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Each year, Baby Center polls parents to find out what they named their newborn. In 2018, more than 742,000 parents answered.

Based on that data, here are the top baby names for 2018.

Girls:

1. Sophia
2. Olivia
3. Emma
4. Ava
5. Isabella
6. Aria
7. Riley
8. Amelia
9. Mia
10. Layla

Boys:

1. Jackson
2. Liam
3. Noah
4. Aiden
5. Caden
6. Grayson
7. Lucas
8. Mason
9. Oliver
10. Elijah

Sophia celebrates her ninth consecutive year as the top choice for girls, while Jackson remains the most popular name for boys for six years running. Oliver and Layla both jumped into the top 10, pushing out Logan and Zoe. The fastest climbers of 2018 include Everly, Isla, Leo, and Carson.

These are the top ten, head to Baby Center to see all 100 top baby names for 2018. If you click on a name, you can discover its popularity over the years (data FTW!). Baby Center also offers predictions of future trends in baby names (inc. sneakers, gender-swaps, and Southern states), as well as alternatives to popular names.

Previously: Heather used to be a popular baby name

(Neatorama)

image via Classic Film

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous two weeks or so. This week's more interesting releases include a Disney-themed sticker pack, an ingenious tool that's useful for repeat phrases when texting, and a banking app from T-Mobile. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last two weeks.

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12 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last two weeks including Ralph Breaks the Internet Stickers, Typing Hero, and T-Mobile MONEY (11/17/18 - 12/1/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

They say to create solutions for the problems you have and that's just what graphic designer Christian Boer did. He has dyslexia and, for his graduation project a few years back, he created a font that makes reading easier for people with dyslexia. According to his site, people with dyslexia often have difficulties reading because of certain "common reading errors" including "swapping, mirroring, changing, turning and melting letters together." Boer's Dyslexie Font is a typeface with uniquely-shaped letters that remove these common reading errors.

GOOD:

...research suggests that it’s effective (though some disagree) and also because Boer has made the font available for free. Many educators and businesses already make use of Dyslexie. For instance, Project Literacy integrated the typeface into its logo.

Recalling an anecdote from one of his design clients, Boer notes, “They were creating an animated commercial and hired a dyslexic voice-over artist to narrate it. He wanted to be able to read the script fast enough to match the video’s pace, so he asked them to lay it out in Dyslexie first.”

For many... individuals and families who have used Dyslexie, the results are transformative. One mom emailed Boer to say that being able to read this font has encouraged her son to dream big.

“He is looking forward to the possibility to become an engineer, now that this is available for him,” she wrote.

Dyslexie can be downloaded to use in programs and documents. It is also available as a browser extension for Chrome.

Text for people with dyslexia can often look garbled like this:

Here's sample text using the Dyslexie Font:

screenshots via Boer's TEDx Talk video and Dyslexie Font

Previously: Read Regular, a dyslexia-friendly typeface

The best part of this marvelous guide is the "draw the rest of the owl" moment halfway in where you must perform an act of origami with a single hand that must simultaneously hold a corner down—and then are told you must next do two corners simultaneously. That said, I'm going to practice it until I get it, because I hate tape. Frankly, I don't know why we've created a world so dependent in so many ways on thin, easily split sticky tape that desperately wants to coil in on itself.

Cat lovers who celebrate Christmas, your tree prayers may have been answered. Argos, a UK retailer is selling six-foot-tall "half parasol trees" with the description, "Keep your perfectly placed baubles, bows and bells out of reach of curious, crawling kids or your cats' playful paws."

That means no more of these kinds of shenanigans (dangit):

Argos' half trees cost £33.33 (about $43) and their flocked half trees cost £37.50 ($48).

(Ladbible)

Netflix's latest "golden ticket" is an original animated series based on the stories of late author Roald Dahl. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and The Twits are just some of the popular titles that will be included. The series will begin production in 2019.

Netflix's Press Release:

Netflix intends to remain faithful to the quintessential spirit and tone of Dahl while also building out an imaginative story universe that expands far beyond the pages of the books themselves.

“Our mission, which is purposefully lofty, is for as many children as possible around the world to experience the unique magic and positive message of Roald Dahl’s stories,” said Roald Dahl’s widow, Felicity Dahl, “This partnership with Netflix marks a significant move toward making that possible and is an incredibly exciting new chapter for the Roald Dahl Story Company. Roald would, I know, be thrilled.”

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week I have the release of a mobile Assassins Creed strategy game, a limited early access release for Gameloft's take on the battle royale genre, and a beautiful adventure game that tells a classic heartfelt story. So without further ado, here are the most notable games released in the last week.

Read More

17 best new Android games released this week including Assassin's Creed Rebellion, Royale Rising, and Storm Boy was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

I love the clothes from Volante Design ("Superhuman Streetwear"); their latest is the "Starfleet 2364" line of men's and women's jackets inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation uniforms.

The jackets are made of heavy denim and are basically extremely well-styled/tailored biker jackets (like Volante's excellent Hacker jackets), partially or fully unzipping them and folding down their lapels takes them from "cosplay" to "cosplay adjacent" in an instant. They've got loads of interior and exterior pockets, and are double-stitched and come in "Command Red, Operations Gold, or Sciences Blue," sized 37 - 51, 55 (men), and 33 - 45 (women). They're made in New York City, retail for $315, and will ship by December 14th.

Werner Herzog is responsible for many strange, wonderful things. Everything he's involved in is kissed by a brutal beauty--even that first Jack Reacher movie, starring Tom Cruise.

In this video from Future States, Mr. Herzog gives voice to the odyssey of a plastic bag: once loved and then discarded by its maker. For a video that runs just under 19 minutes, it runs through a full gauntlet of emotions, weirdness and existential questions.

We've featured the stunning work of filmmaker Ron Risman before. His latest time-lapse video captures the changing sky above the plains.

Image: Courtesy Ron Risman

From January 7, 2019, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will cease to work for all users. Instead of SMS notifications, standard Google Calendar in-app notifications will be the main method of reminder for users regardless of device or wireless connection. more…

The post Google Calendar SMS notifications will be removed January 7th 2019 appeared first on 9to5Google.

Scotland's Inchindown oil tanks, located underground, make for excellent reverberation chambers. In this video, someone fires a starting pistol in the chambers and Tom Scott records the one-minute plus reverberation.

Today I learned that if you can put an avocado in a wool sock, it will ripen faster. I also learned that there's a company that makes special avocado-sized wool socks for just this purpose.

Simply insert an un-ripened avocado into the sock, and in as little as 24 hours, it will be ready to enjoy.

The natural lanolin and warmth of the wool ripens the avocados evenly and gently, and faster than a paper bag.

I'm reminded of this:

Avocado socks are $20 each.

1st image via The Avocado Sock, 2nd image via reddit

Thanks, Laura!

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week I have Beamdog's fantastic enhanced edition of Neverwinter Nights, a solid pixel-based platformer that's reminiscent of the NES era, and the latest yearly release of Truck Simulation. So without further ado, here are the most notable games released in the last week.

26 best new Android games released this week including Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, Soul Chase, and Truck Simulation 19 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week's more interesting releases include a DNS app from Cloudflare, a Feedly beta release, and an alarm clock app from Yahoo. So without further ado, here are the most notable Android apps released in the last week.

16 new and notable Android apps from the last week including 1.1.1.1: Faster & Safer Internet, Feedly Classic, and WakingNews Alarm Clock (11/10/18 - 11/17/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

There's scientific truth to the saying that you never forget how to ride a bike. Even if you can't remember phone numbers, birthdays, or where the hell you parked your car, it's likely that even if you haven't been on a bicycle in decades, you can climb on and ride away just fine. Why? Neuropsychologist Boris Suchan of Germany's Ruhr University Bochum lays it out as best we know in Scientific American:

As it turns out, different types of memories are stored in distinct regions of our brains. Long-term memory is divided into two types: declarative and procedural.

There are two types of declarative memory: Recollections of experiences such as the day we started school and our first kiss are called episodic memory. This type of recall is our interpretation of an episode or event that occurred. Factual knowledge, on the other hand, such as the capital of France, is part of semantic memory. These two types of declarative memory content have one thing in common—you are aware of the knowledge and can communicate the memories to others.

Skills such as playing an instrument or riding a bicycle are, however, anchored in a separate system, called procedural memory. As its name implies, this type of memory is responsible for performance...

According to one idea, in the regions where movement patterns are anchored fewer new nerve cells may be formed in adults. Without this neurogenesis, or continuous remodeling in those regions, it’s less likely for those memories to get erased.

"Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?" (SciAm)

This is Chibi Maru, a Japanese cat with a demonic cry! His human companion LLR伊藤智博 recently posted this video of Chibi Maru vocalizing in a most unusual way. He seems to say, "Ololiloliloliloliloliiiloli," reports SoraNews24.

Is the cat angry? Defensive? Summoning the devil? Something ain't right with its ears folded down like that.

“Chobimaru is talking again…Scary…” tweeted @llritotomohiro, who says this is the second time the kitty has emitted this guttural, rhythmical series of sounds...

A few other cat owners even chimed in to say they’d had similar experiences with their own animals, often as portents of trouble soon to come.

“Did Chobimaru throw up after this? When my cat sounds like he’s casting an incantation, I always run to grab some newspapers and tissues.”
“My cat does the same thing! After he makes this kind of noise, he throws up. It’s nice of him to always give me an advance warning.”

However, @llritotomohiro, while thanking everyone for their concern, was happy to report that Chobimaru was in fine spirits. After his minute or so of chanting, he returned to normal, eating dinner as he always does and playing energetically in the house.

The internet did its thing and put his scary vocals to a dance beat:

The Slow Mo Guys whacked some rainbow Jell-O (aka "jelly") through a tennis racket for their latest video. As they're known to do, they captured it all in its slo-mo glory using a Phantom v2640 high-speed camera.

(Tastefully Offensive)

A suprisingly evenly-matched battle at the Hogle Zoo in Utah. At least one more confrontation is posted to YouTube featuring a young elephant there, named Zuri, who evidently has a geese problem.

BGP is a notoriously insecure process by which routes for internet data are advertised and discovered by routers; its ubiquity and insecurity make it a prime suspect whenever it seems that national spy agencies might be diverting traffic.

So when bad BGP routes caused traffic destined for Google to be briefly routed through China on Monday, there was widespread suspicion that Chinese state actors were experimenting with, or sending a message about, their capacity to surveil Google traffic.

Now a Nigerian cable operator, Main One, has taken responsibility for the traffic diversion, claiming that it was the result of an accidental misconfiguration created during a network upgrade. Main One's upstream provider is China Telcom, and Main One's error caused Google traffic to be diverted to China Telcom's network for 74 minutes.

Google has not commented extensively on the diversion except to acknowledge that it occurred. Reuters spoke to Tel Aviv University security researcher Yuval Shavitt an expert who said that the diversion might still have been deliberate -- Shavitt recently published a paper alleging that China military agencies have routinely engaged in BGP-based traffic hijacking.

Glitches in border gateway protocol filters have caused multiple outages to date, including cases where traffic from U.S. internet and financial services firms was routed through Russia, China and Belarus.

Yuval Shavitt, a network security researcher at Tel Aviv University, said it was possible that Monday’s issue was not an accident.

“You can always claim that this is some kind of configuration error,” said Shavitt, who last month co-authored a paper alleging that the Chinese government had conducted a series of internet hijacks.

Main One, which describes itself as a leading provider of telecom and network services for businesses in West Africa, said that it had investigated the matter and implemented new processes to prevent it from happening again.

Nigerian firm takes blame for routing Google traffic through China [Jane Lanhee Lee and Paresh Dave/Reuters]

(via /.)

Orcasound is a citizen science project (and app) enabling you to listen to livestreams of audio from underwater microphones off Washington’s San Juan Island. Mostly, you'll hear ships moving through Haro Strait and other boats in the area. But if you listen long enough, you might be treated to some whale song. From Atlas Obscura:

(Lead researcher Scott) Viers developed OrcaSound because he saw an opportunity for engaged citizens to help fill gaps in the study of orcas. The whales have long been well-observed in the summertime, when the weather cooperates and the cetaceans are more accessible to scientists and the Coast Guard, who observe them by boat. But questions have lingered about their lives during other times of the year. Now, in any season, listeners can notify scientific authorities to alert them to the presence of whales, so they can rush out like first responders to collect important data. The orcas have been facing a food crisis in recent years, so their fecal matter can help scientists get a sense of what they’re managing to eat, and what their stress levels are like. Having citizens on the line is also an exercise in preparing for the worst, like an oil spill. In such a case, there will be multiple (ear) witnesses to attest to where the whales were at the time.

Orcasound: Listen for whales

Shawn Woods grew some ultra-hot Carolina Reaper peppers in his backyard to find out if they can be used as a rodent repellent. He first ate a whole pepper himself and it made him cry. Then he mixed up some Carolina Reaper into grains and seeds to see if rodents would stay away. The video camera shows that the mice and rats were not bothered by the peppers and pepper juice. Conclusion - hot peppers are ineffective as a rodent repellent.

The legendary comic-book author, publisher, and film producer Stan Lee has died.

He co-created Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, the X-Men, Black Panther, and many more characters and imaginary worlds we've come to know through comic books, games, and movies.

He died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The news of his death was first reported by TMZ, and came from Stan's daughter.

Stan Lee, who began in the business in 1939 and created or co-created Black Panther, Spider-Man, X-Men, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, Ant-Man and others, died Monday morning at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center https://t.co/fEYNEJdzGR pic.twitter.com/Ih8FIgUvFr

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) November 12, 2018

Stan Lee may be known as a creator, but I think people forget how good he was as a superhero hype man. He talked with the excited energy of someone running into a diner after seeing Spider-Man swing by overhead. He sounded like he had all the secrets and couldn't wait to share.

— Mike Drucker (@MikeDrucker) November 12, 2018

If you haven't seen it, this is Stan Lee addressing racism in a 1968 edition of Stan's Soapbox, after the assassinations of JFK and MLK.

What an utter shame this advice holds up, word for word, 50 years later. pic.twitter.com/2zRg83QImt

— Andray (@andraydomise) November 12, 2018

Genuinely impossible to imagine what American pop culture would look like without Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and others who gave us a new model of fairy tales where the freaks, the weirdos, and the outcasts were the heroes and not the monsters.

— Tacchino è buono (@AdamSerwer) November 12, 2018

My favorite Stan Lee moment has to be the time he watched Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld design a character while dunking on them the whole time https://t.co/pHXug65P44 pic.twitter.com/NQqOzeFlWG

— Tristan Cooper (@TristanACooper) November 12, 2018

Denuvo bills itself as the best-of-breed in games DRM, the most uncrackable, tamper-proof wrapper for games companies; but its reputation tells a different story: the company's products are infamous for falling quickly to DRM crackers and for interfering with game-play until you crack the DRM off the products you buy.

The company's reputation for unjustifiable bragging is well-deserved: the latest iteration of Denuvo DRM is version 5.3, slated to launch with Hitman 2 on November 13th. But Hitman 2 leaked onto the internet yesterday, two days prior to its launch, and Denuvo 5.3 was cracked within hours -- two days before the official release.

The DRM was cracked by a group calling itself FCKDRM.

While several groups have been chipping away at Denuvo for some time, FCKDRM is a new entrant (at least by branding) to the cracking scene. Notably, FCKDRM isn’t a ‘Scene’ group but one that works in P2P circles. At least for now, their identities remain a secret but their choice of name is interesting.

FCKDRM is the official name for the anti-DRM initiative recently launched by GOG, a digital distribution platform for DRM-free video games and video.

There’s no suggestion at all that GOG is involved in the cracking of Denuvo, of course, but the FCKDRM group are using GOG’s FCKDRM logo when announcing releases, which certainly has the potential to confuse casual pirates.

Hitman 2’s Denuvo Protection Cracked Three Days Before Launch [Andy/Torrentfreak]

Wells Fargo has asked a court to block a shareholder lawsuit that seeks to punish the company for lying when it promised to promptly and completely disclose any new scandals; Wells Fargo claims that the promise was obvious "puffery," a legal concept the FTC has allowed to develop in which companies can be excused for making false claims if it should be obvious that they are lying (as when a company promises that they make "the best-tasting juice in America).

The lawsuit stems from Wells Fargo's crooked car-loan program that used deceptive tactics to defraud 800,000 customers, ultimately stealing 25,000 of their cars through fraudulent repossessions.

The shareholders argue that when Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan misled investors in 2016, when he said that he was "not aware" of lurking sales scandals (this was four years after the company's internal investigations revealed the car ripoffs and a year before they were made public after a leak to the New York Times).

The company argue that Sloan was making "generic statements...on which no reasonable investor could rely" and thus the shareholders should not be able to sue for the losses they suffered when the scandal became public.

In other words, as the LA Times's Michael Hiltzik puts it, "We can’t be sued because no one believed us anyway."

The shareholder lawsuit focuses on the efforts by Sloan and his fellow executives to conceal the auto-loan scandal from the public. While they were trying to clean up the splatter from the bank’s most prominent scandal, in which sales representatives secretly opened millions of accounts for consumers in order to meet punishing work quotas, the executives consistently stated that they were investigating high and low to make sure the bank was otherwise clean and would fully disclose anything they discovered.

“We want to leave no stone unturned,” Sloan told investment analysts during a conference call in January 2017. “If we find something that’s important, we’ll communicate that…. I think given our desire to be very transparent, we’ll probably err on the side of overcommunicating as opposed to undercommunicating.”

Yet by then, Sloan had received a report from the consulting firm Oliver Wyman that laid out the auto-loan scandal in great detail.

The scandal stayed out of the public eye until the Oliver Wyman report was leaked to the New York Times, which published a story about it July 27, 2017; Wells Fargo issued a news release fessing up to the matter that very day.

Wells Fargo says its promises to restore consumer trust were just ‘puffery.’ But they look more like lies [Michael Hiltzik/LA Times]

(via Naked Capitalism)

Yahoo's recent apps have been all over the place. The company released a group money savings platform earlier this year, followed by another generic personalized news app, then with a group chat tool that no one asked for. Yahoo's latest endeavor is 'WakingNews,' which can create alarms that play news briefings instead of alarm noises.

You can select news sources from sites under the Verizon media umbrella, including Engadget, HuffPost, Yahoo News/Finance/Sports/Entertainment, and others.

Read More

Yahoo's new app will wake you up with audio briefings was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Oh boy, I think I have a new hobby. I've just learned that you can combine puzzles, that have the same die cut, to make really awesome pieces of art. It had never occurred to me that manufacturers of mass-produced puzzles cut different puzzles of theirs in the same way, making the pieces interchangeable. It makes complete sense, of course, but my mind is still blown!

I learned about the art of "puzzle montage" from one of the readers of my inbox zine, Marcia Wiley (she's the gal in Seattle who's fixing up that cool old Checker Cab). She was visiting the Bay Area and we met up for the first time this past Friday. That's when she told me about her friend Tim Klein, who makes incredible puzzle montages. I'm excited to share his work with you.

In an email exchange, Tim told me that he learned about puzzle montages from the man who first made them, art professor Mel Andringa of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, "As far as I know, he and I are the only artists ever to pursue it seriously. And I think he's moved on to other things nowadays, so I may be the sole surviving practitioner."

And this is what Tim shared with me about his process:

...By selecting pieces from two or more compatible puzzles, I assemble a single "puzzle mashup" with surreal imagery that the publisher never imagined.

Sometimes the results are merely chuckle-making, such as my combination of King Tut's burial mask with the front of a truck, which I call "King of the Road". But my favorite montages are ones in which the whimsical is tinged with something a bit deeper, such as "The Mercy-Go-Round (Sunshine and Shadow)", in which a fairground carousel whirls riders around a church from the light to the dark and back again -- or "Surrogate", in which a strange hybrid of beer can and teddy bear opens its fuzzy arms and tells you to "consider yourself hugged".
[editor note: "Mercy", not "Merry"]

The imagery in jigsaw puzzles published nowadays tends to be very busy, often consisting of densely-packed collages constructed with Photoshop. But for my purposes, I favor puzzles from pre-digital years, when the picture was typically a photograph of a single subject, such as a galloping horse or a ballerina or the Empire State Building. As I visit thrift stores and garage sales in search of vintage puzzles, I sometimes feel like an archaeologist, taking great pleasure in discovering and "reconstructing" strange, shattered images whose shards have been languishing in suburban game closets for decades.

Take a look at some of his work (click to embiggen) and then go here to see the rest and to read Tim's notes about the specific pieces:

Aren't they magnificent?

So, yeah, I think I have a new hobby. In fact, I just dug out these two puzzles out of the closet. I know, they're "busy" and probably 'shopped but I still want to give it a go.

P.S. Tim also has a groovy yarn-covered art car.