I'm a little late to the party as I've just discovered the fantastic world of YouTuber Pickitup's ska covers! K.K. Slider himself would be impressed by his ska-jazz cover of the Animal Crossing: New Horizons theme. Now, if that's not your thing, Pickitup's got a huge catalog of other ska/[insert music genre here] covers on his channel Ska Tune Network that are sure to delight.

From his Patreon:

I have been given this gift and love for music, and i've chosen to do the most important thing I can possibly think of with it, and that's to create ska covers of various songs.

This entire journey began on christmas of 2016, when I jokingly posted on facebook saying I should make a bad ska cover of a christmas song, and everyone encouraged me to actually do it, so I did it and people loved it, so since then I've been using my resourses to record myself playing guitar, bass, trumpet, trombone, saxophone, keyboard, and sometimes unconventional instruments like viola, ukulele, euphonium, and honestly anything I can get my hands on to create covers of songs I find interesting or songs other people tell me I should do!

Here's another fun one: A ska-punk one of Billie Eilish's "Bad Guy."

screengrab via Ska Tune Network Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/this-ska-jazz-cover-of-the-ani.html

Shannon LaNier is a television reporter, actor, author, and a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. He's also a Black man — the sixth great-grandson of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who had six children with the Founding Father.

Dressed in period clothing, LaNier recently stepped in front of the camera of Drew Gardner, a photographer who painstakingly re-creates portraits of historical figures with their direct descendants. His ongoing Descendants project is a commission by the Smithsonian.

Shannon LaNier chose not to wear a wig while posing as his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. “I didn’t want to become Jefferson,” says LaNier, who has gone to reunions at Monticello and co-authored the book Jefferson’s Children: The Story of One American Family. “My ancestor had his dreams—and now it’s up to all of us living in America today to make sure no one is excluded from the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

LaNier also had this to say about his famous relative:

“He was a brilliant man who preached equality, but he didn’t practice it. He owned people. And now I’m here because of it.”

Watch the behind-the-scenes video of this portrait being made.

(Smithsonian Magazine)

screengrabs via Smithsonian/Drew Gardner

Thanks, Isabel! Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/sixth-great-grandson-of-thomas.html

Photographer Drew Gardner created a photo series depicting descendants of historical figures, each posed as their ancestors. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Dickens... It's surprising how uncanny the resemblances often are. But none are so fascinating as his portrait of Shannon LaNier, the great^6-grandson of Thomas Jefferson.

The recreation was based on the famous portrait of Jefferson by American painter Rembrandt Peale, and Gardner shot his portrait using a Fujifilm GFX 50S and a Zeiss Otus 85mm f/1.4 lens. LaNier, a black man who descended from Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, tells Smithsonian that he has complex feelings about being a Jefferson descendant, and he chose to not wear a wig to more faithfully recreate his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s portrait.

“He was a brilliant man who preached equality, but he didn’t practice it,” LaNier tells the magazine. “He owned people. And now I’m here because of it.”

The series was commissioned by the Smithsonian; click through for a making-of video. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/792078.html

Earlier this year, we learned that Python had finally accomplished a feat other programming languages had failed for decades, to surpass Java as the second most-used coding language in the world. For its versatility and ease of use alone, its ascent among programmers isn’t hugely surprising. Then when you factor in its key role in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, the question becomes how soon until it knocks off JavaScript to become no. 1?

Either way, Python mastery is a significant talent worthy of any web creator’s skill set — and The Complete Python eBook and Video Course Bundle can offer that learning impactfully and at your own pace.

This collection comes with five videos and five ebooks, each exploring different facets of Python and its application across some of the fastest-growing tech job sectors anywhere. 

Python’s explosive rise goes hand in hand with the emergence of data science and data analytics, mining key findings from large data sets. Each video, all between two and four hours in length, bring users through various Python uses, starting with Learning Python for Data Science, as users learn data analysis, manipulation, and visualization using the Pandas library, then create statistical plots using Matplotlib and Seaborn to find all insightful patterns hidden in the data.

From there, the other video courses dig into other major Python uses, from how to build neural networks using deep learning techniques in PyTorch (Deep Learning with PyTorch) to a full understanding of artificial intelligence (Advanced Artificial Intelligence Projects with Python) to using the scikit-learn library to design and build model pipelines to make machines actually think for themselves (Hands-On Machine Learning with Python & Scikit-Learn). Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/python-is-fueling-some-of-tech.html

Several weeks ago, I put out a call in my weekly maker tips newsletter, Tips, Tools, and Shop Tales. A friend who works in a shared workshop was being called back to the job and he was curious to know what sorts of safety guidelines other shared shops were implementing. So, I asked my readers.

One respondent, Jeff Powers, works in a architectural modeling shop in London. He submitted this list of their COVID-era shop practices. I thought it was useful enough to also share here on Boing Boing.

***

We are an architectural workshop/model shop in London and have a similar issue. We luckily have multiple workshop spaces (2 workshops, separate computer areas, a 3D print room, and CNC room). While some of the solutions are specific to our situation, hopefully some of them can help others.

1. Realisation by the team that the workshop is always an inherently risky place, and we should be used to taking precautions when we work anyway. From cleanliness, safe operation, and use of PPE, these habits just become slightly modified for COVID. Taking care and extra time before beginning a task and after it ends – to assess risk, cleanliness etc – is all the more important now, but should not significantly change any workflows. Safe operation is especially important during these times, you never want to go to the hospital with a workshop injury, but especially during these times, extra care should be observed so we don’t put any more unnecessary strain on the health care system. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/covid-safety-guidelines-for-sh.html

Mr Beast, creator of Finger on the App, a game in which players vie to be the last one to keep their finger on their smartphone screen (and occasionally move it to a new spot indicated by the app, to prevent cheating) announced that he is ending the competition with four players remaining.

He tweeted:

Dear the four remaining contestants with your finger still on the app, I’m ending it here. Three days is insane! You ALL win and will ALL receive $20,000! CONGRATULATIONS!

Dear the four remaining contestants with your finger still on the app, I’m ending it here. Three days is insane! You ALL win and will ALL receive $20,0000! CONGRATULATIONS!

 MrBeast (@MrBeastYT) July 3, 2020

GO TO SLEEP!

 MrBeast (@MrBeastYT) July 3, 2020

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/finger-on-the-app-creator-tell.html

A man tried to hitch a ride on a jet by hiding in one of the engines. It's a good thing he was caught before the pilot started it up.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/man-attempts-to-stowaway-in-je.html

The deadly 2013 El Reno tornado was 2.5 miles (4 km) wide and killed a team of tornado experts. But as Anton Seimon explains, his colleagues turned that tragedy into an opportunity to confirm a key element of tornado formation.

Through crowdsourcing, his team was able to demonstrate that this kind of tornado forms from the ground up, not from the clouds downward.

Image: YouTube / National Geographic Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/watch-how-crowdsourced-citizen.html

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/photo-of-a-freaky-human-sized.html

Republican strategist Steve Schmidt went on MSNBC to express his outrage over Trump's shocking inaction against Russia's well-documented program of paying bounties for dead American soldiers in Afghanistan:

We've had incompetent presidents, and dumb presidents, and dishonest presidents. But we've never had a faithless president, who is faithless to his oath, who refuses to defend the country from a hostile foreign power, whether it's an attack on the lives of our military or it's an attack on our election process, which so many hundreds of thousands of Americans have died to preserve and protect. It's a shameful, shameful despicable hour in the history of the American presidency, and of all of his degradations and desecrations of his office, this is the most severe. It's the most scandalous and it's should shock the conscience of every American. We have never had a president who refuses to fulfill their oath when it comes to being the Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States quite like Donald Trump.

Image by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America - Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/lincoln-projects-steve-schmi.html

Eric Trump posted a photo of Chelsea Clinton's wedding in which suspected pedophile Ghislaine Maxwell can be seen in attendance. “Birds of a feather,” he wrote. Almost immediately, people responded to the tweet with the many photos of Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein cozying up to Donald and Melania Trump.

Soon after that, young Eric deleted the tweet without explanation.

Seriously, why would he tweet this? https://t.co/ibSDUkPKNP pic.twitter.com/b4S3SvApP1

 George Conway (@gtconway3d) July 3, 2020

This is a great example of why I think so little of Eric Trump (and the other one). https://t.co/vuq41FQtPQ

 Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) July 3, 2020

Eric thinks he is on to something. pic.twitter.com/ew7wBci8tF

 KD (@Fly_Sistah) July 3, 2020

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/trumps-dumbest-son-deletes-t.html

Paraglider Hasan Kaval watches Tom and Jerry with a bag of chips and a can of soda as he sails over the Turkish Riviera on a couch. With no helmet and no seatbelt, Kaval looks like someone who's ready to settle in for the night -- except it's daytime -- as he changes into his slippers and stretches out his legs for his DIY flight. According to 9NewsAustralia, it took him two years to prepare for this flight, and besides the bumpy landing, it was as smooth as a kickback evening in the living room. (Forward to 1:15 in the video to see him launch.) Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/paraglider-flies-on-his-couch.html

Next year, the United States Mint will release a silver dollar coin commemorating astronaut and elementary school teacher Christa McAuliffe who died with her six crewmates when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after liftoff on January 28, 1986. The candidate coin designs (below) were presented to the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC) and the group's majority vote aligned with the preferences of the McAuliffe family. The US Treasury will make the final decision. From Space.com:

The heads-side design focuses on McAuliffe's profile, in a way reminiscent of the U.S. Mint's more traditional commemorative coins. The black and white NASA photograph on which it was based was taken on Sept. 12, 1985, while McAuliffe, NASA's "Teacher in Space" participant, received a briefing on the flight suit and personal hygiene equipment that she would use on Challenger's STS-51L mission. "With respect to the coin and the purpose of the coin, I think what strikes me is the gaze is to the future, as it should be," said [Christa McAuliffe's widower U.S. District Court judge Steven McAuliffe]. "It is the look of quiet, committed courageousness[...]"

The family's preferred tails-side design depicts McAuliffe in her role as a New Hampshire social studies teacher, prior to her being selected for NASA's Teacher in Space program from a nationwide pool of more than 11,000 applicants. She is shown standing alongside three children while pointing upwards to the sky[...]

Surcharges from the sale of the McAuliffe silver dollar will benefit Kamen's FIRST organization and its student robotics competitions for "the purpose of engaging and inspiring young people through mentor-based programs to become leaders in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics," [director of the U.S.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/us-silver-dollar-coin-design-c.html

Cory Olsen, aka The Tolkien Professor, explains how Tolkien's hobbit stories got fused with his earlier mythologic work around languages he created to become the Tolkien universe inhabited by Hobbits, Men, Ents, Elves, Dwarves, and what-not.

Olsen teaches at Signum University, which will offer a separate course in the fall titled The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien:

Place is one of the defining features of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium; Middle-earth is arguably its most constant and central character. How and why did he build what he called a secondary world, and in what ways did our primary world help to shape its landscape, geography and cultures? How does his work relate to contemporary understanding of the cultural landscape, to ideas of nationhood, and to environmental issues?

John Garth, influential Tolkien biographer and scholar, will act as your guide in this deep dive into the themes he researched for his latest book, The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien: The Places that Inspired Middle-earth.

Image: YouTube / WIRED Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/watch-this-tolkein-experts-m.html

Someone outfitted a Boston Dynamics SPOT mobile robot with a silly fake horse head and suddenly the future of robotics looks a lot less scary.

As esteemed futurist Jim Dator once said, "Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous." Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/excellent-absurd-video-of-bost.html

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/03/racist-professor-fired.html

Between work, family obligations, and just getting to bed at a decent hour, we all have a lot on our plates these days. So, it’s easy for things like grooming and skincare to never be a high-priority issue.

That is until they become a high priority issue. Like when your face constantly breaks out. Or when it dries out and flakes or cracks like the desert. Or when everyone you know asks why you look so tired or pale or just generally awful lately.

Eventually, self-realization happens, and that's when we finally head over to the skincare aisle, where we are promptly overwhelmed by all the creams, washes, and masks that we can't hope to make heads or tails of.

To cut through all that noise, Geologie has tried to boil basic men’s skincare down to easy to follow essentials. Because let’s face it: No one has the time or energy to figure out what the heck retinol and niacinamide are.

Geologie is men’s skincare reinvented and utterly simplified. When you go to the Geologie website, you take a quick 30-second diagnostic quiz about your skincare trouble areas. From there, Geologie whips up a customized four-step regimen that specifically addresses your skin and your priorities, then ships a 30-day trial supply right to your door for $37.

All the Geologie products are built to be powerful, effective, and simple with clinically-proven active ingredients that get you results.

Each morning, spend 60 seconds using the Everyday Face Wash to rinse away dead skin cells, then clean up with a blast of the Vital Morning Face Cream moisturizer-slash-SPF.  Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/finally-skincare-for-men-that.html

"Pence was scheduled to go to Phoenix on Tuesday but went on Wednesday instead so that healthy agents could be deployed for his visit."

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/pences-arizona-trip-was-post.html

On Thursday, Tesla denied media reports that it fired employees who chose to stay at home during the coronavirus pandemic, rather than expose themselves to possible infection at Elon Musk's California factory.

In a blog post today, “The Tesla Team” says it waived the company attendance policy for several weeks after obtaining approval to reopen factories, and offered employees "a window of time to stay home no questions asked".

Read the Tesla post: Health and Safety at Tesla The Tesla Team July 2, 2020

The Washington Post reported yesterday that three Tesla employees were fired after they chose to stay home from the Fremont, California, factory. Tesla is denying this, today.

More at Reuters: Tesla denies reports of firing employees who chose to stay at home Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/tesla-denies-reports-of-firing.html

Today’s teachers extol the virtues of hands-on learning, the method of helping students, particularly the youngest children, learn through basic doing. From trial-and-error methods to practice honing their emerging skills, youngsters can soak up a world of learning opportunities when their developing minds are unleashed. 

While the thought of dropping a smartphone or tablet into the hands of a pre-schooler and setting them loose online can instinctively make a parent feel like a bad mom or dad, it all comes back to where you’re turning that child loose. In a learning-rich environment like the Papumba Fun Learning App for Kids, there won’t be any guilt handing over a device and allowing them to dive right in.

As the top-ranked play-based preschool academy in over 30 countries, the app offers children from 2 to 7 years old over 500 different interactive games and activities, each created to foster learning in important STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) skills.  

Papumba is chock full of bright engaging animation and all kinds of fun characters that lead young learners through lessons that develop their primary critical thinking skills.

No matter a child’s age or skill level, Papumba adapts to each child’s needs, offering opportunity and encouragement, and their own pace. 

All of Papumba’s content is downloadable, so there doesn’t have to be an active WiFi connection to keep playing. And while all the games are fashioned for a single child, they’re also designed to be expandable so Mom, Dad, siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents can get in on the game as well to help promote the learning and make it more fun for the child. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/07/02/papumba-is-the-worlds-top-r.html