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Self-experimenters, inspired by a 2011 presentation by The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide author James Fadiman, are taking tiny "sub-perceptual" doses of LSD and psilocybin to encourage workplace creativity and give them pep and a positive outcome in life overall. (more…)

Todd W. Schneider analyzed 1.1 Billion NYC taxi and Uber trips "with a Vengeance", teasing straightfoward visualizations from an absolutely enormous dataset.Taken as a whole, the detailed trip-level data is more than just a vast list of taxi pickup and drop off coordinates: it’s a story of New York. How bad is the rush hour traffic from Midtown to JFK? Where does the Bridge and Tunnel crowd hang out on Saturday nights? What time do investment bankers get to work? How has Uber changed the landscape for taxis? And could Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson have made it from 72nd and Broadway to Wall Street in less than 30 minutes? The dataset addresses all of these questions and many more.Remember the scene from Die Hard: With a Vengeance where Bruce Willis is given 30 minutes to drive from the Upper West Side to Wall Street to prevent a bombing? The writer knew New York very well, it turns out. The median journey time for that trip is 29.8 minutes.Traveler protip: don't take a car to JFK on weekday afternoons. Just never do that.[via The New Aesthetic]

Robbo sez, "Outaspaceman on YouTube shows his latest project - an Arduino-based knife wielding tentacle - which, of course, no home should be without."

It's been five years since the first cases of UK undercover police officers infiltrating environmental groups and tricking activists into having sex with them surfaced, and now, one of the survivors of the practice, "Lisa," has granted her first-ever interview. (more…)

The Right Way To Do Wrong presents a unique opportunity to experience Harry Houdini in his own words. A collection of the master magician's interviews of police, grifters, swindlers, and criminals of all sort. These papers also give a fantastic glimpse into Houdini.I expected another dreary book of magic, written in dated English with references to things I'd never understand. What I found is a fascinating collection of captivating essays that also open a window into who Harry Houdini! While I very much enjoyed hearing stories about how turn of the century pick-pockets plied their trade, I loved learned that Houdini has a goofy sense of humor. Peppered with corny jokes and oddball witticisms, we not only learn the secrets to some of histories greatest magicians tricks, but get a glimpse of him.For fans of magic, or just budding con-men, I highly recommend The Right Way To Do Wrong.The Right Way to Do Wrong: A Unique Selection of Writings by History's Greatest Escape Artist (Neversink) via Amazon

Here are a few samples from one of the better cats-that-look-like-pinup-model websites out there.

My father took me to see Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus at the old Madison Square Garden in the early 1960s. What a wondrous day! First the smell of the cotton candy and peanuts embrace you, then it’s on to the Side Show, with the giant (we bought a giant brass "finger" ring he was selling), and Lady Estelline the Sword Swallower (we bought a small silver cocktail sword that pierced a photo of her). Then it was into the big top for the real show. My god, the elephants! The majesty of the beasts. You never forget those sights, sounds, and smells when you're 5 or 6 years old.The circus is not what it used to be in those innocent times. One of the first things to go was the Side Show. Misguided folks forced it out of the circus and only succeeded in ruining the livelihoods of the performers, throwing them out of work. But we still had the pleasure of taking our daughter to see “the greatest show on earth” when they passed through our town over the past decade, and she was mesmerized by all of it, especially the parade of elephants.There’s a wonderful photo essay in the New York Times this week about Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Part of it is about the elephants being forced out of the show by local laws. I’m no expert at animal behavior (other than the domesticated house cat), and the only thing I really know about elephants is what’s obvious: they’re highly socialized and intelligent animals who live in groups. Regardless of what anyone thinks, for better or worse, the elephants will vanish from the ring by 1918. So take your kids to the circus and see the elephants while you can. They’ll remember it always.There’s an excellent bit of writing in the Times piece by Taffy Brodesser-Aknerm which confronts the challenges faced by the notion of a circus in the digital age: It is an amazing thing to see someone fly through the air, but it’s harder to convey that fact to people who believe they are watching people fly through the air on-screen all the time. You can’t convince children who watch shows with talking animals that it is an incredible thing just to see an elephant play ball with another elephant, or to see a tiger simply not eat his trainer. It’s getting harder to convince adults, too. Somehow, over the past few decades, we’ve forgotten how to be impressed by physical achievements, incredible feats that no normal person can do. We have forgotten how to prize an act in which a performer risks his life gracefully — to understand that it is both the risk and the grace that make it something truly astonishing. Nowadays, you go to Times Square, and you don’t see people juggling and eating fire and doing delightful busking; you see people in superhero and Elmo costumes doing nothing but existing off versions of something that appears in movies, on TVs and in toy stores. … The circus is the last bulwark against all that.So go! Buy a ticket, smell the cotton candy, see the wire walkers and aerialists, fear for the lion tamer, and say goodbye to the elephants. Get your tickets right here.

