Make awesome Death Star waffles.I have a set of silicone Star Wars pancake molds, while my sister has this Death Star waffle iron. Her IG photos of waffles look a hell of a lot better than my "Vader's mask after Luke and Palpatine kick his ass" pancakes.Win the familial Star Wars breakfast treat battle, get the waffle iron.Star Wars Death Star Waffle Maker via Amazon Read the rest

In 1947, an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its crew (or a weather balloon, or a nuclear test surveillance device) crashed on a ranch about 75 miles north of Roswell, New Mexico. That 78 acre property has just changed hands for the first time since the early 1950s when it was purchased by the Bogle family. Dinwiddie Cattle Co. now holds the deed on the legendary site and the still-standing shed where the crash debris was held until the Air Force retrieved it all. From the Roswell Daily Record:Without a strong personal interest in the UFO connection at this time, (new property owner Tommy) Dinwiddie said he can’t say for sure whether the crash-site property will be made available to the public.“I just don’t know a whole lot about it,” Dinwiddie said. “The guy who is running the ranch over there for me knows quite a bit about it, and after we kind of get our feet on the ground running it, we will do some more talking about it and figuring out what we want to do.”The Bogle family hosted tours of the site during the most recent UFO Festival in July, marking the first time that the group provided visitor access during its 66 years of ownership of the land. Prior to that, only researchers or documentary makers were given permission to be on the property."Site of alleged 1947 UFO crash changes hands" (via The Anomalist) Read the rest

This guy has a lot of security cameras, and he put them to good use to make a mini-documentary about tracking down a porch pirate. First, we see a black-and-white security camera view of a young woman walking up his driveway. The scene switches to a doorbell camera, where we see her walk to the door and leave with a package. It cuts back to the driveway cam to show her walking away with the purloined item.Then we get a wonderful interior shot of our hero splayed shirtless on his living room couch. His wife comes in a pokes him in the back and lets him know that the security cam identified a person. He springs into action, runs to his pick up truck, and turns on his dash cam. He finds the thief (and a male accomplice with respectable sideburns) and calls the cops. In short order, the porch pirates are in the arms of justice.Image: Thomas Penafiel/YouTube Read the rest

Love was so much easier in the 80s.KC and The Sunshine Band will always and forever be a favorite. Read the rest

Notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is convicted in Brooklyn, could put him behind bars for the rest of his life in a high-security prison.

Lovesync is a pushbutton system for romantic partners. Each partner gets a button. When one of the partners wants sex, they push the button. Nothing happens unless/until the other partner pushes their own button within a specified time window, then both buttons glow green. Lovesync is about 50% funded on Kickstarter.Lovesync reminds me of a proposal someone told me about in the 1980s as a way to keep discussion salons interesting. Everyone would be given a handheld gadget with a button. When someone was talking, anyone could secretly push the button if the person talking was boring them. If over 50% of the people pressed the button, a buzzer would go off, meaning the speaker had to stop talking, Read the rest

In 1960, the US Air Force asked the RAND Corporation to evaluate the possibility of using stationary rockets to pause the Earth's rotation in the event of a nuclear attack. Called "Project Retro," the idea was that the "a huge rectangular array of one thousand first-stage Atlas engines... (would) be fastened securely to the earth in a horizontal position." As missiles approached, the rockets would fire, stopping the Earth's rotation just enough for the nukes to overshoot their targets. In the book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, Daniel Ellsberg, who assessed the problematic proposal, wrote that everything “that wasn’t nailed down, and most of what was as well, would be gone with the wind, which would itself be flying at super-hurricane force everywhere at once." Not only that, he says, but the plan would actually require one million billion rockets:If you do the maths, that’s about 2.6 x 1021 kilograms of propellant – or to put it another way, that’s about 500 times the mass of the Earth’s atmosphere.So even assuming you could build that many engines, once you fired them for the time that was needed to change the Earth’s rotation, you would have put 500 times as much gas into the atmosphere, and this would all be incredibly hot combustion products.So even if your targets were to survive the nuclear war, everyone would then be incinerated by all the exhaust gases spreading around the planet."That Time the U.s. Air Force Proposed Using Rockets to Stop the Earth’s Rotation" (Daily Grail)The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (Amazon)For even more on Project Retro and RAND, listen to my old friend Ken Hollings's excellent 2008 BBC radio documentary "RAND: All Your Tomorrows Today"(image: detail of "Wernher von Braun with the F-1 engines of the Saturn V first stage at the U.S. Read the rest

