Articles by BoingBoing from January 2012

Tech writer Glenn Fleishman doesn't mind attractive people trying to get him to pay attention to their products. But "companies that rely on models whose various assets are stress-testing spandex or e...

Grace Brown created "Project Unbreakable" in October, 2011, and it appears to really be gathering momentum online. The idea: "Use photography to help heal those who were sexually abused by asking them...

At left, the CRASS logo, first seen in the mid-1970s. Center and right, a recent design for the UK garment retailer "Hardware," which appears to have repurposed the CRASS logo after 35 years of prior ...

Above, "Dixon crossing Niagara below the Great Cantilever Bridge," U.S.A., 1895-1903. And you can make your own, with Stereogranimator, a new project from NYPL Labs. Stereogranimator is " a tool for t...

"To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to h...

"To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to h...

I approveof this meme. (thanks, Antinous!)...

Above, one of the bronze sculptures to emerge from the Object Breast Cancer project by art duo caraballo-farman. Snip from the project description: 1.3 Million women in the world are diagnosed with br...

[Video Link] Three happy Boing Boing readers and one troll. (Via Arbroath)...

[Video Link] Apparently, so many people thought this was staged that Scalzi disabled the YouTube comments and asked Athena for a comment....

This table, from Italy's Manoteca, is made from a junk-market door and a lot of style: Made from a door found at a outdoor market in Modena, the table is outfitted with a custom steel frame and new hi...

Joel Johnson turns us on to Dicken featuring Milah and Korben performing "Everything Counts" by Depeche Mode. This is fantastic. I just can't get enough. (See what I did there?)...

My friend Randall de Rikj, noted collector of vernacular photographs, shares with us this absolutely magnificent snapshot used on the cover of Ransom Rigg's young adult novel Miss Peregrine's Home for...

Michael Geist sez, "Throughout the fall, I ran a daily digital lock dissenter series, pointing to a wide range of organizations representing creators, consumers, businesses, educators, historians, arc...

My friend Ken Hollings is a master at connecting the dots between avant garde art history, outr culture, weird science, and basically everything that interests me. You might recall that Ken is the aut...

Toys And Techniques posted several wonderful scans from Christopher Hills' fantastically-titled "Rays From The Capstone: The story of the psychotronic generator of the pi-ray and the incredible coffer...

[Video Link] (thanks, Joe Sabia!)...

Mexican tattoo star Mary Jose Cristerna, better known as "La Mujer Vampiro" (Female Vampire), poses during the Venezuela Tattoo Expo in Caracas, January 27, 2012. She is a 35-year-old attorney. 98 per...

Mexican tattoo star Maria Jose Cristerna, better known as "La Mujer Vampiro" (Female Vampire), poses during the Venezuela Tattoo Expo in Caracas, January 27, 2012. She is a 35-year-old attorney. 98 pe...

"Alyssa Talking Backwards." (thanks, Joe Sabia!)...

NYT's David Carr, on the News Corporation CEO's foray into Twitter: "The rules of effective tweeting for business leaders are no different from the ones for us mere mortals who want to both express ou...

Weird blue gelatinous balls, about 3cm in diameter, rained on Steve Hornsby, of Dorset, England during a hailstorm last week. He collected them in a jam jar and put them in his refrigerator. From the ...

Patrick Farley is one of the greatest and most maddeningly irregular webcomics artists working today. We've been covering his work for a decade, and a new Farley is always cause for celebration. His l...

An attorney for MegaUpload -- which was shut down by the US government earlier this month, and whose assets have been frozen, following copyright complaints from the entertainment industry -- says tha...

Dean Takahashi on the relentlessness machinery of Zynga's game-cloning operation, whereby it minimally modifies others' work and sues those who treat it likewise. Nimblebit drew some blood last week w...

Tomangell sez, "A question advocating marijuana legalization from a retired LAPD deputy chief of police won twice as many votes as any other video question in the White House's 'Your Interview with th...

Who would pay $1.15m for a 57,500-carat emerald from a guy in an Ed Hardy shirt who admits dying the stone green, and who was arrested last week on unrelated fraud charges? No-one. [Vancouver Sun via ...

Safwat sez, "'Oh Expletive!' is a series of clever illustrations by graphic designer Safwat Saleem, each depicting that 'Oh $@#!' moment familiar to anybody who's ever had the odds stacked against the...

Gweek is a weekly 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. My hos...

Wagner James Au writes in with novel uses for a 3D printed Hilbert curve like the one I blogged last week: "Mathematician Henry Segerman creates copies of a 3D printed Hilbert curve he originally made...

Two British tourists landing in L.A. were detained and deported because of tweets joking about "diggin' up" Marilyn Monroe and "destroying" America. According to DHS paperwork, Leigh Van Bryan was mat...

Two U.K. tourists landing in L.A. were detained and deported because of tweets joking about "diggin' up" Marilyn Monroe and "destroying" America. According to DHS paperwork, Leigh Van Bryan was matche...

Two U.K. tourists landing in L.A. were detained and deported because of tweets joking about "diggin' up" Marilyn Monroe and "destroying" America. According to DHS paperwork, Leigh Van Bryan was matche...

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit" is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the...

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit" is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the...

Under the Knife is the first collection of Brandon Seifert and Lukas Ketner's charmingly demented graphic novel Witch Doctor, which concerns th travails of Dr Vincent Morrow, a metaphysical epidemiolo...

The latest prospect in male contraception: blasting your reproductive organs with ultrasound, thereby halting the production of sperm. Experiments on rats using the technique dropped sperm counts to 1...

"My Favorite Museum Exhibit" is a series of posts aimed at giving BoingBoing readers a chance to show off their favorite exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the...

Writing in the Toronto Sun tabloid, Alan Parker rails against the corruption of the entertainment industry, and the hypocrisy of the way that they've painted Kim Dotcom and MegaUpload: "The film corpo...

Last week, I asked BoingBoing readers to send me images and stories about your favorite museum exhibits—beloved displays and collections squirreled away in museums that might not have a big prof...

[Video Link] I could listen to Mika explain movies all day long. Here's her take on Titanic and Inception, too....

This revolting thing is a cocktail called an "Alien Brain Hemorrhage": "To make an alien brain hemorrhage cocktail, fill a shot glass halfway with peach schnapps. Gently pour Bailey's Irish Cream on t...

Artist Jeff Meadows did a great custom paint job on his shoes! From an interview with him on Illustration Mundo....

You know, when I was sitting down with entertainment execs on a regular basis to debate applied, practical technology choices in DRM standards bodies, their constant refrain was, "We love technology! ...

Marshall Alexander made these free downloadable papercraft Etch-a-Sketch and Viewmaster models. He notes, "Instead of creating exact paper replica's I chose to do very simple interpretations that fit ...

The San Francisco Chronicle loves the stage adaptation of my novel Little Brother, and brings the welcome news that its run has been extended by two weeks!...

From the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, this contribution by V.Valenti, showing a superb space-age Lestoil ad. Lestoil Woman of the Future, 1968....

[Video Link] I was up at the MAKE offices earlier this week and saw this little traffic cone that the interns made on a MakerBot Cupcake 3D printer....

A great Mike Masnick Techdirt editorial deals with MPAA second-in-command Michael O'Leary's statement that, "[the Internet is] a platform we're not at this point comfortable with." The MPAA's O'Leary ...

An unsigned rap group called After the Smoke couldn't post their song "One in a Million" to YouTube because every time they tried, it generated a YouTube content-match error saying that Universal Musi...

Thingiverse's Tony Buser has an amazing approach to approximating the Hilbert curve, as Make's Sean Ragan explains: Veteran Thingiverse user Tony Buser has printed a model (intended to be an approxima...

The Wall Street Journal published a letter expressing skepticism about anthropogenic climate change signed by a group of engineers, retired weathermen, and scientists from fields other than climate sc...

Kang Duck-Bong is a Korean sculptor who makes pieces from bundled PVC pipes that appear to be in rapid motion. Disguise 1: pvc pipe, urethane paint, 90x28x55cm, 2011 (via Kottke)...

I already have a lifetime supply of notebooks, but I'll be buying these Lego Moleskines just in case there's a mortality cure coming down the pipes....

From an article by Jake Brodkin at Ars Technica: "Twitter has taken the unusual step ofmaking DMCA takedown notices public, in partnership with Chilling Effects, a project of the Electronic Frontier F...

Sound it Out # 15: Nada Surf "Waiting for Something" Nada Surf has been playing intelligent and catchy guitar-based rock music for two decades. Their records are lush and beautifully written, and the ...

An explainer from Eva Galperin at the Electronic Frontier Foundation on Twitter's "country-based tweet takedown" news. The key point here, which has been missing in much of the initial coverage, is th...

Pat Aufderheide sez, When is it OK for me to put copyrighted material on e-reserves for students? I've got an ancient VHS and the company that made it is defunct. Can I copy it to DVD for a prof's cla...

[Video Link] Amy Seidenwurm says: "'Brothers' by The War on Drugs was possibly my favorite song of 2011. They just released a supremely creepy video for it."...

[Video Link] Sounds like this documentary explores the same kind of mass psychological manipulation that Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays invented to convince Americans that it was a good idea to get in...

Klaus Schulze pilots his Moog spaceship through the composition "For Barry Graves" live in 1977. The track can be found on "La Vie Electronique Vol. 5." The Klaus Schulze La Vie Electronique series, w...

Juha Saarinen sez, 2Johns2Cups by goldenturkey New Zealand media were raided by police last November just before the general election, after the incumbent centre-right Prime Minister John Key made a c...

At Los Angeles International airport early this morning, TSA screeners mistook a woman's insulin pump for a gun. Screening and boarding at Terminal 4 were delayed as airport authorities searched for a...

It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product...He would proof it." Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Ron Pauls company and former supporter of the Tex...

A worker checks in a special room where the Parma hams are hung to dry in Langhirano near Parma. Prosciutto di Parma can only be produced in a very restricted area of 29 sq km (11.2 sq mile) around th...

[Video Link] Short video of Maus creator Art Spiegelman getting a hero's welcome in France, where a museum in Angouleme is exhibiting a retrospective of his work. (Via Potrzebie)...

"This easy-to-use beauty and skincare product was developed by an ordinary housewife. Chikako Hirama was simply concerned about her own age and wanted an easy way to combat those telltale lines. Just ...

RePress is a new WordPress plugin that turns any WordPress site into a proxy that can be used to circumvent national firewalls, including the systems used in The Netherlands, Italy, Finland and other ...

From the Guardian: "Earlier this month the FBI quietly published a request for information (RFI) looking for companies that might help it build a new social network monitoring system looking at "publi...

If you're working on a DIY version of the Hubble Space Telescope, this may come in handy. It's apparently the Vehicle Power Interface Console used at the Goddard Flight Center during pre-launch testin...

Gothamist digs into whether NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly's statements and actions regarding the production of an Islamophobic propaganda film "screened on a continuous loop for over 1,200 NYPD officers...

Photographer Edi Go made a beautiful photograph of an ugly plastic bag. "Elastic" by Edi Go (Behance, via Imaginary Foundation)...

After noticing a lack of space for Rob's vintage synthesizer collection, Happy Mutants has decided not to purchase the ICBM silo and air park for sale in New York's Adirondacks. Instead, we have our s...

Dunchead sez, "RBS boss Stephen Hester has accepted his bonus of 963,000 on top of his annual salary of 1.2 million. RBS is 80% owned by the UK taxpayer. This image represents his annual income as 2.2...

"On Sept 16, 1981, Representative Stewart McKinney and I introduced legislation designed to end bureaucratic interference in the use of marijuana as a medicant. We believe licensed physicians are comp...

Several years ago, VH1 made a documentary about the Langley Schools Music Project, and you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. If you're not hip to the Langley Schools Music Project, you're in for a...

"Just as prohibition of alcohol failed in the United States in the 1920s, the war on drugs has failed globally. Over the past 50 years, more than $1 trillion has been spent fighting this battle, and a...

From Ethan Persoff's ongoing chronicles of vintage weird ephemera: COMICS WITH PROBLEMS #7 - MADONNA ON AIDS. This public health pamphlet was handed out at one of her concerts, one night only, in 1987...

(Photo above: RFE-RL; below, Ivan Krupchik.) Authorities in Russia are investigating the legality of a "doll demonstration" demanding "clean elections" in the Siberian city of Barnaul, and looking for...

Nicko Margolies from the Sunlight Foundation sez, "A new analysis prepared by the Sunlight Foundation shows that wealthy financial sector donors gave $178.2 million in political contributions in 2010,...

Sillysparrowness, a self-described "German teacher with a leaning towards silliness," described the process by which she came to build a beautiful, obsessively finished Tardis. I built a TARDIS (Thank...

Earlier this week, I challenged readers to send me photos of their favorite museum exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. Over the next few d...

Photo of Tiffany Lee Brown by Wiley Wiggins Someday I hope to share with you audio from an interview I conducted with Mr. Wilson, but it's entirely possible the old cassette is long gone. I'm still lo...

As Xeni wrote, Twitter has adopted Google's tactics for coping with legally binding censorship demands: from now on, when it receives a legal demand to censor a tweet, it will only censor that tweet f...

Earlier this week, I challenged readers to send me photos of their favorite museum exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. Over the next few d...

EMI's VP of Urban Promotions Craig Davis opposes SOPA and legislation like it, and thinks the solution to piracy is better products at formats and prices that customers like. TorrentFreak's Ernesto wr...

A PC World editorial by Benj Edwards recounts the history of "copy protection*" for software, and discusses how the cracks-scene, which busted open these software locks, is the only reason the legacy ...

Carlos sez, "A Portuguese Authors Association was caught faking authors' names in support of an abusive proposed law to add a copyright tax to every gigabyte of digital storage." Antnio Pinho Vargas (...

The streets of Poland have erupted in protest on the eve of the country's signing onto ACTA, the secretive copyright treaty that is being rammed through many European Parliaments this year. Members of...

In this video, Hamst, a proud resident of Scunthorpe who enjoys taking photos of local landmarks for the Visit Scunthorpe site confronts two very nasty security guards for the Golden Wonder factory. T...

Kader Arif, the EU "rapporteur" for ACTA (a copyright treaty negotiated in secret, which contains all the worst elements of SOPA, and which is coming to a vote in the EU) has turned in his report and ...

A modern electronica duo can only dream of being as good as Future World Orchestra. [via Robert Popper]...

"Hey, Mr. Kotter, I got a note!" Robert Hegyes who played Juan Luis Pedro Philippo DeHuevos Epstein on "Welcome Back Kotter" has died. "Robert Hegyes dies at 60" (Variety)...

Earlier this week, I challenged readers to send me photos of their favorite museum exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. Over the next few d...

Earlier this week, I challenged readers to send me photos of their favorite museum exhibits and specimens, preferably from museums that might go overlooked in the tourism pantheon. Over the next few d...

Brian Lam on finding happiness after absorbing too much Internet as a too-busy website editor. With my three extra hours a day, I will often go to the beach. Cook a healthy meal. Do a bunch of exercis...

Rachel Hobson of CRAFT correctly figures (in my case, anyway), " you'll enjoy this series of vintage photographs that have been transformed into portraits of superheroes by artist Alex Gross."...

Ethnic Tibetans throughout Tibet this week held some of the largest demonstrations against Chinese rule in four years. The Chinese military responded by shooting protesters. Up to 5 are said to have b...

A new Twitter policy which goes into effect today allows the social network "to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country," so that Twitter can further expand globally and "enter co...

[Video Link] A bank robber in Brazil shot himself in the foot. In the video he is seen limping away with his cohorts. He was later arrested while receiving treatment at a nearby hospital. (Via Arbroat...

From Physicians for Human Rights: "A report (PDF) prepared by professors and students at the University of North Carolina School of Law states that the CIA has been relying on Aero Contractors, Ltd., ...

Goli of MAKE says: Two young makers from Toronto, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both age 17, successfully sent a Lego minifig and four cameras to roughly 78,000 feet elevation on a homemade weather bal...

"With enough global data, you can actually see the traffic drop when the shutdown occurs." Internet traffic analysists at Arbor Networks examined recent worldwide data flow and determined that Megaupl...

"In February of 2009, Google paid about $52 million for an abandoned paper mill in Hamina, Finland, after deciding that the 56-year-old building was the ideal place to build one of the massive computi...

Cloths embroidered with signs are seen in front of the Supreme Court of Justice in Guatemala City January 26, 2012. Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, who ruled the country from 1980-1982 d...

Originally posted by Cory, this is from 1969 and involves helium balloons. The vocal effect, however, was accomplished not with vocal cord-tightening gas, but Chipmunk-style—with threats and coe...

If The Osmonds were a death metal band, "Crazy Horses" might have sounded something like this. Dangerous Minds' Marc Campbell added the visuals. "ARMAGEDDON ROCK: THE VERY METAL SOUND OF THE OSMONDS" ...

The New York Times on the human cost of industrial accidents at Apple's foreign suppliers: Troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers disregard for workers health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an A...

Ninja, Yo-Landi, and their South African art/zef/rap/rave phenomenon get a NYT Magazine profile this week—complete with a portrait by legendary South African photographer Roger Ballen. (thanks, ...

[Video Link] Shot by multimedia journalist Dan Grossman, who writes: The nomadic people of Mongolia don't stay in one place for long. That's why they live in gers (which American's know by the Russian...

Officials at San Francisco International Airport today unveiled what is said to be the first dedicated practice space for yoga in any airport, anywhere in the world. I'm not surprised to see it's in S...

