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The Moroccan Euphorbia resinifera plant produces a resin so spicy that it attains a whopping 16,000,000,000 on the Scoville scale, 10,000x hotter than a Carolina reaper chili.The active ingredient in this resin is resiniferatoxin, AKA RTX, which has proven incredible promising in early animal trials for treating chronic pain. Dogs with joint pain are anesthetized and injected with RTX, which destroys their nerve endings and makes them incapable of sensing pain until the nerves regenerate, about 5 months later.The NIH is experimenting with using RTX to relieve pain in people with bone cancer, under FDA guidance allowing for RTX experimentation on terminally ill people who don't have to fear secondary harms from losing their ability to sense pain, heat, etc.I suffer from largely untreatable chronic pain and I absolutely dote on capcasin-based muscle rubs (Tiger Balm, etc), but I find that I quickly become inured to their effects and have to constantly up my dose. More than once, I've given myself serious chemical burns from too much hot muscle rub. RTX sounds weirdly tempting to me.RTX’s promise lies in its specificity. Think of it like a sniper rifle for pain, whereas opioids are more like hand grenades. Opioids target receptors all over the body, not a specific kind of sensory neuron. “That's why when you give it to somebody, you get problems with constipation, sedation, they can have respiratory depression,” says Mannes.That and you have to take opioids constantly, but not so with RTX. “You give it once and it should last for an extended period of time because it is destroying the fibers,” says Mannes. Read the rest

Remember when they caught the Golden State Killer by comparing DNA crime-scene evidence to big commercial genomic databases (like those maintained by Ancestry.com, 23 and Me, etc) to find his family members and then track him down?It's not just him.If you're an American of US descent, there's a 60% chance that you can be identified from genomic database searches, because even if you've never signed up for one of these junk science services, your stupid cousins have.That's the conclusion of a group of computer science, computational biology, genomics, and public health researchers from Columbia, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who published their findings in the journal Science: Identity inference of genomic data using long-range familial searches (Sci-Hub mirror).They also predict that in the "near future," "nearly any US individual of European descent" will be identifiable from commercial genomic databases.The researchers propose a mitigation technique for avoiding nonconsensual genetic profiling: "DTC providers should cryptographically sign the text file containing the raw data available to customers (fig. S6). Third-party services will be able to authenticate that a raw genotyping file was created by a valid DTC provider and not further modified. If adopted, our approach has the potential to prevent the exploitation of long-range familial searches to identify research subjects from genomic data. Moreover, it will complicate the ability to conduct unilaterally long-range familial searches from DNA evidence.Consumer genomics databases have reached the scale of millions of individuals. Recently, law enforcement authorities have exploited some of these databases to identify suspects via distant familial relatives. Read the rest

This past year at Burning Man, 600 drones light up the sky -- accompanied by live piano music -- one evening in a beautiful "flying sculpture" called "Franchise Freedom." This is the recently-released film of the piece made by its artists at Studio Drift.As dusk fell over Black Rock City, 600 luminous drones rose into a hypnotic display of technological choreography, accompanied by the poignant keys of Joep Beving. The drones were guided by a specially made algorithm that simultaneously allows both individual choice and movement as a group. The innovative technology made it possible to create a 3d image in the sky that could be viewed from multiple angles.Thanks, Cheryl! Read the rest

Sense About Science (previously) is a UK group that advocates for evidence-based policy; as part of that mission they give out the annual Maddox Prizes for people who brave political and social retaliation to infuse difficult public policy debates with factual evidence.There were two Maddox winners this year.The first is Professor Terry Hughes, whose work on the intensification of coral bleaching was the subject of a smear campaign orchestrated by Australian politicians, tourist industry lobbyists, and public figures, all of whom insist (despite the evidence) that pollution, industrialization, and climate change will not have a devastating effect on the Great Barrier Reef.The second is Britt Hermes who trained as a naturopath and then, after investigating the science behind naturopathy, began to aggressively expose the lack of evidence behind naturopathy's many claims, attracting person attacks and even an ongoing libel suit brought by an American naturopath (here's her defense fund).Britt Hermes: “I was a naturopath, until I looked at the evidence and decided to speak up about the dangerous therapies used in naturopathy, especially those to treat cancer. Walking away cost me my friends. I am harassed and being sued for defamation. I am honoured to be recognised by the scientific community for changing my mind.” Professor Terry Hughes: “It is a privilege to receive this prize and to express my gratitude – not just for me, but more importantly for future generations, who have the most to lose if we fail to act on anthropogenic climate change.” Maddox Prize 2018 [Sense About Science] Read the rest

Big library systems struggling with the task of sorting interbranch requests for distribution on the library's delivery vehicles can buy a $2 million Lyngsoe Systems Compact Cross Belt Sorter, whose conveyor takes precisely hand-placed materials down a line of bins, scanning each item and tipping it into a bin destined for the right branch.Washington State's King County pioneered the Lyngsoe system in America, and their example prompted a consortium of the New York and Brooklyn Public Libraries to buy their own, to excellent effect.Using the Lyngsoe is a physical art: the belt passes at 1.5m/s and each item has to be precisely aligned for scanning and deposit into the correct bin; human sorters have to quickly and carefully handle a very heterogenuous set of materials: DVDs, oversized hardcovers, floppy manga collections, etc. In a first-of-its-kind competition, the King County and NY library workers faced off against each other in a head-to-head match to see who could sort the most materials, a race that sounds like a cross between gymnastics and juggling.Matthew Taub's Atlas Obscura writeup of the sorting competition makes for a fascinating counterpoint to the insider horror stories from Amazon's warehouses, the biggest difference being whether the automation has been procured to help workers make a difficult task easier (the libraries) or to work them right up to the point of physical impossibility to wring every last penny of value out of their labor (Amazon).Then, as sudden as the “thwack” of a perfectly placed book, the machine halts. Read the rest

The European Union's new Copyright Directive contains two hugely controversial, poorly drafted and dangerous clauses: Article 11, which limits who can link to news articles and under which circumstances (and also bans Creative Commons licenses); and Article 13, which mandates that all platforms for public communications surveil all user posts and censor anything that matches (or partially matches) a crowdsourced, unaccountable database of allegedly copyrighted works.The Don't Wreck the Net coalition of online platforms and civil society groups has published a laundry-list of the minimum set of technical fixes that Articles 11 and 13 need to actually be fit for purpose, including some really basic things like defining what a "news story" and "link" are in Article 11's ban on linking to news stories without payment.The lists of fixes for both clauses are long and detailed, a mark of just how poorly specified and poorly drafted Articles 11 and 13 are (unsurprisingly, as both were rejected by the EU's experts, and left out of the drafting of the Copyright Directive, and were quietly inserted by a single MEP on the day the GDPR came into effect, while attention was focused elsewhere).But what's even more striking is how different this list is from the actual proposed drafting revisions that have just leaked from the EU, which barely overlap with Save the Net's commonsense list.As MEP Julia Reda notes, some of the proposed changes actually making Articles 11 and 13 worse:Council fails to clearly exclude hyperlinks – even those that aren’t accompanied by snippets from the article. Read the rest

Is a wooden lock as tough as one made out of metal? Nope. Is buying a lock easier than building one? Absolutely. Is a lock you made with your own two hands significantly more badass than anything you can purchase, ready-to-use? Without a shadow of a doubt.If you're looking for an unusual woodworking project to undertake, Matthias Wandel has you covered. You can buy the plans for his wooden mechanical lock, here. Once you do, you'll also get access to the plans for a laser cut iteration of the project. While it might not provide the level of security that you'd want for keeping your valuables safe, the level of whimsy that this project could bring to a woodworker's life looks like it would be hard to beat. Read the rest

It's been driving me crazy. I knew acting Attorney General slash Cult45 tool, Matthew Whitaker, reminded me of someone. Someone awful. My first thought was Lex Luthor. But yesterday, I figured it out. It's Wilson Fisk, aka Kingpin, from Daredevil. Played by Vincent D'Onofrio in the Netflix series, Kingpin is a scary, hot-headed, New York City crime lord. I did a search on Whitaker and Kingpin and found this pic on Imgur. Whitaker could be Kingpin's double. Read the rest

If you were living in Massachusetts a few years back, you might remember that Comcast was offering what seemed to be a screaming deal: a $99 lock-in rate plan. I say "seemed to be," because Comcast's advertised $99 price didn't include the cost of renting equipment and the fact that, as we're talking about Comcast here, there were a number of additional fees that could (and often did) appear on a subscriber's bill at the end of the month, for reasons only Comcast understood. Did I mention that escaping the rate plan set folks back $240 for killing their contract with the company early? No? Well, it totally did. The state's Attorney General, Maura Healey, felt that this was bullshit of the first order. Her office did something about it.From Gizmodo:Comcast will cancel the debts of more than 20,000 customers and pay back $700,000 in Massachusetts as part of a settlement with the state’s Attorney General over deceptive advertising. Back in 2015 and early 2016, the cable giant advertised a $99 lock-in rate for plans that didn’t include equipment costs and had additional fees that could be jacked up at any time.As part of Comcast's settlement with the state, they'll be forced to fork over refunds to anyone who paid the $240 early termination fee. They'll also be forced to forgive all outstanding unpaid early termination fees and related late fees that Massachusetts consumers incurred between January 2015 and March 2016. Comcast fully cooperated with the AG’s investigation. Read the rest

In Montana today, a federal judge said the First Amendment doesn't protect a pro-Nazi internet publisher from being sued for instructing his readers to unleash a "troll storm" that materialized in a barrage of anti-Semitic threats against a Jewish woman and her family in Whitefish.U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen ruled today that Tanya Gersh's lawsuit against Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer can proceed. From Montana Public Radio:Gersh says hundreds of people harassed and threatened her family online and by phone and mail after Anglin accused her of trying to force the mother of white nationalist Richard Spencer out of the Montana town of Whitefish in 2016.Anglin argued that the First Amendment protects his speech and that he can't be held liable for his followers' actions.John Morrison, an attorney for Tanya Gersh says the judge’s ruling upholds the argument Gersh has been making since she filed her lawsuit against Anglin."Online campaigns of hate, threats and intimidation have no place in a civil society, and do not enjoy protection under our constitution," Morrison says. Christensen upheld a magistrate judge's recommendation to reject Anglin's request to dismiss the lawsuit. Read the rest

"Big news Wednesday... Hillary's campaign will die this week," Randy Credico texted Trump ally Roger Stone, just 6 days before the WikiLeaks email dump.These text messages obtained by NBC News show that Donald Trump's longtime political “dirty trickster” consigliere Roger Stone was boasting of dirt to come from Wikileaks. Stone has previously denied any foreknowledge of the late-2016 Wikileaks dumps, as he attempts to squirm away from the Special Counsel investigation led by Robert Mueller. This latest news won't help him accomplish that.Six days before WikiLeaks began releasing those emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, Roger Stone was texting his pal Randy Credico about WikiLeaks, according to copies of phone records provided to NBC News.“Big news Wednesday,” Stone's friend, radio host Randy Credico, wrote on Oct. 1, 2016, according to the text messages provided by Stone. “Now pretend u don’t know me.”“U died 5 years ago,” Stone replies.“Great,” Credico writes back. “Hillary’s campaign will die this week.”From NBC:Credico turned out to be wrong on one count — nothing incriminating about Clinton came out that Wednesday. But two days later, on Oct. 7, WikiLeaks released its first dump of emails stolen from Podesta, altering the trajectory of the 2016 presidential election.Stone, a confidante of then-candidate Donald Trump and notorious political trickster, has denied any collusion with WikiLeaks.But the text messages provided by Stone to NBC News show that Credico appeared to be providing regular updates to Stone on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s plans in the days before the hacked emails were released. Read the rest

