Two of the most prominent makers of body-worn cameras for cops and first responders are fightin' it out over patents.(more…)

The Tsunago pencil sharpener lets you "chain smoke" your pencils by connecting pencil stubs together. The Tsunago ("let's connect") has three blades. One sharpens like a normal pencil sharpener. Another bores a hole in the bottom of one stub. The third makes a plug in the other stub. All you need is a bit of wood glue to keep the pencil pieces stuck together.Here's some who used the sharpener for a courageous Blackwing pencil rescue.(Thanks, Kent!)

Studio Brussels asked astronomers at Belgium's MIRA Public Observatory to select stars that would make a fitting asterism in memory of David Bowie. (Of course, only the International Astronomical Union can officially name stars and other astronomical objects, and it's almost always with a number.)In any case, this effort was tied to the "Stardust for Bowie" annotation project for Google Sky. There is also an unrelated Change.org petition to "Rename planet Mars after David Bowie."(via The Guardian)

I've lived in California long enough to have experienced some big earthquakes, and plenty of power outages from big storms like the ones predicted for the current El Niño season. Plus, nuclear attack, alien invasion, and zombie Armageddon are all possibilities we all have to live with. When shit gets real, you're gonna need light.(more…)

https://youtu.be/oVwmF_vrZh0The real fun in this spherical video starts at 3:43. Use the directional pad in the upper left corner of the YouTube window to center on Emily's face as the room undergoes a Moebius inversion, which turns the sphere inside out.Many of you will have no trouble understanding the math. I don't understand it, but I watched this video about Moebius transformations and now I can pretend to get what's going on.

University of Tokyo food hacker Hiromi Nakamura is developing an electrified fork that zaps your taste buds with low current to make food taste saltier, without using so much salt. Sounds kinda like licking a battery, only not quite as bitter. (Munchies)

https://youtu.be/XnOpOqWWP5o?list=PL6534E936D46257BFEnjoy these 72 videos of virtual models of mechanical devices that draw circles, ellipses, and hyperbolae, as well as more exotic shapes, like nephroids, deltoids, astroids, and lemniscates of Bernoulli.

Teletext was an early mainstream precursor to the web that became successful in the UK and France: hundreds of low-res pages a day streamed in the invisible overscan margins of the TV signal. It died with analog television; archivists are finding the original data can be recovered from VHS tapes.

Chris from Sense About Science writes, "Had trouble sleeping recently? This week Ask for Evidence is turning its attention to the multitude of claims about sleep -- how you should be doing it, what you should be wearing for it, what you should be doing it on. First up is Ben, who got the NHS to change the advice on its website after asking them for evidence about claims that not getting enough sleep could make you obese." (more…)

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is an EU-US "trade agreement" that will allow corporations to sue governments in secret tribunals to force them to repeal their safety, environmental and labor laws. (more…)

Geoff sends us a post about "the 'strange phenomenon' of naturally-occurring 'forest rings,' or circles up to 2km in diameter only visible from the air, in northern Ontario. The rings are at least partially caused by electrochemical effects in the soil -- which are apparently strong enough to affect the local water table, such that 'the water is being held up against gravity,' as geochemist Stewart Hamilton discovered. This is 'beyond science fiction,' he gushed." (more…)

Charlie Stross describes the "the fusion of twitter, facebook, and other disclosure-induction social media with always-connected handheld internet devices" as "telepathy" for election campaigns, which are now able to attune their messages and tactics to the lizard-brains of the electorate. (more…)

When confronted with the fact of his four bankruptcies, Donald Trump argues that he was just being a shrewd businessman, restructuring his affairs to maximize profits. But when The Donald took one of his companies public, we got an unprecedented look into his fiscal incompetence. (more…)

The domestic terrorists who seized the Malheur national wildlife refuge near Bend, OR, are operating with incredible impunity, destroying public property, breaking into federal databases and disrupting sites of archaeological and sacred indigenous interest. (more…)

The left-wing leader of the UK Labour Party has set out a pair of proposed reguations for British limited liability corporations that will challenge their ability to sponge off the tax-payer and enrich themselves and their shareholders in so doing. (more…)

