From a long thread documenting which workers are prepared to walk out on Monday for the general strike in support of the pro-independence movement: the news that Hong Kong Disneyland workers organized by the Hong Kong Disneyland Trade Union will be among the strikers.Who's the leader of the cult of personality?M-A-O T-S-E dash T-U-N-GMao Tse-Tung!Mu Sho Chi!Mao Tse-Tung!Cho En-Lai!Forever let us hold our banners high! High! High!Come along and sing the songAnd join the bureaucracyM-A-O T-S-E dash T-U-N-G!Hong Kong Disneyland cast members are going on a strike on Monday https://t.co/cYoYAPojvH— Yenni Kwok (@yennikwok) August 3, 2019(Image: Arun, CC BY-SA, modified; @maree_jun)Lots of protests planned in #HongKong. Some photos from today's rallies with participants holding #大雄's cartoon posters showing #守护未来 (protecting the future). #HongKongProtests pic.twitter.com/wHqIg6s2wX— Maree Ma (@maree_jun) August 3, 2019 Read the rest

Yesterday, I wrote about science publishing profiteer Elsevier's legal threats against Citationsy, in which the company claimed that the mere act of linking to Sci-Hub (an illegal open-access portal) was itself illegal.You'll never guess what happens next.Elsevier's own journals turn out to be full of links to Sci-Hub.It's also not hard to understand this. You see, the researchers who write the papers that Elsevier publishes are scientists, not private-equity-backed looter/profiteers, so they are more interested in science and scholarship than ensuring that Elsevier continues to rake in billions. And since Elsevier doesn't pay for any of the work it publishes, it's hard for them to exert pressure to end this practice.Now, in theory, the referees, peer reviewers, editorial boards and advisors for each journal could lay down the law on this stuff and ban links -- but they're also all volunteers who are not paid a dime by Elsevier.The reality is that scholarly publishing corporations contribute virtually nothing to scholarship (that's a peer-reviewed, empirical finding -- not a statement of opinion). Indeed, they are so lax and inattentive, with so much of their efforts focused on rent-seeking, that they don't even notice when they themselves violate their own signature policies.Clearly, given that this is supposedly a corporate priority, Elsevier do not very seriously check their own site and publications for links to infringing material, despite these endless “lists of what publishers do” that they trot out every time they come in for criticism. Some of these links provide direct hyperlinks to illegally and freely access the work of other publishers and Elsevier seem to be facilitating this. Read the rest

Anton Hecht writes, "Slime Tango is a new game, the cello is optional. It is an inversion of tug of war, as here the players work together, while going apart. So is also an inversion of dance where people are close. The slime is stretched while following the dance steps, till it touches the floor, or breaks. This one is on the streets of Farlington in the UK." Read the rest

On September 26, 1983, the USSR's missile early warning defense system mistook the sun's reflection off a cloud bank for five inbound US Minuteman ICBMs and began to flash the LAUNCH warning at the Soviet Union's missile command: Stanislav Petrov, the missile commander on duty, ignored the computer warning and forestalled a nuclear war that could have effectively ended human civilization.After the Cold War, Petrov would receive a number of commendations for saving the world. He was honored at the United Nations, received the Dresden Peace Prize, and was profiled in the documentary The Man Who Saved the World. “I was just at the right place at the right time,” he told the filmmakers. He died in May 2017, at the age of 77. Two new books about the Petrov incident and other nuclear close calls in 1983 (related to the NATO exercise Able Archer) came out just this year: Taylor Downing’s 1983 and Marc Ambinder’s The Brink.And for Petrov Day, 2018, the Future of Life Institute gave a $50,000 prize to Petrov’s daughter, Elena.Her brother, Petrov’s son Dmitry, missed the ceremony because of visa delays. “That a guy can’t get a visa to visit the city his dad saved from nuclear annihilation is emblematic of how frosty US-Russian relations have gotten, which increases the risk of accidental nuclear war,” Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and cofounder of the Future of Life Institute, commented in a statement.35 years ago today, one man saved us from world-ending nuclear war [Dylan Matthews/Vox](Thanks, J9c! Read the rest

7 years ago, I posted Cookiewaits's video mashup of Cookie Monster performing Tom Waits's "God's Away on Business," but I somehow missed that Cookiewaits followed it up the next year with this brilliant mashup for "Hell Broke Luce," which is something of a favorite around these parts. If that's your bag, don't miss the Sesame Street gang performing the Beasties' "Sabotage."(Thanks, Richard Callaghan!) Read the rest

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is not the first state to sue Purdue Pharma, members of the Sackler family (who own the company), and other board members for their role in deliberately seeking to addict people to their powerful opioid Oxycontin, but unlike other states, Massachusetts is conducting the suit in the public eye, targeting a court judgment rather than a quiet settlement with an accompanying gag-order.That means that we're able to see the evidence the state Attorney General is entering (evidence from other cases is also available, thanks to leakers who violated the court's seal).Part of that evidence is Assistant Attorney General Sydenham Alexander III's statement that a single addict made $200,000 in profits for the company, and that Purdue deliberately pursued this kind of patient because their addictions were so very profitable to the company.The Sackler family's takings from the opioid crisis has made them richer than the Rockefellers.Purdue's lawyers disclaimed the company's centrality to the opioid crisis, calling it a "dangerous misconception."Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s lawsuit, originally filed in June of last year, claims the Sacklers and other Purdue board members are personally liable for damages. The eight members of the Sackler family named as defendants in the suit, and five Purdue directors who are not Sacklers, also want Sanders to dismiss the claims against them on jurisdictional grounds.In court Friday, their lawyer, Gregory P. Joseph, said there is no evidence of misconduct occurring in the state and no proof his clients approved drug-marketing plans for the Massachusetts market. Read the rest

When big companies need to manage their data, they turn to Microsoft platforms. Want to walk confidently among those server stacks? These training bundles are a great way to learn those platforms quickly and thoroughly. Whether you're looking for an IT job with stability or upward mobility, it's all crucial knowledge.The Microsoft PowerShell Certification BundleSmart system admins use Powershell to automate their daily tasks, and this bundle shows you how to use it to its maximum potential. Pick up the Microsoft PowerShell Certification Bundle for $19.Microsoft Programming Certification Training BundleThis all-in-one course lets you pull back the curtain on Microsoft's .NET framework and Azure cloud computing system, allowing you to program and maintain complex infrastructures for any company. The Microsoft Programming Certification Training Bundle is now $49.The Complete Microsoft Access Lifetime BundleDatabase management just got a lot easier with this structured walkthrough on Access, from simple templates to advanced macros. Get the Complete Microsoft Access Lifetime Bundle for $19.99 now.The Ultimate Microsoft Project Bundle: Lifetime AccessWith this software, any big project can get streamlined a lot easier. And after completing this 2-course bundle, you can be the project manager who steers things along. Get lifetime access to the Ultimate Microsoft Project Bundle for $19.99.The MCSA SQL Server Certification Training BundleGood server management is crucial to keep any company humming. These two master classes on SQL give you the necessary skills to install, maintain and protect server systems against outside threats and interior snafus. Read the rest

See below. Yes, the U.S. Government Publishing Office Style Manual refers to residents of Hawaii as "Hawaii residents." This change occurred last year thanks to Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) who pushed for clarification that not everyone who lives in Hawaii is a Native Hawaiian. After about a dozen arguments about what to call residents of certain states, I finally googled and found the U.S. Government Publishing Office Style Manual. Have fun with this, twitter. pic.twitter.com/H8bugwOH2j— Natalie Jackson (@nataliemj10) July 31, 2019 Read the rest

A surefire way to tell if someone is a liar and/or ignorant about science is if they say a scientific theory is "only a theory," like it's a guess or a hypothesis and not a factual framework. That's exactly what Florida's new Board of Education chairman, a citrus farmer named Andy Tuck, said about the theory of evolution when he was the vice-chairman:"As a person of faith, I strongly oppose any study of evolution as fact at all. I’m purely in favor of it staying a theory and only a theory. I won’t support any evolution being taught as fact at all in any of our schools.”Tuck was appointed by Florida Governor Rick Scott. Read the rest

Police unions have systematized and perfected the process of ensuring impunity for crooked cops, ensuring that even the most violent, lying, thieving, racist, authoritarian cops can stay on the force; at the same time, apologists for police violence and corruption tell us not to blame the whole force for the bad deeds of a few rotten apples.Rotten apples spoil the barrel, though. In The network structure of police misconduct, a new Northwestern University study that analyzed 8 years worth of misconduct reports relating to more than 8,000 Chicago police officers, a trio of researchers from sociology, law and policy fields show that corruption is contagious, and that crooked cops create "misconduct networks" that initiate new officers into corrupt ways.The defenders of the cops are right about one thing, though: most cops don't attract civilian complaints -- "the modal number of civilian complaints is zero and average is something like 1.3"... but 3% of cops account for 27% of all complaints.The dirty cop is likely to be male, between 25 and 45. 76% of cops who attract complaints are partnered with cops who are also named in the complaint. Cops who are paired with rookies are much less likely to engage in misconduct.To reduce police corruption, the researchers recommend "mixed race" pairings of cops in high-crime areas, and more cops from "underrepresented groups."This study set out to examine some of the possible factors associated with police misconduct in Chicago. Broadly, our results can be grouped into four key claims. Read the rest

James Nolan Gandy is a maker/artist who has created beautiful drawing machines that create incredible, multi-spirographic abstract images. Though the machines automate much of the process, Gandy decides when to pause their operation and swap out stylii and change the settings. (via Kottke) Read the rest

Remember Perceptics, the Border Patrol contractor whose facial recognition database was hacked, along with hundreds of gigs' worth of internal files? In that trove of files were emails that reveal that Perceptics's lobbyist was operating as a kind of unpaid, uncredited speech-writer for Rep. Chuck Fleischmann [R-TN], a border-control hardliner who has devoted substantial energy to promoting the use of companies like Perceptics to defend America against a nonexistent "border emergency."Fleishmann's advocacy has created a tax-funded bonanza for beltway bandits like Perceptics, who are much better at making old white people afraid of Central American people than then are at making secure intranets.Rep. Chuck Fleischmann often strikes a Trumpian tone on border security, stoking fears during television appearances and on social media about a caravan of Central American migrants, and repeating the president’s pledge to build a wall to prevent unauthorized immigration.In April 2018, during an appropriations committee hearing, the Tennessee Republican took a more subdued and technical approach to immigration issues when quizzing then-Customs and Border Protection chief Kevin McAleenan. Fleischmann, looking down to read from a paper in front of him, wanted to know if McAleenan was on schedule to implement an upgrade of license plate reader technology at the border, as mandated by a previous appropriations bill.McAleenan thanked the committee for its support and pledged continued work to upgrade LPR technology along the border.A few days after the exchange, a lobbyist representing Perceptics, a tech company that sold state-of-the-art LPR cameras and technology to the government, emailed her team to confirm that Fleischmann had “asked about CBP’s plan to modernize its LPRs as we asked his office to do,” along with a link to a video clip of the hearing. Read the rest

