Boing Boing

It's been a year since David Cameron's Tories took control of the UK Parliament with a majority that gave their free rein to govern UK, plc to their taste. (more…)

Doesn't University of Pennsylvania economist Guido Menzio know that you should never do Al Gebra on a plane?From FB:Unbelievable…Flight from Philly to Syracuse goes out on the tarmac, ready to take off. The passenger sitting next to me calls the stewardess, passes her a note. The stewardess comes back asks her if she is comfortable taking off, or she is too sick. We wait more. We go back to the gate. The passenger exits. We wait more. The pilot comes to me and asks me out of the plane. There I am met by some FBI looking man-in-black. They ask me about my neighbor. I tell them I noticed nothing strange. They tell me she thought I was a terrorist because I was writing strange things on a pad of paper. I laugh. I bring them back to the plane. I showed them my math.It’s a bit funny. It’s a bit worrisome. The lady just looked at me, looked at my writing of mysterious formulae, and concluded I was up to no good. Because of that an entire flight was delayed by 1.5 hours.Trump’s America is already here. It’s not yet in power though. Personally, I will fight back.Here's the WaPo story about it.[via](Thanks, Ryan!)

Monthly bills are a pain. Rent, power, gas, cable, digital...every month, you’ve got to do the rounds, either authorizing online payments or sending old-school checks in the mail like your grandparents did. Bills are annoying.So let your friends at Boing Boing take one of those monthly bills off your plate for the next decade - if you win this killer 10 Years of Netflix Giveaway. One lucky winner will get their subscription to Netflix’s premium service paid for the next 10 years. Just think - you’ll get to watch the end of Frank Underwood, Piper Chapman and even Daredevil’s stories without paying a dime. In fact, Netflix has so much stuff, you could pretty much turn it on now, start watching movies and TV shows continuously for the next 10 years and STILL not exhaust Netflix’s ridiculously huge content catalogue.All you’ve got to do to is fill out a simple online entry form, then wait for the phone call that you’re a winner. You can also pick up an additional entry by getting a friend 21 years of age or over to also enter the contest by following the equally simple Additional Entry instructions.Ten years of Netflix premium service would normally run you over $1,400, so win this contest and cross one of those pesky monthly bills off your list. Good luck and happy viewing...registration ends June 12.

In honor of Free Comic Book Day, we present this essay by Jon Chad, author of Science Comics: Volcanoes: Fire and Life, and the co-author, with Maris Wicks, of "Science Comics," a free comic available in comics stores all over the world today. (more…)

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Chris writes, "After a recent Kobo software upgrade, a number of Kobo customers have reported losing e-books from their libraries--notably, e-books that had been transferred to Kobo from their Sony Reader libraries when Sony left the consumer e-book business. One customer reported missing 460 e-books, and the only way to get them back in her library would be to search and re-add them one at a time! Customers who downloaded their e-books and illegally broke the DRM don't have this problem, of course." (more…)

Animator Lee Hardcastle reimagines the quintessential first-person shooter as an even gorier game, starring Claycat, a fearless and fearsome claymation character.(via JWZ)

After the public overwhelmingly voted to name a new British Natural Environment Research Council vessel "Boaty McBoatface," the UK government pulled a switcheroo, declaring the will of the people to be secondary to the judgment of humourless bureaucrats, and summarily named the ship the R.R.S. David Attenborough. (more…)

Phrack has been publishing erratically since 1985, but the four year gap between the previous issue, published in April 2012, and the current issue, published yesterday, was so long that many (me included) feared it might have died. (more…)

"John Doe," the mysterious whistleblower who released the largest-ever leak of confidential documents in world history -- papers from the Panamanian law firm Mossack-Fonseca, a key player in the offshore dark money industry -- has published their first-ever public statement. (more…)

The practicing Muslim son of Pakistani immigrants has been elected mayor of London. Labour Party politician Sadiq Khan's win today is a major political milestone in the Western world. (more…)

