American Grandma is a fantastic two-piece band from Colorado consisting of Jennifer Lynn Keller and Caden Marchese. They have a new album on the First Base Tapes label, titled Sensation / Forever, that I've been listening all week. It's available on cassette here. You can preview it here.

Bavaria's Verfassungsschutz -- "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution" -- says that the Haus der Kunst, one of the world's top contemporary art galleries, was infiltrated by Scientologists who rose through the ranks, illegally discriminated against non-Scientologists when hiring, and waged psychological warfare against staff who were not members of the cult. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS0NuV-zLZEGreyball is Uber's codename for a program that tries to predict which new signups are secretly cops, regulators or investigators who could make trouble for the company, deployed in "Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China and South Korea" where the company was fighting with the authorities. (more…)

Artist Pippin Barr wrote his PhD video game values and got a Masters in UI metaphors, so it's natural that he's created Snakisms, a collection of 22 variants on the classic video game Snake (best remembered from the era of candy-bar featurephones), each of which is meant to illustrate (or at least make a joke about) philosophies from Stoicism (your snake runs into things, pauses a moment, shakes it off and presses on) to Determinism (your snake drives itself), to Holism (just try it). They're lovely, witty fun! (via Kottke)

Used in countless industries, Artificial Intelligence is no longer just the stuff of science fiction. Encompassing everything from computer vision to natural language processing, machine learning methods aim to give computer systems the same information faculties as human brains. To take a dive into this growing field, pick up this course bundle.Exploring topics like deep learning and decision trees, you will get acquainted with different ways intelligence is modeled in software. While you learn high-level AI concepts, you’ll build a solid foundation in programming by using languages like Python, Java, and R.The Complete Machine Learning Bundle is $39 today in the Boing Boing store.Explore other Best-Sellers in our store:

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Peter Sjöstedt-H interviewed famous 1960s acid chemist Tim Scully for High Existence.

On March 23rd, at San Francisco's historic Roxie theater, three films about the self-proclaimed Norton I, Emperor of the United States, will be screened!Get your tickets now!(more…)

Benjamin Bannister has a good idea about the design of the Academy Awards cards.

Bitcoin reached a new high at $1,271 per bitcoin yesterday, and for the first time surpassed the price of gold per ounce, which was worth $1,235 by the end of last night. A year ago, one bitcoin was valued at $421, so it's nearly tripled in 12 months, while gold's price was about the same last year as it is today.One reason for the virtual currency's surge, according to NBC News:

The North Hills Auto Mall in Pittsburgh has in its inventory a burgundy 1988 Lincoln Town Car in excellent condition with only 72,000 miles on the block, a 5-liter V8 engine, automatic four-speed transmission, cruise control, power steering, air conditioning, and a stripper pole.

https://youtu.be/li0mRLcGbU8This guy said his sergeant recommended that he buy a Rolex GMT Master Model when he was stationed in Germany. He was happy to learn that it was appraised at a much higher price than the $120 he paid to buy it in 1960.

I needed kitchen shears, so I might spatchcock a chicken. These do the job nicely.This fantastic video from America's Test Kitchen has kept me busy. It involves fun uses of cast iron.I'm eager to try the 500F heated cast iron steak searing method, the chicken was fantastic. I also just like saying spatchcock.KitchenAid Shears with Soft Grip Handles, Black via Amazon

https://youtu.be/7TdUqdh9D-M"Big news today from the Kremlin... er, the White House." Colbert has a field day with Lyin' Jeff. "You don't have to recuse yourself, you've already fucked yourself."

I have quite a few different battery packs, but I think Anker's are the most attractive. The Anker battery I have had for years is still going strong. Amazon has a good sale on the PowerCore 15600 USB battery pack: it's $24 when you use the code SPRING80 at checkout.

Steve Mould explains the physics behind the squeak in "squeaky clean."

A gentleman managed to evade the police, at speeds of over 100mph, in a U-Haul. The driver made it nearly 50 miles from Santa Rosa to San Francisco, before law enforcement just gave up.SF GATE:

First aired in 1994 as a Beavis and Butt-Head spinoff, Daria was a fantastic animated series about a whip-smart, sardonic, misanthropic highschool girl, her punk friend Jane, and a familiar gang of jocks, dimwits, and cool cats. Daria, the show and the character, was funny, feminist, emo, and awesome. La la la la la. Vice has an oral history of Daria:

"To The Right" by Candice Drouet. With scenes from:

For $20 million, you could live in Grey Gardens, the East Hampton, NY home that starred with lovable eccentrics Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale and her mother Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale in the incredible 1975 documentary "Grey Gardens." (Watch the whole thing below!) Current owner Sally Quinn, the journalist and Washington socialite, bought the home from Little Edie for $220,000 in 1979 and restored it from its astoundingly squalorific state scene in the film. From the New York Times:

The US lost -- as in, can't account for -- $6 trillion fighting disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a fact that Trump was quick to point out during his speech to both houses of Congress, just before announcing that he planned on giving the same government department that literally claims not to know what happened to that money billions more. (more…)

Best practice for mail-servers is to turn on TLS by default, which means that when that mail server talks to other mail servers, it encrypts the connection to thwart eavesdroppers. Though the practice (sometimes called "opportunistic encryption") started out as something only paranoid organizations partook of, it's now so widespread that Google warns you if you attempt to use Gmail to send a message to someone whose server won't accept encrypted connections. (more…)

The unexpected success of adult coloring books was a huge boon to booksellers, going from a standing start to $90M in sales in 2015, and bringing plenty of readers into bookstores, where they availed themselves of the rest of the stores' wares. (more…)

Snow Brand Milk will celebrate its 55th birthday by releasing "spreadable coffee" intended to be eaten on toast; it's a followup to an earlier "Edible coffee" product that appears to be basically coffee pudding.

The healthcare industry is a well-known information security dumpster fire, from the entire hospitals hijacked by ransomware to the useless security on medical devices to the terrifying world of shitty state security for medical implants -- all made worse by the cack-handed security measures that hospital workers have to bypass to get on with saving our lives (and it's about to get worse, thanks to the Internet of Things>). (more…)

The Evening Standard's Tom Marshall reports that 69 Cock Lane, a nondescript semi-detached house in Fetcham, England, might be "Britain's rudest address." I beg to differ, but there are sadly no more Gropecunt Lanes in the age of that word's offensiveness.

St. Patrick's Day is a boozy celebration of history and culture, and the ShamRockIt! Nipyata is a delightful fusion of traditions, packing ten assorted nips (or airplane bottles) and candy into a shamrock-shaped piñata, eager to be bludgeoned to a recyclable mess and relinquish its pot of confectionary gold.The mental gymnastics to make sense of this fusion aren't actually all that hard, either. Piñatas hail from Europe originally, coming into fashion in 14th century Italy before spreading throughout Western Europe and ultimately traveling with Spanish colonizers to Mexico, where the tradition has enjoyed the greatest staying power, and thus the strongest cultural association.And here's the important part: Piñatas, St. Patrick's Day - they're all about fun, and fun is what you'll have with the ShamRockIt! Nipyata. Booze, candy, twine, and even the blindfold and smashing stick are included so you don't have to scramble around to set up the game. Get it right now in the Boing Boing store for $79.99.Explore other Best-Sellers in our store:

My latest Locus column is "Fill Your Boots," in which I talk about how scientists, sf writers, economists and environmental activists have wrestled with the question of abundance -- how the "green left" transformed left wing politics from the promise of every peasant living like a lord to the promise of every lord living like a peasant. (more…)

Bobby Hankinson interviewed director David Farrier about the craziest documentary of 2016: Tickled, which just premiered on HBO. I don't want to say too much. Just watch it. (more…)

A fellow on the internet reports that Google shipped him a refurbished Pixel phone loose in its box inside a standardized shipping package, with no packing material. The phone was broken.I ordered an SD card from Amazon once and it came in a plastic case inside a box, which was inside another box, buried in at least a cubic foot of foam.

This video of turkeys circling a dead cat went viral yesterday...https://twitter.com/TheReal_JDavis/status/837301561500057605... and here's the explainer, from The Verge's Alessandra Potenza and Rachel Becker. They're a) warily inspecting a potential predator they don't realize is dead while b) getting stuck in a natural follow-the-leader pattern.

Fifty years ago, American Airlines' flight from New York to Los Angeles took 5 hours and 43 minutes. The same flight is 6 hours and 27 minutes today. Wendover Productions examines why planes don't fly faster in this interesting video. (more…)

Self-driving cars can mean a number of different things, so the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration adopted a zero-to-5 scale of the types of automation created by SAE International, with level zero being non-autonomous. Generally: (more…)

Dominique Ansel, the guy who created cronut and cookie milk cups (previously), also created the blooming marshmallow, which opens like a flower in hot chocolate to reveal a chocolate truffle. Popsugar reverse engineered one and shared their technique. (more…)

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Hamburg-based photographer Sebastian Weiss is known for taking stark, clean images of remarkable buildings against bright blue mid-day skies. The results are remarkable. (more…)

Evan Greer writes, "SXSW is one of the most popular music festivals in the US. It was just revealed that they are actively threatening bands from outside the US with "immediate deportation' and immigration investigations if they perform at 'unofficial' events during the festival. At a time when immigrants are under attack, this policy is all the more chilling. Sign the petition to tell them to drop this practice." SXSW has had this policy for years, apparently, but it still sucks. (more…)

Trump's FCC is shaping up to be a complete disaster: the new Chairman is dismantling privacy protections and broadband subsidies for low-income Americans, plans to allow the pending Time-Warner/AT&T merger, and, of course, he's planning to gut net neutrality. (more…)

Trump keeps saying that the media's relentless investigations into Russia's corrupting influence on the White House is "fake news," but the media keeps finding out more and more about how Trump and his inner circle have cozied up to Russian and eastern European mobsters and kleptocrats. This new infographic from Vox is a simple guide to what's been unearthed so far, but it doesn't include recent revelations into billionaire Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross' role as a vice chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, which is co-owned by a dear friend of Russian president Vladimir Putin, and is run by the former head of the mega-money-laundering Deutsche Bank. It also doesn't reveal this bit of news reported today in the NY Times: "Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and now a senior adviser, also participated in the meeting at Trump Tower with Mr. Flynn and Sergey I. Kislyak, the Russian ambassador." (Kislyak is quite the belle of the ball in Trumplandia.)It's stinking to high heaven in the White House, and even the Trump Aftershave everyone is wearing can't mask the odor of large-scale malfeasance.

"Your first doomsday machine is a malevolent, inscrutable wristwatch.”The Please Don't Tell My Parents series, by Richard Roberts, is a wonderful young adult series of novels about Penelope Akk and her two friends Claire and Ray. They are normal middle school kids just hoping their superpowers will kick in soon. (more…)

On Monday, many websites, news services, publishing platforms, and other internet-connected things that use Amazons AWS platform went dark. The cause can finally be revealed.(more…)

Ever wonder how much pee is in the pool you're swimming in? If not, sorry to bring it up. But a study was just done by researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada to determine the amount of tinkle in the average public swimming pool, and the results aren't pretty.The researchers measured the amount of acesulfame-K (an artificial sweetener found in a lot of processed foods) they found in pool water to use as a urinary marker. According to the study, "The widespread consumption of acesulfame-K (ACE), a stable synthetic sweetener, and its complete excretion in urine, makes it an ideal urinary marker. Here we report the occurrence of ACE and its potential application in swimming pools and hot tubs."Over three weeks, the researchers found 7.92 gallons of urine in the smaller pool that had 110,000 gallons of water. In the larger pool they found 19.8 gallons of urine in 220,000 gallons of water.According to Today:

Earlier I crudely redivided the USA into states the size of California, its most populous state. This results in eight states. But what if old England, having abandoned Europe and been abandoned by Scotland and the other bits of its shabby island hegemony, somehow ended up in the Union?Leaving aside all the actual important and interesting social and demographic consequences of such a near-future scenario, here's a dumb map of what America would look like if the current states were kept, but glommed together to form larger ones with the population of England—roughly 55m each.Now you have six (not including England itself.)

Editor's note: Boing Boing publisher Jason Weisberger recently wrote of threats he and others have received online from literal Nazis, post-Trump. Jason's sister Tammy Weisberger shares a story below, at our request, about the normalization of Nazi iconography and yes, even the Hitler salute, at her child's middle school in the U.S. Has this really become normal? And if so, how should she, and other parents, and America, respond? Read on. — XJ.(more…)

Aging Jimmy Buffett fans, aka Parrotheads, take note! Latitude Margaritavile is a new senior housing community under construction in Daytona Beach, Florida. The facility is scheduled to open in the fall and promises to "reflect Margaritaville’s authentic, 'no worries,' tropical vibe." Sounds lovely. I can just imagine my life there, nibblin' on sponge cake, watchin' the sun bake."A Margaritaville-Themed Retirement Community is Coming to Florida" (Mental Floss)

When asked this morning on CNN about Attorney General Jeff Sessions' lie regarding his communication with Russia, Sen. Al Franken was generous. "At the very least, this was extremely misleading." Franken also said, "During the campaign, he made a bald statement that he had not met with the Russians. That's not true."Franken will be sending Sessions a letter "to have him explain himself."

On what would have been Lou Reed's 75th birthday today, his widow Laurie Anderson announced that the New York Public Library has acquired the musician's complete archives. To celebrate, the NYPL is hosting displays and events celebrating Reed's life and work. Details here. Meanwhile, the good people at indie record label and publisher Anthology tweeted that they will work with the library and Reed's representatives "to publish new works!" From the NYPL: