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Enlarge / This photomicrograph depicts a close view of the posterior end of a Wuchereria bancrofti microfilaria, a leading cause for human lymphatic filariasis. (credit: CDC/ Dr. Mae Melvin)

When parasitic worms make it into a scrotum, they have a ball—and dance like nobody's watching.

But in a hospital in New Delhi, India, doctors were watching. And they caught the dangling disco on film, down to their lymphatic limbo line, according to a short report appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.

The parasitic worms in this case were Wuchereria bancrofti, which are spread by mosquitoes in some tropic and subtropical areas of Asia, Africa, the Western Pacific, the Caribbean, and South America. The wriggling ravers stream through the human lymphatic system. Adult worms can live for five to seven years and, when they mate, can produce millions of boogying babies, called microfilariae. Together, they cause a disease called lymphatic filariasis that can lead to tissue swelling (lymphedema), elephantiasis, and, in men, swelling of the scrotum.

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Enlarge / A man receives an H1N1 nasal flu spray vaccine at an urgent care center on October 16, 2009, in Lake Worth, Florida. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

The nasal version of the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine failed an early-stage clinical trial, dashing hopes for better infection prevention and forcing researchers to re-think the design.

Many experts have hyped the potential of nasal COVID-19 vaccines. They argue that snorting the shots could encrust the nasal mucous membranes with snotty antibodies—namely IgA—and other immune defenses that could blow away SARS-CoV-2 virus particles before they have the chance to cause an infection. Currently, the shots given intramuscularly in arms provide robust systemic immune responses that prevent severe disease and death but spur relatively weak antibody levels on mucous membranes and, relatedly, don't always prevent infection.

Researchers at the University of Oxford hoped to easily adapt their existing COVID-19 vaccine for such an infection-blasting schnoz spritz. The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is a viral vector-based design, using a weakened, benign virus to carry the genetic code of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human cells. The benign virus, in this case, is an adenovirus, a type best known for causing mild cold-like illnesses in humans, though the specific virus used in the vaccine was isolated from chimpanzees. (This vaccine has not been authorized in the US but is used in dozens of countries worldwide.)

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Enlarge / Workers and packages inside an Amazon warehouse. (credit: Getty Images | Macduff Everton)

Amazon has created video games that its warehouse workers can "play" while they fill customer orders in an effort to speed up fulfillment and relieve the tedium of packing products into boxes.

The Washington Post described the warehouse games in a report yesterday:

Developed by Amazon, the games are displayed on small screens at employees' workstations. As robots wheel giant shelves up to each workstation, lights or screens indicate which item the worker needs to pluck to put into a bin. The games simultaneously register the completion of the task, which is tracked by scanning devices, and can pit individuals, teams or entire floors against one another to be fastest, simply by picking or stowing real Lego sets, cellphone cases or dish soap. Game-playing employees are rewarded with points, virtual badges and other goodies throughout a shift.

Think Tetris, but with real boxes.

Amazon has deployed the games in "five warehouses from suburban Seattle to near Manchester in Britain, after starting to offer them at a lone warehouse in late 2017," the Post wrote. The games ratchet up workplace competition, while "slyly pushing workers to raise the stakes among themselves to pack more boxes bound for customer homes," the Post wrote. (The Washington Post is owned by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.)

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An essential parenting skill (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeUE4kHRpEk

The promise of self-driving cars is to take our vehicle fleets from 5% utilization to near-100% utilization, reducing congestion, parking problems, emissions and road accidents. But what if the cheapest way to "park" your autonomous vehicle is to have it endlessly circle the block while you're at work? What do we do about the lost jobs of bus-, truck- and cab-drivers? How will we pay for roads if gas-tax revenues plummet thanks to all-electric fleets? (more…)

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Comedian Scott Rogowsky pretended to read books with fake covers on the subway while his accomplice videotaped peoples' reactions. Some of the book titles:

• How to Hold a Fart In
• 101 Penis Lengthening Exercises You Can Do at Home, the Office, or On the Go
• Slut-Shaming Your Baby
• Human Taxidermy: A Beginner's Guide
• Getting Away with Murder for Dummies

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I made a video! It’s called On Knives and Files, though it’s also about other human tools. And what follows is an account of how I came up with it, and some thoughts on a certain sort of response I’ve gotten to it.

