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Draylen Mason was known as an accomplished musician who was heading to college, but he could also make you laugh before he even opened his mouth. "You just expect to laugh with him. That boy was hilarious," said Sharrel Prince, who has known him since pre-K. "What made Draylen funny is that he says the things everyone else is scared to say."

Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir has spent more than a decade working with researchers and computer security experts to design a voting machine that’s more secure and reliable. This massive undertaking resulted in the Secure, Transparent, Auditable, and Reliable Voting System, or STAR-Vote. But getting manufacturers to build it has been a challenge.

This was unexpected and completely within the rules.

Marcus Mariota scored a touchdown in the Titans’ Wild Card Game with the Chiefs by throwing the ball to himself. Really.

Mariota escaped pressure and couldn’t find an open receiver. He rolled to his left, and the Chiefs’ defense collapsed in to stop him short of the goal. Mariota targeted a receiver in the end zone, but the ball was deflected by the Chiefs and bounced right back to him. So Mariota ran and dove over the pylon for the score.

This is a completely legal play. Just part of Mariota’s foot is behind the line of scrimmage, but that’s all it takes.

As the official explained it, Mariota was sufficiently behind the line of scrimmage and he took the snap in shotgun, so he’s an eligible receiver.

It’s been over two decades since this has happened in an NFL game.

Jon Gruden even pulled up the highlight of Johnson’s play on his cell phone.

It’s the second weird rule that worked in the Titans’ favor in this game. Mariota fumbled during a big sack in the first half, but it couldn’t be reviewed because the refs called forward progress.

How did this wind up sinking the Chiefs?

The score cut the Chiefs’ lead to 21-10 and was the catalyst for another epic home team failure in Kansas City. A muffed Tennessee punt return gave Andy Reid’s team the chance to put another nail in the Titans’ coffin, but instead resulted in a missed field goal and nine net yards for the visitors.

Tennessee took the ensuing drive 62 yards in six plays to cut the KC lead to 21-16 and give fans a reason to be nervous. Another Kansas City punt only exacerbated those concerns. Mariota, who had struggled early in the day, was buoyed by Derrick Henry, the hard-rushing sophomore tailback who churned out yards after contact in the Kansas City cold. The pair pushed the Titans 80 yards in 5:09, a long drive culminating in a 22-yard touchdown strike to Eric Decker.

Tennessee’s inability to cap those drives with two-point conversions left the team unable to extend its lead, giving Alex Smith another shot to lead the Chiefs back to a dramatic win. Instead, he flailed in the pocket, forcing a turnover on downs as the two-minute warning approached and dealing a serious blow to his team’s chances.

But then, a miracle seemed to deliver the Chiefs from two decades of playoff futility. Derrick Johnson returned a Henry fumble 56 yards for a tide-shifting touchdown, only to have the play ripped away on review. Two plays later, Mariota threw a game-clinching block as Henry rumbled forward for the game’s final first down.

What this means for the Chiefs: Kansas City hasn’t won a playoff game at home since Joe Montana was the team’s quarterback. Andy Reid is now 1-4 with the Chiefs in the postseason.

The Philadelphia Eagles backup quarterback and native Austinite is playing in the Super Bowl this weekend.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A bipartisan group of six senators has introduced legislation that would take a huge step toward securing elections in the United States. Called the Secure Elections Act, the bill aims to eliminate insecure paperless voting machines from American elections while promoting routine audits that would dramatically reduce the danger of interference from foreign governments. "With the 2018 elections just around the corner, Russia will be back to interfere again," said co-sponsor Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). So a group of senators led by James Lankford (R-Okla.) wants to shore up the security of American voting systems ahead of the 2018 and 2020 elections. And the senators have focused on two major changes that have broad support from voting security experts. The first objective is to get rid of paperless electronic voting machines. Computer scientists have been warning for more than a decade that these machines are vulnerable to hacking and can't be meaningfully audited. States have begun moving away from paperless systems, but budget constraints have forced some to continue relying on insecure paperless equipment. The Secure Elections Act would give states grants specifically earmarked for replacing these systems with more secure systems that use voter-verified paper ballots. The legislation's second big idea is to encourage states to perform routine post-election audits based on modern statistical techniques. Many states today only conduct recounts in the event of very close election outcomes. And these recounts involve counting a fixed percentage of ballots. That often leads to either counting way too many ballots (wasting taxpayer money) or too few (failing to fully verify the election outcome). The Lankford bill would encourage states to adopt more statistically sophisticated procedures to count as many ballots as needed to verify an election result was correct -- and no more.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When ATX Brands owner, Doug Guller, put Sixth Street club the Parish up for sale on online auction site eBay, many in the Austin music scene worried it was the death knell for another live music venue.  On Thursday, local music fans were given a solid reason to breathe easier.

