Boing Boing

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

If you want an example of how big of a problem Chinese espionage is, you needn't look any further than the warnings that Canada and the United States have been throwing at corporations and governmental organizations about the use of gear built by tech companies with ties to the Chinese government. Apparently, the issue extends beyond the use of smartphones and cellular networking hardware built by Huawei and ZTE: the US Government is thinking about conducting deep background checks on Chinese nationals coming to the United States in pursuit of their education. Spies! They're everywhere!From IntelNews.Org:...the Trump administration is reportedly considering the possibility of imposing deeper background checks and additional vetting on all Chinese nationals wishing to study in the US. Citing “a US official and three congressional and university sources”, Reuters said on Thursday that the measures would apply to all Chinese students wishing to register in undergraduate and graduate academic programs in the US. The news agency quoted a “senior US official” as saying that “no Chinese student who’s coming [to the US] is untethered from the state […. They all have] to go through a party and government approval process”. Reuters reported that the proposed plan includes a comprehensive examination of the applicants’ phone records and their presence on social media platforms. The goal would be to verify that the applicants are not connected with Chinese government agencies. As part of the proposed plan, US law enforcement and intelligence agencies would provide counterintelligence training to university officials. Read the rest

Countries surrounding the North Sea imposed an outsize impact on world affairs. But the sea itself was once land, and might have stayed that way had world temperatures been a degree or two different. Lee Rimmer wonders: What if Doggerland had survived?The cultural impact of changing the movement of tribal groupings within northwestern Europe would be immediately evident in terms of language. ...The languages spoken in modern Doggerland and its neighbouring states may sound vaguely familiar to us, but we wouldn’t understand them....Doggerland’s more sheltered, lower-lying peninsula may have been a more agreeable farming region than the windswept highlands of the British Isles, leaving them with a much lower population distribution. Stonehenge, or something like it, may have been built on the plains of Doggerland rather than Salisbury Plain.Wild, impossible counterfactuals. My favored parallel-world Doggerland is one that remained as a small island (even now its uplands lie barely feet under the waves). A strange spooky pinewood backwater where the signs are in three languages and the kids speak them all, and where the rain washes the blood leaching from the deep earth.The (real) Dogger is to serve as the foundations of a vast offshore wind farm, which will provide 4.8GW of sustainable power. Read the rest

There's a lot of controversy surrounding the use of police body cameras. Some privacy advocates argue that the video captured by the always-on cameras has little effect on the behavior of police officers : the statistics surrounding use of force and citizen complaints barely budged before and after the tech was introduced. The police don't much care for them either. The NYPD's police union, for example, says that the footage captured by a body cam shouldn't be able to be used in open court as it could be considered to be part of a police officer's personnel record, which is protected from public disclosure. Then there's the middle ground: by having cops wear body cams while on duty, provided they're not covering them or turning them off during an incident, they're being held accountable for every action they take. No matter where you sit on this spectrum, it's likely safe to say that using the tech to capture video of someone's ass and balls is likely not a great idea.From The New York Daily News:An NYPD detective has been suspended for using another cop’s body camera to shoot an X-rated video of his privates, the Daily News has learned.Detective Specialist Raymond Williams, a neighborhood coordination officer at the 79th Precinct, was suspended Thursday, law enforcement sources said.Williams waited until unsuspecting cop Michael Devonish — another neighborhood coordination officer — went to the men’s room in their Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, stationhouse before he snatched Devonish’s body camera and put it to anatomical abuse. Read the rest

The Republican election of Scott Walker and his band of Ayn Rand cosplayers was a triumph of massive corporate spending, voter suppression and gerrymandering that meant that the votes of the majority of Wisconsinites would no longer count; despite that, last month's midterm elections saw the governorship and Attorney General flip to progressive Democrats with wildly popular platforms.As Wisconsin's Republican legislature sits for its lame-duck session, they have unveiled a plan to steal the state again: a sweeping set of unprecedented (and even unconstitutional) legal changes that would neuter the governorship and the A-G: a ban on early voting (previously struck down by the courts); a logistically impossible shift to the next state Supreme Court election calculated to hand the seat to a far-right extremist who says that affirmative action is literally indistinguishable from slavery, defended gerrymandering, and says same-sex marriage "will eventually rob the institution of marriage of any discernible meaning"; to strip the A-G of the power to back Wisconsin out of its petty lawsuit to kill Obamacare; to strip the governor of the power to overturn the previous Governor's attempt to gut Medicare; to force the state capital to allow private persons to carry firearms on its premises.Moveon Washington director Ben Wikler says the changes are "chillingly cold-blooded":"They gerrymander the legislature to end majority rule. They move powers from democratically elected offices to the undem legislature. They entrench by suppressing votes & protecting partisan Sup Ct justices."Wisconsin was always pitched as a living laboratory for oligarch control by the Koch brothers and their thinktankie allies: if a progressive, egalitarian state could be turned into a massively unequal state where the will of the people could be ignored within a structure that retained the trappings of "democracy," then the whole country could follow. Read the rest

