Kratom is a mildly psychoactive plant that has been used in Asia for centuries to treat pain, fatigue, depression,and anxiety. In the US it has shown promise as a way to help people who are addicted to opiates. The DEA recently announced that it is going to make kratom a Schedule I drug, which will make it very difficult for researchers to study any potential medical uses it might have.From The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association:In Southeast Asia, kratom has long been used for the management of pain and opium withdrawal. In the West, kratom is increasingly being used by individuals for the self-management of pain or withdrawal from opioid drugs such as heroin and prescription pain relievers. It is these aspects of kratom pharmacology that have received the most scientific attention. Although to our knowledge, no well-controlled clinical studies on the effects of kratom on humans have been published, there is evidence that kratom, kratom extracts, and molecules isolated from kratom can alleviate various forms of pain in animal models. In response to the DEA's decision, 127,891 people have signed a White House petition to keep kratom off Schedule I. The White House is now required to respond within 60 days.

Lou Cabron writes, "Tommy Chong has a funny monologue about his 2003 arrest. When federal agents bang on his door and ask if he has any drugs, he says 'Of course I do! I'm Tommy Chong!' But that's just his way of making a point -- that they didn't have a warrant for drugs. Their warrant allowed them to search for glass pipes. (Yes, they actually had a warrant to search for glass.) (more…)

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Fifteen years ago Graham Smith of Liverpool had a bowel operation. The internal nylon stitches in his abdomen caused him pain. "For 15 years I have been hunched over and leaning to the left," he told The BBC. In 2011, Smith, a specialist engineer, told his hospital that he could actually see the stitches as "a small lump of nylon protruding from my abdomen." Eventually the hospital agreed to remove the stitches, but it cancelled the operation twice. Frustrated, Smith decided to design his own titanium operating tools and he performed the surgery on himself.From The Telegraph:"I didn't make the decision lightly - I was desperate, but I had to take control of it and I was not prepared to sit and die on a waiting list."I'm a specialist engineer. I do jobs people can't do, but I'm not a surgeon so don't try this at at home."There was a bit of blood and it stung a bit but I was confident in what I was doing."A spokesman for the Royal College of Surgeons told The Telegraph that DIY surgery was not advisable.

We love the Twisty Glass Blunt, and apparently so do our readers. When you’re ready to kick back and light one up, the last thing you want to do is fuss with rolling papers. And that’s why we are bringing back The Twisty Glass Blunt -- Boing Boing's most popular item of the summer. Now we have to be honest with you. Because this product was so popular the first time around, you should expect a longer than normal shipping time to receive your device. The creators literally had to fly to China and open up a new factory because so many Twisty's were sold.The Twisty Glass Blunt is made out of a 2mm thick German-engineered glass tube and inner corkscrew. At 5mm in length, it’s totally portable, and comes with a microfiber bag so you can take it with you wherever you go. Plus, now you can pair your Twisty with this nostalgic Pokeball grinder for just $13.95. The Twisty Glass Blunt is now $34.99 in the Boing Boing store.

As many as 20,000 US prisoners are going into their second week on strike against forced labor and inhumane prison conditions, though the US prison system has locked down the centers of the strike, denied all conduits for information, and put the leadership into solitary confinement. (more…)

Dr Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez is a research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, studying "criminal entrepreneurship" in drug cartels, who beat Amazon to using drones for delivery by years, use modified potato guns to shoot cocaine and marijuana bundles over border fences, and represent the "true libertarian, Ayn Rand capitalism." (more…)

Bret Victor complained on Twitter that technologists were wasting their imaginations, energy and talent on things that wouldn't matter after climate change reduced the world to a drowned cinder; his followers pushed back and asked what they, as technologists, could do about climate change. (more…)

https://twitter.com/SoundsLikeTemp/status/775399453226184705Films (especially Marvel superhero ones) have unremarkable musical scores for many reasons, but the most remarkable is because scenes tend to be emotionally (and technically) fitted to "temp tracks"—themes taken from other movies as placeholders while the official score is composed. The result: derivative music that imposes another film's emotional landscape onto a newer work, resulting in that characteristic low-risk Hollywood mix of blandness and spectacle. (more…)

Surprise! (more…)

Just in case you needed one. Hosted by Dr. Shini Somara, this video is part of Hank and John Green’s Crash Course series. The channel covers not only physics, but also philosophy, literature, economics, history, astronomy, biology, and a ton of other subjects. You can find the whole collection on YouTube.

