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As a superfan of Us and Get Out, I'm excited to watch the first episode of the new Twilight Zone, "The Comedian," which is directed by Jordan Peele. The hour-long episode is available now on YouTube. Read the rest

Alleged fake blood test grifter Elizabeth Holmes has a busy schedule this year. In addition to attending her upcoming trial for 11 criminal felony counts, she's getting married! The lucky groom-to-be is William "Billy" Evans, scion of the Evans Hotel Group fortune.From Brides Magazine:It's possible they bonded over their shared wealth or interest in tech, as Evans is an MIT grad who worked at Linked In, then Luminar Technologies, a driverless-car start-up. According to Linked In, Evans stopped working there in January—maybe to spend more time with his bride-to-be while he still can? Holmes is being charged with 11 criminal felony counts, including wire fraud and conspiracy, and could face jail time. Holmes has pleaded not guilty.While Holmes is awaiting trial, the couple has been living large in a luxury apartment in San Francisco, according to Vanity Fair, and they even attended Burning Man together just days before Theranos employees were notified the company was officially shutting down. In their San Francisco home, they coparent Holmes's "wolf," Balto. As it turns out, Balto is actually just a Siberian husky.For everyone asking about Holmes's social media. It's private. But here are a few screenshots of her and her fiancé we found online. (I personally find it crazy that she's being charged with 11 felony counts, thousands of people's lives were harmed, and she's as happy as can be.) pic.twitter.com/6nYfjltLt4— Nick Bilton (@nickbilton) February 21, 2019Image by Glenn Fawcett - Cropped version of from https://www.dvidshub.net/image/911248, Public Domain, Link Read the rest

The latest retro-fantasy from Squirrel Monkey - how to declutter your 1990s computer files, Marie Kondo style. Read the rest

For more than 50 years, photographer Roger Steffens has explored the electric arteries of the counterculture, embracing mind-expanding experiences, deep social connection, and unadulterated fun at every turn. After serving in Vietnam at the end of the 1960s, Steffens immersed himself in California’s vibrant bohemia. With his wife Mary and children Kate and Devon, he sought out the eccentric, the outlandish, and the transcendent. Just as often, it found him, grinning, a camera in one hand and a joint in the other. My Ozma Records partner Tim Daly and I are honored to share with you this new collection of Steffens’ spectacular snapshots taken between 1968 and 2015 during the foursome’s freewheeling adventures throughout the visionary state they call home. Think of it as a family album belonging to a very unconventional family. This is The Family Acid: California.Based in Los Angeles, the Steffens family traveled up and down the West Coast, from the wilds of Death Valley and reggae festivals in Humboldt to fiery protests in Berkeley and the ancient redwoods of Big Sur. Along the way, they’d rendezvous with friends like Bob Marley, Timothy Leary, and war photographer Tim Page, the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now. They’d take in the wonders of nature and, of course, the adults would occasionally lose their minds in psychoactive celebrations of creativity, freedom, and hope. The Family Acid: California is a 192-page, large format book manufactured with the finest materials and attention to design as you've come to expect from Ozma Records, producers of the Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition. Read the rest

A new study reveals that the Skrillex track "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" reduces mosquitos' success in foraging, host attack, and sexual activities of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads dengue fever, chikungunya, Zika fever, Mayaro, and other nasty diseases. According to the researchers from the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak and their colleagues, it's all about that bass. From their scientific paper published in the journal Acta Tropica:Sound and its reception are crucial for reproduction, survival, and population maintenance of many animals. In insects, low-frequency vibrations facilitate sexual interactions, whereas noise disrupts the perception of signals from conspecifics and hosts. Despite evidence that mosquitoes respond to sound frequencies beyond fundamental ranges, including songs, and that males and females need to struggle to harmonize their flight tones, the behavioral impacts of music as control targets remain unexplored. In this study, we examined the effects of electronic music (Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites by Skrillex) on foraging, host attack, and sexual activities of the dengue vector Aedes aegypti. Adults were presented with two sound environments (music-off or music-on). Discrepancies in visitation, blood feeding, and copulation patterns were compared between environments with and without music. Ae. aegypti females maintained in the music-off environment initiated host visits earlier than those in the music-on environment. They visited the host significantly less often in the music-on than the music-off condition. Females exposed to music attacked hosts much later than their non-exposed peers. The occurrence of blood feeding activity was lower when music was being played. Adults exposed to music copulated far less often than their counterparts kept in an environment where there was no music. Read the rest

