Dan Jones

Set to air on HBO starting March 3rd, Leaving Neverland is a two-part documentary film about the experiences of two men who were befriended by and allegedly sexually abused by Michael Jackson as young boys. Here’s the trailer:

Leaving Neverland is a two-part documentary exploring the separate but parallel experiences of two young boys, James Safechuck, at age ten, and Wade Robson, at age seven, both of whom were befriended by Michael Jackson. Through gut-wrenching interviews with Safechuck, now 37, and Robson, now 41, as well as their mothers, wives and siblings, the film crafts a portrait of sustained abuse, exploring the complicated feelings that led both men to confront their experiences after both had a young son of his own.

As this quick timeline of abuse allegations against Jackson notes, both Safechuck and Robson previously denied that Jackson had abused them.

Robson, by this point a choreographer for stars like Britney Spears, testified that he had spent the night at Neverland more than 20 times but that Jackson had never molested him or taken a shower with him.

James Safechuck, who had met Jackson as a young boy in the 1980s when he was cast in a Pepsi commercial, also denied publicly that he had been abused, although he was not called to testify.

David Ehrlich saw the film at Sundance and was completely convinced by the stories of the two men.

It may not be much of a secret that Michael Jackson acted inappropriately with a number of young boys, but there’s no way to prepare yourself for the sickening forensic details presented in Dan Reed’s four-hour exposé. It’s one thing to be vaguely aware of the various allegations that were made against the King of Pop; the asterisks that will always be next to the late mega-star’s name. It’s quite another to hear the horrifyingly lucid testimony that stretches across the entire duration of “Leaving Neverland,” as two of Jackson’s most repeat victims bravely lay bare how a universal icon seduced them away from their realities, splintered their families beyond all recognition, and leveraged their love for him into a disturbing litany of sexual acts.

The eloquent and straightforward “Leaving Neverland” was made for no other reason than to give shape to a nebulous cloud of rumors, many of which were floated in public before they were silenced behind settlements, and none of which a jury was able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. In the wake of Reed’s film and the shattering interview footage that it exists to share with us, there’s no longer a reasonable doubt. There’s no longer any doubt at all. Not only do the documentary’s two main subjects perfectly corroborate their separate accounts in all of the most tragic of ways, but they do so with a degree of vulnerability that denies any room for skepticism.

Other stars who previously had private or ignored abuse allegations leveled against them — Kevin Spacey, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, Woody Allen, Louis CK — have been judged more harshly and their accusers have taken more seriously in recent years, and it’ll be interesting to see what happens with Jackson after the documentary airs.

Ard Gelinck photoshops celebrities posing with their younger selves and posts the results on Instagram.

Very serious, well-prepared people, the Trump administration.

It’s not even a clean screenshot — Sanders screwed it up with a black dot from the Markup feature while cropping.

Salt Lake City | Friday, 08 February 2019 |

Elder Ronald A. Rasband of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles encouraged Church educators worldwide Friday night to “talk to teens about suicide and love them out of considering suicide as a solution to their pain.”

We’ve established that I’m a huge fan of Cookie Monster, the most orally challenged but also the most literarily adept muppet. But even with those cards on the table, this Reddit AMA is something special.

Q: Is there anything you won’t eat? I mean, I’ve seen you eat a typewriter before…

A: Me stay away from anything in Oscar’s trashcan. Otherwise me not picky.

Q: My 7-year-old daughter is about to start selling cookies for Girl Scouts. Do you have any advice for her?

A: Don’t eat the product!

Q: There’s been a lot of famous people who have come to visit you and your friends on Sesame Street! Did any of those guests give you a cookie?

A: Me friends have surprised me with lots of cookies! Sir Ian Mckellan even gave me two cookies!

Q: Who would you most like to sing a “C is for Cookie” duet with?

A: Me would love to sing duet with Lady Gaga. Me and me friends are monsters after all. Me hope she see dis!

Q: What is the optimum number of chocolate chips per cookie?

A: Me always say the more the merrier. Me think me need at least 3.14 chocolate chippies per nom nom. MMM pi

Q: If you could only eat one type of cookie for the rest of your life, what would it be?

A: Wow! Me didn’t realize these question be so hard. If me had to choose just one cookie, me would have to pick me Mommy’s classic chocolate chippie!

Q: We know cookies are your favourite food. What is your second favourite food?

A: Can me say more cookies…?
A2: Me thought it over. Definitely “more cookies.”

Q: My son is your biggest fan in the world. His name is Nico and he’s almost 2. Any words of advice for him???

A: Me think it important to always share your cookies. Me know it hard to do sometimes, but it da kind thing to do.
A2: Oh, and HI NICO! Me love you!

Q: What was it like working with Jim Henson?

A: Me never sure what he did, but he always around to lend a hand and give me cookie!

Q: How’s the rent on Sesame Street?

A: Me think you confused…. Rent played on different street, me think Broadway?

It goes on and on like this. Maybe I’m too much of a softie (probably underbaked… god, it’s contagious), but I love this.

I've worked on a lot of open source projects and one thing they all have in common is when you create a merge request (or pull request) they will often ask, "Can you clean up your request?" because commits like fix typo should not be included in a Git history.

Now there are a few ways of cleaning up commits and I'll show you what I have found to be the easiest way.

Below is an example scenario where I use a feature of Git that has saved me a lot of time. I have a tiny project seen in the image below.

Now I like to run my main.py in a test environment to see if it works as expected. I like to do that by configuring a .gitlab-ci.yml to run main.py. Although this is extremely easy, for this example I made sure I increased the number of commits to illustrate my example a bit more clearly. So after some time my commit history looks like this:

Here you can see my first three commits add README.md, main.py and .gitlab-ci.yml. A few commits update my gitlab-ci file, trying some stuff out, and fixing typos. There's also a commit that cleans up my gitlab-ci and two more to fix and clean up main.py.

Now some of you might see this and think, "Looks good," while others might want to scream at me for making a mess out of my commits.

How do we fix it?

How to consolidate your commits

First, let's revert the last two commits using reset. We don't want to lose our changes so we will use git reset --soft HEAD~2. --soft will keep our changes of the files and HEAD~2 tells Git the two commits from HEAD position should be reverted.

We create a new commit, git commit --fixup 6c29979. This will create a commit called fixup! Add main Python file. When we run git rebase -i --autosquash 24d214a we can see below that our fixup commit has been moved below the commit we referenced with the tag 6c29979. I could save this and the fixup will be merged into the commit above.

But if we look at the commits below the fixup, we see that all the commits are related to the .gitlab-ci.yml and by making a small change here, we can clean up my commits in a single go. We will change the pick to fixup for all commits but Add default gitlab-ci (shown in the image below) and we will save this.

Checking our Git log, we see that our long list of commits has been reduced to just three. There is a big change that you should be aware of: because I have just rewritten my Git history I will have to use git push --force to update any remote repository.

This looks a lot better now; only the relevant commits are left. But could we have prevented this while working on this feature? The answer is yes.

We could have used git commit --amend to add almost every commit behind 19d8353 Add default gitlab-ci. This wouldn't require any new commit for any changes that we were making to our .gitlab-ci.yml file. We would have ended up with the following and we already know how to handle the fixup.

Something to keep in mind when using features that rewrite the history of your Git repository: If you already pushed your previous commits to a remote repository you will have to use git push --force to overwrite the history of the remote repository. Bad use of this could cause serious problems, so be careful! If you run into trouble, a useful guide that could help you recover from this is git push –force and how to deal with it.

More Git tips and tricks

• How (and why!) to keep your Git commit history clean
• Git happens! 6 Common Git mistakes and how to fix them
• Git tips and tricks

A recent series of discoveries have upended the widely accepted story of the history of pizza in America and have the NYC food world in a tizzy. The typical origin story of American pizza is this:

In 1905, Gennaro Lombardi applied to the New York City government for the first license to make and sell pizza in this country, at his grocery store on Spring Street in what was then a thriving Italian-American neighborhood.

But research by Peter Regas (who looked in Italian-language newspapers from the late 19th century) has revealed a previously unknown pizza kingpin behind some of the NYC’s first pizzerias and moves the probable introduction date of the pizza back into the 1800s.

Of this forgotten older generation, one baker stands out. Filippo Milone came to New York in the late 19th century and likely established two of the most famous New York pizzerias that still exist today, Lombardi’s on Spring Street and John’s of Bleecker Street.

Regas explains, “Filippo Milone likely established pizzerias in at least six locations throughout New York City. Of these locations, three later became famous under different names: ‘Pop’s,’ ‘John’s,’ and ‘Lombardi’s.’ Pop’s in Brooklyn closed decades ago, but the other two in Manhattan still exist. Milone, a pioneer in what has become a $45 billion industry, later died in 1924, without children to preserve his story buried in an unmarked grave in Queens.”

Wow! This 1903 advertisement is for a pizzeria of Milone’s on Grand St.:

As for Lombardi’s founding in 1905, Regas has the receipts for that too:

While proof of that license has never materialized, Regas has tracked down Gennaro Lombardi’s birth record, naturalization papers, and other supporting documents that tell a different story. Gennaro Lombardi first came to America in November of 1904 at age 17, classified as a “laborer”. If he became involved with the pizzeria at 53 1/2 Spring Street in 1905, it was as an employee not as an owner. By that time, it had already been established as a pizzeria probably by Milone in 1898 but certainly by another proprietor named Giovanni Santillo who followed Milone in 1901.

As Pete Wells writes:

This is as if some other dude we’ve never heard of wrote both the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers and then handed them over to Adams Franklin Jefferson Madison Hamilton etc.

