Articles by BoingBoing from February 2013

Uvex Skypers are protective eyewear that have built-in side shields and a brow guard. Lightweight and comfortably snug, they fit me perfectly out of the box, but they do come with a nose bridge and an...

Thursday night (Feb 28) at the Ft. Worth Museum of Science and History I'm giving a talk titled "Making Makers: The New Tools and Ideas Driving a Movement." I am going to present a short and colorful ...

SuperHeroStuff sells a lot of great socks, but the R2D2 ones take the prize. Star Wars Yoda and R2D2 Socks 2-Pack (via The Mary Sue)...

If your mental image of futuristic human colonies in space involves tubular ships, rolling hills, and a population seemingly plucked from a cocktail party in Sausalito in 1972, chances are good that y...

Robert Frost trains astronauts for NASA. At Quora, he answered an interesting question about what happens when astronauts cry. It's certainly happened, Frost says. But it's pretty uncomfortable. Witho...

Matthews says: "The Vaticans plan to call the retiring pontiff Benedict XVI Pope Emeritus hit a snag today, in the form of a threatened lawsuit by an Oakland-based rapper who has been recording under ...

Basalt, CO's public library has added packets of seeds to its circulating collection: you grow 'em, pick out the best fruits, and harvest the seeds and give them back to the library for the next patro...

Matthew says: "A high school sophomore suspected a teacher was stealing students money, so the student set up a camera in one locker, hid in another locker, and caught the thief."...

Cult classic Wild Style saw the earliest marriage of Hip Hop's key elements in film. Here it is with a special edition of The Hip Hop Family Tree....

NYTimes: "Van Cliburn, the American pianist whose first-place award at the 1958 Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow made him an overnight sensation and propelled him to a phenomenally succ...

Make has the story of physicist David Neevel's Oreo-creme-removing device, which is rather a wonder....

We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for your viewing pleasure include: • Mikael Jorgensen (Wilco) and Helado Negro record a song ...

Earlier today, Google co-founder Sergey Brin pointed out just how emasculating cellphones were. What self-respecting gentleman would be seen thumbing a flat piece of glass? Wearing Google Glass instea...

Mikael Jorgensen of Wilco, with Helado Negro, aka Roberto Lange, record a song in two days....

According to Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady's new book Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry, the secretive National Security Agency spying programs have become institutionalized, and have ...

Wikimedia's Wikipedia Zero project will let people look up Wikipedia articles using text-messages. This will bring Wikipedia to billions of people who lack smartphones: We want to enable access to fre...

Casey Cripe's mixed-media and digital collages are deeply immersive explorations in nature, science, cartography, and whole systems thinking. In the memory palace of my mind, Cripe's work is hung in t...

On Reddit today: "Hey, it's John Cusack. I'm here talk to about Freedom of the Press Foundation, among other things. Ask me anything." More from his intro: Hey Reddit, Im John Cusack. I make films and...

Google's co-founder, pitching the company's wearable "Glass" camera and headset, told an audience at TED that smartphones are "emasculating." "You're standing around and just rubbing this featureless ...

From my fathers trip to Turkey. Thanks, Dad!...

The world's first commercial space traveler, Dennis Tito, is today launching "Inspiration Mars," a space tourism project which involves a 501-day flight for two astronauts to do a "flyby" past Mars, t...

The world's first commercial space traveler, Dennis Tito, is today launching "Inspiration Mars," a space tourism project which involves a 501-day flight for two astronauts to do a "flyby" past Mars, t...

In response to Freedom of Information Act requests, the military today released 84 court documents related to the case of Bradley Manning. As is routine, many of the documents are redacted. The Army p...

World Fantasy Award-winning novelist Nnedi Okorafor's debut young adult novel is Akata Witch, a beautifully wrought hero's journey story about Sunny, a young girl with albinism born to Nigerian parent...

I made it to LA with no problems and a little time to spare. The GoWesty 2.3L rebuilt engine is running beautifully. Having spent much of February breaking the engine in but unable to really apply ful...

The US Supreme Court has dismissed Clapper v. Amnesty International, which sought to overturn the secret, mass surveillance of the Internet by the NSA. EFF has its own lawsuit, which is still proceedi...

"Friends", by euclase. [via Deviant Art Blog via @Aurich]...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH our prenatal protagonist tries to purchase a weapon and gets wrapped up in red tape more tangled than an umbilical cord....

Man shot by low IQ. "According to the police report, Lanier said he was driving along State Road 17 North when the dog kicked 'the unloaded .380 pistol.' It went on to say that Lanier was 'surprised' ...

Photogrammetry is a technique whereby two-dimensional images are automatically converted into three-dimensional models. Indie developer Skull Theater is using this method exclusively to develop Rustcl...

The Hit Squad, an animated comedy about a 1980s London synthpop band's attempted comeback, is headed to Kickstarter, where the producers aim to raise 5,000. "The movie is a tale of sex, skullduggery a...

Unsurprisingly, she has excellent taste in websites. [Adweek]...

At L.A. Magazine, Michelle McNamara reports that one of the most violent serial rapists and killers in history may still be out there. In the March issue of Los Angeles magazine, true crime writer Mic...

One of the biggest charmers at TED2013 so far has been Romo the Robot, who rolled and whizzed around the stage with one of his creators, Keller Rinaudo. With large bubbly eyes, four fang-like teeth, a...

Why learning to program is about more than a job, it's a way to make your whole life better....

Hey, Albuquerque! I'm at the South Broadway Cultural Center tonight at 6PM. Tomorrow, I'm in Lawrence, KS and then my final stop, Toronto. Come on out!...

Collin Brewer, a local councilor in England, regrets having called for disabled children to be euthanazed: "I meant no offence by my remarks to you I can see, in retrospect, that they were ill-judged ...

A bank robber who paid a wizard $450 to make him invisible was nonetheless detected and overpowered during his Tehran heist. [Metro]...

Beer drinkers filed a $5m lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch, accusing it of watering down Budweiser. Meanwhile, Makers Mark abandoned back plans to water down its signature tipple....

This video first made the rounds in 2011, but a kitten chasing apples on a bed, set to dramatic music, is timeless....

Stefan writes, "Parltrack is free software that liberates a lot of hard to process data (like PDFs, Word docs, and HTML pages) as reusable open data and presents this as a kind of dashboard for activi...

Fully articulated. the wings rise and fall with the assistance of custom carved black walnut handles. The wings are affixed with bonded vinyl/leather straps with a range of sizing options....

Randall Monroe's latest "What If?" explores the total number of possible English-language tweets: Based on the rates of correct guessesand rigorous mathematical analysisShannon determined that the inf...

"About 2,240 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in U.S. men a year, compared with about 232,000 cases of invasive cancer among women," writes Laura Hambleton in the Washington Post. "And because mal...

"Anger, frustration, forgiveness, revenge: communicated in 17 Beatles songs."...

"My personal biracial experience growing up on both sides of segregated hoods, suburbs and backcountry taught me a lot about the coded language and arithmetic of racism," writes actor and former histo...

Yesterday I linked to a video of Baile Zhang's "invisibility cloak," which was demoed at TED2013. The video was hosted by Dropbox, which killed the link (too much traffic). Here's a YouTube version of...

Together at last....

I am in Hawaii, working and exploring and writing—and, for the first time in my life, swimming in the ocean. Not just playing in the water, but I mean, really swimming. Laps along the shoreline ...

Yo, Boston! I'm doing an appearance tonight at Harvard Books, and as luck would have it, I spilled a cup of coffee on my laptop this morning and killed it. Luckily, the twitters leapt into action and ...

Pressure Printing, creators of the finest art prints I've ever seen, today issued three new intaglio prints by Mexican-American underground artist Daniel Martin Diaz. Each of the three works -- Atomic...

Piecing together what exploded in the skies over Russia, using infrasound sensors operated by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization...

Here's a preview from Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen's excellent new biography, Al Capp, A Life to the Contrary. More than thirty years have passed since Al Capp's death, and he may no longer be...

Chron: "Scott Masumoto of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cited state health statistics that more than 152,000 West Virginians have an addiction to prescription medication — more than 8...

Dave Barry's Insane City is a tremendously fun novel that romps through a Miami full of grifters, pimps, thugs, sweet-hearted beachbunnies, honorable men with pythons, seductive women with spiked drin...

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

Nokia's latest ultra-cheap candybar phone looks like a good replacement for my trusty e-ink Moto F3. A month's battery life on standby, an FM radio and an LED flashlight add up to a perfect "backup" p...

Left, the first lady at the Academy Awards ceremony; right, as she appeared in a still shot on Iranian TV. Not the best idea, perhaps, when you're trying to bring attention to Argo's historical inaccu...

Hey, Cambridge, Mass! I'm speaking at Harvard Books tonight at 7PM! Tomorrow I'll be in Albuquerque, then in Lawrence, KS and Toronto. Come on out and say hi!...

The state of gun violence research is poor, and some people who own guns see politics at work in any system that allows that data to be gathered. But right now, whatever your beliefs on guns are, its ...

The state of gun violence research is poor, and some people who own guns see politics at work in any system that allows that data to be gathered. But right now, whatever your beliefs on guns are, its ...

The state of gun violence research is poor, and some people who own guns see politics at work in any system that allows that data to be gathered. But right now, whatever your beliefs on guns are, its ...

Unicorns from the Grande Rio samba school participate in the second night of the annual Carnival parade in Rio de Janeiro's Sambadrome, February 21, 2012. Photo: Nacho Doce with Reuters....

A man who decapitated his mother, replaced the head backwards, then performed Hannibal Lecter impressions during his arrest, was sentenced this week to indefinite psychiatric detention. [Court News UK...

Cooper Moo and Erik Bear, two of the authors of the final book of the Mongoliad trilogy from Neal Stephenson and company, The Mongoliad: Book Three, wrote this exclusive essay for Boing Boing. About T...

How about the Real Genius trailer recut in the style of M. Night Shyamalan, by YouTuber dondrapersayswhat?...

I'm here at TED2013 in Long Beach, jacked up on amazing coffee and mind-blowing ideas from today's 4-minute TED fellow talks (the longer 18-minute talks start tomorrow). I was only part-way through th...

Three semitones, 20% timestretch and a whole lotta reverb....

Risk! is a podcast where people tell true stories "they thought they'd never dare to share," usually recorded in front of a live audience. The stories are sometimes confessional, sometimes X-rated, so...

Scott Brown, the publisher of The Cherokee Scout in Murphy, N.C., has apologized for requesting public records about gun ownership from the local Sheriff's office. As reported by Romenesko: As publish...

Quarterly.co is a subscription service for wonderful things. People can subscribe to a curator (such as Joel Johnson, Veronica Belmont, Tim Ferriss, Joshua Foer, Gretchen Rubin and others) and pay $25...

We found this cat in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. Bill Benson shot this photo, and the one below. More in his Flickr stream. These cat photos have an awful lot of meme power within....

A man charged with helping a Zumba instructor develop an uncharacteristically profitable Zumba operation is accused of deleting emails that may have amounted to damning evidence. [Associated Press]...

"We popped open our baby monitor app in time to see what really happens when Jude is 'trying to go to sleep.'"...

I wrote a guest editorial for the Raincoast Books site, in honour of Freedom to Read Week. It's called "Libraries, Hackspaces and E-waste: how libraries can be the hub of a young maker revolution," an...

Poltergeist (1982) was the first movie I ever rented on videotape and it's, well, haunted me ever since. Jerry Goldsmith composed the score, including the sweetly nightmarish "Carol Anne's Theme" you ...

Ali Spagnola spent three years and $30,000 of her own money to void a ridiculous trademark awarded by the US Patent and Trademark Office. She won, but the larger problem remains, with the odds stacked...

Pilots of the US Air Force's F-22 Raptor stealth fighters are experiencing choking, coughing, memory loss, confusion, and blackouts (hypoxia) because of the way the planes are designed. At least one f...

Man, I feel cheated. My chemotherapy infusions were nothing like this....

Man, I feel cheated. My chemotherapy infusions were nothing like this....

Ask women about their relationship, writes Jody Schoger, and "youre apt to hear variations on this theme, 'He never blinked,' or 'He really showed me how strong a man he truly is.' In other words, you...

Hello from Pea Soup Andersen's, en route to Baja California, Mexico, from Marin County, California. I made it this far. I have to admit I haven't always been so sure. I've been hoping to find myself s...

"Lil Poopy" is a 9 year old rapper from Massachussetts whose videos include sexually suggestive content, and lulzy references to the use of cocaine. He has performed with P. Diddy, and his dad says he...

Famous hacker geohot just needs a nodding Cosby next to him....

At the Smithsonian's Smart News blog, a fun post looking at historic debates in America's science media about whether it's okay to eat horse meat, with links to some Scientific American articles from ...

A look into the secret life of a comedian off-stage and an exclusive look at Patton Oswalt's show at the Irvine Improv....

Etsy seller sheepcreeknc makes major deluxe-o custom Star Wars felted mobiles to order. At $380, they're not cheap, but if you owe someone a major baby gift, this might be just the thing. The pictured...

Every piece of original art from the long-running Elfquest comic series—thousands of art boards, drafts and scripts—is entering the archives of Columbia University in New York. "At first, ...

Boing Boing has a new podcast! It's called Tell Me Something I Don't Know, and it's an interview podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas,...

Noah Smith (who is white) saw "Django," and loved it. "Not for the cartoonish violence (which was OK, nothing special) or for Tarantino's trademark witty banter (which was a bit subdued)," he says, bu...

Mark Jarema of South Jersey was charged by Pennsylvania authorities with forcing his girlfriend to help him in an illegal deer hunt, and sometimes "using her head as a gun rest to steady his weapon." ...

The British government paid out 20m to compensate 3,000 slave-owning families for the loss of their "property" when slave ownership was abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833. At the time, that sum a...

Trevor Timm at Freedom of the Press Foundation: "In the wake of the government's secret legal rationale for the targeted killing of American citizens leaking to the press, President Obama has now twic...

I finally got around to reading Carl Zimmer's highly-recommended National Geographic article about antibiotics and their effect on our microbiome, the "100 trillion microbes that live in our healthy b...

Noise rock drummer/artist Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt) made a video for his current musical project Black Pus by animating flip-book comics he drew in middle school. ...

Adam Mansbach's Rage is Back is a sneaky hybrid of a novel, part nostalgic urban graffiti memoir, full of vintage hiphop references and lush, old school New York descriptions; part brooding supernatur...

Anti-bacterial soap is usually made with the antibiotic Triclosan — which targets a wide range of bacteria. Most of you are probably well-educated enough on antibiotic-resistant bacteria to gues...

Artist Rutherford Chang has opened a very curious record shop in Portland's Recess gallery. It's filled with more than 650 first pressings of the Beatles' White Album. And nothing else. You can't buy ...

Blondie's "Heart of Glass" time-stretched into 30 minutes of glorious weirdness....

For several years, MOVIEBARCODE has compressed entire films and famous film sequences into barcode-like images where the lines represent frames from the movie. There are hundreds in the archive and pr...

Britain's top Catholic cardinal stepped down today after allegations of inappropriate behavior with priests, dating back to the 1980s, became public. Keith O'Brien is an outspoken conservative in the ...

Enjoy the latest page of Elfquest. First time reader? Catch up at the comic's official homepage....

At the Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide, HTML "heading" tags accumulate unclosed, thereby making the text grow inexorably in size until the greatest website in the world is achieved. [Sewing and Embr...

Don't miss this call to arms on cellphone unlocking from Derek Khanna, the Republican staffer fired over a memo calling for copyright reform. With SOPA, the industry had the money, the lobbyists, and ...

Do you remember the first profoundly shocking image you saw on the internet? Perhaps it would have been something you came across by accident; perhaps you followed, half horrified and half compelled, ...

It's a crazy world out there. IKEA meatballs — which should, ostensibly, be 100% cow — are, in fact, at least partly horse. Meanwhile cow genomes are even more mixed up, containing 25% sna...

Tonight, I got to meet Martyn Poliakoff — the fabulously frizzy-haired University of Nottingham chemist who you might recognize from a series of awesome videos about the periodic table that Xeni...

The idea of grief being expressed in predictable emotional stages dates back to the 1960s, writes Claudia Hammond at the BBC. But recent studies in the last decade suggest that reality is seldom so ne...

"Dubstep isnt going to stop expanding into fresh sub-genres any time soon," writes Vice's Matt Shea. " ... [which] also made it inevitable that, at some point, someone was going to add wub-wubs to The...

Anon sent in this high-res scan of Charles Einstein's novel, Wiretap!: "This 1955 book from Dell publishing was one of the first popular novels to address police wiretapping abuse. The technology of w...

Dina Spector reports on the Lyubivy Orlova, a Russian cruise ship adrift in the North Atlantic. It snapped free of towing cables while en-route from Canada to new owners in the Caribbean, and for vari...

Lemuria found, reports Sid Perkins: "The drowned remnants of an ancient microcontinent may lie scattered beneath the waters between Madagascar and India, a new study suggests." [Nature]...

Vaughan Bell is one of my favorite neuroscience writers and, at his blog, he makes an impassioned post that's aimed at scientists, but has some important implications for you, as well. The basic messa...

Hey, DC! I'm speaking at Busboys and Poets tonight at 7PM! Tomorrow I'll be in Cambridge, Mass; then Albuquerque (and more!)...

Marshall sez, "This paper scene is a collaboration between illustrator Derek Yaniger and Marshall Alexander. The result is this poster-sized template that you can either hang on the wall or cut to pie...

Jim Dezazzo sez, John Holdren, Obama's science advisor, issued a directive on Friday to all research funding agencies to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically avail...

An epic Reddit thread entitled "These fucking scissors" has lab-techs and scientists compiling an exhaustive, definitive list of all the weird, useless crap that has accumulated in their labs, and the...

Just look at it. Ham and Bananas Hollandaise (Thanks, Teemu!)...

Delicious, delicious, weird Nutella priesthood art....

Redditor bogus_wheel is a physicist in Sydney, Australia. Her boyfriend of seven years submitted a marriage proposal in the form of a physics paper that tracks their relationship (with a graph!). It i...

