Does extraterrestrial life exist? It's a question that, for the past 25 years, Congress didn't care to try and answer.In 1993, just as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) was getting its shit together with a massive program that would see observatories around the world equipped to search the universe for signals that may have been produced by intelligent alien life, Congress pulled the plug on funding them, preferring to throw money at NASA instead. In the U.S. Capital, SETI became a four-letter s-word that didn't end in 'hit.' While all of this is literally in the past, it's now also figuratively in the past as well.From Space.com:

USDish analyzed Google search data for the last 15 years to create this map of the United States showing each state's "favorite" sitcom. The Midwest loves Friends, four states and Washington DC prefer Friends, and (hooray!) California digs The Simpsons."Can You Guess Your State’s Favorite Sitcom from the ’90s?"

A businessman in India was suckered out of $200,000 by two men dressed in cheap silver space suits. The swindlers are a father and son team, who pretended to have special palm-sized copper plates that could "generate electricity from thunderbolts." They said the plates could be sold to NASA for hundreds of millions of dollars, and at least one gullible New Delhi businessman fell for the hoax.According to The Guardian:

I just bought this small bluetooth speaker (3.8 x 2.6 x 2.6 inches) made by Aukey because it has good reviews and is on sale for $6.88 when you use code FORMOM22. It's regularly $16. It comes with a built-in mic so you can use it as a speakerphone, too. It comes with a micro USB to 3.5mm audio cable so you can use it without Bluetooth, too.

Dissatisfied with the quality of service she received at a KFC, this woman decided to destroy the restaurant. It's possible she was inebriated, and now regrets the method by which she delivered her complaint, but I have no further information.

Known as "hog hotels," European farmers have already experimented with raising pigs in two or three-story buildings, and many of those went (pork) belly up. But an agricultural company in China has recently started farming pigs in two separate 7-story buildings and has plans to start four new hog hotels, "including one with as many as 13 floors that will be the world’s tallest building of its kind," according to Reuters.The term "hog hotel" conjures up images of pampered pigs resting in plush beds and a tray of fresh slop being served to them in their room with a view when they're hungry. But of course that's not how it is. In the video above the hotel looks more like a cross between a cold medical institution and a prison.According to the video's YouTube page:

"My 14-year-old just made a MIDI mashup of the Gravity Falls theme song and Gangnam Style and it’s honestly amazing," tweets game designer Elizabeth Samat. This is not a delusional parental boast - it is amazing.Also, I didn't know there was an Online Sequencer. It looks cool!

Covering Airedale, Altofts, Castleford, Crofton, Featherstone, Ferry Fryston, Glasshoughton, Normanton, Ryhill, Walton, Whitwood and surrounding areas of West Yorkshire in England, the Wakefield Rural Police scored an epic haul at Walton Colliery nature park: a "small quantity of Cannabis" seized from a "young man who was parked up alone" and subsequently sent on his way without charge.After announcing the drug bust on its Facebook page, however, the department found itself being mocked by locals who made fun of it posting such a trivial incident.Such insolence will not stand!

Adam Parfrey died yesterday at the age of 61. Carla, David, Xeni, and I knew him for many years. He was one of the most interesting people I knew, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the arcane, the esoteric, and the unusual. He was a great dinner host, too, and I spent many memorable evenings in his amazing 1920s storybook style house in Los Angeles.Adams' publishing house, Feral House, published a wide variety of books about subcultures, cults and mass movements, crime, sexuality, political theory, and history. Many of our friends wrote books for Feral House, such as Martin Olson's Encyclopedia of Hell ("Written by and for demons, instructing them on how to destroy mankind"), Sean Tejaratchi's Liartown USA, and Al Ridenour's The Krampus, and The Old, Dark Christmas Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil.Adam also wrote or edited excellent books about old, weird America: It's A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps, Citizen Keane: The Big Lies Behind the Big Eyes, Ritual America: Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society, Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment, and many other titles. He re-published one of my all time books, You Can't Win, the 1926 autobiography of a hobo burglar."We do not publish fiction," says the About Us page at Feral House's website. "But, if a personal obsession has caused you to investigate a fascinating piece of history or cultural phenomenon, or if you are an artist or photographer interested in unusual subject matter, we’d be interested to hear about it." I don't know if anyone else is capable of carrying on Adam's outstanding work. I've never met anyone remotely like him.Last month, Adam sent me a copy of Feral House's latest book, a translation of The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles, a memoir by French yé-yé singer Françoise Hardy (mentioned on Wednesday in the New York Times). I knew little about Hardy, but of course it's a fascinating read. How did Adam know that it would be?Image of Adam Parfrey, Feral House website

