The Anatomy of Surf rides along with surfing legend Ian Walsh as he describes the sensations of surfing, set to footage of some beautiful waves."Time completely stops when you get into the barrel. Your feet dig into the wax, and your toes start to grip into the board. You're seeing the lip slowly cascading over. The feeling of that just leaves a mark with you and literally never gets old."• SAMSUNG VR - The Anatomy of Surf w/ Ian Walsh (Vimeo / Hidden Content) Read the rest

I have looped a GIF of Trump's viral "hiss" from a higher-definition angle. Pray I do not loop it further. Read the rest

Look, if a bear can figure out how to open the door of a minivan and get her cubs seated for a ride, I don't think it's too much to ask that she be able to take those kids of hers on a cross-country roadtrip to Disneyland. Hand over the keys. Read the rest

Property of the People and Propublica used the Trumptown database of Trump's political appointees and the Freedom of Information Act to pull the appointees' resumes (chock full o' data that doesn't appear on their financial disclosure forms) and put them in a searchable database. Read the rest

If I'd known that this month was going to be so fully of celebratory toasts to Alex Jones' bigoted InfoWars media empire being torn apart, piece-by-piece, I'd have bought one of those magnum-sized bottles of Jameson from Costco.From The Verge:PayPal will no longer do business with Infowars, according to a post on the conspiracy theory site this morning. PayPal broke the news in an email to Infowars yesterday, saying the company had conducted a comprehensive review of the Infowars site and found that it “promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions,” a violation of PayPal’s acceptable use policy. Infowars had used PayPal to process transactions for its on-site store; the site will have ten days to find new payment processors.PayPal’s partnership with the site was highlighted in August by Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt, who described “highly publicized and egregious violations of the platform’s own terms of service.” Reached by The Verge, Holt said today’s move had been a long time coming. “Removing PayPal from the Infowars platform inhibits Jones’ ability to make money from his malice,” Holt said, “but it’s a bit odd it took so long given how egregiously Infowars violated the platform’s terms of service.”So yeah--kicked to the curb like so much crazed, racist conspiracy-peddling trash. For those of you keeping score at home, that's PayPal, YouTube, Twitter and Apple's iOS App Store that have all told InfoWars to jog on. Given the number of lives Jones' hateful bullshit touches on a regular basis, I'm very happy to see every possible avenue he has to profit from the bile and fear he spreads to make a living go up in flames. Read the rest

Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems, though more and more are human-caused. Wendover Productions takes a look at how firefighters work to minimize the spread of wildfires in grueling and dangerous conditions.I hope you guys enjoy this video! It's obviously quite an enormous topic that people will spend years studying condensed down into a ten-minute video so this isn't the comprehensive guide to stopping wildfires but for those that know nothing about wildfire suppression techniques I hope this will be interesting and informative!• How Fighting Wildfires Works (YouTube / Wendover Productions) Read the rest

In their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper From Revolving Doors to Regulatory Capture? Evidence from Patent Examiners (Sci-Hub Mirror), Business School profs Haris Tabakovic (Harvard) and Thomas Wollmann (Chicago) show that patent examiners are more likely to grant patents for companies that they subequently go to work for; they also go easier on patents applied for by companies associated with their alma maters (where they have more connections and will find it easier to get a job after their turn in government service).We begin by showing that revolving door examiners grant 12.6-17.6% (8.5-11.9 percentage points)more patents to firms that later hire them. This result is robust to varying the level of controls, e.g. theinclusion or exclusion of examiner and firm fixed effects, or limiting the sample to only firms that hireat least one examiner, which cuts the sample by roughly two-thirds. While the “headline” numberalone is not proof of capture, the robustness does suggest that unobservable differences—at least alongthe aforementioned dimensions—are very small.We next ask whether revolving door examiners extend this leniency to prospective employers aswell. Here we rely on two premises: first, that examiners face uncertainty about which firms will havefuture job openings and, second, that conditional on the type of work, an employer’s location is themost important attribute on which workers base their choices [Barber and Roehling, 1993, Turban,Eyring, and Campion, 1993, Powell and Goulet, 1996]. Thus, we test whether they grant more patentsto other firms in close proximity to the firm that hired them (after excluding any observations wherethe filing firm later hired the examiner). Read the rest

We've come to the end of an era in portable gaming: according to Engadget, Sony has announced that they'll cease producing their handheld PS Vita in Japan, next year.At the 2018 Tokyo Game Show, Sony has announced the birth of a new product and what could possibly be the final nail in the coffin for another. Sony Interactive Entertainment SVP Hiroyuki Oda has revealed that the company will cease PS Vita's production in Japan sometime in 2019. Further, he said the electronics/gaming giant has no plans to create a successor, echoing Shuhei Yoshida's revelation way back in 2015 that Sony doesn't see a market for a follow-up to the handheld console.That it's not going to be produced for the Japanese market any longer is likely the final nail in the PS Vita's coffin. Japan was the nation where the handheld was most popular. If it's dead there, it'll soon be dead everywhere else as well. I for one am sad to see it go. I have a large library of PS Vita and PSP games that I still enjoy goofing on, from time to time. The size of the PS Vita and its performance made it an enjoyable piece of kit, for me. I ran out to buy one as soon as it became available in Canada and never regretted the decision.Image via Wikipedia Read the rest

I was not expecting the surprise ending to Danny DeVito's retelling of how he once saved the life of his 'Romancing the Stone' co-star Michael Douglas on location in Mexico. 😳 🐍Warning very scary content.If you no like snek, no watch-a the video. He talk about snek. Here is the story. Michael Douglas might have died if Danny DeVito weren't such a totally on top of it dude.During an appearance on the morning television show “The Talk,” Devito, who is 73, retold a crazy story about that time when he and Douglas, 73, were in mexico shooting the early ‘80s movie “Romancing the Stone.” DeVito remembers there was a man nearby driving a flatbed truck with something in a cage -- oh, hey, it's filled with snakes.“The guy’s got a snake on his arm,” DeVito says. “And he says, ‘Mr. Douglas, Mr. Douglas.’ And all the kids are coming around. Michael grabs the snake and I say, ‘Michael, don’t touch that snake! That’s a snake man. That snake could bite you, man.'”Danny was right. A snake bit Douglas.“Wack! The snake bites him on the hand,” DeVito said. “The guy gets it off. I overheard that the best thing to do is you suck the poison out right away. So I did!”“Grabbed his hand … spitting all over the place,” he says as audience member go nuts. “And I said, ‘It’s a good thing this thing didn’t bite you on the balls, man! You would be a dead man!’”“Romancing the Stone” (1984) earned almost $77 million at the box office. Read the rest

John Hudgens writes, "My documentary feature BACKYARD BLOCKBUSTERS (which Boing Boing had run two prior articles on) is finally available, streaming on Amazon's Prime Now service. Free if you have Amazon Prime, and available for purchase/rent as well."What's it about? Did you ever see that movie where Batman fought a Predator? Or where kids remade Raiders of the Lost Ark? What about the fourth season of classic Star Trek?If none of these are familiar to you, that's because they're not studio projects, but fan films.For years, people have been making home movies, many times using pop culture properties that they may not own, but love.In recent years, these types of projects have come to be known as "fanfilms".Backyard Blockbusters looks at the history and influence of the fanfilm genre, as well as the copyright and fair use problems these films create, featuring highlights from and interviews with the creators of many popular films." Read the rest

The Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy [ARPA-E] was set up by bipartisan action in 2007, funded by Obama in 2009; expanded by Congress in 2009; and survived attempts by Trump to kill it in both 2017 and 2018.ARPA-E is a skunkworks project that gives out grants for advanced sustainable energy research that's beyond the initial phases but still too nascent to be commercialized. They've focused on long-term energy storage (a key piece of the picture with renewables) and the portfolio of inventions that have emerged from their funding is mind-bogglingly cool. Vox's David Robert runs these down, from the wide variety of thermal storage technologies to the flow batteries, to more exotic ideas like fuel cells and pumped water systems. Of course, Trump hates the agency, both because it is seen as a creature of the Obama regime and thus must be destroyed, and because it will hasten the demise of fossil fuels.It’s all in what you heat and how much of the energy you get back out. At Michigan State University, they will heat “a bed of magnesium manganese oxide (Mg-Mn-O) particles.” Brayton Energy, in Hampton, New Hampshire, will heat molten salt. Echogen Power Systems, in Akron, Ohio, will heat “a ‘reservoir’ of low cost materials such as sand or concrete.” The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, in Golden, Colorado, will heat “inexpensive solid particles to temperatures greater than 1100°C” and then get the energy out using “a high performance heat exchanger and closed loop Brayton cycle turbine,” which certainly sounds cool. Read the rest

Hurricanes Irma and Maria left Puerto Rico in tatters, but it would be a mistake to blame the weather for Puerto Rico's suffering; Puerto Rico was put in harm's way by corrupt governments doing the work of a corrupt finance sector, then abandoned by FEMA, and is now being left to rot without any real effort to rebuild its public services so that they can be privatized and used to extract rent from the island's residents.As Naomi Klein writes in The Intercept, this wasn't an "Act of God." Men -- greedy men -- laid off the skilled electrical workers who were needed after the storms; greedy men gave relief contracts to politically connected grifters who pocketed the money and did little or nothing for it; greedy men switched Puerto Rico from growing substistence crops to cash crops, leaving them starving when the island's only port closed; greedy men decided to make the island dependent on fossil fuels rather than solar, wind and waves.That is why dozens of Puerto Rican organizations, under the banner of JunteGente, are standing together to demand a different future. Not just a little bit better but radically better. Their message is a clear one: that this storm must be a wakeup call, a historic catalyst for a just recovery and just transition to the next economy. Right now.That begins with auditing and ultimately erasing an illegal debt, and firing La Junta because its very existence is an affront to the most basic principles of self-government. Read the rest

Buried in the new Apple Iphone and Apple TV privacy policy is an unannounced program that uses "information about how you use your device, including the approximate number of phone calls or emails you send and receive...to compute a device trust score when you attempt a purchase."The measure is billed as an anti-fraud system and Apple claims that its surveillance is "designed so Apple cannot learn the real values on your device."Though Apple doesn't provide any details on how this works, the company has previously deployed a privacy measure called "differential privacy" that allows for some aggregate data-gathering and analysis that theoretically protects the subjects' privacy -- however, Apple's differential privacy implementation was fatally flawed, a fact that was slow to come to light in part because of the company's notorious secrecy and its hostility to independent repair and unauthorized analysis of its security measures.Apple's locked-down systems are often a useful line of defense against fraud, theft and surveillance -- but as the company's record in China shows, this control is a dual-edged sword. By locking its Iphones to its App Store, and then capitulating to the Chinese government by banning secure VPNs from the Chinese App Store, Apple has made Chinese mass surveillance and retaliation against political dissidents much easier, and made evading surveillance and retaliation much harder.Apple's privacy policy also adds that the Trust Scores "are stored for a fixed time on our servers." However, this fixed time is not defined, nor are there any promises that Apple won't change the duration in future -- indeed, as the Chinese experience has shown, states have enormous influence over how technology is designed and deployed. Read the rest

Lebanese director Nadine Labaki's Capernaum won this year's Cannes Jury Prize; it premiered in Lebanon this week and will be in North American cinemas starting December 14; It's a "neorealist movie" with an all-amateur cast that sheds some light on the life of outcasts: street children, inhabitants of slums, while tackling modern slavery and illegal immigration.BanX writes, "The main protagonist Zain is a 12 year old Syrian refugee with no prior acting experience; he was illiterate when he started playing in this movie, spending his time wandering the streets in Beirut. Back in 2011, Labaki won People's Choice Award in Toronto International Film Festival about her film 'Where do we go now?' on women trying to ease religious tensions in a remote village." Read the rest

The Ramones' fourth studio album Road To Ruins turns 40 tomorrow. To celebrate, Rhino Records released the Road To Ruin: 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition with three CDs and one LP containing two mixes of the album, additional unreleased studio and live recordings, and a hardcover book. They've also unearthed this previously unreleased video for their classic punk ditty "She's the One." Read the rest

Even in this era, dominated by vertically and horizontally dominant monopolists, few companies are as chronically dirty and corrupt as Ticketmaster (previously), whose parent company, Livenation, is the world's largest concert promoter. Controlling promotion and ticketing is a one-two punch for a monopolist: Livenation's rival promoters still inevitably end up selling tickets through Ticketmaster, enriching their biggest competitor.Ticketmaster and Livenation have managed to claim an ever-larger slice of the revenue generated by creative artists and the companies that invest in their work, Meanwhile, Ticketmaster's shows are notorious for selling out in seconds to bot-running scalpers who then mark up the tickets and sell them for many multiples of their face-value.Ticketmaster has always maintained that these scalpers were unfortunate and undesirable parasites that preyed on Ticketmaster, the performers and the audience alike. Ticketmaster says that it uses anti-bot tools to kick scalpers off the system and prevent them from buying tickets, but laments that it sometimes loses the arms-race with the scalpers and their bots.But a CBC/Toronto Star undercover investigation has revealed that Ticketmaster runs a secret, parallel system called "Tradedesk" that encourages the most prolific scalpers to create multiple accounts to circumvent the company's limits on ticket sales, and then allows them to re-list those tickets for sale in its "brokerage" market, which nominally exists to allow fants who find themselves with a spare ticket or two to sell it other fans. According to Ticketmaster reps who were unaware they were being secretly recorded, the most successful scalpers use this system to make as much as $5 million/year. Read the rest

William Shatner is unleashing a Christmas album next month. Titled "Shatner Claus," it features guest performances by Henry Rollins (Black Flag), Iggy Pop, Rick Wakeman (Yes), Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull), Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top), and many more. Released by Cleopatra Records, "Shatner Claus" is just the latest in ol' Bill's lengthy recording career that includes "Ponder the Mystery" (2013), "Seeking Major Tom" (2011), "Has Been" (2004), "William Shatner Live" (1977), and, of course, "The Transformed Man" (1968).Below, Shatner and Rollins "sing" Jingle Bells: Read the rest

This, the worst episode of V, was originally posted, I think, by @skolanach on Twitter. Read the rest

"An upsetting dystopian future has emerged where women no longer have a say," declared the product description. "However, we say be bold and speak your mind in this exclusive Brave Red Maiden costume featuring a red mini dress, a matching cloak with an attached hood, and a white bonnet headpiece. Pantyhose not included."Sorry, but it's gone now. Read the rest

Huh, I had no idea tiger tails for the back of bicycle seats were even a thing. But, according to Loyal Supply Co., the design company behind this one, it's a throwback to an old 1959 ad campaign for ESSO fuel.“Put a tiger in your tank,” the message read. A simple advertisement spawned a whole generation of kids using this strange attachment in a myriad of great ways. If it seems strange that a gas company would be offering items for a bicycle, you might not be surprised that the tail was a promotional piece originally meant to hang off your gas cap, not your bike seat. Loyal Supply is selling their version for just $4/tail. Read the rest

As more companies leverage cloud technology to unite and streamline their operations, the need for capable IT pros increases. But, as any IT guru will tell you, demand alone won't get your foot in the door to this lucrative field. If you want to cash in on the demand and build a thriving IT career, you'll need to prove you have what it takes by certifying your skills. To this end, the Ultimate MCSE Certification Training Bundle can get you started, and it's on sale now for $49.This 4-course collection covers the concepts and skills you'll need to master in order to ace the MCSA: Window Server 2016 and MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure certification exams, major stepping stones to netting a high-level salary as a cloud professional. You'll develop skills in networking, remote access technologies, securing servers, and more as you prep to ace the requisite exams on your first try.The Ultimate MCSE Certification Training Bundle usually retails for $1,196, but you can get it on sale today for $49. Read the rest

I regret to inform you The Sexual Assault Network is at it again.“Is this hypnosis? Is this confabulation?” That's Judge Jeanine Pirro on Fox News, talking about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's report of surviving an attempted rape at the hands of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.From Media Matters for America...TRANSCRIPT:JEANINE PIRRO: This is worrisome, it means that people will make up stories.SEAN HANNITY (HOST): My understanding is, didn't they say that this came out for the first time in couples therapy in 2012? PIRRO: Yeah and what was that about, and when was the first time Kavanaugh's name came up? And what about, is this hypnosis? Is this confabulation? This is all stuff that is contrary to what the law calls for. FOX NEWSTHU SEP 20 2018 Read the rest

Remember when times were simpler? When a pre-Baywatch David Hasselhoff fought crime in a souped-up talking Firebird named KITT?Youtuber Banjo Guy Ollie remembers. Now's he's covering that "high-tech" Knight Rider theme with his banjo (and his accordion and some other instruments). He reports that he'll soon cover other eighties TV themes like Magnum P.I., Airwolf, and The A-Team.(Likecool) Read the rest

Young Brett Kavanaugh belonged to a wild fraternity at Yale that was reviled for misogyny and drunken woman-degrading antics. Allegations of sexual assault follow more than half a dozen DKE members, including its president. And now, Brett Kavanaugh.This archival photograph from the year Kavanaugh was a sophomore at the University, and already inducted into the fraternity, kind of says all you need to know about rape culture.This photograph appeared in the Yale Daily News on Jan. 18, 1985. You can view a higher resolution version on the Yale Daily News website.Kavanaugh does not appear in the photograph. DKE pledges are “fondly known as ‘buttholes,’” according to the caption.The Yale Daily News says the photo shows Brett Kavanaugh’s DKE fraternity brothers “waving a flag woven from women’s underwear as part of a procession of DKE initiates marching across Yale’s campus.”DKE is a Yale fraternity known for misogynist antics, and the more than half a dozen sexual assault allegations against its members, including the fraternity's former President. In a Facebook comment on the YaleWomen page, Jennifer Lew ’87, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s, says DKE frat bros used to raid women’s rooms when they were in class to collect their bras and panties. Psychologist Dr. Christine Blasey Ford says Kavanaugh tried to sexually assault her at a high school party almost 40 years ago.Although the flag may seem shocking by today’s standards, the photograph appeared in 1985 under the tongue-in-cheek headline “DKE AT PLAY.” At the time of the escapades, Kavanaugh — who does not appear in the photo — was a sophomore, already inducted into the fraternity. Read the rest

The Women for Kavanaugh bus is on tour! But in this photo op (posted by Eli Valley) there seem to be more men than women with a ticket to ride. The carpool has arrived pic.twitter.com/n1VwcKqGAS— Eli Valley (@elivalley) September 20, 2018And what on Earth is going on with that photo of Juche Kavanaugh? Read the rest

Jesse writes, "Vancouver tech retailer NCIX was driven into the ground last year (much to the morbid fascination of local techies). Now their fetid corpse is in the news again, after their SQL servers were sold for $1500 at auction without being wiped, containing the personal data – including credit card details – of thousands of customers." Read the rest

As I wrote last week, the California Farm Bureau (which lobbies for the state's farmers) struck a deal to gut the state's Right to Repair legislation, a move that will cost farmers their right to fix their own tractors and other heavy equipment.Kyle Wiens from iFixit and the Repair Coalition and Elizabeth Chamberlain have the detailed story in Wired, explaining how the Farm Bureau spun the story to make it look like they'd gotten John Deere to make a bunch of concessions, when in reality Deere had already made those concessions, nationwide.Where California farmers go, the rest of America follows—and in this case, that’s dangerous. The state produces more food by far than any other in the nation, accounting for two-thirds of all US-grown fruit and nuts. By agreeing to the spurious distinction between “repair” and “modification,” the California Farm Bureau just made the EFF’s job a lot harder. Instead of presenting a unified right-to-repair front, this milquetoast agreement muddies the conversation. More worryingly, it could cement a cultural precedent for electronics manufacturers who want to block third-party repair technicians from accessing a device’s software.As a nation of repair advocates, we need to reject toothless deals like this. We must define right to repair in a way that supports the needs of individuals and small growers, not the bottom line of enormous corporations.This deal is no right-to-repair victory. Don’t let John Deere—or the California Farm Bureau—call it one. Real progress isn’t going to come until a state passes real Right to Repair legislation. Read the rest

Since the US conquered Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American war, it has treated the island as a playground for the rich, with all kinds of sweetheart tax-deals and regulatory exemptions that lured some industry and some rich people to the island, but which kept it from ever developing its economy and infrastructure to American mainland standards.The latest iteration of this was the 2012 Act 20 and Act 22, which lowered the tax rate for "service-exporting companies" (finance, basically) to 4% and which exempts individuals from tax on capital gains, interest and dividends -- the way that rich people earn their money.This has made Puerto Rico into a playboy's paradise, full of luxury resorts and gate-guarded communities where native Puerto Ricans can find the odd job as a servant or administrator.Meanwhile, the island groans under the largest debt crisis in municipal bond history, with more than $100 billion in debts and unfunded liabilities, created by the structural inequities of colonial rule and engineered by the finance industry, and its democratic government is now subservient to presidentially appointed administrators charged with keeping bondholders whole, by any means necessary, including cuts and sell-offs that left the island terribly vulnerable to hurricanes and other disasters.3,000 funerals later, Puerto Rico is a symbol of looter capitalism, where lethal incompetence, deliberate blindness, crony capitalism, and ethnic cleansing are the only official response to natural disasters that plunged American citizens into months of darkness, the second-longest power-outage in human history. Read the rest

"I can see the blood, but what's in it?" asks cantankerous celebrity chef of a burger before taking a bite in an episode of Kitchen Nightmares. After he tastes it, Ramsey says, "that is hideous" and moves the plate away from him. The restaurant owners get mad at Ramsey, and even madder at their executive chef, after he serves a differently prepared burger to Ramsey which the show host declares "delicious."

Yale engineers developed "robotic skins" from elastic sheets integrating sensors and electromechanical actuators. The idea is that most any flexible object could be transformed into a robot. Professor Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio and her colleagues reported on their project, called OmniSkins, in the journal Science Robotics. From YaleNews:

Every year, the FCC checks in with the industry it nominally regulates to see whether broadband deployment is going well; if it determines that Americans are getting the internet they need, then it can legally shrug off its duty to regulate the carriers and force them to step up the pace. (more…)

A tow truck driver came to pick up a jeep that had been totalled in an accident. "We told him it didn't have any brakes and was unsafe to drive," says the man who uploaded the video. But the tow truck driver chose to ignore the man's advice, got in the jeep and drove it up on the tow truck's ramp. Unfortunately, not having any brakes meant that the jeep rolled backwards down the ramp, and flipped over a ledge. "It broke the natural gas meter off and a large amount of natural gas leaked out," says the man who issued the ignored warning. "Fortunately, no one was hurt, the fire department and police came."

Space Alert is a simple and clever proof-of-concept text adventure game made using Apple's new Shortcuts app for iOS 12. Demo video above. From creator Marcel Wichmann:

YouTuber Kaplamino makes ingenious chain reaction tricks with marbles and dominoes. His latest, Blue Marble 2, is loaded with delightful little mechanisms that release their stored energy when a marble comes into contact with them.From Kaplamino's comments:

Two religious groups, "Warriors for Christ" and "Special Forces of Liberty" are suing Lafayette Library in Louisiana in an attempt to stop a Drag Queen Story Time event scheduled for October 6 because the groups claim the event violates the First Amendment Establishment Clause. Attorney Christopher Sevier, who represents the groups says, “By bringing this lawsuit, we are unapologetically and firmly defending the civil rights movement led by pastor Martin Luther King.”From KADN:

The Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies publishes "world-class commentary and analysis of the film Gremlins 2: The New Batch" on its Twitter account @G2Institute and, allegedly, a scholarly publication titled The Quarterly Journal of Gremlins 2 Studies. Joe Dante, director of Gremlins and Gremlins 2, seems to dig it. At The Quietus, Robert Barry interrogates the anonymous director of the institute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJ-k0TBwvL0&feature=youtu.beMyrmecophiles are parasitic beetles that use chemical cues to fool ants into bringing them into their nests and regurgitating food into their mouths, diverting the colony's bounty of semi-digested ant-chow from the queen and her babies to their own hungry guts. Ant Lab shows us how a Xenodusa beetle can con Camponotus ants into a lifetime of free meals and cuddles. For further reading, check out Behavior and exocrine glands in the myrmecophilous beetle Lomechusoides strumosus (Fabricius, 1775) (formerly called Lomechusa strumosa) (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Aleocharinae) in PLOS One. (Thanks, Adrian!)

A trio of men were arrested on multiple charges of operating a Ponzi scheme, the funds from which the gentlemen used to buy nine homes, 26 luxury cars, a boat, jewelry, and a share in a private jet, all the while telling their clients/victims that the money was being used to buy consumer debt portfolios.Kevin B. Merrill (53), Jay B. Ledford (54), and Cameron R. Jezierski (28) face decades in federal prison if they are found guilty.From a statement issued by the United States Attorney's Office in the District of Maryland:

I have seen incredible changes in both well aged Cavaliers, and my middle-aged Great Pyrenees, just by feeding them fish oil and glucosamine supplements. My dogs love these Salmon Bites. (more…)

A procedural ruling by the Supreme Court this week will mean that the Federal Election Commission will be required to regulate "dark money" ads, forcing disclosure of the source of the funds for the ad. (more…)

In 1985, HR Giger created a Japanese ad campaign for Pioneer's Zone home audio system. Apparently the biomechanical masterpieces seen in these print and TV campaigns were originally created by Giger for Alejandro Jodorowsky's never-made adaptation of Dune.https://youtu.be/Q_B57z6Uqrs

Scientists found that the genetically-distant-from-humans octopus also gets more friendly on MDMA.Honestly, this study doesn't sound so "unbelievable" to me but drugs are fun. I don't like MDMA because it made me want to hug people I know are jerks.Via Gizmodo:

Last June, U of Ottawa law professor/biomedical scientist Amir Attaran floated the idea of invalidating US pharma patents as a way for Canada to retaliate against trade attacks by the Trump administration. (more…)

A new season of Serial is out. I really likd the first season, about the murder of Baltimore high-schooler Hae Min Lee, and unanswered questions about her convicted murdered Adnan Syed. I thought the second season was OK, but I didn't finish it. Now the third season is out, and it is the story of one year in a Cleveland courthouse, told week-by-week. I'm going to give it a try. Two episodes are available.

This xkcd comic reminds me of the way I make up my mind about things, and also how easy it is for other people to convince me to change my mind based on their curve-fitting biases.

Well their domesticated foxes are really cute. What could go wrong?Via Inquisitr:

Before I watched this video and you had asked me if dubnium was a real element or not, I would have had to guess. It turns out dubnium (Db) is on the periodic table with atomic number 105. It is a synthetic element that you can make by smashing an americium atom (atomic number 95) with a neon atom (atomic number 10). One interesting thing about dubnium doesn't have anything to do with the element itself. Instead, the interesting thing is how the way it was named set the standard for naming new elements in a way that didn't ruffle the feathers of particle physicists.

A 2016 study shows the UK drinks so much coffee it has invaded their water systems.I far prefer Irish tea.Via Forbes:

Fred Armisen, a drummer, tells jokes that pretty much only a drummer would love and then ups the ante by going into guitarist humor. (Late Night with Conan O'Brien)

I like the idea that this is Roy Moore intentionally shivving Kavanaugh over some ancient Conservative judicial-community beef.