Purikura means "printing club" in Japanese. It's basically a place for teens and kids to take their pictures in photobooths, filter them, and print them out as stickers. I took my daughters to the purikura shown here on Takeshita Street, and we really didn't know what we were doing, because the touch screens were in Japanese and loaded with options. I also noticed signs that said "No Men Allowed." The guy working there noticed that I was looking at the sign and he said, "Family OK!" and gave me the OK sign with his hand.This video explains how to use a purikura machine. It still confuses me.

I guess outgoing Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has given up on weakly trying to hide things from people and has just gone ahead and said it. If the GOP loses control of the House or Senate they won't be able to cover for Trump anymore.Please lose control of the House and Senate.Via Bloomberg:

Columbus, Ohio police where chasing an armed suspect in front of a public library when a bystander named Bill casually stuck his foot out and tripped the fleeing fellow. From Cincinnati.com:

Bloomberg's Kit Chellel wrote a fascinating profile of Bill Benter, a man who cracked the horse-racing code in the 1980s and made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Fortnite Battle Royale, the video game that has taken over gaming by storm, announced "Revenge" by Enzait as the winner of the #ReplayRoyale fan film contest. Players can use an incredible in-game cinematic Replay feature to re-watch, cut and clip their play from almost any angle.https://youtu.be/x3mAyGYs8l0Fortnite's makers at Epic Games do not't always do the best job of picking contest winners, but the community corrects them when they go astray. They recently released a fan-favorite entry into their dance contest as an in-game emote, Orange Justice. Even tho Epic selected another winner, fan clamour convinced them to add it.Orange Justice looks like the dance for me, and it is great exercise!

In 1978, the usual gang of idiots at MAD gave us "Star Roars," starring Lube Skystalker, Cree-Pio, Bar-stool, Ham Yoyo, Chewbacco, Zader, and Oldie Von Moldie. May The Farce be with you! Always. Below are a couple example strips but can see the entire parody here.

Lithub has put together a gallery of 50 pulp paperback versions of classic works of literature. "Some are true pulp covers—with overtly sexy women and tantalizing movie-esque taglines," writes Emily Temple, "while others are just amusingly lowbrow mass market treatments of highbrow novels. Either way, they’re even better than you’d expect."Equally good is Rebecca Romney's gallery of crime novels given the pulp treatment. Example:

Boyd Clopton was a clothing designer and illustrator who created funktastic fashions in the early 1970s for Stevie Wonder and Syreeta Wright (above), The Jackson 5, Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, and many more soul and rock stars of the era. See more of his incredible illustrations over at Dangerous Minds.

Squid ancestors were happy creatures with shells until about 400 million years ago, when the emergence of fish with jaws set off an evolutionary arms race between fish and cephalopods. (more…)

From The Brick Wall:

Another inconclusive election in the UK, this time for control of local governments, saw Conservatives stave off significant Labor gains thanks in part to right-wing voters coming home after abandoning UKIP. From the ashes on the far right, UKIP's General Secretary had a thought-- a remarkably bad one.

So, Geocities -- the service that, back in 1994, set off the first phase of everyday folks putting crazy, fun stuff online -- still exists as a hosting service. Better yet, it has also preserved an awful lot of those old Geocities sites, and has a rudimentary search engine to find them. I searched for "anime" (what else, really?) and immediately found a zillion fanfic sites, like the one above.When I posted about this search engine on Twitter, a lot of thirtysomething web developers immediately headed over to discover: Holy moses, the fansites they'd made when they were tweens were still up and running!Bonus: if you find a site you created way back when, Geocities has a process for reclaiming yours. So you can start re-updating a site that you probably last edited when Bill Clinton was president.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKntoFl3Jq8&feature=youtu.be

"We thought we'd have a garage sale to get rid of some of the clutter," writes jessie 31. "Unfortunately, our neighbor billy has been a little on edge lately and feels the need to rip everyone a new one."Don't you get the feeling Billie needs someone to talk to about somethin'?That said, there's a whole YouTube channel of Billie's further adventures. If it's real, it's verging on an unsavory level of voyeurism/enabling; if it's comedy, Billie deserves her own show.

