The English NHS is at the very end of a key consultation on the future of its "mandate" -- which sets out its goals and budgets -- and though the public has been able to comment since October, the NHS hasn't bothered to tell anyone about it. (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](more…)

In an earnings call in which Caterpillar execs explained their dismal takings to investors, Cat execs explained their plan to grow by leasing tractors to Chinese companies with crummy track-records for payment. (more…)

Red mercury is a mythological compound that allows nuclear weapons to be radically miniaturized. That mercury oxide (and anything else reasonably described as such) is useless for blowing stuff up matters little to buyers who shell out fabulous sums on a hoax. (more…)

Ted Koppel's new book, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath warns of an impending disaster when America's critical infrastructure will be destroyed by cyberattackers, plunging the nation into a literal dark age. (more…)

After years of missteps, blunders and disasters in which Youtube users have been censored through spurious copyright claims or had their accounts deleted altogether, Google has announced an amazing, user-friendly new initiative though which it will fund the legal defense of Youtube creators who are censored by bad-faith copyright infringement claims. (more…)

BB pal Mitch Altman informs us that he's ceased manufacturing on his marvelous invention the TV-B-Gone, a keychain remote control that turns off any television with a push of the button. It's great fun in sports bars, airports, restaurants, and wherever else there's an idiot box that annoys you! Grab one now because when they're gone, you'll have to make your own (also great fun). Mitch writes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuaWu2uhmRQAlan "Watchmen" Moore, the Wizard of Northampton, gives some frank advice to beginning writers at a Q&A at a 2011 an anti-library-closure protest at St James Library, Northampton, UK. (more…)

The right-wing Telegraph can't deny what critics have been saying since the Tony Blair years: when you use private to fund public services, the only people who benefit are the shareholders. (more…)

Graham Dunning made this fantastic techno music-making contraption in which a DJ turntable triggers a variety of mechanical percussive sounds that are fed through effects boxes. Incredible!

Tomorrow evening (11/20), San Francisco's de Young Museum will celebrate "100 Years of Robot Art and Science in the Bay Area" with an event organized by UC Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg and Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation. The program includes a "Long Conversation," sort of a relay race discussion that I'll be participating in along with ten interesting people whose work is at the intersection of art and technology! Bonus: My friend Kal Spelletich will also bring two of his "praying robots" seen above! Best of all, it's free and starts early (6:30pm)!

tl;dr: they had no prep time, made real-time changes to the story as they shot it, and props and scenes were thrown together as they needed them. Jackson says that his winging-it—"making it up there and then on the spot"—finally fell apart when they came to shooting the big battle scenes. [via]

https://youtu.be/cZkAP-CQlhAWho stuffed this microwave antenna to the bursting point with 35-50 lbs of acorns? Some say it was a squirrel, others blame a woodpecker. But these animals are so similar that it is hardly worth arguing about. Just watch the video.

YouTuber Adrian Gee of Australia has over 100 million views for his "social experiment" videos. He recently uploaded a video where he posed as a blind man standing in the street. He would approach strangers, hand them a $50 bill and ask if they had change for a $5. In the video, the strangers never corrected Gee, and stole the $50 bill instead.The video became an international hit with over 2 million views and Gee appeared on TV news shows around the world to talk about it. But it turns out that all of the strangers were actors that Gee enlisted. Gee did not tell them the nature of the project, and now the some of the actors are getting all kinds of hate from people who think they are actual crooks.In this video, Gee is exposed and confronted for making the deceptive video, and he isn't very happy about it.

Studies are routinely hand-picked to make drugs seem more effective than they are, television constantly tells you to take drugs, and doctors prescribing drugs get kickbacks from phamaceutical companies. Maybe it's time to knock out one of these three problems for good.

Even when action-figure head sculpts are great, the paintjobs can be pretty indifferent, with eyelashes on foreheads. Ibentmyman-thing has, through trial-and-error, come up with a method for priming and painting heads, with gorgeous results. (more…)

Hexa is a next-generation drone. With its unique six propeller design, Hexa delivers ultimate control for flying in every direction and pulling off ridiculous stunts. Simply throw it in the air, and enjoy more than an 164-foot range for professional, precision control. Extra blades mean extra stability, and thanks to the six-axis flight control system, going from beginner to pro will be a cinch. Just two extra blades can make a world of difference – experience flight like never before, Hexa style.

A new Global Terrorism Index annual report claims Boko Haram in Nigeria is the world's deadliest extremist group, with the grim honor of having killed more people than ISIS (or “Daesh”), to which it is linked.(more…)

In France, police are searching for three terrorism supporters who stabbed a Jewish school teacher at a Jewish school in Marseille.(more…)

Otto Frank sought help from his college friend Nathan Strauss Jr, the son of the owner of Macy's, to get a US visa, but the US State Department turned him and his family down. (more…)

You can't release a film in the UK without a certificate from the British Board of Film Certification, a censorship authority that's been rating and banning movies since it was established in 1912 to prevent 'indecorous dancing,' 'references to controversial politics' and 'men and women in bed together." (more…)

Subway systems are circulatory systems, moving the lifeblood of a city from place to place beneath its skin. In the game Mini Metro, you get to be the engineer who maps out the veins, connecting all the stops in colorful tangles that keep the city moving as it grows around you.Some of the biggest cities in the world are your transportation playgrounds: London, Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Berlin. Familiarity may offer a slight advantage as well; although I was complete garbage at building a tube for London, when I tried designing a subway system in my former home of New York City, it felt far more intuitive.Although the map above looks complicated, and kind of is, the game begins very simply. You start with three stops, each one labeled with a shape—circle, triangle, square—and you connect them. The passengers at each stop are represented by shapes of their own, and your goal is to build lines that will efficiently route them to their similarly-shaped destinations. Unlike real life, these passengers aren't interested in reaching specific places; as long as a stop matches their shape, they'll happily disembark. https://youtu.be/WJHKzzPtDDIThings get more complicated as new stops pop up throughout the city, often in very inconvenient places, and you have to figure out how to link them in without turning your metro map into an inefficient mess. Fortunately, you can demolish and build new lines instantaneously, but if you make too many passengers wait for too long, and it's game over.Be warned, this is the sort of game where you can easily lose hours in its sleek, minimalist clutches and feel like only minutes have passed. But you probably won't be sorry. It's so satisfying that the moment one game ends—why weren't you paying attention to that one stop!—you'll immediately want to start again, certain that this time you'll be the brilliant city planner you always believed you could be.Developed by Dinosaur Polo Club, Mini Metro is available on Steam for Mac, PC, and Linux, with a mobile version also in the works.

Beloved reality TV star and noted child molester Josh Duggar is idolized as a cherished paragon of traditional family values by presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and other social conservatives. The Tea Party darling is now being sued for half a million dollars by a woman he paid to have sex with.(more…)

I blogged the announcement of the Qwerkywriter more than a year ago, when the company was retooling from its successful kickstarter to full retail production. I've had one of the production models in my office for a couple of months now and I've been very impressed! (I wrote this review on it). (more…)

When car drivers hear a car horn they react instantly. Bike bells, not so much. The Loud Mini bike horn sounds like a car horn. Great idea. The creators are almost fully funded on Kickstarter, with 12 days to go in their campaign.

How Stuff Works explains the "Transatlantic Accent," a cultivated accent that people in the United States affected in an attempt to trick others that they were in some way affiliated with the British upper crust.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GDZBXZunzMEvan Griffin's dad borrowed his Gopro for a Vegas holiday and walked the strip for days with the camera on the end of a selfie-stick -- pointed the wrong way. (more…)

In the decade since publishing embraced ebooks in earnest, we've seen a cornucopia of exciting and innovative ways technology is being used to enhance reading. By utilizing all the tricks at our Internet- and device-savvy disposal, publishing companies are creating stories that are manifested in and influenced by the digital platform. (more…)

[via]

As a Star Wars fan, and self-proclaimed shoe diva, these boots make me tingle somewhere far, far away. They're available from Irregular Choice.

I am completely deactivated for the duration of this video. Previously.

These little LED flashlights come in handy, and are more convenient than using your phone to light up a dark area. They come with batteries, and the buttons have a small catch on them so you can keep the LED illuminated without having to keep your thumb on the button. I have one in my glove box, my tool box, my travel bag, and on keychains. Once you have them around, you will use them a lot. Amazon has 10 for $3.30, with free shipping.

At last. At last.

When I first saw the Atari 2600 in 1979, I was completely floored. I wondered how those geniuses could fit so much fun into those tiny bricks of plastic. For each game, they only had 4k to work with and what was done with it was simply amazing. So much thumb numbing joy was brought to my life by the Atari corporation that I owe the founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney a debt of gratitude. The countless hours spent playing games in my wood paneled Detroit basement paid off in spades. For some reason, being able to rack up high scores gave kids like me special status among certain cliques. The games gave me a reason to be social at school and if it wasn't for them, I probably would've been picked on a heck of a lot more. (more…)

A new working paper [PDF] from three Harvard Business School researchers builds on the work of Texas A&M professor Markus Fitza, whose paper in last month's Strategic Management Journal showed that nearly everything about a CEO's performance can be attributed to chance. (more…)

Despite the rumors that tricked more than half the state governors in the USA into enacting racist anti-Syrian policies, there is no evidence that the Paris attackers came from outside the EU. (more…)

Wired's Klint Finley tried turning off Javascript and discovered a better Web, one without interruptors asking you to sign up for mailing list, without infinitely scrolling pages, without ads and without malvertising. (more…)

Two design students are hoping to raise $4900 to fund production on archival/acid-free/recycled post-consumer wrapping paper emblazoned with delicious pizza toppings. They bundle the paper with matching pizza boxes to hold your gifts. (more…)

(more…)

By now you've heard the entire world would be saved if only everyone learned to code. Now, a tutorial made by Minecraft developer Mojang and its new parent Microsoft is here to teach coding fundamentals to children—or newbies of any age, really.At Motherboard, Rachel Pick describes how it all works, and said she was surprised at how much she learned, even though as a 27 year-old woman she hadn't expected to be in the tutorial's presumed audience:

Lots of law enforcement agencies hate crypto, because the technology that helps us protect our communications from criminals and griefers and stalkers and spies also helps criminals keep secrets from cops. With each terrorist attack there's a fresh round of doom-talk from spooks and cops about the criminals "going dark" -- as though the present situation, in which the names and personal information of everyone who talks to everyone else, all the time, where they are then they talk, where they go and who they talk to next, is somehow less surveillant than the past, when cops could sometimes use analog tape-recorders to wiretap the very few conversations that took place on landlines. (more…)

Hundreds of thousands of women in Texas women may have tried to self-induce abortions, according to a “first of its kind” study from the Texas Policy Evaluation Project (TxPEP).(more…)

An overnight blast blamed on the Islamic extremist terror organization Boko Haram killed 32 people and wounded 80 Tuesday at a truck stop in northeastern Nigeria.(more…)

French journalist Nicolas Hénin was held hostage for ten months by ISIS terrorists, chained in an underground cell; his cellmates were later murdered by ISIS. For nearly a year, he lived with ISIS fighters, and learned what makes them tick. (more…)

We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War is a new book by veteran Doug Bradley and Craig Werner, professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, about soldiers' musical memories and the impact of James Brown, Eric Burdon, Country Joe McDonald, and other popular artists on the Vietnam experience and our understanding of it.At KQED's Next Avenue, Bradley shared the "Top 10 Songs of Vietnam" mentioned by the hundreds soldiers they interviewed for the book. Here are the top three with Bradley's comments on them:https://youtu.be/wJVpihgwE18

CIA Director John Brennan wants you to think the Paris attacks were Snowden's fault -- the "hand wringing" over mass surveillance has ended his agency's ability to "thwart" terrorists attacks "before they're carried out." There's only one problem with that: there's no evidence that the US's mass surveillance programs have ever prevented a major terrorist attack. (more…)

(more…)

The small town of Minturn, Colorado won the 2015 America's Best Bathroom Contest put on by Cintas, a company that handles restroom cleaning and supplies among other things. Minter's Town Planning Director Janet Hawkinson was involved in the design of the restrooms, inspired by the entrances to gold and silver mines. From the Denver Post: