An 18-year-old high school senior is suing the Northern Kentucky Health Department for banning him from school and sports during a chicken pox outbreak. He refuses to get vaccinated because of his "Christian faith," so the Health Department refuses to let him attend school or play sports. "The fact that I can't finish my senior year in basketball, like, our last couple of games, it's pretty devastating. I mean, you go through four years of high school playing basketball, you look forward to your senior year," the student, Jerome Kunkel, told WLWT5.According to NBC:The health department announced the policy Feb. 21 in a letter to parents, citing an outbreak of chickenpox at the school.It first warned parents of the outbreak Feb. 5, urging them to get their children vaccinated. By March 14, the school had 32 cases of confirmed chickenpox, according to the health department."The recent actions taken by the Northern Kentucky Health Department regarding the chickenpox outbreak at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart/Assumption Academy was in direct response to a public health threat and was an appropriate and necessary response to prevent further spread of this contagious illness," the health department said in a statement in response to Kunkel's lawsuit.Chicken pox is an airborne virus that can also be contracted through physical contact. Although most people get through the illness without any lasting effects, it can be devastating to pregnant women, babies, and people with weakened immune systems.Image: by F malan - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9575488 Read the rest “Unvaccinated high school student is suing the health department for banning him from school during a chicken pox outbreak”

Daren Schwenke's 3D printed blooming rose embeds a capacitive touch sensor -- a magnetic wire -- in one of the leaves, which trips an Arduino-controlled actuator that changes the rose's lighting and causes the petals -- 3D printed and then shaped over a hot chandelier bulb -- to splay open or fold closed.The build log reveals a lively open-source hardware/free software collaboration that is a miniature, perfect case-study.What finally materialized is a terrific combination of common hacker technologies. The petals are printed flat in nylon, then formed over a hot incandescent chandelier bulb. The stem and leaves are also printed, but the side stem has a piece of magnet wire embedded in the print as a capacitive touch sensor; when the leaf is touched, the rose blossom opens or closes. Magnet wire for the LEDs and a connecting rod for the mechanics run through the main stem to the base, where a 9g servo is responsible for controlling the bloom. The whole thing is controlled, naturally, with an Arduino. To move the project along a little more quickly, [Daren] enlisted the help of another Hack Chat denizen, [Morning.Star], who did an amazing job on the software without any access to the actual hardware.A 3D Printed Blooming Rose For (Next) Valentines Day [Ted Yapo/Hackaday] Read the rest “A glowing, 3D printed rose that "blooms" when you touch its petals”

I-Wei Huang (aka Crabfu) makes all sorts of cool steam-powered mini-robots. In this video, he explains how he made a walking robot. Read the rest “How this cute little steam-powered walker works”

Michael Hearst, composer of the classic "Songs for Ice Cream Trucks" and author of the excellent Unusual Creatures, shares this delightful video of seemingly quite dangerous rides at Coney Island in the 1930s and 1940s.These sanctioned affronts to safety remind me of the fun I had rolling around with my brothers in our station wagon's cargo area on long road trips. Read the rest “Video of Coney Island rides from the 1930s and 1940s that would never fly today”

Everyone I know is on a sourdough kick. My sister was talking some stuff she learned in a class, so I took these photos to show her what "waking up the starter" means to me.When I took my starter out of the fridge and looked in the crock I saw a deep pool of hooch. It has been since Thanksgiving that I used it, and I may have put this batch in the fridge back in June or July 2018.I take a heaping spoonful of the starter and......gently mix it with 1/2 cup of warm water and 1/2 cup of flour. Then I set it aside for 4 hours.I feed the starter every 4 hrs when I am awake, until it is awak. When I sleep the yeast can sleep. Once I have 2 cups of starter in my bowl, I discard 1/2 and add 1/2 cup of water and 1/2 cup of flour again, maintaining the volume at around 2 cups. When the starter looks like this, it is ready to use.I used the starter, baking a loaf of bread in my Dutch Oven.Bread with butter, jam and cheese was yesterday's meal. Read the rest “I woke up my long refrigerated sourdough starter”

In 2009, the bipartisan HITECH Act pledged $36 billion to subsidize the adoption of Electronic Health Records throughout America's fragmented, profit-driven health system, promising that the system would modernize American health care, save $80 billion (and countless lives), and deliver a host of other benefits; a decade later, the EHR industry has blossomed from $2B to $13B, and adoption is up from 9% to 96%, and it's a catastrophe.Part of the problem lies in the structure of the HITECH Act itself: it created incentives for practices to buy "certification" EHR tools, but that certification was incredibly lax and allowed all kinds of terrible, buggy code to attain certification. The cash incentives were so great that companies poured fortunes into luring doctors to banquets where they were instructed on how to maximize their government subsidies, but the certification process did not protect doctors from unscrupulous vendors. Importantly, a certified tool did not have to be standards-based, meaning that there was no requirement that patients be able to move their records from one practice to another (this is a feature, not a bug: the medical industry's term for a patient switching practices is "leakage," and the incompatibilities in rival practices' EHR tools were an excellent hedge against it, serving as a lock-in for patients). What's more, certified vendors were allowed to bind the healthcare providers to nondisclosure and nondisparagement clauses, making it illegal for them to warn other doctors about defects in EHR products.To top things off, the HITECH Act did not establish any kind of FDA tracking system for complaints about bugs in EHR tools -- even bugs that maimed or killed patients. Read the rest “Electronic Health Records: a murderous, publicly subsidized, $13B/year grift by way of shitty software”

Police are hunting for a gunman who shot at least four passengers on a train in Utrecht, killing three of them, then fled. BBC:Police say the gunman is still at large. Trains and trams have stopped running and schools have been asked to keep their doors closed. Counter-terror police reportedly say the shooting "appears to be a terrorist attack". Dutch anti-terrorism co-ordinator Pieter-Jaap Aalbersberg said all efforts were now focused on catching the gunman. He also said there could be more than one perpetrator.Update: Three of the victims are reported dead. Police say they are hunting a 37-year-old Turkish man named Gokmen Tanis. They issued a photograph of Tanis taken by security camera and warned everyone to stay away from him. Read the rest

Android tablets being crummy and Microsoft ones being dismembered laptops, it's nice that Apple's unexpectedly announced new models of its aging iPad Mini and iPad Air. The 10.5" iPad Air weighs one pound and starts at $499, while the 7.9" iPad Mini has pencil support, an ultra-high DPI and starts at $399. Both use Apple's latest A12 chips and have optional LTE.The new Air effectively replaces last-gen iPads with something a little smaller and much more powerful, while the Mini should be especially interesting to artists and designers who don't want to hoik around a ~$800+ iPad Pro just to get dirty. From the press release it appears to be the last-gen pencil with the standard 60hz refresh rate, but even then the latency is in a league of its own. Read the rest

Hitting them with "Throughout" first is pretty sadistic. But that they stumble on "choir" suggests that they are hamming it up, un peu? Read the rest

The Wall Street Journal reports that the U.S. Department of Transportation has launched an investigation into the Federal Aviation Administration's approval of Boeing's 737 MAX jets. Two of the new airliners crashed in similar circumstances, killing hundreds of passengers, and American regulators were conspiciously slow to ground the jet even after flights were halted in other countries.Federal prosecutors and Department of Transportation officials are scrutinizing the development of Boeing Co.’s 737 MAX jetliners, according to people familiar with the matter, unusual inquiries that come amid probes of regulators’ safety approvals of the new plane. A grand jury in Washington, D.C., issued a broad subpoena dated March 11 to at least one person involved in the 737 MAX’s development, seeking related documents, including correspondence, emails and other messages, one of these people said. The subpoena, with a prosecutor from the Justice Department’s criminal division listed as a contact, sought documents to be handed over later this month. Read the rest

Ed and Jim's investigation into the 1990's comic book speculation boom and bust continues! In this issue:*The second wave of Image Comics creators is officially upon us with the release of Darker Image issue 1.*Cartoonist Lea Hernandez drops some knowledge about the trials and tribulations of the comic book business.*Palmer's Picks: Hepcats, and the first announcement of Peter Laird's monumental Xeric Grant for self publishers.* Kevin Eastman creates the Words and Pictures museum!*A Dale Keown interview talking about his soon to be published Image title, Pitt!* Fan Favorite artist, Kelley Jones speaks to Wizard about his drawing career, from Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics to an Alien series published by Dark Horse comics* Speaking of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Wizard investigates the comic to see how it compares and contrasts with previous iterations of the DC Sandman character, dating back to the 1940s.* All this and tons more.-------------------------------Subscribe to the Cartoonist Kayfabe youtube channel. New videos are posted often. Cartoonist Kayfabe shirts and other merchandise at our new storefront! Read the rest

It's been a year since the music links on Myspace stopped working; at first the company insisted that they were working on it, but now they've admitted that all those files are lost: "As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer, Dr. Jana Jentzsch at DPO@myspace.com."Yeah, apparently they don't have a backup.Someday, this will happen to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. Don't trust the platforms to archive your data. The Internet Archive will host anything freely distributable, for free, forever, and they have mirrors of their servers in California, Egypt and Amsterdam. They're a mission-driven nonprofit supported by philanthropists, foundations, and small-money donations (I'm an annual donor).(via JWZ)(Image: UNTHA) Read the rest

Property developers in London built more than 1,900 luxury flats in 2018, the majority of which have so far failed to sell; all told, there are 3,000 luxury flats on the market, a high-water mark for a city whose property market was hijacked by offshore oligarchs and criminals who converted much of the housing stock into empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky.While many of these properties were built to be unoccupied, they definitely weren't built to be unsold. In an asset bubble, prices are dependent on the belief that someone will relieve you of your asset when you need liquidity, and if you don't believe that those buyers will be there when you need them, you will stay out of the market, reducing the number of buyers. With fewer buyers, more potential buyers are spooked, and prices start to fall as the people who really need to cash out start to slash their prices. As prices fall, more owners are spooked and sell off, hoping to sell off before prices fall further. More inventory means more insecurity for speculators, who avoid the market, worsening the seller/buyer ratio and forces prices down further, and then more people sell -- lather, rinse, repeat and you're partying like it's 2008.Chinese currency controls and other forces have started to erode the global market for luxury housing as a highly liquid asset-class, and London's property market has been deflating since the Brexit vote,Not only are there 3,000 super-luxe flats unsold on the market in London at the moment; there are also 14,000 regular luxury flats for sale -- and developers are currently in production on 420 more housing towers in the capital. Read the rest

