The driver of a Home Depot truck who plowed into people in a Lower Manhattan bike lane today is said to ahve shouted 'Allahu Akbar' while he killed them. At the time of this post, news reports say at least 8 are dead, and 15 or more injured. The incident is being treated as a terrorist attack, say a U.S. counterterrorism officials.
https://youtu.be/8HUVuycpaiY
Reuleaux Triangle Intermittent Pins Mechanism https://youtu.be/Le-PVXUCl0M
Geneva Mechanism https://youtu.be/QxmV71ykN6E
Reuleaux triangle intermittent mechanism https://youtu.be/VbSL5W8Ua6M
Walking Robot Mechanism https://youtu.be/jsxroTt9IhY
[Fake] Perpetual Motion Mechanisms
“The worst part of my whole encounter with Oreskes [was] the fact that he utterly destroyed my ambition,” says one victim.
Michael Oreskes is now NPR’s Senior Vice President of news. He is accused by two women of sexual harassment dating back a number of years, including “unwanted physical contact with them” while he was employed by another news organization “nearly two decades ago.”
Austrian photography Stefan Draschan sits patiently in museums around Europe until he notices that someone viewing an artwork appears to match the art in some way. The delightful series of photos is titled "People Matching Artworks."
"The Best Gravediggers in the World" is a short documentary about competitive gravedigging:
In the industrial town of Trenčín, Slovakia, a small family-run funeral home has taken their gravedigging contest international. Here, teams of gravediggers from throughout Europe descend with shovels and hoes to see who can create the best eternal resting places, in the least amount of time.
The Wine Of Sacred Purity Unicorn Wine Holder ($19.95, Amazon) holds only one bottle of wine, but it holds it very well.
"Add some falir [sic] to your kitchen by displaying your wine bottles in this holder," the marketing copy suggests. "Beware of knockoff imitation pieces sold by unlicensed sellers."
"It's not all joy and rainbows," warns verified purchaser Jon Hanson. "I bought this unicorn thinking it would bring luck, joy and rainbows into my home. Instead he just sits there, staring through my soul with his cold black eyes, just daring me to steal his bottle."
"Everything you could ever ask for in a creepy unicorn," counters My Name Here, a sentiment that Mir agrees with: "Such A Majestic Housewarming Gift."
Al Jourgensen may prefer to forget that he once cultivated an English accent and created this underground club hit, but on this day, we happily remember Ministry's "(Everyday Is) Halloween" from 1984. Above, a fan video cut up from horror films.
Directed by Noah Harris and animated by Nicos Livesey from character designes by McKay Felt and Rufus Dayglo, this meta-bit pixel masterpiece accompanies the latest single from Gorillaz.
What do computer programmers not want to code in? Perl, the Old Spice of programming languages, is the most disliked by a significant margin, reports Stack Overflow. Delphi, used by children to write viruses for adults, and Visual Basic, used by adults to write games for children, are running neck-and-neck for second place.
Trailing far behind are PHP, for people who still don't care about security, and Objective-C, for people who still don't realize they work for Apple. Coffeescript, a language designed to make Javascript more annoying, takes sixth spot; Ruby, very briefly popular among people who wanted to write web apps without actually doing any work, lurks in seventh.
If you’ve read some of our other posts about the growing and shrinking programming languages, you might notice that the least disliked tags tend to be fast-growing ones. R, Python, Typescript, Go, and Rust are all fast-growing in terms of Stack Overflow activity (we’ve specifically explored Python and R before) and all are among the least polarizing languages. Similarly, many of the shrinking tags, such as Perl, Objective-C, and Ruby, are ones we’ve previously observed to be among the fastest-shrinking tags on the site.
Wim Kruiswijk of the Netherlands has been finding messages in bottles that have washed ashore at the Zandvoort coast since 1983. He now has 1200 of them in his collection, which is roughly 35 bottles a year! While this short documentary doesn't go into it, it seems that the coast of Zandvoort is known for its beach-combing discoveries. In fact, the local museum has a display of washed-up finds, including some message in bottles.
A family in Gulfport, MS was pulled over by a swarm of police cars, handcuffed, held at gunpoint without explanation, and told to "Shut the fuck up." Turns out the cops thought the family had robbed their own house.
On Sunday night, Kelvin Fairley, along with his wife, sons ages 16 and 12, 9-year-old daughter, and 12-year-old nephew were pulled over after a neighbor reported seeing burglars at their house. Rather than simply ask Fairley for his ID, which would have cleared up the issue in seconds, the entire family was pulled out of the car with guns drawn on them. According to the Sun Herald:
“I totally think they racially profiled me,” said the father, Kelvin Fairley, a registered nurse who happens to be black. “They never would even tell me why they stopped me. From the moment they pulled us over, there were six to seven police cars. They immediately had their guns drawn.”
Fairley said the officers told him to get out of the car with his hands up. He kept asking why they had pulled him over, but he said he got no explanation.
They later went to the police department to file a report on how they were treated, and again were treated with an unsympathetic, hostile officer (video below, taken by Farley's sister, who met them at the department). Of course his children were traumatized and cried themselves to sleep.
“Last night, I would have been OK with an apology,” he told the Sun Herald, “but after what happened at the police department, that’s it. My kids are totally distraught."
Farley plans to call his attorney.
Her name was Lilias Adie, and she died in prison while waiting to be burned at the stake as a witch. Forensic artist Dr Christopher Rynn used the latest reconstructive methods to show us her face.
Lilias Adie was tortured in prison and it is believed she may have taken her own life.
Louise Yeoman said: "I think she was a very clever and inventive person.
"The point of the interrogation and its cruelties was to get names.
"But Lilias said that she couldn't give the names of other women at the witches' gatherings as they were masked like gentlewomen.
"She only gave names which were already known and kept up coming up with good reasons for not identifying other women for this horrendous treatment."
I've been waiting for the price to drop on this adjustable folding utility table. It's usually $40, but right now on Amazon it's S26 so I just bought it. The price is bound to go up soon. It has three height settings (22-Inch, 29-Inch and 36-Inch) and can be compactly folded and carried with a built-in handle.
A generative adversarial network (GAN) combines two neural networks engaged in a zero-sum competition. The result is a form of unsupervised machine learning that can produce imaginary celebrities like the ones shown in this one-hour video.
91% of the prisoners in Ohio are in Republican districts: they aren't allowed to vote, but they are counted in the census, creating winnable districts with tiny voting populations that would otherwise be included with large groups of nearby Democratic voters. (more…)
Honda has been manufacturing the Super Cub 50 and 110 since since 1958. Over 100 million have been produced. On November 10, they'll release a "classic" model that hearkens back to its original design introduced 60 years ago. Shown here, the 2018 Honda Super Cub in Pearl Shining Yellow color.
From New Atlas:
If there is one motorized vehicle that deserves to be termed as iconic, that has to be Honda's Super Cub. The small, rugged two-wheeler has been constantly in production since 1958, with numerous variants and offsprings still pouring out from 16 Honda factories in 15 countries.
Among these, the basic Super Cub 50 and 110 are still in production in China and, as Honda has just announced, a new dedicated production line has been set-up at the Kumamoto factory in Japan. These two direct descendants of the original 1958 model have received a well-deserved revamp, ahead of delivery to Japanese dealerships on November 10.
The plastic costumes have undergone a discrete redesign, while the application of LED lights brings about some energy-saving freshness. The four-stroke single-cylinder engine has also benefited from a gentle touch of modern engineering and metallurgy, now employing tougher and lower-friction pistons and cylinders, as well as a host of present-day tidbits, like needle bearings, new oil filter, a dipstick to measure oil level etc.
George Papadopoulos is a fairly common Greek name in these United States. Seems the outraged folks on twitter riled a Michagonian George Papadopoulos.
Via NPR:
"For the nth time, I am NOT Trump's foreign policy adviser!" CPA George Papadopoulos said on Twitter on Monday. "I have NO association with the Trump camp! NONE!"
The response to that tweet that was liked the most — and which hints at the tone of Papadopoulos' Twitter stream — reads, "That's what we'd expect you to say."
It was just one interaction on a day in which Papadopoulos tried to tame a tweetstorm. His name shot to sudden prominence after news emerged on Monday that the Trump aide Papadopoulos had met with people murkily identified as "the Professor" and "Putin's niece" in London. That Papadopoulos was working as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign and was hoping to form ties with Russia and collect "dirt" on Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos the CPA, who lives and works in Novi, Mich., quickly moved to dispel any confusion.
"Greece is six hours ahead," he said in an email. "I had just finished eating the lunch my mother cooked for me and decided to quickly check online to see how Monday was shaping up. Well, the deluge of tweets, media requests, emails and messages has not stopped."
As of Tuesday morning, Papadopoulos' tweet about not having ties to Trump had been liked 31,000 times.
P.S. the couple who adopted young Webster Long were Katherine Calder-Young Papadopolis and her adoring husband George Papadopolis.
Redditor Endeavy created these Halloween-themed skull hotpockets, augmented by dribbles of red, oozing sauce; they used these cake pans to mold the crusts.
Jonathan Simmonds, an MD in Boston, MA, created these Map Anatomy illustrations that represent a detailed, functional diagram of the human head's anatomy in the style of a London tubemap; you can buy downloads and posters from his Etsy store, but act quickly, because Transport for London are notorious, humourless assholes about this kind of thing! (via Reddit)
Ash Bhat and Rohan Phadte are 20 year old UC Berkeley students who turned a machine learning class assignment into a browser plugin that tries to guess whether a given Twitter profile is associated with a bot or a human, and assigns a probability score that takes into account the possibility that a bot has human pilots who can take over at key junctures. (more…)
A company in Japan is rewarding non-smokers with an extra week of paid vacation, or six days to be exact.
Piala Inc, a marketing firm based in Tokyo, has implemented this new policy not for health reasons, but because non-smokers work longer hours than smokers. According to their calculations, smokers take at least 15 minutes per break, and they take a few breaks per day. Apparently, over a year, this adds up to six working days.
The new policy was conceived after non-smokers at the company complained about the inequity, and CEO Takao Asuka decided this was the fairest thing to do.
Via Fortune
Image: 5408435/Pixabay
Joi Ito's Resisting Reduction manifesto rejects the idea of reducing the world to a series of computable relationships that will eventually be overtaken by our ability to manipulate them with computers ("the Singularity") and instead to view the world as full of irreducible complexities and "to design systems that participate as responsible, aware and robust elements of even more complex systems." (more…)
The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program identifies possible duplicate voters by looking at registrations by people with the same name and birthdate; a joint study by researchers at Harvard, Yale, and Microsoft found that 99% of the people it identifies as duplicate voters are not duplicate voters -- that is, it has a 99% false positive rate. (more…)
Earlier this month Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos threw a twittertantrum over accusations that Facebook's algorithms promoted fake news in its users' feeds: "I am seeing a ton of coverage of our recent issues driven by stereotypes of our employees and attacks against fantasy, strawman tech cos," he wrote. "Nobody of substance at the big companies thinks of algorithms as neutral. Nobody is not aware of the risks."
Nobody of substance at the big companies thinks of algorithms as neutral. Nobody is not aware of the risks.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) October 7, 2017
But who needs algorithms to help political trolls transmit propaganda, when Facebook's sales team created this beautiful "US Political Segmentation" menu that made it easy to target groups of people "along a political ideology spectrum."
From Buzzfeed:
Indeed, it's increasingly clear that Facebook did not police its platform effectively during the 2016 election. This week, the company will have to answer questions from Congress about its missteps, including how it allowed a $100,000 Kremlin-linked ad buy intended to influence the election and sow discord in its aftermath. Asked if any of the 14 segments were targeted in that ad buy, a Facebook spokesperson said they were not, noting that the segments were available only through sales teams from whom the Russians did not buy ads. Asked if the Russians used the broader, umbrella categories in their targeting, a Facebook spokesperson reiterated Facebook's intention to let Congress decide whether to release the ads and associated data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDdim63M310
For the past year, sculptor machinist Chris Bathgate has been designing a series of handheld, kinetic fidget toys, starting with a "slider" and then a top, a worry stone, a spinner, and a netsuke. (more…)
Things got pretty spooky over at the United Kingdom’s Met Office yesterday during weather reporter Alex Deakin's forecast. He lost his head, but fortunately managed to hold on to it, at least to the end of his report.
Happy Halloween! Here's your spooky headless forecast for today & trick or treating tonight #Halloween https://t.co/0NJKMlwPvc 🎃👻🧙♀️ pic.twitter.com/PoMFAtCE7T
— Met Office (@metoffice) October 31, 2017
Thanks Huffington Post!
