In this amusing and rather frightening footage, a runaway utility cart turns in circles on the asphalt at Chicago's O'Hare airport, slowly making its way toward a plane at the gate. Workers hover nearby, hoping for an opportunity to leap in and wrest control of the vehicle, but it's whirling too fast and the risk of injury is too great. But all is not lost!
Monday, 30 September 2019
BMW Motorrad to sell "M" class bikes?
BMW Motorrad, the fun BMW that makes the motorcycles, may release some 'M' class bikes. 'M' in the world of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, the boring fuckers who make the cars and SUVs means 'this one is supposed to be fast.'
In motorcycle land, we use "S" for SPEED.
A recent trademark filing suggests that BMW Motorrad has patented ‘M 1000 RR’, ‘M 1000 XR’ and ‘M 1300 GS’. It’s still unclear whether this is a collaboration between the two sub-divisions at BMW, or simply a new naming convention. The rumor comes on the back of BMW’s latest trademark filings with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).
BMW Motorrad currently uses the ‘S’ moniker for its range of motorcycles especially in the premium end of the scale. Currently, the M badge is reserved for the performance-based variants of the regular models and in the future for potential standalone models.
This post serves as a welcome excuse to share a photo of my R90S.
Turn killer quotes by 50 Cent, Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump and more into wall art
Who can forget the moment our president, the man in charge of a nuclear arsenal, coined the word "covfefe"? Sadly, it's easy to forget given the frequency and amount of head-slapping sayings he's given us - not to mention the disposable nature of his favorite mode of communication.
But not anymore. There's now a way to enshrine Donald Trump's words as the age-defining proclamations they truly are, thanks to these framed tweets by Kanye West's favorite president.
Yes, that's one of 45's defining gaffes on a cardstock print, lovingly displayed with beveled matting behind an elegant 10" x 12" gold frame made of New Zealand wood. It's suitable for mounting anywhere you'd like to meditate on the universal truth and eternal mystery of "covfefe," be it the study, living room, bedroom or bathroom. We'd go with the bathroom, but you do you.
It's hard to pick just one of Trump's tweets to transform into wall art, and luckily you don't have to. You can get the same presentation for his classic "sorry losers and haters" burn from May 2013, or the October 2012 insight in which he quipped "I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke."
There's also a ton of non-presidential celebrities who get the gallery treatment. Immortalize the grammatically suspect Twitter wisdom of Cardi B, Soulja Boy, Jaden Smith, Kim Kardashian and other great philosophers of our time in the same golden frame. There are tons of options available, and right now they're all 10% off the MSRP.
"Covfefe" Donald Trump Framed Tweet
"Sorry Losers" Donald Trump Framed Tweet
"Dreams Make You Rich" Rick Ross Framed Tweet
"I'm Rich Eff This" 50 Cent Framed Tweet
"Flawless Body" Kim Kardashian Framed Tweet
"Diet Coke" Donald Trump Framed Tweet
"That Moment When" Jaden Smith Framed Tweet
"Don't Get Lost In The Sauce" Gucci Mane Framed Tweet
"In This World" Soulja Boy Framed Tweet
"Try Some New Shit" Drake Framed Tweet
"LMFAO" Nicki Minaj Framed Tweet
"Born Effed Up" Donald Trump Framed Tweet
"thank u, next" Ariana Grande Framed Tweet
"I will dog walk you" Cardi B Framed Tweet
Turn killer quotes by 50 Cent, Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump and more into wall art
Who can forget the moment our president, the man in charge of a nuclear arsenal, coined the word "covfefe"? Sadly, it's easy to forget given the frequency and amount of head-slapping sayings he's given us - not to mention the disposable nature of his favorite mode of communication.
But not anymore. There's now a way to enshrine Donald Trump's words as the age-defining proclamations they truly are, thanks to these framed tweets by Kanye West's favorite president.
Yes, that's one of 45's defining gaffes on a cardstock print, lovingly displayed with beveled matting behind an elegant 10" x 12" gold frame made of New Zealand wood. It's suitable for mounting anywhere you'd like to meditate on the universal truth and eternal mystery of "covfefe," be it the study, living room, bedroom or bathroom. We'd go with the bathroom, but you do you.
