Articles by BoingBoing from October 2011

The London Metropolitan Police Force uses a tracking appliance that can force mobile devices to cough up their unique IDs (IMEIs and IMSIs) and give the Met realtime views into who is where and who th...

For people who have more money than time, taste, or intelligence: The $125,000 "bespoke library" from the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book. The publishing house renowned for its beautiful volumes and cult...

Redditor JonXP made this wicked "Princess Vader" costume at his five year old daughter's request: "I painted the helmet, and sewed the cape (my first sewing project ever). It was fun to put together."...

The Oakland PD's use of projectile weapons such as flashbang grenades in its assault on the Occupy Oakland camp seems to violate the 2004 court settlement it agreed to in a class-action settlement wit...

This 2009 video shows off a curiously effective Hallowe'en prank: the pranksters dressed a child-sized mannequin in a skeleton costume, then posed it, holding a candy-bag, in front of houses, rang the...

Carl Jara writes, "Calavera del Toro: Gold Medal sand sculpture by Carl Jara, depicts Occupy Wall Street in a Day of the Dead satire. Created last weekend at Sand Castle Days in South Padre Island, Te...

In case you found it hard to understand the whole business of "Marg Warrior Princess" (in which a comedian/news reporter from the CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes dresses up like a middle-aged housewife...

In case you found it hard to understand the whole business of "Marg Princess Warrior" (in which a comedian/news reporter from the CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes dresses up like a middle-aged housewife...

More revelations on the official police-spread malware that Germany's Chaos Computer Club discovered in the wild and reverse engineered: pretty much everything the German police said in their defense ...

Most of Europe's clocks fell back by an hour last night, but not Russia, which will stay on "summer time" forevermore. Or until it changes its mind again....

Clubgoers in South Wales are to be fingerprinted, with the resulting biometric data to be retained indefinitely. The scheme is "voluntary" -- unless local councils make it a licensing condition for cl...

Ruling Clawss was a Daily Worker comic strip by "A Redfield," better known for his contributions to the New Yorker under the name Syd Hoff. The strips are pretty resonant today, amid the Occupy uprisi...

British Christian groups have vowed to protect the Occupy London tent-city out front of St Paul's cathedral by surrounding it with a "circle of prayer" in the event that the cathedral attempts to evic...

[Video Link] Here's a fun look at artist Tim Biskup's studio....

A pricey, but cool, offering for Mustang aficionados. Ford Motor Co. will soon sell brand-new 1965 Ford Mustangs for just $15,000 each. The only hitch: There's some assembly required. As part of its F...

Danger 5 is an wonderfully kitschy and awesome indie video production about a "1960s-inspired version of World War II" in which five chainsmoking, wisecracking superspies take on Adolf Hitler. Danger ...

A flier circulating within the Occupy movement gives detailed instructions for defending yourself against tear-gas attacks, noting that it is "only for defense purposes" and warning "never incite viol...

This clip -- from some sort of Japanese candid camera show -- shows a guy having the bejeezus scared out of him by a woman dressed as a ghost hiding behind a half-silvered mirror. Japanese ghost prank...

Brute Force Studios's Thomas Willeford wrote this great guide to steampunking your jack-o-lantern to make a "Steampunkin." Awesome. Behold, the Steampunkin! (PDF) (via Neatorama)...

Something about sparkplugs brings out the exuberant lunatic in advertising illustrators. Above, exhibit B (exhibit A here). AC Spark Plugs...

A near-future version of Firefox will have PDF support right in the browser, with no plugins; there's a preview of the feature you can see now. That's awfully handy (though it would be handier if peop...

UEFI is a new hardware standard nominally aimed at stopping malicious software, but it could also make it illegal to replace Windows or MacOS with GNU/Linux on your computer. The Linux Foundation has ...

From a NYT opinion piece by Joe Nocera, "What the Costumes Reveal"— On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonl...

Someone in the Chicago Board of Trade dropped this printed rant on top of Occupy Chicago protesters this Wednesday, as demonstrators and union workers gathered in the city's financial center: We are W...

SOPA, the House version of the US Senate's PROTECT-IP Bill, might be the worst-ever copyright proposal in US legislative history. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has begun a series of articles exam...

Zombie Apocalypse is a new movie written by BB pal and SyFy digital honcho Craig Engler -- it premieres tonight on SyFy: The film takes place months after a zombie plague has wiped out 90 percent of t...

Justin Bieber's lawyers might object to the FreeBieber campaign, but Justin himself has called for Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who sponsored the anti-streaming legislation that would criminalize upload...

ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is a punishing, secretly negotiated copyright treaty that could send ordinary people to jail for copyright infringement. The EU will soon vote on it. Her...

Microsoft-owned Skype has launched a campaign to shut down programmers who use reverse-engineering to understand its protocol and make interoperable products. Their PR agency calls this "nefarious att...

[Video Link] Best "Bad Lip Reading" yet, I'd say.  Herman Cain sings God Bless America Cain Train: Herman Cain campaign ad by Tim Heidecker Visualizing Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan to redistribut...

Kobun Chino Otogawa, Steve Jobs' Zen teacher. Courtesy kobun-sama.org. At PLOS, Steve Silberman goes in depth into the influence that Steve's Buddhist teachers had on Apple's mission and its products....

"Im all for leaking when its organized."—White House Chief of Staff Bill Daley. (ProPublica)...

KQED has a live stream of Michael Moore speaking to "Occupy Oakland", right now. And North Oakland Now is live-tweeting soundbites while he speaks, as is East Bay Express....

"I knew I had to see what was happening for myself. Since there was a chance I would be arrested, or worse, I took off my watch and emptied my wallet of most of its cashI carried only a single ID and ...

Over at Wired News, Quinn Norton has a comprehensive Occupy Wall Street roundup: #occupysd, #occupynashville arrested, and Tahrir Square marches with #occupyoakland. And separately: the Oakland police...

A U.S. company that makes Internet "filtering" systems admits that Syria has been using at least 13 of its devices to censor Web activity there. This news comes as the Syrian government cracks down on...

Boing Boing reader Ed Marsh ([email protected]) created this homage to "The Wizard of Oz," and to the Occupy Wall Street movement. What did they want, after all? A heart. A home. Courage....

People keep talking about Saif Gaddafi's artwork, but it is useless without pictures. Here are a few of the paintings ascribed to him in press reports. Many are sadly but necessarily shot at oblique a...

Thanks to our overwhelming no-show of numbers, 49,000 shots havent been fired at OWS yet.—Essayist Greg Tate, who is black, musing that a "blacker" Occupy Wall Street movement would have meant m...

Herman Cain speaks at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition's Presidential Forum in Des Moines, Iowa October 22, 2011. REUTERS/Brian C. Frank. Because Herman Cain's actual campaign ads just aren't w...

A kick-ass op-ed by Dahlia Lithwick smashes the myth that the Occupy movement doesn't have a message: "Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to under...

Here is the excellent title sequence for Roberts Robots, a 1973-1974 UK comedy television series about an inventor of androids and his mechanical creations. (via Toys and Techniques)...

From FluffPo (the blog of bad Huffington Post behavior), here's the HuffPo bingo board....

A gentleman spent nine hours stuck in a toddler/infant bucket swing at a Vallejo, California playground until firefighters rescued him. Apparently, the 21-year-old had bet $100 that he could fit into ...

Prior to Occupy Wall Street, the dominant narrative in US politics was about debt and deficit reduction, and the attendant austerity measures that entailed. A study of keywords from network newscasts ...

Gwen Sharp of Sociological Images comments on an Economist graph that shows how spending patterns have changed in the US during the Great Recession. The results provide a good snapshot of the economic...

DJA and Dirty South Joe are the Blood Bros, dedicated curators and compilers of 1980s action movie songs. Get fired up to chop wood, take on a bully, or stage a single-handed coup. On two mixes, First...

Matthew Agostinis from Toronto made a smashing light fixture by harvesting a collection of odd, dead lightbulbs from the recycling bin at his local Ikea, and setting them amid one working light affixe...

"Aleister Crowley, "The Wickedest Man In The World," Meets His Match With The Wicked Witch Of The West, From '"The Wizard Of Oz'" Who would win? My money is on the witch. Crowley may have been pals wi...

Ben Marks of Collector's Weekly says: "We published an article about Ryan Matthew Cohn's jones for bones. It's got videos from the Oddities show and lots of cool photos of goat-skull chandeliers and B...

In the coming global food riots, keep a close eye on women who don't go barefoot: when things get grim enough that families start eating the youngest children, it's the mother who wears shoes who will...

Over at CRAFT, Becky Stern has a video showing how to make glowing kryptonite candy....

Shape Type is a new HTML5 typography game from the creator of Kern Type; this time around, you have to drag curve-adjustment tools to perfect letterforms. Shape Type (via Waxy)...

@AdsofYore is a twitter feed that republishes unusual liner ads from the archives of local newspapers....

At Gawker, Brooklyn-based journalist Caitlin Curran explains how you could quickly go from being part of the downtrodden 99% to being part of the "no, really, unemployed and utterly fucked" contingent...

My sense is the left hand didnt know what the right hand was doing, he said. I dont think there was adequate command and control. The NYT Lede blog digs into what happened in Oakland Tuesday night. Al...

Today, the statue of Liberty is 125 years old. Above, from the Smithsonian Institution archives, a Harpers Magazine cover: Wilbur Wright flying his Wright Flyer around her in 1909. Sarah Taylor Sulick...

In Esquire, Richard Dorment writes about growing his red hair our after spending years buzzing it to avoid "hearing shit about it" from others. "For the first time in a long time years, maybe I feel...

Hyperbole and a Half, the brilliant, frenetic, illustrated memoir, tackles sudden depression, its effects and eventual cure in the long awaited new installment. I spent months shut in my house, surfin...

As they vowed earlier this week to do, Egyptian pro-democracy protesters marched from Tahrir square to the U.S. Embassy today to march in support of Occupy Oakland—and against the type of police...

Shirky and Rosen respond: "Lefty journalism professor tries to discredit the Tea Party by passing along sensational footage to his buddies at the Times!!!" Really, if this "sting" is the best that And...

The dead tyrant's smartest son intends to hand himself over to the Hague to face prosecution. [NYT]...

Did British newspapers fabricate a story about the Occupy London protest camp being left unoccupied at night? The answer is "yes", when seen through the lens of a specific model of re-rented thermal i...

The FreeBieber campaign -- which seeks to raise awareness of the US illegal streaming bill that criminalizes the kind of YouTube cover songs Bieber launched his career with -- has received a legal thr...

Beloved kids' book The Phantom Tollbooth turns 50 this year (commemorated by a new edition introduced by Michael Chabon) and an oversubscribed Kickstarter campaign has been funded to produce a documen...

Margaret Thatcher leads Britain's former prime-ministers in claiming expenses back from the taxpayer. She's been reimbursed more than £500,000 in the past five years. Figures revealed by the Cabi...

Zombie Poodle, an unsourced net-finding, shows how a little creative dog grooming can turn even the cutest dog-breeds into shambling zombies. Just a Zombie Poodle (Pic) (via Neatorama)...

OAKLAND RIOT CAT. Here's the background. (via Renny Gleeson)...

The Guardian has an update on the case of Scott Olsen, the Iraq war veteran who suffered serious head injuries after being hit by a projectile fired by police during the Occupy Oakland protests Tuesda...

Lalo Alcaraz, the artist and Uppity Mexican-American commentator who created the totally dope new "Occupy"/"Anonymous" poster above, is at laloalcaraz.com and pocho.com. I asked Lalo for info on how t...

In the photo above, Veterans For Peace member Scott Olsen, who is identified as a former U.S. Marine and Iraq war veteran, lies on the street after being struck in the head by a police projectile in O...

JWZ proposed a two-step plan to help Google realize its stated goal of allowing pseudonyms on Google+: 1. Stop deleting peoples' accounts when you suspect that the name they are using is not thei...

"How can the government justify charging students nearly 7 percent while it charges the banks nothing and can itself borrow for less than nothing?" —Tamara Draut, writing at The Nation. (via Ned...

Mexico's Blog del Narco, the subject of a previous Boing Boing interview feature, denounces attempts at censorship as access to their website access is blocked. More: Knight Center for Journalism in t...

Forbes and Betabeat report that the TSA screener responsible for leaving a pervy note in Feministe's Jill Filipovic's checked luggage (after finding a sex toy there) has been fired....

In the photo above, Veterans For Peace member Scott Olsen, who is identified as a former U.S. Marine and Iraq war veteran, lies on the street after being struck in the head by a police projectile in O...

[Video Link]. Fucking gangs, how do they work? Spencer Ackerman at Wired's Danger Room blog: "The FBI considers the fans of shticky rap group Insane Clown Posse to represent a threat on par with the C...

[Video Link] "Satellite," the latest music video for pop tunesmith, multi-instrumentalist, and record collector Brandon Schott, directed by Matt Barrios. Buy Brandon's latest record "13 Satellites" on...

Here's a quick and easy recipe for making your own fog machine for $5 worth of household objects: a candle, glycerin, water, a pop bottle, and a disposable pieplate. 5 Dollar Fog Machine (via Red Ferr...

Sound It Out #4: Say Hi -- "Devils"It's getting to be the end of the year, which is traditionally a slow time for interesting new music. I'm going to scatter in a few songs in coming weeks that came o...

Matt Freidell, a video editor/producer who created a company called The Glossary to produce short trailers for books, wrote to say, "I read the novella included in your newest release The Great Big Be...

Blackboard, the ubiquitous, hedge-fund-backed classroom software found on campuses around the world, has just changed its billing structure to make it possible for schools to share their courseware wi...

Rob Ford is Toronto's buffonish embarrassment of a mayor, elected by the suburbs to "end Toronto's war on cars" and "open the city for business," he declared that he would save money by "ending the gr...

I'll be the guest on the Dr. Kiki's Science Hour podcast today. The live show starts at 6:00 pm Central time/ 4:00 pm Pacific. Can't join us this afternoon? A recording of the show will be posted on S...

Christopher Soghoian's NYT op-ed on one important lesson from Wikileaks: infosec for journalists and their sources. "Sadly, operational computer security is still not taught in most journalism schools...

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This concept design for a "microbial home" centered around a methane digester hub that feeds gas from your food into various appliances has a nice, bodgy, Rube Goldberg feel. We can call it methanepun...

[Video Link: "Police Presence at Occupy Wall Street"] From Casimir Nozkowski and the guys behind Internets Celebrities (Twitter), whom we've featured on Boing Boing's Virgin America in-flight TV chann...

[Video Link: "To Catch a Journalist."] Andrew Breitbart, who wasn't always like this, writes: Earlier this morning, James OKeefes Project Veritas released a new video that sheds light on the way the N...

Vimeo's snobbish policy against footage of video games has long upset indie developers. Recently, however, it began pitching a $200 account upsell directly with ban notifications, and the dam of rage ...

A five-hour Orange County, CA city council meeting ended with the council unanimously agreeing that the Occupy tents on the town hall's lawn were a form of free speech and vowing to "add the needs of ...

Some of Belgian artist Peyo's early drawings are headed to the auction house, where they are expected to fetch $160,000 or more. [Reuters]...

What happens when you combine science, art, and humor? Join Marc Abrahams of the Ig Nobel Prizes and Brian Wecht, a theoretical physicist and half of the music comedy duo Ninja Sex Party, for a live c...

RIM faces class-action lawsuits for its extended service outages last month, with the first already filed in California and Canada. [Ars Technica]...

Once upon a time, people sent monkeys and dogs into the stratosphere as test subjects aboard rockets we weren't yet willing to put a human being on top of. We also used mice to gauge how microgravity ...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our daily delivery of blog headlines to your inbox. Watchismo's showing some very cool automatic mechanical timepieces from Nixon Watches. The...

Bones can tell you a lot about a creature, but there's much more they can't tell you. Bones are not behavior. We know what the skeletons of dinosaurs looked like. But there's a great deal about their ...

As Xeni noted yesterday, the USA PATRIOT Act is now ten years old. In case you were wondering which parts of PATRIOT are the most offensive to liberty, human dignity and commons sense, the Electronic ...

The lack of good phones to go with the Windows Phone OS is at an end! Nokia's Lumia 800—clearly a derivative of its doomed MeeGo handset—puts Microsoft's well-designed but largely unwanted...

[Video Link] Here's the book trailer for the new novelization of the game Settlers of Catan. The 620-page novel was written by Rebecca Gable and is published by Amazon. I just started reading an advan...

Movie premieres like DreamWorks Animations Puss in Boots, are more known for the red carpet appearances of actors like Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek and less known for the efforts of the animators ...

Canadian Conservative MP Lee Richardson, a member of the Standing Committee on Industry, responded to a letter from a constituent who worried that the new copyright bill C-11 creates penalties for bre...

Facebook is to build a server farm near the arctic circle. [Telegraph]...

PROTECT-IP is a US Senate bill that establishes a draconian censorship and surveillance regime in America in the name of protecting copyright. Its House version, SOPA, has just been introduced, and it...

The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories is a collection of "lost" Dr Seuss stories culled from short stories published in magazines like Redbook in the 1940s and 1950s, collected and reprinted for the...

Giles Fraser, a canon at London's St Paul's Cathedral, has resigned his job and given up his church residence in protest of the plan to forcibly evict the Occupy London protesters camped in St Paul's ...

Sony will finally make its own cellphones, absorbing the joint-venture it established with Ericsson in 2001. The time it took for this decision to move from evident necessity to execution -- about 3 y...

I can't find any further info on this Venn piagram, but surely it belongs in the annals of great math related food humor. Venn piagram....

I'm the guest on The Experts today at 5pm Pacific time. It's hosted by Alexis Diana and streams live on Triggla.tv....

Pretty much every item for sale on this 1907 ad for "open driving" accessories would make my life better today in 2011, and I don't even own a car. Sleeve protector, robes and apron, raw hide tire ban...

Quick: Name a common food, consumed every day by most people, that: Increases overall calorie consumption by 400 calories per day Affects the human brain in much the same way as morphine Has a grea...

Surrey University sociologist Dr Paul Hodkinson conducted a series of follow-up interviews with goths he'd studied as teenagers in the 90s and found that the cohort has made a pretty graceful transiti...

WFMU presents a festival celebrating radio's future as it takes on new forms in the digital age for the medium's fans, tinkerers and future thinkers. A special opening night performance with Radio Leg...

COSMIC RAYS TURNED HER INTO A FANTASTIC ICE CREAM TREAT. Josh Glenn says John Hilgart, creator of the excellent comic-book detail galleries Comic Book Cartography, 4CP, and Supertype!, has recently di...

Ben Marks says: "In our latest interview with Mardi and Stan Timm, the couple who collect novelties such as Girlie Glasses and Fake Barf, we drill down on the history of chattering teet...

Chris Fenton is using his MakerBot 3D printer to print out a mechanical computer; here he demonstrates one of the counting mechanisms. Because I have a 3D printer and I can!...

[Video Link.] Video analysis by blogger Matt Kresling: "Footage from the Occupy Oakland protest, October 25th, 2011. After protesters ran to the aid of a badly-injured person, Oakland Police deliberat...

This really is news: the TSA has identified and fired the screener agent who, upon finding a sex toy in a woman's checked luggage, left a creepy note for her. Update: The TSA has not fired the agent. ...

Matty Iglesias, observing Shani O. Hilton's twitpic of the Washington Post front page today: "It's amazing that Oakland PD managed to disperse the Occupy Oakland crowd solely by petting kittens." Says...

My how time flies and civil liberties fade. Ten years to the day since the Patriot Act passed, making potential enemies of the state of us all. And no signs of retirement in sight.  Patriot Act i...

Tha Business is a concept design by Hoang and Anh Nguyen that rethinks a number of antipersonnel objects (pepper spray, knives, brass knuckles) as stylish, wallet-sized gizmos. Also includes a whistle...