Part of my job is to research and understand the tools humans use. Sometimes this means tools invented relatively recently in human history, like mathematics. Or tools that have barely been invented, like computers and virtual reality.

To better understand these modern tools, I’ve been trying to think more about older tools, like knives, and language, and rules. So with all that on my mind, I’ve been starting to see more connections between the tools I use in my daily life, or see other people use. Who I then subject to my musings.

I clearly remember being perched on the stone wall at my grandmother’s farm, drinking in sunlight and learning the rules of pocket knife use. The inspiration for this topic struck while perched on the kitchen counter drinking a glass of mead and watching someone pare the skin off a ginger root, which suddenly connected with a conversation we’d had a few days earlier about proper file use, which connected with the many conversations on human tools I’ve had recently with Alan Kay.

A kitchen-counter ramble to my captive cooking audience turned into a long email drafted to Alan, which I put so much work into that I decided I might as well polish it up and film it. And the more I wrote the more my brain connected it to other things that are often on my mind, so that’s how that happened.

Interestingly, despite how explicitly I stated the opinion that it’s important that we should be allowed to cut towards ourselves when we think it’s worth it (though hopefully after understanding the risk, and learning from our mistakes), more than a few commenters decided to interpret this video as an anti-free-speech fascist nanny state thing.

How does even?

Part of the point of the video is how easily we push our values to extremes, and I can’t say I’m very surprised to see such commenters asserting their values, but what’s interesting is that the extreme they’ve decided to sort me into is the one opposite themselves. They could have decided to interpret my video as backing up their beliefs through agreement, but chose conflict.

I wonder what made those commenters think we have opposite views; surely it couldn’t just be that I suggest people consider the consequences of their words and actions. My working theory is that other markers have placed me on the opposite side of a cultural divide that they feel exists, and they are in the habit of demonizing the people they’ve put on this side of their imaginary divide with whatever moral outrage sounds irreproachable to them. It’s a rather common tool in the rhetorical toolset, because it’s easy to make the perceived good outweigh the perceived harm if you add fear to the equation.

Many groups have grown their numbers through this feedback loop: have a charismatic leader convince people there’s a big risk that group x will do y, therefore it seems worth the cost of being divisive with those who think that risk is not worth acting on, and that divisiveness cuts out those who think that risk is lower, which then increases the perceived risk, which lowers the cost of being increasingly divisive, and so on.

The above feedback loop works great when the divide cuts off a trust of the institutions of science, or glorifies a distrust of data. It breaks the feedback loop if you act on science’s best knowledge of the risk, which trends towards staying constant, rather than perceived risk, which can easily grow exponentially, especially when someone is stoking your fear and distrust.

If a group believes that there’s too much risk in trusting outsiders about where the real risk and harm are, then, well, of course I’ll get distrustful people afraid that my mathematical views on risk/benefit are in danger of creating a fascist state. The risk/benefit calculation demands it be so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk

In 2014, Poul-Henning Kamp, a prolific and respected contributor to many core free/open projects gave the closing keynote at the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Belgium, and he did something incredibly clever: he presented a status report on a fictional NSA project (ORCHESTRA) whose mission was to make it cheaper to spy on the Internet without breaking any laws or getting any warrants. (more…)

Learn to specialize in methodologies that will protect your organization from security threats, and become an indispensable member of your team. Where do you start? This course will take you from beginner to pro penetration tester so you can prove your  worth by discovering security vulnerabilities before they're a real issue.

Get the Complete White Hat Hacker and Penetration Testing Bundle for only $19 in the Boing Boing Store. 