The people behind Brooklyn's brilliant science fiction bookstore Singularity & Co are looking to raise $60,000 to launch a new science fiction quarterly magazine called the Tycho Journal. (more…)

Jahfurry writes, "Ben McCool over at Tech Times unearthed five brilliantly bonkers Star Wars comics written by Alan Moore in the '80s. What a treat to read the Magus's take on Darth Vader, Han, Chewie, C-3P0 and the whole crew with great art by Alan Davis, John Stokes (Invisibles) and more UK artists extraoirdinaire... McCool examines each story separately, giddily dissecting the imaginative insanity you'd expect from Moore, while marveling at how these read as classic, albeit odd, Star Wars stories." (more…)

I watched the Bob Ross marathon on Twitch recently, where a whole new generation got to discover the magic that emerges from his brushes: how you can turn away for a moment and turn back to find a whole new world materializing across a blank canvas. The game Beyond Eyes can feel a little bit like that too.You play as Rae, a young girl who lost her sight in an accident. After her cat Nani goes missing, she opens the gate to that leads beyond her garden and adventures forth to find her friend. Since she's blind, she—and you—have to rely on touch, sound and memory to paint a picture of the world in the blank spaces of the unknown. If a bird sings in the distance, it'll light up a small area in the vast whiteness that cloaks the path ahead—at least until you draw closer. Gates, bushes and other obstacles often spring up in front of you suddenly, since you don't know where they are until you run into them. The world paints itself into being around you, in ways that are beautiful and surprising. Grass grows beneath your feet as you move, flowers bloom, bridges leap across rivers. https://youtu.be/gmmo_2llJp4But things aren't always what they seem: what sounds (and therefore looks) like a sparkling fountain might turn out to be water pouring through a rusty sewer grate. What you thought was your cat rustling around in the bushes might turn out to be some local wildlife. Your other senses can help you paint an imaginative picture of the world around you, but until you actually touch it, you never quite know for sure.The phrase "walking simulator" has become something of a pejorative in certain circles, but that's exactly what Beyond Eyes is. This is a game where almost all you do is wander, imagine, and watch the world unfold. But what ultimately makes it pleasurable is what makes so many "walking simulators" worthwhile: the chance to move through a different world in a different way, and perhaps to remember that not everyone walks through the world in the same way as us. Developed by the Tiger and Squid, Beyond Eyes is available for Mac, PC, Linux, PS4 and Xbox One.

A dumbass posted a thought experiment "proving" that homosexuality was wrong posited three islands: a gay island, a lesbian island and a straight island, in which the two former dwindle away without replenishment while the latter thrives. (more…)

Khartabil has been imprisoned in a Syria's Adra Prison since 2012, though as of October, he has been transferred to an undisclosed location. The free software/open culture activist was the lead for Creative Commons Syria and has contributed to Wikipedia, Firefox and many other projects. (more…)

The statistician and risk analyst, who rose to prominence with his 2007 book The Black Swan, has a history of sticking up for junk science, but has crossed a Rubicon with his latest set of tweets, in which he defended homeopathy as harmless placebos that divert hypochondriacs from taking too many real pharmaceutical products. (more…)

Take an additonal 15% off today only on the below products in the Boing Boing Store by using coupon code: DOORBUSTER at checkout!The future of photography is here--and Lytro has taken their technology up a notch with the Ilum. Transform moments by adjusting everything from the focus to the perspective after the fact. There's no better time to make the ultimate photographic splurge with this one time exclusive offer.There are many VPNs out there, so which is right for you? If you're looking for extreme reliability, Private Internet Access is one the most trusted names in the business--and for good reason. Trusted by Forbes, Wired, and more, PIA is a safe choice for safer Internet surfing.The Panther Air Drone is not your average quadcopter. With its unusually large size yet light durable foam body, the Panther boasts a 4.5 channel radio control to seamlessly maneuver in every direction. Capture snapshots and video footage of the world below or try out full stunt mode. Fly high with the Panther this holiday season.This bundle offers you the unique opportunity to take your gaming passion and turn it into an awesome career. You will learn to code iOS, Android and desktop games all in one fantastic package that will leave you with all the skills necessary to take the developer world by storm.The days of getting your headphones caught on your surroundings and ripping your ears off are over. The Active Wrap Bluetooth Headphones are the perfect solution to those constantly replaced wired headphones. With high-quality sound and noise-canceling technology, you can keep bumping your favorite jams for 8 non-stop hours without any annoying distractions.

Eric Lafforgue is a prolific, talented photographer who's travelled the world, living among people in many hard-to-reach places and telling their stories with his camera. Among the most striking sets of images in his deep portfolio is his 2013 portraits of Daasanach people in Ethiopia, who have created exuberant wigs and hats from mass-produced consumer goods, both new and discarded, that have recently reached their part of the world. (more…)

Using just five scenes and three keystrokes, renowned minimalist game designer Pippin Barr has released a dark, thoughtful piece on gun violence, made with his wife Rilla Khaled. A Series of Gunshots comes in part from the revelation that he was starting to find shooting things in video games "really gross"—and the wish to explore the horrible space around the sound of a shot. The game is very simple. Confronted with a color-starved scene of a street, an apartment front, or some other mundane place, the player must press any key, and the punctuation of a gunshot rings out. You might see a muzzle flash in one of the windows right before your eyes, or you might not, the sound coming from outside of your field of view. Pressing any key up to three more times may or may not trigger another shot, and then the scene changes. The set of scenes you see, and the hidden violence that may be occurring in each, is different each time you play. There is a remarkable thought space around such a deceptively simple design. You as the player notice the urge to 'advance' the scene; you find yourself wishing the shot will occur where you can 'see' it. The game's challenge, in a sense, is being able to sit in the pause after that first sound and to notice how you feel about it—and about your own lack of agency. There is a cold, frightening inevitability about the fact you cannot really observe, control or predict any aspect of the distant violence. You never get to know why the shot was fired, if anyone was hurt or killed, what any of it meant. There may be another round of gunfire coming, and there may not, but all you can do is press a key and see. Any key will do; letting the player use the mouse, Barr said, would have added too great an illusion of control, the player "pointing" hopefully (?) at dark windows. Mapping to a specific key, too, would accord the player too close of a relationship with the idea of a single "trigger." With careful decisions like these, A Series of Gunshots elegantly decouples the report of a gun from the thoughtless, self-relieving behavior that "shooting" usually is in video games, and redraws the weapon as it exists in reality—a deliverer of unknowable darkness.You can play A Series of Gunshots for free in your browser here. Offworld has previously covered some of Barr's projects here and here.

Hammacher Schlemmer is a mostly mail-order company from which I’ve bought some lovely cashmere sweaters for my wife at Christmas. The company is renowned for its entertaining mail-order catalogue (and a great return policy) which has provided me with hours of fun reading over the years. Often the cover features some incredibly outlandish extravagance designed solely for really wealthy folks, and which often costs a stratospheric amount of money. Top of the line at the moment is a “Five Person Exploration Submarine” which can descend to 656 feet, weighs over 7.7 tons and costs—take your seats, please—$2,700,000. As Dr. Evil used to say, “Almost three MILLION dollars.”This year’s new and more reasonably priced money pit is a racing simulator for $185,000. It looks like a lot of fun, and my daughter says she rode something like it at Epcot at Walt Disney World, but something tells me that whoever receives it will lose interest ’ere long.The exact prices are unimportant because they’re silly. As far as most of us are concerned, we’re far more likely to get hit by a bus than be given one of these gifts.I genuinely enjoy Hammacher Schlemmer’s catalogue simply because it’s filled with incredibly weird things, like the remote-controlled flying shark mini-blimp for $40, and “The NASA Sleep Promoting Light Bulb” for $40. There are also lots of handy things, like well-made flannel pjs, nice lined gloves, and so on. It’s a real 90-page potpourri and you should definitely call 1-800-543-3366 and request a free catalogue. You can also do it online. Once in a while I think their copy writers are overcome with enthusiasm to the point of nonsense. This year’s prize goes to something called “The Prestidigitator's Wallet.” As the editor of a well-known magazine on the subject of conjuring, I can tell a “Prestigitator’s Wallet” from one that’s not. This is not. The item is described as “… the ultra-slim wallet that magically secures folded bills with just a flip. Simply insert cash in the middle of the wallet and close it. Next, flip it over, and, like magic, the cash is secured instantly under taut and durable elastic straps.” This, I really have to tell you, is not a magic trick at all. It’s a wallet with some elastic straps in it that are there for no good reason. Nothing magical happens: if you put the folded bills inside, close the wallet, and reopen it on the other side, the bills are under those straps. They haven’t disappeared or changed or anything one would consider a trick. Now if we strip away the silliness of the name and sales pitch (“This wallet replicates a style originally invented by French waiters in the 1920s as a means to quickly squirrel away tips”) then you might have a nicely priced ($40) leather billfold with pockets for credit cards and a window-pocket for your driver’s license.Still, this line of ad copy kills me, “Removing money is as easy as pulling it from the straps.” No shit!

Kamasi Washington, 34, is a saxophonist and composer who is carrying the spiritual jazz torch pioneered by the likes of John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Albert Ayler, and Stanley Cowell. But his sound is not a retro trip. Washington, who has also played with Flying Lotus, Snoop Dogg, Herbie Hancock, and Kendrick Lamar, recently released his three hour album, aptly titled Epic. It's an immersive, post-post-bop modal groove that is utterly and entirely contemporary. Dig the performance above, recorded this summer for NPR's Jazz Night in America. I was thrilled when our friends at San Francisco's Noise Pop Music Festival announced that Washington will be part of this year's killer lineup for the musical extravaganza taking place February 19-28 at clubs around the city. So far, the schedule also includes performances by The Mountain Goats, Parquet Courts, Vince Staples, The Cave Singers, Caucus, The Thermals, Film School, Diane Coffee, Wild Ones, Beacon, Astronauts, Etc., Palehound, and Heartwatch. More details: Noise Pop Music Festival

Eric McDavid, a 26-year-old, nonviolent anarchist activist, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after a paid FBI informant promised to have sex with him if he'd help her bomb some unspecified targets in Northern California. She provided the money, transport, a cabin HQ (filled with hidden CCTVs), and the bomb recipe. Then she helped federal prosecutors illegally withhold 2,500 pages worth of evidence that eventually exonerated McDavid, after nine years in prison. (more…)

See sample pages from this book at Wink.In 1977 and 1978 Topps, the famous bubble gum trading card company, issued five series of Star Wars trading cards. Each series had 66 cards and 11 stickers, and the backs of the cards contained trivia, puzzles, actor bios, and story summaries.This fat little book has high quality scans of the fronts and backs of all 330 cards and 55 stickers from the five series. It also comes with a set of four actual trading cards in a plastic pocket glued to the inside back cover. There’s no gum, but if that’s a deal killer, eBay usually has at least one or two complete runs of the cards for $200 or so, including the sticks of nearly 40-year-old gum.Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series by Gary GeraniAbrams ComicArts2015, 548 pages, 1.5 x 5.5 x 7.5 inches$14 Buy one on Amazon

In this [NSFW] totally non-phallic animated cartoon from 1968 about Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam war, we see the orgasmic annihilation of the American Dream in a montage of cigarette boxes, Coke bottles, hotdogs, TV dinners, breasts, apple pie, Doris Day, Lassie, John Wayne, Superman, Aunt Jemimah, Detroit autos, and deodorant soap. It's called Escalation, and it was made by Disney animation pioneer Ward Kimball. Bryan Thomas at Night Flight has more:[In] 1968, an national election year coming a few years after Walt Disney’s death (in 1966), [Kimball] was venturing out on his own, and so Escalation should be seen as a personal and private Kimball film project, and not as a Disney short. It’s actually credited with being the only film made independently by one of Disney’s Nine Old Men. Kimball personally gave 16mm copies to friends and liberal-minded fans.We first came across this short film online a few years back, and it was said at the time that Kimball’s granddaughter, Laurey Kimball Boedoe, and other relatives of Kimball’s, had decided to put Escalation online, making it free for everyone to see, saying in an email to friends, “Our family thought it was time to put this short film out there for everyone to see since there are a lot of similarities to what is going on now.”

The day after authorities in Paris killed the suspected ringleader of last week's terror attacks, footage has emerged of one of the targeted cafés.The first security video shows the attackers outside, shooting at customers and into the building. Windows shatter, and some of those surviving the initial barrage flee inside. Occasionally, someone pops up to make a break for it.The other videos show the interior of the café—apparently, lives were saved after one of the attackers' guns jammed.

David Bowers, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, recently praised the concentration camps that the US built during World War II to imprison Japanese American adults and children. And, according to Bowers' logic, that's why we can't allow Syrian refugees to be resettled in his town. George Takei has something to say about it. From his Facebook post:Earlier today, the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia, Mr. David A. Bowers, in the attached letter, joined several state governors in ordering that Syrian refugees not receive any government assistance, or be relocated to their jurisdiction. Apart from the lack of legal authority to do so (under the Refugee Act of 1980, only the President has authority to accept or deny refugees), his resort to fear-based tactics, and his galling lack of compassion for people fleeing these same terrorists, Mayor Bowers made the following startling statement:“I’m reminded that Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from Isis now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”Mayor Bowers, there are a few key points of history you seem to have missed:1) The internment (not a "sequester") was not of Japanese "foreign nationals," but of Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. I was one of them, and my family and I spent 4 years in prison camps because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It is my life’s mission to never let such a thing happen again in America.2) There never was any proven incident of espionage or sabotage from the suspected “enemies” then, just as there has been no act of terrorism from any of the 1,854 Syrian refugees the U.S. already has accepted. We were judged based on who we looked like, and that is about as un-American as it gets.3) If you are attempting to compare the actual threat of harm from the 120,000 of us who were interned then to the Syrian situation now, the simple answer is this: There was no threat. We loved America. We were decent, honest, hard-working folks. Tens of thousands of lives were ruined, over nothing.Mayor Bowers, one of the reasons I am telling our story on Broadway eight times a week in Allegiance is because of people like you. You who hold a position of authority and power, but you demonstrably have failed to learn the most basic of American civics or history lessons. So Mayor Bowers, I am officially inviting you to come see our show, as my personal guest. Perhaps you, too, will come away with more compassion and understanding.-- George Takei

You may have heard that "screen time" -- time with TV, phones, tablets, computers, or video games -- is bad for babies and toddlers. Recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics reversed course on their previous advice about screen time for kids under two." (more…)

Amazon has a promo code so you can get this garlic press for $9. It's regularly $18. (Use code 25NLO83R at checkout) It includes a free silicone tube garlic clove peeler, like the kind reviewed here.

