Boing Boing

TV astronomer and author Mark Thompson uses a pig eye he got from his local butcher to demonstrate what happens to people who make the mistake of looking at the sun through a telescope.

Our friend and frequent Boing Boing contributor John Edgar Park built a large cold brew coffee drip tower using laser cut parts, lab glassware, a food-safe solenoid valve, and Arduino-based controller. I'm waiting for him to invite me over for a glass of ice coffee!I love cold brew coffee. Its rich and delicious flavor, and low acidity, means it tastes great over ice. Traditional hot-brewed coffee methods simply can’t compare; when chilled and served on ice they tend to taste diluted and acidic. I have a small commercial drip tower that works very well, however, given the fact that cold brew takes up to 18 hours to brew, it’s disappointing to finish it off in just a few drinks. You can buy large cold-brew towers, but they’re very expensive, aimed at coffee shops. I decided to build a much larger brewing tower from scratch, and to make it considerably higher precision while I was at it — drip rate is everything when it comes to cold brew — using a microcontroller-driven solenoid valve for exact drip rate.

I met Jeff Veen when we worked together at Wired magazine. Jeff came on board in 1994 and built websites for Wired and Hotwired. After that, Jeff went on to do a bunch of cool things, such as launching Typekit (a web font serving service) and serving as Adobe's VP of Design. Today he lives in London and is design partner at True Ventures. (more…)

Antiques Roadshow appraised this "bizarre and wonderful" ceramic jug from the late-19th/early-20th century at $50,000. Turns out, they were mistaken. A woman named Betsy Soule crafted the mug in high school in the 1970s. Soule's friend recognized the piece on TV and alerted her. "As far as its age is concerned, I was fooled, as were some of my colleagues," said Antiques Roadshow's Stephen L. Fletcher in an update. "The techniques of making pottery, in many ways, haven’t changed for centuries…Still, not bad for a high schooler in Oregon.”The current owner paid $300 for the object at an estate sale.“I hated it when it was $30,000 to $50,000, because who wants $30,000 to $50,000 lying around their house?" he told the Bend Bulletin. "Now, it’s on my table, and I love it.”

Fuman Musicoloco performing in Zaragoza, Spain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcMl6xg6f9cLen Peralta writes about a Kickstarter for Renfest: "a new episodic comedy series starring Mary Jo Pehl and Trace Beaulieu of MST3K fame and Dave 'Gruber' Allen from Freaks & Geeks. They are trying to make enough to finish the pilot and hopefully create a full season." (more…)

Fast Company looks into Budweiser's patriotic salute to the upcoming presidential election.The alterations don’t stop with the beer’s name. Almost every bit of type on the Budweiser label has been scrubbed away by Easter Egg patriotism, with new text citing the Pledge of Allegiance, the Star Spangled Banner, and America the Beautiful—all rendered in newly developed hand lettering, inspired by Budweiser’s archives.To name just a few of the updates: "King of Beers" has been changed to "E Pluribus Unum," "The World Renowned" changed to "Land of the Free," and "Anheuser-Busch, Inc." updated to read "Liberty & Justice For All."

Institute for the Future (where David and I are research directors) has a Blockchain Futures Lab blog. Today, Kathi Vian of IFTF presents a scenario involving a "bottom-up distributed toolset for aggregating large groups of people with similar interests, needs, and values into civic affinity groups."This virtual city council is not simply passive profiling, however. You can interact with others to explore the issues with people who are a lot like you, a little like you, or very different from you. These interactions create the opportunities to develop more nuanced affinities with large numbers of people.

Stunning! The National's cover of "Morning Dew," a song penned in 1961 by Bonnie Dobson and later popularized by the Dead, is one of 59 (!) tracks on the Day of the Dead box set they helped produce, featuring Sharon Van Etten, the Flaming Lips, Real Estate, War on Drugs, Jenny Lewis, and many more covering Dead songs. Day of the Dead will be out May 20, with all profits benefiting the HIV/AIDS organization Red Hot.

