In recent years, the high-margin world of mattress shops has been heavily disrupted by mail-order alternatives. To get customers to buy vacuum-shrunk mattresses they haven't seen, let alone bounced on, these companies have generous return policies. But what happens to these big, heavy, unmailable items when someone comes to pick them up?

Maggie Koerth (formerly at Boing Boing) explains over at FiveThirtyEight.

At the other end of those eerily identical ads I found a single seller — an independent agent for a new kind of company that’s aiming to solve the mattress companies’ problems and reduce landfill waste. Called Sharetown, it works kind of like Uber and Lyft: A mattress company contracts with Sharetown to handle returns and, when one pops up, Sharetown connects the customer with an nearby agent who takes the mattress off their hands, cleans it up, and markets it for sale on local community sites like Facebook and Craigslist. When the mattress sells, everybody gets a cut — the agent, Sharetown and the company that originally sold the mattress.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/21/what-happens-to-returned-mail.html

If you're not already familiar with what it takes to gather semen from an elephant, this video of the process will serve as the ultimate "I'm not sure what I expected" experience. The scene is from the Extinctions documentary released in 2011.

Artificial stimulation of the animal does not produce large quantities of sperm. Each drop must be retrieved quickly. The sample is immediately sent to the neighboring laboratory.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/21/collecting-semen-from-an-eleph.html

On Wednesday, Panama's National Aeronaval Service seized this homemade semi-submersible vessel in territorial waters off Bocas del Toro. Authorities discovered 5 tons of drugs inside and nabbed four Colombian citizens.

According to CNN, "the ministry (of public security in Panama) did not specify what type of drugs were seized in the raid, but smugglers have previously been caught using similar vessels to transport cocaine into the United States and Europe."

Indeed, you may recall the intense video below from last summer showing US Coast Guard crew members boarding a similar narco-sub in the Pacific Ocean:

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/21/panama-authorities-seize-narco.html

YouTube user Chave created a supercut of all the locust swarm videos being posted to social media by people in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. My favorites are "falling from the sky like hail" and "so thickly gathered on a tree they become writhing hallucinatory bark".

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/21/footage-of-locusts-swarming-in.html

Sure, when the rubes glance at your feet, all they see are five-pointed stars. But when YOU gaze in the direction of the underworld... HAIL SATAN!

Provenance unknown; posted by u/black_rose_ to r/coolguides. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/21/how-to-tie-your-shoelaces-like.html

It was hip to be square, even in 1986. Especially in 1986. Jma Mitch writes:

As a teenager in 1985 and 1986, I used my trusty Commodore 64 and the "Music Construction Set" program to create computer versions of a slew of songs by the greatest musical artist of all time: Huey Lewis and The News. Only Huey songs, that was the only artist I did. I recently (Feb 2020) was able to access my 35 year old C64 disks, many of which survived, including the ones with the songs I'm uploading to this channel. Some of the songs sound better than others, but these are the original unedited files.

More here: "Commodore 64 plays Huey Lewis (1985-1986)" (YouTube via Waxy)

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/21/listen-to-a-1980s-teenagers.html

US Customs and Border Protection seized a human brain that was part of an international mail shipment from Canada to the United States. They discovered the brain during an inspection at Blue Water Bridge between Port Huron, Michigan, US and Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. The brain was on its way from Toronto to Kenosha, Wisconsin. From Fox5NY:

During the routine mail operation, they say they came across a shipment manifested as an "Antique Teaching Specimen..."

The brain specimen is being investigated by the CDC for any potential infectious biological agents, infectious substances, and a decision on what to do with the specimen.

Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/21/us-customs-seized-a-human-brai.html

It may not rank up there with climate change or personal debt, but confess...isn’t it the worst when you’re trying to put a food container in the fridge, but can’t find the right lid to fit?

Hey, not everything has to be a global crisis to be irritating to the core. But still...it’s even more annoying when you start thinking of how easy it should be to fix this all-container, no-lid conundrum.

