Just look at it.(Thanks, Seth!) Read the rest

Binding arbitration is a way for corporations to force you to surrender your legal rights as a condition of doing business, relegating you to seeking redress for breaches and harms by going before a paid arbitrator who is in the employ of the company that harmed you, and who almost always sides with their employer.Ten years ago, Chase did away with binding arbitration in its credit-card agreements (after settling a class action suit accusing the company of conspiring with its competitors to force customers into binding arbitration), but two days ago, the company sent customers holding Chase Slate cards a notice informing them that their new contract includes arbitration: "This arbitration agreement provides that all disputes between you and Chase must be resolved by BINDING ARBITRATION whenever you or we choose to submit or refer a dispute to arbitration. By accepting this arbitration agreement you GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO GO TO COURT (except for matters that may be taken to a small claims court). Arbitration will proceed on an INDIVIDUAL BASIS, so class actions and similar proceedings will NOT be available to you."Chase Slate customers have until August 7 to opt out, but they must do so in writing by postal mail.This should send shivers down consumers’ spines. It’s unclear if Chase plans to extend binding arbitration to all of its cards, but that wouldn’t be surprising. And Chase is not alone. A 2016 study from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that forced arbitration clauses are on the rise among financial institutions. Read the rest

"In this video I'm restoring an old French Wonder lamp," writes MyMechanics (Patreon). "My good friend TysyTube Restoration bought this Wonder lamp on a flea market in Paris. He asked me if I want to restore it and obviously I said yes. He already restored two of them himself, I link his videos and channel below. These Wonder lamps are very well known in France, they're used on railroads mostly as far as I know."I want to put a Raspberry Pi in one of these and I don't know why. Read the rest

Last year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez successfully challenged establishment Dem Joe Crowley for his seat in the Bronx; now Crowley works as a lobbyist, skirting the restrictions on lobbying by Congress by styling himself a "strategic consultant."AOC publicly proposed a lifetime ban on any Congressman ever lobbying, under any guise, and, when Ted Cruz endorsed her proposal, she seized the opportunity, tweeting ".@tedcruz if you’re serious about a clean bill, then I’m down. Let’s make a deal. If we can agree on a bill with no partisan snuck-in clauses, no poison pills, etc - just a straight, clean ban on members of Congress becoming paid lobbyists - then I’ll co-lead the bill with you."The Democratic Congress has already passed an omnibus bill, HR1, the "For the People Act," that bans former members of the executive branch as well as former Congresspeople from lobbying or serving as "strategic consultants" to lobbyists.But, as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out in a series of tweets, there’s more to consider than just banning—or at the least delaying—lawmaker entrance into lobbying firms. The nature of congressional pay and the necessities of the work, Ocasio-Cortez said, make the easy money of lobbying very attractive to members of Congress.“Keeping it real,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “the elephant in the room with passing a lobbying ban on members requires a nearly-impossible discussion about congressional pay.”AOC Calls for Ban on Revolving Door as Study Shows 2/3 of Recently Departed Lawmakers Now Lobbyists [Jerri-Lynn Scofield/Naked Capitalism] Read the rest

There's no one way to solve the plastic waste problem, but in the packaged goods sector, an enormous amount of plastic is used in order to surround and protect simple solutions of some agent dissolved in water, from toothpaste to window cleaner to shampoo.Treehugger's Katherine Martinko surveys a slate of companies that are shipping dehydrated, solid products that outperform their pre-mixed cousins, while costing less and using far less plastic, like Blueland, whose Windex-beating window cleaner ships as a $2 tablet that you add to a spray-bottle (the bottle comes in a starter kit and you only have to buy one). Obviously, this won't solve the problem, but it represents a substantial advance on the status quo. When you stop to think about it, much of what we're shipping around the world is water. Whether it's cleaning products or personal care products, these are mostly made up of water, with ingredients mixed in to clean, moisturize, color, or do whatever task you need.Now imagine if we could remove the water and only ship the additive. It could come in dry tablet or bar form and, depending on its use, could be dissolved in water to create a product just as strong as anything you'd buy at the store, or used in bar form directly on your body. This would save money, hassle (who loves lugging heavy jugs of detergent home from the store?), and environmental impact (think of the carbon emissions required to get that jug from its manufacturer to your home). Read the rest

The ClockworkPi Gameshell is a portable game console you make yourself, coming as a modular kit and assembling to form a GameBoy-like gadget with a quad-core CPU, 2.7-inch color display, WiFi and Bluetooth, 1GB of RAM, HDMI output and a 16GB MicroSD card holding its Linux-based OS: "a powerful computing platform that lets you begin creating immediately."It smoothly runs various dev environments/engines (including PICO 8, LOVE2D, PyGame and Phaser), comes with Cave Story, Doom and RetroArch for folks who just want to dive in, and clearly has its stuff together both as a creative tool and entertainment device. Mike Fahey reports that it runs 16-bit classics perfectly.Looks like a very serious effort to create a hackable-from-the-ground-up handheld, and a perfect competitor to the recently-announced PlayDate. Yellow is in!The GameShell is available on Amazon for $159 in red or white; yellow is exclusive to the official website, at the same price. Read the rest

