Tiny origami robot folds itself, performs tasks, dissolves into nothing. // The road to success. // Days of future past. (h/t, Pootblog) // Eco-pod. You want one and you know it. // Plants and mirrors. // Cloudreporter. // Here’s some weather in a box. // Balloon creatures. // Hot dog style guide. // I think we need more logos. // A map of horror movie locations. // Odorous alarm clock. If you’re going to wake up to a smell, why not make it one of these? // Octopus lugs coconut shells. // It’s probably best not to try this at home. // Avengers interface porn. // At last, a 10-storey urban playground. // Smart device gesture sensing. // Done with magnets, marbles and sand. // Oh dear, something is sucking the eggs. (h/t, Julia) // And finally, I’m having second thoughts about this cunning plan.  

I’m not entirely sure what’s happening here. 

Via Joan. 

Update via Franklin. Brace yourselves: 

Attention, amorous menfolk. The rules of dating feminists, especially brown ones, have been updated: 

Yeah, I said it: I absolutely refuse to even touch my wallet while on a date with a man. 

The fierce young lady saying it, yeah is one Tiffanie Drayton, whose deep feminist wisdom will shake your tiny world:

I am a thinking, hardworking, autonomous human being. I am also a woman, and a Black woman at that, who is constantly fighting for the right to claim an independence that has been hindered and even made secondary to that of my male peers. 

Damn those bastards. And therefore Ms Drayton has decided that politicised freeloading is the way forward:

Why should I believe I must overcome this inequality without the assistance of a man who wants to pursue me romantically? Why is my effort to reach for the cheque anything more than pretence? Society has never treated me as “equal” to the man sitting across from me, yet all of a sudden the playing field is levelled? 

Yes, relying on a man to pay the bill, every time, is proof of Ms Drayton’s emancipation and empowerment as a thinking, hardworking, autonomous black woman. It’s how she fights for the right to claim her independence. It’s also reparation for collective male sin. Oh, sweet serendipity.

In other words, a man who pays for a date is merely compensating for society’s imbalance and inequality. He is restoring equality. This is especially true in dating White or Asian men who – statistically speaking – has [sic] a weekly median income of nearly 2-3 times that of women of colour.

You see, by paying for everything she wants, whenever she wants it, your money is simply being “returned to the women from which [sic] it was displaced in the very first place.” And so the proudly feminist author “completely rejects the premise” that “I have to pay my own way.”

Ms Drayton is a “freelance writer and activist,” one who struggles daily with The All-Powerful Patriarchy™, and also grammar. Regarding her tweets on racism and sexism – sorry, her “lectures” on racism and sexism – she says, 

Google gets paid. I should too. 

She adds,

If discussions on racism make you uncomfortable, avoid everything I write. 

Given the dating conditions above, potential suitors may wish to expand that idea to contact in general. 

Kevin D Williamson corrects the comedy economics of U.S. senator Bernie Sanders: 

Prices in markets are not arbitrary — they are reflections of how real people actually value certain goods and services in the real world. Arbitrarily changing the dollar numbers attached to those preferences does not change the underlying reality any more than trimming Cleveland off a map of the United States actually makes Cleveland disappear… Free markets are a reflection of what people actually value at a particular time relative to the other things that they might also value. Real people simply want things that are different from what the planners want them to want, a predicament that can be solved only through violence and the threat of violence…

Markets adapt to political changes, and the hierarchy of values that distinguishes between an hour’s worth of warehouse management, an hour’s worth of composing poetry, an hour’s worth of brain surgery, and an hour’s worth of singing pop songs is not going to change because a politician says so, or because a group of politicians says so, or because 50 percent + 1 of the voters say so, or for any other reason. To think otherwise is the equivalent of flat-earth cosmology. In the long term, people’s needs and desires are what they are; in the short term, you can cause a great deal of chaos in the economy and you can give employers additional reasons to automate rote work. But you cannot make a fry-guy’s labour as valuable as a patent lawyer’s by simply passing a law.

Williams quotes the socialist Mr Sanders objecting to consumers having a wide choice of sports shoes and underarm deodorant, as if such things were a sign of wickedness, which reminded me of another socialist’s encounter with well-stocked shelves, in 1989, quoted here by Tim Blair:  

[Russian president, Boris] Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s supermarket nodding his head in amazement.” He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.” “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.

And here’s a Moscow supermarket circa 1990, filmed by Rick Suddeth. As you can see, the egalitarian retail experience is leaving shoppers happier and more morally elevated:  

“Because love is forever!” // Smart collar for dogs. // Brain-controlled bionic leg. // There are duck lanes in London. // Star Trek-inspired office building of note. // That holiday in Iceland you’ve been planning. // How to prolong battery life. // Belly paint. // Rihanna farts in a bath. // Giant strawberry. // Tasty hedge. // Stayin’ Alive. // How to make gummi Lego. // Wet-fold origami animals. // An interactive global map of meteorite falls. // Interactive pixelated fur pompoms. // Cruise ships from above. // “Masturbating men will find their hands pregnant in the afterlife.” Don’t question Islamic science. // Smartphone screen-to-body ratios. // Retro-ironic gaming cabinet of note. // Hurdler. // Dad interventions. // And finally, fiercely, drag queen Storm versus drag queen Dark Phoenix.