From The Guardian:

Tired of ordinary, janky water guns?Well, inventor Sebastian Walter of Munich, Germany has made something for you. He's shaking up the water gun industry with his high-tech Spyra One. He and his team's $133 water gun isn't exactly for child's play though.The Verge:

Dr. David S. Glosser is a retired neuropsychologist. His nephew is Stephen Miller, Trump's immigration policy advisor. In an essay published in Politico today, Glosser writes, "If my nephew’s ideas on immigration had been in force a century ago, our family would have been wiped out."

My 11 year-old paid more attention during Solo than I did. She insisted on Moloch's Landspeeder as her latest Star Wars LEGO. (more…)

Death Cab for Cutie release their new album, "Thank You For Today," on Friday and right now NPR is streaming the whole thing. It's a gorgeous, cohesive, and fresh collection of soulful songs brought to life with startling arrangements and dazzling production. I'm proud of my friends. Have a listen!"First Listen: Death Cab For Cutie, 'Thank You For Today'" (NPR)And in case you missed it, below is the video for the first single from the album, "Gold Rush," featuring a sample of Yoko Ono's "Mindtrain."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTPZWG5eLf8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erNi07dH5pwLimited to two motors and $600, mechanical engineering students from the University of California, Davis designed and built this shoe-tying machine. I particularly appreciate how the robot uses the same technique as I do: the bunny ears method.

"Hold up!" (via r/gifs)

Zacharie Gaudrillot-Roy creates strange and wonderful images of building facades by digitally removing everything else, making them look like weird and wonderful Potemkin villages. (more…)

Now that Facebook and YouTube have dumped Infowars for its hate campaign against the parents of children murdered in the Sandy Hook mass shooting, Infowars Alex Jones is looking for other places to host his sickening videos. One of those other places was Vimeo, but it wants nothing to do with the self-aggrandizing sicko.From Daily Beast:

"Are wormholes real or are they just magic disguised as physics and maths?" (Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell)

Philosopher Jacob Böhme had a small but enthusiastic following who created stunning fan art of his ideas. The William Law editions of his writing have beautifully designed plates that open up thirteen successive layers of illustrations nested inside one another. (more…)

Zookeeper Brianne Zanella is tasked with exercising Oregon Zoo's baby goats, who visit the seals for the first time in this charming video.The smaller of the two, Ruth is a two-month-old Nigerian dwarf goat kid named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her friend Sonia is a mini-Nubian goat kid. No word on when or if they are getting an exotic tiny goat named Elena.There's a whole Tiny Goat Visits series for those interested in a deep dive into goat-related entertainment.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad2anrWsl3Y• Tiny Goat Visits Seals (YouTube / Oregon Zoo)

Comedian John Crist captures what it's like for every parent who makes the mistake of overscheduling their trip to a Disney park. (more…)

The timeless joy of dropping junk from high places to see what happens has been refined into an art form by three Australian gentlemen, and their giant metal dart series is the best giant-dart-based entertainment in human history. (more…)

I can't believe that it's been five years since the final episode of Breaking Bad hit the air. I also can't believe that I could be having breakfast with Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston, thanks to this fun new contest from Omaze. By making a donation, you'll not only be giving to two exceptional causes--The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Kind Campaign--you'll also have the chance to cook AND nosh the most important meal of the day with Cranston and Paul in the RV from Breaking Bad. What's not to like?Oh, one thing... Not everyone who lives in an RV has to shit in a bucket. I'm just saying. We have bathrooms. Also, ditches and bushes.

The Associated Press, working with Princeton University researchers, report that Google services on both Android and iOS devices store the user's location irrespective of location data privacy settings. The company was caught after prompting a graduate student to rate a retail store they had recently visited.

Nauseating. The DC Metro was warned not to and--in an apparent lie--promised workers it wouldn't privately accomodate white supremacists at taxpayer expense. Then it did.

Slovenian artist Kaja Upelj moved to London for school, where she has been creating interesting experimental glass works with unusual colorations and deliberate occlusions. (more…)

I think we can safely say that the United States government's response to the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria was a rolling clusterfuck. Cronyism, red tape and terrible management practices on the part of FEMA, the National Guard and, in many cases, ill-equipped private contractors, turned what should have been a swift government controlled cleanup and restoration effort into a miserable quagmire. Many Puerto Ricans, a year after having their lives torn apart by hurricane-force winds and flooding, are still without permanent housing. Difficult as it might be to believe, the ineptitude at every level of the government, both federal and territorial, has reached a new low. This past week, a large cache of donations--10 semi trailers full of medical supplies, diapers, food and water--that should have been handed out to Puerto Ricans in need of sustenance and other necessities, was found by an employee of Puerto Rican radio station Radio Isla. In a video taken by one of the radio station's employees, it's apparent that the supplies were left to rot. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPe6W4oWQH8[/embed]According to Splinter, when the word got out that the rotting supplies had been found, the head of the National Guard for the region came up with an excuse for why the supplies had been left to ruin:

The Australian reports that Facebook media relations chief Campbell Brown privately disclosed that Mark Zuckerberg is indifferent to publishers and offers the news media a simple choice: "Work with Facebook or die."

You may have thought that you were prepared for this moment, but I want you to sit down, nonetheless. Brace yourself. Buck up. Be strong. Here we go. Crocs, squishy footwear manufacturer to the stars (also, Larry, who stops by to top off that pig tank of propane I’ve got sitting outside of my RV when we winter in Texas,) is closing its last manufacturing plants. According to a statement plopped out by the company last week, Crocs decreed that they will no longer be making the iconic closed cell resin kicks that made them famous, any longer, saying “In connection with ongoing efforts to simplify the business and improve profitability, during the second quarter, the company closed its manufacturing facility in Mexico and moved ahead with plans to close its last manufacturing facility, which is located in Italy,"That said, it’s sounding like the company will likely be licensing out the right to make Crocs sandals, clogs and other squishy footwear options to outside manufacturers.From Jezebel:

Nissan electric cargo vans had become a favorite of people who wanted to convert them into electric campers, so Nissan has now come out with an official model. (more…)

The German Entertainment Software Self Regulation Body voted to end a blanket ban on swastikas and other Nazi imagery in Wolfenstein, allowing case-by-case decisions similar to rules for movies and other cultural works. (more…)

Tetrolled is Tetris but with an additional layer of hostility: as time passes, obsctructions pop into existence at random spots on the board. Trasevol_Dog made it in just 2 hours for the Ludum Dare game-making contest. The source code offers a nice simple example showing how the Pico-8 "fantasy console" is coded.

This broadclub cuttlefish like to prowl the Indonesian reefs for crabs, which it then hypnotizes with its remarkable skin before grabbing and eating. (more…)

Official UK government statistics reveal that on 30 days in July the Border Force agency at Heathrow failed to meet its target of processing visitors within 45 minutes; on July 5, visitors had to wait 2.5 hours. (more…)

At Defcon, Tencent's Wu HuiYu and Qian Wenxiang presented Breaking Smart Speakers: We are Listening to You, detailing their work in successfully exploiting an Amazon Alexa speaker, albeit in a very difficult-to-achieve fashion. (more…)

The European Parliament has passed a resolution calling on the European Commission (the EU's civil service) to craft rules that will severely limit planned obsolescence in electronics by forcing manufacturers to design products to facilitate repair by third parties, extend first-part warranties, warrant and support software, label products with an estimate of their overall life-expectancy, and publicly track and disclose how long products last in the field before breaking down. (more…)

I deleted my Facebook account a few months ago and am not sorry I did. For the last couple of months, I've been thinking about deleting my Twitter account, too. It has become a creepy, toxic place. I'm stunned that Twitter has no problem with people who want to inflict additional misery on the parents of murdered children. It's not about the first Amendment. Twitter is a company -- it can choose whomever it wants to be on its platform.As my friend Sean Bonner posted, Twitter "didn’t start as an open forum for free speech, it started as a way for people to see what their friends were doing. Enforcing the same rules for everyone to promote civil discourse isn’t censorship. Bots spewing hate and attacking people isn’t fun."He's right. I'm joining Sean and others on August 17 by deactivating my Twitter account. The hashtag for this action is #DeactiDay. If Twitter doesn't fix its hate enabler problem in 30 days, I won't reactivate my account, after which it will be permanently deleted. It's very likely it will be deleted, because Twitter has demonstrated that it badly wants Alex Jones and his ilk on its platform. When CNN reported that Jones violated at least a dozen of Twitter's rules after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said Jones hadn't and therefore couldn't be kicked off, Twitter didn't do a thing about it. Then Twitter admitted that Jones had indeed violated rules that had resulted in bans for other people, but said it wouldn't ban Jones.Twitter can have Jones, and I'll be happy to be the hell away from the place.

Leicestershire Fire and Rescue captured this firenado footage in Derbyshire at a plastics factory fire. Via The Guardian (more…)

Wangkatjungka artist Nyuju Stumpy Brown first saw white people in the 1940s as a teenager. Here, she describes that time and later shows some of her artwork. (more…)

SEO can be a fickle creature, but it can work in your favor—you just need the right tools. When it comes to getting your site on that coveted first page of Google, SERPstash Premium simplifies the process with 21 user-friendly tools designed to break down your page's performance and show you where you can improve. Lifetime subscriptions are available for $29 in the Boing Boing Store.SERPstash breaks the SEO hustle down into three simple steps: Identify competitors and keywords, research backlinks, and run a complete audit on your page to identify areas for improvement. Using its suite of intuitive tools, you can analyze and filter ranking keywords related to your industry, discover who's ranking for the same keywords you're targeting, and even find out if Google considers your page "mobile-friendly." With this information and more available, you can figure out which areas of your site to improve and fast-track your way to a higher SERP ranking.Lifetime subscriptions to SERPstash Premium are on sale in the Boing Boing Store for $29, more than 90% off their usual price.

Beyond Bionics traces several important developments in the field of bionics (more…)

Yan Wang Preston left a medical career because she was drawn to nature photography. Her fascinating shots of old-growth trees replanted in urban areas is both beautiful and depressing. (more…)

Josh Mitchell's Defcon presentation analyzes the security of five popular brands of police bodycams (Vievu, Patrol Eyes, Fire Cam, Digital Ally, and CeeSc) and reveals that they are universally terrible, though the Digital Ally models are the least bad of the batch, as Wired's Lily Hay Newman reports. (more…)

Adam Guerbuez is a cryptocurrency evangelist whose Youtube channel is full of videos promoting cryptocurrency trading; when he got a Twitter message from a scammer promising to send him free Ethereum coins, he asked the scammer if they could talk about the scam. (more…)

Last week, a Florida woman (because of course she’s from Florida) was caught rolling around in a stolen SUV. There was a chase! There was a crash! In an effort to escape her police entourage, 46-year old Jennifer Anne Kaufman left the other occupants of her pilfered ride behind and took off on foot. As she fled across a farmer's field, Kaufman could likely hear the sirens of the prowl cars that had been chasing her. The helicopter that the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office called in to help hunt her down? No way she’d have missed that.Kaufman did not, however, account for the cows.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cofSrkP44nERural crime is a serious issue: everyone’s gotta do their part, even livestock.According to the Tampa Bay Times, after the cows and Seminole County Sheriff’s deputies took Kaufman and her pals, who were good enough to stick around, into custody, they had a chance to search the stolen SUV and discovered "…more than a gram of cocaine, a crack pipe, syringes and a metal spoon." That’ll do cows. That’ll do.Yeah, I know that it's more likely that the cattle were either curious or expecting to be fed by a human tromping through their field. But honestly, in a world so full of hate, violence and unspeakable dangers, I need to believe that, when faced with a situation like this one, a cow can be relied upon to rise up and mete out justice, that we all might sleep just a little bit easier. Image via Pexels

Kyle is a Canada goose that was rescued by Mike Jivanjee, who found her struggling in the water as a gosling. After taking care of her, she's been his buddy whenever Mike takes out his boat. (more…)

https://youtu.be/WrzQjUQds6g?t=10sA group of macro photographers developed a set of lenses to do all the things they wished they could do, and the result is pretty cool. (more…)

Ever wonder how the dusty blank slate of the Black Rock Desert becomes Burning Man's Black Rock City each year?Well, my pal Shalaco has started vlogging and in his latest video he gives an interesting glimpse into this process by talking to the Survey crew as they create it. It's a really beautiful piece!On the Burning Man Journal, he writes, "One impossible aspect about Black Rock City, and part of the nature of a city that is born every year, is that you can visit it at different times in its growth and development. Each and every year I visit, Black Rock City it is younger and younger. You can never visit New York when it was a colony or San Francisco before the gold rush, but you can do that with Black Rock City."[Cue the music]https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl_qWnlhOvc/?taken-by=shalacohttps://www.instagram.com/p/BmCT2xVBt29/https://www.instagram.com/p/BmEF_A4hJ9C/?taken-by=shalaco

At Weezer's show at The Forum in Los Angeles Wednesday, Weird Al got onstage mid-song to join the band in a cover of Toto's 1982 hit "Africa." You may remember that a 14-year-old recently convinced Weezer to cover "Africa."https://twitter.com/alyankovic/status/1027472873630253056Billboard:

Toxoplasma gondii infection has been linked to all kinds of human behavior. Now a study has linked it to risk-taking entrepreneurial behavior. (more…)

Juxtaposing bright spray-painted mesh with the ocean vista of a 400-year-old Greek ruin, artistic duo Quintessenz created Kagkatikas Secret. (more…)

Bloomberg Businessweek asked eight designers to come up with logos for Trump's inane "Space Force." Milton Glaser nailed it.

Sometimes, the most delightful musical discoveries happen completely by accident: a song you hear at a party or catch the tail end of on the radio without the DJ bothering to tell you what it's called can wind up being one of the tunes that's always lurking on the cusp of your mind. This was the case for me with Salsa Celtica. I was listening to Eliza Carthy sing The Grey Cockerel, and happened to glance at my phone's display while the music was playing. Salsa Celtica was credited as Carthy's collaborator on the track. Digging their sound, I googled the name. Boom: they'd a ton of albums to their credit. The title of one of their records, El Agua De La Vida, made me laugh. The translation: The water of life. In Gaeilge (Irish,) the translation of this is uisce beatha (uisge beatha in Gaelic.) It means 'whiskey.' It's one of the phrases that many tourists returning Ireland or Scotland is likely to have picked up during their time on holiday.This, it seemed to me, was a band that could teach a master class in taking the piss.Salsa Celtica has been spinning out dancable Celtic-infused Cuban music since the 1990s. I've yet to fall out of love with any of their albums.

A few days after skipping out on the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ebola decided, ‘nah,’ cropping back up in a town of around 60,000 potential carriers called Mangina, located in Congo’s North Kivu province. Since the latest outbreak was identified, four people have died of the hemorrhagic fever. The World Health Organization is hoping that the strain of Ebola that’s shown up in North Kivu province is the same as the one that Congolese health workers and an international team of medical professionals were able to put down, this past July: they have a vaccine for that particular strain and it works fabulously. The WHO plans on giving the vaccine a go with this new outbreak—fingers crossed! Unfortunately, in addition to the possibility that the vaccine might not work for this Ebola outbreak, those tasked with stemming the spread of the disease are facing a threat that doesn’t involve contracting a virus: Working in an active war zone.From The New York Times:

Geographic information systems used to be 2-D maps, but new AR technologies are letting users see where pipes and other underground infrastructure is through augmented reality .

Ugly is an animated film by Nikita Diakur and Redbear Easterman that examines the way all living things are connected, even the ugly ones. (more…)

Donald Trump Jr. wanted to brag about his father's approval rating, but the only way to brag about it would be to fudge the numbers, so that's exactly what he did. But not very well.Junior wanted it to look like Trump's approval rating was better than Barack Obama's at this point in their presidencies, but since that wasn't possible, he took a screengrab of a cable news graphic that compared Trump to Obama, and then Photoshopped a 50% approval rating over Trump's real 40% approval rating so that it beat Obama's 45% approval rating. He did such a botched job that you can actually see 40% trying to hide behind the 50%.He then put it on Instagram, writing, "“Amazing. I guess there is a magic wand to make things happen and @realdonaldtrump seems to have it. #maga #amreicafirst [sic]”Yes, fake news is real. Junior kept the ridiculous post up for over 12 hours before it finally disappeared.Via Think ProgressTop image: DonkeyHotey/Flickr