[Bruce Sterling being opinionated, insightful, and very funny indeed about Snowden, Manning, Assange, et al. -egg]

But Snowden sure is a dissident defector, and boy is he ever. Americans don’t even know how to think about characters like Snowden — the American Great and the Good are blundering around on the public stage like blacked-out drunks, blithering self-contradictory rubbish. It’s all “gosh he’s such a liar” and “give us back our sinister felon,” all while trying to swat down the jets of South American presidents.

via The Ecuadorian Library — Geek Empire — Medium.

The object of Cargo-bot is to write programs that control a robotic arm to move, sort, and stack colored crates. The computer language is a simple instruction set consisting of of squares that tell the arm which direction to move, and whether or not to perform an action based on the color of the crate. You write the programs by dragging and dropping the instruction squares into a sequence that causes the arm to perform the assigned task. You can also write programs that execute other programs you’ve written. (This is important because each program has space for just 8 squares, so you need to be able to write efficient code to complete the challenges). The challenges start out easy but become maddeningly difficult as you progress. With subroutines, if-then statements, and plenty of opportunities to practice debugging, it’s a good way to get kids to think like a programmer. You can also record a video of your program in action and share it to YouTube.

via Cool Tools – Cargo-Bot.

[Just so we don’t forget what the FBI is doing while we focus on the NSA….-egg]

The FBI develops some hacking tools internally and purchases others from the private sector. With such technology, the bureau can remotely activate the microphones in phones running Google Inc.’s Android software to record conversations, one former U.S. official said. It can do the same to microphones in laptops without the user knowing, the person said. Google declined to comment.

via FBI Taps Hacker Tactics to Spy on Suspects – WSJ.com.

[Excellent little sci fi short story by Warren Ellis. -egg]

The white room is bleeding to death.

A white vestibule, with white floors and white walls and a lit white ceiling. The only other color is red. A crack in one wall, exposing a raw fistula in the bioelectric packeting. Blood leaks from the hole, down three inches of slick white wall, to pool on the floor. A broken heart in the interstitial net of veins and wires that makes our houses live and breathe.

Somebody has murdered the house.

via Warren Ellis: “Lich-House,” a short story – Boing Boing.

[Fascinating. -egg]

Then one day in March, HackBB simply vanished, its databases destroyed. One user likened the events to burning a city—its library, market, bank, and entire community—to the ground. It wasn’t hard to guess who’d done it. A few days earlier, Boneless had disappeared—and with him, a serious chunk of the market’s sizable hoards of money.

via The Daily Dot – The blockbuster heist that rocked the Deep Web.

[Hey look, another MASSIVE NSA disclosure. This is arguably the most disturbing revelation to date. -egg]

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

via XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’ | World news | theguardian.com.

What looks like a giant pile of rubble outside the Shangri-La Hotel in downtown Vancouver is actually an art installation by Chinese art collective MadeIn Company titled Calm. All is not as it seems. Pass by in a hurry and you’ll hardly notice this giant pile of broken cement blocks, grass, and construction waste, but stand next to it for just a moment and you’ll notice something almost imperceptible: the entire pile of rubble is moving, slightly undulating atop a giant hidden reservoir of water.

The large field of debris was collected from a renovated Vancouver synagogue and installed on an exhibition space, Offsite, belonging to the Vancouver Art Gallery last April. According to various news reports people seem pretty polarized by the installation, either loving or hating it. The work was inspired by the near perpetual state of urban development currently underway in China. Via the gallery:

Calm’s ambiguity and unexpected ability to move provoke us to question ways of observing, believing and understanding facts, and remind us that the truth often differs from what it seems. In this context, Calm comments on the concerns that arise alongside urban development and the gentrification of residential neighbourhoods, whether in Vancouver or Shanghai. While the volume of construction in Vancouver might pale in comparison and scale to that of Shanghai, there are currently several retail and residential expansions underway within a five-kilometre radius of Offsite.

via Calm: A Field of Liquid Construction Debris on the Streets of Vancouver by MadeIn Company | Colossal.

The Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition was established in 1980 by the American Helicopter Society to help foster the creation of the first human-powered helicopter. To win the prize a team of engineers would have to build a helicopter powered solely by a human that would achieve a flight duration of 60 seconds, reach an altitude of 3 meters (9.8 ft), while remaining in a 10 meter (32.8 ft) square. The first attempt wouldn’t even leave the ground until 1989 when the Da Vinci III built by students Cal Poly San Luis Obispo flew for 7.1 seconds.

Over 33 years have passed since the creation of the AHS Sikorsky Prize and dozens teams have tried to win it. Finally, on June 13th of this year the AeroVelo team from the University Of Toronto managed to fly their Atlas Human-Powered Helicopter for 64.1 seconds, reaching an altitude of 11 feet (3.3 meters). The Atlas is a mammoth four rotor helicopter that despite measuring 154 feet (47 meters) across weighs only 119 pounds. The results were just verified this morning and the AeroVelo team was officially declared the winners of the $250,000 award. Watch the record-breaking flight above and read more over on the Huffington Post. Surely Da Vinci is fist-pumping in his grave.

via The Atlas Human-Powered Helicopter Wins the AHS Sikorsky Prize | Colossal.

The Misconception: You procrastinate because you are lazy and can’t manage your time well.

The Truth: Procrastination is fueled by weakness in the face of impulse and a failure to think about thinking.

Netflix reveals something about your own behavior you should have noticed by now, something which keeps getting between you and the things you want to accomplish.

If you have Netflix, especially if you stream it to your TV, you tend to gradually accumulate a cache of hundreds of films you think you’ll watch one day. This is a bigger deal than you think.

…

via Procrastination « You Are Not So Smart.

Translucent Hermit Shell Crabs Adorned with Architectural Cityscapes by Aki Inomata | Colossal.