By Rob Beschizza at 6:36 pm Sunday, Jan 1
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Ill. Rob Beschizza
2011 was one weird year.
By Mark Frauenfelder
Mark's picks of the very best apps currently available for OS X (with many available on other platforms), in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
By Cory Doctorow
There's something really wonderful about having a great cup of coffee in your hotel room, especially when you're on a brutal 6AM-10PM tour schedule that has you bouncing around like a hyperactive ping-pong ball. Here's how to master the art on the lam.
By David Pescovitz
Mark was a true Renaissance man -- a transplant surgeon, medical researcher, fine artist, and philanthropist.
By Xeni Jardin
He accepted the award with characteristic humility and good humor, saying, "I am just a single monk; no more, no less," later adding for the Amnesty volunteers and human rights advocates assembled, "Your work is good. Please continue."
By Rob Beschizza
The dreams in which you died were the best you ever had.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
For most, nuclear power is a black box technology. Radioactive stuff goes in. Electricity and nuclear waste comes out. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that set of information is enough to get by on. But them one day, an emergency happens.
By Mark Frauenfelder
Last year, a company called California Cedar Products bought the rights to the Blackwing trademark and manufactured a pencil called the Palomino Blackwing. Will it become Mark's pencil of choice?
By Cory Doctorow
Boing Boing has been on the receiving end of one or two stupid legal threats in our day, but this one from the firm of Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh took the cake, the little cake topper, the frosting and all the candles, as well as the box and the cake-stand and the ornamental forks.
By David Pescovitz
In the world of design, urban mobility is much more than how you get from point A to point B. Urban mobility operates at the intersection of myriad innovation freeways, from architecture to infrastructure, technology to transportation, city planning to style. It's about feet, fashion, bikes, busses, automobiles, and yes, even cars that fly.
By Xeni Jardin
"I think I was 12. It was a shock of course, but at the time, initially we didn’t know what happened. I heard about it from somebody in the village. It’s a very, very different kind of bomb, they said, we have to immediately stop the war. It didn't make sense to me at all, in any way. We didn't understand."
By Rob Beschizza
Just how small can a game go? Here's an adventure only 9x9 pixels in size. It's barely-playable and has all the charm of a malicious lite-brite, but once you've found the sword, shield and the all-important, all-healing pub, you can dash through it in a few minutes.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
Peer-reviewed... How often have you read that phrase? If we tried to count, there would probably be some powers of 10 involved. It's clear from the context that peer-reviewed journal articles are the hard currency of science. But the context is less obliging on the whys and wherefores.
By Mark Frauenfelder
Service can be slow at the hotels of Costa Rica. Fortunately, coffee beans are in abundance. Mark and his family invented games to play with them; not all were successful.
By Cory Doctorow
Tim Harford is a Financial Times columnist and the presenter of Radio 4's More or Less, which won the Royal Statistical Society's 2010 award for statistical excellence in broadcast journalism. He is also the author of several books, including The Undercover Economist. His latest is Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.
By Xeni Jardin
Boing Boing visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a peek inside the clean room where NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft (MSL) have been built for launch in late 2011 from Florida.
By David Pescovitz
Ossian Brown was a member of the dark, magical electronic music group Coil and is currently in Cyclobe, a duo with his partner Stephen Thrower. Ossian is a strange attractor. Weird things find him. Like his exquisite collection of antique vernacular photographs of Halloweens past.
By Rob Beschizza
Do you remember the lost decade of the 19A0s, struck from memory by collective cultural trauma? Our secret history is revealed in arty tumblogs, file-sharing forums and garish music videos, by a secretive cabal working to prepare us to learn the truth and its astonishing consequences.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
It seems that we all owe the Insane Clown Posse a bit of an apology.
By Mark Frauenfelder
A guided hike around the old Hollywoodland neighborhood in Los Angeles, guided by Hargobind Singh, or Hargo for short.
By Cory Doctorow
After confiscating Cory's belt buckle, security staff at Britain's Gatwick Airport agreed on one thing: Allen keys are allowed. Right then, that's UK aviation security sorted.
By David Pescovitz
Over the last year, the Institute for the Future researched the future of science to identify big areas of science it thinks will have a transformative impact over the next decade.
By Xeni Jardin
Eight months after a disaster crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, foreign journalists got a first look inside.
By Rob Beschizza
In 1212, thousands of vagrants, bandits and starving children converged on Genoa in search of shelter, adventure and heaven's gate. But their footsteps fell on a path already well-trodden.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
The air grows thick. Dark clouds churn like a pot of boiling water overhead. The colors of reality become oversaturated--greens too green, yellow a sickly gold. This is what tornado weather looks like, and the United States has been hit with a lot of it lately.
By Mark Frauenfelder
Mark's 7-year-old daughter designed a hand drawn "computer game." One plays it a row at a time, from the bottom up, with each apparently imposing its own set of rules.
By Cory Doctorow
Pratchett makes a serious discourse on serious subjects funny, gripping and never trivial; a neat summary of why we love him as much as we do.
By David Pescovitz
Chris Watson was a founder of the seminal 1970s experimental music/performance art group Cabaret Voltaire who has since become a highly-respected ambient sound recordist for television, film, and radio.
By Rob Beschizza
Sony's latest ultraportable laptop is stunning. It's beautiful and lightweight, with a classy metal chassis and impeccably tasteful trim. It has a powerful i7 CPU, 1600x900 13.1" display and a lightning-fast SSD. It's half a pound lighter than the competition. And it exemplifies everything that is wrong with its creator.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
The disaster in Japan produced so much radioactive sulfur that it was obvious when the plume reached the shores of California. The sulfur from Fukushima isn't exactly the same thing as the sulfur dioxide from Chinese power plants, but it is close enough that it can serve as a marker.
By Rob Beschizza at 6:33 pm Sunday, Jan 1
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Here's just a sampler of the many fabulous stories, features and oddities we published last year from guests, freelancers and friends. May 2012 bring forth just as many excellent words!
By Jacob Appelbaum
The Iceland Air lounge has helpful staff—the welcome desk offers helpful tips on avoiding
airport hassles and even provides free internet access. They'll help
you read your boarding pass and even answer questions about all its
confusing symbols. Should one ever be
in the unfortunate position of having the dreaded 'SSSS' marked upon it, the help desk will suggest you wait
until the exact boarding time before even approaching customs. They'll
even apologize, as if they had any hand in the process. And that was their
recommendation to me, when I had it clearly printed on mine. It was not my lucky day.
By Lee Billings
In expanding outward into space, patience, not velocity, may be the greatest virtue. After all, we're already on an interstellar spacecraft called the Earth, sailing with the Sun and its retinue of other planets around the Milky Way in circuits lasting 250 million years.
By Sean Bonner
"As an enthusiast, I'm constantly annoying my local baristas with questions. As an advocate—well, my advocacy work to date has consisted mostly of caffeinated rants to friends. But a few months ago, the opportunity to explore that a little deeper presented itself."
By Susannah Breslin
From war, art. This is the basic premise of The Graffiti of War , a project from two combat veterans that features the unconventional military art that soldiers, seamen, marines, and airmen (and women) create during deployments
By Omar Chatriwala
Thumbing through my passport, he suddenly stops and looks me in the eye. "Wait, where are you from? Who do you work for? ... Please have a seat - over there." I can't be sure if it was the Iraq visa, the India visa, or the numerous Qatar & Saudi visas in my American passport he found suspicious. Or perhaps it was my telling him in Arabic that "my origin" is half Indian, half Hispanic.
By Richard Dawkins
Plants cannot think, and you'd have to be pretty eccentric to believe they can suffer. Plausibly the same might be true of earthworms. But what about cows?
By Richard Dawkins
The prohibition against taking more than very small quantities of liquids or unguents on planes is demonstrably ludicrous. It started as one of those "Look at us, we're taking decisive action" displays, the ones designed to cause maximum inconvenience to the public in order to make the dimwitted Dundridges who rule our lives feel important and look busy.
By Mary Dery
On Ebay, "Poignant" is a pet word in the collectible postmortem photo category. As in: "POIGNANT POST MORTEM BABY," an antique photograph of an infant, asleep forever in her toy casket. Her arched eyebrows give her a fretful look, querulous but a little quizzical, too, as if she's startled to realize that death, unlike gas, doesn't pass.
By Glenn Fleishman
"Everything has its season, and the paucity of visitors corresponds both to the level of competition from general technology reporting and gadget sites, and to the ease with which Wi-Fi now performs. When Wi-Fi was hard, my site was useful; when it's like breathing air, not so much."
By Alan Dean Foster
A selection of novelist Alan Dean Foster's favorite encounters with dangerous beasts.
By Andrea James
The skies have stories to tell. Some of the stories make for interesting puzzles, particularly sightings of previously unseen objects in earth orbit.
By David Ng
One of the principle claims for allowing pharmaceutical companies to continue their hold on current patent practices, is that research and development (or R&D) is very expensive. It just keeps coming up, and seems to be all the rage when arguing against regulation.
By Avi Solomon
Inteviews with Robert Sapolsky, William O. Stephens, Jack Zylkin, David Eagleman, William Powers, Michael Greer, Al Worden and many more.
By Adario Strange
The only thing more disconcerting than the typical calm Japanese people so often exhibit in the face of all manner of outlandish occurrences is actually seeing the normally buttoned-up, retrained populace lose their cool en masse. That is truly scary.
By Oxblood Ruffian
Anonymous seems to be everywhere. But percolating below the surface is an inchoate group of women working under the Anonymous banner: They're called AnonyMiss.
Like Infinite Jest, DFW left things messy in Pale King. It's frustrating. Nothing was neatly tied up, he left too much for us to do ourselves. Nothing is whole, and catharsis isn't delivered to you, you have to go in and grab it and tear it out of the text.
Jennifer Jenkins sez, "
What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978... Works from 1955. Asimov's The End of Eternity, Nabokov's Lolita, the play Inherit the Wind, Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, Disney's Lady and the Tramp, Rebel Without a Cause, The Seven Year Itch, the music for Blue Suede Shoes and Tutti Frutti, and Laurence Olivier's film version of Richard III... What is entering the public domain today? Nothing."
— Cory
