Articles by BoingBoing from September 2013

You are Not So Smart is a new addition to Boing Boing's line-up of terrific podcasts! It's hosted by David McRaney, a journalist and self-described psychology nerd.    ...

Drakegoodman scanned this 1917-ish photo of Soviet planespotters in exotic headgear; according to a commenter, the binox are focused at infinity "so that when you found the source of the sound by turn...

Kevin McFarland looks back on Season 5 of Breaking Bad, in advance of the final episode. All Bad things must come to an end, but what a good Bad thing this series has been.    ...

Kevin McFarland looks back on Season 5 of "Breaking Bad," in advance of the final episode. All Bad things must come to an end, but what a good Bad thing this series has been. Spoilers.  &nbs...

Art Donovan sez, "After four months of deep 'design and build', I finally completed this commission for my client. But, alas, it won't be installed in time, as it is now going to be featured in the Na...

I'm not sure if these 32 tips really work, but I'm going to give them a try. Here are four: Stop: Stop: Play.    ...

One year ago today Princess Vader goes to Disneyland: This little girl reportedly visited Disneyland with her parents in her adorable princess Vader Hallowe'en costume, taking it for a test drive.&nbs...

The final episode of "Breaking Bad" titled "Felina" airs tonight on the AMC cable television network, and on the torrents.    ...

Pity the British establishment. Like their American counterparts, they keep insisting -- against all evidence -- that they're winning the war on drugs, that drugs are an unimaginable scourge and far w...

Thankfully, no humans were harmed by last week's explosion in Aaron Fechter's warehouse in Orlando, FL, but it did leave "robots scattered around burning rubble." Fechter invented both the Whac-a-Mole...

We've written often about Carl Malamud, the rogue archivist who has devoted his life to making the world's laws, standards, and publicly owned information into free, accessible, beautiful online docum...

Datamancer is selling an astounding steampunk PC on eBay (starting bid: $14K), whose every detail is awesome in every day, from the fool-the-eye case that appears to be full of brassworks to the brass...

Just look at them. You've Never Seen Tattoos Like Banana Tattoos (Thanks, Dean!)     ...

This lovely stuffed toy dinosaur was created by ISS/Nasa flight engineer Karen Nyberg for her three year old son, created from scraps left aboard the station.    ...

One year ago today TV news programs ignore false claims in the thousands of political ads that pay their bills: Are these stations offering any local news coverage to debunk the lies in these ads?&nbs...

Ever since whistleblower Mark Klein revealed that he'd build a secret wiretapping room for the NSA at AT&T's San Francisco switching center, we've known that the NSA was illegally wiretapping the...

James Risen and Laura Poitras, two journalists who have experienced first-hand the consequences of pissing off the federal government in the course of performing uncompromising investigative journalis...

I'm loving this short film about two sixth-grade metalheads from Flatbush, Brooklyn. There is a particular moment right before fame strikes a young musician between the full flowering of talent and...

An ACLU report on the FBI called Unleashed and Unaccountable details how three ACLU clients were added to the no-fly list, and were told by FBI agents that though they were understood to be innocent o...

Rhino Shield is a clear coating for Gorilla Glass (used in most smart phones) that was developed from a Kickstarter fundraising effort.    ...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation continues to rack up victories in its Jewel v NSA suit, through which it has been suing the US spy agency over illegal mass-surveillance for nearly a decade (three s...

Willie sez, "Thirty years ago today, Richard Stallman sent out the GNU system announcement, sparking a conversation that has grown into the global free software movement.    ...

This week, the FBI arrested a 19-year-old computer science student named Jared James Abrahams for tricking young women into installing malicious software on their computers, software that let him cove...

Don't miss Boing Boing's video interview with Dr. Donna J. Nelson, science advisor to the television series "Breaking Bad." The show's final episode airs this coming Sunday night on AMC.  &...

"Kitten Family Hanging Out," shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool by Jon Siegel. "This family of cute kittens suddenly appeared near my apartment," he says.    ...

One year ago today Steampunk Nintendo casemod: Redditor Andrew5785 refurbed an elderly Nintendo system for a covetous steampunk nephew. Five years ago today Cardboard duvet set: Proceeds from the sale...

Patent trolls are mushrooming all over the world, thriving on the billions that they're able to extract from productive companies with their absurd patents and transparent extortion attempts. &nb...

Someone once asked Charles Bukowski what compelled him to write. His answer: "An idiotic urge." That's a short way of what he said in this poem, beautifully illustrated at Zen Pencils (Motto: "Cartoon...

Illustrator Brendan Tobin created this wonderful "fake ad" comic. One frame is shown above; I can't find the original on his site; a copy of the full comic is here.    ...

I haven't eaten at a KFC since it was called Kentucky Fried Chicken. But now I want to take my kids there just so I can do this.    ...

You are Not So Smart is a new addition to Boing Boing's line-up of terrific podcasts! It's hosted by David McRaney, a journalist and self-described psychology nerd.    ...

Insurance underwriters generally operate in the real world, where science trumps ideology (that's why terrorism insurance is pretty darned cheap -- despite the politically successful posturing of our ...

After Barilla chairman Guido Barilla announced in a radio interview that "he would never do (a commercial) with a homosexual family," his competitor Bertolli started posting delightfully saucy images ...

Creepy and Eerie were black-and-white comic story magazines from the 1960s that absorbed the talent from Tales from the Crypt and EC's other comics after bluenosed panic merchants put them out of busi...

In Mother Jones, Jonah Engle investigates the business of "shake and bake" methamphetamine labs and how legal drug manufacturers help illegal drug manufacturers stay in business by fighting to keep cr...

Available for pre-order, Breaking Bad: The Complete Series Blu-Ray in a barrel that includes the full run of the show plus 55 hours of special features, a two-hour documentary, booklet, challenge coin...

Librivox -- the volunteer-driven project to record free, open audiobook versions of public-domain books -- has had a redesign, showcasing its 7,000+ title collection.    ...

Dead Kennedys perform "Holiday In Cambodia" in 1982 on the pioneering Los Angeles TV program New Wave Theater. The song appears on their still-killer debut LP, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.&nbs...

Dead Kennedys perform "Holiday In Cambodia" in 1982 on the pioneering Los Angeles TV program New Wave Theater. The song appears on DK's still-killer debut LP, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. ...

Remember Ray the "Forest Boy" who showed up at Berlin's City Hall in 2011 claiming he had been living a feral life in the woods for five years and didn't know much about himself besides his first name...

The terrific humorist and cartoonist Doogie Horner, who wrote last year's hit Everything Explained Through Flowcharts, has a new book out called 100 Ghosts, which consists of drawings of well-known pe...

I'm posting this to make Jason jealous (Via Tiny House Pins).    ...

Included with the new "Super Deluxe Edition" of Nirvana's In Utero is a proposal letter that legendary audio engineer/musician Steve Albini wrote to the band before signing up to produce the album.&nb...

Toekneesan sez, "I've been scanning the covers of my extensive and eclectic collection of children's books and the subject matter of the books, combined with some pretty awesome mid-century graphics, ...

When Elvis Costello was on Saturday Night Live in 1997 he abruptly playing one song and jumped into Radio Radio. It was reported that Lorne Michaels "raised his middle finger at Costello and kept it u...

The term "gonzo journalism" gets thrown around pretty loosely, generally referring to stuff that's kind of shouty or over-the-top, but really gonzo stuff is completely, totally bananas.  &nb...

The Mary Sue has an impressive selection of links to Star Wars pencil skirts; two from Etsy's Engram Clothing (Stormtrooper, AT-AT) and a forthcoming space-battle/Millennium Falcon skirt from Hot Topi...

Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art wrote about his favorite pencil, the Eberhard Faber Mongol (ad copy: “writers say it actually stimulates flow of thoughts”), and included this attractive ...

[Video Link] PBS science correspondent Miles O'Brien and I interview Dr. Donna J. Nelson, science advisor to the television series "Breaking Bad." The show's final episode airs this coming Sunday nig...

"I would never do (a commercial) with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect but because we don't agree with them.    ...

Boing Boing reader Patrick Race has created and managed a really awesome game in our Boing Boing BBS, which we editors had absolutely nothing to do with creating, but totally love!   &n...

At yesterday's Senate Intelligence Committee hearings, NSA boss Keith Alexander and top spy James Clapper evaded, blocked, and dodged questions from elected reps, making a mockery of the idea that the...

The Los Angeles Unified School District has decided not to award 300 students for cleverness after the students figured out how to access YouTube and Facebook on the locked-down iPads the district gav...

Pilots are allowed to use iPads during takeoff and landing, but passengers aren't. That might change after an FAA advisory committee recommended yesterday that "passengers should be permitted to use s...

"Operating with almost no public notice, the FBI has spent more than $3 million to operate a fleet of small drone aircraft in domestic investigations," according to a 35-page report released Thursday....

The Guardian interviews Seymour Hersh, whom the GOP once described as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".    ...

Perhaps you've heard tell of Krokodil, an injectable street-drug popular in Russia that causes your skin to go green and scaly and eventually to rot off all the way to the bone at injection sites, and...

Zhreng3's Seej is a free/open 3D printable tabletop war-game, a real-world tower-defense game you print and play at home. Seej's players come up with all sorts of innovations that are integrated into ...

On their sepahnews.com website, the Revolutionary Guard of Iran today unveiled an attack drone that can travel up to 1700km (1062 mi), has a 24-hour non-stop flight capability, can carry up to 8 bombs...

Back in 2012, I reviewed How Music Works, David Byrne's best book to date, an absolutely vital text explaining not only the biology, politics and aesthetics of music (and all art, really), but also th...

Jan "Starbug" Krissler, the Chaos Computer Club researcher who broke the fingerprint reader security on the new Iphone, had given a long interview to Ziet Online explaining his process and his thought...

How do I love thee? Let the National Security Agency count the ways. On at least twelve occasions in the past ten years, NSA employees illegally listened in on phone calls of girlfriends, boyfriends, ...

Image of a Leafy Seadragon fish (Phycodurus eques) native to the southern and western coasts of Australia. Shot by Boing Boing reader John K.    ...

PBS Digital Studios have created a series of hand-drawn animations to accompany classic interviews with worthy personages; here is their accompaniment to Janis Joplin's final interview, recorded four...

Bo Diddley went around the block a few times, so heed this advice. Alcohol and Drugs Only drink Grand Marnier, and that’s to keep the throat from drying up in a place where there’s a lot ...

Robbo sez, "Alternet reports on Verizon's stated plan to overturn the Federal Communications Commission's Open Internet Order and charge selective tolls for access to internet content." At its core V...

Rainey from EFF sez, "On the weekend of October 26 -- the 12th anniversary of the signing of the USA PATRIOT Act -- thousands of people from across the political spectrum will unite in Washington, D.C...

Knight Rider to the Future    ...

Egypt Urnash sez, "'Decrypting Rita' is a SF comic I've been working on for the past couple years. It's about a robot lady who's dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend; she's got to pull herse...

Biologist Sam Droege photographs insects for U.S. Geological Surveys Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab. Check out the amazing Flickr stream here.    ...

There's a new IPCC report coming out and that, inevitably, leads to confusion about what scientists mean when they say things like "we are 95% certain that climate change is being caused by human beha...

From TED Ed: "What do Game of Thrones’ Dothraki, Avatar’s Na’vi, Star Trek’s Klingon and LOTR’s Elvish have in common?    ...

This weekend you can get free admission to museums across North America, as part of Smithsonian Magazine's Museum Day. Unfortunately, there are limitations and this isn't just a bunch of museums throw...

Harry Harwood Garrison of Cincinnati, Ohio died last week at age 77. Sounds like an amazing guy; wish I'd know him!    ...

A 41-year-old Chinese man died from a rabies infection that he picked up in an attempt to save his son from the disease.    ...

The Grand Haven Tribune's Kevin Collier reports on the Dogman, a cryptid that apparently rears its ugly head from time to time in West Michigan.    ...

As a locksmith, holding open a door while working on it (or preventing it from relocking) is a daily event at least, for me.    ...

"Attorneys for an encrypted email service provider that suddenly shut down last month amid murmurings of potential government inference have asked a federal appeals court to unseal portions of their c...

Fish caught off the Fukushima Prefecture coastline in Japan are being sold starting today, reports Mainichi, "after fisheries cooperatives here resumed test fishing" and after the fish themselves were...

NOVA's Tim De Chant posted this awesome photo of the Kilby Solid Circuit, the first working example of a miniaturized electric circuit that combined all the necessary structures onto a single chip.&n...

The Roots, Jimmy Fallon, and the Sesame Street gang sing a rousing rendition of "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?    ...

"$300K Worth Of Pot In Birthday Wrapping Paper Found At LAX." "Suspected cocaine worth millions found in kidney bean cans in Mass." And "ATF lost track of 2.1 million cartons of cigarettes in sting op...

A $15 stamp, hand-carved in rubber and glued to a wood stump "on whose back you can see the master printed in black ink." And the master, of course is Heisenberg himself.    ...

Acid Dreams, by Tau Zero, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. Shot with a Nikon D40. What is it?    ...

"On Thursday, SecondMarket is expected to begin raising money for an investment fund the first of its kind in the United States that will hold only bitcoins, giving wealthy investors exposure to the...

Four senators working on efforts to limit US government spying programs have announced a comprehensive package of surveillance reforms. "The draft bill represented the first sign that key Republican a...

The Skinner Box, as applied to human infants, was not what you think it was. Psychologist B.F. Skinner did not raise his daughter inside a box without human contact.    ...

STRFKR (video above) is just one of two dozen artists performing at San Francisco's Treasure Island Music Festival on October 19 and 20.    ...

The team behind Stop Watching Us says: "Since the Snowden leaks started, more than 569,000 people from all walks of life have signed the StopWatching.us petition telling the U.S.   &nb...

Ladies and gents, bitches and bros, The Breaking Bad Guide to Stashing Your Cash.    ...

Video Link (thanks, Tara McGinley!)    ...

Meghan sez, "My coworker Rachel Moani created this awesome book display for the Lacey Timberland Library highlighting some of the insane reasons books have been banned over the years - including The W...

The dash cams will keep these accident-stagers from getting the payout they were hoping for. (Via World's Best Ever)    ...

Eric Godtland and Dian Hanson have lovingly compiled a picture book about crime magazines from the mid-20th century called True Crime Detective Magazines 1924-1969.    ...

The Dextrus is crowdfunded, production version of the Open Hand, a 3D-printed, open source hardware prosthetic/robotic hand that is freely licensed and patent-free.    ...

Jane from Creative Commons sez, "It has come to our attention that the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and top internet service providers are draf...

This summer, I spotted a set of Hickies shoelace replacements in an airport store while killing time between flights. I was attracted to them because they were safety orange, which is my favorite colo...

Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600 Magazine sez, "A few weeks ago, 2600 made its entire archive of radio shows available for free on the web in high fidelity.    ...

The number of members of the American Booksellers' Association is slowly creeping up, a welcome sign after a steep decline from 5500 members in 1995 to 2191 in 2002.    ...

The MPAA, RIAA, and America's major ISPs have teamed up to produce a stilted, propagandistic copyright curriculum for California's public schools.    ...

"You're a lawyer. You know u can't tweet stuff like that and expect to get on an @easyJet flight."— Mark Leiser (@mleiser) September 24, 2013 Mark Leiser, a law professor who wri...

Last Wednesday's Fed announcement that it would not taper its bond-buying program triggered huge orders on exchanges everywhere. Several of those orders on Chicago exchanges were placed 2-3 millisecon...

In the Columbia Journalism Review, Sarah Laskow looks at the empirical research on whether, and how, copyright works. From Christopher Buccafusco et al's experimental work on the motivations for creat...

