Boing Boing

Orange Julius is at it again. Check out his latest, totally batshit Mainstream Media Accountability Survey.Full of double negatives and odd rewinds, this survey from the Trump campaign puts in the usual half-effort of twisting words to try and get the response they want.Fill it out! Have some fun!Please list Boing Boing as a source of news that you trust. I sure did.(h/t Fark)

On this day in 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 on a grand tour of the solar system and into the mysteries of interstellar space. (It followed the launch of Voyager 2 a few weeks earlier.)Attached to each of these probes is a beautiful golden record containing a message for any extraterrestrial intelligence that might encounter it. This enchanting artifact, officially called the Voyager Interstellar Record, may be the last vestige of our civilization after we are gone forever.Curated by a committee led by Carl Sagan, the Golden Record tells a story of our planet expressed in sounds, images, and science: Earth’s greatest music from myriad peoples and eras, from Bach and Beethoven to Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry, Benin percussion to Solomon Island panpipes. Natural sounds—birds, a train, a baby’s cry, a kiss—are collaged into a lovely audio poem called "Sounds of Earth." There are spoken greetings in dozens of human languages—and one whale language—and more than 100 images encoded in analog that depict who, and what, we are.Two years ago, my friends Timothy Daly, Lawrence Azerrad, and I released the Voyager Record to the public on vinyl for the first time as a lavish box set. Our project's resonance with the public, and the Grammy that we were honored to receive for it, are really a testament to the majesty of the original record and the entire Voyager mission. As the original Golden Record's producer, Timothy Ferris, wrote in the liner notes for our box set, the Voyagers are on a journey not just through space but also through time. The record is a time capsule but it is also timeless. It sparks the imagination. It provokes us to think about the future and our civilization's place in it. It exudes a sense of hope for a better tomorrow.As of this writing, Voyager 1 is more than 21 billion kilometers away from Earth. Speeding along at 17 kilometers per second, it will take another 40,000 years before the spacecraft passes within 1.6 light-years of a star in the constellation Camelopardalis. Yet it still phones home every day, transmitting new scientific data about cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and the solar wind.In a decade or so, Voyager 1 will run out of power and go silent. But it will still continue its journey, drifting among the stars in orbit within our Milky Way essentially forever or until it's intercepted, an unlikely but certainly possible event.We may never know whether an extraterrestrial civilization ever listens to the Golden Record. It was a gift from humanity to the cosmos. But it is also a gift to humanity. The record embodies a sense of possibility. The Golden Record, and the Voyagers carrying the disks, are a reminder of what we can achieve when we are at our best -- and that our future really is up to all of us.The Voyager Golden Record 3xLP Vinyl Box Set and 2xCD-Book edition is now available from Ozma Records.

Photo: Shutterstock.Theranos, the $1bn Silicon Valley fraud that made fools or corpses of everyone who trusted it, is finally to meet its doom. The Wall Street Journal reports that its dissolution was announced Tuesday in an email sent to the shareholders.Despite a series of journalistic exposés covering both the company's sham technology and its cultlike corporate culture, lawsuits, and regulatory sanctions, founder Elizabeth Holmes somehow clung on until finally being charged with fraud a few weeks ago.

Things got heated outside a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about social media today when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones touched the person of Sen. Marco Rubio in a successful attempt to get him into a deranged discussion about social media.

"There's no money left," says the attorney for a woman and her boyfriend who launched a GoFundMe account for a homeless man who gave his last $20 to the woman so she could put gas in her car. $400,000 had been raised in the crowdfunded effort, but the couple, Kate McClure and Mark D'Amico, only gave a portion of the funds to the homeless man, Johnny Bobbitt Jr. They said they were withholding the remaining funds from Bobbitt because they were concerned he would use it to buy drugs. In the meantime, D'Amico admits using some of the money himself to gamble, but he says he paid it back.Bobbitt is suing the couple to get the rest of his money, and the question that no one is able or willing to answer is, "Where did all the money go?" To help get to the bottom of things, GoFundMe has given Bobbit $20,000 and is working with authorities.A New Jersey ABC news station has investigated the online spending habits of McClure (a secretary who makes $43,000 a year) and D'Amico (a carpenter) since they launched the fund for Bobbit and found that they embarked on a lavish lifestyle of travel, a helicopter ride, shopping, and front row tickets to a Broadway show.

It's been predicted for years without much proof to show for it, but new data from Pew Research finally serves the pudding: young people are leaving Facebook for good.From Pew:

The web was a lot less slick in the mid-90s. Font choices were limited and designers were trying to figure out how best to use the new medium. The Web Design Museum has screenshots of 1990s and early 2000s versions of Amazon, eBay, CNN, Disney, and other sites that look like they were designed by an enthusiastic 13-year-old with a GeoCities account.

Fox News 4 in Dallas reports that a man crashed his truck into the side of its building at least twice "then got out and started ranting." https://twitter.com/FOX4/status/1037309502687772672?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

A few months back we bought a Nintendo Switch. The portable console gets shared between a 46 year-old dad and an 11 year-old daughter. The Switch sees a lot of playtime. (more…)

https://youtu.be/Pb8_uPWhCngI saw Molly Lewis perform "Pantsuit Sasquatch" on stage at the JoCo Cruise earlier this year and it was one of the highlights of the cruise. She just released the video.

On Amazon, a bag of 70 Halls Black Cherry Sugar Free Cough Drops costs $3.84. If you want 70 of the exact same cough drops that have been individually repackaged by Safecor Health of Columbus OH, the hospital will charge you $700. Lesson: if you have to go to the hospital, bring your fucking cough drops with you.

"You're most likely not going to lose a finger making soap," says John Hanson of Longfellow Soap in Minneapolis, Minnesota. That's reassuring! In this video, John shows you how to make bar soap at home. He says it takes about two hours to make a batch. The ingredients include olive oil, avocado oil, coconut oil, lye (drain opener), and some kind of scented oil, like lemongrass. I had no idea that you needed to cure soap for about 3 weeks after you pour it into the mold. The process looks pretty easy and a lot of fun. I want to give this a try.

In this video my friend and former Make colleague, Becky Stern, shows how she organized her workspace. She says she threw away a bunch of unwanted stuff but also found interesting tools and components that she forgot she had.

The principal of Xinshahui kindergarten in Shenzhen, China was fired after bringing pole dancers to perform for the students during back-to-school celebrations. From CNN:

Enjoy Tycho's sunrise DJ set from the Dusty Rhino at Burning Man, August 30, 2018. Track list below the audio embed.

It's no secret that coding is one of the most employable skills today, but not all of us had the foresight to major in computer science during college. That's not to say it's too late to get your coding stripes, though. While going back to school is certainly an option, there exists a much faster, economical way to learn the coding tools of the trade: the 2019 Complete Computer Science Bundle.Packed with 100+ hours of training and 11 coding courses, this collection exposes you to the languages, frameworks, and tools used by today's programming gurus. You'll start with an easy introduction to Python, covering loops, data structures, and functions and learning how to solve basic programming problems. Then, you'll advance to more nuanced topics, like web development with Angular and creating chatbots with DialogFlow. Make your way through the entire collection, and you'll have a solid programming foundation to kick off your job hunt.The 2019 Complete Computer Science Bundle is available in the Boing Boing shop today for $39.

David Pogue writes that Fitbit has 150 billion hours of anonymized heart data from its users, not to mention their ages, sexes, locations, heights, weights, activity levels, and sleep patterns—a treasure trove of information about human health.

I know, I know, we shouldn't be talking about the holidays just yet. But, keep clam, Archie McPhee went ahead and released Clamdy Canes -- yes, candy canes that taste like clams -- and I couldn't resist sharing the news with you.

