IKEA Monkey

I don’t really have anything add to this video of 24-year-old Kris Bryant grinning like an idiot as he made the throw to first to win the World Series, only a sincere wish that everyone reading this gets to experience a moment of similar anticipatory joy in their lives, and the observation that it is a genuine privilege to watch good baseball players having fun.

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David Ross went out a winner.

Already a champion with Cubs fans and teammates for his engaging personality and uncanny leadership skills off the field, the veteran catcher finished his career as a champion on it.

After playing his last game at Wrigley Field over the weekend, the veteran catcher...

Chicago police officers in safety vests formed a bright yellow line down the middle of Clark Street as Cubs fans streamed toward Waveland Avenue just before the last inning of the last game of the World Series Wednesday night.“Look at all these people,” one bystander said, gesturing to the police....

memorian:

Ghostbusters Halloween Appreciation Post

   And so the pendulum swings back. We had the Versace, and now… one of the ugliest shirts FLOTUS has ever worn. I suppose that’s the law of the universe that keeps things in balance. Read More ...

After a day of breathless speculation about whether or not Beyoncé was performing at the 50th CMA Awards, she showed up about two hours into the show to bring the house down with the Dixie Chicks and “Daddy Lessons.”

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Adele has one child and it sounds like that’s all she’s going to have.

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Libertarian vice presidential nominee Bill Weld defended Hillary Clinton Tuesday night, acknowledging an explicit split with his running mate Gary Johnson.

What we know:

—Police arrested Scott Michael Greene, a 46-year-old white man, in connection with the fatal shootings on Wednesday of two Des Moines-area officers. He was detained west of Des Moines without incident and charged Thursday.

—The officers—one from Urbandale, Iowa, and the other from Des Moines—were shot 20 minutes apart early Wednesday. Both were in their patrol cars. Police said they were killed in an “ambush-style attack.” They were identified as Anthony “Tony” Beminio and Justin Martin.  

—We’re live-blogging this story below.

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Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, in a desperate, garbled shriek for the old world order, called a United States Democratic presidential candidate a “cunt” today on Twitter before deleting the tweet. His office briefly tried to claim he was hacked, then settled on the old “bad retweet” argument.

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Never underestimate the power of onions. 📷: @thrillistburgerquest /📍: @owenandenginechicago #forkyeah http://ift.tt/2f6AIh1

Mariah Carey has identified a culprit in her breakup with billionaire businessman James Packer: Scientology. Packer’s business manager, Tommy Davis, formerly served as a spokesperson for the Church of Scientology, and sources say that he was the one to disrupt the romance.

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Anthony Weiner Sends Apology Sext To Entire Clinton Campaign

Frozen soup is a lifesaver when you don’t have time, energy, or groceries to cook dinner, but not all of them freeze well. Here’s why you should stay away from freezing soups with pasta in them.

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Donald Trump is not letting up on his claims that the election could be rigged against him.

There is more than one image suggested by a half fried egg, and different languages have settled on different ideas of what this egg looks like.

An Iowa woman arrested on charges she voted twice for Donald Trump attempted to explain her behavior by stating that “the polls are rigged,” according to Iowa Public Radio.

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Every year, thousands of chimpanzees are illegally yanked from their homes in Central and West Africa, and shipped to Asia and the Middle East to serve as pets or entertainment. Most of them are babies. Most of them die on the way.

Occasionally, the endangered animals are found by airport officials and confiscated—but then what? “A chimp doesn’t come with a ticket or a sign,” says Christina Hvilsom, from Copenhagen Zoo. “So they don’t know where to send it back to.”

Chimps do, however, come with DNA. There are four subspecies of chimps—western, central, Nigeria-Cameroon, and eastern—each of which lives in a different part of Africa. They are genetically distinct, and Hvilsom, a geneticist by training, wondered “if their genomic landscape mimicked their geographical landscape.” In other words, by analyzing a chimp’s genome, could she work out where it came from?

