Articles by BoingBoing from March 2014

A new publisher has re-re-launched Amazing Stories, the very first science fiction magazine, founded 88 years ago by Hugo Gernsback.    ...

One year ago today Mr Unpronounceable Adventures, spectacularly weird graphic novel in a Lovecraftian/Burroughsian vein: Mr Unpronounceable Adventures is a book of comics by New Zealand surrealist art...

The amazing pancake artist Nathan Shields (previously, previously) has launched a video-series in which he makes pancakes with his adorable kids, Gryphon and Alice.    ...

Australian Simon Gittany murdered his girlfriend, Lisa Harnum, after an abusive relationship that involved his surveillance of her electronic communications using off-the-shelf spyware marketed for pu...

Censorship invites abuse. In China, the widespread practice of Internet censorship means that lots of people are hand down censorship orders and lots more people naturally turn to censorship when some...

With an ISO rating so high you may need a Neutral Density filter with the lens cap still on, the new Nikon D4S can take photographs of yesterday.    ...

Microsoft read the email of Hotmail users without a warrant, in order to catch someone who'd leaked some Microsoft software. When they were caught out, the pointed out that they'd always reserved the ...

One year ago today Group whose Wikipedia entry was deleted for non-notability threatens lawsuit against Wikipedian who participated in the discussion: Benjamin Mako Hill writes, "Last year, I particip...

Dodgey99 built an Arduino-powered Etch-a-Sketch clock, in which a pair of stepper motors painstakingly draw out the current time. It's got a very low refresh rate, though: the limits of the motors an...

In January 2013, Disney Animation Studios released a box-set of nine flip books that pay tribute to the "Nine Old Men" of Disney animation -- artists who pioneered the animation techniques that defin...

Sumana is helping put on a new kind of hacker conference in NYC, !!Con (pronounced "Bang bang con"). Unlike other hacker cons, !!Con has no ranking, no winners, and no dominance displays: "Whenever po...

In the ACLU's new paper U.S. Government Watchlisting: Unfair Process and Devastating Consequences [PDF], the group describes strange world of terrorist watchlists, including no-fly lists, where it's n...

One year ago today FOUR MORE ASTOUNDING THINGS THAT BOING BOING READERS ARE DOING RIGHT NOW! Last week, I put up a post asking BB readers to tell us (and each other) about their projects.  &...

Jeffrey writes, "Bay area flyers, come talk and fly drones over pizza and beer in our massive 17 foot tall ceiling warehouse!    ...

Chapter nine of Homeland opens with about 400 digits of Pi. When Wil Wheaton read the chapter, he soldiered through it, reading out Pi for a whopping four minutes!    ...

3 Ways to Escape Zip Ties: An Illustrated Guide    ...

Brad sez, "Trusty Sword, an Olympia, WA-based RPG developer, has posted hundreds of scanned D&D cover art from dndclassics.com [a site where you can buy all the classic D&D modules and books...

Call Me Kuchu is a documentary about unbelievably brave Ugandans who are risking their lives to advocate for gay rights in the country.    ...

A reader writes, "Lewis Carroll's Alice takes an eventful trip on a streetcar in contemporary Toronto in this short stop-motion animated video.    ...

By photoshopping a pair of mirror-flipped profile-shots of your face onto either side of a full-on shot, you can make a gimmicked photo that, when curled and placed in a jar of water, creates a convin...

NYU is beginning research with using psychedelic drugs to improve the emotional/psychological health of people with cancer. An upcoming study with 32 volunteers will be the largest study of psychedeli...

For the scientists who live and work at BICEP2, McMurdo Sound is just a stopover on the way to the even-more-isolated Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.    ...

Political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. is right when he says that one reason we now spend more on disasters than we did in the past is that we are wealthier than we were in the past.   &n...

How scientists figured out that a set of 260 million-year-old footprints were probably made by an arachnid and why those footprints are still shrouded in mystery.    ...

Pterosaurs weren't birds. They weren't dinosaurs, either. And they are definitely more than just pterodactyls. As an order, the pterosaurs contained a huge amount of diversity.    ...

Nearly two thirds of white people support the death penalty, with evangelical protestants bloodthirstiest of all. Black Americans favor it the least, with only 36 percent in favor of executing murdere...

Emily sez, "Working in the blindness field, my husband, Richard and I have many blind friends. We are gamers at heart and have always been dismayed that our friends couldn't play our favorite games.&n...

After a decade in development, Diablo 3 was a let-down. Can it be fixed? The first expansion pack admits the mistakes, killing the real-money auction house, improving loot in general, and adding a new...

Joe sez, "There's a new FDA rule that will make it nearly make it financially impossible for small craft brewers to give their grain away to farmers for animal feed.    ...

A problem crops up when filmmakers try to adapt epic fantasy worlds to the big screen—particularly beloved, richly-imagined literary ones. Sacrifices must be made. Characters are cut, and plotli...

Wink is a new website that reviews one remarkable paper book every weekday. My wife, Carla Sinclair, is the editor. We take photos of the covers and the interior pages of the books to show you why we ...

Bani Garu is Lea Hernandez's story of becoming the U.S. merchandising vice-president of notorious Japanese animation studio Gainax, "a year-long trip down a rabbit hole of reality." Start with page 1....

Lee writes, "Philadelphia's Hacktory has just announced its Call For Artists for its new Unknown Territory Fellowship and Artist-In-Residency." The Unknown Territory Fellowship seeks established new...

Pre-orders have opened for The Peripheral, William Gibson's next novel, which comes out in October 2014. I've been reading this one as Bill worked on it, and it's spectacular, a piece of trenchant, fa...

Your browser doesn't support the HTML audio tag. You can still download the show, though! var audioTag = document.createElement('audio'); /* Do we not support MP3 audio?    ...

I've replaced the playback devices on every TV in my home with a Roku 3. The Roku R3500R is even better!    ...

Matthew, an odd-jobbing freelance artist, took a job as a frozen-food taster ("trained sensory panelist"), spending long days stuffing fried food in his mouth and rating it on 50-100 attributes, swirl...

Yesterday, I reviewed Karl Schoeder's first YA novel, Lockstep, which combines genuinely brilliant techno-social speculation with a driving, exciting adventure plot.    ...

Once again, the "piracy-stricken" motion picture association has had a banner year, with box office revenue breaking all records (as they've done in most recent years).    ...

Tim Powers' outstanding fantasy novel The Anubis Gates has been adapted for the stage and it will premiere at Loncon 3, this summer's World Science Fiction Convention.    ...

Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) is one of many Republican legislators who've objected to a new policy at OSHA that requires experts to disclose when they have been funded by parties with an interest in...

"They Know Everything We Do", a new, exhaustive report from Human Rights Watch, details the way the young state of modern Ethiopia has become a kind of pilot program for the abuse of "off-the-shelf" s...

"They Know Everything We Do", a new, exhaustive report from Human Rights Watch, details the way the young state of modern Ethiopia has become a kind of pilot program for the abuse of "off-the-shelf" s...

Science fiction radio-host and podcaster Rick Kleffel writes, "Lucius Shepard was one of my guiding lights for reading; he worked in all the spaces I loved best.    ...

Dave Kellett and Fred Schroeder created the movie Stripped about the past, present, and future of comic strips and their creators.    ...

Here's a great fashion idea for the next Banned Books Week: burned paper fingernails from Glitterfingersss. Basically, you soak newspaper in alcohol, transfer the ink to your nails atop a light nude p...

Glenn Fleishman writes, "Minecraft YouTube videos are fantastically popular, and a core group of producers of these videos have enjoyed a wild ride up the virtual charts.    ...

Matt Hawkins contributed his lovely papercraft Disney characters to the Boing Boing Flickr pool. His description: "Paper sculptures made of painted watercolor paper.    ...

One year ago today Municipal codes of DC, free for all -- liberated without permission: I was lucky enough to get another one of rogue archivist Carl Malamud's boxes of awesome.    ...

Spies Travels, a Danish travel agency, have conceived of a promotion to help reverse Denmark's plummeting birthrate. They're offering a discount for couples who travel during one partner's ovulation ...

Remember the copyright trolls at Prenda Law, the slippery crooks who claimed that no one actually owned their extortionate racket, that no one made any money from it, and that no one was responsible f...

Leah is looking for a job at a creative agency, so she created a Lego figure of herself and boxed it up as a resume in the form of a custom kit.    ...

I am in Milan about to speak as part of the Meet The Media Guru series. My presentation will be livestreaming at 11:45am PDT.    ...

A New Zealand man was sentenced Monday after admitting to attacking his mother with a lettuce. He threw the leafy vegetable at her during a domestic argument, and will spend nine months on probation a...

California Senator Leland Yee has been indicted, along with 25 others, in an organized crime bust that includes charges of wire fraud and firearms trafficking, as well as accepting bribes for legislat...

Vincent Brady shot these scenes of swarming fireflies at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, and at his home in Michigan: "I used every trick I have up my sleeve to pull this off.   &n...

Spelunk.in, a Los Angeles area group that hopes to teach interested parties about crypto currencies, is throwing a Dogeparty on April 4th, at Hollywood's fantastic Meltdown Comics.   &...

Next up, searching the area for extremophile life forms.    ...

Hurled like a dead childhood pet into the uncanny valley's nastiest toilet.    ...

This is about more than just the ability to treat an infection, important as that is, writes Maryn McKenna. If antibiotics no longer work, we also lose organ transplantation, cancer treatments, kidney...

Scientists found differences in the brain structures of kids with autism compared to kids who don't have autism. Those specific structures form during the second trimester of pregnancy, suggesting tha...

What is this, an ATM for ants? "Customers have to bend or kneel to use the machine, installed outside a Sainsbury's Local store in Basford.    ...

Our solar system has eight planets (again, sorry Pluto). But it has many, many more planetoids — more than 600,000 at last count.    ...

Our solar system has eight planets (again, sorry Pluto). But it has many, many more planetoids — more than 600,000 at last count.    ...

Nick Wingfield: To skeptics, Office for the iPad is arriving dangerously late. Thats because the delay has given people who use iPads, especially business professionals, years to get used to using the...

Professor and pundit Tyler Cowen was lecturing about vigilantism yesterday, only to be pepper sprayed in class by a man trying to place him under citizens' arrest.    ...

The Turkish government has doubled down on its Internet censorship program, blocking all of Youtube in addition to its ban on Twitter.    ...

Selfies make us look strange, lopsided, comical. Why? Because a cellphone camera sits inches from our faces, whereas our brains are used to a mirror-image seen from several feet away.   ...

Adapting data from Cigarette smoking prevalence in US counties: 1996-2012, the New York Times presents an interactive guide to the decline of smoking in America.    ...

Two companies, actual registered companies with people working for them, people with dreams and aspirations and fragile human hopes, are going to court to fight for ownership of Duke Nukem.  ...

"This is supposedly real," writes Brian Ashcraft. [Kotaku]    ...

Rudy Rucker writes, "I'll be reading and giving out BIG AHA and some other titles at Scribd in San Francisco on Thursday."    ...

Worker-owned co-ops are a mainstay of crappy economies, and are thriving around the world. Worker-owned co-ops have better productivity than regular businesses, pay higher wages, and offer better bene...

Yesterday, I reviewed Karl Schoeder's first YA novel, Lockstep, which combines genuinely brilliant techno-social speculation with a driving, exciting adventure plot.    ...

Hey, Danes! There's a limited-edition Danish-language translation of Little Brother that's just come out from Science Fiction Cirklen! Tell your friends!    ...

A disturbing new turn in the North Korean Official Haircut Story: men can no longer choose from 18 approved haircuts and must henceforth all sport the same haircut as Kim Jong Un.   &nb...

A disturbing new turn in the North Korean Official Haircut Story: men male students can no longer choose from 18 approved haircuts and must henceforth all sport the same haircut as Kim Jong Un. &...

The State of the Discordant Union: An Empirical Analysis of DMCA Takedown Notices , a paper publishing in Virginia Journal of Law and Technology by Stanford/NUS's Daniel Seng, documents the vast, ter...

One year ago today RPG inside an Excel workbook: Cary Walkin, an accountant in Toronto, knows a thing or two about Excel.    ...

Obscura Society LA is privileged to invite members to attend what is believed to be the city's longest-running closed society dedicated to exploring the mysteries of the Trickster Coyote, hitherto bar...

The Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology (ACEP) set up a Change.org petition asking Wikipedia to make it easier to post crazy pseudo-science to Wikipedia, specifically information about "En...

[This op-ed is by Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and Lady Parts Justice - Mark] The most important takeaway from yesterdays Hobby Lobby arguments is thank God women sit on the Supreme Co...

It's no fun watching glue dry, unless it's part of a Jimmy DiResta how-to video! I make a lot of signage, often using bandsaws and CNC machines.    ...

Small-scale, rooftop solar power is starting to seriously destabilize the future of electric utility business plans. What will be the utility's role?    ...

Why Lumosity.com (and other workouts for your brain) are unlikely to actually make you smarter or help you think better.    ...

This year, science writer Ed Yong went from being a noted critic of the TED conference science coverage to being part of the TED conference science coverage.    ...

Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types.    ...

Molly Crabapple sez, "In the past three years, I've sketched many courtrooms and seen the widget factory that is the criminal justice system firsthand.    ...

On a recent trip packed with long flights, I remembered that music had once been my best defense when traveling around the globe for prior jobs.    ...

Gibby Haynes, best known as the frontman for the great Texas experimental psychedelic-hardcore band The Butthole Surfers, appeared on The Daily Show With John Stewart last night.   &...

Michael writes, "I'm launching a Kickstarter campaign for a new game founded in the basics of genetics and physics. You're a cell in a 2d underwater universe, and you must reproduce to gain traits tha...

America, #1, has the largest pop music business, and #2 spot holder Japan the weirdest. Third-place Britain is famous for punching above its weight, but #4 will surprise you: Sweden, the pop music pow...

Michael Fertik runs an online reputation repair service that claims to avoid shady SEO techniques and threats. Ian Mount interviews him at the New York Times: Q.    ...

I'm a sucker for this sort of thing! At $10 for three, it's a perfectly good deal, but I'd pay double for unbranded.    ...

When remote areas of Vietnam are flooded out, entrepreneurial swimmers set up informal ferries in which passengers climb into sturdy plastic bags and are then swum across the river against the curren...

The Sword and Laser (S&L) is a science fiction and fantasy-themed book club podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt.    ...

The UK tax authority HMRC abused the country's controversial anti-terrorism law to spy on a whistleblower and journalists at the Guardian after it was embarrassed by the revelation that it had given a...

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Before he died, Aaron Swartz wrote a tremendous afterword for my novel Homeland -- Aaron also really helped with the core plot, devising an ingenious system for helping independent candidates get the ...

Last weekend, a landslide buried/destroyed a neighborhood in Oso, Washington. That location has been the site of many landslides in the past — so many, that a 1967 Seattle Times article called i...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Quantum Mechanic answers a Question, and then More.    ...

You guys, dog sex is seriously strange. If you grew up with un-spayed/neutered dogs, this is probably not a revelation.    ...

It was all part of proving that sperm are crucial to the creation of life.    ...

Ted Gioia: "Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting" Ive just spent a very depressing afternoon looking through the leading music periodicals.    ...

"Goats learn how to solve complicated tasks quickly and can recall how to perform them for at least 10 months, which might explain their remarkable ability to adapt to harsh environments."  ...

"Damn, I was gonna get an apartment over there, too. It'll be cheaper now!"    ...

William Gibson's books often feature big, sinister corporations co-opting near-future technological wonders to uncertain ends. Facebook buying Oculus fits right in there!    ...

There are a few regular, unmissable sessions at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, sessions that have achieved Legendary status, a catalogue of extreme and memorable moments. ...

Yesterday, I reviewed James Kolchaka's new graphic novel for kids, The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza, which made my six year old daughter laugh until she cried (I liked it too).   &...

If you're a Basecamp user who couldn't get into your account yesterday, here's why: the company refused to pay ransom to a criminal who hit them with a 20Gb/s denial-of-service flood, apparently by th...

David writes, "Inspired by classic pulp novels, old-time radio broadcasts and Saturday morning cartoons, Harvey Award Winning Creators David Gallaher and Steve Ellis have created the young adult webco...

The Walt Disney Company has acquired Maker Studios -- a successful Youtube channel focused on millennials -- for $500M, with an additional $450M potential performance-related payout in the future.&nbs...

It would have been DEEPLY satisfying for a beloved Kickstarter to IPO and the best chance we've seen at that just vanished.    ...

Julie Bosman, for The New York Times: In the past, those smaller stores were pushed out by superstores a trend memorably depicted in the 1998 film Youve Got Mail leaving book lovers worried that som...

Four more books have been added to the final week of the third Humble Ebook Bundle: John Scalzi's Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novella The God Engines; Dia Reeves's Bleeding Violet; Mercedes Lackey and ...

Prisoners in America's notorious communication management units (called "CMUs" or "Little Guantnamos") are making great strides in their legal action against the US government over the prisons' illega...

Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R.    ...

I'm immensely proud and honored to once again be shortlisted for the Prometheus Award, for my novel Homeland. The Prometheus is given by the Libertarian Futurist Society, and I've won it for my books ...

Rob Walker's March 7 "New Old Thing" column is called "Great Moments in Gibberish." There are some good videos in the piece, including this one, called Prisecolinensinenciousol.   &nbs...

A while back I posted a recording of Freddy Scott's Trent Reznor parody song, "This is a Trent Reznor Song." Today, Freddy posted the video and it's excellent.    ...

I've just finished listening to the entire, three-year run of Oh No Ross and Carrie, a podcast hosted by two former Evangelical Christians turned skeptics, who join cults and fringe religions, visit p...

Facebook today announced that it has "reached a definitive agreement to acquire Oculus VR, Inc., the leader in immersive virtual reality technology, for a total of approximately $2 billion." The deal ...

Scott sez, "Privacy and security has been a huge problem since the Snowden revelations, and midwest SF/open source software convention Penguicon [ed: near Detroit!] wants to be part of the solution.&...

This was a great way to remind me what happened in the first three seasons of Game of Thrones. Fourth season starts Sunday April 6th!    ...

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This is an amazingly accurate rendering of exactly what happens at Paul's legendary Valley Wagonworks in San Rafael, California. Paul may be the main reason so many well cared for old Westys, like mi...

In Florida, District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro has dismissed a suit brought by notorious porno-copyright trolls Malibu Media on the grounds that an IP address does not affirmatively identify a person,...

The Obama administration will unveil a plan to sunset the bulk collection of US telephone data by American spies. Instead, it will plunder data that the carriers are required to retain for 18 months (...

TempleOS is 100% open-source and 100% free of crufty 32-bit code, but "interpretation is tricky." [via JWZ]    ...

I found myself desperately in need of a new helmet. Upon seeing the Bell Bullitt TT I knew I had to try it.    ...

There are 28 official state-approved haircuts in North Korea, and there is renewed emphasis on the official coiffure parameters under its new leader, Kim Jong Un.    ...

Photo: Ron Johnson / Journal Star The Peoria Journal Star published this photo, by Ron Johnson, to give the impression that player Jalen Brunson was raising a middle finger to the opposing team's fans...

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This journey through the semiotic landscape of marketing is beautiful, charming, insighting, brandful, burtational. [Video Link] This Is a Generic Brand Video is a generic brand video of This Is a Ge...

Reaching into deep into his brain, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew that somewhere in there lurked the perfect analogy for the nation's first black president.    ...

Two of my friends contributed afterwords to my novel Homeland: Aaron Swartz and Jacob Appelbaum. In this outtake from the independently produced Homeland audiobook (which you can get for the next week...

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Hosted by Greg and Sharon Ross, Futility Closet is an interactive exploration of the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy...

Writing to us from the distant future, Ian "Cow Clicker" Bogost describes our modern games industry and the role it will play in the coming downfall of civilization: "Working long before sustenance po...

Here's a terrific gallery of images from NASA's archives imagining life in space colonies. They were made in the 1970s so everything and everyone looks like they are from the 1970s.   &...

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One year ago today Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense: chart of woo: Crispian Jago has compiled a handy Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense.    ...

Jimmy Fallon designed an entire sketch around eliciting a single classic line. [Video Link]    ...

Furreal Kitty is available on Amazon. [via]    ...

The Michelson-Morley Experiment — a 19th-century attempt to prove that electromagnetic waves traveled through a "luminiferous aether", the same way that waves travel through water — failed...

AT&T Senior Executive Vice President of Legislative Affairs James Cicconi has written a monumentally stupid attack on Reed Hasting's call for Net Neutrality.    ...

US NAVY Debris sightings have drawn attention to a particular region, but choppy seas and rough waters deny a conclusive discovery.    ...

Texting has changed the English language! We now use more exclamation points than we did 15 years ago! But that's okay, because language is always changing!    ...

Ars Technica has a good enough rundown of the stinkers. "I had to forbid Andrew Cunningham from just submitting 'all of season 1' as his pick for this piece," writes editor Lee Hutchinson.  ...

Three minutes after last week's earthquake, a Quakebot created by the The Los Angeles Times had already written a story breaking the news.    ...

This four-cell battery dissolves in water after three weeks. Made from non-toxic concentrations of metals and saline electrolyte, researchers hope to use it to power medical devices inside the human b...

Malcolm Gladwell's retelling of the Branch Davidians' story lets a survivor, Clive Doyle, do most of talking. They did not worship Koresh, the way you would a deity.    ...

A review of alternative treatments for multiple sclerosis found that most don't actually work. One that does: An oral cannabis spray that seems to help reduce muscle spasms.    ...

Putrescine, cadaverine, and methanethiol are three chemicals produced by decaying human flesh and are responsible for a dead body's distinctive odor.    ...

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

Deviant Art's Kasami-Sensei has produced a series of illustrations that mashup The Walking Dead with Disney characters, recasting the familiar lighthearted animated figures as post-apocalyptic zombie-...

Zeynep Tufekci suggests that Turkey's motives in blocking Twitter--where news of government corruption spread--are more strategic than most analysts believe.    ...

Zeynep Tufekci suggests that Turkey's motives in blocking Twitter--where news of government corruption spread--are more strategic than most analysts believe.    ...

I have never heard my daughter laugh as loud or as long as she did when I read her James Kochalka new kids' graphic novel, The Glorkian Warrior Delivers a Pizza.    ...

ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISER MESSAGE: As we celebrate with all of our friends who make St. Patricks Day great, we raise a glass to Jameson for sponsoring this story.    ...

Here's a Make HOWTO for converting a set of wind-up novelty chattering teeth to an electronic tooth-brushing timer and toothbrush holder -- take your toothbrush out, start it running, and the teeth w...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to figure out what the LAPD is doing with the mountains (and mountains) of license-plate data that they're harvesting in the city's streets without a warra...

Pure genius from Joe Sabia, and a beautiful example of what's possible when bright creative minds experiment with fair re-use.    ...

In The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis [PDF], published in Science, researchers try to understand why Google Flu (which uses search history to predict flu outbreaks) performed so wel...

William Campbell Powell is a new young adult author whose debut novel, Expiration Day due out on April 1. Powell's book was bought out of the "slush pile" -- the pile of unsolicited manuscripts that ...

On Thursday, I'll be speaking in Milan as part of the long-running "Meet The Media Guru" lecture series! Here's a teaser: Have you ever encountered a work of art that in an instant changed your perce...

The latest episode of the fantastic Memory Palace podcast is about Pickering's Harem -- the women who worked as human computers for the director of Harvard's observatory at the turn of the last centur...

Just a few days after Turkey's scandal-rocked government banned Twitter by tweaking national DNS settings, the state has doubled down by ordering ISPs to block Twitter's IP addresses, in response to t...

ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISER MESSAGE: As we celebrate with all of our friends who make St. Patricks Day great, we raise a glass to Jameson for sponsoring this story.    ...

Artist Jordan Wolfson collaborated with animatronics studio Spectral Motion to create this artwork, currently on display at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City.    ...

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GWAR creator Dave Brockie has died. He was found in his home, and no cause of death has been released. He was 50 years old.    ...

What happens with digital rights management in the real world? Podcast: What happens with digital rights management in the real world?    ...

Carla and I saw Cheap Thrills on Saturday at Cinefamily in LA, and we loved every minute of this black suspense movie, directed by E.L.    ...

Niklas writes, "I have a wonderful thing for you: The Goethe Institute in Krakw asked me if I could make an installation for their exhibition on playing, called "SPIELTRIEB!".    ...

Pt and Limor write, "The Glaucus, named after the Blue Sea Slug (Glaucus Atlanticus), is an open source soft robotic quadruped from Super-Releaser.    ...

I was thrilled to find a tattered, used copy of The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay while looting used bookstores in the U.K.    ...

ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISER MESSAGE: As we celebrate with all of our friends who make St. Patricks Day great, we raise a glass to Jameson for sponsoring this story.    ...

Scientists have been making pronouncements about "hardwired" differences between the brains of men and women since 1854, writes Virginia Hughes at Popular Science, and the science those pronouncements...

It's increasingly difficult for states to get a hold of the drugs needed to execute prisoners by lethal injection. To fix that, Alabama is trying to pass a secrecy bill that would hide identities of m...

Big physics news is often difficult to explain, which, sadly, means it doesn't get explained very well. If you know that, last week, scientists made a major discovery about what happened in the fracti...

Last week, several media outlets announced that a NASA study was predicting the collapse of civilization as we know it. Now, NASA says that wasn't actually their study.    ...

Wafarin is found in rat poison. It's also a key ingredient in medications that prevent blood clots in cardiac patients — just one of the many, many chemicals that can both seriously fuck you up ...

Photo by Gideon VanRiette The Kansas University Natural History Museum's panorama exhibit is an epic example of 19th-century taxidermy, with flora and fauna from all the biomes of North America gather...

Here's Wil Wheaton reading chapter one of my novel Homeland (here's the MP3, which I paid to independently produce for the third Humble Ebook Bundle, which runs for another eight days.  &nbs...

Remember this incredible video above? In the new issues of BusinessWeek, I profiled the brilliant minds behind it, creative robotics studio Bot & Dolly, whose astonishing technology was also ins...

Kevin Wu puts IMDB's ratings dataset to good use. And there are plenty of surprises in store! A recurring bottom line: shows often get more popular after critics and viewers lament a decline in quali...

The New Republic's Noam Sheiber: Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy dont think twice ...

Graham Allison reports on the progress made -- "Vietnams prime minister pledged to eliminate his nations remaining [uranium] stockpile" -- and the step yet to be taken.    ...

After exceeding his three minutes' speaking time at a township board meeting in Michigan, Mark A. Adams was arrested after refusing to sit down, and now faces felony charges.    ...

Taikuutta koirille - Magic for dogs Poor pups! [Video Link]    ...

Some poor devil has to scan in thousands of handwritten documents over the next four years—it's no wonder bags of cocaine are being intercepted by foreign customs on the way there.  &n...

From Ep. 2 of Cosmos. Adds Kottke, to creationists: "worth watching if only to understand what you're aligned against."    ...

A collection of links gathered by filthy light thief. [MeFi]    ...

After the relative quiet of last week's episode, "Takiawase" threw one punch after another, with a few eyeball kicks to round the hour out.    ...

One year ago today Arijit "Poop Strong" Guha has died of colon cancer: Arijit "Poop Strong" Guha (Twitter), a really sweet guy who took on a dirty rotten insurance company and stood up to TSA "Flying ...

Ifixit is celebrating MacGuyver's birthday with an Action Hero Toolkit in a Altos-tin-sized-tin. It includes a bobby pin, a match, a rubber band, bubble gum, a birthday candle, a paper clip (natch), a...

Ifixit is celebrating MacGyver's birthday with an Action Hero Toolkit in a Altos-tin-sized-tin. It includes a bobby pin, a match, a rubber band, bubble gum, a birthday candle, a paper clip (natch), a ...

Writing in Politics.co.uk, Frances Crook (chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform) decries the latest nasty Tory tough-on-crime initiative: denying books from the outside to prisoners, m...

Just look at it. I... just... don't... know... o.0 (Thanks, Josef!)    ...

Facebook continues to tighten the screws on the businesses that use the service to market to their customers. Independent research shows that new updates from businesses reach about six percent of the...

A new Snowden leak details an NSA operation called SHOTGIANT through which the US spies infiltrated Chinese electronics giant Huawei -- ironically, because Huawei is a company often accused of being a...

The Business Software Alliance -- a proprietary software industry group -- has pulled a controversial ad that promised cash to people who snitched on friends and employers who used pirated software, a...

When Wil Wheaton was reading the audiobook for my novel Homeland (exclusively available through the Humble Ebook Bundle for the next nine days!), I had the great pleasure of listening to the raw, uned...

One year ago today Grandmothers who are brilliant at technology: "Grandma Got STEM" profiles grandmothers who have accomplished marvellous feats of technology, and aims to drive a stake through the he...

Christopher Kosek writes, "'The Default Trigger' is a 52 page, free (with a pay what you want version available) digital graphic novel about student loan debt, the shadowy figures lurking in the backg...

I am an American. I have a daughter. We will not be doing this. (Thanks, Susan!)    ...

Here's a funny fake-news video reporting on the mass-migration of teens from Facebook (where their parents have migrated) to the comments section of a slow-motion Youtube video of a deer running.&nbs...

One year ago today NY judge says running a search engine for news is a copyright violation: A NY federal judge handed down a terrible ruling in AP vs Meltwater, which turned on whether providing a sea...

If you remember the first film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, the 1978 animated version by Ralph Bakshithe legendary outsider director behind Fritz the Cat, Wizards, American Pop and Fire and Ic...

A third of people who complain about debt-collectors who break the law say they don't even owe the money under discussion.    ...

Tavie sez, "Canadian treasure Scott Thompson's popular Kids in the Hall character, Danny Husk starred in his own graphic novel in 2010, Husk: The Hollow Planet.    ...

Andrew weev Auernheimer is serving a 41-month sentence for visiting a publicly available webpage and revealing that AT&T had not secured its customers' sensitive financial information.  ...

In MetaPhone: The Sensitivity of Telephone Metadata a pair of Stanford researchers recruited test-subjects who were willing to install spyware on their phones that logged the same "metadata" that the ...

Salgood Sam -- who worked on great projects like Sea of Red and Therefore, Repent! sez, "In the last leg of a successful Kickstarter to print my next graphic novel, I've set up some unlockable intera...

One year ago today How to fix the worst law in technology: Tim Wu's New Yorker piece on Aaron Swartz and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act explains how Obama could, with one speech, fix the worst probl...

Enjoy this great slideshow of photos about WW II workers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, consuming more electricity than New...

Since Netflix CEO Reid Hastings published a statement on Net Neutrality and Comcast (whom Netflix has had to bribe in order to secure normal service for its users), Comcast has gone on a charm offensi...

Can you find Augustus Gladstone in this gigapixel photo of Portland? I was the 10th person to find him! AWOL in P-Town    ...

A real hero. Video Link Thanks, Ryan!    ...

US Rep. Jared Poris (D-Colorado), shown above wearing this Boing Boing T-shirt (which he purchased unbeknownst to us), is the only Happy Mutant on Capitol Hill.    ...

2048 is a super addictive tile matching game. I apologize if you lose a few hours of your life. The insanely high score is that of my girlfriend not me.    ...

Behold! The Diction-fairy! From This City's Lungs/Kelsey Parks. "Diction-fairy" (via Seanan McGuire)    ...

Machine Project in Los Angeles is a National Treasure. It's a combination gallery space, hacker space, and performance center. It has been operating for about a decade.    ...

Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types.    ...

    ...

Michael from Muckrock sez, "With a Freedom of Information Act request, MuckRock has received copies of two of the guides Homeland Security uses to monitor social media, one on standard procedures and ...

This is well-said, from Will Potter on Mashable: "[NSA Deputy Director Richard] Ledgett said he didn't know what NSA surveillance was important, because it's all pieces of a bigger puzzle.  ...

Peter "brokep" Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay and Flattr, a service that allows fans to pay artists, is running for the European Parliament on the Pirate Party ticket (what else?).  &nb...

My friend Bob Self of Baby Tattoo has produced a traveling exhibition/extravaganza featuring artist Michael Husar. It kicks off in LA this weekend, then moves to San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and...

Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign (no relation) boastfully compared Hotmail's privacy framework to Gmail's, condemning Google for "reading your mail." Now, Microsoft has admitted that it scoured the Ho...

Matthew says: "The new World Trade Center has been hailed as one of the world's most secure sites. A 16-year-old slipped through a fence, eluded a security guard, and spent two hours early Sunday morn...

Hugh sends us An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments: "This book is aimed at newcomers to the field of logical reasoning, particularly those who, to borrow a phrase from Pascal, are so made that they un...

"Despite a commonly held belief that LGBT Americans tend to live it up in classy urban neighborhoods," writes Nathan McDermott, "they struggle with disproportionately high levels of poverty compared t...

The Atlantic's Molly Ball reports on the failure of conservative activists to follow through on new legislation opposing gay marriage.    ...

Some of them know what they're doing, some of them don't, and some of them are computer programs. [Stamen via Flowing Data]    ...

Given the abundance of technology making it possible to see where jet planes are, why do we limit ourselves to options that flight crew can disable?    ...

Yevheniy Bolshakov, 26, pleaded guilty this week to an assault charge and was placed on probation for three years. He reportedly was denied permission by his parents to see the family cat, which was r...

Yevheniy Bolshakov, 26, pleaded guilty this week to an assault charge and was placed on probation for three years. He reportedly was denied permission by his parents to see the family cat, which was r...

Wink is a new website that reviews one remarkable paper book every weekday. My wife, Carla Sinclair, is the editor. We take photos of the covers and the interior pages of the books to show you why we ...

From the Morning Sentinel, a story about a gentleman in Norridgewick, Maine, who has the silhouette of a gun tattooed to give the impression that he has one tucked into his belt.   &nbs...

Turkish users: you can send Tweets using SMS. Avea and Vodafone text START to 2444. Turkcell text START to 2555.— Policy (@policy) March 20, 2014 Juha sez, "Looks like Turkish prime minister Tay...

Hugh from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Sunshine Week may be just seven days in March, but fighting for government transparency is a year-round mission for the Electronic Frontier Foundati...

Etsy seller MechWorld makes beautiful, ~$100 junkbots out of miscellaneous hardware. They're extremely poseable, have functional variations (like holding your phone), and there's even a Wall-E. ...

The Sword and Laser (S&L) is a science fiction and fantasy-themed book club podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt.    ...

NYT columnist Vladimir Putin has a guest slot today at The Onion: Its certainly no easy task to forcefully annex an entire province against another countrys will, so I just wanted to thank youthe gove...

Since Netflix CEO Reid Hastings published a statement on Net Neutrality and Comcast (whom Netflix has had to bribe in order to secure normal service for its users), Comcast has gone on a charm offensi...

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The Humble Ebook Bundle continues to rock, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for a bundle of great name-your-price ebooks, including Scott Westerfeld's Uglies, Steve Gould's Jumper, and Holly B...

Bani Garu is Lea Hernandez's story of becoming the U.S. merchandising vice-president of notorious Japanese animation studio Gainax, "a year-long trip down a rabbit hole of reality." Start with page 1....

The Heds Will Roll Tumblr collects headlines that were too weird, offensive, or beyond-the-pale to appear in print. Some examples: "Papas Got a Brand New Body Bag" (An article on the death of James Br...

Marcin Wichary is a designer at Medium who took on the challenge of creating a considered, fine-tuned underline for the links on the site.    ...

More than 25 tech companies -- including Happy Mutants, LLC, Boing Boing's parent company -- have signed onto a letter asking Senator Ron Wyden (chairman of the Senate Finance Committee) to oppose "Fa...

One year ago today Ray Bradbury's fan letter to Robert A Heinlein: YOUR INFLUENCE ON US ALL, FROM 1939 ON, CANNOT BE MEASURED.    ...

Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R.    ...

Thinkgeek bills their $40 Blobfish Plush as a "Grumpy Cat of the sea." While its true that the "world's ugliest animal" is actually pretty unremarkable looking when it is compressed by the awesome hig...

Philosopher Rebecca Roache led a team of scholars at Oxford to think about the future of punishment. Aeon interviewed her about the project.    ...

The Sword and Laser (S&L) is a science fiction and fantasy-themed book club podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt.    ...

On Etsy, The Retro Inc sells a nice line of custom-sized cushion slips screened with polygon art renderings of Star Wars characters.    ...

Since Netflix CEO Reid Hastings published a statement on Net Neutrality and Comcast (whom Netflix has had to bribe in order to secure normal service for its users), Comcast has gone on a charm offensi...

That's a cheeky way of describing the University of Oxford's study of "generalized trust" and IQ, but it sounds like good news, however you cut it: "Science says trust is good for you...  &n...

The universe sends a big gay memorial rainbow to Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps, who died on 2014's International Day of Happiness.    ...

A good start for the smartwatch pioneer. [CNN]    ...

Enjoy 'Mixed Paganini,' by the Studio Di Fonologia Musicale Di Firenze. Published in 1967, it sounds like a weird, hectic video game from 15 years later.    ...

Enjoy 'Mixed Paganini,' by the Studio Di Fonologia Musicale Di Firenze. Published in 1967, it sounds like a weird, hectic video game from 15 years later.    ...

"The Bayside Middle School student, Adrionna Harris, said she took a razor blade away from another student because he was using it to cut himself.    ...

Danielle Hulton of Ada's Technical Books not only opened a bookstore in Seattle in 2010, but recently dramatically expanded the size of the shop by moving to a new space.    ...

Danielle Hulton of Ada's Technical Books not only opened a bookstore in Seattle in 2010, but recently dramatically expanded the size of the shop by moving to a new space.    ...

A few years ago, I posted about TuneUp, software from my pal Gabe Adiv's company that did a bang-up job cleaning up the metadata mess of my 150+ GB music archive by identifying dupes, fixing track na...

Archivist Rick Prelinger sez, "I'm bringing a new archival 'mixfilm' on Detroit's rich history to the beautifully restored, vintage-1927 Detroit Film Theatre this weekend.    ...

BB mascot Jackhammer Jill in 3D-printed ABS glory! This 9" model of Jill will get hand-painted and rigged with advanced bubble-blowing technology before being mounted in a place of honor on the hood o...

Dave Vancook buys thrift store paintings and adds Star Wars characters to them. Artwork by David Vancook (via Super Punch)    ...

Lucius Shepard, one of science fiction's great writers, has died. He was 66. I had met Lucius on several occasions and found him to be just as you'd hope from his novels: smart and witty (but lots of ...

The Humble Ebook Bundle is going great guns, with a collection of recent and classic books from both indie and major publishers, all DRM-free, on a name-your-price basis.    ...

[Ed: Mur Lafferty's 2013 debut novel Shambling Guide to New York City was an outstanding work of urban fantasy and contributed to Mur's winning a much-deserved John W Campbell Award for Best New Write...

Since its inception, in 1979, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area has been a massive, amazing, wonderful resource for bay area residents.    ...

JWZ's law states that "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail." A corollary is that every complex system expands until it becomes a bank.    ...

If you're a student interested in Internet and technology policy, you're eligible to apply for an EFF Policy Fellowship, a ten week placement with public interest orgs in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin A...

Pat sez, "Alaska Robotics News is a political satire series covering the Alaska legislative session. We've had good luck at engaging law makers and have had several notable guests on the show. &...

Well done, sir. (Thanks, Dave Gill!)    ...

Crypto 101 is a free online course on practical, applied cryptography: " everything you need to understand complete systems such as SSL/TLS: block ciphers, stream ciphers, hash functions, message auth...

Your browser doesn't support the HTML audio tag. You can still download the show, though! var audioTag = document.createElement('audio'); /* Do we not support MP3 audio?    ...

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "The government often makes itself more accessible to businesses than the general public. For Sunshine Week, we compiled this guide to using FedBizOpp...

Paul Bennun, who helped created the groundbreaking, video-less binaural sound videogame Papa Sangre sez, "We're making a 'video game without video' and we're turning to Kickstarter to fund it. &n...

We hope Adam isn't jealous! 17 Things You Didn't Know About the New Season of Mythbusters    ...

Afterlife with Archie is exactly what it sounds like: a series of comics in which Archie Andrews, Jughead, and the lovable gang are trapped in a horrific zombie apocalypse.    ...

"My remarks were intended to discourage pitting one group against another group in a society. If my choice of words was inappropriate -- and they well may have been that -- I extend my profound apolog...

Dark Dungeons is a notorious 1984 Jack Chick tract that warns the readers about the danger of being embroiled in soul-destroying Satanic cults through playing Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs.&nbs...

Dark Dungeons is a notorious 1984 Jack Chick tract that warns the readers about the danger of being embroiled in soul-destroying Satanic cults through playing Dungeons and Dragons and other RPGs.&nbs...

I never thought Id say this, but Justified could really use Arlo Givens back. Without his father, Raylan Givens has meandered throughout the season, unmoored from his family connection to Harlan Coun...

"Tiny Worlds" is a delightful trilogy of short films about imaginary miniature city services dealing with the small trash littering the streets and sidewalks of London.    ...

A mystical image of mysterious origin shared in the BB Flickr Pool by John S. Banks (web), "Sky Reflect Discovery Field." He explains, "Uncovered a new scene of this object that was discovered in the ...

Add a few servomotors and an Arduino to a desklamp to make an appliance that seems to be alive. Pinokio is an exploration into the expressive and behavioural potentials of robotic computing. &nb...

Astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson, in dire need of coffee or a nap, praises Isaac Newton. (Just kidding; it's slowed down.    ...

As mentioned yesterday, the DRM-free, independent audiobook of my novel Homeland is available from the Humble Bundle for the next two weeks, along with a collection of brilliant science fiction and fa...

My daughter Jane (age 11) grew bored with World of Warcraft (at least for now), but her passion for Minecraft has not waned after a couple of years of playing it.    ...

The short film "Hunger" by Peter Folds was made over 40 years ago using computers. The design is fresh. It looks like it could have been made today.    ...

Tomorrow night, San Francisco's pioneering contemporary dance company ODC will premiere a new work inspired by famed sculptor/environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy with live music by experimental cellist ...

The Knight News Foundation is running a challenge called How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation? Over 665 finalists have made it through to the current round, where yo...

Here's a good writeup of Loomio, a collective decision-making tool that is raising funds to add features, stability and polish to its free/open source codebase.    ...

Yoga.    ...

Sam Byford at The Verge: The VR system is currently codenamed Project Morpheus, and will work with PlayStation 4. While still in prototype form, Yoshida says that Morpheus is the "culmination of our ...

One year ago today Heinlein on Kirtsaeng: "There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a numb...

Sounds like Haunted Empire, Yukari Iwatani Kane's book about Apple after Steve Jobs is not much more than its fantastic title: "Cant get out of the way of its own Apple-is-doomed narrative to tell tha...

The Huffington Post's Ben Craw created a supercut of scenes in movies where actor Christopher Walken dances. [Video link]    ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Representative Paul Ryan (R- Wi.) explains what he meant when he said "inner city" men are lazy.    ...

Last night, I was lucky enough to attend the announcement for The Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist for best novel of 2013.    ...

I'm extremely pleased to present an exclusive excerpt from Hugh AD Spencer's debut novel Extreme Dentistry. I've known Hugh for more than 20 years now, and he's always been one of the most consistentl...

