Boing Boing, May 27, 2025
Infrared contact lenses, Harvard's tenure drama, and a nostalgic look at Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
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Happy Tuesday! Today's stories showcase revolutionary tech as scientists develop color-shifting infrared contact lenses that could make night vision goggles obsolete. Meanwhile, Harvard makes history by revoking a professor's tenure over academic fraud — the first such case in 80 years. For lighter fare, we revisit the beloved 1968 classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with some fascinating behind-the-scenes tales. Plus, a Darwin Award nominee attempts to board his departing cruise ship by scaling a mooring rope (spoiler: it doesn't end well).
Fun facts about "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"
Jason Weisberger / 11:53 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
When I was a kid Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was constantly on Tom Hatten's Family Film Festival, and I loved seeing it.
Dick Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes are just outstanding. The tale of a well-meaning, but bumbling inventor, his kids, and a candy heiress on an adventure in a car, with just enough personality. This was during an era when Disney was also making movies about cars with too much personality, such as The Love Bug.
Solve 16 cartoonish crimes in this award-winning cooperative board game
Mark Frauenfelder / 11:07 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
If "Where's Waldo?" is too easy (or dull) for you, give MicroMacro: Crime City a try. In this cooperative tabletop game, players use task cards and a giant-sized, ultra-detailed, black-and-white cartoon drawing of a densely populated city to solve 16 crimes, one at a time.
Each crime has its own packet of cards. For example, one crime starts with the following description: "A man was shot dead in a dark corner west of the market square. Many people heard the shot, but there is no trace of the perpetrator." The card shows a man lying on the ground next to a bag of french fries. His eyes are X'd out, indicating he's dead. The first task card asks you to find the crime scene. That's your cue to pore over the map and find the spot where the victim was murdered. Once you find it, you draw the next task card and start searching for that clue. By the end, you will have solved a complex crime. It takes about 45 minutes to complete a crime.
The game set comes with a magnifying glass, which you'll need unless you have excellent eyesight.
The MicroMacro website has a playable demo with a small section of the city, but the paper version (75 x 110 cm) is a more fun.
Murder theme notwithstanding, there's nothing particularly gruesome about the game and young kids will have fun playing it.
Trump CDC's plan for kids: vaccines and fluoride bad, lead good
Jason Weisberger / 10:37 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Under the guidance of Trump henchman RFK Jr, the CDC spends time and money investigating things we already know, and moving away from protecting children.
The benefits of vaccines and fluoride are understood. Cities have tried experiments where they ceased adding fluoride to their water supplies, and dental cavities increased. Vaccines and inoculations have been employed by "Americans" since George Washington's time as "General & Commander in Chief of the army of the United Colonies and of all the forces raised or to be raised by them." Even the Romans knew lead poisoning was bad.
On April 1, the staff of the CDC's Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program was terminated as part of the agency's reduction in force, according to NPR. The staff included epidemiologists, statisticians, and advisors who specialized in lead exposures and responses.
The cuts were immediately consequential to health officials in Milwaukee, who are currently dealing with a lead exposure crisis in public schools. Six schools have had to close, displacing 1,800 students. In April, the city requested help from the CDC's lead experts, but the request was denied—there was no one left to help.
In a Congressional hearing this week, US health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told lawmakers, "We have a team in Milwaukee."
But Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis told NPR that this is false. "There is no team in Milwaukee," he said. "We had a single [federal] staff person come to Milwaukee for a brief period to help validate a machine, but that was separate from the formal request that we had for a small team to actually come to Milwaukee for our Milwaukee Public Schools investigation and ongoing support there."
Inside Andy Warhol's Factory: A teenager's intimate memoir from 1977
Mark Frauenfelder / 10:18 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Fernanda Eberstadt, granddaughter of Wall Street financier Ferdinand Eberstadt, writes about working at Andy Warhol's Factory in 1977 when she was 16.
From her essay in Granta, titled "Buring Mao."
My parents – New York society people with an interest in downtown art – had first met Andy in the late fifties, when my father was working as a fashion photographer and Andy was still an illustrator dressing windows for Bonwit Teller. My father liked to say that back then he'd thought Andy Warhol an embarrassing little creep whose determination to be famous was clearly doomed. But my mother had a taste for oddball dreamers and she and Andy became friends; she appeared in one of his 1964 Screen Tests.
