The USA has moved up in the Tax Justice Network's Financial Secrecy Index to number two, behind Switzerland; in reality, though, the UK is the world's worst money-laundry, but because its laundering activities are spread out over its overseas territories -- taken as a whole, the UK leads the world in helping criminals and looters hide their fortunes. (more…)
For six months, the Intelligence Community Inspector General office investigated the cases of 190 whistleblowers who went through US spy agency channels to report corruption, waste, fraud, abuse and criminality, discovering that the overwhelming majority had faced some combination of indefinite delays and retaliation (being fired, facing paycuts and demotions, being passed over for promotions, etc) -- only one of the 190 whistleblowers had their case upheld, and that took 742 days. (more…)
Watch the Nicholas Brothers dance the "Jumpin' Jive" in the 1943 musical, Stormy Weather. Fred Astaire said it was "the greatest dancing he had ever seen on film."
From The New York Times:
For it wasn't the acrobatics, in themselves, that made the Nicholas brothers the Nicholas Brothers. It was the overall beauty and musicality of the entire dance. Their achievement was in the how -- the way Fayard would deploy his hands, as graceful as Fred Astaire's; the way Harold would make every silhouette superclear; the genial, noncompetitive way each brother would cede the floor to the other for a solo, passing the dance like a baton, in musical time. When Astaire pronounced their "Jumpin' Jive" number in the movie Stormy Weather (1943) -- unrehearsed and achieved on the first take -- to be the greatest dancing he had ever seen on film, he was not commending the acrobatics alone but rather the way the brothers erupted organically out of their tap steps, like a series of overlapping geysers that, simply to look at, project an observer into a stratosphere of elation.
What started off as an experiment to see how many matches it would take to create a sphere ended up as a gorgeous video of what a 42,000-match sphere looks like when it burns. It took months and months to glue the matchsticks together, and only minutes to go from flames to black smoking ball. The fiery green sphere was shot from three different angles – watch them all, as each angle has its own dramatic beauty.
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.
Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here.
Android Police coverage: Square Enix has officially released 'Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition' for Android, and it's fantastic
It feels like it has been ages since we have received a premium Final Fantasy game on Android.
Read More18 new and notable Android games from the last week (2/7/18 - 2/13/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
When she was nearly 30, Jennifer Jones learned that she had been misdiagnosed with allergies and asthma all her life. According to ABC 6 News, Jennifer discovered after the birth of her son, that she instead had Cystic Fibrosis, a disease that wreaks havoc (primarily) on the lungs.
"Last year in October she went in and it was getting so bad they put her on oxygen full time," said Jennifer’s Fiancé, Rob Ronnenberg.Jennifer was put on a transplant list for new lungs in June, which is when things really got bad. In mid-October Jennifer’s lung function was a little over 10%.
But good news was headed their way.
"The nurse comes in the room and says hey you're going to get a phone call and then the phone rang and we're like okay, that's never happened so what's going on? Well, all of a sudden she goes are you for real, are you serious? Is this really happening? And that was it that was the call," Rob said.
Later the same month, she received that lifesaving double lung transplant. This video shows her taking her first unassisted breath with those new lungs. It's tremendously moving, to say the least.
By sharing this video on YouTube, she and her fiancé are hoping to inspire people to register to donate their organs.
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 week or so.
Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here.
Today's roundup is presented by Setmore Appointments - Appointment Scheduling App from Setmore.
Read More14 new and notable Android apps and live wallpapers from the last week (2/6/18 - 2/12/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
A man has an important message about elephant poaching but this baby elephant won't let him deliver it because it's playtime.
Image: Youtube screenshot
Gregory Kaczor had a lifelong dream to skate across Lake Baikul, and he made this lovely documentary of his travels. It's cool how he uses chunks of ice to secure the tent, and the clarity of the ice and water below is something to behold. (more…)
Tom Blachford chronicled Palm Springs at midnight (previously). Now he's back with Nihon Noir, a Blade Runner inspired look at Tokyo at night, like this imposing shot of the Edo-Tokyo Museum. (more…)
Security researcher Scott Helme has spotted a third-party exploit that injects a script that mines cryptocurrency on over 4,200 sites, from the UK NHS to the US Courts' official site to the sites of other esteemed security researchers. (more…)
You just got a Google Home, and after unwrapping it and setting it up, you've asked about the weather, requested a few songs to play, and set a timer for 5 minutes to see how it rings. Now what?
I've been covering Google's smart speaker for more than a year now and I've owned a couple of Google Homes for about a year, yet I still feel like I'm not using them to their full potential.
Read MoreThe ultimate guide to Google Home: Tips and tricks for understanding and making the most out of your assistant speaker was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
In 1969, Irv Teibel(1938-2010) released a record that would have a profound impact on ambient and New Age music that's continues to this day. "Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore" was the first in a catalog of albums that melded pop psychology with environmental sound recording to sooth the mind. Over the years, Treibel's company Syntonic Ressearch Inc. produced 11 albums with 22 soundscapes ranging from "Optimum Aviary" to "Wood-Masted Sailboat" to "Ultimate Heartbeat."
"The music of the future isn't music," Teibel said.
Now, audio archaeologist Douglas Mcgowan, curator of the sublime I Am The Center New Age compilation that I raved about here, Syntonic Research Inc, and the fine folks at Numero Group have brought the Environments catalog to iOS. Environments is now a fantastic $2.99 app with all 22 remastered long-form soundscapes in easily swipeable form. It's intuitive, beautifully minimalist, and a perfect evolution of the original work. Turn on, tune in, chill out.
Environments for iOS (iTunes)
For the whole Environments story, read: Natural Selection (Pitchfork)
https://youtu.be/V10Df3GKvfs
If squeezing pimples until they pop and ooze pus sounds appealing to you, then you'll want to check out the Pop It Pal. It's a fleshy, blemish-blowing novelty toy that lets you obsessively squeeze out "pus" without tearing apart your own skin.
The married couple behind it, Billy and Summer Pierce, came up with the idea one day while driving. Billy explains:
You see, one day, my wife and I were driving down the road.She said:
"How awesome would it be if we could make a pimple that felt real and the pop was huge, just like those videos we watch?"
I thought: "You might be on to something Dear."
Maybe, just maybe, this means she would STOP picking on me all the time. Ladies and Gentlemen, I KNOW you know what I'm talking about.
So, I spent the next year figuring out how to make it happen.
It's now available in their online shop for $19.99. "Pus" refills are available for $5.99.
Detectives Marcus Taylor and Daniel Hersl of Baltimore's elite, seven-member Gun Trace Task Force are on trial for years of robbery, home invasions, drug dealing, gun dealing, and worse -- their defense is that they were not the primary participants in these activities, not that the crimes did not take place. (more…)
Photographer Benny Lam spent several years documenting grim living conditions in Hong Kong where people live inside tiny "coffin cubicles" within illegally divided apartments. The images are grim glimpses of life in the city with the most expensive housing market in the world. The photo series is titled "Trapped." From National Geographic:
Pushed out by soaring rents, tens of thousands of people have no other option than to inhabit squatter huts, sub-divided units where the kitchen and toilet merge, coffin cubicles, and cage homes, which are rooms measuring as small as 6’ x 2.5’ traditionally made of wire mesh. “From cooking to sleeping, all activities take place in these tiny spaces,” says Lam. To create the coffin cubicles a 400 square flat will be illegally divided by its owner to accommodate 20 double-decker beds, each costing about HK$2000 (over $250 USD) per month in rent. The space is too small to stand up in.
A Logitech keyboard is sacrificed to Saturn in this remarkable video posted by Amazing Timelapse. Plunged into acetone, the device melts slowly until only a cloudy congealment of undissolved plastics remains.
This is a regular pc keyboard dipped in acetone for over 70 hours. This is the satisfying result after more than 11.000 photos, enjoy.
Lauri Love is a British man on the autism spectrum who also has depression and severe eczema, who was facing extradition to America on charges of hacking US military and private agencies. (more…)
Look at this coyote. Food is right in front of him. It follows him around, like a sack lunch on legs. "Oh, they're great friends," you say as you watch the video, smiling. A click and the link has been copied to your clipboard. Up it goes on your Facebook and Twitter feeds.
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.
Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here.
Android Police coverage: Cake is a new mobile browser with swipeable search
Cake Web Browser is an ingenious new browser for Android that focuses on making search a lot more intuitive.
Read More12 new and notable Android apps from the last week (1/30/18 - 2/5/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
Guldies (previously) posted this weirdly satisfing stop-motion animation of life in the woods. The visuals are amazing -- 2500 still pictures taken with a Canon DSLR and sequenced at 18 frames per second in Dragonframe -- but it's the way it works with sound that I really felt.
Learning how to crawl is a lot more complicated that most of us realize. But this baby walks, er, crawls you through it step by step. Kinesiology at its cutest.
Kaplamino's "The Blue Marble" is made from ordinary items like rubber bands, magnets, blocks of wood, pencils, bottle caps, and plastic forks, but he turns it into an almost magical chain reaction machine on a tilted wood plane.
After 3 months of work and probably more than 500 fails, I'm happy to present you my best video ever. Since magnets and marbles I've always wanted to make a big chain reaction in one take with this 2D style !
It's also a "one marble path" which means you have to follow the same marble for all the tricks (in that case the little blue one.) Because everything is in a tilted plane, the hard part was to find different ways of having the marble riding up along the table (magnets, falling weight, catapult ...). To do that, the marble has to be light. And because everything has to be triggered by this little marble, all the tricks are very unstable. Most fails happened when an element fall down earlier than expected.
I learned a lot about chain reaction, and I discovered the amazing power of the hot glue gun!
James Conley III (29) went shopping at an Old Navy in West Des Moines, Iowa. When he went to the checkout counter to pay for some items, the clerk asked him if he also wanted to buy the jacket he was wearing.
From Conley's Facebook page:
The store manager Beau Carter was very unprofessional and stereotyped me because I was a Black male. He says "anytime someone wears Old Navy clothing they have to always scan that customers clothing to insure that it was previously purchased". (Where do they do that at?) Every time I go to this store I have on my same exact winter blue jacket and have never been asked to scan my clothing and the previous "non-black" customers had on identical apparel as me from old navy but was never asked to scan their clothing. Then after they scan my jacket they try to make me repay for it?? Finally the District Manager Shannon (who refused to give out her last name) came out and I made her check the surveillance tape to prove that her and her fellow employees were in the wrong for racially profiling me because of the color of my skin. Once she confirmed that I was telling the truth (after watching the tape) she never came back out to apologize to me nor did the store manager Beau Carter as you can see in my videos below.
As a result Old Navy fired three employees at the store.
Image by Steve Morgan/Wikipedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This is really fun. With Japanese artist Rintaro Hara's latest piece, visitors can make giant bubbles simply by pulling on a rope. By doing so, her Projection Wall raises a grid of ropes that have been dunked in a soapy solution. Then, as it's rising, eight fans blow through to create a rainbow-y wall of extra-large bubbles. And, who doesn't love a wall of bubbles?
The concept behind the piece, she writes, "dates back to the representation of water created by Computer Graphics of SF movie "Abyss" by James Cameron (1989)":
In the Hollywood movies since the 1990s, computer graphics became an indispensable image technology, shooting taking advantage of analog until now was superseded by digital, and it became possible to express images that were impossible to realize. "Projection wall" inquires about the difference between analog and digital by reducing the expression born by the evolution of the video to an analog method daringly.
More of Hara's work can be found at her website and on Vimeo.
(Colossal)
photos via Rintaro Hara
This cat appears to be chattering adorably with invisible fairies, but I'm sure that some terrible illness or infirmity has in fact befallen it and all I achieved by posting this is to serve the sociopathic tendency of social media to suppress human empathy in its endless provision of amusement and distraction.
This might very well be my new favorite thing. While the "Super Big Wrapped in Warmth Happy Furry Jeans Sleeping Bag" looks like an oversized pair of dungarees, it's really just a giant novelty sleeping bag built for two!
It even comes with two bandana-patterned pillows, which fit adorably in the back pockets...
It's available at Japan Trend Shop for $696. Grab one for me too and we'll have a sleepover.
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.
Looking for the previous roundup editions? Find them here.
Android Police coverage: Flip : Surfing Colors is a beautiful free-to-play endless runner that offers enjoyable gameplay
Flip : Surfing Colors is a vibrant and colorful endless runner that uses a unique color matching mechanic to add some depth to your standard auto-running gameplay.
Read More26 new and notable Android games from the last week (1/24/18 - 1/30/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.