One great thing about cash is its anonymity – nobody, including the government, can easily stick their nose in your beeswax when you're using physical banknotes and coins. But anonymity is about to become more scarce in Australia, which is about to make it illegal to purchase anything over $10,000 AU ($7,500 US) with cash.The Australian government, who announced the new cash ban on Tuesday, says it wants to discourage money laundering and tax evasion by “encouraging the transition to a digital society.” And to enforce the new law, the government will depend on the "Black Economy Standing Taskforce," which will be focusing on Australia's black market tobacco trade.According to Gizmodo:

In 2016, the Pentagon released a draft of its comprehensive global risk assessment; this climate change as a driver of global instability and possible conflict. The final draft replaces "climate change" with weak-kneed, cowardly euphemisms like "extreme weather," failing to attribute this weather to anthropogenic climate change, a matter of scientific consensus which Donald Trump has stated is a "Chinese plot." (more…)

John McCain's objection to Gina Haspel's appointment to lead the CIA is easily understood: he was tortured in Vietnam, whereas Haspel supervised torture at the CIA. Many conservatives have often held him with a certain contempt for being a prisoner of war, partially because they think torture is effective (cf. the Manchurian candidate) and partially just because they hate victims who share their experiences. Trump's mockery of him over it was not a blurted-out accident, but rather a vulgar fingers-in-mouth earsplitting humanwhistle to the right. And so here we are, with White House official Kelly Sadler's opinion of him.

For more than a century, the Canadian government pursued a policy of forcibly removing First Nations people from their homes and imprisoning them in largely church-run "residential schools" where violence, rape and other forms of abuse were rampant. The last residential school closed in 1986. (more…)

After the delightful wooden elevator down from Antwerp's streets, the 1876-foot pedestrian tunnel under the Scheldt is "staggeringly monotonous," reports Atlas Obscura, but I rather like it. I have one question: what would the diameter of a well-lit circular tunnel like this need to be for its curvature to be imperceptible?Actually, I have another question: What would the diameter of a dimly-lit circular tunnel like this, lined with books, need to be for its curvature to be imperceptible?Photo: Trougnouf (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Whether you have a long commute or an intense workout to get through, the right music can make the experience much more manageable. Magnetic, long-lasting, and enjoyably ergonomic, the N1 Bluetooth Wireless In-Ear Headphones make it easy to bring your music with you and tune in with maximum comfort. They're available in the Boing Boing Store for $39.99.Built around a flexible, contoured neckband and equipped with magnetic earpieces, these headphones are easy to take and stow anywhere. They stream clear stereo sound from your phone or tablet without the mess of tangled wires and are rated to last up to eight hours on a single charge. What's more, you can respond to calls with the built-in microphone and even manage calls and media from two Bluetooth devices at once.You can get your own pair of N1 Bluetooth Wireless In-Ear Headphones in the Boing Boing Store for $39.99.

It's been three years since the filing of a suit against the FBI after agents put several Muslims on the No Fly list to retaliate against their refusal to be conscripted as a confidential informants spying on other Muslims; the FBI's illegal retaliation cost their victims their jobs, subjected them to harassment, and cut them off from visits to family overseas. (more…)

I met Seattle artist Marcia Wiley through my inbox zine a couple months ago. I had written about the idea of the "positive deviant," basically someone who strays from the norm but brings value rather than pain (akin to the "happy mutant"). The concept really resonated with me and I asked readers to send along names of positive deviants who they were aware of because I wanted to start a list. Marcia rightly offered up her own name, and, in our most recent communication, she shared a project of hers with me: "Miss Direction's Ride Service."Since 2005, she has been bringing unexpected delight to strangers in a really fun way. Dressed in her alter ego "Miss Direction" driving outfit (below), she gives people waiting at bus stops a free ride to their destination in her Honda SUV. In exchange for the complimentary pickup, passengers share their story with her. It's been a great success. Now she's looking to start "Miss Direction's Checker Cab Service." A 1967 Checker Cab has already surfaced for the job, but it needs some restoration work before she can take it to the streets. So, she's started a Kickstarter campaign to fund her dream of bringing "everyday magic" to Seattle, a place, she writes, "that is changing so rapidly that people often feel a loss of connection and have a sense that the city is losing its soul and becoming less unique."This is her vow:

Two Nineteen Forty Four is Tristan Greszko's remarkable timelapse of last year's record-breaking ascent on The Nose at Yosemite's El Capitan. (more…)

Just look at it.(Thanks, Gwynne!)

David Weinberger writes, "I just blogged about a 1911 letter in the Thomas Edison digital archive in which the former mayor of Kingston, Jamaica, proposed that Edison take his Gramophone one step further and invent a speech-to-text transcriber. Edison replied, albeit curtly." (more…)

You can run, but it doesn't matter, because so can your pursuer.

Remember back in 2014 when everyone thought that an Ebola outbreak in Africa wouldn't be a problem for North Americans and then – and this is the shit and giggle part – four laboratory-confirmed cases of the hemorrhagic fever showed up in the United States? Everyone, justifiably, freaked out. The panic didn't last, though. As the countries like Liberia, Mali and Sierra Leone began to report that the control measures put in place to stem the spread of the disease were starting to have an effect, the notion of Ebola being the big-bad of our time faded from the public eye. But just because you can't see something doesn't mean it can't hurt you.From the CBC:

Will Smith never planned on being an actor. He never planned on being broke and in debt to the IRS, either. In this video, Smith breaks down how being bad with money started him down the road to becoming one of the biggest TV and film stars in the world.

Space is no stranger to beer. Astronauts have farted about with beer fermentation, in orbit, in the past. The Russians have tried their hand at growing barley and hops in the International Space Station's Zvezda module and, during the early years of their space program, the USSR attempted to crank out freeze-dried beer that was halfway palatable for their cosmonauts to enjoy in the vacuum of space – but it wasn't, so they didn't. Fast forward to the present day: a pair of companies are doing their damnedest to create a beer and bottle that'll let astronauts get their drank on in the inky depths of the vacuum that surrounds our home.From Space.com

Police in Rialto, California have released bodycam footage of an incident in which Bob Marley's granddaughter was detained when a white neighbor reported her for suspected burglary. Donisha Prendergast was merely staying at an Airbnb, on her vacation, with friends, while Black.(more…)

David Chasteen is a veteran of the CIA, who has also served in combat with the United States Army in Iraq, and elsewhere.(more…)

Look at the above image. The higher the peaks, the more sensitive your eyes are to contrasts at those frequencies. Ian Goodfellow spotted the image in a scientific paper about spatial frequency analysis and brilliantly observed that "It's like a graph that is made by perceiving the graph itself." Over at Mind Hacks, Tom Stafford explains the science of spatial frequency, the same concept behind the classic "Marilyn Einstein" image below that was created by Aude Oliva in 2007. From Mind Hacks:

The latest Humble Bundle features dozens of Nebula-winning and Nebula-nominated novels and short stories from past and present, everyone from Octavia Butler and Ursula K Leguin to Samuel Delany and John Brunner, to say nothing of Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, and four titles from Serial Box. (more…)

https://youtu.be/njZ21cbe9uoWhen he accepted his Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize in 2015, Eddie Murphy (who apparently stopped aging 25 years ago) did a dead-on impersonation of Bill Cosby talking about drugging woman.

After three years of legal weed, Oregon has grown 1.1 million pounds, approximately three times what residents buy in a year. From The Guardian:

Infowars went to an event to make a gotcha video with people outside a SXSW event featuring Bernie Sanders. The Infowars reporter probably regrets approaching a podcaster and actress named Dasha Nekrasova, who rolled her eyes at the reporter's claims about socialism leading to people eating rats. Nekrasova, dressed in a sailor outfit, calmly told the reporter that Infowars people have worms in their brains:

An Iron Man suit from the original 2008 film is missing. Apparently the $325,000 suit disappeared from a Los Angeles warehouse in recent months. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Employees at the warehouse 'just happened to check' Tuesday and noticed the costume was gone."As of press time, Stane has not responded to requests for comment.

I've eaten durian a few times. Weighing as much as ten pounds, the hard greenish shell of this Southeast Asian fruit is studded with hard spikes, like some kind of living medieval weapon. Growing at the tops of trees up to 40 feet tall, durian fruits have been known to drop from branches and kill people below.It takes a mighty thwack of a machete to persuade a durian to yield its cache of grayish-yellow sluglike pods. With an odor somewhere between sweetened garlic and pig manure, the fruit’s stench is so overpowering that it can be smelled through a car’s closed trunk.To me, durian tastes like rotten bananas mixed with garlic and a drop of gasoline. And the aftertaste remains on your tongue for at least 24 hours, even after you brush your tongue with toothpaste. Despite — or more likely, because — durian is so foul, it’s considered a delicacy by millions of people. People love it or hate it, there is no in-between. Those who adore it as “The King of Fruit” in its native Indonesia, Malaysia, and especially Thailand (which dominates its export market) are willing to fork over what amounts to a month’s salary for a prime specimen. In Singapore alone, $30 million worth of the fetid fruit slithers down gullets of fearless gourmands each year. The governments of several Asian countries forbid people from bringing durian onto any type of public transportation. Most hotels have a ban on the fruit, and rental car agencies issue fines for cars that are returned smelling of durian.Many visitors to Malaysia and Thailand are tempted to try durian. Here are some reports published on the Internet:“I nearly vomited from the smell alone. I would describe it as a cross between dirty diapers and propane.”“It’s like eating ice cream in a sewer.”“It really does smell like decaying flesh combined with rotting eggs.”“It was similar to eating a cheesecake covered with a layer of feces”"That is the single most disgusting thing I've ever experienced in my life; get it out of my face."In the video above, Crazy Russian Hacker tries durian for the first time. His experience was similar to mine. At first, it tastes pretty good, but every subsequent bite gets worse, until you feel sick.Portions if the text above are from my book, The World's Worst.

https://youtu.be/24Tifo-hJacA game of cornhole at the Douglas County Fair in Georgia led to a dispute between players, reports WSB-TV in Atlanta--a dispute that escalated into a fists-flying brawl at the Foxhall Resort.

The Wild Inside follows Arizona prisoners in a program where they work to break wild horses rounded up from the desert. (more…)

The New York Times' culture reporter Dave Itzkoff has a new biography of Robin Williams called Robin. Vanity Fair has an excerpt about the months leading up to his death. It's sad and fascinating.

When Trump whined this morning in one of his usual bully boy name-calling tweets, Senator Chuck Schumer had the perfect response. Schumer reminded the insecure president of his wife Melania's no cyberbullying #BeBest initiative, launched just this week.Bully boy's tweet:

Illustrator Ksenia Kopalova and ceramic artist Natalia Savinova combined their talents to make a mashup they call illustramics. (more…)

UK-based artist Lisa Lloyd has been getting lots of well-deserved notice for her intricate papercraft animals, birds, food, and other earthly delights. (more…)

Draeger's Alcotest 9510 breathalyzer [Amazon] is used widely by cops and has led to millions of drunk-driving arrests. For years its results have been suspect, and now researchers are elaborating upon its flaws: serious bugs in the code cause it to produce inflated blood-alcohol readings. Draeger used copyright law to try and stop folks talking about the cat writhing in the bag, but it eventually got out.

Geologist Jerry Magloughlin made a lava video that's a real labor of love. It describes the marvelous complexity of Hawaiian lava flows, combined with lots of cool footage and interesting facts. Plan on learning many new things. (more…)

A woman delivering lunch to an Atlanta residence was assaulted, say police, but fought off her attacker with her keys.

Mattia Bicchi captured some stunning panoramas in glorious 8K during a recent trip to South America. (more…)

Zenji Funabashi creates colorful animals scultures that lock together in all sorts of fun ways. Imagine the satisfaction of sliding the pieces together. (more…)

Sure, "Moonlight Sonata" is one of the loveliest songs for a reflective and pensive moment, but what if it were covered in a FREAKIN' EPIC arrangement? (more…)

A team of researchers from Twitter have published a paper detailing a machine learning technique that uses a generative adversarial network to make shrewd guesses about how to up-res small images by up to 400%, into crisp, large images, with eye-popping results. (more…)

A "vast web" of fraudulent reviewers have come to dominate Amazon, with shills being paid cash to order a product, photograph it on arrival, and write a glowing, 5-star review. (more…)

Watch this while you can. Run.Thanks, Doug!

Back in 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in Riley v California, holding that border guards do not have unlimited authority to search our personal electronic devices when we cross the border, requiring individualized criminal suspicion before a search can take place. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF_K4910gQgPerhaps you were slightly unnerved by Silicon Valley cheering Google's startlingly convincing and conversant simulation of a human voice! You know they don't really give a damn about online fakery and abuse, so you know they won't give a damn what ends this tech is put to.Thankfully, it probably won't work quite so well as the demo. Mr. Bandwagon's edit of Google's presentation is great, an artifact popping in perfect form from the near future's mercifullly unequal distribution.The thing is this: if humans don't know they're talking to robots, they won't talk in a way robots will understand, which is what we tend to do with Siri and other voice assistants. It'll take a lot of machine learning to grasp the complexities and vagaries of truly natural human speech, a point so obvious that everyone assumes it will obviously be overcome.Maybe we'll find ourselves talking robotically for the benefit of machines we believe are human. But it's more likely we'll become swiftly inoculated against The Voice, attuned to its little shibboleths and flaws--no Voight-Kampff test necessary--at least for now. We'll just be angrier than ever at our phones, hanging up at the first sign of Robocall 2.0, until it becomes so pervasive we have no choice.