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Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH little Donald really, really wants a wall.

Editor's Note: Richard Metzger is a connoisseur of cannabis, and recently started growing his own. He's test-driving high-end rig good for small-scale grows from Cloudponics. This is not a sponsored post, Boing Boing is not getting anything from Cloudponics. Metzger's just really *that* enthusiastic about weed, and spoiler alert, so far he likes the Cloudponics setup. Here's an early photo from the grow, and the first installment of Richard's ongoing lab notes. — XeniI am a 53-year-old wake-n-bake stoner and I've been high since 1979. Leaving much of that, er, loaded statement aside (and yes, as a definitive study of one, I do plan to leave my body to science) think of all the money I've spent staying massively stoned since I was fourteen. At approximately $20 a day over 365 days per annum ($7300) for 39 years that comes to $284,700 but do consider that I had to make nearly twice that and pay tax on that income before I could spend it on herb. Money doesn't grow on trees, of course, but there was a time not all that long ago when an ounce of pot and an ounce of gold were the exact same price, for a little perspective.I kid myself that all my money was spent on books and records, but I know the truth. And the truth is, I have no regrets. Frankly I cannot imagine what my life would have been like without marijuana nor do I wish to try. It seems obvious in retrospect that I was, and am, self-medicating, but who cares about that? Read the rest

Cannon Harrison, 24, was on dating app Bumble when he connected with a woman in his area who quickly bragged to him that she had just shot a "bigo buck," a large deer, in the darkness. She even sent Harrison a photo posed with her prey and admitted that she had been "spotlighting," taking advantage of the real deer-in-the-headlights behavior to get an easier shot. The woman didn't know it at the time, but Harrison is a warden with Oklahoma’s Department of Wildlife Conservation. And not only is spotlighting against the law but the season for hunting deer with rifles is over. From the Washington Post:“Honestly, the first thing I thought was that it was someone who was messing with me because they knew who I was,” he told The Washington Post. “It seemed too good to be true.”Armed only with the woman’s first name, a photo and a rough sense of her location, Harrison searched through social media until he had figured out her identity. The next morning, game wardens showed up at her home...The woman ultimately pleaded guilty to hunting deer out of season and possessing game that was taken illegally, Harrison said...(She received a fine of) $2,400, according to the Tulsa World — a total that also includes the fines incurred by a man who had been out hunting with her and took home the buck’s head afterward. Because the woman has agreed to pay her share of the fines, she will not face jail time, Harrison said. Read the rest

Mind metaphysics, or positive thinking, is a fascinating and mysterious field of personal exploration and inquiry. The guiding principle and basic tenet of mind metaphysics is that thoughts are causative, i.e. thoughts — those intangible acts of cognition, attention and intention — can actually shape reality and the material world in accordance with our wishes and desires. With roots in ancient Hermetic traditions, this profound idea made its way into culture, though not without resistance, via the New Thought and Human Potential movements, and more recently, Positive Psychology, as well as myriad incarnations in business motivation and the self-help industry. The latest noteworthy work on the contemporary metaphysical scene, already hailed as a modern classic, is The Miracle Club, How Thoughts Become Reality by Mitch Horowitz. A longtime Boing Boing pal, Horowitz is among the most articulate and authoritative voices in the fields of alternative spirituality, occult and esoteric history. He has curated and authored dozens of books, such as the fundamental Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, and One Simple Idea: How the Lessons of Positive Thinking Can Transform Your Life. The Miracle Club is part memoir, part historical map, part "operating manual" for manifesting your true will and your heart's desires. The promise of the book is pretty simple: you can make miracles happen. There's a catch though: miracles ain't free — there is work to do.Grounding his reflections in personal history and a life of experimentation, Horowitz comes across as the real deal: he is an authentic "adept mind" and he knows his stuff. Read the rest

Salinas, California police nabbed Roberto Daniel Arroyo, 33, after homeowners the Dungan family captured video of the gentleman licking their doorbell, many times, in the middle of the night Saturday. Arroyo allegedly also swiped some extension cords from the Dungan's Christmas decorations. According to an interview with David Dungan in the Salinas Californian, they have since cleaned their front porch and "bleached the doorknobs." From the newspaper:Officers knew Arroyo because they have encountered him several times previously, (Salinas Police spokesperson Miguel) Cabrera said...The case has been sent to the Monterey County District Attorney's Office, which will decide whether to file charges. Police are seeking misdemeanor prowling, theft and violation of probation charges, Cabrera said. "This Salinas doorbell camera caught some truly bizarre behavior, police say" (The Salinas Californian) Read the rest

Today is R. Kelly's birthday. Today, news is breaking that the singer is under investigation in Georgia. R. Kelly has been accused of abuse, predatory behavior, and pedophilia for decades. A new investigation has launched into charges he committed crimes against girls in Fulton County. Dream Hampton, executive producer of 'Surviving R. Kelly,' said it best.Happy Birthday @rkelly https://t.co/vJsPMKYMF9— dream hampton (@dreamhampton) January 8, 2019From TMZ, this afternoon:R. Kelly is being criminally investigated in Georgia -- and it's all because of Lifetime's docuseries ... TMZ has learned.Sources connected to the case tell us the Fulton County District Attorney's Office has opened an investigation into allegations made against the singer in "Surviving R. Kelly." We're told the probe was launched over the past few days as a direct result of what 'Surviving' depicted. We're told investigators have been reaching out to several survivors featured in the TV project. We have confirmed investigators reached out to Asante McGee, one of the women who allegedly escaped R. Kelly's home.The attorney for Joycelyn Savage's family was contacted by Chief Investigator Cynthia Nwokocha and has been fully cooperating.Why hasn't R. Kelly faced criminal charges or an investigation of this kind before? Perhaps because he already got off once. From the New York Times, May 2018:Since the first major newspaper investigation by The Chicago Sun-Times into allegations of abuse by the singer in 2000, Mr. Kelly has consistently denied that he has been violent and sexually coercive with women and young teenagers even as he has settled lawsuits, dating to the mid-1990s, with accusers. Read the rest

Trump's government shutdown, now on day 17 and counting, has led to the closure of Joshua Tree National Park. The park announced today, Tuesday January 8, that it will temporarily close “effective 8 am on Thursday, January 10, to allow park staff to address sanitation, safety, and resource protection issues in the park that have arisen during the lapse in appropriations.”Officials at the popular California park say some of the iconic desert trees (Yucca brevifolia) and other ancient elements of the landscape have been damaged by people and their cars since the shutdown began, severely limiting park staffing."While the vast majority of those who visit Joshua Tree National Park do so in a responsible manner, there have been incidents of new roads being created by motorists and the destruction of Joshua trees in recent days that have precipitated the closure. Law enforcement rangers will continue to patrol the park and enforce the closure until park staff complete the necessary cleanup and park protection measures," park officials said in the release.In related news, Rep. Jackie Speier is dumping some of the national park trash right on Trump's doorstep.⁦@RepHuffman⁩ and I are delivering trash that he and I cleaned up in national parks in our districts last weekend and that I personally paid to have shipped to DC so that we can deliver it to the White House. pic.twitter.com/kutje4Ue6F— Jackie Speier (@RepSpeier) January 8, 2019Your faithful Boing Boing writer is among the many Americans who have visited multiple national parks in recent weeks, and encountered trash piling up, restrooms not being serviced, and parking rules being violated. Read the rest

As Donald Trump prepares for his 8-minute “The Wall” remarks, which will be televised live by all major U.S. networks, read Nicholas Rasmussen's take in Just Security on the so-called terrorism crisis at the southern border. Spoiler. There is none. “Bottom line,” says Rasmussen, a career defense professional who was the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center from 2014 to 2017: “There is no crisis, and anyone who says there is probably trying to mislead or scare the American people.”Snip:Taken at face value, rhetoric from the White House and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would lead Americans to believe that the United States is facing a terrorism crisis at our southern border. The picture being painted is one in which thousands of terrorists have been stopped crossing our southern border to infiltrate the Homeland. If that were true, that would indeed be a crisis.In reality, no such crisis exists.Our federal courthouses and prisons are not filled with terrorists we’ve captured at the border. There is no wave of terrorist operatives waiting to cross overland into the United States. It simply isn’t true. Anyone in authority using this argument to bolster support for building the wall or any other physical barrier along the southern border is most likely guilty of fear mongering and willfully misleading the American people.Why do I know this? As Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) from December 2014 until December 2017, it was my job to lead the government’s efforts to collect and analyze all available information about terrorist threats to the Homeland. Read the rest

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort provided an individual identified as a Kremlin agent with internal campaign polling data, while Russia's military was executing a political attack on the United States presidential elections of 2016. Things we learned today from Manafort's lawyers' redaction errors: Manafort is alleged to have met in Madrid w/Kilimnik; shared polling data with him; and discussed a Ukraine peace plan w/him more than once. Is that the same peace plan that Cohen delivered to Flynn in Jan 2017?— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) January 8, 2019That court filing says that Manafort shared the Trump campaign's polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the FBI maintains is linked to Russian intelligence.The filing appears to reveal details that were intended to have been redacted before going public. It explains how Russia probably gained access to Trump campaign data.These failed redactions show Manafort had a meeting with Kilimnik in Madrid, gave him campaign polling data, and discussed a Ukrainian peace plan with him - then lied about all of it. Very normal contacts between a US presidential campaign manager & a Russian intelligence asset. https://t.co/9tt5sjdVVb— Matthew Miller (@matthewamiller) January 8, 2019From the Washington Post:The former Trump campaign chairman on Tuesday denied in a filing from his defense team that he broke his plea deal by lying repeatedly to prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about that and other issues.In his rebuttal to the special counsel’s claims of dishonesty, Manafort exposed details of the dispute, much of which centers on his relationship with Kilimnik. Read the rest

The same year that Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai killed broadband privacy and cheated Network Neutrality to death, the Trump tax plan delivered a $20B windfall to AT&T -- both Trump and Pai claimed that the measures would stimulate the economy and trickle down to the rest of us.Now, AT&T is saying thank you to America by prepping mass layoffs in ten of its operational hubs in New York, California, Texas, New Jersey, Washington State, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, and Washington, DC. They've also cut investment in broadband rollout.Despite some saber-rattling, Trump also let AT&T merge with Time-Warner.The billions Trump gave to AT&T are being used for stock-buybacks, executive compensation, and paying off debts from previous ill-advised mergers.Last month, Verizon killed 10,000 jobs after pocketing billions in tax-breaks. In a memo of talking points advising managers on how to address employee concerns obtained by Motherboard, AT&T attempts to explain away the disconnect between the company’s words and its actions.“What we’ve said was that AT&T planned to invest an additional $1 billion in the United States this year as a result of tax reform, and that research shows that every $1 billion in capital invested in the telecom industry creates about 7,000 good-paying jobs for American workers, across the broader economy,” the memo states.But wireless sector investment actually declined last year, with most of the savings from regulatory favors and tax breaks going instead toward stock buybacks, executive compensation, or to pay off the mammoth debt accumulated by a series of AT&T megamergers many consumers and employees didn’t want in the first place, critics charge. Read the rest

