Grammar might be dead, but Schoolhouse Rock! isn't (thanks to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert!).This latest episode of Schoolhouse Rock! teaches us all about the use of double negatives so that we can speak just like the US president.Double negative what's your function? A desperate way to not side with the Russians. Double negative how's that function? Confusin' the people with sentence construction...

David Frum, the conservative Republican senior editor at The Atlantic, says it has become clear that Trump has been bribed or blackmailed into becoming a Russian puppet, and that the "United States faces a national-security emergency."From The Atlantic:

A criminal mastermind in Vancouver, Washington thought that he'd help himself to the bounty of – I dunno, locks? doors? finger puzzles? – goods that an escape room business had on hand. He ended up, you guessed it, trapped in an escape room and unable to break free. In a fit of panic and defeat, he called 911 for help.

Our technology-centric society is making people miserable, says Don Norman, cognitive scientist and author of the classic book on human-centric design, The Design of Everyday Things. The technology we use expects us to behave like machines, he says, and when we fail, we get all the blame.From Fast Company:

President Trump plans to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington, DC for yet another one-on-one meeting in the fall. Under fire for shady shenanagins around Russia and Putin, Trump is doubling down on the crazy, like he always does.(more…)

The house at Klump Ave. and Dilling St. in Studio City, also known as the Brady Bunch house, has been put on the market for $1.885 million.LA Times:

A former nude model and “Bond girl” exchanged sexual messages via Twitter with the online persona now believed to be an unknown number of Russian spies who are accused of attacking the 2016 US elections, the UK tabloid Sun Online posted today.They're really awful and I don't want to link to them, but this is too rich, you guys. Motherboard has a more credible piece up, you should read that one, too.In today's garbage interview, Robbin Young told The Sun she "fell madly in love" with Twitter user Guccifer 2.0, and sent him photographs of her breasts and exchanged sexually explicit messages with him or them.Excerpt:

Jason Koebler and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai received a $100 iPhone X from China and marveled at how convincing the top-to-bottom, software-to-hardware bootleggery is. iOS is recreated down to the pixel as an Android skin; only the sluggish performance, on-screen keyboard give the game away. Even many of the apps are nearly perfect, though once they run into the bad ones, it's immediately clear what is at hand. And how very bad some of them are...

How weird is it that this needed to happen.(more…)

Greg Harlow made the pre-dawn trek to the perfect vantage point and captured this lovely misty rainbow at Yosemite Falls. (more…)

A scuba diver in shallow water was surprised to see what looked like a "ghostly apparition" coming toward her. It turned out to be a rare albino stingray. (more…)

Austin's Michael-Scott Earle, last seen around these parts when he filed a trademark on the phrase "Dragon Slayer" for use in fantasy novel trademarks, has found a new depth to plumb: he's filed a trademark on book covers "one or more human or partially human figures underneath, at least one of the figures holding a weapon; and an author's name underneath the figures; wherein the title/series and author's name are depicted in the same or similar coloring." (more…)

Walmart has been whining about Amazon drinking what it considers to be its milkshake for some time. Sucking cash out of the pockets of the same low-income earners that you pay just enough to keep alive is a seriously competitive business. With Amazon's online shopping dominance in North America has left Walmart’s brick-and-mortar empire only capable of making Scrooge McDuck money when it’s really Jeff Bezos money that they’re after. In an effort to top off their coffers, Walmart’s been pushing, hard, into catching up to Amazon in the area of online sales. Earlier this week, they announced a partnership with Microsoft that’ll ensure that Walmart’s online shopping experience is faster, more secure and a lot more reliable. Maybe it’ll help! If not, plopping out yet another online video streaming service to compete against Amazon Prime video and, perhaps you’ve heard of it, a little thing called Netflix, will totally help them to make the crazy-hunting-man-because-he’s-the-most-dangerous-game cash that they’re so horny for. From The Information (subscription required):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGBPn9arfVoThe E-meter is a quack device used by Scientologists in a religious ritual called "auditing" in which changes in skin potential are said to indicate past traumas (including traumas from past lives) being re-experienced and cleared from your psyche. (more…)

London's property market continues its implosion, brought on by a combination of tightening capital controls (much of the market exists to help offshore criminals launder their money), Brexit, and a long-overdue correction to a wildly inflated market. (more…)

DiscoveryCube's annual Bubblefest pulled all the stops out this year with the Mega Bubblefest Laser Show. (more…)

California's gun control laws were jumpstarted by rifle-carrying Black Panthers who attended government meetings and went out "copwatching" (shadowing abusive white cops); white conservatives who'd been staunch ammosexuals, opposed to any limits on gun ownership and carrying, suddenly changed their tune and started hollering for gun control. (more…)

Composed from 13 years of Cassini probe mission data, NASA's infrared-based map of Titan shows off one of the solar system's most promising worlds.

When Bernie Sanders made a bid for the Democratic presidential candidacy in 2016 with a pledge of "Medicare For All," the party establishment (coffers fattened with money from the health insurance industry) claimed that the policy was a nonstarter that would never find popular support. (more…)

When Hang Do Thi Duc published her work on the privacy implications of payment processor Venmo's "public-by-default" directory of payments, she did not release her dataset out of respect for the privacy of the Venmo users whose personal lives were on display in the data. (more…)

The porn extortion scam works like this: you get an email from a stranger claiming that he hacked your computer and recorded video of you masturbating to pornography, which he'll release unless you send him some cryptocurrency. (more…)

War is a thing of terror, traditions, heartache and often, boredom. Passing the time between patrols, and the banality that comes from life in the field, is a constant challenge. Some people read. Most exercise. Everyone complains about the food. Soldiers write, train and call home--if there's someone there that'll pick up the phone. Video games? Totally a thing, in some instances. If you have a Sharpie, or a knife, there's a good chance that you might wind up doodling, scratching or scrawling something, at one point or another, to prove that you were there, where ever ‘there’ might be.Jonathan Bratt, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and a current company commander in the National Guard, put together a great read on the history of military graffiti for The New York Times. Starting with 5,000-year old cave paintings and navigating conflicts across the span of history, Bratten touches on the artwork and vandalization that soldiers, living in Death’s shadow, undertook to cure themselves of boredom and, in some cases, serve as proof of their existence. From the New York Times Magazine:

Doc Martens embossed their leather 1460 boots with the iconic cover art from Joy Division's 1979 first album, Unknown Pleasures. So cool!

An Emmy For Megan is a funny take on the practice of "award whoring," or creating work that is specifically created as bait for award nominations. Megan Amram's web series just got two nominations. (more…)

The High Trestle Trail Bridge in Madrid, Iowa is quite lovely by day, but at night it's even cooler, when a lighting effect makes a bike ride a futuristic journey into a vortex. (more…)

Kiwami Japan is the MacGyver of knife making. He's made knives out of the darndest things -- cardboard, gelatin... fish. But he's really outdone himself this time. He's crafted one out of men's boxers. Yes, a knife made from underwear. It's sharp too, it can cut raw chicken, office paper and cucumbers. What will he think of next?

I grew up reading comic books. Green Lantern was my childhood superhero (do not talk to me about the movie.) I loved the X-Men, too. Batman? Hell yes. In my late teens, I graduated into Hellblazer, Shade: The Changing Man and honestly, pretty much anything that Vertigo printed. Sadly, when university rolled around, I was too much of a broke joke to afford extras like the occasional funny book. Of late, I’ve been catching up on what I missed.I’ve read to the end of Hellblazer (so good!) and pick up Saga, Trees and Injection on a regular basis. But I don’t know what to read next. I like dark gritty stuff—I came of age in the 1990s—and I’m not sure what to check out. As I live in an RV, even though it’s a big one, I don’t have space to build up a huge collection of comics, trade paperbacks or graphic novels. What ever I consume needs to make it to my eyeballs, via my iPad or Kindle. What do y’all think I should try next? Do you have any favorite titles that I should take for a spin? If so, what do you like about them and why, based on what I’ve told you that I dig, would I find to love in them?Help a fella out?Image via Flickr, courtesy of Sam Howzit

The concept of "nothing" is easy to grasp for most humans, but the concept of zero as a number is much harder. Recent research shows that bees can be taught that zero is a number which is less than one. This nifty explainer gives an overview. (more…)

My friend John Baichtal has a new project book out called 10 LED Projects for Geeks: Build Light-Up Costumes, Sci-Fi Gadgets, and Other Clever Inventions. John is an excellent teacher and his book will guide you on your way to making fun light-up projects and sharpen your maker skills, including how to:

iJustine and MKBHD opened a sealed iBook G3 from 2000 and started it up. It took a while to configure it to go online, but they were finally able to use Netscape Communicator to browse the Web. Then they used the World Book Encyclopedia CD-ROM to listen to animal sounds.

