Boing Boing

Back in 2010, on the last day of the last Labour government, a whipped Parliament voted in the terrible Digital Economy Act, after a short, embarrassingly illiterate debate whose howlers demonstrated just how little the MPs understood about the law they were voting in (the whole process was later revealed to be a fix from day one). (more…)

The stuff in poison ivy that gives you a rash is greasy and hard to get off your skin. To avoid a rash, scrub your skin 2-8 hours after exposure with any kind of soap and a washcloth or loofa. Lots of friction is needed to wipe off the grease, called urushiol.(Thanks, Wendy!)

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more. And/or buy Ruben Bolling’s new book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=llg3amRR6FMThe Chilcot Report on the UK invasion of Iraq has finally been released, seven years after it was announced, and many years after its completion (it was delayed for years over the release of government documents and memos that were contained in its pages). (more…)

Boing Boing very proudly welcomes our new sponsor, Meh. Meh is a daily deals site that often struggles to explain what the products they are selling are, what these gadgets do, or why you might possibly like them. They handle this the same way I approached college: if you can't offer useful information, make up something that sounds oddly plausible. You'll marvel at the creativity and sheer bullshit that goes into drafting the descriptive copy for the goodies they offer the world.Sometimes you'll find a gem. Occasionally, you find something kinda useful in a limited, and likely to break soon kinda way, for an incredible price! Those are special Meh moments. Treasure them.Meh is about fun! That's why they are sending each one of us at Boing Boing a random box of of crap that was literally laying around their warehouse. They really don't care what we think of the stuff, they hope we find something fun, or at least destructive, to do with it. We're not supposed to tell you how perfect it is. Every week or so this summer, one Boinger after another will receive a mystery Meh box and will share their wonder, bemusement, or disappointment, at what arrives. We may be weird, but to us this sounds very fun.This video was made during the shoot for our Virgin America seat-back entertainment channel. If you fly Virgin America, watch Boing Boing TV on Channel 10 in the television channel selections. We had a lot of fun making it! If you are flying the hep skies sometime in the next 2 months, you'll see Meh. there along with a lot of other great video.

Arduino goes beyond coding to actually connect the physical world of gadgets to computer programming. So many rad devices are built using this language and now it’s easier to learn than ever with this four item bundle. The complete Arduino starter kit has over twenty five hours of training to get you on your feet. At 87% off, it’s the absolute best way to start your engines because it also comes with a fully stocked toolkit of your dreams with wires, lights and buzzers. There are straightforward instructions with easy-to-follow diagrams and lessons on mastering the basics. It doesn’t matter if you’re a total tech rookie or silicon rock star, you can launch or brush up your Arduino skills here with incredible projects definitely worth nerding out on.

Aaron writes, "While filling out this seemingly great rebate for $100 for a recently purchased wifi-enabled thermostat, I happened to read the Terms and Conditions, which includes the fact that I must unwittingly agree to share all my thermostat data with my electric and gas companies (It was odd that they asked for my thermostat's MAC address). Because I have an ecobee3, this includes information on how often I'm in my bedroom, or when I'm home or out!" (more…)

I don't know how long this deal will last, but you can buy a 12-pack of Bicycle playing card decks for $16. You get six red-backed decks and six blue-backs. I just bought 2 boxes. That should last me until the end of the year (I go through a deck a week or so).

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Tesla: The Life and Times of an Electric MessiahTesla: The Life and Times of an Electric Messiahby Nigel CawthorneChartwell Books2014, 192 pages, 7.2 x 10.5 x 0.8 inches $9 Buy a copy on AmazonMad scientist. Inventor. Philosopher. Visionary. Eccentric. A man who was terrible at business, but great with pigeons. A mythic figure, Nicola Tesla was all these things and more. Examining his life and career, Tesla: The Life And Times Of An Electric Messiah is a lengthy, oversized book filled with illustrations, photos, diagrams of his many inventions, and brief, informative vignettes about his friends, colleagues, business associates, and rivals. Tesla's own words are pulled from writings and correspondence, and help flesh out a turn-of-the-century futurist, although they can be somewhat dry and academic. His eccentricities liven things up considerably. For instance, did you know he once fell into a vat of boiling milk, and lived on a diet of bread, warm milk, and something mysteriously known as 'Factor Actus'? Did you know he had a strange aversion to women's earrings, and would become feverish at the sight of a peach? Tidbits like these keep the book moving at a nice pace, as the man became more reclusive and odd toward the end of his life.His War Of The Currents with Thomas Edison is detailed, as well as his battle of radio with Guglielmo Marconi. His experiments with wireless transmission of energy, X-Rays, flying machines, remote control, and artificial intelligence are also described, as well as the mystery surrounding the disappearance of his papers concerning his invention of a death ray by the US government. Beautifully illustrated on parchment-tinted paper, Tesla: The Life And Times Of An Electric Messiah is a handsome, encyclopedic book about a startlingly prescient early 20th-century pioneer.– S. Deathrage

