The Latest from Boing Boing

Krampus was the best thing about Christmas 2014 A gallery of the child-whipping Alpine demon that haunted our holiday Read the rest... Sci fi short story by Paul Di Filippo "Faster Now" is a short story about a near-future world where brain hackers called "now tweakers" (nowts) use their time-management skills to get a leg up on normals. Read the rest... The long, slow death of our watering holes Our gathering spots, neither home nor work, were absorbed into another world. But we knew they were dying long before they disappeared... Read the rest... Drunk birds slur their songs Researchers from the Oregon Health and Science University got zebra finches drunk to see how the booze affected their singing in an effort to gain insight into human speech. Read the rest... Inside a Rolex Submariner Watchmaker Tony Williams gives a tour of the Rolex Submariner's innards. (via) Read the rest... Anthropologist on "food porn" Anthropologist Krystal D'Costa considers food as a spectator sport in history, aka "food porn." From Scientific American:"The term food porn is credited to Michael Jacobson, the cofounder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest which provides information to the public on nutrition, food, and health. Read the rest... The sublime mathematical GIFs of Clayton Shonkwiler Colorado-based mathematician Clayton Shonkwiler creates wonderful animated GIFs and vector art inspired by the beauty of math. On Tumblr, you can find his work here: shonk. [via Cross Connect] Read the rest... Superbly Awful Library Books: mega-gallery of terrible (but awesome) book covers If you enjoy scoffing at "What were they thinking of?" book covers of yesteryear, Awful Library Books is a site you'll want to follow. Read the rest... Cow tells dog a secret That's what the video's titled, but honestly, cow chews on dog's ear is equally cute. Read the rest... The song that sparked the infamous "Roxanne Wars" This week's Hip Hop Family Tree on how we were introduced to colorful MCs like Roxanne Shante. Read the rest... Living at a high altitude may make people 30% more likely to commit suicide Utah is the top state in the US for antidepressant use and has "disproportionately high rates of suicide and associated mood disorders compared to the rest of the country." Perry Renshaw, a neuroscientist at the University of Utah, thinks the reason could be that living in a high altitude screws up people's neurotransmitters. Read the rest... What to do when a kid gets his head stuck in a gate "Very funny kid head stuck in gate. Very difficult to get it off." Read the rest... Gentleman juggler Mat Ricardo at London's South Bank Centre Mat Ricardo sez, "Completely thrilled to announce that, in what must surely be some kind of administrative error, my one man show 'Showman' will have a three night run at The Purcell Room in London's South Bank Centre on the 19th, 20th & 21st of January." Its the culmination of nearly thirty years of working every stage I could find - including a busking pitch just around the corner from the South Bank Centre! Read the rest... Tights with poetry The View Text Etsy store sells custom tights emblazoned with poetry from the likes of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare (you can also get your own text on a pair). (via Geeky Merch) Read the rest... Bridging gongkai and free/open source Bunnie Huang and his team have set out to fully reverse-engineer and document a cheap Chinese Mediatek MT6260. mobile-phone board -- licensed in the complex, informal regime of "gongkai," through which lots of theoretically confidential information is published, but some critical pieces are withheld. Read the rest... New NSA leaks: does crypto still work? Matthew Green's got an excellent postmortem on the huge dump of NSA docs Der Spiegel last weekend. Some of the new leaks imply that the NSA is able to compromise core cryptographic Internet protocols like TLS and IPSEC. Read the rest... United and Orbitz sue Skiplagged, a service you should totally use Skiplagged finds cheap one-way fares by surfacing weird airline pricing strategies, like pricing a NY-SFO-Lake Tahoe flight cheaper than an NY-SFO flight, so you book all the way through to Tahoe, debark at SFO, and walk away from the final leg. Read the rest... Detailed Snowtrooper armor A mere $2000 gets you this suit of Imperial Snowtrooper couture armor, suitable for fighting asymmetric warfare on Hoth or chilling at a con. Read the rest... In-depth interview with Serial's Jay Jay Wilds, the star witness in the case against Adnan Syed, talks at length to Natasha Vargas-Cooper at The Intercept: When did (Adnan) first talk to you about hurting her? Read the rest... Newly-elected GOP House Majority Whip spoke at hate group's neo-Nazi rally in 2002 Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) admitted today that he spoke at a 2002 gathering of a front group for former KKK leader David Duke. Read the rest... Secret Nazi nuclear weapons testing bunker unearthed in Austria An underground weapons bunker built by Nazis to test nuclear and chemical weapons has been unearthed in Austria. It was built using slave labor from the nearby Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. Read the rest... Bizarre glitches in Mortal Kombat This 30-minute compilation, created by gamers, is a lesson in how far one can go into the cracks of an already-batshit classic game in search of the deeply bizarre. Read the rest... "Anon" vs Iggy Azalea After aiming a series of nasty remarks at a black artist, rapper Iggy Azalea was threatened with the release of a sex tape by Anonymous. Read the rest...