Peter

A shop owner asked them to come back when he had more money - when they did, they were arrested.

If you want a coral reef, the Bahamas-based startup Coral Vita is the place to go. They'll grow you one 50 times faster than Mother Nature could. The first clients are already on board. We spoke to one of the founders.

[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

In a stunt that should surprise absolutely no one who knows anything about Banksy, the elusive street artist’s iconic work Girl with Balloon literally self-destructed the moment it was sold at auction for more than £1 million on Friday. “It appears we just got Banksy-ed,” said a Sotheby’s official afterward. Yep, it appears you did.

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Artist Banksy destroys his own painting after selling for over one million dollars with shredder built into the frame #banksy #girlwithballoon #sothebys #contemporartauction #eveningauction #shreddedpaintings #london @sothebys @banksy

A post shared by Casterline | Goodman Gallery (@casterlinegoodmangallery) on Oct 5, 2018 at 1:14pm PDT

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Going, going, gone…

A post shared by Banksy (@banksy) on Oct 5, 2018 at 6:45pm PDT

The framed work, consisting of spray paint and acrylic on canvas, was the last piece to go up for sale that evening in London. The typical controlled chaos of the auction house was punctuated by the clap of the auctioneer’s gavel, and at that very second, the work slipped through its frame in shreds. Almost nobody noticed at first, but gasps from the crowd alerted the room to the situation.

Banksy himself released a video on Instagram that showed him building the shredder into the painting’s frame, “in case it ever sold at auction.” He deleted it soon afterward, but it had already circulated on the internet. The YouTube clip above edits this clip side-by-side with a video capturing the moment of the big reveal.

Ironically, the artwork might be worth even more now than it was at the moment it sold thanks to all the attention it got, but it seems likely that Banksy expected as much, and it’s part of the overall point. A perpetual critic of the commercialization of his own work, Banksy is no stranger to trolling the public. Even when he turns a profit from the sales, he often does so while essentially ridiculing the purchaser.

Learn more at WebUrbanist’s Banksy archive.

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[ By SA Rogers in Art & Drawing & Digital. ]

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It was just like House of Cards. Or maybe Game of Thrones. Trump-Russia was the only drama that mattered.

Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos suffers from overcrowding and violence.

Starting October 2nd, Office 365 Home users will no longer be restricted to 10 devices across five users and Personal subscribers will no longer have a limit of one computer and one tablet. The catch is that you can only stay signed in on five devices at once. Engadget reports: Meanwhile, Home users can let another person use the productivity suite through their account, with Microsoft bumping up the number of licenses per subscriber from five to six. Each user has access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote, along with 1TB of individual storage. Microsoft is also integrating Home subscriptions with its family service, so you can automatically share your Office 365 plan with people you've set up as family members. Elsewhere, you'll manage your subscription from within your Microsoft account settings from now on.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

secwatcher writes: Prolific Google bug hunter Ian Beer ripped into Apple on Wednesday, urging the iPhone maker to change its culture when it comes to iOS security. The Verge: "Their focus is on the design of the system and not on exploitation. Please, we need to stop just spot-fixing bugs and learn from them, and act on that," he told a packed audience. Per Beer, Apple researchers are not trying to find the root cause of the problems. "Why is this bug here? How is it being used? How did we miss it earlier? What process problems need to be addressed so we could [have] found it earlier? Who had access to this code and reviewed it and why, for whatever reason, didn't they report it?" He said the company suffers from an all-too-common affliction of patching an iOS bug, but not fixing the systemic roots that contribute to the vulnerability. In a provocative call to Apple's CEO Tim Cook, Beer directly challenged him to donate $2.45 million to Amnesty International -- roughly the equivalence of bug bounty earnings for Beer's 30-plus discovered iOS vulnerabilities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While wandering West Harlem, murals of birds will begin to catch your eye. The more you explore, the more you'll spot storefronts and apartment buildings decorated with these colorful depictions of various avian species.

In a fairly concentrated area, there are 88 paintings to be found, but this is just the beginning. An ambitious project engineered by the National Audubon Society aims to complete 314 in total, with each one representing a North American species threatened by climate change.

Gitler &_____ Gallery has partnered with the organization to commission artists, and each mural showcases a distinctive style. Some only appear at night, when shops are closed and locked up. Others are small and hidden in windows, while still more stretch across multi-story buildings. Once you've admired the prominent paintings, you'll find yourself searching street-by-street for the more subtle pieces.

Why Harlem? This area was home to John James Audubon, who is famous for meticulously documenting and illustrating hundreds of North American bird species in a series published in 1827. His passion for the natural world has made him a heroic figure in the eyes of later environmentalists.

As Audubon is buried in Trinity Cemetery on 155th and Broadway, West Harlem is the perfect spot for the project. Just across the street from his gravesite is the most dramatic mural of the initiative, Swallow-tailed Kite (and Others).

Saving the Bulgarian bears who were chained, tortured and forced to dance.

The children at the border are just the latest casualty of this deeply misguided approach to public policy.

Why the design of the Eurozone has produced right wing policies.

England fans will be dwelling on moments frozen in time - and they will stick around, writes chief sports writer Tom Fordyce.

UK cave-diving experts and a US military team have joined Thai navy rescuers in the search for a kids' football team trapped in caves in Thailand. The group went missing five days ago.

The complex story of Australia's first UK sporting tour deserves recognition, modern players say.

By Mirwais Harooni and Qiamuddin Shams BAGRAM, Afghanistan (Reuters) - In the year before Qari Naib blew himself up on Nov. 12 inside a NATO base near Kabul killing four Americans, Afghan intelligence warned the U.S. military at least twice that a worker could be planning an attack, government and security officials said. The Afghan officials also said they repeatedly asked Western forces to share information about local employees at the vast Bagram air base in order to check for "suspicious people among them", but were refused. When asked about the information sharing, NATO spokesman Captain William Salvin said NATO forces "routinely partner with ANDSF (Afghan National Defence and Security Forces) on all elements of security, to include information sharing.

There is a church in Leiden called Pieterskerk, or the Church of St. Peter. It’s a 900 year old Gothic beauty, the oldest church in this small city half way between Amsterdam and The Hague. It’s also known as the Church of the Pilgrim Fathers, most famous to Americans as the Dutch refuge where the Mayflower separatists briefly hung out after leaving England, but before sailing to Massachusetts.

The church has been deconsecrated as a religious space since the early 1970s, so you can’t attend services there any more, Calvinist or otherwise. But you can visit the final resting place of one of the world’s great mathematicians, an All-Star named Willebrord Snellius.

Willebrord Snel van Royen is buried under the floor at Pieterskerk, his spot marked by a simple flat stone and small plaque. Snell, as he’s known to physics and astronomy students everywhere, is the brains behind the law of refraction, one of the fundamental laws of physics.

That alone would have secured his math chops, but his reach goes much further. Of his many milestones, he’s also credited with basically inventing triangulation as we know it, managing to figure out the circumference of the Earth to a remarkably accurate degree for the time.

In the Netherlands he is remember with particular fondness and pride for drafting the first accurate map of the country. He achieved it with his new brand of triangulation, climbing up a series of church towers to measure their distances with a giant quadrant. The map was so accurate—and therefor valuable to the Dutch military—that it was kept secret and unpublished until years later.

For all who aren’t familiar with Snell’s Law of refraction or may have forgotten it, there will be no pop quiz. Here you go: 

 Got it? Good.