The answer was yes. By analyzing the complete genomes of 65 chimps from across their entire range, Hvilsom’s team, co-led by Tomas Marques-Bonet, from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, showed that genes do indeed predict geography. For the central and eastern chimps, you can work out where an individual came from to within 50 kilometers—not just to a particular country, but to a particular forest. This genetic geotagging is fuzzier for the other two subspecies, but that’s only because the team had fewer samples. With more genomes, they’ll get more precise.  

The team is now working to put their research into practice, to help customs officials relocate trafficked chimps to their point of origin. But in the meantime, their results led them down an unexpected path.

As they explored the genomes of the central chimps, they kept on finding sequences that seemed to come from bonobos—a closely related ape, which tends to be smaller and gentler. “At first, we thought: Pffft, this is just a mistake,” says Hvilsom. “But we continued with a variety of techniques and kept on seeing this trend.”

The team eventually confirmed that central chimps (and to a lesser extent, the eastern and Nigeria-Cameroon ones) owe some of their DNA to their bonobo relatives. It’s a tiny proportion—less than 1 percent—but it’s there nonetheless. And this implies that the two apes must have successfully mated at some point in the past.

Bonobos and chimpanzees began to split into two species between 1.6 and 2.1 million years ago. But they didn’t stay entirely separate. Hvilsom and Marques-Bonet calculated that the two species must have been mating and exchanging genes between 200,000 and 550,000 years ago, before the central and eastern chimps had diverged into separate subspecies. The central ones still carry the legacy of those liaisons, bolstered by another wave of bonobo genes that came in around 100,000 years ago.

Chimps and bonobos have been known to mate in captivity, so it’s not surprising that they would have done so in the wild. But interbreeding isn’t just about compatibility; it’s about opportunity. The bonobos live in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the mighty Congo River separates them from the central chimps to the west, and the eastern chimps to the north and east. The formation of the river was probably what split chimps and bonobos into separate species in the first place, cordoning them off into separate forests and preventing them from meeting. “It’s a huge barrier,” says Hvilsom, especially since “chimps and bonobos don’t swim; they drown.”

But perhaps the river was shallower at various points in its history, allowing the once-separated apes to meet, mingle, and mate. The team are now looking into this, trying to tie the periods of gene flow that they observed to the ancient climate of Central Africa. They’re also planning to sequence the genomes of more bonobos—they only have 10 so far, which might be why they only saw bonobo DNA in chimp genomes and not the other way around. “I can’t figure out why it would go in only one direction,” says Hvilsom.

The team’s results mirror what we know about human evolution. In 2010, scientists showed that in every person outside of Africa, a small percent of DNA came from Neanderthals. Likewise, Aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders inherited part of their genomes from the Denisovans—another group of early humans, known only from a finger bone and two teeth.

It seems that as our ancestors left Africa and spread around the world, we met and mated with other groups of early humans that had already colonized Asia and Europe, picking up their genes as a result. We now carry traces of those cousins within us—Neanderthals, Denisovans, and likely other as-yet-unidentified hominids, too.

This flow of genes from one species to another is called introgression, and it complicates our understanding of our history. The origin of species feels like a process of division, where one population splits into two distinct ones, creating neatly branching family trees. That’s a fiction. “Gone are the days of neat branching trees,” writes Adam Rutherford in his book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived. “If we are to look at the evolution that led to where we are now, instead of the nice neat tree, I think it could be reasonably described as one big, million-year clusterfuck.”

This seems to be a common leitmotif in hominid evolution. For example, it seems that after humans initially diverged from chimps, we spent a long time exchanging genes—read: having sex—before separating permanently. Chimps and bonobos clearly did the same. And the various chimp subspecies are still exchanging genes between each other.

To Mary Gonder, from Drexel University, this implies that they aren’t just passively drifting apart due to geographical barriers. Instead, it’s likely that “natural selection is pulling them apart from each other,” perhaps by adapting them to local diseases or environmental challenges. And that’s another reason why the original goal of Hvilsom’s work—tracking the origin of trafficked chimpanzees—is so vital. You need to send them back to the right home.

