Jupiter's frozen moon Europa has a massive ocean below the surface that could potentially harbor life. To find out, NASA is in the early stages of building a robotic lander to explore the moon in the mid-2020s. Now though, Cardiff University researcher Daniel Hobley and colleagues suggest that touching down on Europa could be tricky due to fields of massive ice spikes jutting up as high as 50 feet. From Science:Such spikes are created on Earth in the frigid tropical peaks of the Andes Mountains, where they are called “penitentes,” for their resemblance to devout white-clad monks. First described by Charles Darwin, penitentes are sculpted by the sun in frozen regions that experience no melt; instead, the fixed patterns of light cause the ice to directly vaporize, amplifying minute surface variations that result in small hills and shadowed hollows. These dark hollows absorb more sunlight than the bright peaks around them, vaporizing down further in a feedback loop.From the research paper in the scientific journal Nature:We estimate that penitentes on Europa could reach 15 m in depth with a spacing of 7.5 m near the equator, on average, if they were to have developed across the interval permitted by Europa’s mean surface age. Although available images of Europa have insufficient resolution to detect surface roughness at the multi-metre scale, radar and thermal data are consistent with our interpretation. We suggest that penitentes could pose a hazard to a future lander on Europa. Read the rest

Intel reportedly published rigged benchmarks designed to make its new i9 chips look better than the competition, while holding tech media to an embargo on publishing reviews or independent tests.Intel — or to be precise, a company Intel hired to create a whitepaper on Core i9 gaming performance — has crossed that line. According to Forbes, Intel contracted with Principled Technologies to distribute a whitepaper containing various claims about gaming performance between Intel’s upcoming Core i9-9900K and Core i7-8700K and the AMD Threadripper 2990WX, 2950X, and Ryzen 7 2700XSEEAMAZON_ET_135 See Amazon ET commerce. With AMD having surged into competitive positioning in the past 18 months and Intel taking heat from its 10nm delays, Chipzilla has every reason to push a narrative that puts it in the driving seat of gaming. But Intel is using this whitepaper to claim that it’s up to 50 percent faster than AMD in gaming based on Ashes of the Singularity in particular, and that’s where the problems start. The Intel results are somewhat higher than we’d expect, but the AMD CPUs — particularly the Ryzen 7 2700X — are crippled.The wheeze, as described, is simple enough: the AMD-based test rig was thrown together with stock parts and inappropriate software settings, whereas the Intel system was rigorously customized and optimized, with this fancypants $70 cooling fan installed. Then they restricted tests to settings and resolutions that favor Intel's chips.Intel seems to be in more trouble than it's been in for years. As for the press, when we honor embargos after finding another source for the news or finding out that it's bullshit, it's not really an embargo: it's just an NDA, and we're doing PR work for free. Read the rest

If you were thinking of getting a box of Archie McPhee's Mac & Cheese Candy Canes, get on it. After a post on @junkfoodmom in mid-September, their cheesy yellow-and-white striped candies started becoming popular ("This one isn’t bad! Smells like cheese and tastes like Mac n cheese but the sweetness overpowers the flavor eventually so it’s doable."). Since then, the candy has been covered all over the internet and even landed a spot in the print version of People magazine. Now, because of its "extreme popularity, Archie McPhee has had to limit its sales of the canes to one box per person.I asked the company's Director of Awesome David Wahl why he thought they took off like they did and he wrote back, We actually thought Clamdy Canes would be more popular. Turns out mixing two things people actually like together gets people more excited than actually trying to gross them out. (As we should have learned from the Bacon Candy Canes and Pickle Candy Canes.) I think we became the “I dare you to try this” food of the moment (and of Christmas!). Personally, I can’t wait for all the videos of kids trying the Mac and Cheese Candy Canes that Santa brought them.Get a box while you can for $5.95/each. If they do end up selling out, don't sweat it. There's plenty of those Clamdy Canes (their clam-flavored candy canes) to go around. Read the rest

America has a gun problem: the proliferation of guns in American homes has led to a largely silent epidemic of accidental shootings, intimate partner murders, and suicides.While the sky-high fatalities from these everyday shootings are personal, quiet tragedies, the extremely public tragedies of mass shootings are both statistical outliers and rallying points for sensible gun policies in line with the rest of the world.As welcome as the attention from high-profile atrocities is, there is danger that they will shift our focus to the extremely low likelihood that you will be shot by a deranged stranger in a public place and away from the much higher likelihood that someone you know (possibly you, yourself) will shoot you in your home.One way this manifests is in an emphasis on "protecting" schools from mass shootings. At first, this was a minor hustle, with some petty grifters picking up small-money contracts designing "active shooter lockdown drills" for schools.But after the Parkland shooting, the gun lobby and its purchased lawmakers came up with a new talking point: the solution to gun violence was to flood our schools with heavily armed mercenaries (or, worse yet, teachers!) who would execute would-be shooters. This strategy could be backstopped by buying all kinds of "anti-shooter" fixes, like bulletproof doors, bulletproof coffins that children could cower inside of, and Batman utility-belt gadgets like smoke cannons that could flood a school with choking, blinding clouds as a countermeasure against shooters.This was a evilly brilliant move: by creating a "solution" that was tied to high-ticket procurements, the gun lobby created a self-perpetuating lobby machine for tooling up the schools of America -- hucksters who would divert some of their profits to pressuring governments to diverting more education dollars to weapons and armor, generating new profits and thus new lobbying dollars -- lather, rinse, repeat. Read the rest

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the classic childrens' book series is again brought into contemporary times.

I generally don't listen to podcasts. It's not that I don't want to, it's that it's difficult for me because a) I'm not good at multi-tasking (listening and writing do not go hand in hand) and b) I don't have a commute. But I do make exceptions, especially when a podcast has been recommended to me. The rotten thing, in this case, is that I can't remember who to thank for recommending Seth Godin's podcast to me. I took two trips to SoCal in the past two weeks, one by car and one by train, and got hooked on Akimbo. I listened to as much of it as I could while watching the beautiful state of California fly by me.It's about how to change culture and it's terrific. Akimbo is an ancient word, from the bend in the river or the bend in an archer's bow. It's become a symbol for strength, a posture of possibility, the idea that when we stand tall, arms bent, looking right at it, we can make a difference.Akimbo's a podcast about our culture and about how we can change it. About seeing what's happening and choosing to do something.The culture is real, but it can be changed. You can bend it.Now, I think of Seth Godin as a marketing guy, and he is. But this podcast is something more. It goes beyond that. I guess what I'm say think it would be interesting to non-marketing folks. As I listened to it, I took down pages and pages of notes, occasionally stopping the recording to reflect how his lessons apply to me and my work. Read the rest

Acting EPA Chief Andrew Wheeler has been caught --yet again-- engaging with racist and conspiracy theory posts on social media. He pooh-poohed questions about online interactions he had with a Pizzagater, and tells a reporter he doesn’t remember liking a racist picture of the Obamas. How long has his inflammatory online activity been going on? Over the past five years, reports HuffPo, including some new awful crap just in the past month.Excerpt from a report today by HuffPo's Alexander Kaufman:The previously-unreported interactions include liking a racist image of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on Facebook and retweeting an infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist.The findings paint an embarrassing, if unsurprisingly partisan, picture of the 53-year-old former coal lobbyist and Republican aide. Wheeler has kept a significantly lower profile than his predecessor, Scott Pruitt, the disgraced agency chief whose resignation in July amid mounting scandals cleared the way for Wheeler’s promotion. The most incendiary interactions occurred before Wheeler, whose past social media activity has drummed up controversy before, became acting administrator.In an email to HuffPost on Tuesday, Wheeler said he didn’t recall liking the image of the Obamas and clicked on tweets from conspiracy theorists without reviewing the source.“Over the years, I have been a prolific social media user and liked and inadvertently liked countless social media posts,” Wheeler said. “Specifically, I do not remember the post depicting President Obama and the First Lady. As for some of the other posts, I agreed with the content and was unaware of the sources.” Well, there you go, he must not be a racist. Read the rest

Mysteries of the universe.Via the NYT:“I was getting a number of papers showing how remarkable the things were that dogs could do,” he said. When it came to other animals, though, scientific studies on intelligence barely trickled in, despite evidence to suggest that horses, chimpanzees and cats had tricks of their own. “Almost everything a dog claimed to do, other animals could do too,” Dr. Lea said. “It made me quite wary that dogs were special.”Sure, there is Chaser, a Border collie from Spartanburg, S.C., who was trained to understand 1,022 nouns. (His owner, John Pilley, a scientist who studied canine cognition, recently died.) Before that was a Border collie named Rico who learned to recognize the names of 200 items. But beyond those examples, Dr. Lea wondered: Had dog lovers (and scientists, for that matter) imbued their pets with extraordinary capabilities they did not possess?To be fair, Dr. Lea said he was a cat person. Still, he and Britta Osthaus, a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology, Politics and Sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University in Britain, set out to test the hypothesis.They compared dog cognition with members of three similar groups: carnivores, social hunters and domestic animals. Among the animals they studied were wolves, cats, chimpanzees, dolphins, horses and pigeons. What they found, Dr. Lea said, was that “dog cognition does not look exceptional.” Read the rest