Passwords are necessary. Passwords are also a pain - especially when you've got multiple ones to remember for your email, subscriptions, bills and work sites.The problem is keeping all those passwords stored and ready, yet still secure from hackers and malware. The solution? A subscription to the RememBear Password Manager.Brought to you by the same company that built the TunnelBear VPN, RememBear already comes with a pedigree of security. The seconds you spend entering your info into the app will likely be the last time you have to do it anywhere. RememBear saves your passwords, ID and credit card info and can autofill the appropriate websites, letting you log in with a single click. And since this is this most sensitive information you have, it's all protected with AES256 encryption. It can even store notes, and you can retreieve all this data on a number of devices.Pick up a two-year subscription to RememBear for $39.99, a full 33% off the original price of $60. Read the rest

The inimitable Patti Smith will release a new memoir, Year of the Monkey, on September 24. A blend of reality and dreams, illustrated with Smith's Polaroids, the book captures her experience of a single year, 2016. From the publisher:Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs–including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger’s words, “Anything is possible: after all, it’s the Year of the Monkey.” For Smith – inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing – the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre: with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America. Smith melds the western landscape with her own dreamscape. Taking us from California to the Arizona desert; to a Kentucky farm as the amanuensis of a friend in crisis; to the hospital room of a valued mentor; and by turns to remembered and imagined places, this haunting memoir blends fact and fiction with poetic mastery. The unexpected happens; grief and disillusionment set in. But as Smith heads toward a new decade in her own life, she offers this balm to the reader: her wisdom, wit, gimlet eye, and above all, a rugged hope for a better world. Read the rest

China, Mexico -- He's gonna wreck the economy one way or another.President Trump tweeted today:On June 10th, the United States will impose a 5% Tariff on all goods coming into our Country from Mexico, until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP. The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied,......at which time the Tariffs will be removed. Details from the White House to follow.Screengrab below. He was under pressure not to announce this today, so he announced it today, per White House reporters.The president, under pressure from some in White House not to announce them tomorrow, announces them today. https://t.co/DmHOYEEc8T https://t.co/zqp7vud567— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) May 30, 2019INBOX: @realDonaldTrump is raising taxes on Americans because Mexico isn’t closing its southern borders or taking East Germanyesque measures to keep people from leaving the country. pic.twitter.com/x4HjJAACoK— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) May 30, 2019Making Arizona and Texas into swing states to own the Mexicans? https://t.co/pp6s2jgSTU— Nick Riccardi (@NickRiccardi) May 30, 2019The announcement the President’s advisors were trying to convince him not to make https://t.co/WtsW2YzJr3— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) May 30, 2019 Read the rest

Researchers report that a number of white supremacist/white nationalist/violent racist crackpot groups like the 'Proud Boys' and 'Soldiers of Odin' (gag) are doing just fine and being very active on Facebook -- all they had to do is ever so slightly modify their names.Facebook's not-very-effective ban was a kludgy response to the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, the prelude to which was live-streamed on Facebook by the killer.“Over a month after Facebook announced a ban of a number of white nationalist, white supremacist, and other hate groups, they are still on the platform and continue to use it for recruitment,” reports Buzzfeed News:“Facebook likes to make a PR move and say that they’re doing something but they don’t always follow up on that,” Megan Squire, an Elon University computer science professor who researches online extremism, told a joint BuzzFeed News–Toronto Star investigation.Kevin Chan, one of Facebook’s global policy directors, said while they proactively removed some hate groups, the company also relies on users, journalists, and other sources to report when banned personalities make it back on the platform.Chan said that sometimes it may feel like whack-a-mole, but he considers it more of an arms race — with Facebook trying to get better at keeping listed hate groups off its platform, and those banned users figuring out new ways to find their way back online.“Every time we are learning. Now, we presume they’re also learning … I think it’s really more of an arms race,” Chan said. Read the rest

Deadwood: The Movie airs on HBO in the US on Friday, May 31.Can't wait for Swearingen's swears. “Thirteen years after it was abruptly cancelled, David Milch’s grimy, glorious western finally gets the ending it deserves.”From James Donaghy's tease in The Guardian: Set in the historic lawless mining camp in the Black Hills gold rush of the 1870s, Deadwood melded profanity and poetry like no TV show before, reimagining the historic figures of the town in a bloody, grimy revisionist western that felt resolutely arthouse from its first shot to its last. It deserved better and now Deadwood: The Movie is a bold attempt to right that wrong, 13 years after its cancellation.It does the trick. While it isn’t quite Deadwood at its jaw-dropping best – few things in TV history are – there is enough of the old magic left to deliver a satisfying ending. We find Deadwood well on its way to gentrification, a far cry from the rough-as-guts encampment that greeted us in 2004, caked in shit and blood. Trains not wagons now deliver newcomers, the thoroughfare looks more like a street, less like a pigpen, and there’s even a public phone. We are 10 years down the line from the final action of the TV show, with the town coming together to celebrate South Dakota becoming the 40th state of the Union. Philosopher king Al Swearengen is in still in situ at The Gem, perma-angry marshall Seth Bullock still inhales and expels pure righteousness and malevolent robber baron George Hearst is back in town. Read the rest

