The curiously silent conservative Supreme Court justice -- whose term began with the infamour Anita Hill confirmation hearings -- is said to be "mulling retirement" after the election in order to travel America in an RV with his wife.Update: Clarence Thomas's wife Ginny has angrily denied this in a Facebook post: "For all those contacting me about the possibility of my husband retiring, I say --- unsubscribe from those false news sources and carry on with your busy lives."(more…)

French cinematographers BigFly took their drone into Byzantine cathedral Église Saint-Louis de Paimbœuf, and the breathtaking results are almost otherworldly. (more…)

J. Mascis and his overdriven guitar return with the track "Tiny" from their album "Give A Glimpse Of What Yer Not," due out August 5. Laurie Collier (Sherrybaby, Sunlight Jr.) directed this clip, starring Mascis's bulldog Buddy.

"I Love the new Monkees record!," is something I thought I'd never hear my adult self saying, but I've heard myself saying it. The three surviving members of the 60s made-for-TV rock band (Davy Jones died of a heart attack in 2012) have recently released Good Times!, their 12th studio album and their first since 1996's Justus.(more…)

Protip: when powerlines fall on your chainlink fence, remove yourself from proximity to the chainlink fence.

Inept employees at a business in China were publicly spanked for their poor performance, reports People's Daily.In video captured on cellphone, a manager is seen upbraiding staff, lined up on stage before their colleagues at Chinese Rural Commercial Bank. Then he produces a baton and begins spanking them on the buttocks.Though the employees are clothed, the manager's form is robust and the thwacks sharp.

A mystery man assaulted a 62-year-old Burger King server in Texas because his milkshake wasn't tasty enough.Police say footage captured the man rejecting drinks made for him by Alejandra Estrada three times before finally attacking her, reports NBC in Dallas.

Fancy's $100 neon desktop skull lamp is 15.5" x 10", with a one-year warrant and a 6' cord; the picture makes it look more decorative than functional, which is a pity, because it would great to replace a desk-light with this for close-up work, as a kind of contemporary memento mori. (via Crazy Abalone)

John Oliver's Brexit bit provides much-needed perspective on the UK-EU referendum: while acknowledging the real problems with the EU, Oliver points out that on the one hand, the Leave side's core arguments are a mishmash of unvarnished, deranged racism and deceptive number-fudging; while the Remain side provides a lot of good to outweigh the bad of EU membership.

Akamai's Ryan Barnett reports on two attacks against the service's financial customers last year: attackers used nearly 1m compromised systems to attempt to log in to users' accounts using logins and passwords from earlier breaches. (more…)

I scored badly enough on this that I'm thinking that my fallback career will be raiding The Silmarillion for Elvish names to sell to Big Pharma. (more…)

If you looked at this Self-Stirring Camera Lens Mug without examining it too closely, it would absolutely pass for a real DSLR telephoto lens.But pop the cap off, and you’re looking at a custom insulated stainless steel interior capable of handling any hot or cold beverage you pour into it.Oh, and this mug also stirs itself. You heard right. It blends your drink, so you don't have to do it.Whether you’re all about the cool gadgets, or just so lazy you can’t be bothered to stir your own drink--this camera lens mug takes the task into its own hands.The perfect gift for any shutterbug you know, you can pick up a Self-Stirring Camera Lens Mug for just $12.99 - 35% off the usual price - while this offer lasts.

I was an editor at Wired from 1993 - 1998. In 1997, I went to CES in Las Vegas and reported on the Adult Video Exhibition there."Customization" and "control" are the buzzwords at this year's Adult Video Exhibition, the part of CES held at the Sands Convention Center and practically throbbing with loud music, laughter, squeals of joy, and whoops of glee.At the Pixis booth on Friday, a man is demonstrating a new CD-ROM game called UltraVixen. With a slick Japanese anime look, UltraVixen pits a "beautiful, innocent college student" (who looks all of 14 in her schoolgirl uniform) against a "sex fiend overlord" who "tortures and enslaves young girls in his maniacal mechanical machines," the product flyer states.While the stated goal of UltraVixen is to "destroy the sex machines forever," oddly enough, the player is also the controller of the torture devices, which include a flame thrower aimed at the woman's breasts, nipple pinchers and pullers, a large penetrating piston, and a hypodermic syringe filled with some kind of green liquid. (You can shove a robotic ball gag into her mouth to stifle her screaming if you prefer to torture her in silence.) "There's some sick stuff," says the demonstrator happily. "Look, her eyes are watering!"Over at Digital Playground, Dave and Tammy tell me about their latest CD-ROMs. "The new generation of CDs are about interacting with a virtual girl," says Dave. "The first adult CDs were much more limited - you could maybe pick a choice, but in these CDs you can make the girl actually do something." Like what? Tammy hands me a flyer for Virtual Sex with Jenna James, featuring the porn industry's current It Girl. "In this one," explains Tammy, "you're the person doing Jenna. You tell her what to do and she does it to you."For porn consumers who want to control a real human being, as opposed to a prerecorded video or computer animation, they can visit one of many different live one-on-one video shows transmitted over the Web. Ted Walker, who runs Cyberporn.com ("we grabbed the name after Time put out that article") tells me that his company used to make good money, "until everybody else started offering the same thing." A computer monitor sits next to Walker, displaying a small video image of a woman's torso in a red bikini. She's sitting in a chair in an otherwise empty white cubicle. Her head is not visible. A conventioneer is typing on the keyboard:Man: Hi how are you?Woman: (jumps up from the chair and begins tapping on her keyboard) Fine. How are you? (sits back down)Man: Great now that I'm looking at you!Woman: (jumps up) Mmm ... Thank you! How are you?Man: Take off your bikini.Woman: No, sorry. You'll have to call our service for that.Man: Can I see your face?Woman: No, you may only see my face if you call our service. (sits down)(man walks away)Walker tells me that there are about 500 such companies offering "live one-on-one" service but that only "a half dozen companies supply the girls and connections, who then sell to the Web sites." He explains that the women featured in Cyberporn.com work out of Florida. "In case they get too busy and run out of girls," he says, "it rolls over to Denver, where they have more girls working."Will customization and control over live and virtual sex objects take over porn? Tony Lovett, who works at VCA Video and has designed a game based on Shock, one of Vivid's bestselling videos, doesn't think so. "People want hi-res, where they can stop, start, and fast forward," he says. "Video is always going to be the supreme onanistic medium."

Talking to someone, only to discover that person is wearing earbuds and didn’t hear a word you said can be frustrating. It’s also no picnic if you’re the wearer either, and are missing out on the world around you due to having bits of plastic lodged in your ear.Bone conduction headphones, like these SainSonic Bone Conduction Bluetooth Headphones ($69.99 in the Boing Boing Store), are a hugely clever answer to that problem.For the uninitiated: bone conduction headphones rest comfortably along your cheekbone and send audio vibrations directly to your inner ear. There’s nothing covering your ear canal, allowing you to hear the sounds of the outside world in addition to your headphone audio.Workout enthusiasts won’t miss car horns or other sounds of potential danger while they’re getting their sweat on. No wires involved with these headphones either, so sync them with your phone and you can listen to music or make and receive calls effortlessly.Get with the bone conducting trend with the SainSonic Bone Conduction Bluetooth Headphones, now 30% off while this offer lasts.At 30% off its regular price, these babies will go fast...and you should double down on your good luck by entering our Playstation 4 & Uncharted 4 Giveaway. One lucky winner will come away with a PS4 plus one of the hottest games around, Uncharted 4, all for the cost of a single entry.

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Politics are hard: every so often, there's a mass-shooting and Congressmen have to comment on it, despite having collectively taken $3,782,803 in campaign contributions. (more…)

Last week, the Air Force announced that it had lost 12 years' worth of records of whistleblower reports, freedom of information requests, and corruption investigations because of unrecoverable database corruption that not even its contractor, Lockheed-Martin, could unsnarl. (more…)

A game design career may be your dream job, but it doesn’t mean you get to sit around blasting zombies all day. It means you’re tasked with not just dreaming up, but also bringing to life all those game characters and worlds. And that’s easier said than done.Luckily, you’ll learn the essentials for doing so with the Game Design Course bundle - which you can pick up right now for any price you want to pay in the Boing Boing Store.Pay any amount, and you’ll receive access to two courses to get started:

Thomas Mair, the terrorist who murdered a UK member of Parliament last week while shouting "Britain First" (the name of a UK neofascist party), was arraigned yesterday; in the dock, he refused to state his name, shouting "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain" instead. (more…)

On the BBC's More or Less podcast (previously), Tim Harford and his team carefully unpick the numerical claims made by both sides in the UK/EU referendum debate. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMJeaZtgwng&feature=youtu.be&aThis fellow can clap, slap and tap to beat the bands; things get intense at the 40 second mark. Anyone got a guess at the year? (via Reddit)

Borrowing a trick from the Comcast/AT&T playbook, Google Fiber now forces customers who are unhappy with the service to surrender their right to sue and to join class actions in favor of binding arbitration, a one-sided system of shadow courts that overwhelmingly delivers rulings in favor of the big companies that pay for it. (more…)

Jerry Lewis called his unreleased 1972 movie "The Day the Clown Cried," about a clown in Auschwitz who convinces children to go to their deaths, an "embarass[ing] poor work" and said it would never be released. (more…)

My 13-year-old daughter, a fan of all things Japanese, wanted to know her blood type. (Some people in Japan think that blood type correlates with personality types. Jane knows it's bunkum, but it's fun anyway.) I didn't know her blood type, and I forgot mine. Carla didn't know her blood type either. We didn't have Red Cross blood donation cards, because we aren't eligible to donate blood: Carla doesn't weigh enough, Jane is too young, and I "lived a cumulative time of 3 months or more in the United Kingdom" back in the 1980s (I have mad cow prions ready to erupt in my brain any day now, I guess).I looked on Amazon and, wouldn't you know it, they sell blood typing kits! I ordered enough kits for the family. They cost about $5 each.The kits come with everything you need: spring loaded lancet, micropipette, stirring wands, cleansing swab, and a chemically treated card to put your blood on. The card has four circles, each of which contains a different kind of serum designed to cause clotting (or not) in your blood sample.The lancet is a little scary to use. It looks kind of like a tiny tube of Chapstick with a hole in one end. You have to press it against your finger until a spring loaded latch inside the tube releases, slamming a sharp needle into your finger. I went first. The sound it made was worse than the jab. Interestingly, the needle shoots back into the tube after it pokes your finger. What an ingenious device! Here's a video of the same lancet that comes with the kit:https://youtu.be/v7ps2N0DHG4?t=45sAfter that, we just followed the instructions for putting our blood on the cards. I have O negative blood (universal donor, but since I'm a mad cow risk, I can't donate). Carla and Jane were both B positive. And now we know. The process was actually a lot of fun. I wish our blood type was something that changed every couple of years, so we had an excuse to do this again. Maybe we will anyway.

Earlier today Trump tweeted a May 10 poll from OAN/Gravis that showed him with a two point lead over Clinton. People called him out on it, so he tweeted the latest OAN/Gravis poll, with the comment THANK YOU!. I guess he didn't look at it closely, because now it shows Clinton with a two point lead over Trump.

Jellyfish: A Natural History

Whoa. After filming Carpool Karaoke, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Anthony Kiedis resuscitated a stranger's baby: (more…)

It turns out that folding a pizza slice lengthwise to improve its rigidity is a great example of the "Remarkable Theorem" by Gauss. Cliff Stoll explains. (more…)

Jonas Pedersen captured the beauty and danger of cave diving in this haunting footage at El Toh. (more…)

Autodesk’s Project Escher allows multiple 3D printers to manufacture the same object simultaneously via a software "conductor." (more…)

Revealed yesterday in London, the Rolls-Royce 103EX is the car company's vision for a futuristic luxury autonomous whip. The (way) over-the-top concept car features a massive OLED display, Macassar wood detailing, silk carpeting, and an artificial intelligence named Eleanor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGSm082ELXY

MIT Media Lab researchers developed software to design and 3D print hair-like structures in bulk. Eventually, the 3D-printed hair could be used as sensors, actuators modeled on the cilia in our own lungs, and even Velcro-like adhesives for robots and other devices.Their innovation was actually on the software side of the 3D-printing process. From MIT News:

Kyle Clark of Denver area NBC affiliate KUSA ran across a dog locked in a hot car, on a hot day. The dog's cries led him to try and help, encountering a less than sympathetic dog owner.Clark offers this apology, I think for not breaking the car's window, in hopes of helping raise awareness, and help to other dogs.It should be amazingly obvious to people that you do not leave a dog in a locked car, in the sun. The temperatures inside the car rise incredibly fast, and you can bake your dog. Leaving a water bottle, or windows cracked, really doesn't help at all. Don't do it!

On May 9, Mercury made its first transit of the sun since 2006.(more…)

An audiophile pal gifted me this $22 AGPTek A02 MP3 player. It reminds me of a shrunken down version of the early Click-wheel iPods, but with higher quality audio.The battery seems to go forever. I've been testing these with everything from Skull Candy, Westone, Sennheiser, and some dirt cheap $15 headphones. They do a great job of driving any and all IEMs, and a fine job of driving an old pair of Sennheiser HD-680s. The sound quality is great when compared to the iPhone 6 or the water-proofed iPod Shuffle I usually use.The device supports MP3, WMA, FLAC, Ape and some other file formats. There is 8GB of on-board storage, and the unit'll take a 64GB microSD card. Same ones I use in my GoPros, so there are plenty around.The UI is simple, and direct. The buttons work. The unit is super light. The screen is tiny, but this is a single use audio player and you won't be reading the news on it.I checked and the forums at HeadFi don't hate it, they have a super long discussion around this device and its brethren. Even if you spend an extra $3 to get the black cased version, I don't see how you can go too far wrong.[2016 New UI] AGPtEK A02 8GB 70 Hours Playback MP3 Lossless Sound Music Player (Supports Up To 64GB), Blue via AmazonAGPtEK [2016 NEW UI] A02 8GB & 70 Hours Playback MP3 Lossless Sound Music Player (Supports up to 64GB), Black via Amazon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfIjIVLmhAIIf you're ready for a break, perhaps Clams Casino's sublimely trippy "Blast" would help get you in a better frame of mind. (more…)

Director Daniel Jewel invites us into the magical and world of foley artist Pete Burgis and Sue Harding who create sound effects using techniques that look odd when you see them but sound spot on when paired with the right visual.

This app, called "late!" tracks the total number of minutes that your friends have kept you waiting. It also sends texts to your friends who are late for an event. "Kristi is a bad friend."

Published in 1956, this fantastic collection of mathematical mind-benders never gets old!From simple riddles to complex story problems, The Moscow Puzzles has something for everyone. The sketches are wonderful, and some of the problems give you a cute glimpse into mid-20th Century Russian life.The book is available via Kindle, in paperback, or free PDF.The Moscow Puzzles: 359 Mathematical Recreations (Dover Recreational Math) via Amazon

The Commonwealth School is a $40,000/year private school that occupies a couple of mansions in the Back Bay of Boston, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Commonwealth Academy is a pay-what-you-can school for underprivileged kids, located 90 miles away (also in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts). (more…)

After Governor Scott Walker [R-WI] and Congressman Paul Ryan [R-WI] both proposed expanding drug-testing for poor people on benefits, Congresswoman Gwen Moore [D-WI] introduced legislation requiring urine samples from anyone claiming over $150,000 in itemized tax-deductions -- households with gross incomes of about $1M. (more…)

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Lin-Manuel Miranda's final performance in his amazing, blockbuster musical Hamilton will come on July 9 (he'll be replaced by his alternate, Javier Muñoz), but before then, he'll allow a video-crew in to make an archival recording. (more…)

The NRA has disbursed $3,782,803 since 1998 in campaign contributions to 42 senators and 252 members of Congress. (more…)

Jo Cox was an outspoken, left-leaning Labour MP who supported the "Remain" side in the upcoming referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union. (more…)

Marco Arturo's brilliant 2-minute movie about the anti-vaccine movement starts with the 12-year-old promising to show all the evidence supporting the link between autism and vaccination, after which he holds up a succession of blank pages. (more…)

The Guardian's Rupert Neate attended the 35th annual American Jail Association conference in Austin, and came back with a report on the way that the contractors for America's carceral state talk about their business when they're among themselves. (more…)

In the aftermath of the 2008 crash, international shipping sank to record lows -- but container ship companies kept on building, turning out some of the biggest ships the seas have ever seen. (more…)

According to Mayor Libby Schaaf, Police Chief Sean Whent resigned for "personal reasons," and not because of a report in the East Bay Express that revealed that at least 14 of his officers (along with 4 Alameda County sheriff's deputies and a federal officer) trafficked and had sex with a prostitute who was underage when the trafficking began. (more…)