I can confirm that the little Bluetooth speaker that was on sale for $7 last week sounds great. Despite its diminutive size, the sound is very solid and can be turned up a lot louder than I would have thought. I don't know if the Amazon promo code Y98TGMLD still works, but even if it doesn't $15 is a good price. I'm going to take this with me on trips so I can listen to music and podcasts in my hotel.
Acclaimed UK photographer Andy Rosen, who took many of the iconic photos of the early punk days, has written a nerve-racking, but entertaining piece about his bizarre experience he had after photographing Simon LeBon of Duran Duran.
Excerpt:
It all began innocently with an assignment to photograph Simon Le Bon, lead singer of Duran Duran in 1983. It was the first time one of my images was worth more than the cost of an Indian takeaway and a pint of beer. It should have been a great moment. Instead, it ended badly, very badly. The band’s representatives threatened me to try and get me to sign over the copyright. When I refused they told me that if I sold the pictures “blood would be spilled”. A contract would be put out on me, my fingers would be broken, and for the next ten years, I better be watching behind me. The irony is everybody loved the images.
Recently, Rosen launched a blockchain based company called Sendergram, "a secure blockchain registered file sending, presentation, delivery and transaction platform for digital media for all creative types."
What makes Sendergram unique, is the way in which it aggregates and networks a variety of cloud storage services and ties them together with blockchain-based registration, tracking and certification to reinforce, protect and report copyright infringement.
From concept to delivery an immutable, time-stamped, and legally-defensible record of each digital asset and all communication, at each stage of the creative process, are protected, tracked & blockchain registered. Sendergram leverages the blockchain to establish accountability for all parties with verifiable proof of the existence, integrity, and authorship of any intellectual property, transaction or communication.
After 8th-grader Sasha Matthews posted here about the copyright-swiping terms and conditions imposed in Scholastic's annual Art & Writing Awards, the group says it will no longer demand legal ownership of youngsters' submissions.
Scholastic's competition is a marquee annual event celebrating the creative work of schoolchildren, but its rules assign the company copyright ownership of entries forever. This would allow Scholastic to reuse and profit from the work without the creators' permission--and prevent the creator from stopping them or doing likewise.
Now the company is planning a revision to its rules so that it can use the work, but the kids still own it. Though Scholastic hasn't said exactly what form the new terms and conditions will take, similar events require only a license to use the work.
Nicole Brown writes:
Matthews wrote about the copyright issue for a school assignment and got it published in February on the blog Boing Boing.
Shortly after, the alliance reached out to her dad, letting him know they would review its terms and conditions before next year’s contest.
“The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the 501 (c)(3) nonprofit that administers the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, is currently exploring a revision to the program’s terms & conditions for participants,” McEnerney confirmed.
Photo: Scott Matthews
An undercover police car ran a red light at an intersection in Brooklyn, almost cutting off a driver who made a legal left turn in front of him. The officer pulled him over and took pleasure in repeatedly asking the driver why he was "shaking so hard." The officer's amusement was cut short when the driver informed the officer that he had a dashcam recording that would prove the officer a liar in court. The cop made one last attempt to nail the driver for not having his current address on his license, but the driver pointed out that he didn't need to get a new license to reflect that.
From YouTube: "Undercover silver police car with three officers, NY Plate HMJ 7410. Approximately around 12-12:15am on March 9th at the intersection of Morgan and Grand."
French antipodists Régina and Yvonne Baranton wow the audience in this 1969 episode of the Ed Sullivan Show. Fun fact: Regina was married to famous juggler Gil Dova:
A young man named Mohammad Hashem caused a furor on a live Egypt television show after telling the host and his "debate" partner, former Deputy Sheikh of Al-Azhar Mahmoud Ashour, that he was an atheist. Ashour looked as if he'd been startled awake, saying "What? What was that?" When the Hashem said the words "Big Bang" in English, the host (looking dapper in an electric blue suit) angrily interrupted and shouted "Speak Arabic! You are in Egypt and you are addressing simple people, so don't use big words for no reason."
It went downhill from there, with the host whipping himself into an artificial frenzy worthy of Wally George. "You are confused and unreliable," he said. "You deny the existence of God and reject our religion and principles. You come here to talk about a certain idea, but have nothing to offer. You offer atheism! You offer heresy!" The former Deputy Sheikh of Al-Azhar told Hashem he needed "psychiatric treatment." The host jumped in and said, "I advise you to leave the studio and go straight to a psychiatric hospital... Please get up and leave and I will continue the show with Dr. Mahmoud."
As a species, we've got a long history of being shitty to one another for no other reason than skin color. White folks, myself included, have arguably earned the right to drop the mic on bigotry. Over the centuries, we honed systemic racism to such a razor edge that the cuts our ugly worldview made are still being suffered today. As our world's recent politics have illustrated, a lot of people still buy into this superiority-of-the-white-man bullshit. But it's getting better. Views are changing, albeit slowly, and we're crawling on our knees towards equality.
I think that one of the reasons that it's taking us so long to get there is that no one likes to admit that they're wrong. Doing so puts you in a perceived position of weakness, which is ironic given that owning one's faults can be so powerful. Believing this as I do, I was really surprised to read this morning that National Geographic decided to call itself to account for the racist reporting that its correspondents have written and they've published over the decades:
Instead of wasting their time on naval gazing, the magazine's editorial team asked an outsider, historian John Edward Mason, to hunt down all of the ugly, racist writing he could find from National Geographic's archives. As National Geographic's current Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg explains, examining the publication's past was both painful and necessary:
I’m the tenth editor of National Geographic since its founding in 1888. I’m the first woman and the first Jewish person—a member of two groups that also once faced discrimination here. It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past. But when we decided to devote our April magazine to the topic of race, we thought we should examine our own history before turning our reportorial gaze to others.
Race is not a biological construct, as writer Elizabeth Kolbert explains in this issue, but a social one that can have devastating effects. “So many of the horrors of the past few centuries can be traced to the idea that one race is inferior to another,” she writes. “Racial distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and our sense of self.”
Focusing a lens on a publication's racism over the years would be a worthy, noteworthy accomplishment for any magazine. But when one with a pedigree and history like National Geographic does it? That's huge.
Image: National Geographic
Seamus Bellamy at 11:28 am | share | tweet | 8 comments
A man has been living in a tent hidden in a tube on top of a train station in Antioch, CA. He was spotted lowering a bicycle from roof and was reported to police, who determined he was maintaining an "unsafe camp."
From Fox News:
Officials from the city's public works department placed an officer in a boom truck, and then lifted him to the roof... The police department said "homelessness is not a crime," and officers try to "get our homeless citizens into services so they can have a stable environment." Adult film star Stormy Daniels doesn't want Trump's $130,000 hush money anymore. But unlike an unwanted new pair of shoes that suddenly feels too tight around the toes, can hush money be returned?
Daniels, aka Stephanie Clifford in real life, sent a letter to Trump's private lawyer Michael Cohen today offering to return the money for her freedom to freely share her story about Trump. This includes being free to share any text messages, photos and video she might have regarding their alleged affair.
According to NBC:
The letter says the money would be wired to an account designated by Trump by Friday. In return, Clifford would be allowed to "speak openly and freely about her prior relationship with the president and the attempts to silence her and use and publish and text messages, photos and videos relating to the president that she may have in her possession, all without fear of retribution or legal liability," the letter says.
"This has never been about the money," Clifford's lawyer, Michael Avenatti, told NBC News on Monday. "It has always been about Ms. Clifford being allowed to tell the truth. The American people should be permitted to judge for themselves who is shooting straight with them and who is misleading them. Our offer seeks to allow this to happen." I can't see what the upside for Trump would be in taking her up on her offer, besides the $130,000, which is just pennies to Trump according to all the bragging he's done about his finances.
You can read her letter here.
Image: CrazyJ - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
A good way to scare yourself is by googling "phosphorus shortage." Agriculture requires lots of phosphorus for fertilizer, and after it's spread on crops, most of it gets washed into the ocean, where it is irrecoverable. Without phosphorus, food production will plummet, unless people come up with new ways to grow food.
From the Global And Chinese Phosphate Fertilizer Industry, 2018 Market Research Report:
In 2007, at the current rate of consumption, the supply of phosphorus was estimated to run out in 345 years. However, some scientists thought that a "peak phosphorus" will occur in 30 years and Dana Cordell from Institute for Sustainable Futures said that at "current rates, reserves will be depleted in the next 50 to 100 years." From The Conversation:
Fertiliser use has quadrupled over the past half century and will continue rising as the population expands. The growing wealth of developing countries allows people to afford more meat which has a “phosphorus footprint” 50 times higher than most vegetables. This, together with the increasing usage of biofuels, is estimated to double the demand for phosphorus fertilisers by 2050.
Today phosphorus is also used in pharmaceuticals, personal care products, flame retardants, catalysts for chemical industries, building materials, cleaners, detergents and food preservatives. From Critical Shots:
The greatest natural reserves of unmined phosphorus exist in [Morocco]...
According to the USGS, 42% of all phosphorus imported by the United States between 2012-2015 came from Morocco. China beats them out by a tremendous margin in production, but based on the most recent data Morocco and Western Sahara combined are sitting on 50,000,000,000 metric tons of reserves. From NPR:
GRANTHAM: We're on a finite planet with finite reserves of phosphorus. And we are mining it and running through the supply. That should make the hair on the back of everybody's neck bristle.
SMITH: There are widely ranging estimates for just how close we are to the phosphorus cliff. Maybe we've got 30 years. Maybe we have 300 years. It's hard to estimate. This is Jeremy's take.
GRANTHAM: Whether it's 42 years, 62 years or 82 years doesn't really matter. We have to change our way of growing food.
DUFFIN: We've known for a while that phosphorus was limited. But the price was cheap, and the problem just seemed so distant, so people were kind of like, meh, we'll deal with that problem later.
SMITH: Then 2008 happened - the financial crisis. And along with many commodities, phosphate prices spiked, which - because of its use as a fertilizer - made food prices skyrocket. And now everybody's talking about phosphorus.
NARRATOR: Across the developing world in 2008, hungry people rioted as food supplies ran low and the price of phosphate rock spiked by 800 percent.
GRANTHAM: I would argue that that was a shot across the bows. That was the first warning to planet Earth that we are beginning to run out. From MIT:
China is a very inefficient consumer of fertilizer: a recent China Agriculture University study found that northern Chinese farmers use about 525 pounds of fertilizer per acre, of which 200 pounds is wasted into the environment. This is six times more fertilizer and 23 times more waste than the average American farmer in the midwest uses and produces (Shwartz, 2009). These phenomena of growth and overuse, coinciding with peak production, will drive prices drastically higher and force a number of changes in the world's food production and consumption. The potential for catastrophic food shortages and global famine looms without significant systemic changes.
When Nixon formed the EPA in 1970, the agency had the prescience to send photographers across America to photograph the kinds of environmental catastrophes that triggered its formation: chemical factories belching smoke; smog over cities; burning barges in the middle of waterways; clearcuts, litter and filthy lakes and rivers.
(more…)
London's housing bubble has appeared unprickable, stabilised by influxes of offshore money from "investors" who saw property in the capital as a safe, easily liquidated bet even after the 2008 crisis when the rest of the UK saw housing prices tumble.
(more…) "Only slighty exaggerated," it's titled. "Based on actual events. More or less. "
Russia-made nerve agents, chemical weapons of war, were used to poison a former spy who was living in the United Kingdom, and his daughter. That is the determination of the intelligence agencies of Britain, said Prime Minister Theresa May today from London.
She says an inter-agency investigation found that the mysterious poisoning of Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter, Yulia, 33, is being treated as a political assassination by Russia on British soil.
Prime Minister May today said it was an “indiscriminate and reckless act against the United Kingdom.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin in public comments last week obliquely seemed to take responsibility, while not addressing the event directly. “Those who serve us with poison will eventually swallow it and poison themselves,” Putin said, as news of the ex-spy's poisoning first broke.
On MSNBC as the news broke this afternoon, U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul said, “This is outrageous, They went to a town and poisond a pensioner in Salisbury, Hundreds of people were poisoned and injured. Demands a response from Nato and EU and I hope the president will understand the negative consequences of not responding, because that makes him look weak in the eyes of Vladimir Putin.”
Maker collective Hackerloop modified a Nerf gun into a bionic prosthetic for their friend Nicolas Huchet. He fires the gun via EMG (electromyography) sensors that detect when he tenses his forearm muscles.
"It all started with jokes about the fact that it was too easy for us to win over him in a nerf battle, as he’s missing his right hand," writes "tinkerer in chief" Valentin Squirelo.
From Medium:
DIY hardware is not just about temperature sensors and automated door locks anymore. Every hardware component used to make this gun can be found online.
“Electromyography is a great way to make the body communicate with hardware. We used it to detect electrical impulses and translated them into instructions for our gun. You could think of a thousand other uses.
You could think it’s not the first problem to solve for people with disabilities, but in fact being able to have fun with your friends with these wonderful toys is also a real game changer”.
This 3D printed house was unveiled today at SXSW in Austin, TX. A cement house like this – 650 square feet, single story – takes just 12-24 hours to "print."
It's "the first permitted, 3D-printed home created specifically for the developing world," says New Story, the non-profit for international housing, who has partnered with the 3D-printed housing construction company ICON to create 100 of these homes for low-income people in El Salvador by next year if all goes as planned.
According to The Verge:
Using the Vulcan printer, ICON can print an entire home for $10,000 and plans to bring costs down to $4,000 per house. “It’s much cheaper than the typical American home,” Ballard says. It’s capable of printing a home that’s 800 square feet, a significantly bigger structure than properties pushed by the tiny home movement, which top out at about 400 square feet. In contrast, the average New York apartment is about 866 square feet. Not only is the ICON/New Story partnership making really affordable housing, but it's also making really cool-looking houses. Take a look inside:
This isn't the first house to ever be 3D printed, but others before it “are printed in a warehouse, or they look like Yoda huts," Jason Ballard, co-founder of ICON, told The Verge. "For this venture to succeed, they have to be the best houses.”
In September 1981, Stevie Nicks was sitting in Annie Liebovitz's studio for a Rolling Stone photo shoot just after the release of her first solo album Bella Donna. While Nicks is having her makeup done, someone plays an early demo of "Wild Heart." The rest is magic. (via Kottke)
Thousands of years ago in Hierapolis (now Turkey), tourists visited a temple named Plutonium built at a cave thought to be a gateway to the underworld. Magically, large and small animals would drop dead at the entrance to the cave while priest somehow survived. This isn't legend, it's reality. And now scientists have determined why. From CNN:
Research published by the journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences in February shows that a fissure in the earth's surface, deep beneath the site, emits carbon dioxide at concentrations so high it can be deadly.
Using a portable gas analyzer, Hardy Pfanz and his team of volcanologists found CO2 at levels ranging from 4-53% at the mouth of the cave, and as high as 91% inside -- more than enough to kill living organisms...
Pfanz's research adds another possibility: the fact that the animals and priests are different heights. CO2 is a heavier than oxygen, therefore it settles lower, forming a toxic gas lake above the ground. "The nostrils of the animals were way in the gas lake," he says, whereas the priests stood taller, above the gas lake.
Above: digital rendering of the temple
While the Trump administration is pushing for more guns in schools by arming school teachers and other school employees, Trump's son-in-law Jared's brother Joshua Kushner reportedly donated $50,000 to March For Our Lives, a planned gun control demonstration across the nation scheduled for March 24.
According to Axios:
Josh Kushner — a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who founded Thrive Capital, a venture capital firm; Oscar, a health insurance company; and Cadre, a real estate investment platform (and brother of Jared) — has quietly donated $50,000 to March for Our Lives. After the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida last month, students from the school organized March For Our Lives, which will take place in Washington D.C. and dozens of other locations across the US. If you can't attend the march but want to participate in another way, you can donate here.
Via MashableHomeless man's camp hidden in decorative tube atop train station
Stormy Daniels offers to return $130,000 hush money to Trump in exchange for freedom to tell all
The world is running out of phosphorus, which threatens global food supply
America, before the EPA: the photos that the EPA commissioned to document the conditions that led to its formation
Brexit is deflating the London housing bubble, with prices down 15% in some neighbourhoods
Brief travel documentary about Oregon
“Highly Likely” Russia behind poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal & daughter, British PM Theresa May says
Sergei Skripal was convicted of spying by Russia in 2006.Ad agencies tell classic fairy tales in the form of six-second commercials
The Greatest Stories Retold is a project that presents classic fairy tales, like "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," in the form of commercials ranging from six seconds to over three minutes. Above, a six-second version of "The Ugly Duckling."
Bionic prosthetic Nerf gun for man without an arm
Check out this beautiful and super cheap 3D printed house unveiled today at SXSW
Stevie Nicks belts out "Wild Heart" during an Annie Leibovitz photo session (1981)
Why animals near the ancient Roman "gate to hell" really dropped dead
Trump's son-in-law's brother Joshua Kushner quietly donates $50,000 to gun-control's March For Our Lives