NASA today released a so-called 'Blue Marble' image of Earth captured by the VIIRS instrument on NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, the Suomi NPP. The composite image above "uses...

This splendid work, by Aurich Lawson, is a perfect aperitif for Sean Gallagher's wonderful article about the ridiculous but astoundingly successful con artist, Quake cheat and entrepreneur Kim Dotcom....

Oh, this makes me so sad. Tony Alleyne, the trekkie, club DJ, and "house-modder" who redesigned his British flat to be a faithful replica of the Starship Enterprise? Looks like he may lose it in divor...

It's not hard to see why Bloomberg Businessweek chose not to run with this remarkable illustration of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The creative director is Richard Turley; the rest o...

Nancy Sims, of the University of Minnesota Libraries, responds to The Atlantic's criticisms of JSTOR, an academic database that can be difficult and expensive to access: "There are things JSTOR does t...

There's a fun online video series at Reuters TV called "Tech Tonic" that currently features host and Twitter star @antderosa interviewing technology figures at Davos....

Marko Manev creates minimalist posters celebrating Marvel superheroes. "Minimal Marvel Posters by Marko Manev" (Juxtapoz)...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Mechanical timepieces don't need to cost an arm and a leg—check out these cool and afford...

This coin is believed to be a "brothel token" in circulation in London during the 1st century AD. It's currently on display at the Museum of London. From the museum: Caroline McDonald, Museum of Londo...

This nifty widget at Slate.com will make you cry: if you're the average Boing Boing reader, this presidential candidate earns your entire year's salary in a couple days (or much less!)....

The Shiznit devised some "honest" movie posters for this year's Oscar awards season. I love the ones that blandly explain the poster's symbolic intent (left) but not so much the ones that explain the ...

Justin Hardison, aka My Fun, is a Brooklyn musician who uses field recording, sampling, found sounds, vinyl record cut-up/collage, and magikcal digital processing incantations to make absolutely beaut...

BB reader Ipo sends in an illustration of future U.S. president and moon lord Newt Gingrich, based on this photo by Reuters' Eric Thayers....

Gawker has a profile of "Martin," a "mercenary hacker" who provides IT security consulting to millionaires, crooks, cheating spouses (or spouses who suspect their other halves of cheating) and so on. ...

From the channel of Still Waiting, an inexplicably unsigned band. Bonus unexpected air guitar:...

Hughillustration sez, "Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, video artists who break the encryption on a DVD or sample online steaming videos could face legal threats - even if the video they cr...

As an ongoing design exercise, Mike Joyce combines Swiss modernism and punk/indie rock into new flyers for past concerts. Swissted (Thanks, Koshi!)...

Jeff is helping a legendary Disney Imagineer Rolly Crump write his memoirs, and rather than wrestle with Disney archives for access to photos of Crump's work, he's hoping fans will be able to supply t...

Yale professor Alexander Nemerov found a great way to get students to pay attention: lecturing in a Wi-Fi dead zone. Glenn Fleishman, writing for The Economist: The good professor is no Luddite. He re...

Twin Cities Boingers will be meeting up this Saturday afternoon. The meetup is ostensibly scheduled around the Art Sled Rally in Powderhorn Park, but will still happen even if there isn't enough snow ...

"My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit.'" -- Robert Anton Wilson I like to think of myself as a believing skeptic, someone who relishes in the i...

Britain's Houses of Parliament, and Ben Ben, are not on entirely safe ground. The tower is visibly leaning half a meter at its spire. [Reuters] A construction expert who worked on the leaning tower of...

Roger Ibars takes photographs of game controllers hooked up to inappropriate interfaces: "a research interest in how objects would be losing interest in interacting with the users ... where things tak...

Domain registrar GoDaddy drew a lot of bad publicity for supporting SOPA, resulting in a large loss of business and a reversal on its public position. But wherever GoDaddy stands on SOPA, it remains o...

Snake with thought bubble, Shutterstock Britain's Advertising Standards Agency has banned Groupon from marketing snake oil. An internet sales promotion for "Wrinkle Killer Snake Serum" promised to "re...

"By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon." [NPR. Photo: Eric Thayers/Reuters]...

Adrian Chen on the gadget experts who serve rogues: "Martin made them leave their phones in the car for safety. He recalled the phones with disgust. 'They had all smart phones, and I told them: Bad fu...

ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is the notorious, unprecedented secret copyright treaty that was negotiated by industry representatives and government trade reps, without any access by ...

In a bizarre ruling, an English court has ruled that in favor of a commercial poster company that argued that a photo that showed a similar (but different) scene taken by a different person in a diffe...

[Video Link] The Sound Supply is selling 10 digital albums for $15, including Sophie Madeleine's The Rhythm You Started. 10 albums for $15 Sophie Madeleine performs "Oil & Gold" on ukulele -- Boi...

[Video Link] Shayna of LA magazine says: We have this time-lapse video of the Walt Disney Concert Hall being set up for a rehearsal of Mahlers Symphony no. 8, which will be performed by the LA Phil, t...

On The Madeleine Brand Show (a radio program on which I'm a regular guest), Luke Burbank points to two strange Disney-related updates: first, Disneyland has finally relaxed their extreme rules banning...

Stephen Jay Gould once said that LIFE photographer Fritz Goro, who died in 1986, was "the most influential photographer that science journalism (and science in general) has ever known." LIFE.com has p...

[Video Link] Things I did not know before viewing this adorable video shot by Surrey Wildlife Trust Mammal Project Officer Dave Williams: 1) The dormouse, a little rodent species you'll find in Britai...

I think that we have to treat state-based covert activities as the equivalent of acts of war. And I think that we have to respond to that and create a level of pain which teaches people not to do it. ...

[Video Link] The Wilco track "Dawned On Me" re-imagined as a classic, early-era Popeye cartoon. The song is from the band's Grammy-nominated 2011 album, "The Whole Love." They're on tour now, and shou...

Wikileaks announced this week that house-arrested frontman Julian Assange would host a new television interview series with "in-depth conversations with key political players, thinkers and revolutiona...

Laura McKenna excoriates JSTOR, the online database of academic journals that has universities and the public paying thousands of dollars to read their own taxpayer-funded research. [The Atlantic]...

Among others, the BBC interviewed two snipers. Both have killed many people, but they are very different men. One affirms the humanity of his targets, and worries at how ideology sends them into battl...

New research suggests that taking psilocybin, the hallucinogen in magic mushrooms, may actually decrease the amount of blood flow in certain parts of your brain. Scientists at Imperial College London ...

Tynt, the company responsible for inserting adverts when you copy text from websites, was bought by another company that specializes in "graphing" brand loyalty. Just imagine how much fun these guys a...

A couple weeks ago, I got a chance to interview Rex Walheim—astronaut, test pilot, and all-around swell guy. He answered five questions BoingBoing readers had about what it takes to be chosen fo...

Eric Anderson, 37, is the founder of Space Adventures, a company that acts as the middleman for rich people who want to go to space and the Russian space program that sells the seats on the Soyuz rock...

Anthropologist Wade Davis is one of my heroes. He's an incredibly talented explorer and explainer of the world's cultural diversity, what he calls the ethnosphere. He's most famous for his 1985 book T...

Variable Rush sez, "No Safe Harbor is the first book released by the United States Pirate Party. It was released yesterday and traffic managed to knock it offline. The book is great and features an es...

Jeff sez, "Communicore Weekly is a brand new, online VidCast/Podcast with George Taylor and Jeff Heimbuch, exploring Disney news and obscure history. With segments such as the Bathroom Break & Th...

Michael Geist sez, Recent revelations that the content industries are demanding that Canada implement SOPA-style provisions into its copyright law have raised concerns the law could be used to target ...

Mashup master James Hance has crossed Tank Girl with Princess Leia to excellent effect. He's selling prints and tees. Latest Doodle: Falcon Girl (Tank Girl / Star Wars) (via The Mary Sue...

This absolutely stunning video was created from a series of still images taken on the International Space Station. From NASA's Gateway To Astronaut Photography of Earth page: The sequence of shots was...

In this year's Reporters Without Borders international press freedom index, the U.S. slumped to 47th place, a fall of 27 places, largely due to arrests of journalists covering protests. The full repor...

Are you a teenager yearning to join Hellboy in the fight against evil occult, supernatural forces? Now you can, thanks to the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense Training Camp in Portland, Oreg...

RECOMMEND: Visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER, and listen to him as he joins other Boing Boingers in select episodes of GWEEK PODCAST....

JWZ reports some of the sleazy things that DirecTV does to squeeze money out of its customers, of which he is one. In addition to the predictable stuff, like market-obscuring channel bundles and below...

Nick Douglas explains what your favorite blog says about you. Vote Ron Paul!...

It seems appropriate that we all should pause this week to remember Robert Anton Wilson on the 5th anniversary of his death. The world is a little less fun without RAW, and his cosmic humor/insights/i...

Clyde says, "Bhi Bhiman is singer and songwriter that's been labeled a 'Sri Lankan Woody Guthrie.'" His debut solo album titled Bhiman was released today....

Apps for Kids is Boing Boing's podcast about cool smartphone apps for kids and parents. My co-host is my 8-year-old daughter, Jane Frauenfelder. Today, we review a math skills game called Numbers Leag...

A federal judge in Colorado recently handed down a ruling that forced a defendant to decrypt her laptop hard-drive, despite the Fifth Amendment's stricture against compelling people to testify against...

IFPI, the international trade group for the record industry, has trumpeted a study that allegedly shows that France saw a surge in iTunes sales following the institution of a mass-scale regime of "dis...

The final installment of Jeff Lane's reading of my YA story "Martian Chronicles" is up on Starship Sofa. It's from Life on Mars, a great YA anthology that came out in 2011. MP3 (Previously: 1, 2)...

You guys! Remember yesterday, when we learned that dolphins and whales in Hawaii have twice been caught spontaneously playing together? Apparently, this gets better. Dolphins in a French aquarium seem...

This is not a metaphorical view inside a nuclear reactor. This is for real-real. This month, the good folks at TEPCO sent a remote-controlled endoscope and thermometer into the containment vessel of F...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Health Organization, say that H5N1 bird flu kills some 60% of the human beings it manages to infect. Basically, it hasn't infected many pe...

Editor's note: I received so many wonderful essays about Robert Anton Wilson, that I've extended RAW Week for a few more days! -- Mark Robert Anton Wilson departed from this world on January 11, 2007 ...

After seeing today's entry on a homebrew D&D module, Chris sends us his own addenda to the Monster Manual, lavishly illustrated with youthful zest. My Monster Manual (Thanks, Chris!)...

The Pirate Bay has launched a new category called Physibles. They explain: "Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanne...

[Video Link] I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I like this video, and I like the song with the uplifting lyrics about being left behind after the Rapture, too. I learned it is a popul...

[Video Link] I'm not sure what's going on here, but I like this video, and I like the uplifting music about being "left behind" even more. I searched around and learned that the song is called "I Wish...

Matt Richtel's recent NYT article on teenagers who share their Facebook passwords as a show of affection has raised alarms with parents and educators who worry about the potential for bullying and abu...

A year ago, I posted about Take Me To The Water, a terrific book/CD set and exhibit of river baptism photos from the 1880s - 1930s. The photos were from the collection of Jim Linderman, who has a terr...

Chicago's Floyd Davis demonstrates how to make a boombox out of any case, including a Craftsman toolbox. Boombox in a Toolbox...

Dante Antullo, 32, thought he had just been cut with a nail gun last week. But the next day, he felt nauseous and his girlfriend convinced him to see a doctor. Physicians found a 3 1/4-inch nail in hi...

Mike Sullivan is making tiny robot actors to star in his stop-motion robot sex film. Documentary filmmaker Matt Lenski made a documentary about Sullivan's efforts. Titled "The Meaning of Robots," it p...

Caddo Parish, LA commissioner Michael Williams is sick and tired of being able to discern guys' penises through their pajamas at WalMart (apparently, the men of Caddo like to go to WalMart in their ja...

"Everyone who likes my books is like me in some way. If you like my books [but] you've never met me, there's something about you that's just like me." That must mean I'm a dead ringer for Emberley, be...

[video link] Boing Boing is pleased to present the new video for Mastodon's "Dry Bone Valley," from their album...

In this 2011 YouTube upload, violist Luk Kmi shows what to do when your playing is interrupted by a ringing phone, as happened to him during a beautiful performance at an orthodox synagogue in Presov,...

A bunch of people sit and stand around at CES. Photo: REUTERS/Rick Wilking This year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was dull, giving reporters at the show time to write interesting offbeat c...

The next installment of San Francisco's SF in SF reading series, on Jan 28, features Ryan Boudinot (Blueprints of the Afterlife) and Ayize Jama-Everett (The Liminal People). Organizer Rina Wiseman wri...

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi dives in a space suit during a refresher training exercise at the Cosmonaut training centre at Star City, outside Moscow January 23, 2012. N...

  Hip Hop Family Tree, Part 1 Hip Hop Family Tree, Part 2 ...

Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, a German national formerly known as Kim Schmitz, is seen at court in Auckland, New Zealand in this still image taken from video shot on January 23, 2012. The file-sharin...

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "I have a challenge for you. When was the last time you got a letter in the mail? December sees a lot of mail and you remember that sense of delight when the first card arriv...

At approximately 11:00 am Eastern time (15 minutes from now as I type this), the Earth will come into contact with the largest Coronal Mass Ejection since 2005—a huge burst of charged particles ...

Tim H sez, "A recent and amazing donation to the PlaGMaDA.org [ed: Play Generated Map and Document Archive] project: A beautiful, hand-made homebrew addition to the classic TSR Against the Giants seri...

Pittance sez, "This is my brand new 3D printed Fisher-Price record player record (for the old clockwork music box one, not the new electronic one) playing "Still Alive" from Portal. It's entirely made...

Joly sez, "Jim Henson made this film in 1963 for The Bell System. Specifically, it was made for an elite seminar given for business owners, on the then-brand-new topic Data Communications. The semina...

I've featured the work of net-savvy, happily mutated juggler and magician Mat Ricardo here before. Now he's planning quite an astounding show in east London. He sez, Further to the tale of how I soul-...

There's an old joke. Heavy rains start and a neighbour pulls up in his truck. "Hey Bob, I'm leaving for high ground. Want a lift?" Bob says, "No, I'm putting my faith in God." Well, waters rise and pr...

A $250 USB keytar with DAW automapping, MIDI-assignable motion sensitivity and an internal battery for optional use with an iPad? Yes. [Alesis]...

When it heads into orbit this year, SpaceX's Dragon will be the first private spacecraft to visit the International Space Station. It won't be carrying tourists, but you can explore it now thanks to a...

I'm a little late back to the party, but here's even more coverage of the now-infamous NYT My Little Pony Correction. [Romenesko] Previously....

Warner Brothers has canceled production of Elfquest, a movie about the feral descendants of space-faring space shifters and their quest to uncover the truth about their ancestors' crash-landing on a p...

[Video Link] This just hit the internet today. TEN$ION, the South African band's new album scheduled out February 7, will be their first release since breaking up with Interscope.  Die Antwoord l...

AntiqueTypewriters.com has a great section on the Crandall New Model, "one of the most beautiful typewriters ever made." It has a wonderful curved and ornate Victorian design and is lavishly decorated...

Everyone seems to have A.D.D. these days. (In case youve been too distracted by your Twitter feed to remember, A.D.D. stands for Attention Deficit Disorder -- the inability to focus on any one thing f...

Everyone seems to have A.D.D. these days. (In case youve been too distracted by your Twitter feed to remember, A.D.D. stands for Attention Deficit Disorder -- the inability to focus on any one thing f...

Here's the second episode of MAKE's new podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I'll interview one of the makers from the pages of the magazine. We created Make: Talk to find out about the people who wr...

Carl Franzen's history of the SOPA/PIPA fight on Talking Points Memo is a fascinating account of the behind-the-scenes stuff that created the series of ever-larger protests that resulted in the bills'...

The latest installment from the great pop culture podcast Tank Riot is an in-depth look at the Marx Brothers. The lads cover the Marx's personal lives, their filmography, their place in the histories ...

Gweek is a weekly 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. My hos...

Here's the very talented Pablo Defendini -- developer, designer, artist, digital guy -- describing how "responsive" comics can be made using HTML and CSS that intelligently format themselves for a var...

After snatching a notorious copyright troll's domain name, a Swiss company is turning Righthaven.com into a web hosting service. The intended customers? Publishers worried about the kind of abusive le...

Michael Geist sez, The Internet battle against SOPA and PIPA generated huge interest in Canada with many Canadians turning their sites dark (including Blogging Tories, Project Gutenberg Canada, and CI...

Meet presidential candidate Vermin Supreme, the tyrant you should trust. He's wearing a boot as a hat and he knows what's best for you. If you let him control your life, you'll enjoy mandatory daily t...

Reuters profiles "Preppers" who are getting ready for total and complete societal breakdown due to natural disaster, terrorism, economic collapse, pandemic, or a good ol' fashioned apocalypse. Of cour...

When Apple fanboy Mike Daisey saw photos from someone's iPhone that were ostensibly from inside Foxconn and not wiped before shipment, he became deeply curious about the goings on in the factory that ...

Room 237 is my old friend Rodney Ascher's curious new documentary about the hidden (imagined?) meanings and metaphors in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. It premiers today at the Sundance Film Festival!...

Kirk Johnson is a paleobotanist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He took this photo at the University of Alaska Museum during a recent trip to Fairbanks. What you're looking at is a mummifi...

