Jobs done, quickly and messily

Scarlett Johansson was only 17 years old when she co-starred with Bill Murray in Lost in Translation (2003). In this video, Howard Stern interviews her about what it was like. Watching this reminds me of why Stern is such a great interviewer -- he only asks questions he's truly curious about.[via Doobybrain] Read the rest

'Healthy Holly' author in a heap of trouble

CBD-infused snacks could soon join the product line that includes Chips Ahoy cookies, Cadbury chocolate, and Nutter Butter cookies.Mondelez, the company that makes Oreo cookies, is reportedly considering adding the cannabis compound CBD to some of its cookies and snacks. CBD stands for cannabidiol, and it's a calming/anti inflammatory component of (some but not all) marijuana plants. It doesn't get you high.“Yes, we’re getting ready, but we obviously want to stay within what is legal and play it the right way,” CEO Dirk Van de Put told CNBC on Wednesday:Although he dashed hopes that consumers would get CBD-infused Oreos, saying that the non-psychoactive compound in cannabis might not be a fit for the company’s family brands, the company could add the ingredient to other products or even create new product lines.A number of start-ups have already started selling CBD-infused food and drinks, but larger companies such as Mondelez and Coca-Cola are still sitting on the sidelines while federal health officials weigh new rules regulating the industry. Van de Put predicted the ingredient will hit the mainstream food market in the “not-so-far future.”In December, President Donald Trump legalized most products containing CBD when he signed the farm bill into law. Since then, retailers such as Walgreens and CVS have started selling a limited number of CBD products such as lotions and creams. However, the Food and Drug Administration prohibits adding the compound to food or beverages. In response to pressure from Congress, the regulator has set its first date for public hearings on the matter for next month. Read the rest

I'm one of the guest instructors on this year's Writing Excuses Cruise, a nine-day intensive writing program on land and at sea, departing from Galveston and putting into port at Cozumel, Georgetown, and Falmouth, with a roster of instructors including Brandon Sanderson, Piper Drake, Kathy Chung, K Tempest Bradford, DongWon Song, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, and Howard Tayler. The program starts with a two-day workshop at a Houston hotel and then sets sail, running Sept 22-30 altogether. I've taught many other workshops, but this is my first Writing Excuses Cruise and I'm really looking forward to it. I hope to see you there! Read the rest

Shawn Woods was testing out a no-spray skunk trap, but things didn't go as planned, and he got squirted with eau de moufette. Read the rest

Genius musician Jeff Tweedy of Wilco and Uncle Tupelo fame has been cast in the forthcoming season of Larry David's comedy “Curb Your Enthusiasm!" This will be the show's 10th season. No word on whether Tweedy will play himself or someone else entirely, but no matter because I'm sure hilarity will ensue. From Variety:Tweedy is said to be good friends with Jeff Garlin, who stars on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as Jeff Greene in addition to executive producing.This will not be Tweedy’s first acting role, as he previously appeared in the role of Scott Tanner in multiple episodes of “Parks and Recreation.” He also portrayed himself in two episodes of “Portlandia” and in the feature film “Hearts Beat Loud.”Also, don't miss Tweedy's new and much-loved memoir "Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)." Read the rest

U.S. attorney’s office to seek 11-year prison sentence for Jones, 26, on Friday May 3.

Facebook just announced it has permanently banned a number of “dangerous" alt-right and anti-Semitic trolls, including Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Paul Joseph Watson, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Laura Loomer.From CNN:Facebook had removed the accounts, fan pages, and groups affiliated with these individuals after it reevaluated the content that they had posted previously, or had reexamined their activities outside of Facebook, the company said. The removal also pertains to at least one of the organizations run by these people, Jones’ Infowars.“We’ve always banned individuals or organizations that promote or engage in violence and hate, regardless of ideology. The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove these accounts today,” Facebook said in a statement. Read the rest