Philipp sez, "We are two indie developers who just opened the doors to Manyland, a limitless, shared world where you can shape things together with others in any way you want by drawing them... ...

Dan Froomkin has collected some of today's lulzier Green Eggs and C-Span jokes.    ...

New, historic NSA weirdness, as reported by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr at Foreign Policy: As Vietnam War protests grew, the U.S.    ...

The head of insurer American International Group (AIG) offered a half-assed apology for his "poor choice of words" today after outrage spread over his comments likening criticism of banker bonuses wit...

The PeachyPrinter is a well-funded Kickstarter project that aims to produce a $100 kit-based 3D printer that outputs photo-cured resin. The kits are meant to be assembled in an hour, and fully assembl...

The FBI released surveillance video of Aaron Alexis who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard on September 16. According to an FBI spokesperson, Alexis was under the "delusional belief that he ...

Buddyjiang's "Metalic Skull" illustration outgigers Giger. It's the kind of thing I'd have killed to have a giant poster of when I was 15.    ...

One year ago today Jet pack 'Rocketeer' hopes to fly from SoCal coast to Catalina Island, set world record: Yesterday, some very surprised beachgoers and a few tourist watched as O'Malley gave a demon...

At 3:00 Eastern today, science journalist Lee Billings will be doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything. Lee has been a guest blogger at BoingBoing in the past.    ...

Claire L. Evans examines the classic Seinfeld episode "The Parking Garage" as a "specifically Ballardian nightmare: the pornography of infinity, somehow contained within a New Jersey mall." Like the ...

Jonny sez, "I'm Jonny, from Belfast in Ireland. I was just at XOXO and I've spent over a year working on a project to make brewing simple, accessible, and beautiful.    ...

A fun cartoon from Pablo Stanley. In my household we have two Agnostic Atheists and two Agnostic Theists. (Via Neatorama)    ...

Yesterday, the Popular Science website announced that it would no longer allow readers to comment on new stories. Why? Because science, says online editor Suzanne LeBarre, who cited research showing h...

James sez, "Chinese artist Li Chen embedded with the Bay Area Occupy movement and created this beautiful film that's also about the frailty of memory and language.    ...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Gweek is a podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, TV shows...

On Saturday night in Portland between washes of rain, The National performed a magnificent outdoor concert. It was easily one of my favorite shows of the year.    ...

In the early 1990s, I used to get a kick out of the horribly-drawn Bart Simpson bootleg t-shirts, particularly those created by college fraternities as party souvenirs.    ...

In a piece on octopus farming, Katherine Harmon mentions a fascinating fact — octopuses don't have an adaptive immune system, the handy-dandy network of different immune-response cells that all...

During the Cold War, the CIA sent cats outfitted with electronic gear to eavesdrop on the enemy. This and other amazing stories in BB pal Tom Vanderbilt's excellent Smithsonian feature "The CIAs Most ...

"When Susan Orlean (of all people!) revealed in the New Yorker (of all places!) that for at least the last two years, @Horse has actually been authored (shepherded?    ...

Producing power from the wind and sun isn't as simple as just swapping a wind turbine for a coal-fired power plant.    ...

"When the final night falls on us / as it fell upon our parents / we shall retire to / our modest home / earth-sure, secure    ...

As I've mentioned before, my novel Little Brother is the San Francisco Public Library's pick for its first One City/One Book citywide book-club.    ...

Rusty Blazenhoff of Laughing Squid reports on a Butt Pudding kit.    ...

In the New Yorker, Rose George has a feature article on how the piracy business is doing, and how to fight it.    ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH we present The Last Comic Strip About a Mass Shooting Tragedy You'll Ever Have to Read.    ...

I just grabbed DMQZ, a free Kindle novel, on a recommendation. Sounds a bit like the excellent Last Policeman.    ...

What makes the dip in a chocolate dip cone harden from a goo into a crispy shell? It's coconut oil.    ...

A few years ago, Harriet Hall googled "The One True Cause of all disease", just to see what the Internet would come up with.    ...

The Doubleclicks, whose    ...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • Breaking Bad cast on Conan • Richard Feynman explains rubber bands • Lessig's moving speech honorin...

"Earlier this month, 'On the Media' producer Sarah Abdurrahman, her family, and her friends were detained for hours by US Customs and Border Protection on their way home from Canada.   ...

Conan O'Brien interviews the cast of Breaking Bad, Conan, Episode 0467, September 23, 2013. Meghan Sinclair/Conaco, LLC for TBS. Guests on last night's episode of Conan: the entire cast of "Breaking B...

"Each year, EFF's Pioneer Awards ceremony gives the digital civil liberties community a chance to honor the work of those who have bettered our world through remarkable innovation, activism, journali...

Paul Aiken, who has long served as the Executive Director of the Authors Guild, has Amyotrophic Lateral Scleroris, the degenerative neuromuscular disease more commonly known as ALS, or "Lou Gehrig's D...

Wild. From Google and Digital Globe. Here are higher-resolution views. In the news today, the captain of the ship now blames his Indonesian helmsman for the disaster.    ...

Using the phone records of reporters for the Associated Press, federal investigators identified former FBI bomb tecnnician Donald Sachtleben as the source of press leaks for information about a foiled...

Holly Black's young adult vampire novel The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is everything a vampire novel should be: scary, angry, exciting and darkly sexy.    ...

One year ago today Laptop rental companies reach cash-free, pointless settlement with toothless FTC for taking secret naked pictures of customers having sex, harvesting medical records and banking pas...

Here's a clip from the BBC's Fun to Imagine series, in which Richard Feynman explains the amazing thing that happens when you stretch and release a rubber band.    ...

Eric Jou reports on Beijing's hot mystery room businesses, in which customers are locked into single-room funhouses where they have to solve a mystery in order to escape.    ...

Black Perl is a famous 1990 poem written in the programming language perl, by its creator Larry Wall. It is both a poem and a program, and runs under perl 3.    ...

Greg Anderson's photos of the 2013 Beard And Mustache Championships in New Orleans are astounding. Here are 164 more.    ...

The Cyanogenmod project -- a free, open version of Android with lots of great features that Google can't or won't add to the official version -- has a new release out, 10.1.3.    ...

Once, late on a strange Christmas and newly in San Franciso, Kozmo.com delivered me fresh fruit, flowers, a vase, a dvd copy of A Christmas Story, a DVD player, a bottle of wine, an opener and a glas...

The NYT has a story out about Time Warners Apartment Managers Program, which reportedly required one manager interviewed "to snoop on condo owners in his building to ensure they were not stealing cabl...

About half of the web links that point to historic Supreme Court opinions now literally lead to nowhwere, according to a new Harvard study.    ...

The surveillance state capacity far outreaches anything detailed in George Orwell's novel 1984, said Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor-in-chief, at an Advertising Week event in NYC.  &n...

Charlie Stross and Tor.com have published Equoid, a new short story set in his wonderful Laundry universe, in which British secret agents battle Lovecraftian horrors with computational magic, and Bob ...

The journal Metalurgia International recently published a paper entitled "Evaluation of Transformative Hermeneutic Heuristics for Processing Random Data". Though submitted by real researchers from the...

Like Gone Girl (a novel I liked so much that I interviewed the author, Gillian Flynn, on Gweek), The Silent Wife is told in alternating chapters from the points-of-view of a common-law husband and wif...

Starbug, the Chaos Computer Club hacker who broke the fingerprint biometric security on the Iphone, has given an interview [German] to CT Magazine detailing the hack, and released a new video showing ...

This dramatic video from Bot and Dolly shows off their robotic camera systems by projection mapping a 3D animation onto two screens as they're waved around by one and a half ton robotic arms. &n...

-jon snapped this shot of a glorious assortment of gimcracks, gewgaws, gizmos and gadgets at the 18th Annual Anacortes Antique Machinery Show in Anacortes, WA, and then kindly contributed it to the B...

Canadian band Godspeed You! Black Emperor won the Polaris Music Prize, awarded at a giant gala sponsored by Toyota. The band celebrated by releasing a scathing statement condemning the whole affair as...

Boeing and the US Air Force have converted retired F-16 fighter jets into drones, designated as QF-16s. According to Boeing, "While in the air, the QF-16 mission included a series of simulated maneuve...

A gentleman in Texas briefly became an involuntary drunk (at one point ending up in the hospital with a blood alcohol concentration of .37, despite not having imbibed all day) when a colony of brewer'...

The soundtrack to Forbidden Planet (1956) was a milestone moment in the history of electronic music. It was the first entirely electronic film score, composed by Louis and Bebe Barron using DIY circ...

Zack sends us "A look at some wild and often highly-collectible knockoffs, including several things you can't unsee, and a piece that combines Thomas the Tank Engine with giant 'combiner' Transformer ...

Ooops. (The original article has been removed.)    ...

UC Irvine researcher Crystle Martin studies what pro wrestling fans can teach us about storytelling, education, and community. What she found is like fantasy football meets Dungeons and Dragons. Lissa...

Here's an excerpt from the new horror novel by Alison Littlewood, A Cold Season. A dark and disturbing tale from a bold new voice in horror writing: After the battlefront death of her husband, a soldi...

Peter Bagge and Evan Dorkin began making alternative comics in the 1980s. Peter Bagge began his career on R. Crumbs Weirdo magazine as a cartoonist and then editor.    ...

I dig this hallucinatory faux 19A0s TV commercial for Jacob 2-2's new album "Herbivore," from King Deluxe Records. Video designed and animated by Jacob 2-2 and Samuel Rhodes with photography by Migue...

Robot Turtles is "a board game you play with your favorite 3 to 8-year-old that sneakily teaches programming fundamentals." Created by entrepreneur Dan Shapiro and inspired by classic kids' programmin...

Pam "Phantasmaphile" Grossman and artist Jesse Bransford have organized The Occult Humanities Conference taking place October 18-20, 2013 at New York University.    ...

I'm in Washington, DC today to participate in The National Academy of Sciences' second Sackler colloquium, which is organized "to advance a national dialogue about science communication." Climate chan...

Ever since our daughter's birth, my wife Alice and I have found ourselves shopping the "boys" section of the department stores for things like pyjamas and tees and rubber boots, this being the only wa...

Wait for it. [Video Link] (Thanks, Syd Garon!)    ...

Adrian Chen at Gawker: "Alexey Kouznetsov is a 30-something Russian web developer. He looks not unlike a scrawnier Mark Zuckerberg." And he's the guy behind the popular weird Twitter account @horse_eb...

One year ago today Confronting a troll in real life: Leo Traynor, a "writer, analyst & political consultant" in Ireland, was hounded off of Twitter by a vicious anti-Semitic troll whose ghastly t...

Far more people have cells that briefly behave in cancerous ways then ever actually develop cancer. Most of the time, those cancerous cells are destroyed before they can do any real damage, and scient...

The rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student last December drew worldwide attention to India's struggles with tradition, women's rights, and street harassment.    ...

Shocktoberfest, a spook-house in Sinking Spring, PA, is running a Naked and Scared Challenge where customers traverse the maze in the altogether.    ...

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

Emily Pohl-Weary's Not Your Ordinary Wolf-Girl is an absolutely fabulous new young adult novel about a painfully shy rock-star who gets bitten by a werewolf.    ...

As previously noted, Walt Disney World's Jungle Boat Cruise is down for renovations, leaving its complement of skippers -- the most outgoing, hammy group of castmembers -- without occupation. &n...

An interview with Scott Aukerman, producer of Between Two Ferns and host of the comedy podcast Comedy Bang Bang. Your browser does not support the audio tag.    ...

Researchers from Boston Medical Center (BMC) and Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) "studied 589 adults who screened positive for drug use at a primary care visit." They found "no differences...

Please enjoy this six-page scientific research paper — complete with figures, graphs, and (possibly real) references — discussing the discovery of a novel protein linked to regeneration of...

Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker who is currently a fugitive in Russia, "walks freely in the streets in disguise while in hiding," AFP reports his lawyer as saying, "but his security is under such threa...

Colombian artist Diana Beltran Herrera creates exquisite bird sculptures from paper. She's constructed more than 100 species, all life-size. Her papercraft aviary is currently on display at the Rollin...

Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, who has reported extensively on the goings-on at Guantnamo, put Google Glass to interesting use there: Long before Google Glass, Guantnamo had Camp Justice and ...

On the latest episode of Breaking Bad (reviewed here on Boing Boing), cameo-ing TV presenter Charlie Rose referenced a column by Andrew Ross Sorkin in The New York Times.    ...

The family home where the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs built the first Apple computer, as a younger man, may become a protected historical site.    ...

Here's the first page of a three-page "literacy" test that racist authorities in Louisiana presented to black people as a way to keep them from voting in 1964.    ...

Here's the first page of a three-page "literacy" test that racist authorities in Louisiana presented to black people as a way to keep them from voting in 1964.    ...

Fun fact you might not be aware of if you are not the owner of a uterus: Periods go hand-in-hand with pooping.    ...

At Outside, Kyle Dickman interviews the lone survivor of the Granite Mountain Hotshots firefighting team and tells the story of the decisions that lead to the deaths of 19 men.    ...

David McRaney, author of You Are Now Less Dumb and the host of Boing Boing's podcast You Are Not So Smart, made this video about the effect your clothes have on the way you think and behave. &nb...

An octopus' life is short — two years is a pretty common lifespan — and heavily focused on reproduction. They only get one shot at carrying on the genetic lineage and die soon after breed...

You Chose Wrong is a Tumblr devoted to scans of the unhappy termini of Choose Your Own Adventure books, those pages you'd be instructed to turn to if you made the wrong choice.    ...

The Clash's new 12-disk set is called Sound System, and is loaded with a bunch of swag, including what looks like a giant cigarette.    ...

ProPublica has an in-depth story about the hidden dangers of over-the-counter drugs, especially Tylenol. One of the key problems with Tylenol is that it doesn't take all that many extra pills to start...

The once-mighty smartphone maker Blackberry has agreed to sell to a group led by its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial, for USD $4.7 billion.    ...

Spoilers. Kevin McFarland reviews the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad's final season, in which we ask which option is better in the Granite State: to Live Free, or Die? Catch up on previous episod...

Did you know that one inspiration for Chuck Palahniuks novel Fight Club was the author's time in the Cacophony Society?    ...

It's been a while since I've visited artist Jon Rafman's Google Street View site. He finds interesting Google Street View photos and posts them to his site, 9-Eyes (the Google cars have a 9-lensed cam...

We've featured several time-lapse videos of Gus Harper at work (here and here.) Based in LA, Gus has scheduled a show in San Francisco on Thursday, October 24th from 7 p.m.    ...

Illustrator Dan Berry shows how to draw Walter White, one tweet at a time. (Via This Isn't Happiness)    ...

On Modern Mechanix, Charlie's posted a wonderful article about the Floppy ROM, an exotic dead medium that encoded software onto flexidiscs that you played into your computer.    ...

At the terrifically fun XOXO Fest in Portland last weekend I met Haddie Cooke and Dan Benjamin of the 5by5 podcast network.    ...

I'm utterly fascinated by the way culture affects the outcomes of mental illness — whether that's in terms of prevalence of specific disorders, how we interpret and treat those disorders, or eve...

At Matter, physical therapy professor Eric Robertson writes about a very rare condition called rhabdomyolysis — it's what happens when chronically overworked muscle cells rupture and overload yo...

One year ago today Time-Warner Cable pisses off two Starship Enterprise Captains on two coasts: Behold, a Twitter exchange between Captains Kirk and Picard bemoaning the execrable state of Time-Warner...

Spoilers. Kevin McFarland reviews the latest episode of Breaking Bad's final season, in which we look upon Walter White's works, and despair. Catch up on previous episodes in our Boing Boing "Breaking...

The Chaos Computer Club's biometric hacking team has announced a successful attack on Apple's Iphone biometric fingerprint lock, using a variation on the traditional fingerprint-cloning technique.&nb...

One year ago today Pharmaceutical companies deliberately mislead doctors into prescribing useless and even harmful meds: Thanks to aggressive manipulation from the pharmaceutical companies and passivi...

As our coverage of Boing Boing: Ingenuity draws to a close, we'd like to remind you that video evidence of our living cabinet of curiosities is now online for your viewing pleasure.   ...

There's widespread consensus that the best cosplayers at this year's Dragoncon were the people who dressed up in bodysuits patterned after the notoriously bizarre institutional carpet at the Atlanta M...

The Manhattan Project was a secret, but it was as secret a secret as you've been lead to believe, writes Rebecca Rosen at The Atlantic.    ...

First, neither the authors of the paper, nor the journal its published in, have the best track record for careful work, well-documented research, or non-hyperbolic results.    ...

One year ago today Sneak peek at Preservation Hall Band live at Carnegie Hall album: Here's a hell of a way to start the weekend: a couple of outstanding tracks from the upcoming album St.  ...

At Boing Boing Ingenuity: Data Driven, more than 50 folks got their hands dirty with data through our partner Ford's OpenXC open source hardware and software platform. Boing Boing's talented video dir...

Andy (from Toronto's excellent Makerkids) sez, "Toronto's Mini Maker Faire is back on after a 2 year gap! MakerKids is very excited to be a part of it, and we're running Toy Hacking all weekend and a ...

One year ago today The WELL is bought by its users: The WELL, the online community which started out life more than 20 years ago as the Whole Earth Lectronic Link, has been sold to a company founded b...

Rick Kleffel interviewed Ian Tregillis, author of the amazing alternate history Milkweed books, about Nazi X-Men fighting a secret war against British warlocks.    ...

On Saturday, September 21, 2013, a "first": Four of the Boing Boing editors will be on stage, all at the same time, at the XOXO festival in Portland, Oregon.    ...

At Boing Boing Ingenuity: Data Driven, more than 50 folks got their hands dirty with data through our partner Ford's OpenXC open source hardware and software platform. Boing Boing's talented video dir...

Sculptor Marc Giai-Miniet creates astounding miniature boxes with beautiful, hypothetical libraries of teeny, tiny books in them. He lives in Trappes, France.    ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6Inxg5KvME NathanSharratt from Home Depot hit on the idea of stenciling street art with hydrophobic NeverWet stuff, producing designs that are only visible when it rai...

Felienne describes how she, Daan van Berkel and some other friends went away for a weekend to hack a Turing machine out of Excel formulas.    ...

"Residents of two states voted to legalize marijuana in 2012, but despite an increase in public support for liberalizing drug policy, American police arrested about the same number of people last year...

[Video Link, thanks Tara McGinley!]    ...

Ryanair (officially "the worst of the 100 biggest brands serving the British market") is changing its culture because the board are sick of seeing people weeping in the departure lounge and being hara...

Enjoy a gallery of strange Mars photos taken by HiRISE, collected by Jacob Kastrenakes. [The Verge]    ...

Announcing a billion dollar operating loss, Blackberry stock trading is frozen and 4500 jobs are to be lost.    ...

"In response to a FOIA request from USA TODAY, the Justice Department said its ethics office never looked into complaints from two federal judges that they had been misled about NSA surveillance," rep...

io9's Rob Bricken digs out some really quite horrible toys from the 1980s that are unlikely to get the Transformers / Thundercats / Tron reboot treatment.    ...

In the NYT, an item on new research that reveals what many of us grumpy med-skeptics have self-righteously known all along: those copper bracelets and magnets your grandparents and arthritis-suffering...

Today, in Der Spiegel: Documents from the archive of whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that Britain's GCHQ intelligence service was behind a cyber attack against Belgacom, a partly state-owned Bel...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • Breathtaking video of the Moon's rotation • Inside NASA's rubber room • HOWTO silkscreen at home &#...

Miguel Jaramillo has all the details here on Facebook, and tickets are available here. "There will be a special appearance by Rodney Rush (Combo), live art by local artist Cloud Face, silent auction, ...

In the Washington Post today, a story about an interesting problem in oncology: obese patients sometimes don't get enough chemo for their body weight.    ...

Sean Williams sez, "Best-sellers and award-winners Isobelle Carmody, Robert Shearman, Marianne De Pierres, Kim Wilkins, Mark Leslie, Mindy Klasky, Tansy Rayner Roberts, and many, many others, includi...

Yelp, Albuquerque, NM: Los Pollos Hermanos. The chicken is nice and tender with a great blend of spices. The fries are maybe not the greatest though, so minus one star.    ...

Matthew say: "The ACLU has released Suspicious Activity Report summaries obtained from California fusion centers (post-9/11 intergovernmental surveillance hubs) and is asking the Justice Department, t...

If a Saturn V rocket had ever exploded on the launchpad, it would have been a catastrophic event. NASA engineers once calculated that the resulting fireball would have been 1048 feet wide and would h...

While Disneyland's Jungle Cruise is down for maintenance, its temporarily unemployed skippers are passing the time by giving people tours of the wall around the construction site filled with terrible...

Surprisingly, there are a good half-dozen medical eponyms that come from Nazi doctors who performed experiments on unwilling human subjects or used bodies of executed prisoners in their work — o...

Popular Science has a great (and occasionally horrifying) slideshow of gadgets it once suggested were essential for enlightened, tech-minded parents.    ...

Robert sez, "The same team that created the Open Goldberg Variations, a new public domain recording and digital score of Bach's famous keyboard work, is fundraising on Kickstarter with the goal of lib...

Are you the kind of person who could lie in bed for 70 days for science? If so, you could make $18,000 in a NASA study of microgravity.    ...

"You swim slowly through the night, contemplating the solitary brutality of your existence as an apex predator." Jaws, the text adventure, is fantastic in three ways: as a game; in its adherence to t...

Georg sez, "End to end cryptography is one of the few truly effective ways in which privacy and security can be protected.    ...

Spiderman was arrested early Friday morning after allegedly breaking into a Pittsburgh convenience store. Police were summoned, according to local news affiliate WPXI, after a store clerk tased the i...

Top tech reporter Kara Swisher is to leave the Wall Street Journal for new pastures--a place yet to be defined--after parent company Dow Jones failed to strike a deal.    ...

Planet Earth will remain habitable for another 1.75bn years, according to findings published in the journal Astrobiology. You won't see its demise, though -- you're the last generation doomed to die b...

Stephen and Pat raise horses in New Brunswick. One of them, however, knows how to raise itself. "They think it's not real," Stephen said.    ...

Wired profiles Jim Golden, a commercial photographer who has a side project producing beautifully lit, wonderful shots of carefully knolled everyday items, from guitars to beach detritus.  &...

Cullen Hoback's documentary "Terms and Conditions May Apply" is a scathing look at the abusive, lengthy fine-print that dominates our online lives.    ...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Gweek is a podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, TV shows...

Not much to look at in this video, but the song is a far-out funky jam by The Mystic Moods.    ...

Cerkahegyzo is a Hungarian tool maker. In his spare time, he uses "needles, razor blades, sandpaper, files, and polishing stones" to carve pencils into works of art.    ...

The infinitely curious, brilliant, and kind Adam Savage gave the closing benediction at Boing Boing: Ingenuity with his ten ground rules for success.    ...

Beanie Babies inventor Ty Warner, with a net worth of $2.6 billion, is pleading guilty to federal tax evasion charges. Warner was charged on Wednesday, Sept.    ...

Ted Balaker says: "Occupational licensing laws are implemented in the name of protecting consumers, but they're often pushed by established businesses to thwart competitors.    ...

Hugh sez, "EFF'r Parker Higgins tells me this sign was at a rally he spoke at in Berlin recently." Grumpy Cat builds a GNU Internet [Frerk Meyer/CC BY-SA] (Thanks, Hugh!    ...

Andrea Chirichelli, a journalist, writer and video-maker, says: I made a documentary called Illustrators, that describes the job of four Italian illustrators who are world famous and have been awarde...

John Allan Raper, 19, of Chattanooga, was indicted on a rape charge on August 28. [Times Free Press via Arbroath]    ...

Over at out forums, the meta category contains your own topics, should none of ours be to your satisfaction. Today's most popular reader-started thread?    ...

Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate is a scholarly paper by Yochai Benkler (et al) that analyzes the links, traffic and spread of the anti-SOPA campaign...

Erin McCarthy takes us through the history of the Trapper Keeper, the brightly-colored binders that made the Mead Corporation $100m a year.    ...

Photo by Harry W. Frees.    ...

A bargain is betrayed in this animated story of boy meets wolf, with a terrible price.    ...

The infinitely curious, brilliant, and kind Adam Savage gave the closing benediction at Boing Boing: Ingenuity with his ten ground rules for success.    ...

One year ago today Eyeball Creep: a very special My Little Pony: Created for the Horror/Gore custom swap help at the MLPArena.    ...

David Rees, author of How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical & Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Pencil Sharpening, has a pencil sharpening service.    ...

My cable modem and WiFi router are on one end of our long house. The signal peters out before it gets to my daughters’ bedrooms, and because they like to do their homework in their rooms, I need...

photo:Josh Withers The sound extravaganza known as the Treasure Island Music Festival will again surface in the San Francisco Bay on October 19 and 20.    ...

The opalescent inshore squid (which, if you've eaten squid in the US, then you've probably eaten before) can change color just like octopuses can.    ...

Whether or not Voyager I has actually left the solar system, one thing is certain — it never would have made it far enough to have a debate if it weren't for the help of plutonium-238. &nbs...

UN investigators confirmed this week that sarin was used in attacks on civilians in Syria, and, at The Guardian, Ian Sample has an interesting story about the history of this poison, starting with its...

Sloppy UI collects oddities and screwups in iOS7's new look. We love Apple. We think this is the best way to point out what's not up to their standards so they can fix it.    ...

The infinitely curious, brilliant, and kind Adam Savage gave the closing benediction at Boing Boing: Ingenuity with his ten ground rules for success.    ...

Egor Egorov visited Berlin's Stasi Museum and extensively photographed its collection of spy-gadgets from the Cold War (like the squeeze-bulb-operated jacket-button camera above).   &nb...

Sen. John McCain can do that trick, too!: President Putin and his associates do not believe in these values. They don't respect your dignity or accept your authority over them.    ...

The thought, writes PSFK's Ross Brooks, is to make bags of chips that don't turn into grease-gloves for gentlemen with large hands.    ...

Bill Nye turns out to be a pretty amazing dancer -- in this Dancing With the Stars clip, he starts off with a surprisingly coordinated ballroom performance, which is honed to a just terrific performa...

The hoopy froods of Cyanogenmod -- a free/open replacement for Android, with lots of privacy- and security-oriented features -- have raised capital and are going commercial.    ...

Islandersa1 has scanned Welcome to Fear City, an amazing, never-distributed 1970s flier aimed at scaring the pants off of tourists in NYC, produced by the police union, who were looking for more fundi...

This brilliant mushroom cloud Jesus ad was the work of the Psychiana movement of Moscow, Idaho, led by Dr. Frank B.    ...

Jeremy sez, "Flagger is a browser add-on that automatically puts red flag keywords (like bomb, Taliban and anthrax) into the web addresses you visit.    ...

Michael sez, "We Robot, the conference in which roboticists, lawyers, philosophers and many others meet to try to work out how robots will fit into the society of the future, will be meeting in the Un...

Michael from Muckrock sez, ""Documents requested by MuckRock from the National Security Agency show it had a contract with the French security researcher VUPEN whose founder and CEO Chaouki Bekrar puc...

My friend Charles Platt (author of the excellent introductory guide Make: Electronics, which was O'Reilly's best-selling title) has written a 3-part reminiscence about his father, Maurice Platt, who w...

Zack sez, "On eBay -- a first edition of Bradbury's anti-book-burning classic signed and numbered by the author -- and bound in asbestos, to save it from the firemen depicted in the book.  &...

It yodels because it is a Swiss radio man. (Via Magic Transistor)    ...

After an NSA cryptographer took to ZDNet to defend his organization's lawless surveillance, EFF co-founder John Gilmore posted a long and thoughtful reply to the Cryptography mailing list (an absolute...

I just found out about this documentary of my favorite band, The Clash, which was produced by Google. Above: it's Topper, Paul, and Mick!    ...

Bob Knetzger let me know about this fun museum of old art supplies. Above, The Jon Gnagy Pantograf Drawing Device. Early '50s box lid for the Jon Gnagy Pantograf.    ...

ADVERTISEMENT This post is sponsored by the Ford Transit Connect. When talented woodworker Eric Cournoyer isn't immersed in sawdust, you'll likely find him amongst the trees in their more natural s...

Jeremy Bornstein is looking to raise $15,037 on Kickstarter to fund a 30 minute movie of him staring into the camera with his soulful eyes.    ...

What can Logan's Run, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and Shrek teach us about how not to design computers? Veteran interaction designer and author Chris Noessel explored these very questions in his ...

Fantagraphics posted a bunch of photos from the pages of the new printing of The Complete Crumb Comics Vol. 17: Cave Wimp.    ...

Zack sez, "After writing, casting and shooting the pilot for LOST in less than six weeks, how did J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof prepare the show to go to series?    ...

It’s getting chilly outside -- curl up with a good comic. We’ve got a good cross section for you below, from a hefty collection belonging to one of the all-time masters, to a pamphlet-size...

"I will make a film showing myself staring at the camera for thirty minutes," says my deadpan friend Jeremy. "Possibly more." The pitch video is hilarious.    ...

Jeffrey from 360 Cities sez, "I am one of the world's most obsessive and fanatical 360 photographers. So when this weird looking dual-fisheye Theta 360 Camera came out, I hunted high and low for how t...

Johnny Alucard is the fourth book in the Anno Dracula series; the earlier novels are Anno Dracula,The Bloody Red Baron and Dracula Cha Cha Cha -- and the definitive Titan editions include the long nov...

[Video Link]. From this Reddit thread. (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)    ...

Ben Marks of Collector's Weekly says: "When Baz Lurhmann's The Great Gatsby came out on DVD recently, our associate editor, Lisa Hix, noticed something poking out from under all the women's costumes: ...

Nicko from the Sunlight Foundation sez, "The Sunlight Foundation is celebrating five years of the Political Party Time site with a look at where and when U.S.    ...

ADVERTISEMENT This post is sponsored by the Ford Transit Connect. When talented woodworker Eric Cournoyer isn't immersed in sawdust, you'll likely find him amongst the trees in their more natural s...

I'll be at the Envision Symposium in Monterey, CA this week, with a bunch of interesting speakers from the world of live design and stage technology, and other areas of the entertainment industry.&nbs...

If you enjoyed Monday's post about Bruce Alexander's addiction-research experiment "Rat Park" (where heroin addicted rats were given luxurious accomodation, social stimulus, and lots of diverting ente...

What can Logan's Run, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and Shrek teach us about how not to design computers? Veteran interaction designer and author Chris Noessel explored these very questions in his ...

Nope, not a joke: new research has found a correlation between drinking four cups of coffee each day may and a reduced risk of prostate cancer recurrence or spread.    ...

Experimental filmmaker Jayne Amara Ross and composer/sound artist Frdric D. Oberland compiled an absolutely exquisite compilation of cinematic music and spoken word that inspires them, from Bernard He...

Matthew says: "Filmmaker Jason Phipps and his team spent several days atop Old Razorback (a.k.a. Trego Peak) to capture this time-lapse footage of Black Rock City."    ...

What can Logan's Run, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and Shrek teach us about how not to design computers? Veteran interaction designer and author Chris Noessel explored these very questions in his ...

Etsy seller Dellamorteco's $250 kraken bookends are made of resin and hand-painted; they're beautiful (as are his Tentacle Candlestick Holders).    ...

ADVERTISEMENT This post is sponsored by the Ford Transit Connect. When talented woodworker Eric Cournoyer isn't immersed in sawdust, you'll likely find him amongst the trees in their more natural s...

Big Data meets Bigfoot in Penn State PhD candidate Joshua Stevens's visualization of nearly a century of Sasquatch sighting reports in the US and Canada.    ...

Classic Nintendo tunes performed by a modern-day "player piano" (Yamaha Disklavier) and robot percussion system, under Raspberry Pi control. The software is responsible for translating the gameplay a...

Classic Nintendo audio is translated in (very near) real-time for live playing by a modern-day "player piano" (Yamaha Disklavier) and robot percussion system, under Raspberry Pi control.  &...

Today, Google announced the launch of Calico, a new company that will "focus on health and well-being, in particular the challenge of aging and associated diseases." Ex-Genentech Chairman/CEO and form...

ADVERTISEMENT This post is sponsored by the Ford Transit Connect. When talented woodworker Eric Cournoyer isn't immersed in sawdust, you'll likely find him amongst the trees in their more natural s...

"It finally quit movin' though, now that it bit itself," says our intrepid narrator. And that, writes wildlife ecologist David Steen, could have something to do with the fact that a decapitated coppe...

What can Logan's Run, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and Shrek teach us about how not to design computers? Veteran interaction designer and author Chris Noessel explored these very questions in his ...

Addiction — in the neuro-biological can't-get-enough-dopamine sense — might not be as powerful as pop culture would have us believe. A Columbia University psychology researcher has found t...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Vladimir Putin gets a job as The New York Times's new crusading columnist!    ...

What can Logan's Run, Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and Shrek teach us about how not to design computers? Veteran interaction designer and author Chris Noessel explored these very questions in his ...

LuAnne McNulty is an organic chemist. A few years ago, she developed severe asthma that's triggered by ... well ... organic chemistry.    ...

Tavie sez, "Legendary comedy troupe (and troupe of my heart), Kids in the Hall, have put together old and new material for a limited reunion engagement in Toronto this December.    ...

Across the United States, politicians are passing laws limiting abortion that are based on the idea that a fetus can feel pain after 20 weeks gestation.    ...

Joe Palazzolo, at the WSJ: 'Liking something on Facebook is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, reviving a closely watched case over the extent ...

By now, you've seen the amphibian invariably referred to in the press as "an unfortunate frog" being lifted towards the heavens after it wandered too close to a NASA launch pad in Virginia. &nbs...

Enjoy this tour of the countryside near Chamonix, France, courtesy of a GoPro-wearing eagle. [YouTube Video via Kottke]    ...

One year ago today Pattern for crocheted Panzer tank slippers: a peaceful project to while away the long nights on the Eastern front.    ...

Fun to say. Less than fun to experience. Haboobs are dust storms known for their distinctive wall-like appearance. Think the ice wall from Game of Thrones, but made of dirt, and heading right for you...

Apotheon is a game designed to resemble the art on classical pottery; Indiegames' Anthony Swinning says its plays as good as it looks.    ...

It is my sincere hope that this is a real obituary, written for a real person, by their real family. Because it's AMAZING.    ...

Apple's iPhone 5S has a better camera, faster hardware and a gold-trimmed option. How does it stack up to last year's model, and strong offerings from Samsung and Nokia?    ...

On Monday, scientists across Canada demonstrated against the Conservative government's war on science. The Stephen Harper government has imposed political minders on scientists, requiring routine pres...

Trevor Timm of EFF.org and FPF working with John on this op-ed, a few weeks ago. Photo: XJ. Activist and filmmaker John Cusack, in the Guardian, asks if US attorney general Eric Holder will guarantee ...

Rich Stevens from the wonderful Diesel Sweeties webcomic has released a new collection of music-themed strips called I'm a Rocker, I Rock Out.    ...

Hey, Londoners! A reminder: tonight is the launch for the UK edition of Homeland (the sequel to Little Brother) at the Forbidden Planet Megastore on Shaftesbury Ave, from 6PM-7PM.   &nb...

The talented illustrator I-Wei Huang reviewed this $300 articulated artist's mannequin. His verdict: awesome!    ...

Doubleclick co-founder Kevin O'Connor's new business is a company called Find the Best, and it's attracted a legal threat from a patent troll called Lumen View, who assert a patent over "multilateral ...

Tim O'Reilly sets out six "failures" from his experience founding and running O'Reilly Media. It's a frank self-examination, and contains a lot of smarts.    ...

In the 1950's Vikki Dougan appeared on the cover of Life, on countless LP sleeves, in the pages of Playboy, and in magazine ads for grooming products.    ...

"It was springtime in Seattle, and I was a newcomer. One afternoon I found myself at the Seattle Center, taking in the sights. I was standing at the base of the Space Needle, when I spotted a familiar...

This weekend in Cleveland is IngenuityFest, a celebration of "passionate and engaged people using every tool at their disposal to explore and create!" (This is not related to our own recent Boing Boin...

For a mere $300, you can buy a copy of the 1979 screenplay for the Gong Show Movie, written by Chuck Berris and Robert Downey, Sr.    ...

In Spiegel today, Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark report on how the National Security Agency monitors banks and credit card transactions, sometimes in apparent violation of national l...

At Boing Boing: Ingenuity, The Memory Palace's Nate DiMeo took the audience on a captivating journey from the construction of the first Ferris Wheel in 1893, to a time when massive lobsters beckoned t...

I take at least two daily showers and have problems with cotton towels getting damp, smelly, and yucky because they can’t dry quickly enough in the hours between.    ...

EDW Lynch of Laughing Squid says: "Sleight-of-hand artist and master pickpocket Apollo Robbins demonstrates the art of misdirection on an unlucky volunteer in this entertaining TED talk from TEDGloba...

The individual says he's been fighting the charge since March with no resolution in sight.    ...

Ron Paulk posted a proud video showing off his awesome homemade workbench and found himself inundated with requests to build similar benches for his fans.    ...

Thank you to our longtime sponsor ShanaLogic, sellers of handmade and independently-designed jewelry, t-shirts, and other curious creations. Show your love with this Anatomical Heart Ring by Lost Apos...

The news media now uses the word "cyber" the way smurfs use the word "smurf," but things used to be different.    ...

    ...

Thank you to our longtime sponsor ShanaLogic, sellers of handmade and independently-designed jewelry, t-shirts, and other curious creations. Show your love with this Anatomical Heart Ring by Lost Apos...

Spitbank Fort is an offshore island fortress built in the mid-Victorian to help protect Portsmouth. It's been renovated by some savvy hoteliers who've turned it into a luxury hotel and conference cent...

One year ago today Terrorists suck: The best US intelligence puts the whole al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction R&D budget at US$4,000; that Americans who are "radicalized" and brought to terror...

At Boing Boing: Ingenuity, The Memory Palace's Nate DiMeo took the audience on a captivating journey from the construction of the first Ferris Wheel in 1893, to a time when massive lobsters beckoned t...

Mirage Men is my friend Mark Pilkington's excellent book of the story behind the UFO story -- a history of disinformation, paranoia, hoaxers, espionage, and weird psy-ops.    ...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • Breathtaking video of the Moon's rotation • HOWTO silkscreen at home • Righting the Costa Concordia...

There's a new special-edition audiobook of Welcome to Bordertown, the YA reboot of the amazing, classic urban fantasy shared-world anthologies that practically invented the genre.   &nb...

"The hardest part about this project is finding a dinosaur that works as a planter." —Joselyn Hughes, who shows you how it's done, along with Grace Helbig.    ...

At Boing Boing: Ingenuity, The Memory Palace's Nate DiMeo took the audience on a captivating journey from the construction of the first Ferris Wheel in 1893, to a time when massive lobsters beckoned t...

Thank you to our longtime sponsor ShanaLogic, sellers of handmade and independently-designed jewelry, t-shirts, and other curious creations. Show your love with this Anatomical Heart Ring by Lost Apos...

"Traces of You," a pop-meets-tradition melody presented in a trippy kaleidescopic video from Anoushka Shankar's new album. The track features vocals by Norah Jones.    ...

Michigan State Police released this surveillance image of a silver person who is suspected in a rash of burglaries in Macomb Township and the surrounding area.    ...

In this video from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Louis of BHQF teaches you how to silkscreen, right in your bathroom.    ...

This stunning video of the Moon's rotation was made from images captured by NASA's Lunar Reconissance Orbiter's Wide Angle Camera (WAC).    ...

This stunning animation of the Moon's rotation was made from images captured by NASA's Lunar Reconissance Orbiter's Wide Angle Camera (WAC).    ...

This timelapse video shows the entire parbuckling of the Costa Concordia, and demonstrates what a massive task it was to right the sunken ship.    ...

John Scalzi's posted ten points about free speech, conversation, debate and related subjects. There's lots of good stuff there: "8. If people do not engage you, it is not necessarily because they are ...

At Boing Boing: Ingenuity, The Memory Palace's Nate DiMeo took the audience on a captivating journey from the construction of the first Ferris Wheel in 1893, to a time when massive lobsters beckoned t...

A Facebook-friendly Tapir. Yesterday, we linked to a golden oldie (at least in internet terms) from Boing Boing's official Facebook page: the horror of tapir penises.    ...

A Facebook-friendly tapir. UPDATE: Facebook has determined that the posting was acceptable after all! See below. Yesterday, we linked to a golden oldie (at least in internet terms) from Boing Boing's ...

Etsy seller CreationsChristopher has listed a $9500 suit of Batman scalemaille, originally made for a Batfan project called Legends: The Dark Knight.    ...

Here is our world divided equally into territories of about 10m people, with existing boundaries taken into account. "The logic of the map does not entirely discount existing ethnic or national bou...

Max your 401k or equivalent employee contribution Buy inexpensive, well diversified mutual funds such as Vanguard Target 20XX funds Never buy or sell and individual security.    ...

Harold Pollack's advice: Max your 401k or equivalent employee contribution Buy inexpensive, well diversified mutual funds such as Vanguard Target 20XX funds Never buy or sell and individual security....

[YouTube Link via Arbroath]    ...

Snooker is among the more sedate British pseudo-sports, lacking both the working-class charm of darts and the brutal physicality of lawn bowls.    ...

Barely Representational Reviews the Vitamix 6300 (aka the Food Wood-Chipper) How good is the Vitamix 6300? Its so good its earned a nickname in our family: the Food Wood-Chipper.   &nb...

Valve runs Steam, the largest and most successful online game-subscription service. And soon, it'll be the producer of a Linux-based game console to connect to it with.    ...

In Manic Pixel Dream Girl , a four-part comic, Elizabeth Simins recounts a memoir of being a girl who loved video games but felt that they were the reason she couldn't fit in with the other kids. ...

"We don't let animals suffer, so why humans?" [BBC]    ...

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Anything marketed with Alan Watts -- "Let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream that isn't under control" -- gets my click.    ...

If you love comics, you'll known Bone, Jeff Smith's Walt Kelly-esque independent funnybook that ran for an epic 13 years.    ...

Halfway through reading Alex Stone's memoir, Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, I read Ricky Jay's blisteringly negative review of the book in the W...

Halfway through reading Alex Stone's memoir, Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, I read Ricky Jay's blisteringly negative review of the book in the W...

This article from Garry Tan reminded me of the tremendous work of Bruce K Alexander, a psychology professor who retired from teaching at Simon Fraser University in 2005.    ...

A reader writes, "The early history of role-playing games seems like a constant battle between the creators of Dungeons & Dragons and its fans.    ...

Rogue librarian Megan Prelinger is co-founder of the incredible Prelinger Library and author of Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957 - 1962, the launchpad for her captivating prese...

If you like what you read, hear, and watch here on Boing Boing the blog, you'll love us on your favorite social media services, too.    ...

Boing Boing pal Chris Holmes, who works with Paul McCartney, sends a couple of videos that will be of interest to fans of the former Beatle and popular solo artist.    ...

Wait But Why has a fantastic series of graphs that aim to help us wrap our heads around the enormous timescales on which forces like history, biology, geography and astronomy operate.   ...

Prince Jefri Bolkiah is the younger brother of the Sultan of Brunei, and he is believed to have blown $14.8 billion on a series of follies including grotesque mansions; enormous collections of sports...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • Video of US spy chief's Star Trek command center replica • Jacob Appelbaum explains surveillance to the E...

[Video Link] Thanks, Tara McGinley!    ...

Ryan Heshka's astounding pulp-fiction inspired paintings are on display at the annual BLAB! group show, which opened this Saturday at the the Copro Gallery in Santa Monica on 9/14/2013.  &nb...

Rogue librarian Megan Prelinger is co-founder of the incredible Prelinger Library and author of Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957 - 1962, the launchpad for her captivating prese...

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, a major event in the history of civil rights in the United States.    ...

Watch the sixth episode of Breaking Bad's final series, titled "Ozymandias" after the Shelley sonnet, then pop sedative or a glass of whiskey, then a cold shower, and then and only then read Kevin McF...

Of course YouTube has video of the replica Starship Enterprise bridge where General Keith Alexander took Congressmen to "play Picard" and endorse his "collect everything" school of mass surveillance....

Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project and Wikileaks addressed the European Parliament on the issue of surveillance and freedom. It was a remarkable speech, even by Appelbaum's high standards.  ...

Meet Issus coleoptratus, an insect whose larva have interlocking meshed gears connecting their back legs. The gears help coordinate leg movements, helping the larva to jump fast and far.  &...

There has been a shooting incident at the Naval Yard in Washington, DC. At least 7 people are dead, and at least 3 shooters are believed to have been involved.    ...

The answer: Because of a harmless-to-humans viral infection. The bluish egg above was laid by an araucana, a breed of chicken native to Chile and one of two breeds well known for occasionally popping...

If somebody tells you an ostensible fact about human behavior or human thought and shows you a picture of an fMRI at the same time, are you more likely to believe what you've just been told? &nbs...

Rogue librarian Megan Prelinger is co-founder of the incredible Prelinger Library and author of Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race 1957 - 1962, the launchpad for her captivating prese...

These are the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that are thought to refer to acne. They're part of a nifty piece by Hilda Bastian that looks at the history of our understanding about zits — where pe...

Stephen Crohn lost a boyfriend and many friends to AIDS before realizing that there must be something different about him that kept him from contracting HIV.    ...

Join me at 12:30pm ET today for a MAKE Special Event: a live Google Hangout with Bre Pettis, co-founder of MakerBot, the 3D printer company.    ...

Last week, influential hip-hop deejay Mister Cee resigned from New York radio station Hot 97--for fewer than 24 hours. Andrea James writes how it reflects changing attitudes toward trans people in hip...

Skepticblogger Orac writes about the sad saga of Fabio Lanzonis sister Christinas ovarian cancer, which killed her, but with help from "University General Hospital and at the Burzynski Clinic." It's n...

One year ago today Maria Del Camino, a mutant excavator mated to a 59 El Camino, with the face of Maria from Metropolis: It started out life as the body of a '59 El Camino, and was then riddled with t...

A short film by Paul Sullivan that chillingly breaks down the creepy tactics New York City police used to intimidate and harass protesters, and arrest them for expressing their first amendment rights...

"Under the Fifth Amendment, Police cant force you to self-incriminate by testifying, or divulging something in your mind. Its unclear if that same protection applies if the password is your fingerprin...

In this week's podcast, I read aloud a recent Guardian column, "How to foil NSA sabotage: use a dead man's switch, which proposes a "dead-man's switch" service that'll tip people off when the NSA serv...

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Many authors struggle to write beyond what they know and write the other. While conventions are tackling this material, there is frequently not enough time to delve into thi...

Tim Pietrusky nailed it. Select the text!    ...

"A Middlesbrough man who pretended to be pop singer Justin Bieber to trick children into sending him sex act videos has been jailed for 14 years." [BBC]    ...

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan has a collection. [Gizmodo]    ...

Last week, influential hip-hop deejay Mister Cee resigned from New York radio station Hot 97 for fewer than 24 hours. Fabulously-named transgender vlogger Bimbo Winehouse had just published a recordin...

Ethan Zuckerman -- founder of Geekcorps and Global Voices -- is an activist who puts his money where his mouth is.    ...

Contemporary psych minimalists Wooden Shjips invite us on another gorgeous expedition into space rock with their latest release Back To Land, available November 12 on Thrill Jockey Records.  ...

Contemporary psych minimalists Wooden Shjips invite us on another gorgeous expedition into space rock with their latest release Back To Land, available November 12 on Thrill Jockey Records.  ...

Photo: Joe Steve Scoles reports for Northampton Herald & Post: The sinister clown that has been appearing on Northampton's streets made another visitation last night.    ...

In the forums, Daneel shares the things that always remain close at hand. What are yours?    ...

Hey, Londoners! I'm launching the UK edition of Homeland this Wednesday at the Forbidden Planet Megastore from 18h-19h. This is the sequel to Little Brother, and it includes the novella Lawful Interce...

Spoilers. Kevin McFarland reviews the sixth of Breaking Bad's final eight episodes, in which we look upon Walter White's works, and despair. Catch up on previous episodes in our Boing Boing "Breaking ...

Russell Brand explains to Guardian readers the circumstances under which he was ejected from the GQ fashion awards after giving a speech about sponsor Hugo Boss's connection to the Nazis.  ...

Ben Marks say: When Collectors Weekly writer and producer Hunter Oatman-Stanford was growing up in Austin, Texas, one of his favorite places to go as a kid was Aquarena Springs in nearby San Marcos.&n...

Allison Moon sez, "I'm Kickstarting my new book, a collaborative comic novella about queer lady sex. Think of it as 'en and the Art of Vulva Maintenance.'" $25 gets you a paperback.   &...

Senior executives from Netflix have explained their method for choosing which programs to license for the service: they buy the rights to the most-pirated shows in each territory, because that's where...

As found in Curiosities of Puritan nomenclature (1888), a collection of Puritan names chosen "to remind the child about sin and pain." My favorite?    ...

I have to go put my brain back in my head. Video Link    ...

Remember last week's post about NSA boss General Keith Alexander's stage-trick for selling surveillance to Congress? The General realized that if he made his "Information Dominance Center" look like t...

One year ago today Army "Civil Disturbances" training manual from 1975: You too can master the "butt stroke." Five years ago today : Amazing little Gerber Artifact multitool.    ...

A multilingual petition to Bob Iger asks for Disney's CEO and top management to do something about the (frankly, pretty terrible) condition of Disneyland Paris, a park I've stopped visiting (though it...

If you've wondered what happens when you stick a knife in a toaster (and really, who hasn't?), here, in six seconds, is a Vine clip demonstrating the inadvisability of this course of action. &nbs...

I bought this USB charging unit because I have a lousy sense of direction. I get lost in buildings and in cities, even ones Im familiar with.    ...

The Center for Public Integrity's After the Meltdown series documents the fate of the regulators, executives, and firms that were most directly responsible for the subprime meltdown, and demonstrate...

AT&T has started sending letters to some of its customers, threatening to disconnect them because they've been accused (without trial or a chance to rebut the evidence) of copyright infringement....

Join me this Monday for a MAKE Special Event: a live Google Hangout with Bre Pettis, co-founder of MakerBot, the 3D printer company.    ...

Samantha Cook sez, "Hacker Scouts, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland CA, has launched a Kickstarter to fund a new hackerspace designed for kids and their families.    ...

Spocko sez, "Artist Juan Ortiz took each episode of the original Star Trek and created a movie poster for it in the style of top graphic designers of the '60s.    ...

Last week Rob told us his favorite pen is a Pilot Precise, I am sure it is very nice. I prefer my Parker 51, it writes beautifully and has a marvelous history.    ...

I had a great time as a judge at the Insert Coin tech product entrepreneur competition at Engadget Expand earlier this year in San Francisco.    ...

One year ago today Middle East mobs freaking the hell out over YouTube video: This story is so weird. And with every advancement this week, it just gets weirder.    ...

"Cat Spots Doberman," by Camels and Friends, featuring Pancake the cat.    ...

Drawn & Quarterly has reprinted cartoonist Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Datebook Volume One, which came out in 2003. It's a terrific look at the "loose" work of one of the world's best living illust...

Mindy Budgor of Santa Barbara, California has has a book out about her adventures in Kenya, "training to become the world's first female Maasai warrior" and, naturally, "saving" the poor indigenous Af...

"This is an apology to the lady behind me in line at Cub Foods in Edina on a recent Sunday night.    ...

"The Phrenology of Barack Obama," a self-published book by Bensa Magos, is basically the best thing ever. Here's the publisher's blurb, and by that, I mean a blurb written by Bensa Magos about Bensa M...

Health and safety officials in Hawaii are warning swimmers, snorkelers, surfers, and beachgoers in general to keep clear of Honolulu waters after 1,400 tons of molasses leaked into the water earlier t...

Mindy Budgor of Santa Barbara, California has has a book out about her adventures in Kenya, "training to become the world's first female Maasai warrior" and, naturally, "saving" the poor indigenous Af...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • A cappella bass singer goes deep...    ...

Karl Lautman sez, "Since Boing Boing liked my domino piece, 'Ouroborus,' back in 2010, I thought you might be interested in another of my pieces: 'Primer,' a sculpture that generates prime numbers.&nb...

Zack sez, "There's an upcoming Canadian TV animation URBANCE, based on a short film by animator Joel Dos Reis Viegas. The neon-colored series combines elements of SF, hip-hop, and just plane rave-fla...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Gweek is a podcast where the editors and friends of Boing Boing talk about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, TV shows...

A new draft proposal at the Internet Engineering Task Force by Phillip Hallam-Baker sets out a work program to harden the Internet against Prism-style surveillance.    ...

M. Otis Beard sez, "John Perry Barlow has confirmed the rumor with journalists: General Wesley Clark did indeed attend Burning Man 2013.    ...

SETI Institute chief astronomer Seth Shostak bet hundreds of people at Boing Boing: Ingenuity that we'll hear from an extraterrestrial within 25 years. Find out why.    ...

A lawsuit filed by technology entrepreneur and hacker Kim Dotcom against the government of New Zealand demands NZ $6 million (roughly USD $5 million) over an "excessively aggressive and invasive appro...

A lawsuit filed by technology entrepreneur and hacker Kim Dotcom against the government of New Zealand demands NZ $6 million (roughly USD $5 million) over an "excessively aggressive and invasive appro...

"Barrett Brown makes for a pretty complicated victim," writes David Carr in his recent profile of the Dallas-based journalist "obsessed with the governments ties to private security firms." Brown, 32 ...

MuckRock News reports that Freedom of Information Act requests faxed to the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) started coming back as undeliverable a couple weeks ago.    ...

Itsy Bitsy is a free 78-page Kindle story by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Swedish horror writer of Let the Right One In.    ...

Even the NSA's boss and a lead judge in the secret intel courts admit Edward Snowden's leaks were in the public interest.    ...

Brad from Forecast the Facts sez, "Google is throwing its money around in DC politics, led by Republican operative Susan Molinari.    ...

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel has apologized for twenty years' worth of police torture under the stewardship of former Chicago PD Commander Jon Burge, and set aside $85M to compensate victims -- mostly ...

Your browser does not support the audio tag. Apps for Kids is Boing Boing's podcast about cool smartphone apps for kids and parents.    ...

Fashion designer and stylist Kelly Sparks looks at Marc Jacobs' new line of gothic Gotham costumery straight from your grandma's attic.    ...

SETI Institute chief astronomer Seth Shostak bet hundreds of people at Boing Boing: Ingenuity that we'll hear from an extraterrestrial within 25 years. Find out why.    ...

This execution brought to you by Westinghouse? I'd have guessed that Thomas "DC current is safer" Edison was behind it, but this fellow is in the gas chamber, not on an electric chair.  &nbs...

Over at Wired.com, David Kravets writes about an order by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge demanding that the US government begin to declassify its opinions related to the Patrio...

Over at Forbes, Kashmir Hill has an item about an electronics tinkerer who goes by the nom de net Puking Monkey.    ...

According to a 2013 study published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics (Annals of Mad Science and the Journal of Sophisticated Villainery not having nearly as good of impact factors) i...

There's not much right about this page from a mid-20th century kids' book. Besides the obvious creepiness, it looks like Alfred E Neuman on the left is trying to lift the skirt of the girl next to him...

"Women in tech are great. There's just not that many of them because tech is just a kind of thing that a lot of women arent that interested in." Pax "Jesus got raped by a pack of n**gers" Dickinson sp...

"It wasnt ever seriously in doubt," writes Kevin Poulsen at Wired, "but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the larges...

Boing Boing reader Allison Hoffman, whose crocheted Breaking Bad dolls I blogged about previously, tells us: Thanks to your positive review and others like it, I was able to write a book and its rele...

It's the thirtieth anniversary of the Violent Femmes's self-titled debut album, and they've settled their old differences and reformed, and they're touring a kind of greatest-hits set.  &nb...

LEGO's new Minifgure Series 11 includes a female scientist and a Yeti. Both are excellent additions to the minifig universe!    ...

I find a cappella groups to be oddly disconcerting and this one takes it to new lows. (via FP)    ...

Stockholm-based quartet Holograms mine and modernize the desolate punk landscapes that spawned Joy Division, Wire, and The Wipers. It's gritty, lo-fi punk (and post-punk) elevated by singer Andreas L...

Don Petit is one of my favorite American astronauts. He's made some great science videos during three different trips to the International Space Station.    ...

Tonight on BBC Three is the premier of Teen Exorcists, in which Brynne Larson and Tess and Savannah Scherkenback, teenage girls from Arizona who happen to be exorcists just like Brynne's dad, visit t...

Here we have the common Internet blobfish, recently voted World's Ugliest Animal. But wait! At Smithsonian, Colin Schultz has made a very good case for why the blobfish doesn't deserve its unattracti...

A Chinese woman reportedly suffered a snake bite when the reptile jumped from her wine bottle and struck her hand. Apparently, the woman from Shuangcheng, Heilongjiang Province had been drinking pickl...

Chris McCandless was the hiker and simple living advocate who died from starvation in Denali National Park in 1992. His story was later made into a book and movie called Into the Wild.  &nbs...

A 3-year-old girl enters a hospital with severe Vitamin A deficiency and micronutrient malnutrition. The cause: Her parents had self-diagnosed her with so many food allergies that her entire diet cons...

Paskaerte van NOVA GRANADA, en t'Eylandt CALIFORNIA. By Pieter Goos, 1666. Courtesy the Glen McLaughlin Map Collection, Stanford. A collection of maps that depict California as an island off North Ame...

One year ago today An accountable algorithm for running a secure random checkpoint: "output produced by a particular execution of the algorithm can be verified as correct after the fact by a skeptical...

Journalist Rob Walker took an "interactive Google Street View tour" of the Moto X (the Google-owned Motorola phone) assembly plant in Forth Worth, TX.    ...

Tom Fassbender says: "The last time the family went on a camping trip, we made Breakfast in a Bag. We always like to have a cooking adventure when we camp, so this time we baked chocolate cake in oran...

Here's an HTML-ified version of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, volume one, courtesy of the good folks at CalTech. We discussed these lectures when I reviewed Feynman, a biography in graphic novel fo...

Cruel as it is, Jimmy Kimmel's snob trap is diabolically clever. "It's called fashion, look it up!"    ...

Heather found this delightful antique doll in a local store here in Pittsburgh.     ...

Vertigo has published a 1,000-page, black-edged, leather-bound Sandman Omnibus, containing the first half of the comic's run (a second volume is due in November).    ...

Perhaps the greatest album cover designers of our times. [University of Houston via Brendan Koerner]    ...

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has appointed Mike Weatherley, an entertainment executive-turned-MP, to be his "intellectual property advisor." His remit will be "enforcement issues" on "the challenge...

Dungeons & Developers is a cute and useful "skill tree" in the style of an RPG levelling guide. It starts with basic HTML and works its way through various skills all the way to master Web develo...

An "expert" quoted in the Independent predicts that thieves will amputate their victims' fingertips in order to bypass the biometric locks on the new Iphones.    ...

Glenn Fleishman tracks humanity's vicarious voyage into the outer reaches of the solar system—and the strange, indefinite transition to the place beyond it.    ...

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the bestselling book Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), shares insights on late merging, the demographics of honking, and highway hypnosis. ...

How cool is this? My novel, Little Brother, is the San Francisco Public Library's "One City One Book pick for 2013, which means that it's the book for the annual "citywide book-club." The library is a...

Greg Nutt created this JJ Abrams-style trailer for Galaxy Quest, remixing the original. It's an interesting and entertaining exercise in form, and makes me wonder if you couldn't apply the treatment ...

Michael from Muckrock sez, "The problems with various government watch lists, particularly the TSA's, are well known, but a new release of documents shows just how problematic large-scale government t...

Weve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.— Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013   &nb...

This week's SF in SF (science fiction in San Francisco) reading series features Nick Mamatas & Greg Bossert. I reviewed Mamatas's excellent, acerbic novel Sensation back in 2011.   ...

Leilani Franco is in the new Guinness World Records 2014 Book for three records as a contortionist. "She's accomplished the most full body revolutions maintaining a chest stand in one minute (25), pe...

Greg Sandoval at The Verge writes about the Internet's indifferent amplification of rape threats and other unacceptable behavior from men.    ...

The widow of a man who built a bamboo treehouse in Venice, CA says her complaint about the proliferation of "McMansions" in her neighborhood led to an order from the City of LA to demolish the beloved...

David Harper's installation "Stacks" is part of the collection at the Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in upstate New York.    ...

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the bestselling book Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), shares insights on late merging, the demographics of honking, and highway hypnosis. ...

That's one giant leap for a frog beside NASA's LADEE spacecraft lifting off last Friday at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.    ...

Miss Cakehead writes, "A macbre preview of some 'treats' which will be sold in Miss Cakehead's infamous Eat Your Heart Out Halloween pop up cake shop in London - the theme for 2013 being 'Feed The Bea...

Australian tights makers Black Milk continue to plumb the depths of weird juxtaposition and tessellation with these Sesame Street Yip-Yip-Yip leggings, which retail for AUD85 plus S&H.  ...

Minnesota's favorite indie rock minimalists Low covers "Stay" by Rihanna. Yes, Rihanna. Proceeds of the sale of the single via iTunes go to Chicago's Rock for Kids.    ...

Malibu Media is a notorious porno-copyright-troll, a company whose business-model is sending blackmail letters to Internet users threatening to sue them for downloading pornographic movies (and foreve...

In the curiously compelling Hot Pepper Gaming video series, hosts eat hot peppers and then review video games. Here, Erin Schmalfeld enjoys a habanero pepper before telling us about Kingdom Hearts 3D...

Georg Fischer's "Image Glitch Experiment" is a fun and easy drag-and-drop Web tool for corrupting your JPGs in fascinating ways.    ...

Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, a bestiary of the world of Harry Potter, is to be filmed by Warner Brothers.    ...

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the bestselling book Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What It Says About Us), shares insights on late merging, the demographics of honking, and highway hypnosis. ...

One year ago today Magic: The Gathering is Turing complete: Alex Churchill has posted a way to implement a Turing complete computer within a game of Magic: The Gathering.    ...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • Parisian stop-motion music video violates anti-burqa law • How physics sunk the Titanic • Batman an...

This Terri Gross interview with Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman on WHYY's "Fresh Air," which is syndicated by NPR, is really terrific.    ...

This list of third-grade goals is presented by redditor Elbostonian as the work of his eight-year-old son. It's a rather ambitious document, but admirably so -- an excellent mix of stupid body tricks,...

YouTube Link. It's funny if you're not a cow. "No cows were injured during the making of this video," says the spacecraft manufacturer.    ...

Might want to check that photo, guys. [MSN]    ...

YouTube Link. Chilling and masterfully executed. "Noah," a short film directed by Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg. 17 minutes.    ...

Roughly 13 minutes of LOL. Slow clap, gentlemen. Slow clap. [Video Link]    ...

Art: Cellar-FCP Chris Kohler on Ico, the cult video game that's "inspiring everything." Almost 12 years after its quiet debut on Sonys then-new PlayStation 2, Ico (ee-koh) seems to be more popular now...

At Wired, David Kravets offers 6 of the most egregious. Wyden: So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on milli...

According to Wirecutter's survey of top pen bloggers, it's the Uniball Jetstream. My own favorite, the Pilot Precise (pictured above) comes in joint second place.    ...

As the Snowden leaks (and the materials that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has compelled the DoJ to publish) show, the NSA is out of control.    ...

In the tradition of August's book-review roundup, I've pulled together a collection of my favorite young adult reviews from the past decade.    ...

The trailer for Randy Moore's Escape from Tomorrow, shot inside Disneyworld without Disney's permission, is now available. The L.A. Times shares the wonderful story: To make the movie, Moore wouldnt...

Betabrand's "Socks of Catan" are coming in October, at $14 a pair. When Sarah heard that Catan wanted to collaborate with Betabrand, she proposed that we create clothing immediately identifiable to ...

Here's the slide deck [PDF] from a Michael Dearing presentation called "The Five Cognitive Distortions of People Who Get Stuff Done." As Kottke points out, a lot of context is missing, but what's ther...

Despite appearances to the contrary, sinister things are happening behind the squeaky-clean facade of Barrington, Colorado. When Nica Ashley, a free-spirited high schooler, is sent there to live with ...

Batman and Captain America rescued a cat from a burning home. (via Cosey Fanni Tutti)    ...

Today's XKCD strip, Reassuring, wittily illustrates Kevin Kelly's Seven Stages of Robot Replacement, which start with "1. A robot/computer cannot possibly do the tasks I do" and heads toward "5. ...

Writer, filmmaker, and "humanitarian bombing" survivor Jasmina Tesanovic reflects on the similarities between the war she experienced, and the strikes proposed by the United States against Syria. ...

At Slate, Haider Javed Warraich writes about how awesome "Breaking Bad" is from the perspective of a guy who's a practicing resident in internal medicine at Harvard.    ...

I'm skeptical that Dave Hakkens' Phonebloks idea would work in the real world from an engineering standpoint, but it's a marvelous concept.    ...

As the astonishing news that the NSA spent $250B/year on a sabotage program directed against commercial security systems spreads, more details keep emerging.    ...

We all know about Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, in which volunteers believed that they had shocked other volunteers to death, just because the experimenter had told them they were expected ...

In this photo, you can see some kind of fluffy, white specks on the paddle of a cactus. Those are scale insects, microscopic bugs that like to cover themselves in balls of white wax and nibble on pri...

Today's horrible, crushing disappointment comes to you from Etsy seller GreatWhiteVintage, who discovered this vintage anatomical sweatshirt with a flap showing the brains-n-stuff, and then sold it to...

Valley fever is a respiratory disease that can cause flu-like symptoms, rashes, and (sometimes) chronic lung problems. It's caused by a fungus that lives in dry soil, essentially hibernating for years...

Michael sez, "While on a brief visit to Paris last year, I made a silly stop-motion film-clip for my band The Leafs.    ...

The iceberg wasn't the only thing that took down the Titanic, explains Yale University materials scientist Anissa Ramirez. Instead, cold temperatures in the icy North Atlantic changed the behavior of...

I'm loving the "Doing Stuff with Crazy Aunt Lindsey" series of hands-on science YouTube videos for kids. I can't find the host's full name on the YouTube page or her website, but she's a fantastic pr...

James Broughton (1913-1999) was an icon of San Francisco counterculture and the Bay Area's Beat scene. A poet, filmmaker, and prankster, Broughton was one of the original Radical Faeries and a member...

From advertising's deckchair on the periphery of the human condition: The "sorry" is similarly psychopathic, apologizing for nothing and only to those who demanded it--then explaining why they were wr...

What is it about eating Szechuan peppers that causes the lasting tingling or numbness in your mouth and lips after the burn has subsided?    ...

A red mailbox has mysteriously appeared on the side of a bridge crossing the River Thames in Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire, England. Even village resident Uri Geller (yes, that Uri Geller) is puzzled b...

National Geographic posted an exploded view of the Deepsea Challenger, the submersible designed by James Cameron and Ron Allum. This was the sub that Cameron piloted last year to the bottom of Challen...

One year ago today In Letterspace, No One Can Hear You Kern: We spent $2.5 billion to put Arial on Mars.    ...

Molly Crabapple on where American locks up the the war on terror's inconvenient prisoners, a place where "self-satisfaction extends up the chain of command." The guards spoke in cliches.  &...

Molly Crabapple returns to where American locks up the the war on terror's inconvenient prisoners, a place where "self-satisfaction extends up the chain of command." (Previously) The guards spoke in ...

Megan Twohey's Reuters investigative report on the dark side of just-outside-the-law but not-exactly-illegal adoptions in the United States is chilling. Child sexual abuse is part of the story; those ...

Filmmaker Bahram Sadeghi in Amsterdam, whose epic phone-pranking of the NSA we blogged about previously, tells Boing Boing, "Because a lot of my friends (and other people who posted a comment on our ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Counter-Earth has some sensible restrictions on people of a certain age.    ...

In John Wooley's hilarious 30-minute mockumentary The Internet Must Go, he plays a marketing shill hired by the big cable operators and phone companies to convince Americans to accept corrupt, non-ne...

[About + GIFs]    ...

(Warner Bros/Sasha Mordovets and Getty) Russian lawyers are reportedly planning to sue Warner Bros because Dobby the House Elf from the Harry Potter movies looks too much like Vladimir Putin. &nb...

Sociologist and radio/TV presenter Aleks Krotoski's debut book Untangling the Web consolidates and presents a decade's worth of social science related to the Internet, conducted by Krotoski and other ...

The New York Times has published further details of last week's leaked documents detailing the NSA's program of sabotage to crypto products and standards.    ...

The New York Times has published further details of last week's leaked documents detailing the NSA's program of sabotage to crypto products and standards.    ...

As the Snowden leaks about NSA surveillance continue to trickle out, it's easy to miss the fact that the NSA is now releasing hundreds of pages of damning documents about its activities.  &n...

Finn writes, "Prior, Norway's leading brand of chicken and eggs, has just launched Princess Eggs and Pirate Eggs, to get children to eat more eggs.    ...

My friend Jon Lebkowsky (an editor at bOING bOING and the co-founder of Fringe Ware) says, "Your Popeye post sent me to Amazon, where I discovered you can acquire old original issues of Mad Magazine (...

David sends us "An obituary for a prolific commenter on the Brisbanetimes.com.au news website. This nonagenarian only took to the internet in the last year or so and was prolific in the comments on th...

https://vimeo.com/74033442 I'm not sure how Anthony Cerniello made this video of Danielle aging 60 years in five minutes, but it is amazing.    ...

Ferdinando Buscema is a magic experience designer whose work draws from mechanical engineering, sleight-of-hand, and his explorations of hermetic traditions. We couldn't have asked for a more astonish...

Etsy's NutCracks sells these "5 Disney Villians Sugar Skull" prints at $19. They measure 11" x 14" "Printed on acid free paper with ultrachrome inks." They're also available as solo prints.  ...

Herbert Chaves, 35, continues his surgical transformation into Superman: I feel like a Superhero whenever I pull on the costume, but my mission is not to save the world but to help in my own small way...

The Flickr account for the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab has tons of gorgeous CC-licensed photos of bees, snakes, bugs, and plants.    ...

Sportscaster Adam Lefkoe of WHAS11 in Louisville, Kentucky dropped 41 Seinfeld references into five minutes on air. More at Syracuse.com.    ...

My dog Nemo just ate my favorite book of poetry. This copy of Hayden Carruth's From Snow and Rock, from Chaos travelled with me for years, I've already ordered another copy of the same edition. ...

Earlier this summer, I harvested honey from my backyard beehive. I follow the Backwards Beekeepers’ no-treatment school of bee husbandry -- I don’t do anything other than set up a box and ...

A report on Vocativ reports on rumors on Chinese social media and Taiwanese newspapers that the rich and powerful hire "body doubles" to go on trial for them and even serve their prison sentences.&nbs...

It's basically the last-gen model in plastic, with iOS 7, a $99 price tag, and nice colors. Put me down for a green one!    ...

It has a slightly better camera, a fingerprint sensor, and it comes in gold. [The Verge]    ...

DC Denison of MAKE says: Autodesk today expanded its suite of free 3D tools by partnering with Circuits.io to launch an electronics design tool: 123D Circuits.    ...

Sound it Out # 59: Polia - Chain My Name (free MP3) On their second album, Shulamith, Minnesotas Polia bring a more aggressive sound to their languid, sexy music.    ...

One year ago today Haunted Mansion/Small World mashup tee: The Haunted Mansion has taken on the small world in the battle of which ride is really the scariest.    ...

1. MIT 2. Harvard 3. Cambridge 4. University College London 5. Imperial 6. Oxford 7. Stanford 8. Yale 9. Chicago 10.    ...

Yesterday I posted a photo from Barbara G. Walker's fabulous 1972 instructional book, Knitting From The Top. It turns out Barbara is not only a terrific knitter, she is also a designer and illustrator...

A good candidate for the dumbest murderer you'll read about this year! She reported him missing, only to "find" the body herself in a million-acre national park: "It was a place he wanted to see befor...

Documents released today as a result of the House v. Napolitano settlement document the systematic use of laptop searches at the US border to evade the need to get a warrant to read Americans' email.&...

Scientist sets out to determine the chemical differences between bourbon, rye, Tennessee, and other whiskeys. His name: Tom Collins. No.    ...

Here's a great piece by Anahad O'Connor that looks at the dozens of studies that are supposed to link the act of eating breakfast with weight loss — and the problems that very quickly arise when...

Built for $2100 and change, and easily broken down and transported. [Rig Some Light] It is 18 feet wide at the widest point and about 13 feet tall.    ...

How did he get caught? "VPN provider ratted me out." [ask.fm]    ...

Slant rounds up the most popular monospace fonts good for cranking code. Adobe's Source Code Pro is top of the pile, but Consolas is only a couple of votes off.    ...

In 1910, Walter Goodacre published a map of the Moon, created over the course of several decades using nothing more high-tech than a good quality backyard telescope.    ...

If you live near Pennsylvania's Lackawanna State Forest and want your kids to learn to use knives responsibly -- an important skill, endangered by scaremongering and helicopter parenting -- you can ta...

Paul Komoda created these gorgeous sterling Vincent Price rings; he's running a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for his living expenses (A "survival art sale") with lots of great pieces in the re...

At Forbes, Katie Kelly Bell has an interesting look at the extremely subjective measurements happening behind the seemingly objective instruction to drink only "in moderation".    ...

We all know that you can drop red food dye in white wine and get a critic to call it plummy and tannic.    ...

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

Back in July, I blogged about WILD, a gorgeous, sweet picture book about a feral child who won't be tamed.    ...

Evaluating Graduated Response, a new paper from Rebecca Giblin from the law school at Australia's Monash University looks at the impact of "three strikes" and "graduated response" punishments for fil...

Evaluating Graduated Response, a new paper from Rebecca Giblin from the law school at Australia's Monash University, looks at the impact of "three strikes" and "graduated response" punishments for fi...

Iconic southern California car salesman Cal Worthington has passed away at the age of 92. Both you and your dog Spot will be missed.    ...

Tony sez, "The UK Department for Culture, Media & Sport is supporting a review of the .uk domain name registration process, suggesting that restricting offensive words in .uk domain names will he...

Tony sez, "The UK Department for Culture, Media & Sport is supporting a review of the .uk domain name registration process, suggesting that restricting offensive words in .uk domain names will he...

Michael from Public Knowledge sez, "Today the DC Circuit Court is hearing Verizon's challenge to the FCC's net neutrality rules. It has been a while since net neutrality was in the news, so we created...

A long, fascinating profile of NSA "cowboy" Gen. Keith Alexander in Foreign Policy reveals that the top spook is fan of science fiction movies and built his old command room to look like the bridge of...

[Video Link] Matthew says, "Filmmaker Eddie Codel used a DJI Phantom drone and a GoPro Hero3 camera to film a "drone’s eye view" of Burning Man."    ...

Islamic attire being against Abercrombie and Fitch's "look policy", it fired a Muslim employee. There's so much one might say about this, but it is the opinion of one person that matters: Federal Judg...

I haven't seen the Miley Cyrus twerking video, but I just watched Danish silent film star Asta Nielsen dance in this 1910 film called Afgrunden and I am guessing this one is better.   ...

Gille Monte Ruici makes wondrous junkbots. I mean, totally great. He writes adorable little French fairytales about them, too. He sells them in Paris's Brauer Galerie.    ...

Archie was created by Bob Montana, but Dan DiCarlo gave Archie and his pals the looks and personalities we are familiar with.    ...

Princeton computer science profession Ed Felten has an excellent explanation of what it means to security to have the NSA actively sabotaging cryptographic standards and tools.    ...

Gregory Perry says he got stiffed by Lockheed Martin. He says they asked a company he co-owned to develop a fake spy-rock for the Department of Defense in the early 2000s, but didn't pay the company, ...

Pt and Limor write, The New York Times asked Adafruit's founder and engineer, Limor 'Ladyada' Fried to contribute to an article series called ROOM for DEBATE.    ...

I'd not heard of the Hobonichi Techo day planner until I read this interview with the publisher. An English version is coming out soon and I want one.    ...

Sadly, several knit garments from the first edition of Barbara G. Walker's Knitting From The Top (1972) are not included in the most recent addition.    ...

Security researcher Brian Krebs has had a look at the contents of "BestRecovery" (now called "PrivateRecovery") a service used by Nigerian 419 scammers to store the keystrokes of victims who have been...

Enjoy the first chapter of a new novel from James Erwin, creator of Rome Sweet Rome. If you'd like to support it, Erwin has established a crowdfunding project where you can order DRM-free ebooks and h...

My latest Guardian column, "How to foil NSA sabotage: use a dead man's switch," conducts a thought-experiment for a "dead-man's switch" to undermine the system of secret surveillance orders used by Am...

More than 90% of land plants have symbiotic relationships with fungus and those relationships seem to date back hundreds of millions of years.    ...

Check out Scicurious' report on a recent research paper entitled "Spontaneous Ejaculation in a Wild Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops aduncus)" — in which we learn that dolphins can mast...

One year ago today Gendered crayons: From Melissa and Doug, whose image is of a cool, progressive toymaker. Five years ago today Chile's forgotten socialist Internet: Allende contracted with a Britis...

A faster meat safety program, with fewer government inspectors and more inspectors employed directly by the meat companies themselves, is associated with higher levels of contaminated meat.  ...

The artificial sweetener Splenda was discovered when a chemistry grad student misunderstood his advisor's instructions to "test" a compound and tasted it, instead.    ...

This image shows magnetic anomalies in the South Pacific — underwater lines where the crust of the Earth either matches up with the planet's overall magnetic polarity (reds and purples) or is c...

Adrian Tomine's New Yorker cover is called "Crossroads." He was interviewed about it on the New Yorker's website. When asked how being a father affects New York living, he says, “We live in a no...

I go somewhere on a plane at least twice a month. For over ten years I’ve used a Briggs & Riley roller carry-on, and I’ve been fairly happy with it.    ...

I've told you before about Ghosts With Shit Jobs, Jim Munroe's mockumentary about "a future where China's the first world and North Americas the third world." Jim and co took the movie to the Beijing ...

I'm totally fascinated by this photo that the R.J. Dunlap Marine Conservation Program posted to their Facebook page. It shows little branches of staghorn coral growing on a "tree" made of PVC pipes.&...

Patrick Nielsen Hayden and David Hartwell have edited Twenty-First Century Science Fiction , a 250,000-word anthology of short fiction by writers who came to prominence since the turn of the century.&...

James Siddle took a close look at what ratings at Amazon and GoodReads reveal about the long-running fantasy epic, Wheel of Time.    ...

Messy Nessy Chic, on an abandoned company town maintained in perfect condition by its only resident: "Where the Alaskan border is closer than the nearest town lies a mysterious hidden place, accessibl...

Tim Harford's latest book, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, is a great macroeconomic companion to his 2005 debut, The Undercover Economist, an excellent and accessible book on microeconomics.&nb...

An NSA training slide leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden shows that the agency broke into computer systems run by Petrobras, Brazil's state oil company; the President of Brazil; SWIFT, the glo...

Spoilers. Kevin McFarland reviews the fifth of Breaking Bad's final eight episodes, in which Walter White is caught between a rock and a hard place. Catch up on previous episodes in our Boing Boing "B...

Writing in the Financial Times, Bruce Schneier expands on Charlie Stross's demographic theory of US military/espionage leaks, which holds that the end of the "job-for-life" culture in the spookocracy ...

On the Cryptography mailing list, John Gilmore (co-founder of pioneering ISP The Little Garden and the Electronic Frontier Foundation; early Sun employee; cypherpunk; significant contributor to GNU/Li...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • Lego robot that strips DRM off Kindle books • SpaceX's futuristic rocket design toolkit • Steve Job...

Image:" irony is dead," from Glenn Caley Bachmann's photostream, shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.    ...

According to a report in Der Spiegel, the NSA has cracked the protection on Android, iOS and Blackberry devices, and can access protected files, including contacts and location history.  &nb...

ADVERTISEMENT [Video Link] OpenXC is our partner Ford's open-source platform that connects smart phones and tablets to real-time vehicle data.    ...

One year ago today Increasingly desperate quest to find photos to illustrate news stories about Eurozone crisis : Taking pictures of distressed Euro coins isn't cutting it anymore.   &n...

's "Books" is a set of bookends made from mutated, bent hardcovers, or reasonable facsimiles thereof. No indication if they ever went into production or were just one-offs (to be honest, they might e...

Annalee Newitz's Stop pretending we aren't living in the Space Age is a magnificent rant on the incredibly achievements of modern space programs, and a savage indictment of the lack of imagination und...

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud writes, For the first time, a full standards bureau is now available on the Internet for people to examine.    ...

Nicholas sez, "Toronto's oldest hackerspace just turned 5 years old, and with about 50 active members (not to mention all the folks who attend workshops and events), we desperately need to move out of...

One million of the worst-paid people in Britain will have to attend welfare caseworker assessments, and if they are deemed to be "not working enough," they face having their benefits cut -- even if no...

Erik sez, "Three years ago, Musopen raised nearly $70,000 to create public domain recordings of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and others.    ...

Peter Purgathofer, an associate professor at Vienna University of Technology, built a Lego Mindstorms robot that presses "next page" on his Kindle repeatedly while it faces his laptop's webcam. ...

Errata Security CEO Rob Graham has published a blog-post speculating that ninety percent of the traffic on the Tor anonymized network can be broken by the NSA.    ...

Imagine a taxi-meter style display that shows you the true cost of driving for every trip you take in your car. That's just what David Harris and Steven Kryskalla built at our first hack day event.&nb...

"Serious cat is serious," shared by __AK__ in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool.    ...

Alan sez, "A Representative from New Jersey, Rush Holt, has introduced the aptly named 'Surveillance State Repeal Act' with the goal of rolling back some of the worst excesses of the NSA regime. ...

One year ago today Anthrax's Dan Spitz is now a master watchmaker: He quit the music business to become a world-renowned, prize-winning watchmaker who hand-lathes his own replacement parts for antique...

James sez, "Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation published a new report on patent assertion and startup innovation.    ...

Here's an Ignite talk by Hilary Mason, chief scientist at Bitly, explaining how she scraped data from multiple sources to create a service that locates NYC's most optimal cheeseburger, using an algori...

"I took Roberta to a small neighborhood bar on Queen Anne Hill. We weren't there for five minutes before three guys moved in on us." From Real Stuff #3 (Fantagraphics, May 1991).   &nbs...

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir is that sort of book that makes you want to immediately spark up a conversation with its creator.    ...

The Smart Brake gives drivers behind you information about what you are doing, and says thanks to courteous drivers who let you merge into their lane.    ...

"How do you improve upon 3D printers with multiple color heads? Members of the makerspace Artisan's Asylum have built what they're calling a 'microfactory' - a self-contained machine that etches circu...

Glenn Fleishman posts a passionate defense of the value of good graphic design. Even if you don't give a crap about the new Yahoo!    ...

May 1936. "Kitchen of Ozarks cabin purchased for Lake of the Ozarks project. Missouri." Photo by Carl Mydans, Resettlement Administration. The scalloping on the newspaper above the window is heartbrea...

The Internet company Yahoo! has released a Transparency Report today, detailing the requests it receives for user information from government agencies.    ...

For more than a decade, our friends at GAMAGO have created some of the most delightful, inspired, and fresh characters around for t-shirts, toys, and other bric--brac.    ...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • SpaceX's futuristic rocket design toolkit • Steve Jobs' first television appearance • Documentary a...

Back in May, I wrote about a contest to come up with peaceful applications for 3D printers from the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Lab and Type A Machines.    ...

TempAssure addresses the problem of children and pets suffering from heat stroke after accidentally being left inside hot cars.    ...

R.U. Sirius, the founding editor of Mondo 2000 (which greatly inspired Carla and me to start bOING bOING) wrote about the beginnings of the late great cyberdelic magazine for the Omni Reboot. &nb...

New York Times correspondent John Schwartz shares an excerpt from his book "Oddly Normal: One Family's Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality," which was released in a new...

The Smart Brake gives drivers behind you information about what you are doing, and says thanks to courteous drivers who let you merge into their lane.    ...

The University of California, Irvine is offering a free MOOC (massive open online course) about The Walking Dead. Titled Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMCs The Walking Dead, it's a multidis...

Demonstration of SpaceX's experimental rocket design tools melding gestural interfaces, 3D design, virtual reality, and 3D printing.    ...

Ben Marks of Collector's Weekly says: Recently we spoke to Dan Kinem who, with Levi Peretic, has released a documentary called Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector.  &...

Last month, an adventuresome tourist was dropped by boat on the small, remote Governor Island off Western Australia. He planned to explore the island but quickly realized he didn't have enough food an...

[Video Link] We've blogged this before, but this backhaul video from Steve Jobs' first television appearance in 1978 is classic internet zen.    ...

Morbid Anatomy's Joanna Ebenstein just edited a new book by Dr. Pat Morris about English taxidermist Walter Potter (1835-1918) whose creations are icons of Victorian wunderkammer whimsy.  &...

Want to sleep in Robert A Heinlein's bed? THe Heinlein Society was unable to find a museum to take this artifact from his home so they are now selling it on eBay.    ...

In this 1972 interview, Moe Howard talks about the origins of the Three Stooges and more. Moe Howard interview (MP3) (Via Classic Television Showbiz.    ...

Ann Crispin -- science fiction writer, crusader against scams, Star Trek novelist, and nice person -- has died. She wrote of her own impending death, "I want to thank you all for your good wishes and ...

One year ago today How to turn your cars ashtray into a smartphone dock. Five years ago today International day of protest against surveillance Oct 11: We need to get this on the radar for the electio...

Male fiddler crabs are famous for their mismatched front claws — one great big and threatening, one eensy-weensy. (I used to use this as a metaphor for the split in my SAT scores.) But what's r...

The Smart Brake gives drivers behind you information about what you are doing, and says thanks to courteous drivers who let you merge into their lane.    ...

Since October of 2010, "What's Up In the Solar System" has provided monthly updates on the various locations of humanity's many space probes.    ...

There are many downsides to hydraulic fracturing and the natural gas it's used to harvest, but for the people who work in America's booming oil and gas fields there's a positive that outweighs a lot o...

Psychology professor Jamil Zaki has a nice post explaining why the findings that come out of experimental psychology should not be taken as lessons to help you lead a better, happier, fuller life.&nbs...

Apps for Kids is sponsored by HuluPlus. HuluPlus lets you binge on thousands of hit shows anytime, anywhere on your TV, PC, smart phone or tablet.    ...

UK mobile providers, including O2 and its reseller GiffGaff, are blocking commercial VPN providers that help to secure sensitive communications from criminals, hackers and government spies.  ...

Wherein Agence France Presse learns that "mandatory kill" orders have their limits on the Internet.    ...

In 1992, the Beastie Boys appeared on the Arsenio Hall show to perform "So Watcha Want," with Cypress Hill. I'd never seen this before and it's just great.    ...

Ann sez, "I am a librarian in Arizona in charge of my county's social media. For September, National Library Card Sign-Up Month, I created 30 Penguin-Pelican style vintage paperback book covers repres...

The Wet Lord bleeds. Mr. Ballmer and Brad Smith, Microsofts general counsel, were walking across the law firms lobby, when Mr.    ...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: Ask a Slave, funny web video history series Rosh Hashanah meets Daft Punk • Massive hovercraft lands on crowded b...

Security guru Bruce Schneier has posted a typically pragmatic and passionate overview of why you can, and should, follow practices that improve your odds of being able to communicate privately in the ...

I am horrifically allergic to poison oak. I am also an avid mountain biker in northern California. This not a good combination.    ...

A Federal court order [PDF, via Cryptome] prohibits Barrett Brown, a jailed internet activist and journalist who faces more than 100 years in prison, from talking to the media.    ...

The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom have pressured news organizations connected to the Edward Snowden stories to STFU.    ...

Guess what -- Boing Boing has added a new show to its line-up of terrific podcasts! It's called You Are Not So Smart and it's hosted by David McRaney, a journalist and self-described psychology nerd...

A significant addition to Kyoto's justly famed cuisine: the 1.2 kg mega pizza-burger: Pizza Little Party, a home-delivered pizza chain in Kyoto, is going to start selling the massive burger-like piz...

I loved Robert Crumb's back cover from Weirdo #3 (Fall 1981). I don't think it makes any sense, but I spent hours trying to figure it out over 30 years ago.    ...

The stories today in the NYT and Guardian on the NSA's ability to uncloak a lot of encrypted internet communications should not inspire you to "Give up and decide that privacy is dead," says Micah F.&...

In the New York Times, a report based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden says the National Security Agency is "winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical tri...

Huge human rights news from Latin America today: the Center for Justice & Accountability and the family of Victor Jara are suing the man widely understood to have tortured and killed the Chilean...

Huge human rights news from Latin America today: the Center for Justice & Accountability and the family of Victor Jara are suing the man indicted by Chilean prosecutors for torturing and killing...

"Ask a Slave" is great stuff. [Video Link] to one episode, and the entire web series is here.    ...

Cambridge, England, has a pigeon problem. The verminous birds cause so much mess that a $170,000 annual budget was established to deal with them.    ...

Andrew Chambers was a paid informant for the DEA from 1986 to 2000, says Brian Sonenstein of Just Say Now, a cannabis legalization organization.    ...

More evidence that American travel is headed for a two-tier security theater that is reasonable and light for rich people and business travellers, and increasingly awful and invasive for everyone else...

You know how Obama and GWB's spin-doctors redefined "imminent" (as in "we attacked pre-emptively to prevent an imminent attack")? Well, if it's good enough for the Prez, it's good enough for Florida's...

It happened in Florida. (Thanks, Matthew!)    ...

[Video Link] I've mentioned before that I love Jimmy DiResta's MAKE videos. He's an alpha-maker who has hosted several TV series (Dirty Money, Against the Grain, Hammered with John & Jimmy DiRes...

One year ago today Introducing Elfquest at Boing Boing! It's my great pleasure to welcome Wendy and Richard Pini to Boing Boing, where they'll be publishing the next chapter of their long-running fant...

Smithsonian interviewed Janie Bryant, the talented costume designer for Mad Men: I pay huge attention to the men. They all have different shirt collars and different cuff links, or may not have cuff ...

Happy new year!    ...

Dean's Kickstarter, which has blown past its goal and raised over $100,000, ends in four hours. The book is at the printer, he's already received a blank copy to test the materials, and it's going to ...

Over at Wired News, David Kravets reports on a number of developers who are trying to build secure email services capable of ensuring that your communications remain as private as possible.  ...

Sunbathers on Russia's Baltic Coast were surprised by massive hovercraft landing on the beach. According to BBC News, Russian authorities said this was part of a "routine training exercise." &nb...

Our partner Ford created a terrific video highlighting the fun we had at Boing Boing Ingenuity: Data Driven, our first ever hack day that took place on August 17!    ...

How I spent the weekend: I flew to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation in a stunt helicopter with actor, writer, filmmaker, and activist John Cusack, friend of B...

Kyle Roberts used Mattel's new classic Batman action figures to recreate the iconic title sequence of the 1960 Batman TV series.    ...

I'm not able to figure out where, exactly, this sumi-e ink-wash-style painting of the Alien originates, but it's something else. The garbled machine translation of this Chinese article seems like a pr...

Video Link [HT: Tara McGinley]    ...

Sony's minsucule QX Lens Camera offers the specs of its high-end RX100 point-and-shoot--a 1" sensor and Zeiss F1.8 glass--but clips right onto a smartphone.    ...

"If you look carefully at the research, sexual diversity, on the level of genital appearance, hormones and chromosomes, is present and predictable in humans," writes Cory Silverberg, who is the Sexual...

About this lovely video, which samples bits of Colombian folk culture -- and the South American nation's flora and fauna! -- into a trippy animated adventure: Armadillo is a band that sprouted out of...

Swords: A major cause of nose loss in 16th-century Europe. (Also a problem: syphilis.) The good news is that somebody had a plan for how to replace your missing nose.    ...

JOSIV5 isolated the vocals from the 16:11 medley on the B-side of the Beatles' Abbey Road. They're unexpectedly lush and gorgeous and ripe for mashing up.    ...

Making the media rounds as America formalizes a decision to go to war against Syria, this photo by Melina Mara at The Washington Post: Senator John McCain plays poker on his IPhone during a U.S. ...

It's the time of year when you're suddenly more likely to see a spider in your house. And that spider is most likely a dude — on the prowl for lady spiders.    ...

For the last couple of years, each train line on the London Underground has been given its own voice. Ed Jefferson analyzed the lines' tweets to assign Kiersey/Myers-Briggs psychological temperaments ...

Slate is doing a series of articles on life expectancy in the United States, both how it's changed and why. It kicks off with a piece that gives a broad overview of the medical and public health fact...