Carbo pareidolia. Artist: Sabine Timm, “artist, creator, beach-trash collector, flea-market lover and photographer.” She's on Instagram as @virgin_honey. View this post on Instagram topless versionA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Apr 30, 2018 at 5:17am PDT View this post on Instagram barking breadA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Sep 22, 2018 at 2:57am PDT View this post on Instagram cat loves tigerA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Sep 29, 2018 at 2:45am PDT View this post on Instagram Bobtail breadA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Oct 3, 2018 at 2:06am PDT View this post on Instagram ...party is overA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Nov 1, 2018 at 6:12am PDT View this post on Instagram ...endless varieties of dog breadsA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Oct 13, 2018 at 2:22am PDT View this post on Instagram bread creationsA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Sep 19, 2018 at 2:06pm PDT View this post on Instagram back homeA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Sep 15, 2018 at 1:53pm PDT View this post on Instagram Have a nice sunday!A post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Aug 12, 2018 at 2:32am PDT View this post on InstagramA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on May 21, 2018 at 6:41am PDT View this post on Instagram arrghA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Apr 27, 2018 at 11:34am PDT View this post on Instagram breakfast buddyA post shared by Sabine Timm (@virgin_honey) on Apr 20, 2018 at 3:25am PDT [via Laughing Squid] Read the rest

Donald Trump fired Jeff Sessions and replaced him with Matthew Whitaker, a giant tool who thinks Biblical law should prevail in America's courtrooms.He's also a scammer.Back in 2014, Whitaker joined the advisory board of a Miami Beach scam company called World Patent Marketing (they were later shut down and fined $26,000,000 by the FTC) (the company is under investigation by the FBI). World Patent Marketing charged inventors to help them bring their products to market, accepting bizarre patents for unworkable products that were never actually manufactured, bilking their customers out of thousands of dollars each.Whitaker actively defended World Patent Marketing against its critics, citing his credentials as a former US Attorney as a reason to trust that World Patent Marketing was on the up-and-up (Whitaker denies any knowledge of the company's wrongdoing). Among the products that World Patent Marketing marketed were: a "masculine toilet" for guys with giant dicks, designed to keep their fantastic members from coming into contact with the porcelain; a time-traveling Bitcoin-based commodity ("Time Travel X"); and sasquatch dolls whose marketing campaign included an assertion that "DNA evidence collected in 2013 proves that Bigfoot does exist."Whitaker served on World Patent Marketing's advisory board alongside a mixed-martial artist, a failed Central African Republic politician, and other motley characters.Whitaker used his status as a former US Attorney to intimidate the company's critics, sending them threatening letters promising legal retribution if they continued to speak out against the company's fraudulent business-practices.Key Democrats in the incoming House of Representatives have announced their intention to investigate Whitaker. Read the rest

Florida.Andrew Appel takes us on a tour of the selectively bizarre design decisions that have plagued Florida voters since 2000, when the infamous butterfly ballots allowed GW Bush to steal the presidency from Al Gore, all the way up to this month's election, when Broward County's standards-noncompliant ballots caused 26,000 voters to fail to cast a ballot for a contested Senate race where the current margin of victory is 12,562 votes.Amazingly, though Florida's ballots are consistently terrible design catastrophes, they are also consistently design catastrophes that penalize Democratic candidates, which is the most amazing coincidence, ever.By the way, if you’re not sure which party those 26,000 voters might have intended to vote for in the Senate race, look again at Broward ballot. In the race right below the Senate race, one party didn’t even nominate a candidate to run in that Congressional district.Florida is the Florida of ballot-design mistakes [Andrew Appel/Freedom to Tinker] Read the rest

Coming back from the dead is a tabloid staple – just ask Elvis, Michael Jackson and Princess Diana, all still alive and well, hiding in plain sight, according to the rags. But this week sees the most exciting return from beyond the grave: tabloid title The Sun reappears on American newsstands with such sensational tales as UFOs invading the Arctic, a baby born with its grandfather’s forearm tattoo, and a brown bear that can read books “at third-grade level.”Part of American Media Inc’s tabloid stable along with the National Enquirer and the Globe, The Sun, last published in 2012, shuttered as the public’s appetite for outrageously improbable “news" faded. Perhaps we can credit President Donald Trump’s passion for fake news with the revival of The Sun, which breathlessly tells us that John the Baptist’s sandals have been found, curing blindness – and baldness! And of course, there’s the inevitable story that’s crazy-but-true: “Worms from Hell!” have been discovered two miles beneath the earth’s surface. Okay, so they were discovered by scientists in 2011 living in cracks between the earth’s crust (the worms living in the cracks, not the scientists), but for tabloids that often recount decades-old yarns, this counts as fresh news.The Sun, which beneath its title carries the words “God Bless America,” devotes its cover to the exclusive: “U.S. Scientists Transplant Monkey Head – And It Can Be Done on Humans Now.” Yes, it’s another ancient story: American neurosurgeon Robert J. White transplanted heads on four monkeys back in 1970. Read the rest

GenX kids had better toys.I once shot my friend's mother in the eye with a web-slung Spiderman wrist dart. It had to be an accident because you couldn't aim these wrist mounted, weakly sprung dart pushers for anything. No one took the wrist launchers away.An acceptable-by-current-parenting-standards version is nothing but a Silly-string can under your child's wrist.I am so glad I lived through the 1970s and 1980s.Image of the OG toy via Hake's Auctions, who sold one for over $400. I will stick with my Lone Ranger ring for now. Read the rest

Your supervisor would like to speak with you today at 10:53am. Good thing you have a great tasting sandwich to deal with that unreasonable feedback.

