Watching this boy in Mumbai get run over by an SUV made me gasp. But even more shocking is the way that, after looking for a moment as if he's been flattened into a pancake, he pops up and runs off as if he wants to play. Read the rest

Finding a Fortnite squad of 'mature' players who have been around the block, if not The Island, a few times can be tough. Here is a discord for Fortnite players over the age of forty.A small group of friends and I regularly play Fortnite together -- but it can be hard putting together a full squad. We've also discussed trying to set up some scrims and/or tournaments for the older set, but we need a bigger boat! Senior League here we come!Mostly we are Xbox players, but todays news about cross-platform play opening up led us to create a Discord for older players.We tend to play regularly later on Tuesday, but a few of us can be found playing each night.You can join the discord here.The age limit is not enforced, no id will be checked. Read the rest

As posted by Taiyo Masuda to Instagram. The headline, being accurate and complete, requires no further elaboration. (via Nicole Cliffe) Read the rest

One great use of the Force is chores - telekinetically, of course. Samsung may not exactly be the Force, per se, but they are at least making vacuuming a whole lot easier and more fun. Their POWERbot Star Wars Limited Edition Stormtrooper Robot Vacuum is just too cute not to order around.Like Samsung's standard POWERbot, this geeky-clean version has an easy out-of-the-box set-up and charges up at a wall unit that plugs into a standard outlet. But power it on, and you'll instantly feel like Vader lording it over the troops. The Stormtrooper Robot Vacuum fires up with an enthusiastic "Let's go!" before launching into the "Star Wars" theme as it crawls along your soon-to-be clean floor. Armed with a Full View 2.0 sensor, it tracks down dirt as doggedly as the real thing tracks down rebels, moving easily under couches and grabbing particles in corners that other, circular vacuums can't. It detects different surface types and can optimize its suction accordingly. It even responds to commands in an appropriately Imperial way ("Freeze" for stop, for instance).At a discounted $372, it's the nerdiest way to keep your floors spotless. Read the rest

Surya Raghavendran started fixing phones when Apple tried to charge him $120 to fix the defective screen they'd installed in his phone; instead, he followed online instructional videos and fixed it himself.That was in ninth grade. Now, Raghavendran is 17 and runs his own business, SKR Screen Repair.But SKR Screen Repair is in trouble: Apple's newest Ios version uses DRM to prevent third party screen repairs, locking out third-party screens.The change prompted Raghavendran to branch out into politics and advocacy: he's joined with Environment Michigan and US PIRG to advocate for a Right to Repair bill (previously) in Michigan. Raghavendran meets with state lawmakers and has circulated a petition and compiled personal stories about the need to protect independent repair.Repair services account for 4% of US GDP, and they create community jobs that let neighbors help each other get more use out of their own property, while diverting electronics from landfills.The new laws would be about more than just getting companies like Apple out of the way of scrappy businesses like SKR Screen Repair. Right to repair activists want big companies to turn over diagnostic information, repair manuals, and anything else that would help consumers repair their own devices.For Proctor, every teenager like Raghavendran who gets involved in the fight for the right to repair brings that change one step closer to reality.“This is an all hands on deck project,” Proctor said. “That includes hands like Surya’s, which are being blocked by policies which refuse to allow him access to things he needs to properly fix stuff. Read the rest

Firefox Monitor is a new service from Mozilla that draws on data from Have I Been Pwned? (previously) to keep you informed when your data is breached and shows up online. The service also includes important advice, including "Treat security questions like extra passwords" by creating "long, random answers." It's good advice: certainly, it's easier to put into practice than convincing your mother to travel back in time and change her "maiden name." Read the rest

Facebook's acquisition spree -- including huge-dollar payouts for Instagram and Whatsapp -- was supposed to shore up the company's crumbling user base by creating a "family" of semi-independent companies with diverse approaches to business, sharing a back-end of engineering, marketing and other resources, but offering very different propositions to users.But the departure of the Whatsapp founders earlier this year touched off speculation that their independence had been crushed by the Facebook mothership -- these suspicions were largely vindicated by the Whatsapp founders' participation in #deletefacebook campaigns and open criticism of Facebook's surveillant approach to business.This week, the founders of Instagram also quit Facebook, and insider whispers have it that they, too, left because Facebook had compromised their independence.Techcrunch's Jon Russell says that it's all a sign that Facebook senior management have not been able to live up to their promise of independence for their acquisitions, and that the facebookization of Instagram -- surveillance, toxic "engagement" tactics, and general creepiness -- can't be far behind.Over at Instagram, a similar situation seems to have happened with Systrom and Krieger. As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine reports, sources suggested that the leadership’s “weakening independence” from Facebook was a source of frustration for them that ultimately led to their untimely exit.Reading the short farewell note from Systrom seems to hammer that home. There’s no thank you for Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg or any other Facebook executive. Systrom instead stated that Krieger and he are keen to explore their “curiosity and creativity again” by building new products. Read the rest

