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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

Los Angeles Boing Boing readers are invited to the premiere of the film King Baby (2019) the first feature film from filmmaker and artist Case Esparros. King Baby is a second coming of Christ story set in a decaying world. It is a meditation on belief divided into three acts. King Baby is the firm belief that Christianity is the sublime in the wretched image. It's a story of hope and shedding sorrow. The film is scored and features music from Case Esparros himself as well as CON-DOM, Ramleh, and Yung Lean, and stars musicians such as folk artist Sunny War and outsider musician SUPERSTAR AND STAR as the central Christ character.Superstar and Star will perform after the screening.Saturday, August 3rd4-6 PMThe film will begin promptly at 4:00Reserve free ticketsPoster by: mavisfiguls@gmail.com Read the rest

One of the reasons most law enforcement organizations favor drug prohibition is that it gives them a reason to arrest (or in some cases, shake down) people who pose no danger to society. Busting someone for drug possession is such an easy way to nail a person that some cops even plant drugs on people.Yesterday a Florida judge set a former Florida deputy's bond at $1 million. Steven O'Leary is being held on charges of "official misconduct, making false statements, tampering with evidence, false imprisonment, petit theft, and battery." From CNN:Over the 11 months he was working as a deputy in Martin County, O'Leary made 86 drug arrests, according to a 47-page investigative report. Some of those, the report said, were people being wrongly arrested and held in jail for several days.In January, a crime lab found that substances from three cases that O'Leary submitted as evidence were not drugs. According to the report, investigators found a "broken figurine" that appeared to be a religious statue in the trunk of a sheriff's office vehicle O'Leary had used. The figurine was made from a similar substance to that which O'Leary had identified as crack cocaine in two cases, according to the report. A lab test found that the "statue was comprised of gypsum," the report said.From WPTV:In January, investigators said O'Leary claimed to find illegal drugs during traffic stops when he was employed as a deputy with the Martin County Sheriff's Office.While on duty, O'Leary made three narcotics-related arrests in which the substances involved were not actually narcotics. Read the rest

Last week, Motherboard broke a story revealing that Amazon had entered into secret agreements with local law enforcement agencies that had the cops pushing Ring surveillance doorbells to the people they were sworn to protect, in exchange for freebies and access to a system that let them request access to footage recorded by the Amazon's industry-leading internet-of-shit home surveillance tools.Later, a public records request put the number of police departments that had entered into these agreements with Amazon at more than 200.Now, a new report from Gizmodo's Dell Cameron reveals the text of the boilerplate agreements that Amazon entered into with cops: under the terms of these deals, cops would be supplied with scripts and graphics that they were to use to promote Amazon products, and would be required to get Amazon's permission to diverge from these premade talking-points and art. The agreements contain a gag-clause that prohibits the cops from disclosing that they were parroting corporate PR, and the clause contained no carve out for public records requests.Ring's agreements require cops to encourage citizens to install "Neighbors" -- a "neighborhood watch" app that Ring users can use to report "suspicious characters" captured by their doorbells (unsurprisingly, the reports generated by this app are a racist dumpster-fire). Thankfully, the attorneys who negotiated Boca Raton's Amazon deal crossed out the confidentiality clause, which allowed for all of this to come to light through a public records request.Ring gives discounted surveillance doorbells to city employees and supplies products for raffles; the members of the public who win these doorbells are not generally informed that Amazon provides their local law enforcement with comprehensive dossiers on everyone who activates a Ring doorbell, including "where they live, the MAC addresses of each of their devices, and how to reach them by email or phone."Ring appears to take full advantage of the privilege granting it power over police statements. Read the rest

The Action Lab Man is a guy who makes good videos of science demonstrations and experiments. In this video he tries to make something called an "Egely Wheel" to spin just by putting his hand near it. I've never heard of an Egely Wheel before I saw this video. Here's what the Action Lab Man said about it: "In this video I bought and Egely Disk Vitality Indicator that supposedly moves through your body's "bio-energy" or telekinesis. Is it true? I test it out myself to see if it truly can move simply through concentration. I test it with gloves on, in a jar, and even in a vacuum chamber."Image: YouTube/Action Lab Read the rest

Private equity firms like Blackstone and KKR have acquired massive health companies like Teamhealth and Emcare, which bill out doctors to the hospitals they work for, taking those doctors out of the hospitals' insurance agreements and massively hiking their fees -- that's why when you go to a hospital, even one that's covered by your insurer, you still end up with massive surprise bills for your care.In classic private equity style, the firms behind this gouging have figured out which doctors are the most profitable: emergency care, neonatal intensive care, and anesthesiologists -- these being doctors that you see in times of utmost distress, without the chance to shop around. The NICU targets are especially juicy, because they care for critically ill newborns whose parents are confronting the possibility that their baby will die, and are thus unlikely to haggle over the bill.The price hikes are prodigious: "after EmCare took over the management of emergency services at hospitals with previously low out-of-network rates, they raised out-of-network rates by over 81 percentage points. In addition, the firm raised its charges by 96 percent relative to the charges billed by the physician groups they succeeded."The private equity buyouts of doctors' groups were (naturally) debt-financed, leaving these price-gouging companies leveraged to the hilt, with investor shares cratering. Not surprisingly, any legislative relief for patients who face these life-destroying surprise bills is immediately targeted for all-out lobbyist blitz attacks, because the holders of the debt and the PE companies that issued it have everything to lose from even the smallest concession to treating health-care's primary purpose as making sick people well again, rather than making plutocrat looters unimaginably wealthy. Read the rest

In 2008, a security researcher named James Glenn warned Cisco that its video surveillance software had a defect that made it vulnerable to a trivial-to-exploit attack; for four years afterward, the company continued to sell this software to schools, airports, hospitals, state/local governments, the US military, FEMA, the Secret Service and police departments without mitigating the defect or warning their customers that internet-connected randos could undetectably peer through their security cameras, unlock their doors, disable their alarms, and delete footage.Now, Cisco has entered into a settlement with the DOJ, DC and 15 states, and will pay $8.6m to settle all claims against it.Despite the fine, Cisco insists that nothing bad happened, because it never detected anyone making an undetectable attack on any of its customers' systems.80% of the award money will go to the government agencies, while 20% will go to Glenn and his attorneys, who filed a whistleblower lawsuit after he was fired from Cisco subcontractor Netdesign. There's a lesson here about the people who advocate for allowing companies to decide when defects in their products can be revealed: companies are not trustworthy custodians of bad news about their products, even (especially) when the stakes are high and they face titanic liability for failing to mitigate reported defects.Hackers could use the flaw not just to spy on video footage but to turn surveillance cameras on and off, delete footage and even potentially compromise other connected physical security systems such as alarms or locks - all without being detected, according to Hamsa Mahendranathan, an attorney at Constantine Cannon, which represented whistleblower James Glenn. Read the rest

Article 31 of the Russian constitution guarantees the right to peaceful political assembly, which is why Russian opposition protesters like to wave copies of the constitution around as Putin's goon-squads descend on them to dole out savage beatings and mass arrests.On Saturday, a 17 year old woman from Moscow named Olga Misik sat down in front of a line of armed, locked and loaded riot cops and quietly read the constitution to them, setting up a photo-op of the genre that includes Tiananmen Square’s Tank Man, Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge, and the photos of a pigtailed, defiant Greta Thunberg standing alone in the cold before the Swedish legislature.Misik was part of a protest over the banning of leading opposition politicians from upcoming municipal elections in Moscow. She says that after the protest, she was beset by riot cops who beat her up and then arrested her. She faces charges for "attending a public event which was held without filing a notice."Misik is an articulate spokeswoman for protest, grounding her action in a wider context: "Injustice always concerns everyone. Today the Moscow City Duma, tomorrow the governor of the region, a week later the head of the Resurrection District. It is only a matter of time. It is foolish to think that this is a rally only for free elections or the admission of candidates. This is a rally in defence of elementary constitutional rights that would not be questioned in a democratic state."The pictures and videos of Misik reading to the riot squad have become a rallying point for the opposition. Read the rest

When it comes to language lessons, there's no shortage of virtual teachers out there. But even with all that interactive technology out there, it's tough to make the process of learning a new tongue seem as fun as actually getting out there and speaking it.There are some standouts, though. There's a reason why Babbel gets praise both from traditional news outlets and the internet intelligentsia: Its methodology is as smooth as its interface, and the sum of those parts is a joy to dive into.Like a lot of language learning apps, you can plow through one of 14 languages in Babbel at your own pace. But the individual lessons are bite-sized and engaging, making you actually want to pick up that pace. Apart from that, it's all about the details: The audio you'll hear in Babbel is all from native speakers, and feedback from the speech recognition is top-notch. As you progress, you'll notice old words popping up just often enough to make them stick in your long-term memory, and before you know it, you'll be integrating them into a practical, usable conversation.A lifetime subscription to Babbel Language Learning is $149, which is half off the list price. You can also get a 2-year subscription for 33% off at $99 or a 1-year subscription for 17% off at $69. Read the rest

Love this wonderful rendition of the Beatles 'Yellow Submarine' album cover, in string art, which was of course so very much of the era of this record's release.From R/crafts, and by @meltsir -- who mounted it on a piece of spray-painted wood.What a wonderful reminder that patience can result in truly surprising beauty.View the original. Read the rest

“I made a wooden flag out of 2x4s for my oldest friend from high school who works as a peace officer. I grinded and sanded it to look like it it blowing in the wind and used a torch to burn in the dark areas.” From Redditoror and IMGURian GoodlyEarth.Don't miss the video at the end!I made a waving wooden flag out of 2x4s for my peace officer friend who I've know since high school. I used a torch to burn the dark colors into the wood. Read the rest

Get a load of this delicious video of a beekeeper slicing that honeycomb down, from which to extract this year's honey harvest. It's so sweet and sticky and amazing I literally can't handle it!“Is this what you people want?”“And the 2019 honey season is in the bag,” says beekeeper and IMGURian chop655. “Pulled ~30-35 gallons (360-420lbs) for the year. Bee kind to each other.”Here's the video:Is this what you people want? Read the rest

Mama bear and her cubs make off with some dog food on Elizabeth Loflin's North Carolina porch.Video below.The four little bears[IMGUR/MSN/Storyful] Read the rest

ALMERIA, SPAIN: These idiots dumped a used refrigerator out in nature, and the cops made them go out and get it and dispose of it properly.Morons dump fridge in nature. police orders them to retrieve it.The guy in the video got fined 45K Euro, and the shitcompany appliance sales firm where he worked was also investigated:After conducting an inspection at their facilities, located in the town of Olula del Río (Almería), the agents found about 50 washing machines stored in the outer courtyard of a warehouse among dry vegetation, as well as about 20 refrigerators under roof, all without having been removed#ÚLTIMAHORA | Despiden y multan con 45.000 euros al joven que lanzó una nevera por un monte de #Almeria Los compañeros del Seprona ha identificado a este hombre que se grabó lanzando un frigorífico en un monte.👏👏 pic.twitter.com/zdubu2ZxBx— AUGC Guardia Civil (@AUGC_Comunica) July 31, 2019More: Reddit, 20minutos.es, and levante-emv.com[via IMGUR] Read the rest

When you're at the dispensary trying to choose a strain.Not sure what John Delaney was on at the Democratic Debate tonight, but I am certain I do not want to be on it.MRW my wife is going through the list of things that need to get done this weekend[via IMGUR] Read the rest

The sound of his tiny squeaking mews!From the Kitten Lady's IG feed. View this post on Instagram The hummingbirds are 3 weeks old and learning how to walk...and it is SO FLIPPIN’ CUTE! If you’re subscribed to my YouTube then you probably already got a notification for this MEGA CUTE video I uploaded last night. Here’s a tiny taste, but to see the full 6 minutes of cuteness visit YouTube.com/KittenLady 💕A post shared by Hannah Shaw (@kittenxlady) on Jul 31, 2019 at 12:54pm PDT Read the rest

