The ACLU raised $24M over the weekend of the #muslimban, six times its usual annual average, and now it is joining the Winter 2017 class at Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has emerged a mixed bag of great and terrible companies, which has had to contend with controversy over its ties to Peter Thiel. (more…)

This three-minute video was run through Deep Dream, Google's neural net that generates algorithmic pareidolia in the form of weird creatures. I want glasses that do this.[via]

In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, a team from Osaka University publishes its analysis of data gathered by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Selenological and Engineering Explorer, revealing that an isotope present in lunar regolith is a match for an isotope found in terrestrial, atmospheric oxygen. (more…)

Becky Molln, whose husband Nilay writes for The Verge, reviewed the Samsung UN40K6250AF television set. It's a fantastic rant.

Though the crimes and abuses of the GW Bush era seem almost quaint in comparison to the trumpist agenda, the Bush actions spawned a new kind of protest movement, the first mature, networked resistance, which tried (unsuccessfully) to haul the Democratic Party away from finance-oriented neoliberalism and into a labor-oriented, diverse, racially aware left wing opposition party. (more…)

I discovered the Wendover Productions website last year when they posted a great video explaining why trains suck in America. Their latest video is an animated, fun-fact-filled tour through all 50 states in the US. One thing I learned is that a part of Canada is farther south than California.

In 1784, cabinetmaker David Roentgen (1743-1807) made this astonishing automaton of Marie Antoinette playing a dulcimer as a gift for King Louis XVI to give to his queen. This fantastic contraption is in the collection of the Musée des arts et métiers de Paris. From Atlas Obscura:

Today, The Intercept has published a minimally redacted version of a 2015 edition of the FBI's Confidential Human Source Policy Guide, along with a series of in-depth articles reporting on the document (including the FBI's confirmation of a conspiracy by white supremacists to infiltrate law enforcement agencies). Among the most explosive revelations are the ways in which the FBI coerces domestic and foreign informants. (more…)

Sadly, the Boing Boing Store is about to say goodbye to some amazing deals. Whether you want to learn something new or just kick back and binge watch TV, the following items are sure to stimulate one way or another. All of these deals are under $50—but act fast, they won’t be around for long.4. For the TV BingerChoosing between streaming and cable involves some painful tradeoffs. Why not get the best of both worlds? SelectTV lets you access a massive library of shows and movies as well as thousands of live TV channels and radio stations on all of your devices. Get a year of SelectTV for just 24.99—33% off the usual price, and also receive a bonus HD TV Antenna.BUY NOW3. For the smokerBring your living room smoking comforts everywhere you go with this multi-function Rocket Keychain Grinder. With a unique bullet-shaped design, this gadget lets you grind, store, and funnel herbs through its tapered tip. Additionally, the removable end piece works as a handy one-hitter if you forget your rolling papers. Marked down from $39.99, get the Rocket Keychain Grinder for just $29.99.BUY NOW2. For the home cookHomemade meals can be a hassle; buying groceries during rush hour is enough to make you want to give up and order a pizza. With Home Chef, you get perfectly portioned, high-quality ingredients delivered to your doorstep—just follow the recipe for a delicious, healthy dinner for two. Save 34% to get three Home Chef meals for just $39.BUY NOW1. For the ambitious employee

After a wrangle on tactics that pitted the party establishment -- who feared that filibusters would provoke procedural reforms that allowed for a 51-Senator vote to overrule a filibuster, making future Trump appointments easier -- against party activists who want Senate and Congressional Democrats to stall, refuse and resist trumpism by every means necessary (perhaps banking on early impeachment, before a rule-change could do much damage), the Senate Democratic caucus has announced that it will boycott the confirmation hearings for Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Steve Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary. (more…)

Otonamaki (otona = adult, maki - wrapping) is the practice of swaddling adults in cloth to relieve stress.From BBC:

Paul Abueva is a residential contractor. He shared the contents of his tool belt at Cool Tools (a web site I run with Kevin Kelly and Claudia Dawson).I am a residential contractor who does remodeling and repair work, so I carry tools that that are useful to a variety of trades work. Over the years I’ve put together what I believe to be a perfect compromise between weight and function. (more…)

Last April, a weasel-like stone marten jumped a substation fence at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland and was promptly electrocuted. Now, that same poor creature's corpse is going on display at the Rotterdam Natural History Museum in an exhibition titled Dead Animal Tales. From The Guardian:

Larry Hall is developing luxury nuclear bunkers underground at an old nuclear missile site in Kansas. Hall says the Survival Condos, starting at $1.5 million, are "nuclear-hardened bunkers that are engineered… to accommodate not just your physical protection but your mental wellbeing as well." From BBC News:

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A group of tech firms will meet today to plan the filing of an amicus brief in support of lawsuit to challenge U.S. President Donald Trump's “Muslim Ban.”Trump's order was issued on Friday, and restricts immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries in which Trump has no business interests. Adjacent Muslim-majority nations in which Trump does have business interests were left untouched by the ban. Administration staffers took great pains to keep the orders secret from other government officials, and from the public, until it went into effect.(more…)

”Do you think the U.S. Attorney General has a responsibility to say no to the president if he asks for something that is improper?,” asked Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (R-Alabama) in 2015.“I believe they have an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution,” replied U.S. Deputy Attorney General nominee Sally Q. Yates.(more…)

I think Nemo wants to go outside.I knew what he was doing, but I had to wait a few weeks to catch it on video. This is not the least of his antics. No drawer, cabinet or pantry is immune to his rummaging.

Behold the 540 million-year-old fossil remains of the earliest-known human ancestor! Saccorhytus was "likely an egg-shaped creature that ate and expelled from the same gaping orifice," just like Senior Counselor to the President Stephen Bannon.

This is from the U.S. Holocaust Museum.(more…)

Gregg Phillips is the "expert" who told Donald Trump that there were 3 million fraudulent votes in the 2016 election; when reached by an AP reporter for comment on the fact that he is registered to vote in three states, Phillips grunted, "Why would I know or care?" (more…)

I spent the day in serious fear that Trump was staging a coup, but even in my darkest hour, I had a niggling sense that it was also possible he just didn't have a fucking clue.(more…)

Tandy was once a major brand in personal computing, with its TRS-80 among the early 8-bit era's most magnificent and successful machines. By the 1990s, though, the salad days were gone and the bizarre nest of acquisitions behind the company—it started out as a leather supplies retailer, which shares the name to this day—saw the brand fade into that of subsidiary RadioShack until that, too, died in bankruptcy.Whoever inherited the retail chain evidently inherited rights to the Tandy name with it: lo and behold, you may now buy a Tandy Wireless Keyboard and Mouse!"Too bad they suck," reports Lazy Game Reviews. [Thanks, Andrew Singleton!]For your evening listening pleasure, here is Kompressor with the Tandy-referencing classic Kompressor Does Not Dance.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ofYNHRcspM

The Associated Press reports that Boy Scouts of America will allow transgender children who identify as boys to enroll in scouting programs.

Update: they fired her. No foreign surveillance warrants until further notice.Acting Attorney General Sally Yates has ordered Justice Department lawyers not to make legal arguments in the court challenges to Trump's ban on Muslims entering the USA. (more…)

Having traveled to Europe and Japan many times, I've grown to appreciate bidets. They are fantastic and it's horrible that they aren't commonplace in the US. I have added one more bidet to the US and it cost just $22 on Amazon. It doesn't have warm water jet like a Japanese toilet, but you'll get used to it.

This amazingly handy website pretty much holds your digital hand through the process of calling your representatives.Take five minutes, call your reps.5 Calls

"Yesterday was the trial balloon for a coup d’état against the United States," writes Yonatan Zunger on Medium. The "administration is testing the extent to which the DHS (and other executive agencies) can act and ignore orders from the other branches of government. This is as serious as it can possibly get: all of the arguments about whether order X or Y is unconstitutional mean nothing if elements of the government are executing them and the courts are being ignored."

This picture grid brilliantly sums up the attitudes in nearly every IT office I've ever worked in. This is the oldest reference to it I can find. Let me know in the comments if you can find an older source!(Thanks, Chris!)

The World Economic Forum asked "leaders from business, government, academia and nongovernmental and international organizations" to take a survey on the potential risks and benefits of different emerging technologies. They seemed to think the space technologies will have little benefit and pose little risk. Energy capture, storage, and transmission has the great promise and little downside. Geoengineering offers little benefit in relation to the risks. And AI/Robotics will either make a hell or heaven of our planet.

At Boing Boing, from time to time, we enjoy stashing folks bonuses in puzzle boxes. This 3D puzzle by UGears is beautiful.Safe by Ugears Is Mechanical 3D Puzzle Wooden via Amazon

Lessig compares the current constitutional crisis -- a lawless, reckless president; law enforcement officers flouting federal court orders -- with previous crises, such as the impeachment of Nixon, and says the major difference between then and now: then, Congress had a bipartisan consensus that "they were engaged in the most serious job a member of Congress could have — because they knew that in a critical sense, the very stability of the Republic depended on them behaving as adults." (more…)

You can thank Japanese game publisher Namco for Pac-Man, Galaga, Pole Position, Splatterhouse, Rolling Thunder, Soul Calibur and Tekken. And you can thank Masaya Nakamura, who died last week, for Namco.

Rockin'1000, who claim to be "the biggest rock band on Earth," performs Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in Cesena, Italy.

