Another outstanding photo-essay on the Long Forgotten Haunted Mansion blog shows how many of the original Rolly Crump concepts for a walk-through Haunted Mansion at Disneyland eventually made their way into the Enchanted Tiki Room, with effects based on Cocteau's 1946 movie La Belle et la Bête.
Read the restIn this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll explore Benjamin Franklin's self-improvement plan and find out which vices gave him the most trouble.
Read the restAn eye-popping parable about the benefits of automation: 200 years ago, it took 479 hours worth of labor to make a shirt (spinning, weaving, sewing), or $3,472.75 at $7.25/hour.
Read the restLike many cities, SF asks fancy property developers to create "public spaces" in their buildings to make up for parks and other public sites they displace, and these are usually a joke, hidden away far in the buildings' depths and deliberately hidden from the public.
Read the restMade from stainless steel, possibly larger on the inside than the outside, and $20 from Thinkgeek. (via Geeky Merch)
Discuss
Or better yet, some kind of greyish custard: $13 from Thinkgeek, dishwasher/microwave safe. (via Geeky Merch)
Read the restTimebound by Rysa Walker is an excellent time travel adventure!
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If you have not seen it yet, you can enjoy the first season of Amazon's hit series Transparent for free today, Saturday 24 January. A great way to spend your Saturday afternoon or evening!
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“Bottle raised baby fox squirrel loves his daddy too much to leave home and was released two years ago,” says the guy in this video, Roger Durre.
Watch videoA valuable life skill.
Watch videoDeb Chachra, a brilliant engineer, teacher and thinker, explains why she doesn't identify as a "maker" -- because when we elevate "makers" over maintainers, carers, and do-ers, we carry on the tradition of elevating traditionally male work over traditionally female work.
Read the restThe all-pervasive spying bill that was struck down in 2012 is back -- the Lords have slammed a version of it into a set of amendments to an anti-terrorism bill that's already in progress, and if we don't stop it, the government will have the legal right to spy on everything you do online, and use it however they want.
Read the restMy new Locus column, A New Deal for Copyright, summarizes the argument in my book Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, and proposes a set of policy changes we could make that would help artists make money in the Internet age while decoupling copyright from Internet surveillance and censorship.
Read the restIowa Republican senator Joni Ernst gave her party's official response to the State of the Union address by boasting self-righteously about her humble origins and how her self-reliant, heartland-state family pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, but conveniently failed to mention that her family's farm was the beneficiary of nearly half a million dollars in federal subsidies.
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Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly says: "Lisa Hix has just written a very cool piece about Laika, Belka, Strelka, and the other canine cosmonauts who paved the way for Russian Yuri Gagarin's maiden orbit of the Earth in 1961.
Read the restOakland's troop of Radical Brownies are girls of color, aged 8-12, who learn about the Black Panthers and Brown Berets, and who campaign for body-acceptance and an end to police violence.
Read the restGadgets
From “Un gif dans ta gueule.”
DiscussName your price for six titles, including the Wil Wheaton audiobook of my novel Homeland, all money goes to benefit the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
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History of the World in 1000 Objects opens up with a simple stone handax for cutting and digging made around 1.65-million years ago and ends, 999 artifacts later, with satellites and smart phones.
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El Grand Chamaco is an artist from Los Ramones, Mexico.
Read the restOur friends at Adafruit have published their delightful coloring book "R Is For Robots!" You can buy a print copy for $9.95 or download the CC-licensed digital file for free!
DiscussEveryone's favorite inflight microbe spreading vector, the Skymall catalog, is filing for bankruptcy protection.
Read the restOfficer Warren Luke was cleared of the charge of "actual bodily harm" after he admitted to causing more than 40 injuries to a woman who wouldn't leave the hospital bedside of her seven year old daughter, who has cerebral palsy.
Read the rest@fuwa has developed a shuriken multitool, to let you hack like a ninja, and has promised to start selling them once they've gotten 2,000 retweets.
DiscussWhat could be more romantic than a fully operational battle station? $16.61, ships from Canada, made from polymer clay. (via Geeky Merch)
DiscussIt has been a while since I read a superhero novel. Meta, by Tom Reynolds, was all the fun I expected.
Read the restEFF obtained and analyzed records from the Oakland Police Department's secretive automatic license plate readers, showing that the department has mounted a program of incredibly intrusive, highly racialized secret surveillance of an entire city.
Watch videoAfter the beard on King Tutankhamun's iconic burial mask was knocked off during cleaning (or removed because it was loose), it was quickly glued back on with epoxy, resulting in a crappy and permanent fix to the 3,300 year-old artifact.
Read the restCar manufacturers admit that they fake the throaty rumble of their products' engines, using tricks like hidden amplifiers or even playing digital soundfiles when you depress the gas pedal.
Read the restAt-Bristol's Live Science Team has a wonderful video series of experiments that can be done with inexpensive materials available at typical hardware, kitchenware, and grocery stores, like turning water into instant ice.
Watch video
This week Mark and Jason compare tea makers and Xeni talks about her Hario Japanese coffee products. Read the rest
The intelligence and security journalist has already served more than two years in prison for charges related to his proximity to sources within the hacktivist entity known as Anonymous. Read the rest
Will Self suffers from “everythingitis.” Why aren’t we surprised? Read the rest
Angel City's streets explode when ninjas and pirates clash! Read the rest
“Call Me Lucky” is a bold and moving documentary about volatile comedian and abuse survivor Barry Crimmins Read the rest
Our guest this week is Maggie Tokuda Hall. She writes books for children and stories for adults, and also reviews books with her series of videos, Review in Doodle. Her debut children’s book, And Also An Octopus, is due out from Candlewick Press. Read the rest
His brilliant work might never have been seen by anyone, let alone shown at a great museum, were it not for dedicated crate-digger and vinyl hoarder, Dori Hadar. Read the rest
Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the God-Man Fan Club must avenge the grave insult of… "Clod-Man!" Read the rest
Here's a good rule of thumb: Any time a president says new tech laws are to protect "our kids," you know something bad is on the way. Read the rest
Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, learns about drunk elephants, the stoned water buffalo, and the grieving mongoose. Read the rest
Taking things to Los Angeles during the early 1980's in this week's Hip Hop Family Tree by Ed Piskor Read the rest
I have gone back to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to work on a project called Apollo 1201, which will use a combination of code, law, norms and markets to eradicate DRM within a decade: we choose to do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
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Over the past decade, the woo-busting, pharma-fighting Dr Ben Goldacre has written more than 500,000 words of acerbic, entertaining, enlightening and fearlessly combative science journalism and commentary, busting bad math, manipulative abuse of statistics, institutional corruption, media distortion, and newage rubbish of all descriptions. Read the rest
Internet harassment doesn’t just stay on the internet any more. Banned from 4chan, the 'net's worst trolls are making life hell for "social justice warriors"—and anyone else that takes their fancy. Read the rest
What happened when a naked man literally appeared out of thin air inside a couple’s apartment while they were getting ready for work? Read the rest
Cortez and his band of time-traveling pirates/Conquistadors hit the mean streets of Angel City! Read the rest
It's not easy designing a fair and playable game of asymmetrical warfare. But that's what we have here as giant, lumbering tripods, armed with devastating heat rays, suffocating black dust, and corrosive green gas canisters take on appropriately puny human forces. Read the rest
I've written many times about Kim Stanley Robinson's 1990 novel Pacific Edge, a utopian story about a world where corporate growth has been checked and people have found a way to live together wihtout the need for extreme haves and have-nots, and without the imperative to destroy the world to enrich the few. Now it's available as a DRM-free audiobook (download, MP3 CD). Read the rest
Mark Frauenfelder
Cory Doctorow
David Pescovitz
Xeni Jardin
Rob Beschizza
Jason Weisberger, Publisher
Ken Snider, Sysadmin