Stephen Sternschein, owner of Red River Cultural District club Empire Garage and Control Room, has confirmed that his company Heard Presents, in partnership with Simple Tone Ventures, will take over the club after participating in the auction.

In the four years since Sternschein opened Empire in a remodeled auto shop, he has grown the space into a vibrant live music venue with a diverse slate of bookings that cover everything from hip-hop and electronic music to rock ‘n’ roll. Last month, a jury of music critics, industry insiders and super fans selected the club as a finalist in the Venue of the Year category of the inaugural Austin360 Awards.

AUSTIN360 AWARDS: This was Austin’s best music in 2017

The Parish, with its solid acoustics and warm atmosphere, was once lauded as one of Austin’s finest midsize venues. In recent years, the club slipped into the shadows with inconsistent bookings and no coherent marketing strategy.

The biggest fear of many local music enthusiasts was that the club would become a vanity project for a big money investor with no real world understanding of the challenges of running a club in Austin. Instead, it’s an expansion of operations from a successful local player.

“It was important to me and I think to everyone in our community with all of the concern over iconic Austin creative spaces disappearing in the face of developmental pressures, that the Parish end up in the hands of an experienced operator committed to supporting local music.  The best way to ensure that happened was to do it ourselves,” Sternschein said in a press release about the sale.

Sternschein’s partner in the venture, Alex Saunders of Simple Tone Ventures, manages boutique venues on the east and west coasts.

Peter Blackstock contributed to this report.

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An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: Some people claim they can hear a thudding sound when the pylon hits the ground and the picture vibrates. Last weekend, Dr Lisa DeBruine from the Institute of Neuroscience & Psychology at the University of Glasgow posted it on Twitter, asking her followers to describe whether they experienced any auditory sensations while watching it. One person who suffers from ringing ears replied: "I hear a vibrating thudding sound, and it also cuts out my tinnitus during the camera shake." Others offered explanations as to why. While another suggested it may have something to do with correlated neuronal activity: "The brain is 'expecting/predicting' what is coming visually and then fires a version of what it expects across the relevant senses. Also explains why some might 'feel' a physical shake."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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SAN MARCOS, Texas (KXAN) — In what a San Marcos CISD official is describing as a unique and “reckless” incident during lunch at Goodnight Middle School on Monday, a student was able to discharge a bullet by standing over it and “rubbing” it on concrete.

The bullet going off was loud enough to turn heads, but not loud enough to scare students, said Andrew Fernandez, the executive director of Communications and Community Relations with the district.

No weapon was brought to school, Fernandez said. The incident happened during eighth grade lunch, closer to 1 p.m., and administrators responded within seconds.

A call went out to parents alerting them about the situation. No students were injured and the school was not placed on lockdown, Fernandez said.

SMCISD is investigating the bullet discharge and they will decide what consequences the student will face.

While unusual, another case of a bullet going off without a firearm happened to a woman shopping in a Pennsylvania Lowe’s in 2012. The woman, who was carrying a bullet in her purse, was shot in the leg.

In October 2017, a suspicious package sent to Goodnight Middle School led to a response from the bomb squad and an evacuation of students and staff. The package was later determined not to be harmful.

Dalton played a huge role in getting the Bills to the playoffs for the first time in 17 years.

The Bills needed a little help from Andy Dalton on Sunday to snap a 17-year playoff drought. Now, Bills fans are showing their appreciation by supporting Dalton’s charitable foundation at $17 a pop.

