Boing Boing

In the 1960s, when Scientific American copy editor Michael J. Battaglia was 15, he had a chemical romance with the periodic table. In fact, Battaglia was so fascinated by the basic substances of our universe that he tried to collect 'em all (at least the 104 elements that science knew about at the time.) From Scientific American: Read the rest

Bioengineer David Aguilar (aka "Hand Solo") continues to upgrade his DIY LEGO prosthetic arms that we posted about previously with this fantastic fourth generation model. From Reuters:All the versions are on display in his room in the (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya) residence on the outskirts of Barcelona. The latest models are marked MK followed by the number - a tribute to comic book superhero Iron Man and his MK armor suits....After graduating from university, he wants to create affordable prosthetic solutions for people who need them.“I would try to give them a prosthetic, even if it’s for free, to make them feel like a normal person, because what is normal, right?” Read the rest

Inkjet printer manufacturers continue to pioneer imaginative ways to create real-world, desktop dystopias that make Black Mirror look optimistic by comparison: one such nightmare is HP's "subscription" printers where a small amount of money buys you ink cartridges that continuously communicate with HP's servers to validate that you're still paying for your subscription, and if you cancel, the ink stops working.HP's argument is that it's subsidizing the ink and you're agreeing to this treatment in the bargain, but of course, HP isn't "subsidizing" the ink, it's merely charging a couple hundred percent markup, as opposed to its usual practice of charging several million percent markups (and using deceptive and illegal tactics to force you to buy ink from them, and not from their competition).HP has been running the service since at least 2016; you choose a plan that puts a cap on the number of pages you can print in a month. You pay for that many pages no matter how many you print -- and if you run out of available pages, your printer refuses to print anymore, even if you have plenty of ink to print with.HP also requires subscribers to return their empty cartridges (they call it "recycling" but the fact that this keeps empty carts out of the hands of refillers is surely no accident). It's just another way that printer companies are leading the charge to erode property rights for humans by expanding property rights for corporations.Here’s the kicker: if you cancel, your ink stops working. Read the rest

Amy Klobuchar, touted as yet another Democrat 2020 presidential hopeful, sounds like the Gordon Ramsay of politics: notoriously short and abusive with congressional staff, sending allcaps emails in the dead of night and generally heaping wrath upon them.That anger regularly left employees in tears, four former staffers said. She yelled, threw papers, and sometimes even hurled objects; one aide was accidentally hit with a flying binder, according to someone who saw it happen, though the staffer said the senator did not intend to hit anyone with the binder when she threw it.“I cried. I cried, like, all the time,” said one former staffer.In the emails seen by BuzzFeed, often sent between 1 and 4 in the morning, Klobuchar regularly berated employees, often in all capital letters, over minor mistakes, misunderstandings, and misplaced commas. Klobuchar, in the emails, which were mostly sent over the past few years, referred to her staff’s work as “the worst in ... years,” and “the worst in my life.” Read the rest

LipPass is a user verification system for mobile devices that verifies your identity by the unique way that you move your lips. Developed by researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the system doesn't validate based on the sound of your voice but rather the movement of your mouth. From IEEE Spectrum:The researchers realized the audio components on smartphones can be exploited to depict the movement of a person’s mouth by analyzing the acoustic signals that bounce off the user’s face. Since each person exhibits unique speaking behaviors—like lip protrusion and closure, tongue stretch and constriction, as well as jaw angle changes—this creates a unique Doppler effect profile that can be detected by the phone.The platform then uses a deep learning algorithm, which extracts distinct features from of the user’s Doppler profile as he or she speaks. Next, a binary tree-based approach is applied to distinguish the new user’s profile from previously registered users, which also helps discriminate between the identity of legal users and spoofers...In a controlled laboratory environment, LipPass achieved an overall authentication accuracy of 95.3 percent... Across all environments and all kinds of attacks, the overall (spoof) success rate was less than 10 percent, though attacks that used the third method—a recording of the user's Doppler profile—did succeed nearly 20 percent of the time under controlled, laboratory conditions. "Lip Reading-Based User Authentication Through Acoustic Sensing on Smartphones" (IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking) Read the rest

Every year or two, I embark on a round of crazy book-tour travel where I change cities every day for weeks on end (35 cities in 45 days on two continents in 2017!), and I'm on a perennial quest for a piece of luggage that is fuss-free: I want to stumble exhausted into my room, late at night, and in a few seconds access everything I need to go to sleep and then get out the next morning.I'm fond of hanging compression shelves and rolling chests-of-drawers, but this crowdfunder for Solgaard's new suitcase has me intrigued.It's a suitcase with a collapsing set of shelves (like those hanging compression shelves), designed to hang from the bag's handle, and somehow the whole thing doesn't fall over (the other half of the suitcase acts as a support). The shelves are removable, turning it into a regular old suitcase. It's got four spinner-wheels and is wired to accept a power-pack and then allow for charging via an external USB port, and it's $150 for a small case and $165 for a larger one (both are sized to serve as carry-on).I wish it was bigger: I usually check a bag (when you fly as much as I do, they stop charging you for checked baggage and I have a bunch of liquids, etc, that are a pain in the ass to carry on but make my travel that much easier), so a carry-on is a little too small for me. Read the rest

Amazon's plan to bring 25,000 jobs to a NYC campus is under fire from locals, as more details are revealed of what was promised to Jeff Bezos' empire.

The Democrats have started hearings on HR1, a comprehensive anti-corruption and voting rights bill, and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets to participate, which is great news for all of us.With only five minutes on the clock, AOC asked her witnesses about the (virtually nonexistent) limits on corruption in Congress: establishing that a Congressmember can fund their campaign entirely with anonymous corporate money, use the corporate money to pay off people who have evidence of official wrongdoing, then propose legislation that benefits the companies that funded them, while holding stock in those companies and being vastly, personally enriched from their "public service."Then, for dessert, AOC establishes that presidents have even more power to use their office for personal gain. If you thought her debut speech was amazing, well, she was just getting started.It's not like any hearing you've ever heard, and AOC's plain-language, charming socratic dialogue leaves little room for weaseling, dissembling or disagreement. This is a broken system, and it's not hard to see how it got broken, nor what it will take to fix it. The lack of "political will" to address corruption and self-dealing in Congress isn't about "political will" at all: it's greed, pure and simple.‘We have a system that is fundamentally broken.’ — Rep. @AOC is explaining just how f*cked campaign finance laws really are pic.twitter.com/sCwpkRzcHB— NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 8, 2019In less than five minutes, and with the witnesses replying with barely more than a “yes” or “no,” Ocasio-Cortez gets across to the viewer:* just how openly corrupt the current political system is (“you’re going to help me legally get away with all of this”); the lack of meaningful safeguards against corporate capture (“Is there any hard limit that I have in terms of what legislation I’m allowed to touch … based on the special interest funds that I accepted?” “There’s no limits”) how vulnerable the office of the president is in particular to moneyed influence (“Every person in this body is being held to a higher ethical standard than the president of the United States”) and that the very people serving with her on this august committee are most probably compromised by these interests too (“We have these influences existing in this body, which means that these influences are here in this committee shaping the questions that being asked of you all”)That she does it all through the medium of a classroom game and with a sense of fun makes the whole thing even more remarkable to watch. Read the rest

Last year I posted a video to Boing Boing of a young cow enjoying a rotating brush called the Happycow. I wrote, "I think my cats would go for a Happycat." It turns out there is something similar - the Self Groomer Cat Toy. I bought one. It's a plastic brush that you fill with a pinch of catnip (included) then attach to a corner with double-sided adhesive tape (also included). I tested it out on our cat. She was sleeping in another room, and I carried her over to it and set her down in front of it. She ignored it and started to wander away, so I picked her up and rubbed her cheek against the plastic bristles. She immediately caught on and started rubbing her head against it and purring like crazy. She uses it multiple times throughout the day. Read the rest

