As spotted at the Cheltenham Whole Foods by Manny Brown.

A beautiful exchange between returning starman Major Tim and a presumably tired and unprepared interviewer.

Since 2006, Net Neutrality activists have been warning that a non-Neutral internet will be an invitation to ISPs to create "plans" where you have to choose which established services you can access, shutting out new entrants to the market and allowing the companies with the deepest pockets to permanently dominate the internet. (more…)

When the wind is blowing, the great plains could generate enough power to supply all of America, but storing and moving energy to supply those places where the wind isn't blowing, the sun isn't shining and the tide isn't coming in is a significant technological challenge that we're still figuring out. (more…)

The Youth Court of Pearl, Mississippi has been shut down and its judge, John Shirley (also a Republican Party activist) has been forced to resign after widespread disapproval of his decision to bar a mother from seeing her 4-month-old baby for 14 months over her unpaid court fees. (more…)

Yesterday, the Catalonian parliament declared independence from Spain; today, the central government in Madrid made good on its promise to impose direct rule on the region, firing the top tier of the government and the chiefs of the police force; Josep Lluís Trapero Álvarez, chief of the regional police force (Mossos d’Esquadra) has been charged with sedition for refusing to block polling places during the independence referendum earlier this week. (more…)

"So um.. yeah.. I attempted to turn myself into Betty Boop, if she was a brown girl!" Ellarie's daughter recognized her immediately, so it definitely worked.Here's a "before" shot for comparison. Ellarie does super-cute videos with her daughter Yoshido, too.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgSMsEidZtA• BETTY BOOP MAKEUP TUTORIAL Brown/Dark Skin Friendly (YouTube / Ellarie)

If your dog looks like a mop, you can clean up at Halloween contests. Covington, Kentucky's Mainstrasse Paw-Rade had many worthy entries, but Keki the Hungarian Puli getting pushed around in a mop bucket was the crowd favorite. (more…)

André Bergs created this short digital comic titled Protanopia. This short video hints at the possibilities of storytelling in electronic comics. (more…)

https://youtu.be/B9cjO4S17JoHere's the same video, with the original music replaced by a Radio Disney style version of the song:https://youtu.be/mPxsYiwxWnII like them both!

What happens when you tap on a screen pretending to be a shark aquarium with signs that say "Touch at your risk"? For one bold gentleman, who decided to take a risk and tapped away at the screen, the fake shark attack at the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. gave him such a shock he flew back, landed on his butt, grabbed his chest, and opened his mouth as if he were about to scream. According to Huffington Post:

Watching this video makes the 1980s seem like a long, long time ago.

If you have a kid in the house who is curious about programming (or if you are curious yourself), I suspect you'll like the Raspberry-Pi based Kano Computer Kit. It's on sale for $120 and the only thing you need is an HDMI monitor or TV. It's fun to snap the computer together and the programming tutorials for Python and Javascript are excellent. The quality of everything Kano does is top notch. I wish they made laptops - I'd buy one of those, too.Kano also offers computer kit complete with a monitor. It includes a battery, is portable and operates like a regular machine, enabling the use of apps including YouTube, WhatsApp and others. It's $250 and available directly from Kano.

Astronomers have discovered what seems to be the first "interstellar object" speeding through our solar system at 15.8 miles per second. Discovered October 19 with the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope, the object, dubbed A/2017 U1, is less than a quarter-mile in diameter. While scientists say it's most likely an asteroid or perhaps a comet from elsewhere in our galaxy, they can't be certain of its composition or where it may have come from until they collect more telescope data. (Members of UFO cults, please report for duty.) From NASA:

I've never heard of NXIVM. According to Wikipedia, it is "a pyramid selling organization centered on the provision of classes and seminars that encourage clients to pursue a path of personal and professional development. Branding and the "collateral" collection of personal information and/or pictures are recognized parts of the "initiation" into the NXIVM experience." It was co-founded in 1998 by a man named Keith Raniere. Recently a group of women said that they'd been traumatized by medical doctors who belonged to the group. NXIVM says, "This story might be a criminal product of criminal minds who, in the end, are also hurting the victims of the story."From Time:

https://youtu.be/KOtmkIFsEAEIn "The Haribo Check," aired on German public broadcast ARD, a documentary team audits Haribo's supply chain and finds "modern day slaves" in Brazil working to harvest carnauba wax, a key ingredient in the sweets: the plantations pay $12/day, and workers (including children) sleep out of doors, drink unfiltered river water, and have no access to toilets, under conditions that a Brazilian Labor Ministry official called "modern-day slavery." (more…)

The Sex Pistols' seminal punk masterpiece "Never Mind the Bollocks" was unleashed forty years ago tomorrow. Over at Rolling Stone, Johnny "Rotten" Lydon and original bassist Glen Matlock break down the album track-by-track:

On the latest Webby Podcast, my pal and Webbys exec director David-Michel Davies has a rollicking and provocative conversation with the great activist lawyer Lawrence Lessig. In 2014, Lessig won the Webby Awards' Lifetime Achievement Award and damn he deserved it. Listen:

Scotty Allen is a hacker who has a videos series called of Strange Parts. In one video, he showed how he built a working iPhone by buying individual components at electronics markets in China. In his second video he added a 3.5mm headphone jack to an iPhone 7. In his most recent video he talks about how much it cost him to make a iPhone from parts, and answers a few more questions his viewers have been asking. My only complaint is that he doesn't make videos often enough.https://youtu.be/leFuF-zoVzAhttps://youtu.be/utfbE3_uAMA

American households throw away a lot of food: sometimes it's spoiled, sometimes it's past its "sell-by" date (but still good), sometimes it's blemished, and sometimes it's just an unappetizing leftover. (more…)

Juice Media is a company whose "Honest Government Adverts" Youtube series lampoon both the Australian government's decisions and the way it promotes them. Juice's videos are very funny, and very, very obviously parodies (they spell "Australian" wrong!). (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuwIk_G_lnYDays after the Spanish central government announced its plan to impose direct rule on Catalonia, deposing the elected regional government, the Catalonian government has declared independence, citing the outcome of a referendum earlier this month in which Spanish police fired rubber bullets and administered ferocious, unprovoked beatings against people heading to the polls. (more…)

Don't chase Glenda Glitterpoop the unicorn ($41, Amazon). Instead, squeeze it, transforming its beatific unicorn face into a snarling monster. It's washable, too, so you can squeeze it again and again!

Pesco wrote about Coil's unreleased Hellraiser soudtrack in 2011; The Quietus interviewed Stephen Thrower, who talked of it and other things.

Sean Ohlenkamp and Rob Popkin spent years creating this remarkable stop-motion animation made of carved pumpkins. Even the soundtrack is made of pumpkins. (more…)

Matt Shirley (better known via Instagram as mattsurelee) tries to make a whiteboard chart every day, with oft-delightful results. (more…)

The Pascal Press Coffee Mug and Portable Brewer makes coffee in about a minute, and keeps it warm throughout your entire morning. It's currently available in the Boing Boing Store for $35.(more…)

Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiaba planned to sail from Hawaii to Tahiti last spring. They ran into engine trouble in late May, and were eventually rescued by the Navy on October 25, 900 miles southeast of Japan. (more…)

In 1975, Thelma Ross of UCLA's parapsychology lab gifted David Bowie a Kirlian photography machine to capture images of peoples' "auras." This machine generates a high-voltage field to a photographic plate resulting in a glowing corona discharge image of whatever is positioned on the plate. The color, shape, and intensity of the image is affected by myriad factors, from humidity to how well the object is grounded to, or, in the case of people, the amount of oil and sweat on the skin. But of course Bowie was into the occult and other high weirdness so the possibility of photographing one's "aura" appealed to him. From the Daily Grail:

Colin Furze turned a briefcase into a gas-fueled portable fireplace. Seems that it would be impractical, inefficient, and possibly rather dangerous, but still stately and impressive.

"Oh darn." (via r/ContagiousLaughter)

70 or so South American animators were assembled by Brazilian animator Ivanildo Soares to recreate a 1961 Woody Woodpecker short, "The Bird Who Came to Dinner."It's a late-era Woody cartoon, and it's pretty uninspiring. But somehow it inspired these animators to reimagine the entire cartoon, individually, and in intervals of only a few seconds that are weird, creative, and jarring. The soundtrack is exactly the same, but every cel has been replaced, in very diverse styles.Here is the original 1961 cartoon.[vimeo 66482207 w=640 h=480]The Bird Who Came To Dinner - YouTube from Marcelo Glauco on Vimeo.And here is the new South American twist. It's pretty fun to watch.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH4Fag8WrNw&w=560&h=315]What spurred these animators to this project? I can't seem to find the answer, but it may have something to do with this: Like France's inexplicable love for Jerry Lewis, and the theory that "Germans Love David Hasselhoff," South Americans apparently love Woody Woodpecker.via Mark Evanier and Cartoon Brew

Ethan Persoff will be speaking about the John Wilcock comic at The New School's Parsons School of Design, on November 7.Visit Scott Marshall's website at http://scottmarshall.org.

The latest Gallup poll reveals that more Americans than ever support the legalization of marijuana for recreational use. This is bad news for the private prison industry, which poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Trump's campaign fund in the hope that weed foe Attorney General Jeff Sessions will lock up millions of mild-mannered dope smokers. He'll try anyway, but he'll have a fight on his hands.From Gallup News:

This 1992 behind-the-scenes footage of a Scorpion motion capture session from the making of Mortal Kombat could easily be a piece of absurdist Dada performance art. (via Uncrate)

When mainland US cities like Houston and Miami get hit by hurricanes, they rely on mutual aid deals with out-of-state and Canadian power authorities to rebuild, as hundreds of skilled maintenance workers flood in and work for free to get their grid up and running; but debt-crushed Puerto Rico is paying $300 million to Whitefish Energy, a two-person company from Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke's hometown of Whitefish, Montana. (more…)

Looking for something to illustrate a post about crunch-time in game development, I ran into this video depicting many forms of footwear (but mostly high heels) being used to crunch keyboards:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DIMiOyF-1wIt turns out there is a a vast and sprawling genre of "things crushed by heels" — mostly safe for work — on YouTube.Here's a Kiwi, getting what it deserves:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2dqhE39KW4Here's high heels crushing a laptop:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz80nrosBf0Here's four high heels, crushing two laptops:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSjU-Y-tyRM18 laptops now:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p18JwX252NQHere's high heels crushing a Honda Civic:https://youtu.be/AZvzavLDDXU?t=56sHere are toy cars, crushed under high heels:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csPztSl2TBICan you guess what's going to happen to this XBox? It's going to be crushed underheel!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGcIcRZPoSsA delicious-looking pizza, crushed:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC7vR39L1PEEven kibble is not spared:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6skpLdvjCI

In the New York Times, Jason Schreier reports on the game industry's cult of crunch: the pervasive practice of making workers put in 20-hour days, resulting in one met deadline and a many lines of low-quality code.

Free the nipple!

Master luthier John Monteleone created a series of four archtop guitars, one for each season. Anthony Wilson of The Met shows how and why each sounds different than the others. (more…)

The white circles in this gif travel in a straight line across the diameter of the black circle. In the process, they accelerate toward the center and decelerate away with the velocity of a swinging pendulum. (more…)

In 1940, Germany was sending vital telegrams through neutral Sweden using a sophisticated cipher, and it fell to mathematician Arne Beurling to make sense of the secret messages. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the outcome, which has been called "one of the most remarkable success stories in the history of cryptanalysis."We'll also learn about mudlarking and puzzle over a chicken-killing Dane.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

I've started using this Wahoo Tickr to track heart rate as I ride my spinning bike. (more…)

More than 30 women have accused Harvey Weinstein of rape or sexual abuse, another 200+ women have claimed sexual assault by writer-director James Toback, but only the National Enquirer, following a “12-month investigation” into Hollywood sex crimes, can reveal that Halle Berry “walked arm in arm” with an unnamed alleged sex harasser.Arm in arm? Is that seriously the worst abuse the Enquirer could dig up? Apparently. Sandra Bullock “was pursued” by a predatory director, Jessica Alba “was cast” in an alleged sex abuser’s movie, and Jennifer Aniston “enjoyed success with a powerful executive.”Wow. How’s that for blowing the lid off Hollywood sleaze?The Enquirer cover headline screams “New Sex Abuse Scandal Rocks Hollywood,” but you know it’s going to be a disappointment when they can’t even be bothered to add the usually-mandatory exclamation mark at the end.Are we supposed to assume that these stars were victims of far worse indignities than the Enquirer coyly reveals? That seems unlikely, coming from a publication that has never shied away from describing sordid sexual encounters in loving detail.“Three movie moguls exposed inside!” adds the cover. “The Predators Unmasked!” And their identities are ... never revealed. "The three movie moguls remain in the shadows, but the Enquirer is aware of their identities . . ." the rag reports, presumably happy for these "unmasked" predators to continue inflicting their sleazy atrocities. No wonder Donald Trump once said that the Enquirer deserves a Pulitzer prize.The tabloids continue grabbing the moral low ground this week, led by the Globe cover proclaiming: “Michael J. Fox Miracle Cure!” and promising his “big Hollywood comeback!” In a cynical piece of gross exploitation, the Globe correctly notes that there have been advances in treatment for Parkinson’s disease, and combines that with a quote in which Fox says: “I kind of stumbled onto a new combination of meds for dyskinesia” – an abbreviated misquote from Fox’s interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC News in May 2012. From this five-year-old quote they fabricate the illusion that Fox has been cured, beneath the headline “Miracle!” in letters over two inches high. Classy.Actress Valerie Harper, battling cancer, has “six months to live” according to the Globe, which should make her happy, because on May 11, 2016 the Enquirer gave her just three months to live.William Shatner is this week’s victim of the Globe team of "Guess Your Weight" experts, who report that Star Trek alum William Shatner, tipping the scales at precisely 303 pounds – and not an ounce more or less – is “Fighting to Walk.” He reportedly took advantage of a wheelchair to be ferried to a plane at JFK airport, which hardly means he’s incapable of walking. He rides his horses regularly, and is poised to stage his one-man show in Missouri on October 27 and 29. You just can’t let the paparazzi catch you sitting down.Gladiator star Russell Crowe is another target of the tabloid weight police, having reportedly packed on 74 pounds – because the Enquirer knows what a 75-pound weight gain looks like, and Crowe is definitely 16 ounces shy of that – and supposedly “docs fear disaster!” The Enquirer has even found “one shocked doctor” who is “warning the formerly hunky matinee idol to diet – or face death!” Right.Just like Carnie Wilson, who the Enquirer claims “has ballooned up to 300 pounds – again!” as unnamed doctors “warn that Carnie, 49, is courting death!” Yes, it’s been that kind of week in the tabloids – everyone’s going to die.So is the Goldman family, evidently, who won a $33.5 million wrongful death lawsuit against O.J. Simpson for the 1994 slaying of their son Ron Goldman. Both the Enquirer and the Globe report that Simpson offered a former fellow jailhouse inmate $100,000 “to knock off Ron Goldman’s family.” This allegation comes from Vernon Nelson, who reportedly shared a jail cell with O.J. between 2015 and 2016, and who has since supplied several dubious stories about Simpson to the tabloids, presumably in exchange for some financial compensation – yet never before mentioned this murder-for-hire allegation. It’s impressive how Nelson keeps remembering new information from his time behind bars with Simpson. Let’s hope he keeps remembering new details for years to come.It doesn’t get much better at the glossy end of the market with Us magazine’s cover claiming that Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton are “Trying For Baby!” The magazine takes us "Inside Their Secret Struggle,” as an unnamed “insider” alleges that the couple is discussing surrogacy. Because that’s the sort of thing that Hollywood insiders always know. Us also tells us that Jennifer Garner, finally extricated from husband Ben Affleck, is “ready for love.” Aren’t we all?It’s hard to argue with Us mag’s Kardashian headline: “Khloé – Boy or Girl?” Probably.People magazine devotes its cover to This is Us star Mandy Moore going from "Heartbreak to Happiness." A hit TV show and an engagement to wed will do that to you.Fortunately we have Us mag’s crack investigative team to tell us that Whitney Port wore it best (but barely, winning by only 51-49 over Jamie Chung), that Dancing with the Stars castmate Jenna Johnson has “an unhealthy obsession with guacamole” (and what would be a healthy obsession with guacamole?), that American Horror Story: Cult actress Leslie Grossman carries a face massager, organic lollipops and a one cent coin in her Chanel purse, and that the stars are just like us: they eat late-night snacks, fold laundry, push luggage and read books – though not all at the same time.Leave it to the National Examiner to reveal the sighting of a “giant flying saucer” that appeared in the sky above Maui, Hawaii. This close encounter apparently was witnessed by “James Vituscka, an investigative journalist in New York City.” Could that possibly be the same James Vituscka whose LinkedIn page describes him as “Senior Reporter at RadarOnline,” the online outlet for the National Enquirer? What are the odds? We couldn’t ask for a more reliable witness.Onwards and downwards . . .

Cast iron is elegant, simple, and truly an old tool that still works. One of the most beautiful and functional cast iron pieces I’ve found is the waffle iron. Restoring them used to be a real chore, until I found a shortcut. (more…)

Epson has taken a page from HP's dirty-tricks playbook to ensure that no one can compete with them by selling ink at affordable prices. (more…)

We Want You in NYC is a group of civic hackers who believe in using technology to improve people's lives; they've launched a provocative campaign aimed at disillusioned Silicon Valley techies who are tired of working on products that are "designed to kidnap our--and our kids’--attention, only to maximize profits" and want to help "large segments of society to participate in the economic benefits of technology innovation." (more…)

Webflow's history of the web is a Bayeaux Tapestry of obsolete virtues and current vices, a superimposition of new and old bad things. It's a clever and very 2017 way to market a web design app that lets normal people keep making worthwhile mistakes on the web -- a gateway to free expression -- as it becomes increasingly technical and forbidding.I'm startled by how comfortingly, reliably minimal the very early stuff was. Even the lurid GIF explosion in late 1990s! Simple technology made even a terrible mess accessible.