Photographer Alireza Rostami scavenged the lens and shutter from his broken Chinese Seagull TLR camera to create this fantastic wrist-worn camera complete with a self-timer. More at PetaPixel.

Peter Taylor was doing research at the UK's Imperial War Museums when he stumbled across the story of parachuting pigeons. In 1914, the British were seeking intelligence about German troop numbers and movement in Belgium. So they parachuted homing pigeons into the region from balloons and planes. Attached to the pigeons were instructions for civilians to write down what they had seen and then to allow the birds to fly back to base. Inspired, Taylor went on to collect unusual war stories and compiled them into two books, Weird War One: Intriguing Items and Fascinating Feats from the First World War and its sequel Weird War Two: Intriguing Items and Surprising Stuff from the Second World War.“It was a mixture of proper research—talking to curators, reading books, trawling through the archives—and suitably strange research: for example, (mis)using the museum’s database by typing in odd words for hours to see what came up (‘Socks,’ ‘Disguise,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Insect’)," Taylor told Air & Space. "It’s hard to have a completely sensible plan for finding strange and surprising things.”Below, an illustration of a propaganda idea involving flying machines shaped like sharks.

Tomorrow's EU vote on a new copyright directive will determine whether the EU internet will be governed by algorithmic censorship filters whose blacklist anyone can add anything to. (Visit Save Your Internet to tell your MEP to vote against this) (more…)

Trees "talk" to each other in forests. They are part of underground networks based on symbiotic relationships, known as mycorrhiza, with fungi. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the mushroom. (National Geographic)

The New York Public Library's Riverside branch invites you to check out a necktie, briefcase, or handbag suited for a "job interview, wedding, audition, graduation, prom, or other formal event." It's part of their NYPL Grow Up initiative. From the NYPL:

Three vending machines dispensing crack pipes for $2 each were discovered roadside in Long Island. The machines were marked "PENS" and did indeed contain pens, well, ballpoint pens that had been turned into crack pipes. Town of Brookhaven Supervisor Ed Romaine tested the machine by inserting the required eight quarters and later remarked, "We're going to crack down on this."ABC7NY:

After decades of Thomas the Tank Engine having female and international characters (typically represented by an actual train design from their home countries) conservatives have finally noticed and gotten angry about it. This is because the latest one is from Kenya. In response, the NRA posted pictures of the show's trains in Klan hoods.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm_p3sf9kq4On Wednesday, the EU will vote on whether to force all online platforms to filter user-generated content against massive databases of copyrighted works (anyone can add anything to these databases, without penalties for abuse); not only is this a catastrophe for everyone who writes software that will have to comply with this bonkers idea, it's also a catastrophe for anyone who writes software, period. (more…)

After talking about how it takes a whack of skilled experts to make the stuff most of us take for granted, Andy from How to Make Everything comes to the conclusion that minting your own currency is a dangerous resource-intense pain in the ass.

Storyboard Pandemonium writes, "I am twelve years old. Me and a friend who I met at an afterschool program wrote this book to help people deal with unfair rules, beat boredom, protest in a respectful way, and make the best out of afterschool."

The Medieval Fantasy City Generator; fill in a few options and press go, and voila! I have no idea how plausible these are, but they're MUCH better than anything I ever came up with as a Dungeon Master.

Succulents are key to stabilizing the fragile coastal ecosystems of California; they're also extremely popular in China and South Korea, thanks to a fad that's sweeping Asia. (more…)

Last week, Trump invited a collection to sheriffs to the White House for a rousing speech about the evils of the free press, exactly the kind of thing the leader of a democracy does all the time, and the sheriffs gave him a standing ovation, because that's exactly the kind of thing you'd want fairminded law-enforcement agents to do in a democracy. (more…)

https://vimeo.com/285851418Objective Reality is a new VR installation from automato.farm, written by Bruce Sterling, in which you "play" one of a variety of inanimate objects: a rotating fan, a roaming Roomba, the electricity sparking from one outlet to the next; each object has an associated VR helmet that makes you look like your head is a giant appliance.

Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton on how the administration views the International Criminal Court in the Hague, where genocides, crimes against humanity and war crimes are prosecuted: "We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us." Bolton's goal? Ensuring "that the ICC does not exercise jurisdiction over Americans" who are accused of war crimes in Afghanistan. (Image: OSeveno, CC-BY-SA) (via Naked Capitalism)

Writing in the New York Times, Nathaniel Popper notes a new current running through our discourse: the idea that Big Tech is not to be trusted, and should be broken up. (more…)

R.I.P. Burt Reynolds. Recently, I had the pleasure of watching his film The Last Movie Star, directed by Adam Rifkin. In this film, Reynolds portrays an aging movie star who is the guest of honor at a film festival where his successes, failures and personal demons are ever present and a reminder of the way he has lived his life. (more…)

According to the ACLU, the nightmare perpetuated against immigrants and refugees attempting to find safe harbor in the United States has taken a new, unexpected turn for the worse: the parents, separated from their children as part of the Trump administration's drive to make migration into the United States as miserable as possible, are refusing to be reunited with their children. The reason is absolutely heartbreaking: From Reuters:

Samsung's 128 GB MicroSD is on sale now for $29 (Amazon). It's a convenient way to backup/transfer important files like your music, video, and photo libraries. Or, you can use it as the hard drive for your Raspberry Pi computer.

I was so thrilled to discover this last night. Ahead of the forthcoming release of the remastered, expanded edition of the Ramones' iconic 1978 album, Road to Ruin, KEXP premiered a "fully-realized" version of S.L.U.G., a rare Ramones track that previous only appeared in demo and bootleg form.

You may have heard that an Emirates flight EK 203 was quarantined by the Center for Disease Control at John F. Kennedy Airport immediately after landing earlier this week. At first, it was crazy town: ABC news reported that 100 people on the flight were sick with fevers and uncontrollable coughing. Vanilla Ice was on board! But as the CDC and the NYPD began to get a handle on what was going on, things felt a little less scary. Only 10 people in total--maybe--were sick. Only 11 of the 100 sick individuals were taken to the hospital. More than half of the passengers were found to be healthy. Those who were healthy enough to forgo medical attention were released to go about their lives, provided they reported any worsening systems to the CDC. Also, Vanilla Ice is just fine. According to the CDC, all signs point to the illness being a flu. Knowing this doesn't make me feel any better about the fact that two more planes landing in the United States were placed under heavy scrutiny by health officials.From The Verge:

Found this via Reddit. It is beautiful. Relax regarding the vertical video.

