Boing Boing

"What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep," said Brett Kavanaugh "jokingly" during a 2015 speech at the Catholic University's Columbus School of Law in Washington DC. "That's been a good thing for all of us, I think."(Washington Post)

The Journal of Behavioral Addictions found that when people can't play Fortnite they will masturbate.

If you want to visit a National Park, and don't mind crowds, Saturday is the day for you.Via the NPS:

https://vimeo.com/250692555As of 2020, Harriet Tubman -- revolutionary anti-racist hero -- was supposed to replace Andrew Jackson (authoritarian, genocidal stain on the American project) on the $20 bill, with Jackson moving to the other side of the bill as a sop to racist idiots. (more…)

This Saturday (9/22) is Smithsonian magazine's Museum Day 2018 offering free admission to nearly 1,500 museums of all kinds around the United States. Each free ticket (one per email address) is good for two people's admission on Saturday. Download your ticket and find out what museums are participating near you here: Museum Dayimage: Ole Worm's Museum Wormianum, 1655 (Smithsonian Libraries)

Trump hasn't been pleased with Jeff Sessions since the attorney general recused himself from the Russia investigation last year, and this morning he told Hill.TV, "I don't have an attorney general. It's very sad."Needless to say, Trump, in his usual tantrum style, was blurting out alternative facts that he then had to take back. Later in the morning, he admitted that indeed, he did have an attorney general. According to NBC News:

Artist Benjamin Grosser created a browser plugin called Safebook, which removes the content from Facebook. Useful!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4YqLow4D9gBaremetalHW's narrated timelapse of his restoration of a completely trashed Hot Wheels 1971 "Bye-Focal" car is fantastically satisfying: watching him bang out the dings, zinc coat, polish, paint, decorate and re-fit this tiny car to near-perfection is a glorious defiance of entropy. (via Kottke)

In 1922, the devil appeared at several teen dances in Hutchinson, Minnessota. Apparently he'd manifest "in the middle of the dance floor with fire streaming from eyes, mouth and tail" and attempt to break up the sinful festivities. A reward of $5,000 was offered to anyone who would shoot the devil next time he turned up. At the next party, a boy, 14, took his best shot and hit Lucifer right in the abdomen. Turned out that the devil was a local Methodist minister.(Weird Universe)

Future Punk says: "I created retro-style animated intros for today's modern Internet companies inspired by the great work of Sullivan & Marks, Robert Abel and Associates, Computer Image Corporation and various other early CG/Scanimate companies."Here are demo reels of the production companies mentioned above by Future Punk:Computer Image Corporation (1975):https://youtu.be/tETXbPu73ZcSullivan & Marks (1978):https://youtu.be/YclB-1DtYfURobert Abel and Associates (1984):https://youtu.be/Wx1dTGvfqakScanimate:https://youtu.be/f4WYf2RxUJE[via]

When Anita Hill testified about the sexual abuse she'd suffered at Clarence Thomas's hands, Senate Republicans and the press pilloried her, calling her a liar and worse, and going on to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. (more…)

(Funny, as soon as I started typing these words I got a phone call from a telemarketer.) According to a new study, half of the 50 billion mobile phone calls that will be made in 2019 will come from scammers. I wish only half the calls coming to my phone were from telemarketers trying to cheat me. I think about 90% of my calls are spam. I use Nomorobo and Jolly Roger to stem the flow, but plenty of the crooked calls still make their way past these filters.From First Orion:

