Earlier today I pointed to Gemma Correll's timely and accurate video conference call bingo comic. In a similar vein here is Preston Reid's reenactment of different types of zoomers. I am guilty of having been "The one on an iPad," "The virtual backgrounder," and "The walker."

[via Digg]

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/24/this-video-shows-you-different.html

I think my feelings about this somewhat unlikely pairing of Tom Jones and Crosby, Still, Nash & Young can best be expressed by some of the comments on YouTube:

"When I was a kid, I thought Tom Jones was the height of uncool. Looking back, it was clearly the other way round."

"This is gonna be the LAMEST thing ever...10 seconds later...OMG...This is freakin' AWESOME!!!"

[H/t Michael Colombo]

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/24/crosby-stills-nash-young.html

How to medical pic.twitter.com/0EDqJcy38p

 Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) April 24, 2020

Why satirize what Trump says when the nonsense dropping out of his mouth is already comedy gold? Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/24/comedian-sarah-cooper-hilariou.html

Thirty year ago today, the space shuttle Discovery carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, opening up a new vista on our place in the universe.

In celebration of the anniversary, NASA released this astounding Hubble image of a region where stars are born in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest galaxies to our own at 163,000 light-years away. The image depicts a giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and a smaller blue nebula (NGC 2020).

According to NASA, "the image is nicknamed the 'Cosmic Reef,' because it resembles an undersea world."

"Hubble has given us stunning insights about the universe, from nearby planets to the farthest galaxies we have seen so far," said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science.

More about the image in the below video: Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/24/nasa-released-this-astonishing.html

Here's Weird Al's highlarious "Won't Eat Prunes Again," a parody of The Who's "Wont Get Fooled Again."

According to the "Unreleased 'Weird Al' Yankovic recordings" page, it was "written circa May, 1980; recorded in San Luis Obispo early July, 1980; also features Joel Miller (bongos), Joe Earley (jews harp); first aired on KMET July 13, 1980." Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/24/listen-to-weird-al-yankovics.html

DICK-RNN is a recurrent neural network trained with 10,000 doodles of dicks. You start drawing a shape and the AI tries its best to finish it as a penis. Starting with the balls helps a lot.

Try it.

For the technical background and conceptual inspiration: GitHub page for DICK-RNN Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/24/this-ais-only-function-is-to.html

It seems like odd timing for Architectural Digest to dig into its archival videos and make a supercut of celebrities' overlardered kitchens.

Also, I'm showing my cluelessness here, but I don't know any of these people, with the exception of Cara Delevingne.

[via Core77]

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/24/its-a-weird-time-for-archite.html

As Bruce Sterling says, "Impressive accuracy by whoever that is."

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/24/here-are-the-unambiguous-rules.html

The fun "Everybody Must Stay Home" music video is a greatest hits of COVID-19 memes for a song not-by-Bob Dylan.

"We will get through [this] if we keep our sanity as well as our sense of humor," write the creators. "The only thing more contagious than Covid-19, as it turns out, is creativity. " Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/24/everybody-must-stay-home.html

As a miniature modeler and painter, I am obsessed with any type of tiny world-building: model train boards, dioramas, dollhouses, and the like. So, naturally, I adore the work of "micro-mechanician" Bill Robertson.

You can learn more about Bill and his amazing work in this piece on the TED Ideas blog and in his TED talk.

When you look at a miniature, you can see so much more,” he says. “You can see the whole thing with one eye. When you look at a little desk in your hand, it’s all right there in front of your eyes. There’s a fascination with seeing it all at once.

To give you a sense of the extremes to which Robertson goes, consider his reproduction of a microscope that had been made for King Louis XV. Robertson’s version consists of 125 infinitesimally small parts of metal, wood and glass. To match the microscope’s bronze shade, he melted Canadian gold coins and applied the metal to the frame. The original’s barrel was wrapped in shagreen, or sharkskin, and Robertson knew that he needed baby-shark skin for it to be more to scale, so the nodules and grain would be the correct size. He found the sharkskin at a shop outside Paris that had been serving cabinet makers for five generations. In the original text about the microscope, the builder said to polish the metal with the tooth of a wolf; Robertson got creative and used a puppy tooth instead.

Oh, and this microscope is fully functional, something that is very important to Robertson.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/the-tiny-worlds-of-micro-mec.html

After The Markup revealed that Facebook users were being targeted with bad ads for garbage products, Facebook has now agreed to remove “pseudoscience” as an ad targeting option for advertisers.

Yes, this was allowed during the coronavirus pandemic, until a news website shamed Facebook into eliminating it.

“Pseudoscience” was available until this week, The Markup reported, even as Facebook vowed to curb COVID-19 disinformation.

From The Markup:

But at the very same time, The Markup found, Facebook was allowing advertisers to profit from ads targeting people that the company believes are interested in “pseudoscience.” According to Facebook’s ad portal, the pseudoscience interest category contained more than 78 million people.

This week, The Markup paid to advertise a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience, and the ad was approved by Facebook.

Using the same tool, The Markup boosted a post targeting people interested in pseudoscience on Instagram, the Facebook-owned platform that is incredibly popular with Americans under 30. The ad was approved in minutes.

We reached out to Facebook asking about the targeting category on Monday morning. After asking for multiple extensions to formulate a response, company spokesperson Devon Kearns emailed The Markup on Wednesday evening to say that Facebook had eliminated the pseudoscience interest category.

Read the rest: Want to Find a Misinformed Public? Facebook’s Already Done It [themarkup.org

More at Reuters. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/facebook-nixes-pseudoscience.html

In Russia, two human rights groups say Vladimir Putin's government has vastly expanded surveillance to enforce the nation's coronavirus lockdown, using facial recognition technology and collection of personal data. The groups say regulation is required to ensure that surveillance measures are both temporary and proportionate.

From Reuters:

Police say Moscow’s 178,000 facial recognition cameras had caught 200 people breaking coronavirus lockdown restrictions by mid-March. The cameras are capable of tracking individuals using just their silhouette and of detecting groups standing too close to each other, according to the firm which supplied them.

The Russian capital has also introduced digital passes which are mandatory for anyone wanting to use public or private transport, a system that authorities say 21 of Russia’s more than 80 regions will soon copy in some form.

Agora, a Moscow-based human rights group, and Roskomsvoboda, a digital rights campaign group, said the unprecedented nature of the pandemic meant some curbing of citizens’ rights and freedoms was justified.

But in a joint appeal to regional governors they said the expanding surveillance measures had to be regulated to ensure they were legal, proportionate and temporary in nature.

“The authorities ... are actively developing technologies to collect personal data including photographs, videos, geolocations, home addresses, car number plates and medical diagnoses,” said Pavel Chikov, a lawyer who heads Agora.

Go read the rest of the piece. The quote in the last graf is a stunner.

Russia's lockdown surveillance measures need regulating, rights groups say [reuters] Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/under-coronavirus-lockdown-ru.html

Hope you like cats and cat hair.

From the delightful Instagram account of @rojiman and their Scottish Fold Cats, a series of cat portraits in which these kitties are wearing hats made from their own cat hair.

Go see the rest here, and they've been cross-posted on IMGUR as well.

Cats wearing hats made from their own hair

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/cats-wearing-hats-made-from-th.html

After a few weeks under the same roof all day long, your kids might be clamoring for something new to do. And while you’re probably loath to unleash more video game or YouTube time on their developing minds, you might have run out of fun, yet educational diversions to keep them busy.

However, fun, yet educational is pretty much the calling card of the fascinating AstroReality EARTH Augmented Reality Earth Model. This 3D-printed globe and accompanying app make it incredibly easy for kids and adults alike to understand more about the state of our planet today, all with unique interactivity that teaches and expands minds without ever feeling like some dry lecture.

The globe comes in 3.5 or 5-inch sizes, each intricately printed with polyresin density and hand-painted with precise paint pigment ratios to bring all the surface details of the planet’s oceans, mountains, and land masses to vivid life.

While the globe is a work of art in itself, the true magic happens when you open the AstroReality AR app and point your smartphone camera at the globe. Through the app, you can then explore how our planet actually works in precise detail, tracking Earth’s geological changes, wildlife, weather patterns and more.

You can follow exactly how humans have populated and transformed the globe, then shift to see how plants and animals create the biopersity and ecosystems that we depend on.

You can examine how geography, climate, and weather drive the migration of animals and the distribution of those ecosystems; how rocks and heat drive volcanoes, mountains and rivers; how clouds, gases, storms, and other sky phenomena keep life on Earth possible; and even the ocean’s impactful role in keeping the planet stable. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/astrorealitys-ar-earth-mode.html

Researchers at a top Paris hospital examined 343 coronavirus patients, "Among these patients, only five percent were smokers"

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/can-nicotine-prevent-coronavir.html

Parents who brought kids to playground for staged event were told to move on before arrest for breaking public health order

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/officer-you-dont-want-to.html

If you enter Indonesia and don't immediately self-quarantine for 14 days, beware: you might be locked up in a haunted house.

With 647 Covid-19 deaths so far in Indonesia, an area of Java is taking this peculiar measure to make sure people follow the social distancing rules.

According to The Jakarta Post:

Sragen regency head Kusdinar Untung Yuni Sukowati says she issued the unusual edict this week to deal with an influx of people to the area after lockdowns in the capital Jakarta and other major cities...

Sukowati instructed communities to repurpose abandoned houses that were feared to be haunted -- tapping widespread beliefs in the supernatural, which play a key role in Indonesian folklore.

"If there's an empty and haunted house in the village, put people in there and lock them up," Sukowati told AFP Tuesday when asked about the rule.

Officials in Sepat village chose a long-abandoned house and outfitted it with beds placed at a distance and separated by curtains.

So far, five victims, er, people have been scared straight with the haunted house treatment.

Image: PickPik Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/indonesia-punishes-self-quaran.html

Michael Caputo, the GOP media operative hired last week as a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has an unusually clean and boring twitter feed for a Trump crony.

This is because he deleted his Twitter archives after observers noted the long history of hysterical attacks and conspiracy theorizing there, including a racist rant about the Chinese posted last month.

In one recent conversation he described Trump critics as "the enemy of the people" and "carrying water for the Chinese Communist Party", suggested a criticism of Trump "rhymes with sedition", described the Covid-19 outbreak as a "national pandemic tragedy for the Democrats to win", and said that "millions of Chinese suck the blood of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters but some foriegner snuck in a bottle of the good stuff."

Not content with his remarks about the Chinese, Caputo accused George Soros of "requiring" a pandemic for his "political agenda" and posted the hashtag "#ChineseVirus" twenty times in a row, as many as Twitter would permit.

Caputo, a prolific user who often tweeted insults and profanity, recently erased nearly his entire Twitter history from before April 12. CNN's KFile used the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine to review more than 1300 deleted tweets and retweets from late February to early April many, of which were regarding the rapidly spreading coronavirus.

Caputo's ascent is another remindrt there is no bottom. CNN collects all his conspiracy theory stuff from March in one item. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/new-u-s-department-of-health.html

I'm a paying subscriber to Amazon Kindle Unlimited program. For $10 a month I can read as many books as I want from a huge list of excellent books.

One that I just got is Randall Monroe's What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. The book answers questions like "If every person on earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time, will it change color?" and "What would happen if the Earth and all terrestrial objects suddenly stopped spinning, but the atmosphere retained its velocity?" and "What would happen if everyone on Earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?"

If you don't yet have Kindle Unlimited and would like to check it out, you can try it for free for a month. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/what-if-by-randall-xkcd.html

Back in the late 1980s, I would sometimes amuse myself by running a microphone through a digital audio effects processor and twiddle the knobs to transform my voice in very weird ways while listening in headphones. It provided hours of mindbending entertainment. Ah, the good ol' daze. L'eo Ch'eron's WebGL particles experiment, called "Sand Ghost," gives me a similar feeling but it's visual and uses a webcam. Freak yourself out.

(via Waxy) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/04/23/try-this-freaky-webcam-tool-to.html