Insert phallic joke here. Read the rest

Earlier this month, I was in Washington DC during the Smithsonian's festivities around the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and the first human moon landing. As you likely saw, UK-based creative studio 59 Productions and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum collaborated on an astonishing audiovisual experience centered around a lifesize Saturn V rocket projected onto the Washington Monument. Over three nights, several hundred thousand people turned up for the "Apollo 50: Go for the Moon" show that also involved several ancillary screens and an incredibly loud sound system. It was truly breathtaking. Thanks to my kind colleagues at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, I was treated to a behind-the-scenes tour of the installation and had great conversations with 59 Productions directors Richard Slaney and Lysander Ashton and producer Ollie Hester. Their studio's work lies right at the intersection of art and science, my favorite zone of exploration. I particularly appreciate that 59 Productions' roots are in theater and live performance that blends the virtual and real. As Lysander told me, they don't consider the buildings or other physical structures upon which they project video to just be display surfaces. "Rather, they are characters in the performance," Lysander said. Enjoy the video below about how "Go for the Moon" happened here on Earth. Read the rest

Have a nice weekend, y'all.Previously: How long will it take my baby son to defeat the Strong Suction Silicone Plate? Read the rest

In Longjing, China, more than 40 people were reportedly injured at the Yulong Shuiyun Water Amusement Park when an electronics failure at their "tsunami pool" generated unexpectedly massive waves. From the South China Morning Post:Five people were still being treated in hospital for injuries, including fractured ribs, but their condition is stable, according to a notice posted on Weibo by the Longjing city government on Tuesday.“According to the initial stages of the investigation, the incident was caused by a power cut that damaged electronic equipment in the tsunami pool control room, which led to the waves in the tsunami pool becoming too big and injuring people,” the notice said. Read the rest

Kid Icarus isn't especially rare, but one in its original case is. And it's expected to fetch ten grand at auction, reports the Reno Gazette Journal.Scott Amos found the game in the attic of his childhood home in Reno this past Mother's Day after his mom asked him to pick up a few boxes of his childhood stuff. Among the contents was a Nintendo game cartridge for Kid Icarus, still in the bag from J.C. Penney's catalog department three decades earlier. "Fewer than 10" factory-sealed copies are known to exist, according to the auctioneers. Read the rest

Use code CT4HKL7Z to get this 4-pack of MFi certified lightning cables for a fraction of the usual price. The set includes one 3ft cord, two 6ft cords, and one 10ft cord. Read the rest

“Poolside FM feels like a collection of records curated by an 80s Floridian porn star.” -- Unknown. Read the rest

Up until a couple of days ago "Your Highness Qiao Biluo" was a popular blogger in China, with 100,000 followers on the live streaming site Douyu. She appeared as a stylish young woman. But a technical glitch removed the filter she'd been using, revealing her to be much older than her filter made her look.From Oddity Central:Your Highness Qiao Biluo stopped streaming right after the now famous glitch, but the scandal only made her more popular. Her currently inactive Douyu account has over 650,000 followers, compared to around 100,000 before the incident, and the 58-year-old is already making plans for a comeback. She’s started taking advertisements for beauty cameras like the one she used to fool her followers, and is planning to launch a music video.This makes me think that the technical glitch might not be an accident, but a carefully thought out strategy. Her Douyu account is on hold, but her subscriber account has lept to 650,000.Image: Douyu/Oddity Central Read the rest

My former MAKE magazine colleague Becky Stern put together this pleasing video of close-up circuit solderings. Image: YouTube/Becky Stern Read the rest

