Articles by BoingBoing from March 2012

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Marcia Hoffman writes about security research companies that work to discover "zero day" vulnerabilities in software and operating systems, then sell them to gover...

Sculptor Christopher Locke makes the most amazing spiders out of scissors -- but not just any scissors. Scissors that the TSA confiscated and auctioned off. Although the TSA website says scissors with...

In the Boing Boing store, a bubblegum-based label-writer. Feed it with any standard bubblegum tape, and stamp your message into it before you begin your chewy chewing for choosy chewers. Bubble Roll M...

Romssonson created a single YouTube video displaying a grid of 130 miniature Simpsons episodes: About the video: -Top to bottom: each row shows a season (from season 1 to season 10) -Left to right: ea...

Here's the 11th episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I interview one of the makers featured in the magazine. Our maker this week is Yury Gitman. Yury's a toy inventor and a product ...

Mark Bowden's Atlantic article tells the story of Don Johnson, a high-rolling gambler who broke the bank at three Atlantic City casinos without card-counting or other "cheats." Years ago, I was mildly...

Thank you to our sponsor ShanaLogic, sellers of handmade and independently designed durable goods, apparel, delightful gifts, and other fine kit. Check out this clever unisex "...

Regina Spektor is a Russian-born, classically-trained pianist who started making the downtown NYC avant-folk scene as a singer-songwriter in the late 1990s. She eventually rose to international promin...

"Biografias," an installation by Alicia Martin at Casa de America, Madrid. "5,000 Books Pour Out of a Building in Spain" (via Imaginary Foundation)...

The Canadian Tory government has announced that it's discontinuing the minting of new pennies, as the coins are expensive and considered a "nuisance" by businesses and their customers. As Steven Chase...

You've likely heard that the New York City Department of Education wants to avoid the user of certain words or phrases on standardized tests if "the topic is controversial among the adult population a...

Over at MyLifeScoop, a site created by one of our sponsors, Intel, I wrote about Ken Goldberg's Telegarden (1995), Eric Paulos's Limelight (2004), and other classic Internet artworks. Cyberspace is no...

If you've ever heard Meco's classic space disco version of the Star Wars theme, or played the Xenon pinball machine, or saw the original Atari TV commercials, then you've heard the pioneering electron...

If you've ever heard Meco's classic space disco version of the Star Wars theme, or played the Xenon pinball machine, or saw the original Atari TV commercials, then you've heard the pioneering electron...

The illustration in this 1943 Listerine shaving ad is totally perfect, and really makes the case that the MAD Magazine parodies of old time ads were basically faithful recreations. I love that they ga...

…and our countdown continues with more Clowes oddities that couldn’t be included in the book. Design dept: Daniel Clowes: “The only valuable class I took in art school was from a guy...

Here is a man who has apparently been arrested for intoxication in an unknown jurisdiction, disputing the charge from the back of a police cruiser by belting out a genuinely soulful rendition of Queen...

Justin Nichol sez, "Black Flag Games is currently running a Kickstarter to produce a radical boardgame project called 'A Las Barricadas'. It is a boardgame about conflict between state police and anti...

Zarkonnen sez, "The Gender Remixer lets you set the video of one toy ad to the audio of another aimed at the opposite gender, with hilarious/disturbing results." It's true. The heavily gendered world ...

I've got two speaking gigs in Boston coming up. Both are free and open to the public, but you'll need to RSVP. On April 2nd at 7:00 pm, I'll be speaking to the Boston Skeptics in the Pub about energy....

Rina writes, "Join SF in SF and PM Press for an evening with ON THE GROUND: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. with Trina Robbins, Billy X. Jennings, Judy Gu...

As the Economist's debate between Bruce Schneier and former TSA boss Kip Hawley draws to a close, it's clear that Schneier has crushed Hawley. All of Hawley's best arguments sum up to "Someone somewhe...

Nicki Bluhm and The Gramblers cover Hall and Oates's "I Can't Go For That" while crammed into a van, with Bluhm driving, singing, and playing a kazoo, and seeming to do a rather good job at all three....

Here's a great 1941 Donald Duck toon funded by the Treasury, explaining to war-torn America why they need to all file their taxes to defeat tyranny. Help Donald Duck File His 1941 Federal Tax Return...

Here's a great 19412 Donald Duck toon funded by the Treasury, explaining to war-torn America why they need to all file their taxes to defeat tyranny. Help Donald Duck File His 1941 Federal Tax Return...

Princess Juliana International Airport(SXM) on St. Maarten has an extremely short runway (7152 feet) that forces jets to get mighty close to people at Maho Beach. Photographer Josef Hoflehner has take...

An unsourced photo on Biglilkim's Tumblr shows a woman whose back-flip has been turned into an awesome, starey eyeball. Anyone know more about the picture? (via Neatorama)...

In this 2000 clip from a presentation at the Paley Center, South Park co-creator Matt Stone discusses his experience with the MPAA's ratings board, and explains how, as an independent, he found himsel...

The Smithsonian's Design Decoded blog reports on the latest developments in 3D printed footwear, including the fashion designers and students who are experimenting with printing out shoes using cheap ...

Photo: jiazi. Shoop: Rob. Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy is to close 50 stores and cut 400 jobs, mostly at its corporate HQ. Thomas Lee of the Star Tribune: In the past, as Best Buy's stores l...

I've been satisfied with the Stanley FuBar demolition tool that Mark reviewed in 2008 (available in safety yellow!), but I am sorely tempted by the Annihilator Wrecking Bar, which sports all the same ...

Even though I don't speak Bulgarian, I can tell that the Bulgarian version of Married With Children is awfully faithful to the dreadful American original. It really seems like the cast spent a long ti...

A rare moment of sanity from the US courts relating to Bradley Manning: David Maurice House, an MIT researcher and high profile supporter of Manning has been given the go-ahead to sue the US governmen...

In the Boing Boing Store, our eyeball lunchbag, insulated to keep your eyeball sandwiches fridge-cool until you're ready to eat 'em. Eyeball Lunch Bag...

Amazon founder and space entrepreneur Jeff Bezos announces on his blog that the Apollo 11 rocket engines which propelled Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in 1969—making them the first ...

Thanks to Bob's open-source Sentry Gun controller, now anyong can build a gun that "autonomously tracks, aims, and shoots at targets using a webcam." (Via Dangerous Prototypes)...

Via Gawker's Adrian Chen, a Tumblog of Greatness: Webcam Tears. Works best if you play all of them at the same time....

Joe Posner sez, "A month ago Marketplace told me they're doing a weeklong special called "Robots Ate My Job" this week and asked if I could make videos to go with it. Where to start? "Even though we d...

For the past five years, Peter Jansen, a Canadian scientist whose PhD is in neural computation and cognitive modelling, has been developing a series of open source hardware "tricorders" -- handheld se...

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook speaks to employees during a visit to the iPhone production line at the newly built Foxconn Zhengzhou Technology Park, in Henan province, China. Photo taken Marc...

…and our countdown continues with more oddities that they couldn’t include in the book. The Chicago Years… Here are some things from Clowes’s time in Chicago during the mid-198...

[Video Link] Two things to note: 1) the pleasing sound of the snow hitting the cars, 2) the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh of the guy taking the video....

Sound it Out # 23: OFF! - "King Kong Brigade" OFF! is a band full of Southern California punk rock royalty: Keith Morris (Black Flag, Circle Jerks), Dimitri Coats (Burning Brides), Steven McDonald (Re...

A followup to yesterday's post about the Conformateur, a 19th century hat-fitting device acquired by Tricia Roush to aid in her millnery. Here is a post from La Bricoleuse, another proud Conformateur ...

“You’re not gonna use the pink ball. We're not gonna let you do that. Not on camera. Friends don’t let friends use pink balls.” (Via Cynical-C)...

I haven't written much about pink slime—that creamy mixture of meat and animal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of industrial meat processing. Most of what's being written about this latel...

At Gamasutra, Frank Cifaldi tries to pin down a fact that's suprisingly slippery: when was Super Mario Bros. released in the U.S.? The official date—October 19, 1985—is somewhat unconvinci...

[Video Link] Contented creatures on a porch in Unalaska, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. See how the fox, eagle and cat are all just fine hanging out and no one is trying to attack anyone and they are...

User uploads to YouTube have hit one hour per second -- that is, sixty hours per hour. It's a testament to how much latent expression there is in the world, waiting for a distribution platform to make...

Joe Martin plays through classic RPG Fallout 2 with a character of the lowest possible intelligence: "Confidently, I lead Al out of his village, ignoring the hurled insults by the useless NPCs and sta...

To help other PC manufacturers replicate the MacBook Air's runaway sales, Intel defined its specifications as the Ultrabook: slim, lightweight SSD-based laptops without the performance compromises of ...

Is there a better way to show your love of bacon forever than to be buried wrapped in it? We don't think so. This genuine bacon casket is made of 18 Gauge Gasketed Steel with Premium Bacon Exterior/In...

And now: The science of farting. (via Hannah Waters)...

A key component of antibiotic resistance is the over-use of antibiotics. We talk about this a lot in the context of over-the-counter antibacterial cleansers, but there's a doctor's office side to this...

In nine years of filming, the show Myth Busters has burned through 33,500 yards of duct tape. (Via Katherine Nelson)...

Why does electricity move along wires? This is one of those questions where the answer is relatively simple—the wires are made of conductive metal—but the meaning behind the answer isn't a...

"[It's] the start of busy times for dozens of egg vendors across the city, deep in coastal Zhejiang province, who ready themselves to cook up a unique springtime snack favored by local residents. Basi...

Carl Malamud sez, "Paul Vixie tells a real-life action adventure about the DNS Changer and Conficker plagues that are still active on the Internet and how he ended up running a center for disease cont...

Robert sez, "The gamified EyeWire project, now in open beta, is about using human computation to help trace the neurons in a retina. Tracing the neurons will help nail down the computation that goes o...

Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. These brand spanking new Projects TOWARDS watches are as unique in construction as they are ...

Boing Boing science editor Maggie Koerth-Baker's debut book comes out today. It's called Before the Lights Go Out, and I was lucky enough to get to read an early copy back in January. If you read Boin...

UK chancellor George Osborne was confronted on his government's decision to charge value-added tax (VAT) on hot take-away food like pasties. Labour MP John Mann asked Osborne when he'd last had a past...

"He explained to me, quite sincerely, he had been hanging curtains naked in he kitchen when he fell backwards on to the kitchen table and on to a potato," said Sheffield, England A&E nurse Trudi ...

MC Frontalot sez, "The unstoppable Eliza Gauger is selling off the original back-cover painting that she did for my album Zero Day. A little bit of nerdcore history available to the aspiring archivist...

Sculptor Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's piece "Nothing is more optimistic than Stjrnsund" is a curator's playset of modified, daisy-chain-able padlocks. I like the idea of a necklace of these things, lying fl...

(Photo by Will Steger) In a sea of sunlight and drifting snow, huskies awaited their handler's call on the first leg of the traverse. Because dogs were banned from the continent after April 1, 1994, t...

From Boston Dynamics: "Sand Flea is an 11-lb robot with one trick up its sleeve: Normally it drives like an RC car, but when it needs to it can jump 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization syst...

From the Joseba Revuelta collection, photos and commentary (in Spanish) on vintage Czechoslovakian tank-helmets, which were apparently accessorized to the nines. CASCOS CARRISTAS CHECOOSLOVACOS (via M...

Today, most of the electricity in the United States is generated in very large facilities—capable of serving millions of homes—far away from the people who will actually use that electrici...

…and our countdown continues with more Clowes extras that couldn’t be included in the book. Joey Ramone talks about Clowes and I Don’t Want to Grow Up & the Launch of the danielc...

[Video Link] I'm looking forward to seeing this documentary. Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope -- a film by Morgan Spurlock explores this amazing cultural phenomenon by following the lives of five at...

The Long Forgotten blog -- my best source for scholarly discussion of the Disney Haunted Mansion and spook houses more generally -- tackles the historical origins of the rides' haunted organ and the g...

At the JavaOne 1998 conference, Sun gave out rings like this one. It's embedded with an iButton chip containing a Java Virtual Machine. Based on the 1-Wire device communications bus system, IButtons c...

Tricia Roush is justifiably excited by her acquisition of an 1821 Conformateur in excellent shape. Conformateurs are Victorian devices used to measure the irregularities in the heads of milliner's cus...

Derek Sivers recounts an inspiring story of how he got a multi-year music education in a few days from Kimo Williams, and makes a larger point about the excitement of learning at a fast pace with a go...

My colleagues at Institute for the Future and Rockefeller Foundation are launching a fascinating and ambitious online game to crowdsource ideas on how to fight global poverty! It's a 48-hour game to c...

In 2009, I posted that paleontologists found the fossilized remains of the world's largest snake, a 42-foot-long relative of the boa constrictor. Paleontologists from the University of Toronto dubbed ...

Great composition! (Thanks, Greg Long!)...

La Balade des Gnmes is a B&B in Durbuy, Belgium. It has a series of themed rooms kitted out with carved driftwood and various fantastic elements. As the name implies, many of the rooms look like ...

Unassailable evidence presented by the Institute for Dangerous Research's Department of Mad Biology. I don't know where penguinchris got this. But it's amazing....

Incandescent lights work by turning heat into light. You run an electric current through a filament, the filament heats up, and as it does, it starts to glow. The basic element has been around since 1...

The contract presented by Paul Ceglia, who claims he paid Zuck to build Facebook, was forged, according to a forensic report(PDF) by Stroz Friedberg. Wired's David Kravetz: "The metadata shows they we...

Dain Fagerholm creates animated GIF art similar to traditional stereo 3D photos. Pictured here is Daydreamer. Other favorites of mine include Four creatures in a room and "Seven Headed Creature". Dain...

This motion, filed on Mardi Gras in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, is a "metaphorical request for a ride on the streetcar named remand." Its author, Lance Lubel of Lubel ...

If you are a powerful corporation or individual and someone parodies you, challenging them with copyright infringement will not make the whole thing quietly go away. Scientists are boycotting the scie...

James Cameron. Steve Zissou. What is with submarine explorers and little knit caps? Slate investigates. (Via Miriam Goldstein)...

The United State won the race to put a man on the Moon. But we weren't the first to land anything on the Moon. That prize went to the Soviet Union, which successfully put Luna 2 on the surface of the ...

Apps for Kids is Boing Boing's podcast about cool smartphone apps for kids and parents. My co-host is my 9-year-old daughter, Jane Frauenfelder. In this week's episode Jane and I talk about the engine...

At Ars Technica, James Grimmelmann charts the failure of offshore datacenter HavenCo. Supposedly beyond the reach of national laws, HavenCo was located on Sealand, a tiny naval fort six miles off the ...

Ape Lad writes, "Woot is selling a poster of one of my recent Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comics for a limited time. It shows an inaccurate depiction of the constellations." Connect the Dots Poster (Thanks, A...

Following rumors that his cat had run away from home, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev reassured Twitter, the nation and the world that Dorofei is safe. This is not Dorofei's first scrape; he once lo...

At Forbes, Tara Tiger Brown's attack on "fake" geek girls —"Pretentious females who have labeled themselves as a geek girl figured out that guys will pay a lot of attention to them"—has go...

US senators are calling for action on employers' habit of demanding employees' Facebook passwords, but no one seems to notice that many companies configure their computers so that they can eavesdrop o...

Found on Ffffound, artist unknown, this beautiful oil-painting of an AT-AT Walker. Quoted from: ataturner600.jpg (JPEG Image, 600x446 pixels) (via Wil Wheaton)...

Artist Randy Regier visited the Cosmosphere Museum in Hutchinson, Kansas. He snapped a photo of this Russian sphere, a duplicate of the one the Russians sent to the Moon in 1959. Here's the descriptio...

The Mozilla Foundation is on a kick to show people just how amazing HTML5 can be, and to that end, they're releasing a series of free, open, ambitious in-browser apps to inspire developers and users. ...

The Mozilla Foundation is on a kick to show people just how amazing HTML5 can be, and to that end, they're releasing a series of free, open, ambitious in-browser apps to inspire developers and users. ...

Eternal Reefs is a company that will turn your cremains into concrete artificial coral reef and marine habitat. Families are allowed to attend the casting of the reef-component, put their handprints i...

Kyle Orland writes that Sony is preventing customers from re-downloading games they've already paid for, because code flaws in them may be used to run unsigned code on the portable console. The hack i...

Apps for Kids is Boing Boing's podcast about cool smartphone apps for kids and parents. My co-host is my 9-year-old daughter, Jane Frauenfelder. In this week's episode Jane and I talk about the engine...

In October 2007 Simon Glik used his phone to videotape police officers arresting a man in Boston. The police immediately turned their attention to Mr. Glik and arrested him for "illegal electronic sur...

Marilyn writes, "A part of its Giant Paper Airplane Project to get kids psyched about aviation and engineering, the Pima Air & Space Museum launched what may be the largest paper airplane (45-ft-...

In this compilation video, Loomyaire compiles all fourteen of the "window cameos" from the Adam West Batman TV series, in which real-life personages and characters from other TV shows popped out of wi...

A few days ago, AOL fired the staff developing AIM, its long-running instant messaging system. Having done this, it reset user accounts, locking them out of third-party IM clients until they confirmed...

Enrique Dans is a professor at Spain's IE Business School and a well-known blogger who has been a fierce critic of the entertainment industry. Last summer, Prof Dans wrote a blog post, Siete motivos p...

Flipboard is an IOS application that presents Twitter feeds in the form of beautiful magazine pages. Boing Boing has always been one of Flipboard's most popular sites. Today, Flipboard released the "p...

Here's an abridged translation of a Imagonem interview with Heikki Holms, Norway's new minister of International Development. Holms is a lifelong D&D player and LARPer who won the Norwegian D...

"Target Corporation is recalling about 3,400 stuffed plush-fabric frog masks that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says pose a suffocation hazard when secured over a child's face. The thick...

68-year-old of Joerg-Werner Lubbe of Germany enjoys decorating his front yard with Easter candy. But he did not want children to get away with the crime of taking his sweets, so took steps to punish a...

[Video Link] Watch Rick Santorum get frothy with this NY Times reporter for not being able to read Santorum's mind. Earlier, Santorum said in a speech, "Pick any other Republican in the country. He is...

A model displays a creation by Christian Dada during Fashion Week in Tokyo. Christian Dada is a label by Japanese designer Masanori Morikawa. Photo: REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon...

[Video Link] Do you think any disciplinary action will be taken against this duo? I don't. Fort Collins police investigating after video shows officer shoving man (Via biotiv)...

Sword & Sworcery LP - The Ballad of the Space Babies by Jim Guthrie Jim Guthrie has released an LP of the prog/komisch-inspired soundtrack to hit game Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. Avai...

On Wired, Alice Gregory interviews Mark Leyner about the publication of his latest (and long, long awaited) novel The Sugar Frosted Nutsack. Leyner's been a favorite of mine since I had my mind blown ...

The Lifetime network is making a miniseries abut the Columbine High School massacre, in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and one teacher, and injured nearly two dozen others. The...

I dislike PowerPoint presentations that contain lots of bulleted lists. And I hate the fact that I use bulleted lists in my presentations, too. I suppose in some cases a bulleted list is the best way ...

And now, an uplifting message from the Lady In The Radiator. (via The Art of Memory)...

It's been 59 years since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the first confirmed ascent to the summit of Mount Everest. While the reason people climb Everest hasn't changed, the technology they use...

The German Pirate Party has won four seats in Saarland, one of the smallest regions in Germany, described as a "conservative area." The PP campaigned on greater transparency in government. I'm speakin...

Via my friend and fellow cancer-warrior Francesco Fondi of Wired (Italy), news that Fujifilm in Japan is launching what it calls "Real 3D Mammography," a medical imaging system that enables technician...

In a break from the typical sci-fi/fantasy based Kindle Singles, I just read a biography of one of my all-time media favorites, Humphrey Bogart. Stefan Kanfer's Tough Without a Gun is a fairly detaile...

Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski selects the 9 best headlines from The Conservative Teen, a magazine for youngsters that will foster conservative values and counter liberal bias. When I moved to the U.S., ...

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

…and the countdown continues. The Cutting Room Floor From deep in the Clowes archives come a few illustration proposals that caught my eye. I particularly like the one that shows chatroom users ...

This little comic, written by me and drawn by Christopher in 2007, explains the origin of some of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion's most engaging ghosts: the ballroom organist and the screaming singers...

Liminal States is the debut novel from SomethingAwful editor Zack Parsons, and it's extraordinary. It begins as a grim, relentless western novel that describes a doomed love triangle between a simple ...

A farmer carries cucumbers to sell in the markets of Allahabad, India. Photo: Jitendra Prakash with Reuters....

A committee of UK MPs investigating the Internet's role in compromising Britain's privacy laws have concluded that the best way to ensure that court orders demanding suppression of tittle-tattle about...

Dr. Joline Zepcevski, a sci/tech history researcher, quoted by Jeremy Hsu on why much science fiction is as interesting for the technologies abandoned as those newly invented: "Technology is not pre-d...

Io9 has a very cool article about archaeologists using satellite mapping techniques to discover thousands of new sites in the Middle East. These places represent 8,000 years of human habitation and mi...

We've had a couple of posts recently about a hypothesis that links the current increase in obesity with an increase in easy access to foods that are designed to trigger reward systems in the human bra...

To be fair, there are really only a few ways that London's Hunterian Museum would end up with the uterus of a young woman floating in a jar. Given that the museum is home to surgical specimens, many o...

I really dig creative work that turns a sense of place into art. That's why I'm really getting a kick out of WoodcutMaps.com, which uses Google Maps to create really great geometric art—some cle...

Here's an interesting fact about sexual dimorphism: On average, if you were born a male, your hands are a little bit different from those of someone who was born a female. Most men have a pointer fing...

Any questions?...

Kurt Grandis needed to fight the squirrels in his backyard bird-feeder. So he turret-mounted a Super-Soaker, rigged for computer-control, and used python to program it to detect squirrels (distinguish...

Bruce Schneier was invited to testify about the TSA to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, but at the last minute he was disinvited, after the TSA objected to having him in the roo...

…and the countdown continues. Alvin says: "We found this drawing tucked away at the bottom of one of Mr. Clowes’s drawers…" The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist will be availa...

In the latest episode of the Gweek podcast (Number 45), I talked about the new line of limited edition Lego Moleskine notebooks. The front cover has a Lego plate built into it. When I brought up this ...

VenusAngelic, a prominent, 15-year-old member of online ball-jointed-doll fandom, describes how she uses cosmetics to make herself look like a doll, narrating it in a kind of whispering, Asian-inflect...

Most libraries arent found in barns, but Jackson (N.H.) Public Library happily makes its new home in one. Its not just any barn, either. Built in 1858 as part of the towns first inn, the barn was dism...

Daniel L. Everett is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University. He is the author of Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle and the subject of the documentary A ...

[Video Link at Vimeo] Boing Boing pal Richard Metzger produced a series of live artist showcases at SXSW, and one of the artists new to me from these sessions is Chelsea Wolfe. Los Angeles-based Chels...

Evelyn Paswall, 83, is suing Apple for $1 million after walking into the glass door of the Long Island Apple Store and breaking her nose. Her attorney says, "Apple wants to be cool and modern and have...

[Video Link] 17-year-old Anika Brandsma combined a Lego Mindstorms NXT set with a Lego Friends Olivia's Inventor's Workshop set to make this cool robot lab. John Park has more on the MAKE blog. To bri...

Sculptor Nemo Gould, who exhibits at Maker Faire, has completed a new sculpture, called Colonel Ostomy. [Video Link] Col. Ostomy is a casualty of war. His injuries were great enough that he lost the u...

Sorry to have disappeared; work got a hold of me and I spent a week living on planes. It did give me time to read a lot of Kindle Singles... I really enjoyed Harry Connolly's Child of Fire: a Twenty P...

For MyLifeScoop, I made a quickly-absorbed and extremely trustworthy video guide to apps and gadgets that'll help you take better photos with an iPhone. Better apps and add-on lenses (like PhotoJojo's...

Jackie sez, "On May 12th & 13th, 2012, the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation presents the third annual Watch City Festival! This is a city-wide community event that celebrates th...

UPDATE: Neil Gaiman writes on Twitter that he doesn't know anything about this event. - Rob. Jackie sez, "On May 12th & 13th, 2012, the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation presents...

Having flown a 2009 mission on the Space Shuttle Discovery, San Joaquin Valley congressional candidate Jose Hernandez may have thought his credentials as an astronaut are without question. Not so clai...

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

To avoid a return to work, an unemployed Austrian man apparently sawed his own foot off. [Reuters]...

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Wernher von Braun, arguably the most important rocket scientist ever, Space.com posted a gallery of images of the man and his work. And yes, von Brau...

The mayor of Medora, North Dakota has proposed installing a gallows outside his home to stage mock hangings for tourists. My vision is to stage a shooting, where I'd gun down someone in the street, ha...

In a decadent future, The Hunger Games' child-on-child deathmatches entertain the mindless and cower the oppressed. Today, they're as dangerous as a PG-13 movie dares be. Though the sharp edges presen...

Residents of Union County, New Jersey were apparently concerned yesterday morning when they noticed the sky was lit up with a strange glow. According to the New Jersey Star-Ledger, it turned out the g...

Howard Rheingold sez, "Technology criticism is important and I believe we all should critically examine the costs and consequences of our use of any technology. With regard to our use of social media,...

Would you like a signed copy of Before the Lights Go Out, my new book about the future of energy? Would you like some cookies? I have a way for you to earn both. The book comes out on April 10th and p...

Would you like a signed copy of Before the Lights Go Out, my new book about the future of energy? The book comes out on April 10th and pre-orders have already started shipping. Between now and the end...

Rick Kleffel's always-great Agony Column podcast interviews Matt Ruff about his extraordinary "golden rule" alternate history novel The Mirage, in which the Arabia is the cradle of democracy, the USA ...

ADVERTISEMENT The following is a paid post from Microsoft: Are weekly steampunk paper craft enthusiast newsletters filling up your inbox? Too many daily deals on half-priced crocheted Cthulhu kitty ha...

Rick Kleffel's always-great Agony Column podcast interviews Matt Ruff about his extraordinary "golden rule" alternate history novel The Mirage, in which the Arabia is the cradle of democracy, the USA ...

Maskull Lasserre, a Canadian sculptor, made this beautiful, realistic skull ("Three Degrees of Certainty II") by clamping a collection of obsolete computer manuals together and carving away at the pag...

Just arrived at the ocean's deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can't wait to share what I'm seeing w/ you @DeepChallenge — James Cameron (@JimCameron) March 25, 2012 Movie director a...

Just arrived at the ocean's deepest pt. Hitting bottom never felt so good. Can't wait to share what I'm seeing w/ you @DeepChallenge — James Cameron (@JimCameron) March 25, 2012 Movie director, ...

Snip from an essay in the New York Times today about the neuroscience of romantic love, by author Diane Ackerman: While they were both in the psychology department of Stony Brook University, Bianca Ac...

Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. My co-hosts for episode 45 are Ruben Bolling, the c...

Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. My co-hosts for episode 45 are Ruben Bolling, the c...

A herd of Holstein cows, just released from the winter barn. [YouTube via Metafilter] Previously....

So long as Rudy Rucker is publishing his extraordinary and fabulous free sf zine Flurb, life is good. Here's issue 13, fresh off the server. Issue #13 of Flurb is out, with astonishing tales by thirte...

…and the countdown continues. Vida in Hollywood (unpublished) This is the original art for the first page of Vida in Hollywood, a strip that features a character from Ice Haven. Clowes finished ...

Happy Kitchen Hamburgers are kits filled with powders you mix (and sometimes microwave) to make miniature, savory "candies" that taste like "real hamburger" etc. Hard to believe you can get this marve...

I can honestly say that it has never occurred to me to make replica fireworks out of hot-dogs. Creepy kid aside, those are some AMAZING ways to serve your wieners. (Image: 1941 ... playing with his fo...

Bo sells a t-shirt that says "Eat More Kale" from his home in rural Vermont. Titanic chicken sandwich chain Chick-Fil-A claims that this shirt infringes on their trademark for the slogan "Eat Mor (sic...

An unattributed, anonymous set of images on Imgur purports to be an album of photos recovered from a "Chinese gangsters phone." They show a heavily tattooed man lounging with enormous piles of money, ...

…and the countdown continues. Eightball around the World Alvin says: "Naturally, Daniel Clowes's comics are beloved around the globe. Here are covers for some of the many foreign editions. We...

The Open Observatory of Network Interference has released its report on the errors made by T-Mobile USA Web Guard, an Internet censorship product that T-Mobile customers can opt into. Web Guard blocks...

I came across this 2007 post on artist Ward Jenkins' site where he blogged about his mom's collection of 16 Magazine. She was smart for saving them -- the covers are stunningly attractive. Ward Jenkin...

Matt Richardson of MAKE says: I love the simplicity and beauty of Robert Howsare‘s record player-based drawing apparatus. Be sure to watch the video of it in action; you’ll find it quite m...

Wisevehicle sends us the Horto Domi Kickstarter project, "A wonderful project to create a raised bed growing system with open source electronics. The project pulls all the pieces of a great garden tog...

Bob sez, "Nemanja Jevremovic has replicated some of Nikola Tesla's equipment. There are lots of dials, switches, knobs, and meters. The guts of the equipment are beautifully crafted and on proud displ...

At The Awl, TC Gibbons collects unsettling British television Commercials, "Just the sort of thing you might expect from a country with the rich asshole from an '80s teen movie where its Barack Obama ...

Thrive's Nike has a recipe for making rainbow-striped jello Easter Eggs, using Kraft's "JELL-O JIGGLERS Egg Mold." She advises coating the mold with generous amounts of cooking spray, then using a syr...

Meanwhile, at Ars Technica, John Brodkin has two stories about Facebook: Facebook says it may sue employers who demand job applicants' passwords: "Well take action to protect the privacy and security ...

From the BBC: "Kazakhstan's shooting team demanded an apology after a spoof national anthem from the comedy film Borat was played instead of the real one at a medal ceremony in Kuwait." Best potassium...

Solitary Sand, written in just two days, has no graphics, only audio: you're blinded after a shipwreck or kidnapping, and must explore an island with only sound and descriptions of touch sensations to...

"With algorithms subtle and discrete, I seek iambic writings to retweet."...

Colin Dickey introduces the current Laphams Quarterly collection of rude and complaining messages left by monks in the margins of medieval manuscripts, a subject covered in detail in Image on the Edge...

Here's a rare complete photographic catalog of Uzay, the Turkish bootleg Star Wars figurines, which are delightfully shonky and off-model. No line of unlicensed Star Wars figures is as sought after as...

At a dog show in Shenyang, China, a Tibetan Mastiff has no idea whatsoever what this man is trying to achieve. Photo: REUTERS/Sheng Li...

Writing for Screen Trade Magazine Joe Paletta, CEO of Spotlight Theaters, announces that cinemas will begin to eliminate the premium charges on 3D movies and raise the prices of 2D movies to make up t...

On Reddit, KelseyPolo describes a friend's awesome gift for her (presumably Narnia-obsessed) 9-year-old-daughter, which features a through-the-wardrobe entrance leading to a playroom annexed off of th...

My latest Guardian column, "Copyright isn't dead just because we're not willing to let it regulate us," makes the case that copyright hasn't been killed by the Internet -- it hasn't even been threaten...

Briam Lam figured out the best LED lightbulb, and explains why it will eventually pay for itself: "They'll last 15-25 years compared to about a year for regular bulbs [and] 1/5th of the power ... so t...

Dave Jamieson has a long investigative feature in the Huffington Post about the lives of subcontracted temps in the American warehouse supply-chain. Jamieson describes a world of nested layers of temp...

Instructables user PenfoldPlant creates fascinating projects! I love the robotic-claw business card (video above), but I'm also extremely partial to the Spaghetti Yeti (right), and who could say no to...

Denise sez, "Update on the trial of Byron Sonne, arrested in Toronto on explosives charges in advance of the G20 in June, 2010. This week, the Crown pulled up information off of Sonne's harddrives, in...

Why would you buy a Candwich-brand sandwich in a can? Helpfully, the site lists three value propositions: "Healthy fast food," "Great for vending," and, of course, "Disaster preparedness." With an ext...

Industrial designer Daniel Ballou, of Long Beach, CA, creates some pretty sweet housewares. Pictured here are his desktop power lines, which are based on the reasoning that if this form works to organ...

Today would have been the 100th birthday of Wernher von Braun, an amazing scientist whose complicated legacy includes both engines of war and one of humankind's greatest achievements. Is von Braun the...

Here's the 10th episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I interview one of the makers featured in the magazine. Our maker this week is Andy Cavatorta. Andy is a roboticist, artist, mus...

The U.S. Geological Survey says there was an earthquake—a very small, 1.5 magnitude earthquake—in the vicinity of Clintonville, Wisconsin earlier this week. The mysterious booming noises h...

Here are two myths you need to let go of: The solution to high gas prices is more oil. Climate change is something that happens to polar bears and people from Kiribati. The truth is that fossil fuels ...

I'm sure there are a lot of people reading this who will have a hard time understanding why I love this collection of historic photos of female scientists. "Why female scientists?" I can already hear ...

Alvin says: "Here's some Eightball T-shirts from over the years, a Garth Gyro baseball cap, a collaborative drawing by Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware for a Comic-Con T-shirt, glimpses from an odd Hong K...

Before the space shuttles Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour are placed in their final interment at museums, NASA scientists are dissecting them to remove any hazardous materials and evaluate how the ...

The limited edition "Scrabble Typography Edition" stores away in a handsome set of replica type-drawers and features tiles whose letters appear in a variety of fonts. However, there are no kerning opt...

In 2005, Australian literary historian Nicole Moore discovered a nearly-forgotten archive of her country's banned books packed in nearly 800 boxes stored seven stories underground in a government repo...

This kitty, named Sugar, fell 19 floors out of a high-rise window in Boston and landed on her feet with only minor injuries - a scratch and bruised lungs. From Time: The height of Sugars dive might ha...

Last night, I finally saw the film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye about artist/musician and BB friend Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle) and his late wife, Lady Jaye Breyer ...

Apparently, there's big money in human-squab hybrids! Includes an "eye-opening free picture book." (Via Phil-Are-Go)...

Art Donovan writes, "I've created a current collection of illuminated designs that take cues from just about every global, antique influence I can find. My latest work, 'The Most Excellent Rumi Redux'...

The final word in understated sophistication! Comes with instruction manual. (Via Mitch O'Connell)...

This 1913 athleticwear catalog cover illo sure makes their customers look like a bunch of swell kids -- like Hal Roach/Our Gang stars who've got the mumps. Cue the creepy kids! (Image: 1913 ... Lumpy ...

Somehow, I missed last year's publication of the long-overdue Hark! A Vagrant collection, which puts Kate Beaton's fantastic webcomic between covers. Beaton is a Canadian who studied history but plump...

The Economist is hosting a debate between Bruce Schneier and former TSA honcho Kip Hawley, on the proposition "This house believes that changes made to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm ...

An NSA agent reacts to the new rules governing information acquired through domestic surveillance. At the New York Times, a story by Charlie Savage on new guidelines signed into law Thursday by US Att...

CarlBass on Instructables (who's also the CEO of Autodesk) created a 3D modelled, laser-cut version of his son's head, designed to have a secret compartment instead of brains. We made a box in the sha...

In the Boing Boing store: Zombie Sleep Masks. One of these is going in my "most comfortable man in the sky" airplane kit -- a carry-all with a tiny two-temperature sleeping bag, hot water bottle, fuzz...

[Video Link] MoveOn's new ad spot features women repeating brain-curdlingly misogynistic comments made by prominent members of the Republican party. The GOP's War on Women...

Apple's newest iPad, (R) and its predecessor, the iPad 2, are pictured with a thermal camera in Berlin March 22, 2012. Consumer Reports effectively launched "heatgate" hysteria this week, when it repo...

My kids and I have become deeply engrossed with the book Garbage Pail Kids, a fond look at the Topps bubblegum trading cards that were art directed by Art Spiegelman 25 years ago. This book, published...

On TechDirt, Glyn Moody reports the outrageous news that the Australian government refuses to release any substantive information on the secret copyright enforcement meetings it held, redacting nearly...

Actor William Shatner celebrates his 81st birthday today. He is best known for his role in the Star Trek television series and films, but has had a long and wildly varied career that... continues to.....

[Video Link] Our MythBusting pals, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, have a new series on the Discovery Channel called Unchained Reaction. It airs Sundays at 10PM. Here's an exclusive peek at the upcomin...

Via the New York Times: In Chile, a judge who lost custody of her daughters in 2004 because she is a lesbian will now receive damages, after an Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling. Karen Atala...

Via The Associated Press, news that two men on a cruise from Palm Springs through the Virgin Islands were arrested Wednesday in Dominica, where sex between two men—"buggery"— is a crime. A...

Lisa Katayama says: Last summer, TED film director Jason Wishnow and I went to Japan to visit a small fishing village destroyed by the tsunami. We'd heard from a friend that something unique was happe...

Willoughby, Ohio's StPaulAtTheEndOfTheWorld slows down FM radio classics like Boston's "More Than A Feeling" and Alan Parsons Project's "Eye In The Sky" into lush, orchestral drone. He calls it "Cock ...

Dug sez, "This video profile of automata-maker Dug North includes a better view of the 'Crazed giant beast hand-cranked automaton prototype' featured on Boing Boing back on August 2nd, 2011." Automata...

Abercrombie & Fitch should think of a better name for these pants....

Thomas Kuebler's sculptures are a little bit Bosch, a little bit Jaffee, a little bit Wolverton, and a little bit EC Comics -- and a whole lot of awesome. After two and a half decades of working in th...

I don't know anything about wine, but I love the audacious idea of using an immersion blender to hyperdecant wine in 20 seconds. Tim Ferriss explains how in the video above. I'm really looking forward...

Sound it Out # 22: Pond - "Moth Wings" Ive been thinking about getting a medical marijuana prescription for my insomnia, and it occurs to me that that's probably also the only thing that would make Po...

You can own Timothy Leary's sensory deprivation tank! The Samadhi Tank Company delivered the tank to Tim the month before he died. I don't know how often Tim used it, but I remember seeing it in the c...

COPYRIGHT© 2012 RMS TITANIC, INC; Sonar mosaic developed by Remus Operations Group (WHOI) and Waitt Institute. Visible for the first time through sonar imaging, the remains of the ship and its co...

…and the countdown continues. Clowes Juvenilia Alvin says: "For today we have artwork by young Daniel Clowes. He created these drawings between the ages of 6 and 18. What kinda kid draws Spiro A...

The Beyond is Lucio Fulci's 1981 Italian horror film about a hotel that just happens to be built on top of a gate to Hell! Fabio Frizzi's soundtrack is a classic of Italian horror scores and is now be...

Diana Gameros, my favorite singer/songwriter in San Francisco, performs soulful, passionate, and modern music infused with her Latin heritage. Born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Gameros creates authentic,...

I've posted before about mysterious booming sounds from unidentified sources that have rattled people in California, New York, and elsewhere. Now, the small town of Clintonville, Wisconsin has been ro...

[Video Link] Compare this casual, everyday bodkin-plinkage with the glossy and lurid X-Factor equivalent....

[Video Link] Compare this casual, everyday bodkin-plinkage with the glossy and lurid X-Factor equivalent....

I really dig science that makes the inaudible audible. Earlier this month, I posted a link where you could listen to seismic waves from the Tohoku earthquake converted into sound. A couple years ago, ...

National Park Service workers were using black lights to conduct a rat census (!) on Alcatraz last month when they accidentally discovered these strange glowing millipedes. From KQED QUEST: Some milli...

Rudyard Kipling has a crocodile. (Via Jacquelyn Gill)...

SgtGodswordBerserker has implemented a multi-function scientific calculator using Minecraft, a project that echoes the earlier projects to build a CPU and a 3D printer using the game engine and its pr...

It's not just adorable! Grooming is actually an incredibly important part of keeping this baby sea otter healthy. Joanne Manaster visited the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and came back with a whole post ...

Gentlemanwith relaxes with his e-book reader and laudanum kit. From the April, 1935 issue of Everyday Science and Mechanics. (Via The Retronaut)...

Robbo sez, "The band Walk Off The Earth performs Malvina Reynolds' song 'Little Boxes' - on boxes. In fact the whole set for this music video is made of cardboard. Really cool and a sweet rendition of...

Back in high school, I purchased an old travel guide to Europe at a library book sale. It taught me some valuable lessons about inflation and changing social expectations. But I really only used it fo...

You've probably heard that an old pub called The Hobbit in Southampton is under threat from the film company that controls the licensing for the Tolkien canon. After a public outcry, the company agree...

Our thanks go to Watchismo, sponsors of Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email, and to Shanalogic. Destroyers, Restrictors, Crusaders, Surveyors, Observers and Gearheads aren...

Kern Precision Scales has dispatched a garden gnome around the world to be weighed, in order to test the hypothesis that things weigh less at the equator than they do at the poles, due to the "little ...

Fourteen-year-old Luna Ito started making her own clothes and accessories when she was nine, after attending a friends birthday party at a sewing studio in LA. I remember at the beginning, threading w...

We needle our cultural heroes and then are delighted when they dissolve in front of us. It happens again and again, in Whitney Houston and in Michael Jackson and in Don Cornelius. They show us the way...

Wired's Jason Fagone talks to James Erwin, whose brilliant flash fiction -- posted as comments on Reddit -- scored him a movie deal. Previously....

Just look at it. I see your double banana, and raise you another banana... I introduce MUTANT TRIPLE BANANA! (i.imgur.com)...

If you can make homemade corn syrup, you can make homemade marshmallows. If you can make homemade marshmallows, you can make homemade Lucky Charms marshmallows. If you can do that, you are become deat...

Aziz Ansari, an extremely funny standup comedian, has just released "Dangerously Delicious," a comedy special that follows Louis CK's Live at the Beacon Theater DIY, DRM-free concert video, which nett...

Last week's 108th annual Explorer's Club dinner at NYC's Waldorf-Astoria featured the customary assortment of weird, gross and tantalizing food, starting with cow eyeball martinis (see Paul Adams's ph...

Jenny Lawson, creator of the Bloggess blog, has posted a long and extremely funny excerpt from her forthcoming book Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir). The excerpt, from chapter...

"Smith!" screamed the shrewish voice from the Samsung 8000ES-series LED TV. "6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, ...

A large crowd of protesters, between 2,000 and 5,000 by various estimates, are marching through the streets of New York right now to draw attention to the killing of Trayvon Martin. The Florida teen w...

Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has demanded that the Obama administration receive Congressional assent before signing the USA up to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a wide-reaching intern...

At Dangerous Minds, our friend and former (frequent) guestblogger Richard Metzger writes about the death of Royce Reed, co-star of the Royce and Marilyn viral videos. She passed away last night. "In 2...

An anonymous MD has a guest-post on John Scalzi's blog describing her/his medical outrage at being asked to perform medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds on women seeking abortion, in accorda...

McNaughton Fine Art is selling "One Nation Under Socialism" by Jon Naughton starting at just $345 for framed, signed, numbered Gicle prints. I was going to link to this artist's statement generator, b...

In The Atlantic today, a must-read piece by Teju Cole on some of the cultural issues raised by Kony 2012, and reactions to it in the media-blog-Twitter-opinion-sphere. I disagree with the approach tak...

Earlier this week, I blogged the Pirate Bay's announcement of a plan to set up mirrors of its servers in high-altitude aerial drones with wireless Internet links. TorrentFreak has a discussion of Elec...

FoxxFur, the brilliant, pseudonymous design critic and scholar of Disney themeparks, is back again, with the first post in a series of long analyses of the use of lighting fixtures in the design of Wa...

Writing in The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann describes the popping of the "law school bubble," which saw large numbers of law-school enrollees who hoped to graduate into six-figure salaries but instead a...

BB editors Xeni and Maggie feature on Time Magazine's 140 best twitterers of 2011. Adds Xeni: "they picked a tweet I wrote last night while utterly baked out of my fucking mind on medical cannabis."...

Cai Guo-Qiang is making some of the most interesting and beautiful art of our time. Hes been a prominent artist around the world for twenty years or so. Im embarrassed to admit that I knew nothing abo...

A group of high school students at Oakland's Youth Radio, a terrific organization that teaches journalism, production, and tech to underserved young people, launched a $69 weather balloon carrying a $...

I found Tania Branigan's Guardian article on China's coming demographic spasm really interesting. China's One Child policy means that there's a giant cohort of imminent retirees and a much smaller gro...

"SimCity Gameplay Lead Dan Moskowitz describes the concepts of Resources, Units, Maps, and Agents and how they affect the complex simulation behind SimCity." SimCity Insider's Look GlassBox Game Engin...

Billionaire anti-gay campaigner and Mitt Romney campaign co-finance chair Frank VanderSloot is whitewashing his tarnished image with a public relations campaign. After years of trying to silence journ...

Peter Flint sez, "Alan Turing, computer pioneer and geek hero, is generally credited with helping, via his work at the top-secret Bletchley Park code-breaking centre, to shorten World War 2 by anythin...

A really, really interesting report from The Center for a New American Security about how Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo developed it's own chemical weapons program, and what factors enabled it to succes...

Hugh Atkin's "Will The Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up" is a virtuoso feat of mashuperry, turning the Republican candidate into a politicized Eminem impersonator. Will The Real Mitt Romney Please Sta...

Here's a 3-part series on Robert Crumb's comments on dozens of "the famous and infamous," compiled from a large number of interviews. I find it fascinating and I often (but not always) agree with him....

We recently hosted an article by scientist and guest blogger Stephan Guyenet that explained how certain foods—those with a high calorie density, fat, starch, sugar, salt, free glutamate (umami),...

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

Newspaper Club is a service in London that lets people publish super-limited-edition newspapers. They're always finding surprising and sweet niches for newspapers. One recent example is Steve Wilkin, ...

"Over the weekend, I borrowed a friends time machine and cold-bloodedly killed a Neandertal, a Homo erectus, an Australopithecus, a dolphin, a chimp, eight sentient robots, the first extraterrestrial ...

Frank Bures is a friend of mine here in the Twin Cities. He's also one of the best travel writers I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. You might remember his work from a post a couple of years ago, ...

The official design for the disc-art on the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo DVD makes the disc appear to be a pirate copy, designed to mimic a blank, home-burned disc with the movie's title handwritten in...

What is a flame? If you can explain that, on a level that an 11-year-old can understand, then you could win a VIP pass to the World Science Festival, May 30 to June 3 in New York City. This is one of ...

Clowes Deck In 1991, Daniel Clowes designed a deck titled "Mutant City" for Corey O'Brien and Santa Cruz Skateboards. Daniel Clowes adds, “ I have never set foot on a skateboard.” The Art ...

Design Milk offers a roundup of pixelated furniture and home accessories that one may buy, such as this "Do Lo Rez" Ron Arad rug depicting a serious industrial accident in Minecraft....

This series is brought to you by TurboTax Federal Free Edition. The poster above was issued by the US Government in 1943 to remind citizens to be frugal and resourceful at home to help the war effort ...

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 Jane and I talk about Combin3, a...

Brian Ashcraft sez, "A Japanese art student named Mayuka Nakamura created 'sushi warships' based on famous Japanese warships of the past. In Japanese, ikura is often served as 'gunkan maki', which mea...

Despite what you may have seen in popular network dramas, it's actually rather difficult to perform a tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen. In fact, according to a 2010 study, only two specific brands of ...

Chjade84 convinced an Automated Laser Corporation 20 watt fiber laser to play "Still Alive," Jonathan Coulton's epic anthem for Valve's video-game Portal; as a lagniappe, the laser performs this feat ...

The latest Humble Indie Bundle has launched: "The Humble Bundle for Android 2" features five DRM-free Android games (they also play on Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux), available on a name-your-price basis...

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 Jane and I talk about Combin3, a...

[Video Link] From H. Hoover at Distriction blog, a little anecdote about a cool interaction that Stephon, a young man who was "born deaf and justifiably proud," had with the president at a recent even...

Girl Walk is a 77-minute dance film that accompanies Girl Talk's astounding album All Day, produced through an extremely successful Kickstarter project that raised $24,817 out of the $4,800 the produc...

[Video Link] Canadian yarn-lover and privacy-lover Howie Woo has developed an ingenious system for thwarting surveillance cameras that use face recognition technology. His solution involves crochet an...

As I noted in a Boing Boing post yesterday, the Federal Aviation Administration currently prohibits passengers from using electronic devices on commercial flights when the plane is below 10,000 feet i...

This 1977 CB radio ad has it all, from the heavy metal concept album lettering to the lens-flares on every surface -- even a halo for the holy gizmo itself. 1977 CW McCall Midland CB Radio...

In the New York Times, Stephen Castle reports on a case in the Netherlands dating back to the 1950s: Roman Catholic Church officials are accused of surgically castrating as many as ten young men. In a...

Trayvon Martin, 17 (above), was shot to death on February 26 while walking to his dad's girlfriend's house from a convenience store in a Florida town just north of Orlando. He was unarmed, wearing a h...

An interesting piece in the Guardian this week about cashless commerce in Greece, where the currency crisis has prompted citizens to take unusual measures to obtain essential goods. One exchange websi...

An architect named Michael Green believes he can make wooden skyscrapers that stand 100 storeys tall, and he's prototyping the idea with a 30-storey wooden building in Vancouver. More wooden high-rise...

"[W]hat's been pretty seriously under-covered is this past weekend's amazing outburst of out-of-control NYPD tactics on Occupy Wall Street," writes Choire Sicha at the Awl, along with a roundup of lin...

Alvin Buenaventura, editor of The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, says These images (above and after the jump below) are previously unpublished sketchbook pages from The Daniel Clowes Archive...

Alvin Buenaventura, editor of The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, says These images (above and after the jump below) are previously unpublished sketchbook pages from The Daniel Clowes Archive...

Alvin Buenaventura, editor of The Art of Daniel Clowes: Modern Cartoonist, says These images (above and after the jump below) are previously unpublished sketchbook pages from The Daniel Clowes Archive...

Video streaming by Ustream Tonight, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts a roundtable debate on Einstein's Theory of Relativity, its discontents, and h...

When you think of dinosaurs, you are imagining them as envisioned by the artist Charles R. Knight 100 years ago. American wildlife artist Charles R. Knight (1874–1953) spent a lifetime creating ...

[Video Link] Tim Cavanaugh, managing editor of Reason.com, recently came by my house for a video chat. It was a lot of fun! "You know, I studied mechanical engineering in school and I ended up becomin...

Over at Collectors Weekly, BB pal Ben Marks looks at flyers, pamphlets, and manifestos of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Yippies of the 1960s as a graphical blueprint of the Occup...

Molly sez, "MIT OpenCourseWare is developing a set of courses called Scholar, which are designed for self-learners. We recently published 6.00 (or Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in n...

Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day have teamed up to produce a new webshow called Tabletop, "like Celebrity Poker meets Dinner for Five, where we got interesting people we know together for tabletop games." ...

[Video Link] Thanks ClintonD! Check out all the wonderful things people send us over at Submitterator....

Reports are just now coming in of a Magnitude 7.9 7.6 earthquake striking Mexico, centered in the Mexican state of Guerrero Oaxaca. The first AP item was Twitter-sized, and straight to the point: "Str...

My wife, kids, and I have been having a lot of fun coloring the pages of Alice in Wonderland Giant Poster and Coloring Book. The black-and-white illustrations are reproductions of John Tenniel's class...

Over at House of Mirth, esteemed vernacular photo collector Robert Jackson posts a delightful series of favorite photobooth photos chosen by other snapshot collectors. "A Favorite Photobooth Photo" (T...

We've talked here before about the extremely important (and often-overlooked) DIY aspect of science. Scientists are makers. They have to be. The tools they need often aren't available any other way. O...

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is scanning and posting more than 80,000 documents from the University's Einstein Archives and the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech. Seen above is a snip from a ma...

Before the Lights Go Out, my book on the future of energy in the United States, comes out on April 10th. I'm going to be traveling a bunch over the next couple months, doing presentations and panel di...

It's the first day of Spring! To celebrate, here is a photo that science journalist Maryn McKenna took of her car windshield in Atlanta, Georgia, coated with a single day's worth of pollen. Please fil...

On Reddit, a Walt Disney World (and sometime Disneyland) Goofy head-character (a person who roams the streets in a full-body character suit that includes a headpiece) has submitted to an "Ask Me Anyth...

The United States Antarctic station at McMurdo Sound was opened in 1956. Originally it was operated by the Navy, rather than the National Science Foundation. This photo was taken during the Navy years...

[Video Link] Andrew Thomas Huang's 10 minute video gets weirder and better with each passing minute....

"If you are traveling 80 miles an hour, how long does it take to go 80 miles?" (Thanks, Lew!)...

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

Using an OS X utility called Google Book Downloader, Andrew Hearst downloaded every issue of the late Spy magazine into his dropbox account, giving him a tablet-ready version of the fantastically funn...

Avi sez, "Brendan Fitzpatrick has made a beautiful series of x-ray photographs of flowers." And he's selling prints! Floral X-rays (Thanks, Avi!)...

Noordijk sez, "Egyptian graffiti artists make this military street barrier 'disappear.'" Sheikh Rihan mural...

This steampunk, papercraft wonderment comes from Phillip Valdez, who notes, "I do paper sculpture and have a soft spot for steampunk. All creations are made from Archival paper with book binding glue ...

London's Nobrow press, who published the excellent Hilda comics I reviewed in January, have a new sweet little coloring/activity book called "Time to Make a Monster, by Liam Barrett. My daughter was d...

[Editor's note: This morning, I found a an enormous, 30Lb box waiting for me at my post-office box. Affixed to it was a sticker warning me that by accepting this box into my possession, I was making m...

I posted last week about Banksy possibly stealing written material from Sean Tejaratchi in Crap Hound. Like almost rumor, the truth is significantly less salacious. In fact, it sounds like this whole ...

The US Federal Aviation Administration today announced it is exploring ways to make it easier for airlines to allow travelers to use connected gadgets like phones, iPads, and tablet PCs during plane t...

A Craigslist of Greatness: ** READ THIS ** Take a few seconds and read what I am into. Now imagine you contacting me and eventually calling me, and asking if I would like to play some blues. Or some 6...

Aibo is a skilled beatboxer from Japan. Here's her YouTube channel, and you can follow her on Twitter. Above, a little video featuring her work from MyISH. The MyISH folks tell us she's "a friend/prot...

Google Wage. LOL....

Link. (Red Scharlach Points At Interesting Things, via Andrea James)...

Found on Fuck Yeah, Tattoos, an adorable behind-the-ear droid R2D2 (via The Mary Sue)...

Oh, this is rich: I Would Like to Buy Kickstarter, by Eric Moneypenny. (via Joe Sabia)...

[Video Link] BB pal Joe Sabia points us to this incredible video by Evan Shinners, Julliard-trained pianist and "best Bach player around," in which Shinners shows the world what he sees when he plays....

I enjoyed my lightly peanutted salt....

Now that The Pirate Bay is serving tiny "magnet links" instead of torrents, its whole database will fit in 90MB. That means that they can use much lighter-weight server hardware, including tiny Raspbe...

In Gweek episode 044, I interviewed Sarah Vowell about her book Unfamiliar Fishes. It's a history of Hawaii between the time of the arrival of the first Christian missionaries and its annexation to th...

Charles says: Mark Abel is a former rock musician and studio engineer who has bravely chosen to join an endangered species: He is a modern composer of serious music. "Serious" however does not mean "a...

Jennifer Perkins on Naughty Secretary Club has a great idea for spring/summer fun with your kids: freeze a bag of dinosaur toys in a block of ice and then stage a sunny-day excavation: The hardest par...

What happens when you get the chairman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, the chief scientist of Greenpeace, an energy and environmental policy expert, and an environmental activist/politician in a ro...

Danny Hellman, who did fantastic illustrations for bOING bOING (the zine) is posting a selection of 80 illustrations he did for a book about the lousy job prospects for college grads, written in the s...

Danny Hellman, who did fantastic illustrations for bOING bOING (the zine) is posting a selection of 80 illustrations he did for a book about the lousy job prospects for college grads, written in the s...

We've talked before about scientists using Rockethub to fund basic laboratory research—stuff that's important, but not likely to lead immediately to new technologies or other marketable products...

DrawTheShitler sells rolls of toilet roll printed with a caricature of a mustache-less Hitler. You supply the mustache when you wipe. DrawTheShitler...

Last week, you probably heard about a study purporting to show that consuming any amount of red meat significantly upped your risk of premature death. If that news has you freaked out, I highly recomm...

Juggler/impresario Mat Ricardo sez, "Just wanted to say a big thanks to all the BoingBoingers who came to Mat Ricardo's London Varieties last month - it was a sell-out, and a hell of a show, partly be...

How many batteries have you used today? Energy storage devices have become an integral part of our lives, but they still aren't really a part of our electric grid. There are some good reasons for that...

[Video Link] If you've been reading Boing Boing for any length of time, you probably know by now Daniel Clowes is at the top of my list of greatest living cartoonists. (See our many posts about Dan's ...

Golan sez, "The Free Universal Construction Kit is a collection of adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular childrens construction toys. By allowing any piece to join t...

Just look at them. Banana Boats (via Neatorama)...

Here's a video of a Chicago TSA operative searching a three year old boy who is in a wheelchair, wearing a body-cast, on the way to his family trip to Disney World. The boy's parents were not allowed ...

Batman-and-bananas from DeviantArt created a fantastic springheeled set of cosplay boots as part of a steampunk version of Chell from Portal 2. These started as two pairs of shoes, one cheap pair of b...

Metafilter founder Matt Haughey gave an inspiring talk at Webstock about being a 40-year-old Web geek who came of age in the Bay Area in the 1990s dotcom boom. Matt talks about finding work-life balan...

This fellow is Brookesia micra, a tiny chameleon species newly discovered on the island of Madagascar. Seen here is a juvenile, but even an adult only reaches approximately one inch long. According to...

ADVERTISEMENT The following is a paid post from Microsoft: Do you ever feel like newsletters, deals, and updates are weighing down your inbox? This isn't the spam of your inbox. It's the bacon. That's...

Rick Prelinger sez, I'm delighted to let everyone know about our newest Internet Archive collection which, for want of a cooler title, we're calling 35mm Stock Footage. Digitized from 35mm original ne...

On How to Be a Retronaut, a collection of military STD posters from the end of WWI and through WWII. Military STD Posters, 1918-1945...

Artist Anna Schuleit was commissioned to produce an installation in the massive, ancient Massachusetts Mental Health Center before it was demolished. She filled it with 28,000 flowers. Here, Colossal ...

Artist Anna Schuleit was commissioned to produce an installation in the massive, ancient Massachusetts Mental Health Center before it was demolished. She filled it with 28,000 flowers. Here, Colossal ...

A new season of my favorite lifestyle improvement edu-tainment program, Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule, airs tonight at 1230am on Adult Swim....

Fiverr, an online "gig" marketplace offering Mechanical Turk-style piecework, has a thriving market for cheap offers to write positive reviews of your self-published Kindle books. Caveat emptor. Displ...

I was not looking forward to moving two monstrously heavy pieces of furniture from my house to my sister-in-law's house. They probably weighed about 200 lbs each, but we had to get them out to make ro...

Republic Report has released figures documenting the fact that the average member of Congress gets a 1,452% salary hike when she or he leaves office and becomes a corporate lobbyist. They point out th...

Here's a POV video of a fourth grade girl psyching herself up for her first run down an intimidating ski-jump. The tension mounts as she narrates her anxieties and checks in with her instructor for co...

Further to the ignoble saga of Anonymosus-OS, an Ubuntu variant targeted as people who want to participate in Anonymous actions: Sean Gallagher has done the legwork to compare the checksums of the pac...

Newly released documents shed light on the San Francisco edition of the CIA's notorious MK-ULTRA program (through which people were unwittingly given massive doses of LSD to see if the drug would be u...

From the newly released collection of Margaret Thatcher's papers by the Cambridge University archive, "Doodles left by President Reagan on the table beside Margaret Thatcher at the G7 summit at Ottawa...

Sculptor Jud Turner writes, "I thought you might enjoy this full-sized goat, 'Tanngrisnir', named after one of the two goats in Norse mythology that pulled Thor's chariot. He ate them for dinner every...

Fans of the popular public radio program This American Life - and I count myself among them - learned last night that the single most downloaded episode of the show ever - an expos of sorts of Apple's...

Forbes's Carol Pinchefsky profiles "4 Public Interest Groups Who Are Fighting for Your Digital Freedom" including EFF, Public Knowledge, TechFreedom and the Center for Democracy and Technology. It's a...

Noah Scalin sez, "Just look at this awesome steampunky rocket ring created by Herbert Hoover (not the former president) for his Ring-A-Day project. He also has a laser-cut miniature wooden version for...

The license-plate cameras at UK filling stations will soon begin to trigger automatic lookups of every motorist's insurance and tax records. Drivers whose insurance and tax records can't be located or...

STNautilus created a detailed model-train replica of the long-gone, dearly missed Disneyland Mine Train through Nature's Wonderland. Dan sez, "I nearly plotzed from this scene being so charming." (War...

Invisible Children co-founder Jason Russell, who was involved in the making of the Kony 2012 video, was detained in San Diego yesterday morning after being found masturbating in public, vandalizing ca...

Doogie Horner, author of Everything Explained Through Flowcharts designed a chart about the work habits of the moon and sun. Here's another flow chart that Doogie created especially for Boing Boing....

Folks in San Francisco sure like making their own whipped cream in the streets. Greg Long says, "I walked out to find this in the alley behind GAMAGO in SoMa this morning. Our cars have been getting h...

Irishman Sam Jordan wanted to see if he could consume a gallon of that ancient traditional Irish celebratory beverage, the Shamrock Shake. Did he succeed? You'll have to visit the link to find out. Th...

A major new book on the art of video games was released today to coincide with the opening of an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The show curator, Chris Melissinos, is also the co-a...

Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, has reminded the nation that at his instigation, the largest ISPs in the USA are set to disconnect their customers, and their custom...

Here's Molly Wood on UltraViolet, the harebrained new scheme whereby people take their DVDs into stores to pay for them to be ripped to region-locked, time-limited DRM-laden streamable formats: It is ...

Robbo sez, "The title for the article is just a portion of an amazing thank you letter from a primary school student in Austin, Texas - sent to a local weatherman who visited the class. Includes a dra...

Instructables member TimAnderson has a great HOWTO for growing molded "portait gourds," a technique from China and would work with other vegetables. He starts with a 3D sculpture of his subject, creat...

Boing Boing pal and periodic guestblogger Andrea James sends word of a cool and worthy project she's doing, and raising funds for via Kickstarter: "Family Restaurant," a film for children whose moms a...

Michael Geist, "One of the major unanswered questions about Bill C-30, Canada's lawful access/online surveillance bill, is who will pay for the costs associated with responding to law enforcement dema...

This undated Iver Johnson ad may just be the most disturbing thing I've ever seen posted on the LiveJournal Vintage Ads group. Not just for the odd spectacle of the little girl playing with a pistol i...

On Ars Technica, Sean Gallagher delves into the Anonymosus-OS, an Ubuntu Linux derivative I wrote about yesterday that billed itself as an OS for Anonymous, with a number of security/hacking tools pre...

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The TSA has announced a new program rolling out at a few airports that allows selected customers to skip the security lines by checking in at a kiosk and going through a nominal screening, but only af...

Here's Japan's Wrecking Crew Orchestra performing some pretty wonderful dance moves made all the better by their electroluminescent wire garments, which cause them to seemingly wink in and out of exis...

This may just be the best TED Talk video I've seen: listen.com/Rhapsody founder and extremely funny person (and soon-to-be debut science fiction author) Rob Reed examines the math behind the claims ma...

Molly Crabapple sez, "While cultural institutions, from record labels to newspapers, are crumbling around us, the fine art world has remained relatively unchanged. Medici is The Crowd is an article ab...

A court filing from an FBI Special Agent reports that the Bureau's forensics teams can't crack the pattern-lock utility on Android devices' screens. This is moderately comforting, given the courts' re...

Here's a transcript of some of Kristen Schaal's Daily Show routine on the current mandatory transvaginal ultrasound disgrace and the national attack on women's reproductive rights: I just flew in from...

A group working under the Anonymous banner has release Anonymosus-OS, a derivative of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution optimized for doing Anonymous-style stuff, with a bunch of "security testing" to...

Mathieu 'P01' Henri, a French Web developer, has produced a functional speech synthesizer in 1k of JavaScript. It's an entry in the fourth JS1K competition. JS1K#4 was colliding with our long awaited ...

From the first time I watched "Kony 2012," I always sensed a link with the storyline of Matt Stone and Trey Parker's Book of Mormon musical. But sweet fancy Moses, I did not know how closely linked th...

On Play This Thing, Greg Costikyan reviews The Snowfield, a game developed as a student project at the Singapore MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. It sounds like a very odd and compelling experience: in The Snowfi...

Synchrotrons are a type of particle accelerator—a family of machines that includes the famous Large Hadron Collider. Different synchrotrons do different jobs. The Diamond Light Source synchrotro...

An experimental printer documented by Cambridge University scientists in a paywalled Royal Society paper is capable of laser-ablating the toner off of sheets of previously printed paper, leaving them ...

Need ten hours of Darth Vader's mechano-asthmatic wheeze? Look no further, for Murdock129's YouTube video has the soundtrack for your days. 10 Hours of Darth Vader Breathing (via IO9)...

What did people do for fun before photoshop? I don't even remember. Please enjoy the entire blog at Tumblr (of course): Cat Scientists of the 1960s. Via Heather Fenoughty...

Phil Plait linked to this amazing photo of the Sun on the Bad Astronomy blog today. It's incredible. Like nothing I've ever seen before. The photographer is Alan Friedman. Plait explains how Friedman ...

Noticed this on the street in LA this morning. Anyone know who the artist is? Update: Castro Burger has left us a comment and is the artist behind the poster. Nice work Mr. Burger!...

I've been a fan of Roy Doty's ever since I discovered his Wordless Workshop comics for Popular Science magazine, which he's been doing since the 1950s. He started illustrating professionally in 1948 a...

Let me preface anything else in this post by clarifying something important. What we are talking about here is a hypothesis—it's not been proven. In fact, it's not even really been tested yet. T...

Martin Jones patents obvious ideas. A holding company, ArrivalStar, is shaking down cash-strapped cities nationwide over one for public transport scheduling—and they're paying up, to avoid costl...

Wasteland, the classic post-apocalyptic sandbox RPG, is to receive a sequel a quarter of a century later. "We wanted to make a Wasteland sequel, but didn't have the rights," says creator Brian Fargo o...

Even the farsighted Founding Fathers could not have foreseen this--the Fed is now on Twitter! Just think of the possibilities-- one fine Friday any Fed functionary could foment a world crisis in 140 c...

Don Levy says:"Inventor and Innovator Ravi Sawhney (founder of RKS Design), the producer, engineer and recording artist Alan Parsons, music tastemaker Nic Harcourt, Homeboy-Industries founder Father G...

Sound it Out # 21: Rebecca Gates and the Consortium - "Dangerous" Rebecca Gates originally blew my mind with her fantastic duo The Spinanes. She and Scott Plouf (who now drums for Built to Spill) cre...

The next installment in San Francisco's excellent SF in SF reading series will feature Claude Lalumire and Richard A. Lupoff, on Mar 17. Jameson's will be served at the cash bar. Admission is free, as...

Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Here's a BoingBoing-only offer! Watchismo is offering the ODM Time Track Watches for only $7...

Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Here's a BoingBoing-only offer! Watchismo is offering the ODM Time Track Watches for only $7...

Bunnie Huang, cracker of the Xbox and creator of the Chumby, wanted to do something to help people in Japan following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. He created a reference design for a cheap, reliabl...

The Hunger Games is a young adult novel about a grim future, in which teens are picked each year to fight to the death on TV. The subject matter, however, has earned the eagerly-awaited movie adaptati...

I'll be chatting live with the editors of Treehugger.com, starting at 11:00 Eastern. The chat will be embedded at Treehugger. There will be opportunities for viewers to participate in the conversation...

HowToBeAHeroine's M16 Lamp is a great, quick bodge: take one Ikea lamp, stick it onto one toy electronic M16 (sprayed gold), add one Target lampshade. Be sure to watch to the end for a spectacular fin...

Here's the 9th episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I interview one of the makers featured in the magazine. Our maker interview this week is with AnnMarie Polsenberg Thomas. She's t...

At ABV in New York, you can order a $17 Foie Gras Fluffernutter, a Wonderbread sandwich that combines peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, and foie gras. Evidently a dessert, it's topped with hazelnut cr...

Yesterday reader Tim H. yet again recommended a book I've recently finished and loved: James Cook's No Easy Hope (Surviving the Dead.) No Easy Hope is a take on the 'survive the zombies' genre I hadn'...

Syrian activists have leaked a cache of documents purporting to be the private email of Bashar al-Assad and his coterie, penned during the slaughter of the Syrian opposition. The Guardian is working i...

Sara Robinson's written an excellent piece on the productivity losses associated with extra-long work-weeks, something that has been established management theory since the time of Ford, but which few...

If you're feeling alone and vulnerable in a big, troubled world, Amazon has this "Damascus FX1 FlexForce Modular Hard Shell Full Body Crowd Control System," which will provide you with the physical pr...

What better use for a pair of musical Tesla coils than FONentertainment's rousing 2010 chorous of "Dueling Banjos?" Dueling Banjos on musical Tesla Coils (via Geekologie)...

Pundit Dan Abrams joins forces with Science Channels Josh Zepps and Second City legend Jeff Michalski to film a mockumentary on the causes of the 2008 economic collapse. Abrams and Zepps are writing w...

Four flights of seventy-two stairs were transformed into a giant game board using 1,200 feet of wire and 48 Internet-connected tin cans decorated with green and gold helium balloons at DIY: Physical C...

Greg Smith, a 12 year veteran of Goldman Sachs who held the rank of executive director until today, has tendered his resignation and penned a NYT op-ed explaining his disillusionment with the firm. Sm...

On Core77, Hipstomp profiles Oasis Concepts, a furniture maker that produces flat-folding compact furniture. I'm semi-obsessed with tiny-footprint furniture at the moment, having confronted the realit...

BERG's Matt Jones hazards a guess at the future of work in this hypothetical future Richard Scarry book-cover. Richard Scarrys "What Do Robots Do All Day?"...

[Video Link] Via Biotv: "An interesting scene-for-scene comparison of actual media appearances of Sarah Palin and Julianne Moore reenacting them in HBO's Game Change." Pretty amazing acting by Juliann...

Amy Crehore says, "There is something about children who live underground and play with big ants and other bugs that appeals to me." And who in their right mind would disagree with her? Illustrations ...

Here's Christopher Walken reading and narrating Where the Wild Things Are, a treat to rival Samuel Jackson's dramatic interpretation of Go the Fuck to Sleep. Where the Wild Things Are (as read by Chri...

Joe Engressia Jr. was the father of phone phreaking. In the 1950s, the blind 7-year-old realized that his high-pitched whistle could control the phone system. Over the years, he learned the electronic...

[Video Link] David and his son built this Vibrobot, featured in Make: Projects. It's the best one I've come across!...

Zhi Zheng, Hongchuan Zhao and Dongbai Song from China won Evolo magazine's 2012 Skyscraper design competition. My favorite, however, is the runner-up (above) which crawls up the side of the Yunnan mou...

On Monday, I was shooting some video in San Francisco with my friend Lessley Anderson of CHOW and she spotted this card for a late night whipped cream supplies delivery service. This seems fishy to me...

Judy Fox's "Octopus" is an awfully lovely piece -- it's repped by LA's Ace Gallery. Octopus, 2009 Sculpted in terra cotta, cast in poly resin and painted with casein paint...

These never-released Alexander McQueen heels were inspired by HR Giger and the Alien franchise. They look a impractical, uncomfortable, and properly biomorphic. Alien-Inspired High-Heels [Pic] (via Ge...

Please always be visiting the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and when you are not, please always be following RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER....

"Friends in Casino on a slot machine; all obviously are winning" by Kzenon / Shutterstock The morning the trouble began—years before anyone realized there was trouble in the first place—An...

Here's a minute classic Gameboy carved into the base of a toothpick, in a mini-doc about its carving. ...

For more than three decades, veteran music journalist Pete Frame has specialized in creating fantastic Rock Family Trees that map relationships between musicians and bands. In the comments on my post ...

As you might recall from, well, Top Gun, the crew on aircraft carriers use a series of hand signals to direct planes as they land and take off. Spurred by the increase in drone activity, MIT researche...

Bethany Nixon's husband claims to have found the exact proportions of peppermint extract, green food dye, and vanilla ice-cream to reproduce the seasonal McDonald's Shamrock Shake year round. This wil...

Japanese vending-machine powerhouse Sanden has introduced a hand-cranked vending machine that operates when the power goes off. You just crank it 70 times and then insert your change. Crank this vendi...

Righthaven, the copyright troll that flamed out after a botched attempt to get rich by suing bloggers for quoting newspaper articles, has reached bottom. After having its domain seized and sold off to...

Numbers can be powerful things, but they don't necessarily help the average person grasp what's actually going on in science. Instead, personal stories tend to make a bigger impact. And that's underst...

The manure pits on pig farms across the United States have been invaded by a mysterious foam—at Ars Technica, Brandon Keim describes it as "a gelatinous goop that resembles melted brown Nerf". I...

What could possibly make a 1960s-era nuclear war worse than you'd already assumed it would be? How about being packed like sardines into a fallout shelter with 13 of your soon-to-be-closest friends? F...

[Video Link to Al Jazeera report] Invisible Children's "Kony 2012" video has been viewed by millions online around the world. By view counts alone, it is now the most viral video in history. It is now...

Join me tomorrow at 11:00 am Eastern for a live chat with editors from Treehugger.com. They'll be talking with me about my new book, Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Co...

Last year, the Eastern coast of Japan was struck by a massive 9.0 earthquake and tsunami. Since that happened, you've heard researchers talk about how it was not the first time that region had experie...

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History has a new exhibit up dedicated to x-ray portraiture of fish. All the shots were taken by Sandra Raredon, a museum specialist in the Division of Fishe...

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For Wired, Andy Baio recalls how Yahoo went about filing the "defensive" software patents that it now threatens competitors with. For years, Yahoo was mostly harmless. Management foibles and executive...

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 Jane and I talk about Match Pani...

ZeniMax has settled a trademark claim against Minecraft-famed Mojang and its forthcoming fantasy-themed card game, Scrolls. ZeniMax is the holding company for Bethesda Softworks, creator of Skyrim and...

Spider Robinson writes concerning a petition to rescue the 100,000 items from the musical archives of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that are in danger of being purged: "To waste the precious m...

Recommended by several readers in the comments, I read the Trilisk Ruins by Michael McCloskey. There is visible evidence of aliens and their technology, but humanity still hasn't met a live one. Life ...

MTV Hive interviewed our own Ed Piskor about his awesome and epic "Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree" comic that you can read here each week! From MTV: You find yourself listening to more old-school hip ...

After 2.5 centuries, Encyclopedia Britannica has stopped printing encyclopedias. Seems time, as the dead tree books now represent less than 1% of Britannica's sales. From CNN: "Everyone will want to c...

Following on from their Internet of Things Printer, the good folks at Adafruit have produced a set of plans and a kit for making an Internet of Things Camera -- a tiny, standalone gizmo that turns an ...

These "Look of Disapproval glasses" from Thingiverse gives you a 3D-printable option for turning your face into an emoticon. They're the first contribution from user Plasma2002, and the Makerbot folks...

[Video Link] I'm excited about Greg Borenstein's new book for MAKE, called Making Things See: 3D vision with Kinect, Processing, Arduino, and MakerBot. Greg's a grad student at NYUs Interactive Teleco...

Filmmaker Casey Neistat writes in the NYT about his recurring project to steal his own bicycle in really obvious ways in places across New York, to see if anyone intervenes. Very few people do. I rece...

If you're one of those people who tend to lose their phone shortly after putting it down, then you'll want to read this. According to a new study, if you lose your smartphone, you have a 50/50 chance ...

Back from the Games Developers' Conference in San Francisco, Raph Koster weighs in on the perennial debate about what makes a game, starting with his own classic formulation, "Playing a game is the ac...

It appears that the (kind of great) Banksy rant about advertising that's been going around lately is excerpted from his 2004 book Cut It Outand was actually written/inspired bySean Tejaratchicirca 199...

Jesse Thorn had me back on his terrific radio program and podcast Bullseye (the successor to his previous show, The Sound of Young America). I talked about the Zeo Sleep Manager and the art blog Gurne...

Blake Maloof has been covering the Game Developers' Conference for MAKE, and he interviewed his colleagues at Toys for Bob about the game, Skylanders: Spyros Adventure, which my 8-year-old daughter lo...

In "Linguistic properties of multi-word passphrases" (PDF, generates an SSL error) Cambridge's Joseph Bonneau and Ekaterina Shutova demonstrate that multi-word passphrases are more secure (have more e...

[ Video Link. Content warning: Contains azz-shakin' ] Via New Orleans native Clayton Cubitt, who says, I'm gonna say this again, for those of you who yearn for the energy and danger and artistic vital...

On Singularity Hub, Aaron Saenz interviews Rich Burlew, creator of the D&D-oriented webcomic Order of the Stick, whose record-breaking Kickstarter project raised more than $1.2 million. SH: Has t...

DeviantArt's KayleighOC has created some outstanding (and snag-prone) batnails. Na Na, Na Na, Na Na, Na Na, Batmaaan! (via Super Punch)...

I posted last year about Bay Area duo Barn Owl's hypnotic, droney doom-folk guitar. Barn Owl's Jon Porras has a solo LP titled "Black Mesa" coming out on the Thrill Jockey label next month. The song f...

Can't wait to get my hands on this forthcoming Taschen title, by art historian and art editor Sandra Rendgen; with graphic designer and editor Julius Wiedemann: Information Graphics. The book explores...

TomAqMar sez, "'If you were garbage, you'd be home by now,' says Forbes contributor Michael Kanellos in this report about a Swedish co. that's already installed on part of Roosevelt Island a pneumatic...

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

The Daily's M.L. Nestel cites law enforcement reports from across America describing a crime-wave of Tide detergent thefts, including claims that bottles of easily resellable, name-brand washing soap ...

The Masonic Lodge, Los Angeles Richard Metzger and Tara McGinley of Dangerous Minds have cooked up an incredible event taking place this Friday night in Los Angeles, timed to coincide with the occasio...

This is a new humanoid robot designed to fight fires on Navy ships. According to the US Naval Research Laboratory who are building it with Virginia Tech and University of Pennsylvania, "a humanoid-typ...

Robin Wauters writes in The Next Web about the bizarre, cartoon-villain move from Belgian copyright collecting society SABAM, who are demanding that public libraries pay royalties when volunteers read...

Watch the first-ever live global debate on the War on Drugs today on Google+, hosted by Virgin CEO Sir Richard Branson at 7pm GMT/ 2pm EST today. Details on the webcast here. Participants will in...

San Francisco photographer Sharon Beals photographed hundreds of birds nests in the collection of the California Academy of Sciences and other science museums. She's posted the stunning images on Flic...

Outgoing New York Times CEO Janet Robinson received an exit package worth $23.7 million after presiding over an eight year tenure that saw the company's share price fall by 80 percent. The company's n...

The town of Buford, Wyoming will go up for auction on April 5. Yes, the entire town. Population: one. The starting bid is $100,000 and that includes 10 acres, a house, garage, gas station, cabin, scho...

Today is the anniversary of the Apollo 9's completed 1969 mission to test the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) technology that would later bring Aldrin and Armstrong to the surface of the moon. LIFE magaz...

Mike Scarcella in The Legal Times writes about The Justice Department defending the government's refusal to discuss, or acknowledge the existence of, "any cooperative research and development agreemen...

In the WSJ, Jeff Yang reviews "Seeking Asian Female," Debbie Lum's documentary about white guys romantically fixated on Asian women—specifically, one white guy, and his quest to marry the Asian ...

Today is the anniversary of the Apollo 9's completed 1969 mission to test the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) technology that would later bring Aldrin and Armstrong to the surface of the moon. LIFE magaz...

Photo: Leslie Cochran at rest at an Austin intersection in 1998 (Vernon Bryant, The Austin American-Statesman via NYT) New York Times reporter and native Texas son John Schwartz writes about the death...

Ur-happy mutant David Byrne writes, Back in 2004, Caetano Veloso asked me join him for a night during his residency as a Perspectives artist at Carnegie Hall. The concert was very stripped down and ac...

I'm a big fan of DODOcase's handmade-in-SF iPad cases, and the classic, restrained minimalism of their basic black line and "Essentials" collection. They've just announced a Spring/Summer series for t...

On CNN, Doug Gross has a good account of Kevin Smith's SXSW presentation on how he became a podcaster and weaned himself off the "heroin" of movie studio money, going direct to his fans instead for ad...

Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl is no cheap .99 Kindle Single, it cost $12 but looked so interesting I couldn't pass. Downtown Owl is a story about life in the tiny town of Owl, North Dakota. We watch...

A press-release from MIT Press describes ReThinking a Lot, a fascinating-sounding book by MIT landscape architecture and urban design prof Eran Ben-Joseph. Ben-Joseph is obsessed with the odd role tha...

Chuck Klosterman's Downtown Owl is no cheap .99 Kindle Single. It cost $12 but looked so interesting I couldn't pass. Downtown Owl is a story about life in the tiny town of Owl, North Dakota. We watch...

In the Guardian, Stephen Graham describes the militarized security that will transform the UK capital into "Lockdown London" for the Olympics. London is set to meet and exceed Beijing for civil libert...

Dan Frommer offers an infographic illustrating how infographics are ruining the World Wide Web. [SplatF via @GlennF] Previously: Computer-generated PR spam for infographic...

"How can you be serious?" Not by wearing this T-shirt! The classic Mark Pawson T-shirt, updated for 2012. Sold exclusively in the Boing Boing Shop. Demolish Serious Culture T-shirt...

Gramturismo sez, "A maker in Scotland has created an elaborate, steampunk style hand cranked corkscrew." It's quite an amazing gadget -- talk about thoroughly solving a problem! Rob Higgs (Thanks, gra...

Gramturismo sez, "A maker in Scotland has created an elaborate, steampunk style hand cranked corkscrew." It's quite an amazing gadget -- talk about thoroughly solving a problem! Rob Higgs (Thanks, gra...

I'm a great fan of the (now 20 years old!) Joe Pesci/Marissa Tomei/Ralph Macchio movie My Cousin Vinny, and so, apparently, are a lot of lawyers. The Abnormal Use lawblawg has a great collection of ar...

Topher Grace, star of "That 70s Show," created "Star Wars: Episode III.5: The Editor Strikes Back" by mixing down all 7+ hours of the three Star Wars prequels into one tight, punchy, 85-minute mo...

I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with reveling in being drenched in a near-continuous stream of fresh, boozy urine, but if that's the way you're kinked, it seems rude to spirit away the yell...

In the San Diego Reader, more on a bill passed last week by The U.S. House Judiciary Committee to help law enforcement crack down on illicit tunnels along the US-Mexico border: "The bill would allow l...

The BBC airs an hour-long documentary tonight about "Interviews Before Execution," a hit talk show in China in which host Ding Yu interviews prisoners on death row. Some 40 million viewers in China tu...

Hannah Haworth found herself in the enviable position of having to knit 50 life-sized bees, which she did, and celebrated their completion with detailed notes and lovely photos. Remember when I mentio...

Michael Geist points us to "A critique of how the collecting agency behind the 'bone stupid' copyright deals signed by U of Toronto and Western U is poised to have its wishes ensconced in Canada's soo...

Here's a one-hour BBC documentary on Moebius, the French comics artist whose passing we lamented this weekend. The doc, "Moebius Redux: A Life in Pictures," includes interviews with Stan Lee and Jodor...

The Guardian reports that Juan Mendez, special rapporteur on torture for the United Nations, has "formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, ...

Just one month ago, the Manhattan District Attorney's office subpoenaed the Twitter account of Occupy Wall Street participant Malcolm Harris, aka @destructuremal. Today, Jeff Rae received word of the ...

[Video Link] My friend and MAKE columnist Bob Knetzger is a toy designer and creates the Doctor Dreadful line of food toys. He recently emailed me about his latest creation, the Doctor Dreadful edible...

On Ars Technica, Tom Connor does a great job producing a taxonomy and history of rage-faces, showing how they evolved from a set of proscribed, orthodox uses on 4chan to a wider set of uses and meanin...

To kick off Sunshine Week, Catherine Shreve, the librarian for public policy and political science at Duke University's Perkins Library lists her five favorite declassified documents. 3. Bay of Pigs: ...

[Video Link] Over the weekend, I noticed that David Gallagher of The New York Times observed in Austin, "Homeless people have been enlisted to roam the streets wearing T-shirts that say 'I am a 4G hot...

Portland's Shwood -- a manufacturer of wooden eyewear -- offered a (now sold-out) limited run of wooden sunglass frames made from Bushmills whiskey barrels. I toured the Bushmills distillery in the 19...

(Photo: The Kony 2012/Invisible Children guys posing with SPLA soldiers on the Sudan-Congo border in April 2008. Photograph by Glenna Gordon.) At Alternet, Bruce Wilson digs in to the sources of fundi...

(Photo: The Kony 2012/Invisible Children guys posing with SPLA soldiers on the Sudan-Congo border in April 2008. Photograph by Glenna Gordon.) Over at Alternet, Bruce Wilson digs in to the sources of ...

Local San Francisco artist Sonja Navin is showing her work at the Jackson Place Saloon this March and April. Sonja's work always strikes me with a sense of idyllic tranquility, be they street scenes o...

Zack sez, "Screenwriter Dan Fogelman (CRAZY STUPID LOVE, CARS, many others) wrote a screenplay several years ago called THE GARY COLEMAN-EMMANUEL LEWIS PROJECT, where the two diminutive former child s...

I love it when a true story is better than fiction; Joe Kloc's The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks is just that -- crazier than real life. Six times, between 1969 and 1972, the United States put men on...

Local San Francisco artist Sonja Navin is showing her work at the Jackson Place Salon this March and April. Sonja's work always strikes me with a sense of idyllic tranquility, be they street scenes of...

Matt sez, PepysRd.com is an innovative online story based on Capital by John Lanchester, the first big London post-crash novel. Capital interweaves the lives and stories of the residents of Pepys Road...

Rain and flooding in the eastern Australian city of Wagga Wagga have driven sheet-web and wolf spiders to higher ground. But there is no accessible higher ground, so the spiders have had to create it ...

The "Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation" is to promulgate your new guidelines for blogging. David Carr in The New York Times: This is not an anti-aggregation group, we are pro-aggregation, Mr...

The "Council on Ethical Blogging and Aggregation" is to promulgate your new guidelines for blogging. David Carr in The New York Times: This is not an anti-aggregation group, we are pro-aggregation, Mr...

djBC, the archduke of mashup, has created a video to accompany his 2005 "wemix" of the classic Chuck Jones 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?" Whats Opera, Doc? (dj BC Wemix) (Thanks, djBC!)...

Science historian and perennial Boing Boing favorite George Dyson's latest book is Turing's Cathedral, and it is, in some sense, the book he was born (or at least raised) to write. Dyson, the son of e...

A flight attendant was "subdued" by passengers after she "started ranting about a possible crash" over the cabin PA system, writes Andrew Stern. Thereafter, drinks were free....

French president Nicolas Sarkozy apologized to a policewoman struck Thursday by a tomato possibly thrown at her by his teenage son. Louis Sarkozy, 15, and a friend are the only suspects in the fruity ...

Anna Anthropy's dys4ia is a game vignette about six months in the author's life, following her decision to seek hormone replacement therapy. The music is by Liz Ryerson. [Newsgrounds] Also just out is...

Whatever its faults, the seed company Monsanto does employ some very smart people, who have a keen understanding of plant genetics. Given that, I've long wondered why the company has been so blindside...

Artificial hearts are amazing, but flawed. They wear out quickly and, even today, they don't work at all unless the transplantee is hooked up to an external air compressor 24-7. That doesn't make for ...

As Doonesbury tackles mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds for women considering abortions, rumours abound that newspapers will drop or substitute the strip: In the "Doonesbury" strip, a woman goes to a...

In a story at that socialist rag Financial Times, the radical environmental group General Electric explains why the Republican presidential candidates' refusal to accept the evidence on climate change...

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-...

Idlepigeon sez, "Canada's government has moved to call Anonyomous to testify before the House Affairs Comitte, over threats made to a minister who's been pushing to pass Bill C30---online surveillance...

Ichiroya Kimono Flea Market is a company that sells vintage and new kimonos. I don't own any kimonos, and I don't expect to ever buy one. But I do subscribe to Ichiroya's email newsletter. Why? Becaus...

Why does electric infrastructure affect our ability to make energy more sustainable? How is the electric grid like a lazy river at the water park? And why should you never, ever go fishing with a sale...

On June 22, Seattle will celebrate the Alan Turing centennial with an evening concert and installation at the Chapel Performance Space, curated by David Stutz (free software hacker, musician, vintner,...

Thanks to everyone who contributed "square" ideas. I'm no hater, by the way; you can follow me and Boing Boing there. * 'shooped by yours truly....

An elderly Afghan man sits next to the covered bodies of civilians killed by an American soldier in Kandahar province, March 11, 2012. REUTERS/ Ahmad Nadeem An American soldier is reported to have "st...

An elderly Afghan man sits next to the covered bodies of civilians killed by an American soldier in Kandahar province, March 11, 2012. REUTERS/ Ahmad Nadeem An American soldier is reported to have "st...

Thanks to everyone who contributed "square" ideas. * 'shooped by yours truly....

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kurt Opsahl analyzes an important declaratory judgment from a Nevada federal court, which held that excerpting news articles in online postings was fair use. Judge...

Watch live streaming video from oreillymake at livestream.com MAKE is livestreaming from SXSW today. Visit MAKE's Alt.SXSW page for updates and coverage of the festival. Hot on the heels of alt.GDC co...

The Apron Strings cooking blog continues its run of excellent ideas for making molded eggs by frying them inside vegetable cross-sections with this lovely recipe for onion-ring eggs: just half-cook ri...

For a little over a year now, Tom Whalen has been Mondos go-to artist for contemporary movie posters of classic cartoons. Mondo, of course, is the Austin-based gig-style movie-poster publisher whose l...

Famed Czech radical Josef Skvorecky recently died at 87 in his adopted land of Canada. In the Atlantic, JJ Gould remembers Skvorecky through his memoirs, including a detailed list of the rules for jaz...

Chicago never fails to remind me why I love it so; seems a fist fight broke out at the Symphony. Just as the second movement was drawing to a gentle close with Music Director Riccardo Muti at the pod...

After witnessing the effectiveness of consumer boycotts against The Rush Limbaugh Show, corporate America has announced it is pulling support right-wing talk radio. Ninety-eight major corporations, su...

Ian JQ spotted this airbrushed illustration on the tailgate of a pickup truck and was inspired to draw some additional illustrations of the model who posed for it. Oh my God. I have to Draw You...

In the NYT, Mary Pilon profiles a (now defunct) ring of Christian blackjack card-counters who lead Bible-study classes and youth groups when they're not scoring millions at the casinos. One such Chris...

[Video Link]An internet classic from 2010 by Chris Cohen. (via @nytjim @janinegibson @bengoldacre)...

Jean Giraud, the comics artist who worked under the name Moebius, has died at the age of 73. Moebius defined the style of Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal, a surreal, madcap, sometimes grotesque science fict...

Seven-year-old Audri designed this astounding Rube Goldberg machine, and then systematically studied its failure modes and improved it, producing a fine video account of his work. He is made of pure d...

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-...

Franois Vautier infested his flatbed scanner with an ant-colony and scanned the burgeoning hive-organism every week for five years, producing a beautiful, stylized stop-motion record of the ants' slow...

NPR's Planet Money profiles Willow Tufano, a 14-year-old Florida girl who saved thousands of dollars by harvesting furniture from foreclosed houses and selling it on eBay. She's just bought half inter...

Mitch Wagner sez, "uGrokIt lets people attach RFID tags to their stuff, locate it with a device that attaches to a smartphone, just like in Cory's Makers." The Geiger counter-style audio cues are a ni...

Just look at him. Bananamanology...

We wanted to make our own version of Rock Em Sock Em Robots for the Americans Elect lounge at SXSW, so we decided to replace the heads with a donkey and elephant heads, to represent the two political ...

Looking for Lenny is a new documentary about Lenny Bruce and the way that free speech issues still resonate today. It's packed with comedy/spoken word legends talking about Bruce, from Robin Williams ...

Johanna writes, "Carlos Aguirre, a trainer at Academia Barista Pro, stunned audiences worldwide when he pushed not 1, not 2 but 3 aeropresses at the same time for his signature drink during National S...

I feel safer and more harmless already. (Via Jesse Smith)...

[Video Link]. Yes, this remix video is months old, but you probably missed it—and it's not like stuff this weird ever grows old. The song is here. (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)...

Veteran radio journalist and master storyteller Alex Chadwick (who's also a personal friend—he's taught me so much about journalism over the years) hosts a must-listen radio documentary premieri...

PR people sometimes do this thing where they say "I loved your coverage of x, perhaps you'd like to hear about y!". The idea is to ensure that I, Esteemed Journalist, know I'm being specifically appro...

Last week, I posted about Alan Bishop and Sublime Frequencies, the fantastic label that issues outernational psych, and folk from Indonesia, China, Myanmar, and other locales. Mark Gergis is one of Su...

Everything about this video news report is awesome. Edna Geisler, 69, has been stalked for two months by an aggressive male wild turkey (a "tom") who "lurks in her front yard, screeching at her consta...

The AP has published more documents today which offer further evidence that the The New York Police Department "kept secret files on businesses owned by second- and third-generation Americans specific...

Zoltan Kohari, known as the Slovak Batman, poses in his home in the town of Dunajska Streda, 34 miles (55 km) south of Bratislava. Kohari, who is 26 years old, lives alone in an abandoned building wit...

Artist Amanda Visell has a great new print about the reproductive cycle of the chicken....

I feel like the science posts have all been on the depressing side today, so please enjoy this pleasant, Buster Keaton-inspired film short. Via friendlysasquatch on Submitterator!...

21-year-old Steven Mulhall cut a Spicolian caper when he stole the nameplate off a judge's courthouse office-door, then posed with it for a photo, which his romantic ladyfriend posted to Facebook. It ...

The first ever audio recording we know of was made by duoard-Lon Scott in 1857. As Maggie has previously posted here, the recording device he invented, the phonautograph, etched sound waves to paper. ...

Human activities can cause earthquakes. It sounds a little crazy to say, but it's something we've known about for a while. For instance, seismologists say that a 6.3 magnitude quake that struck India'...

"One day Im sure everyone will routinely collect all sorts of data about themselves," writes Stephen Wolfram (founder of the eponymous technology company). "But because Ive been interested in data for...

A public investment of $235 million in helping the poorest women in America access birth control would save the public $1.32 billion, according to the Brookings Institution....

Recently, I posted a series of videos where science writers talked about some of the fascinating things they learned at the 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. In one ...

To date, over 50 advertisers have stopped paying Rush Limbaugh to spread his hateful, sexually-obsessive tirades. Here are some other stats from Daily Kos: -- A total of 86 ads aired during WABC's onl...

Above is Yokohama, Japan's Solar Techno Park. It sounds like the name of an early 1990s massive rave, but the Park is a solar research facility built by international steelmaker JFE to explore alterna...

There's some really interesting—and rather disturbing—research coming out of the UK on the nature of cancer cells and why advanced-stage cancers are so difficult to treat. Scientists have ...

Writer and comedian Peter Bergman, best known as a member of the surrealist troupe The Firesign Theater, died last night of complications from leukemia. He was 73. (Thanks, Taylor Jessen)...

Durham County in north east England will no longer use the house number 13 in any new streets or developments. THe Durham County Council cabinet hopes it will help sell homes that numerically should b...

County Durham in north east England will no longer use the house number 13 in any new streets or developments. The Durham County Council cabinet hopes it will help sell homes that numerically should b...

[Video Link] As I watched this, I kept tilting my head up to see what was coming down the road, but it didn't work. (Thanks, Felipe Li!)...

On his personal blog, Marc DuBois of Mdecins Sans Frontires (MSF, Doctors without Borders) writes about the impact of the hyper-viral Kony 2012 campaign on the work of long-established humanitarian ef...

As you do. Darth Vadar bagpipe unicycle (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

[Video Link.] Yahoo's "Sideshow" blog has the story behind this video, and an accompanying photo gallery slideshow. On a recent Delta Flight, there were 300 or so human passengers and two foot-and-a-h...

Click for more images. Above, one of a number of images released by NASA today that show how a coronal mass ejection (or CME) from our Sun progressed on March 8, 11:38 PM EST to March 9, 12:53 AM EST....

The New York Times has a colorful profile piece out on Hector Xavier Monsegur, who agreed to serve as an FBI informant in the LulzSec/Anonymous sting in hopes of reducing possible prison sentence of m...

London's Impero Leather offers this fantastic tailed leather jacket, a steampunk answer to the postapocalyptic duster that the late Alexander McQueen designed for David Bowie in the 1990s. It's rather...

Michael Geist sez, "Open Media, which launched the most successful Canadian online petition in history on usage based billing, is now encouraging people to speak out on copyright reform. The group mak...

Journey casts the player as a robed wanderer in the desert. There is no narrative, no backstory, and nothing to do battle with; just a landscape of dunes, ruins and strange guardians to explore. Objec...

Solipsist, by Andrew Huang, is winner of Slamdance 2012's special jury prize for experimental short film. It stars Mary Elise Hayden, Marissa Merrill and Dustin Edward. There's also a mini-"making of"...

Talk about crazy eBook genres -- I started with Zombie novels; survive the apocalypse, rebuild society after the apocalypse, zombie break-outs through history -- you name it we got it. Then I was read...

Video Link. The original. (via Oxblood)  Kony 2012: a viral mess - Boing Boing African voices respond to hyper-popular Kony 2012 viral campaign ... Joseph Kony documentary: bringing the world'...

I've written several times here about Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series, a collection of outstanding dystopian YA science fiction novels about a world where everyone is forced to undergo cosmetic surge...

Photo: grahamc99, CC BY 2.0. In 1960-1962, the US government collected height and weight measurements from thousands of US citizens. Using these numbers, they estimated that the prevalence of obesity ...

Jason sez, "A follow up to last years insanely popular Chocolate Cthulhu Idol comes the Giant Chocolate Cthulhu Idol. Standing 7.5 inches tall and weighing a sanity shattering 2 lbs, this solid green ...

Christopher sez, "We developed an infographic along the lines of 'The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly' to show how Charter Cable is engaging in predatory pricing to kill cable/broadband competition in one...

Hammock-tent-makers Tentstile have a new 5-8 person model -- string it up between a couple-three massive trees and it becomes a treetop aerie, far above the madding crowd of critters and hikers. Tents...

The Arizona Senate has passed a bill that immunizes doctors from malpractice suits if they deliberately withhold information about prenatal problems because they don't want the woman carrying the fetu...

My friend, artist Amy Crehore, has finished a lovely painting, called Basker's Cove....

Tavis sez, "A mind-blowingly recursive poster that represents the AD&D rules for procedural dungeon generation as a flowchart which is drawn as a dungeon. From the The Mule Abides blog at NYC's i...

Mike sez, "With the Texas Primaries coming up in May, I thought you would be interested to know that some of the Redditors that were involved in the boycott on GoDaddy.com and 'Operation Pull Ryan' (w...

Jon Corbett, who posted a video explaining a vulnerability in TSA full-body scanners that might allow dangerous objects onto airplanes now reports that two different reporters have told him that they ...

Heidi MacDonald has a great post about a Henry Danger-esque fellow named James Killian Spratt who created a obsessively detailed version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. In a few short hou...

[Video Link] Here's an excerpt from the new book, Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, by Ash Maurya. It's published by O'Reilly (which also publishes MAKE, the magazine I edit). Ru...

[Video Link] These Chinese fellows use chopsticks to liberate their comrades of their material possessions. It looks like hard work but fortunately the passers-by who notice don't disturb the pickpock...

Here's the 8th episode of MAKE's podcast, Make: Talk! In each episode, I interview one of the makers featured in the magazine. Our maker this week is Kyle Machulis, a hardware and software hacker who ...

This is an excellent short profile of video game pioneer Ralph Baer. He's 90 and still inventing. "I still get a big charge out of making something work. I write the hardware, I push a button, I put i...

On Behance, art director Bjoern Ewers shows off the gorgeous macro-photo ads he produced for the Berlin Philharmonic, which depict the insides of instruments as airy atria (or, as Colossal has it, "va...

Michael Geist sez, The long road of Canadian copyright reform is nearing an end as the Bill C-11 committee concluded hearing from witnesses yesterday and indicated that it will begin a "clause-by-clau...

Last week, I wrote about the controversy entailed by the R-rating the MPAA has given to the documentary Bully, effectively putting it outside the reach of most of the young people it addresses. Now th...

Yesterday, I wrote about Jon Corbett's video, in which he demonstrates a method that appears to make it easy to smuggle metal objects (including weapons) through a TSA full-body scanner. The TSA has r...

From Gina Trapani, a project to address the fact that in 2012, women still get paid less than men for the same work: Narrow the Gap. Happy International Women's Day....

An activist group called Invisible Children has produced a 29-minute documentary on Joseph Kony, the leader of Uganda's horrific Lord's Resistance Army, which recruits by kidnapping children and beati...

"Origami: Art + Mathematics" is a new exhibit opening at UC Santa Cruz on April 8. The exhibit is focused on computational origami, in honor of the late UCSC computer scientist and mathematical o...

In Changsha, China, a 30-story hotel project went from blueprint to finished building in fifteen days. Some are questioning how the construction project could possibly be safe, but the builder defends...

The internets are all a-flutter with reactions to Kony 2012, a high-velocity viral fundraising campaign created by the "dream evangelists" at Invisible Children to "raise awareness" about Ugandan warl...

The Department of Justice is planning to sue Apple Inc. and five big US publishers for collusion around e-book pricing. According to the Wall Street Journal, the DoJ has "warned" Apple Inc., CBS Corp....

Here's a scathing editorial from Public Knowledge's Michael Weinberg on the Warner Home Entertainment announcement of a new "service" that allows you to legally rip your DVDs by driving over to a spec...

Wildlife photographer Will Burrard-Lucas and his brother Matt devised a remote-controlled rover outfitted with a DSLR camera to get up close and personal with elephants, lions, and buffalo. After thei...

The TSA dismissed a blogger's repeatedly successful method for getting large metal containers past its expensive new scanners as a "crude attempt" at circumventing TSA screening. As we all know, attac...

In Changsha, China, a 30-story hotel project went from blueprint and prefab parts to finished building in fifteen days. Some are questioning how the construction project could possibly be safe, but th...

[video link] To promote its new B-Class car, Mercedes made it "invisible." Essentially, they draped one side of it in a fabric of LEDs that displayed an image of the scene behind the car, creating the...

Mark Newport, whose hand-knit superhero costumes have been mentioned here before, has a gallery show at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's Ewing Gallery. I really love these pieces -- they'd m...

[Video Link] Here's a new PES stop-motion video, called "Fresh Guacamole." I love the magic of PES' videos. New PES videoFireworks stop-motion animation by PESPES animations: Human Skateboard and Fire...

Photojournalist (and author) Erin Siegal has a wonderful photo-essay up on the The Reuters Photographers Blog about "Fast Friends," a group that adopts/rescues "retiring" greyhound dogs that have been...

These lovely conjoined tortoises are on exhibit in Kiev, Ukraine. From the Los Angeles Times: Dmitry Tkachev, who organized the Kiev exhibition where the tortoise is on display, told Russian state med...

This gentleman, Blake Oren Robinson, was arrested at a grocery store for "committing criminal mischief with the cheese," according to an Iowa City police criminal complaint. Robinson was apparently ca...

Via ComicsAlliance blog, news that 'Life With Archie' features a character with breast cancer in this month's new issue. "That character is Cheryl Blossom, the redheaded spoiler in Betty and Veronica'...

If the cruelty involved in obtaining it isn't reason enough: Shark cartilage, a supplement hyped for purported use as a cancer preventive, joint-health aid, and other unsubstantiated health claims, "m...

The ACLU has brought suit against the Minnewaska (Minnesota) Area Schools and Pope County over invasions of students' privacy relating to a pair of incidents. In the first incident, a 12-year-old stud...

A nurse's aide in Oregon has been convicted of taking photos of hospital patients, and their bedpans, and posting them to Facebook. Her sentence includes an order from the judge to write a thousand-wo...

Use Twitter? Don't give a crap about the annual shindig in Austin? Eliminate references to SXSW from your Twitter stream....

Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. It's very confusing to know when a watch can truly be submerged in water. Thankfully, Watchi...

Spencer Ackerman at Danger Room on reports (utterly shocking reports!) that Afghanistans military uses its US-bought aircraft to transport drugs throughout the country. At a cost of nearly $2 billion ...

Quinn Norton has an excellent piece over at Wired:Threat Level on the reactions within "Anonymous" to the news that Sabu was collaborating with the FBI. Kim Zetter's take on the arrests and secret ple...

Saturday March 10th presents an SF Bay area tradition: the 2012 Run for the Seals. Starting at Rodeo Beach, in the Marin Headlands, and making a 4 mile loop around the lagoon and through some very pic...

Rush Limbaugh wasn't the only one who had something to say about Georgetown Law School student Sandra Fluke's testimony before Congress. Here's a sampling of the conservative media's persuasive and re...

Reminder: tickets are going fast for ORGCon 2012 in London on March 24: speakers include Larry Lessig, Wendy Seltzer, Ross Anderson, Tim Lowenthal and me....

In about 45 minutes, this embedded video will come to life with a live stream from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where researchers and staff are celebrating International Women's Day with a seri...

Colombian Redditor nhg92 created this robotic Metroid arm-cannon that can be used as a Wii controller and a costume accessory. The underlying components are "big glue containers, balsa, polystyrene an...

Last March, I reviewed the first iZombie collection, a new series of stylish, fun horror/comedy comics from Chris Roberson and Michael Allred. The series' premise is that Gwen Dylan is a recently rise...

Good news! You can now earn a certification in piracy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the first crop of official pirates, Jacob Hurwitz, showed up for his interview with the Bos...

Timothy Pachirat, Assistant Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research and the author of Every Twelve Seconds, is not the first to see industrialized violence and political analogues ...

Here's a sentence I never expected to type: You should really read the Grand Forks Herald's review of The Olive Garden. This is in North Dakota, for those not familiar. With almost 100,000 people in t...

Sound it Out # 20: Django Django - "Default" Im just nuts about Django Django. I could give you a bunch of biographical facts about them meeting at a Scottish art school and writing songs in apartment...

As I've been reading a lot of eBooks lately, one thing I've noticed is that there are certainly themes in the type of eBook it seems popular to write and publish. "WHOA! I've got magical powers!" seem...

Kara, a disturbing short film about a self-aware robot, was made by games studio Quantic Dream to demonstrate the "expressive power" of the PS3's graphics. In order to sidestep the limitations of anim...

Meet the Deepsea Challenger, a one-man submersible craft capable of withstanding pressures at the deepest point in the ocean—Challenger Deep in the Pacific's Mariana Trench. Sometime in the next...

Here's a clip of a Danish TV show discussing ACTA, which Denmark has fiercely advocated in favor of. It starts with the head of a rightsholder society and the Danish trade minister quoting dodgy stati...

Louis Vuitton is well-known for its abusive trademark enforcement, but its latest legal adventure is unbelievable. The luxury goods company threatened the University of Pennsylvania Law School after a...

This philanthropic grantspeak generator will help you celebrate humanitarian advisory committees. [via Felix Salmon]...

Jaroslaw Lipszyc sez, "Modern Poland Foundation organizes crowdfunded contest for the best work on the Future of Copyright. Idea is simple: the bigger the prize, the more attention contest will get an...

Maher Arar, a Canadian who was rendered to Syria for years of brutal torture on the basis of bad information from Canada's intelligence agencies, writes in Prism about the revelation that Canadian pub...

After all the fuss about Lytro's 'focus in post' camera—and the bathos of its low-quality results—Canon's EOS 5D Mark III is something of an antidode. It has a 22.3 megapixel full-frame se...

(Photo: The Kony 2012/Invisible Children guys posing with SPLA soldiers on the Sudan-Congo border in April 2008. Photograph by Glenna Gordon.) Mark Kersten at Justice in Conflict on the Kony 2012/Invi...

The largest solar storm in five years is heading toward us, and may disrupt some airline flights and communications systems over the next few days. The Guardian quotes a NASA official: "Solar storms h...

The National Park Service has released a dozen historic sound recordings originally made on wax cylinders in 1889-1890. The recording engineer, Theo Wangemann, was an assistant of Thomas Edison who ex...

[Update: Some readers report that the site redirects to a hardcore adult site, and/or is triggering malware warnings. This is why we can't have nice things.] A Tumblog of Greatness: kitties and tittie...

"OnCentral," a KPCC/Southern California Public Radio reporting project focused on the communities of South LA, has published a terrific series of very detailed posts by Jos Martinez on graffitti and g...

Last month, I wrote about the new patent policy at the University of Washington, which laid claim to patents in all work that the university's staff touched upon. This prompted Open3DP, the world-famo...

ThinkProgress Video put together a supercut video capturing no fewer than 70 recent examples of Rush Limbaugh's repulsive and hateful obsession with Sandra Fluke. "She's having so much sex, it's amazi...

[UPDATE: Caution. Some readers report that the linked-to site now redirects to a third-party hardcore porn site. I'm not getting this, but you may. Sorry. This is why we can't have nice things.] A Tum...

Here's an interesting Bloomberg News item on Metabolomx, a 12-person venture based in Mountain View, CA that's designing a PC-sized device to detect cancer by smell. "The problem with cancer-detecting...

At ABC News, a thorough "explainer" by Ariane de Vogue on the January Supreme Court ruling that requires the FBI to immediately stop using GPS tracking devices to spy on suspects. Today, FBI Director ...

Julian Gough sez, "I get the feeling you and some of your readers are, um, not entirely unconvinced by austerity as an economic strategy. So you might like the BBC's free Drama of the Week podcast. It...

Earlier, we posted about the cool DIY racing event coming up in San Francisco on March 18th, but thanks to some last-minute cancellations, Gever Tulley and Brightworks are making a couple of coveted t...

Jon Corbett, an engineer who is suing the TSA over the use of full-body "pornoscanners," has developed and documented a simple way to smuggle metallic objects, including guns, through the scanners. He...

(PHOTO: Reuters) Media Matters is keeping a list companies still advertising on The Rush Limbaugh Show. According to Media Matters, 45 advertisers have flushed Rush. Limbaugh reassured his audience to...

Michael Geist sez, The Canadian committee on copyright reform conducts its final witness hearing today and not a moment too soon. Based on the demands from music industry witnesses this week, shutting...

An AP article out today details the intimate and internal conflicts in the Osama bin Laden household, prior to his assassination at the hands of US forces last year. Snip: "He spent his last weeks in ...

Israeli President Shimon Peres writes on a blackboard with Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on March 6, 2012. (REUTERS/Moshe Milner/Office of Pre...

There's a good long read by John Arquilla in Foreign Policy magazine this month. He argues that a concept of cyberwar he proposed some 20 years ago with David Ronfeldt "has become a reality," in that ...

Fine art photographer Jefferson Hayman creates timeless, atmospheric, monochromatic images, many of New York City, and presents them in tiny antique boxes as miniature visual treasures waiting to be d...

My older brother Rick Pescovitz has always come up with harebrained schemes to make money. His latest invention is a single-person pop-up shelter to sit inside. It's designed for spectator sports, fis...

A new study on the link between financial speculation in commodity markets and food-price spikes shows that the model can be used to predict future food-price spikes, strengthening the case that finan...

Letterheads of Bob Kane, Batman's creator. (via Letterheady)...

Data from Fermilab's shuttered Tevatron accelerator seems to support the data released by CERN last December. These two different accelerators are both seeing a signal that could be the Higgs Boson in...

Because there are some things you can't ethically test on humans, human medical research involves animal models. Such models are useful and important. There is a lot we wouldn't know—and a lot o...

[Video Link] Here's a fun history of the animated GIF from PBS. GIFs are one of the oldest image formats used on the web. Throughout their history, they have served a huge variety of purposes, from fu...

Short answer: We don't know. Despite its ubiquity, there's a lot scientists don't know about the influenza virus. Helen Branswell is a great medical reporter. In this piece for the Winnipeg Free Press...

Apple CEO Tim Cook introducing the latest iPad. Photo: Robert Galbrath/Reuters Apple's third-generation iPad, announced today in San Francisco, has an ultra-HD 2048x1536 display, an A5X chip with quad...

In times of tight government budgets, there's a temptation to lawmakers to leave the expensive job of scientific research to corporations. I understand that urge. I can sympathize with it. But I also ...

On Sunday morning, a group of amateur astronomers in San Antonio "flashed" the International Space Station with a blue laser and spotlight (sorry to disappoint) as it passed overhead. Astronaut Don Pe...

The seismic waves of an earthquake happen at a lower frequency than what the human ear can hear. But, if you speed up those signals, compressing minutes or even hours worth of data into a few seconds,...

Channel 4 News this week aired graphic video secretly recorded by an employee at a hospital in Syria. The video shows evidence that doctors there torture patients. On orders of the Syrian government, ...

Oaida Raul, a teenager from Romania, launched a Lego Space Shuttle into the stratosphere by tethering it to a high-altitude balloon, along with a camera that shot gorgeous footage of the ascent. He ha...

[video link] Mob justice at the cyber cafe! (Thanks, em!)...

"Cronache dal Mondo" (Chronicles of the World) is an Italian library music LP with a trippy, late-1960s avant-garde electronica vibe. Plus, dig that cover collage reminiscent of a social studies textb...

The Guardian has more on the big hacking news which Fox News broke yesterday (as noted in a post by Rob). "Sabu," the trash-talking, self-appointed leader of LulzSec, has been working for the FBI for ...

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 Jane and I talk about Tiny Tower...

[Video Link] Blake Maloof is covering the Game Developers Conference for MAKE this week. Here's his look at the Outerra world rendering engine, which generates "massive, photo-realistic environments b...

Brent Wittmeier of the Edmonton Journal reports that two newborns were named "Unique" last year in Alberta, Canada....

Artist Oscar Lhermitte attached a digital camera to a spinning plate mounted on a hand-drill. The results are pretty fabulously trippy. Looking at the different ways to shoot videos. Part of a worksho...

Yesterday, commenter Tim H. noted that we must be reading the same books; he then suggested the Old Man and the Wasteland by Nick Cole, which just happens to be the eBook I've selected for today's rev...

Alduous Huxley sent George Orwell a fan-letter in Oct 1949, after receiving a review copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four from Orwell's publisher. Huxley (who, according to Letters of Note, was once Orwell's ...

Brian Stevenson, a lawyer who defends poor African-American people caught in the US justice system. In this incredible, moving, inspiring TED talk, he discusses the way that race and injustice are ent...

Illustrator Kyle Lambert set out to create a storyboard for a mashup of Toy Story and The Shining, calling the result Toy Shining. Earlier this year I began following Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy ...

[Video Link] Rush's attorney sent a cease and desist letter to the The Rush Limbaugh Show. From the letter: According to media reports, Rush Limbaugh, Premiere Radio Networks and The Rush Limbaugh Sho...

From the Boing Boing shop: Nomskulls - silicone cupcake molds. Includes recipe for brainy frosting. Nomskulls - Set of 4 Skull Cupcake Molds - $11.95...

Ralph McQuarrie, the concept artist behind Star Wars, Radiers of the Lost Ark, the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and many other films, died on Saturday. He was 82. "Ralph McQuarrie...

[Video Link] The publicist for the James Renner's novel, The Man From Primrose Lane, sent me an old 8-track tape cartridge player along with a few different tapes, including one with the first chapter...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation would like you to know that this Thursday, Mar 8, is "Wear Your EFF Swag to Work Day" -- the day when you discover which of your co-workers are already clued in to t...

Charles sez, "Naomi Novik's new Temeraire novel, Crucible of Gold, arrives in bookstores this week, accompanied by a stylish video trailer designed to get readers' curiosity piqued and pulses racing. ...

[Video Link] Is anyone surprised that when the Nazis rose to power, they burned a bunch of interesting paintings and other art? (For a taste of pre-Nazi German erotically-tinged art, check out the boo...

Mat Honan on what to expect at tomorrow's iPad 3 event: "We, the Press would rather sit in a dark room, unable to ask tough questions or actually touch and test an Apple product, than do our job. We w...

Blackbeltlibrarian sez, "The Shutesbury Public Library in Shutesbury, Massachusetts is seeking funding in order to build a new building to replace their charming but woefully inadequate current one (w...

Joris Evers of Netflix emailed me to say: Spotted your tweets and wanted to let you know that Netflix has not purchased and does not purchase advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show. We do buy network r...

Here's the backstory behind the iconic "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters. Though 2.5 million were printed, they were never officially issued as they were reserved for crisis or invasion. 50 years later...

Gawker's Max Read talks to Alejandra Gaitan, known to a legion of YouTube hater-fans as TheReplyGirl. "It's a decent amount of money. Am I a millionaire? No. Not at all. If I had all the money in the ...

According to a lawsuit filed in Georgia, butterwitch Paula Deen used a racial slur beginning with "n" to describe the perfect wedding. "I want a true southern plantation-style wedding. ... What I woul...

According to a lawsuit filed in Georgia, butterwitch Paula Deen used a racial slur beginning with "n" to describe the perfect wedding. "I want a true southern plantation-style wedding. ... What I woul...

Our friends at Bigshot Toyworks illustrated this fantastic cover for Bloomberg Businessweek. Covers are the hardest part of magazine design, but this one really nails it....

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

My copies of the beautifully designed clip-art zine Crap Hound are among my most treasured possessions. Sean Tejaratchi, the creator, has a Kickstarter to reprint Volume #6, which has a theme of "Deat...

[Video Link] A brief look behind Ritual America: Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society, a Visual Guide. by Adam Parfrey One of the most exciting secondhand store moments ever: di...

High school vice-principal Amy Strand, a nursing mother mother of four, was told that that she couldn't clear the TSA checkpoint at Lihue Airport in Kauai with her breast pump unless she went into the...

Jon Stewart has a field day responding to Limbaugh's nasty, error-prone attack of Sandra Fluke, the Republican candidates' fear of the powerful bully who can make or break them, and to Fox News' Megyn...

This series is brought to you by TurboTax Federal Free Edition. Here at Boing Boing, we're fond of all things handmade, and of clever ways to stretch one's household budget. As the cost of staple food...

Dan Gillmor has posted the outline of "Permission Taken," a new project he's taken on to explain what he's gone through in his journey from using proprietary systems to open and free ones. Gillmor -- ...

(Video Link) Behold a terrifying new video for Here We Go Magic's new song "Make Up Your Mind". I'm not sure what's going on in here, but I'm positive I don't want it to happen with me. Please note th...

In keeping with my attempts to read and review a kindle eBook a day, yesterday I read The Dig by Michael Siemsen. The Dig was a page turner and I kept reading long past when I should have knocked off ...

Fox News' Jana Winter reports that prominent LulzSec's Sabu was caught and turned by the authorities last June and has been working for them since. Other members of the group were arrested today as a ...

At Gizmodo, Sam Biddle takes a long look at Shiva Ayyadurai, the MIT lecturer who snookered Time, the Smithsonian Museum and The Washington Post into believing he invented email. Ayyadurai appears to ...

James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood was my favorite nonfiction book of 2011, a tour-de-force history and introduction for information theory. It's out in paperback today. Here...

Nisha from the Open Rights Group sez, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow and Wendy Seltzer will be leading this year's Open Rights Group conference (aka ORGCon) in London on 24th March 2012. From the gove...

I was getting tired of our 3 cats kicking litter all over the place. I bought this Clevercat litter box and it has significantly reduced the amount of litter they enjoy spreading around. It's basicall...

JD sez, "This site provides complete plans for printing and assembling a single drawer safe protected by a three digit combination lock." Paper Safe : Come and get it! (Thanks, JD!)...

From a 1961 British Pathe newsreel called "Beat The Bandit", a remarkable anti-theft system for a briefcase: As the man runs off with the case three telescopic poles spring out of it making the case i...

(Reuters) The Atlantic has a list of the 31 advertisers on this morning's episode of the Rush Limbaugh show. I just put my Netflix account on hold, and will cancel it if they continue to sponsor the p...

(Reuters) The Atlantic has a list of the 31 advertisers on this morning's episode of the Rush Limbaugh show. I just put my Netflix account on hold, and will cancel it if they continue to sponsor the p...

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. I was ...

There's a story making the rounds right now suggesting that the use of hair relaxers—products that are used more often by African American women than women of other ethnicities—might cause...

Last week, I blogged about the Mother Jones investigation into labor conditions in ecommerce warehouses. Now Fair Warning and several California newspapers have an expose on the conditions inside Schn...

I had never heard about Toola the Sea Otter before today, but I'm not going to pass up an opportunity for a headline like this. Also, her story turns out to be incredibly inspiring. Seriously, this ot...

If you read our story about the ant evolution debates then you will enjoy this LOLant made by biologist and insect blogger Alex Wild. (Thalex!)...

Want to learn more about exoplanets and the science of other worlds? Then Sean Carroll thinks you will (mostly) dig Journey to the Exoplanets, a new e-book app from Scientific American. The downside: ...

An article in the latest issue of Physics Today puts modern contrived controversies into historical perspective. After all, this isn't the first time that humans have looked at the evidence supporting...

Juha sez, 'As if journalism here in New Zealand wasn't difficult and damaged enough... the government is proposing to make it worse. 'The unheralded change to "journalistic privilege' is contained in ...

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 (in pri...

Developed by Boston Dynamics (previously), Cheetah can run 18 MPH, needs neither to see nor scent you to know where you are hiding (because you're screaming), but is fortunately not aware that it is o...

The violin heard in this video was strung with violin strings made from spider silk. Does it sound different to you? Me neither, but I'm no violin connoisseur. From New Scientist: (Nara Medical Univer...

These wonderful floppy disk pillows are available from ShanaLogic, sellers of more than 1,000 amazing items created by 100 artists from around the world! Products in the shop are 100% made & desi...

Punk collage master Winston Smith, best known for his iconic logo and album art for the Dead Kennedys, has issued a new series of limited prints. The collages are carved from antique steel plate engra...

"I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke. My remarks about her were false, cruel, and repulsive. There’s no excuse and I offer none. I seriously crossed the line and I am sorry." That's how Limbaugh ...

In the early 1930s, a talking mongoose named Gef became quite the media celebrity. Gef lived in a farmhouse on the Isle of Man. Initially, Gef was only known as a "man-weasel" and when the farm owner ...

[Video Link] What's the word for liking and hating something at the same time? FUTULELE is an upcoming Ukulele synthesizer for iOS. Although it can work on a single iPad, similar to our well-known gui...

via Video Link to a short feature on the very popular "human sound machine" Hikakin, who has a growing following within and beyond his native Japan. His YouTube channel is here. Below, his take on Don...

Video Link to a short feature on the very popular "human sound machine" Hikakin, who has a growing following within and beyond his native Japan. His YouTube channel is here, and well worth a subscribe...

Was Jesus intersex? Dr. Susannah Cornwall of Manchester Universitys Lincoln Theological Institute suggests this in a paper titled "Intersex and Ontology: A Response to The Church, Women Bishops and Pr...

AOL is the latest advertiser to bail on radio host Rush Limbaugh following his description of activist Sandra Fluke as as a "slut" and "prostitute". Reuters' Anthony De Rosa cites an AOL source as say...

The Stabyourself folks have created a brilliant Mario/Portal mashup as free/open software for Linux/Mac/Windows. Check out the trailer and be amazed, then play the game and watch your free time vanish...

The deaths this weekend of two Tibetan women bring the number of Tibetans who have set themselves on fire in western China since March 2011 to at least 24. More than 16 are said to have died. On Sunda...

Last week, in the comments for a review of the Wool 1-5 Omnibus, commenter Jon recommended Hugh Howey's full length novel Half Way Home. Jon described it as: "Fantastic author. If you like Wool, make ...

[Video Link] National Geographic wildlife photographer Mattias Klum tells a funny story about the day a lioness got a little too close. He was lying on the ground near her in an effort to get a good s...

Copyfighting nerd rapper Dan Bull's latest track is "Bye Bye BPI." He created the video by asking his musician Facebook fans to submit photos of themselves holding messages to the British Phonographic...

Seth Casteel, the photographer of the fantastic "underwater dogs" photo series that went from viral sensation all the way to Good Morning America, says he's delighted that the attention has driven don...

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

Video Link. A medley of great songs, played in the kitchen. (thanks, Joe Sabia)...

Sergei Barkmaninoff. (thanks, Joe Sabia)...

Marty Halpern sez, "Help me find a home for my father's (he passed away in 1998, my mother passed away this past October) hand-designed Wild West whiskey bottle collection. By 'hand-designed' I mean m...

Matt Buchanan and John W. Herrman started a new tech blog, FWD. Early delights include Herrman on why we sound so dumb when we talk about communications; Buchanan on the ever-increasing importance of ...

Michael Geist sez, "Last week I wrote about the astonishing demands of the Canadian music industry as it seeks a massive overhaul of Bill C-11, the copyright reform bill. The Canadian Independent Musi...

Vlad Savov reviews Sony's Xperia S for The Verge. With a 1280x720 display, 12 megapixel camera and a dual-core CPU, it's the company's first major new design since buying out Sony-Ericsson. How does i...

A Lycoming County woman was treated recently for injuries sustained from being slapped with a pop tart. The Muncy resident, 51, was involved in a "verbal altercation" with her 11-year-old son, during ...

Anders Larsson of Pulman's Weekly News reports that a park bench recently missing from its usual spot in was found in a shed in Colyton, England. A local man launched a private investigation and ultim...

Autistic Gemma Barker, 19, dressed as a boy to seduce younger girls. She was charged with sexual assault and jailed for 30 months.. If only she'd been a teacher raping students—she'd have only g...

Autistic Gemma Barker, 19, dressed as a boy to seduce other girls, one as young as 15. She was charged with sexual assault and jailed for nearly three years. If only she'd been a teacher raping studen...

Today's lead story in the Observer is a maddening and excellent investigative piece revealing that for three decades, the UK's biggest construction companies worked with British police and spy-agencie...

krusty_ar sez, "This guy on my town (Rosario, Argentina) is selling hand made bamboo bicycles. He claims the process uses 10% the energy used to make a regular bike."...

David Friend, CEO of the company Carbonite (which makes backup software), explains why his company won't be reinstating its advertising on the Rush Limbaugh show. Carbonite was one of the advertisers ...

Greg from the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association sez, "The BCCLA is releasing its 'Electronic Devices Privacy Handbook' (PDF) on Monday. It's a know-your-rights guide and a how-to manual des...

I didn't hang around to ask....

Science writer Sally Adee provides some background on her New Scientist article describing her experience with a DARPA program that uses targeted electrical stimulation of the brain during training ex...

Concerned by the San Francisco BART system's decision to suspend cellular service to frustrate coordination among protesters angered by the fatal transit police shooting of an unarmed passenger, the F...

Writing in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, China Mieville blazingly describes two Londons: an exuberant, organic place that has been lived and built over and remade, bursting with energy and vital...

The Washington Post ran an article about the "inventor" of email, which it identified as V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai. But there's a problem! Ayyadurai didn't invent email. After publishing a risible "clarifi...

A high-level summit of the torrenting world's elite release groups -- the groups responsible for the highest quality, earliest infringing video releases -- has resulted in a consensus on dumping the v...

A high-level summit of the torrenting world's elite release groups -- the groups responsible for the highest quality, earliest infringing video releases -- has resulted in a consensus on dumping the v...

There's little provenance for this photo and the distinctive service offered therein (just a note that it was "donated" by Andrew Wightman), but it appears to date back some while. I don't suppose mus...

Watch the father's lips when his kid talks. I don't know what is going on here, but Mediaite offers three explanations: 1. That the boy has a earphone in and his dad is telling what to say and, for so...

Courthouse News Service: "A family claims Chicago police broke into their house, urinated on their mail, spit in the coffee maker, stomped and slapped them and told them "You've been punk'd," while se...

Doktor A, a sculptor and painter, produced this steampunked version of Thing from the Addams Family for an Addams-themed exhibition at the Wootini Gallery in Carrboro, NC. Thing. (via Neatorama)...

For five years "THE ALL GIRL REVUE" has been performing together, monthly, at Los Angeles' Fanatic Salon Theater. The all woman improvisational troupe, featuring cast members Edie McClurg, Jane Morris...

Citizen journalist John McDaid looks at RI Republican Senate candidate Barry Hinckley's campaign spot in which Hinckley's five-year-old son gives a lecture on economics and gas prices. The spot result...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Trevor Timm comments on billionaire Frank VanderSloot's "systematic campaign to silence journalists and bloggers from publishing stories about his political views ...

Aisling sez, "Emerge is an exciting 3 day event of active workshops, thoughtful conversation and keynotes about what it means to be human, hosted at Arizona State University. Featured speakers and act...

Entertainment in 1935. "The trouble is nowadays he refuses to be weighed at all so we don't really know if he's solid or hollow." [Video Link] Ten Stone Baby, a British Pathe newsreel from 1935. Despi...

In the current issue of Time Out London, Sue Townsend (one of my favourite authors, creator of the marvelous Adrian Mole books) describes her view of sleep: "I've only just learned to like being in be...

Jeweler/metalworker Dukno Yoon makes beautiful, animated kinetic winged rings, sculptures and towers that flap when you flex your finger. The contrast between metal structural form and natural feather...

Michael Geist sez, "As protests in Europe against ACTA have grown, skeptics have argued that most criticisms are based on misunderstandings or incorrect information about the treaty. This week, the Eu...

Former MI5 agent and Guernsey native Annie Machon sez, "In the teeth of all the anti-SOPA and -ACTA demos, the Channel Island of Guernsey is proposing it become an offshore libel tourism haven for ima...

Here's the 7th 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 Charles Platt. He writes the Electronics Fun an...

This "drop cloth suit" was made by Sarah Bahr and Hugh O'Rourke by cutting a pattern out of a well-used, well-loved drop cloth and tailoring appropriately. I had the great pleasure of collaborating wi...

Journalist William Gagen, videographer Geoff Shively and fixer Amine Unitor entered Syria to see, first-hand, conditions close to the border with Turkey. Snuck in through the mountains by a Syrian mil...

[Video Link] At TED2012 I interviewed Joshuah Foer, who gave a presentation about his recent book, Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. In his book, Joshua writes ...

Write-Light dug up this insane, multi-limbed lobster jello salad for the Vintage Ads LJ group. It originally appeared in the Davis Gelatine Recipe Book. The Call of Cthulhull-o...

As someone with a mild introvert tendency, I enjoyed this talk by Susan Cain at TED2012. In a culture where being social and outgoing are prized above all else, it can be difficult, even shameful, to ...

Southern Indiana, southern Ohio, most of Kentucky, central Tennessee, northeastern Mississippi and northwestern Alabama are in the middle of a huge storm system. As of an hour ago, there were 22 torna...

The latest from Roger Wood's feverish imagination: a glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of an assemblage clock....

This Sunday night, March 4, the 501st episode of The Simpsons will feature four superstars of American street art: Kenny Scharf, Ron English, Shepard Fairey, and Robbie Conal. Kenny Scharf came up in ...

An acidic tampon? In my vagina? It's more likely to be a reasonable and healthy idea than you might think. (Also: If you aren't reading the Context and Variation blog, you're missing out on the best i...

Ball's Pyramid looks like a place where nothing could survive. The remnants of a long-dead volcano, it sits alone in the South Pacific ... a narrow, rocky half-moon some 1800 feet high. But Ball's Pyr...

Here in the BoingBoing newsroom, we are dedicated to keeping you informed on the latest developments in cetacean friendship. You already know that dolphins and whales hang out and, in fact, play toget...

Due to overwhelming positive feedback from Mark, David, Rob and Joel Johnson I decided to buy an 11" Mac Book Air. I love it but it just felt like I was going to destroy it, shoving it into my travel ...

This is the town of Kivalina, Alaska. Last fall, when the ocean water that almost surrounds the town started turning a gooey orange, people (understandably) got a bit freaked out. After ruling out the...

Not long ago, Cory told you about how the Canadian government has been muzzling scientists—refusing to let them speak freely with the press and, thus, controlling what research the public gets t...

My latest Locus column is "Whats Inside the Box," a discussion of whether owners, users or third parties should be able to know and/or control what their computers are doing: The answer to this that m...

Total Dick-Head's David Gill reminds us that 30 years ago today, science fiction author Philip K. Dick "disconnected." Public Radio International's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" has posted a great se...

For all of us who swooned with Bloom County's Milo Bloom as he crushed on Betty Crocker, here's a nice retrospective of the Betties of times gone by. Betty Crocker Thru' The Ages...

Fred Flintstone, er, Dick Clark rather, is selling this Malibu home for $3.5 million. More details at the realtor's page -- top left listing. (via LA Times)...

I'm not always the biggest fan of Amazon's recommendations, buying books and toys for my daughter frequently leave me with a screen of Dora the Explorer and Strawberry Shortcake titles. I was skeptica...

In 1983, Alan Bishop of avant-garde freak rock band Sun City Girls, was traveling through Morocco when he became obsessed with all of the unusual and "exotic" sounds coming from his transistor radio. ...

Writing in the NYT's BITS section, Brian X. Chen and Nick Bilton describe a disturbing design-flaw in Android: apps can access and copy your private photos, without you ever having to grant them permi...

This fantastic video reveals how Agama lizards use their tails to balance as they leap through the air. The footage, combined with analysis of a "robot lizard" made from an R/C car outfitted with a me...

HR437, "the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011" makes it illegal to protest in the vicinity of anyone who rates a Secret Service detail (even if you aren't aware of the p...

Yesterday Kodak announced that it will no longer produce any slide film. Having ended production of the legendary Kodachrome in June 2009, they will now cease production of their 2 remaining products ...

Mayor Diane Blackwood of Warragul, east of Melbourne, Australia, has issued a warning about massive pine cones falling from a tree in the town center: "They are the size of a watermelon, falling liter...

Teaming up with The Lorax and HP isn't just a chance to help clear the Earth of environmentally voluminous trees: print your sustainability stories with the latest PhotoSmart, where each color comes i...

After testing 4 popular models of standalone photo scanner, Consumer Reports determined that they all "pretty much stink." If you want a decent scan, stick with the old flatbed....

(via House of Mirth)...

(Video Link) In which a baby sloth is shaved and swaddled. Key quotes: Sloth milk is hard to come by. There's an art to swaddling slippery sloths....

Jon Lebkowsky sez, "Former bOING!bOING! 'cyborganic jivemeister' interviews 21st century cyborg anthropologist Amber Case. A discussion of cyborganic mind and memory and the new world of digital tribe...

Sony's double-screened Vaio P Tablet comes with "4G" internet via AT&T, dual 5.5" touchscreen displays, and a selection of apps optimized for the new format. Running Android 3.2, the data plan co...

Bully is a documentary on bullying that follows the lives of bullied teenagers. By all accounts, it is a brilliant and important film, the sort of thing that young people should see. Except that they ...

Ben Sellon submits Red Moon, a short film about a werewolf aboard a Russian sub. An Official Selection at the 2011 Atlanta Film Festival, Hollyshorts Film Festival, St. Louis International Film Festiv...

In her first week working at the Pima County Public Library, Registered Nurse Emily Pogue helped a newly-homeless woman find safe shelter and access to the medications she needed. She listened to the ...

My latest Guardian column is "Censorship is inseparable from surveillance," which discusses the fact that network censorship entails surveillance, and how this exacerbates the public health problem ca...

"I dare thee, say 'What?' again." [Pulp Bard via JWZ]...

Spain's brutal new copyright/censorship law, passed at the behest of the US Trade Rep, has gone into effect. Spanish hactivists working with a recording artist have flooded the service with copyright ...

From Letters of Note, this incredible letter written in 1855 by Lucy Thurston, a 60-year-old missionary in Hawaii who had breast cancer. She underwent a mastectomy with no anesthesia. She wrote the fo...

[Video Link]. I'm recovering from yesterday's chemo infusion (my fifth!), and feeling kind of lousy. Jonathan Mann asked me this morning if he could write a song for me as his daily song project, and ...

Philippe sez, "restorm.com launched rightclearing last week at the prominent Social Music Summit in NYC. The cloud-based music licensing platform provides artists and music professionals a simplified ...

Bruce Levine, a clinical psychologist, has written on Mad in America about his colleagues' propensity for diagnosing anti-authoritarians with mental illness. Levine says diagnoses like oppositional de...

When a student from north Georgia's Lanier Technical College sent an SMS to a friend about his upcoming stop-in at West Hall high school, his phone helpfully corrected "gunna" to "gunman." The message...

[Video Link] Lucy McRae was trained as a classical ballerina and an architect, and her work as a "body architect" incorporates these interests and more. She is the recipient of a TED Fellowship. I int...

[Video Link] Arizona state Rep. Katie Hobbs has introduced a bill requiring disclaimers on ads that digitally retouch models because they are "deceptive." As video producer Ted Balakar points out, eve...

The following is a list of the "23 Types of Vagabonds" as identified in a 1566 book by Thomas Harman called "A Caveat or Warning for Common Cursitors, vulgarly called vagabonds." These "types" were th...

This handsome critter is a newly-discovered species of leaf-nosed bat found in Vietnam's Chu Mom Ray National Park. Scientists suggest that the animal's strange face may enhance the animal's echolocat...

Over on Submitterator, frycook keeps finding these amazing/horrible old U.S. Army newsreels. He or she has posted some great stuff, including this gem, in which the chemical corps tests psychoactive s...

The behavior of rogue stock traders could be considered more reckless and manipulative than that of psychopaths, according to a new scientific study at the University of St. Gallen. (Of course, the de...

The behavior of rogue stock traders could be considered more reckless and manipulative than that of psychopaths, according to a new scientific study at the University of St. Gallen. (Of course, the de...

This is one thing that changed for me during the course of researching and writing Before the Lights Go Out, my upcoming book about the future of energy. I used to approach conversations about energy ...

From Lists of Note, the 10 Commandments for Con Men as set out by Victor Lustig a con-legend who once took $5K off Al Capone and sold the Eiffel Tower. 1. Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast t...

Yesterday, I got to host an eye-opening Q&A with Dan Edge, a PBS FRONTLINE producer who just finished a documentary about what happened at Fukushima during the first few days of the nuclear crisi...

The independent nonpartisan NGO Democracy Watch says that Canada's elections regulator has failed in its duty to prevent fraud in Canada's elections. This comes on the heels of a voter-suppression sca...

Sulka sez, "A Finnish MEP (Anneli Jttenmki) visited US and got told that given ACTA has been prepared entirely outside of Congress and isn't ratified, it's probably not legally binding towards US. The...

Sound it Out # 19: Moonface - "Teary Eyes and Bloody Lips" This is slightly complicated.Moonface is Spencer Krug and whatever collaborators hes working with at the moment. So, this particular Moonface...

xyzzy123 sez, "Want to make a freedom-of-information request to the FBI or other three-letter agencies for any information they might have about you? This post links to a website that lets you enter p...

British newspaper The Guardian promotes its "open journalism" format with this fantastic mockumentary ad....

At Spin, cult cartoonist Ward Sutton illustrates a memorable encounter with the Monkees' Davy Jones....

Nintendo rejected a 3DS port of indie gaming hit The Binding of Isaac due to its "questionable religious content", reports developer Edmund McMillen. Age-restricted in Germany for 'blasphemy,' accordi...

Jeff sez, "We like to be prepared for an alien invasion...Nerf guns loaded, extra rations of nachos packed away, and a Klingon dictionary in the back pocket. Unfortunately, such preparations tend to b...

Andrew Breitbart, conservative author and publisher, died unexpectedly last night. He was 43....

Our thanks go to Watchismo for sponsoring Boing Boing Blast, our once-daily delivery of headlines by email. Thin is in! Taking a break from over-complicated and generously-sized timepieces popular at ...

Mat Honan takes a tour of Windows 8, which was released yesterday in preview form for consumers: "Weird can be brilliant. Weird can be daring. Windows 8 is all of those things."...

After seizing an encrypted laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu, prosecutors headed into difficult waters: could she be forced to unlock it? A judge ordered her to give up the password, raising issues...

At The Verge, David Piece reviews Lytro, the camera that allows photos to be refocused after taking a shot. Explained in-depth at The Economist by Glenn Fleishman, it gathers data for all focal length...

On February 16th, Lord David James of Blackheath (a Conservative life peer) spoke for 11 minutes in the UK House of Lords about a supposed $15 trillion federal reserve conspiracy that involved more go...

Ken MacLeod's new novel Intrusion is a new kind of dystopian novel: a vision of a near future "benevolent dictatorship" run by Tony Blair-style technocrats who believe freedom isn't the right to choos...

The "Irish SOPA" law, which makes provision for arbitrary, ISP-level national censorship without court orders, has been signed -- despite the law's unpopularity and the widespread protests against it....

Mikey P sez, "A guy I went to art school with, Kit Webster, has made something unusual and pretty captivating by attaching pyramid-shaped crystals to an LCD screen and running some kind of algorithmic...

This video is a montage of hidden camera footage of police officers across America -- in unspecified jurisdictions -- intimidating or otherwise hindering someone who has asked for a complaint form. Th...

[Video Link] From Animal New York: While out on a shoot Friday, the ANIMAL team captured footage of a thief with questionable intelligence trying to steal parts from a locked up bike on the Lower East...

Timothy sez, "This is a link to some photos I have took of Buzludzha (pronounced Buz'ol'ja) a very remote building in the Balkan Mountains. It is Bulgaria's largest monument to Communism which was lef...

RM Auction is selling off a lot of Lalique hood ornaments ("mascots") collected by Ele Chesney. They're as lovely a collection of deco beasties as you'll find anywhere. In 1925, Andr Citrons company w...

271kochu created a "fountain of cats" in Minecraft by building a structure that extended to the top of the world, then exploiting the game's simple flocking rules for virtual cats to entice the sprite...

[Video Link] Frank Warren is the founder of Post Secret. He's received over 500,000 postcards from anonymous people around the world who have shared a secret they've never told anyone before. I interv...

The first two videos from TED2012 are up. They're from yesterday's session. Paul Gilding, author of The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a Ne...

This 12-port USB power-strip looks like just the thing for people like me, who have three or four USB switches daisy-chained behind our desks (in fact, I could use a 24-port model). I have no idea if ...

The Smithsonian, the world's largest museum, is planning on producing 3D scans of its collection and making them freely available to the public to print out at home on their 3D printers (or incorporat...

On Wired, Matt Simon profiles Clayton Bailey, who makes spectacular rayguns out of junk and scrap, and who is possessed of a truly magnificent mustache. Next youll notice the many steampunkish ray gun...

[Video Link] Ayah Bdeir is the founder and lead engineer of littleBits, an open source library of electronic modules that snap together with tiny magnets for prototyping and play. littleBits won Popul...

This wartime ad from Life encourages you to get loaded on fine booze at home while cleaning your guns, to leave the roads and railways clear for Our Boys. Life, October 16, 1944...

Before the "Nintendo wars" of the early 21st century, there were these toys, which invited young children to practice accurately releasing atom bombs. I'm not sure that the skills you learned with thi...

The Pirate Bay has moved away from serving torrent files. Now it serves "magnet links," which are the addresses of Internet users whose computers have Torrent files; when you want to download a file, ...

He was 66. Richard Metzger has more at Dangerous Minds....

Holy crap, but Dominic Wilcox's sculptures are seriously up my street. He mods little plastic people to depict strange and newsworthy contemporary moments, then animates them by affixing them to the f...

Inside Japan's Nuclear Meltdown Last night, PBS FRONTLINE aired a new documentary about what happened at the Fukushima nuclear power plant during the crucial first days of that crisis. Using amateur v...

Steve Moore, who identifies himself as a former FBI Special Agent and head of the Los Angeles Joint Terrorism Task Force Al Qaeda squad, says that the TSA is useless. He says that they don't catch ter...

A redditor of Vietnamese descent discovered these giant water bugs in her/his mother's freezer, put there "to scare me." My Vietnamese mom had these in the freezer to scare me. It worked. (i.imgur.com...

[Video Link] I imagine OK Go will be giving these guys a call soon! Quadrotors designed and built at the University of Pennsylvania perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments includin...

If you aren't visiting the TOM THE DANCING BUG WEBSITE, and following RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER, then we must ask: Why do you hate America?...

Wyoming's legislature has defeated its House Bill 85, on third reading, thus ending the state's plan to investigate buying an aircraft carrier (and equipping a military) to defend the state should the...

The 1964 NYC World's Fair is legendary -- birthplace of animatronics and Belgian waffles, the zenith of exuberant goofy corporate futurism and the beloved coming-of-age for millions who entered a mode...

Bloomberg's Max Abelson takes us deep into the spectacle of members of Wall Street's 1% bemoaning their difficult straits as they struggle to make ends meet with their reduced bonuses. One doesn't kno...

Ali Johnson sez, Song Map is a new litho print by Dorothy. The Map is, as its name suggests, made up entirely from song titles: Highway to Hell stretches past Itchycoo Park, Heartbreak Hotel can be fo...

An inspiring call-to-arms from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, founder of Tinker London: This should be a golden age for UK manufacturing. People are making things everywhere at various scales. In Hacksp...

Michael Geist sez, "The Canadian music industry is scheduled to appear before a Parliamentary committee today with some of the most radical demands to date that would effectively create liability for ...

Michael Geist sez, "The Canadian music industry is scheduled to appear before a Parliamentary committee today with some of the most radical demands to date that would effectively create liability for ...

Lamar Smith (R-TX), author of the ill-starred SOPA Internet regulation, has an even dumber idea for the Internet. In the name of fighting child pornography, he wants to force ISPs to log everything yo...

Celer is an experimental/minimalist ambient duo founded in Southern California in 2005 by Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long at the start of their romantic relationship. For several years, the couple ...

My sister-in-law Heather Sparks just returned from the Bruise Cruise Festival, a rock and roll weekend cruise from Miami to the Bahamas. Judging from the video above and Heather's report to me, the Br...

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 Jane and I talk about Bag It, a ...

The Disaster Preparedness Plan prepared by the local DHS for Union County NC explains what steps you should take if you have to evacuate and take your pet fish: "Your name and where you will be locate...

At Penny Arcade Report, Ben Kuchera reports on Cross Assault. A "fighting game" reality show sponsored by Capcom, creator of the classic Street Fighter game series, it was a disaster of sexual harassm...

David Weinberger sez, "Seth Godin reports that the Apple store is refusing to carry his new ebook, Stop Stealing Dreams, because it links the books it references to Amazon. Seth argues that the market...

Raspberry Pi, an innovative $35 GNU/Linux box in a tiny package, launched yesterday -- sort of. Demand was so hot that all the company's retail partners collapsed under load. From Ars Technica's Ryan ...