The Latest from Boing Boing

The Book of Beetles: A life-size guide to 600 of nature’s living gems The white fog-basking beetle dwells in the Namib desert. It climbs “to the top of a dune during the early-morning fog, orienting its body with the tip of the abdomen pointed upward and the head angled downward. Read the rest... Family fake-kidnapped 6-year-old to teach him to mistrust strangers The Troy, MO family of a six-year-old boy staged a kidnapping in which they terrorized him and made him believe that he would be sold into sex slavery, because they wanted to convince him not to be so "nice" to strangers. Read the rest... Artist fights his own cartoon characters In Alex Solis's "Inkteraction" series, he battles his own illustrations. Truly wonderful work. Alex Solis: "Inkteraction" (via Laughing Squid) Read the rest... People throwing pennies changed the color of a Yellowstone hot spring Yellowstone National Park's Morning Glory thermal spring used to be deep blue but its current yellow and green hues were caused in part by tourists throwing coins, rocks, and assorted crap into the pool. Read the rest... No future for you: cultural institutions can't afford to play along with pointy-headed bosses My new Guardian column, Go digital by all means, but don't bring the venture capitalists in to do it, is an open letter to the poor bastards who run public institutions, asking them to hold firm on delivering public value and not falling into the trap of running public services "like a business." When you let regulators and politicians bully you into excluding the public from their own institutions, alienating the public that you need on your side to stave off the next round of cuts -- and the next. Read the rest... Mummified monk not dead, just trancing This 200-year-old "mummified" monk found in Mongolia last week is not dead but rather deeply meditating, say some believers. From the BBC News: Barry Kerzin, a physician to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, told the Siberian Times that the monk was in a rare state of meditation called "tukdam". Read the rest... Video: "Hearing Tarantino" Jacob T. Swinney's supercut celebrates the sounds of Tarantino films. Read the rest... Necromantic lawyers say George Patton can't appear in video games California's insane publicity rights regime mean that the general -- who's been dead for 69 years -- can't be a video-game character because people might mistakenly think he endorses the game. Read the rest... The juice bottle that brought down an art thief Most famous pieces of stolen art are stolen because they’re famous. But a 1949 painting by the Spanish Surrealist Salvador Dalí is famous because it was stolen. Read the rest... Prewar Japanese beer posters: the most beautiful ads ever made? We may now be in the golden age of Japanese beer, but we've missed the golden age of Japanese beer advertising. Read the rest... The modern cat video was invented in 1994 by French multimedia artist Chris Marker The influential French filmmaker died in 2012. Play him off, keyboard cat. Read the rest... Ron Wyden to Eric Holder: before you go, how about all those requests for information? Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has written a letter to outgoing Attorney General Eric "Too Big to Jail" Holder about all those other letters the senator has sent to the AG asking why, exactly, the DoJ thinks that mass spying is legal. Read the rest... The guy behind GPG, Ed Snowden's favorite email encryption tool is going broke A ProPublica story getting a lot of attention today around the 'net, and for good reason. Read the rest... America's wealthiest pet owners by zip code Varick Media Management correlated people visiting pet-related websites to wealth by zip code. These are the 10 wealthiest, pet loving zip codes in the US. Read the rest... A great leather case for the iPhone 6 plus My friend Allen (co-founder of the delicious cashew cheese company Nary Dairy) got this Verus leather case ($22) for his iPhone 6 Plus, and I liked it so much I bought one for my 6 Plus. Read the rest... How to change someone's opinion in an argument If you are having a friendly argument over a policy issue, ask the person you disagree with to explain how their preferred policy would work, describing "step by step, from start to finish, the causal path from the policy to the effects it was supposed to have." A study says that's the best way to get someone to "soften their views" and get them to realize that they don't have a good "understanding of the issues." This seems even more useful as a self-exercise. I want to try it on myself to see if I'm even more ignorant than I think I am. The best way to win an argument Image: Shutterstock Read the rest...