The Bills took care of what they could control in Week 17 with a 22-16 win over the Dolphins in Miami. But to get to the playoffs, they also needed the Bengals to hold off the Ravens.

The Bengals jumped out to a 17-3 lead in the first half, but let the Ravens sneak back in. Baltimore took a lead for the first time in the game with 8:48 left in the fourth quarter. Bills fans and players alike held their collective breath until Dalton connected with Tyler Boyd on a 49-yard touchdown with just 44 seconds left in the game for the 31-27 win.

"I think I'm the hottest guy in Buffalo right now," Dalton said on Monday, via ESPN’s Katherine Terrell. "According to my Twitter, I think everybody's loving us right now."

That love is showing up in Dalton’s foundation’s bottom line.

Dalton’s foundation tweeted Tuesday morning that donations are still pouring in from Bills fans.

Dalton shared a message of thanks to everyone who has given.

“Andy and JJ are thankful for the generosity of Bills fans and honored to have the opportunity to use these donations to support the families in need through our Foundation’s programs,” the foundation shared through a statement to SB Nation. “The city of Buffalo truly is the city of good neighbors and crazy fans.”

In addition to the $17 donations, an homage to the 17 years Buffalo waited for a shot at the postseason, Dalton is getting plenty of love from Bills fans in his mentions.

The donations have been so great, that Dalton’s foundation is putting up five billboards across the Buffalo area to thank them:

Dalton started his foundation with his wife, Jordan, during his rookie season in Cincinnati. The Andy & Jordan Dalton Foundation provides “daily support, opportunities, resources, and life-changing experiences to seriously ill and physically challenged children and their families in Cincinnati and Fort Worth,” according to their website.

That includes helping families pay medical bills, providing date nights for parents with chronically ill or special needs children, and stocking The Hub at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital with iPads, gaming systems, and other fun ways for kids to pass the time while going through medical treatment.

Bills fans are just as happy as the team is to see this drought come to an end. The locker room erupted with joy when the Bills saw Dalton complete that fateful pass. The Bills are even sending some wings to the Bengals as a token of their appreciation.

Dalton’s college teammate at TCU, Bills defensive end Jerry Hughes, said he’d send an Edible Arrangement or some Budweiser Dalton’s way to show his gratitude. Safety Micah Hyde put it plainly.

“Andy Dalton, you heard it here first, I love you man,” Hyde said after the game, via the team’s website. “I love you.”

The Bills get to go to the playoffs, and kids in need are going to benefit through Dalton’s foundation. That’s a win-win situation.

How Andy Dalton and the Bengals got the Bills in the playoffs

Our science staff is trying to lead a more scientific life in 2018. Throughout the week, we’ll be questioning whether some of our favorite habits and hobbies are based on junk science or real evidence. Here’s the first entry, on personality quizzes.

If I were a witch, my Hogwarts House would be Ravenclaw. Or possibly Slytherin. It depends on what publication is directing the Harry Potter Sorting Hat’s work.

I am also a mild extrovert, my moral alignment is neutral, and the Star Wars character I’m most like is the Tauntaun Luke sleeps inside of in “Empire Strikes Back.”

Another big part of my personality: I really like online personality quizzes. Maybe you could tell.

But I’ve never really taken these tests seriously. Not even the Myers-Briggs — a test that is frequently used in professional development and hiring settings and costs $50 to take online. ($55.94 with tax. I’m an ENTP.) Call me cynical. Call me a skeptic. Call me a Ravenclaw with a dash of Slytherin. The point is, I always regarded personality quizzes as strangely addictive horse hockey, good for trading memes with friends, excellent at consuming your cash (or your employer’s — sorry, Nate), but not much more. “Astrology for nerds,” I called it. And as my colleagues and I compiled a list of the junk science we were resolved to let go of in the new year, I fully expected to be writing about how I was going to stop taking these damn things.

Instead, I get to spend 2018 immersed in a new series of personality tests — ones that are actually evidence-based and scientifically sound. That’s because, while most of the personality tests shared around the internet are, indeed, bogus procrastination devices, there is a science to personality, and it’s something that researchers really can put into a quantified, testable format, said Simine Vazire, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis.