It doesn't matter what tech you opt for – composting toilets, incinerator toilets or, as we have in our rig, a john connected to a holding tank – if you live in an RV, sooner or later you're going to wind up handling your own waste.The first time we dumped out tanks, it didn't go so well. We hadn't quite started living in our old 1991 Triple E Empress just yet. At the time, we were busy downsizing our lives to fit into the motorhome, and my wife was enrolled in a week-long wilderness first aid course, in Canmore, Alberta. Normally, she would've had to spring for a hotel. But screw that, we were RV owners! We opted to parking-lot-surf for five days instead. Outside of a few frustrations that came from getting to know the Empress' heating and electrical systems, it was a comfortable week that made us feel like we'd made a good choice in buying the rig as our new home. The Empress was an early example of the large class A RVs that you see on the road today. It was five feet shorter than our current rig, and has no slide outs. Despite its 35-foot length, things were a little bit more cozy at times than we would have liked. The Empress came with basement storage compartments. It was one of the reasons we chose it. Between my wife's dive gear, extras from our apartment that we weren't sure of whether we'd need or not, and the hardware I need to do my job, there wasn't much storage space to spare. This was largely due to the fact that a good chunk of the rig's undercarriage was eaten up by its gray tank (used to hold gray water from our shower and sinks) and black tank (used to hold whatever horrors we flushed down the toilet) and our fresh water holding tank. The two tanks could hold around a week's worth of waste before they needed to be dumped. The RV's freshwater holding tank holds about a week's worth of water. The gauges on the RV's control panel on our dashboard didn't work when we bought it, so we used to have to eye our tank levels. Knowing when to dump the black tank was easy. We'd just look down the toilet as we flushed. If we could see that the shit and toilet paper was resting high enough in the tank to find troubling, it was time to dump. The gray tank was something of an enigma. As our sinks and shower drained in such a way that you can't see inside of the tank, we had to rely on other signs that it was full: bubbling when we pulled the plug in the sink, slow drainage or, when it was really full, grey water would come up the shower drain. That's a feature, not a fault: the extra water's gotta go somewhere and the shower is the safest bet in the rig.We noticed that the water was taking its sweet time to drain into the tank. It was time to head to a dump station. We didn't have to go far. Canmore's full of campers during the spring and summer. To make life easier on everyone, the city installed a dump station outside of their tourist information center. We got the rig ready to move and drove over, confident that, thanks to gravity and a few minutes, we'd be ready to poop and bathe again in no time.If you've never used a dump station before, it's a simple process. Most dump stations consist of two components: a hole in the ground that empties into a holding tank or sewage system and a non-potable water hose for cleaning up any mess you may have made while you're dumping. Pull your motorhome or trailer up alongside the dump station, connect your sewer hose to the station's dump drain, and pull the release levers for your tanks. Boom, done. In a few minutes your tanks will be empty (with the exception of a few bits that may need to be rinsed out) and you're ready to get back on the road again. My wife, being the enthusiast that she is, elected to perform our first dump. She pulled our rig up to the dump station. She connected the sewer hose that came with the RV. She placed the other end in the dump station drain and pulled the levers for our gray and black tanks.We were treated to the breathtaking site of a shit fountain. Our sewage hose, which was likely as old as our RV, was full of wee pinholes. Shit sprayed from at least 50 different locations. It covered the ground, the inside of our tank compartment, the hose itself and my wife. There was no way she could have moved fast enough to avoid it. Thankfully, it was late in the fall and there was no one around to watch us bathing in our own brand. We washed down the area, washed ourselves down and then, before doing anything else, made a beeline for Canadian Tire to buy a new septic hose. So yeah: if you're to remember anything I tell you, I want it to be this: if you buy an RV, make damn sure that you also pick up a new sewage hose. I like these ones. They're tough and cheap. A few months later, we accidentally filled the trunk of our tow vehicle with frozen shit. During the winter that we spent in British Columbia, we had the genius idea that, if we bought a honey wagon (the name says it all) to cart our crap to a dump station with, we wouldn't have to worry about driving the RV in icy conditions or, as we were dirt poor at the time, using up extra gas. The honey wagon we picked up could hold 50 gallons of liquid. The plan was to fill the honey wagon, have me heft its 250 weight into the trunk of our old Toyota Echo and then drive it out to be dumped.On a particularly cold week, we heaved the full honey wagon into the back of the car and left it overnight. We needed to go out the next day to run a few errands and wanted to save on gas by doing everything in a single trip. As we planned out our day, it made sense to hit the dump station midway through our sortie. So, off we went to the university to return library books and have a shower, hit a coffee shop so that I could download some files and then a stop for groceries. When we opened the trunk, we discovered that the honey wagon's lid had come loose. There was a layer of frozen shit and piss covering the bottom of the trunk. We tried power washing it out, but in the cold, it was a half measure. In the end, we took turns chipping away at it. Bamboleo was playing on the CD player. We really haven't listened to the Gypsy Kings since. The experience left us wondering how much worse our winter could get. It didn't take long to find an answer to that one: power washing the trunk fried our tail lights and turn signals – a problem that we were unable to fix for months. Since then, things have gone a lot smoother in the poop department – a lot smoother across the board, in fact. Living in an RV full-time is just like owning a house. You learn to deal with its quirks, fix what you can, tolerate what you can't, and bring in professional help when necessary. There have been no more shit fountains. The honey wagon, on the rare occasion that it gets used, no longer goes in the back of our tow vehicle for any reason, ever. Our new rig's holding tanks are large enough to go for weeks between trips to dump. Awful experiences like these make us both grateful for how much better things are now. Sometimes, you just have to be covered in shit to know what it's like to roll in clover. Images: by Alexander Klink - Photo is my own work, taken using a Minolta D5D, CC BY 3.0, Link