Two years ago, I reviewed Andy Partridge and Todd Bernhardt's highly-recommended Complicated Game: Inside the Songs of XTC, a collection of deep-nerding conversations between these two musicians about beloved XTC tracks. While that book was a wonder, it understandably focused on Andy and his contributions to the band. While deepening my admiration and appreciation for the band, it left me hungry for more.Enter What Do You Call That Noise? An XTC Discovery Book. I didn't think I could love an XTC book more than Complicated Game, but this book just keeps inspiring and surprising me every time I poke my nose into it. This is a delightful and dizzying collection of XTC exploration, analysis, and devotion that should stoke the soul coal of any hardcore fan of the band. Put together by Mark Fisher, editor of Limelight, the 80s XTC zine, this book is a collected conversation between dozens of musicians deconstructing XTC songs, interviews with ALL of the band members (including their Spinal Tap-worthy causality list of drummers), kids and young music students reacting to XTC music, home studio recording tips from Andy Partridge, Andy on music theory (or lack thereof) and songwriting. Contributors include Rick Buckler (The Jam), Chris Difford (Squeeze), Debbi Peterson (The Bangles), Steven Page (Barenaked Ladies), Mike Keneally (Frank Zappa), Peter Gabriel, and many more.Also included are a piece on drummers breaking down some of Terry Chambers more brilliant moments, members of XTC tribute bands around the world talking about their music, a cultural studies professor on the genius of Colin Moulding's lyrics, a piece about a German YouTuber who's covering his way through the XTC catalog, and the (apparently) obligatory photo tour of Swindon, England (the band's beloved home town). Read the rest

Dick Dale, the "King of the Surf Guitar," has died at age 81. RIP, maestro. Dale's pioneering sound was inspired by his Lebanese uncle who played the oud and taught his nephew the tarabaki, a goblet-shaped drum. Dale's 1961 instrumental "Let's Go Trippin'," recorded with his band The Del-Tones, sparked the vibrant surf rock scene that spawned the Beach Boys. Dale was shredding right up until his death. RIP, maestro. From The Guardian:Born Richard Anthony Monsour in May 1937, Dale developed his distinctive sound by adding to instrumental rock influences from his Middle Eastern heritage, along with a “wet” reverb sound and his rapid alternative picking style.In 2011, he told the Miami New Times that the hectic drumming of Gene Krupa, along with the “screams” of wild animals and the sound and sensation of being in the ocean inspired his sound. Read the rest

"Don't you dare talk to me in front of my kids like that, motherfucker!"Jesse Leavenworth, for The Hartford Courant:The video shows the woman, identified by a school district spokeswoman as Corinne Terrone, “repeatedly calling an African-American man the N-word in a supermarket in East Haven” on Friday night, a statement on the district website says.“The video also appears to show the Hamden employee spitting at the aforementioned African-American male as he was walking away from the employee,” the statement says. “It also appears that the employee’s children witnessed her conduct.”Video link. Read the rest

I use Apple Music for the majority of my music listening. It works well and lets me add most of my favorite songs, but there’s a lot missing from it. From what I’ve heard, it takes a little bit of work to get your songs up on iTunes/Apple Music. Unless an artist is well known and doing well in their music career, oftentimes, it’s simply not worth it to publish to Apple Music.SoundCloud, on the other hand, provides extreme simplicity when it comes to publishing music, and makes it easy for listeners to find your songs. So, lots of artists get their start on SoundCloud, which entices me to use it alongside Apple Music. Yeah, there's a popular and pretty true idea floating around that SoundCloud is full of mumble rappers, but this isn’t about that part of the site. If you look, it’s easy enough to find a lot of gems on SoundCloud.Here are four good songs I’ve found on SoundCloud that have less than 10,000 listens at the time of posting this.1. "Decadence" by Gr._.ffThe lack of attention to this song has astounded me since I found it. It starts off with a pretty sweet melody but completely switches mood halfway through, and I love that about this song. I’ve had a few friends who judged this song before it was even a few seconds in, but I think that you have to listen to the entire song to fully appreciate this one.Age of song: 3 years oldListens: 7,332Likes: 1742. Read the rest

[Editor's note: I'm on the advisory board for Free Machine, a nonprofit that describes itself as an "LA-based collective of UX designers, artists, urban planners, and policy wonks. By using the tools of culture to shift the conversation around tech and society, we aim to shape a hi-tech future that is equitable, sustainable, and abundant." The following is from Ben Gansky, Free Machine's executive Director]I'd like to invite you to join me at Free Machine's Future Perfect: A Postcapitalist Adventure on Sunday March 24th at 4pm at Manny's in the Mission, co-presented by Institute for the Future! What is Future Perfect? Who is Free Machine? Where is Manny's? Read on!Future Perfect: A Postcapitalist Adventure is a live group choose-your-own-adventure in which participants take on the roles of neighborhood council members in an imagined society, called Tomorrowland. Faced with a series of events and emergencies created by emerging automation and climate change, councils must debate and vote on the policy decisions that (they hope!) will move their society into an ideal future. Tomorrowland's story will unfold over a twenty-year period, with guest appearances by special interest lobbyists and local experts adding context and insight to these complex topics. What will be the future of Tomorrowland? It's up to you! (This event is $5, with all proceeds to be donated to Data for Black Lives but no one will be turned away for lack of funds: you can reserve your ticket here.) Free Machine is an LA-based collective of designers, artists, urban planners, and policy wonks. Read the rest