After begging parents for an introduction, the three of them met Warhol and his date (Bianca Jagger) at a French restaurant. They hit it off and she became part of the Factory. Her essay is full of funny tidbits. Here are a couple:
My favorite moment was at the end of the day when Andy put on his apron, picked up a broom, and swept the floor clean – I liked the monastic discipline, the humility of the act. If I got lucky, I would then share a ride uptown with either him or his business manager Fred Hughes, the enigmatic Texan dandy who was the one I actually had a crush on.
On these taxi rides, I became familiar with Andy's conversational technique, how he negotiated his mix of shyness, curiosity, malice. He was a persistent questioner, and what he wanted to hear was the most shameful thing about whomever it was we both knew, and because I wanted to please him, I inevitably divulged some incriminating tidbit and his reaction was always, 'Oh come on. Really???'
The mid to late 1970s marked a low point both in Andy's reputation and his creative output, and in those days the Factory's chief business seemed to be managing the Warhol brand: racking up corporate sponsorships; drumming up advertisements for Interview; above all, getting portraits commissioned. I too was inducted into the hustle – how many of my parents' rich friends could I persuade to commission a silkscreen portrait? If I succeeded, I would get 25 percent of the price, which I noted as being $25,000.
Streaming: Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre's "STERLING"
Jason Weisberger / 9:34 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre is sharing some great stuff from their archives! Check out Jim Turner as 1982 Senate Candidate Sterling Dell Zell!
Sunny Side will release videos from STERLING, a 35 comedy video series, on YouTube, TikTok and INSTAGRAM, Monday through Friday starting May 26, 2025.
Sterling Dell Zell was created to be the host of Duck's Breath Mystery Theatre's "The Blob Grows Up," one of twenty five comedy plays the troupe wrote and performed at clubs and colleges across the country. Hollywood actor Jim Turner co-founded the company and performs the over-the-top hilarious role.
Sterling ran for the Senate in December of 1982 and the first video in STERLING is a promotion for that unsuccessful campaign.
1970 BBC documentary about Ridley Scott's coffee commercial
Mark Frauenfelder / 9:20 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
In 1970, coffee growers hired an ad agency to convince young British people to drink more coffee. This 17-minute, black-and-white BBC documentary starts with a slow pan across a group of pasty-faced, chain smoking executives in suits watching a commercial built around an outrageous slogan: "The more you use, the more you get back." Shot in 1969, the features two beautiful young Swinging Londoners in the throes of fascination for one another, staring into each other's eyes as they sip coffee from mugs.
The documentary then goes inside advertising giant BBDO to interview the heads of various departments — research, creative, production — and covers the creation of a new commercial spot, directed by a young Ridley Scott (who would go on to direct Blade Runner and Alien, among other iconic movies). It's a fascinating look at an over-the-pond version of Mad Men. I could have happily watched a much longer version of this documentary.
For some reason, the documentary doesn't show the complete commercial, but I did find a 1971 Maxwell House Coffee commercial directed by Scott, which features Shakira Baksh, who went on to marry actor Michael Caine.
Here's a one hour and 20 minute reel of a bunch of commercials that Scott directed between 1968 and 2023, including perhaps his most famous, the 1984 ad introducing the Macintosh.
Third-party VPNs are still untrustworthy
Jason Weisberger / 9:09 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Unless you need to masquerade your geography to access a restricted website, get around a government restriction, or want to run BitTorrent, there isn't much use for a third-party VPN anymore.
As HTTPS has long since become the standard, third-party VPNs have lost much of their utility. Even necessary VPNs tend to complicate things, and frequently become the "Oh, yeah! I forgot about that" thing that has taken me offline. Here, it is demonstrated that you can obtain a high-quality Chinese military-linked VPN service from Apple's App Store. It is probably easier to find a crooked VPN provider than a good one.
TTP's investigation found that one in five of the top 100 free virtual private networks in the U.S. App Store during 2024 were surreptitiously owned by Chinese companies, which are obliged to hand over their users' browsing data to the Chinese government under the country's national security laws. Several of the apps traced back to Qihoo 360, a firm declared by the Defense Department to be a "Chinese Military Company." Qihoo did not respond to questions about its app-related holdings.
VPNs allow users to mask the IP address that can identify them, and, in theory, keep their internet browsing private. For that reason, they have been used by people around the world to sidestep government censorship or surveillance, or because they believe it will improve their online security. In the U.S., kids often download free VPNs to play games or access social media during school hours.
However, VPNs can themselves pose serious risks because the companies that provide them can read all the internet traffic routed through them. That risk is compounded in the case of Chinese apps, given China's strict laws that can force companies in that country to secretly share access to their users' data with the government.
"19 Years of Broken Promises": Wired examines Elon Musk's track record
Jason Weisberger / 8:37 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Reading Wired's analysis of Elon "Pedo Guy" Musk's record of lies, you'd have thought the "tell" they are exposing was "his lips are moving," but they found something else.
Musk is a fabulous storyteller. The most remarkable story of them all is his brilliance, but in this, the tin age of Americanism, Elon is a favorite. The game of multi-dimensional chess, his fans claim, their TeknoKing is playing, is unknowable to the mere mortals simply cataloging the failed timelines he sets for everything.
Still, even though Musk has a long history of broken promises, investors seemed soothed by tales of crushing market domination for Tesla, not as the car company it is today, but as the robotics behemoth Musk claims it will soon become.
WIRED examined the history of Musk's pledges on everything from Full Self Driving, Hyperloop, Robotaxis, and, yes, robot armies, with a view to reminding ourselves, his fans, and investors how reality in Elon's world rarely matches up to the rhetoric. Tellingly, Musk's fallback forecast of "next year" turns up repeatedly, only to be consistently proven wrong.
"My predictions have a pretty good track record," Musk told Tesla staff at an all-hands meeting in March. Here's a chronological look at that track record.
Phosphorus: The 1% element vital for life
Mark Frauenfelder / 8:30 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
"The human body is, roughly speaking, one percent phosphorus," writes Jack Lohmann in Quillette. The exceedingly rare element is one of six that are absolutely essential to life. (The others are carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur, which are more plentiful than phosphorus).
Each of the six essential elements performs a vital role. Carbon forms long chains, connecting compounds together to create large, complicated structures. Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water. Nitrogen and sulfur create proteins, providing organisms with food. Phosphorus converts energy, carries information, constructs cell membranes, and performs a host of other actions that underpin life's complexity. Phosphorus allows seeds to grow and fruit to ripen. It is the main ingredient in matches. It both enables life and destroys it. Sarin gas, created from white phosphorus, is a potent agent of chemical warfare.
The scarcity of phosphorus limits the amount of Earth's biomass. "The maximum mass of protoplasm which the land can support, like the maximum that the sea can support, is dictated by the phosphorus content is life's bottleneck," wrote Isaac Asimov in 1959.
Lohmann wrote a book about phosphorus, called White Light (not to be confused with Rudy Rucker's fabulous mathematical science fiction novel, White Light).
[Via The Browser]
Red Dead Redemption actor plays through game for the first time after 15 years (video)
Grant St. Clair / 8:03 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Where does the time go? Before we had the masterpiece of storytelling and world design that is Red Dead Redemption 2, its predecessor was also considered one of the best video games of all time — at least before its weird, half-assed port. In celebration of the game's fifteenth anniversary(!!!), actor Rob Wiethoff, who portrayed first-game protagonist and second-game deuteragonist John Marston, has finally sat down to play through the game himself. As he admits, he's not much of a gamer, which — being as nice as possible — is kind of clear to see.
However, it's more than worth it all the same for the insights he provides into the two games' development process and the stories he shares from set. Rockstar Games is notoriously tight-lipped, preferring to let their games do the talking, so this may be the closest thing to a behind-the-scenes video we get from them. And hey — if the video gets you in a cowboy mood, now is the perfect time to dust off the saddle and hit the trail with your Red Dead game of choice. Even Red Dead Revolver if you're a freak like that.
Infrared contact lenses enable night vision without bulky goggles
Gail Sherman / 7:55 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Human vision is limited to a relatively narrow section of the electromagnetic spectrum. Night-vision goggles allow people to see infrared but are bulky and require power. According to a new study in the journal Cell, scientists have developed contact lenses that may one day allow night vision without goggles. The lenses use nanoparticles that absorb and convert infrared radiation to visible light, the same method used in goggles, but in a soft contact lens.
Scientists had previously achieved near-infrared vision in mice by injecting nanoparticles directly into the eye, but this is an invasive and potentially risky procedure to attempt on humans. The nanoparticle lenses allow wearers to see infrared light sources with open or closed eyes. In addition, unlike the green hue of goggles, the lenses produce images in multiple colors. Wearers can see the infrared spectrum more clearly through closed eyes, as the eyelids block visible light.
However, infrared contacts currently have some significant limitations. They can only detect very bright infrared sources, and the images are blurry. Although the lenses currently cannot replace traditional night-vision technology, there are some potential uses. A simple code, like Morse, could be communicated using infrared, or it could be used to detect anti-counterfeiting marks.
Some scientists also have practical and ethical concerns about the technology. Glen Jeffery, a neuroscientist at University College London specializing in eye health, told Nature, "I cannot think of any application that would not be fundamentally simpler with infrared goggles. Evolution has avoided this for a good reason."
How military jargon infected your workplace with endless stupid phrases
Popkin / 7:52 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
This video gives us the answers to a question I've been secretly wondering for years. Where did office jargon come from? Why do we use phrases like "circle back later" or "just looping you in"? I've always wondered if there's some secret manual that contains all the cringey terms you're supposed to use when emailing people from work.
This video loops us all in, and demystifies this bizarre office jargon. Many of these terms come from military terminology and sports terminology. Popular industries, such as tech, added words to the list of office jargon, too, such as "do you have the bandwidth for this?"
From YouTube: Otherwords is a PBS web series on Storied that digs deep into this quintessential human trait of language and finds the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted. Incorporating the fields of biology, history, cultural studies, literature, and more, linguistics has something for everyone and offers a unique perspective on what it means to be human.
See also: These are the first words ever heard in a feature film
See what music looks like in three dimensions
Ruben Bolling / 7:48 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
This video explains how 19th century French physicist Jules Antoine Lissajous used tuning forks to map out two-dimensional shapes, called Lissajous curves, that uniquely correspond to every musical interval, the difference in pitch between two notes.
Musician Reuben Levine notes:
"What I find fascinating about this chart is that some element of the character of each interval seems to come through in these visualizations. Nicer sounding intervals produce simpler shapes, and more dissonant intervals produce squigglier shapes."
Levine takes that concept a step further by creating three-note Lissajous curves that are not two-dimensional, but are three-dimensional. He then 3-D prints these three-dimensional Lissajous curves to show what these three-note chords "look"like in real space.
Late cruise ship passenger wins Darwin Award nomination
Popkin / 7:45 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
When most people are too late to hop aboard their means of transportation, they typically have to accept the fact that their plane, train, or in this case, a cruise ship, is going to leave without them. The gentleman in this video wasn't going to give up without a fight, though. When a cruise ship closed its doors and ended boarding, a light bulb went off in this man's head.
"The rope!" he thought. "I'll just climb the long rope that connects the ship to the dock like a sloth and then see what happens". As a crowd of people gasped in amazement while this man let his intrusive thoughts become a reality. Law enforcement was already on its way.
The gentleman's hopes and dreams were shattered when the rope was loosened, sending him right into a police boat, where angry officers waited for him. Although he got in trouble, I feel he should be given some type of recognition for the effort he put into climbing that rope with such vigor. I really would like to know his plan for actually climbing over the ledge of the ship (I have a slight feeling that he didn't have one).
See also: Ocean swimming as meditation
Smart devices are watching: How to protect your privacy in a connected home
Popkin / 7:33 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
If you feel like your devices are constantly watching you, you're not alone. This video from Wired shows how our smart devices spy on our lives. It also tells us what we can do to minimize and control the information that is collected by our smart devices.
Our robotic vacuums map our houses. Our "Alexa" is constantly listening. Smart phones show us advertisements of the kitchen appliance that we were talking about 30 seconds ago. When these devices are connected to wifi, our privacy can be breached. The video talks about risk vs. reward with these modern machines, and how we can use things like two-factor identification when logging on can help protect us.
There are currently nearly 19 billion smart devices worldwide. From robot vacuum cleaners and smart refrigerators to internet-connected baby monitors and counter top appliances, it can feel as if everything in your home is linked to WiFi. Today WIRED does a deep dive into the security of smart devices — and the pros and cons of welcoming them into your home.
See also: A Single Shot: creepy backwoods crime suspense novel
$300 smart toothbrush does all your teeth at once
Rob Beschizza / 7:22 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Kyle Barr reports that the $300 Feno smart toothbrush is "the worst thing I've ever shoved in my mouth." The gob-filling mouthpiece cleans every one of your chompers simultaneously. He says it works, but he didn't like the experience one bit: it "made my entire head shake like a marionette piloted by a mad puppeteer."
It has technically saved me time. I would even go as far as to say it may do the job of a regular toothbrush with less time to get there. … I'm more bemused that the Feno exists at all. This is a device that costs $300 for the "Founder's Edition" bundle. The company recently said it would increase the price to $400, blaming tariffs for the rising cost.
250 strokes per tooth! I'm sure it gets the job done. But if it's good for teeth, it sounds like it rots the brain: "Every time you turn it on, the smart toothbrush bombards you with a QR code to download an app for all its controls, rather than including those on-device."
I'm fond of water flossers: a great (and cheap enough) gadget for oral hygiene. Be sure to get one with adjustable strengths, so they're good for other jobs too. You'll be cleaning things for the fun of it!
Tiny classic Mac replica made with a Raspberry Pi Pico
Rob Beschizza / 6:11 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Behold Nick Gillard's pico-mac-nano, a tiny and functional replica of the original Apple Macintosh. Only 62mm tall, it's created with a Raspberry Pi Pico and a a 2-inch LCD panel.
The final size was always going to be determined by the LCD panel which needed to be able to display the 512px x 342px screen buffer. I eventually settled on the smallest 640x480px LCD I could find at a sensible price which was a 2″ TFT panel . Unfortunately it transpired it was technically 480x640px i.e. portrait. I assumed using in landscape would be trivial but I was wrong. The driver being used on the panel (the ST7701S) offers no image rotation function so the only option would be to rotate the frame buffer on the Pico. The problem was that the Pico was already being seriously overclocked to make pico-mac responsive so there just weren't a lot of processor cycles to spare.
Check out the gallery, the github page and the components list. Or just buy one—given thirty days, Nick will have one to you for £56 plus shipping. Now comes the challenge of finding an appropriately tiny M0110 keyboard and mouse.
Harvard revokes tenure for professor it says committed academic misconduct
Rob Beschizza / 5:55 am PT Tue May 27, 2025
Francesca Gino is a professor at Harvard Business School whose career was derailed after evidence of data fraud was exposed in her work—a doubly-humiliating circumstance given that she teaches ethics there. The university released a damning report, she sued in response, and now Gina is losing tenure—the first to do so in 80 years.
No professors are known to have lost their tenure at Harvard since the 1940s, when the American Association of University Professors formalized rules of termination, according to The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. … In 2021, three professors and behavioral researchers with a blog site, Data Colada, began examining a number of studies Gino co-authored over a decade and shared evidence they believed proved fraudulent data with the business school.
Gino, also accused of plagiarism, has become an avatar of a "publish and perish" era in science, where an overwhelming combination of academic duties, publishing projects and pursuit of celebrity leads to disaster. In 2023, Stanford's president Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned after his work on Alzheimer's disease was found to contain "errors."
Neuroscientist Eliezer Masliah was released from his role at the NIH after evidence of image manipulation was found in multiple high-profile papers he authored.
In physics, former MIT researcher Neri Oxman faced allegations of plagiarism after her billionaire husband publicly attacked another academic, Claudine Gay, for the same alleged offense.
Tenure is supposed to protect teachers and researchers from getting fired for non-academic reasons. An institution that retains someone who falsified their research would be condoning that fraud. There is a much larger amount of fraud or at least misrepresentation of data in scientific publishing than most people realize.