MicrowaveMe Show Experiment #426: Microwave. Rated G. (more…)

An assistant principal at a South Carolina high school is under investigation after police say the man restrained a 15-year-old student in a chokehold, and kept her in a chokehold until she passed out. The Kingstree, SC police department is reported to be seeking assault and battery charges against the man. (more…)

Listen: "Time Fi Legalize" extra-elevated remix of We Chief feat. Ragga Twins & Gosteffects by Reid Speed. (more…)

Sometimes the simplest things in online life are the most sublime (more…)

Marine biologists with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expedition in the Mariana Trench encountered a luminous red-and-yellow jellyfish in April, Scientific American reports. (more…)

For motion picture use only. Or, for teasing customs and border patrol guards - they are known to appreciate a boredom interrupting joke. Amazon sells it for $54.They also sell fake money with bundles of white powder, but it's currently unavailable.

A long time, and well loved, resident of Yellowstone National Park, Scarface the bear, has been found shot dead. Scarface has been entertaining photographers, non-threateningly, for decades. It seems unlikely he was killed in self-defense, as he was unlikely to disturb family pic-a-nics. ICTMN shares:In the ongoing research into the habits of the grizzlies in Yellowstone, Scarface had been captured, collared, and released 17 times.Scarface did survive to a ripe old age for his species, 25. In his prime, he weighed 600 pounds. He was down to 338 pounds and biologists expected this last winter to be his last. They meant a death from old age, not from gunshots. Social media were full of outrage from biologists and wildlife photographers, for whom Scarface had become a symbol of the species struggling for survival against climate change and the invasion of bear habitat by humans.Shooting a grizzly is unlawful except in self-defense, but Scarface had a long history with people that made him an unlikely candidate to attack a photographer or a hunter. Because of the Endangered Species Act violation, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has opened an investigation into the circumstances of the shooting. Several photographers, decrying the shooting, declared that Scarface was the most photographed bear in Yellowstone.

This week, Techdirt's Tim Cushing published a story about the Hancock County, IN Sheriff's Department officers who stole $240,000 under color of asset forfeiture. (more…)

For flying a really non-threatening kite, in low winds, I find the Prism Atom to be wonderful. For a bit bigger kite flying experience, this Prism Stowaway is just as simple, and fun.Prism specialises in making kites that are easy to deploy, and fly. I have quite a few kites, and even one or two are more complicated than I care to figure out very often. Prism kites pretty much spring into form, and are ready to fly.Prism Stowaway Delta Kite via Amazon

Seems the animal uprising continues on the North American continent! Vancouver humans are under attack by aggressive crows. Jim O'Leary, an instructor at Langara College, has developed an interactive map of the attacks, but as yet offers no explanation for the aggressive birds.Via the CBC website:"You could go out on the street and you could see the crows, literally, coming and hitting people on the head."O'Leary hopes his map will reveal some patterns in where crows attack. For instance, it is already showing that a large number of the attacks happen in the West End and downtown of Vancouver, which makes sense, he says, because crows love to be around human food, and those areas have lots of restaurants and leafy trees.The map has already gotten about 300 attacks recorded in it, and O'Leary wants to see more.O'Leary, however, hasn't added to any of that data, because he hasn't been attacked himself."I'm careful, and I have a little umbrella that I put behind me," he said.(Thanks, Russell Smalley!)