Tiny Dungeon Player hosted by Andrew Faraday (aka @MarmiteJunction) lets you explore emoji-filled dungeons. Eat pizza for health, pick up money, and find the keys while avoiding devils, gators, ants, and other nasties. (more…)

"Ideas are like fish. You don't make the fish, you catch the fish." A lovely animated version of David Lynch's musings on where to find great ideas. (more…)

Depending on whom you ask, a crazy lady got bent out of shape over a dad joke, or a pro-cop token sexually harassed a peaceful protester. Below are both versions of this modern-day Rashomon. Like Harambe, the Hugh Mungus meme works for all political persuasions.(image: Block The Bunker Facebook event)Background: Seattle held raucous City Council meetings over plans to build an expensive new police precinct opponents call "The Bunker." Emotions ran high. This much everyone agrees on.During the chaos, local news teams were interviewing attendees, including resident Rudy Pantoja. Pantoja expressed appreciation and support for the police, who had helped his daughter get help with her personal and legal problems. Protester Zarna Joshi felt the press was not covering the event proportionally, and began to film Pantoja's interview to show that his views were not representative of the protesters. After the interview, Pantoja saw Joshi was filming him. What happens next is an Abbott and Costello routine for the modern era. The transcript below honors Pantoja's nom de guerre, "Hugh Mungus."https://youtu.be/ubrg0J03UdI?t=56s (more…)

This cartoony character is considered the most accurate model of a real dinosaur ever created. Paleoartist Bob Nicholls based his reconstruction of Psittacosaurus on an incredibly well-preserved fossil from China (image below) studied by University of Bristol paleontologist Jakob Vinther and colleagues. From The Guardian:Psittacosaurus fossils are commonly found across most of Asia. The bipedal adults used their distinctive beaks to nibble through the vegetation of the Cretaceous, more than 100m years ago. The relatively large brain of Psittacosaurus leads scientists to suspect it may have been a relatively smart dinosaur, with complex behaviours. The large eyes hint that it had good vision....The reconstruction is the culmination of around three months’ work, from detailed drawings to finished fibreglass model. Nicholls created a steel frame and bulked it out using polystyrene and wire mesh, before sculpting the surface in clay:.“This is where the subject finally comes to life,” he explains, “by adding all the skin details such as scales and wrinkles, and beaks and horns.” A master mould was made from this sculpture, allowing Nicholls to make fibreglass models ready to be painted.I asked Nicholls what makes this Psittacosaurus so special? “The most surprising features include an unusually large and wide head, highly pigmented clusters of scales on the shoulders, robust limbs, patagiums (skin flaps) behind the hind limbs, and a highly pigmented cloaca.” These features make him confident this is the most accurate reconstruction ever produced: “When the anatomy surprises me – it confirms that I’ve followed the fossil evidence rather than any preconceived ideas of my own.”

By pairing classic pictures of George Washington with contemporary captions, the Tumblr LadyHistory turns one of our greatest Founding Fathers into an utterly relatable dude. Only Hamilton has done more to humanize our Colonial icons. (more…)

An all-new episode of the spectacular SASSY TRUMP voicedub series, from British male actor and comedienne Peter Serafinowicz. (more…)

Cocolab created this cool music-synched array of spotlights that visitors can walk through, sit in, and lose themselves in. It is part of this summer's TagCDMX event in Mexico, the theme of which was #BeMoreNerd. (more…)

This chain reaction kit is on sale at Amazon for just $10 right now. It has parts and instructions to build a bunch of different Rube Goldbergian machines.Design and build 10 amazing moving machines - teach your bricks new tricks. Comes with 80 page instructions, 33 LEGO pieces, instructions for 10 modules, 6 plastic balls, string, paper ramps and other components.

From clay to handI don't know anything about the sculptor, but it is fascinating to watch them make a block of clay look like a human hand.

