Boing Boing

Created by James White (previously), the Neo-Noire font represents the apogee of 80s-style brush type. It's $30 at his online store and comes with uppercase and alternate caps for the lowercase, numbers and a layered PSD exemplar so you can see how those glowy gradients are done. Read the rest

Charged with paying a 16-year-old girl for sex at a hotel in Austin, Texas, Cody Wilson was bailed Sunday and is a free man again—at least for now. The BBC reports that Wilson, famous for promoting 3D-printed gun plans, was arrested by Taipei police and returned to the US over the weekend. KHOU 11 filmed him leaving jail and hopping into a cab.Wilson’s attorney Samy Khalil of Gerger, Khalil & Hennessy released a statement late Sunday evening.“We are glad that Cody is back in Texas again where we can work with him on his case. That’s our focus right now, representing our client and preparing his defense.”It’s been a long journey back for the accused 3D-printed gun designer.Authorities say the 30-year-old flew out to Taiwan after a friend told him he was being investigated for allegedly paying $500 for to have sex with a 16-year-old girl he contacted online.Surveillance video shows Wilson checking in to a Taipei hotel Thursday. That’s where police finally arrested him on Friday.How can this guy call himself a Libertarian? You go to Thailand, not Taiwan: just ask Elon! Read the rest

Here's something truly terrifying: a "ghosted" Halloween costume. And it's "sexy" to boot. Boo!Halloween costumes eerily reflect what's really hot in pop culture and apparently this year it's ghosting. Because, what could be scarier than disappearing without a word on a friend who's put their trust in you?This frighteningly skimpy costume is available for $24.99 at Party City.If someone's blowing up your phone, ghost them in a Ghosted Costume for women! The costume is a hooded white dress designed to look like a ghost with a series of unanswered texts on the front. The texts include "???," "R U OK!?," and more. Eager texters will know not to bother you in this Ghosted Costume!Previously: Ghosting is now happening in the workplace too Read the rest

MiniVAN (Android, Iphone) is a mobile app designed for volunteers who canvas door-to-door during election seasons; though the app has been around since 2010, it's seeing a surge in popularity, with 218,189 logged-in users in the 2018 midterm season, compared with the 153,513 users in the 2016 presidential race.On every metric, MiniVAN usage is crazy-high, and the surge can't be explained away with the continuing shift from pen-and-paper record-keeping to mobile tools. Even more exciting: the increase is for a midterm election, and is being compared to the 2016 presidential election, which typically sees a much higher level of activity (fundraising, canvassing, voter turnout).Canvassing numbers don't necessarily predict election turnouts, but they do measure grassroots interest. It's one thing for billionaires to throw fortunes in dark money at a mid-term, but it's another altogether for ordinary Americans to get off their couches and go door-to-door to support progressive candidates."It's very unusual for a non-presidential campaign to have much volunteer power at all," says Eitan Hersh, an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and author of the book Hacking the Electorate, who has studied log-in rates for NGP VAN's tools. There are exceptions for candidates like senator Elizabeth Warren or, this year, for O'Rourke, but Hersh says, "For a typical congressional election, the only person logging into the VAN is the candidate or their spouse."Coulombe says that the spike in MiniVAN usage this year is spread across the country. The weekend MiniVAN set its new record, the top five states for users were New York, Texas, Illinois, Michigan, and Florida. Read the rest

You know what you're getting here going in: things that George Carlin voiced over the years, inappropriately added to his kid-friendly narration of Thomas and Friends. It's really great and fairly NSFW. When the aliens find whatever's left, I hope they judge us by this. Read the rest

In The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow details the account of Deborah Ramirez, who remembers a freshman party at Yale where a drunken Brett Kavanaugh got his meat out and waved it in her face“I remember a penis being in front of my face,” she said. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.” She recalled remarking, “That’s not a real penis,” and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to “kiss it.” She said that she pushed the person away, touching it in the process. Ramirez, who was raised a devout Catholic, in Connecticut, said that she was shaken. “I wasn’t going to touch a penis until I was married,” she said. “I was embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.” She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.”Meanwhile, Michael Avenatti (Stormy Daniels' lawyer) says he is representing a third woman who reports serious sexual misconduct involving Kavanaugh while he was in high school. Avenatti—a showman as well as a lawyer—has put out some tantalizing clues but no specifics beyond confirming that his client is not Ramirez or Professor Christine Ford, who had two weeks ago accused Kavanaugh of trying to rape her when they were teenagers in the early 1980s. “I represent a woman with credible information regarding Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge,” he wrote on Twitter. Read the rest