After Lenovo bought out IBM's Thinkpad business, they began to tinker with the classic and famously immutable laptop designs: in small ways at first, and then in much larger ones. I buy a new Thinkpad every year (I promised myself a new laptop every year as a dividend from the savings when I stopped smoking) and the first decade's worth were practically perfect: they ran various GNU/Linux flavors without a hitch, the hard-drives were swappable in two minutes by removing a single screw, and the keyboard could be replaced without any tools in less than a minute.But for about five years, Thinkpads have seen a steady noose-tightening when it comes to user modifiability and GNU/Linux-compatibility, thanks in part to the decision to miniaturize components, and in part to the increasing reliance on UEFI and other BIOS features that make GNU/Linux installation into a much more fraught prospect than it has been since the earliest days of free software. The first thing to go was the beloved, clacky, positive-action keyboards, replaced by Macbook-style chiclet keyboards that wore out much faster, but at least the keyboards were easily swapped out when they started to falter. Then came new submicro designs that made swapping keyboards into a one-hour procedure that had to be performed by a professional who would have to virtually totally disassemble the computer.The same forces made drive-swaps harder and harder. I used to order a Thinkpad with the smallest, cheapest drive available and then throw it away on arrival and replace it with a third-party, 1TB SSD. Read the rest

"Fruit Belt" is a 150-year-old predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo that has faced a series of systemic hurdles, each worsening the next, with the latest being the erasure of its very name, with the Big Tech platforms unilaterally renaming the area "Medical Park."The neighborhood's story shares a lot with other historically Black, northern neighborhoods: boosted in part by the Great Migration and in part by the razing of other historically Black Buffalo neighborhoods on the east side. In the 1960s, racist slum-clearance policies led to clearance of a large part of the neighborhood and the creation of a huge, university-affiliated medical park with two massive hospitals. The decades that followed were attended by relentless pressure from city government and planners to establish a "medical corridor" in the neighborhood, with more displacements of the families that made up the community.Rents skyrocketed and landlords began to take properties off the market, allowing them to sit vacant in the hopes of flipping them to developers. An African-American cultural center was torn down, as were many homes. But the final indignity was when all the online maps of Buffalo began referring to the neighborhood as "Medical Park." Onezero's Caitlin Dewey sleuthed out the way this came to pass, and it's a fascinating tale.In the early 2000s, a dotcom startup called Urban Mapping hired low-waged recent college grads to catalog neighborhood names referenced in online sources like blogs, marketing sites, city plans, and real-estate sites. Lax antitrust enforcement allowed Urban Mapping's competitor Maponics to acquire it; and then allowed the postage meter giant Pitney Bowes to acquire both companies, becoming virtually the only supplier of neighborhood mapping data in the US. Read the rest

In reports of China's looming debt crisis, it's common to see references to the "shadow finance" or "shadow banking" system, but it's not always clear what these terms mean. One concrete -- and growing -- example of the shadow banking system is the Chinese "pawn-shop" industry, who have $43B in outstanding loans, mostly made to business-owners for working capital, and largely secured by real-estate holdings. These are essentially payday loans for businesses, and come with exorbitant interest rates. While $43B is a drop in the bucket of China's shadow banking sector, which is estimated to comprise $9T in transactions, the pawn industry is growing like crazy, possibly as a result of state crackdowns on other forms of shadow finance. The industry has doubled in size since 2010, and the average loan is about $26K -- meaning that these "pawn brokers" have issued loans to millions of borrowers.The pawn brokers themselves are borrowing from mainstream financial institutions, creating a hard-to-quantify, largely invisible source of systemic risk to the Chinese banking system. The state regulators are expected to publish new, stricter guidelines for this lending, and for insurance underwriting of pawn brokers.My guess is that this will only create new shadow finance firms. China's growth has been fueled by easy credit (and stock bubbles) and the alternative to shadow finance is default, and people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid defaulting.A typical loan in Shanghai comes with an interest rate of about 2 percent a month, or 24 percent annually, compared with the benchmark one-year lending rate of 4.35 percent. Read the rest

J.K. Rowling earlier declared wizarding headmaster Albus Dumbledore a gay man. Much discussion centered on why it wasn't on the page or the screen. Once again, she highlights a sexual dimension to her characters that surely motivates them, yet—for reasons unexplained—remains unspoken and unseen.“So I’m less interested in the sexual side – though I believe there is a sexual dimension to this relationship – than I am in the sense of the emotions they felt for each other, which ultimately is the most fascinating thing about all human relationship,” Rowling adds. Everything you say about your art that isn't in your art is criticism of your art.Photo: Daniel Ogren (CC BY 2.0) Read the rest

A unicorn armed with a crowbar robbed a convenience store near Baltimore, say police, then fled.Police say the suspect had fled in a silver car. They located what appeared to be the same car after it had wrecked. No other cars were involved in the wreck. Police say two people involved in the crash were taken to a hospital, and detectives are working to determine what their involvement was in the robbery. No charges were immediately filed. Read the rest