Anar writes, "Writer and scholar Rubén Gallo sheds light on a fascinating, obscure bit of history: After the press reported Freud’s troubles in Nazi Austria — his daughter was briefly detained by the Gestapo and he was under pressure by friends to flee — several activists and Mexican labor unions (including the Union of Workers in the Graphic Arts, the Union of Education Workers, the Union of Metal Miners, and the Union of Mexican Electricians) urged then-Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas to bring Freud to Mexico."Though the campaign to bring Freud to Mexico came to nothing, Cárdenas expressed his outrage at Germany’s takeover of Austria: he instructed his representative at the Society of Nations in Geneva to file a formal protest against the Anschluss. Mexico was the only country to do so — an expression of solidarity postwar Austria recognized by naming a small plaza by the Danube canal “Mexikoplatz.”The Red Aid campaign was not the last time Mexico would be considered a potential haven for Austrian Jews. In November 1938, after Freud had finally left Vienna and settled in London, Princess Marie Bonaparte came up with a plan to save European Jews. She wrote to Bullitt and proposed that the United States government purchase Baja California from Mexico and establish a Jewish state on that territory. Freud, she added, liked the idea. Bullitt sent her a polite, evasive reply, but the princess — accustomed to having the last word — wrote directly to Roosevelt, urging him to consider her proposal. Read the rest

There's a wealth of psychological research that correlates wealthy people in the real world with negative traits like rudeness (people driving fancier cars are less considerate of pedestrians and their likelihood of cutting off another driver is correlated to the cost of the driver's car); greed (rich people take more candies out of dishes set aside for kids than poor people); generalized unethical behavior; cheating at games of chance; and overall stinginess.One possible explanation for all this is that getting rich is easier if you're dishonest, lack empathy, and cheat whenever you think you can get away with it.But consider that in a rigged Monopoly game, players who won due to an obviously unfair advantage (being given twice as much starting money and twice as many dice-rolls) acted like dicks throughout the whole game, and then boasted about their "brilliant tactics, their finesse at the game of monopoly and their daring moves."So maybe the causation goes the other way: maybe getting rich is mostly a matter of dumb luck, which we justify for ourselves by convincing ourselves of our superiority, which leads to us treating others as inferiors.But why are they more likely to cheat, lie and to cut off pedestrians? And why are they less likely to give to charity?It may be in part because they are cut off from the reality of poverty – living in an upper-class bubble. But primarily the researchers found that greed is actually viewed more favourably in upper-class communities. Read the rest

You know what's better than a smartwatch? Literally everything else. But especially: the centuries' worth of wrist-mounted paint palettes worn by some artists.Some of these are humble affairs (a bit of masonite with a thumb-hole) while others are super-elaborate, mounted on watch-straps, with hinged bodies, unfolding trays, and even high-end, $1225 brass or silver Sketcher boxes with foldaway thumb-rings, water reservoirs, and up to 14 paint wells.As Rain Noe notes on Core 77 these things are at the nexus of DIY and design, relentlessly functional, and extremely beautiful. They would make for great design school projects: - The object has clear utility for the end user, and very specific practical requirements - It requires some human factors work for the interface (i.e. how do you securely hold it?) - It's small enough that a student could manufacture a prototype in the school's shop - The extant examples of this object span from $15 plastic Wal-Mart objects up to $1,000-plus luxury items, giving the students a wide range in how they want to execute - At most design schools, there are nearby Painting majors who could be interviewed and used for testing different designs, providing important feedbackUnusual Product Design: Functional, Technology-Free Wearables for Fine Artists [Rain Noe/Core 77](Image: House of Hoffman) Read the rest

When you talk to Alexa and other voice assistants, you have to phrase your requests by starting with their "wakeword" ("Alexa" "OK Google" "Siri" etc). This means that if you issue an instruction like "Order me a 55 gallon drum of Clearglide lubricant, Alexa," it will fail and you will have to repeat yourself in the form of "Alexa, order me a 55 gallon drum of Clearglide lubricant."Amazon has applied for a patent to resolve this problem by the simple (and obvious and thus unpatentable) measure of having Alexa record everything, all the time, and when it hears its wakeword, it can wind back its buffer and figure out what it just missed.What could possibly go wrong?"The [proposed] system is configured to capture speech that precedes and/or follows a wakeword," the application explains, "such that the speech associated with the command and wakeword can be included together and considered part of a single utterance that may be processed by a system." Newly Released Amazon Patent Shows Just How Much Creepier Alexa Can Get [Peter Dockrill/Science Alert](via /.)(Image: Cryteria, CC-BY) Read the rest