Two women drowned during Hurricane Florence after the van they were being transported in was overwhelmed by floods. The officers driving them were rescued. The AP's Meg Kinnard reports from Horry County, S.C..

Mike DeWaele writes, "A group of homeless activists had maintained a peaceful occupation of Bronson Park in Kalamazoo for about a month in protests of a new ordinance that made it illegal to sleep in public parks. The protest was well organized, clean and well maintained- at one point involving up to 200 homeless citizens and their supporters, with extensive logistical support from the larger community. The protest had clearly articulated demands but the City Comission was willing to address them only on a very superficial level, with no comitment to action, and then only after weeks of public pressure. While the talks were still ongoing, the city manager ordered local police to clear the camp, which happened before his morning. Several homeless and other activists refused to vacate, including city commissioner Shannon Sykes, who had been the lone voice on the commission in (passionate) support of the encampment and who had spent several nights with the protest as a supporter and observer. Those activists have all been arrested on as yet unknown charges." (more…)

I'm heading to the east coast next week, first for a lecture series in NYC for Columbia University (including a conversation with Radiolab's Jad Abumrad about Big Tech, monopolies and democratic technology); and from there I'm headed to Pennsylvania for a talk about my novel Walkaway at Swarthmore, on Sept 28 from 7-9PM at the Lang Performing Arts Center Room (LPAC) 101 Cinema. All the events are free, though some require tickets, so be sure to check in advance. Hope to see you there!

Ever wonder would it look like if Japanese sci-fi monsters were battling it out -- wait -- on a mens' short-sleeved button-down shirt? Wonder no longer. San Francisco clothier Betabrand has made the slim-fitting Kaiju Cage-Match shirt. It depicts several massive monsters, including "the internet's first three-headed beaver," duking it out.

Poppy is a YouTube persona specializing in adorably offbeat yet creepy ASMR-esque vignettes, like a prototype robot overloaded with coy marketing psychology. The increasingly ironic videos ("I am not in a cult") turned out, a la iamamiwhoami, to be a PR campaign for successfully-launched music act. Think Gary Numan via Ladyhawke and Alison Goldfrapp, but pretty much anything anyone might get nostalgic about is in there somewhere.Mars Argo (AKA Brittany Sheets) is a singer-songwriter and onetime YouTuber. She claimed earlier this year that Poppy was a knockoff of her act. In a lawsuit filed against Poppy's creator, Corey Mixter (AKA Titanic Sinclair), she alleged she and Mixter were in a relationship, that he was abusive during and after it ended, and that Poppy actress Moriah Pereira is effectively cloning the act she developed while with him.Mixter had a simple reponse: that he "invented Mars Argo" too. For her part, Pereira, also sued by Sheets, said that “Ms. Sheets’ claims of stalking, harassment, and abuse directed at Mr. Mixter are preposterous projections of her own actions."This week a judge dismissed Argo/Sheets' lawsuit following a settlement agreement between the parties. The Verge's Megan Farokhmanesh writes that it's one of the stranger IP cases of late, heightened by serious accusations of violence and stalking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev6Pweej1wIHans-Georg Maaßen was Germany's top spy, in charge of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (a domestic surveillance agency with 3,100 employees and an annual budget of €350m), and he was widely understood to have used his position to aid crypt-fascist, far-right groups like the notorious Alternative For Germany (AfD). (more…)