Back in the early 2000s, cheap plug & play videogame consoles became ubiquitous. I remember spotting them for sale everywhere from toy stores to Walgreens. Self-contained systems, they integrated one or many games instead of allowing users to swap in cartridges or CDs. Today, Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation shares the deep and geeky history of plug & play as a launching point for his research on the TV Guide Quizmaster, "something so rare it might not even exist." Below are a few bits from the thread. See the whole thing on Twitter!In the early 2000s, a new toy category gained popularity in the United States: the "plug & play" video game console. You probably remember seeing a lot of these! The Jakks Pacific stuff was probably the most prolific. pic.twitter.com/BSjmG5PkiX— Frank Cifaldi the Last (@frankcifaldi) August 1, 2019 Why were there NES games in these things? Well:- In the 90s, Chinese manufacturers cloned the NES and put all of its components on one chip- These were used in all kinds of applications: cloned systems, plug & plays with pirated games, even educational computers! pic.twitter.com/deAFgUwDG9— Frank Cifaldi the Last (@frankcifaldi) August 1, 2019 Read the rest

When airline seatback entertainment systems started to come bundled with little webcams, airlines were quick to disavow their usage, promising that the cameras were only installed for potential future videoconferncing or gaming apps, and not to allow the crew or airline to spy on passengers in their seats.Enter Hong Kong's Cathay Pacific, the country's flagship airline, which has just amended its privacy policy to reveal that it is recording its passengers as they fly, as well as gathering data on how individual passengers spend time in airport terminals, and even brokered data on their use of rivals' hotel and airplane loyalty programs.But don't worry, the company promises it will take "commercially reasonable" cybersecurity measures to keep all that data from leaking. Separately and in unrelated news, Cathay Pacific insists that it was using "commerically reasonable" measures when it suffered the fucking massive data breach it suffered last year (up to 9.4 million customers affected!). So I'm sure it'll be fine.According to a new report from Forbes, the Hong Kong flag carrier has amended its official personal data collection policy to allow the airline to compile a database with detailed information on passengers’ use of in-flight entertainment systems (IFE) – including, but not limited to, images recorded by seatback cameras, customers’ activities at airport terminals and even data obtained about membership activity in competing hotel and airline loyalty programs. The airline further says that the collected data will be possessed by the company for “as long as necessary.”The airline is also making clear that its best efforts to protect intimate details about passengers is far from foolproof, calling its cybersecurity measures “commercially reasonable.” In November, company executives were called out by Hong Kong lawmakers who accused the airline of misleading the public about the seriousness of a massive data breach which may have compromised the personal information of as many as 9.4 million customers. Read the rest

I stay in hotels quite a bit, and these silicone putty earplugs are the best ones I've found for muffling noise. My ear canals don't work well with those cylindrical foam plugs. They leave an air gap. These silicone earplugs form a perfect seal, and they don't penetrate my ear canal at all. They are the only earplugs that feel comfortable for me. I've also found them useful when I use an air blower or an angle grinder. They cost for a 12-pack on Amazon. Read the rest

Reviewing the CraftSynth 2.0 for Engadget, Terrence O'Brien calls the small synthesizer "fun and a little bit flimsy."It's strange to hold Modal Electronics' CraftSynth 2.0 in your hands knowing what's underneath the hood. It's unassuming, and frankly, it feels kinda flimsy. Once you plug it into a decent set of headphones or speakers, though, it comes alive. The fact that these sounds come out of something that weighs just 12.5 ounces when loaded with three double-A batteries is amazing.Image: Modal Electronics Read the rest

After Therese Kozlowsk of Macomb County, Michigan filed for divorce from Brian Kozlowski, he secretly put sleeping pills in her coffee on a regular basis. When Therese felt suspiciously sick, she put hidden cameras in the kitchen and caught Brian on video. In court for the crime, Brian pleaded no contest, but he was only sentenced to spend 60 weekend days in jail. The Macomb County Prosecutors called the sentence a "slap in the face" to Therese and will appeal. From ABC News:"He put eight sleeping pills into that coffee pot every single day for weeks. An adult dosage according to the packaging is one. I was being hunted by a dangerous predator, but in this nightmare the predator was Brian," Therese Kozlowski told the court Thursday. “I believe this was attempted murder. Once Brian realized he lost me and there was no getting me to stay in this unhealthy marriage, his goal was to eliminate me...""You shouldn't be able to commit at 15 year-felony by poisoning someone and only have to serve weekends," Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith said. "It's unbelievable to me."image: "Cup of Coffee" by Julius Schorzman (CC BY-SA 2.0) Read the rest

100,000 stars has apparently been around for years, but I loved how much fun it makes zooming in and out of the Milky Way and checking out nearby stars. I could name a half-dozen recent video games that attempt this exact UI and don't do it as well! They should update it with all the lovely planets we've found since 2012. Read the rest