News alert from Promobot: "A self-driving Tesla Model S hit and destroyed an autonomous Promobot the robot model v4 in Las Vegas in a car accident. The incident took place at 3000 Paradise Rd, Las Vegas." Read the rest

What an excellent choice! Dr William Gibson, Grand Master of Science Fiction has such a nice ring to it. Go Bill! You can watch him get his award at the next Nebula Awards weekend, May 16-19, at the Warner Center Marriott Woodland Hills in southern California. I have been to a Nebula weekend in at least a decade, but I'm putting this one in my calendar. (Image: Frederic Poirot, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

A gentleman thought he could threaten a woman waiting for an Uber outside of her home in Rio de Janiero by demanding that she hand over her phone and that he was armed. What he didn't know is that the 26-year-old woman, Polyana Viana, is a UFC fighter. Within minutes he was beaten with punches, a kick, and a "rear-naked choke," according to CNN, and Viana kept the bloody man subdued until police showed up. The man's concealed "gun" – which he patted when he threatened her – turned out to be a cardboard cutout.An ambulance took the beaten man to the hospital for his injuries before heading to the police station, where Viana filed charges. View this post on Instagram On the left is @polyanaviana, one of our @UFC fighters and on the right is the guy who tried to rob her #badfuckingideaA post shared by Dana White (@danawhite) on Jan 6, 2019 at 7:01pm PST Read the rest

If you want to follow someone in realtime, you don't need to shell out to shady data-brokers like Securus (which use a marketing company that exploits a privacy law loophole to obtain phone location data); there are a whole constellation of location data resellers who will do business with anyone, regardless of the notional privacy protections they promise the carriers they'll put in place.Notably, these resellers do business with bail bondsmen and bounty hunters, who can, for a few dollars, locate any phone on the major carriers' networks.The carriers were mired in scandal over the Securus affair last year, and pledged to clean up their act (T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted "I’ve personally evaluated this issue & have pledged that @tmobile will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen"). They have not.Carriers contacted about this story said virtually the same thing they said last time. Microbilt buys access to location data from an aggregator called Zumigo and then sells it to a dizzying number of sectors, including landlords to scope out potential renters; motor vehicle salesmen, and others who are conducting credit checks. Armed with just a phone number, Microbilt’s “Mobile Device Verify” product can return a target’s full name and address, geolocate a phone in an individual instance, or operate as a continuous tracking service.“You can set up monitoring with control over the weeks, days and even hours that location on a device is checked as well as the start and end dates of monitoring,” a company brochure Motherboard found online reads. Read the rest

After 126 years in business, reports CNBC, Sears is shutting shop.Sears Holdings has rejected Chairman Eddie Lampert’s bid to save the 126-year-old company, setting the storied retailer with more than 50,000 employees on a path to liquidation, people familiar with the situation told CNBC on Tuesday. Sears, which also owns Kmart, planned to announce its liquidation plans Tuesday morning, the people said.In charge of the company for many years and the man responsible for merging it with Kmart, his $4.4bn bid didn't cover the bills. Lampert was "once deemed the next Warren Buffett" but isn't, obviously.Previously: RIP Sears. Photo: Richard Eriksson Read the rest

The Ethereum Classic (ETC) blockchain was recently compromised by a hacker who spent 88,500 tokens (worth $500,000) then used a lot of computing power to roll back the blockchain so they could get the tokens back. The original tokens are now worthless because they belong to blocks that aren't part of the chain. Major cryptocurrency exchanges have halted trading of (ETC).From Ars Technica:Stated a different way, a rollback attack generates a new fork of the blockchain. This causes nodes to replace the original blockchain with the new one and makes it possible for attackers to reverse previously made transactions. Rollback attacks require control of a substantial fraction of the total hashpower devoted to generating the coin's blockchain for a period long enough to pull off the attack. Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto warned of the key limitation in his white paper introducing the digital coin.Coinbase paused movements of affected ETC funds to prevent any double spends from hitting its users. Meanwhile, the Kraken Exchange temporarily halted ETC deposits and withdrawals and plans to bring ETC funding back online once exchange officials believe it is safe to do so. ETC officials, for their part, have confirmed that double spends are affecting the currency, but they have yet to say more.Image: ethereumclassic.org Read the rest

In 1917, a munitions ship exploded in Halifax, Nova Scotia, devastating the city and shattering the lives of its citizens. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the events of the disaster, the largest man-made explosion before Hiroshima, and the grim and heroic stories of its victims.We'll also consider the dangers of cactus plugging and puzzle over why a man would agree to be assassinated.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

It's been ten years since the people of Juneau, Alaska succumbed to conspiracy theories and voted to ruin their kids' teeth by removing fluoride from the drinking water, and it shows.A BMC Oral Health study by Jennifer Meyer (U Alaska), Vasileios Margaritis (Walden U) and Aaron Mendelsohn (Walden U) found that, on average, the families of unfluoridated kids of Juneau paid an extra $300 to have preventable cavities drilled and filled. Fluoride costs pennies. Those figures are based on the youngest children assessed in the study, aged under six years of age.Among those patients, kids who were exposed to fluoride in their tap water had on average 1.55 caries procedures annually – but this jumped to 2.52 procedures annually for the children in the suboptimal group.The effect was more subtle for age groups older than the 0 to Read the rest

Love Hultén makes beautiful game devices based on the Raspberry Pi and RertroPie. His latest design, which has a speckly textured finish, is called the Geoboi. Read the rest

My favorite part of Bewitched was always Bernard Fox's character Doctor Bombay. Read the rest

AT&T has added a "5Ge" symbol to several phones from Samsung and LG, misleading customers into thinking they have something special. There is no 5Ge network, it is LTE.The Verge reports:AT&T has updated three smartphones from Samsung and LG to make them show 5G connectivity logos, even though none of them are capable of connecting to 5G networks.Now, when the Samsung Galaxy S8 Active, LG V30, or LG V40 are connected to portions of AT&T’s LTE network that have received some speed-boosting updates, they’ll show an icon that says “5G E” instead of “LTE.”That “E” in the “5G” logo is supposed to tip you off that this isn’t real 5G — just some marketing nonsense. But there’s no way of knowing that just from looking at the logo. The “E” is smaller than the rest of the icon. And even if you do learn that “5G E” stands for “5G Evolution,” it isn’t immediately clear what that means. Read the rest

In the 1930s, the Works Public Administration commissioned a 1":100' wooden model of San Francisco; the final model is 38' x 42', with 6,000 removable city blocks spanning 158 pieces.After being exhibited in the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay in 1939 and city hall from 1940-42, it was used as a city planning tool and then as a teaching aid at the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.The whole model has not been on public display since 1942, but now SFMOMA and the San Francisco Public Library have commissioned high-resolution photographs of each piece, which are assembled into a virtual layout that has been transposed to Google Maps; it's part of the joint Public Knowledge: Take Part initiative.The condition of the model is generally good except for the downtown and south of market portions which need restoration - many blocks there have been removed and lost, probably from the time it was used and updated as a planning tool. The team that has made the model available again to the public are the principals of Public Knowledge: Take Part: Bik Van der Pol, Artists; Stella Lochman Project Manager; Tomoko Kanamitsu, Project Director; Deena Chalabi, Curatorial Lead; and Bay Area historian Gray Brechin, who for many years has championed the Model's preservation as a critical piece of Bay Area history during the New Deal. 1940 WPA San Francisco Model 42x38 ft Now Online [David Rumsey Historical Map Collection](via JWZ) Read the rest

Every ten years, the US government is constitutionally mandated to carry out a census: the first census, in 1790, only counted "the head of household and the number of free white males, other free persons and slaves in each household."Each census since then has changed the way people are counted, with racial categories expanding and contracting in response to the way people identified themselves: in 1880, the "Chinese" category was added, and then in 1890, it was joined by "Japanese," and ten years after that, "Asian" was broken down into "Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, Vietnamese, and Other Asian." Other "Asian" fluctuations include "Hindu," "Hawaiian," "Part Hawaiian," "Samoan," "Guamanian," "Other Pacific Islander" (and in 2000, Pacific Islanders finally got bureaucratically separated from Asia, to reflect their geographic separation).The categories for indigenous and Black people are no less interesting, as are the Latinx categories.It's all easy to explore thanks to an interactive site put together by the Pew Center.What Census Calls Us: A Historical Timeline [Pew Center](Thanks, Fipi Lele!) Read the rest

What do you do if you're walking alone on a lonely dark street and a car starts chasing you? This man is minding his own business when a car stops alongside him. It's not clear what the passenger of the car says or does to make this guy scared, but he runs in the opposite direction. The car then chases him by driving in reverse, so the guy stops in his tracks, reverses his direction again while crossing the street diagonally. At this point another car comes by, and the man again changes his direction to run alongside it, making it impossible for the stalker to continue without making an obvious scene. This guy was both smart and lucky! Read the rest

The 2018 election included a Florida ballot initiative to restore felons' voting rights (with the exception of convicted murderers and sexual offenders): the 1.4 million Americans who will get their votes restored today as a consequence are the largest cohort of Americans to get access to the ballot since women's sufferage in 1920.The restoration of voting rights for felons is an important step in reversing the electoral suppression practiced by Republicans as part of their election-stealing tactics, which range from dark money spending to poll-taxes to gerrymandering and beyond. 97% of people who are indicted by a Federal grand jury plead guilty. That is not because US prosecutors are in possession of psychic powers that help them to solely indict guilty people: it's because the combination of inhumane prison conditions, resource-starved public defenders, farcically long prison sentences, and the proliferation of jailable offenses. If a prosecutor decides you're guilty, he'll get you indicted like a ham sandwich, charge you with a long list of felonies, threaten you with centuries of prison time in a medieval-torture-grade federal pen, stick you with an inattentive, underpaid public defender, and then offer you a plea deal (which your PD will endorse).The ability to plead innocent is a privilege, a function of the wealth of the accused. Whiteness is also correlated with wealth in America, and banning felons from voting is mostly a way of banning Black and brown people from voting.Florida's voting restoration ballot initiative was incredibly explicit: it restores votes today, without any need for further work from the legislature. Read the rest

If you require Nutella on demand, these 25-gram jars pocketable glass jars of the spreadable wonder substance will fit the bill. Amazon sells them in lots of 16 and 32. Read the rest

This lovely documentary shares a bit of the magic that stuntman and comedian Gary Morgan calls life.The Flying Morgans are Los Angeles' honest-to-goodness circus family. I was lucky enough to have lunch and do some holiday shopping with Gary, Susie and their daughter Bonnie just a few days before Christmas, and as always they filled my day with laughter and light.Gary is a bottomless well of energy and wit. His life is filled with song, dance, art and love. I am lucky to call him a friend. Read the rest

The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive has been cloning giant redwoods from genetic material still living in their stumps, and planting them around the world.e360@Yale reports:Today, giant stumps of ancient redwoods dot the landscape from Oregon to northern California, reminders of the old-growth forest that used to stretch across the Pacific Northwest. Many arborists assumed these stumps were dead, but Milarch and his son, Jake, discovered living tissue growing from the trees’ roots, material known as baseless or stump sprouts. The Milarchs collected DNA from stumps of five giant coast redwoods, all larger than the largest tree living today. These included a giant sequoia known as General Sherman with a 25-foot diameter.They then used this genetic material to grow dozens of saplings, clones of the ancient trees, a process that takes approximately two-and-a-half-years. The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive has already planted nearly 100 of these saplings in the Eden Project garden in Cornwall, England, a couple hundred in Oregon, and is organizing further groves of saplings in nine other countries.“These saplings have extraordinary potential to purify our air, water, and soil for generations to come,” Milarch said. “We hope [the San Francisco] ‘super grove,’ which has the capability to become an eternal forest, is allowed to grow unmolested by manmade or natural disasters and thus propagate forever.”(Thanks, John Stewart!) Read the rest

Go fuck yourself, Rochester.A TV meteorologist at an NBC affiliate in Rochester, New York was fired after being accused of using an on-air racial slur in reference to Martin Luther King Jr. However, WHEC chief meteorologist Jeremy Kappell says he simply "jumbled" his words during Friday's broadcast. A video posted to social media of Kappell's broadcast shows him apparently calling a park named for the slain civil rights leader "Martin Luther Coon King Jr. Park."WHEC general manager Richard Reingold wrote on the station's website that the station made a "staffing change" Sunday. In a rambling video, Kappell says is was a misunderstanding, a mispronunciation, "if it hurts you I sincerely apologize," and then criticizes his station.“What happened on Friday, to me, it’s a simple misunderstanding. If you watch me regularly, you know that I tend to contain a lot of information in my weathercast, which forces me to speak fast and unfortunately I spoke a little too fast when I was referencing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — so fast to the point where I jumbled a couple of words. Now in my mind, I knew I had mispronounced. But there was no malice."...I'm so disappointed that my career could end this way and extremely disappointed and the decisions made by my television station my expected a certain level of support from and I did not receive at all Not the recommended way to apologize, sure, but you can't say he didn't do him. Read the rest

Composer and Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and three of his collaborators on the massively successful musical have saved a famed 100-year-old specialty theater bookstore in New York City from going out of business. Facing unaffordable rent in Times Square, the Drama Book Shop was on death's door even as it sought a new location. According to the New York Times, the city has committed to help identify a new location in Midtown Manhattan. From the New York Times:The new owners of the store are Mr. Miranda; Thomas Kail, the director of “Hamilton”; Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer; and James L. Nederlander, the president of the Nederlander Organization, which operates the theater in which the show’s Broadway production is running. They purchased the store from Rozanne Seelen, whose husband, Arthur Seelen, had bought it in 1958. (He died in 2000.) Ms. Seelen said she sold it for the cost of the remaining inventory, some rent support in the store’s final weeks, and a pledge to retain her as a consultant.“It’s the chronic problem — the rents were just too high, and I’m 84 years old — I just didn’t have the drive to find a new space and make another move,” she said. “Lin-Manuel and Tommy are my white knights...”“When I was in high school I would go to the old location and sit on the floor and read plays — I didn’t have the money to buy them,” Mr. Miranda said... Read the rest

When I was very little, my big brother brought me in to school for show-and-tell. In the lunchroom, a kid fired a rubber band that hit me right in the face. I still remember the welt. This fascinating video uses high-speed footage to explain the physics behind this age-old form of weaponry. It also reminded me of the traumatic experience that forever made me a conscientious objector to the rubber band wars. Read the rest

Art conservator Emily Macdonald-Korth was evaluationg a client's Jean-Michel Basquiat untitled painting from 1981 when she looked at the work under ultraviolet light to reveal any repairs or varnishing. From artnet News:“I start looking at this thing and I see these arrows,” Macdonald-Korth told artnet News. She flipped the lights back on to make sure she wasn’t imagining things and the arrows disappeared. She flipped the lights off again and there they were: two arrows drawn in what looked like black-light crayon, virtually identical to other arrows drawn visibly on the canvas with red and black oil sticks. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “He basically did a totally secret part of this painting.”In fact, this isn’t the first time Basquiat has been known to use fluorescent UV materials. In 2012, Sotheby’s London discovered that his painting Orange Sports Figure from 1982—done just months after the one Macdonald-Korth analyzed—contained an invisible-ink signature of the artist’s name in the bottom right corner. But he has never been known to include UV-specific imagery in his work. Read the rest

Robert Crosland, the high school teacher who fed a puppy to a turtle in front of young teenagers, was found not guilty of animal cruelty this week.Robert Crosland, the Preston Junior High School teacher, smiled as the verdict was read and afterward spoke publicly for the first time since the March ordeal.“I would just like to thank all of the support that I’ve received,” he said. “I’d like to thank this community for staying behind me. It’s really what got me through all of this.”Shane Reichert, an attorney representing Crosland, explained that what matters is not what people think about animals but what the law defines: "Regardless of whether it's a puppy, an elk, a deer, a coyote, a mouse or a rat, it doesn't matter in the eyes of the law. There is no distinction in the law between them and ... domestical animals." Thanking the jury, Reichert air quoted the word "puppy" to emphasize how meaningless it is in legal terms to distinguish them from the live vermin usually fed to reptiles.Also in the news this week is a Sheriff's deputy, Keenan Wallace, who shot a chihuahua to punish a man who refused to talk to him: Here's the video, which, be warned, shows the cop shooting a tiny, obviously harmless dog. The dog survived."An internal investigation conducted by the Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office found Wallace’s actions did not violate any policies or laws," of course, but they changed their minds and fired him after the media found out. Read the rest

In four days, federal employees will suffer their first missed paycheck since Trump's border wall shutdown; it's hard to say who will be worst hit: the employees who are furloughed will never see that money (but who may have been able to pick up some other work while they were off the job to cover their bills); or the "essential" federal employees who've had to show up for work every day without pay, but who will, someday, get a paycheck to cover their forced labor.In the latter group are 51,739 TSA "officers" (TSA screeners aren't cops, but they've adopted the "officer" honorific in a bid to secure flyers' obedience while they confiscate their apple-pie filling). Since the shut-down began, TSA officials have insisted that screeners were not staging "sick outs" (for example, to avoid daycare expenses by staying home with their kids) and that the extra waiting time that passengers were suffering through (53 minutes in Laguardia!) was the result of heavier than usual travel.But after Friday, TSA screeners will have to decide whether they want to stay on the job without pay, and it's a sure bet that lots of them will stay home, and there's not much the TSA can do about it. A TSA walkout would cripple the nation's businesses and strike directly at higher-income Americans (that is, the people who supported Trump as he used racist wall promises to secure the votes needed for a two-trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the wealthy).What happens next is anyone's guess. Read the rest

After 20 years of unprecedented lows, Canada's central bank is gradually raising rates; this, combined with strict rules on new loans, empty house taxes in overheated cities like Vancouver, and mandatory ownership disclosures (which keep money launderers out of the market) are depressing the Canadian housing market, and the prognosis is not good.Canada's economy is heavily dependent on construction (8% of the job market) and consumer spending, and both of these will fall as cheap capital evaporates and debt payments shoot up, potentially triggering a contraction spiral.Taken separately, each of the measures that are cooling the housing market are sensible and long, long overdue -- and it's the tardiness that is the problem. Time and again, Canadian politicians and regulators have kicked the can down the road on the unsustainable housing bubble, leading to a situation in which every possible outcome is impossibly terrible.The original sin was allowing Canada's cities to become speculative vehicles for global criminals looking to stash their capital outside of the states they'd helped loot into near-collapse. Then, to allow Canadians to bid against the looters, the banks loosened up lending rules, larding Canadians with unsustainable debt -- and driving up housing prices, attracting more offshore speculators, requiring even more cheap debt for the Canadians who actually lived in the cities (lather, rinse, repeat).The result is debt of every kind: policy debt, cash debt, city planning debt, and it's all coming due at once. Think of the interest rate hikes: the law of small numbers means that even modest rate hikes have huge effects on borrowers. Read the rest

The leap from a Wacom's Intuos (a ~$300 graphics tablet) to its Cintiq (a $1200 pen-sensitive display) was always too much for me to make: a big investment in a new way of working that I'm not sure I'd benefit from. The likelihood of me forking out receded further when the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil came along, offering better latency for less dough. That said, you don't get Creative Suite and you're stuck with Apple's cursor-less way of doing things—so I might well give the new $649 Cintiq 16 [Wacom] a try.The first "entry-level" Cintiq, it has a 1080-line 15.6-inch display with 8,192 pressure levels, and ditches the physical buttons and touch support found on the high-res Cintiq Pro models.Now, $649 is nothing to sneer at. But for students and working artists who use cheap knockoffs and are sick of fooling arund with them, it's useful ramp to the industry standard. Read the rest

As any successful company can tell you, it's all about the numbers. Compiling and using data quickly and effectively is key, and the best programs for doing just that share one programming language: Python. And if you want to master them all, the Complete Python Data Science Bundle is a good place to start.Set up for programmers of any level of experience, this 12-course package starts with an introduction to Python fundamentals, but branches out quickly. You'll learn to navigate Python's Pandas and NumPy libraries, then display and wrangle those numbers with platforms like Seaborn and Spark 2.x. At the deep end of the course, you'll even learn the same analytic and machine learning tools that drive AI engines such as Siri.All in all, it's enough knowledge to create any data infrastructure. Right now, the Complete Python Data Science Bundle is 96% off the MSRP for the individual courses at $37. Plus, you can take off an additional 19% off with code NEWYEAR2019. Read the rest

Hyundai developed a "walking car" and "unveiled" it at the CES trade show yesterday. As far as I can tell it's just a mockup video, but the idea is timely. Traditionally, only flimsy and obviously impractical spider-legged robots could handle rough terrain, while two- and four-legged ones were too unstable to get far. Will Boston Dynamics soon have serious competition? Add your thoughts in the comments, increasingly-useless waterlogged meatbags! Read the rest

@dyingmars, artist and author of the dark fantasy webcomic Aside, made the best "snowman" I've ever seen. We made a snowman today pic.twitter.com/r6gR0NKAnz— Zack Frost ❄ (@dyingmars) January 7, 2019 Read the rest

No one in America explains the importance of good network policy than Susan Crawford (previously), a one-woman good sense factory when it comes to Network Neutrality, municipal fiber, and reining in the excesses of the goddamned ISP industry. Her latest book is Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution―and Why America Might Miss It, a timely and urgent look at how America is sacrificing its digital future, productivity, connectivity, social mobility, entrepreneurial growth, education, and every other public good, thanks to rapacious telcos, scumbag lobbyists, and negligent, cash-hungry politicians. Crawford and her publisher, Yale University Press, were kind enough to give us an excerpt (below) so you can get a sense of why you should be reading this.Fiber optic, as a category, is both old and new. The cables running under the oceans and among the major cities of the world began to be upgraded to fiber thirty years ago. And once a fiber optic cable is in the ground, it lasts for forty or fifty years; it is essentially future proof, because its information-carrying capacity can be almost infinitely upgraded without digging up the cable, merely by swapping out the electronics that encode and power the pulses of light that travel within its walls. Most people in non-fiber countries (including the United States) can’t even buy what in fibered countries counts as a standard, modern internet connection. About 11 million American households, out of 126 million total, are connected to last-mile fiber, and that service is usually available only at very high prices from a single unregulated provider. Read the rest

A gentleman was trapped in a Burger King restroom, forced to listen to the staff laugh at his plight. In compensation the local manager offered him 'meals for life' -- that's right, a lifetime supply of mediocre "whoppers" and some of the worst fries in fast food existence!For a few weeks all was well, then a REGIONAL manager revoked this fitting reward, and the gentleman has been offered no other recourse than to sue.We will be monitoring this case not at all.ABC reports:Curtis Brooner was locked in the bathroom for more than an hour at a restaurant in Wood Village last month.Brooner's attorney Michael Fuller told KATU that his client went to pull the door and it wouldn't open.Fuller said employees gave Brooner "a fly swatter to 'jimmy' the door open, which actually cut his hand."Court documents claim employees on the other side laughed at Brooner while he was stuck in the restroom.The Burger King manager offered Brooner free food for the rest of his life should he come into the restaurant, Fuller said.He said the restaurant did honor the deal for a few weeks, but then a regional manager reneged the offer."It's the principle," Fuller said. "The jury is going to enjoy it. There are funny elements of the case, but there is nothing funny about being locked in a dank bathroom for an hour."Brooner and his attorney are suing for about $9,000, or the cost of one burger meal a week until he turns 72. Read the rest

My latest Locus Magazine column is "Disruption for Thee, But Not for Me," and it analyzes how Big Tech has been able to "disrupt" incumbent industries, but has repurposed obscure technology regulations to prevent anyone from meting out the same treatment to their new digital monopolies.I cite the example of Uber and Lyft, which have gutted the (often corrupt and rentier-riddled) taxi industry, but which can't be similarly cannibalized my driver co-ops without risking legal retaliation through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.But imagine a disruptive app that disrupted the disrupters.Imagine if I could install a version of Ride (call it Meta-Uber) that knew about all the driver co-ops in the world. When I landed, I’d page a car with Uber or Lyft, but once a driver accepted the hail, my Meta-Uber app would signal the driver’s phone and ask, “Do you have a driver co-op app on your phone?” If the driver and I both had the co-op app, our apps would cancel the Uber reservation and re-book the trip with Meta-Uber.That way, we could piggyback on the installed base of Uber and Lyft cars, the billions they’ve poured into getting rideshare services legalized in cities around the world, the marketing billions they’ve spent making us all accustomed to the idea of rideshare services.This Meta-Uber service would allow for a graceful transition from the shareholder-owned rideshares to worker co-ops. When you needed a car, you’d get one, without having to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of no drivers because there are no passengers because there are no drivers. Read the rest

In the first injection in a human being of macromolecules whose primary structure was developed from a religious text a French 16 year old named Adrien Locatelli describes how he paid Vector Builder $1300 to transcode verses from the Bible and the Koran into macromolecules and then injected one verse into each leg (the Bible verse was written into the DNA of an adeno-associated virus and injected into his left thigh; the Koran verse was encoded into DNA but not merged with a virus and was then injected into his right thigh).The Bible verse caused mild, local inflammation. The Koran verse did not. Locatelli called his effort a "symbol of peace between religions and science." His only relevant experience is a one-week internship with Advanced Biosciences in Grenoble.UCLA biochemist Sri Kosuri -- a DNA data-storage specialist -- expressed dismay at Locatelli's "experiment," calling it "unfortunate" and adding that "2018 can’t end soon enough."Locatelli told his father about the experiment, but has not yet told his mother.Locatelli said he matched various characters in the Hebrew alphabet to the nucleotides in order to produce a strand of DNA that corresponded to the first few verses of the Book of Genesis in the Bible. In his preprint paper he said that a similar technique was used to match individual letters in Arabic to translate the Quran to genetic code.Locatelli said he used a technique known as recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) to write the Biblical genetic code into the DNA of a virus. Read the rest

After four years of Freedom of Information Act litigation, the ACLU has prevailed and forced the Customs and Border Patrol to release 1,000 pages' worth of training documents in which new agents learn when they can stop people and what they can do after they stop them.The documents are a window into the CBP's legal gamesmanship, in which the flimsiest of pretenses are spun into legal excuses to stop, search, question and detain people within 100 miles of the US border and in any city with an international airport.Counsel for CBP has cherry-picked legal precedents to produce a kafka-esque litany of excuses for stops, including being close to the border, being on a "known smuggling route," driving "inconsistent with local traffic patterns," being "from out of the area," having a covered cargo area; paying "undue attention to the agent's presence," avoiding "looking at the agent," slowing down on seeing the agent, being dirty, etc.The documents also shed light on CBP surveillance activities, though much of this section is redacted.Of particular interest are the revelations of the CPB's shadowy "city patrol," which does not target people who've made illegal border crossings.Also interesting is the CBP's belief that it can force any civilian to operate on its behalf on penalty of a $1,000 fine (previously the CBP has used this authority to force doctors to perform medically unnecessary rectal examinations, a practice now banned by the courts).The entire chapter on electronic surveillance has been redacted in the ELC, and the unredacted sections, as well as the PowerPoint presentations, paint a complicated portrait of scenarios in which surveillance technology, when used by CBP, would constitute a search. Read the rest

The state of Tennessee pays doctor-contractors by the case to review Medicare disability claims, leading to a situation in which doctors review four or more cases per hour -- and kick profoundly disabled and terminally ill people out of the program. Tennessee leads the nation in denied disability claims.Tennessee goes to great lengths to cover this up: they fired a whistleblower who raised alerts about problems in the program (and not just any whistleblower: Dr. John Mather was formerly chief medical officer for disability programs at the federal Social Security Administration before he retired and took up a side-gig as a Tennessee disability claims reviewer, only to have his contract renewal cancelled after he contacted the program's overseers with warnings about the process).Tennessee also cooks the numbers on denied disability claims: when calculating the time spent reviewing denied cases, they fold in the time spent by each specialist required to evaluate the claim, even if each of those specialists only spend a few minutes. They also tout a high degree of successful quality assurance spot-checks, without revealing that they overwhelmingly submit approved claims for double-checking, and don't typically double-check the denied claims.The doctors who check themselves into an office building and plow through disability claims can made a fortune, provided they work quickly: Dr. Kanika Chaudhuri has made $1.1m evaluating claims since 2013 ($192k in 2018); Jenaan Khaleeli (who reviews 4.5 cases/hour on average) made $209k in 2018 and $1.2m over five years (he denies nearly 80% of the cases he reviews); Dr. Read the rest

Baylor University political scientist Patrick Flavin's forthcoming study in Social Science Research finds that people in states with higher public goods spending (on "libraries, parks, highways, natural resources and police protection") report higher levels of happiness. It's not clear whether they are happier because they have better services, or whether people who choose to live in places where they don't have to pay for their neighbors' kids' education, parks, etc, are selfish, miserable fucks. In his study, published in the journal Social Science Research, Flavin analyzed data on respondents' self-reported levels of happiness for 1976-2006 from the General Social Survey, a representative sample of Americans that monitors social characteristics and attitudes of Americans and is a project of the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. Flavin also analyzed detailed government spending data for states from the U.S. Census Bureau for 1976-2006. Revenues to fund state public goods are raised from a combination of state taxes and transfers from the federal government to states, averaging 22.5 percent of total state revenues for that 30-year period."We can look at the city where people live, their neighborhoods, and see how public goods spending predicts happiness after taking other important factors, such as marital status, health, education and income, into account," Flavin said.He also found that public goods spending has broad benefits across income, education, gender and race/ethnicity lines."Compared to a lot of the other government spending, public goods tend to be less controversial between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, compared to poverty assistance or unemployment benefits, where there is definite disagreement between political parties," Flavin said. Read the rest

The New York Times weighs in on an Authors Guild survey that shows a "drastic 42% decline in authors' earnings over the past decade. John Scalzi offers some important perspective.Here's the summary:* Authors Guild: authors' incomes are way down, thanks to Amazon's monopolism, which is crushing indies and traditionally published authors alike; universities are relying on fair use and Google Books for coursepacks, and big tech overall is "devalu[ing] what we produce to lower their costs for content distribution."* New York Times: yeah, it's mostly Amazon.* Scalzi: This isn't a very good study. They surveyed 5,000-ish, self-selected authors (and the Science Fiction Writers of America didn't participate). Comparing the fortunes of authors today to Hemingway may not be very representative -- think instead of writers like John Brunner, who lived a writerly life that's pretty recognizable to writers today. Was there really ever a guilded age of writerly incomes, or just a bunch of survivor bias? My take: Amazon and the other monopolists are a huge problem. But big tech isn't uniformly culpable. Facebook and Twitter are certainly big social problems, but, they're not hurting authors. The idea of "devaluing what we produce" by letting people talk to each other for free is incoherent, intellectually bankrupt nonsense, ripped from the pages of "Home taping is killing music" and "Home cooking is killing restaurants."Also a problem: consolidation in publishing (we're down to five big publishers, and rumor has it that Simon and Shuster will be a subsidiary of Harper Collins within a year). Read the rest

Bill Gates has a long, complicated and showy relationship with malaria eradication, and in a new letter, he makes a case that mosquitoes are Earth's deadliest animals, outkilling even the murderous h. sap..Gates's jeremiad comes as the eradication of disease-transmitting mosquitoes is seemingly within our grasp.There are more than 2,500 species of mosquito, and mosquitoes are found in every region of the world except Antarctica. During the peak breeding seasons, they outnumber every other animal on Earth, except termites and ants. They were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths during the construction of the Panama Canal. And they affect population patterns on a grand scale: In many malarial zones, the disease drives people inland and away from the coast, where the climate is more welcoming to mosquitoes.Considering their impact, you might expect mosquitoes to get more attention than they do. Sharks kill fewer than a dozen people every year and in the U.S. they get a week dedicated to them on TV every year. Mosquitoes kill 50,000 times as many people, but if there’s a TV channel that features Mosquito Week, I haven’t heard about it.That’s why we’re having Mosquito Week on the Gates Notes.The Deadliest Animal in the World [Bill Gates/Gates Notes](via Beyond the Beyond) Read the rest

I have a stainless steel Contigo Autoseal Water Bottle but it's a bit too heavy for air travel. This plastic version is lighter and less expensive than the metal bottle. And it's really cheap as an add-on item. Read the rest

Bill Bailey, performing at the London Palladium, entertained the audience by playing major-key songs in a minor key, and vice versa. "Now some of the great national anthems are written in the major key," he said. "In fact most national anthems are in the major key -- celebratory, uplifting. I like to experiment with them and play them in a different key and the one I'm thinking of is the Star Spangled Banner -- the American national anthem, which i think -- appropriately now -- should be played in the minor key it. It takes on a totally different dynamic. Actually, it sounds a bit Russian." Read the rest