It might still be September, but the holiday season will be here before you know it, which means now is the time to think about where you want to vacation to—and what to do once you get there. To this end, we've scoured the Web and tracked down a number of travel hacking ebooks, gadgets, and accessories you'll want to take on your next adventure; and they're all on sale today. Read on for details.1. Lonely Planet Travel Hacker eBook BundleFeaturing 24 guidebooks from the world's leading travel publisher, the Lonely Planet Travel Hacker eBook Bundle will help you get the most out of your next adventure. This collection is packed with complete travel guides to must-see locations in places like Japan, Iceland, and across the United States, as well as tips for travel writing, adventuring solo, and even exploring the world with your dog.Buy now: $19.992. OMNIA TA502 Travel AdapterSay hello to the world's smallest—and cleverest—travel adapter. Boasting a 5-in-1 interface that supports US/UK/EU/AU & USB-A standards, this ultra-compact charger can power your device up in over 150 countries. Simply slide the plugs into place and get a charge wherever your travels take you.Buy now: $39.993. Paww WaveSound 3 Noise-Cancelling Bluetooth HeadphonesFlying is arguably one of the toughest parts of traveling, especially when you're seated next to a crying baby for the entire flight. Engineered with a state-of-the-art CSR chipset and multiple microphones, these headphones can make your time in the sky more pleasant by tuning out distractions and putting out crisp, Bluetooth audio.Buy now: $74.994. NordVPN: 3-Yr SubscriptionWhether you're waiting for your flight or decompressing in your hotel, you're inevitably going to have downtime when you're traveling. Streaming sites like Netflix and Hulu are great for passing the time unless they're blocked by foreign geo-restrictions. NordVPN helps you bypass browsing restrictions when you're browsing overseas and want to binge watch your favorite content with high-speed connectivity.Buy now: $995. Universal Waterproof Solar ChargerIf you plan on traveling off the grid, you'd be remiss to go without this charger. Durable, waterproof, and boasting a 5,000mAh battery capacity that can easily fully recharge your smartphone, this battery will keep your devices energized wherever you go, and recharging it is as simple as leaving it out in the sun.Buy now: $13.996. Dr. Save Vacuum Travel KitPacking for your trip shouldn't have to feel like a game of 3D Tetris. This portable vacuum kit can shrink your clothes by up to 70% inside the included bags, letting you pack more while using less space.Buy now: $397. uTalk Language Education: Lifetime Subscription (Choose 1 Language)Taking the time to learn the native language of the place you're visiting can make for a much richer, immersive experience abroad. With native voice artists and quick lessons you can take on the go, uTalk can help you speak the language of your choice like a true native—and without having to step into a classroom.Buy now: $19.99

Coraline Ehmke is a leading figure in the push to make Linux programming more welcoming and inclusiv, supplementing the project's famed Code of Conflict with an enforceable Code of Conduct project called CoC Beacon. (more…)

HAL is described as the "world's most advanced" Pediatric Patient Simulator. Hal simulates lifelike emotions through "dynamic facial expressions, movement and speech." Gaumard Scientific's video promises "amazed, transient pain, crying, and more." [via @3liza]

The fad for fire-and-forget retro consoles continues with Sony's PlayStation Classic. It's $100, has 20 games built-in, modern connectors, and the original 1995 design—albeit shrunk to the size of the original's controller.Five of the games were announced: Final Fantasy 7, Jumping Flash, R4: Ridge Racer Type 4, Tekken 3 and Wild Arms.

And you thought 2018 couldn't get more grimly, disgustingly, apocalyptically fucked up.There are roughly 4,000 “hog-waste lagoons,” that is the official term folks, in North Carolina. In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality today says a number of these pork poo ponds are at risk of flooding and overflowing. (more…)

Dallas police officer Amber Guyger, who shot and killed Botham Shem Jean when she entered his apartment, using the excuse that she thought it was her apartment, is getting all the privileges that cops give fellow cops accused of committing crimes. She probably wouldn't have even been arrested had it not been for the public outcry. Two days later, Guyger was charged with mere manslaughter. She spent just a few hours in custody, which is highly unusual for a suspected killer. Then, her fellow cops got a warrant on the victim's apartment in a desperate attempt to find something to smear him with. They found a tiny bit of pot, and Fox News reported on it like it was the crime of the century. And now the news is out that Guyger's apartment has never been searched, which means she's had plenty of time to get rid of any incriminating evidence.From Newsone:

Want to be buried in a giant wooden coffin that looks like a Coke bottle?Coffin artist Paa Joe is the guy who can make that happen. He crafts fantasy wood "proverb coffins" (aka as abebuu adekai in his culture) out of his shop in Ghana. He's considered the grandfather of the fantasy coffin trade and his work is exhibited in museums worldwide. But hard times fell on his business. Paa Joe & The Lion is the 2017 documentary that tells the story of how he and his son are rebuilding the family legacy together. It's now available to stream on Amazon (free with Prime). It's really inspiring!

It's nearly the 21st night of September, so here's a video clip of three Filipino boys -- dressed as Earth, Wind, & Fire members -- performing a medley of their iconic songs to celebrate.Do you remember when these kids dressed up like mini Bee Gees to perform on the TV Show Your Face Sounds Familiar? Well, The TNT Boys, as they are known, returned to the stage to perform truncated versions of EWF hits "September," "Let's Groove," and "Boogie Wonderland." It's just as weird as the other video. You have been warned.Previously: Ba-de-ya, the 21st of September will always be special to songwriter Allee Willis

I decided to enter my first USA Memory Championship only a few months after I'd first learned it existed. This was two years before it entered the wider public consciousness after its portrayal in Joshua Foer's bestselling book Moonwalking with Einstein. Foer had written about the 2005 Championship for Slate Magazine, and in the process discovered that mastering the sport required no innate gift for memory. In 2006, he returned -- as a competitor-- and won the whole thing. I didn't know Foer's story at the time, and had yet to read his book, but I did know that anyone could win the Championship with enough practice.Then my grandmother passed away from Alzheimer's disease. She had been suffering from the disease for a number of years prior, but the shock and grief cut right through me as if I never knew the disease would eventually take her. In the midst of that troubling moment, I searched for, and found, a purpose to my own life. I thought to myself, could I beat back this disease that had taken my grandmother's mind and then the rest of her? Could I make my mind not only sharper but healthier?So, I trained. For hours a day, I practiced for each event in the memory championships. I hit plateaus and had to find ways to break through. My goal was to be the very best, and I knew I had to put in hard work to get there. That year (2010), I came in third. The next year, I trained even harder, and I finally became the USA Memory Champion. In 2012, 2014, and 2015, I won as well. Along the way, I also broke a number of U.S. memory records, achieved Grandmaster status, and was, at one point, ranked among the top 25 memory athletes in the world.Memory was something that quickly slipped away from my grandmother, but it was also something that grabbed hold of me just as quickly for the better. I had always thought that memory was static: something you either had or you didn't. After all these years of molding my memory into a machine of a recording device, I now know the ins and out of what make our working memories tick. Everyone has a memory, and everyone knows the frustration of forgetting something you really needed to remember. And now you know that memory is something that can be improved with a few techniques and a little bit of elbow grease.Remembering and storing information in your memory is like real estate: it's all about location, location, location. Let's put it this way: your mind is like a desk littered with all kinds of documents and supplies. Those things pile up over time, but no matter how messy the desk gets, it's never too hard to find the last thing you put on it - it's usually right on top. But that phone bill from last June? It's buried somewhere in the darkest depths of that ocean of paper, and it'll take a serious search operation to unearth it. Unless...you organize it in an appropriate (and accessible) way. So what if instead of piling up all that information on your cranial floor, so to speak, you filed everything away neatly in mental folders that were metaphorically color-coded and labeled, and as a result, made all those memories easier to find?There are a few ways to do this, but one of the ways is by using a technique called the Peg Method. The technique calls for you to use mental "pegs" (basically, other things you know on a pre-learned list) to "anchor" each item you want to memorize to. It sounds a little zany, but it's super simple and wildly effective for attaining true mnemonic mastery of any list -- you'll be able to jump around that list like a champ, backwards and forwards!What do I mean by "pre-learned list"? Literally any list of things you already know. If you're a baseball fan, for example, you already have a list of the different fielding positions (1 for pitcher, 2 for catcher, etc.) already memorized. If you happen to know the order of the planets in our solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc.), because it was ingrained in you at a young age, there's another peg list ready to go as well. Or numbers! We all know how to count from 1 to whatever number you want (1, 2, 3, etc.), right? There's another list! Or how about one of the most universal lists that we've all already memorized, though: the alphabet (A, B, C, etc.)? Basically, anything that is in the form of a list that you already have memorized and know well, can be used as your peg list. Once you have your peg list ready, the next step is to create an image for the things you want to memorize (something memorable, of course) and then anchor them, or imagine them interacting rather, to the things on the peg list. When it comes time to recall the list, you'll have the fixed order of your peg list to keep the order of your memorized list.Let's try an example.While using the alphabet or countable numbers as peg lists are great places to start when first applying the magnificent power of the Peg Method, there is another amazingly convenient peg list immediately ready at your disposal: your body. Choose as many body parts as you like, as long as they connect in some kind of order that is obvious and memorable (maybe start at your head and make your way down to your toes, or vice versa), and you've got a portable peg list! Let's jump right into an example that uses ten body parts to memorize ten things. How about the ten largest countries in the world by population?Our ten body parts, starting at the head, will be:

Oregon is known for breath-taking vistas, bat-shit crazy ranchers, roller derby, and beer. A new state-wide effort to reduce carbon emissions by using easily cleanable and refillable beer bottles will help preserve several of these things.Via KQED:

It's a question that's floated around forever: Are Bert and Ernie gay? Former Sesame Street writer Mark Saltzman says yes.In a recent Queerty interview, Saltzman (whose partner is Arnold "Arnie" Glassman) reveals that the Muppet duo were based on his own (gay) relationship:

If you’re not an academic or scientist, then you probably have no idea how off kilter research scholarship has become. (more…)

Edgar Allan Poe scholar Scott Peeples explains the black magic of Poe's work nearly 170 years after he died. From TED-Ed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EuFOZfRL4UNuuo is a leading vendor of "trusted video management" tools used in conjunction with CCTVs deployed in sensitive applications like surveillance of "transport, banking, government, and residential areas." (more…)

The gadgets of the past had gears, levers, clicky buttons, motors, and other noise-making components. Most of today's electronics have very few moving parts. The sounds they make are edited-in aural skeuomorphs. A website called Conserve the Sound has recordings of the sounds made by old phones, rubber stamps, pinball machines, cameras, typewriters, fans, video game consoles, and other products from 1910 onwards. They have an Instagram account, too.

On this International Day Against DRM, I've published an editorial for EFF Deeplinks setting out a theory of change for getting us to a world without Digital Rights Management, where all our devices obey us instead of betraying us. (more…)

Bert and Ernie made headlines today after Mark Saltzman, who wrote for the show for 14 years starting in 1984, said in Queerty interview: "I always felt that without a huge agenda, when I was writing Bert and Ernie, they were [gay]." (more…)

In 1970, JBL introduced the L-100 home hi-fi speakers based on the company's popular 4310 Pro Studio monitors. With their fantastic sound quality for the price, particularly for rock music, and their killer Quadrex foam grilles available in black, blue, or orange, the L-100 speakers became the best-selling loudspeaker of the era. And now JBL has revived them in modern form, the JBL L100 Classic. They're $4,000 a pair.I'd be curious to hear the JBL L100 Classics up against a pair of restored originals that can be had for a fourth of that price. If you have that opportunity, please roll a number, cue up David Crosby's "If I Could Only Remember My Name" on the turntable, and let us know how it goes.