San Francisco's Walt Disney Family Museum is running an exhibition on the art of Mary Blair, one of the all-time greats of Disney history and modernist illustration and color.    ...

Phil Are Go has done the world the kind service of posting a hi-rez scan of a gorgeous, vintage souvenir of Wisconsin postcard, lavishly and wonderfully illustrated with everything the state has to of...

Here's Edward Snowden controlling a telepresence robot on the stage of TED, being interviewed by Chris Anderson. Watch the full video, recorded today at TED 2104.    ...

Urban Jungle Street View is a Google Street View mashup that pulls out the 3D information latent in the Streetview database and uses it to map lush, ecotopian foliage over the surfaces of the building...

As noted, the new Humble Ebook Bundle is live, and Publishers Weekly has a great writeup on it, including my decision to independently produce an audiobook of my novel Homeland.    ...

Techdirt's Mike Masnick has a gift for catchy, acerbic shorthand terms to describe shenanigans. He coined the term "Streisand Effect" to describe any situation in which a relatively obscure piece of i...

In September 2013 Tan Nguyen was pulled over by Nevada Deputy Sgt. Lee Dove for driving 78 MPH in a 75 MPH zone.    ...

David "Davidope" Szakaly is a talented Hungarian animator who specializes in trippy, freaky GIFs that pulse and twist and melt your brain.    ...

Writing under the rallying cry "Gender-specific books demean all our children," Katy Guest announces that the Independent on Sunday -- one of the UK's great weekend papers -- will no longer review any...

On Instructables, Klee67 has remade the chocolate chip cookie shot glass recipe in a home version that anyone can bake. Her tutorial starts with a modified version of the Serious Eats "Best Chocolate ...

This great 2011 post by Roy Rapoport tells the story of how a software company created and incrementally improved a chat-bot that collected and organized the team's coffee orders -- and how the system...

VanVictor made a terrific image series showing historical figures played by various actors, from Aristotle to Edgar Allen Poe, Jesus to John Lennon.    ...

Seed companies and farmers didn't follow scientists' recommendations about growing a type of corn that had been genetically engineered to produce its own pesticide, and now the beetle they were battli...

"Bill" thought he'd found something amazing: a sex tape featuring New Jersey governor Chris Christie. He had the New York Times, Mother Jones, network TV news and Gawker running the story down. &...

For the past two months, I've been working on a secret project to produce an independent audiobook adaptation of my bestselling novel Homeland, read by Wil Wheaton, one of my favorite audiobook voice...

The NSA has a research facility in Bluffdale, Utah. It's loaded with "metadata-gathering computers that currently require 1.7 million gallons of water a day" to keep them cool.    ...

Above, watch the entirety of "There Is No Authority But Yourself," a 2006 feature documentary about seminal anarcho-punk band Crass. It was directed by Dutch filmmaker Alexander Oey.   ...

Remember Walter Williams, the 78-year old who last month was pronounced dead and then found to be alive and kicking, literally, inside a body bag?    ...

A new Peanuts movie will come to the big screen on November 6, 2015, produced by Charles Schulz's son Craig Schulz with a screenplay co-written by his son Bryan Schulz.    ...

A new Snowden leak reveals that all the voice calls in an unnamed country are recorded and saved for 30 days on a rolling basis, with millions of voice "cuts" (clippings) harvested from the corpus for...

The BBC evaluates the credibility of the most widely-circulated speculations concerning the fate of a Malaysia Airlines flight missing for more than a week, including the widely-praised "straightforwa...

It's on Kickstarter.    ...

Dirt Road To Psychedelia is a documentary about the underground culture in Austin, Texas during the 1960s. Above is the trailer.    ...

Matt sez, "The Danny Devito-like schlub in this ad feigning excitement for 'Stah Woiz' and its 'layzah swoids' in order to pawn off some collectible cups has had me laughing all evening." Star Wars ...

[Video Link, via]    ...

The battleground is most intense in the midwest; on the coasts and in Canada, contiguous coffee empires form. Flowing Data: "The spatial concentration in cities didn't surprise me so much, but the cu...

If you have anything in iTunes bought prior to 2009, chances are it's got DRM on it. Here's how to take it off.    ...

Enjoy this trailer for Spook Train, an extremely gory, foul-mouthed claymation film being produced in the United Kingdom: "This is a train that Margeret fookin' Thatcher herself shut down.  ...

Josh Harker's beautiful and bizarre "21st Century Self-Portrait" [via JWZ] defies easy explanation, so I'll just let him do it!    ...

Shelfie is a crowdfunded one-piece shelf designed to hold a bicycle. It seems rather steep at $125, but certainly looks more attractive and useful than a big old hook on the wall.   &n...

The creators of the annual press freedom index have added the US and Britain to their list of countries that repress online speech, arrest bloggers and use the internet to conduct domestic surveillanc...

A new video has surfaced of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford swearing, stumbling and cursing in front of City Hall after having his picture taken with a young boy whose mother identified as a fan of the mayor....

You are Not So Smart is hosted by David McRaney, a journalist and self-described psychology nerd. In each episode, David explores cognitive biases and delusions, and is often joined by a guest expert....

One year ago today Literature's business model explained, with special reference to the age of the Internet: Richard Nash's essay "On the business of literature" is one of the best, most thought-provo...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and Engine have submitted comments [PDF] to the US Patent and Trademark Office explaining how examiners could improve the quality of patents that t...

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

Terry Pratchett's Raising Steam, the 40th Discworld novel, comes out in the US today. I reviewed it back in November for the UK release; here's what I had to say then: it's a tremendous synthesis of e...

In honour of the 30th anniversary of the brilliant (and incredibly frustrating) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game, BBC Radio 4 Extra have recreated the game in an online edition.&nb...

In this video, Australian Voices, a choral group, sets former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's epic anti-misogynist Parliamentary speech to music, doing a rather beautiful job of it. &n...

(||) pic.twitter.com/3jHkKYuKhd— (@jun_127) March 11, 2014 Japan's Gari-Gari Kun ("Crunchy Crunchy Boy") popsicles now come in spaghetti flavor with tomato jelly -- they also do rice ...

Hosted by Greg and Sharon Ross, Futility Closet is an interactive exploration of the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy...

In 1990, in the middle of the moral panic over Satanic ritual abuse (an almost entirely imaginary phenomenon), Doris Sanford published "Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy," which was "based on months of int...

As a big fan of Game of Thrones, I was happy to get my hands on this Westeros pop-up book. But oh my goodness, I had no idea how amazing a pop-up book could be!    ...

If the universe expanded very, very quickly in the first few moments after the Big Bang it would explain a lot of the things astronomers observe.    ...

Scott Asheton, co-founder and drummer of The Stooges, died on Saturday at age 64. Iggy Pop posted the news on Facebook.    ...

The Metro UK shares DeviantARTist Tee-Kyrin's interpretation of each incarnation of the Doctor as a dog. The War Doctor is my favorite.    ...

Do you have experience with sleep paralysis? Many scientists believe that sleep paralysis is the biological answer to such mysteries as spirit visitations, alien abductions, incubi/succubi, and out-of...

Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay is a forthcoming documentary about industrial music featuring BB pals Throbbing Gristle and V Vale (RE/Search) along with Cabaret Voltaire, NON, Z'EV, Sordid...

The classic game of snap is made interesting to my 6-year-old daughter with these fantastic Gruffalo-themed cards. Snap is a simple matching game and you can play with a regular set of cards, but th...

The classic game of snap is made interesting to my 6-year-old daughter with these fantastic Gruffalo-themed cards. Snap is a simple matching game and you can play with a regular set of cards, but th...

The UK tabloid press spent a decade drumming up hysteria about teenage knife-crime, and MPs responded on cue, passing a series of meaningless, overbearing feel-good measures that require shops to refu...

I was transfixed by this haunting memorial to the Irish who were forced to emigrate during the great famine in the 19th century.    ...

"I've often wondered what made me such a violent teenager... But whatever the reason, by the time I was in my mid-teens I fancied myself a pretty tough customer." Originally published in Real Stuff #6...

I have never seen so many barber shops in one city! This sign is my favorite!    ...

Michael from Mother Jones writes, "Most people who use marijuana probably don't give much thought to where it comes from. Alas, a huge chunk of it comes from environmentally devastating 'trespass gro...

A group of dedicated disciples of bOING bOING contributor Robert Anton Wilson are orchestrating a stage production of RAW's "Comsic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati," a fantastic memoir of high...

Jeroen writes, "about a project I'm working on: FryskLab, Europe's first library-powered FabLab. We're using a mobile lab facility to bring making and 21st century skills to primary and secondary educ...

Taras sez: I noticed last week that access to the Ukrainian media website tsn.ua was impossible from the UK but there was no issue with me connecting to it via a US VPN connection.   &...

After Indian guru Ashutosh Maharaj of the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan (Divine Light Awakening Mission) died in January of a suspected heart attack, his followers let his body sit a week before finall...

Enzymes — the molecules responsible for many chemical reactions central to life — are large and complex. So large and complex that some scientists think the beginnings of life might have h...

Richard Masten is the executive director of Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers, a service that promises anonymity to the people who send in tips on serious crimes.    ...

Linguist James Harbeck explains why so many villains have the syllabel "mor" in their names; the tl;dr is that it has a homonymous and complementary dual etymology, referring to death in romance langu...

Ancient Egyptians were burying (and, presumably, domesticating) cats 2000 years earlier than scientists previously thought.     ...

What are your favorite geosites — cool geologic formations, awe-inspiring landscapes of rock, related museum exhibits, or even buildings made from particularly fascinating stones?  &nb...

One year ago today Sheet music for the Mario "coin" sound: From the Mario Piano site. Five years ago today Sen.    ...

Mitchel Resnick runs the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten lab, from which came the amazing, kid-friendly Scratch programming language. He writes, "We just launched a Kickstarter campaign for Scra...

Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types.    ...

Dorian S. Nakamoto, the California man identified by Newsweek as the Satoshi Nakamoto reputedly behind the creation of Bitcoin, has hired a lawyer to clear his name, reports the Los Angeles Times.&nbs...

Ghost Ship is a surprisingly fun pirate-themed loot-em-up, set on merchant frigates designed by drunken pirate architects. Basic as it is, this is the game I thought I was getting when I first loaded ...

Last year, a Spanish researcher told the Hack-in-the-Box security summit that it could be possible to take control of some parts of an airplane's guidance systems remotely, using a smartphone. &n...

Conor Friedersforf counts the ways, but it comes down to saying "we've failed, sure, but we might succeed if only you gave us more money."    ...

Richard Garriot, creator of the legendary Ultima series of computer RPGs, talks to Wired about his future plans, about being disowned by a fundamentalist relative, and ethics in games.  &nbs...

Wherein the Mind of God is shown through His words. [Youtube via Arbroath] Previously.    ...

The Australian attorney general has mooted a proposal to require service providers to compromise their cryptographic security in order to assist in wiretaps.    ...

Here's a reading (MP3) of my latest Guardian column, If GCHQ wants to improve national security it must fix our technology where I try to convey the insanity of spy agencies that weaken Internet secur...

A 4.4 magnitude earthquake hit the Los Angeles area this morning. Yesterday, northern Chile was rocked by a 6.7 bone shaker.    ...

The trial of Will Graham gets off to a bloody start in this week's episode of Hannibal. We open with a disorienting dream of Will BBQ'ing himself in an electric chair, then get a mirroring scene, set ...

Leaving aside less hopeful answers such as "the sea," where might Malaysia flight 370 have landed? The Atlantic's James Fallows created this interactive map, but warns that "if the plane had actually ...

Stephan Hillerbrand and Mary Magsamen's Mandala series brings to mind Andy Goldsworthy's leaf-portals. Instead of teleporting you to plain old fairyland, though, this vortex goes directly to its most ...

Japanese sculptor Yoshitoshi Kanemak chisels strange, life-sized twins from blocks of wood. This bony conjoined brother is the least of the horrors.    ...

Scuba diver Jason Dmitri's encounter with a shark was caught on film, but he bears no grudge for the beast that tried to get a piece of him.    ...

While the US has had a winter characterized by recurring bouts with the Polar Vortex, Norway has been suffering through a winter that is both one of the warmest on record, and one of the driest. ...

From Science Friday, a video by Luke Groskin about something amazing that we see whenever we cook, but rarely think about.    ...

A clever colleague of mine, Jen, joined us last year as Comms Director and suggested that we use a team talk tool, for light comms and general infosharing, preferably something that can handle the tri...

What's going on? Nobody knows for sure. But Sean Carroll has some pretty fascinating speculation, involving clues about what happened at the very beginning of our universe — in the early moments...

Since 1976, Susan Cahill of All Families Healthcare has been in family practice in Montana, offering compassionate family/reproductive health services -- including abortion.    ...

Ryan writes, "I was a backer of the Veronica Mars movie, one level of backer got you a digital download of the movie.    ...

Ryan writes, "I was a backer of the Veronica Mars movie, one level of backer got you a digital download of the movie.    ...

The NYPD runs an intelligence agency that is even more secretive, and practically as corrupt as the NSA. They even fly their own intelligence officers to the scene of terrorist attacks overseas (and i...

Here's a report from the front lines of the neoliberal educational world*, where homework has consumed the lives of children and their families without regard to whether it is improving their educatio...

One year ago today Maria Del Camino: an art-car that's part tank, part El Camino: Video documentary on my friend Bruce Tomb, who has built an amazing art-car called Maria Del Camino that's part tank, ...

Both Mark and I have sung the praises of Hoang Tran's hand-carved pop-culture crayons (I have one in my office!).    ...

As ever, Bruce Sterling's closing remarks to the SXSW Interactive festival were a barn-burner; in them, Sterling rattles off a list of people who should be in the room, either because they know someth...

In case you were wondering how the milk-cups made from warm chocolate-chip cookies tasted, it sounds like they were pretty darned good, especially once the recipe was changed so that the cups were lin...

Just look at it. Banana Holder (via Julian Bond/Boing Boing G+)    ...

IO9 has published Tobias Buckell's tense, taut technothriller story "System Reset." It's a story about hacker/bounty hunters, taken from the pages of John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey's new anthology T...

Here's a lovely old advisory from William Matthews Bookseller, explaining how to open a book for the first time, which was a major operation in the age of hand-sewn hardcover bindings.  &nbs...

Etsy seller Light Life makes this book-spine masking tape for sealing up your boxes and making them look like they're libraries for tiny flatlanders.    ...

The Winchester Mystery House is San Jose, CA's legendary tourist attraction, built by Sarah Winchester, widow of the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, who believed that she was haunted by the spir...