Daniel Jacob and friends "built a spinning water slide ride for Australia Day down at the river in Canberra."Below, a 1980s TV commercial for the original Slip N Slide. Which one looks more fun?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_6G9ko201c

Masaya Nakamura, the founder of Nakamura Amusement Machine Manufacturing Company (Namco) who unleashed Pac-Man fever on Japan and the United States, has died at age 91. Under his leadership, Namco built its business on Galaxian (1979) and Pac-Man (1980) and later console games like Ridge Racer (1983) and Tekken (1994). In 2007, the Japanese government honored Nakamura with an "Order of the Rising Sun" decoration. From Ars Technica:

Two suspects are in custody after gunmen opened fire in a Quebec mosque, killing six and injuring eight. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned it as an act of terrorism aimed at the Muslim community."It is heart-wrenching to see such senseless violence. Diversity is our strength, and religious tolerance is a value that we, as Canadians, hold dear," Trudeau said in a statement.The identities of the suspects have not yet been released. Nor have authorities identified a motive in the attack on some 40-50 worshipers gathered at the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre. Mass shootings in Canada are rare, reports USA Today.

Emmett Till was a 14-year-old black boy lynched after a Mississippi woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, claimed he made "advances" on her. His killers were acquitted of kidnapping and murder by an all-white, all-male jury. Then, free of further legal jeopardy, they admitted to it. Their casual indifference and impunity helped catalyze the civil rights movement.Last week, we learned Donham admitted she lied.

BuzzFeed reporter Jesse McLaren took this already insane video—in which Donald Trump obsessively discusses the crowd size at his inauguration during an ABC special—and turned it up to 11:https://twitter.com/mcjesse/status/824722071657836544?refsrc=email&s=11Here's the original:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=updAZNMns4s

A Parliamentary petition to rescind the invitation for Donald Trump to make an official state visit has received nearly 1.3 million signatures in a matter of days, making it the fastest-growing such petition in Parliamentary history. (more…)

David Yanofsky and Tim Fernholz created an interactive chart showing the weight, national origin and position of more than 1,300 active satellites orbiting the planet Earth. The data was sourced from the Union of Concerned Scientists.It goes out in bands: there's a cloud in low-earth orbit bulked up with the International Sapce Station and surveillance satellites. Satellite phone networks such as Iridium and Globalstar form conspicuous rings about 800 and 1500 km up. 20km up are the navigation networks GPS and Glonass. 37km up is a mess, with so many geostationary satellites clustered together that they become a rainbow blur in the graphic.

The World Wide Web Consortium's Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) is a DRM system for web video, being pushed by Netflix, movie studios, and a few broadcasters. It's been hugely controversial within the W3C and outside of it, but one argument that DRM defenders have made throughout the debate is that the DRM is optional, and if you don't like it, you don't have to use it. That's not true any more. (more…)

The instructors for this summer's Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy writers' workshop are Dan Chaon, Lynda Barry, Nalo Hopkinson, Andrea Hairston, Cory Doctorow, C.C. Finlay and Rae Carson: the workshop runs from Jun 25-Aug 5 at UCSD in La Jolla, California. (more…)

Tony Benn was a Minister of Parliament for 47 years and one of the greats of the UK Labour party until his death in 2014. He's a reservoir of excellent quotes, but today his thoughts on refugees seem most apt.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is seeking first-hand reports of travellers being asked to divulge their social media habits by US border guards (beyond the optional field on the ESTA form) (email info@eff.org); meanwhile, ACLU urges travellers to stay on the customs/immigration side and let them know if people are being detained (Tweet @nobanjfk). (more…)

The powerful Twitter account St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) spent Holocaust Remembrance Day documenting the names and images of passengers on the German transatlantic liner St. Louis. The ship sailed from Germany in 1939 with 937 passengers, most of whom were Jews fleeing the Third Reich. The St. Louis headed to Cuba where many of its passengers hoped to disembark before heading to the United States. Instead Cuba admitted only 28 of the passengers. Although the U.S. media covered the event with sympathy towards the refugees, the remaining passengers were not allowed entry into the country, despite sailing so close to Miami as to see the lights of the city. Instead the St. Louis returned to Europe, where its passengers tried to find refuge in other European countries. While almost all of those who settled in England survived the war, 532 of the passengers who settled in continental Europe were trapped when Germany conquered Western Europe. 254 of them died in the Holocaust.https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/824957648155996161Created by Rabbi Charlie Schwartz and educator Russel Neiss, the @Stl_Manifest account documents the names and photos (when possible) of those St. Louis passengers later killed in the Holocaust. The account draws explicit parallels to today’s refugee crisis and its bio features the hashtag #RefugeesWelcome. You can read more about the St. Louis and its passengers on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website.https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/825062084035502080https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/825190426239905793https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/825181615785533440https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/825163998597308416https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/825156456886382593https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/825114928646197252https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/825097311265058816https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest/status/824942547294228480

The world is a scary place right now, so take a brief respite with this utterly delightful web exclusive from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. With help from Chance The Rapper, Jon Batiste, and Colbert himself, Ziggy Marley performs his iconic upbeat theme song “Believe In Yourself” from the beloved PBS kids’ series Arthur.