Apparently, modern science is tackling the big problems first because now, The Food Guard ($16.99 for a 5-piece set, 15 percent off) has arrived to solve this vexing kitchen dilemma.

The Food Guard is the one-size-fits-all fix. While it looks like a typical food wrap, it’s actually a stretchable, stackable, washable, reusable, environmentally friendly, money-saving alternative that’s so simple that it’s surprising someone hadn’t created it before.

Made from a silicon material, a 7 1/2 -inch Food Guard can stretch up to 3 times its normal size and clings to any container, plate, bowl, dishpan, or other storage items. The airtight seal keeps your food fresher and locks in flavor -- and when you’re done, the Guard snaps back into shape, never losing its strength or durability.

If you want to use it in the oven or microwave, no problem. It’s capable of withstanding temperatures up to 446 degrees.

With the Food Guard, you can stop sweeping the backs of your cupboards for stray lids and stop using all those plastic wraps that end up in a landfill.

Right now, you can get $3 off this five-pack including a blue, red, green, yellow and clear Food Guard for just $16.99 Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/the-food-guard-kicks-plastic-w.html

An annual parade of kinetic sculptures and other artworks and performances in a Dutch canal to celebrate the work of hometown hero Hieronymus Bosch? More of this in the world, please!

Bosch is known for his symbolic paintings often tying in gruesome representations of the afterlife and human desire and fear. He is also regarded as one of the earliest genre painters, depicting common people and their everyday experiences. The annual Bosch Parade is described by organizers as “a theatrical and musical art spectacle on water,” drawing thousands of visitors to the southern city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, where Bosch was born and eventually got his name from.

Read the full story and view some love photos on Colossal. Also, follow the parade's Instagram feed for more fun images.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/annual-hieronymus-bosch-parade.html

“Can we get 'Gone with the Wind' back, please?” — Donald Trump, 2/20/2020, Colorado

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/trump-is-mad-parasite-won.html

• U.S. intelligence briefed House on Russia to ensure Trump's re-election. • Classified briefing to lawmakers made Trump angry • Trump said Democrats would “weaponize” news of Russian military campaign • Trump was mad DNI Joseph Maguire would let staff appear • That's why Maguire's out, Richard Grenell's in as 'acting' DNI.

In Washington last week, U.S. intelligence officials told lawmakers that Russia is carrying out a military-grade attack on the 2020 elections, with the goal of making Americans doubt the integrity of the vote and ensure re-election for impeached, manifestly unfit and corrupt President Donald Trump, Reuters reported Thursday.

Earlier today, The New York Times reported that one day after this briefing on Russian interference in the 2020 US elections, Trump punished acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Joseph Maguire for allowing his staff to appear before the committee.

The NYT quotes five people familiar with the matter:

The day after the Feb. 13 briefing to lawmakers, Mr. Trump berated Joseph Maguire, the outgoing acting director of national intelligence, for allowing it to take place, people familiar with the exchange said. Mr. Trump cited the presence in the briefing of Representative Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who led the impeachment proceedings against him, as a particular irritant.

On Wednesday, as NYT notes, Trump announced Maguire was out and that Richard Grenell, a Trump toady who has served as ambassador to Germany since 2018, will be 'acting' DNI.

Intelligence officials and analysts say Grenell is not qualified, and this is manifestly corrupt and bizarre. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/u-s-intelligence-briefed-lawm.html

Until I bumped into the first video below on YouTube this morning, I had no idea that a lot of The Mandalorian was shot on a virtual set using the Unreal Engine.

Over 50 percent of The Mandalorian Season 1 was filmed using this ground-breaking new methodology, eliminating the need for location shoots entirely. Instead, actors in The Mandalorian performed in an immersive and massive 20’ high by 270-degree semicircular LED video wall and ceiling with a 75’-diameter performance space, where the practical set pieces were combined with digital extensions on the screens. Digital 3D environments created by ILM played back interactively on the LED walls, edited in real-time during the shoot, which allowed for pixel-accurate tracking and perspective-correct 3D imagery rendered at high resolution via systems powered by NVIDIA GPUs. The environments were lit and rendered from the perspective of the camera to provide parallax in real-time, as if the camera were really capturing the physical environment with accurate interactive light on the actors and practical sets, giving showrunner Jon Favreau, executive producer and director Dave Filoni, visual effects supervisor Richard Bluff, and cinematographers Greig Frazier and Barry Baz Idoine, and the episodic directors the ability to make concrete creative choices for visual effects-driven work during photography and achieve real-time in-camera composites on set.