Regas is documenting his research here on an eventual book about all of this, due out sometime later this year. Boy oh boy, they’re gonna have to reprint a lot of NYC pizzeria menus with incorrect origin stories in them… (via @adamkuban)

A new paper from researchers at University College London argues that the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americans after Columbus’s landing in 1492 had a significant effect on the Earth’s global climate and was a major cause of the Little Ice Age, the dip in global temperatures from the 16th to the 19th centuries. They estimate that 55 million indigenous people died during Europe’s conquest of the Americas (~90% of the population), and the 56 million hectares of land that they had cleared of vegetation (roughly the area of Kenya) was then reclaimed by forests, which then took in more carbon dioxide, reduced the greenhouse effect, and caused the Earth to cool. From the paper’s conclusion:

We calculate that this led to an additional 7.4 Pg C being removed from the atmosphere and stored on the land surface in the 1500s. This was a change from the 1400s of 9.9 Pg C (5 ppm CO2). Including feedback processes this contributed between 47% and 67% of the 15-22 Pg C (7-10 ppm CO2) decline in atmospheric CO2 between 1520 CE and 1610 CE seen in Antarctic ice core records. These changes show that the Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas is necessary for a parsimonious explanation of the anomalous decrease in atmospheric CO2 at that time and the resulting decline in global surface air temperatures.

The authors also assert that this effect of human action on global climate marks the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch.

I first heard about this theory from Charles Mann’s excellent 1493, which led me to William Ruddiman’s 2003 paper. I heard about this most recent study from Mann too… he called it “most careful study of the impacts of Euro conquest of Americas I’ve yet seen”.

If you’re not up for reading the paper itself, you can check out the coverage from the BBC, the Guardian, Nature, or the NY Times.

Randall Munroe, proprietor of the excellent XKCD and author of What If? and Thing Explainer, is coming out with a new book in a few months called How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems.

Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you’re a baby boomer or a 90’s kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and getting to your appointments on time by destroying the Moon. And if you want to get rid of the book once you’re done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth’s mantle, or launching it into the Sun.

Instant pre-order.

Ever since the Huffington Post struck SEO gold in 2011 with their post about what time the Super Bowl started, pretty much every online publication now runs a similar article in an attempt to squeeze some of Google’s juice into their revenue stream. My “attempt” from last year: What Time Isn’t the Super Bowl?

For this year’s contest, Sports Illustrated decided to ask theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, author of The Order of Time, his thoughts on time and Super Bowls.

6:30 p.m. is the time the Super Bowl will start in Atlanta. Most of us are not in Atlanta. So for us, the game will start later than that. You need the time for the images to be captured by the cameras, be broadcasted to air or cable, be captured by my TV screen, leave my TV screen, get to my eyes (not to mention the time my brain needs to process and decode the images). You may say this is fast — of course this is fast. But it takes some time nevertheless, and I am a physicist, I need precision. For most of us, the game will actually start some time later than the kickoff in Atlanta.

Not only that, but time moves at different speeds for each of us:

We have discovered that clocks run at different speed depending on how fast they are moved, and depending on how high they are positioned. That’s right, it is a fact: Two equal clocks go out of time with respect each other if one is moved and the other is kept fixed. The same will happen if one is kept, say, above your head, and the other lower, say, at your feet. All this was discovered by Einstein a century ago; for a while it was just brainy stuff for nerds, but today we are sure it is true. A good lab clock can check this, and it is truly true. Your head lives a bit longer than your feet (unless you spend a lot of time upside down).

So, the clock of the guy up in the high sections of the stadium runs faster than the clock of the referee on the field. And Tom Brady’s clock (if he were to wear one) runs slower, because Tom moves fast (okay, maybe not “fast,” but faster than the people sitting and watching him).

P.S. The Super Bowl starts at approximately 6:30pm EST on Feb 3, 2019. (via laura olin)

Joseph Norwood cherry-picks the “wonderfully strange” names created by early Puritans; I presume many of us have heard of Praise-God Barebone, but he’s just the tip of the iceberg:

A wide variety of Hebrew names came into common usage beginning in 1560, when the first readily accessible English Bible was published. But by the late 16th century many Puritan communities in Southern Britain saw common names as too worldly, and opted instead to name children after virtues or with religious slogans as a way of setting the community apart from non-Puritan neighbors. Often, Puritan parents chose names that served to remind the child about sin and pain.

Many Puritan names started to die out after 1662, when the newly restored monarch, Charles II, introduced new laws that cracked down on nonconformist religions and consolidated the power of the Anglican Church. Despite this, some of the names have remained in common use in Anglophone countries.

I’ve collected some of the best, worst, and strangest names the English Puritans came up with. Most of these are courtesy of the 1888 book by Charles Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (seen here on the Public Domain Review’s website), which includes Parish records with details about some of the people who had these names.

Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar! Continent Walker! Humiliation Hynde! (“Humiliation Hynde had two sons in the 1620s; he called them both Humiliation Hynde.”) NoMerit Vynall! Sorry-for-sin Coupard! Kill-sin Pimple!! There’s plenty more where those came from; go visit the link.