NASA's Juno is about to reach Jupiter after a 5-year journey. I visited JPL before the big show.

Today is a big day for NASA. At 8:18pm Pacific, the Juno spacecraft headed for Jupiter will fire off its main thrusters and, if all goes well, begin orbiting the gas giant. It's a make-it-or-break-it moment and thousands of eyes will be watching the live event.

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Universal, CC-licensed mobile phone charging dock

Eirik writes, "I like those old charging docks for mobile phones. But the problem is that you need to buy a new one every time your phone change. And it won't fit if you use a cover on your phone. So I just designed a dock that can be adapted to almost any phone."
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Magician flubs trick, impales spectator's hand on spike

WARNING: A person gets stabbed in the hand in this video.

This has happened again.

Previously:

Here's how the spike trick is supposed to work: a magician shows the spectator a large nail mounted on a block of wood. He sets it on the table so the nail is pointed up. Then he covers the nail with a paper bag. He places three identical paper bags next to the bag covering the nail. He turns his back and asks the spectator to shuffle the four bags around on the table so that the magician has no idea which one has the nail. The magician turns around to face the bags, then slams his hand down one a bag. It was empty. He repeats the process until only one bag is left. He lifts the bag to reveal the nail. It's a nerve-wracking trick.

Recently a magician performed the trick and made a bad mistake, driving the nail through his hand. You can see the photos here. Fortunately, he's going to recover.

And here's a video from 2007 that captures another magician stabbing himself. It's not too graphic, but it is hard to watch anyway because you know what's coming.

I have no interest in performing this trick.

New York's stately libraries sport hidden apartments for live-in caretakers

For the first half of the 20th Century, it was common for New York's libraries to have live-in superintendents, whose families would live on-site in hidden apartments -- the last one of these apartments wasn't vacated until 2006.
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Should this grandmother have let her granddaughter squirt herself with a hose?

Helicopter parenting vs. free range parenting? Discuss.

Russia's ghastly Children's Rights Commissioner finally quits

Pavel Astakhov -- celebrity lawyer, courtroom TV star, crime novelist, reciter of impromptu religious poetry -- has finally met a scandal he couldn't laugh off: when he met with the children who'd survived a boating accident that killed 14 of their friends, he opened with "So, how was the swim?"

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Peak indifference: privacy as a public health issue

My latest Locus column, "Peak Indifference", draws a comparison between the history of the "debate" about the harms of smoking (a debate manufactured by disinformation merchants with a stake in the controversy) and the current debate about the harms of surveillance and data-collection, whose proponents say "privacy is dead," while meaning, "I would be richer if your privacy were dead."
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