Boing Boing

Boing Boing

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Renaissance painters kept adding a realistic fly to their portraits
Look closely at a lot of 15th- and 16th-century European portraits and you’ll find a housefly sitting on the frame, the sitter’s sleeve, or a page of an…
 • Boing Boing
The math-solving horse who fooled scientists still haunts AI research
In early 1900s Germany, a math teacher named Wilhelm von Osten toured the country with Clever Hans, a horse who could apparently add, subtract…
 • Boing Boing
The time two guys bolted a Ford Pinto to a Cessna and called it a flying car
In 1971 two Northrop-trained engineers in Van Nuys set out to build a flying car called the AVE Mizar, and the design was about as literal as it sounds…
 • Boing Boing
The stubborn old belief that certain weather precedes earthquakes
The idea that a particular kind of weather — hot, still, and heavy — arrives just before an earthquake is old and stubborn.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
Canadian politician mindlessly reads AI-generated speech, prompt and all
Bill Oliver, a Progressive Conservative Party legislator in New Brunswick, Canada, delivered a rousing speech last week.
 • Rob Beschizza
The newest bipartisan issue: not wanting an AI data center next door
The first job AI replaces may be party loyalty.
 • Jason Weisberger
Half the sea lion pups died at La Jolla Cove. People are arguing about cones
Half the sea lion pups born this season at La Jolla Cove have died, according to the Sierra Club Seal Society, compared with 10% in the nearby area…
 • Jason Weisberger
Book Corners is a growing map of places to leave or grab a free book
Book Corners maps more than 37,000 neighborhood libraries, mostly of the little free kind but also indoor book exchanges at cafés and the like: “The…
 • Rob Beschizza
Grandpa Pudding Brains encounters the concept of elapsed time
The teleprompter had, in fact, supplied all the necessary information.
 • Jason Weisberger
Border agents entered his password. His phone erased itself. Now he faces a felony
Cop City protester Samuel Tunick was forced to turn over his password during a warrantless search.
 • Jason Weisberger
For centuries people have watched glowing orbs drift through storms
For many centuries, people have seen balls of light during thunderstorms.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
To ace a hacking test, AI broke out and hacked a real company
OpenAI runs a test where it switches off its models’ safety brakes and dares them to break into things, to see how dangerous they’re getting.
 • Ellsworth Toohey
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