Ryanvasan of Reddit says: "Wife toured 80 year old couple's house for sale and this setup was in their office." The Macintosh Plus came out in 1986. I doubt many people still use it as a daily driver (if you do, tell us about it in the comments, and provide screenshots of what Boing Boing looks like on it).Image by Rama. - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, Link

Today, the whistleblower Chelsea Manning stepped out of the Military Corrections Complex at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, having served the longest sentence in US history for whistleblowing; for the duration of her ongoing appeal, she is on "excess leave in an active-duty status" which entitles her to access to military health-care insurance and other benefits. (more…)

Speaking to U.S. Coast Guard graduates today, president Donald Trump said that no politician in history had been treated worse than him."Look at the way I have been treated lately, especially by the media," he said. "No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly. You can't let them get you down, you can't let the critics and the naysayers get in the way of your dreams."Trump's White House is besieged by bipartisan questions about his alleged request to former FBI Director James Comey to halt an investigation into his former top national security aide.He's really asking for it, isn't he?Crises so far this weekMonday: Trump blurting classified info to Russian diplomats in meetingTuesay: Trump told FBI Director to make investigation disappearWednesday: Putin says he might release transcripts of Monday's chat.

High praise from a former US president to a future US president: "I did not see the program, but Mrs. Nixon told me you were great on the Donahue Show."[via]

There are many wrong ways to sense the world around you, and one of them is the best way to ensure your survival. Amanda Gefter of Quanta Magazine interviewed Donald D. Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine. Hoffman has spent the past three decades studying perception, artificial intelligence, evolutionary game theory and the brain, and his conclusion is a dramatic one: The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction....But how can seeing a false reality be beneficial to an organism’s survival?Hoffman: There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position, and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

The Trumpian trial-balloon on banning laptops in the cabins of planes coming from Europe has put the shits way up the airline industry (rightly), who have published their own (data-free) costings for such a ban: $1B, with $216M for delays, $655M from lost productivity, and $195M for renting airline-supplied devices to use while your laptop is in the cargo hold, awaiting its destiny in one or more of employee theft, gross destruction, or massive lithium-battery fires. (more…)

In this video, you'll learn why you shouldn't rub chopsticks together to remove splinters, stick your chopsticks upright in a bowl of rice, pass morsels from one set of chopsticks to another, and two other dining taboos.

Balenciaga sells a $2,145 leather bag that looks exactly like a cheap, big, blue plastic Ikea Frakta bag. (more…)

This week on Donald Bell's Maker Update -- a skateboard that shoots fire, design concepts from Hackaday prize, a dirt-cheap telepresence robot, cardboard rivets, a microcontroller guide from MAKE, a (canvas military tool bag), and Maker Faire Bay Area, the biggest show and tell on Earth. Extended show notes and transcript are here.By the way, if you're coming to Maker Faire this weekend, I'll be on a panel with Donald, April Wilkerson, and John Edgar Park, moderated by Gareth Branwyn. I'm also giving a talk about making a 1-string guitar in 15 minutes. I hope to see you there!

Construction is near to completion on Apple's $5B campus in Cupertino, and the project has included many odd notes, like the insistence on not having thresholds on the floor of the doorways lest daydreaming engineers trip over them, and some weird ideas about where the bathrooms should go. (more…)

It's been 15 years since the publication of Steven Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, a mindblowing, back-breaking 1,200-page book that (sort of) says the whole universe is made up of recursive fractals, also noteworthy for the frequent repetition of the phrase "A new kind of science" in its early chapters. (more…)

Death Row inmate JW Ledford, after enjoying a 5,000-calorie last meal, was killed with a lethal injection by the U.S. State of Georgia this morning. He quoted Cool Hand Luke, smiled and said "you can kiss my white trash ass," then had his mic cut as he began ranting.For his final meal on Friday, Ledford requested filet mignon wrapped in bacon with pepper jack cheese, large french fries, 10 chicken tenders with sauce, fried pork chops and a blooming onion.For dessert he had pecan pie, vanilla ice cream and sherbet, washed down with a Sprite, according to WGLC-TV, an Atlanta news station.Ledford robbed and murdered his neighbour, Dr Harry Johnston, stabbing him in the neck at his home on 31 January 1992.He then threatened the victim's wife before stealing money, four guns and vehicle from the house.

Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church is a powerful reactionary figure in the country's toxic political scene, which has welded a tale of thwarted imperial destiny to a thin-skinned fundamentalist theology that can't bear the slightest sign of mockery; he's blamed ISIS on secularism and Pride parades and says that marriage equality literally heralds the imminent apocalypse. (more…)

Fergus Wilson rents almost 1000 properties in Kent, England, but not to Indians, Pakistanis, or women who have been victims of domestic violence. The BBC reports that this sterling example of British tolerance is getting sued.He has insisted he is not racist and has rented to "non-white" people, including Gurkhas.Mr Wilson said: "It is not the colour of their skin, but the smell of the curry."The EHRC appears to be saying that the purchaser then must let the house to someone who does cook curry."Advocacy group Hope Not Hate said: "Mr Wilson needs to join the 21st century."It's almost as if he has taken a tick box to offend every vulnerable group in Britain."We hope these legal proceedings will help him rapidly re-focus his outdated views."It's almost comical, how his rental criteria measure a disparate but illustrative collection of inane bigoted resentments.

Motion designer Christian Stangl and composer Wolfgang Stangl created this gorgeous short film, titled LUNAR, from thousands of NASA photographs taken by astronauts. From the film description:In the year 1957 the cold war expands to space. The Soviet-Union sends Sputnik as the first manmade object into earth-orbit. 2 years later Yuri Gagarin enters space as the first man in space. The so called "Space Race" seems to be decided. But in 1961 President Kennedy promised to send American Astronauts to the moon. The Apollo Project was born. A space ship had to be built that is strong enough to escape earth's gravitation, land on the moon and bring the crew safely back to earth.

In the world of professional sand sculptors, Toshihiko Hosaka is known for his large commissioned works (like this commissioned Colossal Titan from Shingeki no Kyojin) and for creating an environmentally friendly sand glue, being used in the video above. (more…)

For their film Fire, Saulo Jamariqueli and Dirk Rees put a couple of fire breathers in a dark studio with a reflective surface, then ran the impressive footage through a kaleidoscope filter, making it even cooler. (more…)

Jodipan was a colorless slum until the local government decided to spend about $22,000 on a colorful makeover. Now the area is a tourist destination. (more…)

At $11, the Proctor Silex K2070YA 1-Liter Electric Kettle was the cheapest model I could find on Amazon that didn’t look like it would result in electrocution or an explosion of boiling water. I’ve spent three months with it. It’s OK.In fact, it’s showing no sign at all of problems. It boils water fast. The cord is detachable. It automatically shuts off when it boils, or if you try to boil air. The design makes it possible to refill from a faucet or fridge dispenser without opening the lid. You can see from across the room how full it is, too, thanks to its nice big window.The little “heating in progress” LED light inside the transparent switch is still working after months of use, and there’s no rubbery seal around the lid slowly failing; two problems that soon became annoyances on the $75 Breville this replaced. The only problem, such as it is? The LEX part of the logo has completely and slightly mysteriously disappeared.Here’s a photo of the heating element after a thousand or so boils:If you do want to die, though, the $2.17 Lookatool Pocket Boiler is where it’s at. The Ovente looks quite similar to the Proctor Silex model, comes in several cool colors, and is currently the same price, but has a stupid window.

Legendary chemists and psychonauts Nicholas Sand and Nick Scully created the legendary version of LSD known as “Orange Sunshine” that was so widely used in San Francisco in 1967. Sand died on April 24 at his home in the Northern California community of Lagunitas. He was 75. (more…)

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House today. While the two authoritarian heads of state chatted, Erdogan's thugs beat the crap out of Kurdish protesters nearby. (more…)

Paul Manafort received a 3.5 million dollar tax-free and payback-free loan from someone yet unknown, right after he left Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Federal investigators have subpoenaed Manafort's records to find out more about this weird real estate loan transaction, and his finances in general. (more…)

A sharia court in Indonesia’s ultra-conservative Aceh province has sentenced two gay men to public caning. (more…)

Before Trump fired James B. Comey last week, he asked the FBI director to end its investigation into former Trump advisor Michael Flynn and Russia, reports the New York Times. This is big news, and has since been confirmed by a number of other news organizations. (more…)

Michael from Muckrock writes, "The 'friendly' rivalry between America's East and West Coasts extends from hip-hop feuds to pizza bagels, and recently unearthed memos regarding California champagne from the CIA's declassified archive shows that even the Agency isn't immune." (more…)

Between 1838 and 1841, an enterprising London teenager repeatedly broke into Buckingham Palace, sitting on the throne, eating from the kitchen, and generally causing headaches for Queen Victoria's attendants, who couldn't seem to keep him out. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the exploits of Edward Jones -- who some have called the first celebrity stalker.We'll also salute some confusing flags and puzzle over an extraterrestrial musician.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

There's some remarkable craftsmanship at work in this step-by-step video of making a large brass fidget spinner shaped like the Batman logo. The best part is they are giving it away to a viewer. (more…)

Alberta’s Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology displays a nodosaur fossil that is so well-preserved that bumps and crevasses on its surface are clearly visible. National Geographic's Robert Clark captured amazing images. (more…)

A woman in the street interrupted a live BBC television interview and the reporter gently pushed her away with his hand. Did he know where he was pushing?