The Right to Repair movement is gaining so much ground that the corporations whose profits it threatens are making tiny, symbolic concessions in the hopes of diffusing the energy behind it.Farm equipment manufacturers and their dealers created a "voluntary agreement to allow customers limited access to some of what we need to repair their equipment" while still retaining control over what could be fixed and on what terms. Samsung is increasing the number of "manufacturer authorized" service depots, and Apple has rescinded its policy of canceling your warranty if you get a third-party battery swap.But all of these are less-than-half-measures, and do not address the fundamental question of Right to Repair: owners of devices -- and not their manufacturers -- should be allowed to decide who fixes their stuff and when it is unfixable and should go to landfill. Progress has been slow. No state legislature has held a full floor vote on Right to Repair. Manufacturers have gone to great lengths to sow uncertainty and stoke fears about repair. Despite the fact that we line up against trillions and trillions of dollars worth of companies every day, we are making progress. And I know from corporate insiders who talk to us that the manufacturers have gone from dismissive to afraid.That is why we are starting to see them co-opt Right to Repair.Corporations Are Co-Opting Right-to-Repair [Nathan Proctor/Wired] Read the rest

Fraser Anning is a far-right Australian politician in the news for saying that Muslims were themselves responsible for the mass-murder of 49 people in two New Zealand mosques by a white nationalist. At a press event today, he said that such events eventually be "accepted" and was egged by a teenager, who he then punched in the face. The teen was then held in a chokehold by his supporters, arrested, and ultimately released without charge.Here's footage of the egging, the punching, and the choking:WATCH: This is the moment Senator Fraser Anning was egged by a teenage boy during a press conference in Melbourne. #9News pic.twitter.com/oePwz3pPH2— Nine News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) March 16, 2019Here's footage that shows why the teen chose that moment to make his move:This is the result of spreading hatred Enjoy your delicious omelette, @fraser_anning pic.twitter.com/pQfDqbUtIT— SayedHosseinQazwini (@Shqazwini) March 16, 2019Here's footage of the choke-hold up close, with some interesting dialogue from Anning's goons.This is what Fraser Anning’s right-wing lads did to the boy. #auspol #FraserAnning pic.twitter.com/sJNzRLppG5— Paul Barry (@TheRealPBarry) March 16, 2019Chaos has broken out at a meeting where Senator Fraser Anning was speaking to a small group of supporters. I've now been booted out after telling 5 men to get off a young protestor @10NewsFirstMelb @10NewsFirst #Christchurch @JonathanLea10 pic.twitter.com/PWnkviLUyl— Katherine Firkin (@KatherineFirkin) March 16, 2019 Read the rest

Meet William Hunter Hardesty. Hardesty posted video of himself "manhandling and jumping on top of" a pelican in Key West, boasted about it to other vacationers, and ended up charged with animal cruelty.Florida investigators were not amused, and the FWC issued a 10-page warrant for his arrest on charges of animal cruelty to a migratory bird and intentionally feeding a pelican.Hardesty was apparently so proud of the recognition he got for the March 5 stunt that he bragged about it this week to some people staying at the same Ocean City, Maryland, hotel where he was staying.Those folks called the police.There are worse things one can do to pelicans, I suppose, but the best policy is not to do anything at all. Read the rest

Boing Boing!It'd be even better if this beautiful ocelot were not in a cage.Wonder if this is what 'Tigger' was based on.That's one big happy kitty.[SOURCE: That's one big happy kitty by OctopussSevenTwo5 on IMGUR.] Read the rest

Genius! You're gonna want to unmute, and turn your sound up.Pirates of Caribbean ThemeFrom TheStrongestBrain on IMGUR. Read the rest

“Nothing has been confirmed,” an LAPD officer told LA Times. “We’re trying to resolve the situation.”

Akin to going hunting with Dick Cheney, this bad-idea-with-a-Tesla begs for catastrophe. Read the rest

Well, this is awesome: Andrew Liptak picked my next book, Radicalized as one of The Verge's picks for March! The tour starts Monday!Cory Doctorow is best known for novels, but his new book is a little different: it’s made up of four novellas set in the near future — “Unauthorized Bread,” about a woman who goes to great lengths to jailbreak the appliances in her subsidized housing; “Model Minority,” in which a superhero tries to tackle police corruption; “Radicalized,” about a man who sparks a violent uprising against his insurance company; and “Masque of the Red Death,” which ties in with Doctorow’s novel Walkaway. Publishers Weekly says that each story’s “characters are well wrought and complex, and the worldbuilding is careful.” You can read or listen to an excerpt from “Unauthorized Bread” (the film / TV rights of which have been picked up by Topic Studios). Read the rest

