Portrait artist extraordinaire Drew Friedman worked as an intern for Marvel boss Stan Lee, and went on to draw Lee's likeness many times. On his blog, Drew remembers Lee:Stan Lee (1922-2018), Born Stanley Martin Lieber, was a complex man. He was both worshiped and vilified, and has been described as a tireless and shameless celebrity spokesman for Marvel comics. He was an imperious comics writer and editor, a persistent self-promoter, and a credit and publicity hog. His public persona was charming, funny and affable. He was the face of Marvel for over half a century and probably the most famous man to have ever worked in the comics industry.I got to know Stan when I was a young kid in the early to mid 1960s. My dad was a magazine editor at Martin Goodman's "Magazine Management" publishing company, and he shared an adjoining office with Stan for a decade, between 1954-66. Mario Puzo's editorial office was also nearby. My brothers and I would often visit and I always made a beeline for the Marvel comics offices, where Stan held court. He couldn't have been nicer to me, like a favorite uncle handing out candy, although in Stan's case, brand new Marvel comic books. Stan took a liking to me, especially after he learned I liked to draw cartoons. He'd often exclaim "Someday Drew is going to draw for MARVEL!" That was not to be although I did intern at Marvel for a week at age 14 in 1972 as part of a school work-study program. Read the rest

The host of the My Mechanics Youtube channel bought a rusted Gressel vise for $20 and made it look brand new again. It was fun to watch him restore this ugly boat anchor into a good-as-new vise. The rust was so severe that he had to make a tool to open the jaws. He also used lots of WD-40, an impact driver, a hammer, scrapers, brushes, a lathe, sandpaper, a grinder, a welder, a file, a drill press, a hand drill, a tap and die set, an oilstone, a screw extractor, and end mill, a sandblaster, degreaser, and paint. He also made some parts that had been missing from the original vise.[via Core77] Read the rest

Dutch dart enthusiast Wesley Harms claims he could not play his best in the Grand Slam of Darts semi-finals due to poor air quality.From Deadspin:In case you missed it, Scottish dart player Gary Anderson defeated Dutchman Wesley Harms 10-2 to earn a spot in the quarterfinals of the Gland Slam of Darts. But the match was not without a whiff of controversy. In a post-match interview, Harms claimed that he wasn’t able to play to the best of his abilities because there was a terrible smell on stage that likely came from the posterior of his opponent. He said Anderson left a “fragrant smell” behind and that it will “take [him] two nights to lose this smell from my nose.”Those might have seemed like harsh comments coming from a likely frustrated loser, but it’s not as though Anderson did a great job defending the honor of his ass. Rather than play the “whoever smelt it, dealt it” card, the Scotsman went some serious lengths to deny any and all accusations. Read the rest

Pope Francis continues his streak of fighting for economic justice (though he's an unrepentant monster on abortion, women's rights, and the rights of queer people).His sermon last Sunday lamented the plight of exploited people, indigent people and migrants, blaming "the wealthy few" for hoarding the riches that "in justice, belongs to all."The sermon was delivered to 6,000 invited poor people, 1,500 of whom were fed afterwards at a Vatican lunch; it's part of the Pope's anti-poverty initiative in Vatican City, which includes free healthcare provided to homeless and poor people in St Peter's Square.He also drew attention to the plight of abandoned elderly, the friendless and “the cry of all those forced to flee their homes and native land for an uncertain future. It is the cry of entire peoples, deprived even of the great natural resources at their disposal.”Francis said the poor were weeping “while the wealthy few feast on what, in justice, belongs to all. Injustice is the perverse root of poverty.”“The cry of the poor daily becomes stronger but every day heard less,” he said. That cry is “drowned out by the din on the rich few, who grow ever fewer and more rich,” the pontiff said.Pope decries that ‘wealthy few’ feast on what belongs to all [Frances D'Emilio/AP] Read the rest

Motion graphics wizard Future Punk is back with his reimagining of what opening titles for video streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Twitch might have looked like if they'd been around in the 1990s.Previously: If today's online platforms existed in the 1970s, here's what their animated logos would look like Read the rest

Fuck Zuck, sure, but what about Sheryl Sandberg?Despite a string of ever-worsening scandals, the Facebook COO has managed to remain largely above the fray, so that she's thought of as that great "Lean In" woman, not an executive whose decisions have helped to create a tech monster that has enabled genocidal violence, the rise of white supremacy and ultra-nationalism, voter suppression, and disinformation of every kind.But Sandberg's day of reckoning is at hand: as Facebookers break ranks and slip data about the way that the company's worst scandals arose internally, Sandberg is exactly where you'd expect her to be, at Zuckerberg's right hands, directing operations that the hooded man-child lacks the attention-span to tackle on his own, from covering up the extent of foreign intelligence ops to hiring PR companies who used antisemitic memes to smear Facebook's critics.Sandberg played a central role in nearly every misdeed at Facebook that’s described in the Times piece. Singularly focused on the company’s stock price and its advertising-based business model, she worked to minimize data abuse and election interference. She employed a Republican-leaning crisis PR firm to attack the company’s critics, and opted to do little to address the company’s rampant fake news problem, fearing that it would anger conservative users.Sandberg also hired lobbyists to pester Democratic senators who dared criticize the company and its business model, and to push terrible pieces of legislation like the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, which has endangered the safety of sex workers, in an attempt to woo skeptical Republicans. Read the rest

In March 2018, Nathan Ganas was murdered in his driveway in Durban, South Africa, during a botched hijacking; now Momentum, the insurer who wrote the 2.4m Rand (USD 170,700) policy on his life, is refusing to pay out because they say he didn't disclose his elevated blood-sugar levels when he took out the policy -- instead, they will refund the premiums Ganas paid during the four years he held the policy.Ganas took out the policy in 2014 and the insurer took his blood for an HIV test at the time. Momentum will not say how they determined that Ganas withheld his knowledge about his blood-sugar levels, nor how they determined that he learned about the condition before taking out his policy.Momentum says the decision is meant to avoid encouraging other customers from withholding information when they apply for a policy, because this leads to a "worsening claims experience.""Our position on this matter is the following, once we have evidence that a client has not acted in good faith, we rectify the matter in an objective manner, and in the interest of fairness to all our clients," the company said in a statement."If we do not do so, we indirectly encourage the practice of non-disclosure. This will in turn result in a worsening claims experience which would ultimately increase the premiums for all our clients."Ganas, 42, was killed during a hijacking in the driveway of his home in March last year, and his wife has maintained that she was not aware of his condition, according to a Daily News report. Read the rest

When Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality (by deliberately ignoring comments from actual humans in favor of comments left by obvious bots), he said that removing regulation from telcos would boost investment, finally ending the US's status as the worst broadband nation in the world.But it's impossible to say whether that is working, because Pai's office has ended the Obama-era practice of letting the American public view the results of its taxpayer-funded speed-tests. The FCC is still paying to have these tests conducted, but it's been two years since they've released the results. What's more, the FCC is stonewalling on Ars Technica's FOIA requests to find out why the reports are not in the public domain yet.It's a real head-scratcher. Surely releasing the telcos that used to employ Pai from any kind of public reponsibility or regulatory oversight must have resulted in a surge of investment and better value for money for the Americans who are paying Pai's wages during his brief holiday from his service as a senior telcoms executive. You'd think that he'd want to trumpet that new from the hilltops, right? I wonder why he won't release that data.It's just so weird.After denying our request for expedited processing, the FCC repeatedly extended its own deadlines for providing documents to us. FCC staff told us they needed more time because they were still "reviewing documents to determine if they are responsive to your request."The FCC, which has an annual budget of $450 million, asked us on October 4 to narrow the scope of our public-records request, telling us that searching for the documents would be "a pretty significant burden and would take a long time to process." We agreed to narrow the request to exclude testing data and to include only emails that relate directly to whether the FCC will release future versions of the Measuring Broadband America report and to whether testing has been discontinued. Read the rest

For the last few weeks Shawn Woods has been trying various popular suggestions for keeping rodents away. Nothing has worked. Irish Spring bar soap: the rats ate it. Fabric softener sheets: they used it for nesting material. Wolf urine: they ignored it to obtain food. Hot pepper juice mixed with grain: they ate it.This week, Shawn is trying another repellent suggested on YouTube: mothballs. He place four mothballs in a small box with a hole cut in it for mice to enter. He sprinkled grain in the box. Shawn said the mothball smell was very strong but the mice didn't care; they entered the box and leisurely ate their fill. He repeated the experiment with 40 or 50 mothballs. The mice didn't seem to mind in the least. Read the rest

Video evidence of owl-like extraterrestrials found in an attic:Baby owls in the loft, or visitors from another planet? pic.twitter.com/F3efPV30Qc— Daily Owls (@Daily__Owls) November 14, 2018 Read the rest

Iain Heath writes, "I recreated the 'distracted boyfriend' meme using LEGO bricks." You certainly did, Iain, and very well, too! Read the rest

The era of finance capitalism is marked by a curious shift in the desire of the business world: to get out of the business of making things people use, and into the business of getting money for owning, extracting and/or liquidating things.The thing is, this isn't a good strategy. Not only did the drive to build up financial institutions themselves precipitate the financial crisis (tanking Lehman Brothers in the process, and bringing the rest to the brink of extinction, forced to beg for government handouts), but all the real-economy businesses that tried to become financial institutions also collapsed in the crisis: GM converted its making-cars business to a issuing loans business and nearly croaked as a result; ditto GE.Since then, the extractive model has shown itself to be a loser for businesses do things that people value: Toys R Us was looted into bankruptcy; so was Sears.But the dream of extractive rentierism still haunts the managerial classes. Take Ford CEO Jim Hackett, whose recent Freakonomics Radio appearance celebrated his company's shift from a car business to a debt-issuance business, with Ford Credit now accounting for a third of the company's profits. Hackett vowed to increase that share by using the leverage he could exert over his debtors to force them to let him spy on them (for example, by doubling down on GM's car radio surveillance), and then cross-referencing this data on the data borrowers are forced to supply in order to buy their cars, and with data-sets from corporate acquisitions like the scooter company Spin. Read the rest

Scotland's Inchindown oil tanks, located underground, make for excellent reverberation chambers. In this video, someone fires a starting pistol in the chambers and Tom Scott records the one-minute plus reverberation. Read the rest

Former First Lady Michelle Obama has a new book, a memoir of her life's journey getting to the White House called Becoming. To promote it, she went to Costco with Ellen DeGeneres for a signing. But it was no ordinary signing, of course, that wouldn't make for good TV. I don't want to spoil it but let's just say Ellen made the signing more interesting with a bullhorn, a hidden flask, and a case of Preparation H (and more). Read the rest

In this video [via Kottke], John Green explains why competitive players are suddenly getting much better at Tetris despite the number of players being much smaller than in its heydey: "a group of enthusiasts built spaces both online and off that allowed people to connect with each other over what is usually a very solitary hobby and because small groups of deeply passionate people can often be more productive than large groups of casually interested people."The improvements apply to a specific implementation of Tetris (8-bit Nintendo) and reflect deep awareness of the technical environment. Read the rest

Viznut created a set of bitmapped Unicode fonts for use on your bulletin boards.Years ago, I noticed that Unicode had a bunch of pseudographic characters that could be used to enrichen Ansi art. However, no one seemed to use them. Even MUDs that used the 256-color Xterm palette and had no issues with Unicode still preferred to stick to the blocks available in the MS-DOS codepage 437.After looking into existing Unicode fonts, the reason became obvious: the implementation of non-CP437 graphics characters was shaky at best. Unicode Consortium doesn't even care how pseudographics are implemented. It was a kind of chicken-and-egg problem: No commonly accepted Unicode graphics font, no Unicode art scene; no art scene, no font support. The idea of an art-compatible Unicode font was born.They're based on fonts from the Commodores 64 and Amiga, the Amstrad CPC, the IBM PC's original ROM font, and iconic Atari arcade fonts. Read the rest

While it's true that everything is political, I appreciate the opportunity to also be filled with rage about something unrelated to the specific issues, personas and parties of contemporary political discourse. So I heartily enjoyed reading the thread on Reddit titled "What's the rudest thing a guest has ever done in your home?".Had some relatives over, and despite very, very clear instructions to not flush feminine products down the toilet, they did anyways. Destroyed our septic field, almost $10000 in damages overall. When confronted, they just denied it, despite the fact that the 32 pads that where pulled out of the system matches the brand that they had while they were over.stole medicine out of my bathroom after eating my food, and smoking all my cigs that were on the table. i know they stole the medicine because of the blood curdling scream that come out of the bathroom because the medicine they ingested was the pills from a UTI. they numb your biz but make you piss bright red. dumbass thought he was dying. i didn't even invite him, he was a roommates guest.My sister used to bring her psychotic mini schnauzer over to play with my dogs against my wishes, until my catahoula realized she could fit the schnauzer's entire head into her mouth. The little dog wasn't hurt, but after that my sister didn't insist on bringing her.I feel kind of bad for that dog now, I haven't heard anything about it since my sister had a kid. Read the rest

My pal Shalaco (previously) shot this bleak video of the smoke in San Francisco using his drone. He writes: ...A look at SF’s skyline. San Francisco’s Air Quality seems to be getting worse, current AQI is 239, purple, very unhealthy. The city skyline is obscured by smoke and Northern California’s air is rated worst in the world as a result of smoke from the Camp fire.If you live in an affected area, wear an N-95 mask, no joke. Read the rest

It hurts me to say this but 2019 is nearly here, and that means stores are filled with calendars.Well, my daughter and I are traveling this week and while out at one of our favorite stores in Arizona, we saw a huge display of wall calendars. Because of the sheer quantity of them, we couldn't decide on one. So, we left empty-handed and I thought to search out what quirky calendars I could find online. I wasn't disappointed. Here are some of the crazy calendars "kids" are into these days (notations in brackets are mine):1. Animal Butts: "Welcome every month of the new year with a new animal butt!" [Or else!]Available from Paper Source for $19.952. Animal Selfies: "did you know that animals love to take selfies too? Its true..." [that's 110% not true]On Amazon for $10.393. NYC Taxi Drivers: "...features 12 of the city's most scintillating and good-humored yellow cab drivers." [Please, do not put jumper cables anywhere near your nipples!]$14.99 and benefits charity4. The RGB Workout: "Exercise with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg... get into supreme shape!" [She recovered so quickly from those broken ribs, I probably should follow RGB's exercise routine!]$14.99 at Chronicle Books5. Pooping Pooches: "Do you know someone who loves dogs...too much?" [No words.]$15.99 and benefits charity6. Merby's: The 'bearded men in fish tails' calendar by the Newfoundland and Labrador Beard & Moustache Club is back. [Sure, why not? Read the rest

Tiny Emus has in-browser emulators for all the classic 8-bit systems, but also ready links for specific games so you don't have to spend ages tracking them down and configuring them. Creator Andre Weissflog, via Hacker News:The emulators are written in C(99), with some platform-specific bits written in Objective-C and Javascript, and in C++ for the UI parts (since Dear ImGui is implemented in C++). Apart from the WebAssembly version, Win32, Linux, OSX and iOS is also supported, but you need to compile those yourselfThe selection's limited but Weissflog's really nailed the "just let me play" UI, so hopefully more's to come. Read the rest

The only way for the party of old white dudes, rape, forced pregnancies, Islamophobia, homophobia, selfishness, pollution, climate denial, unchecked police violence and murder, xenophobia and hatred of Latinx people can get and keep power is by cheating: voter suppression, gerrymandering, etc.In California, the 2018 elections hold out a hint of what the GOP would look like without cheating. The state party's flirtations with white supremacy 20 years ago with an anti-migration initiative "eviscerated" its support among Latinx people, and ever since, its star has been has been sinking, and as the national party has moved to defend rape, pollution, climate denial, the elimination of health services for all but the super-wealthy, blanket bans on abortion, and naked hatred of every kind of brown person: Latinx people, African-American people, and any person of Muslim faith or Arab extraction.The result was a total rout of the California GOP. Even Orange County (political birthplace of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan) flipped; and the state's sole Latinx Republican Assemblyman, Dante Acosta, also lost his job. California Republicans are spitting nails and pointing fingers, calling for the party to be "burned to the ground" and are watching with dismay as the party looks to put the Trumpian Assemblyman Travis Allen in charge of the state party, doubling down on white supremacy in a state that is increasingly brown and/or inhospitable to to anti-immigration white nationalism.Even the "reasonable" wing of the GOP establishment are pinning their hopes on Californians moving to the right in response to Democrats instituting wildly popular reforms like allowing cities to change their property tax rates, restoring rent controls, etc. Read the rest

Today I learned that if you can put an avocado in a wool sock, it will ripen faster. I also learned that there's a company that makes special avocado-sized wool socks for just this purpose. Simply insert an un-ripened avocado into the sock, and in as little as 24 hours, it will be ready to enjoy. The natural lanolin and warmth of the wool ripens the avocados evenly and gently, and faster than a paper bag.I'm reminded of this:Avocado socks are $20 each. 1st image via The Avocado Sock, 2nd image via redditThanks, Laura! Read the rest

Dan Lewis' wildly-popular daily trivia Now I Know newsletter is expanding its presence to YouTube. Yup, he's bringing us a Now I Know webseries.Dan himself is not an "on-air" kind of guy, so he brought on Matt Silverman to star in the videos. I’ve written more than 1,000 surprising, strange, and interesting stories over the years and I’m always looking for other ways to spread the fun. Like the two books and even one of those fact-a-day calendar things. But video? That’s been a struggle. I’m not a video producer and in any case, it takes a ton of time to publish the email newsletter. So I can’t do this myself. I’ve talked to a lot of promising collaborators over the years, but those would-be channels all fizzled.Except for this one -- if you help out. Here's a video about the channel, and you'll see that it isn't me hosting. That's Matt Silverman, a friend of mine who makes awesome videos on the Internet.Now you know. You can back this project: Read the rest

Ever wondered what it takes to make the transition from amateur photography to a full career? If you answered "a better camera," you're half right. Before you get the equipment, get the know-how to use it with the Hollywood Art Institute Photography Course & Certification.Taught by experienced pros, this course is geared towards shutterbugs of any level of experience. On your first day, you'll learn simple techniques that will get you taking better photos right away. You'll then explore every aspect of photography, from picking the right gear to framing to the perfect shot in a variety of conditions. You can even gain feedback on your pictures from Level 3-certified Pro Tutors on your way to professional certification.The 22-module, 54-hour course comes with a free 5 years of access to HAI's Pro Article Database, and it's on sale now for a substantial discount off the regular price. Get started on the Hollywood Art Institute Photography Course & Certification for $19 today. Read the rest

Reason's December issue celebrates the magazine's 50th anniversary with a series of commissioned pieces on the past and future of the magazine's subjects: freedom, markets, property rights, privacy and similar matters: I contributed a short story to the issue called Sole and Despotic Dominion, which takes the form of a support chat between a dishwasher owner and its manufacturer's rep, who has the unhappy job of describing why the dishwasher won't accept his dishes.The story is part of a series of thought-experiments/science fiction tales about appliances that follow the Iphone App Store model of limiting interoperability to manufacturer-approved items; it started with the 2015 story "If Dishwashers Were Iphones," and it followed up in my novella "Unauthorized Bread," which will be published in my 2019 book Radicalized (Unauthorized Bread is also being developed for TV).I am using Disher dishes. The ones I bought in Dubai.Sir yes thank you. Please stand by while I investigate your account.THANK YOU FOR STANDING BY. WE AT DISHER VALUE YOUR TRUST AND STRIVE TO EARN IT EVERY DAY. IF YOU HAVE ANY COMMENTS, CONCERNS OR COMPLIMENTS ABOUT YOUR DISHER EXPERIENCE PLEASE LET US KNOWSir thank you I am back. I see from your IP address and other telemetry that you are in Melstone, Montana. Is that correct?Yes. I took a new job and got relocated here.Sir thank you I see your problem. Your dishes were sold for use within Shia territories in the Middle East and Asian regions. Read the rest

When it was announced last month that FilmStruck, a streaming service dedicated to dishing up the greatest films of all time, would be shut down at the end of November, movie geeks, like yours truly, kind of lost their shit. Home to an unholy number of classic and arthouse flicks, it was a brainy, beautiful refuge from the fare offered up by Netflix, Hulu and other mainstream streaming services. A cry went out. A petition to save FilmStruck was thrown together. Thousands signed. Celebrities lent their voices to the cause.Holy crap: someone actually listened.While FilmStruck is still toast, the folks that own the Criterion Collection--a company that focuses on historically important classic films--is launching the next best thing: The Criterion ChannelFrom The Criterion Collection:The Criterion Collection and WarnerMedia announced today a new chapter for the beloved collection of Criterion films. In the Spring of 2019, through a special arrangement with WarnerMedia, the Criterion Channel will launch as a free-standing streaming service. Additionally, the popular library of films will be part of WarnerMedia’s recently announced direct-to-consumer platform that is planned to launch in the fourth quarter of 2019. Today’s announcement ensures that fans will have access to these films from the Criterion Collection as well as films from WarnerMedia’s deep and extensive library in what will be a rich and curated experience, which will further expand the audience footprint for these classic and acclaimed movies.If this is your bag, you'll be happy to know that if you sign up now, you'll be given a deal as one of the service's charter subscribers: access to everything that the Criterion Channel has to offer for $9.99 a month or $89.99 for a year. Read the rest

For a generation, big box stores have swept across America, using predatory pricing and other dirty tricks to kill the independent retail sector; they used their corporate lobbying muscle to tempt cities and towns into handing out massive corporate welfare checks to lure them to town, and now, with the help of hustling contingency lawyers, they are promulgating a property-tax scam called "the dark store theory" that is cutting their taxes in half or more, with further reductions every year, and no end in sight.The "dark store theory" holds that property taxes on thriving, super-profitable big box stores should not be based on how much the property sold for, plus the capital investment, minus depreciation -- instead, these stores should be valued based on the selling price of nearby failed big-box stores that have been sold at knock-down prices.Big box stores used their generous municipal subsidies to overbuild across American towns, creating a glut that resulted in widespread closures after the financial crisis. Because big box stores are so terribly built -- shoddy construction, weird layouts, and not even enough freight docks to use as a warehouse -- the shuttered stores sell for a tiny fraction of their book value.But even though the big boxes are shuttering their stores like crazy, the remaining stores are still profitable -- thanks to the overinvestment in big box stores during the rampup phase, all the local retail that might have competed with the remaining stores has collapsed. That leaves locals with no choice but to drive longer distances to the remaining stores to shop, meaning that the predatory mega-retailers now get to spend less to do the same business. Read the rest

"We Are NASA" thrills me more than any science fiction movie trailer, and it's real. Read the rest

On October 24, Gregory Bush was said to have opened fire at a Kroger grocery store in Jeffersontown, Kentucky on 69-year-old Maurice Stallard, shooting him in the back of the head. 67-year-old Vickie Lee Jones? She was shot by Bush as well. Both victims were black. According to NPR, it was announced this week that the racist shit stain has been justly indicted on hate crimes and fire arms charges by a federal grand jury.From NPR:The 51-year-old is charged with "shooting and killing two victims because of their race and color; and for shooting at a third man because of his race and color," according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman in the Western District of Kentucky.Minutes before the ambush Bush was also captured on surveillance video trying to enter the First Baptist Church — a predominantly African-American congregation — during a service but locked doors prevented him from entering.So, in addition to being a bigot, Bush was also a coward: he decided to take out his hate on a group of unsuspecting congregants who'd come together to worship their God. Locked doors? Better go and shoot an old man in the back of the head and an unsuspecting, unarmed woman as she walks across a parking lot. But, you know, not a white dude, because "whites don't shoot whites."I'm so sick of reading and writing about this sort of shit. Justice cannot come swiftly enough.Image: by Blogtrepreneur - Legal Gavel, CC BY 2.0, Link Read the rest

On the set of The Good Place, Ted Danson (or is that "Ted Dancing"?) got a lesson from his co-stars on how to floss. Not "floss" as in dental care, but as in the dance craze that's sweeping the nation™.Ted Danson learning to floss is the only video I’m interested in watching for the rest of the year. pic.twitter.com/SKTMKZKvM3— Justin Kirkland (@justinkirkland4) November 16, 2018 Read the rest

Diane Greene was the CEO of Google's cloud business, and it was she who tried to convince Googlers to back her bid to sell AI services to the Pentagon's drone program, as a warmup for bidding on JEDI, the $10B Pentagon infrastructure project.An uprising of Googlers that led the company to cancel its drone/AI project and renounce any intention to bid on JEDI, thwarting Greene's ambition. Then, Greene dragged her heels in pulling out of "Davos in the Desert," the credential-burnishing investor conference in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that became reputational poison after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had a critical journalist named Jamal Khashoggi kidnapped, murdered and dismembered with a bone-saw (Greene had hoped to land a big cloud services sale to the Saudis).Greene now has resigned from Google. Greene was co-founder and former CEO of VMWare, before founding Bebop, which Google bought for $380m in 2015. She has spun her resignation by saying that she'd only intended to stay on as cloud CEO for two years, and, after three, felt it was time to move on. She says she will now focus on helping female tech founders with investment and mentorship.When reports of the company’s involvement in Project Maven spread internally, more than 4,000 employees signed a letter protesting the decision. In March, Ms. Greene defended the decision, saying that it was a small contract worth “only” $9 million and that the technology would be used for nonlethal purposes.When that response failed to calm the furor among some employees, Google announced in June that it would not renew that contract with the Pentagon for artificial intelligence work when the current deal expired in 2019. Read the rest

At times this week, wildfires made San Francisco's air the worst in the world, and the city's stores have largely sold out of the N95 filter masks that make the air barely breathable, leading to at least one enterprising Uber driver selling the masks out of his car (at a substantial markup: $5 each, compared with $1.30 each on Amazon in ten-packs); other drivers are giving the masks away for free. (via /.) Read the rest

Collins Dictionary named "single-use" as their 2018 word of the year and now Oxford Dictionaries' has dubbed "toxic" as theirs. They report that the word was looked up 45% more times on their site over the last year, having "been used in an array of contexts, both in its literal and more metaphorical senses." Drawn from our corpus, the top 10 toxic collocates for the year – that is, words habitually used alongside toxic – are indicative of this.Top 10 ‘toxic’ collocates in 2018by absolute frequencyChemicalMasculinitySubstanceGasEnvironmentRelationshipCultureWasteAlgaeAir"Toxic" beat out the Oxford's shortlist of "Big Dick Energy (BDE)," "Cakeism," "Gammon," "Gaslighting," "Incel," "Orbiting," "Overtourism," and "Techlash."photos by Shalaco ("clear San Francisco" was taken last week and "toxic San Francisco" was taken this week -- Ouch!)(NPR) Read the rest

My 14-year-old pointed me to the cool work of artist Christian Faur. I see Mark featured his crayon portrait pieces on Boing Boing in the past but not pieces using his more recent medium of soda crackers!Prior to the midterm elections, he laser-etched all the (then-current) U.S. senators on crackers (Is the medium the message?):Thanks, SJ! Read the rest

Anyone can learn piano, but don't tell that to the bored kids who had to endure hours of "Chopsticks" and similar drills in their music lessons. Today, there's a better way. Pianoforall lets you jump right in to discover what makes music fun, leaving you eager to learn more.In a simple but innovative approach, Pianoforall starts off by teaching you to play hits by the likes of Billy Joel and Norah Jones, but it doesn't skimp on the fundamentals. Piano guru Robin Hall shows how these songs express the music theory fundamentals you'll need to tackle more complex arrangements. In no time, you'll be playing rock, blues, jazz, and classics, learning advanced techniques like arpeggios and chromatic scales along the way. You'll also be able to read music and play by ear, all essential components that will allow you to compose your own songs.It's all contained in 10 hours of online courses and eBooks, accessible on a lifetime basis. Pick up Pianoforall: The New Way To Learn Piano & Keyboard for a discount price of $10.99 today. Read the rest

OK, it's not quite Dr. Crusher's dermal regenerator (seen above), but Arizona State University researchers have demonstrated a laser system for sealing wounds. The system involves a sealing paste -- made from silk protein mixed with gold nanorods -- that bonds with skin when heated with a laser. From IEEE Spectrum: To use a laser to seal skin, one must focus the heat of the light using some sort of photoconverter. (Chemical engineer Caushal) Rege’s lab opted for gold nanorods and embedded them in a silk protein matrix purified from silkworm cocoons. A silk protein called fibroin binds to collagen, the structural protein that holds together human skin cells. When near-infrared light hits the gold nanorods, they produce heat and activate the silk and skin to create bonds, forming a sturdy seal...They are currently watching how the laser-activated seals hold up in living rats. If that goes well, they’ll move to pigs, and perhaps eventually, humans. Read the rest

This is the new version of Affetto, the robot child head that's a testbed for synthetic facial expressions. According to the Osaka University researchers who birthed Affeto, their goal is to "offer a path for androids to express greater ranges of emotion, and ultimately have deeper interaction with humans." From Osaka University:The researchers investigated 116 different facial points on Affetto to measure its three-dimensional movement. Facial points were underpinned by so-called deformation units. Each unit comprises a set of mechanisms that create a distinctive facial contortion, such as lowering or raising of part of a lip or eyelid. Measurements from these were then subjected to a mathematical model to quantify their surface motion patterns.While the researchers encountered challenges in balancing the applied force and in adjusting the synthetic skin, they were able to employ their system to adjust the deformation units for precise control of Affetto’s facial surface motions.“Android robot faces have persisted in being a black box problem: they have been implemented but have only been judged in vague and general terms,” study first author Hisashi Ishihara says. “Our precise findings will let us effectively control android facial movements to introduce more nuanced expressions, such as smiling and frowning.” Read the rest

In 1994, pop artist, songwriter, and filmmaker Martin Sharp produced a covers album for legendary singer/ukulele maestro Tiny Tim. The album, "Tiny Tim's Pop Album," was never officially released but it's really quite something. Below, from those recording sessions, is Tim's take on the traditional folk tune "The House of the Rising Sun.""Tim's appropriation of song is very much like my appropriation of images," Sharp said. "We are both collagists taking the elements of different epochs and mixing them to discover new relationships."(via /r/ObscureMedia) Read the rest

The right-wing disinfotainment machine is making a big push to shame New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for not dressing in rags as befits a person of modest means. The purpose of the smear campaign is to take attention away from the issues Ocasio-Cortez is dedicated to: Medicare for everyone, ending the student debt catastrophe, justice reform, ending global warming. By relentlessly pumping out tweets and stories about what she wears, the coordinated propagandists get to control the topic of the conversation so that even the people who know it's bullshit get sucked in and join the debate. (Yes, I know I'm guilty just by writing this post.) I’m reading Scott Adams’ new book, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter, and he goes into detail how Trump and his friends at Fox and Breitbart use the same trick all the time. “Master Persuaders,” he writes, "move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason."Fortunately, Ocasio-Cortez's comebacks on Twitter are awesome, and seemed to have shut up some of the propagandists. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.Image: By Corey Torpie, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link Read the rest

Akihabara got its reputation for being Tokyo's "Electric City" -- both for its consumer electronics as well as for its electronics components stalls. In more recent years, it's become more well-known for anime, manga, claw machines, game arcades, capsule toy shops, maid cafes, unusual vending machines, and vintage video game gear stores. Scotty of Strange Parts took a tour of Akihabara with Only in Japan's John Daub. My daughter and I love Akihabara. Here's a few photos and a video from our last visit: Read the rest

The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced a new model in its line of very inexpensive Linux computers: the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+. It has many of the same features as the top-of-the-line 3B+ (including a 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, dual-band wireless LAN, and Bluetooth 4.2/BLE), the main exceptions being 512MB of RAM instead of 1GB, and one USB port as opposed to four. At $25, it looks like a very cool single board computer. ETA Prime has a good informational video about it. Read the rest

The new iPad Pro looks pretty cool (I'd buy one if it also ran OS X). But how durable is it? Jerry of Jerry Rig everything puts it (and the Apple Pencil) to his classic durability test by scratching, burning, and bending the gear. The iPad Pro fails the bend test. Jerry said it "folds like a piece of paper."Most of the fun of Jerry's durability tests is seeing new Apple products pulled from the box and systematically destroyed, like a scene from a J.G. Ballard story. Read the rest

After you've ordered your Trumpy Bear, be sure to pick up the Build the Wall set of MAGA Blocks. This 101-piece block set will have your kids turning away desperate refugees in no time. Comes with a President Trump mini-figure wearing a MAGA hard hat! This fun for the whole family comes from the folks at KeepAndBear.com, which offers a staggering array of unlicensed Trump garbage including CNN toilet paper and Trump Sends Hillary to Prison action figures. Sigh.(via KeepandBear) Read the rest

The Welcome To The Internet tracksuit [Getonfleek.com] features a classic image so thoroughly buried in sedimentary layers of meme and merch that it's no longer easy to locate the original through the usual means: the cover of a Scholastic book from 1999 [Amazon]. The illustrator is Donald Grant, whose page on Behance has contact info if you're looking to commission a sequel. Read the rest

Instagram influencers are easy marks for phishers: they are unlikely to be security-savvy, are easily taken-in by marketing patter, have huge easily-grifted audiences, and Instagram won't even give them their accounts back afterward. Taylor Lorenz: For young influencers with no direct contacts at Instagram or Facebook, it can be nearly impossible to retrieve a stolen account. Hackers will change the contact email address and phone number and reset the username so the account is impossible to find. Then, they’ll run ads on it until they can sell the whole page off for a large price, sometimes more than a hundred thousand dollars.Faisal Shafique, a college student who Instagrams under the handle @Fact, said that he earns roughly $300,000 a year from posting sponsored content for brands like TikTok and Fashion Nova. When Brooks seized control of his account several weeks ago, it put those brand deals in jeopardy, potentially costing him his livelihood. Shafique was able to retrieve his account back before it was sold off, but he estimates he would have lost a half-a-million-dollar property if he hadn’t.See also The Rise of the Nanoinfluencer -- people with smaller but still exploitable social media followings who get paid in care packages of the (sometimes expensive) stuff they post about. Read the rest

I'm tempted by the finally-upgraded Mac Mini (pictured above with the new 13" iPad Pro configured as its display), long the black sheep of the Mac lineup but loved for the promise of compact power it (again) justifies. Rather than make the new model smaller, as some expected, they kept the same box and filled it with powerful modern parts like i7 CPUs. Nick Statt:The Mac mini was simple, it was cheap, and it did its job well. So well, in fact, that it took on a second life for many owners as a home media PC, a NAS server, and even as part of a compute cluster.But the 2018 Mac mini is a different beast. It is much more powerful — it is, without hyperbole, a miniature Mac Pro — and as a result, it is no longer all that cheap. In fact, Apple’s cheapest Mac has moved from a sub-$500 purchase to a $799 one, and much more if you want a larger solid state drive, a faster processor, or more memory. You can spec out a lowly Mac mini all the way up to $4,199 if you really desire. (This time around the RAM is user replaceable, while the SSD is not.)With other models a generation behind, the i7 model benchmarks faster than everything in the lineup short of the iMac Pro.The big drag, however, is the integrated graphics. At the price, there should be something more. That said, it is still much smaller than even the smallest MXM-slot game/workstation-class PCs, and it hopefully won't be long before there are external GPUs in the Mac Mini form factor (similar to the Sonnet Puck) to stack atop it. Read the rest

Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has followed up his scorching condemnation of US poverty with an even more damning report on poverty in the UK, which he calls a "political choice" brought on by a decade of austerity at the hands of the Conservative Party.Alston characterised the findings from his two-week fact-finding tour as "a disgrace...a social calamity and an economic disaster." He described the country's policies as so bad for women that "if you got a group of misogynists in a room and said how can we make this system work for men and not for women they would not have come up with too many ideas that are not already in place."He predicted further declines in the lives of middle class people, who will "find themselves living in an increasingly hostile and unwelcoming society because community roots are being broken."He condemned homelessness, child poverty, the rise of food banks, the sell-off of public assets, the closure of youth centres, the rise of sex-work and gang affiliation among the most vulnerable people, and said that the sole bright spot -- communities pitching in to help their neighbours -- "resembled the sort of activity you might expect for a natural disaster or health epidemic."Conservative politicians insisted that Alston didn't understand how austerity worked and that everyone was much better off due to a decade of cuts.After visiting towns and cities including London, Oxford, Cardiff, Newcastle, Glasgow and Belfast, Alston said that “obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see the immense growth in food banks and the queues waiting outside them, the people sleeping rough in the streets, the growth of homelessness, the sense of deep despair that leads even the government to appoint a minister for suicide prevention and civil society to report in depth on unheard-of levels of loneliness and isolation.”He called for the elimination of the five-week delay in receiving benefits under the universal credit system, which has plunged many into destitution. Read the rest

As a graduate of the "rubbery mutilated omelet" school of scrambled egg preparation, I am mocked by this chef's obvious yet perfectly successful method. The secret ingredient: staying with the eggs from pour to presentation so they never congeal. Read the rest

He calls it "The Beast", which is, all things considered, about right. [via] Read the rest

Stingrays were once the most secretive of surveillance technology: devices whose existence was so sensitive that the feds actually raided local cops and stole their crime files to stop them from being introduced in court and revealing the capability to spy on cellular phones.The cat inevitably escaped the bag, and subsequent disclosures revealed just how widespread the surveillance of cellphones had become.One upshot of the law enforcement reliance on cellular mass surveillance is that it has created a perverse incentive to maintain the insecurity of our mobile devices; this insecurity, combined with the inevitable decline in price for electronic components, means that more and more people are able to spy on your phones (sometimes it's criminals, sometimes it's foreign spies, sometimes it's a mystery).If you want to get in on the action, you can order $20 worth of parts from Amazon, plug them into your laptop, paste a few commands into your terminal and you can start spying on your friends and neighbors.Let's fix phones, OK?As the name implies, a software defined radio, or SDR, is simply a radio that instead of having its feature baked in at a hardware level, can be controlled by a computer program. We bought the ‘NooElec NESDR Mini’ from Amazon for around $20 and received it a few days later.To get the SDR to talk to phones, I needed to give it some instructions. Fortunately, I didn’t need to write my own, but just take some code from GitHub. Read the rest