Canada and Uruguay are the only two countries to have legalised the recreational use of marijuana (the Netherlands has laws on the books against it, but they're not enforced); the Canadian Securities Exchange has been transformed into "the cannabis stock exchange," a latter-day NASDAQ filled with hyperinflated stocks in legal weed companies.For example, Constellation Brands Inc (Corona and Modelo beer, etc) has invested more than $4 billion in Canopy Growth Co.As the WSJ writes, "the optimism has grown beyond any reasonable fundamentals" -- marijuana grower Tilray is valued at $4 billion on $11 million in revenue.All told, listed Canadian weed companies have a market cap of $40B, a 1,000% increase in a single year.Investors are betting that legal weed will hit the USA, and that this will open a Canadian export market (or that Canadian firms will be able to move quickly to establish US subsidiaries). These are both extremely long-shot bets!“This is like a gold rush,” former Mexican President Vicente Fox said during a recent visit to Toronto to promote Khiron Life Sciences Corp. KHRN 11.92% , a Canadian medical-marijuana company where he serves as a director. Khiron, which reported a net loss of 6.7 million Canadian dollars (US$5.2 million) and no sales for its second quarter, raised C$13 million through a stock sale earlier this month.Jesse Pytlak, a Toronto analyst with Cormark Securities, estimates cannabis stocks are currently valued at more than 10 times the C$5 billion to C$9 billion market expected to emerge in Canada by consulting firm Deloitte after legal recreational sales begin. Read the rest

On Friday night, after the first Texas Senate debate where he faced Ted Cruz, Beto O'Rourke went to a Dallas Whataburger and air-drummed to The Who's "Baba O’Riley" while waiting to get to the drive-thru window, commenting, "This is the best song ever." This clip is just part of a 45-minute long live-streamed video he shared on Facebook Live. Thanks, Julie!(Aaron M. Morales) Read the rest

The roster of people carrying student debt is really just "a list of people liable to additional taxation after graduation"; in 2007, GW Bush signed into law the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program that would allow debt-haunted grads to earn loan forgiveness by foregoing the private sector and working for lower wages in public service for a decade.In theory, thousands of people should be having their debts wiped away this year. In reality, less than one percent of the people enrolled in the program will see that happen. The rest are screwed.The PSLF program is a bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork mountains that must be perfectly ordered, at all times -- despite the administering agency routinely losing and messing up its own records.In addition, the eligibility requirements are incredibly confusing, resulting in many of the enrollees being signed up, even though they shouldn't be -- a fact they don't discover until their decade of service is up.All that adds up to the fact that in about a decade, millions of people are likely to find themselves in the same position as Debbie Baker. She's a teacher in Oklahoma who had always been under the impression she was going to have her debt erased, only to find out to her horror that she had the "wrong type" of loan when she went to apply."I almost threw up," she told CNBC. "I've been teaching 18 years and I still don't make $40,000— and now I have to start all over."You're Probably Not Getting that Loan Forgiveness You're Counting On [Allie Conti/Vice](Image: Donkey Hotey, CC-BY) Read the rest

When the private equity raiders who took over Toys R Us, saddled it up with debt, extracted $200,000,000 and then crashed it, they took the employee severance fund with them, but that wasn't the final indignity the titans of finance inflicted on the workforce before turning them out on the unemployment line.Hackaday's Tom Nardi went on an urban exploration adventure through an abandoned Toys R Us, checking out the fixtures and fittings that remained after its inventory had been sold off and the auctioneer had come and gone.Nardi discovered that -- to their credit -- the company's liquidators had taken care to wipe out historical customer data from Toys R Us (unlike, say, Canada's NCIX), but that the same care was not taken with the employees' own data.In a room he dubbed "the records room," Nardi and his friends discovered a trove of extremely sensitive employee data: tax forms, photocopied drivers' licenses and Social Security cards, medical records and more.The amount of personal information left behind for anyone to find was really staggering, especially since these were the company’s own employees. We saw the great lengths the company went to protect customer information, so to see how little regard they had for their own people was honestly infuriating.At the time of this writing, there’s still a question of what to do with all of this documentation. My suggestion was to just start a bonfire behind the store and burn it there before even more people run their eyes over it, but reader suggestions are welcome. Read the rest

