Entire computer installed inside ATX power supply

Fear of Palindromes stuffed an entire computer inside a standard power supply box, complete with gaming-class GTX 1060 video card and a (smaller!) internal power supply.

While lesser ATX units can't do anything on their own, and must be installed in a case and hooked up to other parts in order to create a functional system, STX160.0 is entirely self-contained, fitting within it's case both the power delivery subsystem, and a full gaming computer! Here we can see that despite the somewhat large size compared to other ATX units, there is not a bit of wasted space. ... In order to fit within the 150mm width of the ATX form factor, a Mini-STX had to be used, this particular one being an ASRock H110M-STX.

Day of the Dead nesting dolls

David Clarke, America's other death-camp sheriff, resigns

Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark, facing multiple federal lawsuits over deaths in his prisons, has unexpectedly resigned. He hasn't said what he's doing next, says the Washington Post, but has long been tipped for greatness in the administration of President Donald Trump.

“As far as his rationale,” Christenson told The Post, “I don’t believe I can comment on that. … I was not given any advance notice of this, as you can imagine my phone has been ringing off the hook.”

Earlier this year, Clarke withdrew his name from consideration for an assistant secretary position at the Department of Homeland Security.

With four suspicious deaths under his watch and a taste for military regalia, Clark is popular among authoritarian conservatives. But he's an amateur compared to former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in whose self-described 'concentration camps' some half of all deaths went unexplained.

45-piece toolkit for opening and repairing gadgets -- $7

I just bought this 45-piece toolkit for $7 on Amazon. It comes with tweezers, an extension bar, a handle, and 42 bits, including metric sockets, Torx bits, and a few exotic bits.

Disneyland Paris bans 3-year-old boy from princess event, then apologizes

If a young girl wanted to participate in a pirate event at Disneyland, it's unimaginable that she would be turned away because she's a girl. But Noah, a 3-year-old boy, who was "buzzing with excitement" when he heard about the Disneyland Paris princess-for-a-day event (his favorite Disney character is Elsa from Frozen), was banned from participating because of his gender.

From YouTube:

His mother was shocked when she was told boys could not take part – that the event was for girls only.

“I was so angry I literally couldn’t stop shaking for half an hour afterwards. It’s just – I was so shocked. I mean, I’m his mother, and if I’m okay with him doing it, who are Disney to tell me that he can’t do that? I don’t understand,” said Hayley McLean-Glass, Noah’s mother. “If a little girl went to Disneyland and wanted to do a pirate experience or a Spider-Man experience, there would be no way that they would stop a girl from doing that because there would be uproar, so why is it different for a boy?”

Disneyland ended up apologizing to Noah's mother. According to NBC News:

Disneyland Paris said they “sincerely apologized” to Noah and his mother in a statement to ITV News and that it was an “isolated incident.”

“An isolated incident, the cast member’s response is not reflective of any policy or belief held here at Disneyland Paris,” read the statement — Disneyland calls all of their employees "cast members."

It continued, “We are going to ensure this does not happen again."

“Of course, both boys and girls are welcome to enjoy The Princess For a Day experience in addition to all our other special activities,” the statement added.

https://youtu.be/EK3X315TbZ4?t=17s

Russia's "Bernie Madoff" has been pulling a multi-billion dollar scam for decades, and his victims love him

One of the hallmarks of a great con artist is that his victims will return again and again to be fleeced. A few months ago I interviewed psychologist Maria Konnikova, author of The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time, and she told me there have been many cases where con victims have happily paid the legal expenses of con artists when they were prosecuted in court.

Sergei Mavrodi sounds like a great con artist. He's been running a pyramid scheme for nearly 30 years. It's called the Mavrodi Moneybox Mondial (MMM) and despite the fact that Mavrodi was imprisoned for tax fraud in Russia in 2000, there is a long line of suckers begging to throw money at him. He has now moved into Nigeria, and is wiping out the savings of people living there.