SuperMagnete documents a clever method for removing dents from brass instruments using powerful magnets. You insert a steel ball (smaller than the dent) in the instrument, and then use a padded magnet...

Etsy seller Bunnywithatoolbelt made this "white and walnut" abstract nativity that reminds me of Danish modern furniture crossed with classic starburst clocks. Nativity Set - white and walnut (via Mak...

This is not the best photo, but it is pretty damn mind-blowing. What you see here is Jerry Glover, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, holding the root system of a single perennial wheat plant. The...

In the spring, Cory and I both linked to the Kickstarter campaign for Coffee Joulies. Here was the promise of these intriguing metallic lozenges: Coffee Joulies work with your coffee to achieve two go...

Gaius, a self-described member of the 1% ("Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan would save me roughly $400,000 a year in taxes, and President Obama's tax proposals would cost me more than $100,000") writes on Dai...

[Video Link] 3ric Johanson of Hackerbot Labs shot this beautiful video. He says it "shows the upper deck of the viaduct being demolished by massive jackhammers, while a brave construction worker spray...

60,000 peer-reviewed papers, including the first peer-reviewed scientific research journal in the world, are now available free online. The Royal Society has opened its historical archives to the publ...

CNET reports that a man in California has been sentenced to eight years in prison for identity theft after federal police GPS-tracked his phone and discovered a hard drive with over 300,000 victim pro...

"See if you can tell the difference between a corporate tax avoidance scheme and a Fall song title, by playing our soon-to-be-household-favourite game."...

[Video Link] Mike Springer of Open Culture says: This past weekend, Pete Seeger marched through the streets of Manhattan with the Occupy Wall Street movement. He was a spritely 92. It was the lat...

Reddit poster mdrabz is a middle school science teacher who just got a $5500 state grant to set up a lab for his 7th and 8th grade students in the Mississippi Delta. How do you choose what to buy with...

And then he said, I have Libyas best composer, most famous composer write this song for you, and it was called Black Flower in the White House.—Condolezza Rice, describing her stalker, Muammar G...

[Video Link] I've never heard of a bow lathe, much less see one in action. This is a fascinating video of a man in Marrakech who uses a hand-powered lathe to cut wooden chess pieces. He uses his foot ...

FOR INFORMATION, RECIPES AND PONTIFICATIONS CONCERNING GIANT WOMBATS, please do visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and/or FOLLOW RUBEN BOLLING on the TWITTER (secret code name: @rubenbolling)....

Photo: Oakland North. Veterans for Peace member at Occupy Oakland last night. Last night, hundreds of police in riot gear from divisions throughout Northern California descended on the Occupy Oakland ...

Nanovo Shop sells hand-picked vintage housewares and designy tchotchkes and doodads from Czechoslovakia's Soviet era. NANOVO shop (via Core 77)...

At Anthropology in Practice, Krystal D'Costa looks at the cultural history of the rabbit's foot as a good luck charm, and attempts to figure out why bunny feet ended up being imbued with such signific...

[Video Link] Get out of the way, Big Dog: here comes "the biped robot which rides on a bicycle." (Via nerdstink)...

As usual, Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting perspective on OWS: "t is not a protest, but a prototype for a new way of living. " But “Occupy” is anything but a protest movement. That...

[Video Link] John Hodgman, deranged millionaire, has a job to do concerning his upcoming book, THAT IS ALL....

[Video Link] It's fascinating to watch UnidColor create his digital paintings. For the one above, he started by laying down some photos of the woods behind his house as a "texture wall." As he paints ...

David East drew this detailed, beautiful piece from a 2008 photograph of astronaut Ron Garan working on the exterior of the International Space Station. It's damn fine work. Look below the jump to see...

Etsy seller Geekcetera offers this Doctor Who hoodie: "Featuring the iconic tweed lapels and 11th Doctor's sonic screwdriver, this awesome hoodie will keep you warm all winter!" Doctor Who- Matt Smith...

Dress in your best 1960s attire for a grand-opening party this Saturday at the Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site on the UCLA campus. The site is like Colonial Williamsburg for nerds (or is that redunda...

It used to be that you could make Google include terms in search results by placing the + symbol before them in queries. Not any more! Writing for Wired, Andy Baio covers Google's increasing will...

Max Barry's Machine Man is a disarmingly funny and light-feeling novel about an antisocial engineer who decides to create his own prosthetic leg after he loses his own in an industrial accident. Charl...

Inhabitat has a great gallery of photos of sculptor Ray Villafane's zombies carved out of the world's largest pumpkin: Last week, we brought you news that the world's largest pumpkin was going under t...

Scott Amron's Vanishing Fruitwash Labels are a concept design for a water-soluble, adhesive-backed fruit label that is impregnated with "fruit wash" -- a detergent engineered to remove wax and pestici...

"Square by square, town by town, country by country, the people have risen up to demand their basic human rights. (...)The United States supports a set of universal rights. And these rights include fr...

Writing in the Guardian, Patrick Kingsley debunks the attempts to smear Occupy London protesters as "part-timers." Local councillor Matthew Richardson has been widely quoted in the press saying that t...

Photo: Oakland North From Oakland North blog: Vowing to reoccupy Frank Ogawa Plaza, hundreds of Occupy Oakland protestors marched through the streets of downtown Oakland late Tuesday afternoon, chanti...

Photo: Adreadnonymous. Protester in wheelchair at Oakland protest, tear-gassed. [Video Link: Oakland police throwing tear gas bombs at protesters.] From Oakland North blog: Vowing to reoccupy Frank Og...

Photo: Adreadnonymous. Protester in wheelchair at Oakland protest, tear-gassed. [Video Link: Oakland police throwing tear gas bombs at protesters.] From Oakland North blog: Vowing to reoccupy Frank Og...

[Video Link]. What could possibly top the horrible and weird and real campaign videos for horrible and weird and real presidential candidate Herman Cain? Why, a horrible and weird and fake campaign vi...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Peter Eckersley has been monitoring the revocation of SSL certificates as a way of figuring out how often the 600+ certificate authorities are hacked. A hacke...

Jane from Creative Commons sez, Today marks the official launch of the 2011 Creative Commons Annual Campaign! Please join us in powering the future of openness! This year, we are offering a limited te...

The 9 Most Lucrative Heists. 10 Unsolved Mysteries. 13 Fad Diets. 7 Things Made From Insects. If these pique your interest, you'll enjoy the new book Listomania: A World of Fascinating Facts in Graphi...

Passport to Dreams Old and New -- the smartest Disney blog I know of, and some of the best design criticism I've ever read -- discusses the role of pop-up ghosts in American spook-houses and ghost tra...

Samuel P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Photograph by R. H. Lord. Boing Boing pal Isabel Lara of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum sends along a fantastic little gem f...

Our friend Gareth Branwyn (editor-in-chief of Make Online) has written a wonderful and detailed "Skill Builder" article on tabletop gaming. In the early aughts, I ran a popular and well-regarded table...

"Occupy protests are tough to keep up with, having spread across the four corners of the nation, and beyond them into the net," Quinn Norton writes at Wired Threat Level blog. And she's right. But she...

On the subject of Obama's birth certificate, presidential candidate and noted douchebag Rick Perry seems essentially to be saying, "it's a theory that's out there." (thanks, anonymous!)...

Paleofuture features "If Today Were 1965!" -- a 1955 publication of the Reading Automobile Club Magazine, published a year before the Federal Freeway Highway Act. It's an interesting mix of humility a...

My friend and MAKE colleague John Baichtal co-wrote an upcoming book called The Cult of Lego. I liked it so much that I wrote the foreword to it. As you might guess, John knows a great deal of Lego lo...

These (sold out, sob!) ladies' Robin socks come with capes, which is nothing less than a stroke of genius. Robin Socks w/Capes Jr Women Knee-Highs (Sold Out) (via Geekologie)...

(Photo by Jeffrey Clark) Gwen Moran of Entrepreneur magazine interviewed me about MAKE and Maker Faire. The article came out today (and so did the paperback edition of my book Made by Hand). The Maker...

[Video Link, via Tim Heidecker] This one's classic, meaning it came out back in August when no-one was paying attention.  Herman Cain sings Lennon classic Imagine There's No Pizza ... Visuali...

It's October 25, 2011, and another subspecies of the Javan rhinoceros has gone extinct. There's only one subspecies left, and it's down to 50 individuals....

How do you know that you just experienced a more-impressive-than-average display of the Northern Lights? When somebody can take a picture like the one above in freaking Arkansas. Arkansas, people. Pho...

Etsy seller ZALcreations makes crazy-wonderful lamps. My favorites are the ones that run their wiring through plumber's pipes and use faucets as on/off switches, but then there's the skateboard vanity...

I joined the Madeleine Brand Show today for a discussion about the latest Wikileaks news. On Monday, Julian Assange said—for the second time in as many years—that the organization known fo...

I've talked here before about how difficult it is to attribute any individual climactic catastrophe to climate change, particularly in the short term. Patterns and trends can be said to link to a rise...

A recently published study found a correlation between higher rates of coffee drinking in women and decreased risk of depression. Naturally, that finding made headlines. But blogger Scicurious has a r...

These genuine Hollywood TV Tuffets are not only good for parking your drooling tot in front of the goggle-box, but can also do triple-duty as unsafe car-seats and precarious booster-chairs. Watch out ...

In Baltimore, scientists have joined the Occupy Wall Street movement. They're worried about the lack of job prospects for Ph.D.s, but they're also worried about what that lack of jobs says about a soc...

One of the most common arguments you'll hear against evolution (or, at least, one of the most common arguments I heard growing up amongst creationists) had to do with transitional forms. An eye is a v...

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Today marks the publication of The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, an anthology of short stories inspired by The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, a much-loved book of illustrations and titles for short stor...

Nishma from the Open Rights Group sez, "The Public Data Corporation consultation could mean access to public data is restricted only to those who can afford it. This could mean that data on weather an...

A U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) application shows that Robert and Diane Maresca of Long Island, New York, are seeking to trademark the phrase Occupy Wall St. so that they can place it on "a...

This old shag carpet ad gives due veneration to the almighty knick-knack, showing us what a room can be with sufficient visual noise and soft synthetics underfoot. Bigelow Carpets [vintage-ads.livejou...

Over at credit.com, I took a look at P.T. Barnum's 1880 advice book, The Art of Money-Getting. P.T. Barnum, the great circus showman of the 19th century, is probably best remembered for saying, “...

[Video Link, via Joe Sabia]  Herman Cain sings God Bless America Visualizing Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan to redistribute wealth from the ... Herman Cain sings Lennon classic Imagine There's ...

[Video Link, via Joe Sabia]. You know what they say about blowing smoke. Also, is Cain pulling a trollface at the end?  Herman Cain sings God Bless America Visualizing Herman Cain's 9-9-9 pla...

[Video Link] The Elephant in the Living Room is a 2010 documentary that "exposes the controversial American subculture of raising wild predators as common household pets." It's not on Netflix yet, but...

[Video Link] The Nest thermostat was designed by Tom Fadell, the "father of the iPod." It will cost $250 and will be available next month. Nest learns from your temperature adjustments, programs itsel...

Through a widely-reported poster campaign (see inset), "We're a Culture not a Costume" is a sincere and laudable effort to draw awareness to the perpetuation of prejudice through racist Halloween cost...

A team of Swedish and American researchers used machine translation techniques to crack an 18th century cipher used by a secret society. The approach -- presented to the Association for Computational ...

NYC teachers: MakerBot is holding a free workshop on using DIY 3D printers in the classroom. It's a four-hour program at the Bot Farm in Brooklyn on Oct 29. "No prior knowledge of 3-D modeling or 3-D ...

Jack Zylkin created the USB Typewriter. I interviewed him about his creation, the response he's received, and why people are so interested in "the muggle magic of gears and pulleys and solenoids." Avi...

Early this morning in Oakland, California, some 300-500 police brought weapons including flash-bang grenades, tear gas, rubber bullets, and shotguns to break up and arrest a large encampment of "Occup...

At Occupy Wall Street, a sketch artist seeks inspiration from protestors. [Turnstyle]...

Regine Ramseier's "Windstille" installation involved hundreds (thousands?) of fluffy dandelions, sprayed with fixative and hung from the ceiling of a tall, narrow white room. The result is both exuber...

[Video Link]. Boing Boing reader Samuel Cockedey created this lovely short, and explains: This is a tribute to Ridley Scott and Vangelis, whose work on Blade Runner has been a huge source of inspirati...

Oh, Conan: Apple's New Siri Commercial Cuts To The Chase. Will be region-blocked or ad-preceded for many of you, but there are some illicit copies floating around on YouTube. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin...

Linda Stone, on human attention: "Our relationships with our SmartPhones, and this wicked habit that many of us have, of walking or driving while texting or talking, holds us in a state of perpetual i...

Bad As Me, Tom Waits's first studio album of new music in seven years, was released yesterday. I'm an enormous Tom Waits fan and never met an album of his I didn't love, but I love some of the materia...

Bad As Me, Tom Waits' first studio album of new music in seven years, was released yesterday. I'm an enormous Tom Waits fan and never met an album of his I didn't love, but I love some of the material...

This 1908 Kellogg's Corn Flakes ad is about as good as vintage ads get: you've got your American vernacular, your grotesque charcoal drawing of a vicious attack on a poor grocer by a furious cook, you...

Robert Venditti and Mike Huddleston's stand-alone graphic novel The Homeland Directive is a tight, suspenseful technothriller (in Bruce Sterling's definition of the term: "a science fiction story with...

Photo: Jeff Hindman Boing Boing reader Jeff Hindman says he was strolling on the beach at Siesta Key Village, Fla., today, when he chanced across a "giant Legoman washed ashore." "It is very big, abou...

Back in 2008, I bought one of 686's belt buckles, which has a clever set of snowboard-binding-adjusting tools built into it, including a small flathead and Philips head screwdriver tips on the buckle'...

Following up on the contentious NewsCorp shareholder meeting where the independent shareholders were to express their displeasure with the crimes committed on the Murdoch family's watch: the majority ...

Redditor Junkyardmessiah has a proposal for dealing with neighbors with very large stereo systems: Simple suggestion here, I had the same issue with a neighbor that no matter how nicely or how well I ...

Lee Sonko of The Crucible industrial arts center in Oakland, CA is conducting a flame effects workshop in Los Angeles. Looks great! In this hands-on weekend-long intensive class you will learn how to ...

This clip from the 2007 American Lindy Hop Championships features a pair of talented hoofers cutting a rug to a cool jazz rendition of the Spider Man theme, and the fella is wearing a Spider Man getup...

[Video Link] Xemnas2421 made this crazy puzzle box for his girlfriend. The box is composed of three 1/8" layers. The inner layer is the basic shape, the intermediate layer houses every sliding/locking...

[Video Link] Police and school administrators Wolcott High School in Connecticut tricked students and teachers into believing a dangerous intruder had come into the school building and ordered a lockd...

Photo: Jay Springett Vinay Gupta is a man between worlds, and hes got a lot of arms. Born to Scottish and Indian parents, he was programming from a young age. But looking back on the advent of web-cul...

Photo: Jay Springett Vinay Gupta is a man between worlds, and hes got a lot of arms. Born to Scottish and Indian parents, he was programming from a young age. But looking back on the advent of web-cul...

Rick Dakan, author of the brilliant Geek Mafia books, sez, "Mob Rules Games is a small, indie-startup founded on the core idea that we should develop both the game and the community of players at the ...

Ossian Brown was a member of the dark, magical electronic music group Coil and is currently in Cyclobe, a duo with his partner Stephen Thrower. Ossian is a strange attractor. Weird things find him. L...

In the deep sea, there dwell amoebas of unusual size. Of course, "gigantic" is relative. Although they would dwarf other amoeba species, the biggest xenophyophores are a little more than 4 inches acro...

This short film, "Zombie in a Penguin Suit," is a very high-production-value, often scary, and ultimately very touching seven-minute short film by Chris Russell. It's a good example of how a gimmick p...

Please marvel at Wired's great slideshow history of the spacesuit....

Removing Orbital Debris with Lasers. How's that for a great research paper title? Most of you are probably aware of the existence of space trash—that collection of disused satellites, lost tools...

Jonathan Doyle, a performance artist, has appealed a case involving his right to film bigfoot skits in New Hampshire's Monadnock State Park to the NH Supreme Court. He argues that the permit requireme...

You might know that I'm a big fan of Jake Shimabukuro, who is probably the greatest living ukulele player. His latest album, Peace Love Ukulele features his standing-ovation cover of Bohemian Rhapsody...

I love Gary Schwitzer, a former journalism professor at the University of Minnesota and a key advocate for better health and medical reporting at HealthNewsReview.org. Schwitzer has a quick list of th...

No, no, silly: not for that stolen iPhone prototype, but for a series of stories on technology used inside California's San Quentin State Prison. First up, "prison hacks." Next, perchance, heirloom pr...

My sister-in-law recently gifted me "True Love Cast Out All Evil," psych rock pioneer Roky Erickson's first album in more than a decade. The disc is a collection of unreleased songs that Roky wrote ov...

Mitch O'Connell chose "Good Works" as the door to Heaven. Whoops!...

Mitch O'Connell chose "Good Works" as the door to Heaven. Whoops!...

Vintage plastic foot charms, via The Girl Can't Help It As regular BB readers know, Mark and I have been fascinated by the dozen or so mystery feet that have washed up on the shores of Canada's Pacifi...

Thomas Gideon at the Command Line podcast has done me the honor of selecting a couple of essays from my new collection Context for his latest podcast....

Make way for The Real World, Zuccotti Park. MTV television will premiere "True Life: Im Occupying Wall Street" on Saturday, Nov. 5, according to NYT media writer Brian Stelter. Word spread of TV pilot...

Brian Krebs posts a list of additional organizations said to have been targeted in the RSA attack, that massive data breach disclosed back in March. How many additional targets? Nearly 800 of them....

Love this typewriter-part fraidy cat from Jeremy Mayer, a real favorite around here. It's an older piece, dated 2000. (via Super Punch) Cat X [jemayer.tumblr.com]...

As every blog and news site everywhere has already reported (including Boing Boing), the definitive biography of the late Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, is out today. Actually, it's out today in pape...

The Microsoft YouTube channel was hacked over the weekend, but it was totally the weakest hack of all time. Nary a nyan cat, not one dicksuit, not a speck of porn, not a single Katy Perry bewb. You ca...

In a press conference today, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks will temporarily suspend all publishing activities to "ensure future survival." A financial blockade against Wikileaks by payment p...

Gweek is a podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps and other neat stuff. In episode 023...

This old Frigidaire ad features some crazy, exuberant kitchen-cabinet decor, and the classic fridge-as-cornucopia imagery, nicely offset by the creepy girl-and-doggy posed in postures of supplication ...

"Just unpacked my suitcase and found this note from TSA," tweets writer and attorney Jill Filipovic of Feministe. "Guess they discovered a 'personal item' in my bag. Wow." It was a standard-issue "we ...

Danger Room reports that an Army-backed R&D project called Power Dreaming at Naval Hospital Bremerton in Washington State promises to help troops battle their nightmares with digital "counter-dre...

The paperback edition of my book, Made by Hand: My Adventures in the World of Do-It-Yourself is coming out tomorrow (October 25). It includes a new section with a recipe for making kombucha and instru...

BestSFBooks produces lists of the most award-winning and award-nominated science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as lists of new releases from writers whose works have won a lot of awards in the p...

Scored is Lauren McLaughlin's latest YA science fiction novel, a remarkable book about surveillance, class, and culture. It's McLaughlin's third novel, and her best so far (though the previous two wer...

Twaggies presents another quiz, which this time will have you in knots of frustration behind the media center....

Thanks to Boing Boing reader "WhishingOnAsTar!" for submitting today's background image to the Boing Boing Flickr pool!...

