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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).

The Grey Fox is a beautiful animal. Foxes also shit all over everything. They dared to touch my cars. What was I to do? A friend recommended coyote pee.First time I saw the foxes, I was sitting on a bench on my deck, playing guitar and having a good old time. Suddenly, out from under the deck beneath me, burst four grey foxes! I marveled at their rich and beautiful coats for a moment, and then screeched in fear and surprise! The foxes paused, stared at me, and then proceeded to head down the hill towards my driveway. Foxes do not like my cover of the Ventures' Walk Don't Run.After a few weeks I was really tired of finding fox crap every where. My Great Pyrenees, Nemo, was absolutely not tired of barking at and chasing foxes around all night long. Lack of sleep and muddy paw prints all over my convertible led me to try all sorts of humane deterrents. None worked. A friend kept telling me to try coyote urine, but for some reason I refused to listen. Finally exhaustion won out. Guess what, coyote pee worked!I took a sponge and cut it into 1" squares. I then soaked them with coyote pee and dropped them in strategic locations around the areas where I was having the most fox activity. I also poured small amounts in a few locations. Over night the foxes disappeared. Then they reappeared in my woodshed. So I treated the woodshed area. I'll keep at it until they go visit my neighbors, and my dog lets me sleep again. This urine comes from coyotes who are 100% meat fed! Coyotes here prefer mushrooms.Just Scentsational RS-16 Coyote Urine Small Pest Repellent, 16 oz via Amazon

An anonymous woman has filed a class action suit against Standard Innovation, a company that makes We-Vibe "smart" sex toys that record exactly how their owners masturbate and transmit detailed dossiers, along with personally identifying information, back to the company. (more…)

In this video essay by Kristian Williams, the story of the biomechanical beasts from the mad mind of H.R. Giger, surrealist painter and designer best known for his work on the special effects team behind the film Alien (1979).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CdfIpTiE3gThe European Commission's "Copyright Modernisation" effort has wrapped up, and it's terrible. (more…)

Someone -- possibly the government of China -- has launched a series of probing attacks on the internet's most critical infrastructure, using carefully titrated doses of denial-of-service to precisely calibrate a tool for shutting down the whole net. (more…)

Adblock Plus, an adblocking plugin recently unveiled as a trojan horse for a new ad network, claimed Google and AppNexus were among its partners. This is not so, according to Google and AppNexus. (more…)

A creepy series of shoops by IMGURian Kiyoi. (more…)

A 69-year-old woman was cold-cocked outside a Trump event by one of the Republican millionaire's supporters, reports ABC News—an attack so deplorable that cops plan to charge one of his violent rallygoers with a crime. (more…)

This is the best "Pixar-Off" I’ve ever seen.

What happens when a socially anxious Edgar Allan Poe and his sarcastic ghost companion Lenore invite their favorite authors over for a murder mystery dinner party? Real murder, of course! At least that’s the premise of Shipwrecked Comedy’s new web series Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party. (more…)

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and oh, so much more. GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”A book for the curious and adventurous!” -Cory Doctorow) Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Wallpaper took on the daunting task of narrowing down 20 years of design innovations to just over 100 eclectic choices, including the Tesla Roadster, the 9/11 memorial, Instagram, the bushy brow, and Ilse Crawford's IKEA collection, above. (more…)

When asked to draw pictures of firefighters, surgeons, and fighter pilots, a group of British grade school children produced 61 pictures of men and only five pictures of women. But a visit from three female professionals helps shift their point of view. (more…)

Published on Medium, Jennifer Coates’ “I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out.” is a thoughtful, empathetic, challenging personal essay about identity. (more…)

Barnaby Roper filmed this otherworldly video of Gwendoline Christie (Brienne from Game of Thrones, Captain Phasma from Star Wars: The Force Awakens). Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen supplied the clothes, and Roper ran with the themes in the designs. (more…)

In this poignant video, Cate Blanchett, Keira Knightley, Juliet Stevenson, Peter Capaldi, Stanley Tucci, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kit Harington, Douglas Booth, Jesse Eisenberg, and Neil Gaiman lend their voices to uplifting the current refugee crisis. They do so by performing a reading of Jenifer Toksvig’s rhythmic poem “What They Took With Them,” which was inspired by “stories and first-hand testimonies from refugees.” The video was released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as a way to draw attention to its #WithRefugees petition.

The Scottish sketch comedy series Limmy’s Show! explores that classic riddle in the best way possible. As someone wrote on Tumblr, “This is me during every moment of math class.”

In this three-minute video, MTV News senior national correspondent Jamil Smith explores the ways toxic masculinity perpetuates rape culture. (more…)

https://vimeo.com/163042303Peter Clark collaborated on this cool cymatics video for Thump, but the even cooler stuff is the camera test and the behind the scenes footage: (more…)

Not all people of color deal with the same issues around discrimination and prejudice. This BuzzFeed video explores experiences that people of color with darker skin tones have, and how colorism has shaped their lives.

