Chinese fish farms have successfully bred seven generations of Takifugu rubripes and ten generations of Takifugu obscurus that lack the gene that causes normal specimens of these pufferfish species to produce a deadly toxin that means near-instant death for anyone who eats a fish whose poison has not been completely removed during preparation.In response, the Chinese government has lifted its ban on serving pufferfish in restaurants, and April Puffer, the country's leading pufferfish restaurant, is expanding the operations it had run under an experimental license. The fishery is expected to open a lucrative new trade with Japan, where fugu is an expensive and difficult-to-prepare delicacy.“If they can’t distinguish between the species, poisonings can easily happen,” he says. “For cooking, Takifugu rubripes is [used in] both Japanese- and Chinese-style dishes, while Takifugu obscurus is only used for Chinese dishes.“For Japanese dishes, chefs cut the fish into different parts [which are prepared using] different cooking methods. No part of the fish is wasted. Even the skin is used for salads, after the bristles are removed. Chefs have to learn how to make thin and even slices [of the flesh] for sashimi.“For Chinese cooking, the whole fish is braised or served in a soup. Diners have to be told to turn the fish over when eating so the bristle-laden skin is not consumed. The puffer’s muscles are tight, so it tastes a bit hard and chewy. Chefs have to learn how to make the flesh soft and tasty.”Pufferfish in China: diners lured by delicacy now country has bred them poison-free [Elaine Yau/South China Morning Post](Image: Raita Futo, CC-BY) Read the rest

How did this driver know that he should back up? Sometimes, you can just tell from the way vehicles sit at an intersection that bad things are very likely to happen. And then they do. Read the rest

In Jan van IJken's "Becoming", a single cell becomes a complete organism in "six pulsing minutes of timelapse." (More of IJken's work is featured at Aeon) Read the rest

Gucci has withdrawn an $890 roll-neck sweater designed to resemble a stereotypical black charicature when pulled over the face. It seems the company thought the red-lipped balaclava element would be edgy yet plausibly deniable, but it didn't work out for them.In a statement, Gucci apologised for any offence caused and said it would be removed from sale.Gucci deeply apologizes for the offense caused by the wool balaclava jumper.We consider diversity to be a fundamental value to be fully upheld, respected, and at the forefront of every decision we make. Full statement below. pic.twitter.com/P2iXL9uOhs— gucci (@gucci) February 7, 2019The brand said it would turn the incident "into a powerful learning moment for the Gucci team" and was committed to increasing diversity. The assumption here is that it's an example of corporate foolishness, of not realizing that allusions to racist imagery can perpetuate it, and so on. But perhaps Gucci knew what it was doing and it's a conscious effort to get media coverage through controversy. What if they expected the backlash and the pro-forma apology was posted with smirking indifference? Read the rest

After a blockbuster report in Motherboard revealed that bounty hunters were able to buy realtime location data that originated with three of the four major cellular carriers (the exception is Verizon), the carriers scrambled to spin the news, insisting that the bounty hunter access represented a recent, small-scale aberration, but a new set of leaks reported on in Motherboard reveals that the practice has gone on for years, at industrial scale, and that the resellers who supplied bail bondsmen and other unsavory types in secret have changed names, but are still in business.Motherboard's Joseph Cox reports on a trove of internal documents from a defunct company called Cercareone, who sold cheap access to bounty hunters for years, allowing some firms to make tens of thousands of requests for their targets' location. The data Cercareone sold included so-called "A-GPS data," which can identify targets to a much finer detree than mere cell-tower location, zeroing in on specific locations within houses and other structures. This data is exclusively available through cellular carriers, hinting at a second, even-more-compromising data-sales market never before revealed.Cercareone's data was supplied by a "location aggregator" called Locaid, which dealt direct with the carriers. Locaid was sold to Locationsmart in 2015, which continued to supply data to Cercareone until 2017. Cercareone claimed that every person tracked with its data had signed a "privacy waiver," though this appears to have been a lie.Bounty hunters who contracted with Cercareone were required to sign a confidentiality agreement promising to keep the company's existence a secret. Read the rest