The beloved Tower of Terror ride at Disneyland California Adventure features some of the most elaborate themeing and set-dressing of any of Disney's built environments, consisting of a series of staged scenes that are reminiscent of interactive theater troupe Punchdrunk's sets, followed by a spectacular thrill-ride -- it rarely has less than a 30 minute wait. (more…)

Lynda Carter, the Wonder Woman of 1970s television, with stunt double Jeannie Epper. If you're not hip to the only screen Wonder Woman that matters, watch the original title sequence below.In your satin tights,Fighting for your rightsAnd the old Red, White and Blue.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_blOQEu9ws(via r/OldSchoolCool)

Though most of the world's largest narcotics gang's aircraft are a lot smaller than the Mexican flagship carrier's planes, the Sinaloa have flown at least one Boeing 727; the planes fly drugs, gang members and bales of cash. (more…)

It's been nearly a year since Tony Yarber, pastor and mayor of Jackson, Mississippi capital and largest city in the state, tweeted that he believed he could pray away potholes, citing Moses's alleged parting of the Red Sea as precedent. (more…)

Exotic polyhedron purveyor Dice Lab's crowning randomizer is its monstrous, $12 120-sided die. (more…)

The Facebook board member will be a Trump delegate to this summer's Republican National Convention, representing California's 12th district. (more…)

Mark Zuckerberg, Kevin Systrom, and Jack Dorsey changed the social media landscape with their creations, and now Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are all tech giants. Now, you can learn the keys to becoming a professional programmer - and create your own social network. Of course, there’s no guarantee you’ll soon be the CEO of a tech titan, but hey...there are less interesting ways to learn a career-making skill.With this Learn to Code 2016: Learn Web Development by Creating a Social Network course bundle - now just $59 in the Boing Boing Store - you’ll get over 108 hours of deep-dive instruction on the web technologies you need to know most. You’ll enjoy full tutorials on Python, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, PHP, MySQL, and Wordpress - and that’s just the start.Once you’ve grasped the basics, you’ll utilize your newfound skills by creating a brand-new social network, applying your practical studies to a real-world build that will test your abilities as well as your entrepreneurial vision.Jump in with access to eight courses:Python Tutorial: Learn by CodingAngularJS for the Real WorldBuild Professional Websites with HTML5 & CSS3Learn Web Development by Creating a Social NetworkPHP OOP & PDO with Projects for BeginnersTotal Web Development CourseThe Complete Ruby on Rails Developer CourseLearn By Example: The Foundations of HTML, CSS & JavaScriptThrough homework assignments, quizzes, exercises and video lectures, you'll not only learn what it takes to start a lucrative new career in web development, but you may found a new Silicon Valley power in the making. Either way, at 93% off its regular price, it’s a small price to pay to re-create yourself.

Oxfam has published an open letter signed by hundreds of respected economists, including Thomas Piketty, which describes tax havens as "serving no useful economic purpose." (more…)

Between 120 and 150 IT workers will be fired from the McClatchy newspaper syndicate (Scramento Bee, Miami Herald, etc), after they have trained IT contractors from India's Wipro to do their jobs. (more…)

These facehugger facewarmers come from Brooklyn weird textiles queen Knitrocious (previously). They're made to order from acrylic yarn and cost $150 each: "Legs have clips so that they can be worn around the head (you know, during sexy time) or unclipped just hang out." (more…)

Magnanimous president-to-be Donald Trump says that despite his proposed ban on muslims entering the U.S., London's new mayor, Sadiq Khan, may be an exception.“There will always be exceptions,” Mr. Trump said when asked in an interview on Monday how his proposed ban would affect London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan. “I was happy to see that,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Khan’s election. “I think it’s a very good thing, and I hope he does a very good job because frankly that would be very, very good.”Asked why, Mr. Trump said, “Because I think if he does a great job, it will really — you lead by example, always lead by example. If he does a good job and frankly if he does a great job, that would be a terrific thing.”Khan's having none of it. He rejected Trump's suggestion that he could be an exception to the proposed Muslim travel ban, saying: "This isn't just about me -- it's about my friends, my family and everyone who comes from a background similar to mine, anywhere in the world."The statement continued: "Donald Trump and those around him think that western liberal values are incompatible with mainstream Islam -- London has proved him wrong."

