In my latest Guardian column, If GCHQ wants to improve national security it must fix our technology, I argue that computer security isn't really an engineering issue, it's a public health issue. As with public health, it's more important to be sure that our pathogens are disclosed, understood and disclosed than it is to keep them secret so we can use them against our enemies.
Michael Geist writes, "Canada and South Korea announced agreement on a comprehensive trade agreement earlier today. The focus is understandably on tariff issues, but the agreement also contains a full chapter on intellectual property (note that the governments have only released summaries of the agreement, not the full text, which is still being drafted). The IP chapter is significant for what it does not include. Unlike many other trade deals - particularly those involving the U.S., European Union, and Australia - the Canada-South Korea deal is content to leave domestic intellectual property rules largely untouched. The approach is to reaffirm the importance of intellectual property and ensure that both countries meet their international obligations, but not to use trade agreements as a backdoor mechanism to increase IP protections."
Boars, Gore, and Swords is hosted by stand-up comedians Ivan Hernandez and Red Scott. In each episode they break down HBO's Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. They also talk about movies, TV, science fiction, fantasy, and lots of other things. NSFW.
Midway through “The Princess and The Queen”, Ivan and Red take a break to cover… a web series? With direction by David Fincher, and starring Robin Wright, Kevin Spacey, and Kate Mara, House of Cards is easily the best web series of all time, certainly the one with the highest budget. They cover the reasons Game of Thrones fans would like House of Cards, dog problems, Presidential canon in fictional political shows, those three words every woman wants to here, heirlooms, and absolute, unquestioning, loyalty.
The documentary Teenage, about the history of the concept of teenagers, will open in theaters on March 14th, 2014. Above, an exclusive clip from the movie about Frank Sinatra bobby soxers.
Teenagers didn't always exist. They had to be invented. As the cultural landscape around the world was thrown into turmoil during the industrial revolution, and with a chasm erupting between adults and youth, the concept of a new generation took shape. Whether in America, England, or Germany, whether
party-crazed Flappers or hip Swing Kids, zealous Nazi Youth or frenzied Sub-Debs, it didn't matter - this
was a new idea of youth. They were all "Teenagers."
A hypnotic rumination on the genesis of youth culture from the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th, Matt Wolf's Teenage is a living collage of rare archival material, filmed portraits, and diary
entries read by Jena Malone, Ben Whishaw, and others. Inspired by Jon Savage's book and set to a
shimmering contemporary score by Bradford Cox (Deerhunter / Atlas Sound), Teenage is a
mesmerizing trip into the past and a riveting look at the very idea of "coming-of-age."
Buried in a story on alcohol and hangovers that comes to a lot of 'duh' conclusions (say, did you know that feeling crappy and swearing to never drink that much again is not a good predictor of actually never drinking that much again?) is this odd little bit of correlation: Financial stress is linked to an increased likelihood of experiencing a hangover. — Maggie
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In
Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism , Pulitzer-winning writer Ron Suskind tells the incredible story of how his son Owen disappeared into "regressive autism" at the age of three, losing the ability to speak or understand speech and developmentally degenerating across a variety of metrics, only to reemerge a few years later, able to communicate through references and dialog from the Disney movies he obsessively watches.
A long excerpt in the New York Times, generously illustrated with Owen's expressive fan-art, hints at a book that is wrenching and inspirational by turns. It reminds me of 3500, Ron Miles's memoir of raising a son with autism who was able to engage with the world through thousands of re-rides of Snow White's Scary Adventures at Walt Disney World.
Suskind is a brilliant writer, and the excerpt is deeply moving. I've pre-ordered my copy.
One year ago today Principles for 21st century living: 1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure;
2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them...
Five years ago today Dr Mario agitates for universal health care in Mushroom Kingdom: The king of all Koopas would love to take over every hospital in Mushroom Kingdom, to use them to extract Peach's DNA or create a horrific suit that looks like me to trick the princess. But government-funded doesn't mean government-run.
