Whaling isn't as cool as it used to be, and it's far from necessary. Many of the products we used to make from whale carcasses, such as lamp oil or whale bone baleen – which was used to make everything from typewriter springs to shirt collars – have been replaced by modern technologies. So it's puzzling to hear that Norway has announced a 28% increase of its whaling quote this year.According to The Guardian, the new quota will raise the number of whales that the Norwegian fisheries are allowed to harvest to 1,278 animals. The increase smacks of political bullshit, given the fact that, in recent years, Norway's fishing industry wasn't able to kill enough whales to meet the existing quota. In 2017, Norwegians only killed 432 whales. Two years earlier, their fisheries took out 660 animals. That sounds like an industry in decline to me. But Norway has a different spin on the falling numbers: high fuel prices and too few whale processing plants have kept the nation's fishing industry from fulfilling its quota.Greenpeace disagrees:

Back in 1999, I wrote a Boing Boing Digital article called "Head Like A Hole," about trepanation, the intentional drilling of a hole in your skull for medical reasons or, according to its contemporary DIY practitioners, to achieve higher consciousness. But while trepanation has been around since ancient times, Katherine Foxhall argues that the commonly-held belief that the procedure was once used to cure migraines is just a myth. From Smithsonian:

On a CNN Tonight's panel last night with Don Lemon, CNN economics analyst Stephen Moore cracked a stupid joke about Stormy Daniels, and it didn't go over well with Lemon and the other panelists.On the subject of Daniels and her lawsuit against Trump, Lemon asks political commentator Kevin Madden to react to Daniels' claim that Trump's long-time attorney Michael Cohen has attempted to silence her as recently as last week. Madden says her claims are credible, and he's incredulous that we're even having to have this kind of discussion about a sitting president.Then Moore jumps in and says, "Are you saying that a porn star would actually try to call attention to herself? Shocking, right?”The atmosphere becomes awkward as the panelists quietly stare straight ahead with expressions of suppressed cringes on their faces. Moore tries to breaks the ice with, "I mean, that’s what porn stars do!” He digs himself deeper with, "My only point is, I mean, a porn star?" He then makes that horsey sound people make when they blow air between loose lips, to show that a porn star's remarks are to be dismissed.Political Analyst Kirsten Powers, one of the other panelists, says, "I don't think it's appropriate to be demeaning this woman."The ignorant drivel coming from Moore continues until the video finally cuts off.

"History isn't a a cold, dead thing but always contested and in flux." In this short video, PBS's The Art Assignment does a fine job explaining why museums matter:

Lime mortar was used for millennia to adhere stone blocks together. It was the primary mortar until Portland cement was introduced in the 19th century. In this video, the Primitive Technology guy made lime mortar from the shells of rainforest snails. It's quite an involved process, and is fascinating to watch. How did people ever come up with making lime mortar in the first place?

This marvel of design was posted to Twitter by VGDensetsu; it's said to be official, and apparently romanizes as "Seja" as Arabic lacks a hard "G".The Japanese company uses the classic Latin-alphabet logo in Japan, but here is a fanmade Japanese version:https://twitter.com/exciteless/status/710354237914529793And here is a Hebrew logo, devised by Baraksha, creator of an unlicensed translation of Sonic the Hedgehog into that language:

Below, German football player Felix Passlack demonstrates masterful gum control:

On its surface, project management sounds relatively simple: do what it takes to ensure company initiatives are achieved on budget and on time. But, the reality is that project management encompasses a lot of sophisticated methodologies and techniques to be successful, which is why companies aren't afraid to shell out six-figure salaries to those versed in these skills. The eduCBA Project Management Lifetime Subscription Bundle can help you join their ranks by familiarizing you with the leading tools of the project management trade, and it's on sale for $29 in the Boing Boing Store.With this collection, you'll have lifetime access to more than 100 complete courses and 400 hours of training, covering key project management methodologies, such as Agile, Lean and Scrum. You'll learn about software project management, performance analysis, TQM and more. Plus, you'll use mock tests and online quizzes to stay on top of your training. With lifetime access, you can tackle these resources on your own time and at the pace that's right for you.The eduCBA Project Management Lifetime Subscription Bundle is on sale for $29 in the Boing Boing Store.

Retweet.RIP is a service by Will Cosgrove that, once given access to your Twitter account, systematically turns off retweets for everyone you follow. You can turn them back on again, too, but let's face it—you probably won't.

"It took quite a while to finally get her to howl," writes Hugh Nibley, "and when she did we were not prepared for the majesty of her regal voice."Is it just me, or is that dog a dial-up modem?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESyJop31cmY&feature=youtu.beSeth Radley posted a picture of a tree that resembled a frond of broccoli. Then another, and another. That's where it starts.

Perhaps mom still has a twinkle in her eye when she makes pancakes with that special ingredient, coyly hidden from you since early childhood, a ritual that speaks to a parent's enduring love, the small things that return us to the best moments of our youth and reify the bonds of family.Perhaps dad still talks in hushed terms about the family ragu, passed down from generation to generation since the days of the old country, a secret to be earned, cementing centuries of careful experimentation in tomato and wine, drawing one's soul back into the collective warmth of an ethnic milieu often forgotten in the relentless yet blandly anglosaxon routines of American life.Fuckin' liars got it from a cookbook.

https://youtu.be/n-H6zIeMiUs?t=1m26sCan you de-whip whipped cream and meringue in a low-pressure environment? This important question was posed by The King of Random. The results are expansive.The experiment repeated in a larger chamber:https://youtu.be/n-H6zIeMiUs?t=6m4s"In a vacuum chamber" could be the new "by a hydraulic press"

Join Ruben Bolling at An Unlikely Story, in Plainville, MA this Friday, March 9, where he'll be joined by Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), and talk about comics, his hit kid's book series, The EMU Club Adventures, and the real-life monster that made him an author. Info here.(Buy Book One here. Buy Book Two here.)FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

The folks at Snarkitecture collaborated with the Portuguese design firm UVA to create the "Slip Chair", which looks like it's tipping over, but is safe to sit in.Or so they say! Me, I'd like to see a picture of someone actually sitting in one. But for now I'll take their word, as they write on the UVA site ....

Another marker of the mainstream-ization of emoji: Dictionary.com is now offering entries that explain their meaning. As Time reports:

President Donald Trump makes good on his year-long threats to attack the state of California and its residents with harsh new immigration lawsuit.(more…)

Untitled (the flower game) is a gorgeous game -- playable online, or via a downloadable app -- where you draw a gradually evolving flower, using the left-right keys.It offers two styles of play -- an "arcade mode", where you race to hit as many red targets as possible, and a "drawing machine" mode, where you just use the game to draw gorgeous, symmetrical designs. I've been zoning out for fifteen minutes using the latter, and I'm calmer than I've felt all week, heh.The game is a creation of KR Pipkin and Loren Schmidt, who describe it thusly:

The Office of the Special Counsel, a Federal ethics watchdog agency, has once again found Kellyanne Conway in violation of the Hatch Act.In publicly supporting child molester Roy Moore from the White House lawn and using her government job title, in a harsh political attack on his opponent, Conway broke ethics rules over using a government office for political ends. Conway will of course claim she did not do any of these things by pointing out in fact that she did do all them several times.The OSC has sent information surrounding her offense to the Trump Administration that will probably reprimand her with a large bonus and champagne lunch.Via NPR:

The U.S. State Department today announced the United States has determined that the North Korean government used chemical warfare agent VX to assassinate Kim Jong Un's half-brother.(more…)

Visual effects house MPC offers a fascinating glimpse into the remarkable work they did to digitally recreate Rachael in Blade Runner 2049. Each iteration of these technologies inches close to indistinguishable duplicates.(more…)

I've just finished a wonderful time at the Adelaide Festival and now I'm headed to the last stop on the Australia/New Zealand tour for Walkaway: Wellington! (more…)

Xiaohan Wang was driving near Keluke Lake in Qinghai Province in China, but stopped to snap this lovely image of airglow bands framing the Milky Way. (more…)

Myspace picked a symbolic day to stop tweeting: September 11, 2017. What happened? Are they among the exodus to other cooler platforms like everyone but the most hopelessly addicted? Maybe they got sick of the porn spam and the cesspool of trolling all-stars, aka verified users? (more…)

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, told envoys of South Korea today he is willing to negotiate with the United States to end his country’s nuclear weapons program. South Korean officials say the North Korean leader also agreed to halt all nuclear and missile tests during the proposed talks with Trump administration officials.(more…)

Through the Obama years and even into the Trump administration, Democrats have voted a range of powers for the president that gives him almost unlimited authority, out of a combination of the foolish conviction that no one untrustworthy would inherit Obama's tools, and cowardice about voting against mass surveillance and being criticized by war on terror hawks. (more…)

When David Eagleman was a kid, he and his friends infiltrated a nearby construction site. Soon enough, he was tumbling three stories to the ground. The fall seemed to take an eternity! But years later, he did the math in a high school physics class, and realized that it lasted a smidgen more than a half second.Later still, he landed a gig as a neuroscience professor and started investigating this phenomenon. His experiments involved hurling test subjects off a 150-foot tower in Dallas (yes, there was a net), and probing their perception of time during the fall. His conclusion: time doesn't actually slow; it just seems too – because when our lives seem imperiled, an extra track of memory is laid down by the amygdala (the part of the brain whose duties include freaking out). When survivors look back, a higher density of memory is misinterpreted as a longer interval of memory – creating the illusion that time slowed during the frightening incident.David Eagleman is my guest in this week's edition of the After on Podcast, and you can hear our hour-long conversation by searching “After On” in your favorite podcast app, or by clicking right here:David's insights into our experience of time go far beyond the amygdala’s trick of making our worst moments seem to last forever. Among other things, he believes that we quite literally “live in the past” by a few moments, due to the brain’s trick of stitching together a cacophony of asynchronous input into a unified story. His rationale and evidence for this is fascinating, and too complex to lay out in a short article. So if this interests you, please consider listening to our interview.In it, we also discuss the phenomenon of “sensory substitution.” This is what enables those who lose access to one sense to develop high acuity in other senses (blind people who develop extraordinary powers of hearing, for instance).Three years ago, David left academia to develop hardware to leverage this phenomenon into the creation of new senses for humans. These could include magnetoperception, which many birds use to navigate; or electroperception, which sharks (and other critters) use to track their prey. It might also enable the creation of entirely synthetic senses – like an ambient awareness of developments throughout a factory, or in a market.

America's 1% have waged a long war on defined-benefits pensions, insisting that America could prepare for retirement by putting their money into 401(k)s, despite the stark evidence to the contrary. (more…)

Rhode Island Democratic state Senators Frank Ciccone (@senatorciccone) and Hanna Gallo (@hannagallo27) have proposed grandstanding, unworkable legislation, "Relating to Public Utilities and Carriers—Internet Digital Blocking" which would mandate the state's ISPs to identify all the pornography on the internet, and then block it for all Rhode Islanders, unless those Rhode Islanders specifically requested their porn to be unblocked and paid $20 for the privilege. (more…)

A 2017 prosecution of a California doctor charged with possessing child pornography revealed that the FBI had been tipped off by a Best Buy technician the doctor had paid to service his computer; the technician had searched his computer and then provided evidence to the FBI, sidestepping the need for the FBI to obtain a warrant. (more…)

About 42% of Americans will be broke at retirement age, according to study released today by GoBankingRates. Top three reasons why: "I don't make enough money (40.1%)," "I'm struggling to pay bills (%24.9%)," "I used my retirement savings for an emergency (9.9%)"[via CNBC]Image: Shutterstock

A federal judge ordered Martin Shkreli, who was convicted of fraud last year, to forfeit $7.4 million. This forfeiture includes a Picasso painting, his $5 million bail posting, and the one-of-a-kind Wu Tang Clan album, "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin." Don't worry, though -- after he pays the fine he'll still have $27.1 million.From Click on Detroit:

High school teacher Bruce Yeany makes "mystery boxes" and challenges his students to figure out how they work. The one in this video hangs from the ceiling by a string. Another string protrudes from the bottom of the box. If you pull on the bottom string, the box rises. In the video you'll see how it works.

The Dude's Gran Torino got a little dinged up. He did get the Creedence tapes back, tho.This model will tie whatever space you put it in, together.GreenLight The Dude's 1973 Ford Gran Torino (1:43 Scale) via Amazon(Thanks, allenk for the reminder.)

On March 6, 1998, twenty years ago, perhasps the most quote-able movie of all time was released. Tonight, I am watching The Big Lebowski!

Tomorrow I'm putting new shocks on the front of my Vanagon. It will never do this.(Thanks, Jamie!)

The world's longest airplane flight took place in 1958, when two aircraft mechanics spent 64 days above the southwestern U.S. in a tiny Cessna with no amenities. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow the aerial adventures of Bob Timm and John Cook as they set a record that still stands today.We'll also consider a derelict kitty and puzzle over a movie set's fashion dictates.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

Photo: anfael_Juicero was a fantastically over-engineered $400 juicing machine whose key innovation was DRM fruit slime that you can just squeeze out the bag anyway. The company went out of business six months ago, and Juiceros are now turning up in thrift stores, as observed by anfael_ on Twitter. Even so, there's no point buying one: they're useless without the no-longer-available DRM packets and are too complex to bother hacking."oh wow it's finally here," wrote anfael_, "in the goodwill with the busted keyboards and crusty printers"https://twitter.com/anfael_/status/970494507186728960The genius behind Juicero is now selling "'raw water' packed with all the microbes and amoebas you can stomach".

This video shows passengers of a Boise to San Francisco flight subduing a purported GOD.Questionably a deity, verifiably in need of help, this passenger became agitated and then decided to exit the plane. After being restrained for the rest of her flight, the woman was taken to a hospital.

Our world is a colorful one—and not just in the metaphorical sense. It's filled with vibrant, lush colors that many of us would like to replicate when it comes time to repaint a room or design a website. Of course, as any designer will tell you, matching colors with just the human eye takes a lot of guesswork and can often end with mixed results. The Nix Mini Color Sensor removes this gambling from the color-matching process, and it's on sale in the Boing Boing Store for $69.https://www.youtube.com/embed/Uux5F2F9TCcRoughly the size of a ping-pong ball, the Nix lets you scan any color critical surface, like vinyl, leather, and plastic, save it to your phone or tablet, and match it to an existing color library of more than 28,000 brand name paint colors, as well as RGB, HEX, CMYK, and LAB colors. You can browse and match to leading paint brands like Benjamin Moore, Dulux, Farrow & Ball, and Sherwin Williams, and the Nix even lets you share colors with customers, colleagues, and friends via social media or email,The Nix Mini Color Sensor is on sale for $69 in the Boing Boing Store.

To ensure that its graduates can discharge their duties with the absolute minimum of human warmth, Indiana University Police Academy challenges recruits not to laugh when a squeaky rubber chicken is slowly introduced to their field of vision and then squeezed.I definitely prefer to be policed by the failures!

Searching for Mantas, the poster of this video instead found trash.

Need a meditative moment? Try watching the late great Joy of Painting host Bob Ross peel off contact paper and masking tape from his paintings for nearly four minutes. Ahhh... that's better.(Digg)

In their latest video, the Hydraulic Press Channel team shows how to plow through 10 decks of cards (and other things like a rubber band ball and CO2 cartridges) using their extra-sharp "Guillotine 5,000,000" blade. Hard not to love watching that.(The Awesomer)

Etymology is fascinating! Follow the journey of the slang word "cool" from its early days to now in this whiteboard video by linguistics expert Arika Okrent.(Neatorama)

Even if you don't win an Oscar (the golden statuette itself is only worth $1), if you're an Academy Award nominee you walk away with a gift bag filled with some seriously lavish schwag.Town & Country reports that each one is stuffed with promotional gifts valued at $120K:

They say that, in real estate, it's all about location, location, location. That's especially true if you're a Silicon Valley worker who wants to avoid a horrible commute.The 848-square-foot house at 1062 Plymouth Drive in Sunnyvale is in a great location for someone in tech, as it's about a 10-minute drive to the Google, Apple, LinkedIn or Yahoo! campus.And it just sold for $2M, a mere $550K over asking, according to KRON4.That is $2,358 per square foot, the highest price paid per square foot ever recorded by the MLS in Sunnyvale.The two-bedroom, two-bath house sold in just two days of being on the market, reports listing Agent Doug Larson. He told KRON4, "Well [laughs], I was kind of blown away."

According to The Hill, a Florida middle school teacher who moonlighted as a hate-spewing white nationalist podcast host has been removed from the classroom by the school board she worked for. Her suspension from shaping young minds was put in place by school board officials while they investigate exactly how shitty a person she might be: