NYPD wrongfully seize wrong SD card
"New York City police officers arrested a woman who was video recording them from a public sidewalk as they conducted some type of 'vehicle safety checkpoint.'" More
Is this the best song from this year's Eurovision Song Contest?
The battle of the bands, featuring acts from Ireland to Israel, is underway as we speak. Embedded above is Cezar Ouatu's particularly excellent It's my life, this year's Transylvanian entry. Our Europe Correspondent Leigh Alexander will be filing a report, but not until she's had a bit of a lie down. More
World's tiniest monkey eats a noodle
About this video, which shows a Pygmy Marmoset noshing on a macaroni, Meredith Yayanos says: "The tinier the primate, the deeper the Uncanny Valley." I don't know anything about the conditions under which this video was shot, but obviously monkeys belong in their natural habitat, not in someone's home eating macaroni. Still, wow: how amazing [...] More
Yuck! NYC fourth grader sneaks camera into school, makes documentary about gross cafeteria food
http://vimeo.com/64607150 Here's a clip from an upcoming documentary by a fourth grader who snuck a camera into school to document his horrible school lunches and the vast distance between the food that the school claims to serve and food he and his friends end up eating. Zachary is a fourth grader at a large New [...] More
Brain hacking: using neurofeedback to master conflicting wills in your mind
I've written before about Moran Cerf -- celebrated neuroscientist, former military hacker, and good-guy bank robber -- who also happens to be a great storyteller. Here's a video in which Cerf recounts some clever and fascinating neuroscience experiments that use neurofeedback to help people resolve competition between different thoughts and wills in their minds. The [...] More
Grizzly bear eats video camera: close up of terrifying maw
Here's a video of biologist Brad Josephs's GoPro camera being eaten by a grizzly bear in Alaska; he'd set it out in order to get footage for a BBC documentary. The grizzly went above and beyond the call of duty. A grizzly Ate My GoPro!!! GoPro HD (Thanks, Hugh) More
11 year old and his 3D printer
Alex sez, "My colleague Chris Neary and filmmaker Nathan Fitch made this great short film about 11-year-old inventor Andrew Man-Hudspith, who was so intent on getting a 3D printer he made a PowerPoint presentation to convince his parents to help him get one." An 11-year-old and his 3D printer (Thanks, Alex!) More
NMA on Rob Ford's crack video
Taiwan's Next Media Animation -- basically, news-of-the-weird, made weirder with instant machinima-esque videos -- weighs in on the allegation that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford was caught on video smoking crack. Crack smoking Toronto mayor Rob Ford caught on tape! More
Printing a gun is hard
Caleb sez, "The Department of Defense ordered that 3d printed gun removed from the Internet. That didn't work out. You can still download it and print it. I did, and found that the files are a mess and not really functional. I also took a cool timelapse video of the printing." 1. the scale on [...] More
Help Young Knives get their record finished
I'm still mad that Young Knives' fantastic last record Ornaments from the Silver Arcade never got released in the U.S. (though we featured a song from it). They've been doing a lot of experimenting with ambient sound recording and have even created a custom synthesizer from all of the sounds they gathered. Their extremely entertaining Kickstarter [...] More
Woman smacks cop so she can go to jail and quit smoking
Sacramento's Etta Lopez apparently waited outside the Sacramento County Jail for a cop to emerge and then slapped him, so that she could be thrown into jail. She wanted to go to jail because she believed it would help her give up smoking. According to deputies, Lopez knew she'd immediately be arrested, and slapped a [...] More
Hacking Politics: name-your-price ebook on the history of the SOPA fight
Hacking Politics is a new book recounting the history of the fight against SOPA, when geeks, hackers and activists turned Washington politics upside-down and changed how Congress thinks about the Internet. It collects essays by many people (including me): Aaron Swartz, Larry Lessig, Zoe Lofgren, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Nicole Powers, Tiffiny Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, [...] More
Chasing away the big black bird: a monologue on cancer and depression by Jeff Simmermon
My friend Jeff Simmermon talks in this video about cancer and depression. He nails it. Jeff explains, I had testicular cancer in the spring of 2009. The cancer wasn't really the hard part, it was mostly the depression, combined with all the dumb shit that people had to say about it. I told this story [...] More
EFF beats the Trans Pacific Partnership to Peru, sounds the alarm about upcoming brutal, secret copyright treaty meeting
Danny O'Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, The latest round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership starts today in Lima, Peru. Embedded in the trade agreement is an IP chapter that, according to leaks, exports the worst of US copyright law -- DRM blocks, extended copyright terms, ISPs as copyright cops -- without even of the [...] More
Monkey shares lollipop with puppy, then beats him with it
Because monkeys. (thanks, Tara McGinley!) More