Martin Raynsford makes beautiful and intricate wooden puzzles with space-filling fractal curves and is kickstartering a set of four. The pattern is a single line that crosses all of the two dimensional space without ever repeating. The puzzles follow these simple rules to break the line into multiple pieces that are almost identical but are actually unique. The pieces are so similar in style that once they are placed into the puzzle it is hard to see where the pieces are. The puzzles can be tricky to solve even if you have the solution on hand.The puzzles are made from a high quality 3mm, 6 Ply, BR Grade, Birch Laser Plywood sheet. It shows the natural look of the wood and will have natural colour variations. Each puzzle is 200x200mm in size, the pieces are 3mm thick and the whole puzzle inside the tray is 6mm thick. For immediate gratification, you can also hit up his Etsy Store; the Cryptex box (Note that it's for PLANS only, you'll need to cut and make it yourself) looks like a great gift for the smartest egg in your family. Read the rest

A Buzzfeed investigation exposes the World Wildlife Fund's funding of torture, murder and paramilitary violence, which it claims is necessary to stop poaching. Shikharam was in too much pain to swallow. He crawled toward Hira, his thin body covered in bruises, and told her through sobs that forest rangers were torturing him. “They beat him mercilessly and put saltwater in his nose and mouth,” Hira later told police.The rangers believed that Shikharam helped his son bury a rhinoceros horn in his backyard. They couldn’t find the horn, but they threw Shikharam in their jail anyway, court documents filed by the prosecution show. Nine days later, he was dead. ... WWF’s staff on the ground in Nepal leaped into action — not to demand justice, but to lobby for the charges to disappear. When the Nepalese government dropped the case months later, the charity declared it a victory in the fight against poaching. Then WWF Nepal continued to work closely with the rangers and fund the park as if nothing had happened.As for the rangers who were charged in connection with Shikharam’s death, WWF Nepal later hired one of them to work for the charity.The WWF released a press release boasting that Shikhamam Chaudhari's killing sent a message to poachers. “WWF welcomes the government’s decision,” said Anil Manandhar, Country Representative of WWF Nepal. “I have every confidence that this move will renew the motivation of park staff and other conservationists to save Nepal’s rhinos and root out illegal wildlife trade. Read the rest

In a message posted to its official Twitter account, UK electronic music group The Prodigy announced the death of singer and songwriter Keith Flint today. “It is with deepest shock and sadness that we can confirm the death of our brother and best friend Keith Flint ... A true pioneer, innovator and legend. He will be forever missed. We thank you for respecting the privacy of all concerned at this time.”In an Instagram post, [via NME] Howlett wrote: “The news is true. I can’t believe I’m saying this but our brother Keith took his own life over the weekend. I’m shell shocked, fuckin angry, confused and heart broken.”Pitchfork posted an obituary.Flint was a regular fixture of the UK’s late-1980s rave scene. At a beach party, he met Howlett and suggested they form a band. Howlett began recording as the Prodigy, eventually touring America and bringing along Flint to hype the crowd. By 1996, Howlett had enlisted him as a frontman. When they released “Firestarter” that March, Flint’s emphatic performance and inverted mohawk became ubiquitous, making the video a staple of international music channels. A global hit and UK Number 1 for three weeks, the single teed up The Fat of the Land, one of the most successful UK dance albums of all time, helped along by follow-up singles “Breathe” and “Smack My Bitch Up.”If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255),or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741 Read the rest

Tim Maughan has long been one of the most promising up-and-coming, avante garde UK science fiction writers, whose post-cyberpunk short fiction mixed radical politics with a love of graffiti and a postmodern filmmaker's eye: now, with his debut novel Infinite Detail, Maughan shows that he has what it takes to work at longer lengths, and can sustain a first-rate adventure story that grabs and never lets go, without sacrificing the political and technological insights that give his work depth that will stay with you long after the book is done.Infinite Detail tells the story of a mysterious, permanent internet-wide shutdown, through the lens of counterculture network guerrillas who grow out of graffiti/squatter subculture in Bristol. The action flips back and forth between their fraught bohemia in which smart city technology is jammed in favor of free software that gives users control and community without ever spying on them; and the post-apocalyptic, blighted world ten years after the network collapses, killing supply chains, kicking off plagues and civil unrest, starvation and revolutions.From these two poles, Maughan's characters -- a free software hacker who is the architect and a grassroots free/open alternative to surveillance captialism's version of augmented reality; a seer who can call up images of the dead; a DJ who uses a sputtering, non-networked sampler and 3.5" floppies and aging audio cassettes to mix beats; a guerilla fighter who has spent a decade in Wales, waging war on the conscript army that the elite uses to enslave agricultural workers -- work backwards and forwards to the now of the story, explaining the mysterious event that killed every networked device in the world, almost at the same instant, and precipitated the chaos that shows no sign of ending. Read the rest

German Data Privacy Commissioner Ulrich Kelber is also a computer scientist, which makes him uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive. The Directive will be voted on at the end of this month, and its Article 13 requires that online communities, platforms, and services prevent their users from committing copyright infringement, rather than ensuring that infringing materials are speedily removed.In a new official statement on the Directive (English translation), Kelber warns that Article 13 will inevitably lead to the use of automated filters, because there is no imaginable way for the organisations that run online services to examine everything their users post and determine whether each message, photo, video, or audio clip is a copyright violation.Kelber goes on to warn that this will exacerbate the already dire problem of market concentration in the tech sector, and expose Europeans to particular risk of online surveillance and manipulation.That's because under Article 13, Europe's online companies will be required to block all infringement, even if they are very small and specialised (the Directive gives an online community three years' grace period before it acquires this obligation, less time if the service grosses over €5m/year). These small- and medium-sized European services (SMEs) will not be able to afford to license the catalogues of the big movie, music, and book publishers, so they'll have to rely on filters to block the unlicensed material.But if a company is too small to afford licenses, it's also too small to build filters. Read the rest

Cartoonist and animator Bill Plympton's wonderfully weird "Your Face" animated short features vocals by Maureen McElheron, slowed down by one-third for maximum slurriness. Nominated for a 1988 Academy Award, "Your Face" inspired the below 2018 couch gag on The Simpsons with Homer's vocals by Dan Castellaneta. (r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

[Editor's note: Xeno Evil is an Oakland artist fighting to save their home; I'm happy to help them with their campaign -Cory]The historic Vulcan Lofts in Oakland, CA are up for sale and nearly 200 working-class Bay Area artists are at risk of losing our homes. In order to save the Vulcan, we’ve founded a tenant’s union, hired several attorneys, and petitioned the City of Oakland to put the building under rent control. Our hearing with the rent board is coming up very soon and we need to raise $50k in the next month to cover legal costs. Please support us by donating to our cause and sharing our crowdfunding campaign with your network. We love you.The Vulcan Lofts have been an integral part of the Oakland arts community for over 30 years. Housed within a former steel foundry, the Vulcan is a central residential hub for nearly 200 low-income, working class artists and their communities. Full of visual artists, musicians, circus performers, and creatives of all stripes, the work produced at the Vulcan enriches the cultural fabric of the Bay Area and beyond on a daily basis, creating works of joy and beauty in the most rapidly gentrifying corner of America.Now, the oldest, largest, and most visible live-work community in Oakland is under threat.In late 2018, the Vulcan was put up for sale for $16M by its current owner. Following the tragedy of the Ghost Ship fire, the city of Oakland has increased its oversight on live-work spaces, putting new pressures on landlords and increasing the requirements involved when these buildings change hands. Read the rest

SpicyIP is arguably the leading blog for experts on India's copyright system, but links to it disappeared from Google's search index following a fraudulent claim of copyright infringement filed by Saregama, India's oldest record label.The label claimed that an expert report from 2010 on the history of a Bollywood song called "Apni To Jaise Taise" infringed on the copyright to the song. It did not.Luckily for SpicyIP, they have no shortage of copyright experts who can argue their case with Google's takedown system, and they were reinstated.However, this is a bad omen for the future of free expression in India, which is contemplating legislation similar to Europe's catastrophic Article 13, which would automate censorship of anything claimed as copyrighted, without any requirement that these claims be truthful or made in good faith.Regardless of the form of notice-and-takedown, it is apparent that placing an obligation to police copyright infringement on intermediaries create perverse economic incentives on private parties like Google or YouTube to over-comply and take down legal content. This is not solely attributable to the intermediaries’ practices themselves, but the policy and legal decisions which are created and are supposed to to strike a balance between access to knowledge and copyright protection in the digital age.While we hope SaReGaMa has a stern word with its lawyers, it’s funny and (perhaps on the balance) appropriate that this takedown notice came to a copyright law blog, where we can discuss and dissect such procedures. Yet, had it happened to a non-lawyer, or even someone who had ceased to take interest in their old blog, as it often does, it would result in the permanent removal of public information from an index which serves as the gateway to the internet, due to the ‘mistakes’ of private parties whose interests do not coincide with public access. Read the rest

Absher is a kind of Saudi equivalent to China's Weibo, an all-in-one service that manages payments, interaction with government services, and, key to the Saudi system of sadistic, totalitarian medieval patriarchy, it lets men track the whereabouts of their wives, daughters, and employees, sending alerts to "guardians" when women use their passports.Last month, Senator Ron Wyden [D-OR] publicly called on Google and Apple to remove the Absher app from their mobile app stores. Wyden and allies like Rep. Jackie Speier [D-CA] wrote to Apple and Google with the demand.Google has announced that after reviewing the app, they found that it did not violate their policies. Apple (whose terms of service ban apps that contribute to "systemic discrimination or marginalization") has not yet responded, saying that they are still reviewing Absher. Rep. Speier and 13 colleagues in Congress wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook on February 21, demanding that the app be removed.They and gave a deadline of Thursday 28 February to explain why the app is hosted on Google Play.The 14 — including Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Katherine Clark, and Jackie Speier — said that Google and Apple are "accomplices in the oppression of Saudi Arabian women" for hosting the app. Google, siding with Saudi Arabia, refuses to remove widely-criticized government app which lets men track women and control their travel [Bill Bostok/Business Insider](Thanks, Kathy Padilla!) Read the rest

Pramila Jayapal [D-WA] has introduced the Medicare for All Act, which mandates comprehensive health-care reform so that Americans can enjoy the same basic right to high-quality health care that the people in every other developed nation have had for decades, while ending the cream-skimming and price-gouging created by America's fragmented system, which is a gift to grifters and middlemen, but which leaves patients and medical professionals mired in needless expense and bureaucracy, a system so byzantine and inefficient that it would be vastly cheaper to simply give away health care than continue to charge for it. I have lived under Canadian and British socialized medicine, and currently use US private insurance. The US system is much, much worse in every conceivable way. Write to your Congressperson today and demand that they support this bill! Read the rest

If your job involves a desk, it's going to involve typing. If you've never taken a typing class or just don't have the experience that comes with using a keyboard day to day, it can be hard to adapt quickly in an office that takes it for granted. Luckily, there are apps out there that can get you up to speed. One standout: The Typesy Typing Trainer.Designed by touch typing experts, Typesy takes a multi-pronged approach to teaching. There are lessons that focus on each area of the keyboard, letting you get more comfortable as you spread out from that central "home row." But it also gamifies the process of learning with exercises that let you compete against the clock, pushing you to improve your accuracy and technique. You can even import your own choice of text into the lessons, and it rounds off this technical approach with video tutorials and feedback from real trainers. By the end, you'll even have a certificate to show to prospective employers.Right now, a lifetime subscription to Typesy Typing Trainer is over 90% off at $19.99. Read the rest

Belly up to the bar for Stephen Molloy's cocktail shaker take on the classic cups and balls magic routine: I was asked to share my handling here. Hope you guys enjoy :) (Instagram molloy894) from r/Damnthatsinteresting(via /damnthatsinteresting) Read the rest

Members of the European Parliament have been carpet-bombed with a "report" claiming that the historically unprecedented opposition to the pending Copyright Directive was the result of "US meddling in the EU lawmaking process," with 21 pages of alarming charts and figures to support this conclusion.However, the report is completely wrong, because it relied on analytics provided by Talkwalker, without understanding the assumptions that Talkwalker uses to fill in missing data.Specifically, when Talkwalker encounters a tweet whose location field is blank, it guesses which language the tweet is in, then assigns the capital city of the most populous country where that language is spoken as the account-owner's location. Every German-language tweet is reported as originating in Berlin, and every English-language tweet is reported as originating in Washington, DC.The opposition to the Directive's Article 13 is correlated with technical knowhow, and that is correlated with privacy consciousness (hence opponents of the Directive are likely to have blank location fields) and also with discourse in English. Also, English is the most-widely spoken language in the United Kingdom, which is one of the 28 member states of the European Union (for now). These tweets are in English, and have no location specified, and will all be classified as originating in DC.So Talkwalker's analytics falsely reported vast numbers of opponents to Article 13 were voicing their opposition from Washington D.C., including Julia Reda, the German MEP who has led the Parliamentary opposition to the Directive from her offices in Brussels and Strasbourg (the analytics also claim that Reda is based in Berlin, because she also tweets extensively in German, of course). Read the rest

The National Socialist Movement is one of America's oldest and most influential Holocaust denial/neo-Nazi movements, proprietors of one of the world's most prominent Holocaust denial websites and defendants in a case over members who participated in racist violence at the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally.James Hart Stern is a Black civil rights activist who has previously -- through very unlikely circumstance -- become head of a prominent KKK organization, which he took over in order to dissolve it. Stern was able to do this because he became a confidant of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Edgar Ray Killen while they were cellmates, while Killen was imprisoned for murder and Stern was imprisoned for mail fraud. Killen ended up giving Stern power of attorney, which Stern used to take over the Klan and shut it down.Jeff Schoep was the longterm president of the NSM, credited with reinvigorating it and growing it. He became acquainted with Stern through Stern's connection to Killen. He claims that he sought Stern's advice on his legal exposure from the Unite the Right suits, and that Killem convinced him that he should sign over control of the NSM to him in order to protect himself, and that Stern tricked him into signing over control. According to Stern, Schoep was worried that NSM was riddled with "the most vulnerable, the most loose-cannon members that they had ever had in the organization" and that "somebody was going to commit a crime, and he was going to be held responsible for it." Stern says Schoep also felt unappreciated by the membership. Read the rest

Hacking Team (previously) was an Italian cybermercenary company that sold surveillance tools to the world's most vicious autocrats and dictators, only to collapse when all of its internal documents were hacked and dumped online by an unknown person who claimed to be motivated by a desire to expose their complicity in human rights abuses including torture and murder.The Hacking Team mercenaries keep turning up anew in rebranded startups, but anyone who was involved with Hacking Team should be permanently disqualified from any role involving information security, the same way that ex-KGB officers should be permanently disqualified from roles in politics or policing (yeah, I know).The latest group of Hacking Team war criminals to find themselves reaccepted into polite society is the staff of Neutrino, a startup acquired by the cryptocurrency company Coinbase, to do forensic tracking of blockchain transactions.Many Coinbase users have concluded that they do not want to entrust their finances to a company that includes these unsavory characters, and so was born the #DeleteCoinbase movement to coordinate divestiture from the company.However, Coinbase will only allow you to delete your account if it has a zero balance, free of "dust" (infinitesimal residues left behind from fractional cryptocurrency transactions) and users are finding it impossible to rid themselves of their dust, which Coinbase insists is merely an accident and nothing to do with not wanting disgruntled users to leave.Self-described Bitcoin maximalist Jeremy Seaside participated in the #DeleteCoinbaseTrustChain, cleared all of his Coinbase accounts out, but still couldn’t close his accounts, he told me in a Twitter direct message. Read the rest

The majority of applications use "visualization" to give feedback and responses to users: think of graphs, alerts, and other visual cues about what is going on inside a computer, or what the computer has detected in the world.Sonification is the aural equivalent of visualization: communication from computers to humans by means of sound. There's some of this already in the world: alert chimes, system beeps, and talking voice assistants. But in an age of constant earbud use, there is lots of potential for more.Writing in Wired, Boing Boing contributor Clive Thompson (previously) discusses the growing use of sonification, from promising medical applications (using sound cues to help people with compromised movement and balance correct their gaits) to scientific analysis (transforming the hurricane telemetry into sound, allowing researchers to easily hear when hurricanes are about to intensify) to UI for everyday applications (adapting incoming message chimes to communicate something about their content, like whether they're coming from known senders or appear to be urgent).Thompson notes, in passing, a very important caveat: "done elegantly [emphasis added], sonification could help create a world where you’re still as informed as you want to be, but hopefully less frayed by nervous glances at your screens." The reason screens are anxiety-provoking isn't solely a factor of having to get your phone out of your pocket to see what's going on -- it's also the result of an arm's race between app designers and our limbic and attentional systems. Think of how Google Fi, Lyft, and other apps use the fact that they've got permission to send you alerts (for useful things, like telling you when you've lost service or when your cab is arriving) to send you promotional messages inviting you to sign up friends or buy additional services. Read the rest