It is fun to watch a bullet shot from a 44 go through a block of ballistic gel."Sonoluminescence is a a phenomenon that occurs when gas bubbles are suspended and driven in a liquid at ultrasonic frequencies. This results in bubble collapse, cavitation, and light emission." -- Guns.com

Bernard Barbier presided over DGSE, France's answer to NSA, during the agency's period of fast growth, spending €500M and adding 800 new staffers; in a recent speech to a French engineering college, Barbier spilled a ton of secrets, apparently without authorisation. (more…)

My friend, the brilliant Pam Grossman (What is a Witch, Phantasmaphile), posted the following discovery on her Facebook page.You are undoubtedly already familiar with the fact that the armrests on plane seats can be raised and lowered, all expect for the aisle rest. Turns out, that one can also be raised, if you can find the lever. It's under the armrest (if it exists on your model aircraft) and probably looks something like the one above. Pam describes her squee in finding it to be a for-real feature:I have been taking a lot of flights of late, and so I have garnered a few tips to offer re: how to make things *slightly* less horrid when doing so. But holy horses, this one changed my life on this last go-round. When I tried it - and it worked! - it was all I could do to keep from leaping to my feet and crowing about it to my fellow passengers like some sort of zealous banshee.In the responses on her FB page, someone asked about the other "few tips" she alluded to. I asked Pam's permission to include her reply here. There may be a few useful ideas in here for you. I have recently become a convert of 1 & 2:Oh, not secrets. Just silly little tips. Here are a few more: 1. TSA Pre-Check is highly worth it and makes everything so much better. 2. Buying a carry-on wheelie bag with 4 wheels that go in all directions is worth it 3. Wear the same outfit every time you travel, and it should have multiple layers, and a hood 4. Order the tomato juice, no ice (with a squeeze of lime if possible) and pretzels for a free meal 5. Buy the Tapas Snack Box on Delta. It has good hummus and enough snacks you can take with you for future meals 6. Though if they have 2 services, space them out. So snack box during 1st service, tomato juice during 2nd service or vice-versa 7. If, when you board, the overhead bins are getting full, put your bag on as soon as you find a spot before your seat, not after, otherwise it's a pain to have to swim upstream and get your stuff when you deplane 8. If the airline messes up (and they often do), definitely send a firm but polite note to them about it and tell them you want to be compensated somehow, which in my experience usually results in bonus mileage points. OH MAN, so much more, but that's a good start.[Image via Broken Secrets]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hbuhFwFsDUFor €49.95, you can own a "USB Killer" that "instantly and permanently disables unprotected hardware" with a 200V DC shock. The €13.95 USB KILLER TESTER is a shield that blocks the killer from actually delivering its voltage to your machine (buy the tester, get the killer for half price). (via Schneier)

From Exploding Kittens to the Coolest Cooler, Kickstarter has changed my life with some ridiculously cool products in the past. They just did it again with theBASICS Wallet. (more…)

When FBI Director James Comey released detailed notes on the Bureau's investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server, they broke with precedent, specifically, their refusal to release documents explaining why they totally failed to prosecute any of the bankers responsible for tanking the US economy in 2008 and destroying the lives of millions of Americans. (more…)

In my late teens and early 20s the Penguin was an amazing spot to hang out. The restaurant was an absolute time machine, right down to their 'eat this giant hamburger and win a t-shirt' challenge. After spending around two decades as an orthodontists office, LA Eater reports that Mel's Diner is trying to move in!Per planning commission reports in Santa Monica, it appears Mel's is looking to re-open the location as a 24x7 diner. Via the Eater:A tipster points to this Planning Commission report for Santa Monica, which points towards a meeting to be held in just one week’s time that will (hopefully) establish a conditional use permit for one Mel’s Drive in right in Lincoln Boulevard. It's a nice replacement of sorts for Norm's, which had to close to make way for some development.The 5,352 square foot property sits right off the freeway on Lincoln in a former orthodontics business, but carries the peaked roof and wide frontage of a Googie restaurant — making it perfect for Mel’s to arrive. Originally built in 1959 as the Penguin Coffee Shop, the spot could once again be hosting diners twenty-four hours a day if Mel’s gets their way.Every time I'd be exiting the 10 at Lincon, westbound, the Dr. Beauchamp's sign would break my heart a bit. Mel's isn't my favorite diner but it is wonderful to think of that space being used as a restaurant again. I remain confident there are plenty of orthodontists in West L.A.

BB pal Ariel "Spacehack" Waldman has curated a stellar program for the big DENT: SPACE conference next week (9/21-9/22) in San Francisco! I'm honored to be on the schedule with such amazing people as SETI Institute's Seth Shostak, science writer Mary Roach, The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla, Ars Technica's Annalee Newitz, UC Berkeley planet hunter Alex Filippenko, and so many more fascinating folks! I'll be joining Ariel on stage Thursday at 2:50pm to talk about space history and the intersection of science and art to instill a sense of wonder about the universe, and a far out new project that I'll announce soon. See below on how to get a free ticket! Ariel writes:On September 21-22, 2016, Dent:Space takes place at the Innovation Hangar at the Palace of Fine Arts (formerly the Exploratorium museum) with two stages of fascinating speakers spanning the technological, artistic, commercial, scientific, educational, and DIY aspects of space exploration. We’re also putting together an exhibit hall for the conference — kind of a World’s Fair-like set of interactive demos that illustrate the future of space exploration and its many possibilities. We were able to give away 3,000 free tickets to the talks and exhibits, but we’ve run out of room for that. In the interest of keeping it all accessible for as many as possible, tickets are still only $49. But, as a (Boing Boing reader), you can still grab a free ticket hereDent:Space is a celebration of humans breaking the status quo of who can be involved and what can be achieved in space exploration. This event is for anyone interested in the future of space exploration and how they might be able to contribute their skills to it through software, design, hardware, entrepreneurship and collaborative efforts. The event is tailored for people from all backgrounds/industries to attend (if you work with space stuff already, great! but not needed to enjoy the event). We promise to fill you with ideas and send you home and back to work with a take-out box full of inspiration.Space colony painting above by Rick Guidice courtesy of NASA.

Tim O'Reilly writes about the reality that more and more of our lives -- including whether you end up seeing this very sentence! -- is in the hands of "black boxes": algorithmic decision-makers whose inner workings are a secret from the people they affect. (more…)

Hayley Ashburn narrates this short but intense film on fear, overlaid on heart-stopping footage of her highlining on a line 2800 meters up, between Italy's snow-dusted Torri del Vajolet in winter, the first person ever to do so. Recognize the quote? (more…)

“My mom said to me, ‘You know, sweetheart, one day you should settle down and marry a rich man.’ And I said, ‘Mom, I am a rich man.’” (more…)

This delightful tour of how the United Record Pressing plant in Nashville makes clear vinyl albums is narrated by Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes. (more…)

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve spent your entire life being trained to empathize with white men. From Odysseus to Walter White, Hamlet to Bruce Wayne, James Bond to the vast majority of biopic protagonists, our art consistently makes the argument that imperfect, even outright villainous, men have an innate core of humanity. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Good art should teach us to empathize with complex people. The problem comes not from the existence of these stories about white men, but from the lack of stories about everyone else.That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot during this increasingly insane presidential election season. Particularly as I try to wrap my head around the fact that Hillary Clinton is on one hand the most qualified human being to ever run for president of the United States, and, on the other, one of the most disliked presidential candidates of all time. In fact, Donald Trump is the only candidate who is more disliked than Clinton. And he’s not only overtly racist, sexist, and Islamophobic, but also unfit and unprepared for office. How can these two fundamentally dissimilar politicians possibly be considered bedfellows when it comes to popular opinion?Gallons of digital ink have been spilled trying to figure out why Clinton struggles so much with likability. But perhaps the problem isn’t with her at all. Maybe it’s with us.We tend to talk about likability as a black or white issue. But like the old adage, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,” there’s no universal component of likability. After all, erudite Barack Obama, folksy Joe Biden, and angry Bernie Sanders couldn’t be more different, yet all three are beloved by their bases. Even Donald Trump—as divisive as he is—clearly has a magnetic pull among his loyal supporters. But Clinton is different. Even many of those who plan to vote for her admit they don’t find her particularly likable. According to The Washington Post, just 33 percent of Clinton supporters are “very enthusiastic” about supporting her while 46 percent of Trump supporters say the same about their candidate. (For the record, Clinton—like most women—tends to be far more popular when she’s in office than when she’s running for one.) Pundits usually blame Clinton’s favorability issues on her perceived caginess, her tone, and her general awkwardness when it comes to public speaking. Essentially: Clinton’s flaws make her unlikable. But that’s not the case for male politicians. In fact, it’s often their flaws that make them likable. After all, on paper the idea of an old disheveled man yelling sounds downright unpleasant. But in practice Bernie Sanders is an utterly charming and refreshing political figure. And while one might assume Joe Biden’s frequent gaffes and penchant for using words like “malarkey” would make him seem hopelessly old-fashioned, those are precisely the qualities that have transformed him into a beloved darling of the social media age. And Clinton’s own running mate, Tim Kaine, provides a particularly interesting contrast because he shares so much of her awkwardness. Yet far from being condemned for it, he was lovingly hailed as “America’s nerdy stepdad” after his speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgNP3g1LwssSo why is Clinton critiqued for raising her voice like Sanders, speaking hard truths like Biden, and making an awkward Pokémon Go reference we almost certainly would have dubbed a “dad joke” had Kaine said it? Why do we find their flaws likable and Clinton’s flaws off-putting? Why isn't she seen as America's awkward aunt or nerdy stepmom?I would argue it’s because we don’t yet have cultural touchstones for flawed but sympathetic women. We can recognize Sanders as a fiery activist, Biden as a truth teller, and Kaine as an earnest goof, but we just don’t have an archetype—fictional or otherwise—through which to understand Clinton. As the first female nominee of a major political party, her campaign is in uncharted waters. As Clinton explains in a recent post for Humans Of New York:It’s hard work to present yourself in the best possible way. You have to communicate in a way that people say: ‘OK, I get her.’ And that can be more difficult for a woman. Because who are your models? If you want to run for the Senate, or run for the Presidency, most of your role models are going to be men. And what works for them won’t work for you. Women are seen through a different lens. And our entertainment doesn’t help us understand Clinton either. Our movies, books, and TV shows are filled with attractive female love interests, badass female warriors, hissable female villains, and bumbling female leads. But we don’t have very many female protagonists who are allowed to be flawed in ways that are messily realistic not just charmingly endearing. We haven’t been taught to empathize with flawed women the way we have with flawed men. Viola Davis is slowly balancing the antihero gender scales as Annalise Keating on How To Get Away With Murder. But like Clinton, she's frequently asked why her complex female character isn’t more likable. And as Davis points out to Variety, that’s just not something we question about male antiheroes like Tony Soprano and Hannibal Lecter. We find those characters inherently appealing despite the fact that they’re deeply flawed. Yet we struggle to do the same with imperfect female leads. We sympathize with the self-centeredness of Louis C.K. on Louie but we can’t stand it in Hannah Horvath on Girls. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jh2n5ki0KEAnd in a roundabout way that ties back to Clinton as well. Like any human being she is flawed and like any high-ranking politician, her flaws exist on a scale that requires an insane level of cognitive dissonance to comprehend (the same cognitive dissonance that allows us to “love” Obama even as we realize his drone warfare program is responsible for the deaths of potentially thousands of innocent people). And for the record, I have no problem with people critiquing Clinton’s flaws. Criticism is a crucial part of the political process and there’s plenty in Clinton’s record worth critiquing—from the racist dogwhistling language she used to support the 1994 Crime Bill to her hawkish foreign policy style. But what does bother me is when the criticism aimed at Clinton seems so much more severe than the kind aimed at her male counterparts.And I’m not just talking about Trump, who by all accounts has completely coasted through this election season. Data shared by FiveThirtyEight suggests that although voters under 25 are “more likely than any other age group to approve of the job Obama is doing as president” and although Clinton is essentially running for a third Obama term, she’s winning under-25 voters by half as much as he did. That’s a fairly glaring disconnect. And as my friend Alasdair Wilkins explores for Paste Magazine, Joe Biden enjoys a far rosier public image than Clinton even though he shares many of her political flaws. Despite sponsoring pro-banking legislation, mishandling the Anita Hill trial, and authoring that 1994 Crime Bill, Biden is still looked at as loveable “uncle Joe.” Now to be fair, Biden isn’t currently in the pressure cooker of a presidential race. But even if he were, I suspect we would have a far easier time conceptualizing him as greater than the sum of his flaws, as we've long been conditioned to do with men. And that’s not a luxury Clinton enjoys. Jonathan Chait made perhaps the most radical statement of this election season when he referred to Hillary Clinton as “a normal politician with normal political failings.” It feels groundbreaking to discuss Clinton in such benign terms because that’s simply not how she’s understood. She’s at best “the lesser of two evils” and at worst a scheming Lady Macbeth hungry for power. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUV4Ha_Tf_4Which brings me to my final point and perhaps the biggest elephant in the room: Sexism. Personally, I’m not hugely interested in how sexism plays into someone’s decision as to whether or not to vote for Clinton. But I am interested in how sexism has shaped Clinton personally. And particularly how it relates to the idea—as Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and Ezra Klein have both explored—that Clinton is warm and personable in intimate settings but more distant and awkward in large ones. In another Humans Of New York post, Clinton attempts to explain that disconnect by telling a story from her past:I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.Essentially what Clinton is saying is that the stiltedness of her public persona is a kind of self-preservation tactic born out of years of brutal misogyny. And while that doesn’t excuse the fact that she sometimes struggles with transparency, it transforms a dehumanizing flaw into a relatable one. It gives her a humanity that’s too frequently missing from the discourse around her. Just as in order to understand Bernie Sanders you have to understand what it means to be an activist, in order to understand Hillary Clinton you have to understand what it feels like to face a lifetime of sexism. Unfortunately, while explorations of women grappling with inequality aren't completely absent from our entertainment, they’re also not incredibly common either—particularly in stories set outside the Mad Men era and particularly in media aimed at men. That’s why the Marcia Clark-focused episode of FX’s The People Vs. O.J. Simpson from earlier this year felt so revolutionary; it offered insight into the personal cost of sexism that many people—including many women—don’t often think about.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIFDaGs8l8What’s especially telling is that the group most likely to enthusiastically support Hillary Clinton are older women in the workforce. As Jill Filipovic explores for The New York Times, that’s because unlike men or younger women (who deal with different feminist issues), working women are more likely to have been personally exposed to the kind of sexism and discrimination that has shaped Clinton. And once they understand Clinton’s experience, they like her better for it. They start to see her not as a Lady Macbeth, but as a Leslie Knope, a Hermione Granger, or a Paris Geller. And crucially it’s not just the idealized strengths of those fictional women that echo in Clinton, it's their relatable flaws too.

Strong typhoon winds in Fuzhou, China caused a giant inflatable moon balloon to be blown from its home outside a shopping mall. It was originally part of a Mid-Autumn Moon Festival installation. (more…)

The Vicod 5G Vaporizer is advertised as easy-to-use, and it's a really solid vaporizer for beginners. One thing that immediately impressed me was its solid construction. Unlike other vapes, Vicod feels truly high-end and like it won't just fall apart after a few uses.You literally just click open the chamber, pack it, and you’re ready to go. The OLED screen even displays the temperature you’re lighting up at, and shows where the battery life stands.Another great feature is that you can control the temperature to the degree (from 300F - 435F). This type of precision is rare and allowed me to really find my personal sweet spot for a perfect vaping experience. Thanks to the vents on both sides, I was able to create some impressively large vape clouds too.All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this little vape, which is actually conveniently compact enough to fit in my pocket. The manufacturer also offers a good 5-year warranty which adds a lot of value to the deal.You can find it in the Boing Boing Store for just $84.95 - 34% off the original price.

Essex, England police ticketed Nigel Mills, 55, for speeding in his DeLorean. He was apparently going 88mph (although his top speed was 89mph). Mills insists that he "wasn't trying to time travel.""Me and the rest of my family enjoyed the Back to the Future films," he said about his purchase of the DeLorean. "When I’m out in it a few people recognise it, they slow down and take pictures – drivers take pictures out of their windows or try to film you and I get approached at petrol stations.”Mills's ticket was tossed out of court when the two officers who cited him didn't show up. Probably because Mills erased them from existence.(The Guardian)

Joshua Browder, the teenaged botmaster whose Do Not Pay bot is helping drivers save millions by challenging NYC and London parking tickets and assisting UK homeless people who are applying for benefits, sat down for a chat on the O'Reilly Bots Podcast (MP3). (more…)