Gosh, it only took 'em 4 whole years

Alphabet, parent company of Google and YouTube, told a U.S. House panel that it spends hundreds of millions of dollars on reviewing content each year, and claims to have identified at least one million “suspected terrorist videos” on YouTube in the first quarter of 2019.Alphabet/Google/YouTube disclosed this information to lawmakers in an April 24 letter that was made public on Thursday. The letter claims that a “manual review” by YouTube content moderation workers found that 90,000 of the videos identified as “suspected terrorist videos” violated YouTube's terrorism policy.From Reuters:In March, following the live-streaming on social media of a mass shooting in New Zealand, the chair of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security urged the top executives of Google, Facebook Inc, Twitter Inc and Microsoft Corp do a better job of removing violent political content.After a briefing in March, Representative Max Rose, who chairs a subcommittee on intelligence and counter-terrorism, asked the four companies in an April 10 letter to disclose their budgets for counter-terrorism programs and number of people working solely on counter-terrorism programs.Rose said in a statement Facebook has not responded and the other firms did not fully or directly answer his questions.Twitter said in an April 24 to Rose that “putting a dollar amount on our broader efforts is a complex request.”Twitter said a “substantial portion” of its 4,100-person global workforce are involved in reviewing content.Google spends hundreds of millions of dollars on content review: letter [reuters.com][via techmeme] Read the rest

Nine people have been injured using Starbucks/Bodum French Presses after the plunger handle snapped off, causing the stem to stab or cut them. As a result, Starbucks is recalling 236,000 of the presses.From CBS:Co-branded by Starbucks with Bodum, the eight-cup French press has a cylindrical glass beaker with a screen and a plunger held in place by a plastic dark gray frame with locking lid and a light gray handle and knob. Made in Portugal, the recalled product measures about nine inches high and four inches wide, and has the number 011063549 printed on a white label on the bottom of its base.Consumers should stop using the presses and contact Starbucks about how to obtain a refund in the form of store credit. The Seattle, Washington-based company said it is not accepting returns at its stores.Image: US Consumer Product Safety Division Read the rest

Kelsey Ables explains how social media killed art communities. It's not just a statement of fact, but a history of the parts of the web that mainstream users might have only seen in the periphery as it happened, but whose loss is now keenly felt.And while artists have made their mark on all of the major social-media networks, these new, bigger sites have changed the way we communicate and consume. Algorithms steer us back to similar content in echo chambers that inhibit both critical and creative thinking. Platforms incentivized to keep users scrolling discourage long-looking and render users as passive consumers, rather than active seekers of inspiration. They aren’t a space for productive feedback, either: Art takes on a different tone when it’s surrounded by dog GIFs, political memes, and your cousin’s baby photos.The blanding out of art hosts like DeviantArt and ConceptArt are the big ticket items, and the decay of tumblr into a "joyless black hole" exemplifies the process. But I feel things on a smaller scale are more instructive. Left unsaid, but also important: when audiences migrated to Facebook and other social media platforms, what was left behind on once-vibrant small community sites often went toxic fast. Read the rest

During a test ride of the GaleForce rollercoaster at Playland’s Castaway Cove in Ocean City, New Jersey, two dummies flew out of their seats and crash-landed on the roof of a nearby hotel. The theme park's vice president Brian Hartley blamed the accident on the dummies and says that the rollercoaster is "100 percent safe." From NBC10:Hartley said the dummies had leaks that went undetected and they lost their mass and shape, causing them to fall.“Obviously it’s not something that would ever happen with a person in it,” Hartley said. “You know you don’t lose rigidity in a person. The lap bar comes down. You’re secured in there.”The rollercoaster remains in operation.(image: Martin Lewison, CC BY-SA 2.0) Read the rest

This is more impressive to me than being able to solve it in 1.2552 nanoseconds or whatever the current record is.(GlobalMagicians) Read the rest

A few days ago, two little robots arrived at the International Space Station to help astronauts with simple tasks. Called Astrobees, the cube bots are 12" x 12" x 12" and propelled around the microgravity environment by small fans. The bots are named Honey and Bumble. A third, Queen, remains on Earth. From NASA:Working autonomously or via remote control by astronauts, flight controllers or researchers on the ground, the robots are designed to complete tasks such as taking inventory, documenting experiments conducted by astronauts with their built-in cameras or working together to move cargo throughout the station. In addition, the system serves as a research platform that can be outfitted and programmed to carry out experiments in microgravity - helping us to learn more about how robotics can benefit astronauts in space.(via Space.com) Read the rest

This is pioneering computer scientist and US Navy read admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992) explaining the concept of a nanosecond. From the Computer History Museum:(Hopper) held a B.S. in mathematics and physics from Vassar College (1928) and an M.S. (1930) and Ph.D in mathematics (1934) from Yale University.Hopper began her career teaching at Vassar and taught there from 1931 to 1943, when she joined the u.s. Navy Reserve. Her first assignment was to work with Professor Howard Aiken of the Harvard Computation Laboratory on problems of military significance.Hopper remained at Harvard until 1949, when she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, led by the designers of the groundbreaking ENIAC computer system. There, she developed one of the world's first compilers and compiler-based programming languages. In 1959, Hopper played an important role in defining a new easy-to- use programming language. The result was COBOL, probably the most successful programming language for business applications in history.(via Kottke) Read the rest

The Build Cave is a California-based prop-maker whose Etsy store is focused on decor for haunters with an emphasis on haunted, vintage elevators (!!), and which includes these delightful resin skull fence-toppers designed to be affixed to PVC pipe verticals and painted; they're $95/dozen. (via Creepbay) Read the rest

Puerto Rico has endured decades of looting and austerity from the finance sector who then used the pretense of Hurricane Maria to impose radical financial policies on the island, dismantling the statistics agency that would track how those reforms punished the people of Puerto Rico, while filling the streets with armed, anonymous mercenaries.Puerto Rico was drowning in both debt and seawater, and America threw it an anchor (a bipartisan anchor at that). But not everyone was willing to destroy the lives of Puerto Ricans to help billionaires add another zero to their balance sheet: since 2017, both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been demanding that the American citizens in Puerto Rico be afforded the aid and dignity that any mainlander would expect. (I am a donor to both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders' 2020 election campaigns).Now, Elizabeth Warren has added another plank to what is fast becoming the best platform in the 2020 Democratic nomination race: debt relief for Puerto Rico, eliminating the island's antidemocratic "manager" and restoring its elected democratic leadership, and allowing it to write off its debts while preferentially paying off the government bonds used by Puerto Ricans themselves as retirement savings, while sending offshore looters to the back of the line to get redemption from their bonds.This legislation would give U.S. territories like Puerto Rico the option to terminate their debt if they meet certain criteria, like being struck by a disaster, suffering major population loss, and staggering under overwhelming debt. Read the rest

[Harry Tynan posts on our forums as Moose Malloy. Earlier this week, he messaged me about his fun, self-published kid's book, written as a series of bedtime stories for his kid (a tradition I'm very fond of -- it's the origin story of The Borribles!). The book is so much fun that I invited him to write a short introduction and choose a excerpt for your edification. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did! -Cory]The great Umberto Eco once wrote, in a marvellous essay about Casablanca, that "Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion."And hey, who doesn't love Casablanca?I'm no Umberto Eco, but a while back I wrote a science fiction novel out of love for my son and out of love for the SF genre itself. Freed by love, I poured my heart into this short tale of a boy and his dad (plus his two accidental, argumentative clones, plus his dad's childhood dog accidentally yanked forward from the 1970s for their own, very tail-waggy reunion).For my son's amusement, I unselfconsciously stuffed each of my quick, cliff-hanging chapters with my favourite SF clichés from a lifetime of fandom. I smushed in some 'gritty history' and some light moral lessons and some Shakespeare and some counterfactual frolics. I had huge fun bashing out 500 words nightly on an old laptop after everyone else hit the hay. Read the rest