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal suspected that cultural studies lacked academic rigor. So he wrote an intentionally nonsensical paper, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, and submitted it for publication in the respected academic journal Social Text. It was accepted. Sokal exposed the hoax, the embarrassed academics made their excuses, and the paper was retracted. The imbroglio was posed largely as a story of flimflam and imposture in postmodernism.This year, mathematician Theodore P. Hill co-wrote a paper about how the variability of traits differ between men and women. Uh-oh! It was accepted for publication by the respected academic journal The New York Journal of Mathematics. But within days it was gone, leading to accusations that scientific ideas were being suppressed. Upon close reading, though, the paper turned out to be, as Fields Medalist Tim Gowers put it, "a bad mistake." https://twitter.com/ilaba/status/1038956672159379456The imbroglio is still being posed largely as a story of academic censorship. By The Feminists.And just last month, researcher Lisa Littman authored a paper suggesting a social contagion model of transgender identification, replete with a DSM-ready diagnosis named "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria." Once more eyeballs (not least those of angry trans activists) fell upon it, serious methodological flaws were noted and both Littman's university and the publishing journal, PLOS ONE, began cringing at what they had put their names to.Censorship, etc.Sokal was a scientist deliberately trolling the pompous appropriation of scientific terminology by sociologists. In these new papers, the authors sincerely believe in their work, but face accusations of shoddiness and inappropriate abstraction. Sokal was presented as evidence of academic fraudulence; the recent examples as evidence of academic censorship.But these dynamics are shared:1. Dubious work is accepted for publication in an academic journal.2. It is publicly debunked, making fools of the institutions involved.3. Retractions and other defensive PR exercises generate the bulk of media attention.There are two things about this "Sokal model" of media attention that stand out to me, lowly humanities graduate that I am: First, beware excuses from academic publishers and institutions. Whatever else it might accomplish, it evades discussion of the sausage factory of scientific publication, especially the failure of peer review and the fact no-one gets any sleep. It's worth thinking about how culture war debates might obscure the systematic flaws of process that aggravate them. Conversely, beware any story about culture war stuff that rides in on conveniently angry tide of academic conspiracy. You're promised steak, but you're getting cake.Second, the scientific certitude of nonexpert journalists is taking on an uncanny air. It's a permission slip to glibly turn science stories in culture stories without addressing the science.It even suggests a game! Can you get an internet knowitall to support any old horseshit so long as it serves their ideological vanity? Per Sokal that's a lefty postmodern trap, but we are all Post-Truth now. Just put your horseshit somewhere you know it'll get removed, wait for the censorship to happen, then tell someone about it. QED. HARD MODE: Skeptics

Doug Ford is the laughable bumblefuck who was elected Premier of Ontario by a roster of cheap Trumpian tricks and (literally) a promise to make beer cost $1 in the province (this promise was not fulfilled). (more…)

Who needs a pull-down bar when you have an arm to keep your kid from plummeting hundreds of feet?[via r/OldSchoolCool]

I've been using these silicone dish scrubbers for about a year. They are far less gross than sponges.All the tales of sponge-nastiness got to me last year. I decided that some silicone scrubbers were worth trying out, and a small expense if they did not work out.These silicone scrubbers work fantastically!Pictured are the two that currently live in my sink. The blue one gets more use, but both have been aggressively used for scrubbing over the last 12 months. They have not worn out, they have not become so fouled or toxic that I've had to toss one. There are still 3 others in my kitchen drawer waiting to be employed.The only trick I find to cleaning with these, is that silicone scrubbers don't hold soap like a sponge does, so I'm either applying soap several times during a big wash-up, or I capture a bowl of soapy water at the beginning of cleaning.You can just rise these off in the sink with water, but every few dishwasher loads I throw one or the other of the scrubbers into the machine. They come out almost as-new. I have heard tales of folks boiling these, but the dishwasher seems to handle it.I still use a sponge sometimes, but these are where the cleaning starts.INNERNEED Food-Grade Silicone Non Stick Dishwashing Brush Kitchen Dish Cleaning (5 mix color) via Amazon

A young snow leopard jumped from a rock and startled its mother, and the mother's startled reaction startled the cub.

What kind of person shoots a firefighter? We don't know yet, because the identities of two hunters, charged by the FBI with chasing down and shooting at two Australian firefighters and two local police officers working with the US Forest Service in Washington state, haven't been released.From The Age:

Don't concern yourself with the context. Just enjoy the marvel of a giant red ball rolling down a street in Toledo with two people in hot pursuit. (more…)

Nothing lets guests know what you expect from a party like a giant inflatable Fortnite Battle Bus.My brother has bought his own bounce house, and his kids love him for it. I am not sure that buying this huge replica of the Battle Bus will work in the same way.You can't bounce on it, you probably shouldn't jump on it, and you'll likely have more fun with a Llama Piñata, but...Thats one huge inflatable Battle Bus.Interestingly, the bus is cheaper via Amazon than Spirit direct.Spirit Halloween Fortnite 17.5 Ft Battle Bus Inflatable via Amazon

