California's Assembly Bill 5 isn't radical: it merely affirms the obvious fact that Uber and Lyft drivers (and other "gig economy" workers) are employees, something that the California Supreme Court already made obvious in the Dynamex decision.However, it does mean that the bezzle that is Uber and Lyft is in deep, deep shit. Having to treat their employees like employees is antithetical to their business-model, which is basically a Ponzi scheme that redistributes cash from later investors and drivers (especially those who don't know how to calculate depreciation or read a predatory car-lease) to the early money into the companies.And here's the amazing thing: it looks like AB5 is going to pass. This situation has Uber and Lyft so scared that they've offered to pay drivers $21/h (but only when they've got passengers), offer paid sick-leave, and allow drivers to "have a collective voice" (a usefully ambiguous phrase that may refer to the unions drivers are trying to form, or maybe to the company's practice of forcing drivers to go to arbitration rather than suing). It's too little, too late. State legislature watchers in Sacramento say AB5 is going to pass, and that means that the Uber/Lyft Ponzi is a little closer to its inevitable implosion.Still, California’s passage of AB5 could have a domino effect that inspires other states to codify their own ABC misclassification tests, said Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney who represented thousands of drivers in a class action suit against Uber. But it will run into strong resistance from Uber and Lyft, which have deep pockets to spend on lobbying and public relations campaigns. Read the rest

One of the most obvious facts I've learned in covering the unfolding scandal of the secret deals between Amazon's Ring surveillance doorbell group and hundreds of US police departments is that Amazon loooooves to play word-games.For example, I've been repeatedly emailed by company spokespeople to tell me that cops only get access to Ring customers' videos if the customers offer to share it; but what they never said is that if a customer turns down a police request, Amazon instructs the cops to make an "official request" to the company and then they grant warrantless access to the footage.This kind of deceptive practice really is business-as-usual for the company: last week, the company tweeted at the ACLU to accuse them of posting something "misleading" when they said that Ring uses facial recognition with the footage it captures, and a Ring spokesperson (anonymous, as is inevitably the case with Ring, whose spokespeople have to be cajoled, pushed and wheedled to put their names to their statements to the press) told Buzzfeed that "Ring is not Rekognition and does not work with Rekognition" (Rekognition is Amazon's creepy, low-reliability facial recognition flagship product). Maybe that's true, but you know what's also true? There's a dude at Ring Ukraine named Oleksandr Obiednikov whose title is "head of face recognition researchm" and who has given conference talks on how facial recognition can integrate with products like Ring. The company's filed multiple facial recognition patents, and its terms of service allow it to use the video from your doorbell to train facial recognition systems. Read the rest

Apple was at the vanguard of the massive corporate spending that killed Right to Repair bills in 20 state legislatures last year, and while the company claims that it wants to protect its users from evil repair dudes who secretly hack their devices while claiming to fix them, Apple's CEO's frank warning to investors that profits are expected to slide if people keep fixing their Iphones instead of replacing them points at a much more likely answer.Now, Apple has announced that it is going to supply original parts to indie repair shop, and once again, the company has declared that it is simply looking out for its customers by helping ensure that they get original parts, not janky counterfeits.But as Karl Bode writes at Techdirt, this is just as transparent as Apple's campaign against last year's Right to Repair bills: the company is hoping to head off the bills that will be introduced this year. Access to parts is just one of the standard demands in Right to Repair legislation, along with access to diagnostic codes (including codes needed to bypass DRM without having to risk DMCA liability by breaking it) and repair manuals. Meanwhile, Apple has reserved for itself a veto over which independent repairers can access the official parts.Note also that Apple has a long history of equating refurbished parts and "donor parts" harvested from broken units or deadstock with "counterfeits," even though they were originally made and sold by Apple. The secondary market for these parts increases the value of devices to their owners, diverts electronics from the e-waste stream, and supports a market of small-and-medium refurbishers, importers, scrappers and other occupations that support broad prosperity for people who fix and make stuff, not just shareholders who own stuff. Read the rest

Illegitimate, popular vote losing President Donald Trump's spokeslackey and vice president Mike Pence visited Ireland on official United States business this week, and did so in a way that will personally enrich Donald Trump and his idiot spawn. For reasons no one can figure out, Pence stayed the night at the Trump Doonbeg resort, which was 150 miles away from the vice president's meetings in Dublin. Said Mike Pence to a reporter:"If you have a chance to get to Doonbeg you'll find it's a fairly small place, the opportunity to stay at Trump National in Doonbeg, to accommodate the unique footprint that comes with our security detail and other personnel made it logical."The decision to stay at a Trump-owned golf resort instead of a hotel near the VP's official meetings meant Pence spent 4 four in transit today, back and forth. It doesn't make any sense. It couldn't be that he did this for corrupt reasons, could it? What is he doing in this bonkers video clip, improvising an advertisement for Trump's privately owned luxury resort? Is this happening?.@VP Pence in Ireland: "If you have a chance to get to Doonbeg you'll find it's a fairly small place, the opportunity to stay at Trump National in Doonbeg, to accommodate the unique footprint that comes with our security detail and other personnel made it logical." pic.twitter.com/yqOSjKt9M3— CSPAN (@cspan) September 3, 2019Trump encouraged Pence to stay at his golf resort in Ireland, the Washington Post reports. Read the rest