The most popular — used by the vast majority of scientists who study personality — is called the Big Five, a system that organizes personality around five broad clusters of traits: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience.

Those clusters were not randomly chosen. Instead, the categories stem from research that began in the 1920s and ‘30s, when researchers first theorized that you might be able to figure out the anatomy of a personality by studying the words we used to describe what people are like. But it wasn’t until the 1970s and ‘80s that scientists finally had enough computing power to test their hunches. Researchers took thousands of surveys about the words people used to describe themselves and others, applied factor analysis, and came up with five big themes the traits clustered around, according to Christopher Soto, a psychology professor at Colby College. (Some researchers use a similarly derived model that adds a sixth trait: honesty-humility.)

The idea behind the Big Five is that everyone’s personality has a little of all five trait groups. What the test does, essentially, is tell you where you fall on the spectrum of each of the clusters. Your results are based on comparing you to all the other humans who have taken the test. So, for instance, when I took the Big Five through a website run by Soto, I ended up in the 99th percentile for extroversion, the 58th percentile for agreeableness, the 29th percentile for conscientiousness, the 43rd percentile for neuroticism and the 99th percentile for openness to experience.

That result is a bit different from the results you get with most online personality tests, which tend to group people by type — you’re a Hufflepuff, or a Charlotte, or an ISFJ. This is one of the big problems with pop culture ideas of personality, from a scientific standpoint. They try to fit us all into a set of immutable types. “That’s why we don’t like Myers-Briggs,” Vazire said. “We shouldn’t be talking about types of people.” That’s because, like most things with humans, personality traits fall on a bell curve and most of us will be near the middle of that distribution. When you try to categorize people by type, you end up with a lot of people who are placed in boxes that seem far apart, but whose distribution of personality is actually pretty close to each other. “Types create more artificial boundaries, where most people are really close to the boundary line,” Vazire said. “That’s the nature of human difference.”

The Big Five also differs in the way it asks questions. With the Big Five, you get direct statements — I am a person who is outgoing and sociable — and you agree with that, or you disagree. Sometimes you’re given a spectrum of agreement to choose from — agree strongly, disagree moderately. You aren’t asked about hypothetical situations. You aren’t asked about which words you like best. You aren’t given five images of different sunsets and asked to pick which one best reveals your inner soul.

“People feel like those are magic,” Vazire said. “I don’t want to take that feeling away from people because it’s not really harmful. But it harkens back to Freudian ideas of unconscious. The better and more valid way is to ask you pretty transparent questions.” The Big Five, she told me, has produced results that can be shown to remain largely consistent across a person’s lifespan and that can be used to predict at least some part of a person’s likely academic achievement, dating choices and even future parenting behavior. It has also been validated cross-culturally to some extent, Soto told me. Although, to do that, researchers re-create the model from scratch, using dictionaries of local languages, and the fifth cluster — openness to new experiences in the English-language version aimed at Americans — is often something different in other countries, influenced by different cultural values.

But none of that scientific evidence does much to make the Big Five popular online. In fact, when personality scientists think about their pet peeves with online quizzes, they take themselves to task. “I think we feel like we’ve done such a bad job of marketing the scientifically valid stuff,” Vazire said. Their science resolution, she said, isn’t so much to get people to stop taking personality quizzes, but to get those people who love quizzes to transfer some of that enjoyment to the Big Five. That’s something Soto and his team have been working on — creating a Harry Potter version. Of course, because it’s the Big Five, Soto’s test doesn’t tell you an absolute personality “type.” Instead, it tells you how compatible you’d be with each of the four Hogwarts Houses. I’m 69 percent compatible with Slytherin, 44 percent compatible with Gryffindor and 43 percent compatible with Hufflepuff. And Ravenclaw? I’m 99 percent compatible. ¹⁵

Turns out, sometimes, the scientifically valid answer isn’t so different from Buzzfeed’s.

Jeopardy! contestant Nick Spicher got a $1,400 lesson in the importance of proper pronunciation last night, courtesy of the rap-minded sticklers of the long-running trivia show’s notoriously strict judging table. Spicher was poking around one of the show’s nerdier categories—“Music & Literature Before & After,” which…

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“Titanic” turns 20 years old today, and we haven’t had a film much like it since. It was a global phenomenon. It wasn’t built on a pre-existing franchise. And it turned into one of the most iconic films ever produced.

It was nominated for 14 Oscars and won 11. Its legs were legendary: “Titanic” didn’t make its billions all at once up front, it made them week after week after week. The film had the biggest ninth weekend at the domestic box office in history, then the biggest 10th weekend, and so on and so forth through its 18th weekend. The film clocked in 15 weeks as the No. 1 film at the domestic box office. Paramount shipped an estimated 24 million units to video stores in 1998 to brace for the home video sales market. Its television rights sold for $30 million, but that figure was considered so low it launched an internecine industry fight.

So as its anniversary was approaching, we started wondering in the FiveThirtyEight office: Has anyone not seen this movie?

As such, we added two questions to a SurveyMonkey Audience poll of 1,009 respondents in the U.S. aged 18 and up.¹⁹ We asked: Have you seen “Titanic?” And, if so, did you first see it in a theater?

It turns out that far more people had seen the film than I originally imagined. Eighty-five percent of respondents said they had seen “Titanic”; 15 percent said they had not. That’s an impressive figure. For perspective, only about half of America watches a given Super Bowl, tops. As far as I can tell, the rate of “Titanic” viewership sometime in the last two decades is roughly on par with computer or Bible ownership.

‘Women and children toward the front, please’

There is not much of a gender split. I thought there might be, but men were slightly more likely to say they had seen “Titanic” in theaters, and women were slightly more likely to have seen it overall. “Titanic” is one of those rare four quadrant hits: young and old, male and female alike have seen this thing.

I think that’s a strong part of the movie’s appeal. Remember that the film’s first 20 minutes is essentially a swashbuckling treasure heist starring Bill Paxton trying to find a diamond. Jack doesn’t even see Rose until 35 minutes into the film, and from then on it’s only a little over an hour of romance until the iceberg shows up and it turns into a seat-of-the-pants action and disaster movie. It really has something for everybody.

Age brings in another angle. The older the respondent was, the more likely they were to have seen the film in a cinema, but — and here’s the fascinating part — the less likely they were to have seen it, period. About 90 percent of women aged 18 to 29 and 30 to 44 had seen the film, the highest viewership rate among all groups. They’d have been in their early 20s or younger when the film was in cinemas, and most of the former group had grown up with “Titanic” as a cultural phenomenon all their lives.

On the other end, only about 3 in 4 men age 60 and higher said they had seen it, making them the least likely group. (These guys would have been in their 40s and up when “Titanic” was released, and about two-thirds of the ones who have seen the film said they saw it in theaters.)

Given these age and gender figures and census data for 2016, and assuming they scale nationally, I’d estimate that about 39 million American adults haven’t seen “Titanic” while about 211 million have at some point in their lives.

‘Will the lifeboats be seated according to class?’

My favorite finding of the poll? This is a movie about a relationship with a staggering wealth disparity, but the richest and poorest respondents were the least likely to have seen the film. Among respondents in households who make $50,000 to $74,999, 92 percent said they had seen the film. Only 81 percent of those who live in households making $150,000 or above and 82 percent of those making $24,999 and below said they’d caught the movie.

All this has left me a bit curious about that 15 percent of people who have managed to avoid seeing “Titanic” for each of the last 20 years.

I found one.

“Basically, I was 7 when it came out; shockingly my mother was against me seeing a film with a naked woman,” said Heather Antos, an editor at Marvel who recently confided to me that she had not seen “Titanic.” “Beyond that, I’ve just never been interested in it. I know the story. What’s left other than sitting around for three hours?”

That’s three hours and 14 minutes, thank you very much.