Now that the sixth season of HBO's Game of Thrones has ended, Boars, Gore, and Swords returns to the book club format to finish off the last few chapters of A Storm of Swords. In this week's "Songs for the Deaf Dick," Ivan and Red cover chapters Samwell IV and Jon XI, skip the previously covered Tyrion XI, and go on to Samwell V and Jon XII. Catch up on previous book club episodes, then join the boys next week as they start on A Feast for Crows.To catch up on previous television seasons, the A Song of Ice And Fire books, and other TV and movies, check out the BGaS archive. You can find them on Twitter @boarsgoreswords, like their Facebook fanpage, and email them. If you want access to extra episodes and content, you can donate to the Patreon.

Meredith from Simply Secure writes, "Artificial Intelligence is already with us, and the White House and New York University’s Information Law Institute are hosting a major public symposium to face what the social and economic impacts might be. AI Now, happening July 7th in New York City, will address the real world impacts of AI systems in the next next 5-10 years." (more…)

I feel like you can't go wrong with Anker charging cables. I have found them to be more durable than Apple's own cables, which tend to tear over time. I wanted a short cable to charge my phone from a portable charger, so I bought a 1-foot Anker PowerLine for $9 on Amazon. The housing around the connectors is very sturdy, and has a 4.8 out of 5 star rating on Amazon.

Between 2011-2015, there were more than 800 individual UK police personnel who raided official databases to amuse themselves, out of idle curiosity, or for personal financial gain; and over 800 incidents in which information was inappropriately leaked outside of the police channels. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5DwPgYp6vkA master minecrafter has given us the recursive video gaming experience we didn't know we needed! Amazingly he has made a working GBA emulator, inside Minecraft! The Gameboy works well enough to play "Pokemon Fire Red."Via TechTimes:Nevertheless, it is still very much surprising when gamers continue to find ways to push the limits of Minecraft, and the latest achievement even gives a nod to another popular video game franchise that is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.A YouTuber who goes by the name Reqaug has built a fully functional Gameboy Advance within Minecraft, with the virtual mobile gaming console also capable of playing Pokémon Fire Red.

As Herman Yung says, Sung Jin Jang's animated version of pig processing is "a combination of cute and cuddly and disgustingly horrifying."

Voice actor Scheiffer Bates does uncanny impersonations of your favorite male characters from the Game of Thrones TV series.

In 1996, Finland invented, but never adopted, a harpoon device to stop drivers evading police.It latched onto a fleeing car and, if necessary, released tear gas into the car.

Suddenly camelAfter I saw this gif of a camel biting a news reporter's head, I took a look at other camel videos. A lot of videos on YouTube are about biting camels. Example:https://youtu.be/BHG1l-4ML2sMany videos are even worse.This camel, which is treated with love, has no desire to bite its human friend:https://youtu.be/K9X7zQ6Cb1A

At The New York Times, Peter Wehner is angry at evangelical leaders who rationalize their support of Donald Trump, a faithless huckster who talks of "Two Corinthians" and mocks the disabled.This fulsome embrace of Mr. Trump is rather problematic, since he embodies a worldview that is incompatible with Christianity. If you trace that worldview to its source, Christ would not be anywhere in the vicinity.Time and again Mr. Trump has shown contempt for those he perceives as weak and vulnerable — “losers,” in his vernacular. They include P.O.W.s, people with disabilities, those he deems physically unattractive and those he considers politically powerless. He bullies and threatens people he believes are obstacles to his ambitions. He disdains compassion and empathy, to the point where his instinctive response to the largest mass shooting in American history was to congratulate himself: “Appreciate the congrats for being right.”What Mr. Trump admires is strength. For him, a person’s intrinsic worth is tied to worldly success and above all to power.But that is evangelical Christianity in practice, isn't it? Dobson and Falwell and co., stripping naked at the slightest promise of money or political influence, is what they always do. Whether or not he has read a word of Nietzsche (I’m guessing not), Mr. Trump embodies a Nietzschean morality rather than a Christian one. ... It celebrates the “Übermensch,” or Superman, who rejects Christian morality in favor of his own. For Nietzsche, strength was intrinsically good and weakness was intrinsically bad. So, too, for Donald Trump.Attributing Trump to Nietzsche? Good Lord. If Christianity is shriveling on the right, is there any question why? Even their pigeonholes are rotten.

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Helicopter parenting vs. free range parenting? Discuss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2YYEceo1HIOne of Frederick Douglass's most famous speeches was his 1852 "The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro." (more…)

New Jersey public transit was forced to remove the bugs it had installed on its light rail system after a public outcry, but Baltimore's buses and subways remain resolutely under audio surveillance, while in Oakland, the cops hid mics around bus-shelters near the courthouses to capture audio of defendants and their lawyers discussing their cases. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOMLtMSljyANigel Farage, a stock broker who spent years pretending to be a working class lad in a flat cap, has announced that he is quitting as leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party because now that he has "[his] country back" he wants to "get [his] life back." (more…)

I like Primitive Technology (previously) because his videos are completely free of blather, music and tricky editing. (Here's an interview with the "mysterious bushman.") (more…)

As this poll has it, with the margin of error taken into account, Trump may receive minus 1.4% of the black vote. [via]

Oslo wanted to host the 2022 Winter Games, but has decided against it because of the International Olympic Committee's demands for special treatment. The IOC's imperial arrogance and opulence would be amusing—were it not the tip of an iceberg of corruption and despotism that floats from city to city every two years.• They demand to meet the king prior to the opening ceremony. Afterwards, there shall be a cocktail reception. Drinks shall be paid for by the Royal Palace or the local organizing committee.• Separate lanes should be created on all roads where IOC members will travel, which are not to be used by regular people or public transportation.• A welcome greeting from the local Olympic boss and the hotel manager should be presented in IOC members' rooms, along with fruit and cakes of the season. (Seasonal fruit in Oslo in February is a challenge ...)• The hotel bar at their hotel should extend its hours “extra late” and the minibars must stock Coke products.• The IOC president shall be welcomed ceremoniously on the runway when he arrives.• The IOC members should have separate entrances and exits to and from the airport.• During the opening and closing ceremonies a fully stocked bar shall be available. During competition days, wine and beer will do at the stadium lounge.• IOC members shall be greeted with a smile when arriving at their hotel.• Meeting rooms shall be kept at exactly 20 degrees Celsius at all times.• The hot food offered in the lounges at venues should be replaced at regular intervals, as IOC members might “risk” having to eat several meals at the same lounge during the Olympics

My latest Locus column, "Peak Indifference", draws a comparison between the history of the "debate" about the harms of smoking (a debate manufactured by disinformation merchants with a stake in the controversy) and the current debate about the harms of surveillance and data-collection, whose proponents say "privacy is dead," while meaning, "I would be richer if your privacy were dead." (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.What is a Witch by Pamela Grossman (author) and Tin Can Forest (artists)Tin Can Forest2016, 36 pages, 9.0 x 11.75 x 0.25 inchesFrom $20 Buy a copy hereThere are few ideas and words in the popular zeitgeist more mercurial than “witch.” Whether coming from the world’s mythologies, religions, folk tales, the realms of fiction, or from those who embrace it as a real-world religious identity, witch can mean myriad things. There are probably few archetypes more simultaneously romanticized and demonized.This dizzying dream of character and identity is uniquely and creatively expressed in What is a Witch, a sort of comic book grimoire on the subject by witch and author Pamela Grossman and Canadian’s comic-art occultists, Tin Can Forest.

 In just under 40 pages of lush, saturated black art and text, What is a Witch serves as something of a witch’s manifesto. The dreamy, free-form text, interwoven amongst equally dreamy art, attempts to cast a spell over the reader, to bring this complex character more vividly to life. In doing so, it doesn’t really answer the question (note that it’s not posed as one) of what a witch is, but instead, plays with her mercurial identity, dipping in and out of fictional and real-world conceptions and how witches are experienced and self-identified.

 The art and production are really lovely and work to deepen the spell that the book is attempting to cast. The effect of Grossman’s free, often trance-like prose reminded me somewhat of Jack Parson’s famous “We are the Witchcraft” manifesto, another attempt at a poetic conjuring on the identity of the witch. What is a Witch feels like a captured dream to me, one in which the author and artists dutifully recorded what they experienced and shared the results with us. And those results definitely feel touched by magic.

Iain ("an ex-physicist currently working as a data scientist") scraped Dark Lyrics and built a dataset of lyrics to 222,623 songs by 7,364 metal bands, then used traditional natural language processing techniques to analyze them. (more…)

Macedonia's laws define vandalism as a misdemeanor which puts a limit on the jail time faced by participants in a political movement whose symbol is splashes of brightly colored paint. (more…)

Virtual reality gaming and exploration doesn’t have to cost a fortune...you can enjoy a ridiculously cool VR experience for under $20 with the VR Box Virtual Reality headset on sale for $18.99 - 36% off - in the Boing Boing Store.VR Box creates a comfortable headset unit that’s compatible with most smartphone models - just slip in your phone, adjust the easy-to-use Optical Axis Sliding Control to maneuver your 42mm-diameter resin lens and start enjoying VR gaming, apps and videos that immerse you in a 3D world.The unit includes plenty of padding for a comfortable fit on your face with high-quality lens that won’t fatigue your eyes like many other VR headset models.You’ll even get a game controller that connects to your phone and headset via Bluetooth, offering loads of gameplay options that will definitely take your Google Play or Apple Store games to the next level.Usually priced at $30, pick up the VR Box Virtual Reality headset now for the discounted price of just $18.99 before this offer expires.

Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner, a prolific author, and an outspoken activist for peace and human rights. He died Saturday, at 87 years old. (more…)

Hannah Cohen is a 19 year old who is being treated for a brain tumor at Memphis's St Jude's Hospital, who is "partially deaf, blind in one eye, paralyzed, and easily confused" -- and who was subjected to a violent beating during a secondary TSA screening while flying home to Chatanooga, TN for the holidays. (more…)

A Russian home-buyer pulled out of a "agreed offer" of £6.95m for a six bedroom Kensington flat, now it's listed for £6.75m; a three-bedroom in Swiss Cottage is down to £1.05m from &pound1.5m; a £1.1m 2-bedroom in Whitechapel is now £720,000; a 2bm maisonette in Notting Hill fell from £1.59m to £1.35mk; a £1.3m 5br in St. Reatham is down to £850,000 and estate agents have mutually agreed to go back to calling it Streatham. (more…)

No, you can't kill civilian noncombatants with them. We only sell happy fun drones. (more…)

Gawker's Ashley Feinberg reports on rumors that Donald Trump, presumptive Republican candidate for U.S. President, is on "cheap speed."...according to a source with knowledge of Trump’s current prescriptions, that letter isn’t telling the whole story. Most notably: Donald Trump is allegedly still taking speed-like diet pills.Rumors of Trump’s predilection for stimulants first started really popping up in 1992, when Spy magazine wrote, “Have you ever wondered why Donald Trump has acted so erratically at times, full of manic energy, paranoid, garrulous? Well, he was a patient of Dr. [Joseph] Greenberg’s from 1982 to 1985.” At the time, Dr. Greenberg was notorious for allegedly doling out prescription stimulants to anyone who could pay.Previously: Hitler was injected with all sorts of crazy drugs

Elizabeth Warren is on fire in this speech at a New America Open Markets conference on monopolies this week in DC; Senator Warren is pitiless, lucid and laser focused on the way that corruption creates monopolies, and monopolies suborn corruption. (more…)

At Blue Hill, Maine's George Stevens Academy, there lies a Twinkie that was the subject of teacher Roger Bennatti's 1976 science lesson on chemical preservatives and shelf life. Now the immortal snack cake sits in a glass case on the desk of the school's Dean of Students Libby Rosemeier who was a student in the class when the experiment began. “It’s really funny that we’re this wonderful coastal community in Maine, and we have this school of 325 kids that is a gem and we’re doing great things and kids are going to great colleges, and the thing people know about us is this 40-year-old Twinkie,” Rosemeier told ABC News.Hostess did not respond to ABC News's request for a comment on the miracle of the everlasting golden spongecake with creamy filling.(via Weird Universe)

The US imprisons more people than any other country in history, both as a total number and as a proportion of its population; a White House data-mining effort proposes to set free prisoners who are "low risk," which is something we can all get behind. (more…)

One would hope that if a two-year-old child spit on a stranger, his or her parents would swiftly apologize and take the child out of spitting range from any other human in the vicinity. But this wasn't the case on a flight from Spain to Liverpool, England. The boy, who was with his parents and siblings, began spitting at people who were ready to board the Ryanair flight from Spain. His parents looked the other way. Then the boy's "unruly" behavior continued on the plane, and when passengers complained, the boy's mother became aggressive and unruly as well. According to Liverpool Echo:“At the baggage carousel, passengers were telling us how a boy had been spitting at people in the Barcelona departure lounge, they’d asked the parents to intervene, and the mum took exception to that.“This behaviour carried on when on the plane, threats were made by her, and there was aggression towards the Ryanair stewards.“It was all pretty surreal.”When the plane landed, the family of five was escorted off the plane by police, and the mother was given a "strongly worded warning" from Ryanair officials. Nobody was arrested, but the mother was banned from flying Ryanair again.

In the early 1970s, Princeton University physicist Gerard O’Neill became a space activist touting plans to build human colonies in outer space. He argued that humans could escape (while helping alleviate) the environmental damage we are causing on Earth by migrating to space habitats housed in cylinders that would be suspended 250,000 miles from Earth at LaGrange Point 5, a spot where the gravitational forces enable objects to just hang there. O'Neill's ideas, while controversial, were mostly sound from a scientific and engineering perspective. After the New York Times published a front page article about O'Neill, he became a media sensation and quickly developed a very vocal following of space geeks, (some) environmentalists, heads, and future-minded scientists. NASA even jumped in, supporting studies based on O'Neill's research and commissioning the incredible illustrations seen here. O'Neill's specific concepts influenced countless science fiction books and movies and were the seed of bOING bOING patron saint Timothy Leary's plan for humanity's future, SMI2LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension.) His book The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space is still in-print and captures the wonder and sense of possibility that permeated our culture after the first moon landing and into the 1970s. It's my hope that today's myriad private efforts to make space accessible will re-ignite that desire in everyone to explore and experience what lies beyond our home planet.The fantastic podcast 99% Invisible told O'Neill's story in an episode titled "Home on Lagrange":

The Obama administration today “partially lifted the secrecy that has cloaked one of the United States’s most contentious tactics for fighting terrorists,” as the New York Times puts it, and revealed that it believes U.S. airstrikes conducted outside established war zones like Afghanistan have killed as many as 116 civilian bystanders. The administration says it also killed an additional 2,500 people in those non-war-zones who were members of terrorist groups. (more…)

I think this truck is owned by Tyme Sefari, Inc.

Here's a gallery of stuff people bought online, only to receive something that was too small, too crappy, or completely unexpected.

Apple has rejected Spotify's latest app for inclusion in the Ios App Store, citing its rules against app vendors processing their own payments; Apple requires software vendors to pay to use Apple's own payment processor -- which collects hefty commissions -- in their apps. (more…)

When it comes to accessing public websites, Tor has an intrinsic security problem: though the nodes between your computer and the public internet are unable to see where the traffic is coming from or going to, the final hop in the network (known as an exit node) gets to know what webserver you are connecting to. (more…)

Amnesty International reports a "huge increase" in the number of people killed by police in Rio de Janeiro in the run up to the Summer Games.According to new figures from Brazil’s Public Security Institute, in the city of Rio alone 40 people were killed by on-duty police officers in May: an increase of 135% on the same period last year, when 17 were people killed by police. Across Rio state as a whole, police killings almost doubled, from 44 to 84.The 2016 Olympics are shaping up to be quite the trainwreck: a government meltdown, a doping scandal that may see Russia's entire team banned, and a public health crisis likely to convince many athletes, media and tourists to stay away.

Kokichi Sugihara's Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion was a finalist of the Best Illusion of the Year Contest 2016. Do you know how it works? Here's the explanation, via a guy with a 3D printer:https://youtu.be/SKpOKXAVjGoYou can even buy one!