The Decoy Effect is a simple but powerful trick that marketers use to influence you to buy something that is bigger or more expensive than you need or want. I fall for this every time I go to the movies and think I'm going to buy the medium popcorn but end up getting the large because it costs just a few cents more. The medium popcorn is the decoy that nudges you to buy the large. But social psychologists have also studied the Decoy Effect outside retail environments. From the BBC News:The decoy effect might also influence our voting in elections, and recruitment decisions. In these kinds of situations, the “decoy” may appear by accident rather than having been deliberately placed in the selection, but if you do come across two candidates who are similar, but one is slightly superior to the other, it will heighten your regard for them compared to the other competitors...On a more positive note, scientists in the UK have also started to consider whether the decoy effect might be used to encourage people to make healthier life choices. Christian Von Wagner, a reader in behavioural science and health at University College London, for instance, recently explored people’s intentions to undergo a vital – but unpleasant – screening for colorectal cancer. He found that given the choice between arranging an appointment for the screening or not having the procedure at all, many people chose not to go. But if he also presented them with a third option – an appointment at a less convenient hospital with a longer waiting time, ie, the decoy – the uptake was greater. Read the rest

Mining the results of public records requests relating to Amazon's secret deals with local law enforcement to promote its Ring surveillance doorbells (more than 200 agencies!) continue to bear fruit.Yesterday, it was the news that these deals gave Amazon PR a veto over public statements about the program, and banned cops from disclosing that they were being given free merch and other incentives to recommend Amazon's products.Now, further reporting from Gizmodo reveals that Amazon's deals also include realtime access to the 911 system, so that Amazon can repackage 911 alerts as "alerts" that are pushed out through the "Neighbors" app. The app is intended for use with Ring surveillance doorbells, but can also stand alone, and allows people to form a kind of curtain-twitchers' alliance with others nearby to combine their (often unfounded) suspicions of (often brown-skinned) passers-by with footage and stills from their home surveillance devices, and then discuss them in a forum that is like Facebook for frightened people.The problem is that crime is in steady decline, and even the most motivated, toxic pecksniffs can't really manufacture enough content to make Neighbors into a compelling proposition. The agreements between police and Amazon give Neighbors access to information provided to 911 operators and fed into the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, which can include extremely sensitive information ("names, phone numbers, addresses, medical conditions and potentially other types of personally identifiable information, including, in some instances, GPS coordinates"). The internal docs show that Amazon's "Neighbors News team" processes this data and turns it to "alerts" that are pushed to Neighbors users, based on their proximity to the incidents, for crimes from eight categories: "burglary, vehicle break-in and theft, robbery, shots fired, shootings, stabbing, hostage, and arson," as well as "residential, commercial, and structure fires, as well as explosions."In some territories, 911 calls are matters of public record, but these are in the minority. Read the rest

This outstanding 1982 TV commercial makes me want to play my son's collection of vintage Atari 2600 games. Except, of course, for Pac-Man. Read the rest

Everything in this restored film about Tokyo is interesting -- the street celebrations, the sporting events, the children's swordplay drill -- but the standout is listening to Japanese ambassador Hiroshi Saito talk about the country's desire to remain on good terms with the United States. Image: YouTube Read the rest

This tiny "soft" robot, just 3cm long, zips along at 20 of its body lengths per second. It can also carry heavy things, like peanuts in the shell, but that slows it down a bit. And amazingly, you can step on it and it won't die. Over at IEEE Spectrum, Ivan Ackerman writes about the little robot developed by researchers from Tsinghua University and UC Berkeley:It takes a scanning electron microscope to actually see what the robot is made of—a thermoplastic layer is sandwiched by palladium-gold electrodes, bonded with adhesive silicone to a structural plastic at the bottom. When an AC voltage (as low as 8 volts but typically about 60 volts) is run through the electrodes, the thermoplastic extends and contracts, causing the robot’s back to flex and the little “foot” to shuffle...The researchers also put together a prototype with two legs instead of one, which was able to demonstrate a potentially faster galloping gait by spending more time in the air. They suggest that robots like these could be used for “environmental exploration, structural inspection, information reconnaissance, and disaster relief,” which are the sorts of things that you suggest that your robot could be used for when you really have no idea what it could be used for. But this work is certainly impressive, with speed and robustness that are largely unmatched by other soft robots. An untethered version seems possible due to the relatively low voltages required to drive the robot, and if they can put some peanut-sized sensors on there as well, practical applications might actually be forthcoming sometime soon. Read the rest

Making a solar hot-dog oven is a science fair standby, but JohnW539's CNC-milled Sundogger Instructable really digs into the classroom portion, drawing on the creator's experience as a physics/astronomy/computer science prof at Middle Tennessee State University.Detailed scientific measurements have show that a typical hot dog has a diameter of about 1 inch of about 2.5 cm. This gives us a hot dog radius of about 1.25 cm. (Precision measurements of hot dogs put this number at 2.726 cm in diameter - but your actual hot dog diameter may vary.) The volume of a hot dog - or anything - is its length times its cross sectional area. The cross sectional area is going to be A = Pi times the radius squared. This means that every linear centimeter of the hot dog has a volume of (1.25 x 1.25 x 3.14) = 5ish cubic cm.The mass of any object is the density times the volume. According to the manufacturer of the hot dogs I used, each dog has a mass of 57 grams. With the length of the hot dog measured at about 12 cm, this gives us a volume of about 4.8 grams per hot dog cm. This estimate puts the typical hot dog density just below 1 grams per cubic cm.Combining these energy input per centimeter and the mass per centimeter, we find that we have 117 / 4.8 = 24 calories of energy per gram being added to the hot dog every minute. Thus in every second, we get enough energy to raise the hot dog temperature about 24 degrees Celsius every minute when it's internal temperature is about 20C. Read the rest

In the late 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian empire built a network of carrier-pigeon post-offices throughout its territory: today, Bosnia has but a single (nonfunctional) pigeon post office remaining, in the southeastern town of Trebinje.Writing in Balkan Insights, Mladen Lakic describes the site -- now a museum -- and its history, including a failed attempt to revive the pigeon post.The post office lies on the right bank of the Trebisnjica river, in the old town, or Kastel, near the Sahat kula – the clock tower – another famous symbol of Trebinje.Nowadays, it belongs to the Museum of Herzegovina, an institution run by the local authorities, and the trained avian messengers are long gone.Some would like to see them back at work. “There was an initiative to keep pigeons once again, as part of the museum attraction, but for some reason it failed, even though it would be nice to see something like that, now, when even regular letters are becoming part of history,” Vulesevic noted.But the museum does its best to keep their memory alive. In February, it ran a workshop for local children of Trebinje where they explained the history of these winged letter carriers.You’ve Got Mail: Bosnia’s Last Pigeon Post Office [Mladen Lakic/Balkan Insight](via Beyond the Beyond)(Image: Slobodan Vulesevic) Read the rest

Writing in Wired, political scientist Henry Farrell points out what should be obvious: we're going to pay for climate change (that is, either we're going to rebuild the cities smashed by weather and take care of the people whose lives are ruined, or we're going to pay to cope with the ensuing refugee crisis), so the question isn't "how can we possibly pay for climate change?" but rather, "Will the people who profited from pumping CO2 into the atmosphere pay, or will their victims be left on the hook for their greed and recklessness?"The public treasury will be on the hook for cleaning up cities and remediating human wreckage, no matter what we do, so the only real question is, do we fill the treasury by taking money from the people who just tried to live their lives in an impossible situation, or do we fill it by taking money from the tiny number of ultra-wealthy people who made their riches by setting things up so that just living our lives destroyed the planet?This fight has already started to play out. Fossil fuel interests are rich, politically influential, and well organized. They are able not only to pay for lobbyists in Washington, DC, but to organize an entire political movement at the state level. The Koch-funded “grassroots” organization Americans for Prosperity pushes to protect fossil fuel interests in individual states. The group has become intimately intertwined with the Republican party.The interests on the other side are broader, less well organized, and less influential. Read the rest

Jurors found that Katy Perry's Dark Horse "improperly copied" an earlier song titled Joyful Noise by Flame, a Christian rap artist.The case focused on the notes and beats of the song, not its lyrics or recording, and the questions suggested that Perry might be off the hook.But in a decision that left many in the courtroom surprised, jurors found all six songwriters and all four corporations that released and distributed the songs were liable, including Perry and Sarah Hudson, who wrote only the song’s words, and Juicy J, who only wrote the rap he provided for the song. ...Gray’s attorneys argued that the beat and instrumental line featured through nearly half of “Dark Horse” are substantially similar to those of “Joyful Noise.” Gray wrote the song with his co-plaintiffs Emanuel Lambert and Chike Ojukwu.Here's Joyful Noise:Here's Dark Horse. The infringement begins 18 seconds in.Though the distinctive, whining 8-note loop was the matter at hand, jurors found all involved in the song to be infringers, irrespective of their role in its production. You might say they did the RICO. It surely can't have helped Perry that both songs start with a guy shouting "y'all know what this is". Even if it didn't factor into the legal analysis, her song is showing up to court unshaven, without a necktie, and smirking at the judge.It's nonetheless a a disturbing outcome, writes Vox.But Charlie Harding of the Vox podcast Switched on Pop explains that the striking similarities should be free to use by both artists, despite their similarities. Read the rest

Bellowphone made a unique organ and now demonstrates it in action: "the sound of my most recent skweeze-ball instrument, with a song from Mozart's Magic Flute." Read the rest

Ooh, this is awesome. Activists have made a free font called Gerry that is made from the shapes of gerrymandered congressional districts. They encourage you to use it to write your representative.It's here. GERRY. A font created by your congressional districts. Log on to https://t.co/WkuVp7oDpu and use the font to tell congress how happy you are that your vote doesn't matter. pic.twitter.com/j9U5W7qmTz— Gerry (@UglyGerry) July 23, 2019The Next Web:The font’s creators, Ben Doessel and James Lee, made it to raise awareness and provide a method for disenfranchised voters to protest partisan gerrymandering. The duo, in a press release provided to the media, stated:"After seeing how janky our Illinois 4th district had become, we became interested in this issue. We noticed our district’s vague, but shaky U-shape, then after seeing other letters on the map, the idea hit us, let’s create a typeface so our districts can become digital graffiti that voters and politicians can’t ignore."For those unfamiliar with gerrymandering, it’s the process by which US voting districts use increasingly nonsensical borders to disenfranchise voters and limit who they can vote for by party lines instead of geography.(The Week)Thanks, Veek!screenshot via UglyGerry.com Read the rest