If you visit the MMM Nigeria website, you will be greeted by live person ready to help you in a chat window.

From the site:

ATTENTION!

YES, IT IS POSSIBLE TO GET 100% PER MONTH HERE, BUT THIS IS NOT A HYIP! This is a community of ordinary people, selflessly helping each other, a kind of the Global Fund of mutual aid. This is the first sprout of something new in modern soulless and ruthless world of greed and hard cash. The goal here is not the money. The goal is to destroy the world's unjust financial system. Financial Apocalypse! Before you join, be sure to be acquainted with our IDEOLOGY! If you are interested in learning how much you'll make, use the handy MMM "Calculator of Happiness." If you invest 1 bitcoin ($4700) per month, in just 12 months you'll have 4,100 bitcoins ($19 million). I'm sold!

From Buzzfeed:

Mavrodi was Russia’s Bernie Madoff. A trained mathematician who sports trademark oversized glasses and a comb-over, he has perpetrated one of the biggest pyramid schemes in the world. At its peak, MMM was raking in so much cash that its founders spoke in terms of how many “rooms” full of banknotes they had.

In 1994, four years after it began, the scheme collapsed.

The following year Mavrodi was elected to the Duma, Russia’s parliament, after convincing investors he’d bail them out with taxpayers’ money. Instead, he fled within a year after Russian authorities stripped him of his parliamentary immunity so they could put him on trial.

After eventually serving a four-and-a-half-year sentence, Mavrodi launched a failed presidential bid, then hosted a radio talk show called Pyramid in which he gave financial and life advice to callers. Then he branched out beyond the former USSR, taking his racket to the US, India, and China, among other places.

The endgame for MMM, Mavrodi frequently tells journalists, is “a financial apocalypse” that will destroy the global financial system. It will then be replaced with his own, fairer system, where users call themselves “Mavrodians” and trade using “Mavro” currency units. More than 230 million users have signed up globally so far, according to a perennially upward-ticking counter on its official website.

What the solar eclipse looked like from the Moon

If you were on the Moon during last week's solar eclipse, you would have seen the Moon's shadow moving across Earth. This image was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) satellite. From Arizona State University's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) site:

As LRO crossed the lunar south pole heading north at 1600 meters per second (3579 mph), the shadow of the Moon was racing across the United States at 670 meters per second (1500 mph). A few minutes later, LRO began a slow 180° turn to look back at the Earth and capture an image of the eclipse very near the location of maximum length of totality. The LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) began scanning the Earth at 18:25:30 UTC and completed the image 18 seconds later (UTC is 4 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time, or 7 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight Time).

The NAC builds up an image line-by-line rather than the more typical "instantaneous" framing camera (i.e. your cell phone camera). Each line of the image is exposed for 0.338 milliseconds, and since the camera acquires 52224 lines, the total time to acquire the image is about 18 seconds. The line exposure time was set at the lowest possible value to prevent bright clouds from saturating the CCD (charge coupled device) sensor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJZ-zx_y74c

Rendering of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

LROC Narrow Angle Camera (NAC):

Flights From Hell: online documentary of unruly passengers and crewmembers

Airplane travel is not much fun these days (unless you are very rich). It's made worse by drunken passengers, sociopathic flight attendants, and mechanical issues. “Flights From Hell: Caught On Camera” is a cheap, sensationalistic documentary that compiles the best of the worst flight incidents in recent years.

Via One Mile at a Time.

Trump tweeted he witnessed "horror and devastation" of Harvey, but others say he didn't really

Yesterday morning, Trump tweeted, "After witnessing first hand the horror & devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey, my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!"

It's a nice sentiment, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to be true. It seems Trump was nowhere near enough to the devastation of Hurricane Harvey to actually witness it, but instead was safe and sound – and dry.

According to a tweet by journalist Andrew Beatty, writing for Agence France-Presse, "I traveled with the President yesterday. Personally, I would not claim to have seen Harvey's horror and devastation first hand."