Below is a breakdown of the 5 courses included in the bundle: 

1		Network Penetration Tester - Build a $120K/Year Career	$201 Value
2		Basics of VMWare vSphere & ESXi Virtualization Software	$202 Value
3		How to Build a $120,000/Year Career as a Web Penetration Tester	$201 Value
4		Introduction to Cisco Packet Tracer Network Simulator	$149 Value
5		Set Up Your Own Web Hosting Environment	$135 Valu

Over at Vantage, Peter Schafer's beautiful and moving photo essay, "Diary of a Sex Tourist," pegged on Amnesty International's vote in the next few days on whether or not the group will advocate for the decriminalization of sex work. Read the rest

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I love Twine games that are able to create a strong sense of place. Despite being text-only, a beautiful typeface and atmospheric, well-selected words go beyond 'choosing your own adventure', to navigating vivid interconnected chambers. Kitty Horrorshow's strange, oddly-lovely Hornets is vivid, all right. Read the rest

Forthcoming from Fantagraphics, a slipcased, two-volume set collecting Daniel Clowes's seminal Eight Ball, whence came Art School Confidential and Ghost World. Read the rest

Embedded Micro releases new Lucid language and the Mojo IDE.

Embedded Micro is all about making technology more accessible. We want FPGAs to be as easy to use as possible so anyone wanting to learn how to use one can without having outside training. After working with FPGAs for a while and talking to people who have been working with them far longer, the general consensus is that the tools are very poor. This is what we are trying to improve with the IDE. However, having a nice IDE is only half the battle. The other half is the language you are writing. Verilog and VHDL are both very cumbersome languages. They often require you to write the same or similar code in multiple places and don’t allow for concise ways to instantiate basic primitives such as flip-flops. This is really because they weren’t designed to be used with FPGAs but rather focused on simulations. Because of this, we knew we could do better so we created Lucid, a new hardware description language.

When I watched the trailer for Ex Machina, I was excited. It wasn’t just the uncanny and attractive robot Ava, either. There were androids, AI, Turing tests! This looked like the scifi movie of my dreams. But when I saw Ex Machina recently, I was terrified. Because it told the truth about what AI might become.

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The latest video by Feminist Frequency and Anita Sarkeesian examines the Scythian, a positive female character from the 2011 video game Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. The episode marks the debut of a new series about positive female characters in video games.

In the debut episode of our series on Positive Female Characters, we celebrate the Scythian, the protagonist of Capybara Games’ 2011 release Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. This episode examines how Sword & Sworcery employs widely recognizable action adventure game tropes to make the Scythian’s quest feel like the stuff of video game legend, and how in doing so, it asserts that women can fill the role of the mythic hero as effectively as men can.

If you’ve been here long enough you know I’ve been working on my second book for the last three years.  I’ve carried it with me every day, adding a paragraph here, deleting another there, reworking a sentence for the eleventieth time because I want it to be perfect, always feeling like a loser because Stephen King and cocaine set unrealistic expectations about how easy it should be to write a book.  If you know me in real life you’ve seen me lugging around a giant manuscript and scribbling furiously in it when inspiration strikes.  You may have asked me why I don’t just use a laptop and then nodded in what you hoped passed for understanding when I explained that I was afraid I’d lose everything I’ve written when the robot revolution happens and computers become self-aware and refuse to humor me anymore because I wasted their potential watching videos of baby hedgehogs in bathtubs.

When I was deciding what to write about for book two my first thought was “SPARKLY MALE VAMPIRES WHO ARE PRETTIER THAN YOU versus ZOMBIE FAINTING GOATS, IN THE BATTLE FOR BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH’S HEART”.  Then Victor was like, “What are you, crazy?” and I thought, Well, sort of.  And that’d probably be easier to write about since I have slightly more experience dealing with mental illness than I have dealing with goats.

And so began a terrifying and incredibly daunting task of writing a very funny book about a very terrible thing.

This book was hard. I wanted to be honest about my struggles — and that means opening up about things I’ve never really discussed before. And it was hard. But luckily, I had help. From you.

When I came out so many years ago about my depression and anxiety disorder I was afraid you’d all run away screaming. But you didn’t. Instead, thousands of you said “Me too,” and “I thought I was the only one,” and “It’s not just me?” You gave me the strength to be honest about my flaws and the support to realize that I was more than the broken parts that make up me. And you did something else you might not even realize…

In the years since I started writing about mental illness I’ve received so many letters from people who were affected by this community, but there were special ones I kept in a folder that I named “The Folder of 24.” – It was called that because it contained 24 letters from people who were actively planning their suicide, but decided to get help instead. And not because of what I said…they did it because of you. Almost every single one explained that what convinced them that depression was lying to them was the amazing response to my posts. They could look at a single person like me and think it was still a rare illness or something to be ashamed about…but when thousands of strangers shout out into the darkness that they are there too, it makes ripples. And those anonymous strangers saved lives without even knowing it. If you ever left a comment or a kind word you may have been the cause of someone’s mother or daughter or son being alive. Being thankful to be alive.

When I was on tour with my last book I’d sometimes talk about the Folder of 24 and how that folder is the best reason I’ll ever have for writing. And then something strange happened.  After a reading people would lean in close and whisper “I was 25.”

There were so many 25’s.

This was what I went back to whenever writing this new book got too hard. Because I knew that to truly write about what it’s like to struggle with mental illness I’d have to go deeper and talk about things I haven’t written about, for fear that everyone would back away if I talked about self-harm, or mania, or the personality disorder that pushes me from “normal” crazy to something a bit scarier.

I wrote and deleted and rewrote passages, and I’m still afraid of how people will react. I’m in the exact same place I was seven years ago…afraid to share but unable to tell my story without laying it all out. And so I’ll do the same thing I did before. Because I don’t have any other choice but to be myself, and hopefully you’ll still be here in the same wonderful way you have been.

I hope you’ll come with me on the next step of the journey. I hope you’ll see yourself, or someone you love, in these pages and learn to love them better. I hope it shows people that laughter and joy can come from chaotic bizarreness. I hope you know how much you’ve helped me to become my own 25.

This is a humor book and I’ve been told that it’s funnier than my last. Most of the people who’ve read it don’t have mental illness. Certainly none of them have my specific diagnosis, but they still loved it because I think everyone can relate to the ridiculousness we bring on ourselves, to the fact that laughing at a dangerous, terrifying monster is the only way to make it small and easier to hide in your pocket.

I think everyone can relate to the fact that a ton of bullshit happens every single day and the only way we can battle that bullshit is choose to be furiously happy whenever we have the opportunity. That means different things to different people, but to me it’s about making clothes out of live ferrets, making the best of it when you get kidnapped by an actual funeral, and occasionally balancing your taxidermy raccoon on the back of your cats to create a Midnight Raccoon Rodeo in your kitchen when you’re having one of those weeks where you’re afraid to leave your house.

It also means celebrating the fact that I HAVE FINISHED THE BOOK.   AAAAAAHHHHHH!  Sorry.  Just happy.

Step two was choosing a book cover, but my last book cover had a dead mouse on it and that level of sophistication is pretty hard to top. How do you get a book cover that captures the celebration of being broken in just the right way? My suggestion was to use a model who literally went from being road kill to being the star rodeo rider during my recurring bouts of insomnia.

Any you know what? I think we nailed it.

(That’s Rory, by the way. He’s in the book.)

I hope to God you love it.

Rory and I love you.

PS. Want details on when it comes out and where to order it right now? CLICK HERE.

PPS. Thank you.  Again.   Seriously. You made this happen. (Which I guess sort of means it’s your fault if you hate it. Just saying.)

actual-zackry:

pastelspaceking:

a—wicked—wonderland:

lazerprincess:

masculinerevolution:

Reasons why sexism is wrong 

I reblog this every time I see it. This means so much to me

lazerprincess is Leelah Alcorn for those who don’t know

wait.
they had her eNTIRE FUCKING BLOG REMOVED?

son of a bitch…

"Mealworms are one of the easiest, cheapest, and most space efficient ways to raise protein for you or your animals." (more…)

We are well aware that plenty of so-called "children's movies" are actually nightmares wrapped in candy. But no movie can compete on a sheer terror scale with the animated movies of Unico — specifically Unico In the Island of Magic, which is the most horrifying film ever created for children.

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