Steven Heller calls himself a "letterhead" -- that is, someone who collects letterhead (compare with "Deadhead"); his brief reflections on his passion for Design Observer and interesting and well-observed, but they're not a patch on the actual samples of beautiful, bygone letterhead from his collection. Letterhead collectors are not a monolithic cult. Each has his or her special needs. Some collect only corporations and institutions, other subsets are just design firms, and others are just design firms that start with the letter P. Collecting can get obsessively granular. There are collections of 19th century, political party and automotive letterheads, among others. You name it and someone collects it. There are many books on the art and design of letterheads. My favorite is Leslie Carbaga’s 1992 Letterheads: One Hundred Years of Great Design, 1850-1950. I also cherish The Avant Garde Letterhead by Elaine Lustig Cohen and Ellen Lupton (catalog of the 1996 Cooper Hewitt exhibition of Lustig’s modernist letterhead collection now in the MoMA permanent collection). Then there are dozens of richly stocked paper company sample books that contain printed examples on numerous paper weights, colors and textures. Usually these specimens are blank — many collectors prefer blank pages. But others prefer writing and signatures too. This is where the rarified field of autograph collection intersects with “letterheading.” Confessions of a Letterhead [Steven Heller/Design Observer](via Kottke) Read the rest

The world’s longest-running soap opera, otherwise known as the British Royal Family, takes some shocking plot twists in this week’s dramatic though fact-challenged tabloids.“Drunken Camilla’s Brawl With Queen!” screams the Globe, complete with a photo of Her Majesty with a “bloody eye wound.” “Raging Camilla” attacked the Queen, “threw a glass of red wine in her face and ripped a treasured pearl necklace from Her Majesty’s throat” before Prince Charles dragged her off, the rag reports. “Crazy drunk Camilla snaps as insults fly,” claims the tabloid, which has a storied history of quoting verbatim from private conversations among the Royals, thanks to a series of well-hidden listening devices – or possibly an over-active editorial imagination. When they make the TV movie the Queen will doubtless played by Joan Collins, and Camilla by Linda Evans. Expect a cat-fight in the Royal lily pond.Is it unsporting to note that the photo of the bloodied monarch at Scotland’s Balmoral Castle was actually taken on November 2, 2016, at the launch of Prince Andrew’s Pitch@Palace Event in London? Surely only a cad would point out that the Queen’s photo has been flipped, and the burst blood vessel in her left eye seen in the Globe was actually in her right eye two years ago? I wouldn’t stoop so low.Prince Harry’s months-old marriage to Meghan Markle dominates the National Enquirer under the headline: “Harry Confesses to William: ‘It’s Hell at Home! . . . This was the biggest mistake of my life!’” A “distraught” Harry “begged his big brother, Prince William, for advice.” My advice: Stop reading the tabloids. Read the rest

Back in September 2016, Novum Pharma made headlines when it raised the price of Aloquin, a barely-effective acne cream from $240/tube to $10,000/tube, after acquiring the exclusive right to manufacture it.Now, Novum is bankrupt, a fact it attributes to the price hike leading to "public scrutiny regarding [Novum’s] business model and further increased prescription rejection rates."While this is reason to cheer, don't get too happy. As Beth Mole points out at Ars Technica: "despite the public spotlight on drug pricing, more than three-dozen drug companies started 2019 with sweeping price increases on hundreds of drugs."While the bankruptcy may seem like a victory in the battle to drag down soaring drug prices, Craig Garthwaite, director of healthcare at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, did not have such an optimistic view. “I think we’re seeing companies sensitive to announcing these price changes. I don’t think we’re seeing a wholesale change in behavior,” he told the Tribune.Infamous pharma company declares bankruptcy after 3,900% price hike [Beth Mole/Ars Technica] Read the rest

Last October, I published a list of cities that appeared to have contracted with Predpol, a "predictive policing" company, based on research provided to me by an anonymous source who used clever methods to uncover the customer list.Now, Motherboard's Caroline Haskins has used that list as a jumping-off point for a wide array of public records requests that have revealed a pattern of extensive, secret experimentation with precrime in dozens of cities that allowed Predpol to access policing data and predict where more crimes would occur.Predictive policing is a notorious source of algorithmic discrimination and Predpol, in particular, has been shown to be a means of laundering racist policing practices through an algorithm that gives them the veneer of empirical impartiality: feeding faulty data to a predictive algorithm produces faulty analysis.The documents obtained by Motherboard—which include PredPol contract documents, instructional manuals and slide presentations for using the software, and PredPol contract negotiation emails with government officials—were obtained from the police departments of South Jordan, UT; Mountain View, CA; Atlanta, GA; Haverhill, GA; Palo Alto, CA; Modesto, CA; Merced, CA; Livermore, CA; Tacoma, WA; and the University of California, Berkeley using public records requests. These cities and municipalities are home to over 1 million people, according to the most recent census data available. In October, BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow published a story speculating that these cities had contracts with PredPol, based on an anonymous researcher's study of the company's URL structures and login portals. These documents confirm these cities have or had relationships with the company. Read the rest

Amazon is building out its ad-targeting program to allow for ad-buys like "people near a physiotherapist's office who've bought a knee-brace," and reports that the ads are incredibly successful.What's interesting about Amazon's reference customers for the efficacy of their program is how trivial they are: figuring out that knee-brace buyers who live near a physio might patronize that physio is not exactly rocket surgery. There are a ton of these "signals" that are probably a good predictor of future actions: if you buy a baseball bat and ball, you might travel to a nearby park to meet some friends in the near future; if you look up car ratings, you might buy a car soon; and so on.The insights are trivial: what's sophisticated is the targeting after the insights. In the age of paper car-buyers' guides, the only way to advertise to potential car-shoppers was to buy ad-space in those guides. You couldn't -- for example -- know when people were talking about buying a car with friends and show them an ad there. Surveillance capitalism has bequeathed upon us vastly improved means of identifying people who have some rare, widely diffused trait (say, people who recently called to price out a refrigerator repair and might be in the market to buy a new fridge, something the average person does between 0 and three of four times in their entire lives). But what surveillance capitalists do is conflate their ability to identify people who share a trait with their ability to identify traits to look for in people. Read the rest

There are plugins and obscure settings that will get this behavior, but, as the saying goes, "defaults matter": Firefox 66 will not play any audio or video until "a web page has had user interaction to initiate the audio." (via Four Short Links) Read the rest

Oh. My. God. Genius. It's original stuff, made & shared by IMGURian Iputbootsonsnakes.State of the union *snap filters* Read the rest

2018 was the fourth warmest year ever recorded on planet Earth, NOAA reported today. “Earth’s long-term warming trend continued in 2018 as persistent warmth across large swaths of land and ocean resulted in the globe’s fourth hottest year in NOAA’s 139-year climate record,” NOAA said. 2018 ranks just behind 2016 (the absolute warmest), 2015 (second warmest) and 2017 (third warmest).“In separate analyses of global temperatures, scientists from NASA, the United Kingdom Met Office and the World Meteorological Organization also reached the same heat ranking.”NOAA, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is a scientific agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce that focuses on the conditions of the oceans, major waterways, and the atmosphere. Here are a few highlights from NOAA’s findings:• The average global temperature during 2018 was 1.42 degrees F above the 20th-century average. This marks the 42nd consecutive year (since 1977) with an above-average global temperature. Nine of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 2005, with the last five years comprising the five hottest.• The globally averaged sea surface temperature was 1.19 degrees F above average, while the land surface temperature was 2.02 degrees above average, both the fourth highest on record.• Much of Europe, New Zealand and parts of the Middle East and Russia had record high land temperatures. Parts of the southern Pacific Ocean and parts of the north and south Atlantic Ocean also tallied record-high sea-surface temperatures. • In 2018, the U.S. experienced 14 weather and climate disasters, each with losses exceeding $1 billion and all totaling around $91 billion in damages. Read the rest

Bottom line: If the new Consumer Reports study is accurate, far more people have been killed or seriously hurt by electric scooters from Bird, Lime, and other dockless scooter-share companies than anyone realized.

