Charles Ross recorded himself removing stop signs for sweet, sweet YouTube views. He found an audience in the local police who pranked him back with a 3rd-degree felony charge. (more…)

Science Fiction Interfaces, gathered by nnkd, represent the myriad yet curiously familiar systems of control found in other worlds and times.Previously: Chris Noessel: lessons of science fiction computer interfacesUser interfaces in sf movies and tv

In a 217-213 vote in the House of Representatives, every Democrat and 20 Republicans were not enough to prevent the passage of Paul Ryan's Obamacare repeal bill. The American Health Care Act (ACHA) will reportedly allow insurers to raise premiums and deny healthcare coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions (including being the victim of domestic abuse or sexual assault, or giving birth by c-section) and amounts to an $880-billion slashing of healthcare services in the form of a tax cut returning mostly to the rich.The Senate, however, will not need any Democrats to pass it because they are using a procedural mechanism that allows the bill to pass the Senate to pass with just 51 votes instead of the usual 60-vote threshold. There are 52 Republicans in the Senate.The House measure came to the floor without an updated accounting of how much the bill will cost or its impact. The last assessment, which was done before the bill was altered, said that 24 million people would lose insurance, it would save $300 million and premiums would go down ten percent after ten years.Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Georgia, said that having no updated CBO score is slightly concerning."It is a concern, but at this point we have to move forward. The American people are clear they want this done, so I think we have to strike when the iron's hot," he said.The bill must still be voted on in the Senate. Then, assuming it passes, it will be signed into law by President Trump, who had promised before the election to provide healthcare coverage for all Americans.As the bill passed to cheers, House Democrats sang "hey hey goodbye" to their Republican counterparts, because the only thing that matters to them is the sweet hope that it might be unpopular enough to serve them a political victory in 18 months' time.https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/860201880290340864https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/860198826757541889https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/860216330120814592https://twitter.com/Beschizza/status/860204118509596672

@Smutclyde Google Translated sequences of unicode characters and short pairings, at varying lengths, to see what the neural networks would interpret each as. The results are remarkable. Lovecraftian wailings, for example, become homoerotic death metal lyrics.And is this not as disturbing as it is funny? Especially when you consider that the machine minds are learning their way beyond our comprehension.

Luis Padron, 25, has spent huge sums of money on cosmetic surgery in order to resemble an elf. He has almost spent more than £25,000 on surgery including liposuction on his jaw, a nose job, full body hair removal and operations to change his eye colour. ... He is planning surgery to make his ears pointed, hair implants for a heart-shaped hairline and a limb lengthening operation to make him 6ft 5in tall.Mr Padron fell in love with the fantasy genre during his early teenage years, while struggling with bullies who mocked him because he dyed his hair and had different dress sense.But by the end of high school, he claimed his quirkiness led to him being admired, which further fuelled his desire to be different.He added: 'I was bullied as a child and as an escape I would submerge myself in fantasy movies like Labyrinth and The NeverEnding Story, as well as other fantasy tales.'Over time things changed, older teens liked me because I was unique and that's what encouraged me to start turning what I felt on the inside into a reality.From an aesthetic perspective, I think he's executing his goals unusually well, which is largely due to broadened horizons among competent surgeons. There will be more of this in future from the rich (and those willing to tolerate a lifetime of debt). But I must say his is a rather sickly and emo-looking sort of elf. It's like he set out to turn his body into an illustration rather than an embodied creature; the details require "a £4,000-a-month ritual applying creams, dyes and treatment," according to the Daily Mail.Such measures can hide human problems, too. Without making any judgement on this chap's motives or concerns or what-have-you, let me just point out that the price drops to like $75 if you're OK being a fat elf.

Surveillance companies like Axon hope to turn every law enforcement officer into a data-gathering drone for a bodycam surveillance database they privately control. Now ShotSpotter, a listening technology that triangulates gunfire in "urban, high-crime areas," announced a planned IPO. (more…)

Last night, the whistleblower Edward Snowden and appeard on stage at the New York Public Library's LIVE from the NYPL series, to discuss my novel Walkaway. (more…)

The SS7 vulnerability has long been understood and publicized: anyone who spends $1000 or so for a mobile data roaming license can use the SS7 protocol to tell your phone company that your phone just showed up on their network and hijack all the traffic destined for your phone, including those handy SMSes used to verify sketchy attempts to log into your bank account and steal all your money. (more…)

Trish Vickers of Dorset, England, decided to write a novel. Though blind, she preferred to work the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper, with her son dropping in weekly to type up the results. On one visit, though, she learned to her horror that her pen had ran out of ink fully 26 pages ago. But all was not lost!Not knowing what else to do, she and Simon called the police. To the Vickers’s surprise, officers at Dorset HQ volunteered to work during their breaks and free time, hoping to use their forensic tools to help. And, five months later, the police reported back with success: they recovered the never-written words. Vickers told a local newspaper that the pen she used to write the pages — even though there was no ink left in it — left behind a series of indentations: “I think they used a combination of various lights at different angles to see if they could get the impression made by my pen.”Vickers finished the book, Grannifer's Legacy, and died the day it was published. [via MeFi]

MapSCII turns vectors into text-mode maps using the Braille ASCII character set. You can check out examples at ASCII Cinema, which provides animated embeds comprising of actual text!Examples follow:(more…)

Ultrasonic beacons (previously, previously) let advertisers build an idea of when and where you use your devices: the sound plays in an ad on one device, and is heard by other devices. This way, they can associate two gadgets with a single user, precisely geolocate devices without aGPS, or even build graphs of real-world social networks. The threat was considered more academic than some, but more than 200 Android apps were found in the wild using the technique.In research sponsored by the German government [PDF], a team of researchers conducted extensive tests across the EU to better understand how widespread this practice is in the real world.Their results revealed Shopkick ultrasonic beacons at 4 of 35 stores in two European cities. The situation isn't that worrisome, as users have to open an app with the Shopkick SDK for the beacon to be picked up.In the real world, this isn't an issue, as store owners, advertisers, or product manufactures could incentivize users to open various apps as a way to get discounts.From the paper:While in April 2015 only six instances were known,we have been able to identify 39 further instances in a datasetof about 1,3 million applications in December 2015, and untilnow, a total of 234 samples containing SilverPush has beendiscovered. We conclude that even if the tracking through TVcontent is not actively used yet, the monitoring functionalityis already deployed in mobile applications and might becomea serious privacy threat in the near futureApparently it's not very effective—consumer speakers and mics aren't designed with ultrasonic use in mind and the authors say noise, audio compression and other factors "significantly affects the feasibility" of the technology—but the intent is clearly there on the part of advertisers and appmakers to make a stab at it. Annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be a list of the apps that are doing this, but there is a reference to a McDonalds app. If an app asks for access to your device's microphone, camera, etc., and you don't know why, delete the app.

Subject-28 presentes sketches, cels and animation tests from Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 masterpiece, Akira. A huge and beautifully-presented selection. [via]

@mattatomic on Twitter not only had a brilliant idea, but executed it with such perfection I'm not sure I'll ever be able to eat carbs again without wondering at its moral and ethical placement.

My latest Locus Magazine column is Weaponized Narrative, about the pulp fiction convention of mashing up "man against nature" stories with "man against man" stories to tell "man against nature stories" (first the tornado smashes your house, then your neighbors come over to eat you). (more…)

Lasermad's Nixie Chessboards take 8-10 weeks to hand build, during which time each of the chess pieces is painstakingly built around a vintage nixie tube scavenged from the world's dwindling supply, and the board is prepared with the wireless induction coils that power the pieces when they're set on the board, lighting them up. (via Red Ferret) (more…)

A pizza dress and a taco gown by IMGUR-ian Avant Geek Art. (more…)

Behold, “The Nicolas Cage suit.” (more…)

Desiree Fairooz is a Code Pink activist who attended the confirmation hearing for former Senator Jefferson Sessions, in which he was approved as Attorney General for the USA; when Sessions' colleague Senator Richard Shelby claimed that Sessions' record of "treating all Americans equally under the law is clear and well documented," she burst out laughing and was arrested for disorderly conduct. (more…)

Oh Joy Sex Toy (previously), our favorite pervy webcomic, just announced their fourth annual kickstarter for a new collection of the best of their excellent, excellent, sex-positive comic. (more…)

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "The Internet strikes back! Hundreds of people chipped in small amounts to crowdfund these billboards targeting U.S. lawmakers who voted to gut the FCC's Internet privacy rules and allow ISPs like Comcast and Verizon to collect and sell their customers' personal information and web browsing history without our consent. Check out photos of the billboards here. (more…)

William Gibson's next novel, Agency, comes out in January 2018; it's a near-future science fiction story set in the world of The Peripheral in which "a gifted 'app-whisperer' is hired by a mysterious San Francisco start-up and finds herself in contact with a unique and surprisingly combat-savvy AI." (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiOzt57mfyAEric writes, "This is an analysis on the Chuck Jones short 'So Much for So Little' -- a documentary cartoon produced and paid for by the American government in 1949 that makes a stark case for public healthcare that everyone chips in a little for, in the interest of the greater good. This topic's always relevant, but with the recent monologue from Jimmy Kimmel, I think it's even more so this week." (more…)

Motorcyclists are 27x more likely to die and 5x more likely to be injured than folks in passenger cars. RideApart discusses the dangers of motorcycling in a mature and upfront fashion. (more…)

This weekend legendary centre of western civilization Eugene, Oregon once again plays host to the greatest spectacle in all of roller derby: THE BIG O!Teams usually come from all over the world to compete in Eugene's thunderdome of derby, however Orange Julius bullshit travel bans may have tempered that a bit. A quick glance shows there are still international teams on the roster.If you just happen to be in the greater Eugene metropolitan area this weekend, check out the Big O!

Pensacola, and the Internet's, Mark Gormley released this new recording in February! Since his first video took the internet by storm in 2006 folks anxiously await Mark's next gem.https://youtu.be/zEcGNj5nIgQ

Kent Tyler Smith made this lovely documentary covering artists Gus Harper and Gronk's collaborative painting.Gus and I are old friends, and it is no surprise to hear him describe his process, hobbies and life as fairly solitary. Over the years, however, I've seen Gus collaborate with a number of artists to create works that were more than what he could achieve alone. In the past this has involved other mediums like body painting or photography. Here Gus works with another amazing painter, they share the canvas. Gus and Gronk working together on the same images is wonderful to watch.

I bought this set of 4 little silicone bowls in 2015 and they still look new despite using them every day. I use them to sort vitamins and supplement powder and to hold chopped herbs and garlic. I started using another set for painting and gluing, because they are so easy to clean. The set is only $6.72 on Amazon.

Read Max Read's sharp précis of what happened to the internet over the last few years: the slow drifting of message-boards to the right as their inhabitants grew from sad kids to angry adults, then the sudden explosion of that pattern across social networks run by corporations with only an ambivalent interest in stopping it. This was the core value of message-board political consciousness: sovereignty, a concept similarly important to the politics of the far right. Posters and trolls wanted to reserve for themselves on the internet the power and freedom they couldn’t find off it. And as the online and offline spheres slowly merged over the course of the 2010s, that sovereignty expressed itself as an abject refusal to resocialize — the reservation of a sacred right to be cruel. The puckish left-libertarianism that had characterized the early message-board political activity of groups like Anonymous transformed into a revanchism, seemingly intended to protect “Kekistan” — the joking name, from the LOL-like word Kek, for the safe spaces of the frustrated men of the internet.This was the sensibility galvanized in 2014 by — what else? — a depressed and frustrated man’s rambling, 9,000-word post falsely accusing his game-developer ex-girlfriend Zoë Quinn of exchanging sex for video-game reviewsTim O'Brien's painting of Pepe is fantastic: a poisoned meme made creepily, grossly real.One of the interesting oddities about the Alt Right is a "geek fallacies" thing: loyalty to parasitic luminaries, even though they're crudely exploitative, too weird to be on television, and all seem to hate one another. As with Trump himself, the Nazi comparisons are (frankly) strained. But they're stuck on their proverbial Drexlers and Eckarts and you wonder not what comes next but who.

Here are five new lateral thinking puzzles to test your wits and stump your friends -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

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 comics, and other Stuff. GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”A book for the curious and adventurous!” -Cory Doctorow) Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

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@matttomic's Sandwich Alignment Chart isn't just an amusing and thought-provoking taxonomy of sandwiches (though it certainly is that!). (more…)

From the wonderful, refreshingly bullshit-free marketing guy Seth Godin (Seth Godin, a new online course on marketing, called (simply enough), "The Marketing Seminar." (more…)

FJ Anscome's classic, oft-cited 1973 paper "Graphs in Statistical Analysis" showed that very different datasets could produce "the same summary statistics (mean, standard deviation, and correlation) while producing vastly different plots" -- Anscome's point being that you can miss important differences if you just look at tables of data, and these leap out when you use graphs to represent the same data. (more…)

Tor Books -- my publisher, who are also DRM free and the largest English-language science fiction publisher in the world -- have announced a new project, Tor Labs, "a new imprint emphasizing experimental approaches to genre publishing, beginning with original dramatic podcasts." (more…)

I loved this too short-lived late 70s/early 80s New Adventures of Flash Gordon. The full first episode is here.

Here's a fellow who made a movie of three-second clips from his 2600-mile hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. (Thanks, Matthew!)

LA Weekly's fabulous photographer Star Foreman captured these amazing images at RuPaul's DragCon.View the entire gallery here.

William Shatner is auctioning off his Captain Kirk action figure that orbited the Earth in 2014 aboard the Orion EFT-1 spacecraft. It's part of Shatner's Hollywood Charity Horse Show fundraiser that supports therapeutic horse riding programs for children with special needs. From the auction listing:Star Trek Captain Kirk Action Figure of Captain Kirk in an Environmental Suit was the perfect choice to be part of the cargo that was flown aboard Orion EFT-1! The Orion EFT-1 flew two orbits around the earth on December 5, 2014. On the second orbit it reached a high apogee and reentered the Earth's atmosphere at 20,000 miles per hour. This action figure went along for the ride. The figure is still sealed in the shipping package it came back with and includes a folder with a letter of authentifiation from Lockheed Martin the flight certificate and a note from Mr. Shatner. In addition Mr. Shatner will personally autograph the figure for the winner if they choose. How many people can claim that they have a Star Trek action figure that flew on Orion?(via Space.com)

These Banshee playing cards are made for throwing!Made of plastic, heavier and stiffer than my normal US Playing Cards Bicycle 808 style decks, the Banshee cards sail through the air. The cards also have some cuts in their face to make them scream! Made of tougher stuff, these cards last a lot longer than a paper deck and are a bit easier to learn with. You will need to practice, however, these cards do not instantly imbue you with skill. Talk about useful skills to have at a party!Banshees: Cards for Throwing via Amazon

https://youtu.be/xzbI8PsEL68Why is this couple trying to go down the up escalator? For fun? Exercise? I'm at a loss to explain it.

I only recently discovered the art of Lorenzo Etherington, who draws gorgeous Will Eisner-esque 3D illustrations. He has a new book coming out that's in the final days of a successful Kickstarter campaign. It's incredible stuff.

It's not just security and airline staff you've gotta watch out for on planes these days. Here's an aggressive fight between two passengers on an ANA Japanese flight from Narita to LAX. The flight hadn't yet taken off when the men started pummeling each other. "Someone help, this guy is crazy!" one of the men screams. You can also hear one of them shouting, "Get this guy off this plane!"Passengers are begging them to stop while a baby cries and a flight attendant tries to break it up. It quiets down for half a minute, then starts back up.According to the Daily Mail, one of the men – a 44-year-old American – was drunk. When the airline asked him to get off the plane, he became even surlier.According to Japan Today:Deeming him a potential safety threat, the airline decided to ask him to disembark before takeoff. However, the man resisted, hit a woman passenger and after leaving the plane, proceeded to choke a male airline employee, which led to his arrest.Have plane rides always been this crazy, or is it something in the air?

Spinning things with contrasting stripes are evidently mesmerising.

I'm on the US tour for my new novel Walkaway (I'll be at DC's Politics and Prose tonight), and tomorrow, I'm doing a sold-out appearance with Edward Snowden onstage at the New York Public Library; although the event is packed, I've just learned that there will be a free livestream starting at 7PM Eastern.

"Sir, put down the glue gun!"As ridiculous as that may sound, Colgate University in upstate New York was placed on lockdown last night after someone spotted a a man carrying a gun. A glue gun, that is. The man was a black student working on an art project."There is a dangerous situation in the Coop. Everyone is advised to leave the building," the university tweeted. And, “There is an armed person at the Coop. Find a safe space and remain indoors. If you are off-campus, stay away." The Coop is a dining hall on campus. Then rumors spread. Suddenly there were two gunmen, and one had committed suicide. This was false. According to Huffington Post:During the lockdown, students in campus dorms were advised to keep their lights off to avoid attracting attention, a student told The Huffpost. The college finally lifted the shelter-in-place order shortly before midnight.“After thorough investigation, and with the assistance of the person in question, law enforcement identified the individual as a student who was using a glue gun for an art project, confirmed the misunderstanding, and released the campus from lockdown,” said a Colgate statement.Some students expressed concerns on social media about the reaction to the student with the hot glue gun, and worried about what could have happened to him because of his race, particularly as rumors mounted.Image: Luke Surl

Emory Williams Sr., 82, has been performing magic for 70 years. He owns and operates a tiny roadside magic shop east of Tucson, Arizona. Scott Craven of the Arizona Republic profiled Williams, and took photos of his place. He also took a video of Williams performing a trick.Calling it a shop is giving it the benefit of the doubt. It is nothing like the store the 82-year-old once owned in Tucson. That brick-and-mortar spot held more than 6,000 tricks in roughly 2,000 square feet, a destination for amateur and professional magicians throughout southern Arizona.This shop, parked on a dusty gravel lot roughly 50 feet back from the road, is a 13-foot by 18-foot trailer, modified with solar panels providing power to the TV, radio, computer and air conditioner. Inside are 1,000 tricks and novelties. Some visitors can’t quite believe what they are seeing, as if the bold black letters that say “Magic Shop” must be, well, an illusion.But it's no mirage, as shown by the tourists who stop just long enough to take a photo, as if Instagram posts could pay Williams' bills.

Merriam-Webster added "sheeple" to their dictionary. It's defined as "people who are docile, compliant, or easily influenced : people likened to sheep." Here's one of the two usage examples they include:Apple's debuted a battery case for the juice-sucking iPhone—an ungainly lumpy case the sheeple will happily shell out $99 for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYD3QtyEGGM&list=PL8s6sSjUyaxUk3mCUqiNuJiMNxs9QdthO🎜 "They're Princess Leia's stolen Death Star plans, she's got them and it's time to go..." 🎝It's the work of Pallete Swap Ninja, who has a full album of it you can download free of charge. (more…)

You are probably very good at your job, and may not feel the need to learn how to code. That's perfectly okay. But it's possible that learning programming could be an interesting and fiscally rewarding way to enrich your life and advance your career. In that case, take a look at The Ultimate Learn to Code 2017 Bundle in the Boing Boing Store. This collection offers a multi-disciplinary approach to learning programming and features a wide variety of courses. A sampling of what you’ll learn:How to build web applications with Ruby on RailsResponsive web design with HTML, CSSCross-platform mobile app developmentCrafting complex user interfaces using Angular.js and TypeScriptHow to work with relational databases and client-server communicationJava, Python, Javascript, Objective-C, Swift, and other powerful programming languagesWith over 80 hours of instructional content, you’ll gain fluency in an array of widely-used technology stacks and coding styles. Go ahead and take a deep dive into software development with the Ultimate Learn to Code 2017 Bundle, available in the Boing Boing Store.