As a wise man once side: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they never stopped to think if they should."

Is this real life? — Read the rest

A Vermont man was so bladdered when arrested by Ontario Provincial Police that he did not realize he had made his way into another country. CNC News reports that the 52-year-old man was charged with impaired driving in Cobden, Ontario after the truck he was driving was found with flat tires "stuck in a drive-thru" at about 5 a.m. — Read the rest

Orcas in the Iberian Peninsula have been attacking boats for years. Hundreds of yachts and fishing vessels have been rammed or had their rudders smashed, and several have been sunk. The reason behind the attacks has been a mystery. Now a multi-year study of the orcas' behavior has been published, concluding that the apparent attacks are just young orcas playing. — Read the rest

In Woodbury, Connecticut, police arrested Herbert Irving Miller, 63, pastor of United Methodist Church, for allegedly dealing meth. Makes sense.

According to police, he had made the unorthodox decision to offer the drug to couples in exchange for the opportunity to watch them having sex. — Read the rest

Icon of the Seas, Royal Caribbean's newest ship, is the largest cruise ship in the world (previously). It set sail Saturday, January 27, out of Miami on its first voyage, a sold-out seven-night Caribbean cruise. The massive ship, which cost 2 billion dollars to build, is 1200 feet long and weighs over 250,000 gross tons. — Read the rest

Engineers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) have invented a new type of "safe" fuel that won't ignite unless an electric current is applied, making it safer than conventional fuels that can ignite from a flame.

The new fuel is based on an ionic liquid, a form of liquefied salt with a lower melting point than table salt and low vapor pressure. — Read the rest

HP wants you to print things through its cloud service, wherein you pay a subscription fee for ink and your usage is routed through its servers. To encourage you to do this, it covers the USB port on one model with a sticker with a No Smoking-style "No USB" logo on it–lest you simply plug in your printer and start printing things with it before you've endured the hard sell via network setup. — Read the rest

A pair of orcas near South Africa have developed a taste for great white shark livers, and have learned to kill the giant fish, remove its liver with "surgical" precision, and leave the rest of the carcass. Link to the Phys.org — Read the rest

American grandmaster Hans Niemann filed a $100m lawsuit yesterday against world champion Magnus Carlsen, rival Hikaru Nakamura and the website chess.com, all of whom have accused him of cheating. "My lawsuit speaks for itself," Niemann writes, linking to it. — Read the rest

Andrew Wodzianski is a DC-area artist whose work often riffs off of nerdy pop cultural touchstones and ephemera. His pieces make references to comic books, 8-bit video games, monster movies, and tabletop gaming.

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, September 28, 1987, he created pieces of meme-styled art that draw inspiration from the Star Trek coloring books and ship blueprints of his youth. — Read the rest

To go on the shelf with all the others.

Bonus back issue set:

The Northern Sea Route along the Bering Route has typically been open for passage from July to November. The rest of the year, the Arctic ice is just too thick for any ships to pass. In 2020, a Russian tanker was able to make the trip from the Yamal peninsula down to Northern China as early as May:

The LNG carrier passed through the Bering Strait and entered the Pacific Ocean on May 31 and the ship is expected in the port of Tangshan in northern China on June 11 after a 25 day voyage, compared to 36 days through the Suez Canal.

I have always had a thing for sprues, the plastic frames used in the injection molding process and to hold model parts in place. Anyone who does any scale modeling or tabletop game modeling likely has tons of this stuff lying around (if you don't throw it all away). — Read the rest

US Representative Cedric Richmond (D-LA), who served as the national co-chair for the campaign of President-Elect Joe Biden, has been named a senior adviser for the Office of Public Engagement (formerly the Office of Public Liaison). The position deals largely with issues of "public policy" — which, in the Biden administration, means a lot of domestic climate policy. — Read the rest

Simon Stephenson, author of the new novel, Set My Heart To Five, wrote the following exclusive essay for Boing Boing. — MF

Welcome To The Misstopia

When I moved to Los Angeles in 2013, there were no mosquitoes here. Maybe it was not a wonder on the scale of the Pacific Ocean as seen from Malibu's Point Dume, or even just the outlandishly-sized produce in my local grocery store, but it was one more way in which the Golden State lived up to its name. — Read the rest

From Rolling Stone:

A new Trump administration rule relaxing guidelines that govern the transport of liquefied natural gas could create "bomb trains" with enough explosive power to level whole cities, environmental groups say. A coalition of organizations led by the nonprofit Earthjustice has sued the administration, challenging the rule, which is scheduled to go into effect on Monday.

The Washington Redskins will "retire" its name today, according to a report in Sports Business Daily. Its owners long declared their intention to keep the racist moniker irrespective of criticism, but this summer's widespread unrest over police violence rattled the team's advertisers and sponsors, who in turn liquefied the ground under their feet. — Read the rest

Imperial Oil is Exxon's Canadian subsidiary, with control the majority of Canada's tar sand oil — the filthiest, most climate-damaging oil in the world. Calgary's Glenbow Museum has a largely unregarded archive of historical internal Imperial Oil documents, which were retrieved by Desmog and the Climate Investigations Center and turned over to The Intercept.

After Lenovo bought out IBM's Thinkpad business, they began to tinker with the classic and famously immutable laptop designs: in small ways at first, and then in much larger ones. I buy a new Thinkpad every year (I promised myself a new laptop every year as a dividend from the savings when I stopped smoking) and the first decade's worth were practically perfect: they ran various GNU/Linux flavors without a hitch, the hard-drives were swappable in two minutes by removing a single screw, and the keyboard could be replaced without any tools in less than a minute.

In 2019 a single bluefin tuna, weighing 279 kilograms, sold at auction in Tokyo's famous Tsukiji fish market for $3.1 million dollars. That comes out to $315/ounce, making for a very expensive piece of sashimi.

In this video from Abroad in Japan, we take a trip to the northern coast of Honshu, where Japan's prized tuna are caught. — Read the rest