See sample pages from this book at Wink.Groundbreaking Food Gardens: 73 Plans That Will Change the Way You Grow Your Garden

In 1979, the Duke of Lancaster -- a cruise liner turned car ferry -- was retired from service and moored at Llanerch-y-Mor, North Wales, where it was made over as a "Fun Ship," whose car-deck was refitted as a coin-op arcade. (more…)

If you think that your phone may have been hacked so that your adversaries can watch you through the cameras and listen through the mics, one way to solve the problem is to remove the cameras and microphones, and only use the phone with a headset that you unplug when it's not in use. (more…)

For more than four years, we've been writing about Prenda Law, a prolific copyright troll (that is, a company that sends dire legal threats and demands for money to people they accuse of copyright infringement, based on the flimsiest of evidence), whose conduct is so breathtakingly illegal that it feels like satire or performance art (but it's not). (more…)

Michelle Duchouquette gave Prestigious Pets of Dallas a 1-star review on Yelp. She was unhappy about being charged an extra $5 for dog care and the way the water in her fish bowl became cloudy. Now the pet daycare company is suing her for up to $1 million because she unwittingly signed a non-disparagement clause buried in the fine print of the agreement she signed.From CBS Dallas Fort Worth:

When Purdue Pharma's patent on the MS Contin was close to expiry, the Sackler family who owned the company spent millions trying to find a product that could replace the profits they'd lose from generic competition on MS Contin: the result was Oxycontin, a drug that went on to kill Americans at epidemic scale. (more…)

From The Washington Post:

In A2: Analog Malicious Hardware, a paper given at the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, a group of researchers from the University of Michigan detail a novel, frightening attack on the integrity of microprocessors that uses nearly undetectable tampering, late in the manufacturing process, to allow attackers to trip the "privilege" bit on the chip from userspace processes. (more…)

Each one of us has a relationship with our own ignorance, a dishonest, complicated relationship, and that dishonesty keeps us sane, happy, and willing to get out of bed in the morning.Part of that ignorance is a blind spot we each possess that obscures both our competence and incompetence.Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudThis episode is also brought to you 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.If you love the show and want to support its continued production, become a patron! Get episodes one-day-early and ad-free as well as show extras and original content just for patrons. Head over to the YANSS Patreon Page for more details.In the case of singing, you might get all the way to an audition on X-Factor on national television before someone finally provides you with an accurate appraisal. David Dunning says that the shock that some people feel when Simon Cowell cruelly explains to them that they suck is often the result of living for years in an environment filled with mediocrity enablers. Friends and family, peers and coworkers, they don’t want to be mean or impolite. They encourage you to keep going until you end up in front of millions reeling from your first experience with honest feedback.When you are unskilled yet unaware, you often experience what is now known in psychology as the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological phenomenon that arises sometimes in your life because you are generally very bad at self-assessment. If you have ever been confronted with the fact that you were in over your head, or that you had no idea what you were doing, or that you thought you were more skilled at something than you actually were – then you may have experienced this effect. It is very easy to be both unskilled and unaware of it, and in this episode we explore why that is with professor David Dunning, one of the researchers who coined the term and a scientist who continues to add to our understanding of the phenomenon.Read more about the Dunning-Kruger effect from David Dunning himself in this article recently published in the Pacific Standard.Links and SourcesDownload – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – SoundcloudPrevious EpisodesBoing Boing PodcastsCookie RecipesDavid DunningWe Are All Confident IdiotsScientific Evidence That Self-Promoters Underestimate How Annoying They Are20 Minutes of X-Factor AuditionsIgnorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design (Inside Technology)Image Source: Picserver via Creative Commons 3 – CC BY-SA 3.0

This week, Marvel Comics published the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers in which it's revealed that since his earliest days, Captain America has been a double agent for Hydra, the thinly veiled allegory for the Nazis; in an epic Twitter rant, Livejournal alumnus and Dreamwidth cofounder Denise Paolucci explains the way that perpetual copyright and business concentration has neutralized the ancient custom of collective storytelling of epic narratives, magnifying the harm from bad corporate decisions. (more…)

Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have more or less agreed to debate one another. (more…)

In a new report, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reveals that the "Department of Defense uses 8- inch floppy disks in a legacy system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation’s nuclear forces." That floppy format was developed in the late 1960s and was obsolete by the 1980s. I wonder if the DoD saves a few bucks by using a hole punch to make them double sided.According to the GAO report, "The agency plans to update its data storage solutions, port expansion processors, portable terminals, and desktop terminals by the end of fiscal year 2017."INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: Federal Agencies Need to Address Aging Legacy Systems (PDF)

Next April, Tor Books will publish Walkaway, the first novel I've written specifically for adults since 2009; it's scheduled to be their lead title for the season and they've hired the brilliant designer Will Staehle (Yiddish Policeman's Union, Darker Shade of Magic) for the cover, which Tor has just revealed. (more…)

From Jonathan Marcus's YouTube:

Roadside snapshot by my pal Rachel Demy in Twisp, Washington.(via Rachel's Instagram)

Random number generators are the foundation of cryptography -- that's why the NSA secretly sabotaged the RNG standard that the National Institute for Standards and Technology developed. (more…)

I love TV theme songs. I play old science fictions standards in the car or fast roads, funky 70s cop and public service show themes when I drive around big cities, and children's television workshop themes touch my heart. Walks down Memory Lane can be fun, when they aren't terrifying acid flashbacks.Here is a list I kept as I lost 30 minutes this afternoon, feel free to add more to the comments below.3-2-1 Contact (top) was the best kids science show of my youth. The theme song continues to inspire and I admit to singing along, very loudly. You can watch them recording it, it was the intro of their first episode.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-PLEhiOeVAThe Bob Newhart Show's big band jazz theme contrasted with the mundane, but brilliant, Bob Newhart walking around opening.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o02VPDM4XIcGimme a Break's Nell Carter sure could sing.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQTqKcojrVYThe Patty Duke Show's theme always struck me as just ridiculous, but I can remember ALL THE WORDS. I mean how much convincing does it take? Those cousins are awfully similar.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_AmqBGDJDsCharles Gounod's The Funeral March of a Marionette (Marche funèbre d'une marionnette) very distinctly means Alfred Hitchcock Presents is on.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPI63UKkdHYThe Electric Company sure had a trippy intro.https://youtu.be/udrJU4dUXAAIf you made it this far, this video of Sammy Davis Jr. singing the theme song to Baretta, "Keep Your Eye On The Sparrow" is amazing. The several minutes of Sammy, on stage and being his incredible, generous, loving, and just genuine self brings tears to my eyes as I type this. Sammy singing the funkiest television theme song of all time? Really an absolute masterpiece of music, let alone TV music, and a masterpiece of a human being.

Arduino is an electronics prototyping platform that gives non-engineers the ability to add interactivity to their projects. (I teach an online Arduino course on Skillshare that 1,163 have taken with a 97% rating).Amazon has a sale on the genuine Arduino Starter Kit for $72. It has the Arduino Uno microprocessor and a bunch of components, along with instructions for 15 projects that will give you a feel for all the things you can do with Arduino.

This cinéma vérité style documentary follows a Marine Corps drill instructor and his crew of fresh recruits in San Diego during the 13-week training program known as boot camp.From Wikipedia:In Helmet for My Pillow, his World War II memoir, journalist Robert Leckie wrote of Marine Corps Recruit Training that, "It is a process of surrender. At every turn, at every hour, it seemed, a habit or a preference had to be given up, an adjustment had to be made. Even in the mess hall we learned that nothing mattered so little as a man's own likes or dislikes ... Worst in this process of surrender was the ruthless refusal to permit a man the slightest privacy."