I didn't know they still made Garbage Pail Kids. I miss these and Wacky Packages. I'm keeping this one!...

Aaron Williams, a devout follower of Pastafarianism, has had his religious rights trampled by the New Jersey Motor Vehicles Commission, which refused to allow him to wear his religious headgear (a pas...

Hey, Concord, NH! I'm at Gibson's Bookstore today at 3PM. Tomorrow, I'm in DC, then Cambridge, MA. Come on out!...

The wonderful folks at the Port City Makerspace had me over to their enormous, beautiful spot this evening, and gifted me with "the keys to the city," in the form of a set of handmade lockpicks from t...

Jordan sez, "Tuesday, February 26 @ 1pm PST/4pm EST/9pm GMT: Peter Watts, who has been mentioned repeatedly on BoingBoing (beaten and arrested at US border, survived flesh-eating bacteria, etc.!) will...

I ordered the last few parts I needed for my Baja trip from Van Cafe. I had to, after all the cool artwork I'd seen on the Samba. I depart Monday and am eager to see how all the new gear and mods I ma...

I'm on stage at the Liberty Forum in Nashua, NH today from 1545h Eastern. Assuming Ustream does its thing, you should be able to watch right here!...

From rogue archivist Carl Malamud (who recently liberated a massive trove of expensive standards and regulations that you were legally obliged to comply with, but couldn't see without paying out large...

The Analog Tele-Phonographer is Christopher Locke's fantastic smartphone amplifier made from salvaged, chimeraed brass instruments. Each one is different, and each one is awesome in its own way. "Trrr...

Hey, Portsmouth, NH! I'll be at RiverRun Books tonight at 7PM (I'll also be at the Liberty Forum in Nashua). Tomorrow, I'm in Concord, before heading to DC. There's plenty more to come, too! Tell your...

Jeffrey sez, "I spent the last 4 months stitching 48 THOUSAND images together into a single panorama which lets you see things up to about 15 miles away. This image is about 4 times larger than the pr...

Etsy seller Rockets and Rainbows makes clever jewelry out of Star Wars and My Little Pony toys, including the Snow Speeder ring shown here. But you can't buy that one, because I just bought it as a su...

I can't think of a better day than today to announce that my 2005 book, The World's Worst: A Guide to the Most Disgusting, Hideous, Inept, and Dangerous People, Places, and Things on Earth is on sale ...

More scenes from a book tour: SECURE DOCUMENTS! Secure documents do not enter sign, Pasadena High, Houston, TX, USA...

A US soldier with a unit in Eastern Afghanistan was shot in combat, and bled profusely, nearing death. Helicopters picked him up, medics inspected his injuries, cut off his clothes and looked through ...

Humans brought the brown tree snake to Guam about 60 years ago. Since then, the reptiles have slithered their way across the island — devouring whole bird species as they went. The snakes are su...

An excellent piece by Taylor Owen, for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia: "The principle lesson from the whole Tesla affair: Data is laden with intentionality, and cannot be removed fr...

I use my iPhone to shoot video because the quality is excellent and I like the many different inexpensive video apps available for the iPhone (such as stop motion apps). I also like being able to emai...

Esquire has published one of the clickbaitiest neuroscience articles in the history of all ZOMG-dom: "President Obama's proposed Brain Activity Map Project could lead to cures for Alzheimer's, autism,...

"You and six friends after a long night of drinking." One of many reasons why amateur photographers should not be allowed to Instagram their foodz. Tumblr: "Amateur Food Porn Has Got To Stop." Below, ...

What do top predators have to do with chemistry? Turns out, their presence (or lack thereof) can alter ecosystems, turning them from carbon sinks or carbon suppliers (and vice versa). Researchers from...

Scientists are studying another element that attracts bees to flowers, in addition to color and scent: the distinct electric field a flower emits....

Kurtzman's ground-breaking color rough for the cover of MAD #1 along with the printed cover (1952). “I think Harvey’s MAD was more important than pot and LSD in shaping the generation that...

"My experiences with violence in schools still echo throughout my life but standing to face the problem has helped me in immeasurable ways."...

Asahi Shimbun reports that several pudding containers in the baggage of a Chinese man returning from Hong Kong were seized by airport screeners. In response, the traveler assaulted the security office...

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou, 48, is heading to prison for 30 months for whistleblowing on torture. "He seemed unbowed and almost content at the prospect of prison as he basked in the well wishes of...

Jess Hill has published the second part of a three-part series on what its like to have a brain tumor diagnosed, then surgically removed. Read: Magical Realism: From Seizure to Surgery. The earlier in...

By Joey Angerone, of his 9 month old baby Quentin....

Photo: Bruce Sterling I've been to tech conferences all over the world, but this one may be the most radical: Webstock in Wellington, New Zealand. It's about web designers as both stars of "new media"...

The track is from Computer Jay's Savage Planet Discotheque. Jay has also written an 8-bit style video game to accompany the album and unlock a few hidden tracks....

Hot off the press: the Boing Boing Skullcap Moleskine Ruled Cahier Journal! • 64 lined pages! • Last 16 sheets detachable!! • Acid-free paper!!! • Inner pocket!!!! • Size...

Marianne, at XOJane: "Because you are not an asshole, I feel like I can say these things to you, in the hopes that you will think about them the next time you hang out with a friend who might be fat&#...

Ivan Pavlov had at least 35 dogs that were involved in his Nobel Prize-winning on behavior and conditioning. But only one of them was stuffed and preserved in the Pavlov Museum....

In November 1322, Jakoba (or Jacoba) Felicie stood trial in her native Paris for the crime of practicing medicine without official sanction. Over the course of the trial, it became clear that her work...

Nineties Irish indie feature HOW TO CHEAT IN THE LEAVING CERTIFICATE was recently remastered, and the 1080p telecine created from the original camera negative and is now available in full on YouTube...

Derek Khanna was a Professional Staffer for the Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives. Khanna, 24, previously worked on Mitt Romneys 2008 presidential campaign and in the office o...

Derek Khanna was a Professional Staffer for the Republican Study Committee in the House of Representatives. Khanna, 24, previously worked on Mitt Romneys 2008 presidential campaign and in the office o...

Live bidding on the Johnny Romita's cover art for Amazing Spider-Man #121 has commenced at Heritage Auctions. The loss of Gwen marked nothing less than an end to the carefree fun and offbeat innocence...

From chalk artist Chris Carlson (Via UniqueDaily)...

Ian Thacker of the DIY Family blog teaches English at a girl’s high school in Taiwan. MAKE reports on Ian's recent project: a popsicle stick amplifier case. One of the school projects that caugh...

Authors (and/or publishers) can make money by paying people to read books. That's Kevin Kelly's idea, and it's an intriguing one. Readers would purchase an e-book for a fixed amount, say $5. They woul...

Scenes from a book-tour, part sqrt(-1): the SPIDER DUCK, at Austin's magnificent Toy Joy. Spider Duck, Toy Joy, Austin, TX, USA...

Chair lift mishap Sneak attack (Via What the Christ? NSFW)...

I have worn a Fitbit activity tracker for a long time. I enjoy it and the calorie estimation based on my 'daily activity' is really helpful in managing my weight. I figured I should try out the Fitbit...

Larry Lessig's Harvard Law address, "Aaron's Laws - Law and Justice in a Digital Age" is a riveting, bittersweet talk on the state of Internet law, and law in general, and, always, corruption....

Finally, someone has written the in-depth article about the cultural ethos of classic 1980s beat-em-up Double Dragon. Dan Whitehead: Like its closest peersnamely Renegade and Streets Of RageDouble Dra...

Adolf Hitler is among candidates for office in Meghalaya, India. Adolf L. Hitler, that is. [Reuters]...

Hey, Austin! I'm in town today, doing an event at Book People at 7PM, and then an EFF-Austin benefit. Saturday, I'm in Portsmouth, NH, then on Sunday I'm in Nashua, NH....

Nicholas Thompson in The New Yorker: "The climax of the movie Argo takes place at the airport in Tehran. Six Americans, having hidden in Iran for three months, are taking this one chance to get out of...

New Haven Independent: "In the basement of a New Haven housing co-op, tied to a chair at gunpoint, in a vain effort to save his life, Alex Rackley started giving up names after fellow party members po...

Mat Honan in Wired News: "Customer service software provider Zendesk announced a security breach that allowed attackers into its system, where they could access data from three customers this week. Wi...

Commit Logs From Last Night: highlights funny, profane source-code commit-messages from GitHub, as bedraggled hackers find themselves leaving notes documenting their desperate situations. Some recent ...

The RIAA says Google doesn't list the sites it likes highly enough on search result pages. Masnick on TechDirt nails 'em to the wall: "For everyone else in the world, if they're not satisfied with how...

Sean Williams sez, "Australia's #1 sleep research centre in conjunction with the Aust Network for Arts & Tech put #1 NYT-bestseller Sean Williams in a week-long sleep deprivation study with Maker...

Panera has been converting some existing stores to a "pay what you want" model and it appears to work. "'They feel like every other Panera Cafe in America; they don't feel the least bit different,' sa...

Etsy's BabyTalkDesigns sells these x-ray t-shirts showing the contents of various family members' tummies (mix and match for added hilarity!). There's even a glow in the dark version (Go, Nigel, go!)....

San Francisco's influential Noise Pop 2013 indie music, arts, and film festival kicks off its 21st year next Tuesday, February 26. The stellar lineup this year includes Califone, Yacht, Toro Y Moi, Gr...

It's interesting to learn what Robert Crumb thinks about notable people. "Crumb on Others, Part Five," compiled by Alex Wood, was just published on Robert Crumb's website. (The black-on-red text is aw...

One of my lucky days last year was meeting Brett, the bass player for Falling Still when he came to my house with his van to help me move some heavy furniture (found him on Taskrabbit). Here's their l...

Nick Gillespie of Reason says: "We have an interview with Derek Khanna, the guy who got bounced from the Republican Study Committee last fall for publishing (with full approval by his boss) a memo cri...

The NYTimes reports that Google "is negotiating with Warby Parker, an e-commerce start-up company that sells trendy eyeglasses, to help it design more fashionable frames."...

A must-read by Steven Brill in Time on the brutality of medical bills in America, for cancer patients and others in need of medical care....

A three-year-old girl woth spina bifida "was reduced to tears by TSA screeners on her way to a family vacation in Florida earlier this month." Video at Gothamist....

Sometimes you just need a fountain of cats set to rap music. HEY GRIFF, BRING IN THE CATS....

Matt Alt in Japan says, "You just can't make this kind of thing up. Snapshot from the NHK health/medical show "Tameshite Gatten" last night. I think this answers the question of "is anything NOT kawai...

Ever see flying robots doing stuff that you never suspected flying robots could do? I have....

We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for your viewing pleasure include: • Exchange students in Japan try popular local treat: ice ...

Jeff sez, Seattle will spend $500,000 to settle a lawsuit it lost with phonebook companies over its sensible opt-out program for residents. Beginning in May 2011, Seattle began allowing residents to o...

BB reader Readblood shares this photo in the Boing Boing Flickr pool and explains, Bitblox are wooden alphabet blocks inspired by our pixelated nostalgia. While pixels continue shrinking out of sight ...

In the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, BB reader Dan Bennett shares photos of Yogi and Bambi, two adorable Dachsund puppies who are growing up adorably. They have a fan page....

I'm going nuts with podcasts. Here's the latest: Cool Tools' "Show and Tell" videocast and podcast. Last week, Kevin Kelly and I did a video hangout with Joshua Glenn and Michael Pusateri. We showed e...

In this episode of Gweek I was joined by John Walker of the gaming review site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and Phillip Gullet of the blog Phil Are Go. Here are a few of the things we talked about: Rum Doing...

Last week, we learned that Clayton Woitas, the CEO of Canadian energy company Encana, uttered an angry expletive after an analyst asked him an impertinent question. "The answer would be no," Woitas sa...

Aaron sez, "A fellowship of leading RPG designers-turned-writers is offering their novels for a short time in a DRM-free ebook collection at a pay-what-you-want price. The Bundle of Holding not only s...

After a presentation that dragged on for hours, Sony failed to show the assembled game press the gadget they were there to see. The verdict was in before the event was over: another Sony shitshow. The...

The "Gold Metal Man Dress" by Etsy seller GeekyU1 is a pretty good stab at a C3PO frock. Made to order for $200. Gold Metal Man Dress (via Neatorama)...

I use Palomino Blackwing 602 pencils every day. The graphite is perfect for me - dark, but not greasy. And it lives up to its motto: "Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed," which is printed on each penc...

In downtown Cambridge, Mass., there's a research laboratory where scientists create plasma — the superheated, energy-dense gases that make up the Sun — and then try to manipulate that matt...

They aren't saying you should do it. There's really no reason to. (Even fecal transplants are done in a much less disgusting manner.) But if, for whatever reason, you were to ingest your own poop, you...

Oh my, this is good news: Danny O'Brien, my successor at EFF (who left to work for the Committee to Protect Journalists) has gone back to EFF, where he'll run the international team....

Scene from a Houston grocery store, courtesy of a touring author's life. I did not buy any of these things. Junk food, grocery store, Houston, TX, USA...

My 9-year-old daughter is an avid World of Warcraft player, and enjoys reading Dungeons and Dragons manuals (We are joining a twice-monthly game that my friend is setting up). So it's no surprise that...

How do we know whether screening for something like cervical cancer is effective at saving women's lives? Two ongoing studies conducted in India (one funded by the National Cancer Institute and the ot...

A long, investigative feature on junk food, health and the processed food industry in yesterday's NYT consists primarily of interviews with tortured and semi-tortured junk food scientists and execs wh...

The University of Oregon's Mapping History site could easily suck up all your productivity for a day or two. Filled with interactive graphs, charts, and timelines, it allows you to explore history in ...

The favorite party game of Ernie Kovacs - Common Scents...

The Epidemic Intelligence Service is the crack CDC team that investigates new diseases. (If you want to read more about them, I'd recommend checking out Maryn McKenna's Beating Back the Devil.) Now, y...

"I will allow you to pull my 'hairpiece;' if it moves, I will give you another $100,000; if it does not, I punch you in the mouth. How about it?" -- Frank Sinatra Frank Sinatra's "pull my hairpiece" c...

A battery can hold a lot of energy, but it takes a long time to charge it. A capacitor can be charged very quickly, but doesn't hold a comparable amount of energy. A graphene supercharger is the best ...

Matthew, a young man who blogs about air-travel, was thrown off a United jet after a flight attendant chastised him for taking photos of the new first class seats. She apparently thought he was a terr...

Screengrabbed by @Ryden before its inevitable deletion....

Remember the potential weirdo sex-dungeon in Houston's Hotel ZaZa? A reader with inside knowledge writes, That "two-way mirror" in 322 hangs on the bathroom wet wall for the more spacious suite 321 ne...

After 32 years shining shoes at Pittsburgh's Children's Hospital, Albert Lexie amassed $200,000 in tips—and paid it right into a fund for sick kids whose families cannot afford medical costs. [W...

A royal penguin, somewhat worse for the wear, was found stranded on a New Zealand beach after going on a 1000-mile holiday by mistake. [AP]...

The CEO of U.S. tire company Titan International declined to invest in a French factory, writing that the "so-called workers" only put in three hours of work a day. His letter generated French outrage...

Les Irvin, operator of the web's top Joni Mitchell fan site, reports that he's being "sued for up to $600,000" over four photos uploaded by to the site by anonymous commenters. Until now. Charlyn [Zlo...

Michael Geist sez, The business opposition to Canada's anti-spam and spyware legislation has added an unlikely supporter: the Canadian Recording Industry Association, now known as Music Canada. The or...

Wherein Quintin Smith and Leigh Alexander discuss adventure games, narrative, and the power of nostalgia. [Polygon]...

Hey, Houston! I'll be at Brazos Bookstore tonight at 7PM with my new novel Homeland. Tomorrow, I'll be in Austin at Bookpeople and then a benefit for EFF-Austin, and then I'm heading north to New Hamp...

Two Canadian exchange students in Japan tried a popular local treat: ice cream in a condom. Seems they let the ice cream thaw a bit too much and raucous hilarity ensues....

Matt Senate has a tattoo of the ARPAnet as it stood in 1971 -- ARPAnet being the lineal ancestor of the modern Internet. The photo here is from Cyrus Farivar. Here's some relevant Wikipedia verbiage: ...

Rick Prelinger sez, Megan and I were very fortunate that Emma Hurst chose to spend her college field work term with Prelinger Library and Archives, helping with Megan's forthcoming book and my forthco...

Yesterday, I wrote about some John Hopkins' students who overcame a game theory problem and got an A for the whole class. I called it a non-iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, but as Tim Harford points out, ...

The video profiles software developer Austin Meyer, who is the target of a patent troll lawsuit....

Wired News has a feature on butane hash oil, a highly combustible form of marijuana that is increasingly produced inside the US. Just last week, FEMA posted an odd alert in its emergency services bull...

Playstation 4, from Kotaku's liveblog'Tis the season for big news in console gaming: both Microsoft and Sony have been expected to announce new hardware. Sony is first with a new edition of the PlaySt...

A group of independent booksellers have filed a suit against Amazon and the major publishers for their use of DRM, which, the booksellers say, freezes them out of the ebook market: Alyson Decker of Bl...

Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez, "Since the reintroduction of the controversial CISPA bill, I imagine many in the Boing Boing community will be interested to follow the latest developments on t...

Redditor royal_dump makes eye-poppingly great Iron Man suits out of cardboard. He also sometimes sells ones he makes from foam. I like to make Iron Man Suits out of cardboard... (imgur.com)...

Here's a selection of images from the new book, The Art of Dead Space, by Martin Robinson. The Art of Dead Space is the ultimate gallery of the Dead Space universe, with over 300 images including sket...

Taylor Berman at Gawker reports that two of the top candidates to replace retiring Pope Benedict have predictably well-informed opinions about why Catholic priests rape so many children. Firstly, here...

