Boing Boing

Why are bidets so great? Have you ever tried to wipe peanut butter out of a shag carpet? That's why. I now have one of these simple to install bidets in both of our bathrooms. Like I wrote earlier, it is a game changer. Amazon has them on sale today for $18.73. Buy one and level up your lifestyle.

Shocking the bejeezus out of my lower back led me to the fastest recovery I've experienced yet from periodic bouts of debilitating back pain. For me, this inexpensive TENS unit is a winner, and was as effective as a higher-priced comparison unit I tried. (more…)

I could watch this all day.

Not even remotely adequate.

The owners of John Lennon's former home found an old sketchbook containing this tiny sketch of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. It's up for auction with an estimated selling price of $40k-$60k which seems oddly low for such an artifact. From Julien's Live auctions:An ink on paper sketch by John Lennon of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover with Lennon’s handwriting of the album’s title on the central bass drum in the image. The drawing was found in a sketchbook left in Lennon's former home, Kenwood in Surrey, England, and recovered by the new owners. The design of the album cover is known to have been executed by artist Peter Blake based on drawings provided by Paul McCartney. All of The Beatles contributed to the design of the cover in some way. It is unknown how this undated drawing figures into the history of the album cover and Lennon’s involvement.

The filmmaker was diving off Gansbaai, Western Cape, South Africa. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwfWfVCSJcgThe Doritos' Guardians of the Galaxy 2 chips sold with a MP3 player containing the movie's full soundtrack, a pair of retro headphones of the sort that airlines used to hand out for free, even in coach, and a USB charging cable. (more…)

Google often boasts about the 10,000 skilled raters who test its results, reporting weird kinks in the ranking algorithms and classifiers that the company uses for everything from search results to ad placement to automated photo recognition. (more…)

The Australian reports on a leaked memo -- described but not published -- marked "confidential" and created and distributed internally by Facebook that describes how the system's surveillance tools can identify children and teens in "insecure" moments when they "need a boost," explaining that they had identified markers to tell them when a young person was feeling "stressed", "defeated", "overwhelmed", "anxious", "nervous", "stupid", "silly", "useless", and a "failure." (more…)

Brexit is not the cause of Britain's renewed interest in its weird folk heritage, in the joys of cults and pagan sex. But the sudden veering into that world's darker side, where violence and groupthink and human sacrifice rule, seems guided by its anguish and sickly glee. Here's Michael Newton on the new flowering of folk horror.Folk horror, which is the subject of a new season at the Barbican, presents the dark dreams Britain has of itself. The films pick up on folk’s association with the tribal and the rooted. And our tribe turns out to be a savage one: the countryside harbours forgotten cruelties, with the old ways untouched by modernity and marked by half-remembered rituals. ...They may lurch into the ludicrous, but with surprising earnestness these films nonetheless play out a three-way philosophical debate: between enlightened rationalism, orthodox Christianity and renewed paganism. Sex is at the heart of this debate: just as these films both adore and recoil from natural beauty, so human loveliness entrances and repels them.The anxiety comes from an unsettled telepathic quality of exurban British life, where eccentricity is adored so long as privacy is abdicated, and the heightened empathy of the village lurches to the crowd's destruction of individuals. Newton notes that a key theme of British folk horror is that the supernatural is never so vulgar as to show itself: the darkness is in people. And by the time you get to see it, you are thrillingly both participant and victim: "The pagan rite we are witnessing is the film itself."

Macro Room made a simple and beautiful video of inksquirts: "This time we dived into the hypnotising beauty of colored ink in water and the interaction of this substance with different elements." I love how their videos are carefully devised to show both sides of the curtain. Here's another:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNbSjMFd7j4

Would you like to play the same instrument Wendy Carlos used for Switched-On Bach? Moog announced it is making a limited run of just 25 of the Synthesizer IIIc and it looks really cool. (more…)

Ian and Emily Pfaff took a couple of Little Tykes Cozy Coupes and turned them into the most awesome Mad Max-inspired vehicles this side of Fury Road. They even made little cosplay outfits for their two kids. (more…)

For about 30 years, CareerCast has ranked jobs. Their best jobs in 2017 include analysts, engineers, scientists, and a few surprises like dieticians and speech pathologists. The crappiest job is newspaper reporter, which barely edged out broadcaster. (more…)

Like me, you may have taken an interest in mechanical keyboards only to uncover a world of baffling options. "Can I have a clicky one, please" is like asking for a drink in a pub: they'll stare at you for a moment then say "which one, mate?" Brandon West reminded me that Input.Club is the best guide to all the options available, so when someone asks you if you want your Cherry Yellow or a nice Lubed Zealio, you'll know to slap them hard across the chops and say, "How dare you. 55g Topre Realforce Linears or nothing."

Canadian artist Maud Lewis lived in a tiny house covered in her paintings, which she sold door to door in Nova Scotia. A biopic of her life, Maudie, is a surprise hit in theaters, reports the BBC.The film's success has also been spurred by a rather serendipitous find: an unknown Maud Lewis painting found in a thrift shop is being auctioned off for charity, with bids topping C$125,000 ($91,500, £70,685). The work was authenticated by Mr Deacon, a retired school teacher who is now somewhat of a Maud Lewis sleuth. ... Typically characterised as a "folk artist", Lewis was self-taught and lived her whole life in poverty. Unable to afford things like canvas, she'd paint on anything from scraps of wood and plywood to thick card stock. Her subjects were the things she saw in her everyday life - fishermen, wildlife, flowers and trees."Maud was not a person who travelled to other galleries or saw other art, so there's a kind of naivete to it," Noble told the BBC.Here's the trailer:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCJO6Ax_ev8

Vintage Geek offers a list of miscconceptions people have about pulp-era science fiction, whose legacy has warped in the public imagination moreso even than Captain James T. Kirk's. [via MeFi]“Pulp-Era Science Fiction was about optimistic futures.”“Pulp scifi often featured muscular, large-chinned, womanizing main characters.”“Pulp Era Scifi were mainly action/adventure stories with good vs. evil.” “Racism was endemic to the pulps.”“Pulp scifi writers in the early days were indifferent to scientific reality and played fast and loose with science.”All these things are true, of course, but what better time to search for counterexamples than now?To be fair, science fiction was not a monolith on this. One of the earliest division in science fiction was between the Astounding Science Fiction writers based in New York, who often had engineering and scientific backgrounds and had left-wing (in some cases, literally Communist) politics, and the Amazing Stories writers based in the Midwest, who were usually self taught, and had right-wing, heartland politics. Because the Midwestern writers in Amazing Stories were often self-taught, they had a huge authority problem with science and played as fast and loose as you could get. While this is true, it’s worth noting science fiction fandom absolutely turned on Amazing Stories for this, especially when the writers started dabbling with spiritualism and other weirdness like the Shaver Mystery. And to this day, it’s impossible to find many Amazing Stories tales published elsewhere.

Once the tallest building in Changzhou, Jiangsu, China, this tower went down in eight seconds on April 25.This angle gives an excellent impression of the local government's appreciation of modern public safety standards:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu2V1v_ZEV0https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/857172436353138688/

Wolfen stars Albert Finney as Dewey, a grizzled NYC detective assigned to figure out why a rich developer gentrifying the Bronx got mutilated and spread over an acre of Battery Park. Set at the turn of the 1980s, it was the first movie with a clear vision of what should be done with Donald Trump. (more…)

TheScreamingFedora sharpened a joke more tamely made here. Previously: Biggie Smalls the Tank Engine

The greatest break in snooker history is Ronnie O'Sullivan's legendary 147 at the 1997 World Championship. He not only sank every ball with unmatched grace and force, but did so in a record-breaking 5:20s, some two minutes faster than the previous record. But Deadspin's Ben Tippett proves it was executed even faster than the books show.The famous 147 break had everything: The white ball obeyed O’Sullivan’s every command, every shot looked easy because he made it so through his honeyed cueing and Juno-level precision positional play, the break was fast—the fastest maximum break ever, by a long way—and yet he looked like he had oodles of time. O’Sullivan said at the time that he knew a maximum was on after the second red, and the result never looked in doubt. O’Sullivan moved around the table with grace and ridiculous ease, like a concert pianist preparing breakfast in his kitchen.The 5:20 time was human error, based on the BBC's primitive chess-clock technology from the time. The Guinness Book of Records' bizarre retcon to make it work -- the next player's break starts when the previous player's white ball last touches a cushion -- is so weak it requires an event that doesn't even happen on many shots. So Tippett offers two options as to when a player's shot (and therefore any resulting break) starts, yielding two possible times of O'Sullivan's still-unbeaten break:1. 5m 06s : When the player takes his shot.2. 5m 15s : When the previous player's shot comes to rest.

