Boing Boing

Political art collective INDECLINE (previously) create provocative works. Their latest repurposes a gold ore processing facility on the Mojave National Preserve that was closed in 1994 and declared a Superfund site. (more…)

Last winter, Dante de Kort -- an eight-year-old boy who lives in central Arizona -- found a dead collared peccary, a wild pig-like animal, near his house. He set up a motion-controlled camera nearby, and over the next ten days, was surprised to discover footage of the peccary's herd returning to visit their dead herd-member, over and over.When he wrote up his findings in a school science-fair presentation, it caught the attention of local biologist Mariana Altricher. It looked like the wild pecarries were in mourning, which was surprising: Scientists have seen grief-like behavior in animals like elephants, dolphins and primates, which are known for their high level of intelligence. But never in these creatures, as National Geographic reports:Having studied the social, pig-like mammals for years, Altrichter knew how tightly bonded peccaries could be. But she'd never witnessed herd members return to a body repeatedly ...“It was pretty amazing because it wasn’t just an immediate reaction and then they moved on—it went on for 10 days,” says Altrichter, chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Peccary Specialist Group. [snip]In the videos, the peccaries pay close attention to the body, nuzzling, biting, sniffing, and staring at it. They slept next to the carcass, and even tried to lift it by wedging their snouts under the body and pushing upward.And when a pack of coyotes approached their fallen peer, the herd chased them away. “It really surprised me that they would stand up to the coyotes,” says de Kort, noting the peccaries were outnumbered.Altricher used the video evidence to write a scientific paper -- "Collared peccary (Pecari tajacu) behavioral reactions toward a dead member of the herd" -- that lists de Kort as its lead author.Picture via Wikimedia

In 1952, the U.S. military packed a sleeping bag in a tin that looks like a giant can of SPAM. Fast forward 65 years to when Taras Kul decided to open it, and he does not disappoint. (more…)

David Chapman writes about how he's spent the last year "navigating the medical maze on behalf of my mother, who has dementia." His key observation? The American health-care system isn't a system at all. Or to put it another way, US health-care no longer demonstrates systematicity. If want to send a package with Fedex, they have an excellent system in place that ferries your parcel from point A to point B. They know what's going on inside their complex system of many moving parts. Fedex also has a simple user interface, which is another crucial property of good systems: To use Fedex, you don't need to call your friend with clout who can "get you in". You just call Fedex.The health-care system displays none of these properties. It may possess formidable amounts of medical tech, but there's almost no formal information flow, so access to anything requires a doctor wielding mafia-like connections. As Chapman notes ...It’s like one those post-apocalyptic science fiction novels whose characters hunt wild boars with spears in the ruins of a modern city. Surrounded by machines no one understands any longer, they have reverted to primitive technology.Except it’s in reverse. Hospitals can still operate modern material technologies (like an MRI) just fine. It’s social technologies that have broken down and reverted to a medieval level.Systematic social relationships involve formally-defined roles and responsibilities. That is, “professionalism.” But across medical organizations, there are none. Who do you call at Anthem to find out if they’ll cover an out-of-state SNF stay? No one knows.What do you do when systematicity breaks down? You revert to what I’ve described as the “communal mode” or “choiceless mode.” That is, “pre-modern,” or “traditional” ways of being.Working in a medical office is like living in a pre-modern town. It’s all about knowing someone who knows someone who knows someone who can get something done. Several times, I’ve taken my mother to a doctor who said something like: “She needs lymphedema treatment, and the only lymphedema clinic around here is booked months in advance, but I know someone there, and I think I can get her in next week.” Or, “The pathology report on this biopsy is only one sentence, and it’s unsigned. The hospital that faxed it to me doesn’t know who did it. I need details, so I called all the pathologists I know, and none of them admit to writing it, so we are going to need to do a new biopsy.”(Illustration via the CC-licensed stream of Hucky)

