The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission today pledged to aggressively scrutinize publicly-traded companies that suddenly change their name or their business model to try to profit from the nutty hype surrounding cryptocurrency. SEC Chairman Jay Clayton threw this wet towel on the blockchain bubble Monday.(more…)

The Senate voted to reopen the government after 81 senators broke a Democrat-led filibuster that shut it down for 2 days and 17 hours. The fate of the 'Dreamers' is still undetermined. A crucial House vote to end the shutdown is next.(more…)

Whoa, Funko has made a Pop! figure of a shirtless, bleeding Jeff Goldblum, as seen in 1993's Jurassic Park.Rowr, is it hot in here or is it a "Wounded Dr. Ian Malcolm" toy?This is an exclusive 25th anniversary Jurassic Park item and Funko is only making it available in-store at Target.Previously: Jeff Goldblum rates Jeff Goldblum tattoos(Consequence of Sound)

The Republican party is rapidly becoming the party of white men. Minorities want nothing to do with the GOP and a new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that white women are now ditching the party of pussy grabber apologists.From Reason:

Unicode Table has something over the other Unicode table sites: predictive search. There's useful tools as well: a HTML endoder/decoder, text-flipper

Michele MicheleThe Ides of March will soon be upon us. In San Francisco, that means it's once again time to don a a white wedding dress to paint the town white with other "brides."Now in its 20th year, the annual "Beware the Brides of March" gathering was started by Burning Man co-founder Danger Ranger (previously) who thought of the idea while in a thrift store:

Here's the set up: two cars are side by side on the road. One car is going 70mph and the other is going 100mph. The drivers of the cars see a fallen tree in the road and start braking at the same time. The car that had been going 70mph stops right before touching the tree. How fast is the other car going when it hits the tree? The answer surprised me.

"Larry, you do now realize that we, this group of women you so heartlessly abused over such a long period of time are now a force, and you are nothing."Watch three-time Olympian gymnast Aly Raisman deliver her powerful statement at the sentencing hearing for Larry Nassar, who sexually abused over 70 girls while he was the national team doctor for the USA Gymnastics team.

Little Ripper is a remote controlled multicopter that carries a floatation device. On its first day of service off the coast of Lennox Head in Australia, the drone was used to drop a floatation device for two boys in distress.From Core 77:

The next installment in the extraordinary lecture/reading series features Hugo-winning environmentalist author Kim Stanley Robinson and prolific historical novelist Cecelia Holland: $10 donation at the door, no one turned away for lack of funds. (Images: AllyUnion, CC-BY-SA; Other Change of Hobbit)

Every active NYPD cop used to get 30 Patrolmen's Benevolent Association "courtesy cards" from their union per year; now they'll only get 20 (retired cops used to get 20 and now they'll get 10). (more…)

In Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen has held power since 1998, a reign characterized by systematic looting, political patronage and violent suppression of human rights; when opposition parties used Facebook to organize a strong showing in the 2013 elections, Hun Sen turned to the tool to consolidate his slipping hold on power. (more…)

Hill Billies Ice Hole is a seasonal bar that sits on Minnesota’s frozen Lake Lida. It's a favorite among ice fisherfolk, especially because you can fish from inside the bar. The favorite drink is the minnow shot, which is a shot of hooch with -- you guessed it -- a live, wriggling minnow in it.

Fix Your Kicks proprietor Joshua Marin, 20, is a third-generation cobbler whose specialty is restoring classic and highly-collectible sneakers. (Great Big Story)

Purdue University researchers built this bizarre crawling robot baby to study how real infants kick up dirt and bacteria from carpet that they then inhale. Engineer Brandon Boor and his colleagues ran the robot over carpet samples removed from people's homes and then analyzed the particulates that were stirred up. Turns out that the particle concentration is as much as 20 times greater than higher up in the room where we adults breathe. That isn't necessarily bad though, Boor says."Many studies have shown that inhalation exposure to microbes and allergen-carrying particles in that portion of life plays a significant role in both the development of, and protection from, asthma and allergic diseases," says Boor, an assistant professor of civil engineering and environmental and ecological engineering. "There are studies that have shown that being exposed to a high diversity and concentration of biological materials may reduce the prevalence of asthma and allergies later in life."(Purdue University)

After uncovering a ferocious horde of hidden spyware in official Android apps the Yale Privacy Lab and Exodus have created an app store that only allows apps that include their source-code and whose licenses require anyone who modifies them to also include the source. (more…)

Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran amped up the color and contrast of images of Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere as captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft. Below, for, um, comparison, Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night" (1889) and Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (1893).More of Eichstädt and Doran's stunning work here.

The Planet is a personal pod chair complete with speakers and solar panels. It's a melding of the 1960s Lee West Stereo Alpha Egg Chair concept with a Buckminster Fuller geodesic vibe. The Planet sells for (gulp) $3,350. From MZPA:

We're gonna need a bigger oasis.Author Ernest Cline: "I could not have written Ready Player One had I not grown up on a steady diet of Steven Spielberg movies."Director Steven Spielberg:"When I read Ready Player One, it was the most amazing flash forward, and flash back, at the same time."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6-ELukbhhsSince the earliest days of Facebook, social scientists have sent up warnings saying that the ability to maintain separate "contexts" (where you reveal different aspects of yourself to different people) was key to creating and maintaining meaningful relationships, but Mark Zuckerberg ignored this advice, insisting that everyone be identified only by their real names and present a single identity to everyone in their lives, because anything else was "two-faced." (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAMWcjBR-YsSears Canada has been in serious financial trouble since 2013, when workers wrote to the CEO and regulators and senior politicians to ask that their pensions be safeguarded. They were ignored, as they had been since 2009, when they first started asking for greater scrutiny of the pension fund. (more…)

Millions of new cars sold in the US and Europe are "connected," having some mechanism for exchanging data with their manufacturers after the cars are sold; these cars stream or batch-upload location data and other telemetry to their manufacturers, who argue that they are allowed to do virtually anything they want with this data, thanks to the "explicit consent" of the car owners -- who signed a lengthy contract at purchase time that contained a vague and misleading clause deep in its fine-print. (more…)

Osprey Games has found itself a sweet little niche in the current tabletop gaming craze. Games like their extremely popular (and highly-recommend) Frostgrave: Fantasy Wargames in the Frozen City (and now Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago) and the many titles that have followed, like Dracula's America: Shadows of the West and Scrappers: Post-Apocalyptic Skirmish Wargames, adhere to a similar format of relatively quick, low miniature-count skirmish games with simple but tight, effective rulesets. All of the games feature inexpensive rulebooks loaded with gorgeous fantasy artwork that really helps flesh out the worlds and begs for more narrative wargaming, with a little RPG-like character development and ongoing storylines (all of these games have built-in campaign systems). The games are also all miniature-agnostic, meaning that you can pull minis from any of your favorite ranges. And because the gameworlds are so evocative and interesting--but what you're provided with, so basic--you are heavily encouraged to flesh out the world and the tabletop on your own. In other words, not only are these awesome and fun tabletop skirmish games, they are also games designed to seriously seduce makers and modelers.Osprey's latest, Gaslands: Post-Apocalyptic Vehicular Combat, is a perfect case in point of all of the above, but especially that last point. In Gaslands (think: a breezier, less crunchy, more modern Car Wars) there are no ranges of miniatures to draw from. Instead, the game encourages you to Mad Max-ify Matchbox and Hotwheels cars to use in your games. How much fun is this? Lots. Here's a video of Jamie from The Secret Cabal Gaming podcast enthusing over the game, the joys of weaponizing tiny toy cars, and the overall pleasures of miniature painting for gaming.https://youtu.be/jj1ATUNSAZMImage: Screen capture from The Secret Cabal Gaming podcast

One Steamelmo of House Imgur posted this exchange, with a twitterer who alleges a brutal womanhandling at this weekend's Women's March.The OP has locked down their twitter account, but the replies remain:https://twitter.com/r3zatora/status/954913121331699712If it is perhaps faked, console yourself with this picture of a man slathered in jam. [via]

This has the whiff of a pickup-artist seminar about it ("Being able to keep eye contact with a girl is a sign of confidence and the first step to getting her attracted"), but it's also a strange and wonderful music video in its own right. Is she watching a video of dogs arfing? Snapping and discarding selfies with the systematic professionalism of a fashion photographer? Watching her bitcoin wallet's value crash and rebound in realtime? Is this the looping video on the telescreens of utopia?