When booking a flight, it's often cheaper to buy tickets for a connecting flight — one in which your destination is the first leg of the flight. You then get off the plane and ignore the second leg. This is a trick that some passengers do to save money, and apparently Lufthansa isn't pleased. The airline is suing a man who booked a flight from Seattle to Oslo with a stopover in Frankfurt, but got off the plane in Frankfurt and scrapped the last leg of his flight. According to CNN:Lufthansa saw this as a violation of their terms and conditions and is seeking €2,112 (around $2,385) in compensation.A Berlin district court dismissed the lawsuit in December, but Lufthansa's spokesperson confirmed to CNN that the company has "already filed the appeal against the decision."It's not clear how Lufthansa thinks they can win a case like this. If we buy a gallon of milk because it's cheaper by the ounce than buying a quart, must we drink the entire carton? Image: By Lasse Fuss - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link Read the rest

Fashion designers often make Derek Zoolander look like Albert Einstein, but in picking 2019 to be the year of smirking references to racist imagery, they really outdid themselves. The latest celebrity endorser to be humiliated by something under their name? Katy Perry's blackface shoes.Katy says she is "saddened" that her design - blue eyes and red lips on black leather - was compared with "painful images" of blackface by critics online.The shoes have reportedly also been taken off shelves at US retailers.Katy says the shoes, The Rue and The Ora, were "envisioned as a nod to modern art and surrealism"Note that it isn't an apology, as some reported. It's not even an "apologize if you felt that way" nonapology. Perry is instead "saddened" and "our intention was never to inflict any pain."It truly is the year of stupid in the fashion biz:Ignorance is Never A fashion statement! Apology NOT accepted😡#blackface #Gucci #gucciblackface #prada #moncler #katyPerry pic.twitter.com/KDCnkzGlgA— Kieren Boyce (@ThatGyrlKieren) February 10, 2019 Read the rest

Ralph Jay Triumfo's official title for this piece is "1% Guitar Skills 9% Chopsticks Skills 90% Editing Skills." Read the rest

We have an Eero system in our house; it does really good and reliable wifi distribution, including to my office in the garage. And it was nice to have a piece of home electronics that was neither from one of the great data-sucking companies like Google, nor from the control-freak companies like Apple -- and also not from a no-name white-label re-badger or a giant shitty telco switch company whose consumer products arm is an afterthought.Now Eero is to become a part of Amazon, and Amazon explains that the idea is to help the company become better at dominating the Internet of Shit, which means that it's going to go way up on both the surveillance and control-freak league tables, and take Eero with it. The company promises that it's not going to revise Eero's (exemplary) privacy policy -- but this is the same company that promised it would drop Audible's DRM 11 years ago and not only hasn't done so, it also won't answer questions about why it hasn't.And as Dieter Bohn writes in The Verge, there's more than one way to spy on your with an Eero -- it doesn't have to monitor your traffic, it could enumerate the devices, and/or look at flows of data rather than content, and/or connect Eero data to the many other data-streams that Amazon sucks out of your life. It's just a minor annoyance -- yet another device I'm going to be in the market to replace with something that has no Alexa support or support for any other company's surveillance/silo strategy -- but it's also a good candidate for this month's poster child for trustbusting. Read the rest

A fellow who walked into an abandoned home in Houston, Texas to smoke weed was surprised to see a caged tiger in the garage. Fortunately, he called police."We questioned them as to whether they were under the effects of the drugs or they actually saw a tiger," said Sgt. Jason Alderete of the Houston Police Department's Major Offenders, Livestock Animal Cruelty Unit.From KTRK:The tiger was found in a "rinky-dink" cage in the garage, which was not locked, police said. The garage was secured with a screwdriver and a nylon strap, according to police."A pretty small cage inside basically a garage in a house that didn't look like it was in the best shape. So it was important that we get it out of that situation," Lara Cottingham, with the city of Houston, said.According to the Houston Chronicle, the tiger will be moved today to a wildlife refuge. Read the rest

The BBC reports that one of its journalists was attacked by a Trump supporter at his rally in El Paso, Texas, monday night. The footage from the victim's camera shows Trump delivering his speech before it is knocked to the ground. Sporting a Make America Great Again cap, the man shoved and swore at the BBC's Ron Skeans and other news crews before being pulled away. Mr Skeans said the "very hard shove" came from his blindside. "I didn't know what was going on." Mr Trump saw the attack and confirmed Mr Skeans was well with a thumbs up after it happened. Trump previous described the media as "the enemy of the people" the day a bomb was sent to CNN. Jim Acosta, a CNN reporter, posted this footage of the rally crowd:Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018 Read the rest

Donald Trump is the first president since the Victorian era not to own a dog. Despite rest dominating his schedule, he "doesn't have time," he says.On Monday night, during his rally in El Paso, he finally explained that he doesn’t have a dog because the idea of getting one seems “phony” to him, and his base likes him just fine regardless. Plus, he said, he doesn’t have time.The explanation came amid an extended riff about the superior abilities of German shepherds to sniff out drugs being smuggled across the border. “You do love your dogs, don’t you?” Trump said, as the crowd whistled and cheered. “I wouldn’t mind having one, honestly, but I don’t have any time. How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?”Dirty, narsty dogses. Read the rest

Amazon sells "Amazon Basics High Mileage Full Synthetic Motor Oil", perhaps the most alarming mystery meat yet to appear in the CHOAM warehouses. Project Farm decided to see how it stood up against name-brand standbys such as Mobil and Valvoline. Things get going about 2:50m in.Dozens of viewers requested this video. I'm not part of the Amazon Affiliate Program either, since I'm not trying to sell products. I do independent testing only. So, thank you very much for the video ideas, including this one! AmazonBasics Fully Synthetic Motor Oil better than Mobil 1 Advanced Full Synthetic Motor Oil? In this video, I tested Valvoline 10W-30 Conventional Motor Oil, AmazonBasics Full Synthetic Motor OIl, and Mobil 1 Full Synthetic Motor oil for cold temperature flow, lubricity, evaporative loss after exposure to approximately 400F for 2 hours, and cold flow of each oil after exposed to heat for 2 hours. Sleuthing (and the bottle shape) reveals the true maker as Warren, a respectable budget supplier. So you can trust Amazon motor oil so long as it comes in Warren bottles. Read the rest

Small towns had business districts. Then small towns had Walmarts. Then small towns had nothing. For nearly 20 years retailers in downtown Winnsboro, South Carolina struggled to compete with Walmart's cheap products and one-stop shopping. As we reported in 2016, Walmart closed its supercenter there three years ago, one of 154 stores it shuttered across the country that year. NewsHour Weekend's Christopher Booker returned to see what life after Walmart is like for the small American town. Read the rest

There are 17 Mac's Fresh Markets throughout Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana and this week, shoppers got a message about immigration in their sales flyer along with ads for discounted pork chops. You know, because nothing goes better with pork chops than a steaming side dish of xenophobic bullshit. Reggie McDaniel owns the Mac's chain and when asked about the message, which has some shoppers calling for a boycott, he told Louisiana's KALB, " If I used a political message, and I’m very aware it's political, to highlight Jesus Christ, then I’m guilty of it." McDaniel says he plans on including more political messages in the future. Local grocery store company stirs controversy with ad mailer (KALB) Read the rest

Mike Pace had a decent, signed journeyman band but, at 40, has realized that he'll never be the rock star he dreamed of becoming. Nonetheless, he's at a creative peak; a powerful change of perspective comes when reality, and age, are acknowledged.Deep down I care more about my work than anyone else ever will, and that’ll inevitably lead to temporary disappointment when I don’t get the reaction I want, but that’s a good thing. You want to care deeply about what you create, even if it’s hard to square the response or lack thereof, regardless of what stage of your career you’re at. Ultimately that response is only part of the overall experience of making music and it’s one I can’t control. I again remind myself why I do this in the first place: I love the feeling that comes with making music, even if it’s in my basement now after the kids have gone down and not onstage at a Mexican restaurant in Saskatoon on some godforsaken tour across Western Canada.The band split up just before the social media era; I can't help but suspect that by now it would have had a hit record and made stars of Pace and the rest. And they'd be completely miserable, because being a professional rock star in your 40s is hell. Instead, solo projects. Read the rest

“The vice president will essentially call out Iran for their actions. He will give a message to those groups that are there, that, you know, if you stand with us, we’ll stand with you,” a White House official said.

American Media asked the DoJ about having to register as foreign agent after publishing a glossy mag that hyped Saudi Arabia.

Whether you love them or hate them, rideshares like Uber and Lyft have become a daily part of life for millions of New Yorkers. These app-based services make it easy to pay for your ride, but while the privacy cost isn’t always as clear, it’s about to get a lot larger. These apps have tracked our movements since they launched, but as of this month, the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) started tracking us too. The TLC’s new rules went into effect on February 1. Buried in them is a provision forcing rideshares to provide the location of every driver and passenger to TLC “at an interval no less frequent than every sixty (60) seconds.” The clause was not part of the original, proposed rule, but was added only at finalization with no public comment. As undemocratic as this rule-making process is, worse is the effect; the government knowing you’re late for work, leaving a meeting, heading home from the bar, and more. This sort of surveillance have seemed dystopian a few years ago, but it will now be reality. Historically, privacy advocates questioned how rideshares use location data, but it’s a far more chilling when this data is extracted and analyzed by government agencies, and potentially made available to law enforcement. Yes, the rideshares complied with law enforcement subpoenas in the past, but it’s different in kind, not degree, to have a sweeping, suspicionless collection of every single car’s location, rather than a subpoena or warrant backed by probable cause of individual criminal wrongdoing. Read the rest

