Bobby Womack, a legend of soul, died today at age 70. (CNN)

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Not a man, a Time Lord.

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Our favorite six-year-old guest reviewer, Poesy Taylor Doctorow, is back with a review of the latest volume of Ariol, a French kids' comic that Papercutz is bringing out in English. Read the rest

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In each episode of the Gadgets podcast we recommend technology we love and use. Xeni, Jason, and Mark check out a pro-quality food dehydrator, a camera lens and eyeglass cleaning brush, a cool synthesizer kit, and more! Read the rest

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Don Jolly profiles Shannon Taggart, photographer of s'eances, spirits, and ectoplasm. What is beyond the veil—and what ISO does it look best at? Read the rest

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My friend has had gallstones, but with no insurance, just suffered through them for the last year. She just had her gallbladder taken out at the ER and is, happily, doing fine.

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One year ago today RIAA lies about Pandora's royalty rates: For example, the comparison to satellite streaming rates is pure spin -- it compares the rate of sending a song to every person turned into that satellite station to a single person listening to a Pandora stream.

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The ACLU reports [PDF] that when it made Freedom of Information requests for Massachusetts SWAT team records, the SWATs claimed that because they were organized as "law enforcement councils" (jointly owned by many police departments, with additional federal funding) that they were not government agencies at all, but rather private corporations, and not subject to open records laws.

SWATs are the white-hot center of the increasingly brutal and militarized response of US police forces, which have outfitted themselves with ex-Afghanistan/Iraq military materiel and have deployed it in an escalating violent series of attacks, largely as part of the war on drugs. As Radley Balko writes in the Washington Post, the SWATs' claim to be private companies doesn't pass the giggle test: they are funded by the government, pay government employees, and do the government's business.

The argument boils down to this: we are not the police, we are private mercenaries armed with automatic weapons and military-grade vehicles and equipment, and when we attack and kill in the streets of American cities, we do so as private soldiers who happen to be funded by the police departments' budgets.

The ACLU is suing the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council to challenge this ruse, but even if they win, this should be setting off alarm bells for anyone who believes in good government and responsible policing. The cornerstone of democratic legitimacy is a duty to the public, with all the transparency and respect that implies. When police forces up and down the state structure themselves to create and exploit a loophole that lets them obscure the details of their most violent, most spectacular screw-ups -- which generally result in gruesome injuries and deaths to innocent members of the public -- there is no way they can claim to be acting in the public interest.

The fact that the city governments that oversee these departments and the federal agencies that fund the LECs have been complicit in this suggests that this isn't a matter of police overreach, but rather is a policy that goes literally all the way to the top of the policing regulatory structure in America. Read the rest

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This is exciting - Locust Moon Press in Philadelphia is publishing a giant-sized tribute to the great Winsor McCay (Little Nemo, Gertie the Dinosaur).

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MonkeyParking is an iPhone app which allows users to auction their parking spaces.

On Monday, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera sent a cease-and-desist letter to MonkeyParking, threatening the startup with a lawsuit unless it shuts down operations in San Francisco by July 11.

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Our friend Janelle Hessig illustrated Brontez Purnell's funny, NSFW memoir, The Cruising Diaries. It's a collection of Purnell's "various sexual follies and misadventures around '00s Oakland. Taco truck blowjobs, 'shrooms, Santa - everything you could want from an illustrated sex memoir and much, much more." Get a copy from Gimme Action.

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Mark Hurst, CEO and founder of Creative Good, is our guest on the Cool Tools Show this week. Our highly productive discussion yields tips on how to properly rinse your text, type more efficiently, and learn Mandarin Chinese in your spare time. (more…)

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Sign up for my free 2-day video course on making cool stuff with your kids.

Make your weekends more awesome with activities you and your kids can get their hands on.

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From Antennae Books, "Polaroids: H.R. Giger." A collection of personal snapshots by the late Swiss artist and Academy Award-winning film designer best known for Alien.

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Medical historian Thomas Schlich wrote a fascinating essay for CNN about the history of prosthetic body parts and the "Bionic Men of World War I.

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Based on UPI photographer Arthur Sasse's famous photo taken on March 14, 1951, Albert Einstein's 72nd birthday. GIF source: Psychedelicacies (via Imaginary Foundation)

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It makes no sense.

Sharing to a social network or via email is a ubiquitous action nowadays but designers have still not been able to reach a consensus on what symbol to use to represent it. Not only does each major platform use a different icon, but they've each witnessed changes over the years.

Pixelapse explores.

[via Buffer]

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At Tested, exploring the origins of a keyboard symbol familiar to Apple computer users. Turns out it traces back to Borgholm castle in Sweden. In Sweden, the shape of the castle became a symbol used in street signs to indicate a point of interest or attraction. [via Buffer]

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Seattle's EMP Museum announced its 2014 inductees into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame: movie director Stanley Kubrick, writer and animator Hayao Miyazaki, author Olaf Stapledon, author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett, and the amazing Frank Frazetta.

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