Freddy deBoer writes that he's been telling the same joke for years about Silicon Valley's only product, which might be universalized as "At last, a way to verb with nouns on the internet!" But the social-media techopoly is stable, now, and so the venture capitalists have moved on to the three terrible trends that will now occupy their interest.First is infecting everything with DRM so it's controlled by the manufacturer and limited to their ecosystem. Second is charging rent for being in it and using algorithms to maximize it. Third is marketing workaholic poverty to the young as a way of life.We Love Doers So Much We Want to Give Them a Hellish Existence of Endless PrecarityThe basic idea here is that 40 years of stagnant wages, the decline of unions, the death of middle class blue collar jobs, the demise of pensions, and a general slide of the American working world into a PTSD-inducing horror show of limitless vulnerability has been too easy on workers. I’m sorry, Doers, or whatever the fuck. The true beauty of these ads is that they are all predicated on mythologizing the very workers who their service is intended to immisserate. Sorry about your medical debt; here’s a photo of a model who we paid in “exposure” over ad copy written by an intern who we paid in college credit that cost $3,000 a credit hour. Enjoy.The purpose of these companies is to take whatever tiny sense of social responsibility businesses might still feel to give people stable jobs and destroy it, replacing whatever remains of the permanent, salaried, benefit-enjoying workforce with an army of desperate freelancers who will never go to bed feeling secure in their financial future for their entire lives.

What starts as a live action hand extrapolating a line along a grid gets real trippy real fast, but the fanciful hand-drawn extrapolations follow a discernible mathematical pattern. (more…)

This remarkably clear VHS footage of Clinton-era yuppies who are now retirement age will either take you back to a more innocent time, or give you a good glimpse of what yuppie scum looked like back in the day. (more…)

This adorable little Xenomorph will be available in July, but itty bitty Ellen Ripley is available right now.

In this relaxing video, YouTuber Jordan Clark talks through her process for making a keepsake travel diary.

Received this from a fellow HERper this morning. No caption needed, the task was implied: "can you spot the snake?" 🐍 pic.twitter.com/oVkjOm8ufy— Helen🐍👩🏼‍🔬 (@SssnakeySci) April 23, 2017@SssnakeySci would like you to find the venomous snake in this photo, taken by Jerry Davis. I thought I was being pranked, but I finally found it.(Featured image is Brainspore's solution!)

Philosophy and Predictive Processing is a new online research compendium in which neuroscientists, psychiatrists, philosophers-of-mind, and other big thinkers explore the theory that we're always hallucinating. Our brains aren't just processing information from your senses so we can perceive reality, the authors argue, but also constantly predicting what we'll encounter, presenting that to us as what's actually happening, and then doing error connection. From New Scientist:...Predictive processing argues that perception, action and cognition are the outcome of computations in the brain involving both bottom-up and top-down processing – in which prior knowledge about the world and our own cognitive and emotional state influence perception.In a nutshell, the brain builds models of the environment and the body, which it uses to make hypotheses about the source of sensations. The hypothesis that is deemed most likely becomes a perception of external reality. Of course, the prediction could be accurate or awry, and it is the brain’s job to correct for any errors – after making a mistake it can modify its models to account better for similar situations in the future.But some models cannot be changed willy-nilly, for example, those of our internal organs. Our body needs to remain in a narrow temperature range around 37°C, so predictive processing achieves such control by predicting that, say, the sensations on our skin should be in line with normal body temperature. When the sensations deviate, the brain doesn’t change its internal model, but rather forces us to move towards warmth or cold, so that the predictions fall in line with the required physiological state."A guide to why your world is a hallucination" (New Scientist)

Smurfs: The Lost Village is wonderfully animated, the first good transposition of Peyo's 20th-century cartooning to 21st-century moviemaking. Moreover, it directly tackles the worst things about Smurfs—their creator's banal misogyny—in an effort to make of them a vehicle for progressive values rather than product placement. It has everything going for it. Sadly, it's not much good. (more…)

Brainiac was a fantastic experimental indie band that emerged from the 1990s Dayton, Ohio music scene that gave us Guided by Voices, The Breeders, and other great post-punk, no wave, and noise pop groups. Growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, I caught many of Brainiac's crazed live shows in the area. (Bassist Juan Monasterio went to fashion design school with my wife Kelly and after we moved to San Francisco, the band stayed at her apartment when they came though the Bay Area.) Their stars rising fast, Brainiac released two LPs on Grass/BMG before signing with Touch and Go Records and collaborating with the likes of Steve Albini, Kim Deal and Jim O'Rourke. Then on May 23, 1997, with their major label debut set for Interscope Records, charismatic frontman Timmy Taylor was killed in a car crash near his home. He was 28. Now, filmmaker Eric Mahoney is telling the Brainiac story through a new documentary. Please support it on Kickstarter. This film will explore the 90's Dayton music scene, Brainiac's legacy and how people survive and cope with the loss of loved ones. Over the past 20 years Brainiac has been cited as a massive influence on the likes of Nine Inch Nails, The Mars Volta, Death Cab For Cutie and countless others. You'll hear from the band, family members, fellow musicians and label heads.Steve Albini, Wayne Coyne, Buzz Osbourne, Cedric Bixler, David Yow, Eli Janney, Fred Armisen, Jim O’Rourke, Gregg Foreman, John Schmersal, Juan Monasterio, Tyler Trent, Michelle Bodine, Linda Taylor And Many More…Brainiac Documentary (Kickstarter, thanks UPSO!)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnqoesEFW2Ihttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoZWf9CADgk

After spending five weeks in the hospital and losing 50 pounds, Shane Godfrey is home only to find that he's become unrecognizable to his dog, Willie. The dog barks and barks – personally I would have been scared – but Godfrey sits calmly until the dog comes over and sniffs. Finally recognizing him, the dog becomes overjoyed. Watch his adorable reaction.Thanks News and Observer!

Director Jonathan Demme, best known for his horror-thriller movie Silence of the Lambs, has died in New York at age 73. He had been battling cancer. My first introduction to Demme's work was his quirky 1986 film Something Wild, about a free spirited young woman (played by Melanie Griffith) who kidnaps an uptight yuppie (played by Jeff Daniels), who then are both held hostage by her creepy thug ex-boyfriend (played by Ray Liotta). I fell in madly love with this film, which turned me into an instant Demme fan.Some of his other brilliant films include Married to the Mob, Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate, and his Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense. And the list goes on. He was survived by his second wife, Joanne Howard, and their three children, Ramona, Brooklyn and Jos. Our hearts at Boing Boing go out to his family.For more on Demme, here's a write-up by Variety.

David Bowie and Trevor Jones's soundtrack to Jim Henson's fantastical film Labyrinth, starring Bowie as Jareth the Goblin King, will be reissued on vinyl next month for the first time since its release in 1986. (These days an original pressing goes for around $75-$100.) To complement Trevor Jones's synthesizer/orchestra score, Bowie wrote five original songs for Labyrinth, including Underground, As The World Falls Down, and the classic Magic Dance.With Magic Dance, "the song for Jareth and the baby, sung by them and the goblins in the castle throne room - I had problems,” Bowie said at the time. “The baby I used in the recording studios couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put more than two gurgles together, so I ended up doing the baby-gurgle chorus myself! It’s an up-tempo song, and visually exciting.”Labyrinth LP (Amazon)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwVqOs3Aesshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvLnPO9t4Wg

My UK publisher, Head of Zeus, has published the official tour schedule for the British tour for Walkaway, with stops in Oxford (with Tim Harford), London (with Laurie Penny), Liverpool (with Chris Pak), Birmingham, and the Hay Literary Festival (with Dr Adam Rutherford). Hope to see you there! (more…)

Jonathan Demme, the talented director of Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Something Wild, Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense, and numerous other great films, has died at 73. His death was caused by esophageal cancer. From the New York Times:A personable man with the curiosity gene and the what-comes-next instinct of someone who likes to both hear and tell stories, Mr. Demme had a good one of his own, a Mr. Deeds kind of tale in which he wandered into good fortune and took advantage of it. A former movie publicist, he had an apprenticeship in low-budget B-movies with the producer Roger Corman before turning director...Mr. Demme’s other films include documentaries about the folk-rock singer and songwriter Neil Young; concert films featuring the country singer Kenny Chesney and the pop star Justin Timberlake; and “Swimming to Cambodia” (1987), Spalding Gray’s monologue ruminating about Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and his experience appearing in the film “The Killing Fields.”Mr. Demme was a member of the alternative arts scene of Lower Manhattan, which included Mr. Gray, who died in 2004, as well as Mr. Byrne and the composer and performer Laurie Anderson, who scored “Swimming to Cambodia.”

I'd not heard of Elektor magazine until today, when I came across this photo of the cover from a 1974 edition. I assumed it was fake. Everything about it seemed like it was created this year - the typeface, the names of the projects, the tagline ("up-to-date electronics for lab and leisure"). Someone has uploaded the issue in PDF format.Such a groovy magazine!Joint smoking transistors:Trippy traces:Elektor is still around, but the design is vastly different:From Wikipedia:Elektor is a monthly magazine about all aspects of electronics, first published as Elektuur in the Netherlands in 1960, and now published worldwide in many languages including English, German, Dutch, French, Greek, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese (European and Brazilian) and Italian with distribution in over 50 countries. The English language edition of Elektor was launched in 1975 and is read worldwide.Elektor publishes a vast range of electronic projects, background articles and designs aimed at engineers, enthusiasts, students and professionals. To help readers build featured projects, Elektor also offer PCBs (printed circuit boards) of many of their designs, as well as kits and modules. If the project employs a microcontroller and/or PC software, as is now often the case, Elektor normally supply the source code and files free of charge via their website. Most PCB artwork is also available from their website.

Boing Boing proudly welcomes our new sponsor Eversign: Legally binding electronic signatures at work, at home or on the go!Taking your company paperless is a wonderful goal, but without a fantastic electronic signature system you will create problems faster than you solve them. Enter Eversign!Eversign is a full-suite electronic document management system non-pariel! Beyond merely allowing you to identify signature blocks on documents, and securely send documents to another signing party, Eversign adds a world of features and integration. So many features you'll be kinda shocked this is just a document signing service! Eversign easily manages any document. From simple agreements for your first born to complex documents with long lists of signators. Documents can be signed serially, or in parallel, enabling folks to sign in a precise order if desired, just like the Lesser Key of Solomon requires.Documents can be signed with any device, and in-person signing options also exist for times when you and a colleague want to mutually execute a document in the field! The second your client agrees to that crazy idea? Get them to sign on your phone right there! The only signing option Eversign seems to lack is blood.Eversign also allows users to type, upload, or draw their thoroughly authenticated and unique digital signatures. Forget cursive! Want to use a sketch of your favorite 70s Saturday morning cartoon character superimposed with an image of the devil? That is your legally binding signature now, baby!Eversign is also packed with conveniences like document editing, when you need to correct a last minute mistake, contact management and document management databases. Eversign also allows you to chose your own cloud storage service, and offers integration with all the top providers seamlessly connecting you to popular online applications like Google Docs, Zoho, Dropbox, Salesforce and many more.Signing documents gets a whole lot easier, and nicer to trees, with Eversign!

At the new Magic Touch Bullet Train Sushi restaurant in Cerritos, California, you order off an iPad menu and the rolls arrive via model bullet trains. I can't wait for them to upgrade to maglev trains. (via Laughing Squid)

It hasn't been a good month for United Airlines – or, rather, its passengers. First Dr. Dao gets beat up by security while sitting in his United seat until he's toothless and unconscious, while on the same day a scorpion on another United flight stings a passenger in the hand. This week the unlucky passenger was Simon, a 3-foot-long rabbit who was being sent from Heathrow to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. He was perfectly healthy upon boarding the plane, but was found dead when it was time to deboard in Chicago.According to The Telegraph:“Simon had a vet’s check-up three hours before the flight and was fit as a fiddle,” breeder Annette Edwards, of Stoulton, Worcs, told The Sun.“Something very strange has happened and I want to know what. I’ve sent rabbits all around the world and nothing like this has happened before.”At least United Airlines had the good sense to apologize this time around."We were saddened to hear this news,” a United Airlines spokeswoman said, according to the Mirror."The safety and wellbeing of all the animals that travel with us is of the utmost importance to United Airlines and our PetSafe team."We have been in contact with our customer and have offered assistance. We are reviewing this matter."Simon, who had just been sold to an unnamed celebrity and was on his way to meeting his new owner, was the son of Darius, a rabbit who measured 4' 4" long and holds the Guiness World Record for the world's longest rabbit. Edwards says Simon would probably have beaten that record. https://youtu.be/zn9kAEVu1CQ

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 much, MUCH more. 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…)

After my parents got divorced in 1965, I lived in a one-room apartment with my mother at 56-10 94th Street, in Elmhurst Queens. The apartment had a small alcove, and a wall was built to separate it from the rest of the space, and that was my room.Our apartment was next to the incinerator room. For those of you born before recycling, you tossed your open bags of garbage down the chute, where it was burned. Some lazy jerks couldn’t be bothered to open the chute’s door, so they just left their bags of garbage (usually just open paper grocery bags) on the floor. Guess who’s coming to dinner?Unsurprisingly, we had a lot of roaches in our apartment. I became inured to them after several years; if you’ve never had a roach infestation, you’d be shocked at how awful thousands of them smell. I became so used to them, in fact, that one night I was sleeping and woke up to see a little brown figure sauntering down my arm. I blew it off and went back to sleep. Just like that.When I remember that awful smell and the shadows of those little pieces of shit scuttling around in the dark it gives me a shiver.After moving into my own place in Manhattan, where the little fiends were already in evidence, I bought a bug bombing gas fogger for every room. Set each one off and ran the hell out of there. Came back a day later and cleaned up. No roaches. I was not about to let those little turd-dropping brown prehistoric bug-ass mothers into my domain. Yeah, they’ve been here since the dinosaurs and will still be here long after the human race is gone, but I don’t have to know see them.Which leads me to this article I found on SoraNews24 (nee Rocket News), about an astoundingly easy way to rid your abode of cockroaches. Posted on Instagram by @adreamorreality, the remedy is stupidly simple: fill empty tea bags with dried peppermint leaves.While @adreamorreality affectionately calls the bundles “mint bombs,” they’re not explosive booby traps. Instead, the scent of the oils present in the peppermint is highly repulsive to cockroaches, and so the packets work as non-lethal repellants. In spots that are ordinarily especially attractive to the pests, such as underneath the sink, @adreamorreality recommends leaving two mint pouches.This is the only thing which causes me to wish the internet existed when I was a kid.Postscript: Earlier this month, on April 11, my old apartment building in Queens, The Monte Plaza, burned down. I had not been there since January, 1992 when my mother died, so I didn’t get to yell “GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE!” to the half million cockroaches who got their asses toasted in the fire (fortunately no humans were harmed).Al Jones, a reporter at 1010WINS, the all-news radio station in New York, snapped this photo and uploaded it to Instagram.Meanwhile, there are still millions of folks living in roach-infested apartments and homes, spraying dangerous chemicals all over the place to kill the bugs. That’s bad for them, and their kids and pets … and the bugs will come back. So, spread the word: dried peppermint leaves in tea bags. Would have changed my life.Via SoraNews24

Senator Ron Wyden [D-Equestria] sent a letter to the chairs of the Senate Committee on Rules & Administration asking why Senate staffers have been issued ID cards whose "security chips" are just photographs of a chip. (more…)

All moms are different. But all moms like getting flowers on Mother’s Day, and that’s a fact (not, however a fact we can document in any fashion.) Instead of getting chewed out for forgetting to call her on the second Sunday of May, you can take care of it ahead of time with Teleflora’s flower delivery service. For $20, you can get $40 of site-wide credit in the Boing Boing Store.These bouquets are hand-arranged by local florists, so you can be sure they won’t be delivered completely wilted in a beat-up cardboard box. Honestly, your mom might even know the person who arranges them. Even if you are a total space cadet, you can order last minute and still get fast, same-day delivery (depending on where mom lives). Their collection includes a brilliant array of colorful, exotic selections presented in a wide variety tasteful baskets and vessels.Get $40 of store credit for Teleflora here for just $20.

Boing Boing has previously highlighted Japan’s Henn Na Hotel or “The Weird Hotel,” a hotel almost entirely run by robots. But this new video from British expat Chris Broad actually takes viewers inside the animatronic establishment itself.

The Sideways YouTube channel digs into the many different ways Disney has used foreign languages in its animated musical movies over the years.

One of the weirdest places in Antarctica is Blood Falls, a five-story cascade of blood-red liquid pouring from Taylor Glacier. Researchers finally traced its source: a saltwater lake millions of years old trapped under the glacier. (more…)

In this TED-Ed video, Kate Slabosky breaks down the differences between placental, marsupial, and monotreme mammal births.

Nordstrom's is selling artificially mud-stained jeans that look like they've just gotten in from a few hours' laboring in the yard. The $425 mud isn't mud: it's paint.Details & CareHeavily distressed medium-blue denim jeans in a comfortable straight-leg fit embody rugged, Americana workwear that's seen some hard-working action with a crackled, caked-on muddy coating that shows you're not afraid to get down and dirty.Previously: Clear plastic jeans

Researchers at Washington State University have created a fluid "that has the properties of negative mass," reports New Atlas. When you push it, it accelerates towards you.Snip:The team made the Bose-Einstein condensate by slowing down rubidium atoms with lasers, which cools them to just slightly above absolute zero and keeps them confined to a bowl-shaped area of about 100 microns across. Next, the scientists hit those atoms with another set of lasers that changed how they spin, a phenomenon known as "spin orbit coupling." That gives the rubidium the properties of a substance with negative mass when it's allowed to flow out of the bowl shape, which, according to the researchers, makes it look like it's hitting an invisible wall."What's a first here is the exquisite control we have over the nature of this negative mass, without any other complications," says Forbes. "It provides another environment to study a fundamental phenomenon that is very peculiar."

My dear old friend Mitch O'Connell designed the art for this fabulous They Live tribute billboard, and he's looking for your support to rent billboard space for it.“Clear Channel Outdoor” tells me renting one month of a 10’ 5” by 22’ 8” billboard can be had for as cheap as $850, plus a production fee of $225 every 60 days. So let’s set the goal at $1930 for one 2-month rental to begin with. If more money is raised, break out your pen and paper to do the math to figure out how many more billboards could be acquired.

Chicago's Department of Aviation finally replied to the LA Times's Freedom of Information request for the police report on the public beating Chicago airport cops dealt to Dr David Dao when United Airlines decided to give his confirmed, paid seat to a crewmember and ordered him to vacate it. (more…)

My latest novel, Walkaway, was published today, and the Crooked Timber block has honored me with a seminar on the book, where luminaries from Henry Farrell to Julia Powles to John Holbo to Astra Taylor to Bruce Schneier weigh in with a series of critical essays that will run in the weeks to come, closing with an essay of my own, in response. (more…)

AquaGenie is "the world's smartest water bottle," a $70 internet-of-things device that "knows your water goals" and will connect to the Internet to inform you if you have met them.AquaGenie is your daily companion that keeps you on track and fully hydrated, helping you achieve all your health, wellness, fitness and weight loss goals! Attractive, durable, easy to wash and easy to use, your AquaGenie tracks your consumption, reports it to most fitness apps, and goes with you everywhere.The AquaGenie bottle knows your daily water goal and how much you've had to drink. To keep you on track, when it sees you're behind, a glowing ring at the base of the bottle lights up to remind you to take a sip. It's that simple!To recharge, just place it on its stand for an hour and you’re good to go for a week! No wires, no batteries to change, no need to set it still to take a measurement.Unlike your current water bottle, it's wireless! Ah, but I snark. And in the wake of the Juicero "$500 bag-squeezing machine" fiasco, that's too easy. Beyond the naked consumerism, there's something deeply weird about the idea of smart gadgets. They tell us what we experience. Here, for example, is a machine that reminds you when and when not to be thirsty. You pick it up and ask it: am I thirsty?Somewhere behind the gadget is a less human machine that doesn't know us but needs us to do things for it, and which has a lot of stories to tell to help us on our way. "Capital" sometimes seems too obvious an answer. [via Nick Douglas]

If you vomit, do be considerate and try not to let it land on the moon. [via Metafilter]

On Friday, surgeons installed a "click-on robotic arm" on a patient in the Netherlands. The wearer controls the robot arm by thought alone. Myoelectric sensors in a bracelet worn on the upper arm measure muscle signals that are transmitted to the prosthetic arm via Bluetooth. From ScienceDaily:Through an opening in the skin, the patient "clicks" the prosthesis onto a metal rod in the bone. Because the prosthesis connects directly to the skeleton, a prosthesis socket is no longer necessary. This ensures that it does not slip off, avoids skin problems, and makes it very easy to put on and take off...The nerves that controlled the muscles in the hand and the underarm before the amputation are meticulously attached to parts of the muscles in the upper arm stump. By connecting the nerves to the muscle, the muscle acts like an amplifier of the nerve signal...The surgeries are followed by a rehabilitation period, so that the patient can learn to contract the muscles in their upper arm by using their thoughts. If the patient imagines opening and closing their hand, the muscles in the upper arm contract."Click-on arm prosthesis controlled by patient's thoughts" (ScienceDaily)

Astronaut Shane Kimbrough, commander of the Expedition 50 expedition to the International Space Station, explains how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in space. He returned from the ISS earlier this month after six months in orbit.

In Would You Survive a Movie Gunfight?, Shea Serrano offers a thorough look at the form and function of movie gunfights and what it takes to get through one alive. The Best Times to Movie-Shoot Someone• When it’s a revenge thing.• When you’re a law-enforcement officer and they’re a bad guy.• When you’re a bad guy and they’re a law-enforcement officer.• When it’s the Wild West and someone is riding toward you on horseback. (This one is great because they always roll off the back of the horse, or, if you’re lucky, they get their foot trapped in one of the stirrups and then the horse drags ’em a good ways.)• When they’re standing on top of a building and you shoot them and they fall off very dramatically. (They have to crash through an awning.)I have so many problems with Serrano's top list of movie gunfights, but I'm busy finishing up a nice piece about the shortcomings of Smurfs 3: The Lost Village as revolutionary praxis.

Fetal lambs survived for weeks in an experimental artificial womb, and scientists hope that the breakthrough could lead to new treatments for premature babies and perhaps the dreamed-of machine utopia where humans are kept mindlessly writhing in translucent plastic sheaths filled with psuedoamniotic liquid.Physicians at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia placed fetal lambs into the transparent bags and connected their umbilical cords to a machine that oxygenated their blood. The lambs own hearts provided the pumping power.Eight lambs survived for as long as four weeks inside the devices. The gestational age of the animals was equivalent to a human fetus of 22 or 23 weeks, about the earliest a human baby can be born and expected to survive outside the womb. A full-term baby is born at 40 weeks.

Pelicans haven't evolved much in 30 million years. That's because they've pretty much nailed how to be a pelican. From KQED:A number of anatomical adaptions enable the bird to take these dives in stride. The shape of its bill is essential, reducing “hydrodynamic drag” — buckling forces, caused by the change from air to water — to almost zero. It’s something like the difference between slapping the water with your palm and chopping it, karate-style.And while all birds have light, air-filled bones, pelican skeletons take it to an extreme. As they dive, they inflate special extra air sacs around their neck and belly, cushioning their impact and allowing them to float.Even their celebrated pouches play a role. A famous limerick quips, “A remarkable bird is a pelican / Its beak can hold more than its belly can…” That beak is more than just a fishing net. It’s also a parachute that pops open underwater, helping to slow the bird down.“This is a really tough bird that’s built to last,” said (Anna Weinstein, Marine Program Director at California Audubon).

Our friends at The Webby Awards have announced this year's recipients! The Webby Awards, now in its 21st year, celebrates well-known big sites and also fantastic indie operations I've never heard of before but can't wait to explore. Congratulations to our friends Adam Savage, Internet Archive, and all of the other winners and nominees! Webby Awards 2017 winners

https://youtu.be/46h-LfNWPn8This cartoon from Bill Nye Saves the World uses various ice cream flavors as part of a hysterical analogy on the intolerant views of Christians when it comes to sexuality. It starts off with various flavors of ice cream showing up at an "Ice Cream Conversion Therapy" group. Vanilla is the dogmatic leader of the group. "It's the science of feelings, and as vanilla, I feel that I am the most natural of the ice creams. And therefore the rest of you should just go ahead and also be vanilla. It's the one true flavor."But his stance immediately weakens once he gets a quick lick of salted caramel, and then all hell breaks loose (literally, if you're a vanilla thinker) as they all jump into the bowl together and vanilla sees his true inner flavor.

The US Army has released "Counter-Unmanned Aircraft System Techniques," a manual for soldiers and commanders who find themselves in the field fighting forces that use modified consumer drones to gather intelligence and project force against them. (more…)

The Mirai Worm is a seemingly unstoppable piece of malware that targets the garbage-security Internet of Things gadgets that have proliferated through the world; these gadgets then used to deliver equally unstoppable floods of traffic that endanger whole countries. (more…)

In 1941, Catalonian chicken farmer Juan Pujol made an unlikely leap into the world of international espionage, becoming a spy first for the Germans, then for the British, and rising to become one of the greatest double agents of World War II. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe Pujol's astonishing talent for deceiving the Nazis, which led one colleague to call him "the best actor in the world."We'll also contemplate a floating Chicago and puzzle over a winding walkway.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

50 armed men in camou flak jackets driving armored cars cordoned off the roads leading to a transportation company's office in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay (a "smugglers' haven in the border region with Brazil and Argentina"), blew the entire face of the building up with demolition equipment, stole an estimated $40M and escaped by motorboat up the Parana River. (more…)

Wikitribune (strapline: "Evidence-based journalism") is a newly launched project from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, conceived of as a crowd-edited, crowd-funded tonic against fake news. (more…)

In the Japanese version, he says "Cheerio then, love."

Hidden inside a bazaar, off the beaten track, in an adventurous land far from civilization, where the paths are thick with dense vegetation and an ancient temple can be seen in the distance, one can meet the self-proclaimed “Doctor of Jungle Medicine,” Colonel Nedley Lostmore.He has, in fact, lost more than most of us since all that remains is his head … his shrunken head. Despite this seemingly insurmountable dilemma, the good doctor (known to the natives as “Shrunken Ned”) dispenses medical advice for up to 16 hours a day depending on his mood and the season.It’s not free, though, and he’s quite up front about that—until you part with two bits he won’t even look at you.To see the wooden contraption that is Shrunken Ned, you’d think it was built in the late 1950s or early 60s, and has been at Disneyland for most of the park’s existence. But while one group of The Walt Disney Company’s Imagineers were busy developing the most sophisticated ride in the history of the park, “Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye,” another group designed a retro coin-op machine that, like so many of its fortune-telling ancestors, dispenses a card of wisdom (of a sort) at the end. He’s been the sole medical practitioner in this corner of the jungle since 1995.So, while Colonel Nedley Lostmore has only occupied his little spot in the South Sea Traders shop for 22 years, it seems like he’s always been there.Why is he such a popular MD? For one thing, he does not suffer fools and if you’re an idiot, he’ll tell you. He’s snarky. He likes bad puns. The medical advice he tenders “below” is more likely to kill you than save you, but as far as doctors go, he’s cheap. Dirt cheap. Two bits, remember? The Doctor will see you now …https://youtu.be/DUsIdcWaIcshttps://youtu.be/WMBfcXSL5bchttps://youtu.be/XY6F3TA7JWQ

In this new Vlogbrothers video, John Green discusses his OCD and the ways in which social media shapes our perception of others and, in turn, our perception of ourselves. To hear Green discuss his mental health in more detail, check out this video he made on his 100 Days channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcylG7ZuQb8

Yeah, Bluetooth audio is pretty common these days, so why should you care about these earbuds? Look how happy that woman up above looks. She's got FRESHeBUDS in. Boom. There's your reason. She's also at the beach and it appears to be a very nice day.But for the sake of promotion, wireless earbuds are fast becoming the new normal, what with Apple getting rid of the headphone jack and all that. Obviously, that isn't like the death knell of wires, but for casual or more physically active listeners, wireless earbuds make a lot of sense. The budget-friendly FRESHeBUDS are designed to be sweat- and water-resistant so you can wear them comfortably on a run.In addition to the wireless convenience and balanced sound quality, FRESHeBUDS are also magnetized. This clever touch keeps them from getting tangled, and simplifies the cumbersome connection process by pairing with your phone as soon as they’re pulled apart. You'll get up to 6 hours of playback time on a single charge so they're good for most of the work day, as well.The FRESHeBUDS Pro Magnetic Bluetooth Earbuds are in the Boing Boing Store for $29.95.