Analysts are predicting that 2015 will be the drone-givingest holiday retail season ever, and you can even buy drones in our Boing Boing store.(more…)

In 1968, I think, my grandmother offered to take me to the movies. I would have been 10 at the time, and my grandmother was cool: she took me to see Planet of the Apes and The Poseidon Adventure when they first opened in the big movie theaters on Broadway. But on this day in 1968, the two enormous side-by-side theaters were playing Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang and Oliver!Oliver! got great reviews (written by adults, of course). Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang was based on a book of Ian Fleming's that I'd read a few years earlier and this was the movie kids were excited about. It got not-so-great reviews. But it starred Dick Van Dyke, with songs written by Richard and Robert Sherman. It had the scent of Mary Poppins about it (and would have had Julie Andrews in it if she hadn't been stubborn). It was also made by the folks behind the James Bond films.As we stood in front of the theaters, my grandmother asked, "Are you sure you want to see Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang? Oliver! is supposed to be very good." This meant, of course, that she wanted to see Oliver! I was not to be deterred: Dick Van Dyke and an amazing flying car was what I wanted to see.If you're a Disney fan, or a fan of the brothers Richard and Robert Sherman, then the terrific score for Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang will be no surprise to you. Lots of great tunes, including the title number, "Toot Sweets," "Hushabye Mountain," "Me Ol' Bamboo," and so on. You can buy a terrific CD here.I stood my ground, my grandmother acquiesced, and into Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang we went. A pity, because I'm sure that Oliver! is a much better movie. Nevertheless, I was enthralled. There are so many things in the movie that hit just the right buttons for a kid that's easy to forgive that Julie Andrews would have made it much better and the movie is a bit of a lumbering mess.But there were lots of cool toys, among them a damn fantastic car from Corgi of Britain that has pop-out wings and also turns into a boat of sorts.And also this really wild machine from Mattel (which meant that it’s really swell) which made Toot Sweet candy whistles out of four different flavors of Tootsie-Rolls.The car in Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang is a marvelous creation with real personality, and thus when Dick Van Dyke sings an enthusiastic song about it, well it just doesn't seem as silly as it otherwise might.Now the miraculous part of this is that we are at the end of 2015 and Dick Van Dyke has just turned 90. A beloved figure in Hollywood (he really is a nice guy), he's being widely feted and deservedly so. And he's still performing! I never in my wildest dreams could have imagined as a 10-year-old that as a 57-year-old I would still have the pleasure of seeing Dick Van Dyke singing "Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang." But sometimes miraculous and wonderful things happen, so click here and enjoy a real blast from the ancient past from a 90-year-old guy who still knows how to have a lot of fun. Does anyone you know really enjoy himself so much?

President Barack Obama today announced he has commuted the sentences of 95 federal prisoners, and granted two prisoners pardons. Most of them are nonviolent drug offenders.This is the most he has done at one time, and more than doubles the number of clemency orders he has granted since taking office. His signature today sets free 40 prisoners who are serving life sentences.(more…)

See sample photos at Wink.Here in Japan, ’tis the season to make nengajo. Nengajo are specialized New Year’s postcards sent to friends, relatives, acquaintances, former classmates, current classmates, co-workers, and anyone and everyone else in one’s contacts list.These days, the vast majority of nengajo are either pre-printed or made on a computer and printed at home. Even then, however, many people still make a few cards by hand with stamps and ink. To that end, every year, stores display and sell rubber stamp and ink pads, along with markers, glitter, and all kinds of other utensils and accessories. The stamps are made primarily by two companies: Beverly Japan and Kodomo no Kao (Child’s Face). Both companies produce a full line of New Year’s themed stamps as well as stamps featuring popular characters like Snoopy, Doraemon, and Hello Kitty.2016 is the Year of the Monkey in the Chinese Zodiac, so, for my card this year I chose a stamp called “Banana Kara Konnichi wa,” or “Hello From the Banana,” and a small banana stamp for accents. I toyed with using a multicolored ink pad but, in the end, I chose a standard black ink pad for the outline. Once I had the outline stamped on all my cards, I colored the cards using stiff brushed markers. I used the same marker to color directly onto the banana stamp in lieu of using an ink pad and it worked very well. What I have yet to do is write individual messages on the cards and then haul them down to the post office to be stamped (different kind of stamp!) and sent. But, one step at a time!– Joel NeffNengajo Stamps

Needle-in-a-haystack stories are the caffeine of collecting. As the editor of Fine Books & Collections, Rebecca Rego Barry knows this better than most; her new book, Rare Books Uncovered, is filled with more than 50 such tales of book-collecting bonanzas. Recently, I interviewed Barry for Collectors Weekly. She told me about her conversations and correspondences with everyone from legendary rock guitarist turned book hunter Martin Stone — he reportedly sold Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page a copy of the I Ching that had been owned by occultist icon Aleister Crowley — to author and book dealer Larry McMurtry, who typed out his book-discovery story before mailing it to Barry.

A while back, I realized that something was amiss in my relationship with my telephone. Notifications, email, Facebook, Twitter… it all became a constant drain on on my attention, the internet following me around like a shadow. I just couldn't give it up! So I asked the readers of Boing Boing about the current situation with low-end dumbphones, in the hopes that something was out there that could do the things I needed to do (send texts and make calls) without having me permanently dripped to the great saline bag of bullshit in the cloud.And without being absolute junk.I once owned the legendary e-ink phone, the Moto F3, and hankered for those simple, halcyon days. But it, like some of the most minimal options touted (such as the grandmatastic Johns Phone and $15 cardphones from China), are so rudimentary as to be hostile to their purpose. If all I had to do was receive calls, fine. But these things don't even have functional address books.My search for a really nice dumbphone left me with three standout options:1. Get whatever standard entry-level candybar phone the carriers are giving away.2. Get one of the classy, high-end Nokia dumbphones (e.g. the 301 and the 515) from before it was eaten by Microsoft.3. … something else? A model aimed at seniors?1 is the sanest, eBay-free route of the 2015 dumbphone aficionado, but they're bland and chintzy and not well-designed. They work, but they aren't nice. If you're just looking to get a job done, though, here you go. Stop reading! You're done. Get a Blu Phone or a Samsung Chuckle or Kyocera Snazzy or whatever is lately $9.95 contact-free. However, guess what: most have the same problems as…2, which I thought would be just the ticket, but let me tell you, classy Nokia models didn't work for me at all. Sure, Nokia's hardware is great. The devices are sturdy, well-designed, and it's really obvious they're the end of many years of hardware design evolution. The problem is Nokia's Series 40 software. It's a trash fire, and there's just no saving it. A slow, hinky, fiddly, crashy, stinky, rinky-dink trash fire. Take every UI metaphor ever, throw it in the blender of a mad Finn's stomach, then vomit it onto a tiny, non-touch LCD screen. This is every fancy late-era Nokia dumbphone.Worse: these models not only have Facebook apps, you aren't allowed to delete them! The ultimate betrayal from my escape-the-smartphone dumbphone.Now, the ultra-basic Nokia models, such as the Nokia 105/106, are in fact much better than the supposedly flagship dumbphone models, because their software (Series 30) is simpler: no apps, no nonsense. It's still not great, but it is what it is, the batteries last weeks on a charge, and they're better than contemporary carrier crapphones from Samsung and LG. Moreover, contemporary models are more likely to have various pointless additions and apps (i.e. Facebook) that muddy the nice useful simplicity of your dumbphone.So I kept looking. Which brings us to 3, and to……this bizarre looking contraption, which comes all the way from the Baltics. Creator Just5 also offers a more modern-looking rounded version in black, but I like the Brick model--yes, it's called the Brick!--in wild colors like green and crimson. And it's pretty much exactly what I wanted.It's basic, easy to use, and the UI is completely straightforward. It's designed with intent, right down to the retro 80s font and the black and white UI. Everything about it adheres to a rather dramatic miniminal plan, which is quite appealing after the surprising mess that most dumbphones present. It's responsive and well thought out: once muscle memory sets in, you'll set a reminder faster than you can tell Siri to do the same thing, and there's no possibility she will think you want to pet a bookbinder.It has an address book and a few basic apps such as an alarm, a calendar, and text messaging. (more…)

The Food and Drug Administration today proposed banning the use of indoor tanning beds by minors under 18 years old, to try and reduce the risk of skin cancer.(more…)

https://youtu.be/KPG7P6jvb6QRemember the cretins who shut down a busy freeway in Los Angeles several years back, forcing stalled drivers to listen to their musical performance? Or the marriage proposal that took place in the middle of the 10 freeway in West Covina in a cloud of pink smoke, stopping traffic for 10 minutes?The latest chapter in the book of narcissistic assholes who enjoy causing massive gridlock on freeway systems used by ambulances, fire trucks, and people who get their pay docked if they punch in late is Vidal Valladares. He was arrested on Tuesday after he shut down Interstate 45 in Houston to propose to his girlfriend amidst the romantic clamor of honks and angry screams. He faces six months in jail and a fine of up to $2,000. He was charged with obstructing a roadway, a Class B misdemeanor.

In this Japanese TV commercial we learn that anyone who tries to prevent college students from enjoying any beverage other than water will face the wrath of a giant inflatable duck.(more…)

Every other week, it seems, an exciting new discovery crops up in a distant star system. The latest is Wolf 1061c, the closest Earth-like world yet found, barely a probe's throw away at 14 light years. But this got me thinking: which is the least interesting exoplanet yet discovered?To my inexpert eye, OGLE 2005 BLG-390Lb looks like a terrifically boring world. Though it was scientifically interesting early in the exoplanetary race due to its tiny size and vast distance from Planet Earth, this merely makes it the Rand Paul of planets.It's at least 18,000 light years away, so we're not getting there until we can reach billions of other, more interesting worlds. And when someone does get there, they'll find what appears to be rocky blob well out of its star's habitable zone.It's covered in abundant elements such as ammonia and nitrogen, all frozen solid because it's so cold. Its star is believed to be a red dwarf, which is to say, very boring in its own right."I wish I'd had a chance to visit OGLE 2005 BLG-390Lb," no-one will ever say.But I could, of course, be completely wrong. I'm not an astronomer, after all. Tell us in the comments which exoplanet you are most bored by!Previously: Extremely mundane places in Minecraft.

DJ BC wrote us with the news that he's not doing another Santastic Christmas mashup album this year, but: "While we have no NEW collection this year- we do have ten years of holiday mashups and remixes here for your enjoyment and free downloading. This should be more hours of fractured Xmash than any sane person can stand, from bootleggers worldwide." (more…)

Since 2013, I've been reading in the Times of India's RSS feed about the Vyapam scandal that has shaken the state of Madhya Pradesh to the very highest levels, but I never understood exactly how insane and massive the scandal was until I read Aman Sethi's cogent, comprehensive A-to-Z in today's Guardian. (more…)

Rebecca Solnit's brilliant, scathing critique of Esquire's "The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read" (a list with 79 male authors in it) earned her a mailbag full of mansplaining letters in which dudes explained to an eminent, brilliant author how to read a book. (more…)

No painful dialogue. No stiff acting. No virgin births or midi-chlorians. No racist stereotypes. No bloated plotlines or boring politics. No weightless CGI environments. And I say that as someone who's been known to defend the prequels—or, at least, elements of them.In look and feel, The Force Awakens is more like the original trilogy. It gets right into the story, yet takes time to introduce its characters and the post-Return of the Jedi world. Action, humor and heart are present—as are Chewbacca, Han, Leia, C-3PO, R2-D2 and yes, Luke Skywalker. This offers immediate familiarity and appeal, but the new characters are immediately likable, and I felt invested in their stories right out of the gate. (more…)

Ben Rose was in the middle of a game of Fallout 4 when an uninsured driver in the parking lot outside his Irving, TX apartment building hit the accelerator instead of the brakes and crashed straight through another apartment, then through his living room wall, straight into Rose, fracturing one of his vertebra and nearly severing one of his tendons. (more…)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba1J7OIYHWY&feature=youtu.be&t=24m56s“Say my name.”(more…)

[My friend Maureen Herman, former bassist of Babes in Toyland is currently writing her first book, It's a Memoir, Motherfucker, due out 2017. Maureen posted this to Facebook, and she kindly gave me permission to run it on Boing Boing. - Mark]We got our Christmas decorations out tonight. To me, Christmas is an annual milestone that makes me look around at where I am in my life. It makes me want to do better. Next year, I want to soar. I want to dissolve every hurt and injury in a flurry of words and wit and hard-won wisdom, then hand it into my publisher in triumph. I want to skip around and say, “I did it! I did it!” I want to thank everyone who said I could do it, and I want to thank the ones who said I never would, because that was inspiring, too.Merry Christmas, my sweet motherfuckers! I hope yours is truly merry and bright -- and if it’s not, I hope you know that every Christmas will be different, and in our memories, the hard ones end up serving as a contrast to appreciate the easier ones to come. That is how it’s been for me from the very beginning.My very first memory is from one Christmas Eve in 1970, where I was at a big family party where everyone was laughing and happy. It was amidst the reverie that an older relative sexually assaulted me. Shocked and embarrassed, I said nothing. I didn’t have the words for it. I was four.One Christmas, we drove to my grandparent’s house in Wisconsin and had delicious Sauerbraten and spaezel. My grandma Anna had been a pastry chef’s apprentice when she lived in Germany. We literally had the best Christmas cookies in existence every year. They were almost too beautiful to eat. I said almost. I was ten.One Christmas, I had a caroling party. My friends came over and we had hot chocolate and cookies and we’d go out in the neighborhood and ring people’s doorbells and sing a Christmas carol to them whether they liked it or not. My retroactive apologies to the Jewish families we accosted. I was twelve.One Christmas, each of the six kids in my family got 10 speed bikes--they were all in the living room around the tree. It looked fucking insane. I was thirteen.One Christmas, we all got new ski outfits, skis, boots, and poles. I lost my green leather ski mitten a few days later when it got caught in the bumper of the car I was skitching on. I stood helplessly as the car drove on, with a mitten stuck to the back. My mother demanded to know how the hell I couldn’t find my bright green mitten in the white snow. I came clean. Convicted of skitching. I was fourteen.One Christmas, I went to my parent’s house in San Diego and my brothers were all talking about Nirvana. I knew then that punk as I knew it was dead. I was in the band then. I was 28.One Christmas, I lived in New York City. It was beautiful everywhere you turned, but my life was a disaster. Dispossessed from my family, I spent Christmas Eve with three friends in equally disastrous straits. The Insane Orphan Posse. We all got really drunk and argued. I was approaching the tipping point with my untreated alcoholism. After New Year’s, I entered my first rehab. I was 34.One Christmas, I was six months pregnant, a crack addict, and living in a motel room in Nashville, Tennessee. I had become the cliche of an addict incarnated and couldn’t shake the costume, like it was glued to my skin. Almost everyone had given up on me. But my mother sent me a big box of food from Meijer that arrived on Christmas Eve. It was all I had in the world. I was 36.One Christmas, I was living in Aurora, IL at my mother’s house, now sober, raising my three-year old daughter, Anna. I bought a tree that was 8 feet tall and decorated the motherfucker with the skill and taste of a Macy’s window dresser. I got to use all the ornaments I grew up with and give Anna the best Christmas I could. My boyfriend spent his whole paycheck on gifts for her and stayed up late wrapping them perfectly like a department store clerk, even though they would be ripped apart in hours by a dazzled and manic toddler. I was 39.One Christmas, my first year on my own in Los Angeles with Anna, I had a small, but real, tree, and my very own apartment. I had a full-time job. I’d launched a new nonprofit and produced videos. My daughter was in a great school. I had a decent car. I was able to buy my own ornament sets. I finally had the Christmas tree I always wanted, with silver and blue decorations, and the loose tinsel in sparse clusters sitting on the branches like the trees looked back home after a snowfall. It was my very favorite Christmas tree ever. It was one of my favorite years ever. I got to live my life again. I was 44.Last Christmas Eve, someone I loved said, “I love you” for the very first time--it felt like the best Christmas present ever. I wrapped the moment up in my memory for safekeeping. I was 48.This Christmas Eve, it will be me and Anna, and our little fiber-optic tree from Walgreens. Though I’m kind of in a motel again, in our weird apartment-in-a-motor-lodge-complex, I survived an extraordinary year--one of the toughest ever in some ways, and one of the best in others. Late on Christmas Day, we will be with our friends up the hill again, who have been there for us through thick and thin in every way imaginable for the past six years. Thank you Mark, Carla, Jane & Sarina for letting us share your Christmas. You make us feel at home in every way, every time we are with you. I am 49.The traditions I kept and still practice are borne of fond memories. Baking cookies (Maux Bars!), decorating the tree, playing Christmas carols. The memories I had to survive and recover from are what make celebrating Christmas truly mean something to me. They soak our rituals with authenticity and joy.One Christmas, my grandma Blanche broke out into a hearty Irish jig in the kitchen. Like that wonderful moment, our family traditions are the stage where I can freely express my spontaneous appreciation for the sudden, precious sparks I now feel after twelve years without drugs or alcohol--the actual true joy of living. The rituals become an annual dance that hollers, “You didn’t break me, motherfuckers--not this year!” And every year, Anna and I add some of our own moves.I treasure every adversity, every violation, and every bit of scorn, betrayal, and rejection I had this year. It got me here, to the precipice, and the view is nothing short of miraculous and beautiful. I didn’t know I was so close. The journey was so steep at times that I couldn’t see the top. I almost gave up. But no--not this year. Not this year. Thanks to the love, support, and generosity of my family, friends, and the countless strangers-turned-allies in this wonderful Facebook community, I made it through a very dark time, and I’m OK. A bit bruised and bloodied, but cleaning up nicely.I believe next year can be off the charts--literally--if I just face the terrifying maelstrom of emotions that overwhelms me at times, instead of trying to numb them. They will pass as surely as the years. I need to let myself feel the pain and despair just as passionately as I’ll bask in the joy and peace on the other side of it. Every year is different. I hope yours is nothing short of revolutionary.

Brian Knappenberger, the documentarian who created The Internet's Own Boy, a beautiful documentary about Aaron Swartz, has announced a new ten-part documentary series called "Truth and Power," which will show on Pivot. (more…)

Andrew Wiseman wins the day with this hilarious Freedom of Information Act Request.(more…)

A group of skaters and street artists in Llanera, Asturias, Spain transformed an abandoned church built in 1912 into a beautiful indoor skate park featuring murals by artist Okuda San Miguel. Photos and video below! See more at Juxtapoz.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gKromFsi_w

"We know of no case where such an addition of exceptional access capabilities has not resulted in weakened security." (more…)

Rudy Rucker is one of my favorite authors of all time. So it's no surprise that the books he read in 2015 and recommend on his blog sound interesting to me: Purity by Jonathan Franzen, Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Inherent Vice and Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, The Peripheral by William Gibson, All Families are Psychotic by Douglas Coupland, Sandman Slim Series by Richard Kadrey, Genius at Play: the Curious Mind of John Horton Conway by Siobhan Roberts, Jean-Michel Basquiat by Leonhard Emmerling, A Palazzo in The Stars by Paul Di Filippo, and The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne.

Peter from Shelfie writes, "Shelfie has announced a partnership with Findaway to add 20,000 audiobooks to its print to digital bundling service. This news comes on top of the recent announcement that it will be adding nearly 100,000 titles for DRM-free bundling from Springer." (more…)

Wendy (then Walter) Carlos's 1971 Moog synthesizer re-imagination of Ludwig Van Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," from the final movement of his Ninth Symphony. Of course, Carlos's music was used in Stanley Kurbrick's film A Clockwork Orange. Happy 245th birthday Ludwig van Beethoven!

BMG hired Rightscorp, a publicly traded blackmail company, to send threatening letters to Cox Cable subscribers it accused of infringing its copyrights, demanding cash payments to stay out of court. (more…)

It turns out there’s a way to actually make fire work better. This gas-less, flameless lighter can ignite anything you need without that whole pesky elemental process. It juices up with a super convenient slide-out USB charger to give you up to 50 uses at a time. Because it’s flight-approved, you can travel anywhere around the earth, no matter how windy it gets, because it’s both windproof and eco friendly.(more…)

"Star Wars: A Bad Lip Reading"

In honor of Ludwig van Beethoven's 245th birthday today, here is Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" (1976). Can you dig it? I knew that you could.

See sample pages of http://winkbooks.net/post/135373865141/collecting-childrens-books-a-guide-for-the-book at Wink.Collecting Children’s Books is as much a guide for the book collector as it is a trip down memory lane for the book reader. This 200-page collection of children’s literature chronicles timeless classics from the 1900s to present day. Besides detailed background stories and fun facts about lots of famous authors and illustrators, there are listings of the estimated auction values of many well-known novels.As I perused Collecting Children’s Books, I had a feeling of overwhelming nostalgia. I happily remembered my love of these books from my childhood – James and The Giant Peach, A Wrinkle in Time, Freaky Friday and The Phantom Tollbooth to name a few. I ran to a closet and dug out my copy of Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran The Circus to see if it was a first edition (recently sold for $400 at auction!). I fantasized about owning the original art work for Where The Wild Things Are (recently sold for $74,688!) and I learned that the illustrator of Stuart Little (Garth Williams) also did the art work for two of my favorite illustrated books, Little House On The Prairie and Charlotte’s Web. Collecting Children’s Books also shares events in history and provides solid book recommendations for young readers. It’s a great resource for adults to help children discover the joys of a good book. – Carole RosnerCollecting Children's Books

The @internetofshit account posts sardonic observations about the Internet of Things, which is filled with the most depressing array of useless, dangerously insecure, exploitative junk imaginable. (more…)

The Effects of a Year in Ketosis by James McCarter from Quantified Self on Vimeo.At the most recent Quantified Self conference, geneticist Jim McCarter t talked about the effects of going on a ketogenic diet for a year.

This is my favorite letter from a collection of unusual landlord notices.

Zachary M. Seward picks the best Twitter bots of 2015 for Quartz. My favorite is Derek Arnold's @FFD8FFDB, which tweets random screengrabs from insecure, internet-connected security cameras around the world. https://twitter.com/FFD8FFDB/status/676290365176041473?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

After this month's killings, there was widespread reporting (fueled by comments by FBI director James Comey) that Syed Rizwan Farook and Tafsheen Malik had declared their commitment to jihad on Facebook and that the security services failed to note this. (more…)

https://youtu.be/jd76dTFXocMDamanhur is a massive, elaborately system of underground temples near Turin Italy. They were built in 1975 by a new age guru, Oberto Airaudi, and his followers. Airaudi passed away, and today about 600 members still live in the community around the temples. The temples are appointed with cartoonishly elaborate murals and I would love to visit them, but if this website is to be believed, Damanhur is a typically creepy cult.

Kyle Kallgren's Star Wars Minus Star Wars is an amazing remix of dozens of media snippets from other soundtracks, shows and movies. The result is an unambiguous patchwork that adds up to the original—so long as you've seen it, too.

Facewatch is a private-public system that shopkeepers and the police use to keep track of "persons of interest," a list that includes anyone a shopkeeper doesn't like and registers with the system. (more…)

A cop who convinced a judge to let him take photos of a 17-year-old boy's erect penis has killed himself after being accused of having an "inappropriate relationship" with another underage teen.David Edward Abbott, a member of a Crimes Against Children taskforce, obtained a warrant to "inject a young boy with a drug that would cause an erection" after the teen sent a dick pic to his 15-year-old girlfriend. The ostensible plan: to match one pic to the other to prove they were the same penis.

Evan writes, "Today is WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning's 28th birthday. She's been imprisoned since she was 22, and is serving a 35 year sentence for exposing some of the U.S. government's worst abuses." (more…)

[My friend Peter Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based correspondent for British national newspapers. He has covered revolutions, civil wars, riots, wildfires, and Hollywood celebrity misdeeds for longer than he cares to remember. As part of his job, he must read all the weekly tabloids. For the past couple of years, he's been posting terrific weekly tabloid recaps on Facebook and has graciously given us permission to run them on Boing Boing. Enjoy! - Mark]Today’s tabloids never let facts get in the way of a good story.“It’s official!” screams the Globe. “Kate Crowned Queen.”Not exactly. The last time I looked Elizabeth II still sat on the British throne and Kate Middleton was Duchess of Cambridge - unless the Globe’s “Palace insiders” know something HRH doesn’t know.The Enquirer reveals Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s “Secret Divorce Papers!”Except they don’t.Photos of divorce papers splashed across the cover and inside the mag come from both stars’ previous divorces. And those weren’t secret anyway.The purported $480 million divorce battle is about as real as Queen Kate.“Communion Wafer ‘Bleeds’ For Three Days,” shouts an Examiner headline. “Is It A Miracle?”No – it’s just a cracker. Get over it. Or give it to Angelina Jolie, since the tabloids are always complaining she’s too thin.There are “Terrorist Spies Working in White House!” proclaims the Globe, which for good measure adds that President Obama is secretly Muslim and “put double agents in his Cabinet.”Right.This fair and balanced report shares a page with a completely impartial story headlined: “Why U.S. Needs Straight-Shooting Donald Trump!”For those who can’t get enough of The Donald, Us magazine features a Trump action figure, which presumably hurls insults at ethnic Bratz dolls and keeps Muslim Barbie out of the dollhouse.Ben Affleck’s “shocking new ink” gets widespread coverage in Us magazine and the tabloids showing the actor's back tattooed with a rising phoenix - but let’s not forget that we saw this “new” tattoo months ago, though at the time everyone assumed it was fake ink for a movie role.Sadly no fake ink was employed in bringing us the news that Real Housewives of Atlanta star Cynthia Bailey carries Preparation H in her handbag (to treat under-eye puffiness, she claims), Chloe Grace Moretz and Hilary Duff wore it best, and the stars are just like us: they play with dogs, bring toys to the beach, read labels, dodge balls, serve themselves, show sweet affection, and exercise in Paris – just like all of us, who find the City of Lights so much more convenient than the local gym.Several times annually People devotes whole issues to weight loss and triumphant slimming tales, but the rest of the year is spent fattening up readers, like this week’s recipes for “chocolate & peanut butter croque babes,” and “Jalapeño chicken ‘bombs.’"The celebrity magazines continue lavishing attention on so-called “stars” in whom I have less than zero interest.People devotes its cover to Maksim Chmerkovskiy’s engagement to Peta Murgatroyd, which does not have me dancing in the streets; while Us mag tells us that Kourtney Kardashian is having a “revenge hookup” with Justin Bieber to “get back at” her ex, brings us up to speed on the “stars” of Teen Moms, and explains why Anna Duggar won’t leave her “cheating hypocrite” husband Josh.Taking a lesson from the tabloids, it seems she won’t let the facts get in the way of a bad marriage.Onwards and downwards . . .

On the science of alcohol and alcholism, from 1949, Encyclopedia Brittanica films. Booze: “a potential menace to community safety as well as personal health”.(more…)

Naturally Apple's choice of optical audio-out cable is going to be a pain. Obviously, its not going to be one I'd just have around, that is not the Apple way! Rather than pay $30 plus at an Apple store or hifi audio boutique, this $6 cable does just fine for me.If you want to use an Apple laptop or Airport Express as a streaming audio source, this cable will come in handy.Monoprice 3-Feet Optical TosLink to Mini TosLink M/M 5.0mm OD Molded Cable via Amazon

You’re rushing out the front door, but can’t find your keys or wallet. Happens to all of us. What if you could push a button, and find them in an instant? You can. Just attach the iHere 3.0 Tracking Device to whatever it is you lose most often, then click the app on your phone when you inevitably lose that thing. You’ll hear the device alarm, and just like that, you don’t have to scramble to find your keys ever again.(more…)

For women, so commonly invisible in their daily lives, the path to fame is, as a rule, transgressing rules. Whenever visible, they are mostly notorious. In reading history we can scarcely see what famous women actually did with their lives. It is their misdeed, or some failure to perform, that we can generally see.This applies especially to heroines and celebrities: women placed on a pedestal have a hard time climbing off it to relate their actual experience. Invisibility is a woman's permanent condition, a method of survival, a gender's way of life: like in Edgar Allan Poe's story, "The Purloined Letter," a hidden message is concealed by its very display.Ada is our heritage souvenir, 200 years after her birthday. She is heavier than a gold medal, more mysterious than Nefertiti, a thought experimenter whose fantasy calculations have transformed the world like the work of Einstein. General computation is a stark reality, a revolutionary insight which took its own time to arrive after its conception by a woman.Who else would think up such an unlikely thing, other than Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Byron? It's the proper work of a poet to give names to the unseen things in the world. And yet, living as a woman of science is not so easy as conceiving, thinking, writing, calculating, publishing. In those 200 years -- or 36 years less, since Ada died young -- the role of women in science has become more complex, not simpler.In Ada's day, women, when rarely accepted into the narrow circles of scientific societies, were accepted as popularizers, as teachers, as sympathetic advocates. Women of science were legitimated in that sociable way, intuitive, visionary and romantic, but were still superfluous in the serious male work of science and progress. A female propagandist can only be a source of wary respect when she becomes dangerous politically.In our own time, I see Adas every day, in my life in technology art. I have outlived Ada, so I see what professional life is like for women who live in, or are placed on the fringes of, technology. Talented, geeky, bright, yet held back by the structures of a boys' camaraderie when it comes to technological products: boys and their toys.These talented women, as geekettes, as crazed women, as eccentric females, prefer to stay back, to conceal themselves, if they cannot perform in their own way, to their own ends. They do not know how to bargain with their creativity in the mainstreams of science or art. Their ideas are still intuitive and visionary, as Ada’s ideas were, when compared to the engineering plans of her colleague Charles Babbage.Babbage was her good friend and they had a successful collaboration. They complemented each other and yet today, his work holds little mystery, while hers still does. Because there are yardsticks for measuring his scientific output -- he tried to build a costly machine for a government, and he failed -- but no yardstick for hers. She is in the domain of courtly fantasy for male authors, and a matter of hope and trust for women scientists.Feminists analyze Ada's famously absent father and her strongly biased mother, her constrained and yet peaceful private life as wife and mother. Her sexual life which ended in uterine fatal sickness: so feminine, so incurable, even today. Her uterus exploded from too much mathematics! Her contemporary misogynist doctor allegedly claimed that of her illness, and certainly it was common enough at that time to think that scientific knowledge was too much for female frailty to bear.She bled to her death at the same age as her father, Lord Byron, who was bled to his death by incompetent doctors while struck with fever in Greece. Only, Lord Byron was courting his own death by fighting a foolish war, as an aggressive proud bossy male, while obedient Ada bore her children while diligently doing her calculus.How did Ada escape her father's shadow, his scandalous absence from her life, her mother's clutching, overbearing presence? Through rigid lessons of hard science and flights of creative fantasy. Through computation: an endless perspective of thinking, creating, coding! A programmable machine that weaves numbers, with an intelligence that was artificial because it was a woman's intelligence.People like to indulge themselves in quarreling over the proper division of intellectual spoils between Lovelace, Babbage, Menabrea and others. The truth is that the Difference Engine was an abject failure, the Analytical Engine could not succeed even though Ada bravely offered to finance the machine. So her great idea of general-purpose computation remained dormant for many decades. Many women enter science only to find frustration. "A serious injustice and a scandalous waste of talent," as Máire Geoghagan-Quinn, the European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, recently said about the stifled role of European women in science, innovation and research.If Ada had never existed, we would have had to invent her, but she did exist, and it's her modern myth as a digital heroine that we have invented. Certainly she was never "digital" even for a moment, but we are still standing on the shoulders of this attractively gowned and vivacious Victorian society hostess.If Ada were alive today, I would certainly invite her to visit our "Internet of Women Things" group. IoWomenT is a recent attempt related to Casa Jasmina, a smart home of the future in Turin. I'm sure that the Countess of Lovelace would be quite helpful to an open-source effort, since she always was a friend to scientific enlightenment, and never one to rudely quarrel over worldly reputation or commercial advantage.One of our goals is to create at least one connected smart IoT "Thing" from a woman's point of view. Some thing that has never existed, something that women need, dream about and yet have never managed to technically manufacture. The open source Maker movement should certainly be capable of this: An Ada IoT object.But what is it, what could it be? A sentimental memento? A 3D printed sculpture of her brain (Babbage's brain was pickled, and is still available)? A analog brass computer-generated piece of music, because Ada doted on music? How could we, as modern women, act in her spirit, and not as the myth would have it?Many things impress me about the mysterious Countess of Lovelace (who probably wouldn't much like our impertinence in always calling her "Ada"). Her father, George Gordon, Lord Byron, I love in my own way (because I had a father story too). Also her feminist struggle with her authoritarian, invasive mother (same here again). People dwell on her arranged marriage and her supposed lovers (I don't trust the gossip). Almost every woman can relate some similar problems and that's fine, nobody is perfect, not even an aristocratic woman scientist.What excites me about Ada is her lateral way of thinking, deducing, calculating. Because that imaginative freedom, the cognitive leaps to a good conclusion, are obvious from her surviving letters and notes. This is just what society still needs today from women. We never have enough of it: female genius rising from the cradle of constraint.So I would invite her ladyship, the countess and scientist, to our IoWT workshop. Dressed contemporarily, to the extent she could manage (after all she is 143 years older than us, and given to corsets) she could participate in our open source Casa Jasmina brainstorming, where we honk like geese in the fog. Listening politely, till she stands up screaming in her ladylike manner: I’ve got it! I know what we need to do!Then she tells us her vision… And we would just make it!

Today, EFF published Pwning Tomorrow, a science fiction anthology featuring stories by 21 celebrated authors, including Bruce Sterling, Neil Gaiman, Lauren Beukes, Pat Cadigan, Madeline Ashby and Charlie Jane Anders (I have a story in there too!). (more…)

As Chicago's mayor/kingmaker/kingpin Rahm Emanuel grins at the chorus demanding his resignation for his role in covering up video showing that Chicago PD officers shot a man 16 times, lied about it, and confiscated and destroyed all the evidence they could find, the Five Thirty-Eight blog looks at the data on Chicago's dirtiest cops. (more…)

There have been plenty of lawsuits challenging America's prisons' use of solitary confinement as a form of torture; but the situation is no better in the jails where prisoners await arraignment, trial and sentencing, and can spend years in solitary. (more…)

A last-minute change to pending EU data-protection rules will ban under-16s from using social media without explicit parental consent -- the rules are up for a vote on Tuesday. (more…)

The Fireeye "threat prevention device" is designed to scan all the emails, attachments, and other files coming in and out of your network, but a bug in the device allowed hackers to embed malware in an email that would take over the device -- and your whole network -- when the device checked it for viruses. (more…)