I have never once asked myself what would happen to my vehicle if I poured liters of Coca-Cola into its tank. But YouTuber TechRax did. Watch as he fills his 2003 BMW 325i wagon with Coke and then drives it. I have no words.(The Fresh Toast)

Playground compiles 2,000 Google Earth images of American football fields, then plays them alphabetically at a speed where they become hypnotic. (more…)

Let's face it: Not all of us were born with the literary acumen of T.S Eliot, but that's no excuse to send off typo-laden emails and unclear messages. With Grammarly, you can step up your writing game and ensure your correspondence goes out grammatically sound and typo-free every time. A 1-year premium subscription is available in the Boing Boing Store for half off.Think of Grammarly as a tough-love editing tool. It corrects hundreds of grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes while also catching contextual errors, improving your vocabulary, and suggesting style improvements — all without you having to lift a finger. That way, you can focus on getting your point across while Grammarly cleans up your work. What's more, Grammarly allows you to enable genre-specific writing style checks and even checks for plagiarism, which comes in handy when you're scrambling to finish that term paper.Now, you can sign up for a year of Grammarly Premium for $69.98.

Anders Kvernberg, aka PisseGuri82, created this lovely map of ten of the world's shortest borders. Here's the full-size version. (more…)

Standards Manual is one of the greatest recent projects in archival graphic design. Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth painstakingly recreate notable graphics standards manuals from NASA, the EPA, the American Bicentennial, and the New York Transit Authority. Next up is Identity: Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, an overview of the iconic design firm behind many logos still in use today. (more…)

Tina Johnson accused Roy Moore of sexually assualting her in 1991, when she was 28, making her a rare adult to be preyed upon by the delusional pedophile mall-crawler. (more…)

Goop is Gwyneth Paltrow's life-threatening, wallet-flensing empire of woo, home to smoothie dust, vulva steaming, rocks you keep in your vagina, and a raft of rebadged products that are literally identical to the garbage Alex Jones sells to low-information preppers. (more…)

Damascus steel is renowned for its use in ancient edge weapons and for its unusual mottle pattern. Blacksmith Dmitriy Shevchenko demonstrates his blade-making technique, since the manufacturing techniques of old were not meticulously recorded. (more…)

The rumors were true: Hulu has just ordered two seasons of new Animaniacs cartoons (previously), reviving one of the greatest animated series of all time. (more…)

From an article titled “Preventing nuclear war” in the March 1981 issue of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:An early arms control proposal dealt with the problem of distancing that the President would have in the circumstances facing a decision about nuclear war. There is a young man, probably a Navy officer, who accompanies the President. This young man has a black attache case which contains the codes that are needed to fire nuclear weapons. I could see the President at a staff meeting considering nuclear war as an abstract question. He might conclude: “On SIOP Plan One, the decision is affirmative. Communicate the Alpha line XYZ.” Such jargon holds what is involved at a distance.My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If the President ever wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is — what innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.Of course, this would only work with a president who isn't psychopathic. Some presidents might consider this as an incentive instead of a deterrent.[via Kottke]

A man in Chicago who invites homeless people to spend the night at his house during brutally cold weather must stop his generous charity immediately or face consequences. City officials threatened to condemn his house if he continues to have homeless "slumber parties."When the winter weather turned dangerously cold and not enough shelters were available, Chicago resident Greg Schiller offered his house to homeless people, making sure they didn't bring in any drugs or alcohol. He offered them food, hot drinks, movies and cots for the night. But authorities – who didn't offer any alternative solutions – didn't like it. According to NBC:Last winter, Schiller offered up his garage to area homeless, but said he was told he could no longer do so after EMTs were called to help a man with a heart condition. That’s when he had the idea to move them to his basement – complete with all the activities needed to consider them simply “slumber parties.”Schiller believed city code allowed for slumber parties, but officials said there are "sleeping regulations" for basements and Schiller's basement doesn't meet those requirements...Schiller said city officials and police officers came to his home with a warrant Tuesday and went into his basement. There, he said they found his ceiling height too low and windows too high and too small to be an egress.“They shut me down and said I have 24 hours to return my basement to storage and take down - I have several cots with sleeping bags for everybody – or they’ll condemn the house.” Yep, those hazardous low ceilings and high windows do sound threatening – good thing authorities have the good sense to send people outside in below-zero temperatures to do their sleeping.Image: George Hodan

Roy Moore, who still thinks God wants him to be a senator despite the fact that his opponent Doug Jones was sworn in yesterday, has a new problem to deal with: the woman who says Moore molested her when she was 14 has filed a defamation lawsuit against him. From Time:Leigh Corfman filed the lawsuit Thursday. The suit says Moore and his campaign defamed her and made false statements as they denied the accusations in the midst of the U.S. Senate race in Alabama.Corfman says Moore sexually abused her when she was 14 and then “called me a liar and immoral when I publicly disclosed his misconduct.”

For his "Existence of" project, photographer Eiji Ohashi captured lonely-looking vending machines out in the weather around Japan. (more…)

Nebraska State Senator Paul Schumacher [R-22] [(402) 471-2715] has proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would create 36-square-mile regions in the state where corporations would enjoy up to 99 years of sovereignty, with "no city or state taxes and no local or state regulations." (more…)

This delightfully impractical gadget looks complicated, but can a price be put on the value of serving eggs with star-shaped yolks? (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcQZAzDVTlASebastian Tomczak, who blogs his fascination with sound and technology at little-scale.blogspot.com, reports that "My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims!"The culprit appears to be YouTube's hapless and hostile contentID system, which automatically matches portions of different videos, makes stupid conclusions about intellectual property, then invites corporate customers to "claim" and monetize other people's work as their own.https://twitter.com/littlescale/status/949032404206870528Owning white noise today are "White Noise Sleep Therapy", "El Muelle Records", "Rachel Conwell" and "Silent Knights."

Michael Wolff's book about Trump, featuring treason accusations from former ally Steve Bannon and reports of the president's dementia, is being released early. Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House can be bought immediately at Amazon."Due to unprecedented demand," the book about President Trump's White House by Michael Wolff will be released Friday, four days ahead of schedule, according to the book's publisher. The announcement comes hours after President Trump's personal lawyer issued a cease and desist letter over "Fire and Fury: Inside Trump's White House" to Wolff and Wolff's publisher, Henry Holt and Company. Wolff, too, confirmed the early on-sale date on Twitter.Wolff provides a wealth of new details about the chaos in the Oval Office. Among the revelations:-- What President Trump’s staff really thinks of him-- What inspired Trump to claim he was wire-tapped by President Obama-- Why FBI director James Comey was really fired-- Why chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner couldn’t be in the same room-- Who is really directing the Trump administration’s strategy in the wake of Bannon’s firing-- What the secret to communicating with Trump is-- What the Trump administration has in common with the movie The ProducersEvidently, Trump's threats were to no avail.Previously: Bannon: Trump Jr and Kushner meeting with Russians was "treasonous"

Five months after learning of the devastating Spectre and Meltdown bugs, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold off more than $39,000,000 worth of his Intel stock, all he was permitted to liquidate. (more…)

This 101-year-old knows how to have fun. She also throws a lot better than I do.This man caught his 101-year-old mother playing in the snow and making a snowball on camera and it is the sweetest reminder that it is the simple pleasures in life that make us happy.Armand Foisy from Lillooet lives with his wife and his old mom Albina. Armand says that it is amazing how Albina’s strength and joy of living is contagious. She laughs at everything and is so giving. Way to live your life, sweet lady!It is good that Armand keeps his camera around in order to capture the special moments like this. It was snowing outside so Armand decided to take his elderly mother for a ride and give her the joy of a lifetime. Fortunately, the snow level was really low so they managed to pull over and stop the car in order to enjoy the snow.Watch Albina’s face expression when she is out in the snow. She is overjoyed with excitement and her story can serve as a reminded that it is the simple pleasures in life that give a special meaning to it.