With the news that scandal-plagued American Media Inc. plans to sell its tabloid empire including the ‘National Enquirer’ and ‘Globe,’ the rags’ hacks seem to have given up all pretense of trying to inject reality into their fact-challenged offerings this week. The ‘Enquirer’ pulls out all the stops in trying to scare off a prospective purchaser, with a clutch of dubious stories.“Aretha Franklin Was Murdered!” screams its cover story. No, she wasn’t. “Queen of Soul EXHUMED after nine months” the cover proclaims. No, she wasn’t. Franklin is still interred, and no coroner or law enforcement agency has made moves to dig her up, “Millions missing!” No - Franklin made a police report last year that $200,000 had been purloined from her bank account, but her death ended the police investigation. And $200,000 isn’t exactly “millions."“Kinkster Kevin [Spacey] Caught Up in Murder Scandal!” No, he isn’t. Linda Culkin, one of the first to accuse Spacey of molesting young boys, was struck and killed by a car while walking near her Boston-area home. “Investigators have launched a murder probe,” says the ‘Enquirer.' No, they haven’t - the driver remained at the scene and no charges were filed. Culkin was crossing a road against traffic that had a green light. There is no “murder scandal,” and Spacey is not "caught up” in it. The rag also fails to mention that Culkin was obsessed by Spacey, and was jailed in 2013 for making bomb and anthrax threats against the actor.George Clooney has saved his marriage “from the brink” of divorce with a second honeymoon. Read the rest

1mb.site is a simplified hosting service for personal websites with all the bells and whistles: custom domains, SSL, databases and an online code/content editor. It's free of charge so long as you don't have more than 1mb of stuff.1MB is a free website host designed to make web development feel more approachable. You do not need to browse through complicated settings menus or juggle a bunch of server credentials here. You can edit your site directly inside your browser. 1MB has a custom code editor with some useful features such as starter templates, live site previews, and themes. 1MB gets you online fast by letting you focus on coding.This is great and I hope it'll be a hit, because setting up cloud hosts is a frustrating experience. That said, having had to so often, I know useful things you'd not figure out from a service like 1mb. Read the rest

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley -- who served as Trump's Ambassador to the UN, where she resigned on America's behalf from the Human Rights Council before resigning her post -- has got a new, lucrative side-hustle: serving on the Board of Boeing. Read the rest

Wireless headphones aren't a mind-bending thing anymore now that Apple made them the standard thing-to-be-outraged-over-in-the-new-iPhone fare, thereby killing the cool factor. But let's be reasonable here. Wires really are a pain when you're running, trying to get off the bus, or even just standing up from your desk. Wireless headphones make sense, they just don't always sound great. FRESHeBUDS is shifting the paradigm, however, with their Air Bluetooth 4.1 headphones.Bluetooth 4.1 delivers crisper, clearer sound in the Airs, eliminating the spots and static that plague a lot of other wireless headphones. Their weather- and sweat-proof design are conducive to wearing in the rain or beneath the shameful amounts of sweat you expel on a run. You can even take calls on them when somebody gives you a reason to stop.The FRESHeBUDS Air Bluetooth 4.1 Earbuds are currently 72% off at just $24.95. Read the rest

Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg continue to dissect the turbulent comic book speculator boom on the 1990s while looking through antique copies of Wizard Magazine.What to expect in this issue:* Malibu's Ultraverse is announced!* Chris Claremont's life after X-Men. An interview.* Joe Quesada is talking is hopes and dreams about wanting to leave a mark on the industry.* Ron Wagner, the Morbius Artist, cuts promos on the series writer, Len KaminskiSubscribe to the Cartoonist Kayfabe YouTube channel for more comics vids and analysis like this. Read the rest

[Matt Polotsky's new book, The National Security Sublime, is a tour through the look-and-feel of mass surveillance, as practiced by the most unlikely of aesthetes: big data authoritarian snoops and the grifter military contractors who wax fat on them. This is a subject dear to my heart. -Cory]The US National Security Agency is big, really big. But it’s unlikely that most people outside the government can (or would even try to) quantify its size or powers with any specificity. The agency is just massive, a quality that can produce in those who try to contemplate it the overwhelming sense of awe and wonder called the sublime. Triggered by an encounter with something grand (towering mountain peaks) or verging on the infinite (the number of stars in the universe), it describes a generally pleasurable feeling of cognitive breakdown, the sensation that you just can’t wrap your head around an object or idea so vast and boundless.The sublime was an important touchstone for Romantic painting and poetry of the early nineteenth century (think windswept peaks, crumbling castles, and misty vales), but it made a striking comeback in the years after the 9/11 attacks, when the surveillance activities of the NSA and other agencies first became common knowledge to the American public. As I argue in my new book, : On the Aesthetics of Government Secrecy, the sublime offered a valuable resource for artists, writers, filmmakers, and television showrunners during the War on Terror. Images of vast size and unimaginable scope gave aesthetic form to the feeling of living under seemingly limitless surveillance. Read the rest