The effect is based upon the ancient optical illusion known as The Hollow Face. Most simply, a cast of a face is made in a concave (or negative) sculpture. If you look at the cast with one eye closed and walk by it, the face will appear to turn and follow your movement. The Walt Disney Company obtained a patent on a new process that lit the reversed face in such a way that it was more easily viewable while both eyes are open. These busts appear several times in its Haunted Mansions. To see the sculptures created for you to download by Disney, watch this movie (since the camera has only one eye, the turning effect works very well). https://youtu.be/4-AlsVsLCNw And now it’s DIY time: click on each image below, download it. Print it out on cardstock and follow the instructions to create your own Hitchhiking Ghosts that will watch the trick or treaters and follow them as they go home. To increase the effect of the heads turning, wink at the ghosts as you pass them. They'll appreciate that. Ezra Phineas Gus All Materials Copyright Disney.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, recently indicted on federal criminal charges, allegedly laundered $18 million in money he earned illegally lobbying for Ukraine. CNN has a breakdown on how he spent it:
--Home improvement company in the Hamptons, in New York: $5.4 million.
--Home lighting and entertainment company in Florida: $1.3 million.
--Antique rug store in Alexandria, Virginia: $934,350, plus $100,000 related to those purchases.
--Men's clothing store in New York: $849,215.
--Landscaping in the Hamptons: $820,240.
--Antique dealer in New York: $623,910.
--Clothing store in Beverly Hills, California: $520,440.
--Investment company: $500,000.
--Contractor in Florida: $432,487.
--Contractor in Virginia: $125,650.
--A Mercedes-Benz: $62,750.
--A Range Rover: $47,000.
--Payments related to three Range Rovers: $163,705.
--Home equipment installation company in the Hamptons: $112,825.
--Property management company in South Carolina: $46,000.
--Art gallery in Florida: $31,900.
--Housekeeping in New York: $20,000.
The indictment also says Manafort used the money to buy three properties:
--Condominium in New York's SoHo neighborhood for $1.5 million.
--Brownstone in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens neighborhood for $3 million.
--House in Arlington, Virginia, for $1.9 million.
The indictment says Manafort listed the SoHo condominium on Airbnb for at least a year, beginning in January 2015, and took advantage of the tax benefits of owning a rental property.
Side note: Manafort and Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who Manafort lobbied for, look like they were separated at birth: 
Image of Manafort: Disney | ABC Television Group Image of Yanukovich: Agência Brasil 2011
Firebox's $36.69 Eleven candle-holder: insert one red candle, light, and wait for the blood to start dribbling from her nostril. Caution: telekinesis. (via Bonnie Burton) (more…)
With so many communication channels available on the web, knowing how to leverage each platform’s strengths is key to developing businesses online. To help you hone your digital marketing skills, we’re featuring the new Digital Marketing 22-Course Masterclass.
In this masterclass, you’ll get introduced to a variety of relevant concepts and techniques by acclaimed instructors Phil Ebiner and Diego Davila. You’ll discover the best ways to handle branding and copywriting for websites, email, and blogs. Over nearly 30 hours of content, you’ll learn how to harness the power of SEO and social media to grow brands. Right now, you can pick up this masterclass from the Boing Boing Store for $15.
Toy artist Jesse Wroblewski of Chainsaw Estates challenged himself to sculpt a horror movie-themed PEZ candy dispenser for each day in October.
Here's a look at some of his horribly-creative sculptures, from Pennywise to Pinhead: https://www.instagram.com/p/BaT_qWoADut/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/BZv6K2hggxY/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/BaMDlveg76G/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/BZ81ywRgt0i/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/BaSQHYWgreM/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/BaZD3fvgs7-/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/BaWk18GgcjK/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/Bag-RPigq0I/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/BaFNeU0gxbC/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/BZtbACqgC-s/?taken-by=chainsawestates https://www.instagram.com/p/BaeaWmYgVNz/?taken-by=chainsawestates
See the rest at his Instagram feed.
A drone, spotted over Gatwick Airport, led to an abundance of caution among air traffic controllers. The result: a growing armada of inbound flights redirected into increasingly-chaotic epicycles over southern England, a crap solar system of annoyed travelers. [via]
It's hard to describe this video, posted by Dan Cole, but I'll try.
1. A man objects to having a camera put in his face by a videographer who is talking vicariously through a glove puppet.
2. The man adopts a doomed strategy: trying to get the camera out of his face by fastidiously keeping his face in-shot while following the camera around.
3. He argues as he does so, occasionally with the camera operator, but occasionally with the glove puppet.
It gets so good at the end I'm almost certain it's staged – but not entirely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSUa6yWVCxY
Mari writes, "My daughter loves everything spooky--especially Disney's Haunted Mansion! She loves it so much she's memorized the song and likes to dress up as one of the cast members. Her fave ghost of the 999? The Bride, of course!"
Three researchers from Kyushu University have published a paper describing a means of reliably fooling AI-based image classifiers with a single well-placed pixel. (more…)
You've likely seen the stabilized, enhanced panoramic edit of the famous Zapruder film of JFK's assassination. Here's another angle—the less well-known Orville Nix film—with the same treatment. Though it's not as clear or as long as Zapruder, it's recorded from the other side, showing the grassy knoll and a ground-level view of the assassination. (Note that at least four people filmed the fatal shot, and possibly href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babushka_Lady">five.)
YouTuber Brainiac75 got a lot of questions about the possible dangers of a supermagnet affecting the iron in his blood, so he did an experiment with real blood. (more…)
Shadow of the Colossus, one of the most beautifully gloomy games of all time, is being remastered in 4K. Here's the trailer.
Unlike the hideous new edition of Secret of Mana, they didn't fool with the artwork. It still has that dreamy, dialogue-free crepuscular atmosphere to it.
I'm eager to experience it again, but something is lost in the high-definition technical polish. It's too focused, too plastic, too obvious where the seams and joints are. It reminds me of what new LCD displays do to old movies, sharpening edges and filling in 120 frames per second that were never supposed to be there, making everything look like morning television.
You can preorder Shadow of the Colossus for PS4 at Amazon.
Dan and Cathy Balsam of Alameda, California are putting the "trick" back in trick-or-treating by handing out fake Trump University diplomas this Halloween. You may remember this same couple is behind the "world's scariest Halloween decor."
Obvious Plant wins the droplifting game this year with these fake costumes he left on a Halloween store's shelf somewhere.
Students from Pratt High School in Kansas didn't get their "first hand job experience" as reported, but they -- and a headline writer at The Pratt Tribune --did get a lesson in grammar. On Saturday, the local newspaper printed an inappropriate, though hilarious, headline for an otherwise benign article about Disability Mentoring Day. The hyphen-less headline was completely rewritten for the online version of the story.
image via Tigerfan56
Thanks, Tim!
Digital Vegetables is an installation by by PARTY that was part of the 2017 Tokyo Midtown Design Touch event. (more…)
Talk about a tight maneuver. This trucker has to make a sharp right turn onto a single-lane bridge with an enormous load of logs. (more…)
This neat short film explains the specialized split-beam camera Martin Dorhn developed to film bioluminescent animals without disturbing them. As the information comes through the lens, it's split so one camera captures infrared and the other captures the bioluminescence. (more…)
FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.
JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more. You can also now join through Patreon!
GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”Filled with wild twists and funny dialogue” -Publishers Weekly) Book One here. Book Two here.
More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)
Were it not for the unexpected bulk of the case, I think I'd be satisfied with the Minila Air thanks to its obvious excellence in most other respects. Reliable wireless is especially rare among mechanical keyboards, for some reason, and models that have it tend to be either unnervingly cheap or annoyingly expensive. I'll be trying the Anne Pro ($90, Amazon) next, but I don't think I can live without my arrows. Most of the above also applies to the wired version of the Minila ($120, Amazon) as it takes the same form. 
After six seasons House of Cards is history.
From a Netflix statement issued this afternoon:
"Media Rights Capital and Netflix are deeply troubled by last night's news concerning Kevin Spacey. In response to last night's revelations, executives from both of our companies arrived in Baltimore this afternoon to meet with our cast and crew to ensure that they continue to feel safe and supported. As previously scheduled, Kevin Spacey is not working on set at this time."
The statement was issued one day after Spacey posted a bizarre apology on Twitter in which he said "I choose now to live sa a gay man."
— Kevin Spacey (@KevinSpacey) October 30, 2017
From CNN:
On Sunday, actor Anthony Rapp told BuzzFeed about an alleged encounter with Spacey at a party in 1986, during which Spacey made a sexual advance toward the then 14-year-old Rapp. Spacey issued a statement late Sunday, claiming he did not recall the incident but apologized for what he said would have been "inappropriate drunken behavior."
The final episode will air in 2018.
Whitefish Energy's had quite a week: last week the two-person company from Whitefish, Montana (hometown of Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke) was awarded a $300M contract to help rebuild the power-grid in Puerto Rico, with some very favorable terms including $462/hour for subcontracted supervisors, no penalties for nonperformance, and a guarantee that the government wouldn't audit its expenditures. (more…)
Facebook is reported to soon reveal it exposed an estimated 126 million Americans, many of whom voted, to what was effectively Russian state propaganda (served from Russian webservers in Russia) during the runup to the U.S. 2016 presidential election. All of that content favored Trump, who is now President of the United States.
Here's a cool domino spiral of candy corn that seems impossible to pull off. How can these lightweight triangular pieces of candy perfectly knock each other down without leaving one kernel standing? Explained by YouTuber FlippyCat: "After trying a few techniques, I ended up free standing the candy corn on top of mini black dominoes, which blend into the black floor. The entire 221 pieces of candy corn fell without stopping!" Aha! So it's a trick, and a pretty sweet one at that.
Unicorns' conservation status puts them beyond the reach of most hunters, but now you too can mount the dismembered head of Satan's most beloved creation on your wall thanks to the Toscano Alicorn Unicorn Trophy Wall Sculpture ($25, Amazon). Offered in "antique stone," which is to say resin-bound plaster dust, it's about a foot square yet weighs only three pounds.
"Majestic," reports verified purchaser Danielle Summer. "For some reason when I was reading the product description I thought it said five inches. It is definitely larger than five inches."
"Far too pointy," writes Hunkulees in a review that 15 people found helpful. "Weirdest rectal thermometer I ever bought. Would buy again."
Douglas M. Taylor, however, deducted a star because a rainbow was not included: "Would have given it 5 stars if it came with a rainbow."
Dr. Phil is to psychology as Judge Judy is to jurisprudence: a maliciously entertaining jobsworth who's spent so long stripmining their professional credibility it's hard to see where sincerity ends and irony begins. He's much better when he isn't talking, though, a fact exposed by this marvelous cut by Bill Smith.
Previously: Dune without words.
Update! He did the same thing for Judge Judy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK3EyUt8lKY&feature=youtu.be
Aaron Grooves: "Koji Kondo is my hero! He composed the music for Super Mario Brothers and many other of my all-time favorite NES games, like Zelda."
Here he is performing Michael Jackson's Thriller on Ukulele: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNWcod2gt74&feature=youtu.be
Washington Examiner’s Jen Kerns probably wished she hadn't gone onto Joy Reid's “AM Joy” show on MSNBC. Kerns was there to propagandize the bogus "Hillary Clinton helped sell uranium to Russia" story, but Reid wasn't about to allow her to get away with it on her show. The video below is a wonder to behold:
Have you ever seen Wolf Blitzer do this? Brian Williams? pic.twitter.com/qqBxg3EDir
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 29, 2017
A federal judge in Washington D.C. blocked parts of Trump's ban on transgender military service today. This means that "openly trans troops may be able to join the military starting in 2018," according to Vox.
The decision comes after trans service members filed a lawsuit against the ban, arguing that it has “already resulted in immediate, concrete injury to Plaintiffs by unsettling and destabilizing plaintiffs’ reasonable expectation of continued service.” US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly argued that the trans service members are likely to win and stopped parts of Trump’s ban from taking effect, according to the Associated Press...
In July, Trump tweeted that he would ban trans military service. He argued, “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming … victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.” (The research, based on the experiences of other countries, shows that the costs associated with trans service members are actually very small.)
Then in August, the White House put out the actual policy behind those tweets. According to the administration, Trump would effectively return to the pre-2016 era in which trans troops could not serve openly. The policy also banned the military from paying for gender-affirming surgery, with some exceptions to “protect the health” of someone who had already begun transitioning.
But today's decision doesn't undo Trump's ban on the military paying for gender-related surgery.
Image: Gage Skidmore
Back in the 1970s, cinemas saw cable TV as a threat to their business model. So they attempted to sway public opinion with PSAs like this. (r/ObscureMedia)
An 18-year-old high school student in Osaka Japan is suing her high school because it forced her to dye her hair black.
From Quartz:
The student, 18, said that in addition to mental suffering, the dye caused physical harm to her scalp and hair. The first arguments were heard in a court in Osaka today (Oct. 27).
The student was allegedly forbidden to attend class last year when her hair wasn’t dyed black enough, and was later prevented from going on a school trip. Her name was also removed from the school register. She hasn’t attended school since late 2016. The school reportedly told the girl’s lawyer that even a “blonde-haired foreign-exchange student would have to dye their hair black.”
Image: @fadequ
On November 18, 1992, the Seinfeld episode "The Contest" aired for the first time. That was the one about who could control their masturbatory urges to become "master of their domain," yada yada. New York/The Vulture have an oral history of this classic bit of television history:
Larry David, writer of “The Contest”: I can’t believe I have to discuss this at my ripe age. I would say there was only one other person involved [in the actual contest]. Should I mention his name? I don’t even know — my friend Frank Piazza. I don’t remember what the bet was. There must have been some money involved. I think it was a small amount. [The contest lasted] two days. Maybe three. I just remember it didn’t last very long. I was surprised at how quickly it ended. I won handily, yes.
Kenny Kramer, friend of Larry David, a.k.a. the real Kramer: I wasn’t in [the contest] because I knew I would never win it.
David: By the way, [the idea] was in my notebook for some time and I never even mentioned it to Jerry [Seinfeld] because I didn’t think there was any way that he would want to do it, and I didn’t think there was any way the show actually could get done on the network. So it took me a couple years, you know, to even mention it to Jerry because it didn’t even occur to me that it was a possibility. But he was all for it.
Warren Littlefield, former president of NBC: The series always was completely unpredictable, and Jerry and Larry never followed rules, right? They made up their own rules. When it came time to do the table read for “The Contest,” no one knew about the subject matter ahead of time. Rick Ludwin, the program executive on the show, he didn’t know what was coming.
David: I remember being nervous because the NBC executives were there. I really had this thing going on in my head where, well, if they don’t like it, I’m just going to quit the show. I really had this built up in my head where, there’s no way they’re going to do it and I’m just going to quit if they don’t do it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGhg-htVnJ0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb-tF7WilP8
Frank Wu writes, "US Congressional candidate (MA-8) Brianna Wu (previously) will be killing virtual Nazis today. Brianna will be doing a playthrough of the new video game Wolfenstein II, whose tagline is 'Make America Nazi-free again.' The playthrough starts today at 5 pm Eastern."
Whitefish Energy is the 2-person Montana company from Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's hometown of Whitefish, Montana that was awarded a $300M contract to help remediate Puerto Rico's shattered electrical grid, billing its subcontractors at $462/hour for supervisors and $319.04/hour for linesmen in a sweetheart deal that banned Puerto Rico from auditing the company's expense reports, or penalizing it for nonperformance. (more…)
I enjoyed Blade Runner 2049, though I would have enjoyed it more if it was at least an hour shorter; Jamie Zawinski did not enjoy it for many inarguable reasons, ranging from plot holes ("Why is Leto's character blind? Dude you literally own an eyeball factory") to visual laziness ("Before [Las Vegas] was abandoned, all of its gaudy statuary had been replaced with gargantuan reproductions of the statues from The Korova Milk Bar from A Clockwork Orange. Really? That's all you got?") to all the scenes and scenarios lifted from better movies and made worse ("A love story between two people who are somewhere between 'poorly socialized' and 'not quite real'. Oh wait, that movie was called Her and it was excellent!"). (more…)
A London man found a USB stick on a pavement in west London and (unwisely) plugged it into a computer, only to discover that it contained 76 folders with at least 174 documents full of sensitive information on the security arrangements at Heathrow airport, including "the types of ID needed to access restricted areas, a timetable of security patrols and maps pinpointing CCTV cameras" as well as the measures used to protect the Queen when she flies through LHR. (more…)
When New Yorker columnist/blowhard Andre Walker "Nobody goes to libraries anymore. Close the public ones and put the books in schools", librarians all over the net gave him what for, and one of the best responses came from self-described "Angriest Librarian" Alex Halpern, a student librarian in Portland, OR, whose tweetstorm went viral. (more…)
Katie Van Fleet has suffered 15 identity thefts since the Equifax breach and she believes the criminals who've targeted her are using information from the breach to open credit cards in her name; she's started a class-action suit against Equifax. (more…)