How does the internet get routed to Greenland? Just how many cables snake their way through the waters of the Caribbean? Submarine Cable Map is exactly that, but it's beautiful and interactive too. [via Internet is Beautiful]

There's an obvious answer to the smallness of statues' penises: the manners and religious prudishness of classical elites. But the issue is more about differing standards of beauty and modern mens' penis anxiety, writes Ellen Oredsson. Which is to say that smaller penises were once regarded as ideal, and many real penises aren't any bigger than the ones on the statues....small penises were more culturally valued is that large penises were associated with very specific characteristics: foolishness, lust and ugliness. There are actually quite a few ancient Greek sculptures that have enormous penises. Here’s one:Small dicks are, then, associated with reason and logic. The argument gets strained when applied to the western renaissance, where imitation and idealism intersect more sharply with religious sentiment.

Craig Wright's latest effort to prove himself the creator of bitcoin ended in farce, but some commentators are tired of the whole saga, saying that it doesn't matter who invented Bitcoin because its decentralized nature renders the creator irrelevant. Adrian Chen disagrees: "the idea that Nakamoto’s identity is irrelevant is wishful thinking."Most obviously, Nakamoto’s identity matters because he is estimated to control four hundred and forty-eight million dollars’ worth of bitcoin, which, if it were unloaded quickly, could seriously depress the value of the notoriously volatile currency.The real Nakamoto could have a more fundamental impact as well: as The Economist pointed out, this latest saga unfolded during a heated “civil war” that has broken out among bitcoin developers over how to deal with an increase in transaction volume in the bitcoin network. The network processes transactions in batches known as “blocks.” As the number of blocks has increased, the network has become in danger of being overloaded. One side in the dispute wants to change the bitcoin code, increasing the block size to allow the system to process transactions more quickly. The other side sees this as a betrayal of the integrity of the original code, arguing that a change would lead to more centralization in the system (the greatest sin for a bitcoin believer) and consequent problems.Vanity's murky pond, inch-deep yet thick as tar.

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The massive wildfire that continues to burn in the Fort McMurray area of Alberta, Canada has been captured from space by NASA imaging satellites. (more…)

Publishing is in a weird place: ebook sales are stagnating; publishing has shrunk to five major publishers; libraries and publishers are at each others' throats over ebook pricing; and major writers' groups are up in arms over ebook royalties, and, of course, we only have one major book retailer left -- what is to be done? (more…)

A man in Florida was cited by state wildlife officers for killing an alligator without a permit after an inspection revealed gator body parts in his pickup truck, and the poor dead critter's foot sticking out of the dashboard. (more…)

A man the U.S. says is a hacker aligned with the government of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad will appear in a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on Tuesday. An unnamed source with U.S. law enforcement told reporters today that the accused hacker, 36 year old Peter Romar, was extradited to the US and flown from Germany to Dulles International Airport on Monday. (more…)

Eight people were killed in Chicago over Mother’s Day weekend. Another 43 people in the city were injured in gun violence. (more…)

A robin made its nest under our deck, giving us a wonderful birds' eye view of the nest through the boards. Today we noticed one of her three eggs had hatched! Here is footage of the new level 1 robin that emerged.

For two years, Vinny Desautels grew out his hair to donate to children with cancer who have lost their hair during treatment. The 7 year old Roseville, California boy was recently diagnosed with an unknown form of metastatic cancer, according to reports from his family and in local news. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition CatalogueBill Watterson and Robb JennyAndrews McMeel Publishing2016, 160 pages, 8.5 x 11 x 0.6 inches (softcover)$15 Buy a copy on AmazonI like many grew up on Calvin and Hobbes. I don’t know if there’s a comic, book, film, or any other piece of art that better captures a childhood. I read every Sunday strip, most of the dailies, and the ones that I missed I would read in dog-eared collection books checked out from the library. As I got older, I wanted to know more about the strip’s creation. When I picked up the Complete Calvin and Hobbes, a 14-pound tomb, I was a little disappointed. Other than an introduction, there was very little information about the mysterious creator Bill Watterson. Thankfully, Exploring Calvin and Hobbes: An Exhibition Catalogue makes up for that. This is the Blu-Ray extras that Calvin & Hobbes fans have been waiting for. It’s not for those casually interested in reading the strip. There are plenty of other books for that. But if you’re interested in process, history, and the inspiration behind a boy and his tiger, you’re going to love this book. The book explores an exhibit of Watterson’s work at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum. It also includes one of the most in-depth interviews he’s ever given. In it you get a rare look at his early work, the tools Watterson used, the struggles he went through, and the wonderful comic that he created. You get a real sense of the artistry that Watterson put into the strip, and how it evolved over the years. It’s great to relive and learn about something that had such an influence on me. This book is definitely a must-have for Calvin and Hobbes fans. – JP LeRoux

My orange Bialetti Moka Express Stovetop Percolator is my version of the red stapler. (I have a real red stapler, too.)Over the years, I've tried to keep my Moka in pristine condition, but my family members don't care about it as much as I do. They would leave it on the burner after the water boiled up from the lower chamber to the upper chamber, which caused the bottom part to overheat and turn black. The final straw dropped on Saturday when one of my family members forgot to put water in it *and* forgot about it on the burner. I was in another room and when I smelled burning plastic, I knew what had happened. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the handle with a dish rag. It stretched like taffy. Even the plastic knob on the lid was melted. Disgusted, I threw the coffee maker in the trash. An hour later I pulled it out of the trash. I decided I could make a new handle. That was a good idea, but I idiotically thought I could get away with making a handle on a 3D printer. I designed the handle on Tinkercad (a fantastic web-based 3D modeling application):I also designed a knob for the lid. It took about an hour to print out both pieces. While it was printing, I used a Dremel tool to remove the carbonized black stuff from alternating facets of the octagonal boiler chamber. I was pleased with my new orange/green/black/silver Moka and posted a photo of it to my Instagram feed: The espresso maker that wouldn't die. A photo posted by Mark Frauenfelder (@frauenfelder) on May 7, 2016 at 8:00pm PDTA few minutes later, I tried making coffee with it and the handle melted immediately. What was I thinking? I guess I'd hoped the water in the boiler would absorb the heat so the handle wouldn't get hot enough to melt. Live and learn.As a believer in the sunk cost fallacy, I didn't want to give up on making this thing work. I found a little bamboo cutting board that we don't use much (part of a 3-piece set I bought last year). I eyeballed a pencil outline for the handle on the board and cut it on a bandsaw. I made a knob from a scrap of 0.75-inch square lumber. The whole process took less than 20 minutes. I like the finished result so much that now I'm happy my family member melted the handle and knob. I like my Moka now more than ever, and it seems to be working just fine (bamboo doesn't melt, and I hope it never gets so hot that it undergoes sublimation). Hurray for mistakes and happy accidents!

The World Wide Web Consortium's plan to standardize web-wide digital rights management is based on the idea that if an entertainment company doesn't like a new technology, it should have the right to prevent that technology from coming into being. (more…)

Created by Kurt Rauffer, who writes:Growing up in the 90s where Star Wars was released on VHS, the franchise really sparked my imagination as a child. It not only let me exercise my imagination but also supplied me with some of the happiest memories as I watched it with my family. After re-watching "The Empire Strikes Back," I decided to use this as a chance to create a homage in the form of a title sequence. This would also serve as my senior "thesis" at SVA and took me the whole semester to complete.The style and tone of the animation was inspired by the James Bond title sequences. The music was a rejected song from the newest Bond film, Spectre, sung by Radiohead. I really wanted to play on the concept of Luke trying to find himself and true purpose, so the music and inspiration felt fitting.

US Federal Magistrate judge Stephen William Smith sounds the alarm about the skyrocketing trend of US courts operating in secret, with their findings (or even the fact that they're hearing a case at all) sealed to scrutiny, and an ever-increasing portion of judicial action taking place in off-record arbitration. (more…)

Kaplamino made this delightful Rube Goldberg-esque demo using magnets and steel balls.

https://vimeo.com/164726039Matthew Callahan's Galactic Warfighters series poses Star Wars action figures in scenes that recreate war journalism from US operations, captioned with AP-style slugs that conjure up the human cost of the battles hidden by the inscrutable armor of the Empire. (more…)

The Present, Jacob Frey's four-minute short about a young boy who's not sure about the three-legged puppy his mom gives him, won more than 50 awards and played more than 180 festivals -- it's got a sting in its tail (and its tale). (more…)

The Australian Productivity Commission has published its long-awaited, 600-page draft report on the country's copyright and patent laws, which are largely the product of diplomatic pressure from the US government, fronting for US entertainment industry associations. (more…)