What a great way to fancy up a broken car key fob. Here is how he did it.IMGURian Michicanery built an amazing custom hardwood and aluminum key fob for his car.“Aside from a slight range reduction due to the heavier materials, all of the original remote's functionality is maintained - this is really just a cosmetic update.”I made a custom hardwood and aluminum key fob for my car. View this post on Instagram Made the parts for a custom key fob over the weekend. Just cuz! . . . . . #custom #honda #woodworking #craftsman #cnc #openbuilds #leadCNC #key #auto #DIY #maker #makers #art #handmadeA post shared by Michicanery (@michicanery) on Jan 28, 2019 at 5:12am PST View this post on Instagram First custom key, done. And not bad, eh? This was fun - great little warmup for a big project I've been working up to! . . . . . #custom #woodworking #craftsman #cnc #openbuilds #leadCNC #key #auto #carporn #DIY #honda #maker #makers #art #handmadeA post shared by Michicanery (@michicanery) on Feb 4, 2019 at 5:09am PST ['I made a custom hardwood and aluminum key fob for my car', IMGUR] Read the rest

IMGUrian Syn9 made this wonderful cyberpunk face shield helmet blinky thing. The creator's build post includes loads of information and video documenting each of the build steps.“Can you see through it? - Yes! I added a mini camera and LCD screen.”“Why? This is for my band, Syn Nine, which does theatrical cyberpunk music / shows.”PHOTO: “This is the gear I started with. I didn't end up using all of it, but the important parts are...”- Arduino microcontroller(s)- 7x RGB LEDs- 2x Alphanumeric displays- 1x RGB LED matrix display- 1x cheap, damaged VR toy- 5V rechargeable battery pack- Safety glass plastic sheet- capacitors- resistors- electrical tape- heat shrink- mini LCD display- mini spy camera- cellphone wide angle lens- jumper wiresThe tools I used were:- dremel rotary tool- soldering iron- heat gunMore below. [Link]Cyberpunk Helmet Build Steps Read the rest

There aren't many details in Trump's “American A.I. Initiative,” but the point appears to be: send a message of technological dominance to China.

Former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, the corrupt law enforcement chief who was fond of giving himself awards, campaigning against marijuana legalization, encouraging prison rape, wrongfully imprisoning people, locking up nonviolent people who possessed drugs, and horribly mistreating inmates, lost his court appeal for obstructing justice and lying to federal authorities. He could spend several years in prison.From the LA TimesAttorneys for Baca, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, appealed the verdict, arguing it had been tainted by rulings U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson had made during the trial and so should be reversed. Among several alleged errors, they focused on Anderson’s decision to bar the jury from hearing testimony about Baca’s illness and about a conversation he had with an aide about the FBI’s investigation. Either piece of information, the defense team said, could have helped sway the jury in Baca’s favor.But the three-judge panel from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected those claims, finding the trial was fair and the conviction legally sound.Calling the case prosecutors had mounted “fair and thorough,” U.S. Atty. Nick Hanna said in a statement the ruling “confirms the principle that no one is above the law.”“Instead of cooperating with a federal investigation that ultimately was concerned about improving conditions in the county jails, Mr. Baca chose to obstruct and then lie to federal authorities,” Hanna said.Image by ScottMLiebenson - Own work, CC0, Link Read the rest

Unauthorized Bread is the first installment of my next science fiction book for adults, Radicalized, which comes out in just over a month; the audiobook is available DRM-free on Google Play and direct from me.Unauthorized Bread is a story about refugees, rent-seeking, DRM and the housing crisis, and the audiobook, read by Lameece Issaq, is amazing. Tor.com is hosting an excerpt from the book. Read the rest

Angie Schmitt's list of "all the bad things" about Uber and Lyft only touches on transportation, leaving aside the companies' labor, taxation, regulatory and other issues, but it's still quite a damning document.From increasing the number of cars on the road and the number of miles driven, to displacing and hurting public transit, to displacing walking and cycling, to increasing traffic fatalities and hoarding data, there's a good case to be made that rideshares will never be sustainable and their investors are doomed.Uber and Lyft are just crushing transit service in the U.S. A recent study estimated, for example, they had reduced bus ridership in San Francisco, for example, 12 percent since 2010 — or about 1.7 percent annually. And each year the services are offered, the effect grows, researcher Gregory Erhardt found.Every person lured from a bus or a train into a Lyft or Uber adds congestion to the streets and emissions to the air. Even in cities that have made tremendous investments in transit — like Seattle which is investing another $50 billion in light rail — Uber and Lyft ridership recently surpassed light rail ridership.Transit agencies simply cannot complete with private chauffeur service which is subsidized at below real costs by venture capitalists. And maybe that’s the point.Erhardt, for example, estimated that San Francisco would have had to increase transit service 25 percent overall just to neutralize the effect of Uber and Lyft.Worse is the tale of two cities effect: Relatively well off people in Ubers congesting the streets of Manhattan and San Francisco slow down buses full of relatively low-income people. Read the rest

During the 1930s, the WPA sponsored horseback librarians -- all women -- to visit rural Americans, bringing them books; the librarians were only allowed to make deliveries in counties that had existing libraries, so schools and other institutions donated materials to establish libraries that would make their counties eligible.The program ran until 1943, and, as with many WPA programs, it was lavishly documented by talented photographers, as a reminder to all of us in their future that America is a place where we take care of each other.These adventurous women on horseback would ride as much as 120 miles within a given week, regardless of the terrain or weather conditions. Sometimes, they would have to finish their travels on foot if their destination was in a place too remote and tough for horses to go.Female Librarians on Horseback Delivering Books, ca. 1930s [History Daily](via Metafilter) Read the rest

[I wrote this review in 2010. I now have a newer model, the ix1500 and have edited the following to include the new features -- MF] I once left a box of important files out in the rain and wasted a lot of time drying them a sheet at a time, then filing them in cabinets. It gave me pause. Was I going to have to live with ever-growing stacks of paper files that took up space, were hard to search through, and were fragile? I decided to try digitizing my paper trail. I started scanning documents on my HP scanner-printer-copier, which is mind-numbingly slow and had a buggy driver that crashed my computer, forcing a reboot about 25% of the time I used it. I then bought a sheet-fed Fujitsu ScanSnap. It lets me insert a stack of up to 50 two-sided documents into the sheet feeder and it whips through all 100 pages in a couple of minutes, saving them as text-searchable PDFs. I was honestly surprised that my laptop was capable of accepting data at such a fast pace. This scanner doesn't hog a lot of precious desktop real estate, either. It's surprisingly small -- about 11.5 inches wide and 5 inches deep, with the feeder and output flaps folded in.I configured my SnapScan to send scanned documents as PDF files to my Evernote account, although this is not required. (If you don't know about the previously reviewed Evernote, it's an outstanding online service that accepts images, sound files, notes, scans of documents, and just about anything else you want to throw in it. Read the rest

Baby Abram and Haru, his Shiba Inu sidekick, both want a piece of cheese. But in order to get it, they must first ring the bell. Can they learn this trick? The answer isn't too surprising, but what does surprise me is how polite the dog is to the baby, and how helpful the baby tries to be to the dog. Read the rest

Toronto police are asking the public to help them identify a woman who threw a chair from the balcony of a tall building, where it fell into traffic.From CBC News:Toronto police now say the incident took place around 10 a.m. ET on Saturday in the Harbour and York streets area — where there are dozens of condo towers — and that a mischief investigation was launched on Sunday morning.Police also say in a news release that the suspect threw other items from the balcony that landed near the entrance to another condo building.Sgt. Ron Boyce told Radio-Canada that police believe the condo is at 55 Bremner Blvd., and said management at the building is working with them. Read the rest

In 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed the Illinois Sky-City, a skyscraper taller than one mile (~1,600 meters). That's more than twice the height of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, currently the tallest structure in the world. In the video above, Dutch architest Stefan Al asks "Will there ever be a mile-high skyscraper?" If it happens, there should be a rooftop bar named... the Mile-High Club. Read the rest

Freedom EV is a free/open software stack intended to replace the software in your electric vehicle, it's been tested on a Tesla Model X and should work on a Model S, if you can get root.Electric vehicles are very exciting but the same informatics and versatility that make them exciting also invite manufacturers to add all kinds of antifeatures (like batteries with plenty of charge remaining that refuse to power a vehicle because you've only paid for so much electricity; to say nothing of the usual surveillance, etc).Experimenting with FLOSS alternatives is an important (but insufficient on its own) hedge against bad manufacturer conduct.You need root access on the Central Instrument Display of your Tesla Model S or Model X with MCU 2.0 (arm based). Currently only tested on my Model X. I suppose it will also work on the Model S as the architecture is very similar. The latest generation of Model S/X and the Model 3 might be more problematic for now as they use an Intel based board instead of the ARM based Linux system. If someone has root to such a Tesla, we might get FreedomEV working. Aside from root access, we need some kind of 'persistence across reboot'. On the MCU 1.0 and 2.0 cars this is easily accomplished using the crontab as it reads from a read/writeable /var filesystem. Model 3 cars are even better closed down and harder to root. Tesla gives high bug bounties for those people finding root exploits and/or persistence across reboots; thus ensuring everybody their cars are safer. Read the rest

“Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades,” says a study published in the journal Biological Conservation. “The repercussions this will have for the planet’s ecosystems are catastrophic to say the least.”Highlights-Over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction.-Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera and dung beetles (Coleoptera) are the taxa most affected.-Four aquatic taxa are imperiled and have already lost a large proportion of species.-Habitat loss by conversion to intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines.-Agro-chemical pollutants, invasive species and climate change are additional causes.From The Guardian“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” said Francisco Sánchez-Bayo, at the University of Sydney, Australia, who wrote the review with Kris Wyckhuys at the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing.The 2.5% rate of annual loss over the last 25-30 years is “shocking”, Sánchez-Bayo told the Guardian: “It is very rapid. In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none.”One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. “If this food source is taken away, all these animals starve to death,” he said. Such cascading effects have already been seen in Puerto Rico, where a recent study revealed a 98% fall in ground insects over 35 years. Read the rest

Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, has a book out about journalism, ethics and truth. Unfortunately, many paragraphs turned out to be plagiarized from other writers. To the seemingly oblivious Abramson, it seems incomprehensible that this might be a problem. To her publishers, the vast sunk costs involved (it paid about $1m for the copied-and-pasted hackintome) have forced them to pretend that it isn't.And then there's the errors. Even before it was out, reviewers noticed problems ranging from major cities situated in the wrong states to insulting factual flubs about the young journalists Abramson thinks she's schooling. And now this, spotted by Chris Krewson:CPM refers to cost per mille, a measure used in advertising, and makes no sense as written here. In any case, it certainly was not a term devised by Nick Denton to calculate traffic bonuses."The lack of understanding about digital is stunning," Krewson writes. Ah, but whose lack of understanding about digital? The problem with all the mistakes in Jill Abramson's book on journalism is you'll never know who made them. It's the paradox of plagiarism: all discussion that depends on authorship, intent, context -- all of it becomes pointless. You can't very well blame Abramson for someone else's mistake, can you?Her book supposedly honors the traditions of 20th century journalism but has become a gravestone marking their death. The corpses will now be fucked by social media companies, billionaires and fascists until there's nothing left to fuck but the cold stone where they lay. Read the rest

Some climate deniers go beyond arguing that climate change isn't real; rather, they argue that adapting to climate change is cheaper than preventing it, and it's a fool's errand to spend money on a Green New Deal, when we could continue to burn fossil fuels and simply relocate everyone who gets flooded out, figure out how to grow crops in new places, come up with medicines to treat new epidemics, etc.In a wonderful short essay (the first in a series), Synapse Energy Economics economist Frank Ackerman describes the problems with this line of argument.Ackerman starts with the calculus of insurance: we buy insurance for risks like housefires or accidental death not because they are likely, but because their consequences are more than we can bear without insurance. When the habitability of the only known planet that can sustain our species is at stake, the case for insurance is easy, even if you think the likelihood is low.But planets aren't like houses: there isn't another planet we can relocate to if ours fails, so no insurer is going to write us a policy. Instead, we have to self-insure (just as someone who can't get fire insurance has to put in extra fire-suppression technology, clear brush, etc): we have to take every credible step to reduce the risk of losing our planetary home.But then Ackerman takes on the whole idea of cost-benefit when it comes to environmental risks: because these cost-benefit calculations involve literally making up a value for human lives and then calculating whether the "costs" (including other people dying) are less than the "benefits" (that is, profits to the companies whose environmental misdeeds cost other people their lives), these calculations always act as a kind of empirical facewash on an otherwise untenable proposition: that you should be allowed to kill other people if you get rich in the process. Read the rest

To honor her impending bat mitzvah my niece Ilana has designed some t-shirts and is selling them on behalf of Immigrant Families Together.Please help Lana help the world!This is Lana O'Neal's Tikkun Olam project for her upcoming Bat Mitzvah. Tikkun Olam is the Jewish concept that we all bear responsibility to repair the world. Lana has chosen to raise money for Immigrant Families Together (https://immigrantfamiliestogether.com/). This group works fast to help moms and children separated at the border. In addition to raising funds to post bonds, this group:-- Provides government and foster agency-approved housing when needed to expedite reunification-- Provides food and furnishings to families -- Provides transportation within the city-- Assists in obtaining lenient visitation rights and release of children held in foster carePlease support this important need by ordering one (or more -- they make a great gift!) of these awesome t-shirts and sweatshirts.If you aren't in need of an awesome t-shirt, please considering donating directly via the "Visit Website" link below and include Lana's hashtag: #TikkunOlam so we can track donations.Evidently the US process to attain bar and bat mitzvah now includes a project of some sort, like becoming an Eagle Scout! Anything for Tikkun Olam! All I had to do was cry a lot and learn to sing in a breaking teenage voice (I did not make Eagle.)Buy a tee shirt from Lana, help her repair the world. Read the rest

