The answer is yes.[via]

An unexplained odor of rotten eggs is causing distress to residents of the San Francisco Bay Area. From Science Alert:

Aw shucks - this enamel pin paying homage to a late '80s era Photoshop toolbar is currently sold out, but you can sign up to be notified by email when it's back in stock.

As has been the case for many consecutive years, the movie industry beat all box-office records in 2016, earning $11.4B at the US box office (while simultaneously insisting that piracy was destroying the industry and demanding the right to control and redesign the internet to save itself from this existential threat).

Last weekend, your social media feed might have featured this photo of beggars sleeping on a pavement in Mumbai, in front of a Trump Tower billboard emblazoned "There is only one way to live. The Trump Way." (more…)

There are twelve black dots in this image. Why can't you see all twelve at the same time?I replaced the black dots with red dots, and it is easier to see them all at once.

On this weekend's Meet the Press, WSJ editor in chief Gerard Baker said that even when he was clear that Trump had uttered a falsehood, his paper would not call that falsehood a lie, because to do so would ascribe "moral intent" to Trump; instead, the WSJ will call Trump's lies "challengeable" and "questionable." (more…)

Fresh MIT grads were asked to power a light bulb with a wire and a battery. The ones shown in the video failed. It also looks like the grads were given a 1.5 v battery and a 120 v bulb. Even if it had been wired correctly, it would have produced a dim glow at best. Later in the video one of the students is shown with a small bulb. He successfully completes a circuit. Where did that bulb come from? This is a poorly edited video.It looks like this was shot in the 1990s. I wonder if today's grads would fare better on this test? I suspect so, since there is more emphasis on hands-on making.

I only bother with a pocket square on really special occasions. New Year's Eve always seems to require I try something new. This year it was the Rose.The fabric on your square needs to be pretty thin, and mine was not, so back to the 3 stairs I went.I realize this may have been more helpful a few days ago. Welcome to 2017.

Nature takes a look at what's likely in store for 2017 in various fields of scientific inquiry. Short answer: some is dependent on Trump regime drama, like climate research, space research, stem cell research, multinational research agencies, and a host of other issues. (more…)

Jim Toole, the proprietor of Capitol Hill books in D.C., appears as a curmudgeon in Caroline Cunningham's wonderful profile of him and his overflowing store.

Apothecarry is just one example of the commercialization of recreational marijuana. Now that it's legal in California (Hollyweed!), the green rush is on in the high-end/connoisseur market. In time, marijuana will be like wine, cigars, and other luxury items, where some will want to display their collections. (more…)

It was supposed to be a 60th birthday present to herself, but Rhonda King's dream of sharing her life with a family of chirping birds ended when USPS delivered a boxful of crushed canaries her hair salon in Alabama.

Japanese manga artist Junko Mizuno is known for her dizzying mix of everything from Japanese cute culture to erotic and pin-up art to religious and fairy tale imagery. In TRIAD, an absolutely stunning 16-page book, she brings three of her characters to life in 3D pop-up form — the Nurse, the Witch, and the Wrestler. The trio appears in five pop-up spreads, Ocean, Serpent, Triptych, Mansion, and Tree.There is no text to the book, and no explicit narrative that I could discern. But there’s so much going on here, so much whimsy and weirdness, and some very clever use of pop-up book technology. This is really a piece of interactive art exploiting the book format. If you’re a fan of Junko Mizuno, Japanese manga and pop art, or of pop-up books in general, you will likely be as blown away by TRIAD as I was.This little video flick-through by Poposition Press will give you a better idea of the blazing eye-candy to be had in TRIAD.https://youtu.be/JK2A_ehA8NcTRIAD

I love the idea of TED talks (Mark, Cory) but most of them are insufferable. What are your favorites? And which ones would you like to see? I'd like to see Lord Humongous explain climate change.https://twitter.com/jpcarver/status/813505146592358400

Paper marbling is alive and well at Oberlin College's Letterpress Studio. Alex Fox filmed his friend Jones Pitsker demonstrating a couple of techniques. (more…)

If you happen to have a Pacific parrotlet who happens to be patient, and you happen to have a couple of spare feathers lying around, you might try this trick to turn it into a rabbit. (more…)

Nagurski writes, "Tyrus Wong was a brilliant Chinese-American artist who designed the look of the landmark 'Bambi' cartoon for Disney. Due to racial attitudes and at the time, he received limited recognition for his contributions, but was belatedly named a Disney Legend in 2001. He also was an accomplished painter and made fantastic kites, which he flew on the Santa Monica beach, continuing to do so past the age of 100." (more…)

Jennifer Jenkins writes, "What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2017? Under the law that existed until 1978 -- Works from 1960. The books 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and 'Rabbit, Run' the films 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'The Time Machine' early episodes of 'The Flintstones' the musical 'Camelot' and more -- What is actually entering the public domain this January 1? Not a single published work." (more…)

Prior to the election of the business-worshipping, union-busting, climate denying Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, the state's Department of Natural Resources website was a rich trove of information about climate change -- as you'd expect from a state with a lot of fresh water, where resource extraction played an important part in the economy. (more…)

The Koldunov Brothers put together this simple demonstration of how using a standard white party balloon can give your flash photography a nice diffused look. (more…)

The Boing Boing Store had plenty of great items over the past year, but these 8 deals top each catagory. From course bundles in an array of professional programming and IT subjects to futuristic vaporizers, this guide features healthy discounts on leading tech finds.Twisty Glass Blunt – $34.99Rolling your own without destroying the paper with saliva is tricky without ample practice. This elegant glass pipe eliminates the hassle with a clever corkscrew design that holds up to 1.5 grams of tobacco. This deal will only be available until midnight of December 26th .Buy Now: $34.99, 30% OffUltimate Unity3D Game Building Bundle –$32 The Unity3D development environment has made creating video games remarkably accessible. With this game development bundle, you will learn the fundamentals of 3D modeling, physics simulation, and game analytics.Buy Now: $32, 90% offA-Audio Legacy Noise Cancelling Headphones – $79.99Eliminating background noise is an easy way to significantly improve your music listening experience. These headphones go beyond passive over-ear sound isolation with additionally enhanced bass and active noise cancelling. This deal goes away at midnight on December 27th.Buy Now: $79.99, 73% offThe Complete Raspberry Pi 3 Starter Kit - $99The Raspberry Pi compact computer offers a welcoming platform for creating custom electronics projects. This introductory bundle supplies a Raspberry Pi 3, a variety of components, and six detailed courses.Buy Now: The Complete Raspberry Pi 3 Starter KitPython Programming Bootcamp – $39.00With a design that encourages equally readable code in small- and large-scale programs, Python is one of the most popular programming languages around. If you want to learn the language behind everything from YouTube to a variety of scientific computing applications, pick up this course bundle.Buy Now: $39, 96% offCode Black Drone with HD Camera – $89Quadcopter drones are great fun, and this one doubles as an aerial photographer with its built-in HD video camera. Enjoy ultra-smooth flight right out of the box for up to 10 minutes at a time with the intuitive remote control.Buy Now: $89, 70% offGhost Indoor HDTV Antenna – $15.99You don’t need an expensive cable subscription to get local broadcasts on your television. This antenna receives high-quality HDTV signals without any monthly fees. This deal lasts until midnight on the 25th of December.Buy Now: $15.99, 57% offPax 3 Vaporizer – $274.99Enjoy a healthier, smoother alternative to combustion smoke with this sleek vaporizer. Easily switch between extracts and herbal leaves for equally pure vapor with the included insert. The PAX Vapor app provides ample customization options to give you a tailored experience.Buy Now: $274.99Become an Ethical Hacker Bundle – $44.99

Since I last presented a year-end videogame wrap-up for Boing Boing readers, it's become an exponentially harder task. The number of games released per day has - even just since 2014! - risen a few times over, so narrowing a list down means leaving amazing and creative work behind. That's not even to mention the herculean task of staying on top of the pile of games still unplayed.2016 gave us a generous amount of powerhouse titles hoisted by massive budgets and massive marketing efforts: hello Overwatch, Dark Souls III, Doom, No Man's Sky, Pokémon Sun & Moon, and especially Uncharted 4. But I did my best to wander the far corners of the internet, searching and sometimes blindly stumbling upon weird, beautiful, thoughtful videogames.Below you'll find 20ish games (actually quite a good number more) that sang to me the most, and I think exemplify the best that 2016 had to offer. You'll find interesting places to explore, unique achievements and re-inventions of old standards, and brilliant ideas executed simply. I hope you find them as surprising and delightful as I did.👾https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z6gFT7e5LVIBeglitchedby A.P. Thomson & Jenny Jiao Hsia • Get it: Windows/Mac/LinuxBeglitched is, on its face, a fairly simple match-3 type game, on the same family-tree branch as Bejeweled or Candy Crush or any other number of similar clones you may have spent all your idle moments thumbing around with on your phone over the past few years.But here, its creators — then NYU Game Center students A.P. Thomson and Jenny Jiao Hsia — have added an honestly quite engaging & effective narrative layer about hacking layer-by-layer deeper into an intentionally-misplaced laptop, and battling against other hackers, each of whom are trying to keep you out of their various network nodes.The game is rife with refreshingly on-point commentary about life & vulnerability on the internet in 2016, and stacks of secrets for you to pierce through, all of which lies on top of a great twist on match-3 mechanics. This is one of the best entry points into the world of indie games this year.👾https://www.youtube.com/embed/xOtOVvP3gbkCapsule Silence XXIVby Anamanaguchi & Ben Esposito • Get it: Windows/MacIn one of the year's best low-key art stunts, New York City electronic pop band Anamanaguchi had a spectacular melt-down this past March, in which they deleted their entire Twitter archive, overnight. The move, according to all-caps tweetstorm before the mass deletion, was in protest of contractual disagreements over a 33 million-dollar videogame extravaganza (codenamed Project Homunculus, a 'Millenial Game & Culture VR Development'), which they'd secretly been developing & alpha-testing behind closed doors for years.Just prior to their entire social media presence being taken over by their "manager", "Devin" (whom no one seems to have managed to photograph, let alone meet in person, in the months since), the band managed to "leak" an in-progress version of the game, which then spread almost exclusively via confused & bemused tweets and reddit posts.Created with the help of developer Ben Esposito (part of the LA-based game collective Arcane Kids), the Capsule Silence XXIV demo begins with the promise of an epic (if overwrought) sci-fi/fantasy storyline starring the band members themselves, before suddenly crashing entirely. Only then are you presented with the hidden option to venture behind the curtain into its "developer sandbox", where the real game begins.What happens from there on is best left discovered yourself (though you can watch a good portion of it in my playthrough above). Coming in blind to Capsule Silence now will almost certainly feel like you're in over your head on a joke you totally missed the setup for, but it quickly becomes one of the most intriguing experiences of the year, backed by some of the best people working in both music and games.👾https://www.youtube.com/embed/7bLNC8VDTlQDishonored 2by Arkane • Get it: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox OneIn a year packed back-to-back with massive AAA games, Dishonored 2 stood apart, managing to create something truly original that both spoke with its own confident & distinct voice, and was tremendously mechanically pleasing.Though you'll have to go pretty far out of your way to find footage of the game that shows much beyond hyper-violent jump-cuts of soldiers being knifed in the neck (see: above, and which is, of course, an entirely legitimate way to play the game), that wasn’t quite the game I played. My version featured far more silent sneaking through some of the most beautifully & intricately crafted spaces I’ve seen in big-budget games in a while, trying to leave behind as little of a mess as possible. Others tried to find as many creative ways to dispose of some characters as possible. Everything is permitted.Whichever way you might want to wend your way through, if you want to see what’s been happening in “big" games over the past few years, you won't find a much finer example.👾https://www.youtube.com/embed/znh5ksgzOS4Dragon Quest Buildersby Square Enix • Get it: PlayStation 4, PlayStation VitaYou'd be 100% forgiven for presuming what Dragon Quest Builders is at first glance. For as much as it builds on the lineage & narrative of the very first game in the series (known here as the mid-80s NES role-playing-game Dragon Warrior), it wears its Minecraft very plainly on its sleeve.But, for as much as you might be convinced (as I initially was) that the game was a simple grab for Minecraft dollars with a franchise-branded clone, the actual meat of the game here is really uniquely structured. Played out as a series of storybook chapters, each quest starts with you again dressed in rags, back at the drawing board, and tasked with venturing out into the unforgiving world to gather everything you need to plant and nourish your home base, both to the whims of your own design, and at the request of other wanderers who happen in and take residence.Most interestingly, the game repeatedly drives home that you’re not the or even a great, conquering warrior in this game - you’re more or less just a humble servant with enough pluck to pull together resources and lay down bricks side-by-side. On top of that, the fact that each subsequent chapter continually subverts the way in which you solved the previous one made this way more compulsive than I'd expected — this ended up being the equivalent of my "bedtime-story game" for several weeks.👾https://www.youtube.com/embed/NxYv9cvvM9UEarth Defense Force 4.1by Sandlot • Get it: Windows, PlayStation 4Next up is actually a game that I brought up back in 2014, which was re-released this year for modern consoles and also for PCs for the first time. But, until every person I know is playing this, I’m going to bring it up forever.Earth Defense Force 4.1, for the uninitiated, is a continuation of a series that’s been around for some 13 years now, since the PlayStation 2. There is nothing more to this game than basically exactly what you see above: over a series of about 100 levels, you get dropped into a quasi-futuristic Tokyo suburb, with nothing more than two weapons of your choice. Then, the game spawns something like a billion giant bugs or strange UFOs half a block away, leans back, shrugs its shoulders, and sees how you endure.I usually describe it as the 21st-century super-literal B-movie answer to Space Invaders. It is unrepentantly so dumb, and so fun, and now supports playing with your friends online. If you’ve ever wanted to climb aboard a cumbersome giant mech and literally just punch Godzilla square in the face, Earth Defense Force has got you more than adequately covered.👾https://www.youtube.com/embed/cXWlgP5hZzcFirewatchby Campo Santo • Get it: Windows/Mac/Linux, PlayStation 4, Xbox OneA lock for strongest studio debut of 2016, Campo Santo's Firewatch is infamously a hard game to pin down, so here I'll simply say that it's a narrative adventure where you’re uncovering intriguing morsels of plot simply by moving forward through the world, and that it’s one of the best true "mystery" games we’ve had in ages.Played from the vantage point of a park ranger who took the job of watching out for forest fires to get away from the world for the summer, you’re essentially alone in the woods the entire time, only communicating over walkie-talkie with a fellow fire-watcher in a tower across the park. Without the ability to actually meet your compatriot, let alone ever even really see her, over the course of the game you begin to wonder if you should be opening up to her as much as you are, or whether something more nefarious might be at play.Many of the folks who crafted this story also worked on a number of chapters of the Walking Dead adventure games, so if you liked the way those stories were constructed, or just want to experience fantastic storytelling in a genuinely, jaw-droppingly beautiful simulacrum of the Wyoming wilderness, this is a perfect game for you.👾https://www.youtube.com/embed/c0t2m2HFOUoHidden My Game By Momby Happ • Get it: iPhone/iPad, AndroidBy far the "smallest" game on this list, created by a one-man Japanese development team who drops three or four free games on mobile devices every year, this still manages to be one of the funniest.The premise here is that Mom is continually upset that you spend so much time on your Nintendo DS, and so decides that every single day she'll hide it in a new place around the house. Your job is simply to tap around until you unearth it.That might be as simple as the first level you can see above, where she’s just shoved it behind some books on the bookcase, but day-by-day she makes it more outlandishly hard to find. Even better, Mom herself begins to lurk in various places alongside the DS itself, ready to pounce on you if you slip up and root around too recklessly.This game is entirely free and won’t take you more than an hour or two to finish. By the end of its 30-something levels, though, it becomes so self-aware and -referential, and so laugh out loud funny, and then caps itself off with such an oddly emotional ending, that you should not end the year without giving it your time.👾https://www.youtube.com/embed/E0V2rPVQWfMInsideby Playdead • Get it: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox OneFirst announced in 2014 and finally landing on consoles and PC this year, Inside is by the same team that previously created Limbo, an indie classic in its own right from many years back. If you're familiar with Limbo, you will know more or less what to expect here: it’s a game heavy on simply moving from left to right, pausing in areas to solve an environment puzzle or two before moving on to the next.That said, what makes Inside truly remarkable is the amount of cinematic fidelity and polish they’ve manage to wring out what seems at first glance like a fairly low-detail world. The subtlety and fluidity of its animation, and particularly its sound design (recorded, it turns out, by piping through the sound through a replica human skull) went largely unparalleled this year.

The world's oldest male panda, Pan Pan, has died in China.Pan Pan, 31, was diagnosed with cancer six months ago, having lived almost all his life in captivity. He was captured in Sichuan as a six-month old cub. The BBC reports that his name means "Hope."

In the 1860s, illustrator and idiot Leopold Trouvelot deliberately brought gypsy moths from France to America. Some outsmarted him and escaped, and they now cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage each year. This charming film tells the tale and explains our greatest and grossest hope for eradicating them: baculovirus. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73kd6wsBq0In the ingenious world of consumer electronics, we often have the thought "why didn't anyone think of that?" The Creative Prodikeys instead leads to the thought "why did someone think of that?" A MIDI controller keyboard and a typing keyboard all-in-one, it appears to have enjoyed several generations in the 1990s and 2000s. [via r/MechanicalKeyboards]I covet this, and they're cheap on Amazon and eBay. (more…)

After considerable thought, Jenny Nicholson weighs in on why the Dark Side doesn't make sense. In what would make an excellent PowerPoint presentation to the Sith, she lays out her five key objections: (more…)

Twitter's wonderful, but it's also horrible a lot of the time &endash; especially for the people using it. And we all complain about it, too! Anil Dash weaves the obvious and not-so-obvious threads of criticism into a billion dollar gift for Twitter. It comes down to these five key points: (more…)

Mohammed Kerawia shot this charming interview with Elmer Long, owner of the Bottle Tree Ranch on Route 66 in Oro Grande, California. Elmer accepts donations but it is free to enter. (more…)

Petra Haden is a talented violinist and singer who has performed with everyone from The Decemberists to Victoria Williams to Sunn O))). On her YouTube channel, she also posts really impressive a capella versions of such movie themes as The Exorcist (Tubular Bells), Star Trek: The Original Series, and the theme to the 60s Batman TV show. She's also done a capella covers of Bowie's Life on Mars, King Crimson's Frame by Frame, the Furs' Ghost in You, and other pop and progressive tunes.Here, she does a seriously beautiful and haunting rendition of the Vangelis Blade Runner theme, complete with Deckard's voice commands as he navigates an image of the replicant Zhora.

Compared to 75 years ago, Americans spend less on reading, alcohol, tobacco, clothing, and food. They spend more on education, entertainment, and transportation, but the real bank-breaker is how much more Americans spend on housing, even adjusted for inflation. (more…)

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Running a cloud-based service requires much more than just software developers. Developer Operations engineers are crucial to the growth, maintenance, and security of online products. Mastering the skills required to be a DevOps engineer can be overwhelming, but this Ultimate DevOps Mastery Bundle will provide a solid foundation.This 9-course bundle will introduce you to a variety of IT subjects. Prepare for the Amazon Web Services Solutions Architect Professional exam. Dive into the fundamentals of Systems Administration with Linux/UNIX to manage users and software on servers. Explore network security by studying for a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.Additionally, this course bundle will familiarize you with the basics of coding, database management, modern software deployment techniques, and large-scale data analysis. Proficiency in all of these areas is essential to becoming a successful IT professional, and this curated course bundle provides an accessible introduction. For a limited time, get this Ultimate DevOps Mastery Bundle for just $43, over 92% off the regular price.

How ridiculous the British police are! You'd think they'd arm up with guns, what with more than 20 of them getting killed so far this century.

In 2004, under then-governor Rick Perry, the Texas Education Agency secretly instituted a plan to cap the number of students receiving special education support at 8.5% -- far less than the national average. (more…)

Moonlight Gliders is a beautifully shot and reported piece on mating season for Montana's flying squirrels. Among the amazing facts shared by Alexander V. Badyaev: they can glide while carrying rather large pine cones in their mouths. (more…)

Since 2014, we've chronicled the reality-challenged internet proposals of the scandal-haunted EU Commissioner Günther Oettinger; now, on the eve of Oettinger's promotion to EU budget chief, MEP Julia Reda lists the 10 normal web activities that Oettinger has sought to ban, from sharing snippets of 20 year old news articles to quoting three-word newspaper headlines to creating and operating a search engine. (more…)

One thing that’s consistent among amateur pool players is that they unknowingly stand up during their shots. Just as in golf, pool players need to keep their heads down and stay still after they shoot in order to hit straight.The DIGICUE helps keep shots consistent by letting you know every time you’ve had extra movements that may alter your path. It conditions your play by silently buzzing whenever you’ve moved in an awkward way.Here are the actions that the DIGICUE is constantly looking for:

Fitness trackers are effective for gauging your progress and holding yourself accountable to your exercise goals. But competitive triathletes and multi-sport enthusiasts often need more capabilities than simple step counting and sleep monitoring. The Magellan Switch Up GPS Fitness Watch offers robust activity tracking for more intense multi-stage workouts.With onboard GPS, this fitness watch accurately follows your location without the need for an external device. ANT+ certified networking allows it to monitor data seamlessly from other fitness sensors like heart rate monitors and bicycle power meters. By providing configurable display screens that combine data from internal and external sensors, the Magellan Switch Up acts as the central nervous system of your workout.The included bike mount makes it a great cycling companion, and 50-meter water-resistance rating means it is safe to wear underwater as well as in the rain. Configure multiple activity profiles to represent various activities as a single workout, or keep them separate depending on your training regiment.With this powerful device, improving your athletic performance won’t require a personal trainer. For a limited time, the Magellan Switch UP Fitness Watch is on sale for 85% off, just $29.99.

Donald Trump said today that U.S. telecommunications company Sprint will bring 5,000 jobs back to the United States from overseas, while he said another company OneWeb will add 3,000 jobs in the United States.(more…)

If you're concerned about what, if anything, the outgoing presidential administration can do to fight back against Russia hacking the U.S. elections for Trump——stay close to your phones as this lame duck end of the year week rounds up.Tomorrow, team Obama is rumored to be “announcing a series of measures to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, including economic sanctions and diplomatic censure.”(more…)

No, Mark and Carla didn't name bOING bOING after Dr. Seuss's wonderful story. (The far stranger truth is right here.) But nonetheless, the story of young Gerald McCloy, aka Gerald McBoing-Boing, is a true delight! Please enjoy this Oscar-winning animation of Gerald McBoing-Boing, adapted from Seuss's story by Phil Eastman and Bill Scott, directed by Robert Cannon, and produced by John Hubley.

“I turned an 1907 Upright Piano into a luxurious desk.” What an amazing share, via IMGUR. “Seeing how this piano serviced the great depression, WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and to this day, brings me such happiness, to know I have a little piece of history right in my own home.”(more…)

"Sardine Run" by G. Lecoeur edged out a competitive field of remarkable images to take National Geographic's 2016 title. (more…)

Carrie Fisher kills it at the American Film Institute's 2005 Life Achievement Award honoring George Lucas.

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and MORE.GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”A book for the curious and adventurous!” -Cory Doctorow) Book One here. Book Two here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

A World of Disputed Territories maps all the countries in the world fighting over territority. Sometimes the disputes are quaint, even comical—visit Rockall or Hans Island!—but others are as tangled as they ever have been. Want to live somewhere undisputed? Try Svalbard!

Believe it or not, Florida is only the 14th worst state for accidents, according to The Daily Beast's breakdown of per-capita stats. But its unique combination of aggression, stupidity and good weather (worst-state North Dakota has a pretty good excuse) puts it in a league of its own.