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NERVANA is an award-winning gadget aimed at helping people calm down and regain focus with just a generator and headphone set. By sending a gentle electrical wave through the left ear canal, NERVANA stimulates the body’s Vagus nerve—the nerve that triggers neurotransmitters that help us focus, feel relaxed, and cut out distractions. In short, NERVANA helps us calm down, and calm down fast.The gentle signal is emitted while you’re listening to music—thanks to NERVANA’s proprietary, patented circuitry. And if you’re feeling like relaxing sans music, you can also use NERVANA in formula mode.This technology is so effective that it won the TechStars Award in the "Lifestyle and Digital Health" category at CES 2016, and it was later featured in USA Today.You can get 21% off NERVANA in the Boing Boing Store and start improving your focus for just $249.99.

Temporarily embarrassed millionaires will be pleased to know that Donald Trump has filled his cabinet with people just like them: the "17 cabinet-level picks have more money than a third of American households combined," reports Quartz. The 17 people who US president-elect Donald Trump has selected for his cabinet or for posts with cabinet rank have well over $9.5 billion in combined wealth, with several positions still unfilled. This collection of wealth is greater than that of the 43 million least wealthy American households combined — over one third of the 126 million households total in the US.

The Cold Drone Wars have begun. In a first-of-its-kind military standoff, the Chinese Navy has taken possession of an underwater autonomous drone deployed by a U.S. oceanographic vessel in the South China Sea. (more…)

https://youtu.be/NpN9NzO4Mo8After Anthony van der Meer's phone was stolen, he installed spyware on a new phone and intentionally allowed someone to steal it. He then remotely recorded audio, photos, and videos from the phone and made a 20 minute film about the guy who stole it.After my phone got stolen, I quickly realized just how much of my personal information and data the thief had instantly obtained. So, I let another phone get stolen. This time my phone was pre-programmed with spyware so I could keep tabs on the thief in order to get to know him. However, to what extent is it possible to truly get to know someone by going through the content of their phone?In the Netherlands, 300 police reports a week are filed for smartphone-theft. Besides losing your expensive device, a stranger has access to all of your photos, videos, e-mails, messages and contacts.Yet, what kind of person steals a phone? And where do stolen phones eventually end up?The short documentary ‘Find My Phone’ follows a stolen phone’s second life by means of using spyware.Although you’ll meet the person behind the theft up close and personal, the question remains: how well can you actually get to know someone when you base yourself on the information retrieved from their phone?

Fred Couch, father of the drunk driving teenager who got his wrist slapped for killing four people in 2013, got his own wrist slapped yesterday for falsely identifying himself as a peace officer. From The Daily Beast:The elder Couch, 51, was charged in September of 2014 after falsely identifying himself as a reserve Lakeside police officer, showing a North Richland Hills police officer a shield-style badge and claiming to have his "Lakeside police stuff in the truck."He will serve a year's probation.

Wells Fargo didn't merely open 2,000,000 fraudulent accounts and bill its customers for them; it also tricked its customers into signing up for insurance policies, at mass-scale. (more…)

This fellow has zero fucks to give as THREE oshiya (pushers) try their hardest to get those doors to close.(via Marco Patella Photography)

My friends in Reboot and Partners In Crime opened a fantastically cool Reboot Hanukkah Pop-Up Shop on Union Street in San Francisco (and online too)! The physical shop is only open this weekend and there are terrific events for the whole family including a lunch concert today by blues guitarist Luther Dickinson, a reading/signing tomorrow afternoon by the inimitable Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) and Lisa Brown, Lego Menorah Making, and a Sunday evening screening of Tiffany Shlain and Julie Hermelin's new film 50/50!Reboot Hanukkah Pop-Up Shop

Back in 2010, John Holbo created a beautiful, illustrated cthuhoid version of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas called "Mama in Her 'Kerchief and I in My Madness," and this curiousity has lurked on Flickr ever since -- until now, when it has emerged as an actual book that you can actually own and cower from -- with guaranteed delivery by Christmas. (more…)

Paul writes, "Embroidered in lovely Copperplate letters on a Democratic blue hat. I set the price as low as it allowed so there are unlikely to be much profits. But any there are will go to border collie rescues that I work with."

Singer Anohni released a striking song and video asking for Chelsea Manning to be released:"If you leave Chelsea Manning in prison for whistle blowingYou send the final message to our nationthat the Obama administration brutally punished moral couragein these unforgiving United States." (more…)

The $30, 4" x 3" die-cast zinc alloy tool includes four hexkeys, two screwdrivers and an adjustable wrench, with tool storage inside a magnetically sealed compartment. (more…)

Belatedly, I've finally read Hao Jingfang's novelette "Folding Beijing," which won the Hugo Award last summer in Kansas City: it's a story about a future in which the great cities continue to be engines of economic power, but where automation eventually makes most of the people in the cities obsolete -- a problem solved by dividing the city's day and geography up by strata, using marvellous origami buildings that appear and disappear, and suspended animation technologies that whisk away great portions of the city's unneeded proletariat for most of the day. (more…)

Of course you do. (more…)

Hiné Mizushima creates whimsical felt sculptures that combine insects and plants into adorable new life forms, like this Venus Anttrap Beetle, or this Amanita Beetle: (more…)

Broadway stars Laura Osnes and Christopher Rice pay homage to classic MGM films in this holiday performance.

Zip through 105 years of popular baby names in this interactive map by Mike Barry. Toggle for boys or girls. We've come a long way from John and James and Helen and Mary. (more…)

Finnish photographer Oscar Keserci braved brutal temperatures in and around Kirkkonummi, Finland for his breathtaking Blue Night series of photos. (more…)

From Verge social reporter and cartoonist Dami Lee. (more…)

James Corden’s 'Carpool Karaoke' segment is almost always a delight. This latest Bruno Mars edition is no exception.

As part of his Project One Life series, Matt Bray has uploaded videos of himself performing the same dance routine for 100 days in his bedroom as well as performing the routine in 100 different places. (more…)

As the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo continues to grow, many people are looking for ways to help. (more…)

Artist Geoffroy Amelot created this Lego-centric replica of Vincent Van Gogh’s famous self-portrait. (more…)

Monocle interviewed Ed Cooke, the founder of the language learning site, Memrise.During a three-month hospital stay when he was 18 years old, Ed Cooke studied memory techniques to overcome boredom. By the age of 23 he was a Grand Master of Memory, someone who can memorise 1,000 random digits in an hour and the order of a deck of cards in two minutes. Cooke is now the founder of a fast-growing start-up called Memrise, which allows people to learn a language quickly while also having fun. He outlines the value of a good memory and tells us how Memrise gained tens of millions of users.

1. Fight the fights (against more government and commercial surveillance; backdoors, government hacking); 2. Prepare for those fights (push companies to delete those logs; remind everyone that security and privacy can peacefully co-exist); 3. Lay the groundword for a better future (figure out non-surveillance internet business models, privacy-respecting law enforcement, and limits on corporate surveillance); 4. Continue to solve the actual problems (cybercrime, cyber-espionage, cyberwar, the Internet of Things, algorithmic decision making, foreign interference in our elections). (more…)

The Australian National Dictionary Centre has declared the two-word compound phrase "democracy sausage" to be its 2016 Word of the Year, defining it as "A barbecued sausage served on a slice of bread, bought at a polling booth sausage sizzle on election day." (more…)

David A Banks argues that the boom in NPR explainer podcasts -- Radiolab, Note to Self, Hidden Brain, Freakonomics Radio and others -- are ideologically bankrupt, presenting individual, often neurological explanations for social phenomena -- rather than turning to the traditional social science accounts of these issues, so that the weird, broken, messed up things in our world are the result of our human "hardwiring" rather than the outgrowth of policies and ideology. (more…)

The financialization of everything is just as real in the boardrooms of technology as it is everywhere else; though the deferential press likes to paint the tech-sector leaders as geniuses, superheroes (Elon Musk as Iron Man), and super-villains (Peter Thiel as Lex Luthor), the reality is that they're basically run-of-the-mill financial engineers, whose major creation is stock bubbles, not "revolutions." (more…)

Germany's DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier's academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017. (more…)

I thought it was a trail for a movie, but this is a real product. It’s advertised as a virtual wife for men who live alone.Gatebox is a holographic home "robot" in the vein of Siri or Alexa. It's basically a 3D cosplay character that says nice things to you and can be programmed to automate your home. It comes pre-installed with a character named Azuma Kikari. She's 20 years old, likes donuts, and dislikes insects. She says her role is "healing character supporting living alone. I always try my best to serve my husband."It costs 321,840 yen (about US$2725) and is available for pre-order now. https://youtu.be/KQ3iZiegnR4

Art collective The Principals put together Sound Journeys, an immersive multimedia project focusing on how sounds shape human response to environment. (more…)

Dayna Corbitt of WhimsyCalling makes impossibly cute clay figurines of whimsical and mythical animals. (more…)

Proofpoint has identified a new version of DNSChanger EK, a strain of malware that changes your DNS settings so that the ads on the websites you browse are replaced with other ads that benefit the attackers -- and which can also be used for more nefarious ends, because controlling your DNS means controlling things like where your computer gets software updates. (more…)

Rotten Tomatoes compiled a highly subjective list of striking movie posters. Since the Moonlight and Sausage Party posters are well-known, here are a few lesser-known posters they list. Note: poster quality and film quality do not necessarily correlate. (more…)

He's been dead for 225 years, but Mozart can still top the charts in terms of CD sales. The Mozart 225 box set was named Billboard's Biggest-selling CD release of 2016. Take that, Kanye and Taylor Swift! (more…)

Accepting the #SeeHer award at the Critics’ Choice Awards earlier this week, Viola Davis emphasized the importance of seeing diverse types of women onscreen. (more…)

Trichinosis will seem like a walk in the park after what Captain Link Hogthrob has to endure in this Muppets Alien sendup starring First Mate Piggy. (more…)

"What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and, at first, the eyes adjust." The New Yorker's Evan Osnos, with one of the best essay openings of the year, examines the posthumous memoir of Xu Hongci, a Chinese revolutionary and true believer of Mao Zedong, later imprisoned. (more…)