Randall "XKCD" Munroe's next book has been announced: How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems, a sequel of sorts to his 2014 book What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, spun out of his wonderful XKCD spinout site. It's out on Sept 3, and the publisher's description makes it (as Kottke says) an instant pre-order: "For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally bad that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole." Read the rest

"Well, pisser fans, it's been a while. But we've got one for ya." Read the rest

Changing the headline after public outcry, The New York Times once again backflips as they excuse hate.hey @nytimes this is some racist bs. IT'S BLACKFACE. BLACKFACE. jesus christ, this is why we have these problems in the first place! call RACISM RACISM. pic.twitter.com/KboYvqKbpf— Oliver Willis (@owillis) February 6, 2019 Read the rest

After publicly displaying her '7 Rings' tattoo, and its botched repair job, singer Ariana Grande has been told she may not perform the song whose title she adorned her body with at the Grammy's.What is the kanji for "Bad Luck BBQ?"HuffPo:Grande apparently intended to perform her new single “7 Rings” at the 61st annual ceremony, which has advertised her appearance far and wide in the weeks leading up to the show, but she felt “insulted” when producers refused to let her play the song, unnamed sources told the outlet. Hits magazine was the first to break the news of Grande’s clash with Grammys producers over song selection.After all parties later agreed to include the track off Grande’s upcoming album “thank u, next” as part of a medley, talks broke down once again when producers stipulated that the second song in her performance be up to their choosing. Read the rest

Author Carol Emshwiller has died at the age of 97, after a long and distinguished career in science fiction, fantasy and other genres.Emshwiller has been publishing since 1955, and while she is best known for her fantasy and science fiction, my favorite work of hers is the superb and moving western Ledoyt, published in 1995. Carol Emshmiller was married to the illustrator and experimental filmmaker Ed "Emsh" Emshwiller, with whom she had three children.I never met Carol Emshwiller, but her work stayed with me for decades, and I'm glad she lived such a long and productive life.Though best known as a story writer, Emshwiller also wrote strange, powerful novels, including Carmen Dog (1988), set in a world where women transform into dogs (and vice versa); alien invasion tale The Mount (2002), a Philip K. Dick Award winner; YA Mister Boots (2005) about a man who transforms into a horse (or vice versa); and aliens-stranded-on-Earth novel The Secret City (2007). She also wrote a pair of Westerns, Ledoyt (1995) and sequel Leaping Man Hill (1999). She received a World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2005, and was a World Fantasy guest of honor in 2007. Agnes Carolyn Fries was born April 12, 1921 in Ann Arbor MI. She attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, earning BAs in Music and Design, and attended the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1949-50 as a Fulbright Fellow. In 1949 she married artist and experimental filmmaker Ed Emshwiller; he predeceased her in 1990. Read the rest

Colbert's honest translations of Orange Julius' endless stream of misdirection and outright lies are easier to watch than the original speech. Read the rest

A San Juan county assault case has been thrown out after it was revealed that Sheriff Ron Krebs had used the courtroom's cameras to zoom in on the notes of the defense attorney and a juror.The San Juan Sheriff's office is a hot mess of corruption and misconduct, and even the San Juan prosecutor's office has condemned the county's sheriffs, with prosecutor Randall Gaylord saying "I too am frustrated at what has happened here, frustrated that it has happened to cases I personally was involved in, and concerned about the community we represent." The prosecutor says that he was not given any intelligence by the Sheriff after he misused the court's cameras.Sheriff Krebs says that the focus on the defense and juror's notes was "isolated and unintentional" and explain it by saying that Krebs "inadvertently manipulated the camera in the District Courtroom in such a way that it zoomed in on one or more locations in the courtroom."If that is true, then a review of recordings from earlier hearings would not find similar incidents. It's not clear whether these recordings have been retained, nor what process would have to be set in train to trigger such a review.Screenshots from the video provided by Power that show close-ups of a trial exhibit, a steno book belonging to the No. 3 juror in the case, and a legal pad belonging to Kenimond were introduced as evidence at the hearing and played into Eaton’s decision to dismiss the charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be refiled. Read the rest