Boing Boing is proudly sponsored by Sugar and Kush!Click to Jump to a Section:Unhealthy CBD productsUnregulated CBD IndustryPure Unflavored CBD OilBest Carrier Oils for BioavailabilityLaura Brenner & Sugar & Kush CBDConclusion Cannabidiol, or CBD, is one of the many cannabinoids found in the cannabis plant. Unlike the more well-known cannabinoid THC that gets you “high,” CBD can be extracted from industrial hemp, which is legal nationwide under the Hemp Farming Act included in the 2018 Farm Bill. The science is developing, but people use CBD widely with claims that it acts as an anticonvulsant, analgesic, anxiolytic and a gentle sleep aid. With and without the presence of other cannabinoids, CBD is used to help with PMS, and as a support for focus, and against anxiety. Pet owners are now dosing their pets with veterinary formulations of CBD to calm them down during thunderstorms or when traveling. (Editor's Note: DO NOT GIVE YOUR PETS THC, or CBD products that are formulated for humans. Talk to your veterinarian first.) If you want to find the best quality CBD gummies, oil, vape or edibles though... good luck. The market is flooded with junk.Unhealthy CBD ProductsIf you take a look at the vast variety of CBD products available on the market now, it’s difficult to rationalize how you could think of most of them as health and wellness products. The market is full of CBD infused candies packed with sugar more suited for a trick-or-treat bag than an item you might find in a medicine cabinet. Read the rest

Freelance journalist Alessandra Bocchi posted this video of protesters in Hong Kong using some kind of laser to target security forces' cameras: it's part of the #612strike movement's stunning repertoire of improvised anti-police countermeasures, in a near-civil-war where faces have become a battleground.Hong Kong protestors are on another level. Here they’re using lasers to avoid facial recognition cameras. A cyber war against Chinese artificial intelligence. pic.twitter.com/t1hIczr5Go— Alessandra (@alessabocchi) July 31, 2019(Thanks, @feralrobots!) Read the rest

David Hayward's proposal to "solve no-deal Brexit" is pretty delicious: Her Majesty's Government need only insure all UK businesses and individuals against No Deal Brexit losses, and pay for it by issuing special "Great British Brexit Bonds" that No Deal supporters can voluntarily sink their entire pensions into.These will be perpetual, nontransferrable bonds that pay out forever, in a sum that is indexed to post-No-Deal Brexit GDP growth. This means that all the elderly racists happy to have Bojo drive the country off the Dover cliffs need only stake everything they have to back their certainty that it will work out all right, and if they're right, they'll be handsomely rewarded for their prescience.I’m a modest Stylite, but I must tell you I have solved Brexit. [Thread]— The Columnist (@Sime0nStylites) February 4, 2019(Image: Dr Dunno/B3ta) Read the rest

This darling denizen of the deep is a Helicocranchia, aka a piglet squid. Scientists on the Ocean Exploration Trust's E/V Nautilus caught footage of the rarely seen creature at a depth of 4,544 feet near Palmyra Atoll in the Northern Pacific Ocean. The commenters' delightful descriptions really make the clip.(MNN via Kottke) Read the rest

There are, in Esquire's counting, 104 Bond villains as of July 31, 2019. It categorized and ranked them, creating the perfect tour of the franchise's best bits.59. NicknackThe Film: The Man With the Golden GunThe Actor: Herve VillechaizeThe Basics: Dedicated and diminutive manservantIf Herve Villechaize wasn't such a spirited performer, Nick Nack would be near the bottom of this list. The loyal right hand to Francisco Scaramanga, he spends the bulk of The Man With the Golden Gun going above and beyond the call of duty, even attempting to avenge his deceased employer in an extended, unnecessary, and hugely embarrassing epilogue. He may be at the center of one of the worst Bond movies, but Villechaize makes it watchable. Read the rest

Nintendo's smaller, cuter, more portable new console is coming September 20th, and now you can pre-order one. It comes in yellow, teal, gray orwhite with scribbles and it costs $200. Those are Amazon links; daddy gets paid if you order through them.The Verge: “Nintendo says there’s no performance difference between the two models, and you can still use the same accessories with the Lite, including Joy-Con controllers, the Switch Pro Controller, and the Poké Ball Plus. The Switch Lite still supports Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC, and has built-in gyro controls.” But you cannot connect it to a television, a thing people are just not seeming to understand about it. This is a fair assuption, as the whole point of calling the Switch "Switch" was that it could switch between a living-room and portable console. So calling this one the "Switch Lite" is an example of branding inverting meaning in the halls of high capitalism. They should, of course, have called this new portable-only device the Nintendo Snatch. Read the rest

