Boing Boing

During an "improvised sermon" in his residence during morning mass, Pope Francis excoriated Catholics who lead a "hypocritical double life," going to mass and joining religious organizations while living from the exploitation of others -- the Pope said these people should say to themselves, "my life is not Christian, I don't pay my employees proper salaries, I exploit people, I do dirty business, I launder money, (I lead) a double life'." (more…)

Tucker Gott posts lots of great videos of himself whizzing around above his idyllic town on his paramotor-powered paraglider. He just added a foot-mount camera, which is even more vertigo-inducing than a POV shot. (more…)

Wikipedia says Isaac Asimov wrote 506 published books. Where did he get his ideas? Charles Chu says Asimov used a number of tactics:1. Never Stop Learning“All this incredibly miscellaneous reading, the result of lack of guidance, left its indelible mark. My interest was aroused in twenty different directions and all those interests remained. I have written books on mythology, on the Bible, on Shakespeare, on history, on science, and so on.”2. Don’t Fight the Stuck"I don’t stare at blank sheets of paper. I don’t spend days and nights cudgeling a head that is empty of ideas. Instead, I simply leave the novel and go on to any of the dozen other projects that are on tap. I write an editorial, or an essay, or a short story, or work on one of my nonfiction books. By the time I’ve grown tired of these things, my mind has been able to do its proper work and fill up again. I return to my novel and find myself able to write easily once more."3. Beware the Resistance4. Lower Your Standards5. Make MORE Stuff6. “By thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to kill myself."Image: Wikipedia

Google's Perspective is an API that aims to keep micturitors from fouling community swimming pools.Perspective is an API that makes it easier to host better conversations. The API uses machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation. Developers and publishers can use this score to give realtime feedback to commenters or help moderators do their job, or allow readers to more easily find relevant information, as illustrated in two experiments below. We’ll be releasing more machine learning models later in the year, but our first model identifies whether a comment could be perceived as “toxic" to a discussion.Check out the slider bar example and the writing example here. It seems to work pretty well!Wikipedia, The NY Times, The Economist, and The Guardian experimenting with the technology to help them approve/disapprove of comments more quickly.

Richard Spencer, the American white nationalist guru famous for being punched on camera by an antifascist protestor, was ejected today from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) by security guards.“I’m not welcome on the property?” Spencer asked.“I’m not going to debate this,” said the guard. “This is private property. They want you off the property.”After Spencer asked if could stay if he would simply “stay out of trouble,” he said a hashtag — “Free Spencer” — into the cameras, and posed for another photo as he was taken outside.He attracted attention to himself after walking out during a deranged speech from American Conservative Union director Dan Schneider, who, desperate to distance the movement from Spencer's ilk, had described the Alt Right as a "left-wing" group.

On Wednesday the Arizona Senate passed SB 1142. The bill would allow the state to seize the assets of demonstrators who attend protests that turn violent.From Arizona Capitol Times:But the real heart of the legislation is what Democrats say is the guilt by association — and giving the government the right to criminally prosecute and seize the assets of everyone who planned a protest and everyone who participated. And what’s worse, said Sen. Steve Farley, D-Tucson, is that the person who may have broken a window, triggering the claim there was a riot, might actually not be a member of the group but someone from the other side.Sen. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said that chilling effect is aimed at a very specific group of protesters. “You now have a situation where you have full-time, almost professional agent-provocateurs that attempt to create public disorder," he said. “A lot of them are ideologues, some of them are anarchists," Kavanagh continued. “But this stuff is all planned."What's to stop the state or someone else from hiring agents provocateurs to damage property, thereby giving the state an excuse to strip peaceful protestors of their homes and assets? Image: David Mulder/Flickr

Inspired by Westworld, Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell created this video to explore the questions: "What shall we do once machines become conscious? Do we need to grant them rights?"

Making people aware of goods and services in the digital age requires an array of new strategies from social media and email to number-crunching tools like Google Analytics. To get a handle on the techniques used to capture attention and convert traffic into dollars in a crowded online environment, the Full-Stack Marketer Bundle offers 22 hours of training to get you up to speed.In this course, you’ll start by getting a broad overview of marketing strategies including copywriting, web analytics, email campaigns, social media, and SEO. Studying these core concepts will help you understand how to create a great customer experience and web presence for your company or brand.Diving deeper, you'll explore Google Analytics and AdWords to give you the tools to make smart, data-informed business decisions. By the end of the bundle, you'll have a wealth of relevant skills that you can leverage for high-paying jobs or apply to your own entrepreneurial ventures.

Ed Felten (previously) -- copyfighter, Princeton computer scientist, former deputy CTO of the White House -- has published a four-and-a-half-page "primer for policymakers" on cryptography that explains how encryption for filesystems and encryption for messaging works, so they can be less ignorant. (more…)

As the US government ramps up its insistence that visitors (and US citizens) unlock their devices and provide their social media accounts, the solution have run the gamut from extreme technological caution, abandoning mobile devices while traveling, or asking the government to rethink its policy. But Maciej Cegłowski has another solution: a "travel mode" for our social media accounts. (more…)

The Freedom of the Press Foundation's lawsuit against the DoJ has resulted in the release of documents showing that a bill with that was nearly unanimously supported in Congress and the Senate was killed by behind-the-scene lobbying by the Department of Justice, which feared that they would lose the ability to arbitrarily reject Freedom of Information Act requests if the bill passed. (more…)

The craftperson behind this wonderful, tiny room inside a PC tower is unknown, but they have a flair for detail and style -- dig that tiny newspaper! (via Crazy Abalone) (more…)

Help is just a prototype, but it's already nearly perfect: in the American west of 1869, hunt down the bandits who've kidnapped your wife, then return her safely home. The controls are simple (walk around with WASD and point and click with the mouse to shoot) and the aesthetic and gameplay add up to an austere but thoroughly modern echo of Boot Hill. Sadly Windows-only.

The artifacts that tumble out of Scarfolk (previously), the English horror-town stuck in a ten-year loop from 1970-1980, continue their amazing run of being so very much on-point with the issues facing the UK today, case in point: The Campaign for Real British Crime. (more…)

This umbrella cockatoo is a very good puppo.

We've all seen the uncanny, not-quite-there art produced by new AIs. Why Matt Reynolds reports on an area computers might be expected to excel at creatively: programming themselves. And this one's doing it the same way humans do, by stealing and remixing.DeepCoder uses a technique called program synthesis: creating new programs by piecing together lines of code taken from existing software – just like a programmer might. Given a list of inputs and outputs for each code fragment, DeepCoder learned which pieces of code were needed to achieve the desired result overall.“It could allow non-coders to simply describe an idea for a program and let the system build it”One advantage of letting an AI loose in this way is that it can search more thoroughly and widely than a human coder, so could piece together source code in a way humans may not have thought of. What’s more, DeepCoder uses machine learning to scour databases of source code and sort the fragments according to its view of their probable usefulness.DeepCoder, make me a point-and-click adventure game featuring Rosicrucians, billionaire perverts and the complete dissolving of all culture by internet-mediated telepathy.

Frog tongue mechanism has been well-documented, but only recently have scientists started looking at the remarkable combo of tongue softness and frog spit's chemical makeup. (more…)

VFX artists have long complained they do not get the compensation they deserve for the value they bring to the film industry. Just in time for the Oscars, Ali Rizvi and Sohail Al-Jamea have teamed up with McClatchy with Hollywood's Greatest Trick. (more…)

Enjoy the wonderful new music video from the recording artist Jenny O., co-directed by Jenny O. with Mariana Blanco. (more…)

Editor's note: Here's an inspiring update on a cool project some friends of ours are doing in India. About a year ago, Boing Boing readers began contributing to help the Tibetan exile community in Mundgod, India build the region's first free Tibetan public library, with the support of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Shiwatso Library is now open for reading! “We have visitors checking out books from the Library and also coming to read,” says Phuntsok Dorjee, who is one of the organizers, and was raised in one of the refugee settlements there. (more…)

A Florida pastor who took his 11 year old daughter to see a Donald Trump campaign-style presidential rally said he'd hoped his kid would learn something, but instead witnessed that “demonic activity was palpable.” (more…)

After a former Uber engineer detailed her account of sexual harassment while working there for about a year, New York Times reporter Mike Isaac dug into the story and got the goods. His exposé describes an amoral Ayn Randian meritocracy filled with aggressive jerks, in which one could absolutely imagine impunity for sexual harassment being an accepted norm. (more…)

Ten-year-old Lena Draper, from Marion, OH, was stumped with her math homework and needed help. And who do you go to when in need? The police of course! The fifth grader jumped on Facebook and went straight to the Marion police department. “I’m having trouble with my homework. Could you help me?” Here was the problem: (8+29) x 15. Lt. B.J. Gruber, age 42, came to the rescue. "Do the numbers in parenthesis first." Lena didn't stop there, and asked him to help her with a second problem: (90+27) + (29+15) x 2. The patient officer did his best to help her again. "Take the answer from the first parenthesis plus the answer from the second parenthesis and multiply that answer times two. Work left to right doing the work inside [the] parenthesis first."But, having been a few decades since he last sat in math class, the officer was a little rusty with the order of things. When Lena's mom posted the Facebook exchange, she found out from a friend that the second answer was wrong – the order of operation was, well, out of order. Gruber admits his best subject was always history, not math. See the full story here.

Sham president Donald Trump's sham government on Wednesday rolled back federal protections for transgender students who don't want to be harassed, sexually assaulted, or physically attacked when they go to a public school bathroom that matches their gender identity, instead of the conflicting gender definition others try to force upon them. (more…)

I pretty much sprinkle the same thing on every meal. I am admittedly heavy-handed with the cayenne on my own plate and rarely stray from the variety of basils I grow in the summer or bundles of dried rosemary in winter when cooking for my family. I am much more apt to get creative with spices while baking, to savory up my sweets. Lior Lev Sercarz’s The Spice Companion has got me pretty excited to change things up. This book is an absolute must read for anyone who likes to cook. In it, Lev Sercarz, celebrated culinary expert and master of spices, walks readers through a collection of spices chosen based on the criteria of: 1) can be found anywhere and 2) are essential in certain parts of the world. He opens with a few short essay-like chapters on his own culinary journey, the history of spices, and overviews on procuring, blending, and storing spices, all written in an inviting tone that makes the reader, no matter how novice in the kitchen or rote in their culinary routine, feel excited and encouraged to experiment with spices. They serve as thoroughly informative, enjoyable appetizers to the main course of the collection: the spices. “Any dried ingredient that elevates food or drink is a spice,” Lev Sercarz writes. His alphabetically organized curation of spices is gorgeously photographed by Thomas Schauer, who also gives us plenty of food-porn shots spanning the lifecycle of spices (from herbs still growing to well-seasoned meals) throughout the text. The spices themselves are shot both whole and deconstructed, each with its own two-page spread. The first page of each is like a mini spice biography or encyclopedia entry, including a botanical illustration, the characteristics, origin, harvest season, and history. Schauer’s photographic spice portraits tumble across the second page, framed by factoids on traditional usage, recommended dish and spice pairings, recipe ideas, and “quick blend” recipe. There is also a great collection of 15 “Classic Spice Blends” recipes at the back of the book.The Spice Companion: A Guide to the World of Spices by Lior Lev SercarzClarkson Potter2016, 304 pages, 9.3 x 1.3 x 10.3 inches, Hardcover$24 Buy on AmazonSee sample pages from this book at Wink.

Russian band Leningrad's "Kolshik" is a reversed video of multiple disasters in and around a circus.Someone reversed the reverse:https://youtu.be/YPtl9pUI8cM[via]

Angry constituent gives Mitch McConnell the what for pic.twitter.com/tyHseJVtqd— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 21, 2017It must be hard for Senator McConnell pretend he cares about the little people.

Pablo Defendini writes, "Fireside Magazine has just relaunched their website, with a focus on fiction for the resistance. Their latest short story, Andrea Phillips' The Revolution Brought to You by Nike, tells the story of what happens when a corporation turns its brand marketing into a tool for societal change. In light of the actual Nike's recent TV spots celebrating Arab female athletes, Andrea's story reads more like near-future prognosticating, rather than speculative fiction."

Daniel Dopps, a chiropractor, has invented a vaginal glue applied with a lipstick-like device. The idea is to glue one's vagina shut during menstruation, thereby obviating the need for sanitary pads or tampons: he claims that the glue will dissolve and menses thereby released during urination, after which one's vag glue can be reapplied. His product has the rather spectacular name "Mensez," lady consumers are not impressed by any of it, and Dopps is therefore having to explain it to them until they understand.The superficially feminine stock art over masculine sales concepts really pulls it together. CONTROL IS THE SECRET. LEAKAGE. INFECTION. COMFORT.

The fabulous Shelly Bond, former DC Vertigo editor and head honcho, just launched a kickstarter for an anthology called Femme Magnifique that she’s doing in conjunction with Kristy and Brian Miller at HiFi Color. (more…)

For $170, Motherboard's Joseph Cox bought SpyPhone Android Rec Pro, an Android app that you have to sideload on your target's phone (the software's manufacturer sells passcode-defeating apps that help you do this); once it's loaded, you activate it with an SMS and then you can covertly operate the phone's mic, steal its photos, and track its location. (more…)

Last night, Coyote Creek in San Jose, California dramatically overspilled its banks. A mandatory evacuation displaced 14,000 residents, many of whom required decontamination because the water was likely toxic. (more…)

Tim Harford points out that Dieselgate -- when VW designed cars that tried to guess when they were undergoing emissions test and dial back their pollution -- wasn't the first time an industry designed its products to cheat when regulators were looking; the big banks did the same thing to beat the "stress tests" that finance regulators used to check whether they would collapse during economic downturns (the banks "made very specific, narrow bets designed to pay off gloriously in specific stress-test scenarios" so that they looked like they'd do better than they actually would). (more…)

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, a "rising star" in the GOP, ran as an "independent" thinker, but has dutifully toed the GOP line since taking office -- that's why the town halls on her "99-county tour" of Iowa are packed with angry people who want to know about Trump's relationship to the Russian government, and the GOP's plan to destroy their health care without anything credible to replace it; it's also why most of the stops on Ernst's tours are planned photo-ops at factories instead of public events where voters can actually talk to their elected rep. (more…)

Governments have "official" unofficial leaking policies, releasing tons of confidential material to the press without any attribution or public acknowledgement: they leak stuff to maintain good press relations, to test out ideas, to hurt their in-government rivals, or to let information be generally known without having to answer difficult questions about it (for example, letting the press report on "secret" drone strike in Yemen without a press-conference where embarrassing questions about civilian casualties might come up). (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsmtVLoXFtQCharles Duan from Public Knowledge sends us "a video we put together for Fair Use Week about copyright and fair use, to the tune of 'Let It Go' from Frozen, and full of clips of other fair use videos."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBD6OlKYz40&feature=youtu.beElenco's Night 'n Day Mechanical Globe uses a system of translucent, exposed gears to rotate an internally illuminated globe that displays the seasonally adjusted, real-time night/day terminator as it spins. (more…)

Richard Wiseman, author of 101 Bets You Will Always Win, made a fun video of seven different illusions.

Got lint on your felt fedora? You need a hat brush. (more…)

High school teacher Joe Howard made another excellent math video. This time, he shows how Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth in 200 BC.In one of the dopest displays of critical thinking in history, Erotosthenes estimated the circumference of the Earth. All he had was a pole, the sun, knowledge of a famous well in Egypt, and potentially money to pay someone to walk the distance between two cities. This story demonstrates the beauty of trigonometry.

Silver's predictions of the election outcome took much of the shine off the statistician-pollster-guru, and no amount of statistical spin ("we were expressing our confidence that the unpredictable wouldn't happen, but we left open the possibility of the unpredictable!") can restore it to its former glory, but this Fivethirtyeight explainer on the polls that show a huge variance in Trump's approval and disapproval ratings is the kind of detailed analysis that is mostly light, with little heat. (more…)

A popular running trail in a North Carolina park became dangerous when vandals set nail traps. One runner was injured, setting off a fairly large clean-up process. Over 40 nails were removed. Via WYFF NBC 4:A popular park has reopened after being shut down because a runner impaled his foot on one of dozens of intentionally placed nails, the Asheville Citizen-Times reports.A search since that incident located dozens of 4-inch galvanized nails, hammered pointed end up into roots and logs along a trail in Sylva’s Pinnacle Park in Jackson County.Brian Barwatt, an engineer with the North Carolina Department of Transportation and the director of a trail race in Pinnacle Park in March, said whoever hammered the nails left them sticking out one-half to 1 inch, and at an angle.The nails were found on a popular trail that leads to Black Rock Summit.As if running wasn't unpleasant enough.

Having a luxurious bed isn’t just a fairy tale from a catalog; it is a real, affordable possibility with offerings like this Olive+Owen bedroom set. If you're thinking of doing some "spring cleaning", this bed set is an easy way to completely upgrade your room in one purchase.This 20-piece collection has all of the expected slumberland elements, as well as extra details I personally never thought I would own. It includes an oversize comforter, a collection of decorative pillows and shams, and design touches like curtain valances, ties, and a bed skirt to hide all of your underbed storage. And the stately gray color scheme pretty much goes with anything.Usually going for $300, get the entire 20-piece set for just $120 for a limited time.

It appears Grand Admiral Thrawn is done hanging back, collecting data and has begun hatching his plan to end the rebellion. We've all been waiting for the softspoken military genius to start kicking some butt.

This is doing the rounds invariably attached to the remark "not photoshopped," which leads me to think it must be. Surely old Bill isn't that unselfware?

Americans can legally manufacture an assault rifle for personal use without registering it, so Daniel Crowninshield figured his paying customers could push the button to start his milling equipment and claim they made the AR-15 themselves. Feds disagreed. (more…)

Tom Rex Jessett and his fiancee Vanessa tricked out a panel van and drove all the way around Australia, a journey known as The Big Lap. We spent hours upon hours driving, walked on hundreds of beaches, Watched nearly every sunrise and sunset as well as ate a whole lot of tinned food! 35,000km later we were back where we started, the big lap complete! Here is just a small selection of the photographs I took along the way as memories.Bonus video: Catherine Lawson and David Bristow take newborn Maya all the way around Highway 1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGSG-lqj6t8• I Spent 9 Months Road Tripping The Big Lap Of Australia And Took These Amazing Photos To Remember It! (Tom Rex Jessett)