A group of Russian scientists have been trapped for two weeks by polar bears at an Arctic island weather station. The scientists face a month-long wait for a rescue. (more…)

This inexpensive remote control electrical outlet switch was just the thing we needed to completely turn off our electric garage door (we have reasons). It's pretty bulky, and gets in the way of the second socket on a standard wall outlet, but it gets the job done. It's RF not IR, so it doesn't need line-of-sight to work. It's $10 on Amazon.

Instead of kegging, I wanted to set up a batch of beer that I could more easily share with friends. I decided to bottle a barleywine with these O2 absorbing bottlecaps.The idea is these caps will draw what little oxygen is in your bottle out. This should help preserve the beer by keep things from using that o2 to grow bad flavors. Can't be a bad idea, and at $6.42 for 144 I do not like I'm just wasting money.Cellaring a barleywine should help mellow its boozy flavor. The high alcohol content of a barleywine should make visiting with friends better for everyone.The caps went on easily. I used this simple capper.1 X Beer Bottle Caps - Oxygen Absorbing for Homebrew 144 count via Amazon

Austin band Survive's masterful synth soundtrack to Stranger Things is available now digitally and at your local independent music shop on vinyl! Meanwhile, the surviving members of Tangerine Dream, a primary influence on Survivor's Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, released their own covers of the Stranger Things score! Listen to them below. And here's a bit from an excellent interview that Billboard's Gil Kaufman conducted with Dixon and Stein:How did that main theme come to life? It's an old demo Michael had, but it's nothing like what you hear... nowhere near as much of a piece of music as it is now. That was just some random thing that ended up in the library they had and when they found it they were like, 'what if this was the main title?' We thought it could be good, so we built it out. We've been wanting to get into music for TV and film for a long time, but we had no idea how. We've been passively creating libraries, weird droney noises... so we had this collection of songs that we were trying to figure out how present to people in film....Without that previous (soundtrack) experience, how were you able to create music that spoke so deeply to the characters in the show? They said our music was actually used to help cast the show. During the demo period they said, 'we know you can do dark and epic, but this is a show about a group of kids, so we need to show the producers that you can do the more lighthearted, sentimental stuff.' So a lot of the demos were like that. They made the decision to play our music over the auditions and that was the deciding factor in casting.Tangerine Dream plays Stranger Things:

Orange cheeses have been on my mind. I absolutely love aged gouda!Three plus year aged gouda completely loses the rubbery, bland, 'this is congealed milk' texture and taste of young goudas. It is crumbly, and delicious with hints of butterscotch, and lined with incredible sugar crystals. For the best aged gouda experience slice off the thinnest possible pieces with a cheese plane, and let them melt on your tongue.Aged gouda is amazing with beer and hard salami. A good dubbel would be my choice.The Reluctant Gourmet has all the details:Most of us have enjoyed some form of Gouda cheese in our lives. It is a yellow cheese made from cow’s milk and is often found with the red or yellow paraffin wax coating in the supermarket. It gets its name from the city of Gouda in the Netherlands where it originated.Gouda as a young cheese is easy to slice and may be great to serve to the kids in their lunch packs but just doesn’t have that much flavor. It’s great if you enjoy a mild, mellow flavored cheese but if you want a much more distinct flavor, you’ll want to try aged Gouda.Aged Gouda has a wonderful distinctive flavor that can be both sharp and sweet – think of butterscotch. It is a hard cheese that doesn’t come in the red wax covering, but a natural buff colored rind. The cheese itself has an amber color that Jack explained to me comes from a coloring agent called annatto that gives it the pale orange color.I read in one of my favorite cheese books, Cheese Primer, that some cheeses “once had a natural orange hue caused by the vitamin D that cows ingested from grazing on green plants. But winter milk comes from cows that are fed silage, and the cheeses that result from this milk are white.”So the cheese makers started adding food coloring like annatto to the milk so they would look the same year round. Jack explained to me “all cheese are naturally cream colored and many use coloring for eye appeal.”

In Wired, our pal Adam Savage geeks out with Tom Sachs, a sculptor who makes incredibly intricate space-themed installations:(Sachs had) mounted two Space Program exhibitions—the moon (at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills) in 2007 and then Mars (at the Park Avenue Armory in New York) in 2012. There were the blue Tiffany Glock and orange Hermès hand grenade, and also a Chanel chain saw and a Prada toilet. And a foam-core R2-D2, which I’d collected pictures of as inspiration for building my own DIY Artoo, a decade before I knew who Sachs was.We had a lot in common. We’re both obsessive organizers. We both make replicas. And when we’re in the shop and can’t think of what to work on, we build infrastructure—stands, shelves, benches. Sachs told me he’d cribbed construction ideas from MythBusters Now he uses my workshop when he’s on the West Coast, and I use his when I’m back east. Our wives describe our relationship status as “dating.”When I look at Sachs’ workshop, what’s more familiar to me than the tools are the rituals, the signs of how Sachs turns prosaic objects and materials into art."Ground Control to Major Tom" by Adam Savage (Wired)

Lotus Dimension is a tabletop, D&D-style role-playing game in which characters advance through nonviolent means -- a game that incorporates "amazing sci-fi and fantasy storytelling while also incorporating principles of nonviolence inspired by peaceful protests, historical leaders and the tenets of peaceful philosophical practices." (more…)

Movie trailer for The Cat from Outer Space (1978), directed by Norman Tokar and starring Ken Berry, Sandy Duncan, Harry Morgan, and Roddy McDowall. I predict a remake in 3... 2... 1....If you're, er, curious, you can watch it on Amazon Video: The Cat from Outer Space

The nonprofit Urban Institute's new study, Impossible Choices: Teens and Food Insecurity in America used paired, single-gender focus groups in 10 urban communities to learn about the hunger and food strategies of children aged 10 to 17 whose families received food assistance (the total sample size was 193). (more…)

If you’re an active person, then you need headphones that can keep up with you—and these waterproof FRESHeBUDS can definitely hang.Packing an enhanced battery life and a sound quality that’s unrivaled for their compact size, these earbuds will play your favorite tunes for up to 10 hours on a single 90 minute charge. Just connect them to your phone via Bluetooth by pulling them apart—it’s automatic. When you’re done listening, place the earbuds back together, and the connection will turn off.Plus, the FRESHeBUDS are designed to be lightweight and stay in your ears no matter what you’re doing: running, jumping, or swimming. You can even answer calls straight from the earbuds with a built-in microphone.If you’re ready to upgrade your headphones, now’s the time: the FRESHeBUDS are 66% off retail, at just $39.95 in the Boing Boing store.

Kratom is a herb that has been in widespread use in Southeast Asia for centuries; it is chewed for to increase stamina, induce gentle euphoria and relaxation, and it has also been used with unheard-of success to help people kick their addictions to opioid painkillers. (more…)

"The auctioneer is typically speaking logical sentences quickly," says Barry Baker of Ohio Real Estate Auctions, "with filler words mixed in." (more…)

I discovered Villains and Vigilantes in 1982, with the publication of the game's second edition, and 11-year-old me played it like a fiend; I still remember long hours of designing costumes on the super-cool character sheets that came with the game (we'd sneak into the school office and run off more of these from blanks; ditto for hex-ruled paper for Car Wars and all the best stories from that month's Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine). (more…)

If you like puns you’ll love Keren Rosen’s work, which turns idioms into adorable chariactures. You can find Rosen's art on her Facebook page or as prints on her Etsy shop, Dings & Doodles. (more…)

Animal-rights group SHARK thought they'd launch their drone on public property in July to get some footage of Harris Feeding Company, a massive and apparently pungent cattle feedlot near Coalinga, California. Each day, local cops got called out every time they tried to film. (more…)

"The cost of excess bureaucracy in the U.S. economy amounts to more than $3 trillion in lost economic output, or about 17% of GDP," write Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini in Harvard Business Review. Their recommendation? Cut management in half. The don't specify if that's crosswise or lengthwise. (more…)

There are two things that have gotten lost in the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” speech: a.) It was mostly focused on reaffirming the importance of LGBT rights to her campaign and b.) It ended with Clinton introducing Barbra Streisand. (more…)

Jeff Rowan loves Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. When he decided to look into the young woman who inspired the trilogy of films, he discovered a remarkably moving story that's worth the 20 minutes if you love those films. (more…)

Getting college advice from Seth Meyers is nice, but getting college advice from First Lady Michelle Obama is priceless (even if she does pressure you to eat your vegetables).

Now that so many wonderful strains and variants of marijuana are available legally, it is a crying shame to smoke dope out of a dirty pipe. Formula 420 really works and it smells great. (more…)

She's a rescue kitty, and her human just showed her a red dot on the wall for the very first time. (more…)

Writing on Medium, AI researcher Kate Crawford (previously) and Simply Secure (previously) co-founder Meredith Whittaker make the case for a new scholarly discipline that "measures and assesses the social and economic effects of current AI systems." (more…)

Randall Munroe once again shows that he's one of the web's most talented storytellers, inventing ways of conveying information that use the web's affordances to novel and sharp effect (there's a reason he won a Hugo award). (more…)

It's no secret that tiny drones are super fun to fly because of their nimble movements, high speeds, and easy maneuverability. The downside is missing out on the cameras offered by larger drones on the market. That's exactly why the World’s Smallest Camera Drone is so amazing. Get all the benefits of a mini drone with the advantage of snapping awesome aerial shots along the way. At only $26.99, this tiny drone surprisingly packs a ton of really impressive features. It's omni-directional, meaning it can turn every which way you tell it to with the included remote control. And it doesn’t skimp on speed either: 3 speed flight modes let you control whether you want to cruise or tear through the sky.With its superior flying stability and side flight, hover, flip, and hand launch capabilities, the World’s Smallest Camera Drone is full of opportunities to advance your drone piloting skills. Plus, the attached LED lights let you fly the drone at night, so you can capture crystal-clear video and photography no matter what time of day it is. As a bonus, there’s even a 2GB camera memory card included so you can store your photos onboard. It's available now in the Boing Boing Store for 46% off the retail price - simply click here for more info.