Boing Boing

In my opinion, people drink too much water. Imagine a time traveler from the 1970s looking at all the people walking around carrying canteens. They'd wonder what happened. On the flip side, there are people who hate drinking water (and other liquids) so much that they end up in emergency rooms. Quinn Meyers of Mel investigates this odd breed of hydrophobes.I can only drink it when I’m about to seriously dehydrate. I can’t describe the taste, but I dislike it so much that when I know I should be drinking it, I have to force myself or convince myself I need it. If I do drink it, I almost have to shoot it so I don’t taste it — like I just try to get it over with.Moreover, I put all sorts of stuff in it to make myself drink it, like Emergen-C, Crystal Light and other flavored hydration tablets, because I can barely force myself to drink it plain.Even if there are absolutely no other options, I usually just opt to not drink anything, which is how I’ve gotten myself in trouble hydration-wise — I’ve ended up in the ER three times over the past 20 years from dehydration! The first time, I was at the gym and should have been hydrating while working out but didn’t. My heart started racing, and I got really lightheaded and got rushed to the ER.The second time, I had a really bad cold and wasn’t hydrating. The third time, I went into a full-on panic attack because I couldn’t breathe. Read the rest

Boing Boing friend Cosey Fanni Tutti of pioneering experimental/electronic/art groups Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey, and Coum Transmissions will release a new solo album, Tutti, in February. This is her first solo record since Time To Tell in 1982. Above is the title track, a pulsing (throbbing?) soundscape of electronic rhythm, noise, and Cosey's glorious trumpet. Cosey composed these new tracks as the soundtrack to her autobiographical slideshow Harmonic COUMaction, part of last year's COUM Transmissions retrospective in Hull, England."Working on the COUM Transmissions exhibition also coincided with writing my autobiography - collating archive material and re-engaging with my past," Cosey told The Quietus. "My work is a continuum, the past feeding the present and vice versa. The album is an interpretation of my past and present, of my understanding the shifting perceptions of how they inform one another. One form creating another through a metamorphic process."A gentle reminder about a not-so-gentle book: Cosey's 2017 memoir "Art Sex Music," is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of avant-garde music, performance art, underground culture, radical living, and female empowerment. Read the rest

What animals have night vision and how the hell can they see in the dark anyway? (Nat Geo WILD via The Kid Should See This) Read the rest

George Conway, husband of White House advisor Kellyanne Conway, tweeted last night that Trump's words on immigration are "just drivel" and that "Clearly he has no comprehension of the words he’s using."To say that “illegal immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” is just drivel. Were that true, then the government wouldn’t be able to arrest them. Surely that’s not the President’s position. Clearly he has no comprehension of the words he’s using. https://t.co/LYlutDG73M— George Conway (@gtconway3d) November 1, 2018But this is nothing new. Just because Conway's wife is in cahoots with the president doesn't mean he can't have his own opinions, and that he does. Just yesterday he co-wrote with Neal Katyal an op-ed for The Washington Post titled, "Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship is unconstitutional."And last night's tweet wasn't the first of its kind. In August, he corrected Trump when the often-wrong president criticized Ohio Governor John Kasich on how unpopular he was.Cincinnati Enquirer/Suffolk 6/6-11/18 OH statewide 500 LVUnfavorable opinion of > Donald Trump: 58.6% > John Kasich: 34.8%https://t.co/CLkIOda8aN https://t.co/hTldDq1ZD6— George Conway (@gtconway3d) August 13, 2018And Conway's retweets are often against what his wife would try to defend on Trump's behalf.Ladies and Gentlemen... the undisputed world heavyweight champion of lying... the 45th president of the United States of America. What a disgrace. Inside What Even an Ally Calls Trump’s ‘Reality Distortion Field’ via @NYTimes https://t.co/MTjeLOlVMT— Dan Nathan (@RiskReversal) November 1, 2018Fact Check of the Day: From nonexistent riots to conspiracy theories about migrants to false claims about his popularity and job-creating record, President Trump has offered a litany of falsehoods in the midterm campaign https://t.co/HLRuDBX12b— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) October 31, 2018Wanting a president to be able to override the Constitution with an EO is not conservative. Read the rest

I like bright yellow and orange equipment because it's easy to find. I'm less likely to leave something on a hotel room bedside table if it isn't black. I always thought pencils were yellow because it made them easier to spot on a cluttered desk, but the real reason turns out to be a lot more interesting.From The Little-Known Reason Pencils Are Yellow, by Gabrielle HickA number of pencil manufacturers, including Hardtmuth, now sourced their graphite from Siberia—the vast Russian province which shares borderland with China. That geographic proximity was key for Hardtmuth as it devised its marketing scheme.In China, yellow had long been tied to royalty. The legendary ruler considered the progenitor of Chinese civilization was known as the Yellow Emperor; thus, centuries later in Imperial China only the royal family was allowed to wear yellow. Eventually, the shade came to represent happiness, glory, and wisdom.Hardtmuth settled on yellow to communicate the graphite’s geographical origins, while also linking its product to the long-held Chinese associations of royalty, and therefore superiority.To further emphasize the point, Hardtmuth dubbed its new line of yellow pencils “Koh-I-Noor” after the world-famous diamond from the British Crown Jewels. “Diamonds are graphite, and the name Koh-I-Noor—being the name of such an exquisite diamond—was deliberately chosen to suggest the quality of graphite in the pencil,” Petroski noted. So popular was its yellow pencil that the company actually changed its own name to Koh-I-Noor Hardtmuth. Image: Shutterstock/Valentin Kundeus Read the rest

A rare and beautiful Mandarin duck, native to East Asia, has turned up in New York City's Central Park. The bird spends most of its time entertaining curious on-lookers in a pond near 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. City official plan to leave the duck alone so long as it's safe. From CBS News:(Bird enthusiast Dave) Barrett said he's checked with every zoo in the city and none are missing a duck. It leads the bird-watching community to believe it was a domestic pet, which is illegal in New York City."It might have got away or someone might have got tired of it and dumped it," Barrett said.It also may have flown to Manhattan from a neighboring town. Read the rest

Judge Andrew Napolitano sat down with his friends at Fox and Friends this morning to let them know why Trump's plan to end birthright US citizenship to babies whose parents are non-citizens or unauthorized immigrants is uninformed. "Look, the president can’t change the plain meaning of the Constitution with the stroke of a pen," the Fox News senior judicial analyst explained. Earlier this week, in a clip from the upcoming Axios on HBO, Trump boasted how he would change the 14th amendment with an executive order. This clip makes for a great explainer video not just for Trump (who needs it most), but for anyone who wants to understand how US constitutional law is supposed to work.“The President can’t change the plain meaning of the Constitution with the stroke of a pen.” -@Judgenap weighs in on debate over birthright citizenship pic.twitter.com/aN2xiwlJaE— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) November 1, 2018Via Daily Beast Read the rest

Welcome to your new job. Please do not be late on your first day.

Former Google executive Andy Rubin was credibly accused of "coercing" a colleague into oral sex. Google believed the victim and quietly forced Rubin out with a $90m payoff, according to a bombshell story in The New York Times. Staff at Google offices worldwide walked out in protest today.The employees are demanding several key changes in how sexual misconduct allegations are dealt with at the firm, including a call to end forced arbitration - a move which would make it possible for victims to sue.Google chief executive Sundar Pichai has told staff he supports their right to take the action."I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel," he said in an all-staff email. "I feel it as well, and I am fully committed to making progress on an issue that has persisted for far too long in our society… and, yes, here at Google, too."Remember James Damore and his fable of totalitarian feminism at Google? It will always be more real to those guys than any of this. Read the rest

Watch as two houseplants, and Oxalis and a Maranta, move throughout a 24-hour period in this cool timelapse video by Instagrammers houseplantjournal.Watch it in its entirety here.If you liked that one, watch this from a few years ago. It shows a plant come back to life after watering it:(Geekologie) Read the rest

Just days before the horrific mass murder at Pittsburgh's Tree of Life synagogue, my Institute for the Future colleagues Sam Woolley and Katie Joseff published a deeply upsetting study on how social media bots and computational propaganda are being used to instigate and amplify anti-semitism online and manipulate public opinion. From the paper:This report explores the ways in which online propaganda, harassment and political manipulation are affecting Jewish People in the runup to 2018 U.S. midterm elections. In the course of our research, members of this group have described a marked rise in the number of online attacks their community is experiencing. This is proving especially true during electoral contests and major political events. Correspondingly, our analyses suggests that tools like social media bots, and tactics including doxxing, disinformation, and politically-motivated threats, have been used online during the 2018 midterms to target Jewish Americans. According to interviewees, veiled human users—rather than automated accounts—often deliver the most worrisome and harmful anti-Semitic attacks. As part of the wider paper series focused on “humanizing the effects of computational propaganda” this empirical work details the ways in which the Jewish socio-religious population in the U.S. is being disproportionately targeted with disinformation and abuse during this crucial political moment. We use a mixed methods approach in this research, deploying both qualitative and quantitative analysis in order to generate both a culturally deep and statistically broad understanding of how computational propaganda is being leveraged against this community...Analysis of 7,512,594 tweets over a period from August 31, 2018 to September 17, 2018 shows the prevalence of political bots in these efforts and highlights groups within the U.S. Read the rest

You'd think that so-called "porch pirates" would have realized by now that everyone has installed cameras to catch them in the act. But this brazen thief couldn't care less. Bill Garner writes: "My phone alerted me that my doorbell had detected a visitor. When I pulled up the clip, I saw this pair of thieves! They obviously had it planned..." Read the rest

Welcome to 2018.Here's an archived clip of ghost-hunting vlogger Moe Sargi having an oops moment. This peek behind the curtain was supposedly left in a now-removed original posting due to an editing error. The interesting thing, though, isn't the embarassment of a paranormal poseur, but the fact that the only consequence is a new layer of kayfabe: both his official twitter account and channel are currently "occupied" by an anonymous-style "hacker" character, Project Zorgo, who supposedly forced him to post the obviously-faked video.Ah, but is it this the real fake Project Zorgo?Millions of subscribers! The future of entertainment! The older you are, the more likely you are to bring something with you, cultural receptors from an earlier media age, that means this kind of thing (if not this exact thing) somehow manages to fool you. But Sargi's tween fans just want him to knock it off and go back to the spooky basement crawls. Read the rest

Don't be fooled by our endless dissection of movie trailers; nerds love a good surprise as much as the next sentient being. So if you're looking for a gift idea for the fanboy or gal in your life, a subscription to Loot Crate is the cheat code to a perfect Christmas or birthday.It works like this: Each month, a Loot Crate hits your doorstep, packed with pop culture collectibles, apparel and gear. Every crate is based around a different theme, and past ones have included "Dystopia" (including a Fallout 4 Funko figure, Terminator 2 Metal Print, and Robocop tee) and "Futuristic" (with a Rick & Morty tee, Futurama model, 4001 A.D. 1st issue comic book and more). You get the gist. Never the same gear twice! There's a t-shirt in every crate, but no matter what, they're always a mystery and always a bargain.Speaking of which, a 3-month subscription to Loot Crate is now 33% off. Pick it up for $45.90 today. Read the rest

"I want my baby back, baby back, baby back."Is there anyone who doesn't know this incredibly catchy jingle? (I'm guessing Chili's sold a lot of baby back ribs because of it.) Well, the actual footage from its recording was posted on YouTube last year by Alvin Chea of the a capella group Take 6, the gentleman who were paid to sing the song. It's kind of a trip to watch since the ad has only been an auditory experience before.Also, there's an amusing story behind the jingle. The ad man who wrote it, Guy Bommarito, told Vice in 2015:I only did it when we got into a situation where we had done a campaign that did so poorly they were going to fire us. We went up to Dallas and we begged them for a second chance. They said, "We need a spot for baby back ribs in about six weeks, and we want it to be music in the restaurant."I was too embarrassed to go back to my department and give them the assignment, because it was really an awful assignment. This was a time when really good agencies would send out Christmas cards that would have a blank before the word "bells," like "___ bells, ___ bells," and when you'd open it up it would say "We don't do jingles." That was the feeling at the time, that jingles were the lowest form of advertising and the lowest common denominator. Our department didn't even do them, so I just did it myself so that no one would have to mess with it. Read the rest

If you're looking for some gentlemens' hosiery, the Men's Sexy Pantyhose Tights Hosiery Seamless Lingerie at Amazon is a well-rated and inexpensive option. But would you look at that product photograph? That man's butt crack has been filled in with Photoshop—by David Cronenberg.[Amazon via The Worst Things For Sale Online] Read the rest

Sumana writes, "SecureDrop (previously) (originally coded by Aaron Swartz) is an open source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can install to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. Its parent nonprofit, the Freedom of the Press Foundation (previously), is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join the team and:""be responsible for development tasks related to the current SecureDrop server and Tails OS workstation code, as well as the next-generation SecureDrop Workstation based on Qubes OS."Tasks include adding tools for submission metadata inspection and removal and prototyping client-side encryption for journalist and source communication.Developers with 4+ years of experience working with Python should check this out. FotPF has offices in New York City and San Francisco, and this position is also open to remote work from anywhere. Read the rest

Things have been looking weird and ominous for the fifteenth annual International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, a small but respected academic games conference, and now the conference has gone from bad to worse to worst, with the addition of white supremacist gold-farm hustler Steve Bannon as the keynote.The problems all seem to stem from conference chair Adrian David Cheok, director of Malaysia's Imagineering Institute (not affiliated with Disney) and professor at the City University of London. Cheok's made a lot of questionable choices this year: first he listed Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski as a "famous Montanan" on the conference website (Kaczynski targeted technologists for his bombing campaign, maiming and killing several before being caught).Then he quietly merged the conference with the Congress on Love and Sex With Robots, without informing the presenters or attendees, and then went on a social media tear, viciously personally attacking an academic who objected to this (Cheok's personal brand includes a lot of these social media hatefests). Cheok subsequently packed the conference committee with people affiliated with his Malaysian center whose academic credentials and qualifications were questioned by the academics who quit the committee once they met their new peers.But things really bottomed out when Cheok announced that Steve Bannon would be keynoting the conference. Bannon is not an academic or games professional: his sole connection with the industry was a failed $60 million goldfarming scam he created while working for Goldman Sachs.Since then, presenters, attendees and sponsors have been walking away from the conference, though Cheok insists that the lurkers support him in email, that he's signing up crazy numbers of new attendees, and that they're all in for hearing Steve Bannon explain video-games to them. Read the rest