Reuters, the news agency, has banned photographers from filing photos captured in RAW format, mandating in-camera JPGs instead. This, it believes, will cut down on processing time—and prevent photographers from editorializing their images.“As eyewitness accounts of events covered by dedicated and responsible journalists, Reuters Pictures must reflect reality. While we aim for photography of the highest aesthetic quality, our goal is not to artistically interpret the news."Filing RAW is the equivalent of handing unprocessed film, instead of a print, to your page layout guys. It shouldn't be their headache. So that complaint makes sense.But the thing about photomanipulation? This strikes me as a human resources problem being misunderstood as a technical problem.Whatever else you might say about the increased latitude for photomanipulation that RAW images provide, one can easily convert a worked RAW photo to JPG before filing it. Asking everyone to capture photos as JPGs won't make "arty" shooters more honest.

Engineer Alex Weinberg reviews suspension bridge scenes in movies and finds their representation of structural mechanics to be wobbly at best. Embedded above is the most accurate he found, from Final Destination V. The origin of the structural failure in this situation is pretty absurd because the asphalt driving surface on a traffic bridge is non-structural. The road itself rests on a steel structure, which would probably not be seriously compromised by some sawing and jackhammering on the asphalt. Further, it’s hard to invent a scenario in which any of this could cause a failure at the top of a vertical suspender. But who knows, maybe there had been some plot-friendly corrosion in the steel. Regardless of the initial cause of failure, the collapse progresses in a halfway believable manner: The road deck falls, but the main catenary cables and the bridge towers remain. With no road to support, the vertical cables swing dumbly over the void.Most scenes, however, are very bad indeed, like this one from The Dark Knight Rises. "I consider this the worst suspension bridge destruction scene in motion picture history," he writes.https://youtu.be/g8evyE9TuYk?t=45sHis roundup serves as a nice overview of the symbolism of suspension bridges, too. Alas, our directors score only 2 unnerving metallic whipping noises out of 10. Must try harder! [via]

Pete Reynolds in McSweeney's, proving that humor is a better source of news than the news is: "I refuse to support special interest groups whose sole mission is to profit from putting weapons into the hands of people, if those people are Syrians." (more…)

This post is a heartfelt thank you from Loog Guitars CEO Rafael Atijas. Loog is a company that we at Boing Boing are proud to have helped grow. We are thrilled to see them join us as a sponsor. To enter to win one of their guitars, simply send an email to gadgets@boingboing.net!Four years ago I had an idea: what if a children’s guitar wasn't just small but also had other features that made it fun and easy to learn how to play? That’s how I came up with Loog Guitars: a line of 3-string kits that kids can build with their parents and, in that way, connect with their instrument at a deeper level. The 3 strings still let kids and beginners play chords and, therefore, any song. But, with fewer things to learn, it's easier to play and to make sense of what they are playing. I took this idea to Kickstarter and that's how Loog Guitars, which is now a 4 year old business, was born. Later, I pushed my luck and ran a second Kickstarter campaign to make an electric version of the Loog Guitar. Running a Kickstarter campaign, especially one for physical products, is really no cakewalk and can be pretty nerve-wracking. You have to keep on pushing without coming off as spammy or annoying, while keeping an eye on the still-ticking clock urging you closer toward the goal. You feel like you're fighting an impossible fight, until you reach your goal and everything's okay with the world again. For both of our Kickstarter campaigns, that moment came right after Boing Boing posted about us. We always say that Loog Guitars would not exist if not for our Kickstarter backers. And it's also fair to assume that we would have never reached our goal if it wasn't for those two BoingBoing posts. This is why we're writing this post. We want to thank the Boing Boing community by throwing a giveaway consisting of three separate prizes: A complete set of Loog Guitars (an Electric Loog and an Acoustic Loog) plus Loog accessories for both: stands, backpacks, straps and tuners. An Electric Loog Guitar with accessoriesAn Acoustic Loog Guitar with accessoriesTo enter, all you have to do is send an email to gadgets@boingboing.net There will only be three winners, so here's a little something for everyone else: a 20% off discount code, exclusive for BoingBoing readers (shhh!): THXBOINGBOINGERS. We are still a tiny (not small: tiny) company, but strong in our quest for something much bigger than us: helping kids learn how to play music in a fun, engaging way. Bonding through music used to be a huge family activity. Today, it is increasingly rare. We want to change that and make the world a more musical place. But that's just the driving energy behind Loog Guitars; the purpose of this post is just to say thank you. So, thank you Boing Boingers! You are awesome :)