The questions posed by David Cay Johnston include some tough-to-avoid queries about Trump's involvement with the mafia, the regulatory findings against his company for unfair and unsafe employment practices, and times when Trump had admitted to shading the truth or lying outright about his affairs. (more…)

Over 90 tents, sleeping bags, coolers full of food, and of course trash were left strewn about California's Lake Shasta. Some of the detritus was proudly emblazoned with University of Oregon logos, and those of the fraternal organization Lambda Chi Alpha. Unsurprisingly, the images have made their way to social media.Via Oregon Live:

See sample pages from this book at Wink.World of Warcraft Chronicle

Secret Life of the Human Pups is a Channel 4 documentary that takes a "sympathetic look at the world of pup play, a movement that grew out of the BDSM community and has exploded in the last 15 years as the internet made it easier to reach out to likeminded people."From The Guardian:

In this video from the Florida Institute of Technology, professor Ningyu Liu at the Geospace Physics Laboratory "caught a beautiful lightning show from a recent storm. It’s recorded at 7000 frames per second and the playback speed is 700 frames per second."

Supaidāman (スパイダーマン) aired in Japan for one season from 1978-1979. Spider's suit is familiar, but in this series his main power is that he, um, pilots a transforming robot named Leopardon. From Wikipedia:

May 25th is celebrated as Towel Day! a tribute to the late author Douglas Adams, 1952-2001.From Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

I'd never heard this Sammy Davis Jr. cover of José Feliciano's charming Chico and the Man theme!Chico and the Man told the story of Ed, an alcoholic garage owner in 1970s East L.A., and Chico, a struggling young man looking for work. The two form an incredible relationship, and the chemistry between actors Jack Albertson, who plays Ed, and Freddie Prinze's Chico was amazing.The show has a sad history, during its run Freddie Prinze lost a battle with depression, and drugs, wherein he took his own life. The theme song, however, is seriously uplifting. It encourages tolerance and understanding.If you want to try the show, this DVD via Amazon has 6 handpicked episodes for $4, including "Ed Talks to God" the final episode with Prinze. I didn't have any luck finding full episodes on YouTube.

As I type this, the consumer rights organization has been broadcasting its live-reading of terms of service for Instagram, YouTube, Kindle, Spotify, Snapchat and other popular apps for more than one day and eight hours. (more…)

Join Tom the Dancing Bug's INNER HIVE in May, and more than the amount of your cost to sign up will be donated to help protect journalists around the world! You get exclusive access to comics and other stuff, and journalists get to do their work exposing corruption without being put in jail.Click here to sign up for the INNER HIVE; click here for information.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Long before Sergio Aragonés filled the margins of MAD Magazine with tiny, weird cartoons, the margins of medieval manuscripts were a playground for bored monks with crude senses of humor. (more…)

The Freedom of Information Act specifies that government agencies must give a discount to "educational institutions" when they file requests, but for years, agencies led by the Department of Defense have argued that this discount only applies to faculty, not students, who would have to pay full rate even though they generally have less money to begin with. (more…)

In a recent high-stakes basketball match between the Golden State Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder, Golden State Warrior player Draymond Green kicked Thunder player Steven Adams directly in the penis and testicles. (more…)

The National Rifle Association (NRA) tells the "ayatollahs of Iran" to "listen up" to a new ultra-nationalist dis track featuring country music has-been Charlie Daniels.(more…)

NASA today announced that astronomers studying data from NASA’s Great Observatories have found the best evidence yet for “cosmic seeds in the early universe that should grow into supermassive black holes.”(more…)

On Thursday May 26, Red Nose Day will return for the second year. It’s all about giving to children to fight hunger, sickness, and homelessness.In the video above, the most famous magician in the world, David Copperfield, has his own magical way of asking you to get involved.There’s going to be a two-hour TV show on NBC that evening at 9 p.m. eastern time, 8 p.m. central time, brought to you by the folks who put together Comic Relief. The biggest stars in America are going to come together for your donations.Learn more about it here, and see what even the smallest donations can do.