At a The Marine Mammal Center in Hawaii, a cute little gecko butt-dialed random people ‘a bazillion’ times before a human figured out what was going on.Technically it wasn't a butt-dial. It was a gecko foot dial.Excerpt from the story first told by the human it kinda happened to, Dr. Claire Simeone:Marine mammal veterinarian Claire Simeone was at lunch when she got a call from Ke Kai Ola, the Big Island hospital where she’s director. There was silence on the other end. Nine more silent calls followed. Fearing a seal emergency, she rushed back.She wasn’t the only one getting calls, and people started asking why the hospital was calling non-stop.Trying figure out why a “bazillion” calls were made from one line, she called the phone company and a rep tried to talk her through finding a possible line on the fritz. She walked into a lab and found the culprit. And that's when she saw the gecko perched on a phone, making calls to everyone in the telephone's recent call history with “HIS TINY GECKO FEET,” as she tweeted the next day.“You are not going to BELIEVE this story,” she said.THREAD.So yesterday I started getting calls at our hospital, #KeKaiOla @TMMC. I was getting lunch, so I thought maybe someone had a seal-related question. I picked up. Silence. pic.twitter.com/yX6aziwoHz— Dr. Claire Simeone (@Claire_Simeone) October 5, 2018More calls. NINE calls in 15 minutes. I start to panic a bit, and drive back to the hospital. Read the rest

Taylor Swift may speak to her home state, but MTv's former presidential hopeful Randee of the Redwoods may be more effective to rally Happy Mutant voters!Randee reminds us of our youth, while encouraging everyone to register and to vote.Just say "Whoa!" Read the rest

Journalist Jamal Khashoggi is believed by some to have been tortured, murdered, and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Others think he was kidnapped by Saudi officials and is still alive. This image appears to show him entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week, when he was last seen by his fiancé or anyone else who's talking.Other than a “I heard a report” from Donald, a “we're monitoring the situation closely” from James Mattis, and similar mumblings from others here and there, why is this tough-on-mideast-bad-guys administration so hushed on the apparent execution of the Saudi reporter who contributed to U.S. news organizations?On MSBNC, Richard Engel says Istanbul security officials have two theories: One, they grabbed him and killed him inside the embassy. The other theory is that Khashoggi was the subject of an attempted rendition to Saudi Arabia, and he died in the process.The Trump administration hasn't said much about #JamalKhashoggi's alleged murder—@RichardEngel talks to @chucktodd about the possible reasons behind its silence on @MTPDaily @MeetThePress @MSNBC pic.twitter.com/dUPtcIe6tZ— On Assignment with Richard Engel (@OARichardEngel) October 9, 2018Here's the short version of why Trump and his version of the U.S. government isn't going to do anything about it.MBS, the Sunni prince of Saudi Arabia, has powerful allies in the Trump administration like the president himself, and Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, none of whom are likely to want to piss off their ally for personal financial reasons.“If they can't find a body, it'll be difficult to make Saudi Arabia pay a price,” says Richard Engel in this two-way with Chuck Todd on Meet The Press. Read the rest

I wish Drew Magary was more prolific. He's only written two novels and both are wonderful. (See our reviews of The Postmortal and The Hike on Boing Boing). If you haven't read Magary's work, today is a good day to start because The Hike is on Kindle for $2. Read the rest

I never knew how those machines that court reporters use to record testimony worked until I watched this video. Stan is a stenographer and he explains how he is able to make a real time transcription of speech. Read the rest

This new Cruz attack ad was directed by Richard Linklater. It stars a man, named Sonny Carl, who calls bullshit on Ted Cruz's "Tough as Texas" boast."If somebody call my wife a dog and said my daddy was in on the Kennedy assassination I wouldn't be kissing their ass," says Carl. "You stick a finger in their chest and give them a few choice words or you dragged their ass out by the woodshed and kick their ass." Read the rest

A pair of Crocs, a couple of bent sections of reinforcement bar, and some baling wire is all you need to scale poles like a boss.It's Not Stupid if it Works Read the rest

“Are you sure it’s not a witch hunt?” This is the best GIF adaptation of all time, as one commenter already said. IMGURian TheGhostofElizabethShue made a killer cut-up political explainer out of a Simpsons clip that made the rounds in GIF form.Watch and enjoy.How Scandal Fatigue Works[via] Read the rest

This isn't a long post, but damn it's an important one. The Root's got the lowdown on the voter registration deadline for every state. If you haven't registered to vote yet, you'll find the deadlines right here. Read the rest

Fill in this form and Vote Save America will tell you whether you are (still) registered to vote, a vital step in an age of rampant, illegal voter suppression. The process takes 30 seconds. Here's instructions on registering to vote in every US state and territory. Read the rest

Canada's CBC News went into Apple Stores with hidden cameras and discovered that the Geniuses there were especially smart when it came to ripping off customers who brought their equipment in for repair. In some cases the Geniuses told customers that they should buy a new computer, phone, or iPad rather than fix their broken one, even though the repair was a lot cheaper. In this video, we see an Apple Genius tell a reporter that a repair would $1100 and $100 in labor. The reporter took the computer to an independent repair technician, who removed the case and fixed the computer by straightening a bent pin. Read the rest

Through the use of hidden cameras, consulting with private computer repair joints, and chatting with right-to-repair advocates, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation has cast a very unflattering light on Apple's Genius Bar and its pricing and repair policies. Yes, this video is close to 20 minutes in length, but if you own Apple devices, like I do, or plan on investing in one, it's definitely worth your while to watch it from start to finish. Read the rest

