Boing Boing

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently implemented a goal to introduce 500,000 foreign workers to Japan -- which is experiencing an aging and declining population -- by the year 2020. Currently about 2% of residents in Japan are foreigners. Asian Boss hit the streets of Tokyo to get reactions to the program. Opinions range from positive to dead set against it. One of the most cited reasons for not allowing a large influx of foreigners is because they do not understand Japanese culture and will have a hard time fitting in. One woman said Japanese in general like Americans but dislike non-Japanese Asians. Another woman said she was "scared of foreign drugs coming to Japan."

Lobbyists for "creators" threw their lot in with the giant entertainment companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU Copyright Directive by a hair's-breadth this morning, in an act of colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else. (more…)

Well, this is a downer: Prozac, a drug taken by millions of folks every day to help them cope with chronic depression and anxiety, has been shown to allow for antibiotic resistance in dangerous strains of bacteria, under laboratory conditions. Prozac is the commercial name for a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor called Fluoxetine. That Fluoxetine could be responsible for making bacterias such as Escherichia coli able to laugh off antibiotics is new. Strangely, the notion that Fluoxetine has the potential to also kill off bacteria, isn't. Scientists held hopes that the drug, along with other SSRIs, might be able to be leveraged in new antimicrobial treatments. According to a recently released report, this could all be shot to hell by the fact that tons of SSRIs, Fluoxetine included, are released into our environment through our sewage systems on a daily basis.From Gizmodo:

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.RESIST! … the temptation to fail to JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and much more.GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. Book One here. Book Two here.More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

Today's press event will have the details, but view source offers an unexpected preview this morning. All Things How, The Verge and others spotted the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR in files hosted at Apple.com, confirming one speculative device (the Max), revealing another (the XR) and disappearing a third (the rumored XC).

We live in an age dominated by video, and with little more than a camera and a computer, virtually anyone can make a living producing interesting video content. However, competition is stiff, so if you have aspirations of becoming a successful filmmaker or world-class YouTuber, you'll need to give yourself an edge. Breaking down the video creation process from start to finish, the Complete Filmmaker Guide can help you get ahead of the competition, and it's on sale for $14.99.This 5-hour collection gives you a wall-to-wall look at the creative aspects of planning, shooting, and editing videos. From pre-production to editing, you'll familiarize yourself with the guidelines industry experts follow when creating video content. You'll explore production hacks for creating better videos regardless of your equipment, and you'll finish the training ready to capture, organize and create a rough edit.The Complete Filmmaker Guide normally retails for $199.99, but it's available in the Boing Boing Store for $14.99 (92% off).

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo claimed to have known nothing about the state Democratic Party's smearing of primary opponent Cynthia Nixon as an antisemite. But an aide, mistakenly believing himself to be off the record, emailed The New York Post with evidence that suggests otherwise.

Every year, Halloween costumes get weirder and more complicated. Case in point: this inflatable Han-in-Carbonite one.Here's how it works:For $59.99, you get the adult-sized costume (and a battery-operated fan to inflate it), plus gloves and a mask for the full effect.Previously on BB: Other Han-in-Carbonite items(Geeks are Sexy)

To honor the memory of the recently deceased Burt Reynolds, Smokey and the Bandit is headed back to the big screen.According to Variety, the 1977 hit flick will show in 240 AMC theatres for nine days from September 12 to 20.As a child of the '70s with a real love for American trucker culture, I'll be at one of those shows. https://youtu.be/IzMpOvKxXdMhttps://youtu.be/P68J9QHyDV0https://youtu.be/uHZJej98_T0

As the Carolinas prepare for the arrival of Hurricane Florence, currently a Category 4 storm, Senator Jeff Merkley appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show with a document that shows $10,000,000 was diverted from FEMA's budget to pay for ICE detention centers.[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8Z8o69edAI&w=560&h=315]It's believed the transfer of funds took place at the beginning of summer. You know, right before the start of hurricane season. And if that's not enough to make your blood boil, this video of Trump calling his administration's handling of Puerto Rico during and after Hurricane Maria "an incredible, unsung success" should do the trick. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlWG9Yz97E8&w=560&h=315]I'm sure Carolinians are relieved the President of the United States considers 3000 dead Americans an incredible, unsung success. No worries, Outer Banks! He'll be there to throw paper towels at you soon.Trump admin took millions from FEMA for ICE detentions [MSNBC]

https://youtu.be/WRQv9xMQ3E0Michael Moore's latest documentary is a scorching Trump takedown called Fahrenheit 11/9; next Wednesday, all over the USA, theaters will screen a "People's Premiere" of the movie: just indicate your willingness to buy tickets for a nearby screening and once enough of your neighbors sign up, the screening will "tip" and get scheduled (Angelenos, help me get a screening in Alhambra!). The site for doing all this is creaking under the load at the moment, so keep hitting that reload button!