I've been interviewing a lot of people via Skype recently. I like to pace around while I talk so I bought this lightweight $20 Bluetooth headset on Amazon. It paired easily to my computer (a Macbook Pro) and the sound quality is fine. I've made a point of asking the people I've been interviewing me if they can hear me clearly and they've all said yes. The manufacturer promises "up to 12 hours continuous talking time and 200 hours standby time with single fully charged in just 2 hours." It charges through a micr-USB connection (cable included).

The best part of waking up...

National Security Sharer H.R. McMaster's overnight flip from denying the Washington Post story about Comrade President sharing classified data with the Russians during his job interview last week, to calling this blunder critical for national security is par for course.It is now far easier to trust just about anyone other than the White House.Slate tears into the logic of trusting the White House:The Post’s sources have made factual allegations that can be checked. The administration hasn’t.Contrast this record with the administration’s response. The White House has released three statements. McMaster says the Post story, “as reported, is false,” but he doesn’t debunk any specific claim in the story. He says “it didn’t happen,” but he doesn’t say what “it” is. The empirical claims he makes—for example, that “at no time were intelligence sources or methods discussed”—are compatible with the Post report, which alleges not that sources and methods were explicitly discussed, but that they were inadvertently exposed by Trump’s disclosures.The other two statements released by the White House are equally hollow. Dina Powell, the White House deputy national security adviser, says: “This story is false. The president only discussed the common threats that both countries faced.” Again, the factual claim fits the Post story, and the denial is too vague to check. A third statement, issued by Tillerson, doesn’t even say the Post story is false. It just says the people in the meeting “did not discuss sources, methods or military operations.”To be fair, that last claim by Tillerson is falsifiable. Indeed, it seems false. According to McMaster, Trump “did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known.” It’s hard to imagine why McMaster would add the caveat about “not already publicly known” unless Trump had, contra Tillerson, discussed military operations.On Tuesday morning, Trump himself weighed in. “As President I wanted to share with Russia (at an openly scheduled W.H. meeting) which I have the absolute right to do, facts pertaining to terrorism and airline flight safety,” he tweeted. Trump’s tweets, like his subordinates’ statements, didn’t challenge the Post’s reporting.A few hours later, at a White House briefing, reporters asked McMaster what elements of the Post story were false. He ducked the question, instead disputing what he called the story’s “premise”: that what Trump had said in the meeting was “inappropriate.” He was then asked about four claims in the story: that Trump had shared classified information, that he had revealed the city where the crucial intelligence was obtained, that the information he shared came from a U.S. intelligence partner, and that Bossert had subsequently contacted the CIA and NSA. McMaster disputed none of these allegations.

https://youtu.be/3H-Y-D3-j-MIn this 1981 Nightline interview Ted Koppel asks 26 year old Steve Jobs "There is a sense that many of us have who really don't understand how computers work, or what they do for us or to us, that we are becoming controlled by the computers. Any danger of that happening?"Jobs said: "Well, as you know, the product we manufacture, many people see it for the first time and they don't think it's a computer it's about 12 pounds you can throw it out the window if the relationship isn't going so well."

This crazy, groovy flick from the US Army was made in 1970 and features a Army Captain giving great fashion advice to a young soldier. Army Captain: Say, that's a beautiful dress. Where did you get it?Soldier: Where did I? Oh... I, uh, bought it at Lorman's last Thursday. Army Captain: You know, I wish I could wear one of those. They're really cute, but... well, I guess they're a little young for me.Soldier: But I thought, that, well, you didn't dig -- oh, excuse me ma'am, that you didn't like miniskirts and clothes like that.Army Captain: No, now that's not exactly right. We do have certain ideas about how you should look in your uniform... and I guess sometimes we do express these feelings rather strongly. How you dress in your off-duty hours is another matter… Now we do expect a girl to show good taste… but that shouldn't keep you from expressing your own individuality… take miniskirts, I think they're great, and you look good in them…If you aren't in the mood to watch all 20 minutes, here's the 3 minute highlights reel:https://youtu.be/Ow4feuNaKTI[via]

We are introducing Evezor, a robot that can carve, draw, engrave, pour, pick, place, cut, weld, print, grab, mill, assemble and create your next project or business. Powered by Raspberry Pi, open source software and hardware, Evezor is the most hackable robotic arm there is. Evezor can share and automate the hand tools you already own and with open toolhead platform, anyone can make tools for this machine. (more…)