Investigative tech journalist Joseph Menn's (previously) next book is a history of the Cult of the Dead Cow (previously) the legendary hacker/prankster group that is considered to be "America's oldest hacking group."In a characteristically excellent Reuters story excerpted from the book, Menn reveals for the first time that Democratic presidential nomination hopeful Beto O'Rourke was an early member of the cDc under the handle "Psychedelic Warlord," having run a cDc BBS, contributed weird and sometimes unhinged essays and short stories (textfiles, or t-files) to the group's zines, and even blazed trail by sponsoring the group's first female member.Many of O'Rourke's t-files are still online: A Feature on MONEY - Today's Monster, a 1987 essay about the end of money and the erasure of class distinctions; 1988's Visions From The Last Crusade, a gory short-story; and 1988's INTERVIEW WITH NEO-NAZI 'AUSDERAU', a transcription of a debate with a fascist which showcases O'Rourke's skillful argumentation. O'Rourke has admitted that during his tenure with cDc he engaged in low-level hacker crimes like toll-fraud (in order to make free long-distance calls to BBSes) and software piracy.O’Rourke and his old friends say his stint as a fledgling hacker fed into his subsequent work in El Paso as a software entrepreneur and alternative press publisher, which led in turn to successful long-shot runs at the city council and then Congress, where he unseated an incumbent Democrat.Politically, O’Rourke has taken some conventional liberal positions, supporting abortion rights and opposing a wall on the Mexican border. Read the rest

I've been experimenting with curing meat, cause life has been too long already. Prague Powder is the secret ingredient.While I've tried a couple of different recipes for corned beef I am not ready to recommend one yet. Getting the spice blend right may be a thing of personal preference, but I have to keep working at it. Getting the texture and color right, however, was very simple. I used Anthony's Pink Curing Salt #1.Curing Salts are not edible on their own. That is why they dye them pink. This is not Himalayan Pink Sea Salt or some other delicacy. Prague Powder (pink salt #1) is a nitrite that inhibits the growth of anaerobic bacteria, thus working to block toxin production and keep meat from spoiling. When added to a brine the curing salts help preserve the meat, and impart that red-pink corned beef color. You'll also find it used in those weird smoked turkey legs at Disneyland and other theme parks.I'll keep working at it. We have a lot of fun baking rye bread to go along with this favorite.Pink Curing Salt #1 (2lb Prague Powder) by Anthony's via Amazon Read the rest

From the culture that brought you Cheese-in-a-Can, it is The Maple Stream.Not a Canadian superhero nor a trough urinal at Toronto's Oktoberfest celebration -- this is pressurized maple syrup lazily being hosed into the mouth of some sort of sportsball fan. Read the rest

Mysterious bundles of hair have been turning up on streets in Santa Barbara's Mesa neighborhood. It's not known yet if the hair is human, non-human animal, or synthetic. From KEYT:We reached out to cosmetology workers and those who may have some insights into cultural traditions that involve these hair bundles, but there were no answers...One resident said she saw some people dropping or throwing smaller ones out of a car window recently, but those are not the ones out there now.One person on the Mesa saw a resident run into traffic this afternoon, grab one and disappear.More at Mysterious Universe: "Mysterious Bundles of Hair Appear on California Streets" Read the rest

Using software-defined radios, researchers from Trend Micro were able to reverse-engineer the commands used to control massive industrial machines, including cranes, excavators and scrapers; most of these commands were unencrypted, but even the encrypted systems were vulnerable to "replay attacks" that allowed the researchers to bypass the encryption.The lack of authentication (researchers say these are less secure that typical keyless entry fobs for cars, and those suck) means that the machines can be remotely controlled by unauthorized people, enabling attacks ranging "from theft and extortion to sabotage and injury."The systems use a dog's breakfast of custom codes and command system, with no standardization, let alone basic security. All systems pose some risk of vulnerabilities, but in this case it's like they didn't even try.Five different kinds of attack were tested. They included: a replay attack, command injection, e-stop abuse, malicious re-pairing and malicious reprogramming. The replay attack sees the attackers simply record commands and send them again when they want. Command injection sees the hacker intercept and modify a command. E-stop abuse brings about an emergency stop, while malicious re-pairing sees a cloned controller take over the functions of the legitimate one. And malicious reprogramming places a permanent vulnerability at the heart of the controller so it can always be manipulated.So straighforward were the first four types of attack, they could be carried out within minutes on a construction site and with minimal cost. The hackers only required PCs, the (free) code and RF equipment costing anywhere between $100 and $500. Read the rest

"Letterlocking" is a term coined by MIT Libraries conservator Jana Dambrogio after she discovered a trove of letters while spelunking in the conservation lab of the Vatican Secret Archives; the letters had been ingeniously folded and sealed so that they couldn't be opened and re-closed without revealing that they had been read. Some even contained "booby traps" to catch the unwary. Dambroglio and her colleagues have since been painstaking reconstructing these long-lost letterlocking techniques (which they hypothesize led to the development of the modern envelope), and documenting their findings in an online Letterlocking dictionary that documents the techniques, tools, and jargon of their discipline.Letterlocking got a huge boost in 2012 when Yale's Rebekah Ahrendt discovered 600 unopened 17th century letters in at the Hague post-office; the letters were in a larger collection of undeliverable post, held against a date that someone came forward to claim them. Prior to the trove's discovery, letterlocking had been primarily studied through reconstruction, using fold-marks, dirt, and traces of seals on multiple documents to try to recover the lost techniques.Dambroglio and a colleague named Daniel Starza Smith are self-described letterlocking "evangelists," having distributed 10,000+ replica letterlocked-letters in the hopes of reviving the practice. Both researchers are adamant, however, that there is still so much left to uncover. Many questions remain: How, for instance, did John Donne and Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster know the same letterlocking techniques? Were they passed down from a parent or from a colleague? Did certain locks imply something about the content of the letter? Read the rest

The RaniPill is another syringe that you can swallow to deliver drugs to the bloodstream from the inside. It's triggered by an interesting and complex mechanism involving a chemical reaction that inflates a tiny polymer balloon to push the needle into the intestinal wall. Rani Therapeutics just completed a successful 20-person trial using a pill that shoots blanks. From IEEE Spectrum:Working from the outside in, the RaniPill consists of a special coating that protects the pill from the stomach’s acidic juices. Then, as the pill is pushed into the intestines and pH levels rise to about 6.5, the coating dissolves to reveal a deflated biocompatible polymer balloon.Upon exposure to the intestinal environment, a tiny pinch point made of sugar inside the balloon dissolves, causing two chemicals trapped on either side of the pinch point to mix and produce carbon dioxide. That gas inflates the balloon, and the pressure of the inflating balloon pushes a dissolvable microneedle filled with a drug of choice into the wall of the intestines. Human intestines lack sharp pain receptors, so the micro-shot is painless.The intestinal wall does, however, have lots and lots of blood vessels, so the drug is quickly taken up into the bloodstream, according to the company’s animal studies. The needle itself dissolves...Participants passed the remnants of the balloon within 1-4 days.(Founder Mir) Imran calls the device a robot though it has no electrical parts and no metal. “Even though it has no brains and no electronics, it [works through] an interplay between material science and the chemistry of the body,” says Imran. Read the rest

GPT-2 is Open AI's language-generation model (last seen around these parts as a means of detecting machine-generated text); it's powerful and cool, and Gwern Branwen fed it the Project Gutenberg poetry corpus to see what kind of poetry it would write. Pretty good poetry, as it turns out.Scott Alexander (previously) does a good job of highlighting its greatest hits (and misses).GPT-2 poetry manages some impressive accomplishments, like solid iambic pentameter ("Thou know’st how Menoetiades the swift/Was dragged, of Hector and the fierce compeers/And Phrygian warriors. So, we will dispatch/Your bodies, then, yourselves to burn the ships/In sacrifice; with torches and with bells") though it struggles with extended/complex rhyming ("If sick of sense; Wholubil, or snug. ills, we know our own our first in sense the worse maintained between the worse, soon expired").Sometimes, it gets stuck (there's a poem that's just "The Emperor Wu (the great Wu), majestical," repeated 11 times, then a bunch of repetitions of "The Emperor Wu (the great Wu), rapacious," salted with the odd "majestical"), but some of it is actually gorgeous: There are several kinds of people in America; There are several kinds of people, I mean their number. There’s a girl growing up in the house by the light, There’s a youth upon the road, or a girl somewhere in New York; There’s a prettier girl, and a man more congenial, But none of the likes of the likes of the fellows are equal. There’s one who has never been married and married, There’s one who don’t want to be treated with kindness; A fair youth is never employed nor neglected; There’s one who has never yet come to a neighbor,v And one who resides in New York from the start; But none of the likes of the likes of the fellows Are equal to him, and wherever he goes, The heart somehow breaks under the hand that is steering; Read the rest

There's buying school buildings, making million-dollar "donations," photoshopping your kid's head onto a real athlete's body, hiring a grown man to take your child's SAT test, and then there's an admissions tactic that hasn't yet come up in the college admissions scandal – screwing the head of the school. Here's a hilarious – and tragic – clip from Forrest Gump to show us how it's done.Via Reddit Read the rest

Walmart self-insures its workforce, rather than relying on an outside insurer like Cigna or Blue Cross; this means that it gets to make judgment calls that other firms cannot, and that has led the retail giant to a pretty weird place: for certain procedures that it believes to be overused by local hospitals, it flies its employees (even front-line, low-waged employees) to see the nation's top specialists in out-of-state facilities where they receive "concierge, white-glove care that was reserved at other companies only for highly paid executives."Walmart has written up the results of its program in an HBR case-study that details the company's mandatory policy that its employees be treated for spinal issues, cancer diagnoses and heart surgeries at the Mayo Clinic and others, including Pennsylvania's Geisinger Medical Center.American hospitals are notorious for opaque billing practices and rampant price-gouging, a phenomenon that is only exacerbated by their adversarial relationships with insurers, with the two parties locked in an arms race to generate and deny charges.Bill, an employee at Walmart, had been suffering from mild neck pain and a tremor in his hands. A local surgeon recommended spine surgery as the next course of action.Walmart decided to send him and his wife on a flight to a hospital in another state, all expenses paid, so he could get a second opinion. He saw a team of clinicians at Geisinger Medical Center, a top hospital system in Pennsylvania. They noticed a subtle shuffle in his step and diagnosed him with Parkinson’s Disease. Read the rest

Joan C Gratz's animated short "Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase" is a lovely and trippy 2D claymation of iconic artworks transforming one into another. After spending a decade on the piece, Gratz won the 1992 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Gratz called her animation technique "clay painting." From Educational Media Reviews Online:“Clay-painting” is a unique process that blends film and painting, and an innovation that garnered Joan Gratz’s Mona Lisa Descending A Staircase a 1992 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. In this true landmark of animation, numerous famous and iconic paintings from 20th century art are “reproduced as exactly as possible but the transitions between these paintings [are] used to communicate the relationship of artistic movements” as Gratz has stated. “In the clay painting technique, which I began developing in 1966, I work by painting directly before the camera, making changes to a single painting, shooting a frame, repainting and shooting, etc. In the end there is one painting with the process recorded on film, the product is the process.” Read the rest

West Virginia Manufacturers Association (whose major member is Dow Chemical) wants to do something about the frequent "boil water" advisories in the state: specifically, they want to relax the criteria that results in water being declared unsafe to drink, on the ground that West Virginians are so overweight that they can absorb more dangerous substances before reaching unhealthy concentrations of them; and besides, West Virginians don't drink much water, anyway.Chemical products are the leading industry in West Virginia (coal is a distant fourth). Trump carried West Virginia by 42 points, and immediately appointed Scott Pruitt (previously)-- a climate-denying, pollution-advocating criminal who advocated for lowering drinking water standards and was forced to resign after a series of corruption scandals -- to run the EPA.Pruitt's replacement, Andrew Wheeler (previously) is a notorious white-supremacist who formerly served as a coal-industry lobbyist who previously advocated for lowering drinking water standards.aThe Trump administration's environmental record is a house of horrors, with EPA enforcements at a 30-year low. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, Democrats were on the receiving end of countless lectures about how “liberal elites” looked down their noses at Trump voters. No state in the union represents Trump country more than West Virginia—where he won by 42 points.I would suggest that the real “elites” who are looking down their noses at the Trump voters of West Virginia are those manufacturing companies producing chemical products that contaminate their water supply while telling them that, because they’re so fat and don’t drink enough water, they can handle being exposed to carcinogens. Read the rest

Birdpunk is the quite natural intersection of two subcultures, punk and birding. From a feature article by Steve Neumann in Audobon:The overlap between birding and punk might seem strange to outsiders, but for birdpunks like Croasdale, the Do-It-Youself (DIY) values that shape punk living feed perfectly into low-frills activities such as birding. The DIY aesthetic and mentality is a core philosophy for punks, who thrive on independence and individualism. Their music bucks the profiteering industry of labels and promoters and travels over a homegrown network of venues and websites. The ethic also spills over to visual media, politics, economics, and social philosophy. Hospitality, trust, and authenticity are key traits in the community.When you consider these principles, it’s clear why many punkers are drawn to birding and its rustic qualities. Or vice versa: why their early love of birds steers them straight into the throes of punk. It’s a two-way street that draws out the best of both worlds, forming a distinctive subculture that’s holistic, aware, and expressive...Raquel Reyes, who lives in San Francisco... (had) always been interested in biology, but she credits her volunteer work at a wildlife hospital with making the discipline more personal. Similar to the others, Reyes discovered punk in her teens; she found self-esteem in a community where being a “weirdo” was a badge of honor.“Mainstream views about punk culture characterize it as self-absorbed and nihilistic,” Reyes says, “but there are many sub-categories immersed in ecological concerns.” The rejection of capitalism and mainstream consumerism spurs the need for self-sufficiency and self-discovery, through sewing, carpentry, gardening, and, of course, birding. Read the rest

A white man in his 20s was taken into custody after killing 49 and wounding dozens more at two Christchurch mosques, reports the BBC. Authorities described him as an "extremist right-wing terrorist"; he live-streamed one of the attacks on the internet.The attack, which came around the time people were attending the mosques for Friday prayers, was the deadliest in the nation's history. A gunman live-streamed footage of his rampage to Facebook, filmed with a head-mounted camera. The footage showed him firing indiscriminately at men, women and children from close range inside the Al-Noor mosque.Police called on the public not to share the "extremely distressing" footage online. Facebook said it had removed the gunman's Facebook and Instagram accounts and was working to remove any copies of the footage.He's been named by some media as Brent or Brenton Tarrant. A 74-page anti-immigration manifesto posted online and attributed to the killer rants about "white genocide".The 74-page document, called The Great Replacement, consists of a rant about white genocide and lists various aims, including the creation of “an atmosphere of fear” against Muslims.The document, which suggests an obsession with violent uprisings against Islam, claims that the suspect had “brief contact” with the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik and that Breivik gave a “blessing” for the attack. ... In a question-and-answer section of the manifesto, the author claims he was not seeking fame and was actually a “private and mostly introverted person”.He describes himself as an ethnonationalist and a fascist. Read the rest

Canton Becker, an electronic music composer and programmer, composed a procedurally generated song that uses the first billion digits of pi as its input.I haven't listened to all 114 years of the song yet, but I like what I have heard so far.From his statement:Becker programmed — or composed — an algorithm to generate music using the first one billion digits of pi (π). These digits supply the "turn signals" used to determine every musical expression in the song. Each digit (3.1415...) is responsible for orchestrating approximately four seconds of music. The electronic instruments and sound samples were prepared by Becker in advance.Because the numbers in pi never repeat, each one of the million hours in "Shepard's Pi” is in fact unique. Listeners who fast forward to some distant moment in the song are virtually guaranteed to find themselves listening to something that nobody else – including the composer himself – has ever heard before.Becker told me "here’s one of my favorite 20 minutes so far, from around hour 10,470." Read the rest

The Eastern District of New York empaneled a Grand Jury into the dirty data dealings of Facebook.

Not all heroes wear capes.

'Sorry,' and it wasn't a DDOS, says Facebook.