PACER (previoulsy) is the controversial US system for publishing court records; although the records themselves are in the public domain (US government documents are not copyrightable), you have to pay $0.10/page to read them, which is supposed to pay for the cost of serving them.PACER makes some $150m/year, to support a service that's basically just a big cloud drive full of (unindexed, unsearchable) PDFs, and which only costs $3m/year to operate. Services like RECAP, which copy PACER pages its users pay to read into a free repository, have drawn the ire of federal prosecutors and the FBI, and may have led to the malicious prosecution of Aaron Swartz, which ultimately ended in his death.While previous legislative attempts to make the law free for every American to read have died in Congress, a new push shows promise: the US government is being sued to make PACER free for all, and one of the amicus briefs filed in support of the case comes from Joe Lieberman, who wrote the E-Government Act that established PACER in the first place.Lieberman is joined by a roster of judges from across the political spectrum, as well as free-speech nonprofits and many others. If they prevail, a great historic wrong will have been righted: equal access to the law -- without regard to your ability to pay to read it -- is necessary for equal treatment under the law. In addition to Lieberman, the list of amici includes dozens of journalistic entities and former judges Richard Posner and Shira Scheindlin -- the latter most famous for dismantling the NYPD's unconstitutional stop-and-frisk program. Read the rest

Nine Inch Nail's Head Like A Hole no longer feels all that.Static-X's Push It also has lost a lot of its edge. The video cracks me up. On the other hand... Punk still has it. The Sex Pistols God Save the Queen still hangs in there for me. Read the rest

Spend any time at all around creative-minded techies, and you'll likely hear about Arduino. Whether you're making a simple motion sensor or a fully internet-controlled robot, Arduino is the platform of choice. If you're just diving in, we can't think of a better entry point than the Arduino Uno Ultimate Starter Kit & Course Bundle.First, and most importantly, the kit gives you an Arduino-compatible Vilros Uno board, along with the manual you need to connect it to whatever mad science you're bound to dream up. You'll get a master class in the possibilities of this open-source platform, too. "Crazy About Arduino" is a triple-tiered workshop that will take you from the broad-strokes concept for your project to the skills needed to set up servers and connect your device to the internet. To supplement that, "Arduino Zero to Hero" shines the spotlight on the components that connect to the platform: Breadboards, resistors, LEDs and more.You'll get lifetime access to all these resources and info, but that's no reason not to start soon: Right now, the Arduino Uno Ultimate Starter Kit & Course Bundle is on sale at $51.99. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Super-Fun-Pak Comix features: Prayers Answered; Percival Dunwoody, Idiot Time Traveler from 1909; etc. etc.

This spring, HBO will air a new documentary about Adnan Syed, the subject of the first season of the Serial podcast. The four-part series is directed by Amy Berg ("Deliver Us from Evil"). From the Baltimore Sun:Syed, the subject of the wildly popular “Serial” podcast, was convicted in 2000 of killing his former girlfriend and Woodlawn High School classmate. But “Serial” raised questions about why his attorney, M. Cristina Gutierrez, did not call a potential alibi witness. The attorney died in 2004.Syed’s conviction was vacated in June 2016 by a Baltimore circuit judge, and the Court of Special Appeals upheld the decision, prompting the state to bring its case for reinstating the conviction before Maryland’s highest court in November.The HBO trailer prominently features Syed’s family friend, Rabia Chaudry, who brought the case to “Serial” host and former Baltimore Sun reporter Sarah Koenig. The documentary, directed by Academy Award nominee Amy Berg, promises “a piece of evidence that nobody even realized existed for all these years.”It’s unclear when the Court of Appeals, Maryland’s highest court, will make a decision. Chaudry said in November that Syed’s family expects a ruling by August. Read the rest

My colleague Elliot Harmon writes: " EFF is looking for a new addition to our activism team. This job is a big one: you’ll be joining EFF’s efforts to end warrantless spying by the NSA and other federal government agencies, as well as to fight for restrictions on the use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies. And it’s the perfect time for you to start: Section 215—the law that the NSA relied on for decades to collect Americans’ phone call records—is set to expire at the end of 2019. Between now and then, we expect a major legislative fight over its reauthorization. We need someone activating the public to demand that lawmakers respect their right to private communications." Read the rest

The runner wrestled with a juvenile lion estimated to weigh 80 pounds before suffocating it to death in a park west of Fort Collins.

There it goes, making little cans of adorable fizzy beverages!'This morning was the first canning run at our little craft brewery,' says IMGURian fleadh, who made this wonderful video.You can watch the entire clip below.This morning was the first canning run at our little craft brewery...[source] Read the rest

“They want me to be homeless and die!,” Loomer cries on Instagram as she asks fans to send her $40,000.

