I had no idea Muhammad Ali loved magic. This is a great story about a friendship between a young magician living with the aftereffects of polio, and the world's greatest athlete.From Vox:

The United Arab Emirates held an auction for coveted vanity license plates. The most expensive plate was "1," purchased by Emirati businessman Arif Ahmed al-Zarouni for US$5 million. He said: “My ambition is always to be number one.”

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Star Trek original TV series, Mattel is releasing a new Barbie collection of Kirk, Spock, and Uhura dolls. These figures would play well with the Star Trek Barbie and Ken released in 1996, during the 30th anniversary of Star Trek.

This is what 3D chalk artist Chris Carlson did over the weekend. Here's the side view, followed by more work by the Denver, Colorado-based master of anamorphosis. (via r/pics)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2juYr2Xjeo

If you’re a hardcore gamer, then Steam likely occupies more of your time than you’d care to admit. With its endless collection of recent and time-honored hits, you could spend a fortune building your game library and still only scratch the surface of what's offered.So...why don’t you spend Boing Boing’s money instead? You will if you win our $1,000 Steam Giveaway. Be the lucky winner, and you’ll instantly have access to $1,000 in Steam cash, ready for you to start gobbling up titles from any of the 3,500 games covering every genre of gaming.How do you win? Just sign up via Facebook or email, and then be that lucky person who gets their name randomly selected. You can even earn an extra shot at the big prize if a friend of yours (21 or older) also enters by following the Additional Entry instructions on the screen.Enter now -- registration ends soon.

After seeing a picture of the Swedish royals in "folk costumes," she used four blue Ikea bags, one yellow one, and a Ikea Dvala bedsheet to replicate the costume -- she did a brilliant job. (more…)

The Guardian reports that Ralph Clarke, facing charges of child abuse dating to the 20th century, is believed to be Britain's oldest court defendant.

Since the earliest days of the Snowden revelations, apologists for the NSA's criminal spying program have said that Snowden should have gone "through channels" to report his concerns, rather than giving evidence to journalists and going public. (more…)

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There it was on my Facebook feed yesterday: Trending: Prince. Why was Prince a trending topic when he’d been found dead a month ago? Then I learned his official cause of death had just been released: “Accidental Fentanyl toxicity.” In other words, he unintentionally overdosed on a drug he was taking to treat chronic pain. After reading the comments on the various new Prince articles, it hit me: though Prince’s body died of opioid overdose, the autopsy report may as well have said “death by ignorance and fear,” both his own, and the public’s.If “death by ignorance and fear” sounds inflammatory and sensational, stop and think about it. Why on earth would anyone wait to get medical help for something that could kill them? Would you furtively seek treatment if you realized you had something potentially fatal? Would you wait until things were so bad that your life was literally falling apart and you were afraid you might die? No. You’d rightly engage in proactive self-care and get professional medical treatment, with no fear that anyone would proclaim you as weak-willed and morally bankrupt. You would do it with no fear that it might permanently damage your reputation, your career, or negatively affect your family. But that’s not the case with addiction and mental health.Because of his fear of what had become his “secret” getting out to the public, Prince passed off an emergency plane landing due to overdose as “the flu.” The public’s eyes were on him, and treatment that would have saved his life was delayed. Why? It is primarily the ignorance and fear of an addiction-shaming and tabloid culture that drives public figures to make such insane decisions. The press and public surely would have turned the very normal act of Prince seeking medical treatment for his condition into scandalous fodder, something the very private Prince--or anyone--would likely choose to avoid.Most of the reactions to the cause of death news were disheartening to read, partly because I used to work for Prince, who was as straight an arrow as they come. I was 22 years old and got a gig as the production secretary for his second film, “Graffiti Bridge,” shot at Paisley Park Studios in Chanhassen, Minnesota. I wasn’t on set much, mostly working in the production office, which was on the main floor, right across from the elevator that led upstairs and to Prince’s private quarters. That was usually where I saw him, stepping out of the elevator door in the morning. So when I heard that his body was found in the elevator, it was a jarring visual contrast to the spry cannon of energy that bounced out of that door every day in four inch heels.I liked working at Paisley Park, it was a very professional environment, but also had a community feel to it, and I felt like I was a part of something. When George Clinton would do his scenes, he would ask me to watch his grandson for him and we got chatty over time. I was even able to get my brother a job on the film, doing security patrol. It seemed to me that Prince took the good will that Warner Bros. showed in building Paisley Park, very seriously, and passed it on to others. It was a not a glorified man-cave or over-priced party house. Prince ran the place like what it was--a world class production facility with a massive soundstage, recording studio, and performance space. From my observations, the partying took place offsite and did not involve Prince. (It was apparently in George Clinton’s wheelhouse, however.)I remember processing Prince’s W-9 form for payroll and seeing that his legal first name really was Prince. “Prince Rogers Nelson,” it read, and then his social security number. Prince was human--a person working hard for his paycheck just like everybody else. I remember him taking some actors into the hallway to teach them complicated dance moves for an upcoming scene--again, in 4-inch heels. Prince was a petite guy, but he wore those heels well, and could move nimbly in them, and he seemed to be moving all the time. I can’t help but fast forward now to the ensuing decades of performance and the toll it obviously took on his body, leading to his double hip replacement surgery in 2010. The surgery failed to relieve his pain, and so his long-term chronic pain treatment began.That job was my first experience in major studio film production, and I learned a ton. I was grateful for the opportunity and the stories I had from it. The last time I saw Prince was when he threw the film’s wrap party at Paisley Park. Everyone was invited and could bring guests, from production assistants on up, and were treated by our host as equals.At that time, I had only just begun teaching myself how to play bass, so I would never have believed that in years to come we’d both have stars on the wall outside of the Minneapolis rock club he made famous, First Avenue. His, of course, for being Prince, and mine for my years as the bassist in Minneapolis band Babes in Toyland. I’ve played numerous gigs at that club, and we shot a music video there, but it was an indescribable honor for our band to be on the same wall as him.Though Prince and I may have both been musicians who shared a city, I am sure as hell not drawing parallels in our careers. I have not gone on to sell 100 million records like he did. And I didn’t blow people’s minds playing the Superbowl. I can’t dance in 4-inch heels. I can’t write hit songs as easily as jotting down a shopping list. Nor was it my time working for him that feeds my empathy about his death and the public’s reaction to it. What I have in common with Prince are my personal experiences with chronic pain and addiction. I’m a recovering addict 12 years sober, but an addict nonetheless, and I deal with pain daily. Glancing at comments like “He did it to himself,” “Surprise, another rock star drug addict,” and other victim-blaming attitudes, angers and upsets me.I know what it’s like to live in chronic pain. I’ve survived four car accidents, none of which I caused, surprisingly. Each one incrementally worsened my neck pain to the point that after the third one in 2011, I agreed to have cervical spine surgery to relieve it. Surgery was risky, and not a quick fix, but I couldn’t imagine living in pain like that any longer. It also involved an extremely long recovery--and being on painkillers most of that time. I struggled with them, but it was an unavoidable part of my treatment.My doctor knew I was an addict, but it was the only option for treating the inevitable and severe pain--and severe it was. Sure, it killed the pain as I recovered, but it also gave me a wonderful feeling--peaceful and anxiety-free--an instant vending machine happiness, which, for someone with Depression, is delightful. That is what I struggled not to cling to. That, I knew, was addiction. I was weaned off of them, and thankfully I lived pain-free for four years. Last year, another accident brought it back. Though it is chronic, the pain is not as severe as before, so I am able to avoid opioids. It is nothing like the pain Prince was enduring. I can’t imagine living with severe pain for the rest of my life, like he was facing.In the case of prescription opioids, these people are not addicts looking for a high, but for relief from their pain. Fentanyl is up to 100 times more potent than morphine and can be 30 to 50 times more powerful than heroin. Even when taken in small amounts, it can be fatal. Neuroscientists know that addiction is a brain disease, but most people don’t. There is a huge gap in the public’s understanding of it as a medical condition, not a choice or moral failing, but a progressive, fatal disease.Though my original addiction was to another substance, it almost killed me, as it does so many. Prince wasn’t as lucky as me. My incident happened two blocks away from a hospital. I was saved, the ER doctor later told me, by how quickly I got to the hospital. Five minutes later and it would have been curtains, as she put it. It was shortly afterwards that I got sober.Prince may not have been happy about the need for addiction treatment, but he knew it was time, and he had a close enough call on the plane to ponder the thought that his addiction could end his life. Clearly, he wanted to live. But he didn’t want anyone to know. Sadly, addiction is particularly lethal in the case of performing artists with egos and identities whose destruction could mean the end of their careers. Hide it, hide it, hide it. Hide it from you. Hide it from us.From my perspective, lumping Prince into the bin of rock stars done in by overdose, dismissing the tragedy as another example of excess and bad choices, is not only inaccurate, it perpetuates dangerous attitudes and ignorance about chronic pain and addiction. Every medical treatment has inherent risks. So why the shame?We didn’t disavow David Bowie for treating his cancer with chemotherapy, though the side effects made him sick in many ways. Bowie was a patient seeking relief, and that’s what Prince was doing, too. In his case, it was chronic pain. The most common treatment for that calls for a dependency on prescription painkillers. It’s not like he became addicted by surprise or chance. It is a known side effect of treating pain with painkillers. The management of that pain is tricky business, as pain is measured by self-report and not observation. Where I believe mistakes were made is in secrecy and shame, which our culture demands in exchange for perceived indulgence in narcotics, prescribed or not.The tragedy that treatment had been delayed and sought through back channels to avoid detection--that is what the focus should be on. Shaming for the treatment of addiction and mental illness is everywhere, and its impact is very real. In my own first year of sobriety, I met a young woman in AA who, like me, also suffered from clinical Depression and was on prescribed anti-depressants. Unfortunately, her AA sponsor was one of those people who believe that ANY drug is bad and that you should be clean of all drugs no matter what. I think a pretty broad swath of the public believes the same. But tell that to a diabetic who takes insulin, or the chronic pain sufferer who takes opioids, then tell it to this girl, who listened to this woman, went off her meds, and killed herself about a month later.I’ve experiences the shaming and ignorance many times, and was once let go from a music project partly because someone said I was “not really sober” because I took prescribed psychiatric medication for Major Depressive Disorder. It is the dangerous attitudes of people like that, and people like the misguided woman at the AA meeting that contribute to the deadliness of addiction.Both the broader medical community and public turn a blind eye to the plight of those in chronic pain, and the majority deny that their inevitable opioid addictions are a progressive, potentially fatal disease worthy of compassion, treatment, and medical resources. Resources like treatment with the drug Suboxone (aka Buprenorphine), which is a narcotic used to treat opiate addiction for not only heroin addicts, but the chronic pain sufferer, whose treatment relies on opioids to live their lives. They aren’t asking for addiction. It’s a side effect of their treatment and it can be lethal. The man who found Prince in the elevator wrote about the limited access to Suboxone both in Minnesota and the nation in treatment for opioid addiction.Prince’s pain management treatment, like so many others, had led to long-term physical dependence on prescription painkillers, which in turn evolved into an addiction, which he was actively seeking help for. What’s the difference between dependence and addiction?According to the National Institutes of Health:

