Articles by BoingBoing from September 2011

Here's Todd Coleman, exec food editor for Saveur, explaining a 10-second percussive method for separating garlic peels from the cloves. Handy! (Thanks, Fipi Lele)...

A large handwritten poster (purportedly) from a laid-off employee of the defunct bookselling chain Borders entitled "Things we never told you: Ode to a bookstore death," reveals several key truths of ...

[Video Link] This Mike Wallace interview is a beautiful performance by Dali. From Open Culture: In 1958, [Mike] Wallace tried to demystify "the enigma that is Salvador Dali,  and it didnt go terr...

The TSA and airport police in Indianapolis saved the world from total annihilation this week by seizing a breast cancer patients medical marijuana. Indiana police seize California woman's medical mari...

Being Elmo is a documentary on the live of Kevin Clash, who was raised on Sesame Street and dreamed of being a Muppeteer with Jim Henson. He went straight from high school to New York to throw himself...

Nicholas Rougeux made this fabulous Menger sponge fractal out of mini Post-its, which he swears by for erecting fractals: Each Post-It was torn into 16 equal squares, then folded into units and assemb...

The Ig Nobel Awards honor scientific research that is simultaneously silly-sounding and thought provoking. This years' awards ceremony, in Boston, is sold out. But you can watch the whole thing here, ...

A broken-hearted person in Heather's neighbourhood is building a boat. He wants your help, your garage, and your company....

Doc Pop shares the news that our mutual friend Amit Gupta (founder of the terrific online photography shop Photojojo, and lots of other cool photography-related projects) has been diagnosed with leuke...

The group of merry populist pranksters The Yes Men have a Kickstarter going to raise funds for Occupy Wall Street Journal, "a four-page broadsheet about the 99% represented at Liberty Plaza." (NYO)...

Science Now reports on a project from David Walt (Tufts) and George Whitesides (Harvard) to come up with a steganographic text-encoding scheme that uses bacteria to encode messages and selective antib...

Nice one, MyGayDads! (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

Old meets new in Chennai: "The sari with a pocket pre-stitched and embroidered, appearing just below the waist on the left that can carry a mobile phone or even the stray iPod or lipstick." (NYT)...

As Keith Dawson says, "People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored" by Amazon Silk. Chris Espinosa has an analysis here and Joe Brockmeier at Re...

"A Terry Richardson photo of Jay-Z and Thom Yorke dressed in tuxedos eating Swedish fish while wearing Hulk hands"—one of an infinite number of images that would be awesome, if they existed. (vi...

"I am gravely serious when I write this - if I catch someone not replacing the milk, or at least, in the case where the downstairs store has close [sic] already, not sending an email to the office so ...

Derp. "A Japanese airline says one of its jets nose-dived and rolled almost upside down earlier this month because the co-pilot hit the wrong controls while trying to open the cockpit door so the capt...

"Men of the Stacks" is a beefcake calendar featuring hunky librarians, with proceeds to the It Gets Better project. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

Ken Layne at Wonkette points to this provocative video. Not sure of its true provenance, or who's doing what, but it's gone viral....

Ken Layne at Wonkette points to this provocative video. Not entirely sure of its true provenance, or who's doing what, but it's definitely struck a popular chord, and gone viral. I remember protesting...

The activists behind Occupy Wall Street plan to demonstrate Friday on the streets outside the New York City police department's operations center. They're adding "excessive police force against protes...

Now here's some good news for movie-goers: Sony has informed theatrical exhibitors that it will no longer pay for 3D glasses, and will now expect the cinemas to pay the $0.50/customer for the specs, p...

Check back here tonight to watch a live broadcast of the Ig Nobel Awards, starting at 7:05 Eastern time....

What does a scientist do all day? The Smithsonian's Matthew Carrano explains his job as a paleontologist, what he hopes to discover, and why he made a career out of dinosaurs....

On April 6, 1909, Robert Peary claimed to be the first person to reach the North Pole. Of course, there were some issues with his claim. For one thing, Inuit had almost certainly been through the area...

Above and below: models at the Alternative Hair Show in Moscow's Kremlin, September 28, 2011. (REUTERS/Denis Sinyakov)...

Love this Ian Leino Red Shirt t-shirt design, whose Star Trek insignia bears a frank and unmistakable icon depicting the fate of all redshirts in the landing party. (via Making Light)...

Dan Ruff shot this wonderful photograph of structural engineers rappelling down the face of the Washington Monument to inspect possible earthquake damage. More shots here. Shared in the Boing Boing Fl...

Here's a (wonderful) turn-up for the books. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (a stellar organization) has assumed the trademark for the Comics Code Seal, once a symbol of self-censorship in the comic...

Thanks so much to Bryan Jones for submitting this awesome photo of a sunset you see as our background today to the Boing Boing Flickr pool!...

In Mexico, where violence seems to be escalating daily, the nation's National Defense Secretary today warned citizens of fake flyers distributed in narco-plagued Monterrey that invite concerned locals...

The 7 Stages of Robot Replacement 1) A robot/computer cannot possibly do what I do. 2) OK, it can do a lot, but it can't do everything I do. 3) OK, it can do everything I do, except it needs me when i...

The Financial Times, which is justly famed for being one the few newspapers that manages to charge for an online version and attract substantial numbers of subscribers, pulled its app from the Apple A...

I was on Shira Lazar's What's Trending on Wednesday. Joining me as a guest on the couch was the delightful Romany Malco (check out his Tijuana Jackson character sketches). Today at 11am PST What's Tre...

In early 2011, Felisa Wolfe-Simon published a scientific paper purporting to show evidence that bacteria from California's Mono Lake could, if pressed, live without the essential element phosphorous, ...

In this telling BBC clip, a news presenter is rendered virtually speechless as a stock-trader explains that for traders like him, a Eurozone crash would be a godsend, since someone always makes money ...

Update: Alert readers point that that this gentleman isn't a trader, he's a self-described "attention-seeker" Update 2: The Yes Men deny responsibility: "If youd like to see the human face of the huma...

Image: From the Onion, a photoshopped image of John Boehner holding a child hostage on the steps of Congress. A series of tweets related to this article caused a stir today. An oddly presented tweet f...

This is a seriously incredible story. If you did not already kind of love Carl Sagan, and think of him as a sort of benevolent hippie grandpa, you totally will now. And the message here is seriously s...

One thing that strikes me about silly "iPad Killer" headlines is that it's surely not good SEO. People don't go searching for an "iPad Killer", they google "iPad alternative" or "best Android tablet",...

On the Shoulders of Eastern Giants: The Forgotten Contributions of Medieval Physicists is a webinar, happening Thursday, October 20th. It's hosted by the Institute of Physics, and will focus on the hi...

Writing in The Nation, Allison Kilkenny offers an angry rebuttal to Ginia Bellafante's NYT article on the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, which paints the protesters as "scatterbrained, sometimes bo...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our daily delivery of blog headlines to your inbox. Mr. Jones' best-selling The Accurate watch is now also a 9.8"-diameter clock. The hour han...

Biella Coleman and Michael Ralph write a long, nuanced rebuttal of Joseph Menn's recent FT article on Anonymous. Coleman, an academic who has done some fabulous work studying hackers, Anonymous and ot...

The American Civil Liberties Union has unearthed a Department of Justice document called Retention Periods of Major Cellular Service Providers (PDF), which documents the length of time that America's ...

Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down, the latest album from blues/roots legend Ry Cooder, impressario of the Buena Vista Social Club, is an unabashedly left-wing album in the tradition of the great titles o...

This undated old Grad Rapids Milk ad features a bit of dialogue from Minnie and Mickey Mouse that either contains a rude double-entendre or is a relic of an era of unbelievable naivet. Either way: sni...

The Ig Nobel Awards bestow honors on scientific research that is simultaneously silly-sounding, and utterly fascinating. This year's awards will be presented tonight, in Boston, and the show is sold o...

A spacecraft named Tiangong-1, or Heavenly Palace, is set to blast off Thursday from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu province. "The launch will mark the start of China's first spacecr...

I've just returned to podcasting after a summer holiday, kicking it off with my story "The Brave Little Toaster" (part of a series of stories that share titles with famous stories, in this case, the D...

Instructables user Blightdesign has developed a method for rubberizing paper origami creations by dipping them in Plastidip, using them for Christmas tree ornaments. This HOWTO explains how to rubberi...

I've reviewed the Settlers of Catan and the Settlers of Catan Portable Edition. The nice thing about the portable edition's board is that it's not wont to fall apart like the standard edition's is. SJ...

Still think that something other than a mere plane crash brought down the World Trade Center towers? According to a Norwegian materials expert, you may be right. Just ... you know ... not in the way m...

A small Estonian study is offering some hints that our brains could be even weirder than we'd imagined. Researchers found that magnetic pulses directed at a certain part of the frontal cortex affected...

In this Pecha Kucha presentation from Christchurch, New Zealand, Zoologist Mike Dickison talks about where a certain large, yellow, flightless bird fits into the tree of life. Via Erin Kane...

From BrodyQat, whose infamous desaturated Santa outfit made her the toast of the Internet, advice on how to make yourself a monochrome costume: You have to think in shades of gray, not black & wh...

Hartley Hoskins is a geophysicist and communications engineer who has worked for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute since 1958. Last month, he gave me a behind-the-scenes tour of the places where ...

Couple in shock after drug raid: krqe.com Acting on a "citizen's tip," a team of assault-weapon toting DEA agents were denied entry into a married couple's home in New Mexico. "There came this huge ba...

You can't really get upset with Harvard man Mitt Romney for disparaging Obama for being a Harvard man. After all, Romney is just reciting words on a card that someone (probably a Harvard grad) has ins...

[Video Link] "The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that brought down the financial world." Doc Zone, a documentary series produced by CBC Television, is now ai...

There are things you can't buy at Radioshack. There is not always an App for that. Sometimes, the only way to make something work is to build it yourself. Nobody knows that better than scientists. Fro...

"We asked Andy Warhol to paint a picture of a Pioneer high fidelity receiver. He can seem to finish. He says he gets so wrapped up up in the beautiful sound of the subject that he can't concentrate on...

Here's a first: a nuclear power plant in Virginia shut down by the earthquake last August was effectively "switched off" not by a loss of power, as previously thought, but by the actual seismic vibrat...

While working on a story about citizen journalism at the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York for PBS affiliate WNET Thirteen, reporter John Farley was arrested, along with the demonstrators whose ...

Giant panda cubs lie in a crib at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Chengdu, Sichuan province September 26, 2011. Picture taken September 26, 2011. (REUTERS/China Daily)...

Artist Mike Stimpson recreates iconic photographic images in LEGO. (via Russ Marshalek)...

The New York Times photography department is really on a roll with this deliciously absurd photo of a chicken....

This Massachusetts cat with two faces has become the world's longest surviving so called "janus" feline at 12 years of age. The cat, who is named Frank and Louie, has two mouths, two noses and three e...

I love these "polar ice" molds from the Japanese site Monos; they resemble penguins and polar bears perched on icebergs, and are balanced so they stay upright in your drink. (via Super Punch)...

[Video Link]. From a longer appreciation of Any Rooney on Woot. The veteran television commenter, whose complaints and annoyances somehow comforted the rest of us, will announce this weekend on 60 Min...

At a General Services Administration building, a toilet exploded and injured a woman so badly, she had to go to the hospital. Things have since improved. It's not funny if you're the one on the toilet...

"Nairobi, Kenya," a photo from Boing Boing reader Biketripper shared in the BB Flickr Pool. On the bikeflaps of one rider, "A Strong Enemy Is Better Than a Weak Friend."...

Tim Rogers's essay "Who killed videogames? (a ghost story)" is one of the most interesting pieces of technology reporting I've ever read. It's a long (long!) account of the mechanics of "social games"...

There are a number of delightful little easter eggs baked in to our redesign by Boing Boing's managing editor, Rob Beschizza. Among them, a section we're calling B-side, "a place where we'll post unwi...

Christopher Jonassen photographed well-used frying pans that resemble alien planets. The series is titled "Devour." (via @wonderosity) Related, the "'Fried Egg' nebula cracks open rare hyper giant sta...

ThinkGeek's got a set of funny Portal 2 warning-sign coasters, which may serve as a minatory presence in your home for careless visitors who leave rings on the furniture. (via Red Ferret)...

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[Video Link] Richard Metzger says: American Juggalo, a new short film by Brooklyn-based director, Sean Dunne explores (without judgement or editorializing) the distinctive youth culture of the Juggalo...

When I was very young and I'd watch my dad watching his favorite TV show M*A*S*H, his default facial state was wide-eyed with a frozen open-mouthed grin. I remember asking him why he kept his face lik...

I wanted to be outraged by this BBC News story about beauty parlors in Beirut, Lebanon that cater to girls as young as four. Then I googled "child beauty pageants," and was reminded of an even more ou...

Video Link. A Joe Sabia joint. Performed by Jane Lui, Michael T., and Jonathan Batiste....

Mark recently posted the magnificent time-lapse video taken from the International Space Station orbiting the Earth. Here is that same video with its magnificence further amplified by an appropriately...

If there's one thing I love, it's irising mechanisms. And if there's another thing I love, it's thick-framed glasses. That's two things I love, and as you've probably guessed, there's someone who's co...

On September 7, Amy Crehore posted the two images above on her blog, Little Hokum Rag. She wrote: Top photograph (an autochrome) was taken by Leon Busy around 1915 in French Indochina. Bottom image is...

This is the Kindle Fire. It's $200. Yes, it runs Flash. "Playing with Fire: Amazon Launches a $200 Tablet, Slashes Kindle Prices" (Wired)...

This is the Kindle Fire. It's $200. Yes, it runs Flash. Kindle Fire (Amazon) "Playing with Fire: Amazon Launches a $200 Tablet, Slashes Kindle Prices" (Wired)...

[Video Link] "Music video for the Berlin-based band Rats Live On No Evil Star [a palindrome]. This music video has been made entirely of images from old comics found on the internet and animated in AE...

Tom took a pile of books left over from a jumble sale and made a bookshelf out of them: So many books are thrown away each year, and although recyclable, the emotional bond that is attached to books s...

Good news - Bob Flynn has a new Brain comic strip at Heeby Jeeby....

Tommy Edison, the blind film critic last featured here demonstrating an "accessible" ATM explains the inaccessible design of US money and the difficulties it presents for people with vision problems....

We just watched Penn & Teller's Magic and Mystery Tour, their 2003 documentary on traditional magic in China, India and Egypt, and really enjoyed it. Penn and Teller resolve to track down perform...

If you love Japanese ice-spheres in your booze, but don't want to spring for a pricey bespoke machine to accomplish the trick, you can always pick up one of Muji's silicone ice-ball molds, a steal at ...

The Bad Lip Reading series of YouTube video synch up alternative dialog for speeches and other footage, using words that match the lip movements. The effect is hilarious -- witness this alternative ma...

In this video, a Danish comedian does a convulsively funny routine about the swimming rules posted by Norwegian beaches. The subtitles were done by someone whose English is a little imperfect, but com...

CA$HCATS.BIZ, via demarko...

Sam Gellman's tourist photos from North Korea's Mass Games are wonderful and weird studies in repetition at scale, where all sorts of pomp and spectacle are performed with thousands of identically dre...

The open Android ecosystem keeps on getting more interesting. Austen Dicken, a key developer on the CyanogenMod project, is making great strides in porting VLC Player, the best, most versatile media p...

Bunnie Huang blogs his recent Open Hardware Summit talk on the future of open hardware. Bunnie says that open hardware stands to grow from a niche in the global hardware market to an important segment...

Photo: A relative reacts after his arrival at a crime scene where a man was shot dead in Acapulco two days ago. According to local media, unidentified gunmen opened fire on a DVD and music salesman. T...

[Video Link]. From the Cartoon Network show MAD (via @evanatwired/@waxpancake)....

[Video Link]. (via @antderosa)...

Dan Nguyen shot this photo and shared it in the Boing Boing Flickr pool today. Here's a related shot. He explains: Hundreds of pilots from United/Continental showed up in full dress and made a show in...

Video Link. "Video games delivered to your door! What more could you ask for!?" (NSFW for repeated use of the word "vagina." Thanks, Jesse Thorn!)...

"The Fewer the Better: Number of Goals and Savings Behavior," (PDF) a study from University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business on consumer savings strategies, concludes that it's better to have a ...

Here's a neat gallery of Curiosity as Art (Facebook, may prompt for login). Images of the next Mars rover created by space-fans. Shown here, "What if Warhol had painted Curiosity?," Used with permissi...

Here is what authorities are describing as a "football-shaped" bundle of marijuana, confiscated by the Santa Cruz Metro Taskforce in Arizona. Mexican drug traffickers routinely toss packages like this...

At least 15 people are reported to have died in a still-widening outbreak of listeria food poisoning tied to contaminated cantaloupes, according to state health officials in the US. Dozens more have b...

This video from the BBC's "The Real Hustle" show a re-enactment of what is purportedly a real con whereby a fingersmith pretending to be a tourist approaches a mark with a large-lensed SLR around his ...

Here is a video demo for Pet a Kitty, a new iOS app. You pet the virtual cat, and it purrs, stretches, and miaows accordingly. Like a cat cafe for your iPad! It's not out yet, but I'll certainly be do...

In this clip from QI, the talk/quiz/comedy-show that Stephen Fry hosts, Fry asks the participants "where one percent of Americans can be found." The correct answer is prison, and the contests proceed ...

In this sweet, melancholy, raucous video, several of Jim Henson's Muppeteers perform Henson's favorite songs at his 1990 memorial service. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

Dig the video for Wooden Shjips' "Lazy Bones," available on their new album West, out now from Thrill Jockey. The band's sound is an epic trip induced by 1960s psych, avant-garde minimalism, and the f...