"Privacy Not Included" is Mozilla's Christmas shopping (anti)-guide to toys and gadgets that spy on you and/or make stupid security blunders, rated by relative "creepiness," from the Nintendo Switch (a little creepy) to the Fredi Baby monitor (very creepy!).Mozilla's reviews include a detailed rationale for each ranking, including whether the product includes encryption, whether it forces a default password change, how easy to understand the documentation is, whether it shares your data for "unexpected reasons," whether it has known security vulnerabilities, whether it has parental controls and more.The reviews also explain what might go wrong with each product (some of these are a little unconvincing, like an insecure sous vide wand that could overcook your food). Mozilla rightly acknowledges that a survey of 70 products shouldn’t be seen as any sort of definitive buying guide. There are thousands of internet-connected presents waiting to be gifted this year, all of them offering a wide range of privacy controls. But that’s not the point.“The number of products is a drop in the bucket,” says Boyd. “We’re trying to drive a conversation where manufacturers can see that consumers care about this information. We’re trying to give people essentially a way to look at any product and what to look for, what questions to ask.”Shop Safe This Holiday Season [Mozilla]Mozilla Makes a Naughty List of Gifts That Aren't Secure [Brian Barrett/Wired] Read the rest

Alex Jones, starved of attention since he was no-platformed by Big Tech, has launched a desperate bid for notoriety, releasing an unhinged (even by Jones's standards) statement blaming the credit-card skimming malware his online store was serving on "a zero-day hack probably carried out by leftist stay behind networks hiding inside US intelligence agencies" (he also blamed it on "big tech, the communist Chinese, and the Democratic party" "globalist forces, "the corporate press, Antifa and rogue intelligence operatives").Jones claims that none of the suckers who buy his rebadged Gwyneth Paltrow quack remedies were affected by the malware.De Groot spotted the malware infection on the Infowars online store using a powerful malware scanner that he built a few years back and which is specialized in detecting vulnerabilities and infections in online stores built on top of the Magento e-commerce platform."I have not detected any other malware on this site in the past 3.5 years," de Groot told ZDNet in an interview today. "The first detection was on 2018/11/12 21:37:07 UTC. It was added in the previous 24h," de Groot said, referring to today's discovery of the malicious JavaScript code.The malware that de Groot found was hidden inside a modified block of Google Analytics code.Card skimming malware removed from Infowars online store [Catalin Cimpanu/Zdnet] Read the rest

Melania Trump publicly called for the firing of an official in her husband's administration late Tuesday, flexing her political muscle and giving the distinct impression that no-one is really in charge right now.“It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House,” Melania Trump’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said in a statement in response to a question about reports the first lady had sought [Mira] Ricardel’s removal.Like a dollar store Isabella Peron, the First Lady is taking control in the absense of any discernible competence or authority in the men circling a moribund presidency. Now, as Trump enters the back end of his first term in office, determined to shake up his team at the senior ranks and facing a Democratic-run House, Kelly’s grasp has been exposed as flimsier than ever. With the president mangling an overseas trip and infighting among White House staff nearing Civil War-like levels, the chief of staff appears to be more of a bystander to the chaos than a manager of it. No one, at this juncture, is particularly surprised. America does everything better, even the political omnishambles. In Melania's defense, Richardel (a former Boeing executive and John Bolton crony) seems an inappropriate person to leave anywhere near power or policymaking.Eat the figs, Donald. Read the rest

One of my all-time favorite tee-shirts is available again: the HTTPSTER by Christopher DeCaro ($25). The hypertext-transfer-protocol antithetic hipster shirt for nerds, geeks and unicorns. Read the rest

Tyler Barriss, a serial hoaxer whose SWATting calls to 911 we've covered before, is off to jail. He'll serve at least 20 years, according to his plea deal, but won't be sentenced until January.A California man has admitted making a hoax call that ultimately led police to fatally shoot a Kansas man following a dispute between online gamers over $1.50 bet in a Call of Duty WWII video game.Twenty-six-year-old Tyler R. Barriss pleaded guilty to making a false report resulting in a death, cyberstalking and conspiracy related to the deadly swatting case in the Kansas. The deal with prosecutors will send him to prison for at least 20 years, if the judge accepts it. He had previously pleaded not guilty in Kansas.28-year-old Wichita, Kansas father of two, Andrew Finch, was killed by local police in 2017 after Barriss apparently took a $1.50 in-game bet to call them on him. Vile as he is, Barriss is just a trigger: the bomb is police enthusiasm for deadly violence on the slightest pretext. Prosecutors refused to charge Justin Rapp, the cop who actually killed Finch, though his department faces a lawsuit from his family. Read the rest

If you're a Disney-Pixar superfan, this $2500 is a solid investment. A fan from Colorado recreated the Pizza Planet pickup from Toy Story (which has also made several cameos in other Disney-Pixar films) and now has to sell his sweet, sweet banana yellow ride. His loss, your gain.The truck runs and handles a bit rough. Its very hard to part with, but it needs to go. Looking for $2500. Make me an offer, but please don't insult me. Lots of my own work went into the exterior.You know you want it: 1983 Toyota Pickup (Pizza Planet) - $2500 (Highlands Ranch)(Geekologie)images via screenshot and Craigslist Read the rest