Frequent Boing Boing contributor Sean O'Brien and his colleague Scott J Shapiro built a Raspberry Pi-enabled smart pumpkin and then challenged their Yale cybersecurity students to hack it.The exercise looks like lots of fun, and the instructors have documented their process on Github, along with sourcecode for your own "Pumpkin Pi."The Pumpkin sat on a table in class, with the red and yellow LEDs simulating a candle. The objective I gave to students was to trigger the green lights, rather than just shutting the LEDs / the Pumpkin down (someone did anyway, which was interesting and followed by an explanation about objectives in hacking and security research...) Physical access was not allowed.The first step was to figure out what we were trying to hack. Using "nmap", we tried to detect the operating system and other useful details. The students were then tasked to evaluate their target.They quickly realised that this was a Raspberry Pi (MAC matching) running an up-to-date Linux. Therefore, it would be difficult to exploit.As we all know, many administrators do use weak credentials, and luckily, the PumpkinPi administrator set a very weak and seasonal password. Using "hydra" and a wordlist, the students were able to brute force the password and gain access to the device.However, this was not enough! As mentioned before, I set a specific objective while not denying the root user any rights. Indeed, one student just used the "shutdown" command and turned off the Pi. I then explained that in hacking and security research, it is important to know one's objectives and not simply "break things", while restarting the PumpkinPi. Read the rest

My local cable monopoly is Spectrum, part of Charter, and I refuse to get anything except internet service through them (alas, my city, Burbank, will not sell me access to our amazing, 100GB/s fiber network, which runs directly under my house, because they have a deal with Charter not to connect any non-commercial-zoned properties to our muni fiber).Charter sends me approximately 400,000,000 letters a day, begging me to add a TV package, despite my having opted out of this several times (also every time I report a outage to them they force me to listen to several pitches for more service, which is hilarious, because if there's one time when I really don't want to buy more from a big, stupid cable company, it's when they're dropped my existing service).Charter is one of the handful of bloated, monopolistic cable operators in America that are hemorrhaging customers and making up for it by gouging the people who haven't left in every conceivable way.For example, in 2017, the cable operators spent giant sums of money to kill the FCC's "Unlock the Box", which would have forced Big Cable to let you buy a set-top box from anyone you want, rather than leasing one from your cable monopoly. That set-top box? It costs an average of $231/year (read that again: $231/year!) to lease, despite being slower, less power-efficient, and less feature-rich than any of the commercial offerings from third parties.Having killed our freedom to buy cable-boxes on the open market, the cable operators are now raising the price on set-top boxes by 7.3%, triple the rate of inflation. Read the rest

[Note: disturbing photos below]Lisa Kereszi “has an eye for the kind of detail that makes you feel like slitting your throat,” Sarah Boxer writes in her New York Times review of an exhibition that included Kereszi’s photos of Governors Island, in New York Harbor. A courtesy phone the color of freshly dried blood; a drinking fountain that somehow manages to look sinister against the traffic-cone orange of the wall behind it; an abandoned motel room whose queasy-green carpet still bears the ghost image of a bed, a discolored rectangle uncomfortably reminiscent of a grave: looking at Kereszi’s images of the former military and Coast Guard base, we have to agree with Boxer’s observation that she has an eye for “plain and awful surfaces.”Kereszi, who is director of undergraduate studies in the Yale School of Art when she isn’t prowling modern ruins, captures the uncanniness of the banal, the creepy melancholy of the abject, the disquieting blur at the edge of camera frame. Boxer compares her work to Eugène Atget’s proto-surrealist photographs of dreamlike boulevards and sleepwalking mannequins in Belle-Époque Paris but to my mind it’s more accurately a cross between Diane Arbus’s mixture of the mundane and the insinuating — her ability to render the everyday freakish with the snap of a shutter — and the nameless creepiness of David Lynch. (I’m thinking of the saloon singer’s apartment in Blue Velvet.)Nowhere is this quality more abundantly on display than in Haunted, a “Halloween series” of “temporary and semi-permanent scare attractions” Kereszi has “been working on, on and off, since 2004,” as she told me in an e-mail. Read the rest

I love this. A guy working at an office of the Utah state Division of Motor Vehicles wore a sloth costume to work today. I salute you, sir, and also, I happen to love sloths. Meanwhile...at...the...Utah...D...M...V... Read the rest

The United States Senate Intelligence Committee is “pursuing a wide-ranging investigation” into ex-White House adviser Steve Bannon’s activities during the 2016 election, Reuters reports, and looking into what possible co-conspirators George Papadopoulos and Carter Page had to do with those activities. They're looking to determine “What Bannon might know about any contacts” that 2 Trump campaign advisers, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, had with the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The probe is also looking into Bannon’s “role” at the dirty political data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, which Trump's campaign under Bannon hired to “target messages to potentially sympathetic voters.” Before he joined the Trump campaign, Bannon was vice president of Cambridge Analytica. The company has officially been dismantled after a UK probe into its role in Brexit. Reuters reports that Senate Intel is also trying to interview other witnesses about what “Cambridge Analytica and affiliated companies” did in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Bannon is to be interviewed by the committee in late November, Reuters reports. Papadopoulos, a consultant, initially advised the presidential campaign of Republican hopeful Ben Carson before joining the Trump campaign. Page is also a consultant, who had business contacts in Russia.On Sept. 7, Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in prison. He had pleaded guilty last year to lying to FBI agents about the timing and significance of his contacts with Russians, including a professor who told him the Russians had “dirt” on Trump’s Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton.No charges have been filed against Page. Read the rest

Carl Reiner is disgusted with what's happening in the United States these days. In this heartfelt PSA, the accomplished nonagenarian shares his thoughts on what Americans can do to change what's happening. In short, vote!What is on my mind will be coming out of my mouth as you watch this: pic.twitter.com/fZkyGg8rlU— carl reiner (@carlreiner) October 30, 2018 Read the rest

It's not funny.Medicare For All is the idea of you and everyone you love being protected from going bankrupt if you get really sick. That is a thing that happens to Americans. It ruins lives and families. Sometimes it kills people, even when the disease does not. It is obscene for the Administrator of Medicare to mock human lives, and to mock Medicare. This is just all so nauseating. Happy Halloween. Please vote on November 6.[source] Read the rest

President Donald Trump said today he may issue an order to deploy more troops, possibly up to 15,000, to the U.S. southern border with Mexico. The midterm elections are next week, and Trump is playing to racist voters who are inspired to vote Republican by his white supremacist fearmongering over a so-called “migrant caravan” of a few thousand poor and underfed people from Central America who are a thousand miles away from our border, and probably won't make it here by Election Day, November 6.Trump said: "As far as the caravan is concerned, our military is out, we have about 5,000—we'll go up to anywhere between 10,000 and 15,000 military personnel, on top of Border Patrol, ICE, and everybody else at the border. Nobody's coming in.""Immigration is a very, very big, and very dangerous—a really dangerous topic," says President Trump.In today's exchange with reporters, the President was asked if he considered himself a fearmonger. Trump: "No, I'm not fearmonger at all. Immigration is a very important subject."He also said:QUESTION: Have you received a subpoena at all from Robert Mueller?TRUMP: No.Breaking: Trump, talking to reporters before leaving WH for Florida, says troop deployment to border may go up to 10,000 to 15,000 on top of border patrol officers.— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) October 31, 2018President Trump re: ending birthright citizenship says that if President Obama “could do DACA, we can do this by executive order.”DACA wasn't set up by executive order; it was White House guidance to DHS. Read the rest

Full-on white supremacy and fascism, folks. Nothing to hide anymore.'Jobs Not Mobs, Vote Republican Now,' says the sitting president, in an ad with a raised fist. #JOBSNOTMOBS! VOTE REPUBLICAN NOW!! pic.twitter.com/wso9ZHIvyF— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 31, 2018The campaign ad Trump just tweeted apparently (like the CNN bodyslam video he tweeted last year) samples the WWE fight where they let him beat up Vince McMahon. pic.twitter.com/GaYqBb8sLN— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) October 31, 2018Here's the backstory. Read the rest

Artist Janelle Hessig (who was a guest many times on Boing Boing's retired Gweek podcast) has launched a comic book publishing company in Oakland called Gimme Action. Tomorrow Gimme Action is releasing a new comic anthology by Liz Suburbia (who wrote and illustrated the excellent Sacred Heart in 2015). Suburbia's anthology is called Thee Collected Cyanide Milkshake, which includes all seven issues of Liz's mini-comic Cyanide Milkshake.As Janelle describes it, "the book takes you on a journey from hilarious single panel gags (a la Mad Magazine) to deeply personal autobio strips about subjects like anxiety and street harassment to horny sci-fi (favorite new genre?). If it sounds jam-packed, that's because it is. But it never feels fractured or inconsistent as it takes readers through a variety of experiences. Cyanide Milkshake is personally very precious to me and I feel honored that Liz has trusted me with her genius work. I truly believe this book will make the world 176 pages less shitty. It feels worthwhile to note that this book was created by a woman, published by a woman, printed by a women-owned press, and debuts at a women-run comic convention (Short Run in Seattle)."Thee Collected Cyanide Milkshake ships November 1st, 2018. Ordering info is on the Gimme Action site.Enjoy these sample pages: Read the rest

I'm pretty used to driving on the left side of the road, having driven in Rarotonga, New Zealand, and Australia for several months. But I would be nervous to drive in Japan, because the roads are narrow and I am nervous I wouldn't be able to read the signs. But this video makes me think I should rent a car the next time I go there.This video tells you about international driving permits, speed limits, rest stops, car rental, tolls, and other tips.Video: YouTube Read the rest

Two of the MIT researchers behind the provocative Deep Angel project, an algorithm that digitally erases objects from photos, have now delivered a strange and beautiful system to "conjure phantasms into being."According to the project developers Matt Groh and Ziv Epstein, the phantasmagoric AI Spirits manifested by their code are meant to "commemorate those missing via algorithmic omission."From DIGG:"In AI and robotics, we talk a lot about "the uncanny valley,” where stuff is human-like enough to make it seem plausible, but small deviations from our expectation of humans lead to a very creepy result," Epstein writes in an email to me. "AI Spirits in particular explores this uncanny valley by actually leaning into and appreciating the erroneous, distorted and bizarre output of these deep neural nets..."Where Deep Angel is tasked with removing people from images, Groh and Epstein fed all of that image data into AI Spirits so it could learn how to insert rough, but believable, approximations of people. Spirits, you might say."This model maps scenes with missing people to scenes with people. So, it is not exactly detecting humans and altering them to glitched out spirits. Instead, it's a process of disappearing humans and then reimagining humans from what it knows about people in images," writes Groh in an email. Read the rest

There are three Egyptian hieroglyphs depicting penises, each with Unicode characters: 𓂸𓂹 𓂺 Amazingly, no-one seems to know about them despite their being among the most succinct and obviously useful glyphs in the standard. The RealRevK reports:They are rather innocuously named U+130B8: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D052, U+130B9: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D052A, and U+130BA: EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D053.I cannot actually work out what the middle one is meant to be doing, to be honest. Looks painful.Someone will no doubt explain to me that in fact that is not what the hieroglyph is and that I just have a dirty mind, but if that were true, why are they apparently censored in some fonts?Many unicode characters fail to attract use simply because they aren't present in any common fonts. The penis unicode characters render for me on MacOS Mojave Firefox and Safari, but disappear in Chrome. Are you seeing it on your system? Are they missing or conspicuosly "censored"? Tell us in the comments!UPDATE: WordPress's "Tags" panel automatically bowdlerizes a single penis by turning it into the 👍 emoji, but left dual penises unmolested. Read the rest

The LockPickingLaweyer modified a cheap battery-powered pumpkin-carving saw into a rather effective electric lock pick! Read the rest

The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 was a disaster for the Dutch East Indies, but its astonishing consequences were felt around the world, blocking the sun and bringing cold, famine, and disease to millions of people from China to the United States. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll review the volcano's devastating effects and surprising legacy.We'll also appreciate an inverted aircraft and puzzle over a resourceful barber.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

Cast as Geralt in the forthcoming adaptation of The Witcher, Henry Cavill seems to be undergoing an unsettling realization in his first costume test as the monster-hunting master swordsman. Here's a still frame:I can only imagine Julian Sands checking his phone and nodding sagely and saying "Yep, I made this mistake too. This exaaact mistake." Read the rest

Russians, obviously. Quality UK newspaper The Sun reports:A SCIENTIST accused of attempted murder in Antarctica stabbed his colleague because “he was fed up with the man telling him the endings of books,” it has been claimed.Scientific engineer Sergey Savitsky, 55, became enraged and stabbed welder Oleg Beloguzov, 52, with a kitchen knife.The victim is recuperating in Chile. The stabber is being held in St. Petersburg. Adds The Sun's Will Stewart: "Reports say the altercation was fueled by alcohol."[Thanks, Heather!] Read the rest

What pork from pigs who had a cannabis-infused diet tastes like wasn't a burning question that I needed answered. But damned if I'm not all ears for the answer. Read the rest

Al Jourgensen may prefer to forget that he once cultivated an English accent and created this underground club hit, but on this day, we happily remember Ministry's "(Everyday Is) Halloween" from 1984. Above, a fan video cut up from horror films. Read the rest

William Sitwell, editor of UK grocery chain Waitrose's in-house magazine, has resigned after calling for the killing of vegans. He was responding sarcastically to a pitch from freelance writer Selene Nelson, and Nelson collapsed his context.Nelson, who writes about food and travel, had suggested ideas on "healthy, eco-friendly meals" as "popularity of the movement is likely to continue to skyrocket".Sitwell had emailed back 10 minutes later, saying: "Thanks for this. How about a series on killing vegans, one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy? Force-feed them meat?" He also suggested making them eat steak and drink red wine, with Nelson responding: "I'm certainly interested in exploring why just the mention of veganism seems to make some people so hostile". Waitrose is a very British institution: superficially upscale but with plenty of cheap stuff lurking in the aisles to help middle-class snobs keep up appearances. It's no wonder an editor of its food magazine would let slip some jocular contempt for specialized cuisine or minority tastes – or that he'd have no idea that he is in fact the easy meat. Read the rest

Just kidding, these are officially-licensed USPS U.S. Mail Carrier costumes for kids and they're adorable at that. At $24.95, I might just buy one for that swell shoulder bag.Thanks, EPS! Read the rest

Not all virtual private networks are created equal. For masking your IP address and location, just about any service will do. But in an increasingly insecure internet, a no-logs policy is the mark of commitment that makes sure your data is protected not only from hackers and trackers but from the VPN itself. And for that, you need Private Internet Access VPN.Private Internet Access has been named editor's choice for VPN by Tom's Guide and PC Mag, and with good reason. Their MACE feature blocks trackers and ads, while your data is made doubly secure with Blowfish CBC algorithm encryption and SOCKS5 proxy servers. With PIA, you'll be able to access global content from anywhere - at increased speeds - from one of more than 3,160 servers in 33 countries. And did we mention their no-logging policy? That means no one - not even the VPN - will be able to track your log-ins.Give it a spin with a subscription to Private Internet Access VPN starting at $55.55 for 2 years - a 66% discount off MSRP. Read the rest

Blackface halloween costumes represent a perfectly-formed bubble of bad ideas. Everyone knows they're widely condemned as racist and everyone knows you can get in trouble for doing it. But a frozen peach-flavored witches' brew of indifference, ignorance and inchoate spite leads a certain sort of person into doing it all the same. Then they go viral and are made examples of in exactly the way that they knew they risked.KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A nurse lost her job with a Kansas City, Missouri hospital Tuesday after a Facebook photo of her in blackface went viral. A photo of Shelbi Elliott-Heenan reportedly shows her dressed in blackface as Beyonce, standing next to a man in blackface as Jay-Z. Saint Luke's Health System, where Elliott-Heenan worked, released a statement about the matter."While it is against Saint Luke’s policy to comment on specific personnel matters, we can confirm that this individual is no longer a Saint Luke’s employee," the statement said.This is a common failure state of examined privilege: they know who what, but don't know who whom. Read the rest

At $111,000,000, the California dialysis industry's campaign spending against Prop 8 (which caps the price of outpatient dialysis) is now the most expensive in US history.Obviously, the dialysis industry is really in trouble, if all it can scrape up is $111 mil. “These clinics are routinely understaffed, leaving patients at risk,” claimed Yes on 8 spokesperson Sean Wherley. The Yes on 8 campaign believes that the measure would not only rein in dialysis costs (which can run as high as $88,000 a year), but would also force the industry to improve staffing and hygiene at the facilities. “All of a sudden their profits are on the line and they cough up $111 million,” added Wherley, referring to Fresenius and DaVita.The No on 8 campaign denied that it is attempting to buy an election. Spokesperson Kathy Fairbanks noted that California is an expensive state to campaign in. The sum thrown in by the dialysis industry “goes to show how disastrous Prop 8 would be for patients and clinic viability in California,” Fairbanks said. “Providers are taking Prop 8 very seriously because it would shutter clinics and jeopardize their patients’ lives.”The Dialysis Industry Is Spending $111 Million to Argue That Regulating It Would Put It Out of Business [David Dayen/The Intercept] Read the rest

Last year they danced to The Ramones. This year the Addams Family is grooving to Joy Division.Related: How Wednesday Addams got her name Read the rest

I'm not sure what's funnier about these Halloween dog treats: the fact that they exist or that they're clled "Bits O' Brains"!My friend Lisa just spotted these at a local Bay Area Target and I was amused, to say the least. I mean, the dog on the package has his own brains exposed. Are we feeding dogs the (all natural, soft and chewy) brains of other dogs? I kid, of course. (I went to the Blue Dog Bakery website for an ingredients list and could not find the product at all.)I mean, I knew Thanksgiving dog food was a thing but Halloween dog food is new and hilarious to me. I was going to make a joke about how they'll probably make Easter dog food next but they beat me to the punch. Thanks, Lisa! Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Gramps teaches us all an important lesson about voting!

London is the epicentre of the British affordable housing crisis, and while there are over 500 high-rises under construction in the capital, consuming nearly every available lot, virtually every one of these towers is designed to serve the high-end luxury market (despite plummeting prices in this category), whose anonymous offshore buyers often never occupy or rent out the flats they buy, merely holding them to flip them later.Nearly half of London's offshore-owned highest-end housing stock is vacant, and the more valuable a property is, the less likely it is that anyone lives there. This figure rises to more than one-third of buyers, or 36 per cent, if we look at the “prime” market areas of central London over the same period. Here, vacancy was measured by looking at homes with little or no “transactional data”, relating to finance, retail or other forms of administration, such as tax records and bills.On this measure, we find that half of residences in new builds in general are empty, as are 19 per cent of dwellings across London’s inner boroughs. The likelihood that a home is empty rises alongside its market value: 39 per cent of homes worth £1m to £5m are underused, and 64 per cent of homes worth more than £5m. Of the homes owned by foreign investors, 42 per cent are empty. The more expensive a property in London, the more likely it is to be empty [Rowland Atkinson/Citymetric](via Reddit Read the rest

Greyhound announced that it was pulling its buses out of western Canada earlier this year. For anyone that owns a car? No big deal. For those living in remote western communities without access to a vehicle of their own or other means of transportation to shuttle them to more populous locales, it's a disaster. On October 31st, decades of being able to rely on a Greyhound ride to take an inexpensive trip into the city to access government services, make a visit to the hospital or see far-flung friends or family will come to an end.From the CBC:When Lillian Sylvestre heard Greyhound Canada was ending its western bus service, she made arrangements to visit her children in Red Deer on the route she's taken for the last four decades.Sylvestre lives in Sprague, Man., minutes from the Minnesota and Ontario borders. It lost its bus service to Winnipeg several years ago."It was sad when all the small communities lost the bus route," she said. "It is very hard because I used to hop on the bus in Sprague ten o'clock in the morning, go do my business — doctor, whatever in the city here, six o'clock — eight o'clock I'm home. Now I can't do that. I got to rely on my kids, in-laws, friends."The closure will effect almost all routes west of Sudbury, Ontario. As part of Greyhound's spinning down their western services, 415 people will lose their jobs. In total, 400 communities will lose access to Greyhound's services. Read the rest

Blizzard games have staying power. They're incredibly well crafted and designed to run on a wide spectrum of Windows PCs and Macs, both low powered and high. New content? They're all over it. I can't think of a single one of their titles that hasn't received multiple updates, oft-times for free, in the past decade. I played Diablo III on my Mac. When it came out for PS3, I played it there, too. It's a game that I return to time and time again, not because it is particularly challenging, but because of the grind: there's always something new to find--a new piece of gear that'll give the character that you're playing a slightly different way to play. So, when I tell you that Diablo III Eternal Collection for Nintendo Switch is pretty much the same deal as Diablo III played on any platform, you'll understand that what I actually mean is that it's great.I've always preferred playing Diablo III with a game controller over a mouse and keyboard. I like that a wee flick of the right thumbstick will send my hero rolling out of the way of danger. This was one of the first things I tested when I loaded up the copy of the game that Blizzard sent to me last week. The thumb-flick works with the Switch. The rest of the game's controls are similar to what I remember from my PS3 as well. You can't remap your controller's buttons, but your powers and attacks are laid out well enough in the game that it's not a hassle to use them, arbitrary or not. Read the rest

Far-right Twitter troll Jacob Wohl (age 20) looks like he could be in a heap o' trouble. The banned-for-life ex-futures trader recently announced that he was in possession of an investigator's report alleging that Mueller raped a woman in 2010. Wohl gave the report to a right-wing website, The Gateway Pundit, which published the report. But there are more holes in his story than Swiss cheese. And now the FBI is investigating this as a possible fraud.EXCLUSIVE DOCUMENTS: Special Counsel and Former FBI Director Robert Mueller Accused of Rape By 'Very Credible Witness ' https://t.co/n4brvtkWsn— Jacob Wohl (@JacobAWohl) October 30, 2018Wohl denies having any connection to the investigation firm, Surefire Intelligence, but DNS records show that Wohl himself registered the domain:Surely you jest pic.twitter.com/hhYihwjt62— a plot gone awry (@flowerednews) October 30, 2018Jacob, you are in WAY over your head with this one. Why the lies then? pic.twitter.com/3NGdbyQLo1— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) October 30, 2018Also, look at the photo of Surefire Intelligence's managing partner, "Matthew Cohen." It's Wohl, as can be seen by comparing the photo with a photo of Wohl:😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂 pic.twitter.com/PhLAUFX5if— Marfan Mike (@Marfan_Mike) October 30, 2018And the phone number for Surefire Intelligence? Why, it's young Master Wohl's mommy:From NBC:Wohl declined to comment on his involvement with Surefire Intelligence. However, his email is listed in the domain records for Surefire Intelligence's website and calls to a number listed on the Surefire Intelligence website went to a voicemail message which provided another phone number, listed in public records as belonging to Wohl's mother. Read the rest

About 10 years ago I was in New York City, walking to Martha Stewart's office to interview her for Wired. With about 10 minutes before my appointment, I noticed my fingernails looked too long for polite company. It suddenly became very important that I trim my nails immediately. I spotted a bodega and found the tiny toiletries section. They had a pair of no-name clippers for $7 or $8. I bought them, quickly tore open the packaging, and went to work on my nails. Unfortunately, something was wrong with the clippers. They were either dull or misaligned. They just made dents in my nails, so I used them to create tear-lines to rip my nails off. I used the built-in file to smooth them out as much as possible. The results were passable -- just barely. I don't think Martha noticed.Anyway, these SZQHT 15mm Wide Jaw clippers are the opposite of the NYC bodega clippers. They even make clean cuts on my extra thick toenails. At $14.75, they're twice the price of the bodega clippers, but still a bargain. Read the rest