With only weeks to go before the most important midterm election in living American memory, the deadline for voter registration is fast approaching in many key states: here's how to register to vote. As a foreigner with a green card, I don't get a vote (though, this being America, I am allowed to give money to political candidates), but I have to live with the consequences of this election, just like you. If you enjoy Boing Boing, or my books, or, you know, democracy, please do this -- I'd consider it a personal favor. Read the rest

Even though the DoJ has expressly prohibited using the No-Fly list to gain leverage over potential informants, the FBI has continued its longstanding practice of blackmailing American citizens by putting them on the No-Fly list because they refused to work as informants.The FBI is being sued (again) for doing this: Oregon resident Yonas Fikre was added to the No-Fly list while he was out of the country in Sudan; he was told by the FBI that the only way he could come home was to turn informant, whereupon they would remove him from the list.Fikre is suing the FBI in federal court, and the Bureau is desperate to escape the courtroom, so they removed him from the No-Fly list and asked the judge to end the trial.But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals says that Fikre still has standing to sue the FBI. Fikre was kidnapped and tortured by UAE police, at the behest of the FBI. He ended up stuck in Sweden, and is seeking an admission that he should never have been put on the list, as well as damages for his significant hardship. The notice filed by the government averred only that “counsel recently was advised by the Terrorist Screening Center that [Fikre] has been removed from the No Fly List.” Absent an acknowledgment by the government that its investigation revealed Fikre did not belong on the list, and that he will not be returned to the list based on the currently available evidence, Fikre remains, in his own words, “stigmatiz[ed] . Read the rest

Mexico's governance crisis continues: beyond the clandestine mass graves, the kidnapping of elected officials (and assassination of political candidates) and coordinated attacks on anti-corruption candidates, there's the well-known problem of corrupt police officers and whole departments, including, it seems, the Acapulco police department, who have been raided and disarmed by federal forces, with two officers charged with murder and the rest under investigation. (Image: Tomascastelazo, CC-BY-SA) Read the rest

Walmart is blockchaining its supply chain, including the lettuce. The Wall Street Journal:Pinpointing the source of food contamination can improve public safety, cut the amount of time illness goes unchecked and could save money for retailers and farmers who can be swept into overly broad product recalls, said Frank Yiannas, head of food safety at Walmart. Millions of bags and heads of romaine lettuce had to be thrown out as an eruption of E.coli linked to romaine spread through 36 states early this year. As investigators worked, 210 people got sick and five died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If you thought all the blockchain corporate pivoting of last year was a joke, you underestimated something about the intended customer. Read the rest

For weeks, Honeywell Home customers have been complaining about outages with their Honeywell "Total Connect Comfort" apps, which allow them to remote control their smart thermostats; several days ago, customers started complaining that the app had stopped working altogether.Honeywell says that the outage only lasted for a few hours on Tuesday, and adds that its products can still be manually set by people who able to physically access them. Honeywell's smart thermostats are sold on the basis that they can be remotely controlled, and Honeywell's customers include many people who cannot readily access their thermostats: people with mobility issues, and landlords and their property managers who manage several properties at once.Honeywell customers say that they found the company unresponsive to complaints about the reliability of the app in the days and weeks before the outage, and dispute the company's claims about the short, limited duration of the outage. Despite Honeywell's assurances, one customer told Business Insider they first encountered issues four days ago, and had run into issues earlier in the month before that. There are also multiple Honeywell customers complaining on social media about technical problems before Tuesday. Honeywell’s 'smart' thermostats had a big server outage and a key feature stopped working entirely — and customers were furious [Rob Price/Business Insider] Read the rest

Pixelmash is clever indeed: create your resolution-independent art with the same freeform speed as you might in any other painting app, then let it nondestructively pixelize it, with 1-pixel outlines, adjustable gradients and dithering.Pixelmash's resolution-independence lets you do really cool things... Like create animations using layer transforms rather than having to paint every frame pixel-by-pixel. Or make outlines, shading, and dithering easily adjustable by having them applied as layer effects. Or easily create different resolutions and color variants of the same image. Or convert photos or other hi-res artwork into pixel art using layer effects and the resolution slider.Free demo, $15 to pre-order. Read the rest

Kosmic is the first human to beat Super Mario Bros in 4 minutes and 55 seconds, a time so good it is less than a second slower than the best tool-assisted speedrun. Mashable:When Kosmic says he's tied with the [tool-assisted] run at 4-1, that means his inputs are matched up exactly with the program's and he can't physically do any better.From there, Kosmic continues to nail everything almost perfectly, slipping up so minorly that most viewers who aren't familiar with the nuances of Super Mario Bros. speedruns won't even recognize when it happens.As YouTuber and speedrunning historian points out in his thorough analysis of Super Mario Bros. speedruns, speedrunners have been whittling down the world record for well over a decade. Top runners are at a point where they can only hope to improve their times by shaving off milliseconds.Supreme pixel-precise coordination is not enough: you have to know all the game's technical extremities to get close. Here's an explainer video (featuring one of Kosmic's earlier record runs) describing all the bugs and tricks exploited along the way. Read the rest

Move aside Fail Whale, now the internet has a Snail Whale (and other strange beasts).Digital Culture's interactive Hybridizer app allows you to digitally create cryptozoological creatures using the 17th c. art of engraver Matthäus Merian. His work has been digitized, split in half, and animated by the team of Kajetan Obarski, Igor Hardy and Tukasz Kozak.Give it a whirl. (Nag on the Lake) Read the rest

Some people will do anything for attention. Oh, wait, this benefits charity. On Tuesday, for his 50th birthday, Will Smith faced his fears and bungee jumped out of helicopter into the Grand Canyon. Entertainment Weekly:The video was hosted by Smith’s longtime friend and Fresh Prince of Bel-Air costar Alfonso Ribiero, and Smith’s family was also on hand for the 1,000-foot leap, including mom Caroline; wife Jada Pinkett-Smith; and kids Trey, Jaden, and Willow.The stunt was live-streamed to raise awareness and donations for Global Citizen’s education campaigns. The organization is known for its commitment to end extreme poverty by 2030. Read the rest

This is a prank of epic greatness. “My roommate left town for a few days, so naturally i decided to put a mini golf course in her room,” says khicagokid -- “complete with a water hazard.”The video is astonishingly good.HIGHLIGHTS: • “the water hazard was made of 400 dixie cups full of water. this part wasn't necessary, but at the same time it felt completely necessary.”• the holes were completely operational • it all started when i found this piece of astroturf on the side of the road... i can't believe someone would get rid of this beauty. it was less astroturf than i wanted, but i made it work. View this post on Instagram ⛳️ 🏌️‍♂️A post shared by ACMCIC (@acmcic) on Sep 20, 2018 at 11:24am PDT Read the rest

Cat vs. Lazy Susan. What in the heck is this bamboozle. Who's lazy now, Susan?[via] Read the rest

One son, who has autism, hates being photographed. His sibling does not mind it. Mom is a photographer. She comes up with a creative parenting solution, and some amazing images, below.Mom's incredible solution?Let the kid who can't stand being seen in photographs dress up as Tyrannosaurus Rex.Photographer and mom Samantha, aka Roaming Magnolias, shared this incredible gallery of photos on Reddit/IMGUR today. We'd like to know if she adopts adults, too, because we're ready to be her kids also.Samantha writes:My son, Levi, is autistic. He doesn't like having his photos taken because he gets uncomfortable with things like eye contact and smiling on command. So instead of begging and pleading for a few good photos, this year him and Lola went a different route. Why not let him wear a t-rex costume and make the best of it? 😂 Read the rest

Here are some timely resources for sexual violence survivors and the people who love them.RAINN is an important non-profit organization that has been advocating for the rights and dignity of sexual violence victims for a long time. They put out a statement on the Cosby verdict today, and some great advice for people who have survived sexual violence, and their loved ones. Because days like today are tough.RAINN [The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network] is America's largest anti-sexual violence org, and they help survivors via the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.4673) and the Safe Helpline. Spanish-language resources are here.Hearing about sexual violence in the media and online can be very difficult for survivors and their loved ones. Remember to take care of yourself during these times. Below is a thread of resources:— RAINN (@RAINN) September 24, 2018Those of us who have survived sexual violence can become deeply affected when we're exposed to a lot of content about that issue. That's what's happening right now. We're seeing a lot of coverage of sexual assaults involving political and entertainment figures this week. Much of this amplifies what victims are told: we lie, we make it up, it's our fault, and besides if it happened it wasn't that bad anyway. It's difficult. Here are ways to get through it safely, in the form of a Twitter thread from RAINN.[Or if you prefer, here's the Threader App version.]Physical and emotional self-care after trauma: https://t.co/F3tFNAcxRa— RAINN (@RAINN) September 24, 2018Practicing self-care when sexual violence is present in the news and on social media: https://t.co/TdkCLt7rU8— RAINN (@RAINN) September 24, 2018Managing flashbacks: https://t.co/SHegMtYAow— RAINN (@RAINN) September 24, 2018Self-care for loved ones of survivors: https://t.co/kJJNkQlRAV— RAINN (@RAINN) September 24, 2018Every survivor has different methods of self-care and managing the effects of sexual violence. Read the rest

Eccentric spectacle-maker Scott Urban kickstarted his Reflectacles in 2016: ray-ban-style frames inset with highly retroreflective material that is visible from hundreds of meters and strobes under a flash, making for fantastic photos. Later that year, Urban launched an all-white frame that was highly reflective in the infrared range, throwing back so much IR that they overwhelmed the sensors in low-light-capable CCTVs, which come equipped with infrared LEDs used to paint low-light scenes with invisible illumination that their sensors can resolve.Now, Urban has announced the Phantom, an all-black, infrared-reflecting Reflectacle that doesn't advertise its reflective nature, but which can increase your facial privacy in public spaces.Urban is planning to kickstart the Phantom later this year or early in 2019. Read the rest

One man was unafraid. An underestimated voice of wisdom, he tried to warn us all, decades before the 2016 elections. His name was Buddy Hackett.In this audio clip (uploaded ages ago by someone else), comedian Buddy Hackett tells Merv Griffin a pretty good joke about Donald Trump that you should probably not listen to on speakers in front of kids or your boss.Wait for it. Seriously, this one's good.If you liked that, here's Buddy trying to keep his jokes clean on Johnny Carson's show, below. This 'uncensored' collection of Hackett's standup work is a great place to start, or return, if you're old enough to know who he is already. He had so much blue material in his act, there's a part two of the dirty stuff. A lot of it was super racist, and super sexist. I don't wish to argue about it on the internet.[Thank you, JB!] Read the rest

The Transportation Safety Agency makes use of dogs to track down contraband, bombs and other stuff that we're better off never seeing onboard an airplane. It takes a pooch with a particular temperament to be trained for this sort of work. Not all dogs are well-suited for the job. Unfortunately, while you can make broad guesses, based on breed, on which dogs may be a good fit for identification or tracking work, there's no way to tell if an individual doggo will be any good at it until you put them to the task. In instances where dogs are found to be less than desirable for the sort of work the TSA has in mind for them, they're pushed to the side -- almost like any other animal you'd find at a local shelter. The only difference is that the TSA's castoffs aren't nearly as visible, making finding them a good home a difficult task. If you're thinking about adopting a pooch from a shelter, maybe take a look at the TSA Canine Training Center Adoption Program. Where the agency usually makes our lives a lot more difficult than they need to be, looking to them to find your family's new best buddy could make the process of discovering the perfect pooch dead easy.In order for potential dog owners to qualify for a pooch from the TSA Canine Training Center Adoption Program, they'll have to be able to fulfill a few reasonable criteria:From the TSA:-- You must have a fenced in yard at the time of applying. Read the rest

There's no one better to teach you about the history of folks walking on the wings of planes than a fella walking on the wing of a plane. I mean, that's pretty much as gonzo as you can get. Read the rest

Dunkin' Donuts will still sell donuts but, as of January, shall only be Dunkin'.According to CNN, "The makeover is part of Dunkin' Brand's efforts to relabel itself as a 'beverage-led' company that focuses on coffees, teas, speedy service and to-go food including -— but not limited to — doughnuts." Read the rest

In the midst of yet another shitty news cycle, it's nice to hear that great things can still happen. Earlier this year, the state of Wyoming said "yeah" to allowing a maximum of 22 grizzly bears, once sheltered as a protected species, to be hunted. Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen said "nah" to hunters gearing up to shoot at grizzly bears that call the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem home. From Earther:In his order, Christensen made clear that the case “is not about the ethics of hunting, and it is not about solving human- or livestock-grizzly conflicts as a practical philosophical manner.”Instead, the case was about whether the decision to de-list this segment of the Lower 48 grizzly population was scientifically sound. (Grizzly bears as a whole still enjoy endangered species protections across the Lower 48.) Christensen felt that it wasn’t, writing that FWS “failed to consider how reduced protections in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem would impact the other grizzly populations.”The ruling drew heavily on a case the federal agency lost last year, when its decision to de-list Western Great Lakes region gray wolves was vacated in court for failing to consider species-wide impacts.In the United States, there's only around 1,800 grizzly bears roaming Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Idaho and Montana. That's far from what I or any ecologist (of which I am not) would call a recovered species. Earther points out that while the Yellowstone grizzly population has rebounded in recent years, it's still isolated from other populations. Read the rest