Our own Ruben Bolling, creator of the Tom the Dancing Bug comic, has won a Kennedy Journalism Prize, given for works that "provide insights into the causes, conditions, and remedies of human rights violations and injustice, and critical analyses of relevant policies, programs, individual actions, and private endeavors that foster positive change." Couldn't have happened to a sweller feller! Congrats, Ruben!

Matt Baker from UsefulCharts.com made a detailed poster and video of how the English alphabet evolved over the last 4,000 years, but his elegant and colorful topline is the simplest iteration of the process: (more…)

If you have aspirations of making it as a web developer, you're likely going to need to master JavaScript. A browser language that supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles, JavaScript is the tool in a coder's toolbox that lets them display dynamic information on a webpage, like interactive maps, content updates, animations, and the like. You can learn the ins and outs of working with this language and a host of its tools with the 2018 Essential JavaScript Coding Bundle, available for $29.Featuring more than 29 hours of training and a plethora of learning resources, this 10-part collection is designed to walk you through the fundamentals of using JavaScript and leveraging some of its core tools, like Angular 2 and Bootstrap. You'll dive into responsive web development as you use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to customize sites, and you'll expand your knowledge further as you learn how to architect large-scale and maintainable software using Angular 2.The 2018 Essential JavaScript Coding Bundle is on sale in the Boing Boing Store for $29.

EFF has just published an update to its Catalog of Missing Devices (a catalog of things that don’t exist thanks to the chilling effects of Section 1201 of the DMCA): a trio of ads for future artificial pancreas firmwares that illustrate the way that control over devices can magnify or correct power imbalances.(more…)

Machine learning's reproducibility crisis is getting worse, and the massive shortage of qualified researchers has driven top salaries over $1,000,000, bringing in all kinds of cowboys and pretenders. (more…)

Here's some promising eco-news: A simple scientific experiment tweaked the ecosystem of a California farm, and the soil began capturing tons of carbon from the atmosphere.The experiment began in 2007, when some Californian farmers collaborated with some ecologists. They wanted to enrichen the soil so that it'd grow grasses and plants that trap more carbon, particularly "occluded" carbon, which is usually dead microbes. That stuff gets in the earth and stays there for a long time.To try and encourage new forms of growth that trap that type of carbon, they did a simple treatment: They covered three acres of the farm with a half-inch of compost, bought from a nearby composting plant.When they checked back three years later, the soil in the treated acres was indeed trapping far more carbon than untreated soil in nearby farms (which, interestingly, was mostly losing carbon, on balance). How much capture had taken place? About 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide per acre per year, which is "roughly equal to your car’s emissions if you drove from Miami to Seattle."The scientists' research suggests that the soil will continue to capture carbon at that rate. That's particularly remarkable considering it was a one-time treatment!This suggests something quite enticing: Treat farms all over America just one time with a half-inch of compost, and they could become sponges that soak up tons of carbon. Moses Velasquez-Manoff has written a fascinating long feature about the work in the New York Times Magazine:

Even by Trump administration standards, Scott Pruitt is a fucking mess, and as his day of reckoning looms, his staff are doing everything they can to take the heat off their boss, which is why Pruitt press-staffer Michael Abboud approached multiple reporters to give them dirt on Pruitt archrival Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXK4Re7VS2Q&feature=youtu.beColumbus police report that an armed suspect fleeing on foot was tripped up by a bystander.

The New Years revelation that decades' worth of Intel's processors had deep, scary defects called "Spectre" and "Meltdown" still has security experts reeling as they contemplate the scale of patching billions of devices that are vulnerable to attack. (more…)

Tim at Grand Illusions chose several of his favorite "photogenic" puzzles to share. Some of them he has not solved yet, and even some that he's solved are still quite challenging to replicate. (more…)

The University of Utah's Suresh Venkatasubramanian and Katie Shelef are teaching a course in "Ethics in Data Science" and they've published a comprehensive syllabus for it; it's a fantastic set of readings for anyone interested in understanding and developing ethical frameworks for computer science generally, and data science in particular. (more…)

One of the USA's sources of "soft power" in the world is as a convener and crossroads for academics, businesspeople, professionals, and other members of international communities that gather every year or two in huge global conferences and trade shows, often choosing the USA for their event's site. (more…)

Professional photographer Doc Jon captured a remarkable series of photos of a shark snatched from the waves just as it had clamped down on a fish. Check out his page for more cool nature shots. (more…)

Republican Patrick Little doesn't stand much of a chance in California's Senate race this fall: he's up against Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and his own party denounced him. Nonetheless, as the state's top-polling Republican candidate, his hatred for the Jews says much about the GOP's future.

Austrian researcher Károly Zsolnai-Fehér from Two Minute Papers presents four examples of AI finding loopholes that programmers had not anticipated. (more…)

Rob Bell lays out the basics of the Japanese concept of ikigai, the search for purpose and fulfillment in life. Illustrator Mark Winn created a Venn diagram often used to explain the idea: (more…)

In the wake of the Toronto van attack (image above), media attention is turning to the next strand of online white-guy aggrievement that the mainstream hasn't yet discovered -- the self-described "incel" movement.There'll be endless pieces attempting to interrogate the specific claims made by incel guys online, too many of which will somehow ignore their phosphorescent misogyny, and the many open calls to violence against women you see in these forums. Ella Dawson synthesized this nicely ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ylfto5YnOwwAs posted to YouTube by Nate Gowdy, this gentleman appropriates a counter-protestor's sign and makes strenuous efforts to rip it up. But it's a fancy thick one and he lacks the strength or technique to do the job. Watching him wither under the sarcastic commentary and recording cameras of nearby libs will never not be funny.

Women have had to deal with the shitty end of the employment stick since, well, forever. Sexual harassment, rampant misogyny and pay disparity are but a few of the crap things they frequently have to put up with. Apparently, you can add being screwed out of equal pay for authoring a frigging book to the list: researchers at Queens College have discovered that books written by female authors are, on average, sold for just over 50% less than those written by a dude.The study looked at sales data for titles released by large publishing houses in North America between 2002 and 2012. Looking to the gender of the authors of the books reviewed, cross factoring this with data on the price, genre and how the books were published brought the study's authors to a lousy conclusion: Books written by women that are released by mainstream publishing houses sell, on average, for 45% less than those written by men.The study's authors, Dana Beth Weinberg and Adam Kapelner, a sociologist and mathematician, respectively, found that even when you looked at book genres that are dominated by female authors, the percentages only go up by an average of 9% – so, even if hardly any men are writing, say, romance novels, the women who are writing them are still getting screwed out of equal pay.From The Guardian:

Archaeologists have long known that tattooing goes back for millennia. But recently they made a cool find: what appears to be a Native American tattoo kit that's at least 3,600 years old.The kit, which includes a bunch of pointy wild-turkey bones, was unearthed decades ago, but recently came under closer scrutiny. As Mental Floss reports ...

There's no guarantee that the cat in your life won't cut you at the drop of a hat, but learning the correct way to pick one up might make it think twice before breaking off a shiv in one of your vital organs.