An astonishing school of hammerhead sharks surprises divers at Darwin's Arch in the Galápagos Islands in this majestic video from the BBC's Mission Galápagos series. In an article at a href="https://www.wanderlust.co.uk/content/liz-bonnin-amazing-wildlife-experiences/"Wanderlust, the Mission Galápagos series host, animal biologist and presenter Liz Bonnin, lists this adventure as one of her "most amazing wildlife experiences":The hammerheads come from all different directions and gather, swim around each other in big circles in a wonderful sort of balletic association. At the very centre of this big mass of hammerheads are the oldest, most mature females. The younger sharks swim around them. When the males come in to mate, they’ve got to weave and wind their way through this mass of hammerheads, so only the strongest, fittest males will get to mate with the females in the centre. We are only just beginning to understand the purpose of this mass congregation, so the more scientists dive down there, the more they’re understanding its importance. It’s a very special place, and a very important behaviour, that needs to be protected. The Galapagos is one of the last jewels of this blue planet of ours. It really needs extra protection of ours oceans to make sure that that doesn’t disappear for ever. It was extraordinary.(via The Kid Should See This) Read the rest

Remember that a lot of you see today on the internet will be humorless lies. And everything else will be April Fools jokes. Read the rest

The National Library of Scotland released an online viewer that combines historical maps with the latest elevation data. The results are a remarkably beautiful wedding of old and new. Here's a 1940s map of Loch Tay, in 3D.The 3D map viewer includes our standard interaction options, including a zoom slider, a scalebar, mouseposition location, as well as the ability to choose georeferenced overlays and background layers. Our standard map location options, such as geolocation, the ability to locate the map with placenames and drop-down lists of counties and parishes are all included. The 3D map viewer uses open-source technology, which has been shared on Github and described with notes in the GeoCart Historical Maps Online Workshop.[nls.uk via John Overholt] Read the rest

default filename tv finds and presents videos uploaded to YouTube without the filename being edited. The work of Everest Pipkin, it shimmers with the light of a liminal place between crushing normality and unhinged wonder. Which is to say,they've got a VIBE. Read the rest

You could be the proud owner of this customized 1978 Tradesman 200 undercover police surveillance van! Currently for sale on the San Francisco Bay Area's Craigslist, the white, 8-cylinder automatic has just 78,000 original miles. Asking price is $4,000. And now for the good stuff:It has been carpeted with a bench and workbench inside. It is chock full of surprises and cool modifications including; a CB radio setup (don't think it currently works), police band radio/scanner, black out windows/shades, custom AC unit designed to run off a few deep cycle-cell marine batteries (daisy-chained together), a door to separate the cab from the rear of the vehicle, and best of all.....a periscope that comes out of the vent. It does have some minor dents and dings as a 40 year-old truck will likely have, but no major defects/issues. Everything seems to work on it, but I haven't done much driving in it since it is not currently registered or insured. Seats are going to need to be recovered or replaced. This van would make an awesome undercover PI van, party van, camper van, hippy van, surfer van, boogie van, classic 70's van. I have another one already, and with two jobs, and school, I don't have a lot of free time to convert a second van. I may consider a trade for a 4x4 van, or similar, Suburban, Bronco, Scout, Jeep etc."1978 Dodge Tradesman 200 undercover police van - $4000 (san mateo)" (Craigslist) Read the rest

Actor EJ Zapata provides "solid evidence every TV show, Movie, and Commercial are all in the same Cinematic Universe." This is "How It All Connects," a compilation of Zapata's on-camera moments in the background.Learn more from Zapata over at r/videos. (Thanks pvanb!) Read the rest

Banksy's anonymity makes it hard to authenticate his pieces and prints, so Banksy has created a nonprofit called "Pest Control" that issues certificates of authenticity: you send them an alleged Banksy print and £65 and if they agree that it's authentic, they'll return it with a certificate that has a torn-in-half "Di-faced" fake banknote with Lady Diana's face on it, with a handwritten ID number across the bill.As Clinton Freeman points out, this is a great piece of cryptographic engineering: faking a Banksy cert involves matching the tear precisely, and also requires that a would-be counterfeiter know what was written on the other half of the note, which is stored at Pest Control and is not made available.Let’s say someone did manage to recreate a convincing copy of a print, certificate and the public half of the matching Di Faced Tenner. And you want to purchase this thing that looks like an authenticated print, so you head over to Pest Control’s website and make a change of ownership request. They contact who they have on file as the current owner of the work: ‘Hey, are you going to give your print to Joe Bloggs?’. Naturally the owner, unaware of the forgery and has no intention of selling their current print is going to be confused and reply ‘WTF are you talking about?’Can an information system be art? Because, like I said, it’s flipping sweet, and all executed in Banksy’s trademark tongue in cheek style. This whole authentication process would easily be my favourite artwork by Banksy. Read the rest

The Boston Globe has published a giant weekend package of responses to Elizabeth Warren's proposal to break up the Big Tech monopolies.I'm absolutely in favor of this proposal, but I'm concerned that the proponents for it have fallen into the trap of tech exceptionalism, the idea that tech is either intrinsically monopolistic (something you hear from Big Tech itself, as they insist that "network effects" and similar excuses mean that they are helpless to avoid monopolies), or more dangerous (see the rhetoric about how "algorithms" can produce influence campaigns that turn decent people into anti-vaxxers, Trump supporters or murderous jihadis), or both.I think both of these are vastly overstated and that you don't need to believe in them to support the case for breaking up Big Tech. Big Tech is monopolistic because it grew up without any meaningful antitrust enforcement -- because the Apple ][+ and Reaganomics were born in the same 12-month period, because a generation of tech lawyers learned from the FTC's tame response to Microsoft that it was fair game, and because the investors who choose the boards of these companies are great fans of monopolies in every industry they back, not just tech.And as to tech's ability to distort our thinking, the idea that this is due to some kind of machine-learning secret sauce is something that Big Tech itself promotes ("Buy our ad-tech and we'll sell your stuff to people who wouldn't buy it otherwise"), but I don't know why we'd conclude that these companies lie about everything except their sales literature. Read the rest