Robert Reich, who served as Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor, chairs Common Cause, and wrote such bestsellers as Beyond Outrage, answers six of the most common objections to raised by "Bernie skeptics" who don't believe Bernie Sanders could win the presidential race. (more…)

A leaked Vancouver internal police bulletin sent the city into a tizz when they learned that the cops were trying to locate three "Middle-Eastern" men who'd been taking a suspicious amount of photographs of a shopping mall. (more…)

If you've grown weary of recaptioning your New Yorker cartoons with any of the other universal punchlines ("Christ, what an asshole," "Hello, I'd like to add you to my professional network on Linkedin" and "What a misunderstanding," to name only three), Matthew Garret invites you to try "Late stage capitalism." Works a treat! (more…)

Muckrock has secured the FBI's files on Epcot Center, revealing the panicked thrash that the prospect of a semi-circle of international pavilions around a toy artificial lake set off in Cold War atmosphere of 1981. (more…)

Let there be light in the bathroom. Now you can add any color of LED light to your toilet bowl and see it glow. That means no more stumbling around when you have to go at night. Simply snap it onto the rim and let it shine: it will automatically turn on when someone walks into the bathroom. There are eight color possibilities and patterned illuminations, making quite the show.

My latest Guardian column, 'Poor internet for poor people': India's activists fight Facebook connection plan, tells the story of how India's amazing Internet activists have beaten back Facebook's bid to become gatekeeper to the Internet for the next billion users. (more…)

A terse update to the Wikimedia page for DMCA notices confirms that the Sanders campaign has withdrawn the legal threat it sent to the organization yesterday over its hosting of copies of campaign logos and designs. (Thanks, Tomasz!)

The silicone rubber part of the OXO Good Grips flexible pancake turner ($11 on Amazon) has just the right amount of give. That, combined with a sharp edge, makes it perfect for flipping eggs, pancakes, and French toast. It's also very wide, which means I get to make large diameter pancakes just the way I like them.

A supercut of “Severus Snape's most important scenes and arcs in the Harry Potter film series in chronological order.”(more…)

https://youtu.be/3pNj6GsoUIMThe otter perches on your teacup's rim while the tea steeps, staring adorably at you while it goes. (more…)

“To shine a spotlight on the widespread use of torture in Tibet, British actors lent their voices to Tibetan torture survivors who can not speak out for themselves. In this video, Alan Rickman reads the testimony of Tibetan torture survivor, Phuntsog.”[Free Tibet]https://youtu.be/H5gmB3_Gkas

See sample pages from this book at Wink.The Explorers Guild: Volume One: A Passage to Shambhala is a throwback to the golden age of adventure stories. It’s one part pulp novel and one part graphic novel, brought to cinematic life by Hollywood director Kevin Costner. I first heard about The Explorers Guild on an episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast. Costner described it as a book that could stand the test of time. "I like the idea of taking something off the shelf that has the heft of this [book] and actually having to blow the dust off it”.I was immediately hooked.The story is set during World War I and revolves around the Guild’s quest to find the mythological holy Buddhist city of Shambhala, a search that will take them from one side of the globe to the other, and unveil an incredible secret. The story is Rudyard Kipling meets Indiana Jones. It’s good fun.The old timey language took me a while to get used to, but after a few chapters the style and voice really enriched the story and made it feel even more like an adventure from another time. The plot meanders a bit, like an old black-and-white Saturday matinee movie, always begging you to turn the page to find out just one more secret, but I found that perfect for this kind of story. If you enjoy plunging into mysterious, sprawling worlds you will probably like it too. I enjoyed returning to it again and again each night as I read.The book itself is beautiful, comprised of five interconnected “books” or stories printed on finger-pleasing paper stock made to look aged in the printing process. It sounds silly, but I found these little touches helped to transport me back in (fictitious) time as I read about secret parts of the world, hidden histories and big adventures. The cover is embossed with subtly illustrated clues to the story within that have a nice retro feel to them. (Cannibals! Mysterious lights! Fighter planes!)No doubt there will be sequels. I can’t wait to read about the further adventures of The Explorers Guild. It’s the kind of book that makes me want to settle into a worn leather chair with a glass of scotch in my own adventurer’s club. – Keith MonaghanThe Explorers Guild: A Passage to Shambhala