Earlier this week, I bought tickets to see a concert in September (Gogol Bordello!) and wanted to see the view from our seats. I discovered that the venue, San Francisco's legendary Warfield, has a terrific 360-degree virtual tour of the entire theater, backstage and all. It's a bit of a rabbit hole but totally worth a look. Not only can you see the view of the stage from anywhere in the theater but you can also visit its green room (spacious), "Jerry's Room" (Jerry Garcia's "second home"), and this Autograph Room. The theater calls it a "hidden gem" and it sure is! Zoom in closely to the walls (and ceiling) to try and spot the Sharpie-d art and autographs of famous people you know. I was able to find both Penn and Teller's and Beck's fairly easily.(The seats I nabbed have a fantastic view, by the way.)screenshot via The Warfield Read the rest

Ten Second Songs is one of those amazing YouTube channels that doom you to a morning lost in someone's incredible and decidedly unique talent. In this case, performing songs in the style of other musicians, including excellent vocal impersonations. [via Metafilter] Read the rest

Hank Green and I are doing a double act tonight, July 31, as part of the tour for the paperback of his debut novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. It's a ticketed event (admission includes a copy of Hank's book), and we're presenting at 7PM at Spring Forest Middle School in association with Blue Willow Bookshop. Hope to see you there! Read the rest

I'd kill to see Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4, or any of the Borderlands games come to the Nintendo Switch. They're some of my favorite titles to turn to at the end of a long, stupid day when my brain is in desperate need of a bit of numbing. Sadly, so far as I know, there hasn't been a reliable peep on the possibility of a port for any of them. Happily, Engadget plopped out some news today about a game that could be the next best thing to the titles on my wish list.From Engadget:Obsidian had already revealed its Fallout-esque sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds will debut on PC, Xbox One and PS4 October 25th. Sometime after that, it'll land on Switch too. Nintendo's console is less powerful than Sony and Microsoft's ones, and won't pack as much punch as a typical PC, so it remains to be seen how well The Outer Worlds will run on the hybrid.For this version, Obsidian is teaming up with Virtuos, which has helped bring the likes of Dark Souls Remastered and Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age to Switch. There's no firm release date as yet for The Outer Worlds' arrival on Switch, but the UK eShop pegs the release date for sometime this year.Obsidian was responsible for Fallout: New Vegas. From what I've seen in the trailer for The Outer Worlds, much of the humor of that old chestnut has made it alive into their space game. Read the rest

My name is Herobine. I am twenty-six years old. I live in a data entity resembling an ultramodernist residence at x: 68;y: 73; z: 636 in the seed -98734659879863346. I believe in taking care of myself, in a balanced diet of fish, bread and cake, and a rigorous exercise routine of jumping up voxel hills. In the morning, if my face is a little pixelated, I'll put on a diamond helmet while farming my generators. I can get 100 levels a day now. After I remove the diamond helmet, I eat four apples. In the cave below my house, I clear out any mobs, then collect and throw all the rotten meat into the small lava pond beside it.Then I apply a potion of regeneration which I leave on for ten minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use antidote potions with little or no alcohol because alcohol dries your textures out and makes you look older. Then elixir, then eye drops, followed by a final moisturizing tonic potion...There is an idea of a Herobrine, some kind of abstraction lost in the thousands of hours you have abandoned to this game, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can see me fleetingly from a distance and feel fear gripping you and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.PREVIOUSLYAlready regretting assigning J.G. Read the rest

I loved Robert Eggers' The Witch. It was a moody, masterfully shot masterpiece of slow-simmering tension, mistrust and the gentle hand that moves desperate people to make terrible decisions. I bought it and ripped it to watch on all the screens I own, as soon as it was released to video. Today I learned that Eggers' second film, The Lighthouse, first broke cover at the Cannes International Film Festival, a few months back.The trailer for the movie dropped earlier today and holy crap, am I ever invested.I've watched it a few time today and I'm sucked in further with every viewing. Read the rest