Stop-motion-animation wizard Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013) is widely regarded as the master of old-school special effects. Harryhausen called his method of animating small models of monsters and superimposing them into live action scenes “Dynamation,” and it was used to great effect in such movies as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Today’s crop of special effects animators are split on which of two famous Harryhausen scenes had a stronger effect on their decision to enter the field: the rousing and meticulously choreographed skeleton fight in Jason, in which a team of seven undead creatures spawned from a hydra’s teeth are acrobatically knocked, flipped, and stabbed out of commission by Jason and his cohorts, or the gray-skinned, 20-foot-tall Cyclops who gets seriously pissed off when Sinbad and his crew impale him with spears.Here's a gallery of movie posters from Richard Holliss's new book, Harryhausen: The Movie Posters:From the press release:

The European Copyright Directive vote is in three days and it will be a doozy: what was once a largely uncontroversial grab bag of fixes to copyright is now a political firestorm, thanks to the actions of Axel Voss, the German MEP who changed the Directive at the last minute, sneaking in two widely rejected proposals on the same day the GDPR came into effect, forming a perfect distraction (you can contact your MEP about these at Save Your Internet). (more…)

Nibbling away over the eight years of her employment at a grocery store in Canton, Ohio, an employee munched through $9,200 worth of deli meat before being shown the door. From The Canton Repository:

He'd been clinging on in hopes of winning a spectacular golden parachute, but Leslie Moonves left CBS suddenly on Sunday after Ronan Farrow surfaced six more victims' stories in The New Yorker.

Shawn Woods is known for his informative videos demonstrating every imaginable kind of mousetrap, but this time, he goes after yellowjacket wasps. (more…)

Sweden's electorate fragmented at the ballot box, delivering a less-impressive showing for the far right than anticipated by polls—and a better one for the Left Party. The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats still made big gains, though, leaving the country's mainstream parties at a weak ebb and raising the possibility of a hung parliament.

Summer in Japan isn't summer in Japan unless there are fireworks—and lots of them. Cities and towns, temples and ports; somewhere near you, on one of these hot and outrageously humid summer nights, there will be a fireworks show. It will be loud, and it will be incredible. The quiet side of summer pyrotechnics, though, is called senko hanabi. Senko in Japanese meaning an incense stick, and hanabi (literally flower fire) is the word for fireworks. The senko hanabi is one cool little dude with a lot of meaning and charm packed into a very short and very serene ten seconds. First, one of these delicate sparklers looks like a roughly 20 centimeter long, tightly twisted, rainbow-colored piece of tissue paper, with one end not so tightly twisted. That’s the top. There’s no stick inside, so the way to burn one is to pinch the top, holding the senko hanabi vertical, while you light the bottom. After a second or two, a molten bubble will form. Here’s where you have to have a steady hand. If you’re not careful, that tiny shimmering ball of fire will drop off and the show is over. If, however, you can hold it very still, you will be able to enjoy the serene, mesmerizing, indeed almost hypnotizing beauty of a Japanese senko hanabi.This beauty is divided into five stages that go like this:1. Bud. The fire bubble looks like the bud of a flower. 2. Peony. When the first burst of sparkles appear, breaking the surface of the tiny molten ball, the shape is said to look like a peony. 3. Pine Needle. This is the stage when the sparkles are most active, shooting energetically and straight like a prickly pine tree.4. Willow. The sparkles become a little sluggish as the hanabi nears its end, resembling the long strands of a willow tree.5. Falling Chrysanthemum. Right before the sparkler goes out, the pretty branching sparklies cease, there is once more a round fiery ball that drops off much like the way a chrysanthemum does when falls from its stem.If all of that isn’t impressive enough. The entire show happens in about ten seconds. It’s a good things they are cheap and there are quite a few in one package.The only thing to remember — and I’m reminded every time I use one of these sparklers — make sure you don’t hold it above your foot, because when that mini ball of magma falls its temperature is somewhere around 350 degrees Celsius/662 Fahrenheit . Ouch. So I give you the end of summer and the end of my two-week stint at BoingBoing, all beautifully represented in the short life of a senko hanabi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr6NItfJyu0

Dallas cop Amber Guyger, 30, was charged this weekend with manslaughter after killing her neighbor Botham Shem Jean, supposedly under the belief that he was an intruder in her apartment. She was in fact intruding into his apartment after returning home from work. Authorities' refusal to arrest Guyger in the days after the slaying led to an outcry, and they were only forced to act after the story made national headlines.

The delightful trend of incompetently "restored" art continues, though at this point one wonders if it's for the publicity. Maria Luisa Menendez of El Ranadoiro says the local priest gave her permission to restore a chapel's 15th century sculptures, so she really ran with it. (more…)

Mario Unger brings old photos to life through his colorization skills. Above is a 12-year-old Frida Kahlo taken in 1919. Below: Freud in 1920: (more…)

In Patent 10049419, "Mobile law enforcement communication system and method," Motorola engineers describe "A communication system, comprising: a self-driving vehicle within which to detain a detainee by a law enforcement officer" that locks you up, administers a breathalyzer, reads you your rights, figures out who your counsel of record is, conferences you in with your lawyer, consults with a court on your bail, and lets you swipe your cards to bail out of the car. (more…)

Kerwax Studios in Brittany, France sports some of the most beautiful, vintage audio mixing gear you'll ever see; the studios have made a "replica" in the form of an "excerpt" that does two channels' mixing, with customizable tube options to "shape the sound." No word on price. At a guess: "If you have to ask, you can't afford it." (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9I-dgJ_n40The City of Los Angeles sends the nation-wrecking finance industry more than $100MM/year in the form of fees and penalties for its banking business, supporting the institutions whose racist lending practices, financial engineering and mortgage fraud have wreaked untold harm on the city's residents. (more…)

You might not think much could be done to improve the humble mouse pad, but do a quick Google search, and you'll find options that are ultra-thin, pure metal, or even engineered with RGB lights. While the utility of a light-up mouse pad can be debated, the SwissTek Wireless Charging Mouse Pad is a sensible pick for any gamer looking to keep their phone juiced while they play; and it's on sale today for $21.Pulling double duty as a mouse pad and charging solution, this 2-in-1 pad comes packed with a Qi-enabled wireless charger for your smartphone. Simply place your phone directly on the pad, and it'll start to charge while you play. It boasts built-in over-voltage, under-voltage, surge, and short-circuit protection, and its generous 11" x 9" size gives you plenty of space to maneuver without knocking your phone from the pad.The SwissTek Wireless Charging Mouse Pad normally retails for $99.99, but it's available in the Boing Boing store for $21.

Individuals willing to lay down their lives—or at least risk them for the promise of steady employment—shouldn't have to put up with phony websites designed to snag and sell their personal information. It's an opinion that's apparently shared by the FTC.From Gizmodo:

Cynthia Nixon's upstart challenge to fellow Democrat and incumbent governor Andrew Cuomo has hit a snag: her own party hasn't just picked sides in next week's primary election, it's mailed out flyers insinuating that she's an anti-semite.Just a few days ago, the New York Times ran an editorial detailing Cuomo's prolific and systemic corruption--its own words!--only to endorse him anyway.

I am deeply considering Slimer as my Cavalier Zuul's Halloween costume. (more…)

All but exiled from social media over his violent threats and harassment of journalists, Alex Jones's Infowars iOS app became his last prominent platform after Twitter finally gave him the boot. Apple promptly banned it hours later, citing a rule against "content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, or in exceptionally poor taste."

George Zimmerman, killer of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin and cause célèbre of conservative pundits, has similar plans for Beyoncé and Jay Z, who produced a documentary about Martin's short life. The threats were made over the phone in a recorded medium, reports The Blast.