"The doctor felt no vital signs, ran tests and pronounced Rosa Celestrino de Assis dead. She was taken to the morgue and spent at least two hours in a plastic body bag. "'I went to give my mum one las...

Radley Balko shared this amazing photo in his Morning Links....

[Video Link] He must've been coached. (Via Dangerous Minds)...

About one-third of sun-like stars are predicted to have at least one terrestrial planet in a habitable zone, says California Institute of Technology astronomer Wesley Traub after studying data from th...

About one-third of sun-like stars are predicted to have at least one terrestrial planet in a habitable zone, says California Institute of Technology astronomer Wesley Traub after studying data from th...

Glitch, the whimsical free-to-play MMO game from Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, is now open to the public. Glitch's developer team includes Katamari Damacy creator creator Keita Takahashi, and...

On Saturday night, some friends and I visited a collector of rare 78s and he played this delightfully raunchy 1936 tune "Get 'Em From The Peanut Man (Hot Nuts)" by Lil Johnson. Another one of Lil's lo...

On Saturday night, some friends and I visited a collector of rare 78s and he played this delightfully raunchy 1936 tune "Get 'Em From The Peanut Man (Hot Nuts)" by Lil Johnson. Another one of Lil's lo...

Caving is one of my weirder hobbies. But spending time underground has introduced me to a fascinating array of tools. This includes one of my favorite possessions: the incredibly durable waterproof ro...

Back in the Nixon administration, George Bush (the elder) congratulated family planning advocates on all their successes: As United States Ambassador to the United Nations under the Nixon Administrati...

I'm not surprised that Ryan Cohn, who co-hosts The Science Channel's "Oddities," and I have very similar taste in decor. Above is his dining room. Below, his living room mantel. The lovely photos are ...

When you smoke a blunt, you are responsible for two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. At least according to a study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The same study, by energy analyst Evan...

[Video Link, via blogdelnarco] Above, a video released on September 24 by a purported counter-cartel vigilante group in Mexico identified as "Mata Zetas," or "Zetas Killers," which vows to kill member...

[Video Link, via blogdelnarco] Above, a video released on September 24 by a group in Mexico identified as "Mata Zetas," or "Zetas Killers." In the video, they claim to be a counter-cartel vigilante fo...

Love this Perry Bible Fellowship strip on the celestio-centric view of human life....

Nick Sayers is flying his math flag with this geometrically precise haircut where "the acute angles meet in groups of five, six, or seven, depending on the curvature. In the flatter areas, they meet i...

In developing countries, a new, inexpensive treatment allows nurses to spot pre-cancerous lesions on a woman's cervix and remove them—without needing a medical lab, and without surgery. It has h...

Oldupai Gorge in Tanzania is kind of the human race's institute of higher learning. It was one of the places where our ancient ancestors congregated and changed. And it's become famous for the quantit...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is celebrating the White House's openness to public petitions with a plea to update the nation's electronic privacy law, which last saw major revision in 1986, and w...

Several weeks ago, a pre-teen girl fishing in Tom Bass Park in Houston, Texas hooked a piranha. According to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, it was likely an illegal pet that its own tired of...

[Video Link]"It is unlikely that you will experience in your lifetime all that you will see in The Carpetbaggers." From Aplantage4's review: The film is such an outrageous mix of Hollywood melodrama, ...

From the archives of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Postal Museum: In the 1930s, U.S. postal officials tried different ways of moving the mail. One technique was called "skyhooking, ...

[Video Link]. "The Shatner Project cameras go into the studio as William Shatner lays down the final vocals on his Iron Man rendition for his new album "Seeking Major Tom" from Cleopatra Records." (th...

The parents of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, who was found dead at their home earlier this month, say Jamey's teen sister was the subject of further abuse at a school function immediately after Jameys ...

From the Netherlands' National Archive, a 1938 photo taken in New York City of a Colt revolver that has been modified to shoot a picture with every trigger pull. Presumably most of those photos are of...

[Video Link] I enjoyed this excerpt of a debate between Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, and Asa Hutchinson, former DEA Administrator. The debate was sponsored by the S...

Some extremely awesome engineers will be rappelling down the side of the Washington Monument today, to inspect it for any structural damage that may have happened during last month's earthquake....

I don't know why this never occurred to me before, but today on Twitter, several people who are attending the 2011 Accessibility Summit pointed out that traffic lights aren't, traditionally, accessibl...

Remember last fall, when Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry hosted one lucky lady to live in the museum for a month? (She got to sleep in the U-Boat, you guys.) The Museum is doing the same thin...

The Copyright Alliance, a lobby group for the entertainment industry, has been given permission to set up an "educational display" in the Senate Russell building rotunda, while the Senate is debating ...

Here's the video from the talk I gave last week at the O'Reilly Strata conference on "big data" in NYC. The talk is called "Designing for Human Sensors, Not Human Barcodes," and it talks about the phi...

Todd von Bastiaans' Pancake Floor Pillows (with butter-pat accent pillows) are the perfect way of filling the void created by your lack of foodstuff-like housewares with JPEG artifacts. $600 for the s...

Back in 2009, I reviewed "Sa-ba-da-OW!", a wonderful, eclectic album from Gypsophilia, an indie band out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. I've just finished a day's listening to their new album, "Constellatio...

Art Lebedev's Space Invaders cards use different arcade game sprites to denote the suits, and have a great, heavily aliased 8-bit design for the card-backs. (via Oh Gizmo)...

On September 13th, the Iranian government began blocking The Onion Router (TOR), a system for evading network censorship. On September 14th, the TOR project changed its code so that it wasn't blocked ...

The UK Labour party's conference is underway in Liverpool, and party bigwigs are presenting their proposals for reinvigorating Labour after its crushing defeat in the last election. The stupidest of t...

The disambiguation page for "Disambiguation". (via Kottke)...

Stelios Haji-Ioannou, founder of EasyJet, is set to launch a new airline to compete with his old company. The new airline will be called FastJet. Stelios sold controlling interest in the business ten ...

[video link] via @pourmecoffee....

It's not enough to simply log out of Facebook: web tracking cookies persist until they're explicitly deleted from your browser. (via @newtonmark)...

The State Assembly of Veracruz has created a law that makes it a crime to use Twitter or other social networks to undermine public order. "It is the first law of its kind in Mexico, but most likely no...

Susan Crawford in Bloomberg on why the FCC should find BART in the wrong: "As far as anyone knows, no government agency in the U.S. had cut off general-purpose communications before BART took this ste...

"The Guardian has learned that the officer, named by activists as deputy inspector Anthony Bologna, stands accused of false arrest and civil rights violations in a claim brought by a protester involve...

Last night's edition of the CBS News program 60 Minutes included an extensive feature on the anti-terror capabilities of New York City's police. In the segment, Commissioner Ray Kelly claimed the NYPD...

Last night's edition of the CBS News program 60 Minutes included an extensive feature on the anti-terror capabilities of New York City's police. In the segment, Commissioner Ray Kelly told Scott Pelle...

Retired Frito-Lay executive Arch Clark West has died at age 97. The marketing man (shown at left in a family photo) is credited with having invented Doritos, the best-selling American snack chip. "His...

Here's the video from the talk I gave last week at the O'Reilly Strata conference on "big data" in NYC. The talk is called "Designing for Human Sensors, Not Human Barcodes," and it talks about the phi...

Photo by Boing Boing reader Steve O., shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool: A protester facing off with NYC's finest. Because of some obscure law protesters are not allowed to wear masks when protest...

Quote of the year? "Julian messed with my pigs." That's from the lulziest life-on-bail profile yet of Julian Assange by the NYT's David Carr. Ellingham Hall, as it happens, is a working farm. "Assange...

Oh, this'll end well. From Reuters: "The presence of former felons in the business of creating businesses is an extreme example of vulnerability in corporate America. Nevada has spawned a thriving ind...

A native Bolivian from the Isiboro Secure indigenous territory and national park, known by its Spanish acronym TIPNIS, clashes with police as he and dozens of others break away from police custody to ...

In the Wall Street Journal today, this extraordinary photograph of a Pennsylvania woman lighting water on fire as it pours out of her kitchen sink faucet. State regulators have attributed the contamin...

Look at these cute photos of hummingbirds in a smuggler's underwear....

Here's a marijuana pipe made from legos and aluminum foil....

Just in time for Rosh Hashanah: "The Dead Sea Scrolls are now online; a project of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, powered by Google technology." Vide Link....

A man who is accused of holding six women as sex slaves in a dungeon for two years and killing two of them has been terminated from his government post and stripped of his Communist Party membership....

AP: " More than 11,000 kindergartners missed at least one vaccine in 2010 because their parents decided to forgo inoculation." That's the state's highest rate of declined vaccines since 1978, the year...

Amanda Vissell says: "This is round 2 for posters for girls. I got down to basics a little more this time, imagining what we all need to see when we wake up in the morning. To know its not just okay t...

John Schwartz in the New York Times writes about the case of Thomas Haynesworth (shown at left), a Virginia man wrongly convicted of multiple rapes in the mid-1980s and recently proven innocent by DNA...

Winter is coming. And Scientific American's Bora Zivkovik has a detailed explanation of the biological basics behind seasonal affective disorder....

This amazing photo, by Cambridge biological sciences professor John H. Brackenbury, is a highly-commended runner up in the British Wildlife Photography Awards. Via Alex Wild, who thinks Brackenbury wa...

[Video Link] A new iPad app for "The Magic of Reality," Richard Dawkins' new book about fact-backed, science-based, worldly wonders, is out today in the iTunes store. The book in digital and paper for...

When you're trying to figure out what to eat for dinner, why not eat like Damon Runyon, who specialized in documenting rounders, con-artists, hustlers, show-people, and loan sharks? Apparently, that m...

Smithsonian posted a list of "The Top 10 Books Lost To Time" by authors like Shakespeare, Homer, Melville, Plath, Hemingway, and an unknown monk explorer. Inventio Fortunata In the 14th century, a Fra...

The NYPD officer caught on video macing peaceful female "Occupy Wall Street" protesters at close range, then "slinking away," has been identified. And doxed by Anonymous. "Before you commit atrocities...

The Post-it Note Diaries: 20 Stories of Youthful Abandon, Embarrassing Mishaps, and Everyday Adventure, edited and illustrated by Arthur Jones, contains stories written by John Hodgman, Kristen Schaal...

Smithsonian has a neat feature on the Dahomey "Amazons"—an elite troop of female soldiers who fought in the 18th and 19th century for the independent African country of Dahomey (it's now Benin)....

Here's video of an impressive waterspout, one of many, that formed over Lake Michigan on Saturday. (National Weather Service meteorologist Samuel) Shea said the climatological culprit was a big upper ...

Without Lord Kelvin, there would have been no D-Day. There's some very cool science history in the September issue of Physics Today, centering around a collection of analog computers, developed in the...

A 7-year-old boy in Chilly-Mazarin, France was digging in the ground behind his school when he unearthed a jar of real human fingers (not seen below). Police believe they have identified the owner of ...

[Video Link] A 22-year-old Dan Akyrod screen tests for Saturday Night Live in 1975. He delivers news and commercials in a number of different voices, ad-libbing hilarious nonsense the whole time. Dang...

[Video Link] A 22-year-old Dan Akyrod screen tests for Saturday Night Live in 1975. He delivers news and commercials in a number of different voices, ad-libbing hilarious nonsense the whole time. Dang...

My son (and I) would be much more likely to eat squash if we knew it was SAS Squash brand. Photo by Jason Tester. Also available, Yeti's Best fruits and vegetables....

In a very cool video from Chemical and Engineering News, Art Olson of the Scripps Research Institute explains how chemists in his lab can predict how well the drugs they develop will work. Olson's lab...

Andre Torrez was inspired to build a Twitter add-on service that allows you to track what happens to the accounts you report for spamming. Later, Spam! remembers the spam reports you've made and keeps...

BB contributor Jess Hemerly turned 30 last weekend, so she had a Logan's Run themed birthday party! She made this fantastic origami Carrousel centerpiece, complete with a blinking LED in the center, a...

[Video Link] "A large white pitbull has been quarantined at the Providence Animal Shelter, after it escaped from its home and bit three children, then busted into a barber shop and wreaked havoc." The...

[Video Link]Above: I created a speeded-up version of the original video referenced by Biotv, who says: "Uruguayan striker for RCD Espanyol Walter Pandiani is speaking at a press conference I don't kno...

Cartoonist Pete Emslie complains bitterly about the dull blue tinge of contemporary movies in comparison with the vibrant Technicolor palette of yesteryear. It's bad enough when horror, sci-fi and fan...

In Gweek 018, Boing Boings managing editor Rob Beschizza and Kotakus editorial director Joel Johnson join me in a discussion about comic books, video games, books, LEGO, and more. Rob and Joel talk a...

Rathika Sitsabaiesan, a Canadian Member of Parliament had to swap outfits for her official profile page photo. But she's still smiling about it! Cover-up in Canadian Parliament...

I browsed Francesco Pittau and Bernadette Gervais's That's Disgusting! at the Brooklyn Book Festival last weekend, and found myself paging through simple, funny illustrations of a little girl doing ab...

Jesse Anderson set out to recreate every single work of Shakespeare at the same time by means of virtual monkeys that are simulated on Amazon's cloud computing platform. One million virtual monkeys cr...

Eric Hines' beautiful photos of the stars at night have won much acclaim. But his other landscape photos are no less spectacular....

Eric's beautiful photos of the stars at night have won much acclaim. But his other landscape photos are no less spectacular....

Sebastian Bergne's Lego greenhouse isn't merely an enormous structure made from transparent legos*, it's also a functional greenhouse that apparently uses legos as a growing medium. LEGO commissioned ...

The ROFLCon Summit, a celebration of internet culture, is to be held next weekend in Portland, Oregon. There, I'll be joining a fantastic cast of panelists that includes Chris Poole, Andy Baio, Sherro...

Want to be a successful blogger? Every new endeavor requires a period of ascetic dedication. You must write a minimum of 1,000 words a day. Some bloggers make this their ceiling, but many make it thei...

Boing Boing reader Brian won the eBay auction for a device touted as the "World's most irritating musical instrument". He finds it not particularly irritating at all: "an incredible waste of $81.95, b...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency was formed in 2008 amid the housing panic. Among other functions, it is the regulatory organ overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It has not escaped notice that th...

From Craig S Wright, vice president of Global Institute for Cybersecurity + Research, a look at the use of SCADA systems that are connected to the Internet. You probably remember SCADA from the s...

Oona Kivela, winner of the I Pole World Cup, and Grazzy Brugner, organizer of Miss Pole Dance Brazil, held an impromptu dance-battle at Rio's Up Dance Studio, performing crazy, acrobatic routines that...

Protesters at the demonstrations in and around New York City's Financial District are being met with increasingly harsh police response. A growing number of videos found on YouTube document clashes be...

Lee Wei Chen, a Masters student in design at Kingston University, created this hybrid washing-machine/arcade game that only washes your clothes if you're winning: I realised that the skills I had deve...

In Airshark: Detecting Non-WiFi RF Devices using Commodity WiFi Hardware (PDF), researchers from U Wisconsin (Madison) document a firmware for WiFi access points that can detect and dynamically adjust...

Luke Hart created these rubber bookshelves for The Sculpture House. They have the delightful impracticality of all the everyday objects crafted from rubber that appear in old Warner Brothers cartoons,...

Eh'husl ("Little Wedding House") is the "world's smallest hotel," located in Amberg, just north of Munich. It dates to an 18th century ordinance that required couples to own a house before they got ma...

Eh'husl ("Little Wedding House") is the "world's smallest hotel," located in Amberg, north of Munich. It dates to an 18th century ordinance that required couples to own a house before they got married...

Police arrested dozens of demonstrators today at the ongoing "Occupy Wall Street" protests in New York City....

In the northern Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo, police found the decapitated of a woman today with a "narco manta" (a handwritten drug cartel message that typically accompanies corpses) which say...

In the northern Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo, police found the decapitated body of a woman today with a message saying she was killed because she posted information about cartel activities on a...

From a recent trip to Vegas, a clandestine photo of a directive to employees at a boutique in Caesar's Palace from a crazy, crazy control freak. As this is Fall...no more flip flops. You cannot wear S...

"Plunging over Niagara falls in a burning barrel."—NASA astronaut Ron Garan describes what returning home from the International Space Station feels like. (via @pourmecoffee)...

"Plunging over Niagara falls in a burning barrel."—NASA astronaut Ron Garan describes what returning home from the International Space Station feels like. (via @pourmecoffee)...

(photo: Demonstrators wearing "Anynomous" masks protest in Madrid. REUTERS.) Joseph Menn has a must-read analysis piece in the Financial Times today, mercifully freed from the paywall, about why the w...

Kevin Owocki's TOSAmend is a provocative browser applet that allows you amend the (up-to-now) non-negotiable terms of service you had to "agree" to in order to access many services online. The applet ...

Kevin Owocki's TOSAmend is a provocative browser applet that allows you amend the (up-to-now) non-negotiable terms of service you had to "agree" to in order to access many services online. The applet ...

Chris Hayes has a new show on MSNBC, "Up with Chris Hayes," and the first week has been pretty great. In the clip above, he illustrates the bait-and-switch trope being tossed around by conservative pu...

Chris Hayes has a new show on MSNBC, "Up with Chris Hayes," and the first week has been pretty great. In the clip above, he illustrates the bait-and-switch trope being tossed around by conservative pu...

"Dee rolls a d20, and gets a critical." Photo:, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (2.0) image from darkestpaisleyphotos's photostream (aka Kate Eburg)....

Ape Lad reinterprets the unforgettable trio of "beer run guys" mug shots featured in Pesco's post yesterday....

Ape Lad reinterprets the unforgettable trio of "beer run guys" mug shots featured in Pesco's post yesterday....

Delfina Delettrez, a designer in Rome, made this beautiful, polished skeletal bracelet (though I couldn't locate it at her site, which autoplays music) (be warned). Delfina Delettrez...

[Video Link] I'm a year late in posting this, but I like Ed Emberly's work so much that I don't care. My kids and I use Ed Emberley's instructional drawing books all the time. He's brilliant....

Having moved Boing Boing to WordPress, the old design hung loose on its bones. It's time for an update! The revision is simpler than before, with a smaller bandwidth "footprint", less clutter, and mor...

Blogto's Derek Flack went spelunking in the Toronto Archives for photos of old computers in situ, from the days when installing a monsterscale computing engine was cause for bringing in the photograph...

Blogto's Derek Flack went spelunking in the Toronto Archives for photos of old computers in situ, from the days when installing a monsterscale computing engine was cause for bringing in the photograph...

Boing Boing readers following the violent convulsions of the drug war in Mexico, and fans of the AMC narco-drama Breaking Bad, will likely find these photos from a secret Mexican meth lab to be of int...

A forensic worker walks at the city's morgue past the recovered bodies of people that had been dumped around Veracruz September 22, 2011. At least 11 more bodies were dumped around the Mexican city of...

A forensic worker walks at the city's morgue past the recovered bodies of people that had been dumped around Veracruz September 22, 2011. At least 11 more bodies were dumped around the Mexican city of...

[Video Link] Here's John Hodgman's excellent presentation at World Maker Faire last weekend: "Are Magic Tricks Really Magic?" It is adapted from his forthcoming book, That Is All....

[Click this video link to see John's entire presentation] Here's John Hodgman's excellent presentation at World Maker Faire last weekend: "Are Magic Tricks Really Magic?" It is adapted from his forthc...

"I hope that Ill be able to work for the Department of Defense. From what I hear, theyre pretty good at what I want to do."— Cody Andrew Kretsinger, the LulzSec/Anonymous suspect arrested this w...

Pssst! Hey, kid. Wanna buy a Yahoo?...

Pssst! Hey, kid. Wanna buy a Yahoo?...

"The FCC has finally officially published long-delayed rules prohibiting cable, DSL and wireless internet companies from blocking websites and requiring them to disclose how they slow down or throttle...

"The FCC has finally officially published long-delayed rules prohibiting cable, DSL and wireless internet companies from blocking websites and requiring them to disclose how they slow down or throttle...

UC Berkeley researchers used brain scans of the visual cortex and computational models to reconstruct what the individual is seeing. From UC Berkeley: As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie...

"Rosie ODonnell once told me over the Internet that I should change my profile picture. She pretty adamantly was like, 'Youre a pretty girl, why are you doing this? People are gonna wanna hear you les...

"Rosie ODonnell once told me over the Internet that I should change my profile picture. She pretty adamantly was like, 'Youre a pretty girl, why are you doing this? People are gonna wanna hear you les...

Pithiness from Bruce Schneier: "I'm not worried about cyberwar, but I am worried about the proliferation of cyber weapons. Arms races are fundamentally destabilizing, especially when their development...

My old high school buddy Mitch O'Connell, who used to wow us in art class with his Conan drawings, has a line of products for sale at Retro A-Go-Go, including some cool canvas prints that you can tric...

My old high school buddy Mitch O'Connell, who used to wow us in art class with his Conan drawings, has a line of products for sale at Retro A-Go-Go, including some cool canvas prints that you can tric...

According to Amnesty International, an 18-year-old woman was killed in a Syrian prison to pressure her brother, a political activist. Her body had been decapitated, the arms cut off, her skin removed....

Somebody in the Galway, Ireland, coroner's office hasn't been watching Myth Busters. (Thanks, Tim Heffernan!)...

This 3D printed bicycle, exhibited at this week's London Design Festival, is claimed to be as strong as steel. It was printed from layers of fused nylon, using a technique more commonly deployed in sa...

This image comes from "Microbiological laboratory hazard of bearded men," a peer-reviewed research paper concerning the risk bearded scientists who work with bacteria and viruses might pose to their f...

One of many highlarious jokes making the rounds about those crazy neutrinos traveling faster than light. (Thanks, Ariel Waldman!)...

MP3 Download Audio (MP3) PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien and I had a conversation with The Madeleine Brand Show (a Los Angeles-based radio show on which I'm a regular guest), to discu...

Senator John Pastore: "Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?  Physicist Robert Rathburn Wilson: "No sir, I dont beli...

These three young gentlemen, all 19, were arrested in Covina, California after allegedly shoplifting a 30 pack of beer (Tecate) and then turning their escape into a comedy of crime errors. Employees o...

Possibly NSFW in parts. Thanks, Jon Hiller! Video Link...

Last month, Armando Herrera Corral was wounded when a package delivered to his office at Mexicos Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education turned out to be a bomb. Nobody knows who sent t...

In this widely circulated video from the campaign trail, Massachusetts Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, explains the taxation bargain that the state strikes with its citizens: in order to ...

Neil sez, You may remember 2 months back when the Troy, Michigan Public Library faced closure due to declining revenue. It was particularly sad given that this libary only recently celebrated its fort...

A DOJ Office of Inspector General report released this week found that DoJ conferences were a source of major waste, with insane catering bills that charged the public $8 for a cup of hotel coffee and...

And NASA has more here on the re-entry of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, which is expected to return to Earth's atmosphere late Sept. 23 or early Sept. 24 EDT. That's six years afte...

Isn't augmented reality cool? Awesome photoshop work by Ryan Snieder....

Earlier this week, I gave a talk on the way that "Big Data" is underpinned with a kind of myth about how users trade privacy for services. Ciara Byrne from the NYT's VentureBeat interviewed me afterwa...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our daily delivery of blog headlines to your inbox. Watchismo is offering BoingBoing readers a 10% off BOINGISMO coupon code for the newest re...

[Video Link] Pentecostal minister Becky Fischer teaches kids how to raise the dead. At the six minute mark she explains that kids can successfully pray their dead pets back to life. Good luck, kids! (...

Edward Lear (1812 - 1888) is best known for his excellent nonsensical limericks, but he was also an accomplished artist who published books of illustrations documenting his travels. Indeed, his first ...

In today's XKCD, a nicely illustrated framework for managing the cognitive disruption entailed by hard-to-understand scientific breakthroughs, such as the news of a faster-than-light particle. Neutrin...

Over at LIFE, our pal Ben Cosgrove put together an image gallery of people pointing at things. Why is that interesting, you ask? Just start clicking through the pictures and you will slowly be confoun...

Michael Leddy says: I tuned into the Republican presidential candidates debate last night just in time to hear audience members boo Stephen Hill, a gay soldier serving in Iraq, who asked whether the c...

[Video Link] A San Francisco office worker who takes a personal day off from work is surprised to see how crowded the cafes and parks are. "Why is this place so full? Everybody should be at work right...

We've posted before about Scopitone, the A/V jukeboxes of the 1960s that featured 16-milimeter films of the musicians singing and dancing in campy loungadelic scenes. For example, dig Joi Lansing's We...

"When labor leads to love," a paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology experimentally tests "the Ikea effect" that leads to people valuing things that they assemble, customize or build themselves m...

SceeneShoes of NorthCarolina sells hand painted geek-themed bras, shoes, and panties in her Etsy store. She is experiencing a 3 week backlog on orders, please be patient. (Via biotv)...

New York Times reports that Ugandans say they were beaten and forced off their land to make way for a carbon credit forest. The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon...

Joplin, MO librarian April Roy, bookseller Pete Cowdin and members of the Kansas City Woodworkers Guild are building 22 mobile libraries -- book-shaped travelling bookcases that can be brought to poor...

Today, Friday, Sept. 23rd (12:00 p.m. PT), MashUp Radio explores "Life Logging the Self-Quantification Phenomenon.  This weeks show will explore the rapidly expanding movement in which people tr...

Spencer Ackerman at Wired's Danger Room keeps digging into Islamophobia at the FBI, and the problem reveals itself to be deeper and deeper. Above, a montage of some of the books at the FBI library at ...

Milwaukee's Craig Smith presents his Han Solderer, a high-powered soldering gun made from a collectible Han Solo blaster he treasured as a lad. The gag is funnier if you pronounce it "sol-der" (UK) no...

danah boyd sez, "Alice Marwick and I just crafted an op-ed for the New York Times entitled 'Why Cyberbullying Rhetoric Misses the Mark.' It's based on a new paper that we just released called 'The Dra...

There are a lot of Fairey remixes around, but this Admiral Ackbar/Star Wars TRAP poster's pretty nicely executed. POSTERS > Trap poster (Thanks, Sebastian!)...

GadgetSponge features some wonderful birdhouses made from found objects and turned into aviary sculptures. Bird Houses (Thanks, Brian!)...

Etsy seller hand-forges these steel spiders and makes the eyeballs they support, and describes both with a lot of verve: I hand hammer glowing hot steel on an antique anvil and make glass eyeballs tha...

I bought a new Alternative Tentacles tshirt to replace the one I bought in the early 1980s. I didn't realize how faded it had become until I placed them side by side. I like the way the old one looks ...

Ben says: "Although Skulls Unlimited generally articulates species that actually exist, we are sometimes asked to create custom skeletal mounts, such as this Centaur. Created using the torso of a real...

From the Nov, 1938 issue to Mechanix Illustrated, a sweet little pop-up camping "house" that folded down flat and could be strapped to the roof of your hupmobile, tin lizzie any other jalopy you find ...

"How do you explain all the drugs in your house?," an Alabama police officer asked Ola Mae Robinson as she was cuffed andtaken into custody. "It wasn't mine! Til they found me I was sitting up in my c...

Rafe Needleman at CNET, on Facebook vs. Google+: "The Algorithm is a big part of today's announcement at the F8 developers' conference. The Algorithm can determine what you're likely to like base...

Photo, by Dave Shumka: At left, Sean Connery as Zed from the 1974 movie Zardoz. At right, Dave's dog Grampa dressed as Zed, Halloween 2009. (thanks, @somebadideas!)...

Steven Levy tweets: "It will take people a while to absorb that a Facebook profile is now a timeline of your life, an autobiography rendered by data." Check out his long-read over at Wired today: "Fac...

Etsy seller MechanicalOddities 3D prints these D6s with gears instead of pips, then finishes them by hand with brass-effect paint. Dice - 3D printed, Steampunk Style, Bronze Finish (Thanks, Alice)...

No more fancy feasts for death row prisoners who are about to be killed in Texas. The state is doing away with them. The meals. And, you know, also the death row prisoners. Brian Evans of Amnesty Inte...

The Twitter account of Mark Davidson, a self-described social media professional, has apparently been taken over by someone claiming to be an ex-employee who had been paid to ghostwrite Davidson's twe...

Let the ringtone/remix fun begin! From NASA today: Here's a collection of NASA sounds from historic spaceflights and current missions. You can hear the roar of a space shuttle launch or Neil Armstrong...

HP today named Meg Whitman President and Chief Executive Officer. Let the company's deathwatch commence. Quipped @laloalcaraz: "[Her] first task at HP will be to shove all the Asian employees."...

The FBI has arrested 23-year-old Cody Andrew Kretsinger of Phoenix, Arizona on charges of stealing data from Sony Pictures Entertainment earlier this year. Prison: not so lulzy. More from Elinor Mills...

Los Angeles firefighters are under investigation by the LAFD for apparently allowing porn producers to use their fire engines (the actual fire engines, not a euphemism for their hubba-hubbas) in an ad...

TorrentFreak has excellent analysis of the revelation that a user in the Swedish Film Institute's IP block has been accused of illegally downloading movies in a report from one of the motion picture i...

Big, and widely-contested, science news breaking today, via AP: "A pillar of physics   that nothing can go faster than the speed of light   appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic part...

[Video Link] Above, a sexually playful video with furries, which was apparently created by someone in the fandom, with his friends. Others in the furry community were upset when the video went viral, ...

Video Link. Maggie Spotz has a wonderful YouTube channel full of short-form, funny and/or cute animal videos. My favorites are the ones where her cat swats at hamsters and pet rats. Some of her videos...

According to the US Dept of Agriculture, the cost of raising a child in a middle-income family has increased by 40 percent over the past ten years. Every major category of child-rearing expense has se...

Schuyler Erle's FOSSLC presentation, "Pivoting to monetize mobile hyperlocal social gamification by going viral in the cloud," bridges the important gap between marketing and free/open source develope...

Trivia: Actual Tim & Eric vs. Breaking Bad connection? Bob Odenkirk, ya dummy! Now why didn't you think of that? [Shoop: XJ]...

Earlier this year, I posted about sound designer and composer Diego Stocco who "played" a tree as a rhythmic instrument. Now, Diego has played a dry cleaner. Both projects remind me a bit of David Van...

Today is the start of Cincinnati's 10th annual MidPoint Music Festival, a very hip indie festival where hundreds of emerging (and cult fave artists) from all over the country play at intimate venues i...

Alba Prat's clothing designs are made to look pixelated, as though they've emerged from a video-game. I love how subtle the effect is -- not the chunky, 8-bit fashion we've seen before, but rather, a ...

Bob Harris says: I've always been fascinated with maps. They're guides to whole new worlds I'd never imagine otherwise -- real, fictional, modern, ancient, or predicted. Turns out Ken Jennings (the bi...

David Sykes's Skulllolly series are sculptural confections that serve as mementos mori. Skulllolly (via Super Punch)...

Crazed homophobe and presidential candidate Rick Santorum says the communists at Google won't rewrite their search algorithms that return a disagreeable top result linked to his name because he is a m...

Avi sez, "Anya Kamenetz has made her 'Edupunks' Guide to a DIY Credential' available as a free PDF. The guide is 'a comprehensive guide to learning online and charting a personalized path to an afford...

A new paper is arguing that epigenetic variation—basically, what happens when an environmental trigger turns genes on and off, or makes them express differently—may not survive over many g...

[Video Link] Lisa Hannigan performs "Knots" on the ukulele. (Thanks, @funnelbc!) Kate Micucci plays "Dear Deer  on the ukuleleSarahsukulele plays "Object of the Game  on ukuleleSophie Madele...

"Boom! Blood stem cells generated from skin cells." — From the Google+ feed of Erik Westin, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham....

Psst, kid. You want to see a shell-less turtle?...

The Sack Boris campaign, which seeks the ouster of London Mayor Boris Johnson, has a nice line of brightly coloured Oyster-card sleeves that can be yours for a mere £3 donation. The mayor has inc...

What are all those frothy bubbles rising from the sea floor and coating the submersible craft in this video? Why, it's liquid carbon dioxide, venting off an underwater hot spring connected to Eifuku v...

Are you a busy professional attending an event at the Toronto International Centre? Be prepared to travel in time to an idyllic era when physically leaving the office made you unreachable by your coll...

Geekdad has a bunch of tips for using the round power-cells from a dead laptop battery. These cells, called "18650s," look like AA batteries, but have very different characteristics. Your laptop batte...

It's hard to illustrate articles about exoplanet research. The pictures from deep-space telescopes just doesn't really look the way your readers want it to look. Instead of an image of a mysterious fa...

Writing in Slate, Paul Lukas tells a fascinating series of New York stories that he learned when he decided to track down the subjects of a packet of 1920s report cards from the Manhattan Trade School...

Jim, the resident genius at Jim's Pancakes, has made an AT-AT Walker OUT OF PANCAKES! PANCAKES! Total time to create it was about 15 minutes, mostly because it took a while to get the legs "crispy&nbs...

Rob Myers writes in about "Collaboration and freedom the world of free and open source art": A collection of artworks, texts and resources about freedom and openness in the arts, in the age of the In...

PZ Myers explains why the discovery that the male of a species of squid reproduces by showering other squids with sperm regardless of their sex doesn't make the squid "bisexual." Not that there's anyt...

Update on a post from earlier this evening: The US Supreme Court has denied Troy Davis a stay of execution. The quote: The application for stay of execution of sentence of death presented to Justice T...

Update on a post from earlier this evening: The US Supreme Court has denied Troy Davis a stay of execution. The official statement, in its entirety [PDF], reads: The application for stay of execution ...

VIDEO: In the trailer for "The Grey" embedded here, actor Liam Neeson, "with broken liqueur bottles strapped to his knuckles, enter[s] into Mortal Kombat with a CGI wolf. Driven on by the power of lov...

[video link] "OneMillionMoms," an offshoot of the right-wing American Family Association, is calling for a boycott of Ben & Jerrys after the companys release of an irreverently-named new flavor: ...

A dead female harbor porpoise that washed ashore in August at San Francisco's Fort Funston showed "evidence of a sadistic attack." Marine biologists believe this was a clear case of "porpicide," the d...

Carl sez, "Buster Keaton wore his unique porkpie hats throughout his long career, but what most fans don't know is he was a maker, he made his hats out of 'normal' hats. Here's how he did it." I think...

[Image, REUTERS: Soyuz TMA-21 carrying International Space Station (ISS) crew members U.S. astronaut Ron Garan and Russian cosmonauts Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev, descends, 92 miles (14...

William Booth in the Washington Post covers a disastrous media juxtaposition that many of my internet-friends in Mexico have been talking about online today: The timing couldnt have been worse. As Mex...

One day after three dozen bodies were found dumped on a busy Veracruz street, authorities in the same Mexican state released a man and a woman and dropped terrorism charges that they faced for tweetin...

Well, hello, irony: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange today condemned his British book publisher for releasing drafts of a much-anticipated memoir without his approval—but he won't be returning t...

Local farmer Shu Mansheng starts the engines of his self-designed and homemade flying device before a test flight in front of his house in Dashu village on the outskirts of Wuhan, Hubei province Septe...