At a rally in Toledo, Ohio on Thursday, Donald Trump, a clump of moldering drain hair, suggested we cancel our election and let him be president.

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In an essay posted to Medium Thursday, Amy Schumer addressed the backlash surrounding her recent “Formation” parody/spoof/tribute/video. “It was NEVER a parody,” she writes. “It was just us women celebrating each other.”

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Last week, a massive chain of hacked computers simultaneously dropped what they were doing and blasted terabytes of junk data to a set of key servers, temporarily shutting down access to popular sites in the eastern U.S. and beyond. Unlike previous attacks, many of these compromised computers weren’t sitting on someone’s desk, or tucked away in a laptop case—they were instead the cheap processors soldered into web-connected devices, from security cameras to video recorders. A DVR could have helped bring down Twitter.

Great, I thought as I read the coverage last week. My DVR helped bring down Twitter. (Probably not, at least this time—the targeted products were older than what you’d find in most American homes, and less protected.) But the internet is huge! There are around a couple billion public IPv4 addresses out there; any one of those might have a server, a desktop computer, or a toaster plugged in at the other end. Even if the manufacturer of my gadget gave it a dumb and easily guessed password, wouldn’t it be safe in this sea of anonymity? How would the hackers find me?

I don’t actually own a wireless toaster. But I devised a test. Renting a small server from Amazon, I gussied it up to look like an unsecured web device, opening a web port that hackers commonly use to remotely control computers. Instead of allowing real access, though, I set up a false front: Hackers would think they were logging into a server, but I’d really just record their keystrokes and IP addresses. In cybersecurity circles, this is called putting out a honeypot—an irresistible target that attracts and ultimately entraps hackers and the scripts they use to find vulnerable servers.

Here’s what my particular honeypot looked like, if you tried to log in:

I switched on the server at  1:12 p.m. Wednesday, fully expecting to wait days—or weeks—to see a hack attempt.

Wrong! The first one came at 1:53 p.m.

This graphic is a simulation—a bot’s-eye view, if you will—but it’s the actual sequence of commands the hacking script used. It tried a common default username and password (root/root) and executed the “sh” command, giving it the ability to run programs and install its own code. My fake toaster doesn’t allow that, of course—it just cuts the connection.

The next hacking attempt, from a different IP address and using different login credentials, came at 2:07 p.m. Another came at 2:10. And then 2:40. And 2:48. In all, more than 300 different IP addresses attempted to hack my honeypot by 11:59 p.m. Many of them used the password “xc3511,” which was the factory default for many of the old webcams hijacked in last week’s attack.

The last attempted hack came 5 minutes ago, using the username root and the password root. (Yes, those are live figures; they were updated when you loaded this page.)

I’ll admit this volume of attacks might not be typical. I hosted my fake toaster on a virtual Amazon server, not an actual toaster hooked up to residential internet. Hackers aren’t typing these passwords themselves—they’ve programmed bots to do the hard work for them, scanning through thousands of open ports an hour. And I’d bet those scripts are trawling Amazon’s range of IP addresses more frequently in hopes of hacking vulnerable rookies. (If that has happened to me without my knowledge, I am very sorry and please don’t hurt me.) But my experience matches what security firms have seen. It is now within the capability of hackers to literally scan the entire internet, looking for vulnerable servers with open ports. And every hacked computer adds another recruit to the search effort, shortening the time required geometrically.

Matthew Prince, the cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare, said anyone hooking up a poorly secured  IP device to the internet can expect to see that gizmo hacked within a week, if not much sooner.

“Assuming it’s publicly accessible, the chance [of being hacked] is probably 100 percent,” he said. “The IPv4 address space just isn’t that big. You can now run a scan across that entire space in hours, especially if you have a big botnet. The scans for vulnerability are continuous, and if anything, have accelerated over the last couple of years.”

This doesn’t mean that every Internet-of-Things device is vulnerable. Most things that you connect to the web through your home WiFi are probably okay: Your router kills most incoming hacking attempts. (Of course, if your router is compromised...) You have more to worry about if your device hooks up to your modem directly, which is more common in industrial settings.

All the same, the vastness of the internet can no longer protect us. I can’t count the number of sloppy things I’ve done, security-wise, because I thought I was small enough to escape notice—reused passwords, put private keys in code, left servers open to the world. Nowadays, even the most obscure among us can be found by a roving script, and in a startlingly small amount of time.

It seems almost farcical that the 2016 presidential campaign has become a referendum on misogyny at a moment when the United States is poised to elect its first woman president.

Not that this is surprising, exactly.

There’s a long tradition of politics clashing spectacularly with perceived gender norms around election time, and the stakes often seem highest when women are about to make history.

Today’s political dialogue—which often merely consists of opposing sides shouting over one another—echoes another contentious era in American politics, when women fought for the right to vote. Then and now, a mix of political tension and new-fangled publishing technology produced an environment ripe for creating and distributing political imagery. The meme-ification of women’s roles in society—in civic life and at home—has been central to an advocacy tradition that far precedes slogans like, “Life’s a bitch, don’t elect one,” or  “A woman’s place is in the White House.”

Today’s memes can be found on T-shirts and bumper stickers, yes, but they’re mostly online—published and shared on platforms like Tumblr and Imgur and Twitter. A century ago, political memes were distributed primarily on postcards, via pamphlets, and in newspapers—with suffragettes as a favorite subject of either mockery or admiration, depending on the illustrator’s beliefs.

Much of the imagery that circulated in the early 20th century made fun of suffragists, even in illustrations that weren’t explicitly anti-suffrage. Mainstream humor at the time relied heavily on gender-based tropes and stereotypes, and political humor was no exception.“It made no difference that the bulk of this material was not intentionally anti-suffrage,” wrote Lisa Tickner in her 1988 book, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14, “It represented an enormous mass of material, and some very deep-seated prejudice.”

One common theme was the subversion of male and female roles in society—with men often depicted holding crying babies or doing housework, and women portrayed as ultra masculine and detached from home life.

Artists who created works with the intention of promoting suffrage were organized and devoted to the cause, Tickner wrote, “but [their efforts] were very small against the accumulated weight of individual and institutional misogyny.”

Sounds familiar, no?

On top of all that, in a sub-genre of suffrage-era propaganda that’s downright internetty, there was even an obsession with cats. (This was likely because of the 1913 Cat-and-Mouse Act, a government strategy to discourage hunger strikes by imprisoned suffragettes in the United Kingdom, according to the historian of social movements Catherine Helen Palczewski.)

As Palczewski points out in an essay accompanying her web collection of suffrage postcards, it was common for people to display albums filled with postcards in their homes in the early 20th century. So it made sense that postcards both supporting and opposing the women’s vote were ubiquitous, especially between 1890 and 1915 in the United States. About 4,500 different suffrage-themed postcards were designed during that time, she wrote.

Congress ultimately ratified the 19th Amendment in 1920. But many women, particularly women of color, remained disenfranchised long after that. Early 20th-century suffrage memes were nearly exclusively concerned with white people. In reviewing hundreds of postcards, prints, and illustrations, the only portrayal I saw of a black woman was in a cartoon strip about a white husband struggling to manage housework after his wife had gone off to a suffrage meeting. The woman in the strip is a mammy caricature, only there to help the man with the laundry.

And though the aesthetic of early comics and other memes isn’t exactly contemporary, many of the formats used back in the day—like inspirational quotes overlaying imagery of revered figures—have lived on. You can find this kind of thing all over sites like Pinterest and Reddit today:

In 1941, George Orwell wrote an essay about the endurance of this art form, focusing in particular on the work of Donald McGill, a British illustrator known for his raunchy postcards. His observations remain salient today, and could easily apply to modern collections of political “shitposts.” (The epithet he uses is jarring to read in 2016, but such racist imagery is still being produced.)

They have an utter lowness of mental atmosphere which comes out not only in the nature of the jokes but, even more, in the grotesque, staring, blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like those of a child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in them, every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with bottoms like Hottentots. Your second impression, however, is of indefinable familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are they so like?

Comic postcards, Orwell concluded, were so familiar because they exploited tensions and ideas rooted deeply in Western European consciousness. Finding humor in punching down at women, the depictions of them as grotesque, sexual innuendo at their expense—all this stuff has deep cultural roots. “What you are really looking at,” he wrote, “is something as traditional as Greek tragedy.” Which, of course, brings us back to the 2016 election.

Outspoken and civically engaged women are still a target for humorists and activists, routinely cast as either larger-than-life saviors or power-thirsty demons destroying modern society. “To her critics, the modern woman was a symptom of the social decline she helped to precipitate,” Tickner wrote of the way suffragettes were perceived during the presidential campaign of 1908, “To her champions, she was not unwomanly, but womanly in a new and developing way.”

The only consensus, it seems, is that a woman’s political ambitions cannot be ignored.

Starting in November, Arby's will be serving up venison (deer meat) in a select number of restaurants located in popular hunting markets.

Arby's Venison Sandwich features a thick-cut venison steak, crispy onions, and juniper berry sauce on a toasted specialty roll. The steak is marinated in garlic, salt, and pepper and then cooked for three hours for tenderness. The juniper berry sauce is a Cabernet steak sauce infused with juniper berries.

Venison is similar to beef but tends to be leaner with a finer texture and can sometimes be a bit gamey. It's not commonly found at restaurants in general.

The sandwich will only be offered at 17 Arby’s restaurants across America. Each is located within heavy deer hunting areas in either Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, or Georgia.

The locations and dates available are:

Available October 31 - November 3, 2016:

- 2044 Rosa L. Parks Blvd., Nashville, Tenn. 37228

Available November 4-6, 2016:

- 3821 Tower Ave., Superior, Wis. 54880
- 1690 Park Place Blvd., St. Louis Park, Minn. 55416
- 704 Highway 33 South, Cloquet, Minn. 55720
- 348 Lincoln Ave. SE, St. Cloud, Minn. 56301
- 3275 First St. S, St. Cloud, Minn. 56301
- 4415 Roswell Rd. NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30342

Available November 12-15, 2016:

- 4229 W Vienna Rd., Clio, Mich. 48420
- 4040 17 Mile Rd. NE, Cedar Springs, Mich. 49319
- 1215 M 89, Plainwell, Mich. 49080
- 8685 Birch Run Rd., Birch Run, Mich. 48415

Available November 25-28:

- 5205 Library Road, Bethel Park, PA 15102
- 4260 Ohio River Blvd., Bellevue, Penn. 15202
- 16 Towne Center Drive, Leechburg, Penn. 15656
- 2539 W State St., New Castle, Penn. 16101
- 2648 Ellwood Rd., New Castle, Penn. 16101
- 3224 Wilmington Rd., New Castle, Penn. 16105

Photo via Arby's.

Not a bad place to start your day. 📷: @girlinbluecoat /📍: Greece #7dayweekend http://ift.tt/2eV04NB

Please take a moment and watch this video of Newt Gingrich losing his mind when Megyn Kelly deigns to call out the sexual assault allegations against Donald Trump, I promise you, it is worth your time.

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Cashmere is not merely goat hair.

No, no. Most hair on a goat—even a so-called cashmere goat—is coarse and thick, unsuitable for the neck of lady. Cashmere comes from a second undercoat that goats grow only in the winter, where the hairs are fine and soft and downy. But even goats specially bred to produce cashmere grow pitifully little—about half a pound per goat. Hence, your very expensive cashmere sweater.

In China, the world’s top producer of cashmere, scientists have been trying to breed more productive cashmere goats. They’ve now used CRISPR, the genetic editing technique, to disrupt a single gene in cashmere goats. The change made hair in their undercoats even longer and more numerous—but not, crucially, any thicker. The genetic tweak boosts yield by about three ounces.