Police at Towson University in Maryland are warning students to be on the lookout: a helicopter mom is on the loose. Several students have already been harassed by said mom, in her 50s, with dark hair and a cellphone in her hand.The mom is harassing students on campus in hopes of finding a Valentine date for her son. She corners students and shows them photos of her boy, hoping to make a match. Instead, the students have complained to the police.According to The Baltimore Sun:It caused enough of a disturbance that police alerted students via an “incident advisory” that included a link to surveillance footage of the woman. They asked anyone with information about the woman or the incidents to contact university police at 410-704-4444.“This incident advisory is being provided in order to make the TU Community aware of an incident on campus that may cause concern,” Charles Herring, chief of the university police department, wrote in an e-mail to the campus community. “This advisory is intended to heighten awareness and inform the community of incidents that may impact their safety and security.”Police don't plan on arresting the mom – they just want her to stop. I think it's safe to say her son would agree.Image: Mohamed Hassan/Pxhere – CC0 Public Domain Read the rest

The Sackler family (previously) is one of the richest in the world, and if you've heard of them, it's probably because their family name adorns so many art galleries, museums, and academic institutions around the world: but they way they got that money is less-well-known.The Sackler fortune was made through the family pharma company, Purdue, which used illegal tactics, fraud, bribery and disinformation campaigns to deliberately create the US opioid addiction (read about it here), whose death toll puts the Vietnam wars and other great national scars in the shade. What's more, Purdue is recycling the tactics it developed to trick, coerce or bribe doctors into overprescribing its flagship product Oxycontin in other countries, creating fresh mountains of corpses and mountains of cash.The Sacklers are pretty much Exhibit A when it comes to using philanthropy to launder the reputations of capitalism's most immoral, rapacious beasts. As Anand Giridharadas has forcefully argued, one of the major functions of "charitable giving" is to deflect attention away from the blood on a billionaire's hands (the other function is to allow billionaires to turn their pet theories into public policy, and here the Sacklers also shine, helping to destroy the life-chances of a whole generation by funding privatization efforts that shut down public schools and replace them with underperforming "charter schools").Nan Goldin is a legendary photographer who nearly died when she got hooked on the Sacklers' products after a routine surgery. She's the founder of a pressure group called PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), which is modelled on the AIDS activist group ACT-UP, following their example with high profile, flashy direct actions that lift the rock on wrongdoing and its enablers. Read the rest

Weed is not legal in Prague, but that doesn't stop grifters from ripping off naive tourists. In this episode of Honest Guide, you'll learn about these places (and also the fact that most absinthe sold in Prague is fake, too.) Read the rest

A new squad-based Battle Royale game, Apex Legends, is thrilling the gaming world.Available free for Xbox, PC and Playstation, Apex Legends moved to the top spot on Twitch in under a week. Teams of three heroes work together to survive yet another battle island.Apex Legends is far less whimsical than Fortnite, the reigning champion of Battle Royale video games, but also includes character classes. Players choose from a limited list of classes to received special powers and offensive accents. Carribean and Pacific Islanders will cringe.Game play and overall functionality are fantastic for a free game at launch. There are in-game purchases that you do not need. Most are purely cosmetic, a few speed the activation of a few player classes. I am still learning my first class and do not need a new one. Read the rest

Teams of researchers are developing sesame seed-size neuro-implants that detect brain activity that signals depression and then deliver targeted electrical zaps to elevate your mood. It's very early days in the science and technology but recent studies suggest that we're on the path. Links to scientific papers below. Fortunately, the goal is to develop tools and a methodology more precise than the horrifically blunt "shock therapy" of last century. From Science News:DARPA, a Department of Defense research agency, is funding (Massachusetts General Hospital's research on new brain stimulation methods) plus work at UCLA on targeted brain stimulation. Now in its fifth and final year, the (DARPA) project, called SUBNETS, aims to help veterans with major depression, post-traumatic stress, anxiety and other psychiatric problems. “It is extremely frustrating for patients to not know why they feel the way they do and to not be able to correct it,” Justin Sanchez, the director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said in a Nov. 30 statement. “We owe them and their families better options.”These next-generation systems, primarily being developed at UCSF and Massachusetts General Hospital, might ultimately deliver. After detecting altered brain activity that signals a looming problem, these devices, called closed-loop stimulators, would intervene electrically with what their inventors hope is surgical precision.In contrast to the UCSF group, Widge, who is at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and his collaborators don’t focus explicitly on mood. The researchers want to avoid categorical diagnoses such as depression, which they argue can be imprecise. Read the rest