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

Senior Google employees Meredith Whittaker and Claire Stapleton were key organizers of last year's string of googler protests, including the 20,000-employee walkout over the company tolerance and rewarding of execs who engaged in sexual harassment; last month, Whittaker and Stapleton revealed that they had been targeted for retaliation by the company; now, a group of googlers around the world have staged another walkout in solidarity with Whittaker and Stapleton, this one a "sit-and-knit" that was also held in solidarity with women who've had their sexual harassment claims mishandled by Google. Read the rest

Our Boing Boing pal Joe Sabia made a video for Vanity Fair in which he gave screenwriter Emily Carmichael seven minutes to write a scene from a sci-fi thriller from scratch. It's interesting to hear her thought process as she writes the scene. After she writes it, the scene is critiqued by a studio exec, who gives her notes so she can write a second draft.Who would have thought a video about someone writing a script would be so much fun? Read the rest

Over the weekend, someone set fire to two dozen bee colonies in Alvin, Texas belonging to the Brazoria County Beekeepers Association. The perpetrator also dumped some of the bee boxes into a nearby pond. The Beekepers Association and the police are offering rewards for information leading to the conviction of the idiot who did it. From KTRK-TV:"We're looking at 500,000 to 600,000 that have been destroyed out of that environment," said (beekeeping supplier Steve Brackmann)... "It takes a long time to establish a colony," Brackmann said. "It can take a year to get a full one, but the queens were probably killed, which means those that survived have nowhere to go." One comment on Facebook referred to it as ecoterrorism, and Brackmann doesn't disagree with that. Bee populations are dropping rapidly across the country because of insecticides and herbicides which take away the plants on which bees forage. More at the Brazoria County Beekeepers Association's Facebook page. Read the rest

Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono burned Bill Barr to a crisp at today's bizarre Capitol Hill hearing.“You lied to Congress,” Senator Hirono [D-HI] said to Trump's handpicked Attorney General and coverup guy. “America deserves better. You should resign.”Sen. Mazie Hirono to Attorney General William Barr: "Now we know more about your deep involvement in trying to cover up for Donald Trump ... America deserves better. You should resign" https://t.co/UyviQ1DWt6 pic.twitter.com/jOqsQv5uXT— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) May 1, 2019"Being attorney general of the United States is a sacred trust. You have betrayed that trust. America deserves better," Sen. @maziehirono tells Attorney General William Barr. "You should resign." pic.twitter.com/m7VwKdmatw— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) May 1, 2019[via The Washington Post] Read the rest

Russia claims did not tell Venezuela's Maduro to flee, disputes Pompeo and Bolton

My old 100-foot extension cord seemed to have wriggled out of my sight like a shy snake. I bought a replacement, from the AmazonBasics line. It coils nicely and is fairly lightweight, which doesn't bother me, because I'm not using it to power an electric kiln or an industrial clothes drier. Right now Amazon is selling it for a couple of bucks less than the usual price. Read the rest

If you went to a showing of 'Avengers:Endgame' last Thursday/Friday in Southern California, read on, there's a list of showings that authorities say *may have been* exposure sites for measles.The LA Times reports that “Orange County officials say a woman with measles may have exposed others in the region to the contagious disease, including people who were at a midnight showing of "Avengers: Endgame" in Fullerton late Thursday/early Friday.”This is a highly contagious disease that is fully preventable by a decades old vaccine.Almost all cases of measles in the U.S. begin with people who traveled to countries where measles is prevalent.The latest measles outbreak in L.A. County this year began when an area resident visited Vietnam earlier in 2019 and contracted measles, officials say. That contaminated individual then spread measles to three other people in L.A. County.From the Los Angeles Times:The patient, the first to come down with measles this year in the county, lives in Placentia and contracted the illness when she traveled to a country with an outbreak, officials said. They did not say whether she had been vaccinated against measles.This patient appears to have gone to work for a few days and seen a movie — likely the opening night midnight showing of “Avengers: Endgame” in Fullerton — before realizing she was sick.The warning comes amid several major measles outbreaks nationwide and the highest number of measles cases across the nation in more than two decades. Officials in L.A. Read the rest