Over on Google+, my friend Patrick Tufts writes, "A few days ago, a newspaper in Pennsylvania reported that Amazon was forcing employees to work to the point of collapse in high heat, and that an...

Phil Gyford looks at the frequent revisions made by the IMF in its economic forecasts and wonders why anyone pays attention to something so demonstrably unpredictable: I have no doubt that its extreme...

The "other" man to be executed in America tonight, an unrepentant white supremacist who dragged a black man to death in one of the most horrific lynchings in history, "requested an extensive final mea...

A Dallas resident of African-American descent says she was humiliated at an airport in Atlanta, when TSA agents patted down her hair. Isis Brantley was headed down an escalator at Hartsfield-Jackson I...

This PDF link contains the last-minute appeal filed with the U.S. Supreme Court as Troy Davis heads to the execution chamber in Georgia. The execution is scheduled to begin at 7pm Eastern Time. The mo...

I've spent an inordinate amount of time over at Monster Brains, a blog filled with thousands of scans of comic books, movie posters, science fiction paperbacks, model kit boxes, and other media starri...

It's been years since the idea of "trusted computing" was first mooted -- a hardware layer for PCs that can verify that your OS matches the version the vendor created. At the time, TC advocates propos...

That's no dandelion. It's a painted close-up of a slice of human hippocampus. Jessica Palmer at the Bioephemera blog introduced me to the gorgeous artwork of neuroscience grad student and painter Greg...

Over at Smithsonian.com, Sarah Zielinski has a great piece about important female scientists whose names aren't as publicly well-known as they ought to be. She lists 10 smart, sciencey ladies. Here's ...

A UK court ordered ISP British Telecom to use censorware called Cleanfeed to block Newzbin2, a file-sharing site. Newzbin2 responded by releasing a cross-platform app for evading censorware. The app, ...

Cory posted earlier this week about Amy Harmon's excellent profile of an autistic 20-year-old, trying to find a place in the adult world. At her Culturing Science blog, Hannah Waters adds some nice pe...

A retired climate research satellite will plummet to Earth on Friday. There is a 1-in-3,200 chance of it hitting a person. BUT! Don't worry too much about that, says Scientific American reporter John ...

For obvious reasons, there's not a lot of observational data concerning the behavior of deep-sea-dwelling squid. But a new study has found indirect evidence that one species of squid—the 5-inch ...

Richard sez, Power to the people is a popular theme in elections, but how do you get it there when the election process and rules can be complicated and difficult. David Lynn's answer was to create an...

Greg Seitz took this amazing photo of the Pagami Creek fire, a wild blaze that's been burning in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness since August 18. Fire fighters and rain have managed to conta...

Ed Piskor, creator of the wonderful Wizzywig hacker history comic, has finally finished the story, which now runs to 412 installments. Ed's done three printed collections of the comic to date, and now...

Stefan Jones, one of the "fifth Boingers," spotted this Jolly "Googie" sign in Wenatchee, WA. "It was in wonderful shape," he wrote. "Most signs like this are faded and beat up. Note the missing apost...

This tiny, turn-of-the-20th-century bookcase with its complement of miniature books is on sale at Vininghill, an antiques dealer. A very sweet miniature bookcase , probably made of maple. This bookcas...

There's a proper treasure-trove of great old gag ads linked off this Vintage Ads group post, but get a load of that bow-tie (and get a load of that awesome type design and color scheme!) A LAFF RIOT...

...

Over at Bedazzled, Derek See is posting his "45 of the Week," which includes an MP3 and a short, interesting write up on an obscure but excellent song. This record is almost ridiculous in its high vel...

Work has gotten underway on Plan 28, a project to create Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, the never-built successor to the Difference Engine. The Analytical Engine was to have been a general purpo...

[Video Link: YouTube or PBS NewsHour website] PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on conflict between ranchers and environmental advocates in the American West. I accompanied Mile...

A fantastic collection of covers from the pre-Comics Code comic book Witches Tales. Too bad Fredric Wertham had to come along and spoil the fun. (Via Dooby Brain)...

At the Twitter-driven "Occupy Wall Street" protest, New York police "charged demonstrators with violating an obscure, 150-year-old state statute that bans masked gatherings." More: Wall Street Journal...

Chrissizle was a barista at Starbucks who wrote and recorded a ranty, funny song about his job and posted it on YouTube. It "went viral" (oh, how I hate that phrase!) and he got fired. Welcome to star...

Robin sez, "William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and inventor of the term 'cyberspace' predicts ebooks, Twitter revolutions and the balkanisation of the Internet in an interview from 1994. (MP3)"...

Reason.tv has a powerfully moving video about the brutal and fatal police beating of Kelly Thomas (a schizophrenic young man who cried out for his father as Fullerton, CA police beat him to a literal ...

[Video Link] A very good short book trailer that's really a short documentary in which Art Spiegelman reflects on his masterpiece, Maus. I can't wait for this new book, called MetaMaus. In METAMAUS, S...

Carl Warner is a photographer who creates elaborate, fanciful landscapes out of food ("mealscapes") which often make their way into commercial advertisements. They're really outstanding work, and mana...

Craig Thompson's new graphic novel Habibi is an enormous and genre-busting graphic novel that blends Islamic mysticism, slave/liberation narratives and post-apocalyptic science fiction, creating a sto...

Morskoiboy created an hydraulic typewriter that mixes cocktails -- the typewriter keys inject different liquids into a big LCD-like display, which then decants them into a waiting beaker. So, if youre...

TRSF is a new science fiction anthology of original stories commissioned by Technology Review, the tech magazine published by MIT. They commissioned a story from me, "The Brave Little Toaster," and th...

"Barely Feral answers the question: what if there was a porn site designed by cats for cats?" Tumblr, Twitter. (via @choire / @annetaylor; photo in this post by Flickr user Dawn Frasca)...

Police and members of a forensic team stand around bodies on a motorway in Boca del Rio, on the outskirts of Veracruz September 20, 2011. The bodies of 35 people with suspected links to organized crim...

From the Guardian, via RichardDawkins.net: One of the most hotly contested death row cases in recent years looks set to go ahead with the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia on Wednesday. He lost a fin...

From the Guardian, via RichardDawkins.net: One of the most hotly contested death row cases in recent years looks set to go ahead with the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia on Wednesday. He lost a fin...

OnStar -- the company that uses satellite tracking and cellular data to offer roadside assistance, disable stolen vehicles, etc -- has a new privacy policy, which states that they'll continue to track...

Watchismo's acquired distribution rights for Click Watches, mouth-wateringly dorky watches that you set with dip-switches and mechanical dial-selectors. These new watches are reaching back into the gl...

My dear old friend Kate Melville, a brilliant Canadian playwright and TV writer, has just gotten her first feature film, and she's looking for cheap locations in Toronto: "We are a small, courteous, p...

Video Link (NSFW Audio). Previously: Thomas the Tank Engine's ultraviolence....

Over at Credit.com, I took a look at a new web service called BillGuard that scans your credit card statements for bogus transactions. What do you do when you notice an unusual transaction on your cre...

Roger Doiron says: This month's KGI newsletter focuses on Adam Guerrero, a gardener from Memphis, TN who is facing possible legal action for his code-violating, "nuisance" front yard garden. Adam happ...

Last year I wrote about Rafael Atijas' Kickstarter campaign to start a 3-string guitar kit company called Loog Guitars. Rafael was seeking $15,000, but ended up getting over $65,000. I'm happy to repo...

Al Jazeera director Wadah Khanfar, whose resigned today, removed content from the news network's website after receiving complaints from the U.S. government according to a 2005 State Dept. cable publi...

[Video Link] Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year old from Buffalo, NY, is the latest victim of homophobic bullying on- and offline. Just months after recording the "It Gets Better" video above, Jamey committed...

Lawmakers in Wisconsin have proposed an overzealous method to banning stem cells—banning, instead, the use of any cells derived from human fetal tissue ever in history—even if that tissue ...

"Methusalah trusts" are (very) longterm trusts that accumulate so much compound interest over hundreds of years that by the time they mature, they could potentially pose a real threat to the economy. ...

"Methuselah trusts" are (very) longterm trusts that accumulate so much compound interest over hundreds of years that by the time they mature, they could potentially pose a real threat to the economy. ...

Speaking of smart games, Spongelab's Natural Selection is almost more of an interactive demonstration than an actual game, but it's still way cool. The goal: Learn about how evolution works by causing...

A couple of years ago, I told you about Foldit, a computer game that harnesses the power of human putzing to help scientists unravel the mysteries of protein structure. There's a new research paper ou...

This report from the Second West Coast Computer Faire -- in 1978 -- from Byte magazine is a perfect time-capsule of the heroic age of personal computing: I enjoyed the many special features of the sho...

Funny. There are quite a few more at stocklogos.com....

Italian MPs from Berlusconi's party have proposed legislation that will require ISPs to disconnect any customer on receipt of a single unsubstantiated copyright complaint, from anyone -- even someone ...

At least according to Wes Wilson, a psychedelic poster pioneer who helped define the rock poster aesthetic of the 1960s, iconic rock promoter Bill Graham wasn't as cool a guy as you might think. Of co...

[video link] My IFTF colleague Kim Lawrence pointed me to this rather excellent c.1960s animated commercial for Uniroyal Tiger Paw tires....

Bergenco recreated MC Escher's 1951 House of Stairs using Minecraft, saying it took: "5 or 6 hours over 2 days. The sandstone room took the longest." Relativity- by M. C. Escher (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

Bergenco recreated MC Escher's 1951 House of Stairs Relativity using Minecraft, saying it took: "5 or 6 hours over 2 days. The sandstone room took the longest." Relativity- by M. C. Escher (Thanks, Fi...

Glyn from Open Rights Group sez, "The UK government is asking for you feedback on patent filings. Some applications have under 10 days remaining on the website and need your comments. So if you know o...

El Paso Times: "Two former law enforcement officers allege that they cannot get anyone to investigate allegations that the Mexican drug cartels have corrupted U.S. law officers and politicians in the ...

The Occupy Wall Street protests are in their fourth day today, and NYPD is arresting people more aggressively now....

New York Observer reports that a book about Anonymous is in the works. "The working title is Tales From Inside The Accidental Cyberwar. The not-so-anonymous Gregg Housh and Barrett Brown will be writi...

Surely there is nothing to worry about in this Washington Post story about future defense technology: "A future for drones: automated killing."...

Spencer Ackerman at Wired.com's Danger Room has a major followup today on their recent scoop about an FBI training workshop that characterized Muslims as inherently more prone to violence and terroris...

Christopher Soghoian and Jake Appelbaum FOIA'd emails from BART related to the recent/ongoing Anonymous protests....

Last February, i.materialise reported that they'd declined an offer to 3D print a new fascia for an ATM, because they suspected it was part of an ATM skimmer (a device used to capture peoples' ATM PIN...

From the Department of Terrible Ideas: The Washington Post has a must-read story up reporting on research that promises to someday make military drones fully automated. Yes, that's right, drones that ...

Joris Peels sez, "The Origo aims to be an affordable, easy to use 3D printer for ten year olds. It will be more robust than current 3D printers and work straight out of the box. By reapplying existing...

The good news: The New York Times called shenanigans on a quote in the same story the quote appeared in, saying "This is false." The less-exciting news: It happened in a story about competing pizza re...

Confused about what we do and don't know about the relationship between humans and Neanderthals? This video by Lynn Fellman will get you up-to-date on the basics—including some of the questions ...

Mark Thompson of Discovery writes about a group of amateur astronomers who are embarking on an "epic quest to track down the 42-year-old lunar module that's adrift in the solar system." They think it ...

I got some amusing spam today from Philip of England's Accounting and Auditing Manager bank of England, and felt it deserved a quick dramatic reading. "Dear friend, I know that this message will come ...

The Deglon Meeting Knife, designed by Mia Schmallenbach, is a set of sculptural, nested knives (priced, alas, as sculptures, at $600 for the set). The proportions of the four nested knives -- paring k...

Nicole sez, "The American Folk Art Museum, one of the best museums in NYC, is on the verge of deaccessioning its amazing collection and shutting it doors forever. If you haven't been, the folk art mus...

Austin Brown of The Long Now Foundation says: In appreciation of the many fine and astounding mechanical wonders located along San Francisco's North Short, Long Now invites Bay Area locals to temporar...

If you are a fan of hardboiled fiction, you probably know about Hard Case Crime, a pulp-noir book imprint founded by the founder Juno Online Services, Charles Ardai. Recently, Titan books has become t...

[Video Link] "These are the Born Losers. The sickest sicko gang that ever terrorized a town, while the law stood helpless." It stars Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin. Wikipedia has a good article about the m...

The 3D printing wars are hotting up, as Thingiverse users upload a design for an AR-15 magazine (holds five rounds, easy to expand to as many rounds as the material will hold without snapping) and an ...

On How to Be a Retronaut, a gallery of Irving Penn's "Corner Portraits" -- black and white photos of celebrities shot wedged into narrow corners in his studio. The effect is striking, making models li...

Writing in the New Scientist, Prof. Stephen Reicher, a specialist in crowd psychology at the University of St Andrews, takes aim at the posturing and macho rhetoric after the UK riots that dismissed a...

Scott Westerfeld's Goliath ships today, concluding his fabulous steampunk YA trilogy that began with Leviathan and continued in Behemoth. This alternate history of WWI is set in a world divided into t...

Rufus Roo jackets are designed to help you beat airline luggage limits (given that they seem to be British, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this was inspired by the awful RyanAir, which t...

From Ukrainian steampunk/fetish mask maker Bob Baset, the Hugger Head mask, "Slightly reinterpreted Giger monster. It now manages the object. Or maybe its a happy symbiosis?" Hugger head Leather Mask...

I recently noticed that Jarritos became a sponsor on Boing Boing (you may well be seeing their ads here as you read this post). And tonight, I spotted this New York Times feature about how the 61-year...

Just look at it. Banana Fan...

Madeline Ashby sez, "The Border Town design studio has been invited to the Detroit Design Festival to exhibit costumes, board games, 3D-printed snowglobes, mixtapes, and other kipple of an awesome nat...

Shain Erin is an artist who makes adorable dolls that any child would love to snuggle with. You can buy them in Shain's etsy store....

I enjoyed my friend Bill Gurstelle's TEDx talk about "The Art of Living Dangerously," an idea he explores in his recent book, Absinthe and Flamethrowers. An individual's risk taking propensity and ski...

Tim O'Reilly has a lengthy Google+ post with photos of his visit to the Occupy Wall Street rally....

Jonathan sez, "I've been writing a song and posting it on YouTube every day since January 1, 2009. On September 28, 2011, I will be commemorating my 1000th song by releasing an album. The first single...

On September 20, 2011, "Don't Ask Don't Tell" will officially become past tense. More: Washington Post. Here's the document (PDF) memorializing the transition. (thanks, Gautam Ramdurai)...

[video link]...

Over the weekend and after an ill-received price hike, beleaguered Netflix CEO Reed Hastings pulled a dramatic mea culpa. In a post on the official Netflix blog, he announced that the company will spl...

Today, September 19, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. But "avast ye hearties" and "arrrrr" aren't representative of the language you'd most likely hear if your boat were overtaken by actual, m...

Tonight in NYC: The Upper North Side Author Series presents Michael Crummey -- a Canadian writer who's just had his novel Galore published in the USA....

[Video Link] I saw this video on TV about 10 years ago. A doctor demonstrates his ability to deliver shocks like an electric eel and ignite a newspaper with his bare hand. What's the trick?...

Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps and other neat stuff. This week I interviewed David Hahn, creator of of th...

If today's broadcast schedule continues as planned, The PBS NewsHour will air a piece I helped Miles O'Brien shoot in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho about the return of wolf hunting for sport in the Amer...

The latest episode of The Midnight Archive weird culture video series talks to my friend Mitch Horowitz, author of the excellent Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, ...

Above are two incredible artifacts from the Fabienne & Franois Marchal Collection of Fairground Art to be auctioned off in Paris on September 28-29. From the press release: Among the historic and...

Barn Owl -- the heavy, minimalist, trance-inducing collaboration between Bay Area guitarist Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti -- have released a stunning new LP, titled Lost in the Glare. On this release, ...

Welcome to America, the country with the 25th fastest Internet service in the world, just behind Romania, and falling fast. The culprit? Hard to say, but maybe it's got something to do with the FCC's ...

Filmmaker John Landis, director of the classic An American Werewolf in London and a slew of other great films, is a connoisseur of monster movies. In fact, he has just written a history book on the su...

A coup of tabloid headline writing, from the UK rag The Sunday Sport. The backstory, from BuzzFeed: Percy Foster was a 3-foot-6-inch dwarf who starred in the UK porno "Hi-Ho Hi-Ho, It's Up Your Arse W...

[Video Link, via this AOL Moviefone post, via @Glinner.]...

Video Link, via Eric Wareheim. Peaches the Skunk's YouTube channel is full of great stuff. But, "no treats for Peaches hardly."...

The above photo shows dinosaur feathers found in amber. Discovered in Alberta, Canada, the preserved plumage likely came from dinosaurs and birds that lived 75 to 80 million years ago. The University ...

PHOTO: Eacles Imperialis, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from Boing Boing reader camerajohn's photostream, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. This otherworld...

Last month, these gentlemen, Robert Young and Mark Rubison, took their pal Jeffrey Jarrett out for drinks in Denver. Jarrett stayed in the car though. Why? Because he was dead. Still, he was kind enou...

[Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (R) talks with members of the parliament during a debate in the upper house of Parliament in Rome September 14, 2011. REUTERS/Max Ross] The foreign press is r...

A mysterious young fellow named Ray, around 17-years-old, walked out of a German forest last week and told authorities he and his dad, who had just died, had been living in the wild for about five yea...

