Nationally the High School graduation rate has been on the rise. NPR reports the rise is due to a combination of hard work that benefits students, and some states simply lowering standards so they earn passing grades.Via NPR:

No, there's never been a planet Janet hasn't seen.

Let’s Split! causes me no end of joy and pain. It is my favorite Nietzsche quote come to life. (“Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is the rule.”) It is also a 636-page atlas of separatism, national identity, fringe geopolitical movements, and a baleful cry from oppressed minority populations.The book is put together with the obsessive care of an eccentric Victorian explorer documenting each step of his journey through uncharted lands, never stopping to discern between the observed real and the observed surreal. But Roth is no Victorian. He’s an anthropologist who’s worked with indigenous peoples in Canada and Alaska for governmental recognition and rights. Let’s Split! began life in 2011 as a blog that Roth maintains titled Springtime of Nations. (Full disclosure: by some trick in the time/space continuum, author Roth lives just a few miles from me and we have friends in common. I found this out after I discovered his blog and book.)Conceptually, the idea of a nation-state is relatively new in the spectrum of development of human societies. People were once few on the earth and tended toward the homogeneity of tribal affiliation. As populations grew, coalitions, hegemony, and politics took shape both psychologically and politically.Organized by continent, Let’s Split! leaves no territory behind. (Though Roth rightfully excludes "cybernations" and the giggling masses of "micronations" invented by bored teenagers declaring their basement lairs sovereign territory no longer oppressed by the evil overlords, Mom & Dad.) Included with each entry are pictures of the flags, potential population, geographic size, and finally, its likelihood for autonomy.And this is where Let’s Split! transforms into something beyond a history, an atlas, or a dry-as-dust encyclopedia. Entries for the Eastern European region ripple with references to long-forgotten kingdoms and internecine rivalries. We follow the migrations of the Mongols and the surge of conquerors to the painful remnants of a peoples’ history written in blood. Understanding these thousand-year-old grudges makes the all-too-many modern skirmishes throughout the world profoundly real.Let’s Split! is loaded with enough facts and minutiae to delight history geeks yet remains highly readable. Let the pages fall open and you’ll be immediately drawn into the conflict within. Make no mistake, a guide to breakaway states and freedom movements is rife with conflict and suffering. As Westerners, it’s all too easy for us to sit in judgment as chaotic events in other parts of the world are blipped onto our screens, then summarily dismissed. But please don’t let that, nor the high price dissuade you. (Though I would love to see a lower priced paperback edition.) Let’s Split! is a worthy addition to your library.See sample pages from this book at Wink.Let's Split! A Complete Guide to Separatist Movements and Aspirant Nations, from Abkhazia to Zanzibar

https://youtu.be/YjNt_8qeLD8In this commercial for headphones, a young woman dances in an eerily empty Piccadilly Circus, London's famously crowded tourist attraction. The creative director of the ad explains how it was done:

In 1971, Shirley Cromartie, a housekeeper for President Richard Nixon at his Key Biscayne retreat, was arrested for shoplifting four dresses. According to Cromartie, she was hypnotically coerced into the theft by a young woman who approached her, "released a jasmine-like scent from her left hand" to told her "to take the dresses former children."Psychiatrist Dr. Albert Maslow who examined Cromartie said he "believed she was telling the truth."Clip below of a Philadelphia Inquirer article from October 23, 1971. More at Weird Universe.

A waitress employed at a Cracker Barrel in South Carolina sent this "tip" written on a napkin that she got to The Bitchy Waitress website.

The UK government says it wants to stop people under 18 from looking at pornography, and so it's going to make all the porn sites operating in Britain collect some kind of age-verification in order to make this happen, on pain of being blocked by the UK's Great Firewall. (more…)

Swim Through the Darkness: My Search for Craig Smith and the Mystery of Maitreya Kali is the much-anticipated story of one of the more esoteric, fascinating casualties of the flower power generation. As told by Ugly Things magazine creator Mike Stax, the book tracks the odyssey of Craig Smith, a musician who evolved from clean-cut singer songwriter, landing gigs on the Andy Williams show and a Monkees-esque television pilot, to a post-institutionalized street messiah, Maitreya Kali. Smith wrote songs for The Monkees (and was nearly cast in the band) and Glen Campbell, headed the much fabled psych pop band The Penny Arkade, and released two of the most acid-drenched folk records of the early 70s before fading into obscurity. After his initial songwriting success, he used the money he earned to travel the world, only to return as a permanently damaged shell of his former self, complete with a spider tattoo on his forehead.Until now, Smith’s life has mostly been told by the music he left behind. And even so, his Penny Arkade recordings were only made readily available within the last twenty years, while his psych folk records, self-released under the moniker Maitreya Kali, have only been experienced by extremely lucky record collectors or in varying quality online. Apache and Inca, those latter releases, include an early demo of the Monkees' "Salesman" (from Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd.) as well as alternative versions of songs recorded by The Penny Arkade. But what the records are really known for is their otherworldly vibe that could only be made by someone whose mind was no longer on Earth. Stax’s new book piecees together the story of this lost musician, whose path is not dissimilar to those of Syd Barret and Roky Erickson. Swim Through The Darkness tells the tale of an artist who got lost between fame and discovery, until all that was left were musical echoes."Swim Through the Darkness: My Search for Craig Smith and the Mystery of Maitreya Kali" by Mike Stax (Amazon)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQAX5yb_Ga0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOUtt6aphc4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQAX5yb_Ga0

For Halifax, Nova Scotia's Nocturne arts festival animators from the province recreated the 1967 Spiderman cartoon "Vulture's Prey" in their very different personal styles.

Security researcher Kevin Beaumont had a look at the mail servers operated by the Trump organization and found a veritable dumpster fire: systems running Windows 2003 (!), unpatched, badly configured. (more…)

Not only is the song catchy, but this delightful homage by Pogo has fantastic production values, to boot! Warning: you may be singing this the rest of the day. (more…)

Can something be un-memed? Matt Furie hopes his creation Pepe the Frog can have a second metamorphosis back from being a go-to troll image of the alt-right. He's teamed with ADL to #SavePepe. He even made a new cartoon about it. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shqJR_0WdrIIt's difficult to comprehend the onset and severity of the 2008 financial crisis, but this timelapse map of US unemployment data from 1990 through July 2016 helps put things in context. (more…)

Somewhere Over The Rainbow has never sounded this exquisite.

When you conduct a poll of human beings and ask them who won each of the two presidential debates (the third is tomorrow) they mostly say Hillary Clinton. But millionaire Donald Trump overwhelmingly wins on web-based polls. Why? The fabled alt-right internet hordes crusading around the internet clicking the lot? Maybe. But his fandom is also winning the bot war, with automated robotweeting and online interaction efforts that far outstrip those of their adversaries.

It's widely-suspected that there's more out there of millionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump boasting about assaulting women, but the obvious sources—TV producers and radio hosts, say—aren't going to shit where they eat just to give Hillary Clinton another point in the polls. Enter Larry Flynt and Hustler Magazine.

Despite his support for Trump opponent Hillary Clinton, radio shock jock will not release the recordings of old radio broadcasts he made with Trump in which Trump made offensive sexual remarks, because "it would be a betrayal" to encourage their use in political campaigning. (more…)

The Department of Justice has announced that it has arrested three Kansas men who called themselves "Crusaders" and planned "a bloodbath" in an apartment complex where many Somali people lived, which was to including bombings followed by house-to-house shootings sparing no one, "not even babies." (more…)

Following on their earlier statement that "Julian Assange's internet link has been intentionally severed by a state party," the Wikileaks organization has accused Ecuador of being that state party. (more…)

The new Star Wars film, Rogue One has released a bunch of new character posters today. You can download them here.

Last week I bought a 64GB SanDisk Cruzer Flash Drive for $15.49. Today I found out that the 128GB model is on sale for $22. Shoot.

Followable:Cartoonist Danny Hellman did a lot of illustrations for Boing Boing when it was a zine in the 1990s. His Instagram feed reveals his fascination with European cemetery statuary (pictured above), and his photos reveal some striking examples. — Mark FrauenfelderReadable:A science fiction novel I really liked is The Three-Body Problem. It is the first Chinese-written novel to win a Hugo award, and it is making waves in China and, in a new English translation, with the rest of the world. Complicated, deep, and seeped in a different view of China, it’s a masterpiece. — Kevin KellyWatchable:I watched the new movie The Jungle Book all the way through without realizing that EVERYTHING in it, except the little boy, was a computer fabrication — a virtuality way beyond Avatar. Incredible. Hundreds of wild animals, hundred of species of plants, the rivers and jungles, were all computer generated and the whole movie “filmed” on a blue-screen stage in LA. It’s a good movie, but even better evidence of where virtual production — and all films — are headed. You can catch it now on Amazon. — KKTravel:Google Trips is a brand new app (for iOS and Android) that scans my Gmail for travel and dining reservations to build an itinerary and offer things to do at your destination. It’s worked like a charm so far, identifying every upcoming trip I have planned. It even created summaries for past trips. — MFBingeable:Netflix just released the trailer for the new season of Black Mirror, which comes out Oct. 21. The show is dark. Every episode is a mini-adrenaline rush. It's become my Twilight Zone fix, since I've exhausted all those episodes. You can watch the last two seasons (7 episodes) now. — Claudia LamarStuff:Pomegranate's Charley Harper puzzles are beautiful and sturdy. Each piece is glossy and locks well with other pieces, and it's a fun distraction for a few hours. I've bought two so far — Tree of Life and Exquisite Creatures. — CLJoin the 5473 people who get the free Recomendo weekly newsletter a week early by email.

Mary Forgione, a US citizen, was stopped and detained by Turkish border patrol when she attempted to reenter Turkey while on vacation. She wrote about her interesting experience for the LA Times. Takeaway: the State Department won't help you if you get detained in another country because a border agent forgot to stamp your passport.

The Boing Boing Store features tons of headphones with a range of functionality, quality levels, and prices. Today we're featuring 2 of the best additions, fresh to the Store this week.The first set of bluetooth headphones are great for working out or everyday listening, while the wired second set will be really attractive to anyone who is a serious gamer or wants to hunker down in the library at school and get some work done.#1 SainSonic Wireless HD Stereo Earphones - $15.99These SainSonic Wireless Earphones feature the latest Bluetooth 4.1 technology, and a design that won't budge from your ears no matter what you're doing. They deliver an impressive 6 hours of playtime on a single charge. Plus, with their special nano-coating, the SainSonic earphones work even if when it's raining outside or during extra sweaty workouts. Best of all, they're extremely affordable at just $15.99 thanks to our current sale.#2 SteelSeries 9H Gaming Headset - $99The SteelSeries 9H Gaming Headset is not only more affordable than standard gaming headsets, but delivers impressive audio, too. For one thing, it comes loaded with Dolby Technology, meaning you get great audio every time you play. The retractable mic and included noise cancellation mean all your mid-game communication will be crisp. And the best part is how refreshingly comfortable this headset is. Get it on sale in the Boing Boing Store for just $99.Also explore the top Online Courses on our network right now:

This is even smaller than the compact drum kit Charlie Watts used when recording Exile on Main Street.

For the first time in more than 125 years, the Arizona Republic endorsed a Democrat: Hillary Clinton. Some of the paper's readers responded with death threats -- and worse. Editor Mi-Ai Parrish's response is as classy a civics lesson as you could ask for. (more…)

German designer Marcus Blättermann created this nifty series of scalable pixel illustrations based on Greek mythology (Tantalos shown here). Drag your cursor around at his site to alter the image. (more…)

Data visualization has its own Cake Wrecks or PhotoShop Disasters type site to mock bad examples of the craft. WTF Visualizations (viz.wtf) has answered the call. Perhaps a good name and shame campaign will finally bring clueless designers to heel. Submit your finds! (more…)

https://youtu.be/w6j70qBvJOA"All Trump's Words." From a series of “Sassy Trump” voicedubs by Peter Serafinowicz, using Donald Trump's very own words, but with an entirely new new tone.