Other Music, my favorite New York City record store, is closing down after more than two decades in the East Village. Other Music was a hub of avant-garde culture both locally and via their phenomenal weekly newsletter reviewing new releases, from experimental electronica to post-punk indie to freaky psych reissues, and everywhere in between. Whenever I visited Manhattan, I made a beeline to Other Music, and loved hearing staff recommendations (and peeking at what other customers were buying).“We still do a ton of business — probably more than most stores in the country,” co-owner Josh Madell told the New York Times. “It’s just the economics of it actually supporting us — we don’t see a future in it. We’re trying to step back before it becomes a nightmare.”Business has dropped by half since the store’s peak in 2000, when it did about $3.1 million in sales, said Chris Vanderloo, who founded the shop with Mr. Madell and Jeff Gibson after the three met as employees at the music spinoff of Kim’s Video in the early ’90s. (Mr. Gibson left Other Music’s day-to-day operations in 2001.)Rent, on the other hand, has more than doubled from the $6,000 a month the store paid in 1995, while its annual share of the building’s property tax bill has also increased with the local real estate market.Other Music, I will miss you.

A joint report by RNZ, TVNZ and Nicky Hager accuses New Zealand of being at the heart of a gigantic money-laundering operation for the corrupt elites of Latin America. (more…)

Update: Opposition Labour leader Isaac Herzog, identified in the original article as the source accusation denies having made the accusation; and called the websites claiming he did "unsane."It's hard to enumerate all the people to whom this would be politically significant: the Israeli opposition; leadership rivals from Benjamin Netanyahu's own party; Islamists who are at odds with wahabiism; fighters in Yemen and other territories where Saudi is fighting direct or proxy wars, and the citizens and elites of those countries. (more…)

Our favorite PhD of high weirdness, Dr. Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis, recently gave a compelling cosmic rap at the Morbid Anatomy Museum about Timothy Leary and his appropriation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead! Listen to it here."While even most psychedelicists now discount the brazen and now rather dated work he created with Richard Alpert and Ralph Mezner, 1964’s The Psychedelic Experience," Erik writes, "I argue that there was also something deeply canny and even visionary about this mapping, which in some sense just extends possibilities already inherent in the ancient Tibetan concept (which is itself probably as indigenous-shamanic as it is Indian)."

A group of successful indie game devs are kickstarting Losswords, a game whose premise is that players are the resistance in a totalitarian future in which books have been banned, and games are the only form of permitted entertainment: you keep literature alive by making games out of the great books of history. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdBjrURwg-QRicky from Inside the Magic writes, "This weekend Shanghai Disneyland began soft openings and that means the world has now had the pleasure of finally seeing a TRON ride come to life - and it's brilliant. The Tron Lightcycle Power Run is a roller coaster that lets guests hop on the film series' signature vehicles and race around the track to Daft Punk's Tron: Legacy tunes, surrounded by special effects. The Grid is live and is very real." (more…)

The Guardian featured essays by UK punks who made the scene when it first emerged in the late 1970s. Above, Terry Chimes, 59, original drummer for The Clash, now a chiropractor."I just wanted to be in a band, and this was the most exciting band I could find," he writes. "Everyone else in The Clash was angry at the world and the establishment. I wasn’t. That’s why I left, actually. I felt like the odd one out.Below, Jordan, 60, Sex Pistols stylist, Adam and the Ants, manager, now a nurse."A lot of the major music moguls were extremely sexist," she writes. "An A&R guy once said to my face, 'This is not a woman’s job. You should be cooking and laying on your back.' I didn’t want to be there any more, so I came home to Seaford.""Never mind the bus pass: punks look back at their wildest days" (The Guardian)

American toddlers have shot 23 people this year—mostly themselves.Last year, a Washington Post analysis found that toddlers were finding guns and shooting people at a rate of about one a week. This year, that pace has accelerated. There have been at least 23 toddler-involved shootings since Jan. 1, compared with 18 over the same period last year. In the vast majority of cases, the children accidentally shoot themselves. That's happened 18 times this year, and in nine of those cases the children died of their wounds.Doubtlessly these toddlers will kill many more before they are stopped.It correlates strongly to state-level gun storage laws, reports WaPo. States with lax ones see lots of toddler shootings; even states with high levels of gun violence in general see few toddler gun injuries when they enact such laws. The NRA claims gun storage laws are an attack on individual liberty, and it not only opposes them but sues city governments that enact them.