Adapted by Josh Costello from the novel by Cory Doctorow/September 15, 16, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 2017/Directed by Ryan Whitfield and Jason Green (more…)

This left me very satisfied. (ahem)(via Laughing Squid)

Quindar is a fantastically far out project to remix NASA's weird and wonderful sound and film archives into a new audiovisual experience of electronic music and video cut-ups. Created by my friends Mikael Jorgensen of Wilco and art historian/curator James Merle Thomas, Quindar's recordings and live performances are a wonderful hyperreal trip into the human history of space exploration. Indeed, their just-released album "Hip Mobility" is essential listening for all Earthlings jonesing for a new kind of cosmic kick. I recommend going for the stellar vinyl package, created by Lawrence Azerrad/LADdesign who partnered with Tim Daly and I on the Voyager Golden Record: 40th Anniversary Edition.Below, have a listen to Quindar's Hip Mobility and also hear an interview with Mikael and James on the latest episode of NPR's Science Friday.

The overwhelming majority of Americans think medical marijuana should be legal. Even Donald Trump pretended to be in favor of states' rights to make their own cannabis laws when he was campaigning. That hasn't stopped attorney general Jeff Sessions from trying to revive the disastrous drug war policies of the 80s and cracking down on the devil weed. Today, he was soundly defeated by the Senate Appropriations Committee, which voted in favor of a renewing a spending rider that blocks the Justice Department from interfering with state medical marijuana laws.(more…)

In 2005 a young man from England created a website called The Million Dollar Homepage and sold advertising space on it. The page is a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid (1,000,000 pixels) and he sold the pixels for $1 each. The page has 2,816 links in it. A recent analysis of all the links reveal that only 1,780 are still reachable.From Harvard's Library Innovation Lab:

I was once invited to attend an event in Dubai, but after I read stories of people going to prison there for stupid reasons (like a man from Britain who received a four year prison sentence when customs officers found a microscopic speck of cannabis stuck to the bottom of his shoe, and a another man who went to prison for "possession of three poppy seeds left over from a bread roll he ate at Heathrow Airport") I bowed out.Here's another reason you might want to think twice about going to Dubai: you can get jailed for having sex if you aren't married.From Gulf News:

Actor James Franco has a new YouTube channel in which he raps about philosophy with Eliot Michaelson, a philosophy lecturer at King's College London, and other experts on such heady matters as imagination (above), metaphor, and the ethics of abortion (below). The special guest on these episodes is Princeton University philosophy professor Elizabeth Harman.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5EmZh_Obi8https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5SQnQjryzI

No wonder Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David did such a great job impersonating presidential candidate Bernie Sanders last year on Saturday Night Live. The two are apparently related, perhaps as distant cousins.According to NBC News:

Doggosaurus Rex: Origins.(more…)

The US Naval Research Labs's CICADA (Close-In Covert Autonomous Disposable Aircraft) microdrones are designed to be dropped in bulk from a flying aircraft. Once airborne, the drones use autopilot to stabilize and then GPS and fins to steer to the intended location. Apparently they can glide into a safe landing within 15 feet of their targets. From IEEE Spectrum:

In Paper Girls, the celebrated comics creator Brian K Vaughan (Saga, Y: The Last Man, etc) teams up with Cliff Chiang to tell a story that's like an all-girl Stranger Things, with time-travel. (more…)

In the 1970s and 1980s, Legendary musician Fela Kuti pioneered the sound of Afrobeat, an entrancing amalgam of West African highlife music, jazz, and American funk. Among his fans, he counts David Byrne, Brian Eno, and Thom Yorke. Fela was also a lifelong social activist and organizer who served time, a "prisoner of conscience" according to Amnesty International. One biographer famously described Fela as a "superstar, singer, musician, Panafricanist, polygamist, mystic, legend."Above, Jean Jacques Flori and Stephen Tchal-Gadjieff's excellent concise documentary about Fela, shot in 1982. It's aptly titled "Music is the Weapon." From the film description:

China's Xinjiang province is home to the Uyghur ethnic/religious minority, whose fights for self-determination have been brutally and repeatedly crushed by the Chinese state: now, people in Xinjiang are being required to install mobile spyware on their devices. (more…)

A strategy memo circulated around the time of a Koch network retreat sets out a five-part plan to pressure the Trump regime to lower corporate taxes and pass other policies favorable to corporate elites and the investor class. (more…)

Brian H writes, "Cartoonist Mike Diana is the first artist in the US to receive a criminal conviction for artistic obscenity. Here he recounts (MP3) the trial that barred him from drawing for three years and has made it impossible for him to return to Florida nearly 25 years later." (more…)

This woman seems sad to find out that her idea to patent paper trays full of nachos and beer as an improvement over the catcher's mitt was not good.

The Kansas City Star reports that a crane that was removing a sign tipped over. It severed power lines and crushed a pickup truck. No one was injured.

Conservative Iranian state television presenter Azadeh Namdari makes a big deal about how important it is for women to obey an Islamic dress code. But someone took a video of her drinking a bottle of beer and not wearing a hijab while she was on vacation in Switzerland. When the video was made public, Namdari said the video was taken immediately after her scarf fell off. She didn't explain how the bottle of beer ended up in her hand. I reckon a squirrel in the tree overhead dropped it she accidentally caught it. Then she took a sip to find out what it was. Since alcoholic drinks are forbidden in Islam, she definitely spit it out.(more…)

This eraser wheel is wonderful. It removes old, weathered decals in seconds.I attached this eraser to my cordless drill and effortlessly rubbed some very old and bad looking decals off my VW Van. I replaced them with something closer to my heart.I cleaned up with rubbing alcohol after removing the decal.ABN Decal Eraser Wheel Pinstripe Removal Kit via Amazon

Paris, France is making good on its promise to reopen long polluted waterways to bathers.

I bought some of these 7W Ultrabright mini LED flashlights a while back and they are my favorites. They are surprisingly bright (it has a bright/dim/strobe setting) and a zoom feature to focus the beam on a small area or spread it out. A twin-pack is just $9. It uses either a single AA battery or a 3.6 volt type 14500 Battery (rechargeables are cheap).

Trump's plan seems to be: 1) force Sessions to resign. 2) appoint Giuliani to be attorney general during the Senate recess session as a way to avoid the Senate confirmation process. 3) ask Giuliani to fire Mueller, who is investigating bribery, extortion, and money laundering in the Russo-Trump empire. 4) profit!(more…)

The American Psychoanalytic Association told its 3,500 members that it was dropping a long-honored rule against making public comments "on the mental state of public figures — even the president," reports Stat.Snip:

Machine learning companies are making big bucks selling opaque, secretive sentencing algorithm tools to America's court systems: the vendors of these systems claim that they are too sophisticated to explain, and use that opacity to dismiss critics who say the algorithms oversentence black and poor people. (more…)

These jumbo-sized crayons are called "Hamiltones" because each one of them humorously reference the hit musical, Hamilton. There are punny ones like the "Alexander Hamil-tan" and the "Maroon Where it Happens," and 10 others. Each pack is $13.95 over at the Theatre Nerds Swag Shop. If colored pencils are more your thing, they've got a Hamiltones set of those too.(Cool Mom)

Retiree Adi Astl just wanted some stairs down a well-trod embankment in his local park. The city told him it would cost between $65,000 and $150,000, so he and a homeless guy built a nice set of stairs for about $550. Astl was then informed he violated municipal code section 608, and the stairs were ordered removed. (more…)

Ok, this year's Burning Man is going to be great. First of all, there's going to be that 40-foot tall pink flamingo. Now I'm hearing that a 20-foot long, LED-lit mutant vehicle --based on Chris Torres' popular 2011 meme Nyan Cat-- will be roving around the desert. It's a project of the Astro Cats camp who plan to serve up "toaster pastries" (I guess they can't say "Pop-Tarts") and pump out "Nyan-Cat inspired dance music" as they drive the giant space-cat around the event.The name of the vehicle? Nyan Car, of course.The Astro Cats are currently crowdfunding Nyan Car on GoFundMe. One of the pledge rewards is for a "special 'toaster pastry'" that can only be redeemed on-playa.Even if you're not a Burner, give their pitch video a watch, it's pretty spectacular.

You know all those health industry lobbyists who say that the American healthcare industry will go broke if it has to take care of the health of Americans? (more…)

Trump wants to dismantle America's labor, environmental and safety regulations, but to do so, he needs to hold hearings, post notices, collect feedback and go through the whole long, cautious process of changing agency rules for the EPA and others. (more…)

Machinist/sculptor Chris Bathgate (previously) continues his run of collaborations on small, gorgeous kinetic sculptures and fidget toys with the "Netsuke Hybrid Vessel Bead," a collaboration with Revolve Makers. (more…)

In the 1990s, Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porsche, Daimler and other German auto-makers formed a secret pact to price-fix a diesel emissions control substance called AdBlue, according to Der Spiegel, who cites memos from those meetings that VW and Daimler have sent to German competition enforcers. (more…)

The Swedish Transportstyrelsen (Transport Agency) botched its outsourcing to IBM, uploading its records to IBM's cloud and then emailing cleartext copies to marketing managers, unvetted IBM employees in the Czech Republic and others. (more…)

The UK -- like most countries -- excludes "inactive workers" (students, new parents, people who don't want a job) from its unemployment figures, but "inactive" is such a slippery concept that it can paper over huge cracks in the labor market. (more…)

Whether you're a seasoned entertainment industry veteran or a student working on your first spec script, having the right tool for the job will make a huge difference in your focus and productivity.Final Draft 10 is far and away the world’s best screenwriting software, used extensively by professional film and TV writers at top production companies like NBC, Disney, and Paramount because it makes drafting screenplays as straightforward as possible. By automatically formatting your work to comply with industry guidelines, Final Draft helps you focus on content and removes the tedium of preparing text for a read-through.Aside from ensuring that your finished script is properly paginated, this program helps you plan everything out in a piece’s early stages. The Story Map feature lets you outline and rearrange major sections, and the Beat Board helps you refine your work beat-by-beat.When writing dialogue, Final Draft 10 lets you store multiple versions of lines within the same file for easy comparisons and faster editing. You don’t even need to physically write; the desktop apps have powerful dictation capabilities when you’d rather talk it out. It supports real-time collaboration with a partner, and it guarantees that you never lose work by saving and backing everything up automatically.Final Draft 10 is available for Windows, Mac, and iOS for sketching on the go. We have licenses available for this Hollywood-approved software in the Boing Boing Store now for $149.99. You can also take an additional 15% off with coupon code, FINALDRAFT15.

These videos of a guy in Istanbul playing the piano with his kitty cat are so sweet and genuine. I can't get enough of them.His name is Sarper Duman. Play him off, keyboard cat.(more…)

Studio audiences continue to be thrilled by the giant clown with the golden voice.

Ginter Senfeldas of Cary, North Carolina, says he purchased this 1989 Dodge Ram 350 "FBI surveillance van" from a government auction site. It's apparently outfitted with vintage A/V tech, external microphones, pinholes for cameras, and other interesting modifications. Apparently when he purchased it, there were handcuffs, binoculars, "and even leftover video from an old FBI stakeout" inside.From the auction listing, details of the "interesting" features:

You don't want to be in a car that gets struck by lightning in this town. It happened to the the folks in this car, and within seconds a mob of zombies dressed in black surrounded the car and presumably devoured the occupants.

The scene: a kitchen table. It could be anywhere. A pet bird, possibly a cockatoo, stands next to box made of woven fibers. It flips open the lid of the box, revealing a kitten resting inside. The bird sees something in the box (a loose strand of fiber?), and when it makes an exploratory nip, the kitten boops the bird on the beak. The bird flips the lid back on the box, trapping the kitten inside. The gif ends.

I like the way Bec Hill translates Edith Piaf's French vocals. She simply assumes Piaf is signing in English, and writes it on a flipboard along with photos. NSFW?

This week on HOME: Stories From L.A.:The original Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in the hills above Glendale, may be best known outside California for inspiring the sledgehammer satire of the 1965 cult comedy "The Loved One." For tourists and curiosity-seekers, it's the gonzo life's work of Hubert Eaton, who memorialized himself as The Builder in the park's every corner. For the families of the people interred there, though, it's something more, and harder to joke away: A place of their own, green and quiet, and eternity-adjacent.This is the second episode of Season 5. You can catch up on the whole series at the iTunes Store. While you're there, please take a second to leave the show a rating and review. And you can subscribe right here:iTunes | Android | Email | Google Play | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

HBO's Game of Thrones continues its new season, and Boars, Gore, and Swords is here to recap all the talky and fighty events in "Stormborn". Ivan and Red cover extremely gross pot pie transitions, reunions both affecting and not, Daenarys's managerial style, and Cersei's parallels to other floundering leaders.

On August 3 in celebration of the 40th anniversary month of the Voyager interstellar mission, please join me at San Francisco's Exploratorium to experience the Voyager Golden Record with two of the brilliant minds behind it -- SETI pioneer Frank Drake and science writer Timothy Ferris.In August and September 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, on a grand tour of the solar system and beyond, into the mysteries of interstellar space. Mounted to each spacecraft is a golden phonograph record, a message to introduce our civilization to extraterrestrials, perhaps billions of years from now. Ozma Records, the label I co-founded with my friend Timothy Daly, is releasing the Voyager Golden Record as a box set of vinyl LPs so those on Earth can hear it as it was meant to be played. As our co-producer/designer Lawrence Azerrad has said, "It is the ultimate album package of the ultimate album package." (The limited edition super-deluxe Kickstarter edition will not be repressed but please keep an eye on our Twitter feed @ozmarecords for announcements from us in the next few weeks.)At the Exploratorium's August 3 After Dark event, themed around "Our Place in Space," we'll play the Voyager Record on the museum's incredible Meyer Sound system while projecting the images encoded on the disc. Then, at 8pm, Frank Drake and Timothy Ferris will join me on stage to discuss this incredible artifact that was a gift from humanity to the cosmos, but also a gift to humanity.As Carl Sagan, executive director of the original Voyager Interstellar Record project wrote, "The launching of this 'bottle' into the cosmic 'ocean' says something very hopeful about life on this planet."Our Voyager Record program is just one of several fantastic events happening at the Exploratorium that evening. Our friend Adam Savage will show off his space-inspired projects, NASA systems engineer Bobak Ferdowsi will talk about exploring planets with robots, astronomer Isabel Hawkins will deliver a how-to on viewing the upcoming solar eclipse, and much more. I hope to see you there!Our Place in Space

Airbus mounted a 360-degree camera on a rocket being launched as part of a microgravity experiment, and the result it pretty phenomenal. Watch the stages separate and the earth's curvature reveal itself as the Maxus 9 pops up through the clouds.Via Airbus:

Between Las Vegas and Reno, there is a sleeping establishment like no other. It's simply called The Clown Motel and it's been deemed "America's scariest motel." In 2014, Cory described it as follows:

People flying home from San Diego Comic-Con yesterday got a rude surprise when they spotted signs at the United check-in warning them not to put comics in their checked bags -- and most assumed it was the TSA's doing, a reasonable assumption given that the agency has been repeatedly trialling programs to search passengers' literature for exploding words for some months. (more…)

Protests are boiling over across Poland after the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) passed legislation that would allow the government to force the country's judges, all the way up to the Supreme Court, to retire, allowing them to appoint new, party-friendly judges in their place. Update: Thankfully, the president vetoed the legislation. (more…)

The Chinese government's wish-list for AI researchers is pretty ambitious: "Breakthroughs should be made in basic theories of AI, such as big data intelligence, multimedia aware computing, human-machine hybrid intelligence, swarm intelligence and automated decision-making." (more…)

A teenager discovered that the website of Budapesti Közlekedési Központ -- the public transit authority in Budapest -- would allow you to edit the price you paid for your tickets, so that purchasers could give themselves massive discounts on their travel, and when he told the authority about it, they had him arrested and issued a press-release boasting about it. (more…)