From Game of Thrones to Conan, from Lord of the Rings to, well, everything, the filmic representation of casting swords is "completely wrong, so wrong it's frankly difficult to know where to start. How can you cast a 3D item in an open-top mould? Are you going to glue two halves together?" Read the rest

Aren't they beautiful? Here's how 'ghost apples' formed on this apple tree in West Michigan.Ice forms on rotting apples, and as the apples decay, they slide down and out of the ice that is left behind hanging off the apple tree branches. There's a longer explainer here:Andrew Sietsema sent in photos of the hollow ice apples to ReportIt late Wednesday night. He said he came across the interesting formations while pruning apple trees earlier that day.Sietsema said the freezing rain coated rotting apples, creating a solid icy shell around them. When he pruned the trees, they would shake, causing many of the frozen apples to fall off, ice and all. However with a few of them, the mush slipped out of the bottom of the ice casing, leading to a "ghost apple." Sietsema the temperature provided the perfect recipe: it was cold enough for the ice to remain, but warm enough for the apples to turn to complete mush, since apples have a lower freezing point than water.Sietsema said Jonagolds are one of his favorite apple varieties, "but we'll call these Jonaghosts."PHOTOS by Andrew Sietsema, shared courtesy of WOOD TV 8 of Michigan, via their Facebook page. Read the rest

If you accidentally leave your credit card at a bar or restaurant, they can charge you a hefty "walkout fee." The Street asked financial advisors at NerdWallet and WalletHub about this, and they said this practice is legal, provided the establishment has a "prominently displayed sign" about the fee.If, when you show up to retrieve your card from the bar and they have already run your card without your permission, that’s definitely a point to challenge, as you did not authorize the transaction.“If you didn’t sign to approve that transaction, that’s not legal. You do have rights around how your card is used,” Yuann says. “If you dispute the charge, then your credit card company would reach out to that merchant or that merchant’s bank to remediate the issue.”It really depends on how badly you want to fight the charge, Yuann says. If the bar is totally inflexible about removing or waiving the charge and you genuinely don’t feel as if you were notified of the policy, it’s time to start the dispute process.Image: oneinchpunch/Shutterstock Read the rest

Prosecutors "are reviewing the National Enquirer's handling of their Jeff Bezos reporting to determine if the company may have violated a cooperation deal reached with prosecutors last year," per Evan Perez and Kara Scannell of CNN, citing two sources familiar with the matter.Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg reported the news separately around the same time:Scoop: Prosecutors are reviewing whether National Enquirer’s messages to Jeff Bezos about his affair violated tabloid’s deal to avoid prosecution over hush-money payments to women who claimed relationships with Trump.If tabloid committed any crime in 3-yr window, no immunity.So did NBC.Prosecutors probing whether National Enquirer parent company violated its non-prosecution agreement with the Southern District as a result of the conduct Jeff Bezos is alleging. Expect stories to develop throughout the day.Breaking news among many other stories breaking this Friday, less than a day after the Jeff Bezos/AMI sexts story first broke, and then took a weird turn that hasn't been resolved either. Not enough goddamn popcorn in the world, you guys. Read the rest

Well alrighty then.

Promised royalties from the movie ‘Wind River’ never made it to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.

"Under what circumstances and to what extent would adults be willing to sacrifice robots to save human lives?" That was the question posed by researchers at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich.From Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet:The participants were faced with a hypothetical moral dilemma: Would they be prepared to put a single individual at risk in order to save a group of injured persons? In the scenarios presented the intended sacrificial victim was either a human, a humanoid robot with an anthropomorphic physiognomy that had been humanized to various degrees or a robot that was clearly recognizable as a machine.The study revealed that the more the robot was humanized, the less likely participants were to sacrifice it."The more the robot was depicted as human - and in particular the more feelings were attributed to the machine - the less our experimental subjects were inclined to sacrifice it," says Markus Paulus, Professor of Developmental Psychology at LMU. "This result indicates that our study group attributed a certain moral status to the robot. One possible implication of this finding is that attempts to humanize robots should not go too far. Such efforts could come into conflict with their intended function - to be of help to us."Image: Sari Nijssen. "To what extent are people prepared to show consideration for robots? A new study suggests that, under certain circumstances, some people are willing to endanger human lives -- out of concern for robots." Read the rest

Facebook loves "zero rating," when an internet provider takes bribes from online services to exempt them from data charges on their networks: Facebook says that having a roster of (Facebook-approved) services that are free-to-use benefits the poorest people in a country (and the fact that this also makes "Facebook" synonymous with "internet" for whole nations is merely incidental). But reality has a well-known anti-Facebook bias, which is why all the studies done on the supposed benefits of zero-rating have shown that the practice is harmful in every way: primarily benefiting the rich, not the poor, for example.Now, a careful, comprehensive study of 30 European countries by Epicenter.works finds that zero-rating encourages carriers to collude with Facebook to raise prices on non-zero-rated services, making it much harder to escape Facebook's orbit (and other big incumbents).Many countries and territories are debating zero rating today, from California to the FCC, and the same old arguments about access for poor people and bridging the digital divide keep getting trotted out to support what is ultimately an anti-competitive tie-up between the biggest telcos and the biggest online services to freeze out smaller competitors.This study is an important addition to the scholarship rebutting this nonsense, and as Net Neutrality moves back into US Congress, it's a handy document to keep around for your racist Facebook uncle and other low-information types who are being astroturfed into thinking that Net Neutrality is "government control of the internet." Based on the evidence, zero rating not only serves as a means to enhance ISPs’ power over the Internet, but it’s also how they charge consumers more money for wireless service. Read the rest

As Naomi Klein documents in her classic and seminal book The Shock Doctrine, disasters and upheavals are the bread-and-butter of global looters, who use the collapse of civil society or the default of debtor states to nationalize state assets at pennies on the dollar, then milk them into further crises, which create more chances for looting -- but the collapse of the USSR was different, because the spies and strongmen who rode out that collapse ensured that public assets were only given to domestic looters, not off-shore oligarchs.This created a distinctly Russian form of failed state, in which the wealth that had been stolen from the country's people was still in the country, in the hands of the country's "leaders" -- oligarchs -- who then began to eagerly offshore that cash, understanding that their wealth was precarious and depended on the ongoing sufferance of the higher-ups in the mafiyeh state (Putin has a habit of murdering his super-wealthy rivals and redistributing their assets as an example to the rest of the oligarch class). The oligarch money that poured out of Russia to be "invested" in criminal enterprises, laundered through western firms, or parked in huge swathes of real-estate flipped the script on the Shock Doctrine: when the USSR collapsed, it didn't open the doors for foreign looters to drain the nation dry, instead, domestic looters drained the nation and began to project their power overseas, using tremendous wealth to engineer profound shifts in countries like the USA and the UK that made it a juicy target for oligarchs of every nation. Read the rest

On the left is a screenshot of YouTube on Chrome. On the right is a screenshot of the same video with an extension called "Distraction Free for YouTube" activated. Below is a screenshot of the extension's options.[via 5-Bullet Friday] Read the rest

Cold is slow to worsen. Then it's fast.A large ice jam formed and released on the Ausable River at Au Sable Forks, NY on January 12, 2018. The ice jam was caused by a combination of rapid snow melt with moderate rain in abnormally warm temperatures. The gauge peaked at 13.27 ft and the gauge data showed that the river rose exactly 7.75 ft in 14 minutes during the peak rise meaning the river rose at just over half a foot a minute at that time. Read the rest

As the technology that drives them evolves, the tasks you can accomplish with Microsoft's suite of Office tools is growing every year. That's great news for the businesses who already rely on that software, but its individual users have that much more to learn. The best way to get up to speed? eLearnOffice Microsoft Office School.Whether you're just diving into Office or honing your existing skills, eLearnOffice breaks down the functionalities of Microsoft's programs into clearly-presented mini-lessons. There's over 1,200 of them in the school, covering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive, Outlook, Access, and Calendar - all the essential platforms. What's more, you'll earn skill points on the Microsoft Skills Score Dashboard as you complete each of these lessons, and that translates into CPD (Continuing Professional Development) certification that will show potential bosses you've got the know-how to be part of their team.There's never been a better time to put on the thinking cap for this one: Lifetime access to the eLearnOffice Microsoft Office School is now available for just $19. Read the rest

[Source unknown?]UPDATE: It's apy.malt on Instagram. [Thanks, fake_gojira!] Read the rest

This week started with a terrifying bang, when German and French negotiators announced a deal to revive the worst parts of the new EU Copyright Directive though a compromise on "Article 13," which requires copyright filters for any online service that allows the public to communicate.The Franco-German "compromise" was truly awful: German politicians, worried about a backlash at home, had insisted on some cosmetic, useless exemptions for small businesses; French negotiators were unwilling to consider even these symbolic nods towards fairness and consideration for free speech, competition, and privacy.The deal they brokered narrowed the proposed German exemptions to such a degree that they'd be virtually impossible to use, meaning that every EU-based forum for online communications would have to find millions and millions to pay for filters — and subject their users to arbitrary algorithmic censorship as well as censorship through deliberate abuse of the system — or go out of business.Now that a few days have passed, European individuals, businesses, lobby groups and governments have weighed in on the proposal and everyone hates it.That German uprising that German politicians feared? It's arrived, in force.Bitkom, representing more than 2600 German businesses, from startups to small and medium enterprises, has completely rejected the proposal, calling it "an attack on the freedom of expression";Eco, lobbying for more than 1,100 businesses across Europe, said that Germany had "become weak" in its negotiating position, putting "the smallest, small, and medium-sized companies" at risk;Deutschestartups tweeted their condemnation of the proposal, saying it put "stones in the way" of any European tech company hoping to grow;The Berlin think tank iRights.Lab called for an "immediate and total stop" to the negotiations, so alarmed were they by their direction; while C-Netz, another think tank that serves as a kind of arms-length expert body to Germany's mainstream political parties also denounced the deal. Read the rest

Unless you are a Nazi, you probably don't want a pillow with Hitler's face and a swastika on it.From the Fresno Bee:When the Very Rev. Ryan Newman bought the pillow on walmart.com in November, he could see it featured large images of a bicycle and the Eiffel Tower, and the word “Paris.” What he didn’t see were Nazi party seals with swastikas, along with Hitler’s face on postage stamps with the German word “Reich” – referring to the Third Reich, the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 – on the top near the pillow’s seams. The images cover several inches on each side.Newman said he was dumbfounded, and then angry and upset.“To me this is a symbol of hate,” he said. “This is a symbol of evil.”But it really wasn't Walmart's fault.A Walmart spokeswoman provided the following statement: “This pillow was listed by a third-party seller on our online marketplace and is in violation of our policy. We regularly scan our marketplace for these types of items, but, unfortunately, the offensive image wasn’t visible on the pillow’s photo and we were not aware of it until the customer reached out. We removed the item immediately and are reviewing the seller’s assortment.”.mcclatchy-embed{position:relative;padding:40px 0 56.25%;height:0;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%}.mcclatchy-embed iframe{position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%}Image: Screengrab from Fresno Bee video Read the rest

Germany's Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt, the country's antitrust regulator) has ruled that Facebook can't combine user data aggregated from different sources (Facebook usage data, data from pages with Facebook Like buttons, data purchased from third parties, etc), because users can't reasonably anticipate the way these different datastreams might be combined, nor the kinds of inferences that could be gleaned thereby.Facebook's practice of using clickthrough agreements to perform a kind of parody of consent was ruled invalid by the FCO, which pointed to Facebook's market dominance as the basis for subjecting it to stricter scrutiny and controls.Facebook has said it will appeal.The FCO singled out the lack of competitiveness in Facebook's market as the factor that swayed its judgment, arguing that Facebook has inserted itself into the social lives of Germans in such a way that failing to use it amounts to opting out of large slices of civic life, and thus the take-it-or-leave-it privacy waiver Facebook imposes on its users can't be characterized as an "agreement" of any kind -- rather, it is a form of coerced consent, which is to say, not consent at all.The regulator invoked the GDPR, stating that Facebook had no credible purpose for blending data from multiple sources: users don't benefit from this mixing, and Facebook could operate just as well (if not as profitably) without this mixing.The FCO ruling explains that the harm to users from Facebook’s data collection is not in cost but in “loss of control.” “They are no longer able to control how their personal data are used. Read the rest

Mlem, mlem, mlem.You're missing it, doxie!XDAnd below, another post of this same pupper doing a big frighten with his eyes.Ummm so this is how my dog was sleeping today. XD[XD by MatthewHolder123 on IMGUR] Read the rest

First: The dog who bounced into the guy's foot is fine! Dog didn't get hurt, nor did human.“Tried to make snow angels,” says IMGURian Automatvapen. “One of my dogs had a different kind of idea.”Tried to make snow angels. On of my dogs had a different kind of idea. Read the rest

Amazon sometimes dipped into tips earned by contracted delivery drivers for its 'Flex' service to cover the base pay they'd been promised, a Los Angeles Times review of emails and receipts shows.They're not the only contractor-supported delivery giant playing hinky with tips. Instacart and DoorDash have caught criticism for doing the same.As Amazon continues to grow, it increasingly relies on contractors to meet delivery demand. They aren't employees, so they don't get benefits. Tips help.Amazon tells its contractor drivers they'll earn at least $18-$25 per hour driving for 'Flex', but the payment they get does not always come Amazon, the LA Times reports: If Amazon’s contribution doesn’t reach the guaranteed wage, the e-commerce giant makes up the difference with tips from customers, according to documentation shared by five drivers.In emails to drivers, Amazon acknowledges it can use “any supplemental earnings” to meet the promised minimum should the company's own contribution fall short.“We add any supplemental earnings required to meet our commitment that delivery partners earn $18-$25 per hour,” the company wrote in multiple emails reviewed by The Times.Amazon insists drivers receive the entirety of their tips, but declined to answer questions from The Times about whether it uses those tips to help cover the drivers’ base pay.“Our pay commitment to delivery partners has not changed since we launched the Amazon Flex program — delivery partners still earn $18-25 per hour, including 100% of tips — and on average drivers earn over $20/hour,” Amazon spokeswoman Amanda Ip wrote in a statement. Read the rest

Um. Wow.

In an extraordinary post on Medium, Jeff Bezos has revealed threatening emails he received from attorneys for The National Enquirer, after Bezos refused to call off an investigation into how the paper got access to his private text messages."In the AMI [owner of the National Enquirer] letters I’m making public," writes Bezos, "you will see the precise details of their extortionate proposal: They will publish the personal photos unless [my lead investigator] Gavin de Becker and I make the specific false public statement to the press that we 'have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.'"From: Howard, Dylan [dhoward@amilink.com] (Chief Content Officer, AMI)Sent: Tuesday, February 5, 2019 3:33 PMTo: Martin Singer (litigation counsel for Mr. de Becker)Subject:. Jeff Bezos & Ms. Lauren Sanchez PhotosCONFIDENTIAL & NOT FOR DISTRIBIUTIONMarty:I am leaving the office for the night. I will be available on my cell — 917 XXX-XXXX.However, in the interests of expediating this situation, and with The Washington Post poised to publish unsubstantiated rumors of The National Enquirer’s initial report, I wanted to describe to you the photos obtained during our newsgathering.In addition to the “below the belt selfie — otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick’” — The Enquirer obtained a further nine images. These include:· Mr. Bezos face selfie at what appears to be a business meeting.· Ms. Sanchez response — a photograph of her smoking a cigar in what appears to be a simulated oral sex scene. Read the rest

The Bureau concludes! — with a summoning of The President and a performance of "Ignore Him (The More You Say His Name)" by the Aloha Aryan Fellows.

Biomedical engineers prototyped a pill that integrates a syringe to inject insulin into the floor of the stomach. From Science News:The shape is designed to guide the device to rest, cap down, on the floor of the stomach. There, it sticks a needle tip composed almost entirely of insulin a few millimeters into the mucus membrane lining the stomach. Once the insulin needle tip dissolves, the device passes through the rest of the digestive system.Thanks to the dearth of sharp pain receptors inside the stomach, the tiny injection “is unlikely to cause any discomfort,” says study coauthor Giovanni Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and MIT."An ingestible self-orienting system for oral delivery of macromolecules" (Science) Read the rest

Trump, yesterday: "When I say something that you might think is a gaffe, it’s on purpose; it’s not a gaffe."Trump, today: "Since the founding of our nation, many of our greatest strides – from gaining our independence to abolition of civil rights to extending the vote for women – have been led by people of faith." Read the rest

The other website I edit is called Cool Tools, which features reader-written reviews of tools they love. For the last couple of years, we've been posting video reviews of tools (subscribe to the channel here), produced by Donald Bell. His latest video is a comparison review of wire strippers. His pick of the batch is the Irwin Vise-Grip Self-Adjusting Wire Stripper. Read the rest

Chocolate contains cocoa solids, except when it is white. Read the rest

Fluffy the cat's human caretakers found her frozen and unresponsive last week in a Kalispell, Montana snowbank. From CNN:"She was essentially frozen," said Andrea Dutter, director of the Animal Clinic of Kalispell. When she got to the clinic, her temperature was below 90°F, said Dr. Jevon Clark."They used a few different methods to raise her body temperature: warm water, hair dryers, heated towels that were rotated out," Dutter said. "And finally, we put her in heated kennel."Fluffy spent one night in the ER before returning home with her owners. Read the rest

I came across Roger-Pol Droit's Astonish Yourself at the Califonia Science Center museum shop about 10 years ago. I was attracted to its bright red and yellow cover. When I flipped through it, I was even more intrigued. It had 101 simple self-experiments designed to change your consciousness and to better understand yourself.One of the experiments in the book challenges you to prolong the "Where am I?" experience people sometimes have when they wake up and it is still dark. Yesterday I woke up in a motel room and I didn't know where I was, who I was, how old I was, what kind of work I did, or where I lived. I felt the opposite of fear. I liked the experience of my life being an utter mystery to me. I knew that this was one of the experiments in Astonish Yourself, and I tried to prolong this mental state for as long as possible by not probing my mind. I was able to maintain the state for about 3o wonder-filled seconds before the facts fell into place.Here is a list of the first 3o experiments in Droit's book:1. Call yourself2. Empty a word of its meaning3. Look in vain for “I”4. Make the world last twenty minutes5. See the stars below you6. See a landscape as a stretched canvas7. Lose something and not know what8. Recall where you were this morning9. Hurt yourself briefly10. Feel eternal11. Read the rest

Juul -- now a subsidiary of the company that owns Marlboro -- attained its $12.8B valuation by growing faster than any other vaping company, thanks in large part to the children who bought its products, reversing decades of progress in getting teens off nicotine products while simultaneously monopolizing the market for vaping productsJuul's other secret to success was to steadily ramp up the levels of deadly, highly addictive nicotine in its products, being the first to leap from 1-2% nicotine refills to 5% refills -- a move that touched off an arms-race with other manufacturers, leading to the status quo where nearly all refills are 5-7% nicotine.One of Juul's key innovations was a patented "nicotine salt" that offset the bitter flavor of nicotine, allowing users to consume much higher levels of nicotine without having to endure a bad taste.Ramping up nicotine levels didn't just make Juul's products more addictive, it made being a nicotine addict more affordable: the major costs of a vape refill are not the liquid, but the pod, its manufacture and distribution.Americans get more toxic versions of Juul's products. The tighted regulatory environment in countries like the UK and Israel have limited Juul to the sale of 1.7% refills.The vaping industry now sells liquid in non-childproof bottles that contain enough nicotine to "kill an entire preschool class."The findings about Juul's pioneering role in increasing the nicotine in vaping products were reported in the BMJ journal Tobacco Control, in a study entitled Nicotine arms race: JUUL and the high-nicotine product market (Sci-Hub mirror) written by a pair of Stanford researchers. Read the rest

This ad forces me to question the value of Superb Owl advertising.Where will you be? I think Qualcomm is still around, but not Flo.Tv.Catchy tune tho. Read the rest

"The Bottle Imp" (1893) is a great horror story by Robert Louis Stevenson. (You might want to read it before continuing here, but it's not much of a spoiler if you do.)Futility Closet: An Idler's Miscellany of Compendious Amusements, by Greg Ross, describes the paradox of the bottle:In Robert Louis Stevenson's story “The Bottle Imp,“ the titular imp will grant its owner (almost) any wish, but if the owner dies with the bottle then he burns in hell. He may sell the bottle, but he must charge less than he paid for it, and the new buyer must understand these conditions.Now, no one would buy such a bottle for one cent, as he could not then sell it again. (The imp can’t make you immortal, or support prices smaller than one cent, or alter the conditions.) And if 1 cent us too low a price, then so is 2 cents, for the same reason. And so on, apparently forever. It would be irrational to buy the bottle for any price.But intuitively most people would consider $1,000 a reasonable price to pay for the use of a wish-granting genie. Who's right?Side note: I learned about "The Bottle Imp" after someone pointed out that a short story, "Miniature Bottle", which I wrote for the anthology Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things, reminded them of Stevenson's story. Read the rest

Grind coffee espresso-fine for less than $100.A switch flipped in my head last summer and I started drinking espresso again, after a several year stint drinking tea. I had been back on the coffee kick for a few months when a stone from a bag of cheap Trader Joe's beans ended my decade old Baratza. Panic set in.I tried fixing it. I tried a lot. I have had that grinder open severaltimes, adjusting it for extra-fineness as my espresso machine is pretty picky and the lower-end Baratza was good but not great with every bean or roast. That machine was not going to grind Turkish-fine.After I fail at fixing something like this I usually email my colleague Mark.I had read this post about his Capresso grinder just a few months ago, and remembered using it in his home. Mark and I also have the same finicky but excellent espresso machine, the Rancilio Silvia. The machine is mildly picky about the grind you use. Shots will fail until I dial a roast in on my grinder.I just didn't believe an $80 grinder was going to replace the $400 one. So many internet forums on coffee and espresso recommended spending more on a grinder than an espresso machine. Kinda like the common sense 'don't drive a sports car on cheap tires' advice that is actually good advice, but maybe not?Mark said buy the cheaper grinder. I bought the cheaper grinder. The cheaper grinder kicks ass.I am really happy. Read the rest

"Humans have massage chairs so why shouldn’t our pets have petting machines. I gave it a Rube Goldberg style flare to make it interesting to watch." Read the rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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