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Learn more! Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/az89zP4wEaU/the-est-torch-l1-is-an-ultra-d.html

The final spot on Boston's city council race for at-large councillors went to Julia Mejia, who edged out her opponent Alejandra St. Guillen by a single vote (22,491 to 22,492). Both were in the running to be the first Latina elected to council.

The re-count took three days, and is described as "brutal" by WGBH's Isaiah Thompson.

Through the grueling three-day recount, Mejia and St. Guillen were cordial, complimenting each other's campaigns.

After St. Guillen conceded the race, it was her campaign Mejia first singled out for praise when she celebrated the victory, at last, in front of City Hall.

“I want to thank Alejandra St. Guillen for the hard race that she and her campaign team led,” Mejia told reporters.

In an election that will be remembered for a long time, both the winner and loser will have fought a clean fight.

Five Takeaways From What Might Have Been The Closest Election In Boston History [Isaiah Thompson/WGBH]

(Thanks, Kathy Padilla!)

(Image: About Labels) Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/FKquaOQ_aaY/22491-to-22492.html

Bunnie Huang (previously) is a legendary hardware hacker, and one of his claims to fame are his annual trips to Shenzhen -- China's electronics manufacturing hub -- with groups of MIT students to show them how electronic production actually works in the field, both so they can design projects with that reality in mind, and so that they can get an appreciation of what's happening behind the scenes when they order parts, tool up a line, or otherwise interact with the factories -- tiny and massive -- of the Pearl River Delta.

Huang's "Essential Guide to Shenzhen" grew out of that project: it's a soup-to-nuts, practical electronics hacker's guide to navigating Shenzhen, with point-to-translate guides to components, tools and tooling, bargaining, and transport. It's got chapters on spotting counterfeits, tipping, dress codes, local sights, haggling, and "technical Chinese" language notes. There's also a section on travel, visas, border-crossings and Chinese customs.

The book is all-but-out-of-print (Huang notes that "the last few physical copies of the book available for purchase are at MJ Maker’s stall on the 2nd floor of the SEG Plaza in Huaqiangbei. His stall number is 2A08; I think he has maybe 10 copies left as of this post. If you do stop by MJ’s booth, say hi for me"), and as the maps are out of date, he doesn't want to bother reprinting it.

Instead, he's put the whole book online as a free download (it's Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Sharealike), "so that others can swap out the map pages with something more up-to-date and have a swing at making their own derivative works."

As my friend Gavin Zhao once quipped, Chinese is a wonderful language for poetry, but difficult for precise technical communications.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/T_b_JbMEgH4/xing-pian-hao.html

In his latest BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller (previously) relates the key moments in the history of private equity, from its roots in the notorious "leveraged buyouts" of the 1980s, and explains exactly how the PE con works: successful, productive business are acquired through debt financing, drained of their cash and assets, and then killed, leaving workers unemployed and with their pension funds looted, and with the business's creditors out in the cold.

Private equity's story begins with William Simon, "a mean, nasty, tough bond trader who took no BS from anyone" whose idea of child-rearing was the douse his children with buckets of ice-water to rouse them from bed on weekend mornings. Simon was given senior Treasury appointments under Nixon/Ford, then became America's energy czar during the oil crisis. He was pro-austerity and blocked the bailout of NYC in 1975.

Once out of government service, Simon set about to create a Republican "counter-intelligentsia" to swing the party to the right. He ran the influential far-right think-tank the Olin Foundation, and dispersed money to fund law and economics scholars who were devoted to discrediting the New Deal and the idea of any limits on corporate power, all cloaked in "scientific" rhetoric.

The darlings of this movement -- Henry Manne, Milton Friedman, Michael Jenson -- promoted the idea of "shareholder capitalism" and the notion that managers have a single duty: to put as much money in the pockets of investors, even at the expense of the business's sustainability or the well-being of its workers. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/zA3rphVjdow/capitalisms-grave-diggers.html

Here's what's happened: first, ICANN (the legendarily opaque US corporation that runs the internet's Domain Name System) approved a change in pricing for .ORG domains, run by the nonprofit Internet Society (ISOC) through its Public Interest Registry (PIR), allowing the registry to raise prices. The change was done entirely by staff, without board approval.

Next, several of the people involved in that decision migrate from ICANN to ISOC or to a brand-new private equity fund called Ethos Capital, whose major investors are three families of Republican billionaires: the Romneys, the Perots and the Johnsons.

Ethos then buys the Public Interest Registry from ISOC for a little over a billion dollars -- about a billion dollars less than it's likely worth -- and makes a nonbinding pledge to limit its price increases to 10%, compounded annually (!!) and starts a PR campaign to argue that this is very reasonable (however, none of the defenders of this practice are willing to refinance their mortgages on these "reasonable" terms, nor to offer bonds for sale at that rate). They buy the top Google Adwords for search terms related to the sale, and hire one of the most expensive PR firms in the business to run interference for them.

But despite this charm offensive, the opposition continues to mount. EFF and a bunch of other nonprofits point out that selling .ORG to private equity looters will put these shadowy power-brokers in a position to censor some of the world's leading human rights and nonprofit organizations by taking away their domain names (domain names have become a central nexus of censorship efforts). Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/arOITeoPaAg/its-an-ethos.html

The RV might be winterized and staying put until the spring thaw, but we're not. Now that I have the all clear from my cardiologist, my wife and are are planning a 20-day trip to Morocco. It'll be the first time that either of us has set foot on the African continent: With its French colonial influence and their King's tourist-friendly policies, it seems like a great place to dip our toes in the continent's waters.

Plus, it's cities, country side deserts and mountains are absolutely stunning. With out tickets purchased, we're now in the throes of planning our itinerary (which we always tend to keep a bit loosey-goosey.) I'm brushing up on my mediocre French. My partner is taking Darija lessons. I'm taking a HEAT course to polish up my already existing skill set, given that Morocco's neighbors have been a little rambunctious of late.

Perhaps most important out of all of our preparations, is the fact that my travel playlist is slowly coming together. I find that having the right music while moving into and out of an adventure helps to set the mood for the whole thing.

Tinariwen is a band that's been around for decades. Maybe you've heard of them. They only showed up as a ping on my radar within the last year.  originally hails from Mali,

From Wikipedia:

Tinariwen is a group of Tuareg musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali. The band was formed in 1979^[2] in Tamanrasset, Algeria, but returned to Mali after a cease-fire in the 1990s.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/AwbW32JV5nc/travel-tunes-tinariwen-kel.html

Isaac Johnson, 14, of Bloomington, Minnesota, has the world's largest mouth gape. Johnson's 3.67 inch pie hole was recently confirmed to be .21 inches large larger than the gape of the previous record holder, a German fellow named Bernd Schmidt.

According to Guinness World Records, Johnson "can fit objects like a baseball and the bottom of a 20 oz soda bottle into his gape."

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/-C3vMLECpTY/this-teenager-is-not-just-a-bi.html

The U.S. Supreme Court refused to let Boise ban people from sleeping rough.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Boise would be violating the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishments by enforcing criminal penalties under its anti-camping ordinance when its three homeless shelters are full.

“The state may not criminalize conduct that is an unavoidable consequence of being homeless -- namely sitting, lying, or sleeping on the streets,” the 9th Circuit said.

State abuse of the homeless is one of the nastier trends in 21st century governancethe end is usually accomplished by more subtle means (pictured) than criminalization. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/SwXIjkT7g_4/supreme-court-affirms-homeless.html

Here's The New York Times's verdict on the 2010s: "The Decade Tech Lost Its Way." The individual stories--Deepfakes, self-driving cars, social media, fake news -- aren't laden with opinion, and many simply chart the development and success of particular gadgets, platforms and policies. But it all adds up, in a way that seems implicitly subtracted from everything else.

News breaks of a video circulating on the internet that shows the “Wonder Woman” star Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother. The video is not real; someone had used artificial intelligence to superimpose Ms. Gadot’s face on the body of a pornographic actress.

Phillip Isola, one of the A.I. researchers who pioneered the techniques used to create deepfakes: In 2011, 2012, deep learning started taking off. The big event was, deep nets could recognize animals in photos.

It took a few years until people started to make systems that could do the opposite: not take an image and recognize that it was a cat, but take the label “cat” and synthesize an image that looks like a cat — the inverse problem. You could make photos of really low-resolution faces.

Very rapidly after that, people were able to use these things for face-swapping and deepfakes and all of that.

The technology advanced so quickly right around those years. It went from “O.K., this is a really interesting academic problem, but you can’t possibly use this to make fake news. It’s just going to produce a little blurry object” to “Oh, you can actually make photo-realistic faces.”

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/cpRCMvXh7IA/how-tech-rotted-out.html

Joshua Topolsky's new techology news site, Input, just launched. The aim, in a crowded pack? To focus on the things that are neither speculative nor mass-market but which will shape lives in the immediate future.

We see technology as not just an intrinsic part of your life and ours, but a shaper of that life in a way that can be seen but is often missed. We see technology not just as a thing to be covered but a core part of the way we need to tell the story. This isn’t just about phone reviews or detailing the next Twitter meltdown (we’ll do some of that too). It’s about finding the ways technology and a life lived inside technology changes us, connects us, and moves us — and then telling you why you should care with as much honesty as possible. And hopefully, telling you in ways that make you question, think, and act.