BGP is a notoriously insecure process by which routes for internet data are advertised and discovered by routers; its ubiquity and insecurity make it a prime suspect whenever it seems that national spy agencies might be diverting traffic.So when bad BGP routes caused traffic destined for Google to be briefly routed through China on Monday, there was widespread suspicion that Chinese state actors were experimenting with, or sending a message about, their capacity to surveil Google traffic.Now a Nigerian cable operator, Main One, has taken responsibility for the traffic diversion, claiming that it was the result of an accidental misconfiguration created during a network upgrade. Main One's upstream provider is China Telcom, and Main One's error caused Google traffic to be diverted to China Telcom's network for 74 minutes.Google has not commented extensively on the diversion except to acknowledge that it occurred. Reuters spoke to Tel Aviv University security researcher Yuval Shavitt an expert who said that the diversion might still have been deliberate -- Shavitt recently published a paper alleging that China military agencies have routinely engaged in BGP-based traffic hijacking.Glitches in border gateway protocol filters have caused multiple outages to date, including cases where traffic from U.S. internet and financial services firms was routed through Russia, China and Belarus.Yuval Shavitt, a network security researcher at Tel Aviv University, said it was possible that Monday’s issue was not an accident.“You can always claim that this is some kind of configuration error,” said Shavitt, who last month co-authored a paper alleging that the Chinese government had conducted a series of internet hijacks. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH little Donald uses his spunky imagination to come up with a nifty way to handle some tough midterms!

A suprisingly evenly-matched battle at the Hogle Zoo in Utah. At least one more confrontation is posted to YouTube featuring a young elephant there, named Zuri, who evidently has a geese problem. Read the rest

Lyudmila Pavlichenko was training for a career as a history teacher when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. She suspended her studies to enlist as a sniper in the Red Army, where she discovered a remarkable talent for shooting enemy soldiers. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll trace the career of "Lady Death," the deadliest female sniper in history.We'll also learn where in the world futility.closet.podcast is and puzzle over Air Force One.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

The Slow Mo Guys whacked some rainbow Jell-O (aka "jelly") through a tennis racket for their latest video. As they're known to do, they captured it all in its slo-mo glory using a Phantom v2640 high-speed camera.(Tastefully Offensive) Read the rest

Pam Cowburn from Article 19 sez, "Over 70 civil society groups have written to Mark Zuckerberg asking for Facebook to review its content removal processes and give all users the opportunity to appeal against content takedowns that they think have been made in error."Facebook remains far behind its competitors when it comes to affording its users due process. 1 We know from years of research and documentation that human content moderators, as well as machine learning algorithms, are prone to error, and that even low error rates can result in millions of silenced users when operating at massive scale. Yet Facebook users are only able to appeal content decisions in a limited set of circumstances, and it is impossible for users to know how pervasive erroneous content takedowns are without increased transparency on Facebook’s part. 2While we acknowledge that Facebook can and does shape its Community Standards according to its values, the company nevertheless has a responsibility to respect its users' expression to the best of its ability. Furthermore, civil society groups around the globe have criticized the way that Facebook’s Community Standards exhibit bias and are unevenly applied across different languages and cultural contexts. Offering a remedy mechanism, as well as more transparency, will go a long way toward supporting user expression. An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg: [Santa Clara Principles]ARTICLE 19 and 70+ civil society groups write to Mark Zuckerberg over content removal [Article 19] Read the rest

After Trump's tax-cuts and forgiveness program, Apple repatriated $260 billion it had stashed in offshore tax havens (or, more truthfully, had funneled through offshore tax-havens to buy onshore financial products that were notionally held offshore); this made Apple the leading beneficiary of the Trump tax forgiveness program.Apple used that money to continue its streak of record-setting stock buybacks, which which the company gooses its share price and allows investors to cash out, diverting money from worker compensation and R&D to financial engineering.Apple's stock-buybacks are so aggressive that they have lured in Berkshire Hathaway, famous for "patient investing" -- Apple CEO Tim Cook initially touted this as vindication that the company still had the confidence of "value investors," until Berkshire CEO Warren Buffet clarified that his stake in Apple was based on the expectation that the company would continue to use financial engineering to reward investors who brought nothing to the table except the ability to move share prices.Cook has since suggested that the buybacks will create public value because of the capital gains that Apple investors will pay when they cash out -- but of course, Trump's tax cuts offer massively preferential tax rates for people who earn money through capital gains, shifting the US tax burden onto waged workers who earn their money by making things that other people use.Just after the announcement in May 2018 that Buffett had purchased an additional 74 million Apple shares, interviewer David Rubenstein asked Apple CEO Tim Cook: “Are you pleased to have him as your shareholder?” Cook responded: “I’m overjoyed. Read the rest

This is for everyone who follows me on social media, or who has read my press criticism. All my former students. Fans of my blog, PressThink. Anyone who owns my book. Anyone who's heard me speak. It is a personal statement, from me to them. I have never asked you for anything. Except maybe to read this, or share that. I don't push products, or join campaigns. But today, after 32 years as an observer and critic of the press, I am breaking with that policy. Breaking it in half.Today I am asking you to do what I have done: join The Correspondent. If you have ever wondered what I would recommend to public-spirited people who want a better press, this is it. Go here, read about the site's founding principles, and if they move you become a member.I won't make a dime if you do. I am not getting paid to tell you this. I have no stake in the company. I am not an officer or an employee. I just believe in what they are doing, and I have tried to advise them on how to do it better.After the shock of the 2016 election, I felt I had to find something more useful to do than criticize the performance of the news media. (I do that, as well.) So I decided to work with The Correspondent on its membership campaign, which launches today. Now I am asking you to participate, for reasons I will explain. Read the rest

In January 2018, researchers made a blockbuster announcement of seemingly unpatchable security bugs lurking in Intel processors; after a round of initial reassurances about the mitigations for these bugs, it became apparent that the reassurances were overblown, and active exploits were found in the field -- and then still-more bugs exploiting "speculative execution," started to pour out of the security research community.This week, the original Spectre/Meltdown team revealed seven more of these speculative execution attacks, discovered through a systematic exploration of the potential uses of data obtained by trickery from different parts of the CPU that can be attacked in this way. Some of these attacks cannot be mitigated by any of the known mitigation techniques.Processors rely on "speculative execution" for performance gains that compensate for a slowdown in gains from clockspeed, microlithography and other historic sources of processor improvement. Speculative execution uses statistical techniques to predict what instruction is likely to follow on from one received from the program, effectively guessing that if you run instruction X, the computer should start executing Y straightaway because that is likely to follow on. That guessing system is exploitable by attackers, who can use it to force processors into executing malicious code.In the new research, these Meltdown variants are joined by a new one using Intel's "Protection Keys for Userspace" (PKU). Protection keys introduced with Skylake allow an application to mark pieces of memory with a four-bit key. Applications set the processor to use a particular protection key, and, during that time, attempts to access memory that is labeled with a different key will generate an error. Read the rest

Mini Materials are 1:6 scale construction toys made from brick, wood, concrete and other real construction materials: everything from breeze blocks to Jersey barriers to pine pallets (marketed as drinks coasters!). (via Super Punch) Read the rest

In addition to destroying hundreds of homes and claiming human lives, the Woolsey Fire that began last Thursday burned 83% of federal park land in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, per Cal Fire.So far, the fire has burned at least 435 homes, and blazed through some 96,314 acres. LAFD says the blaze is 35% contained.A considerable portion of that 96,314 acres was protected, wild, open space that is home to bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, and innumerable other indigenous species of plants and living creatures.The destruction of so much land is a “stunning loss of a cherished open space area for Southern California,” writes David Pierson at the Los Angeles Times.The Santa Monica Mountains, which stretch from Hollywood Hills to Point Mugu in Ventura County, have long offered Southern Californians a respite from the city below with the range’s array of hiking trails, waterfalls and rock pools. And its sprawling ranch land has given Hollywood real-world ties to the frontier life it exhaustively depicted on screen.The Woolsey fire destroyed more than 400 structures but also took a deep toll on landmark areas of the mountain areas. Wildfires decimated the historic park tucked inside the Santa Monica Mountains a day earlier — taking with it markers of its proud past as a backdrop for television shows and movies such as “Planet of the Apes.”Flames consumed the set of the long-running TV series “MASH.” The same went for the Reagan Ranch, named after the former president and actor who used to own one of three parcels that comprise the 44-year-old park’s footprint along with Bob Hope and 20th Century Fox. Read the rest

Simply setting fire to her wedding dress wouldn't do for Kimberly Santleben-Stiteler. The newly divorced woman from outside San Antonio, Texas (shocker!) attached 20 pounds of Tannerite to the dress and created an explosive target. In front of family and friends, she shot the dress from 200 yards away, creating a fireball and explosion that was heard for miles. Santleben-Stiteler plans on selling her wedding ring. Sorry, demolition fans.Via Star-Telegram Read the rest

The good folks at Improv Everywhere made a couple of old phone booths in New York City a "little more useful" by converting them into co-working spaces.Watch how they break some people's brains:Improv Everywhere: Phone Booth Coworking Read the rest

The Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, created these Damage Proxy Maps (DPMs) that show the areas in California that were probably damaged by the Woolsey and Camp Fires. From NASA JPL:The Advanced Rapid Imaging and Analysis (ARIA) team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, created these Damage Proxy Maps (DPMs) depicting areas in California likely damaged by the Woolsey and Camp Fires. They are derived from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA).The pre-event images for the Woolsey Fire in Southern California (main image) were taken before the fire on Oct. 30, 2018 and the post-event image was acquired during the fire on Nov. 11, 2018. The map covers an area of 50 miles x 25 miles (80 km x 40 km), indicated with the big red polygon. Each pixel measures about 33 yards x 33 yards (30 m x 30 m). The color variation from yellow to red indicates increasingly more significant ground surface change.The pre-event images for the Camp Fire in Northern California (Figure 1) were taken on Nov. 4, 2018 and the post-event images were acquired during the fire on Nov. 10, 2018. The map covers an area of 55 miles x 48 miles (88 km x 77 km). As in the previous image, each pixel measures about 33 yards x 33 yards (30 m x 30 m). The color variation from yellow to red indicates increasingly more significant ground surface change. Read the rest

After the whole damn planet declared its disgust with China's lifting the ban on using tiger bones and rhino horn in medicine, the Chinese government has decided to back peddle on its declaration: using the exotic, endangered animals bits and pieces will remain off limits to the world of eastern medicine. From The New York Times:Making a rare concession, the State Council, China’s cabinet, said that it had decided to postpone an order made last month to undo a 25-year ban on the trade.“The Chinese government has not changed its stance on wildlife protection and will not ease the crackdown on illegal trafficking and trade of rhinos, tigers and their byproducts,” Ding Xuedong, a top official with the council, said in remarks published in the state-run news media on Monday.I'm having a hard time believing that anything to do with any government would be good news this year, but here we are. It is worth noting, however, that the Chinese ban on slapping bones and horn into medicine isn't permanent. It could be rescinded at any point in the future. However, as The New York Times points out, China's working hard to sort out a greater share of respect on the world stage. Not murdering rare animals for their bits and pieces? That's an easy win.Now if we could just get them to knock off the shit they're pulling with Muslims in their nation, we'll be getting somewhere. Image by Soumyajit Nandy - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link Read the rest