Today, I'm wrapping up the tour for my new book Radicalized at Anaheim's Wondercon, where I'm on a panel at 11AM (Technology Is Cold; People Are Warm, Room 300B), followed by a signing from 1215PM-1PM (in the Author Signing Area). I hope you can make it! (Image: Brandon Locke) Read the rest

PSA Press's $15 Stop Making Sense pin is jointed for moving Big Suit action, just like in the greatest concert movie ever made; I just bought one at Wondercon and it's superb. Read the rest

The $100 Frank Frazetta Death Dealer Xmas sweater is licensed, with a portion of the proceeds going to the Frazetta museum in East Stroudsburg, PA. Read the rest

AOL bought Netscape, renamed it New Aurora Corporation, sold it to Microsoft, who sold it to Facebook, where it is a "non-operating subsidiary." Netscape veteran JWZ writes, "That makes Facebook the current owner of the cookie patent, so I was hoping that this meant that they are now embroiled in the Forever War with ValueClick, but I now see that it was settled in 2010. Bummer!" Read the rest

I want to go there.My favorite pan is a Wagner I got at Goodwill in San Francisco.I especially like to refinish cast iron waffle irons.(Thanks, David Wolfberg!) Read the rest

Sourdough is not the complicated, finicky bread baking technique some folks might like you to believe. Sourdough baking takes very little effort and is mostly an art of patience.This loaf is an example of what you can achieve by barely paying attention to your starter. I left mine in the fridge for months, and then forgot it on the kitchen counter.Here is the dough after its first rise, and before I spread it out for folding.Here is the loaf in its proofing basket. It was VERY wet and took a lot of the flour out of the basket.Here is the finished second loaf, baked from a starter that had been left on my kitchen counter, unfed, for over a week. Previous to ignoring the starter on my counter, I had left it in my fridge for well over 6 months.Here are some details on preparation of a basic sourdough loaf. Read the rest

As the lawsuit against Alex Jones for his role in directing and encouraging the vicious harassment of the parents of children murdered at the Sandy Hook shooting has led to a lawsuit, and that has led to discovery and depositions that reveal much about how Jones deliberately and cynically created the campaign of terror against the grieving parents -- and the role that organizations like the NRA play in the creation of cruel and destructive conspiracy theories about mass shootings.The law firm of Farrar & Ball are representing the parents in the suit, and they've uploaded the video of their deposition of Jones, conducted by attorney Mark Bankston. It is a complete shitshow, as Jones spins, and does backflips, going back and forth on whether he believes that the Sandy Hook parents are part of a conspiracy or not, repeating conspiracy theories about shadowy figures in the woods and so on.If you can't bear to watch the video, you can read a transcript.Jones is asked about the supposed “deep research” he did on the shooting shortly after being read the official report: Bankston: Okay. Thank you, Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones, I’ve noticed on a lot of these answers you’ve said, “Well, I’m just going off what Mr. [Wolfgang] Halbig said.” So what I want to know is: When you talked earlier about how you did deep research, what was that? What deep research did you do? Jones: Well, I mean, I did look at the news articles saying they were being very secretive about the case, that a lot of things were sealed, which is unusual. Read the rest

With the Prime Minister's Brexit deal failing for the third time to receive Parliament's blessing and the looming possibility of crashing out the EU without a deal, or a snap general election, or a second referendum, or another series of Parliamentary votes, or a general-purpose popular uprising, or alien intervention, the Church of England has a plan: tea parties.Churches are being encouraged to host “informal café-style meetings” over the weekend of 30 March “to bring together people of all standpoints and encourage open discussion.” The Archbishops of Canterbury and York, Justin Welby and John Sentamu, have today backed newly-commissioned resources to invite people to “get together and chat over a cup of tea and pray for our country and our future”.Under the slogan “Together”, the packs include specially-chosen Bible passages, prayers and questions designed to prompt conversations. The introductory notes urge participants to have “respect for the integrity of differently held positions, encouraging communities which feel the same about the issues to use their imagination to consider the viewpoints of those who feel differently.”Photo: AS Food studio / Shutterstock Read the rest

On Tuesday, the Oklahoma House Judiciary Committee approved Senate Bill 614, which forces doctors to counsel patients seeking medical abortions with false statements claiming the procedure is reversible; doctors who refuse to lie to their patients would be guilty of a jailable felony.The law's backer is Rep Mark Lepak [R-9, (405) 557-7380), who falsely claimed that "medical science has developed a method for reversing the effects of a medication abortion and saving the life of an unborn child."This belief is widespread among anti-abortion extremists, and has prompted the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists to issue a statement in 2017 that reads, "Claims regarding abortion ‘reversal’ treatment are not based on science and do not meet clinical standards."Four other Republican-led states (Arkansas, Idaho, South Dakota, and Utah) have passed laws requiring doctors to tell this lie to their patients and seven more are considering it, as part of a nationally coordinated, nonconsensual Handmaid's Tale LARP that made significant advances with the elevation to the Supreme Court of accused serial rapist Brett Kavanaugh.Arizona was the first state to pass such a law, but it was later overturned after a court challenge because the law's proponents couldn't find a single credible expert to testify that "abortion reversal" was a thing.The bills are grounded in a series of flawed and deeply unethical experiments performed by Dr. George Delgado of Southern California.Anti-abortion extremists have made forcing doctors to lie to patients a centerpiece of their tactics: a string of state laws also require doctors to give medically unsupported warnings to abortion patients about a supposed (and unproven) link between breast cancer and abortion. Read the rest

Genie Ogden writes, "Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince (previously) was invited to speak at Beloit College last night, by the right wing group Young Americans for Freedom. A couple of weeks ago, a Beloit student who is Muslim posted on the internet that he was angry - about the shootings of fellow Muslims in New Zealand, and then about the YAF bringing Erik Prince to speak. He was suspended. Fellow students were upset about his suspension, and protested in the hall where Prince was scheduled to speak last night. They banged on drums, and some of them piled their chairs on the stage. Erik Prince cancelled his speech and has threatened to sue." (Image: Tess Lydon/The Round Table) Read the rest

People.cn is a publicly listed subsidiary of The People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party; its fortunes are rising and rising with no end in sight as it markets itself as an outsource censorship provider who combine AI and a vast army of human censors to detect and block attempts to circumvent censorship through irony, memes, and metaphors.Analysts praise People.cn for its "precise grasp of policy trends," and the company's customers agree, using People.cn's censorship service to block content in apps and on social media. Full-year net income is expected to have risen as much as 140 percent, People.cn said in late January, the biggest annual increase since 2011. That would mean net profit of as high as 214.8 million yuan ($31.93 million).Revenue from its censorship business is forecast to have jumped 166 percent last year, the company said in a filing to the Shanghai Stock Exchange.Encouraged by surging revenue, People.cn is raising a bigger army of censors. This month, it signed a strategic deal with the government of Jinan in eastern Shandong province to help the city become China’s censorship capital.Censorship pays: the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper expands lucrative online scrubbing business Read the rest

The Sacklers (previously) are mostly known around the world as "philanthropists," with their names adorning the wings of galleries, museums and institutes of higher learning; but the Sackler family fortune came from their pharmaceutical company, Purdue, whose deceptive marketing and underhanded regulatory evasion for their highly addictive drug Oxycontin has led to the prescription opioid overdose deaths of 200,000 Americans so far, with another 200,000 overdoses from heroin and other opioids likely related to the addiction epidemic created by Purdue and the Sacklers.The Sacklers are anxious to keep details of their criminal activities out of the press and the public eye -- they recently gave Oklahoma $270m to settle a claim rather than have it go to trial, and you only have to look at the recently unsealed deposition of family boss Richard Sackler to see why: it reveals that Purdue execs, led by Sacklers, took steps that addicted as many people as possible and went to elaborate lengths to avoid regulatory detection of their misdeeds.Now the family has been sued by New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose (heavily redacted) legal complaint claims that as the Oxy epidemic drew more legal attention, the Sacklers began to extract millions from Purdue via offshore money laundries that would hide their fortunes from US courts, going so far as to abolish Purdue Pharma's written quarterly reports and replacing them with verbal reports direct to board members, leaving no records to subpoena as fortunes were sent abroad.The suit claims that the Sacklers incorporated a new pharma company, "Rhodes," to use as a "landing pad" if they had to shut down Purdue due to the legal claims and scandal around it. Read the rest

NRA training instructor and program coordinator Mark Richardson is a veteran of the organization, having worked there since at least 2006; in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland shooting, Richardson used his NRA email account to correspond with Infowars correspondent Wolfgang Halbig, a Sandy Hook denier who has pursued a career of harassing the grieving parents of the children murdered there and accusing them of being "crisis actors" in a "false flag operation" whose children were either imaginary or unharmed.Halbig and Richardson pursued a lively correspondence, discussing their belief that the Parkland shooting was a hoax designed to provide cover for the confiscation of guns from musketfuckers and ammosexuals across America.The emails were revealed through the discovery process in a lawsuit against Alex Jones brought by grieving Sandy Hook parents who have been harassed and threatened by Jones supporters who were weaponized by Jones's repeated insistence that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax and that the parents were anti-gun conspirators who had faked their losses and their grief. Wolfgang, You have included me with a lot of Information since the Sandy Hook Incident and I do appreciate it very much. Concerning what happened in Florida yesterday, I have been asking the question and no one else seems to be asking it. How is it that Cruz was able gain access to a secured facility while in possession of a rifle, multiple magazines, smoke grenades and a gas mask? To pull the fire alarm, he had to already be inside. Read the rest

This time she'd promised to resign if they approved it, paving the way for new leadership to execute Prime Minister Theresa May's deal with the European Union for Britain to depart the bloc. Dangling the keys to Downing Street reportedly won over a few power-hungry Tories like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, but not enough. Her Brexit deal was defeated again, for the third time.The vote on Friday might have been Mrs. May’s last chance to succeed on the issue that has dominated and defined her time in office, and the result left open an array of possibilities, including renewed demands for her resignation and early parliamentary elections.The defeat appears to leave the increasingly weakened prime minister with two unpalatable options in the short run: Britain can leave the bloc on April 12 without an agreement in place, a chaotic and potentially economically damaging withdrawal; or Mrs. May can ask European leaders – who have ruled out a short delay if her plan failed – for what could be a long postponement.It wasn't quite the thrashing as the first two votes — 344 votes to 286 — but still so far off that the sheer surreal chaos of it all impresses once again. Read the rest

In the extremely unlikely event that you end up piloting a Boeing 737 MAX jet and it decides to nosedive, here's a 20 minute tutorial from Mentour Pilot on how to turn off MCAS. Don't forget your duty free! Read the rest

In this otherwise unsourced video (via Singaporean news site Mothership) we may enjoy seeing parts so finely engineered that when they are socketed together, they appear to become single blocks of metal.UPDATE: Commenter for_SCIENCE pointed out that these are made using Electrical discharge machining, which Mark posted about here. More from RandomDude:"It is the only technology that makes specifically the kind of Parts you saw in that video possible. No other process can create perfect shapes that mesh so perfectly this way they appear seamless. I don’t care how good of a machinist you are it is physically impossible to do with traditional machining techniques what you saw." Read the rest

This desktop phone stand has a heavy base and a platform that swivels up to 45 degrees. The platform is coated with silicone rubber so as not to scratch your precious device. It also has silicone pads on the base to keep it from sliding around. I have an earlier discontinued model and use it every day. Read the rest

After Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivered a blistering rebuttal to Rep Sean Duffy's [R-WI] charge that the Green New Deal and environmentalism were "elitist" concerns that ignored the needs of rural people, Congressional Coal Caucus member Rep. Andy Barr [R-KY] invited her to visit Appalachian coal-towns and "go underground" to talk to people in the mining industry.AOC has taken Barr up on his invitation, saying "It’s a complete injustice the cancer levels that a lot of these communities are confronting. We have to plan a future for all of our communities, no matter what. Failure to plan is planning to fail and I feel like we’ve been failing Appalachian communities for a very long time and it’s time to turn that ship around."“We have to plan a future for all of our communities, no matter what,” she said. “Failure to plan is planning to fail and I feel like we’ve been failing Appalachian communities for a very long time and it’s time to turn that ship around.”Ocasio-Cortez says Appalachia ‘close to my heart’ as she accepts Barr’s coal mine invite [Lesley Clark/McClatchy] Read the rest

Former NSA contractor Harold Martin today changed his plea to guilty, on charges of willful retention of national defense information. Harold Martin was originally charged with 20 counts of violating the Espionage Act. He now appears more likely to face up to a recommended 9 years in prison, after pleading guilty to only the one charge, and may get credit for time served. Martin was arrested in 2016 on charges he stole an enormous amount of sensitive information and stored it on various devices he kept at his home in Glen Burnie, Maryland.From CBS News, Baltimore:He initially pleaded not guilty.The government recommended a nine-year-sentence. Martin has already served two and a half years, which he will get credit for.He pleaded guilty to one count of stealing a top secret NSA document and leaving it in his car, and another copy in the living room of his Glen Burnie home.His sentencing is scheduled for July.And from a 2016 Daily Beast profile of Martin:The retired Navy officer arrested for allegedly removing highly classified information from the National Security Agency worked with the organization's elite computer hackers, who specialize in using computer code to penetrate the systems of foreign nations, according to a former colleague and the man’s online resume.Harold Thomas Martin, III, who goes by Hal, was also enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. The university has a partnership with the NSA, in which the agency helps develop curriculum for the school and agency employees can take classes there. Read the rest

“It’s time, finally, to put a stake in the heart of this unnecessary government surveillance program and start to restore some of Americans’ liberties,” Wyden said in a statement.

The admitted agent for Russia was connected with the NRA and pro-Trump U.S. political groups.