When planning a mission to another planet, or even the moon, a big challenge is testing the suborbital rockets that actually land the payloads on the planetary surface. In this video, Draper Laborator...

Brian Krebs has been through the support forums for the "Citadel" trojan, a piece of commercial malicious software (spun out from the notorious ZeuS trojan) you can buy and use to take over other peop...

While the amazing John Cale is best known as a founder of the Velvet Underground, his association with the group followed Cale's deep involvement with the avant-garde classical music scene. During the...

Even with all those Snowpocalypseses(?), NASA says that 2011 was still the ninth warmest year on record since 1880—and all but one of the top 10 warmest years have happened in the last 11 years....

The US Supreme Court has unanimously overturned several lower courts and ruled that police can't hide GPS trackers on your car without a warrant....

You may be pleased to know that there is an International Forum for the Study of Itch. And it has a regular conference, which just leads to inevitable jokes....

Sometimes, you need to start off your week with a dose of happy news. For instance, this video from the American Museum of Natural History details two recent instances where scientists have observed a...

Sabina Hossenfelder, an assistant professor of high-energy and nuclear physics at Sweden's Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, is collecting a list of scientific research papers with hilarious n...

A petition to the White House asks for an official investigation of former senator and now-MPAA CEO Chris Dodd, who strongly implied that he believes his members' contributions to election campaigns a...

East London's Nobrow Press sent me a review pack last week, including a couple of kids' comics featuring Luke Pearson's Hilda. Poesy is almost four, and we recently graduated from wordless comics (lik...

ACTA is a secretly negotiated copyright treaty that obliges its signatories to take on many of the worst features of SOPA and PIPA. The EU is nearing ratification of it. ACTA was instigated by US trad...

Lamar Smith, are you reading this? (Via Mitch O'Connell)...

Christopher Johnson, a Canadian journalist residing (until recently) in Japan published a ghastly account of his return to Tokyo after a short pre-Christmas trip. He was flagged at the border (he impl...

Julian Sanchez is on fire in this Ars Technica article on the funny accountancy and outright lies that underlie the harms-from-piracy stats cited in policy debates about Internet censorship and survei...

The former senator and now CEO of the MPAA can't catch a break: "You've got an opponent who has the capacity to reach millions of people with a click of a mouse and there's no fact-checker." Must be t...

Chrisperfer sez, "I randomly came upon this Isaac Asimov graffiti when attending a birthday party in Rome for my 4 year old daughter's friend." Isaac Asimov...

For Polish readers: StopACTA.pl is your clearinghouse for action in the Polish fight against the punitive ACTA copyright treaty....

Here's a Filipino traffic-cop performing his duties while breakdancing, to the great delight of a large and excited crowd. Filipino Traffic Cop Doing His Job Like A Boss (via 3 Quarks Daily)...

Inspired by a Warren Ellis tweet, Robert made this fitting Newt bumper-sticker. Newt 2012 (via Super Punch)...

Sumitsumit sez, "Tired of carpet, want wood floors, but living in a rental apartment? If you have the low-pile variety, here's an economical way to make yourself a great new floor without damaging the...

In this video from a European Central Bank press-conference in Ireland, journalist Vincent Browne demands that the ECB representative explain why the ECB required the Irish people to bail out a bank's...

Boing Boing's blog incarnation is 12 today!...

From DigitalGlobe, this striking satellite image of the Costa Concordia shipwreck off Giglio, Italy....

Avant-garde hero John Cale performs his cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" in 1992. Cale's version is available on the highly-recommended multi-artist cover album, "Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Fan," fr...

Channel 19 in Akron, Ohio was disappointed that it wouldn't be allowed to take cameras into the corruption trial of Jimmy Dimora, a former county commissioner. But when life gives you SARS, you make s...

Former Senator Chris Dodd, now head of the MPAA, is pissed at Obama. He's threatened to withhold entertainment lobbyist money from Obama's upcoming re-election war chest over the administration's lack...

With PIPA off the legislative calendar and SOPA paused, this tool may seem a bit redundant, but it's a nice piece of advocacy work. Creator Jonathan Vanasco sez, "I tossed together a mashup over a few...

Undercover police agents in the UK infiltrated environmental groups, had sex with their members, struck up long-term relationships with women in these groups, fathered children with these women, and t...

Van Dyke Parks has a new singles project! Michael Leddy (who wrote the "imaginary liner notes" for the first four singles) says Parks is "putting out six 45s with cover art by E Ruscha, Art Spiegelman...

[Video Link] Irina Alexander, Chair of SSDP (Students for Sensible Drug Policy) Board of Directors says: Two weeks ago, SSDP members took over New Hampshire before the primary, confronting presidentia...

Our friends at Adafruit Industries just announced FLORA, a new wearable electronics development platform. For the last few years Ladyada has been thinking about everything she wanted in a wearable ele...

Steve Hoefer (a fantastic maker who I interviewed on the Make: Talk podcast earlier this week) has come up with a great way to clearly mark his tools so they don't get lost when he brings them to a ha...

Ice Cube shares his appreciation for Charles and Ray Eames. "Ice Cube Celebrates The Eames" (via Gabe Adiv's Pinterest)...

[Video Link] This reminds me of the SubGenius photo manipulations I enjoyed on alt.slack....

Mashable: "Lamar Smith, the chief sponsor of SOPA, said on Friday that he is pulling the bill 'until there is wider agreement on a solution.' ... and ... 'In light of recent events, I have decided to ...

CBC's long-form/big think radio program Ideas recently featured a lecture called "Feeding Ten Billion" from Raj Patel, an Africa development scholar formerly with the World Bank, and author of The Val...

The world lost two musical greats this week. Etta James died today at age 73. Johnny Otis passed away on Tuesday. He was 90....

Artist Chet Zar curated Conjoined II, a mind-bending group show that opens tomorrow night at Santa Monica's CoproGallery. Featured artists include Charles Krafft, Ron English, Jason Hite, and many oth...

Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman of the excellent Sprudge.com coffee news site took the "Shit Girls Say" meme into my favorite San Francisco cafe, Four Barrel Coffee. Hilarity ensues. "There's no ...

Gnat sez, "The only thing cuter than this Game Master asking TeX gurus for help making his RPG notes 'look like they were scrawled by a gibbering madman, unhinged by the horrors he has witnessed' is t...

JG Bryce took these incredible photographs at the 20th World Orchid Conference, aka "The Orchid Olympics" that took place in Singapore last November. Bryce's photos illustrate a feature at Smithsonian...

Playboy's website The Smoking Jacket interviewed cartoonist Chester Brown about his autobiographical novel, The Playboy. Jessica Campbell of Drawn & Quarterly (publisher of The Playboy) says, "OK,...

(Insert quarter into your computer to enlarge the image above. If not thrilled and delighted beyond words, your quarter will be returned.) After the MPAA orders its minions in the Justice Dept. to shu...

"Microsoft has jumped onto the free-to-play bandwagon with its latest game, a text-driven adventure called Visual Studio 2010. The innovative new game marries the traditional interactive fiction text ...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Watchismo and Devon Works have announced details and a sneak peek of the Devon Tread 2, the eag...

James Losey from the New America Foundation sez, "Great news, the PROTECT-IP Senate vote scheduled for Tuesday has been postponed!" Washington, D.C. Nevada Senator Harry Reid [ed: D-NV, Senate Majori...

The Split Decision pie-pan lets you bake two pies in the same receptacle, settling any arguments about which sort of pie should be had that day and generating handsome, smooth half-pies the like of wh...

Don't click this if you're at all squeamish, but there's something terrific (in ever sense) about the extraction of a gauze-pack from a healing broken nose, like watching a kind of horrible stillborn ...

Denmark's EGE Carpets sells a line of carpeting inspired by HP Lovecraft illustrations called Dark Water. They were created by Kirill Rozhkov, who has a nice gallery of them on Behance. Dark Water (Th...

Charlie Stross looks at some leading indicators of library decline in the UK, which he attributes to cuts and closures, and notes: "if the drop in my PLR loans reflects library closures, then we have ...

Fred "the Shred" Goodwin, an infamous figure in Britain's aristocracy and a symbol of finance industry greed and incompetence, stands to lose his knighthood. Goodwin was knighted for "services to bank...

New Zealand police, responding from a request from the US government, raided MegaUpload today, arresting founder and CEO Kim Dotcom Schmitz and three "associates." The service, which allowed users to ...

DC-area photographer Chris Wieland writes in: "Stumbled upon the Wikileaks van guy getting searched by capitol police today!" As if!...

Writing for Cato At Liberty, Ars Technica alum Julian Sanchez has a timely redux of the research he did on how the made-up piracy numbers quoted during debates about SOPA and PIPA come from, and how l...

Here's a great photo of the beaming staff of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, posed with their laptops showing the sites that were blacked out yesterday. Visitors to EFF's site sent over one millio...

Stephen Colbert provides some perspective on the net-wide blackouts yesterday, as well as some alternatives in case the Internet needs to stand up for itself again. Now I've got to find that video of ...

The Young Knives - Human Again Ive been eagerly waiting for the new Young Knives album Ornaments From The Silver Arcade to come out in the US. Now I've learned that its not being released here at all,...

Amy Seidenwurm says: "Pro Publica posted a simple/powerful image of the members of Congress' position on SOPA/PIPA today vs. yesterday." SOPA Opera Update: Opposition Surges...

[Video Link] Soft Skull Press has kindly given Boing Boing an exclusive excerpt of Mike Edison's history of Playboy, Penthouse, Screw, and Hustler magazines, called Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, ...

You know all those times someone claimed to have found the greatest 404 page, ever? They were wrong. (Thanks, Marko!)...

David Cronenberg is one of my all-time favorite film directors and I alway enjoy hearing his thoughts on the obsessive and curious details that, in my opinion, really elevate his films. In fact, back ...

Jud Turner sez, "My latest piece is a life-sized Columbia Mammoth skeleton made from 95% recycled material, mostly old farm equipment. It was created as a commission for Pacific Studio, and will be pe...

ADVERTISEMENT Does this sound like you? All New years resolutions start with good intentions, but as the year unfolds, so do many of our resolutions not to mention our waistlines. What if personal fit...

Joey Sellers sez, "I know you've been covering PIPA-SOPA and wanted to share a large flowcart I just completed on the subject. It brings together a slew of material to get folks new to the subject up ...

Markos of DailyKos tears into Democrats who lack the fortitude and intellectual honesty to oppose SOPA, and continue to back it because they fear losing the campaign funding that comes from Hollywood....

This 2009 image captures the scene on a foggy night in Odessa, Ukraine, when a digital billboard crashed and displayed a floating error warning in the night sky. Windows Error Box Floating in the Air ...

Kevin Kelly provided a nice summary of Larry Lessig's recent SALT ( Seminar About Long-Term Thinking) talk. It was about corruption in the US congress. Lessig said the type of corruption rampant in th...

This magnificent thing is Agustina Woodgate's "No Rain No Rainbows," a rug made from skinned teddybears. There are many more. They are equally wondrous. augustina woodgate, an artist originally from b...

Rybka, a powerful chess program, was stripped last year of its titles and its author publicly disgraced. Declared a plagiarist by the International Computer Games Association, Vasik Rajlich was also h...

Chicago real estate company Equity Lifestyle Properties Inc. fired a receptionist named Sharon Smiley for violating company policy and working through her lunch break. She had worked for them for ten ...

Here, Sabrina shows off her Bell & Howell Headliner Colour Slide Projector....

Earlier this week, Cory posted about fun "My Monster Family" car stickers. Coincidentally, our pals at GAMAGO just released their terrific Zombie Family Car Stickers! Calvin, zip up your pants and run...

Writing in Mother Jones, Siddhartha Mahanta and Nick Baumann describe the unprecedented legislative difficulty that the entertainment lobby faces today in Congress. The MPAA was able to win a legislat...

Clay Shirky gives a great talk in the TED offices about the biggest danger of PIPA/SOPA. What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper ...

Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales engages with the Copyright Alliance's Sandra Aistars, who says she's the voice of 11 million artists in the US whose ability to make a living urgently require the country to ab...

William Gibson weighs in on SOPA/PIPA: "I think that SOPA as it stands now, or as it stood before they paused to think about it, is extremely ill thought out, and a basically crazily Draconian piece o...

has come out against SOPA. He previously had no public position on it....

Vice's Jamie Lee Curtis Taete continues to investigate the copyright shenanigans that SOPA and PIPA's authors get up to (see the saga of how SOPA author Lamar Smith (R-TX) ripped off the photo on the ...

RECOMMEND: Visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER....

Reuters: "Apple Inc unveiled a new digital textbook service called iBooks 2 on Thursday, aiming to revitalize the U.S. education market and quicken the adoption of its market-leading iPad."...

At The Scuttlefish, Mark Lukach reports that Clint Eastwood is, indeed, bad-assed. My friend Chris tipped me off to a pretty incredible story about Eastwood from when he was only 21 years old: the guy...

Writing in the Guardian, Dan Gillmor argues that SOPA and PIPA aren't foolishly extreme because their proponents don't understand the net; rather, they are extreme because their proponents understand ...

...

I'm at the Science Online conference this week in Raleigh, North Carolina. SciO brings together scientists, bloggers, and journalists to talk about communicating science to the public, how we screw it...

The company that invented the hand-held camera filed for bankruptcy protection. [Reuters]...

PIPA sponsor Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) can't figure out why people don't like it: "Hiding behind the black box of self-censorship does not resolve the problem that is plaguing American busines...

Last year, I posted about a new technology to identify individuals based on the pressure signature of their feet on the ground. Now, Japanese scientists at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technol...

In this video announcing They Might Be Giants' next tour, the lads construct a gigantic pink monster truck hearse. And sing a fine song! They Might Be Giants are going on tour across the United States...

BLDBLOG surveys fascinating "intelligent geotextiles," essentially buried wire webs that act as sensor networks to monitor the landscape above. They remind me a bit of those invisible fences suburbani...

This music -- which sounds like a moody piano soundtrack for a existentialist movie about a rainy day -- is made by slicing a tree in cross-section, sticking it on a turntable, and dropping a tone-arm...

If you ever find yourself writing a historical novel about someone who goes joyriding in the Disneyland Monorail, I have a hell of a reference for you: the 1966 Disneyland Monorail Operator Guide. Dis...

Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600 sez, "The Call For Papers for 2600 Magazine's HOPE Number Nine conference has been issued. HOPE stands for Hackers On Planet Earth and has been happening in New York City ...

As Xeni wrote on Tuesday, the MPAA isn't pleased about sites like this one going dark to protest SOPA and PIPA. Former Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America...

The globally praised Khan Academy comes out against SOPA and PIPA in this explainer video, which does a really excellent job of digging into the implications for legitimate sites (like Khan Academy) i...

House Judiciary Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) has vowed to resume his markup hearings in February. (Thanks, Adam!)...

Yesterday, literally millions of Americans contacted their senators and congressional reps to ask them to withdraw their support for SOPA and PIPA. The result? A massive withdrawal of support from ele...

The globally praised Kahn Academy comes out against SOPA and PIPA in this explainer video, which does a really excellent job of digging into the implications for legitimate sites (like Kahn Academy) i...

House Judiciary Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-TX) has vowed to resume his markup hearings in February. (Thanks, Adam!)...

Yesterday, literally millions of Americans contacted their senators and congressional reps to ask them to withdraw their support for SOPA and PIPA. The result? A massive withdrawal of support from ele...

Welcome to Boing Boing's Apps for Kids Episode 5 for Wednesday, January 18, 2012. Apps for Kids is a podcast about cool smartphone apps for kids and parents. I'm Mark Frauenfelder. My co-host is Jane ...

"Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Fai...

A Freedom of Information request reveals that aerial drones are rife with expensive technical problems. The aerial disasters described draw attention not only to the technical limitations of drone war...

ADVERTISEMENT Does this sound like you? All New years resolutions start with good intentions, but as the year unfolds, so do many of our resolutions not to mention our waistlines. What if personal fit...

Michael Geist sez, While there is little that people living outside the U.S. can do to influence SOPA and PIPA, there are many reasons why it is important for everyone to participate in tomorrow's SOP...

[Video Link]"Nuclear Aftershocks," the PBS Frontline documentary which Maggie described in a Boing Boing review as "brilliant," airs tonight online and on local PBS stations at 10pm. I've seen an adva...

Jonathan from Hackers and Founders sez, "We're planning SOPA/PIPA protests in SF, NYC, DC and Seattle on Wednesday the 18th to coincide with the blackouts."...

Wisconsinites needed 500,000 signatures in order to authorize a recall election against Governor Scott Walker. They got 1 million....

We recently ran a guest post by Seth Roberts, detailing the case against tonsillectomies as a regularly prescribed treatment for sore throats. I was able to read Roberts' post before it went up here, ...

Here's the first episode of MAKE's new podcast, Make Talk. In each episode, I'll interview one of the makers from the pages of the magazine. We created Make Talk because we wanted to find out about th...

I reflected today on the fact that my four-year-old makes a "click" sound when she's playing with a toy camera because that's the MP3 that my phone plays when I take her picture. A number of people po...

Emmanuel Goldstein sez, "The websites for 2600 will go dark on Wednesday, joining many others around the world in protest against the potentially devastating effects of bills like SOPA and PIPA."...

Yahoo announces that Jerry Yang has resigned from the internet company's Board of Directors "and all other positions with the company, effective today." Yang has also resigned from the Boards of Yahoo...

ADVERTISEMENT Does this sound like you? All New years resolutions start with good intentions, but as the year unfolds, so do many of our resolutions not to mention our waistlines. What if personal fit...