Veteran transportation economics Hubert Horan has consistently published the best-informed, deepest critiques of Uber and Lyft, explaining how the companies can never, ever be profitable, and warning investors away from becoming the "greater fools" that allow Uber/Lyft's early investors to cash out at their expenses, while cataloging the many ways that Uber and Lyft's legislative strategy, coupled with predatory pricing, is destroying the cities they operate in.Now, three weeks after Uber's disastrous IPO, which has left more than 80% of the $25.9B pumped in by Uber's pre-IPO investors underwater (over a period when the S&P 500 rose by 50%!), Horan is back with a sobering reckoning for the sector's future profits.As Horan writes, there's no way that Uber and Lyft "can produce their service at costs consumers are willing to pay" and there's "no evidence that they can ever profitably expand to any other markets (food delivery, driverless cars, etc.)." Uber and Lyft are losing money faster than any Silicon Valley startup in history, and they have "none of the economic characteristics that allowed companies like Amazon or Facebook to quickly grow into profitability and drive strong public equity appreciation."But that's not to say that the company failed its (early) investors. The company currently has a market cap of $80B, "corporate value [created] out of thin air," and Horan's educated guess is that the investors in Uber forced founder Travis Kalanick out not over sexual assault scandals, but because Kalanick wanted to remain a private company for as long as possible, keeping the company's finances shrouded in mystery so that critics couldn't see what was really going on behind the closed doors. Read the rest

Abby Smith, a graduating senior at West Virginia's Parkersburg High School, claims that her principal, Kenneth DeMoss, plagiarized his commencement speech from Ashton Kutcher's monologue at the 2013 Teen Choice Awards. She originally posted the video above on her Facebook page. According to Yahoo Lifestyle, "the principal directed Yahoo Lifestyle to the district's superintendent, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, A Google search for "best motivational speech for teens" yields Kutcher's 2013 speech as the second video result."From Yahoo:"So first, the opportunity," principal DeMoss said in the graduation ceremony video. "I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work. When I was a kid growing up, I didn't get paid to do chores. I had to do 'em. I had to run the vacuum cleaner, dust the house, clean my room, cut the grass. When I became 15, I had to get my first paid job working as a busboy, so I could pay for my own insurance to help drive my family car. I didn't have my own car, nor was I given one; the family had to share it. Then I got a job working as a waiter; then I got a job selling shoes at the mall, then I got a job being a laborer for a construction company carrying shingles up and down a ladder to a roof and cleaning up job sites. Sometimes I even did two jobs at once. At one point, I was juggling four part-time jobs, like going to college.""And the greatest thing about that is that I never had a job, in my life that I was better than, that I was too good for," the principal continued in the speech delivered to graduates. Read the rest

This dual-set (US and metric) set of Bondhus ball-end allen wrenches are on sale for . They have a lifetime warrantee and are highly rated on Amazon. Read the rest

The 1990s nanotechnology dream of tiny robots swimming through our blood stream to treat disease is moving (verrrry) slowly but surely toward reality. In a new milestone, researchers used an external magnetic field to steer microbots through a live mouse's body carrying therapeutic stem cells. From IEEE Spectrum:..Delivering stem cells typically requires an injection with a needle, which lowers the survival rate of the stem cells, and limits their reach in the body. Microrobots, however, have the potential to deliver stem cells to precise, hard-to-reach areas, with less damage to surrounding tissue, and better survival rates, says Jin-young Kim, a principle investigator at DGIST-ETH Microrobotics Research Center, and an author on the paper....The team fabricated the robots with 3D laser lithography, and designed them in two shapes: spherical and helical. Using a rotating magnetic field, the scientists navigated the spherical-shaped bots with a rolling motion, and the helical bots with a corkscrew motion. These styles of locomotion proved more efficient than that from a simple pulling force, and were more suitable for use in biological fluids, the scientists reported....Kim says he and his colleagues are developing imaging systems that will enable them to view in real time the locomotion of their microrobots in live animals. Read the rest

From The Pudding: a zoomable people map that shows the name of the person with the most Wikipedia traffic for any given city. I looked at Golden, CO (where I lived as a kid) and learned that actor Greg Germann is the Wikipedia champ of that little town. Read the rest

Last night, The Cure celebrated the 30th anniversary of their Disintegration LP by playing the entire album at the Sydney Opera House. They opened with an array of b-sides and demo tracks, moved into Disintegration, and encored with "Burn" from The Crow soundtrack, "Three Imaginary Boys" from their 1979 debut album, and a cover of Wendy Waldman's "Pirate Ships." Here's the full setlist. Read the rest

Those rascal corpuscles!This empty bag of blood at the hospital looks like a snowy mountain scene Read the rest

In 1904 a Manhattan church outing descended into horror when a passenger steamboat caught fire on the East River. More than a thousand people struggled to survive as the captain raced to reach land. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the burning of the General Slocum, the worst maritime disaster in the history of New York City.We'll also chase some marathon cheaters and puzzle over a confusing speeding ticket.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

Yesterday, a guest on the 28th floor at the Tidewater Resort on Panama City Beach caught this video of a big shark circling a lone woman who had no idea the animal was nearby. Eventually people on the beach noticed the shark and yelled to the woman to return to shore. I don't know what kind of shark it was, or whether it was hungry, but I am certain that this video would be more interesting with the soundtrack below. (News Herald) Read the rest

This morning, Trump went on a rant about special counsel Bob Mueller, who reiterated yesterday that his investigation did not clear the President. He then tweeted that Russia helped him get elected—a first admission that the Putin regime's interference in the 2016 campaign helped put him in the White House. Russia, Russia, Russia! That’s all you heard at the beginning of this Witch Hunt Hoax...And now Russia has disappeared because I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. It was a crime that didn’t exist. So now the Dems and their partner, the Fake News Media,.....— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2019"I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected."Then he denied it. The New York Times:“No, Russia did not help me get elected,” Mr. Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for Colorado Springs. “I got me elected.” He spoke less than an hour after his Twitter post.The original comment, a clause in one of several Twitter posts this morning, is an extraordinary admission from Mr. Trump, who has avoided saying publicly that Russia helped him win the presidency in 2016 through its election interference. American intelligence agencies and federal prosecutors have long concluded that Russia tried to influence voters. Read the rest

Harrison Ford dedicates the Galaxy's Edge Falcon from r/StarWarsShe'll hold together.Reddit Read the rest

Eleven people have died so far this year on Mt Everest (aka Sagarmatha and Chomolungma), but that hasn't stopped climbers from attempting to ascend the world's highest mountain. The Instagram video below shows dozens of climbers at a bottleneck on the trail, waiting their turn. View this post on Instagram Waiting for climbing up. . . @everester_rohtash_khileri_29 . . #rohtash_khileri #climber #mountaineer #everester #climbing #mountains #mount #everest #mteverest #mounteverest #mounteverestofficial #everestsummit #everest2018 #everest8848 #everest2019 #summit #8848m #sagarmatha #himalayas #expeditions #adventuretime #commando #life #kathmandu #nepal #indianA post shared by Commando_Of_Mountain (@everester_rohtash_khileri_29) on May 27, 2019 at 7:49am PDT Image: Instagram Read the rest

Chills. I get chills and I'm on the edge of tears. Read the rest

5MadMovieMakers shows us the perfect way to ruin a xylophone: "A total of 374 black-and-white '65 Ford Mustangs hit some black-and-white xylophone keys to play the world's first die-cast song. ... Yes this video is edited on the computer but it would've been difficult to film otherwise. Filmed with a Sony VG30H camcorder and edited with Adobe Premiere Pro 2019." Read the rest

Ahead of this week's EU elections, the popular German Youtuber Rezo published a 55-minute video explaining the missteps of the ruling CDU party and other establishment parties in addressing climate change, inequality, rising militarism, and internet freedom (notably, the German support for the wildly unpopular Copyright Directive), a statement he backed up with hundreds of references.The video caught the German public's mood, attracting 12,000,000+ views and inspiring a coalition of German Youtubers who released a joint statement co-signed by 90 people denouncing the ruling parties and calling on Germans to back minority parties with better track records on these issues, like the German Greens (the statements warned Germans away from the far-right AfD party and its right wing allies as well as the centrist parties).Then came the EU elections, in which the CDU and other mainstream parties took a horrible pasting, while the Greens surged. This so infuriated CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer that she publicly denounced the Youtubers and promised a "very aggressive discussion" about what sort of measures could prevent people from complaining about their political masters in the future. In service to this mission, Kramp-Karrenbauer faxed the party's board to invite them to a seminar on dealing with "asymmetric campaign leadership" in the future. Here's what Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, leader of the CDU, said about those YouTubers who offered their views on which party people should vote for: What would actually have happened in this country, if a group of 70 newspaper editorials had made a joint appeal two days before the election: "please do not vote for the CDU or the SPD". Read the rest

Hey everyone, let us all take a Victory Poison Pill!ABC News:Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy Steven Winberg, who signed the export order and also attended the Clean Energy Ministerial, said he was "pleased that the Department of Energy is doing what it can to promote an efficient regulatory system that allows for molecules of U.S. freedom to be exported to the world." Read the rest

Phenomenal maker Simone Giertz shares some of her battle with her brain tumor and makes a great lamp out of her radiation mask. Read the rest