Right-wing persona Milo Yiannopoulous was supposed to tour Australia with an ever-shifting lineup of alt-right numpties. But it's all fallen apart, and the tour organizers have taken revenge by dumping his dox as part of an apparently-pending lawsuit. Revealed are staggering debts: unpaid contributors to his website galore, $56k in wedding expenses, $76k owed to the ghostwriter of his (famously bad) book. There's even a $16k debt to a clothing company, suggesting that the number of people who want to walk around with Augusto Pinochet tees was radically overestimated.The documents show Yiannopoulos demanding money from the promoters for his living expenses, medical bills for himself and his husband, and payment for his employees, on top of sums that the promoters claim they had already transferred to him.At one point, as he attempts to negotiate the transfer of more funds from the Spillers, Yiannopoulos remarks in a message that “I am less financially secure, more panicked and stressed, and more miserable than when we started”, and then says he returned his wedding ring to Cartier to wipe out the debt he had with them.The Mercers want $400k back from him! What a hoot.Americans, especially when in New York, are easily fooled by superficial indicia of wealth, is all I have to say. Read the rest

Cephalopod intelligence is widely known, but scientists struggle to understand why it evolved. The New York Times' Carl Zimmer reports on one of zoology's most fascinating questions.About 275 million years ago, the ancestor of today’s cephalopods lost the external shell. It’s not clear why, but it must have been liberating. Now the animals could start exploring places that had been off-limits to their shelled ancestors. Octopuses could slip into rocky crevices, for example, to hunt for prey. On the other hand, losing their shells left cephalopods quite vulnerable to hungry predators. This threat may have driven cephalopods to become masters of disguise and escape. They did so by evolving big brains, the ability to solve new problems, and perhaps look into the future — knowing that coconut or clam shells may come in handy, for example.Yet intelligence is not the perfect solution for cephalopods, Mr. Amodio suggested. Sooner or later, they get eaten. Natural selection has turned them into a paradox: a short-lived, intelligent animal.They also like MDMA. Read the rest

Thirty years after its mostly-European heydey, the Commodore Amiga remains a cult favorite with a huge library of excellent and often weird games to discover. But what if emulation isn't your idea of fun? This guy went out and bought a real one.The Amiga still has an active and faithful community, and it's thanks to them that it's possible to pick up an Amiga and get it upgraded and running all these years later. I also think it's a testament to how important the machine was in the UK and around Europe.If you're looking to learn more about the booming home-brew game scene during 80's Britain then I can highly recommend "From Bedroom to Billions", it's a little low budget but seems to capture the time perfectly.The follow-up documentary, "From Bedroom to Billions: the Amiga Years" is also a must watch if you have fond memories of the Amiga.Interesting how buying a later, more powerful model, obliged him to further upgrade it before games were playable. The low-end 512Kb Amigas were invariably put to use as game consoles, booting right into games, the code given bare-metal access. But it seems fancier models more or less obliged users to launch games from the operating system's GUI, Workbench. And there even 2Mb wasn't enough.If you like Workbench, though, there's a new simulation of it online. Just for fun! "OS 1.3" is the right one for the legendary A500 era. Read the rest

I haven't played Bloody Rally, an old-school top-down racing game echoing Super Sprint and Carmageddon, but I like the look of its procedurally-generated tracks. Read the rest

After pulling over a woman he claims to have seen drinking beer at the wheel, Sanford, Fla., police officer Michael Wagner filed a citation saying she'd been breathalyzed over the legal alcohol limit, and her license was suspended. At trial, though, Wagner testified that no breath-alcohol test was conducted and that all he did was book her into jail.This video shows district court judge Fred Schott yelling at the prosecutor over Wagner's shenanigans and throwing the driver's guitly verdict out. The Orlando Sentinel reports that the judge has been asked to only do civil cases for a while. He sticks by his decision but admits he shouldn't have gotten mad at the prosecutor—or granted a nonexistent motion for a new trial after apparently aquitting the driver."I was angry," he said. "I probably got more emotional than I should have, but I really feel this woman was treated unfairly." ... Schott accused Wagner of falsifying a sworn document by checking the box that indicated Gonzalez had failed a blood or breath test."I want you to take him up for perjury," the judge said. 'He lied. He lied on a sworn citation. … He broke the law.Even if it was an honest mistake, note that it's incomprehensible to police or the presecutor that they be held responsible for the mistake. Even when the only thing at stake is one iffy DUI case. Read the rest

