The Isle Man Tourist Trophy is a deadly race. Two lives have been claimed already this year. That didn't stop incredible motorcyclist Michael Dunlop from posting up a sub 17 minute lap, the fastest ever.Watch as Dunlop barely keeps his wheels on the ground, while blowing past other riders like they were stationary obstacles. His average speed of 133.392 mph is staggering.

Ken White was once a US Federal Prosecutor, but he's also served as a defense attorney, and when he was defending clients, he routinely told the judge about the ways in which his clients were good people, and what talents they had. (more…)

The hardware customizers ColorWare are now offering new MacBooks reskinned with an Apple IIe vibe. They're $3,000 and limited to an edition of ten. (more…)

Progressive political advocacy group MoveOn.org issued a statement today discouraging any attempts to use Super Delegates to overturn the popular vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has maintained that this is his path to the Democratic Party's nomination, as results from state primaries show his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton with a majority of the popular vote, pledged delegates, and won states.(more…)

This intense slow-motion video, depicting an electric eel jumping from a tank to zap a faux alligator head, accompanies a new scientific paper by Vanderbilt University biologist Kenneth Catania. From Nature:

Yes, cassettes are making a comeback,but there's only one factory in the US that manufactures them: National Audio Company in Springfield, Missouri. And they're having a banner year.

"One Got Fat" is a surreal bicycle safety film from 1963 where the gang of freewheeling bicycling kids in monkey masks suffer brutal fates, one by one. (Thanks, UPSO!)

https://youtu.be/qDSySu_mT0IWhat could be more magical than the flickering glow of fireflies on a summer evening?When I began my quest to capture that firefly magic, I wasn’t sure itwas possible, and my first attempts to photograph lightning bugs werefailed, out of focus blurs. It took several years to make a reasonablygood image.https://youtu.be/g6WT812Al8ANot only was I photographing after sunset, with my best light sourceslowly disappearing, but I also never knew where the fireflieswould appear, so I had to be mobile, ready to move quickly.How to light is my biggest concern, and a poorly lit firefly photo hasno magic. My best images use mostly available light. A firefly isreally just a small, black beetle, and they can easily disappearagainst the darkness or any background vegetation, so the only way wesee them in the dark is by their glow. The males are harder tophotograph up-close as they flash in flight while trying to attractfemales on the ground.I’ve seen great images by many photographers capturing fireflies from adistance, and the cumulative long exposure or time-lapse images arebeautiful. But I wanted to get as close as possible to individualfireflies, if possible while in flight. This is easier usingspeedlights, but the light is very unattractive and can overpower theglow of the firefly.Usually each night I ran out of time, the encroaching darkness forcingme to give up, but I learned from my mistakes and improved eachevening. Firefly season where I live lasts from mid-June through theend of July, sometimes into August. At the beginning there are fewerfireflies and by the end you’ll find only lonely males, unsuccessfullylooking for love in their last days or hours, all the females havingfound their mates.The most important tools are my camera support and any extra lighting Imight need. I’ll get to my robots in a bit.I've always believed it's better to make your own tools if possible,rather than buy them, so I scavenge from equipment I already have orbits and pieces of junk I’ve collected.I sometimes use small mirrors to help direct the light and I positionand support them using wooden sticks with a hinge and clamp at the top.It helps to make them light and not too bulky.Much of the time I use a ground-level tripod, but many of my bestimages were made with a homemade “spike” that I attach to my camera andcan push into the ground wherever I need to be. I took the spike endfrom an old, decorative axe and epoxied it to a 3/8” tripod mountscrew, which attaches to the ball-head. This has a smaller footprintthan a tripod, and is easy to move quickly. The wooden base and threebolts you see in the image aren’t really needed, but make it a littlemore stable.The biggest hurdle is overcoming the disappearing daylight. I usuallyhave only about fifteen minutes before the skylight is gone and I haveto rely exclusively on artificial light. The easiest solution is to useflash, but I don't like the harsh look and in this case light from theflash would overwhelm the glow of fireflies, so most of my lightingcomes either from the sky or reflectors I build to help direct theskylight or possibly street or porch lights nearby. I sometimes usesmall flashlights with diffusers, which give just enough light toilluminate the deep shadows.Now about those robots. It took me a few years to come up with theidea, and it’s a stretch to call what I’ve made a robot. In essenceit’s a colored LED attached to a timing circuit to mimic the flash of afemale firefly, camouflaged just enough to hopefully fool a few males.Each firefly species has its own flash pattern and color, and mine istuned to Photinus pyralis, the “big-dipper” firefly, the lightning bugmost commonly associated with Midwestern summers.I didn’t have the expertise to design the circuit, so I turned to myfriend, the brilliant Guy Wicker, for help. I used an LED scavengedfrom a broken flashlight, a 3909N LED Flasher IC, a capacitor, aresistor, and a battery, the fewest number of components to produce asmall flash that can sometimes fool a male firefly to investigate itcloser, and as physically small as possible. The white LED is coatedwith yellow-orange acrylic paint to match the color of the big-dipper’sglow.For one of the circuits we attached an on/off switch, but it’s just aseasy to turn it off by removing the battery. Three AA batteries workfine, or you can use a 4volt Lithium battery to cut down the size ofthe finished circuit. Exquisitely unattractive, I think, but it getsthe job done.Here’s the simple circuit diagram Guy drew, and constructing it took abit of trial and error.Everything is wrapped in black electrical tape, to hold it together andmake it almost invisible in the near-dark. The parts were only a fewdollars each, or else scavenged from leftover electronics. The circuitcan certainly be improved, the whole package made more attractive, andthe timing more flexible. If you make your own, please post theresults! The world can always use more amorous robot fireflies.Rick Lieder is a photographer and artist. His 2016 book Among a Thousand Fireflies uses his backyard firefly photos to illustrate a beautiful poem by Helen Frost. You can learn more about it on his site. The PBS Nova documentary Creatures of Light features his robot fireflies.

An old man lay by the path on a crag in the cold Peak District December. Dead, with a bottle of pills in his pocket and no identification, "Dovestones" sent investigators the other side of the world in search of answers. Who was he? Why strychnine? Why there?

For all its brilliance, Adobe Photoshop can be pretty intimidating for the novice user. Sure, you can figure out how to crop an image or maybe fix some “red eye,” but Adobe’s seemingly bottomless list of photo manipulation features can leave a newbie spinning.It’s all there for a reason...so learn all the digital image tricks with this Adobe Creative Cloud Photography bundle, now 87% off in the Boing Boing Store.You’ll not only get a one year subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography Plan, including access to Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, but also 6 courses to help you navigate those programs:

The classic photo of Leonard Nimoy in Spock costume leaning on the 64 Buick Riviera he bought with his Star Trek earnings will be immortalized in dinkycar, thanks to the good offices of the Hot Wheels Corporation. (more…)

Simone Giertz's oeuvre of "shitty robots" doesn't end with her marvellous slap-in-the-face alarm clock: her Youtube channel is full of examples of her work, each better than the last, from arms on her phone that let it commando-crawl along the sidewalk to the world's greatest hair-washing bot and the world's most alarming chopping bot. (more…)

The password breaches are getting stronger and worser, and hardly a week goes by without a dump that's a couple zeroes bigger than the biggest to date -- but not all password breaches are created equal, and a lot depends on whether and how the passwords were hashed. (more…)

A conflagration quickly took over a small home on Horners Lane in Rockville, Maryland, posing a mystery for arson investigators. Fortunately, a resident of the dwelling knew who started the blaze. [via r/videos]

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won the California Democratic primary last night, cementing her status as the party's prospective nominee. The first woman to clinch a major party's nomination, Clinton remains the favorite to win the general election in November.The BBC reports that an overwhelming majority of Bernie Sanders supporters plan to back Clinton after all, though the data is a few weeks old, with only a few percent switching to her Republican rival Trump.Perhaps it's the case that having been engaged in politics, young people who would never otherwise have voted for Clinton are now very much aware that she isn't like Trump at all. While Clinton might not have much to offer them, the difference for others would be stark.Sanders vowed to fight on at least until Washington D.C.'s vote next week, but he and President Obama are meeting tomorrow at the White House—a graceful exit plan in the offing?

We often overestimate and overstate just how much we can learn about a claim based on where that claim originated, and that’s the crux of the genetic fallacy, according to the experts in this episode.The genetic fallacy appears when people trace things back to their sources, and if you traced back to their shared source the ad hominem attack (insulting the source instead of attacking its argument) and the argument from authority (praising the source instead of supporting its argument), you would find the genetic fallacy is the mother of both kinds of faulty reasoning.You might be in danger of serially committing the genetic fallacy if your first instinct is to ask where attitude-inconsistent comes from once you feel the twinge of fear that appears after a belief is threatened.In this episode, listen as three experts in logic and rationality when we should and when we should not take the source of a statement into account when deciding if something is true or false.This episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast is the eighth in a full season of episodes exploring logical fallacies. The first episode is here.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudThis episode is sponsored by Bombas – game-changing socks. Bombas decided to take socks seriously, by designing the most highly engineered, best-fitting, comfortable socks humans have ever imagined – and they look cool too. Go to Bombas.com/SOSMART for 20% off your first order.This episode is also sponsored by Exo Protein. If you want to eat sustainably and responsibly, it’s 20 times more resource-efficient to raise crickets for protein than cows. Exo, has made crickets easy to eat by making protein bars with cricket flour. These bars are not only high in protein and Omega 3s, but are also low sugar, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, and most importantly, they’re absolutely delicious. This makes sense, because a 3 star Michelin chef developed the recipes. Go to exoprotein.com/sosmart, to get a sampler pack with all their most popular flavors for less than $10, with free US shipping.This episode is also sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Get unlimited access to a huge library of The Great Courses lecture series on many fascinating subjects. Start FOR FREE with The Fundamentals of Photography filmed in partnership with The National Geographic and taught by professional photographer Joel Sartore. Click here for a FREE TRIAL.Support the show directly by becoming a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.Bob Blaskiewicz is an assistant professor who teaches, among other subjects, critical thinking at Stockton University. He also writes about logic and reasoning at skepticalhumanities.com, and is a regular guest on the YouTube show The Virtual Skeptics.Julie Galef is the president and co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, a non-profit devoted to training people to be better at reasoning and decision-making. She is also the host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast and writes for publications like Slate, Science, Scientific American, and Popular Science. This is her website.

Zoe Quinn's awesome $21 "I'm the best graphic designer" tee has it all: linebreaks, Comic Sans, all caps, weird kerning... Just the thing to break the hearts of your designer pals!

Today marks the end of any major contests among presidential candidates in the U.S. Democratic Primary. The election has been steady and relatively predictable at the polls. It seems hardly a contest at all, if you look at the math. But math hasn't stopped a flaming screamfest about lifted chairs and cheating complaints, system-rigging, and general disharmony between two candidates with voting records that actually align 92% of the time.(more…)

In its death throes, the Republican Party is a toilet of racist, sexist, misogynistic bullshit. Today, Iowa State Senator David Johnson has changed his party affiliation to "No Party", and compared the rise of Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president, to that of the fascist German National Socialists in the 1930s.Via TPM:

Mark Cain's second installment in his Circles of Hell series, A Cold Day in Hell, was just as funny as the first!Steve, Hell's superintendent, and his assistant, THE Orson Welles, are it again! Seems the air conditioning in Hell is on the fritz, and that proverbial cold day is here. With the help of Satan's pet BOOH, the Bat Out Of Hell, and the love of Steve's after-life, Flo, can they set things right?Cain's Circles of Hell series are fast, fun, endearing reads the remind me of Robert Kroese's DIS series.A Cold Day In Hell (Circles In Hell Book 2) by Mark Cain via Amazon

Bicycle playing cards are probably the most common playing cards, at least here in the United States. I prefer to do magic tricks using Bicycle cards, because they don't make people suspicious like a deck with an unfamiliar back might.In my book, Trick Decks, I show how to mark your own Bicycle deck with a Sharpie, but to use it, you have to memorize the code.If you are lazy and want an easy-to-read deck, get the Ultimate Marked Deck, available with red or blue Bicycle backs. The cards look and feel exactly like a regular bicycle deck, but you can instantly read the suit and value of any card with a quick glance at its back.Historically, the company that makes Bicycle cards has not made marked Bicycle decks, so this is kind of a big deal in the magic world. At $30, it's pricey, but you can do some amazing tricks with a marked deck.

See sample pages of Hurts Like a Mother at Wink.Hurts Like a Mother: A Cautionary Alphabet

Some objects that probably belong in tribal hands or a museum are being auctioned off. Evidently the Rathbun family of Colorado has been holding on to a quite a few tribal artifacts, and guns, including a few collected from the Wounded Knee battle site, immediately after the battle.Via the Indian Country Today Media Network:

My new Guardian column, It's your duty to complain – that's how companies improve, is a rebuttal to those who greet public complaints about businesses' actions with, "Well, just don't buy from them, then." (more…)

On last night's Late Show with Stephen Colbert, our pals Death Cab for Cutie delivered a lovely performance of "No Room In Frame" from their magnificent album Kintsugi. They're co-headlining shows with CHVRCHES tonight in Cleveland and tomorrow in Canandaigua, New York, followed by more US dates through the summer.And yeah, I'm biased, but hot damn do they put on a tight live show. Trippy too.

Ocean photographer Tim Samuel captured these startling photos of a fish swallowed by a jellyfish off Byron Bay, Australia's Pass Beach."(The fish) seemed to be struggling a little bit, as it would swim around, it would try to swim in a straight line but the jellyfish would knock it off course, would send it in little circles or loops," Samuel told CNN. "It was a tough decision, I definitely thought about setting it free, but in the end decided to just let nature run its course."

The Leica KE-7A is a very rare camera manufactured for the US military in the early 1970s. It's essentially a hardened and dust-resistant version of Leica's popular M4 camera. With around 500 produced, it's nearly impossible to find one in good condition. That's why this unopened specimen up on eBay right now is so special, and so expensive, priced at $45,300 or best offer. The listing includes an x-ray of the package.According to the listing, the image below depicts another example of the same camera outfit as the one in the sealed package. But then again, how can you know for sure what's inside until you open it..."Although I do not advise I can open the bag to inspect the camera for you at a Euro 5000 nonrefundable deposit," says the seller. "If you decide not to buy at any reason the deposit will not be refunded as the value will then be less."

I suppose no news was good news on April 18, 1930. At 6:30pm during the regularly scheduled news bulletin slot, the BBC News announcer turned on the mic and said:

Todd May of Ogden, Utah discovered this object that he says is a fossilized Bigfoot skull. May previously spotted Bigfoot in Ogden Canyon. Twice. In fact, he says the creatures have thrown rocks at him. Hiking again in the area, he found the fossilized skull."It had the same facial structure as the creatures I had seen," he told the Times Record News."There's haters out there, other Bigfoot enthusiasts that don't like that I found something first," May said.On the other hand, Jesse Carlucci, a geoscience professor at Midwestern State University, insists that the object is absolutely a rock. Sure it is, professor...(Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)

Stephen Ruth, a self-styled "Red Light Robin Hood," pleaded not guilty to 17 charges of disabling red light cameras in Suffolk County, New York. If convicted, he could serve up to seven years in prison. Ruth uses a painter's extension rod to tilt cameras to face the sky, and also snips the cameras' power wires. He said he does it because the county recently reduced yellow-light times from 5 to 3 seconds to increase revenue generated by fines, and that the time change has increased the number of accidents.

Web Sheriff has been retained by the mysterious celeb(s) at the center of the super injunction over an olive-oil threesome in a paddling pool, and as we learned, merely mentioning that such a thing exists is enough to lure them out of their caves and onto your doorstep, from which vantage they will endlessly pastebomb a series of legal threats, each more bizarre and incoherent than the last. (more…)

A 21-year-old Naval petty officer in Okinawa allegedly hit two cars while she was drunk, injuring two other people. It was the latest in a series of incidents involving US military personnel who have hurt or killed Japanese citizens. On Monday, the US Navy banned all 19,000 Navy personnel from drinking. The ban applies both on-base and off-base. In addition, sailors have been grounded. The can only leave their base to run "necessary errands."McClatchy DC:

"Aberdeen" is a montage of journal doodles and visual art, including animated excerpts from the documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck.

Star Trek turned 50 in 2016. In its half-century of existence — on TV, on the big screen, and in the worldwide community of its fans — Star Trek has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Even casual viewers know the pointed ears, the Vulcan salute, and the meaning of “beam me up, Scotty.”Manu Saadia's Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek is available from Amazon.Yet, Star Trek does not owe its enduring popularity and its place in our collective imagination to its aliens or to its technological speculations. What makes it so unique, and so exciting, is its radical optimism about humanity’s future as a society: in other words, utopia. (more…)

Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton is arguably the most successful Broadway show of the century (deservedly so -- the soundtrack is practically all I've listened to for the past month) but good luck if you want to get a ticket. (more…)

The producers of a Hollywood biopic about 13th-century poet Jalaluddin al-Rumi hope to cast Leonardo DiCaprio in the role—and they're eyeing Robert Downey Jr. for the part of "enigmatic mystic" Shams of Tabriz. (more…)