I was at a friend's birthday dinner when he received a WeWOOD wooden watch from his wife. Everyone at the table was quite impressed. The wooden watch is very striking, elegant, and solid. WeWOOD timep...

B3ta user Limpfish's "Lossie" graphic is great JPEG artifact humor -- and other B3tans took up the challenge with similarly altered movie posters. Home Messageboard Message 10579834 [b3ta.com]...

Pere Tarragó built this MV Agusta 750 S. For the fun surprise, click here....

Here's the latest Narco Polo comic by Rob Arthur, a a former inner-city teacher and public defender and author of one of my favorite books, You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos. The astronomer an...

Leaky ex-Scientology bigwig Marty Rathbun reveals that the Church of Scientology has been running deep "public records checks" (including dumpster-diving and investigating friends) on South Park creat...

Spotted in the Clinton Station Diner in Clinton, NJ: a "garbage omelette" with "anything the cook can find." Check out the omelette I'm too scared to order at the Clinton Diner. (It's the last on the ...

Spotted in @carriebish's Twitter, this insane and menacing shop-window sign about an improbable sky-diving trip and a fraught marriage. Just about the amazingest craziest sign I've ever seen [twitter....

Charlie Stross goes on a tear with "A cultural thought experiment," looking at what the wealth of the 1 percent means, what it can't buy them, and how it might be viewed from a future society. The dim...

Thomas Gideon at the Command Line podcast has done me the honor of selecting a couple of essays from my new collection Context for his latest podcast....

Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) is working on a stage adaptation of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist. Teller's got an eclectic, less-well-known scholarly/serious bent, having contributed to pee...

A man carries an injured girl after an earthquake in Tabanli village. REUTERS/Abdurrahman Antakyali/Anadolu Agency. Turkey's Kandilli Observatory estimates that some 500 to 1,000 people were killed in...

A man carries an injured girl after an earthquake in Tabanli village. REUTERS/Abdurrahman Antakyali/Anadolu Agency. Turkey's Kandilli Observatory estimates that 1,000 or more people were killed today ...

A new DARPA solicition seeks "swarming robot space vampires" (in JWZ's evocative phrasing) to disassemble and harvest valuable components from decommissioned satellites before they're deorbited, to us...

A new DARPA solicition seeks "swarming robot space vampires" (in JWZ's evocative phrasing) to disassemble and harvest valuable components from decommissioned satellites before they're decommissioned, ...

On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs and Apple unveiled the first iPod: 5GB of music packed into a white box no bigger than a deck of cards. More on the history, and Tony Fadell's role in developing the de...

PA Design sells die-cut post-its shaped like wristwatches, gummed so they can be joined at the wrist. A cute way to put notes where you're sure to glance at them. Montre Post It Pense bte [pa-design.c...

The network of global corporate control (PDF), a study published in PLOS One, analyzes the ownership structures of the world's corporations and finds a tightly-knit cluster of 147 entities control 40 ...

Some damned good fiction advice from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, just back from teaching the Viable Paradise science fiction/fantasy writing workshop on Martha's Vineyard. Rules 3 and 4 are particularly ni...

Since you know that November 1 is the day that retailers bust out their Christmas dross, why not combine Hallowe'en and Xmas with this zombie nativity scene from Etsy seller fetishforethics? (via Maki...

Etsy seller GeekyCuteCrochet (and there's a descriptive moniker for you -- a 16-character repudiation of the theory that real names make for better commerce than nyms) has these sweet little crocheted...

"Toronto Tempo," a 3:42 timelapse video of Toronto captures the city's many iconic rhythms and gaits, from the subway's rocketing roar to the deceptive stillness of the lakeshore to the beetling crowd...

Video Link: Willie Nelson and his wife wrote this poem in solidarity with the "Occupy" movement. "We're the ones we've been waiting for." Disclosure: I love this totally awesome dude, and he can do no...

Etsy seller CarryTheWhat created these 3D printed Minecraft pickaxes and swords. They're handpainted to your spec: "wood, stone, iron, gold or diamond available." There's a Thingiverse model for you t...

Muammar Gaddafi may have died the richest person on earth, with more than $200bn in assets sneaked out of Africa's most oil-rich nation....

The ACLU of Tennessee has brought suit against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement after a warrantless raid on an apartment complex where ICE officers believed some illegal immigrants were housed. ...

Ransom Riggs's photo-essay on the airplane graveyard in the Mojave Desert features astounding imagery of ancient, rotting aviation hardware bleaching its bones in the desert sun. I thought it was a mi...

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[Video Link] Thanks for reminding me how to store my 100-foot extension cord, Muskrat and Rat Man!...

The Escapist's Leigh Alexander interviews Anna Anthropy, author of a dating sim that breaks out of the "nerd harem fantasy" conventions of the genre....

New from PM Press: Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: Stories of Crime, Love and Rebellion, a short story collection "that revolves around riots, revolts, and revolution." It includes "I Love Paree...

The Canadian Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that linking does not constitute libel, arguing that subjecting linkers to the same libel risks as publishers would cause the Web to collapse. This rev...

"Occupy the Classroom," Nicholas D. Kristof's NYT op-ed, argues that the fight for economic justice needs to include a demand for universal access to high quality early childhood education, as this is...

TheNewHobbyist has posted an Instructable for re-creating the "Singing Busts" effect from the Disney Haunted Mansion rides, using an Arduino to control the effect so that it springs to life when trick...

[Video Link] An interesting 30-minute documentary about 2001 CrossFit champion, Annie Thorisdottir. I've never been to a CrossFit gym before. The workouts look intense! Join filmmaker Sevan Matossian ...

The ACLU has sent a...

As...

As Blake Hounsell says, "The civilized way to kill a dictator's entourage." Video Link. In Sirt, Libya.  The Day Gaddafi Died: Photos (warning, graphic content) Muammar Gaddafi killed...

An instructive lesson in what not to do on television, from a FOX affiliate news program in Grand Rapids, Michigan. YouTube ("Funny Local News"), via Gawker....

New reports about DSK coming out in the French press involving pimping, paying for possibly underage prostitutes with company funds, and related activities—some while in the United States—...

Next week marks the inaugural Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference (AKA Rightscon) in San Francisco. This event will explore the role that technology plays in the expansion -- or elimination -- of h...

[Video Link] Soul Kitchen is a new restaurant opened in Red Bank, New Jersey, by Jon Bon Jovi and his wife, Dorothea. The establishment offers a "pay what you can afford" payment model, and serves who...

Walter Isaacson's definitive biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is out Monday. All week long, excerpts have been leaking out, with little snippets of the late Apple CEO's reported thoughts on al...

China Digital Times verifies a long list of banned keywords on Sina Weibos search function that combine occupy () with a place name inside China: "provincial capitals, economically developed regions, ...

From Dandingeroz Designs, from the Philippines (created by Dan Eijah Fajardo, aka Dandingeroz, and Pedro Kramer, aka Badbasilisk). It's currently up for voting as a Threadless t-shirt design. (MyModer...

Justin Elliott in Salon: "New documents obtained by the ACLU show that the FBI has for years been using Census data to map ethnic and religious groups suspected of being likely to commit certain types...

"I was a little sorry Wozniak wasnt along that day because Id read that he had lived in a tree. Im partial to tree-dwellers, having as a kid hoped to be one, when my little friend Bob Nelson (we were ...

One wonders if a trial for crimes against humanity might have been a little more dignified—not because the deceased deserved it, but because the living deserved something better than perpetuatio...

One wonders if a trial for crimes against humanity might have been a little more dignified—not because the deceased deserved it, but because the living deserved something better than perpetuatio...

Columbus Circle, New York City, last night. [Video Link, via Kevin Gosztola]...

Columbus Circle, New York City, last night. [Video Link, via Kevin Gosztola]...

Walter Isaacson's definitive biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is out Monday. All week long, excerpts have been leaking out, with little snippets of the late Apple CEO's reported thoughts on al...

Starting Out Small, a photo by The Mighty Womble, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool....

The World Intellectual Property Organization is hosting an off-the-books meeting in the Philippines on trademark enforcement, with speakers from Louis Vuitton, Chanel, the Swiss Watch Federation. The ...

This 1909 letter from Okhil Chandra Sen to the Sahibganj divisional railway office in West Bengal is credited with instigating the practice of installing toilets on India's trains. The image presented...

The popular Mexican social activist and superhero "Super Barrio," who says he wants to improve the financial situation of the working class and the poor and homeless, stands outside the Stock Exchange...

As I publish this blog post, the iconic American folk singer Pete Seeger is marching and performing with Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in New York City. There's video at Livestream....

An emergency measure put into place by the DEA on Friday places mephedrone, methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) and methylone under the most restrictive category of drugs for at least a year, while the ...

Forget it, everyone: there can be no greater jack-o'-lantern theme for 2011. Robert Pearlman tweets this snapshot of a pumpkin carved as an homage to the Space Shuttle Program, which ended this year....

John Lennon's tooth will be on the auction block November 5. Omega Auctions placed a reverse price on it of approximately $16,000. "So, any road, we went to see the dentist instead Who gave her a pair...

Why did you choose go to sleep last night at the particular time you did? Maybe you were just plain tired. But, chances are, there were other factors involved in that decision, as well. Where you hopi...

This gag by the talented Rev. Dave Johnson made me laugh....

Forty years in the making, The Someday Funnies is a 12" x 16", 215-page book containing color comic strips about the 1960s. They were created by famous cartoonists in the early 1970s for a Rolling Sto...

Delia Creates made this awesome kids' Frankenstein's monster hat for her son, Owen. She started with an off the peg Frankenstein suit and then modded for great excellence. (via Craftzine)...

The only one you need to read....

Godtfred Kirk Christiansen et al, filed Jul 28 1958 [US Patent Office/Google Patents via 365blanc] Previously: The Lego brick turns 50; Lego cannot be trademarked, European judges rule....

Tom Deininger is an assemblage artist who arranges bewilderingly large collections of odd plastic tchotchkes into gorgeous pieces, including this Monet-like masterpiece. (via Craft)...

It applies to hotspots and tablets, not smartphones, but haha, wasn't that fast?...

Obviously, Fab Ciraolo's newly-recovered illustrations of Oldschool Heroes provide more evidence of the ruthless looting of 19A0s culture by the subsequent memetic counterrevolution....

Dann Matthews' variation on the Keep Calm poster is one I can live with. Prints are available for $15 and up. via GamOvr....

[Video Link] Good times at Improv in Toronto. Imagine this. A single ninja, standing silently by himself. Beside him sits a sign urging people to fight. Walking along the pathway, you notice said ninj...

The Consumerist: "Someone has graffitied this Burger King billboard in downtown Seattle to transform it into criticism about how sugary fast food contributes to diabetes and the obesity crisis."...

Christine Chin's "Sentient Kitchen" sculptures imagine a whole set of kitchenware sculpted to resemble body parts. The hairy nostrils are a really good touch -- indeed, the whole collection uses spars...

I'm thrilled to be able to share the new website of Jazz and Improv legend Fred Kaz. For the better part of my life Fred's wisdom and music have been a guiding force in the lives of hundreds of the mo...

Spencer Ackerman at Wired News: "The fact is Americas military efforts in Iraq arent coming to an end. They are instead entering a new phase. On January 1, 2012, the State Department will command a hi...

Dan Goldman's Red Light Properties is a serial webcomic about a Florida real-estate brokerage that specializes in exorcising haunted houses and then listing them for cheap. Goldman (who created the fa...

Important news: "Despite confusion, Carlos Santana is NOT Muammar Gaddafi; still very much alive." Via Tim Heidecker. Image Credit: l-r: ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images; Richard Drew/AP....

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our daily delivery of blog headlines to your inbox. BoingBoing readers can get an additional 25% off with the coupon code CLOCKTOBER on any of...

Tim Biskup's new solo show just opened at the THIS Los Angeles gallery. The Los Angeles I'm Yours blog has a slew of striking images from the exhibition, titled Former State. "Tim Biskup's Former Stat...

Our friend Rob Walker, author of Buying In and a contributor at Design Observer, has spun off another brilliant branch of the Unconsumption Project: The Unconsumption project that I co-founded, which ...

How To Be A Retronaut posted a series of lovely vintage circus photos, all from Dominique Jando's The Circus Book: 1870-1950. (via @wonderosity)...

Consider yourselves informed....

From the Aug, 1956 issue of Scientific American, this sweet advertisement for the Univac: "Leading companies throughout the country have learned that Univac has become synonymous with enlightened mana...

Our thoughts are with Mr. Murdoch on the day of his tragic loss....

As I type, U.S. president Barack Obama is addressing the nation on live television. "After nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over. (...) Our troops in Iraq will definitely be home for the holi...

The editors of Poetry magazine invited me to contribute a piece for the October issue. It is here: "Everything Moves to Live." This Poetry podcast episode includes a conversation between me and the ma...

A graph by the wonderful illustrator Chris Piascik....

[Video Link] At a recent college bowling event, a streaker dressed as an umpire ran onto the diamond and interrupted a free throw attempt. Policemen knocked him down and dogpiled him before he could j...

I dote on pajamas and bathrobes (first thing I do when I get on an overnight flight is change into a pair of freshly ironed jammies for a good night's sleep -- I call it the "Most comfortable man in t...

From Futility Closet: Publicity hound Jim Moran brought a sealed case of playing cards to a meeting of magicians. One randomly chosen audience member opened the case, a second chose a deck, a third op...

[Video Link] Dan Colman of Open Culture writes: This summer, Jonathan Pararajasingham created 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God and then Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About G...

Can your wife bake her own bread? Can she get a kid's leg stitched and not phone you at the office until it's all over? Find something to talk about when the TV set goes on the blink? Does she worry a...

[Video Link] I traveled to Japan recently with PBS NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien, and helped shoot and produce a series of stories related to the March 11 disasters: earthquake, tsunami...

Today's Google Doodle honors Mary Blair, the Disney artist who defined the look of "It's a Small World" and the tremendous tile-mural at the Contemporary Resort in Walt Disney World. Today is Blair's ...

I would just like to take a moment to congratulate my alma mater on being ranked #1 by the World Quidditch Association. Rock Chalk!...

Glenn Greenwald rounds up a number of reports related to the killing of al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son by an unmanned aerial drone from the US: Two weeks after the U.S. killed American citizen Anwar Awla...

Reports the Associated Press: "Moammar Gadhafi's blood-streaked body has been stashed in a commercial freezer at a shopping center as Libyans try to keep it away from crowds as they figure out where a...

Scenes from a Multiverse, the delightfully weird webcomic from Scott Rosenberg (creator of the transcendently bizarre Goats, is now available in book form. Rosenberg created Scenes as a more accessibl...

Ommatidia's recipe for "Bolognese Machiavelli" is a delightfully savage bit of cookery: 1. Arrange to have garlic and onions cast into hot oil. 2. The carrot and celery you must divide against themsel...

The UK Open Rights Group has released a report on the way that the UK government approaches copyright policy, in the wake of the government's recent plaudits for the UK film industry's online offering...

Beyond Infinity, an installation by french artist Serge Salat, is described as "interweaving mirrors, light, music, and fractal art" to "conflate visitors' perceptions of space". Sponsored by Buick, i...

Snijlab's wood flexes and folds thanks to an intricate pattern of laser-cut grooves. The best part, however, is that the materials and hardware required to do it yourself are commonplace. "Because a l...

A new Danish study finds no causal association between cellphone use and increased risk of brain tumors. [British Medical Journal]...

This is the business card of game designer Will Wright, interviewed for The Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal. Naturally, the country that minted the note no longer exists....

This is my Next's Vlad Savov reviews the Nokia N9, "one of the most fascinating phones of the last few years." Beautifully designed and toting a linux-based operating system that can actually scroll s...

Gadget Lab's Mike Isaac take a "deep dive" into the latest version of Android, with the platform's chief engineer as tour guide....

The Periodic Table of Swearing isn't just a saucy JPG: it's a real-life interactive box that gets down and dirty with everyday English. It was built by Modern Toss—the duo of artists Jon Link an...

T(ether) from Matthew Blackshaw on Vimeo. T(ether) is a display that sees you. With motion capture cameras embedded in a special glove and headset, it tracks the user's movements and allows them to ma...

My steampunk YA short story, "Clockwork Fagin" (about the children who are mangled by the machinery of the industrial-information revolution, who murder the orphanage's cruel master and replace him wi...

Haley Pierson-Cox of CRAFT found a tutorial from Wee Little Stitches to make a personalized cross-stitched iPhone cover. It uses this terrific Justice League of America Cross Stitch Pattern. How-To: C...

[Video Link] If you like this, be sure to check out the fun companion iPhone app. Anne Lucht's visual music clip takes you for a trip round the town of Dsseldorf, Germany - the place where electronic ...

Khaddafy. Gadhafi. Gaddafi. Qadhafi. Qaddafi. el-Qaddafi. "Good luck googling his obituary." (Rachel Maddow Show)...

[Video Link] In the video above: Noted troll Andrew Escher Auernheimer, aka weev of Goatse Security, on his federal case and why Occupy Wall Street matters to him: "I've had a strong decade of infuria...

Tom Watson, the Labour MP who's tirelessly hounded Murdoch's News of the World over its illegal spying, has flown to the USA to attend the NewsCorp's shareholder meeting (he's got the AFL-CIO's proxy)...

Susannah Breslin in Forbes: "Really, there isnt much of a distinction left between porn and snuff, between selling sex and selling death, between the worlds desire to see a dead person dragged through...

From NASA: "Earth is about to pass through a stream of debris from Halley's comet, source of the annual Orionid meteor shower. Forecasters expect the shower to peak on Saturday morning, Oct. 22nd, wit...

[Video Link] The documentary Revenge Of The Electric Car opens in the US beginning Oct. 21. Looks like fun. Revenge Of The Electric Car follows 4 larger-than-life entrepreneurs at the forefront of the...

I'm not sure I have any comment for this, other than to say how pleased I am that puns work just as well in math. Via Vincent Knight...

There are many pretenders to the throne of Violet Beauregarde. Buddy Bumper Ball...

Whenever you see a dust cloud, there's an almost instinctual reflex to start talking about The Grapes of Wrath. It's natural. But it's often misplaced. Your average cloud of dirt is less apocalyptic t...

They said it couldn't be done. But National Geographic Traveler's Andrew Evans seems to have invented the Alligator Chaser. As a bonus: Check out this 2007 research paper, published in The Journal of ...

Back in the day, home versions of arcade hits were often disappointing: low-res screens, tiny sprites and tinny music. At the time, this was seen as the result of computers and consoles lacking the or...

An anti-Gaddafi fighter shows the media what they say was the golden pistol of Muammar Gaddafi, near Sirte October 20, 2011. Gaddafi was killed on Thursday as Libya's new leaders declared they had ove...

I can't make this, but if you're in the Boston area tomorrow, you should consider spending your Friday at MIT's Energy Night. The event starts at 5:30 pm, it's free and open to the public, and you'll ...

Creative works published before 1923 are legally part of the public domain. Beyond that, the federal government can't copyright anything, except in very specific circumstances. So why is the Smithsoni...

A sweet gig for NYC-based makers and hackers and 3D printing enthusiasts: MakerBot is hiring support technicians: "To work for support is to be right in the thick of all that is MakerBot if you find ...

[Video Link, thanks @demarko]...

[Video Link] Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was killed today when rebel fighters battling what was left of his regime took over his hometown of Surt. Since no-one has created a "Hitler Finds Ou...

Writer Naomi Wolf attended a HuffPo event in NYC where Governor Andrew Cuomo was expected to attend, and which had attracted a group of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators who wanted to address the gover...

Troy Hunt installed the HTTP proxy Fiddler on his network and used it to examine the way that iPhone apps performed. What he discovered was a series of shockingly poor implementation decisions that ma...

Canada's Parliament is debating bill C-11, the latest incarnation of a "modernisation" copyright bill, which contains a very controversial US-style "digital locks" (DRM) rule. Under C-11's digital loc...

[Video Link] Boing Boing pal Mike Outmesguine shares this excellent video of his son Mikey and his classmates putting on a demonstration for his school. Mike is a wireless technology expert and a fun-...

Sound It Out #3: Jenny O. -- "Well OK Honey" Its not easy to find information about Jenny O. Her bio tells us that her father is a scientist/wedding singer and that she began playing music at an early...

Korean sculptor Yeong-Deok Seo works with densely welded bicycle (and other) chains, creating beautiful, hollow forms with strange, irregular surfaces and voids. (via Colossal)...

Since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, you've probably heard me and other people talk about the radiation exposure we experience in everyday life. All humans, throughout history, have been exposed to b...

From The Onion: "The groundbreaking Outkube.com launched this week, providing an online destination where pandering and incendiary content is used to lure moronic Internet commenters away from all oth...

Submitted to the Boing Boing flickr pool by Dan Swenson....

According to an NTC leader quoted by Reuters, Colonel Gadaffi was shot and captured today. Update: And he's dead....

On the 1896 five dollar bill, "the entire obverse was covered with artwork representing electricity." The $2 bill offered an image representing science, with youth gracing the $1....

S.978, a new bill in Congress, make it a felony to post videos that contain copyright-infringing music, with up to five years in prison for violators. The clever folks at Fight for the Future have not...

Good thing there are no unemployed graphic designers in America. Because if there were, it would be really uncool for our president to have asked them to labor, without pay, for a poster about creatin...

The United Nations named this year the Intenational year of Chemistry in honor of the amazing Marie Curie, who won her second Nobel Prize a century ago this month. She shared her first Nobel prize in ...

The central bank of Belarus has auctioned off its office chairs, cardboard boxes, and sugar bowls, but they promise it's not an indication of any sort of trouble with the economy....

The way he has been burned alive and is smiling about it, Frankie Doodle Dandy would make an ideal mascot for the Tea Party....

The Indiana Election Division sends its notices out with a small styrofoam cube in the envelope; the cube increases the envelope's thickness to 3/4", so it qualifies for discounted parcel-rate shippin...

This c.1984 Honda commercial starring Devo makes me want to buy an original Elite instead of a vintage Vespa. But only if I can have a Devo visor for my helmet. (Thanks, Lux!)...

[Video Link] Here's Jane Birkin (the best part of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up NSFW link ) singing "Di Doo Dah." (Via Dangerous Minds)...

Left: Before. Right: Now. For the last 23 weeks, personal trainer Drew Manning has been eating "sugary cereal, soda, chips, white bread, white pasta, pizza, cakes, cookies, muffins, etc." in order to ...

Aaron Rasmussen and Michael T. Astolfi have a project going called BlindSide, for which there's a Kickstarter, to create "a video game with no graphics, played entirely using audio." The idea is to cr...

IFTF exec director Marina Gorbis visited her native Ukraine and was delighted by the signs for this inviting eatery in Kiev....

The First Amendment guarantees the right to peaceable assembly. So why do peaceful protestors keep getting arrested, and sometimes pepper-sprayed and beaten up by police? Pro Publica looks at "Just Ho...

[Video Link]. Not sure of the origin of this footage, or the mission in question. The quail chicks on the space station apparently didn't live long. (via Heather Goss)...

In 1992, eight individuals entered the "Biosphere 2" in the Arizona desert where they lived for two years. The point was to study interactions inside a closed ecological system. The success of the "pl...

[Video Link] "Have you heard," the latest from LA-based, Tijuana-born artist Ceci Bastida (web, Amazon). "Narco, Narco, have you heard? Drugs and money gonna kill the world. Dollar's green and border'...

Larsie, a Thingiverse user and MakerBot owner, whipped up these 3D-printed shoelace-toggles for his kindergarten-aged son's sneakers, helping the lad tighten his own shoes: Tying knots in shoelaces ha...

Several weeks ago, a man attacked a woman in Dallas with a frozen armadillo. Apparently, the man was selling the armadillo to the woman, who intended to eat it. They argued, and he chucked the carcass...

Authorities in Saudi Arabia have arrested two men in connection with a video about poverty in Riyadh (above) published to YouTube. "Feras Bughnah and Hosam al-Deraiwish were summoned for questioning o...

[Video Link] I'm one of those suckers who will buy a 99-cent iPad app for the sole reason that the maker says the price will be $29.99 after 30 days. Animoog music synthesizer for the iPad...

Ariana Page Russell is a visual artist whose work features intricate patterns etched in her own skin. Russell has dermatographia, an immune system disorder that causes histamine swelling in response t...

...

[Video Link] Thanks to Doobybrain and Laughing Squid for exhuming this funny song that has 15 million views on YouTube. “The Assumption Song” a 2008 video created by animator Chris O’...

The French court has ordered ISPs to block a website that posts videos of alleged police misconduct. The court made the "right decision," said Jean-Claude Delage, secretary general of the Alliance Pol...

Love the crazy-ass exuberance of the imagery in this ad for Dzus fasteners. In general, fastener companies seem to do some pretty sweet signage and collateral -- there's the most excellent Brafasco si...

Monster Brains has a scan of The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album from 1979, which was illustrated by underground cartoonist Greg Irons. Isn't it nice when someone makes somethi...

Occupy George presents data about US wealth disparity as a series of data-visualizations that are intended to be overprinted on US dollar bills. The visualizations are available as templates to turned...

This Is My Next rounds up coverage of the Galaxy Nexus smartphone. Even better, though, is its useful comparison chart of the latest Android, Windows and iOS phones....

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been investigating Silk, the web browser built into Amazon's new Android-derived Kindle Fire. Silk is billed as being a very fast browser, thanks to acceleration...

Photo: Poptech David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and author. Avi Solomon What fascinates you about the nature of time? David Eagleman We all go through life assuming that time is an external river th...

I'm spending today at "What Will Turn Us On in 2030?"—a Future Tense conference on the future of energy. I'm live Tweeting, and you can actually watch the whole conference live stream online. Tu...

Heather Brooke is the American-trained "data journalist" who upended British politics when she moved to the UK and began to use the UK's Freedom of Information law to prise apart the dirty secrets of ...

Remember Anthony Bologna, the New York police officer seen on videos pepper-spraying female Occupy Wall Street demonstrators at close range? An internal NYPD review finds that he violated departmental...

Construction material and indoor plumbing are common targets for scrap metal thieves who re-sell copper and steel for quick cash. But a group of scrappers in PA dared to think big: they're blamed for ...

This photo was taken last March 19 in Cordoba, Spain. Photographer Paco Bellido captured a particularly special full moon—it appeared larger than any full moon had in 20 years. NASA explains: Fu...

Some Russian scientists want to build a space colony inside a network of caves on the Moon. No, really. It's hard to tell, from the Reuters story, how much support this plan actually has from the peop...

What happens when the founder of Improv Everywhere marries his girlfriend, another Improv Everywhere provocateur? See above. Congrats, Charlie Todd and Cody Lindquist! "Pro Wrestler Wedding"...

Marine biologist Roger Hanlon is king of the color-changing cephalopods. I've talked about him here before. In this video, narrated by NPR's Robert Krulwich, Hanlon demonstrates how much fun his job r...

The science of adorable kitties is actually really fascinating, and more than a bit weird, says Marc Abrams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and the man behind the Ig Nobel prizes. In an a...

How do you define "aerosol", or "manipulation"? What about "organic", "mutant" and "confidence"? The truth is that scientists often say words that do not mean what the general public thinks they mean....

TorrentFreak looks at the sleazy mass lawsuits brought against alleged BitTorrent users by pornographers and compiles a list of the criteria that lawyers use for deciding who to let off the hook. Your...

[Video Link] In this episode of Gweek, I interviewed Chris Metzler, the co-director and co-producer of the new documentary Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone. Chris and Lev Anderson made another...

The CardSharp 2 from Iain Sinclair is a folding utility knife that turns into a credit-card object when it's not in use, suitable for storing in your wallet. It's a clever little design, unlike a lot ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reminds protesters everywhere that the mobile phones they bring to protests, rallies and marches are little snitches, chock full of personal information that the pol...

The BBC reports that record numbers of Britons are legally changing their name by deed-poll, and speculates on the factors that account for this (escaping your past, reverting to maiden names after di...

The following Steve Jobs quotes are reprinted with permission from the new book I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words, edited by George Beahm, Agate B2. Broad-Based Education Reed College at that time...

Lemony Snicket has contributed 13 sharp-eyed and well-worded observations to the Occupy Writers project -- I think anyone standing in a glass tower watching the demonstrators down in Liberty Park woul...

Last weekend at New York Comic-Con, I had the pleasure of meeting Glen from Kinect, who made the geared fidget rings we featured back in 2010 (one of my favorite gadgets of all time!). Glen's been doi...

We've featured the works of Aaron Ristau, a talented mechanical sculptor, before; his latest whimsical mechanical found-object mice are sweet and odd and lovely....

A Stockholm metro station has been redecorated with pixel-art inspired by classic games. They're lovely -- what a nice way to start your daily commute. (via Neatorama)...

According to Harry Belafonte's publicist, the 84-year-old was not dozing off while waiting for his TV interview. Rather, "His earpiece wasn't working, so he decided to take the the time to meditate be...

Here's a magical demonstration of superconductivity from Tel-Aviv University. Of course, superconductors are key to the future vision for high-speed maglev trains. (Thanks, Ariel Waldman!)...

Time to revise the Luxury Tax space in Monopoly. Resolution-independent PDF here...

An Austrian student has kicked off a movement that pits EU privacy rules against Facebook's data collection practices. Max Schrems requested a copy of the data Facebook had collected on him (which Fac...

[Video Link] This 1968 piece of schlock isn't John Carradine's finest moment, but the trailer is entertaining! "The Astro-Zombies are a strange, weird, unbelievable breed of living dead in human form....

After just having read Seth Roberts' blog post about The Willat Effect (the hedonic change caused by side-by-side comparison of similar things), it was interesting to see Xeni's post about the side-by...

Following up on yesterday's BB post: here's a Video Link to a testimony by 22-year-old Evelyn Apoko. A post with more on her story at Media Matters. Here is her statement. From the website for Ms. Apo...

Photoshopper unknown. Via Brandon Neely....

The Real Role Of Anonymous In Occupy Wall Street: "Anonymous has caught the attention of the media--and even Homeland Security--with its biggest contribution to Occupy Wall Street: hype. But, so far, ...

The state of Victoria, Australia is considering legislation making it an offense to "assault, obstruct, hinder, threaten, abuse, insult or intimidate" the state's Gaming Minister Michael O'Brien or hi...

At Wired Threat Level, Kim Zetter parses a recently-leaked DHS memo that effectively brands Anonymous as a domestic terrorist organization....

[Video Link, by Jonathan Mann, via Sean Bonner.]...

[Video Link] On Vimeo, Robino Films did this "fair" test between the iPhone 4S and the Canon 5D MK II. I've been shooting video and stills with the iPhone 4S for a couple of days, and I've been pretty...

"They’ve been anonymously commenting on the web for years, but some of the Internet’s most prolific commenters reveal themselves and share why they do it." (Via Laughing Squid)...

Our background art today (visible on large displays) was submitted by Eliot K Daughtry of Killer Banshee Studios. Visit the permalink to see a high-res version suitable for use as desktop wallpaper. T...

KING-5, a local news station in Seattle, Washington reports that a couple who also happen to be very much into RenFaire-style cosplay forced their daughter to fight the stepdad in a medieval-style due...

A 40-year-old actress is suing IMDb and parent company Amazon for "misusing her personal information" by publishing her real age on IMDB after she signed up for the industry insider IMDbPro service in...

A Gallup poll released yesterday shows that for the first time since it began conducting the survey, more Americans favor legalizing pot than Americans who favor keeping it illegal. As Radley Balko pu...

I love these pillows They're $35, or $20 for just the cover. Designed by Michael Mabry.(via @heathermg)...

During the recent 25th anniversary celebration for the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, I had a public conversation with Miles O'Brien, longtime scie...

You might be familiar with "Jan Pehechan-Ho," Mohammed Rafi's Bollywood anthem, from the opening credits of Ghost World, but have you seen the fabulous accompanying dance number from the original film...

Hackathons in support of Occupy Wall Steet were organized in New York City, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and elsewhere, and the results posted to Occupy the Web. One of the most promising projects, ...

In 1985, a library in Holland banned one of Charles Bukowski's books: Tales of Ordinary Madness. The library officials said the work was "very sadistic, occasionally fascist and discriminatory against...

Last week, I pointed to an amazing set of "Occupy Wall Street" protest portraits by Boing Boing reader Eddie McShane, aka Macdawg. He has been going down to Zucotti Park, setting up a little portrait ...

It's my great pleasure to welcome Ed Piskor to Boing Boing, where he's launching a new comic strip, Brain Rot. You may know Ed from his work on Wizzywig, which he recently completed. A professional ca...

...

Ars Technica's Matthew Lasar has a great potted history of the 1972 first International Conference on Computer Communication in Washington, DC, where, for the first time, ARPANet (the first iteration ...

The "Backcountry Intimacy Kit" is a waterproof bag with everything you need to push-push whilst in the bush: "3 lubricated condoms, 2 packets of lubrication, 4 wet wipes, 4 compressed towels, and one ...

Photo: Anne_Ghory-Goodman William Powers is the author of Hamlets BlackBerry. Avi Solomon First of all, I understand why you're having all these interviews because I think you've really touched on a s...

Oct 18 Aloha From Hell is the long-awaited third volume in Richard Kadrey's hard-boiled, kick-ass supernatural horror series Sandman Slim (the other two being the Satanic revenge novel Sandman Slim an...

[Video Link] Man, if there's one thing Richard Branson knows better than anyone, it's how to put on an amazing launch event. Above, video from the unveiling of the world's first commercial spaceport, ...

Gweek is Boing Boings podcast about movies, science fiction, games, comics, books, gadgets, and other cool stuff. In episode 21 Rob reports back from ROFLCON and Respect the Internet. Also! Rob prese...

Gweek is Boing Boings podcast about movies, science fiction, games, comics, books, gadgets, and other cool stuff. In episode 21 Rob reports back from ROFLCON and Respect the Internet. Also! Rob prese...

[Video Link]...

I like these lenses. If I tried to install them in a pattern like the one shown above, the lens holes would be non-collinear and unevenly spaced, and I would have to buy a new door. Craft-Modern intro...

Michael C. Woodford (shown above), the former CEO of Olympus, says the Japanese technology company is involved in a whole lot of financial hanky-panky. The Olympus board says the 51-year-old British n...

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA NOSES, by Simon Fletcher. "GOD IS THE ARTIST. I JUST FIND THE NINJA TURTLE IN HIS WORK." (thanks, Joe Sabia)...

Tenzin Wangmo, a 20-year-old nun from Dechen Chokorling Nunnery in Tibet, is the ninth Tibetan to commit self-immolation since March, and the fifth of those to die. They are protesting repression by C...

I'm at the Web 2.0 Summit for the next couple days. You can follow along with me as I tweet my notes and thoughts on the event or watch their live stream. It's already heating up!...

Futility Closet is a blog about surprising passages found chiefly in out-of-print books. It's one of my favorite blogs. Greg Ross, who runs it, describes it as "An idler's miscellany of compendious am...

[I am reading Bill's novel now and really enjoying it. Look for a review from me soon -- Mark] When John F. Kennedy was asked how he became a war hero, hes supposed to have replied: "It was involuntar...

[I am reading Bill's novel now and really enjoying it. Look for a review from me soon -- Mark] When John F. Kennedy was asked how he became a war hero, hes supposed to have replied: "It was involuntar...

PHOTO, click for larger size without mosaic: Jean-Marie Anigbishe, 45, who was attacked by Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels near Ngalima sits with gaping head wounds at hospital in Ngalima ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a helpful legal checklist for people participating in the "Occupy" protests (and any other form of civil disobedience likely to draw the attention of l...

Above, a rare letter by Walt Disney, featured on Letters of Note, a neat blog that gathers and sorts fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Shaun Usher, the guy who runs Letters ...

Best-in-class "Read Later" app Instapaper hit version 4 today, featuring redesigned navigation and much else besides. [Marco Arment]...

At Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi on right-wing efforts (yeah, including Breitbart) to turn the "Occupy Wall Street" movement into a liberal-left conspiracy. "Don't fall for it," he writes. (via Dan Gillm...

The Guardian is mapping "Occupy" protests around the world....

French urban climber Alain Robert, also known as the French Spiderman, climbs to the top floor of a 22-story hotel building in Bucharest October 14, 2011. Robert's climb was part of an advertising cam...

Shares of beleaguered Blackberry maker Research In Motion dropped more than 5 percent today after the company tried to make up for a four-day BlackBerry outage by offering customers $100 worth of free...

Conor Friedersdorf, an associate editor at The Atlantic, shares a strange but true story of how his words wound up on a protest sign 3,000 miles from his home: "How Occupy Wall Street Is Like the Inte...

[Video Link] Make: Projects has complete instructions to make a chomping pacman costume....

Last night, I saw Death Cab for Cutie perform an epic, majestic set at the Treasure Island Music Festival. I'd never caught them live before but their musicianship and the energy behind it was really ...

In this performance from 1991, presidential candidate Herman Cain sings (splendidly) a version of Imagine in which the lyrics have been changed to be about pizza. [via Gawker]...

Bennie says: "The National Radio Quiet Zone is a 13,000 square mile area located in parts of West Virginia and Virginia. Some find the silence soothing; others because they suffer from electromagnetic...

[Video Link] Becky Stern says: "MAKE Volume 28 hits makers’ passion for play head-on with a 28-page special section devoted to Toys and Games, including a toy “pop-pop” steamboat mad...

Texas scientists wrote a report detailing the state of the environment in Galveston Bay. Rick Perry-appointed officials from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality went through the report and s...

This is an incredibly rare cyclops shark embryo. Sadly, this dusky shark never even had a chance to live. A fisher caught its momma in the Gulf of California and when cut her open, he found the curiou...

In 2008, Stefan Ramin was on a global sailing trip when he and his girlfriend landed on the remote French Polynesian island of Nuku Hiva. He was never heard from again. and ashes, believing to be his,...

One of the cool things about LED lighting is that it provides opportunities to bring some of the benefits of big, modern infrastructures to developing countries without having to actually build the bi...

A species of sea slug can become photosynthetic by eating plants. The creatures eat algae for two weeks when they're young, and are then capable of surviving off the algae's photosynthetic abilities f...

Every year, intrepid Ph.D. students face off in a high-stakes competition for honor, glory, and the intermingling of science and art. The goal: Dance your Ph.D. thesis. I showed you the finalists last...

This custom silver ink, developed by materials researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, allows you to draw working circuits out on paper. It's extremely cool, and the video shows y...

Apple Inc says today that 4 million iPhone 4S have been sold since it went on sale October 14. In-store sales began Friday in Japan, Australia, France, the UK, Germany, Canada and the US. Over 1 milli...

Richard Branson blogs: "A historic day today in New Mexico as we will be opening the first commercial spaceport in the world - Spaceport America." More at the Virgin Galactic website. We'll have photo...

We're honored to be first to present the video for MC Frontalot's Critical Hit, starring Brian Posehn alongside the nerdcore rapper. The track's from Frontalot's latest album, Solved, which is availab...

Gawker has published the account of Elana Carroll, one of the 24 (or more?) "Occupy Wall Street" protesters in New York who were arrested at the Greenwich Village Citibank location this weekend....

Photo: La Repubblica, Italy That is the graffiti in one of the destroyed streets in this Saturday's "indignati" demonstration. It ended in violence against the police, city security, and last but not ...

My latest Guardian column, "Adult content filters can't replace good parenting," is a critique of the media coverage of Britain's new national "adult content" filter. The reporting on this story all l...

Government workers are dying to get their hands on tablet computers, according to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and published by Government Attic. The files show, however, th...

Designer Joey Roth is auctioning a limited run of 24-karat gold Sorapots to help out BB pal Amit Gupta, who recently fell ill with leukaemia: "South Asians are severely underrepresented in the pool of...

Michael Greer is a Bookbinder. I interviewed him to find out more about his unusual profession and his recent creation, the binary Genesis. Avi Solomon Could you tell us a bit about yourself? Michael ...

I Heart Guts sells absolutely excellent plush internal organs. I ran into them at New York Comic-Con today and had a chance to play with their wares, and they're adorable, well-made, and well, organy....

Derek Slater is my former colleague at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, now serving as a policy analyst at Google. He's just published a barn-burning essay called "#noimnotgoingtolawschool: Or, Why...

Wade sez, "This cartoon appeared in U.S. Money vs. Corporation Currency, ;Aldrich plan' by Alfred Owen Crozier, published by The Magnet company in Cincinnati, Ohio." *I have one (1) delicious knuckle-...

It appears that infamous wire fraud criminal Charles Keating doesn't have as much influence on the availability of pornography at 7-Eleven as he once did. Photo by Mitch O'Connell...

From the Independent Florida Alligator via Guardian UK, via Greg Mitchell's blog, proof that awesomeness sometimes just runs in the family: Ellas Anthony McDaniel, the 56-year-old son of rhythm and bl...

Some post-steampunk ideas I had at yesterday's preview screening of Vintage Tomorrows (a documentary on steampunk and its relationship to technology), premised on the idea that new movements will simp...

One for the demonstrators in some 1,000 cities in some 80 countries who are #occupying: The arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty in Madison Square Park, New York. These portions of the Statue were e...

Fortunately, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has issued an opinion on Gitmo detainee Adnan Farhan Abd Al Latif's appeal against his continued detention by the Obama administration. Unfortunately, it's...

[Video Link] Occupy Wall Street protests took place in New York and around the world yesterday. In New York, thousands packed Times Square, then broke off into smaller groups occupying other public ar...

[Video Link] A video shot at the Occupy Wall Street protest at Times Square yesterday, which at its peak included some 15-20,000 protesters. The man in this video, whose identity we do not know yet, i...

Another find from New York Comic-Con: this epic Star Wars snark tee from Joel Watson, creator of Hijinks Ensue, a most excellent webcomic....

A tip for New York Comic-Congoers: don't miss the Romanian booth for a look at some of the weirdest, coolest comics being made in the world today. See my piece in Forbes from a few years back on Roman...

Writer Doranna Durgin sez, "For eighteen months, publisher Fitzhenry & Whiteside has refused to honor the contract reversion clause for one of their fantasy titles; they have persistently demurre...

_ Anyone got any spare change for the anonymous submitter?...

[Video Link]Ken Layne at Wonkette: Be patient through the first 90 seconds   haha, attention span of a gnat!   because a remarkable little drama unfolds with protesters inside the Citibank b...

Snapped by Ben Furnas. Protester/sign-maker's name unknown. Ben got another funny shot here....

Happening as I post this. Watch live video here. More on the New York City protesters' longer-term plans back at Zucotti Park, including a map, at Mother Jones. (via @antderosa) Update, 715pm PT: I've...

Watch live streaming video from occupynyc at livestream.com 445pm ET: Happening as I post this. Watch live video here. More on the New York City protesters' longer-term plans back at Zucotti Park, inc...

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: the forthcoming "Create Your Own Zombie Action Figure" kits, which are available for pre-order, and sport arms, legs, torsos, heads, chest pr...

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: Yaya Han's hand-cut foam cosplay wings, which come in a variety of styles, including devil, fairy, angel, cherub and steampunk. They're darne...

Happening as I post this. Watch live video here. More on the New York City protesters' longer-term plans back at Zucotti Park, including a map, at Mother Jones. (via @antderosa)...

From multiple news sources in Japan today: "Researchers from Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology collected plankton in waters up to 60 kilometers from the coast of Iwaki City in July. Th...

Bloomberg News has published a two-part, first-person investigative piece by Rhacel Salazar Parreas, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, on the lives of Filipina sex wor...

A federal judge has ruled that police need only a judge's permission, not a warrant, to force cellphone service providers to hand over data to law enforcement that reveals where a suspect used their m...

This is really cool: "Downs Designs." Snip from a post on Springwise: When Karen Bowersoxs granddaughter was born with Down syndrome, she saw the challenges her mother faced trying to find clothes tha...

Activists in hundreds of cities around the world are planning demonstrations for Monday, October 15th, inspired by Occupy Wall Street....

Bloomberg News has published a two-part, first-person investigative piece by Rhacel Salazar Parreas, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, on the lives of Filipina sex wor...

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: Banana Design's whimsical bare-bones lights, which consist of flickering LEDs set into sweet, cut-out circuit boards that look like candelabr...

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: these terrific Johnny Cupcakes tees, entitled the "Lycanthriller." The site lists the men's tee as sold out, but the woman's edition is in st...

Video Link: "Bonkers Kitty." (thanks, Jose!)...

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: Jason Edmiston's "Cereal Monsters" illustration (available as a print) which portrays the Frankenberry family of cereal monsters in the style...

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: this plea for 500 Jack Kirby fans to kick in $60 each to get a pop-up Jack Kirby museum in a Lower East Side storefront, to be curated by the...

Photos: Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing — CC BY 3.0, allowing commercial use with attribution. Demonstrations inspired by Occupy Wall Street spread worldwide today, with marches across the U.S and A...

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending, the fabulous, ultra-deluxe gaming tables of Geek Chic, which sport a series of nested, pull-out play-surfaces, drawers, a rail-system for sus...

Michael Klapthor's ceramic sculpture "The Price of Safety" is a one of a series of beautiful and evocative works featuring stylized houses on the backs of expressive dog-like creatures. (via Super Pun...

From Reddit's Cylinsier, a response to Occupy Wall Street critics who argue that because they somehow managed to bootstrap themselves to wealth and privilege, the system is fair and its critics are ju...

The Guardian reports on life for visible minorities under Alabama's new "immigration" law that allows the police to detain and question "suspicious" (that is, brown) people and arrest them if they don...

Jonas Pfiel's "Throwable Panoramic Ball Camera" sports 36 cameras and contains firmware that stitches their output together to form a global panorama; you throw it into the air and at the top of its a...

Toby Slater sez, "London, UK steampunk extravaganza White Mischief hosts 'Ghost In The Machine', a Halloween ball on Saturday 29th October. Headlining is Abney Park, arguably the world's most famous s...

Seen at New York Comic-Con, which I'm presently attending: illustrator Pat Dorian's excellent t-shirts, which took top honors in my personal "t-shirt I would buy if I didn't have about 40 times more t...

"The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations," published in 2008 in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, experimentally verifies the hypothesis that laypeople find explanations for psychologic...

Forbes has a good article on Intel's "Tomorrow Project," wherein Intel Chief Futurist Brian David Johnson gets science fiction writers and technologists to produce materials about the future of techno...

[Video Link] Brian from the band I Fight Dragons generously made a tutorial that explains how to create your own chiptunes (music made on old videogame soundcards). Many of you have asked how we do wh...

[Video Link] This disturbing video is making the rounds today, and there are conflicting reports of what it documents. The man on the ground has been identified as 32-year-old Ari Douglas, a legal obs...

YouTube video link....

[YouTube video link.] This YouTube video title misidentifies the person being punched as female. The person is Felix Rivera-Pitre, reports Gothamist. He tells Gothamist that he is HIV positive and is ...

Here's Randy Regier's latest artwork. I don't know if it's the size of a matchbook cover or a blimp hangar door, but its terrific. Randy Regier's "Fisher Fire Fly" model spaceship kitRandy Regier's Sh...

From Borowitz Report: "NYPD spokesman Frank Hannefy explained the controversial decision to arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters while leaving the people who had brought the nations economy to the bri...

The latest episode of the consistently great podcast 99% Invisible is particularly great: a profile of Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston, sound designers for televised sporting events. (thanks, Jesse Tho...

More here. Artist Stephen Eichhorn lives and works in Chicago, IL, and is represented by EBERSMOORE gallery. (via Susannah Breslin via @superanne)...

I didn't think it was possible to think any less of disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller. But then, sweet fancy Jesus, I read her analysis of the Great Blackberry Outage of 2011. For...

A North Carolina college student who was angry at what he believes is the forced use of a school-branded debit card, which also doubles as college ID, was kicked off campus after ranting about the pol...

Look at 'im in 'is widdle swedder. Just look at 'im. Seriously, though, apparently penguins caught up in oil spills sometimes need sweaters to keep them from preening their feathers and ingesting toxi...

Photo: Ahram Online. Mohamed Bishr was minding his own business last Sunday, walking to a local cafe in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, when three black-suited guys grabbed him and shoved him in the ...

Fetzer, 51, From Waitsboro, North Carolina. Military Veteran, Arabic Linguist. Boing Boing reader Eddie McShane, aka Macdawg, has been doing an amazing portrait series of people at the Occupy Wall Str...

I've just put up the site for my latest book, a slim chapbook in PM Press's Outspoken Authors series called The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow. The book contains a novella ("There's a Great Big Beautifu...

From the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, a helpful banker's guide to spotting "single-issue terrorists," which includes (apparently) abortionists and ecological extremist...

I'll be speaking next Wednesday, the 19th, in Washington DC, as part of a one-day conference on the future of energy. What Will Turn Us On in 2030? is part of Future Tense, a series of events sponsore...

The Very Large Array is a spectacular piece of a scientific equipment with a less-than-compelling name. Located in New Mexico, you've seen this radio observatory pop up in the background of movies, al...

When an animal as big as a whale dies, its body becomes a whole new ecosystem. One whale carcass can support other forms of life for 50-to-75 years—basically as long as the whale itself lived. T...

Officials were worried this week, when they discovered a radiation hotspot in Tokyo, kicking off readings as high as 3.35 microsieverts per hour. (For context, a dental x-ray is about 5 microsieverts....

The Awl offers a selection of photos and videos from the early hours today, in which the city of New York's deadline for clearing out the park (so it might be "cleaned") passed....

This strangely affecting short of Paris, abandoned under a yard of water, is by Olivier Campagne & Vivien Balzi. Brice Tillet made the music. [Video Link via Laughing Squid]...

Field Notes' lovely but inexpensive pocket jotters now come in stiff-cover red....

Holy Smokes is a company that will load cremains into shotgun shells and standard-caliber cartridges for you. [Wired]...

Illo: Rob Beschizza. Photo: Frederic Poirot Author William Gibson discusses Victorians, John Shirley and the early days of his career. A longer version of this interview appeared in the 197th issue of...

Rome Sweet Rome, a historical sci-fi saga published as comments at Reddit, was snapped up today by Warner Brothers. In answer to a question -- "Could I destroy the Roman Empire ... with a U.S. Marine ...

An unwise individual has made a wager that involves inserting a cotton bud soaked in the world's hottest pepper into his rectum. He has asked Reddit how to minimize the harm that might arise as a cons...

If you thought your mobile carrier was a pile of shit, it's understandable -- after all, the phones themselves are festering hives of E coli: Researchers said that 16% of the devices were contaminated...

Seattle prosecutors decided not to press charges against Seattle superhero Phoenix Jones. As I posted yesterday, Jones was arrested over the weekend for allegedly pepper spraying a group of people. Hi...

[Video Link] I couldn't figure out how he did it. I had to watch the video below to learn the trick. (Via TYWKIWDBI)...

[Video Link] This police helicopter has gee-whiz visioning technology that makes it easy for the pilot to pinpoint a moron who flashed him with a green laser. Laughing Squid: Man Aiming a Laser Pointe...

[Video Link] It's fun to watch this fellow drop a magnet on a large disk of copper. I have no idea why he is talking about a Brazilian X-rated website. That's just a bonus feature....

...

The publication of Walter Isaacson's highly-anticipated, authorized bio of Steve Jobs, formerly titled iSteve (like iWoz?) and now titled, er, Steve Jobs, has been moved up to October 24 and Sony Pict...

Santa Cruz, California police are testing prototype software that predicts where crimes may be committed in the next few days. The deputy chief of police thinks that it may help police patrol areas th...

On his blog, Frazetta historian and collector DocDave Winiewicz shares a wonderful story about the above artwork. (To see the whole NSFW painting, click the link below). [In 1994] Alex [Acevedo, owner...

Instructables user makendo created this wonderful Rubik's Cube chest of drawers for his children. This cubic piece of furniture has only one of the three required axes of rotation, so is unsolvable in...

No, Linus, THIS is the great pumpkin. Greg Ruffing took this photo of Tim Parks harvesting last year's entry into a contest held by the Ohio Valley Giant Pumpkin Growers club. Amazingly, he didn't win...

MTV has relaunched its classic 1990s animation showcase Liquid Television as an online venture. Ah, Aeon Flux, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Dog-Boy Original trailer above. Liquid Television...

Sound It Out #2: Tame Impala "Why Wont You Make Up Your Mind?" Ill admit to being a latecomer to Tame Impala, and for the stupidest reason: based on their name, I assumed that they were a bunch of pre...

Sound It Out #2: Tame Impala "Why Wont You Make Up Your Mind?" Ill admit to being a latecomer to Tame Impala, and for the stupidest reason: based on their name, I assumed that they were a bunch of pre...

Have you seen this gentleman? This is Gregory Liascos, 36, of Portland, who was arrested last year for allegedly trying to cut a hole in the Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals to break in. He...

Do you have anything to declare? Yes, moon dust and moon rock. This is the customs form filed by NASA for the astronauts entering Honolulu after departing from the moon. The Atlantic recently posted i...

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen and AI scientist Mark Greaves are pessimistic about the prospect of a technological singularity in the intermediate future: "If [it] is to arrive by 2045, it will take u...

T4obrien has uploaded files to create a laser-cut cardboard Tardis to Thingiverse: This detailed and thoughtfully laid out laser-cuttable cardboard version of a TARDIS by t4obrien totally qualifies as...

Photo: Lucas Jackson / Reuters The history of populist uprisings like Occupy Wall Street isnt a reassuring one. The last one to have any staying power was the populist farmers revolt of the 1800s, and...

A Closed World is an JRPG-style flash game, whose androgynous hero faces up to the oppressive attitudes of his/her hometown by leaving it. "[It's] a digital game with LGBTQ-friendly content, something...

RIM's service troubles roll on: "I'd like to give you an estimated time of full recovery around the world, but I cannot do this with certainty". [Ars Technica]...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our daily delivery of blog headlines to your inbox. This special edition version of Mr. Jones Watches 'The Last Laugh' features artwork by Bri...

Agatha H. and the Airship City is the first prose novel about Agatha Clay, the heroine of their Hugo-winning webcomic Girl Genius. I've been reading the Foglios since I was a sprout poring over Dragon...

Etsy seller WeirdlyCute (an apt name!) makes these "Zombie Stitch" necklaces that make it appear that your head has been sewn on. Alice and I went as Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein last year, ...

Apple's co-founder and longtime CEO was a "very challenging photo subject." Photographer Albert Watson, however, once heard that his 2006 photo of Jobs--currently serving as a memorial at Apple's home...

Prints are available for $16. Designer Yoni Alter also published a cheat sheet, if you can't figure them all out!...

Do you like Daffy Duck? Do you like 1970s-style fantasy-themed heavy rock? Then you will like this. [Merrie Melodies via Flooby Nooby]...

The ZenBook, from Asus, is a Windows 7 "ultrabook" hewing closely to the MacBook Air's mold: an 11" or 13" display, teardrop shape, SSD as standard, and i5 or i7 processors from Intel. Previous challe...

Discount airline Ryanair continues to wage war on dignity and comfort with a plan to remove all but one of the toilets from its aircraft, leaving 200+ people to share one bog: The prospect of onl...

The malware that infected unmanned aerial drones in the US Air Force "is routinely used to steal log-in and password data from people who gamble or play games like Mafia Wars online,  notes the A...

Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died at his home this past weekend, after a long battle against an unspecified illness. No further details are available at the time of this blog ...

Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie is reported to have died at his home this past weekend, after a long battle against an unspecified illness. No further details are available at the time of this blog ...

Here's a nice gallery of video-game-themed fine art remixes, including this curiously appropriate Escher/Portal remix. (via JWZ)...

Sam sez, "Copyright laws are supposed to spur innovation by protecting creators' rights. But after 400 years of legal wrangling, and the complexities of new technology, the law has become muddied. Ins...

Jeff Simmermon says: I am not sure if you saw this Funny or Die clip about insufferable coffee snobs -- but it REALLY reminded me of the whole "iced-espresso" incident I wrote about that you promoted ...

[Video Link] Here's Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig in Boston: "If this movement can be identified as a fight against the corruption that our political system has become, then it has the potential t...

In a remarkable feat of balloon twistery, Twisty Kristy made this full-sized balloon Tardis for eAtomic Comics at Chandler Fashion Square Mall. (via Neatorama)...

Geert Matthys, research and development manager at Barco, a Belgian company specializing in high-definition projectors and displays, gives an explanation inside a fully immersive 360-degree flight sim...

Here's a poodle styled to look like My Little Pony. Visit The Telegraph to see more full-size photos of the creature....

This just isn't fair. Wall Street bankers are making less today than they were in 2007! Bankers’ salaries vs. everyone else’s...

This year's Core77 Design Awards trophy is a mold. The winners also get a supply of crayons to melt for casting. This year we invited New York design team Rich Brilliant Willing to create the first tr...

The feds believe they've nabbed the man who hacked into the personal e-mail accounts of celebrities including Scarlett Johansson, whose nude pics were then spread out all over the web. His name is Chr...

Watch the creative Needham brothers (who built the underwater bubble fort that Maggie wrote about in August) demonstrate their awesome moon jumper on tonight's episode of National Geographic's Mad Sci...

Boing Boing reader Byron shares this photograph of one of our ancestors in the National Museum of Scotland: An old Commodore PET computer (complete with tape deck for loading and saving programme and ...

From the FBI website, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller, center, joined by Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General for National Security Lisa Monaco at a press conference about an all...

This 1966 ad for "beep n' blink" Bop 'Em punching bags is interesting: I remember nearly identical ads from the mid-1970s, when I was old enough to pore over the Consumers Distributing catalog and sho...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Activism Director Rainey Reitman has an in-depth analysis of how Facebook continues to track its users even after they've taken several affirmative steps to log ou...

[Video Link] (I recommend skipping to the 2 minute mark so you don't have to watch her taking a cab ride into the city.) Former Saturday Night Live regular Victoria Jackson does a fine job of not resp...

Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone columnist who has produced better coverage of Wall Street corruption and government collusion, has a list of suggested demands for the Occupy Wall Street movement; as yo...

...

Tim Chartier, an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Davidson College, has a series of ingenious and delicious methods for illustrating fundamental concepts from calculus using chocolates. I had a b...

Last month Cory reviewed Ry Cooder's album, Pull Up Some Dust And Sit Down, describing the songs as "a combination of Mexican-style corridos, stomping blues, shitkicking C&W tracks, and other form...

[Video Link] "The camera is shaking because I'm shaking. And I'm shaking because I'm SCARED OF THAT TURKEY."—Duffy Kelly, Sacramento, CA television news producer, who was terrorized by a turkey....

A federal grand jury has indicted 47-year-old Syrian-born Mohamad Anas Haitham Soueid. He is an American citizen who lives in Virginia. Soueid is accused of spying for Syria: collecting info on protes...

Over at The Atlantic, columnist James Fallows shares a cautionary tale that should serve to remind you to have lots and lots of strong passwords for all the internet-connected services and sites you u...

Declan McCullagh and Greg Sandoval at CNET: "The great iPhone prototype caper of 2010 has finally ended, with the two men accused of shopping the device to gadget blogs sentenced to probation yesterda...

Google engineer Steve Yegge posted a long, impassioned, and blunt rant to Google+ about what he felt were problems with Google+. One of those problems, it seems, manifested in the fact that ...

"2011 Homecoming Lip Dub. Morgan County High School, Madison, GA." Video Link, and they're lipdubbing to OK Go's "Here it Goes Again." (via Ze Frank)....

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez's "Glitch Reality II" is a 3D-printed tea set made by harvesting mismatched pieces from charity shops, scanning them in with a 3D scanner, "roughly repairing the digital mesh...

Cartoonist Ethan Persoff pointed me to the first 8-page installment of his outstanding new online comic book (which he drew with Scott Marshall) about the 1960s underground publisher John Wilcock. It ...

On Sunday morning, Seattle superhero Phoenix Jones, whose secret identity has been revealed as 23-year-old Benjamin John Francis Fodor, was arrested for allegedly pepper spraying a group of people. Do...

Brian Krebs continues his excellent investigative series on the inner workings of online ripoffs, today with a deep look at underground freight-forwarders, so-called "Drops for stuff." These services ...

So Hyun Woo creates amazing, weird steel-welded beloved fantasy creatures from classic children's literature, often toting large and impressive armaments. Many appeared in a show called "Cruel Fairy T...

Love this old ad for Zenith's early remote control, the "Flash Matic," which let you "shut off long, annoying commercials while picture remains on screen!" (a process that was eventually known as "mut...

[Video Link] Here's the trailer for Mail Order Mysteries, "the book that reveals what you really got when you ordered stuff out of comic book ads." I interviewed Kirk in Gweek 019....

[Video Link] Open Culture posted a Candid Camera prank about group pressure in the uncomfortable confines of an elevator.  Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, w...

"To put it very simply, the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol." — Anthro...

Photographer NK Guy has posted his annual "Burning Cam" set of photos from Burning Man. This was my first year attending the festival in Black Rock City (my wife and I went as a mutual fortieth birthd...

The Los Angeles Times reports that the FBI has made an arrest in its investigation of celebrity phone-hacking in Hollywood. As every heterosexual male of fapping age on the internet knows, nude snapsh...

Richard Wiseman found a cow that may have a vase on its face. Or ... maybe ... it has two faces on its face. Is your mind blown yet? Via Dimitrios Diamantaras...

A man's $750,000 Ferrari was stolen. It was recovered, and while the government was holding it as evidence an FBI agent and a federal prosecutor took it for a joyride. They totaled it. The owner sued....

A man's $750,000 Ferrari was stolen. It was recovered, and while the government was holding it as evidence an FBI agent and a federal prosecutor took it for a joyride. They totaled it. The owner's ins...

Solyndra, a would-be solar energy manufacturer that went belly up, has been in the news a lot lately because, before the company failed, the United States government gave it a sweet financing deal. Wh...

At the Thoughtomics blog, Lucas Brouwers has a really nifty post on a recent discovery about the biology of pentastomes. What's a pentastome? Oh, I am SO glad that you asked. Every animal has its own ...

Richard Feynman, God of Perfect Analogies, explains why it's not a failure or a scandal when scientists adapt and change their understanding of the world. This is a really important point, applicable ...

Pablo Defendini writes, "Caribbean-born sf author Tobias Buckell is crowdfunding The Apocalypse Ocean, the fourth installment in his Xenowealth series (Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose, whic...

FirstSecond's new Nursery Rhyme Comics: 50 Timeless Rhymes from 50 Celebrated Cartoonists is one of those rare parental treasures: a picture book that kids and parents can really enjoy together. Edito...

Jamie writes in about Pioneer One, "A drama series with a sci-fi bent, made independently and distributed online. It gained some notoriety for being the first 'TV show' to be distributed through BitTo...

When It's Gone It's Gone, an online one-of-a-kind store, is selling this Royal Navy ejector seat that's been fitted with legs for use as an office desk-chair. Not sure what the ergonomics are like (I ...

A doorman looks out the entrance to a Park Avenue building as members of the Occupy Wall Street walk past in protest through the upper east side of New York October 11, 2011. The Occupy Wall Street mo...

Over the past week, I've been tuning in to various live video streams from cities around the US on OccupyStream. An excellent resource for "live television by the people," from protests all over. When...

Video Link: "Occupy Boston 10/10/2011: Police show their presence at new campsite." Hundreds of "Occupy Boston" protesters were arrested last night, as police moved in on demonstrators who refused to ...

Boing Boing reader Joe Holmes shares this set of portraits of Occupy Wall Street participants, in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool....

From Reuters: "Sony said on Wednesday that a third party had tried to sign in to 93,000 active accounts on its PlayStation and other networks this month."...

From the looks of all these iPhone 4S reviews suddenly hitting the web, it seems Apple's press embargo has just lifted. TL;DR consensus is that the latest revision of Apple's dominant device is really...

From the looks of all these iPhone 4S reviews suddenly hitting the web, it seems Apple's press embargo has just lifted. TL;DR consensus is that the latest revision of Apple's dominant device is really...

[Video Link] Evan van der Spuy, a mountain biker with Team Jeep South Africa, is thrown from his bike in this video during a cross-country race by a Red Hartebeest buck. His teammate Travis Walker sho...

An ex-cop answers that question here. At last, I've figured out what Quora is good for! (thanks, Todd Lappinhttps://twitter.com/telstarlogistic/status/123934638380023808 )...

(Eric Holder. Photo: REUTERS) A congressional subpoena directed to Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to be issued soon, according to CBS News, and will order him to hand over documents to lawma...

(Saudi Arabia's Ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir speaks to the media at the Mideast Peace Conference in Annapolis, November 27, 2007. REUTERS/Jason Reed) This alleged Iranian terror plot...

Danger Room reports: "Officials at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada knew for two weeks about a virus infecting the drone "cockpits  there. But they kept the information about the infection to them...

Lowering the Bar, a legal humor blog, has a look at bank robbers who stop for lunch at nearby restaurants. Most recently, there was Henry Elmer, who allegedly robbed a Wells Fargo in Yuma, AZ, then st...

Life is the Story from Lucy Knisley on Vimeo. I've written about the talented cartoonist Lucy Knisley before. Here she is giving a presentation about one of my favorite types of comics, the autobiogra...

This Saturday (October 15) at 5pm, legendary rock club Maxwell's in Hoboken will open its Kirby Enthusiasm art show in its front room. More than 30 visual artists have contributed work paying tribute ...

My friends Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell wrote a gem of a book called The Wage Slave's Glossary, which was designed and edited by the great cartoonist Seth. They've kindly permitted me to run a few e...

Our friends at House Industries designed the logo for the QDrive, some kind of "radiation pressure imbalance" drive for space travel. I don't understand it, but it looks nifty! The QDrive is a resonat...

This small gallery of "original" superhero costumes have a nice tactility to them, looking like they've been crafted from naturally occurring fibers, a far cry from the seamless, shiny lycra aesthetic...

[Video Link] John Waters being as brilliant and funny as ever.Paul Gallagher of Dangerous Minds says: It’s National Coming Out Day and to celebrate, here is John Waters - a man who knew he was g...

Etsy seller Melangerienyc makes custom Viewmaster reel wedding invitations, which are nicely packaged with a lot of associated printed matter. Not cheap ($3450 for 100!), but they sure are purdy. (via...

Of those who remember, some reveal our secret history through unusual media such as fashionable tumblogs and private filesharing forums. By sharing elements of an intricate and rigorous symbology draw...

Congrats to our friend and colleague Ruben Bolling for winning the Society of Professional Journalists Award for his Tom the Dancing Bug comic strip! "Combining rapier wit with an astute sense of kits...

Reuters: "Tahrir Square in Cairo, Green Square in Tripoli, Syntagma Square in Athens and now Zuccotti Park in New York -- popular anger against entrenching power elites is spreading around the world."...

Neal Ungerleider interviewed me for a (very good) piece in Fast Company about drug cartels in Mexico, and a new assault on digital media: "The factors that are remarkable about the narcoblog phenomeno...

Above, the original, rarely-seen French release trailer for Jean-Luc Godard's WEEKEND, which is now touring again in a new 35mm print via Janus Films. That opening shot with the slow pan accross the t...

I will be joining a group of speakers in Boston on Friday and Saturday for the Shorenstein Center's 25th Anniversary Weekend, at Harvard. Others on the bill whose names have appeared in Boing Boing be...

This is Toms Saraceno's Cloud Cities, a massive art installation at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof museum. Twenty huge bubbles are suspended inside the massive hangar. It reminds me of 1970s space colony ...

Brass nuts make this macrame bracelet into a beautiful, industrial fashion statement (via Craft)...

Molly Crabapple's "Faces of Occupied Wall Street."...

The Aesthetics and Astronomy Project is a new effort from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to explore how beautiful scientific images can better be used to present complex ideas and pro...

It took nine people to rescue a moose that was trapped in a swimming pool on Friday night in Manchester, New Hampshire. From WMUR: The visit came as a shock to the pools owner, George Trapotsis, who s...

One of the more tedious parts of health science and microbiology is monitoring Petri dishes. It's time consuming. And, if you don't look at everything that's going on in the Petri dish often enough, y...

Scientists are already publishing formal critiques of the methodology used in the "faster than light neutrinos" study. There's nothing super definitive yet. That'll have to wait until an independent t...

Kern Type is a competitive kerning game that invites you to nudge type until it's laid out real nice and kentucky. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

Susannah Breslin in Forbes, story and photos: "Is the Occupy Wall Street movement a revolution or a mess? That all depends on who you ask."...

Because I have, in the past, illustrated a story about honey bees with a picture of a bumble bee, I am posting this handy chart, put together by biologist Alex Wild, as a form of penance....

The Mexican art, technlogy, games, and culture magazine GATOPARDO interviewed me recently, about Boing Boing and all things online. The interviewer, Wookie Williams, is as cool as his name. Content is...

California governor Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that required the police to get a warrant before searching a telephone. Without this law, California's police will continue their practice of searching th...

[Video Link] The great science reporter Robert Krulwich of NPR has a beautiful story up from earlier this year about epically tall trees in the ancient forests of California. I missed this when it was...

[Video Link] John Cassavetes' Shadows (1959) is "the real story of real people living in the shadows of the neon-crazy streets of Manhattan." Jazz and beatniks. Watch it, one 10-minute chunk at a time...

Copyranter rounds up some tasteless "homages" to the late Steve Jobs. What were they thinking?...

Your tax dollars build bridges. They pay the salaries of teachers and firefighters. Tax dollars help put people through college, provide a safety net for the elderly and the disabled, and pay for figh...

A good one from our friends at Photoshop Disasters. It's almost like the artist wanted to see how many ways he/she could fuck up the photo and still get it approved. UPDATE: Marktech suspected the gia...

Wim Delvoye merges X-rays with stained glass to make religio-anatomical art. (via Crib Candy)...

On June 24, My Morning Jacket descended on Oakland's historic Fox Theater for an epic performance in support of their majestic album, Circuital. Remedy Editorial's Scott Compton and his merry band of ...

Daniel Clowes' comic book, Eightball # 23 contained a 48 page story called "The DeathRay." It's a superhero origin story about a teenage boy named Andy who discovers he has superpowers whenever he tak...

There is now an entire blog dedicated to looking at what is written on the blackboard in the background of naughty schoolgirl porn films, and evaluating it for accuracy and grade level of information....

The Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle -- the latest installment in the Humble Bundle project, which distributes DRM-free games on a pay-what-you-like basis with a portion of each payment earmarked for char...

Marc Brownlow's Skull Truffles look like a fabulous seasonal treat: I wanted to create a Halloween treat for adults. Something not to be gobbled, but savored. As a kid, I thought shelled walnuts looke...

The Children of the Sky is the third novel in Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought cycle of novels, three brick-sized, Hugo-award winning novels that are the near-perfect balance of science fiction's twin ...

Having recently conducted a security audit of several free/open source software programs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Chris Palmer and Dan Auerbach have published some guidelines for improv...

A security guard in Braehead shopping centre near Glasgow questioned a man who was taking pictures of his young daughter looking cute while eating an ice-cream. The guard told him that photography in ...

A media theory moment: UK media outlets are reporting on the government/ISP deal to "block child pornography", and are universally regurgitating the press release's language, saying this will "block a...

Here's an excellent photo of Walt Disney and Salvador Dali admiring what I presume to be Walt's model train. It was likely taken around the time of their collaboration, Destino. Production on that fil...

Germany's Chaos Computer Club published the sourcecode for a piece of malware used by the German government to spy on citizens. The software was discovered in the wild and reverse engineered. It can b...

Scott Matthew of Turnstyle tells Boing Boing: Hi Xeni, saw your post about the signs of Occupy Wall Street, and thought I'd share ours. Amy (Cory blogged her autism story a few weeks ago) and took our...

My daughter and I built a guitar out of a lunchbox this weekend. It actually sounds better than the cigar box guitars I've built. For frets, it uses toothpicks. If you decided to listen to this sample...

I found these waterlogged insects in my backyard yesterday. I prefer to call them "children of the earth," but they are also known as "potato bugs" and "jerusalem crickets." Click image for a closer l...

My pal Kyle Wiens, founder of iFixit, is in Africa with Wired's Brian X. Chen to make a documentary about "e-waste in Africa, and the repair technicians who turn our unwanted junk into coveted treasur...

[Video Link] Hooray for stick-on crooked teeth! (Via Dangerous Minds)...

Seth Roberts is the author of The Shangri-La Diet and posts at Seth's Blog about personal science, self-experimentation, and the scientific method. [Video Link] Crohn's Disease is a type of inflammati...

Weezer's former bassist Mikey Welsh tweeted the above on September 26. Then he followed up with, "correction - the weekend after next." Guess what? He died on Saturday. In Chicago. According to CNN, "...

Play This Thing reviews Megamash, a weird chimeric Flash game that combines several kinds of play and requires players to figure out how to use the mechanics of each genre to solve puzzles: At first, ...

This lovely steam-powered jalopy, built in 1884, is said to be the oldest automobile still running. It sold at auction on Friday for $4.6 million. From CNN: The four-wheeled De Dion-Bouton et Trepardo...

Record label/publisher Dust-to-Digital -- creators of Victrola Favorites and Take Me To The Water, have just released what appears to be another exquisitely-packaged book and CD set. I Listen To The W...

Record label/publisher Dust-to-Digital -- creators of Victrola Favorites and Take Me To The Water, have just released what appears to be another exquisitely-packaged book and CD set. I Listen To The W...

Check out Gama-Go's Bite Me! bottle opener. Sharp!...

Video Link. Nigerian films have better trailers than movies from any other country in the world. Always. (via Robert Popper)...

Last month, I broke the news that Survival Research Laboratories was restoring their first ever machine, the "De-Manufacturing Machine" (1979), for a group exhibition titled "Under the Big Black Sun: ...

.post img {margin-bottom:0px; } .captioned {font-size:14px;text-align:right;color:gray; } Portrait of a cute mature couple enjoying themselves while preparing food — Yuri Arcurs. Rich and Tasty:...

A "beta edition" of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia's third edition (which is online-only) is up and available to the public. I served as a volunteer advisor to the project, and can't wait to see how...

Everything is a Remix, the short video series previously featured here, is back with a new installment on The Matrix, in which Rob Grigsby Wilson and his friends trace the influences, lifts, cribs, an...

[Video Link] Kids around the nation will be happy to hear that Jesusween celebrators plan keep their candy for themselves and instead "give out Bibles and Christian gifts -- in a friendly way!" on Oct...

J.D. Salinger published very little, considering his literary legend. His place in classic American literature of the 20th century is secured mostly by his single novel The Catcher in the Rye, his col...

Musician Dan Bull (YouTube) created this rap mix of Radiohead's Street Spirit to honor the protests in New York and elsewhere. "I made the song because I believe the monetary system needs to be review...

Keeping things honest, Washington style. Deep-pocketed corporate interest are writing big checks to members of the supercommittee, the group of 12 senators and members of Congress who have been tasked...

Astrophotographer Alan Friedman took this photo of a large, vaporous Sasquatch taking a stroll on the surface of the sun. Sunsquatch (Via Neatorama)...

Documents revealed under the Freedom of Information Act suggest that the U.S. government is interested in low-energy nuclear reactions, but remains cautious due to the field's controversies. [Thanks, ...

Etsy seller Bionicbuttercup makes "haunted mirrors": "Originally a picture frame, the glass was painted with a special paint that allows it to be part functioning mirror, part gateway to the paranorma...

Ruben Bolling and I had a terrific time interviewing one of our heroes, the amazing Al Jaffee, who has been a member of MAD magazines usual gang of idiots for 56 years (his work has appeared in every ...

Snuff, Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel is an absolute treat, as per usual. It's a Sam Vimes book (there are many recurring characters in the Discworld series, whose life stories intermingle, ...

Terry Pratchett's latest book, Snuff: A Novel of Discworld, is out now. Don't miss Cory's review. — Boing Boing Neil Gaiman: Where did the idea for Snuff originate? Terry Pratchett: I havent a c...

Geoscientist Brian Romans posted this very real scientific abstract at his blog, Classic Detritus. It's from a collection of papers that were presented at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union i...

DeviantArt's DrFaustusAU has been posting "The Call of Cthulhu," Dr Seuss/HP Lovecraft mashup, one page at a time. The good doctor's got a nice ear for scansion, and is quite adept at producing seussi...

Last June, researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology published the results of an experiment that proved that light does not move faster than light—specifically, that si...

At The Awl, Maria Bustillos authored an excellent feature about the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, which became a huge hit 60 years after it was first printed by the British government. An entrepreneu...

This gorgeous photo of a statue in England called The Angel of the North was taken by Justin Quinnell, over the course of three months, using a pinhole camera made out of a beer can. Yes, the parabola...

Turnstyle's Jeremy Helton interviewed Emmy-nominated artists Mike and Tim Rauch, who are helping a national oral history project retell its most compelling stories through animation....

Dopamine Jackpot! Sapolsky on the Science of... by FORAtv Dopamine does a lot of things, but you're probably most familiar with it as the chemical your brain uses as a sort-of system of in-game gold c...

Big Ben was completed in 1858 and it sits on a site that is both directly next to a river, and surrounding by subterranean construction work. With that in mind, it's probably not a huge surprise to fi...

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report tonight that Jacob Appelbaum, a hacker, security researcher, and human rights activist, is the subject of a secret court order demanding his email data ...

There's something inevitable about Tautr's "Occupy Sesame Street" set, but that doesn't mean I don't like it. After all, most of us learned how to think about concepts like "fairness" from these chara...

Brazilian favela-dwellers without reliable electricity have an alternative means of supplying light to enclosed spaces that have no/insufficient windows (either because they are abutted on all sides b...

Artist Jason Mecier has used candy, food, pills and the actual garbage of actual celebrities to construct celebrity portraits. This new Snoop Dogg portrait is made of marijuana joints, marijuana leave...

I feel like there are so many excellent signs at these Occupy Wall Street (and Everywhere) protests, we should just be featuring one a day on Boing Boing while the movement lasts. All these mainstream...

Neatoshop's $10 "Doomed Skull Shot Glass" is a pretty stylin' way of presenting your ethanol....

Bob "dj BC" Cronin sez, "Last winter Big D and The Kids Table (the ska/punk outfit I have worked with, you may remember) recorded a kicking dubby punk song called "It's Raining Zombies On Wall Street....

The Matitizia is an edible pencil made from (delicious, delicious) licorice root, created by Cecilia Felli. (via Neatorama)...

Noe Montes shot some beautiful portraits of people at city hall in Los Angeles, at the "Occupy LA" protests. (thanks, Jesse Thorn)...

At Fire Dog Lake and at American Spectator, evidence indicating that Patrick Howley, Assistant Editor of The American Spectator, effectively acted as an agent provocateur at an anti-war protest outsid...

Researchers report that Saturn's moon Enceladus is covered in superfine powdery snow. From National Geographic: "The particles are only a fraction of a millimeter in size even finer than talcum powde...

Two bits of glad tidings: first, Charlie Stross announces that we've turned in the manuscript for our collaborative, post-Singularity comic novel Rapture of the Nerds; second, my agent Russ Galen has ...

On the always-excellent How To Be a Retronaut, a gallery of the dreadful automobiles of the Soviet Bloc from the 1960s and 70s....

A group of protesters in the nation's capitol tried to force their way into the National Air and Space Museum on Saturday. Police responded with force, pepper spraying many of the demonstrators. The m...

[Video link, from "Stop the Machine," aka October 2011, the anti-war group that attempted to occupy the National Air and Space Museum today in Washington, DC. Shot by Nathan Schneider.] A group of pro...

From the New York Times, more on a secret legal memo from 2010 that paved the way for the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen in Yemen: The secret document provided the justification...

The cover of the October 17, 2011, issue of The New Yorker....

Radley Blako says: "I have a piece up at Huffington Post looking at a new House bill that would make it a federal crime to plan or advise any activity in another country that would violate U.S. drug l...

Jon Stewart looks at Sarah Palin's fundraising tour across America through which she solicited donations from people who might support her presidential bid, all the while coyly refusing to say whether...

Dan Jones (AKA Tinkerbots) was kind enough to add this charming fellow to the Boing Boing Flickr pool. There's plenty more where that came from....

"There has been a lot said about the lack of vision, lack of specific demands, and a disparity of beliefs and goals among the Occupy Wall Street protesters in the media in the past several weeks," wri...

From YouTube user havelah's video description: An elderly couple walked into the lobby of the Mayo Clinic for a checkup and spotted a piano. Theyve been married for 62 years and hell be 90 this year. ...

Photo by zoestercoaster, taken at an "Occupy Dallas / Occupy Wall Street" demonstration in Dallas, TX, and contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool....

Laika the dog is seriously styling in this AT-AT costume, created by Katie Mello. (via Super Punch)...

Last June, the Swiss Press Club held a launch for the Global Innovation Index at which various speakers were invited to talk about innovation. After the head of CERN and the CEO of the Internet Societ...

Reclamations, a journal published by University of California students, has published a special, timely pamphlet called "Generation of Debt," on the trap of student debt in America. Young people in Am...

Composer Alex Braidwood whomped up these awesome "Noisolation Headphones," which are designed to "let your ears blink," and are quite eye-catching, in order to "start a conversation." And if you don't...

[Video Link] BusinessWeek asked me to write my "Story About Steve." I never met Steve, but I had a story to tell. Here it is. In May 2002 I got a call from my friend Alberta who asked if I'd like to b...

Virginia district court Judge John A. Gibney has threatened to sanction D. Wayne O'Bryan, a personal injury lawyer with a sideline in copyright threats on behalf of pornographers. O'Bryan used subpoen...

This print from Andy Warhol's 1985 Ads Portfolio set of 10 screenprints is on eBay for $400,000, more than 10x what you can get it for elsewhere. If you really want it and have that kind of money burn...

A crafty family decided to do a series of portraits while dressed in improvised body-armor from a notional post-zombpocalyptic world. I love this little girl's zombie-hunting outfit! When your dear si...

Christa Faust has penned numerous crime and horror novels, including the Scribe Award-winning novel version of the cult movie Snakes on a Plane and Edgar Award-Nominated Money Shot. Choke Hold, the st...

This Saturday is the Festival of Rock Posters in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Over at the New York Times, our pal Ben Marks talks about some of the fine artists who will be making the scene. One ...

As I've noted here before, Venkatesh Rao is a thought-provoking, profound thinker, and I always welcome his long, fascinating blog posts. When he sent me a copy of his slim book, Tempo, I was very exc...

A brief roundup of some of the pieces observing the passing of Steve Jobs, by journalists who covered Apple and Jobs, and peers who knew him. Steven Levy's piece in Wired was beautiful. Levy first int...

Mike Daisey wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times arguing against Jobs hagiography. Some might say "too soon," but it's a compelling piece, with much to think about. The Steve Jobs who founded...

Noah Shachtman at Wired News: "A computer virus has infected the cockpits of Americas Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and othe...

Alex Mallis directed this beautiful short film about Occupy Wall Street....

I asked Jason Torchinsky, one of my favorite makers/artists, to describe how he built his gigantic Space Invader sculptures for the IndieCade Festival (the international conference festival of indepen...

Pictoplasma is an annual conference and festival of contemporary character design and art. It will be held at Tishman Auditorium, November 4+5, 2011. Our pal, Tim Biskup, will be giving a talk th...

Niagara Falls, Ontario's Nightmares Fear Factory has a Flickr feed full of visitors being terrorized in its environs. I grew up with the spookhouses of Niagara Falls, and they can be incredibly scary,...

This car fell into a massive hole that suddenly opened up on a busy road between the towns of Woking and Chertsey in Surrey, England. A busted water main caused the road collapse. From an onlooker quo...

"I share the values and the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We want to provide the opportunity for the people of Seattle to express their views. And we are." The Mayor of Seattle has given...

"I share the values and the message of the Occupy Wall Street movement. We want to provide the opportunity for the people of Seattle to express their views. And we are." The Mayor of Seattle has given...

Settle in for some good ol' fashioned avant-garde theater. This is an Austrian TV broadcast of "Black Rider," a 1990 collaboration between Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, and theater director Robert ...

Photo: Quinn Norton At noon on Wednesday, October 5, 2011, #occupysf protestors staged a march starting at their tent city in front of the San Francisco Federal Reserve down Market Street street, to C...

Photographer Rion Sabean created a series of "Men-ups!," males posing in stereotypically female model poses. "Men-ups!" (Flickr) Sabean interview (Jezebel)...

This handsome pack allows you to stroll around with your bird on board. This hands-free, vest-style bird carrier hangs over your shoulders and is constructed of durable mesh fabric that allows good ai...

The New York Times's T Magazine posted an excellent interactive photo gallery where you control a slider to see how models are transformed with makeup and styling for fashion runways. Seen here, Iris ...

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"The distinction between neurodiverse and neurotypical is too simplistic. There is certainly a great deal of structural variability between individuals, and that's compounded by structural changes tha...

What's one of the things Time magazine says you should never waste your money on ever again? Alternative flu remedies—from homeopathic to herbal, there's no evidence that they actually produce r...

This Tron-o-saurus is part of Dinosaurs & Robots, a gallery show by artists Scott Elyard and Raven Amos, which opens tonight in Anchorage, Alaska. For more info, check out the video trailer that ...

From satellites, to probes, to capsules full of people—humans have launched more than 7000 objects into space. In a nifty infographic at Technology Review, Tommy McCall and Mike Orcutt illustrat...

Redditor TheHerferd carved this brain out of the rind of a watermelon using a potato peeler and a paring knife. The project took less than an hour and looks great. We've posted about this before: here...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our daily delivery of blog headlines to your inbox. Enter the special BoingBoing code CLOCKTOBER for 25% off most German watches at Watchismo....

Elizabeth Stark sez, Friend of Boing Boing Amit Gupta was recently diagnosed with cancer, and he needs help finding a bone marrow donor match. In fact, for someone of South Asian descent, the odds of ...

This project from CRAFT shows how to make paper silhouettes for a terrifically spooky Halloween effect. The author has a book of silhouettes you can punch out. It's reviewed (by my wife Carla) here. H...

Daniel Kottke demos the Microwriter (Photo by Avi Solomon) Avi Solomon interviewed Daniel Kottke at his home in Palo Alto on 2nd September, 2011. He says: I had a wide-ranging conversation with Daniel...

Here I am, days after I was born, being held by my father in front of the family Macintosh. Our family has spent an enormous amount of time and effort growing with Apple. My brother and I spent years ...

Alexis Jones writes, "Went out and bought a toy car spare tire because I thought this tiny tree needed a swing." Miniature Tire Swing (via Super Punch)...

I knew Amy Seidenwurm had good taste in music when I saw that she had painted the names of some of my favorite bands on her beehives. Amy worked in the record business at Enigma, Elektra, Virgin and S...

There's no additional info for this photo, so I'm not sure how this bizarre car-parking lift worked back in the glory days of running boards, but I'd sure love to see it in motion! Vintage Vertical Pa...

I really like "Uncle Six Eyes," a 10" high bust based on Travis Louie's painting of the same name. Uncle Six Eyes (via Super Punch)...

Venkatesh Rao (one of my favorite provocative thinkers) noodles around with the idea of "streams" -- demographics of people who follow a particular international course, in long, stable, weird, nearly...

This is a such a fun project. Steve Hobley make a "ball whacker" that uses a simple circuit consisting of a 555 timer chip and a photoresitor to create a feedback loop. When a ball (or a plastic egg) ...

Kirk Withrow, a surgeon and cigar box guitar maker, imparts a good deal of maker wisdom in this lovely CNN profile. "I absolutely don't want to make them to support myself. Once you switch from making...

Paola C's Cuore is "two glass carafes shaping a human heart when joined together" -- made from blown Pyrex. Cuore : LIVIANA OSTI (via Neatorama)...

The "PX1020 Easy Hang Up" is a device for people who a) still have landlines and b) hate phone solicitors. Simply press the button and hang up, and the person on the other end is played a pre-recorded...

You probably have heard of the TV-B-Gone. If you haven't, it's a small wireless gadget that will turn of any TV. Now, for people who hate the TV-B-Gone, or for people who hate it when someone changes ...

Redditor Fakeproject shows off his annual Hallowe'en costume, a skull drawn on with eyeliner -- bald guys get all the fun on Hallowe'en! Let's share Halloween costumes. Every year, I draw a skull on m...

Math Girls is Hiroshi Yuki's immensely popular series of fiction and manga about math geeks ("Like Glee for math nerds"), and the stories themselves are a potted education in all sorts of mathematics....

Thom Buchanan says: "If you're a fan of Frank Frazetta, and I know a couple of you are, The Pictorial Arts Journal has just published its latest on-line issue that just might interest you."...

Did you know that, with a properly conducted series of clinical trials, it can take upwards of 20 years before a medical discovery makes it from the lab to the hospital? Judy Stone, an infectious dise...

This hair-washing robot, introduced by Panasonic at a public demonstration in Tokyo last week, is actually a pretty practical idea. Washing your hair involves a decent amount of small motor coordinati...

A Filipino man named Herbert Chavez has undergone extensive surgery to make himself look like Superman: a nose job, a chin implant, collagen in his lips, and (randomly) hip implants. Pinoy goes under ...

The fun thing about the Nobel Prize in Physics is watching pundits try to explain to the public the research that won. It doesn't always go well. Physics is not, shall we say, the public's best subjec...

I know we're all thinking of a different death today, but I'd like to go back for just a moment to Ralph Steinman. Steinman is the man Xeni told you about earlier this week, who won the Nobel Prize in...

Here's a guide to the specialized sign language used by the Maitre D' and staff at NYC's swanky Eleven Madison Park restaurant; there's also a set of traffic rules to keep things moving smoothly (staf...

Scott Edelman sez, "It seemed serendipitous that on a day when so many out there are occupying Wall Street I should run across this wonderful 1931 photo of Ralph Walker, the architect who designed One...

Ot sez, "Dutch digital rights organisation Bits of Freedom is raising money to ensure it can continue defending online freedom in the coming years. Bits of Freedom fights for an open Internet which is...

Steve Jobs, former Apple CEO, passed away today after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Here is the statement from Apple's Board of Directors....

[Video Link] Turnstyle News from Oakland, CA interviewed Jelani, a 16-year-old protester who traveled with his grandmother from Pontiac, Michigan to New York City for the Occupy Wall Street protests. ...

Artist Molly Crabapple created this downloadable, printable, stencil-able, remixable poster with an excellent reference to Matt Taibbi's classic characterization of Wall Street fraudsters: a bunch of ...

Arturas Rosenbacher (@USAanon) shot this photograph of windows in the building where the Chicago Board of Trade is located. The CBOT was established in 1848, and is the world's oldest futures and opti...

Mother Jones is maintaining an interactive map of "Occupy" protests around the US, and beyond. That little lonely red dot in the Pacific is a demonstration in Hilo, Hawaii! If you know of others, tell...

[Video Link] This one is inspired. (Via Cynical-C)...

Friends in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities around the U.S. are sharing tweets, photos, and texts with me today about Occupy Wall Street and spinoff demonstrations. I was on IM w...

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Thanks to 50 Watts for posting this photo of The Isolator from Hugo Gernsback's Science and Invention in 1925. See the cover I posted yesterday. (Via A Great Disorder)...

Copyfighting British nerdcode rapper Dan Bull sez, "I've now made a rap video for #occupywallstreet. The video mixes Radiohead's Street Spirit with dubstep and my own lyrics."  Dan Bull's Stu...

Who inspired you? The role that teachers play in influencing the lives of their students is something that's been lost in current debates about education mandates and standardized testing. Teaching is...

Chris from Telecommunications as Commons Initiative sez, "There's an upcoming referendum in Longmont Colorado on providing municipal Internet service over existing fiber. We know that the incumbents (...

[Video Link] The Professor Funk made a fun video about the placebo effect. Now excuse me while I shoot up my morning dose of saline. Laughing Squid: The Strange Powers of the Placebo Effect...

[Video Link] This stick bomb, which winds through a house, is a thing of beauty. I like this YouTube comment: "I just reported this to the Improper Use of Magic Office over at the Ministry of Magic. H...

Over at credit.com I reviewed the book Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomics Living, by Mark Boyle [I]n 2008 Mark Boyle decided to try living for a year without money. His self-imposed rules were simp...

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Security researcher Brian Krebs got a look at the auction prices at iProfit.su, a criminal marketplace where you can buy hacked and phished PayPal accounts; he discovered that the going account for 10...

[Video Link] Sure am glad someone posted a copy of this "Timeless Seasons" shopping network clip, so I could share the good news about these ladygadgets with Boing Boing readers. I almost expected the...

AMC has posted six short webisodes intended to whet your appetite for season two of the TV adaptation of The Walking Dead, a kick-ass zombie comic. They're goddamned scary stuff. (via JWZ)...

This image of a tiny crustacean called a copepod is one of the winners of this year's Nikon Small World photography competition. At Deep Sea News, blogger ParaSight explains how the photographer, scie...

Letters to the Editor are an interesting feature of peer-reviewed scientific journals. The function of this section varies from journal to journal, but, in general, this is where you'll find things li...

More than a quarter-century since its inital publication, Maus, Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning graphic novel history of his father's Holocaust experience, is still counted as one of the seminal doc...

New York State Senators Jeff Klein, Diane Savino, David Carlucci and David Valesky apparently missed civics class, because they think the First Amendment grants the "privilege" of free speech, not the...

Researchers at the Universidad de Buenos Aires recreated conditions found on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa in the lab, and then proved that some Earth organisms are capable of surviving in that...

Briefly mentioned on BoingBoing back in 2007, The Unicorn Museum is a spot-on (and Biblically correct!) parody of the Creation Museum. This photoshopped billboard kind of makes me wish it were a real ...

The Chirurgeon's Apprentice is an entire blog dedicated to eye-witness accounts of surgery in the days before anesthesia. Oh, Internet. Thou art wonderful and horrible. Collected by University of Lond...

On Monday, I told you about The Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College, in St. Peter, Minn., where top neuroscientists are speaking about the mind, the brain, and what it means to be human. Now...

Prompted by Italy's punitive (batshit) wiretapping law proposal, Wikipedia has removed its Italian version and now directs anyone trying to find Italian Wikipedia to a page explaining that Italy's Int...

Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern crypto and the home of the WWII codebreaking effort, has received a 4.6m Heritage Lottery Fund grant to fund restoration efforts and new exhibits. Bletchley wa...

Caravan Palace is Alexandre10021's fabulous swing/electro mix, and it got me juking and jiving in an all-reet way. (via Reddit)...

Here's Richard Feynman monologing about the way that science creates new ways to appreciate the beauty of the world around us. Inspiring stuff, and the accompanying video is nicely apt. (via Kottke)...

Steven Daily's "Jahbulon" (available as giclee on canvas print) is a thoroughly contemporary sort of demon -- the stuff of delirious and glorious nightmares. (via Super Punch)...

As game companies start to add conditions to their EULAs that prohibit class action suits for their negligence in handling your personal data, a collective of gamers called Gamers Opt Out have created...

Dolf sez, "Dolf Veenvliet aka macouno of Entoforms fame has been working on some fun tools to generate 3D forms. Under the ShapeWright moniker Dolf has produced a random space ship generator entitled ...

Do enjoy the lead single from USL's latest album, "Build Motherfucker!" (Thanks, Joel)...

This young fellow and his mother created a ginormous popsicle-stick bomb that snakes through their kitchen and living room, constructed on a scale that beggars the imagination. The detonation event is...

Dejana Kabiljo's contribution to Beijing Design Week are these flour-sacks covered in chocolate-looking polyol sponge frosting. The recyclable sofas are called LetThemSitCake. Beijing Design Week has ...

Old school blogger. From Hugo Gernsback's Science and Invention. Lots of other great science fiction illos on this page. (Via TIH)...

Despite over 500 pages of internal affairs complaints lodged against Clayton County police officer Michael Hobbs, he is still on the force. A Metro Atlanta police officer is accused of being out of co...

William Ernst, owner of the QC Mart chain of stores headquartered in Bettendorf, Iowa, has lost a court case against an employee who claimed benefits after quitting. Ernst had created a contest that i...

[Video Link] A new video from Badlipreading.com always brightens my day. "I went from being two banana plants up to a thrill-seeking shark who sold pictures of different toys I wanted." (Via Dangerous...

The fantastic Monster Brains blog has some examples of Greg and Tim Hildebrandt's excellent book cover art. The painting above is the cover for John Christopher's wonderful young adult science fiction...

Netflix CEO Mike Lang, speaking a the MIPCOM conference, discussed the problems facing his industry and suggested that while piracy isn't a big deal, chokepoints in the distribution chain were, becaus...

The inimitable David Lynch is releasing his first solo album on November 7. The title track, "Crazy Clown Time," can be heard at left. It's quirky, dark, and strange. Does that surprise you? Didn't th...

Give that lady her Serpasil! From Wikipedia: Reserpine was isolated in 1952 from the dried root of Rauwolfia serpentina (Indian snakeroot), (which had been known as Sarpagandaand had been used for cen...

One of the better services provided by the Science Fiction Writers of America is Writer Beware, maintained by Victoria Strauss and Ann Crispin, which lists scammy vanity publishers, book doctors, fake...

Nothing makes more sense than this. Rachel Hobson of CRAFT says: In a special outreach titled Space Farm 7, seven of the nation's top agritourism farms have been selected to celebrate and honor the U....

In the new issue of Wired, Peter Savodnik wrote a great story about the very strange Russian shortwave station UVB-76. Known as the Buzzer because of the buzz patterns it transmits, UVB-76 is most lik...

Caravan Palace is Alexandre10021's fabulous swing/electro mix, and it got me juking and jiving in an all-reet way. (via Reddit)...

Fox News has been dispatching a stream of trolling reporters to Occupy Wall Street with the mission of making the protesters look stupid, using cheap editing tricks to heighten the effect. But sometim...

A Russian tabloid features the story of Nizhny Novgorod Alexander Karpenko, who taught himself to shave with a shovel (also a hatchet and a pair of scissors), inspired by his grandad's stories of shav...

An unnamed one-legged woman conceived of this terrific Christmas Story lamp costume for Hallowe'en....

For more than 20 years, the Tevatron reigned as the gold standard in particle accelerators. Under a berm outside Batavia, Illinois, the machine pushed protons and antiprotons to high energies around c...

Apple has gathered gadget bloggers and tech journalists to unveil an update to the iPhone. Gizmodo, GDGT, and Engadget have boots on the ground and/or liveblogs in the ether (some are covering remotel...

The health blog "Well" at the New York Times covers the case of Lori Dorn, a 44-year-old New York woman and friend of Boing Boing who learned in March that she had breast cancer. Over the weekend, I b...

My friend Yasuko is the most talented massage therapist I know, not least because she's always studying anatomy and related subjects. Last week, she raved to me about the Integrative Biology 131 class...

Over at Intel's MyLifeScoop site, I wrote about my quest to put together my dream hi-fi system, circa 1972. I have hundreds of gigabytes of digital music. Yet I listen to less than one percent of it. ...

[Video Link] The US Department of Justice and police in Massachusetts have decided to confiscate a $1,000,000 motel from a family that has owned and operated it for two generations, because 0.0005% of...

[Video Link] Who needs Glengarry Glen Ross when you can watch the Maysles Brothers' fantastic 1969 documentary about door-to-door Catholic Bible salesmen and their impoverished, reluctant, guilt-racke...

[Video Link] A busy crowd in China stops for a moment to marvel at rats enjoying ice cream through a small opening in a manhole cover. (Via biotv)...

A highlight from Mitch O'Connell's blog....

Max Allan Collins wrote the award winning graphic novel Road to Perdition. His new Hard Case Crime novel, The Consummata is out today! Here's an essay Collins wrote for Boing Boing, titled, "Who Do Yo...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation are asking the Supreme Court to ban the practice of using warrantless GPS-based bugs to track citizens' movements. They've just been joined in their appeal by Roger ...

James Moore recently appeared on TVO's Search Engine podcast. Moore is the Canadian minister hell-bent on spending Canadians' tax-dollars to police DRM, making it illegal to break DRM even if you're n...

From the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, a nicely composed shot of an upbeat Occupy Wall Street (?) protest sign with flowers, taken by Sleepy Armadillo....

Chris Moriarty's The Inquisitor's Apprentice is the first volume in a fantastic new historical young adult series that takes place in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York where magic is the key to...

Chris Moriarty's The Inquisitor's Apprentice is the first volume in a fantastic new historical young adult series that takes place in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York where magic is the key to...

Wayne Chisnall's assemblage sculpture The City, a "mobile cabinet of curiosities," will be displayed at TROVE gallery, in the Engine Room of Birmingham's Science and Industry Museum for a show called ...

The new Bank of England 50 pound note features British steam pioneers James Watt and Matthew Boulton; it's a nice, makerish touch to the currency. (via Core77)...

Here's a clever mouse-and-USB-stick sandwich, creator uncredited. (via Neatorama)...

Meon is like Lite-Brite with EL wire (electroluminescent wire). The manufacturer sent a review unit and my 8-year-old daughter and I have enjoyed playing with it. You basically weave strands of EL wir...

MIR is a Brooklyn based clothing co. that features designs inspired by old Russian criminal tattoos. A while back, I asked Roman Belenky, the designer, to tell me about Russian criminal tattoos, which...

Kevin Balktik says: Horizons is an annual forum for learning about psychedelic drugs in New York City. Its goal is to open a fresh dialogue on their role in medicine, culture, history, spirituality, a...

The New York Times has an op-ed out today, which claims that fMRI studies show that, when people are exposed to a pretty, shiny, ringing iPhone, the experience lights up the part of their brains that ...

[Video Link] Reason's Nick Gillespie talks to cartoonist Peter Bagge for Reason TV. He created great comic books: Neat Stuff and Hate, and was also the editor of Robert's Crumb's Weirdo for a while. P...

[Video Link] Reason's Nick Gillespie talks to cartoonist Peter Bagge for Reason TV. He created great comic books: Neat Stuff and Hate, and was also the editor of Robert's Crumb's Weirdo for a while. P...

Glows in the Dark! by Darling Pet Munkee I was looking at the comments section for the Gweek 019 post and I learned about this terrific garage punk band called Darling Pet Munkee (Do Not Forsake Me Oh...

Here's a set of instructions for "carving" precise shapes into a pumpkin by knocking them through using a cookie-cutter and a mallet. Place a cookie cutter on the pumpkin and tap firmly with a rubber ...

This year, six Toronto-area high school students will get to learn supercomputing from researchers at The University of Toronto. If you'd like to be one of them, check out the application materials. D...

A gem of a story, posted by The Futility Closet: "For Children Three Years Old,  from Lessons for Children by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Philadelphia, 1818: There was a naughty boy; I do not know wh...

Phytoplankton are tiny, plant-like organisms that live in the ocean and are, basically, at the very bottom of the food chain. But, sometimes, they get their revenge. When lots and lots and lots of phy...

Canada's Conservative government is set to bull through its copyright legislation, Bill C-11, which notoriously includes a special protection for "digital locks," making it illegal to remove such a lo...

Unicode has a special character, U+202e, that tells computers to display the text that follows it in right-to-left order; this facility is used to write text in Arabic, Hebrew, and other right-to...

My IFTF colleague Mike Liebhold just snapped this photo of a strange juxtaposition of a "Darth Vader yacht at the entry to Mandraki Harbor on Rhodes, Greece by Agios Niklaos a ruined 15th century fort...

[Video Link] What to do if you accidentally zip-tie your wrists together. How to escape from zip ties (Via TYWKIWDBI)...

[Video Link] Gayageum is the new ukulele. (Via Cynical-C)...

[Video Link] Dan Colman of Open Culture says: [A] vintage interview with Dick Cavett. Recorded 40 years ago (November 23, 1971), the conversation starts with light chit-chat, then (around the 5:30 mar...

In case you were curious, that atmospheric research satellite crashed to Earth without hitting a single person. It landed in the Pacific—scattering bits and pieces over an 800-mile-long stretch ...

Hrm....

In Counting the Cost: corporations and human rights abuses in the Niger Delta, Platform and a coalition of NGOs accuse Shell Oil of funding vicious conflicts between rival gangs in the Niger Delta, br...

[video link] The Star Wars "Imperial March" played on two modded floppy drives. (Thanks, Jim Leftwich!)...

Roger Hanlon is a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He studies cephalopods—octopus, squid, and cuttlefish. Specifically, he studies the way these animal...

Brian Lam, former Gizmodo editor, today launched a "list of amazing gadgets" called The Wirecutter. I dig the look, and the Big Idea....

If you live anywhere near St. Peter, Minnesota, I highly recommend taking tomorrow and Wednesday off from work to attend the 47th Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College. Every year, the school ...

Dorrit Moussaieff, the first lady of Iceland, made a dramatic gesture over the weekend by joining a group of demonstrators hit by the debt crisis. As the Icelandic president and MPs came under fire fr...

"Erroneous analyses of interactions in neuroscience: a problem of significance," a paper in Nature Neuroscience by Sander Nieuwenhuis and co, points out an important and fatal statistical error common...

A new study suggests that crows can recognize symbols that represent quantities of items. At Japan's Utsunomiya University, crows were shown two containers. Only the container marked with five symbols...

The young lad in this video, four-year-old Faris, is about to learn who Luke Skywalker's father is. His face should be in Wikipedia under the (nonexistent) entry for "mindblown." Kudos to young Faris'...

In 2002, The Economist writer/editor Emily Bobrow gifted me a copy of Helen DeWitts The Last Samurai and my life changed forever. Its one of those novels that you can go back to every couple years ane...

Rockefeller University in New York says Ralph Steinman, co-winner of this years Nobel Prize in medicine, has died. The immunologist and cell biologist is reported to have died on Friday after a four-y...

In 1979 Kirk Demarais bought a comic book at a neighborhood gas mart. It was a copy of Micronauts #9. Kirk was a kid at the time, and the comic books plot confused him. But he was drawn to the adverti...

Prywatna Wytwrnia Lamp is Aleksander Zawada's one-man vacuum tube factory, now housed in Warsaw's Institute of Vacuum Technology (Zawada's original vacuum tube factory was in his apartment). Sbastien ...

Accustomed as I am to typing on the iPad, it's not an experience I'd take over tapping it out on a proper desktop keyboard. And yet the cruel, perfect look of Dr. Kazuo Kawazaki's "Cool Leaf" still in...

Accustomed as I am to typing on the iPad, it's not an experience I'd take over tapping it out on a proper desktop keyboard. And yet the cruel, perfect look of Dr. Kazuo Kawazaki's "Cool Leaf" still in...

The sofa sequence in last night's Simpsons episode was created by Happy Mutant John Kricfalusi! Love it. (via Super Punch)...

The sofa sequence in last night's Simpsons episode was created by Happy Mutant John Kricfalusi! Love it. (via Super Punch)...

Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century, my second essay collection, is now officially available from Tachyon Books, and in finer book...

Oh, I could read Debbie Chacra's #dailyidioms buzzword tweets all day long: * uterine replicator, Turkish delight doughnut, Galapagan isolation, ghost craters, empathy system, nonconsensual collaborat...

Here's a whole whack of extremely talented and energetic young people doing awesome and fun acrobatic routines on a slackline -- a bouncy rope that works like a cross between a trampoline and a tightr...

Ticktock Showroom's handmade "Timing Chain" clocks are a really appealing way of telling time. They run $100, and you'll need 26" of clearance below them for the chain-hang. Innovative chain driven cl...

"A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries -- in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East -- has sold millions of dol...

(Image: Woman at Occupy Wall Street, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 33498942@N04's photostream) A manifesto of sorts has emerged from Occupy Wall Street: As we gather together in soli...

Esther Dyson snapped this vertiginous shot of a glass floor at the Digital Moscow event. I have a mild fear of heights, but this kind of thing goes straight into my spine and my digestive-tract's puck...

A coincidence, I imagine, but it sure is poetic. Just as the Occupy Wall Street movement was picking up speed, JPMorgan Chase donated what the financial organization itself described as "an unpreceden...

The live streamed coverage of the NYC protests by the Occupy Wall Street organizers is pretty impressive stuff....

This video from the #OccupyWallStreet livestream on Saturday shows what is being widely reported as a young girl being arrested by the NYPD on the Brooklyn Bridge, in full restraints. I am trying to c...

This video from the #OccupyWallStreet livestream on Saturday shows what is being widely reported as a "13-year-old girl" being arrested by the NYPD on the Brooklyn Bridge, in full restraints, and an a...

The Village Voice notes a changed account at the New York Times of what exactly happened between police and demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday. Nick Greene at the Voice writes, The above p...

[Video Link] From Media Sanctuary TV: "We get to the root of what many protestors are looking for from Occupy Wall Street."...

Here's a frank discussion (an "IAmA" in Redditese) from someone claiming to work as a censor for the Internet ministry of a "Middle Eastern country." It makes for interesting reading, as this guy come...

A coincidence, I imagine, but it sure is poetic. In mid-June, just before the Occupy Wall Street movement took shape, JPMorgan Chase donated what the financial organization itself described as "an unp...

Etsy seller Boobercakes made these Pac Man ghost Hallowe'en dresses (though, honestly, I don't understand why you couldn't wear them to the office or out at the shops). She'll make 'em to order, and d...

Britain, the land that "sleepwalking into the surveillance state" was coined for, continues its somnambulistic randomwalk into a privacy-free zone. Recently, without any public discussion or debate, s...

This ad for the Super-Charged Auburn from the May 5, 1935 Newsweek shows a car sporting a four-yard-long hood driving at 100mph to the red-faced chagrin of someone in a merely very large car....

The Guardian reports that 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested in "chaotic scenes" as a group of "several thousand" protesters move to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. At one stage 500 protesters...

I just love the little fellers crawling around in these fancy-pants rum drinks of yore. They sure don't make 'em like that anymore....

Here's a piece of hackerspace lore from earlier this summer. Rinpoche Fa Zang, a Buddhist monk, believed (incorrectly) that the rule of the San Francisco Noisebridge hackerspace was that "if the space...

Many attending the memorial for Troy Davis in Savannah, Georgia, wore t-shirts that said I am Troy Davis. "Troy... told us to keep on fighting until his name is finally cleared and Georgia admits what...

Leadership of the United Steelworkers (USW), with 1.2 million active and retired members, issued a statement on Friday in support of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. "[The USW] stands in solid...

Sculptor Ronit Baranga's ceramic pieces sport sensual mouths and walking fingers, something between Clive Barker and Giger, and beautiful. (via Street Anatomy)...

Broadcast journalist Dan Patterson of ABC News Radio went down to Occupy Wall Street on Friday, and has posted extensive reports in Storify, image, and audio form. Below, an ambient soundscape of the ...

My longtime friend Scott Beale, who runs Laughing Squid, says: My wife Lori Dorn, who has breast cancer, tells her story about a TSA agent at JFK on Friday who required her to submit to a pat down due...

Bodhi, a photo by TomorrowGirl contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. Boing Boing's Caturday cover-kitten of the week is available for adoption at Friends of Animals Los Angeles....

From the Boing Boing Flickr pool, a candid moment of a young man cutting his hair on a San Francisco fire-escape, by Erik Wilson....

NoiseBridge, the celebrated hackerspace in San Francisco's Mission district, is celebrating its third anniversary tonight with a Hacker Prom. There's a makeout room (featuring Makerbots), pre-spiked p...

Plumb B made this rubber-band-firing, full auto-capable chainsaw/assault rifle out of Lego, inspired by the Lancer Assault Rifle in Gears of War. (via DVICE)...

I had a great conversation with Christina Agapakis, a science blogger at Scientific American and a scientist studying synthetic biology. In this episode of Bloggingheads.tv's Science Saturday, you'll ...

Here's Jon Stewart and the Daily Show crew and some very special guests on the future TV show featuring ruthless NYPD mace-rampager Anthony Bologna. (via Salon)  Occupy Wall Street: "Mace-in-the-...

Etsy seller Patricaia Rodriguez has created an astounding Hallowe'en prop: an animatronic door inset with an LCD that looks like a window showing a corridor beyond it. An axe-murderer stalks down the ...

Toto, Japan's foremost toilet manufacturer, has made a motorized tricycle that runs on human crap. The saddle is a functional toilet, and if you can muster up enough colonic motility to keep up a stea...

"What constitutes due process in this case is a due process in war.  The Washington Post reports that a secret Justice Department memorandum authorizing the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. The operat...

Ned Batchelder sums up a series of technique to keep spammers from attacking submission forms with automated bots (it won't work against humans, but even cheap humans are more expensive than bots). So...

Maximus Clarke shares photos taken today at Occupy Wall Street....

[Photo by Jim Kiernan] Michael Moore, holding a copy of the announcement that the New York City Transit Workers' Union has voted unanimously to support the #occupywallstreet movement. The Transit Unio...

[Video Link] My friends at Crashspace are opening their doors to the public tonight for a fun event: its members are going to show me things they are working on and we are going to figure out the best...

This video, labelled as being recorded "moments after" NYPD DI Anthony Bologna's now-infamous unprovoked mace assault on four women at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, shows the same office in an...

Reuters reports from the Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi: "Google, Twitter and Facebook are increasingly co-opted for surveillance work as the information they gather proves irresistible to law e...

The "Occupy Wall Street" protests in New York City are inspiring similar demonstrations in other US cities. Above, in San Francisco on Thursday, protesters scuffle with a Charles Schwab employee at th...

Gawker's Adrian Chen is liveblogging the afternoon's events at the Occupy Wall Street protest in NYC. Sounds like some of the protest organizers (or an overenthusiastic supporter?) pranked the media a...

Glenn Greenwald reports on the US assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen in Yemen, who had not been charged with (or convicted of) any crime. Al-Awlaki was "far from any battlefield," and no j...

An advertisement from the good old days when illustrators were celebrities. See some examples of Jon Whitcomb's work. (Look at that big bowl of chicken broth, too!) Drawn: Hard to believe illustrators...

[Video Link] Caturday arrived early. That's good, because you'll need extra time to handle all the cute. Madison has previously appeared on Boing Boing, teaching us all how to be sunflowers. (thanks, ...

Creator unknown. (via Chase Turner, via Joe Sabia)....

Today's XKCD proposes a strangely optimal strategy for reviewing the hotels you love, provided you don't mind being a jerk. He calls it the "tragedy of you're a dick."...

Daniel Krause interviewed me in Booklist about my DIY short story collection, With a Little Help, on the occasion of that book being listed in the Ingram catalog, which'll make it easy for libraries t...

You like what you see, don't you? She's on Twitter now. Previously ogled by Dean here on Boing Boing....

Last June, Xeni posted some photos of a huge school of squid swimming off the California coast, taken by photographer/1st grade teacher Jon Schwartz. This month, Schwartz got to swim with the squids a...

[Video Cat] Today's weird animal viral video is, like all great examples of the genre, equal parts funny, creepy, cute, and sad. Apparently, the cat in this video is having a fear/anxiety/aggressive r...

[Video Link: Sylvia Robinson performing her hit "Pillow Talk" on Soul Train] "Most famous for assembling the Sugarhill Gang, Sylvia Robinson was a songwriter, performer, producer and label owner. 'RIP...

A visually impaired man who'd recently undergone intestinal surgery answered the door to find a woman who announced that she was there to give him an enema. He complied, but later felt that there was ...

A coalition of activists, community groups and trade unions (whom Crain's New York Business hilariously refer as "agitators," as though they were the Red Menace a post-WWII installment of Little Orpha...

Christopher Maag of Credit.com write: Bank of Americas homepage was down Friday morning, a day after the megabank announced that it will begin charging customers $5 a month to use their debit cards. I...

Alex Santoso of Neatorama says: "The Euthanasia Coaster, designed by London's Royal College of Art's student Julijonas Urbonas, lets you ride the last ride of your life. Literally." The three-minute r...

San Francisco BART police are going to start wearing video cameras that record their interactions with the public (transit cops in SF have committed some controversial high-profile shootings lately). ...

This is the "Noah" capsule, a Tsunami survival pod now sold by Japanese company Cosmo. From The Guardian: The company's president, Shoji Tanaka, said the capsule could hold four adults and had survive...

[Video Link] "Let's creep in the frozen aisle and think one thought: trick the bridesmaid to get her to take it off." I appreciate the work Bad Lip-Reading does to make politician's speeches bearable....

[Video Link] Here's the swim cap fashion show set in a Punch-and-Judy theater that you've been waiting for. Pete Emslie would be happy with the colors! The brooding people in the audience look like th...

[Video Link] Happy birthday, Buddy Rich! (1917-1987) (Via Thomas Arey)...

"This May Be My Last Time Singing" is a rousing collection of African-American gospel from the latter half of the last century. Interestingly, the tracks were compiled from 45s, many of which were pre...

Gaylord Stinchcomb's B3ta illustration celebrating Google's 13th birthday is everything I love about B3ta in one little bitmap....

[Video Link] sloanchurchman says: "I was born deaf and 8 weeks ago I received a hearing implant. This is the video of them turning it on and me hearing myself for the first time :)" (Via Sean Bonner)...

At top is Simon Dale's DIY hobbit house in Wales' "first authorized 'low-impact' ecovillage." The home is their second foray into hobbit living. Several years prior, Simon Dale and his friends and fam...

Behold the magnificence of the Bolshoi, apparently the most accurate computer simulation of the universe ever. The researchers from the University of California High-Performance Astrocomputing Center ...

Ooh, this does look good: Graham "The IT Crowd" Linehan has done a stage adaptation of The Ladykillers, a classic Ealing comedy recently remade (with moderate success) for modern audiences. The origin...

This unsourced bit of net.art depicting the girl from The Ring climbing out of Po the Teletubby's screen is freaky in the extreme. (via Neatorama)...

A Slashdot user posed a question: how to conclusively destroy 15-some hard-drives without spending big bucks on a degausser or wasting a lot of time waiting for DBAN to run. I like this response from ...

Dozens of current and former Boeing workers were arrested today in a federal drug bust. The workers are accused of illegally dealing prescription drugs (including Actiq, Oxycontin, and Xanax) at a pla...

Stephany Aulenback tried out a recipe for "Chemical Apple Pie," a beloved science experiment that uses cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) to trick the human tongue into tasting apples, though no a...