It's hard to pick just one of Trump's tweets to transform into wall art, and luckily you don't have to. You can get the same presentation for his classic "sorry losers and haters" burn from May 2013, or the October 2012 insight in which he quipped "I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke."
There's also a ton of non-presidential celebrities who get the gallery treatment. Immortalize the grammatically suspect Twitter wisdom of Cardi B, Soulja Boy, Jaden Smith, Kim Kardashian and other great philosophers of our time in the same golden frame. There are tons of options available, and right now they're all 10% off the MSRP.
"Covfefe" Donald Trump Framed Tweet
"Sorry Losers" Donald Trump Framed Tweet
"Dreams Make You Rich" Rick Ross Framed Tweet
"I'm Rich Eff This" 50 Cent Framed Tweet
"Flawless Body" Kim Kardashian Framed Tweet
"Diet Coke" Donald Trump Framed Tweet
"That Moment When" Jaden Smith Framed Tweet
"Don't Get Lost In The Sauce" Gucci Mane Framed Tweet
"In This World" Soulja Boy Framed Tweet
"Try Some New Shit" Drake Framed Tweet
"LMFAO" Nicki Minaj Framed Tweet
"Born Effed Up" Donald Trump Framed Tweet
"thank u, next" Ariana Grande Framed Tweet
"I will dog walk you" Cardi B Framed Tweet
PG Tips 'Extra Strong' is a perfectly drinkable strong black tea
Tea time, happy mutants! PG Tips 'Extra Strong' is not as pitifully weak as PG Tips 'Gold' offering. Belly up to the bar and get your tea on!
Over the course of the last year, I've mostly leaned into coffee and espresso to make life liveable. They supply the necessary energy to do that which must be done. 5-6 double shots of espresso on my Rancilio Ms Silva was a normal morning until I packed that darling machine into storage. 32-64 oz of french pressed medium roast was my ritual whilst living la vida #vanlife. Now-a-days its been liters of drip coffee.
A recent day where I unintentionally skipped the coffee nearly crippled me. Shit man, that was some bullshit withdrawl symptoms. Coffee isn't nearly as much fun as things that are far easier to kick.
I have said it before and will say it again: There is no room for amateurs in the drug culture.
I couldn't find the best tea in the universe, Barry's Gold Blend, in any local market. I did not want to wait for Amazon to deliver it. I bought a box of PG Tips 'Extra Strong' and it gets the job done!
PG Tips 'Extra Strong' is only extra strong if you are in the UK. This is a dark black tea that is a lot like Barry's but has a bit more of a malty tone to it. It is not like "Whoa, existential crisis!" black, but PG Tips 'Extra Strong' is someplace between deathrock and skate punk.
I am drinking probably 6 mugs of tea, using 1 bag per 2 mugs.
PG Tips Extra Strong 80s via Amazon
San Franciscans happily house Oregonian searching for his lost dog 'Yippy'
Well known for its inhospitality to folks without a home, San Franciscans will help you out if you've lost your dog.
Dogs bring out the best in humanity, usually.
“I was closer with Yip than I have ever been with anybody,” Lopez said.
In June, the Apple Valley native was only passing through San Francisco on his journey to begin a new life in Oregon.
Then everything changed.
“I’d take him everywhere,” he said. “He’d sleep right next to me every night that’s my dog you know?”
Sean said he was driving in the Ingleside area when Yippy was apparently spooked by something and then disappeared.
For the last three months, Sean has been couch surfing throughout the city as people have felt compelled to help in his search
People are less compelled to help random homeless folks. Dogs make people nicer.
Electronic billboard on Michigan highway hacked to play porn
On Saturday night in Auburn Hills, Michigan, someone hacked an electronic billboard on the I-75 highway to play a porn video. It ran for at least 30 minutes before police were able to get the billboard owner to shut it off. No word on who was behind the porn prank but that is definitely one way to deter speeding.
Video evidence below. And here's a NSFW tweet with more.
So apparently someone was playing porn on a billboard off I-75...
— Chris Robertson (@needaproject) September 30, 2019
...
...
...
nice pic.twitter.com/HuwZkXiLmI
Watch a black bear break into a middle school
A young black bear broke into Fretz Middle School in Bradford, Pennsylvania. As it was evening, the only humans inside were the custodians. The bear eventually left of its own accord.
I'm positive that this was the plot of an (ahem) Berenstein Bears book I read as a child.
Luigi says "Fuck you!" to Mario on "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!" (1989)
My 13-year-old son showed me this and we couldn't stop laughing. How dare Luigi be so rude to his brother!
The 1989 TV series "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!" starred wrestler Lou Albano as Mario, Danny Wells of "The Jeffersons" as Luigi, and Jeannie Elias as the voice of Princess Toadstool.
Cormac McCarthy on how to write a scientific (or any kind of) paper
For twenty years, novelist Cormac McCarthy (The Road, No Country for Old Men) has been an unofficial "editor-at-large" for the Sante Fe Institute, where he is a trustee. McCarthy has helped numerous scientists improve the writing in their technical papers about theoretical physics, complex systems, biology, and the like. In the new issue of Nature, theoretical biologist Van Savage and evolutionary biologist Pamela Yeh present a distillation of McCarthy's advice on "how to write a great scientific paper." I think the suggestions are applicable to any kind of non-fiction writing. Here are a few of the tips, rom Nature:
• Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.
• Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.
• Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.
• Don’t over-elaborate. Only use an adjective if it’s relevant. Your paper is not a dialogue with the readers’ potential questions, so don’t go overboard anticipating them. Don’t say the same thing in three different ways in any single section. Don’t say both ‘elucidate’ and ‘elaborate’. Just choose one, or you risk that your readers will give up.
• Choose concrete language and examples. If you must talk about arbitrary colours of an abstract sphere, it’s more gripping to speak of this sphere as a red balloon or a blue billiard ball.
image: "Disassembled parts of an Adler Favorit mechanical typewriter" by Florian Klauer (CC0)
Why Japanese are angry over French soccer fans who behaved like idiots on a train
Whenever I'm in Japan I marvel at the efficient, clean, quiet, and comfortable trains. The passengers are polite, and the train employees bow when moving from one car to another.
Right now there is some kind of international soccer tournament going on in Japan, and a Japanese woman shot a video of some obnoxious French soccer fans acting like jackasses on the train. They are lying in the aisle, carrying each other, yelling, bumping into other people, and putting their dirty shoes on the seats. This Logan Paul-like idiocy would be looked down upon even on a European train, but in Japan it's unthinkable.
In this video That Japanese Man Yuta shows the video and the Japanese reactions to it on social media.
New animated YouTube series for kids: Think Like a Coder
TED-Ed just released the first episode of a 10-part series called "Think Like a Coder." It's an animated adventure starring a teenager named Ethic who wakes up with amnesia in a prison cell and befriends a hovering robot named Hedge, who will do anything she tells it to do in the form of pseudocode instructions. In this first episode we learn about for, next, and while loops, which Ethic uses to get Hedge to pick some locks.
SF residents dump "anti-homeless" boulders, prankster puts them on Craigslist
In case you missed it, some frustrated residents in the Clinton Park neighborhood of San Francisco chipped in a few hundred bucks each to purchase giant boulders to keep homeless people off their street ("anti-homeless architecture," as it's called). Boulders that the city of San Francisco aren't going to remove.
Well, BB friend Danielle Baskin, who lives on that small street, thinks the rocks are "barbaric," so she did something about it.
Some neighbors pooled together $2000 to dump 24 boulders into the sidewalk as a form of “anti-homeless decoration”.
The city won’t remove them, so I put their rocks on the Craigslist free section.
The post was flagged and removed, of course. But she didn't stop there. She then tried to sell the rocks for $5 each and that post was also flagged and removed.
The latest? On Friday night, the boulders were pushed into the street!
image via Danielle Baskin
The American Library Association says Melvil Dewey is canceled
Melvil Dewey created the Dewey Decimal system, established the first school for instruction of librarians, and was one of the founders of the American Library Association. But in June, the ALA voted to strip his name from the ALA's annual award for "creative leadership of high order." Why? The ALA cited Dewey's racism, antisemitism, and serial harassment of women. Although the decision to strip his name from the award is new, it wasn't based on a modern view of Dewey's behavior.
Dewey owned a private club in New York that expressly excluded Jews and African-Americans. When that policy was publicized, Dewey received a public rebuke from the New York State Board of Regents, and ultimately resigned his position as State Librarian in 1905. Around that same time, he was also censured by the ALA for his serial harassment of women:
several women complained about his improper behavior toward them—including unwanted kissing, hugging, and caressing in public. Dewey’s daughter-in-law even moved out of his home because she was uncomfortable around him.
Wikipedia notes:
Reports, allegations, and an investigation of Dewey's inappropriate and offensive behavior directed at women continued for decades after his departure from ALA. In 1930, he paid $2,000 to settle a lawsuit by a former secretary alleging sexual harassment.
In an understatement, the Library of Congress simply notes, "His legacy is complex."
Slate has much more on Dewey's history, including the problematic nature of the Dewey Decimal System itself.
(Image courtesy of the Provincial Archives of Alberta.)
Kranch dressing is a real product you can buy
I stared at this a while in Target and a staff member eventually asked if I needed help and I slowly turned to them and whispered "kratom ranch."
Kranch Saucy Sauce [Amazon]
Pixel art castle generator
Castle-generator is, as you can probably already guess, a generator of castles—gorgeous, two-dimensional pixel art fortresses to die for over and over and over again. It's by _unsettled_; all sorts of parameters are offered to determine the general shape and size of your medieval manse.
2D pixel art parametric castle generator
Hide/show the UI with H, move the camera with the arrow keys.
Octopus changes color while asleep, possibly dreaming
Here's a video of an octopus changing color while it's asleep. Are the patterns in response to a dream?
Possibly, suspects the Alaska Pacific University professor David Scheel. That video is from an upcoming PBS TV show called "Octopus: Making Contact", and in it, Scheel narrates the color changes thusly:
"She's asleep; she sees a crab and her color starts to change a little bit. Then she turns all dark. Octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom.
"This is a camouflage, like she's just subdued a crab and now she's going to sit there and eat it and she doesn't want anyone to notice her. It's a very unusual behavior, to see the color come and go on her mantle like that. I mean, just to be able to see all the different color patterns just flashing one after another — you don't usually see that when an animal's sleeping. This really is fascinating."
The truth is, we don't actually know if cephalopods dream. There is some scant observational data, as this piece in Atlas Obscura noted a while ago:
The only cephalopod with a proven penchant for dreaming is probably the cutest. A 2012 study led by Marcos G. Frank, now a neuroscientist at Washington State University Health Sciences Spokane, discovered that sleeping cuttlefish demonstrate a form of rapid eye movement (REM), the same stage of sleep that gives us our dreams, distinguished by the spontaneous activation of brain cells, going off like fireflies in a forest. For a cephalopod, this manifests in frantic eye movements under closed lids (octopuses: they’re just like us) or erratic shifts in skin coloration (or not). In Frank’s study, the sleeping cuttlefish’s chromatophores recombined into recognizable patterns, just like ones they displayed while awake. He believes this might be analogous to the weirdly familiar patchwork of human dreams. “This video is the best evidence I have ever seen that this particular cephalopod has a sleep-state similar to what we saw in cuttlefish,” Frank says of the Caribbean two-spot octopus.
(Thanks to Susan Glickman and Harry Allen for pointing out this one!)
Whales worth about $1 trillion in carbon sequestration, analysis finds
A new analysis of whales suggests that each one is worth about $2 million in carbon sequestration -- and the global population is thus worth about $1 trillion.
How do whales sequester carbon? By eating stuff, getting big, then drifting to the bottom of the ocean after they die. This makes them carbon sinks on a scale even bigger than most trees, as the authors point out:
The carbon capture potential of whales is truly startling. Whales accumulate carbon in their bodies during their long lives. When they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean; each great whale sequesters 33 tons of CO2 on average, taking that carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries. A tree, meanwhile, absorbs only up to 48 pounds of CO2 a year.
On top of that, the metabolic activity of whales -- their breathing, peeing and pooping -- stimulates huge growths of phyloplankton, which itself sequesters tons of carbon. As National Geographic notes, in a post about this new study ...
When phytoplankton die, much of their carbon gets recycled at the ocean’s surface. But some dead phytoplankton inevitably sink, sending more captured carbon to the bottom of the sea. Another study from 2010 found that the 12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean draw 200,000 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere each year by stimulating phytoplankton growth and death through their iron-rich defecations.
When the study authors priced out the cost of carbon capture, that's how they arrived at the value of $2 million per whale.
The corollary of this analysis is that if we could increase protections for whales -- and expand their population -- it could sequester even more carbon. As Nat Geo notes ...
There are about 1.3 million great whales in Earth’s oceans today. If we could restore them to their pre-commercial whaling numbers—estimated at between 4 and 5 million— the economists’ calculations show that great whales could capture about 1.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. That’s more than the annual carbon emissions of Brazil.
It's worth keeping this in perspective, though, because while that's a lot of carbon, there's a lot more to sequester. This new analysis is more about reframing the way we ponder the value of natural systems to global survival and flourishing:
However, it’s only a few percent of the 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide humanity spews into the air each year. And even with aggressive global conservation efforts, it could be decades before great whales rebound to their pre-whaling numbers, assuming that’s possible at all given how much we’ve degraded the oceans.
“We don’t want to oversell the concept,” said Steven Lutz, the Blue Carbon Program Leader at GRID-Arendal, a Norweigan foundation that works with the United Nations Environment Program. “It’s not like we save the whales and we save the climate.”
To Lutz, the exact numbers presented in the new analysis are less significant than the framework it introduces for thinking about wild animals in terms of their value when kept alive. He’d like to see this sort of approach applied to carbon-rich marine ecosystems like seagrass beds, and to other groups of marine organisms, like fish.
The original analysis has some terrific infographics that neatly illustrate the role of whales in carbon sequestration, including this one here ...
(CC-2.0-licensed photo of a whale courtesy the Flickr stream of Christopher Michel)
Tree root completely surrounded a brick
Silver maples are evil, obviously, but I was enchanted by one root's complete embrace of a brick in my back yard. Liberating the brick meant liberating the root first, and I feel such a mildly interesting chunk of cellulose and lignin deserves more than fire. But what, exactly? It is too large to serve as the handguard of an ecologically-conscious sabre.
Behold the glowing Yooperlite rocks of Lake Superior
Described by their finder as "Yoopalite" rocks, a cache of fluorescent sodalite-laced stones was found on a Michigan beach. The apparently bland, well-weathered pebbles light up under 365nm; agate-hunter Erik Rintamaki discovered them in 2017 while experimenting with ways to reveal the rare stones.
I actually sold a few to at Michigan Tech University, and they sent them out for testing and they contacted me through emails and told me I probably had something new that had never been found in Michigan before, and I ended up being published in the Mineral News in 2018 for that discovery," Rintamaki said.
Trump repeats claim that impeaching him will lead to civil war
Nothing worth saying about this man can safely be said—at least on Twitter.
Scientists discover the WORST cup of tea
Good news everyone! All of those products made using microplastics that you invested in will hang around even after you get rid of them: that's good value. Currently, they can be found fouling up the guts of any number of sensitive species, littering the deepest depths of the ocean, making it possible to enjoy your microplastics almost anywhere you roam. Now, scientists from McGill University in Montreal have discovered an amazing new vector for getting the particular plastics you paid for into your body, where they belong: tea.
From CNN:
Plastic tea bags are shedding billions of shards of microplastics into their water, according to a new study.
[Scientists] found that a single bag releases around 11.6 billion microplastic particles, and 3.1 billion even smaller nanoplastic particles, into the cup -- thousands of times higher than the amount of plastic previously found in other food and drink.
The health effects of drinking these particles are unknown, according to the researchers, who called for further study into the area.
I mean, we're already, on average, devouring five grams of plastic every week, so what's the big deal? A little more won't hurt ya.
Image via Wikipedia
Target has a scratchable haunted house for cats
Cats are possessed so it makes sense that Target has made a scratcher that looks like a haunted house! You can get this two-story cardboard Haunted Mansion from Target's Halloween Hyde & EEK! Boutique ($16.99).
It’s a spooky chateau for your favorite cat (black or otherwise) – just in time for Halloween! Frightful and delightful, the Deluxe Haunted Mansion from Boots & Barkley
is where your pet will be wanting to spend all her time. It’s two stories of entertainment, with a spacious cove on the bottom complete with scratch pad built into the floor. The perfect perch to keep an eye on the room is up above. Even better, the entire set assembles in just a few easy steps. The only thing not included are spirits to haunt the place, but your cats will have a scary amount of fun nonetheless.
The cats of the internet seem to take to it just fine:
#catsofinstagram #cats_of_instagram #target #targethalloween #spookyseason
time to show off my new haunted crib 
(complete with Halloween @sphynxswag of course) . . #BeverlyHills #sphynx #calicosphynx #sphynxcat #hairlesscat #sphynxswag #halloween #halloweenswag #hauntedmansion #newcrib #firstdayoffall #catmansion #catcrib #targethalloween #cat #catsofinstagram #sphynxofinstagram #sphynxlove #sphynxismyworld #beverlyhillssphynxapart.jpg){kind=link}
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(POPSUGAR)
Gaze upon the disturbing Donald Trump and Meghan Markle puppets from the new incarnation of 80's series Spitting Image
Children of the 80's will remember the disturbing puppets from satirical puppet show Spitting Image and the video for Genesis' Land of Confusion. Co-creator Roger Law has confirmed that a pilot has been filmed, with hopes of a new series focusing on major celebrities like Donald Trump, Boris Yeltsin, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Jeff Westbrook, a writer on The Simpsons and Futurama, is serving as show-runner, and caricaturist Adrian Teal is working on the puppets. You can get a glimpse of the Trump puppet in action in this clip:
(Images via Avalon and The Guardian.)
Sunday, 29 September 2019
Carla Sinclair talks about some of her favorite tools on the Cool Tools podcast
In this week's Cool Tools Podcast episode, Kevin Kelly and I talked to Boing Boing co-founder Carla Sinclair. Carla is an author, freelance writer and editor. She’s written 5 books, including Girl Genius, which will be released in November.
Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single page
Raw transcript excerpts:
BYU Online Japanese course
I take a course through Brigham Young University. It's their online independent study. They teach tons of foreign languages. I've been studying Japanese. I'm on my second year. They're really supposed to be semester classes, but luckily they give you a year, and I take it every day of that year. And then I also pay for a three-month extension, so it takes me about 15 months. But you can take either university or high-school-level classes, and if you are in high school, you can get credit for them and the same with the university classes. I don't do it for the credit. The reason I chose BYU is because our daughter, Jane, who's 16, wanted to study Japanese for her high school credits, and her school doesn't offer it. So we did a lot of research, and BYU is one of the only universities we could find online classes that offers credited high school classes. After I took the first semester, we went to Japan, and I was able to converse. I could order in restaurants, and I could go to a shop and ask how much something is, although I tend to forget almost everything as soon as I start speaking to someone. I felt pretty comfortable, but I couldn't have a conversation with anybody yet, nothing more than just asking for things and telling someone what I like. You're quizzed on each unit by having to speak to them and answer questions and have prepared stories that you say in Japanese. At the end of the course when you're about to do your final, your final exam is actually proctored. You have to go somewhere. I had to go maybe about 10 or 15 minutes away to a place to have someone proctor the test for me.It's $270 a semester. If you take their university-level class, that's a lot more. That's like $790 or something like that.
Duolingo
I like Duolingo as kind of a complimentary way to learn with Brigham Young. Duolingo is popular. I think a lot of people already know what it is. Duolingo has like 90 different languages. For English speakers, it's around 34 languages. But then for people speaking other languages, they can learn English and Spanish and French and all the basic, more popular languages as well. But the thing I really like about Duolingo is they set it up so that it has the same feeling as a game. I'm really competitive, and so it makes it fun. You can compete against other users. You collect these things that they call lingots that you can spend for leveling up or for getting a little outfit for your owl, the green owl called Duo. But that kind of thing makes it fun. I feel like I'm playing more than I'm learning, and yet I'm learning a lot. And what I like about Duolingo is they are teaching kanji as well, because the Brigham Young class hasn't taught that yet. So it's more dimensional. It's a great complement. You can do it for free, and then you do get ads, and I do it that way. But you can do something called Duolingo Plus. I'm not sure how much that is because I haven't done it yet. But it's ad-free, and there's some other perks you get with it, like, I think you can do it offline, so that if you're on a plane or something, it could be easier.
GLOV Makeup Remover Cloth ($15)
This is a makeup remover, but you don't use any soap. It has nothing on it. It's just the microfibers. And I didn't think it would work when I first got it. I got it in the mail with something called Birchbox. It's a subscription service, and they gave it to me. So I just tried it. I had a little mascara that had rubbed off, and it was on my skin, and I used it. You just wet it and you wipe it across your face, and it takes off the makeup. It reminds me of that Mr. Clean’s magic eraser. The first time I ever had a magic eraser and I erased some pen mark on my couch, my vinyl couch, it was so exciting because it really was like magic. I thought, "How does this work so well?" And that's how this glove is. I just thought, "How does this work?" There's no soap on it. It's something about the microfibers. And it feels like a washcloth until you rub it. Once you rub it across your face, there's this interesting kind of spongy, rubbery texture to it. And I guess that's the magic that's taking off the makeup. Afterwards, you wash it with a little bit of soap, and then you let it dry. It comes with a little strap, and you can just hang it somewhere and let it dry. It's supposed to last for three months, and then you're supposed to buy another one after that. I've had it for about a month.
Nespresso Milk Frother
I like to make macchiatos, which is an espresso with a little bit of foam on top. This makes better foam than I've ever had. It's just the perfect consistency, and it's so easy. You just pour the milk into this little canister, put the lid on, and just push a button, and it foams it up.
It has this little coil that's like a donut-shaped coil, and that just spins. And somehow it spins, and you can do it warm or cold. You just push one button. There's only one button on this whole thing. And if you push it quickly, it'll make warm foam, and then if you push the button a little bit longer, it makes it cold, cold foam. So this little coil just spins and somehow makes the best consistency of froth. For my daughter Jane, she likes matcha in the morning, and she likes it with either soy milk or sometimes she does almond milk. So I just pour the milk in there with the matcha and do the cold cycle, and it just blends the whole thing together. It's kind of foamy and smooth, and she loves it. It's just so easy, and it's really easy to clean. It's so perfect.
Also mentioned:
Girl Genius by Downtown Bookworks
This book is part of a series. It's called Girl Genius, and it's a book for young girls ages nine and up. It's 40 profiles of women in history and contemporary women and teenagers too, who have done amazing things in STEM-related fields — women inventors and innovators and doctors and scientists. I interviewed a lot of people and came out with some really great, interesting stories about women and probably about five teenagers in the book, too, who have done amazing things. One of them, her name is Keiana Cave, she developed a molecule that neutralizes the toxins from the BP oil spill in the ocean, and Chevron took notice of it and funded her. She’s so smart, and she was only 16 when she developed this. So it's just a really fun, inspirational book, I think. There's a woman named Sandra Pascoe from Mexico. She's turning cactus into biodegradable plastic. It's just really fun, interesting things that these women are doing, and it's part of the series from Downtown Bookworks. They also have one called Girl CEO and Girl Activist, and so this is the third one in the series.
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Just This Banjo: free/open banjo instruction for an angry moment, because you can't be sad while playing the banjo
For years, I've been covering the career of Patrick Costello (previously) a deaf, copyfighting, open access banjo player and teacher who is responsible for a bounty of instructional books, videos, and meetups for would-be banjo players. Now, Patrick has finished a new book called Just This Banjo and made it open access, in the name of fighting the malaise and terror of our precarious moment. As Steve Martin has proved: you can't be sad while playing the banjo.
Patrick writes:
As I was finishing up this book, the launching of impeachment hearings against President Trump was the breaking news headline. Every channel seemed to have angry people yelling at other angry people. Seeking a reprieve, I went online and found more of the same anger everywhere I looked. A directionless cloud of rage that was eerily reminiscent of the Day of the Dove episode of Star Trek.
My father and I always advise our students, “if you see a need, fill it.” So, in defiance of the negative emotions of the day, I am making Just This Banjo freely available online. Maybe, just maybe, the encouragement, support, and love I experienced will come through the pages and inspire even one person to stop being angry.
I was the least likely music student to ever fret a string. I was able to learn my craft because there were kind and decent people in the world – and that has not changed. Hopefully, my adventures will inspire you to, as Woody Guthrie put it, 'vaccinate yourself right into the big streams and blood of the people.' If you like the book, the eBook edition will be available for purchase. You may also consider sponsoring our work on Patreon. If for, some reason you can’t stand the book, donate to charity in the name of somebody you don’t like.
So this time it's not so much a copyfighting thing. It's more like, 'Yes, things are upsetting in the world right now. Let's go make music.'
Desperate for a way to communicate after losing his hearing, young Patrick Costello set his heart on becoming a musician. Ignoring the odds, empowered by his family and a karate grandmaster, Patrick won a banjo in a bet, salvaged a guitar from the trash and wandered into the city of brotherly love looking for a teacher. What happened next is an unbelievable true story of chasing improbable dreams, the kindness of strangers, the IRA, the Philadelphia Mummers, and unconditional love. Just This Banjo will make you laugh, cry and maybe inspire you to pick up an instrument yourself.
Death of a Cyborg
Shorra's 2012 piece Death of a Cyborg remixed William-Adolphe Bouguereau's 1888 painting The First Mourning/Premier Deuil, giving it a 21st century zest that I found so moving that I bought a print immediately. (via Quinnception)
Stealing Ur Feelings: interactive documentary on the snakeoil "science" of facial emotion detection
Filmmaker Brett Gaylor (previously) writes, "Stealing Ur Feelings is an augmented reality experience that reveals how apps like Snapchat can utilize facial emotion recognition technology to secretly collect data about your emotions to make decisions about your life and promote inequalities."
Come see me tomorrow in Portland, Maine with James Patrick Kelly!
I'm coming to Maine to keynote the Maine Library Association conference in Newry tomorrow (Sept 30); later that day, I'm appearing with James Patrick Kelly at the Portland, Maine Main Library, from 6:30PM-8PM (it's free and open to the public) This is the first time I've been to Maine, and I can't wait!
Jonathan Lethem on Edward Snowden's "Permanent Record"
Science fiction writer, essayist, and Macarthur "genius" Jonathan Lethem (previously) has excellent bona fides to write about Edward Snowden: not only has he helped make a short film about the Snowden leaks, he's also spent years on the right side of the fights over surveillance and free expression (and it doesn't hurt that he's an outstanding essayist).
In a long, beautifully written and insightful piece in the New York Review of Books, Lethem reviews Edward Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record. As with my review, Lethem focuses on the ways that Snowden's early life and his experiences with official corruption and a culture of impunity transformed him from an apolitical, hyper-patriotic, gung-ho military kid to this century's most consequential whistleblower.
Lethem's expansive piece delves into the personal blind-spots revealed by Snowden's tale (his valorizing of the early, anonymous years of the internet is contrasted with Jia Tollentino's experience of gender-based harassment) and also the blind spots that Snowden revealed in the world around him by coming forward -- particularly Malcolm Gladwell's hilariously obtuse attempt to use Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg as a standard that Snowden doesn't live up to.
Lethem is one of my favorite writers, and Snowden is one of the most interesting subjects in the mix today: Lethem's essay is a perfect Sunday read.
In Robert Sheckley’s 1978 short story “Is That What People Do?,” a man named Eddie Quintero buys himself a pair of binoculars from an army and navy surplus outlet, “because with them he hoped to see some things that he otherwise would never see. Specifically, he hoped to see girls undressing at the Chauvin Arms across the street from his furnished room”—but he was also “looking for that moment of vision, of total attention.” Since this is a science fiction story, Quintero accidentally ends up with a pair marked “Experimental. Not to Be Removed from the Testing Room.”
The binoculars turn out to have a fabulous capacity not only for seeing through walls but also for diminishing the distance between Quintero and those he would spy on. When he peers through the experimental device just so—an effort of contorting his body into increasingly bizarre positions—Quintero is suddenly granted visions of other human beings, behind closed doors, doing “what people do.” Which turns out to be, well, weird shit. The least disturbing of what Quintero surveils is what’s now called cosplay; the most extreme consists of giddy ritual murder, and of the deliberate calling-forth of a Satanic, sexually violent “smoke-demon.” On the last page, Sheckley’s parable attains an existentialist clarity: the binoculars grant a vision of a shabby, middle-aged man in a dreary room, standing on his head, with a pair of binoculars awkwardly wedged against his face. Quintero recognizes himself:
He realized that he was only another performer in humanity’s great circus, and he had just done one of his acts, just like the others. But who was watching? Who was the real observer?
He turned the binoculars around and looked through the object-lenses. He saw a pair of eyes, and he thought they were his own—until one of them slowly winked at him.
Snowden in the Labyrinth [Jonathan Lethem/New York Review of Books]
(Image: David Shankbone, CC BY, modified)
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