Will you help us fill the Mundgod library with books?(more…)

https://youtu.be/XLMKku4HbrYThis 8-minute video gives the rise-and-fall stories of powerful or promising online startups that went bust: Friendster (social network), AltaVista (search engine), Napster (file sharing), The Torquing Group (drone maker), boo.com (fashion shopping), Secret (social network app), and KaloBios (douchebro's pharmaceutical firm).Here's what the front pages for these startups look like now:Friendster (above)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RGnEJRkIDAIf you haven't subscribed to the Hard-to-Find Mormon Videos YouTube channel, you don't know what you're missing. Watch this anti-coffee film from 1980. It's got edge of your seat action, engaging characters, humor, ethical dilemmas, and intrigue, plus an American Sign Language interpreter, and is presented in an experimental time-slice format that would make any film school student envious.[via]

Postdoc researcher Kate Lister has fun, weird and often NSFW Twitter feed called Whores of Yore. She describes it as a "catalogue of jilts, cracks, prostitutes, night-walkers, whores, she-friends, kind women, and others of the linnen-lifting tribe."

"Against School" is a previously unpublished Aaron Swartz essay about the centuries of word-perfect complaints about the US public school system, which have led to mass-scale, sneak privatization of the public system. (more…)

Business is bad for Chipotle as a result of a string of food poisoning outbreaks last year. According to the Chicago Tribune, the share price has dropped 40% and sales have dropped 30%. I believe it. On Saturday night, around 8:30, Carla and I went to the Chipotle on Ventura Blvd. in Studio City, CA for some tacos. It was nearly empty inside. Only one customer was there when we walked in. He left and a party of two came in. No one else came. I felt sorry for the half dozen people working there. They had nothing to do. (I think they might have been eating peanut butter sandwiches in the back room because Carla and I could both smell it.) Last year at this time, it would have been hopping.Chipotle has announced that it is closing every one of its 1,900 locations for a few hours on Monday, February 8 to "thank our teams for all of their hard work, to discuss some of the changes we are making to enhance food safety, to talk about the restaurants role in all of that and to answer questions from employees," said a Chipotle spokesman.

Sarah Jeong reports on how Twitter has begun to take control of the hatred, harassment and general horseshit posted on its site.

When the feeling's gone and you can't go on...

A 12-year-old honor student from Texas got suspended from school for giving her asthama inhaler to another girl who was wheezing and gasping in gym class. She could also be tranferred to an "alternative schoo for up to days." The girl told Fox 4 News she feels the punishment is not fair. “I was just trying to save her life. I didn't think I was trying to do anything bad,” she said.

I figured Pesco might enjoy my magic tricks more, if I was using Bicycle's Big Foot deck.The backs on this deck are just lovely. An absolutely homage to the Bicycle Rider Back, but done with Big Foot. Each face card is an illustration of a specialized, geographical Big Foot, and you'll rapidly learn the names from Ucu to California Desert Sasquatch. The numbered cards each include some Big Foot trivia!I'm trying to come up with a Yeti themed trick!Bicycle Bigfoot Playing Cards via Amazon

DNC Parks & Resorts at Yosemite, Inc (a division of one of the largest privately owned companies in the world) used to have the concessions to operate various businesses around Yosemite National Park. Now that they've been fired, they're using some decidedly dubious trademark to force the Park Service to change the names of buildings and locations that have stood for as much as a century, including some that have been designated national landmarks. (more…)

Trevor Timm reads through the latest poll numbers and finds that Bernie Sanders is gaining on Clinton with key Democratic demographics: people under 45; women under 35; African Americans and Hispanics. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go8woPGOgggSwiss engineer Christoph Laimer has built an open-source hardware, 3D printed watch with a tourbillon mechanism, uploading it to Thingiverse for you to print and assemble yourself. (more…)

Learn to specialize in methodologies that will protect your organization from security threats, and become an indispensable member of your team. Where do you start? This course will take you from beginner to pro penetration tester so you can prove your worth by discovering security vulnerabilities before they're a real issue.Get the Complete White Hat Hacker and Penetration Testing Bundle for only $19 in the Boing Boing Store.Below is a breakdown of the 5 courses included in the bundle:1Network Penetration Tester - Build a $120K/Year Career$201 Value2Basics of VMWare vSphere & ESXi Virtualization Software$202 Value3How to Build a $120,000/Year Career as a Web Penetration Tester$201 Value4Introduction to Cisco Packet Tracer Network Simulator$149 Value5Set Up Your Own Web Hosting Environment$135 Valu