Players in VRChat were surprised to see another gamer experiencing an apparent seizure in-game. The video of the incident, uploaded by YouTuber Rogue Shadow VR, is rather surreal. You see a red robot writing around on the ground, unable to communicate. Soon, the mood changes in the room and all the cartoon-y avatars come to see what is going on. When he does come to, the community, save a few bad eggs, does their best to help and comfort him. The robot, who goes by the moniker DrunkenUnicyclist, shared with Kotaku:

Blowing out birthday cake candles the traditional way spreads germs, according to the gentleman in this video. He offers a more sanitary way to extinguishing those candles: by waving your hand over them in a big swoop.That video was from 2016. Since then, this germophobe sexagenarian has upped his game. In this 2017 video, he demonstrates how to use his method to snuff out a blazing 61 cake candles. Spoiler: It took more than one swoop.Watch and learn:https://youtu.be/CZOnWgDGyokphoto by Jon Phillips(reddit)

No one's sure how the windows on commuter buses between San Francisco and Silicon Valley keep getting smashed on a stretch of the 280 -- maybe it's a pellet gun, maybe it's thrown rocks -- but Apple and Google have informed employees who use the service that their commute is about to get 45 minutes longer as they take alternate routes to avoid that highway. (more…)

For years, racist authoritarians in New York City defended the stop-and-frisk program in which primarily black and brown people were repeatedly stopped without any particularized suspicion and forced to turn out their pockets, empty their bags, even strip naked in public on frozen-street corners. (more…)

University of Western Australia Law professor Camilla Baasch Andersen has helped businesspeople draft legally binding contracts that take the form of simple comic-strips, arguing that their simplicity not only promotes understanding, but also insulates companies from the risk of courts finding their contracts unenforceable because they were too confusing (an Australian court has forced insurers Suncorp and Allianz to refund AUD60m paid for insurance that was of "little or no value," but which Australians purchased thanks to confusing fine-print that made it hard to assess). (more…)

The proprietors of every Facebook page containing the word "Sarajevo" in its title reportedly received demand letters from the city government of Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia, threatening legal action unless the proprietors pay a royalty for permission to use the city's name in their pages. (more…)

Whether you aspire to be a filmmaker, YouTube sensation, or some other media professional, understanding videography inside and out is a must, but it can be challenging for the uninitiated. Thankfully, the web is a big place, and it's filled with a host of online tutorials for just about everything, including videography. Take the aptly-named Videography Bootcamp for example. Loaded with more than 30 hours of training, this 8-course collection can walk you through creating stunning content from start to finish, and it's on sale for $39.This bootcamp covers videography in several mediums, including DSLR video production, drone cinematography, and editing with Adobe Premiere Pro and green screens. Regardless of what you plan to produce, this collection will give you a strong foundation in all things videography as you dive into filmmaking hacks, create online content, and learn techniques from experts who have worked on big-name films like Jurassic World and Avatar.You can catalyze your journey into the world of videography with the Videography Bootcamp, now on sale for $39.

After the subprime crisis, vulture funds swept into the hardest-hit areas and bought thousands of foreclosed-upon homes at firesale prices and floated bonds based on the expected returns from the rents they'd be able to charge in an America with the lowest levels of home-ownership in modern history. (more…)

Just look at it. (more…)

MG's Mr Self Destruct project takes the USB Killer to new levels, combining a $1.50 system-on-a-chip with a variety of payloads: smoke bombs, "sound grenades," and little explosives, cleverly choreographed with keystroke emulation, allowing the poisoned drive to first cause the connected computer to foreground a browser and load a web-page that plays an appropriate animation (a jack-in-the-box that plays "Pop Goes the Weasel" with the drive's explosive detonating for the climax). (more…)

The web may be a big place, but space is certainly limited when it comes to securing a spot on that first page of a Google search. That's why investing in your site's SEO is critical for staying relevant and ensuring the appropriate audience finds you. Thankfully, doing so just got a bit easier with SE Ranking, and now you can sign up for a personal plan for $49.99.SE Ranking delivers all the standard SEO tools, like keyword position tracking and competitor research, while also loading in unique features like page changes monitoring and SEO ROI forecasts. You can audit as many pages as you need while receiving actionable recommendations on the go. Plus, you can discover what keywords your competitors are using in their ads to give you an edge online.You can net a lifetime personal plan of SE Ranking for $49.99 in the Boing Boing Store.

Putin does the best manly-man propaganda of all global bad guys. It's a long-established internet truth.(more…)

Facebook today announced major changes to their 'newsfeed' which 2 billion people use monthly. Now, Facebook plans to begin asking each user to rank their trust in various news organizations.(more…)

Stairs that lead nowhere. Toilets that get in the way of doors. Balconies you can't stand on. Pfusch am bau is a Pinterest page with delightful examples of building boo-boos.

This was her third baby. She was accustomed to the harsh realities of motherhood in a life in poverty. But I wasn’t.I’m a midwife. I was volunteering at one of the camp clinics when I was called to visit Rojinessa on the morning after her baby was born. I walked about half a mile into the sprawling refugee camps to her tent and stepped inside. The tent was smoky and very dark. I could hardly breathe. I asked one of the Bangladeshi midwives who came with me to open the flap of plastic sheeting that served as a door.Rojinessa was sitting on the concrete floor on a thin woven mat. The remains of a small fire was inches from her “bed.” She and her husband and her now three children live in a one bedroom tent in the middle of what used to be a rice field. Cows bathe in the small polluted stream that bubbles twelve feet from the structure.I don’t know what happened during the birth because I wasn’t there. All volunteers are required to leave the camps by 5 pm every day. Most babies are born at night, so even as trained medical personnel, we are cold comfort to the mothers giving birth in the camps. Plus, I don’t speak the Rohingya dialect. And neither, it seems, do many others. The Chittagong dialect of Bangla, I’m told, is somewhat similar, but miscommunications are all too common as we play “telephone” from English to Bangla to Rohingya.Rojinessa’s blood pressure and pulse were normal. She didn’t have a fever. She complained of weakness, dizziness, fatigue. No kidding. She hadn’t eaten anything but rice in days. Her family could not afford to buy one of the live chickens sold at the pop-up market by the road. We had nothing to give her but a few biscuits and… you guessed it, more rice, with a few lentils mixed in. She had no menstrual pads to catch postpartum bleeding. We were able to bring her some from the clinic.Her baby was vigorous and hungry. Good signs. She popped him on her breast to nurse like she had done it hundreds of times before. Fantastic.Pregnant women in Ukhia sometimes walk miles to receive care at one of the women’s-only clinics sprinkled throughout the camps. The clinics themselves are tents. Only a few of them have electricity. Most of them lack the equipment to provide the most basic prenatal and postpartum care. Running a routine lab test is out of the question, much less listening to a fetus on a heart rate monitor or ordering an ultrasound. We have to use our hands, our ears and eyes, and hope for the best.If there is a true emergency, we can refer a patient to the Red Crescent or MSF hospital tents a few miles down the road, where they have some more capabilities. But there are a number of reasons a woman might not go. Maybe her husband won’t give her permission. Or he can’t give her permission because he’s out working in the fields. Or she doesn't have anyone to watch her other children.Rohingya mothers grow small babies. They often have trouble producing enough milk for their babies because they don’t have enough food themselves. All of the people in the camps are malnourished. They have been trapped in a state of abject poverty since long before they fled their homes. At the clinic we give each mother a small package of high-calorie cookies and a fist-sized bag of rice with lentils at every visit – which is about once a month. The food is encouragement to come and get care. But it isn’t anywhere near enough.Rojinessa and her baby survived birth in the camp. Not all do. Hopefully they will continue to survive and her baby boy will grow into one of the many children running and playing everywhere in the camps. They play soccer with empty plastic jugs and make kites out of bamboo sticks and plastic bags. But survival is about all they can hope for. Without a home and without access to education, without the legal right to work, her family, as well as the other hundreds of thousands of families in the camps, continues to face a desolate future.Firen Jones is a midwife from Texas who has found her home in San Francisco. She spends her time catching babies, running her midwifery practice, and occasionally getting to travel the world and volunteer. You can find her through her website, blog, or on Medium.

Just a few minutes left to get this super lightweight backpack that folds into a small pouch. I just bought one for our upcoming trip to Japan. It's $16 on sale.

Delta passengers who wish to bring emotional-support animals with them on flights now face tighter restrictions. Beginning March 1, passengers must provide a letter signed by a doctor or licensed mental-health professional attesting to the passenger's need to travel with the animal and a letter that states the animal can behave out of a kennel.From USA Today:

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, founded by Elizabeth Warren prior to her career as a senator, was once the gem of the US political system, a consistently effective force for punishing finance industry wrongdoing, until Trump let Wall Street robber barons loose on it, under the direction of a lawyer who represented loan sharks before going to work for the Trump administration. (more…)

This new origami-inspired robot, "milliDelta," created by Harvard researchers, moves so quickly all you can see is a blur. In fact, moving at 70 motions a second, it's the "smallest, fastest, and most precise of its kind," according to The Verge. The robot can be used in assembly lines as well as as assisting in delicate surgery.

Chris Christie, the much-reviled former New Jersey governor, learned that he will no longer be treated like the important person he pretends to be. Yesterday at Newark Liberty International Airport Christie headed straight to the special VIP entrance with his state police security detail but was turned away.From Huffington Post:

Cracked Labs' massive report on online surveillance by corporations dissects all the different ways in which our digital lives are tracked, from the ad-beacons that follow us around the web to the apps that track our physical locations as we move around the world. (more…)

David and Louise Turpin, the monsters who starved and tortured their 13 children, had a cheesy renewal wedding in 2015, which featured a bad Elvis imitator as their poor children, all dressed in matching church fashion, are forced to watch and then dance on stage in mock joy. This video has the same effect as a David Lynch movie, except it's real.

https://youtu.be/2bIZ0kWpiD4Participants in a VRChat room watched as the avatar of one of the participants appeared to go into a grand mal seizure, accompanied by distressed sounds audible through the voice-chat. (more…)

Looking for relationship advice? If so, stay away from Siri.(more…)

The legendary German rOtring 600 mechanical penicl is now made in Japan. I had to have one.I once spent a day of wandering around London because my girlfriend had forgotten her .3mm architects pencil that she just neeeeeeded for whatever reason. She stayed in our AirBNB, drank tea, and probably read books all day while I looked for mechanical pencils. When I finally found a shop that carried more than just Pentel in plastic bubble wrap, I was given a lesson in the style and quality of automagic penciling -- evidently my Autopoint is for low class Americans and anyone with any taste or style uses a rOtring 600.The rOtring 600 is all metal. It has an octagonal shaft, and a lovely, finely textured grip. The eraser holder has an indicator for lead hardness, much like an old camera did for ASA. When you click it pencil lead comes out, and those clicks are precise. This is a well made mechanical pencil that will last for ages. The rOtring is only $16 in .5mm.You can find this model in lead thicknesses of .3mm, .5mm and .7mm -- .5 writes at about the same thickness as my Autopoint .9, with my hand.If you like the feel of a tiny, pencil making very precise scratches on paper -- the rOtring 600 is for you. If you want a big honkin' AMERICAN pencil, get an Autopoint in .9.The rOtring 600 inspired one of my favorite two daily use fountain pens, the Levenger L-Tech 3.0 in stealth.Oh, and I got the woman a Pentel P203. She is long gone, but left the pencil behind.rOtring 600 0.5mm Silver Barrel Mechanical Pencil via Amazon