https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOjnpOyUzS0He can type numbers faster than I can read them!

The nice folks at Libro.fm supply audiobooks online and through a network of the country's best indie bookstores; all their books are DRM-free, and they have a new, snappy way of describing them: Cage-Free Audiobooks. (more…)

Get your phone to loop Madame Leota (or your favorite spooky fortune teller), stick it in a goldfish bowl with strategic black cloth covering everything except the video, and plonk the whole thing on a candle-holder: viola! (via Gameraboy) (more…)

"Charming brick bungalow on quiet street close to schools and parks. Cozy and gently lived in. Meticulously maintained. Detached cedar garage and shed with lots of parking and well kept lawn. Same owners for over 30 years! $239,900"

Jeez, what just happened here?Reporter Josh Scheinblum with a local Iowa TV station had just started an interview with Congressman Rod Blum, when, after only 1-1/2 minutes, Blum stormed out of the room.The questions were simple, such as "Today you're having your first town hall meeting since January – what are you expecting?" and "Shouldn't all Iowans have a voice at the table?" But for some reason Blum was getting tenser and tenser. And then the question that made him snap: "Would you still take donations from a Republican?""I'm done...this is ridiculous," the fragile Congressman said.The schoolchildren surrounding Blum were brought there per his request. Great role model, Blum!Click here for more details.

Wired's Rhett Allain built a rig with a laser and light sensor to study fidget spinner physics and determine how long it will spin based on the starting angular velocity. Allain's article will make a great teachable moment for my kids, as in I'll ask them to read it and explain it to me. From Wired:

Every bubble of Dognames represents a particular name. Max and Bella lead, followed by Charlie, Coco, and Rocky, and Buddy and Lucky, and so on. [via]

Damien Henry, co-inventor of Google Cardboard, trained a machine learning algorithm using footage shot from a moving vehicle and then had the machine generate this beautiful video."Graphics are 100% generated by an algorithm in one shot. No edit or post-processing," Henry writes. "Except the first one, all frames are calculated one by one by a prediction algorithm that tries to predict the next frame from the previous one."The soundtrack is the Steve Reich masterpiece "Music for 18 Musicians."

Aditya Aryanto carefully photoshopped some animals to look like adorable escapees from the world of Minecraft. [via Kottke]

Cinemagraphs turn still photographs into moving images. Armand Dijcks has taken the gorgeous wave photography of Ray Collins (previously) and turned them into hypnotic slow-mo animations. (more…)

Talk about just desserts! Troll Cakes will turn a hater's online comment into a tasty cake and mail it to said hater. Above, one they made of a classic Trump troll. (more…)

Light, fluffy, big and round ... yeah, I'm talking about pancakes. But not those flat things that look like a round napkin that you cook on a griddle, but the Japanese kind that you make with a rice cooker.Doesn’t every self-respecting household have a rice cooker? If you don’t, then you should! And here's one more nifty thing you can do with it.Get yourself a box of pancake mix plus any extra ingredients it calls for such as water, eggs, whatever.Dump it all into the removable pot from the rice cooker and give it a healthy mix.Put the pot into the rice cooker and turn it on for about 45 minutes. (Like bread baking machines, rice cookers do all the work for you.) When it’s done, turn it over onto a plate with a good shake and out comes a light fluffy blimp of a pancake.Major yum.You can also add cocoa powder and … heaven … get a chocolate pancake.It sounds nutty, I know, but it works if the evidence of success on Instagram is any indication. You can also add chunks of chocolate, fruit (blueberries or bananas), and lots more when you mix the batter. Think in terms of utter pancake debauchery—liberate your palette from those flat things the rest of America is eating.And one more thing:

Just how overblown was the media panic over ebola? This interactive chart compares media coverage of a dozen health scares, from mad cow disease to zika. (more…)

It's mushrooms to the rescue in a major study to stop bee colony collapse disorder. One culprit, parasitic varroa mites, stood out as a major threat because they were developing tolerance for many pesticides. (more…)

Adam Savage is on a tour of maker spaces around the country. He visited the Tulane School of Architecture's Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, where students are assigned real-world projects. He went to a local homeless shelter "to learn about one of the center's recent builds: an outdoor space that the class conceived, designed and built in just 16 weeks!"

Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford star in Blade Runner 2049. Ridley Scott, who directed Blade Runner in 1982 (35 years ago!), is the exec producer. It was directed by Denis Villeneuve (Arrival).

Stef Magdalinski (previously) (AKA, DJ at my wedding) writes, "I have a new music show 'Press Play. Music Comes Out,' on SF's finest community radiostation, BFF.fm. I'm only on the 4th show, and stillfinding my feet (i.e. how the controls work), but this is my first showwith a guest, Mole from old BB faves The Marseille Figs (previously), playingsome brand new tunes from his kickstarter-backed double album, The DANGER ISLAND, their first new music in over 5 years...The show goes out on bff.fm 2-4pm on Monday afternoon,archive available shortly after and at your favouritepodcast outlets soon thereafter...

There's something really odd, if not a bit eerie, about this tutorial. It's as if robots observed human beings for a few weeks, then decided to make this video on how to pluck a pubic ingrown hair.

Ryan Monahan, who reviews mattresses (and used to work for a mattress company called GhostBed), is being sued by a company called Purple Mattress. Here's a video Monahan made about the lawsuit. Monahan says he's being sued because he publicly asked why Purple mattresses have white powder, what the powder is, and whether or not it is safe to inhale.(more…)

If you have a hard time sitting on this toilet, the installer can adjust you to fit if he hasn't put away his saw yet.[via]

We got one of these Phillips Hue ($25 on Amazon) wireless dimmer switches for our bedroom about six months ago and it has not failed us once. It's not an Internet of Things gadget that requires using your smartphone to turn on a light bulb. It's just a wireless switch that you stick to your wall. The little remote can pop out of the frame if you need use it away from the wall, but we just keep it in the frame. It can control up to 10 bulbs at once. Of course, you need to use a compatible Hue bulb (About $15 each). A kit containing the bulb and the switch is $35.

I've been playing with Ableton Live's Learning Music website. It starts by showing you how to use an electronic drum kit, then moves to notes, chords, basslines, etc. You get to experiment on almost every page and see the structure of famous songs. A very cool learning resource!

FinnAndersen spotted this wonderful vintage portable TV in a dumpster. He gutted most of it and outfitted the shell with a new screen and Raspberry Pi 3 to run RetroPie. Demo video below."It can emulate everything up to and including N64/PS1/Dreamcast, with a built-in wireless XBOX controller receiver for multiplayer parties!, he writes. "It also has a digital tuner inside to watch actual television, using the original knob for channel switching."I'd love to do this to a JVC Videosphere!"I turned an old portable TV into a dedicated retro gaming system!" (Imgur)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hu4SaxqlHVo

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology attached small robots to the back of turtles and enabled the machine to steer the animal by delivering it snacks. Eventually, they hope to use similar systems to control fish and birds. The technology could lead to parasitic robot/animal "teams" for surveillance, exploration, and disaster response. From New Scientist:

Rather than knock out some teeth and drag off a passenger United Airlines style, watch this new twist on air passenger treatment when these Irish flight attendants on Ryanair find out a man, who doesn't understand English, has brought an accordion onto the plane. Luckily the passenger sitting next to him is able to translate. What comes next is astonishing.

I'll bet this Youngstown, Ohio teacher didn't expect her colleague to snap a photo as she dragged a little kid down the hallway. She was fired and is probably very sorry.Via WKBN:

At the recent Pokémon World Festival in Incheon, South Korea, a Pikachu deflated midway through a dance. Fortunately, agents specially-trained for such emergencies acted quickly and decisively. (See the action at 1:12 in the video.) (via Laughing Squid)

Jeremy McLellan posted a video to twitter that he reports was taken by a Muslim friend of his being "harassed at a Trader Joe's in Reston, VA."https://twitter.com/JeremyMcLellan/status/861096829865271296From his Facebook posting:

When Mike Mitchell noticed that Trump's chin(s) had a bit of a ranine quality, the shoops started rolling in. Behold: (more…)

It's been three years since John Oliver's amazing Net Neutrality rant brought the term "Cable Company Fuckery" into common usage, crashed the FCC's website, and delivered a neutral internet to a desperate nation. (more…)

Fruit is good for you; fruit-juice is mostly sugar and water, and what's more, getting your calories from liquids does not invoke your satiety response meaning that you stay hungry even after consuming crazy amounts of calories. (more…)

Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich made quite the entrance at the Met Gala, but it didn't get the kind of coverage as the reality TV toilet selfie. In fact, the artist had no coverage until security laid a beautiful drape across him and had him arrested. (more…)

It is always summer in Phoenix. [via]

The Klencke Atlas is a massive 350-year old bound book that has graced the entrance of the British Library maps room. Now it's being digitized with the latest technology, and the process is remarkable. (more…)

Thanks to everyone who's come out for the Walkaway tour so far! Tonight, I'll be appearing at Winnipeg's McNally Robinson bookstore, then it's off to Denver's Tattered Cover, Austin's Book People and Houston's Brazos Bookstore. (more…)

Spare a thought for poor Matt Furie, a wonderful indie comics creator whose Boys' Club comics featured a lovable frog called Pepe that was adopted by the neofascist movement (the so-called "alt-right") as a symbol for racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia and misogyny. (more…)

The always-excellent SF in SF reading series continues tonight with three excellent writers reading from their debut novels: Ellen Klages, David D. Levine & Robyn Bennis. Doors open 5:30PM at San Francisco's American Bookbinders Museum, and the $10 fee (which benefits the museum) is waived for people who can't afford it.

Nature, red in toot and boop.Here's more video of this terrifying monster:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC08u_iDibI

I lived in Britain for 20 years and am still amazed by Drunk-Scientist's map of London's commuter drainage basins.

Rep. Raul Labrador [R-Westeros] (Twitter: @Raul_Labrador, DC: (202) 225-6611; Meridien: (208) 888-3188; Lewiston (208) 743-1388; Coeur d'Alene (208) 667-0127), to a constituent who was angry he'd voted to take away healthcare from 22,000,000 Americans, dooming some to premature deaths: "That line is so indefensible. Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care." (more…)

With Obamacare all but history, Republicans are moving fast to provide replacement services that embody a principled conservative viewpoint on healthcare for America's poor. Check out the official ACHA website.

Tempest is a Pico-8 browser game by impbox that dumps you on an uninhabited island. Not a nice desert island, no, but an unpleasant one much closer to the arctic circle. Gather wood, fruit and fresh water (use the Z key) and see if you can make shelter before the cold night sets in and kills you. Key tip: you have to manually drink and eat, by opening menus with the X key and hitting the relevant options. (more…)

The Nixie Machine 2 is a huge (1.2m long!), expensive ($30,000!) nixie clock whose tubes are modern Nixies, scratchbuilt by Czech engineer Dalibor Farny. (more…)

The Paper Aviary just completed a successful free exhibition of beautifully-crafted paper birds. Let's hope it travels following its inaugural success! (more…)

You want to see visualizations of the vorticity fields around the flapping wings of hummingbirds, don't you?

Comparitech commissioned a survey of 2,000 people in the US and UK to ask whether they thought "it is legal to install a program on a partner's phone to snoop on their activity?" and whether they would "ever consider adding a program to your child's phone that allows you to listen to their conversations and spy on their messages?" (more…)

Here's a thoughtful, passionate piece in CNN by Xeni that anyone who breathes (and thus needs health care) should read. It's about the time before Obamacare, when her new insurance company had opened a fraud investigation because they suspected she might have sneakily been living with cancer before she signed up with them. In other words, she might have had a pre-existing condition. (Off with her head!) Thankfully (or luckily, because the timing of her new insurance, right before her diagnosis, was pure luck), she had signed up for insurance first and was cleared of any wrong-doing.Her piece is also about the American Health Care Act, that some Republicans didn't even read before it passed in the House yesterday by only five votes.

Maintaining an avid reading habit is one of the best workouts your brain can get, but actually following through with that degree of literary ambition usually involves lugging around a bag full of paperbacks. To keep up with the newest books without breaking your back (and bypassing your laziness), Instaread gives you access to hundreds of summaries of New York Times’ bestselling titles from your iPhone.Instead of an ebook store, Instaread offers readers digestible takeaways from over 560 current bestsellers. Their concise summaries help you figure out if you’ll enjoy a book before buying and putting in the full time investment, offering plot overviews and key thematic points from the story. All of their content is available in text and audio, so you can get up to speed on popular titles as easily as listening to your favorite podcast.Instaread is a perfect way to stay on top of new releases that you might otherwise not have time to read. You can get a lifetime subscription here in the Boing Boing Store.

My colleague at Institute for the Future, Eri Gentry, is the guest on the Cool Tools Show this week. Eri is the founding president of BioCurious, the first hackerspace for biology. She is also co-founder of the emotional wellbeing site, My Happy Tools.Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single pageShow notes:Niice.com"For my work at Institute for the Future we're often trying to distill these nebulous concepts about the future into images and into words that people can understand. It’s really important that we get the visual part down right, but most sites aren’t really great for visual inspiration. … but Niice is this incredible site that shows you really creative imagery and often a lot of original art from artists, which is great because sometimes it can be hard to access the people doing really interesting creative work. Niice is meant, I believe, for designers and for design firms to do premium mood boards. … The great thing about this site is it can make me associate new concepts actually that I hadn’t before. It’s a really neat way to think about the future visually."Double eyelid tape ($12)"Double eyelid tape is literally a small strip of adhesive that you place on your eyelid to create or change your crease. For those of us not blessed with pronounced eyelid creases, this product is amazing. No more eyeliner smearing on your own eyelid. Life-changing.”Sacroiliac belt ($30)“This device helps me walk when my back and hips go out of whack. It’s a simple tool that straps tightly around your hips/pelvis to stabilize the SI joints. My joints can dislocate pretty easily and this belt is the difference between me being able to walk fairly comfortably and hobbling, grabbing the wall for support.”Fancyhands.com"Fancy Hands is a website and platform that has a bunch of people who will do small tasks for you on the back end. As a user you pay some monthly fee and you buy a package of tasks. These are things that can be done in 20 minutes by somebody who may not be an expert in the field, and it's things like making reservations, doing a little bit of online research, finding doctors that work with your insurance, for example. The story behind this is that for years I’ve been reading that you should outsource your life."

The power went out in our neighborhood for 24 hours earlier this week, but we had a lot of battery-powered LED lights. These bulb-shaped one are meant from camping, but you can hang them from chandeliers, curtain rods, hooks, etc. (I might make an adnapter with my 3D so they can screw into bulb sockets.) They use 3 AA batteries. They're on sale on Amazon: 2 for $8.