Ten years ago today We're a Movable Type blog now! After over four years with Blogger, Boing Boing is now a Movable Type blog! Blogger is an excellent tool, but we'd outgrown it and it was time for a change.
ADVERTISER MESSAGE: As we celebrate with all of our friends who make St. Patrick’s Day great, we raise a glass to Jameson for sponsoring this story.
I'm sitting at my local bar, the Pelican Inn, enjoying a whiskey and remembering the many wonderful experiences I've had in Irish bars around the world. It is the folks behind an Irish bar that make it such a comfortable place. I find them ubiquitous and have for most of my adult life, seeking out the Irish pub as an island of calm and safe normalcy, regardless of where my travels take me.
A blue balloon hangs from a railing on the porch of a home belonging to a family of four in Tampa, Florida March 8, 2014. A pregnant woman and her family were hospitalized after eating steak bought from a Wal-Mart that local authorities believed was laced with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, according to the medical examiner's initial test results. REUTERS/Ken Knight
A family of four in Florida, including a pregnant mom and two young kids, were hospitalized after consuming a dinner of LSD-laced steak. First, 24-year-old dad Ronnie Morales complained of heart palpitations and dizziness sick after eating dinner. His 31-year-old girlfriend Jessica Rosado drove him to a nearby hospital, but she too soon fell ill. She was 9 months pregnant, and doctors performed an emergency delivery of her baby, who is alive and healthy. Her daughters, ages 7 and 6, also became sick that night. The entire family reportedly began hallucinating, and each member had to be intubated. It sounds like they all consumed very high doses. From WLTX Tampa:
he NeXT computer was used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to develop the World Wide Web, and acted as the world's first ever web server. via nationalmediamuseum.org.uk.
The World Wide Web turns 25 on Wednesday, March 12, if you consider Sir Tim Berners-Lee's paper proposing the system as the web's inception date. On PBS NewsHour tonight, a conversation about the last 25 years of the internet, and the next. I am among the guests. Do tune in, and I'll post video here when it's online.
The Web turns 25th on Wednesday! Follow the conversation using #web25 and share your earliest memories of the Web with us! #web25
At Mosaic — a new online publication funded by the Wellcome Trust that features long reads on science and medicine — Rose George has followed the story of Radha, a 16-year-old Nepali girl forced by custom into unsafe and unsanitary conditions every time she has her period.
Brooklyn-based photographer Joey L. created breathtaking portraits of ascetics in northern India, Nepal, and other parts of the region. The series is titled Holy Men. Above, Lal Baba, age 85. Joey L is best known for creating the Twilight movie posters and other commercial projects. Holy Men is part of his personal body of work that also includes the stunning Cradle of Mankind photos of tribal people in Ethiopia's Omo Valley. Below, filmmaker Cale Glendening's documentary about the Holy Men project. (via Daily Grail)
This is a single particle of interplanetary dust, its image captured with the help of a scanning electron microscope by researchers at the University of Washington and Germany's Institut für Planetologie.
Now zoom out and think about all the dust particles like this that float around the inner solar system. That amount of interplanetary dust is a "1 zodi", a unit of measurement I never even thought to assume existed.
This beautiful object is a corrosion cast of bronchi and trachea, c. 1880-1890, most likely from a rabbit, sheep, or dog. It's part of the new Body of Knowledge exhibition at the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture.
Corrosion casts have been part of anatomical teaching from the 17th century to the present, particularly for creating display specimens. A rapidly hardening substance, often metal or plastic, is injected into blood spaces or other cavities. Then the tissue is dissolved away by strong acids or bases. This cast was created using a mixture of bismuth, lead, tin, and cadmium. After injection, the tissue was dissolved in potassium hydroxide.
In my latest Guardian column, If GCHQ wants to improve national security it must fix our technology, I argue that computer security isn't really an engineering issue, it's a public health issue. As with public health, it's more important to be sure that our pathogens are disclosed, understood and disclosed than it is to keep them secret so we can use them against our enemies.