A joint UT Austin/Cornell team has taught a machine learning system based on the free/open Torch library to correctly guess the content of pixellated or blurred redactions with high accuracy: for masked faces that humans correctly guess 0.19% of the time, the system can make a correct guess 83% of the time, when given five tries. (more…)

There something about convicted child molester Kraigen Grooms, 19, that fits the pattern of judicial restraint, even sympathy, shown to young offenders such as Brock Turner and Austin James Wilkerson. Can't quite put my finger on it. (more…)

Now you too can spend a penny in a priceless pissoir: New York's Guggenheim Museum is inviting visitors to take a slash in a gold toilet created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. (more…)

The new Night Vale books are filled with amazing, insightful forematter and marginalia, the story of each episode annotated by the writers, actors and production crew.I was privileged to write the introduction to the first volume (Maureen Johnson wrote the intro to book two), and the folks at Harpercollins and Night Vale have kindly given permission for me to reprint it here.Being weird and funny is easy. Being weird and funny and compelling ishard.We've all guffawed as some strange, surreal juxtaposition ("Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored machine tools"). You don't have to be stoned to crack up at a friend'sfantastic, perfect non-sequitur. Stories that inspire hilarity andmystification are good fun, but they're not great stories.Stories become great by hacking your brain. Nothing that happens infiction matters. The people in fiction are fictional so theirtriumphs and tragedies have literally no consequence. The death of theyogurt you doomed to a fiery death in your gut-acid this morning isinfinitely more tragic than the "deaths" of Romeo and Juliette. Theyogurt was a alive and then it died. Romeo and Juliette never lived inthe first place.Stories trick your naive, empathic mind into resonating in sympathy(literally) with the plight of their imaginary people. Usually they dothis by scrupulously avoiding any reminder that these are imaginarypeople. That "willing suspension of disbelief" is a bargain between thecreator and the audience: the creator tells the tale and hews tosomething that is plausible (or at least consistent) and the audiencemember doesn't pinch herself and say, "Cut it out with the quickenedheart, the leaking tears, the smiles of triumph, you dope, this is allmade up!"This makes weird stories and great stories nearly incompatible. A storyis a love affair on the last night of summer camp that depends on bothparties not calling attention to the fact that the camp bus is coming inthe morning, so they can pretend that the night could last forever.Weird stuff happening to the characters is a reminder that this is allmade up, the ending is coming, and when it's done, these invisiblepeople will disappear into the nonspace whence they came, so stopcheering them on or crying for them.Bringing me to Night Vale.The remarkable thing about the people of Night Vale isn't how delightfully weird theyare. The remarkable thing is how moving they are. Cranor and Fink andco-writers and actors weave a world with haphazard internal consistency.When things are weird, they make them weirder. It's a good, meaty sortof weird, steering clear of cliche and venturing into fresh, imaginativeterritory -- but it's still undeniably weird. (more…)

Today was health record day in the 2016 US presidential campaign news cycle. After an embarrassing round of press involving Hillary Clinton's pneumonia diagnosis, the Democratic nominee's team released some medical reports. Dr. Lisa Bardack says "she is in excellent mental condition," and is “healthy and fit to serve as president.” (more…)

After having promised to reveal a medical status report, then reportedly deciding not to, millionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump finally offered a handful of details via TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz. He takes statins and weighs 267 pounds, which Oz describes as "slightly overweight" but which The New York Times eagerly informs us is, in fact, medical obesity for a man of Trump's height.Over many months, Mr. Trump has sought to raise questions about the health of Mrs. Clinton, 68, and his supporters have asserted that she is hiding something about her health (her aides have denied this). But Mr. Trump has answered almost no questions about his own health over the last 15 months of his campaign, except for issuing a highly unusual doctor’s note.So the appearance on Dr. Oz’s show, announced on Friday, had been anticipated as a potential breakthrough, as Mr. Trump’s aides had said that over the next few days he would release results from the physical examination, which was conducted last week.Earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, told Fox News that she did not think the candidate should release medical information on a television show.This paragraph at the end of the Maggie Halberman's story caught my attention:He has also been criticized for questionable assertions over the course of his television career, and sometimes speaks in the same type of hyperbole as Mr. Trump, which the medical profession has been known to reject.What you are supposed to know from these words: that Oz is paid to pitch weight-loss pills on his show, that he describes them as "magic," and that his colleagues think he's a quack.That 36-word sentence exemplifies the euphemistic language that the Times indulges in like a literary crack addict. Once you start noticing these passages, they're impossible to miss: another one today comes from "Public Editor" Liz Spayd, who writes in passing that journalist Suki Kim "considers herself a journalist." Oof! I've met NYT journos who think tabloid Britishisms such as "tired and emotional" are erudite and worthy of emulation. Perhaps the writers of these paragraphs should be sent for enhanced conversational repartee with occupying authorities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK8xHq6dfAoMargot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures recovers the lost history of the young African American women who did the heavy computational work of the Apollo missions, given the job title of "computer" -- her compelling book has been made into a new motion picture. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.My Dad Used to Be So Cool by Keith NegleyFlying Eye Books2016, 48 pages, 9.1 x 10.7 x 0.4 inches $11 Buy a copy on AmazonTo believe that your own parents are “boring” or “typical” is a pretty common thought amongst children. Unless your parent is a spy or superhero, you aren’t going to refer to them as “cool.” And why would you? Keith Negley’s book, My Dad Used to Be so Cool, illustrates the dynamic between a son and his father. The story is told from the son’s point of view as we journey through his fantasies of what his father used to be like when he was younger. Through descriptive illustrations and minimal word usage, a world that we are all too familiar with is created. The son sees his father doing laundry and vacuuming just like every other child has seen their parent do. Nothing particularly “cool” about those daily tasks, right? The son begs the question, “What happened?” A life event changed the father from a tattooed rock and roll super star to a laundry-folding dad. What was it? The answer – his son. Negley perfectly demonstrates the sacrifices a parent makes for their child, but how beautiful those sacrifices really are. This story opened my eyes to how “cool” my own parents actually are. At 18 years old, I am not a parent but I can honestly say that the daily struggles and chores that any parent deals with are nothing short of remarkable. This is a truly heart-warming tale and I would strongly recommend that not only children read this book but adults as well. The story is a solid reminder to appreciate our parents and if you are a parent, congratulate yourself because you are awesome. I look forward to my child asking me, “Did you use to be cool?” I’ll laugh and smile. “You know, I was never that cool anyway.” – Madeline Shapiro

Upcycler extraordinaire Rodney Allen Trice turned salvage toilet bowls into designer lighting! From Refitting the Planet:To contribute my ideas and vision and energies in the arena of creative repurposing or applied deconstruction was an honor. here are some off the initial sketches and the build of THE TOILET CHANDELIER. My latest, largest and first piece built in my studios new home base of PITTSBURGH, yinz!!!Very Exciting! Now I am making tweaks and changes to this design. There are still things to work out as it was a race to complete it at this event on Saturday, but the piece will be on permanent display at Construction Junction forevermore once completed! WOO HOO!!

It’s true that summer is almost over—but that doesn’t mean that you’re all out of chances to take the vacation of your dreams. And because we think that everyone deserves to kick back and relax as much as possible, we’re pumped to announce this Virgin America $1000 flight credit giveaway.All you have to do is sign up through this link and very soon it could be you taking that long-awaited trip.And while you're on any Virgin America flight, be sure to check out our very own Boing Boing TV channel, #10 on the in-flight satellite TV dial.Good luck, we’re rooting for you! Oh and by the way, while you’re zipping through the air on your Virgin America flight be sure to check out the A-Audio Legacy Noise Canceling Headphones. These are Boing Boing's best-selling headphones of the summer and you can get them for $79 in the store.

Whistleblower Edward Snowden, exiled in Moscow, has asked the outgoing US president Barack Obama to give him an official pardon before leaving office. (more…)

From Tesla's release notes for its upgraded Autopilot technology based on radar as its primary control sensor:The net effect of this, combined with the fact that radar sees through most visual obscuration, is that the car should almost always hit the brakes correctly even if a UFO were to land on the freeway in zero visibility conditions.Taking this one step further, a Tesla will also be able to bounce the radar signal under a vehicle in front - using the radar pulse signature and photon time of flight to distinguish the signal - and still brake even when trailing a car that is opaque to both vision and radar. The car in front might hit the UFO in dense fog, but the Tesla will not.Of course they're kidding. Or so they'd like us to believe.Video clip from Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).