As a million people evacuate the coastal regions of Virginia and North Carolina to escape the damaging winds of Hurricane Florence, the badass scientists of NOAA are flying smack-dab into the storm.

When you walk into a bookshop, chances are that you weren't expecting to walk out with a bookshop. However, that's exactly what happened to Ceisjan Van Heerden after shopping at the Bookends bookstore in Cardigan, Wales. After opting for an early retirement due to medical issues, the bookshop's owner, Paul Morris, decided that he wanted to raffle it off and give a lucky book lover the opportunity to own a shop of their own.From The Guardian:

The internet is perpetually amused and fascinated by the crazy, corkscrewing duck penis, but commonsense dictates that if fella ducks have crazy willies, then lady ducks will have equally amazing hoo-hahs. (more…)

In Walter Scheidel's new book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, the Stanford classics prof traces the rise and fall of inequality from humanity's history, showing how over time, the rich get richer and richer, creating an ever-more-unstable situation, until, basically, the world melts down or the people start building guillotines on their doorsteps. (more…)

We already know what kind of a person Trump is. We knew it 17 years ago when he told a TV reporter on 9/11 that his tower was the tallest building in downtown Manhattan now that the World Trade Center had been demolished by terrorists.

Many cultural critics freaked out when people started riding newfangled bicycles in the 19th century. In fact, their complaints sound so much like modern-day writers' complaints about e-scooters, Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post created a quiz to see if you can tell the difference between Victorian and contemporary scolds.A few example questions:"The new two-wheeled transportation options are no casual amusement.""Seize, break, destroy... all such machines found running on the sidewalks.""The gentlemen [x]ing coolly across our city streets and sidewalks at 15 miles an hour, the wind gently flapping their ties and tousling their hair, are indifferent to your angry glares.""It is better to make safe machines than to pooh-pooh the fears of people who don't want to get their craniums cracked."I scored 8/10

A few months ago on Conan, the late Burt Reynolds shared the fantastic and funny origin of one of many iconic moments from Deliverance (1972): "He got a real purty mouth ain’t he." Watch the clip below. And as a bonus, here's the story of Deliverance's inbred banjo boy!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLEL-Gewt6E(via Laughing Squid)

A lot of people can't stand the dedicated Bixby button on Samsung phones because it is easy to accidentally press. And on the Galaxy Note 9, you can't turn off Bixby. So Jerry from Jerry Rig Everything offers a warranty voiding solution -- remove the button and fill the cavity with solid 14k gold, kind of like the way a dentist would fill a tooth cavity with gold. My cheapskate solution: use some black Sugru.

Photographer Alireza Rostami scavenged the lens and shutter from his broken Chinese Seagull TLR camera to create this fantastic wrist-worn camera complete with a self-timer. More at PetaPixel.

Peter Taylor was doing research at the UK's Imperial War Museums when he stumbled across the story of parachuting pigeons. In 1914, the British were seeking intelligence about German troop numbers and movement in Belgium. So they parachuted homing pigeons into the region from balloons and planes. Attached to the pigeons were instructions for civilians to write down what they had seen and then to allow the birds to fly back to base. Inspired, Taylor went on to collect unusual war stories and compiled them into two books, Weird War One: Intriguing Items and Fascinating Feats from the First World War and its sequel Weird War Two: Intriguing Items and Surprising Stuff from the Second World War.“It was a mixture of proper research—talking to curators, reading books, trawling through the archives—and suitably strange research: for example, (mis)using the museum’s database by typing in odd words for hours to see what came up (‘Socks,’ ‘Disguise,’ ‘Secret,’ ‘Insect’)," Taylor told Air & Space. "It’s hard to have a completely sensible plan for finding strange and surprising things.”Below, an illustration of a propaganda idea involving flying machines shaped like sharks.

Tomorrow's EU vote on a new copyright directive will determine whether the EU internet will be governed by algorithmic censorship filters whose blacklist anyone can add anything to. (Visit Save Your Internet to tell your MEP to vote against this) (more…)

Trees "talk" to each other in forests. They are part of underground networks based on symbiotic relationships, known as mycorrhiza, with fungi. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the mushroom. (National Geographic)

The New York Public Library's Riverside branch invites you to check out a necktie, briefcase, or handbag suited for a "job interview, wedding, audition, graduation, prom, or other formal event." It's part of their NYPL Grow Up initiative. From the NYPL:

Three vending machines dispensing crack pipes for $2 each were discovered roadside in Long Island. The machines were marked "PENS" and did indeed contain pens, well, ballpoint pens that had been turned into crack pipes. Town of Brookhaven Supervisor Ed Romaine tested the machine by inserting the required eight quarters and later remarked, "We're going to crack down on this."ABC7NY:

After decades of Thomas the Tank Engine having female and international characters (typically represented by an actual train design from their home countries) conservatives have finally noticed and gotten angry about it. This is because the latest one is from Kenya. In response, the NRA posted pictures of the show's trains in Klan hoods.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm_p3sf9kq4On Wednesday, the EU will vote on whether to force all online platforms to filter user-generated content against massive databases of copyrighted works (anyone can add anything to these databases, without penalties for abuse); not only is this a catastrophe for everyone who writes software that will have to comply with this bonkers idea, it's also a catastrophe for anyone who writes software, period. (more…)

After talking about how it takes a whack of skilled experts to make the stuff most of us take for granted, Andy from How to Make Everything comes to the conclusion that minting your own currency is a dangerous resource-intense pain in the ass.

Storyboard Pandemonium writes, "I am twelve years old. Me and a friend who I met at an afterschool program wrote this book to help people deal with unfair rules, beat boredom, protest in a respectful way, and make the best out of afterschool."

The Medieval Fantasy City Generator; fill in a few options and press go, and voila! I have no idea how plausible these are, but they're MUCH better than anything I ever came up with as a Dungeon Master.

Succulents are key to stabilizing the fragile coastal ecosystems of California; they're also extremely popular in China and South Korea, thanks to a fad that's sweeping Asia. (more…)

Last week, Trump invited a collection to sheriffs to the White House for a rousing speech about the evils of the free press, exactly the kind of thing the leader of a democracy does all the time, and the sheriffs gave him a standing ovation, because that's exactly the kind of thing you'd want fairminded law-enforcement agents to do in a democracy. (more…)

https://vimeo.com/285851418Objective Reality is a new VR installation from automato.farm, written by Bruce Sterling, in which you "play" one of a variety of inanimate objects: a rotating fan, a roaming Roomba, the electricity sparking from one outlet to the next; each object has an associated VR helmet that makes you look like your head is a giant appliance.

Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton on how the administration views the International Criminal Court in the Hague, where genocides, crimes against humanity and war crimes are prosecuted: "We will not cooperate with the ICC. We will provide no assistance to the ICC. We will not join the ICC. We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us." Bolton's goal? Ensuring "that the ICC does not exercise jurisdiction over Americans" who are accused of war crimes in Afghanistan. (Image: OSeveno, CC-BY-SA) (via Naked Capitalism)

Writing in the New York Times, Nathaniel Popper notes a new current running through our discourse: the idea that Big Tech is not to be trusted, and should be broken up. (more…)

R.I.P. Burt Reynolds. Recently, I had the pleasure of watching his film The Last Movie Star, directed by Adam Rifkin. In this film, Reynolds portrays an aging movie star who is the guest of honor at a film festival where his successes, failures and personal demons are ever present and a reminder of the way he has lived his life. (more…)

According to the ACLU, the nightmare perpetuated against immigrants and refugees attempting to find safe harbor in the United States has taken a new, unexpected turn for the worse: the parents, separated from their children as part of the Trump administration's drive to make migration into the United States as miserable as possible, are refusing to be reunited with their children. The reason is absolutely heartbreaking: From Reuters:

Samsung's 128 GB MicroSD is on sale now for $29 (Amazon). It's a convenient way to backup/transfer important files like your music, video, and photo libraries. Or, you can use it as the hard drive for your Raspberry Pi computer.

I was so thrilled to discover this last night. Ahead of the forthcoming release of the remastered, expanded edition of the Ramones' iconic 1978 album, Road to Ruin, KEXP premiered a "fully-realized" version of S.L.U.G., a rare Ramones track that previous only appeared in demo and bootleg form.

You may have heard that an Emirates flight EK 203 was quarantined by the Center for Disease Control at John F. Kennedy Airport immediately after landing earlier this week. At first, it was crazy town: ABC news reported that 100 people on the flight were sick with fevers and uncontrollable coughing. Vanilla Ice was on board! But as the CDC and the NYPD began to get a handle on what was going on, things felt a little less scary. Only 10 people in total--maybe--were sick. Only 11 of the 100 sick individuals were taken to the hospital. More than half of the passengers were found to be healthy. Those who were healthy enough to forgo medical attention were released to go about their lives, provided they reported any worsening systems to the CDC. Also, Vanilla Ice is just fine. According to the CDC, all signs point to the illness being a flu. Knowing this doesn't make me feel any better about the fact that two more planes landing in the United States were placed under heavy scrutiny by health officials.From The Verge:

Found this via Reddit. It is beautiful. Relax regarding the vertical video.

In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal suspected that cultural studies lacked academic rigor. So he wrote an intentionally nonsensical paper, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, and submitted it for publication in the respected academic journal Social Text. It was accepted. Sokal exposed the hoax, the embarrassed academics made their excuses, and the paper was retracted. The imbroglio was posed largely as a story of flimflam and imposture in postmodernism.This year, mathematician Theodore P. Hill co-wrote a paper about how the variability of traits differ between men and women. Uh-oh! It was accepted for publication by the respected academic journal The New York Journal of Mathematics. But within days it was gone, leading to accusations that scientific ideas were being suppressed. Upon close reading, though, the paper turned out to be, as Fields Medalist Tim Gowers put it, "a bad mistake." https://twitter.com/ilaba/status/1038956672159379456The imbroglio is still being posed largely as a story of academic censorship. By The Feminists.And just last month, researcher Lisa Littman authored a paper suggesting a social contagion model of transgender identification, replete with a DSM-ready diagnosis named "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria." Once more eyeballs (not least those of angry trans activists) fell upon it, serious methodological flaws were noted and both Littman's university and the publishing journal, PLOS ONE, began cringing at what they had put their names to.Censorship, etc.Sokal was a scientist deliberately trolling the pompous appropriation of scientific terminology by sociologists. In these new papers, the authors sincerely believe in their work, but face accusations of shoddiness and inappropriate abstraction. Sokal was presented as evidence of academic fraudulence; the recent examples as evidence of academic censorship.But these dynamics are shared:1. Dubious work is accepted for publication in an academic journal.2. It is publicly debunked, making fools of the institutions involved.3. Retractions and other defensive PR exercises generate the bulk of media attention.There are two things about this "Sokal model" of media attention that stand out to me, lowly humanities graduate that I am: First, beware excuses from academic publishers and institutions. Whatever else it might accomplish, it evades discussion of the sausage factory of scientific publication, especially the failure of peer review and the fact no-one gets any sleep. It's worth thinking about how culture war debates might obscure the systematic flaws of process that aggravate them. Conversely, beware any story about culture war stuff that rides in on conveniently angry tide of academic conspiracy. You're promised steak, but you're getting cake.Second, the scientific certitude of nonexpert journalists is taking on an uncanny air. It's a permission slip to glibly turn science stories in culture stories without addressing the science.It even suggests a game! Can you get an internet knowitall to support any old horseshit so long as it serves their ideological vanity? Per Sokal that's a lefty postmodern trap, but we are all Post-Truth now. Just put your horseshit somewhere you know it'll get removed, wait for the censorship to happen, then tell someone about it. QED. HARD MODE: Skeptics

Doug Ford is the laughable bumblefuck who was elected Premier of Ontario by a roster of cheap Trumpian tricks and (literally) a promise to make beer cost $1 in the province (this promise was not fulfilled). (more…)

Who needs a pull-down bar when you have an arm to keep your kid from plummeting hundreds of feet?[via r/OldSchoolCool]

I've been using these silicone dish scrubbers for about a year. They are far less gross than sponges.All the tales of sponge-nastiness got to me last year. I decided that some silicone scrubbers were worth trying out, and a small expense if they did not work out.These silicone scrubbers work fantastically!Pictured are the two that currently live in my sink. The blue one gets more use, but both have been aggressively used for scrubbing over the last 12 months. They have not worn out, they have not become so fouled or toxic that I've had to toss one. There are still 3 others in my kitchen drawer waiting to be employed.The only trick I find to cleaning with these, is that silicone scrubbers don't hold soap like a sponge does, so I'm either applying soap several times during a big wash-up, or I capture a bowl of soapy water at the beginning of cleaning.You can just rise these off in the sink with water, but every few dishwasher loads I throw one or the other of the scrubbers into the machine. They come out almost as-new. I have heard tales of folks boiling these, but the dishwasher seems to handle it.I still use a sponge sometimes, but these are where the cleaning starts.INNERNEED Food-Grade Silicone Non Stick Dishwashing Brush Kitchen Dish Cleaning (5 mix color) via Amazon

A young snow leopard jumped from a rock and startled its mother, and the mother's startled reaction startled the cub.

What kind of person shoots a firefighter? We don't know yet, because the identities of two hunters, charged by the FBI with chasing down and shooting at two Australian firefighters and two local police officers working with the US Forest Service in Washington state, haven't been released.From The Age:

Don't concern yourself with the context. Just enjoy the marvel of a giant red ball rolling down a street in Toledo with two people in hot pursuit. (more…)