The Atari 800 was released in 1979. I wish I'd bought one at the time because apparently it will never become obsolete.(via Weird Universe) Read the rest

On April 7th, 2017, a group of Trump advisors and co-conspirators converged on Mar-a-Lago (one of Trump's properties) for a night of drinking and dining, while Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping were having dinner in a separate room at the hotel. In attendance were Steve Bannon, Joe Hagin (then Trump's deputy chief-of-staff) and others.All in all, the side group rang up a bar-tab of $1005.60, for 54 glasses of premium liquor, at an average price of $18.62/drink. They charged the whole thing to the taxpayer, and when the State Department rejected the claim, Trump's White House overruled them and paid the Trump Organization.Steve Bannon says he is a teetotaler and didn't contribute to the bar tab.The bar tab was just for starters. That weekend, at least 24 of Trump's staffers stayed at Mar-a-Lago, violating the US government's procurement rules, which required them to stay at one of the many nearby, more reasonably priced competitors. The Trump Organization bills the US government $546/night for each room in a Trump hotel that a government employee stays in. That's the maximum permitted under law.The billings were revealed by a joint investigation between Pro Publica and Property of the People (previously), who had to sue the Trump administration to get the underlying documents.Six days later, on April 13, Mar-a-Lago created a bill for those drinks, tallying $838 worth of alcohol plus a 20% service charge. It covered 54 drinks (making for an average price of $18.62 each) of premium liquor: Chopin vodka, Patron and Don Julio Blanco tequilas and Woodford Reserve bourbon. Read the rest

Christ, what an asshole.Wow, this sure was a moment for the ages in today's Capitol Hill grilling of Trump's coverup man, aka our Attorney General, Bill Barr. What a massive disgrace this guy is, and what damage he is doing to the nation. Watch this video and see how he splits hairs over whether presidential campaigns should maybe contact the FBI when offered hostile dirt on an opponent from a foreign government.Another doozy of an excerpt from Aaron Rupar's thread.OMG -- Barr hesitates before acknowledging that presidential campaigns that are offered dirt from hostile foreign governments should probably contact the FBI pic.twitter.com/eqFkHjmBJj— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2019Barr is so transparently bullshitting here pic.twitter.com/CMUPliMqfk— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2019So much to be shocked by."I'm not in the business of determining when lies are told to the American people. I'm in the business of determining when a crime has been committed."Yes, Attorney General William Barr.The entire hearing was bizarre.I just have to say this hearing with the attorney general is totally surreal.— Kasie Hunt (@kasie) May 1, 2019BARR: "I'm not in the business of determining when lies are told to the American people. I'm in the business of determining when a crime has been committed." pic.twitter.com/ueJvsLNnsQ— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2019Justifying the means of committing the crimes is usually the last thing the criminal does before the caper is up.What Kasie said.I'm still replaying Barr saying he doesn't recall if he has discussed criminal investigations with the White House and President Trump. Read the rest

My late brother Mark was a transplant surgeon. He told me how sometimes he'd be woken up in the middle of the night to fly to a nearby city to retrieve, say, a kidney, from someone who had just died (frequently in a motorcycle crash), then carry the organ on a plane to another city where he'd install the kidney into a waiting patient, and then fly back home. (He felt it important to personally retrieve the organ that he'd then be transplanting.) I thought of that process while reading about the first drone delivery of a donated kidney that resulted in a successful transplant for a 40-year-old woman who had been on dialysis for 8 years. The drone delivery system was designed by researchers from the University of Maryland and organ donation nonprofit the Living Legacy Foundation of Maryland. The kidney only traveled three miles but was a major step forward. From the New York Times:The team’s leader, Dr. Joseph R. Scalea, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said he pursued the project after constant frustration over organs taking too long to reach his patients. After organs are removed from a donor, they become less healthy with each passing second. He recalled one case when a kidney from Alabama took 29 hours to reach his hospital.The drone used in this month’s test had backup propellers and motors, dual batteries and a parachute recovery system, to guard against catastrophe if one component encountered a problem 400 feet in the air. Read the rest

People who run their own mail servers are increasingly finding that the mail they send to Gmail users is being rejected, because the company's anti-spam algorithm treats small, independently managed mail-servers as high-risk mail sources. And since Gmail users never receive the blocked messages, it can be impossible to convey to them that they're missing some messages. This happened to me last month and Ken Snider, our awesome sysadmin, was somehow able to fix it, but Google doesn't make it easy.Email is one of the last federated systems in widespread use on the internet. That fact is why newsletters are on the rise: using email to convey your message means "you don’t have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience." But now you do.I'm sure there is no malicious intent behind this and that there are some very smart people working on spam prevention at Google. However for a metric driven company where a majority of messages are only passed with-in the walled garden, I can see how there's little motivation to work well with mail coming from outside. If all training data is people marking external mail as spam and there's much less data about false positives, I guess it's easy to arrive to a prior that all external mail is spam even with best intentions.Google is eating our mail [Tomaž Šolc/Avian's Blog](via Webshit Weekly) Read the rest

In 2011, activists began an occupation of Zucotti Park near Wall Street, starting a movement that spread around the world and changed the discourse around wealth, inequality, corruption and justice.At the time (and ever since), critics have dismissed it as a stunt, a flash in the pan, an anarchist boondoggle whose lack of crisply defined demands doomed it to peter out into irrelevance.But eight years on, Occupy's legacy is alive and well, with Occupy organizers and veterans playing key roles in the Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats, the anti-student-debt movement, and other radical organizations that have changed what is considered "mainstream politics" in America and around the world.Vox's Emily Stewart does a deep dive into Occupy's legacy, and shows how the Movement for Black Lives' critique of race and politics has merged with Occupy's more class-oriented critique to produce a more inclusive, radical politics. Occupy's legacy -- the mainstreaming of Fight for 15, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders -- is the thing that gives me the most hope for our world right now.Strikes and militancy have deep roots in the labor movement, but as journalist Sarah Jaffe in her book, Necessary Trouble, noted, Occupy had “added vigor” to labor campaigns throughout New York and had galvanized them to make bigger, bolder demands.“We needed to be more aggressive and direct-action oriented toward how we were going to make our demand and hopefully win, which is not dissimilar from what Occupy was doing in terms of being more aggressive, taking the streets, taking arrests,” said Jonathan Westin, now executive director of New York Communities for Change. Read the rest

Razzle Dazzle is a carnival game in which you roll marbles into a tray with numbered holes. Once you get to 100 points, you can win fabulous prizes. It looks like a can't lose game, but in this video Brian Brushwood and mathematician James Grime reveal why it's a scam.[via Doobybrain] Read the rest

Donald J. Sobol (1924 – 2012) created the Encyclopedia Brown series of mystery books in 1963, which have sold over 50 million copies. I loved these as a kid. Each one had ten stories starring the boy detective, who charged his neighbors 25 cents to solve a mystery. Often the culprit of the petty crimes Brown investigated was the bully Bugs Meany, leader of the Tigers gang. Bugs's abbreviated intelligence was no match for Brown's erudition and powers of deduction.Craig Pittman, writing for CrimeReads, says Sobol shunned publicity:He never gave a single television interview. When he talked with newspaper and magazine reporters, he did so by telephone. That way they couldn’t take his picture or even describe what he looked like. A photo of the author only appeared in one book, and he said that was by mistake.“I am very content with staying in the background and letting the books do the talking,” he told the Oberlin Alumni Magazine in 2011. Read the rest

As part of the 40 year anniversary of Alien, 20th Century Fox commissioned illustrator Serene Teh to create Alien flipbook art for the above animation. Videography and post-editing by Noel Lee. Read the rest