And from John J. Gillman: "Our reporting does not match claim that @POTUS witnessed any horror or devastation first hand."

And from the press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, via The Washington Post:

He met with a number of state and local officials who are eating, sleeping, breathing the Harvey disaster. He talked extensively with the governor, who certainly is right in the midst of every bit of this, as well as the mayors from several of the local towns that were hit hardest. And detailed briefing information throughout the day yesterday talking to a lot of the people on the ground. That certainly is a firsthand account.

Uh, sorry, but that's not a firsthand account. A firsthand account would be wading through the flooded streets (or at least seeing them with your own eyes), talking to victims, maybe jumping on a rescue boat and helping out some stranded folks. But talking to some officials about it while insulated from the disaster is not firsthand, it's a secondhand account.

Via The Washington Post

Image: Evan Guest

Nanomachines drill through cancer cells and kill them

Researchers demonstrated single-molecule nanomachines that can target diseased cells and then kill them by drilling through the cell membrane. Developed by a team at Rice University, Durham University (UK), and North Carolina State University, the single-molecule nanomotors are about one-billionth of a meter wide and spin at 2 to 3 million rotations per second. They're activated by ultraviolet light and could also be used to deliver drug treatment into the cells. From Rice:

“These nanomachines are so small that we could park 50,000 of them across the diameter of a human hair, yet they have the targeting and actuating components combined in that diminutive package to make molecular machines a reality for treating disease,” Tour said...

The researchers found it takes at least a minute for a motor to tunnel through a membrane. “It is highly unlikely that a cell could develop a resistance to molecular mechanical action,” Tour said.

Pal expects nanomachines will help target cancers like breast tumors and melanomas that resist existing chemotherapy. “Once developed, this approach could provide a potential step change in noninvasive cancer treatment and greatly improve survival rates and patient welfare globally,” he said...

The Pal lab at Durham tested motors on live cells, including human prostate cancer cells. Experiments showed that without an ultraviolet trigger, motors could locate specific cells of interest but stayed on the targeted cells’ surface and were unable to drill into the cells. When triggered, however, the motors rapidly drilled through the membranes.

"Molecular machines open cell membranes" (Nature)

Amazon hit with class-action lawsuit for selling unsafe eclipse glasses

Corey Payne and his fiancée Kayla Harris bought a three-pack of eclipse glasses on Amazon. Now they say they are suffering from impaired vision and they filed a lawsuit in federal court in South Carolina on Tuesday.

From The Next Web:

On August 10, Amazon issued a recall of glasses it was unable to verify as safe. The retail giant emailed customers to return their units, although Payne and Harris say they didn’t receive an email. They aim to represent other people who suffered injuries and weren’t warned by Amazon. There are almost two million independent sellers on Amazon’s platform, and counterfeiting has long been a problem for the service. In response, the company has launched initiatives designed to stem the flow, including a registry that makes it easier for shoppers and brands to flag counterfeit goods, and a program called “Transparency,” that lets companies label products with a code, which can later be used to check authenticity.

Lousy tank driver swerves into car on public road

The Russian army clearly needs to teach its tank drivers not to text and drive.

Rooster vs. cobra: who wins?

In the video below, a rooster in India tangles with a deadly cobra that can deliver enough venom in one bite to kill 20 people, and many more roosters. From National Geographic:

The rooster pushes the cobra away from the other chickens, sometimes dropping and pecking at it and sometimes running with the snake dangling from its beak. The bobbing movements of the rooster seem well-suited for this kind of fight, making it harder for the cobra to strike with its lethal venom.

At the end of the encounter, the rooster swallows the weakened snake whole, sliding the reptile into its beak as the creature’s muscles coil uselessly a couple more times.

Underwear-clad man outside of courthouse with sign: "Return my bong"

Jeffery Shaver, 31, stood outside the Kitchener, Ontario courthouse yesterday in his underwear beside two signs that read "RETURN MY BONG" and "RETURN MY MARIJUANA." He claims that police seized his bong and stash at a local hospital where he was taken during a panic attack. He says he was yelling about a problem with a vending machine when they arrested and searched him. This is the second time one of his bongs and his weed were confiscated. From The Record:

"I have a legal medical marijuana card. Five months after I got it, I was arrested for possession of marijuana, but I had my card on me," Shaver said.

"So two days later, I went back and smoked marijuana on the front lawn of the police station," Shaver said. "Again they arrested me. I went to jail for the first time. They held me there for 16 hours.

"And that charge, ironically, has already been dropped and this is the very bong they returned to me," he said, pausing to take a hit off the bong. "They refuse to return the other one because they haven't dropped that marijuana charge."

photo: Vanessa Tignanelli/The Record

Steven King's "It" hurting the clown business

Pennywise, the creepy clown in Steven King's "It," and the recent increase in "evil clown sightings" around the country have fueled the anti-clown movement in the US and hurt clowning as a legit business. From the Hollywood Reporter:

"Last year we were really blindsided," says World Clown Association president Pam Moody of the evil clown sightings — typically pranksters in store-bought clown masks who lurked near schools and in residential neighborhoods, sometime with weapons in hand. "We've since created a press kit to prepare clowns for the movie coming out."

That guide, “WCA Stand on Scary Clowns !!,” reminds the WCA membership that the "art of clown is something to be treasured and enjoyed" and that "just because someone wears a rubber Halloween mask, that does not make one a clown!" It also recommends "that young children not be exposed to horror movies" such as It...

The industry has taken a hit thanks to all this "scary clown" business. "People had school shows and library shows that were canceled," says Moody. "That’s very unfortunate. The very public we're trying to deliver positive and important messages to aren't getting them."

How to make a good lighting rig with a hamburger box and a flashlight

Photographer Philippe Echaroux used a cheap flashlight, a soda straw, and a Big Mac box to take some excellent portraits with his iPhone.

That probably hurt

Of all the ways a Saarinen knock-off chair could fail, this ranks among the worst.

[via Bits and Pieces]

The meaning of "premium mediocre"

Venkatesh Rao coined the phrase "premium mediocre" and wrote about it on Ribbonfarm. The term came to him when dining at Veggie Grill. He describes that particular restaurant as in the same class as Chipotle which, of course, is inarguable premium mediocre. Below are some other things that Rao has identified as premium mediocre. Please list others in the comments! From Ribbonfarm:

Premium mediocre is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden. Premium mediocre is cupcakes and froyo. Premium mediocre is “truffle” oil on anything (no actual truffles are harmed in the making of “truffle” oil), and extra-leg-room seats in Economy. Premium mediocre is cruise ships, artisan pizza, Game of Thrones, and The Bellagio.

Premium mediocre is food that Instagrams better than it tastes.

Premium mediocre is Starbucks’ Italian names for drink sizes, and its original pumpkin spice lattes featuring a staggering absence of pumpkin in the preparation. Actually all the coffee at Starbucks is premium mediocre. I like it anyway.

Premium mediocre is Cost Plus World Market, one of my favorite stores, purveyor of fine imported potato chips in weird flavors and interesting cheap candy from convenience stores around the world.

(via Kottke)

Three gentleman on a motorcycle fail to break into a moving truck

Breaking into a truck, WCGW ? from Whatcouldgowrong

A motorcycle with three riders drives up behind a large truck at night. One of them snaps a lock with bolt cutters, and dismounts the bike to board the bus. But when he steps off the motorcycle, he knocks it off balance, causing the remaining two riders to crash and fall. The man standing on the truck sees what he did, then steps off the truck onto the road, falling on his back.

But wait! A few seconds later, they are back on the bike, ready to try again. "Failure isn't getting knocked down. It's not getting back up."

Cheap used Echo Dots on Amazon

My kids keep removing my Echo Dot from the the kitchen and taking it to other parts of the house (mainly to listen to music), so I bought another one on Amazon. They sell used Dots for as low as $32. I use my Dot to listen to music, NPR, podcasts, the weather, Audible books, and to ask it questions about things, and add to my shopping list.

Amazon Warehouse is a good place to get all kinds of used, returned, and refurbished stuff at a discount.

Augmented reality project adds a little road system to your living room floor

Judith Amores Fernandez, Anna Fusté Lleixà, and Jam3 created the Invisible Highway at Google Creative Lab using Unity, Tango, and the AdaBox maker kit from Adafruit. From the YouTube description:

Invisible Highway is an experiment in controlling physical things in the real world by drawing in Augmented Reality. Simply make a pathway along the floor on your phone and the robot car will follow that path on the actual floor in your room. A custom highway with scenery is generated along the path to make the robots a little more scenic on your phone screen.

This is a generic Millennial ad

And/Or studio created "This Is a Generic Millennial Ad" for a stock footage house called Dissolve as a way to show how agencies can create their own generic Millennial ads using stock footage from Dissolve.

Stoner is a podcast that interviews creative people who smoke weed

This is a fun podcast I just learned about. It's called Stoner. The host Aaron Lammer (also the co-host of the Longform Podcast) says, "Stoner is a freewheeling conversation that often starts with 'when was the first time you ever smoked weed?' and can end up anywhere."

I embedded the episode above, which is an interview with our friend, Matt Haughey, who created Metafilter.

Matt Haughey never touched weed as a teen, despite being a competitive BMX rider in Southern California. He didn't smoke any weed in his 20s either, busy founding Metafilter one of the internet's first collections of "cool shit people find on the internet." By the time he was in 30s, Matt was curious to try marijuana but didn't know anyone who had any. Finally, a decade later, legalization came to the West Coast and he set off for Washington State to acquire some weed so he could smoke his first joint, age 42.

We talked about the lack of beginner's weed-smoking information on the internet, touring elementary schools and churches performing in a D.A.R.E. BMX show, and why he gave Metafilter away after 16 years.

Man who created islamophobic children's book with Pepe the frog ordered by court to give profits to Muslim charity

In 2006 Matt Furie introduced a "blissfully stoned frog" named Pepe in a comic book called Boy's Club. But in recent years Pepe got appropriated by the alt-right as a racist icon, prompting the Anti-Defamation League to designate Pepe as a hate symbol.

Furie has hired intellectual property lawyers to defend his creation against misuse by racists, and he is winning. His latest victory is against Eric Hauser, author of an Islamophobic book for kids called Adventures of Pepe and Pede, which has a villainous bearded alligator named Alkah, and a place called Kek Cliff.

From Motherboard:

Matt Furie, the creator of Pepe the Frog, struck back against a self-published children's book that depicted Pepe as an Islamophobic, alt-right champion on a mission to make his farm great again.

Thanks to Louis Tompros and Don Steinberg — intellectual property lawyers at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP — Furie has reached a settlement with The Adventures of Pepe and Pede author Eric Hauser. That settlement prevents further sale of the book and forces Hauser to donate all profits to a Muslim-American advocacy group.

Hauser will donate the $1,521.54 in profits from the book to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

"As this action shows, Furie will aggressively enforce his intellectual property, using legal action if necessary, to end the misappropriation of Pepe the Frog in any way that espouses racism, white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Nazism, or any other form of hate," a release from the WilmerHale law firm said.

[caption id="attachment_543843" align="alignright" width="300"] Eric Hauser[/caption]Hauser (right) was an assistant principal at a North Texas middle school, until Denton Independent School District officials found out about the book and removed him from that position. According to the Dallas News, Hauser "will be reassigned to a yet-to-be-determined role that will not involve being a campus administrator or educator, the district said."

From The Dallas News:

Several people have taken to social media to debate about the book. One called it "anti-Muslim," while others said it'd be a big leap to link it to white supremacy.

"I think people will take that and then just assume negative, just assume bad things," Hauser said. "That's unfortunate. I hate that."

Instead, Hauser said he hopes people appreciate the story and insisted that he didn't intend to upset anyone.

Hauser said he doesn't align with the alt-right "at all" and said chose Pepe because he's a "funny," "lovable character." The same goes for Pede, he said, which is short for centipede.

Some supporters of President Donald Trump call themselves centipedes.

Kat Ralph of Denton, TX started a petition demanding that the district fire Hauser.

Here’s how to realize the true potential of Raspberry Pi

 

The Raspberry Pi 3 can do almost everything a standard desktop can do, just for a fraction of the cost — as well as plenty of things that you would never expect out of a laptop. It offers an extremely open-ended platform for interacting with countless physical and digital things, and is a great way to explore electronics and computer science. To help you dive right in to this single-board wonder, the Raspberry Pi 3 Board + Mastery Bundle is currently available in the Boing Boing Store.

Here’s a list of some cool things you can do with your Raspberry Pi, and how to build your skills with our bundle:

Make your computer truly personal

At it’s core, the Raspberry Pi is just an extremely general-purpose computer. If you ever wished your workstation wasn’t just a mass-produced slab of aluminum, the Pi gives you freedom to reimagine your computer in whatever form suits you best. Just take a look at this Raspberry Pi Netbook Briefcase, which uses a handful of off-the-shelf parts for a clever self-contained desktop. You don’t even need any advanced technical skills to assemble a custom machine. As long as you can successfully boot into the Raspbian OS, the hardest part is either building your enclosure or choosing a pre-made one from Adafruit.

Smarten up your home

Because of it’s slew of connectivity options, the Raspberry Pi excels at bridging the gap between physical sensors and the internet. Instead of waiting for IoT consumer technology to mature, you can roll out your own home automation using this cheap computer. The Raspberry Pi Mastery Bundle features several courses on automation. 

To design your own home system, you’ll learn to use Cayenne, a drag-and-drop IoT project builder, as well as get experience using Python code to interface directly with raw input from your Pi’s GPIO pins. Once you learn to read real-time data and feed it to a web back-end, you’ll have the freedom to wire up almost anything. For some idea of the possibilities, check out this DIY Raspberry Pi Weather Station that automatically logs environmental information to CSV files for easy processing.

Dig for treasure

Bitcoin mining on stock Raspberry Pi hardware is possible, but not very lucrative. However, you can employ some specialized peripherals to make better use of its relatively small power footprint, as seen in this Pi Bitcoin Miner. It uses several USB ASIC devices that can process transactions at speeds that rival desktop graphics cards for more efficient blockchain verification. While this bundle doesn’t come with a complete moneymaking machine, it will teach you how to set up a Bitcoin Wallet and all of the Terminal commands needed to make it happen.

Build robots

Raspberry Pis are also great brains for robots and other specialized mechanical devices. Aside from reading data, the GPIO pins can also interact with electrical components like servos and DC motors. You can get introduced to the basics of robotics, and cover concepts like h-bridge circuits and degrees of freedom with three of the courses included in this collection. The projects range from a simple robot arm, to a fully remote-controlled Pi car. After mastering this material, you can start setting your sights to the future, like this incredible augmented reality robot made with Raspberry Pi and Microsoft Hololens.

The Raspberry Pi 3 Mastery Bundle includes a Pi Board, a robotic car kit with all of the necessary hardware, as well as the following seven courses:

• Build Your Own Armbot Step By Step Using Raspberry Pi Zero
• Home Automation in 48 Hours Without Coding
• Internet of Things Automation Using Raspberry Pi 2
• Raspberry Pi Robotics
• Bitcoin Mining Using Raspberry Pi
• Hardware Projects Using Raspberry Pi
• Automation with Raspberry Pi Zero

It's everything you need to get started with a fun, technical new hobby, and it's all in the Boing Boing Store for $178.99.

Spoiled Red Bull heir kills policeman, Interpol asking world for help in catching him

The 32-year-old grandson of the billionaire who invented the Red Bull energy drink killed a policeman in Thailand five years ago and is still living the life of luxury. And now Interpol has issued a "red" alert, asking for member countries to arrest and extradite him.

The wealthy heir, Vorayuth Yoovidhya, from Thailand, was zipping around in his Ferrari when he hit a policeman on a motorcycle, dragging the officer and the bike behind the fancy car for at least nine feet before stopping. This was in September, 2012, when he was 27-years-old, and Voovidhya, who goes by the name "Boss," has been dodging the law ever since, simply by not showing up for court.

But he's not hiding out in some cabin in the woods, like you might imagine a fugitive to do. No, this entitled gentleman has been living the Red Bull lifestyle, with the help of his family. According to AP News:

Within weeks of the accident, The Associated Press has found, Vorayuth, then 27, was back to enjoying his family's jet-set life, largely associated with the Red Bull brand ... He flies around the world on private Red Bull jets, cheers their Formula One racing team from Red Bull's VIP seats and keeps a black Porsche Carrera in London with custom license plates: B055 RBR. Boss Red Bull Racing.

Nor is he all that hard to find. Just last month, social media clues led AP reporters to Vorayuth and his family vacationing in the ancient, sacred city of Luang Prabang, Laos. The group stayed at a $1,000-a-night resort, dined in the finest restaurant, visited temples and lounged by the pool before flying home to Bangkok.

And according to NPR:

Vorayuth's case has drawn attention to the apparent impunity of the extremely wealthy in Thailand. "Justice has failed," read one headline in the Bangkok Post in 2013. An AP piece from 2016 called Vorayuth a "famous untouchable," one of a generation of "deadly rich kids" causing fatal crashes and dodging any punishment.

And, as is typical with spoiled brats, Yoovidhya's attorney has been filing petitions claiming that Boss has been treated unfairly.

Why we are prone to optimism and hope over realism and the skepticism of experience

When you think about your future health, career, finances, and even longevity — you imagine a rosy, hopeful future. For everyone else, though, you tend to be far more realistic.

In other words, if you are a smoker, everyone else is going to get cancer. You’ll probably be in the that lucky portion who smokes into your 90s, or so you think. Similarly, the odds of success for a new restaurant change depending on who starts that venture. If its you, the odds are pretty good. If it is someone else, you see the odds as pretty bad.

For about 80 percent of people, the brain overestimates the likelihood of future good events and underestimates the odds of future bad events. This, guest Tali Sharot says, is our built-in optimism bias.

Sharot is the director of the Affective Brain Lab and teaches cognitive neuroscience in the department of Experimental Psychology at University College London. In this episode, she explains why we are prone to optimism and hope over realism and the skepticism of experience. She also details how we can use our knowledge of this mental quirk to our advantage both personally and institutionally.

Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud

This episode is sponsored by Dignity Health. Just two minutes of mindful thinking can reduce stress and help us be more mindful of the moments and people around us. Share #take2mins on social media to tell the world how you are incorporating mindfullness into your daily life.

This episode is sponsored by Blue Apron who sets the highest quality standards for their community of artisanal suppliers, family-run farms, fisheries and ranchers. For less than $10 per meal, Blue Apron delivers the best ingredients along with easy-to-read, full-color recipes with photos and additional information about where your food came from. Check out this week’s menu and get your first three meals free with free shipping by going to www.blueapron.com/YANSS

Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.

Links and Sources

Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Soundcloud

Previous Episodes

Boing Boing Podcasts

Cookie Recipes

The Optimism Bias

Sharot’s TED Talk

Sharot’s Website

I want these gyro-buses to happen

The engineering firm Dahir Insaat presents the future of transportation: the monorail gyro-bus. It zips along congested urban roadways because it zips over them. But it doesn't fly -- rather, it rides on wheeled stilts. It's got a flywheel inside to keep it from tipping over.