Rick sez, "Lev Grossman and Rick Kleffel speak about Grossman's latest book (MP3 link), The Magician King, and its roots in both C. S. Lewis and Evelyn Waugh. Grossman talks about the book as a fantas...

Marc Campbell of Dangerous Minds says: "These are photos from 1957 of entrants in an annual beard-growing contest that took place in Kansas. I swear I saw a couple of these guys walking around Austin ...

If there was ever a mask made to be worn by a creepy serial killer, it's Hallowe'en 31's grotendous "Goth Mask 4." Goth Face Mask 4 (via JWZ)...

San Francisco's delightful Stow Lake Boat House in Golden Gate Park, and much of the park itself and other public spaces in the City, are in danger of being commercialized and crapified through backro...

In Atlanta, a police officer arrested a disabled woman who was sitting in a chair in front of her home waiting for an ice cream truck. Walker said an Atlanta police officer approached her and told her...

[Video Link] Is this R/C truck being used to herd cattle or just bother them? In either case, it's a way to observe allelomimesis in action. (Via Blame it on the Voices)...

It's worth watching the HD version in fullscreen mode. A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean a...

I wonder if the colors are really that vibrant. If so, I could use the red filling in place of the cadmium red acrylic paint I use. The cupcake filling would probably be just as toxic, but it would be...

Housefish has a writeup on Kagen Schaefer's pipe-organ desk, which hides in its drawers a pipe organ that doubles as a fluidic computer, and which has stolen my heart: At first glance, its a relativel...

Bon mot from DemocraticUnderground's Earth First: "I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one." (via Reddit)...

Lewis Shiner (one of my favorite writers!) sez, "My latest suspense novel, DARK TANGOS, is now available as a free PDF download from my Fiction Liberation Front website. The starred review from BOOKLI...

Kevin Rudd, the Australian foreign minister, reports that customs at New York's JFK airport tried to confiscate his supply of Vegemite, the Australian analogue to Marmite, a dark brown salty paste mad...

Kevin and Jody Kidney created this one-off maquette of Colin Campbell's 1969 illustration depicting The Hatbox Ghost, a very short-lived illusion that was once part of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. ...

On Saturday, I posted about Popehat's "Anatomy of a Scam Investigation," in which Ken, a former federal prosecutor, is documenting his work to run down a con-artist who tried to rip him off with the "...

According to this report in the Iceland Review, Terry Gunnell, associate folklore professor at the University of Iceland, has surveyed Icelanders and discovered a large number who believe in elves and...

The Soundwagon is a little toy bus that drives around a vinyl record playing the music from its onboard speaker. (The product is sometimes called the Vinyl Killer which is probably a more descriptive ...

In this clip from Russian TV, oligarch billionaire Alexander Lebedev sucker-punches another billionaire, Sergei Polonsky, hitting him twice. Clad in very tight grey jeans, Lebedev showed a glimpse of ...

LaHaine sez, "According to the first prognosis, the German Pirate Party has entered the state parliament of the city-state of Berlin with 8,5% of the votes, counting for 14 of a total of 149 seats." W...

On the cover of today's NYT, a 8,000+ word feature on Justin Canha, an autistic high school student who has been participating in an intensive program that aims to integrate people with autism (a...

In this week's Observer, a heartfelt obituary from John Naughton for Michael S Hart, founder of the Gutenberg Project, and inventor of ebooks: Those who knew him testify that Michael Hart was an extra...

Ken, a former "fed" (of some description) on the group blog Popehat, received a "toner-scam" (a scam whereby someone sends you an invoice for a service you never ordered or received in the hopes that ...

Italian magistrates investigating a prostitution ring have been wiretapping prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, and have recorded the oligarch boasting about ordering eleven women for a single night (he...

Paul Spinrad snapped this photo at Maker Faire NY. He writes, "A cyclist rides a tall bike with a short wheelbase and tiny wheels that provide minimal gyroscopic balancing effect. The bike was built b...

The Internet Archive's Book Scanning project just added its three millionth text. Unlike Google Book Search, the Archive only scans public domain works, and, more significantly, places no restrictions...

Zack sez, "The author of such surreal delights as LIZARD MUSIC and THE HOBOKEN CHICKEN EMERGENCY has gone to the web to premiere his latest work before it heads to hard-copy. Daniel Pinkwater's BUSHMA...

JC Leyendecker's commercial illustrations from the 1920s sure were beautiful. J C Leyendecker Arrow Collar artwork 1920's...

Women in Mindanao, Philippines ended a violent, armed, intervillage fight by going on a "sex-strike" until their husbands stopped killing each other, as confirmed by the United Nations High Commission...

Video Link (via Tara McGinley)....

Michele Bachmann chooses STD's - watch more funny videos Michele Bachmann went on national TV this week to tell the world that the HPV vaccine could render women "retarded." Here's Funny or Die's resp...

A Guardian journalist who was researching prices at a Tesco supermarket was threatened with arrest for writing down prices as he walked around. The security guard who questioned him claimed that it wa...

Leah sez, "DSEi, the worlds largest arms fair, takes place in London every two years. This year, Life Neutral Solutions announced that it was using the event to launch a new 'life offsetting' scheme. ...

The Granite City, Illinois police have arrested 37-year-old Gerry Arville Armbruster (mugshot above), and they believe he is the same guy who stole a massive collection of Superman memorabilia from Mi...

Amish have been popping up in the news as of late. Here's a story by Christopher Maag of Credit.com: An Amish man who promised guaranteed investment returns to thousands of Amish families actually los...

Video Link, and here's a previous episode. Created by Zach King, aka Final Cut King.(via Jason Wishnow)...

The NFL plans to have fans at stadiums patted down, TSA-style, as a new security measure. Under the new "enhanced" pat-down procedures, the NFL wants all 32 clubs to search fans from the ankle...

2006 was a very good year: Crazy Frog Bros. Wonder where these guys are now? (about)...

Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Team Leader and Director of the CICLOPS project at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, CO, says: Just down on the ground this morning and posted to the CICLOPS websi...

PeePoo bags are alternatives to the "flying toilets" (plastic bags filled with human shit and then flung into the public street) used in Nairobi shantytowns. Created by the company PooPeople, they're ...

Sociological Images has a nice gallery up called "United We Buy," showcasing the use of war and patriotism in advertising from WWII up to the present day. That's some weird-ass WD-40. United We Buy: U...

Panasonic's "Evolta" swim robot, powered by the company's Evolta rechargeable batteries, is demonstrated at a pool during a news conference in Tokyo September 15, 2011. The company said three types of...

Glad you asked! Reports the Associated Press: In this Monday Sept. 12, 2011 image of a CAT scan released by Brazilian Federal Police on Sept. 16, 2011, bags loaded with cocaine are seen inside the bod...

Wikileaks has a history of colorful fundraising stunts. Assange's latest: an eBay auction of various and sundry memorabilia, including "Julian Assange's Prison Coffee, Signed and Fingerprinted." Scarc...

Elinor Mills at CNET News reports that the FBI's Los Angeles office is investigating a series of hacking incidents targeting celebrities. "The FBI is investigating a person or group responsible fo...

What's happening to those named WikiLeaks sources? AP reports that the Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned about the case of a reporter in Ethiopia whose name was disclosed in that recent, u...

Mark Riffee at Danger Room on how entertainment industry liasons for the CIA and DoD work to "image control" America's war and spy machines. "The scripts we get are only the writers idea of how the De...

"As Mexican authorities capture a growing number of drug gang leaders, many of their pets are being driven from their gilded cages into more modest housing in the country's zoos. That's proving to be ...

The Evil Mad Scientist Labs folks made badges for the Open Hardware Summit. Naturally, the designs for the badges are, themselves, open: Naturally, the badge itself is an example of open source hardwa...

In the Star Trek vs. Star Wars thread below, sagodjur brought up the fight between Kirk and a Gorn from the Star Trek: TOS episode "Arena" (1967). This was clearly a high point in the long history of ...

Erin Simon had NYC's Marie Nails In Soho paint her nails like a variety of anti-depressants! (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)...

In "Recognizing The Maker Movement," a 25-minute video in honor of the World Maker Faire in Queens this weekend, Anil Dash and Dale Dougherty talk about the significance of the Maker movement, its his...

[Video Link] Download here. From Gummy Soul, produced by Amerigo Gazaway: What do you get when you put together afrobeat legend Fela Kuti and rap pioneers De La Soul? You get Fela Soul; a musical tape...

Gregory Dale Brockman, 33, was in prison for burglary when he wrote letters to the Secret Service about his desire to kill and eat President Obama and sexually assault and skin Michelle Obama. Guess w...

William Shatner on Star Trek vs. Star Wars....

Photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by batmkana....

Laurie Anderson's "O Superman (For Massenet)," recorded in 1981 for her epic United States performance piece and also released on the stunning Big Science LP. Anderson will perform at the Other Voices...

Today is Mexican Independence Day. Let out a grito, pour some mezcal on the ground for the ancestors, then kick off your celebrations by watching this late-'90s rap-en-Espaol track by Tres Delincuente...

[Video Link] The 20th anniversary of Nirvana's "Nevermind" is an excellent occasion on which to recall an epic prank played on the New York Times by Megan Jasper, the receptionist for Sub Pop records ...

Astronaut Ron Garan takes photos in space and posts them to Google+. This photo was taken yesterday, aboard the ISS, and shows the Southern Lights. Real-time astronaut photos may be my favorite b...

"If it exists, it has to be there. And if its not there, it will be known to be science fiction by December." — Vivek Sharma, a physics professor at UC San Diego, talking about the as-yet elusiv...

The "Official Ojai Valley Taxidermy TV Commercial" created by "YouTube sensations" Rhett and Link as part of their Commercial Kings series has gone very very viral. But most of the people ROFLing seem...

Some recent research is confirming what a lot of us have probably long suspected—there's a pretty reasonable scientific explanation for near-death experiences. Recently, a host of studies has re...

This scanned image, and a very interesting story that accompanies it, are shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool by reader Casey....

Spaceboy Robot makes beautiful, steampunky junkbot sculptures; he's also a talented photographer of same, and he has an Etsy store (though it's on hiatus). Spaceboy Robot (via Neatorama)...

Mike sez, London's Metropolitan Police, already under huge criticism for their cosy relationship with Rupert Murdoch's News International and their failure to investigate phone hacking of amongst othe...

Today in Midwestern news, the Missouri town of Osceola has passed a resolution asking that the University of Kansas retire the Jayhawk from being the school's official mascot. To understand why, you h...

Suw sez, "Ada Lovelace Day, the yearly celebration of women in science, tech, engineering and maths, is on 7 October this year. I'm excited to say that we've teamed up with BCSWomen to put on two real...

[Video Link] Marc Campbell of Dangerous Minds writes: If youre a regular reader of Dangerous Minds, youve probably noticed that Im a huge Ramones fan. One of the reasons I started my own punk band in ...

[Video Link] And here. (Via PCL LinkDump)...

In "HELLO, I'M SHELLEY DUVALL !," a short video edited by Goddessshelleyduvall, Shelley Duvall repeatedly says the words, "Hello, I'm Shelley Duvall," while wearing a variety of outfits, for 55 second...

[Video Link] The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins, is an illustrated book for readers age 12 and up. Each chapter opens with a question: "What is a rainbow?" "What is an earthquake?" What is the su...

[Video Link] One McDonald's employee takes a stand against coners. (Via Blame it on the Voices)...

In journalism school, one of the things we learn to never do is start a story by asking readers a question that they could answer with a firm, "No." There's just no point in risking disengaging your r...

Britt of Colourlovers says: I wanted to share with you an infographic that my team and I created that discusses common color schemes for comic book heroes and villains. It's called 'Behind the Colors:...

President Obama has now extended the national emergency declared by GW Bush into its 11th year. (Thanks, Tim!)...

The next time you log into your Sony Playstation Network account, the company is going to ask you to click through a EULA whereby you promise not to sue them if they get hacked again, even if they're ...

The next time you log into your Sony Playstation Network account, the company is going to ask you to click through a EULA whereby you promise not to sue them in a class action if they get hacked again...

Love these crying "narrative humor" tights -- striking and funny. Les Queues de Sardines are an original range of tights notable for their unconventional and unique graphic style. Add a pinch of narra...

Count USA Today among the news outlets that has never encountered the powerful effect that talcum powder can have on "human magnets."...

Say what you will about ARC's in-car 45-record changer and 8-track player, they certainly epitomize some handsome industrial design. Also, my mom had this haircut in her wedding photos! ARC Electronic...

Say what you will about ARC's in-car 45-record changer and 84-track player, they certainly epitomize some handsome industrial design. Also, my mom had this haircut in her wedding photos! ARC Electroni...

From CNN, an article about the growing anger in China at "taizidang" ("princelings"), the spoiled children of the rich and powerful who make the news for driving luxury cars into innocent bystanders, ...

DotD snapped this excellent photo of an adorable Flying Spaghetti Monster cosplayer at this year's DragonCon.I love the noodly appendages! Flying Spaghetti Monster (sexy version!)...

My latest Guardian column, "Lib Dems get a chance to vote on copyright reform," discusses the new Liberal Democrat IT white paper that's being presented at the party conference this weekend, where mem...

Ernesto sez, "In August, after an unexpected summer storm, 4 people died when one of the festival tents at pukkelpop collapsed, leaving 10s of other people injured. The festival's insurance companies ...

Long time friend of Boing Boing Brian Zisk throws the SF MusicTech Summit, the conference at the convergence of Internet Music and Technology. SF Intercom Creator Stefan Aronsen creates awesome live s...

Scott Edelman sez, "In a statement which I assume has all the scientific accuracy of phrenology, optometrist Irving Strauss was quoted in a May 1937 Associated Press article as stating that blonde dri...

You may have heard that the Author's Guild is suing the HathiTrust, a coalition of libraries that is proposing to share their scans of some out-of-print books whose authors can't be located, passing t...

Hurray for Crashspace member, high school science teacher, and Boing Boing reader Levi Simons for winning an "Unsung Heroes" grant from ING, the financial services institution! The honor comes with a ...

Just because you're a Buddhist monk doesn't mean you can't be an asshole. BBC News reports that "a group of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka led a crowd that demolished a Muslim shrine last week," in Anura...

nervousMONSTER says: "Saw your Amish Mugshots post & thought you might be interested in this buggy picture I snapped on Sunday."...

Police in a small town near Little Rock, Arkansas "have received two complaints in the past week about a man who seems desperate to suck women's toes   whether they want him to or not." This same...

The AP reports that the FBI says a lecture at the bureau's training academy which portrayed moderate American Muslims as inherently violent and prone to terrorist tendencies "has been discontinued." S...

Missouri resident George F. Blackburn had a moment of inspiration one day when he went to the local courthouse to finalize his divorce from his third wife. The 64-year-old gentleman seized the opportu...

In the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, reader Chris Arnade shared another great photo of a kitten in Bushwick, Brooklyn, just in time for CAT-THURS-DAY. In the same grimy stairwell as this guy, Bushwick Kitt...

If you see something (awesome), say something. Crnicas de Hroes is a mapping project to document and pay tribute to the honorable actions of normal people in cities like Juarez and Monterrey, held cap...

The wooden crates for these Eames Office wire frame tables -- which House Industries designed for Herman Miller in Japan -- are as cool as the contents. House Industries and Herman Miller Japan announ...

Artist Jonathan Brand is working his way through a papercraft 1:1 model of a 1969 Mustang coupe, beginning with the engine, and (eventually), making his way through the rest of it. It's fabulous all i...

Sean Hartter does a great line in "Alternate Universe Movie Posters," prints of which he sells from his site; the latest edition is this "She-Ra Princess of Power" golden age pulpy sci-fi flick, writt...

My friend and fellow coffee-lover Tony Konecny, aka @tonx, has launched a cool new business at tonx.org. For $35 a month, he'll ship you a 12-oz bag every two weeks of his favorite beans fresh-roasted...

"I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on pg 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," writes Susan An...

Mugshots of Amish men who refuse to put reflective orange triangles on their buggies....

Really interesting new study of 20,000 women suggests that the use of IUDs might reduce the risk of both major types of cervical cancer, even in women who contracted cancer-causing HPV. The researcher...

Whoops, wrong house. Some new parents got an unexpected scare Wednesday morning when they awoke to a team of armed Federal Bureau of Investigation agents attempting to raid their home. CBS News corres...

...

I asked my friend and fellow beekeeper Russell Bates to write about a new honey bartering concern he and his wife Amy started, called Feral Honey & Bee. They don't sell honey; they barter it for ...

Stream videos at Ustream The Kepler space telescope has found a new, fun discovery that promises years of great Star Wars jokes. Kepler-16b is a planet that represents a type of system we've never see...

So, it's not a T-Rex skeleton, but otherwise I think this little girl is pretty much living out the childhood dreams of you, me, and everyone we know. Video Link Thanks, Kimberly Clarke!...

BAMM.tv recently made a lovely mini-documentary about two Latin musicians who emigrated to San Francisco, including my dear friend singer/songwriter Diana Gameros from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose mus...

(Image: Best friends., a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image contributed to the BB Flickr Pool from hyper7's photostream)...

From the Los Angeles Police Protective League email newsletter: "A man dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants was detained by police outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, officials said Wednesday....

A new scientific study suggests that overconfidence may actually improve your success rate. It's been somewhat of a mystery to evolutionary biologists as to why so many people are overconfident or nar...

Our pals at GAMAGO have launched their new Spaceport USB Hub and it's a beaut! The ship is ceramic and features 4 ports and a 50" extension cable. Spaceport USB Hub...

You might recall last week's video above of Gumby fumbling a robbery of a San Diego 7-11 store. Apparently, Gumby and his accomplice (not Pokey, fortunately) have turned themselves in. From the Los An...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our daily delivery of blog headlines to your inbox. Watchismo has two new limited edition timepieces in its collection. Tsovet watches just la...

This gentleman was arrested for eating raw meat off the shelf in a Central, Pennsylvania Walmart this week. Scott T. Shover, 53, was apparently tearing open packages of raw beef. Well, the police call...

[Video Link] When I went to Dead Kennedys shows in the 80s, one of my favorite things was watching Jello Biafra make lots of weird gesticulations at the beginning of songs and during the guitar solos....

This counts as a unicorn chaser, of sorts, for that depressing space travel post of mine. That big mandible in the picture above belongs to Acherontisuchus guajiraensis, a recently identified species ...

[Video Link] WARNING: Watch this and you will die of cute. "I really love this color for the eyes. It is good for... the liners... and stuff. And [unintelligible]... I would be a ch-... ch--... chocol...

[Video Link] "Sometimes I wonder if G-d even exists. How could a G-d make John Galliano?" This precocious young fashionista is awesome. I love her speech, and the cameo by the bored mini-dachshund. He...

DragonCon founder Edward Kramer, who has long argued that he is too ill to stand trial for multiple counts of child molestation in Georgia, was caught stayingin a motel room in Connecticut with a 14-y...

My short story Clockwork Fagin, which will appear in the forthcoming YA anthology Steampunk! is available from today as a free file for Kindle, Nook, and other ebook platforms. The whole anthology com...

I recently found out that, in 2050, when I am 69 years old, the Voyager 1 space craft will finally reach a distance of one single light-day away from the Earth. Light will reach that point in 24 hours...

My friend Jim captured this excellent moment in science reporting this morning. Thankfully, as I check Google News now, the headlines are drifting more towards the real story, which is fairly interest...

The opening in McDonald's in Moscow in 1990 was (at the time, anyway), a symbol of significant reforms to the Soviet system. Though in true Soviet style, a breadline stretching for blocks immediately ...

Up the Mysterly River was Bill Willingham's first kids' novel, published by a small press in the 1990s, long before his multi-award-winning (and most excellent) Fables graphic novel got underway. Afte...

A Dutch woman has been charged with stalking after calling a man 65,000 times in one year. She claims she was in a relationship with him (he denies it), and that this required her to call him. A lot. ...

If you want to keep your wire-cutters from being stolen, attaching them to something heavy might work -- but not if you attach them with wire. My boss was tired of our wire cutters getting stolen. I'm...

For Milan design week, furniture company Poltrona Frau exhibited some of its designs covered in transparent PVC without any fill, so that the structural elements were visible. I like the look of this,...

Brian from Greenpeace sez, "Greenpeace is 40 years old today, and one of the ad agencies we've worked with over the years made this for us. The agency asked to remain anonymous, so as not to lose any ...

Australians now have a third option for the "gender" field on their passports. Transgendered people and people of ambiguous gender are allowed to enter "X" for gender, rather than "F" or "M". An Austr...

Walt Mossberg reviews Sony's Tablet S, a ~$500 Android touchscreen model that isn't an iPad clone. He is quite impressed by it, in an abstract "Sony deserves credit for this" kind of way. [All Things ...

In Nuevo Laredo, Mexico today, bloggers and Twitter users who share information on crimes of drug cartels and related gangs received a gruesome warning. The tortured bodies of two people in their mid-...

In Nuevo Laredo, Mexico yesterday, bloggers and Twitter users who share information on crimes of drug cartels and related gangs received a gruesome warning. The tortured bodies of two people in their ...

Spencer Ackerman at Wired.com's Danger Room defense blog has a big story breaking tonight. It's a very upsetting read. If you had any doubt that racism against Muslim-Americans was institutionalized a...

Our friend and MAKE executive editor Paul Spinrad has exciting news: A couple of days ago, Pescoblogged the newsthat Obama's jobs plan includes the idea of legalizing crowdfunded securities. I think t...

I enjoyed meeting Bilal Ghalib at the Detroit Maker Faire this year. He told me about his plan to establishhackerspaces in Africa. Now he has a Kickstarter project to kick it off. A great idea. We wan...

Cult of Mac has an item about a six-year-old girl named Lim Xin Mei (above) who is learning computer programming. The article says she was using Applesoft BASIC on an old Apple II GS. Later she starte...

Mark Frame, an orthopedic surgical trainee at Scotland's Monklands Hospital, 3D printed a model of a bone from a CT scan, as preparation for surgery. Rather than using the local rapid prototyping shop...

(photo: Edith Valle for VICE) Snip from today's radio program summary for The Madeleine Brand Show: Thirty years in prison for tweeting? That's the maximum sentence two people from Veracruz, Mexico ar...

Love and Rockets' "Dog End Of A Day Gone By," from their absolutely classic 1985 debut Seventh Dream Of Teenage Heaven. L&R fans may also be interested in Weird Pop, a brand new double vinyl comp...

Fishbowls are cruel (arguably), but if you're looking for an arty fishbowl for your, say, robotic fish, or a place to keep Goldie while his large, stimulating tank is being cleaned, Fishscape is a pre...

Best cat video ever, via BB commenter GRS: Bouygues Telecom prsente les Chatons Telecom - YouTube. Update: English language version below....

On the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, Half My Dad's Age's beautiful action shot of a guerrilla planter perched atop a bicycle locking-stand on the streets of Toronto. I like the way this beautifies the lock...

What is this? Who made this? Please help me understand. "  22 : . (thanks, Antinous)...

Alan Scherstuhl writes the terrific Studies In Crap column for the SF Weekly and other papers, in which he posts about his fabulous finds as a craphound who specializes in the weirdest books relegated...

Michelle Legro in Lapham's Quarterly on the culinary-themed writings, sketches, and opinions of Leonardo da Vinci, who was known as "fat boy" when he was a pastry-snarfing 17-year-old kitchen apprenti...

LazerShirts are a fun idea for a t-shirt that's coated with glow-in-the-dark material. You can draw your own temporary glow design on them with a UV or LED flashlight. The creators launched a Kickstar...

Princeton's Andrew Appel writes on Freedom to Tinker about an illegal cover-up of New Jersey e-voting irregularities. The Princeton team have done amazing technical and investigative work on electroni...

New research suggests that individuals can be identified with a very high degree of accuracy just by looking at the pressure signature of a person's foot on the ground as they walk. Researchers from S...

[Video Link] The great American alt-country-rock-whatever band Wilco, whom I love dearly, invites their fans to shoot video of the cities they're touring in. Some of the resulting videos "may be proje...

Snip from a thought-provoking post by danah boyd: Youre a 16-year-old Muslim kid in America. Say your name is Mohammad Abdullah. Your schoolmates are convinced that youre a terrorist. They keep typing...

My friend Tiffany Shlain's new documentary feature film, Connected, opens in select theaters starting this Friday. The film is a lovely and moving meditation on technologies of connection as told thro...

Los Angeles-based radio station KCRW is, in my experience, one of the best ways in the entire world to discover new music and new artists. They've launched a free iOS app, Music Mine, to guide listene...

Walk in the footsteps of one of South America's banal monsters with the Pablo Escobar tour of Medellin. The four-hour tour culminates with a handshake and photo-op with Escobar's brother, Roberto, who...

Steve Myers at Poynter has a detailed piece on disclosing potential conflicts of interest, and says the New York Times shouldnt throw stones at Michael Arrington and TechCrunch. I'd like to take this ...

MIT News Office posted a survey of the fascinating research at the university, and by alum, on an array of 3D printing technologies and applications. Another variant underway now is a system being dev...

Nomadic Matt, a self-described "travel hacker," takes readers through a detailed look at how he scores his best deals on airfares. He comparison shops, then tries to beat the best price through the ai...

Europeans: this Saturday marks the fifth annual Freedom Not Fear day, when Europeans take to the streets to ask their governments to respond to extremists and terror attacks by affirming the values of...

Cloaklet is a service that provides end-to-end private IM, email and file-transfer. The system uses three physically and logically separate systems, each of which has limited knowledge of what the oth...

On Monday, October 17th, I will be 16,000,000 minutes old. Want to know your age in prime birthdays, Venusian years, or fortnights? Check out Matt Parker's collection of links explaining How To Celebr...

...

Dimitri Tsykalov makes guns out of meat. Vegetarians, rejoice -- as noted previously, he also makes skulls out of produce. But these meat guns are pretty spesh -- the radish bullets, magnifique!. Meat...

Vladimir Putin's stagey action shots put the Russian leader in more macho costumes than a fleet of GI Joes. This Atlantic Big Feature photo-series catalogs the many moods of the ex-KGB spook. To quote...

Hey Google+-ers: Here's another, different list of sciencey people for you to peruse. Unlike the last list, which included a lot of science writers and advocates, this one leans more heavily towa...

[Video Link] Last night, Boing Boing pal Richard Metzger gave a talk and retrospective at Cinefamily in Los Angeles (both Mark and I were there). Among the rare video gems and related stories Metzger ...

James Fallon studies the brain. Then he studied his own, and found out that he has the same brain malfunctions as psychopathic serial killers. What happened next is a fascinating story about the brain...

SVK, the fab Warren Ellis/D'Israeli comic published by London's BERG with hidden UV ink action, sold out in hours. The second printing just came back from the printers and it's back on sale....

How do you keep a crowded prison with no air conditioning from exploding during the hottest days of the year? Treat the prisoners like human beings....

Last month, I read Deborah Blum's The Poisoner's Handbook , a really fascinating book about poison and murder in the early decades of the 20th century. Primarily, Blum looks at the development of fore...

BB reader Guido D. Nez-Mujica says, Given that BoingBoing has posted a bit ago the Indian ID project, I saw this and thought to send it: a sad, outrage-inducing story about how the indigenous Wayuu pe...

The Mozilla Foundation is pressing hard with mobile Firefox efforts; the Android tablet edition sounds very tasty. Firefox has been my browser of choice for years, and I'm just about to try out a new ...

Jonas Loh's Cruiser Charisma is a little 3D printed caravan inspired by "technological alteration of nature" and "intentional communities like the Amish." The outcome of the project is a fantastical c...

After last month's UK riots, the government directed the courts to ignore existing sentencing guidelines in favor of prison for looting/rioting (even a man who stole a £3.50 case of water got six...

Ben Hammersley's after-dinner speech to the UK's Information Assurance Advisory Council (a "talking shop for government, law enforcement, security services, and private companies") about the contempor...

REAMDE Back in 2010, I found myself in Seattle (I was touring with my novel For the Win -- a young adult science fiction novel about gold-farming), I stopped by Neal Stephenson's place for breakfast a...

In this video, witnesses to a car-motorcycle crash quickly self-organize to lift a flaming car off the trapped motorcyclist. In addition to being an inspiring, life-affirming clip, it's also a fascina...

Noah sez, "Freehand Prophet, the guy behind the fantastic MASK365 project, has created an incredible new piece for Star Wars Remix: a wearable Stormtrooper helmet made out of 2 pairs of Adidas sneaker...

The gift shop at the Burbank airport sells Mexican jumping beans. I always buy a couple of packs when they are available. My kids and I had a fun jumping bean race after dinner tonight (my bean kicked...

Posted to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by ShellBell63...

Titan Books gave me permission to present samples from the new art book, The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss. It's available in a standard edition for $21.14, and a special edition for $75 that come...

Photo: Definitely not a Prius. From a lovely photo set contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by reader Greg Lynch, who explains: Jalopy Fest is a Traditional Hot Rod and Custom Car Show held at G...

If you contribute $50 or more to Joshua Harker's Kickstarter campaign, you'll get one of his elaborate "Crania Anatomica Filigre."...

If you contribute $50 or more to Joshua Harker's Kickstarter campaign, you'll get one of his elaborate "Crania Anatomica Filigre."...

TERADA MOKEI, a Japanese company, makes dense sheets of punch-out people, animals and scenery intended for use in architectural models. The sets include sports matches, mass transit, street scenes, co...

Clive Thompson has a great rumination on a missing piece of the Internet toolsuite: a mapper that watches your browsing and tells you how you found interesting stuff. This is a great example of a tech...

It's the headline of the zeitgeisty moment: "A guy accused of being Anonymous, but who used his real name online, can now no longer use his real name... because he may have been a part of Anonymous." ...

A refreshing moment of sanity: the TSA is going to stop groping 12-and-unders and let them keep their shoes on: "Napolitano didn't give a timeline but I'll bet you they make these changes in time for ...

ifttt.com is like Yahoo's Pipes, but easier to use. Here's a list of 728 useful "recipes" sorted by popularity. Popular ifttt.com recipes...

The Hotfile file sharing service is suing Warner Bros. for "allegedly engaging in copyright fraud and abuse of anti-piracy laws. Hotfile accuses the Warner Bros. of using the hosting company's anti-pi...

Speaking of Shriekback, Roderick and Anisa Romero -- founders of the excellently 1980s-1990s trancey/alt.rock group Sky Cries Mary that also featured Shriekback's Michael Cozzi -- have a side-business...

Last week's attack on Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar completely blew my attempt to avoid the Internet while I was on holidays: it seemed like enormously important news, but of such a highly tec...

This video shows the process that a blind man goes through in using ATM for the first time; the machine he selects is one that has a ton of assistive features that are aimed at making use easier for v...

Our friend, Sarah Milstein, made a treadmill desk for $160. Ever since learning about treadmill desks a couple of years ago from this New York Times story, I've been eager to try one. Because while I ...

Omid Kashan created this lovely and immersive Big Bang Timeline infographic. (Thanks, Ariel Waldman!)...

Collin Cunningham of MAKE shows how to make the popular Atari Punk Console music synthesizer. Visit the link for a schematic. Collin's Lab: Atari Punk Console...

Virgin America, the airline that offers Boing Boing Video as an in-flight TV channel, is today announcing a re-vamp of its in-flight entertainment system scheduled to go live in late 2012. This makes ...

In my latest Credit.com column, I write about an iPhone app called Debt Free that helps people use the Snowball method to pay off credit card debt Over the summer, I used credit cards to pay for thing...

Professor Solomon, author of the indispensable How To Find Lost Objects and a history of Coney Island, now introduces us to JW Dunne, an Irish aeronautical engineer who in 1927 published a curious ess...

This came out while I was traveling, but I wanted to post it here in case you missed it. It is very cool, in that "maybe cool isn't the right word" sort of way. Our modern antibiotics are really just ...

Shriekback's exquisite 1985 album Oil And Gold has just been remastered and reissued with a slew of bonus material. When I heard the news, I dusted off my old vinyl of this essential album and was not...

Mmmmmmm, delicious context. When the news says "massive," this is what they mean. Thanks to Scott Stevenson for making this and sending it my way!...

[Video Link] Carla and I saw this in London in 1984 at an Anthony Perkins triple-feature (along with The Trial and another Perkins movie I can't recall). Pretty Poison was our favorite of the three....

My old employers, mental_floss magazine, have a new editor and some cool new stories out in their September/October issue. One is about a kid who built a nuclear reactor at age 14. No, not that kid. M...

My pal Jonathan Koshi continues his reimaginings of calaveras, the decorated skulls associated with the Dia de los Muertos. This new letterpress series includes the likes of Mario, Ultraman, Domo, and...

New CIA director David Petraeus says the agency has launched an internal investigation into whether it broke the law by closely cooperating with the New York City police department, to spy on Muslims....

Filmmaker Kim Pimmel combined ferrofluids, a magnet, soap bubbles, and dye to create this mesmerizing short video. Science + art = awesomesauce. Video Link Thanks, Brian Thomas!...

Kevin sez, "The Fellowship of the Strings finally recorded their hot new single, The Ballad of Helm's Deep! We think the Boing Boing crowd would definitely get a kick out of our music, and of course w...

[Video Link] A great find from Open Culture. Alan Watts moved from his native London to New York in 1938, then eventually headed west, to San Francisco in the early 1950s. On the left coast, he starte...

Ben sez, "I remember getting 'dittos' in school as a child, and on a whim I looked it up to see what went into creating the periwinkle printout. I found this copy of a school newspaper in 1978 discuss...

Matthew Lasar at Ars Technica has a really fascinating piece on the history of AT&T—why the company was able to become such a massive force during the 20th century, what changed that made t...

Your tax dollars at work: "Transportation Security Administration officers worked with police from New York and Florida to ship tens of thousands of oxycodone pills to New York and Connecticut, federa...

[Video Link]. A quick YouTube browse shows many videos of similar phenomena throughout the world, but I choose to view this as a sign that the gods are unhappy with the grim results of this week's pre...

My husband sent me this video, a truly inspired entry in Environment Minnesota's solar power video contest. The contest is meant to promote solar energy in Minnesota—a goal that makes a bit more...

The BBC reports on the phenomenon of people who claim to have been made sick by wi-fi and mobile phones, who now seek refuge in Green Bank, West Virginia. This town is situated in the US Radio Quiet Z...

The BBC reports on the phenomenon of people who claim to have been made sick by wi-fi and mobile phones, and now seek refuge in Green Bank, West Virginia. This town is situated in the US Radio Quiet Z...

From Reddit. Best guess is that it's a Kenguru car....

In India, a new national identity system is under way that uses iris-scanning technology and the assignment of a unique 12-digit number for each person as proof of existence. He can use the number, al...

[Video Link] Do you think a network in the USA would run something like this? "The Pitch" is a segment on ABC (Australian Broadcasting System) TV's The Gruen Transfer where two ad companies compete to...

Adrian from Six to Start sez, "We just launched a Kickstarter project for a new running game called 'Zombies, Run!' we're developing for iOS and Android. In the game, you help rebuild civilisation aft...

Phil Are Go! has unearthed this 1963 advertisement for "broadband" data services from Western Union: "So, by 1963, business guys who were rich enough to have those little egg cups could transmit pictu...

From How to Be a Retronaut, a fine gallery of scanned syphilis/gonorreah posters from the last days of each disease's reign of terror, before widespread use of antibiotics. If you're ever in Philadelp...

Ethyl: the fuel for men who allow their children to goad them into driving dangerously! Oedipus, schmoedipus, so long as he loves his mother. Poor Dad seems to have enough lead in his system as it is....

Zahra's Paradise, a new book from FirstSecond, collects in one volume the serialized (and brilliant) webcomic, written by two pseudonymous Iranian dissidents. It's the gripping story of a Medhi, a you...

Back in June, I wrote about the Hathi Trust, which is rescuing orphaned literary works from the university libraries that Google has scanned. If they can't find an author for a book, and if it's not i...

OldUse.Net is a historical, realtime re-creation of the Usenet experience, as it was in the heroic green-on-black era of the Internet. That is, it is a command-line-driven interface to Usenet posts, s...

Jon Keegan, a designer for WSJ.com, tweeted: "You will dig some of the crazy medicare codes in our searchable database. Injuries from collision in space." Jon, you are correct....

Jon Keegan, a designer for WSJ.com, tweeted at me today: "You will dig some of the crazy medicare codes in our searchable database. Injuries from collision in space." Jon, you are correct....

Shoshana Hebshi, who describes herself as a "half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife," was aggressively cuffed and detained from Frontier Airlines Flight 623, then strip-searched, for the apparent crime of b...

Over the weekend, I tweeted a question: is anyone using Google Maps or another online mapping service to chart incidents of drug-related violence in Mexico (and/or Central and South America)? The one ...

Canada's majority Tory government is poised to reintroduce its disastrous DRM-friendly copyright law, formerly Bill C-32, without any further public consultation. This law repeats the major error made...

Deanna found this vintage home canning and label book from the Worthington Rendering Company. "Our gift to you in appreciation of your calls" for "dead and disabled animals."...

[Video Link] In Gweek 014 I discussed a psychological thriller novel I enjoyed by Ben H. Winters called Bedbugs. Here's the trailer for it....

One day shortly after Halloween, when I was 10 or 11 years old, I went with my mother to a King Sooper supermarket in Boulder, Colorado and came across a bargain bin loaded with tubes of Vampire Blood...

Including 16 superearths for you to explore in your imaginations, one in its star's habitable zone. [BBC]...

I'm awfully envious of the folks who get to see this in person! And here comes Byrne himself, arriving as usual by bicycle, dressed all in blue, accented by his white hair, white wristwatch, and white...

Helpful tents with water, food and clothing are installed by the highway, in parking lots and prefabricated buildings. People just pour in with stuff to give, and we did that too. It feels normal. Ins...

Dangerous Minds has a great interview with punk/post-punk era photographer David Arnoff. Above: Joey Ramone, 1976....

Here's an oldy but goody: Video of astronauts from Apollo 15 proving Galileo's hypothesis that, in the absence of wind resistance, two objects will fall at the same rate regardless of how much they ea...

Mike Kesslers story "What Happened to Mitrice Richardson?  in Los Angeles magazine looks into the puzzling death of Mitrice Richardson and the sheriff department's baffling mishandling of the cas...

My friend Richard Metzger (founder of Dangerous Minds), a collector and disseminator of mind-blowing media, is screening some of his favorite films and videos at the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angele...

Compared to traffic signals that force you to stop your car and then bring it back up to speed again, traffic controls like roundabouts save energy and money, and reduce pollution. The trouble is that...

Photographer and Boing Boing reader Chris Arnade of Brooklyn shares this shot with the Boing Boing Flickr Pool and says, "I was climbing stairs in a building in Bushwick, heading to the roof to see mo...

What, if anything, should we make of studies that purport to find neurological differences between people who self-identify as "conservative" and people who self-identify as "liberal?" You've seen stu...

For 9/11, contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Kyle Dettman....

A press release from a mysterious "independent" Australian research outfit announced that if Aussie ISPs would help the movie industry by threatening the families that Hollywood says are downloading w...

Photo: posted to Glow-in-the-dark cats offer insight into AIDS by BB reader Allybeag....

A Tea Party fantasy for only $50, framed....

Rose Fox from Publishers Weekly sez, "Authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith wrote a YA novel featuring five POV characters, all of whom are non-white, one of whom is a gay boy with a boyfrien...

Friends from Mexico have been turning me on to a form of electro-fusion music called "musica tribal" for the past year or so. We featured a Mun2 video about one Texas superfan on Boing Boing's Virgin ...

The TechCrunch/AOL saga's been an easy way to attract readers of late, but I never wanted to get into it because I had no questions. It's always been obvious that Mike Arrington was an active investor...

An anonymous sculptor has been leaving gorgeous carved-book sculptures in Scotland's libraries, along with little notes of encouragement. Some are left out in the open; others are hidden away and may ...

I've been waiting a long time for issue #12 of Adrian Tomine's comic book, Optic Nerve. It'll be available on Wednesday. Find a local comic shop that sells it. Order it directly from the publisher. In...

Andrew Hyde of Laughing Squid says: Boulder based Mighty Fudge Studioscreated a set of clipboards for citizens to carry around to help fight "Clipboard Zombies  or those that are raising money fo...

London has a new monument to Yuri Gagarin. The statue was just unveiled this summer, and when I was in town last week, some friends were kind enough to take me around to see it. Personally, I feel lik...

Bart Aalbers, a terrifically talented and funny illustrator from Rotterdam explains what the pitch process is like for a freelancer. I'd say he got it exactly right. Check out these videos he makes ab...

Another "odd moment in advertising" from our ephemera fanatical friend, Mitch O'Connell....

Spotted in downtown Cape Town, South Africa. Insert your own "Home of the Whopper" + "I once caught a fish THIS big" joke here....

I've been traveling for the last couple of weeks. One key stop: Woods Hole, Mass., where I got up close and personal with everybody's favorite research submarine. Originally commissioned in 1964, Alvi...

From the Mayo Clinic: "The technique is called gamete-targeted lentiviral transgenesis   essentially, inserting genes into feline oocytes (eggs) before sperm fertilization. Succeeding with it for...

Historypin is an app and site that overlays vintage photos, audio, and video onto current Google Maps Street View images. For example, above is the March of the 100 Bagpipers on a Nova Scotia road in ...

Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about movies, science fiction, games, comics, books, gadgets, and other cool stuff. Today, I interviewed Drew Magary, author of the new novel called The Postmortal. It's...

Hey, Torontonians, Ann Arborites, and New Yorkers! I'll be giving a free talk at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto called "Can creativity and freedom peacefully co-exist in the Internet age?" on S...

"Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow," the PM Press "Outspoken Authors" chapbook that includes my novella "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life," an original interview wit...

Photographer Luis Gispert's new NYC gallery show, titled "Decepcion," features shots of fancy cars blinged out in aftermarket, knock-off Louis Vuitton, Burberry, and Gucci interiors. Above, "Gucci Glo...

On Threadless, up for vote: MaxiGlob's "Dr Jones Phobia" spider-infested tee design, inspired by Raiders of the Lost Ark. dr Jones phobia by maxiglob (via Super Punch)...

Kurt from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "A judge the the Northern District of Texas writes a blistering opinion, sanctioning Evan Stone, attorney for porn studio Mick Haig Productions, $10,0...

Susannah Breslin reaches out to a Wall Street corporate lawyer turned yoga instructor, journalists and writers, and a former Army combat medic for their stories about how the terrorist attacks of Sept...

TechCrunch is hosting a hackathon at its SF conference, with $500,000 in prizes. There are also unusual hats. [TC]...

Above, a Fire Helmet belonging to Chief Joseph Pfeifer. This object is now part of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York. More photos, and stories about those objects, below (so...

My family are hardcore Boggle players; it's been our traditional family vacation game for as long as I can remember, and my parents have a first-gen Boggle set with its handsome, round-cornered dice a...

Jody Culkin's made a great, CC-licensed comic-book introduction to the Arduino platform and to electronics projects in general. Introduction to Arduino, PDF link...

Neil Gaiman's launched a creator-centric audiobook label; Neil's a fabulous reader. "When Don Katz first called and explained ACX to me I started to get excited. I've loved narrating audiobooks w...

Jungle Brothers' "I'll House You" (1989). Can you feel it? [video link]...

You know that unskippable government warning on DVDs, which only big media corporations may use? The FBI's anti-piracy imprimatur may now be used by any copyright holder, not just members of trade ass...

You know that unskippable government warning on DVDs, which only big media corporations may use? The FBI's anti-piracy imprimatur may now be used by any copyright holder, not just members of trade ass...

"True Names," the Hugo-nominated novella that Benjamin Rosenbaum and I published in 2008, has been republished in a CC-licensed Polish edition, courtesy of Ireneusz Dybczyski....

One of many reasons I admire artist James Gurney so much: he finds beauty in almost everything. Yesterday I took my car to the shop because it needed an inspection. The rain was pouring down. There wa...

Kevin Kelly enjoyed Douglas Coupland's Marshall McLuhan biography, You Know Nothing of My Work!. I have not yet read it, but I'm planning to. Here's an excerpt from the book, in which Coupland explain...

Kevin Kelly enjoyed Douglas Coupland's Marshall McLuhan biography, You Know Nothing of My Work!. I have not yet read it, but I'm planning to. Here's an excerpt from the book, in which Coupland explain...

NBC News' twitter feed was compromised today and fake reports of new terrorist attacks posted to it....

Presidential candidate Herman Cain offers a touching rendition of God Bless America, set to footage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and a backing track of human screams. [via @Mat]...

As Mark posted yesterday, Project Gutenberg founder Michael S. Hart, who invented ebooks when he keyed in the text of the Declaration of Independence in 1971, has died. He was 64. He was a copyfighter...

[video link] Friday Freak-Out: Ray Columbus & The Invaders play "She's A Mod" (1964), originally performed by The Senators. The track is available on the double CD set Ray Columbus & The Inv...

Miles O'Brien did a report for PBS NewsHour on how the technology and design of skyscrapers has changed since 9/11. Video here, transcript here. The World Trade Center collapse was a "stark and stunni...

Bill D. of the "Riding With Robots" blog shares this image with the Boing Boing Flickr Pool and says, Flame shooting hundreds of feet from NASA's new five-segment solid rocket motor during a ground te...

Last week, Mark blogged about t-shirts that replace classic rock logos with the names of scientists and philosophers. I just spotted a similar line of film director t-shirts! Available from CineFile V...

[Video Link] If you fly Virgin America airlines sometime soon, and tune in to channel 10 on the in-flight entertainment TV dial, you'll have a chance to see some beautiful animations, short films, and...

My old roommate worked in a mall photo lab (remember those?) and used to frequently see photos of young men posing with big spreads of contraband -- drugs, guns, piles of money, jewelry. I was reminde...

Over at the White House blog, Tom Kalil and Aneesh Chopra look at Obama's American Jobs Act in the context of innovation, entrepreneurship, and crowdfunding, including a link to the iPhone 4 Tripod Mo...

About the OpenWatch Project from OpenWatch on Vimeo. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit wrote an essay for the Washington Examiner called "You have a right to record the police." In an era when government ...

Smartphone apps that display certain colors in a way that supposedly eliminates acne don't work, says the FTC The makers of two mobile applications claiming to treat acne have settled FTC complaints t...

Rush Limbaugh explains who our pal Doug Rushkoff is to his dittoheads: Okay, now, I found out who this Douglas Rushkoff guy is. Hes a "media theorist,  a media theorist, "the author of Program or...

Photo: Kleine Gelbe Ente This post is brought to you by Columbia Pictures "Moneyball" The novelty of disruputive technology soon becomes second nature. Social networking made the web intimate, a lingu...

A photo contributed to the BB Flickr Pool by JKG II....

A photo contributed to the BB Flickr Pool by JKG II....

The Nike Mag, based on the sneakers seen in the popular motion picture Back to the Future II, is finally in existence. The NIKE MAG is no longer the "greatest shoe never made.  The mythical shoe ...

Over at Credit.com, I reviewed SmarterComics, a new line of well-written graphic novel adaptations of business and self-help books. When I was a kid my parents told me I read too many comic books. "Yo...

Over at Credit.com, I reviewed SmarterComics, a new line of well-written graphic novel adaptations of business and self-help books. When I was a kid my parents told me I read too many comic books. "Yo...

[video link] I spent the day shooting (video) inside Folsom Prison. It was pretty intense in there. We listened to Johnny Cash's famous Live at Folsom Prison on the way to the site, and listened to th...

Kirk Demarais of the fantastic Secret Fun Blog came across a website of a Japanese collector who has an incredible collection of 1960s and 1970s novelties. The collector's site is difficult to navigat...

Flipboard is currently spotlighting Boing Boing in its "Cool Curators" category, along with a number of other sites we dig that look really nice on the popular iPad app....

Liz Ohanesian of the LA Weekly says, Dennis Zine of LA City Council has proposed checking IDs, and keeping tabs on the info, for purchases of various art supplies that are considered "graffiti paraphe...

[Video Link] Eddie Codel sends word of the launch of MakerBot TV, a new online video series. "It's a new weekly series about all things MakerBot and 3D printing," says Eddie. "Entertaining and informa...

[Video Link] Griffin of watkykjy.co.za says, In South Africa, the word "barbeque  translates to "braai  in Afrikaans but the word is used by all cultures in our country and people look at yo...

Blake Eskin writes about the Blackwing 602 pencil for The New Yorker's News Desk blog: In June, I learned from the omnium-gatherum site Boing Boing that the Blackwing has been resurrected. I shared my...

Air & Space has a gallery of Zippo lighters sold during the Vietnam War at PX stores and customized for US soldiers by village artisans. From Air & Space: "Snoopy the Flying Ace replaced Bug...

San Francisco photographer Shaun Roberts, who has taken a number of portraits of underground/street artists in their homes/studios, collaborated with bookstore Babylon Falling on multimedia studio vis...

Several years ago, Alan McConchie created the Pop Vs. Soda project that attempted "to plot the regional variations in the use of the terms "Pop" and "Soda" to describe carbonated soft drinks." I wonde...

Joy Tomkins, 81, had "Do Not Resuscitate" tattooed on her chest. On her back, it says "P.T.O." (please turn over) with an arrow. From the BBC: The grandmother, who is diabetic but said she was not ser...

In 1979, machine artist Mark Pauline staged the first ever Survival Research Laboratories performance. Pictured above, the show, titled "Machine Sex," took place at a San Francisco Chevron station whe...

In 1979, machine artist Mark Pauline staged the first ever Survival Research Laboratories performance. Pictured above, the show, titled "Machine Sex," took place at a San Francisco Chevron station whe...

In 1979, machine artist Mark Pauline staged the first ever Survival Research Laboratories performance. Pictured above, the show, titled "Machine Sex," took place at a San Francisco Chevron station whe...

Photo: REUTERS/Robert Galbraith Outgoing Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, fired over the phone by board chairman Roy Bostock, is famous for using foul language. Following her departure, she did not disappoint. ...

Photo: REUTERS/Robert Galbraith Outgoing Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, fired over the phone by board chairman Roy Bostock, is famous for using foul language. Following her departure, she did not disappoint. ...

Gumby attempted to rob a 7-11 store in San Diego on Monday but failed, in part because he couldn't get into his pockets to retrieve his weapon. Police are offering a $1,000 award leading to his arrest...

Tim and Nina Zagat's eponymous review service has been acquired by Google. I give this news a 25-25-25....

This post is brought to you by Columbia Pictures "Moneyball" Human beings are supposed to avoid chili peppers. The fruit contains a fiery irritant, called capsaicin. Its so strong that one milligram o...

Sad news: Michael Hart, who founded Project Gutenberg in 1971, died this week. Michael Stern Hart was born in Tacoma, Washington on March 8, 1947. He died on September 6, 2011 in his home in Urbana, I...

Bakingdom has a cute photo gallery and how-to on the occasion of Star Trek's 45th TV anniversary: Star Trek Sugar Cookies....

Boing Boing reader Porter Yates shares this photo, titled "The Earth is Flat," with the Boing Boing Flickr Pool—and explains: Looking onto Andean fields near Simiatug, Ecuador. My vantage point ...

Japan's outgoing Prime Minister Naoto Kan shared candid thoughts on the Fukushima nuclear disaster in an interview this week. "Deserted scenes of Tokyo without a single man around came across my mind,...

[Video Link] "I'm a hardworking, tax-paying, kid-raising, church-going citizen of this country," say author and PBS travel host Rick Steves, "and if I work hard all day long and want to go home and re...

In the NYT, John Markoff tells a personal story of how GPS data helped him fill in details of a bike crash lost to memory: While I healed, I became obsessed with figuring out why I had crashed. Hittin...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our daily delivery of blog headlines to your inbox. Watchismo is offering BoingBoing readers a 10% off BOINGISMO coupon code for their new col...

Jessica Stephens snapped the pic of the newspaper headline, above, and asks, "Seriously? Nobody at the Washington fucking Post saw a problem with this headline?" (via @rstevens)...

Comedian and writer Aman Ali of the "30 Mosques" project featured previously here on Boing Boing has an opinion piece up at CNN about how he's sick of feeling like he has to apologize, on behalf of al...

Gilberto Martinez Vera, a 48-year-old school teacher, and Maria de Jesus Bravo Pagola, a radio host, are accused of spreading fake reports of gunmen attacking schools in Mexico's south-eastern city of...

Brandon Boyer, IGF Chairman and former editor of Offworld here at BB, is launching its successor: Venus Patrol. Within hours of establishing a Kickstarter project to make it possible, he's already rai...

At MacWorld, Lex Friedman looks at recent reports of hacked iTunes accounts, where hundreds of users say gift card credit was wiped out by purchases made without their permission. Apple is issuing ref...

[Video Link] The gist of what Sam Wang says here is that the best way to teach young kids self-restraint is through elaborate play that requires a lot of steps, like having a tea party. According to P...

Photo: James Nachtwey for TIME. Today, TIME magazine released its issue commemorating 10 years since 9/11, with a wide array of interviews and photos (including images never before published). There a...

The Postmortal, by Drew Magary, is the first-hand account of what happens when a cure for aging is discovered. The story is told to us by 29-year-old John Farrell, an estate lawyer who, in the year 20...

Only $9.99! (Via Kotaku)...

[Video Link] Director and ber-remixer Joe Sabia says, Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism teamed up with ACLU and Princeton research associates international t...

And Business Insider explains it this way: " Arrington is publicly threatening to quit TechCrunch... This is equivalent to an employee who has been fired demanding that, if the division he just got fi...

Via Physorg.com: "John Fleming of SilverEagles Energy and Tim Maxwell from Texas Tech University, say they have developed a way to make ammonia that is cheap enough so that it could be used as fuel fo...

Unsurprising news: "Delayed-notice search warrants issued under the expanded powers of the Patriot Act, 20062009." (Via NYMag)...

Mitch O'Connell presents a small gallery of plastic-wrapped pipsqueaks....

[Video Link] Collin Cunningham of MAKE shows how to put together a kit that sends sound signals over fiber optic cable, and explains why that's cool. Circuit Skills: Fiber Optics...

...

This is the kind of competitive sport I can get behind. (Via Subtropic Bob)...

Quest Diagnostics, which has analyzed over 4.5 million urine specimens "collected from the general U.S. workforce," issued a report listing the top US states with tweaked employees. State:------------...

Continuing in an investigative series on ties between the The New York Police Department and the CIA, and coordinated activities involving Muslim populations in NYC, the Associated Press reports that ...

Motorola's long-awaited Android flagship, the Droid Bionic, is out tomorrow. At Gizmodo, Brent Rose says it's similar to other recent 4G models such as Samsung's Galaxy S II, with fast-performing hard...

Mannequin parts, seen at the beach in Tripoli, Libya, on September 6, 2011. Photo: Anis Mili/Reuters....

After killing the TouchPad a near-record 45 days after launch, then discounting it in a clearance sale at as low as $99, HP opted to fire up its production line to make and ship more. A baffling decis...

Via Newsarama and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the story of 48-year-old Mike Meyer, a mentally disabled man who was robbed "of about 1,800 of his favorite Superman comic books, some dating to the 1950...

Adrian Chen at Gawker reports on the tragic tale of an awesome dude unable to change his name to'NJWeedman.com'. Image courtesy of NJWeedman.com's MySpace....

From a Village Voice article on the intersection of 9/11 and money: The September 11, 2001 attacks have been a symbol of many things and many causes, but like the lavish, flag-draped rebuilding of the...

A few minutes ago I got a copy of Mindhacker: 60 Tips, Tricks, and Games to Take Your Mind to the Next Level, a new book (released today), by Ron Hale-Evans and Marty Hale-Evans. I started flipping th...

Edward L. Platt describes himself as a "a web developer, maker, artist, recovering physicist, and neuroscience fanboy." I met him at Maker Faire Detroit, where he had an exhibition of his geometric sn...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece for credit.com about roasting coffee at home. Today, Craft published a more in-depth piece I wrote about how to do it. Relaxing in a coffee house with a professio...

Radley Balko, senior writer for Huffington Post says, "I have a new piece up at Huffington Post related the Leigh Stubbs case. Stubbs is a Mississippi woman serving a 44-year sentence due to the testi...

Congratulations to our friend Daniel Clowes for winning the PEN Center USA Literary Award in the category of "Outstanding Body of Work in Graphic Lit." Well deserved, Dan! Here are my reviews of some ...

[Video Link] Reason.tv interviewed science fiction author Vernor Vinge. Good stuff Vernor Vinge is a former San Diego State University math professor and a Hugo award-winning science fiction novelist....

One of my favorite living photographers, Charles Gatewood, has a "Greatest Hits" show of photos and new collages opening September 8 at San Francisco's Robert Tat Gallery. Charles is best known for do...

This is an illustration of the world's smallest electric motor, just a billionth of a meter across. Tufts University chemists constructed the nanomotor from a single butyl methyl sulphide molecule on ...

[Video Link] She's a quick study. (Via Arbroath)...

The International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine has outgrown its modest digs in the back of Green Hand Books and is moving to big new location nearby. To help with the move and build-out of ...

[Video Link] The fellow in this video shows how he opened a safe by entering a default password of 000000. (Via Cynical-C)...

John Baichtal of MAKE writes: Mike Krumpus of Nootropic Design (and creator of the Video Experimenter Shield which is the heart of Matt Richardsons Enough Already hack) is at it again with his Defusab...

Kate Klingbeil and Grace Lannon created this trippy hand-drawn and manipulated video for hip hop experimentalist Shlohmo's "Sink" from his latest release Bad Vibes....

It's Labor Day. We woke this morning with the smell of fire in North Austin. During the night 300 houses were consumed by wildfire, west of the town of Bastrop. We decided to visit the flames: we put ...

Photo: Joseph Rodriguez. In NY Mag, a 9/11 Encyclopedia, as we approach the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The alphabetized jumble of an encyclopedia, with its preposterous aspiration to describe wh...

The Sound of Young America I recently guest-hosted Jesse Thorn's "The Sound of Young America" radio show and podcast, and my guest was British comedy writer and internet prankster Robert Popper. You c...

Security researcher and Tor Project member Jake Appelbaum has been writing about the DigiNotar hack I blogged about yesterday. He's been on it for some time now, and has a couple of posts up on the To...

My 14-year-old daughter spotted the review copy of Echoes sitting on my desk. Intrigued by the creepy images on the front cover, which included small illustrations of what appeared to be voodoo dolls,...

The forthcoming 1.8 "Adventure Update" of Minecraft adds randomly-generated villages, a more refined control system and game mechanics, larger and more realistic ocean and mountain biomes, and the End...

Behold "the World's Most Irritating Instrument," a handmade noisemaker that has yet to find a single bid on its imminently-ending eBay action. From the description: It makes a clicking sound that is v...

[Video Link] Boing Boing is proud to debut the latest video from our mutant friends They Might Be Giants (John Flansburgh and John Linnell), "Spoiler Alert," from the 2011 album "Join Us." Video direc...

Yesterday, Craig Cormick—the public awareness manager at Australia's Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, and the person who invited me to the 6th Science Center World Congr...

In the language of the Din (what the Navajo call themselves), the word for "star" is "sitsoi yoo." But that word means more than just "star." According to Nancy Maryboy of the Indigenous Education Ins...

The NYT has a summary of new information about the Diginotar hacking incident that has come to light over the past week: Attackers who hacked into a Dutch Web security firm have issued hundreds of fra...

Matt Alt penned a guide to Tokyo's legendary animals and mythical beasts (not to be confused with yokai). Chip Boles did the great illustrations that accompany Matt's explainer. Japanese monsters, and...

Happy Labor Day cookout, everyone! Maggots, worms, metal, plastic, a razor, and semen are but some of the many non-food substances callers claimed were in their hot dogs in complaints lodged with the ...

Video director and funny guy Mark Day shares two wonderful short films from Burning Man 2011. First, artist Duane Flatmo's steampunk-styled El Pulpo Mechanico, which Mark describes as "One of the most...

A Nepal Airlines flight was delayed for nearly 12 hours by a mouse that managed to find its way on-board a Boeing 757 9N-ACB Monday. It was discovered in of a box of drinks at 9:30am local time, and w...

My latest Locus column, "Why Should Anyone Care?" looks at a hard question that many people interested in self-publishing ignore: "Why should anyone care that you've got a book out?" I get a lot of e-...

In 1992, our dear friends at Survival Research Laboratories staged a machine performance at the groundbreaking ceremony for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. As part of SRL's ongoing digitizatio...

Look closely. This isn't your dad's rabbit-duck illusion. forgetmori's "Rude Illusion Parade"...

Gweek is Boing Boings podcast about comic books, science fiction & fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. In episode 15, I interviewed designer and comic b...

Listen at left to "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide," from Nik Raicevic's Head (1970), an epic journey of Moog komische music via Los Angeles. On the same album are "Cannabis Sativa" and "Methedrine." Accor...

How to succeed by failing: be a banker. From CNN World: For the American economy and for many other developed economies the elephant in the room is the amount of money paid to bankers over the last ...

Dig the Kodachromatic beauty of this spontaneous V-J Day celebration on Waikiki, August 14, 1945. Don't miss the perfect moment at :55. "VJ Day, Honolulu Hawaii, August 14, 1945" (Thanks, Jennifer and...

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid writes: "Colossal has a great roundup of Skull Nickels, carved coins that are made in the tradition of Hobo Nickels, which are still celebrated and collected by the Hobo ...

Elizabeth McGrath, best known for her delightfully creepy and strange faux taxidermy beasties, has a small show of exquisite watercolors opening this week at Sloan Fine Art in New York City. Seen here...

Liz Ohanesian, LA Weekly writer and periodic guest contributor to Boing Boing, has an in-depth look at the cosplay subculture phenomenon known as "Crossplay." Crossplay is exactly what you think it mi...

I don't know the real story behind this clip, purportedly of a 1939 "Underwater Boxing Match," but it puts a delightful Chaplinesque spin on the sweet science....

On eBay is this 1979 movie poster for the Polish release of one of my favorite films, Bliskie spotkania trzeciego stopnia. It's not clear to me that poster designer Andrzej Pagowski saw the film first...

Kit, a herd dog at Flying Diamond Ranch in Montana's Paradise Valley. After a long day working with Gelbvieh cattle on the summer grazing grounds, Kit is resting in the shade beneath her owner's truck...

John Schwartz has a nice piece in today's New York Times on science fiction as a tool for predicting the future: The dirty little secret of speculative fiction is that its hard to go wrong predicting ...

(Image: Kitten on a tabletop, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (2.0) image from tomorrowgirl's photostream, contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.)...

In the NYT, science writer John Noble Wilford reports that scientists have finally pinned a firm date on the earliest evidence of advanced tool-making by Homo erectus, a forerunner of modern humans. T...

Photography by Kristina Alexanderson: still-lifes with Stormtroopers. (via Bryan William Jones via Kuriositas)...

[Warning: video contains graphic visual content of surgery which may be upsetting to some viewers.] For the launch of the game "DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION," Square Enix commissioned filmmaker Rob Spenc...

At Indiewire's "Press Play" blog, Masha Tupitsyn has an essay on the life and work of John Cusack, and thoughts on the art of being yourself. Cusack, as regular Boing Boing readers may recall, is a pe...

Jonny Quest Opening Titles from Roger D. Evans on Vimeo. Jim Leftwich sent me the link to this excellent stop-motion recreation of the opening title sequence for Jonny Quest. Wow! In 1964, Jonny Quest...

Smithsonian magazine presents "Ten Enduring Myths About the US Space Program." Of course, the moon landing hoax made the cut but there are several good ones in the mix: "Alan Shepard is A-Okay.  ...

Following Apple's loss of another iPhone prototype, a San Francisco man reported that a group of men claiming to be police officers appeared at his home and demanded to search it for the cellphone. On...

Following Apple's loss of another iPhone prototype, a San Francisco man reported that a group of men claiming to be police officers appeared at his home and demanded to search it for the cellphone. On...

MG Siegler has beheld the legendary Amazon tablet. It is 7" big and has multitouch, a full-color backlit screen, Android, and a $250 price tag. Hardware-wise, then, it's rather like the Nook Color. So...

Friday Freak-Out: Mellow Japanese psych to end the summer with Yuya Uchida & The Flowers covering "Summertime" from their 1968 album, Challenger. Reissued on the Phoenix label and available from ...

Starting about an hour ago, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is answering pretty much whatever questions people pose him on Reddit. Among the gems: evasilev: What is the top priority policy chan...

Still feeding her curious fascination with twins and triplets, masterful oil painter Korin Faught has an exhibition of gorgeous new works opening at Culver City's Corey Helford Gallery tomorrow evenin...

Samsung's MV800 point-and-shoot camera opens like a book to allow HD previews of one's unflattering, arms-length self-portraits. Chin down, look up! The 5x zoom camera has 720p video capture, a 1/2.3"...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring another week of Boing Boing Blast, our delivery of blog headlines to your inbox. Watchismo has unlocked 'The Vault', a curated collection of high-end mechanical ...

Shaun Clayton compiled a collection of scenes from old coffee commercials, which often shared a theme: "men being jerks to their wives about coffee." [via Peter Serafinowicz]...

A herd of bison in a valley in the northwestern region of Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming). I shot this iPhone snap while shooting video with Miles O'Brien and team we're working on a story fo...

My friend Tara Helfer, who you may remember as the illustrator of this lovely drawing I posted a while back, is taking on a pretty ambitious senior project: organize seventy two different artists to i...

William Gibson's most recent novel, Zero History, was recently published (Cory called it an "exciting adventure that wakes you to the present-days futurism"). I asked William a few questions by email....

A gentleman from Hamilton, Ohio was charged with public indecency after being caught having sex with a stolen inflatable pool raft. The raft was pink. Edwin Charles Tobergta has four previous public i...

Apparently George Lucas couldn't leave well enough alone, again, and tweaked the Star Wars films for the new Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Episodes I-VI, Blu Ray). As seen in the above clip, Vader now...

While at the Gira Telmexhub conference in Mrida, Mexico last weekend, I met artist Christian Pacheco Quijano who showed me his striking series of lucha libre paintings. Seen here, "Prncipe de Seda" (2...

[Video Link] Here's the trailer for a funny book called Crap at My Parents' House. Crap at My Parents House is a laugh-out-loud celebration of all the weird, odd, and unfathomably tacky stuff that our...

The Guardian released a statement today assailing Wikileaks' accusation that one of its reporters published the password to an unredacted set of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables. The newspaper admits pub...

After someone wondered whether a single Marine division could take on the Roman Empire, redditor Prufrock451 took up the challenge the best way possible: with flash fiction. [Reddit via Metafilter]...

John Naughton's latest book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, expands on his spectacular Observer feature article, "The internet: Everything you ever need...

Last night, a PR person contacted me and said to expect a mysterious "puzzle piece" to arrive the next morning. I steepled my fingers, squeezed in my monocle, and warned her that it was unlikely that ...

Wikileaks, facing criticism after unredacted versions of diplomatic cables escaped into the wild, today accused a Guardian journalist of negligently publishing the password required to decrypt them. A...

Wikileaks, facing criticism after unredacted versions of diplomatic cables escaped into the wild, today accused a Guardian journalist of negligently publishing the password required to decrypt them. A...

When I was at Venice Beach with my family, we came across a freak show. The barker in front had a couple of two-headed turtles in a plastic tub filled with water. He said admission was $5. The barker ...

42-year-old Michael Allison of Illinois could spend the rest of his life in prison for recording police in public. He faces five counts of eavesdropping, a class one felony. Of course, the police are ...

The spectacularly shrewd Ashley McDowell was approached by two men in a McDonald's parking lot where they offered to sell her an iPad fetish for $300. She only had $180, but they gave it to her anyway...

The Monsters of Grok t-shirt line is funny. (Via Liz McLean Knight)...

...

Cat meets balloon cat...

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom describes his Simulation Argument on a recent episode of the excellent Philosophy Bites podcast. He proposed the argument in 2003, and it is interesting to hear him dis...

On October 17, 1814 at the Meux family brewery in Tottenham Court, London, a massive vat of beer cracked open, spilling 3,500 barrels of beer and killing eight people. Smithsonian's Food & Think ...

JC Penny was called out for selling this t-shirt, emblazoned with the words "I'm too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me." What a positive, empowering message for girls aged 7-16, ...

Kevin Kelly interviewed the two grad students at Cornell Creative Machines Lab who posted that amazing video of Cleverbot-driven avatars having a conversation. You've probably seen the viral video of ...

For The Economist, Glenn Fleishman wrote an item about our comment policies, which are strict as fuck. (Disclosure: Glenn also writes for BB occasionally) Beschizza approvingly cites an essay publishe...

In Hamilton County, Tennessee, a gentleman noticed that his Cadillac was smoking so he pulled into a gas station. He lifted the hood to reveal flames on the engine which in turn caught the adjacent ga...

In Seattle, Marlow Harris and JoDavid curated a rather curious and delightful Paint-by-Number art exhibition for the 2011 Bumbershoot Arts Festival. More than 40 artists altered vintage (and completed...

Over at Collectors Weekly, BB pal Ben Marks lays out the fascinating history of barbed wire through the eyes of those who collect the stuff. Yes, there are barbed wire collectors. From Collectors Week...

Enjoy this report by the BBC's Tomorrow's World into the new phenomenon of desk toys for bored modern executives. At the weekends, he polishes his flowers with aerosols. Video Link [BBC]...

David Benqu's Infinite Adventure Machine creates random folk-tales, and is itself an adventure in what he describes as an unsolved computer science problem: automatic story generation. Tales and myths...

Sony's HMZ-T1 is a head-mounted 3D headset, to be released later this year in Japan. Two 1280x720 OLED displays, each just 7/10 of an inch across, create a virtual 750" screen. Perceived 20m from the ...

I know it doesn't look like much, but see that \"1.44\" off to the right? That means they are high density floppies. First Look Inside Security Unit [WSJ. Photos: Edu Bayer]\n\n\n...

I know it doesn't look like much, but see that "1.44" off to the right? That means they are high density floppies. First Look Inside Security Unit [WSJ. Photos: Edu Bayer]...

Illustration: Sean Gladwell, Shutterstock. See more like this. A schoolteacher who bought a stolen laptop from one of her students ($60, with a scraped-off serial number) is suing the makers of LoJack...