If you enter into a plea deal in California today, your prosecutor will likely make you promise not to use any future legal reforms to get out of jail earlier than is stipulated in your plea -- that way, you won't be able to take advantage of the slate of criminal justice and sentencing reforms passed by the California legislature and voted in by Californians through ballot initiatives.But word of the waiver even in limited use raised protests from defense lawyers and criminal justice reform advocates. They said that prosecutors were making an end-run around the Legislature and voters, largely out of frustration at the wave of changes the state has made to the criminal justice system.“The ground is shifting underneath them,” said Kate Chatfield, the co-founder and former policy director of the reform group Re:store Justice. “They don’t like it. And that’s shameful.”Chatfield’s group was instrumental in the Legislature passing a bill this year that changed the felony-murder rule so that accomplices who did not do the actual killing would no longer face murder charges, as they had in the past. The law was retroactive — meaning hundreds of inmates serving prison sentences have now gone back to courts, seeking a lower sentence. That is just one of several measures — including Three Strikes reform, a measure that reduced felonies to misdemeanors and is also retroactive — that have remade the face of criminal courts in California.After waves of criminal justice reforms, prosecutors now want to lock in pleas, ask defendants to give up future rights [Greg Moran/San Diego Union Tribune] Read the rest

Stephen Moore, the gold bug economics writer nominated by Trump for the board of the Federal Reserve, has a history of making racist and misogynist statements. For example, in 2000 he told C-Span:“It’s not a good thing that black women are making more than black men today. In fact, the male needs to be the breadwinner of the family, and one of the reasons I think you’ve seen the decline of the family, not just in the black community, but also it’s happening now in the white community as well, is because women are more economically self-sufficient. So, I would like to see an increase in black earnings because black men have not closed the gap as much as black women have.” And after Trump was elected, Moore told an audience how much he "loved" a racist joke about the Obama family:“By the way, did you see, there’s that great cartoon going along? A New York Times headline: ‘First Thing Donald Trump Does As President Is Kick a Black Family Out of Public Housing,’ and it has Obama leaving the White House. I mean, I just love that one. Just a great one.”This week, when Moore was interviewed by PBS and shown video clips of his statements, he seemed to have trouble defending them..@StephenMoore explains his 2016 joke about Donald Trump moving into the White House and kicking “a black family out of public housing.” Moore says, “That is a joke I always made,” adding he didn’t mean it “like a black person” lived there. Read the rest

The 8bit Deck is a standard 52-card deck with pixelated artwork using the Pico-8 pallette.A few months ago, I began designing a few face cards for what, at the time, might have been an 8-Bit solitaire game or something similar. As the process continued, the idea of making these pixel art cards in to actual high-quality playing cards came to mind, and thus the 8Bit Deck was born. Each card has been crafted pixel by pixel, and the color palette was heavily inspired by the Pico-8 fantasy consoleHere's the full set:I'm going to be that guy and say that instead of rounded corners, there should be a singe-pixel-sized notch on each. Read the rest

With Nintendo and now Sega offering popular retro consoles and Atari soon to join them, here comes the Intellivision Amico.All of its games are downloadable and will run between $3 - $8 US, with no high-priced DLC or in-game purchases. It will launch with some pre-installed Invellivision classics and over 20 games (both reimagined classics and brand new titles) through the Intellivision Online Store. There will also be similar Atari and Imagic classic titles.The games coming to the Amico feature updated graphics, modernized audio, additional levels, multi-player modes (local and online), tournament modes and more. This includes games like Astrosmash, Shark! Shark!, Baseball, Night Stalker, Skiing, Math Fun, Pong, Asteroids, Centipede, Tempest, Adventure, Missile Command, Swords & Serpents, Miner 2049er, Super Burgertime, ToeJam & Earl and more. Read the rest

Employers in British Columbia will no longer be able to skim worker's tips, according to a story in the Read the rest

Close-up photography in this BBC video shows how a Venus flytrap works. We see a fly, tempted by the Venus flytrap's nectar, alight on a trap. As the fly sucks up the tasty bait, it brushes against one of the trap's six hairs. This sets off an internal timer in the flytrap. If a second hair is disturbed within 20 seconds, the trap snaps shut.Image: YouTube/BBC Read the rest

I'm on this week's Techdirt podcast (MP3) talking about my latest book Radicalized -- this being Techdirt, the talk quickly moved to DRM, and then to tech policy, monopolism, breaking up the Big Tech platforms, and neofeudalism. Read the rest