In news that will not surprise anyone who is Black, Latinx, Jewish, Muslim, queer, or a member of any other group targeted by hateful idiots, hate crimes in America are way up under Trump. Says who? FBI.The Federal Bureau of Investigations just released its 2017 Hate Crime Report. In Donald Trump's first year as President of the United States, FBI reports a record high, with thousands more hate crimes than the year prior.2013• 5,928 hate crimes2014•5,462 hate crimes2015•5,818 hate crimes2016•6,063 hate crimes2017•8,437 hate crimes.Here's an excerpt from the top of the FBI's report:Victims of Hate Crime IncidentsThere were 7,106 single-bias incidents involving 8,493 victims. A percent distribution of victims by bias type shows that 59.6 percent of victims were targeted because of the offenders’ race/ethnicity/ancestry bias; 20.6 percent were targeted because of the offenders’ religious bias; 15.8 percent were victimized because of the offenders’ sexual-orientation bias; 1.9 percent were victimized because of the offenders’ disability bias; 1.6 percent were targeted because of the offenders’ gender identity bias; and 0.6 percent were victimized because of the offenders’ gender bias. (Due to rounding, percentage breakdowns may not add to 100.0 percent.)Sixty-nine (69) multiple-bias hate crime incidents involved 335 victims.Offenses by Crime CategoryOf the 5,084 hate crime offenses classified as crimes against persons in 2017, 44.9 percent were for intimidation, 34.3 percent were for simple assault, and 19.5 percent were for aggravated assault. Twenty-three rapes, 15 murders, and 1 offense of human trafficking—commercial sex acts were reported as hate crimes. Read the rest

Jemel Roberson was working as an armed security guard at Manny's Blue Room Bar in the Chicago suburb of Robbins early Sunday morning when he asked a group of intoxicated men to leave the bar. The men came back to the bar and one with a gun began shooting. The 26-year-old security guard fired back and caught one of the men outside of the bar. He had the suspect down on the ground at gunpoint when two Midlothian police officers responding to 911 calls arrived on the scene. One of the officers shot and killed Roberson. "He had somebody on the ground with his knee in back, with his gun in his back like, 'Don’t move,'" witness Adam Harris said.Soon after, witnesses said, an officer responding to the scene fired at Roberson — killing him."Everybody was screaming out, 'Security!' He was a security guard," Harris said. "And they still did their job, and saw a black man with a gun, and basically killed him."The Cook County medical examiner's office ruled the death a homicide and both officers have been placed on administrative leave. Roberson was studying to be a police officer. The NRA has yet to comment.Federal lawsuit filed against Midlothian in fatal shooting of bar security guard (Sam Charles & Mitch Dudek/Chicago Sun-Times) (Photo: WGN-TV) Read the rest

Just shy of three months ago, Amber Guyger, then a Dallas police officer, burst into her 26-year-old neighbor's home and shot him.Botham Shem Jean was murdered in his home, unarmed--a threat to no one. Guyger's bullshit excuse: she was confused and thought that the apartment that she'd broken into was her own and that Jean was an intruder.Cool, cool, cool. Who hasn't broken into their own home, found it to be decorated completely differently and contained their neighbor? That crap could happen to anyone.At the time of the murder, Dallas District Attorney Faith Johnson was accused of giving Guyger, who has since been shit-canned by the Dallas Police, preferential treatment. Guyger was let off without a murder charge against her. But here's the thing: Johnson's no longer Dallas' DA. In January of 2019, she'll be replaced by Dallas' freshly-minted District Attorney John Creuzot. For Guyger, the worm could be about to turn so fast that it breaks its own frigging neck.From The Root:Creuzot, a former judge who retired from the bench in 2012, told NBC that anything less than a murder charge for Guyger deviates from Dallas County precedent.“I don’t know any police reports. I don’t know any forensic reports, but based on what I have seen, manslaughter is an inappropriate charge, based on the circumstances as I understand them,” he said. “Once I get in there and I get everything in front of me and it appears the most appropriate charge is murder, then that’s the charge we will go forward with. Read the rest

I'm a big fan of Moment's lens system for Android and iOS smartphones. The company is staffed by folks who are just as passionate about mobile photography as I am. More importantly, they seem to understand that having to buy entirely new lenses every time you land a new handset is twelve different kinds of Bullshit. With Moment's second generation lens system, all you need to do when you invest in a new smartphone is plunk down some new cash for a new photo case and you're in business. Their business model makes me feel comfortable with fielding the relatively steep cost of their high quality smartphone accessory lenses and other kit.Today, Moment announced that they're releasing a new 58mm telephoto lens. If you're using it with a single lens smartphone like the Google Pixel 3, it'll provide you with 2X optical zoom. Have a dual camera lensed phone like my iPhone 7 Plus? You can expect 4X optical telephoto zoom. That means better photos of far away subjects, portraits and landscapes without having to deal with the pixilation that comes from using digital zoom. Having this option makes me feel much less obligated, in many cases, to bring along an actual camera with me. I've got one on the way to me and can't wait to try it out. I'm curious to see how it performs versus the last incarnation of their tele lens. I'll post a review with a few choice shots of the lens in action just as soon as I can. Read the rest

This is an amazing case of being in the right place at the right time. An 11-year-old boy runs to pick up a kite that had just been dropped from a third floor balcony after it had gotten stuck up there. As the boy bends down to pick up the kite, the boy who had freed the kite falls off the balcony, only to have his fall broken by his friend's crouching body. Neither boy was hurt. It was all caught on a CCTV camera.Via LiveLeak Read the rest

