want entering your city. Especially since they tend to be heavily armed.The group was launched in 2009 after—not coincidentally—we elected a black president. Its beliefs roughly mirrored the conspiracy theories of the day: that the black guy was preparing to invoke martial law. That he would take away your guns. That he would relegate patriots to detention camps.A decade later, it appears Obama forgot to execute his plot, likely because he never entertained it in the first place. Yet the Oath Keepers carry on, raising “Citizen Preservation” militias to defend against “global elitists” and fight the imaginary forces arrayed against them.Local PD warns people to take care:In the meantime, Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo seems prepared for the worst. He’s urging residents to not just avoid bringing firearms, knives, and sharp objects, but such innocent items as backpacks, coolers, and strollers. Read the rest

Pence is trying as hard as he can not to go down with the ship. pic.twitter.com/jrA8aoQSfb— Matt Rogers 🎙🎃 (@Politidope) October 10, 2019 NBC's Vaughn Hillyard refuses to let Mike Pence offer non-answers. Pence cannot answer the questions asked of him. Read the rest

Our friends at Futility Closet wrote this post about the Speech-to-Song Illusion:In 1995 UCSD psychologist Diana Deutsch was fine-tuning the spoken commentary on a CD when she noticed something odd. When the phrase “sometimes behave so strangely” was repeated on a loop, it came to sound as though it were being sung rather than spoken. When the full surrounding passage was then played in its entirety, this phrase still sounded as though it were being sung (you can hear this here).The phenomenon is not completely understood, but “the present experiments show that for a phrase to be heard as spoken or as sung, it does not need to have a set of physical properties that are unique to speech, or a different set of physical properties that are unique to song,” the researchers write. “Rather, we must conclude that, assuming the neural circuitries underlying speech and song are at some point distinct and separate, they can accept the same input, but process the information in different ways so as to produce different outputs.”The first few times I heard the narrator say "sometimes behave so strangely," I heard it as speech. Now, it is impossible for me to hear it as anything other than singing. Read the rest

Chanel Miller wrote a book called Know My Name, about her life before and after being sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, the sex criminal who was portrayed by the trial judge as a victim. She was interviewed on The Daily Show to promote her book.Image: The Daily Show Read the rest

We'll find a cloud to hide usWe'll keep the moon beside us Read the rest

Unicode includes six "zero-width characters" that are not visibly rendered in browsers (U+FEFF, U+200C, U+200D, U+200E, U+2060, U+180E) -- they're used for some specialized cases in rendering non-Roman alphabets.Inzerosight's browser extension allows you to insert and detect hidden messages encoded in zero-width characters; absent the plugin or a source-code inspection, these do not show up at all, not even when the text is highlighted.‌‎­‍­­‍⁠⁠‌᠎­​‌​​⁠‍‍​​᠎​⁠‌‌᠎‍⁠⁠‌᠎⁠⁠​‍‌‌‌‌⁠⁠‌​‌⁠​‌⁠᠎­​​‍‍​​⁠‌­​‍​‌​​᠎‍⁠​​­I may or may not have included some of this text in this post.inØsight [Planetrenox](via Hackaday) Read the rest

Sesame Street continues its run of excellent, empathetic new muppets to help kids deal with a changing world: after introducing muppets experiencing homelessness, living with autism, and explaining marriage without recourse to gender norms, the show has introduced a muppet whose mother lost custody of her after becoming addicted to drugs.The Sackler family got richer than the Rockefellers when their business, Purdue Pharma, used unethical and illegal tactics to sell their incredibly addictive opioid, Oxycontin. The epidemic has claimed more American lives than the Vietnam war, and it's left far more families broken and traumatized by addiction.The muppet, Karli, discusses her mother's addiction with ten year old Salia Woodbury, whose own parents have been in recovery for eight years. Karli's segments appear in Sesame Street Communities, a collection of online resources for families.Karli, introduced earlier this year as a muppet who was in foster care, will tell her story through the Sesame Street in Communities project, which offers free content online. The show creators said they wanted to focus on addiction because 5.7 million children under 11 years old live with a parent who struggles with a substance addiction, according to The Associated Press."How they're impacted by addiction is often something that we don't hear about or, more importantly, don't hear [in] a children's voice or perspective," NBC News reported Jeanette Betancourt, senior vice president for U.S. social impact at Sesame Workshop.Karli told NBC News that "I love my mom so much" but that "she couldn't take good care of me because she was having such a tough time."Sesame Street to reveal muppet's mom suffered from addiction [Justine Coleman/The Hill] Read the rest

For years a friend has been telling my diet was hurting my general demeanor. Last year I stopped ignoring her and switched to a diet more like what is described in this study.I will never be Mr. Cheerful, but it really did help.NPR:A randomized controlled trial published in the journal PLOS ONE finds that symptoms of depression dropped significantly among a group of young adults after they followed a Mediterranean-style pattern of eating for three weeks. Participants saw their depression "score" fall from the "moderate" range down to the "normal" range, and they reported lower levels of anxiety and stress too.Alternatively, the depression scores among the control group of participants — who didn't change their diets — didn't budge. These participants continued to eat a diet higher in refined carbohydrates, processed foods and sugary foods and beverages. Their depression scores remained in the "moderate severity" range."We were quite surprised by the findings," researcher Heather Francis, a lecturer in clinical neuropsychology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, told NPR via email. "I think the next step is to demonstrate the physiological mechanism underlying how diet can improve depression symptoms," Francis said.If a tiny piece of blotter can change your whole world outlook, everything else we eat must be pretty impactful too. Read the rest

I can not put down Shannon Messenger's Keeper of Lost Cities series. Lodestar continues Sophie Foster's waking nightmare.Sophie Foster thought she was human pre-teen. Sophie loved her family and her pet cat. She had no idea that in reality she was a genetically tweaked elf with super super-powers! Ever since she found out things have been off the hook bad, but somehow she perseveres. No matter how bad it gets, Sophie rises to the occasion and then it gets worse.After nearly destroying the Ogre capitol city in the last book,Lodestar picks up with one of Sophie's best friends, and budding love interests, betraying the cause and joining with the bad guys. He claims to be doing it for Sophie, and all living creates, but his Mom was the leader of the baddies and who knows what he is really up to!Sophie makes ridiculous decisions about who to trust and why. Much like W, she goes with her gut.Destroying the elf school where elf kids all learn their magical powers is just a start. Torture, immolation and wanton destruction follow as Lodestar leaves Sophie with little new information and several fewer people she can trust.More parents and parental figures lie to Sophie than die on her in book 5, so there is that.The novels are dancing towards Sophie picking a boyfriend! This seems to be momentous and cruel as elves apparently pick only once and are immortal. Big choice for a 12 or 13-year-old being constantly flirted with by every remotely age-appropriate boy. Read the rest

Ingvar Kamprad founded Ikea and invented some of the modern tax-evasion playbook, while amassing billions; despite this, he is lionized both in Sweden and abroad for his quirky frugality and the ubiquity of his stores and their products.But Kamprad was also a member and patron of the Swedish Nazi party, enlisting at 17 years old in 1943, as Member No. 4,014 of Swedish Socialist Unity (Sweden's Nazis). He was an active recruiter to the Nazi cause and brought in several friends to join the party. There's no record of Kamprad ever leaving the Swedish Nazis, and as an adult, he fell in with Per Engdahl and his Swedish fascist organization, the New Swedish Movement. He hosted fascist meetings in his home, published one of Engdahl's books, and had Engdahl give a speech at his wedding in 1951, and in correspondence, Kamprad and Engdahl called one another "BB" for "best brother."Engdahl was instrumental in smuggling Nazi war criminals out of Europe, and he knit together the post-WWII pan-European fascist network that encompassed fascists in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Denmark and Norway. He gathered the leaders of these movements together for a meeting in Malmo, and dubbed the outcome of this meeting the "Malmo Movement," AKA "Europäische Soziale Bewegung." The Movement published a Holocaust denial journal called Nation Europe, and Engdahl published a book that was the central text of the movement, called "The Renewal of the West" which Kamprad praised in a 1951 letter to Engdahl. Read the rest

On Saturday, Danny McDaniel was kayaking near Santa Catalina island off the southern California coast when he felt something big strike the side of his boat. It was a great white shark that Ben Frable, Marine Vertebrates Collection Manager at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography later estimated to be 17-20 feet long. How did they know how big it was? They measured the teeth left lodged in the kayak. From CNN:"I felt like I was being pushed like a toy in the water," said McDaniel, who lives in San Diego.The shark had sunk its teeth into the back end of the boat and pushed McDaniel around till he was face-to-face with (his kayaking partner in another boat)."The whole upper body of the shark was out of water," he said. "It was humongous."The shark soon let go and went deep into the water, according to McDaniel, who said the whole ordeal lasted about five seconds..."It is pretty amazing and encouraging that such large animals are still able to exist out there with fishing activities and human encroachment and environmental change," Frable said."Big individuals like these, especially if they are female, are very important for species' health and survival as they can produce and have produced more offspring than others." Read the rest

Open Concept is a new bar in St. Louis, Missouri where patrons make an appointment to visit and then pay by the hour to drink as much (or as little) as you'd like. The per-hour price is $10 but if you want top shelf booze, it jumps to $20/hour."At our bar we don't sell drinks, we sell time," states their website.From St. Louis magazine:Proprietor Michael Butler, the city's current recorder of deeds, got the idea from fundraising parties while running for office. “I would hold events where we charged by the hour for admission and have an open bar,” he recalls. “We got a lot of presale tickets online, and we created large-batch drinks in order to cut costs.” After a series of successful events, he imagined the same model could be applied to a business. He believes the price is "what the market can afford and will feel is a good value...."When patrons book their time at Open Concept, they create a profile and are assigned a confirmation code, which is used to place drink orders at the bar. Bartenders will only serve one drink per person at a time, and a proprietary point-of-sale system will track consumption. Butler says the system will scan driver’s licenses and use a patron’s height and weight to assign a number of drinks per hour to keep the bar in compliance with legal limits. Read the rest

Mike Winkelmann (homepage, behance) animated a few illustrative seconds of the immediate future: "ZUCKERBORG'S NIPPLE FREE TECHNO-UTOPIA"ZUCKERBORG'S NIPPLE FREE TECHNO-UTOPIA #everydays pic.twitter.com/nPGlLkemie— beeple (@beeple) October 9, 2019Here's another, starring that darn mouse.DISNEY PLUS #everydays pic.twitter.com/IhUV9dAama— beeple (@beeple) October 8, 2019Embedded below is a short movie he made in 2015, "Zero-Day" Read the rest

Designer/activist Mike Monteiro added a pointed pro-Union message to the cover of his new, print-on-demand book that Amazon workers would perhaps see when they print copies to ship to customers. The Amazon-specific cover to Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It made it through their approval process and is visible on the product page, for the moment anyway.From The Verge:While Monteiro says he’s sold over 10,000 copies of the book so far, only 150 paperbacks have been printed since he changed the cover, which isn’t a lot of opportunities for it to catch the right person’s eye.Monteiro says he was working on some union organizing when he came up with the idea: “We were discussing how to get messages in front of people and I realized ‘Oh, huh. I have this thing that Amazon workers see every time a book gets ordered. Let’s put a message there.’”Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It (Amazon)Every time you buy my book from Amazon, a warehouse worker has to pull it off the shelf. From now on, this is what that worker will see. At least until Amazon shitcans the whole thing. Hurry up. https://t.co/l5jxdz1azW pic.twitter.com/DqWZT5MI9q— Mike Monteiro (@monteiro) October 4, 2019 Read the rest

What's more fun than playing The Legend of Zelda? Not making Perler bead art of the characters and icons in the game, that's for sure. But Perler beading is enjoyable, in a non-creative way (unless you are using it to make art without a pattern, which makes it enjoyable and creative) . If you aren't familiar with Perler beads, they are small colored plastic beads. Each bead is like a pixel. You place the beads on a pegboard according to a pattern sheet, then fuse the beads together by running a hot iron over them. The Legend of Zelda Perler Bead Kit has 2000 beads, a pegboard, a pattern sheet with 12 designs, an ironing paper. You supply the iron. Read the rest

Here’s the trailer to The Life Cycle, a new podcast starting next week. Featuring renowned thinkers like Bryan Johnson of Kernel, Neural Signals’ Dr. Philip Kennedy, and many more, it’s an offbeat series about tech, transhumanism, future politics, brain uploads, and life as we do not yet know it.Hosted by writers John Holten and Eva Kelley, it’s a spinoff project of Seed, the upcoming space colony simulation MMO. (Watch the game teaser here.) The first season of The Life Cycle features experts interviewed during Seed’s development, turning their talks into a free-form conversation and soundscape about our future as a species. Subscribe here. Read the rest

I woke up this morning to two exciting announcements about crowdfunders for kid-oriented RPGs, which is outstanding news indeed: the first is a set of adventures for Martin Lloyd's superb Amazing Tales, a (four and up) kid-and-adult RPG that's endlessly fun and incredibly easy to get started with; the second is Destiny Dez, from Scott Wayne Indiana, last seen around here with his pacifist RPG Lotus Dimension, now back with an RPG for 3-8 year olds, in which "kids come up with their own plans to navigate situations before rolling a 20 sided die to decide their fate and move on in the story."I love RPGs for really little kids (when my daughter was a toddler, I created a stripped-down version of D&D to play with her, and Enrique Bertran did the same for his 4 year old).Amazing Tales (previously only available with a long fulfillment delay from a print-on-demand outlet, now available as a pre-printed book) was especially great when I took my daughter -- then nine -- on a book tour around Australia and New Zealand, it being a game that we could take from the airplane to the hotel room all the way to walking down the street (I kept a pocket full of dice for her to roll at key junctures). It's really exciting to see Lloyd back with a volume of pre-set adventures for the game, at €15 for a PDF and €25 for a hardcover.Meanwhile, Destiny Dez holds out the promise of gaming with kids as young as three years old, at $20 for a paperback and $28 for a hardcover, built around a hybrid of choose-your-own-adventures and imaginative play. Read the rest

Behold the master in enunciation outclass the mediocrities that surround him.Previously in Diabeetus: Cat resembling Wilford Brimley skilled in art of playing "death by diabeetus" Read the rest

An app used by Hong Kong protestors to track security forces there disappeared Wednesday from Apple's app store. Apple says it's being used by criminals to attack police, but given that it very publicly reviewed and approved the app just days ago, the true reason seems obvious: the Chinese government ordered it gone to stymie ongoing pro-democracy demonstrations in the autonomous city-state.The U.S. tech giant had come under fire from China over the app, with the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper calling the app “poisonous” and decrying what it said was Apple’s complicity in helping the Hong Kong protesters.Apple rejected the crowdsourcing app, HKmap.live, earlier this month but then reversed course last week.Apple said in a statement that it had began an immediate investigation after “many concerned customers in Hong Kong” contacted the company about the app and Apple found it had endangered law enforcement and residents.Apple joins a growing list of prominent American companies, including Activision-Blizzard and the NBA, to kowtow to the Chinese government. This year, reports Nikkei, China overtook the U.S. as the world's largest market for consumer goods. Read the rest

Whoever said you'd never need math to succeed in life clearly never sat down at a high-stakes poker table. When it comes right down to it, poker is a winnable game no matter where you play it - as long as you play the odds.There are time-honored strategies for playing those odds, tested by card sharks the world over. And if you want to make an already exciting game pay off for you, the Ultimate Poker Pro Blueprint Mastery Bundle is an invaluable resource that's an additional 20% off for October.Whether you play at the casino or on a laptop, this massive 11-course bundle teaches the skills you need to minimize your mistakes and capitalize on those of others. There are beginner courses that will teach you to read the odds at any table and build a stake in no time. Dedicated courses cover the peculiarities of online play at sites like PokerStars Zoom 2nl and various multi-table tournaments. You can even learn how to use PokerTracker4 and other tools to take the guesswork out of your game and start racking up the chips - virtual or otherwise.The Ultimate Poker Pro Blueprint Mastery Bundle is already on sale for 99% off the original cost of the individual courses, but you can take an extra 20% off that price by using the online code 20LEARN20 - for a final price of just $16.72. Read the rest

A series of identical monuments depicting a tourist being mauled by a pack of wolves have surreptitiously been installed in different New York City parks with plaques that read:Dedicated to the many tourists that go missing every year in New York City. And a reminder as to why the parks close at dusk. Erected by the Ed Koch Wolf Foundation and the NYC Fellowship.A brilliant prankster with mad sculpting skills is taking credit.His "Ed Koch Wolf Foundation" reveals the fabricated backstory behind the statues: In the late 1970s, New York Mayor Edward I. Koch launched an unprecedented campaign against subway graffiti. The city employed new guardians to patrol its vast train yards—wolves. Captured from upstate New York and set loose in various borough depots, the wolves successfully kept taggers at bay until anti-graffiti technology eliminated the need for the animals. At that point, the wolves migrated underground. Since then, wolf packs have survived and even thrived in New York’s labyrinthine tunnels, emerging in local parks only on occasion to hunt in the moonlight for live prey. In fact, the NYPD chalks up the majority of missing tourist reports each year to the city’s subterranean canine inhabitants. Today, The Ed Koch Wolf Foundation in partnership with the NYC Fellowship is erecting monuments in city parks to serve as cautionary reminders to out-of-town visitors. When in NYC, visit our many beautiful green districts. Just let these stunning statues remind you as to why we close our parks at night. Read the rest

Raytracing is a method for drawing scenes by modeling beams of light, illuminating and richocheting off objects. It's realistic but very slow, and only the newest and most expensive video cards [Amazon] introduce it to realtime games. MySQL is the most commonplace relational database, the sewer containing all the web's fatbergs, the last thing on earth you'd use for number-crunching graphics. Or ... is it? Behold the MySQL Raytracer, by Holtsetio.This is a raytracing engine contained in a single Mysql SELECT statement. In the beginning of the code there are a few parameters that can be modified. The scene can be specified using the @triangles and @squares parameters, but everything is explained in the comments. The whole query returns a bitmap file which can be written to the filesystem using the "INTO DUMPFILE" syntax at the end of the query, if mysql has filesystem write permissions.The raytracer supports shadows and reflections, which makes it, to my knowledge, the most advanced MySQL raytracer on the market right now. However, it is not really polished and kinda slow. Since I didn't really know how to present this work in a demoparty friendly way, I just included two finished renderings. Read the rest

Scientists in Queensland, Australia have pieced together the most complete pterosaur fossil collection yet—a big-headed reptile with a 12-foot wingspan they've named Ferrodraco lentoni, or "Butch's Iron Dragon.""It’s kind of scary when you think their heads are disproportionately large, it would have had a skull maybe 60cm," Adele Pentland from Swinburne University, the lead author on the study, told The Guardian. "To see it walking around on the ground it would have walked on four legs and looked really different to any kind of animal we have today." You can check out an artist's rendering of the derpy-looking lizard-bird here.The field of dinosaur research is in a bit of a renaissance period, with some three dozen new species discovered this year alone. More importantly: of course a flying mini-T-Rex was found in Australia of all places. After all, this is the land of such natural wonders as mutant eel-sharks, birds that weaponize fire, projectile bull semen, human-sized jellyfish, and more strange spiders than anyone ever wants to hear about, except for that guy who was bit on the penis not once but twice (and still hasn't gained any spider-penis super powers).In that context, it's frankly surprising that a flying T-Rex hadn't been discovered there until now.(Image via Luis Rey/Wikimedia Commons) Read the rest

[Before he was a crime writer, Alex Segura was busily overseeing the edgy, amazing reboot of Archie Comics. Now, he's murging his murder-mystery career with his comics life, in The Black Ghost, a new noir comics collaboration with Monica Gallagher. It's a delight to offer this conversation between Alex and Monica. -Cory]When we first announced plans to launch The Black Ghost - a crime/vigilante comic series from Comixology Originals, co-written by Monica and I, with art by George Kambadais, colors by Ellie Wright, letters by Taylor Esposito, and edits by Greg Lockard - we knew the kind of story we wanted to tell: a story about a woman overcoming her own demons to become the hero her city needs - vigilante mask and all. The crux of the narrative was about how our eventual hero, Lara Dominguez - a grizzled cops reporter that’s battling two obsessions: alcohol and her city, Creighton’s, lone vigilante, The Black Ghost - makes it from zero to hero. Our tale mixes elements from our own past works - including the acclaimed iHeart podcast, Lethal Lit, and our respective gigs writing the Pete Fernandez Miami Mysteries and the webcomic Assassin Roommate - with the tropes of the street-level vigilante genre: the fictional city, the masked protector, the eager sidekick. Blended together, the end result was The Black Ghost - a book that hopefully feels like the perfect balance between classic, gritty vigilante comics and hardboiled crime fiction.ALEX SEGURA: First off, have you been surprised by the response to the book? Read the rest

Terumasa Ikeda uses lacquer and bits of mother of pearl to create surreal sculptures. He demonstrates the painstaking process in this video:The results look like code given solid form:(H/T @MasakiSe.) Read the rest

NPR reports a real life X-File: someone (or something!) drained the blood from cattle at Silvies Valley Ranch in eastern Oregon:The bull looks like a giant, deflated plush toy. It smells. Weirdly, there are no signs of buzzards, coyotes or other scavengers. His red coat is as shiny as if he were going to the fair, but he's bloodless and his tongue and genitals have been surgically cut out.Over the course of a few days, more mutilated bulls were discovered:four more Hereford bulls were found within 1.5 miles in the same condition. There were no tracks around the carcasses.To date, the investigation has mostly just eliminated possibilities such as poisonous plants or bullets being the cause of death. Perhaps overlooking the public's enthusiasm for Westworld-style adventures, the ranch does not seem to have added the ongoing investigation to its list of activities. Read the rest

Ellen DeGeneres's friendship with ex-President George W. Bush became controversial this week, in light of the progressive values she claims and the 600,000 corpses left by his occupation of Iraq. She delivered a monologue on her show in response, casting their friendship as an example of civility, overcoming political differences, and having "faith in America". So Rafael Shimunov added a simple backdrop of Iraq war scenes to her monolog, in the hopes DeGeneres might better understand the complaints. In response, copyright takedown notices flew and it was removed from the 'net, so it is at least getting under her skin. Here's a copy, which I'll update if and when it disappears.Not one word of hers is changed, and there are no misleading or misrepresentative edits to her performance. Only the backdrop is changed, so that it now shows scenes of abuse, atrocity and horror from her friend's ruinous war instead of the blue studio wall.The video is transformative and offers clear editorial comment, so its creator could certainly avail himself of a fair use defense in court. But social media is not the courts, and the companies running the platforms tend to side quickly with takedown requests and respond slowly to counterclaims.The Streisand Effect, however, is something celebs and their agents can rarely control: countless social media users are reposting the remix in response to its disappearance, spreading it far wider than Shimunov could have ever hoped.Thanks to Ellen DeGeneres' chilling of my antiwar criticism by filing fraudulent copyright claims on my video with 10K views, people are reuploading all over Twitter for a now collective 300K (and growing) views faster than @andylassner can file false claims. Read the rest

Oregon Zoo posted a collection of X-ray images of animals taken at its Veterinary Medical Center, reavealing "the inner gothy beauty of animals." [h/t Steven Glista]See if you can guess the beasties; then hit the Zoo's Twitter thread for answers (and more beasties). Read the rest

Australian politics are a revolting mess of unstable governments dominated by xenophobic, climate-denying far-right oligarchs, and the only check on their power is the fact that Australian governments are so riven by internal strife and unhinged authoritarianism that they tend to collapse on a quarterly basis, triggering new elections and/or leadership contests.But the Aussie oligarch class are persistent: sometimes, they can actually get policies and laws that suit their needs enacted, as happened in late 2018, when the country banned working cryptography, or last June, when cops and spies staged a series of armed raids on journalists who'd reported on leaks that revealed official corruption.So it's perhaps not surprising that the country's annual flagship cybersecurity conference, the annual conference of the Australian Information Security Association, has become mired in a censorship scandal.This year, AISA opted to co-organise its annual conference with the Australian Cyber Security Centre, a creature of the same spy agencies that led the crackdown on whistleblowers in June.But the ACSC has a very different set of priorities to AISA, which is why it insisted on the cancellation of multiple invited talks at the show, including Thomas Drake, a celebrated NSA whistleblower who was scheduled to give a talk on "the golden age of surveillance, both government and corporate"; and the University of Melbourne's Dr Suelette Dreyfus whose cancelled lecture was on "anonymous whistleblowing technologies like SecureDrop and how they reduce corruption in countries where that is a problem."Both speakers have posted their slides, and Bruce Schneier, who gave a keynote at the conference, opened his talk by reading the URLs aloud. Read the rest

SQL Murder Mystery is a free/open game from Northwestern University's Knight Lab that teaches the player SQL database query structures and related concepts while they solve imaginary crimes.It was inspired by The Command Line Murders, a murder mystery game that teaches you to master Unix command-line syntax.I love this kind of thing so much. Learning the abstruse syntaxes of power-users, network administrators and programmers gives users so much power over the computers they use.SQL Murder Mystery [NU Knight Lab/Github](via Four Short Links) Read the rest

Modern Monetary Theory (previously) is an economic philosophy based on the idea that all state spending is "deficit" spending, since money comes into existence when the government spends it, and when the government raises taxes, it does so in order to take that money out of existence, both in order to control inflation and to limit the concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy.The corollaries of this are many, but the two standout ones are:1. The government can create money to buy any good or service that the private sector isn't using without driving inflation (that is, if there's someone unemployed and the government gives them a job, that won't drive up wages because the private sector had already passed on using their labor, so the supply/demand ratio of labor to private jobs remains constant), offering full employment to everyone who wants to work; and2. The government can create money to buy goods and services that the private sector is currently using without creating inflation, provided it can convince people not to spend that money -- for example, by creating "war bonds" that sequester the vast sums that get pumped into the economy during wartime, to prevent the workers who receive those sums from bidding against the materials that are being used in munitions factories.These two facts are central to the Green New Deal, which proposes using a combination of a federal jobs guarantee and federal procurements of the materials needed for a sustainable energy conversion and climate change remediation to avert the climate crisis. Read the rest

Assuming facts not in evidence is a time-honored courtroom objection, and one which could be stamped on almost every page of this week’s tawdry tabloids.

This summer on remote U.S. Forest Service land in eastern Oregon, cowboys discovered five, young purebred bulls dead, drained of blood, and their tongues and genitals removed with almost surgical precision. Who or what did this and why remains a mystery. (Insert "I'm not saying it's aliens..." joke here.) Silvies Valley Ranch has offered a $25,000 reward for information that could lead to answers. From National Public Radio:"A lot of people lean toward the aliens," (Harney County Sheriff's Deputy Dan) Jenkins says. "One caller had told us to look for basically a depression under the carcass. 'Cause he said that the alien ships will kinda beam the cow up and do whatever they are going to do with it. Then they just drop them from a great height."Jenkins says the cases have been tough, with little evidence and no credible leads.On his whiteboard, he has a running list scrawled in green marker with the top theories. What's clear: It isn't bears, wolves, cougars or poisonous plants. Nor were the animals shot.The FBI won't confirm or deny that it's looking into the multiple slaughters.image: Silvies Valley Ranch Read the rest

In the early 1980s, Susan Kare joined Apple Computer to design fonts and user interface graphics. A legend of pixel art, Kare created the look of the original Macintosh, from the Chicago typeface to the Trash Can to the Happy Mac icon. She's currently creative director at Pinterest. David Kindy profiles Kare in Smithsonian:Pioneering designer Susan Kare was taught by her mother how to do counted-thread embroidery, which gave her the basic knowledge she needed to create the first icons for the Apple Macintosh 35 years ago.“It just so happened that I had small black and white grids to work with,” she says. “The process reminded me of working needlepoint, knitting patterns or mosaics. I was lucky to have had a mother who enjoyed crafts..."Designing the icons proved to be more of a challenge (than the typefaces). Reproducing artwork on those primitive CRT surfaces, which used a bit-mapped matrix system with points of light, or pixels, to display data, was a designer’s nightmare.However, the friend who recommended Kare for the job—-Andy Hertzfeld, then lead software architect for Macintosh-—had an idea. Since the matrix was essentially a grid, he suggested Kare get the smallest graph paper she could find. She then blocked out a 32-by-32 square and began coloring in squares to create the graphics...After leaving Apple in 1986, Kare became creative director for Apple cofounder Steve Jobs at the short-lived NeXT, Inc., an influential computer startup that was eventually acquired by Apple. She founded her own eponymous design firm in 1989, which created graphic designs for hundreds of clients, including Autodesk, Facebook, Fossil, General Magic, IBM, Microsoft and PayPal. Read the rest

Efteling is an amazing Dutch theme park about an hour outside of Amsterdam; while it deploys many of the same technologies as Disney-style parks, it has a completely different affect, centered around small, homely, perfect little jewel-box rides that bring fairy tales to life.Case in point: the new Elisa and the Six Swans ride, which uses swan-boats as ride vehicles to bring visitors into a set of watery caverns for a brief, soft-focus encounter with a detailed and lovely animatronic, followed by a short denouement. It's a huge investment in a very short, very sweet experience, the kind of thing that's motivated by equal parts craft and business.(Thanks, Dan!) Read the rest

The green cardigan that Kurt Cobain wore during Nirvana's classic MTV Unplugged performance in 1993 (see above) will be on the auction block at the end of the month. The sweater last changed hands following a November 2015 auction, selling for $137,500. This time, the minimum bid is set for $200,000 and it's expected to go for more than $300,000. It has not been washed. “It’s very important that we don’t wash it,” Darren Julien of Julien’s Auctions said in Rolling Stone. “The stains are still there. There’s even cigarettes burns that you can see on the sweater.”From Julien's Auctions:The Manhattan brand sweater is a blend of acrylic, mohair and Lycra with five-button closure (one button absent) with two exterior pockets, a burn hole and discoloration near left pocket and discoloration on right pocket. Size medium. The sweater was obtained from Jackie Farry, a close friend of the Cobain family, and is accompanied by both a handwritten letter and a typed, signed letter from Farry. Read the rest