So are you thinking what I’m thinking? How do you sell cashmere from GMOs? Conventional genetic engineering in the 90s took on commodity crops like corns and soybeans, and even more recent CRISPR experiments, like the bulked-up pigs in South Korea, are aimed toward large potential markets. Cashmere is a luxury product, its value derived precisely from its rarity. What does making more cashmere—through a process as wisely misunderstood and disliked as genetic modification—do to its value? What happens to a luxury product in the age of genetic engineering?

It’s worth considering that CRISPR’s recent discovery is the reason we’re even contemplating this question. Just a few years ago, a couple papers on gene-editing potential of CRISPR set off a firestorm in biology, expanding the imaginations of geneticists. The new technique makes it relatively easy to edit genes in virtually any species. And while much of the hype has focused on CRISPR’s potential to cure human diseases or to rid the world of malaria mosquitoes or revive the extinct wooly mammoth, an unappreciated effect of genetic engineering is how it changes the way we get stuff—stuff we eat, wear, use, and break. After all, conventional genetic engineering changed the face of modern agriculture for a commodity crops; for better or worse, CRISPR could do the same to niche markets, including cashmere.

So I called up Karl Spilhaus, longtime president of the Boston-based trade group Cashmere and Camel Hair Manufacturers Institute. Spilhaus was circumspect. He says the industry could be open to hair from these genetically modified goats if the quality was there. It’s just way too early to tell.

But he also pointed out why the Chinese would be interested be creating a higher-yield cashmere goat. Lately, China’s dominance of cashmere market has gotten shakier. The goats graze on windswept grasslands in China’s northwest, and they grow their cashmere undercoats in response to harsh winters. As China modernizes, the cashmere-goat-herding lifestyle is falling out of favor.  “People no longer want to pursue the nomadic way of life,” says Spilhaus. “And China’s diet is going more toward meat, and goat meat is a big factor. It’s a lot easier for a herdsman to raise goats for meat than for very fine cashmere.”

Cashmere production has also taken a toll on the environment in Central Asia. Goats are destructive grazers, and their hooves destroy the root systems of grass. This double whammy has contributed to desertification in China and Mongolia. Environmentalist groups have taken stances against cashmere, which has in turn prompted efforts towards a “Sustainable Cashmere Standard.”

Here, perhaps, genetically-modified goats could find a niche. Loro Piana, an Italian company that specializes in high-end wool and cashmere, has launched a sustainability program to increase the yield of cashmere goats in China through traditional selective breeding (not gene editing), in hopes of raising fewer goats without sacrificing yield. If gene editing could accomplish the same—and achieve gains greater than through selective breeding—than perhaps you just might see a new “green cashmere.”

“Genetics always goes hand-in-hand with the environment and the production system,” says Scott Fahrenkrug, cofounder of the livestock genetics company Recombinetics. In other words, a means to alter DNA is a means to alter the living systems that create our food and clothes and everyday objects. To win over the public to this new wave of genetic engineering enabled by CRISPR, though, you need to alter it for the better. That is Fahrenkrug’s argument for Recombinetics, which uses genetic engineering to create hornless dairy cows, eliminating the painful process of dehorning cows.

Fahrenkrug is skeptical that yield gains currently reported in the genetically altered goats are enough to sell it. And to be clear, the Chinese scientists have no immediate plans to commercialize their gene-edited cashmere goats. Xiaolong Wang, a biologist at Northwest A&F University who worked on the goats, says the team is still studying the effects of the mutation. They want to know, for example,  what other consequences it may have on the long-term growth of the goats. “It may take years of work,” he wrote in an email. For now, the only genetically modified cashmere goats are the ones in a research lab.

CRISPR research is still only a few years old, and the full spectrum of its applications barely explored. As scientists try out new ways of using CRISPR, the effects will likely ripple outward, touching more species, more markets, and perhaps even more items on your Christmas list.