In 1979, Roger Mainwood, just out of the Royal College of Art, created this wonderfully trippy animation for Kraftwerk's "Autobahn." It was a commission from the band's record company but Kraftwerk had no input on the film, and Mainwood says he's unsure if they even saw it. The fan site KraftwerkOnline tracked down Mainwood and interviewed him about the film:

The biggest banks in the world have admitted to rigging LIBOR, a key interest rate that determines the value of trillions of dollars' worth of assets -- they paid billions in fines as a result. (more…)

I've been keeping a ChicoBag in my travel kit for about ten years. It's small enough that I could almost hide it in my fist. But when opened, it's large enough to carry a laptop and charger, or a beach towel and sunscreen, or a fair amount of groceries. It's made of polyester and can carry a lot of weight without bursting at the seams. It has handles. I've used it countless times. The bag has a sewn on pouch, so you can stuff the bag into the pouch, ouroboros-style. A four-pack costs $20 on Amazon.

The heroin epidemic in America has a death-toll comparable to the AIDS epidemic at its peak, but this time, there's no movement coalescing to argue for the lives of the economically sidelined, financially ruined dying thousands -- while the AIDS epidemic affected a real community of mutual support, the heroin epidemic specifically strikes down people whose communities are already gone. (more…)

"Zero rating" is a widely practiced business among mobile carriers: they solicit bribes from Internet companies in return for their services being exempted from the carriers' data-caps -- products from companies that pay the bribes can be used for free, while a billing meter ticks for every bit downloaded from their competitors. (more…)

A police detective in Rock Falls, Illinois has been arrested for stealing more than $1,700 in cash found on the body of a man who died of a heroin overdose. Detective Sgt. Veronica Jaramillo, 43, was taken into police custody on May 17, 2016 by Illinois State Police and charged with theft and official misconduct. (more…)

The Turkish five lira note, issued in 2009, has a DNA helix. But Nobel laureate Aziz Sancar noticed that the note "shows a left-handed Z-DNA helix winding from left to right, when it should be the other way round." What Sancar doesn't know is that the monetary systems of the world are controlled by the lizard people, whose DNA is exactly like that depicted on the banknote.

When a team of "vested up and gunned up" U.S. Marshals in Tennessee apprehended Tracy Hinson and began interrogating her about selling 10 Xanax tablets in 2012, she gave them answers that made it clear they had the wrong woman. The marshal in charge told Hinton he needed to make a call."After he went and made a call, he came back and told me that he had to do what the paper said he had to. He asked if I ever lived in Mt. Pleasant, and I said no," said Hinson. "They took me to the Dyer County Jail and I was fully processed there, and that included being shackled and strip searched. They said they were holding me until Lawrence County could come and pick me up that night."From State Gazette:

Pixelsynth is a lovely and compelling Web app by Olivia Jack that enables you to easily turn your own images into weird electronic music and tweak the tones (and graphics) in real time. PIXELSYNTH (via Waxy)

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration asked its head of security to turn in his badge and bright blue gloves. Kelly Hoggan has been 'removed from his post.' (more…)

Dolores Park is a symbol of the clash between of the Mission District's low-income, non-white traditional residents and the flood of gentrifying tech world. (more…)

Virginia authorities handcuffed a middle school student and charged him with larceny for "stealing" a milk carton from the school cafeteria earlier this year. The child has also been suspended from school.(more…)

According the the filings in a lawsuit brought by Equal Justice Under Law against Harris County, Texas, 77% of the inmates in Harris County Jail -- largest in Texas, third largest in America -- are there because they couldn't make a bail payment of $5,000 or less. (more…)

The Isis River, which flows through the English university city of Oxford, has inspired many place names that include "Isis," including "Isis Close." (more…)

“Netflix will become the exclusive US pay TV home of the latest films from Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Pixar,” Netflix announced today in a blog post. The blockbuster Netflix/Disney deal from 2012 goes into effect this fall.