Boing Boing

Have you ever woken up one morning and bemoaned how much time you waste everyday preparing and eating meals? You have to rifle through your refrigerator to dig up ingredients, prepare them in some mildly pleasing and palatable way, before finally consuming them. Even if you’re the type of person who prefers eating out, there’s the choosing a restaurant, deciding what to order, paying, and, again, actually sitting down to eat the meal. This isn’t even addressing the time spent trying not to think about what insidious strain of salmonella or E. coli might be lurking under that leaf of Romaine lettuce. Time. Money. Dangerous vegetables. Well, in Japan the company Peyoung might have an answer to your prayers. Especially if your prayers included: How do I get an entire day's worth of calories into one sitting?A little while ago I was stopped dead in my tracks at my local 7-11 when I saw this package (above). Let me read that for you. It says Cho-Cho-Cho Omori Gigamax Yakisoba (Super, Super, Super Large Serving Gigamax Cup Fried Noodles). You'll notice the 2,142 calories is written nice and boldly, too. Below that is a friendly request to limit your consumption of this yummy and enormous meal to only once a day, because you could possibly exceed your daily calorie intake, and that would be bad. But isn't that the dream? One delicious meal, prepared in a mere three minutes, and all those pesky calories garnered in one fell swoop?

FOR THE KIDS IN YOUR LIFE, AND THEIR SUMMER READING: Get Ruben Bolling’s hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures."The EMU Club inhabits exactly the world I always hoped to live in when I was 12, when the answer to questions like 'Where did I put my toy' led inevitably to alien conspiracies and secret underground tunnels. A book for the curious and adventurous!" -Cory Doctorow, author of "For the Win" and "Little Brother""The type of non-stop action and improbably hilarious fun that only a kid could dream up. ... The EMU Club's adventures perfectly capture the intersection of imagination and wonder - the crossroad that's so often found in cardboard boxes, pillow forts and backyards everywhere." -GeekDadGet Book the First, "Alien Invasion in My Backyard," here.Get Book the Second, "Ghostly Thief of Time," here.—RESIST!! The temptation to not join Tom the Dancing Bug's INNER HIVE!More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

There is no such thing as an inexpensive Apple laptop. The least painful entry into MacOS, save buying a refurb or hunting down a used MacBook online, is the MacBook Air. They're great! Well, they're great so long as you need to crunch numbers, do some VERY light gaming or type for a living. I've owned two of them. If the first hadn't been destroyed falling off the back of a motorcycle and the second hadn't been futzed up by Costa Rica's crazy temperatures, I'd still be using them. That said, the line is getting a bit long in the tooth. The MacBook Air's design is woefully dated – its wide display bezels make it feel like you're typing on a computer minted in 2010, which, I guess you are. Its design really hasn't changed since back then. Then there's the display. It's a low-resolution nightmare that guarantees eyestrain if you stare at it for more than a couple of hours at a time. Fortunately, all of this could soon change.From Bloomberg:

I lost my spring break to the original Diablo back in the mid-1990s. I spent the whole damn week in my underwear, wrapped in a blanket, playing it from dusk until dawn, surviving on pizza and Pepsi. It wasn’t my proudest moment. When Diablo II came along, I was a little older and much wiser. I knew what to expect. I promised myself that I’d play responsibly: No more losing sleep in the pursuit of better gear. I’d wear clothes. I’d force myself out into the daylight on a regular basis.I would break every one of these promises as the game held me in thrall.By the time that Diablo III rolled around, I was mature enough to know that playing too many games meant not making enough money. I was able to boot it up on my laptop and then, after a reasonable amount of time, turn it off so that I could get some work done. I bought it for my PS3, so that I could play it with my friends. When I upgraded to a PS4, I repurchased the game so I could play it there too. This fall, Diablo III is coming to the Nintendo Switch. Junkie that I am, I will exchange money for a copy of it to play on my handheld. I will do so, giddily. When the title comes to the Switch, it’ll include the Reaper of Souls expansion and the Rise of the Necromancer. I never got to play either before surrendering my PlayStation during a cash crunch, a few years back. There’ll be a whack of content that’s exclusive to Nintendo, too. That I can play it with four other people is icing on the cake. Living in the middle of nowhere and traveling constantly as I do can be isolating. It’ll be nice to goof off with some far-flung friends. The game’s already up for pre-order online. But I’m not into pre-ordering digital goods. It feels goofy to me. It’s not like they’re going to run out of downloads. But maybe you feel different than I do about it. If so, here’s a link to get you going. I’m absolutely loving the Switch for its new games and ports of old school titles I never got enough of back in the day. Here’s hoping devs will continue to feel that the system’s worth their while.Artwork via Nintendo and Blizzard

Facebook announced today they are taking down 652 pages, groups and fake accounts for "coordinated inauthentic behavior." (more…)

Tuberculosis was a disease that Doc Holliday died from; in old-timey novels, it’s often called consumption: a disease that sees those afflicted with it coughing delicately into hankies and later dying peacefully in bed. The truth is, the disease doesn’t afford a peaceful death, nor is it a relic of centuries past. In 2016, 1.6 million people died after contracting tuberculosis – a disease that causes the cells of an infected individual to burst. It can take hold of multiple sites in your body, but most often it affects the lungs. As the cells in an infected individual's lungs burst, the walls of the lungs destabilize, replacing the space where air’s supposed to go. As the victim’s lungs slowly collapse, the body believes itself to be drowning, because it is. As a result, the infected individual hacks and coughs, trying to clear the obstruction and, in the process, coughing up wee bits of flesh, blood and particles small enough to go airborne in a sneeze or cough. When someone else breathes those airborne particles in? They get infected. It’s scary shit, but it’s also treatable shit. To handle the symptoms that come with a case of tuberculosis, it’s necessary to take medication on a daily basis. Doing so isn’t just necessary for someone infected with tuberculosis to live a relatively normal life: given how infectious the disease is, it’s also vital for keeping everyone around them safe from contracting the illness themselves. Because of this, those undergoing treatment for TB are closely monitored by healthcare professionals, to ensure that they’re taking their pills as required. Patients are typically required to take their meds in the presence of a healthcare worker, to ensure that the dosage was actually ingested. This works well in a clinical situation, but not everyone lives near a clinic. Additionally, transient individuals may not be able to check into the same clinic on a daily basis, making treatment of their tuberculosis difficult. Happily, researchers from Johns Hopkins and the University of California, San Diego have come up with the means to monitor patients as they take their daily doses, even when they’re far from a clinical setting. As with so many other things, these days, it involves a smartphone. In this case, those being treated for TB are asked to take their medication in front of their smartphone camera, using an app called SureAdhere.From Stat News:

There's a rumor that Trump will pardon Paul Manafort tonight at one of his sweaty rallies. If he does, it could come back to haunt him. Vox interviewed 10 legal experts who are largely in agreement that pardoning Manafort would actually help prosecutors nail him to the wall that much faster.A few highlights from the article:"If the president issues a pardon in order to influence a witness and impede the investigation, that would also be a further act of obstruction." -- Lisa Kern Griffin, law professor, Duke University“If the president pardons anyone involved in the Russian investigation, it may prove to be one of the stupidest things he has yet done.” —Julie O’Sullivan, Georgetown University“The threat of state prosecution is enough to force Kushner, Flynn, Manafort, etc. to become cooperating witnesses, regardless of whether Trump secretly promises to pardon them.” —Jed Shugerman, Fordham UniversityIf President Trump pardons subjects of Mueller's investigation, they will be unable to claim their Fifth Amendment rights if they are asked to testify under oath. -- Asha Rangappa, associate dean, Yale Law SchoolWith each abnormal, unbecoming, or dishonorable act, President Trump makes it harder for his appointees to defend him, harder for traditional Republicans to maintain their uneasy power alliance with him, and easier for Democrats to take the moral high ground and secure political advantage. President Trump is in danger of snuffing out his candle in the first year of his presidency. -- Andy Wright, law professor, Savannah Law SchoolImage: Alexandros Michailidis/Shutterstock

The Santa Clara County Fire Department had its Verizon wireless access throttled to 0.5% of normal, in the midst of its fight against the California wildfires; Verizon said that the firefighters had been using too much bandwidth while they risked their lives racing to save the county from being engulfed in flames. (more…)

Actually, it's about ethics in purchasing videogames with campaign funds. (more…)

Top Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow hosted at his home the publisher of a website that serves as a platform for white supremacy and anti-immigrant hate. (more…)

In 1980, David Bowie did a series of Japanese TV commercials for Crystal Jun Rock, a Japanese liquor. See below. “The money is a useful thing,” Bowie later said about doing the ads.The soundtrack was the gorgeous track "Crystal Japan" that Bowie released first on a couple 7-inch singles and then as a bonus track on the CD reissue of "Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)." Bowie fan Nacho Video recut the three TV commercials into the lovely music video above for "Crystal Japan."(via /r/ObscureMedia)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VkVowfxU1U

Angel Nene created this montage showing how the Rolling Stones' faces and music evolved over the years. I got sad about one minute in (1969) when Brian Jones died.Below, my favorite of Nene's morphing animations of aging rock stars, "The Beatles Aging Together (1960-2017):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ewWzlx_bV8(via Laughing Squid)

Oxford Business School researcher Bent Flyvbjerg's 2014 paper on "megaprojects" is a minor classic of the project-management genre (but I hadn't heard of it until this morning, and, having read it, I can see why). (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD6A_tvbKT0LEDs are diodes (that's what the D stands for) and diodes are sensitive to voltage drops: when you blow on an LED, you make it ever so slightly cooler, and that causes an infinitesimal, but detectable voltage drop. (more…)

Since 1946, the Clown Egg Register has collected blown eggshells that clowns hand-paint with their distinctive makeup, in order to claim that particular makeup as belonging to them; by custom, clowns do not copy each others' faces. (more…)

President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen surrendered to the FBI today, and admitted to violating campaign finance laws in relation to payments made to porn performer Stormy Daniels on Donald Trump's orders. (more…)

In the trial of U.S. vs. Paul Manafort, a jury has found Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty on 8 counts. He faces a maximum of 80 years in prison. Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on 10 counts for which the jury couldn't reach consensus. (more…)

As the Cohen and Manafort news blows up, we've got Jackhammer Jill watching the Orange Menace's twitter feed like a hawk! As the blowhard begins to melt down, we'll post the tweets and analysis here:

These 8oz insulated thermos-like bottles will be going to school with my daughter. (more…)

Anti-vaccine shenanigans have lowered Europe's average vaccination rate below the threshold to adequately provide for herd immunity. Following the decade's lowest year of measles cases in 2016, the rate of measles cases in Europe in 2018 is already headed for the stars. (more…)

The Koch-backed Mercatus Institute was humiliated last month when it published a scare story claiming that American couldn't afford the $32.6 trillion cost of universal health care for the next decade, a number that seems huge until you realize that the cost of privatized US health care over the same period will be $2 trillion higher. (more…)

The fabulous Lea Redmond of Leafcutter Designs (previously) has launched a brand new project. It's called Lively Matter and it's a 52-card activity deck to create grand adventures and experiences out of the ordinary.She writes:

Have you ever wanted to talk with the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the risks of talking in public about security issues, especially in connected Internet of Things devices? Today, you'll get your chance. (more…)

For more than 100 years, the animals on the Barnum's Animal Crackers' packaging were depicted in a circus cage. Now, thanks to a request from PETA, that has all changed. The animal rights organization asked Mondelez, Nabisco's parent company, to remove the bars in a letter sent in 2016, according to AP:

The Attorneys General of New York, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia have filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, asking it to reinstate the Network Neutrality rules killed by Trump FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. (more…)

The abandoned Karl Lagerfeld Realdoll prototype known as Rodrigo Alves used the N-word on a British reality TV show and the broadcaster didn't even take him off the air. Here's the BBC on the alarming but very highly-rated return of a classic.

I've been keeping one of these mini umbrellas in my suitcase for years. It's so small and leight I don't notice that it is there until I need it. It weighs 7-ounces. It's under 7-inches long when closed. It opens to 34-inches in diameter. Amazon has it on sale today for $11.54.

Whether it's paying for burying dedicated power-lines for data-centers, winning below-cost sweetheart deals on electricity rates, or securing tax-breaks and incentives to set up shop, Amazon Web Services has proven time and again that it is the nation's best cost-shifter, enjoying billions in tax-funded gifts for operating data centers that employ almost no one and whose profits go straight to distant shareholders. (more…)

The New York Times interviewed Stephen Colbert on stage. Among other things, he describes his typical working day, and what goes into producing The Late Show. I haven't watched the whole thing yet, but what I've seen so far is really good.I had the privilege of being on the Colbert Report twice. Each time, Colbert came into the green room and spent about 20 minutes chatting with me. He was really nice. I also noticed that the crew adored him and had a great relationship with him.

Second Life is many things, but among them is an attempt to build a virtual world that works more like the web (where anyone can add a site or a page) than a finished product that can only be modified by the corporation that manufactured it. (more…)

Squirrel Monkey makes excellent videos that imagine what popular online sites and services would have looked like if they'd been around in the 1980s or 1990s. Squirrel Monkey uses actual vintage computer equipment in the videos, which look like 5th generation VHS cassette duplicates. Even though the videos are funny, they are also spot on. In this one, Squirrel Monkey shows us Uber in the 1980s. The final step involves printing a voucher on a very slow dot matrix printer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Vu1ysp7QYkNewt Gingrich's 1995 Republican Revolution dismantled all the expert departmentsand bureaus that Congress depended on to make sense of the world, making lawmakers dependent on corporate lobbyists to advise them on everything from pollution to food safety to military technology to mass surveillance -- nearly 25 years later, Washington DC is a literal and figurative swamp, and only 18% of Americans say they trust Congress. (more…)

From one of my favorite blogs, Nag on the Lake, a post about how workers in Tokyo moved section of train line underground in the course of an evening in 2013.

Randy Rainbow is on point again. In his latest song, he asks Omarosa (who has a new book, Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House), "Could you be the hero we've been waiting for?"

Venezuela's bolivar is worth less than the paper it is printed on. Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro has a solution. He has issued a new bolivar, called the "strong bolivar." How can you fail with plan as clever as that?From NPR:

A possible plea deal in the fraud case of Donald Trump's personal attorney Michael Cohen plea deal may come together as soon as today, NBC reports. (more…)

And if Bruce Dickinson wants more cowbell, we should probably give him more cowbell!Fortnite has added a new dance. I had to have it. Epic may want to organize these as part of the "Dad dance series" because my 11 year-old star player doesn't get the joke.Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!

A research team wrote about how they trained a machine-learning AI to generate images from text descriptions. When fed birds as its dataset, it got very good at painting birds...... But the more you feed it, the crazier it gets.More collected here, and you can try it yourself thanks to Chris Valenzuela's online implementation. Here are my efforts.

Zookeepers are tricking a new panda mom of twins into thinking she's got only one cub, so both will survive.In this BBC Earth clip, a new panda mother doesn't realize she's raising twins. According to the narrator, who is none other than David Attenborough, it's not unusual for pandas to birth multiples. What is unusual is for mama pandas to take care of more than one panda cub when she has. Normally, she'll abandon one (or more) of them so that the other will live. Attenborough says that it's thought that they don't have "sufficient milk or energy" to raise more than one, so they starve the unwanted cub(s).So, in an effort to keep both pandas alive, zookeepers are playing the old switcheroo on the twins' mom, Lee Lee. They've been switching out the (OMG-they're-so-adorable) cubs up to 10 times a day and, so far, Lee Lee is none the wiser.(Mashable)

Nikki Fried is a Florida Democrat running to be the state’s agriculture commissioner. Medical marijuana is legal in Florida, but when Fried said she'd be accepting be accepting campaign contributions from the medical marijuana industry, Wells Fargo terminated her account.From The Washington Post:At a news conference on Monday, Fried said that “Wells Fargo’s actions against my campaign are emblematic of what is wrong with our government and politics today," adding that she was “kicked out of a bank for voicing support of a law that is literally codified in the Florida constitution.”In a statement, Wells Fargo spokeswoman Bridget Braxton declined to comment on the specifics of Fried’s case but said that “it is Wells Fargo’s policy not to knowingly bank or provide services to marijuana businesses or for activities related to those businesses, based on federal laws under which the sale and use of marijuana is illegal even if state laws differ.” By phone, she clarified that “activities related to those businesses” would include donations, to politicians or any other account holders.Image: Rob Wilson/Shutterstock

Thanks to the members of a street art project, some bus shelter adverts for Facebook in London were improved by a good ol' fashioned culture jam.The Protest Stencil is taking credit for these subvertising efforts which altered Facebook's messaging to say, "Fake news is not our friend, it’s a great revenue source," and "Data misuse is not our friend, it’s our business model."They refer to their work as "honest Facebook ads," writing, "To facebook, you’re not a ‘friend’, you’re the product on sale." Preach it!https://www.instagram.com/p/BmgCAhknnv7/?taken-by=proteststencilhttps://www.instagram.com/p/BmbKDvQHRFP/?taken-by=proteststencil(Design You Trust)image via Protest Stencil

Cat's gonna be cats.This kitten doesn't know that there's a wedding. It's got its own schedule which includes chasing and riding on the bride's train.https://imgur.com/Tr4qppB

Josh, one of my inbox zine's readers, made this. He wrote, "For a very long time I’ve wanted to build a giant geodesic dome filled with fake grass in lower Manhattan. This August it happened."His piece is called dusk-space and it's an immersive synthetic environment meant to "recreate the experience of being in a remote country field at dusk." Here are some words about it from its statement (emphasis mine):

Holy crap! There's a toilet plunger that looks like a poop emoji on a stick. This smiling anthropomorphic plunger is the work of Squatty Potty, the folks who really know how to market toilet stools.Need it? (Don't kid yourself, you do.) It's available for ~$15.Previously: Poop-themed toys rule New York Toy FairThanks, Howie!

It's about damn time. Nick Lyon, Michigan's health director, has been ordered to stand trial on involuntary manslaughter charges after the deaths of two men were linked to an outbreak of Legionnaire's disease in Flint. 90 cases of Legionnaire's were reported in Genesee County, resulting in 12 deaths. Flint still does not have clean drinking water.State official ordered to trial on Flint charges[WOOD-TV] Image by Ildar Sagdejev (Specious) - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Shockingly good work by Banjo Guy Ollie.

Paul Hansmeier pleaded guilty to of wire fraud and money laundering today for his role in the Prenda Law copyright scam. Prenda uploaded porn movies to download sites, got the IP addresses of users accessing the files, then shook them down for settlements with the threat of exposing them to their families and the public through court action.

Evan Greer from Fight for the Future writes, "At this moment in history, it's just not okay for tech companies to support government agencies that are openly violating human rights. But while Salesforce's executives have been speaking out against US immigration policies, the company is maintaining a multimillion dollar contract with US Border Patrol. We just launched DropSalesforce.com, an open letter from tons of organizations threatening to boycott Salesforce (and Heroku) if they don't cancel the contract. We're also crowdfunding BART bus ads to run near Salesforce HQ in San Fransisco during their big yearly conference. Lots of big tech companies have contracts with ICE and Border Patrol. Salesforce could be the first domino to fall."

Hey you! I'm driving to the Playa this Thursday, and there's a small but significant chance that you'll be there too! If you're around, come and say hi! (more…)