A redditor called joelikesmusic reported that a friend of his had been checked into a weird, narrow dungeon-like theme room at the Hotel Zaza in Houston (it's got lots of theme suites -- I once stayed...

Boing Boing is on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Join us at the social network of your choice, or heck, all three of 'em....

The winner is “It’s your Birthday!” by Monk Turner and Fascinoma. The “Happy Birthday To You” melody was published in the late 1800s by two sisters who taught elementary ...

Mathias Lachal remade the classic Budweiser "Wassup" ad. The new video, dubbed "Wasa," is a gorgeous, psychedelic animation triumph....

Coldcut's Solid Steel radio show invited BB pal Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey to spin a set as part of the pioneering program's 25th anniversary celebrations. It's a mind-wa...

Next Tuesday, February 26, marks the start of Noise Pop 2013, the 21-year-old San Francisco festival celebrating indie music, arts, and film across more than a dozen venues in the city. Wanna go? The ...

Discovery shares the findings. "The researchers said dolphins copy the signature whistles of loved ones, such as a mother or close male buddy, when the two are apart. These 'names' were never emitted ...

Nicholas Koutros sez, Bill C-30 in Canada argued that police need new lawful access powers in order to keep up with modern criminals. This paper examines the police's own reports to demonstrate that t...

Code genius running on one of the most primitive game consoles....

Code genius running on one of the most primitive game consoles....

Matt Richardson says: My partner and I like to partake in "novelty dining" occasionally. A few weeks ago, we went to Guy's American Kitchen and Bar, Food Network star Guy Fieri's restaurant in Times S...

Happy birthday, Kurt Cobain....

NASA movie of asteroid 2012 DA14 flying away from Earth last week. I had no idea it was built in Minecraft!...

"Blank smart phone isolated on white", courtesy of Shutterstock. At Poynter, Carlie Kollath Wells reports on top newspaper publishers' ability to remain profitable thanks to paywalls--and their plans ...

Bill Geerhart says: "This is a bizarre little chapter from Eisenhower’s post-presidency that I have documented. It concerns him being asked to participate in a community fallout shelter at his e...

During the Jubilee, someone -- probably Banksy -- posted a graffiti mural on the side of a Poundland discount shop depicting a child working in a sweatshop sewing bunting with the Union flag on it. Th...

Smithsonian looked at the recent startling video of a "spider rain" west of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Thousands of spiders can be seen moving up and down their Webs hanging from telephone wires and floating ...

I watched this full-screen and loved it -- the shades of gray, the falling snow, the playful crows. Thank you to the person who captured this on video! (Via Arbroath)...

Greg Ross of Futility Closet wrote about composer Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote piano music unplayable by humans. Born in Texarkana in 1912, Conlon Nancarrow had no access to technology that could reali...

This promotional video apparently demonstrates the Google Glass experience. ...

Here's a nice surprise: a glowing review of my new novel Homeland in the WSJ....

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea used Jeremy Soule's theme tune from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in a fiery propaganda video. [Kotaku] Previously: Modern Warfare 3 clips used in NK propaga...

I've known that Leonard Richardson was a good writer for half a decade, since he was my student at Viable Paradise. I liked his novella Pink Noise, which was brimming over with cool ideas and interest...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the omnipotent superhero God-Man is at the mercy of the Paradoxer. Who can save him??!!...

Republicans rankled at Chuck Hagel, Obama's pick for Defense Secretary, and challenged him to explain the money he was once paid to speak to an organization named Friends of Hamas. But there's a probl...

Here's a brutal, must-read article from Brian Phillips detailing the bizarre, globalized game of soccer-match-rigging, which launders its influence, money and bets through countries all over the world...

Hey, New Orleans! At this very moment, I'm flying your way for an event tonight at Octavia Books at 6PM. Tomorrow, I'll be in Houston, and then to Austin for a bookstore event and a benefit for EFF-Au...

Steven Brust nails what it feels like after you send a book in to your editor: It has now been over an hour since I sent my [email/query/story submission/250 thousand word novel] and I have heard noth...

Doctorow's law: "Every meme advances until it destroys white goods."...

Here's Boing Boing pal Jasmina Tesanovic performing "Kepler Aria," with lyrics by Bruce Sterling....

This tetris of vehicles was constructed by a Polish truck driver, who conceived of it as a clever means of transporting several trucks and a car in one go. His plan was foiled by a spoilsport German c...

Wired's got a roundup of evil patents that are going to make 3D printing expensive and barren of innovation for years to come. There's even a business-model patent in there. Ick. (On the plus side, th...

My latest Publishers Weekly column, "I Can't Let You Do That, Dave," is a look at the dangers of redesigning our computers to boss us around instead of doing what they're told and trying to help us: C...

A podcast with poor acoustics is exhausting to listen to. As a podcast listener, I’ve dropped several otherwise excellent podcasts because they sound like recordings made with two tin cans and a...

We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for your viewing pleasure include: • Tickle Me Elmo frozen in carbonite. • Video romp t...

Todd Blatt and the fun-loving weirdos at the Baltimore Node hackerspace froze a Tickle-Me-Elmo in carbonite because of (awesome) reasons....

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan on the controversy over John M. Broders NYT review of the Tesla S, which upset Elon Musk and many fans of his electric vehicles: "I do not believe Mr. Br...

Aaron Swartz spent many years trying to get the FBI to cough up its file on him. Now that Aaron is dead, that file is automatically declassified, so FireDogLake's DSWright decided to request it, and h...

Federal data to be released this week through the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that drug overdose deaths rose for the 11th year in a row. Most were accidents involving prescriptio...

"Types of insanity, an illustrated guide in the physical diagnosis of mental disease" from 1883 is not just a frightening look at the inhumane treatment of people with mental health problems in the 19...

Michael Geist sez, "Hollywood crime dramas are infamous for the scene when an accused is taken to a local police station and permitted a single phone call to contact a relative or lawyer. While the st...

Open Culture has compiled seven pieces of fiction writing advice from Ernest Hemingway. They all look pretty good, but the pencil one is especially near to my heart. 6: Use a pencil. Hemingway often u...

From the Boing Boing Flickr pool, a lovely photo of one of my favorite places in greater Los Angeles by Shabdro Photo, a Boing Boing reader and photographer....

Here's a remix of the DC supervillains crossed with real-world bad guys, courtesy of Brazilian graphic designer/illustrator Butcher Billy. Legion of supervillains | Chill Hour (Thanks, Marine!)...

Today: Aaron's Laws: Law and Justice in a Digital Age Lawrence Lessig: Director, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics; Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School February 19, 2013 ...

'Shoop: XJ."An alleged illegal marijuana grower reportedly showered his South of Market neighbors with coffee shop gift cards in an apparent attempt at keeping them quiet," reports the SF Examiner. Th...

Salon: "The Irish Independent reports that grocery giant TESCO has strapped electronic armbands to their warehouse workers to measure their productivity, tracking their actions so closely that managem...

In Washington state, where medical pot has been voted legal, the House held a public hearing this week on a bill that would tax medical pot dispensaries 25% on weed sales. The measure is billed as "an...

"Hood County sheriff's Lt. Kathy Jividen says the 48-year-old woman was "very intoxicated" when she requested the special delivery on Feb. 11."...

A video romp through several years of spinning things in the name of science....

"The earliest sawfishes likely arose in the shallow Tethys Sea, that ocean surrounded by the ancient continents of Godwanda and Laurasia, during the Cretaceous period at least 60 million years ago," w...

At Dangerous Minds, a funny guest post by Tim Pope, the director who created about 40 videos for The Cure during their heydey. An internet fan just remade one of the more popular ones in LEGO. Says Po...

Beau Chevassus wanted to order most expensive coffee drink in the world: he went to Starbucks, ordered a 48-shot Frapuccino with every single revolting additive....

Jason Isley is an underwater photographer, which means that the strange and wonderful creatures you and I go ga-ga over are really just part of a workaday routine for him. This is a fact which has got...

Reuters reports that Apple has announced, in "an unprecedented admission of a widespread cyber-security breach," that its network was attacked by the same hackers who targeted Facebook. "No data appea...

Death Waltz Recording Company is the phenomenal reissue label that deals in exquisitely-curated horror/cult soundtracks in gorgeous packaging like masterworks by John Carpenter, Alan Howarth, and Giul...

Google reports that account hijacking is down 99.7% in the last two years....

The NY Times had first dibs on a preview of the 60-page study released today by computer security firm Mandiant, which "tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Ch...

Sonorous, sleepy, otherworldly and tentative, it's hard to avoid the curious feeling that I played this album years ago....

Thanks to Jurassic Park, we tend to focus on one use for the DNA of extinct creatures — resurrecting them, in full, to live here in the modern age. But it's not necessary to go that far to learn...

Back in October, Cory was kind enough to post a link to my Halloween costume [Ed: this was a wearable puppet theater/playset that was so fantastically fantastic it beggars description.]...

On Feb. 20, PBS' long-running science series NOVA airs "Mind of a Rampage Killer," an hour-long documentary on the neuroscience of teen rampage shootings: Newtown, Aurora, Columbine, and on the list g...

Gravity isn't uniform. Denser planets and objects in space — that is, things with more mass to them — experience a stronger pull of gravity. But even if you zoom in to the level of a singl...

A documentary on the legendary Farm community in SF, home to chickens, goats, and punk bands in the '80s....

Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition author) sounds like fun -- it's a detective novel that take place during the heyday of the anti-comic book hysteria of the 1950s, whic...

Science journalist Stephen Ross Pomeroy uses real research to explain how you can trick your friends and loved ones into "remembering" events that never actually happened. Key tips: Don't get too intr...

From the Boing Boing Flickr pool, a wonderful photo by Kai Teoh, a Boing Boing reader and photographer based in Minnesota who is available for editorial and special occasions booking....

Fantastic idea! Top shelf underground artists COOP, Frank Kozik, Alex Pardee, Sam Flores, and Jeremy Fish teamed up with pinball hackers Tilt Warning Customs to build a classic pinball arcade. They've...

The cookiecutter shark is one of those animals that kind of makes you believe nature just likes to mess with us. Instead of killing the things it eats, a cookiecutter shark just takes a bite — l...

Video by Pastor and Mrs. Jim Colerick, of the now-closed West Dubuque 2nd Church of Christ, and Brian Spinney....

There is definitely a seasonality to human births, writes Beth Skwarecki at Double X Science. The complicated bit is that human baby season isn't necessarily the same (or as strongly expressed) from p...

After nearly two weeks on the road, I've finally resolved the niggling technical issues I was having with the free, CC-licensed electronic edition of Homeland. Many, many thanks to Nat Torkington and ...

Gwern's "Using Silk Road" is a riveting, fantastically detailed account of the theory and practice of Silk Road, a Tor-anonymized drugs-and-other-stuff marketplace where transactions are generally con...

Johns Hopkins computer science prof Peter Frhlich grades his students' tests on a curve -- the top-scoring student gets an A, and the rest of the students are graded relative to that brainiac. But las...

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

TIME Magazine called Abbott and Costello's "Who's on first?" routine "the best comedy sketch of the twentieth century," and I find that hard to argue with. I loved listening to it as a kid, and when I...

Hey, Memphis! I'm appearing tonight at The Booksellers at Laurelwood at 6PM! Tomorrow, I'll be in New Orleans, followed by Houston on Thursday. And lots more to come!...

OK, nobody tell my kid about ~renegadecow's "Applejack's Apple Harvest" My Little Pony automata....

Garth sez, "There's only 1 in 20 000 of us, so most people have never met an 'albino' in real life. And yet, we are everywhere: The idea of 'the albino' has seized the popular imagination from the cir...

Facecord is a chest of drawers disguised as a woodpile, with hidden drawers: the vision of a stockpile of wooden logs, brings forth visions of fueling the fire and keeping warm by the hearth on cold w...

Every cyclist should have a flat kit to enable them to deal with a flat tire. Most kits include simple levers to get the tire off the rim and a set of patches for repairing holes. The Lunar Levers com...

"I Am Astronaut Chris Hadfield, currently orbiting planet Earth." The ISS commander took questions from Reddit users, in a really good AMA this weekend. Go have a read....

I say this to my daughter, whether its changing the world or having a good time, that we should do what we want to do. I drink the expensive wine now.—Dr. Susan Love, longtime breast cancer rese...

Patrick Costello sez, Brick Kiln Road in Crisfield in Maryland is one of those quiet places that you can drive by a thousand times without noticing. The short stretch of road is home to a small fishin...

The Mountain View, CA-based Hacker Dojo, a grandaddy of hacker spaces, is hosting a job fair on March 3, described as "an awesome opportunity to find the candidate or job of your dreams." This is thei...

Olly Moss's new personal tableware remixes the classic Willow Pattern with a video-game motif. I'm assuming it's a shoop, or at least not available in the stream of commerce, which is a durned shame. ...

Hurray! A new Captain Underpants novel is out. My daughter Jane (9) rips through each Captain Underpants novel the second she gets her hands on a copy. And so do I. These adventure stories are about t...

Yoko Ono by @MatthuPlacek, 18 Feb 2013, via @yokoono Artist and peace activist Yoko Ono, wife of the late John Lennon, turns 80 today. Boing Boing interviewed her two years ago, when she was honored w...

A series of leaks have led to outcry over the secrecy with which our government conducts targeted killings with drones overseas. Now, "the Obama administration is considering shifting more of the CIA'...

We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for your viewing pleasure include: • "Fly on Out," short shot on super slowmo Phantom Miro Hi...

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) is a creaking, 1986-vintage US anti-hacking law. It makes it a felony to "exceed authorized access" on a computer you don't own, and some federal prosecutors (i...

"A colorful kaleidoscope of kinesthetic imagery showing off all the grit and beauty that is Brooklyn."...

I've been work-cationing in Hawaii for the past week, meeting lots of interesting people and experiencing so many amazing places around the islands. One of the interesting people I've met here is Davi...

In the late 1950s, American scientists very publicly readied a crew of monkeys for a series of trips into Earth orbit and back. As far as the researchers knew, Project Discoverer was an actual, honest...

Philip Bump took the recently discovered 17-million-digit prime number and, six digits at a time, converted it into RGB colors. This is the result....

"A Snowflake," above, and another, below. Shot by Nick Loven and shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool. And further below, "Snowflakes on a car windscreen."...

The story of a deadly bar fight between a guy named Billy and a guy named Stagolee (or Stack Lee, or Stagger Lee) has worked its way into a broad swath of 20th-century music — from the blues of ...

Trypophobia — a fear that isn't, technically, a disorder, but is, most likely, a brilliant example of how easy it is to be influenced by the power of suggestion. This piece by NPR's Michaeleen D...

You may have heard that the private Finnish copyright enforcement agency CIAPC (the same creeps who confiscated a 9 year old girl's Winnie the Pooh laptop because she downloaded a song from an artist ...

Someone using the City of Melbourne's IP block has been introducing biased edits to the Wikipedia page for Occupy Melbourne, attempting to erase the record of council's resolve to remove Occupy, and t...

In this episode of the Gweek podcast, I interviewed Mitch O'Connell about his massive new art book, Mitch O'Connell the World's Best Artist by Mitch O'Connell. This book shows his early work (he publi...

Derek Khanna (the GOP staffer who got fired after penning an eminently sensible paper on copyright policy) sez, "The White House Petition to reverse the decision to ban unlocking cellphones is at 72,0...

CISPA is a sweeping, privacy-annihilating Internet law that we killed last year. The Congressmen who introduced it haven't learned their lesson and they've reintroduced it. The price of freedom is ete...

John Camden Hotten's The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical and Anecdotal was published in 1874, and is available in Project Gutenberg's archive. It's a nice piece of work, as this post on Ebo...

Jennifer writes with amazing news! "FISH WHISTLE is a compilation of the best of Daniel Pinkwater's short essays. Contains classic (and very funny) stories of Pinkwater's family, travels in Africa, fo...

Ian Welsh's piece on the "logic of surveillance" makes several good points, but this one really smacked me in the face: "The enforcer class...is paid in large part by practical immunity to many laws a...

The English have a coy euphemism for addiction: moreish. It summons the delightful anxiety in surrendering your control to something else, the ambivalent cocktail of desire and guilt. We feel it flick...

The English have a coy euphemism for addiction: moreish. It summons the delightful anxiety in surrendering your control to something else, the ambivalent cocktail of desire and guilt. We feel it flick...

When asked by an analyst whether new Canadian investment rules would prohibit its takeover by foreign state-owned entities, interim CEO Clayton Woitas had a ready answer: "The answer would be no. Fuck...

Before Rimbaud, before the Surrealists, there was Nerval (1808 - 1855), living his life as if it were a lucid dream. Of course, it didn't hurt that his mental skies flickered with the chain lightning ...

Enjoy ...

Hey, Oxford, MS! I'm coming to town today, and signing at Square Books at 5PM on the tour for my new book Homeland. I'll be in Memphis tomorrow, and then I go to New Orleans on Tuesday. Though I can h...

Jenise sez, When a new pizza place opened up next door to my favorite happy mutant cafe in Salem, MA, I had to wander in. The delectable smells wafting out certainly helped nudge me through the doors....

On March 4, a landlord will go on trial in Montgomery County District Court, Maryland, over charges he secretly recording three female tenants while they were nude or engaged in sexual acts with their...

Lifeguards and SeaWorld marine mammal specialists freeing a juvenile dolphin that became tangled in fishing line....

Guys, scientists who have "been on the lookout for killer objects from outer space that could devastate the planet" were once mocked by skeptics "as Chicken Littles," but less so after that scary Russ...

Stefan Geens: "Like many others, I was absolutely astounded by the meteor strike over Chelyabinsk when I woke on Friday morning. One silver lining to our self-surveilling society is that an event of t...

Lifeguards and SeaWorld marine mammal specialists freeing a juvenile dolphin that became tangled in fishing line....

mage: Lauren Goode, WSJ, via Twitter. A group of Tesla Model S owners set out Saturday to re-create John Broder's ill-fated review test-drive of the Tesla Model S. One of the participants set up Tesla...

Here's 53 minutes' worth of Soviet commercials from the 1970s and 1980s, produced by what's billed as the USSR's sole advertising agency....

Hey, Decatur! I'm coming to town today on the tour for my new novel, Homeland; I'll be at the Decatur Library at 7PM. Then, on Monday I'll be in Oxford, MS, followed by Memphis on Tuesday. There's man...

The Old Town Ale House in Chicago. Many storied. One of my favorite places too. Ebert blogs "I returned to the North Avenue drinking scene on New Year's Eve 1966, opening night of the legendary O'Rour...

I lost some things in the Phoenix airport last week, and USAir found them -- I know this because they called me late the other night to say they had. They told me to call back the next day to arrange ...

Just look at it. Banana dalek, Sylvia Toth's box of custom bitmap shortbread cookies, Chapel Hill, NC, USA...

Marco Fernandes's R3bots are absolutely sweet little light-up junkbots made from electronics salvage. They're even poseable! They run about €350 each. R3bot series (via Colossal)...

Snipped from a New York Times piece that reads like an episode of Portlandia (or, like a parody of the Times): With an increase both in density and in the atmosphere of busy professionalism, Brooklyn ...

Tim Stevens at Engadget has published a thoughtful breakdown of the Elon Musk vs. John Broder Tesla review brouhaha....

A black female nurse is suing the hospital where she worked in Flint, Michigan over over allegations of racial discrimination: she claims she found a note in a patient's file stating, "No African Amer...

A black female nurse is suing the hospital where she worked in Flint, Michigan over over allegations of racial discrimination: she claims she found a note in a patient's file stating, "No African Amer...

A short film by Mato Atom....

@kanwarsation sez, "Using a muzzling Court Order under India's badly written IT Act against the Department of Telecom, the IIPM has blocked articles critical of them, including satire on humour sites,...

"little cat enjoying music," shot by Viktoria Vitkovska of Kiev, Ukraine, and shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool....

Aaron Muszalski tells Boing Boing, Inspired by Skepchicks genderbent Star Wars costumes at last year's DragonCon, hobbyist armorsmith Ryan spent the winter creating a version of the iconic Slave Leia ...

Aaron Muszalski tells Boing Boing, Coda Shetterly (@KindredCoda) made a frame-for-frame 1080p re-creation of Marv Newlands infamous animated short, Bambi Meets Godzilla. Originally created in 1969, Ba...

Remember when the HMS Bounty sank during Hurricane Sandy? the hearings to determine why and how have begun. Mario Vittone analyzes the hearings at Gcaptain. (HT: @SFriedScientist)...

Canadian astronaut and ISS commander Chris Hadfield speaks with fellow Canadian and space-lover William Shatner....

The full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico....

Living on Mars time is making Katie Worth fat. The journalist is attempting to live, on Earth, as if she's operating in a Martian time zone and blogging about the experience for Scientific American. O...

We clicked to grab tickets the second the gates opened, and got this screen after a few minutes of waiting for the server to respond. The same result occurs immediately now upon further attempts to en...

Kevin Loughin came out to my Homeland tour-stop in Cincinnati on Valentine's Day and made a great video of the presentation and Q&A....

Reuters' Balazs Koranyi: Norwegian public television plans to broadcast a burning fireplace for 12 straight hours from Friday evening, with firewood specialists providing color commentary, expert advi...

Derived from Adam Lashinsky's Inside Apple, rumors spread of "fake" engineering projects within Apple, crafted to expose leakers. Not quite, reports Jacqui Cheng: "Our own sources acknowledged that Ap...

Bunny rabbits at Denver Airport have caused thousands of dollars' worth of damage to cars, having become fond of eating exposed wiring. The USDA is unable to remove them fast enough. [CBS Denver]...

"There is a new kind of bad thing in the world: persecution on the Internet by a clever, mentally unbalanced person. If you havent experienced it yet, you may have trouble believing how upsetting and ...

Back in June, blogged about Ben, a young man with autism who had a fierce devotion to the Snow White ride at Walt Disney World, and who was the last person to ride it, after more than 3,500 turns on i...

Russia? Boston? ...

Hey, Chapel Hill! I'm headed your way today on the Homeland tour! I'll be at Flyleaf Books at 2PM. Tomorrow, I'll be in Decatur, and Monday it's a 5PM event at Square Books in Oxford, MS. I'm only hal...

You may have heard that a group of batshit insane entertainment shills have asked the W3C (the standards body responsible for Web standards) to put "DRM" -- magic beans anti-copying stuff -- into HTML...

Adam Miller backflips off his skateboard down six stairs and lands on another skateboard. And after the jump, you can watch him, er, not land it. Many times....

This here is a Namaqua Rain Frog (Breviceps namaquensis) in Port Nolloth on the northwestern coast of South Africa. (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)...

href="https://www.openculture.com/2013/02/tom_waits_shows_us_how_not_to_get_a_date_on_valentines_day.html">Open Culture shares this deleted scene from Mystery Men....

Zack Kopplin, the 19-year-old anti-Creationism/pro-science activist I wrote about last month, has won the TroubleMaker Award, which comes with a $10,000 prize. ...

Matt sends us this, "Article from leading Sherlock Holmes blog about a recent civil action filed by a prominent Sherlockian (Leslie Klinger, editor of 'The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes') who also hap...

We should have had 14 years together. Today Calliope passed away of kidney and liver failure. She was 11 months old. I spent about a year alone. I knew I needed a dog but I was afraid of the commitmen...

When I was eight, this is exactly what I believed all devices would someday resemble. The future is pink and dial-up....

HadOneJob.com is a collection of images showing massive, inexplicable cockups that appear to be the result of terrible negligence and/or deliberate sabotage. I laughed and laughed, and then I cried. T...

Jacob Appelbaum's keynote from 29C3 -- last December's Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin -- is a riveting hour on surveillance, freedom, and the wild, criminal lawlessness of the NSA....

Watching a dime roll for an hour on a treadmill is strangely satisfying....

Marie Belcastro's long, lavishly illustrated article on the mathematics of knitting and mathematical knitting is a totally fascinating read: chewy, mathy, and inspiring. Makes me want to go and get so...

USA USA USA...

This insectile "Green Art Gas Mask" is quite a departure for Ukrainian leatherworkers Bob Basset. I like it. A lot. Green Art Gas Mask...

A forthcoming report in the journal Science finds that wild European perch exposed to the popular anxiety medication Oxazepam tend to be antisocial, wander away from the safety of their group, and dev...

Master pop surrealist Mark Ryden painted the deluxe-edition cover for the new album by Odd Future's Tyler, the Creator. The record, titled "Wolf," will be released on April 2. That week, Porterhouse F...

"It first appeared in the southeast, and presented the appearance of an ordinary rocket, but as it moved onward it grew in size until at the moment of its disappearance its apparent diameter was equal...

Over at Slate, @badastronomer Phil Plait examines what we do and do not know about the meteor incident in Russia today....

NASA TV at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA is following the Asteroid flyby, and you can watch their live coverage here. The asteroid is about 515,000 miles away from earth right now, and...

Inside the Smithsonian's Antarctic meteorite storage facility, all Antarctic meteorites in the national collection are kept under close security and tight airlocks....

All of the Criterion Collection films on Hulu are free for viewing until February 18. (US only, unfortunately.) Time to stock up on Jiffy Pop, Gitanes, and Blue Bottle. "Watch the Criterion Collection...

Don sends us, "the Gutenberg Project's copy of Robert Sheckley's 1953 story Watchbird from Galaxy Magazine about one nightmare scenario arising from the use of armed drones to solve all our problems. ...

Video of today's meteor explosion over Russia's central Ural Mountains that injured hundreds. ...

Pam Grossman of Phantasmaphile talks about the intersection of art and the occult....

MAKE has a great interview with one of my favorite makers: Steve Hoefer. Steve Hoefer is a San Francisco-based inventor and creative problem solver with nearly 20 years of experience. He’s contr...

Duke University researchers implanted lab rats with a device enabling them to perceive invisible infrared light....

Our friend Molly Crabapple and others are featured in this excellent PBS short documentary about illustrators. Illustrators articulate what a photograph cannot. Using an array of techniques and styles...

Wired visited the garage of my friend I-Wei Huang, which is loaded with his delightful little creations, including a Strandbeest-style hamster ball walker. (For his day job, I-Wei designs the characte...

Goli Mohammadi of MAKE says: A few years ago, we were happy to learn that Barbie’s 125th career (since her inception in 1959) was computer engineer. Not surprisingly, that career was decided ent...

All round e-publishing genius Pablo Defendini sez, Fireside Magazine is a multigenre fiction magazine. Our goal is twofold: to publish great storytelling and offer fair pay for writers and artists. We...

The world's largest collection of microcars from the Microcar Museum in Madison, Georgia is on the auction block today and tomorrow. Put together by a single collector Bruce Weiner, a former executive...

A Long Time Ago, Gib Van Ert's memoir about growing up with Star Wars became news last Christmas, when it disappeared from Amazon following a bogus trademark question. It's been back for months now, a...

Hey, Miami! I'm about to head to the airport for my appearance tonight at Books & Books. Tomorrow I'll be in Chapel Hill at Flyleaf Books, and on Sunday I'll be in Decatur at the Decatur Library ...

The nice folks at the Tank Riot podcast did a great job with their new punk episode, reviewing the early history of punk and some of its later mutations (MP3, subscribe)...

A meteor has exploded over Chelyabinsk, a remote part of Russia 150km north of Kazahstan. The meteor's descent was captured by many video cameras (largely the ubiquitous Russian dashboard cams, it see...

Mat Ricardo sez, Last year I started a monthly variety show in a small East London venue. It was a little personal project that let me show my vision of what a variety show could be. Well, happily, it...

Here's a must-read story from Tech Review about the thriving trade in "zero-day exploits" -- critical software bugs that are sold off to military contractors to be integrated into offensive malware, r...

Does tomorrow's cover of UK tabloid The Sun not possess a certain je ne sais quoi? The subtle alliteration, dancing down the page in distinctive formal juxtaposition against the stark prosody of the h...

I'm going to be cooking a dinner featuring locally-produced honey at canelrestaurant in LA next Tuesday, February 19. The restaurant has a program called "Friends Cook", where they invite neighborhood...

Ryan sez, "Here's a new essay entitled 'Code, Nudge, or Notice?' The essay compares side-by-side three ways that the government tries to influence citizen behavior short of making it illegal. It uses ...

Earlier today, Tesla's Elon Musk released logs suggesting that NYT reviewer John Broder deliberately abused the review car's batteries to contrive a poor performance. Broder has just published his res...

€60 is a lot to spend on your kid's duvet cover, but there's no denying that this astronaut bedding from Snurk is pretty wonderful. Astronaut (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

I can't vouch for the sound quality of the Ion IT34 Duo Deck USB turntable/cassette deck but I sure dig the design. It runs on two AA batteries, fits in a backpack, and plays 78s -- perfect for a real...

You may have heard Jill Lesser, Executive Director of the Center for Copyright Information, explain that America's six-strikes copyright punishment system would not hard open WiFi. Adi Kamdar explains...

After my event at Austin's Book People on Feb 27, I'll be doing a benefit for EFF-Austin on their location privacy campaign. We did this the last time I came through town and it was tremendous -- come...

Excerpted from The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well, by Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield. (Camille and Josh interviewed me for the book, too.) It was the Si...

A documentary on the neuroscience behind teen rampage shooting violence, like the recent tragedy in Newtown....

Sandra sez, "OpenITP's first round of 2013 project funding is now open for proposals! Project grants are meant to support specific technical efforts to improve users' ability to circumvent censorship ...

A round up of items that helped shape the underground culture of the late fifties. With Paul Krassner, Robert Anton Wilson, Yoko Ono, God's Penis, and Gustav Metzger....

Colossal has a gallery of Alan Friedman's stunning sun photography. (Here's Friedman's TEDx Talk from December). [Alan Friedman] points a telescope skyward from his backyard in downtown Buffalo, direc...

This hand-cranked tool was inspired by Raymond Loewy's 1933 pencil sharpener. (Via the World's Best Ever)...

The Benson family's maple "meth lab." Photo: WFVS-TV. A Missouri couple who enjoy making their own maple syrup were reported to the cops as likely meth cooks. "I think my neighbors on their way to chu...

Back in 2005, High Admiral Enchurito posted this great shoop to the Rebelscum forum depicting a Millennium Falcon toilet lit and a lightsaber plunger-handle. The fact that 7 years have gone by without...

This week I visited BB pal Kirsten Anderson's wonderful Roq La Rue Gallery in Seattle where Casey Curran has hung a number of his exquisite kinetic sculptures. Each sculpture is a baroque ecosystem of...

By studying the way it has mutated and changed over time, scientists can trace human mitochondrial DNA — the DNA that is passed from mother to daughter — back to a single woman. Basically,...

Shutterstock...

Consider the following corollary to Rule 34 — No matter how unattractive you think a certain feature (or lack thereof) might be, there will always be somebody who is totally into it. Case it poi...

House of Mirth asked several vernacular photo collectors to share their favorite vintage snapshots of weather events. The wave shot comes from Erin Waters' collection and the tornado photo belongs to ...

What would happen if scientists suddenly stumbled upon a message from outer space? There's not actually a formal plan. No international body has ever decided whether we reply or not, and, if so, how w...

Notice those areas on this house that are circled. Follow the jump for a fun surprise below. Much more in this vein at the site of the artist, Felice Varini. (via Accidental Mysteries)...

Liz Fosslien offers 14 graphs explaining love from the perspective of a twitterpated economist....

This has to be some kind of brilliant hoax: a Twitter 'attribution troll' is showering threats on anyone who tweets a popular one-line poem. On Press Inc., supposedly a division of Knopf Publishing (a...

Today's must-read long-read is Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, with "How HSBC hooked up with drug traffickers and terrorists. And got away with it." A profile of the gangster bankers our government forg...

Hello, Valentine! We've hand-picked lovely videos for you to enjoy, and they're here on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for viewing pleasure include: • A very sad love song by Amand...

Tony Swatton of Sword & Stone is the blacksmith behind Jaime Lannister's sword for "Games of Thrones."...

A supercut of YouTube videos capturing goats that "talk" like humans....

What do you have up your sleeve for your love tomorrow??? #getexcited #ValentinesDay— Reeva Steenkamp (@reevasteenkamp) February 13, 2013 Reeva Steenkamp, South African celebrity and model, twee...

"The Los Angeles Times has scrubbed its Web site of malicious code that served browser exploits and malware to potentially hundreds of thousands of readers over the past six weeks," reports Brian Kreb...

Those with a moderate knowledge of this site (or, for that matter, who have spent any mount of time on its Wikipedia page) can tell you that Boing Boing (nee bOING bOING) came into this world as a zin...

As mentioned Charlie Brooker's science fiction TV show Black Mirror is back for another season. This is the second coming of the Twilight Zone: scary, trenchant, clever and sparing in its use of speci...

"The Bed Song," from Amanda Palmer & The Grand Theft Orchestra's new album, 'Theatre Is Evil.'...

From Filmdrunk, a mashup of the most disturbing kisses from film history...

Archive.org has three different prints of George Romero's fantastic zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead. 1. Raw untouched video master - how the film has been seen on late night TV and PD video's a...

Special thanks to our sponsor Amorphia Apparel, makers of the wonderfully irreverent line of History League t-shirts. We've posted many times about Amorphia's witty t-shirt lines like "Teach the Contr...

'The Proposal. I'll love you while Life Lasts' - Photograph of two skeletons, one sitting and one kneeling, 1896. From the collections of The National Archives on Flickr....

Autodesk's 123D Creature is an iPad app that lets you design a monster and then order a 3D print for home delivery. The app costs $2 and I just bought it. Looking forward to trying it out with Jane to...

400 years is an adorable and clever browser-game where you play a kind of ambulatory stone pellet on a quest, wherein you overcome obstacles by holding down the spacebar to make the seasons fly past a...

A two-hour special documentary with space-based visions of our planet....

Cypherpunks -- a quick, stirring, scary read -- transcribes a wide-ranging conversation between Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum (Wikileaks/Tor Project), Any Muller-Magnum (Chaos C...

"i think this is sad: in a weird new twists of fate, the old guard of celebrity artists like her are now being attacked for using a platform that should be reserved for starving musicians only?"—...

Shared by John Cook in the Boing Boing G+ Community. Facebook for Dummies might actually be useful, because Facebook confuses me....

Roger Cheng reports that BlackBerry co-founder and former co-CEO Jim Balsillie, one of the company's largest individual shareholders, has dumped his entire stake. [CNET]...

The reviews on the Amazon page for a toy Predator drone are pretty trenchant: You've had a busy play day - You've wiretapped Mom's cell phone and e-mail without a warrant, you've indefinitely detained...

Ina Fassbender photographed this papier-mache figure of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, suckling 'Greek', 'Spanish', 'Portuguese' and 'Italian' piglets at Cologne's Rose Monday carnival procession. P...

Last week, Tesla's electric sedan reportedly died during a reviewer's road trip in cold weather; the firm's CEO, Elon Musk, said the review was "fake" and promised a data-driven takedown. Today, Musk ...

Jim Finkle: Poor password security allowed hackers to broadcast a bogus warning on TV networks that the United States was under attack by zombies, broadcasters said, and one expert in the technology s...

This morning, while hurrying down the concourse at La Guardia Airport, I tried to dictate a text message to my Nexus 4 while wheeling my suitcase behind me. It got the dictation fine, but appended "kd...

As I write this, I'm on my way to the airport, headed for Cincinnati, where I'll be doing an appearance tonight at Joseph-Beth Booksellers on the tour for Homeland, which hit the New York Times bestse...

It's bloggers vs. newspapers time again! And on this occasion, we have the special soupons of sportswriter subject-coddling, editorial derangement, and Gawker's well-tuned nose for drama. On February ...

Hidden in the tooltip for today's XKCD, a piece of important existential philosophy: A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout...

"Striking it Richer," a paper by Emmanuel Saez (an economist at UC Berkeley) looks at the way that the dividends of the slow US "economic recovery" have been distributed. Saez finds that 121% of the e...

The boards of AMR Corp and US Airways Group Inc separately met today and approved a merger that would value the combined company at around $11 billion, making it the largest airline in the world. [Reu...

I don't know what's going on here, but I wholeheartedly approve. (Via Filled With Chocolate Pudding!)...

Reader Jon Siegel in Singapore shares this wonderful photo in the Boing Boing Flickr pool. "As far as I know, this one's the leader of a pack of these critters which hang out around my office," he say...

At the Washington Post, Erik Wemple reports that the Knight Foundation defended its decision to pay journalistic fraud Jonah Lehrer $20,000 to deliver a speech. Alberto Ibargen, the foundations presid...

Last September, Doctor Kristen Stubbs -- a roboticist who makes sex-gadgets for her Toymaker Project -- released a video (NSFW) demonstrating her prototype pelvic-floor strength-tester, called "The Ha...

From 1926, an "ideal" female body. 1926: The 1920s Silhouette...

Elven Aesthetics makes stunning David Bowie dolls, but they are, alas, not for sale. Tara McGinley spotted that some are modeled on iconic Mick Rock portraits. [Deviant Art & Dangerous Minds]...

Indiebound list, too! Life is good where I am....

PopSci: "In order to create a workable model of a human mental disorder like depression, anxiety or schizophrenia, rats are often genetically manipulated or have their nerve system surgically altered....

Photoshop Disasters says: "Introducing Iran’s fancy new Qaher-313 radar-evading jet, seen here lazily superimposed over a generic photograph of Mount Damavand." Iran: not-so-stealthy...

While wandering the NYC offices of my publisher Tor, I happened upon these beautiful 2010 omnibus reissues of Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books. These are some of my favorite books of all time, an...

Vaughan Bell is one of the best neuroscience writers out there. In a piece at The Guardian, he explains what, exactly, the chemical dopamine is doing in our brains and why we do it a major disservice ...

In a fossil of 400-million-year-old plants, the world's oldest sample of ejaculate....

Slender lorises are adorable, squirrel-faced primates with huge, sad-looking eyes. Sadly, their cuteness is working against them as poachers have started capturing them for an illegal pet trade and wi...

Researchers map the history of curry by analyzing chemical traces in ancient Indian pottery....

In case you have ever wondered what lobsters sound like, here is a recording of Justitia longimanus, the West Indian furrow lobster. I literally jumped a bit when the lobster's voice came on. (Thanks ...

A woman is surprised to find an owl trapped in her SUV's grille as she runs errands....

It doesn't matter if you're vegan or like "wed vewvet" cupcakes, Petey Rojas is a very entertaining child....

Balance bikes teach balance before pedaling. Learning to pedal is easy if you know how to balance. Learning balance is fairly easy, too. But learning them concurrently is hard. With a balance bike ins...

The old cups-and-balls "shell game" trick so effectively exploits the human brain's ability to be deceived that, even when the cups are see-through, you can still get played....

A bill introduced in the Missouri legislature by Rick Brattin is a genuinely bizarre attempt to cram religion into the state's science curriculum. In what must have seen to Mr Brattin as a very clever...

Spencer Ackerman, from the Wired News defense technology blog Danger Room, writes a brilliant military analysis of the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. From a military persp...

Attorneys for five Guantanamo Bay detainees charged in the 9/11 attacks are demanding to know if U.S. government officials have been listening in on their private conversations with the defendants. Th...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH "News of the Times" uncovers President Obama's classified legal technology development program for drones....

Officers engaging in a gun battle with a person they believed to be Christopher Dorner in a San Bernadino cabin lobbed incendiary tear gas into the structure where the ex-cop was holed up. The cabin b...

Warning: Story includes photos of a male shark's genitalia....

Zach Galafianakis' Oscars coverage is pretty much all I want to watch. ...

Shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool, and available on Woot as a kids' pullover hoodie for $20-25....

"Fat Tuesday," shot and shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Fred Facker. "He was absolutely not excited about Mardi Gras at all ... whatsoever."...

"I understand people are upset if what they thought was beef turned out to be old Romanian ponies, but when horses are reared properly it's a delicious meat." Gerard Marin, 67, of Paris, during "his w...

A review analysis of 13 studies — encompassing more than 13,000 individuals — found that there were more differences in personality, behavior, and preferences from one woman to another wom...

A post on Dr. Roni Zeiger's blog (it's a few months old, but new food for thought for me) explores models for shared intelligence in health care. "Weve heard a lot about crowdsourcing, or outsourcing ...

Poland Spring should hire Senator Marco Rubio as their spokesperson. Here's the TV commercial....

Fred and Carrie tackle movie theatre snack concessions, introducing salted ice cream and arugula salads where stale, oily popcorn once ruled—all with the same slow service you've come to know an...

A collection of five unusual and pleasant Beatles covers...

Innovatio, a patent troll which shakes down hotels and coffee shops that operate Wi-Fi networks—and which regards the right to sue individual homeowners likewise as a 'strategic' decision—...

We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for viewing pleasure include: • A romantic animated short in which walrus looks not for bukki...

Over at Dangerous Minds Melissa Stewart wrote about the 1968 "blue eyes/brown eyes" classroom experiment. The class of third graders are told that blue-eyed people are smarter and better than brown-ey...

In Spain, a popular petition to protect bullfighting as part of the country's cultural heritage was easily backed in parliament, where the government has a conservative majority. Recent regional bans ...

Rob Walker says: "A proposal for a new punctuation mark that would be somewhere between the deadpan period and the excitable exclamation point. I think the digital-text era would benefit." I can recal...

In this delightful romantic animated short, the walrus is not looking for his bukkit, but for true love....

Rainbow Chan hails from Sydney, Australia. I love her cover of The Cardigans' "Lovefool...

"Rhythm and Hues has filed for Chapter 11 and most of us have been laid off," a Boing Boing reader wrote in an email Monday. "The visual effects industry woke up Monday morning to news it had been dre...

Bloomberg reports that a team of "about 100 product designers are working on a wristwatch-like device that may perform some of the tasks now handled by the iPhone and iPad."...

"Vinegar valentines" are insult greeting cards popular in the 19th and early 20th century. Over at Collectors Weekly, Lisa Hix shares a fine selection of these snarky missives. "Happy Valentines Day, ...

"A sea slug that is able to detach, re-grow and then re-use its penis has surprised scientists." [BBC]...

For photographer Khanh Hmong's powerful series Vietnam Looking Into the Past," he held historical photos of the past over the same locations in the present. "Vietnam - Looking Into the Past" (Flickr,...

Just hours after Pope Benedict XVI quit, a lightning bolt struck St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican. Yeah, yeah, lightning probably strikes the church on days when the pope hasn't resigned too. But i...

Creative agency LOLA Madrid designed and built a prototype bicycle constructed entirely out of scrap auto parts, from a transmission belt used as the "chain" to a seat post clamp from a door handle....

Creative agency LOLA Madrid designed and built a prototype bicycle constructed entirely out of scrap auto parts, from a transmission belt used as the "chain" to a seat post clamp from a door handle....

Les Rockets cover The Spotnik's "Last Space Train."...

Retronaut has collected a huge gallery of posters from both sides of the Spanish Civil War that come from the Biblioteca Nacional de Espaa site. 1936-1939: Posters from the Spanish Civil War...

Hey folks! Just a reminder that I'll be in romantic Cincinnati tomorrow night at 7PM at Joseph-Beth for the next stop of my Homeland tour. From there, it's Miami and Chapel Hill (and tons more)....

Sara from the British Humanist Association sez, The British Humanist Association is selling the original Atheist Bus Campaign signs. The controversial campaign was launched in October 2008 and by Janu...

"The baby on the right was masking for the first time and could barely stand on her own."—Clayton Cubitt New Orleans native Clayton Cubitt, a photographer now based in Brooklyn, is back in his s...

For Valentine's Day, CDZA takes a trip to a Senior Living center to share the stories of four couples and perform the songs they were married to....

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, Assemblyman Brian Nestande of California has introduced Assembly Bill 292, which would open source the California Code of Regulations (including the Building Codes...

Christopher Dorner, the former LAPD officer suspected of murdering three of his ex-colleagues, has finally been cornered—first, by officers who tried to pull him over, then at a cabin in the Cal...

Please enjoy this excruciating speech from fabricator and plagiarist Jonah Lehrer, a shit sandwich lovingly-prepared for journalism by the Knight Foundation. If the former Wired and New Yorker writer'...

Here's an excerpt from Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan's new book, The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office. In The Org, Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan explain the tradeoffs that every organization faces,...

Etsy seller Niquegeek made these 3D printed stainless steel dice that resemble the beloved weighted companion cubes from the game Portal. They're hollow, and retail for $29. This unique die (singular ...

Scott Sigler's got a new YouTube show called Monstrosity, and he interviewed me (and several others!) for it. ...

I interviewed my friends Liz Kruger and Craig Shapiro, the creators and executive producers of the USA Network television series Necessary Roughness. It's a drama about a psychologist who works with p...

Ben Bates imagines the first page of Orson Scott Card's upcoming Superman comic. (Thanks, Neowolf!) Previously: DC Comics hires anti-gay author Orson Scott Card to write Superman...

NPR: "DC Comics has tapped Orson Scott Card, the Ender's Game author who has said homosexuality is "deviant behavior," to write for its new, digital-first Superman. That has sparked outrage among fans...

Karswell is co-editor of the Chilling Archives of Horror Comic Books series (including Zombies, excerpted on Boing Boing). He also runs the fabulous blog, and everything else too. He recently scanned ...

As I watched competitive eater Takeru Kobeyashi consume a 12" Domino's pizza in one minute, I realized that I could probably do this....

(Via Mental Floss)...

It's the stuff of dystopian fiction: welfare claimaints sent to work for no pay at profitable private companies, with costs born by the taxpayer. British courts are taking aim at the policy, the BBC r...

We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for viewing pleasure include: • Miguel Alonso built a QWERTY Rubik's Cube. Looks like fun. &#...

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

Matt Ruff's alternate history novel The Mirage was one of my favorite novels of 2012, and it's out in paperback today. Here's my review from last February: This is Matt Ruff with the awesome turned up...

April Winchell is shutting down Regretsy, the site where she has tirelessly cataloged the most horrible things on Etsy, from "an oil painting of a couple copulating inside a burger bun, called Sex Bur...

Cabel's got a great name for those odd gaps in buildings and street-furniture where people shove their garbage. He calls them "Litterplugs," and boy does he have a lot of great photos of them. We get ...

I never suspected how wondrous the results would be if I shone a projector into a blizzard, as Redditor bmaffitt did three days ago....

Canada's terrible proposed spying law, Bill C-30, is dead. The Harper Tories, who nailed the colours to the mast on the passage of the law, which would have given nearly unlimited access to private el...

Photo from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on December 12, 2012 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un giving final orders for the launch of the Unha-3 rocket, carrying the sat...

Photo from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on December 12, 2012 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un giving final orders for the launch of the Unha-3 rocket, carrying the sat...

Richard Weisman has updated his marvellous video of unloseble sucker bets with ten more bar-bets you can't lose....

"Amid talk of a possible nuclear bomb test, North Korea vowed Tuesday to carry out a 'high-intensity, all-out action," CNN reported earlier today. They just made good on that threat. Voice of America ...

Los Angeles based singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe performs "Flatlands," from her acoustic album "Unknown Rooms"...

Two dudes, 22 and 24 years old, built a sexting app through which more than 60 million "snaps" (photo-messages) are now sent daily. The messages are ephemeral, and vanish irretrievably shortly after t...

Maryn McKenna writes in Wired News about two important documents recently and quietly released by the FDA about antibiotic use in livestock raising, and what the results of that antibiotic use are. "T...

The New York Times reports that several journalists who cover Myanmar (Burma) have received warnings from Google that their Gmail accounts may have been hacked by state-sponsored attackers....

In a Mediaite column, Dr. George Lombardi blames what he believes to be misleading science journalism in the New York Times for the death of one of his patients. The patient declined a PSA test, and i...

Phil Lapsley is on tour starting today to promote his new book, "Exploding the Phone," which features a foreword by Steve Wozniak. The book "traces the birth of long-distance communication and the tel...

Amit Gupta of Photojojo says, "We just launched something that we built during our final week of Workcation in Thailand. (Every year I take the Photojojo crew on a trip somewhere fun for 2-3 weeks.) I...

Los Angeles based singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe performs "Flatlands," from her acoustic album "Unknown Rooms"...

On Coinheist.com, a crossword puzzle you solve by interpreting regular expressions. PDF download...

Rick Ibsen unloads the Model S from a flatbed truck at the Supercharger station in Milford, Conn. (John Broder/The New York Times.) John Broder of the New York Times test-drove a Tesla Model S on an i...

Last summer I tried some carrot soup that tasted like buttered toffee. It had been made in a pressure cooker, which heats water vapor above boiling temperature, greatly reducing normal cooking times. ...

Fast Company excerpted a chapter from a new book, The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well, by Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield. The chapter is an interview wit...

Boing Boing has a new podcast! It's called Tell Me Something I Don't Know, and it's an interview podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas,...

Here's a nice reminder that an expert is only "an expert" in their specific, narrow field, and (more importantly) everybody in an expert in something. A Baltimore hair stylist has helped archaeologist...

Miguel Alonso built a QWERTY Rubik's Cube, which looks like a lot of fun....

It appears that there lies a large wetland ecosystem under Antarcticas ice sheet, with an active microbiology. — There's some really exciting news coming from the land at the bottom of the world...

There are 17 million digits in the largest prime number we know of, so far. Its discovery is part of an ongoing distributed computing project aimed at exposing the existence of ever larger prime numbe...

Baratunde Thurston is generally known as a humorist, not a net.activist, but here he gives a concise and remarkably non-technical explanation of what net neutrality is and what it means for the averag...

Barking might just be a reflex for agitated dogs. It might be a side-effect of domestication — i.e., when you select for less-aggressive animals you get ones that tend to bark. Or, it really mig...

When we talk about the resurgence of childhood illnesses, we tend to focus on vaccine-resistant people as the primary cause. And it's true that a large population of un-vaccinated kids can give a dise...

San Francisco will get a new Bay Bridge this summer. The New York Daily News has an interesting story about that bridge's creation — and the earthquake-proof engineering behind it....

A friend of Boing Boing introduced me to the work of artist Kii Arens this weekend. We visited his studio for a karaoke party. It was great. I love his work. You can buy it in reasonably affordable po...

Ben Marks on the Retro-Futuristic World of Laurent Durieux. This year, 2013, has gotten off to an equally rousing start, beginning with the January release of a poster for Steven Spielbergs 1975 thril...

ASU's Center for Science and the Imagination has already posted the video from this morning's panel on hacktivism and politics. It was a good, meaty discussion: Part 1, Part 2...

Martin Douglas's "The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show" is a fascinating longread about race, culture and class, partly a memoir of Douglas's life as a young black kid in a North Carolina housing...

"You know, after watching the mullatos shake it, I can absolutely understand why Brazil is totally devoted to my favorite body part, the ass."--Arnold Schwarzenegger...

When I first heard the Bad Brains, I did the exact same thing this little kid is doing in the video....

From a 1926 volume of Glamordaze, 10 sarcastic pieces of flapper slang: The Top 10 most sarcastic Flapper slang words. 1- Umbrella- young man any girl can borrow for the evening. 2- Rock of Ages- any ...

In the arsenal of eternal skeptics there are few tools more dramatically and more commonly used than Ockhams razor. It is triumphantly applied to resolve arguments about ghosts (more parsimoniously se...

From A Century of PUNCH Cartoons. (Via Kip W)...

A filmmaker named Melton Barker travelled America from the 1930s to the 1970s, making and remaking a short movie called "The Kidnapper's Foil," which featured a large cast of kids. He'd roll into smal...

Sound it Out # 42: Helado Negro - Dance Ghost(MP3) Helado Negro is the musician alter ego of the visual/experimental artist Roberto Carlos Lange.Hes the son of Ecuadorian immigrants who grew up in Sou...

London mayor Boris Johnson wonders why the British don't like horse meat, which the French eat loads of. Amazing! Here are two nations, with roughly the same level of civilisation, with a densely inte...

Ed Piskor is one of the most fascinating young cartoonists in America. Marc Sobel talked to him about his influences, his art, and his forthcoming book, The Hip Hop Family Tree....

Enjoy the latest page of Elfquest. First time reader? Catch up at the comic's official homepage....

Last month, I blogged a fascinating profile of Apollo Robbins, a stage pickpocket with an almost supernatural facility for manipulating attention and vision to allow him to literally relieve you of yo...

Yesterday's event at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, AZ was amazing, and I'm sticking around in Phoenix for one more day: this morning, I'll be presenting at ASU's Center for Science and the Imagin...

The BBC reports that Benedict XVI is unexpectedly resigning as pope. I guess you could call it an ex cathedra announcement. /caruso...

Raytheon's "RIOT" (Rapid Information Overlay Technology) is intended to help governments all over the world by providing a "Google for spies" that mines multiple online sources to build up detailed pi...

Purdue's prof Mark French and grad students Craig Zehrung and Jim Stratton built a supersonic ping-pong-ball gun that attains supersonic muzzle velocity....

Last week I sat down for an interview with Rick Kleffel at KQED in San Francisco. He's put the whole interview -- a long one! -- up in his Trashotron podcast feed. We talked about Homeland and other t...

From Taylor-Ruth's Tumblr, a page from her fifth grade diary. She was unquestionably the most punk fifth grader she knew, and possibly the most punk fifth grader in history. If you're trying to place ...

As you've no doubt gleaned, I'm on tour with my new novel, Homeland. A lot of people commiserate with me about the grueling pace -- and it is! a new city practically every day and nowhere near enough ...

From RonPaul.com: Earlier today, Ron Paul filed an international UDRP complaint against RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org with WIPO, a global governing body that is an agency of the United Nations. The comp...

I pointed my camera out my dining room window for 30 hours of Nemo in Boston, from the start of precipitation on Friday to the end of Saturday's cleanup....

Amanda Palmer's live performance of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah....

Los Angeles police looking for ex-cop and multiple homicide suspect Christopher Jordan Dorner have opened fire in a second mistaken identity incident, this time shooting at an innocent guy who was jus...

The New York Times found a bunch of good snowpocalypse photos on instagram, so you don't have to trudge through the snow to find them....

Trevor Timm at the The Freedom of the Press Foundation blog writes: "This week, Congress finally started a substantive debate on the role of drones in US foreign policy, and more importantly, the Obam...

Noted crazyperson Charlie Sheen was noted in the online manifesto of noted crazyperson Christopher Dorner. Charlie Sheen, you're effin awesome, Dorner wrote. The former police officer who threatened t...

Josh Fitzpatrick, meteorologist with WSAZ TV, posts this photo (don't know who took it), with this factoid: "The deepest snow with the #blizzard of 2013 was 40" inches at Trumbull, CT! 7' foot drifts....

I'm heading to Tempe, AZ today for a 2PM appearance at Changing Hands Bookstore on my tour for Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother. Next I'll be in NYC for the Tools of Change publishing conference...

Matthew Borgatti has built a air-powered, 3D-printed robot tentacle that waves in a friendly fashion and lends a helping hand....

The DHS office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties -- a watchdog that's supposed to keep the DHS in check -- has concluded that it's fine for the DHS to stop anyone within 100 miles of the US border, ...

Scott Edelman sez, "I was surprised to spot Isaac Asimov's head bouncing around this morning in an ad for Pimsleur Approach. I don't recall him ever writing anything on that subject, or hearing him po...

News networks are scrambling to "curate" the best blizzard photos and Nemo videos and blurry vines from "citizen journalists," but here's the only crowdsourced analysis of #zomgsupersnowstormpocalypse...

Fantastic graffiti by 0331C, made in part using a fire extinguisher. (via @death_waltz_records)...

Young mister William Hallman steals the show when doing weather with Valley News Live chief meteorologist Hutch Johnson. ...

Gary Busey says: "Ramping up a show about me doing short 1-5 minute Q&A's, Buseyism, and randomness. Wanted to share some things we have for you." Also: Inner Tubes (How to molest an Inner Tube),...

The awesome people at Instructables have launched a series of HOWTOs based on my novel Homeland, written from the point of view of Marcus, the novel's hero. They previously posted 11 of these for Litt...

Aaron Wolf's released a jim-dandy Barbershop Quartet arrangement of Nina Paley's song "Copying is Not Theft." The song is licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 (as is my entire website...

The latest from steampunk/fetish maskmaker Bob Basset is the "Insect Inspector": "Leather, Brass, Glass, soviet gas mask parts." Insect Inspector. Steampunk art Leather Gas mask....

"To Serve Crab"...

The awesomesauce merchants at EpikIP.net have engineered an appropriately epic set of internal routes, such that a traceroute to 206.214.251.81 produces the introductory crawl from Star Wars: TraceRou...

As you read this, I'll be on a plane heading for Salt Lake City, where I'll be appearing at the Leonardo Science Museum at 2PM with my new novel Homeland. On Sunday, I'll be in Tempe at Changing Hands...

TorrentFreak used the ScanEye BitTorrent monitoring service to check what was being downloaded by IP addresses associated with the FBI. There's a lot: As can be seen above there is a particular intere...

"If you make things at home that you can easily buy at the supermarket ... see if Unpretentiousil is right for you." — guilty as charged, but hey, also paraben- and sulfate-free! [Video Link]...

Seattle's police force were very hot-to-trot for a pair of new surveillance drones, an issue that became a lightning rod for criticism of the scandal-haunted force. After public outcry, the city's may...

Constellation Tatsu is a music "micro-label" based in San Luis Obispo, California. San Luis Obispo is nicknamed SLO (for its acronym and a lifestyle) which fits rather nicely with Constellation Tatsu'...

The Camden Council in London removed many public benches, apparently in an effort to chase out vagrants. A group of Guerrilla Benchers were offended by this, and responded by reinstalling their own be...

A 'shiny protuberance', spotted on Mars by Curiosity Rover, has had the internet aflutter for days; theories range from erosion artifact to evidence of alien life. I asked my wife, Heather, and she fi...

"Video of thundersnow in Middle Island, Suffolk County, New York. Shot around 6:30pm with a Canon7D. Flash can be seen at 15 seconds."...

A quick NSFW! search in the craigslist personals classifieds for "nemo" turns up many gems, among them, "I want to get plowed harder than your driveway," and "I'm disease-free and recently tested; I'm...

A quick NSFW! search in the craigslist personals classifieds for "nemo" turns up many gems, among them, "I want to get plowed harder than your driveway," and "I'm disease-free and recently tested; I'm...

Photo of El Matador beach at sunset, shot by Shabdro Photo and shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool....

Matt Richtel & Sophie Littlefield are the next guests at the wonderful SF in SF free science fiction reading series in San Francisco, it's tomorrow at 6PM (details). (Thanks, Rina!)...

Members of the Barenaked Ladies performed their song 'I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)' over a video-link with Chris Hadfield, who is on the International Space Station: Watch the video above as astronaut...

A Wisconsin woman who lived in a mobile home with 300 rats will be evicted, and her home and the rats will be destroyed. Wausau Daily Herald: "The problem began when Flatoff, 58, began buying domestic...

New Fu. Photo: Jason Weisberger. In my early twenties, I became fascinated with the idea of having a set of Fu Dogs. They are beautiful and come chock full of fantastic magical powers. I like magic. T...

One woman was 41, the other 71. "It sounded like the Fourth of July," said a neighbor. Without warning, thirty to forty rounds were fired at their vehicle. The women ducked down when the shots rang ou...

From Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room blog: "These satellite images show a remote airstrip deep in the desert of Saudi Arabia. It may or may not be the secret U.S. drone base revealed by reporter...

Timothy B Lee has a gripping and thorough account of the work to tear down the PACER paywall, which requires that Americans pay $0.10 per page to access court files, which are necessary to understandi...

A short documentary from Imperium Pictures on artist Paul Laffoley's painting, Alchemy: The Telenomic Process of the Universe,...

Shit's getting real....

Phil Are Go! has performed another public service by doing a nice cutout of the boxy, undistinguished Toyota Corona, the perfect stock art for any dull automotive piece. Toyota Corona - Good for the k...

Amish sect leader Samuel Mullet was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for ordering attacks on other Amish people in which their hair and beards were forcibly cut off. [BBC]...

...

At long last TPB:AFK, the Kickstarter-funded documentary about the persecution of The Pirate Bay is finished and online, and ready for you to download....

A "smashmouth investigative journalist", Teri Buhl, claims that no-one may publish her tweets. Faced with widespread ridicule and criticism, she's doubled down, going as far as to threaten lawsuits ag...

This is Rex, a $1 million "bionic man" built in the UK by roboticists Richard Walker and Matthew Godden. Rex was the star of a new Channel 4 documentary titled "How to Build A Bionic Man." Rex is outf...

This grilled cheese sandwich, made by Dude Food's Nick, is made entirely of cheese -- the "bread" is Finnish "bread cheese," toasted in the skillet with American cheese within. It's an international s...

In woodworking, planing is the process of using a very sharp blade to shave off pieces of wood. The people in the video above are some of the best at it in the world....

Stitch wizard Ben Venom continues his quilt magick with more large fabric artworks sewn from vintage band t-shirts. Tuck yourself into his blog and Instagram feed.  Heavy metal quilts by Ben Veno...

Lousy Book Covers and Caustic Cover Critic are blogs which collect, as you may already have deduced, really badly-designed book covers. CCC generally takes aim at bad pro work, whereas LBC nails haple...

Lousy Book Covers and Caustic Cover Critic are blogs which collect, as you may already have deduced, really badly-designed book covers. CCC generally takes aim at bad pro work, whereas LBC nails haple...

TED announced version 2.0 of its TED Talk player app. "Subtitles are now available in 90 languages, directly in the video player. And, should you want to watch via Apple TV, when you scoot over to Air...

The Weather Channel posted an internal marketing pitch, I mean feature article, about why they've deemed themselves the official naming entity for big winter storms. From the article: During the upcom...

In space, no one can hear the pareidolia scream....

Charlie Stross has a fascinating and insightful post about the growth of the political class and the "beige revolution" that has caused all parties to converge on a status-quo-preserving non-platform:...

Tonight's my last night in San Francisco on my Homeland tour. I'll be at Borderlands books at 7PM. Tomorrow I'll be at the Leonardo in Salt Lake City; and on Sunday I'll be at Changing Hands in Tempe,...

Ed Piskor, creator of the Brain Rot/The Hip Hop Family Tree comics here at BB, has won the Columbus Museum of Art and Thurber House's graphic novelist residency. The three-week residency is designed t...

"Ultra Ever Dry" is a nanomaterial spray-coating that is (apparently) insanely hydrophobic, shedding dirt, water and oil. The jaw-dropping product video suggests many possibilities, from extreme hydro...

KING-TV reports that raccoons have established their home in the cab of a huge tower crane, bringing its construction project to a halt. The Raccoons are big ones, locals allege: "The thing was like a...

Head Like an Orange has gif after gif of nature in all its glory. Special focus on adorable baby sea turtles....

Back in 2010, the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience published an article looking at the neurobiology of psychedelic drugs and why researchers were returning to this field after 40 years of stagnatio...

An attempt to mate Galapagos Tortoises in the presence of Richard Clayderman ended in failure Thursday, even after the reptiles were granted a virtuoso performance of Chariots of Fire by the French pi...

The car in this photo was 13 kilometers northeast of Mount St. Helens when that volcano erupted on May 18, 1980. This photo was taken about a month later by researchers from the United States Geologic...

John Huttick lost his eye after being punched outside a Philadelphia tavern. On the witness stand at his attacker's trial, he lost the replacement—albeit temporarily. The defense requested, and ...

This creepy-looking image of U.S. swimmer Tyler Clary has its origin in the movement of water molecules. The Fuck Yeah Fluid Dynamics tumblr explains what's going on — and how physics can make a...

Police questioned a 28-year-old woman who allegedly scribbled "AE911" with a sharpie on Eugene Delacroix's Liberty. [Reuters]...

It may be a little late for folks on the East Coast to round up the necessary parts before the blizzard really hits, but this would be a fun trapped-in-the-house project. It's not cheap, but it does g...

An academic librarian at McMaster University wrote that "The Edwin Mellen Press was a poor publisher with a weak list of low-quality books, scarcely edited, cheaply produced, but at exorbitant prices,...

There's no reliable evidence that GM crops are dangerous to eat. On the other hand, they aren't the best way to reduce world hunger, and you can basically roll your eyes at anybody claiming GM crops a...

The production company that made the Hobbit convinced the government of New Zealand to suspend its labor laws and tax laws. Now the NZ Labour Party is asking for the details of the deal that the compa...

Englishman in Japan showing how the Japanese queue for local football games....

Or possibly vomit. We cooked it exactly like it said on the box, writes PR. But sometimes the ugliest of foods can still be tasty. Apparently not so much in this case. The yellow part tasted a bit lik...

Here's a surreal aside from the "manifesto" of alleged spree-killer and former LAPD man Christopher Dorner. Dorner is currently the subject of a manhunt launched by his former colleagues, already rema...

Last month, I linked to a great Atlantic profile of Apollo Robbins, a stage pickpocket who pulls off the most audacious fingersmithing you've ever see....

this brave new orleans comrade/librarian was just kidnapped & raped in new orleans. she's an AFP fan. please read &... nola.com/crime/index.ss— Amanda Palmer (@amandapalmer) February 7, ...

What happens when you wed French suppliers and British standards? "The meat content of some beef lasagne products recalled by Findus was up to 100% horsemeat, the Food Standards Agency has said." [BBC...

Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann is the boss of Carmen Ortiz, and the man primarily responsible for the over-the-top, vindictive prosecution of Aaron Swartz. A WhiteHouse.gov petition to get him ...

Meg from Reuters Asia sez, "This is our latest video about some crazy gadgets that Chinese travelers are talking about and using for their long journeys during Chinese New Year. Our reporter (bravely)...

"Polaris Nuclear Sub," offered in the Spiderman Comics March 1967 Issue. As shared on Flickr by SenseiAlan. I love those old Honor House ads....

Ramcy Wama with the Post-Courier: A TRAGIC and brutal sorcery-related murder took place in full view of hundreds of onlookers in a Mount Hagen City suburb in Western Highlands Province yesterday morni...

Lucasfilm announced that Stuart Freeborn, the makeup artist who helped create Chewbacca, Yoda, Jabba the Hutt and the crazy creatures in the Star Wars trilogy's famous barroom scene, has died. He was ...

I'm digging Sam Biddles work at Gawker on how Monster lost to Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, in the battle of the high-priced headphones....

An autopsy report on the body of Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez, 16, "raises new questions about the death of a Mexican youth shot by at least one U.S. Border Patrol officer four months ago in Nogales."...

At Dangerous Minds today, a post about "The source of inspiration for most of the songs on Coney Island Baby, Lou Reeds transvestite lover and muse Rachel," who has has always been "somewhat of a myst...

Ex-LAPD officer and shooting suspect Christopher Jordan Dorner, left, with former LAPD chief Bill Bratton. Christopher Jordan Dorner, 33, a disgruntled former officer with the Los Angeles police depar...

A documentary and PSA from Yoko Ono and Artists Against Fracking....

A documentary and PSA from Yoko Ono and Artists Against Fracking....

I'm still revving up my tour for Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother, and tonight I'll be at Booksmith in San Francisco. I'm lucky enough to get two days in SFO and tomorrow I'll be at Borderlands,...

 ...

The Freedom of the Press Foundation, of which I'm a board member, has reached a fundraising milestone: $200K in 6 weeks to support independent transparency journalism. From my fellow board member John...

Digitally archiving half million cards, letters, and drawings sent to the town of Newtown, CT after the Sandy Hook school shooting. ...

Archipelagos was a 1989 Amiga game set on an expanse of tiny islands. The objective was to purify what remained of the land while being stalked by corrupted trees, which could move only when outside o...

John Gruber on the rise in the use of *asterisks* for emphasis in the plaintext age: "Neither appeared in print until the mid-60s, when *sigh* began appearing. But *cough* doesnt appear until 1987. Bo...

YouTube is streaming the full move Superman, a 1987 Hindi remake of the Hollywood movie....

Time to clear some space on the knick-knack shelf. Mezco has shown a line of AXE COP action figures at the NY Toy Fair: Based on a webcomic that turned into a print comic that turned into a web based ...

Just keep hitting refresh, for more truth that "they" don't want you to know! verifiedfacts.org....

Two workers at a wildlife park in Indonesia have been hospitalized after being attacked by a 6.5-foot-long Komodo dragon that wandered into their office. Both men were evacuated to a hospital with sev...

12-year-old Lauren Rojas and her dad, Rod, built a balloon-lofted Hello Kitty space-capsule for her science fair project in Antioch, CA, and launched it 17 miles above the Earth's surface, recording i...

The wonderful Ukrainian horror/fetish/steampunk mask maker Bob Basset has produced a two-faced Cthulhu mask; on one side, the betentacled visage; on the other, a lecterine horror. Call of Cthulhu. One...

Newborn pygmy goats doing their "Happy Dance."...

From the March 12, 1967 episode of Walter Cronkite's CBS show "The 21st Century," a short clip illustrating the home office of tomorrow....

Danielle from the ACLU sez, "The ACLU has just released a new guide for tech companies on why they should and how they can better protect user privacy and free speech. The guide features dozens of rea...

I loved watching this. The shapes they form are just mesmerizing....

Photo: Romeo Ranoco / Reuters Evidently these are new recruits. I wonder how well the experienced ones can balance a banana....

Scarecrowoven has revisited his "Skele Gore" image, and just in time for St Valentine's Day! Of the new version, Mr Scarecrowoven sez, "It's pretty insane. In person, the colors are so bright and fluo...

The ThingsFittingPerfectlyIntoOtherThings Tumblr is a celebration of the phenomenon of kentucky in all its glory. Things Fitting Perfectly Into Other Things (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)...

Last month we reported that the makers of Monopoly were holding an election to add a new piece to the game, and to get rid of one of the existing pieces. I was sure the robot would win, but the cat lo...

John Lehmann, a photojournalist with the Globe and Mail is travelling through China and documenting his experiences on Tumblr. An article in the Globe highlights some of the best posts so far, includi...

The elevators in the Seattle Sheraton are fitted with buttons that allow their riders to rain earthquakes upon the Pacific Northwest. This power is largely used for good, and that is rather affirming ...

Peter Bagge is one of my favorite cartoonists. I was introduced to his work when it appeared in Robert Crumb's legendary Weirdo magazine. (Crumb later made Bagge the editor. When I was in my 20s I sen...

What would Settlers of Catan be like if you added oil wells to the already potent resource mix of sheep, wood, ore, brick, and grain? The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds out when...

The $19 TrackR is a like a leash between your wallet and your mobile phone. It's a Bluetooth-enabled wafer of plastic that fits in your wallet or pocket. You pair it with your phone, and whenever the ...

Michael Geist sez, A coalition of Canadian industry groups, including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Marketing Association, the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association and the...

Are you curious about Complexity? Do you dig dynamic systems and information theory? The Santa Fe Institute, one of the birthplaces of chaos theory, is now offering a free "Introduction to Complexity"...

Retraction Watch, a website that documents the retraction of scientific papers, has had a series of articles about disgraced cancer researcher Anil Potti abruptly censored by WordPress in response to ...

There's no better way to show that you care about your "environment and community" than by trucking in tanks of water to be dumped in an artificial indoor pond and moved around with electric pumps for...

Seeking a Valentine's Day gift for the happy mutant in your life? Our sweet sponsor ShanaLogic, sellers of handmade and independently-designed apparel and other unique items, suggests the Sloth Love N...

This entire interaction between Penelope Soto, 18, who was arrested on possession of Xanax, and Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jorge Rodriguez-Chomat rivals Wapner and Judge Judy in its absurdity. ...

In December 2011, a beautifully-illuminated, 300-year-old German bible was among items lost in a truck theft. Though the thieves were caught, they had already gotten rid of it. It took a year of detec...

If you're in LA and enjoy music of the 1960s and 1970s, I highly recommend you attend this 2/9/2013 screening of The Wrecking Crew, a documentary about a group of studio musicians behind many of the h...

"Stewie the Cat, the longest domestic cat in the world at more than 4 feet long from nose to tail, has died." [AP]...

"A bighorn sheep named Bam Bam because of his habit of butting vehicles at a Wyoming park has died with his horns, likely of natural causes." [Standard Examiner]...

Reg Presley, lead singer of The Troggs, has died. He was 71. The Troggs' biggest hit was their 1966 cover of "Wild Thing" charted at number one in the US and number two in Britain. Presley's excellent...

You might as well be warned. This video contains a sea cucumber money shot. ...

Nick Criscuolo's latest 16-bit-style video is a mini biopic of Cuban-American marathon runner Alberto Salazar. The music, he adds, is a remix of World Revolution, a track from SNES classic Chrono Trig...

This shuffled into my music player this morning, and delighted me as it ever does: Allan Sherman's When I was a Lad, a lovely bit of Mad Man-style period parody from the album My Son, the Celebrity. Y...

PES's new title sequence for Het Klokhuis (Dutch for "apple core"), a long-running educational TV show in the Netherlands....

I loved this druggy Adventure Time illo so much I nabbed us a wee exclusive on it; it's going to be part of an epic "50 Worse Things About Cartoons" roundup in the new issue. You can see more of Anton...

Finnegan's Wake, just published in a new Chinese translation, has become a sleeper hit in China. In just one month, it's sold 8,000 copies and hit number 2 on a Shanghai bestseller list. According to ...

Finnegans Wake, just published in a new Chinese translation, has become a sleeper hit in China. In just one month, it's sold 8,000 copies and hit number 2 on a Shanghai bestseller list. According to F...

Getting tipsy is more than just a simple equation of "Insert booze, receive stupid behavior". There's some complicated chemistry at work — especially when you begin to factor in the stuff you mi...

arXiv is a website where papers in physics and mathematics are published before they've gone through the formal peer-review process. snarXiv is a parody site where people submit fauxphysics papers ful...

Michael Donaldson says: I thought I'd share this evidence of a recent discovery with all of you as I feel it might be of interest. Yesterday this was found laying in the center of my front lawn. The d...

Tonik, a canine-human hybrid, is available for adoption in Mishawaka, Indiana. He is a Poodle/Shih Tzu/human mix. (via Nothing To Do With Arbroath)...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Godwin's Law is used for the first time, Percival Dunwoody saves the Titanic from sinking, a woodlands murder most foul, and MORE Super-Fun-Pak Comix....

For a limited time (until midnight Thursday PST), Michael D. Sellers' book about the making of the giant flop John Carter is free in the Kindle format. I can't wait to read it. I hope it's as fun as J...

Last night, I kicked off the tour for Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) with an amazing event at the Seattle Public Library, and now I'm hitting the road! I'll be in Portland tonight, at the Pow...

Dondrapersayswhat's Avengers/Breakfast Club trailer mashup is pretty inspired. Loki is Judd Nelson....

The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) has joined a private equity consortium that acquired the notorious Internet surveillance company BlueCoat, yoking teachers' retirement security to the fortunes...

Ron Nixon: "The Postal Service is expected to announce on Wednesday morning that it will stop delivering letters and other mail on Saturdays, but continue to handle packages, a move the financially st...

1300 Happy Mutants so far, goofing off and sharing links. We're having fun....

"My disabled goldfish scooting around in her newly redesigned sling."...

For years, there have been stories about Games Workshop being trademark bullies and sending threats to people who use the term "space marine" in connection with games. But now that they've started pub...

Simon sez, " This is a short motion graphic video concisely documenting the fall of SOPA with great attention to detail, and recognising future bills that may be a threat to online democracy. It is no...

I'm teaching the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop this summer at UCSD La Jolla -- it's an amazing writing program (I'm also a graduate), and the early application deadline is coming up: Applic...

The Federal Reserve announced Tuesday that one of its internal websites had been briefly breached by hackers, and added that no critical functions of the U.S. central bank were affected by the intrusi...

It's pretty great....

Ed sez, Inspired by traditional Victorian floriography, writer and artist Ed Saperia developed a series of over 200 "flower codes", allowing you to express anything from a simple romantic gesture ("I ...

While the name "ULTIMATE DECK" is a little off-putting, I'm rather fond of the illustrations on this deck of cards. At $25 a pack, it's a pricey way to play Go Fish, but if you think of it as a kind o...

I've told this story before (on Gweek), and I'm going to tell it here again. I'm a great admirer of artist Mitch O'Connell. I'm envious of his work, which pays homage to exactly the kind of garish mid...

Our pal Rob Walker says: Once upon a time, designer/artist Shawn Wolfe conjectured an imaginary product, backed by a vigorous ersatz ad campaign: The RemoverInstaller™. More recently, in a speci...

BerlinerStrasse sells fairly pricey but nice vintage home decor products from Berlin. I especially like the selection of classroom wall charts and posters....

We've gathered fresh video for you to surf and enjoy on the Boing Boing video page. The latest finds for viewing pleasure include: • "Commuters," a short film about a year on the NYC subway. ...

ANDREW WINNING / REUTERS It doesnt look like the face of a tyrant. Im sorry but it doesnt ... Hes very handsome. Its like you could just talk to him, have a conversation with him right now." Based on ...

LAtaco.com has an interview with Simon Pecco, a GIF creator who lives in Tijuana....

"Commuters," a beautiful short by Rebecca Davis about a year riding on the New York City Subway...

Law blogger Popehat was annoyed by the way I referenced the maximum sentence threatened by prosecutors in that Los Angeles whale sushi case. At his blog today, he vents about this latest item on his "...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is looking for podcasters who've received legal threats from Personal Audio, a patent troll that claims a bullshit patent on "disseminating a series of episodes repr...

On Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013, Astronaut Chris Hadfield will speak with William Shatner live from space. The webcast will be here. Hadfield sounds pretty stoked!...

Found on the net: a clever and irie way to store your cables. I Should Store My Cables This Way...

My friend Lisa Adams, who coached me through so much of my treatment for breast cancer, recently learned that her breast cancer returned as metastatic disease. She has been writing about cancer eloque...

"Radio is for boys only. No girls allowed. Or at least that was the message from so many young men at the dawn of the medium." Matt Novak writes in PS Mag about the "sense of betrayal by many young me...

NBC News' Michael Isikoff this week released a 16-page "white paper" prepared by the Obama DOJ that effectively justifies president Obama's power to target even Americans for assassination without due...

Tmorej Smith, 3, was found dead with a single gunshot wound to his head; the child and his 7-year-old sibling were playing with a pink handgun that they believed to be a toy when the gun went off. As ...

In my films I have always discussed America: who we are, what we are, for better and worse, and the ridiculous. Im here on Kickstarter asking for your support for my newest project, Last Days of Cone...

From Rudy Rucker, a riveting essay on "The Bogosity Generator," science fiction's answer to the McGuffin: Lets call what Im talking about a bogosity generator. Kind of like a tank of helium, useful fo...

The trailer for this MAD magazine documentary looks good! The filmmaker has interviewed a lot of the surviving gang of idiots. There are 3 days left to go and it's very close to being fully funded. Pr...

"NISTAR" is a graphic novel project about a superhero for children with cancer. The Indiegogo fundraiser is close to its goal. I'm pretty picky about cancer-related media, as so much of it tends to ex...

The Source Family tells the story of a radical, utopian social experiment that emerged from the Los Angeles freak scene in the 1970s....

KDVR: [The 7-year old] was playing a game during recess at Loveland’s Mary Blair Elementary School and threw an imaginary grenade into a box with pretend evil forces inside. “I pretended t...

Looking good right up til the *POOF*. I do love the spirit of fun and camaraderie as people flock to the drivers side, laughing....

By an 85-8 vote, The Arkansas House of Representatives has passed a measure that allows concealed guns to be carried in churches and houses of worship. (HT: @jodyms)...

Before storming the subterranean bunker where a kidnapper held a boy at gunpoint for six days, law enforcement agents "built a mock bunker nearby where they prepared over the prior six days," then sto...

"Migraine Chocolate, works safely with migraine, fatigue, lassitude and headaches."...

In a stunning demonstration of automated stupidity HBO asks Google to censor HBO. TorrentFreak shares the details."Today, for example, we stumbled upon a DMCA notice sent on behalf of HBO in which Goo...

Wired reports on a nearly complete Kickstarter to mount an exhibit of grand and glorious LA buildings that were never built, including the design for LAX shown above: Wired: What is it with Los Angele...

As I predicted, the Minecraft Creeper hoodie I posted about a few months ago turned out to be a big hit. Jane loves it and her friends are asking their parents from them, too. I have a vision of all t...

Sean sez, "Thought you guys would dig this pictorial guide to electronic bugging that I posted today. The article ran in the September 7, 1968 issue of the legendary Bay Area radical slick Ramparts. Q...

A "speaking piano" recites the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009....

In a piece for The Magazine, Jamelle Bouie argues that "an implicit network, not overt racism, keeps tech writing dominated by men." A long read worth reading....

Here, scientists suck all the dignity out of a Jamesons mamba — a snake capable of killing a human in just a few, painful hours. The photo is part of a story in the February issue of National Ge...

Whale bacon. (Jake Adelstein) At the Daily Beast, Jake Adelstein writes about shifting cultural norms around the consuming of whales as food: In the United States, serving whale meat can cost you deca...

(Audio NSFW) Matt Richardson says: "These are actual outtakes from the voice actors of LA Noire, rendered out. These hilarious screw-ups were generated as a natural side effect of the MotionScan anima...

This clever little tool forms clamps from stainless steel wire. As a commercial pilot in Alaska, I have used this many times over the years in emergency situations. I often operate in remote areas, aw...

Today our open subtitling platform Amara.org ("a wikipedia for subtitling video") is launching free crowd subtitling for every YouTube user....

On the left is a picture of me with my bike, taken by my friend Laura Kling. On the right is the same image, as it would be seen by a person with protanopia — a relatively common (as in, still v...

A homeless hitchhiker saved a woman from a violent attack by killing her assailant with a hatchet. His TV interview is excellent....

A homeless hitchhiker saved a woman from a violent attack by smashing her assailant with a hatchet. His TV interview is excellent....

Exquisite LEGO model of the original Apple Macintosh by Chris McVeigh, aka powerpig on Flickr....

Bossa Studios created the surgery game "Surgeon Simulator 2013" in a weekend. It's somewhere between Operation, advanced medical training simulations, and splatterpunk films....

In 2010, a group of scientists claimed to have found bacteria that could build its DNA using arsenic, instead of the phosphorous used by the rest of Earth's life forms. Within days, the research behin...

Last week, I posted a link to a story on the Atlantic, all about the history of research into supertasters — humans with the ability to taste a bitter compound called phenylthiocarbamide. It's a...

Overt at 365 Tomorrows, my friend Dave Gill of the "Total Dick-Head" blog posted a very short science fiction story that I found quite, well, touching. In fact, that's what it's called. From Touching:...

To overdose on caffeine, you'd probably have to drink around 75 8oz cups of brewed coffee over the course of just a few hours. The effects vary from person to person, but that's a good estimate for a ...

At the Super Bowl on Sunday, Beyonce flashed the Illumanti triangle and it caused the stadium lights to fail. Either that or she was referencing her husband Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella Records "dynasty sign."...

At readwrite, Dan Lyons covers the news that Dell is going private in a leveraged buyout led by a private equity company. Back in the 1990s I used to cover Dell for Forbes, and I visited the company a...

What a way to spend the spring: The (New York Public Library) Manuscripts and Archives Division is offering an (unpaid) internship to aid the Digital and Project Archivists for the Timothy Leary Paper...

Horrible, horrible things. Blogger Bug Girl explains the finer points of male spider anatomy and, also, probably way more than you wanted to know about Peter Parker's personal life....

The first two albums by seminal proto-goth band Bauhaus, have been reissued today on vinyl. (Video above from The Old Vic Theatre, London, February 24, 1982.) ...

If you see a Farrah on a dating site listing her age as 29, she’s lying by six or seven years. (Via Sociological Images)...

Hey, Seattle! Just a reminder that I'll be at the Seattle Public Library tonight at 7PM with my new novel Homeland. Come on down (and bring the kids!)! Portland, you're next, then San Francisco (and a...

Craig Brittain is the most prominent operator of an operating "involuntary porn" site, publishing compromising pictures of unsuspecting women and generating extravagant removal fees. While lawyers wor...

Molly Crabapple on the dangers of being a disruptive kid around hysterically risk-averse adults: In December, a New Jersey schoolboy was arrested for drawing in class. In the post-Sandy Hook rage to b...

Asif Ali is the latest to find fault with shifty domain registrar GoDaddy. Me: Why did you release a domain that belonged to me..the registration was still active. And two days before the domain expir...

Please enjoy this North Korean propaganda video, which features dreams of happiness and space travel, a stirring instrumental rendition of We Are The World, and America engulfed in flames. [Video link...

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

Today on XKCD's "What If...?", Randall Munroe runs the numbers of when and whether the Internet's throughput will ever exceed FedEx's sneakernet file-transfer capacity (one interesting note here: why ...

From the Dec 20, 1924 issue of the New York Times: Adolph Hitler's rehabilitation is now complete, and he is "no longer to be feared." Hitler Tamed By Prison...

Slaying victims Alex and Macaila Marshall with their father, Phillip Marshall. Philip Marshall, 54, a career airline pilot who claimed to have once served as a contract pilot for the CIA and DEA durin...

Slaying victims Alex and Macaila Marshall with their father, Phillip Marshall. Philip Marshall, 54, a career airline pilot who claimed to have once served as a contract pilot for the CIA and DEA durin...

A man named Johnny Dixon complained to the Washington Personalized License Plate Committee about the Spinal Tap-homage vanity plate GOES211 on Tony Cava's BMW. Dixon thought Cava was boasting about hi...

Avi Solomon popped this patent-drawing for a hypothetical X-Wing fighter patent into the Boing Boing Flickr pool. If Star Wars was a patent: X-Wing Fighter...

Tales of the Weird: Unbelievable True Stories is possibly the best bathroom reading book ever written....

This Cult of Mac video makes it look pretty easy to jailbreak your iPhone or iPad. What is a good reason to do it? If you have jailbroken your iOS device to do something cool that you couldn't have ac...

Acer's $1,000 Iconia tablet runs Windows 8, weighs only 2 pounds, and packs in 4GB of RAM, a 128GB SSD and a 1.7Ghz Core i5 CPU. Christopher Null put it through its paces: The bigger challenge, though...

Bruce Davis was 30 years old when he was convicted of participating in two murders at the behest of Charles Manson. Forty years later, the California Board of Parole Hearings sent its recommendation t...

I kind of want one. $20 (Via The World's Best Ever)...

LeBron James asks science and statistics questions. Khan Academy answers....

Government Attic posted a collection of complaints lodged with the FCC about Saturday Night Live from 2008-2012. Selections follow. Problem Description: There is a comedy skit which repeatedly referre...

Apparently Iran launched a monkey into space. The photos of the monkey, pre-flight prominently showed that he had a mole over one eye, however the post-flight photos appear mole-free. This caused some...

In the mid- to late-1980s, Kevin Kelly was editor of Whole Earth Review, which was my favorite magazine (it’s no longer around, but it’s still my favorite). It’s where I learned abou...

"Female students at a Catholic high school in northern New Jersey have taken a no-cursing pledge at the request of school administrators, though some question why no such demand was made of male stude...

Before you get excited about the bones of Richard III being found under a parking lot, consider this — the announcement included no mention of how common the DNA sequences that ostensibly identi...

As this post goes live, I am on a plane from London to Seattle to kick off the tour for Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother. My first stop is tomorrow (Feb 5) night, at the Seattle Public Library, ...

In which Finnish researchers valiantly attempt to quantify the sexiness of hip wiggling....

Can you actually be addicted to sex? Marty Klein doesn't think so. In an interesting article at The Humanist, he critiques the diagnostic criteria and common treatments behind this tabloid-ready psych...

Anybody who has spent much time with children's literature knows that scarlet fever blinded Mary Ingalls. But scarlet fever doesn't cause blindness. Mary really did become blind, though, in real life ...

Amoeba Records' new out-of-print music service proves a deep knowledge of the industry it cherishes. But the much-loved music store's archive of obscure classics is also a potential time bomb, ticking...

You've perhaps heard some queer folks suggest that gay marriage is a heteronormalizing institution with dangerous strings attached for queer sexuality and its social capital. Now we have that proposit...

CBS has a story on "revenge porn" sleaze Craig Brittain, whose website solicits private photos, then funnels the victims' takedown requests to a non-existent "lawyer" who advertises outrageous fees. T...

Enjoy the latest page of Elfquest. First time reader? Catch up at the comic's official homepage....

@Kya7y's father spent seven years drawing an enormous, intricate maze on a sheet of A1 paper, of which this photo is but a tiny part. Flooby Nooby's Ron Doucet collects the revealed sections; there se...

"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance" — Steve Ballmer's 2007 spectacular earns him only ninth spot on Alex Bracetti's collection of the 25 c...

A pizza restaurant robber broke down in tears during his heist, then told a story so sad that his victims cooked him a pizza: the need to support his family had forced him into crime. But he lied, say...

Ornithology [Oglaf]...

Andy Baio looks at the implications of Macklemore's Thrift Shop, the first single from an unsigned artist to reach #1 since Lisa Loeb's 1994 hit, Stay (I Missed You). We're at the beginning of an indi...

In this special Superb Owl Sunday Family Channel podcast Mark Mark, Jane (9), and Sarina (15) share a pan of Jiffy Pop and talk about books. What we are reading now: Mark: Game of Thrones, by George R...

Rick sez, "Spanish photographer Cristina De Middel's fictional documentation of a failed 1960s space programme in Zambia - The Afronauts - has just been nominated for the 2013 Deutsche Borse photograp...

Joseph Gordon-Levitt whipped out his video camera and confronted some paparazzi who were firing flashbulbs in his face. They were dicks about. ...

Look at this superb owl photograph by Boing Boing reader Erik Veland, shared in the BB Flickr Pool. It's a barking owl, native to Australia. Do you have photos of a superb owl to share on Superb Owl S...

It's as if they lifted the plot right out of a Cory Doctorow novel. In Maryland, the Prince Georges County Board of Education is considering a proposal that would allow the school system to copyright ...

The 5 year old boy who has been held hostage for 5 days by an Alabama man in an underground bunker has ADHD and Aspergers, his mom says. Law enforcement agents have been able to deliver medication, to...

A rare photograph of delta blues king Robert Johnson has been authenticated after eight years. The famous subject's identity was confirmed by the same forensics expert who ID'd "the sailor kissing the...

Behold: the StrawBEARy, a miraculous mutant fruit discovered by Redditor Taybow, and put into the Internets for the greater glory. Found a strawBEARy! (imgur.com) (via Neatorama)...

The two decade wait is over for fans of My Bloody Valentine: finally, a new album. ...

The two decade wait is over for fans of My Bloody Valentine: finally, a new album. ...

I, Robot...

Former NASA Flight Director, Wayne Hale, shared some unique insights and memories on the 10th anniversary of the national tragedy that was the loss of space shuttle Columbia. "'If it has been damaged,...

I'm excited to see the folks at Law and the Multiverse (a blog that considers legal questions through the lens of comics, movies and fiction) having a look at the legal issues raised in Little Brother...

The Raspberry Pi is a computer the size of a credit card. To use it, you need a keyboard and mouse, a monitor, and an SD card with Linux. The Raspberry Pi is powered by USB. The creator, Eben Upton at...

The European Space Agency is contemplating 3D printed moon-bases: By using the Moons loose rocks (regolith) as a base for concrete, robots based on Monolites D-Shape 3-D printer will be able to build ...

Artist Philip J Bond created a set of illustrations depicting the women who've been to space. They're beautiful and full of personality and style, and really do justice to their subjects. I just showe...

FREEDOM, a legendary anarchist bookstore in east London, was firebombed on Friday morning. This is the store that Peter Kropotkin helped found in the 19th century, and the home of a monthly newspaper ...

DeviantArt's dogzillalives is makes jewelry and housewares studded with eyeballs, tentacles, yellowing fangs, stitched faux-skin, and more. She's got an Etsy Store, too! Stitched eyes cuff side (via N...

Levi sez, "Chicago Shorts -- distinguished selections, including never-before-published material, off-the-radar reads culled from the University of Chicago Press's commanding archive, and the best of ...

Durex launched an emergency condom delivery service application for Apple devices, offering service only in Dubai....

Beneath what may be the most passive-aggressive hack disclosure blog post title ever, Twitter today disclosed that it, too, has been compromised by hackers. At least 250,000 user accounts were affecte...

Werestill working our technical issue & apologize for thisinconvenience.Our ATMs, credit& debit cards areworking.Stay tuned.— Bank of America (@BofA_Community) February 1, 2013 Some of B...

Remember the LA sushi scandal involving a chef who served up endangered Sei whale meat at The Hump, a once-popular restaurant next to the Santa Monica Airport? It was a sting set up in 2009 by one of ...

Remember the LA sushi scandal involving a chef who served up endangered Sei whale meat at The Hump, a once-popular restaurant next to the Santa Monica Airport? It was a sting set up in 2009 by one of ...

Instructable user DoneDirtCheap posted this "Octopizza" recipe for the site's fast-food contest. We eat a lot of pizza. Usually that means we take a blank canvas of soft dough and apply our favorite c...

22-year-old suspect refused to get out of the vehicle, instead inhaled nitrous oxide from balloons....

Twitter today disclosed that it, too, has been compromised by hackers. This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident, said Twitters director of informatio...

Locus magazine has just released its 2012 Recommended Reading List of science fiction/fantasy/horror, which is always a great reading guide (and a fabulous resource for those of us nominating for the ...

Start your new year with new comics! Or slightly old comics that you may have missed toward the end of 2012. It was a busy time, after all, no one expected you to head to the comics store every Wednes...

Disney's posted the short feature "Paperman" to YouTube. It's an utterly charming and stylishly drawn animated film about love at first sight....

On Facebook, earlier this week, Ed said he's soon to tell the story of Tracey Lynn Curry, The D.O.C. He's one of my favorite artists and I can not wait....

Avery Edison, who is transgender, writes about what it feels like to live with a constant threat of violence because of your gender identity. "If youre trying to feel less like a man, you can do worse...

In The New Republic, Jed Perl writes about Ai Weiwei: the man, the activist, the artist. "The trouble with most critiques of political art is that they pay too much attention to the politics. This is ...

Carlos Ribeiro stands on a ball he made from rubbish in Inharrime, Mozambique, where boys learn to make balls at age five. Anna says: "The February issue of National Geographic magazine features a uni...

John Young says: "Here is a picture of a toy pyramid scheme I did for one day with my friends. People who made money are in green, people who lost money are in red. I think it's a stark picture of wha...

Last month, I blogged the new Bruce Sterling book, Love is Strange, an ebook-only paranormal romance. I haven't had a chance to read it yet (it's in my queue), but Warren Ellis has, and he's written u...

Sweden's Pipparkakan sells porny "kama sutra" cookie cutters, which would probably come in handy for V-day. They're 250 Swedish Krona (USD40) per set. Only Lust Limits the Imagination (via IZ Reloaded...

After 4.6 billion years of evolution, DNA's mission is complete. There is nothing left to do but sit around and wait for the heat death of the universe. 2-In-1 iPotty with Activity Seat for iPad (Via ...

Meet The Executioner. Earlier today, I got a tour of the mosquito breeding facility at North Carolina State University. Basically, it's a small room — about the size of my bathroom at home ̵...

Megan Reardon of Not Martha wrote about seven iPhone games that she loves. I'm familiar with just one (Where's My Water?) so I'm looking forward to trying these out! Megan's recommendations for iPhone...

The mosquito on the left is a male Aedes aegypti mosquito. The mosquito on the right is his female counterpart. Viva la difference — and the difference is in the antennae. Mosquito antennae are ...

Here's a small sampling of artist Mitch O'Connell's fabulous Valentine's card collection gallery. Just in time to send to your Valentine sweetheart, a huge selection of the offbeat, odd, perplexing, i...

A reader writes, "On Monday, February 4th, family and friends of Aaron Swartz will join members of Congress at the Cannon House Office Building to honor and celebrate the life, work, and legacy of Aar...

Here's a recent talk given by Princeton's Steve Schultze where he argued for the right of all Americans to access federal court records online at no charge....

Alas, the mystical and gorgeously elaborated jacket worn by Alex Winter in his performance as Marko in The Lost Boys has been sold. No idea how much it cost, but it can't have been enough. Lost Boys, ...

My friend Mikael Jorgensen of the band Wilco turned me on to a classic tape I'd never heard before: The Venom Banter Tape (MP3). From a 2005 WFMU blog post about this classic tape of "mentally-defying...

In an unbylined report, the Bradenton Herald reports that a Florida woman accused of kicking people in the genitals was charged Tuesday with battery: "The foot pursuit ended with Collins allegedly tur...

Claire Davenport: "An Austrian member of the European Parliament is under investigation over suspect expenses claims totaling 1.3 million euros, including one item listed as 'elephant'."...

A free Mardi Gras Bounce mix tape, with bounce versions of all the classics-Professor Longhair, Meters, Wild Magnolias......

Here's The Atlantic on how New York's busiest train station helps commuters get there in time: by giving them an extra minute: "The idea is that passengers rushing to catch trains they're about to mis...

A Russian judge filmed nodding off in his courtroom lost his job this week. Ben Rankin, of the Daily Mirror, writes that he will be able to return to his post "provided he retakes his exams."...

Brian Lam on the new Blackberry: "If you like BlackBerry and keyboards, I'm not going to try and change your mind and I'm certainly not going to try to understand you. I accept you, and we can agree t...

An article on Skift, "Inside the Cayman Islands' sea turtle tourist trap," details how a popular Caribbean wildlife farm promises up-close-and-personal experiences with the sea critters, but abuses th...

Oona Risnen has written a thorough and engrossing article about the noises emitted by dial-up modems while they connect and handshake, and the accompanying graphic (ZOMG HUGE) is nothing short of spec...

One day after The New York Times reported that Chinese hackers infiltrated its network and stole reporters' passwords, The Wall Street Journal says: "Us, too."...

After years of legal battles, The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has grudgingly released files on priests accused of sexually abusing children. An announcement from the church about the document ...

Former New York mayor Ed Koch has died, at 88 years of age, from congestive heart failure. His grave marker will bear the Star of David and a Hebrew prayer, Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord i...

You are warned. Thanks, Bill Rini!...

Red Emma's, Baltimore's astoundingly awesome collectively run radical bookstore/cafe, is having an Indiegogo fundraiser that's gone into its final stretch....

This is the creation of Mikhail Smolyanov, whose concept bike designs are, to a one, wonderful to behold. Funnily nostalgic, gloriously impractical, and beautifully rendered. Solifague Design (via Kad...

This Sesame Street/Beastie Boys "Sure Shot" mashup does some very clever stuff with fast and slow framerates that makes the puppets appear to be perfect lipsynchers...

I don't want to give away the punchline here, but it's definitely worth 1:40 of your time to get to it....

The John Wilcock comic returns with the story of Thelonious Monk's heroin arrest, followed by John's personal memory of seeing Monk play at the Five Spot....

From an email sent to author Tyler Cowen by a reader: Oh, and heres a tip I hope you never need: if your car is ever stolen, your first calls should be to every cab company in the city. You offer a $5...

Inb4 Cory! [Etsy via Khoi]...

Karyn Temple Claggett is the new Associate Register of Copyright and Director of Policy & International Affairs for the Copyright Office. Her previous gig was litigating for the RIAA, shutting do...

RealAbsurdity's "Modular Snap-Fit Airship" on Thingiverse is a 3D-printable toy whose parts can interchangeably form part of a Saturn V rocket. More snap-fit vehicles are planned. This is a fully modu...

David Byrne and St Vincent appeared on the David Letterman show this week to perform "I Should Watch TV" (a deliciously ironic choice, given the song's content) from their amazing album Love This Gian...

Sara Crasson sez, "With the posts about magic recently, I thought you might be interested in an article I wrote about how intellectual property law applies to magicians (among other performers). In wr...

Justin sez, In 2010, Boing Boing wrote about about James "The Amazing" Randi coming out of the closet as a gay man. Coming from the famed exposer-of-deception, many found his honesty inspirational. Th...

8 & 4! 8 & 4! (Via Doobybrain) See also: Adjust a car's sideview mirrors to eliminate blind spots...

Spiral staircase? Yes please. Spiral staircase modeled on the spine of a whale? Hell yes! Andrew McConnell conceived of this system as a modular set of components that can be deployed in a spiral, eac...

Photo: Glenn Fleishman Go and check out Glenn Fleishman's fantastic set of photos from the Jet Propulsion Lab's sandbox, where the scientists get to hang out and play with one of Curiosity rover's sib...

Somebody tried to kill Elle Peterssen. She's comatose in the hospital. Her wealthy family doesn't seem to care much -- not her Korean tiger mom, not her emotionally vacant father, not her spoiled brot...

TL Taylor (author of Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming) talks about competitive gaming and e-sports in this short PBS documentary....

Gary Shapiro is chief of the Consumer Electronics Association, the tech industry group behind the massive annual CES trade show. In an op-ed published by USA Today, he writes that the organization is ...

"I don't have an STD." "Then why did you want to talk?"...

The Consumerist reports that Chelsea, the Applebee's employee who earlier this week posted a receipt with a note from a tightwad "pastor" that read "I Give God 10%. Why Do You Get 18," was fired. R...

Chris Smith very helpfully fixed the newspaper photo I posted earlier today, which showed me at 9 months, with my mom. 25 years of legal abortion in Canada (Thanks, Chris!)...

Dreamworks is producing a sensationalized, awful movie about Wikileaks and Julian Assange. Some of the action involves the Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco that Wikileaks's Jacob Appelbaum hel...

My latest Guardian column is "Internet copyright law has to have public support if it's going to work," and it goes into the difference between copyright infringement and plagiarism, and tries to unde...

In a radio interview this week, San Francisco 49ers cornerback Chris Culliver said, ""We ain't got no gay people on the team They gotta get up out here if they do. Can't be with that sweet stuff. ... ...

Beijings air quality has long been known to be unsafe, and has been over the World Health Organizations healthy limit every day this year. A chart and report from Bloomberg show that it is in fact sim...

The Washington Post digs in to the very important question of whether or not Obama goes skeet shooting all the time while at Camp David, as he once claimed....

An article in China Daily excitedly touts the re-discovery of an ancient variety of rice known as Wannian rice. " It can reach 1.8 meters while ordinary rice grows less than 1 meter high.Also, there i...

Thank you to our lovely sponsor ShanaLogic, sellers of handmade and independently-designed apparel, delightful gifts, and other fine finds! New to the shop is Maiden Voyage's excellent "Council of Cro...

Gavin Grant sez, "Loren Ipsum bookstore in Cambridge, MA, has about 14 hours left on Indiegogo to raise $29K to stay open. They're almost halfway there. I recommend the Helvetica T-shirt, although the...

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a shoe stamping on R2D2 — forever. MAKE: How-To: R2D2 Heels...

Bruce Schneier's essay "Power and the Internet" is a thoughtful look at the way that the Internet causes shifts in power relationships. Here's the crux of the thing, in my opinion: It's not all one-si...

Thanks, Dave Pasquesi!...

"The University of Minnesota - Twin Cities is set to hold an event this spring designed to help its female undergraduate students achieve more and greater orgasms"...

Long Live the Kings is a short film, shot entirely on 16mm film, that shares the joys and dreams of people who take motorcycle road trips. It is just beautiful. ...

Next Tuesday marks the publication of my latest YA novel, Homeland, and I'll be kicking off a month-long tour across the US on February 5 with a stop in Seattle, followed by Portland and San Francisco...

Van Cafe packaging just rules! Back in December we shared photos of their Flaming Unicorn. Sir Sam, over on the Samba posted another beautifully decorated box of parts. This time the FSM and a VW embl...

This grotesque-Jetsons illustration comes from the 1994 title Art? Alternatives Magazine. It's by XNO/Chet Darmstaedter, and there's also a dandy Flintstones/zombie illustration I've had a look at. (T...

A 360-degree view from the famous Bright Angel Trail. Street View imagery of the Grand Canyon is now available on Google Maps. Says a spokesperson, "Our team visited this spectacular national monument...

In the 2009 Wired mag article Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street, writer Felix Salmon blames the Gaussian Copula Function for the financial meltdown in American markets. A SciAm ...

After running Church of Scientology advertorial, The Atlantic has updated its advertising policy. They nail the problem, too. The Atlantic will refuse publication of such content that, in its own judg...

Kyle Orland, quoting Lamar Alexander, (R-TN) Speaking with NBC News' Chuck Todd this morning, Alexander responded to a question about universal background checks with this amazing non-sequitur: "I thi...

I'm doing a talk at the 2013 Liberty Forum on my Homeland tour. I'm giving a talk on the role free and open devices play in greater questions about freedom. There are many other interesting talks as w...

I'm doing a talk at the 2013 Liberty Forum on my Homeland tour. I'm giving a talk on the role free and open devices play in greater questions about freedom. There are many other interesting talks as w...

On Torontoist, an appreciation of the 25th anniversary of R v Morgantaler, the court decision that made safe and legal abortion on demand the rule of the land in Canada: When police raided Henry Morge...

Attention! The state of Washington requires a pot consultant with many years of experience in how cannabis is grown, dried, packaged and "cooked into brownies." It really is time we opened a job board...

Mega Search is the first third-party index of Kim Dotcom's resurrected Mega file-sharing service. At Ars, Megan Geuss analyses the legal implications: 'Clearly, not all of this content is infringement...

Moon and Source Code director Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) is to direct a feature film version of World of Warcraft....

Ambergris in Morecambe, England. [BBC] A man from Morecambe believes his dog has found a rare piece of whale vomit while walking on the beach. ... Mr Wilman said: "When I picked it up and smelled it I...

Sound it Out # 41: The Cave Singers - Easy Way (MP3) Ivegone on about my love for The Cave Singers here before. Whats changed:Theyve added bassist & multi-instrumentalist Morgan Henderson (Blood B...

Sepoy at Chapati Mystery blog proposes an architecture for a drone-proof city in the Middle East: The idea for my final project, an architectural defense against drone warfare, came from the realizati...

I don't understand why I have to die but the scarlet medusa jellyfish doesn't. Although it does have to eat out of its own asshole.— Bitchuation (@Bitchuation) January 28, 2013 Director Steven S...

The New York Times reported today that hackers inside China infiltrated its network over the course of at least four months. They obtained reporters' passwords, presumably to ID sources and gather int...

The New York Times reported today that hackers inside China infiltrated its network over the course of at least four months. They obtained reporters' passwords, presumably to ID sources and gather int...

Hitler's toilet in Florence, N.J. (Photo: Hana Hawker/Tablet Magazine) In Tablet Magazine, a most unlikely profile of Greg Kohfeldt, who ended up acquiring a little something extra when he bought Sam ...

Google Maps has added notorious, secretive North Korean prison camps to its maps of the country. The data is gleaned from user contributions, including a first-person account of Shin Dong-Hyuk, who es...

Artist Chris Shen made a TV out of 625 discarded remote controls, hacking their LEDs to light up in a grid, creating a low-rez moving image. ...