Julian Assange, imprisoned at Belmarsh on a 50-week sentence for jumping bail, was said by his lawyer to be too ill to appear by video link at a court hearing Thursday. The WikiLeaks founder is fighting extradition to the United States over the site's publication of classified U.S. government information.According to WikiLeaks, Assange has been moved to the medical ward in jail.A spokesman for the whistleblowing website said it had "grave concerns" about Assange's health. "During the seven weeks in Belmarsh his health has continued to deteriorate and he has dramatically lost weight," the spokesman said."Defence lawyer for Assange, Per Samuelson, said that Julian Assange's health state last Friday was such 'that it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him'."Has anyone ever conducted a normal conversation with him? Read the rest

AdAge reports that North Face successfully placed advertising into articles at Wikipedia, without other editors of the publicly-editable encyclopedia noticing. This effectively allowed North Face to co-opt the site's enormous influence in Google search results.According to the agency, the biggest obstacle of the campaign was updating the photos without attracting attention of Wikipedia moderators to sustain the brand’s presence for as long as possible, as site editors could change them at any time. The "hack" worked, at least for a while, evident in a quick Google search of some of the places mentioned in the campaign's case study video.Soon after the North Face campaign was featured on AdAge, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors were quick to remove North Face’s photos, noting that the effort breached the site’s user terms for paid advocacy. North Face claimed to have "worked with" the Wikimedia Foundation, which immediately denied it and issued a damning statement of its own: Let’s talk about The North Face defacing Wikipedia.Yesterday, we were disappointed to learn that The North Face, an outdoor recreation product company, and Leo Burnett Tailor Made, an ad agency retained by The North Face, unethically manipulated Wikipedia. They have risked your trust in our mission for a short-lived marketing stunt.In a video about the campaign, Leo Burnett and The North Face boasted that they “did what no one has done before … we switched the Wikipedia photos for ours” and “[paid] absolutely nothing just by collaborating with Wikipedia.”The video was later published by AdAge, which said that the agency’s “biggest obstacle” was in manipulating the site “without attracting attention [from] Wikipedia moderators.”Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation did not collaborate on this stunt, as The North Face falsely claims. Read the rest

The Wall Street Journal reports that President Trump ordered the locally-anchored USS John McCain to cover its name in tarp and stay hidden while he was visiting Japan. Sailors, who wear badges with the ship's name, were given the day off or told to stay away from official events where Trump would be present. Newsweek summarizes the Journal's paywalled article:"I think it's fair to say that it was something that really stunned a lot of the officials who were on the receiving end of the directive," Ballhaus said. "We reviewed some emails that were exchanged between various Navy commanders and officials for the U.S. in the Pacific command and both sides really seemed taken aback by the request, even the person who was conveying the request from the White House military office." Among the measures taken were a tarp that covered the ship's name and, as the president's visit approached, a barge was moved closer to the USS John McCain to make it less visible. Sailors on board the ship were instructed to remove any items that displayed its name and were also given the day off when the president visited, the Journal said.An official naval account tweeted that the report was false, but photos showed it was true and the Pentagon ultimately admitted likewise:NEW: The White House wanted the USS John McCain “out of sight” for Trump’s visit to Japan. A tarp was hung over the ship’s name ahead of the trip, and sailors—who wear caps bearing the ship’s name—were given the day off for Trump’s visit. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Super-Fun-Pak Comix features Percival Dunwoody, How to Draw Doug, Walter-Higgins-Man, and much, much (much) MORE!

Microsoft Excel know-how is a plus in nearly any business. More than just a spreadsheet program, this popular software suite has applications for data analytics, accounting, security and more. It can take months of tutelage under an expert to master all the features in Excel - or a couple of weeks with the Epic Excel 2019 Mastery Bundle. And now that there's a "pay what you want" deal, you'll definitely want to consider the latter option.Suitable for any level of experience, this training package covers all the essentials in 8 integrated lessons. You'll quickly learn to work with columns and cells, then move on to Excel's more powerful features. By the end of the final course, you'll know your way around PivotTable and be able to automate complex processes with VBA.You can name your price for the Epic Excel 2019 Mastery Bundle by bidding what you want. Any bid will take home a partial bundle while beating the average price will get all eight courses. Read the rest

Data scientist Tim Hopper noticed that Google Maps displayed a humungous word in the outback of Magwi County, South Sudan: "DEMO".🤔 https://t.co/TOJvHsxdD9 pic.twitter.com/UtHG6Jpgxz— Tim Hopper 🗑🦝 (@tdhopper) May 28, 2019After the discovery made it to the BBC, the DEMO sadly disappeared: a ghostly landscape feature lurking somewhere between Borges and Baudrillard on the slopes of misfortune. Read the rest

