The Latest from Boing Boing

Posted: 10 May 2009 03:38 AM PDT

Roywanglu's mysterious EggDrawer automates creating designs on eggs. Put one of these in the kitchen and you'll be eatin' pretty.

The egg printer

Can't see the video? Click here

Geeky writing techniques I love that someone should simplify

Posted: 10 May 2009 03:10 AM PDT

My latest Locus Magazine column, "Extreme Geek," is online: it's a description of three geeky writing tools I use that are a) useful; b) too geeky for most people; c) ripe for being turned into something useful to less geeky people.

I put the call out to the readership at Boing Boing, the blog I co-edit, and Dan McDonald, one of my readers, came through with a fantastic little Perl script called tagcloud.pl that does exactly this, parsing all my notes into a database that I can search or query visually, by clicking on the cloud.
Now, as I write the novel, this has become an invaluable aid: for one thing, it lends itself to a kind of casual, clicky browsing in which one hashtag leads to another, to a search-query, to another tag, exploring my notes in a way that is both serendipitous and directed.
For another, the format is one that comes naturally to me, because of all the other services I use -- such as Twitter -- that employ this telegraphic, brief style.

Extreme Geek

Hackerspaces and hippie crashpads

Posted: 10 May 2009 03:06 AM PDT

Johannes from Monochrom sends us his essay on Hackerspaces, HACKING THE SPACES:

The history of the so-called hackerspaces expands back to when the counter culture movement was about to make a serious statement. In the decade after the hippies attempted to establish new ways of social, political, economical and ecological relationships, a lot of experiments were carried out concerning the construction of new spaces to live and to work in. Thus, the first hackerspaces fit best into a countercultural topography consisting of squat houses, alternative cafes, farming cooperatives, collectively run businesses, communes, non-authoritarian childcare centres, and so on. All of these established a tight network for an alternative lifestyle within the heart of bourgeois darkness. Hackerspaces provided room where people could go and work in laid-back, cool and non-repressive environments (well, as far as any kind of space or environment embedded into a capitalist society can be called laid-back, cool and non-repressive).
Sociological termed "third spaces" are spaces that break through the dualistic scheme of bourgeois spatial structure with places to live and places to work (plus places for spare time activities). They represent an integrative way that refuses to accept a lifestyle which is formed through such a structure. This means they can come to cooperative and non-repressive ways of working on e.g. technical problems that may result in new and innovative solutions. And that's exactly where Adorno's "Wrong Life" could slip in too...

HACKING THE SPACES (Thanks, Johannes!)

Previously:

Hackerspaces around the world - Boing Boing

Long-exposure photo of Roomba coverage

Posted: 10 May 2009 03:02 AM PDT

The Roomba's coverage algorithm looks maddeningly random and inefficient when watched with human eyes, but use a long-exposure camera to track it and you can see how thorough it really is:

Now here's something interesting, I set up a photo camera in my room, turned out all the lights and took a long-exposure shot of my roomba doing it's thing for about 30 minutes. The result is a picture that shows the path of the roomba through it's cleaning cycle, it looks like a flight map or something. It really hits every spot!

Roomba, Economics and Long-Exposure Photography (via JWZ's Livejournal)

MediaSquat Radio Show

Posted: 09 May 2009 06:50 PM PDT

Douglas Rushkoff - author of the book Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back - is a guest blogger.

I've started doing a rather free-form talk radio show on WFMU-FM and WFMU.ORG called The Media Squat, in which we explore bottom-up, open-source style solutions to some of the problems engendered by a relentlessly top-down, closed source society. We've had some great guests so far, from Richard Metzger and Paul Krassner to Joanna Harcourt-Smith and RU Sirius.

We also focus on "real people doing real things" - from people turning cement tracts in the projects into urban agriculture centers, and unemployed workers developing local currencies.

A month or so ago, a group from Indiana emailed asking if they could meet up with me in New York to get some advice and support for some bottom-up ventures they're initiating - and I figured it would be a great opportunity to take advantage of some of the community we've developed through the show. So they're coming on this Monday evening, May 11, at 7p EST.

I invite you all to tune in and help them figure out exactly how to proceed. Here's what they sent me so far:

The Bloomington Think Tank, aka the 'Culturvators,' are a group of young people in Bloomington, IN who are exploring and enacting hyper-local methods of creating, supporting, and improving permaculture practices, local economic initiatives, and community. They are promoters of and participants in organic agriculture, the art community, and local currency/bartering. They are engaged with local permaculture practitioners, and are earning food through a work-share CSA.

The Culturvators believe in the tribe, or small to medium social group, as the key component in improving their local community, and the world at large, in our present moment of crisis. Culturvation is the process of bridging the gaps of individuation that prevent us from creating and sustaining working relationships with our neighbors. Culturvators are those who break down barriers to form the social groups that produce change. In short, many hands make light work, and the Culturvators get those hands to shake so the work can get done.

Brit MP saw undercover cops egging crowd to riot at G20

Posted: 09 May 2009 06:39 PM PDT

A British Member of Parliament claims he saw two undercover cops acting as agents provocateurs at the G20 demonstrations, attempting to get the crowd to riot. It was during one of the "kettling" sessions (this is a tactic used by UK cops wherein all protesters and bystanders are crammed into a physical space that is cordoned off indefinitely, and though the protesters are not charged with any offense, they are not allowed to leave, seek medical care, use toilets, etc). The men apparently threw missiles at the cops and tried to get others to do the same, then, after being accused of being provocateurs, flashed credentials at the police and passed through their lines.

"When I was in the middle of the crowd, two people came over to me and said, 'There are people over there who we believe are policemen and who have been encouraging the crowd to throw things at the police,'" Brake said. But when the crowd became suspicious of the men and accused them of being police officers, the pair approached the police line and passed through after showing some form of identification.
Brake has produced a draft report of his experiences for the human rights committee, having received written statements from people in the crowd. These include Tony Amos, a photographer who was standing with protesters in the Royal Exchange between 5pm and 6pm. "He [one of the alleged officers] was egging protesters on. It was very noticeable," Amos said. "Then suddenly a protester seemed to identify him as a policeman and turned on him. He legged it towards the police line, flashed some ID and they just let him through, no questions asked."

G20 police 'used undercover men to incite crowds'

Previously:

If the banks are so healthy, how come we're all still broke?

Posted: 09 May 2009 07:04 PM PDT

Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Life Inc., is a guest blogger.

We're supposed to take heart in the fact that the Treasury Department's bank "stress tests" didn't come out worse. No, our biggest banks aren't insolvent, exactly. In fact, enough cash was printed to guarantee that they should be able to survive the rest of the recession. Worst case, with a little late-night printing and lending by the central bank, even the worst of them - like Citibank - should be able to hobble through. Our Treasury Department wants us to be reassured.

True enough, as long as banks are understood by many as fueling the economy, this should be good news. By this logic, banks disperse the capital that allows businesses to do their business. As so many have explained to me, it all starts with the banks. Banks lend businesses money, and then those businesses turn it into something real - like products, salaries, or innovation.

Sorry, but that's just not true. Labor might make money, but money doesn't make labor. (Or as I said to Rolling Stone's editor, music makes money - money doesn't make music). And while we can certainly point to the fact that assembly lines and mixing boards cost money, neither are required as the first step in creating a car company or a musical act. Yes, in a well-functioning economy, good production yields income, part of which goes to making production better. A great company dedicates part of its winnings to R&D.

But the notion that enterprise and production starts with banking is just another artifact of Renaissance-era currency monopolies. Back before the first central banks, production and yield actually created money. (That's what all this hoopla about complementary currency is about.) Money was not lent into existence by a bank. Instead, farmers brought their grain to town and received receipts for the grain. These receipts served as the local currency. Currency was worked into existence. There was as much money as there was grain.

The problem with this scheme was that people got too wealthy - especially in comparison with the feudal lords and fledgling monarchy, who had always been used to getting rich, well, by being rich. So they went and made all the grain-based currencies illegal, and forced everyone to use coin of the realm - central currency. While this coin was better for long distance trade and collecting taxes, it was lousy for local transactions. People lost their ability to live off the land, took jobs with early corporations, got poor, less fed, and eventually the economic downturn in Europe led to a plague that killed half the population. This isn't economic interpretation - it's just fact.

Eventually, with only half the population to deal with, Europe's new economic scheme proved basically sufficient to the task. And we got the rules that have - in one form or another - defined economics to this day: people don't make money, banks do. The chief function of money is for money to make money - not for it to be used for successful transactions.

But today we may be smart enough, information may travel around fast enough, for many of us to realize just how transparent a fraud we're witnessing unfold before us today - how the bailouts of AIG were really funding Goldman Sachs, how intimately involved are bankers - Rubin or Paulson, are with Treasury chiefs like, er, Paulson and Rubin. How government and banking are one and the same, both after the same centralization of authority, both inextricably linked with the biases of lending-based wealth schemes, and both utterly incapable of serving as the source of anything.

Star Trek original bridge and action figures reissue

Posted: 09 May 2009 01:10 PM PDT

The Star Trek Bridge playset was, hands down, the best toy I owned as a child. I played with it for approximately 10,000 hours. Especially the whirly-twirly transporter cubicle. I loved the psychedelic cardboard viewscreens, the tippy chairs and furniture, the stick-on UI for same that was as inscrutable and ridiculous as the authentic show computers. This toy had the magic, a vinyl-covered, detailed, configurable kind of magic that made you want to play with it for hours and hours on end.

I kept my Bridge playset for all these years. It sat in my Toronto storage locker for a decade, and then got shipped to London, where it now resides, along with my action-figures, in my office. And it still has the magic.

And now: the toy has been reissued, along with all the original action figures, including the two-tone aliens and the lizard dudes. The crew have the tiny blue phasers and the same dead eyes and the miniatures plastic Blundstones from the future. And I just saw the set, in person, in a comics shop, and it still has the magic.

Star Trek: Retro Bridge Playset

Star Trek Retro Action Figures

Elsevier has an entire division to publishing fake advertorial "peer-reviewed" journals

Posted: 09 May 2009 12:56 PM PDT

Remember the revelation that pharma giant Merck had paid Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed journal that promoted its products? Turns out Elsevier has an entire division devoted to publishing fake journals for money:

Now, several librarians say that they have uncovered an entire imprint of 'advertorial' publications. Excerpta Medica, a 'strategic medical communications agency,' is an Elsevier division. Along with the now infamous Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, it published a number of other 'journals.' Elsevier CEO Michael Hansen now admits that at least six fake journals were published for pharmaceutical companies."

More Fake Journals From Elsevier

Previously:

Merck and Elsevier publish fake peer-reviewed journal - Boing Boing

Can't see the video? Click here

Tiny little phonograph from an old Datsun

Posted: 09 May 2009 12:49 PM PDT

Murilee sez, "Remember the first generation of cars with voice warnings, from the late-70s/early-80s era? The Datsun 810 was the first, and I've disassembled the voicebox from a junkyard unit. Turns out that Nissan used a tiny phonograph, complete with 3" record with 6 separate grooves (one for each message) and a precision solenoid-controlled stylus. All in a 3" cube. Coolest thing I've seen in a while."

1982 Datsun Voice Warning Box Used Tiny Phonograph Record, Just Like Moon Base Robots (Thanks, Murilee!)