“The time has come to accept that in its current mode of operation, Facebook’s flaws outweigh its considerable benefits”. — Roger McNamee in ZUCKED.

Yesterday I recommended the Anker PowerCore 10,000 mAh portable charger, which was on sale but isn't anymore. If you want a great deal on a 10,000 mAh portable charger, consider this Aukey charger. Anker generally has a better reputation for quality, but I've used Aukey gear for years with no problem. When you use code 47OU8KKJ at checkout, you can get this for a fraction of the price of the Anker model. Read the rest

Great Big Story shows how an expert dorodango maker makes beautiful shiny balls of mud. It requires starting with a mixture of a clay-based mud, straw, and water. "When you begin to polish them," she says, "and they begin to shine, they are living creatures coming to life." There is even an annual dorodango tournament in Japan.When Carla was editor of Craft magazine, she ran an article with a dorodango how-to.Image: Great Big Story/YouTube Read the rest

Gifts for lovers

Anand Giridharadas (previously) is the Aspen Fellow/McKinsey consultant turned anticapitalist gadfly whose brilliant book Winners Take All exposes the "philanthrophy" of the ultra-rich as a form of reputation-laundering with the side benefit of allowing some of history's greatest monsters to look at themselves in the mirror.Enter Harvard University, whose graduates constitute some of the world's richest, most sociopathic, most generous donors to any university -- the Harvard endowment was selected for study by Thomas Piketty in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century because it is the only privately held, oligarch-scale fortune whose books are open for study.Now, the Humanist Hub and the Humanist Community at Harvard, along with the Harvard College Community of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics (HCHAA) and the American Humanist Association have given Giridharadas their Rushdie Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, which is presented at a big "social enterprise" conference put on every year by the Harvard School of Government and its business school, where Giridharadas will present the keynote for "1000 top leaders, practitioners and students."Congrats to Giridharadas, of course, but more important, bravo to the Harvard Humanists! We are particularly proud to announce, therefore, that Giridharadas will accept our 2019 award as part of delivering the opening keynote for this year’s 20th annual Social Enterprise Conference, a joint production of students at the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, set to bring together approximately 1000 top leaders, practitioners and students on March 2-3, 2019 to engage in dialogue, debate, and expression around Social Enterprise. Read the rest

A massive cavity so large you could fit New York City inside of it has opened up under Thwaites glacier in Antarctica. Scientists say if it collapses, as it's likely to do within the next 50 to 100 years, it could cause a catastrophic rise in sea levels capable of flood coastal cities around the world.The researchers behind the discovery describe what it means in a paper published Jan. 30 in the journal Science Advances. They expected to find that much ice had been lost, but were shocked by the size of the growing void.timeline is 50-100 years based on projections—which is not a long time!!!! https://t.co/LzokvhPjLE— Dave Gershgorn (@davegershgorn) February 5, 2019From Denise Chow at NBC News:Scientists have discovered an enormous void under an Antarctic glacier, sparking concern that the ice sheet is melting faster than anyone had realized — and spotlighting the dire threat posed by rising seas to coastal cities around the world, including New York City and Miami.The cavity under Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is about six miles long and 1,000 feet deep — representing the loss of 14 billion tons of ice.It was discovered after an analysis of data collected by Italian and German satellites, as well as NASA’s Operation IceBridge, a program in which aircraft equipped with ice-penetrating radar fly over polar regions to study the terrain.Read the rest of the piece here.GIF below: Sinking areas at Thwaites Glacier are shown here in red and rising areas in blue. Read the rest

Congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has won the endorsement of former KKK leader David Duke. Wait, what?A "Tulsi Gabbard for President" banner features the banner tagline, "Finally a candidate who will actually put America First rather than Israel First!" Duke also endorsed Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election.Though Gabbard does have some reactionary credentials (she's a notorious homophobe, among other things), Duke's probably trolling as she's otherwise a moderate who hasn't taken aim at Israel or its policies.UPDATE: Duke's done this before, and she's replied before:U didn't know I'm Polynesian/Cauc? Dad couldn't use "whites only" water fountain. No thanks. Ur white nationalism is pure evil— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) November 27, 2016 Read the rest

In 2006, artist David Hensel, a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, submitted a sculpture to the UK's Royal Academy. It was a laughing head made from resin, and he called it "One Day Closer To Paradise." Hensel was pleased to learn the sculpture had been accepted for the Royal Academy's summer exhibition. But when he went to a special preview, he saw only the pedestal for his sculpture along with a small piece of wood that was meant to keep the head affixed to it. BBC News reported: "The Academy said the judging panel assumed the two pieces were separate and decided the support was better." The head had been rejected and was being stored in the basement. Read the rest

Back in 1947, decades before cat memes became a way of life, experimental documentary filmmakers Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid gave us a lovely glimpse of the "Private Life of a Cat." From Archive.org:RECORDS FEMALE CAT & HER 5 KITTENS AS MOTHER CAT APPROACHES LABOR, KITTENS ARE BORN & OBTAIN MILK & MOTHER CAT THEN CARES FOR THEM IN LEARNING & GROWING PROCESS, IN WHICH TOM CAT OCCASIONALLY PARTICIPATES.(via r/ObscureMedia)Previously: Maya Deren's Sights and sounds of Haitian vodou Read the rest

One of my favorite puzzle books as a kid was Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers, by Martin Gardner. It had fun "real life" type problems (how can you drive an 11-foot-9 truck under a bridge with 11-foot-8 clearance?) and it introduced me to palindromes ("Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts.") Here's another "real life" puzzle: a person brings four pieces of a broken bracelet to a jeweler and asks him to repair it. The jeweler says he charges $1 for each link he cuts apart and welds together again. "Since I have to cut and weld four links, the job will cost you four dollars." But the customer correctly tells the jeweler he can make the bracelet by cutting and welding only three links. How? Read the rest

Kyiv-based sculptor Polina Verbytska (AKA WeirdSculpture) is a prolific and grotesque maker whose jewelry and knickknacks are superb and grody, all the teeth especially: rings, necklaces, earplugs, etc, and then the rest of it, like these severed fingertip hairpins.(via Creepbay) Read the rest

Remember that school-room lesson on invisible forces where the teacher sprinkles iron filings over a sheet of paper that is placed over a magnet? Here's a complete upgrade. Watch these magnetic field patterns in 3D, created when magnetite sand is thrown on magnets – some of them bouncing on a small trampoline – and shot in slow motion. Beautifully captivating. Via Gizmodo Read the rest

In September 1772 the English scientist Joseph Priestly had a difficult decision to make. Should he accept Lord Shelburne's offer to become his personal librarian, which paid well and would certainly be rewarding, or should he remain in Leeds, where he was comfortably settled and had plenty of interesting work to pursue? Priestly turned to his American friend Benjamin Frankin, who offered the following weighted pro/con algorithm for arriving at a decision when faced with uncertainty:Dear Sir,In the Affair of so much Importance to you, wherein you ask my Advice, I cannot for want of sufficient Premises, advise you what to determine, but if you please I will tell you how. When these difficult Cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under Consideration all the Reasons pro and con are not present to the Mind at the same time; but sometimes one Set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of Sight. Hence the various Purposes or Inclinations that alternately prevail, and the Uncertainty that perplexes us. To get over this, my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four Days Consideration I put down under the different Heads short Hints of the different Motives that at different Times occur to me for or against the Measure. When I have thus got them all together in one View, I endeavour to estimate their respective Weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three. Read the rest

Smart toilets that analyze urine and poop in the bowl have been demonstrated for years, but now Rochester Institute of Technology engineers have integrated multiple kinds of biosensors into the toilet's seat. The WiFi-enable systems tracks EEG, blood oxygen levels, and the heart's pumping force. From IEEE Spectrum:If the monitoring system works as expected, the device could help catch early signs of heart decline and decrease the number of hospitalizations for heart patients.To test their seat, the team gathered blood pressure and blood oxygenation measurements from 18 volunteers in a laboratory who were instructed to sit on the seat but not urinate, defecate, or talk. Urination and defecation can shift readings since they put minor stress on the body, says Conn. While the system currently operates with algorithms that analyze signal quality, in the future Conn also plans to incorporate algorithms to identify and reject those inevitable bathroom moments from the data set.But even if a person is fidgety on the toilet and the system fails to record a clean signal, there is always the next time. “If you’re not going to pick it up in the morning, you might pick it up at night. People are going to continuously use this seat,” says (researcher Nicholas) Conn. Read the rest

