In her final hours, mum's death sleep grew louder. Morphine lost control of her body. Murmurs rose into a harrowing whine, swelling with each unconscious breath.

It's not even clear where it's from, but alongside various stories about Trump's healthcare legislation woes, it's been on the BBC News homepage for what, two days now? For this morning's one, they've started zooming into it. By tomorrow, if the legislation has yet to pass, we'll be inside his weird angry tired mouth. — Read the rest

Behold, the Blue Marlin, a "semi-submersible heavy lift ship" that is capable of hoisting and transplanting other, full-sized ships (that is ships as big or bigger than a US Destroyer-class vessel) all around the oceans.

The only thing at Hypernom.com appears to be a 3D fractal cage. You can move toward the edge with the WASD and arrow keys. But as you approach it, a new level of detail pops in and you seem no closer to the perimeter. — Read the rest

When the government of Romanian PM Sorin Grindeanu announced that they would gut the country's anticorruption statutes, removing criminal sanctions for official corruption, the country erupted into mass protests.

On Quartz, Dave Edwards and Helen Edwards assert that after studying 30 professions, they've concluded that the occupations that are most resistant to roboticization are those that are "unpredictable" — CEOs, school psychologists, economists, allergists, immunologists, and environmental scientists.

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel tries to convey the vastness of space by inviting you to side-scroll through our Solar System with (you guessed it) the scale of 1 pixel to the diameter of the moon. These scale comparisons always manage to temporarily invoke something in me that approaches intuitive understanding, but before long, I can feel it fading and being replaced with the nonsensical science fictional conceit of solar systems as being something tractable. — Read the rest

Ghost sharks, aka chimaeras, are elusive relatives of sharks and rays that live in the black depths of the ocean, as far down as 2,600 meters. The Ghost Shark was captured on video by a remotely operated vehicle deployed on a geology expedition by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in waters off Hawaii and California. — Read the rest

Gollancz have announced a gorgeous set of new editions of William Gibson's seminal Sprawl books, which began with 1984's Hugo, Nebula and Philip K Dick award-winning novel Neuromancer, designed by Daniel Brown (previously), using software that created fractals based on 1970s apartment buildings.

The Boing Boing Store features tons of headphones with a range of functionality, quality levels, and prices. Today we're featuring 2 of the best additions, fresh to the Store this week.

The first set of bluetooth headphones are great for working out or everyday listening, while the wired second set will be really attractive to anyone who is a serious gamer or wants to hunker down in the library at school and get some work done. — Read the rest

Journalist Thomas Fuller returned to the United States after 27 years abroad, mainly in Asia. He moved to San Francisco and wrote about the reverse culture shock he experienced. The thing that struck him the most was the disparity between the wealthy (ganja yoga, organic ice cream sandwiches, vegan shoes, Bluetooth compatible toothbrushes) and the poor (outbursts of the mentally ill on the sidewalks, vaguely human forms inside cardboard boxes). — Read the rest

Last week while dining at Denny's in Santa Monica, Dick Van Dyke and his a cappella Vantastix buddies broke out into song. Although not quite a flash mob, it was a surprise performance of the song "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" for the lucky diners at the coffee shop. — Read the rest

Martin O'Leary not only made a cool fantasy map generator, he's giving away the source code and has described the process at a high enough level for an idiot like me to partly understand how it works.

I wanted to make maps that look like something you'd find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth.

British science writer Ed Yong's new book I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life is a history of gut flora and bacteria, which first entered our consciousness as a scourge to be eliminated and has lately become something between a cure-all (see the universe of "probiotic" food supplements) and a superfood (think of the fecal transplants that have shown such promise in treating a variety of debilitating and dangerous health conditions).

When internet laymen suggest that Trump is manifestly mentally ill—the abusive narcissism, the total absence of empathy, the 400-word sentences tracing random paths through the vaporwave fractal landscape of his paranoid obsessions—there are yet fair grounds for concern. You're not a doctor. — Read the rest

I am absolutely thrilled with this Manfrotto 3-way head. My last one took nearly a decade to wear out, mostly due to abuse in salt water environments, and I had to have a new one.

This head works great with some of my larger lenses on board. — Read the rest

CETA — the "Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement" is a secretly negotiated deal between Canada and the EU, mirroring many of the most controversial provisions in notorious deals like ACTA, TPP, and TTIP — including the "corporate sovereignty" clauses that permit multinational corporations to sue governments in closed courts, and force them to repeal environmental, labour and safety rules (albeit dressed up in new clothes that make the provisions appear different, without making any real difference).

The world's first amphibious centipede has just been confirmed. It swims, and unlike other centipedes who hunt on land, this one hunts in water. It has super long legs to help it swim and, like all centipedes, is carnivorous. It also has a powerful bite, causing excruciating pain. — Read the rest

Thea video feedback emulator offers a vague memory of fooling with video cameras and a strong flavor of crisp and fractal generative art, The results lurk somewhere between the decades. Click and drag your results for wild (and often brightly-flickering) variations. — Read the rest

Ethan Zuckerman — formerly of Global Voices, now at the MIT Center for Civic Media — has spent his career trying to find thoughtful, effective ways to use technology as a lever to make positive social change (previously), but that means that he also spends a lot of time in the company of people making dumb, high-profile, destructive suggestions for using technology to "solve" problems in ways that make them much worse.