Articles by BoingBoing from March 2011

I know this story on Planet Green—all about the edible "meat glue" that holds together everything from imitation crab sticks and chicken nuggets to modernist chef cuisine—is supposed to m...

(photo by Jason Hickey) The Orange County Register reports that a manager at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station claims he was fired after reporting safety concerns, according to a suit filed to...

A group of MIT students have used a Microsoft Kinect sensor-package to enable a UAV to map and fly circuits around a room: Students have developed a real-time visual odometry system that can use a Ki...

Ed Vaizey, the UK Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries has admitted that he is in talks with ISPs to create a voluntary national firewall. Big copyright companies would petiti...

Politico today reports an update related to a BB item earlier in the week: A NYT story (sparked by this story in a German newspaper) "revealed the extent to which Deutsche Telekom tracked and stored l...

Heritage Auctions estimates that the art for page 10 from issue #3 of Frank Miller and Klaus Janson's The Dark Knight Returns (1986) will fetch at least $100,000 when it goes on the block on May 5. Pr...

As Jack Chick's jolly devil would say, "Haw Haw Haw!" Classic: Grandma's Bookmarks UPDATE: CSMcDonald commented: "Unfortunately it looks like Cumming (town in Georgia north of Atlanta) has changed the...

Bhob Stewart says: "There were variations on the Mad logo by several artists. This is Wood's concept plus quick sketches and a few random free associations." See it bigger over at Bhob's excellent sit...

Reuters reports that President Barack Obama signed a no-longer "secret order" authorizing covert U.S. government support for rebel forces attempting to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The a...

From artist Mitch O'Connell's bottomless trove of mind-bending ephemera: the Car Chic. (See also: Vibra-Finger.) Car Chics......

Photo of bhut jolokia fruit by Matt Rudge. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. David sent me an ad for bhut jolokia pepper plants, which have a Scoville rating of slightly more than one ...

Consequences of the nuclear crisis in Japan continue to expand. The March 11 quake and tsunami left 28,000 people dead or missing, and triggered a series of increasingly grave problems at the Fukushi...

PHOTO, CLICK FOR LARGE: An aerial view from a height of some 1,500 meters (4,920 feet) and distance of more than 30 kilometers (18 miles) from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, March 29, 20...

From the Google Blog today, news that the company will build an "ultra high-speed network" in Kansas City, Kansas. "We've signed a development agreement with the city, and we'll be working closely wit...

...

The native wildlife of the Florida Everglades is under attack by thousands of Burmese Pythons, thought to be the spawn of pet snakes that have escaped or were abandoned by their owners. To understand ...

Boing Boing reader cinemajay says, My wife and I just returned from NYC where we saw "Infinite Variety," an exhibition of 650 red and white quilts. As the husband of a quilter I'm used to going to cra...

Israeli footwear designer Kobi Levi handmakes delightful shoes-as-sculptures that he photographs and posts to his blog. Kobi Levi Footwear Design......

Harry Coover, creator of Super Glue, died on Saturday at age 94. Coover stumbled upon the chemical, called cyanoacrylate, in 1942 while developing gun sights for Eastman Kodak. From the Washington Pos...

German police are concerned about an increasing number of teens who are reportedly getting drunk using vodka-soaked tampons as the alcohol delivery system. The practice is known as "slimming," a term ...

British graffiti artist D*Face has a show at Corey Helford Gallery opening in LA this Saturday, April 9, 201, from 7:30-10pm. D*Face: "Going Nowhere Fast"......

This great old video is a remarkably clear explanation of how a differential gear works -- the kind of thing that you could show to a young child or an adult and make the lightbulb go on for both of t...

In the early 1990s, the United States was set to build a particle accelerator even larger and more awesome than the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. Naturally, Texas was chosen as the location for suc...

Designer Ryan Novelline has created a smashing gown out of Golden Books -- he's documented the process, which looks like great fun: "The skirt is comprised entirely of the illustrations from the book...

James Gleick and Open Road Media have produced a new edition of the classic Chaos: Making of a New Science with new material and some great illustrative videos; it runs on Kindles and iOS devices. Cha...

Mr. Ralph Mooney, master of the steel guitar, died on Sunday at the age of 82. I just noticed the obituary in a friend's Facebook post (thanks, Katie!). Mooney was go-to guy for pedal steel guitar du...

I received these lighted magnified tweezers as a stocking stuffer a few years back, and although I am fortunate enough to have great eyesight these tweezers are absolutely amazing for inspecting and r...

Shapeways user Ceramicwombat created these great "thorn dice" and they're available in a number of polymers and metals, fresh and piping hot from the 3D printer. Thorn Dice Set with Decader......

Warp drive technology, as described in Star Trek, is nonsense, but there might actually be something to the idea of "warp drive" as a concept, says theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss.......

It's spring! Time to watch some videos that will teach you how to tune-up and repair your own bike. (Not that I would need a pre-spring tune-up, of course. I've totally been riding all winter. Yeah. T...

I'm late to the party on Elephantmen -- the comic has been running since 2006 and there've been three collections to date. I've just read the first one, Wounded Animals and I've got that happy, warm ...

The judge who reversed all precedent to date and said that it was permissible for copyright trolls to sue hundreds of people who never met or communicated in "reverse class action" suits? She just...

Wired asked me to write about some of the cool tools that are becoming increasingly available to DIYers. I described inexpensive computer-aided design software, 3-D printers, computer numerical contro...

"This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System's innermost planet." (NASA)......

I've used this flour duster for about 5 years and have found nothing else that can compete. It allows for remarkably light and even dusting of dough or a work surface. You simply squeeze the wire hand...

I just got done reading an excerpt from a book that sounds completely fascinating. It's all about pica—the overwhelming desire to eat dirt, starch, and other things that aren't food. Apparently...

This geeky dad made a growth-chart for his daughter that allows her to log her height against Star Wars and other science fiction franchise characters. It comes as a seven-foot-tall PDF, in case your...

This handy gentleman has built an (arguably ill-conceived, but nevertheless impressive) rifle-cum-slingshot that fires machetes, should you find yourself with the need to fire machetes. He also has a...

The fine folks at COILHOUSE magazine (mentioned many a time here in the past, and who featured Xeni and Boing Boing Video in issue 3 have just put made available for the first time all five back issue...

Festo, creators of robot penguins and a robotic elephant trunk, created the majestic robot bird in this video. From New Scientist: SmartBird is modelled on the herring gull and can take off, fly and l...

A London entrepreneur is planning to convert a half-dozen unused subway stations into clubs, bars, and live music venues. Ajit Chambers' plans have apparently been blessed by London Mayor Boris Johnso...

If you aren't already a reader of the history of futurism blog, Paleofuture, then you are making a serious mistake that future generations will someday mock. And there is no better time to learn the w...

Trixie Bedlam's photo captures a poignant moment of bedbug existentialism. anyone can see (via Warren Ellis)......

Just a reminder for Southern Californians that I'll be speaking at Claremont McKenna College's Atheneum series tonight at 1845h, and it's free and open to the public. I'll be reprising and expanding o...

Artist Andr Lassen's created a set of sinister, skeleton-adorned flatware that Raven Armoury is selling in stainless steel or bronze (a carving set is coming soon). Great for your evil overlord dinne...

Canada's cable-based ISPs have filed regulatory comments on their "Usage-Based Billing" model that caps bandwidth use and then charges high rates for overage. In these comments, they admit that the r...

Hammacher Schlemmer's "Audio Light Bulb" is a $300 pair of speakers that you screw into your light-socket (it has a set of white LEDs that provide light equivalent to a 60 Watt incandescent). It draw...

A paper from James M. Donovan (U Kentucky) and Carol A. Watson (U Georgia) analyzes the pattern of citations in law journals and finds that legal scholars who publish in open access (free and freely ...

AsiaObscura has a short piece on the "cave dwellings" (~) of rural Sanxi province, China. An older generation of local farmers have reared their families in these caves, which they praise for th...

Rick Prelinger sez, "My friend Robin Edgerton, whom some of you will know from WFMU and VH1, just helped AT&T select a bunch of its cooler films from the thousands in its archives to put online. The ...

Senior London police officers lied to peaceful protestors from UKUncut who had entered the luxury department store (and alleged tax evader) Fortnum and Mason, telling the demonstrators that they'd be...

We hear a lot about animal diseases that make the jump to humans—swine flu, for instance. But this transfer goes the other way, too. There are 786 mountain gorillas left in the wild, and three ...

Slate has an interesting look at what's up with all the different ways of measuring radiation exposure. Sieverts, rems, grays—what's the difference? It is boils down to two issues. First, s...

What can't whiskey cure? Link. "What is the Grip?," from the April, 22, 1891 edition of the New York Times. Via Gabriel Snyder of Atlanticwire, originally the subject of this "Found item" post...

Online today at Rolling Stone, and in the current print issue on newsstands: "The Kill Team," Mark Boal's feature on a group of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan who are accused of murdering innocent civil...

Here's something I've never been able to remember: when I rent a car I forget to notice which side the gas cap is on. For the rest of my trip, I don't think to look. I only think about it when I'm dri...

In a T-shirt sold in 2008 to raise money for victims of violence in Darfur, artist Nadia Plesner depicted an African child holding a Louis Vuitton-style bag. So Louis Vuitton sued her. When she recent...

Via Jay Smooth, Andrew MonkOne Mason, and egotripland, this wonderful mix of Japanese hip-hop at Names You Can Trust Radio: "B-Boy Bungaku, an hour's worth of solid nipponese rap heat straight from th...

The "Serious Mario Movie Trailers" meme meets a second layer of recursion in this latest amusement. If you are a PC gamer worth your salt, you'll know why I think the creators of this should be in cha...

I've had this pocket geiger counter for a while, and I have not used it much. I took it out recently to check its battery just in case. The unit is made to check for radioactivity in industrial or geo...

"Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation ...

When my kids were little they loved it when my wife and I read Pat the Bunny to them. The crudely drawn illustrations and pastel colors were half the charm of this book; the real fun was the interacti...

MP3 I joined host Madeleine Brand today on her eponymously-named radio program for a segment on two tech-related headlines of the week: first, the New York Times paywall, which went live earlier today...

[Video Link] Divvy doesn't do anything except let you resize OS X and Windows windows by snapping them to widely-spaced gridpoints. I watched the above video, and was interested enough to download the...

I had a fun time yesterday on episode #294 of Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech webcast, with fellow guests Baratunde Thurston of The Onion and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb. Topics included onli...

So many people have asked for it, so here it is: an MP3 of the MIDI mix of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" as used in our "Game Deaths" montage of classic arcade death sequences: Download/MP3 file link.....

Laughing Squid blog has photos from the South Park 15th Anniversary tribute art show going on in New York City at Opera Gallery. The show opens today and continues through April 10th.......

On Friday, March 11, 2011, 66% of news links on Twitter were about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journa...

Paul Baran, whose co-invention of packet switching lies at the very foundation of the Internet, has died. He was 84. Baran spent the 1960s at RAND's computer science department where he focused on dev...

Boing Boing pal Syd Garon points us to a wacky piece of arcade-themed art by Hunter Jonakin called "Jeff Koons Must Die." "It's a 80's style video cabinet with a first-person-shooter game he created, ...

Some artists and fashion designers in Paris put together a "haute nuke couture" conceptual video, inspired by... Fukushima. One of many to come, I'm sure. (thanks, Susannah Breslin)......

The latest from Japan: 11,004 are confirmed dead, and 17,339 are missing after the March 11 quake and tsunami. Updates from the weekend's developments in the nuclear crisis: Water in a trench outside ...

Time "picks the 140 Twitter feeds that are shaping the conversation," and this @boingboing editor is among them—not that a happy mutant stands a chance against Palin, Bieber, or Lord Voldemort, ...

From ONI: "The recent political unrest in the Middle East and North Africa has thrown into focus the information shaping, events-based blocking, and counter-control activities undertaken by government...

Catherynne M Valente's Deathless is a beautiful Russian fairy-tale set in the Stalinist era, brilliantly conceived and executed. Masha is the youngest of four sisters in Petrograd and, over the years,...

Roy Trumbull has recovered some rare Yippee! movement footage: "In the wake of the demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the city produced a white wash entitled 'What Trees...

Christopher Priest's obit for much-loved fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones in today's Guardian is a lovely and loving look at a wonderful person who will be much missed: Like many good writers, Diana W...

I received some random chemistry-industry PR, and spotted therein this unusually-named chromatography company and its contemplative technical director. What could he be thinking about? Heather sug...

We all know that Nintendo, family-friendly videogame industry titan, started out making playing cards. Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft looks into the details and finds a company that once served gangsters and...

Jason Wishnow, TED film director, helped create this PSA for Maitri, the AIDS hospice where Lisa Katayama volunteers and where Vinny, the subject of a feature here at BB by Lisa, died last year. Adds ...

The photo sharing/social network app Color launched last week, and much fuss was made for a variety of reasons: massive media hype, massive funding, and a complete lack of documentation about how peop...

This dip coating is awesome. I wanted to label a couple of tarps so I would know what was underneath them. I couldn't seem to find anything that would hold up. Everything I tried would peel and flake ...

Forget what you've seen on the BBC and Sky about yesterday's protest/"riot" in Trafalgar Square; the New Statesman's Laurie Penny was on the barricades (and apparently, there was a moment when the ba...

DMZ: MIA is the ninth collection of Brian Wood's spectacular (anti-)war comic set in a Manhattan ravaged by an American civil war that is fuelled by scumbag profiteer military contractors, sensationa...

iZombie: Dead to the World is the first collection of Chris Roberson and Michael Allred's smart, sassy supernatural thriller comic about a crime-solving zombie gravedigger and her cadre of supernatur...

He made it to 2,747 last year!......

Photo: A handout photo from Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency shows Tokyo Electric Power Co. workers refueling a portable power generator at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Tom...

[Video Link, and related Wikipedia entry.] (via Mikael Jorgensen)......

"A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli Saturday morning and fought off security forces as she told journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of the Q...

"A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli Saturday morning and fought off security forces as she told journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of the Q...

Japan's nuclear safety agency, NISA, says tests on Friday reveal that radioactive iodine levels have spiked 1,250 times higher than normal in sea water just offshore from the damaged Fukushima nuclear...

"A Libyan woman burst into the hotel housing the foreign press in Tripoli Saturday morning and fought off security forces as she told journalists that she had been raped and beaten by members of the Q...

Brook Jordan sends word of a fascinating Android app called Privacy Blocker: Basically what the app does is scans all the applications you have installed. It identifies what data the apps are request...

Designer Baiyang made this funny (albeit impractical) and lovely cocktail ring out of sterling silver and polystyrene. My Treasured Trash II (via Super Punch)  Lego wedding ring - Boing Boing DC...

For reasons unknown, Microsoft has changed the settings on Hotmail to disable HTTPS for users in several countries including Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Congo, Mya...

[Video Link] I predicted this. But I was joking. In the clip above: Nancy Grace, my absolute favorite television personality, goes to war with a CNN weatherman over fears that radiation leaked at Fuk...

This site allows you to track price history and has price drop and price watch alerts. Ever since I discovered it a few weeks ago, I've looked at it before I bought anything on Amazon just to make sur...

The traffic in dead babies is booming: daguerreotypes of dead babies, ambrotypes of dead babies, tintypes of dead babies, cartes de visite of dead babies, cabinet cards of dead babies; dead babies fro...

Homophobic (or at least stridently heteronormative) fans of Bioware's Dragon Age II are upset at the game's omnisexual characters, which offer players romantic dalliances regardless of their avatars' ...

Illustration for WIRED by Goi Montes Noah Shachtman has an epic, 11,000 word piece in the current issue of Wired Magazine on the biggest case in FBI history. It's a long read, but an amazing one. Here...

Pet wolves are coming to Minecraft. Extremely cute.......

[video link] Friday Freak-Out: The Golden Dawn's "Evolution," from their 1968 album Power Plant.......

(Via QBN)......

Santee Cooper is selling the design and major components for a 600-megawatt coal-fired power plant. The plant was slated for Kingsburg, South Carolina but was cancelled. I heard about this primo inves...

[Video link. Music is a cover of Mad World, by Tears for Fears. You can buy the original here.]......

[video link] This prototype clock, designed by James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau, is powered by dead flies. A conveyor of fly paper catches the insects and then drops them into a microbial fuel cell where...

On Copyfight, Alan Wexelblat picks apart the widely reported story that P2P music sharing dropped 30 percent when Limewire shut down -- pointing out that the drop began two years ago, and Limewire on...

Voidmstr sez, "I cut this clip from an old PD documentary I found on archive.org, a film made by the Los Angeles Fire Department in 1949. The announcer wants people to literally dial 1-1-6 to report a...

Click for larger photo. Japan Self Defense Force members in protective clothing prepare to transfer to another hospital workers who were exposed to radiation at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima Da...

This 1961 fashion shoot from Disneyland, "Storybook Fashions," ran as an insert to the April 9, 1961 issue of Midwest Magazine distributed in the Chicago Sun-Times. It features some extremely snazzy d...

This New York Times primer on DIY food projects will show you how to make your own butter, cheese, corn muffin mix, fancy mustard, and more!......

Officials in Japan just released new data on radiation levels in a town about 30 kilometers northwest of the badly damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant: "If you were outside with no protection, you w...

Ian Murphy, the Beast editor who called up Wisconsin governor Scott Walker pretending to be a Koch brother, is now running as an Green party candidate in a conservative, rural New York district and h...

William Cronon is a historian at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison. His work has recently led him into an inquiry into the shift in Republican policy in his state, and he published some prelimin...

There's a new science blog that I'm rather excited about. It's written by scientists, and aimed directly at answering questions, and countering misinformation, that arise from the way science is repor...

At Nature blogs, Declan Butler has put together a really info-dense mapping of the world's nuclear power plants, using Google Earth. Nifty stuff for anybody whose interest in nuclear power has gone u...

After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, a Florida nuclear power plant lost external power for five days. Luckily, in that case, the backup diesel generators were still operational.......

Saber teeth—the dangerous, vicious-looking cousin of buck teeth—are a pretty rare feature to find in animals. Mostly, the teeth are associated with several species of extinct cats. All of...

According to some of the twitterers, there is something erotic about this parnsip. I can't see it, though. (Image: Phallic Parsnip3311, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from fireflies604's p...

Gene Luen Yang (author of the brilliant graphic novel American Born Chinese") returns to long-form work with Level Up, illustrated by Thien Pham. Level Up is the story of Dennis Ouyang, a Chinese kid...

The Manifesto Manifesto is a recipe for writing manifesti. I tried to follow it for "bananas," but it just didn't sing. Can you do better? THE MANIFESTO MANIFESTO (via Futurismic)  Cult of D...

Public Knowledge -- whose white paper on the law and 3D printing is required reading -- is throwing a conference in DC for wonks, policymakers, regulators, staffers and all manner of Hill rat. The ev...

In this 1944 ad for Lifebuoy soap, an unhappy gal working as a Rosie the Riveter on the war effort can't figure out why her husband doesn't want to go out to the movies with her anymore. She's rescue...

In this video from OSCON Ignite, Evan "rabble" Hanshaw-Plath gives a five-minute primer on gaming frequent flier programs to get free flights, perks and bonuses. I actually met Evan on an airplane --...

Craig Ventner created an artificial lifeform, and in order to tag it, he encoded some literary quotes in its DNA -- a misquotation (as it turns out) of Feynman, and a line from James Joyce. Now he's ...

[Video Link] On PBS NewsHour, Miles O'Brien reports on new questions around the future of nuclear development and nuclear energy policy in the US, as Japan continues struggling to get the badly damage...

If you ask me, Sam's Club found the old copywriter for the Johnson Smith Catalog and hired him/her to write the description: A life-like, full-size menacing predator, the 3-D coyote decoy rids an area...

I've just finished reading The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick's tour-de-force history of information theory. I read Freeman Dyson's early review of The Information with inter...

We've linked many times to the Everyday Carry (EDC) blog, essentially an annotated photogallery of the gadgetry that folks carry with them. Every day. I do enjoy the site but some of the images remind...

Craig Venter created an artificial lifeform, and in order to tag it, he encoded some literary quotes in its DNA -- a misquotation (as it turns out) of Feynman, and a line from James Joyce. Now he's a...

I just saw this magnificent photograph hanging at Sausalito's Cavallo Point Lodge. It's a piece from Canadian artist Gregory Colbert's Ashes and Snow collection of photographs, films, and novel consis...

This amazing job-posting from the Sarasota Herald-Tribune advertises for a journalist who's willing to make trouble, go crazy, chase the story, and fight the good fight -- in Florida! We do a mix of ...

Dorothy Young, the most long-lived of Harry Houdini's assistants, died on Sunday at 103. As a teenager, Young worked with Houdini from 1925 to 1926. Young went on to dance on Broadway, studied paintin...

[video link] Hunter S. Thompson interviews Keith Richards in 1993. Do you speak mumble? Part 2 after the jump. (via Dose Nation)......

Machine Project in Los Angeles is hosting a lecture and book launch event with author Joshua Foer on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 8pm. It sounds great! On average, people squander 40 days annually comp...

BB pal Douglas Rushkoff has launched a new one-day conference to explore alternatives futures of social media outside the context of marketing and what he sees as the overwhelming corporate influence ...

Lee Price creates photorealistic oil paintings that are mostly self-portraits of herself, binging on junk food. In the new print issue of Bust magazine, Price talks about how her work explores body im...

Maker Shed (the kit and project store owned by the publisher of Make magazine) has recently introduced its Mintronics kit, a $20 electronics prototyping platform that fits in a mint tin. The Mintronic...

It's one of those ideas that sounds less nuts the more you think about it: "The Wire" imagined as a 19th-century serialized novel. After all, David Simon's great multi-season drama had all the muckrak...

Here's Stewart Brand's recap of science author Matt Ridley's (The Rational Optimist, Genome, The Red Queen) talk at the Long Now's Seminar About Long-term Thinking in San Francisco on Tuesday. Hominid...

Last week, Ann Coulter told America that exposure to low levels of radiation might actually be a good thing. And most of America went, "What?" But, while Coulter seems to have overstated the case...

[The below is from Tim Hardy, an activist and writer from London interested in the role of technology in driving social and political change, editor ofBeyond Clicktivism and member ofSukey.] This Satu...

There's a new peer-reviewed research paper out this week that purports to show a link between an animal's levels of serotonin—a brain chemical probably best known for its association with happy...

All National Geographic photographer Mark Moffett wanted to do was travel peacefully to Colombia and photograph the world's most poisonous frog. Instead, he ended up on a road trip through the rain fo...

Reminder: I'm in LA this weekend and the nice folks at Dark Delicacies in Burbank (3512 W. Magnolia, 91505) were kind enough to host a signing and reading for me on Sunday, March 27th at 2PM. (I'll al...

I'm coming to Southern California next week and I'll be speaking at Claremont McKenna College's Atheneum series. It's next Wednesday, 30 March, at 1845h, and it's free and open to the public. I'll be...

Here's an interesting price-comparison between the forthcoming NYT paywall and other subscription services from the Economist to Dropbox. The NYT offering (in its most expensive guise) is extremely e...

Adina Goldman's analysis of Rebecca Black's popularity, the lameness of the parodies and mashups it's engendered, and her own relationship to the vision in Black's video is revelatory and incisive, a...

A cafe in Nunawading, Australia is being forced to stop toddlers from drawing with chalk on its sidewalk, despite the fact that the kids, the cafe, the townspeople and the mayor all like the drawings...

Electronic Frontier Foundation staff technologist Peter Eckersley has a good, in-depth analysis of the revelation that Iranian hackers acquired fraudulent SSL certificates for Google, Yahoo, Mozilla a...

Instructables user BrittLiv has a fairly intense HOWTO for making a pixelated home trash can made from hand-painted woodblocks and plywood. It's a lot of work, but you can't argue with the results! P...

Dark Roasted Blend's gallery of "Radical Screw-propelled Vehicles" is a tour through the screw-tipped evolutionary dead-end of vehicle design. Screw-propelled vehicle makers have played in the snow a...

Scott Bedford bent and twisted a fork to make a snaggletoothed egg-cup. I have a friend who has a mild phobia of bent fork-tines, this would drive him crazy (and I have to admit, there is something s...

The confusion surrounding this latest Gulf spill points up a fatal flaw of America's oil pollution reporting system, which operates via a virtual honor code. Under present reporting protocols, pollute...

On PBS NewsHour, Miles O'Brien reports on new questions around the future of nuclear development and nuclear energy policy in the US, as Japan continues struggling to get the badly damaged Fukushima p...

Frustratingly, just as things were starting to look like they might be getting a bit more under control, another couple of problems have arisen at the beleaguered Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Chief ...

Why didn't the United States Institute of Medicine take into account Vitamin D's cancer-preventing powers when they wrote up their latest nutrition recommendations? Because those powers haven't re...

Scroll through this set of black and white photos and you will find that our Great-Grandparents' generation was perfectly capable of letting their freak flags fly when they wanted. It starts off slow,...

If you live around Columbus, OH, I'll be giving the keynote talk at Digital Media in a Social World at 9am on April 1. Admission is free. Details here. Later that day, I'll show 15 people how to make ...

Photo by Nathan Jongewaard. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. (Read my earlier post about the game Carcassonne, and my dislike of most boardgames.) The board game Settlers of Catan has...

What are described as "the first photos of the Fukushima Fifty," the TEPCO nuclear plant workers who stayed behind to Fix This Shit Before Shit Gets Even More Catastrophically Real, have been publishe...

Just noticed this powerful advertisement from the Topsy Foundation. It was one of the winners at TED's "Ad's Worth Spreading" contest, which is generally worth checking out. This particular video does...

Norwegian landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd spent one week around Kirkenes and the Norway-Russia border, in -25 Celsius temperature, to make this magnificent time-lapse video of the Aurora Boreali...

People who enjoy drinking and driving probably don't have much time to download PhantomALERT from the iTunes App Store, because a group of US senators have complained to Apple about apps that alert dr...

Greg Long of GAMA-GO writes: It's been a long and wrenching 10 days watching the catastrophes unfold in Japan. We wanted to do something to quickly and directly support the people affected by these di...

It's hard to to top the phrase "pole dancing for Jesus" -- I dare you to even try -- because it satisfies so many absolutely awful contemporary needs in just four words. It's the perfect bogus local-n...

[Video Link] Ayahiko Sato, a member of visual design unit in Japan called Rakudasan wrote to me about this cool music video they directed for a 16-piece band called Gaka. The song is called Tsuchinoko...

A little trademark thought-experiment: under a proposed UN treaty, Internet Service Providers (as well as search engines, social media sites, online auctions, online games, and sites like Etsy and Thi...

FreeNYTimes writes, "The twitter account I set up to broadcast data from the NY Times API, @freeNYTimes, was recently suspended, ostensibly for trademark infringement. But I set up a mirror at @freeU...

[Video Link] If someone moved my potato I'd be mad, too. (Via Arbroath)......

An interesting item about the flavor of pet, vermin, and work animal meat, courtesy of Futility Closet. During the German siege of Paris in 1870, residents had to eat whatever animals were at hand. Da...

Scientific American has a neat slide show showcasing the work of some historic Muslim scientists whose names deserve to be better known. Among them: Abu al-Iz Ibn Ismail ibn al-Razaz al-Jazari, who li...

Research from the University of Wisconsin""Madison points to progress in creating hybrid computer chips combining silicon and neurons. Biomedical engineers demonstrated a novel technique for...

A miner climbs on excavated rocks after a giant drill machine broke through at the final section Sedrun-Faido, at the construction site of the NEAT Gotthard Base Tunnel March 23, 2011. Crossing the Al...

In June of 1832, the 57 Irish migrant workers arrived at the docks of Philadelphia. Their job was to lance a flat path for the track through steep, hilly terrain. In railroad parlance, this is known a...

Spacehack is a clearinghouse for space geeks who want to participate in offworld exploration but may not have a science background and probably can't afford a ticket to orbit. Yet. Space.com interview...

"Mikas," a photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Boing Boing reader Jani.......

...

Amnesty International has issued a report condemning the sexual abuse of female demonstrators and reporters who were present at anti-government protests. Army officers detained the women, beat them wi...

Are the design flaws and technology problems that led to the crisis at Fukushima a necessary evil inherent in nuclear power? Not really, says Alexis Madrigal, writing for The Atlantic. There's de...

Sculptor Randy Regier, who makes toys limited to one unit, made a flying model kit of the "Fisher Fire Fly" spaceship. In a continuing effort to explore the potential and parameters of my American Dre...

This chart released online by the government of Japan plots levels of radioactivity measured in drinking water in various cities. Also new, this data about radioactivity levels around the Fukushima nu...

Today in 1839, the expression "OK" was first used in print. It appeared in Boston Morning Post article about the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society. From Smithsonian (image: OK Krew 509): Ever since, scholars ...

Another quip-for-the-ages from Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez: "I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, ...

Fact: Some piranha are vegetarian. (OK, they're not piranha, exactly. But they are very close relatives.)......

On Ars Technica, Timothy Lee has some excellent legal analysis of the Google Books settlement, which was just rejected by a US federal judge. Under the terms of the settlement, Google would get permi...

The Technology Studio connected a Kinect sensor/camera to a Pufferfish round video screen and created their own animated Eye of Sauron that follows you around the room. Kinect & Pufferfish Eye of Sau...

[Video Link] Here's the trailer for a funny parody book by Ross MacDonald and James Victore called In and Out with Dick and Jane. The illustrations are excellent. In and Out with Dick and Jane: A Lovi...

AT&T is to buy T-Mobile USA. Both GSM networks, the hoped-for result will be better coverage, though yeah, right, whatever. But it'll take a while. And that's assuming regulators don't nix the deal......

French campaigning politicians from Nikolas Sarkozy's UMP party are leaving the party logo off their campaign materials and begging party leaders not to campaign on their behalf. They're hoping that v...

John Scalzi's Epublishing Bingo card captures nearly every tedious talking point from nearly every side of the epublishing debate. The Electronic Publishing Bingo Card......

Here's a sneak peek at the new interactive queue area for the Haunted Mansion at Walt Disney World; it's the latest elaborate playground to be incorporated into the wait area for a major ride (Winnie...

From the Guardian, directions for making a shooter's sandwich -- a sandwich made by hollowing out a round loaf, filling it with two steaks and some cooked mushrooms, wrapping and tying it, and then co...

Mike Glicksohn, a lifelong prominent science fiction fan, has died from cancer. He was 64, and is survived by his wife, Susan Manchester. I can't count the number of times I've run into Mike at a con ...

BB Submitterator idontlikewords mentioned the youarelistening.to websites last week, a soothing mix of police radio chatter and ambient music. Choose from Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago...

[click chart to embiggen] There has been much talk of radiation exposure levels in the news, and here on Boing Boing, this past week. But it can be hard to wrap your head around what those measuremen...

Just snapped it out back. If you can see eastward tonight, go look!......

One issue that has emerged during the nuclear crisis in Japan is that there isn't always a reliable source for radiation levels from specific areas. RDTN.org has just launched, an experiment to help a...

...It would be a lot like the Matt Mulholland version of the execrable "Friday." Whenever that song goes back in my head, Matt's version pulls me back from the brink of insanity. Thank you Matt, for p...

Click to play [Video Link] - I've just stumbled across the pilot episode of The Silver Lake Badminton And Adventurers Club. I found it very amusing, and not just because I live in Silver Lake (a neigh...

You might know Joshua Allen from the Twitter, where he posts hilariously (and not often enough) under the handle Fireland. Allen is one of the three or four people who make it seem possible that Twitt...

Watch live streaming video from libya17feb at livestream.com Via LibyaFeb17.com and via the Twitter updates from NPR's Andy Carvin, terrible news that the brave citizen journalist Mohammed Al-Nabbous,...