You've got to check out the band Lawrence and their new album, "Living Room"

In a new Columbia Law and Economics Working Paper, Columbia Law prof Joshua Mitts uses "stylometry" (previously) to track how market manipulators who publish false information about companies in order to profit from options are able to flush their old identities when they become notorious for misinformation and reboot them under new handles.Stylometry is a field of text analysis that seeks to identify authors by stylistic quirks, including word-choices, punctuation habits, and subtler cues like sentence-length and structure.Mitts studied 2,000 "attacks" published on the finance site Seeking Alpha, showing that the scammers involved were shedding old identities when their financial analysis proved to be incorrect -- and also showing that someone (maybe the scammers, maybe the Seeking Alpha editors, maybe someone else) -- was making a killing by buying options before the publication of erroneous data.Mitts uses stylometry to identify when multiple consecutive pseudonyms seem to belong to the same anonymous author, but he doesn't actually attempt to unmask the author, though the same stylometry techniques could produce evidence, if not proof, of the scammers' identities. Pseudonymous attacks on public companies are followed by stock price declines and sharp reversals. I find these patterns are likely driven by manipulative stock options trading by pseudonymous authors. Among 1,720 pseudonymous attacks on mid- and large-cap firms from 2010-2017, I identify over $20.1 billion of mispricing. Reputation theory suggests these reversals persist because pseudonymity allows manipulators to switch identities without accountability. Using stylometric analysis, I show that pseudonymous authors exploit the perception that they are trustworthy, only to switch identities after losing credibility with the market. Read the rest

Olive ("Open Library of Images for Virtualized Execution") is an experimental service from Carnegie Mellon University that stores images of old processors, as well as the old operating systems that ran on top of them, along with software packages for those old OSes; this allows users to access old data from obsolete systems inside simulations of the computers that originally ran that data, using the original operating systems and applications. This is a very powerful model for maintaining access to old data formats; while modern apps are often capable of parsing old data formats, they have well-understood shortcomings. For example, buggy versions of old apps may have been able to understand the corrupt files they created, but newer programs may only parse the old data if it was written to "spec." Attempts to overcome this with "bug-compatibility" and "quirks modes" are imperfect substitutes for actually running the old code, bugs and all.it's also a powerful rebuttal to the lazy idea that digitized data is inherently less stable than, say, print records. We often hear about how obsolete file-formats, media and computers are causing "digital decay" of our old data, but the story is much more complicated than that.Old storage media is definitely unstable. Magnetic and optical media literally rots, delaminating and decaying. I/O devices like tape drives and disk drives go out of production, break down, get scrapped, and can be next to impossible to find, creating races against the clock to find a device to read out old media before it decays beyond use. Read the rest

Founded after the Joint P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Command and the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office were folded into a single agency, the Defense P.O.W./M.I.A. Accounting Agency (D.P.A.A.) is an incredibly important part of the United States military. They're responsible for the locating and identification of the remains of soldiers who were deemed to be Missing in Action or who died as prisoners of war.Sometimes, the task of identifying and repatriating remains can be conducted with immediacy. In other cases, the realities of war--that a body can be torn asunder, rendering it near unidentifiable--or discovering the remains of skeletal remains of a soldier decades after they died, can slow this process down. In such cases, forensic experts are brought in to assist in identifying the dead. This past August, the North Korean government allowed the U.S. military to repatriate 55 coffins full of the mixed skeletal remains of American soldiers who died in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. That nothing's left of these soldiers but bones would make identifying them difficult enough. When the bones are mixed in with one another? That's a puzzle that few people are qualified to deal with. Dr. Paul Emanovsky is one of those few. He's a forensic anthropologist that's worked to bring closure to the lives of the loved ones of missing military personnel since 2002. If you're interested in a fascinating, morbid read, the New York Times recently published an interview with Dr. Emanovsky, where he talks about his work and the recovery projects that the D.P.A.A. Read the rest

Hydrophytes are 3D-printed multimaterial forms that explore the possibilities for engineered plants of the future.Via University of Wellington:Introducing Hydrophytes, 3D printed 'plants' that respond to their surroundings in incredibly lifelike ways. These objects are part of unique research into multi-material 4D printing by Master of Design Innovation student Nicole Hone, and they're drawing international attention.• Hydrophytes (YouTu8be / Victoria University of Wellington) Read the rest

Would you spend $530 on a pair of sneakers that were described like this? Crumply, hold-it-all-together tape details a distressed leather sneaker in a retro low profile with a signature sidewall star and a grungy rubber cupsole.Yeah, neither would I, and neither would these folks (aka "the internet"):Golden Goose comes out with a pair of sneakers listed at $530 that are worn down and kept together by tape. Since when is it a trend to glorify the appearance of used sneakers and poverty? pic.twitter.com/1yLTuitIBX— Bryan Heckman (@b_hecky) September 20, 2018Poverty is real, I’ve been bullied for wearing thrifted clothes before thrifting was “cool”, and now we have high end brands capitalizing upon many people’s past and current poverty related suffering. Thank you Golden Goose. I hope the designer that came up with this is happy. https://t.co/iixNhxip7T— 1-800-ARE-YOU-DYIN (@evelyn_art_) September 20, 2018The new fashion is wearing worn out looking shoes that include taped one that costs a bomb from $530 to $1340. Glorifying poverty or making a mockery of poverty, can't decide. #fashionstyle #GoldenGoose pic.twitter.com/k8mxvchw4n— Kumar Manish (@kumarmanish9) September 20, 2018There's a quote from something, wish I could remember what, but it goes something like "the rich kids all want to be poor and the poor kids all want to be dead". Seems relevant— steph 👻 (@Thespookysteph) September 20, 2018Once available at Nordstrom online, these held-together-with-tape sneakers by Italian luxury brand Golden Goose are currently sold out (or removed??). Not to worry, they have plenty of other filthy, overpriced shoes to choose from. Read the rest

As a latchkey kid, I was raised, in part, by the 20" RCA console TV that sat on the floor of our living room. I never cared too much for cartoons. I did, however, have a thing for old TV shows. For years, everyday after school I'd come home to catch shows like Combat!, Have Gun Will Travel and my absolute favorite, The Twilight Zone. I don't have cable and our Internet connectivity is often too sketchy to use streaming services. But man, after seeing what Jordan Peele did with Get Out, I'm going to have to find a way to watch his reboot of one of my all time favorite programs. Read the rest

Gone are the days when you needed to pore over a 400-page physics textbook to learn about weight ratios, aerodynamics, and all of those other STEM concepts that let us take to the skies. Thanks to Force Flyers' DIY Building Block Drones, you can foster your STEM knowledge as you build and fly your own functional drone. You can get one on sale today for $42.99.Compatible with your favorite toy building blocks, these DIY drone packs have you experiment with STEM concepts as you create and customize your own flying or driving machine. The drones boast a responsive 6-axis gyro, giving you enhanced control, and they're even capable of executing 360° stunt flips. Plus, with auto-stabilization and a durable ABS plastic construction, these kits are a safe pick for novice pilots.Force Flyers' DIY Building Block Drone packs come in a variety of styles, like police, army, and firefighter, and they're all on sale today for $42.99 each. Read the rest

There are no crying children, no victims, no poor seniors or struggling patients. But this ad is one of the most brutal I've ever seen. Despite the manifest vileness of its target, Paul Gosar, it is restrained, measured, straightforward, and you should stick with it to the end. Read the rest

The Yogi Bear Graveyard was a short-lived accidental tourist attraction in North Carolina. After Yogi Bear's Honey-Fried Chicken restaurant chain dwindled to just one location, the owners sold all the fiberglass statues of Yogi, Boo-Boo, Cindy, and Ranger Smith to a local Jellystone Park campground. After that failed, the statues were dumped behind a truckstop.Travelers who find themselves in Hartsville South Carolina can still visit that last location standing. The beginning of the end for the chain came when Hardee's bought the honey-flavored chicken additive they used in their chicken. Via The Post and Courier:From its first location in Myrtle Beach, Yogi Bear expanded to Charlotte, Rocky Mount and Hartsville, among other cities. The franchise was about six stores strong when Hardee’s expressed interest in the honey technology; the Rocky Mount-based chain purchased the method for $1 million, according to Davis.But once Yogi Bear belonged to Hardee’s, the branded stores were largely neglected.“It was mismanagement,” says Yogi Bear’s current owner, George Atkins. “All the rest of them just didn’t control their costs.”Anyone who finds themselves in Hartsville can still stop by Yogi Bear's and enjoy some batter fried corn, liver, or even the original honey-fried chicken.• The Yogi Bear Graveyard Read the rest

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: