Good morning, Happy Mutants.Previously: 10 minutes of Elizabeth Holmes' creepy unblinking stare with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Read the rest “Elon Musk but with Elizabeth Holmes' eyes”

Level two, "Amateur", sounded so good that I suspected a joke was afoot. It was, but only the sort of joke a virtuoso like Rob Landes could pull off. Read the rest “Mario theme performed on violin at four levels of expertise”

Willie Cade's grandfather Theo Cade was one of John Deere's most storied engineers, with 158 patents to his name; he invented the manure spreader and traveled the country investigating stories of how farmers were using, fixing, modifying and upgrading their equipment; today, Willie Cade is the founder of the Electronics Reuse Conference, having spent a quarter-century repairing electronics, diverting e-waste from landfills and rehabilitating it for use by low-income schools and individuals.In a stirring op-ed for Security Ledger, Cade the Younger takes aim at John Deere and the other businesses that have lobbied against Right-to-Repair legislation that would force them to end practices ranging from the use of software locks to prevent activation of new parts to withholding parts, documentation and service codes from the independent repair sector.Though Willie Cade works in electronics, he uses his grandfather's work with farmers to explain why this is wrong, saying that "Thrift and efficiency were the values my grandfather and the John Deere of his generation embraced. It’s time John Deere returned to those core values."An avid diarist, Theo’s journals detail his travels all over the country as he visited his inventions in the field to better understand how people used John Deere products. He wanted to design products that would facilitate safer and easier operations, not impose costly delays or contribute to more farming accidents. That closeness to the customer and his dedication inspired many additional patents.My grandfather had 158 patents — 31 of which are on the manure spreader. Read the rest “Grandson of legendary John Deere engineer defends right-to-repair and condemns Big Ag for "taxing customers"”

Last spring, a coalition of young European political activists adopted this motion opposing the upload filters and link taxes in the new Copyright Directive, which the EU Parliament is about to vote on. With only days to go before that vote -- it'll probably happen on Tuesday the 26th at 12:30 PM, after a debate that starts at 9AM CET, following a day of mass, EU-wide street demonstrations -- -- the youth coalition have reminded their adult colleagues in the Socialist, Conservative, Green and Liberal Blocs that "A free and open internet is crucial for who we are and will define the generations coming after us."Furthermore, the protection of creators has not been substantially strengthened and even worsened in some regards. “Fair remuneration” has been watered down to include unfair payment schemes between publishers and collecting societies on the one hand and authors on the other.As a result, thousands of young people have turned up at protests in Germany and beyond, demanding that policy-makers protect our internet. A record-breaking petition has been signed by over 5 million Europeans. An international mobilisation is planned around Europe for Saturday 23 March.The European Parliament will vote on the directive during its plenary on 25-28 March. This text can still be amended and MEPs from different groups have already declared that they will try to do so, with a particular focus on removing the provisions that are paving the way for upload filters and a link tax.We demand that policy-makers take the concerns of young people around Europe seriously and remove the provisions establishing upload filters and a link tax from the draft copyright directive. Read the rest “The General Assembly of European Youth adopts anti-#CopyrightDirective motion backed by socialists, conservatives, liberals and green youth organisations”

Despite government legislation and improving caller ID technology, robocalls and scam artists are rampant on the phone lines - up to 35 billion a year in the US alone. They can be annoying at best and a financial threat at worst, but there's a way to take security into your own hands. One good example of the recent rise in call-filtering apps is Call Control, which has been racking up kudos from NBC News and Fox Business - as well as consumers on the App Store and Google Play.Not only does this app feature a list of automatically blocked numbers from a CommunityIQ database, but the enhanced caller ID detailed information so you can distinguish between genuine government entities and the scammers that pose as them. Easily block numbers, look up unknown numbers with reverse lookup, even set "quiet hours" that silence your phone from all calls during a designated time. It's a simple and reliable way to take back your number.Right now, a one-year subscription to Call Control Premium is 33% off at $19.99. Read the rest “Stop robocalls and phone scams with this top-rated app”

Last night's book tour event in Toronto was a smashing success! Thanks to everyone who came! I just checked in for my flight to Chicago for a weekend's worth of appearances at C2E2, and then on Monday I'll be at Berkeley Arts & Letters at 7:30PM with Richard Kadrey, then The Revolutionary Reads series at Ft Vancouver (outside of Portland, OR), and then the Seattle Public Library and finally a weekend of events at Wondercon in Anaheim. Come on out! (Image: @codepoet127) Read the rest “Chicago! I'm at C2E2 this weekend with my new book RADICALIZED! Next up: San Francisco, Portland/Ft Vancouver, Seattle & Anaheim!”