Gymboree is one of the many companies acquired by Mitt Romney's Bain Capital, through a "leveraged buyout" through which the company was loaded up with debt so that the hedge fund could cash out; the company was left with massive debts and cycled through a succession of incompetent, inexperienced grifter CEOs who eventually ran the company into bankruptcy.As the company was going through bankruptcy, the board decided to exercise an obscure clause in its contracts to "terminate the severance plan," for all but a handful of favored execs on the leadership team (that is, the people who drove the company into bankruptcy). By doing this, the company was able to fire longterm employees who had stayed on in the runup to bankruptcy despite the obvious warning signs because they had been hired with the promise of generous severance.One of those denied severance was Mera Chung, who was recruited to work at Gymboree by her former boss from Old Navy, where she had been a vice-president. Chung was promised control of Crazy 8, Gymboree's most successful brand, and even though she could see that the company was headed for insolvency, she stayed on the job so that she could continue to pay her household bills, which included the costs of caring for her elderly and infirm mother; Chung assumed that her contractually promised one-year severance would kick in if the company folded and that she would have a cushion while she sought other employment.Instead, she was given no severance -- but watched as colleagues more favored by the company's board and its lead creditor, Goldman Sachs, were given secret severance payouts in the form of "retention bonuses" that nominally ensure that key personnel were available to ensure an orderly wind-down. Read the rest

Today, Twitter announced expanded 'dark mode' options for iOS users. Previously, Twitter offered a blue/gray dark mode theme, but they've added a true black/white “Lights Out” mode, and an automated dark mode.“Giving more people options to personalize their experience on Twitter based on what makes them most comfortable is what the latest update to Dark Mode is all about,” Bryan Haggerty, Senior Design Manager at Twitter, said in the company's announcement.Dim: Dim is the current Dark Mode theme that we introduced in 2016 – a blue/grey color that still gives people a more comfortable way to enjoy Twitter for any environment you’re in and helps reduce eye strain in low lit environments.Lights Out: Our new theme for Dark Mode, which is a pure black color palette that emits no light since the pixels are turned off. This is a great option for those who want an even darker theme for low lit environments that reduces eye strain, and can potentially help with saving battery.Automatic Dark Mode: Now, Twitter for iOS devices can enable automatic dark mode to switch from light to the dark mode theme of their choice according to their timezone. This feature takes the burden off of people to make the adjustments. If you’re using Twitter all day long, it’s better on the eyes to have a tool that adjusts for the varying environments, contexts, and atmospheres you’ll experience throughout the day.You should be able to launch the new modes with a close/reopen of the app, if updates are enabled. Read the rest

Documents from Apple leaked to reporters describe a program of support for third-party repairs, and the details sound like it was intended to comply with the requirements of a slew of new right-to-repair bills proposed in some 20 U.S. states.From Jason Koebler at Motherboard:As Apple continues to fight legislation that would make it easier for consumers to repair their iPhones, MacBooks, and other electronics, the company appears to be able to implement many of the requirements of the legislation, according to an internal presentation obtained by Motherboard.According to the presentation, titled “Apple Genuine Parts Repair” and dated April 2018, the company has begun to give some repair companies access to Apple diagnostic software, a wide variety of genuine Apple repair parts, repair training, and notably places no restrictions on the types of repairs that independent companies are allowed to do. The presentation notes that repair companies can “keep doing what you’re doing, with … Apple genuine parts, reliable parts supply, and Apple process and training.”This is, broadly speaking, what right to repair activists have been asking state legislators to require companies to offer for years.“This looks to me like a framework for complying with right to repair legislation,” Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit and a prominent member of the right to repair movement, told me on the phone. “Right now, they are only offering it to a few megachains, but it seems clear to me that it would be totally possible to comply with right to repair.”PHOTO: Shutterstock Read the rest

Photographs we're seeing online today, including one by Mark Lambie of the El Paso Times, below, capture the desperation of the unknown number of men, women, and children currently penned in, inside cages, under the Mexico-US international bridge, in El Paso, Texas.This should have been the featured photo. The United States government is penning in asylum seekers under the international bridge in El Paso. pic.twitter.com/8CDc5MOZjr— Brooke Binkowski (@brooklynmarie) March 28, 2019Hundreds of migrants are being held beneath the Paso Del Norte International Bridge in El Paso. CBP says it has run out of space to process the asylum seekers. In the El Paso Times' photo above, two boys look out from the fence at the bridge as protestors demand their release.As reported yesterday, most are from Central America, many are families, and some are in urgent need of medical attention. Border Patrol holding asylum seekers in tent under bridge in El Paso. Calls it a "transitional camp." More than half are families, most from Central America, “meaning their asylum requests and credible fear interviews must be heard,” reports @abcnews https://t.co/ekCRCyft9B pic.twitter.com/mAP6VVkDjr— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) March 27, 2019Let's be clear about what we are witnessing in these images. The United States government under Donald Trump is creating impromptu wire fence concentration camps for asylum seekers, as part of a manufactured border crisis driven by the Trump administration's white nationalist, white separatist, white supremacist policies.U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan visited El Paso today, El Paso Times reports, and said the border has hit its "breaking point." The recent influx of Central American migrants has made the El Paso Sector the second-busiest location on the U.S.-Mexico border. Read the rest

Sarah Leo is a visual data journalist at The Economist. In this Medium piece, she gives some past examples of Economist charts and graphs that were confusing or misleading and shows her revisions.Mistake: Truncating the scaleThis chart shows the average number of Facebook likes on posts by pages of the political left. The point of this chart was to show the disparity between Mr Corbyn’s posts and others.The original chart not only downplays the number of Mr Corbyn’s likes but also exaggerates those on other posts. In the redesigned version, we show Mr Corbyn’s bar in its entirety. All other bars remain visible. (Avid followers of this blog will have seen another example of this bad practice.)Another odd thing is the choice of colour. In an attempt to emulate Labour’s colour scheme, we used three shades of orange/red to distinguish between Jeremy Corbyn, other MPs and parties/groups. We don’t explain this. While the logic behind the colours might be obvious to a lot of readers, it perhaps makes little sense for those less familiar with British politics.Image: Medium Read the rest

Things keep getting weirder.Look in the background during Interior Secretary Nominee David Bernhardt's opening statement.Watch LIVE on C-SPAN3 https://t.co/i3oegv9okf pic.twitter.com/UiiaVfV8h2— CSPAN (@cspan) March 28, 2019I am wondering what statement the cosplayer would like us to take away from this. Evidently the Democratic Senators in attendance had a lot to say about candidate Bernhardt's ethics. Read the rest

US Representative Adam Schiff responds to all 9 Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee calling for his resignation. Read the rest

Unlike all the breadcore pals I have baking loaves with hand-ground sorghum and Bolivian yeast strains kept at 75% hydration, I left my sourdough starter on the kitchen counter for a week and didn't bother feeding it.After another midafternoon phone call from a friend who newly discovered baking as a relaxing and delicious artform asking for recommendations on baking something crisp-but-gooey, I looked at the live starter I keep on my counter. I transplanted it from the sleeping mass of junk a week or so back, baked a few great loaves of bread, and then kinda forgot about it. I had other stuff on my mind. The phone conversation led me to desire bread.Intending to put up a loaf later in the afternoon, I fed the room temperature but dormant starter. Fi,rst I mixed all the hooch into the starter. I then discarded a cup of starter and added 1/2 cup each of warm water and flour. Then I stirred, covered and gave it 4 hours.I used the starter to prepare my go-to no-knead loaf of bread, flour and whole wheat. Said dough was permit to rise overnight. Pretty much everything looked like dough normally does on a first rise. I then folded the blob! The dough was pretty wet, I left it to proof in its basket.I had a hard time deciding when it was ready for the oven. After 90 minutes I could see some large bubbles had formed in the dough, and a poke-with-index-finger test was getting what I thought were correct springing back results, but something looked off. Read the rest

New York Times reporters Andy Newman and Ana Fota took one (and sometimes two) for the team by visiting subway station restrooms across New York City. It was a shitty job, but someone had to do it. I guess. From the New York Times:Norwood-205th Street, BronxD lineThe cracked concrete floor of the men’s room looked like it had not been mopped in years. But on the plus side, on the frigid day of our visit, the room was toasty hot.So hot that someone had wedged takeout Chinese food between the scalding radiator and the wall, possibly to keep it warm — a full container of shrimp-fried rice and brown-breaded nuggets.“That’s no good,” said the station supervisor, S. Hope, when we brought it to his attention. “That will melt and catch fire.” He threw it out.In the women’s room, fire safety has apparently been learned the hard way. “No storage within three (3) feet,” read a sign on the floor beside a radiator covered in burn marks. The radiator was working fine, though. The environment was reminiscent of the tropical monkey habitat at the Central Park Zoo.(Mr. Hope said the bathrooms are cleaned three times a day.)The main door to the women’s room has a peephole to let you see who’s in the hall. But it does not lock. “People hert people,” reads graffiti on the door.The women’s room offered another unexpected sight: a man, standing at the toilet. He apologized on his way out, but offered no explanation. Read the rest

TossingBot is a robot that teaches itself how to pick up and toss objects with great accuracy. Eventually, the robot -- designed by researchers from Google, Princeton, Columbia, and MIT -- could lead to more efficient pick-and-place (grab-and-toss?) robots for factory automation, debris clearing at disaster sites, or perhaps package delivery. Right now though, the TossingBot is quite good at throwing bananas into bins. From IEEE Spectrum:Part of what makes TossingBot so useful is that the tossing technique significantly decreases the time that the robot spends on the “place” part of a pick-and-place task. Rather than spending time putting an object down, objects are instead (as the researchers put it) “immediately passed to Newton,” and the toss also means that the robot’s effective reach is significantly longer than its physical workspace....The interesting bit of TossingBot itself is a deep neural network that starts with a depth image of objects in a bin, and goes all the way through from successful grasp to parameters for the throw itself. Since the throwing of an object (especially an unbalanced object) depends heavily on how it’s being held, grasping and throwing are learned at the same time. By measuring whether a grasp is successful by whether a throw is successful, TossingBot learns to favor grasps that result in accurate throws. As you can see from the video, the learning process itself is fairly clever, and the robot can be mostly just left alone to figure things out for itself, managing 10,000 grasp and throw attempts in 14 hours of training time. Read the rest