Chris Christie's got a new memoir, "Let Me Finish," and Matt Taibbi (previously), Rolling Stone's most incandescent and relentless writer, has done us all the mercy of reading Christie so we don't have to.As Taibbi describes it, Christie's lack of self-awareness has led him to publish a book where he tries to come off as a tough guy, but ends up revealed as a spineless chump whose greed and cupidity made him the perfect patsy for a series of sadistic head-games played by Trump that are so egregious and merciless that they almost make you forget that the victim was Chris Christie, a corrupt thug who deserves no mercy whatsoever.Taibbi calls this book "a furious allegory about the perils of not being as smart as you think you are," and it's a great example of a burgeoning genre of memoirs, leaks, and tell-alls that reveal that there is an elite out there that has amassed vast fortunes and high office simply by being colossal assholes with a howling void where their conscience should be, but who were once revered as brilliant 11-dimensional chess players (insert parade of Trumpian self-dealers who have pled guilty or been convicted since 2016 here).Christie doesn’t bother to explain why he didn’t get the Attorney General job. He does go on to tell an even more humiliating story.Trump, he writes, called after Election Day and said, “Are you willing to be chairman of the RNC?” This was after both Kushner and Bannon had told him conservative mega-patron Rebekah Mercer supposedly wanted him for the job. Read the rest

Kevin Gill, a NASA software engineer who deals in data visualization and analysis, created this new, director's cut of his low flyover movie of Jupiter's moon Europa. Cut from recently processed images transmitted back from the Galileo orbiter launched in 1989, Gill explains, the video "uses high resolution grayscale and low resolution color images taken between 1996 and 1998." Both NASA and the European Space Agency have missions in development to collect much higher data about Europa from probes expected to launch in about four or five years. NASA's Europa Clipper will "investigate whether the icy moon could harbor conditions suitable for life." That's all well and good, assuming we attempt no landing there.(via Kottke) Read the rest

Kisaragi double 6 created this fantastic hand-drawn stop-motion animation of the Super Mario Bros (1985) World 1-1 level. 動画内では分かりづらいものの、紙ならではのこだわりを持った出演者達です。実際に折ったり燃やしたり、クリボーのやられ方を考えるのは、とっても楽しかったです。 pic.twitter.com/GeawVAkagb— 如月 二重 6 (@KisaragiHutae6) February 11, 2019 Read the rest

The scholarship on inequality has been producing a wealth of empirical findings about how inequality is created, expanded and perpetuated, building on the work of Thomas Piketty in tracing capital flows.In a short memo for "a workshop on a left-liberal financial foreign policy," Henry Farrell describes how addressing inequality in a globalized world requires foreign -- not (just) domestic -- policy intervention.In some ways, Farrell is just restating a frequent objection to proposals like a 70% tax on income over $10m and an annual wealth tax on massive fortunes: that the rich will simply figure out how to move (even more of) their wealth offshore, out of reach of the USA.This is both a) true and b) surmountable (and c) urgent -- because the flows of capital into offshore havens is a corrosive force on other countries and they spread the rot back to the USA by laundering their money here).Farrell starts with the way that global legal structures shift capital flows: international IP treaties pave the way for profit-shifting, where companies create the fiction that all the profit from their national subsidiaries is exhausted in licensing fees paid to related companies in offshore tax-havens); international state dispute settlement systems let companies overrule democratic laws on environment, pollution, worker safety, health, and other matters to preserve their profits.More visibly, countries are lobbied to create tax regimes with interlocking loopholes: a company registered in country a realizes its profits in country b through a shell company in country c, with the net result being little or no tax owed, anywhere. Read the rest

The two bullet points for the Belladonna Foot Soldiers [Amazon] makes clear all you need to know. First, it offers "astonishing details" in "realistic rubber," and second that there is one left foot, one right foot, and a free bottle of lube. [via The Worst Things For Sale]Now you too can have your own set of Belladonna's exquisite feet to hold, fondle, love and caress. Live out your wildest fantasies with Belladonna. The top review, alas, warns of a strong smell.I’m not sure what it is, but the smell never goes away. This time I’m determined to see if it does. I’ve owned these for 6 years, and rarely take them out of the box. I can smell the material at least 6 feet away. It’s a shame, because they are beautifully detailed. I wish I knew the cause. I’ve throw them in nylons and will keep them out of the box as a last ditch effort to see if the scent mellows. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Though less life like, I prefer the Topco Justine Joli Cyberskin Foot Stroker. Read the rest

Storytelling can be a collaborative process, but here's one partner too few writers collaborate with: Their computer. And we're not just talking about a decent spell checker. Software has evolved to help more than just a writer's grammar, and you might just be surprised at the headaches the Storyteller's Essential Mac Bundle can save at every step of the writing process.What you've got here is six of the latest apps designed to get stories from the first page to the final draft. Yes, there's a state-of-the-art word processor (Mariner Write) and script formatter (Montage). But you also get Contour 2, a program that helps you understand the elements of a winning story and apply it to your own outline. You can get intuitive help on character creation with Persona, organize your timeline and kill cliches with StoryMill, and hear your characters speak (literally!) with the Narrator dictation app. No matter what your genre or medium, you've got a helping hand in this bundle.The Storyteller's Essential Mac Bundle is currently on sale for $19.99 - a full 90% off the cost of the individual apps. Read the rest