Articles by BoingBoing from February 2012

[Video Link] Here at TED2012 Gregory Gage of Backyard Brains showed me how to measure the electrical activity of a neuron in a cockroach leg. At around the 12:00 minute mark, Gregory pumps the electri...

Wyoming state representative Lorraine Quarberg (R-Thermopolis) has proposed Wyoming House Bill 85, which will prepare Wyoming for the day that the USA collapses. It includes an amendment proffered by ...

Michael Weinberg from Public Knowledge sez, "After coming out against SOPA and PIPA, many people are asking what the Internet is for. The Internet Blueprint is designed to help create a positive agend...

Japanese photographer Satoru Niwa, whose work I blogged in a previous Boing Boing post, has a new series from Fukushima marking the one-year anniversary of the March 11 disaster: Invisible You. Again,...

An October, 2011 Department of Homeland Security memo on Occupy Wall Street warned of the potential for violence posed by the "leaderless resistance movement." (via @producermatthew). Update: Looks li...

The Sparkfun folks have a sweet recipe for building an Arduino-based, accelerometer-triggered Tardis sound-effects box into the ceiling of an elevator, noting that care must be taken not to freak out ...

Apple today invited tech reporters to an event in San Francisco on March 7, with the following graphic suggesting that the unveiling relates to a new iteration of its market-dominating iPad. As is the...

Last week, Maggie went to the largest science conference in the Western Hemisphere for four days of wall-to-wall awesomeness. Every day, she learned amazing things, watching scientists from all over t...

This book is called Cooking With Poo. Yes, "Poo" is Thai for "crab" and it's also author Saiyuud Diwong's nickname. But this book is called Cooking With Poo. Heh heh. Heh. It's on the shortlist for Th...

With help from the international police organization Interpol, Spain and three South American countries today arrested 25 people who are suspected of being Anonymous activist/hacktivist/hackers. They ...

Williams-Sonoma sells Star Wars vehicle pancake molds. The X-Wings and TIE-fighters are pretty cool. Star Wars Vehicles Pancake Molds (via Geekologie)...

This fun BigFoot UFO Abduction t-shirt hits me right in my high strangeness receptors. It reminds me of my delightful Bigfoot/UFO "Believe" painting by Pietro Ramirez....

Airing tonight on PBS Frontline (check your local listings, or watch it online!), a documentary film that provides the definitive inside account of what really happened, moment to moment, during the F...

Faces Of Death is the infamous 1978 shockumentary depicting a variety of violent and horrible ways that humans and animals can die. Much of it was faked, some of it obviously so. Regardless of its sem...

Here's a set of photos from the ruins of Heritage USA in Fort Mill, SC, the Christian themepark built by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker at the height of their evangelical empire, now fallen to ruins since ...

Jeff Roberts at PaidContent claims that TechCrunch's traffic is plummeting. TechCrunch, the long-time darling of the digerati, is smashed to bits and all of AOLs horses and men will be hard-pressed to...

From Funny or Die: middle-aged men explain why they are best qualified to make decisions about women's reproductive health. Let These Middle-Aged Men Explain Why Theyre Better at Discussing Womens Hea...

Here's a bloco (a marching-band) at Rio's Carnival performing the Super Mario soundtrack, complete with Mario-themed signs, dancing, and enormous verve. Super Mario Bloco em Santa! (Thanks, igorz!)...

[Video Link] I'm here at TED2012! Here's a short interview with Bre Pettis, co-founder of MakerBot Industries. He shares news about the new Replicator 3D printer, and the printing of an old school mec...

NPR's guidelines promise an end to "he said, she said" journalism that tries to be fair to both sides of an issue. From now on, the network will ask its reporters to be fair to the truth: "In all our ...

Science publishing giant Elsevier has pulled its support from the Research Works Act, a bill that would have restricted the ability of scientists doing government-funded work to place their papers wit...

A recent article in China Daily pointed to charges that Hong Kong Airlines "has been accused of profiting from animal cruelty by striking a HK$850,000 deal to fly live dolphins from Japan to Vietnam."...

Xandrigirly made this stained glass Tardis for a class. It's lovely work. It's Bigger on the Inside! [TARDIS Box] [IMG Heavy!] (via Neatorama)...

Joel Johnson found that the Department of Homeland Security's list of Facebook and Twitter search terms was not in an easily-available public format, "curiously embedded as an image of text" in a PDF ...

This is a drawing of what the edge of the solar system might look like, as envisioned by plasma physicist Merav Opher. One of the few women in this field, Opher is also one of the top scientists, of a...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!...

I've known of James Hathaway and the NGO he co-founded, Clear Path International, for many years. They do great work to help landmine blast survivors with disabling injuries live better lives through ...

It's cold outside in Minnesota (though, not as cold as it usually is), but the Occupy movement has not been idle here. They've been busy occupying a house threatened with foreclosure and saving homeow...

Last week, while I was on a train, researchers at CERN announced that neutrinos are probably not traveling faster than the speed of light. Last year, as you'll recall, the OPERA experiment clocked the...

Mother Jones's Mac McClelland goes underground at an unnamed ecommerce packing facility in a rural American town and reports on the terrible, back-breaking working conditions that are compounded by co...

Yes, the deadline is tomorrow. But I know this is the perfect opportunity for at least one of you, so hop to it! Cornell and the University of Hawaii are putting together a series of studies aimed at ...

[Video Link] Boing Boing pal Joe Sabia, who works with me to create our in-flight Boing Boing Virgin America TV channel, shares his latest project. This delightful animated short was 7 months in the m...

If you're looking for serving suggestions to accompany yesterday's post on how to bake a Death Star cake, have a look at this groom's cake that @paulblomdahl's wife made for him....

Thomas Gilmore offers a brief history of chipmusic, whose practitioners "make complex music in a minimal way." The more popular tools of the chipmusic (or chiptune, or 8bit) trade were made from the e...

Cotton Candy, a computer the size of a (big) thumbdrive, is available for pre-order and will ship in March. The $199 machine, which runs Ubuntu or Android 4, has a 1.2GHz ARM CPU, 1GB of RAM, and HD v...

With hellish out-of-body action and 3D graphics that look eerily like an Amiga-era Cyberpunk game left to self-replicate for 20 years, Antichamber already defies description. But it's the soundtrack's...

As reviewed in Gweek - Tom Gauld's tragic, darkly funny retelling of David and Goliath from Goliath's perspective. Gauld's work is always quietly powerful and emotionally grabbing. Here's a seven-page...

On IO9, Jess Nevins reviews The Steampowered World, a Singaporean anthology of steampunk short stories published by a "micropress" called Two Trees. The editors put out a call for upbeat stories ("No ...

The Body Mass Index is a popular way to measure and assess whether someone is overweight or underweight. Basically, it's just your weight divided by your height. BMI is a simple system, but it does ha...

Gawker's Hamilton Nolan was invited to and attended one of those pre-Oscar parties where celebrities are loaded with luxury gifts. Subsequently, Secret Room Events, the "product placement" outfit conc...

You're familiar with contrails, the tracks left by airplanes as they move across the sky. Those are made when hot water vapor from the exhaust of jet engines hits cold, high-altitude air and condenses...

Faith Erin Hicks's new graphic novel Friends With Boys launches today. It's the story of Maggie, who is about to follow her three older brothers to the town high-school after a lifetime of home-school...

Following last night's eviction of Occupy London from St Paul's Square, many of the protesters blame the cathedral for colluding with the eviction effort. This past winter, the cathedral was rocked by...

The Occupy London camp at St Paul's Cathedral has lost its legal fight to remain in place. Once the injunction was ordered, bailiffs and officers from the City of London Police (a separate police forc...

[Video Link] Our friend Sean Bonner filled me in on the goings on here at TED2012's Coffee Common....

Some heartwarming news on the Kickstarter front: fans of the Diesel Sweeties webcomic have oversubscribed R. Stevens's DRM-free ebook, for which he was hoping to raise $3,000, and brought the total up...

Artifacture Studios is a maker shop based near Dallas, TX (I met the founders at a recent speaking gig at U Texas at Arlington) that does pretty amazing stuff with laser-cutters. They are probably bes...

James from New America Foundation sez, "Mike Masnick has done an incredible job covering copyright issues and the SOPA debates at Techdirt but today he had a troubling post: an important post on who S...

James from New America Foundation sez, "Mike Masnick has done an incredible job covering copyright issues and the SOPA debates at Techdirt but today he had a troubling post: an important post on who S...

A group of protesters in wheelchairs who gathered in La Paz to demand legal recognition of disability along with monetary benefits were met by a line of riot cops with shields and batons and gas. The ...

This is, to say the least, a busy week. There's several events happening that I'm involved in. They're all related to my upcoming book on the future of energy, and they're all open to the public. I wa...

From last August, here's Jeanette Strole Parks on Dollar Store Crafts outlining a method for turning a paper plate into a set of shark jaws: 1. Fold your paper plate in half "backwards" (with the bott...

I'm really happy to be a part of Download the Universe, a new group blog dedicated to reviewing science e-books and apps. No dead trees allowed. It fills a long-ignored niche, helping readers find hig...

This is a 2006 winner in the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science. The Challenge always showcases mind-...

[Video Link] Hard to explain this web series, and this particular episode. Cats. Philosophy. Emptiness. Best to just watch. (via Andrea James)...

On Friday, I threw together a quick blog post about a recent David Pogue column on Foxconn, and responses to that column by others around the web. The resulting Boing Boing discussion thread was full ...

Avi sez, "AFOL Shannon Sproule built this charming Raygun entirely from LEGO parts." Shannon calls it the Russian Tokarev TT-34 Atomiser and notes, "Every mechanonaut was issued with a Tokarev laser p...

This curious device is The Badgermin. Artist David Cranmer hacked a Theremin kit to integrate it with a taxidermy badger, and vice versa. The Badgermin (via Technabob)...

Chandra Bahadur Dangi of Nepal is now officially the world's shortest living man. He's 21.5" (54.6 cm) tall. If you have a hard time estimating that, notice the, er, iPad included in the photo above f...

Here's a fantastic essay by our friend Jesse Thorn (creator and host of the Bullseye radio show and podcast) about how to make a living doing what you love. It took a few years, but now I make a good ...

Behlod "Graffiti Rock," the killer pilot for a 1984 hip hop variety TV show that unfortunately never went any further than this episode. What a phenomenal line-up: Run DMC, Shannon, Kool Moe Dee, DJ J...

From Molly Crabapple, this wonderful portrait of Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times war reporter who was recently killed in Syria. More about Colvin here. Killed with her was French photojournalist Rmi Oc...

A recent US Supreme Court ruling that overturned the warrantless use of GPS tracking devices "has caused a 'sea change' inside the U.S. Justice Department." Following the ruling, the FBI turned off an...

Snip from a wonderful interview by Paradigm Magazine with one of my favorite photographers (and people), Glen E. Friedman: Dont care about what other people think about what youre doing, if youre insp...

[Video Link]. Also contains an attractive woman in a bikini. (thanks, Tara McGinley!)...

Via the Smoking Gun, a frustrated (and now medicated) John Hinckley, Jr. is upset that the world knows him only as a would-be assassin of president Reagan. He writes songs and paints landscapes now. S...

Genius scientific paper of the day: "A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine, by O. Hai and I. B. Hakkenshit." (PDF). A response by annoyed Sudafed users to the o...

Jan Berenstain, who wrote and illustrated the popular Berenstain Bears children's books (and animated TV series, and records, and so on) with her husband Stan, has died at 88 years of age. The Berenst...

Etsy seller NirdHaus (AKA Ben Mayer) sells nerdy birdhouses and Christmas ornaments based on classic video-game and movie designs. NirdHaus is a safe place where crafts and general geekery unite to fo...

Action Figure Insider's Jason Geyer has published a second gallery of rejected toy-ideas he and his co-workers pitched to tie in with the launch of Star Wars: Phantom Menace (the first gallery came ou...

Rumblefish, a company notorious for sending copyright takedown notices to YouTube alleging copyright violations in videos' soundtracks, demanded removal of a video whose audio consists entirely of amb...

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 co-...

Today, Wikileaks releases its "Global Intelligence Files," a trove of more than 5,000,000 emails from Stratfor, a Texas based "global intelligence" company. The dump includes emails detailing Stratfor...

This beautiful Death Star cake is surprisingly straightforward to bake: two semi-spherical cakes are baked in steel bowls, then joined with sugar dowels, then iced and decorated with ganache polygons....

Americans rejoice! Chocolatier Paul A Young's chocopornoholic recipe book Adventures with Chocolate is out in the USA, in mouth watering goodness. I reviewed the book in 2009 when it was released in 2...

The Danish band Qu'est-ce Que fuck? claims that they were prevented from playing an anti-ACTA gig by KODA, a Danish rights-management society. They claim that KODA deliberately put a number of bureauc...

Kirby Ferguson, creator of the absolutely outstanding Everything is a Remix series, explains his theory of creative inspiration, remix, and cultural commons, citing some of history's best-loved "indiv...

Barry Ritholtz sez, "The Washington Post has been kind enough to allow me to vent about what is wrong with Wall Street and Washington DC. Today's episode: Robosinging Bank Settlement." Before the sett...

Madeline Ashby (whom you'll remember from such Boing Boing features as Surfaces - a short story for a thesis on border security sez, "This is an invitation to join a 2-day design jam in Toronto, focus...

Writing in Smithsonian magazine, magician Teller describes the neuroscience that underpins magical illusions, using admirably clear language to describe some of the weirdest ways that our brains can b...

Veteran author Jim C Hines offered some of his titles independently direct through Amazon's Kindle store. He discovered that Amazon reserves the right to arbitrarily reprice his books -- slashing the ...

The Associated Press has obtained portions of a suppressed independent investigation into the role that debt collectors working for microfinance giant SKS played in the suicides of desperately poor bo...

On the off-chance that your blood is in need of boiling on this fine Sunday, I present a Reddit discussion started by a teen survivor of a religious brainwashing school that practiced "education" tech...

Philipp Lenssen sez, "I've set up RootStrike as a minimalist site for easy referencing of root problems in online discussions. Problems -- like the corrupting system of US campaign funding -- which, i...

Here's a video of Google's head copyright lawyer Bill Patry (one of America's foremost copyright scholars) discussing his brilliant latest book How to Fix Copyright with copyfighting record exec Jim G...

Bill Lin snapped this picture of a ice-sculpture AT-AT in Bend, OR, made with chisel and chainsaw. This is just a little thumbnail, click through to see the full image at Kotaku. AT-ATs make surprisin...

Rudy Rucker has launched his own press, Transreal Press, and has inaugurated it with a massive single-volume collection of his complete short stories and a reissue of his long out-of-print steampunk c...

Alex Cox, director of the classic Repo Man, talks with The Quietus's Craig Terlino about his frustrations with the entertainment industry, the alleged longstanding studio grudge that's prevented a US ...

Research company Ipsos asked 19,000 adults in 24 countries how happy they are. Turns out they are pretty happy, even (especially?) people in poor countries. Some 77% of respondents now describe themse...

More fantastic, barn-storming Disney theme park theory from Passport to Dreams Old and New: On Integrity, an indictment of the wholesale destruction of the unique identity of Florida's Walt Disney Wor...

Harriet Harman, deputy leader the UK Labour Party, has explained her party's programme for the British Internet: "implement the Digital Economy Act under a clear timetable including getting on with th...

This device is a wheelchair steering "wheel" in the form of a dental retainer instrumented with sensors that are activated by a tongue piercing. Georgia Institute of Technology engineers devised the T...

In 1972, Dr. Ediwn Land introduced the first one-step instant camera, the Polaroid SX-70. According to Charles and Ray Eames' short promotional documentary about the camera, embedded below, the SX-70 ...

[Video Link: "Birthday Cake in the Face."] A quickie remix parody of "Birthday Cake" by Rihanna ft. Chris Brown. Lyrics quoted directly from the police report (PDF). What is this about? Created by And...

Everyone's favorite internet cat goes to the Academy Awards. Well, in poster form. You can't buy the posters, or the cat, but you can buy the book. More about the legend in this previous Boing Boing p...

New York Times tech columnist David Pogue sure has an interesting take on the Foxconn/worker's rights debacle. One point I agree with: it's a mistake to focus solely on Apple. Many, many Western techn...

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un aims a rifle at the Sporting Bullet Factory, built in 1996 at the order of the North's late leader Kim Jong-il. The factory produces "sporting bullets" for developing m...

Illustrator Jack Teagle painted this plaster cast to be auctioned on eBay for the charity Keep A Breast. Kitty Lea Cast by Jack Teagle...

No more hope. LA-based street artist Shepard Fairey today entered a guilty plea in his criminal case with the Associated Press. He's facing a maximum sentence of six months in prison. The criminal cas...

Evening Standard: "A prominent Right-wing Republican sheriff in Pinal Country, Arizona, known for his conspicuous campaign against illegal immigrants, is accused by his gay Mexican lover of three year...

After reading Pattie Boyd's memoir, Wonderful Tonight I think this spelling variant is apt. From a photo taken in Okinawa by Lawrence Downes....

[Video Link]I have heard many of these lines, myself. Jenny Saldaa (Facebook | Web | Twitter) is a Dominican actor/writer/producer/speaker who is surviving breast cancer with a fierce sense ...

Historically, people slept for four hours, woke up for a couple of hours, then fell back asleep for another four hours, according to historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech. In 2001, he "published a s...

On Thursday an El Paso County Commissioner, with a reputation for shouting down any efforts towards drug law reform, was was indicted by a federal grand jury for "conspiracy to distribute more than 11...

Kyle Wiens of iFixit reports on his visit to Molycorp Mountain Pass, the last rare earth metals mine in America. [The Atlantic, via The Verge]...

Posted by The Chris Valle to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool....

Imitation is the sincerest form of imitation. (Via Josh Helfferich)...

Our thanks to Shana Logic, one of the web's coolest indie shops. Everything there is 100 percent handmade or independently-designed. Plus, it's a small business so you're supporting artists. Shana Log...

Gawker's Adrian Chen tracked down the man behind @horse_ebooks, the fascinating twitter spambot....

A new girl indeed! Please give us back the old one, Rimmel. (Via Photoshop Disasters)...

Photojojo's iPhone Rangefinder clips onto your iPhone, making it look like an iPhone inside a case that looks like a bit like a rangefinder. It's compatible with Photojojo's magnetic fisheye, wide-ang...

[Video Link] Jeff Diehl made a great video of a his drive across the barren landscape of Mongolia, condensed to four minutes. It's a time-lapse with occasional real-time breaks and his comments. This ...

MG Siegler complains that the Wall Street Journal failed to credit him when covering a story he earlier scooped at TechCrunch: Apple Acquires Chomp. The Wall Street Journal Is Fucking Bullshit Earlier...

Umm? Official Liquid-Plumr Double Impact Commercial (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

Russian sculptor Katya Malakhova created a set of Batman matrioshkes that -- judging from the description -- actually nest. I wonder if the ears are hollow? Batman doll (via Neatorama)...

In the tradition of The Shining re-cut to look like an uplifting comedy, comes this music video, which repurposes scenes from several movies—most prominently 2001: A Space Odyssey—to tell ...

Jennifer Maestre is a sculptor who makes extremely pointy (and beautiful) pieces out of bunched nails and highly sharpened pencils. Jennifer Maestre (via Neatorama)...

"The Price of Privacy: How local authorities spent 515m on CCTV in four years" is a new report from Britain's Big Brother Watch, and it documents how the skyrocketing expansion of Britain's police and...

Wolfram co-founder Theodore Gray, whose books, puzzles, posters, vaults (!), card decks, and apps about the Periodic Table of Elements we've featured on Boing Boing many times, has a happy obsession: ...

Jillian York and Trevor Timm, writing for the EFF, explore the possibility that the Syrian government used satellite phone surveillance to pinpoint the locations of journalist Marie Colvin of the Sund...

[Video Link] Boing Boing's managing editor Rob, not Bob, but Rob, Beschizza speaks on the Russian television news network RT about Megaupload, ACTA, the global copyfight wars, and the high-flying hiji...

[Video Link]. Craig Davis Pinson, a composer who is a Boston Conservatory student, writes in the liner notes for the video embedded above: This is a set of variations written on the melody heard in th...

Annalee Newitz at io9: "What will happen if the state takes control of human reproduction? The answers could be weirder than you think and might terrify pro-life politicians as much as pro-choice adv...

The wonderful science fiction writer David Marusek sez,...

Rose Fox sez, Right this minute, eleven accomplished creative professionals have wedged themselves into a studio in Brooklyn, New York, and are in the process of putting together the first issue of tw...

Michael Geist sez, In what has become an annual rite of spring, each April the U.S. government releases its Special 301 report - often referred to as the Piracy Watch List - which claims to identify c...

New in the Watchismo Vault collection, the $17,500 Devon Tread watches, which use a cunning system of belts and optical sensors to keep and display the time. No, I don't have $17.5K to drop on somethi...

Jon Rosenberg, creator of the entirely demented Goats webcomic sez, "Just wanted to let you know that it looks like I'm going to be able to do a fourth Goats book, and I'm doing it without a publisher...

Carlos Bueno, author of a kids' book about understanding computers called Lauren Ipsum, describes what happens when the cadre of competing bots that infest Amazon's sales-database began to viciously f...

Last year I had 250 business cards printed up with :) printed on them and nothing else. Since then I've been finding handy uses for them: writing notes, flirting with girls on the bus, propping up the...

Buzzfeed's vision of the 1990s seems close to that of many Americans. From the other side of the pond, I offer a single addendum....

A heartening development in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's ongoing effort to secure the Internet's timezone database, which was threatened when an astrology software company called Astrolabe cla...

On the left, a jewelry design by TattyDevine. On the right, one sold by Claire's. I suspect that it's a fairly generic motif, but that really is very close to an exact rip, isn't it? Except that it's ...

Here's the 6th episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I'll interview one of the makers featured in the magazine. Our maker this week is William Gurstelle. He's a contributing editor t...

You may be fond of creating minimalist movie posters, which cleverly boil down a whole production to a single distinctive, cinematic motif. I'm afraid Slacktory's Jed Stoneham has you all conclusively...

Brian Provinciano's Retro City Rampage is a 2D sandbox kill-em-up similar to the pre-3D GTA outings—but with more 1980s. Available for pre-order, it'll be released on PC in both DRM-free form an...

Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Watchismo has just added three of the coolest independent watch brands to 'The VAULT', a cur...

Trevor sez, ZED.TO is a transmedia adventure that invites audiences to join the ranks of a biotech corporation called ByoLogyc. They're innovative and design-minded, they're the Apple of an emerging t...

Sound it Out # 18: Polica- "Lay Your Cards Out"" (ft Mike Noyce)I havent done any market research on this song, but Im pretty sure that the playing of it will make someone want to have sex with you. O...

Jonathan Mann has devoted today's song-a-day entry to the notorious Virginia transvaginal ultrasound. He notes, "As I was writing this song, the Virginia house passed a bill which still mandates ultra...

Indie juggler, conjurer and impresario Mat Ricardo sez, Earlier this month we launched the first in this season of Mat Ricardo's London Varieties - the combined comedy variety and interview show that ...

This Asian street-food vendor is a great showman, juggler, and all round bad-ass banana pastry maker. Expert Cooking - AMAZING !!! (Thanks, wetdog2!)...

A proposed anti-copying extension for the WC3's standard for HTML5 has been submitted by representatives of Google, Microsoft and Netflix. The authors take pains to note that this isn't "DRM" -- becau...

Matter is a new startup hoping to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter to support thoughtful, long-form journalism on the Internet. Founded by Bobbie Johnson (my former editor at The Guardian) and respected j...

The ad, clipped from one of the national Pakistani newspapers today (it apparently ran in all of them), seeks bids for a national censoring firewall: "Each box should be able to handle a block list of...

Alice spotted this coffee cart from the (above average) London coffee chain Apostrophe, which includes a superfluous apostrophe. It's either ironic or too clever by far. Oh the irony....

Piotr Czerski's manifesto, "We, the Web Kids," originally appeared in a Polish daily newspaper, and has been translated to English and pastebinned. I'm suspicious of generational politics in general, ...

Vill4no snapped this great shot of zombie Star Wars cosplayers at Megacon 2012, where there was much awesomeness on display, judging from the rest of the set. Best Star Wars Cosplay ever...

Inside Tibet and elsewhere, ethnic Tibetans are today observing Losar, or Tibetan New Year. Above: Tibetan women pray around the Labrang Monastery in Xiahe county, Gansu Province. A teenage Tibetan Bu...

Inside Tibet and elsewhere, ethnic Tibetans are today observing Losar, or Tibetan New Year. Above: Tibetan women pray around Labrang Monastery in Xiahe county, Gansu Province. Three Tibetan Buddhist m...

Our Maggie Koerth-Baker is on a train adventure across the USA. She's tweeting the ride. Everything about this is awesome. Here's a storify collection of most of her tweets. (thanks, Chris!)....

A short film about the happy side of hoarding. Director Mark Cersosimo of Departure Arrival Films: On an unseasonably warm November night in Manhattan on our way to get ice cream, we stumbled upon wha...

Wondering why your Facebook breastfeeding image was blocked, but not the image of a deep wound your friend posted? Wonder no more. A leaked document reveals the weird, arcane, and extremely detailed g...

Modern cereal box art features beloved characters rendered in a certain overdone pseudo-3D style. The technique: slickly-gradated shadows with intense highlights. When done well, the result offers the...

[Video Link], via Sean Bonner. I LOL'd, then cried, then hit play again and LOL'd some more. CONTAINS HELVETICA....

Know What is a new travel guide for LA and San Francisco (with New York, Chicago, Portland coming soon). It's available on the iPhone, and you can buy additional guides from different people. I contri...

Daniel Ritthanondh's "Barnacle Ceiling Lamp" is a tribute to the decor in the game Half Life, an altogether ooky bit of ceiling sculpture. Not yet available for sale, but Ritthanondh advises that a li...

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

[Video Link]. YouTube viewer comment: "I liked the part where they played the opening chords of the symphony." (thanks, Joe Sabia!)...

Cassetteboy vs. The News: "There's been a shocked response around the world to video footage appearing to show U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urinating on Boris Johnson." [YouTube via Metafil...

Video Link: "Justin, Bloody Justin, Bloody Bieber," by Hugh Oliver (website). It is reckoned that he's hotter Than Harry fucking Potter, His hairdo like some wagging gold retriever, Looking lovely, lo...

In this earnest, protracted video, an emphatic gentleman argues that the Earth does not rotate, and stresses that if science's claims to the contrary are accepted, that this will call all of the Bible...

Cornell's Franz Nigl and Jeremy Blum demonstrate their truss-climbing robot in this video, which accompanies a paper accepted into IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine. The robot can climb and reconf...

"Wait 'til they hear about this on CaringBridge!" I can relate to this video by 21-year-old Woody Roseland of Colorado. Here's his website with more background on his personal story, and his creative ...

In San Francisco, developers who want to build big projects are required to make space available to the public as part of their planning permission. Some of the most beautiful spots in town are in the...

A leaked screenshot from a Mormon database shows that Anne Frank has been posthumously baptised into the Mormon faith, again, despite LDS church promises to the contrary. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

My friend Nicole Tindall macramd her iPod headphones! Not only do they look fantastic, they tangle less frequently. Bonus: Nicole used macram string out of her mom's old supplies dating back to macram...

Eileen Gunn sez, "Amazon, seeking to force independent book distributor IPG to accept a new, less favorable contract, has struck out at all the publishers and authors whose books are distributed by IP...

NECA and BigBadToyStore have announced a forthcoming line of Portal toys, including this awesome Portal Gun replica. Aperature Studios Portal Gun Prop Replica (via Super Punch)...

Now that California's video-game censorship law has been struck down by the courts, the state finds itself $2 million poorer, having had to pay the legal expenses of all the vendors they sued under it...

Danny Choo snapped this wonderful cosplay cyclops at the Wonder Festival. Wonder Festival Cosplay (via Geekologie)...

With Google's privacy policy change looming, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a guide to turning off Google's search-history logging, thus preventing your search-history from all of Go...

The latest episode of The Mutant Season, hosted by the amazing 9-year-old Gil, has an interview with Jane and me about our podcast, Apps for Kids. We had a great time on the show, which is conducted i...

Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez, "Today the Sunlight Foundation continued an investigation of how congressional offices operate with a closer look at the ever-present "Revolving Door." The new ...

VoiceBunny is an online spot-market for professional voiceovers for your videos, podcasts, voicemail systems, etc. I imagine that involving the "In a world where..." movie trailer voice in your threat...

Jeff sez, "Flying in from Miami to Seattle this morning on Alaska Airlines Flight #17, I was somewhat amused (and a bit horrified) when the flight attendant said that the cabin doors would not be open...

If you couldn't afford to pay $6000 for the "art edition" of Mark Ryden's book Pinxit (it's sold out anyway), Taschen has thoughtfully introduced a popular-priced edition of the 366-page book, for $10...

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Here's a great, simple DIY project from A Beautiful Mess for using glued-on tapestry fabric to create a kind of floral saddle-shoe effect. They note that there's another version in the offing with str...

It's tempting—oh so tempting—to lead off a review of Samsung's Galaxy Note by mocking its enormous size. So I shall. The Note is big enough to give me a sense of empathy for our toddler wh...

AdaFruit has released a set of plans for building your own Internet of Things Printer. It's a weekend project that ends up with a homebrew analog of BERG's Little Printer. They also have a kit for sal...

This series is brought to you by TurboTax Federal Free Edition. Saving money is easy when you stop spending it. But who is ever going to do that? Instead, spend it a little less dumbly, and avail your...

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. In this week's episode In Jane and I talk about two gam...

Toronto's librarians are considering going on strike, as Mayor Rob Ford continues to make good on his election promise of "outsourcing everything that isn't nailed down." They're looking for your supp...

In this rousing video, Canadian comedian and commentator Rick Mercer adds to his earlier most excellent rant on Canada's bill C-30, a pending domestic spying bill that abolishes the need for a warrant...

Amelia_G sez, "The German Pirate Party is working out its platform online, transparently. One key concept is 'das Liquid Democracy,' intended to be a flowing interface between direct and indirect demo...

On Wired, Robert McMillan has an inspiring profile of GitHub, the remarkably successful, self-funded startup that provides a streamlined, easy-to-use version of Git, the version control system beloved...

As I recently posted, my colleagues and I at Institute for the Future hosted a conference late last year where we presented our new map, titled A Multiverse of Exploration: The Future of Science 2021....

From the August 1951 ish of Mechanix Illustrated, a modest HOWTO describing a "Snooperscope" that requires a 4,000 to 6,000-volt power-supply to fire infrared light at and through the materials around...

Here's the 1958 Ford brochure, in super-widescreen, showing all the models in a mural of tailspin desiderata. It's also available on Flickr at a whopping 2380 px wide, suitable for framing. 1958 Fords...

FCC Commissioner Robert M. McDowell has a WSJ op-ed condemning a treaty proposed at the International Telecommunications Union, the UN agency that oversees global phone systems, which would transfer m...

Motrhead has officially disavowed the "Complete Early Years Box Set" new $600 product issued by the band's former label, a division of Universal Music Group, which controls the rights to the band's ea...

My daughter Jane told me she wanted to build something "electronic," and luckily, I had a sample of the Solder: Time kit. It looked like a fun thing to make, and it turned to be so. It's a large digit...

This lovely squid-shaped USB drive makes for a fine way to transfer information around. 4GB for $35. Squid USB Flash Drive (Disclosure: the vendor is a Boing Boing advertiser, though I didn't know it ...

Matt Haughey shares his tips on traveling abroad with an unlocked Verizon smartphone: "Warning: don't use Verizon for international use." [A Whole Lotta Nothing]...

This cam-drone, illustrating an Atlantic article on the subject by Alexis Madrigal, is the work of Simon Jardine. Jardine's aerial imaging business has an online home at Eye in the Sky; check out his ...

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation profiled FinFisher and Amesys, two of the companies that had been caught selling network spying tools to despotic regimes around the world, including Hosn...

One of the most interesting technical presentations I attended in 2012 was the talk on "adversarial stylometry" given by a CMU research team at the 28C3 conference in Berlin. "Stylometry" is the pract...

A start-up called Organovo uses a 3D printer to build a variety of human tissue types, from cardiac muscle to blood vessels. The company hopes to eventually print entire organs for transplant from fee...

Tokyoflash's latest Kisai watch is the Kisai Stencil, based on a concept design submitted by a math teacher named Heather Sable. It uses "negative space" to draw the numbers, a display that is cryptic...

Russian scientists grew the plants above from the innards of fruit that had been frozen for 30,000 years. From Discover: The plant owes its miraculous resurrection to a team of scientists led by David...

Attention! There is now a unicorn version of Accoutrements' legendary Horse Head Mask. Product Features • Fits most adult heads • Super Creepy! • This mask lets you be the unicorn yo...

I'm digging this luminous t-shirt tribute to Isaac Asimov, from our friends at the Imaginary Foundation. UPDATE: The Imaginary Foundation's Director kindly offered BB readers 20% of the price of this ...

Bigott's "Cannibal Dinner," from the album The Orinal Soundtrack. Perhaps NSFW. (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)...

Tim Hutchings, who maintains the most excellent PlaGMaDA (Play Generated Map and Document Archive) has recovered a bizarre but strangely compelling amateur RPG about dolphins and he's producing a publ...

On Project Gutenberg, the 1811 edition of Francis Grose's "Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue," a compleat look at all the dirty cussin' of the early 1800s. It was produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles ...

Charles Tan sez, "Ekaterina Sedia translates a Russian fictional Table of Contents for Encyclopedia of Feminism According to Harry Potter." The Practice of Female Separatism in Daily Life of Luna Love...

Danny Choo snapped this wonderful cosplay cyclops at the Wonder Festival. Wonder Festival Cosplay (via Geekologie)...

Karen sez, "Instructables user abetusk has designed her own animatronic cat ears." Holy awesomely cute. I mean keee-yooo-te. I saw the demo video for the neurowear "necomimi" brain controlled cat ears...

Released today by Hard Case Crime books: The Comedy is Finished, by the late Donald E. Westlake. Book description: The year is 1977, and America is finally getting over the nightmares of Watergate and...

In this YouTube video, someone in Anonymous garb has threatens a massive, embarrassing document dump for Vic Toews, the Canadian MP and Public Safety Minister whose domestic spying bill will require I...

A reader writes, "User of popular music discussion board 'I Love Music' designs, builds and posts photos of a tiny home-made cardboard model of a record store. Fellow posters give their suggestions fo...

The rather unfortunate product name ("Borden's Hemo") along with the odd, stilted smile of the young man as he approaches the beverage suggests a vampiric note that probably wasn't intended. Bordens H...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!...

Hey, Austinites, Bruce Sterling's giving away his books at the ATX, the Austin Hackerspace, on Saturday from 5-7PM....

The January 2 issue of New Idea Australia revealed something surprising! (Via Photoshop Disasters)...

On Play This Thing! (my favorite games-review site), Greg Costikyan reviews "Realm of the Mad God," a strange blend of vintage graphics and contemporary, MMO-inspired gameplay. Realm of the Mad God ta...

Radiolab covers the strange saga of Marvel Comics's fight against the US customs authority over whether X-Men dollies were "dolls" or "toys" -- the difference being that dolls (which are defined as ch...

Middle-aged people who get face-lifts look between 6 and 8 years younger as a result, according to a paper published Monday. Caveat: the before-and-after mugshots used in the the 60-patient study were...

Water scientist Peter Gleick admitted that he was the source for the anonymous leak of documents from the climate-change-denying Heartland Institute. The documents -- obtained under a false name, and ...

Listeners tuning into Jazz FM's "Funky Sensations" show were treated Saturday to soft moans, fleshy slapping noises, and the incomparable sax of Sonny Rollins. The station apologized. The mix was reco...

Lawrence Lessig's new ebook One Way Forward is one of the most exciting documents I've read since I first found The Federalist Papers. One Way Forward is more of a long pamphlet than a book. It's temp...

Combine the spike in commodity metal prices with advances in geriatric medicine and the increased trend to cremation and what do you get? A thriving trade in artificial joint harvesting and recycling....

Kevin from the Raymond Scott Blog sez, "Exactly 75 years ago today, Raymond Scott recorded his iconic hit tune, 'Powerhouse.' On the same date, following 8 months of rehearsals with his Quintette at C...

John Herman sez, "I am producing 'An Evening of Apocalyptic Theatre' in Portsmouth, NH. Nine plays, nine visions of the end -- including new works by Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction auth...

Under a new deal signed by the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto, the act of emailing a link will be classed as equivalent to photocopying, and each student and faculty membe...

Lauren, proprietor of the LAMP zine, got frustrated after arguing with a homophobe on Facebook, so she whipped (!) up a parody of a fundamentalist tract called GOD HATES CHECKERED WHIPTAIL LIZARDS, de...

"Circuit Skull" is a prizewinning piece by Graham Rudge from the Yukon School of Visual Arts, entered in a Bank of Montreal competition. 1res uvres! Concours invitation destin aux tudiants en arts vis...

Pril, a brand of dish soap in Germany, had an online competition to create and vote for art to run on the label. The winning art is just so-so, but a few of the runners-up (shown here) are great. In o...

(Via This Isn't Happiness)...

On Instructables, CaseyBorders's recipe for making stained glass 20-sided dice. A bit tricky to carry these around in your grandad's old Crown Velvet bag, but otherwise, they make some pretty smashing...

The US Trade Representative claims that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, closed-door copyright treaty being negotiated in even greater secrecy than the notorious ACTA, is "transparent." Actually, he say...

Streaming rights to the Whitney Houston movie The Bodyguard were revoked at Netflix after her death. According to a Netflix rep quoted by Dan McDermott, the production company (Warner Bros., per IMDB)...

Streaming rights to the Whitney Houston movie The Bodyguard were revoked at Netflix after her death. According to a Netflix rep quoted by Dan McDermott, the production company (Warner Bros., per IMDB)...

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...

"I'm Not the Road" is the second album from NYC-based indie band Whisperado. I've been listening to it pretty steadily since it came out a couple weeks ago, with immense and ever-growing pleasure. Whi...

The beach at Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Photo: BBM Explorer I had my vasectomy on January 19, 2012, the date memorialized with the iCal notation "Vascect [sic] no lunch 34th st." At this writin...

For years the Turk, a chess-playing automaton, toured Europe and America, delighting audiences and besting Catherine the Great,Napoleon Bonaparte andBenjamin Franklin. But the Turk was a trick: Somewh...

Dominic Ludlam writes, "Promise.TV has launched the world's first Promiscuous TV recorder! Working on the UK's Freeview platform, it records every programme on every TV and radio channel and stores th...

The Science Fiction Writers of America have announced the nominees for the 2011 Nebula Awards, which are voted by the community of professional sf/f writers (in contrast to the Hugo awards, which are ...

Games creator Adrian Hon has a parodical modest proposal in the Telegraph: eternal copyright....

Gmoke sez, "Two grad students at Harvard have developed a method to print sheets of miniature drones, the Harvard Monolithic Bee or Mobee, that pop-up into their final form. So far they've got them to...

After many years of work, Video LAN Client (VLC), the all-powerful free/open video-player, has hit 2.0, with an amazing roster of new features. The new version is called "Twoflower," and it cuts throu...

Here's Frank Zappa explaining what went wrong with the music industry -- it all went sour when the clueless, cigar-chomping old guys hired hippies who "understood music" to do the picking. Frank Zappa...

It's that time again. Maggie is back at the largest science convention in the Western Hemisphere for four days of wall-to-wall awesomeness. Each day, she'll tell you about some of the cool things she ...

Hey, look, it's the Johnny Space Commander Mask! "Why Billy, Look! I've Already Bought You One! Let Me Put It On!"...

Vic Toews, the Canadian Public Safety minister who introduced a sweeping domestic spy bill (a bill whose name keeps changing and is likely to end up being called the "Utterly necessary and minimally i...

AaronRaff sez, "My grandpa worked up in the booth as a movie projectionist for over 25 years in Queens, NY. In this video he explains how projectionists would rig up a bell to ring when reels were rea...

In the New York Times, Charles Duhigg takes a creepy look at how Target mines its customer data to predict major life-changes, like pregnancy, so that they can send coupons that guide customers into t...

Independent game developers including Mojang, Oxeye Game Studio and Wolfire Games are jamming live this weekend. The theme: real-time strategy shoot 'em ups set in a steampunk ancient Egypt. Watch the...

Skifcha, who has a Facebook page and may be seen in its full glory at xgabberx's Vimeo, is now available in stereo. There are more adventures. [Thanks, Joel!]...

It's that time again. Maggie is back at the largest science convention in the Western Hemisphere for four days of wall-to-wall awesomeness. Each day, she'll tell you about some of the cool things she ...

Get your weekend going with Garoto Nacional by Strausz, a blast of anime, explosions, monsters, NSFW flesh, etc., set to a pounding dance track of similar dimensions. [Video Link. Released by Penetra ...

Over at Accidental Mysteries, a delightful collection of Vintage European Soap Packaging. (Thanks, Randall de Rijk!)...

AaronRaff sez, "My grandpa worked up in the booth as a movie projectionist for over 25 years in Queens, NY. In this video he explains how projectionists would rig up a bell to ring when reels were rea...

Spotted by the cash-register at London Drugs, a giant discount pharmacy-cum-big-box-store in downtown Vancouver, these cheap RFID-blocking credit-card sleeves. RFID-blocking wallet, point of sale, Lon...

The Canadian Harper government's policy of not allowing government researchers to speak without approval and without being attended by political minders is in the news again. A series of speakers at a...

Here's an interesting, short memoir about science fiction in Africa, written by Jonathan Dotse, a science fiction writer in Accra, Ghana. Dotse describes how his early exposure to science fiction chan...

This ad hearkens back to the days before America came to mistrust its military-industrial complex, the dreamtime when the scream of jets was a sound to comfort your children. Freedom Has a New Sound...

Dr Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre sez, "I did a really sophisticated and complex data visualisation. I think you might enjoy it. There's definitely a pattern in there, I just need to decide what statistic...

Dr Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre sez, "I did a really sophisticated and complex data visualisation. I think you might enjoy it. There's definitely a pattern in there, I just need to decide what statistic...

Western Sky Loans boasts that it's "not a Payday Loan!" Whatever it is, a 116.73% APR on a $5,075 loan seems a bit steep. After 84 monthly payments you'll have spent $40,872.72 paying it back. $5,075 ...

Dan Kaminsky sez, There's been a lot of talk about some portion of the RSA keys on the Internet being insecure, with "2 out of every 1000 keys being bad". This is incorrect, as the problem is not equa...

In the Vintage Ads LiveJournal group, a contributor called Noluck-Boston is currently digging up a fantastic set of cheesecake/pin-up fruit crate labels of yesteryear. Here's Foot-High Melons, and On ...

A charming advertisement for a college down under, by Henry and Aaron. Stay to the end. Send the kids out the room. [via Gizmodo]...

"The four posts of the death-machine tipped off Lang's fate: They were going to tear him apart -- nice and slow!" (Via Subtropic Bob)...

You'd think that the proponents of SOPA[1] would give up that legislative dead parrot's ghost. But they're still doing the rounds on radio and in print, claiming that millions of Americans were 'duped...

Tim O'Reilly tweeted: "Quantified self for caffeine addicts -- IOS app to optimize intake. (Didn't know half-life in body was 5 hours!)" Two doctors at Penn State University have developed Caffeine Zo...

Nerdcore rapper MC Chris is getting his own cartoon show, which apparently involves zombies, the music industry and profanity. Just as it should. the mc chris cartoon teaser trailer (via Neatorama)...

More fun from the self-loathing society: This American Life had a show about how young female undercover cops infiltrated a high school and flirted with boys to entrap them into selling pot, so they c...

For people who still think it's important to shower with soap, this is neat: a piggybacking soap bar system. When the bar of soap becomes a sliver, you just stick it into the hollow part of a new bar ...

Criticism of C-30, Canada's proposed domestic spying law, has focused on the fact that the police could access certain kinds of ISP subscriber information without a warrant. But as Terry Milewski writ...

Last night, Rob posted a very good piece on Apple's new "Gatekeeper" technology, which defaults to warning users of Apple's new Mountain Lion OS that software from companies that haven't been official...

On the always-excellent How to Be a Retronaut site, a great collection of 1960s fallout shelter ads, a perfect capsule of upbeat, cheerful fear-selling. Fallout Shelter Ads, 1960s...

The @Vikileaks30 account on Twitter has been publishing embarrassing personal information about Canada's Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who is pushing for a domestic spying law that would require I...

Google has been caught circumventing iOS's built-in anti-ad-tracking features in order to add Google Plus functionality within iPhone's Safari browser. The WSJ reports that Google overrode users' priv...

John Scalzi's Big Idea introduces Bruce Schneier's excellent new book Liars and Outliers, and interviews Schneier on the work that went into it. I read an early draft of the book and supplied a quote:...

The Humble Indie Bundle people are gearing up for their next event, the Humble Bundle Mojam, and this one's pure charity. Humble fans voted on which game they wanted to see the folks at Mojang (creato...

The new OS X Gatekeeper encourages desktop apps to be registered with Apple, with users warned against installing unsigned software unless they disable the prompts. The benefits—and the potentia...

The Blast Lab at Imperial College, London, is a place where scientists study how explosions affect the human skeleton, and try to find ways to mitigate some of those effects. As you can imagine, this ...

Meet Brookesia micra, one of four newly identified species of ultra-small chameleons that live in Madagascar. Never let it be said that reptiles can't be totally cute. Submitterated by Dr. Sideshow an...

I'm going to be speaking on Monday, February 20th, at the meeting of the British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association, starting at 7:00 pm. My presentation will focus on the North American electric...

"Encrypt Facebook is a Chrome extension that would prevent snooping on the discussions,status updates in Facebook groups by storing it them in an encrypted format on Facebook's database instead of nor...

Justine Larbalestier, a very good novelist with very bad RSI, has written a great post called "Why I Cannot Write a Novel With Voice Recognition Software." In it, she explains why machine-based speech...

Gever Tulley, co-founder of the Brightworks K-12 school, says: The whine and growl of high-performance electric motors, the smell of ionized air, the squeal of rubber on pavement, the roar of the crow...

Canadian MP Vic Toews is pushing bill C-30, a domestic spying bill that requires ISPs to log your online activity and give it to police without a warrant. He says that if you don't support this, you "...

Back in 2008, I posted about Neil Harbisson, an artist with complete color blindness who makes paintings like those above using a camera/computer system that translates colors into sounds. In an edito...

Virginia Prescott of New Hampshire Public Radio interviewed me today about the Apps for Kids podcast that my daughter Jane and I do each week. With developers pumping out an estimated 2,000 applicatio...

IFPI, the international recording industry lobby, has gone on the offensive to save ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an unprecedented international copyright agreement negotiated in secr...

Matthew Frye Jacobson, a professor of American Studies at Yale, made a gallery of hundreds of photographs of commercial buildings that have "Space Available." Indeed, that's the name of the photo seri...

Artist Mark Reigelman, working with architect Jenny Chapman and engineer Paul Endres, created a rustic cabin and installed it as a parasite on a big building in San Francisco. Too bad nobody is living...

This summer, Lego will ship an official Minecraft "Micro World" set, with blocks designed to look like the primitives used for construction in the popular game/virtual playset. Help Steve survive his ...

Expensive, yes, but I heard the public schools in the area are very good. It's 35,000 square feet and includes a a three-bedroom caretaker's house. It was part of the divorce settlement between Texas ...

A Canadian Conservative MP has asked for an end to medium-wide camera shots in the broadcasts of Parliament on Friday afternoons. Fridays are when many MPs travel to their home ridings (districts) and...

In 1982, famed author Martin Amis published a book about arcade games: Invasion of the Space Invaders. He's since become reluctant to discuss this curiosity, which poses the question--why? Was it rend...

Indie documentary maker Michael McMahon sez, The year is 2036. Decades after the second American Civil War and the global nuclear strike known as 'N-Day', an American soldier named John Titor is assig...

Do you want to add a more "human element" to your next project? The Pulse Sensor, available in the Maker Shed, measures subtle changes in light from expansion of the capillary blood vessels to sense y...

The Colbert Report is off the air and no one knows why, or if they do, they're not saying....

Kim Zetter in Wired: TSA agents in Dallas singled out female passengers to undergo screening in a body scanner, according to complaints filed by several women who said they felt the screeners intentio...

RussiaTrek's DeIntegro has assembled a marvelous gallery of mid-century Soviet space-program propaganda posters, showing brave and noble Russians ascending to the heavens on the back of sound socialis...

The foundation of Web security rests on the notion that two very large prime numbers, numbers divisible only by themselves and 1, once multiplied together are irreducibly difficult to tease back apart...

OS X is to go onto a yearly release schedule, a la iOS, starting with this summer's Mountain Lion. Highlights include deeper iCloud integration and document storage; renamed core applications; the rem...

Writing on 21k12, Jonathan Martin offers up a thoughtful response to the "plague of cheating" in secondary and postsecondary education. The right way to reduce cheating is to make education about more...

Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Check out the most controversial watches of the Mr. Jones Watch Collection: the Fuck Cancer ...

Andy Baio and his 15-year-old nephew Cooper McHatton created PlayFic, "a community for writing, sharing, and playing interactive fiction games (aka 'text adventures') entirely from your browser, using...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has begun to publish a series of informative corporate biographies of technology companies that make network spying equipment and sell it to torturing dictators like...

Here's the 5th episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I'll interview one of the makers featured in the magazine. Our maker this week is Carol Reiley (@robot_MD and @tinkerBelleLabs). ...

Surfing the Gnarl is the latest volume in PM Press's wonderful Outspoken Authors series: a collection of slim, handsome chapbooks curated by Terry Bisson that combine essays, stories and interviews (I...

Just this morning, I was thinking that I needed an accordion file to slip into my laptop bag. The GAMAGO gods heard my prayers and responded this afternoon with a handsome Accordion File that certainl...

The Beastie Boys' Michael "Mike D" Diamond is part of an AT&T investor group seeking to put a net neutrality question on the shareholder ballot: "The shareholder resolution would recommend each c...

Bret Victor was once a "Human Interface Inventor" for Apple, and was apparently key to the iOS/tablet efforts at the company. In this hour-long presentation to CUSEC (a Canadian computer science organ...

[Video Link] Adafruit's Circuit Playground looks like a major update to Collin Cunningham's earlier circuit design assistant app. Circuit Playground simplifies electronics reference & calculation ...

"Code Hero is a game that teaches you how to make games so you can learn to code while you play with a Code Gun that shoots Javascript in Unity 3D." I was very impressed with the demo of Code Hero tha...

Ant sez, "Cory kindly posted about Dimensions, a 1920s/30s sci-fi drama filmed in Cambridge, England, when we were in pre-production. At the time we were trying to round up steampunk props for our mai...

Today Cartoon Movement launches the first monthly installment of Army Of God, an ambitious 100 page work of comics journalism by David Axe and Tim Hamilton focusing on the Lord's Resistance Army in th...

Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin shoots buildings around his town of Ghent and then mashes them up into impossible (and beautiful) structures he calls "Fictions." Dujardin's website is a bit cumber...

"When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're taking their time. They'll sit in ...

Julian Oliver's "Transparency Grenade" is a surveillance device shaped like a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, stuffed with network sniffers and other technology. It is intended to be hidden in smoke-filled ro...

[Video Link] Neal Stephenson talks about "our society's inability to execute on big stuff, to get big stuff done. In the first two thirds of the 20th century we went from not believing that heavier-th...

Writing in The Atlantic, Megan McArdle analyzes the societal cost of requiring a doctor's visit to get a prescription for Sudafed, in order to make it harder to acquire materials used in fabricating m...

"Large group of smiling business people. Teamwork." by Kurhan. Courtesy of Shutterstock. If you want to understand why Silicon Valley startups keep tripping into privacy-related PR disasters, you coul...

More dominoes are falling in the global fight to kill ACTA -- Bulgaria and the Netherlands have joined Germany and many other EU nations in refusing to move further on the secretive copyright treaty t...

So. That happened. Interesting tidbit for those of you too horrified to watch: Hissing cockroaches apparently give birth upside down with their lady parts up in the air. Another thing I learned: Anima...

[Video Link] This is pretty much what all spoken directions sound like to me, and why I depend on my GPS. (Via Cynical-C)...

Yesterday, the Canadian Conservative government introduced a "minor" change to its sweeping domestic spying bill. Instead of being called the "Lawful Access Act" it is now called the "Protecting Child...

Terri Luanna DaSilva is the daughter of science fiction writers Spider and Jeanne Robinson. Readers will remember that Jeanne died of cancer in 2010. Now the family has been visited by cancer again: T...

Vic Toews is the controversial Canadian Minister of Public Safety whose spying bill will require ISPs to log and retain an enormous amount of your online activity, and then make that available to poli...

Before the Lights Go Out is Maggie's new book about how our current energy systems work, and how we'll have to change them in the future. It comes out April 10th and is available for pre-order now. (E...

[Video Link] (Via Biotv)...

The Man Who Prints Houses is a documentary about Enrico Dini, an Italian roboticist who switched tracks to design and build enormous 3D printers capable of outputting houses: Having built his printer ...

God-Man Commandeth that you visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and that you do Follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER....

Hot on the heels of Adam "Ape Lad" Koford's Unizilla T-shirt comes this piece of formal attire: Skullcap. Designed by Sarina Frauenfelder, the design represents the relationship between the universali...

I snapped a photo of the art on the box on the left before tossing it in the recycling bin. What a hideous illustration! Then & Now #11: Inn-Hospitable Then and Now #10.5: Tear Mender Then & N...

When I was in second grade, I got health insurance for the first time. I remember my parents—with looks on their faces somewhere between proud and relieved—telling me that it was now total...

Britain's Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) seizes domains in similar fashion to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But whereas American authorities' placeholders are all businesslike neocl...

James, a photo retoucher in New Zealand, makes these "de-touched" "polygon hero" posters, 3D representations of familiar comics icons, downrezzed to abstract jaggie forms. Polygon Heroes (Thanks, dani...

Takanori Aiba's bonsai and epoxy fancies are beautiful, gnarly fairylands, full of whimsy and perfectly weird. (Image: "Bonsai-B" and "Htel de Michelin" by TAKANORI AIBA, copyright TOKYO GOOD IDEA Dev...

Last week, we learned that scientists had reconstructed the song of a Jurassic-era cricket. This week, song-a-day impresario Jonathan Mann has written a ballad to that lonely insect and its ancient qu...

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. In this week's episode we have a special guest. He's Ja...

Here's a trailer for a documentary-in-progress called "Kidnapped for Christ," which tells the stories of children whose evangelical Christian parents pay military-style boarding school to render them ...

After the fall of the Qaddafi regime, secret police documents were discovered linking the UK spy agency MI6 with the kidnap of two leading Libyan dissidents and their families, in order to deliver the...

Boontdustie sez, "Topeka, Kansas craigslist - A man built entire 'Cowboy Town' in backyard and is now looking to sell it all for $20,000. Complete with bank, saloon and livery stable... Awesome pics i...

Here's a long-lost 1937 report on police corruption in San Francisco: In 1935, the citizens of the city of San Francisco were indignant when tales of police officers having amassed huge fortunes throu...

On the always-excellent Search Engine podcast from TVOntario, host Jesse Brown interviews Alan Borovoy, general counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Borovoy in one of Canada's most res...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's SSL Observatory is a research project that gathers and analyzes the cryptographic certificates used to secure Internet connections, systematically cataloging them ...

Canadian comedy hero Rick Mercer nails the new Canadian spying bill and the political tactics that gave rise to it. Bravo! Rick Mercer: Rant: Be Afraid (Thanks, James!)...

Ford's Theater's Center for Education and Leadership sports a 6,800 volume, 34-foot-tall tower of (aluminum replica) books about Abraham Lincoln. The majority of the titles are histories and biographi...

On my way to Dallas-Fort Worth airport today, I snapped this picture of the sticker on the inside of the back-seat passenger-side window of my taxi. It warns "The method used to authenticate credit ca...

Wired Science's Dave Mosher investigates elastomeric soft robots -- air-powered origami creepers that can go places that challenge their rigid metallic kin. Getting the soft robots to perform a partic...

Absolut has commissioned Jamie Hewlitt (co-creator of Tank Girl and Gorillaz) to do a limited edition vodka bottle celebrating London's public drunkenness. It's a rather nice piece of work, too -- sui...

Kader Arif is the former EU official who served as rapporteur on ACTA (the secretive copyright treaty pushed by the US Trade Rep) on Europe's behalf. He made headlines when he handed in his report on ...

Juliette says: Following The New York Times Sunday profile on VICE's in house drug aficionado/chemist, Hamilton Morris and his original web series Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, VICE today premieres the lat...

Several years ago, I read Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree -- his "true history of science fiction" from Mary Shelley to the early 1970s. I found Aldiss's account of the genre's development entertain...

My friend Vann Hall received the following email from the FBI. Apparently, they caught him through their, er, track light monitoring device. Vann, I hope you can clear this up quickly! respectively, p...

Brian Jewett makes various kinds of sculptural housewares, including ticket bowls ("Made by winding multiple rolls of tickets into one disc, shaping and sealing"). He made this ticket-bowl teapot as a...

VeriSign Inc., the company responsible for assuring that more than half the world’s websites are authentic, was hacked multiple times in 2010, and the thieves succeeded in stealing information, ...

Shane Speal says: The Speal’s Tavern Cigar Box Guitar Museum near Pittsburgh, PA has been expanded and improved for 2012. The museum now sports over 40 handmade instruments, cigar box amplifiers...

Here's a trailer for Tim Burton's forthcoming adaptation of the satirical horror novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Hard to tell how Burton will play it -- it will be tricky to maintain the releva...

Over at Submitterator, anelson sends us this surreal video of a child playing with a huge pack of Saint Bernards in a temperate rainforest in British Columbia. I love the idea of being surrounded by t...

Over at Submitterator, anelson sends us this surreal video of a child playing with a huge pack of Saint Bernards in a temperate rainforest in British Columbia. I love the idea of being surrounded by t...

Buzzblog sez, "Ten years ago today, at 9:25 a.m., Slashdot founder Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda, used his insider access to the homepage of one of the tech worlds most popular forums to send a very public Val...

[Video Link] "Dear God, we should not be putting civil rights issues to a popular vote to be subject to the sentiments, the passions of the day. No minority should have their rights subject to the pas...

A gallery of clown portraits....

Bye-bye, Blackberry: "The U.S. federal government's main procurement agency is issuing iPhones and Android-based devices to some of its 17,000 workers." (Reuters)...

Marilyn Terrell of National Geographic Traveler magazine says, "I thought you might like this sweet story about Alexander Graham Bell, who was a 27-yr-old Scottish speech therapist and part-time inven...

(In 2010, Boing Boing was pleased to feature as a guestblogger Arthur Goldwag, author of Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, B...

A fellow named Joe, from Saskatchewan, Canada, has been digging out his basement since 2005 with a fleet of remote-control scale models of tractors and trucks. He even has a conveyor belt to move the ...

Alarm Talk is a handsome iPhone app that reads the weather and your agenda to you in an appropriately lo-fi robotic voice. It's $2 in the iTunes store....

Further to Mark's bizarre old Valentines post from yesterday: Flickr user Page of Bats has assembled a marvellous and often inexplicable collection of tasteless, gross and weird vintage V-day cards. I...

"From Public Radio International's Bullseye with Jesse Thorn: Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing and the Gweek podcast joins us to share his recommendations this week: the drawing game Depict and the Bl...

As a veteran character animator, I was beginning to doubt whether I'd ever again have the opportunity to create a short narrative piece -- then I got the call. When Google calls and says, "We'd like y...

NME today reports: "Jamie Oliver has apparently found rare Joy Division and New Order master tapes when digging up the basement of a new restaurant in Manchester." (thanks, Michael Donaldson)...

Video Link, from www.memrise.com....

This Valentine's Day, enjoy a classic essay by Annalee Newitz about celebrating differently-defined love. (image: Shutterstock)...

From the Smithsonian's snapshot series, a special image for Valentine's Day: Caged crinoline, also known as a hoop skirt, was the most distinctive silhouette of the late 19th century. This photo shows...

gmoke sez, "Post an Instructable on how to turn a virtual item into a tangible object by April 30, win $100,000 in 3D printing tech and supplies. Examples include 3D printed objects, laser-cut files, ...

Foster Kamer at Betabeat writes: "Apple released an announcement today explaining that the Fair Labor Association will be conducting an independent audit that is unprecedented in size and scale in the...

Tompkins Square records have released an exquisitely-curated collection of pre-war music exploring the timeless themes of love -- found and lost. Aime & Perdre: To Love & To Lose, Songs, 191...

Tompkins Square records have released an exquisitely-curated collection of pre-war music exploring the timeless themes of love -- found and lost. Aimer et Perdre: To Love & To Lose, Songs, 1917-1...

Video Link. The recently-launched Women Under Siege website is a new project of the NYC-based Womens Media Center, and features a number of powerful essays and features by women, about sexual violence...

Katie Metcalfe from the video publishing/sharing community at Vimeo says, I'm reaching out from Vimeo where we are currently working on the Vimeo Festival + Awards, which is happening in June in ...

Happy Valentine's Day! "My wife could turn to me and she may say, Why do you love me?' And I can with all honesty look her in the eye and say, 'Because our pheromones matched our olfactory receptors."...

Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!...

Aspiring science fiction and fantasy writers have two weeks left to get their applications in to this summer's Clarion Writers' Workshop at UC San Diego. I'm a Clarion grad, instructor and board membe...

Vic Toews, the Canadian Tory MP pushing for the new spying bill says that people who oppose him are "standing with child pornographers." Mr Toews's bill will require ISPs to record all your online act...

Judge Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the ninth circuit court of appeals, is rather outspoken. In a good way. This page collects some of his most memorable quips: The two provisions have as much in comm...

Icecube sez, "Earlier this month, a flier was released by the FBI saying that TOR users might be terrorists. It seems that there is another article that was recently published that says that if you se...

Speaking of animals doing people things, here's a fox queuing for an ATM. You may cry shoop! When I lived in South London, however, foxes were quite approachable and friendly. They did not, however, g...

Jo Walton, author of the incomparably wonderful novel Among Others is on tour with the paperback, and she's stopping in Toronto at BakkaPhoenix Books on Feb 25 at 3PM....

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...

RJ Palacio's new book Wonder is a middle-grades novel about August ("Auggie"), a young boy born with severe facial abnormalities who, at the age of 10, leaves the safety of his parents' homeschooling ...

There's a whole tumblr of stuff like this....

The Wall Street Journal was first to report that Verizon Wireless and AT&T will offer the next edition of Apple's iPad to run on their newest 4G wireless networks....

Dr. Jen Gunter, who is an OB/GYN and a pain medicine physician, writes a harrowing account of receiving a patient who has undergone an unsafe abortion, and is bleeding to death: On the gurney lay a yo...

The Guardian's Asia correspondent Jonathan Watts sneaks into Aba, a remote town on the Tibetan plateau, and captures this video report of how Chinese authorities are trying to stamp out dissent among ...

Dr. Jen Gunter, who is an OB/GYN and a pain medicine physician, writes a harrowing account of receiving a patient who has undergone an unsafe abortion, and is bleeding to death: On the gurney lay a yo...

Video Link. Adam Forgie, who shot the video, shoots videos like this with some regularity. "I take care of my legally-blind, near-deaf grandmother," he explains. "She may be blind, but she can still d...

Amazon Link. I can't tell what's funniest here, the user reviews, or the pricing and seller details: (thanks, Fell Pie I)...

The head of an inflatable sex doll is pictured in a box at Ningbo Yamei plastic toy factory, on the outskirts of Fenghua, Zhejiang province, February 13, 2012. The company started producing sex dolls ...

Fro Design's Mario Propaganda posters show how the other side recruited all those turtles and carnivorous plants. COMPLETE MARIO PROPAGANDA SET (via Super Punch)...

If you ever needed a good reason to buy a whipped cream maker: The New York Times adapted several of Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine recipes to work with ingredients and equipment you're actually ...

Michael Geist sez, "The Canadian government will introduce new Internet surveillance legislation that will mandate a massive new surveillance infrastructure at all Canadian ISPs and remove the need fo...

El Zombre sends us this great video of Apollo 17 astronauts singing a silly song together on the moon surface. I dug in a little, and Wikipedia confirms that this is real footage! Thanks El Zombre! [V...

Minecraft's defiantly unrealistic style notwithstanding, players appreciate the game's internal consistency and get frustrated at certain failures of verisimilitude. Chunk errors, for example, are squ...

Scott Henson, "a former journalist turned opposition researcher/political consultant, public policy researcher and blogger," recounts how he was repeatedly stopped and eventually cuffed and detained w...

Thanks Frycook! via Submitterator...

Our pal Adam "Ape Lad" Koford managed to capture the elusive unizilla and draw it from life. (He released it safely into the wild so it could get back to the business of destroying cities). The result...

NYT: "PrivacyChoice, a company that has analyzed and indexed the data in hundreds of privacy policies across the Web, has developed a system to score Web sites on a scale of 0 to 100 based on how a si...

Well look what just spilled onto the internet. An unreleased Die Antwoord track, performed live on the current tour, but not included on TEN$ION. The leaked track, "Money and Da Power," features a sam...

Donovan Leitch and I were together during the holidays of the year 2000, I think it was. We had been discussing the Hip-Hop movie trend where musicians were having shoot-outs with cops and/or other Hi...

On DeviantArt, thebiscuitboy showcases his "zoological nonsense" creations, trophy-heads of fanciful creatures inspired by Dr Seuss. These are really fantastic (if a little disturbing). Walrus, Baffle...

[Video Link] A fellow named Scott Cover noticed a group of Baltimore Police standing over a man handcuffed on the ground. He remembered reading that morning that the Baltimore Police department had to...

This series is brought to you by TurboTax Federal Free Edition. Back in 2010, Rachel Botsman wrote a book titled "What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption," which was one of the fir...

Gunpoint puts you in the role of a freelance spy, performing jobs for the highest bidder. Joining elements of Taito classic Elevator Action and puzzle-based hacking sims, it's a one-man heist experien...

Cary Huang's amazing Scale of the Universe animation has been updated—now with a better format, extra background information about the objects whose sizes are being compared, and more opportunit...

Responding to a post by David Heinemeier Hansson, Bryce Roberts thinks aloud about "indie" businesses -- high tech startups that eschew the fast path to sale and exit and opt for slower, self-financed...

When we read something silently we are, essentially, saying it to ourselves in our internal monologue. Psychology researchers at Britain's University of Nottingham wanted to know whether the voice tha...

At The Guardian, Josh Halliday writes about Sony's rush to profit from Whitney Houston's death. Sony Music has come under fire after it increased the price of a Whitney Houston album on Apple's iTunes...

Thanks to a tweet by Ars Technica's John Timmer, I was introduced this morning to Gomez's Hamburger—a delightfully named astronomical feature about 900 lightyears away from Earth. The name is fu...

Cat Valente, author of such outstanding novels as The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making and Deathless, is guest-editing Charlie Stross's blog, posting writing advice. Part...

Artist Mitch O'Connell opened his ephemera vault to find his sub-collection of unusual vintage Valentine's Day cards. Below, a small sampling from his post. The Top 100 Most Strange, Odd, Perplexing a...

If that special person in your life has the right sense of humor, this card, designed by dandee and for sale on Etsy, may be just the thing to make them feel all smooshy inside without playing in too ...

The BBC's Panorama looks at the rise of semi-official homeless tent-camps in American cities. These are springing up in states where austerity "balanced budget" drives are severely cutting services. E...

After World War II and the toppling of the Nazi regime, the Soviets laid claim to much of Germany's highly-advanced metallurgy industry. In so doing they got a head start on the Cold War race for supe...

This very beautiful working Stirling-engine steam-car model was made by the Germany company Bhm Stirling-Technik and sells for $500. The stirling Car A1 (Thanks, Francesco!)...

In 1981, comics writer Alejandro Jodorowsky teamed up with French comic artist legend Moebius and created a new French comic serial called The Incal, (allegedly salvaging a bunch of material Jodorowsk...

Ever since fire consumed the Library of Alexandria, bibliophiles have been captivated by stories of epic endings to libraries. Madison, Wisconsin recently contributed a memorable ending, answering the...

I'm giving a free talk tonight at UT Arlington engineering, 7PM at the Lonestar Auditorium, entitled: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Internet Regulation." Tell your friends!...

Economics researchers at Wellesley College and U Minnesota have published a study showing that feature films' US box office returns are not correlated to BitTorrent sharing. They also show that shorte...

A gasoline bomb explodes at riot police during a huge anti-austerity demonstration in Athens' Syntagma (Constitution) square February 12, 2012. Historic cinemas, cafes and shops went up in flames in c...

Xi Jinping, the man expected to take Hu Jintao's post as general secretary of China's Communist Party later this year, came from humble beginnings. According to a Los Angeles Times profile this weeken...

Saudi Arabia is reported to have used Interpol's "red notice" system to locate and arrest journalist Hamza Kashgari, 23, (image at left) over tweets perceived as an insult to the Prophet Muhammad. The...

Here's artist Bruce McCall explaining the aesthetic of his retrofuturistic "serious nonsense" illustrations, which nostalgically recall futures that never came to past. It's a very sweet TED talk, and...

Todd Johnson's Shockfossils are "multimillion volt Lichtenberg figures in acrylic." He masks acrylic slabs with lead and then rents time on a commercial particle accelerator and the result are beautif...

Greg sez, "Check out this collection of all-new flash fiction from some huge names -- Neil Gaiman, Lev Grossman, Scott Westerfeld, Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe, N.K Jemisin, IO9 contributing editor An...

Probably not the best choice of font for the flag of the US Marine Corps Scout Snipers. From CNN: The Marine Corps said it became aware of the photo last November and the local command investigated, b...

Reuters reports that the most award-winning songstress of all time died today: "A Beverly Hills police officer told reporters at a briefing that emergency assistance received a call from the Beverly H...

This much is certain: Gary Friedrich created the Marvel comics character Ghost Rider. Freidrich sued Marvel (and its new owners, Disney) because he claims that he never signed away the rights to his c...

Walt74 sez, "Today about 10.000 people protested the ACTA treaty in Berlin, people in whole Germany went on the streets, 50.000 altogether. Here are my pics from the protests in Berlin." Did you get p...

I've never seen anyone fringe the ring quite like that before. [Jiskefet via Reddit]...

Back in 2008, the blog Who Cares About That? wrote about Vanessa Mancini's project to build a functional sculpture: a bathtub made from deconstructed books fitted together and then sealed so that one ...

Walt and Lilian Disney's daughter Diane talks to the Huffington Post about her parents' "secret apartment" over the firehouse on Disneyland's Main Street, USA. The apartment, decorated by a film produ...

The Art of Google Books is a Tumblr devoted to "Captured mark of the hand and digitization as rephotography" -- that is, collecting examples of accidental art generated by scanning glitches from the G...

Here's a MMO-Champion thread in which Ramsesakama sets out to recreate the World of Warcraft realm of Kalimdor in the maker-friendly game/environment Minecraft, in faithful 1:1 scale. Using procedural...

Here's the casting-call poster for Samuel Bayer's video for Nirvana's iconic 1991 anthem, Smells Like Teen Spirit. It asks (unpaid?) extras to be prepared to "adopt a high-school personna (sic), i.e. ...

Here's Washington State rep Maureen Walsh, a Republican, explaining to her colleagues why her she was breaking with the party line and voting in favor of same-sex marriage. It's an emotional, moving a...

Mark V sez, "Electric Puppet Theatre is a web comic that I draw in Inkscape, using git for version control. A neat side effect of using git is that I can make a 'making of' video for each 24 page issu...

Today is the day of global protest against ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a copyright treaty negotiated in secret (even parliaments and other legislatures weren't allowed to see the th...

Bill Keller, former executive editor of The New York Times, rails against those who mock him. The newspaper published someone else's column without permission while he was busy insisting that copyrigh...

John Brownlee on why there'll probably never be an ARM Mac on store shelves, despite Apple's porting of OS X to the platform: "ARM processors are still relatively slow, and unsuitable for the vast arr...

Quinn Norton's first-person account of the police raid on Occupy DC for Wired is riveting and scary. The Occupy camp that was demolished was riven by a deep disagreement on tactics and politics, and t...

Peter Sunde, the notorious and entrepreneurial "brokep" who co-founded the Pirate Bay, writes in Wired about his view on the entertainment industry's corruption and the cluelessness of the lawmakers w...

Converse will release two different styles of Super Mario low-top in Japan in March 2012 -- I like the overall look, though I think I'd prefer them in canvas over leather. It comes in a black and a wh...

Noah sez, "I thought you might enjoy this piece I was recently commissioned to create for a play about an electrician who starts channeling the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Needless to say the peopl...

Aaron Swartz, the young activist and entrepreneur who kicked off the fight against SOPA and PIPA, talks strategy and tactics with the MIT Technology Review, and makes a lot of important points about t...

Writing in the WSJ, Tom Downey describes what he perceives as a new shift in the way that Japanese food, coffee, cocktails and fashion relates to the outside world; according to Downey, the ideal now ...

Inky-handed, staple-punctured mutants, start your engines! The LA Zine Fest comes to the Spring Arts Tower (453 S. Spring Street) on Feb 19, from 11AM to 5PM. Team False Start is a collective of zine-...

Alcoa's 50,000-Ton forging press in Cleveland is "one of the great machines of American industry." Built in 1955, the "Fifty" broke down three years ago, and Alcoa considered scrapping it. But it's ba...

Michael Geist sez, As the public outrage SOPA effectively killed SOPA and tens of thousands of Europeans take to the streets to protest ACTA, Canadians need to do their part to counter the inclusion o...

[Video Link] Book of Sith, by Daniel Wallace, just came out today. It features a battery-powered electronic case. The black-and-red pyramid-shaped Sith case appears innocuous. But with the touch of a ...

Eolas, a notorious patent troll who partnered with the University of California in a shakedown scheme that claimed royalties for all "interactive web sites" that featured rotating images, streaming vi...

Locus magazine, the venerable science fiction trade publication put out by the nonprofit Locus Science Fiction Foundation has finally gone digital, selling DRM-free PDFs, ePubs, and Mobis on a subscri...

The oldest living thing on Earth is a massive "meadow" of sea grass growing in the Mediterranean between Spain and Cyprus. It's somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years old and reproduces by clonin...

CIA.gov is down. Any number of entities might like to claim credit, but Anonymous seems to be first (via various accounts on Twitter). No hard reporting available yet, however, and given the target in...

Italian Etsy seller ConceptualDevices made this $450 elephant beanbag chair, "a place where to read (and write) fairy tales." Its external lining is made of a soft fabric used for outdoor upholstery p...

A Sith nun is be found in this month's edition of Elle. [Thanks, Heather!]...

Mark W Shead uses the terrifying design of this air pistol (you have to point is straight at your face to check the pressure) as a jumping-off point for a short, to the point essay on "domain knowledg...

In an interesting interview at CEPro, Alan Parsons, the man who engineered Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and yes, had his own Project, says that room acoustics are far more important than audioph...

Andy Baio, in an opinion piece for Wired News: "Since Gmail added oAuth support in March 2010, an increasing number of startups are asking for a perpetual, silent window into your inbox. Im concerned ...

There is significant evidence out there that suggests that not only did John Wayne Gacy not operate alone, he may not have been involved in some of the murders, and the fact that he was largely a copy...

The latest fantastic Kickstarter-funded video from the album Solved, by MC Frontalot...

Wood burns in a stove as Pascal Prokop drives his totally baller 1990 Volvo 240 station wagon during cold winter weather on a road near the town of Mettmenstetten, some 25 kilometres south of Zurich, ...

Placebos have no repeatable physical effect that can be broadly demonstrated to exist. But, if people believe the placebo can help them, it often does—especially for inherently subjective issues...

The excellently-named Meshuggah is a "technical death metal" band from Sweden. While I appreciate their musical experimentation, the singer's angry growl is a bit much for me. I was delighted when my ...

A judge has granted requests from defendants in the BP oil disaster case to exclude various emails from trial. The details of the emails are an interesting read. For instance: At Halliburton's request...

The incomparable MC Frontalot sez, "The second video extravaganza from my overfunded Kickstarter is Stoop Sale, a chilling tale of indecision and loss presented in cheerful all-puppet format. This is ...

The hard-hitting investigative journalism team at Accuweather is trying to figure out why this squirrel is purple. Currently, there is "No Explanation for Pennsylvania's Purple Squirrel." What do you ...

Moms, priests, and peace-minded activists in a small North Carolina town haven't forgotten that a local aviation contractor was a key player in the CIA's torture taxi business. I dont want to live in ...

For many years, Jaroslav Flegr, a biologist at Pregue's Charles University, suspected that a parasite in cat feces, the same ones that can harm a pregnant woman's fetus, can actually screw up the mind...

For many years, Jaroslav Flegr, a biologist at Pregue's Charles University, suspected that a parasite in cat feces, the same ones that can harm a pregnant woman's fetus, can actually screw up the mind...

Remember last fall when an entire small zoo's worth of exotic animals briefly ran amok through an Ohio town? GQ has a feature that explains what the hell happened....

At Hacker News, a user named "Sara70" posts: I'm writing this to report the serious troubles we have regarding accessing Internet in Iran at the moment. Since Thursday Iranian government has shutted d...

I love it when news lines up almost perfectly with our editorial calendar. Next week, I've got a Science Question from a Toddler feature lined up that will explain how scientists can date reserves of ...

This 1948 ad for Viking's "VisQueen" plastic film paints a utopian vision of a world where everything is entombed in airtight plastic layers, rendering it sterile and impervious to the world's depreda...

This goofy video by Total Ghost first made the internet rounds some months back, but I was recently reminded of it when SpaceX founder Elon Musk shouted it out on Twitter. He's absolutely right, it's ...

BB pal Ben Cosgrove writes: In 1937, LIFE magazine launched the career of an up-and-coming starlet in a multiple-page photo spread that, overnight, made "Cynthia" a household name. In very short order...

Natalie LeBrecht carries the torch of New York's downtown avant grade into contemporary popular music. Recording as Greenpot Bluepot, LeBrecht melds outernational influences with vocal melodies remini...

Nice to see some recognition from high places for Joe Sabia, the talented director who also collaborates with Boing Boing Video on our in-flight Virgin America television channel. Here's the first of ...

Stephen Wildish's Tumblr is a good one for your RSS feed. As a bonus, the artwork above will give those who feel a need to point out that the Venn diagram doesn't make sense something to do. (Via This...

Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Save 25% on all Tendence Watches at Watchismo for a very limited time. Enter coupon code TEN...

On The Disney Blog, John Frost describes the upcoming rule-tightening for FastPasses in Walt Disney World. FastPass is a ride reservation system: park visitors visit a ride, feed their entry ticket to...

[Video Link] Bedazzled has a short, interesting history of a band called The What's New, which formed in 1959 in Long Beach, CA. They got their start playing at Disneyland. The What's New have always ...

Yesterday, the United States' Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the construction of the first two nuclear reactors to be built in this country since 1978. They're both part of the same power plan...

Ian Randall Strock, author of the Random House book The Presidential Book of Lists, writes with news of a companion volume, Ranking the Powers Behind the Oval Office: Vice Presidents, First Ladies, an...

Petros Vrellis created this interactive, animated version of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night, where the viewer can send impressions swirling with a touch. [Creative Applications] Previously....

Alan Moore, writer of V for Vendetta and enigmatic wizard of comicology, describes the relationship between the Guy Fawkes mask and Anonymous, anti-ACTA protests, and the Occupy movement. Beginning wi...

Writing in Washington Life, Karin Tanabe describes the remarkable writing office designed by Travis Price architects for Wade Davis, National Geographic's "Explorer in Residence." It's one of the most...

Tomorrow marks a day of global protest against ACTA, the profoundly undemocratic copyright treaty that was negotiated in secret, and which governments are signing up for without democratic review and ...

Photographer David Jay's SCAR Project is described as "a series of large-scale portraits of young breast cancer survivors," intended to raise awareness about early onset breast cancer while "paying tr...

Here lies the late Robert Sanders, 58, at the Robert L. Adams drive-through funeral parlor in the Los Angeles area city of Compton. The funeral parlor has been in business since 1974, and is believed ...

Here lies the late Robert Sanders, 58, at the Robert L. Adams drive-through funeral parlor in the Los Angeles area city of Compton. The funeral parlor has been in business since 1974, and is believed ...

Radio Free Asia reports that a 40-year-old Tibetan monk and his 38-year-old brother in Sichuan province were shot by authorities today, after participating protests against Chinese rule and calling fo...

Among the recent projects of London/Tokyo-based photojournalist Satoru Niwa is this stunning series of images captured near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, just days after the March 11, ...

In 1991, the FBI began interviewing Steve Jobs and people he worked with, as the CEO of Next Inc. "began to be considered as a candidate for sensitive, presidential appointments." Here is Steve Jobs' ...

The Breaded Cats (or Breading Cats, or Cat Breading) website has been making the rounds for some weeks now. Like a fine wine, or a cat, but not a loaf of bread, it seems to improves with age. Warning:...

Here is the most wonderful photograph you'll ever see of a Buddhist monk sharing food with a tiger. shot by Wojtek Kalka at the Tiger Temple in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. (via Bill Gross)...

CDR sez, "Watches that keep Martian time. Originally for a Mars Mission, now for anyone who needs something useless yet infinitely desirable." Mars Watches...

Rina from San Francisco's SF in SF reading series sez, "Join SF in SF for a very special evening with steampunk innovators K. W. Jeter, Jay Lake, and Rudy Rucker on Saturday, February 11th. Each autho...

A UK e-petition: Public Hanging for those who propose public hanging: "The proposed punishments for some crimes are so horrific that the proper punishment for proposing this punishment is the death pe...

Avi sez, "Shu Sugamata has been making origami spaceships since 1977 and has amassed quite a body of gorgeous work." ORIGAMI SPACESHIPS (Thanks, Avi!)...

At Jalopnik, Jason Torchinsky's interest in the bottoms of toy cars borders on the Nicholson Bakeresque. The bottoms of toy cars are fascinating because it's a revealing insight into the mind of the t...

Michael Geist sez, Tens of thousands of Canadians have spoken out against proposed copyright reform in recent days that could combine the US DMCA with SOPA to create restrictive digital lock rules alo...

The Pirate Bay is making good on its long-announced plan of moving from hosting a torrent-tracker to hosting "magnet links" that allow BitTorrent file-sharing without a centralized tracker. This will ...

Stop ACTA & TPP: Tell your country's officials: NEVER use secretive trade agreements to meddle with the Internet. Our freedoms depend on it! AfghanistanAlbaniaAlgeriaAmerican SamoaAndorraAngolaAn...

Over 100 NGOs have asked the UN's World Intellectual Property Organization to postpone a summit in South Africa on the grounds that notice of the meeting was not published, the agenda has been set wit...

Here's the fourth episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I'll interview one of the makers featured in the magazine. Our maker this week is Steve Lodefink. An inveterate tinkerer and "...

Michael sez, "The Open 3DP lab at UW has been doing some amazing things with 3D printing. More amazingly, they have prioritized sharing what they are learning with everyone else in order to make 3D pr...

Writing in PC Pro, Stewart Mitchell describes a partnership between GPS vendor TomTom and Fair Pay insurance, an auto insurer, to offer discounts to people whose GPS devices report low incidences of s...

mitmproxy, "an SSL-capable man-in-the-middle proxy," is a useful little free software utility that can sniff the traffic between your computer or mobile device and its servers and determine what data ...

I thought this week could do with some more "fanboy", so cobbled together this blast of Every Apple Design Ever (ish) in 30 seconds. I'm a Sony guy, at heart, but even if each of its products were giv...

Social Media Week's "Future Hipsters" video imagines today's young technophilic changesurfers as old farts in 2062, wearing out-of-date fashion and telling rambling stories about being embarrassed by ...

In the latest Geeks Guide to the Galaxy podcast, William Gibson talks in depth about his terrific new essay collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and explains how he feels about doomsaying by e...

Here's a perfectly delightful cover of I Wanna Be Like You from the Disney film "The Jungle Book," performed by a group of young people crowded into a bathroom. Good acoustics and fine choreography! J...

In a recent survey of 5000 Bicycling magazine readers, 50% of men and 58% of women said that—if pressed to choose between sex or bikes—they'd pick the bikes.(Via Maria Popova)...

Re-creation of Jurassic Cricket song, from Bristol University in the UK by qparker Listen to this recording. It sounds a little like Sputnik, but it's actually a noise that's not been heard in 165 mil...

Here's footage of the police in Henderson, NV beating the crap out of Adam Greene, a man immobilized diabetic shock whom the police have mistaken for a drunk driver. The police point guns at him, pull...

Astronaut Don Pettit is a national treasure. He's been to space three times—once for a six-month stay on the ISS. On every mission, he's found time to make huge contributions to the public commu...

Sound it Out # 17: Father John Misty Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings Im extremely happy to share this free/exclusive download of Father John Mistys first single. Father John Misty is better known as ...

The Boston Phoenix's Cindy Carioli points out that on the same weekend that the New York Times carried a column from Bill Keller decrying piracy as a war on creative people, the Times's op-ed page pir...

The sixteenth collected volume in Bill Willingham's long-running Fables series is Fables Super Team, and Willingham uses the volume to demonstrate his absolutely catholic approach to mythmaking and st...

David Weinberger sez, "Stephen Fry explains that when a frustrated traveler tweets something about wanting to bomb an airport where there have been delays, the traveler doesn't isn't really announcing...

[Video Link] Thanks, Erin! (Via Orangette)...

[Video Link] Er…...

[Video Link] Er…...

From a 2001 issue of Giant Robot magazine, this one-pager by Adrian Tomine has a bid of $500. Adrian Tomine's cathartic one-page comic strip describes his personal feelings about actor Gedde Watanabe'...

“Those who know don't say, and those who say don't know.” Purchase includes membership in the Church of [ ---------- ]. Buy one today! Don't forget about our other fancy decorated jerkins ...

Right now, I'm reading The Conundrum by David Owen. It's a really interesting book about some of the unintended consequences of the way we approach sustainability and environmentalism. I'm going to po...

Magpie Killjoy sez, "SteamPunk Magazine, the oldest-known journal of steampunk fiction and culture, has returned after a two-year hiatus. This 110-page issue covers everything from the fine art of urb...

On the heels of the official, and sadly discontinued, Mickey Mouse vs. Joy Division "Unknown Pleasures" t-shirt, some culture jammers printed up Mickey Mouse vs. Crass shirts and shopdropped them at a...

Schreer Delights is selling these fun iPhone cases until, as Gizmodo writes, they get "sued into oblivion." I dig the Mac Classic model but I would prefer a faux Netwon case, like the one someone sket...

Sure, it's fun to post old pages of mid-century science magazines and make fun of the predictions that never came true—flying cars! Weather control! But it's equally, if not more, enjoyable to r...

It is no secret that spacesuits are heavy. The full spacesuit worn on the space shuttle, including life support system, clocked in at 310 pounds. At the same time, these suits are bulky, and hard to m...

Max Lupo's Thingiverse archive contains all the parts necessary to allow three people to slowly type one phrase over and over again on a typewriter, by operating a complex machine called "the convenie...

Combine glowstick gunk and diamond glitter in a sealed jar and shake -- voila, fairies! Ashley LeMieux (via Super Punch)...

Robbo sez, "James Lillis, a designer with Black Milk Clothing, has come up with a freaky-awesome set of muscle leggings which allow you to celebrate the human anatomy without getting all Gray's Anatom...

Michael Geist sez, "Barry Sookman, lawyer and registered lobbyist for the Canadian Recording Industry Association (now Music Canada), the Motion Pictures Association - Canada, and Canadian Publishers ...

"REK is a bookcase that grows with your book collection," writes Reinier De Jong Design on its official website. "The more books the bigger the bookcase gets. The zigzag shaped parts slide in and out ...

I love this comic by Grant Snider. He's selling it as a poster, and has lots of other insightful and funny posters on his website, Thought Balloon Helium. (Via This isn't Happiness)...

Ḅǐŕĉȟ & Ḃåàãǧò is a Danish Institut for Moderne Hudpleje (Modern Huge People) Here's their list of services (Translated from Danish): Voks ...

Ryan Tronier, producer of The Browser on KSL radio, did a segment about the language game my daughter and her friends speak. He says, I sent the recording of your daughter to the linguistics departmen...

Ryan Tronier, producer of The Browser on KSL radio, did a segment about the language game my daughter and her friends speak. He says, I sent the recording of your daughter to the linguistics departmen...

Could the Death Star really destroy a planet? Back in 2008, I posted that astrophysicist and mathematician Jeanne Cavelos, author of The Science of Star Wars, speculated that indeed, the Death Star co...

Furious Pete, a body-builder, shows how with just a few hours' preparation he can look absolutely ripped or paunchy and out of shape. He starts by doing a brief, intense exercise and cosmetic regime a...

Steve Silberman says: Perry Hall is a born synaesthete who "hears color and light, and created an iPhone/iPad app called Sonified to let his synaesthesia "loose in the wild, as he puts it. I take Hall...

[Video Link] This is going to be the most awesome movie ever. In the last moments of World War II, a secret Nazi space program evaded destruction by fleeing to the Dark Side of the Moon. During 70 yea...

Steve Albini, guitar genius of Big Black, Rapeman, and Shellac, and producer of albums by Nirvana, The Pixies, and hundreds of other bands, is also a delightful food blogger who posts recipes he makes...

Above is video of the incredible Serpent Twins, two slithering vehicles created by the incredibly talented maker couple Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate. You may recall that Jon and Kyrsten are the cr...

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor did a guest appearance on Sesame Street. She sits down for coffee with Maria, but their chat is interrupted by a series of storybook characters who ask her to adj...

Not a funny or clever sort of troll; just a bottom-feeder who specializes in writing racist remarks on online memorials. [BBC via Waxy and Metafilter]...

Nick Douglas devises a new advice macro, but not before checking his tweets again and organizing the client email list and making sure the icons on his desktop are lined up nicely....

[Video Link] Joey Hudy is one of Maker Faire's superstars and we were so excited to see him demo his “Extreme Marshmallow Shooter” in the White House. Here's a fun video of the President g...

In the latest episode of The Midnight Archive, the show's creator Ronni Thomas shares his own collection of 19th century 3D devil tissues. Also known as diableries, they're a particularly unique speci...

The NYT's Andrew Ross Sorkin digs into how Facebook's IPO documents define "active" users and finds that many of them may never visit the site. Facebook counts you as "active" if your only involvement...

We've posted before here and here about Hashima Island, aka Gunkanjima ("Battleship Island") off the coast of Nagasaki that from 1887 to 1974 was a coal mining facility but is now a compound of abando...

The earliest timelines, published in the 1500s and 1600s, were difficult-to-follow mashups that attempted to place all of human history into a list of numbers or an elaborate graphical metaphor. (I im...

The Caretaker, who I've posted about before, is the alter-ego of musician James Kirby who composes gorgeous haunted music by cutting up, processing, and looping vintage 78s. His last album as The Care...

Quora users offer the most hauntingly beautiful songs; it's a recurring thread there....

TidBITS introduces Bookle, an EPUB reader for OS X, developed by Peter Lewis and Adam C. Engst: "Rather than write an editorial about how Apple was slighting Mac users, I drafted a spec for a straight...

You can follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER, and visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE....

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has selected some of the best submissions from the Copyright Office's review of whether it should continue to be legal in the USA to "jailbreak" your devices in orde...

Salon's Kerry Lauerman found that the given wisdom of publishing more content did not yield more traffic. [We published] Short (a few hundred words) summaries or explainers about a major news event co...

Victoria Johnson revisits the maps we "wandered into" as kids: If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction...

The night before the Challenger space shuttle disaster, engineer Roger Boisjoly spent hours trying to get the mission called off. He was so certain that booster joints would fail in freezing weather a...

Here's DIYHacksandHowTos's great Instructables for making duct tape roses. The method is simple and produces a really beautiful (and romantically geeky) end-product. Realistic Duct Tape Rose (via Craf...

Path, an app to access the eponymous social network, uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers. The CEO considers this "industry best practice" and OK because iOS allows it to. [mclov.in]...

Photo: Urban Trophy "The carefree sensations that once permeated the park are lost, only to be replaced by a grim sense of nostalgia and unease." [Atlas Obscura]...

Conservative legislators in India resigned Wednesday after being caught enjoying mobile phone smut during a session of parliament. Karnata state's Minister for Cooperation Laxman Savadi and Womens' an...

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. In episode 008, we review game called Mad Chef. It's 99...

The Guardian's Jon Henley reviews Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, a popular science/self-help book by Roy F Baumeister, "eminent American social psychology professor" and NYT sci...

British advertising regulators have dismissed a complaint against an ad that portrayed terrier-headed playboy "Trevor Mountleg" and sexual antics in the presence of animals. The commercial, for Electr...

One of the things that makes it difficult to understand weather, climate, and long-term climate changes is the fact that, when something noticeable happens, there's a good chance it's being caused by ...

Antinous sez, "RIP Bill Hinzman, the actor who played the first zombie in Night of the Living Dead." Mr Hinzman died of cancer at the age of 75. Hinzman was working on the movie as an assistant camera...

Last year, I told you about a group of 7th graders who took a trip to Fermilab that completely changed their perception of what scientists ought to look like. Before they went on the field trip, "scie...

An undercover police officer in Sussex, England, shadowed a suspicious character through the streets a small market town for 20 minutes, following directions passed to him by a CCTV operator who guide...

Sky News has issued guidance to its reporters on their Twitter use. Under the new policy, Sky reporters are prohibited from retweeting from rival journalists and the public (though they are allowed to...

Last week, Tom Klimchak emailed me with a link to a counting box app he made for his son. He said he'd been inspired by Cory's post about Nathan's beautiful wooden cased Kid's Counting Box (above), so...

The crisis among ethnic Tibetans in Sichuan Province continues: "three livestock herders set themselves on fire to protest what they saw as political and religious repression at the hands of the Chine...

"That September, Tyler Clementi and Ravi were freshman roommates at Rutgers University, in a dormitory three miles from the courtroom. A few weeks into the semester, Ravi and another new student, Moll...

[Video Link] The Komen kerfuffle that inspired this video may soon pass from the headlines, but for people living with the disease, breast cancer—and the fight for dignity, survival, and a cure&...

(Via This isn't Happiness)...

Libsyn kindly featured Apps for Kids as its "Rockin' New Podcast" of the week, and interviewed me about it. Why did you start podcasting? I started Apps for Kids because my 8-year-old daughter Jane an...

[Video Link] A young man disconnects from the "cloud" for 90 days, on a mission to reboot his connection with the world and the people he loves in it. (via Joe Sabia)...

[Video Link]Members of the Black skeptics organization African Americans For Humanism (AAH) are planning events on Feb. 26 in six major U.S. cities, "targeting African-Americans who have privately or ...

A double treat from Errol Morris: a short video documentary about a man who calls himself the Wingador, the five-time champion of the Philadelphia Wing Bowl eating competition, and an accompanying ess...

[Video Link]. Well...by God... —David Letterman. Die Antwoord's new album, TEN$ION, is out today. (via Clayton Cubitt)...

[Video Link, via LAist] Los Angeles area radio station KPCC produced this lovely video portrait of designer, educator, and media artist Alex Braidwood. His work "explores methods for transforming the ...

[Video Link] Rachel Hobson says: Ever since I was a kid, I've adored the crunchy/creamy sweet treat of astronaut ice cream. Now that I live just five minutes from Johnson Space Center, the freeze-drie...

On Jan. 21, 2011, 40-year-old telecommunications sales manager Saad Allami of Quebec sent a text message to colleagues encouraging them to "blow away" the competition at an upcoming trade show in New ...

From the Telegraph: "Of the 12,000 who attended the scene of the atrocity at the World Trade Center 10 years ago, 297 have been diagnosed with cancer, almost triple the incidence before the attack. A ...

The Los Angeles Times reports that two more $6,000 King brass sousaphones (marching band tubas) have been burgled from an LA county high school this week, in an extended run of thefts over recent mont...

Last week was a pretty good one for the notion of privacy in America, which has increasingly become forlorn and tattered as a result of the advancement of digital technology. First, the Supreme Court ...

BB pal Nick Harmer snapped this gorgeous photo of the moon last night in Seattle just by pressing his Canon S95 point-and-shoot against the eyepiece of his Orion Starblast 6 telescope! His crescent mo...

A long-lost brand, and singularly odd one. Like discovering Spicy Cajun Visine Hot Sauce lurking in the product's history. listerine cigarettes........

Sculptor Mark Jenkins's "City" series is comprised of lifelike mannequins placed in public spaces in odd postures, often in seeming distress or danger, usually with a broadly humorous undertone. They'...

Typewriter Boneyard does a sweet line of reading lamps made from drilled-out old books, fitted with replica Edison bulbs. Hardback Book Lamps (via Neatorama)...

Clay Johnson is the author of The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, which has been getting a lot of media attention lately: Weekend Edition, Triangulation, Atlantic, The Wirecutter, ...

Here's a neatly categorized and tantalizing list of medieval urban professions, including the criminal trades. silk-snatcher - one who steals bonnets stewsman - probably a brothel keeper - "since the ...

Marque Cornblatt made the OMG-AR15 Unicorn zombie gun using Smith & Wesson parts and an 18v pole saw. "It's very accurate," he says. Below, a video of it in use. Inspired by the recent trend towar...

Hip Hop Family Tree Part 1 Hip Hop Family Tree Part 2 Hip Hop Family Tree Part 3 Hip Hop Family Tree Part 4  ...

No Good Deed is a new multimedia play in Los Angeles that melds a graphic novel with live theater. Created by the edgy, experimental Furious Theatre Company -- including my brother Robert Pescovitz --...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is petitioning the US Copyright Office for a DMCA exemption legalizing "jailbreaking" -- modifying the devices you own so that they can run software of your choosing...

This Thursday, I'll be donating my time to support The Phillips Clinic, a free healthcare provider that serves more than 1000 patients in Minneapolis. Come to the Clinic's annual silent auction where ...

If Rick Santorum can apprehend the rainbow robber, all his problems will be solved....

Here's a peek of a 30-minute profile of MAKE founder Dale Dougherty that will air on CNN this Sunday night. Dale says, it’s time to get back to making. It doesn’t matter what it is: cheese...

Carlos Miller, an accredited photojournalist covering the Occupy Miami eviction, was arrested by Miami-Dade police, who deleted several videos from his camera before they returned it to him. Miller re...

Rench sez, "The previously BoingBoinged bluegrass hip-hop band Gangstagrass shares an exclusive premiere of their live video for 'Gunslinging Rambler featuring R-SON' - showing that this has gone way ...

I am a huge fan of Matt Ruff's novels, so when friends in the know started to spontaneously tell me about how fantastic the advance manuscript they'd just read for his next novel, The Mirage, was, I j...

Here's a handsome Blue Screen of Death Valentine's heart. Kathrn Cramer calls it, "A stick-on icon for relationships with a blown motherboard: how to say its over on Valentine's Day." Heart Sticker (T...

Here's some handy, infringealicious clip art for the discriminating Anon who wants to make a statement without paying a royalty: a Guy Fawkes mask, suitable for urban art, dress-up, and silkscreening....

One of the quieter scenes from a story in Western Gunfight magazine, illustrated by George Wilson. The high bid on this piece of original art stands at $1! GEORGE WILSON (American, 1921-1999). Western...

Boing Boing was a clue on Jeopardy! tonight. "Who was Steve Jobs?"...

Mr Norton also added: "It was a pleasure collaborating with PRADA and LG, both Global brands with impeccable reputations for being the most innovative and respected in their fields." How nice of Mr No...

Johannes sez, "Cory was so kind to post my TEDxVienna talk on monochrom's feature film project SIERRA ZULU. I wanted to give you guys an update. Today we released a short film: EARTHMOVING. It's the p...

I've always enjoying studying the original art for comic book pages, because it's fun to look at the washes, white-out marks, pen lines, blue pencil lines, erased pencil, and brush lines. You can lear...

Dan R sez, "This corporate news piece from the opening of 'Spaceship Earth' has plenty to offer the casual to semi-rabid technology fan who is also partial to World's Fair-esque exhibits about the FUT...

The EU's Eastern European constituents have been under enormous trade pressure to sign onto ACTA, the copyright treaty negotiated in secret at the behest of the US Trade Rep and the entertainment lobb...

[Video Link] "Camden council in north London have recently installed this talking camera that issues threats to residents at Walker House."...

I had missed this sad news, but Dick Tufeld, the man who gave Robby the Robot his voice on Lost In Space, died last month. He was 85. Along with his famous catchphrase "Danger, Will Robinson!" and the...

This restored 1957 home movie of a Disneyland visit, from the Disney History Institute, is an absolute treat. I love the rare footage of the Frontierland pack-mules and the Jungle Cruise as it was bef...

A welcome White House petition for our American readers' consideration: a request to make the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty negotiation more transparent. This bland-sounding treaty is, in fact, 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...

Stop-motion film about an entomologist's nightmare MikeyP sez, "Filmmaker friends of mine have a lovely melancholy stop-motion film (about a tiny entymologist with a lightbulb for a head) they're hopi...

Here is OK Go's excellent video for "Needing/Getting." And yes, it was done "in partnership" with the maker of that particular car. According to the video description, the car "was outfitted with retr...

My friend and oft-times workshop mate Tom Marcinko, a very talented writer and critiquer, has just put seven of his previously published sf stories into the Kindle store for what he calls "the amazing...

This is the first post from the fine folks of the American Library Association, which recently launched a member interest group called Library Boing Boing. They will be posting now and again as Librar...

Timo's video "Robot readable world" is made up of stitched-together found footage from computer vision systems, "exploring the aesthetics of the robot eye." It was inspired by Matt Jones's essay The R...

A recent mathematics study showed that you have to have at least 17 clues on a Sudoku grid in order for the puzzle to be solvable. You could make the game easier, by adding more clues. But if there ar...

There are too many malls in America, and too many vacancies in them. So city planners are looking for other ways to use all that square-footage. The New York Times has a neat story about some of the d...

Andreas Gursky "Union Rave" (1995) In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke wrote ""Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." That's ...

The "flow state" is how neuroscience researchers describe that zone you can get into when you're doing something that you've become highly skilled at. It's a zen-like place in your brain — that ...

How to Be a Retronaut's gallery of images from the 1970 edition of the "Encylopedia of Home Improvement" are like shots from a never-aired episode of The Brady Bunch where the family took over managem...

Last month, I posted about the gorgeous droning ambient music of From The Mouth of the Sun. People really seemed to dig it! Carter Gunn created this video for their track "Sitting In A Roofless Room" ...

An Icelandic man captured video of what some suggest is the Lagarfljtsormur, a lake monster residing in the lake Lagarfljt in the eastern part of the country. Others suggest it's a fishing net. I pref...

The Jolly Green Giant was always the most ambiguous and slightly threatening of the tinned food mascots. Tilt your head and squint and this is a cruel titan who's toying with the mortals at his dinner...

This is a Sol LeWitt yarmulke created by the Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek temple in Chester, Connecticut. LeWitt, a member of the congregation, helped design the temple. "Sol LeWitt Kippah" (Thanks, Jill M...

I've been doing periodic appearances on Sex is Fun, a sex-positive podcast aimed at providing fun, informative sex ed. for grown-ups. Last time I was on the show, we talked about some funny animal sex...

This is the U.S. Air Force's pitch to the entertainment industry, a smorgasbord of mil-porn to delight anyone who loved shows such as Airwolf and The A-Team. The objective is to help productions, from...

This bit of graffiti, spotted by entomologist and photographer Alex Wild, seems like the perfect way to start off a Monday morning. Thanks, anonymous tagger! I feel better already!...

Razani Base, Waziristan,Aug. 1938, from which British and Indian forces suppressed a local insurrection.Photo: Brian Harrington Spier, under CC The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that drones...

Today in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, "Planktonauts," by Robert Steven Connett, who notes, "This is a direction that I feel very comfortable with. Very enjoyable to create. Im happy with the results. ...

We've blogged once or twice about the Jamesburg Earth Station, a disused satellite communications station in a remote Californian valley. Alexis Madrigal went there, and found a trailer park, a buddhi...

A rundown of one week in British music history, courtesy of "Top of the Pops", via Charlie Brooker....

Ty Templeton has a strangely appealing and plausible look at the likely fallout from the DC comics' decision to produce a line of Watchmen prequels. Click through below for the punchline. Who Watches ...

Ange-line Tetrault made a series of "hidden animal" teacups with little ceramic beasties inside that are slowly revealed as you sip through your (opaque) beverage of choice. Whimsical Hidden Animal Te...

...

A group of Anons are about to dump a torrent 2.6GB of email containing "detailed records, transcripts, testimony, trial evidence, and legal defense donation records" about the Haditha massacre, in whi...

One of the first "physibles" available for download on The Pirate Bay's 3D object download site was a 3D model of TPB's pirate-ship logo. Canadian Charles Randall ordered one up from Shapeways, and it...

Tor.com's Irene Gallo gathers together an absolutely fantastic gallery of science fiction artwork that quotes famous works of fine art. I'm all over John Mattos's Mos Eisley reimagined as Picasso's Th...

An 83-year-old woman with a badly infected lower jaw had the entire thing replaced with a 3D printed titanium/bioceramic replica. The surgery was performed by doctors from the University of Hasselt (B...

Chris sez, "My name is Chris Peterson. I run web communications for MIT Admissions and have been a loyal BB reader for years. For the last several years we have been sending our admitted students thei...

I don't know an awful lot about fingernail painting, but this seems like a pretty straightforward painting task, and the effect is pretty awesome. Converse Nails (via Super Punch)...

Joly sez, "Rebecca Mackinnon discusses her new book 'Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom' (Basic Books) with Mark Whitaker, managing editor for CNN Worldwide, at The ...

Joly sez, "Rebecca Mackinnon discusses her new book 'Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom' (Basic Books) with Mark Whitaker, managing editor for CNN Worldwide, at The ...

Gmoke sez, "This statistical model uses 'zipcode-level energy consumption data to estimate the average annual energy use for every tax lotat practically building levelthrough all five boroughs of the ...

Dan Sayers ("I am not a type designer") decided to explore "generative" type-design by seeing what happened when he "averaged out" a large number of fonts. Once he got his teeth into the problem, he r...

This afternoon some friends and I will be playing this new game we really like in Yerba Buena Gardens, and you're welcome to join us. Johann Sebastian Joust is basically like high-tech tag. Each perso...

The NYT's Scott James recounts the insane red-tape endured by Juliet Pries, an entrepreneur who decided to open an ice-cream parlour in San Francisco's Cole Valley. She had to pay rent on an empty sto...

I blogged "Extermiknit!", a knittable Dalek, back in 2007, but it turns out that an even cooler knittable Dalek of the same name was created on Feather and Fan in 2010, with an opening hatch containin...

If you need me to explain why you should spend 1:26 watching a man wielding an iron guitar in a Faraday suit playing Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" on MIDI-compatible Tesla coils, you are in the wrong pla...

Derryl Murphy sez, "Drew Smith's lovely new song 'Smoke and Mirrors' needed a video, so he decided to outsource it. The result is wonderful." So I outsourced my video to Bangalore, India. Why? Well, I...

In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick examines the impact that Stephen Colbert's SuperPAC is having on public perception of the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, which establishes that "corporate personhoo...

Apparently inspired by the Polish parliamentarians who showed up for work in Guy Fawkes masks for the signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (a US-driven secret copyright treaty), members ...

Michael Geist sez, "I've posted a video version of a recent talk on SOPA activism and what it means for the next generation of global copyright agreements such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreeme...

Chair, with entrails. (via Blood Milk) UPDATE: My pal Stacey Ransom found the original color photo of this fine resin/fiber piece, titled "Visual Temperature - Sofa," by Cao Hul, and posted it to her ...

[Video Link] (Thanks, Gary!) Cute U900 Rabbit and Bear UkesCutest Japanese stopmotion crocheted beachside critter ukelele video everUkulele version of "Walk, Don't Run"...

I heard my 14-year-old daughter and her friends talking to each other using a word-changing language game, like pig latin, but much harder for me to understand. I asked my daughter's friend to say som...

Excerpted with permission from The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life, by Shimon Edelman. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyrig...

[Video Link] Sonar readings show that the mysterious object is about 60 meters across, or, about the size of a jumbo jet. And it's not alone. Nearby on the sea floor is another, smaller object with a ...

In 1969, Fluxus artist/musician Takehisa Kosugi formed the Taj Mahal Travelers, an octet of Japanese musicians whose used traditional instruments like violin, double bass, tuba, trumpet, and mandolin ...

In 1969, Fluxus artist/musician Takehisa Kosugi formed the Taj Mahal Travelers, an octet of Japanese musicians whose used traditional instruments like violin, double bass, tuba, trumpet, and mandolin ...

When Elinor Zuke went to the checkout stand of a store in the UK to buy a pack of teaspoons, a shop worker told her she wouldn't be allowed to buy then until she presented photo identification. The re...

"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...

Inspired by the bountiful Vanitas still-life paintings of 16th-century Northern Europe and the excessive ornamentation of the Baroque period, Dirk Staschke seduces the viewer with his voluptuous organ...

Jeff Atwood on exactly how much attention to pay to feedback. 1. 90% of all community feedback is crap. 2. Don't get sweet talked into building a truck. 3. Be honest about what you won't do. 4. Listen...

Punk artist Mike Kelley, a force in contemporary art for more than three decades, has died. He was 57. From the Los Angeles Times: Writing in Slate in 2005, novelist Jim Lewis said: "I think I could w...

"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...

Yellow Pages Income Fund is trading at $0.18. (Via Reddit)...

"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...

[Video Link] "In this video we see Sir George Martin, Giles Martin (his son), and Dhani Harrison listening to the mix of “Here Comes The Sun.” Suddenly Dhani opens the channel with the ...

Tomo sez, "Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, announced ACTA needs to be reviewed and consulted with his ministers as well as internet community representatives. ACTA won't be ratified until all doub...

Earlier this week, Mark told you about a couple of the cool art projects happening on a frozen lake in Minnesota. The Art Shanty Projects are a semi-annual wintertime tradition up here. And it's a sor...

JimKillock from the Open Rights Group sez, "Come to the London Stop ACTA Demo, one of many days across Europe protesting against the international attempt to impose SOPA and DEAct-style enforcement th...

JimKillock from the Open Rights Group sez, "Come to the London Stop ACTA Demo, one of many days across Europe protesting against the international attempt to impose SOPA and DEAct-style enforcement th...

Years ago, the good people at the Imaginary Foundation gifted me a wonderful knee-high Garden Bigfoot statue that stands guard at my lair. Now, Loren Coleman reports that its makers, Design Toscano, h...

My oldest pal Gil Kaufman, a reporter for MTV News, is on the campaign trail with Mitt Romney. Gil left me a voicemail yesterday sharing a funny/telling experience he had just before Romney spoke at t...

For many years, most of the Internet ran on ASCII, a character set that had a limited number of accents and diacriticals, and which didn't support non-Roman script at all. Unicode, a massive, sprawlin...

Here's a video of a mechanical piano performing Circus Galop (sic), a composition created to test the performance of automatic pianos and other instruments. It apparently can't be played by humans. Ci...

Named for Marie Curie, this line of Maria S.C. chandeliers from Poland's Gangdesign uses test-tubes as pendants that can be planted with sprigs or flowers. Here's the sell-copy, Google Translated from...

Someone jumped into a conference call between FBI investigators and UK counterparts, in which they discuss a turned Lulzsec wannabe, forthcoming arrests (!), and how horrible Sheffield is. If you ever...

Here's a fascinating history of Frank Stuart's Mechanical Elephants, a line of life-sized, rideable elephant automata that were sold to department stores and amusement parks in America in the 1950s. "...

After Helena Drnovsek Zorko, Slovenia's ambassador to Japan, signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, she was deluged with emails from Slovenians criticizing her for signing onto the agreement,...

I never met Robert Anton Wilson, but after reading him closely for years, I like to think I know him pretty well. When I went to college in the 1970s, I encountered Illuminatus!, and it had a greater ...

Icecube sez, "Are you concerned about your online privacy? Do you shield your laptop from view of others? Do you use various means of hiding your IP address? Do you use any encryption at all like PGP?...

[via Qt3]...

@daveg appears to have found the census record for Jordan Anderson, author of the very arch and admirably sarcastic letter from a former slave to his former master I reposted the other day....

Paul Reda was taken with the above 1908 ad for Miss Cora Strayer's Private Detective Agency, which was posted to the most excellent Vintage Ads LiveJournal group. A Chicago history buff, he decided to...

It was raining hard and I came into work soaking wet. My Doc Martins had that darker sheen around the toes where the water had sunk into the petrol-resistant exterior. The smell of damp and of dusty b...

Neal sez, "This is a White House petition to reform U.S. copyright law in regard to libraries. Due to DRM and other publisher restrictions, libraries have lost their first sale right for ebooks and ot...

[Video Link] His name is Rmi Gaillard and he's a well-known French prankster. (Via biotv)...

A depraved individual gouged out the eyes of all the animals on the wallpaper in the men's room of the Bollywood Cafe in Studio City, CA. And who colored in the gouges with ball point pen: the crimina...

In Wired, Jason Tanz tells the bizarre, incredible tale of how Ian Bogost's satirical Facebook game "Cow Clicker" became an actual, successful game, despite being designed to show how incredibly stupi...

[Video Link] Thanks Bedazzled for uploading this video of Vashti Bunyan singing "Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind," and thanks Amy Crehore for posting it!...

Design student Victoria Caswell created this "Boy Scout Survival Sewing Kit" that puts all the sewing essentials into a rugged, macho knife-roll-style package. Student Work Victoria Caswell (via Supe...

[Video Link] Like a 20-below Burning Man on ice. Fun! It's taking place until February 5 atop Medicine Lake, Plymouth, Minnesota. Learn all about it here....

The "Bang Bang Handle" is a door-handle made from a 9 mm Makarov semi-automatic pistol ("the personal weapon of the Soviet and post-Soviet armed forces and law enforcement"). It was designed by Nikita...

Why does the University of North Carolina-Charlotte need a SWAT team? "Virginia Tech and Columbine," explains Lieutenant Josh Huffman of Campus Police. Radley Balko, a journalist who covers the milita...

Tony Smith sez, "Why Science Fiction is Too Important To Be Left to the Scientists will be a talk given by scientist and science fiction writer Peter Watts for a online writers workshop held in March ...

We've covered the iModela, Roland's $1000 hobbyist CNC milling machine over at MAKE, but here's a new photo showing some of the things you can make with it. A milling machine is sort of the opposite o...

We are excited as humanly possible to unveil the latest in Boing Boing's Artists Series of T-shirts: Jim Woodring's "It Followed Me Home." Offered in scarlet ink on a jet black T-shirt (for a "tigers'...

Sound it Out # 16: Patrick WatsonInto Giants Patrick Watsons new song Into Giants is a gorgeous journey into a land of angelic singing, trumpet solos and string arrangements. The song has a delightful...

[Video Link]...

Zack sez, "24-hour comics -- comic books written, drawn and finished in 24 hours -- have been around for more than 20 years, but rarely have the results been as polished or charming as 'Darkness,' the...

[Video Link] "Tomorry is a drag man, tomorroy is a king-size bust." Phillippa Fallon delivers a poem in High School Confidential (1958)...

Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Who makes your heart tick? Timing is everything and Watchismo has progressive savings in sto...

A student is suing his fraternity after a bottle rocket was inserted into him by a drunken acquaintance. Then ignited, the rocket failed to launch, instead exploding inside his anus. [Courthouse News]...

CreativeAmerica is an astroturf group financed by the MPAA that pretends to represent everyday folks who want to see further-reaching, stricter copyrights, and it just happens to be run by a bunch of ...

But Does It Float has screenshots and links to videos (Catalog, Permutations, Matrix) of pioneer computer animation artist John Whitney. Whitney collaborated with designer Saul Bass to create the titl...

Aerogel.org is devoted to making open versions of aerogel, the super-strong, super-light new material. They provide recipes for several sorts of aerogel, testing protocols, and projects you can undert...

"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...

When Google changed its privacy policy last week, they made a strong effort to ensure that everyone knew that a change had occurred, but if you tried to figure out what had actually changed, you had t...

"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...

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson takes a good look at the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the secret copyright treaty whose latest negotiation round just took place in Hollywood (see last night's post about th...

Michael Geist sez, The reports that the music industry lobby (along with the Entertainment Software Association of Canada and the movie lobby) is seeking the inclusion of SOPA-style provisions into Ca...

Locus magazine, the science fiction trade journal, has published its annual recommended reading list, which, as always, is a very reliable guide ot the very best science fiction, fantasy and speculati...

Turnstyle's Noah Nelson interviews the brilliant minds behind Indie Game: The Movie, whose trailer is embedded above. Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky left behind a comfortable career doing corporate v...

A new tech/art blog with a beautiful minimal layout and custom pixel-art illustrations for nearly every post. [via Submitterator]...

On Twitter, a South Korean sarcastically retweeted something posted by North Korea's official news agency. Treasonous baby photographer Park Jung-geun, 23, will now pay for his crime. The New York Tim...

Katy from Public Knowledge sez, It's Special 301 season at the office of the US Trade Representatvie, which means that the content industry gets its annual opportunity to tell the USTR which countries...

A French court has ruled that Google's free Google Maps application is anti-competitive and has ordered the company to pay €500,000 to Bottin Cartographes, a for-pay map company, as well as a &#...

A French court has ruled that Google's free Google Maps application API is anti-competitive and has ordered the company to pay €500,000 to Bottin Cartographes, a for-pay map company, as well as ...

Here's the third episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I'll interview one of the makers featured in the magazine. Our maker this week is Larry Cotton, a long time contributor to Make...

Government investigators suspected that goats may have been used to bribe locals in Afghanistan, but found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in the goat-giving program. [Muckrock]...

Courtney sez, "The D&D themed webcomic Order of the Stick has been running a Kickstarter campaign to get some of its out-of-print books back onto shelves. It's now broken $350,000 and is one of t...

I reviewed The Behavior Gap for credit.com. Would you take financial advice from a cocktail napkin sketch? Well, it depends on who is sketching. If its your brother-in-law, who likes to boast about ho...

Austin's astoundingly great Alamo Drafthouse cinema is hosting a Valentine's Night "Princess Bride Quote-Along & Feast" with Rodents of Unusual Size on the menu, and special Inconceivable wine. W...

[Video Link] After Fox aired a video calling the Dutch "naive," and the country "out of control," "a cesspool of corruption and crime," "a mess," and "anarchy," a man from the Netherlands named Max We...

If you follow Boing Boing, you're probably passingly familiar with ACTA, the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a treaty negotiated in secret, comprising a kind of wishlist from the entertainment in...

With a workable shutter button and straps to hang it around your neck, I prefer this camera attachment to the Big Red Button I mentioned yesterday. And it's $65, which is less than the Big Red Button....

U xpect adorabulness. U gets it. But kittehs also gives u edukashun n' sientific nuance. That's all the LOLcat speak I can muster in one go. Seriously, watch this video from Big Cat Rescue. It's fasci...

"We're having a whale of a time at the Mildendo Grand Hyatt." (Via Photoshop Disasters)...

"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...

The wizards at Sparkfun, an open source hardware company, show us how to make one of these spiffy furry barbarian leather arm-bracers with a charmingly anachronistic D&D dice-roller built into, b...

"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...

Thomas Haller Buchanan posted this scan from a 1912 comic strip panel by Raggedy Ann and Andy artist Johnny Gruelle. He says, "Time to isolate another panel from the comics to celebrate its stand-alon...

Gary Hesterberg was in a national park in San Francisco with his two lap dogs. A park ranger saw him with his dogs and told him that the dogs must be leashed. She asked for his name and told him to no...

Researchers from GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania developed software to allow toy-sized nano quadrotors to fly in tight, precise and eerie formation. Gmoke sez, "William Gibson dreams of a ...

[Video Link] Daniel Clowes is profiled in this 30-minute documentary produced by a Dutch television channel. A little heavy-handed with the mood music but otherwise very good. I was always convinced a...

NYT: "Don Cornelius, the producer and television host who created the dance show “Soul Train,” was found shot dead in his Los Angeles home early Wednesday morning in what appears to be a s...

For ten years, Kickstarter founder Andy Baio has been compiling his "Pirating the Oscars" reports, which document which Oscar-nominated movies are available as downloads on P2P and other file-sharing ...

[Video Link] Daniel Clowes is profiled in this 30-minute documentary produced by a Dutch television channel. A little heavy-handed with the mood music but otherwise very good. I was always convinced a...

There's a caption for this, but I'm drawing a blank. I'm depending on Boing Boing's hive mind to supply one. (Via X-Ray Delta One)...

According to artist Lorenzo Oggiano, his computer-generated art is made to... …stimulate thought and dialogue on the progressive relativisation of natural forms of life as a result of techno-bio...

[Video Link] Language NSFW. (Thanks, Byrd!)...

Andys sez, "The WSJ just published a letter to the editor in response to their No Need to Panic About Global Warming editorial from last week. The response is signed by (GASP!), actual climate scienti...

WE INVITE you to visit the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and ENCOURAGE you to follow RUBEN BOLLING on the TWITTER....

[Video Link] I subscribe to RRcherrypie's videos because my daughter Jane and I like to watch how he or she makes those adorable little food kits (Here's a video of Jane making candy sushi). RRcherryp...

A 1924 article by Winston Churchill imagined drone warfare: "Might not a bomb no bigger than an orange be found to possess a secret power to destroy a whole block of buildings -- nay to concentrate th...

Failing to prevent pregnancy is a pretty big failure for a birth control pill. Pfizer is trying to avoid that outcome by recalling 1 million packets of potentially defective pills. What's the problem?...

The White House says it can't comment on a petition to investigate former senator-turned MPAA boss Chris Dodd for fraud over the remarks he made in which he implied that his industry's campaign contri...

A great how-to from our friends at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: "A hack-box to go, filled with interconnects, LEDs, and love. Because, what better way to say I love you, than with the gift of elec...

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 multiplayer game called...

If you're one of the millions of MegaUpload customers whose data is endangered by the entertainment industry's legal action against the company, EFF wants to help you get your files back. They've team...

David Weinberger is one of the Internet's clearest and cleverest thinkers, an understated and deceptively calm philosopher who builds his arguments like a bricklayer builds a wall, one fact at a time....

Here's a cocktail menu from the Monkey Room, a drinking establishment once ensconced in Spokane, WA's Sillman Hotel. What a lovely piece of design, and what a deadly collection of concoctions. cocktai...

Photo: Sabeth Last week, Twitter announced plans to censor tweets in specific countries, but only to local readers. At the same time, it committed itself to publishing each act of censorship at the Ch...

Shan sez, "Our guide/map of SF is printed on a single sheet of A3 Tyvek, and is then folded up according to a technique originally developed at Tokyo University for satellite solar panels. The bistabl...

According to Survival Research Laboratories founder Mark Pauline, the pioneering machine performance group has been banned from staging their provocative, brilliant, and awesome spectacles in San Fran...

These twice-baked Pizzas in a Jar seem calculated to enrage TSA operatives, who will doubtless claim that pizza magically becomes a "gel" once you put it in a jar. Nevertheless, that looks like a jar ...

[Video Link] Mike Haeg made this "Marcel Duchamp Inspired Ice Fishing Tip Up / Auto Jigger." He says, "this auto-jigger harnesses the power of the wind. A silver dinner bell rings when a fish bites. P...

Prosecutors in China cited a poem and messages sent on Skype in the trial of dissident Zhu Yufu. The 60-year-old man is charged with "inciting subversion of state power." The poem in question is title...

pony H 54" L 49" W 27" is a kinetic sculpture that is reminiscent of one of Paolo Bacigalupi's more disturbing stories, somehow sexual and biomorphic at once. Do you know who made it and where it was ...

From Mother Jones: In 1995, "[Newt] Gingrich warned of a horror scenario in whichSaddamHussein trained a hacker army to cause civil unrest by issuing 500,000 American Express cards and then charging a...

Puffin Biscuits, 1956, a vintage ad shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by BB reader MewDeep, whose collection there is full of great stuff....

The very first appearance of Dave King's Crass symbol on Penny's Rimbaud's zine, "Christ's Reality Asylum." In 1977, in an old farmhouse in the wilds of Essex in Britain, I designed a logo for my frie...

The very first appearance of Dave King's Crass symbol on Penny's Rimbaud's zine, "Christ's Reality Asylum." In 1977, in an old farmhouse in the wilds of Essex in Britain, I designed a logo for my frie...

The very first appearance of Dave King's Crass symbol on Penny's Rimbaud's zine, "Christ's Reality Asylum." In 1977, in an old farmhouse in the wilds of Essex in Britain, I designed a logo for my frie...

This 17-minute mini-documentary introduces Michael Garnier, proprietor of the Out'n'About Treehouse Resort in Oregon. Garnier is a thoughtful and salty woodcrafter who's put a lot of thought into the ...

Collateral damage in the abortion wars, and bad news for working class and low-income women who rely on Planned Parenthood clinics for breast cancer screening services: the Susan G. Komen Foundation i...

[Video Link] A video for "I Fink U Freeky," from Die Antwoord's new release "TEN$ION." Co-directed by the band and Johannesburg, South Africa-based photographer Roger Ballen (the first of what I hope ...

Thingiverse user Brian Beebe has contributed this great design for an electrified wire-stripper that uses an LED to tell you the instant the razor-blades have penetrated the insulation, completing the...

When Kraft introduced Oreos to China in 1996, it was only moderately successful. They revisited the cookie with a lot of market research and came up with a bunch of different chapes, fillings, colors ...

"Shit Programmers Say" -- a worthy addition to the series and a trenchant comment on the inherent interiority of programming. Shit Programmers Say (via Waxy!)...

Fred "The Shred" Godwin has been stripped of his knighthood. The former head of RBS, who oversaw its downfall, was knighted for "services to banking" and then received an enormous pension from the bai...

Fred "The Shred" Goodwin has been stripped of his knighthood. The former head of RBS, who oversaw its downfall, was knighted for "services to banking" and then received an enormous pension from the ba...

[Video Link] College Humor's RPG video game parody of Breaking Bad is spot on. Contains spoilers of all kinds....

I ate a lot of cereal growing up. When I was six years old I'd wake up before my parents, fill a large aluminum mixing bowl with Cap'n Crunch and milk and park myself in front of the TV (black and whi...

Hard Drive Productions is a pornographer that has switched business models, shifting its focus from making dirty movies to making sleazy lawsuits. It collected IP addresses of people who were supposed...

Popa is an iPhone attachment that lets you take photos by pressing the "big red button." It's a neat idea but seems kind of expensive: $74.99...

Michael Geist sez, "In recent days there has been massive new interest in Canadian copyright reform as thousands of people write to their MPs to express concern about the prospect of adding SOPA-style...

Members of UKC Japan care for dogs rescued from inside the exclusion zone, a 20km radius around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (REUTERS) As regular Boing Boing readers will recall...

Rep. Jud McMillin, a Republican in the Illinois General Assembly, has withdrawn a bill requiring mandatory drug-testing for welfare recipients. The withdrawal was occasioned by an amendment introduced...

Rep. Jud McMillin, a Republican in the Illinois Indiana General Assembly, has withdrawn a bill requiring mandatory drug-testing for welfare recipients. The withdrawal was occasioned by an amendment in...

(Alan Lomax, via Wikipedia) American folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and traditional music collector Alan Lomax envisioned a global jukebox with which to share and analyze recordings he gathered over d...

Norwegian insurance company DNB has installed an alarm system in their toilets that alerts managers if an employee spends "too much time" in the restroom. Apparently, this is only the latest weird and...

Hip Hop Family Tree Part 1 Hip Hop Family Tree Part 2 Hip Hop Family Tree Part 3  ...

(via Wooster Collective, thanks Lindsay Tiemeyer!)...

Jourdon Anderson, an ex-slave, penned this letter to his former owner, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee in 1865, after the Colonel wrote and asked him to return to service as a paid work...

"Dynamite" by Munsingwear, 1973, shared in the BB Flickr Pool by MewsDeep....

Over 1,000 academics and scholars have signed a petition against science-publishing titan Elsevier, taking issue with the company's exploitative and abusive dealings with its writers, and with its sup...

Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist and one of the first people to criticize the "arsenic life" paper last year, recently announced that she and several colleagues had attempted to replicate the original...

At Technology Review last week, Christopher Mims made an interesting argument against getting too excited about 3D printing technology. His basic point: This stuff is neat, but it is still a long, lon...

The Sky is Rising is a free 36-page report on all the ways that Internet-era "content companies" are making more money than ever, putting the lie to the funny statistics used by entertainment giants t...

[Video Link] Here's the trailer for Frank Reade: Adventures in the Age of Invention, a beautiful new book by the authors of the equally amazing Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel. It's on sale i...

These three fellows made superhero-shaped RC airplanes and buzzed New York with them, giving the city the aerial defenders it has dreamt of for so long. Much of the video was recorded with UAV cameras...

This is simply breathtaking. In the video, researchers pump 10 tons of concrete down an ant hole and then slowly, carefully excavate the site to see what an ant colony looks like. The result is an int...

"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...

Paige sez, "My best friend Fenny runs this little DIY company called Little Asian Sweatshop- and her and I design some pretty sweet handmade papercraft hairflowers, many that are inspired by some of o...

"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...

2600 Magazine's Emmanuel Goldstein writes, "One of the keynote addresses at this year's HOPE conference (July 13-15, NYC) will be given by The Yes Men. They're a natural fit at the biennial hacker con...

Old Ideas is Leonard Cohen's new album, officially released today. I bought it yesterday from the Amazon MP3 store, and I've been listening to nothing else, ever since. I'm a big Leonard Cohen fan, an...

My latest Publishers Weekly column is "Digital Lysenkoism," a look at the bizarre internal forces that causes people who work at publishers to defend DRM, even though they know it doesn't work. I also...

As part of his Mondo 2000 History Project, R.U. Sirius uploaded a couple of Robert Anton Wilson recordings from a Reality Hackers Forum from 1988. He writes: I can’t remember if having RAW give ...

Should non-millionaires be able to invest small amounts, like up to $100 or $1000, in small, local businesses or other ventures that they believe in, without the ventures having to spend tens of thous...