A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science reports on new analysis of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which tracks outcomes for 24,066 people aged 50-96 with a good balance of genders (56% female), and reports a strong correlation between "early affluence" and "faster cognitive drop" in "verbal fluency" (measured with an animal naming challenge). SHARE is the largest study of its kind, with more than double the subjects of similar projects.Overall, the data showed that people whose childhoods were characterised by early affluence (measured by the subject's life circumstances at the age of ten, including main breadwinner's job, books in the house, overcrowding and housing quality) experienced cognitive decline at 1.6 times the rate of the least advantaged group in the study.The decline was only for the "verbal fluency" measure; another measure, "delayed recall" (remembering items from a list of 10 words) did not worsen with levels of affluence.Also, the overall levels of verbal fluency and delayed recall rose with early affluence levels.That is, the wealthier you were as a kid, the more verbal fluency and delayed recall you had as an adult, but when you started to lose your verbal fluency, the rate of loss was faster than in those who were poorer than you as a kid.This finding is unexpected, because it seems to contradict the leading theory of "cognitive reserve" which holds that advantaged childhoods allow people to build up "brain reserves" which are used to repair cognitive damage later in life. Read the rest

Larry Baer, the CEO of the San Francisco Giants, was filmed manhandling his screaming wife in public, prizing away a cellphone from her grasp, and finally dropping her to the ground. He claimed she fell over due to a injured ankle:Larry Baer spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle after the incident."My wife and I had an unfortunate public argument related to a family member, and she had an injured foot and she fell off her chair in the course of the argument," he said. "The matter is resolved. It was a squabble over a cell phone. Obviously, it’s embarrassing." His wife has apologized for her behavior:"I took his cellphone. He wanted it back and I did not want to give it back. I started to get up and the chair I was sitting in began to tip. Due to an injury I sustained in my foot three days ago, I lost my balance. I did not sustain any injury based on what happened today. Larryand I always have been and still are happily married.”If this is what he'll do in broad daylight knowing he'll face no consequences, just imagine what he does behind closed doors knowing he'll face no consequences. Read the rest

On the stormy seas of modern business, data analysts are the navigators. Smart bosses steer where the trends are headed, which makes the techs who can follow those trends invaluable. And no matter what software your company uses to make sense of its data, there's likely a tutorial to be found in the Ultimate Data & Analytics Bundle.This online course pack is quite a database in its own right. It contains over 400 courses and 1,500 hours of training in all the major platforms. That includes comprehensive lessons on SAS, including key functions like Dataset and Format. It includes R and all its relevant environments, plus Oracle - with a focus on Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle SQL & RMAN. Hadoop, Tableau, MongoDB - even if you've never used these platforms, you'll have all you need to build out a database and put its information to work.Currently, you can get lifetime access to the Ultimate Data & Analytics Bundle for $29, 90% off the list price. Read the rest

Man-Eaters Volume 1 collects the first four issues of the Image comic by Chelsea Cain and Kate Niemczyk (and friends) and it's insanely great: the premise is that America's patriarchy has been given a huge boost by a mutant strait of toxoplasmosis that is benign for most carriers, but turns adolescent girls into unstoppable were-panthers that crave human flesh when they get their first periods.In response, America's city fathers (in their infinite wisdom) decide to add progesterone and other adulterants to the water supply to suppress menstruation (which they always thought was gross anyway), but don't worry guys, the Estro Corp has you covered: their corporate social responsibility program has paid for a nationwide string of "boys' lounges," girl-free safe-spaces, whose vending machines sell all manner of beverages designed to give you the testosterone you need!Maude is 12 and right in the middle of the dangerzone for turning into a big cat. Her dad is a homicide detective, divorced from her mother, a big animal vet on a special anti-big-cat SWAT team. Which would be fine, except that Maude has a plan to fight the patriarchy: she has acquired a massive stash of boys-only Estro Pure water and has convinced a group of her fellow 7th graders to swap out tap water for Estro Pure, and they have turned into a pre-teen gang of lethal werepanthers who are striking several blows and disemboweling swipes for women's rights.It's brilliant, hilarious, with the swag of Zdarsky and Fraction's Sex Criminals and the edginess and cleverness that has made Image Comics the press to watch in this decade. Read the rest

Human beings are strange. The unimaginative jackass Logan Paul has 18,819,071 YouTube subscribers, while the fascinating and talented Maxwell Helmberger has 105 subscribers. In my opinion, Paul should have 105 subscribers and Helmberger should have 18,819,071.Helmberger's claymation video about how the pincushion millipede (smaller than a grain of rice!) defends itself against ants trying it eat it has 94 views. Please watch and share with your friends. I want to encourage him to do more.Image: YouTube[Thanks, Pink Frankenstein!] Read the rest

Well, that didn't take long: after seven days on strike, the Oakland teacher's union has received an offer that they say capitulates on every major point at issue in the strike, including the stealth privatization of Oakland schools through vouchers and charter schools.The rank-and-file still have to ratify the settlement, but after that formality, they're good to go.It's another moment of brightness and hope, as teachers across America continue their one-year-plus streak of victories for quality public education for every child in the nation.A LIVING WAGE:11% salary increase over 4 years. PLUS a 3% bonus upon ratification. We FORCED OUSD to invest in keeping teachers in Oakland – which will give our kids experienced teachers in their classrooms. Dramatic increases for subs, and tying sub pay to the wage scale, so our substitutes never fall behind again.MORE STUDENT SUPPORTS:More counselors, RSPs, psychologists, speech pathologists and Newcomer support staff for our students! Bonuses and a new salary schedule to support nurse recruitment.LOWER CLASS SIZES:A one student reduction in class size at high needs schools next year. A one student reduction in class sizes across all schools in 2021-22. We FORCED OUSD to take this step to improve student learning conditions, especially at our highest-needs schools.SCHOOL CLOSURE MORATORIUM:Board President Aimee Eng has committed to introduce a resolution calling for a 5 month pause on school closures and consolidations, and more community input into the process. The power of our strike will help us organize against future closures! Read the rest

It's West Virginia Republican Party Day at the state's Capitol and Republicans from all across the Mountain State have gathered in Charleston to promote their party's values. Vendors have set up tables throughout the Capitol Building, offering the finest in wingnut lit including this classic from die-hard Islamaphobe Robert Spencer.One Democrat in particular, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is drawing heat of the racist, Islamophobic kind. West Virginia Democrats attending the gathering at the Capitol posted this photo on Facebook.When confronted, the yet-unnamed woman responsible for the poster seemed to lose all her self-righteous indignation.Her t-shirt and posters reference ACT for America, a group that calls themselves "the nation's largest grassroots national security organization." ACT for America was designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2015. (H/T Eric Engel) (Photos: Facebook/West Virginia Democratic Party) Read the rest

NASA and SpaceX have completed thousands of hours of tests to prepare for this unmanned test flight to the International Space Station.

Chinese nanotechnologists injected tiny particles into the eyes of mice resulting in the rodents demonstrating "infrared 'night vision'" that lasted for months. According to nanoscientist Tian Xue and colleagues the University of Science and Technology of China, the technology could eventually help those with certain kinds of color blindness and "provide the potential for close integration within the human body to extend the visual spectrum." From New Scientist:Like humans, mice cannot perceive light with a wavelength longer than 700 nanometres, which is at the red end of the visible spectrum. But the nanoparticles absorb light with longer – infrared – wavelengths and convert it into shorter wave light that retinal cells can detect. This converted light peaks at a wavelength of 535 nanometres, so the mice see infrared light as green...Some mice did develop cloudy corneas after the injection, but this disappeared within a fortnight and occurred at similar rates to those in the control group. The team found no other evidence of damage to the mice’s eyes two months after the experiment.The researchers published their findings in the scientific journal Cell: "Mammalian Near-Infrared Image Vision through Injectable and Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantennae" Read the rest

After taking over Whole Foods, Amazon is now launching a new, more mainstream chain of grocery stores, according to Business Insider. And it makes me wonder why, when they haven't yet mastered the managing of Whole Foods. At least not when it comes to keeping their markets stocked. In fact, it's incredible how consistently empty their shelves are. Ever since Amazon took over the "natural" food grocery store, I started noticing walls of shelves with gaping holes where food should be, and oftentimes even entirely without food. It was so surprising that I took photos several times throughout the year to text to friends. I do like the fact that they've lowered their prices, which has seduced me into coming into the store in the first place (I used to avoid the market for their astronomical prices), but it's frustrating to go in with the idea of buying some eggs only to find there aren't any uncracked ones left.So what's the problem? Via Business Insider:Business Insider spoke with seven Whole Foods employees, from cashiers to department managers, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution.Order-to-shelf, or OTS, is a tightly controlled system designed to streamline and track product purchases, displays, storage, and sales. Under OTS, employees largely bypass stock rooms and carry products directly from delivery trucks to store shelves. It is meant to help Whole Foods cut costs, better manage inventory, reduce waste, and clear out storage.But its strict procedures are leading to storewide stocking issues, according to several employees. Read the rest

The United States Food and Drug Administration issued a warning Thursday about the use of surgical robots in breast cancer surgery. FDA says that use of the robotic medical devices in mastectomy, lumpectomy, and related surgery because of "preliminary" evidence that it may be linked to lower long-term survival..The warning was specifically directed at use of the devices for cancers that affect women, specifically breast and cervical cancer.Robotic surgery with devices like the da Vinci Surgical robot is also now increasingly used for cancers that affect men, like prostate cancer. The study doesn't appear to address this. From reporting by Emily R. Siegel and Andrew W. Lehren at NBC News:The FDA's official safety communication said that while robotic "surgery may help reduce pain, blood loss, scarring, infection, and recovery time," there is "limited, preliminary evidence" that using the devices for cancers that affect women, specifically breast and cervical cancer, may be associated with diminished long-term survival.In a statement, Dr. Terri Cornelison, assistant director for the health of women in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said the FDA is "warning patients and providers that the use of robotically assisted surgical devices for any cancer-related surgery has not been granted marketing authorization by the agency, and therefore the survival benefits to patients when compared to traditional surgery have not been established."Prior related reporting at NBC: "New Robot Surgeon Works on Its Own"IMAGE: Da Vinci Surgical Robot, courtesy davincisurgery.com Read the rest

Arduino is an easy-to-learn prototyping platform that lets you create interactive electronic projects. This Arduino compatible kit is the one I recommend to people who ask me how to get started. The reason I recommend it is because it's very cheap and it has a bunch of components that would cost a lot more if you were to purchase them separately.Two things it doesn't have, but should if you really want to have fun with Arduino: a potentiometer and a servo motor. This kit, which has these components and many more, is available for about twice as much as the basic kit above. Read the rest

“It appears as though their effort to partially pay people screwed things up and they are still getting their act together.” — Anonymous TSA official who spoke to CNN

42,000 Mozilla supporters contributed to Common Voice, a free-open dataset of 1,361 hours of voice recordings in 18 languages, which is now free for anyone to use as a set of "high quality, transcribed voice data... available to startups, researchers, and anyone interested in voice-enabled technologies" -- in a field plagued with sampling bias problems, this is a dataset that aims to be diverse, representative and inclusive, and it's growing by the day (you can contribute your voice too!) -- the whole project is inspiring. (via Four Short Links) Read the rest

The creative minds at Squirrel Monkey imagine what the new Galaxy Fold would be like if it had been released in the late 1990s. I don't know what technology they use to make these videos, but they do a perfect job of capturing the look and feel of the era. Read the rest

On March 8, Amanda "Fucking" Palmer (previously) will release There Will Be No Intermission, her third studio album and the first release in six long years: it's an ambitious 71 minutes long, and the whole thing is streaming as a preview on NPR's First Listen.I recommend starting with "Judy Blume" for sheer tear-jerking, and the two long confessionals, "The Ride" and "A Mother's Confession."Palmer's touring with the album, with dates across the USA and Europe; the purchase packages include gatefold vinyl, an elaborate accompanying book, and all the usuals. Read the rest

2019 has seen a string of bold and successful teachers' strikes that built on last years' #RedForEd strikes: the new wave of strikes goes beyond paychecks and funding, though, and takes aim at charter schools as a system for the stealth privatization of public education.The issue, long considered too complex and contentious for teachers' unions, has turned out to be a winner. First the LA teachers overcame some of the largest dark-money spenders and billionaire backers in the country's second-largest school district; then came Denver; and now teachers in West Virginia (who won legendary victories in 2018 in fights over pay and funding) have won another victory in a strike that targeted charter schools and privatization, to widespread public support.The West Virginia teachers only had to walk out for two days to score total, decisive victory.The next strike to watch is Oakland, a city where public activism has already struck pioneering blows for transparency and accountability by public officials, overcoming massive spending by private interests. Oakland is also a city on the front lines of racial discrimination, displacement, gentrification and inequality, and the city's schools are the front lines of these battles. 30% of Oakland's pupils are in charter schools, thanks to a cycle that underfunds and under-resources public schools, leaving parents with little choice but to send their kids to privatized, publicly funded charters, siphoning even more public money out of public schools, making their situation even worse.There are unique challenges in the Oakland strike -- many working class parents see the charters as the only schools that offered their kids a fair chance at a decent education -- but Oakland teachers get to build on the victory of the LA teachers, whose strike prompted state action on charter transparency and oversight. Read the rest

Fritz Kahn was a German physician and writer. In 1926 he created Der Mensch als Industriepalast ("Man as Industrial Palace"), an iconic illustration of the human body as a kind of industrial chemical plant. German animator Henning M Lederer did a fantastic job turning Kahn's illustration into a 3-minute animated video (with slightly gross sound effects).[via Aeon] Read the rest

The Amazon Dash button has gone the way of the CueCat and other oddball forms of consumer tech that were quickly made obsolete by newer technology. The $5 wireless Dash button was promised to be an easy way to order consumables from Amazon, but configuring the devices was sometimes confusing. The people who really enjoyed Dash buttons were those who hacked them into Internet-connected remote control devices to accomplish useful tasks other than buying stuff.From Cnet:The Dash button isn't nearly as necessary as it used to be. Today, plenty more appliances connect to the internet. Amazon also integrated its Dash Replenishment Service into hundreds of products from major manufacturers like Whirlpool and Samsung worldwide. DRS lets appliances automatically reorder the stuff they need, like a printer purchasing new ink. No need to even push a button.Plus, Amazon created virtual Dash buttons on its website and developed voice shopping through its Alexa voice assistant, which have both grown in popularity, Amazon says. Read the rest

This VW van made of LEGO is amazing. There are more photos on the VW site.The van was designed and built by Rene Hoffmeister, one of only 12 officially certified LEGO® professionals in the world. Along with colleague Pascal Lenhard, the duo used 3D modeling to assemble a plan for the van, including a precise figure for the number of bricks needed. Beyond ensuring the major flexible pieces like doors worked, the pair also had to ensure structural rigidity in the side walls and other vertical surfaces to keep all the bricks from collapsing. Read the rest

According to reports from gullible parents' organizations, police departments, and media outlets, Kids on the Internet are spreading memes featuring an image of "Momo" (actually a sculpture called "Mother Bird" created by Keisuke Aisawa for the Japanese SFX studio Link Factory) that includes explicit self-harm and suicide instructions (the "challenge" in "Momo challenge" is allegedly to get kids to hurt or kill themselves).It's a hoax, though. There are no verified sightings of Momo Challenge memes in the wild, and this isn't even the first time this hoax has gone around; it circulated in September 2018 as well.As Taylor Lorenz writes in The Atlantic, this is part of a genre of hoaxes that rely on parental anxiety about kids' use of technology to spread incomprehensible cultural ideas, from the Satanic Panic over backmasked secret messages in heavy metal lyrics to the "eating Tide Pods" hoax to the fictional deaths linked to the "cinnamon challenge."As it happens, there is someone who -- unrelated to the Momo hoax -- appears to have inserted at least two self-harm messages in kids' videos. These trends are “part of a moral panic, fueled by parents’ fears in wanting to know what their kids are up to,” Benjamin Radford, a folklorist and research fellow at the Committee for Skeptic Inquiry, told Rolling Stone. And spreading them can actually end up causing harm. “These stories being highly publicized, and starting a panic means vulnerable people get to know about it and that creates a risk,” the U.K.-based suicide-awareness charity Samaritans told The Guardian. Read the rest