ISIS, or as they hate to be called, Daesh, released a video online Wednesday threatening an imminent attack on New York City. (more…)

This week's XKCD has a hell of an Easter Egg, and it's not even in the tooltip. (more…)

Above, The Mickey Mouse Club, circa 1930. Below, Mickey's first appearance, a May 15, 1928, test screening of the cartoon Plane Crazy. The film wasn't picked up by a distributor and as a result we celebrate Mickey's birthday on November 18 because that day in 1928 was the first public appearance of the mouse, in Steamboat Willie (below).https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6c_WgxTsMohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBgghnQF6E4

A new report from the Manhattan District Attorney calls for law requiring "any designer of an operating system for a smartphone or tablet manufactured, leased, or sold in the U.S. to ensure that data on its devices is accessible pursuant to a search warrant." (more…)

Playboy Enterprises has agreed to a settlement with a woman who claims she was injured when a co-host of The Playboy Morning Show hit her in the buttocks with a golf club. The incident occurred at the Playboy Golf Finals in 2012. (more…)

See more photos at Wink Fun.750 Years in Paris is a historical graphic novel sans words as well as a stunning coffee table art book. Paris-based artist Vincent Mahé (aka Mr. Bidon) illustrates 60 snapshots of the same building in Paris, spanning from the year 1265 with cows grazing in front of its humbler beginnings to 2015 in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. With the smallest of details, from words of storefront signs to the clothing of people to the state of the building itself, Mahé is able to subtly and masterfully inject humor, horror, nostalgia, historical facts and pride into his various images. The back of the book has a timeline to help decipher some of the historical events revolving around the images. For instance, directly quoted from the book (and images shown above):1515 – Francis I is crowned king and enters the city in a lavish procession.1804 – Napoleon’s enthronement and imperial troops procession.1915 – World War 1.2015 – 4 million in the streets defending freedom of speech.As I began to write this review, the horror of Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris unfolded before the world, making this newly-released book all the more poignant and significant.750 Years in Parisby Vincent MahéNobrow2015, 120 pages, 8.4 x 13 x 0.7 inches$18 Buy a copy on Amazon

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. You can get both EMU Club Adventures books, signed, sketched and delivered here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

As the saying goes: when life gives you Marshmallow, jumpstart a thriving career! Android's latest platform has opened up even more demand for Android developers, and now's your shot to learn the ropes. Gain the necessary skills--from Java to Android Studio--to build amazing apps from scratch with this lifetime e-learning offer!

A New York man who spent a month in jail after Pennsylvania state police mistook homemade soap he was traveling with for cocaine has filed a lawsuit. (more…)

This amusing criticism of game rating inflation is doing the rounds. Who can deny that game ratings are inflated? And that if it gets less than 7, it's gonna suck.But the suggestion that this inflation is a phenomenon of the 2010s; now, that is suspect. I cracked open a 1990s copy of ACE magazine—one of the more popular British general-purpose gaming mags of the 16-bit era—and it had the following scores. (They're normalized to "out of 10"; ACE rated games out of 1000)Issue 15:Operation Wolf 9Joan of Arc 9Powerdrome 9Bombuzal 9Rocket Ranger 8R-Type 9Space Harrier compilation 7Typhoon 7Menace 7Hostages 7Albedo 7Action service 6Mad Mix 5The only game that gets less than 6/10 is a promotional merch for a drink mix. Basically, every credible commercial product gets at least 7/10. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

Pop Chart Lab was founded in 2010 by a book editor and a designer, with the modest goal of rendering all of human experience in chart form. Since then they’ve charted a wide array of cultural touchstones. A Visual Guide to Drink is Pop Chart Lab’s comprehensive volume of its most important topics in graphical form: beer, wine, and spirits. Containing everything from the many varieties of beer and the vessels from which to drink them, to cocktails of choice in film and literature, A Visual Guide to Drink maps, graphs, and charts the history, geography, and culture of the world’s very favorite pastime. The domestic beer-drinking novice and whisk(e)y aficionado alike will relish this perfectly practical primer awash in essentials like charted cocktail recipes, a breakdown of brewing processes, and extensive maps of the world’s wine region in Pop Chart Lab’s trademark clean and elegant design. The definitive guide to informative imbibing, A Visual Guide to Drink is a fun, functional, and beautiful concoction of data and design that is sure to inspire delight in readers (and drinkers) everywhere.

The hand-wash 55" knit scarf is $25 from Thinkgeek, with faux-fur ears. (via Oh Gizmo)

The UK Prime Minister has seized on the tragic deaths and injuries in Paris as an excuse to terroise Britons into allowing him to pass his Snoopers Charter, a sweeping, badly written surveillance bill that will end security research in the UK, cause Internet bills to soar, and riddle critical software with back-doors, threatening anyone who reveals these vulnerabilities, even in court, with a year in prison. (more…)

Hamilton's the kind of city where half of City Hall says they've been bullied at work, where the "accountability" committee charges you $100 to make a complaint and proposed that it would only investigate if you are never quoted in the press on the matter, and where city policy prohibits linking to its website without written permission. (more…)

Matthew Hankins catalogs 500 phrases used in scientific articles that researchers use to figleaf the fact that their results aren't statistically significant, and to hand-wave-away the fact that they're publishing anyway. (more…)

Gardening games tend to be soothing cycles of repetition: You plant, you water, you harvest, and then you do it again. You play them to relax, which is probably why so few of those games are set during wars. But that's exactly where A Good Gardener begins, by asking you to tend a small garden in the midst of a terrible conflict. You're a captured deserter in this unspecified war, assigned to grow crops for the troops in a small, open air compound that looks like it once had a roof. Perhaps it was blown up? All you can see beyond it is sky, and the top of a deserted building in the distance, its windows broken.The experience of the game is simple: every day you collect a box of seeds, plant them, and water them. (Don't forget to refill your watering can at the spout on the days when it rains.) As the days pass, you'll see different crops take different shapes until they reach their final form, and then your mustachioed supervisor will come to collect them. On the days when he arrives to gather the fruits of your labor, he'll often make offhand, ominous statements about what's happening in the world outside, or even your own mysterious past.Who are you really, and what exactly are you enabling with your green thumb? That's the question that lingers over your peaceful daily routine of weeding and watering, and if you're a good enough gardener, perhaps you'll learn the truth.A Good Gardener was originally made for the Ludum Dare 32 competition by Ian Endsley and Carter Lodwick, the creators of the charming sleepover game Little Party. It's is available for $5 on Mac, Windows and Linux, though the developers note that if this "too high a price for you at the moment, please email us and we'd be happy to send you a download code for free."https://youtu.be/skb2Q3IA3_s

Yasuomi Hirai, 28, allegedly hid in a drain under a Kobe, Japan sidewalk grate to peep up the skirts of women as they stepped over. (more…)

This week, our partnership with Critical Distance brings us writing on witch folklore, the intimate language of games, and a lost design doc made by Carl Sagan. (more…)

Law and the Multiverse uses comics and movies to explain the law; today they turn their hands to the evidence that Batman provides to Commissioner Gordon, and how district attorneys like Harvey Dent would be constrained in using that evidence to prosecute the crooks that Batman helped catch. (more…)