I've yet to find a hinged garlic press that I love. The ones I've tried are inefficient, fragile (especially the hinge, which inevitably fails), and not that easy to clean. I end up having to peel the unused garlic from the inside of the press, and my fingers stink for days. Everyone has their opinion about crushing garlic - my top choice is Joseph Joseph Rocker Garlic Crusher, Press, and Mincer ($15). (more…)

In a Washington Examiner op-ed published this morning, two conservative lawmakers thought it best that Jeff Sessions resign, saying, "It's time for Jeff Sessions to go." This comes on the same day that Republican Senator Cory Gardner "torches Sessions over pot reversal." But back to the matter at hand...According to CNN:Mark Meadows, Freedom Caucus chair, and Jim Jordan, a member who sits on the oversight and judiciary committees in the US House of Representatives, wrote the op-ed for the Washington Examiner, and criticized Sessions' handling of the department's investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election."Attorney General Jeff Sessions has recused himself from the Russia investigation, but it would appear he has no control at all of the premier law enforcement agency in the world," they wrote. "It is time for Sessions to start managing in a spirit of transparency to bring all of this improper behavior to light and stop further violations."The Republican congressmen charged that "if Sessions can't address this issue immediately, then we have one final question needing an answer: When is it time for a new attorney general? Sadly, it seems the answer is now."Read the full story here.Image: Gage Skidmore

A resourceful Pennsylvania man had a lot of snow to shovel, so he made his own snowplow with a lawnmower and a 50-inch HDTV box. Works like a charm!Via CNN

Creative writing can be a sensitive process, which is why it pays to ensure you have every edge available when it comes to churning out that screenplay or novel. Storyist for Mac gives you complete control over manuscripts and screenplays. It helps you tap into elite annotation power, high-level story viewing, and many more tools to streamline your writing projects, and it's available in the Boing Boing Store for $19.With Storyist, you can work off intuitive templates for manuscripts and screenplays or even customize a manuscript to your stylistic liking. You can readily implement images, comments, spell checking, smart quotes, headers, footers, and more into your work. Plus, Storyist includes tools to help you auto-complete introductions, locations, times, character names, and transitions, shaving precious time off the writing process.Optimize your creative writing potential at home and on the move with Storyist for Mac, now on sale for $19.

You could load an image up in Photoshop, reduce the color depth and fiddle with the pixel diffusion slider a bit. Or you could get Pixatool, a brilliant app completely dedicated to tuning pixelated images to the finest and most authentic details. Line and contrasts are rendered so well there's often an uncanny suggestion of hand-drawing, and the dithering smokes what mainstream painting apps offer.It's $30, with a free-of-charge demo version. There's more examples. Artists are sharing their work with the #pixatool hashtag.

Here are six new lateral thinking puzzles to test your wits and stump your friends -- play along with us as we try to untangle some perplexing situations using yes-or-no questions.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

There are tons of houses worldwide in coastal areas, and as climate change proceeds, they'll see more and more flooding. Those owners can't all afford to move. So the Buoyant Foundation Project is developing an ingenious adaptation concept: Instal floaty material to underside of the house, so when floods arrive the house rides up above the waves -- settling back down when the water recedes. It's super clever resilience engineering, retrofits existing buildings (instead of requiring new construction), and is relatively cheap to boot. The New Yorker's web site reports:A typical New Orleans shotgun house sits slightly above the ground, resting atop short piers; the researchers could, they thought, fasten a steel frame to the underside of a house and affix a set of foam buoyancy blocks. Then they could sink posts into the ground and attach them to the corners of the frame, allowing the house to rise up off the piers without floating down the street.English and her students built a full-scale prototype of the system, and in the summer of 2007 they put it to the test. They borrowed some corral panels from the College of Agriculture and built a temporary flood tank around their model amphibious home, pumping in water straight from the Mississippi River. The tank filled with two, three, four feet of water, and the house began to rise. By the time they stopped pumping, it was hovering about a foot above the piers. “It was a religious experience when it lifted off,” English recalled.The system was simple and cheap; it could be installed by two reasonably handy people without heavy equipment for between ten and forty dollars a square foot. It left a building’s appearance and structure almost unchanged, and it was more resilient than permanent elevation, which can cost two or three times as much and make a building more susceptible to wind damage. “This is not a one-size-fits-all solution,” English said, noting that the system would not provide adequate protection against high-speed waves. “But it’s an excellent solution for some circumstances.

This interesting morph is a whirlwind tour through the careers of each member of The Beatles, while together as a group and beyond. (more…)

In 1924 two British mountaineers set out to be the first to conquer Mount Everest. But they never returned to camp, and to this day no one knows whether they reached the top. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll review the case of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, which has been called "one of the greatest unsolved adventure mysteries of the 20th century."We'll also learn what to do if attacked by a bear and puzzle over the benefits of a water shortage.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

President Donald Trump has lashed out at Steve Bannon, his former campaign manager and White House strategist, following Bannon's suggestion that a Trump Tower meeting with Russians was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic."“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.”Trump continued, “Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base — he’s only in it for himself.”

The Washington Post reports that the NSA "is losing its top talent at a worrisome rate as highly skilled personnel" because of a mix of low-pay, uninspiring leaders, and a bureaucratic re-org that everyone hates. (more…)

What's more revolting than buying color-matched books by the yard to class up your room like you were some kind of Trumpish dumbass who wants people to think you read but never actually read anything? (more…)

A man who had been on a long, delayed Ryanair flight from London to Malaga, Spain couldn't take the wait for another minute. Rather than stand in a slow line to get off the plane, he opened the emergency exit door and sauntered down the wing of the plane. In the video you can hear bystanders laughing in the background.According to Time:The incident on New Year’s Day took place 30 minutes after the flight from Stansted Airport landed.The man, who has not been named but is said to be a non-Spanish citizen, was coaxed back onto the plane while police were called.Fellow passenger Fernando del Valle Villalobos, who videoed the incident, said he heard the man say he got fed up waiting...Later, he said the captain came out and asked the man why he had done it and del Valle heard him say clearly that he was sick of waiting inside. The passengers, except the man in question, were kept a further 15 minutes on the plane before being let off.

If you open up ketchup packets with your teeth, you might want to change your ways. A 41-year-old woman thought she had Crohn's disease – inflammatory bowel disease – for six years, until she underwent surgery and a doctor happened to find two small pieces of plastic that said "Heinz" in her small intestine.Once the plastic was removed from her body, her symptoms – diarrhea, fatigue, abdominal pain – went away.According to the Huffington Post:The woman thought she was living with the type of inflammatory bowel disease for a staggering six years before doctors discovered an unusual inflammatory mass which was caused by perforation due to the foreign body.“This case highlights that an inflammatory mass in the small intestine caused by the perforation of ingested foreign body can mimic Crohn’s disease,” researchers wrote in the BMJ Case Report.The woman has no memory of eating a meal in which she used ketchup packets. Image: Ben Sutherland

For months, Japan's much-vaunted manufacturing sector has been wracked by scandal after scandal, as the country's biggest corporations admit to decades of systematic fraud that started in the boardroom and went to the factory floor, with scandals hitting "Nissan Motor, Subaru, Toray Industries, Kobe Steel and Mitsubishi Materials" among others. (more…)

UK-based artisan Omid Asadi traded in his boxing gloves and engineering career to focus on his craft since leaving his native Iran: turning large leaves into beautiful carved sculptures. (more…)

The iMac Pro starts at $5k, but only it comes in Space Gray, Apple's closest offering to black. The same's true of its peripherals, which are not sold separately. If you like, you can buy a Space Gray set on eBay for $1,525 -- with an hour of bidding to go. [via @mathowie] Only the Keyboard, Mouse and Trackpad. These are the dark ones that come with the iMac Pro and cannot be bought any other way. Unused. I already have a preferred keyboard/mouse combo I chose to use for my configuration and won't be needing these.Or, just get a perfectly-decent Matias knockoff for $100. (Amazon)Update. SOLD for $1525, with no further bids.

This auto-ranging multimeter has good reviews on Amazon. It has an LCD backlight, a non-contact voltage detector, a diode check, 15 minute auto shut-down, and the probes have built-in clips. It's regularly $13, but if you use code 54GCYL5X it's just $7.78

Here's an infographic with 40 scams you should be aware of when you travel. Grifting creeps have tried pulling scams like this on me on various trips but luckily they weren't good enough at their trade to stop me from figuring out what was happening before I lost any money.The Broken CameraSomeone will ask you to take a photo of them and their group of friends. The camera won’t work, and when you go to hand it back, they will drop it can cause it to smash. The entire group will then demand money for repairs, or pickpocket you during the commotion.The Fake Takeaway MenuScam artists will slide fake takeaway menus under your hotel door, in the hope that you order from them on an evening where you don’t feel like going out. You won’t receive any food though, just a frightening bank statement after they have used your card details to make their own copy.The Getaway Taxi DriverWhen you arrive at your hotel from the airport, the taxi driver will kindly take your bags out of the trunk for you. He’ll seem in a rush though, and quickly hop back into his car and drive off as soon as possible. This is because he’s actually left one of your smaller and less memorable bags in his taxi.

Core 77's year-end roundup of "Best How-To's, Fabrication Techniques and Tool Hacks" is a fantastic grab-bag of fascinating, esoteric and useful hacks, tricks and techniques for making things better, running the gamut from building a silencer for your air compressor to weaving a Danish seating surface to fixing a Dremel tool to hacking a drill-press. (more…)

The Juicero was a $400 "juicer" that squeezed packets of DRM-locked fruit pulp, an idea so perverse that it got honorable mention in DRM's worst moments of 2017, and inspired sighs of relief when the business cratered in 2017, as evidence of the fundamental soundness of human judgment in a year plagued by serious lapses in same. (more…)

Paralys reenacts the moment a young woman falls asleep while watching a game show, only to experience sleep paralysis. (more…)

Heart-pounding snowboard footage set to the original version of "Major Tom"? Yes please! (more…)

A friend asked me to follow the flow, and write this hashtag #metoo. Cavafi, the Greek poet who lived all his life by the sea and wrote about everything but the sea, before dying he said: Let me too say something about the sea. (more…)

Wired UK created a beautiful chart to illustrate the miseries of Britain's current occupants. Debt, divorce, welfare cuts and housing prevail, but further down the threads become more tangled. Parking fines?

Marvel is launching a website that allows visitors to create their own comics using the company's pantheon of famous characters. They insist, however, that certain topics not be addressed: social issues, death, farts, and so forth. You wonder: if the trap is so obvious, why walk into it?Here are some highlights from the very long list of no-no’s:“Content that could frighten or upset young children or the parents of young children.”Prescription drugs or over-the-counter medication, vitamins, and dietary supplements.Contraceptives“Suggestive or revealing images,” including “bare midriffs” “Sensationalism,” which is not defined but elucidated with the examples “killer bees, gossip, aliens, scandal, etc.” “Obscenity, bad or offensive language” or “proxies for bad or offensive language.” E.g. no “X@#%!” “Noises related to bodily functions.” No politics, including “alternative lifestyle advocacies” Death “Misleading language” “A copy or parody of current or past Marvel advertising creative” Any “controversial topics,” including “social issues” Double entendres Any amusement parks that aren’t Disney amusement parks Any movie studios that aren’t “affiliated with Marvel” GunsI can't wait to play with this.https://twitter.com/alexdecampi/status/946554968504438798

The Republican tax plan -- more than a 1,000 pages covered in last-minute scribbled annotations and pastebombs, passed without any substantial debate or analysis -- is a fucking mess. (more…)