In 1944, a bizarre criminal assaulted the small town of Mattoon, Illinois. Victims reported smelling a strange odor in their bedrooms before being overcome with nausea and paralysis. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll pursue the mad gasser of Mattoon, who vanished after ten days, leaving residents to wonder whether he had ever existed at all.We'll also ponder the concept of identical cousins and puzzle over a midnight stabbing.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Unlike typical portable monoculars with a magnification range from 4x – 10x, this universal lens attachment enables a remarkable 40x – 60x zoom in a backpack-friendly package.Using a simple clip, it attaches to any smartphone, quickly enabling powerful optical zoom. With this large monocular and your tiny smartphone camera lens, you'd think it would be tricky to get a steady hand-held shot. But an opposable tripod attachment keeps it steady as can be.For me, smartphone camera lens attachments are often hard to justify. Device-specific connectors are rendered useless with a phone update, and restricted size attempts to maintain pocketability are often at the cost of quality. This lens dodges both of those common issues and even functions as a standalone compact telescope. Get one for 70% off in the Boing Boing Store for just $37.95.Also check out the Boing Boing Store's 2016 Holiday Gift Guide to treat yourself or someone close to you.

Just a few months after Yahoo disclosed a 2014 breach of 500 million user accounts, the company today revealed this was preceded by a 1 billion account breach in 2013, in which the hackers took everything: hashed passwords, names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and possibly the tools necessary to forge login cookies that would bypass password checks altogether. (more…)

I had completely forgotten about this, probably one of the most thoughtful and emotional Christmas messages from a major media corporation ever televised. It aired starting in 1966, the year after A Charlie Brown Christmas was first broadcast, both on CBS. Created by illustrator R.O. Blechman and animated by Willis Pyle, it's a startlingly simple 60-second piece that truly and fully encompasses the good will and warmth of the holiday. I recently wrote a piece here here about being sucked down the rabbit hole of the internet but there are indeed many long-lost gems to find and so far this is my favorite. As G. Jack Urso writes on his blog, Aeolus 13 Umbra.One of the wondrous things about the Internet is its ability to conjure up the ghosts of the past, and in this case the animated ghosts of Christmas Past. We can connect with long-forgotten memories that upon retrospect we see contributed to our psyches.We live in a world that is a swirling mass of widespread mayhem, murder, and insanity. Take just 60 seconds and watch this—it's my Christmas gift to you.

From YouTube: "Master impressionist Jim Meskimen reads "The Night Before Christmas" as 27 different celebrities, including Robert De Niro, Anthony Hopkins, and Robin Williams."[via]

Bungie's massive online FPS/RPG Destiny has brought back it's holiday celebration, featuring one of its most fun add-ons: Sparrow Racing. Destiny's guardians spend 11 months a year mowing down invaders from outer-space, and farming loot. For a few weeks, in December, Destiny turns into a crazy fast racing game, ala Wipeout XL. Bungie also added a few new features, like scored and upgraded strikes, and brought back one of the favorite guns in the game, the exotic sniper rifle Icebreaker. I loved Icebreaker.

Yesterday they drew hands on the mitten thumbs to spread good cheer. Today they poked a hole in the cup to release a tubful of holiday joy. (more…)

The Martian mVoice G10 has the trappings of a typical activewear watch. The retro-military aesthetic, rotating bezel, and IPX4 water resistance are common features to expect in a modern timepiece. But the combination of smart features and analog reliability stand out.Instead of contending with the Apple Watch and Android Wear offerings, the mVoice goes a much simpler route. A discreet 96 x 16 pixel OLED face display communicates notifications and incoming calls, and the built-in microphone enables voice communication with your phone’s digital assistant (i.e. Siri and Google). The mVoice is one of the few smartwatches on the market also compatible with Amazon’s Alexa.The biggest caveat to wearing a smartwatch has always been the unexceptional battery life, often requiring daily charging. Because of its minimal display, the Martian mVoice delivers five days of smart feature use. Beyond that, a standard analog watch battery keeps it ticking for up to 2 years. For a limited time, it is on sale for 49% off, just $149.99.Also check out the Boing Boing Store's 2016 Holiday Gift Guide to treat yourself or someone close to you.

Before Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines, he was the mayor of the southern city of Davao, where he boasted of authorizing death-squads that murdered suspected drug-users and drug-dealers with impunity. (more…)

Edward Snowden's Periscope interview with Jack Dorsey -- hosted by the Pardon Snowden campaign ranged over a lot of territory, including the special problems of metadata surveillance (metadata can be "more intrusive" than content "because it can be understood at scale"); asymmetry in privacy (where "an increasing imbalance of power" arises between citizens, with no privacy, and officials with all the privacy: "We can't even see their tax-returns"); the problems of relying on the rule of law in a "global context" where surveillance crosses borders and jurisdictions; and fake news, which Snowden thinks can't be solved by asking Google to be a "referee" but rather when "We talk and we share and we point out what is true." (more…)

The two famous Chicagoans joined forces to remind everyone that December 15 is the deadline to get covered for healthcare for 2017. (more…)

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