These smiling assassins enlisted as snipers when Germany invaded Russia in 1941. "We mowed down Hitlerites like ripe grain," said Lyudmila Pavlichenko aka Lady Death, one of many elite snipers whose photos were colorized by Olga Shirnina aka Klimbim. (more…)

Convenience always carries costs. In the case of e-commerce, the surge in residential deliveries is causing in urban gridlock. Citylab goes out on delivery routes for their interesting report: (more…)

Justin Rhodes profiles an urban market gardener who leases other people's residential yards for planting produce, which he harvests and sells up and down the east coast of the United States. He makes over $5,000 a month. (more…)

26 years ago.

The Book of Miracles (also known as the Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs) is a compendium of beautiful 16th-century illustrations of cosmic anxiety and apocalyptic surrealism. The new edition from Taschen, edited by Till-Holger Borchert and Joshua P Waterman, is a perfect introduction to the Renaissance obsession with signs, portents and the damned weird. (more…)

The Neural Parametric Singing Synthesizer is a voice synth with a difference: it soars! It's perfectly uncanny; any better and you'd not even suspect it might be a robot, any worse and it would just sound bad. Previously: I feel fantastic.

I love Alex Schaefer impasto works depicting branches of Chase bank going up in flames in daytime. They were from a series by him called "Disaster Capitalism," and apparently the banks (and cops) would pretend he was planning acts of arson to try and make him stop painting. [via mutantspace, via Janie]On July 30, 2011, Alex Schaefer set up an easel across the road from a Chase bank and began painting the building in flames. However, before he had finished the police arrived, asked him for his information and if he was planning on actually carrying out an arson attack on the building. Ridiculous. Later they turned up on his doorstep asking about his artwork and looking for any signs that he was going to carry through an anarcho – terrorist plot based on his paintings. If this wasn’t bad enough a year later he was arrested for drawing the word ‘crime’ with a Chase logo in front of an LA bank.

Rancher Adrienne Ivey noticed her 150 heifers were all bunched together, and headed over to find them being herded by a "furry little beaver."“It wasn’t until we got to the very front of the herd, that we could see what all the commotion was about.”Ivey said it was “really quite cute,” and “the most Canadian moment of all moments.” Ivey shot video of the curious cattle drive and posted it online, where viewers have been watching the cows trailing closely behind the buck-toothed creature, with their heads lowered. When the beaver stops, the cattle stop, too, only to proceed when the furry animal continues on.The beaver was probably just trying to get from one bit of swamp to another, apparently, when the cows put it in charge.

I don't play a lot of games, but my friend Craig loaned me his BioShock discs for Mac couple of years ago and I enjoyed it. The super creepy dystopian universe is a critique of Ayn Rand's simplistic political and economic ideas based on the concept of "rational self-interest." Amazon has a sale on all three BioShock games in the series for the Xbox One and PS4 for $30. If you don't already have this game, this is a good time to get it.

A time-lapse radar loop from Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch shows today's storms billowing like a fire dancing over gasoline. The image (and the storms) cover the U.S. from West Texas to Pennsylvania. [via]

Sony's cameras seem to be in a league of their own. So why do professionals stick with bulkier models from Canon and Nikon? One answer is glass—often just as pricey as pro-grade bodies, and you need a lot of it to be in business. DPReview's Dan Bracaglia suggests that Sony's latest full-frame model, the $5,000 A9, is so fantastic that many pros are talking about jumping ship, but should be cautioned by the sheer expense of doing so.Using our example, the cheapest one could go full-on Sony, with most of the same kit is $22,870. After applying the $11,820 discount from having sold off all the Canon equipment, a photojournalist would still have to cough up about $11,050 to make the switch. Or they could simply take that $11,820 and buy a couple of a9 bodies and maybe a lens."Switching systems is a headache," he adds, "and sports photography gear is crazy expensive."

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All you need to make these movable Wolverine claws are 15 popsicle sticks, six rubber bands, a piece of paper, and glue. Here’s a second, slightly more terrifying version that uses actual blades:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHYu3oJEKSY

The Los Angeles punk and skate scenes of the mid-1980s produced a brief, shining moment of total badassery in the form of The Hags, a now-legendary all-girl skateboard gang that prowled Hollywood and West LA. Bust magazine takes a loving look back. (more…)

HirokA1007's youtube channel is a menagerie of enormous insects such as this Hercules beetle pupa. Below, a larva, also the size of his fist. [via JWZ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ1fuq8rKZQPreviously:

For more than a decade, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been suing the NSA over its extraordinarily broad interpretation of its powers under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act -- a law that the NSA says gives it the power to spy on Americans any time they mention a foreigner. (more…)

The Supreme Court heard arguments in Maslenjak v. United States, a case about whether minor omissions or falsehoods in an immigration application can cost a naturalized American their citizenship, decades after the fact. (more…)

I had no idea!Evidently HAL 9000 sang Daisy Bell as a tribute, it is the first song ever sung by a computer. In 1961 an IBM 7094 was the first to raise its voice in song.The vocals were programmed by John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum and accompaniment was programmed by Max Mathews, but the song was written by Harry Dacre, almost a century earlier, in 1892.

(Note to proofreader: I just received this copy and figure it should just go up verbatim. Next time they do something like this remind me to send William Golding instead. — Rob)Later, as he sat in his tent eating the doggo, Robin Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place at the Fyre Festival during the previous three hours.Now that everything had returned to normal, with most of the rich kids cowering in the airport and the ostensible proprietors begging Twitter for forgiveness and mercy, he was surprised that there had been no obvious beginning, no point beyond which lunch had moved into a clearly more sinister dimension. In the middle of the field, a girl in an Afhan Whigs tee shirt screamed about gluten in the rye. (more…)

Not all careers are created equal. Take journalism, for example. High stress, low growth, very low pay. Why would anyone choose this field? (You're asking the wrong person.) According to CareerCast, who ranked the 200 most common jobs in America, journalism is a pretty crummy field to be in this year (as in, last place on the list). CareerCast used metrics such as "growth outlook, income, environmental conditions and stress" as their basis in creating this list. Here is the methodology they used. And now (...drumroll...), here are the 10 worst jobs of 2017:1. Newspaper reporter (Median Salary: $37,820)2. Broadcaster (Median Salary: $38,870)3. Logger (Median Salary: $37,590)4. Enlisted military personnel (Median Salary: $27,936)5. Pest control worker (Median Salary: $33,040)6. Disc jockey (Median Salary: $30,830)7. Advertising salesperson (Median Salary: $50,380)8. Firefighter (Median Salary: $48,030)9. Retail salesperson (Median Salary: $22,900)10. Taxi driver (Median Salary: $24,300)And in case you're wondering, the very best job these days is that of statistician (Median Salary: $80,110). To see CareerCast's full list of 200 ranked jobs, click here.Image: Israel Government Press Office

My new novel Walkaway (US tour/UK tour) is set in a world that is being torn apart by out-of-control wealth inequality, but not everyone thinks that inequality is what destabilizes the world -- there's a kind of free-market belief that says the problem is really poverty, not inequality, and that the same forces that make the rich richer also lift poor people out of misery, delivering the sanitation, mass food production, communications tools and other innovations that rescues poor people from privation. (more…)

At a pottery fair in Pittsburgh, I ran into Kimberlyn Bloise, who makes handsome musical instruments that are also mugs, vases and pendants. They sound and look wonderful, and have the strange quality of something both charming and haunting, like remnants of a vanished culture. You can order them from her online shop.I put a lot of testing into my instruments, but none of them plays a full scale, and none are traditionally tuned. The clay changes so much from when I begin to working with it to when I have the finished product. It shrinks and expands, and the pitches change along with it. What I have been able to do is figure out where to place the holes in relation to the size of the resonating chamber (the hollow handle) so that the notes all sound good together on each individual piece. The flute mugs all play parts of a blues scale! Could I figure out traditional tuning on all of them? Probably. But it would take so much planning and effort, and my prices would have to reflect that. I'm sure you've noticed that "real" instruments are quite expensive, and I don't want to make mine that pricey! Plus, I don't intend for anyone to play the flute handle in any professional capacity, so I don't sweat it too much. Here's a flute hidden in a mug handle:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuLztv5XlXAThe large horn vase:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uS-6HFytkHere is the "complaining husky" horn vase:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrKp30pD-KkAnd the bouncy udu:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6hRxAXdOGQhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnpAlO3WWTg

People snore because they've lost throat muscle tone, says Dr. Mike Dilkes, an ear, nose and throat surgeon in London. In an interview with CBC, he offers an exercise to rebuild your throat muscles:MD: There's a quick [exercise] you can do: Opening your mouth as wide as you can. Poking your tongue out as far as it'll go, so it hurts. You got to really strain your tongue out. Then you touch tip of your nose with your tongue. Then go south and touch your chin with your tongue. Then go side to side as far as you can. Then, as you're doing this, in a loud voice, sing something familiar like your national anthem.CO: So if someone does this workout, four or five minutes a day, they'll stop snoring?MD: If there's no other mechanical obstruction i.e. it's just an age-related problem, then yes — this is a good treatment.

Three million Americans have Type-1 diabetes. If they don't get insulin every day, they will slip into a coma and die. The price of rapid-acting insulin, needed by diabetics who can't take slower-acting insulin, has increased 1,123 percent since 1996. Many insurance companies won't cover the costs, forcing desperate parents to look for insulin on the black market.From NBCNews:Gabriella is allergic to the kind of insulin her insurer covers at a $25 out-of-pocket cost. She can only take Apidra, but her insurance only covers 25 percent of the price, leaving the family to pay hundreds of dollars a month they can't afford.So her mom has turned to the black market, trading for the medication with other families with diabetes she meets online, a tactic that regulators and health experts warn is a health risk. And she cut a back-end deal with a sympathetic drug rep: If she bought one vial he would give her 10 vials from his sample kit, nearly a one year's supply. Gabriella's grandmother covered the cost.

All airlines have their share of customer service problems, and Southwest is no exception. But they seem to be better than most (two free checked on bags, no charge for changing flights), and they just announced that they will no longer overbook its flights, bucking a widespread airline practice.From CNN Money:Southwest is taking it one step further and plans to end overbooking outright by May 8, spokeswoman Brandy King said. The carrier joins JetBlue, which has long advertised that it doesn't overbook flights.It's standard practice for airlines to sell more tickets than there are seats in anticipation of no-show fliers.When a flight is overbooked, federal rules require that airlines first check to see whether anyone will give up his or her seat voluntarily. Airlines control how much they offer to pay, though they usually shell out a travel voucher toward a future flight or a gift card.Image by aeroprints.com, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Lego just announced its new NASA Apollo Saturn V model rocket set. It's based on a Lego Ideas submission by a builder named saabfun, it's a 1:110 scale model of the real thing. Of course the Saturn V was the workhorse rocket that took astronauts to the moon beginning in 1969 and delivered Skylab to orbit in 1973. and The 1,969 piece set will sell for $120 starting in June. It looks fantastic but I'll wait (and hope) for a Voyager Mission set complete with the Golden Record!

Yesterday Elon Musk took delivery of his second-hand boring machine for his Boring Company. It's in a parking lot next to the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Musk says he's going to take it apart, figure out how to improve the design of boring machines, and start testing by coring out an underground pedestrian tunnel from his offices across (or rather under) the street to the parking lot. He'll certainly need good boring machines to build his Hyperloop system. From the San Jose Mercury News:Last week, a tunnel-boring machine used by L.A. Metro to carve out 2 miles of earth for the new Crenshaw/LAX line was removed from the future Leimert Park Station in South Los Angeles in three pieces.No one confirmed whether the 950-ton, 400-foot-long steel grinder would go to SpaceX. Metro had dubbed the machine “Harriet,” in honor of Harriet Tubman, an American abolitionist instrumental in the Underground Railroad, after a student contest.The day Harriet finished work for Metro, Musk submitted plans to Hawthorne officials to build an underground pedestrian tunnel from SpaceX headquarters to its parking garage across Crenshaw Boulevard.A vertical tunnel shaft already has been dug in the SpaceX parking lot.Now, The Boring Co. machine will dig – cheese grater-style – a 500-foot-long, horizontal pedestrian tunnel that is 20-by-150 feet and 13.5 feet in diameter, according to interim Hawthorne City Manager Arnie Shadbehr.

https://youtu.be/mz5kY3RsmKoFyre Festival was advertised as a luxury music festival on a private island in the Bahamas. But promises of a private chartered flight to the island, gourmet meals, private glamping tents, yacht cruises, gourmet catering, and an all-star concert performance line-up "quickly turned into a terrifying B-movie, with flocks of Instagram models forced to seek shelter in an airport after arriving to discover a lack of food, violent locals, appalling accommodation and feral dogs roaming the grounds," reports The Telegraph.Snip:As a result, social media has exploded overnight with tales of Instagram-filtered terror and disappointment, with beautiful festival-goers arriving on the island to discover half-built tents, their luggage being thrown out of the back of a truck, muggers and thieves laying in wait to steal wallets from trust fund kids, unhelpful staff, and "gourmet cuisine" that turned out to be nothing but ham and cheese sandwiches.From iBankCoin:The “chartered flight from Miami” turned out to be severely delayed coach seats, and upon arrival shocked concert-goers were met with partially constructed USAID disaster relief tents.Heres a drive by tour of the tents:Early report is that many of the tents aren't assembled. Here's their tropical private island owned by Escobar! #FyreFestival pic.twitter.com/TNzBDbNAUJ— FyreFestivalFraud (@FyreFraud) April 27, 2017Angry attendees have flocked to social media to express their disappointment:The $12K Music Festival Promoted by Supermodels Is Already a Mess: #Fyre_Festival, promoted by Kendall… https://t.co/QcVCK3WeFr #nyc #royer pic.twitter.com/OVXQCpRhQ1— Kevin Royer (@isellbrooklyn) April 26, 2017The luxury festival tents are left over disaster relief shelters from @USAID Fyre Festival scammed us! https://t.co/kW4olVKgzY #fyrefestival pic.twitter.com/8QYkQ3jIPR— FyreFestivalFraud (@FyreFraud) April 25, 2017More deliberate lies by #fyrefestival. Fyre Festival makes it appear to be its own island...marketing says private island...it isn't! Scam. pic.twitter.com/E4Gz8o3X0z— FyreFestivalFraud (@FyreFraud) April 20, 2017This is how Fyre Fest handles luggage. Just drop it out of a shipping container. At night. With no lights. #fyrefestival pic.twitter.com/X5CdZRyJWo— William N. Finley IV (@WNFIV) April 28, 2017The "gourmet cuisine" this weekend was included in the ticket cost. We are being fed salads and ham and cheese sandwiches out of this tent pic.twitter.com/MRv7U0RiyM— dylan (@DylanACOP) April 28, 2017When I showed Carla these photos, she said "Why did the promoter even bother to put *anything* there?"Sad & Snoozy says he found an event planners notes sitting on the ground:The Notebook: Fyre Festival edition. pic.twitter.com/gjUvDvUKhW— William N. Finley IV (@WNFIV) April 28, 2017So, Jonestown with worse logistics, basically.Fyre Festival's website has gone offline, save for a cryptic, unhelpful, unapologetic message:Imagine being stranded and reading that.

In a federal complaint against Fox News, former Outnumbered host Andrea Tantaros claims that after she filed a sexual harassment claim against the former CEO Roger Ailes, Fox News contracted with a psyops team to set up a "black room" to run a hate campaign that targeted her by cyberstalking her, implanting malware on her computer, and libeling her on "fake news" sites. (more…)