This late 1890s Lumière film of Paris is amazing. The image is clear and the motion is smooth. Sound was added, which makes the film come alive (I wish they would have colorized it, too). No cars in sight - just horse-drawn carriages, pedestrians, and the rare bicycle (why not more bikes?). People are dressed in elaborate outfits - how long did it take them to dress up in the morning? The horse-drawn fire trucks at 3:35 are a highlight. Read the rest

Sarah Gailey (who wrote a brilliant, wrenching short story about empathy and self-driving cars) has just published a new story about wearable computers in a series in The Atlantic edited by Ian Bogost (previously).Gailey's story, "An Augmented Reality," starts with an unhappy pharmaceutical rep late to see a doctor, and proceeds into some very technologically fascinating speculation that has all the hallmarks of Gailey's work: empathy, complexified by algorithms.Denise was already late, even before her augmented-reality glasses decided to perform another endless system update. Updating… Updating…She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel of her car. She could not afford to be late for her first appointment of the day. Being late meant being rushed, and a rushed pitch would almost always turn into a failed pitch. She’d been emphatically reminded of that at her last performance review. She’d also been reminded that she needed to fail a lot less, if she wanted to keep her job.An Augmented Reality [Sarah Gailey/The Atlantic] Read the rest

Russel Walks' astounding and vast collection of unofficial, retro-styled Star Wars propaganda posters are also available in postcard form. Read the rest

The journalists whom Facebook recruited to check the spread of policitized disinformation campaigns have called for an end to the program because Facebook has consistently ignored their recommendations, especially when they conflicted with the desires of big spending advertisers -- the factcheckers even accuse Facebook of ignoring warnings about the disinformation campaign that led to the genocidal attacks on the Royhinga in Myanmar.The factcheckers are especially galled that Facebook paid a dirty, GOP-affiliated PR firm to spread a false and anti-Semetic conspiracy theory that claimed that the company's critics were stooges for George Soros, paid to reduce the company's stock value so that Soros could cash in on a short-sell position.Binkowski, who left Snopes earlier this year and now runs her own factchecking site, which does not partner with Facebook, said the Facebook-Snopes partnership quickly became counterproductive. During early conversations with Facebook, Binkowski said she tried to raise concerns about misuse of the platform abroad, such as the explosion of hate speech and misinformation during the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar and other violent propaganda.“I was bringing up Myanmar over and over and over,” she said. “They were absolutely resistant.”Binkowski, who previously reported on immigration and refugees, said Facebook largely ignored her: “I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments as part of their business model.”Kim LaCapria recently left Snopes as a content manager and factchecker partly due to her frustrations with the Facebook arrangement. She said it quickly seemed clear that Facebook wanted the “appearance of trying to prevent damage without actually doing anything” and that she was particularly upset to learn that Facebook was paying Snopes: “That felt really gross … Facebook has one mission and factchecking websites should have a completely different mission.”'They don't care': Facebook factchecking in disarray as journalists push to cut ties [Sam Levin/The Guardian](Image: AK Rockefeller, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

Amazon filed a patent application for a doorbell camera that scans the faces of passers by and compares them with a database of suspicious persons. If a match is made the camera calls the cops.From ACLU:The ACLU’s test is consistent with academic research demonstrating that face surveillance technology is less accurate for darker skinned faces and women. These systems threaten to further entangle people with law enforcement, ripping families apart and increasing the likelihood of racially biased police violence. In addition, this technology puts activists and protesters in danger when exercising their First Amendment rights.Despite the risks to civil liberties and racial justice, Amazon has chosen to ignore questions from members of Congress and calls from consumers, civil rights groups, and its own employees and shareholders to take responsibility for the consequences of its technology on communities where it is deployed.This patent application also suggests that Amazon has no plans to stop at identifying people based on their faces. The company anticipates targeting an arsenal of other biometrics, including fingerprints, skin-texture analysis, DNA, palm-vein analysis, hand geometry, iris recognition, odor/scent recognition, and even behavioral characteristics, like typing rhythm, gait, and voice recognition. Read the rest

Most everyone's losing sleep over what'll happen to our species and the rest of life on earth as human-driven climate change rips our planet a new one. Capitalists? Not so much: some are too busy hustling to ensure that other capitalists pay for the fiscal hurt that the Earth's bid to evict us all is putting on their bottom lines.From The Calgary Herald:In a letter addressed to Calgary-based Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. dated Nov. 15, Whistler Mayor Jack Crompton said the town’s taxpayers “are paying 100 per cent of the costs” associated with climate change events such as “drought, flooding, and extreme weather.”He’s asking CNRL to pay in to “the costs of climate change being experienced by Whistler,” including the municipalities’ “$1.4 million investment in community wildfire protection activities” for 2018.“As a town with a population of less than 15,000 people, this is a significant cost to bear along with costs associated with impacts to winter and summer sports tourism,” he said in the letter.Sure, Whistler only has a population of less that 15,000 people, but the majority of them are filthy rich--you have to be to live there. I have a feeling that the town does okay on property taxes, especially since the one thing that Whistler has more of than mountains and rich people are Whistler's insidiously expensive hotel and resort properties.Whistler's not the only town in Canada looking for oil producers to pay up for putting their municipalities in the red. Read the rest

In California, the GOP scores below "no party preference" in voter registration, but much of the state's elites -- business leaders, prosecutors, judges -- have remained Republican, even as the party has moved away from overt support of unlimited capitalism supported by quiet racism and misogyny to overt racism and misogyny as a smokescreen for quiet support of unlimited capitalism.The latest casualty: California Chief Supreme Court Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, a lifelong Republican, who had previously objected to Jeff Sessions' terror campaign against immigrants but who finally quit over the appointment of the rapist Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.Cantil-Sakauye also cited Trump's assaults on the judicial branch as reasons for leaving the party.“I’ve been thinking about it for some time,” Cantil-Sakauye said, adding that she talked it over with her husband and friends. Their consensus, she said, was that “you didn’t leave the party. The party left you."Chief justice of the California Supreme Court leaves the Republican Party, citing Kavanaugh [Dan Morain/Calmatters] Read the rest

From a distance, it's hard to understand the nuance of the mass "gilets jaunes" protests that rocked France; with one in five French people identifying as a yellow vest and more vests marching in Basra, Baghdad and Alberta (and with Egypt's autocrats pre-emptive cracking down on the sale of yellow vests ahead of elections), it's clearly a complicated and fast-spreading phenomenon.The complexity stems in part from the leaderless nature of the group; participants claim they have no formal membership structure and no formal policy-setting mechanism. They're like Anonymous: an "ensemble" (to use anthropologist Gabriella Coleman's very useful frame). You become a yellow vest by putting on a yellow vest. An action is a yellow vest action if people in yellow vests do it. (This leads to tortured phrasing, as in Caroline Haskins's excellent Motherboard piece, where each yellow vest action is attributed to "certain Yellow Vest protestors" -- this will be familiar to anyone who followed Anonymous.)So while the original yellow vest protests kicked off over a proposed fuel tax, the actual views of individual yellow vesters are hugely variable. There are factions that want cheap petrol, and factions that want subsidies for a green new deal that will let them get off petrol all together.But what unites them -- and other yellow jackets around the world -- is rage at oligarchic policies, whether these are aimed at fighting climate change or addressing other problems. French President Emmanuel Macron decided to fight climate change in France by taxing the poor, while transferring masses of wealth to the billionaires who are responsible for the climate crisis, slashing inheritance taxes and weakening labour protections. Read the rest

In an article published Wednesday, Fast Company revealed that logoed fruits and vegetables are a hot trend with tech companies, beating out the usual swag like stress balls or notebooks. Serial artrepreneur Danielle Baskin (who you may remember from the Your Boss app or Drone Sweaters) is behind this trend. It all started in 2015 after being asked to bring some avocados to a barbecue celebrating the sale of a friend's startup. She thought it would be funny to put the startup's logo on the avocados as a joke. They were a big hit. In 2017, she started BrandedFruit.com and orders have been coming in steadily ever since.She has now made branded fruit for everyone from Pizza Hut to Heroku to AT&T. Baskin has also had personal requests: One man ordered several avocados for a wedding proposal. Orders are as small as 10 pieces of fruit that will be centerpieces at an event to 500 pieces that will be handed to out to guests. Each fruit costs, on average, $5 to make. That’s not cheap in the world of swag, which is known for churning out products at rock-bottom prices, like $1 T-shirts or 50¢ tote bags. But it is reasonable to larger companies. “Large companies seem to have enormous budgets for swag,” she says. “I sometimes think I should increase my prices, but I also think it is crazy to spend more than $5 on a piece of fruit.”Since the article published, Baskin's phone and inbox has been full of requests for branded fruit from around the globe. Read the rest

Hungary's far-right, xenophobic government rose to power by exploiting racism and economic anxiety, just like Trump -- and just like Trump, they've pursued an agenda that uses performative racist cruelty to distract people while they enact policies that make the rich much richer, at everyone else's expense.The latest of these policies is the so-called "slave labour law," which allows employers to force workers to work up to 400 hours of overtime per year, and to defer payment for this overtime by three years.Police gassed protesters outside the parliament where this bill was being voted on, but even so, the speaker of the house wasn't able to reach the podium and had to call the vote from the floor. The Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban won the vote, and the slave labour law is proceeding, as is another measure to replace the courts with "administrative judges," appointed by the president's justice minister, and operating without judicial oversight, for many proceedings.In Hungary, the law previously allowed for companies to demand a maximum of 250 hours of overtime in a given year.But for someone who works eight-hour days, the new amount of 400 hours is the equivalent of an hour of extra labour every day, an extra day's work every week, or 50 extra days each year.Mr Orban's government, however, argues that the labour reform will benefit workers as well as companies who need to fill a labour shortage."We have to remove bureaucratic rules so that those who want to work and earn more can do so," he said on Tuesday before the bill passed. Read the rest

Earlier this month, European right-to-repair activists sounded the alarm, warning that the model right-to-repair legislation that had been proceeding through the EU legislative process had been hijacked by lobbyists who had gutted its core protections and were poised to make repairs even harder in the EU.But Europeans rallied, and now they seem to have the upper hand. Pressure groups like Germany's Schraube locker!? (Screwloose!?) have organised mass write-in campaigns and other ways of lobbying EU officials, to good effect. This week, they scored a victory over refrigerator design, securing an amendment to the EU's pending Eco Design and Energy Label Directives (where the right-to-repair rules are enshrined) that will require refrigerator manufacturers to design their appliances to be repairable with everyday tools, and to supply their customers with spare parts and manuals so they can keep their property in good working order.It could be a model for many kinds of devices, a return to the Maker Manifesto's call for "screws not glue" and "user-replaceable parts." At the vanguard of the movement are people from ex-Soviet states, where deprivation was the mother of innovation, so that thrifty, ingenious home repairs were the key to human thriving. This ethic is also key today, if we are to reduce our material consumption, carbon footprint, and complicity in the human rights abuses committed in the name of securing the conflict minerals in our devices. It was a good year for it because the EU had planned to vote on changes to its Eco Design and Energy Label Directives. Read the rest

