The Latest from Boing Boing

Every episode of every Star Trek series ever, ranked Jordan Hoffman of Playboy has ranked all 695 episodes of every Star Trek series, with comments on each episode. It's a monumental effort that could be a book. Read the rest... Torture report shows 26 men held in error Meet one man who survived CIA torture–-including solitary confinement, which he says was the worst. Read the rest... Serial-inspired vigilante app will help the Internet investigate unsolved crimes An Indiegogo campaign inspired by the Serial podcast is underway to develop a platform for crowdsourcing crime solving. CrowdSolve will supposedly provide a home for the public documents, a forum for debating theories and visualization tools for making presentations and videos. Read the rest... Help preserve feminist video gaming history Back in the mid-90s, late game maker Theresa Duncan made some unconventional, ground-breaking CD games based on the everyday experiences of young girls. Read the rest... The clitoris is a direct line to the matrix At Motherboard, Claire Evans presents a brilliant "Oral History of the First Cyberfeminists, sharing bits of her correspondence with pioneering Australian tech-goddesses Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt, four net artists who worked together under the pseudonym "VNS Matrix". Read the rest... WATCH: How a nearly-blind woman cooks for her family "Gordon Ramsey would probably be angry, but he doesn't have to eat my food." Licia Prehn has congenital cataracts and sees about 2% of 20/20 vision. [via] Read the rest... Snail named after The Clash singer Joe Strummer “Because they look like punk rockers in the 70s and 80s and they have purple blood and live in such an extreme environment, we decided to name one new species after a punk rock icon,” said Shannon Johnson, a researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Read the rest... The ruble is sinking almost as fast as bitcoin The falling price of oil is causing problems for Russia's economy, says Matt O'Brien of theWashington Post. The ruble is down 50% against the dollar this year. Read the rest... UK cops demand list of attendees at university fracking debate Canterbury Christ Church University refused to give the Kent police a list of the attendees at a debate on fracking, despite the cops insistence that they needed to have the names to assess "the threat and risk for significant public events in the county to allow it to maintain public safety." One of the speakers at the debate, Ian Driver, a Green party councillor in Thanet, has been subjected to extensive police surveillance, though he has no criminal record: the police logged 22 public meetings and demonstrations he helped to organise about gay marriage and animal exports. Read the rest... Sitting in radioactive dirt was a thing in the 1950s No wonder so many comic book superheroes got their superpowers from radioactivity. In the 1950s. some people thought uranium dirt was good medicine. Read the rest... Learn how to survive a helicopter crash in water Survival Systems USA teaches civilians how to walk (or swim) away from aircraft crashes in water. Air & Space writer James Chiles spent a day in training: Survival Systems USA offers several such courses at its headquarters building alongside the airport at Groton, Connecticut. Read the rest... A man and his mushrooms Rodham E. Tulloss, a 70-year-old retired electronics engineer in Roosevelt, N.J., has one of the world's largest and most scientifically important collections of Amanita mushrooms in the world.Read the rest... Video: How books used to be made "The Art of Making A Book." Read the rest... The year's best music, by mood There are a lot of album of the year lists, but Hype Machine's Zeitgeist 2014 list is a bit special. A diverse group of contributors have each kicked in a song that's perfect for every moment or mood, whether that's "Remembering you're in love and climate change is probably 50 years away from flooding the West Coast and maybe things aren't so bad" (that's Allo Darlin's 'Romance and Adventure'), or "Walking Home Alone from the Club at 4 AM" (that's 'Bae HD' from Starfoxxx). Read the rest... Fresh Fest '84 This week's Hip Hop Family Tree strip features the first national rap music tour, the Swatch Watch New York City Fresh Fest `84, by Ed Piskor. Read the rest... Laser-cut record clocks Vinyl Record Eaters is Greg Durt's Etsy store for laser-cut record-clocks (made from unplayable, scratched records) that sport clever silhouettes from pop culture: Daryl from Walking Dead,Walking Dead execution, Lightsaber battle, Hobbit march, Godzilla eats New York and cities of the world! Vinyl Record Eaters Read the rest... The Year We All Wore Kigurumi Nicole Dieker on the suddenly-ubiquitous animal onesies. Read the rest... One of the last northern white rhinos has died A northern white rhino named Angalifu died at age 44 at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, leaving only 5 left of the subspecies in the world. Read the rest... At the Gate of the Center [Short Story] Tara Marsden tells the story of a corporation exploiting the newest renewable energy source: pain. Read the rest... Barbaric, backwards ancestor worship The fetishization of "correct" English -- which is to say, white, wealthy English -- is in direct opposition to everything that makes English such a glorious drunkard's debauch of a language. Read the rest... Modified London police brag-sheets These are a refreshing antidote to the Metropolitan London Police's poster campaign trumpeting their 2014 achievements. @doctorow this is awesome. pic.twitter.com/1vfzissYtA #london #racism — Michael Weems (@weems) December 15, 2014 Read the rest... Judge convicted of planting meth on woman who reported him for harassment Bryant Cochran was chief judge of Murray County Magistrate Court when a woman reported him for hitting on her while she entered his chambers to take out assault warrants following an attack on her. Read the rest... HTML color clock By converting the time to a hex-value, the What colour is it? clock does a lovely job of showing the relationships between adjacent colors in the "Web-safe" color palette. (via Waxy) Read the rest... Over 700 million people have taken steps to improve privacy since Snowden As Schneier points out, the way this is spun ("only 39% of people did something because of Snowden") is bullshit: the headline number is that more than 700 million people are in the market for a product that barely exists, and that could make more money than Facebook if you get it right. Read the rest... Her Majesty's Royal Shroom: Hallucinogenic fungi found at Buckingham Palace Officials say garden shrooms are never used in the palace kitchens. Read the rest... Macedonia helped CIA kidnap and torture a German they mistook for a terrorist Macedonia kidnapped a German citizen called Khalid al-Masri and sent him to the CIA, mistaking him for a similarly named terror suspect; the CIA tortured him in Afghanistan and held him even after they realized they had the wrong name. Read the rest... Science explains why cops shoot black men Racism rewires white people's brains to perceive black people as an implicit threat. The good news: it's reversible. Read the rest... Physicians: “Anal feeding” of prisoners is sexual assault, has no medical use What a sad world we live in, when a coalition of medical professionals has to issue a press release announcing this most obvious of obvious observations about so-called “anal feeding” of war-on-terror detainees. Read the rest... Boing Boing reader sees Santa in a plate of breakfast This holiday pareidolia beats the Virgin Mary in a tortilla. Shared in our Flickr Pool by John Thoeming. Read the rest... GIF: Panda dodges laser blasts [via] Read the rest...