Sgaawaay K'uuna, or Edge of the Knife, is the first feature film to portray the Haida – a group of people from Haida Gwaii, aka the Queen Charlotte Islands (off the west coast of Canada's British Columbia). It's also the first film in which the characters speak entirely in Haida, a language which only 20 people in the world speak fluently (even though the Haida population is a few thousand, according to The Guardian). The actors had to learn the language in order to understand their lines.Via The Guardian:The film, set on Haida Gwaii in the 19th century, is based on an old Haida myth about a man who survives an accident at sea, only to become so weakened that he is taken over by supernatural beings.It is part of a wider push to preserve the Haida language, including a new dictionary and recordings of local voices.Edenshaw said Haida uses a lot of “guttural sounds and glottal stops” and that actors needed to learn it because it differs from English, let alone other languages: “When you upspeak to denote a question in English, that doesn’t exist in Haida. There is an upspeak, but the questioning portion … appears in the middle of the sentence.”That was among the details that his cast of non-Haida speakers had to learn over many months before the shoot.The film will be released in April. Read the rest

Now this is a bedroom suite. "But wait, there's more!" says mansion-explorer Erick Tseng. Even the panic room, which it took cops half an hour to find, is larger than most London apartments. Read the rest

No-one can make you sound quite as great as your enemies can. Here's Dr. Paul Nathanson, responding to conservative host Laura Ingraham's suggestion trans people are merely destroying traditional families:“I think that the trans people have taken it one step further because by abandoning gender altogether, not simply re-writing it, they're basically trying to use social engineering to create a new species. Which is what, in fact, the transhumanists have been doing for the past half century. Using medical and other technologies to develop a new species.“So the goal is really quite radical. We're not talking about people who want to simply do a bit of reform here and there, add a new category. They want, they must, in fact, destroy whatever is in order to replace it with what they think should be. We're talking about revolution, not reform.”Then:Ingraham asks: "And the new species will be looking like what? Will be part human part animal? I mean, will be human mostly…"Nathanson said, "I think human and part machine," to which Ingraham replies "part machine, hmm."Conservatives often see with a suprising clarity and openness before their political instincts kick in. Here they're noodling on 1985 or so in feminist posthumanism. If the enemy has long moved on, this still has the hauntological result of snapping everyone back to a long-ago moment that seems suddenly fresh again (yet weirdly rustic to those who were there). I've never met a trans-exclusionary feminist who has read Haraway, but now everyone will have to at least take a stab at it. Read the rest

Jordan Reeves, 13, was born with a left arm that doesn't extend past her elbow. Last year, Jordan dreamt up a curious prosthetic arm that resembles a unicorn horn and shoots glitter out of its tip. Then, working with her prosthetist and technical designers at Autodesk, she designed and built the magical contraption."I wanted show people that our differences don't necessarily hold us back, in fact, they can give us more opportunity," Reeves told WGN9.After receiving numerous awards for her ingenuity and founding a nonprofit, Born Just Right, Reeves was invited to display her prosthetic at the Chicago Musuem of Science and Industry's Wired to Wear exhibit. "I love that I can show people that our differences aren't a bad thing... just look at how much fun it can be" Reeves said.More on Jordan Reeves in Fast Company: "The Girl Behind The Sparkle-Shooting Prosthetic Arm Is Just Getting Started" Read the rest

Relaxing, and ever so slightly peculiar, is this footage of an American Freestyle Canoeing master at work. American Freestyle canoeing is the art of paddling a canoe on flat water with perfect control of its movements. The canoe is usually leaned over to the side to help the boat turn sharply and efficiently and paddle strokes are taken on either side of the canoe depending on the individual move. Balance, paddle placement and turn initiation are a few keys to this control. Since the movements seem dance-like, some practice this art timed to music, which is the ultimate in control.A redditor on Ornstein's unique abilities: His backstroke tilted side-turn is probably the best you'll ever see. Not to mention he pretty much invented the inverted wind-slide. He was the first one to ever do it in the late 90s. I know some people are going to laugh, but it really is the most dangerous trick in the sport. People have sustained serious arm injuries and muscle tears attempting it. Sven Englewood almost drowned trying to perform it in the 2009 World Championships.Anyway, guys like Ornstein are the reason Freestyle Canoeing has grown with such popularity in the last couple decades.Shhh. Whatever you're about to say: Shhhhhhhh.Also fits the sartorial-semiotic slot that the British and Chinese plug snooker into. Read the rest

We had a fantastic time on Tuesday at the Ft Vancouver Library Revolutionary Reads event for Radicalized, my latest sf book. Tonight, I'll be in Seattle, appearing at the the Central Library at 7PM. From there, I finish the tour with a weekend at Wondercon in Anaheim. See you there (tell your friends)! (Image: Fort Vancouver Library) Read the rest