This summer, I am working as an intern at the company Switch Science in Tokyo, Japan. Switch Science creates electronics kits for people to build and learn from. They produce products that are enjoyable for kids in elementary school all the way up to adults interested in electronics. (more…)

Donald Trump's flip-flop routine around Russia's information warfare campaign against the U.S. is based on a lie.(more…)

I had to have the Mr. Rogers Funko. (more…)

This is the story that may unravel the presidency of Donald Trump. (more…)

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CBC reporters have verified health record files provided by hackers who say they acquired them by breaking into the computers of CarePartners, a company that contracts with the Ontario government. (more…)

Election Systems and Software is America's leading voting machine vendor, a category notorious for buggy, insecure software and rampant manufacturer misconduct. As the 2018 elections loom, voting machine companies are coming under scrutiny, and when veteran security reporter Kim Zetter asked them, on behalf of the New York Times, if their products shipped with backdoors allowing remote parties to access and alter them over the internet, they told her unequivocally that they did not engage in this practice. (more…)

Rep. Mike Coffman [R-CO] -- one of the signatories to the Democrat-led bid to overrule the FCC and restore Net Neutrality -- has introduced The 21st Century Internet Act, which amends the 1934 Telecommunications Act to add a new category of regulated service that ISPs will fit into, sidestepping the legal wrangles over earlier Net Neutrality efforts, which hung up on trying to squeeze the internet into categories that were set in the Marconi era. (more…)

A quirk of British rail history left 4,555 railway arches in public ownership through National Rail, and these commercial spaces are that most rare of British commodities: publicly owned, reasonably priced commercial spaces that welcome quirky industries and small businesses that are the nation's only respite from endlessly homogenised high-streets sporting the same fast food chains, betting shops and chain grocers. (more…)

Facebook claims it is trying to limit fake news and hate speech. Facebook is not.

Last month, the legendary hardware hacker and entrepreneur Andrew "bunnie" Huang (who is also a talented science communicator) published a great explainer on the quirks of the Trump China tariff plan, which exempts finished goods (like TVs), but imposes stiff taxes on components that are shipped from China to US factories for final assembly, a tactic common to the most innovative, cutting edge companies who fear having their trade secrets stolen by Chinese manufacturing contractors. (more…)

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Jurassic Park, a 25-foot-tall statue of Jeff Goldblum (as his character in the film, the sexy and shirtless Dr. Ian Malcolm) has been placed at the base of London's Tower Bridge. The piece is called Jurassic Jeff and it will be on display through July 26.Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.https://twitter.com/NOWTV/status/1019526810697191425https://twitter.com/BruceMcLachlan/status/1019515567143833600https://twitter.com/NineDaves/status/1019567919334903808

In Their Own Words is a new project that gives voice to the growing movement to do away with gender labels and restrictive expectations. As an example, here's an eye-opening comment from a participant named Jen: (more…)

Sinclair Lewis novel It Can't Happen Here, published in 1935, is about fascism coming to America. It has never been more relevant.The novel is available free via Goodreads.

Supermodel Elle Macpherson has embarked on a second career as a supervillain in the mold of Gwyneth Paltrow, hawking a Goop-ish line of useless-to-harmful "elixers" and other "remedies" from her Welleco emporium of woo. (more…)

Tater tots might as well their own food group. I have mastered the art of simple, no mess, delicious tater tots. I use an air fryer. Also, my simple seasoning combination will make the most delicious tater tots you've ever had from a bag.(more…)

Autonomous racing company Roborace demonstrated their latest technology for the crowd at the 2018 Festival of Speed. (more…)

Back when I was a teen Car Wars player, one of my great pleasures was kit-bashing toy cars together with arms and armor from tank models to make Mad Max-ish battlewagons to use in our autoduels (a friend with family in the USA used to help us blow up our cars with smuggled in firecrackers to make "battle-damaged" models -- pretty much the perfect dangerous, stupid teen boy activity) (sorry, Mom). (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3tRuaMhqQsKansas is an Ayn Randian dystopia of voter suppression, measles epidemics, Handmaid's Tale fanfic masquerading as law, Isalmophobic terrorist cells, voting machine shenanigans, and economic collapse, all thanks to the far-right ideologues who paid for and control the state's legislature. (more…)

Years ago, a hairdresser noticed that spilled oil stuck to bird feathers and marine mammal fur, so he started playing around with making oil booms from nylons and hair from his salon. It worked well and is in small-scale use already. (more…)