FaceApp is a smartphone app that can add a smile to an unsmiling person's face. Olly Gibbs, the digital and print designer at Empire Magazine, used the app at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum to improve the paintings on display there.Went to a museum armed with Face App to brighten up a lot of the sombre looks on the paintings and sculptures. The results... pic.twitter.com/N0zYGAFgKW— Olly Gibbs (@ollyog) May 11, 2017And some more Face App museum creations... pic.twitter.com/0mBRgiLgCb— Olly Gibbs (@ollyog) May 12, 2017I hear your calls for more #MuseumFaceApp art! Again all from the brilliant @rijksmuseum... pic.twitter.com/xXHNTu86eW— Olly Gibbs (@ollyog) May 12, 2017

A man wearing a bright orange Home Depot apron loaded some air conditioners into a truck. No one noticed he was actually a thief until he got greedy and went into the store for more. That's when the store manager saw his name tag that said "Shannon" with flowers drawn around it. The observant manager knew the store didn't employ anybody with the name of Shannon, so he called the police.Shannon turned out to be 53-year-old Bernardo Calana from Massachusetts. The gentleman tried to tell the police he had nothing to do with the air conditioners, but the orange apron stuffed in his back pocket gave him away. This is something straight out of an I Love Lucy episode, minus the jovial laugh track to make it all good in the end.Thanks Seattle Times!Image: Enriquecornejo

Thanks to everyone (especially Neal Stephenson) who came out to last night's Walkaway event in Seattle: if you're in the area and couldn't make it, you get another chance tonight when I'll be at Bellingham's Village Books at 7PM. (more…)

A UK weapons company called Drone Defence has sold an anti-drone product to Les Nicolles prison on Guernsey that will use 20 nonspecific "disruptors" to do something to drones that will stop them from overflying the prison and smuggling in contraband. (more…)

"Willpower" began as an element of philosophical/theological arguments, used to explain riddles like how humans could commit sin even though they were created by a perfect, all-powerful god -- but it took on new meanings through the Enlightenment and then the Victorians imbued it with mystical, all-important significance, as a kind of synonym for morality and goodness. (more…)

Chris Notap used a small, cheap vacuum pump to suck the air out of a variety of plastic containers ranging from bread bags to 55 gallon drums.

Artist and animator Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame, with collage artist Kōsuke Kawamura, painted this view of the inside of the Tower of Babel, a perfectly fascinating pastiche of Bruegel's original, below.Eric Stimson reports:... Kawamura, who colored the painting to closely match the original. Kawamura says that he used over 25,000 layers in his editing software, "the most I've ever done in my life." He also had to carefully set the correct perspective for each brick. In the end, he doesn't even recognize his own work.Otomo visited the original painting in Rotterdam's Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen so he could study it carefully in detail. He even stumped the resident curators with his questions. For instance, they weren't sure where the tower's entrance was, but Otomo thinks he found it. He also noticed a river flowing into the tower and in the background, so he included it in his cutaway.Modeling the Library of Babel in Sketchup.

The Wall Street Journal reports that human error is still a factor in potential cockpit door breaches. (more…)

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra BONUS comics, and much more. GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Arc Symphony is a text-only game about being a fan of an elaborate Japanese Playstation RPG in the 1990s. Designed to evoke an old-timey USENET group and the ancient DOS PC used to connect to it, it's a perfect and mysterious capturing of a long-gone moment. To promote it, the creators commissioned designed jewel cases, complete with glossy booklet (no disk, of course), in perfect imitiation of a PSX game that never existed.At shows, people spot the clever mockup and say, hey, I remember that game. People tell them they remember playing it. People insist they remember. There are fansites. Arc Symphony works because of Park and Evan’s marketing of it—it becomes easier to pretend to be a fan of the game when they’ve managed to slip a little nostalgia for it into your drink. Both Park and Evans were very surprised by the success of their campaign, and how quickly it got away from them.“It’s actually really unsettling when it stops just being indie game devs having fun with each other,” Park said, “and starts being, well, rewriting cultural memory…”Previously: Nomen Ludi, the game you can't quite remember.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Social media apps have conditioned humans to accept vertical video in the way we now accept microplastics in our sea salt. Mashable is the latest to embrace the vertical video genre with Reels, a series of vertical format stories that were designed for viewing on a phone held vertically. (more…)

If otters experience the uncanny valley, this otter-like spycam seems just enough like an otter for them to accept, but not enough like an otter for them to consider a threat. (more…)

Donald Trump's white supremacist peanut gallery is scrambling to deny the reality of today's bombshell revelation the President shared highly classified information with Russian officials during a bizarrely timed White House visit the day after Trump fired FBI director James Comey. (more…)

https://youtu.be/RW7W-OKZBswThe original name for The Beverly Hillbillies was The Hillbillies of Beverly Hillbillies. The core cast in this unaired pilot from 1962 didn't change with the new name, and it also features the amazing customized 1921 Oldsmobile Model 43-A touring car built by car customizer George Barris (who created Black Beauty from Green Hornet, the Batmobile from the 1966 Batman TV series, and the Munster's Koach).