Star Trek's original series and TNG were shot on film, allowing them to be rescanned for high-definition broadcast. Star Trek: Deep Space 9, however, was shot on video at standard definition: there's no further detail to recover for HD broadcasts. Machine learning to the rescue! CaptRobau writes:I will go into greater detail about my process in a future blog post, but it took me about two days to get everything extracted, upscaled and put it back together in a way that was pleasing. This resulted only in the first five minutes of the episode being done (the episode recap, the opening scene, and the intro). Still pretty good time for a mid-to-high end PC with software that isn't just available to professionals.The result left me pretty awestruck. It looked better than I had hoped. No weird issues or anything. It looked pretty much like an HD version of DS9. Since (moving) pictures are worth more than a thousand words, here are two comparison videos that show off the improvement I was able to get with this machine learning based upscaling technique.Below, the intro at 4K. CBS, hire this man! (Or license his code!) "Imagine what a real team could do, with more powerful equipment, custom trained neural networks ... and access to the original SD files instead of a DVDRip like me." Read the rest “Deep Space 9 remastered with deep learning”

Security services firm FireEye says two hacker groups known to be sponsored by the Russian government of Vladimir Putin are waging cyber-attacks currently against European government systems.FireEye says these internet-based digital attacks are focused on the member states of NATO, the European security alliance that both Putin and Trump disparage. The two hacking groups are believed to be coordinating their efforts, but they're using different tools, FireEye reports, adding it noticed a “significant increase” in activity from both groups in mid-2018. The cyber-espionage campaign is said to be ongoing.“The groups could be trying to gain access to the targeted networks in order to gather information that will allow Russia to make more informed political decisions, or it could be gearing up to leak data that would be damaging for a particular political party or candidate ahead of the European elections,” Benjamin Read, FireEye's senior manager of cyberespionage analysis said Thursday.NBC News's Ryan Browne reports that the firm's findings “are likely to fuel worries over the possibility that Russia may influence upcoming EU elections.”The company found that two state-sponsored hacking groups, APT28 and Sandworm, used spear phishing — the practice of sending out emails designed to look like they’re from a trusted party — in an attempt to obtain government information.FireEye said European government institutions were sent emails with links to websites that appeared to be authentic, luring a person into changing their password and thus sharing their credentials with hackers.APT28, more popularly known as Fancy Bear, is believed to be linked to Russian military intelligence agency GRU and has been labeled as one of the malicious actors behind the 2016 Democratic National Convention hack. Read the rest “Two Russia-backed hacker groups target Europe ahead of elections, FireEye reports”

This very good doggo is either hunting something special, or clearing a path for his human, or who knows? Either way, the dog is obviously a submarine.When you thought you were adopting a dog, but instead got a subwoofer.And below, meet Yukon. “He is named after Yukon Cornelius and he, too, is still searching for that elusive peppermint mine!”May I present, Yukon. Destroyer of Worlds.[Link, via Reddit user blue_bomber697] Read the rest “Watch these dogs with floofy fluff-butts bravely tunnel in snow”

You need this.From AcousticTrench, first published on Oct 15, 2017, from their album. Read the rest “Relaxing music video: 'Can't Help Falling in Love' on kalimba, with dog, in nature”

Such graceful dogs.“Frank face planted and Skippy tried to imitate a cat but to no avail.”Doggo slow motion moves of grace and utter agilityLink: Doggo slow motion moves of grace and utter agilityby IMGURian @LollipopFromHell3 Read the rest “Adorkable dogs bungle a graceful jump”

But her emails.

"Change your Facebook password right now" is the instructive title of a news story at Wired today, sourced to a report at Krebs on Security. Lily Hay Newman:On Thursday, following a report by Krebs on Security, Facebook acknowledged a bug in its password management systems that caused hundreds of millions of user passwords for Facebook, Facebook Lite, and Instagram to be stored as plaintext in an internal platform. This means that thousands of Facebook employees could have searched for and found them. Krebs reports that the passwords stretched back to those created in 2012.Culture eats strategy for breakfast, they say, but the thing about Facebook is that neither its culture nor its strategy is for you to have any privacy. There's nothing in Facebook that can prevent it from stripping away privacy, in ways both intentional and unexpected, because that's the point. What is the first and principal thing he does? What need does he serve by watching you? Read the rest “Facebook stored millions of passwords as plain text”

If you fail to vaccinate an eligible child you are willfully endangering not only that child but everyone else's. This should be a crime.Scientific American: Read the rest “Our social contract demands people able to be vaccinated get vaccinated”

Raw vegan celebrity Instagrammer/YouTuber Yovana Mendoza Ayre (28), known as @rawvana on Instragam, was seen in a video with a plate containing fish, and now a lot of people are upset about it. In the video, it looks like she is trying to hide the fish from the camera.She eventually posted a half-hour long video to YouTube where she fessed up to reintroducing fish and eggs to her diet for health reasons: Read the rest “Vegan influencer outed for eating meat in video”