In the year 2,000, Susan Potter, then 72, donated her body to medicine. After Potter died, scientists froze her corpse, sliced it into 27,000 slivers thinner than a human hair, photographed each slice, and created "the world’s most advanced virtual cadaver using the highest-quality imagery of an entire human body in existence." Not only is the virtual cadaver an incredible accomplishment but so is National Geographic's story about Potter and the lead researcher, Dr. Vic Spitzer Ph.D., director of the Center for Human Simulation at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Why? Because National Geographic followed this incredible story of the Visible Human Project for almost two decades, from before Potter died through the completion of the simulation. Watch the documentary above. From National Geographic:Are you interested in working with us before you die? (Spitzer) finally asked (Potter). Are you interested in giving us more than just your body—in giving us your personality and knowledge?Spitzer wanted to videotape her while she was living and record her talking about her life, her health, her medical history. Your pathology isn’t that interesting to the project, Spitzer told Potter. But if I could capture you talking to medical students, when they’re looking at slices of your body, you could tell them about your spine—why you didn’t want the surgery, what kind of pain the surgery caused, and what kind of life you led after the surgery. That would be fascinating.“They’ll see her body while they’re hearing her stories,” he explained, adding that video and audio of her would make her more real and introduce the element of emotion to students. Read the rest

In this BBC News clip, a child seems to materialize just behind the woman speaking. WTF. Unfortunately this isn't likely a fun glitch in our simulated reality but rather something with much more insidious potential. From WAXY:If you watch the woman’s face at the same time the boy appears, you can see her expression morph into a smile.This technique is known as a Morph Cut, a feature added to Adobe Premiere Pro in 2015, intended to smooth transitions in interview footage, removing unwanted pauses, stutters, and filler words (“like,” “um,” and “uh”) without hard splices and cuts.The results, when used appropriately in interview footage without a changing background, can be nearly seamless.It’s likely that BBC News used a morph cut in the clip above to tighten up the interview without changing its meaning. But it’s also ripe for abuse and fully capable of altering the meaning of an interview, and in many cases, undetectable.Another demonstration of the technology: Read the rest

Yesterday, the European Union's "trilogue" met for what was supposed to be the last negotiating session on the new Copyright Directive, including the universal filters for all user-generated content and a ban on links to news-sites without a paid license; as recently as last week, the proponents of the Directive were predicting an easy victory and a vote by December 19th, but yesterday's meeting ended in chaos, with a draft that everyone hates.The Directive wasn't always so controversial. Up until last spring -- when the German MEP Alex Voss took over as rapporteur -- the rules for linking to news had been expunged, and the rules for universal filters had been converted into a discussion of licensing terms between big entertainment companies and Big Tech.But since Voss crammed these proposals back into the Directive, there has been chaos, with massive spending and intense lobbying, mostly by the entertainment industry and its allies in the collecting societies.There's only one problem: the proposals are bonkers. The top scholars of the news media say that a right to control links will only cement the dominance of the legacy news media, while weakening the press overall. The world's most renowned technologists say that copyright filters are a stupid, dangerous, unworkable idea that is doomed to fail.So Voss had to come up with "compromises" that would allow him to convince fellow MEPs that things weren't that bad. For example, he expunged all mention of "filters" from the filter rule, but still made it impossible for companies to avoid filters. Read the rest

One story pegs Elvis Costello as the original impetus for The Pogues' Fairytale of New York. Another points to the band's manager. Either way, it took Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan two years to write the now-classic anti-Christmas Christmas song. The story behind it is an interesting one. This Polyphonic video tells it. (Nag on the Lake, Open Culture) Read the rest

Everybody's flown a paper airplane. But what if you could fly on a paper airplane? Until we invent shrink-ray technology, the PowerUp X FPV Video Paper Airplane Kit will have to do - but it's as fun as that sounds and more.The original version of this creative toy added drone tech to the old, reliable paper airplane, making a formerly throwaway toy into a gadget that will draw a crowd in any park. That's cool enough on its own, but the PowerUp X FPV kit lets you not only control your plane with a smartphone app but see what it sees in real time through a video feed. Assemble your own plane, attach the kit, then let it fly - even in windy conditions, thanks to the precise stabilization features. Add an auto-takeoff function, and you've got a paper airplane that rips all others to shreds.The PowerUp X FPV Video Paper Airplane Kit was sale priced at $119.99 but just took a price drop to $79.99 - a 42% discount. Pick one up today. Read the rest

Back in October, Sainsburys grocery chain launched two new questionably-flavored teas based on UK Christmas dinner favorites: Brussels sprouts and pigs in blankets. Metro:Yes, you can now drink meat or vegetable flavoured tea and we’re not quite sure what to think. In hopes of helping anyone looking for unusual gifts, Sainsbury’s decided to create a green tea which is made using actual Brussels sprouts, as well as a tea which features the smoky flavour of sausages, sage and rosemary.The supermarket says the tea will make the ultimate stocking filler for any foodie – especially as it’s only £1 for 20 teabags. Despite the name of the pigs in blankets flavour, it is suitable for vegans and is totally calorie free, and is apparently best enjoyed without milk.Hard pass.Image via MetroThanks, Veek! Read the rest

My home has a fireplace and before the oppressive smoke of wildfires ruined the joy of lighting it, I used to start a fire once in a while during the colder months. Firewood isn't readily available here in the Bay Area, so I would often have to resort to the use of firelogs since they were easily obtained in the barbeque section of my local grocery store. This lead to a conversation with a friend of mine who assured me, "There's no shame in the chemical flame." Well, KFC's latest promotional item, the 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog from Enviro-Log®, puts the shame back into the chemical flame. Yup, it's a chemically-engineered firelog that emits the scent of their fried chicken. Imbued with the unmistakable, mouth-watering aroma of Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe, the KFC 11 Herbs & Spices Firelog finally puts to rest the age-old dilemma, “How can I make this fire a hundred bajillion times better?” This one-of-a-kind firelog from Enviro-Log, a leading manufacturer of firelogs made of 100 percent recycled materials, is the result of countless hours of research and development, all done over the last couple of months since we had this idea. Pick up a firelog today, and you’ll be wondering how you were ever able to enjoy a fire that didn’t smell like fried chicken.This fried chicken firelog was available for $18.99 but has since sold out. Image via The Daily Meal(Geekologie, The Daily Meal) Read the rest

In January 2019, Peter Orosz plans to live broadcast his snowy trek across the Japanese island of Shikoku. He will also produce a printed field report.The story is that last year I walked 2,700 miles from one end of Japan to the other, and now I will go back to walk the most interesting 300 miles in the winter, then write and print a large format Field Report about it. You will also be able to follow it live on YouTube and Instagram.It costs $45 to support the expedition, for which you get a copy of the Field Report, an extra $20 will get your name in it as a Patron, and there’s also some cool hand-crafted stuff from my collaborators: a watercolor map, a book of essays on Japan by Alan Booth, an indigo-dyed towel. It’s shipping worldwide in Spring 2019. Read the rest

San Antonio artist Michael Esparza's oil paintings put Texas-based fast food restaurants in the center of bucolic landscapes. It's hard not to compare his work to Thomas Kinkade's but that's the point. (The main difference, imo, is that Esparza's pieces are actually palatable.)Texas Monthly:The idea for the series, which Esparza describes as “a little bit Bob Ross and a little bit Thomas Kinkade,” came to him 2012, just after he came back to Texas from a year of studying art in Italy. In Italy, nothing was built taller than a church, so it was a shock when Esparza returned to San Antonio, the size of roadside signs were particularly jarring. “I was just seeing how iconic they are, but also from the Italian perspective, how ridiculous they are. From that point of view, it’s like, ‘What are you doing, Texas? What’s going on with these big signs that you have on the side of the road?'” he says. “But the first thing I did when I got back from Italy was I went to Whataburger, and then right after that, I went to Bill Miller’s. I just needed a burger, and I needed a po’ boy. I was already full after Whataburger, but I didn’t care.” Esparza says he wants the paintings to evoke the sense of homecoming you feel when you see those signs after spending time in a place where they don’t exist—be it Italy or elsewhere. “They become your own little beacons for where you live,” he explains. Read the rest

Dr Nim is a plastic, gravity powered computer from the 1960s that plays the game, Nim, against a human player. Recently Michael Gardi made a 3D scale model of Dr Nim, which you can download and print on a 3D printer.The Amazing Dr. Nim is a toy invented by John Thomas Godfrey and manufactured by Education Science Research (E.S.R., Inc.) in the mid-1960s. It consists of a marble-powered plastic computer capable of playing the game of Nim. The machine selects its moves through the action of the marbles falling through the levers of the machine.The "game board" is a based on the mechanical Digi-Comp II digital computer (also a Godfrey creation). It has memory switches that hold bits of data. The unit is programmed by lobed levers that affect and are affected by marbles that are released from the top of the game. Three of the levers set the start position. The fourth lever is the 'equalizer' option; if set, the player can win if they play perfectly. The last lever is used to indicate who's turn it is, the human or Dr. Nim's.Game play is described in the manual that was bundled with the game and can be found here:The Amazing Dr. Nim ManualThere are many good online references for the game. The following video is especially informative and entertaining:The Unbeatable Game from the 60s: Dr NIMAnd this article speaks to the relevance of a game like Dr. Nim in today's digital world:Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories - Dr. Read the rest

Six ago I posted singer Dominique Pruitt's first music video, "To Win Your Love." Since then, she's released a number of country-inspired tunes and I like them all. Her latest is "High In The Valley." Read the rest

If you're traveling on Alaska Airlines on December 21, make sure to wear your holiday sweater. No doubt it's ugly, and wearing it will get you a free pass to board the plane early, in celebration of National Ugly Holiday Sweater DayVia MarketWatch:Back by popular demand, this is the second year Alaska Airlines and its employees have embraced National Ugly Holiday Sweater Day, hoping to bring joy to travelers during the busy holiday travel season. All guests are invited to join in the celebration and share their memories on Twitter by tagging their photos and videos using the hashtags: #UglySweaterDay and #iFlyAlaska.For those of you not familiar with ugly holiday sweaters, they're similar to ugly sweaters, but with a holiday theme. Here are some examples, most found on #uglysweater: View this post on Instagram Ugly sweater contest @salonatwarren. Cast your vote on Instagram or Facebook. #uglysweater #contest #voteA post shared by E.M -Guate-lombian 🇬🇹🇨🇴 (@ggrgp2) on Dec 13, 2018 at 10:42am PST View this post on Instagram Stardock's Ugly Sweater Chili Cookoff was a success! Congratulations to the winners who either looked ugly or cooked lovely. #Stardock #Stardockians #UglySweater #Chili #Cookoff #HaveFun #AtWorkA post shared by PC Games & Software Developer (@official.stardock) on Dec 13, 2018 at 10:35am PST View this post on Instagram Ho, ho, ho! It’s me Scotty Claus, welcome to the #12GaysofChristmas!! 🎅🏼🎄 - What IS the 12 Gays of Christmas you ask?? It’s a way for our virtual family to celebrate the holiday together! Read the rest

NZ$6800 in cash was mysteriously left on cars and toilets at a campground in New Zealand. The recipients of the gifts turned the money over to police, fearing it might be stolen/Image: StuffThanks, Roger! Read the rest

If you can't stand the thought of sitting through another superhero movie, All Is True looks like a fabulous alternative option. With a stellar cast that includes Dame Judy Dench, Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Kenneth Branagh (who also directs the flick), All Is True is a story about the life of William Shakespeare, his family and hangers-on, after he steps back from his life as a writer. Read the rest

Stephen Keys, an actor who has appeared in many movies, including Soul Plane, was on a flight from Reno to Los Angeles last week. When he raised his armrest so he could get his seatbelt, his pinky got stuck in a hole under the armrest. According to a lawsuit he filed against American Airlines and SkyWest Airlines, "The spring mechanism embedded inside of this hole in the armrest applied intense pressure to plaintiff's finger, immediately inflicting injury, swelling and pain.""By this time, dozens of passengers became aware of Mr. Keys' perilous condition, causing his dire situation to become a humiliating public spectacle," the suit alleges. "By the end of it all, he remained entrapped in this nightmarish condition, suffering for nearly an hour."From NBC:Flight personnel and members of a fire department rescue team were unable to free Keys' finger, which was finally accomplished with the help of an airline mechanic who disassembled the armrest, the suit says.The injury to his finger left Keys unable to perform such previously routine tasks as driving and playing with his children, according to his complaint, which says he experienced weeks of intense pain and severe emotional distress. Read the rest

After Burning Man founder Larry Harvey died in April of this year, a special storytelling event was held in his honor a few months later at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. I attended "The Man With the Hat" event and can attest that it was a lovely, heartfelt evening. Of note, his brother Stewart and nephew Bryan shared their stories set to a backdrop of personal photos from Larry's childhood in Nebraska and from his early "bohemian scene" (pre-Burning Man) days in San Francisco. It was a delight to see them then, as it is now in this lovely video tribute of Larry that was created and gifted to the community by the Profiles in Dust group. Screenshot via YouTube Read the rest

A gentleman arriving from Guyana was caught at JFK Airport attempting to smuggle 70 live finches hidden inside hair rollers. He was sent home without his birds, which he was planning to enter in a high-stakes underground singing contest.From the New York Times:On Saturday, 70 live finches were discovered in the black duffel bag of a Guyanese citizen who, like the other smugglers, was believed to be bringing them to the United States to participate in underground singing contests. Gamblers set the birds against each other and place bets on their chirping skills.A winning male finch with a good pedigree and track record can sell for up to $10,000, according to a United States Fish and Wildlife Service investigation nicknamed Operation G-Bird.“They bet on how many times the finches will chirp in a minute, which finch chirps the most,” Anthony Bucci, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection in New York, said on Wednesday. Image: United States Fish and Wildlife Service / US Customs and Border Protection Read the rest

The trend is to make distinctive logos all look the same by using bold san serif typefaces.😔 pic.twitter.com/MKMPuBfgv3— JoRoan Lazaro (@JoRoan) December 13, 2018EVERYBODY FALL IN LINE! pic.twitter.com/B9JU5nvpMu— OH no Type Co (@OHnoTypeCo) February 13, 2018 Read the rest

Cash came pouring out of an armored Brink's truck this morning in New Jersey, causing much excitement and chaos – including car crashes – on the morning drive. Apparently, the back door of the truck wasn't working properly and opened during the drive. According to NBC:Police said they received a call about 8:30 a.m. ET about an armored truck spilling cash along Route 3 West in East Rutherford.Several drivers got out of their cars and attempted to grab cash off the road, causing two separate motor vehicle crashes, police said. But at least one person tried to help the Brink's driver, who was seen on video posted to social media running through traffic trying to collect the scattering cash.Here's another video from someone who risks her life on the highway to grab (steal) some cash before taking off. Read the rest

This is a fun way to spend about 90 seconds of your day. Read the rest

For two years now, Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang have been knocking my socks off with their Paper Girls graphic novel, a mysterious, all-girl, Stranger-Things-esque romp through 1980s pop culture, time travel, conspiracies, clones, paradoxes, and you know, all that amazing coming-of-age/friendship-is-magic jazz. Now, the pair have released the fifth collection, and it's a doozy.Every volume of Paper Girls has been marked by outstanding dialog, incredible, likeable characters, and art worthy of the magnificent Fiona Staples, whose work on Saga has revived a kind of Jack Kirby/Canteen on Mos Eisley comic surrealism that Chiang is definitely dabbling in here.In this fifth volume, we follow the paper girls into a distant-future, shiny dystopian Cleveland, where police-state surveillance rubs shoulders with flying cars and a cure for cancer. The girls are grappling with the prophecies and other shenanigans that have given them glimpses of their own futures and the futures of other versions of themselves, and this classic time-travel dilemma of free will versus predetermination makes for a great driver for a tour of Chiang's fantastic art and Vaughan's outstanding writing.Along with Saga, Paper Girls marks out Image as the comics publisher of the moment, an undeniable example of the power of allowing creators to own their comics and take them in places where increasingly cautious comics publishers (embedded in massive media empires) dare not go.Paper Girls 5 [Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang/Image]Previous reviews:* Volumes 1/2* Volume 3* Volume 4 Read the rest

Here are Cool Tools' favorite sub-$10 tools for 2008:CANARY Corrugated Cardboard Cutter Makita Impact Gold Ultra-Magnetic Torsion Insert Bit Holder Pacer Technology (Zap) Flexy-Tips Komelon Speed Mark Gripper 3M Virtua CCS Protective Eyewear w/ earplugsEngineer SS-02 Solder Sucker Favorite Tool Finds Under $10 (2017 Edition) Read the rest

To my delight and awe, I have discovered a whole, new-to-me universe of "realistic flame" effect LED lightbulbs, which produce the illusion that you have a goblet of raging flame sticking out of your lightsocket: the bulbs come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes (and can also be had in fanciful colors, for about $6-8/bulb (via Red Ferret) Read the rest

Jerry of JerryRigEverything takes apart the new PlayStation Classic, a miniature replica of the original Playstation that comes preloaded with 20 games.Image: YouTube/JerryRigEverything Read the rest

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street, isn't afraid to keep it real for kids. Last year they introduced Julia, the first muppet with autism. Now they've launched an initiative called Sesame Street in Communities that, amongst other things, will bring the first muppet to experience homelessness. Her name is Lily and she was originally introduced in 2011 as a character whose family was struggling with hunger. Unfortunately, Lily’s path is common for many children experiencing homelessness.“We know children experiencing homelessness are often caught up in a devastating cycle of trauma—the lack of affordable housing, poverty, domestic violence, or other trauma that caused them to lose their home, the trauma of actually losing their home, and the daily trauma of the uncertainty and insecurity of being homeless,” said Sherrie Westin, President of Global Impact and Philanthropy at Sesame Workshop. “We want to help disrupt that cycle by comforting children, empowering them, and giving them hope for the future. We want them to know that they are not alone and home is more than a house or an apartment—home is wherever the love lives.”CNN:"When Lily was first launched, she came out as part of the food insecurity initiative. So she's not brand new, but this seemed like a really perfect extension of her story, so that we could use her to help children identify with," Westin said. "With any of our initiatives, our hope is that we're not only reaching the children who can identify with that Muppet but that we're also helping others to have greater empathy and understanding of the issue."Although her journey with homelessness will not appear in televised episodes of "Sesame Street" at this point, she will be in separate videos and materials in the initiative. Read the rest

Good news everybody! If you're in the Navy or Marines, it's now illegal to throw you in the brig and feed you nothing but bread and water as a punishment.Yes, The American military is still into this sort of bullshit.From Task & Purpose:As Navy Times’ Geoff Ziezulewicz reports, the Obama-era Military Justice Act of 2016 and subsequent Trump administration amendment in March 2018 will outlaw the archaic punishment after Jan. 1, 2019.The military’s Uniform Code of Military Justice previously allowed Navy commanders to confine personnel in the grade of E-3 and below who were attached or embarked upon a vessel to receive only bread and water for up to three consecutive days.“Rations furnished a person undergoing such confinement shall consist solely of bread and water. The rations will be served three times daily at the normal time of meals, and the amount of bread and water shall not be restricted,” the order reads.In order to offset the lack of nutrients, personnel that were subjected to the all-you-can-eat penal buffet (get your minds out of the gutter) were, as part of the Uniform Code of Military Justice's deal, to be excluded from any sort of duties or physical exercise. So that's nice. From what I understand, the punishment was a rare one--but not that rare. According to The Navy Times, the Commanding Officer of the USS Shiloh submitted the cruiser's sailors to it so often that the Shiloh's crew, the base it sailed out of, and even taxi drivers plying their trade in and around the base knew the ship as the "USS Bread & Water."That the punishment is coming to an end has got to be a good thing: convicted civilian criminals get Nutraloaf when they're locked down for misbehaving. Read the rest

People who steal other people's packages off porches are the frigging worst. They've no idea of what's in the box they're swiping: they don't care what they get, so long as they get something. It's burgling a house blindfolded. It's the laziest form of break and enter. It's one of the lowest forms of causal criminality going. Also, it's wicked hard to stop. With the holidays coming on like a freight train, more packages than usual are showing up on front porches, ripe for the picking. This year, in at least one city, the cops are ready to put a stop to the package poaching nonsense.From The Associated Press:Police in Jersey City, across the Hudson River from New York, are teaming up with Amazon to install doorbell cameras and plant dummy boxes with GPS tracking devices at homes around the city.They didn’t have to wait long Tuesday for someone to take the bait.“We had a box out on the street for three minutes before it was taken,” said police Capt. James Crecco, who is overseeing the mission. “We thought it was a mistake at first.”The suspect was caught, Crecco added.Jersey City Police Chief Michael Kelly told The Associated Press that locations for cameras and boxes were selected using the city’s own crime statistics and mapping of theft locations provided by Amazon.“Most of the package thefts we’ve made arrests on revolve around (closed-circuit TV) or private surveillance cameras that give us a still image,” Kelly said. Read the rest

A coalition of shipping industry associations has published The Guidelines on Cyber Security Onboard Ships, laying out best practices for the giant ships that ply the seas, and revealing that these behemoths are routinely infected with worms, ransomware, and malware spread by infected USB devices.The document recounts incidents in which infected ships were stranded because malware caused their computerized navigation to fail, and there were no paper charts to fall back on; incidents where fleet owners paid off ransomware demands to keep ships at sea safe, and where the entire digital infrastructure of a ship at sea failed due to malware that spread thanks to weak passwords.The report includes details of two incidents where USB thumb drives have led to a cyber-security incident, delays, and financial damage. 1) A dry bulk ship in port had just completed bunkering operations. The bunker surveyor boarded the ship and requested permission to access a computer in the engine control room to print documents for signature. The surveyor inserted a USB drive into the computer and unwittingly introduced malware onto the ship's administrative network. The malware went undetected until a cyber assessment was conducted on the ship later, and after the crew had reported a "computer issue" affecting the business networks. This emphasises the need for procedures to prevent or restrict the use of USB devices onboard, including those belonging to visitors. 2) A ship was equipped with a power management system that could be connected to the internet for software updates and patching, remote diagnostics, data collection, and remote operation. Read the rest

Maria Butina, 30, stood in a D.C. federal court this morning and told the judge that she “knowingly engaged in conspiracy against the United States.” Then, one hour into the hearing, she stood again and said one word: “Guilty.”The accused Russian spy acknowledged that she acted "under direction of" a Russian official who has been identified as Alexander Torshin. She has signed a plea agreement with the U.S. She is expected to plead guilty to the charges against her when the (ongoing) hearing concludes.Prosecutors say Butina acted under the direction of Russian bank official Alexander Torshin (who has disappeared) and U.S. right-wing operative Paul Erickson, to establish back-channels with the NRA and U.S. political officials -- all with the goal of advancing Russian power and interests in the United States.Butina's promised cooperation could be the key that unlocks the bigger question of whether and how the NRA, the GOP, and Trump were linked together in a criminal conspiracy with Russia. While the accused Russian spy has been locked in jail awaiting this plea hearing, she told the judge she had a conversation with a journalist, and on that call -- which was surveilled and made available -- she complained that her court-appointed U.S. public defender lawyer was acting as a go-between with news media, passing on messages to journalists. Butina's case is under a gag order. The judge in her case addressed Butina's complaint before the hearing got under way.We had a pretty good idea before today that she was a foreign agent for Russia. Read the rest

These stunning felted-wool witch hats are the handiwork of a Kentucky-based fiber artist named Kate. The world of fantasy felted creations is her full-time job now. On top of creating them, which she sells in her shop Felt Wicked Art, she also teaches felting workshops all over the United States and offers downloadable tutorials to would-be hat makers. But she writes that she nearly gave up after making (and selling) her first hat at a craft fair:I made a few "normal" hats before making my very first witch hat. It would be unrecognizable today as my style, with just a few wrinkles and some embellishments. At that point it was really more of an experiment and I was actually a little self-conscious of it. I took it to a craft fair though and it to my surprise it sold that day. It was a relief that someone else thought it was interesting too, as some part of me still just wasn't sure. And I almost didn't make any more. I didn't want to go through that vulnerable process of making something unique and then asking people to give me money for it. In the end though I just couldn't stop myself from making another one, and then another one, not necessarily because I even wanted to sell them but just because I loved the hats so much! I'm glad I stuck with it."We're glad you did too!Kate's bewitching hats are available through her Etsy shop and her website. Read the rest

Today in the Mojave desert, Virgin Galactic had a successful test flight that reached 50 miles above the surface of the earth, meeting the Federal Aviation administration's definition of space. This places the company one step closer to the long-awaited goal Richard Branson promised: space tourism.SpaceShipTwo, welcome to space.— Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) December 13, 2018Lovely shot of takeoff! WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo take to the skies pic.twitter.com/JFcSDVB9jR— Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) December 13, 2018Breaking: Virgin Galactic reached suborbital space for the first time in a test flight Thursday, bringing Richard Branson’s company closer to flying its customers beyond Earth’s atmosphere. https://t.co/1DZ4dYYOYZ— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) December 13, 2018On the flightline @virgingalactic @TheSpaceshipCo pic.twitter.com/5PyOpnnxV2— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) December 13, 2018 Read the rest

It's been a year and a half since London's Grenfell Tower burned and at least 72 people died.The fire's deadliness was attributed to a combination to a combination of bad advice once the fire broke out and renovations to the building to sheathe it in Reynobond aluminum composite cladding from Arconic, a measure that was taken to make the building more attractive to people in nearby luxury towers.Now, Arconic's lawyer has told a Parliamentary committee that the panels were not to blame: he says the fire was so deadly because the building had been renovated with PVC windows, synthetic insulation, and different decorative panels used elsewhere in the building.He claimed that "a simple fire extinguisher in his hands would have made a big difference to the outcome."Hockman said: “The external spread of flame was substantially exacerbated by combining ACM PE with combustible PIR [polyisocyanurate] insulation without any horizontal or vertical bands of non-combustible material to limit spread.“The PIR insulation ensured the fire would spread to new portions of the building.”He said this “meant that not only did the fire exit from the flat much more quickly than anyone would have expected, but it contributed to an increase in temp within the cladding system cavity.” If the insulation foam had been non-combustible, the London fire brigade might have been able to put it out, he said.Arconic also argued that if internal features had been different, including fire doors, lack of sprinklers, the ventilation system, “then the fire would have penetrated the building much less rapidly and thus all or at least much of the tragic loss of life would have been spared”. Read the rest

Adobe's design software catalog is essential to any graphics program, as much for their simplicity as their versatility. Anyone can be an effective graphic designer with tools like Illustrator and InDesign - and the right training in their potential. That's where the Adobe CC A-Z Lifetime Bundle comes in.Whether you're getting your feet wet in graphic design or want to dive deeper into the functionality of the Adobe suite, this is the resource. The full 12 courses here cover both beginner and master classes in the essential tools like Illustrator and InDesign, but that's just for starters. You'll also learn all you need to know about web design in Adobe XD and video production with Premiere Pro and After Effects.That's more than 100 hours of exhaustive training and resources, and it's available for (potentially) a 99% discount. The Adobe CC A-Z Lifetime Bundle is now on sale for a pay-what-you-want price. Read the rest

(Previously: A bicycle snob takes on an e-bike)Last time around, we met the e-bike, and discussed how it came to pass. I was starting to feel comfortable with how it rode, and I was curious to see how it handled my commute.Speed, or lack thereofThe first lesson in e-biking is that it isn't really about speed (that is, on a legal in Canada, pedal assist bike). Yes, there are circumstances where you're moving dramatically faster than you would on a non-e-bike. But overall, if you're a somewhat fit cyclist, your speed on flats will not be much greater than what it would be on a regular bike. At times, I found myself getting dropped by fit guys on road bikes. They most definitely would have dropped me if I was on a regular bike, and perhaps a bit more quickly, but it is far more embarrassing to not keep up when a motor is assisting you. I would feel an urge to rush off after them to explain the challenges of a 32 km/hour speed limit, but that would have required an ability to push through that limit (which is more or less impossible due to all of the additional weight and resistance of an e-bike).Almost immediately, one of the main premises of my experiment was shot. No matter how I sliced it, the e-bike was going to be a fair bit slower than a car and not much faster than a regular bike. Still, the scientist in me required rigorous documentation to prove this out. Read the rest

When eight- and nine-year-old students at Hyde England's Flowery Field Elementary School walked into class last week, they were confronted with a crime scene. Behind the police tape was chalk outline of an elfin figure and a desk smeared with blood. Their assignment? Solve the mystery of the murdered elf. Apparently it was a writing exercise. And surprise! Some parents were pissed. "My daughter came home and she was absolutely traumatized," one parent said. "I'm not the only parent who felt like that. A lot of the kids in Year 4 were unsettled by it."Apparently, that did not discourage head teacher Ian Fell who encouraged the students to continue their detective work. "I have been a teacher for 30 years and this is, in my judgement, an appropriate, engaging and exciting thing that children aged eight and nine have done," Fell said. "They have been so up for it."(UPI and Manchester Evening News) Read the rest

State-owned TV network Russia-24 ran a story about an impressive humanoid robot named Boris that wowed attendees at a youth technology conference. Turns out, Boris the Robot was actually a man inside a commercially-available, high-end robot costume. From The Guardian:A photograph published by MBKh Media, the news agency founded by the Vladimir Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky, appeared to show the actor in the robot suit ahead of the forum on Tuesday in Yaroslavl, a city about 150 miles north-east of Moscow.The organisers of the Proyektoria technology forum, held each year for the “future intellectual leaders of Russia”, did not try to pass off the robot as real, the website reported.But whether by mistake or design, the state television footage did just that. “It’s entirely possible one of these [students] could dedicate himself to robotics,” an anchor reported. “Especially as at the forum they have the opportunity to look at the most modern robots.” Read the rest

There's been a lot of money thrown around to determine the future of the Internet in the EU, but despite the frequent assertion that every opponent of the new Copyright Directive is a paid puppet for Google, the numbers tell a different story: according to the watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), the entertainment industry are the biggest spenders by far, and they have obscured that fact by using dodgy accounting to make it look like Google is buying out the European Parliament.The fight over the European Copyright in the Single Digital Market Directive has been a long one, but it boiled over last spring, when control over the Directive passed into the hands of the German MEP Axel Voss, who reversed his predecessor's decision to drop one of the Directive's most controversial clauses (Article 11, the "link tax" that forced publishers to charge for licenses to include more than a word or two in links to their news stories) and jettisoned the compromise work on the other controversial clause (Article 13, which makes online platforms liable if their users post anything that infringes copyright, even for an instant, which will require expensive black-box algorithmic censorship to accommodate). Since then, the lobbying and public debate has been fierce. Roughly speaking, there are three sides: Large corporate rightsholder organisations and collecting societies, often allied with creators' rights groups, who are largely in favour of Voss's version of the Directive (though a large group of powerful corporate rightsholders completely hate it; The tech sector, a mix of smaller EU tech companies that couldn't afford to comply with Articles 11 and 13, and US "Big Tech" platforms, who largely oppose it (though YouTube isn't actually that worried, because they're closer to having a filter than any of their competitors); and Unaffiliated civil society groups: 70 of the world's top tech experts (including the "Father of the Internet" and the inventor of the World Wide Web); a diverse coalition of human rights groups, academics, journalists, scientists, and others; legal and economic scholars; leading academics; Europe's library associations; free press advocates; the UN's special rapporteur on free expression, and of course, those four million Europeans who signed the Change.org petition against it. Read the rest

While researchers continue attempts to build practical insect-size flying robots, engineers at the University of Washington have prototyped a backpack for real bees that outfits the insects with sensing, computing, and wireless networking capabilities. From UW News:“We decided to use bumblebees because they’re large enough to carry a tiny battery that can power our system, and they return to a hive every night where we could wirelessly recharge the batteries,” said co-author Vikram Iyer, a doctoral student in the UW Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering...Because bees don’t advertise where they are flying and because GPS receivers are too power-hungry to ride on a tiny insect, the team came up with a method that uses no power to localize the bees. The researchers set up multiple antennas that broadcasted signals from a base station across a specific area. A receiver in a bee’s backpack uses the strength of the signal and the angle difference between the bee and the base station to triangulate the insect’s position...Next the team added a series of small sensors — monitoring temperature, humidity and light intensity — to the backpack. That way, the bees could collect data and log that information along with their location, and eventually compile information about a whole farm...“Having insects carry these sensor systems could be beneficial for farms because bees can sense things that electronic objects, like drones, cannot,” Gollakota said. “With a drone, you’re just flying around randomly, while a bee is going to be drawn to specific things, like the plants it prefers to pollinate. Read the rest

Check out this incredibly dedicated animated flipbook re-creation of all the booby traps in the 1990 holiday scare-'em film HOME ALONE, starring Macaulay Culkin and Joe Pesci.It's a supercut flipbook! I can't stop watching it.This is the creation of IMGURIAN theflippist, and you can see more of their wonderful work at TheFlippist.com.From The Flippist:The booby trap scene from Home Alone already feels like a cartoon, so turning it into a flipbook was natural! It especially works great with the amazing sound effects. This took over a month to draw/color, but has always been one of my favorite movies so I had a lot of fun making it. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all! Thanks for watching :)[via] Read the rest