Behold the incredibly weird-looking Horten Ho 229 -- an all-wing "wonder weapon" plane that the Nazis frantically developed even as they were collapsing and losing WWII.The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has one in its collection, and they've been slowly examining it for decades. Created by the brothers Reimar and Walter Horton, it was the the first iteration of the concept of "bell-shaped lift distribution," an idea that's still being bandied about today.Because it looks so weird, this nutty plane has long been cocooned in mythology. After the war, Reimar claimed they'd treated the exterior of the plane with charcoal to make it invisible to radar. Nope: The Smithsonian folks haven't found any evidence of that. (A good story on the charcoal search is here.) Indeed, the plane was a colossal failure; the one time they tested it with powered flight, it crashed and killed its pilot.The one thing it succeeded at? Keeping the Horten brothers away from the front lines. As Smithsonian Insider reports:

Marcio Cabral won a Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, but he was stripped of his title after some claimed he used a taxidermied anteater, shown above, in his winning shot. Internet sleuths have been having a field day with the investigation ever since. (more…)

The Core Shopping Center caters to the needs of Calgary, Canada's downtown office workers. Wandering its multiple floors over a series of city blocks, you'll find a mid-ranged food court, travel agencies, cell phone stores and stores flogging business attire – pretty standard stuff. Its white walls and polished floors give it an institutional feel that shouts "shop and bugger off." It's a mall! You could mistake it for any number of other shopping centers around North America, except for one thing: the Core has, or rather, had, a dead fella in the wall of one of its women's washrooms.I spend six months of the year in and around Calgary and worked for a number of years managing mall cops. Lemme set the scene.Instead of forcing maintenance personnel to rip a hole in a wall to access plumbing every time that there's a problem, a lot of mall bathrooms are designed to include small, lockable doors that provide access to the pipes. The wall that this door is baked into is often referred to as a "pony wall." Pony walls aren't designed for load bearing. They're there, primarily, to hide plumbing, HVAC and electrical conduits from folks using the building. It looks nice. In between a pony wall and the wall that lies beyond it, there's usually a small chunk of space – maybe one and a half feet feet deep – to allow workers to get parts of themselves and their tools into to make repairs. The access hatch for a pony wall can be locked and unlocked from the outside. The space behind the wall typically isn't large enough to safely accommodate a person. There's no reason to have a handle or a latch on the inside of the hatch.Now, we're good to go.Earlier this week, according to the Calgary Herald, one of The Core's maintenance personnel was dispatched to the woman's washroom by the mall food court. A toilet wasn't flushing. Easy fix. With his tools in tow, maintenance worker bopped into the stall in question, unlocked the maintenance hatch and found some poor, dead bastard jammed into the space behind the pony wall. It wasn't long before the police arrived on the scene, followed by one of the city's medical examiners. Soon after, the fire department showed up to help extricate the body from the wall – remember, the access hatches are large enough to get an arm and maybe your head into, but not a whole body.From The Calgary Herald:

A fresh pile of human doo doo was found on the football field of Holmdel High School on a daily basis in Holdel, New Jersey, so coaches and staff made a stink about it to the district's resource officer. To crack the mystery, surveillance cameras were set up, and plop! They caught the mystery pooper in the act. It turned out to be the school district's Superintendent Thomas Tramaglini.The 42-year-old gentleman was out for a run on the track in the early morning when he was arrested at 5:45am.According to NJ.com:

Olesja Schemjakowa of France enjoyed coffee and cake at a cafe in Switzerland. Her bill was $23.76. When it was time to settle the bill, she accidentally entered her PIN code (7686) as the tip on the cafe's terminal device. She didn't realize her mistake until she was back home and got her bank statement in the mail and saw that she'd been charged $7,732 for the snack.She called her credit card company and asked them to reverse the charges but they told her they wouldn't help her because the charge was not fraudulent. She asked the police department in the town where the cafe was located but they told her it wasn't a "criminally relevant" matter. She then called the cafe owner, who agreed to refund the money, but soon stopped communicating with her. Schemjakowa then learned that the cafe owner had filed for bankruptcy and shut down the cafe.From Oddity Central:

My family came late to the Arrested Development series, and so we've been binge watching it on Netflix. The series is narrated by Ron Howard, and also narrates this very good Arrested Development: Star Wars sketch from The Star Wars Show. Spoilers, of course.

Here's a fun puzzle explained to us by math writer Alex Bellos (but invented by mathematician Henry Ernest Dudeney) that you can try with six coins. First line them up like this:Now see if you can arrange them in a circle with only three moves. The two rules: you can slide them but not pick them up, and you must move them to a position where they are touching two other coins.Here is a video explaining the rules a bit more, but spoiler alert: don't go past 2:37 unless you want to see how it's done.https://youtu.be/_pP_C7HEy3g

One of my favorite authors, psychologist Maria Konnikova (who I've interviewed many times for Boing Boing and Institute for the Future) is writing a book about the world of professional poker. As part of her research, Maria decided to play in some tournaments. It turns out she's a really good poker player, and is making a lot of money. So much, in fact, that she's delaying the release of her book until 2019 so she can pursue her new career.From Deadspin:

In 2016 Jessica Pell fainted and cut her ear when she fell. She went to Hoboken University Medical Center, where was given an ice pack and a bandage. That was the extent of her treatment. She did not get a diagnosis. Her bill was $5,751.From Vox:

A year ago Daniel J. Green -- NBC News' self-described "overweight health editor" -- said he "had stage 1 hypertension, prediabetes and elevated cholesterol numbers. I also weighed 244½ pounds and had a body-fat percentage of 26.9%, placing me firmly in the obese category."He followed federal guidelines for diet and exercise for a year, and says he now feels better, "physically, psychologically and emotionally" than he did before he began.From his article:

Matt Werth of record label RVNG Intl. asks: "Do you agree that a spoken word track about a mythical being sucking out the insides of someone and turning them into a skin balloon" is appropriate for Boing Boing?Yes, Matt. Yes it is.Please enjoy "Edge" by Colombian experimental musician Lucrecia Dalt from her forthcoming LP Anticlines.Video by Charlotte Collin & Jonathan Martin.

Hawaii just passed a bill that would make it the first US state – as well as the first place in the world – to ban most sunscreens.Chemicals used in over 3,500 sunscreen products – oxybenzone (aka Benzophenone-3) and octinoxate – "have significant harmful impacts on Hawaii's marine environment and residing ecosystems, including coral reefs that protect Hawaii's shoreline," says the bill that Hawaii lawmakers passed on Tuesday. If signed by Governor David Ige, the sunscreen ban will become law by January 1, 2021.From NPR:

Blade Runner superfan Adam Savage and Norm Chan build exquisite Blade Runner snub-nosed blasters:

Most Cubans have terrible access to the Internet -- estimates suggest only 5-25% of the populace can regularly get online. The government made it a bit easier in recent years with paid wifi hotspots, but they require dough, and they're super slow.So Cubans have instead, in the last decade, evolved a complex, massive sneakernet. It's called "El Paquete Semanal", or "The Weekly Package" -- in which a loosely-connected group of Cubans assemble a bunch of files (video, audio, web pages, texts) and distribute them around the country via external hard drives, CDs and USB sticks. It's pretty stunning: A weekly curated version of the best of the global Internet, mixed with a ton of locally-produced Cuban content, too. The upshot is a population that is fully conversant in contemporary global TVs, movie and music, except they get it all via USB port and DVD drive.A group of academics did a deep dive into how El Paquete works, and their paper is free online. They met with "Los Maestros" -- the folks who download and compile the material, relying on their own crowdsourced networks of Cubans who get files off the creaky public wifi, or, in the case of bigger files, from contributors who have fatter bandwidth at their government or university jobs. The Maestros also act as promoters of local content, finding Cuban music and video and putting that in El Paquete.The next step in the chain is Los Paqueteros -- "The Packagers" -- who are the distributors: They buy the weekly package from the Maestros, and sell files to everyday customers. They work as librarians of a sort, helping people find the content they're looking for ...

I always loved Ferrero Rocher because of its wonderful television ads in Britain. To immigrants in America, writes Liana Aghajanian, the foil-wrapped chocolates are a status symbol.