During the 2018 Brazilian Grand Prix, Sebastian Vettel's crew manages a sub-2 second pitstop. (via Next Draft) Read the rest

On Sunday in Pusad, Maharashtra, India, an 11-year-old boy climbed to the third floor of a building to retrieve a stuck kite. He tossed the kite down but then slipped. Fortunately, his buddy was in the right place at the right time. Watch:(LiveLeak/Newsflare) Read the rest

Orcasound is a citizen science project (and app) enabling you to listen to livestreams of audio from underwater microphones off Washington’s San Juan Island. Mostly, you'll hear ships moving through Haro Strait and other boats in the area. But if you listen long enough, you might be treated to some whale song. From Atlas Obscura:(Lead researcher Scott) Viers developed OrcaSound because he saw an opportunity for engaged citizens to help fill gaps in the study of orcas. The whales have long been well-observed in the summertime, when the weather cooperates and the cetaceans are more accessible to scientists and the Coast Guard, who observe them by boat. But questions have lingered about their lives during other times of the year. Now, in any season, listeners can notify scientific authorities to alert them to the presence of whales, so they can rush out like first responders to collect important data. The orcas have been facing a food crisis in recent years, so their fecal matter can help scientists get a sense of what they’re managing to eat, and what their stress levels are like. Having citizens on the line is also an exercise in preparing for the worst, like an oil spill. In such a case, there will be multiple (ear) witnesses to attest to where the whales were at the time.Orcasound: Listen for whales Read the rest

A 28-year-old gentleman in Gulfport, MS crashed his pickup truck into a courthouse in order to report that someone had stolen his drug paraphernalia. After his truck smashed into the courthouse's glass wall, however, he had a change of heart, slipped out of his truck's passenger window, and took off. Keith Rio Cavalier, who had been driving under the influence, was later caught and arrested. He admitted that at the time, he thought intentionally crashing his car into the courthouse was a good way to contact the police. Fortunately for the people of Gulfport, Cavalier is, at least for now, is sitting in the Harrison County jail. Via WLOXImage: Gulfport Police Department Read the rest

In the 18th and 19th centuries, mudlarks were people who sifted through the mud on the banks of the River Thames to find things of value. Ted Sandling keeps the dream alive. He compiled his curious collection in a book, London in Fragments: A Mudlark's Treasures, and you can also follow his finds on Instagram. If you're inspired to dig yourself, new laws require mudlarkers (and metal detector users) to apply for a permit first and then report any treasures you uncover to the authorities. View this post on Instagram A couple of days ago I found this spoon, standing straight up in the gravel like a very small and shapely monolith. There was a symbolic significance to its position, as if it had been placed with deliberate purpose, probably to do with britishness, and tea. I picked it up (how could one not?) and brought it home for someone who is six and a half years old and likes spoons. The reverse tells all manner of stories to those who can decode the hallmarks (I can’t, but I know a google who can). It’s silver plate, made by James Deakin & Sons in the late nineteenth century and has what sophisticates know as ‘rather a lot of dings’ in the bowl. Also, for some ceremonial reason, most of the silver has come unplated. It’s their Sidney Silver brand, so called because it was made at the Sidney Works on Sidney Street, quite possibly by a man named Sidney. Read the rest

Smithfield is a Chinese-owned pork producer based in the USA that exports a lot of pork back to China; when Trump touched off a trade-war with China, he committed to compensating US-based companies that faced retaliatory sanctions at the Chinese border.You see where this is going, right?The US government is buying $240,000 worth of pork from Smithfield to compensate it for its lost Chinese sales. Smithfield's Chinese shareholders will get US tax-dollars from Donald J Trump. #MAGAThe Agriculture Department said last month that Smithfield qualified for the bailout money, noting that the agency would be purchasing only goods produced in the United States. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a farmer and member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, has expressed alarm that a Chinese-owned firm could benefit from bailout money intended to help American farmers survive a trade war with China.The timing of Wednesday’s announcement raised some eyebrows."It is highly suspicious that this announcement came a day after the midterm elections," said Tony Corbo, senior lobbyist at Food and Water Watch, which tracks federal agriculture programs. "Congress needs to exercise oversight of this program. This is an example of corporate welfare at its worst."Chinese-owned pork producer is getting U.S. bailout money to protect it from China's tariffs [Jeff Stein/Washington Post] Read the rest

Few things can fuck an RV up worse than a frozen water system. Grey, black and potable water tanks, water pumps and the delicate tubing that run through the undercarriage and into the living area of a motorhome don't do well when exposed to subzero temperatures. Some RVs, like ours, come with blowers that force warm air from the furnace into the undercarriage. Others, like our old rig, have systems that draw power from the chassis battery to keep the tanks heated and the liquid inside of them, well, liquid. We started our first day headed south at -4° Celsius. We assumed that we'd be able to make it to Lethbridge, Alberta, a few hours south of Calgary. The overnight temperature would dip to -10° there. Fading headlights and the encroaching dark forced to a halt, short of our goal, in Claresholm. There, the overnight temperature dipped to -17°. We knew that we could weather the weather in Lethbridge. Claresholm, cold as it was, would have been a test we weren't prepared to sit for. Fortunately, we were able to find a hotel. Even more fortunate was the fact that we'd winterized our RV well before the first cold. Our tanks were drained dry. Our lines were wetted with anti-freeze. For the first three days of our trip south, we traveled without any water, save what we brought with us in bottles. We used it to flush our toilet, brush our teeth, make coffee and wash. On the end of the third night, we felt it warm enough to risk de-winterizing the RV. Read the rest