Incredibly Interesting Authors: RSS | iTunes | Download this episode | Email | AndroidOne day in September 1951, Dr. Joseph Cyr, a surgeon Lieutenant of the Royal Canadian Navy, was on board a Navy ship in waters off the coast of North Korea. This was during the height of the Korean War, so when crew members spotted a small Korean junk off in the distance, they became suspicious, especially because the boat was headed straight for them. As the junk approached, the lookouts could see someone on the deck frantically waving a flag, and when the junk got closer, they saw that the men on board were more dead than alive. Their bodies had been torn apart by bullets and shrapnel. As soon as they were lifted aboard, Dr. Cyr immediately began operating on them. As the only person on the ship with medical qualifications, he spent the next 48 hours performing surgery, saving the lives of 19 men. He was hailed a hero at home, and he certainly would have received honors and a promotion from the Navy, if only they hadn’t discovered that Dr. Cyr was not a doctor and had never performed a surgical operation in his life before that day. He didn’t even have a high school degree. And his name wasn’t even Joseph Cyr, it was Ferdinand Demara. He’d stolen the identity of the real Dr. Cyr, a friend of his who knew him as Brother John Payne of the Brothers of Christian Instruction. Ferdinand Demara had been assuming false identities his entire adult life. At one time or another Demara had impersonated a "civil engineer, a sheriff's deputy, an assistant prison warden, a doctor of applied psychology, a hospital orderly, a lawyer, a child-care expert, a Benedictine monk, a Trappist monk, an editor, a cancer researcher, and a teacher." [Wikipedia]Demara was a master con artist. Not only could he fake his way into almost any job, he could often successfully talk his way out of trouble after getting caught, and then go on to rip-off the very same people who had forgiven him the first time he got caught.In Maria Konnikova’s new book, The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time, Ferdinand Demara stars as one of many larger-than-life con artists presented as exemplars of master manipulators of human nature. In her book, Konnikova takes a deep dive into the psychology of con artists, as well as the psychology of the trusting people they take advantage of. It’s a scary and fascinating book that reveals the methods and motives of con artists like Bernie Madoff, Jim Bakker, and Lance Armstrong, and explains why everyone is vulnerable to the con artist’s game, even other con artists, and why there isn’t much we can do to protect ourselves from getting conned.

U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump continues to grab all the media attention, and Hillary Clinton remains a Wall Street favorite--so why is underdog Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders suddenly surging again in the polls? In a Guardian op-ed, Trevor Timm argues that part of the reason is his common-sense, non-hysterical approach to ISIS/ISIL and related Islamist terrorist threats.(more…)

It's a good week when we get two new short stories from political science fiction wunderkind Laurie Penny: on Monday, it was The House of Surrender, about a prison in a world without coercion; today it's "The Killing Jar," about the intern to a serial killer employed by an English town council: "Since serial murder was first recognized as one of the English Fine Arts, the trick has always been to keep it original." (more…)

After a 7 year hiatus, perhaps the greatest horror video game series of all time may be picking up where it left off! Rumors have it that Valve has delayed work on Half-Life 3 to work on Left 4 Dead 3.Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 were wonderful zombie smashing, cooperative first person shooters. The game play was fantastic, the characters, levels, and script hilariously endearing. We all wept when Bill sacrificed himself for the team. I'm hopeful!Via Express:

Daniel Rigmaiden was a prolific and talented fraudster who made more than a million dollars filing tax-returns for dead people, using ninja forgery skills and super-tight operational security to avoid arrest for years. (more…)

On Sunday, the US border patrol in Pharr, Texas seized 2,500 tons of marijuana stuffed into faux carrots mixed in with real vegetables coming from Mexico. In November, agents there found bricks of marijuana and cocaine in bags of fresh carrots, but based on the image below from the US Customs & Border Protection's Instagram feed, it seems those smugglers weren't as creative with the packaging. Not that it helped this time.

This fellow made an unboxing video about his new hoverboard and it apparently caught fire before he even had a chance to try it out.