Arnold Schwarzenegger delivers the speech Trump should have made in response to the Charlottesville violence. He also has a few choice things to say about white supremacists and neo-Nazis; in short they are a cancer and are losers. Read the rest
It probably won't last long, but the Nintendo Switch with gray Joy-Con is in the Amazon store right now for $299. We got one a few weeks ago and haven't touched our Wii-U since. Read the rest
A woman from Alberta lost her diamond engagement ring while gardening 13 years ago, but her grandaughter found it in the middle of a carrot growing on the family farm.
Read the restWhen days of searching proved fruitless, she decided not to tell her husband. “I didn’t tell him, even, because I thought for sure he’d give me heck or something,” she said. “Then I finally went to the jeweller and bought a cheap ring. I only told my son, I didn’t tell nobody else.”
Her husband – who died five years ago, shortly after the couple’s 60th wedding anniversary – never noticed the swap, said Grams.
The missing ring remained a secret until earlier this week, when her granddaughter brought over a freshly-picked carrot that had an ornate ring encircling it. “I recognised it right away,” said Grams. “They found it yesterday when my daughter-in-law was digging carrots for supper.”
Colleen Daley said she hadn’t noticed the ring around the carrot when she picked it. She had briefly contemplated feeding the malformed carrot to her dog, but decided against it, only to later notice the ring as she was washing the carrot. “It was pretty weird-looking,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
In Donald Bell's latest Maker Update video, he looks at acoustic levitation, an Arduino made by Sony, a new kit by Anouk Wipprecht, self-centering drill bits, and a turning old monitors into a video wall. See show notes here. Read the rest
Before Chris Cantwell became infamous as the angry white supremacist in Vice's Charlottesville: Race and Terror and soon after as the weeping, frightened white supremacist in a viral video, he was an armed harasser of parking meter officers. In fact, in 2014 The Colbert Report profiled Cantwell and two other equally nutty members of his group. They harassed an Iraq veteran who was a meter officer so much that he quit his job. "Very fine" people indeed.
Here's the video:
From Heavy:
Read the restThe 36-year-old Cantwell, who runs a podcast called Radical Agenda, is heard sharing his anti-Semitic and racist views in the Vice film, even telling reporter Elle Reve that he doesn’t think President Donald Trump is racist enough because he allowed his daughter Ivanka Trump to marry the Jewish Jared Kushner. “I don’t think that you can feel about race the way I do and watch that Kushner bastard walk around with the beautiful girl,” Cantwell said.
My friend John Park sent me the following:
This is an article about my old friend, UVa housemate, fellow Glee Club member, and all around wonderful character, D.R. Tyler Magill, who took on Nazis in Charlottesville and has now suffered a stroke.In the video below we see Tyler doing the right thing, in a smart, calm way, as he chased Nazi organizer Jason Kessler from the podium along with a group of fellow protesters. This, despite having already been doused in torch fuel and struck with torches by fascist thugs as he and a group of 25 students were surrounded by the alt-right mob at the base of the statue on Saturday night. At one point he was struck in the neck, which damaged an artery, leading to his stroke.
He's stable from what we know, and has a fundraising goal to cover sick leave costs, but more publicity about his actions would be a good thing.
I hope Tyler inspires others to be this brave in the face of fascist thugs.
Here's another person who was injured in the same terrorist attack that killed Heather Heyer. Her name is Natalie Romero:
#BREAKING Natalie Romero @HoustonISD grad says she was hit by car in #Charolettesville protest. #khou11 w/ mom when she got call from 20YO pic.twitter.com/fnRtMnpK1a
— Melissa Correa (@MCorreaKHOU) August 13, 2017
Here's a USA Today article about Natalie. She was in the Junior ROTC. Read the rest
The old ice cream scoop we had wasn't really an ice cream scoop. It was a disher, and was more suited for scooping mashed potatoes than ice cream. When the trigger mechanism on it finally broke, I happily got rid of it and replaced it with the OXO Good Grips Solid Stainless Steel Ice Cream Scoop ($15). This surprisingly heavy scoop is made from a solid chunk of stainless steel with a comfortable rubber grip, and comes with a pointed end that digs right into hard ice cream, especially if you run hot water over it. It's supposedly dishwasher safe but why put it in the dishwasher? Just rinse it and dry it with a towel. Read the rest
In March, Foreign Policy asked a number of national security experts to estimate the likelihood of a second US civil war in the next 10-15 years. The average estimate was 35%. This was before Charlottesville.
Chukwuemeka Afigbo of Lagos demonstrates a public toilet soap dispenser that only serves light-skinned people.
Read the restIf you have ever had a problem grasping the importance of diversity in tech and its impact on society, watch this video pic.twitter.com/ZJ1Je1C4NW
— Chukwuemeka Afigbo (@nke_ise) August 16, 2017
A 28-year-old woman from British Columbia was banned for life from entering the United States after a US Customs and Border Protection agent searched her phone for two hours and found an email she'd written to her doctor about an accidental drug overdose. Chelsea had gone to a strip club in 2016 for a friend's birthday and one of the women in the party offered her some "cocaine" that turned out to be fentanyl. Her friend died and she was taken to the emergency room and saved after being injected with the opioid overdose antidote naloxone.
When border officials learned about the incident by taking Chelsea's phone and reading her email to her doctor, they informed her that she was being issued a lifetime ban from entering the US.
From Vice:
Read the restCanadians have also reported being banned from the US for admitting to smoking weed before. Since Trump has taken office, he's promised to crack down on border security, including the controversial "Muslim ban."
Waivers that temporarily allow entrance to the US like the one Chelsea is currently trying to obtain only last one to five years, so she'll need to get a new one every so often if she plans to keep visiting the States. Waivers cost $585 to apply for and take about six months to be issued.
Chelsea wants to warn others about how deeply they'll search smartphones at the US border. Even in the context of North America's current opioid crisis, which is killing thousands annually in the US and Canada, no extra compassion was given to someone who accidentally ingested fentanyl and nearly died from it.
Pres. Trump: There were "very fine people on both sides" at Charlottesville white supremacist rally. https://t.co/JWgPb30f7H pic.twitter.com/zgrEodkEK1
— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 15, 2017
On one side is Americans. On the other side is Nazis. Trump told reporters there were "very fine people on both sides" at the Charlottesville white supremacist rally.
More coverage from the same event here. Read the rest
This is neat: "A free, one-hour online class anyone can take to learn everything they need to know about the eclipse. It’s part of a real college course at University of Colorado, Boulder taught by Prof. Douglas Duncan, a professional astronomer and director of the Fiske Planetarium."
Read the restA total eclipse is one of the most spectacular sights you can ever see! It looks like the end of the world may be at hand. There is a black hole in the sky where the sun should be. Pink flames of solar prominences and long silver streamers of the sun's corona stretch across the sky. It gets cold, and animals do strange things. People scream and shout and cheer, and remember the experience their whole life. But total eclipses are important scientifically as well. They let us see parts of the sun’s atmosphere that are otherwise invisible. A total eclipse presented the first chance to test Einstein’s prediction that matter can bend space – like near a black hole. The best total eclipse in the United States in 40 years happens August 21st, 2017.
This course has two primary goals:
1) to get you excited for the total solar eclipse coming in August 2017 and prepare you and your community to safely view it
2) to provide an inviting overview of the science of the sun and the physics of light
If you are most interested in preparing for the eclipse, you can hop right into Week 5! If you want the full course experience, and to get some fun scientific context for what you'll be seeing on August 21st, start with Week 1 and move through the course week by week!
I just pre-ordered my copy of Wired founder Louis Rossetto's forthcoming novel, Change Is Good, on Kickstarter. I was at Wired in the early years (1993-1998) and every day was a thrilling adventure.
Read the restIn the 1990s, they came from all over the world. Young people with fire in their eyes and big dreams in their hearts flooded into South of Market, San Francisco, the epicenter of the Digital Revolution that was changing everything.
We now live like settlers in the world these young pioneers created. But for those young revolutionaries, the future was uncharted, full of wonder and risk. In the face of insurmountable opportunity, they had only their optimism, their grit, and each other.
Change Is Good is the novel that tells their story — at the precise moment when their utopianism was turning into the orgy of the Dotcom Bubble.
Written by Louis Rossetto, the co-founder and editor of Wired, the self-proclaimed “Mouthpiece of the Digital Revolution,” Change is Good is a labor of love, written over the past 12 years to reconnect to and celebrate the optimism and courage of the young pioneers who changed the world forever.
In many ways, the Digital Revolution perfectly parallels the ferocious disruption and explosion of knowledge birthed by the start of the Information Age – an age made possible by a then revolutionary new technology: the Gutenberg printing press.
What better way to release an iconic story of the Digital Revolution than to print it on a classic letterpress using a revolutionary new printing method: Post Digital Printing.
A car pulls into a driveway. A woman steps out of the front passenger side car to greet her dog. Seconds later, another car drives up behind her and a masked man with a gun jumps out and runs towards her. In the nick of time, she gets back in the car and the car backs up very quickly, away from the car jackers. The dog was uninjured. Read the rest
Silly Putty has an interesting property. It's soft when you squeeze it slowly, but rock hard if you hit it with a hammer. Someone came up with the good idea of making speed bumps (or "sleeping policemen," as they cleverly call them in the UK) out of a Silly Putty like substance. That way, slow drivers get a smooth ride, but the faster you go, the more the bump punishes you. It would be fun to design the speed bump in such a way that it rips the undercarriage out of any car going twice the speed limit.
Kottke says: "This is perhaps the best on-the-ground view of what went down in Charlottesville over the weekend. It’s graphic in spots. Prepare to get angry and sad and frustrated and scared."
On Saturday hundreds of white nationalists, alt-righters, and neo-Nazis traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia to participate in the “Unite the Right” rally. By Saturday evening three people were dead — one protester, and two police officers — and many more injured.
“VICE News Tonight” correspondent Elle Reeve went behind the scenes with white nationalist leaders, including Christopher Cantwell, Robert Ray, David Duke, and Matthew Heimbach — as well as counter-protesters. VICE News Tonight also spoke with residents of Charlottesville, members of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Charlottesville Police.
From the neo-Nazi protests at Emancipation Park to Cantwell’s hideaway outside of Virginia, “VICE News Tonight” provides viewers with exclusive, up close and personal access inside the unrest.
UPDATE 8/15/2017:Independent documentary photographer Daniel Hosterman wrote: "I think the Vice piece did a reasonable job showing on very small slice of what happened in Charlottesville and in the typical Vice, sensationalist style. It definitely showed a lot of the extremist language and ideology of the white supremacist contingent and showed how they can be terrifying. Those of us on the ground -- who have been to events like these before -- already knew that.
What the Vice video did not show was the nature of the folks resisting these white supremacists, the utter disregard of law enforcement for the safety of the citizens of Charlottesville, and the really powerful displays of bravery I witnessed over those couple of days.
“I am seriously considering a pardon for Sheriff Arpaio," Trump told Fox News on Sunday. "He has done a lot in the fight against illegal immigration. He’s a great American patriot and I hate to see what has happened to him.”