Pure excitement last night from Pittsburgh's WPXI, which devoted several minutes to covering a local man accused of pocketing more than $3,000 from the store where he worked, in small amounts, over a long period of time. I can't remember his name, occupation or the outcome of the investigation, but love that the TV station thought "Very Sorry" to be worthy of a bulletpoint. Which it is. Read the rest

There's been a lot of talk about Taylor Swift's marching orders to her 112 million Instagram followers this past Sunday. Some folks are welcoming her to the resistance. Others wish she'd shut her political cake hole and stick to singing (but Kanye West's blathering on is totally cool). No matter which side of the fence you find yourself on in the debate over whether celebrities should be able to use their status to motivate the political leanings of their fanbase, there is no denying that an endorsement or suggestion from the right star gets shit done. According to Buzzfeed, Vote.org has seen an insane spike in traffic since Swift waded into politics.From Buzzfeed:"We are up to 65,000 registrations in a single 24-hour period since T. Swift's post," said Kamari Guthrie, director of communications for Vote.org.For context, 190,178 new voters were registered nationwide in the entire month of September, while 56,669 were registered in August.In Swift’s home state of Tennessee, where she voiced support for two Democratic candidates running in this year's midterms, voter registrations have also jumped."Vote.org saw [Tennessee] registrations spike specifically since Taylor's post," Guthrie said. The organization has received 5,183 in the state so far this month — at least 2,144 of which were in the last 36 hours, she said, up from 2,811 new Tennessee voter registrations for the entire month of September and just 951 in August.Holy shit.Whether this massive registration will translate into a whack of voters turning up to cast their vote remains to be seen. Read the rest

A new documentary, David Bowie: The First Five Years, reveals how wrong some BBC judges were when he first started out. In 1965, David Bowie's band, the Lower Third, auditioned for the BBC's radio air time. This was when Bowie went by Davey Jones. The band, and especially Bowie, did not impress. Some of the comments by the judges:“Singer not particularly exciting. Routines dull.” “I can’t find fault with them musically – but there is no entertainment in anything they do.”“Strange choice of material. Amateur sounding vocalist who sings wrong notes and out of tune”.“I don’t think they’ll get better with more rehearsals.”These tone deaf judges must've been surprised when Bowie released Space Oddity four years later, in 1969. As an aside, notice how much the guitars in "You've Got a Habit" above (starting at around 00:57) sound so much like Space Oddity. According to The Guardian:The documentary, David Bowie: The First Five Years, will be shown on the BBC in 2019 to mark the 50th anniversary of Space Oddity. It features a clip of Phil Lancaster reading the audition report for the first time. The film concludes the BBC’s Bowie Five Years trilogy, directed by Francis Whately: The Last Five Years was broadcast in 2017, while Five Years, which focused on five key years in his career, was shown in 2013. Read the rest

"Go vote." A SCARY TIMEby Lynzy LabI CAN’T WALK TO MY CAR LATE AT NIGHT WHILE ON THE PHONEI CAN’T OPEN UP MY WINDOWS WHEN I’M HOME ALONEI CAN’T GO TO A BAR WITHOUT A CHAPERONEAND I CAN’T WEAR A MINI SKIRT IF ITS THE ONLY ONE I OWNI CAN’T USE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION AFTER 7 PMI CAN’T BE BRUTALLY HONEST WHEN YOU SLIDE INTO MY DMSI CAN’T GO TO THE CLUB JUST TO DANCE WITH MY FRIENDSAND I CAN’T EVER LEAVE MY DRINK UNATTENDED BUT IT SURE IS A SCARY TIME FOR BOYSYEAH GENTLEMEN! BAND TOGETHER, MAKE SOME NOISEITS REALLY TOUGH WHEN YOUR REPUTATION’S ON THE LINEAND ANY WOMAN YOU’VE ASSAULTED COULD TURN UP ANYTIMEYEAH, IT SURE IS A SCARY TIME FOR GUYSCAN’T SPEAK TO ANY WOMEN OR LOOK THEM IN THE EYESITS SO CONFUSING, IS IT RAPE OR IS IT JUST BEING NICE?SO INCONVENIENT THAT YOU EVEN HAVE TO THINK TWICEI CAN’T LIVE IN AN APARTMENT IF IT'S ON THE FIRST FLOOR I CAN’T BE WEARING SILK PAJAMAS WHEN I ANSWER THE DOORI CAN’T HAVE ANOTHER DRINK EVEN IF I WANT MOREI CAN’T MAKE YOU FEEL INVALID, UNSEEN, OR IGNOREDI CAN’T JOG AROUND THE CITY WITH HEADPHONES ON MY EARSI CAN’T SPEAK OUT AGAINST MY RAPIST AFTER 35 YEARSI CAN’T BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY IF I'M HOLDING BACK TEARSAND I CAN’T EVER SPEAK EARNESTLY ABOUT ALL MY FEARSBUT IT SURE IS A SCARY TIME FOR DUDESCAN’T TEXT A GIRL REPEATEDLY ASKING FOR NUDESCAN’T MAKE HER HAVE SEX WHEN SHE’S NOT IN THE MOODAND WHAT GIVES HER THE RIGHT TO GIVE YOU ATTITUDE?? Read the rest