Following on Willie Nelson's "Willie's Reserve" cannabis brand, the music icon and weed enthusiast has launched the new Willie’s Remedy line of CBD-infused health and wellness products, starting with coffee. From Rolling Stone:According to a release, Nelson’s coffee is a medium-dark whole-bean blend with “flavor notes of cherry and cocoa.” Each 8 oz. cup contains 7 mg. of hemp-derived CDB.Nelson’s wife Annie is overseeing the Willie’s Remedy brand and has plans to release other products in the coming year, including topicals and confections. “The Willie’s Remedy line is a purposeful departure from Willie’s Reserve,” said Annie Nelson. “It’s not about getting high, but it’s still all about Willie and the benefits we believe cannabis has to offer.” Read the rest

If you believe in the sanctity of property rights, you believe that the law should entitle you to compensation if someone damages your property; the energy sector has knowingly, willfully destroyed some of the most valuable property on earth, in large coastal cities, and if libertarians and right-wingers were sincere in their belief in private property (as opposed to mere oligarchic consolidation of wealth and power), they would be baying for the liquidation of every energy company's fortunes to compensate the owners of all that property. After all, only 25 companies are responsible for more than half of the planet's emissions. Read the rest

Yes, as seen below, somehow Ross with Nicolas Cage's face makes him look even more like Ross. But now comes the discovery of this lost Friends episode above, "The One Where They Are ALL Nicolas Cage."(TheAngryStag via r/funny)Here's the original weirdness:Ross from Friends with Nicolas Cages face on him just makes him look more like Ross from r/pics Read the rest

Wendell Primus is one of Nancy Pelosi's top health aides. Leaked slides from a closed-door meeting with Blue Cross execs reveal that he has been quietly advising the health insurance industry that there is no danger of Democrats pursuing a "Medicare for All" strategy, and offered them what amounted to a quid pro quo that would keep them safe from nationalized healthcare if they would break with the pharma industry to help lower drug prices.Shortly after this meeting, Nancy Pelosi was made the Speaker of the House, with the power to advance or kill Medicare for All, a policy that the majority of Americans support.Primus denies that there was a deal on offer, claiming instead that the presentation was a "broad look at the health care environment and some of House Democrats’ legislative priorities over the next two years."Primus's leaked slides suggest an expansion of Obamacare -- which obliges Americans to pay private insurers for care, and allows private insurers to bill the US government at arbitrarily high rates to cover people too poor to pay -- as an alternative the national healthcare, a right enjoyed by the residents of every other developed nation in the world.The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which operates under Pelosi, in 2017 presented House Democrats with survey data, claiming that it showed that single-payer was a political loser, and that Democrats should focus their messaging on lowering drug prices and protecting the ACA.Yet a significant number of Democrats who flipped Republican districts blue in 2018 were publicly supportive of Medicare for All, suggesting that it isn’t necessarily the albatross Pelosi and the DCCC believe it to be. Read the rest

Starting in the early 1990s with a Democratic Congress (and continued by other congresses, Republican and Democrat, since), the rate of tax on "passive, unearned income" has been in decline, but someone has to pay to keep Uncle Sam's lights on, so the tax on workers' wages have diverged, until today, when the tax bite out of a worker's wage is double the tax taken on wealthy investor with the same amount in "passive income." The easy explanation for this is that workers don't change their behavior when you raise payroll taxes (you still show up for work because you still you have to pay your mortgage), while investors are prone to changing their behavior depending on the tax code. The more complete explanation is that, since the Reagan years, the share of national wealth owned by the richest Americans has gone up and up, and so has their political power, and so the political will to tax the wealth of the 10%, the 1% and the 0.1% has been steadily leached out of US politics.Taxing workers more than investors is fair, conservatives also argue, because investors and workers are really the same people at different stages of their lives. When you’re young, you save and pay high tax rates on your wages. When you’re old, you get to enjoy the lightly taxed proceeds of that invested income.The wrench in these arguments is the massive jump in inherited American wealth—driven by rising income inequality and loose tax laws. In practice, the person who successfully accumulates assets is often not the person who spends them. Read the rest