Wow. This poem, titled Dyslexia, was written by a 10-year-old who goes by AO, and it's jaw-dropping.As part of a class assignment, his teacher, Jane Broadis, asked the students to write a poem that could be read forwards and backwards. This one "stunned" her, so she posted it on Twitter, which has since gone viral. After you read it, read it again in the reverse direction, not like a palindrome, but line by line. Today in Y6 we looked at poems that could be read forwards & backwards. I was stunned by this one written by one of my 10 year olds. Please share - I would love her work to be appreciated further afield. I wonder if it could even find a publisher? pic.twitter.com/tmEQpiRrhq— Jane Broadis (@Jb5Jane) February 27, 2019Here are some reactions via Twitter:Made this grown man cry. I must have read it over twenty times already.— James Simporis (@simporis) February 27, 2019As the mom of a teen with severe dyslexia, who was told repeatedly in grade school that he would never succeed, please tell the author this is the most insightful and beautiful poem I’ve ever read on the subject. -proud mom to a dyslexic honor student who proved them all wrong— Amy Eldridge (@amy_lwb) February 28, 2019I am dyslexic. I thought I was stupid. I was called names because I couldn't read like my peers. Eventually, I realized I am not dumb. I am different and I learn a different way. Read the rest

Nemo underwent a Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy. This RuffWear 'Webmaster' harness made a real difference in my dog's recovery. The Webmaster comes with snap-together closures for easy on and off, however, I've kept the harness on Nemo since his surgery on January 2nd. Once adjusted the harness slips over his head like a collar. Another strap runs across the chest, just behind the front legs. The third strap rides in front of the hind legs. There is a cross piece tying the collar to the chest strap as well.Titularly, the harness creates a 'web' of support under your dog! Said web allowed me to lift a doped up Great Pyrenees with a sawed-on leg up 3-sets of 27 total stairs without hurting the dog!Webmaster was the silliest dot-com era job title. I was able to use the harness to assist Nemo up and down stairs, or any difficult territory, while he healed. I also found it easier to move Nemo around when he didn't want to move. My Great Pyr now has a handle!It is machine washable, and super durable.RUFFWEAR - Web Master Secure, Reflective, Multi-Use Harness Dogs via Amazon Read the rest

Your very own Weezer World on @FortniteGame, created by @FN_TeamCre8 ft. @HELLRAISERGamin, @G_Schway, KK-Slider, @Wertandrew pic.twitter.com/GVopkGvIkr— weezer (@Weezer) March 1, 2019Seems Weezer likes Fortnite and covering Toto. Read the rest

A masterfully-executed selection of LP covers that "imagine how your current favorite singers would look like in a 80s version." The artist is Fulaleo from Australia. Read the rest

Two men were arrested Thursday after a fight broke out at the execution of murder Billy Wayne Coble in Huntsville, Texas. As Coble was finishing his statement, his son, a friend and a daughter-in-law became emotional and violent. They were yelling obscenities, throwing fists and kicking at others in the death chamber witness area.Officers stepped in and the witnesses continued to resist. They were eventually moved to a courtyard and the two men were handcuffed.“Why are you doing this?” the woman asked. “They just killed his daddy.”Coble, 70, killed his estranged wife’s parents and her brother, a police officer, in 1982, and was himself killed by lethal injection. The oldest inmate killed by Texas since it resumed executions in 1982, his final statement was “That’ll be $5.” Read the rest

Elsevier (previously) is one of the titans of academic and scientific publishing, a wildly profitable and politically potent corporation whose market dominance has allowed it to extract ever-larger sums from the universities whose researchers provide the vast majority of the material it publishes -- material it does not have to pay for, and in some cases, material it charges money to publish.The University of California system is one of Elsevier's biggest customers, and after eight months of unsuccessful negotiations over its subscription deals with the publisher, it has walked away and announced an indefinite boycott of the publisher, making it the largest Elsevier customer to do so.The sticking point was the university's insistence on a single price that covered both subscription fees for closed-access journals, and the fees that university personnel are expected to pay when they submit their work for publication in open access journals -- while Elsevier insisted on its right to "double-dip" from the system: charging it for submissions of papers and then again for access to its journals.The boycott will cost Elsevier $11m/year and about 10,000 papers that UC researchers will publish elsewhere. The move comes amidst a global uprising over the closed-access publishing model, which New Scientist called "more profitable than oil" and "indefensible." Europe's largest scientific funders have announced that they will only support research that is made free to read at the moment of publication.The stand by UC, which followed eight months of negotiations, could have significant impacts on scientific communication and the direction of the so-called open access movement, in the United States and beyond. Read the rest

A thunderous pop.What it sounds like inside a nuclear power plants cooling tower. Matt Ballos and Kevin Peterson of WSDG were out in Elma, Washington this week to visit NWAA acoustic test labs. The lab is built in a nuclear power plant that was abandoned a few weeks before it received its first uranium. In between the acoustic lab parts of the trip they were able to go around and explore the rest of the abandoned facility. This video is in one of the cooling towers. Even though it has an open top it does have a convex curve on the inside bottom of the tower. This shape makes for some awesome acoustics as you hear in the video.The story of Elma's never-onlined nuclear plant:Satsop Abandoned Nuclear PlantThe Satsop Nuclear Power Plant was 75% complete in 1983 before the money ran out and work was abandoned. To avoid steep dismantling costs, the site was eventually handed over to a public corporation and became the Satsop Development Park, home to various light industry businesses who work in the shadows of the two cooling towers. You can enter the property freely but you can't go under the towers (they're fenced off, although supposedly they are planning to open them to the public someday). Still, you can peek inside them since their bases are not solid (the hollow structures are held aloft by a zigzag of beams.) The tower at the site entrance was completely empty inside save for a lone port-a-pottyObviously it's not too hard to gain entrance to at least one of the towers. Read the rest

Ulrich Kelber is the German Data Privacy Commissioner, and also a computer scientist, and as such, he is uniquely qualified to comment on the potential consequences of the proposed new EU Copyright Directive, which will be voted on at the end of this month, and whose Article 13 requires that all online communities, platforms and services block their users from committing copyright infringement, even if the infringing materials are speedily removed after they are posted. In a new official statement on the Directive (English translation), Kelber has warned that Article 13 will inevitably lead to the use of automated filters, because there is no conceivable way that the organisations that run online services could examine everything their users post and determine whether each message, photo, video, or audio clip is a copyright violation.Kelber goes on to warn that this will exacerbate the already dire problem of market concentration in the tech sector, and expose Europeans to particular risk of online surveillance and manipulation.That's because the smaller companies, based in the European Union, are required to block all infringement, even if they are very small and specialised (the Directive gives an online community three years' grace period before it acquires this obligation, less time if the service grosses €5m/year). These small- and medium-sized European services will not be able to afford to license the entire catalogues of the big movie, music, and book publishers, and will have to rely on filters to block all that material they can't license. Read the rest

Demand for IT professionals is high. Doubly so for those who are versed in cloud-based infrastructure. Amazon Web Services is one of the top platforms out there, and the AWS Certified Architect Developer Bundle 2019 is a reliable way to get up to speed - not just on how to build your systems, but monitor and manage them.Geared toward IT workers of any level of experience, the opening courses of this 51-hour bundle will teach you how to navigate Amazon's databases and technologies. It'll also give you a primer in DevOps, the system that more closely integrates the development and operations teams of any application. Armed with those fundamentals, you'll discover how to configure storage, set up security through Cloudwatch - all the skills you'll need to become a bona fide architect in AWS. And more importantly, the certification to prove it to potential employers.The AWS Certified Architect Developer Bundle 2019 is on sale now for $35. Read the rest

I have a friend who drives seven hours from Los Angeles to San Francisco instead of flying, just so he doesn't have to take off his shoes at the TSA checkpoint.I would rather fly than drive, but I can understand where my friend is coming from. TSA security is the worst part of flying for me - the lines, the liquids in a clear plastic bag, the laptop and kindles out, etc.Fortunately, I pay for TSA Pre, so I don't have to take my shoes off, but my belt buckle always set off the metal detector. Last year I bought a belt with a plastic buckle on Amazon, which allows me to walk through the metal detector without taking it off. I fly a lot, so it's worth it. As an added bonus, there are no holes in the belt. I can make the belt exactly as tight as I want it, rather than deciding between using a slightly too lose, or to tight belt hole. Read the rest

So you think American authorities' taste for asset seizure is bad? Try the city fathers of Ahlen in Germany, who seized a pedigree pug and sold it on eBay.Frank Merschhausm, spokesman for the city of Ahlen, told NPR in an email that the seizure of "the valuable pet" was "legally permissible," because of open claims by the city's treasury office.However, he acknowledged that the method used to sell the animal might be open to criticism."Obtaining the proceeds of the sale through a private eBay account was a very questionable decision by the enforcement officer," Merschhaus said in the email translated from German. He added that the city is undertaking an internal investigation.Today I learned you can buy dogs on eBay Germany. Read the rest

How could so much misinformation be packed into so few words?A “bombshell” psychological report in the latest National Enquirer reveals that “Princess Meghan” is a “ticking time bomb who could explode at any moment, according to royal insiders!” “She’s emotionally tortured!” screams the Enquirer cover, touting “The Secret Psych Report!" Setting aside for a moment that the former Meghan Markle is not a Princess but only a Duchess, one wonders: How did the Enquirer get their hands on such an incendiary top secret report? Simple. They commissioned it. Might I suggest that it’s not a “secret report” if you’re the ones who order it, pay for it, and are the first to know its results? But it’s “royal insiders” who put the report together, according to the Enquirer’s opening sentence. Except the story makes it clear that no royal insider, let alone any member of the royal family, ever contributed to this report. It’s been compiled "at the Enquirer’s request” by the dubious Institute of BioAccoustic Biology in Ohio, which claims to diagnose patients by analyzing their voice. That’s right: Duchess Meghan suffers from “huge emotional conflicts, trauma and confusion,” according to a report by analysts who have never met with or spoken to her. But they have listened to recordings of her talking, and they have a “computer algorithm to diagnose health issues and psychological characteristics.” It couldn’t be more high-tech if the Institute shot out laser beams and read her brainwaves – which is why we should all be wearing tin foil hats. Read the rest

The "Phoenix Checklist" is a set of questions developed by the CIA to define and think about a problem, and how to develop a solution.THE PROBLEMWhy is it necessary to solve the problem?What benefits will you receive by solving the problem?What is the unknown?What is it you don’t yet understand?What is the information you have?What isn’t the problem?Is the information sufficient? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?Should you draw a diagram of the problem? A figure?Where are the boundaries of the problem?Can you separate the various parts of the problem? Can you write them down? What are the relationships of the parts of the problem? What are the constants of the problem?Have you seen this problem before?Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Do you know a related problem?Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknownSuppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method?Can you restate your problem? How many different ways can you restate it? More general? More specific? Can the rules be changed?What are the best, worst and most probable cases you can imagine?=====THE PLANCan you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem?What would you like the resolution to be? Can you picture it?How much of the unknown can you determine?Can you derive something useful from the information you have? Read the rest