A guy is on the side of the road giving CPR to a squirrel by pressing his fingers on its chest (yes, he is wearing a glove). Two police officers pull over to see what's going on, and find out that the guy's car either drove over the squirrel, or maybe just sideswiped it. (Or, perhaps it's just stunned by an almost-roadkill moment.) But the guy and the officers determine that the car's tire didn't actually roll over the animal, who is out cold on its back. The good samaritan keeps working on the squirrel, massaging it and turning it over, when suddenly, voila! It pops back to life and runs off. Read the rest

Dustin W. Burns, 33, of Springfield, Missouri, on probation after violating a restraining order, was arrested again after he allegedly made an instructional video on how to remove an ankle monitor with a butterknife and posted the clip on Facebook."This is how you take an ankle bracelet off," says the voice in the video, "without breaking the circuit." From Springfield News-Leader:In August, the Facebook account posted a video of a man who looks like Burns walking through what appears to be a large marijuana farm with the caption: "Dream come true."Court records show several probation violations were filed this summer against Burns and a warrant for his arrest was issued...Burns was charged this week with tampering with electronic monitoring equipment, a felony, court records say.Post by dustin.burns770. Read the rest

Warren Ellis's closing keynote from the Thought Bubble festival in Leeds is distilled Ellis: witty and wordsmithed, insightful and thoughtful, futuristic and deeply contemporary.Ellis's subject was the unique merits and practices of comics, the traits that have made it the incubator for so much successful media in other forms, from movies to fashion to games to toys.Comics is a form without convention: there is not even a standardized way of writing a comics script, much less a standard way for artists and writers to collaborate once the script is done. This has created an endless variety of storytelling modes in comics, where illustrations are used to bend space and time, stretching and compressing it, even running multiple timelines in parallel, in a way that is never matched in any other form.Combine this with a new golden age of diversity in comics in which the usual suspects are having to share the stage with new creators telling new stories and you have a medium not quite like any other.There’s a page I often cite in these conversations, from the 1974 comic MANHUNTER by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson. It’s an entire Jason Bourne sequence in a single page. In a Marrakesh alleyway, Damon Nostrand is in a car attempting to run down Paul Kirk and Christine St Clair. Kirk pushes St Clair to cover, rolls under the speeding car, draws a knife, tears it through the car’s petrol tank as it passes over him, gets clear, lights a match, touches it to the trail of petrol the car leaves, the petrol blazes down the alley to the car, the car explodes, and then they do three or four lines of dialogue while watching Nostrand burn to death about how it’s horrible but really he was a bit of a git and completely deserved it. Read the rest

In 1863, on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, a 69-year-old shoemaker took down his ancient musket and set out to shoot some rebels. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow John Burns' adventures in that historic battle, which made him famous across the nation and won the praise of Abraham Lincoln.We'll also survey some wallabies and puzzle over some underlined 7s.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon! Read the rest

There is a major retrospective of John Waters' visual art that's just opened in his hometown of Baltimore. It's called Indecent Exposure and it pulls pieces from his entire career. In this PBS NewsHour video, we get to see a glimpse of it guided by Waters himself. In the interview that follows, the filth elder himself gives young people some advice on how to look for opportunities to break into the contemporary art world: "It's a secret biker club that hates you. I even have a piece that says, 'Contemporary Art Hates You.' because it does if you hate it first. It's a thin line. You can't have contempt about it and go in. You have to learn. You have to study a little. You have to figure it out... and suddenly this whole world opens up to you. You can see it in a completely different way. It was like you were blind before."There's more, watch.You can catch Waters' exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art until January 6, 2019.Exhibition highlights include a photographic installation in which Waters explores the absurdities of famous films and a suite of photographs and sculpture that propose humor as a way to humanize dark moments in history from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11. Waters also appropriates and manipulates images of less-than sacred, low-brow cultural references—Elizabeth Taylor’s hairstyles, Justin Bieber’s preening poses, his own self-portraits—and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counterculture muse, Divine. Read the rest

A group of people on a boat had amazing good fortune when a couple of friendly whales came to visit. The whales came right up to them, swam under their boat, and gently rolled around before saying goodbye. But rather than enjoying the miracle, the group panicked – you can hear one of them hyperventilating – and they finally called the police on the whales. You can hear one man who is the voice of reason, trying to keep the group calm, explaining that these whales are not going to hurt them, but no one listens. Not sure why they went on a boat ride in the first place.Image: Public Domain, Link Read the rest

It's not great footage, being video of a video monitor recorded with a potato, but it's a quality bridge collapse with no apparent fatalities and one of the most cinematic escapes reality might provide: keep your eye on the person waiting for the train in the bottom right of the shot, next to the pillar.Machtrans of the Russian caption:On 09.10.2018 in the morning, there was a collapse of a CAR BRIDGE THROUGH A TRANSIB. A few more cars were miraculously managed to drive. The Russian Railways employee was born in a shirt! I almost died under this bridge! Angel keeps it! Read the rest

In 2015, Parker Kane's performance of dubstep on a McDonald's cup went viral (video below). On Sunday, Kane returned to the same McDonald's in Rexburg, Idaho for the above encore. Read the rest

Described as "a transient bazaar that is not publicly announced, where nothing is for sale, and very little trace can be found of it afterward," it's been nearly 10 years since the first Lost Horizon Night Market hit New York City. Since then, this quirky underground event has popped up in other cities worldwide.This past weekend it was back in Brooklyn.Gothamist's Oriana Leckert went: At a moment when the world seems to be going in a bleaker, more dangerous direction than at any point in our lifetimes, this is a night where New York’s most unusual spectacle-makers gather to share a few hours of pure weirdness and joy.The Night Market is a shadowy affair, a truly underground, immersive occasion at a time when both those words have been so overused as to be rendered nearly meaningless. There is no mailing list to sign up for or Facebook page to “like”; one only learns of the sporadic soirée through word of mouth, and the market’s location, different each time, is not revealed until the day of. The only instruction truck proprietors receive is to create an interactive art piece within the vehicle’s four walls...Saturday’s market, situated on two dimly lit blocks in industrial Bushwick, included 19 trucks, ranging from very simple to hilariously convoluted concepts. Each engendered its own atmosphere, engulfing visitors in a tiny world that was consuming enough to let people forget about the real one for a little while...Read more: Photos: A Secret Box Truck Art Carnival Materialized Briefly In Brooklynphotos by Alix Piorun for Gothamist, used with permissionGlitter gun fight Read the rest

The Internet Archive now offers in-browser emulation of more than 13,000 Commodore 64 floppy disks. The Sentinel, Paradroid, Oregon Trail, Wasteland... they're all there, waiting for you.Software Library: C64 (Internet Archive) Read the rest

On Sunday evening, SpaceX launched a satellite on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Visual Burrito created this beautiful time-lapse, 4K video of the spectacle in the sky. Read the rest

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley might well be the only person in the Trump administration you actually like. Nikki Haley will no longer be part of the Trump administration, if Axios's sources are wise.President Trump has accepted Nikki Haley's resignation as UN Ambassador, according to two sources briefed on their conversation. The timing of her departure is still unclear, the president promised a "big announcement" with her at 10:30 a.m.Reuters:U.S. President Donald Trump has accepted the resignation of U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Axios news site reported on Tuesday, citing two sources familiar with the matter. Haley would not confirm the report to Reuters when asked.Photo: Shutterstock. Read the rest

The Telegraph-Journal is a newspaper in New Brunswick, Canada. It is owned by the Irvings, among Canada's richest industrialists. Yesterday, an oil refinery owned by the Irvings exploded. Here's how the Telegraph-Journal covered it. [via]Today I learned that yesterday was Thanksgiving in Canada. Read the rest

This looks great. For the San Francisco History Association, John Law is giving a presentation on "How Everything Started in San Francisco (While We All Thought We Were Just Fooling Around)" at Congregation Sherith Israel on Tuesday, October 30.Here are the details:John Law will discuss how the Free University movement and other pivotal former scenes, including the hippies, Beats, Situationists, Dada, adventure and pulp fiction, B-films, and a ton of other stuff prominently influenced San Francisco (and national) scenes. He will also examine related influences on the rise of Silicon Valley and its connection to the SF underground “art” scene.John Law has been involved in the S.F. underground art and pranks scene since 1977. He co-founded the Billboard Liberation Front and the Burning Man Festival, and has crewed for Survival Research Labs and S.F. Cyclecide. He was an original member of the infamous San Francisco Suicide Club, and helped to establish the Cacophony Society. He is the coauthor of Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society (out in paperback from Last Gasp in 2019), the definitive history of the group that birthed Burning Man and SantaCon (sorry 'bout that one!) and influenced underground culture worldwide. He is owner and steward of the Doggie Diner Dog Heads, the ten-foot-tall, six hundred pounds (each) fiberglass symbols of an iconic post-computer-age San Francisco. He lives in North Beach and has an office atop the signature Oakland Tribune Tower.Doors open at 7 p.m. with refreshments and a historical book sale; presentation begins at 7:30 p.m. Read the rest

Facebook's newest product is "Portal," a home camera intended to follow you from room to room while you videoconference.The product is presumably overseen by Consumer Hardware VP Andrew Bosworth, last seen telling female Facebook employees to shut the fuck up about the company's top lobbyist throwing a victory party for serial rapist Brett Kavanaugh on the eve of his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.As Taylor Hatmaker writes on Techcrunch, there's a lot of tone-deafness in the launch of this product. It's not just the obvious creepiness of letting a company that can't go ten minutes without another privacy (or, you know, genocide) scandal breaking put cameras all over your house -- there's also the fact that the company has spent more than a decade making official pronouncements about the foolishness of making its own hardware.Of course, Facebook has made all kinds of promises about respecting user privacy with its new surveillance portals, but as the founders of Instagram and Whatsapp discovered Facebook's promises are all subject to change without notice (other people who discovered this: billions of users who trusted Facebook's promises).This stuff sounds okay, but it’s standard. And, like any Facebook product testing the waters before turning the ad hose on full-blast, it’s all subject to change. For example, Portal’s camera doesn’t identify who you are, but Facebook commands a powerful facial recognition engine and is known for blurring the boundaries between its major products, a habit that’s likely to worsen with some of the gatekeepers out of the way. Read the rest

When Facebook hired Joel Kaplan to serve as Vice President for US Public Policy, who could have predicted that he would turn out to be a far-right partisan who would embarrass the company by throwing a victory bash for a serial rapist on the occasion of his being handed a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court?After all, Kaplan's previous career -- serving as Deputy Chief of Staff in the George W Bush White House -- abetted an endless war (a war that's now older than some of the soldiers dying in it), cruel cuts to social services, funding religious cults to replace social programs, doubling down on mass incarceration, so much torture, even more mass surveillance, and innumerable other sins that can be loosely sorted into two piles, one labeled "war crimes" and the other, "crimes against humanity." But not appointing actual rapists to the Supreme Court, after all.Kaplan was a vocal supporter of Kavanaugh throughout the confirmation process (they both served in the Bush White House and might have enjoyed a beer or two hundred during their joint tenure); he prominently situated himself behind the judge during the hearings, as if to ensure that Facebook's officials were publicly seen to be supporting the rapist's bid for the highest judicial office in the land. After all, as Kaplan told his reports at Facebook, "I have known Brett and Ashley Kavanaugh for 20 years. They are my and my wife Laura’s closest friends in D.C. I was in their wedding; he was in ours. Read the rest

From the outset, folks suspected the self-shredding Banksy painting was a planned media stunt. After all, Sothebys hung it on the wall instead of the customary easel, allowing the shredder to function, and put it up at the end of the day, so the fuss didn't interrupt other auctions. But the devil is in the details. At Artnome, Jason Bailey sets about myth-busting the shred, right down to the technical challenges of creating such a device. If you thought batteries couldn't last long enough to do the deed, you lose! But if you realized that a row of flatside-up exacto blades aren't going to start clean cuts, pat yourself on the back. Yes, a battery can last for up to 10 years; there are also other plausible theories that do not implicate Sotheby’s Yes, there was a functional shredder (in the loosest sense of the word) Yes, the work was partially pre-shredded and spooled Yes, the device in the video is the one that was used to further shred the painted during the auctionAnd, of course:Had Sotheby’s actually been completely caught off guard by a man with a remote detonation device and large frame concealing electronics making a beeping noise, one would assume they would have jumped into action assuming the worst. Instead, the porters calmly shepherded the work out of the room and returned to the activities of the evening. I assume Sotheby’s was familiar with the person who had the triggering device (if not also familiar with the specifics of the plan). Read the rest

In honor of Indigenous Peoples' Day today, I suggest cranking up the following selections from Light in the Attic's essential Grammy-nominated box set "Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985, Morley Loon's "Northland, My Land," and Willie Thrasher's "Spirit Child." (top photo: Quebec’s Sugluk) Read the rest

Speaking informally to reporters today, President Donald Trump said he liked Taylor Swift's music “25% less” after she came out in favor of Democratic candidates in America's midterm elections next month. “Let’s just say I like Taylor’s music about 25% less now,” he said, after reporters told him Taylor Swift has come out in support of Democrats.Trump tells us upon arriving back at the White House he likes Taylor Swift’s music but maybe about “25 percent” less now that she has endorsed Bredesen— Kathryn Watson (@kathrynw5) October 8, 2018Below, Tay-Tay's instagram post that's making all the commotion. View this post on Instagram I’m writing this post about the upcoming midterm elections on November 6th, in which I’ll be voting in the state of Tennessee. In the past I’ve been reluctant to publicly voice my political opinions, but due to several events in my life and in the world in the past two years, I feel very differently about that now. I always have and always will cast my vote based on which candidate will protect and fight for the human rights I believe we all deserve in this country. I believe in the fight for LGBTQ rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG. I believe that the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening and prevalent. I cannot vote for someone who will not be willing to fight for dignity for ALL Americans, no matter their skin color, gender or who they love. Read the rest

“I modified a standard Nintendo Switch game case to hold up to 24 games,” says IMGURian MrJspeed, who provides a killer step-by-step HOWTO for gamers who'd like to try this instead of buying a multi-game carrying case.“There are similar products online, but they're very bulky and don't have the game density that this has. This is a great way for us to get to our games at the house by only grabbing one case.” Here's the step-by-step.Modify your Nintendo Switch game case to hold up to 24 games[via] Read the rest

I'm coming to Chicago for this week's installment of the Censorship and Information Control During Information Revolutions seminar series, and while I'm in town, I'm appearing at Volumes Book Cafe (1474 N. Milwaukee) for the regular Deep Dish reading series, on November 11 at 7PM. Read the rest

There's no better way to beat the heat on your next beach vacation than to hold on for dear life while being blown around by the power of a jet engine. Read the rest

Last week, we warned you about a couple of ugly, low-rent bugs baked into Apple's decidedly high-falooting iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max. A number of users, including Lewis Hilsenteger of Unbox Therapy fame, have reported that the handset has a hella hard time, in certain circumstances, recharging. If you plug in a Lightning cable while the phone's in standby, there's a good chance that it's not going to be juiced up. Given the high price of ownership associated with Apple's latest smartphones, that's twelve different flavors of bullshit. Fortunately, Apple agrees and has come up with a software fix for the issue, as well as one for poor cellular connectivity reported by a whack of the new iPhone's owners. From The Verge:Apple has issued an update to iOS 12, which fixes several bugs that have plagued iPhone XS and XS Max users since the phones were released. The IOS 12.0.1 update is available to download now in Settings —> General —> Software Update on your iPhone or iPad.The update should fix one of the biggest issues on the iPhone XS and XS Max: users reported poor Wi-Fi reception compared to their previous iPhone X devices when used in their homes, but it doesn’t address the separate LTE issues. It also resolves the widespread issue of iPhone XS devices requiring to be unlocked before recognizing the Lightning cable charger.So, if you've got a handset giving you guff, get on it.Image: Apple Read the rest

These candies have been around for awhile in Japan, but I can't help but think that with the slime craze that's been all over Youtube for the last few years, kids in other countries might truly appreciate the ooey gooey goodness of Japanese Nerunerunerune candies.The company Kracie was established in Japan in 1887 as the Tokyo Cotton Trading Company. It produces everything from pharmaceuticals to cosmetics to -- you guessed it -- candy.But what is special about Kracie's super cute sweets is that they are actually do-it-yourself treats. The two I made are called Nerunerunerune (kneading, kneading, kneading). Powder is shaken into a plastic receptacle, water is measured and stirred in, beautiful colors are made (lavender and yellow in my case). Next, a second package is added and the vigorous kneading or stirring occurs. The goop changes colors again. It fluffs up and turns into very fragrant slime! Finally, the dollops of sticky goodness can be dipped into either rainbow-colored crushed pop rocks or tiny sweet tarts and eaten. It feels a bit like child alchemy. Yummy, yummy, sweet and sticky child alchemy. Read the rest

It's Columbus Day: a holiday slapped together to celebrate a raping, murdering, plunder-horny opportunist that's been dead for hundreds of years. Columbus, Ohio? It was named after the gold loving bastard. Despite this, for the first time since the city's founding in 1812, Columbus Day won't be celebrated there. Instead, the city's government has opted to throw the days off that are typically allotted to the holiday at something far more important: honoring the United States' veterans. From AP News:Ohio’s capital city, population 860,000, will be open for business Monday after observing Columbus Day probably “for as long as it had been in existence,” said Robin Davis, a spokeswoman for Democratic Mayor Andrew Ginther. City offices will close instead on Veterans Day, which falls on Nov. 12 this year.“We have a number of veterans who work for the city, and there are so many here in Columbus,” Davis said. “We thought it was important to honor them with that day off.” And, she said, the city doesn’t have the budget to give its 8,500 employees both days off, she said.The way that city of Columbus gave the shaft to Columbus Day is absolutely genius. According to the AP, instead of having a public vote over whether or not the city should abolish the observation of the holiday--something that has, in other locales, drawn protests, and a whack of political moaning--they opted to announce, late last week, that they were shifting the city's stock of holiday hours from the contentious holiday to be used on Veteran's Day in November. Read the rest

Passengers were robbed of jewelry and cash while they were sleeping during a 13-hour flight from Johannesburg to Hong Kong on South African Airways (SAA). Two of the passengers informed the flight attendants, and one passenger said they suspected a few passengers who had been rifling through the overhead bins while people slept. The attendants called the police.Once the plane landed, the police came onboard and the suspects were asked to remain while the other passengers were let off the plane. The suspects were searched, but none of the stolen items were found on them. However, after they left, the items mysteriously appeared on the suspects' and robbed passengers' seats. The suspects were not arrested since there was no direct evidence. Apparently, this isn't the first mid-flight robbery of its kind. According to International Business News:In a similar incident in January this year, several passengers onboard a flight bound for Prague from Beijing were robbed by another passenger mid-air. Money was stolen from the luggage stored in the overhead compartments and also from seat pockets.The cabin crew was alerted by one of the victims who discovered her money was missing half an hour before the flight was supposed to land. This prompted the co-passengers to check their luggage during which they discovered their cash was also robbed. And according to The Telegraph:Authorities have previously said how the thieves “scout” their prey before boarding and then place their own bags in the same overhead bins as their targets before rifling through them when the owner is asleep or in the toilet. Read the rest