Here is an article about it on the Unreal Engine's website.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/how-the-mandalorian-was-shot-o.html

I write a weekly newsletter with Claudia Dawson and Kevin Kelly, called Recomendo. In each issue we briefly recommend 6 things. Here's a great tip in the Jan 26, 2020 issue, which Kevin shared with me a few years back and has proven to be very useful in helping me make decisions about whether or not to accept invitations to events weeks or months away:

Immediacy filter One of the most useful bits of advice I ever got, came from the writer Anne Herbert who said that whenever she got an invitation to do something months away or even a week away, she asked herself whether she would accept the gig/meeting/task if it was tomorrow. The answer was often no. I use that immediacy trick all the time, and it has served me very well. — KK

By the way, Claudia, Kevin, and I recently published a book of the best of Recomendo, with 500 brief reviews of cool stuff.

 

  Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/help-your-future-self-by-imagi.html

I really enjoyed this interview that Kevin Kelly conducted with sci-fi author, Neal Stephenson, as part of The Long Now Foundation's salon series at The Interval in San Francisco.

During the one hour exchange, these two inspiring thinkers discuss Neal's latest book, Fall, or Dodge in Hell, some of the inspirations behind it, and how some of these technologies may come to pass. Half of the video is Q&A with the audience.

Here is the cover slap copy for the book:

Fall, or Dodge in Hell" is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson raises profound existential questions and touches on the revolutionary breakthroughs that are transforming our future. Combining the technological, philosophical, and spiritual in one grand myth, he delivers a mind-blowing speculative literary saga for the modern age.

Image: YouTube Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/kevin-kelly-discusses-fall.html

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have come up with this new IoT Assistant app (available for both iOS and Android) that will supposedly inform you about what Internet-connected smart devices are around you at any point in time, and what kind of information they might be collecting.

“Because of new laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), people need to be informed about what data is collected about them and they need to be given some choices over these processes,” says Professor Norman Sadeh, a CyLab faculty member in Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Software Research and the principal investigator on the project. “We have built an infrastructure that enables owners of IoT technologies to comply with these laws, and an app that takes advantage of this infrastructure to empower people to find out about and control data collected by these technologies.”

I've downloaded the app myself, and I plan on adding my own smart home devices to their database, just to see what I can find. I don't know how well it will actually work, but I'm certainly intrigued by the idea.

New infrastructure will enhance privacy in today’s Internet of Things [Daniel Tkacik / CyLab, the Carnegie Mellon University Security and Privacy Institute] Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/a-new-app-will-help-you-identi.html

I was on Cape Cod this past weekend — specifically, the town of Eastham, which is way up by the wrist and fairly desolate in winter. What I didn't know at the time was that Janet Uhlar, one of the juror's from Whitey Bulger's trial, was right around the corner from me the whole time. Along with the collection of handwritten letters she'd received from him between 2014 and his totally suspicious prison death in 2018.

NBC News just published a piece about Uhlar and her relationship with Bulger, and how she came to regret her decision to convict him on racketeering charges and 11 counts of murder.

Uhlar started writing Bulger, she said, because she was troubled by the fact that much of the evidence against him came through testimony by former criminal associates who were also killers and had received reduced sentences in exchange for testifying against their former partner in crime.

"When I left the trial, I had more questions," she said.

After Bulger started returning her letters, Uhlar noticed he often dated them with the time he had started writing in his tight cursive style. "He always seemed to be writing at 1, 2 or 3 in the morning, and when I asked him why, he said it was because of the hallucinations," Uhlar said.

Uhlar knew, of course, about Whitey's reputation as a notoriously brutal mobster. And she knew that the FBI had enabled his behavior. Her uncertainty and regret had nothing to do with whether Bulger had actually killed people, either — that's a universally accepted fact at this point. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/one-of-the-jurors-who-convicte.html

Facebook leader Mark Zuckerberg has a Facebook executive blow-dry his armpits before making speeches, according to a forthcoming book about the company by journalist Steven Levy.

Zuckerberg is harder to read, ping-ponging in Levy’s portrayal between naive genius and robotic robber baron. He, too, is consumed by his public image. (A communications exec is shown blow-drying the CEO’s armpits before speaking appearances to eliminate anxiety sweat.)

The book, Facebook: The Inside Story [Amazon], is out in two days and available for pre-order now. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/zuckerberg-has-staff-blow-dry.html

Assembling a truly autonomous smart home is getting closer and closer to reality every day. But for every new smart bulb, thermostat, home security system and appliance we set loose within our walls, there are still probably a half dozen “dumb” items we’d still love to replace.

But whether they’re too costly or too big a hassle to swap out, there are also new alternatives for making dumb items smart. The AXIS Gear is one of those new smart accessories, turning old-school blinds and shutters into window coverings that do what you want when you want it.

Indiegogo backers got the Gear off the ground, a smart device that allows you to control your existing window shades from your phone. After a quick 5-minute installation, your blinds are suddenly motorized.

Compatible with any window shade that has a beaded chain, the AXIS Gear syncs with the free smartphone app so you can raise or lower your blinds at the touch of your phone. With Gear, you can also set custom schedules to raise or lower your shades so you can always make sure they’re closed each night, then open in the morning, then closed again during the heat of the afternoon.

Right now, you can save $25 off the purchase of the AXIS Gear, only $224.99 with this offer. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/the-axis-gear-turns-your-regul.html

The IRS is suing Facebook for $9bn over unpaid taxes, reports Reuters, targeting its licensing of "intellectual property" to its own Irish subsidiary to shift profits to that lower-taxed jurisdiction.

Under the arrangement, Facebook’s subsidiaries pay royalties to the U.S.-based parent for access to its trademark, users and platform technologies. From 2010 to 2016, Facebook Ireland paid Facebook U.S. more than $14 billion in royalties and cost-sharing payments, according to the court filing.

The company said the low valuation reflected the risks associated with Facebook’s international expansion, which took place in 2010 before its IPO and the development of its most lucrative digital advertising products.

The practice used to be called Double Irish but has become more elaborate in recent years with changes to the law; Ireland remains the hot place to store profits. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/irs-sues-facebook-for-9bn.html

With so many manufacturers out there these days, it’s tough to know who to trust in the ultra-competitive wireless earbuds market. If you’ve never heard of LinearFlux, you may soon. That’s because it’s a company with a stellar pedigree whose co-founders were two of the engineers behind the original success of two audio houses you likely have heard of: Beats by Dr. Dre; and Monster Products.

They struck out on their own to start LinearFlux and created the HyperSonic Lite True wireless earphones. These ultra-powerful, yet ergonomically comfortable earbuds are on sale now for $59.99, 25 percent off their regular price.

As you’d expect from seasoned engineers, sound quality is job no. 1 with the Hypersonic Lites. Sporting Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, these headphones offer extended range without the dropouts you find in competing models. Meanwhile, these buds also feature LinearFlux’s exclusive DL02 Immersive Sound Engine, which connects the unit wirelessly to all the popular streaming music services. All you’ve got to do is turn on and tune in to listen to your favorite Apple Music, Spotify or Pandora channels.

Of course, great sound always starts with a proper fit. The HyperSonic Lites’ lightweight design is reinforced to withstand sweat and water, and crafted with soft ear tips to allow comfortable listening for up to eight hours on a single charge.

The HyperSonic Lite earphones are currently $20 off retail, down to just $59.99. Read the rest

https://boingboing.net/2020/02/20/these-earbuds-created-by-beats.html