In one Austin neighborhood, there are six Mattress Firms within a square mile of one another. In the company’s hometown of Houston, there are four locations on Westheimer between Bagby and Shepherd alone. In Mesquite, you can pick whichever side of I-635 you like at Town East Boulevard and get to a Mattress Firm within minutes. Out in the West Texas town of El Paso, you can fall in love with some memory foam at either the Cielo Vista Shopping Center, or go literally next door at The Fountains at Farah. Sleepy Valley residents can buy a new mattress at Tenth and Trenton, or if they don’t think they can make it that far north, they can make the less-than-two-mile drive down to Nolana and…View Original Post

The post Why There Are So Many Mattress Stores Everywhere appeared first on Texas Monthly.

Austin-based company ATX Brands is putting Sixth Street venue the Parish up for sale on eBay. The online auction will kick off at noon Friday, Dec. 1, with an opening bid of $1, and will continue for 10 days, closing at noon Dec. 10.

The auction does not include the physical property of the club, located on the second story of a historic but well-renovated building in the heart of Austin’s party district. Instead, the top bidder wins the Parish brand name and club amenities including in-house lighting and production capabilities, furniture and fixtures, and an HD projector and screen. The winning bidder will sign a new and separate lease with the property’s landlord based on predetermined rates and options.

More information about the upcoming sale is available on the club’s website. 

The sale comes a few months after ATX Brands, a company that operates the “breastaurant” chain Bikinis Sports Bar and Grill and several Texas bars and restaurants, sold Austin music venue the Scoot Inn to concert and events promoter C3 Presents.

In April, the company’s owner, Doug Guller, sold historic dance hall Schroeder Hall in Schroeder – 17 miles east of Victoria – on eBay for $499,700. At the time of that auction, Guller told the Statesman he was looking to get out of the live music business and focus more on his restaurants.

“The great thing about putting it on eBay is that it gives me a much wider net to find a buyer,” he told the Statesman then.

ATX Brands is also in the process of selling Hill Country town Bankersmith. The company acquired the Fredericksburg-area ghost town in 2012, did significant renovations, and for three years operated it as Bikinis, Texas. Bankersmith initially went on the market for $1.5 million dollars in January, but the price was lowered to $975,000 in August.

The Parish has over 5,300 square feet of space and a capacity of roughly 425. A private viewing of the space before the auction closing can be arranged by contacting info@theparishaustin.com. The auction winner will be contacted immediately following the close of the sale, and the final closing must take place on or before December 22, 2017.

You may know The Upside Down inside and out, but what about the Snackside Down? 

Oh yes, we're talking about the Netflix hit show Stranger Things parodied by our friends over at Sesame Street. (Warning: If you haven't finished the season and/or don't want to see any spoilers, steer clear of the 6-minute video above.)

Here's a spoiler-free summary: In Sharing Things, Cookie Monster plays the Cookiegorgon, and he's on the hunt for some treats on Halloween night. The whole crew is there with Grover playing Lucas and Ernie playing Dustin.

This isn't the first time Sesame Street has reimagined a popular franchise. There was The Walking Gingerbread, a play on The Walking Dead, and Star S'Mores, bouncing off Star Wars. And let's not forget Furry Potter and The Goblet of Cookies. Read more...

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Vietnam War Draft Lottery - Would your number have been called?:

On Dec. 1, 1969, the United States held its first draft lottery, which gave young men a random number corresponding to their birthdays. Men with lower numbers were called first and told to report to induction centers where they could be ordered into active duty and possibly sent to the Vietnam War.

AUSTIN (KXAN) — Tuesday is Election Day and if early voting numbers are a sign of interest in the election, the Travis County Clerk is predicting just 10-percent of the 727,000 registered voters will come to the polls.

“On Election Day we typically double the amount of people who come for early voting,” says Dana DeBeauvoir, Travis County Clerk. “Since about 5.5 percent voted early, we’re expecting about double that on Election Day.”

According to the League of Women Voters, the number one reason voters head to the polls is because they feel a connection to their county and about what they are voting. The county clerk says voters may not feel impacted by what’s on the ballot.

• What you need to know before you vote

Items on the ballot for Central Texas voters include a billion dollar AISD school bond that would not raise the tax rate. Voters in Leander and Lake Travis ISD will also vote on school bonds that will not raise taxes. In Bastrop a school bond would raise taxes by $2 per month. In Travis County voters will decide on two propositions that would improve roads and parks totally more than $184-million. Those bonds would raise the tax bill by $24 per year. Statewide, voters will decide on seven constitutional amendments.

DeBeauvoir believes letting voters go to any voting location helps improve turnout.

• Get familiar with the items that could be on your ballot here

“We do think based on what voters have told us that it is helpful in their lives, it makes it a lot more convenient, and therefore we are seeing fewer marginal voters, the ones who miss Election Day because something comes up,” DeBeauvoir says.

A spokesperson for the Secretary of State’s office said the types of items on the ballot typically don’t drive voters to the polls when it’s not a mid-term or Presidential Election.

Polls are open from 7a.m. to 7 p.m.

schwit1 found this story in the Wall Street Journal: Daniel Parfitt thought he'd found the perfect drone for a two-day mapping job in a remote patch of the Australian Outback. The roughly $80,000 machine had a wingspan of 7 feet and resembled a stealth bomber. There was just one problem. His machine raised the hackles of one prominent local resident: a wedge-tailed eagle. Swooping down from above, the eagle used its talons to punch a hole in the carbon fiber and Kevlar fuselage of Mr. Parfitt's drone, which lost control and plummeted to the ground... "It ended up being a pile of splinters"... These highly territorial raptors, which eat kangaroos, have no interest in yielding their apex-predator status to the increasing number of drones flying around the bush. They've even been known to harass the occasional human in a hang glider... Camouflage techniques, like putting fake eyes on the drones, don't appear to be fully effective, and some pilots have even considered arming drones with pepper spray or noise devices to ward off eagles. One mining survey superintendent said he's now lost 12 different drones to eagle attacks, costing his employer $210,000. Another drone was actually attacked by nine different eagles, and its pilot estimates eagles are now attacking 20% of all drone flights in rural Australia.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Villagers ate the nearly 8m (26ft) long reptile in Sumatra after a local man wrestled and killed it.

WOBURN, MA—In light of reports that Miramax cofounder Harvey Weinstein had sexually harassed women for decades with no apparent consequences, local man Devin Blanford, who is currently ignoring the sexual misconduct of 17 separate coworkers, acquaintances, and friends, wondered Friday how Weinstein was able to get away with it. “How was this allowed to happen in the year 2017?” said an exasperated Blanford, who reportedly has willfully refused to acknowledge let alone challenge suggestive comments made by coworkers toward female colleagues and the unwanted sexual advances made by his friends toward women at social gatherings. “I know he’s a powerful man, but that doesn’t mean these disgusting things [that I deliberately choose to overlook in my own life or rationalize so quickly that it’s barely even a conscious act] can just be tolerated. Look, no one wants to rock the boat, I get that, but [other ...

The cult of pumpkin spice has officially gone too far. So far in fact, that its pungent odour brought about the evacuation of an entire high school in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Students and teachers at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Upper Fells Point, Baltimore, were concerned about an "unusual smell" on the third floor at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday. It was getting stronger. And, per the school's president Bill Heiser, several students and teachers were having trouble breathing. 

The principal took the decision to evacuate over 200 students and teachers from the building and call the emergency services. When the fire brigade showed up, they called for a Hazmat team. Things were pretty serious.  Read more...

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SAN JUAN, PR—Saying that their fellow countrymen were probably deluged with coverage of their plight, residents of Puerto Rico who have been without power for the last month told reporters Thursday that they could only assume that this crisis had to be the nation’s leading news story. “I mean, I haven’t heard anything…

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Get ready to finally become the witch or wizard you've always wanted to be.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is a new augmented reality mobile game created in partnership between Warner Bros. and Niantic  —  the creators of the hit mobile game Pokémon Go.

Not much is known about Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, which was revealed today, but it sounds like it has some similar features to Pokémon Go. Namely, players will have to visit locations in the real world to find different objects and engage with the world. That means uncovering magical artifacts, meeting characters and beasts from the wizarding world, and learning to cast spells. Read more...

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