My friend Daniel Martin Diaz's exquisite paintings lie at the intersection of science, art, and magic to provoke questions about technology, physics, theories of mind, and the nature of reality. He has an exhibition of spectacular new works opening in San Francisco today at the wonderful science/nature/curiosity shop Paxton Gate. The show is titled titled "Atomic Enlightenment." Indeed. Get illuminated.Daniel writes:

Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz and angel investor Ron Conway have donated to San Francisco's Proposition Q: if passed, "the city would give residents of tent encampments 24 hours’ notice to relocate to a shelter or accept a bus ticket out of town." (more…)

The developers behind the hotly anticipated Shadow Warrior 2 have gone on record explaining why they didn't add DRM to their new title: they themselves hate DRM, and understand that DRM disproportionately inconveniences legit customers, not pirates who play cracked versions without DRM. (more…)

A global agreement to cut a heat-trapping chemical used in air conditioning units and refrigerators was announced today, with participation from over 170 nations.“The deal could have a greater impact on global warming than the Paris pact of 2015,” reports the New York Times.(more…)

Superhirocat is easily entertained.What came first?(more…)

Nice place!(more…)

This woman ran up to a police officer in Melbourne and pushed him over, possibly on a dare. She seemed perplexed when she was arrested shortly after.

Danny Elfman reacted to last sunday's debate by writing a soundtrack to Donald's stalking.(more…)

MK Wren was the pen-name of Martha Kay Renfroe, whose novels we featured in 2014. Martha died at age 78 last August, but I've only just found out. She was 78. (more…)

Beam is a lightbulb replacement that screws into any light-socket and turns it into a remote-controlled LCD projector. (more…)

There was a time when I had a lot of multitools: it started innocently, with a classic Leatherman "pocket survival tool," which I carried everywhere, and because when you have a multitool, everything looks like a screw, bottlecap, thing-in-need-of-sawing/scissoring, or filing, I used it all the time. (more…)

Bawston & Tucker Solid Cologne is the best deal out there when it comes to finding a cologne that works for you. Getting a full bottle of cologne can be a big, expensive commitment, and even travel-size bottles can be upwards of $30.With a 3-scent set from Bawston & Tucker, you'll get a range to try for a fraction of the price. Made from the highest quality materials, these shea butter-based colognes smell great and nourish your skin.Unlike other colognes, Bawston & Tucker’s scents won’t cause skin irritation or allergy flare-ups. They also come in a concentrated solid form, meaning they last much longer than spray colognes.If you're not into cologne for yourself, this pack makes a great gift for a friend or boyfriend. And for just $34.99, you can get three of their most popular colognes—Motega (sweet, spicy), Aroostook (fresh, earthy), and Hurytt (woodsy, citrus).Explore more trending deals:

Jason Allemann built a neat LEGO Drawing Machine, inspired by a Spirograph and a 1950s toy called the Hoot Nanny or Magic Designer.It can create many different patterns by changing the configuration of the model," Allemann writes. "You can also draw multiple patterns on the same piece of paper to create even more complex designs."He's posted the building instructions on his site JKBrickworks.com.(via Laughing Squid)

The New York Times' Timothy Egan writes on the stark, sudden demise of American civility under the force of millionaire Donald Trump's presidential run: "He’s made America vile. He’s got angel-voiced children yelling “bitch” and flipping the bird at rallies."

[via thefrogman.me]

Yesterday, Donald Trump denied forcing a kiss on Temple Taggart McDowell, who accused him of doing so when she was Miss Utah in 1997. (more…)

Courtesy of the YouTube channel Skunk Bear.

"Was there anybody in there?" asks someone on the boat. Not anymore!

An analysis of five decades of police records by The Chicago Tribune found that a small group of Chicago police officers have racked up over 100 complaints each over the course of their respective careers, “including notoriously corrupt cops who wound up in prison but also others whose allegations of repeated wrongdoing were never before made public.”(more…)

In 2012, more than two-thirds of Iceland's population ratified the most democratically crafted constitution in world history, written in public and drafted by a representative committee of 1,000 Icelanders; now in a stirring video in the leadup to the next national election, Icelanders are calling on one another to only vote for candidates who'll take action on the constitution the nation voted for. (Thanks, Larry!)