Pentagon said to be reappropriating $3.6B from military construction projects to pay for section of Trump's stupid wall

Supermajority's Gender Equality, the Status of Women and the 2020 Elections surveys likely 2020 voters (N=1912), finds a strong correlation between opposition and broad misogynistic beliefs, such as opposition to the idea that women and men should hold an equal number of positions of power; opposition to the #MeToo movement; a disbelief in the idea that access to birth control affects women's power in society (likewise, skepticism that the lack of woman role models in powerful positions is significant). Pro-lifers are also substantially more likely to say that women are "easily offended" and prone to interpreting innocent acts or words as sexist; only 34% of pro-lifers believe that increasing the number of women in public office would improve the nation's politics. Next, do the overlap between "pro lifers" and people who blame migrant parents for their children being imprisoned, tortured, raped and murdered in ICE detention.Remember, for many Republicans:1. Life begins at conception; and2. Ends at birth; and3. Can be renewed by forming an anonymous LLC.Do men make better political leaders than women? More than half of anti-abortion voters agreed. Do you want there to be equal numbers of men and women in positions of power in America? Fewer than half of abortion opponents said yes – compared with 80% of pro-choicers, who said they want women to share in power equally.Anti-abortion voters don’t like the #MeToo movement. They don’t think the lack of women in positions of power impacts women’s equality. They don’t think access to birth control impacts women’s equality. Read the rest

Boris Johnson defied on Brexit by Parliament, UK PM loses key no-deal vote

In my latest Recomendo newsletter (subscribe here!) I wrote about my travel packing list. It’s a PDF that can be edited in Adobe Illustrator (because I don’t expect anyone to pack the same things I do). As you can see, my list is broken down into sublists of different bags: charger bag, meds bag, tool bag, etc. I keep the stuff in these excellent Japanese mesh zipper bags. Now I don’t forget important things any more like I used to. I recommend that you make a similar packing list for yourself. Read the rest

The United States military first started using code talkers during The First World War. They were aboriginal soldiers fluent in the languages of the Cherokee and Choctaw peoples who were tasked with speaking in their native tongues to secure voice and communications from an all-too-likely eavesdropping enemy. It wasn’t until they were deployed with the Marine Corps during World War II, however, that code talkers became the legends they’re remembered as, today.From Wikipedia:There were two code types used during World War II. Type one codes were formally developed based on the languages of the Comanches, Hopies, Meskwakis, and Navajos. They used words from their languages for each letter of the English alphabet. Messages could be encoded and decoded by using a simple substitution cipher where the ciphertext was the native language word. Type two code was informal and directly translated from English into the native language. If there was no word in the native language to describe a military word, code talkers used descriptive words. For example, the Navajo did not have a word for submarine so they translated it to iron fish.Today, there are only five code Navajo code talker veterans of the Marine Corps left in the world: Joe Vandever Sr., Peter MacDonald, Samuel F. Sandoval, John Kinsel Sr., and Thomas H. Begay. Arizona Central’s* Shondiin Silversmith has done the Navajo Nation and all future generations a great service by collecting the stories of these five brave men in text and video.Taking a browse of Silversmith’s feature is well worth your time: take a few moments to remember a handful of brave men who sacrificed their youth and, in far too many cases, their lives, to fend off fascism. Read the rest

The protestors in Hong Kong, leery of state eavesdropping on digital communications, have been adept at using communications tools not normally associated with activism, like Tinder, Twitch, and Apple's Airdrop (previously). The latter one, being peer-to-peer over local wifi, has particular advantages in avoiding scrutiny, since you have to be physically nearby to intercept a message.Now, in the same vein, it appears the protestors are using mesh-networking tech -- courtesy the messaging app Bridgefy. It uses bluetooth to let people pass messages from one phone to another within a few hundred feet; and since the app installations mesh with each other, you can daisy-chain messages to recipients even further away, so long as they're inside the mesh.These days, Bridgefy mostly licenses its backend tech to other app-makers, offering it as way to keep apps working if the Internet isn't available. But their original messaging app is still available (Iphone and Android), and in the last few weeks Hong Kong protestors have begun massively using it -- with over 75,000 downloads last week alone, according to this interview in Latam List:LL: How is Bridgefy helping protestors communicate in Hong Kong? JR: Although we are focusing more on the software now, our original app is still live and available for download. Actually, we use the app to test out our new technology! We have noticed an organic boost in app downloads during massive events like protests or natural disasters because Bridgefy works best when there are more people on the network – the opposite of Wifi or cellular networks. Read the rest

This Candy Chemistry set is a great way to learn about candy with your kid, in the kitchen. Do not, however, leave your kid alone with this Candy Chemistry set.Learn all about candy, and temperature control, in your own kitchen. This kit comes with almost everything you'll need to make quite a few delicious treats, all posed as science experiments. This is what makes cooking fun, for me and I hope it'll inspire other kids to learn to cook!Leaving a 12-year-old alone with this can create a huge mess in the kitchen, and should the child be so daring, burnt sugar all over the place.Candy Chemistry by Thames & Kosmos via Amazon Read the rest

Here's a beautiful NASA music video and photo montage with awe-inspiring shots from ISS Expedition 56. This gorgeous Earth-view “eye candy” music video features images captured by astronaut Ricky Arnold while on the International Space Station during his increment, ISS Expedition 55/56. As “Astro Ricky” tweeted:There are times when it is helpful to take a step back and take in the big picture. Thank you @Space_Station, @irvinmayfieldjr, @HaleyReinhart and @KermitRuffins for reminding us that we are all in this together. #Expedition56 pic.twitter.com/85NQ24yvum— Ricky Arnold (@astro_ricky) August 30, 2019Music:Song: Beautiful World [for Imani]Artist: Kermit Ruffins, Irvin Mayfield[via NASA Johnson Space Center] Read the rest

Via Youtube and The Ontario Provincial Police:A public safety film narrated by Peter Fonda with special guest Evel Knievel who provide safety tips and guidance for motorcycle riders. Features performance riding by the Los Angeles Police Department. (OPP Museum accession number 2012.51.5)Credits and Copyright: Filmfair Communications Incorporated (1973) Read the rest

Persia Beheshti made this short film about a community of mermaids in Virginia. It's narrated by one of the mermaids, Mermaid Undine.Image: Vimeo/Persia Beheshti[via Nag on the Lake] Read the rest

Any list of great video game soundtrack list that does not include THPS is bunk. Tony Hawk is measurably one of the coolest people to ever walk the Earth and this soundtrack wins.Halo and the Gregorian chant thing. Chills. Halo 3 might be better, tho.Space Harrier. Meant to be played at a motion-enhanced sit-down machine.If Tony Hawk is he coolest guy ever in a video game, Parappa is a close second. Read the rest

Tyler Cowen of Reason used the occasion of the release of Neal Stephenson's new novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell to interview him about what he thinks on a wide variety of topics, including surveillance, clothing of the future, and the rise of algorithmic decision making.In your books, you saw some of the downsides of social media earlier than most people did. What's the worst-case scenario, and why do many people think they're screwing things up?I think we're actually living through the worst-case scenario right now. I think our civil institutions were founded upon an assumption that people would be able to agree on what reality is, agree on facts, and that they would then make rational, good-faith decisions based on that. They might disagree as to how to interpret those facts or what their political philosophy was, but it was all founded on a shared understanding of reality. And that's now been dissolved out from underneath us, and we don't have a mechanism to address that problem.But what's the fundamental problem there? Is it that decentralized communications media intrinsically fail because there are too many voices? Is there something about the particular structure of social media now?The problem seems to be the fact that it's algorithmically driven, and that there are no humans in the loop making editorial, curatorial decisions about what is going to be disseminated on those networks. So it's very easy for people who are acting in bad faith to game that system and produce whatever kind of depiction of reality best suits them. Read the rest

Hassan Akhtar attempted to send a shipment from the UK to Pakistan of 5,000 tablets of MDMA hidden inside, ahem, Celebrations tubs of assorted chocolate. Now that's a party! From BBC News:Police said the drugs were discovered by the postal company in tubs of Celebrations chocolates and Akhtar was later identified by CCTV footage.Det Sgt Rob Hood said the defendant was "clearly looking to profit" from selling drugs and "thought by concealing them in chocolate tubs that they would not be detected". Read the rest

Here's a perfect frame from the UK parliament's video feed. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Secretary of State Andrea Leadsom and Home Secretary Sajid Javid are realizing one of their MPs is crossing the aisle to defect to the Liberal Democrats, costing the Conservatives their parliamentary majority.The BBC:Conservative MP Phillip Lee has defected to the Liberal Democrats ahead of a showdown between Boris Johnson and Tory rebels over Brexit.Dr Lee, the MP for Bracknell, took his seat on the opposition benches as the PM addressed the Commons.His defection means Boris Johnson no longer has a working majority in the House of Commons.He said the government was "pursuing a damaging Brexit in unprincipled ways... putting lives and livelihoods at risk". Read the rest

Dark patterns are sneaky tricks websites use to fool users into doing things they don't want to do. This video and glossary describes a number of the manipulative ruses and gives some examples.ConfirmshamingThe act of guilting the user into opting into something. The option to decline is worded in such a way as to shame the user into compliance.Forced ContinuityWhen your free trial with a service comes to an end and your credit card silently starts getting charged without any warning. In some cases this is made even worse by making it difficult to cancel the membership.Sneak into BasketYou attempt to purchase something, but somewhere in the purchasing journey the site sneaks an additional item into your basket, often through the use of an opt-out radio button or checkbox on a prior page.Roach MotelYou get into a situation very easily, but then you find it is hard to get out of it (e.g. a premium subscription).Image: YouTube Read the rest

Satellite monitoring company ICEYE composed this image, based upon satellite shots of the storm-drenched Bahamas, which shows how much of Grand Bahama went underwater as Hurricane Dorian arrived. The yellow lines show the normal coastline and the white lines show the streets of Freeport, the main town there.Here's the Bahamas on Google Maps, for reference:#HurricaneDorian has affected Bahamas heavily on Monday, with vast areas hit with #flooding, including the Grand Bahama International Airport, Freeport. ICEYE #SAR satellite image from 11:44AM local time. Please, stay safe! (Y: coastline. W: roads. Source: OpenStreetMap.) pic.twitter.com/ruXau8QhKn— ICEYE (@iceyefi) September 2, 2019 Read the rest

This weekend, police were called to an Ikea store in Glasgow, Scotland when employees learned that thousands of people had signed up on Facebook to play an unauthorized game of hide-and-seek in the maze-like building. According to The Scotsman, "groups of youths who looked like they were only there for the game were turned away from the shop.
" From The Scotsman:The trend for using Ikea’s giant warehouses for games began in Europe a few years ago - and has seen people hiding in fridges, under beds and in the firm’s big blue shopping bags.

..However in 2015, IKEA was forced to impose a ban because the events were getting out of control.

Citing health and safety a spokesman explained: ‘We need to make sure people are safe, and that’s hard if we don’t know where they are.’

Rob Cooper, IKEA Glasgow Store Manager said: “The safety of our customers and co-workers is always our highest priority. We were aware of an unofficial Hide and Seek Facebook event being organised to take place at our store today and have been working with the local police for support.



“While we appreciate playing games in one of our stores may be appealing to some, we do not allow this kind of activity to take place to ensure we are offering a safe environment and relaxed shopping experience for our customers.”"Police called to Scottish IKEA after thousands sign up for hide and seek" (The Scotsman)image: Google Maps Read the rest

From the headline, you're probably expecting some AI-powered, creepily realistic image of a person who either doesn't exist or isn't really in the photo. #Faces, though, is all about old-timey hand-drawn cartoon faces, with a technical eye on having them drawn on plotters. Refresh for a random one, or fiddle with the sliders; I got this Tove Jansson-esque character on the first go. Read the rest

Journalism is a tough job, especially when they won't pick up the phone! Read the rest

PETA installed an old-fashioned protest billboard adjacent to the Ohio Renaissance Festival that opened this weekend in Waynesville. The animal rights activists consider the classic Renaissance faire fare of an oversized turkey leg to be distasteful, to say the least. From WLWT5:The billboard -- placed near the fairgrounds and showing a turkey's face -- reads "Ye Can Live Without Yon Turkey Leg. I Cannot. Go Vegan Forthwith!"Officials with PETA said they're urging festival-goers to switch from a turkey leg to a falafel, hummus or corn on the cob..."PETA erects billboard protesting turkey legs at Ohio Renaissance Fest" (WLWT5, thanks Charles Pescovitz!) Read the rest

Last week Trump infamously suggested nuking hurricanes. Loopy, of course -- but it also put me in mind of a similarly bananas idea from 1965: Using nukes to dig ditches and excavate earth.As Matt Novak notes in the Paleofuture vertical at Gizmodo, Athelstan Spilhaus -- a scientist and educator -- wrote the comic "Atomic Ditch Digging", and got it published in US newspapers on July 4, 1965.A screenshot:Spilhaus was pretty stoked about it, as Novak notes:“For an explosion equivalent to 2 million tons of TNT, chemical explosives would cost $2 million, nuclear just $600,000!” the strip exclaimed.The strip went on to explain that by placing a small nuclear device, just 4 feet in diameter, inside Earth, the explosion would be entirely safe. Or, that was what they claimed anyway.“Most of the radioactivity could be kept underground so that workers could go into the craters within a week or two and people live nearby within a year,” the comic strip said.The last panel of the strip explained that a “second Panama Canal” could be dug for “a tenth of the cost of doing it mechanically.” If only President Teddy Roosevelt had been able to use nuclear bombs in the first decade of the 20th century, right? Go check the rest of Novak's post at Paleofuture to see the other scans from that comic. They're quite something! Now I want a t-shirt with just that image of a shovel bedecked with an atomic symbol. Read the rest

One of my favorite genres of book is the popular engineering book, a rare breed that combines physics and engineering to establish the full range of ways to address a problem (for example, if you want to talk about whether solar can ever replace fossil fuels, it's useful to know how many photons penetrate the Earth's atmosphere every day); no one does this genre better (or funnier) than Randall Munroe, the creator of the wonderful XKCD webcomic, whose 2014 book, What If? combines Dear Abby with extreme physics ("How fast would a human have to run in order to be cut in half at the bellybutton by a cheese-cutting wire?"); now there's a companion volume, How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, which picks up where What If? left off.How To's premise is about as Munrovian as it gets: take a simple task, imagine the most ridiculous, scientifically plausible way of doing it, research the underlying scientific, legal, social and technical questions in eye-watering detail, then deliver all this in an absolute deadpan, livened by his trademark stick-figure drawings.It's a kind of competence porn for people who love Rube Goldberg machines: for example, Munroe contemplates what it would take to build a "lava moat" of molten rock around your house, which sends him down not just one, but several rabbit-holes, from considering the heat output from a square meter of lava under both still and windy conditions; the human "rapid pain threshold" as applied to a notional moat; the relative costs of maintaining lava in a molten state; various cooling and insulation techniques that would maintain a human-habitable environment in the house surrounded by the moat; and, finally, what do to about the jellyfish that will inevitably clog the intakes on any seawater-based cooling system. Read the rest

This is a lot of fun. Katrin and Janine, a couple of Swiss gals, recreated the sequences where Homer Simpson eats his way through New Orleans. It even impressed the animators of The Simpsons.Eric Koenig:"Hey! Just wanted you to know, we here at The Simpsons Animation Studio saw your video and were blow away! And also hope you don't have heartburn from all that eatin'!"(tmn, Nag on the Lake) Read the rest

When the Hendrickson brothers started selling bibles out of their parents' home in Massachusetts almost 40 years ago, they likely had no idea their business would go on to become the world's largest retailer of Christian products with its own 300,000 square foot warehouse. And they definitely had no idea the declassification of hemp as a controlled substance would force their company to rebrand.Christian Book Distributors, long referred to as CBD, was renamed Christianbook earlier this summer in order to distinguish itself from the tsunami of CBD (cannabidiol) products that have flooded the country. CBD is everywhere (including our store!) and in dozens of forms, including gummies, ice cream, lotions, and vapes. But it doesn't come in bibles (yet) and that has caused a lot of confusion for the Hendrickson brothers' company.After decades of being known by the name CBD, Mr. Hendrickson’s company, which is based in Peabody, Mass., rebranded itself last month as Christianbook. Mr. Hendrickson, the company’s president and chief executive, said it was getting too confusing.“A person may call up and say, ‘Hey, I’m looking for my order,’” Mr. Hendrickson said. “It’s like, ‘What did you order? Oh, I ordered gummies. You don’t have the right company.’”The CBD popularity surge has even affected the retailer's search engine results, knocking it off of Google's main page and burying it deep within the search returns. While the retailer is working hard to scrub all references to CBD from its website, there's one CBD item it's not getting rid of anytime soon. Read the rest

This totally excellent computer animated television commercial for Hawaiian Punch was created in 1987 by Omnibus/Abel, the ill-fated company born from the merger of Omnibus Computer Graphics with computer animation pioneer Robert Abel's Abel and Associates. From Vintage CG:Rarely seen is this full 90 second version.... Music is by Mark Mothersbaugh (of DEVO), who later admitted to embedding a subliminal message: "Sugar is bad for you."Excerpts from the commercial later turned up in the classic computer animation VHS compilation "Beyond the Mind’s Eye," the content of which you can enjoy below: Read the rest

The potholes are the size of craters on the roads of the Indian city of Bengaluru. So, artist Baadal Nanjundaswamy put actor Poornachandra Mysore into a spacesuit to "moonwalk" on them. Bengaluru, we have a problem. Read the rest

The Singapore Police Force arrested a man at Changi airport for buying a plane ticket just to walk his wife to the gate and say goodbye. He apparently had no intention of flying anywhere. It does sound like a lovely airport to visit but I hope he purchased a fully-refundable ticket. From CNN:Anyone accessing the gate-side areas at Changi without intending to fly can be prosecuted under Singapore's Infrastructure Protection Act and fined up to S$20,000 (US$14,300) or imprisoned for up to two years. Thirty three people have been arrested under the legislation in the first eight months of 2019...When Changi's new Jewel terminal opened in April, it made headlines around the globe for its 40-meter waterfall (the world's largest indoor one), a 14,000-square-meter Canopy Park, complete with a suspension bridge, topiary and mazes, and one of Asia's largest indoor gardens with 3,000 trees and 60,000 shrubs. Read the rest

I got told by a friend as I described what I was having for lunch "enjoy your sandwich". With the way that my brain works, I instantly heard, insdie of my skull Bruce Springsteen singing Warren Zevon's My Ride's Here from the Enjoy Every Sandwich tribute album that popped after Zevon's death in 2003. This, in turn led me to a wicked heartache over the fact that there will never be another Warren Zevon tune brought into this world.Listening to him play Play it All Night, acted as a bit of a balm against that pain. I'm pretty sure that this video would have been snagged by some lucky audience members attending the concert tour where Zevon's Learning to Flinch live album was recorded. His writing's pretty dark, but damned if it never fails to bring a smile to my face.Image via Wikipedia Commons Read the rest

Last month was a rough one. I began August grieving the death of a friend, Paul Krassner, which Mark remembered here on Boing Boing, following Paul's death on July 21. I also wrote a piece on PK, which ran on The Comics Journal.I didn't share the Comics Journal item with many people, but one of those I emailed was the Silver Jews' David Berman. I figured he'd appreciate the politics, strength, and humor of Paul's life. I didn't hear back, which wasn't surprising, yet I'd regret it being the last message I'd send him. Two weeks later news everywhere would announce Berman's suicide.For a brief moment I was horrified at my last message. I barely knew David, yet it's weird how grief can operate, overwhelming you with regret over help not offered. But what can anyone ever say. Communicating with David had been a highlight of 2019. I'd spent years living with his music and art. I'd contacted David earlier this year to invite him to a project of mine, Spoken Word with Electronics. I'm now so thankful for the brief moment I felt a friendship developing, no matter how fleeting. One wall of Harry's Loft, my recording space in Austin TX I've been quietly working on this spoken word project for a few years. It's meant to be a modern take on Folkways Recordings. I either record a vocal performance from an author in the studio, do a live recording on the phone, or arrange for an emailed audio file. Read the rest

Director Errol Morris made a bunch of darkly funny 30-second spots about climate change starring Bob Odenkirk. From his director's statement:I have never had any trouble believing in climate change, global warming, or whatever you want to call it. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. Galileo famously replied to Archbishop Piccolomini (or some other Vatican prelate), “And yet it moves.” Today we could just as well say, “And yet it changes.” But what to do about it? Logic rarely convinces anybody of anything. Climate change has become yet another vehicle for political polarization. If Al Gore said the Earth was round there would be political opposition insisting that the Earth was flat. It’s all so preposterous, so contemptible.I’ve created nineteen thirty-second spots that profile a character I created: Admiral Horatio Horntower. He’s an admiral of a fleet of one and perhaps the last man on Earth. Hopefully it captures the absurdity and the desperation of our current situation. No pie graphs, no PowerPoint—just a blithering idiot played by one of my favorite actors, Bob Odenkirk.Image: Errol Morris/YouTube Read the rest

I don't have a single piece of hardware that'll be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 when it's released. This fact didn't do a single damn thing to stop me from watching this 14-minute preview video, however.Beyond getting a peek of the incredible environments that the game has to offer, the video, as its title suggests also gives a solid look at two play styles and massive number of character tweaks that will be available to players on launch day. Read the rest

To break a world record, Rob Scallon linked together 319 pedals and played his guitar through them. What does it sound like? A wall of whooshing, muttering, occasionally howling noise!In the video, it's pretty interesting watching the guitar techs slowly assemble and debug the massive pedal chain. Once it's ready to go, Scallon plays a finger-tapping song using different combos of pedals, and then at the end engages them all simultaneously. The ensuing wash of sound is mostly just random noise, but coming at that point in the performance it's kind of aesthetically interesting. Read the rest

The journalists at The Next Web scripted a bot -- Satoshi Nakaboto -- that crawls around the aether looking for Bitcoin news and tweets, then assembles into a daily news story. There's no cutting-edge AI at hand here -- it's just good-old "rule-based phrases and terms we wrote beforehand," as The Next Web folks note. You can see an archive of the bot's daily stories here.Nonetheless, it wasn't long before the bot published a story that was the #1 most-read for the site that day, as the editor noted:Már Másson Maack, a writer for the site, wrote a good essay pondering his own psychological reactions to being outperformed at his job by a few lines of code. As he notes, there's an obvious discomfort at realizing a bot can author a top-viewed story, because of course in a publishing operation, money comes from reader clicks; if a deathless, tireless, un-unionizable bot can deliver those clicks, that's unsettling for all the meatbag authors.As Másson Maack points out, the traditional response of AI optimists is to argue that this will all be fine. Sure, bots can outperform humans at routine drudge work. But this frees the humans up to do the complex, thoughtful, high-EQ stuff that humans are at the moment uniquely capable of, right?Fair enough, in theory. Except Másson Maack identifies the bigger problem: Our economy mostly has no idea how to value those supposedly superior "human" skills. No, today's firms are mostly obsessed with measuring output, which is where bots excel:The phrase du jour of technologists, ‘tech-minded’ CEOs, and other self-proclaimed thinkfluencers is that AI will actually make ‘work more human.’ The argument being that with the rise of AI, ‘soft skills’ like communication, creativity, teamwork, and problem solving will become the most valuable talents in the future job market. Read the rest

PayPal suspended an account used to raise funds for the Ku Klux Klan Monday. PayPal was criticised for allowing the white supremacist group to accept donations through its service, despite earlier committing to banish "Hate, Violence & Intolerance" in a post that explicitly named the KKK. [via]"I have tonnes of concerns that PayPal is not able to act quickly and decisively on hate groups," Nandini Jammi, from the internet-based group Sleeping Giants, told BBC News."There are some examples of them acting in a fairly timely manner."But they're not applying [their anti-hate policy] in a consistent enough manner."A spokesman for PayPal said: "Due to our legal and data protection obligations, we cannot comment on any specific PayPal customer's account.PayPal was unresponsive to complaints about this account. The BBC reports that it took public pressure from several groups to get them to suspend it. Something about this reminds me of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki's recent declaration of support for "offensive" content followed by an ostentatious headline-grabbing ban on a single far right figure. The result is to revive far-right usage of the platform while appearing to clamp down on it. There's really no engagement like you get being a far-right provocateur online. It's quick, life-changing money for anyone with a little wherewithal and a lack of shame. Which, ironically, signifies just how behind the times the Klan is with its shabby PayPal donation button. Read the rest

The 'deepfake-style face swap app' ZAO has climbed to the top of Android and iPhone download charts in recent weeks. As its popularity grew, so have privacy concerns on Chinese social media, and now, beyond.Here's how it works:In case you haven't heard, #ZAO is a Chinese app which completely blew up since Friday. Best application of 'Deepfake'-style AI facial replacement I've ever seen. Here's an example of me as DiCaprio (generated in under 8 secs from that one photo in the thumbnail) 🤯 pic.twitter.com/1RpnJJ3wgT— Allan Xia (@AllanXia) September 1, 2019 The sudden wide adoption of ZAO is an “intriguing development in a country where mass surveillance and facial recognition technology are prevalent,” writes Jake Newby at radiichina.com.“Some social media platforms, including WeChat, have now started blocking ZAO videos,” Newby writes in an update to his story on Monday. “WeChat has done this before with popular rival short video apps.”The app — developed by Momo, the same company behind popular Chinese dating app Tantan — became an overnight sensation after it began circulating on Friday evening. Hashtags related to the app quickly became some of the hottest on microblogging site Weibo, while the app rocketed up the iOS download charts. Chinese social media feeds quickly became filled with ZAO-produced videos from friends and contacts for many users.The premise of the app is pretty simple: take a selfie and put yourself into your favorite movie or soap opera (chosen from a pre-selected list of clips). Cue users giving themselves starring roles in Leonardo DiCaprio’s filmography or uninvited guest appearances on Game of Thrones. Read the rest

A number of malicious websites that were recently reported to have been secretly hacking into iPhones over a two-year period were in fact targeting Uyghur Muslims, Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch reports today. Android and Windows users were also targeted in the same watering hole attacks affecting iPhone users, Thomas Brewster later reported at Forbes.The entity which would be presumed most likely behind such an attack is the government of China, or an entity working for the government's interests -- so there's been much speculation the attacker is China. Some questions remain. Exactly what the FBI's role in this remains unknown. And were Android users also targeted by the same campaign?— Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) September 1, 2019 But no proof in the code found. And some doubt it was China. Good reporting by Techcrunch here. Not PR for Apple or China, or conspiracy mongering.Read the TechCrunch article, and check out some of the analysis on Twitter below from infosec folks. [via Techmeme, images: Shutterstock]New: @iblametom has confirmed that Android and Windows users were *also* targeted in the same watering hole attacks affecting iPhone users. https://t.co/RV3NCOoRMY— Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) September 1, 2019 I'm going to be the odd one here and say this isn't right. So far China has had complete control of the Uyghurs using physical means and coercion. Their entire lives are controlled so why go this route when you will get burned (china doesn't like people knowing internal stuff)— Daniel Cuthbert (@dcuthbert) September 1, 2019I cannot find anywhere in this article *any* sourcing for the assertion the hack was by China, or to target Uyghur Muslims. Read the rest

May your monday be as charming and as thoroughly moistening as this crew of puppies. Read the rest

Leon Sans is a generative typeface for the web, meaning that its weight and other characteristics can be animated, colorized, fine-tuned or otherwise messed with on-the-fly using javascript. Check out the demo page.The Mask Tiling example is nice! Read the rest

There's nothing I hate in my bag so much as my laptop charger, a heavy Lenovo-grade brick of black plastic with two thick cables sticking out of each end, invariably forming a coiled knot of nonsense three times larger still. So I ordered this alarmingly small universal charger from RAVpower as soon as I saw that Wirecutter didn't recommend it. It's smaller than an iPad charger, but charges a MacBook Pro or Thinkpad. The RAVPower also charges the way it should. We ran the RP-PC112 through our standard testing procedures, which include running Total Phase’s USB Power Delivery Analyzer and its Data Center Software. This test tells us the power rates the chargers make available to connected devices, the actual power output observed when they’re connected, and whether any errors occur during charging. The RAVPower passed without issue. The special sauce in these new power supplies is Gallium Nitride.USB C Wall Charger, RAVPower 61W PD 3.0 [GaN Tech] Type C Fast Charging Power Delivery Foldable Adapter, Compatible with MacBook Pro/Air, Ipad Pro 2018, iPhone Xs Max/XR/X and More [Amazon] Read the rest

The Lima National Security Center was home to a bevy of nuclear weapon tests during the Cold War. Today, it’s still being used to fart around with radiation, but in a way that’s actually beneficial to folks like you and I. This five minute video shows how first responders are being trained to deal with nuclear materials being released, due to an accident, terrorist attack or—holy shit, please no—a tactical nuclear weapons strike on an urban population.Image via Wikipedia Read the rest

This book features 550 recommendations grouped by subject. These “best of” recommendations have been selected from the accumulated pool of 6 brief suggestions Kevin Kelly, Claudia Dawson, and I have sent out each Sunday for the past two years in a free email newsletter called Recomendo.It's available as a searchable DRM-free PDF for $1.99, or you can buy a paperback copy on Amazon for .Sample pages: Read the rest

Pedro Bell, the visionary painter whose astonishing psychedelic art (and liner notes) appeared on numerous Funkadelic albums and shaped the P-Funk mythos, died on Tuesday at 69. Free your mind, and your ass will follow. From the New York Times:“The artwork of Pedro Bell was an essential component of the alternately utopian and dystopian world of P-Funk, which placed African-American reality in the context of a science fiction future that was both scary and hopeful,” (art curator Pan) Wendt said by email. “Pedro was a brilliant autodidact who was a key source of George Clinton’s ideology through his readings of science fiction, media theory and environmentalist tracts, as well as his knowledge of Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism..."Mr. Clinton was especially fond of what Mr. Bell came up with for Funkadelic’s “Standing on the Verge of Getting It On” (1974): an alien landscape that was both scary and whimsical.“It was a combination of Ralph Bakshi and Samuel R. Delany and Superfly and Fat Albert and Philip K. Dick and Krazy Kat and Flash Gordon,” he wrote in his book, “all mixed together in Pedro’s brain with some kind of blender that hadn’t even been invented yet.”We lost the Master Mind behind the Graphic's & Artwork of Funkadelic. Mr. Pedro Bell is an American artist and illustrator best known for his elaborate cover designs and other artwork for numerous Funkadelic and George Clinton solo albums. Thxs for yr service our brother.😲🙏 pic.twitter.com/PsD8TRxlRU— Bootsy Collins (@Bootsy_Collins) August 28, 2019 'Free your mind & the rest will follow...We believed where the funk was going to take us.' Chicago's Pedro Bell told his funk-tastic philosophy to @kspak in @Suntimesstory. Read the rest

Jazz genius Thelonious Monk was often known for his laconic mumbling and other idiosyncrasies beside his legendary compositions, technique, and contributions to jazz. But in this short clip, Monk is crystal clear in sharing his thoughts on fellow bandmate saxophonist Johnny Griffin’s new pants. “Some bad muthafuckers” indeed!Further reading: “Thelonious Monk's surreally strange and spartan genius gets its due” The Guardian “The Secret Life of Thelonious Monk” The AtlanticImage: YouTube Read the rest

A pharmaceutical lab in Spain mislabeled minoxidil (a hair-loss drug sold in the U.S. as Rogaine) as omeprazole (an antacid marketed as Prilosec). Excess hair growth resulted after babies were prescribed the latter and consumed the former, reports the New York Times.The children who took the mislabeled medicine, some of them babies, began growing hair all over their bodies, a rare condition known as hypertrichosis, Spain’s health minister said on Wednesday. ... Ms. Carcedo, the health minister, told reporters that no pharmacy in Spain still had the mislabeled omeprazole.“We have immobilized all the batches,” she said.Do not drink Rogaine. Read the rest