Paul Dozsa, a former chess champion and chef who developed a taste for dine-and-dash, endures his circa-1980 arrest in style.    ...

Link: logo.thatsaspicymeatball.com. Created by @bertrandom. * Notable runner-up: Andrea James.    ...

A new leaf, as they say.    ...

Brian Fung offers a quick guide on how to stick it out. [WaPo]    ...

Minecraft's real star is its landscape, flowing psuedo-randomly from whatever name you give your world. But it also became a checkerboard of predictable components: rolling hills here, weirdly-shaped ...

An interview with journalist Joshuah Bearman about a high school dope-smuggling ring.    ...

2600's Emmanuel Goldstein writes, "25 years of hacker radio is now online at full broadcast quality as part of the 2600 website redesign.    ...

Rosie Revere, Engineer is an absolutely wonderful kids' picture book about a young girl who loves to invent, but finds herself crushed by the laughter of adults -- until her great aunt Rose explains t...

Neal Stephenson's exceptional essay collection, Some Remarks (which I reviewed in 2012) is now out in the UK. Here's some of my original review: Some Remarks is a new collection of mostly reprinted, ...

Noemi sends us a Kickstarter campaign: "to help re-imagine education and establish an Art Circus for the Kids of Canning Town in East London run by the good folks at The House of Fairy Tales. &nb...

As the UK government continues to roll out the Great Firewall of Cameron (by which ISPs are required to opt their customers into an "adult content filter" that is meant to block sites related to porn,...

Dylan sez, "The hyper-designed world of architectural model building is facing a new threat - the advent of 3D printing. Dylan Reibling's new short film MODEL is a playful look at the battle for supre...

Alan sez, "Nomorobo recently won the FTC's contest for best anti-robocall invention. It uses a feature of the phone system that's already mostly in place which lets the Nomorobo device get the call at...

Jeff Moser's "A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)" beautifully presents the history, context, and workings of one of the most important pieces of math in the modern world.&n...

Ben Marks of Collector's Weekly says: "I just wrote an article about John Gilroy, who was the illustrator of all those wonderful Guinness ads during the 1930s-1950s.    ...

The TSA is allowed to lie in its responses to Freedom of Information Requests. Its court-granted ability to lie to the public it nominally serves isn't limited to sensitive issues, either: they're all...

Stateless Media made an excellent 11-minute film about NY mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner. It's called "Chutzpah." From inside the Weiner tornado the whole world looks absurd.    ...

Xeni recounts an adventure: choppering from Hollywood to San Francisco with actor, writer, filmmaker, and activist John Cusack, to meet up with hackers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Freedom...

Project: Autobahn uses OpenXC data as MIDI data to compose and play Kraftwerkian music that matches the driver's behavior.    ...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: •Darth Vader vs. Beethoven •Portlandia: "Change the World One Party at a Time" •Monkey, dressed in ba...

Ronald Coase, Economics Nobel Laureate and author of the 1937 classic Nature of the Firm, has died at 102.    ...

A bar in the Yukon needs to source a new human toe, because a patron ate the one they used to use as a cocktail garnish.    ...

ADVERTISEMENT This post is brought to you by Fat Tire. Pairs Well With People. There's not a lot that can prepare you for what a beer festival with 25,000 costumed bicycle riders looks like: think o...

Here's how I described The Listserve in 2012: Here's how The Listserve works: you subscribe to the mailing list (13,667 people are subscribers so far).    ...

(Ganesha 2011) Sculptor Masao Kinoshita's work comes in a variety of forms, but what really tweaks my amygdala are the anatomical maquettes of fanciful creatures.    ...

Xeni recounts an adventure: choppering from Hollywood to San Francisco with John Cusack, to meet up with hackers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Freedom of the Press foundation staff. &n...

Souris Hong-Porretta writes, Two and a half years ago, I conceptualized a coloring book with line drawings by our creative cabal made up of video game developers, comic book artists, illustrators, gr...

Frank Santoro is a Pittsburgh-based cartoonist. He self-published his first major work, Storeyville in 1995 while living in San Francisco. Upon its republication twelve years later, Tom Spurgeon wro...

Portlandia season three is finally streaming on Netflix and I'm so happy to be catching up. I can't get enough of "One Party At A Time." Or mind eraser shots with a hint of lime.   &nb...

Project: Autobahn uses OpenXC data as MIDI data to compose and play Kraftwerkian music that matches the driver's behavior.    ...

Last weekend saw the presentation of a slew of major science fiction and fantasy awards, starting with the Hugo awards, whose winners included John Scalzi's Redshirts (for best novel); Brian K Vaughan...

Huck towels are durable low-lint cotton towels canonically used for wiping down surgical instruments after sterilization, but they are useful for many other tasks where a clean strong towel is optima...

This guy got a book deal from posting his wonderful and witty illustrations online, and has a book out. I'll be buying it!    ...

This guy got a book deal from posting his wonderful and witty illustrations online, and has a book out. I'll be buying it!    ...

I previously admired a lovely and affordable silver-bronze handcrafted skull ring by Lost Apostle available from our wonderful sponsor ShanaLogic!    ...

Science journalist John Rennie is an amazing story teller. In this recording from Story Collider, he explains how he became the lab safety officer in his post-undergrad biology laboratory in the early...

"Youre the worst thing that has ever happened to the universe, you owe everyone everywhere an apology for this burritobomination, and I hope your babies look like monkeys." @luckyshirt on Medium. ...

Over the past 18 years the life expectancy for white women who didn't finish high school has dropped precipitously. Today, those women can expect to die five years earlier than their counterparts a ge...

You may have heard speculation that the NSA has secretly broken the strong cryptographic systems used to keep data secret -- after all, why collect all that scrambled data if they can't unscramble it?...

In the Guardian, Dan Gillmor ghost-writes a speech for any presidential candidate who wants to enter the 2016 race on a freedom and transparency ticket.    ...

[Video Link] This is a video of a monkey dressed in warm baby clothes, hopping in the snow. (Via 22 Words)    ...

The takeaway from Brian Palmer's Slate piece: if a business uses loyalty cards to retain customers, it probably sucks. [C]ompanies that think they can’t compete on service or quality are not try...

In 1950, farmers praised the news that small amounts of antibiotics would help their livestock put on more weight, faster. Ironically, that same year, different scientists published some early evidenc...

How do you know if your kopi luwak coffee, made from beans collected, swallowed, and crapped back out by civets, is the real deal?    ...

The $300 Galaxy Gear smartwatch, which connects to phones via bluetooth, was revealed today along with a selection of new Android phones.    ...

Rest in peace to my beloved grandfather Frederik Pohl, who showed me by example how to be an author. 1919-2013. https://t.co/GXP2H1pI72— Emily Pohl-Weary (@emilypohlweary) September 2, 2013 Fred...

At Slate, shark scientist and blogger David Shiffman breaks down the risks that swimmer Diana Nyad was really taking this week when she swam from Florida to Cuba without a shark cage.   ...

A London man blames a new 37-story skyscraper under construction for melting his Jaguar. Apparently, sunlight reflected off the building, known as the "Walkie-Talkie," and melted parts of the car.&nb...

Back in early August, I had the pleasure of interviewing John Mainstone, the man who has taken care of the Pitch Drop Experiment at Australia's University of Queensland since 1961.   &n...

Last weekend, my family had a wonderful meal at Casa de Fruta, an RV resort, motel, candy shop, wine store, gas station, and restaurant in the Pacheco Valley of Northern California.   ...

This Saturday, celebrate the eternal kitten-ness of Lil Bub with a group art show at Spoke Art in San Francisco, featuring purrrrty new work by our pals Ransom & Mitchell and dozens of other arti...

It's all done on computer. [Max Read]    ...

My latest Locus column, Libraries and E-books, talks about the raw deal that libraries are currently getting from the big five publishers on ebook pricing (libraries pay up to five times retail for th...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch, creating a power vacuum and chaos in Oz!    ...

ADVERTISEMENT This post is brought to you by Fat Tire. Pairs Well With People. There's not a lot that can prepare you for what a beer festival with 25,000 costumed bicycle riders looks like: think o...

One year ago today The history and science of meringue, from a new book by Linda K. Jackson and Jennifer Evans Gardner: A gorgeous recipe book called Meringue, which is all about the featherweight del...

"Ariel Castro, 53, was found hanging in his cell around 9:20 p.m. Tuesday at the Correctional Reception Center in Orient, located south of Columbus in central Ohio, JoEllen Smith, Department of Rehabi...

A robot that paints water colors is super. A car that generates dozens of data streams is awesome. When you connect the two the result is super awesome    ...

I recently received a box of Moleskine products to review. I've been using them for a week or so. The Moleskine Portfolio XS ($10) is a small business card and receipt holder.    ...

The late great Buddy Rich and Ed Shaughnessy, who died earlier this year, burn up the skins on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, August 11, 1978.    ...

Shredders offers delightful intarsia sweaters with ironic, crass, and fun designs. You might think I'd be all about the Sasquatch Knit Bigfoot sweater but I prefer the Satanic Knit Baphomet design!&nb...

Afraid of clowns? Perhaps you suffer from coulrophobia. Smithsonian looks at the "History and Psychology of Clowns Being Scary".    ...

Dutch cabaret performer Hans Liberg commissioned Piet Hein Eek to design him a delightful log cabin that from the outside really looks like a pile of logs.    ...

Several months ago, I posted about "The Beam," a fantastic space age-inspired experimental music project by The Simonsound (Simon James).    ...

Master classical improvisor Richard Grayson satisfies an audience request to perform "The Imperial March (Darth Vader's Theme) in the style of Beethoven.    ...

Cable bundling, whereby we have to pay for channels we don't want to get ones that we do, hits us in the pocket harder than we realize.    ...

The lava lamp turns 50 this year! The product's inventor, Edward Craven Walker, was inspired by a Christmas ornament containing oil and water.    ...

ISP throttling YouTube half the time? Proxy IP-blocking tricks not working anymore? Here's the latest incantation to get video running.    ...

Mr. Hagar, in Europe you can and will drive 55. In a move to reduce the 30,000 annual traffic fatalities in Europe each year, the European Union is planning to equip cars with technology that senses t...

Mr. Hagar, in Europe you can and will drive 55. In a move to reduce the 30,000 annual traffic fatalities in Europe each year, the European Union is planning to equip cars with technology that senses t...

In Harpers, 2007, Scott Horton wrote: Known for his biting satire and his dedication to Socialism, [dissident East German songwriter Wolf Biermann] chronicled his life under surveillance with a powerf...

Some of the most recent video selections you can find on our video archive page: • Hay Devil: vortex whips field into an amazing sight • Everyday twerking • CDZA vs.   ...

After the revelations of broad spying by the NSA, Brazil's government seeks to create a new, surveillance-proof email system that provides citizens an alternative to Gmail and other free web-based ser...

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks publisher and Australian Senate candidate currently sheltered in Ecuador's London Embassy, "has lodged a formal complaintasking Swedish police to open acriminal investiga...

In case you missed it, the latest domestic spying bombshell: At the New York Times, Scott Shane and Colin Moynihan report that for the past six years, at least, "law enforcement officials working on ...

Boing Boing pal Jeff Simmermon says, "After the Miley Cyrus event, I got real tired of hearing the word "twerk." However, these videos are a considerable exception - this woman just films herself twe...

I have this great teenage memory of standing next to my father at the Baltimore aquarium, as we both attempted to stridently ignore the gigantic walrus penis that was flopped out right in front of us....

Drop a message-in-a-bottle into the Gulf of Mexico, somewhere near New Orleans, and, 10 years later, your missive has a high likelihood of ending up near Cuba — or northern France.  &n...

The artist in this 2005 video is Hyon Song-wol, former vocalist of the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble (), and reported former paramour of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.    ...

The Uncanny Valley is that point where something designed to look human gets too close to success, and ends up accidentally reminding us of the many, many ways that it also looks totally alien. ...

If you enjoy the irony in the fact that the great East Coast blackout of 2003 was largely caused by a few untrimmed trees, then you're going to love Jon Mooallem's account of how America's squirrels a...

oclHashcat-plus is a "password-recovery" tool that chews through 8-million guesses a second. It optimizes its guesses by trying phrases from "the Bible, common literature, and in online discussions,&#...

There's a theory that seeing something over and over and over will increase your acceptance of that thing. Applied to art, the idea suggests that what we think of as "good art" is actually just the st...

E-cigarettes are different enough from cigarettes that it's hard for regulators to figure out how to monitor their safety and use.    ...

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

One year ago today TOM THE DANCING BUG: Mitt Romney Repudiates President Roosevelt's Fear of Syrup Shelves Five years ago today Make canned monstrosities: Tutorial shows you how to make realistic pick...

Spoilers. Kevin McFarland reviews the fifth of Breaking Bad's final eight episodes, in which W.W. reassesses the values of the pieces on his game board.    ...

One year ago today 1967 JPL employment ad, remixed: now with more Mars Curiosity "Mohawk Guy": Updated to feature the MSL space celeb Bobak "Mohawk Guy" Ferdowsi, who works on the Mars Curiosity team ...

From the Chicago Tribune: "Chicago Shakespeare Theater and The Second City are joining forces to stage a public tribute to Bernie Sahlins, the late co-founder of The Second City.   &nbs...

In an article that provides only laughter, the Metro reports on a goat stuck on an Oregonian roof: "The goat will charge you, one neighbour told the officers during the incident last week.  ...

Published by Subterranean Press, part of its fall 2013 issue. People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasonseverything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic rea...

It's almost as if it was designed to be turned into short, looping images for use on the World Wide Web.    ...

Strange rocks, smelling of chlorine, were found near the Mexican city of Navojoa, Sonora. Weird News reports that Juan Manuel Ramirez Sandoval, an official with the city's civil defense force, said th...

Signed and given to psychic carnie Uri Geller by the king of pop, this spoon fetched 500 at a pub in Oxfordshire.    ...

Here's Glenn Fleishman on healthcare in America, where sufferers receive outsize bills and must engage with an insane, bloated bureaucracy to chop them down to size--if they have insurance.  ...

Charming. Stacey Kafka with ABC News: I walked in and the lady at the front counter said hey youre too big to be in this store, I need you to leave, said Buster.    ...

The Sunday Mail claims that a British company was given an export license to sell chemicals to Syria that could be used to make chemical weapons.    ...

Spoilers. Kevin McFarland reviews the fifth of Breaking Bad's final eight episodes, in which W.W. reassesses the values of the pieces on his game board.    ...

--"I understand you keep track of lots of emails and internet data, can you help me? No? So you don't keep track of emails of people?" --No, we wouldn't be able to help you.    ...

--"I understand you keep track of lots of emails and internet data, can you help me? No? So you don't keep track of emails of people?" --No, we wouldn't be able to help you.    ...

One year ago today Economix: terrific cartoon history of economics: ld as a history, it ties important world events (wars, revolutions, technological progress, resource depletion, pollution, etc.) to ...

Watch live, or listen to NPR's live coverage in audio. The president is not expected to order military strikes against Syria immediately, but administration sources say the US is prepared to attack ov...

"To followers of technology issues, there are many days when Microsoft and Google stand apart." Quite an understatement, but so begins a recent blog post by Microsoft's General Counsel and Legal/Corpo...

The US National Security Agency spied on Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera, according to documents "seen by SPIEGEL," the German news agency today reports.    ...

Seems the plan to name the new Bay Bridge span after Willie Brown has hit a snag. From the SF Chronicle: "People don't like renaming things, whether it's Willie Brown or Harvey Milk, and they especial...

One year ago today Former IBM Japan president questioned over upskirt filming: A former president of IBM Japan has been questioned by police after allegedly filming up the skirt of an unsuspecting wom...