The Open Insulin project ("a team of Bay Area biohackers working on newer, simpler, less expensive ways to make insulin") is trying to create an open source hardware system for making insulin in small batches, through a process that uses engineered yeast to "produce a modified proinsulin protein, and an enzyme to convert the modified proinsulin into insulin glargine" so that insulin co-ops can produce and test their own insulin for a cost "from ten thousand to a few tens of thousands of dollars."The project is organized under Counter Culture Labs, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, making donations to it tax-deductible (I gave $50).Price-gouging on insulin is literally killing Americans with diabetes, while Canadians pay only 10% of what their US cousins pay. A September, 2018 article in Cell does a good job of laying out the legal and technical challenges to microbrewing your own insulin.Open Hardware Production Platform. The process technology to make insulin and other biopharmaceuticals at a small scale should be straightforward to develop and capable of efficient production. Initial, fairly crude estimates suggest that we can build a highly automated system that integrates a bioreactor, a purification and formulation system, and QA tests in a platform that would fit in the space of a large table or the corner of a room and cost from ten thousand to a few tens of thousands of dollars. It could have a capacity from a few tens to about a hundred liters of culture, and based on typical yields obtained in industry, one such system could produce enough insulin for a few tens to a hundred thousand people. Read the rest

Army National Guard Sergeant Franklin Richardson and his wife, Jessica, took their dog to Oktibbeha County Lake in Mississippi to enjoy a picnic by the water. As soon as they arrived, a woman in a Kampgrounds of America shirt pulled a gun on them, said she was the manager, told the couple they didn't belong, and that they didn't have a reservation. Then she said "Get! Get!" as if shooing away animals.Buzzfeed:“Time stopped. Everything stopped. I was confused as to what was going on. It’s not like we posed a threat to anybody out there walking our dog. There’s nothing harmful about that,” Richardson told WCBI. In the video, the woman can be seen putting the gun in the pocket of her shorts."Racism is alive and well," Richardson wrote in the video's caption. She said her husband also checked in with another employee — who happened to be the woman in yellow's husband — who said reservations were not required to use the grounds.The woman was fired. More from WCBI:“It’s kind of crazy. You go over there and don’t have a gun pointed at you, and you come back home and the first thing that happens is you have a gun pointed at you. It’s kind of crazy to think about,” said Sgt. Franklin Richardson.We reached out to the corporate KOA office and they released this statement to us:“Kampgrounds of America does not condone the use of a firearm in any manner on our properties or those owned and operated by our franchisees. Read the rest

[Velma Demerson was jailed in 1939 and by the Ontario government for the "crime" of having a Chinese boyfriend; sixty years later, she began an ultimately successful legal challenge seeking reparations; I'm pleased to present this remembrance for Demerson by Harry Kopyto, the campaigning human rights lawyer, who served as one of her advisors -Cory]On Monday May 13, 2019, Athena Mary Lakes, better known as Velma Demerson, died from old age in a Vancouver hospital at the age of 98. She is best known for her successful legal battle culminating in 2002 against the Ontario Government for incarcerating her in Toronto in 1939 for almost a year. The reason for her incarceration? She was found morally “incorrigible” under the Female Refuges Act for living with a Chinese man, Harry Yip, whom she married after her release. Their son, who was born while she was in jail, was taken away from her until after her release.Velma returned to Toronto in the late 1990s after living half a century on the west coast. While there, she married and raised two children. Her implacable sense of injustice led an unstoppable Velma Demerson to storm back to Toronto to quench her thirst for justice. After being rejected by a slew of Toronto lawyers, eventually she found Harry Kopyto who initiated a legal claim arising out of her imprisonment and turned a room in his office into a defence committee centre. Gradually, her case drew widespread public attention and support including from the leaders of all Ontario’s political parties at that time, the women’s movement, academics, the organized labour movement, the Chinese community and many individual human rights activists such as David Suzuki. Read the rest

Amazon sells pig fetuses now. Twenty bucks and change. How about a sheep's brain? Delicious, I hear.No true connoisseur of the animal kingdom, however, would be caught without a large bucket of animal scat, with 65 different species' shits to enjoy. Read the rest

“RFK Second Shooter Found!” screams the cover of this week’s ‘Globe,’ revealing the identity of the “girl in a polka-dot dress” seen leaving Robert F Kenned's assassination scene in 1968.

We've written extensively about the glories of the New York Public Library, from its talented book-sorters to its circulating collection of neckties and briefcases for job-seekers to the subway cars it turned into virtual ebook libraries to its pioneering work on e-lending platforms to its astounding online collections, which include some of the best-presented public domain resources in the world.In a new blog post, Electronic Resources Librarian Rhonda Evans takes us on a tour of the NYPL's "top ten best kept online secrets": marvellous, globally accessible collections including more than 700,000 declassified US government documents to more than 800 screenplays to a database of test-prep/elearning resources for the ACT, SAT, GED, and TOEFL, to 7,000,000+ AP images.These materials are all meticulously catalogued and beautifully presented.The older the book the harder it is to come by, but don't worry, with your New York Public Library card you can read every book in the English language printed abroad from 1475 to 1700. For example, read Queen Elizabeth I’s 1601 work, Her Maiesties most princelie answere, deliuered by her selfe at the court at VVhite-hall, on the last day of Nouember 1601 When the speaker of the lower house of parliament (assisted with the greatest part of the knights, and burgesses) had presented their humble thanks for her free and gracious sauour, in preuenting and reforming of sundry grieuances, by abuse of many grants, commonly called monopolies. The same being taken verbatim in writing by A.B. as neere as he could possibly set it downe. Read the rest

I keep this ball and vase trick around because kids like it.Sure, you are brilliant. We get that know how it works. You can also read this post. While little kids often find card and coins tricks to be a yawn, they love even a lamely presented magic ball and vase!After you fool them with the trick a few times, sneak the ball insert out and let the kids play with the empty vase.It is as much fun as fooling your cat with a laser pointer.Magic Ball and Vase via Amazon Read the rest

A year ago, Benjamin "Mako" Hill gave a groundbreaking lecture explaining how Big Tech companies had managed to monopolize all the benefits of free software licenses, using a combination of dirty tricks to ensure that the tools that were nominally owned by no one and licensed under free and open terms nevertheless remained under their control, so that the contributions that software developers made to "open" projects ended up benefiting big companies without big companies having to return the favor.Mako was focused on the ways that "software as a service" subverted free/open software licenses, but just as pernicious is "digital rights management" (DRM), which is afforded a special kind of legal protection under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act: under this rule, it's illegal to reverse-engineer and re-implement code that has some connection with restricting access to copyrighted works. That means that once a product or service has a skin of DRM around it, the company that controls that DRM also controls who can make an interoperable product. That's where Google's web-dominating Chrome browser (and its nominally free/open cousin, Chromium) come in: these have become the defacto standard for web browsing, serving as the core for browsers like Microsoft Edge and Opera.And while you can use or adapt Chromium to your heart's content, your new browser won't work with most internet video unless you license a proprietary DRM component called Widevine from Google. The API that connects to Widevine was standardized in 2017 by the World Wide Web Consortium, whose members narrowly voted down a proposal to change the membership rules for the W3C to require members not to abuse the DMCA to prevent DRM from becoming a tool to undermine competition. Read the rest

For 17 years, I've been writing about the possibilities of "cognitive radio", in which radios sense which spectrum is available from moment to moment and collaborate to frequency-hop (and perform other tricks) to maximize the efficiency of wireless communications.It's hard to overstate how revolutionary this would be; today, most radio communication takes place through dedicated spectrum allocations (for example, a radio station will have exclusive rights to a given band in a given territory) that prohibit others from using the spectrum, even if it's not in use at a given moment.With cognitive radio, spectrum becomes a commons that everyone shares, with computation, software-defined radios, and phased-array antennas subbing in for the blunt instrument of exclusive spectrum allocation.Writing in IEEE Spectrum, DARPA's Paul Tilghman reports on the Agency's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, in which teams competed to design algorithms that found efficient models for collaboration with one another. The Challenge has a $4m prize for the winning team, and the championship will be held in LA in October.The Challenge runs in Colosseum, a simulated environment hosted on a supercomputing cluster at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. As Tilghman writes, the approaches taken by the teams in previous rounds are a kind of recapitulation of the history of AI, starting with first-wave-style expert systems, then evolving into second-wave-style Big Data/machine learning approaches.I'm not thrilled about this stuff being associated with the DoD, but it's very exciting to see progress towards delivering on the long-anticipated promise of cognitive radio. Read the rest

16GB is not a lot by today's flash storage standards but the price on this Kingston Digital 16GB Data Traveler 3.0 USB Flash Drive is a bargain. The 32GB and 64GB models are cheap, too. Perfect for your Raspberry Pi OSMC media center! Read the rest

The Chinese central environment minister has released a report detailing thousands of instances of corruption and coverups from local governments in ten provinces last year: the report details instances of fabricated meetings, imaginary progress on remediating toxic waste spills, and falsified claims that polluting factories had been shut down.The ministry claims that its investigations resulted in "significant progress" in halting these practices.Corruption is an incredibly sensitive issue in China, where the quid pro quo for accepting authoritarian rule is that the rulers themselves are supposed to be incorruptible and dedicated to promoting the general prosperity. That's why Xi Jinping's 2018 corruption purges were incredibly popular, providing cover for Xi's consolidation of power, ahead of a vote that changed the rules so that he can rule for life.The (correct) perception that China's elites are creating a new hereditary aristocracy who function with impunity while looting the country is the greatest threat to Chinese stability.Corruption scandals that touch on quality of life issues like the tainted milk scandal or the school collapse scandal are doubly destabilizing, because they strike at the heart of the Chinese contract: it's one thing for the elites to line their pockets, shut down social mobility and commit the odd vehicular murder with impunity, but if they also fail to ensure that food, water, air, buildings and transport are safe because doing so would interrupt the flow of bribes they rely on, then all bets might be off.Last week, the Chinese government acknowledged that "rogue manufacturers" were behind the mysterious rise in planet-cooking, ozone-trashing CFC-11 gas. Read the rest