Lynn Freer Turner has been painting for decades, but you had to know the Turner family to see her work! If you got really lucky, as I did with the top image in this post, sometimes Lynn would sell you a piece. Finally, this outstanding artist decided to share her work via Instagram! Lynn is trying to share one new image of her work a day. View this post on Instagram New one#painting#losfeliz#animallover#losangelesA post shared by Lynn Freer Turner (@lynfogram) on Mar 20, 2019 at 9:21am PDT View this post on Instagram A bad dream#sleeplesspaintingA post shared by Lynn Freer Turner (@lynfogram) on Mar 7, 2019 at 7:31am PST View this post on Instagram Exploring the neighborhood#griffith parkA post shared by Lynn Freer Turner (@lynfogram) on Mar 4, 2019 at 1:12pm PST Lynn paints whatever catches her fancy. Sometimes wonderfully bizarre scenes, sometimes the chickens in her back yard. The world displayed through Lynn's lens delights me.Lynfogram Read the rest “Lynn Freer Turner's wild, whimsical, and sometimes absurd paintings”

The Father's Nursing Assistant is made by Dentsu, a Japanese company. It's basically a canteen in the shape of woman's breasts. Of course, it's also wireless with some kind of app to let you know what happened.From the press release:The amount of time infants in Japan spend sleeping is shorter compared to the rest of the world. Much of the parental stress and difficulties surrounding childrearing are related to feeding and sleeping, and generally the rate of participation by fathers tends to be low. Breastfeeding is also effective at helping the parent sleep--a benefit that is currently skewed toward women. Focusing on breastfeeding, we aim to decrease the amount of burden on mothers and increase the amount of time infants sleep by enabling fathers to breastfeed. This is realized with the FATHER'S NURSING ASSISTANT wearable device. Based on advice from pediatricians and babysitters, who say that babies tend to touch the breast with their hands when feeding and that the softness seems to sooth them, the product has been shaped to resemble a woman's breasts. As a result, a father can hold his baby in both of his arms, creating a deeper skin ship between them and enabling the baby to sleep peacefully in his father's arms. Father's Nursing Assistant has a tank for milk on one side and the breastfeeding system on the other. The device also senses the infant's breastfeeding and sleep timing and is linked to an app that facilitates a better, visual understanding of the infant's condition. Read the rest “High tech device allows men to breastfeed babies”

Archie Lee Williams, Jr. (41) of Brunswick County, North Carolina, has been charged with 73 felony counts of taking 216 Venus Flytrap plants. He could face 450 years in prison and is being held on a $750,000 bond.From Port City Daily:The tiny carnivorous plant is listed as a “vulnerable” species on the state’s protected plants list. Environmentalists and officers tasked with protecting the plant from poachers cited difficulty in the past with identifying whether the plants were grown or poached.According to the Wildlife Resources Commission (WRC), Williams was caught on camera. He was later apprehended with over 200 plants and digging tools. Williams admitted to a WRC officer that he habitually poaches Venus Flytraps from multiple locations around the area.Interestingly, while it is illegal to take Venus Flytraps from public land, developers can destroy the plants with impunity.Image of Venus Flytrap: Kuttelvaserova Stuchelova/Shutterstock Read the rest “Man faces 450 years in prison for poaching Venus Flytraps”

Last night I saw HBO's The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and her company/cult, Theranos. It's very good and surprisingly unsettling. UPDATE: I've looped her intensely unpleasant stare for 10 minutes and set it against a nice slow performance of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Enjoy the embedded video above.Here's an infinitely looping GIF of it, sans music. Read the rest “Infinite Elizabeth Holmes”

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.I read William Gibson's Neuromancer for the first time in 1985. I bought a copy at the San Francisco State University bookstore (Carla was attending college there and I was working at Memorex/Burrough in nearby Santa Clara as a mechanical engineer) after we went to a talk by Timothy Leary and he raved about it.It's probably safe to say that without Neuromancer, Carla and I might not have ever started the bOING bOING zine in 1987, because the novel was hugely influential on the way we thought about technology and society.Neuromancer is on sale on Amazon in the Kindle edition for a very low price right now. Get it before the price goes back up. Read the rest “Kindle edition of Neuromancer at steep discount”

YouTuber PewDiePie has more subscribers than anyone else on the network, and some of his rabid fans have released at least two ransomware strains that encrypt hard drives and display a notice that informs victims that a decryption key will be made available only when PewDiePie's account gets 100 million subscribers. One of the ransomware strains also warned victims that if, at any time, the Indian Bollywood channel T-Series gets more subscribers than PewDiePie, the decryption key will not be released.From ZD Net:Its author eventually realized the world of trouble he'd get into if any of those victims filed complaints with authorities, and released the ransomware's source code on GitHub, along with a command-line-based decryption tool.I made this whilst learning java 😂I hope I didn't cause to much of an issue for anyone. Here is the decryption tool: https://t.co/2hkUIsLRxv its command line based. Keep up to good work— __JustMe__ (@JustMe79194181) February 25, 2019Yesterday, the team at Emsisoft released their own decrypter app based on these two tools, meaning victims can recover files without having to wait months until PewDiePie reached 100 million subscribers.Both ransomware strains show the level of idiocy the competition for YouTube's top spot has reached. While T-Series fans have remained mostly quiet most of this time, a portion of PewDiePie's fans appears to have lost their minds and engaged in media stunts bordering on criminal behavior.They've defaced sites, taken over printers, and hijacked thousands of Chromecasts and smart TVs to spew out messages of support and the now-classical "subscribe to PewDiePie."The message itself has become a meme, and not in a good way. Read the rest “PewDiePie fan unleashes ransomware that encrypts hard drives until he gets 100M subscribers”

Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves are to star again as Bill and Ted, a long-hoped-for sequel to the 1990s classics: "The world is about to get a lot more excellent."Weird fact: both Winter and Reeves are British, but neither have spent much time there: Winter moved to the U.S. from East London when he was 5, while Reeves's mom is from Essex but moved to Canada before he was born. Winter holds British and American citizenship; Reeves is a naturalized Canadian citizen. Both would have been exposed, as youngsters, to Estuary English, an emergent dialect with many curious similarities to California English, like, totally. Read the rest “Bill & Ted 3 announced”

Every few years, someone figures out who Jack the Ripper was. Science is cited, in a peremptory kind of way, and there might even be a study or paper to show for it. But then the hypothesis falls apart.According to the new study, a silk shawl was found by the body of Catherine Eddowes, a victim killed by Jack the Ripper during the early morning hours of Sept. 30, 1888. ... First and foremost, it's doubtful that the shawl belonged to Eddowes, Jack the Ripper's fourth victim. ... The genetic analysis of the shawl is also unconvincing, said King, who is known for her work sequencing the whole genome of King Richard III ... handled by countless people over the years, meaning that their DNA got on the shawl, contaminating it, King said. "At that low resolution, it could be that thousands and thousands and thousands of people share the mitochondrial DNA types that they're finding," King said. The study was designed to hit Kosminski, and it was not described to permit reproduction. Read the rest “New Jack the Ripper claim strains under scrutiny”

If you're a Mac user, you thrive on simplicity. Everything in its place and a place for everything. Unsurprisingly, there's a ton of great organizational apps out there for Mac, and now someone's had the great idea to bundle them all together. Whether you're running a demanding business or just getting through the day to day grind, it's likely you're going to find something to love in the Epic Mac Bundle Ft. Fantastical 2 & PDF Expert. If you're not familiar with the primary time-savers on this eight-app roundup, here are a few highlights:Fantastical 2Integration is the key to this calendar app. It uses natural language to let you easily create new events and invite contacts in a single stroke. Intuitively, it can also merge duplicate events across any other calendars you might have and set reminders - complete with directions - to any event on your schedule.PDF ExpertThe beauty of PDFs is in their simplicity, but things can quickly turn ugly when you need to modify those crucial documents. PDF Expert is an effective workaround for that, allowing users to easily edit text or images in any PDF doc. You can also merge PDFs or read large files with an innovative viewing system - even share them remotely across iPad, iPhone or Mac. Annotation and form filling options abound, all user-friendly.Pagico 8The ultimate task manager, this program corrals all your tasks for the day, week or month into an interactive flowchart. With a simple click on a tab, you can stay on track with ongoing projects and schedule new ones, then send that info out to an integrated contact list that can also collaborate and update items through the app. Read the rest “Maximize your Mac with a bundle of top organizational apps”

Some 1,600 people were secretly livestreamed while staying in South Korean motel rooms where cameras had been hidden by criminals who operated a 4,000-user service for voyeurs, where a $45/month upcharge bought subscribers the right to access replays and other extra services.South Korea has been rocked by scandals and protests over men who hide cameras in women's toilets and secretly record them and then nonconsensually share the videos; there have also been multiple scandals involving so-called "revenge porn" sites and "upskirt" sites.The cameras were disguised as "TV boxes, wall sockets and hairdryer holders."After an investigation, the Cyber Investigation Department at the National Police Agency has arrested two men and is questioning two others.Two men have been arrested and another pair investigated in connection with the scandal, which involved 42 rooms in 30 accommodations in 10 cities around the country. Police said there was no indication the businesses were complicit in the scheme.In South Korea, small hotels of the type involved in this case are generally referred to as motels or inns. Hundreds of motel guests were secretly filmed and live-streamed online [Sophie Jeong and James Griffiths/CNN](via /.) Read the rest “Two arrested for hiding cameras in motel rooms and charging for access to livestreams”

We had a hell of an event last night at The Strand in NYC, and I'm about to head to the airport for my flight to Toronto for tonight's event at the Metro Reference Library, hosted by the Globe & Mail's Barry Hertz; then it's Chicago's C2E2 festival and then to Berkeley for an event with the writer and photographer Richard Kadrey, and then the Revolutionary Reads program at Fort Vancouver's Clark College (just outside of Portland, OR); and then the tour takes me to Seattle and Anaheim! I hope you'll come out and say hi! (Image: Vlado Vince) Read the rest “Toronto! I'm at the Metro Reference Library tonight at 7PM with my new book RADICALIZED! Next up: Chicago, San Francisco, Portland/Ft Vancouver...”