So, for National Mustard Day (August 3), French's thought to make mustard-flavored ice cream. They're selling their horrible concoction for a limited time on both coasts:To celebrate National Mustard Day on the West Coast, Coolhaus’s location in Culver City, CA will have the ice cream available on August 2-4 and August 9-11. On the East Coast, New Yorkers can look for the French’s Mustard Ice Cream truck on August 1 and 2, before making its way out to the Hamptons on August 3...August 2Madison Square ParkBrooklyn Heights (DUMBO)August 3Main Street HamptonsEast Hampton Main Beach on Ocean Ave.Or, you can make your own. Because, why not? French's leads the way: Read the rest

King of the Hill is "The greatest anime of the late 90s," writes Gamblor on YouTube. QED. Read the rest

Attention humans: The robots are taking over. The good news is, they're taking over the household chores. Robot vacuums have come a long way in terms of technology in the last decade or two. Not only are they a huge time-saver, but some of them are also downright fun to watch. Here's a roundup of some of our favorite deals on our favorite robo-cleaners.ECOVACS DEEBOT 901 Robotic Vacuum Cleaner (Refurbished)Not every home is the same, but the DEEBOT 901 has solutions for nearly any floor plan. You can draw cleaning maps and assign jobs from the ECOVACS app on your phone, or just direct the bot to clean by voice command and let its Smart Navi Mapping technology do the rest. Get a refurbished ECOVACS DEEBOT 901 Robotic Vacuum Cleaner for $249.99, half off the retail price.ECOVACS Deebot Robot Vacuum Cleaner & Canister Vacuum StationWhen it comes to tidy floors, it's OK to be a bit of a control freak sometimes. This cleaning duo includes ECOVAC's flagship robot and its smart mapping features for vacuuming wide areas, but the charging station also has a standard canister vacuum for those tight areas that need a personal touch. Pick up the ECOVACS Deebot Robot Vacuum Cleaner & Canister Vacuum Station for $439.99, a full 44% off the list price.iRobot Roomba 805 Robotic Vacuum (Certified Refurbished)iRobot has had a long time to perfect their pioneering Roomba units, and it shows in this model. iAdapt Responsive Navigation lets it deftly navigate around or under obstacles and its Dirt Detect technology can actually seek out areas with a high concentration of dirt. Read the rest

This video of a dog groomer deftly nurturing a bond of trust with a dog who's feeling very hostile, very defensive, and very much like biting and barking -- wow, it's something to behold. She's so talented. Not sure where the original video came from, or who the woman in the video is. There's a lot to learn from this short clip, however, if you have to interact with dogs you don't know.Here's the video clip in full.The way this talented groomer creates trust with this dog.[via IMGUR] Read the rest

It's hot everywhere, even in Burträsk, Sweden, where this very strange human-dog-mutant enjoys cooling down with a slice of watermelon. Piece by piece, the Labrador Retriever appears to lift the juicy fruit to its mouth with their owner's hands.The video was filmed on a hot day in Burträsk on July 24, 2019.Hey, they're not the only dog who appears to feel very comfortable around watermelons and video cameras."Nobody cared who I was until I put on the mask..." Read the rest

Here's a fun card trick video that shows you “How To Flick a Card Boomerang.”“Prepare to be Whelmed,” says Max Maher.Here's the complete video:How To Flick a Card Boomerang. Prepare to be WhelmedAnd here's a fun behind-the scenes companion clip.Here's another fun card-related video from Max's YouTube channel. [via IMGUR] Read the rest

Nary a curse word in the neighborhood. Read the rest

Those with coulrophobia are advised to avoid Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas during their upcoming "clown-only" screenings of IT: Chapter Two. Back in 2017, they had clown-only screenings of IT at two theaters so based on that fun, they've expanded the extravaganza to 17 locations across the country.According to Alamo Drafthouse, guests are “encouraged to come dressed as a clown – the wig, the makeup, the oversized pants and suspenders, the blood-curdling makeup — and sit through this coulrophobia-inducing fright fest with a theater full of fellow clowns.”What could possibly go wrong. Read the rest

In Chennai, India, a 7-year-old boy went to the hospital with a swollen jaw and mouth pain. Turned out he had more than 500 extra teeth. According to Prathiba Ramani, the head of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology at Saveetha Dental College and Hospital, the teeth were contained in a sac tucked inside his lower jaw. From CNN:"There were a total of 526 teeth ranging from 0.1 millimeters (.004 inches) to 15 millimeters (0.6 inches). Even the smallest piece had a crown, root and enamel coat indicating it was a tooth," she said.The boy was released three days after the surgery and is expected to make a full recovery, Ramani said.Ramani said the boy was suffering from a very rare condition called compound composite odontoma. She said what caused the condition is unclear, but it could be genetic or it could be due to environmental factors like radiation."Doctors find 526 teeth in boy's mouth in India" (CNN) Read the rest

Penn State engineers have devised a circuit inspired by the way barn owls can so precisely determine where a sound is coming from and track their prey in the dark. Eventually, this fine example of biomimicry could lead to more accurate electronic navigation devices. Essentially, the owl's brain calculates the difference between when a sound arrives at the left ear compared to the right ear and uses that information to locate the source of the sound. After that is when things get interesting. From Penn State:The speed of sound is faster than the owl's nerves can function so after the owl brain converts the sound to an electrical pulse, the pulse is slowed down. Then the brain's circuitry uses a lattice of nerves of different lengths with inputs from two ends, to determine which length is where the two signals coincide or arrive at the same time. This provides the direction.Saptarshi Das and his team have created an electronic circuit that can slow down the input signals and determine the coincidence point, mimicking the working of the barn owl brain...The team created a series of split-gate molybdenum sulfide transistors to mimic the coincidence nerve network in the owl's brain. Split-gate transistors only produce output when both sides of the gate match, so only the gate tuned to a specific length will register the sound. The biomimetic circuitry also uses a time-delay mechanism to slow down the signal..."Millions of years of evolution in the animal kingdom have ensured that only the most efficient materials and structures have survived," said Sarbashis Das. Read the rest

MIT Technology Review reports that scientists in China are making human-monkey embryos.[T]he Spanish-born biologist Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, who operates a lab at the Salk Institute in California, has been working with monkey researchers in China to perform the disturbing research.Their objective is to create “human-animal chimeras,” in this case monkey embryos to which human cells are added. The idea behind the research is to fashion animals that possess organs, like a kidney or liver, made up entirely of human cells. Such animals could be used as sources of organs for transplantation.Image: Read the rest

Which ad copy for a banking service is more effective?A) “Access cash from the equity in your home.”orB) “It’s true—You can unlock cash from the equity in your home.”If you answered B, you are correct. It did better with Chase Bank customers than A did.Answer B was written by a machine learning language model developed by Persado, "a New York-based company that applies artificial intelligence to marketing creative," according to Ad Age.From the article:Kristin Lemkau, chief marketing officer of JPMorgan Chase, noted that machine learning can actually help achieve more humanity in marketing. “Persado’s technology is incredibly promising,” she said in a statement. “It rewrote copy and headlines that a marketer, using subjective judgment and their experience, likely wouldn’t have.”Chase plans to use Persado for the ideation stage of creating marketing copy on display ads, Facebook ads and in direct mail, according to Yuval Efrati, chief customer officer at seven-year-old Persado. He says that the AI company works alongside Chase’s marketing team and its agencies.[via Digg]Image: Shutterstock (modified) Read the rest

Ugly Gerry is a typeface where each glyph is a conspicuously gerrymandered congressional district. The district boundaries are manipulated thus by incumbent politicians to arrange voters to their own party's advantage. The result is that, unlike their opposition voters, every letter of the latin alphabet gets represented. Read the rest

When Jim Stauffer's mother Doris Stauffer died at the age of 73, he sought out a way for her body to be used to further scientific study: she had Alzheimer's but did not carry the genes commonly associated with it, so he thought that her brain might yield further insights into the disease.He donated her remains to Phoenix's Biological Resource Center, not knowing that it was a criminal, for-profit enterprise run by a deluded grifter whose medical knowledge came "from books or the internet." Years later, Stauffer was contacted by an investigative journalist from Reuters who was reporting the story, who told him that the Biological Resource Center sold his mother's remains to the military for blast testing, in an procedure that Stauffer explained this way: "She was then supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of apparatus, and a detonation took place underneath her to basically kind of get an idea of what the human body goes through when a vehicle is hit by an IED."Though years have gone by, he remains traumatized by the knowledge of the abuse of his mother's remains.Arizona does not require licensing of clinics that handle body donations, and even though the Arizona legislature has adopted legislation to make this a requirement in the wake of the Biological Resource Center scandal, the legislation has not been implemented and is not enforced in Arizona.Stauffer is part of a group of families of people whose remains were mutilated by the Biological Resource Center who are suing its former owner, Stephen Gore, who is currently serving a prison sentence related to the Center's activities. Read the rest

The smelly compounds that skunks squirt when threatened are called thiols and are notorious hard to eliminate from humans and dogs who get spray with them. Tomato juice merely temporarily overpowers the stench, and commercial products are mostly junk or dangerous. But researchers recently discovered a fungal compound in Alaskan soil that actually neutralizes thiols, reports Chemical and Engineering News:The researchers reacted pericosine A with different skunk thiols and found that it converted them into odorless compounds, reducing the thiol levels to a point at which they were undetectable by the human nose....There’s nothing like skunk odor, [Robert H. Cichewicz, a natural products chemist at the University of Oklahoma] says, to expose the shortcomings of a lab’s hood system. And once he made the mistake of wafting his hand over a sample of pure anal gland secretions. It was, he says, “the nasal equivalent of staring at the sun.”Image: Yasmins world/Shutterstock Read the rest

The whistleblower Edward Snowden announced today that he has written a memoir, Permanent Record, which will go on sale worldwide in more than 20 languages on September 17.John Sergeant, CEO of Macmillan, Snowden's publisher (and my own), said, "Edward Snowden decided at the age of 29 to give up his entire future for the good of his country. He displayed enormous courage in doing so, and like him or not, his is an incredible American story. There is no doubt that the world is a better and more private place for his actions. Macmillan is enormously proud to publish Permanent Record."I know Snowden slightly and was lucky enough to get a blurb from him for my novel Walkaway and then to do a double act with him at the New York Public Library.He impressed me as incredibly smart and thoughtful, and while I know the broad outlines of his biography, I'm fascinated to read Permanent Record and gain more insight into the circumstances that led to his extraordinary, principled act of bravery and self-sacrifice.Permanent Record [Edward Snowden/Macmillan] Read the rest

A group of MIT Media Lab researchers have published Radiotalk, a massive corpus of talk radio audio with machine-generated transcriptions, with a total of 240,000 hours' worth of speech, marked up with machine-readable metadata.The audio was scraped from streaming radio services between Oct 2018 and Mar 2019, and the transcripts run to 2.8 billion words. The researchers hope the corpus will be used by "researchers in the fields of natural language processing, conversational analysis, and the social sciences."I'm mostly interested in the social science implications here: talk radio is incredibly important to the US political discourse, but because it is ephemeral and because recorded speech is hard to data-mine, we have very little quantitative analysis of this body of work.As Gretchen McCulloch points out in her new book on internet-era language, Because Internet, research on human speech has historically relied on expensive human transcription, leading to very small and corpuses covering a very small fraction of human communication. This corpus is part of a shift that allows social scientists, linguists and political scientists to study a massive core-sample of spoken language in our public discourse. We introduce RadioTalk, a corpus of speech recognition transcripts sampled from talk radio broadcasts in the United States between October of 2018 and March of 2019. The corpus is intended for use by researchers in the fields of natural language processing, conversational analysis, and the social sciences. The corpus encompasses approximately 2.8 billion words of automatically transcribed speech from 284,000 hours of radio, together with metadata about the speech, such as geographical location, speaker turn boundaries, gender, and radio program information. Read the rest

Laura Poitras (previously) is the Academy Award-winning director of Citizenfour; she teamed up with the activist group Forensic Archicture (previously), whose incredible combination of data-visualization and documentary filmmaking have made them a potent force for holding war criminals and authoritarians to account: together, they created Triple Chaser, a short documentary that uses novel machine-learning techniques to document the ways in which tear gas and bullets made by companies belonging to "philanthropist" Warren Kanders have been used against civilians to suppress anti-authoritarian movements, and even to murder innocents, including children.Kanders sat on the board of the Whitney Museum of Art, where Poitras had a one-woman show (I contributed to the program book); he is also owner of Safariland, which manufactures the ubiquitous Triple Chaser tear-gas cannisters (Kanders has resigned from the board after the production of this short film).When Forensic Architecture was invited to contribute to the Whitney's biennale, they teamed up with Poitras to train a machine-learning system to recognize Triple Chaser cannisters in videos captured by protesters and journalists while they were under assault by security forces. They crowdsourced samples of the Triple Chaser cannisters, then created 3D models of them and placed them on a series of backgrounds to train their classifer. The video is narrated by David Byrne.The resulting film -- which documents the production of the machine learning system and its use in identifying Triple Chaser products targeted at peaceful protesters, as well as Kanders' complicity in crimes (including the firing of live ammunition into the Occupied Territories in a massacre that killed many civilians, including children) and his connections to the Whitney -- was submitted to the Whitney for the biennale (to the Whitney's credit, they accepted the film). Read the rest

You can almost hear the narrator drooling as he gleefully describes how Fisher Industries proposes to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, one mile a day, in ten years. By the way, illegal border crossings have been declining for the last 20 years. "In 2017, border-crossing apprehensions were at their lowest point since 1971." (NY Times)Fisher Industries seems well-suited for a president like Trump. From Wikipedia:Fischer Industries is a privately-held construction company based in Dickinson, North Dakota, led by Tommy Fisher. It is a child company of Fisher Sand and Gravel.President Donald Trump has lobbied for the company to receive contracts on the US-Mexico Trump wall, to the Department of Homeland Security, to Todd T. Semonite of the Army Corps of Engineers, and promoted the company in an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity. Jared Kushner has also endorsed the company, as well as freshman North Dakota senator Kevin Cramer, to whose campaign the Fisher family contributed $10,000.Tommy Fisher has appeared on local and conservative TV and radio and is a donor to several charities and the Republican Party. Senator Kramer suggested Fisher's Fox News appearances are what attracted Trump to the company.The High Plains Reader has documented environmental violations and tax evasion by the company, including 169 citations and paying $1 million in air quality violation fines in Maricopa County, Arizona over the past 10 years. In 2009 Michael Fisher, then-owner of Fisher, pled guilty to nine counts of felony tax fraud, being sentenced to 37 months in prison and over $300,000 in restitution. Read the rest

This January, we celebrated the Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain, as the onerous terms of the hateful Sonny Bono Copyright Act finally developed a leak, putting all works produced in 1923 into the public domain, with more to follow every year -- 1924 goes PD in 2020, and then 1925, etc.But there's another source of public domain works: until the 1976 Copyright Act, US works were not copyrighted unless they were registered, and then they quickly became public domain unless that registration was renewed. The problem has been to figure out which of these works were in the public domain, because the US Copyright Office's records were not organized in a way that made it possible to easily cross-check a work with its registration and renewal. For many years, the Internet Archive has hosted an archive of registration records, which were partially machine-readable.Enter the New York Public Library, which employed a group of people to encode all these records in XML, making them amenable to automated data-mining.Now, Leonard Richardson (previously) has done the magic data-mining work to affirmatively determine which of the 1924-63 books are in the public domain, which turns out to be 80% of those books; what's more, many of these books have already been scanned by the Hathi Trust (which uses a limitation in copyright to scan university library holdings for use by educational institutions, regardless of copyright status)."Fun facts" are, sadly, often less than fun. But here's a genuinely fun fact: most books published in the US before 1964 are in the public domain! Read the rest