Articles include Twitter's plans to label candidates in 2020, Facebook's disinclination to cooperate with California's new privacy laws, and Nike's effort to create sneakers for people with disabilities. But there are reviews, too: the new 16-inch MacBook, the new Moto smartwatch, Boosted Beams. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/msc25WtaK_U/input-a-new-tech-news-site.html

The Catholic church has plenty of weird relics stored in ornate boxes around the world. Tourists flock to these churches to get a glimpse of the vessels that allegedly contain the original Crown of Thorns, or some of Christ's dried blood that turns to liquid every now and then.

And then there's Jesus's foreskin—the last (allegedly) surviving piece of flesh from God-made-flesh, chopped from the tip of his penis on New Year's Day, according to the official Roman calendar.

The fact that Jesus's foreskin still allegedly exists in the world somewhere is pretty weird, but its existence alone is not the weirdest part. No, the weirdest part is that Jesus's foreskin has been missing for more than 30 years—and that in true Dan Brown style, it may have been stolen by covert agents of the Catholic church.

According to "records," Charlemagne received the foreskin from an angel, and gifted it to Pope Leo II on Jesus' 800th birthday. It moved around a bit before being stolen during the Sack of Rome, then eventually turned up in a small village north of Rome called Calcata, where it remained until 1983, when it was stolen under mysterious circumstances. Calcata had become a sort of pilgrimage destination thanks to that little slice of petrified baby foreskin.

The Catholic Church started to downplay the foreskin in the early 20th century, even threatening to excommunicate those who mentioned it. Meanwhile, Calcata went through some changes on its own. The whole town was condemned in the 1930s, deemed unsafe by the local government due to the crumbling volcanic cliffs nearby. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/TiRuvJbQ6LI/merry-christmas-someone-stole.html

In 1990, Brian Eno and John Cale made a wonderful experimental pop/art rock record called Wrong Way Up, released by Warner Bros. Records. At the time, the label would send out 7" records to alt.rock/college radio stations to promote their new releases. The promo series, called Soil Samples, featured different artists on each side of the record performing songs that weren't included on their new albums.

Above is Brian Eno's contribution to Soil Samples #3, a sublime cover of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire," originally written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/XL3bQu_Wbtc/listen-to-brian-enos-beautif.html

Synth pioneer Gershon Kingsley is dead at 97.

Kingsley was most famous for his 1969 song “Popcorn,” which was one of the first electronic singles to hit the airwaves. The song became a hit for the group Hot Butter in 1972, and Crazy Frog revived it again in 2005. (Aphex Twin and Muse have covered it, too). Kingsley also co-wrote “Baroque Hoedown,” which was used as the theme song to Disneyland’s Main Street Electrical Parade, with fellow synth pioneer Jean-Jacques Perrey. His song “Rebirth” has been sampled in multiple hip-hop songs, including Freddie Gibbs’ and Madlib’s “Soul Right.”

Kingsley joins musical partner Jean-Jacques Perrey, who died in 2016.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/FP2AW187Xw0/gershon-kingsley-1922-2019.html

There's a scene in the fourth episode of The Mandalorian where the unnamed child (aka Baby Yoda) is literally pushing Mando's buttons, well, the buttons on his ship anyway. Since it aired, the internet has been doing its thing — imagining Baby Yoda is playing with the ship's radio.

The meme started a couple of weeks ago, so there a TON of them out there. I picked out a few of my favs:

And, OF COURSE...

(Geekologie) Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/B8Vcv7XkQE4/baby-yodas-just-fiddling-wit.html

I haven't had the chance to play any of the Witcher games (although Witcher 3 for Nintendo Switch is on my list of titles to buy, just as soon as I finish Divinity: Original Sin 2.) However, I loved the books back in the day and have high hopes for the Netflix series. The final trailer for The Witcher dropped earlier this week and it's looking good. That said, I've been disapointed by streaming service series in the past. Fingers crossed. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/2X8ZLgV0-hw/the-final-trailer-for-netflix.html

In last week's Superman #18, the eponymous hero held a press conference to reveal his identity to the public. Comic book continuity is ever-shifting, of course, and the connection between Superman and Clark Kent has been known or exposed by other people before, just as the genie will someday be placed back in the bottle once again. In this particular context, Superman was inspired to come clean after learning about the lies and deceptions of his birth father, Jor-El (who also used to be dead, but now is not, because comics). This revelation also comes on the heels of an epic crossover that shattered the acronym-happy intelligence community of the DC Universe with some other truths and justices.

This curiously came on the heels of the Inspector General's report on the origins of the FBI investigation into the connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. The results of this investigation were as much of a political Rorschach test as anything is these days. But one thing it did reinforce was the FBI's overconfidence in its own self-righteous status quo enforcement, for better and for worse.

While there was (unsurprisingly, IMHO) no political bias found in the FBI's motives, the IG report did note a handful of oversights and omissions that had been along the way—a detail that the President's stalwart defenders have eagerly jumped on. For anyone who's ever paid attention to anything the FBI has ever done, however, this all came across as the same standard over-zealous stuff the organization's also done—again, for better, and for worse. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/GhobNruP1kQ/why-is-the-fbi-protecting-supe.html

"Vandalism must be mild!" declares the pinned post at r/MildlyVandalised, my new favorite subreddit. It's dedicated to amusing examples of relatively insignificant destruction and decay, such as missing letters in signs, wikipedia "vandalism" and fake instructional stickers added to public appliances and the like.

Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/EfZmIfIAS8A/things-that-have-been-mildly-v.html

With just days to go before it would have to close its doors forever, San Diego's beloved science fiction bookstore Mysterious Galaxy has found a new location and new owners: Jenni Marchisotto and Matthew Berger have bought the store and will run it at its new home, 3555 Rosecrans St. Suite #107 San Diego, CA 92110.

Everyone's keeping their jobs, too. It's a Christmas miracle. I'm looking forward to having lots more events with them in the years to come!

From Jenni: The first books I ever loved, the ones I read over and over again until the bindings practically disintegrated, were The Song of the Lioness and The Immortals quartets by Tamora Pierce. I spent much of my childhood dreaming about having purple eyes and debating whether Alanna should have ended up Jonathan or George with my cousin Courtney. As an adult I still get carried away by reading. For my degree I focused on disability in 20th century Anglophone literature. I could talk about James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Shani Mootoo for hours. I’m also a sucker for romance and fantasy. Some of my favorites include Helen Hoang, Sarah J. Maas, J. R. Ward, Richelle Mead, and Jasmine Guillory. I'm currently reading Arora Blazing by Jessie Mihalik & Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab by Shani Mootoo.

From Matt: I have spent far too much time trying to figure out how to make a lightsaber work. Like, how do you get light to take a shape? Growing up, my days were filled with thoughts about the worlds authors built in my favorite series: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Feist’s Magician series, Eragon, and countless others.

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/n8fs21dS8gc/3555-rosecrans-st.html

For some folks, writing notes by hand is just plain easier, but having to re-type them later can be a huge bore, not to mention time-sink.

The guys from Rocketbook successfully merged the best parts of analog and digital note-taking with their Everlast notebook awhile back. And now, that tech just got a lot more portable with their Rocketbook Everlast Mini.

If you haven't used an Everlast notebook before, here's the gist. The book is composed of specially-treated synthetic paper that you can write on with a special Pilot FriXion pen (included). It writes smoothly and without smudging but is completely erasable with a bit of water and a wipe. The Mini, true to its name, is pocket-sized, and the pen fits snugly in a holder flap.

Want to save that work? Just scan your page with the accompanying app. You can set up a variety of destination folders in all the major cloud locations like Dropbox or Google Drive, or just drop it into an email folder - all with the touch of a single icon.

A 2-pack of Rocketbook Everlast Minis is already on sale for 25% off the MSRP, but you can take an extra 15% off the final price by using the coupon code MERRYSAVE15. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/v56Zkb84xCI/this-smart-notebook-saves-your.html

There are fast-paced card games, and some of them even require enough dexterity for a mini-workout (like Skip-Bo or Snap). But there's nothing quite like the Mokuru® Card Game, which uses an already addictive fidget toy as the centerpiece for a cutthroat game of tabletop challenges.

The game is named for the toy that gets used in its challenges, a weighted cylinder that you try to roll end-over-end across a table, then catch upright with your palm. As a solo fidget device, it's engrossing yet meditative, and hard enough to do simple tricks with on your own.

The card game adds other players into the with mix, throwing down the gauntlet of increasingly difficult tricks, some of which you have to do with added challenges (like being blinded). Pull it off, and you earn "belts" that move you ever closer to the winner's circle. But don't get cocky - the belts can be stolen by sneaky players with the right card and the right timing.

The card game (including 3 Mokurus) is on sale already for 25% off the MSRP, but you can take an extra 15% off the final price by using the holiday discount code MERRYSAVE15. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/z0BjshpVqKo/save-40-on-this-innovative-de.html