My friend Bob Parks has a great story in Bloomberg Businessweek about the sad fate of a new kind of running shoe that promised to be better than any other running shoe on the market. (Photo by Daniel ...

The delightful R. Stevens is distributing the first Diesel Sweeties webcomic collection as a DRM-free, free PDF, in celebration of his birthday. "Pocket Sweeties, Volume 1," is a sterling example of t...

Former Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA), pooh-poohs the January 18 internet blackout protests over SOPA and PIPA: It is an irresponsible r...

Former Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA), pooh-poohs the January 18 internet blackout protests over SOPA and PIPA: It is an irresponsible r...

"Check engine" lights suck! Jason Torchinsky of Jalopnik asks you to sign a whitehouse.gov petition to "require automakers to replace the nearly useless Check Engine Light with a display that actually...

People walk past graffiti on a street in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, Jan. 13, 2012. (REUTERS) Editor's Note: In response to an anonymously-sourced wisecrack we published about police corruption in f...

Inspired by Rebecca Hains' harrowing tale of cupcake confiscation by the Las Vegas TSA, Providence, RI's Silver Spoon Bakery is selling "TSA-compliant cupcakes." These have exactly three ounces of fro...

Part 1 of The Hip Hop Family Tree...

Here's some interesting data that I would like to believe is true—mainly because it matches up with what I've experienced here at BoingBoing. Many of you use some kind of pseudonym in the commen...

In celebration of the new Makerbot Replicator 3D printer, a stop-motion animation that depicts the birth-by-printer of a sweet girl and the heartbreak she experiences thereafter. This all new stop-ani...

"Iraqi state security officers are systematically arresting people on trumped-up charges, torturing them and extorting bribes from their families for their release." Guardian UK via Richard Engel....

A couple of years ago, Cory posted a really interesting story about the mathematics behind seemingly cause-less traffic jams. It's pretty interesting. Shorter version: The researchers think jams like ...

Photo: An oil removal ship is seen next to the Costa Concordia cruise ship as it ran aground off the west coast of Italy at Giglio island, January 16, 2012. Over-reliance on electronic navigation syst...

Mitch O'Connell said it had taken "a full minute to realize that Sluggo had drawn a 'three.'" Same here!...

Above, a man walks through a tunnel of Google homepage logos at the Google campus near Venice Beach, in Los Angeles. Below, Googler Katharine Ng zooms in to Paris on panoramic Google Maps screens. And...

MakerBot has announced "MakerBot Playsets," a series of freely downloadable dollhouses, furnishings and dolls for your 3D printer. Whip up as pieces as needed, on demand, and amaze the wee ones (and c...

Finally, a science-themed entry in the "Shit ______ say" meme. Science journalist Ferris Jabr and friends put this together and it's pretty funny. Reminds me a conversation I had earlier this week wit...

@BaLueBolivar snapped this picture advising NYC residents that 26th and 11th was now an Authorized Drone Strike area. The coming of drones to every neighborhood. NYC. 26th and 11th (via JWZ)...

I stumbled across this randomly on YouTube today and had to share. The first 3/4 of the video are a chemistry experiment breakdown of what goes into a glow stick and what each of those ingredients is ...

Editor's Note: In response to an anonymously-sourced wisecrack we published about police corruption in former Soviet states, the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs has responded with a statement, w...

There's a new stage adaptation of my novel Little Brother opening in San Francisco. Charlie Jane Anders from IO9 got to go to the preview and loved it, which is incredibly heartening, since I won't ge...

Big news: although Google won't be blacking out tomorrow in protest of SOPA and PIPA, they will have a homepage graphic and link protesting the laws: "Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users...

Syndicate, the Amiga-era Bullfrog classic of crime and corporate behemoths, will soon work on modern computers thanks to a DRM-free re-release by Good Old Games....

Morgan sez, "Hello Bar's Stop PIPA bar is a free notification bar that can be added to the top of any website. It's an easy way for websites to show their opposition to PIPA and SOPA if they can't go ...

ADVERTISEMENT Does this sound like you? All New years resolutions start with good intentions, but as the year unfolds, so do many of our resolutions not to mention our waistlines. What if personal fit...

Science Fiction Writers of America President John Scalzi writes, "The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has named Connie Willis, one of the most-awarded and beloved science fiction writer...

The tomb was recently unearthed in the Valley of the Kings, and her coffin will be opened this week. "The singer's name, Nehmes Bastet, means she was believed to be protected by the feline deity Baste...

No one was there to witness the demise of Phobos-Grunt, the Failed Russian probe, which is believed to have crash-landed back to earth "somewhere over the Pacific." Probably about 1,000 miles off the ...

Remember all that research about resveratrol, the compound in red wine said to help your heart? "Following a three-year investigation, a university review board has concluded that Dipak K. Das, Ph.D.,...

Having enjoyed the hell out of Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson's long-overdue essay collection, I thought I'd try it on audiobook for a second pass (I really like to do this when I fin...

This story is sketchy and unsourced, but it claims that the Chinese Communist Party has commissioned its own Android tablet, a boondoggle that costs twice as much as an iPad and comes with a state-run...

The StarShipSofa podcast has the second installment of Jeff Lane's reading of my YA novella The Martian Chronicles (here's part one). Lane does a great job with the reading. MP3 link....

This short, unsourced video contains 100 percent of your daily allowance of nostalgic paper-tape, punchcard and patch-panel techno-nostalgia. Classic old computers and machines (Thanks, Frycook!)...

"Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies, etc. block the ability to receive; robot...

Gwendal Uguen has created this terrific mindmap about Discordianism, and has kindly given us permission to run it on Boing Boing. Click it for full-size. Discordianism is a religion founded in the lat...

In The Guardian, Domninic Rushe quotes Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's dim view of "Blackout" SOPA protests from Wikipedia, Reddit, and others. That's just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to s...

In The Guardian, Domninic Rushe quotes Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's dim view of a "blackout" SOPA protest from Wikipedia, Reddit, and others* at Twitter. That's just silly. Closing a global business in ...

Written and first published (on my radio show) shortly after Bobs death in 2007. Robert Anton Wilson is dead, again, and I'm not feeling so good myself. Wilson -- or let's call him 'Bob', as he would ...

Mathias Broeckers says: "I edited some of Bob's books in Germany and did a fine interview for the German edition of Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups. Perhaps worth a lin...

Artist Randy Regier (I love his work and have posted it quite a few times on Boing Boing) visited a place called Roadside America in Shartlesville PA. As he told me, "To any of us makers or wannabes, ...

Robert Anton Wilson Remembered: Interviews with Douglas Rushkoff, RU Sirius, David Jay Brown, Phil Farber, and Antero Alli, by Propaganda Anonymous. My favorite memory of Bob, hmmm. Late one night dur...

Katie sez, "To help writers get in the habit of working on their craft a little bit each day, Figment has started Daily Themes, a free email service that sends subscribers a writing prompt five days a...

[Video Link] A very nice commercial, directed by Kevin Dart and Stéphane Coëdel. Kevin Dart's Yuki 7 illustration for LA WeeklyLaunch party for Yuki 7 and the Gadget Girls book: Looks that K...

Warren Ellis has advice for writers who are trying to figure out how to write comics scripts. I've written a few of these, and I've been looking for a guide like this. I especially like his advice on ...

Seven years ago, I read an article that completely changed the way I thought about what racism is, and the privileges I experience as an upper-middle class white person. In honor of Martin Luther King...

Here's an essay about RAW (followed by interview with him) by our friend Mark Dery, which ran in 21C magazine. Mark Dery: Youre best known as the co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, which seemingly...

Michael Geist sez, "The U.S. government just concluded a consultation on whether it should support Canada's entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations. The TPP raises significant concerns a...

Monster Brains has a large gallery of Mexican horror magazine cover artwork. If you are like me, you will head straight over to his Flickr photostream and launch your copy of Bulkr (Let Verona Belmont...

Benny and Rafi says: Why would we show teenagers the new My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic show? Because of the internet meme. "BRONIES" of course! Why do teen guys love this show intended for young...

Fine artist Mitch O'Connell has the largest archive of hot dog ephemera on the planet. All five multiplujillion, nine impossibidillion, seven fantasticatrillion, and sixteen clippings are stored in a ...

Luma Labs is a small company that sells a camera sling with a sliding clip. When a competitor of theirs filed for a patent on the idea, they weren't concerned. After all, Luma knew of prior art for th...

Radley Balko says: I've put together a little quiz that may be of interest to Boing Boingers. The idea is to illustrate just how hard it can be distinguish police from military. Which is a problem, gi...

[Video Link] Todd Bieber (whose work we have featured previously on Boing Boing) is performing Commercial Interruption this Wednesday Jan 18th at 9:30PM at UCB Theatre in Chelsea, NYC. It looks like a...

Jimmy Wales has announced that Wikipedia will join Reddit, Boing Boing, and many other sites around the Internet in going dark on Wednesday to protest SOPA/PIPA, the pending US legislation that would ...

As "outsider" teenage readers of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's classic Illuminatus! Trilogy in the early 1980s, it seemed to some of my friends at the time (all big Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brau...

[Video Link] Tony Coleman of Mighty Uke says: "This might be the very first maple syrup music video. It's for James Hill's new single "Hand Over My Heart" His songwriting is as good as his ukulele vir...

Neal Stephenson snapped a pic of this Junior TSA badge during his REAMDE tour. He notes, "Remember when we used to give them little pilots' wings?" Junior TSA badge (via Beth Pratt)...

Andrew sez, The New York Tech Meetup, a 20,000 member community of people working in the New York Tech Industry are protesting the pending legislation in the US Senate called Protect Intellectual Prop...

Pierre Far recommends using a 503 HTTP status code—but read on for important details. Other options include Zachstronaut's beautiful splash page; a WordPress plugin; and a simple javascript meth...

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., August 28, 1963 (via Archive.org)...

A truck driver hauling wooden crates from an arms plant in Russia's Ural Mountains to a landfill stopped at a village to make some extra cash by selling the containers as firewood. The guy who bought ...

Via a FOIA filing, Government Attic yielded the FBI's official list of notable dead people. (PDF link)...

In an interview with GigaOm's Coleen Taylor, publisher Tim O'Reilly explains what's so wrong about SOPA: I talked with Nancy Pelosi about SOPA the other day, and she said that the experience with pira...

Brendan Jamison sculpts intricate buildings from hundreds of thousands of sugar cubes. Above is "Eastbourne Tower," built from more than 250,000 cubes. From BBC News: Brendan's interest in architectur...

Artist Tyree Callahan hacked an antique typewriter so it types colors instead of letters. "Tyree Callahan's Chromatic Typewriter" (Hi-Fructose)...

Artist Tyree Callahan hacked conceived of hacking an antique typewriter so it types colors instead of letters. "Tyree Callahan's Chromatic Typewriter" (Hi-Fructose) UPDATE: At Callahan's site, he expl...

Nuclear Aftershocks is a new FRONTLINE documentary, airing tomorrow, January 17, at 10:00 pm Eastern. I watched an advance screener yesterday. About halfway through Nuclear Aftershocks, a new FRONTLIN...

Debates over the "idealization" and objectification in the portrayal of women in comics are often met with a reflexive response: "Men are idealized in comics, too!" It's true, they are. But there's di...

In the interest of not having every thread on every subject turn into a hissfest about whether Obama or Romney/Santorum/etc. is a bigger doody-head, Boing Boing's election year rules are back on. Thes...

NASA's freshly-restored film images of the Gemini missions are now online. The classic shots of spaceship exteriors and Earth from orbit are breathtaking. Yet the weird misfires, such as unfocused sho...

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez, Cory Doctorow wrote in the Guardian about our copyright problems on YouTube with FedFlix, a channel of U.S. government videos. On January 4, we protested one of the C...

In this special episode of Gweek we interviewed Christina Wilson, the daughter of Robert Anton Wilson. Before interviewing Christina, I really didn't know much about Robert Anton Wilson's personal lif...

Updated: Commenters have pointed out that I've jumped the gun here. SOPA is shelved, but not killed. It could be put back into play at any time. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor has killed SOPA, stop...

Here's a brief article from a June 2011 number of the NYT by Damien Cave detailing the bizarre improvised tanks used by Mexican drug gangs: Over the weekend, Mexican authorities found two more of thes...

Oakleaf Cakes, creator of the life-sized Stormtrooper cake we featured yesterday, have a post up detailing the fella's construction, right down to his rice krispie skeleton. The building of the Stormt...

Britain's flamboyantly weird education secretary Michael Gove sometimes seems to me to be some kind of secret saboteur, bent on discrediting Tories as out-of-touch rich nutjobs. Education budgets are ...

The Guardian published a long excerpt from Nick Cohen's forthcoming You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom, a fantastic-looking book that reveals the dirty truth of English libel la...

"A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production." -- Robert Anton Wilson Fnord...

In this old video, an 80 lb man with muscular dystrophy in a wheelchair explains to Mitt Romney that his qualified physician believes that medical marijuana is the only medication that helps him. Mitt...

In this old video, an 80 lb man with muscular dystrophy in a wheelchair explains to Mitt Romney that his qualified physician believes that medical marijuana is the only medication that helps him. Mitt...

Pziselberger sez, "This was done by Oak Leaf Cakes, for the Arisia Science Fiction Convention in Boston. It is a 6'4" tall, edible Storm Trooper."...

Zachary sez, "I needed someplace to vent my frustration with SOPA between calls to my Congress members. I created a homepage design option for people who want to take their sites dark on January 18. I...

These 1860s vintage photos of children posing with their toys (from the collection of Musee McCord Museum) hints at a mid-19th century in which children were a lot more serious about everything. Child...

The latest Colbert PAC attack ad points out that Mitt Romney says "corporations are people," but he also made his fortune as a raider buying up, gutting and killing corporations. Conclusion: Mitt "the...

RAW (seated) and Rev. Ivan Stang (left) If Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had not written the Illuminatus! trilogy, there might still be a Church of the SubGenius, but we probably wouldn't get it...

Horst Kiechle made this astounding card-stock human torso, stuffed with anatomically correct paper organs. Its for the Science Lab of the International School Nadi, Fiji Islands. Man, what I'd give fo...

"We look for the Secret -- the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever... and all the time it is carrying us about... It is the human nervous system itsel...

The English and Welsh law allowing the police to stop-and-search people in "exceptional" circumstances was used against black people 29.7 times more often than it is against white people in the past y...

Ranking members of the Obama administration have published a memo condemning the approach taken in SOPA and PIPA, the punishing, pending Internet bills that establish and export a censorship regime in...

Some game developers are raising Kickstarter money to fund a production run of For the Win, a fun-looking tile-game based on net memes. The developers have a good track-record for producing great game...

Dominic Girard from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sez, It's one thing for Iran to arrest an American and sentence him to death for being a spy. It's a whole other thing when you say the spy ma...

On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime ...

On January 18, Boing Boing will join Reddit and other sites around the Internet in "going dark" to oppose SOPA and PIPA, the pending US legislation that creates a punishing Internet censorship regime ...

Here's a good brief look at the state of CyanogenMod, a free/open fork of the Android operating system that lets you do a lot more with your tablet/phone. I really like the way that CyanogenMod exerts...

Sebastian Schmieg of the Netherlands created this video by feeding a transparent image to Google Image Search and asking it to find similar images, and then taking the top result and feeding it back i...

Bruce Sterling received a phishing email purporting to be a followup to a report of a phishing email. Coming soon: a phishing email purporting to be a phishing email purporting to be a followup to a r...

I first read Robert Anton Wilson in 1985, which also happened to be my Weirdest Summer Ever. After freshman year at college back East, I went to Berkeley and lived with my high school girlfriend in Ba...

In the Neatorama store, a set of "My Monster Family Car Stickers" designed by Mike Jacobsen. These are a great antidote to the ubiquitous sickly-sweet minivan stickers. My Monster Family - Family Car ...

The Colbert Super-PAC steams on with excellent and helpful election ads like this one, starring candidate Buddy Roemer, who did not coordinate with the Super-PAC in any way. Colbert Super PAC Ad - Und...

Workers in Brazil who must answer work emails on their mobile phones after their job shift ends can qualify for overtime pay under a new law. The Star via Slashdot (via @evgenymorozov)....

After repeatedly insisting that establishing a national censoring firewall with DNS-blocking was critical to the Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill's sponsor (and chair of the House Judicial Committee) ...

Here's a terrific article at e-patients.net. advocating for opposition to H.R. 3699, aka The Research Works Act (RWA). The bill before Congress would seriously impede "the ability of patients and care...

Image: Alfalfa, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr pool by photographer David W. Oliver....

Like, I'm sure, tens of thousands of others, I snapped up the Illuminatus! trilogy when Dell first published it in 1975, reading each volume as it came out, awed by the erudition, the chutzpa, and the...

John Huntington sez, "I'm preparing a new (and self published) edition of my book, Control Systems for Live Entertainment. And so I put a survey online and got over 100 respondents. It's not a huge sa...

Mark's written about winning rigged carny games before, and now the Art of Manliness has a nice little guide to winning five midway challenges, including the secrets behind them (for example, the milk...

Peleg Design's "Video Notebook" bears an uncanny resemblance to a VHS cassette, and comes with labels for extra verisimilitude. Video Notebook (via Neatorama)...

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, 'My current model' -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- 'contains the whole universe and will never need...

No British citizen has ever been extradited to the United States for a copyright offense. Richard O'Dwyer, who ran TV Shack, may become the first....

No British citizen has ever been extradited to the United States for a copyright offense. But Richard O'Dwyer, the 23-year-old college student who ran TV Shack, may become the first. As I understand i...

In Mexico City, butterfingers medics dropped a donor heart being rushed to a hospital for a transplant operation. Rolled right out of the container and everything, right on to the street. All worked o...

[Video Link] Look at that! (via @joejanecek+@popurls, video by Katie Westlake)...

The Phobos-Grunt spacecraft may impact Earth in North America, South America, Europe, Asia or even Australia. Its not possible to say where the thing is going to fall down, Heiner Klinkrad, head of th...

From the combat filmmaker's Washington Post op-ed: "There is a final context for this act in which we are all responsible, all guilty. A 19-year-old Marine has a very hard time reconciling the fact th...

Computing giant Apple today for the first time released an unprecedented trove of information about its supply chain: the "Apple Supplier Responsibility Report." Some industry observers believe the mo...

City College of San Francisco's computers have been infected with software viruses that illegally transmit personal data from students and employees overseas, school officials said today. (MSNBC)...

Rainforest Action Network claims responsibility for the art-prank intervention. RAN activists took to the streets of San Francisco last night and turned every Bank of America ATM in the city into an A...

[Video Link] The hard-working star of Der Untergang learns of a recently-launched set of tweaks to Google search results that push Google+ content to the top, integrating social information into ...

An anti-government protester films with her iPad during an al-Wefaq rally in Sanabis, west of Manama, Bahrain, January 12, 2012. Thousands of anti-government protesters participated in the rally shout...

[Video Link] Keep the volume low when you watch this (Via NSFW What The Christ?)...

Going to TED is one of my yearly highlights. They just announced their list of presenters for 2012. Take a look and let me know who you'd like me to interview for Boing Boing! (Here's who I definitely...

...

How to Be a Retronaut's latest gallery is a world-beater: "U.S. Air Force personalised bomber jackets, WWII." Stylin'. U.S. Air Force personalised bomber jackets, WWII...

A lawsuit filed by Chicago's Cecelia Groark claims that Krunch Kretschmar, owner of a store called Bottled Grapes, created a fake blog about her nonexistent drug problems, thieving, and prostitution t...

Askbryan, who runs the delightful "Doc Fermento Discovers The World" podcast, interviewed me about my book Made by Hand: My Adventures in the World of Do-It-Yourself . He says, "I have provided a full...

In 1978, over 900 people at Jim Jones' Peoples Temple in Guyana committed suicide by drinking Flavor Aid with cyanide added to it. This parody ad from a 1961 issue of Mad magazine is an uncanny harbin...

Remember the contest to rename the Very Large Array? (I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it resulted in one of the best BoingBoing comment threads ever.) The good news: A name has been cho...

Last week, a mystery bidder snatched the domain of copyright troll Righthaven at auction for just $3,300. Just now, the domain name system updated to reveal his identity: one Stefan Thalberg of Zug, S...

John Flesk, founder of the terrific art book house Flesk Publications, just released four new titles (The Art of Craig Elliott, Warren Chang: Narrative Paintings, Flesk Prime, and Naughty and Nice: Th...

Some time in 1976, I went into this very hip bookstore in downtown Binghamton, New York where I lived and came across two books whose covers screamed for my attention with their flaming psychedelic de...

Themac sez, "Fantastic response to a cease and desist. I was particularly impressed at whom they cc'ed." This may be the nicest "go screw yourself" letter ever sent. The backdrop: The San Antonio, Tex...

[Video Link] Snig says: "A documentary is being produced on Count Dante, the man behind the Deadliest Man Alive ads that were in Marvel comics. His real life? Straight out of a comic book." [Trailer i...

A month ago, one of these islands didn't exist. On December 13, fishermen in the Red Sea reported volcanic eruptions shooting lava into the air. Just ten days later, the new island was visible. Volcan...

"Everything is color." A wonderful bit of vintage footage also seen in the excellent 1986 BBC documentary, LSD: The Beyond Within....

Carrie M/ Becker made a 1/6th scale hoarder's house. I have a love of all things miniature. As a young adult, I collected small Japanese toys from a company called Rement. During the summer after comp...

rubidium says Welcome to New York City. Population: 01 When an unexplained event decimates the human race, the survivors fight for their lives in the ruins of civilization. A new take on the post-apoc...

Sarah sez, "The Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers is a ten-day workshop held annually in Pittsburgh, PA for writers ages 14-19 who are passionate about writing science fiction, fantasy, and/or h...

The multitalented JL Schnabel, aka BloodMilk, created this delightful planchette ring, complete with glass window. Do I like it? The Ouija says YES. (Thanks, Stacey Ransom!)...

I've been following the story about the scientists who have been working to figure out how H5N1 bird flu might become transmissible from human to human, the controversial research they used to study t...

This photo was taken in Kota Bharu, Malaysia on Wednesday. According to news reports, the small car "went out of control and hit a pile of sand before landing on the van." It's not clear if the driver...

The Hulk is wanted for robbing a bank in Hamburg, New York on Monday. The Hulk attempted to disguise himself by wearing a brown jacket, jeans, and a necklace as opposed to purple shorts. "Man in Hulk ...

A followup to this morning's post, The Google-Keyna Ripoff. Nelson Mattos, Google's Vice-President for Product and Engineering, Europe and Emerging Markets, writes: We were mortified to learn that a t...

Quinn Norton has completed her triumphant history of Anonymous's actions in 2011 for Wired and this installment is amazing, containing real insight into how the world sees Anon, how Anon sees itself, ...

Back in the late '80s, when Gnosis Magazine was just beginning to find its audience, we were lucky enough to have Robert Anton Wilson as one of our contributors. Over the span of six issues he contrib...

Remember this video, in which protesters ask an Oakland PD officer why he illegally covered his name-badge, then, when he won't answer, ask a supervisor why this was so? Well, both the cop and his sup...

[Video Link]Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz's wonderful mock-educational-film-parody BBC2 show "Look Around You" celebrated its 10th anniversary this week. Robert writes, We had a fantastic night...

Hey, guys, I figured out where all of Minnesota's winter snow went. It's in Cordova, Alaska. Since Nov. 1, storms have dropped 176 inches of snow and more than 44 inches of rain on the town, about 150...

I just got through re-reading Tim Power's World Fantasy Award-winning 1996 novel Last Call, which is truly one of the triumphs of modern fantasy literature. Powers, one of Philip K Dick's three proteg...

Fight for the Future has compiled a list of 61 senators who won't meet with them to discuss PIPA (the Senate version of the Stop Online Piracy Act) before Jan 24, when a critical vote will take place....

The 60-or-70-something businessman and symphony-goer whose iPhone halted Mahler? Don't hate on him, hate on bad UI. The ringer mute switch on iPhone doesn't silence alarms. (via @jswatz)...

[Video Link] Never would have seen this coming. Paula Deen is said to be planning to step back from being the public face of her food empire to become the celebrity endorsement personality for a diabe...

British bookseller Waterstone's is dropping the apostrophe from its name, but keeping the possessive form: i.e. "Waterstones Books" instead of "Waterstone Books." Camacho for Prime Minister! Waterston...

British bookseller Waterstone's is dropping the apostrophe from its name, but keeping the possessive form: Waterstones. In a press release, Waterstone's claims that apostrophes are "impractical" in a ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking a judge to sanction the lawyers for Astrolabe, who launched a frivolous copyright lawsuit against Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. These two researchers...

After a judge ordered the removal of the barriers around Zucotti Park (a privately owned space that is open to the public, built as part of a deal to allow a property developer to put up more building...

Mocality is an African startup that has a Kenya-wide business directory. There is no Kenyan yellow pages, so the directory was crowdsourced, paying thousands of Kenyans to help create and validate its...

Mocality is an African startup that has a Kenya-wide business directory. There is no Kenyan yellow pages, so the directory was crowdsourced, paying thousands of Kenyans to help create and validate its...

Much-loved fantasy and science fiction author Diane Duane has had a lot of bad luck lately, but this takes the cake: her ATM card was skimmed and the joint account she and her husband share has been z...

Tony from Starship Sofa sez, "Launching today Friday 13th sees a new horror podcast from StarShipSofa called Tales To Terrify. This will be a sister show to the Sofa but dealing with scary character d...

"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood test...

Jesse Thorn says: Lawrence Weschler is on this week's Bullseye to talk about his great new book The Uncanny Valley, which is a collection of his narrative non-fiction for the New Yorker and other outl...

There are quite a few talented musicians playing on Sharon Van Ettens new record Tramp (out 2/7), including dudes from The National, Wye Oak and The Walkmen. Its a big-sounding album with lush product...

Above is the world's smallest known vertebrate, Paedophryne amanuensis. Researchers found the frog in 2010 in southern Papua New Guinea and just announced the discovery yesterday. From National Geogra...

From The Mouth Of The Sun - Like Shadows In An Empty Cathedral* by experimedia From The Mouth of The Sun lie somewhere on the ambient spectrum near Eno's Music for Airports and Tim Hecker's (stunning)...

For years, it was thought that a piece of paper could not be folded in half more than seven times. Back in 2002 though, then-high school student Britney Gallivan folded a piece 12 times. And later, My...

National Geographic has a really interesting story on what we can learn about human biology and human culture from studying the lives of twins. (Last week, Mark blogged about some of the photos in the...

We all probably had at least one friend who attempted to reinvent themselves after high-school in a way that was so not them that it just made you feel pity. You know what I'm talking about. Like the ...

47-year-old Suzanne Basham of Springfield, Missouri called police to report that she had paid $40 for crack cocaine that turned out to be sugar, and wanted her dealer arrested. She is now in jail....

"Google, which has taken a principled stand by refusing to censor its search results in China, may be slipping to the dark side as it considers launching the Android Market there. The Chinese governme...

MSNBC reports: "When you call a company or government agency for help, there's a good chance the person on the other end of the line is a prison inmate. The federal government calls it "the best-kept ...

Markoff in the New York Times: "Researchers at I.B.M. have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the e...

Cory blogged earlier about the Missionary Church of Kopimism, Swedens newest registered religion. Now there's a feature about it in the New Yorker, by Pollo Romig: The Missionary Church of Kopimism pi...

British burglars have stopped stealing CDs and DVDs because, yeah, who needs 'em? "...thefts of entertainment products like CDs and DVDs have collapsed in England and Wales, to the point that they are...

A recent study of 2000 heart attack patients found that people who have recently lost a loved one have a greater risk of heart attack—even if they had no other risk factors for coronary medical ...

[Video Link] Our friend, author Douglas Rushkoff, fills the late Robert Anton Wilson in on what he's missed since passing away on February 11, 2007. Fnord...

Ferdinando Buscema is a stage magician and also a management/leadership consultant for large organizations. I really enjoyed his TEDxVenezia talk in which he links magic, magick, and management....

An employee demonstrates a "Police Pad" at the Algorithm factory in Tbilisi, Georgia, on January 11, 2012. Five thousand police officers will receive portable field computers, equipped with features t...

Summer interns at the Open University's computer science department created this interactive punching bag, then figured out how to play Ode to Joy on it: The interactive punching bag is a conventional...

[Video Link] Make Vol 29 is hitting newsstands any day now. Here's a video glimpse of what in this issue. We have the technology (to quote The Six Million Dollar Man), but commercial tools for explori...

"Walter Robot" -- aka BB pal Bill Barminski and writer Christoper Louie -- directed the new Death Cab For Cutie music video "Underneath the Sycamore." It's a terrific piece of neo-noir animation! And ...

See the background photo on the archived, pre-SOPA version of US Congressman Lamar Smith's website? Jamie Lee Curtis Taete of Vice says: I managed to track that picture back to DJ Schulte, the photogr...

Tomorrow is the first Friday the 13th of 2012. To celebrate, LIFE.com posted a terrific gallery of photos from a "Friday the 13th Party" that took place December 13, 1940, in Room 13 at the Merchants ...

Ken at Popehat examines Google's report on the number of police departments and governments that have requested removal of police brutality videos shot by citizens, and asks what will happen once the ...

[Video Link] On Monday night, Jermaine Green, a recently returned US Army veteran (who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan), videoed an LA County Sheriff Deputy strike a mentally handicapped ...

Tor.com has a sneak peek at Ashes of Candesce, the fifth volume in Karl Schroeder's astounding, heroic Virga series, about a post-Singularity civilization mining a pocket solar-system where the last p...

[Video Link] Colbert's funny/scary take of Obama's weaselly handling of the NDAA....

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Watchismo is announcing the newest and coolest "Diesel Super Bad Ass" watches today, now in sol...

Photo: Shutterstock The New York Times' Arthur Brisbane wants you to tell them whether they should disclose in stories when subjects are clearly lying about something. The New York Times is unsure at ...

Photo: Shutterstock The New York Times' Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, wants you to tell them whether they should disclose in stories when subjects are clearly lying about something. The New York Tim...

Normally, the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show marks the season when I stop reading gadget blogs. It's when sites that do 12 interesting posts a day turn into a sites that publish 120 barely rewrit...

Turnstyle's Robyn Gee interviews Brooklyn-based photographer Vanessa Bahmani, who took 1,000 portraits of Occupy Wall Street Protestors with a medium-format camera. One of the things that inspired me ...

The Summer of 1979; Berkeley California. The back story of how I got here is far and away too convoluted to explain but here I am sitting on a couch in Robert Anton Wilson's living room, dumbfounded b...

The Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas is ongoing, and it's been widely-hailed as the dullest in years. There are only three things you need to read about it. Brian Lam at Wirecutter: The magical (and...

On its official blog, the MPAA describes Cond Nast-owned news site Ars Technica as a "blog with a long history of challenging efforts to curb content theft." Consider it a window to the MPAA's soul....

pziselberger sez, "Senator Lahey, sponsor of PIPA [ed: the Senate version of SOPA], will be on Vermont Public Radio's 'Vermont Edition' January 12 at noon. This is an opportunity to share your outrage...

The New York Philharmonic's Tuesday performance of Mahler's Ninth symphony was halted by an unwelcomed sound: someone's ringing iPhone (using the marimba ringtone). It rang repeatedly in the fourth mo...

Evan sez, "This is a new construction toy on Kickstarter that uses clever laser-cut clips to assemble regular playing cards into almost any kind of sculpture. We hit our first production goal for the ...

The Clarion Writers' Workshop is a sort of bootcamp for science fiction and fantasy writers. You write something like six stories in six weeks, critique your fellow students' stories for several hours...

Niels sez, "Yesterday, the Court of The Hague ordered Dutch ISPs XS4ALL and Ziggo to block access to 3 IPs and 24 domains of The Pirate Bay. On top of that, it granted the entertainment industry's lob...

Adi Zaffran's "Pita bread toaster" is a super-minimalist, possibly incendiary, rather heavy brutalist rethink of the design of a toaster: "The pita bread as a staple food led me to the use of simple a...

Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The...

Thin Lizzy vs The Pixies, "The Boys Are Back In Heaven," courtesy Phil Retro Spector. (via Greg Dulli)...

Bob Knetzger, who writes the Toy Inventor's Notebook column for MAKE says: In Portland yesterday I wandered in to Powell's Books. No, not the big, main Powell's Books, but the small satellite Powell's...

Kate sez, "Soapy is a new web browser plug-in that allows users to visit websites blocked by SOPA by automatically redirecting them to the site's IP address. The Firefox version of the plugin is downl...

I used a PID (proportionalintegralderivative) controller to regulate the temperature of my espresso maker. I wrote about it in my book, Made by Hand: My Adventures in the World of Do-It-Yourself. (You...

Um. Yeah. So I'm going to be charitable here and presume that whoever compiled that internet monitoring watchlist at the Department of Homeland Security thought that "Miss Thirteen," at www.msthirteen...

So I'm going to be charitable here and presume that whoever compiled that internet monitoring watchlist at the Department of Homeland Security thought that "Miss Thirteen," at www.msthirteen.com, was ...

I always liked getting letters from Robert Anton Wilson. He enjoyed playing with the fonts on his Mac. In this letter, he thanked me for sending him a copy of my self-published comic book, Toilet Devi...

Crochet costumer Veronica Knight has topped herself with this crocheted cyclops outfit. This puts the Z in ZOMG. Crocheted Cyclops Costume...

I am outraged that our blog didn't make it on to the list of websites the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's command center routinely monitors. Cryptome, predictably, has published a copy of the g...

I am outraged that our blog once again failed to make it on to the list of websites the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's command center routinely monitors. The grandfather of all rogue leak site...

[video link] Faith in humanity status: restored. They're from Veterans for Peace. Babylon Restaurant, the business targeted in the apparent hate crime, was featured in this Boston Globe article just o...

[video link] Faith in humanity status: restored. They're from Veterans for Peace. There's an article about the incident in the local paper, here. Babylon Restaurant, the business targeted in the possi...

Associated Press: "We're finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn't even think could exist,' said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror Star Wars Luke Sk...

MIT mechanical engineer Alexander Mitsos and colleagues were seeking an improved layout for solar power plants, and found inspiration in the concentric spirals of the sunflower. (via @pourmecoffee)...

The Starship Sofa podcast has produced an excellent reading of my novella "The Martian Chronicles," which was originally published in Jonathan Strahan's YA anthology Life on Mars. The reading is by je...

Above: Gareth's original copies of The Illuminatus Trilogy. It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep. -- Illuminatus! I first discovered Robert Anto...

Balayla Ahmad, an observant African-American Muslim student at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, has filed a federal lawsuit claiming she was sexually harassed by a male student in 2009 for...

Consumer Electronics Association president Gary Shapiro, at his CES keynote: "[SOPA is championed by] politicians who are proudly unfamiliar with how the internet works, but who are well familiar with...

A study at Nanjing University in China found that ingested "microRNA" (very small pieces of ribonucleic acid, or RNA) from plants were able to survive digestion and influence the function of human cel...

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff's recent op-ed in the Salt Lake City Tribune is full of quotes and paraphrases from promotional materials produced by the MPAA and execs from its member-companies ...

This is Pig Chase, a concept for an interspecies video game for pigs to play with humans. Researchers at Wageningen University and the Utrecht School of the Arts designed the game to make farm life mo...

Over at Copycat Effect, Loren Coleman shares his list of "Top Ten Evil Clowns of 2011." Seen here is Andrew Joseph Davis, 20, who was arrested in May for running down a person with his car. Police wer...

Watchismo gives us an early look at Vincent Perriard & Co's HYT H1, a concept watch starting at $45,000 that will debut at the Baselworld 2012 show. It uses liquid-driven pistons as well as gears...

Etsy seller LIMOchi makes these killer "poly leather" TARDIS purses to order for all your time-travelling bits and bobs. The seller claims that they are, indeed, bigger on the inside than they are on ...

Make's Sean Michael Ragan reviews an old-school Dymo Metal Embossing Tapewriter he found cheap on eBay and finds it to be an eminently satisfying piece of kit. There are modern versions but they'll co...

Part two of the mini-documentary on the historical occult underbelly of NYC is now online at The Midnight Archive. In this episode, former BB guestblogger Mitch Horowitz, author of the terrific Occult...

RECOMMEND: Visit the Tom the Dancing Bug website, and follow Ruben Bolling on Twitter....

Makerspaces are pretty gnarly, filled with unwieldy equipment, fragile projects-in-progress, glorious fire hazards, and delicate instruments. Moving a makerspace sounds like a nightmare. MAKE's guide ...

Wilson and Krassner Display Maturity . . . Maybe Most likely your daily newspaper didn't acknowledge the death of Robert Anton Wilson on January 11, 2007. He was 74. The prolific author and countercul...

Public Knowledge, a public interest group fighting SOPA and PIPA, believes that its email to supporters has been plagiarized by its rivals, Creative America, an MPAA-funded astroturf group that lobbie...

This "first ever" Android speaker dock does some pretty clever mojo to get compatibility with a wide variety of Android shapes, connectors, and OSes without sacrificing useful functions. JoeBorn from ...

DeviantArt's ~toge-NYC hot-glued this awesome dragon out of plastic disposable cutlery and cups, slaving over it for 80 hours, "completely freestyle - no plans/blueprints/drafts." Plasticdragon (via C...

I regard belief as a form of brain damage. Robert Anton Wilson Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of Robert Anton Wilson's death. Bob was a writer of fiction and non-fiction, most notably the Illum...

Following the RP_Newsletter account is great, because 140 characters of the Ron Paul Newsletters is about as much as I can stand in one gulp. The Twitter account publishes actual quotes from the presi...

Croshame's just posted a pattern for making your own crocheted Spock ears, which are both logical and very toasty-warm. Well, Christmas has come and gone and youve already gotten all the fancy stun gu...

Bruce Schneier looks at the TSA's brag sheet, documenting the "Top 10 Good Catches of 2011" and finds "mostly forgetful, and entirely innocent, people. Note that they fail to point out that the firear...

Earlier today, I posted a quick link to an LA Weekly item about a new round of media attention devoted to Dr. William Courtney, and his research on juicing cannabis for health benefits. The tl;dr of h...

In episode 34 of the Gweek podcast, I mentioned Lego Heroica and how much my 8-year-old daughter enjoys it. It's a simple-rule-set role playing game that uses Lego pieces for the characters, board, an...

A near-perfect example of the monster-movie drive-in poster-maker's art. "The Biggest THING in Town!"...

Donald DeSantis explains how an unnamed "crime boss" mentored him through his first high-tech startup. The piece is a little oblique, thanks to a lack of specifics ("The other business was transaction...

The NYT gives space to Lakhdar Boumediene, a humanitarian aid worker who was arrested on secret evidence that he was planning to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo. Despite the fact that the case was ...

This chamber, currently under construction at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, will be able to reproduce the temperature, pressure, and chemical conditions on the surface of Venus. Scientists ...

In 2008, Rachael Hoffman-Dachelet's eight-year-old son started having frequent sore throats. He'd run a fever, feel stiff and tired, and miss a few days of school. After six sore throats in a year, he...

I like this idea for a banquet table: cover it with black construction paper and then chalk on place-settings and namecards for all the guests. Fall 2006, Blackboard-Chalk Reception Table (via Craft)...

Okay, yes. This is an ad for a Delta "track your luggage" ap. And, yes, it blacks out the part where your luggage goes through security. But it's also a nifty little video that reminds me of the how's...

"I am Giancarlo Esposito. I've had a few people tell me Reddit would be a great place to have a discussion with fans. And what does a man do? A man provides." Reddit AMA here. (thanks, Joe Sabia!)...

"I am Giancarlo Esposito. I've had a few people tell me Reddit would be a great place to have a discussion with fans. And what does a man do? A man provides." Reddit AMA here. Response videos shot by ...

Drink your cannabis, say some raw-pot advocates. It won't get you high, but it's good for you. I'm skeptical, but I know one thing: unless you're growing your own, it is likely not good for your walle...

[Video Link] Spoiler: the hornets win. Above, snip of BBC documentary with narrator commentary. Below, the EPIC MUSIC REMIX VIDEO. (Via The Daily What)...

Hey, something interesting happened at CES! Intel got caught faking a graphical demo of a video game supposedly running on an ultra-portable laptop. Watch for the little popup when the "game" starts. ...

[Video Link] Animal cruelty as entertainment in 1937. (Thanks, Felipe Li!)...

By walking lengthwise down the grave, he can tell the height of the deceased, he said. The rod in the right hand swings to the right if the remains belonged to a male and left if female, he said. A pe...

In The Guardian, Chris McGreal looks at the horrific state of policing in Texas schools. The age of criminal responsibility in Texas is 10, and many schools have uniformed police officers on site who ...

[Video Link NSFW language] EightyFour says: "I recently finished animating this music video for the LA based punk group, Trash Talk. My good friend, Jay Howell, did all of the illustration too (you ma...

Evohollywood says: "Over the weekend I took a day trip over to my old neighborhood of East Hollywood to document the super entertaining professional and amateur murals that cover many of the storefron...

Over at Psychology Today, psychologist Christopher Ryan states the obvious. My favorite part: Given the number of days a human female is actually fertile each month, it's a pretty safe bet that the Sa...

(REUTERS/Lucas Jackson) A young boy looks up at a woman with no pants on while riding in the subway system during the annual No Pants Subway Ride in New York on January 8. The event is organized by Im...

General-purpose computers are astounding. They're so astounding that our society still struggles to come to grips with them, what they're for, how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. This ...

No More SOPA is an Android app that lets you scan the barcodes of the products on the shelves at stores to determine (more or less) whether the manufacturer has backed SOPA. Unfortunately, manufacturi...

The current print issue of Reason has a wonderful, thoughtful piece by Mike Godwin about the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. I know it's hard to imagine there's anything new to say about this...

Today, we talk about a great fictional video series for kids called Recess Stories, and review a hair salon simulation app for the iPad called Toca Hair Salon. Thanks to everyone who has written us to...

('Shoop-Illustration: Xeni Jardin) On the TSA blog, a defense of the recent confiscation of a cupcake at Las Vegas International airport over concerns the tasty morsel was a terrorist threat. Cory blo...

Here's newsreel footage of a good-natured, improbably tall automotive inspector from America's past. I'd trust him to look over my jalopy! Tall guy inspects the top of cars in the factory (Thanks, fry...

...

  Yesterday evening, I stood at a bus stop in Minneapolis wearing no socks, no gloves, and no hat. The breeze was warm. The birds were singing. Clearly, something is deeply wrong here. In fact, 2...

The US Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is hosting a Healthy New Year Video Challenge with cash prizes of up to $2,000. They're soliciting short videos with t...

PIPA is the Senate version of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. It's only slightly less Internet-killingly-insane, but it hasn't gotten as much attention, mostly because the House's SOPA is just so ov...

Cisero's, a Park City, UT restaurant that is a darling of Sundance festival attendees has been hit by enormous fines from Mastercard and Visa, who claim, without evidence, that the restaurant is respo...

Flipbook masters Idiots' Books have created a "Build Your Own President" site that lets you use flipbook mechanics to produce political chimeras consisting of the appearance, icons and rhetoric of any...

You know that mysterious Postal Service gadget that's been in your desk drawer since the day you took the job? Or perhaps it's on top of a cupboard in the mailroom, by the dessicated remains of a long...

Douglas Rushkoff's graphic novel debut, "A.D.D." (Adolescent Demo Division) is a tight, action-packed comic wrapped around a serious, thought-provoking critique of the commodification of youth culture...

The good folks at Toronto's Type Books have made this smashing stop-motion animation of their shelves mysteriously and mischievously reorganizing themselves after everyone has gone home. They position...

Mike Cardwell claims that T-Mobile UK are silently disrupting VPNs and secure connections to mail-servers, using packet-injection techniques more often found in the Great Firewall of China. He documen...

"[President Obama] is involved in a war against leakers, against whistle-blowers."...

...And what's amazing is the process. Joe Sabia shares this YouTube video featuring Chilean artist Fabian Gaete Maureira of arte100cia (Arte Sciencia, or "Art Science") that's making the internet roun...

Hostess Brands, maker of sugary snacks renowned for their immunity to the laws of thermodynamics, some of which are filled with indeterminate white creams, is preparing to declare bankruptcy for the s...

Hostess Brands, maker of sugary snacks renowned for their immunity to the laws of thermodynamics, and some of which are filled with indeterminate creams, is preparing to declare bankruptcy for the sec...

Our guest for Gweek podcast 034 is fashion designer Diana Eng, who blends technology with clothing in interesting ways. My cohost is our own Boing Boing science editor, Maggie Koerth-Baker. We sure ta...

A sustained campaign coordinated by redditors has evidently convinced Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the House Budget Chair, to drop his support for the Stop Online Piracy Act: "The internet is one of ...

Boing Boing reader Kenneth is a weird-and-rare book lover who is painstakingly scanning and posting online some of his favorite obscurities. Among the Golden Guides he's posted (dig the iconic visual ...

One of my favorite comic book series of 2011 was Viktor Kalvachev's Blue Estate. I described it as "a hardboiled crime series that takes place in modern day Los Angeles. It’s got a sleazy action...

Image: A Dimock, Pennsylvania resident who did not want to be identified pours a glass of water taken from his well after the start of natural gas drilling in Dimock, Pennsylvania, March 7, 2009. Dimo...

This undated photo from an unattributed newspaper shows the facade of a Danish clothier that advertised its overstock coats by covering the building from top to bottom with over a thousand coats. The ...

Ariel "Spacehack" Waldman points us to this survey of "the most anticipated space missions of 2012." Yes, the Space Shuttle has been retired but as Ariel has said, "I see it as more of a beginning of ...

Are you following @horse_ebooks? John Herrman explains why you must: "It isnt a parody account and it doesnt tell jokes. Its a spam bot that sells shitty ebooks about horses, and it might be the best ...

Raph Koster's on a tear these days on the theory and practice of game design. Today, it's a fab little sermonette on why it's not right to sneer at data-driven, "free-to-play" games that use extensive...

This really fascinating image comes from a Scientific American guest blog post about the appendix. What does the appendix have to do with cholera? Turns out, the more we study the appendix, the more i...

And doesn't call ambulance. "Youre a big boy I cant carry you." Skokie school board officials are remaining mum on the advice of their legal counsel. Of course, no one will be held accountable except...

This sure feels familiar....

"He stepped around the podium, and pulled his loose pants tight up around his genitalia in an attempt to demonstrate his erection." — You really, really, really must read the story of Professor ...

H.W. Hill & Co. of Decatur Illinois, the sole manufacturer of Hill's hog ringers, produced this map called "Nicknames of the States." It is from 1884. The Library of Congress has it for free downl...

The coolest-looking new headphones announced this week aren't at CES. My friend Jens Martin Skibsted and Lars Larsen from KiBiSi designed the Capital headphones from AIAIAI. Jens says that the adjustm...

The Optillusions blog appears to be a collection of optical illusions, but there's something not quite right about it....

[video link] This data visualization of the Apollo 11 moon mission gathers social and technical data from the 1969 lunar landing in video form. The horizontal axis is an interactive timeline. The hori...

This fascinating video from the Mayo Clinic explains how 28-year-old Mary Meixner went through "awake surgery" during which surgeons used an intra-operative MRI to target her brain tumor. At the end o...

I love both the idea and the lessons behind this project writer Mike Adamick took on with his daughter during her winter break from kindergarten. Emmeline wanted to know what life was like underwater ...

Our friend Bre Pettis has introduced the MakerBot Replicator, his company's latest open source 3D printer. It can print much larger objects than the cupcake-sized creations spewed by previous models, ...

The sciencebloggers are abuzz after a WSJ editorial mentioned Nexium, a heartburn medication, repeatedly by name, implying that it is some kind of wonder drug. Nexium was developed by AstraZeneca beca...

Photos of famous people with cats thrown jauntily over their shoulders: It's my new favorite cat meme. Visit Heather Archuletta's Facebook collection for more shots like this. Besides Frank Zappa, she...

Back in December, researchers at Caltech posted a research paper to arXiv that attempts to explain why the shape and structure of snowflakes change significantly depending on relatively small shifts i...

KolotiBablo, a Russian service, pays workers in China, India, Pakistan, and Vietnam to crack CAPTCHAs -- it's a favorite of industrial scale spammers. This company's fortunes represent an interesting ...

Mount Everest's got nothing on Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in our solar system. At 15.5 miles high, it's also the largest volcano on Mars, covering the size of Arizona. Smithsonian listed the t...

At The Awl, Kase Wickman covers the first major Brony convention, an "explosion of wild color ... the glitter, the rainbows, the homemade pony-mane hooded sweatshirts, all of it bright and sparkly eno...

The Philippines' National Power Corporation is offering tours and overnight beachside holidays at its Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, built in the 1980s but never fired up. It's been "uranium-free" since ...

[video link] Here's drone minimalist duo Stars of the Lid's "A Meaningful Moment Through A Meaning(less) Process" as the soundtrack for Walt Disney's 1966 vision video about EPCOT. The track appears o...

A UK project called Ekinoid aims to produce free/open plans for spherical houses that perch on poles seven feet off the ground. The goal is a house that can be built in a week. Ekinoid homes will be d...

[Video Link] This is as good as the other pedal car I posted years ago....

Born in 1966, raised in Galway on the west coast of Ireland, and now resident in Berlin, Julian Gough has been many things: lyricist and singer for cult Irish rock band Toasted Heretic; author of the ...

Candace Kohl, a well-known meteorite hunter and asteroid specialist with an asteroid named after her, gave me a tour of her home and her collection of meteorites this weekend. I had a blast checking o...

Everything above ground level is getting blown apart in a fiery blast while this 1950s family gets ready to settle in for the evening in their cozy basement bunker. (Via X-Ray Delta One)  ...

Ikea makes a super-cheap, $9 articulated anglepoise knock-off lamp. The articulated arm is a useful for anything lightweight that needs to have an adjustable X- and Y-axis. Instructables user Brianand...

Phillip Stearns created Year of the Glitch, a gallery of electronic artwork resulting from the shortcomings of digital cameras. There'll be a new image added each day until 2013, at which point the wo...

The Denver Post collects some of the Library of Congress's best color photos from the early 1940s, chronicling Depression life in small towns. These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Admin...

Epic action-RPG Diablo III will not be released in February. Rumors persist that the game is finished, but Blizzard will not launch it unless the game's real-money auction house, where players may buy...

The XO-3, designed to sell for just $100, has a Marvell Armada processor, 512MB of RAM and runs Android or the OLPC project's own variant of Linux. The 1024x768 Pixel Qi display offers a high-res e-in...

Joseph L. Flatley interviews R.U. Sirius for The Verge: "I can't believe how confident and flip and well, frankly funny and brilliant and inspired we were... and so very dedicated to unapologetic ab...

Tony from StarShipSofa sez, "What does the world's only consulting detective have to do with science fiction you may ask? What was the relationship of his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to the genre...

Tony from StarShipSofa sez, "What does the world's only consulting detective have to do with science fiction you may ask? What was the relationship of his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, to the genre...

A great many new cameras were announced at CES this weekend, but this is the one that caught my eye: Canon's "ressurection", as it describes it, of the original Digital Elph design and dimensions from...

This ad for Glyde.com, a games retailer/reseller, focuses on how incredibly awful shopping at their major competitor, GameStop, is. A quick look at our archives confirms that GameStop is hardly a para...

Here's a great gallery of Dik Daniels's photos of science fiction costumers from the conventions of the 1980s, when I was a teenaged con-goer. If only I'd had a little more forward planning nous, I'd ...

The Reboot Page features the reboot dialogs, shutdown sequences, and even the magical floppy-disc grinding SFX from a variety of vintage OSes. Rebooting the Amiga was just like being there. I got shiv...

There's loads to love about this 1947 ad for Air France's sleeper service -- just look at that cutaway diagram! -- but the chart-topping eye-grabber is that awesome sleeper-service bed. Man, if Air Fr...

The cover story on this week's The Economist is Save the City, a love-note to London's legendarily corrupt, self-governing financial district, ground zero of the global financial collapse, and home to...

Nick Wingfield, writing at The New York Times, looks into why Microsoft's excellent Windows Phone 7 mobile OS failed to take off. To the technorati, as he puts it, the reasons are obvious: Microsoft i...

The Denver Post collects some of the Library of Congress's best color photos from the early 1940s, chronicling Depression life in small towns. These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Admin...

Steve D's friend Maggie 3D-printed TARDIS cookie-cutters and he used them to make scrumptious gingerbread cookies. Gingerbread TARDIS Cookies (Thanks, mistercliff!)...

CTA Digital is producing a United States Army-branded line of video game peripherals, including rifles, a backpack, and headsets. Start the training early! According to The Verge though, "It's not qui...

Here's ChadRocco's Lamar Smith anti-election poster, in honor of the congressman's advocacy for the net-killing Stop Online Piracy Act and his blithe dismissal of the bill's critics. Meet Lamar Smith,...

Zack sez, "Remember how a hyper-earnest Randy Newman song used to play the opening/ending of just about every Hollywood flick? Well, here's one creative person's take on the song Newman would do for t...

Papabear2010 sez, "Based on Dr. Seuss's final book before his death, this is a story about life's ups and downs, told by the people of Burning Man 2011. Combining the stunning visuals of Burning Man a...

George Mason University's Green Machine marching band plays Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" and they crush it. George Mason University Green Machine plays Rage (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

Rep Lamar Smith, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the principal instigator of the Internet-killing, freedom-hating, pro-censorship Stop Online Piracy Act, has dismissed the bill's eno...

What in the fuck has Obama done so far? "Reaffirmed his opposition to same-sex marriage." "Dramatically increased government secrecy, blocking more FOIA requests in 2009 than Bush did in 2008." "Launc...

Katharine Gammon writes in Wired about the work of McGill University researcher Pieter Sijpkes and colleagues, who have produced an experimental 3D printer that produces ice-sculptures. The researcher...

Writing in the LA Magazine, Dave Gardetta visits the thinking of the world's top parking theorists, who believe that parking causes people to go insane: "I truly believe that when men and women think ...

Mother Jones attempts a taxonomy of libertarian thought in order to figure out where Ron Paul fits. My feeling is that Ron Paul can only be understood by abandoning the traditional one-dimensions left...

OrgNet, a data-mining consultancy, describes how it mined the social graph of the interlocking, every changing owners of several slum-buildings to show that they were all in a criminal conspiracy to a...

[Video Link] Becky Stern made this video about her cool pulse-sensing headband, which makes a heart-shaped LED array flash in time to your heartbeat. You can build one yourself by following the instru...

After a few days on the block, copyright troll Righthaven's domain name sold for $3,300 this afternoon. The funds go to creditors of the bankrupt firm, which tried -- and failed -- to build a business...

The January 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine, on newsstands now, features fascinating photos of twins by Martin Schoeller. Loretta (left); Lorraine (right) When Loretta was diagnosed with br...

"They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them." "Snake Handlers, Faith Healers of the 1940s" (Life.com)...

[Video Link] The wait is over! Here's a new Supercute video, called "Dumb Dumbs." According to Alec Cumming, dad of Supercutester Julia Cumming, "Dumb Dumbs" is "a uke-driven cautionary tale about the...

Michael Geist sez, Canada celebrated New Year's Day this year by welcoming the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Carl Jung into the public domain just as European countries were celebrating the arrival of...

"The maggots, starved for oxygen, writhe and jump in the bag, creating a 'pitter-patter' sound. When the sounds subside, the maggots are dead and the cheese can be eaten" [Wikipedia]...

Instructables virtuosa Mezcraft made a (sadly non-working) geared gingerbread cuckoo clock with internal gingerbread gearing. She kind of beats herself up for the mechanical unsoundness of gingerbread...

This tiny, adorable papercraft Paris playset is a free download. Good fun for a weekend's pretend voyage -- spice up your romantic life by bringing your loved one a Continental breakfast in bed with a...

A clever fellow called Qarl figured out how to make a custom snowglobe of his family's house as a surprise gift for his wife. He auto-modelled it in Google Sketchup, cleaned it up some, added a snowy ...

Author Ben Marcus sent me a link to this video based on his new novel due out next week, titled The Flame Alphabet. Judging by this animation and Ben's description, I expect it to be a delightfully da...

Ohio artist Robert Brandenburg "hijacks" existing mass-produced oil paintings to great effect. He has a solo show, appropriately titled "Pooh and Other Sh*t," opening tomorrow at Gallery 1988 in Venic...

Friday Freak-Out: Tropiclia-psych heroes Os Mutantes perform "Caminhante Noturno" on TV in 1969. (Thanks, Mark!)  Friday Freak-Out: The 13th Floor Elevators perform "You're Gonna ... Frid...

John at Super Punch had such a farcically bad time trying to get service on a new Dell laptop that turned out to be a lemon that it prompted him to document it in eye-watering detail in a post called ...

What is a zombie head decanter? According to the description, it's a "decanter shaped like a zombie's head." Only $19.95 in the Boing Boing Shop!...

Marlon didn't bite. But this May, the movie On the Road is coming out. The clip below looks like it was shot surreptitiously by someone who sneaked on the set. Potrzebie: Jack Kerouac writing to Marlo...

Two (unnamed?) Ocean Engineering students created a "hamster-powered submarine" from "materials derived from common household objects" that connected a hamster wheel in a sealed, air-supplied vessel t...

Microsoft's "Signature" PCs come without pre-installed crapware. Many new PCs come filled with lots of trialware and sample software that slows your computer downremoving all that is a pain, so we do ...

(Via Phil Are Go)...

Ars Technica's Matthew Francis: "The 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Dan Schechtman for his discovery of quasicrystals, materials that do not have the regular lattice structure of crystal...

The cover of the latest Village Voice, art directed by John Dixon. I like the way the top line information is in the reflection along the top of the bin. How fun would it be to go through airport secu...

Every Friday, artist Mitch O'Connell runs a T.G.I.F. post featuring an image from his massive collection of vintage ephemera. This time, it's an old lipstick add, in which a woman is practicing her li...

Hallowe'en has come and gone, but it's always the right time for hats that make you look like your skull has been removed, exposing your brain! It's best to study pictures of the human brain before ta...

Our thanks to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Check out the DEFAKTO Inkognito. The idea is to display the time with the minimum information w...

A new bill in Congress, H.R. 3699 ("To ensure the continued publication and integrity of peer-reviewed research works by the private sector"), creates a regulation that make it hard-to-impossible to p...

I don't know much about the editor they've hired, former CBS.com health editor David Freeman, but color me cautiously optimistic. Will this move clean up the HuffPo's notoriously woo-filled science co...

This is a great find by Not Exactly Rocket Science's Ed Yong. A tourist and a couple of researchers from the California Academy of Sciences have documented an instance of Pacific-dwelling jawfish hidi...

Another great example of NASA footage set to sci-fi movie scores. Apparently, we have a thing going here now. Video Link Thanks, Avi Solomon! Previously: Comet Lovejoy + Total Recall = awesome...

The Los Angeles City Attorney's Office has offered Occupy protesters a get-out-of-jail card: all they need to do to skip their court dates is pay $355 for private "free speech lessons" where they will...

On the eve of the enactment of Spain's harsh new copyright law, El Pais has published a leaked letter from the US Ambassador to the outgoing Spanish president ordering him to enact the copyright law A...

Jamaica's new Prime Minister -- who won by a landslide -- has vowed to turn the island into a republic, eliminating the Queen as the head of state. This may seem pretty pro-forma, but in the past few ...

This vintage chip is on sale; a snap at only $800,000. Free shipping!...

Having broken apart an extremely expensive cellphone from Vertu, what does one find inside it? "This is the one that I wasn't able to fix," writes S., who says he buys salvaged cellphones from insurer...

Two days ago, I described Vertu's $20,000 cellphones as "resembling dragon poo." Today, it announced the Signature Dragon Commemorative Edition. [Luxury News via The Verge]...

Johannesburgs Spoek Mathambo (real name: Nthato Mokgata) makes music that blends traditional African sounds with very current electronica, goth, rock and dubstep elements. Hes described it as township...

CV Dazzle is a systematic approach to creating "dazzle" makeup and hair effects that fool computer vision systems. For example, you could change the symmetry of your face by painting a lightning bolt ...

We have featured the incredible artwork of painter R.S. Connett before. Here is his latest work, called Night Trawlers. On his website, R.S. shares the story behind it: Many years ago, when I was a yo...

Here's a sweet gig: the Electronic Frontier Foundation is soliciting applications for its annual Google Policy Fellowship,"an opportunity for undergraduate, graduate, and law students to work alongsid...

[Video Link] David and I were talking about avant garde musicians' work from the 1960s and we both agree "Bye Bye Butterfly" by Pauline Oliveros is one of the best. "Through Pauline Oliveros and Deep ...

On the Autopia forums, AkamaiDetailing recently unveiled his brushed-steel DeLorean, polished and buffed to a mirror finish: "This took an insane amount of time, but it was so worth it. Has anyone els...

From @LASTEXITshirts, an unattributed "commercial side of Tatooine" image, that made me guffaw. If you know who the creator is, please leave it in the comments! The commercial side of Tatooine. (via S...

Lest you think that Rick Santorum is a mere garden-variety homophobe who offers no threat to the sexual freedom of hetero couples, consider this quote: "Many of the Christian faith have said, well, th...

    As a Midwesterner and someone who has been paying a lot of attention to energy issues, I read Joel Johnson's recent Jalopnik essay with interest. "You're Not Alone. America Hates Electri...

At her Tumblr, Kelly Kate says: "HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEARS ASSHOLES, I JUST PEED OUT THE WINDOW OF A MOVING BUS." This image has generated many comments -- some funny, some offensive, some just plain pr...

Ting London makes bespoke flooring out of recycled leather belts, laying them down like floorboards. When/if you get sick of them, they'll take them back and recycle them. I'm not sure how they'd wear...

Theory11's $6 Steampunk Playing Cards are manufactured in concert with the American Playing Card company on custom bronze-effect paper stock. The cards feature machinelike illustrations and are really...

A nuke-proof space observation station in Carmel Valley, Ca., is up for sale. The asking price: $2,950,000. Able to take a 5 megaton blast, the Jamesburg Earth Station was built in the 1960s and was t...

The Cato institute's dug deep into the MPAA's funny piracy accounting: "In IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the D...

Old-school bOING bOING contributors Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky posted their annual State of the World discussion on the good ol' Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. Sidle up for some fine brain tennis....

OMG there are like 1000 different hairstyles! Nonetheless, while I am proud of my Pony, this has failed to turn me into a Brony. [General Zoi's Pony Creator via Metafilter. Previously]...

This Pan-Am ad from 1983 really grabbed my attention with an oddly disharmonious message: first you have the cowboy, sleeping with his hat over his eyes, a symbol of ruggedness and the ability to rela...

Over at the Huffington Post, UC Berkeley roboticist/artist Ken Goldberg writes about the future of social robots that help each other learn to better navigate a world they never made. From HuffPo (ima...

[Video Link] Gravity seems to work differently at this Bangkok bazaar. (Via Tai-Wiki-Widbee)...

[Video Link]Introducing the new teen sensation, The Sunnygirls, direct from Sweden. (So, that's where Slim Jim Phantom got the idea of standing up while drumming.) Sunnygirls perform "From A Distance"...

Recess Stories #3: Rat Story web series for kids from Beeswax Productions on Vimeo. Recess Stories is a series of short fictional films about realistic kids' having kid-sized adventures on a school pl...

One evening this week, my wife and I were walking on Market Street in San Francisco when we were awestruck by the painting at left leaning in the window of the E6 Gallery. The artist, Nathan Richard P...

Sweden has given official religious status to Church of Kopimism, a faith and philosophy based on file-sharing. The faith's foundational document, ""POwr, broccoli and Kopimi," is available as a .torr...

A diagnosis of brain cancer is basically a death sentence. It's a terrible thing for anyone to deal with, and it's only made worse by all the uncertainty. Doctors don't really understand how brain can...

Joel Johnson, formerly of Kotaku and Boing Boing Gadgets, is now at Jalopnik. His first editorial: You Are Not Alone. America Hates Electric Cars....

Rebecca Hains is the lady whose cupcake was confiscated by a TSA supervisor at the Las Vegas airport because its frosting was a "gel." The story broke here, and has gone nationwide, as a grieving land...

This clever fellow has made a flute* out of a cabbage. * (or possibly an ocarina) Cabbage slide flute-Lightly Row- (via Tokyomango)...

Correction: December 30, 2011 An article on Monday about Jack Robinson and Kirsten Lindsmith, two college students with Asperger syndrome who are navigating the perils of an intimate relationship, mis...

A Denver woman allegedly caused $10,000 worth of damage to Clyfford Still's 1957-J no.2, punching and scratching the abstract expressionist painting. Police remain unsure, however, whether she succeed...

Michael sez, "Congress is on recess and at home, which gives the public an opportunity to tell Members how bad SOPA and PIPA are in person. Members hold town halls, but they are often announced on sho...

Sony's new handheld gaming console, the PSP Vita, is selling poorly in Japan. Within days of its launch, sales were slower than everything Nintendo makes, and even the PSP Old. Will Americans want a $...

Amazon isn't the only place shifting inexpensive tablets by the truckload: bookseller Barnes and Noble reports that its Nook lineup of e-readers and tablets sold well over the nine-week holiday period...

Lenovo's ThinkPad T43 is an $850 thin 'n' light notebook with an SD card reader, two USB ports, track-nub, and an optional 1TB solid state drive. The 14" screen makes it a little larger than other mod...

In this video from the NYC subway, a singer named Jessica Latshaw, bearing a small uke, finds herself sitting across from a gentleman with a fine pair of bongos. The two begin an impromptu jam session...

Scott Edelman sez, "With the news that Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, it seems the right time to take a look at an old timey Kodak photo wallet you'd have received ha...

John Naughton's latest book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, expands on his spectacular Observer feature article, "The internet: Everything you ever need...

Omniglot is an intimidatingly complete site devoted to cataloging every writing system that ever existed. As JoshP says, "If you ever need to transliterate Punic... this is the place." Omniglot - the ...

This year-old butter ad from TINE, Norway's "butter monopolist" manufacturer, eerily presages Norway's notorious, Atkins-fuelled butter shortage. Reklamefilm TINE Smr - Superchef (Thanks, Samurai!)...

A redditor called BobA841908 lays out a lucid and compelling case for how SOPA came about and what might stop it: A full blackout is a reasonable response, because, in the language that is so popular ...

In the Nov, 1950 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, a piece about an early iteration of the hackspace: the "New Inventors Club" where a technician would help you modify your project designs so that you co...

Raph Koster, who has many critical insights on game design, has a great new essay on his blog called "Making games more cheaply," which closes with this statement that applies to practically every for...

Mynonymouse sez, "The Library of Congress just posted a Flickr set of lovely WPA posters. There are awesome ones about keeping your teeth clean, science and one that seems to be about drunk driving bu...

From an 1890 edition of the Szarvas s vidke, a weekly Hungarian newspaper, an explanation of the "stamp code" used to signal one's intention when sending mash notes and such through the Emperor's post...

Clay Shirky rings in the new year with another barn-urning essay about the state of newspapers, first noting that a "porous" paywall that allows 20 free pageviews per month is a tacit admission that p...

The above photo of the M9-P is how Leica's publicist sent it to me -- an uncropped screen grab. It caught my attention! The price tag also caught my attention: $7,995.00. It's the flip side of the lux...

Gareth sent me this link to The Oatmeal's funny and all-too-true 6-page comic strip about the horrible interaction design of many online checkout procedures. How to make your online shopping cart suck...

James Losey from the New America Foundation sez, "Ernesto Falcon with Public Knowledge does a great job explaining Senate rules on filibuster and cloture, and what the rules mean for the Protect IP Ac...

00...

The Cato institute's dug deep into the MPAA's funny piracy accounting: "In IPI-land, when a movie studio makes $10 selling a DVD to a Canadian, and then gives $7 to the company that manufactured the D...

Agent X-Ray says: The Los Angeles Chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH and the LA 3-D Club want you to participate in our non-competitive 3D Stereoscopic film festival. The LA 3-D Club (Stereo Club of Southern Cal...

The IP addresses assigned to the Canadian Parliament have been implicated in several copyright-violating BitTorrent downloads. The 192.197.82.0 192.197.82.255 IP block was seen to be in BitTorrent sw...

Dreams of Space is a wonderful blog that celebrates non-fiction kids' books about space flight from 1945 to 1975. But the images are so small that the creator of the blog ought to be fined by the Leag...

This Pan-Am ad from 1983 really grabbed my attention with an oddly disharmonious message: first you have the cowboy, sleeping with his hat over his eyes, a symbol of ruggedness and the ability to rela...

Science is the best method we have for understanding the world. That doesn't mean that everything scientists ever think they've figured out is correct. And it doesn't mean that we're doing science in ...

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering electronic musician and sound engineer at the famed BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I've posted previously (link, link) about her amazing creativity and invention of...

DrFaustusAu, the DeviantArt member who created the fabulous Cthulhu and Ghostbusters Dr Seuss mashups, is back with this great Joker-by-Seuss mashup. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Arkham Asylum...

The Banach-Tarski paradox is one of the many places where higher-level math starts to sound like a stoned conversation in a Freshman college dorm room. Imagine a ball. Now imagine cutting that ball up...

[Video Link] The Zen of Steve Jobs is an 80-page graphic novel by Caleb Melby and Jess3 that "imagines the part of his life when he was fired from Apple in the mid-80s... He turned to Buddhism, which ...

Macoto Murayama's exquisite "Inorganic Herbarium" diagrams will be on display at Frantic Gallery's booth in the Art Stage Singapore Art Fair next weekend, January 12-15. I first posted about his work ...

Further evidence that the ability to remix scientific videos and images is awesome: Here's NASA's footage of the International Space Station rounding planet Earth to catch a glimpse of the comet Lovej...

Each year, the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society awards a "Best of Show" prize for excellence in map design. The winners have included the Central Intelligence A...

RECOMMEND: Follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER....

Jesselyn Radick is a former US government lawyer, blew the whistle on the US Justice Department when her advice that John Walker Lindh request to have access to a lawyer during questioning should be a...

HP's new 27" Omni all-in one is not a clone. The photoshopped slash of reflected light is at a totally different angle....

Or is that five lilliputian women cavorting on an ordinary toothbrush? In any case, these woman love the two-tone design and "automatic" gum-massaging action of the Pro-Phy-Lac-Tic Double Duty toothbr...

Roku today announced the Streaming Stick, a wireless dongle that plugs directly into a TV set's HDMI input and requires no external power of its own. The stick features all the usual services and stre...

Researchers at the Japan Institute of Technology have a killer demo for their controlled quantum levitation technology: they outfitted little slot-car-style RC cars with liquid nitrogen tanks and sent...

Retrode, a USB adapter for 16-bit Nintendo and Sega carts, may be preordered for $85 at the official website. Features include two controller ports for each platform, driverless operation with any emu...

On Core77, Hipstomp gives us a structural package designer's perspective on the elegant and lethal Talstar Professional Insecticide bottle. The bottle contains a potent concentrate of bug-killing juic...

In episode 3, Jane and I review Kingdom Rush, a fun tower defense game that's available for free play on the web, and on the iPad for $2.99. We're going to start this podcast with some tips from Jane'...

Just when you thought PayPal couldn't get any stupider, well, they get stupider. Erica sold an antique violin to someone who paid $2500 for it over PayPal. The buyer disputed the authenticity of the v...

Bruno Zamborlin, a PhD candidate at IRCAM/Centre Pompidou and Goldsmiths, University of London, and Norbert Schnell, a Centre Pompidou researcher, created this astounding demo of using a contact micro...

From Demand Progress President Obama just signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law despite startling provisions that will allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens. It'...

Last month, I posted some photos of Steve Lodefink's unfinished pinewood racer bodies. Today, he sent me photos of one of the finished racers. I love the sparkle paint job. Steve and I have started ta...

This charming video combines everything you like about the Apollo program with everything you like about "The Dukes of Hazard." Thanks frycook! Video Link...

It's hard to explain the experience of expertise. That's why one of the first things they teach you in journalism school is to avoid questions like, "What's it like to be a mathematician?" It's hard f...

There are facts that just aren't apparent from our everyday perspective. Sometimes, in order to really get a scientific concept at the gut level, you have to seek out a different way to view the world...

Are you there Judy Blume? It's me, Smithsonian: Do you plan which important life issue you will deal with in a book? I always have some idea of the story Im about to tell. I knew Daveys father would d...

Qamar Hashim, who is 8, takes pictures at al-Mutanabi street in Baghdad. Hashim tours famous streets to picture Baghdadis with his single camera. He is the youngest Iraqi photographer to win several l...

In my latest Guardian column, "The internet is the best place for dissent to start," I look at Ethan Zuckerman's recent talk on the Internet and human rights, and the way that cute cats create the pos...

The New York Times has a fascinating story about the current state of the science on weight loss, including the results of one recent (albeit small) study that suggests that the human body responds to...

The government of Belarus has passed a law that makes it a misdemeanor for citizens to browse websites hosted outside of the country. The law goes into effect in the former Soviet republic on January ...

Here's a fascinating study that shines a bright spotlight of nuance on some of those maybe-too-simplistic assumptions we make about evolution, physical characteristics, and reproductive fitness. If yo...

The Australian blacktip shark lives in tropical waters. The common blacktip shark prefers its water subtropical and temperate. Because of the difference in habitat, these two animals have become separ...

Mineways is a tool that converts your Minecraft creations into 3D files that can be sent to the 3D printing bureau Shapeways, who will print them out in color plastic and send them to you. The tool it...

Lena Paahlsson, who lives on a farm near Mora, Sweden, says that she found her wedding ring, lost for 16 years, on a carrot in her garden. From the BBC News: "The carrot was sprouting in the middle of...

A gentleman from Lexington, North Carolina was arrested for trying to pay for his purchases at Walmart with a $1 million bill. (No report whether it's a Reagan bill as seen above, Statue of Liberty, G...

In 2002 Dinah Sanders started a personal holiday called Discardia. As she writes in her book, Discardia: More Life, Less Stuff, her quarterly festival celebrates unconsumption, the slow movement, down...

At a photoraphy exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mark Wilson of Philanthropr and Gizmodo spotted this lovely sign: "Are things so bad we've banned sketching?" What next, No Derivative Thoug...

Spider Robinson writes in with an account of a visit to Wardenclyffe, Nikola Tesla's facility at Shoreham, NY, near the north shore of Long Island: "I stood, gobsmacked, within a couple of hundred met...

In this week's Gweek podcast, our guest host was the Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn. Jesse talked about his new radio show and podcast called Bullseye. Here's episode one of Bullseye. You can su...

In this week's Gweek podcast, our guest host was the Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn. Jesse talked about his new radio show and podcast called Bullseye. Here's episode one of Bullseye. You can su...

All-round slingshot badass Jrge Sprave demonstrates his latest lethalness: a zombie-killing sling-hammer with a skull-ejector to make it easy to knock away the shattered, punctured zombie-heads after ...

Starbucks is raising the price of their coffee beverages by an average of 1% in the Northeast and Sunbelt regions of the US. This will affect cities including New York, Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Da...

Hundreds of US prison inmates, including 43 who were serving life sentences, registered with the IRS as income tax preparers. "The IRS officials told auditors it would suspend tax preparer identificat...

"Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment" is a series of 8-bit Flash games based on the punishments visited by the gods on various naughty ancient Greeks: Sisyphus, Tantalus, Prometheus, Danaids and Zeno...

Did natural selection help African-Americans adapt to the harsh conditions of their new lives as slaves in the Americas? A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai report in ...

...

An untitled work by Katinka Matson, via John Brockman and EDGE.org. Update: Boing Boing reader Jennifer Forman Orth, Ph.D., who is an Invasive Plant Ecologist, says, "That's actually a scan of the see...

Charlie Brooker presents an insightful, 5-minute mini documentary by Adam Curtis on Rupert Murdoch: how did the media baron come to be, what drives him, and where is he headed? Adam Curtis on Rupert M...

The Verge has a teaser video for HP's Envy Spectre, which appears to be an ultrabook-style laptop. The original Voodoo Envy was a good-looking alternative to the MacBook Air, with a distinctive style ...

The Hugo Award nominations are open. Attendees of last year's World Science Fiction in Reno and next year's WorldCon in Chicago (as well as those who paid for "supporter" status) can nominate their fa...

Ars Technica's Chris Foresman reviews Polaroid's Z340 instant camera, and finds that it captures none of the charm of the classic models. "The novelty of getting a physical print of a digital photo ne...

Tiffiniy sez, "Whenever you search for how to record an mp3 or a song or whatever else, you get some old school options that you have to download. This is better - it's a webpage that lets you record ...

Photo: lunar caustic Is it any solace to sentimental mothers that their babies will always be part of them? Im not talking about emotional bonds, which we can only hope will endure. I mean that for an...

Bloo sez, "David Byrne's Nonesuch Records has a great collection of artists, of course, but something that I really appreciate is Nonesuch Radio, where you can stream a sample of everything they have ...

The remarkable thing about Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson's debut essay collection, is that it was so long in coming, collecting two-and-a-half decades' worth of nonfiction, opinion, ...

Did you know that Nokia has a "luxury" subsidiary that makes phones for stupid rich people? As the European cellular industry's supernumerary nipple, Vertu has long specialized in calculator-display b...

Just in time for the 75th anniversary, some photos of the "first" science fiction convention, in Leeds (shown here, Walter Gillings, Arthur C. Clarke, Ted Carnell, in front of Theosophical Hall). Alth...

Government Attic's latest FOIA haul is a compilation of FBI documents concerning the security of telephone services, 1952-1995. The collection is posted as a single 66MB monster PDF. Get cracking! On ...

Avinoam Danin is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Evolution, Systematics and Ecology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He curates Flora of Israel Online. His latest book is Botany of the S...

Illustration: Kurt Caesar (?) Tell me the difference between these two pieces of text. Example 1 Even if Junior had understood enough English to answer her, he didnt get the chance. The RV swerved abr...

Aerodyne is Jeffrey Stephenson's latest hand-made Art Deco PC. In keeping with the (modern) times, it's a compact Mini-ITX affair in mahogany and aluminum, with an Intel i3 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB...

The Next Web predicts this unauthorized Steve Jobs action figure will get the kibosh before it goes on sale in February. (Thanks, Rachel!)...

When [Rock] Santorum was in high school, "Everybody called him 'Rooster' because of a strand of hair on the back of his head which stood up, and because of his competitive, in-your-face attitude. 'He ...

[Video Link] I'm looking forward to Into the Zone, a documentary about the Cacophony Society, which was a pranksterish underground cultural movement from San Francisco that paved the way for Burning M...

The Verge's Thomas Houston offers a roundup of the best tech stories from last year....

[Video Link] Scott Siepker set me straight about Iowa! (NSFW) (Via Steve Silberman)...

Mighty God King lives up to his handle with this fab series of truth-in-advertising shoops of old Atari game box-art, in which the true nature of the games is revealed in their titles. Fun From Yester...

From Futility Closet: In 1944 a childrens book club sent a volume about penguins to a 10-year-old girl, enclosing a card seeking her opinion. She wrote, This book gives me more information about pengu...

Radley Balko says: Maybe theres a legitimate law enforcement reason to strip a man naked, strap him to a chair, tie a spit hood around his mouth, put a hood over his head (see video at the link), and ...

In Gingerbread Girl, a graphic novel by Paul Tobin, and illustrated by Colleen Coover, Anna Billips is a outwardly-cheerful and carefree 27-year-old woman who is convinced that her Penfield Homunculus...

On the CBC Ideas podcast, a lecture by Ethan Zuckerman on the connection between LOLcats, Internet activism and the Arab Spring: In the 2011 Vancouver Human Rights Lecture, Ethan Zuckerman, director o...

Here is someone who hates everyone....

Here is someone who hates everyone. [SMH] Update: Though the deletion was widely reported, the tweet is evidently still live....

A soldier carries ammunition on a naval ship during the Velayat-90 war game on Sea of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz in southern Iran December 31, 2011. Iran test-fired a new medium-range missile, des...

Alan Turing will get his own UK commemorative stamp in 2012. It will be fun to use it on sealed envelopes, as a kind of cherry-on-the-top for the traditional crypto argument that scrambling messages i...

[Video Link] Above, a PBS NewsHour report by science correspondent Miles O'Brien which I helped shoot, on the subject of tissue engineering. The goal in this field: Grow tissue or even whole organs to...

Writing in Wired, Adam Rogers tells the story of how Canadian mycologist James Scott started his career by tracking down an ancient fungus that had adapted to growing on whiskey fumes and had infested...

5star's Lords of Graphite is a series of sculptures made from pencil segments: "The vision that haunts me still is a landscape of dark brooding mystic air - raw rough lines drawn forcefully throughout...

BB pal and former guestblogger Marc Weidenbaum, of the excellent Disquiet site asked 25 ambient musicians "who also enjoy using Instagram to create original short pieces of music -- call them "sonic p...

Above is the Iberian Peninsula as photographed from the International Space Station. Light pollution looks pretty from space. From National Geographic: This photograph from space also shows airglow, a...

My son and I were looking at volcano videos on YouTube and got a chuckle out of this European Railways commercial....

Roboto, the new "house" font for Android 4, was branded a haphazard mash of classic typefaces. The longer you look at it--and the technological constraints that it aims to transcent--the clearer its v...

We have a new T-shirt design! I drew this one, and it's called "Critter." It comes in a baby snapsuit size, too, for $8.95. Boing Boing Critter $14.95 Boing Boing Monkey $14.95 Boing Boing Beetle $14....

Seen above is a proposed 1912 design for the Lincoln Memorial by John Russell Pope, who would go on to design the Jefferson Memorial. According to historians quoted in Smithsonian magazine, Pope didn'...

In celebration of the new year, David "Everything is Miscellaneous" Weinberger has written up his "Top Ten Top Ten Top Ten list" -- a list of ten great lists of top ten lists. He also includes seven a...

For Christmas, some Oxford geologists built an amazing cake based on the geologic time spiral—a way of visually representing the order and flora/fauna of the different stages of deep history. It...

Here's another SOPA supporter for you to boycott: Elsevier, publisher of many medical and scientific journals. You might also remember them from a 2009 scandal where Elsevier published fake journals a...

Ikea has announced a new cardboard shipping pallet, which uses fiendishly clever folding to give a loading capacity of 1,650 lbs: "As Ikea uses some 10 million pallets a year, if the experiment is a s...

Longform.org has a list of their favorite long science articles of 2011. Included are some of my favorites, as well: Daniel Engber's Slate.com story about the problem with research mice; Susan Dominus...

Over the past few years, I've heard several people in the natural gas industry estimate that the United States is sitting on 100 years worth of natural gas. Every time I've heard the 100-year estimate...

How do you decide whether or not to trust someone you've never met before renting them your car or apartment? Christopher Maag looks for answers in an interesting article he wrote for credit.comcalled...

Seriously. If you haven't figured out by now that the world is not ending and that any Mayan predictions claiming otherwise are largely fabricated pseudoarchaeology, then I'm not sure that I can help ...

Espen sez, "This is an excellent essay by Jonah Lehrer on the increasing difficulty of finding direct causation in medical (or, indeed, all) research. Highly readable, though I would have liked to see...

My new obsession: Cockpit landing videos taken during approaches into technically challenging airports. Yesterday, Phillip Bump posted a link on Twitter to a detailed rant, written by a pilot, about w...

(Image: GoMA Blog) Yayoi Kusama's installation The Obliteration Room at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art started as a stark white room, and then thousands of passing children were given brightly col...

Mark Nathan Stafford made this "Bones" teapot fashioned in the likeness of DeForest "Dr McCoy" Kelley's noggin: "Stoneware. Dimensions: 11 inches in height by 9 inches in width by 9 inches in depth. 2...

The Commodore 64 is 30 years old. [Reg Hardware]...

Jeff Jarvis on the trend toward being less secretive in public about our personal health: "Rather than reflexively declaring that sharing information about ourselves -- our bodies as well as our thoug...

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 this episo...

Here's a recipe for using up your leftover Champagne: combine it with corn syrup and gelatin and make champagne marshmallows. When youre not feeling especially celebratory, make these with any sparkli...

Seth Schoen at the EFF has a suggestion for an extra New Year's Resolution: Full-disk encryption on all your computers....

My latest Locus column, "A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future," talks about science fiction's uselessness as a predictive medium, and its great utility as a medium for thinking about, attaining,...

David Weinberger sez, "An amazing video from StooTV shows the first 13 minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark paired with identical shots from 30 different adventure movies made between 1919 and 1973. Yup...

2011 was one weird year. My essential Mac applicationsBy Mark Frauenfelder Mark's picks of the very best apps currently available for OS X (with many available on other platforms), in five parts: 1, 2...

Here's just a sampler of the many fabulous stories, features and oddities we published last year from guests, freelancers and friends. May 2012 bring forth just as many excellent words! Air Space: a t...

Jennifer Jenkins sez, "What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978... Works from 1955. Asimov's The End of Eternity, Nabokov's L...

The STRIP Act, proposed in the US House of Reps, would require TSA employees to stop dressing like police officers, because they aren't cops, and when they give orders to travellers, travellers assume...

Happy New Year, Boingers. Have fun tonight, but don't drive drunk. Or tipsy. Or whatever it is you decide to call it when you're inebriated enough that your reflexes and attention aren't operating at ...

Quinn Norton continues her excellent history of Anonymous for Wired, this time visiting the shift in the movement from pure transgression to political activism, and the way that this played out among ...

Marco Arment nails three companies -- Apple, Google and Facebook -- for spreading bullshit. "Everyone has their bullshit," he writes. "You can simply decide whose youre willing to tolerate." Percolate...

Every year, Ian takes to the streets of London early on Christmas Morning to photograph the normally thronged streets in their state of eerie emptiness. The project was inspired by the scenes of empty...

EA and Nintendo and Sony's electronics divisions have renounced their support of the disastrous Stop Online Piracy Act, but their industry association, the Entertainment Software Alliance, still suppo...

The ACLU of Massachusetts is representing an anonymous Twitter user who has been targetted by an Assistant DA who is trying to build a case related to Occupy Boston; the court and the ADA have sealed ...

Here's a gallery of advertisements from the Bohn Aluminium and Brass Corporation, illustrated in super-modernist, streamlined style by Arthur Radebaugh. They run the gamut from future farms to future ...

Christian Whrl has produced a German translation of my 28C3 talk, The Coming War on General Purpose Computing. Thanks, Christian!...

Long Forgotten, the world-beatingly insightful blog on the history and design of the Haunted Mansion rides at Disneyland, Walt Disney World and other parks, has a new lavishly illustrated post up, thi...