If you are outraged by American spies getting a free pass from their political masters (and you really should be), remember that this is an age-old tradition.    ...

There are a lot of covers of Frozen's themesong "Let it Go" on Youtube -- enough to seriously freak out the loony Christian right -- but Brian Hull beats 'em all, managing to sing the song, verse-by-...

I love this beautiful essay on compassion and good death by Dr. Richard E. Cytowic. It's a piece that discusses how medicine dealt with death before there was much technology — in the time of ho...

One year ago today Grotesque portraits from Christian Rex van Minnen: I love the crammed-together, rammed-together higgeldy piggeldy of insectoid body parts, high fashion, and toons.   ...

Is it the planes, or is it the pilots? The most fair answer is a little bit of both, writes Finlo Rohrer & Tom de Castella at the BBC.    ...

I passed this wind turbine blade on a highway in Iowa yesterday. Looking a bit like a giant dinosaur femur (or, from another angle, a really, really, really big beluga whale) it was both awesome in th...

Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R.    ...

Fishermen in Costa Rica caught (and then released) what appears to be an albino blue marlin. But experts say you have to look closer.    ...

Turns out that the claims made by British spies about Youtube granting them the power to censor Youtube videos that they didn't like (but weren't illegal) were bullshit.    ...

Glasgow's Popculturepencils makes custom pencils that come in threesomes which spell out fannish messages, For example: "He's dead Jim," "Beam me up Scotty" and "Live long and prosper." Or: "Sedagive?...

Hampton, Florida is a town so corrupt that it offends the Florida Legislature, a body with a notoriously high tolerance for sleaze.    ...

Jeswin proposes that Facebook has failed, explaining that the more you use Facebook, the worse it gets. He describes a login screen with 30 stories on it, four of which are interesting, and blames Fac...

One year ago today Large format Adrian Tomine prints: One of Mark's favorite illustrators, Adrian Tomine, has started offering prints of his work, including these two sublime New Yorker covers. &...

Math-doodling manic talking charming vlogger Vi Hart has updated her classic anti-Pi rant with a new poop-on-Pi video called "Happy Pi Day?    ...

Miles O'Brien, science correspondent for PBS NewsHour, has produced a series of three must-see investigative reports revisiting the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan.    ...

Miles O'Brien, science correspondent for PBS NewsHour, has produced a series of three must-see investigative reports revisiting the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan.    ...

Breaking In Two 7" by Doug Gillard Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types. ...

A group of Hong Kong engineers are kickstarting a Bluetooth speaker/LED lightbulb that draws power through the lightsocket called "Airbulb." Eric writes, "AirBulb has dimmable, bi-colored LED lighting...

... or trying to find a grain of salt in San Francisco or a red blood cell at Burning Man. Rob Cockerham explains why the search for Malaysian flight 370 isn't easy.    ...

Ten years ago, photographer Thomas C. Card read a newspaper article about the extreme makeup and outfits being worn by Japanese club kids.    ...

Bill Moyers spoke with investigative reporter Julia Angwin, author of the new book Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.   &n...

The Raspberry Pi is a $35 Linux computer the size of a credit card. I'm running a Minecraft server on one (above photo).    ...

The day after a Snowden leak revealed that the NSA builds fake versions of Facebook and uses them to seed malicious software in attacks intended to hijack "millions" of computers, Facebook CEO and fou...

When Tony Benn was a Member of Parliament, he would go around with homemade plaques celebrating heroes of democracy, such as suffragette* Emily Wilding Davison, and illegally screw them to the walls.&...

A detail from a poster, sold by Pop Chart Lab for $29, which diagrams the opening lines of 25 famous novels using the Reed-Kellogg system for breaking down the grammatical construction of sentences.&n...

"My accessory tools are mostly extremely strong espresso and research chemicals from China that are classed as "Smart Drugs". They allow me to solve 2nd order partial differential equations in my head...

The Lowcostcosplay Facebook group is a wonderful thing. [via Ufunk]    ...

Happy 3.14! Next year is 3.14.15!    ...

Orteil42, creator of Cookie Clicker and Nested, has published a random game concept generator. The Insanity Game Jam, whereby one must implement one of machine's ideas, is to run April 1-4.  ...

Nick Bilton shows how to kick forgotten corporate eyes out of your Twitter, Facebook and Google accounts: "its time to start deleting." [NYT]    ...

Malaysia's military radar data suggests Flight MH370, missing with 239 people on board, veered hundreds of miles off course, on a heading toward the Middle East and Europe.    ...

The life of a police officer is medically and pscyhologically ruinous, writes Erika Hayasaki: "Brian had been a healthy and fit ex-airborne infantry soldier when he began his policing career. &nb...

Edited by David Seidman Okada was not so optimistic Nadia would be a hit--Gainax was already in the red onNadia andchafing under the direction of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and Toho (a film ...

I was in Berlin for the day yesterday to speak at a World Consumer Rights Day, and before I headed back to the airport, I dropped in at Werkhaus, a retail outlet that sells innovative, made-in-Germany...

Tony Benn, a veteran left wing Labour MP who renounced his title in order to become a parliamentarian, has died at home at the age of 88.    ...

Zack sez, "Submitted for your approval -- Bif Bang Pow! has a new line of action figures inspired by the classic TV series done in the scale and style of such 1980s figure lines as Star Wars. &nb...

One year ago today In case you missed: Bradley Manning has a voice: The Freedom of the Press Foundation this week released surreptitiously recorded audio leaked from the Bradley Manning military pre-c...

Tomorrow, 3/14, is Pi Day in the USA (it will not be Pi Day in the rest of the world until the Martian Emperor subjugates us all to his sinister 14-month calendar).    ...

Before she was in Blondie, Debbie Harry had a number of interesting experiences - Playboy Bunny, pretend Ted Bundy escapee, and paperback cover model.    ...

The FBI has turned over a redacted set of documents from its investigative archives related to Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, a notorious strong-man whose antics have cost the taxpayers ...

Above, video evidence of my short presentation "Just Say Know: A Cyberdelic History of the Future" at the recent Lift Conference 2014 in Geneva, Switzerland.    ...

Above, video evidence of my short presentation "Just Say Know: A Cyberdelic History of the Future" at the recent Lift Conference 2014 in Geneva, Switzerland.    ...

For some reason, the audio file for Gweek episode 137 was not working. I've corrected the problem (I hope). You can listen to the stream below, or go to the show notes post for other listening options...

Eric Bradley of Heritage Auctions sent me an item about a paperback cover model from the 1960s and 1970s named Steve Holland.    ...

Imagine a world... where film trailers have emerged as their own art form. Where today, we learn that one of the greats of that genre has passed on.    ...

It's rare (and, thus, an often overlooked mode of transmission) but women can give each other HIV. In fact, it happened recently to a couple in Texas.    ...

Your whole genome can now be scanned in a couple days for a few thousand dollars. Unfortunately, it's not yet accurate enough to be a clinical tool in your doctor's office, writes Nancy Schute at NPR....

Joshua Lifton is one of the founders of Crowd Supply, a company that crowdfunds around products. They take a very different approach to preparation, funding, and follow-up than Kickstarter.  ...

The Raymond Scott estate turned over 50 years' worth of the composer's archives to three DJs -- The Bran Flakes, The Evolution Control Committee, and Go Home Productions.    ...

Google Flu Trends — an attempt to estimate flu rates by analyzing searches for flu-related topics — is not terribly accurate.    ...

Dictyostelium discoideum is an amoeba known for its ability to navigate mazes. HL60 is a cancerous human cell line, derived from a 36-year-old woman with leukemia, that is known for the speed with wh...

There were two celestial-bodies-on-a-collision-course-with-Earth movies that came out in 1998. Because I prided myself on being contrarian as a teenager, my favorite was Deep Impact.   ...

Matthew says: "An extremely rare albino chimero coast redwood tree is growing in the small Sonoma County town of Cotati. Federal regulators say the tree must be chopped down because the genetically mu...

This was included as part of the official forecast last night for the Baltimore, Maryland/Washington DC area. Hope you all are surviving the apocalypse.    ...

"When Captain America throws his mighty shield, all those who chose to oppose his shield must yield."     ...

The service will allow British security officials to censor videos "at scale" -- but not illegal videos, just material that "certainly is unsavoury and may not be the sort of material that people woul...

While searching for a good loft bed/desk system for my son, I found this photo of a fantastic bed/desk/closet module designed in 1975 by Luigi Colani.    ...

Korean artist Hyungkoo Lee created a series of portraits of people wearing this strange helmet he devised that allows various lenses to be swapped in to distort the subject's face with comic, cartoony...

Underground the city of London are eight massive bomb shelters like the one pictured above that have been empty or used as document storage for more than 50 years.    ...

Black Simon and Garfunkel, aka The Roots' Captain Kirk Douglas and Questlove, cover Lorde's "Royals." (via Laughing Squid)    ...

In 1969 at a school in Shoreditch, England, children young and old learned to experiment with avant-garde music composition using tape recorders, loops, electronics, and other techniques.  ...

Jeffrey sez, "Paul French, who recently won an Edgar in the true crime category, uses the forthcoming US publication of Decoded, the first spy novel by a PRC author to be translated into English, as a...

MIT engineers are developing "soft robots" with bodies made of silicone that is actuated by fluid flowing through veins in the material.    ...

Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R.    ...

Tor.com has reprinted China Mieville's inspired introduction to The Borribles, the classic, 1980s urban fantasy young adult trilogy by Michael de Larrabeiti, recently relaunched in the UK.  ...

As previously mentioned, Jen Wang and I have adapted my short story "Anda's Game" as a full-length, young adult graphic novel called "In Real Life," which comes out next October.   &nbs...

Jeff Vinall, a Conservative Party activist who is director of communications for the Oxford University Tories and is a second year law student at Brasenose College has abused the US Digital Millennium...

Developers from the Replicant project (a free Android offshoot) have documented a serious software back-door in Samsung's Android phones, which "provides remote access to the data stored on the device...

UCAS is the UK post-secondary admissions service, and is the sole means of applying to most British tertiary institutions. It has been caught selling its applicants' data to marketing departments hopi...

Here's a great history of English mispronunciations that became the received pronunciations. The piece makes the important point that English has no canon, no unequivocal right way or wrong way of spe...

Head over to the BBS and win nothing but the approbation of your peers! The true caption will be posted at 6 p.m.    ...

Tidbits' Julio Ojeda-Zapata takes a look at Microsoft's Surface tablets from the perspective of a writer. He likes it, and has "come to admire that which I once dismissed." "Like many Apple stalwarts,...

A great one-shot site: punch your name in and watch it explode into a mass of wiggling cellular automata.    ...

I'm not sure USB port design is the detail I care most about, but I'm glad that Razer spent $380k sweating it.    ...

Please stare at this self-explanatory and rather sad graph for no less than 90 seconds, then share it on Facebook. Tony Haile: If youre an average reader, Ive got your attention for 15 seconds, so her...

Enjoy this table tennis match fought out by German champion Timo Boll, a robot, and irremediable cinematic pretension. [Video Link] Previously.    ...

Mini Metro is a video-game from New Zealand's Dinosaur Polo Club in which you create public transit systems in order to improve the lives of virtual citizens of an imaginary town.   &n...

I doubt that the "Bacon Scent Alarm Clock" is a real thing, but this marketing photo carries a certain perverse wonder about it; one day, this will clearly be an artifact of the age of reaching irony....

The good news is that Getty is to allow free-of-charge use of many images. The bad news is that you have to use official embed code, inserting an iframe whose contents they maintain control over. ...

Your browser doesn't support the HTML audio tag. You can still download the show, though! var audioTag = document.createElement('audio'); /* Do we not support MP3 audio?    ...

Nothing is a supercut of scenes from Seinfeld in which no humans appear, creating a show that's not only about nothing, but also about no one.    ...

Dog of The Day, a photo shared by reader Benjamin G. Levy in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool. "Chops is the tiniest puppy," he says correctly.    ...

The Web is 25 today, and its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, has called for a "Magna Carta" for the Web, through which the people of the world will articulate how they want to curtail their governments' ad...

What child wouldn't want to be surprised by this adorable wax-headed baby doll crawling out from under their bed at 2am?    ...

Etsy seller Matthew Cummings of Kentucky's Pretentious Beer Glass Company created a set of four cylindrical, dual-chambered beer glasses, which allows you to mix any two beers without regard to their ...

"Apollo Television Camera," a photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader Jeff Stvan. An Apollo Command Module television camera on display in the Apollo Treasures Gallery at the Apollo/Satu...

Video genius Joe Sabia, who has collaborated with us on our Virgin America channel for years, worked with Vogue on a fun video: "73 questions for Sarah Jessica Parker."    ...

It's the fortieth anniversary of the release of Free to Be...You and Me, the groundbreaking movie/record/book that encouraged kids and their grownups to break out of gender stereotypes and shame and ...

Maria Droujkova writes, "Last week, The Atlantic published my interview called 5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus. I have been following the discussions on blogs, forums, and news sites.   ...

XKCD creator Randall Munroe has announced that Houghton Mifflin will collect his amazing What If? science columns into a book called What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questio...

    ...

It's the Web's 25th birthday and Tim Bray, inventor of XML and Web pioneer, has a great remembrance of the milestones of the early Web: Back in the earliest days, Playboy.com went live; the picture ...

Attention, book lovers! My wife, Carla (Boing Boing co-founder), Kevin Kelly (Wired co-founder), and I have launched Wink, a site that reviews one remarkable book that belongs on paper every weekday.&...

A new Snowden leak, detailed in a long, fascinating piece in The Intercept, explains the NSA's TURBINE initiative, intended to automate malicious software infections.    ...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Percival Dunwoody, Idiot Time-Traveler From 1909, attempts to kill Hitler. Again.    ...

Recommended if You Like is Boing Boing's weekly podcast of Brian Heater's cafe conversations with musicians, cartoonists, writers, and other creative types.    ...

I am so happy with this waterproof iPod Shuffle by Underwater Audio! Swimming, surfing and scuba diving, three of my favorite hobbies, are all amazingly enhanced!    ...

396 pure, unadulterated, dyed-in-the-wool, 100% made-up, completely fake disneyland "facts" is funny book of plausible-sounding Disneyland lies, penned by Horatio Liar (AKA Dominick Cancilla). &...

One year ago today McDonald's price increases over the years: Rob Cockerham says: "Because I have pictures of every fast food franchise's Drive Thru menu from 2002, I was able to take new drive-thru m...

It's so easy to find things wrong with 1994's Street Fighter movie, I thought that Chris Plante's epic feature about the flick wouldn't have any surprises.    ...

In my latest Guardian column, If GCHQ wants to improve national security it must fix our technology, I argue that computer security isn't really an engineering issue, it's a public health issue. ...

Michael Geist writes, "Canada and South Korea announced agreement on a comprehensive trade agreement earlier today. The focus is understandably on tariff issues, but the agreement also contains a full...

Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R.    ...

ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISER MESSAGE: As we celebrate with all of our friends who make St. Patricks Day great, we raise a glass to Jameson for sponsoring this story.    ...

The documentary Teenage, about the history of the concept of teenagers, will open in theaters on March 14th, 2014. Above, an exclusive clip from the movie about Frank Sinatra bobby soxers.  ...

Buried in a story on alcohol and hangovers that comes to a lot of 'duh' conclusions (say, did you know that feeling crappy and swearing to never drink that much again is not a good predictor of actual...

In Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism , Pulitzer-winning writer Ron Suskind tells the incredible story of how his son Owen disappeared into "regressive autism" at the age of thr...

One year ago today Principles for 21st century living: 1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure; 2.&nb...

ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISER MESSAGE: As we celebrate with all of our friends who make St. Patricks Day great, we raise a glass to Jameson for sponsoring this story.    ...

A family of four in Florida, including a pregnant mom and two young kids, were hospitalized after consuming a dinner of LSD-laced steak.    ...

A satellite imaging company is looking for volunteers to help comb through satellite pictures for evidence of Flight MH370.    ...

The World Wide Web turns 25 on Wednesday, March 12, if you consider Sir Tim Berners-Lee's paper proposing the system as the web's inception date.    ...

ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISER MESSAGE: As we celebrate with all of our friends who make St. Patricks Day great, we raise a glass to Jameson for sponsoring this story.    ...

At Mosaic — a new online publication funded by the Wellcome Trust that features long reads on science and medicine — Rose George has followed the story of Radha, a 16-year-old Nepali girl ...

Brooklyn-based photographer Joey L. created breathtaking portraits of ascetics in northern India, Nepal, and other parts of the region. The series is titled Holy Men.    ...

This is a single particle of interplanetary dust, its image captured with the help of a scanning electron microscope by researchers at the University of Washington and Germany's Institut fr Planetolog...

This beautiful object is a corrosion cast of bronchi and trachea, c. 1880-1890, most likely from a rabbit, sheep, or dog.    ...

The ocean is big and deep. The most likely scenario, right now, is that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crashed into the water and no one has yet looked in just the right place to find evidence of that c...

(video)    ...

Bennett Foddy, creator of QWOP and Sportsfriends, explains why many recent indie games eschew online features in favor of old-fashioned local multiplayer.    ...

Drones are being used to drop care packages of drugs into Quebec prisons, according to Stephane Lemaire, president of the province's correctional officers' union.    ...

"Wheels That Go," a gorgeous 1967 short film by Jim Henson, starring his son Brian, with music by pioneering jazz and electronic music composer Raymond Scott.    ...

"He's charging at us," she screamed into the handset. "He's at our door, the bedroom door!" "One moment, okay?" the dispatcher's voice echoed in the darkness, the liminal zone between cell towers, bet...

Tamar Stelling at the Washington Post: He started with prawns. After so many years of working with them, he thought he knew what to expect, which was that he would see nothing more than reflex reactio...

Animated by Samuel Lewis for Elliot The Bull's single, Colorblind.    ...

Filmmaker Tatia Pilieva asked twenty people to kiss for the first time. The awkwardness, anticipation, and culmination... Just lovely.    ...

Meet Peacemaker, one of the Maidan Square weapons photographed by Tom Jamieson.    ...

Wired's Jordan Golson covers the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, now entering its fourth day. The experienced captain, with 18,000 hours of flight time, gave no warning and issued no ...

A Denver barber is sick of marijuana and will no longer cut the hair of people who smell like it.    ...

Fit to Print collects the literary gyrations that the New York Times uses to avoid saying bad words such as "dang" and "jeez" and "fiddlesticks." "A derogatory word for gay men, followed, alliterative...

Yesterday at SXSW, Barton Gellman and I did a one-hour introductory Q&A before Edward Snowden's appearance. Right after Snowden and his colleagues from the ACLU wrapped up, I sat down and wrote u...

ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISER MESSAGE: As we celebrate with all of our friends who make St. Patricks Day great, we raise a glass to Jameson for sponsoring this story.    ...

Scott writes, "We've just received word that our documentary short, The Silly Bastard Next to the Bed, will be debuting at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, NC next month. &nbs...

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

ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISER MESSAGE: As we celebrate with all of our friends who make St. Patricks Day great, we raise a glass to Jameson for sponsoring this story.    ...

I've written a guest editorial for the new Guardian Cities site about the way that the offices that house the startups of London's famed "Silicon Roundabout" are being systematically demolished by dev...

Tristan writes, "The Open Source Beehives project is a partnership between the Open Tech Collaborative and Fab Lab Barcelona crowd-sourcing a solution to the bee colony collapse issue.  &nb...

Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly says, "We just published a piece about how streets came to be the exclusive domain of automobiles (spoiler alert: they didn't start out that way).    ...

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur on Friday a little before 1 p.m. ET. It disappeared on its way to China and no trace has been found.    ...

One year ago today Review: Ghirardelli White Mocha Premium Beverage Mix: Drinking this stuff was a profoundly bad idea. Not bad in the way that drinking methanol is, but bad enough.   &...

Nat writes, "A Dunedin, NZ, man lost a bet five years ago and changed his name by deed poll to the longest name he could make (99 characters, 1 shy of the Dept of Internal Affairs limit).  &...

Arthur Chu is mopping the floor at the American game show Jeopardy!, a program that combines trivial knowledge, speed on a signaling device, game strategy, a mind for wagering, and flopsweat. &nb...

Arthur Chu is mopping the floor at the American game show Jeopardy!, a program that combines trivial knowledge, speed on a signaling device, game strategy, a mind for wagering, and flopsweat. &nb...

In celebration of the new Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Joel Achenbach wrote a feature for Smithsonian about Carl Sagan's enduring impact on the popularization of science.    ...

If you're at SXSW in Austin, Texas today, do come by the Hilton Level 6 Salon F room at 330pm today (Monday March 10, 2014) for a panel on #BCSM (Breast Cancer Social Media), which I'll be moderating...

Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash devised a pretty amazing paper microscope that uses cheap tiny spherical lenses. The "Foldoscope" costs around 50 cents.    ...

A fellow in Lawton, Oklahoma chased a twenty dollar bill he dropped down a storm drain and ended up lost in the city's pipe system for two days.    ...

This is Colin Smith, a con artist clown who was busted for posing as a charity collector. Apparently, there were nearly 20 unrelated police incidents last year in Manchester, England involving clowns ...

Over at Institute for the Future's Future Now blog, my colleague Rebecca Chesney writes: Marc Roth moved to San Francisco to make a better life for his family, but he soon became ill and unable to wo...

I'm at SXSW, having just done the panel introducing Edward Snowden's first live address to the USA. He will be appearing momentarily.    ...

According to this flow chart, my baby is raising my risk of obesity, heart attack, alcoholism, and more.     ...

San Francisco's Spoke Art gallery is holding an exhibition of art inspired by film director David Lynch. Titled "In Dreams," the group art show features more than 50 artists including works by Joshua ...

A reboot of Cosmos, starring Neil deGrasse Tyson, premiered last night on a bunch of channels I don't have access to on my TV.    ...

Our friends at pioneering machine performance group Survival Research Laboratories respectfully request the opportunity to bring their delightful robotic presentations to the Google campus. &nbs...

Arabidopsis thaliana is the most-studied plant in the world, with a 50 day life cycle from germination to death. In a video at the Indiana University Plants in Motion site, you can watch a time-lapse ...

Popular Science has a nice graph showing where the plastic you recycle in the United States goes for processing.    ...

You've probably seen this image making the rounds on social media. It shows a method of doing basic subtraction that's intended to appear wildly nonsensical and much harder to follow than the "Old Fas...

You've probably seen this image making the rounds on social media. It shows a method of doing basic subtraction that's intended to appear wildly nonsensical and much harder to follow than the "Old Fas...

I am always looking for dog toys that'll keep both a very large Great Pyrenees and a pretty small Cavalier King Charles happy.    ...

The South is warming to gay marriage, writes Robert P Jones in The Atlantic. The reasons are complicated and regional, but it reminded me a little of how some British conservatives evinced a similar "...

Kevin McFarland reviews the finale of HBO's crime drama "True Detective," starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. If you're new to the show, start with our introduction here. This post conta...

Never let it be said that Community goes halfway in its genre homage episodes. App Development And Condiments is a full-on dystopian meltdown that pitches Greendale into a disastrous state of rigid s...

Never let it be said that Community goes halfway in its genre homage episodes. App Development And Condiments is a full-on dystopian meltdown that pitches Greendale into a disastrous state of rigid s...

Hannibals premiere hit the ground running, but it felt like half of an episode. We barely even met the artist behind the giant corpse-eye mural, because there was so much fallout from Wills incarcerat...

You've probably seen Garfield Minus Garfield, a collection of Jim Davis Garfield strips in which Garfield himself has been removed, transforming the strip into a sinister portrait of Jon Arbuckle's de...

ST Geotronics have exanded their Instructables project for building your own Arduino-based Enigma and turned it into a Kickstarter. $40 gets you some boards you can kit-bash with; $125 gets you the fu...

Reddditor Amzfx created a Putin butt-plug by way of commentary on Russia's invasion of Crimea, and he's selling them on Shapeways for €20.22.    ...

Next Saturday (Mar 15), the SF in SF people will host a screening of indie movie PIG, an award-winning sf movie, followed by a Q&A with producer Mark Stolaroff, founder of the No Budget Film Scho...

One year ago today US lawmaker uses neat flip phone trick to avoid talking to "pesky reporters": Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) "is well known for pulling a flip phone out of his pocket and pretending...

The Public Prosecutor of Rome has unilaterally ordered Italy's ISPs to censor 46 sites, and it appears the ISPs are complying, even though no complaint had been lodged against the sites, nor had any j...

Last month, I wrote about the announcement of the $25 Firefox OS smartphone, aimed at developing world users who have never owned a smartphone and can't afford a high-end mobile device.  &nb...

One year ago today Welcome to your Awesome Robot: instructional comic turns kids & cardboard boxes into AWESOME ROBOTS!: Welcome to Your Awesome Robot is a fantastic book for maker-kids and their...

Edward Snowden is speaking at SXSW on Monday at an event that I'm also part of.Rep Mike Pompeo (R-KS), who sits on the House Intelligence Committee (and on whose watch the abuses that Snowden has deta...

Janice writes, "The Harlequin Creature is a journal of poetry and prose that is hand-typed at typing bees by a circle of friend and volunteers from Los Angeles to Ann Arbor to New York.  &nb...

Caitlin Roper's 25th anniversary appreciation of Katherine Dunn's magnificent novel Geek Love manages the improbable trick of doing the book justice.    ...

I linked to the seven-hour video file from Trustycon, the convention held as an alternative to RSA's annual security event, inspired by the revelation that RSA took money from the NSA to sabotage its...

Dan Gillmor's got more to say about the news that K-cups are getting coffee DRM and what it means in the wider world: "Just as the police and security agencies are racing deploy all new technologies t...

My partner Miles O'Brien will be appearing on tonight's PBS NewsHour to talk about the accident that led to the loss of his left arm, while on a reporting trip in the Philippines.   &n...

Ukrainian leather mask-maker Bob Basset's unveiled his latest creation, a menacing stormtrooper that calls to mind the recent Euromaidan violence. New Stormtrooper Art Leather mask    ...

Carol writes, "After a much-needed break, this week Phil & Kaja Foglio started up a new story arc on their multiple-Hugo-award-winning 'Girl Genius' comic series.    ...

Bani Garu is Lea Hernandez's story of becoming the U.S. merchandising vice-president of notorious Japanese animation studio Gainax, "a year-long trip down a rabbit hole of reality." Start with page 1....

Jim Munroe sez, "Ten years from now, videogames are so immersive that teenagers learn lethal skills just by playing. They're called hapheads.    ...

My partner Miles O'Brien will be appearing on tonight's PBS NewsHour to talk about the accident that led to the loss of his left arm, while on a reporting trip in the Philippines.   &nb...

Our good pal Brandon "Offworld" Boyer has cancer. Lucky for Brandon, he signed up for medical insurance with Humana not long before he was diagnosed.    ...

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has submitted written testimony [PDF] to an EU committee investigating mass surveillance. Glyn Moody's Techdirt post gives a great tl;dr summary of the document, but y...

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is a terrible world leader among terrible world leaders: a xenophobic bigot and homophobe, committed to resource extraction economies and the destruction of soci...

Lisa T. McElroy is a law professor who's spending a year at the University of Denver with her two kids, one in high school and one in middle school.    ...

I missed this Ask Me Anything when it was live back in February, but it's definitely worth going back and reading.    ...

Five years ago today Super Mario vs NYC -- street art: Some street artist in NYC is using tile-mosaics to turn the street-level water hookups into a giant Super Mario reenactment!   &nb...

Arunachalam Muruganantham is an inventor who came up with a way to make sanitary pads available to women in rural India (and give local village women a source income in the process).   ...

If a paleontologist breaks her leg three days' travel from the nearest hospital, what happens? One thing she might do is call Matt Lewin — a doctor who specializes in treating scientists who get...

Adam sez, "This is the first episode of an original Dailymotion production called 'That Was Me' which highlights the achievements of pop culture icons.    ...

Noam Cohen at The New York Times In a move that promises to increase the use of photography across the Internet, the Getty Images photo agency announced that it would allow noncommercial websites and ...

John Brownlee reviews The King in Yellow, the mysterious real-life book posed at the heart of True Detective's fictional mystery, and why the two are linked.    ...

Female representation in games is mired in toxic archetypes, so much so that even conscious efforts to avoid or neutralize them tends to end up mirroring the problem.    ...

Hang the Bankers has a set of photos from 1972 surrealist ball hosted by Marie-Hlne de Rothschild at the Chteau de Ferrires, with Salvador Dali in attendance.    ...

"Apologies for a couple of technical problems during that news bulletin," said BBC radio host Vic Minett, after her show played audio of a woman's screaming over a report from the murder trial of ath...

Twitter's 6-second video-sharing platform, Vine, has banned sexual content. Depictions of "provocative" nudity, sex acts, clothed but "aroused" genitals, and "sexually graphic" artwork or animation is...

Following a much-derided court ruling that found upskirt photos legal, legislators in Massachusetts rushed through a bill to make absolutely clear to the state's esteemed judiciary that it is not OK t...

I've written a guest editorial for the new Guardian Cities site about the way that the offices that house the startups of London's famed "Silicon Roundabout" are being systematically demolished by dev...

In Safety and Efficacy of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety Associated With Life-threatening Diseases, a new paper published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, a...

Phil and Limor from Adafruit write, "Make your own flexible, spiky, glowing accessory using NeoPixel strip diffused by NinjaFlex flexible 3D printing filament!    ...

When you watch Netflix videos in the Chrome browser, the service disables Chrome's developer console, a debugging and programming tool that gives you transparency and control over what your browser is...

Eric sends us this site documenting the construction of a kid-sized, 2/5-scale Batpod as seen in The Dark Knight: "My friend Travisis a pretty rad maker.    ...

Senator Joe Manchin delivered a grandstanding, technologically clueless, facepalm-inducing request to the Treasury Department to ban Bitcoin. In response, Rep Jared Polis (who proudly wears Boing Boin...

The Rochester Institute of Technology has announced America's "first minor in free and open source software and free culture." (Thanks, Stephen!    ...

Mack writes, "XyloVan is a roving musical mutant vehicle that our family built four years ago. Thousands of musicians, kids, Burners and amateur XyloVanists have enjoyed banging on the van, everywher...

On Hackaday, Shenzhen demonstrates some proof-of-concept "taser-proof clothing" created by adding carbon fiber to the clothes' lining. The carbon fiber textile can be procured in a variety of forms, i...

From the journal Science China: Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, February 2014.    ...

On its 40th anniversary, iconic splatterpunk film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been restored with a new 4K transfer from the original 16mm film shot by director Tobe Hooper in 1974.  &n...

One year ago today Politely refusing to talk to DHS checkpoints: Top quote: "Am I being detained?" Five years ago today The Economist: the "least bad" way to deal with drug problem is to legalize them...

"The first controlled LSD study in more than 40 years was released today in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease...    ...

In this International Labour Office complaint, Miranda Brown, a former employee of the World Intellectual Property Agency, alleges that WIPO Director General Francis Gurry illegally collected DNA samp...

An Instagram post from cronut creator Dominique Ansel announced his new invention: a milk-tumbler made out of molded, baked chocolate cookie dough intended for serving milk.    ...

Jon sez, "When conjuring up the future, why do writers and filmmakers so often imagine Northern California as an edenic utopia, while Southern California gets turned into a dystopian hellscape? &...

Illustration: Adam "ApeLad" Koford Headed to 2014 SXSW Interactive in Austin this weekend? Cory, Xeni, Mark, and Pesco will all be there participating in a variety of sessions.    ...

The CIA did not invent the concept of coming up with ludicrous, flaw-filled ways to kill someone. Around 1530, artillery master Franz Helm of Cologne wrote a treatise on gunpowder-enhanced warfare tha...

Clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of The Big Disconnect, studies why it's so hard for us to disregard the digital disruptions around us. Tanya Schevitz, spokesperson for Reboot's N...

Robotic, Department-of-Defense funded, and power performance enhanced — high-tech replacement limbs make for great photos and video clips. And the people who wear them — often veterans, or...

Hiland writes, "The auction website Hakes is featuring a bunch of things from the estate of Maurice Sendak. A particular one of note is the miniature Lindbergh Baby kidnapping trial souvenir wooden la...

Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, is offering a Summer biology field research program designed for a diverse mix of able-bodied students and students with ambulatory disabilities.  &...

Science journalist Colin Schultz writes about how boys who know next to nothing about menstruation become men who are uncomfortable with and/or dismissive about the normal bodily functions of their fr...

Clinical psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of The Big Disconnect, studies why it's so hard for us to disregard the digital disruptions around us. Tanya Schevitz, spokesperson for Reboot's N...

The Guardian reports that the Phillips Island Penguin Foundation in Australia is asking volunteers to knit sweaters for penguins being rehabilitated after oil spills.    ...

Dave from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Remember when Rep. Mike Rogers likened opponents of pernicious cybersecurity legislation to 14-year-olds? It turns out that middle-school-age studen...

Above is the original glorious painting, artist unknown, used for the cover of the pseudonymous Warren Smith's 1970 book Strange Abominable Snowmen.    ...

It's not an exercise bike for your nose. Instead, the nasal cycle is the biological cycle that automatically switches the bulk of your breathing from one nostril to another throughout the course of th...

This iGo keychain fob sized USB smartphone charging cable is fantastic! It is compact, flat and simply gets the job done.    ...

Michael Froomkin writes, "My latest privacy paper, Regulating Mass Surveillance as Privacy Pollution: Learning from Environmental Impact Statements, has a new take on how to regulate mass surveillance...

I've been thinking about the news that Keurig has added "DRM" to its pod coffee-makers since the story first started doing the rounds a couple of days ago.    ...

Satoshi Nakamoto, 64, is the San Bernardino man who created Bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency and drama machine. He is bemused by his creation, and generally unimpressed with the outcomes. &nbs...

Satoshi Nakamoto, 64, is apparently the San Bernardino man who first developed Bitcoin, the popular cryptocurrency and drama machine. He is bemused, and generally unimpressed.    ...

Jon Lebkowsky writes, "EFF and EFF-Austin, working with the amazing Maggie Duval, put together this celebration of the 90s Internet and cyberpunk memes.    ...

Marcus Wohlsen covers the plans of Green Mountain Coffee to add DRM to the little plastic cups of ground coffee used in its Keurig-brand coffee machines, More than just curbing your coffee choices, Gr...

Jane Friedman and Manjula Martin founded Scratch Magazine, a born-digital publication that tells writers what they're worth and how the publishing industry sausage-making factory actually works. ...

Online "character quizzes," suddenly ultra-viral thanks to adroit Facebook-centric designs at sites like Zimbio, are all the rage. Are they fueled by narcissism?    ...

Crawl looks like a fun action RPG in a Victorian horror setting. The gimmick: your friends control the enemies! They have a Steam release date of "first half 2014." One player controls the Hero, the ...

After an accident, British pop singer George Michael began smoking heavily and "has joked about the time he talked in a regional voice totally unconnected to him, saying: 'Theres nothing wrong with th...

An amusing headline, but a serious problem for beleaguered beekeepers in England: "According to committee member David McLarin, nosema is becoming more prevalent in the South West and that is not good...

Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford flew to Los Angeles for an appearance on the Jimmy Kimmel show. What followed was more than a little awkward.    ...

William Adams, the Aransas County Court-At-Law Judge caught on camera slurring his voice and mercilessly whipping his terrified, screaming 14-year-old daughter with a belt ("Bend over the bed like iI...

Senate majority leader Harry Reid gave a hell of a speech in Congress about the agenda of the billionaire Koch brothers, carbon barons who are the prime beneficiaries of Citizens United, the Supreme ...

Godaddy has censored a prominent Mexican political site that was critical of the government and a proposed law to suppress public protests.    ...

The DoJ has filed a motion to dismiss charges against Barrett Brown related to republishing a link, an act they had previously characterized as a felony.    ...

I read this Golden Age Simon and Kirby comic about a malevolent leprechaun when I was a kid. I think it was in a black and white paperback anthology; but I'm not sure. I do remember being thoroughly c...

Canadian artist Clem Chen produced a pair of lovely grotesque sculptures by combining bicycle seats with taxidermy, presently on display at the Hot Art Wet City Gallery in Vancouver.   ...

Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Ivan Brunetti... three fantastic artist who are part of the new Pigeon Press Gallery, founded by Alvin Buenaventura (editor of The Art of Daniel Clowes).   ...

Thinkgeek have teamed up with Ifixit to create a Game Console & Electronics Refurbishing Kit, with all the tools you need to crack the case on most games consoles, phones and other gadgets. ...

Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and CNN Chief Medical Correspondent, used to be an opponent of medical marijuana. Last year. after looking into the research, he changed his mind.   &nb...

Russia Today anchor Liz Wahl resigned during her broadcast, explaining that she wanted no "part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin." Wahl began her comments by referencing her colleag...

Harold Feld from Public Knowledge writes, "One of the hardest problems I face advocating for more open, shared 'unlicensed' spectrum is trying to explain exactly what 'spectrum' is and why decisions ...

The sweetest pleasure arises from difficulties overcome. Publius Syrus (Via 22 words)    ...

Mr. Jalopy bought a Pullman Vacumobile at a garage sale. He says, "Don't believe I have ever seen a more handsome shop vac in my life." I like the logo for the "Never Clog" filter.   &n...

Tell Me Something I Dont Know is Boing Boing's podcast featuring artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creative people discussing their work, ideas, and the practical side of how they do what they d...

Christopher Mitchell, a PhD candidate in NYU's Computer Science program, is building a 1:1 scale model of Manhattan in Minecraft, with faithful, handmade reproductions of each of the island's skyscrap...

The Sword and Laser (S&L) is a science fiction and fantasy-themed book club podcast hosted by Veronica Belmont and Tom Merritt.    ...

The ACLU and SXSW will host a video chat with Edward Snowden on Monday, during the day's civil-liberties-focused program track. I'll be speaking immediately before Snowden, with Barton Gellman, and we...

That Gilbert Sheltons name isnt immediately recognized by everyone who reads these words is a shame, one Knockabout Comics has spent the past half-dozen years working hard to correct.   ...

The Delhi police lost the password for a portal that hosted complaints that had been passed on by the Central Vigilance Commission after an initial vetting.    ...

Well over half of Americans want pot to be legalized, and a panicky Drug Enforcement Administration is ramping up its lies and surliness.    ...

The CIA's Inspector General has asked the Justice Department to consider criminally charging CIA agents who spied on a senate committee that was engaged in writing a report that was highly critical of...

For the first time, some researchers studied the long-term impacts of breastfeeding vs. formula feeding in American children by comparing breastfed vs.    ...

One year ago today Humans yelling like goats yelling like humans: Full circle, guys. Five years ago today Doctors force patients to sign gag orders forbidding online reviews: Over 2,000 US doctors hav...

Apply by April 11 to be one of the 54 lucky/gifted high school juniors and seniors chosen to attend the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's Disease Detective Camp this summer.   ...

I live in a place so dark that grues are a legitimate concern. I've found no super bright flashlight better sized or more dependable than the SureFire E2D Defender.    ...

Tim got an email from someone trying to get rid of comment spams -- ever since Google started punishing sites that left comment spam on blogs, this has been going on a lot.    ...

My friend Dale Dougherty, founder of MAKE Magazine and creator of Maker Faire, went to Sochi with his wife, Nancy. He wrote a long, fascinating account of their stay in Russia for Medium.  &...

An interesting look at how political tensions on Earth affect relationships on the International Space Station. Spoiler: They officially do not have any effect and there's a long history of compartmen...

This story about the recent loss of a millions-of-years-old dinosaur footprint uses the word "vandals" to describe the criminals, but I think that's misleading.    ...

Click the icons at the top, or scroll right [via Kottke]    ...

Max Read ranks the nation's problems in order of severity: "5. A loss of perspective on what is and is not important."    ...

Cody Foster & Co is an art-swiping tchotcke maker, used by big retailers to source fashionable cloneware they want to sell.    ...

We are thrilled to announce that work on the Boing Boing Happy Mutant Mobile has begun! Here's a glimpse of the handiwork from the talented makers at LGE CTS Motorsports!    ...

Robot Mountain has compiled a partial list of the bad-ass weapons of Catholocism, which include Durendal, "which had in its hilt one of St Peters teeth, St Basils blood, a hair of St Denis, and a scra...

Fong Qi Wei created these astounding animations from time-lapse photographs of cities and other landscapes, fading into darkness. "This is a follow up to my previous series Time is a Dimension (TIAD)....

A toilet is missing from the USA Economy Lodge in Spartanburg, SC., and they're pretty sure they know who took it, but the danged judge won't sign off on the warrant.    ...

Nullify your coffee with Musicians With Guns's Overstepping Artifacts. Musicians With Guns is a project by a Ricardo Montalban; see Astroblast for more of the same.    ...

Jen from Cake Wrecks made this amazing AT-AT rocking-horse, documenting the build online (she's promised plans to follow). It will be auctioned for charity at Megacon by the Florida chapter of the 501...

Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH The New York Times's Crusading Columnist Vladimir Putin Gets a Scoop on the Ukraine Conflict!    ...

A major, critical security flaw in a key cryptographic program used by most flavors of GNU/Linux as well as other free/open operating systems has been reported.    ...

It was a lot of work, rowing The Father Skolnik Maru, but it wasn't torture. It wasn't like Les Miserables or anything.— Daniel Pinkwater (@DanielPinkwater) March 4, 2014 We got 10 minut...

The Obama administration has a new negotiator in its effort to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a secretly negotiated treaty that includes broad powers to censor and surveil the Internet: Robert H...

Vi Hart, the Internet's favorite manic vlogging mathematician, has released a new video in which she teams up with math artists Andrea Hawksley and Gwen Fisher, and Gwen's sister Ruth of Sweets by Ru...

Ryan Calo, the organizer of the annual Stanford conference on Robots and the Law has written a new paper called Robotics and the New Cyberlaw , examining the new legal challenges posed by the presenc...

Your browser doesn't support the HTML audio tag. You can still download the show, though! var audioTag = document.createElement('audio'); /* Do we not support MP3 audio?    ...

In 1924, Mae Keane got fired from a job painting watch dials. Failing at the job may have seriously altered her fate.    ...

Carol from the wonderful Cheapass Games writes, "Pairs is our latest project: a classic pub-style card game, designed by James Ernest and Paul Peterson.    ...

Not many people bought the first bOING bOING T-shirt when it came out in 1990. We charged $12 for it. Since you waited 24 years, you will have to pay $19.95.    ...

Tim sends us, "A way of encoding binary numbers into playing cards that I thought up. It usually allows many more bits than there are cards.    ...

My family ships a lot of boxes during the holidays, and we go through a few rolls of packaging tape. Large pistol-grip tape dispensers dont work well on smaller boxes I have never been able to get th...

The Intergalactic Travel Bureau is a cool combination of science education outreach and performance art that gives people a chance to interact with real scientists.    ...

Jeff sez, "On Saturday, March 29, 2014, there will be an epic Disney event in San Francisco. The Disney Project proudly presents: Walt, WED, and WESTCot.    ...

Thinkgeek's Tauntaun Costume Hoodie not only has horns and ears, but its lining includes line-art innards and gore, to really bring home the feeling of climbing inside your trusty steed's guts to be s...

Thinkgeek's Tauntaun Costume Hoodie not only has horns and ears, but its lining includes line-art innards and gore, to really bring home the feeling of climbing inside your trusty steed's guts to be s...

Our friend Gareth Branwyn has just announced the publication of his new 20-page booklet, "Gareth's Tips on Sucks-Less Writing." This is loaded with excellent advice for writers.    ...

"Moments ago, the Washington, D.C. City Council voted to decriminalize marijuana possession! The bill, which goes into effect this summer, replaces criminal penalties of up to six months in jail and a...

"Albedo" is derived from the Latin word for "white". Scientists use it to describe the reflectivity of a surface — how what a surface is made of changes the amount of light it reflects. &nb...

I love Toca Bocas iPhone apps for kids. They aren't games; they are open-ended interactive toys. The art is beautiful. (So many other kids' apps have depressing 1970s Saturday morning cartoon style a...

Valerie Hegarty makes mixed-media painting/sculptures where the paintings appear to be taking on three dimensionality and bursting out of their frames and off their canvases.    ...

A London court has found a man named Andrew Meldrum guilty of "unauthorised access to computer material" and "voyeurism." Meldrum "helped" young women fix their computers and covertly installed snoopw...

Kevin writes, "A motion just filed by the defense in Barrett Brown's case makes the argument that merely linking to information which is already publicly available should be protected by the First Ame...

In 2010, Ed Fries, a former Microsoft VP of game publishing, programmed an Atari 2600 version of Halo. The game, titled Halo 2600, has now been added to the collection of the Smithsonian American Art ...

Filmed at Kruger National Park in South Africa. [Video Link]    ...

"Get a life," warns the Economist. "Or face the consequences."    ...

Above is the Centaur rocket, "America's Workhorse in Space," that NASA used in more than 200 missions, from Voyager to Viking, Cassini to New Horizons.    ...

Daniel sez, "Mediagoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.   &nbs...

I like the creative restraint; the tentative, subtle touches. [YouTube. via]    ...

I've posted previously about Reuben Margolin's beautiful large kinetic wave sculptures. Inspired by Margolin's work, Dean O'Callaghan created this exquisite tabletop hand-crank automata mimicking the...

I was digging through the stacks of used science fiction at San Francisco's Green Apple bookstore when I came across this absolute gem, H.    ...

Philip Bump at The Wire looks into the possible copyright law interpretations surrounding the famous Ellen DeGeneres Oscar selfie. Ellen gave it away to the AP.    ...

"Facebook, one of the primary backers of the Internet.org initiative, which aims to bring affordable Internet access to the 5 billion people in the world who still lack connectivity, is in talks with ...

Glenn sez, "An Irish programmer started with a club in Cork to teach (at no cost) kids aged 5 to 17 how to program.    ...

Matthew Ingram talks to Reddit GM Erik Martin about the site's plans to build out crowdsourced reporting features—and how it will guard them against misuse and chaos.    ...

Despite its reputation for sending hundreds of cruise ship vacationers to the bathroom en masse, norovirus isn't nearly as big a problem on naval vessels.    ...

The good news: Otters in Alaska's Prince William Sound seem to have finally rebounded to population levels and life cycles similar to those they enjoyed before the wreck of the Exxon Valdez in 1989.&n...

Kayona Hagen-Tietz, a ninth grader at Como Park High School in St Paul, MN, says she developed frostbite when she was made to stand in -5F weather wearing nothing but a wet bathing suit.  &n...

Every year, five companies capture thousands of horseshoe crabs, drain the animals of up to 30% of their blood, and release them back into the wild.    ...

Need a place to urinate at Mardi Gras? Check out AirPnP — a "bathroom rental" service that matches people who need to pee with people willing to open their bathroom up to pee-ers.  &nb...

Jason & Farah, cognitive science postdocs at Washington University, write, "We humans have always used our surroundings to extend our memory.    ...

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

Glyn sez, "UK Deputy PM Nick Clegg has commissioned a review into the new intrusive capabilities of British intelligence agencies and the legal framework in which they operate." He warns: "It is not...

Patrick Rock, a Thatcherite who served as special advisor to UK Prime Minister David Cameron who played an influential role in the Prime Minister's national Internet censorship plan, has been arrested...

Here's a reading (MP3) of my latest Locus column, Cold Equations and Moral Hazard which considers the way that science fiction can manipulate our ideas about the technical necessity for human misery, ...

Maciej Cegowski's Webstock 2014 talk is called OUR COMRADE THE ELECTRON, and it's an inspired rant about the relationship of technology to power and coercion.    ...

Maciej Cegowski's Webstock 2014 talk is called OUR COMRADE THE ELECTRON, and it's an inspired rant about the relationship of technology to power and coercion.    ...

danah boyd has posted a free PDF of the full text of her must-read book It's Complicated, the best book about young people and the Internet I've read to date.    ...

Exactly what it sounds like: 46 calories per 200ml.    ...

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You are Not So Smart is hosted by David McRaney, a journalist and self-described psychology nerd. In each episode, David explores cognitive biases and delusions, and is often joined by a guest expert....

US Customs and Border Patrol agents can detain American citizens for hours and seize laptops and phones without evidence or suspicion of wrongdoing. This has happened to a number of journalists, and p...

John Baichtal is a contributor to MAKE online, and is good at explaining complex things to newbies. He's put this talent to use in his new book, Arduino for Beginners, which assumes nothing from the r...

In the 1970s, British men could (apparently) rent hair. Unless this is a parody ad that has lost its context -- does anyone know?    ...

John Twells tallies the 14 synthesizers that shaped modern music. tl;dr: Minimoog, Odyssey, Prophet-5, Fairlight, PPG Wave, Jumo, Yamaha's CS-80 and DX7, and Korg's MS-20, M1 and Triton.  &n...

Phil Torrone and Limor Fried send us the latest episode of Collin's Lab: "Learn how to bring a circuit from schematic to reality using a solderless breadboard - then make it permanent by reincarnatin...

Mikkelson's civilized serial killer returns in "Kaiseki," the eye-opening premiere to season two of Hannibal. Theresa DeLucci takes a bite out of the show's mad metaphors.    ...

Scouting New York visited the New York filming locations of The Godfather (1972) to see how they look today. Top, Don Corleone gunned down outside Genco (128 Mott Street), and that location now. ...

A bedroom of books, provenance unknown. From the inspiring Instagram feed of The Academy New York.    ...

A python bested a crocodile in an epic battle at Lake Moondarra in Queensland, Australia. After the victory, the snake celebrated by eating his foe.    ...

To clarify, the @HSCIC story thats coming is, I believe, infinitely worse than patient hospital records being uploaded to Google BigQuery— ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) March 3, 2014 PA Consulting...

One year ago today Smoothing 3D prints with acetone and without patent violations: Austin Wilson and Neil Underwood from the North Carolina makerspace Fablocker invented a great, simple process f...

"Downloading copyrighted material through torrents may be illegal in your country. Use at your own risk... Best of all, it's free!" Popcorn Time    ...

A pelican knocked around by a storm near Tanzinia's Mahale Mountains was rescued and taught to fly again. Here's beautiful "beak-cam" footage of the soaring bird.    ...

"Monday afternoon, Robert Duncan will report to Mendota Federal Prison in Fresno, Calif., to begin a two-year prison sentence. His crime?    ...

Here's electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack appearing on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1968 with experimental children's dance educator Esther Nelson. Two years later, Haack went on to compose the q...

Kevin Bateske made this credit card sized video game player using a Barebones Arduino and a tiny OLED screen. It's just 1.6mm thick.    ...

Flashy, gilded, luridly-colored glass towers surrounded by decaying concrete boxes? Welcome to the architectural aftermath of soviet communism, collected by Frank Herfort in his book, Imperial Pomp.&n...

The Bishop of Rome had a problem with cock at his weekly blessing. Listen out for "questo cazzo--questo caso", which translates to "this cock--this example".    ...

Financier Carl Icahn takes aim at Silicon Valley capitalist and eBay board member Marc Andreesson, who profited handsomely after eBay sold Skype to his investment group at a marked-down price: "Icahn ...

Kara Swisher learned that some high-ups at Microsoft at leaving the company following the appointment of new CEO Satya Nadella.    ...

CarPlay is the new name of Apple's in-car cut of iOS, and the launch partners will be Mercedes, Volvo and Ferrari.    ...

My latest Locus column is "Cold Equations and Moral Hazard", an essay about the way that our narratives about the future can pave the way for bad people to create, and benefit from, disasters. &n...

"Be More Tea," an ad for Lipton's tea, is sheer genius: Kermit finds himself tempest-tossed in a hard, uncaring version of Manhattan where everyone is an avatar of Animal.    ...

Kevin McFarland reviews episode 7 in season 1 of HBO's crime drama "True Detective," starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. If you're new to the show, start with our introduction here. This...

One year ago today Twenty Four Standard Causes of Human Misjudgement: Classic 1995 speech by Charlie Munger (much cited, and transcribed here in PDF), in which Munger (a respected investor and partner...

MC Chris, creator of such immortal nerdcore classics as Fett's Vette and Aqua Teen Hunger Force, has a new double album out: Foreverrr.    ...

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a secretly negotiated trade agreement let by the USA. Though the text is secret, enough drafts have leaked to make it clear that one of its goals is to ensure that for...

The Trustycon folks have uploaded over seven hours' worth of talks from their event, an alternative to the RSA security conference founded by speakers who quit over RSA's collusion with the NSA. ...

Molly Crabapple sez, "I wrote this piece about a program in Phoenix called Project ROSE arrests sex workers in massive raids and brings them to a church, where they are held extra-judicially and offer...

Last August, I posted about a lawsuit brought by Larry Lessig and the Electronic Frontier Foundation against Australia's Liberation Music, who hold the rights to "Lisztomania," a song by the French b...

The National Center for Public Policy Research, group of climate deniers with stock in Apple, tried to force a motion to terminate Apple's use of renewable energy (and failed miserably).  &n...

An entrepreneur is looking for $100K on Kickstarter to fund production of Shareroller, an ingenious, portable, snap-on electric motor for city-share bikes, like those in NYC, London, Toronto, Montreal...

Glenn sez, "R&B music was pretty bawdy before its entered the era of white appropriation and radio play. Leah Reich, an ethnographer by training and a music lover and singer by love, takes a str...

Glenn sez, "R&B music was pretty bawdy before its entered the era of white appropriation and radio play. Leah Reich, an ethnographer by training and a music lover and singer by love, takes a str...

Sheer hilarity. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)    ...

Trip Pixel Furniture, from Studio Badini Createam/Seletti, adds pixellated fine-art images to the Trip line of furniture, created a tastily dissonant juxtaposition of modern glitchiness with ponderou...

Zack Smith writes, "I recently got to talk to John Ridley, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of 12 YEARS A SLAVE, about his past writing superhero comics and cartoons including JUSTICE LEAGUE and THE A...

Davi Barker was flying from Manchester, NH when, he says, he was stopped by two men who identified themselves as "managers" for the TSA, who claimed they had seen Bitcoins in his baggage and wanted to...

Charles Koppelman writes, "Zero Day (working title) is a documentary film being produced and directed by Charles Koppelman. BBC Storyville is co-producing and intends to air it.    ...

One week after Ukrainian strongman Viktor Yanukovuych fled Kiev and the government snipers who'd murdered dozens of protesters ran for the hills, Vladimir Putin has received approval from the Russian ...

One year ago today Frank Frazetta's painting of Ringo Starr on the back cover of MAD (1964): The portrait itself was painted with full Ralph William Williams lusciousness by infrequent MAD contributor...

Disney has dropped the Boy Scouts of America from the roster of charities eligible to benefit from its Voluntears program, through which the company donates money to charities when its employees do vo...

The South Carolina House of Representatives has withdrawn $52,000 from the College of Charleston for including Alison Bechdel's brilliant, celebrated memoir Fun Home in its summer reading program.&nbs...

Earlier today, I reviewed a new book by Kevin "Lowering the Bar" Underhill called "The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance and Other Real Laws That Human Beings Have Actually Dreamed Up, Enacted, and Someti...

Just look at it. (Sugary sweet J-pop goes death metal) (via Mefi)    ...

Walter Williams, 87, of Lexington, Mississippi was pronounced dead on Wednesday night. The coroner came to his home, did the paperwork, put him in a body bag, and transferred him to a funeral home.&nb...

Richard Wiseman is the professor of Public Understanding of Psychology at the UK's University of Hertfordshire. His last book, Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There, was about the psychology of ...

Here's an exclusive Blu-ray clip from 3rd season box set of Adventure Time, which went on sale this week. The Blu-ray and DVD both feature all 26 episodes from the series third season, as well as bon...

Seth Rosenblett reports from Trustycon, the conference formed as a protest against, and alternative to the RSA security conference. RSA's event is the flagship event in the security industry, but the ...

Kevin Sweeting reports on The revenge of Jobriath, the first ostentatiously gay music star, and our growing collective appreciation for his brilliant music.    ...

Happy Fangs is the punk pop duo formed last year by singer Rebecca Gone Bad (formerly of My First Earthquake) and guitarist Michael Cobra of King Loses Crown, plus drum machine.    ...

Our friends at Last Gasp are having a logo design contest. Q: Who doesn't like drawing skulls? A: No one! Attention Artists!    ...

Etsy seller RandomPrefect cuts beautiful silhouettes from recycled vinyl records and sells them as bold, elegant necklaces. These are hand-cut (not laser cut or machined) and the designs include birds...

The fifth season of Community isnt breaking new ground, but its a perfectly satisfying addition to a catalogue of episodes that now breaks down into a number of categories.    ...

Kelsey Campbell-Dollahan: " there's still no perfect way to care for sufferers of dementia and Alzheimer's. In the Netherlands, however, a radical idea is being tested: Self-contained "villages" where...

It lost 750,000 bitcoins to a "hacking attack", reports The New York Times, a haul worth some $400m at the present exchange rate.    ...

A well-established myth debunked. [via MeFi]    ...

Kevin Underhill, the very funny lawyer behind Lowering the Bar, a very funny law-blog, has published a book of weird laws through the ages, called The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance and Other Real Laws...

Kevin Underhill, the very funny lawyer behind Lowering the Bar, a very funny law-blog, has published a book of weird laws through the ages, called The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance and Other Real Laws...

DC resident Ashley Brandt was surprised to meet a TSA agent at Phoenix airport who didn't think that DC drivers' licenses were valid ID, because DC isn't a state.    ...

King Games, makers of Candy Crush, have backed down from their insane campaign to trademark the use of "Candy" in connection with games, a gambit that brought them ridicule and opprobrium (for example...