For the uninitiated, DevOps is a fairly new tech field focused on getting a project’s programmers and operation engineers on the same page. The goal: to ensure they can seamlessly collaborate from the very beginning of a given project.And as those in this rapidly expanding field can attest, companies are finding tremendous value in DevOps masters who can bring together two very different sides of the tech industry into a cohesive unit.You can be your company's DevOps “snake charmer” - or find the start of a new career - with this DevOps Hacker course bundle, now on sale in the Boing Boing Store for only $29.Through 13 hours of content, you’ll become familiar with DevOps procedures and closely study Docker, a platform designed to help you build software that’ll run smoothly and quickly in any environment.You’ll cut your DevOps teeth building customized Flask and Ruby on Rails apps, then learn how Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) cloud platform works with Docker to streamline your software and development of your app products.Open a new career opportunity with the DevOps Hacker Bundle, discounted at only $29 for a limited time.

A gentleman in England spots, adroitly, that the road ahead is underwater. So he decides, not so adroitly, to "Charge!" The story unfolds from this point as you expect it will.

A youngster somewhere in British Columbia was recording video of an unrelated event in a strip mall parking lot when he noticed a charming, red-striped vintage bus. It's not every day you run into a 1970s General Motors New Look! The exciting moment is at about 41 seconds in.

Fred Eaton's chicken is a slacker. [YouTube]

Follow @RubenBolling on Twitter and Facebook.Please join Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the INNER HIVE, for early access to comics, and more.And/or buy Ruben Bolling’s new book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

In 2010, the UK spy agency MI5 drafted memos informing top UK officials that its dragnet surveillance programme was gathering more information than it could make sense of, and warning that its indiscriminate approach to surveillance could put Britons at risk when signals about dangerous terror attacks were swamped by the noise of meaningless blips from the general population. (more…)

Earlier today, the Santa Clara Sheriff's department released its mugshot of Brock Turner. Here, though, is the booking photo taken the night of his arrest and sent to us by Stanford University's Department of Public Safety, the arresting agency.Brock Turner, 20, was taken into custody after raping a woman behind a dumpster on Stanford's Palo Alto campus on on January 18, 2015. Though convicted on multiple felony counts, with prosecutors asking for a 6-year custodial sentence, Turner was given only 6 months in jail. With good behavior, he could be out in weeks.The lenient sentence (he will also spend 3 years on probation and must enroll on the sex offenders' registry) drew much criticism, as did authorities' apparent refusal to release booking photographs of Turner until today. Without access to the public record, most outlets (including Boing Boing) ran a yearbook photo that presented a clean-cut, smiling athlete.Photographs can influence the public's appreciation of a case, and many criticize police and the media when poor or minority suspects are presented with booking photos, while suspects like Turner end up given the benefit of professional headshots.Stanford University released a statement today regarding the case, pointing out that it immediately launched an investigation, banned Turner from its campus after his arrest, and praised students who literally brought him to justice.

Before Trump became the Republican nominee, BuzzFeed and the Republican National Committee had struck a $1.3-million deal to run ads in the fall before the general election. But then came Trump, and it looks like his racist comments of the last week were the last straws. According to Politico:

Rude Cakes

Avant Garde magazine ran for 16 issues from January 1968 to July 1971. It had a small print run, but is treasured today for its gorgeous design by art director Herb Lubalin. It was edited by photo-journalist Ralph Ginzburg, who was indicted by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the 1960s for distributing obscene literature through the mails. This website has scans of most of the issues. I would love to have the dead tree version of the complete run.

Deece27 bought 4,000 random books from Books by The Foot and fastened them to the wall by nailing each one to the book underneath followed by two nails angled into the wall. Check out more images of the project here. (via r/DIY)

Norman Sperling's fantastic re-imagined AstroScan telescope, the Bright-Eye, has been funded. Thank you all for participating!Years ago, I asked Mark for a recommendation on a good at-home telescope. He sent me a link to the AstroScan. It looked so cool I immediately bought it. Luckily it is also a damn fine device for viewing the skies!A few years later the AstroScan was discontinued. This was sad. Lots of people loved the scope! Its inventor, Norman Sperling, crowdfunded an updated release called the Bright Eye. Now you can order a Bright-Eye from Norman direct, info is on the KS page.You guys! Boing Boing readers! You helped make it possible. Thank you!

(more…)