The Latest from Boing Boing

Meet Jeff: mocumentary/biopic about a giant, killer robot who plays himself Meet Jeff is a Wired web-series that's a mockumentary about a robot actor called Jeff 1000 who has been given his own biopic, starring Summer Glau. Read the rest... Inside Beijing's airpocalypse – a city made "almost uninhabitable" by pollution Image: Shutterstock The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright reports on the miasmal atmosphere enveloping Beijing. On bad days, bike lanes are completely deserted, as people stay at home or retreat to the conditioned environments of hermetically-sealed malls. Read the rest... Crypto-Santa: use onion routing to anonymize gifts at your Xmas party Dmytri writes, "Add a crypto wrinkle to your Kris Kringle! Make your Secret Santa even more secret with the magic of Onion Wrapping!" How? Read the rest... WATCH: Sneak preview of the last episode of Serial The Last Episode Of Serial from Funny Or DieAn "exploration of the truth." This is exactly what Pesco and I were thinking a few days ago. Read the rest... Vomit Minecraft block I found this perfectly cubic block of reconstituted foam. It immediately made me think of a) Minecraft, and b) William Gibson's description of recycled plastics from Communist-era East Germany. Read the rest... New York bans pet piercing You'll still be allowed to put tags in your guinea pigs' and rabbits' ears, but no more tattooing or piercing unless it's for the animal's benefit. Read the rest... Star Wars cookie cutters For $8 these Star Wars cookie cutters come ready to bake our favorite characters. Far cheaper than other brands. Read the rest... Want to try making a video game? Visit the Sorting Hat If you have ever read anything I've written about video games, you will have heard me insert notations about the democratization of tools. Read the rest... Google's end-to-end email encryption moves to Github Google's made some major announcements about End-to-End, their implementation of the best-of-breed email encryption tool PGP, which they're refactoring as a way of encrypting webmail so that neither they nor the spy-services can read it in transit or at rest. Read the rest... The Top Secret Files of Dick Cheney [Comic] Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH the Top Secret Files of Dick Cheney reveal why torture ISN'T torture anymore! Read the rest... This is the best Best Art list Animal NY is one of my personal favorite sites for Stuff To Do With Net Art, and Rhett Jones has a formidable "The Best Art of 2014" list up just now. Read the rest... Mystery of creepy 1970s Sesame Street clip solved I didn't truly appreciate what a miracle is YouTube til I realized how many half-remembered Sesame Street sketches, songs and puppet shows from my grainy, nostalgic childhood could be found there. Read the rest... Help with medical expenses from author Katherine Kerr's husband's dementia Mitch Wagner writes, "Our dear friends are in dire straits and need some financial assistance. Howard has Alzheimer's, and Kit is stretched to the limit caring for him." "Kit is the author of the fine Deverry high fantasy series (first book: Daggerspell), as well as a mess of urban fantasy novels, one or two science fictions, as well as an upcoming s00per-seektrit project that I've been looking forward to for all the 20+ years I've known them (it's a historical novel set in a period and place that fascinates me.)" My husband has Alzheimer's. Read the rest... Watching the climate-cholera connection from orbit Dr. Kiki Sanford on how scientists are predicting outbreaks from an unusual new vantage point.Read the rest... Air pollution: the holy Hajj's health threat Reporting this week at the annual American Geophysical Union, scientists from UC Irvine discussed air quality results from samples taken during the 2012 and 2013 Hajj. Read the rest... Black hole power in a lightning bolt Have you ever been on a plane during a thunderstorm that experienced a direct lightning strike? While most commercial airliner will do their best to avoid thunderclouds delivering the wrath of the atmosphere, it's estimated that every plane in the U.S. Read the rest... How the Halo Effect turns uncertainty into false certainty David McRaney explores why, when faced with a set of complex information, we tend to turn the volume down on the things that are difficult to quantify and evaluate and instead focus on the few things that are most tangible. Read the rest... Spectacular, weird horror movie as pharma infomercial Adult Swim's Unedited Footage of a Bear trumps Too Many Cooks for intensity, virtuosity and genuine terror. What begins as a nature documentary turns quickly into an informercial for a side-effect-prone sedative called Claridryl, whose accompanying site is itself a marvel of surreal web-design (be sure to leave it running in a tab for a while and check back on it from time to time). It's like a short, multimedia episode of Black Mirror -- genuinely creepy horror that is enmeshed in enough reality to make it plausible -- and scarier for it. Claridryl - Acts Immediately, Lasts Indefinitely Read the rest... 37K sentiment-analysis words associated with emotion scores Hosted on github, Depeche Mood is a lexicon of 37,000 emotional terms, part of the research work in DepecheMood: a Lexicon for Emotion Analysis from Crowd-Annotated News [PDF]. Read the rest... Barrett Brown sentencing delayed Barrett Brown, the American Journalist accused of computer crimes after linking to material posted online by anonymous hacktivists, will have to wait a few more weeks to learn his fate. Read the rest... Only 55% of food-crop calories are consumed directly by humans. The rest: fuel and feed. In this National Geographic feature on the future of food, a map that illustrates how much of the world's crops are grown for people to eat directly (green), compared to crops grown for biofuel or to feed animals. Read the rest... Hanukkah + hip-hop = Dr. Dreidel A clever tchotchke created by Hannah Rothstein. Sometimes, the best concepts are the ones with no complex reasoning behind them. Like the Dr. Read the rest... Is it ethically okay for journalists to mine hacked Sony emails for stories? "The question is not whether or not to mine them, but rather how." Read the rest... Apple wins antitrust case over iPod music and DRM A jury today ruled in favor of Apple in a long-running, class-action lawsuit that charged the tech giant with antitrust law violations over suppressing competition for iPod music devices. Read the rest... How to gift-wrap a cat for Christmas "Many cats have an aversion to being wrapped or being dressed up and are not toys. Please do not attempt to recreate this scene if your pet is unwilling to remain still." [Video Link, thanks Marcus Elia] Read the rest... Lecture on zombies, art, and death Zombie artist George Pfau sends us, "Zombies Identified: A slideshow-lecture performed for BAASICS 5:Monsters, a free event at ODC Theater in San Francisco." It's a slideshow of diagrams, film stills, animations, and other images drawing focus toward the zombie as a learning tool about identity and the ephemeral aspects of being human. Read the rest... As ruble value plummets, Apple halts online sales in Russia Apple today stopped all online sales in Russia, citing “extreme” ruble fluctuations. “Our online store in Russia is currently unavailable while we review pricing,” said spokesman Alan Hely in an e-mailed statement. Read the rest... What torture sounds like “Have you heard the screams of a prisoner who is being tortured in America’s war on terror? I can’t forget them,” writes Peter Maass at The Intercept. Read the rest... Watch: 2 years before Snowden, Barrett Brown on why reporters should be covering intel contractors Today, a judge in Dallas will decide the fate of journalist Barrett Brown, who is being sentenced in a case that has been fraught with controversy and deplorable conduct by the Justice Department from its beginning in 2013. Read the rest... California needs 11 trillion gallons of water to recover from ongoing drought A new analysis of NASA satellite data reveals that it will take about 11 trillion gallons of water (42 cubic kilometers), which is about 1.5 times the maximum volume of the largest reservoir in the USA, to recover from California's continuing drought. Read the rest...