To make his fish look fresher, a Kuwaiti fishmonger glued googly eyes on his stock. The Kuwaiti Commerce Ministry reportedly forced him to close shop after a Facebook video showing the infraction went viral. As one Twitter user wrote, "Never judge the freshness of fish by the googliness of their eyes." Truer words, truer words...https://www.facebook.com/Ayman.Mat.News/videos/1475870085847456/

Today, CNN photographer Khalil Abdallah captured this photo of God's anger at the White House. (via @matthoyeCNN)

Columbia University's Brown Institute is hosting me for a trio of lectures later this month in New York City: I kick off with a conversation with the Brown's Dennis Tenen about science fiction, copyright, and the arts on Sept 25, then a lecture on copyright and surveillance on Sept 26, and wrap up with an onstage conversation with Radiolab's Jad Abumrad about Big Tech, monopolies, and democratic technology on Sept 27. (I'm also dropping by Swarthmore for a lecture on Sept 28, details to follow).

A team from the University of Florida won a 2018 Usenix Security Distinguished Paper Award for Fear the Reaper: Characterization and Fast Detection of Card Skimmers, which presents their work on the "Skim Reaper," a fast, easy-to-use, reliable credit-card skimmer-detector. (more…)

Journalist Sarah Jeong (previously) was just appointed to the New York Times's editorial board, prompting garbage people to dig through her twitter for old posts that could be made to seem offensive out of context in the hopes of getting her fired. (more…)

I've been fighting with voting machine vendors since Bush v Gore, when companies like Diebold brazenly sought to subvert the Supreme Court's order to standardize a secure design for US voting machines, going so far as to send out thousands of fraudulent copyright notices in a failed attempt to silence whistleblowers who'd reported defects in their systems. (more…)

There will be a new Instagram app sometime soon that's all about shopping, reports The Verge. (more…)

Two new laws that allow California residents to officially change their gender identification went into effect this past Labor Day weekend. (more…)

Race-baiting internet blowhard and alternative medicine profiteer Alex Jones said getting banned by Facebook or YouTube would only increase the numbers of rabid fans willing to click on his rants and buy his bullshit. (more…)

Defense Secretary James N. Mattis denies the words attributed to him in Bob Woodward's new book, 'FEAR: Trump in the White House.' (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYQUsp-jxDQ&feature=youtu.beJon Cog writes, "On the 30th anniversary of IRC, David Cassel pulls together his favorite memories from the 1990s, 'when there were all kinds of fun things to do.' It was an unexplored world of freedom and fun, where even Monty Python's fish-slapping dance got a shout-out in a popular IRC client -- prompting one reporter to describe IRC as 'the kind of place that slaps you around a bit with a large trout.' But the article describes the humble origins of IRC (as a Swedish college student's summer project), as well as the many weird and wonderful moments that followed -- including an IRC-themed music video from Sweden in 2006. And best of all, IRC is still popular among open source developers today. (more…)

“I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actually going on and stop defending child rapists, you fucking asshole.” — Elon Musk, September 4, 2018, to Buzzfeed News. (more…)

America, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and Australia are in a surveillance alliance called The Five Eyes, through which they share much of their illegally harvested surveillance data. (more…)

Kenny Shopsin was the proprietor of Shopsin's, an incredible, storied, secretive, boisterous, tiny restaurant and general store in Greenwich Village, whose cookbook/memoir is a masterclass in sloppy diner chef-craft in the mode of Daniel Pinkwater's Fat Guys From Outer Space. He died this week. (more…)

On September 12th, the European Parliament will vote on whether to include Article 13 with the new Copyright Directive, and if they do, they will destroy the internet. (more…)

Michael Froomkin writes, "We Robot, now heading into its 8th year, is lots of fun -- and it's also the leading North American conference on robotics law and policy. The 2019 edition will be held at the University of Miami on April 12-13, 2019, preceded by a day of special workshops on April 11. We just today opened the submissions portal for paper and demo proposals. Full details are in the Call for Papers.

Arduino is an electronics prototyping platform that makes it easy to build interactive projects without being an electrical engineer. Here's a $16 kit that has an Arduino Uno clone, a solderless breadboard, a charging cable, and lots of components to get you started.

Fred Guttenberg, father of 14-year-old Jamie, who was murdered during the Parkland school shooting, says he was snubbed today by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, nominee for the Supreme Court. (more…)

https://youtu.be/8yLXhUmEENQAndy of How To Make Everything decided to make his own bug spray by growing certain plants and extracting their essential oils. He put the oils into alcohol that he distilled from some foul-smelling crabgrass beer he'd made previously. Then he went to a wildlife preserve with some friends to test out the spray. He deemed the spray to be "moderately effective," but said he is going to order a batch of research mosquitoes and perform a more scientifically rigorous test in a couple of weeks.

The geniuses at Squirrel Monkey are back with another trip down alternate memory lane. This time, they imagine what the online game platform Steam would be like back in the days of modems and floppy disks. Their videos are a great reminder of what it was like to use computers in the 1980s.

These kinds of best-of lists are always highly personal, but this list of great horror novels include several that I love, including World War Z, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Exorcist.18. Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon (1987)

I would watch this show. From Funny Or Die:

The Beauty of Science's "Microworld Unseen" project reveals the hidden beauty and weirdness of everyday objects through the "eye" of a scanning electron microscopes (SEMS). Capable of imaging at 1 nanometer resolution (one billionth of a meter) or less, SEMS scan the sample surface with a focused electron beam to generate topographic data that's used to produce the image. The first specimen in the Microworld Unseen series is a butterfly called the pale grass blue (Pseudozizeeria maha). Below is the butterfly's genitalia.

Over the weekend, a shopper at Trader Joes spotted former Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens working at the grocery store. She took photos of Owens (who played the young doctor Elvin Tibideaux), which the Daily Mail and Fox News immediately pounced on, job-shaming the actor in before-and-after tabloid-style stories.Owens went on Good Morning America this morning, where he said, "There's no job better than another...every job is worthwhile..." He said he was devastated by the job-shaming at first, but then became overwhelmed by all of the support he received online.

"Clear alcohols are for rich women on diets." --Ron SwansonI really didn't want more of these in my home. My niece convinced me that having Ron Swanson in the house did actually make me cooler.Make the addiction stop.Funko Pop Television: Parks and Recreation - Ron Swanson via Amaozn

Brandon Presser managed the high-roller suites in Las Vegas's Cosmopolitan. They're reserved for players who front more than a million in the hotel's private casino. In Bloomberg, Presser reveals what happens behind closed doors:

Inspirational speaker and YouTuber Claire Wineland, who had cystic fibrosis, died Sunday night. The 21-year-old activist had a successful lung transplant on August 26, but days later she suffered a severe stroke.According to BBC:

London's Victoria and Albert Museum has digitized and posted two of Leonardo da Vinci's personal notebooks. From The Art Newspaper:

Earlier this year, we were treated to a brief taste of Cyberpunk 2077 – the latest game from the developer of The Witcher, Projekt RED. It had me looking forward to the game, despite the fact that I currently don't own a single piece of hardware capable of playing it. With the release of this 48 minute gameplay video, I'm having lusty thoughts about investing in a new console or gaming computer, for the sake of getting my game on as a cyborg.

In 1607, a 15-year-old girl fled her convent in the Basque country, dressed herself as a man, and set out on a series of unlikely adventures across Europe. In time she would distinguish herself fighting as a soldier in Spain's wars of conquest in the New World. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of Catalina de Erauso, the lieutenant nun of Renaissance Spain.We'll also hunt for some wallabies and puzzle over a quiet cat.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!