Australia just passed into law one of the world's most censoring copyright law, which allows the country's media giants like Village Roadshow to use one-sided administrative process to get court orders to censor any website whose "primary effect" is infringement, then use those orders to force search engines to delist any site so blocked, and then recycle those orders to block for any site or service that "provides access" to a blocked site or service.In other words, Village Roadshow can now censor any site it doesn't like, without the site's operators being present to argue their side, and then block search engines from displaying that site's contents, making it virtually impossible for everyday Australians to learn that the site has been blocked -- and they get to block tools like VPNs that might allow people to get outside this censoring national firewall that they get to run.The pricetag for this is a secret: thought Village Roadshow gave AUD1.2 million to pass the precursor to this bill, Village Roadshow refuses to say how much it spent in this cycle, and Australia's backwards election-spending transparency rules mean we won't find out for months, after this has faded from the news cycle (prior to this bill, Village Roadshow's all-time lobbying spend topped AUD6.7 million).Village, one of the bill’s key backers, refused to tell Guardian Australia how much it donated to the parties in the months leading up to debate. Australia’s weak and sluggish donation disclosure requirements mean their contributions for 2017-18 will remain secret until at least February. Read the rest

Kate "McMansion Hell" Wagner (previously) has put out a call for "the most nubtastic, gawdawful gingerbread McMansion in all of McMansion Hell!" (no styrofoam or support materials allowed) with prizes starting at $200 and a t-shirt and 3 pins from the McMansion Hell store. Read the rest

Creepbay is a beautifully selected catalog of online "creepy and cool" merch, skewed heavily to Etsy, though not limited to it: it's full of stuff that will probably end up in my house, eventually (this planter will look great in the tiki bar we're building; this is next Christmas's door-candy; and someone in my life surely needs this) -- better yet, there's RSS, so expect more from this feed to show up here in the fullness of time. (via Metafilter) Read the rest

The Girlfriend Zone is the place that women find themselves repeatedly and insufferably placed into by their male platonic friends, who can't or won't understand that the relationship is and will remain platonic: Ann: "So are you hanging out with Ben after class today?" Leslie: "No, he girlfriend zoned me hard. Hes a cool guy, but I can't hang out with him for more than 10 minutes without him making a pass at me." (via Seanan McGuire) Read the rest

Every time Trump reminds you that the stock market has experienced a feverish, tubercular bloom under his presidency, just recall that 84% of stocks are held by 10% of Americans.The wealth of middle class people is primarily in the form of their personal residences, whose value has driven to incredible peaks by rich people (often represented by hedge funds) diversifying their portfolios by speculating in the property markets.That is why any politician who proposes to do something about the housing crisis without addressing the underlying factors of inequality will end up infuriating the middle class, because that fix will wipe out their net worth.“Despite the fact that almost half of all households owned stock shares either directly or indirectly through mutual funds, trusts, or various pension accounts, the richest 10% of households controlled 84% of the total value of these stocks in 2016,” Wolff writes.That number—which accounts for individual shares as well as stocks held via mutual funds—represents a big change from 2001, when the top 10% owned just 77% of all stocks.Furthermore, while virtually all (94%) of the very rich reported having significant stock holdings—as defined as $10,000 or more in shares—only 27% of the middle class did. (The study framed that middle class as the group between the poorest 20% and the richest 20% of Americans.)The Richest 10% of Americans Now Own 84% of All Stocks [Rob Wile/Time](via Late Stage Capitalism) Read the rest

Each year, Baby Center polls parents to find out what they named their newborn. In 2018, more than 742,000 parents answered. Based on that data, here are the top baby names for 2018.Girls:1. Sophia2. Olivia3. Emma4. Ava5. Isabella6. Aria7. Riley8. Amelia9. Mia10. LaylaBoys:1. Jackson2. Liam3. Noah4. Aiden5. Caden6. Grayson7. Lucas8. Mason9. Oliver10. ElijahSophia celebrates her ninth consecutive year as the top choice for girls, while Jackson remains the most popular name for boys for six years running. Oliver and Layla both jumped into the top 10, pushing out Logan and Zoe. The fastest climbers of 2018 include Everly, Isla, Leo, and Carson.These are the top ten, head to Baby Center to see all 100 top baby names for 2018. If you click on a name, you can discover its popularity over the years (data FTW!). Baby Center also offers predictions of future trends in baby names (inc. sneakers, gender-swaps, and Southern states), as well as alternatives to popular names. Previously: Heather used to be a popular baby name(Neatorama)image via Classic Film Read the rest

Over 200 hardcore Shrek fans contributed to the crowdsourced Shrek-Retold, a full-length, deeply-artistic scene-by-scene remake of Dreamworks' original 2001 animated film. The 90-minute adaptation is a project headed by 3GI Industries, the Shrek superfans behind Shrekfest (their hyper-busy retro website is a must-see). Now, I've admittedly only skimmed the video but it's probably the most "internet-y" thing -- with its surreal mix of live-action, cosplay, and animation -- I've seen in a good long while.(Digg) Read the rest

Ok, I'm not just sharing these "Cutetitos" for the sake of sharing them. I'm sharing them because I've just learned that toy makers have figured out that young kids really like unboxing videos and they have now found a way to replicate that experience with "mystery toys" (like these plushies wrapped up a burrito). The Atlantic [emphasis and some links mine]:"Enter the L.O.L. Surprise! doll, a sphere the size of a bocce ball that consists of seven layers of packaging. Kids peel away the layers of crinkly plastic, which contain stickers and messages and tiny accessories that are surely crunched under many a parental foot, and find a small, nearly naked plastic doll with giant Bette Davis eyes who measures just a few inches tall.More than 800 million L.O.L. Surprise! toys have been sold since their debut in late 2016, and they were one of the top products sold on Cyber Monday this year... Parents can now buy eggs, pods of foam, cake pops, burritos, and balls of many shapes and sizes containing mystery animals and figurines. (“Unrolling is the new unboxing,” said Ashley Mady, the head of brand development at the company that launched the burritos, called Cutetitos, in October.)"...There are biological reasons young children like watching unboxing videos, and it’s the same reason they’re drawn to surprise toys. Kids don’t really get good at understanding and anticipating the future until they’re about 4 or 5, Rachel Barr, the director of the Early Learning Project at Georgetown University, told me...Unboxing videos and surprise toys allow kids to enjoy the anticipation without being too afraid...because they know roughly what will be in the package, just not the exact details. Read the rest

Talking Heads frontman and all-round musical/art-theory/bicycle genius David Byrne has published a playlist of "Eclectic Music For the Holidays," recommended by the musicians in his orbit: a fine way to start Christmas month! (stream it here) Read the rest

Aella was a top-earning, top-ranked camgirl who performed sex shows over the internet for money, using the popular Myfreecams platform; she quit a year ago, and has written an incredibly detailed, soup-to-nuts primer on getting started camgirling, though she warns that some of her advice is out of date.There's remarkably little here about production values (though she does have intriguing advice on decor and lighting), an not a ton about the way the platforms work.Instead, the meat of Aella's advice sits at the intersection of publicity tips, retail psychology (for example, how to use the Street Performer Protocol to entice spending); gender theory (men who patronize camgirls want to win competitions for women's attention, harbor a perverse antagonism to the women they patronize, and pay more when the camgirl fronts a kind of displeased persona that they have to crack with tips and flattery); and then a whole whack of material on emotional labor and dealing with the price that labor extracts from the performer, which is exacerbated by features of the platform, like ranking systems that punish performers who have a bad day, reducing their visibility to men in the future, making future days worse, in a death-spiral that quickly erodes the performer's earnings.Aella's piece is a real snapshot of this moment: she talks at length about the "whales" -- rich men who pay orders of magnitude more than typical customers -- and how getting a couple of these into your customer base can be game-changing, and how some women text and call these whales when they're off-camera, just to keep them happy. Read the rest

Jack Poulson is the former Google Senior Research Scientist who quit the company's machine learning division over Project Dragonfly, the company's secret plan to build a censoring Chinese search engine designed to help the country's spies surveil dissident search activity.In an editorial on The Intercept, Poulson describes the series of events that led up to his resignation: a chain of execs who, in private meetings and public statements, engaged in hypocritical deflection and spin rather than giving the straight answer about why they were going to go into China and what the result of that would be (answers: "To make money," and "complicity in human rights abuses").Poulson is emerging as a kind of Robert Oppenheimer of AI, one of the first top machine learning scientists to stage a high-profile resignation over the humanitarian consequences of the abuse of the technology he helped build.My final two weeks at Google were spent balancing between handing off my projects to other engineers and meeting with increasingly senior management about my letter; my penultimate evening was spent in a disappointing direct meeting with Jeff Dean, the head of artificial intelligence research and my interface to Google’s CEO. Dean argued that only a small number of queries would be censored and that China’s surveillance is analogous to the U.S.’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants, secret warrants purportedly issued for the purpose of rooting out foreign spies. The next day, I worked late to finish my last project handoff and anticlimactically turned in my company badge and laptop to an empty office. Read the rest