Inventor Dahir Insaat says:

My hope is that this will be the most important transport event of the next two decades. I can say without exaggeration that this mode of transportation is compatible with the human habitat, with the spaces in which city dwellers recreate. It can pass alongside parks, squares, and pedestrian paths, and in some cases it can even ride alongside people strolling down wide boulevards. After all, it is absolutely safe in both ecological and physical terms. It cannot cause serious injury. The most it would do if it hit a person who is standing on the monorail would be to push him out of its way. In a word, Anna Karenina would not have been able to commit suicide if she threw herself in front of a gyro monorail, no matter how much she wanted to.

(Sorry for the Tolstoy spoiler.)

Here are some of Xeni's favorite tools

We have hired an editor to edit the Cool Tools podcast. It costs us $300 a month. So far, Cool Tools listeners have pledged $247 a month to the podcast. Please consider supporting us on Patreon. We have nice rewards for people who contribute!

Our guest on the Cool Tools show this week is Xeni Jardin. Xeni is my partner at Boing Boing. We've been friends for a really long time, and Xeni has been with me from the very beginning at Boing Boing. She is always coming up with really cool ideas for tools that she uses for cooking, for communicating, and she does a lot of traveling, and I'm happy she shared some of her favorites with Kevin Kelly and me.

Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single page

Show notes:

AmazonBasics High-Density Foam Roller ($19)
"I work with a physical therapist, I had lots of surgeries and stuff, and when I travel, I get sore. I didn’t realize how cheap foam rollers on Amazon are, if you're just doing like the cheapo, basic, no kind of weird serrations, no crazy Space Age material, but just basically a 36-inch foam roller about six-inch diameter. I overnighted one of those things to myself here in Utah the day that I arrived. … I can stretch out everything that gets stiff, either from exerting myself on hiking trails, or just getting out there. … It’s just amazing what some really basic PT tools like this do.”

RIVA Turbo X Wireless Speaker ($159) “It’s a high-end wireless Bluetooth speaker. ...You get about 26 hours of playing time on it. I don't know how to exactly describe how the sound is great. Compared to, say, some of the other like $50 and under speakers, there's just no comparison. I hear a lot of crispness and a lot of definition, if I'm listening to more complex orchestral cinematic compositions. I can even do calls on it, too. If I'm listening into a conference call, or an audio book, or something while I'm cooking. They’re just really great, so I wanted to put a shout-out to this fantastic little speaker brand and it’s half off. .. You can also charge your phone, or tablet off of it.”

30% Pure Vinegar ($30)
"There’s lots of different ways to use simple household ingredients like baking soda or Epsom salt or vinegar to clean up around the house…People who are into not supporting big chemical companies might be interested in this ... I’m a cancer survivor and I just don’t like having lots of extra chemical ingredients around that I don’t actually need. …30% vinegar is a cool tool that you can use in some of those household cleaning practices. …You can use 30% pure vinegar also as a weed killer. I think some people mix it with orange oil for certain things like that. There's lots of crazy uses for it. I like to dilute it and use it in laundry.”

Oral-B Black Pro 1000 Electric Toothbrush ($40)
"When I was looking on Amazon for a toothbrush, I wanted to spare no expense and get the absolute top of the line. It turns out most electric toothbrushes now, are like $100 and they include a lot of crap that you don’t need. The one that I like is called the Oral B Pro 1000, and it’s 39 bucks … Basically it gets your teeth super, super clean if you use it correctly. You don't have to move it back and forth like you do with manual toothbrush. You don’t have to press down into your teeth and your gums, as many people often do when they’re transitioning. …There’s a little buzzer on it that buzzes in your hand every 30 seconds to let you know it is time to move on the next quadrant of your mouth. Minimal price and no feature creep.”