For its 25th anniversary, Wired Magazine asked numerous luminaries to pick a figure from the digital world to celebrate; Edward Snowden chose EFF Pioneer Award Winner Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice and cofounder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, who is one of the leaders in teaching grassroots activists to resist government surveillance. (more…)

I'm a big fan of BioLite products, because they're well-designed and the company develops low-cost lighting and cooking tools for low-income markets in regions that don't have access to clean affordable household energy. BioLite sent me an early release model of its new HeadLamp and it is radically different from the typical headlamps you've seen before. It is so lightweight that I hardly notice it on my head. It spreads a wide circle of bright light. It charges via USB. The Kickstarter campaign started today with a goal of $40k and it's already at $144k. You can pre-order one for $49.

Google's WWWBasic project allows you to write web-page interactivity using a BASIC-like syntax that will be recognizable to anyone who grew up with early personal computers in the late 1970s and 1980s (it can be imported within Node.js, too, so you can mix Javascript and BASIC). (more…)

Researchers from the University of Toronto's outstanding Citizen Lab (previously) have published their latest research on the notorious and prolific Israeli cyber-arms-dealer The NSO Group (previously), one of the world's go-to suppliers for tools used by despots to spy on dissidents and opposition figures, often as a prelude to their imprisonment, torture and murder. (more…)

When a man tried to enter his own house, his Nest doorbell got suspicious and locked him out. Nest's facial recognition feature confused the man, B.J. May, with the Batman T-shirt he was wearing, and apparently even Batman isn't allowed through the front door without the owner's consent.

King County Council was ambushed by a series of surprise amendments to its meeting on Monday that resulted in $135,000,000 being diverted from hotel lodging tax funds earmarked for affordable housing, arts, and tourism boosting, to effect repairs to the Mariners stadium, despite the team being valued at nearly $1.5 billion. (more…)

Woke up with this in my head. Wonderama was a wonderful show.

It's been a decade since Marvel launched their shared cinematic universe with the first Iron Man movie. In all that time, they've never had a film with a female lead. That's about to change. In 2019, Captain Marvel will be coming to theaters. While this trailer only gives a quick taste of what we can expect, it's enough for me to feel hopeful for a great movie.

People are so boring! A new study shows there are only four clusters of personality. Why bother talking to folks?Via Ars Technica:

With Canada's legalization of cannabis consumption quickly creeping up on the calendar, the nation's Armed Forces decided that it might be high time to figure out where and when those with access to small arms, artillery and combat aircraft should be allowed to take a toke. From The CBC:

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been elbows-deep in the investigation of the Novichok nerve agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skirpal. As part of their investigation into where the nerve agent may have originated, the OPCW sent samples of the chemical weapon to a number of independent labs. Using multiple labs provides a fail safe against false positive results and bias – two things you'd want to avoid considering the fact that the results of the tests could trigger a significant international incident. One of the labs that the OPCW may have used (I mean, they're not going to come right out and say that this is where they're sending dangerous shit) was Switzerland's Spiez Laboratory. Since Russia has denied that it had any role in the poisoning of the Skirpals and the other collateral victims of the Novichok attack, it's really really surprising to be surprised by the surprise expulsion of two Russian intelligence agents (surprise!) from The Hague, where OPCW is based. Apparently, they were trying to tinker with Spiez Laboratory's computers.From NPR:

Future Punk created retro logos and motion graphics for today's Internet companies if they existed decades ago. The artist was "inspired by great work of Sullivan & Marks, Robert Abel & Associates, Computer Image Corporation and various other early CG/Scanimate companies."And if you're not hip to Scanimate:

Punk, Algerian chaabi music, Rai, rock and techno: Rachid Taha had it all going on. He drew inspiration from the music of North Africa, New Orleans jazz, delta blues, The Clash and Elvis Presley. He cut his teeth spinning albums as a DJ and playing in a number of bands as he came of age in France. He worked with famed producers like Don Was and Steve Hillage and traveled in the same circles as David Bowie. In his later years, he was slowed down by muscular dystrophy, but he continued to rock, nonetheless. You've very likely enjoyed his music used in films and video games without ever knowing it. It's beautiful, fire-filled stuff.On September 12th, Rachid Taha passed away at the age of 59.