If you're looking for a salary bump (and interesting work to do), consider becoming a certified IT specialist with this CompTIA IT Security, Network and Hardware Certification Training, now just $39 (over 90% off) in the Boing Boing Store.You’ll get 50 hours of content to help you understand threats to a company’s IT systems and network, and neutralize them before they become a liability. Master firewall installation, authentication protocols, and more -- ensuring you're equipped to maintain your company’s online systems.Once you’re done, you’ll be ready to ace four CompTIA-certified tests: the A+ exams, the Network+ exam, and the Security+ exam en route to a better career.This training normally runs almost $2,200, so get on board now at the blowout price of just $39 while this offer lasts.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told rally attendees in Redding, California that he will get "tremendous" support from African-American voters. As proof, he pointed to someone at said, "look at my African-American over here, look at him."

Without realizing it, you sometimes apply a double standard to the things you love, believe, and consider crucial to your identity.If you do this while arguing, it is sometimes called special pleading. You search for exemptions and excuses for why a rule or a description or a definition does not apply to something that you hold dear while still applying those standards to everything else.You also use special pleading to explain away how something extraordinary failed to stand up to scrutiny, or why there is a lack of evidence for a difficult-to-believe claim that you personally think is credible.One of the tools used by special pleaders is called moving the goalposts. Whenever your opponent eliminates one of your claims, you alter your claim just a smidge so that it remains right outside your opponent’s rhetorical grasp. When they do it again, you move your claim a bit more.In this episode, listen as three experts in logic and reasoning dive deep into the odd thinking behind the special pleading fallacy and how you move the goalposts to keep from seeming incorrect.This episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast is the seventh in a full season of episodes exploring logical fallacies. The first episode is here.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudThis episode is brought to you by the MIT Press, publishing Marc Wittmann’s Felt Time The Psychology of How We Perceive Time. Read more about Felt Time and a few other new science, philosophy, language, and technology titles at mitpress.com/smart.This episode of You Are Not So Smart is also brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create you own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial and 10 percent off go to Squarespace.com and use the offer code SOSMART.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.

Muhammad Ali, three-time world heavyweight boxing champion and cultural icon, died today at 74. He was the greatest. From the New York Times:

Meskel Square in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia doesn't appear to have traffic signs, yet drivers and pedestrians do a good job of making it from one side to the other without dying or killing someone.

In this video, Cocktail Chemistry lab shows you how to fill a hollow ice sphere with smoke, so you can crack or melt it open when the drink is served. Instructions here.

Confidential File was a television series that ran from 1953-1959, hosted by Paul Coates. In the episode above, they tackle quack medical treatments and devices.And here's a sensational episode of the program created to scare people about comic books, which were villainized as corrupters of young minds in the 1950s:https://youtu.be/GI8IJA8kdkIRelated: 1950s live television: tricks of carnival game swindlers

See sample pages from this book at Wink.Tacopedia

Meet Danica McKellar who as an undergraduate in college co-published a paper titled "Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on Z2," research that resulted in the Chayes–McKellar–Winn theorem. Oh yeah, before that, McKellar was Winnie on The Wonder Years.(And just to confirm, Josh Saviano who played Paul Pfeiffer did not grow up to become Marilyn Manson.)

I have never heard Greenlandic being spoken. It's like nothing I've heard before. To my untrained ears, it sounds like the vocal track is being run backwards.(more…)

https://youtu.be/dvF2IpWB2B0Don't watch this video if you don't want to see an attack that results in bloodshed.In this video, which may have been taken in Shanghai, a young man throws seed shells on the floor of a subway car in defiance of other passengers telling him to stop. Suddenly, a man in a costume runs up and violently attacks the litterbug with a rubber hammer, drawing blood. The attacker is accompanied by a woman in costume. Are they cosplayers or misguided real-life superheroes? It's hard to tell.

Attorneys for Dr Salo Schapiro, on trial in Miami for Medicare fraud, says that the FBI and the US Attorney have engaged in a decade-long conspiracy to improperly gain access to confidential defense documents, in a scheme that used a crooked Ft Lauderdale copy shop that slipped CDs containing scanned confidential defense documents that had been entrusted to it to the FBI and the DA. (more…)

Caleb Kraft used the Google Cardboard design to make a working VR headset from graham crackers and icing. It's entirely edible, except for the lenses."Making an Edible Virtual Reality Viewer for Your Phone" (MAKE:)

Available as shorts ($25) or pants ($42), and they say "Creepy" on the butt, because they come from Night Vale, where "creepy" is a superlative. (more…)

Canada Post claimed a "crown copyright" over the postal codes assigned to Canadian homes, meaning that Canadian organisations and businesses could only use this vital information if they paid -- that is, they'd have to pay to access something their taxes already paid for, and the richer you were, the more access you could afford. (more…)

There's a well-studied phenomenon that men overestimate even occasional participation by, or mention of, women, but in case you had any doubt... (more…)

As with most museums, Pennsylvania's National Watch & Clock Museum has a "no touching" policy. But one couple wanted so badly to see artist James Borden's wooden clock sculpture run that they couldn't help themselves...Museum director Noel Poirier told NBC Philadelphia that the couple reported the mishap to museum staff. The clock is undergoing repairs and will be on display again in a few months.

Neil Gaiman's third book was a history of the Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy called Don't Panic, which Adams described as "devastatingly true - except the bits that are lies." (more…)

Former Stanford University athlete Brock Allen Turner, 20, raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. Prosecutors wanted him put away for 6 years, but the judge, Aaron Perksy, gave him 6 months to avoid being unnecessarily harsh on the boy. He'll be out in a few weeks.

Last month, a controversial political machination at the top levels of Brazil's government saw the removal of its elected left-wing president, Dilma Rousseff, and her replacement with an appointed, neoliberal "interim president" President Michel Temer, who has now been convicted of committing election fraud and barred from holding elected office in Brazil for 8 years. (more…)

The origin of dogs is a hot topic among biologists, who've fought over whether there's a single point of origin from wolves and when and where it (or they) happened. A new study suggests the answer is twice, independently, from populations of wolves in western Europe and in east Asia. But they interbred, so most modern dogs are descended from both western and eastern groups.

At the outset of the campaign for the Democratic nomination, many of the party's "superdelegates" (party grandees, including current and former officeholders, party officials, etc, who have the ability to swing the nomination at the convention if they think the popular vote has selected an "unelectable" candidate) publicly pledged for Hillary Clinton, but Sanders supporters have held out hope that they would switch sides when it became apparent that Bernie Sanders had a better chance of winning the general election than Hillary Clinton did. (more…)

When John Yoo thinks you're an unacceptably authoritarian threat to the rule of law, does that make you one of the baddies? The New York Times reports on conservative legal eagles unsettled by Trump's naked threats to wield presidential power against his enemies.

If you’re fascinated by paper art and pop-up books, then the name of 51-year old Robert Sabuda will resonate like that of a Zen master. He’s a legend in the world of children’s books, paper design, and engineering, with many famous books to his credit (my favorites are The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland).[caption id="attachment_464808" align="alignnone" width="889"] Photo of Robert Sabuda by Zymeet[/caption]Kind of like a pop-up book equivalent of The Avengers, Sabuda has embarked on a new adventure in collaboration with Shelby Arnold and Simon Arizpe called The Armchair Detective Company. You can also follow them on Facebook. (more…)

In a major blow to security and privacy advocates, a U.S. appeals court on Tuesday ruled that police don't have to have a warrant to obtain your cellphone location data. The ruling means that in America, you have zero expectation of privacy over the historical location data generated by your cell phone. (more…)

If you install "Coincidence Detector," a Chrome plugin from Altrightmedia, then every time a Jewish-seeming name appears in your browser, it will be surrounded in (((triple parentheses))) (the extension also uses a crowdsourced list of known Jews to enfold their names in parenthetical hugs where they appear). (more…)

If you hire Prestigious Pets of Dallas, TX to take care of your pets, you have to sign a sleazy nondisparagement contract through which you promise not to complain in public about the company's service. (more…)

Teacher JoAnne Bolser of Mobile, Alabama's public Cranford Burns Middle School was put on leave last week after administering a math test with word problems about pimps, hos, cocaine dealing, drive-by shootings, gangmembers who "knocked up" multiple girls, and other delightful subjects. The questions included:

New research shows that bees can recognize flowers by the plants' tiny electric field that differs between species. The electric field bends the tiny hairs on a bee's body, firing neurons located at the base of the hair. From the journal Science:

Yusuf Abdi Ali, a former Somali national army commander, is a pretty famous alleged war criminal, someone who's been profiled on major news media, deported from Canada over a failed claim of refugee status, arrested in the USA for lying about his participation in "genocidal acts" on his visa applications, currently embroiled in a lawsuit with someone who claims Ali tortured and shot him -- and now he works as a private airport security officer at DC's Dulles airport. (more…)

Dremel commissioned Mark to make something interesting that used their tools and document the process online. So he made this cool soprano ukulele that has a full-size body but is much shorter than typical ukes because he used zither tuning pegs. He posted the full build notes on Medium.

At Maker Faire a couple of weeks ago Bob Knetzger offered me a BrushPick from a little keychain dispenser. I thought my teeth were already clean but I took one anyway because the picks looked cool, with a tiny sword on one side, a moth antenna on the other side. It turned out that my teeth were not as clean as I previously thought. I bought a 3-pack of dispensers ($6.21 on Amazon) and have been using them every day since. I need to stock up on replacement brushes to refill the containers, each of which hold 15 picks.

The 9th Circuit Court affirmed today that a quarter-second sample used by Madonna didn't infringe the copyright of the original artist. Billboard reports that 1990 hit Vogue's use of a brass hit from 1976's "Love Break" was so small as to be trivial.

Yesterday, the State Department declassified and released Organization and Management of Foreign Policy: 1977-80, volume 28, a Carter-era document that includes startling statements by CIA General Counsel Anthony Lapham on the role of the WWI-era Espionage Act in prosecuting leaks of classified material to the press. (more…)

This welder was perched on a column when the roof collapsed around him. He didn't fall.

Artist and researcher Terence Broad is working on his master's at Goldsmith's computing department; his dissertation involved training neural networks to "autoencode" movies they've been fed. (more…)

Brigham Young University assistant professor Jason Hansen can no longer offer glasses of artificial urine to his physiology students.From ABC7Chicago:

Redditor Isaac_2 didn't just morph actors Hayden Christiansen (Young Anakin) and Sebastian Shaw (Elderly Anakin/Vader), but carefully photomanipulated the result for anatomical credibility and Star Warsyness. Some people see David Bowie; others see a more athletic George Lucas. See the working process at the Star Wars subreddit.

Bryan Whitman -- familiar to many as the Pentagon's top spokesman during much of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- has settled a case with people who live near him in DC, who caught him repeatedly stealing the license plates off their nanny's car using a hidden camera. (more…)