Film director and journalist Cameron Crowe is adapting his fantastic 2000 film "Almost Famous" as a stage musical. Of course Crowe based the original film on his own life as a teen journalist for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. From Rolling Stone:Crowe has been developing the musical for the past couple years and first teased the project on Twitter (below) with a video of composer Tom Kitt performing at the piano. Jeremy Herrin (People, Places and Things) will direct the show, with Crowe’s book, music by Tom Kitt (American Idiot, Next to Normal) and lyrics by Kitt and Crowe. No further information on when or where the musical will premiere has been announced at this time.“It doesn’t even feel like work,” Crowe continues. “It feels like a new adventure, a natural progression but still true to the question that started it all. ‘What do you love about music?’. Can’t wait to bring it to you in the coming months.”pic.twitter.com/v8R23UUfYC— Cameron Crowe (@CameronCrowe) September 21, 2018 Read the rest

Four years since the last edition, Merriam-Webster's Official Scrabble Players Dictionary is on now shelves. From The Guardian:Included in the new edition are some long-awaited two letter words, notably OK and ew.“OK is something Scrabble players have been waiting for, for a long time,” said lexicographer Peter Sokolowski, editor at large at Merriam-Webster. “Basically two- and three-letter words are the lifeblood of the game.”There’s more good news for Scrabble players with the addition of qapik, a unit of currency in Azerbaijan, adding to an arsenal of 20 playable words beginning with q that don’t need a u.The Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary, Sixth Edition (Amazon)image: thebarrowboy CC BY 2.0 Read the rest

Electronic body music pioneers Nitzer Ebb are releasing a career-spanning retrospective box set. From Pylon Records, "Nitzer Ebb: 1982-2010" features 10 LPs with all five of the band's Geffen/Mute albums along with bonus tracks and 12" club mixes. Below, the "Join in the Chant (Burn!)" 12" mix. Lies, lies, lies, lies. Gold, gold, gold, gold. Guns, guns, guns, guns. Fire, fire, fire, UH! Read the rest

Being told that you've been injured in such a way that you'll never walk again must be absolutely horrific. Such a loss of mobility would mean not only a great loss of one's options in life, but also having to worry about the peripheral effects that the loss of mobility could have on your health, such as a loss of bone density or the weakening of your cardiovascular system. For those who have to pay for their own healthcare, it could mean bankruptcy. I wouldn't even want to consider the sort of stress it would place on an individual's psyche, not to mention the emotional toll it would have on their loved ones. However, a breakthrough in treating spinal cord injuries made by the University of Louisville could, one day, make paralysis a thing of the past. From The Verge:Thomas and Jeff Marquis, who was paralyzed after a mountain biking accident, can now independently walk again after participating in a study at the University of Louisville that was published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. Thomas’ balance is still off and she needs a walker, but she can walk a hundred yards across grass. She also gained muscle and lost the nerve pain in her foot that has persisted since her accident. Another unnamed person with a spinal cord injury can now independently step across the ground with help from a trainer, according to a similar study at the Mayo Clinic that was also published today in the journal Nature Medicine. Read the rest

Rather than wait for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's hearing on Thursday, Trump has already made up his mind. "This is a con game being played by the democrats...The democrats are playing a con game. C-O-N. A con game."And the accusers can't be telling the truth, because, first of all, Kavanaugh "is a high quality person." But also, the second accuser "has nothing" because "she admits that she was drunk."Trump also defends Kavanaugh by saying, "She said she was totally inebriated and she was all messed up."The hearing on Thursday won't really be a hearing, at least not for those who whose minds are as shuttered as Trump's. Read the rest

Space is the Place is a remixable Glitch app that generates a full-screen starfield with a "morph" control to make it more or less psychedelic: hold your clicker down and move it back and forth for fabulous results. There's something weird about the optical effects used, a video-era flare that's unusually appealing, like the early-1980s Doctor Who intro Read the rest

Ted Cruz and his wife Heidi had just taken a seat at a Washington restaurant last night when a group of protestors began chanting, "We believe survivors." Moments later the couple had a change of heart and left the restaurant. Cruz uttered the hollow words, "God bless you," as he pushed past the crowd. Almost as hollow as the standard "You're in our thoughts and prayers," after a mass shooting.BREAKING. Activists just chased @TedCruz out of a fancy Washington DC restaurant, chanting “We Believe Survivors!”Cruz has been friends with creep Kavanaugh for 20 years. Now Cruz is on judiciary committee hearing his testimony. Fascists not welcome! #CancelKavanugh pic.twitter.com/7mx6Tc32za— Smash Racism DC (@SmashRacismDC) September 25, 2018Sexual assault survivor questioned Cruz during disruption at fancy Washington DC restaurant. Cruz ignores her. #CancelKavanaugh pic.twitter.com/bbtQ8TqE4H— Smash Racism DC (@SmashRacismDC) September 25, 2018After the couple left, the restaurant asked the protestors to leave the premises.Via USA Today Read the rest

Bill Cosby was sentenced today to 3 to 10 years in state prison for sexual assault. He will also be placed on the sex offenders' registry and placed under a lifetime counseling regime. He declined to make a statement when a judge gave him the opportunity at the courthouse in Norristown, PA.Earlier in the day, the judge had already declared the disgraced entertainer a "sexually violent predator" in this morning's sentencing hearing.Prosecutors had asked for between five to 10 years in prison, with the defense asking for house arrest. Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home, his conviction coming amid a whirlwind of revelations about celebrity sex pests.UPDATE: Here's the impact statement from Andrea Constand, his victim in the case.To truly understand the impact that sexual assault has had on my life, you have to understand the person that I was before it happened.At the time of the assault, I was 30 years old, and a fit, confident athlete. I was strong, and skilled, with great reflexes, agility and speed. When I graduated from high school in Toronto, I was one of the top three female high school basketball players in Canada. Dozens of American colleges lined up to offer me basketball scholarships, and I chose the University of Arizona.For four years, I was a shooting guard on the women's basketball team, scoring up to 30 points a game. It was an amazing time in my life, and I learned a lot, developed a circle of really good friends, many of them teammates, and traveled around the US to compete. Read the rest

These simple to inflate Air Chairs add a lot of fun to family trips.This summer we took the Vanagon from San Francisco to Vancouver. There were a lot of great adventures, but my daughter and niece playing around in Air Chairs was pretty hilarious.Simple to inflate, and awfully comfortable to lounge on, the kids took to wearing them around like giant bumper-costumes. Several meals were served to ½ kid ½ chair creatures in the Washingtonian woods.The chairs easily support adults. The material is strong enough they do not have a problem with punctures from the ground. Keep the chairs, and kids, away from the campfire tho.My favorite part of these chairs is how easy they are to pack and store. I am close to letting my giant, heavy duty, folding camp chairs stay home on a few trips.CleverMade QuikFill Outdoor AirChair: Lightweight Recliner Style Inflatable Lounge Chair via Amazon Read the rest

He's not mad, though. He's actually laughing.One of the wettest we've ever seen, from the standpoint of sweat.Previously: How embarrassing: UN General Assembly laughs at Trump's false claims Read the rest

Alaskan Justin Schneider, 34, will serve no time for picking up a woman in his car under false pretenses, driving her to a remote location, choking her until she lost consciousness, then masturbating on her. He will not be required to register as a sex offender.From KTVAAnchorage Assistant District Attorney Andrew Grannik said Wednesday that Schneider lost his job working for the federal government as a result of the case, a consequence he called a "life sentence." "I hope it doesn't happen," Grannik said. "That's the reason why I made the deal that I've made, because I have reasonable expectations that it will not happen. But I would like the gentleman to be on notice that that is his one pass -- it's not really a pass -- but given the conduct, one might consider that it is." When given the opportunity to speak, Schneider offered no apology or recognition of the potential long-term impacts the assault might have had on his victim but highlighted the positive effects the case has had on his own life. "I would just like to emphasize how grateful I am for this process," Schneider said. "It has given me a year to really work on myself and become a better person, and a better husband, and a better father, and I'm very eager to continue that journey."From the KTVA video segment: "According to court documents [the victim] told police she thought she was going to die, then awoke to find Schneider had masturbated on her.According to court documents, she told police Schneider said he was never going to kill her. Read the rest

We've got a lot of animals up here in Alberta, Canada. Bears, wolves, coyotes, raccoons and elk? We rock that. Goats and sheep? Yep. To make sure that you know the difference between those latter two, Parks Canada has put together a helpful video. Now you've got no mistake for ever thinking goats are sheep ever again. Read the rest

How low the United States has fallen. Read the rest

Rob Goldstone, the gentleman who set-up the meeting between Russian government agents and the Trump campaign, believes Mueller's interest in the meeting stems from Don Jr and other officials eagerness to accept help from a foreign power.Via NBC News:Asked if he had conveyed a "dirty offer" to the Trump team in brokering the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, Goldstone said, "Yes. That is true.""That [dirt] didn't materialize," said Goldstone, but he believes the apparent willingness of campaign officials to accept dirt is what drew the scrutiny of congressional investigators and special counsel Robert Mueller.Goldstone's account of the meeting, which he says he relayed in detail to Mueller's grand jury in March, is largely consistent with how it's been described by other participants. He says Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya talked in a meandering fashion about U.S. sanctions against Russians — and the financier who lobbied for those sanctions, Bill Browder — but didn't offer any information about Trump's foe in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary Clinton. He considered the Russian's presentation "complete and utter nonsense," he said.Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the candidate's son, Donald Trump Jr., came into the room anticipating — and very happy to accept — "opposition research" he believed was coming from the Russian government.Goldstone himself had promised as much, in an email to Trump Jr. saying the Russian had information that "would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father," and that it was "part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Read the rest

A research team from Imperial College London have published promising results of an experiment in which Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes -- responsible for the spread of malaria -- were genetically modified with a stable, gene-drive-based CRISPR modification that caused them to go extinct in the lab.Importantly, the experiment showed that the modified snip of the mosquitoes' genome was kept stable by the gene drive, neither reverting to a neutralized version that would allow the mosquitoes' population to rebound, nor mutating in a way that might threaten other players in the mosquitoes' ecosystem.The result raises important ethical questions about whether it would be safe and ethical to deliberately render a species extinct, even one as harmful to humans as Anopheles gambiae. Crisanti dismisses the notion gene drives could be used to easily create new biological weapons. While he acknowledges the concerns, which have been considered by numerous scientific organizations, Crisanti and others argue the potential benefits far outweigh the risks."I regard a mosquito that transmits malaria as a pathogen — and as a pathogen we have the right to eliminate it," Crisanti says. "We have eliminated viruses like smallpox. We are trying to eliminate polio. I don't see a big difference."The technology could also be used to target other disease-spreading insects, such as the species of mosquitoes that spread diseases including Zika and dengue. Gene drives could also be used to fight agricultural pests.Mosquitoes Genetically Modified To Crash Species That Spreads Malaria [Rob Stein/NPR]A CRISPR–Cas9 gene drive targeting doublesex causes complete population suppression in caged Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes [Kyros Kyrou, Andrew M Hammond, Roberto Galizi, Nace Kranjc, Austin Burt, Andrea K Beaghton, Tony Nolan & Andrea Crisanti/Nature Biotechnology] Read the rest

Machine learning image classifiers use context clues to help understand the contents of a room, for example, if they manage to identify a dining-room table with a high degree of confidence, that can help resolve ambiguity about other objects nearby, identifying them as chairs.The downside of this powerful approach is that it means machine learning classifiers can be confounded by confusing, out-of-context elements in a scene, as is demonstrated in The Elephant in the Room, a paper from a trio of Toronto-based computer science academics.The authors show that computer vision systems that are able to confidently identify a large number of items in a living-room scene (a man, a chair, a TV, a sofa, etc) become fatally confused when they add an elephant to the room. The presence of the unexpected item throws the classifiers into dire confusion: not only do they struggle to identify the elephant, they also struggle with everything else in the scene, including items they were able to confidently identify when the elephant was absent.It's a new wrinkle on the idea of adversarial examples, those minor, often human-imperceptible changes to inputs that can completely confuse machine-learning systems.Contextual Reasoning:It is not common for currentobject detectors to explicitly take into account context ona semantic level, meaning that interplay between objectcategories and their relative spatial layout (or possiblyadditional) relations) are encoded in the reasoning processof the network. Though many methods claim to incorporatecontextual reasoning, this is done more in a feature-wiselevel, meaning that global image information is encodedsomehow in each decision. Read the rest

Copyright markets are -- and always have been -- broken. People make art because they have to, and there's always a middle-man ready to take advantage of the oversupply of willing creators to grab our rights and pay us peanuts.That's why expanding the term or scope of copyright does little to help creators, especially less-well-known artists or those at the beginning of their careers. When you give a person with no bargaining power more rights, the bullies who've been grabbing the lion's share all along simply take the new rights, too. Merely expanding copyright is like giving your bullied kid more lunch money in the hopes that the bullies will leave them with enough to buy something to eat.But there's a better way! One of the best features of the US copyright system is "reversion": this allows creators to fill in a few forms and take back their copyrights after 35 years, even if they have entered into a "perpetual assignment of copyright" with a publisher, studio, label or other party.Creators at the start of their careers have no negotiating leverage, and most creative works have no commercial life after the first couple of years. Reversion allows the small minority of creators who have attained fame to take back the copyrights they were strong-armed into surrendering when they were unknowns, and it allows other, less-successful creators to take back their creations and distribute them in small, independent editions that give them new life.Canada is contemplating a sweeping set of copyright reforms; as in inevitable on these occasions, the process has been dominated by batshit proposals from giant corporations who've bilked some creators to front for them. Read the rest

Fan Bingbing is a Chinese megastar who has also appeared in western movies like "X-Men: Days of Future Past"; she has not been seen since June and the smart money has it that she was kidnapped by China's National Supervision Commission (NSC), an "anti-corruption" task force established in 2018, with a reputation for practicing "liuzhi" or "enforced disappearances."The NSC is the next step in Xi Jinping's longstanding practice of "disappearing" people he disapproves of, including anti-corruption activists and dissidents. Fan Bingbing is accused of tax-fraud.People held in luizhi detention are kept in secret locations and denied contact with family or legal counsel, and often emerge after giving widely disseminated forced confessions. It's not uncommon for people to die during luizhi custody.Under the new laws, these sweeping anti-corruption bodies have jurisdiction not only over China's roughly 90 million Communist Party members, but also over a potentially unlimited target group including nearly any government staff, managers at state-owned enterprises, and really anyone if they are deemed relevant to a case of Party concern.The crimes might include, as with Fan Bingbing, large scale tax evasion or tragically, as with Chen Yong, if you are only wanted in relation to another investigation.According to Liu Jianchao, head of the Zhejiang supervision commission, those swept up into Liuzhi are typically kept for 42.5 days before being transferred. Although someone can be kept for up to six months, a lot can happen in forty plus days of disappearance. Read the rest

As low interest rates and terrible bond yields have driven more everyday people into the stock market in the hopes of protecting their savings from inflation and building their pensions, the market has surged -- with the richest people on Earth surfing the wave.Bloomberg reports on UBS and Campden's annual survey of the rise of "family offices" created by the new class of super-rich (37% of family offices in the survey were created since 2010), some with as many as five offices dotted around the globe.These offices (about 5,000 of them thought to exist today) are intended to preserve hereditary, dynastic fortunes that ensure that the new breed of financial aristocrats retains its grip on power indefinitely.Family offices have proven to be a powerful accelerants for huge fortunes: from their modest beginnings of 0.3% returns in 2015, family offices returned 7% in 2016 and 15.5% in 2017.The pace of new family offices has accelerated especially within the past decade, driven by the rise of Asian wealth, with UBS estimating that a new billionaire is minted in China every two days. Asia is now home to a quarter of the people on Bloomberg’s ranking of the world’s 500 richest people, second only to North America.Of the 311 family offices that responded to the latest survey, 37 percent were created after 2010. The average assets held by respondents was $808 million and the average worth of the families was $1.1 billion. Just over 1 in 5 said they have two family office sites, while some have as many as five locations. Read the rest

Adam Rutherford's amazing book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived is on shelves in the USA now; debunking the absurd claims made by genetics testing companies -- claims about your distant relationship to ancient kings or the percentage of your genes that came from Vikings.Rutherford's quest to debunk the highly profitable "genetic astrology" industry has some staunch allies, including the wonderful Sense About Science people (previously), including Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at UCL and Prof Mark Thomas.Rutherford's book is a really clear -- and often very funny! -- explanation of what genomics is useful for: analyzing whole populations and species and discovering what is and isn't a heritable trait, adding nuance to the stories of heredity and evolution, and debunking old eugenic idiocies like "noble blood" and the idea that human beings can be divided into "races."If you want to get a sense of just how terrible these old ideas are, check out this week's podcast of Rob Newman's "Total Eclipse of Descartes," a standup routine in which Newman explains how junk eugenic science and old scientific frauds have been used to make education into a toxic mess. A warning about the accuracy of the tests was made by the Sense About Science campaign group, which said "such histories are either so general as to be personally meaningless or they are just speculation from thin evidence."The warning was backed by a number of leading genetics experts. Steve Jones, Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics at UCL said: “On a long trudge through history – two parents, four great-grandparents, and so on – very soon everyone runs out of ancestors and has to share them. Read the rest

François Chollet's "Notes to Myself on Software Engineering" is posed as reminders from Chollet to himself, but they're a really wonderful list of extremely sensible advice on how collaborative projects work, how to be a good collaborator, how to build things for other people to use, and how to collaborate with future engineers and builders who will some day want to hook things up to the thing you're making.For example: "Code is also a means of communication across a team, a way to describe to others the solution to a problem. Readable code is not a nice-to-have, it is a fundamental part of what writing code is about;" and "Users are focused on their own specific use case, and you must counter this with a holistic and principled vision of the whole project. Often, the right answer is to extend an existing feature."I'm especially taken with his thoughts on APIs, like "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible. Don’t increase the cognitive load of common use cases for the sake of niche use cases, even minimally."Then there's the section on having a good and worthy career in technology: "When making any choice with long-term repercussions, place your values above short-term self-interest and passing emotions — such as greed or fear. Know what your values are, and let them guide you." That is very good advice.Notes to Myself on Software Engineering [François Chollet/Medium](via Four Short Links) Read the rest

A metaphor for social media, courtesy of /u/imjustkidding on Reddit: "My breakfast sausages begged for their lives this morning. Listen to their cries for mercy." Read the rest

Hank Green (previously) is one half of the famous and much-loved Vlog Brothers; while his brother John Green (previously) is well-known for his novels, Hank hasn't ventured into fiction -- until now. His debut novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a deceptively romp-y novel about mysterious samurai alien robot statues appearing all at once, everywhere that has hidden and absolutely remarkable depths.