We’re into the final days before members of the European Parliament vote on the Copyright and the Digital Single Market Directive, home of the censoring Article 13, and the anti-news Article 11. Europeans are still urging their MEPs to vote down these articles (if you haven’t already, call now, and stepping up the visibility of their complaints in this final week.The first salvo drawing attention to the damage the directive will cause has come from the European Wikipedias. German Wikipedia has gone completely dark for today, along with the Czech, Slovak and Danish Wikipedias, German OpenStreetMap, and many more.With confusing rhetoric, the Directive’s advocates have always claimed that they mean no harm to popular, user-driven sites like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. They’ve said that the law is aimed only at big American tech giants, even as drafters have scrambled to address the criticism that it affects all of the Internet. Late in the process, the drafters tried to carve out exceptions for “online encyclopedias,” and the German government and European Parliamentarians fought hard – though ultimately failed – to put in effective exceptions for European start-ups and other competitors.Very few of the organizations and communities for whom these exceptions are meant to protect are happy with the end result. The Wikimedia Foundation, which worked valiantly to improve the Directive over its history, came out last week and declared that it could not support its final version. Even though copyright reform is badly needed online, and Wikipedians fought hard to include positive fixes in the rest of the Directive, Article 13 and Article 11 have effectively undermined all of those positive results. Read the rest “The Best of Europe’s Web Went Dark Today. We Can’t Let That Be Our Future.”

Do tabloid editors even read what their reporters write? It’s hard to imagine, given the disconnect between headlines and the barely-detectable trace elements of facts contained in the stories beneath them.“Alex Trebek — Lung & Liver Surgery” reports the cover story of this week’s National Enquirer. But he’s had neither surgery according to the story on the inside pages about the beloved host of TV’s Jeopardy, who recently admitted having stage four pancreatic cancer. Is Trebek even poised to undergo such surgeries? Not according to the Enquirer, which says he “may be considering” such measures. Or maybe he isn’t considering them at all?“Monster Moms Tell All,” screams the front cover of Us magazine, promising the inside scoop on Lori Laughlin and Felicity Huffman’s role in the college cheating scandal. But neither actress says a single word. About anything. The mag reports: “Now both women are trying to explain away their involvement.” Evidently they’re not trying to explain it to Us."R. Kelly Flunks Lie Test!” yells a spread in the Globe. A super-scientific what-could-possibly-go-wrong voice stress analysis of the beleaguered singer's appearance on TV with Gayle King shows that Kelly was stressed and therefore must have been lying. Why else would anyone be stressed appearing on national TV being accused of pedophilia? It boggles the mind why voice analysis isn’t used in criminal courts nationwide. Tom Cruise could have really used one in Minority Report instead of relying on those flaky precogs.Sometimes you just wish that celebrities read their own press, so that they’re on the same page of the script as the tabloids. Read the rest “Angelina’s boozing, Prince Charles’ divorce, and college entry cheat Lori Loughlin “tells all,” in this week’s dubious tabloids”

In San Diego, the United States Border Patrol grabbed a girl who is 9 and a U.S. citizen and on her way to school, accused her of lying about her identity, then detained her for 36 hours. Many families in the San Diego-Tijuana area cross the border routinely for work, school, and shopping. The child and her mother live on the Mexico side, and school is on the U.S. side. They were reunited after the kid had been held away from her parents for 36 hours, when the Mexican consulate got involved.It's hard to imagine this sort of thing routinely happening under Trump's white supremacist presidency to families who look differently. Say, blonde and white and wealthy.Below, the NBC San Diego news segment video.From NBC San Diego's online report:Thelma Galaxia said her friend, Michelle Cardenas, was driving each of their two children from Tijuana, where they live, to their schools in San Ysidro Monday morning, as they do nearly every day.Galexia's 9-year-old daughter, Julia Isabel Amparo Medina, attends fourth grade at Nicoloff Elementary School and her 14-year-old son, Oscar Amparo Medina, attends ninth grade at San Ysidro High School. Both are passport-holding U.S. citizens.When they got in line at the border at 4 a.m. Monday, traffic was moving slow. Cardenas told the four children to walk across the border instead. She was going to call them an Uber so they could make it to school on time.But Oscar and Julia Medina never made it across, according to their mother. Read the rest “Border Patrol detains 9 year old U.S. citizen for 36 hours after falsely accusing her of lying about her identify”

Kraft could show up at the White House party before he shows up in court.

Real wasabi, Wasabia japonica, is apparently one of the most expensive vegetables to grow. That green stuff you're eating? Ground horseradish, Chinese mustard, and, you guessed it, green food coloring. Yum.According to The Atlantic, "Worldwide, experts believe that this imposter combination masquerades as wasabi about 99% of the time."Above, meet Shigeo Iida, 75, whose family has grown real wasabi for eight generations.(via NextDraft)image: HK 北角 North Point 和田 Wada Japanese Restaurant 放題 Buffet dinner 山葵 green Wasabi Mar-2013 Read the rest “The wasabi you think you're eating isn't wasabi”

Richard Marx silhouette reminds me of a buffalo for some reason.Flock of Seagulls hair was outstanding. The Go Gos on the other hand just looked good.Cyndi Lauper and Captain Lou would be my inspiration today, but I am bald.Aside from Flock of Seagulls, these were not even extreme hairstyles. I am sure you have better ones...Also 80s punk never went out. Read the rest “Will 80s hairstyles make a resurgence?”

Having traveled to Europe and Japan many times, I've grown to appreciate bidets. It's a shame they aren't commonplace in the US. Here's a cheap one on Amazon. It's really easy to install. It doesn't have warm water jet like a Japanese toilet, but you'll get used to it. Read the rest “Easy-to-install bidet is a game changer”

Steve King, a racist Republican US congressperson from Iowa, is making waves again. King posted a meme to Facebook suggesting GOP-leaning Red states would win a new civil war.LA Times:“Folks keep talking about another civil war,” the meme read. “One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”King, whom Congress recently stripped of committee assignments over his comments about white supremacy, annotated the image with a winking emoji and mused, “Wonder who would win....”King was openly pondering violent, armed conflict, apparently joking about Republican-leaning states fighting their Democratic-leaning neighbors in a second American civil war.But King, an Iowa native, may have been confused about which side he was on. There, forming the blue warrior’s bicep, was his home state, delivering a cartographic uppercut to the jaw of its red opponent.King deleted the post, which he shared on an official campaign page, Monday. His office did not respond to questions about the picture or his reasons for posting and removing it. Read the rest “A post by racist Iowa congressperson Steve King threatens a second American Civil War”

If the Captain Marvel opening credits didn't tug your heartstrings enough, perhaps this marvelous Stan Lee Funko Pop will satisfy.The only autograph I ever asked a celebrity for was Stan Lee. "Excelsior, Jason! Stan Lee" is on a 3x5 card around here someplace.Funko POP!: Stan Lee via Amazon Read the rest “Funko's lovely Stan Lee tribute”

This new film by Eric Minh Swenson shares the work of Gus Harper, one of my favorite artists.Harper's work has been featured in film, television and my living room. While he is a phenomenal artist, Gus really excels as a friend.Keep it up, Gus!More posts about Gus on Boing Boing Read the rest “A new film about artist Gus Harper”

In The New York Times, Mike Isaac explains why newsletters are a better way of communicating than Facebook and Twitter.For me, the change has happened slowly but the reasons for it were unmistakable. Every time I was on Twitter, I felt worse. I worried about being too connected to my phone, too wrapped up in the latest Twitter dunks. A colleague created his own digital detox program to reduce his smartphone addiction. I reckon he made the right choice.Now, when I feel the urge to tweet an idea that I think is worth expounding on, I save it for my newsletter, The Dump (an accurate description of what spills out of my head). It’s much more fun than mediating political fights between relatives on my Facebook page or decoding the latest Twitter dust-up.I agree with Mike. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter control every aspect of your communication. As centralized proprietary platforms, they own your content and your audience. They can deplatform you with the push of a button and permanently cut you off from a readership or viewership you've spent years to cultivate. With a newsletter, you have the email addresses of all your subscribers. Newsletters are so much better than Facebook I'm surprised Zuckerberg isn't lobbying Congress to ban them.Speaking of newsletters, you should check out Boing Boing's newsletter! I also have a couple of newsletters you might be interested in: Recomendo, a weekly newsletter with 6 short tips and recommendations, and Book Freak, a weekly newsletter with useful quotations from books I've read. Read the rest “Why newsletters are the best form of social media: “You don’t have to fight an algorithm to reach your audience””

The world is about to get a lot more excellent. Watch this special announcement from your two favorite dudes! 8.21.20 🎸⚡️ pic.twitter.com/miOtBhinlC— Bill & Ted 3 (@BillandTed3) March 20, 2019Thank you both, and everyone else on the project, for working so hard to bring Bill S. Preston and Ted "Theodore" Logan back to us. Clearly it has not been easy. They have been missed.Party on and be excellent to each other. Read the rest “Wyld Stallyns speak from the Hollywood Bowl”

According to this video and article from by The Atlantic, most of the wasabi eaten around the world is horseradish with green food coloring in it. Shigeo Iida, a 75-year-old farmer in Japan, grows the real stuff, and in this beautifully shot video, we get to see him harvest wasabi and make wasabi paste while he waxes philosophical. “Real wasabi, like the ones we grow, has a unique, fragrant taste that first hits the nose,” he says. “The sweetness comes next, followed finally by spiciness.”Image: YouTube/The Atlantic Read the rest “Short video about life on a Japanese wasabi farm”

Mike Monteiro, co-founder and design director of Mule Design, has a new book called Ruined by Design: How Designers Destroyed the World, and What We Can Do to Fix It. He posted a sample chapter from the book, about Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand's influence on Silicon Valley. He's a funny writer!Welcome to Silicon Valley. A libertarian stronghold at the very end of America. (Literally.) Silicon Valley, and specifically the venture capital firms of Silicon Valley, are mostly run by old white men who read Ayn Rand in high school, thought it was great, and never changed their minds. (This is where I need to be fair and let you know that not all venture capitalists are monsters. In fact, I’m friends with a few who are lovely people. They are very much the exceptions. Also, every VC who reads this book will think this parenthetical is about them.) In the words of the late great Ann Richards, they were, “born on third base and think they hit a triple.”For those of you not familiar with Ayn Rand, she wrote crappy books about the power of individual achievement while she collected social security and started some pseudo-philosophy called “objectivism”, which can be summed up in five words: I got mine, fuck you. The old white men of Silicon Valley all have giant Ayn Rand back tattoos. (Look, it’s a chapter about venture capitalism inside an ethics book. I gotta tell a joke once in a while, for all our benefit.)Image: Ruined by Design Read the rest “"Ayn Rand is a Dick" - excerpt from a new book by Mike Monteiro”

Prior to its recent discovery the baris was a ship best known through Herodotus', widely regarded as the father of history, description. There were other references in literature but no physical sign this type of craft ever truly existed. A recent discovery shows Herodotus was no liar.Science Alert:In fragment 2.96 of Herodotus' Histories, published around 450 BCE, the Ancient Greek historian - who was writing about his trip to Egypt - describes a type of Nile cargo boat called a baris.According to his portrayal, it was constructed like brickwork, lined with papyrus, and with a rudder that passed through a hole in the keel.This steering system had been seen in representations and models through the Pharaonic period - but we had no firm archaeological evidence of its existence until now.Enter Ship 17, of the now-sunken port city Thonis-Heracleion near the Canopic Mouth of the Nile, dated to the Late Period, 664-332 BCE. Here, researchers have been exploring over 70 shipwrecks, discovering countless artefacts that reveal stunning details about the ancient trade hub and its culture.Although it's been in the water for at least 2,000 years, the preservation of Ship 17 has been exceptional. Archaeologists were able to uncover 70 percent of the hull."It wasn't until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right," archaeologist Damian Robinson of The Oxford Centre for Maritime Archaeology told The Guardian.Image source Read the rest “Corroborating evidence that Herodotus wrote accurately about a boat”

I just realized the theme song I've been singing about my dog Nemo is set to the Black Sheep Squadron opening tune.After starring in what would be my favorite TV show of all-time The Wild Wild West, Robert Conrad went on to lead the cast in Black Sheep Squadron.Naturally, I thought the airplane was his co-star.The series was confusingly renamed after one season, hence the Baa Baa Black Sheep vs Black Sheep Squadron thing. Read the rest “The song stuck in my head is the 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' theme”

I use lots of Google products (Chrome, Gmail, Gcal, YouTube, and Google itself) and like them, but I'm wary of using new Google projects because the company has a history of releasing something, allowing a user base to grow, then yanking the rug out from under everyone by killing the project. This site shows 147 dead Google projects. I miss Google Reader, and will miss Google URL Shortener, Inbox, and even Google+. Read the rest “Look at all the dead projects in this Google Graveyard”

Ontario, Canada's Workplace Safety and Insurance Board created these splatterpunk workplace safety ads in 2012. "This is not a feel-good campaign," said WSIB Chair Steven Mahoney. "We’ll feel good when the number of injuries and fatalities go down.” Read the rest “Odd and gruesome workplace safety ads that aired on TV”

During the long years when Philippines strongman Rodrigo Duterte (previously) was mayor of Davao (circumventing term limits by periodically allowing his daughter to run for mayor and serving as her vice-mayor) the city was terrorized by death-squads who enjoyed total impunity as they assassinated police suspects and Duterte's political opponents, while Duterte cheered them on (Duterte has boasted about his participation in extrajudicial killings during this period, but has also denied participation in the death squads).In 2012, IBM signed a multi-million-dollar deal to supply high-tech surveillance gear to the Duterte regime, a program that IBM boasted of when attempting to sell surveillance gear to other cities. IBM also produced sales literature boasting of having sold its "Face Capture" facial recognition program to the city (the city's promotional material also features police using this tool), though now IBM claims it never supplied facial recognition tools to Davao.Davao's death-squads murdered scores of street children, petty criminals, and suspected gang members. Often, these victims would be slain shortly after being released from police custody. One police official, Antonio Boquiren, boasted that IBM's tools let them arrest people for the pettiest of crimes: "Whether it’s criminality, smoking, or jaywalking, any violation of ordinance is a crime and a police is sent."IBM says it stopped supplying Davao in 2016. Today the city uses surveillance gear supplied by giant, Chinese firms like Huawei, paid for with loans from state-owned Chinese funds.IBM is notorious for supplying the Nazis with the tools needed to track the mass-slaughter of Jews, homosexuals, Catholics, communists and dissidents in the concentration camps, through an ongoing relationship that included servicing and supplying these systems throughout the camps' operation, directed from IBM's New York offices. Read the rest “IBM supplied surveillance gear to Davao while Duterte was mayor and cheering on the city's police-linked death-squads”

They had me at the opening reference to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Read the rest “Watch the new Stranger Things 3 trailer”

Here are some "ordinary citizens" who have recently been featured in the press as people who are completely OK with the state of American healthcare and totally opposed to Medicare for All or any other project to reform America's worst-in-the-world health care system: "Mustafa Tameez, businessman, Texas" (Tameez is managing director at Texas-based Outreach Strategists, a public affairs and lobbying firm that reps Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, University of Texas Physicians, and St. Luke’s Hospital).Another health care status quo enthusiast is "Jim Corson, Montana" (Corson was a 14 year veteran of the staff of Sen Max Baucus, the former Senate Finance Committee who killed ACA's public option). "James Rang" is just an ordinary dude who wrote a letter to the editor opposing single-payer because it was bad for the "free market" (Rang is vice president in the employee benefits department at the Friedman Group -- that is, he's a health-insurance salesman).Florida businessman "Carlos Carbonell" is one of the "influential leaders" cited in the Orlando Sentinel's piece on opposition to health-care reform (Carbonell is a Public Affairs Advisor” at Converge Strategies, a lobbyist that reps the health care industry)."Jack A. Roy," a proud son of Massachussetts, and he "[does] understand how this could work" (Roy is the former head of the Haverhill City Republican Committee.).In Des Moines, "Mark Havlicek" is a businessman who is adamant in his opposition to single-payer (Havlicek is a "political consultant" and "committed Republican activist" who was on Jeb Bush’s Iowa leadership team). Read the rest “Health industry lobbyists are posing as "ordinary citizens who don't want Medicare for All"”

If you've got 3+ years of experience and want to cover "the growing political and cultural Big Tech backlash,' copyright clashes, the culture of Silicon Valley firms, tech-policy battles, and important tech-related court cases" then Ars Technica wants to hire you. Read the rest “Ars Technica is looking for a "technology and society" reporter”

Last year, California was one of several states to introduce right to repair legislation that would force companies to end practices that discourage the independent repair sector, creating a requirement to sell replacement parts, provide documentation, and supply codes to bypass DRM systems that locked new parts out of devices until the company activated them. The bills were mostly defeated, thanks to coalitions led by Apple -- which subsequently warned its investors that its profits were threatened by customers' unwillingness to abandon their old devices and buy new ones.In California, the farm lobby did a deal with the devil, selling out to the ag-tech sector and throwing its weight behind Apple's push to kill the bill.But the California right-to-repair legislation is back in play, thanks to California State Assemblymember Susan Talamantes Eggman [D-Stockton], whose Assembly Bill 1163 is substantively similar to last year's r-to-r bill.Depending on how you count, the repair sector is worth 1-4% of total US GDP, and most repair businesses are neighborhood-based small firms whose profits stay in your community. By contrast, Apple (and other Big Tech firms) are notorious tax avoiders who funnel their profits offshore and then direct them to their distant shareholders in the form of massive stock buybacks and other forms of financial engineering. "Companies love when we buy and toss, and buy new at the greatest possible speed, but it's expensive for consumers and the waste is piling up," said Emily Rusch, Executive Director for CALPIRG. "Electronic waste is now the fastest growing part of the waste stream. Read the rest “California's Right to Repair Bill, killed by Big Ag and Apple, has been reintroduced”

The EU's Copyright Directive will be voted on in the week of March 25 (our sources suggest the vote will take place on March 27th, but that could change); the Directive has been controversial all along, but it took a turn for the catastrophic during the late stages of the negotiation, which yielded a final text that is alarming in its potential consequences for all internet activity in Europe and around the world.More than 5,000,000 Europeans have signed a petition against Article 13 of the Directive, and there has been outcry from eminent technical experts, the United Nations' special rapporteur on free expression, and many other quarters.Now, a coalition of more than 130 EU businesses have entered the fray, led by file storage service NextCloud. Their letter to the European Parliament calls Article 13—which will lead to mass adoption of copyright filters for online services that will monitor and block user-submitted text, audio, video and images—a "dangerous experiment with the core foundation of the Internet’s ecosystem." They also condemn Article 11, which will allow news publishers to decide who can quote and link to news stories and charge for the right to do so.Importantly, they identify a key risk of the Directive, which is that it will end up advantaging US Big Tech firms that can afford monitoring duties, and that will collect "massive amounts of data" sent by Europeans.March 21st is an EU-wide day of action on the Copyright Directive, with large site blackouts planned (including German Wikipedia), and on March 23, there will be mass demonstrations across the EU. Read the rest “More than 130 European businesses tell the European Parliament: Reject the #CopyrightDirective”