In an effort to prove that there are authorities even stupider than those in the UK when it comes to parsing Twitter, the Chinese government has sentenced a woman to… Read the rest of the article: Chinese woman kidnapped to labor camp on her wedding day over sarcastic re-Tweet

Jagex, the UK game dev behind RuneScape, refused to be intimidated by patent trolls Paltalk, who claim a broad patent on what amounts to all online multiplayer gaming. Microsoft settled… Read the rest of the article: RuneScape devs refuse to cave in to patent trolls

Samuel Arbesman from the Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science has a fascinating look at the parallels between the way that text mutates over the years (say, because sloppy scholars… Read the rest of the article: Similarities between genetic and textual mutations

Reuters blogger Felix Salmon has scorching media-criticism over the coverage of the "debt-strike" in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, where the governor has urged citizens to stop paying some… Read the rest of the article: Understanding the "microcredit crisis" in Andhra Pradesh

Here's a sketch of some of the current research into the distributed intelligence of octopuses, which appears to be spread out among the neuron-dense tissues of the tentacles: Octopuses have… Read the rest of the article: Clever octopus tentacles stuffed with neurons

On the Vintage Ads LiveJournal community, user Spuzzlightyear has a roundup post of favorite scanned ads of yesteryear — fantastic stuff! Best of everyone else…#3

Looking for a gig in the glamorous world of publishing? Specialty SF publisherNight Shade Books (who put out Paoli Bacigalupi's Windup Girl, among other worthy books) is looking for an… Read the rest of the article: Night Shade Books looking for an editor

Dinosaurs and Robots brings us a look at Luigi Colani's 1970 LeMans Concept Car, "a hand-sculpted, biomorphic, plexiglass-domed, pivoting cockpit pod onto the business end of a Lamborghini Miura," presently… Read the rest of the article: Freaky 1970 bubblecar concept vehicle, then and now

The Phonekerchief is a mobile-phone-signal blocking hankie that you can wrap around your phone while you're at dinner as a way of telling your dining companion that s/he is more… Read the rest of the article: Phonekerchief: cellular-blocking hankie for polite dinner social signalling

James sez, "Sacha Goldberger found his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother Frederika, a WWII survivor, feeling lonely and depressed. To cheer her up, he photographed her dressed up as a fictional superhero.… Read the rest of the article: Man dresses depressed Holocaust-survivor grandma as superhero, cheers her up

WileyDogg sez, "The PBS broadcast of Tina Fey's acceptance speech was edited to remove comments about Sarah Palin and other conservatives. As Mark Twain said many years ago 'In America–as… Read the rest of the article: PBS censors Tina Fey's Sarah Palin joke

Michael Geist sez, "Canadian Heritage James Moore appeared on public television yesterday to defend his copyright bill and to oppose a new levy system. In doing so, he made the… Read the rest of the article: Canadian Heritage Minister inadvertently damns his own copyright bill

Sources at the TSA are bitterly angry that CNN is covering the global horror at the new pornoscanner/genital-fondling procedure: because, you know, it hurts their feelings. Unlike, say, irradiating breast-cancer… Read the rest of the article: TSA is sad that we don't want them to touch our junk

Are you a murder investigator who is secretly ashamed of your inability to spot the signs of a Satanic ritual killing? Fear not: this gentleman will help you spot subtle… Read the rest of the article: HOWTO investigate a Satanic ritual killing

I'm not a dog person. It's not that I don't like dogs, but they're not my thing, and usually I skip over any news-item, blog-post or conversation that contains the… Read the rest of the article: Hilarious story of disastrous cross-country move with dogs

So much for any hope that a Conservative-LibDem coalition would signal a beginning to sane network/information policy in Britain. Ed Vaizey, the new Minister of Culture, has given the go-ahead… Read the rest of the article: UK gov't promises to allow telcos to hold Brits hostage on "two-speed" Internet

Erin, a prominent "Mommyblogger," had her vagina and breasts fondled without notice or warning by a TSA screener in Tampa Dayton. In her view — and her lawyer's (and mine)… Read the rest of the article: Sexually assaulted by a TSA groper

The UK Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has apologized for 40 years' worth of clandestine, illegal mutilation of the corpses of British nuclear energy workers. When these workers died, pathologists and… Read the rest of the article: UK gov't apologizes for decades of secret nuclear power industry corpse-mutilation

Oleg Volk has a smashing new TSA checkpoint warning side: Achtung! TSA breast-groping ahead! Achtung, TSA!   Make the TSA Meet the Resistance – Boing Boing TSA demands testicular fondling… Read the rest of the article: Achtung! TSA!

These South Asian gentlemen have their parotta-cooking down to an art — they fling the bread with perfect, unseeing grace to one another. One has to wonder: why not move… Read the rest of the article: Balletic grilled bread prep