Boing Boing

I've been cutting my own hair for decades. I've used everything from blunt preschooler's scissors on up, but the best clipper I've used is the one I have now. It has a ceramic blade that stays sharp, so it can easily lop off my unusually thick hair. And it's cordless, which makes it easy to maneuver around my head. The price is more than agreeable, too: . Read the rest

'80s and '90s rap and hardcore fans, this one's for you.BOOKS: TOGETHER FOREVERRizzoli, October 1, 2019Longtime punk and hiphop photographer Glen E. Friedman has been capturing mosh pits, skate ramps, and rap royalty since the 1980s, and his work is legendary. We've written about him a lot. Glen has an amazing new book out that focuses on the rise to fame of Run-DMC and Beastie Boys, two iconic acts whose origins was around to witness — with his camera, of course. From the foreword by CHRIS ROCK: Rap was the opposite of Martin Luther King, it was not about integration, it’s really about our own thing, fuck what the world wanted from it, from us. We became our own. It’s parallels to punk rock’s destroying all that came before it while borrowing little bits to help you get there. bring it to a full circle and kind of help us understand how and why these two groups did what the did, and where Glen E. Friedman brings us into the picture deeper than anyone, and brings it all together forever, for us in photographs that excite and inspire to this day.CHRIS ROCKIn 'Together Forever,' we see how Friedman's lens captured images that define how we remember both groups, including the moment when both joined forces for the highly publicized 1987 joint concert tour, Raising Hell.This book collects all of GEF’s most iconic RUN-DMC and Beastie Boys photographs in one gorgeous 224-page Rizzoli volume. There are loads of never-before-published photos of the bands in concert, goofing around with celebrities, portraits, and, of course, hanging out together. Read the rest

Today Pretzel had her feathers removed, so her coat does not absorb every leaf this Fall brings. The frizzy soft hair she has left leaves her legs looking mighty tiny here.Here is what the de-feathering looks like without the backlight. Read the rest

Trump White House changed security on the National Security Council's top-secret codeword system in early 2018, two former administration officials tell Politico, in an apparent effort to increase secrecy around Trump calls with foreign leaders.Politico today reports that the system upgrades put into effect in Spring of last year "included a new log of who accessed specific documents in the NSC's system... and was designed in part to prevent leaks of records of the president's phone calls with foreign leaders and to find out the suspected leaker if transcripts did get disclosed."We now know that more than one of those calls between Trump and a foreign leader (first Ukraine, now Australia) has become the subject of a whistleblower probe that now threatens to topple the presidency through an impeachment inquiry.What was contained in the Trump calls with Russian leader Vladimir Putin? Embarrassing friendly talk. “They were certainly the type of thing that you would not want in public because they were just really embarrassing from the standpoint of just national pride,” said a former Trump NSC official.Excerpt:While only a certain number of NSC staffers have the codeword system installed on their workstations, only a subset of those staffers, in turn, has access to specific documents on that system. The former official with knowledge of the system added that he had never seen transcripts put on that codeword system during his time in the Obama administration.The changes came months after entire transcripts of President Trump’s calls with the leaders of Australia and Mexico were leaked to the Washington Post, setting off a furious internal search for the source of the unauthorized disclosures and widening the mistrust between the president and his own staff. Read the rest

I keep a pack of Crayola colored pencils in my bag.This is a good deal the 36 pack for about the price of the 10. I keep a pack in my travel carry-on, incase I am overcome by the urge to sketch something.My ability to draw anything is very limited, but not by the pencils.I also love the watercolor colored pencils.Crayola Colored Pencils, 36 Premium Quality via Amazon Read the rest

Lowell Farms: A Cannabis Cafe opened today in West Hollywood, California, and it's the first restaurant in the US that serves weed. Rather than sommeliers, the cafe has "flower hosts" that deliver weed to your table, and charge a $20 corkage, er, "toke-age" fee for people who bring their own pot. Weed is served along with food, but not in your food. According to Eatery:Andrea Drummer is Lowell’s veteran cannabis chef, with seven years experience preparing cannabis-infused meals throughout Los Angeles. However, Lowell Farms is restricted by state California law to infuse any of its own food with cannabis.In an awkward workaround, Lowell Cafe allows the consumption of edibles produced by an outside source, but is prohibited from serving any cannabis-infused food made on the premises. But Drummer created dishes that complement cannabis, similar to pairing wine with food. She prepares a saucy cauliflower banh mi, pulled pork and a crispy chicken sandwich, as well as a chicory salad with endive, guanciale, and Fiji apples. Vegan nachos come topped with cauliflower meat and cashew cheese, while other bites like jerk lamb chops, fries, and sticky tamarind wings are part of a fairly large snack menu. Prices for the dishes range from $9 to $23.And if you're thirsty, you'll have to order something along the lines of tea or a milkshake -- there is no alcohol on the premises. At the end, you'll get two checks, one for food (which you can pay by cash or credit card) and one for the green stuff (cash only). Read the rest

Pres. Trump's "Twitter account should be suspended," says Kamala Harris."There's plenty of…evidence to suggest that he is irresponsible with his words in a way that could result in harm…so the privilege of using those words in that way should probably be taken from him." pic.twitter.com/k5SYGCuwX1— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) October 1, 2019 "We have to also agree that when the President of the United States speaks her words are very powerful and should be used in a way that is not about belittling much less harming anyone. And this President has, I think, never fully appreciated this responsibility and so what we see continuously, including in the last 24 hours, is a use of his words -- Donald Trump using his words in a way that could subject someone to harm. And, if he isn't going to exercise self-restraint then perhaps there should be other mechanisms in place..." Read the rest

Amber Guyger, the Dallas police officer who shot her neighbor to death after entering his apartment thinking it was his own, has been found guilty of murder.From Washington Post:The prosecution cast Guyger as careless and negligent — armed, distracted and too quick to pull the trigger. The state’s lawyers called her defense “garbage” and “absurd.”They said a reasonable person would have noticed the illuminated apartment numbers that read 1478, rather than 1378, and would have seen Jean’s red doormat. She wasn’t paying attention, prosecutors said, because too caught up in a sexually explicit conversation she was having with her partner on the police force.“I mean, my God," said Jason Fine, the Dallas County Assistant District Attorney. "This is crazy.”Image: Washington Post video screenshot Read the rest

In July, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg held two hour-long internal employee meetings to discuss the business's future; The Verge obtained the recordings of those meetings, which reveal, among other things, that Zuckerberg dreads the possible election of Elizabeth Warren (Warren has pledged to break up Facebook and its Big Tech competitors if she becomes President in 2020).Zuckerberg explains that he really only wants what's best for America, explaining that his vast monopoly profits allow him to invest in countermeasures to fight disinformation campaigns, and suggesting that if Facebook had to compete and therefore lower its margins, he would not be able to do be as effective.Zuckerberg also explicitly stated that he would not testify before most governments (he already snubbed the British Parliament on this score). He dismisses the plight of Facebook's downtrodden and traumatized content moderators as "overdramatic" and announces that he's planning to launch a product to compete with Tiktok called "Lasso," launching it first in poorer countries where Tiktok has not yet penetrated. He also downplays the difficulties with launching Libra, Facebook's cryptocurrency venture.When it comes to Facebook employees whose friends give them shit about working for a terrible, cancerous monopolist, Zuck tells them to remind their pals that Facebook "has their best interests at heart."Leadership, people.What can we do to help improve Facebook’s self-image to our peers and friends that might have a negative opinion of the company?MZ: Well, look, I think humanizing stuff is always really important. So I’ve always focused more on the substance and trying to deliver things, and a little bit less on the perception. Read the rest

I love you Monchichi. Read the rest

An off-duty Dallas cop who killed a man in his own home was convicted today of murder. Amber Guyger, armed with a gun, claimed she thought she was in her own apartment—a floor down—when she shot Jean Botham, armed with a bowl of ice cream. At trial she availed herself of a stand-your-ground defense: that even the mistaken belief he was the intruder justified shooting him dead. Jurors disagreed ... or simply didn't believe her story.The jury has found former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger guilty of murder in the killing of Botham Jean.The jury deliberated less than two days on the killing.The sentencing phase will resume at 1 p.m.His home was not her castle. Read the rest

Being a Tor author is pretty swell. (Thanks, Patrick!) Read the rest

I think the dog prefers to have the gate there.This gate is not getting in the way of playing fetch. from r/awwImage: r/aww/ Read the rest

Sean K Reynolds' and Shaunna Germain's free, short ebook Consent in Gaming (from Monte Cook Games) is a beautifully thought-through exploration of how game-masters and players can negotiate their own boundaries before, during and after playing RPGs, in a way that allows everyone to be mindful and respectful of those boundaries without sacrificing fun or intensity of game-play.Reynolds and Germain set out a concise and thorough set of explanations for why some players might be averse to some scenarios -- not just sexual ones, either -- and then move on to a set of practices and principles for GMs and other players to keep those limits in mind, and to recover gracefully when there are slipups.RPGs are intense, wonderful ways to explore your imaginative limits and to create and deepen your friendships. But that same intensity and deepness meant that they can put people in difficult and even traumatic emotional states. Consent in Gaming is a marvellous resource for keeping things fun for everyone.Consent in Gaming [Sean K Reynolds and Shaunna Germain/Monte Cook Games](via Fuck Yeah DnD) Read the rest

Grand Hardin's 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" is one of the most widely assigned readings in the past ten years' worth of university syllabi; notionally, it describes how property that is held in common is prone to overuse and exhaustion, while privatization creates an owner who has an incentive to serve as a wise steward over the resource.Hardin was an ardent nativist and eugenicist, and the "The Tragedy of the Commons" was Hardin's jumping-off point for full-blown ecofascism: a strain of ecological thinking that treats humans as a kind of cancer on the Earth, doomed to grow out of control until they trigger a mass die-off, which ecofascists are committed to shaping such that the people who are exterminated in the collapse are brown and Black "foreigners" and "invaders," while "white people" of European descent are spared, to serve as wise stewards who oversee a new, sustainable era of human relations with the natural world (the Christchurch killer self-identified as an ecofascist and attributed his mass killings of Muslim people to a desire to rid the Earth of nonwhite people in order to avert the climate crisis).After a generation of climate denial, the US and European right is in the midst of a fast pivot to ecofascism, simultaneously acknowledging the seriousness and imminence of the climate crisis, but planning to address it by exerminating non-white people. Hardin's writings -- both "Tragedy" and his more explicitly eugenic, fascist works -- are gaining a new prominence as central texts of the ecofascist movement. Read the rest

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders topped the charts, receiving more than $25 million dollars in Q3 fundraising. Sanders is also dropping in the polls.Politico:Bernie Sanders raised more than $25 million in the third quarter of the year, his aides announced Tuesday.The large haul demonstrates the Vermont senator, despite slipping to third place behind Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden in national polling averages, remains a fundraising juggernaut. Sanders also recently revealed that 1 million people have donated to his bid for the White House — a milestone he reached faster than any Democratic presidential candidate in history.This certainly helps demonstrate how little the numbers we use to forecast election results really mean. Read the rest

Here's the state of U.S. politics, starring the runaway airport cart as the Trump administration. pic.twitter.com/tFv0nY3RNk— Zara Rahim (@ZaraRahim) October 1, 2019Image: Twitter Read the rest

Project Farm is one of my favorite YouTube channels. They thoroughly test different products and methods for solving common problems that farmers, and just about everyone else, have. In this video, Project Farm tests a bunch of different brands of masking tape to see which one is the best at keeping paint from seeping under it. The bottom line: Frog Tape is the best in almost every circumstance.Image: YouTube Read the rest

A beauty from last February: Kyle McDonald tweeted redacted social media screenshots from a surveillance camera owner that emitted a steady stream of alerts because it saw a face in the garden -- a face that was just a random assortment of grime and snow that only vaguely resembled a face, but still triggered the facial recognition algorithm. In the end, the only way to shut up the camera was to stomp around in the snow until the "face" was erased.when you have to stomp out the face in the snow so your surveillance camera stops texting you @internetofshit pic.twitter.com/hW2vJmXGhD— Kyle McDonald (@kcimc) February 25, 2019(via Dan Hon) Read the rest

As of Jan 1, a new International Maritime Organisation standard will seriously restrict the kind of air pollution that shipping vessels can emit; in response, the industry has invested more than $12b in "open-loop scrubbers," which capture the sulphur from heavy fuel oil exhaust and reroute it, along with CO2, into waste water that is dumped from the ships directly into the sea. Heavy fuel oil is the dirtiest form of fossil fuel.Of the 3,756 ships -- mostly oil tankers, container ships and bulk carriers -- that have been equipped with open-loop scrubbers, only 23 store the sulphur for safe disposal in port; the rest dump it straight into the ocean.The waste water is voluminous and fantastically toxic: every ton of fuel generates 45 tons of contaminated, carcinogenic water laced with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and heavy metals. The scrubbers also increase fuel consumption by 2%, creating a vicious cycle.The ICCT has estimated that cruise ships with scrubbers will consume around 4 million tons of heavy fuel oil in 2020 and will discharge 180 million tons of contaminated scrubber washwater overboard.“About half of the world’s roughly 500 cruise ships have or will soon have scrubbers installed,” said Mr Comer. “Cruise ships operate in some of the most beautiful and pristine areas on the planet, making this all the more concerning.”Scrubbers generally cost between £1.6m and £8.1m depending on the vessel – and the adoption of this technology has cost billions of dollars over recent years, according to Mr Comer. Read the rest

For years, the Harvard Business School fellow William Lazonick has been writing about the rise of the "shareholder value" doctrine in capital markets, and how that has driven financial engineering tactics like stock buybacks, which allow shareholders (including top executives) to prosper at the expense of the companies they have invested in, siphoning value out of profitable businesses until they collapse.The practice began in 1982, after the SEC ruled that stock buybacks were not an illegal form of stock-price manipulation. After decades of this practice, some of the most innovative, productive companies in America have been sucked dry and are on life-support, just as Lazonick predicted in his 2014 Harvard Business Review article, Profits Without Prosperity.Now, Lazonick is taking something of a victory lap with Predatory Value Extraction, a forthcoming book co-written with economist Jang-Sup Shin and published by Oxford University Press.Lazonick was interviewed by Worth's Michelle Celarier, discussing how his ideas have found their way into the electoral program of Elizabeth Warren and new pronouncements from the Business Roundtable.It is absolutely clear to me that the foundation for capital formation is companies retaining their profit through investing in the capabilities they have. In the late ’70s and early ’80s when you had the Japanese challenge, people were saying, “American companies are paying out too much dividends. They need to invest more.” But now on top of dividends, you have buybacks, and it took me a lot of time to really understand it. It wasn’t until much, much later that I understood its origins with this SEC rule. Read the rest

We are to understand that "both the body and head of the costume show substantial breakdown to the foam latex elements."Leonardo's (Mark Caso) costume from Stuart Gilard's family adventure sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. When their friend April O'Neil (Paige Turco) was magically transported back in time to 17th century Japan, Leonardo and his fellow turtles followed in an attempt to rescue her.This costume includes a green turtle bodysuit consisting of foam latex cast elements over a spandex base, with dense-foam chest and shell elements, leather knee and elbow pads, and a leather sheath setup for Leonardo's swords. The head included is a stunt version, also utilizing a foam latex skin over a spandex base, with cast resin teeth, high-quality eyes, a fabric bandana, internal helmet liner shell for the performer, and a zipper at the back to allow the piece to be closed. Both the body and head of the costume show substantial breakdown to the foam latex elements and require restoration. The body is currently filled with some stuffing and rests on an oversize clothing hangar -- additional work is needed to make the piece standUPDATE: I added the theme tune, slowed 400%. [via JWZ and brainexploderr] Read the rest

I can't rightly say I know what's going on in Mushroom Délicieux!, a demented glitchy Pico-8 game by Rémy Devaux. But I had plenty of fun racing around the woods chomping shrooms, avoiding crawlies and getting high, for as long as it lasted.Walking through the forest feels great! But sometimes you get a little hungry... You're in luck though, because the forest is here for you in... Mushroom Délicieux!It's free to play online, and you can donate to Devaux on their itch.io page. Read the rest

Bandai Namco owns the trademark and copyright in classic arcade game Ms. Pac Man, but a retro hardware company named AtGames has acquired rights to collect royalty payments on it. These rights were separated out in 1982, to reward the independent developers who devised the Pac Man modifications that Namco would later market as Ms. Pac Man, and AtGames bought those rights earlier this year. AtGames thinks this gives it the right to make and sell new Ms. Pac Man cabinets; Bandai Namco does not.Bandai Namco also says AtGames made at least one prototype Ms. Pac-Man miniature arcade cabinet, using Bandai Namco's trademarks without the company's authorization, and showed it to at least one of the GCC successors as part of its negotiations. AtGames has also allegedly been contacting retailers like GameStop and Wal-Mart about selling that Ms. Pac-Man cabinet without the involvement of Bandai Namco. Bandai Namco also believe AtGames made false statements about its access to the IP."Not only are AtGames’ false statements likely to damage Bandai Namco Entertainment America’s relationship with its current and prospective licensees, retailers and/or distributors, but they are also likely to cause severe harm to BNEA’s reputation and goodwill," the lawsuit reads.AtGames recently marketed a "flashback" style console where the models sent to game reviewers were flashed with ROMS from the original arcade games, but the actual retail version had only the ROMS from crappy 8-bit home conversions. Arcade game screenshots were on the box. AtGames doesn't seem a well-respected outfit among retrogamers. Read the rest

These cute little pottery vessels -- fashioned in the shape of animals -- are about 3,000 years old, and were found near children's graves. A group of scientists hypothesized that they might actually be sippy cups, and when they analyzed the contents, voila: They contained the residue of milk. Sippy cups!Over at Fast Company, Elizabeth Segran meditates on the design lessons at hand here. Quite apart from the fact that adorable animal-shapes clearly have a historic vintage in tech-for-feeding-children, our ancestors had a leg up on us in their use of sustainable materials:These prehistoric sippy cups remind us that people were extremely creative with reusable materials millennia before plastic was invented. Just like our baby bottles, these ancient vessels were functional, perfectly sized for pouring milk into a child’s small mouth. But they were also fun, shaped like tiny cows and goats. And unlike our plastic bottles, which are designed to be thrown out after a few years, it took time and effort to create these ancient vessels—it is likely they would have been designed to last, perhaps even passed down from one child to another. They were such valuable items, full of such sentimental value, that they were buried with children who died too soon.The original academic letter, "Milk of ruminants in ceramic baby bottles from prehistoric child graves," is online and unpaywalled here.(Image above from Enver Hirsch/courtesy Wien Museum]) Read the rest

In a bit of an understatement, the American Kennel Club observes, "Pugs sometimes experience breathing problems." Here's pug Gyoza's snorts and snores being recorded for use in the upcoming game Halo Infinite: View this post on Instagram Meet our favorite pug, Gyoza. 🐶🔊 The best friend of our studio's Technical Art Director, his grunts, breaths, and excitement are sure to make for some... interesting sounds in #HaloInfinite. #halo #xbox #343industries #sounddesign #sounddesignsaturday #fieldrecording #pug #pugs #pugsofinstagramA post shared by Halo (@halo) on Aug 24, 2019 at 9:11am PDT Read the rest

Here are seven new lateral thinking puzzles to test your wits and stump your friends -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

In this amusing and rather frightening footage, a runaway utility cart turns in circles on the asphalt at Chicago's O'Hare airport, slowly making its way toward a plane at the gate. Workers hover nearby, hoping for an opportunity to leap in and wrest control of the vehicle, but it's whirling too fast and the risk of injury is too great. But all is not lost! via Gfycat Read the rest

The Gate is a short creature feature with some sharp creepy moments, the docu-footage look, and a self-subverting lesson about drugs and faith in government. It slips perfectly into a certain British tradition of clinical secular horror (Chimera, Ultraviolet, 28 Days Later), awful things lurking where science and bureacracy meet. Read the rest

Mathematician Clifford Pickover's brilliant caption for this clip: "Philosopher-cat explores the nature of reality, identity, mind, and its place in the vast space-time cosmos that we call home." Read the rest

US imposes sanctions on 3 companies Yevgeniy Prigozhin uses to manage 3 planes and 1 yacht.

No new bill on online privacy expected expected to show up in Congress before the end of the year, Reuters reports, citing three unnamed sources on Capitol Hill.A U.S. online privacy bill is not likely to come before Congress this year, three sources said, as lawmakers disagree over issues like whether the bill should preempt state rules, forcing companies to deal with much stricter legislation in California that goes into effect on Jan. 1.U.S. online privacy rules unlikely this year, hurting big tech [Nandita Bose, Diane Bartz, REUTERS] Read the rest

[[You may know Richard Littler from the astounding dystopian alternate fiction/bleak humour series Scarfolk (previously). He's been working on an on-again/off-again animated series that is, at long last, on. I was honoured to be offered the opportunity to launch the series here today!]]Dick and Stewart is a series of short animations set in either Britain’s dismal past or the Britain that’s soon to come. It's hard to tell nowadays, isn't it? Either way, just imagine what it would be like if children's TV programmes were written by George Orwell or Franz Kafka. Or the government itself.The stories follow the adventures of the eponymous Dick and an eyeball, which is all that’s left of his best friend, Stewart, following an accident. It’s written, animated and directed by Richard Littler (Scarfolk), produced by Andy Starke of Rook Films (A Field in England, Free Fire, In Fabric) and read by Julian Barratt (The Mighty Boosh).While each episode will address a different dystopian but topical subject, such as propaganda, civil defense, ‘fake news’, gaslighting and other forms of governmental corruption currently blighting western politics, the pilot episode, which is called ‘I Spy with my Little Eye’, concerns surveillance, an unsurprising theme given that, last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the UK government's bulk interception of data was against human rights. Read the rest

Walgreens and CVS have pulled the very popular heartburn medicine Zantac, along with their generic versions, from store shelves after the FDA warned they had found a cancer-causing drug among its ingredients. The drug in question is nitrosodimethylamine, also known as NDMA (not to be confused with MDMA or MDNA). It's often used in laboratory research to induce tumors in mice.From CNN:The nitrosamine impurity known as N-nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA, has been classified as a probable human carcinogen based on lab tests, and this isn't the first time that it has been detected in a common medication.Since last year, the FDA has been investigating NDMA and other impurities in blood pressure and heart failure medicines known as angiotensin receptor blockers or ARBs. Numerous recalls have been launched as the FDA found "unacceptable levels" of nitrosamines in several of those common drugs containing valsartan.A study published last year in the medical journal BMJ found no "markedly increased short term overall risk of cancer" among users of the valsartan drugs contaminated with NDMA. Yet that study also noted that research into long-term cancer risk is needed.Customers can return their Zantac purchases to either store for a refund. As a person living in Massachusetts who vapes for pain relief and has taken Zantac for years, I'm 0-2 this month. Thank God Advil is still okay. Oh, wait...Drugstores are pulling Zantac-like heartburn drugs off the shelves over potential cancer risk (Washington Post) (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) Read the rest

BMW Motorrad, the fun BMW that makes the motorcycles, may release some 'M' class bikes. 'M' in the world of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, the boring fuckers who make the cars and SUVs means 'this one is supposed to be fast.'In motorcycle land, we use "S" for SPEED.BMWBlog:A recent trademark filing suggests that BMW Motorrad has patented ‘M 1000 RR’, ‘M 1000 XR’ and ‘M 1300 GS’. It’s still unclear whether this is a collaboration between the two sub-divisions at BMW, or simply a new naming convention. The rumor comes on the back of BMW’s latest trademark filings with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).BMW Motorrad currently uses the ‘S’ moniker for its range of motorcycles especially in the premium end of the scale. Currently, the M badge is reserved for the performance-based variants of the regular models and in the future for potential standalone models.This post serves as a welcome excuse to share a photo of my R90S. Read the rest

Well known for its inhospitality to folks without a home, San Franciscans will help you out if you've lost your dog.Dogs bring out the best in humanity, usually.KRON4:“I was closer with Yip than I have ever been with anybody,” Lopez said.In June, the Apple Valley native was only passing through San Francisco on his journey to begin a new life in Oregon.Then everything changed.“I’d take him everywhere,” he said. “He’d sleep right next to me every night that’s my dog you know?”Sean said he was driving in the Ingleside area when Yippy was apparently spooked by something and then disappeared.For the last three months, Sean has been couch surfing throughout the city as people have felt compelled to help in his searchPeople are less compelled to help random homeless folks. Dogs make people nicer. Read the rest

My 13-year-old son showed me this and we couldn't stop laughing. How dare Mario be so rude to his brother!The 1989 TV series "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!" starred wrestler Lou Albano as Mario, Danny Wells of "The Jeffersons" as Luigi, and Jeannie Elias as the voice of Princess Toadstool. Read the rest

For twenty years, novelist Cormac McCarthy (The Road, No Country for Old Men) has been an unofficial "editor-at-large" for the Sante Fe Institute, where he is a trustee. McCarthy has helped numerous scientists improve the writing in their technical papers about theoretical physics, complex systems, biology, and the like. In the new issue of Nature, theoretical biologist Van Savage and evolutionary biologist Pamela Yeh present a distillation of McCarthy's advice on "how to write a great scientific paper." I think the suggestions are applicable to any kind of non-fiction writing. Here are a few of the tips, from Nature:• Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.• Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.• Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.• Don’t over-elaborate. Only use an adjective if it’s relevant. Your paper is not a dialogue with the readers’ potential questions, so don’t go overboard anticipating them. Read the rest

TED-Ed just released the first episode of a 10-part series called "Think Like a Coder." It's an animated adventure starring a teenager named Ethic who wakes up with amnesia in a prison cell and befriends a hovering robot named Hedge, who will do anything she tells it to do in the form of pseudocode instructions. In this first episode we learn about for, next, and while loops, which Ethic uses to get Hedge to pick some locks. Read the rest

Castle-generator is, as you can probably already guess, a generator of castles—gorgeous, two-dimensional pixel art fortresses to die for over and over and over again. It's by _unsettled_; all sorts of parameters are offered to determine the general shape and size of your medieval manse.2D pixel art parametric castle generatorHide/show the UI with H, move the camera with the arrow keys.I made a pixel art castle generator with Unity! Read the rest

Here's a video of an octopus changing color while it's asleep. Are the patterns in response to a dream? Possibly, suspects the Alaska Pacific University professor David Scheel. That video is from an upcoming PBS TV show called "Octopus: Making Contact", and in it, Scheel narrates the color changes thusly:"She's asleep; she sees a crab and her color starts to change a little bit. Then she turns all dark. Octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom."This is a camouflage, like she's just subdued a crab and now she's going to sit there and eat it and she doesn't want anyone to notice her. It's a very unusual behavior, to see the color come and go on her mantle like that. I mean, just to be able to see all the different color patterns just flashing one after another — you don't usually see that when an animal's sleeping. This really is fascinating."The truth is, we don't actually know if cephalopods dream. There is some scant observational data, as this piece in Atlas Obscura noted a while ago:The only cephalopod with a proven penchant for dreaming is probably the cutest. A 2012 study led by Marcos G. Frank, now a neuroscientist at Washington State University Health Sciences Spokane, discovered that sleeping cuttlefish demonstrate a form of rapid eye movement (REM), the same stage of sleep that gives us our dreams, distinguished by the spontaneous activation of brain cells, going off like fireflies in a forest. Read the rest

A new analysis of whales suggests that each one is worth about $2 million in carbon sequestration -- and the global population is thus worth about $1 trillion.How do whales sequester carbon? By eating stuff, getting big, then drifting to the bottom of the ocean after they die. This makes them carbon sinks on a scale even bigger than most trees, as the authors point out:The carbon capture potential of whales is truly startling. Whales accumulate carbon in their bodies during their long lives. When they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean; each great whale sequesters 33 tons of CO2 on average, taking that carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries. A tree, meanwhile, absorbs only up to 48 pounds of CO2 a year.On top of that, the metabolic activity of whales -- their breathing, peeing and pooping -- stimulates huge growths of phyloplankton, which itself sequesters tons of carbon. As National Geographic notes, in a post about this new study ...When phytoplankton die, much of their carbon gets recycled at the ocean’s surface. But some dead phytoplankton inevitably sink, sending more captured carbon to the bottom of the sea. Another study from 2010 found that the 12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean draw 200,000 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere each year by stimulating phytoplankton growth and death through their iron-rich defecations.When the study authors priced out the cost of carbon capture, that's how they arrived at the value of $2 million per whale. Read the rest

Silver maples are evil, obviously, but I was enchanted by one root's complete embrace of a brick in my back yard. Liberating the brick meant liberating the root first, and I feel such a mildly interesting chunk of cellulose and lignin deserves more than fire. But what, exactly? It is too large to serve as the handguard of an ecologically-conscious sabre. Read the rest

Described by their finder as "Yoopalite" rocks, a cache of fluorescent sodalite-laced stones was found on a Michigan beach. The apparently bland, well-weathered pebbles light up under 365nm; agate-hunter Erik Rintamaki discovered them in 2017 while experimenting with ways to reveal the rare stones.I actually sold a few to at Michigan Tech University, and they sent them out for testing and they contacted me through emails and told me I probably had something new that had never been found in Michigan before, and I ended up being published in the Mineral News in 2018 for that discovery," Rintamaki said. Read the rest

Nothing worth saying about this man can safely be said—at least on Twitter. Read the rest

Good news everyone! All of those products made using microplastics that you invested in will hang around even after you get rid of them: that's good value. Currently, they can be found fouling up the guts of any number of sensitive species, littering the deepest depths of the ocean, making it possible to enjoy your microplastics almost anywhere you roam. Now, scientists from McGill University in Montreal have discovered an amazing new vector for getting the particular plastics you paid for into your body, where they belong: tea.From CNN:Plastic tea bags are shedding billions of shards of microplastics into their water, according to a new study.[Scientists] found that a single bag releases around 11.6 billion microplastic particles, and 3.1 billion even smaller nanoplastic particles, into the cup -- thousands of times higher than the amount of plastic previously found in other food and drink.The health effects of drinking these particles are unknown, according to the researchers, who called for further study into the area.I mean, we're already, on average, devouring five grams of plastic every week, so what's the big deal? A little more won't hurt ya.Image via Wikipedia Read the rest

Cats are possessed so it makes sense that Target has made a scratcher that looks like a haunted house! You can get this two-story cardboard Haunted Mansion from Target's Halloween Hyde & EEK! Boutique ($16.99). It’s a spooky chateau for your favorite cat (black or otherwise) – just in time for Halloween! Frightful and delightful, the Deluxe Haunted Mansion from Boots & Barkley™ is where your pet will be wanting to spend all her time. It’s two stories of entertainment, with a spacious cove on the bottom complete with scratch pad built into the floor. The perfect perch to keep an eye on the room is up above. Even better, the entire set assembles in just a few easy steps. The only thing not included are spirits to haunt the place, but your cats will have a scary amount of fun nonetheless.The cats of the internet seem to take to it just fine: View this post on Instagram @target Spooky house! Occupied by Cinnamon and Nova😻 #catsofinstagram #cats_of_instagram #target #targethalloween #spookyseasonA post shared by Molly (@goodgollymollyy) on Sep 17, 2019 at 12:26pm PDT View this post on Instagram It’s the first day of fall 🍁time to show off my new haunted crib 🎃👻 🧛🏻‍♀️ (complete with Halloween @sphynxswag of course) . . #BeverlyHills #sphynx #calicosphynx #sphynxcat #hairlesscat #sphynxswag #halloween #halloweenswag #hauntedmansion #newcrib #firstdayoffall #catmansion #catcrib #targethalloween #cat #catsofinstagram #sphynxofinstagram #sphynxlove #sphynxismyworld #beverlyhillssphynxA post shared by The One and Only Ruby (@beverlyhillssphynx) on Sep 23, 2019 at 7:36am PDT View this post on Instagram Welcome to Sinatra’s Halloween crib 🎃 Got this cute scratchy house from Target! Read the rest

Children of the 80's will remember the disturbing puppets from satirical puppet show Spitting Image and the video for Genesis' Land of Confusion. Co-creator Roger Law has confirmed that a pilot has been filmed, with hopes of a new series focusing on major celebrities like Donald Trump and Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Westbrook, a writer on The Simpsons and Futurama, is serving as show-runner, and caricaturist Adrian Teal is working on the puppets. You can get a glimpse of the Trump puppet in action in this clip:On #FrontRowLate tonight, @wmarybeard speaks exclusively to Roger Law, as he films a pilot in the UK for the new Spitting Image series coming to American TV. pic.twitter.com/JFuX5dHCEU— BBC Arts (@bbcarts) September 27, 2019(Images via Avalon and The Guardian.) Read the rest

In this week's Cool Tools Podcast episode, Kevin Kelly and I talked to Boing Boing co-founder Carla Sinclair. Carla is an author, freelance writer and editor. She's written 5 books, including Girl Genius, which will be released in November.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageRaw transcript excerpts:BYU Online Japanese courseI take a course through Brigham Young University. It's their online independent study. They teach tons of foreign languages. I've been studying Japanese. I'm on my second year. They're really supposed to be semester classes, but luckily they give you a year, and I take it every day of that year. And then I also pay for a three-month extension, so it takes me about 15 months. But you can take either university or high-school-level classes, and if you are in high school, you can get credit for them and the same with the university classes. I don't do it for the credit. The reason I chose BYU is because our daughter, Jane, who's 16, wanted to study Japanese for her high school credits, and her school doesn't offer it. So we did a lot of research, and BYU is one of the only universities we could find online classes that offers credited high school classes. After I took the first semester, we went to Japan, and I was able to converse. I could order in restaurants, and I could go to a shop and ask how much something is, although I tend to forget almost everything as soon as I start speaking to someone. Read the rest