It's irrational that successful confectionary mogul Willy Wonka would pass on his wealth and his business to a naive, well-meaning boy. Violet Beauregarde, last seen suffering from bloat, was the obvious and superior choice.Violet is already basically Wonka. She’s passionate, sarcastic, candy-obsessed, free thinking, and a total firecracker. She’s even better than Wonka, because she doesn’t endanger others.Violet should’ve been picked to inherit the chocolate factory.Previously. Read the rest

Sweden's Disgusting Food Museum is opening a touring exhibition in Los Angeles's Architecture and Design Museum. The exhibit runs from December 9 to February 17. "What we find disgusting has to be learned -- it's purely cultural," says curator/psychologist Samuel West. This is a fine opportunity to taste foods you've been curious about, like fermented shark, durian, maggot-infested cheese (above), bull penis (seen below), or mouse wine (also below). From CNN:...American favorites such as root beer and Jell-O salad sit in the museum alongside fried tarantula and cooked guinea pigs. "If you give root beer to a Swede they will spit it out and say it tastes like toothpaste, but I think it's delicious," he notes...While many food-related "museums" of late have mostly just been opportunities for novel selfies, West is adamant that the Disgusting Food Museum is there to help people learn and think critically, not just to pose for photos.The downside? "One of my worries that it will start stinking in here," West says.Also see posts about Samuel West's previous Museum of Failure here and here. Read the rest

Tim of Grand Illusions demonstrates a neat little trick, called the Magic Sword, in which a piece of solid metal seems to pass through another piece of metal.Image: Grand Illusions/YouTube Read the rest

Why Evolution Is True introduced me to a profoundly awesome example of mimicry in nature: Uropyia meticulodina, a moth from eastern Asia that looks like a dead leaf.Real Monstrosities: "It’s not just brown like a dead leaf, it’s brown like a curled up, dead leaf. And it’s not just brown like a curled up, dead leaf, it depicts a leaf catching the light, with shadows in all the right places and you can even see the veins casting tiny shadows along the curled underside. It’s like one of those optical illusions that still work even when you know it’s a trick."Here's what it looks like "normally", or at least when pinned to a board. (Hsu Hong Lin, CC) Read the rest

Imad Khachan is proprietor of Chess Forum, the last chess shop in New York City. “When no other place will welcome you, you have a seat [here],” Khachan says.Khachan is the subject of King of the Night, a short documentary above by Molly Brass and Anne Hollowday.(The Atlantic) Read the rest

Long before #MeToo became the catalyst for a women's movement about sexual assault — and a decade before the fall of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and U.S. Olympic gymnastic doctor Larry Nassar — there was Jeffrey Edward Epstein. #PerversionofJustice pic.twitter.com/z3rIvzQWE9— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) November 28, 2018If you're a registered sex offender it helps to have millions of dollars to make the problem go away. Financier Jeffrey Epstein, well-connected with the Washington power elite, was able to spend a small fraction of his vast fortune in 2017 to avoid a life sentence in prison for molesting and abusing kids (thanks to a secret deal he made with servile federal prosecutors).From Sputnik News:Epstein's teen sex trafficking ring worked like a pyramid scheme, according to victims, who say they were paid to give massages to Epstein, paid extra for sex acts and paid even more to recruit more girls between the ages of 13 and 16 into the ring. The girls were also, at times, allegedly offered up to Epstein's powerful friends.Today Epstein spent another pittance to prevent his young victims from revealing in court how he'd sexually abused them. Epstein settled a lawsuit that he'd filed against attorney Bradley Edwards, who is representing several of Epstein's teen molestation victims in a civil suit against Epstein. By settling the suit, Epstein was able to stop his victims from telling the court just what a kind of person he is. Epstein didn't even have to apologize to Edwards face-to-face, instead he paid his lawyer to read an apology for him. Read the rest

When a rightsholder complains to Google about a website infringing its copyright, Google will generally delist the site, but allow the site's owner to contest the removal through a process defined in Section 512 of the DMCA.But when Google gets a complaint about DRM-breaking tools, which come under Section 1201 of the DMCA, they remove the accused site and offer no appeal process -- it's permanent.Malware authors have been serving Google with DMCA 1201 notices, in which they impersonate Ubisoft, Steam and other large game companies. These notices target pirate sites that distribute cracked versions of games, and when the malware authors get them taken offline, permanently, their own sites rise in Google's search rankings, advertising the same cracked games, but these oneshave been poisoned with malware.After some negative publicity, Google has reinstated a few of the sites. Google correctly says that DMCA 1201 doesn't provide any appeal process, but that doesn't mean that the company has to honor obviously fraudulent notices.Google revealed that this “Ubisoft” sent notices from suspicious Gmail addresses, using a Russian user interface, from an unidentified Ukrainian IP-address. In addition, the handle used in one of the email addresses can be linked to game-related spam, which doesn’t build any confidence either.The site owner shared his findings with Google but the company repeatedly said that there is no option to file a counter notification.This is because the notices are not regular DMCA takedowns. Instead, they are notifications that the URLs circumvent technological protection measures such as DRM, which is separately covered in the DMCA. Read the rest

In 1992, seven years before the premier of SpongeBob SquarePants, the late Stephen Hillenburg was enrolled in CalArts' Experimental Animation Program. As a student, he created his first cartoons, including "The Green Beret" (1992) seen above, which landed him his job at Nickelodeon, working on Rocko's Modern Life and, later, developing SpongeBob SquarePants. Read the rest

Dark Reader is a browser plugin, available for Firefox, Safari and Chrome, that gives any website a light-on-dark color scheme. Unlike some other efforts, it can invert images too. You can tweak on a per-site basis, with sliders for grayscaling, contrast, font substitution and such, and it remembers your picks.See how pretty it makes our gift guide! Read the rest

Facebook's walled garden/roach motel strategy made it progressively harder and harder for charities to reach supporters on the web, driving them within Facebook's confines, where they devoted thousands of hours to making their Facebook presence attractive and pleasing to Facebook's algorithm.Facebook rewarded them with a "Donate" button that could be used to raise funds directly within Facebook -- which increased donations and also provided one more way for Facebook to lock in its users and surveil their actions.But as charities started to fall prey to hackers who used phishing and social engineering to repeatedly take over the charities' accounts and steal the donations destined for them, Facebook was AWOL, refusing to answer increasingly desperate pleas from charities who sometimes found themselves blackmailed by hackers who threatened to delete the charities' pages altogether unless they diverted their donations to the hackers by way of ransom.Some charities got shut down by Facebook, when the hackers who took over the accounts did shady things that triggered Facebook's fraud-detection. Again, nobody was home at Facebook to help these charities get their accounts back.Wired traces the story of two charities that finally got their accounts secured and undid the damage that the hackers had done -- but only by raising such a stink that a Facebook Vice President got the company's PR department to sort them out. Remember this the next time someone calls for Facebook to stop harassment or hate speech: this is a company that doesn't pick up the phone when a hacker steals thousands of dollars from a charity. Read the rest

Archaeologists at an excavation site for London's Thames Tideway Tunnel (the "super sewer") dug up a 500-year-old skeleton who died with his boots on. Based on the location of the find, the boots, and other signs, the fellow may have been a fisherman or sailor. From National Geographic:"It’s extremely rare to find any boots from the late 15th century, let alone a skeleton still wearing them," says Beth Richardson of the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA). "And these are very unusual boots for the period—thigh boots, with the tops turned down. They would have been expensive, and how this man came to own them is a mystery. Were they secondhand? Did he steal them? We don't know."..The position of the body—face down, right arm over the head, left arm bent back on itself—suggests that the man wasn’t deliberately buried. It’s also unlikely that he would have been laid to rest in leather boots, which were expensive and highly prized.In light of those clues, archaeologists believe the man died accidentally and his body was never recovered, although the cause of death is unclear. Perhaps he fell into the river and couldn't swim. Or possibly he became trapped in the tidal mud and drowned... Read the rest

8 years after Scott Walker and his Koch-backed GOP used voter suppression and gerrymandering to steal control over Wisconsin, Wisconsites finally pried his crooked ass out of the governor's chair, but Walker and Co want to blow up the state on their way out.The lame-duck session of the Wisconsin legislature is about to pass a suite of undemocratic and illegal reforms to the state's legislative and regulatory system that will allow them to steal a state supreme court seat (their nominee is a homophobic bigot who says that affirmative action is indistinguishable from slavery), gut the power of the attorney-general to reverse the state's subversion of Obamacare and poisoning of Medicare, and even force the capital to allow firearms.Last night, thousands of Wisconsinites protested outside the capital -- after the GOP sponsors of the bill failed to turn up and testify in favor of it -- in subzero weather. Michigan is in the same boat, and there, too, anger is roiling in the streets and around the capital. The GOP takeover of Michigan murdered the city of Flint and poisoned its children; the takeover of Wisconsin gutted the state's treasury and handed billions to a Chinese company that reneged on its job-creation promises. The wreckers were finally ousted, but their blowing up the states on the way out.Michiganders and Wisconsinites have shown incredible, indomitable spirit throughout this nightmarish time, and they're not giving up. We've got your back, Michigan and Wisconsin!Apparently lacking the courage to speak on behalf of their legislation—or fearing the immense grassroots backlash—the bill's Republican sponsors didn't bother to show up to the lame-duck hearing. Read the rest

From the beginning, Facebook's strategy was to build a walled-garden-cum-roach-motel: content and users checked in, but they never checked out, so over time, everyone and everything was captured within the site, and a prisoner of the whims of its algorithms.As media companies became totally dependent on being upranked by Facebook's algorithm, they practiced a kind of Kremlinology, poring over the utterances of Facebook execs; and this was compounded by the gambler's fallacy that the site cultivates by having the inscrutable judgments of the algorithm randomly turn seemingly undistinguished posts into massive viral hits, like a slot machine ringing the cherries.Then came the day that Facebook announced the "pivot to video," a rare, clear, ringing instruction to the media companies: MAKE VIDEO. Video: the most expensive, difficult-to-skim content there is, and there'd better be a lot of it.Companies fired their print writers and hired video makers, tooled up, borrowed or sold equity to build out the video capacity, made capital and employment decisions that would take years and years to pay off. Facebook had better not pivot away from video!Then they did.The fuckery compounded by fuckery with fuckery heaped atop it has done in so many media companies, and they're still dropping. Mic just fired 100 people and sold off the company name for $5 mil -- having raised $60 mil, mostly with the promise of making videos to fulfill Facebook's imperial decree.Why did Facebook pivot away from video? It wasn't sadism. It wasn't merely indifference. Read the rest

Here's a turntable that no one asked for: the Oreo Music Box ($20 but includes cookies). To get it to work, just place a cookie on it, put the arm on the cookie, and then press the black "play" button. No, there's no actual music embedded in the Oreos. What you'll hear is one of four prerecorded songs they've installed in the player. And, if you take a bite out of the cookie and place it back on the box, it will play a different song. If you want to see how it works, watch this: Read the rest

In this chilling video, YouTuber oncologist Chubbyemu tells the story of a woman who colon-cleansed by drinking a liter of soy sauce—which would be about 200g of sodium on top of whatever other crap is in there, five times the lethal dose. The internet has long been a place to go for bad advice, but now more of it is malicious and no-one can tell. Things did not go well for her. Read the rest

Two years ago Sunday, a fire broke out at the Ghost Ship warehouse in Oakland, California. By the time it was extinguished, 36 people -- friends of friends from the Bay Area art and music community I know and love -- had died. I saw the fire that night, as I was driving to my home just a mile away, but didn't know until the next morning what tragedy had taken place. Now, a mother has written a brave, though haunting, piece that describes not only what it was like to find out that her child had died in the fire, but also what it's been like to live with that unfathomable loss. A warning: As a mom myself, I found it to be an extremely difficult read and it may be for you as well.Colleen Dolan lost her daughter Chelsea Faith Dolan (aka Cherushii) on December 2, 2016:I burned my thumb this afternoon. The oven mitt I used to remove a cookie sheet from the oven must have grown thin in one spot, and the heat immediately seared my flesh. The pain was so severe that I dropped the pan on the oven door and rushed to the faucet to run cold water over my blistering thumb. In a flash, I saw 36 young people trapped on the second floor of a burning warehouse in Oakland, screaming in desperation, “Help us!”My hope is that those beautiful young people passed out from the smoke before experiencing the scorching flames. Read the rest

Your racist uncle is about to have a new favorite TV channel. Conservative media superstars Glenn Beck and Mark Levin are merging their respective networks to form Blaze Media, a venture they claim will reach over 165 million poor, unfortunate souls.“Tens of millions of Americans have had it with the biased, ideologically driven mainstream media outlets that sanctimoniously advance their own agendas under the guise of ‘news’ and ‘journalism.’ Conservatives actually believe in a free press and the rest of the Constitution,” said Levin.He added that his intention with the merger is “to further expand and offer the public an alternative to liberal media group-think.”LOL.Levin's "talent" roster at CRTV is a who's who of odious personalities including Steven Crowder, Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson, failed video game mogul Curt Schilling, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, and Our Lady of the Internment Camps Michelle Malkin. Glenn Beck's TheBlaze has struggled financially, parting ways with such luminaries as Dana Loesch and Tomi Lahern. TheBlaze and CRTV Merge to Create Conservative Media Powerhouse (Paul Bond/Hollywood Reporter) (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr) Read the rest

In the late 1800s Chicago families bought their Christmas trees from the decks of schooners that had ferried them across Lake Michigan. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll meet Herman Schuenemann, known as "Captain Santa," who brought Christmas to the city for 30 years until a fateful storm overtook him.We'll also peruse some possums and puzzle over a darkening phone.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

I feel like such a chump. Several years ago, I hadn't planned on buying anything at a Tupperware party that I had agreed to take place in my home (yes, they still exist). But then the hostess told us about this special black-and-white can opener that was available. It didn't cut the top of the can, it popped it up leaving no sharp edges. Well, I immediately imagined all the fake products** I could make with those now-reusable empty cans and bought it for $35. Cut to today: this video shows that any old ordinary can opener can essentially do this same thing by using it horizontally! Ok, to be fair, I haven't tried this new method (mainly because I no longer have ordinary can openers). It could be that it leaves sharp edges but I don't think so. I think my life has been a lie.**On my website, there's an example of one of my empty can pieces. It's called "Mermaid in a Can."(digg) Read the rest

More than almost any career, graphic design is about the marriage of creativity and functionality. Assuming you've got the tools of the trade, all you need is a tutor that can show you how to join the two. Enter the Ultimate Graphic Design Bundle, a pack of online courses that serve as a boot camp for aspiring or journeyman designers.The bundle comes with everything you need to know at every level of the trade, starting with a course on the fundamentals of color, layout, and photography. Then you'll learn to implement those concepts in Adobe's indispensable Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign platforms with lessons that focus on painting, designing and creating in each. Later courses will spotlight the flashier (and potentially lucrative) aspects of design like logo design and kinetic typography.That's more than 30 hours of training in an 8-course package. Lifetime access to the Ultimate Graphic Design Bundle is currently $29. Read the rest

The Boing Boing Gift Guide has dozens of great ideas for stocking stuffers, brain-hammers, mind-expanders, terrible toys and badass books. It comes in four easily-digestible parts, this time around: Books, Gadgets, Toys and Stocking Stuffers.Happy holidays! Read the rest

The question-and-answer sharing website Quora says about 100 million users were affected by a hack blamed on a “malicious third party.”We have discovered that some user data was compromised by unauthorized access to our systems. We’ve taken steps to ensure that the situation is contained and are notifying affected users. Protecting your information is our top priority. Read more here: https://t.co/uwbdMjoM1v— Quora (@Quora) December 3, 2018Account information that was accessed by this mysterious third party includes user name, email address, encrypted password, any data imported from linked networks like Facebook, per Quora in a statement today.Reuters:The company said it is logging out all Quora users who may have been affected to prevent further damage."We are in the process of notifying users whose data has been compromised," Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo said in a blog post hereThe breach, discovered on Friday, did not affect question and answers that are written anonymously, the company said, adding that it has also notified law enforcement officials.“We have retained a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist us,” it said.The Quora Inc-owned website was founded in 2009 by D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever, two former Facebook (FB.O) employees. Read the rest

Yes.“A collection of the sponsored ad trash shirts and items we see daily on Facebook (and Instagram).' View this post on Instagram #tbtA post shared by Facebook Shirts (@facebookshirts) on Nov 20, 2018 at 1:20pm PST View this post on Instagram ‼️IN THE WILD‼️. (If you see them out there send us a pic) wtf is this guy up to now?A post shared by Facebook Shirts (@facebookshirts) on Dec 1, 2018 at 12:14pm PST View this post on Instagram Actually, it’s a way larger demographic than you’d imagine 🎣 @foxmuskA post shared by Facebook Shirts (@facebookshirts) on Nov 29, 2018 at 7:56am PST View this post on Instagram You came to the right place player. #facebookshirtsA post shared by Facebook Shirts (@facebookshirts) on Nov 27, 2018 at 11:55am PST View this post on Instagram Smash like if you need it! @ex5essiveA post shared by Facebook Shirts (@facebookshirts) on Nov 24, 2018 at 10:51am PST View this post on Instagram Do us a favor and check out our friends over at @bootlegworld for more weird internetA post shared by Facebook Shirts (@facebookshirts) on Nov 20, 2018 at 3:27pm PST View this post on Instagram Thank you for this @uncleorry, well done. #winkingskullA post shared by Facebook Shirts (@facebookshirts) on Nov 18, 2018 at 6:00pm PST Follow @facebookshirts.[via @bencollins] Read the rest

Tumblr will ban 'female-presenting nipples' and other content beginning December 17, 2018. Photographer and writer Nate 'Igor' Smith is a longtime Tumblr user whose work straddles the boundaries of art, editorial, and adult. Here, Nate explains why Tumblr's decision to censor is devastating for the Tumblr's longtime users, and the rest of us. — XJTHERE WAS A TIME when Tumblr was my favorite place to post photos. It was a social network that you could customize in so many ways that you could create a blog or a mood board or hide a secret project behind a password protected gate. It was used by so many people in so many different ways. You could posts .gifs on Tumblr before they worked on Twitter and you could post uncompressed images that looked good on desktop or smartphone without having to know any code. I used it as a great place to post images that I could then send to Twitter to get around Twitter’s terrible compression and constantly flowing feed. I used it as a place to organize my images because of Tumblr’s tagging system. I could search for a person or subject or send someone a link to just a specific tag so they could see all my favorite photos of juggalos for example. It was a fantastic tool and my most popular social network until Instagram really exploded.My career as a photographer took off right around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr and Tumblr really felt like a place where I could post my more personal work alongside my more commercial stuff. Read the rest

He Jiankui, the scientist who claimed to have produced the world’s first gene-edited babies using CRISPR technology, is missing. Reports indicate he has been detained by Chinese authorities.The scientist gave a presentation in Hong Kong last week on the human gene editing experiment, which Chinese authorities condemned. After that, he disappeared.A spokeswoman for the Shenzhen university where He Jiankui was a former employee told the SCMP, “Right now nobody’s information is accurate, only the official channels are.”“We cannot answer any questions regarding the matter right now, but if we have any information, we will update it through our official channels.”Various news outlets in China report that He Jiankui has been detained and brought back to Shenzhen, by the university’s president.Kristin Houser at Futurism.com:He will probably turn up eventually, at which point he’ll likely need to submit to an investigation from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology.The results of that investigation could shape the future of human gene editing — if China punishes He severely for his actions, it could deter other scientists from pursuing the “ask forgiveness, not permission” route with their own research. Leniency could have the opposite effect.From technical missteps to ethical blunders, here's a list of 15 worrying things about the increasingly farcical CRISPR baby scandal. https://t.co/aocT4luAcp— Ed Yong (@edyong209) December 3, 2018[via @Jon_Christian] Read the rest

President Lenín Moreno of Ecuador *really* wants Julian Assange out of that London embassy. Convicted felon and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort suggested he could broker a deal for the handover of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States during a meeting in May 2017 with the president-elect of Ecuador. Paul Manafort is reported to have implied to Lenín Moreno, who is now the President of Ecuador, that he could help the South American nation get a debt relief deal from the Trump Administration in exchange for handing over Julian Assange to the U.S. The talks went nowhere. A few days later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to lead the investigation that now threatens to topple Trump's entire political career and family organized crime business. And now, of course, Manafort is now a convicted felon. Report Kenneth P. Vogel and Nicholas Casey at the New York Times:In at least two meetings with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Moreno and his aides discussed their desire to rid themselves of Mr. Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, in exchange for concessions like debt relief from the United States, according to three people familiar with the talks, the details of which have not been previously reported.They said Mr. Manafort suggested he could help negotiate a deal for the handover of Mr. Assange to the United States, which has long investigated Mr. Assange for the disclosure of secret documents and which later filed charges against him that have not yet been made public. Read the rest

When MP3s conquered music, it depended on three key technologies: CD ripping software, file-sharing software, and MP3 playing software, primarily Winamp.Winamp was infinitely customizable, and there was an exuberant practice of coming up with MP3 player skins (some of Winamp's competitors adopted its skin format, making the skins interoperable among different players), and sites devoted to featuring and distributing the coolest skins.This is long gone -- the sites, the files, all of it, except for the fraction preserved by the Internet Archive. But Google Images still preserves fragmentary relics of this lost art, and John Hendren has rounded up a selection of "unusable and incomprehensible skins" from the glory days.years ago most people used winamp to listen to mp3s on their computer. but there was another program, sonique, that supported skins with transparency and altering object placements. so the internet made hundreds if not thousands of unusable and incomprehensible skins for it pic.twitter.com/sACR8a7Kjr— jon hendren (@fart) December 2, 2018(via Super Punch) Read the rest

Ricky Jay – magician, sleight-of-hand artist extraordinaire, actor, author, scholar of weirdness and oddities, Guinness award winner for throwing playing cards – passed away on November 24th at age 72.Ricky Jay's life and legacy have been dutifully celebrated in the feature documentary Deceptive Practice, an enduring 1993 profile in The New Yorker, and lately by David Mamet's eulogy. The man indeed left a dent in the magic community.A personal note should say enough for my love of this man's work. I have only one object hanging on my studio walls: an original print of Ricky Jay’s book cover “Cards as Weapons.”I was a teenage kid when I stumbled upon the card-magic bible "The Expert At The Card Table" by S.W.Erdnase. This book became an obsession of mine for a few years; eventually I translated and published the work in my native Italian. One day I got my paws on a VHS tape of a man who took Erdnase’s century-old presentation “The Exclusive Coterie” and brought it back to life – with humor, a charming style, and a never-before-seen flair. I was completely enraptured. That performance set the bar for artistry and excellence for years to come. Ricky Jay’s long time friend, collaborator and co-conspirator Michael Weber said, “The real mark of an artist is not becoming known as the finest exponent of their art. It’s when the only way to describe what they do is to name them.”Well, Ricky Jay’s name is set in stone: an artist in a league by himself. Read the rest

Peter Brown was born in Philly, but he made the mistake of visiting Jamaica for one day, years ago on a cruise. But that gave U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Sheriff of Monroe County, Florida a good enough reason to detain Brown and attempt to deport him to Jamaica, even though he has never lived there and doesn't know a single person there. From Mr Brown's lawsuit, as reported in CNN:"Despite his repeated protests to multiple jail officers, his offer to produce proof, and the jail's own records, the Sheriff's Office held Mr. Brown so that ICE could deport him to Jamaica — a country where he has never lived and knows no one," the lawsuit says.The Sheriff's Office ignored all the indications that it was illegally detaining Mr. Brown. It did nothing to investigate his citizenship. It did not contact ICE to pass along this urgent information, or ask for a review of Mr. Brown's files. It did not seek any further information from Mr. Brown or anyone else. It simply held Mr. Brown, in violation of his constitutional rights and after he was entitled to release under state law, so that he could be picked up by ICE and deported from the country."The Monroe County Sheriff's Office and ICE couldn't be bothered to comment on the case. They are probably too busy rounding up people born in Cleveland and shipping them off to Haiti.Image: Shutterstock/Jonathan Weiss Read the rest

Australia's Paleotronic is celebrating Christmas with twelve posts celebrating the best seasonal computer ads of the years between 1980 and 1992; today is day 1: 1980, in all its Coleco gloriousness. (Thanks, Gnat!) Read the rest

The medical world is no stranger to shilling (see, for example, the kickbacks that Purdue Pharma paid doctors who helped hook people on Oxycontin, generating billions in blood-money for the "philanthropist" Sackler family), and doctors are cashing in on the social media influencer market, selling everything from Quaker oats to deodorant.In theory, these docs have been trained on the ethical lines they must not cross when participating in marketing campaigns -- unlike the med school students who have become the shock troops in a new wave of often sketchy influencer marketing campaigns.Whether it's someone studying to be a dermatologist using Instagram to promote skin products or a baby-doc with a fitness-oriented social media account selling protein powders, the appeal of med student marketing for cosmetics, mattresses, and (eventually) quack remedy peddlers is easy to understand: you get the white coat and attendant medical credibility without having to navigate all the ethical strictures, and at a lower price. Sufficiently intrigued, I fell into a digital rabbit hole that surfaced dozens of fellow med students moonlighting as social media influencers, and the partnerships grew ever more questionable. Some accounts featured sponsored posts advertising watches and clothes from Lululemon; another linked back to a personal blog that included a page that allowed followers to “shop my Instagram.” A popular fitness-oriented account, hosted by an aspiring M.D., promoted protein powder and pre-workout supplements. A future dermatologist showcased skin care products. Another future M.D.’s account highlights the mattresses, custom maps, furniture rental services, and food brand that, according to the posts, help her seamlessly live the life of a third-year med student. Read the rest

Later this week, China plans to launch its Chang'e-4 spacecraft to the far side of the lunar surface. The aim is to land a rover on the dark side of the moon for the first time. Blocked from direct communication with the Earth, the lander and rover will depend on China's Queqiao communication satellite launched in May. From Scientific American:The lander will also conduct the first radio astronomy experiments from the far side of the Moon—and the first investigations to see whether plants will grow in the low-gravity lunar environment...The ultimate goal of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) is to create a Moon base for future human exploration there, although it has not announced when that might happen. One of (the experiments) will test whether potato and thale-cress (Arabidopsis) seeds sprout and photosynthesize in a sealed, climate-controlled environment in the low gravity on the lunar surface.“When we take the step towards long-term human habitation on the Moon or Mars, we will need greenhouse facilities to support us, and will need to live in something like a biosphere,” says Anna-Lisa Paul, a horticultural scientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.(image: CNSA rendering of Chang'e 4 Rover on the Moon) Read the rest

When Rudy Giuliani went to Twitter over the weekend to whine about the Mueller investigation, he somehow, accidentally, created a website link in his post. Mueller filed an indictment just as the President left for https://t.co/8ZNrQ6X29a July he indicted the Russians who will never come here just before he left for Helsinki.Either could have been done earlier or later. Out of control!Supervision please?— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) November 30, 2018And of course a prankster couldn't help but have some fun with it, creating this simple but spot-on message about Trump that people reading Giuliani's tweet would be linked to: Via Daily Kos:On a more serious note, it remains a mystery as to why Donald Trump would name Rudy Giuliani to a cybersecurity role, a job he is most assuredly unqualified to hold, especially in light of the serious, dangerous hacking efforts of Russia, China and other foreign agents. Roughly eight months after Trump named Giuliani to the job, the cyber security wonks at cyberscoop noted the advisory committee was doing nothing at all.Giuliani’s so-called “cyber working group,” a vague advisory committee officially announced by Trump’s presidential transition team in early January, is rarely in contact with White House staff. It is absent and disconnected from significant decisions, said a U.S. official with knowledge of White House affairs who spoke to CyberScoop on condition of anonymity. The source, like others in this story, declined to speak on the record citing the potential for blowback from Giuliani’s allies in government. Read the rest

Everest isn't the most difficult mountain in the world to climb, but it is one of the most expensive. The individual cost of getting one's athletic ass to the top of the mountain range is between $40,000-$130,000. Most of this cheddar gets thrown at logistics. It takes a lot of money for a mountain outfitter to set up multiple camps at varying altitudes along the route to the top of the world. It takes considerably less money to hire the ludicrously underpaid Sherpa guides to set it all up and, if things go well, get their clients up the side of Everest and back down to base camp again in one piece. This in-depth video explains it all. Read the rest

When Tod Kurt of ThingM recommended these reversible Micro USB cables, I bought a 3-pack on Amazon. They really do work. Both the USB male plug and the micro plug can be inserted without regard to the orientation, like a USB C plug. There is no "right side up." Why aren't all USB cables made this way? Read the rest

Since 1991, Canadian sculptor Gillian Genser has used shells to make her artwork. The mussel shells she grinded released dust filled with heavy metals, which got into her body and poisoned her. Now she is permanently disabled. Let this serve as a warning to people who say natural materials are always better.From Toronto Life:The symptoms worsened. After a few hours of grinding mussel shells, I would become immobilized. My muscles ached. My hands would cramp when I held my tools. I became combative and fatalistic, declaring that my life was over. My husband was afraid to the leave the house, worried he’d come home and find me hanging from the chandelier. He found friends to babysit me. These symptoms continued, on and off, for 15 years.One day in 2013, I cleaned out my ventilation system, which had trapped years of fine dust. As I swept out the particles, I suddenly felt weak and unable to stand. For the next week, I lay in bed, my mind in a fog. I couldn’t string full sentences together, and my speech was slurred. My whole body was in excruciating, paralyzing pain—my neck, abdomen, arms—and I had suddenly lost all hearing in my left ear.Image: Shutterstock/Ingrid Maasik Read the rest

The supergeniuses at The GI (go ahead and carve out about ten minutes to marvel at their homepage, I'll wait -- you'll thank me) have posted Shrek Retold, a fan remake of Shrek in which 200 different creators each recreate a scene from the movie, using live action, stop motion, and animation techniques ranging from crude paper cutouts to super-sophisticated stylized illustration and 3D rendering. Combined with the voice acting -- also a huge range! -- the result is, you know, jaw-dropping. (via Waxy) Read the rest

Oil and water don't normally mix, unless you emulsify it with something, like soap, egg yolk, or mustard. But there is a way to mix oil and water without using an emulsifier, and in this video, the Action Lab Man shows how to do it. The secret is to remove the dissolved air from water by using a vacuum chamber. This means you can use degassed water alone to remove grease from clothes. Read the rest

After traveling two billion miles over more than two years, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has arrived at asteroid Bennu. The spacecraft will survey the asteroid, collect a sample, and bring it back home in 2023. From NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/University of Arizona:This series of images taken by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft shows Bennu in one full rotation from a distance of around 50 miles (80 km). The spacecraft’s PolyCam camera obtained the thirty-six 2.2-millisecond frames over a period of four hours and 18 minutes.Below is a set of images compiled during OSIRIS-REx's approach. Learn more at: ISIRIS-REx: Asteroid Sample Return Mission.From NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona:From Aug. 17 through Nov. 27 the spacecraft’s PolyCam camera imaged Bennu almost daily as the spacecraft traveled 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km) toward the asteroid. The final images were obtained from a distance of around 40 miles (65 km). During this period, OSIRIS-REx completed four maneuvers slowing the spacecraft’s velocity from approximately 1,100 mph (491 m/sec) to 0.10 mph (0.04 m/sec) relative to Bennu, which resulted in the slower approach speed at the end of the video. Read the rest

High ranking German government officials were outed this year for secretly supplying advice and assistance to the xenophobic, violent, far-right extremist Alternative For Germany (AfD) party.Now, information about the party's secret financial backers is emerging: according to sworn affidavits reviewed by Spiegel, the party has long been backed by reclusive billionaire August von Finck through his trusted lieutenant Ernst Knut Stahl, who, in 2017, courted a publisher with an offer to work on a new anti-Merkel newspaper called Deutschland Kurier, aimed at countering the influence of "a street in New York with lots of investment bankers, lawyers and so forth...they are all Jews...They control everything. Merkel and also Ralf Stegner from the SPD."Deutschland Kurier is now a going concern, and hundreds of thousands of copies of it were mailed to voters in the runup to the last German federal elections, warning of "exploding migrant crime" and briefing against Merkel, while throwing heavy support behind AfD.The Kurier's parent organization is the "Association for the Preservation of the Rule of Law and Citizen Freedoms," whose PAC has provided generous support to the AfD -- at least €10,000,000 worth of posters, and free newspapers.AfD won seats in all 16 German state Parliaments in that election.The AfD campaigns as an anti-establishment party that says it rejects corporate money and calls for restrictions on big money donations in politics, and accuses the established parties of being creatures of "big money."The revelations about Stahl and von Finck's possible financial links to AfD come amidst a scandal about huge pools of dark money flowing into AfD campaign coffers through dodgy Swiss bank accounts and cutout "foundations" in the Netherlands. Read the rest

Making your own decisions can be hard work. Often, I turn to my trusty Magic 8 Ball. How have things turned out? "Ask again later."My Magic 8 Ball has the same pat 20 answers as every other Magic 8 Ball, so I can not imagine why it is never, ever helpful? Replies are never hazy, my 8 Ball is way off base.Signs never point to yes, even when there is no other possible answer. Other people are told their outlook is good -- but never me! "Cannot predict now?" WTF? What else does it have to do?My Magic 8 Ball must hate me. I no longer talk to it. The 8 Ball just seethes.Magic 8 Ball via Amazon Read the rest

A guy set up a camera to figure out how his small dog was escaping its enclosure in the kitchen, and this is what he found. Who knew French Bulldogs were so nimble? Read the rest

Raspberry Pi is a line of inexpensive ($5 - $35) single board Linux computers. The latest model is the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, which costs $25 and is quite a bit smaller than the 3 Model B+. This episode of ExplainingComputers takes a look at this new edition to family. Read the rest

Tumblr, the mainstream web's last redoubt for niche smut in general and queer smut in particular, is going to clean house. The social blogging platform is banning all adult material on December 17.Banned content includes photos, videos, and GIFs of human genitalia, female-presenting nipples, and any media involving sex acts, including illustrations. The exceptions include nude classical statues and political protests that feature nudity. The new guidelines exclude text, so erotica remains permitted. Illustrations and art that feature nudity are still okay — so long as sex acts aren’t depicted — and so are breast-feeding and after birth photos."Users have a chance to appeal flagged content"The policy change takes effect on December 17th. From then on, any explicit posts will be flagged and deleted by algorithms. For now, Tumblr is emailing users who have posted adult content flagged by algorithms and notifying that their content will soon be hidden from view. Posts with porn content will be set to private, which will prevent them from being reblogged or shared elsewhere in the Tumblr community. Even the cold dead embrace of a Yahoo! acquision could not end Tumblr, such was the power of fandom gathered there. But Yahoo never knew what it owned in Tumblr and was indifferent to its continued existence. The management of new Yahoo owner Verizon, however, has a pulse. It knows what Tumblr is and it hates it. It will hack it down until a perfectly clean advertising- and appstore-friendly traffic center remains.That phrase Tumblr uses, "female-presenting nipples", is rather on the nose. Read the rest

"For God's sake, fund it as a mainline program. Don't put it in yet another competition with science," Russell "Rusty" Schweickart insisted. "This is a public safety program."While some elements of the US government seek to establish the "Space Force," one former Apollo astronaut believes an asteroid spotting telescope is what we need.Business Insider:Russell "Rusty" Schweickart, an aerospace engineer retired astronaut who flew on the Apollo 9 mission, says there is a solution in waiting for this problem: NASA can launch the Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam), which is a small infrared observatory, into space."It's a critical discovery telescope to protect life on Earth, and it's ready to go," Schweickart told Business Insider at The Economist Space Summit on November 1.NEOCam's designers have pitched the mission to NASA multiple times. The mission has received several million dollars here and there to continue its development in response to those proposals, but the agency has denied full funding in every instance on account of it not being the best purely science-focused mission."For God's sake, fund it as a mainline program. Don't put it in yet another competition with science," Schweickart said. "This is a public safety program." Read the rest

Ryan Jewell is a professional watchmaker in New York. In this episode of Wired's Deconstructed series, Jewell (good last name for a watchmaker) takes apart two Carpenter watches, one with a Swiss movement (~$150) and one with a Japanese movement (~$500). It's interesting to see the different tools he uses to take the watches apart without damaging the tiny delicate components. Read the rest

Steve of Miller Knives found an extremely rusty old Estwing hammer at a flea market and restored it beautifully. The process is the product. Read the rest

On stage at the G-20 summit on Saturday, Trump suddenly wanders off, for no apparent reason, leaving the president of Argentina standing alone. A staffer runs after him, trying to corral him back. We then hear Trump on a hot mic saying, "Get me out of here." The Guardian captured it on video, which @TopRopeTravis tweeted here:Oh my lord. Trump just wandered right off the stage, leaving the Argentinian president all by himself.A staffer is then observed attempting to stop and retrieve Trump.Ladies and gentlemen... Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/JhZpKFfiZG— TOᑭ ᖇOᑭE TᖇAViS (@TopRopeTravis) December 1, 2018But this is nothing new. Watch how Trump zombie-steps away from Prime Minister Netanyahu last year in Israel. Yikes.Is Donald sleepwalking around the G20 or something pic.twitter.com/COsL2mHu1O— Nathan H. Rubin (@NathanHRubin) December 2, 2018 Read the rest

The Clarion Workshop, hosted at the University of California San Diego at La Jolla, is an annual, six-week, intensive writing workshop for aspiring science fiction and fantasy writers (I'm a graduate of Clarion, a frequent instructor, and a member of the board of the Clarion Foundation, a nonprofit that administers the election); the 2019 workshop runs June 23 - Aug 3, with instructors Carmen Maria Machado, Maurice Broaddus, Karen Lord, Andy Duncan, Ann VanderMeer, and Jeff VanderMeer. Apply here. Scholarships available. (Image: Locus) Read the rest