Sinister conspiracy theories about LSD, the government and MKUltra are not uncommon on the internet. But one anonymous Redditor's comments, easily ignored as odd paranoid tangents on the threads they appear on, add up to a "compelling science-fiction horror story" in aggregate — especially all that stuff about flesh interfacing. Reddit is a fascinating platform for such eerie, slow-building metafiction, writes Leigh Alexander. The seemingly random thread names start to form a pattern: the reader gets the distinct pleasure of wondering why the author chose to post each component in each place. Eerie fragments of fiction hide among commonplace online discussion. Sometimes readers reply and engage, and sometimes are none the wiser. The enthusiastic cult fandom quickly built a Wiki to study and catalogue the mysterious tale, create a timeline of known events, and to note in a sort of literary formalist way what tropes the author is employing. The story also has its own dedicated discussion thread where volunteers have even developed audiobook editions.The internet has always loved a good mystery, and Wikis, message boards and image boards have a history of playing host to fascinating and often scary folktales that leverage the format and utility of these digital spaces in creative ways."We can only hope," she adds, "that it's not a viral marketing stunt."

https://youtu.be/gGCg6M-yxmUThe Moog Model 15 App runs on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. It's $30 and judging by the track below, it's worth it!The Moog Model 15 App is an iOS version of the iconic 1970’s instrument. It is designed to evoke the joyous experimentation and sonic bliss of it’s predecessor’s vintage hardware, the Moog Model 15 App meticulously recreates the look, feel, and sound of its highly expressive analog namesake.[via]

It's unfortunate that this deer got its head stuck in a light globe. It must have been terrified. The good news is that Jeff Hull with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation managed to remove the globe, and the deer appears to be unharmed.As you might expect, the photo of the deer has become fodder for all kinds of photoshoppery.

https://youtu.be/2dhHpHOgrUIWhen powered mercury(II) thiocyanate is ignited, it summons Crom Cruach.

https://youtu.be/8X-L8z52v4MThis is from a 1994 episode of The Tonight Show host by Jay Leno. This clip begins after Leno interviewed Burt Reynolds, who is sitting to the left of an empty chair reserved for the next guest, Marc Summers (host of Nickelodeon's game show Double Dare). Before Summers comes out, Leno shows a scene from Double Dare where Summers gets repeatedly hit by pies from some kind of pie throwing machine.Leno asks him about it, and Summers says that it is weird for him to be the host of a messy show because he is a "neatness freak." (Summers has OCD) For some reason, that strikes a nerve with Reynolds, who starts making sourfaced verbal jabs. Summers makes a crack about still being married (Reynolds had just gone through a messy divorce with Loni Anderson) and Reynolds grabs a mug of water and tosses it on Summers. It goes downhill from there. Leno does nothing to stop it because he knows good TV when he sees it. If you want to know the backstory (and it's fascinating to hear Summers describe it), here's the chapter about the incident from Summers' book, Everything In its Place: My Trials and Triumphs with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. [via]

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Parent Hacks: 134 Genius Shortcuts for Life with Kids by Asha DornfestWorkman2016, 272 pages, 5 x 0.8 x 7 inches (softcover)$36 Buy one on AmazonIn 2005 Asha Dornfest, a new parent, launched the blog Parent Hacks as a way for parents to share tips that make raising young children less nerve-racking. This book has the 134 best tips from the blog. Here are a few examples from the On the Go section:#116 Write your phone number on your kid’s belly.#113 Strap ankle weights to a lightweight stroller to keep it from tipping.#110 Line your car’s cup holders with cupcake liners.#118 Use adhesive bandages to baby-proof hotel room outlets.Other tip themes include pregnancy and postpartum, sleep, food and mealtime, organizing time and space, and getting dressed. Craighton Berman’s clear illustrations make it easy to understand most tips at a glance. If you or someone you know is pregnant, this book is essential reading.(Read Cory's review of Parent Hacks, too!)

In 2015, Bloomberg's "With All Due Respect" asked Presbyterian Donald Trump what his favorite Bible verses were. "I wouldn't want to get into it. Because to me, that's very personal," he said. "The Bible means a lot to me, but I don't want to get into specifics."When the show's host asked Trump if he favors the Old Testament or the New Testament, he said, "Probably equal. I think it's just incredible," he said.Last month, Trump decided not to keep his favorite Bible passage a secret any longer when Bob Lonsberry of WHAM 1180 asked him, "Is there a favorite Bible verse or Bible story that has informed your thinking or your character through life?""Well, I think many. I mean, you know, when we get into the Bible, I think many. So many," Trump responded.“And some people — look, an eye for an eye, you can almost say that," he said. "That’s not a particularly nice thing. But you know, if you look at what’s happening to our country, I mean, when you see what’s going on with our country, how people are taking advantage of us, and how they scoff at us and laugh at us. And they laugh at our face, and they’re taking our jobs, they’re taking our money, they’re taking the health of our country. And we have to be firm and have to be very strong. And we can learn a lot from the Bible, that I can tell you."I wonder if Trump likes Proverbs 16:5: "Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the Lord; be assured, he will not go unpunished."

Money is tight for the great majority of people right now. If renting an apartment is not for you, and you want a small house for less than $40k, then chances are it’s going to be a so-called “tiny house.” These are typically 50 to 400 square feet and most often use a compost or chemical toilet (or, god forbid the smell, an incinerator toilet).Here (right) is a photo of a typical tiny house from Wikipedia.People think this is a new thing. While the reason people may be building and living in houses the size of a single room in a home may vary (“I want to downsize,” “I can make do with less,” “Who can afford a regular size house?” “My wife and kids drive me nuts!”), the fact is that people have been living in eensy-weensy domiciles for hundreds of years.I suppose we could start with the cave, and the caveman and woman, but that’s silly. They didn’t even know about toilet paper.In the 1800s, as the migration toward the western part of the U.S. began in earnest:As the first waves of loggers swept over great portions of the Pacific Northwest's old-growth forests in the second half of the nineteenth century, those men opened up the dark dense woodlands to settlement. …. Left behind was a scarred landscape, scrap wood, and stumps. Many stumps. Huge stumps. Stumps that still stood a full 10 feet high but were undesirable as lumber because they tended to swell down toward their base, making the wood-grain uneven. When subsequent waves of pioneer settlers came on through, they found those old logging sites to be welcome clearings that hinted at possible futures as rich farmland. But, being littered with debris—and those towering stumps—these homesteads presented the challenge of years' worth of hard labor just to clear (by burning and digging-out stumps) enough proper space to plant orchards or raise crops or livestock.For select stumps would-be farmers found other uses … By constructing roofs on them and attaching a door or gate the stump-based shelters worked fine as storage sheds or chicken houses, or pens to keep pigs and calves safe from prowling predators including raccoons, bobcats, or bears. And sometimes it was people who were the denizens of these stump houses. As early as 1847 the pioneering McAllister family moved northward to the Medicine Creek area (near Nisqually). It was there that they set up shelter by hollowing out a stump and making a “Home Sweet Home” there until they could erect a proper house. After that, the structure served them as a barn.Later, on June 20, 1892, a William D. McDonald opened up the very first U.S. Post Office located in the remote northern portion of the Olympic Peninsula. The McDonald Post Office was located at a site 10 miles southwest of Port Angeles, and on the east side of the Elwha River. It was located in a large roofed stump. In time the house was sold, moved, renamed the Elwha Post Office. Today the aging icon still stands.But the most famous of all local stump houses was one located on the Lennstrom family's property in Snohomish County's Stillaguamish Valley, in the tiny community of Edgecomb, which is currently a neighborhood within the old logging and railroad town of Arlington.It was likely in 1901 that the first of many curious visitors toting a camera arrived and documented the stump house in photographs. The Northwest's famed photographer, Darius Kinsey (1869-1945), brought four cameras (of different formats) and took eight classic shots. Over the ensuing two decades they were marketed as postcards and stereoview cards and helped establish the stump house as a regional icon. Kinsey himself liked the stump house so well that by March 1902, he was using a small image of it on his company's business stationery.In 1903 the Skagit County Times newspaper up in Sedro-Woolley, Washington, offered this description of the stump-house: “Inside it is one good-sized room, which is boarded up and neatly papered and made as comfortable as any apartment could possibly be made. The walls inside slant inward at the top, which gives one the impression rather that it is an upstairs room, otherwise it is not different from any other room.” Amazingly, a few of these stump houses still remain.So, if you have a big old massive tree stump on your property and are looking for a new private space, get your tools ready. It took one guy 20 years to carve out his stump house![Via Vintage News, which used text, with credit, from Historylink.org]

3D printing has been one of those “next big thing” innovations among early adopters and the tech circle in-crowd for a few years now. However, the prospect of creating your own three-dimensional objects is still in its relative infancy with the general public. While the idea itself is fascinating to most, high prices and the slow process of introducing a new technology to your typical consumer has translated into very few 3D printers in use today in an average home. So, now you can be an electronics trend-setter AND score it at a fantastic price by picking up a M3D Printer and four reels of filament for just $399, a 20% discount off its regular price.The affordable M3D will give you the means to launch literally thousands of fun and educational 3D print projects right off your office desk. Unlike other 3D printer manufacturers, M3D started as a Kickstarter campaign with backers supporting the high quality design that resulted in a sleek, compact and almost startlingly quiet 3D printer capable of producing objects on par with much more expensive models.The M3D’s micro motion sensor chip calculates ultra-sharp precision, while its carbon fiber rods allow for a sturdy and lightweight build. The unit’s Aerospace-grade ceramic heater system creates the type of rapid and precise heating necessary in 3D print projects along with both internal and external filament spooling options to help keep the material coming during the most exacting of builds.See what everybody’s talking about for yourself with the top quality, low cost M3D, available right now for a limited time at $399 in the Boing Boing Store.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL0FSg76gFI&w=560&h=315]

QF481, from Melbourne to Perth, was delayed last week because a passenger spotted a wifi network called "Detonation Device." (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s9GCkK6oZsA new documentary, "(In)Securus Technologies: An Assault on Prisoner Rights", tracks the rise of for-profit video "visitation" programs, which are being rolled out across America's unimaginably huge prison system, replacing the in-person visits that have been shown to be vital for prisoners' successful rehabilitation and reintegration into society. (more…)

A new ad campaign from the International Fund for Animal Welfare features rendered images of cross-sectioned endangered animals on the beds of 3D printers, being printed out, layer by layer. (more…)

For the second year in a row, a bunch of disgruntled "conservative" sf readers and writers are attempting to destroy science fiction's Hugo Awards by nominating slates of works that are, variously: rabid racist tracts; works by their ideological opponents; tepid military sf; works by bystanders; and weird porn by Chuck Tingle, a master of the form, who has nothing to do with any of this. (more…)

Since November 2015, FBI agents have been trying to get Tor developer Isis Agora Lovecruft to meet with them, but they won't tell her or her lawyer why. (more…)

In 2015, Stanford computer science PhD candidate Andrej Karpathy decided to test out some neural network tools he'd been experimenting with, and set them to generating plausible baby names. (more…)

An editorial in The American Journal of Public Health, signed by 2,000 MDs, endorses Bernie Sanders' "Medicare for All" single-payer healthcare system. (more…)

Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo -- a former venture capitalist who invested state funds with hedge funds during her tenure as state treasurer -- invited Goldman Sachs to set up a partnership with the Community College of Rhode Island, then kicked out the college's daycare center to make room for Goldman staffers to work. (more…)

In 1996, New Jersey's courts heard 500 debt-collection cases; in 2008, they heard 140,000 cases, almost all against black people, almost all of whom were not represented by lawyers. The cases were filed by vulture capitalists who bought the debt for pennies on the dollar and employed "attorneys" who filed up to 1,000 cases a day, "reviewing" each one for about four seconds. (more…)

For amateur astronomers, tonight is an exciting night. (more…)

Matt Ritchie makes "slumps" — whimsical artwork of popular characters slumped over as if falling asleep or theatrically dejected by their latest mishap. Up top are the heroes of Star Wars, who have perhaps just learned that Disney has no plans to remaster the original theatrical release. Here's the Justice League, reading reviews of the movies they appear in. (more…)

Toy inventor Bob Knetzger alerted me to the new officially licensed Misty Copeland doll from Mattel, makers of Barbie. It has a "new 'ballerina body' sculpt, which in this case means large calves," says Bob. "This adds another body type to the new line of Barbie bodies."

The 25th year of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's activism to keep the Internet and its users free was an amazing one. (more…)

What a stunning portrait of one brave person. (more…)

NCR reports in-the-wild sightings of "deep skimmers" (tiny, disposable card-skimmers that run on watch batteries and use crude radios to transmit to a nearby base-station) on ATMs around the world: "Greece, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Bulgaria, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States." (more…)

Here's a puzzle from Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column, which ran for many years in Scientific American. I found it in his anthology, My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles, which is only $3.42 on Amazon.There is a simple procedure by which two people can divide a cake so that each is satisfied he has at least half: One cuts and the other chooses. Devise a general procedure so that n persons can cut a cake into n portions in such a way that everyone is satisfied he has at least 1/n of the cake.

Religion blogger Fred Clark is fascinated with the urban legends and panic surrounding "satanism," so years ago he set up a Google News Alert for the word "Satanic." Over at Pathos, he posted the funny, ridiculous, and fascinating things he's learned. Here's a sample:• Every year, dozens of filmmakers try to recapture the magic that made The Exorcist so unsettling. Most fail.• Pat Boone is still alive.• The political performance art of the Satanic Temple is both hilarious and pointedly effective. They’re defending the First Amendment the way that we Baptists are supposed to.• Adolescent legend tripping is happening all the time, every day, somewhere in the English-speaking world.• Adults who should know better are freaking out and over-reacting to adolescent legend tripping all the time, every day, somewhere in the English-speaking world.• Censorious adults worried about Kids Today listening to satanic heavy metal aren’t really keeping up with the satanic heavy metal acts trying hardest to gain their condemnation.• Same goes for video games."Things I Have Learned Due to My Google News Alert for the Word ‘Satanic’" (via Daily Grail)

Alert administrators at a Houston, Texas, public school called police when a 13-year-old student tried to use a $2 bill to buy chicken nuggets from the cafeteria. An officer went to the school office where the girl was being held, scaring the hell out of her and calling her grandmother with dire warnings about federal counterfeiting crimes being committed. Bill in hand, the officer went to the store that gave the $2 bill to the girl's grandmother and questioned them, then went to a bank with the bill, where he was told that $2 bills are legal tender. The officer never apologized to the girl, who missed her lunch that day.That's right: the 13-year-old didn't even receive an apology from the authority figures, even though she was ultimately denied lunch that day, according to her grandmother. Grandma also had this to say: "It was very outrageous for them to do it. There was no need for police involvement. They're charging kids like they're adults now."

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign used ultrasound to transmit high-speed data through pork loin and beef liver. Why? They're developing a system for controlling wireless medical implants and also stream high-definition video from inside the body. "You can imagine a device that is swallowed for the purposes of imaging the digestive tract but with the capability for the HD video to be continuously streamed live to an external screen and the orientation of the device controlled wirelessly and externally by the physician," says engineering professor Andrew Singer.Singer and his colleagues posted their results on arXiv in a paper titled "Mbps Experimental Acoustic Through-Tissue Communications: MEAT-COMMS."“To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has ever sent such high data rates through animal tissue,” Singer said. “These data rates are sufficient to allow real-time streaming of high definition video, enough to watch Netflix, for example, and to operate and control small devices within the body.”That's a whole new spin on dinner and a movie.(Engineering at Illinois)