PHOTO: An employee of Yamagata city office holds a Geiger counter to detect radiation when evacuees from the vicinity of Fukushima nuclear plant wish to be screened upon their arrival at an evacuation...

[ UPDATE: Joi Ito has been blogging about lies, corruption, and safety breaches with TEPCO for nearly ten years. Links to a couple of his 2002-2003 TEPCO posts at the bottom of this Boing Boing item.-...

A fire truck sprays water at No. 3 reactor of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Tomioka, Fukushima prefecture in this still image taken from a video by the Self Defense Force Nuclear Biolog...

Al Jazeera reports that rebels in Free Benghazi are coming heavy fire from Gadaffi's military and its mercenaries: "The international community is late in intervening to save civilians from Gaddafi's ...

A new radio spot paid for by the Koch brothers extols the spirit of cooperation that led unionized workers at Harley-Davidson to take a pay cut for the good of the company. What it doesn't mention is ...

Slate's Tom Scocca reminds us that the west's willingness to rescue pro-democracy protesters from brutal, murderous middle-eastern despots is highly selective. If you're rebelling against a dictator ...

DC Comics apparently shut down commenting on its blog The Source after things got ugly in a thread about an eternal question: Who runs faster, Superman or The Flash? "DC's Blog Closes Comments, Gi...

A Brief History of Title Design from Ian Albinson on Vimeo. Last year, Pesco mentioned the new SXSW Title Design Competition. Ian Albinson's presentation video for this year's SXSW "Excellence in Titl...

In Japan today, some of the flowering cherry trees are blooming early. Photo courtesy Matt Alt, taken in Tokyo.......

NPR reporters spent some time looking at the radiation level readings near the crisis-stricken Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Their determination? "The first radiation measurements from within ...

Rock Paper Shotgun talked to Jason Rohrer about Chain World, his USB-stored Minecraft saved game. Set up to be passed from player to player, each permitted just one life, Chain World explores the hint...

Japan's nuclear safety agency (NISA) today raised the level of the crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant from level 4 (local consequences) to level 5 (wider consequences, same level as Three Mile Isla...

Need to get into a laptop or cellphone? Ryan O'Horo describes how to open snapped-shut plastic enclosures using a credit card. The best part is that you have to cut up the credit card. [CraveDIY v...

Former Goldman Sachs computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov was convicted last December of stealing the confidential source code for the firm's high-speed trading system. Prosecutors have since been deb...

ICANN's Board of Directors today gave the organization's CEO permission to execute a proposed registry agreement for the .xxx sponsored top-level-domain with ICM Registry. Now, more than ever, the int...

Why do the British live longer than Americans? [Time]......

As soon as I saw that Wired had put excellent lady engineer Limor Fried on the cover, my first thought was Yes! Finally! My second thought was "Angry people will find something to be angry about here!...

Last night, Xeni posted a link to this chart, showing radiation readings taken in all of Japan's different prefectures, except for Fukushima. I thought it might be useful to put this chart in context...

[video link] Friday Freak-Out: Julie Driscoll with Brian Auger & The Trinity doing a swinging cover of Donovan's "Season of the Witch," 1968. Available on the greatest hits compilation "Kind of Love i...

From a 1968 issue of Flying Saucer Review is this HOWTO on building your own Electronic UFO Detector. It's actually an electronic magnetic field alarm, so even if you're skeptical about UFOs, this dev...

Cartoonist and illustrator Adrian Tomine (author of the terrific little book Scenes From an Impending Marriage) was recently interviewed on the Bat Segundo show. (I love this cover Adrian drew for Th...

On March 19th, a full Moon of "rare size and beauty" will rise in the east at sunset. The super "perigee moon" will be the biggest in nearly two decades. (NASA)......

Photo above, by Max Hodges (blog, Twitter): Japanese Self-Defense Forces delivering supplies to an elementary school converted into a shelter in Ishinomaki, after the earthquake and tsunami. Below, a ...

Yemeni security forces and plainclothes snipers on rooftops shot dead up to 42 protesters at an anti-government rally in Sanaa after Muslim prayers on Friday. President Ali Abdullah Saleh has since de...

A remote-controlled disaster monitoring robot has reportedly been dispatched to Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, to measure radiation levels within a site now so contaminated, it is unsafe for...

The moon has its own time zone—and 9 other things you didn't know about our nearest neighbor in space. (Via Jeremy Hsu)......

"The out-of-control status of the 6 Fukushima nuclear reactors and their stored spent fuel rods is a textbook example of 'Don't Know Squared - It's What You Don't Know You Don't Know' that can bring d...

Science journalist Charles Q. Choi is still in Chernobyl, where he's traveling as a tourist alongside health physicist Vadim Chumak, of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine's Research Center fo...

Managing Director Akio Komori of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company that manages the more or less totally Fuk-ed Fukushima nuclear plant in northern japan, wept as he left a press confe...

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima nuclear power plant at the center of a nuclear crisis since last week's earthquake and tsunami, just announced it has connected an extern...

In this transcript from an Ohio Supreme Court Case, a Cuyahoga County office worker refuses to answer a simple question: "has the Recorder's office had photocopying machines?" The worker mainains ...

Managing Director Akio Komori of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company that manages the more or less totally Fuk-ed Fukushima nuclear plant in northern japan, wept as he left a press confe...

Managing Director Akio Komiri of Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the company that manages the more or less totally Fuk-ed Fukushima nuclear plant in northern japan, wept as he left a press confe...

It doesn't have an earthquake scenario. Anyone know of a simulator game that does? Nuclear power plant simulator game......

Tomorrow morning, I'll be back on Bloggingheads—the video chat that pairs two science bloggers, and lets you in on their conversation. I'll be talking about the Japanese nuclear crisis. If you'v...

While looking for an external set of speakers for my iPad, I rediscovered my Tecsun Pl-390 portable radio. Most of the external speakers I had seen were either without power of their own, or they ate ...

From The Atlantic's archives, a harrowing 1961 account of a Soviet surgeon on a primitive Antarctic base who had to remove his own appendix, stopping frequently as he battled vertigo and blood loss: ...

This concept design for a Cheshire Cat pocket watch tells the time by the disappearing bits of the mad kitty. The hours are affixed around the outside of the case in normal clockwise fashion. The cat ...

Comics writer Dwayne McDuffie describes the ridiculous criticism he faced when he took over Justice League and fanboys reacted to the presence of a black writer on their beloved comic. Dwayne McDuffie...

The Facerocker people animated this insane short film illustrating what Super Mario would look like if it were a first-person shooter. First Person Mario (via Super Punch)  Stop-motion Super Mar...

The UN Security Council has approved air strikes against Gadaffi loyalist forces and the Gadaffi mercenary army as they advance on "Free Benghazi," the Libyan rebel stronghold. In response, Gadaffi t...

The Guardian has a great profile of Tim "Master Switch" Wu, the activist scholar who coined the term "Net Neutrality." Tim's a respected authority on the history of media regulation and consolidation...

An update on the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan, damaged after a massive earthquake and tsunami hit, and now leaking radiation with no power and no clear way to cool do...

The US Navy has published a set of photos related to the "Operation Tomodachi" disaster relief mission in quake- and tsunami-stricken Japan. About the photo above, by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd...

From the Your Tax Dollars at Work file, news that the US military's Central Command (CENTCOM) has awarded a $2.7 million contract to Ntrepid, a newly-formed Los Angeles-based startup, to create fake o...

(screengrabs from NHK, courtesy IZ RELOADED) During a live broadcast yesterday, the Japanese television network NHK unveiled a hand-crafted scale model of the damaged Fukishima Daiichi nuclear plant. ...

In the past couple of days, as many of us around the world began thinking seriously about the fallout from the damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima, Japan, I've gotten lots of questions about potass...

From the Your Tax Dollars at Work file, news that the US military's Central Command (CENTCOM) has awarded a $2.7 million contract to Ntrepid, a newly-formed Los Angeles-based startup, to create fake o...

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the Japanese owner of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant, falsified safety data and "dishonestly" tried to cover up problems there, according to reports based o...

In 2005, our friends at surrealist clothier and thinktank Imaginary Foundation created the design above left, "Music is a Force of Nature." Recently, IF designer Nick Philip spotted the, er, similar g...

[YouTube link, and here's a downloadable MP4] In case you're not hip to The Decemberists, they're a fantastic indie/folk/rock outfit from Portland, Oregon who took 15 years to become an overnight succ...

Strange times. The office of the Prime Minister of Japan has issued an update to the country's Food Sanitation Act, in light of the "nuclear state of emergency" declared after the accident at TEPCO's ...

"The House of Representatives approved a measure Thursday to bar federal funding of National Public Radio. The bill also prohibits public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to N...

[Video Link]. The title, from Japanese: "Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station from the air." Shot after multiple explosions damaged multiple structures at the site.......

Photo: Anti-government protesters' reflections are seen on a car that was hit by bullets during an operation by Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) military forces to remove protesters from Pearl Square in...

Several years ago, Cory posted about tentacle chandelier artist Adam Wallacavage. This master of wunderkammer fixtures has continued to hone his vision and craft leading to work like the piece above l...

HEX's new iPod nano watch bands are "designed specifically for women." HEX Unveils Slim Watch Band for iPod nano Gen 6 Designed Specifically for Women [Max Borges]......

This table links radiation dose to radiation risk in a way that's a bit more clear. It was put together for BoingBoing by Kelly Classic, public outreach coordinator for The Health Physics Society, an...

The Coava Disk is a perforated steel plate designed to replace the paper filters in your Aeropress. It's $15, lasts indefinitely, and the reviews are good. [Coava via Wired]......

The hexayurt is an update on Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome and is a sturdy, affordable, easy-to-build temporary shelter. The geometry has been adjusted slightly to make it easier to build domes f...

The Fukushima nuclear crisis, explained for youngsters. [Kazuhiko Hachiya via Laughing Squid]......

S.J. Culver writes: "I got a rejection note for a short story I had sent out to a magazine 838 days previously. ... while that magazine was considering whether to publish my 16-page story: I grew my h...

Today, Reuters asked the questions we've all been thinking. Namely, "This is Japan, right? They've got lots of robots, right? So why aren't there robots helping out at Fukushima?" The ans...

Researchers have fired up an 1895 x-ray machine to compare its images to that of a modern system. A physician from Maastricht University Medical Center in the Netherlands dusted off the antique machin...

The New York Times just announced a new paywall that will let you see 20 articles a month and thereafter redirect you to a signup for paid access. However, if you follow a NYT link from some search en...

Todd Lappin says: "Do they have robotic fire trucks like these at Fukushima? Let's hope so." If they don't, they should launch a Kickstarter campaign to buy a few dozen. I'd contribute! Let's Hope...

Who are you? I'm your f'ing muse, you little polyp. [Oglaf. NSFW]......

There's no doubt that Nursery Rhymes is a beautiful iOS application, but the promotional video, which showcases its remote reading feature, is very sad. Nursery Rhymes for iPad......

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour. On Monday, PBS Newshour had a special report on the Fukushima nuclear crisis with Miles O'Brien and David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiologic...

Wah wah, call the wahmbulance! "Cry Baby: The Pedal that Rocks the World" is a documentary about the history of this iconic guitar effects pedal, beginning with its invention in 1966. (Thanks, Jeff Cr...

Hart Main, age 13, of Marysville, Ohio has launched a new company to sell "Mancans," candles scented with what he considers manly odors like pizza, sawdust, bacon, and baseball mitts. From the AP: ......

Frank Munger at the Knoxville News Sentinel is a reporter whose entire beat is devoted to the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That means Munger spends a lot of his time reporting...

Caribou is an Android app that demonstrates the terrible security in popular card-key entry systems. It can brute-force these systems with just the IP address of their server: By providing Caribou on...

MJ Locke's Up Against It is the cracking first volume of WAVE, a space-opera series that manages to be both original -- full of smart new ways of looking at science fiction ideas -- and old fashioned...

Dino D-Day is a forthcoming video game set in an alternate reality where Nazis team up with dinosaurs to fight WWII. The collateral for the game -- propaganda posters, newspapers, newsreels -- is rea...

Brian Krebs reports on the takedown of the command-and-control servers for Rustock, the largest and most successful spam botnet. The botnet's output has fallen from thousands of spams per second to o...

The government of Japan has asked Seoul for 52.6 tons of boric acid to try and keep the damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station cool. Boric acid lowers the temperatures of the ...

The Japan news network NHK, quoting government figures, just reported that 13,400 people are believed to be dead or missing after the catastrophic quake and tsunami struck one week ago. As of today, 4...

Spike Priggen of Bedazzled has uploaded a bunch of formerly-rare music videos from the 1960s from French TV, including The Who, Marianne Faithfull, The Bee-Gees (pre-disco), and The Four Tops, The Ele...

(Image, from NHK TV: A Japan Self-Defense Force helicopter collects seawater from Japan's northeast coast, en route to aerial operations over the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.) About two hou...

(screengrab of NHK TV coverage of the third helicopter water drop in the current operation, around 10am local time in Japan.)Two helicopters, modified to help protect pilots from radiation, have just ...

One of my favorite illustrators, Barnaby Ward, found a cache of 1st edition copies of his dreamlike graphic novel, Sixteen Miles to Merricks, which sold out quickly (Used copies go for $90 and up on A...

Facebook's "verify your login" friend recognition test needs some work.......

I am a huge geek; my wife, however, is not. She, like Luke, could never be turned, so the responsibility for making sure our two little kids end up liking stuff like Star Wars, Tolkien, Final Fantasy...

(U.S. Geological Survey map based on 2008 data that shows earthquake damage risk in the United States. The highest risk areas are purple, red and orange.) MSNBC's Bill Dedman publishes a list that sho...

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu told Congress on Wednesday that the DoE is attempting to place radiation monitoring equipment in Japan. The detection system is part of the 17,200 pounds (7,800 kg) of...

For Hanukkah, my wife gave me a Billykirk Designs Large Carryall bag that resembles an old timey doctor's bag with the hinged closure mechanism. Made of durable waxed cotton with leather trim, it's my...

A growing number of news organizations and civil liberties groups are condemning the Department of Defense's "gratuitously harsh treatment" of Bradley Manning, a young Army intelligence specialist cha...

From the testimony of a female 25-year old Tahrir Square demonstrator in Egypt, who spent days in a military prison: "They spit on her. All of her belongings were stolen. She was given kerosene-soaked...

The New York Times reports that the chairman of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) "gave a significantly bleaker appraisal" of the danger posed by Japan's nuclear crisis than previo...

The New York Times has just announced that four of its journalists are missing in Libya. Among them: two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Shadid; Stephen Farrell, a reporter and videographer who was...

A fellow in Lynnwood, Washington torched his motel room because he was trying to protect "the good people" from Satan who apparently was bunking there too. Call me silly, but it seems to me that setti...

Watch live streaming video from boingboinglive at livestream.com If you missed our BoingBoing Live chat about the Japan nuclear crisis, radiation, and public health, you can now watch the archived vid...

Amy Ahlstrom creates striking quilts with urban themes, inspired by San Francisco, New York City, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Chicago. She's currently working on pieces informed by trips abroad to London, Paris...

A scholarly report funded by the Canadian government and the Ford Foundation investigates the alleged link between copyright infringement and terrorism and finds none. Basically, counterfeiters can't ...

Watch live streaming video from boingboinglive at livestream.com Later today, we're going to try out something a little different, and we'd like you to join us. Starting at 1:00 pm Eastern/ 12:00 pm C...

Dear Bill: You know that picture of the terrified giant panda clinging to a policeman's leg after the Japan earthquake? The one that, in the terrible early hours of this awful disaster, rocketed a...

[Video Link] From her Circus Freak show, Taimane Gardner plays Bach's Toccata on ukulele. Previously: Taimane plays Eleanor Rigby on ukulele......

[Video Link]MIT researcher Deb Roy's presentation was probably my favorite at TED2011. The highlight of his presentation was when he played an audio file of his son learning how to say "water" over th...

[Video Link] I wasn't expecting David Brooks' talk at TED2011, about the failures of politicians to make good policy decisions, to be as funny and insightful as it was. After all, as one commenter at ...

On the day that pro-union protestors were arrested and carried out of the capitol building, Tennessee Senate Speaker Ron Ramsey wants the world to know that his state is not Wisconsin. It's true: in T...

Killing Bill C-393, a law that would help provide generic drugs to developing countries that need them, would be a facepalm of the highest possible order....

Artists Joe Somers and Kirby Kerr are auctioning off three hand-painted vinyl lake-monster figurines (sculpted by Chris Ryniak) with proceeds to benefit people in Japan: Over the years we've had the ...

A bookmaker called Betfair has released a line of synthetic hoof-shoes as a charity fundraiser. They cost 1,300 a pair, and sport carbon fibre hooves with horsehair uppers. Louise Dainton, 25, from E...

I'm coming through Los Angeles later this month on the way to a meeting and a lecture, and the nice folks at Dark Delicacies in Burbank (3512 W. Magnolia, 91505) were kind enough to host a signing and...

Penguinsix sez, "The Tokyo Hackerspace is calling for help. They are planning to build 150 solar powered LED lanterns and are calling on hackerspace members from around the world to lend a hand, soon:...

Martin Backes's "Pixelhead" is a mask that looks like a pixellated face that's been through the automatic privacy feature in Google Streetview. It's pretty dazzle-paint-y and hard on the eyes. The fu...

Hoo-ah! Congrats to Limor "Lady Ada" Fried on gracing the cover of the next issue of Wired. A better choice you could not find! Hardware Hero  Open source hardware business booms: 13 companies m...

Artist Claire Watson's series of textile sculptures "Kid Gloves" is a delightful series of riffs on handwear. Kid Gloves  Freehands, gloves for cold weather gadget twiddling - Boing Boing Claw g...

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson summarizes the crazy House Judiciary Committee testimony of Daniel Castro from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation DC think tank. Castro was testifying o...

Etsy's CEO and COO have posted an update acknowledging some of the concerns of Etsy buyers and sellers who have discovered that changes to the site have exposed much about their buying and selling hi...

Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory writes about a new bill in New Jersey that would prevent minors who engage in "sexting" (taking naked pictures of themselves and sharing them with boy- and girlfriends) from...

Etsy seller FableAndFury (whose work I've featured before) is making lovely laser-cut black stainless steel silhouette cameos of Tom Waits. Tom Waits cameo necklace in black stainless steel - Rock an...

This 1943 advertisement for Bag Balm (still sold today as a top product for chapped hands and other parts) captures a moment in the product's history when, it seems, competitors had come into the mark...

As New York's health care system slashes spending by charging more to be unwell and providing fewer services to disabled people, one area of costs is off-limits: multimillion-dollar compensation for ...

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost's sweded reenactment of the droids-on-Tatooine scene from Star Wars is a naked attempt to create a viral ad for the...

Geek heroine Jeri Ellsworth put up a YouTube video explaining how she might build a $10 version of the $5000 audible turn warning system recently installed on Portland public busses. In the comments, ...

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, an academic report on pricing and copyright infringement in poor countries, comes to the conclusion that high media prices (as measured against the average wage in...

Killing Bill C-393, a law that would help provide generic drugs to developing countries that need them, would be a facepalm of the highest possible order....

Reuters: "Breaking news from NHK, quoting Tokyo Electric Power: Fire breaks out at Fukushima Daiichi No. 4 reactor." From NHK broadcast now: Fire detected on NE upper corner of the outer structure of ...

In the Guardian, a story on the 50 to 70 TEPCO employees, now known in English as the Fukushima 50, who are working to prevent full-scale nuclear disaster at the beleaguered power plant. Wearing prote...

[video link] Sound designer and composer Diego Stocco plays a tree as a beautifully rhythmic musical instrument, recording it using a custom stethoscope and other masterful techniques. From his descri...

NASA reports that the March 11, magnitude 9.0 earthquake in Japan may have shortened the length of each Earth day by about 1.8 microseconds and shifted its figure axis by about 17 centimeters . "But d...

Following Tuesday's explosion at the No. 4 reactor at a Fukushima nuclear power plant, two workers are missing, according to Japan's nuclear safety agency. In a press conference today, a spokesman als...

Screen capture from video of an explosion at the Fukushima Daichi plant in Japan (Reuters) In the New York Times today, Tom Zeller reports on warnings issued repeatedly as far back as 1972 on safety i...

From a TIME Magazine piece on post-trauma counseling for survivors in Japan: "Experience with past disasters suggest that some types of psychological first aid may help those who have lived through th...

Above, "Tokyo Geiger Counter," built with this DIY kit. The location is Tokyo/Kotoku. (thanks, Francesco Fondi) CNET: "The intensifying nuclear crisis in Japan is raising anxieties on both sides of th...

""The problem is very complicated, we do not have all the details of the information so what we can do is limited. Is it a crack? Is it a hole? Is it nothing? That we don't know yet. It is...

("hello-cthulu" from Sneakykitty) In the excellent Volume 5 of Darklore Volume 5 , Greg "Daily Grail" Taylor's fringe culture journal, Erik Davis contributes a fantastic study of our favorite hideous ...

Remember last year when someone dropped their baggie of blow in a space shuttle hangar at Kennedy Space Center? Happened again. From CNN: "Law enforcement personnel field tested the substance, whi...

When you prefer something more refined than a typical Unicorn Chaser, you might open a fine vintage of Charles Shaw with this elegant Screwnicorn Corkskrew. It's $10 from those crazy coots at Gama-Go....

I don't like playing board games. I used to like playing them (Chess, Risk, Scrabble, Monopoly, Tactics II) but for some reason I don't understand, I became bored with them in my early 20s. So I'm sur...

Several years ago at a St. Louis area Starbucks, Roger Kreutz, then 54, saw Aaron Poisson, then 19, snatch the tip jar from the counter and run off. Kreutz gave chase and as Poisson tried to getaway i...

There's a popular blog post making the rounds this week, written by an MIT scientist, called "Why I am not worried about Japan's nuclear reactors." I saw it over the weekend, and decided not to post ...

[video link] I really enjoyed the rhythmic weirdness of David Ellis's "True Value (Paint Fukette)," recently installed at Joshua Liner Gallery. Roberto Carlos Lange composed the percussive "score." Da...

This tiny sensor can be injected into the body during a biopsy to keep a constant vigil on tumor growth. Developed at MIT, the device is packed with magnetic nanoparticles and proteins that bind to pa...

Consumerist reader Justin sent a textbook he'd sold on eBay to a buyer two miles from his house in California; it took a little longer to arrive than he'd counted on. He discovered why when he looked...

M-Paisa (AKA M-Pesa) is an extremely successful and efficient scheme for managing micropayments and electronic banking using SMS. In more developed and stable places, the system uses ATMs as end-poin...

After his work in recent years designing the Jawbone Bluetooth Headset and the OLPC's XO "$100 laptop," celebrity designer Yves Bhar has branched out. First, there was the Form 2 sex toy and now he's ...

Over at Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men blog, named after his excellent book, he reads through this delightfully named 1950 report from the RAND Corporation: "The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purpos...

[Video Link] It's been over three years since I posted a video of Raquel Welch in a space girl outfit dancing in front of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics public sculpture project, so I think it's time f...

Back in December, LiveScience.com's Charles Choi wrote an article about tourism at the Chernobyl disaster site. Guess where he's reporting from this week? I drove to Chernobyl with health physicis...

Michael Levi, senior fellow on energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, offers a nice bit of advice for vetting the quality of talking heads called in to discuss the earthquake,...

If you're wanting to stay on top of the fast-moving story of the nuclear crisis in Japan, one good source: the IAEA's updates, on Facebook (the iaea.org website is intermittently overloaded). Today, u...

[video link] Over the weekend, I blogged a pointer to this video, which was shot by a local resident in a northern Japan town devastated by Friday's great quake and tsunami. The video has since gone v...

Noriyuki Shikata, Deputy Cabinet Secretary for Public Relations and Director of Global Communications at Prime Minister's Office of Japan, tweeted this morning that the Japanese Government is planning...

The drive to recall the Wisonsin senators who helped pass the bill that took away state workers' collective bargaining rights is going great guns: Dems have now collected over 56,000 signatures suppo...

Fantagraphics' collection Four Color Fear: Forgotten Horror Comics of the 1950s, edited by Greg Sadowski, is a wonderfully creepy hurtle through the exuberant, cheerfully gross and icky horror comics...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's work to use the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to detailed information about the way that the US government operates in the realm of privacy, due proces...

Edano before: Edano after. Image by shiba36ms Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano is the hardest working politician in the disaster business. Since the earthquake and tsunami hit the country o...

...

My latest Guardian column, "Beware the spyware model of technology - its flaws are built in," is a look at some of the coming battles over the general-purpose PC and the general-purpose network, and h...

The New Statesman's Laurie Penny has gotten into Saif Gadaffi's multi-million-pound mansion in London's tony Mayfair Hampstead, which has been squatted by Libyan exiles. She reports on life inside th...

Fraudster scumbags have beaten all records in setting up fake Japan relief pages, fielding more than 1.7 million malware pages, 419 scams trading on the Japanese disasters, 50+ fake domains with ...

Jeweller Yuma Fujimaki has many beautiful pieces for sale, but I'm especially taken by these rings made from circuit boards and RAM sticks that have been cut, polished and reformed into jewellery. Yu...

The Guardian's Rob Fitpatrick has a long, loving profile of the amazing Asha Bhosle, Bollywood's most famous singer, who has been making film soundtracks since she was 11 years old. Bhosle was immort...

A report from GDC describes the "Game Design Challenge 2011: Bigger than Jesus" winning entry, Chain World. The challenge had been to design a game that's also a religion, and so winning designer Jas...

Ionustron, a forum poster on Select Button, describes a lifelong practice of creating fantasy figurines out of twist-ties, including some really sweet moments of personal history, such as the discove...

Asahi reports that according to TEPCO, the operator of the troubled nuclear power plants in Japan, U.S. military personnel were involved in fighting the fire in Reactor Number 4 of the Fukushima Daiic...

The KatHack is a great little Javascript bookmarklet; simply paste the text below in your location bar and you can turn any page into a fabulous game of Katamari Damacy. I've been trying to get this ...

A recent, unannounced change to Etsy's privacy policy has created an avalanche of embarrassing disclosures for Etsy shoppers. Etsy hoped to make its service more Facebook-like and sociable, so it beg...

Bolefloor makes hardwood floors that eschew the wastefulness of straight lines. Instead, they use computerized analysis to calculate puzzle-fit lengths that follow the curves and irregularities of th...

Image (Reuters): Tokyo Electric Power officials hold an illustration of a nuclear plant as they answer reporters' questions at the disaster center in Fukushima, northern Japan March 15, 2011. A fresh ...

Marshall Brain is the founder of howstuffworks.com (which he sold to Discovery Networks in 2007 for $250 million). Brain records a daily podcast called BrainStuff, in which he explains how machines an...

So, I'm in process on putting together a post that will, hopefully, add some context to the concept of radiation exposure and relative risk. It's coming together slowly because (shocker) many of Ameri...

Image (Reuters): Tokyo Electric Power officials hold an illustration of a nuclear plant as they answer reporters' questions at the disaster center in Fukushima, northern Japan March 15, 2011. A fresh ...

(photo by Jason Hickey) A spokesman for Southern California Edison, the operator of the San Onofre nuclear power generating station (between LA and San Diego, the big white dome-shaped thing off I-5) ...

Marshall Brain is the founder of howstuffworks.com (which he sold to Discovery Networks in 2007 for $250 million). Brain records a daily podcast called BrainStuff, in which he explains how machines an...

CNET: "Rescue robots are making their way to parts of Japan affected by the massive earthquake and tsunamis that devastated coastal areas Friday and in the days following, leaving nearly 6,000 people ...

"Shoko Ono, the 23-year-old who took the $800 taxi ride from Tokyo, completes the last part of her journey to her parents' house on foot. The family dog welcomes her to a home largely undamaged by the...

IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano and various IAEA nuclear safety officers briefed media today on the current state of the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan. Audio and video are available here.......

A progesterone hormone injection, used to prevent preterm labor, used to be $10 a shot. Now that the FDA has assigned an exclusive right to create the easily-made formula to one company, KV Pharmaceut...

The excellent Charlie Brooker is going through all the standard stages of the Windows-to-Mac transition. First mocking them as toys, then not caring about their superiority, he ultimately embraced the...

[Video Link] Johnny Foreigner says: "No idea if this is for real - looks like a guy has created a video repeater that "somehow" manages to overwhelm the inputs of any screen in the vicinity. The demo ...

New York Times: "The risk of a meltdown spread to a third reactor at a stricken nuclear power plant in Japan on Monday as its cooling systems failed, exposing its fuel rods, only hours after a second ...

Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters I've been reading about some pretty astounding impacts of last week's 8.9 earthquake. For instance, there's the fact that the quake not only shook Japan, it moved the country...

New Scientist has put together an extensive list of Pi Day-related events and features—including the Pi Phone, a number you can call to hear the digits of pi being read.......

In honor of Pi Day, here's my all-time favorite Pi joke (incidentally, this was also the first XKCD strip I ever saw!). Pi joke......

"4G" is meaningless. "4G" phones and modems offer less bandwidth than 3G ones, carriers are rebadging 3G gadgets as 4G ones, and even where it's available, speeds are throttled to the kilobit range. P...

She Creates Stuff has a great HOWTO that uses a spherical cake mold to make a ball-shaped, sealed pie-crust that you can stuff with your favorite jammy gooey goodness, and so celebrate the mysterious...

While I was writing the previous post, recommending World Nuclear News as a not-unbiased, but-at-least-well-organized source of information about what's happening at the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini po...

[Video Link] "The reason this topic has been so long in coming is because we've been waiting for the industry to provide us with a good topical example of a well-done female character. Unfortunately, ...

Breaking information about what is going on at the two Fukushima nuclear power plants—Daiichi (where most of the trouble is) and Daini—has often conflicted with other reports, points out C...

Yomiuri Yomiuri / Reuters There was another explosion at a Japanese nuclear power plant today. Same power plant, same cause, different reactor. (Also, same outcome: The outer layer of the buildings s...

A six-minute video of the Japan tsunami destroying a town in the northern part of the country. While I cannot yet confirm who shot the video, or the location shown, various observers have ID'd the sit...

TeamTeamUSA replicated the Josef Hartwig's Model I chess set (created in 1922 at Bauhaus Weimar) as a series of 3D models on Thingiverse, the community for freely reproducable 3D files. Thingiverse u...

Here's a heart-breaking saddening collection of photos showing earthquake and tsnuami damage to Japanese libraries, apparently uploaded by Japanese librarians and library workers.  2011 """"...

Here's video of Stephen King addressing a pro-labor, anti-Tea-Party rally in Sarasota, Florida, explaining why he supports redistributive taxation policy and unions, and opposes the anti-union laws be...

I love these zoological grotesque masks from the 16th century. They were designed by Cornelis Floris and engraved by Frans Huys. They were originally published in Antwerp in 1555 by Hans Liefrinck. Th...

Mid-March is generally a good time to get a deal on a calendar, and the Fold-Your-Own Zombie: 2011 Wall Calendar is a good candidate. 12 papercraft zombies, waiting for you to cut, glue and fold. Fol...

This undated two-page spread Perma-Lift Brassiere ad glorifies an "ideal" conical breast-shape that has long fallen by the wayside. OW! MY EYE!......

Saudi Arabia will split its security forces, lately much occupied with suppressing protest at home, and will send them to Bahrain to help put down the popular uprising there. Witnesses said security ...

Tesla 500 likes to blow up old microwaves so that he can harvest their transformers, gang them up and turn them into buzzing, instantaneously lethal apparati that burst into flames. He has put a lot ...

Book Scan Wizard -- software for scanning/OCR'ing books on a DIY book-scanner -- now has a way to automatically upload scanned public domain/Creative Commons books to the Internet Archive, where they ...

[Video Link] Above, video of the second explosion at Japan's Fukushima Daichi (No. 1) nuclear power plant since the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated the country. This apparent hydroge...

Augustus Owsley Stanley III, AKA the "Bear," died in a car crash in his adopted home of Queensland, Australia today. He was 76. Between 1965 and 1967, Stanley homebrewed more than one million doses of...

Discovery News reports that NASA has taken over Japan's portion of the International Space Station (ISS), and is managing the Japanese cargo ship docked at the orbital outpost, after Japan's Aerospace...

William Broad reports in the New York Times that crew members on the US aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, sailing in the Pacific, "passed through a radioactive cloud from stricken nuclear reactors in Ja...

Zick Rubin is a copyright/trademark lawyer who used to teach psychology. His work was notable enough to be cited in the The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology . Unfortunately, that book listed him as ha...

(IMAGE: Before and after shots of structures that house nuclear reactors at the Fukushima power plant in Japan, where an explosion occurred on Friday—blowing the roof off the building shown at ...

Security researches at UCSD and UWash have been looking at advanced ways of making mischief with computerized automotive systems, from messing with Bluetooth to inserting malware into the diagnostic ...

CNN reports that P.J. Crowley, State Department spokesperson, has left (or been sacked) just days after widely reported comments critical of the Defense Department's treatment of accused Wikileaks sou...

Here's a giant list of famous and accomplished people with philosophy degrees, just the thing to show the parental units when you choose your major. I want the comparable list of successful underwater...

Welcome to Daylight Savings Time (AKA the week when I screw up all my overseas phonecalls while I wait for the UK clocks to spring forward, too). As this poster attests, messing with the clocks has a...

If WI governor Scott Walker hoped that sneakily passing his union-busting bill would diffuse the energy of the protests that have rocked Madison, he was sadly mistaken. This weekend saw the biggest p...

Here's a demo of the Junkyard Jumbotron, created by Rick Borovoy at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. It's a cool app to allow you to gang up multiple screens (phones, tablets, flat panels), runnin...

A research team reports evidence of an ancient ringed city, 60 miles inland on the Spanish coast, which they hope is Atlantis. National Geographic screens a TV show about the research this evening.......

A blogger must pay $60,000 after reporting a link between a local community leader and mortgage fraud. From the Star Tribune: The jury awarded [Jerry] Moore $35,000 for lost wages and $25,000 for emot...

A brief history of civilizations that mysteriously vanished. [Flooby Nooby]......

James White made this poster, which you can buy at the Signalnoise store. All profits go to the relief effort.......

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a paramilitary Hindu nationalist group with 60 million members is eliminating its traditional leather belts and shoes and replacing them with synthetics, in a nod to Hindu...

Chickflix has posted an Instructable that pierces the veil of mystery and describes how to mix your own Pop Rocks at home. The secret ingredient turns out to be pretty mundane, alas -- I always assum...

This ad for "non-greasy Groom & Clean," a product that allows men to "groom" their hair by putting "hairdressing" in it and combing it through with water raises a fairly obvious question: "Why don't y...

"The probability of this occurring is hard to calculate primarily because of the possibility of what are called common-cause accidents, where the loss of offsite power and of onsite power are caused ...

Sonification of the great Japan earthquake , by Micah Frank. Tectonic is a realtime seismic analysis and sound synthesis system. Sound is created in realtime by earthquakes as they occur across the gl...

Documents from Tokyo Electric, the operator of the Japanese nuclear plants in crisis after Friday's devastating quake and tsunami, reveal that the company tested the Fukushima plant to withstand a qua...

A collection of Google Earth satellite imagery of the areas in Japan worst hit by Friday's earthquake and tsunami.......

Al Jazeera has announced that one of its cameramen, Ali Hassan Al Jaber, was killed after a reporting team for the Arabic-language channel was ambushed by government forces near the town of Benghazi. ...

A spokesperson for the Japanese government says authorities are presuming that "possible meltdowns are under way at two nuclear reactors" at this hour. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporte...

At Global Voices, Solana Larsen looks at conversations among Japanese citizens on Twitter. "Some urge against alarmist tweeting that could cause panic, and many more vent frustrations over safety risk...

Link (via @shioyama).......

Two websites launched this week, Karma Japan and Ignorant and Online, collect a wide assortment of terrible, insensitive, hateful things said by stupid people about Japan and her people after the eart...

Here is a video clip from the Japanese television network NHK showing before and after video of areas in the earthquake zone. The scale of the devastation is overwhelming. (via CNN, thanks @CalgaryGur...

This morning, I got an email from a BoingBoing reader, who is one of the many people worried about the damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima, Japan. In one sentence, he managed to get right to heart o...

YokosoNews has been offering live, real-time English translation of NHK other Japanese-language networks on his Ustream channel. I'm listening to him as I watch NHK TV on my cable provider (Time Warne...

Photos: Officials in protective gear check for signs of radiation on children who are from the evacuation area near the Fukushima Daini nuclear plant in Koriyama, March 13, 2011. Japanese Chief Cabine...

Monday night's installment of the excellent SF in SF reading series features Jeff and Ann VanderMeer: "Jeff and Ann will be reading, and speaking about their current projects, past projects, and what ...

Alyson Schafer's latest parenting book, Ain't Misbehavin' is an excellent companion to her Honey, I Wrecked the Kids; the latter being a humane, sensible book on the theory and practice of raising kid...

Stephen King has written another installment in the Dark Tower books, a long-running, seven-volume series that concluded (somewhat unsatisfactorily, I think) in 2004. The new book, The Wind Through t...

Knowledge Ecology International has published a leaked draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the latest secret, US-led treaty, this one targeting countries on the Pacific rim. The IP chap...

"Octopussy" is just one of several splendid spheroid sculptures from artist Nir Adhar. It's full of tentatcly goodness! Octopussy (via JWZ)  Building festooned with inflatable tentacles - Boing ...

This handy Venn diagram illustrates the relationship between the Council of Europe, the European Union, Shengen, the Eurozone, the European Economic Area, and the European Trade Association. I had to...

The quake and tsunami that hit Tokyo this week stranded thousands of visitors at Tokyo Disneyland/Disney Sea (this latter being the most extraordinary built environment I've ever seen). The parks -- ...

UPDATE, 10pm PT: People are starting to throw the word "meltdown" around. Here is an NHK update reporting that venting has been suspended at the plant because of high radiation levels, and concern ove...

[Video Link] from NHK (via Good).......

Photo: Shutterstock.......

David Israel submits this cute low-fi flashtoon featuring "dozens of villains from all your favorite movies, books, comics, cartoons and games. We especially dug what they did with the Eye of Sauron. ...

(Reuters) The very powerful earthquake that hit Japan today was even more powerful than everybody first thought. US Geological Survey seismologists upgraded it to a magnitude 9.0—making it the ...

Maryn McKenna is the author of a new book called Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA. MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staphyoloccus Aureus) kills more people every year than AIDS. In the US alone 19,000 di...

Link to PBS NewsHour map of live seismic data from Japan.......

(Click for large photo: Fukushima nuclear plant in northeastern Japan, in a 2008 file photo - Reuters) Widespread concerns in Japan over a possible radiation leak at one of the country's largest nucl...

[Video Link] Mark Demma says: "We saw this wave come ashore in Emeryville [near Oakland, CA] today. Remember it had to go through the Golden Gate first so they must have had a larger wave on the unpro...

[Photo: Citizens of Tokyo evacuate the city on train tracks, after a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami struck Japan on March 11, 2011. REUTERS] The only thing more disconcerting than the typical cal...

Sean Michael Ragan of Make: Online shows how to make this cool "doortop stash" out of an aluminum cigar tube. I'm going to make one and use it to hide my Tweezerman Slant Tweezers (the best tool I kno...

Want to participate in NASA's upcoming summit on open source space science? Fittingly, given the topic, anyone can virtually join in on the conference, via live streaming, electronic discussion, a...

In Oregon, faith healing has been a legitimate legal protection against certain kinds of homicide charges. Yesterday, the Oregon state House voted unanimously in favor of a bill that would remove that...

(Click for large photo: Fukushima nuclear plant in northeastern Japan, in a 2008 file photo - Reuters) Widespread concerns in Japan over a possible radiation leak at one of the country's largest nucl...

[YouTube video Link] Dig this freak-out: Sun City Girls' Richard and Alan Bishop performing an acoustic rendition of "Space Prophet Dogon/Multiple Hallucinations" in Iowa City, 2008. Sun City Girls fo...

From George Takei's Twitter feed: "Today we are all Japanese. Give $10 to help. Text REDCROSS to 90999, or click here."......

[Video Link] from NHK.......

"I spent 26 years in the air force. What is happening to Manning is ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid, and I don't know why the DoD is doing it. Nevertheless, Manning is in the right place." &m...

This model comes from the Center for Tsunami Research at the NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, and displays the anticipated wave heights of the tsunami as it travels across the Pacific, af...

[Video Link] (Tokyo Broadcast News)......

High-rise buildings swaying during the 8.9 magnitude quake at Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan on March 11, 2011. [video link]......

(Reuters) The very powerful earthquake that hit Japan today was even more powerful than everybody first thought. US Geological Survey seismologists upgraded it to a magnitude 9.0—making it the ...

If you have kids (or even if you don't) I recommend that you add the Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves blog to your RSS feed. I don't collect many things, but I have acquired a small collection of vint...

Fred "the shred" Goodwin, who presided over the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland and is now collecting a 200,000/year pension at taxpayer's expense (over and above his £3m bonus) for his ...

[Link] (thanks, Oswaldo, via 8760r)......

"Maru is safe. Thank you for worrying and praying." Previous Boing Boing post about Maru. He has a Wikipedia page and a YouTube channel.......

CNET reports on how the people of Japan are coping with overloaded (and carrier-restricted) cellphone networks, after today's catastrophic quake: they're turning to text messaging, and "social network...

A whirlpool is seen near Oarai City, Ibaraki Prefecture, northeastern Japan, March 11, 2011. The biggest earthquake to hit Japan on record struck the northeast coast on Friday, triggering a 10-meter (...

In the NYT, the headline many folks on Twitter were griping would not appear today: "Japan's Strict Building Codes Saved Lives."......

Reuters reports: "Tokyo Electric Power Co said pressure inside the No.1 reactor at its Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant has been rising, with the risk of a radiation leak." After the quake hit Japan ab...

Some of the best live online video coverage (Japanese language) of the quake can be found here: the TBS live channel on YouTube. Related: NYT roundup of clips, and Citizentube on YouTube for curated e...

John Gruber criticizes a mainstream media critic's efforts to find things wrong with the iPad 2, apparently so that his review would be more objective and balanced. Sure, it's an Apple fan finding fau...

Joris from i.materialise sez, "The Open3DP team at the University of Washington has amazed us again by demonstrating that 3D printing in bone is possible. For an art project the team tested different ...

Nerd legends Steve Jackson Games have announced an Axe Cop adaptation for their kick-ass World of Munchkin game: AXE COP exploded onto the net in 2010 with art by Ethan Nicolle and stories by his fiv...

[Video Link] Journalist Adario Strange, who is now living in Japan, interviewed some people on the street in Tokyo who were stranded by the quake. On Friday, March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. a major eart...

Using the Japan Sendai Quake and Tsunami to make his point, Doc Searls shows how live coverage of breaking news stories has been turned over to the internet. (via Jay Rosen)......

This Gilliamesque 60-second adaptation of Inception uses delightful Victorian woodcuts to tell the story. It was an entry in a Jameson's whisky competition by Wolfgang Matzl. Inception - Done in 60 s...

The July 10, 1939 issue of Time featured a condescending and sarcastic look at the first-ever World Science Fiction Convention, sneering at the "pseudo-scientifics" as published in Thrilling Wonder S...

An anonymous artist creates "Involuntary Collaborations" by buying cheap landscapes at thrift stores and yard-sales and improving them by adding monsters to them. Involuntary Collaborations (via Neat...

This 1976 record sleeve, uploaded by Supraterra to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, is printed with a long warning about the horrors of 8-track cassette piracy, urging listeners to look for tapes with mul...

The always-brilliant and always-exhaustive Haunted Mansion blog Long Forgotten has a great article on the history of the stretching portraits from the ride's pre-show. These portraits have to be repa...

A catastrophic earthquake has struck Northern Japan, 150 miles off the coast. The quake hit on Friday, March 11, 2011 at 06:25:51 UTC. Magnitude 8.9, with frequent aftershocks at the time of this blog...

[Video Link] When I was at TED2011 I interviewed writer Clive Thompson about what he calls "the best sharpener I've ever used in my life," the Palomino-KUM Long Point Pencil Sharpener. UPDATE: Here's ...

[Video Link] When I was at TED2011 I interviewed writer Clive Thompson about what he calls "the best sharpener I've ever used in my life," the Palomino-KUM Long Point Pencil Sharpener.......

The Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators in New York is presenting "R. Crumb: Lines Drawn On Paper," a retrospective of the world's greatest living illustrator. This 90-piece...

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour. The attorney for Pvt. Bradley Manning, the 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst who is accused of downloading thousands of classified State Department d...

The people ransack the state security headquarters in Egypt, and archives of torture and oppression are unlocked: "This is a moment exposing what was hidden, but how this will be used is the problem. ...

This photograph of "a real sign in Itaewon, South Korea" was contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader Misha McMurtray.......

Dear readers! URL shorteners' popularity with spammers means we've blocked some of the big ones (at least temporarily) to cut down on the spammation. Sorry for the inconvenience! While we plan a long-...

Just wanted to showcase this marvelous comic by Stuart McMillan (the cover of which you see above and is a nice nod to Herg). It's called "St. Matthew Island" and asks: "What happens when you introduc...

Allan Cochinov says: Core77, the popular design website network, has just launched the Core77 Design Awards, re-imagining many of the elements of a typical design award program -- leveraging online sc...

The European Union has seized all incoming shipments of Playstation 3s. It marks the climax in an ongoing IP war between Sony and LG, which have been patent trolling each other over various trivially ...

Here's a working, homebrewed 1MW laser pistol that can fire through a steel razor-blade and possibly other objects as well. If you want to make one of your own, the creator will help you find the par...

This great Metafilter post by Codacorolla links to cutting edge computer graphics demos for all the years from 1989 to 2010. It's a vivid demonstration of the astounding rate of change in CGI, and a ...

Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 film L'Inhumaine is considered to be a triumph of avant-garde culture, a strange science fictiony story with cubist sets by proto-pop art painter Fernand Lger and pioneering mo...

From Anarchy, State, and Utopia, by Robert Nozick (1974) Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your bra...

Turning data strings like DNA and what-not into audio can produce interesting results. YouTube user r2blend says, "If you import an EXE file into an audio program as audio data, you hear all kinds of ...

[Video Link] Strangefriend says: "Ukulele player Molly Lewis plays a song offering to bear Stephen Fry's baby." Gary Peare adds: "After you've watched the above video, check out this video of Molly se...

In Wired's Threat Level blog, a three-part series on the technology and politics surrounding those "nude body scanners" introduced to a number of American airports last year. "Court Likely to Uphold C...

While raiding a $1.5 million pot-growing operation, California narcotics investigators found an alligator named "Wally" guarding the stash. He is healthy, weighs 55 pounds, and is now being cared for ...

Marcel L'Herbier's 1924 film L'Inhumaine is considered to be a triumph of avant-garde culture, a strange science fictiony story with cubist sets by proto-pop art painter Fernand Lger and pioneering mo...

Why are there so many different spellings for the Libyan dictator's name? An AP Stylebook post explores: Starting on the pronunciation front, the spelling is complicated by a perfect storm of issu...

"Look at that dot. Now look at me."......

Don't miss episode 16 of the Judge John Hodgman podcast: The Potluck Problem Two best friends disagree on the morality of the potluck. One says it's a great opportunity for everyone to pitch in. One s...

Seen above is the "Door to Hell" in Turkmenistan, Darvaza. It's one of many locales around the world where curiosity-seekers will celebrate the second annual Obscura Day on April 9, organized by our f...

banner by Fred Johnson, c.1940 Ripley's Believe It or Not! Times Square is holding a talent contest for sideshow performers. The prize is a summer gig at their NYC Odditorium or $1,000 cash. Contests ...

[Video Link], more about the band. Die Antwoord, S. African zef-rap, and Progeria survivor Leon Botha Die Antwoord's US debut at Coachella Die Antwoord: Evil Boy Die Antwoord: "Evil Boy" ly...

Judging from a single, very small survey of San Francisco's BART and Muni systems, fabric seats on public transportation may not be the best choice for public health. A biologist tested one Muni plast...

Last weekend, my family and I visited Paxton Gate Kids, a wonderful "curiosities for kids" shop in San Francisco. In the entranceway/gallery, we were bowled over by the beautiful "Animal Anomalies" pa...

[Video Link] PopSci reports on a new Gemenoid robot, the DK. Like its Geminoid siblings, the DK is controlled remotely with a motion-capture system in which the Geminoid mimics the movements of the pe...

Reader pbump spliced together this fabulous video from NASA footage taken by the cameras mounted on Discovery's two solid rocket boosters. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on here, so ...

Noncoding DNA is a weird thing. This is the stuff that's often called "junk" DNA, because it's not involved in making protein sequences—the building blocks of life. But, just because noncoding ...

Ben Cosgrove at LIFE Magazine writes, "Recently released photographs -- all of them rare, some of them unseen for decades -- from Eva Braun's personal photo albums provide a window into an era and a c...

[Video Link] (via Eric Wareheim)......

Last week, I got an email from a lawyer representing the Tolkien estate informing me that his clients hadn't demanded that Zazzle remove Adam Rakunas's badge reading "While you were reading Tolkien, ...

Judging from a single, very small survey of San Francisco's BART and Muni systems, fabric seats on public transportation may not be the best choice for public health. A biologist tested one Muni plast...

I've just finished listening to Crossroad Press's audio adaptation of Poppy Z Brite's classic debut novel, Lost Souls. Lost Souls was first published in 1992, when I was working as a bookseller, and ...

Reader pbump spliced together this fabulous video from NASA footage taken by the cameras mounted on Discovery's two solid rocket boosters. It took me a minute to figure out what was going on here, so ...

The Smithsonian has sent a curator to Madison, Wisconsin, to collect protest signs, interviews, and other artifacts from the demonstrations. Some of the wording in this CNN story about this is a littl...

Intrigued on hearing that Amazon's Mechanical Turk is increasingly used by spammers, Mark Alen, a UC Berkeley Operations Research PhD candidate decided to see whether he could hire Mechanical Turks t...

Students at Olin College have made a robot that can crack a MasterLock brand padlock's combination; it can work faster depending on whether it knows some, none or all of the combination. The document...

Further evidence that expressions of crazed delight had a place in commercial advertising that is inexplicable by today's standards: this Nestle's ad from 1956 that features a nearly zombioid woman en...

A team of BBC journalists in Libya were kidnapped by security forces loyal to the Gadaffis. They were hooded, imprisoned, beaten, and subject to repeated mock-executions. While imprisoned, they witne...

A followup to the Librarians Against DRM logo: Nina Paley has adapted the logo for readers as well. Readers Against DRM (RAD!) (Thanks, Alycia!)  Librarians Against DRM logo - Boing Boing Boing ...

A new Shel Silverstein book, Everything On It is coming this September; it's the first new Silverstein book since the posthumous publication of Runny Babbit in 2005. Not much info yet, but the publis...

[Video Link] Gever Tulley says: "This might just be the most beautiful piece of collaboration between nature and industrial agriculture that I have ever seen." The video gets much better after the fir...

A 19-year-old teen is accused of choking and squeezing her 9-year-old sibling's 4-ounce hamster and throwing it on the floor. "It was then thrown across the street, though a necropsy concluded the ani...

A volunteer at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History has discovered what is believed to be the first, and maybe the only, color photos of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire...

In Dharamsala, India today, His Holiness the Dalai Lama announced plans to step down as political leader of the exiled Tibetan government, and cede power to an elected representative. This will not co...

Watch live streaming video from theuptake at livestream.com Wisconsinites have flooded back into their Capitol Building tonight, aided by police officers who largely stood back and let them in. It's n...

Tonight, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker passed a controversial law that will make it illegal for certain classes of public workers to bargain collectively on important issues like working conditions ...

The food transformation magic of Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche was one of my favorite presentations at TED2011 TED director Chris Anderson introduced Cantu as "a mad scientist who became a chef." Cantu o...

Your browser does not support iframes. Direct link One of the funny things about the New York Times' avoidance of the word "torture" is that everyone knew it eventually slip up or give up. It finally ...

United States Patent 3962748: "A TV control device for rotating a dial of a TV set, from an area distant from the set." (Via Futility Closet)......

A 19-year-old teen girl is accused of choking and squeezing her 9-year-old sibling's 4-ounce hamster and throwing it on the floor. "It was then thrown across the street, though a necropsy concluded th...

Errol Morris is an academy award-winning documentary filmmaker. His films include Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control, and Standard Operating Pr...

[Video Link] Who needs computers when you can simply make grooved cams to solve math equations? (Via Nerdstink)......

Video: Chiefland Star Party Skyscape Time Lapse by William Castleman The skies have stories to tell. Some of the stories make for interesting puzzles, particularly sightings of previously unseen objec...

"Seuss-ish mountain ranges can be found in every can of spackle," Boing Boing reader Dave says of this lovely macro shot he contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.......

A comedy of errors, some understandable, and some inexplicable, leads to HP's repairs department kidnapping an antique dresser from someone's porch and then vengefully reducing it to splinters. (Thank...

My novel For the Win is the featured title this month at Readergirlz, a literacy site that does wonderful work. I'll be answering questions there through the month.......

Simon Phipps sez, "As an adjunct to creation of its report 'Media Piracy In Emerging Economies', the Social Science Research Council has devised a license that tries to show people in rich economies w...

A group of activist squatters have occupied Saif "War Criminal/Plagiarist/Zillionaire" Gadaffi's swanky £10M mansion in London's Mayfair. A spokesman for the group said "We didn't trust the Bri...

Brace yeselves fer a tale of the high seas. Out there, in the deep, there be abandoned shipping containers. Yarr. The merchant vessel Med Taipei left San Francisco on February 25, 2004, in the middle...

I know this is going to come as a shock, but a diet that involves eating only 500 calories a day while injecting yourself with pregnancy hormones is probably neither healthy, nor proven to be effectiv...

Last December, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act—a popular, bipartisan bill that would have protected public workers who exposed corruption, waste, and illegality—died a sudden...

"South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have long made sport of skewering cultural icons, and are known for poking at religion with particular delight—from Jesus to Scientology to Moha...

Conservative pundit George Will offered a remarkable turn of phrase in his analysis of presidential candidate Mick Huckabee's recent political dog-whistling. ...sensible Americans, who pay scant atten...

The Skeptically Speaking podcast has a fascinating episode all about the science of semen. It includes a long interview with blogger Scicurious, covering some of the sex-related stories from her Frida...

Being an abortion provider in the United States is a difficult job. You'll likely be demonized. You could be killed. Given the working conditions, it's no surprise that the number of abortion provider...

Probably Corey's HTML 5 video-game "URL Hunter" takes place entirely in the URL bar of your browser, in which you must chase down rogue "a"s with your mighty "O" and clobber them with the spacebar. I...

Love these (sadly unattributed) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tattoos. Illustrating the flowerpot/whale scene is particularly poignant, as it is perhaps the most humorously existential moment in o...

Artist Ward Shelley's brilliant map of the history of science fiction from 2009 is a kind of interestingness black hole whose event horizon captured me for several hours this morning as I pored over ...

Link Visits His Mother: a captioning series on Dorkly that imagines the dialog when Legend of Zelda hero Link goes back to see his mum. Link Visits His Mother (via Super Punch)  Blind gamer spee...

Eric Guth discovered a cave-entrance on the side of an Arctic glacier in Juneau, AK, and set out to explore it. He returned with a series of breathtaking photos of curvy, crystalline beauty. Guth's o...

Joe Newton's letterpress poster, "Google Before You Tweet is the new Think Before You Speak" is damned good advice. Google before you Tweet (via Super Punch)  Singapore "Fail Whale Bus"...

The American Library Association has struck two new task forces to investigate the future of ebooks in libraries: the Equitable Access to Electronic Content Task Force and the E-book Task Force. The ...

"Populist" Wisconsin governor Scott Walker continues to restrict the freedom of Wisconsinites to seek redress of grievances in their state capitol. The latest "decorum" rules handed down by Walker's ...

...

Our friends at Bibliodyssey spotted this wonderful collection of anatomical drawings from the University of Leipzig in the late 19th century, reminiscent of high resolution medical imaging of today......

Those who are of the opinion that the CEO of American Apparel is a skeevy sonofabitch who exploits young female employees will not find this news story surprising.......

Photo of Matt Cutts at TED2011. Credit: TED I enjoyed Google engineer Matt Cutts' presentation at TED2011 about his series of "30 Day Challenges." In May of 2009, Matt decided to walk at least 10,000 ...

My name is Bill, and I'm bad at GTD. Many, many factors account for this -- let's call it a character flaw. But the biggest is probably this one: My utter inability (or maybe it's just an unwilingness...

In the NY Review of Books, David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow take a disturbing look at the vastly under-reported and under-prosecuted phenomenon of rape and sexual assault within the US prison system, a...

I love the look of Rafael Atijas' 3-string Loog guitar kits. He is seeking $15,000 on Kickstarter to fund the project. If you kick in $150 or more, you'll get a Loog of your own. Rafael says: I am a B...

Shutterstock image by Bianda Ahmad Hisham (The following is the second excerpt from Losing Control, Finding Serenity. Read the first excerpt.) Flashback to November 2008. Breaking news: investor panic...

Shutterstock image by Larisa Lofitskaya (The following is the second excerpt from Losing Control, Finding Serenity. Read the first excerpt. Read the second excerpt.) Victoria never played soccer herse...

Control panel photo by Led Chatfield. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. (This is the first in a series of three excerpts from Losing Control, Finding Serenity.) "Everything is determin...

Photo: Nokton Pictured here are 1954's Leica M3 and Fujifilm's forthcoming digital homage, the X100. Both will set you back around $1,200: the former can be found in abundance on eBay, while the latte...

Thermos and Threadless teamed up to create a fun line of lunchboxes and thermos bottles. I wanted to buy the spaceman bottle above for my son, but this style is only available in the 24 ounce size (as...

It's conclusive: owning a passport will prevent you from becoming diabetic. (Left: Andrew Sullivan's Map of the Day. Right: Diabetes Belt stretches across Deep South and Appalachia)......

A mask of a member of the Mondo Kayo Social and Marching Club is seen as they march down St. Charles Avenue on Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans, Louisiana March 8, 2011. (photos: REUTERS/Sean Gardner)......

I first became acquainted with Eames Demetrios through his work as a filmmaker: back in 2007, he shared with Boing Boing a stop-motion short about elephants that playfully explored a small piece of th...

A mask of a member of the Mondo Kayo Social and Marching Club is seen as they march down St. Charles Avenue on Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans, Louisiana March 8, 2011. (REUTERS/Sean Gardner)......

"Yesterday everything looked absolutely normal. This morning when I got up, there were millions and millions of them floating everywhere." Walter Waite, who lives at Redondo Beach harbor, on the billi...

On his Technium blog, Kevin Kelly wrote: I am having trouble convincing myself why digital books will not cost 99 cents within 5 years. All books, on average. Just as the price of music does not in ge...

A bill introduced by Florida state senator Jim Norman would make it a felony to take a photograph of a farm without the owner's permission: "A person who photographs, video records or otherwise produc...

First Steps on the Moon, a photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by photographer and BB reader fdcomite.......

Photo of Matt Cutts at TED2011. Credit: TED I enjoyed Google engineer Matt Cutts' presentation at TED2011 about his series of "30 Day Challenges." In May of 2009, Matt decided to walk at least 10,000 ...

"This spring, the United Arab Emirates is expected to close a deal for $7 billion dollars' worth of American arms. Nearly half of the cash will be spent on Patriot missiles, which cost as much as $5.9...

University of Michigan Museum of Zoology researchers Pavel Klimov and Ekaterina Sidorchuk captured this image of a pair of extinct mites who were trapped in amber in the midst of getting it on. Their...

I recently visited the new, raw office space of TuneUp, my pal Gabe Adiv's startup that makes a really good iTunes plugin to fix your music library's metadata. (I can personally vouch that it worked m...

Warner Bros Entertainment today announced that it will offer movies through Facebook, which users can pay for with the virtual currency Facebook Credits, previously used only in social games like Farm...

Thank you, Greg Leuch and fffff.at, for providing us all with a tool for blocking Charlie Sheen from the Internet: Tinted Sheen. "Download the plugin for Firefox or Chrome, and never again worry about...

It's like face blindness, but for music. Researchers at the University of Montreal say that a 23-year-old man they call "Mathieu" is functionally unable to move in time to music, or follow a beat tha...

[Video Link] In honor of one of the great American holidays, we present to you an encore post of "Mardi Gras 1956: Through my father's lens," a Boing Boing Video episode originally published in 2010. ...

You've might have seen the video above for the Popin! Cookin! sushi-candy making kit. The US distributor made a commercial that serves the candy nyotaimori-style (NSFW, below).......

One thing the military is getting right these days: Making the connection between fossil fuel dependence and insecurity. I did a lot of research in the past year on efforts throughout the Department ...

Craig Newmark, O.G. internet guy and founder of Craigslist, tells Boing Boing this morning: Hey, I know I say "this is a big deal" a lot, but this really IS a big deal. I've decided what I want to do ...

Photo: Jake von Slatt I recently bought Canon's t2i DSLR camera and am having a lot of fun exploring the available lenses. I've avoided stuff from outside the Canon EF ecosystem so far, but after rea...

The Australian Honeypot Project is a group of volunteers who set up tantalizing decoy targets for cyber criminals. By carefully monitoring those honeypots, the group can gather data about the tactics ...

Tomorrow in Austin, Texas: "Energy at the Movies" is a lecture and panel discussion about 70 years of energy on the big screen, and how our pop-culture understanding of energy has influenced our polit...

Photo: Nokton Pictured here are 1954's Leica M3 and Fujifilm's forthcoming digital homage, the X100. Both will set you back around $1,200: the former can be found in abundance on eBay, while the latte...

Lenovo's just updated the X200 series, Cory's main machine, and the reviews are looking good. Here's PC Magazine's Cisco Cheng: An improved keyboard, made up of larger keys, is made possible by wideni...

Here is an interactive timeline of Bradley Manning's alleged leaking. [Wired]......

Mt. Kilauea is currently erupting in Hawaii. This video, from the US Geological Survey, shows lava pouring from a new fissure that's opened in the Earth between two previous craters. The USGS has help...

The 10-year UK census came out today, and Britons are required to fill it in after March 27th. The census includes a voluntary question on religion, with a blank for writing in your faith if it's not...

The Space Shuttle Discovery is coming home, for the last time, tomorrow. Xeni already mentioned NASA's contest that allowed Americans to vote on wake-up songs for the astronauts. The results of that ...

Nina Paley designed this great "Librarians Against DRM" logo to accompany the Readers' Bill of Rights for Digital Books. Librarians Against DRM  O'Reilly drops ebook DRM, sees 104% increase in s...

Ivan Smith maintains a page tracking the price of digital storage over the years. This is one of technology's least appreciated growth stories -- we hear a lot about Moore's Law and the doubling of p...

Pawel Hynek's 2006 image "Obsolete" depicts a homeless robot begging for electrical power; it's striking and funny as well as a little uncomfortable-making. It reminds me of one of the most demented ...

A cache of Wikileaks Cablegate cables disclose that Saudi Royals -- with collusion of the religious police -- throw wild drug- and alcohol-fuelled parties, sponsored by western energy beverage compan...

Aeon sends us, "a website showcasing a selection of ingenious long drop toilet seating arrangements that have proliferated in the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake and its disruption of the se...

A tiger at Ankara zoo managed to find a gap between its cage and that of a lion, which it attacked and killed. From the BBC: "The tiger severed the lion's jugular vein in a single stroke with its paw,...

Chicks brillianty dyed with food coloring sit on display at the animal market in Souq Waqif. A photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by freelance mideast-based journalist Omar Chatriwa...

The Christchurch cafe is a site where you can buy virtual items you might find in a coffee shop, from a $2 espresso to a $300 espresso machine. This is a creative and interesting way of raising aid do...

I first met my friend Mark Pilkington, the UK journalist and publisher of Strange Attractor Press, a few years ago when he was visiting San Francisco researching a new book about UFOs. Mark (smartly) ...

Noah Shachtman: "Darpa chief owns stock in a Darpa contractor, which makes $$$ off of the agency. Nothing to see here, move along."......

Noteslate plans to offer an e-ink drawing tablet later this year. Its single-purpose design — it's for drawing things in monochrome and dumping them to SD card — will hopefully keep the p...

[Video Link], via Clayton Cubitt.......

The merry pranksters at Improv Everywhere brought King Philip IV to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art to sign autographs beside his portrait, painted by Velzquez circa 1624. Improv Everywhere...

Note: This is not an image from next week's farmer-labor day at the Wisconsin Capitol Building. That hasn't happened yet. This is an image meant to illustrate the concept of a tractorcade for anyone ...

The BBC and other sources have reported that some South Africans have taken to stealing an antiretroviral HIV medication, and using it as a street drug. That may or may not be true. But the drug in qu...

On Saturday, my son and I visited Pirate Cat Radio, a low-power community station in San Francisco, to see our favorite Bay Area singer/guitarist Diana Gameros perform. Diana plays a wonderful mix of...

As somebody who does a fair amount of curating—collecting and commenting on cool stories from around the Internet—I'm very aware of how easy it is to accidentally mutate the news. Kind of...

ProPublica continues to serve as an important and credible force for transparency: "The Federal Aviation Administration is proposing rules [1] that would prevent private plane owners from keeping thei...

Perhaps you missed Rob Beschizza's epic review of this gadget cleaning goop, posted over the weekend. You should watch it now. [Video Link]......

"Maybe I die, but as Shakespeare says the question is to be or not to be". —untrained Libyan rebels, guarding a checkpoint on the road to Ras Lanuf. One was an economics student, the other in ch...

This is what the effects of an earthquake look like from space. Vertical movement was mapped by a Japanense satellite as the ground shifted closer to it (blue) or further from it (red). (Via Jon Filde...

The control panels in this Russian nuclear power plant look like something out of the 60s, but it was built in the 1990s. Why so little computer interface? It's probably a budgetary issue, but, a...

I don't quite know what it is about Brooklyn5and10's Motif Cubes that's so addictive, but at $25 a set I just can't resist. There's nothing to solve, no winning arrangement or maze (though wouldn't th...

Michael Geist, Canadian Liberal MP Dan McTeague, who was recently linked to the Canadian Recording Industry Association, has been the most outspoken MP in favor of tough penalties for copyright infrin...

Tom "Subblue" Reddard, whose fractal work was featured here recently, developed an interactive WebGL fractal explorer app that runs in the browser. Fractal Lab currently works in Chrome or the latest ...

NPR is sick of spam and trolls and has switched to auditioning commenters before accepting their submissions. Only after establishing themselves over multiple comments will their comments begin appear...

How to extend the life of your books. [Lifehacker]......

Michael W Hudson's book-length investigative journalism piece on the subprime meltdown, The Monster, is both a brilliant example of skeptical business journalism done right, and a brilliant example o...

Premiere On Call, a division of the Clear Channel subsidiary that distributes Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, is a service that hires actors to call into radio shows and read a script tha...

Yuri Zupancic says his microchip paintings are an homage to the tradition of miniature painting, informed by the "smaller and faster...catchphrase of commodities." He makes some of his brushes from h...

Socrates from the Singularity Weblog attended my University of Toronto iSchool talk ("A Little Bit Pregnant: Why it's a Bad Idea to Regulate Computers the Way We Regulate Radios, Guns, Uranium and Oth...

BB reader forteller says, "Khalas Mixtape Vol. 1 is a compilation of songs created by North African hip hop artists from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria who have emerged as voices of recent uprising...

Today, I received an email from Amazon announcing that a 12-issue subscription to Popular Science is on sale for just $5. That's a great deal. (Note that it is an "autorenew" subscription, which you c...

This splendid postcard is yours for just $2.50 at Etsy.......

Hugh Electronic sez, "The I.W.W. hired Eric Drooker to design posters for a general strike which he is told, now appears imminent in Wisconsin. The Industrial Workers of the World asked him to design ...

This summer, Waterloo, Ontario's Institute for Quantum Computing is running a residential "Quantum Cryptography School for Young Students" for Canadian kids aged 16 and over. Holy awesome, does this s...

A heavily-linked and cited list of 20 lies told by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker makes for good Sunday reading. The cynicism and manipulation from Walker and his handlers has been really depressing,...

Poutine is a Quebecois delicacy made by combining french fries, gravy and cheese curds; when I was growing up, poutine was strictly Canadian, and you could always amaze foreigners by describing the s...

My 7-year-old daughter makes hand drawn "computer games." You play one row at a time, from the bottom up. Each row has its own set of rules. UPDATE: Since some of you asked if Jane could explain the g...

Hugh Electronic sez, "The I.W.W. hired Eric Drooker to design posters for a general strike which he is told, now appears immanent in Wisconsin. The Industrial Workers of the World asked him to design ...

Canada's modest, self-effacing autocratic Prime Minister has demanded that the country's civil service must cease to use "the government of Canada" in official publications. From now on, the tax-funde...

GeekDad's Dave Banks explores the current state of indie comic's with New Brighton Archeological Society co-creator and writer Mark Andrew Smith. Finally, here was an all ages graphic novel that treat...

Forget beating Watson on Jeopardy. I just got dusted by The Terminator in Rock Paper Scissors. Skynet is nigh!......

At Scuttlefish today, an item on the largest set of shark jaws (outside of a living shark, I suppose) going up for auction. All 182 teeth, 11 feet of width, and more than 8 feet in height. "The jaws, ...

"Look," a photograph contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Katia of Porto Alegre, Brazil.......

red"> Banksy had bailed two members of the Russian arts collective Voina ("War") out of a horrific St Petersburg prison, where they were being held indefinitely awaiting trial. Voina is known for man...

An enterprising fellow in Christchurch is auctioning off the 25-tonne boulder that destroyed his building as a "landscape feature" with proceeds going to the ChCh Earthquake Relief Fund. He calls the...

Seth Godin's Poke the Box is a breezy, short manifesto that extols the virtue of taking initiative and doing stuff, even though you might fail or annoy the people you work with. At first, it seems aw...

...

'Cause he wonders where you are, and he wonders what you do. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)......

Our pals at Backyard Brains (makers of the terrific SpikerBox kit, which allows you to study the electrical impulses of insect neurons) are developing circuitry to control which direction a cockroach ...

Nate Bellegarde painted a set of blank matrioshka dolls with the likenesses of famous astronomers. It's a gift for his girlfriend, who is studying astronomy. Astronomatryoshkas  Whimsical, fanta...

When I want a substitute for an egg, I insist that the egg be substituted with an egg. (Thanks, Wendy!)......

Mazda is recalling 52,000 Mazda6 cars because they attract cobwebs: The recall of 2009 and 2010 Mazda6s is due to "a certain type of spider" that "may weave a web in the evaporative canister vent line...

The TSA is upset that we're avoiding checked-bag fees with more carry-on, as this increases the amount of hand-luggage they have to screen. So they're proposing a new fee to pay for all the extra hand...

As always, Mr Stewart puts it into perspective -- the same people who object to limiting the tax-funded bonuses of bailed out bankers because it would violate their contracts say that teachers' contr...

Sage advice from 37 Signals' Jason Fried on how to get good at making money through low-risk iteration and practice: So here's a great way to practice making money: Buy and sell the same thing over an...

A study reported on in Psychology Today set out to determine whether people could distinguish abstract art from paintings done by monkeys (as well as children and other animals, like elephants). Turn...

Katherine sez, Public libraries in Camarillo, Santa Clarita and Ventura have all been targeted for a takeover by Library Systems and Services (LSSI), a private company headquartered in Maryland and m...

I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, but the Tank Riot podcast guys have put together an episode on the retrograde legislative mishegas in Wisconsin. Tank Riot's one of my favorite podcasts, an...

Remember the Dervaeses, the family from Pasadena, CA who decided to trademark "Urban Homestead," a term that has been in common use for decades? Well, a fellow by the name of Michael Nolan (co-au...

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) this week filed a civil rights lawsuit against the FBI on behalf of Yasir Afifi, a Muslim-American student of Egyptian descent who lives in Santa Clara...

bOING bOING contributor, computer musician, and transgender activist/educator Terre Thaemlitz, who was recently featured on NPR's "All Things Considered." created two remixes of indie electro/house pr...

Have you seen this man? According to National Geographic, he has the most typical face on Earth. The composite is a 28-year-old Han Chinese man. The image was created for National Geographic's spe...

1905 postcard of a badkhn at a wedding What are the roots of Jewish humor? According to UC Berkeley theater arts professor Mel Gordon -- author of Siegel and Shuster's Funnyman and Voluptuous Pan...

Anti-Gaddafi demonstrations continue in Libya today, amid ever-increasing reports of violent response by pro-government forces. In the photo above, protesters prepare caricatures depicting Libyan dict...

This is Leather Man, a famed hermit who wandered New York's Westchester County and Western Connecticut more than a century ago. He slept in caves, rarely spoke to anyone, and wore a suit made from old...

A man accused of being a large-scale meth dealer may lose his beloved collection of nearly 19,000 comic books, said to have been purchased with his drug money. The collection is valued at more than a ...

[Video Link] Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land is at the TED 2011 conference in Long Beach, where Google gave rare demos of its auto-driving car. Danny captured this video from inside the car. Th...

A fellow in Gilbert, Arizona was pulled from a city manhole on Tuesday after he had become stuck 25 feet down a pipe. The man said he was attempting to rescue trapped children. He was also nude. And h...

Love this fascinating look at the filament inside standard light bulbs. As "Engineer Guy" Bill Hammack points out, this type of light is on its way out. But the history behind it is still really inter...

Later this month, I'm going to be picking back up on Science Question from a Toddler—a regular feature that finds the surprisingly deep science behind simple questions. But, in order to do that...

Marilyn Terrell of National Geographic tells Boing Boing, A Japanese red-crowned crane flailing in midair to impress a mate and a pair of orange-bellied parrots (fewer than 150 left) on a branch in Ta...

Artist Gary Baseman has a show opening up at Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York City this weekend. In this post, a preview of some of the works featured in the exhibition, and a statement by the arti...

If you watch the first few shots of this video with the sound off, you might be forgiven for thinking it was about volcanoes. It certainly looks like a thin trail of lava cascading off the side of a ...

One of my favorite blogs has moved to a new site. If you're interested in a nuanced, thoughtful look at politics, ethics, philosophy, pop culture, and religion—both in the actual blog, and in on...

Old Man Murray, a legendary PC humor site which inspired a generation of gaming journalists—and whose alumni just scripted Portal 2, one of this year's most hotly-anticipated games—was de...

Incredible views of Dubai's many new skyscrapers, from the viewpoint of its many new skyscrapers. [Wonder a Day via Coudal]......

Blair River, the 575-pound promoter of Heart Attack Grill restaurants, is dead at 29. [Daily Mail]......

Rebels hold a young man at gunpoint, who they accuse of being a loyalist to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, between the towns of Brega and Ras Lanuf. Photo: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters.......

A Republican Texas legislator has introduced a bill that would make the TSA's grope-and-fondle secondary search into a felony, and would also criminalize installing and using a pornoscanner: HB 1937 ...

According to this unsourced photo-magnification, Hosni Mubarak's swanky pinstriped suits were made from custom fabric whose "stripes" were Mubarak's name, printed in tiny letters, over and over again...

According to Case-Shiller/S&P, US housing prices have fallen to levels not seen since the 1890s (adjusted for inflation, of course), in 11 of 20 markets. It looks like this is slightly skewed by the ...

The University of Wisconsin at Green Bay's geeky concert series is back. The Wind Symphony and Symphonic Band plays music inspired by Godzilla, anime, MMORPGs, and sf/f. They're kind enough to credit...

The Shower Squid is a $35 stretchy shower caddy/squid whose elastic tentacles hold your shampoo, soap and other products. SHOWER SQUID (via Thoughts From Kansas)  Shark tea-infuser turns diffuse...

Heather Allen and David Sensenbrenner were Wisconsin high-school sweethearts who moved back to Madison just in time to get married and then rush back to the pro-labor protests outside the state capit...

Alcon Entertainment, producers of the Blind Side and The Book of Eli, own the rights to make a prequel or sequel to Blade Runner. They seemingly haven't gotten much further than that. From Entertainme...

Dan Gillmor's essay, "Rodney King and the Rise of the Citizen Photojournalist," looks at the history that led up to the watershed moment, 20 years ago, when the King beating was recorded with a person...

In 2006 corporate futurologist Derek Woodgate and I flashed on the idea of an future-focused think tank that would produce experiential events, what Derek has come to call "sense events." Since then w...

TED Prize Winner JR & INSIDE OUT from TED Prize on Vimeo. TED2011 posted a video of TED Prize winner JR, an anonymous artist who drapes large scale photographic portraits across buildings in poor urba...

...

Remember the badly-drawn Boo Berry cereal box character that Mark spotted? The creepy gouge-l'"il style of modern adver-toons makes for some uncanny nightmare fuel. That said, something is to...

Boing Boing's Dean Putney covered Apple's unveiling of the new iPad today in San Francisco, and shot video at the event of hands-on tests he performed with the updated device. In this video, Dean tes...

I noticed this obscene graffiti at a San Francisco playground. Yes, it's written in chalk.......

The Wisconsin Senate passed a resolution today that calls for the arrest of the 14 Democratic senators who left the state two weeks ago, if those senators do not return by 4:00 pm today. According to ...

Dan Gillmor's essay, "Rodney King and the Rise of the Citizen Photojournalist," looks at the history that led up to the watershed moment, 20 years ago, when the King beating was recorded with a person...

The crime rate in Oregon is down, but most Oregonians feel that the rate has gone up, and that they are less safe. I think this story has some interesting parallels with a recent British Medical Journ...

Mark Dery writes in the NYT how Edward Gorey's fabulous, sinister drawings haunt the collective subconscious, inspiring the artistry behind Alice, Coraline and other blockbusters. Gorey was born to be...

I love creative science analogies, which is why I'm digging this story about a lecture given by Bob Paul, a biology professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Paul attempts to explain some of the b...

This is the equivalent of finding a really hot supermodel, then making a pornographic movie with Wally Shawn. Holga HL-N for Nikon SLR [Holga Direct]......

In real life, this stone carving—found in an irrigation ditch in the Mexican state of Chiapas—stands 3 ft. tall and weighs 130 pounds. From photos, it can be hard to catch all the detail ...

At heart, a laser is really just an electron that's been pushed into releasing a little energy, in the form of a particle of light—a photon. The atom that electron comes from doesn't have to be...

Here's a clever way of projecting the same movie onto several screens throughout a building using tubes, mirrors and multiple apertures: It must be assumed that the average reader understands how a pi...

The Guardian reports that three UK teenagers who created and ran "one of the world's largest English-language internet crime forums," described in court as "Crimebook", have been sentenced to up to 5 ...

A Cisco white-paper on mobile data usage shows that "high bandwidth" users are just early adopters -- the first people to start using high-bandwidth apps like video. In other words, it's not P2P or te...

I have no idea what's going on in this uncredited scan from a unnamed Cyrillic (Russian?) book illustrating the many ways in which a collie dog could be converted to a terrifying, but friendly me...

Science fiction writer Peter Watts can't catch a break. After being brutally beaten without provocation by US customs guards last year and then charged with a felony, he's now contracted "flesh-eating...

Here's Esquire's heartbreaking profile of Raymond Daniel Towler, a man who served nearly 29 years after being wrongfully convicted of raping a twelve year old girl before being exonerated on the basis...

Ncorrigible sez, "My son was told to make a model of Saturn and its major moons for his 3rd grade science project. He and his geek dad built this model in Minecraft and make the video to showcase it....

Shocked by the news that HarperCollins has told libraries that its ebooks will now self-destruct after 26 checkouts because that's how long a print book lasts, these librarians give us a tour of some...

Performance artist Mike Daisey's show at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, "The Last Cargo Cult," started with the attendees being handed US currency (notes ranging from $1 to $100) as they came into t...

Taiwanese computer manufacturer Asus is shipping its MiniATX motherboards in a cardboard box that can be used as a PC case: There are punch-out holes for ventilation and a real panel that houses the ...

Troubletwisters is the first volume in a collaborative series from Australian YA superstars Garth Nix and Sean Williams, and it's as marvellous as its pedigree suggests. The titular troubletwisters ar...

Xanadoodle crocheted this 16" x 9" Han Solo in Carbonite throw-pillow, which would make a lovely addition to any smart home. Han Solo in Carbonite Throw Pillow (via Neatorama)  You, frozen in ca...

Boing Boing's Dean Putney covered Apple's unveiling of the new iPad today in San Francisco, and shot video at the event of hands-on tests he performed with the updated device. About the video in this...

Boing Boing's Dean Putney covered Apple's unveiling of the new iPad today in San Francisco, and shot video at the event of hands-on tests he performed with the updated device. About the video in this...

Boing Boing's Dean Putney covered Apple's unveiling of the new iPad today in San Francisco, and shot video at the event of hands-on tests he performed with the updated device. About the video in this...

Boing Boing's Dean Putney covered Apple's unveiling of the new iPad today in San Francisco, and shot video at the event of hands-on tests he performed with the updated device. In this video, Dean tes...

Boing Boing's Dean Putney covered Apple's unveiling of the new iPad today in San Francisco, and shot video at the event of hands-on tests he performed with the updated device. About the video in this ...

A skier wearing a helmet camera tumbled off a sheer cliff, recording the terrifying journey for posterity. It appears that he escaped unscathed. This video was released by the manufacturer of the cam...

Boing Boing's Dean Putney covered Apple's unveiling of the new iPad today in San Francisco, and shot video at the event of hands-on tests he performed with the updated device. About the video in this ...

A Wisconsin judge ordered the Capitol Building opened to the public yesterday, but that order is being interpreted very narrowly—with only eight constituents allowed in, per legislator. Those e...

"In the end, despite our best intentions, much of what we're told or assume about the provenance of the seafood we eat is essentially a fish story." —journalist Erik Vance, in a fascinating stor...

Dan Mirvish: "When [actress] Anne Hathaway makes headlines, the stock for Warren Buffet's Berkshire-Hathaway goes up."......

For the better part of a decade—1884 to 1891—this man criss-crossed the United States, using a string of aliases and forged credentials to gain access to scientists and steal their valuab...

The U.S. Army on Wednesday filed 22 additional charges against Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is accused of downloading tens of thousands of classified military and State Department documents, and believed...

There's something oddly soothing about hearing David Attenborough say the words, "soft, slumpy legs." Almost like he's talking about Winnie the Pooh, rather than a carnivorous worm that eats its prey ...

A fun video of an ingenious (and apparently incredibly dangerous) method to get a stuck tractor out of the mud. (via Jim Mason)......

Noting that this year's film lineup sports "four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to ...

An Egyptian man who fled the unrest in Libya talks on a phone provided by Telecom sans Frontiere (TSF) at a refugee camp near the Libyan and Tunisian border crossing of Ras Jdir March 1, 2011. (REUTER...

An "A" student at a Virginia middle school was given a one-day suspension for holding open a door for a known adult who had her hands full. This violated the school security policy, which holds that ...

Sony has apologized for Japanese boy band Kishidan's attire in a recent TV appearance. The BBC reports: The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organisation based in Los Angeles, said it wa...

Attention Apple fans! Dean Putney is liveblogging Apple's press conference in San Francisco, where executives will soon announce the latest iPad. Expected are front and rear-facing cameras; hoped for...

My latest Locus column takes the form of a thought-experiment in which I try to make sense of how we treat creative work on behalf of a notional Martian: It's about this time that the Martian notices...

The Awl's Abe Sauer is at the Wisconsin state house with press credentials, and he describes the scene after rogue governor Scott Walker defied a court order and violated state law by locking the pub...

Scattered Trees made a Star Wars tribute video to go with their new song, "Love and Leave." Directed by J.M. Harper, it features sad stormtroopers and Boba Fett on drums. Scattered Trees' new album, S...

"Medication," from Andrew Brandou's Jonestown series When does a religion become a cult? That's the question former BB guestblogger Mitch Horowitz, author of the excellent Occult America, recently...

What you see in this photo is a common occurrence at Maho Beach on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten. Photographer Thomas Prior spent a week there taking pictures on the dunes, where there's even a...

Heidi Taillefer created this stunning painting titled "Venus Envy." Taillefer is best known for painting the poster art for Cirque du Soleil's "Dralion." von Scaramouche Gallery is now offering limite...

The folks randomly selected to get one of three mystery boxes have started receiving them! Ms. H. blogs her box's contents here. Ms. B. of California emailed to say she'd gotten hers (she had a specia...

Oliver sez, "I came across this extreme example of Dr Martin Austwick, an independent artist (and practising physicist) going the extra mile with the presentation of his CD album package for 'Songs f...

Xanadoodle crocheted this 16" x 9" Han Solo in Carbonite throw-pillow, which would make a lovely edition to any smart home. Han Solo in Carbonite Throw Pillow (via Neatorama)  You, frozen in car...

Cornell University and the French Culinary Institute are collaborating to modify 3D printers to output delicious, detailed, edible objects. They puree materials such as "chocolate, cheese and hummus ...

A skiier wearing a helmet camera tumbled off a sheer cliff, recording the terrifying journey for posterity. It appears that he escaped unscathed. This video was released by the manufacturer of the ca...

MattonlyMoore sez, "My latest project is messing around with 3D animated GIFs. I just take the stereo image and alternate it back and forth at varying focal points, which creates the illusion of 3D. ...

Here's a scan of a 1936 report on the state of radio penetration, commissioned by CBS as a sales tool to convince advertisers to shift their spending to broadcast. Bary sez, "The book and pamphlet pr...

Gnat sez, "A resident of Christchurch, New Zealand, cleverly demonstrates the liquifaction that caused so much trouble in the recent earthquakes. The ground is soil and water, usually stable. When sh...

Darren Barefoot sez, "Certainly the weirdest extreme sport I've seen in a while. Free-diving enthusiasts play hockey under frozen lakes, with the floating puck gliding along the underside of the ice....

Germy Shoemangler sez, "On the Kraft Music Hall, Harpo plays the clarinet (and blows bubbles out of it), accuses Milton Berle of using cocaine, and holds up seven fingers on one hand when asked how l...

I love film and dig dates to the art house but I'm woefully lacking in my knowledge of classic and "important" cinema. Of course, a terrific curriculum in film history can be found in the Criterion Co...

A soccer player is in serious trouble after kicking a defenseless owl off the pitch. The opposing team's mascot, it survived despite being struck first by the ball and then by Luis Moreno's boot. (TV ...

I'm at TED2011 in Long Beach. I've seen several interesting presentations today. One of my favorites was with the head of Al Jazeera ( "Corrupt regimes have lost the power to deceive") Another was Sun...

Sometimes you just need to go around in the muck. Since 2006, these American-made boots have kept my feet dry in snow, ice, mud and everything in between. They have excellent, deep cleats for traction...

This shot from Google Earth shows an Ethiopian "Church Forest"—one of the symbolic reconstructions of the Garden of Eden that surround most Christian churches in the Northern part of the countr...

The George Sarton Memorial Lecture—an annual presentation on the history of science, which takes place as part of the AAAS meeting—is rapidly becoming one of my absolute favorite lecture ...

Today, Freddie King is the unicorn following John Galliano. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)......

Over the weekend fashion designer John Galliano was accused of making threatening racist and anti-semitic remarks at a Paris bar. Fellow designer Patricia Field posted a public message defending her f...

Want to test your own ability to recognize faces? There's several online tests available through the Prosopagnosia Research Centers at Harvard and the UK's University College London. I got an 86%&...

One evening, while we were watching TV, a short video preview came on, announcing that the channel was going to show Jurassic Park over the coming weekend. As the preview played, my husband turned to...

On of my favorite books from last year was Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project, in which Gretchen tried out a bunch of different old and new techniques for becoming happier and reported on the resu...

TED2011 is about to officially kick off, and I'm excited to be here to write about it for Boing Boing. When I walked into the Long Beach Performing Arts Center I was greeted by this 20-foot sea creatu...

Sebastian has made a video to introduce his first LP. Whole Milk describes it as "like plugging into the Matrix, but instead of the Matrix it's 4chan," but these markers seem too modern; the rapid-fir...

I love film and dig dates to the art house but I'm woefully lacking in my knowledge of classic and "important" cinema. Of course, a terrific curriculum in film history can be found in the Criterion Co...

Adafruit's Phil Torrone points us toward this excellent BBC short about hardware hackers. When you buy a new piece of technology "" like a phone, or a games console "" you most lik...

Markus Diebel is a former IDEO design director who is currently the VP of design for InCase. On the side, he created Manymals, an ingenious and lovely line of necklace pendants representing animals th...

BubbleTrees are prefab, inflatable tents that appear to be comparable to jumpy houses for rich grown-ups. They run $9,000 to $17,000 depending on amenities such as wood floors or furniture. From Yahoo...

Computational architect Michael Hansmeyer makes incredibly elaborate columns out of cardboard and wood. Co.Design's John Pavlus writes: "Hansmeyer's column stands nine feet tall, weighs about 2000 pou...

CthulhuChick is editing the ebook edition of the complete works of HP Lovecraft, so she decided to see how often Cthulhudaddy's favorite words crop up in his oeuvre: Abnormal - 94 Accursed - 76 Anted...

I had hip surgery back in January to correct a weird and unsuspected birth defect, and while the operation was a smash success, my physiotherapy regime calls for six months' worth of deep water runnin...

26-year old Amanda Hocking sold 450,000 e-books in January, at $3 a pop, directly to her readers. She's never been traditionally published and it is unlikely any publisher could offer her a better dea...

17,000 USB sticks (or thereabouts) were left in laundries last year. [Gizmodo]......

...

B3ta's herman:D made this grisly Mario aftermath animation. Watch out for those sharpened flagpoles, Mario! Message 10349932  Mario v. Pac-Man animated short film - Boing Boing Boing Boing: Kata...

Vikcreated a 3D-printed bug-repellent and uploaded the 3D file to Thingiverse: Cabbage white butterflies are antisocial when they're laying their eggs. So if you stick up decoy butterflies, you can s...

Rabidiga's written an Instructables HOWTO explaining how to make a pan flute out of bullet shells of varying size: "I came up with this for a contest being held over at www.wastelandoutpost.com where...

Epbot captured this magic moment from the Miami Comic-Con: "John and I happened upon this little Cinderella solemnly flipping through the pages of a book and showing them all to R2D2, who was respond...

Yesterday's Game Developer Conference in San Francisco saw a smashing presentation from game-design legend Raph Koster, entitled, "Social Mechanics: The Engines Behind Everything Multiplayer." Alice ...

Tax.com's David Cay Johnston exposes the truth behind Wisconsin governor Scott Walker's claim that unionized state workers get their pensions "subsidized" by the state, a claim that has been blindly ...

Video archivist extraordinaire Rick Prelinger sez, "A TRIP DOWN MARKET STREET BEFORE THE FIRE is that charismatic archival film made by San Francisco's Miles Bros. several days before the April 18, 1...

This fully funded Kickstarter project will commercialize the "Gameduino" -- an Arduino shield optimized for creating old-school, 8-bit video-games, pre-loaded with numerous sprites and set up for eas...

[Video link] (Boing Boing Video's YouTube) In this morning's episode of Dr. Oz, he and a phobia expert helped a young lady overcome her irrational fear of a very unusual creepy crawly.......

The Washington Post reports that Hughie Elbert Stover, chief of security at the Upper Big Branch mine and at two other Massey Energy subsidiaries, has been charged with lying to the FBI and obstructin...

(Image: Shutterstock) Now that we're half way through the university semester, I'm finding myself inundated with a lot of marking. Sometimes, I try to tackle this work at home, but being the skilled p...

Image: People burn pictures of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi inside the main prison of Gaddafi's forces in Benghazi February 28, 2011. Foreign powers accelerated efforts to help oust Gaddafi on Monday...

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is currently fighting extradition from the UK to Sweden over allegations of rape and sexual assault, has applied to trademark his name, the Guardian reports: The ...

I'vehad this little hatchet for a few weeks now. Seldom have I had a tool give me so much pleasure. I love to look at it as it sits by the fireplace. It makes me happy. And using it is a whole other h...

It's illegal to block public access to the Wisconsin State Capitol Building (See Article I, 4), but it appears that Governor Scott Walker is attempting to do that, anyway. Today, the Capitol has been ...

[Video Link] Superbrothers' Sword & Sworcery looks like a cool game for the iPad. Another video here. (Via baibai_matane)......

LibraryGoblin sez, "The Librarian in Black, Sarah Houghton-Jan, has posted this call for basic e-book user's rights. She's released it into the public domain and is encouraging people to spread it as...

Had a long layover in the Singapore airport the other day. What to do? Why, I visited the Fish Spa, of course, where for just S$30 (about US$23) I could let hundreds of hungry doctor fish feast on...

Do you know what this is? Science blogger Southern Fried Scientist found it in a cabinet in his laboratory. It's got a motor, which turns some kind of centrifuge, and a set of optical lenses, whi...

Propagandacritic.com is a fascinating site dedicated to explaining what makes propaganda propaganda, and getting people to think critically about the messages they see. It's run by Aaron Delwiche, a p...

So. That's the sound a koala makes. Huh. It's not really very cute, is it? But it does get the job done. Specifically, this is the call of the horny male koala—and this sound is such an eff...

On September 13, 2009, Malcolm Casadaban, a University of Chicago professor of genetics and cell biology, was taken by ambulance to a hospital and died just a few hours later. Cause of death: The Pla...

A Sahrawi woman takes a picture with her mobile phone during the 35th anniversary celebrations of their independence movement for Western Sahara from Morocco, in Tifariti, southwestern Algeria Februar...

"A massive propaganda campaign by the South Korean military drew an ominous warning from North Korea on Sunday, with Pyongyang saying that it would fire across the border at anyone sending helium ball...

The last U.S. World War I veteran, Frank Buckles, died this Sunday at age 110. Buckles "died peacefully in his home of natural causes," according to a family statement.......

Here is the video. But you don't need to watch the video, even, just meditate upon this still.......

Photographer Anthony Citrano captured this shot of the Hollywood sign, with bands of snow visible in the sky above, as a rainbow shines in the foreground. Snow and small hail fell in Los Angeles this ...

Last week I was excited to announce the birth of Coffee Common, a project of coffee enthusiasts (one of them being me) coming together to improve the experience of coffee for both industry and consum...

"Mystery Machine AT-AT" is one in a series of pop-culture AT-AT redesigns from Seven_Hundred; others in the series include the Dukes of Hazzard's General Lee and Quentin Tarantino's "Pussy Wagon." My...

"Piracy is the Future of Television" is Abigail De Kosnik's Convergence Culture Consortium paper on the many ways in which piracy is preferable to buying legitimate online TV options. None of these a...

As Bruce Sterling notes, this manifesto of the Chinese Jasmine revolution (translated by Human Rights in China), "sounds almost identical to the gripes that the impoverished American populace might m...

Character designer Tubbypaws has fallen down the Minecraft productivity singularity and has emerged bearing a downloadable, printable, buildable Minecraft papercraft design for your delectation. I wo...