It's illegal to discriminate based on "protected classes," including "men and women on the basis of sex; any group which shares a common race, religion, color, or national origin; people over 40; and people with physical or mental handicaps" but from the earliest days of its self-serve ad platform, Facebook gave advertisers the ability to exclude people from ads for jobs, financial products, housing and other necessities based on these categories. (more…)

The fine folks at MTG Manager have one of the favorite apps for fans of the game. Now they are toying around with an AR option that could display information about each card and possibly animate the images. This concept video of what it might look like live is pretty neat! (more…)

Convicted rapist Brock Turner is seeking to have his rape conviction overturned, claiming he only wanted "outercourse" and didn't intend to rape his victim.It is amazing what rich parents will pay for.Via HuffPo:

Conservationist, entomologist, and photographer Phil Torres recorded this enchanting slow-motion video of hummingbirds in the cloud forest of Sumaco, Ecuador. He used Moment lenseson his Phone X set at 240fps with a fantastic result.More at PetaPixel.

Ola Selsjord does some seriously crazy stuff on this waterslide before he dons a 360 helmet cam and gets some seriously trippy footage. The 360 part starts at 7:10. (more…)

Japan's Wakino Ad Company is selling ad space on women's underarms for rates starting at 10,000 yen/hour. Their first paid campaign comes from Seishin Biyo Clinic for its armpit hair removal process. From Straits Times:

NASA scientists listen to the low-frequency pulsing hum of the Sun to gain insight into the star's atmosphere over time. The raw data comes from the ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) launched back in 1995. Researchers from Stanford Experimental Physics Lab then process and filter the data and speed it up "a factor 42,000 to bring it into the audible human-hearing range."From NASA:

The hilarious running commentary really adds to this idiot's attempt to rip off a store right before asking about working there. (more…)

Bring a bit of Overlook Hotel chic to your family room with an area rug duplicating the iconic carpet design by David Hicks. The 240cm x 170cm rug costs $3275 and it's also available as a runner or by the square meter to ensure you have enough to reach room 237. Also available from Film and Furniture are the likes of Deckard's cocktail glass from Blade Runner, the George Nelson Action Office Desk from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many other items you'll recognize from the big screen."Checkmate! The story behind Kubrick’s carpet in The Shining revealed" (Film and Furniture via Kottke)

Here's some refreshing news: the pending reform to South African copyright is really excellent, with a fair use definition that futureproofs itself with the key phrase "such as" -- so naturally, giant entertainment companies are doing everything they can to kill it.

At around 3:30am on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, a fellow opened a guitar case, removed a pickaxe and destroyed Donald Trump's star. The Hollywood Reporter's Ryan Parker tweeted the photo above and reports that "a man had been taken into custody concerning the incident. He was described as a 25-year-old man. As of 6 a.m., he was being processed at the LAPD Hollywood division and booked on felony vandalism."(Hollywood Reporter)

This was not created in Photoshop. This is a real photo of a real corn maze in Northwest Indiana. Using special GPS-guided tractors, the folks at Exploration Acres planted the seeds for this 20-acre Stranger Things-themed corn maze earlier this year. Tim Fitzgerald, president and CEO of the farm, told WTHR, "This year, new technology allowed us to plant the maze design like an inkjet printer, dropping seeds into the precise design we imagined."The team at Exploration Acres create a massive maize maze every year on their Lafayette (no, it's not in Hawkins, that's a fictional place) property and Fitzgerald says they were inspired to create a Stranger Things one after binge-watching the series.The maze is open September 14 through October 28, 2018.(Mashable)image via Exploration Acres by Mark Seest

The Weird Of Wendy PiniVoices from another world spoke with sublime otherness, helping an indie cartoonist face down prudes, pain and the patriarchy. By Rob BeschizzaIt’s night and the trees are whispering. Wendy Pini approaches a young oak, its branches bare in winter. The artist behind the long-running fantasy series Elfquest, she took me here to understand something of our relationship to art.Though Wendy’s work flows from the line of beauty, a sinuous aesthetic defined by William Hogarth, the tree is angular, wandering and weird. It embodies nature’s indifference to our romance of its forms. The artist Eyvind Earle, she says, beautified this paradox.The oak’s fingers trace gentle circles, pointing to the night sky. (more…)

Lockheed Martin just made the largest 3D printed part they've ever ever built for space. The titanium domes used to take a couple of years to make from scratch, but this was completed in about three months. (more…)

A team of researchers examined 2,101 commercial experiments facilitated by A/B splitting tools like Google Optimize, Mixpanel, Monetate and Optimizely and used regression analysis to detect whether p-hacking (previously), a statistical cheating technique that makes it look like you've found a valid cause-and-effect relationship when you haven't, had taken place. (more…)

Max Roucheau barely avoids getting his tow line caught in his spokes as he barrels through a field and jumps over a residential street. (more…)

Dylan Beattie created the (functional, but a) joke programming language "Rockstar" so that recruiters would be forced to end the odious practice of referring to people as "rockstar programmers." (more…)

Brazil escaped the clutches of a military dictatorship three decades ago. But fascism is really hot right now, so the nation may be about to get back on its bullshit once more.From The New York Times:

As more companies go digital and move their operations to the Cloud, the need for qualified IT professionals grows—as well as their compensation. However, demand alone isn't quite enough to get your foot in the door, as employers look for applicants who can validate their skills with the appropriate certifications. The Complete 2018 CompTIA Certification Training Bundle can help bolster your resume with the industry's top credentials, and it's on sale at a new price drop.Across 12 courses and more than 140 hours of training, this collection is curated with content to prepare you to ace a number of certifications exams from CompTIA, one of the industry's premier certification providers. From networking to cloud computing and even security, this training boasts a diverse curriculum that can prepare you for several specializations in the IT field and earn the appropriate certifications to boot.The Complete 2018 CompTIA Certification Training Bundle was on sale for $59, but it's available at a new price drop this week for $49, more than 90% off the usual price.

Photographer Barry Kusuma shares this beautiful and relaxing footage of his visit to Thailand's Lake Nong Han, nicknamed the Red Lotus Sea. (more…)

It sucks to be ghosted. Last year, I was dating a guy for a few months and it was going well (or so I thought). But, after I got back from Burning Man, he had vanished. He was no longer answering my texts. Poof! He just suddenly ended contact without explanation.It hurt at first but then I felt a sense of, "Good riddance." I mean, ultimately, who wants to be with someone who does that? (Not me!)Now, USA Today is reporting that ghosting is happening at the workplace too. People are not only ghosting scheduled job interviews but are also not showing up to positions they've already accepted offers on:

Unlike most airports, London's Heathrow is privately owned, so it's a great case study for how airports make money. Wendover Productions explains. (more…)

Apparently, for some people, snapping into a Slim Jim could result in snapping in a much more serious manner.According to Gizmodo, while looking for connections between food-borne infections and mental illness, researchers accidentally discovered that a correlation between the routine noshing of cured meats and symptoms of mania, depression, arousal and hyper excitement began popping up in individuals in the scientist’s test subjects far more often than those who refrained from eating the snacks. The same issues were not noted as being consequential to eating any other foods.From Gizmodo:

YouTuber DaveHax had some gallium lying around, so he wanted to see the chemical reaction when it was applied to an aluminum tennis racket. (more…)

Through a mix of archival and current footage, this lovely documentary puts Milton Glaser's iconic I ❤ NY logo in historical context. (more…)

This video churned out by the BBC in 2017, offers a number of frank, intelligent conversations about the microdosing of LSD and magic mushrooms. Those interviewed seem sincere in how the practice has improved their everyday lives in a manner that's medicinal, not recreational. As a guy who's traditionally limited his drug use to booze and coffee, I was fascinated by what they had to say.

Fly Geyser was accidentally created in 1964 by well drilling for geothermal energy. In the ensuing half century, the continuously-spouting geyser has accumulated quite a mound of travertine terraces from dissolved minerals. (more…)

Yes, a PR video and yes, the music is kind of terrible. But man, I learned so much watching this video churned out by the folks at Victorinox. Given the ubiquitous nature of the Swiss Army knife, I'm surprised by how much of the tool's production is still done with human intervention. Being as the video was only produced two years ago, I have to assume that they're still making their knives in the same manner. If anyone knows different, I'd love to hear about it.If you've ever owned a Swiss Army Knife or want to understand more about how an iconic piece of hardware is created, taking in this 13-minute film is time well-spent.

As reported here earlier this week, Apple's newest MacBook Pro laptops had been reported to be having issues with heat throttling with the highest end i9 processors installed. (more…)

Donald Trump can be heard on an audiotape released by CNN tonight talking with his former fixer/attorney Michael Cohen about how to purchase the rights to a Playboy model's story about an affair she says she had with Trump years earlier. (more…)

Renowned environmentalist and chimpanzee buddy Jane Goodall has her fingers crossed: she’s entered the lottery to win the right to kill a grizzly bear in the area of Yellowstone Park. That Wyoming’s allowing the bears to be hunted is a big deal. There’s been a moratorium on taking down a grizzly bear in Wyoming for the past 44 years. This year, the state is allowing 22 of them to be killed by hunters. But, instead of taking down a furry behemoth so that she might eat its steaming heart to celebrate her kill, Goodall, and a growing number of other people, have a better idea of what to do if they win the right to shoot a grizzly: they’re advocating that folks take that shot with a camera instead of a gun. Shoot ‘em With A Camera is a guerrilla campaign to undermine Wyoming’s bear hunt lottery system. The premise is simple: Apply to the bear hunt lottery for your chance to kill a magnificent creature. Then, should you win, instead of heading to the hills with a rifle, you head out with a camera. It’s a cheeky campaign and according to National Geographic, its gaining momentum, quickly.Not everyone, however is thrilled about it.From National Geographic:

Are you sitting down? After months of anti-government protests, over 300 civilian deaths and, more recently, the rounding up of protesters and intellectuals who were designated as terrorists or linked to risks to Nicaragua’s sovereignty, the country’s president-cum-dictator Daniel Ortega announced today that he refuses to step down from his post. On the bright side, Ortega told Fox News (the preferred network of dictators and kleptocrats, apparently) that he has fabulous news: the violence that's plagued his nation for months is over! Just like that!Except, it isn’t.From CBS News:

Steve Moriarty of MoreGems.com works with designer Christopher Michael to create beautiful faceted gemstones, like this hyalite opal that glows under UV light. (more…)

Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas), released in 1975 by Brian Eno and the late British multimedia artist Peter Schmidt, is a deck of 100+ cards with evocative statements designed for musicians, artists, and others who find their creative imaginations stuck in a ditch. The minimal, modern black and white cards, housed in an equally stark black box, present strange and evocative statements and directives that the querant agrees to follow and allow to inform the current phase of his or her work. Here, let me draw a couple of cards. I got: "Tidy up," "When is it for?," "Give way to your worst impulse," and "Look at the order in which you do things."If you need any testament to the efficacy of these cards, they were used in the studio to aid in the composition and engineering of tracks on Eno's Another Green World and Before and After Science, Bowie's Berlin-period records (Low, "Heroes," Lodger), and again on Bowie's 1995 record, Outside (among many other records).[caption id="attachment_633253" align="aligncenter" width="1512"] My draw for today, 7/23/18.[/caption]I fell in love with Oblique Strategies when I fell in love with all of the above records that were created with its assistance. Oblique Strategies was one of the first apps I installed on my first iPhone (and have had on every phone since). When I heard, in the early aughts, that the long out-of-print deck was back in print, I jumped at the chance to finally own a physical copy. In my world of hoodoo and woo-woo, oracular cards should be physical. I use my deck quite a bit and love how it fits into my creative process.One of the things that I think makes Oblique Strategies so effective for so many people is how annoying, ponderous, and impenetrable many of the cards are. "Simplify a matter of work," "The inconsistency principle," "Only a part, not the whole." You really have to work to try and reconcile the problem that you're facing with one of these often vexing statements. And that's often where you find your ah-has, in the midst of the mental gymnastics you're doing in trying to match up the drawn card with your "worthwhile dilemma."And that's why I am now so in love with artist and musician, Noah Wall's meta-generative response to Eno and Schmidt's generative art cards. Called Grotesque Tables II, this is a deck of cards comprised of anagrams of Oblique Strategies. The phrases on the cards, as well as the deck’s title, are anagrams of the originals. (There is no Grotesque Tables I: the II is the pair of “i's” from the original title.) So, you get things like: “Be Frictionless Latecomer" out of Oblique Strategies' “Be Less Critical More Often,” "Notice Arc" from "Accretion," and "Elope by mere thread" from "Breath more deeply."I found out about Noah's deck when it was mentioned by Eno himself in a lecture that he was giving at the Edinburgh College of Art. He mentions it at the very end of the lecture (at 01:34:32). About Grotesque Tables II, he says: "The results are completely nutty. They say things like 'Fat hen kick?' They are much more difficult to use, and in fact, much more inspiring in a way than the original cards. [laughs]" He seems to recognize the fact that it is the ponderous nature of Oblique Strategies' statements that make them so effective. I haven't found Grotesque Tables II to be harder to use, they just make a different part of my brain feel funny.On the inspiration for creating the cards, Noah told Electronic Musician: “It came from the idea of taking an iconic piece of generative art and using it to make another, new generative piece,” he explained. “There is an Oblique Strategy that reads ‘Do the words need rearranging?’ I read this as an invitation to transpose the original strategies into new, further obliqued prompts by way of anagrams.Taking the idea even farther down the generative art rabbit hole, Noah has also produced Scores, another pass of the cards through the anagram process, but this time pulling musical notes from the available letters so that each card has a fragment of a score plus an anagram. This is ripe for all sorts of sound and spoken word applications.On Noah's website, he maintains a page called GROSS. Here he collects various art and music projects that were aided by Grotesque Tables II and Scores. You can also purchase copies of the deck directly from Noah on his site.

Open Culture collected videos of the four times Hunter S. Thompson appeared on David Letterman, ranging from 1987 to 1997. I saw Thompson speak at live events a few times during this era, and he was usually mumbling and incoherent. He's much sharper and funnier in the videos.

I've been to Japan seven times, once staying for five months. Most of the facts in the video new to me (free dry ice in supermarkets!) This short video presents 50 interesting facts about modern Japanese society, and many of them are useful for people visiting.

Ivanka Trump is closing her fashion brand. A spokesperson said the decision has nothing to do with sales. Ms. Trump simply wants to avoid a conflict of interest while serving her father in the White House.In unrelated news, Ivanka Trump's products were dropped from Hudson's Bay, the largest department store in Canada. Via BBC:

Josh from Fight for the Future writes, "Big news out of Alaska this morning: Local entrepreneur Jennie Stewart of CustomMousePad.com has gone public with news that Congressman Don Young promised he would sign the Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution discharge petition to help restore net neutrality when the two of them met on Capitol Hill back in June. But now, a month later, he still hasn’t followed through and signed the CRA. His office has gone completely silent, so we need net neutrality supporters to call Rep. Young's DC office (202-225-5765) and ask him to keep his promise by signing the CRA before the August congressional recess."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lV_sWK9_LPEMarc Zicree (writer on Star Trek:TNG, DS9 and more) and friends are kickstarting another volume in their enormously successful fan-funded, "retro and stylish" Space Command science fiction show. (more…)

CCTV footage from China’s Jiamusi City. Fortunately the elderly fellow was reportedly unhurt. According to MSNBC, "the road had not been built well after construction last year and the rain was too much for it to bear."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMqL3iG4UfI&feature=youtu.beIn 2008, a presentation at the RSA conference revealed the existence of "DNS rebinding attacks," that used relatively simple tactics to compromise browsers; a decade later, Berkeley and Princeton researchers announced a paper on DNS rebinding attacks against consumer devices (to be presented at August's ACM SIGCOMM 2018 Workshop on IoT Security and Privacy), while independent researcher Brannon Dorsey published similar work. (more…)

Unsure if you want to plunk down your hard-earned cash to see Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again? Let the Onion's Head Film Critic Peter K. Rosenthal (comedian Ron E. Rains) persuade you, you "miserable killjoy who slogs through life recoiling at anything remotely joyful."Previously: Cher recorded an entire album of ABBA covers(Tastefully Offensive)

Margrethe Vestager (previously), the EU's fire-breathing antitrust regulator, has hit Asus, Denon & Marantz, Philips and Pioneer with $130,000,000 (€111,000,000) in fines for fixing minimum prices at which their goods could be sold online. (more…)

The Royal Museums Greenwich announced the shortlisted images from their Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2018 and the photos are absolutely breathtaking. They'll announce the winners in October. See more at: Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2018 shortlist galleryAbove: "RS34358_NGC 6726 and NGC 6727" by Mark Hanson, Warren Keller, Steve Mazlin, Rex Parker, Tommy Tse, David Plesko, Pete Proulx.Below: "Aurorascape" by Mikkel Beiter; "Expedition to Infinity" by Jingpeng Liu

I keep an Opinel No. 8 pocket knife in most of my jackets. This one has been with me for years.I buy Opinel No. 8 pocket knives for a lot of reasons. They are elegant in their simplicity. The carbon steel blade is excellent, stays sharp and develops a lovely patina. The handle is a simple piece of wood that fits well in your hand. The locking neck ring is pretty ingenious, and down right fool-proof if you use it.Best of all, they are cheap and I don't mind losing them when I've forgotten to remove one on its way to the airport. The "No.8" 3.35in blade, perfect for most of my camping needs, is not allowed to board a plane on my person. Frequently, like last weekend, the heroic defenders of democracy that are the TSA just let me pass thru, but on occasion they will confiscate it.I've had this blade since 2012. The patina started out by stabbing a lemon, but over the years has taken on a life of its own. While the ink on the side of the handle has slightly worn off, this knife just keeps getting better.I hope I don't lose this one, it has ranged from Baja to Canada.You can decorate, carve or otherwise modify the handle to your liking.Opinel Carbon Steel Folding Everyday Carry Locking Pocket Knife via Amazon

Postcolonial Enlightenment is an exhibition of churches and movie theatres that were built in the wake of independence in 1947, with a bold new aesthetic in mind. As the curators describe: (more…)

Back in 2015, California enacted legislation requiring cellphone makers to equip their products with over-the-air kill-switches that could be used to brick stolen phones; the idea was to reduce the incentive to steal phones (a crime that often involved a surprising amount of violence) because as soon as the phone was stolen, it would stop working forever. (more…)

Ever wanted to build your own voltage generator for fun and profit? YouTuber ElectroBOOM shows how with stuff that available at better hardware stores. (more…)

New research from legendary usability researchers The Nielsen (previously) Norman (previously) Group finds that voice assistants are basically a hot mess that people only use because they are marginally better than nothing. (more…)

Like most salt flats, Salinas Grande in Argentina has a short but glorious window where the skies open and deluge the desert with a thin layer of water. El Tribuno de Jujuy captured this lovely drone footage of the phenomenon. (more…)