The Latest from Boing Boing

Tube-map cross-stitch Posted: 12 May 2009 04:52 AM PDT This cross-stitch Tube-map is surprisingly successful and sounds simple to do. Geek + maps + craftiness = (via Wonderland) Can't see the video? Click here

747 sucks a baggage cart into its engine at LAX Posted: 12 May 2009 04:48 AM PDT Yesterday, a 747 at LAX sucked an entire baggage-cart into one of its engines. No one was hurt: The incident occurred yesterday afternoon as Japan Airlines Flight 61 to Narita was pushing back from the terminal gate. A Federal Aviation Administration spokesman, Ian Gregor, said a baggage cart was being towed by at the same time and the engine ingested one of the containers. Airport officials told the Los Angeles Times the vacuum created by the air intake of the left outboard engine was so strong it pulled the empty container off the baggage cart. The object was lodged in the outer left-side engine of the four-engine jet. Baggage container sucked into Boeing 747 engine at LA airport

Stuff it would be great to have designed Posted: 12 May 2009 04:46 AM PDT In this interview with designer Jack Schulze (which also contains this great aphorism: "No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say."), a magnificent list of stuff he wishes he'd designed: There are products I wish I'd designed because I like them and then people would think I'd done them and like me more. This list is massive. Off the top of my head: I wish I'd directed and conceived the perfume commercial where a guy on a helicopter kisses a woman at the top of the Eiffel Tower, and a Channel commercial with Little Red Riding Hood shooshing the wolf. I'd like to have been the first to take the photomontages Hockney produced in the 60s. I wish I'd written The Filth by Grant Morrison. I wish I'd conceived and made Super Mario Galaxy. I love the table-top skirmish game called Necromunda in the Warhammer universe, although I only played it once, because the social negotiation of the rules that always happens around the game, are embedded back into the rules. I think Formula 1 television coverage is visually completely remarkable. I have no idea what is going on, but it's so good I can watch it just for the optics. It's like injecting Photoshop filters straight into your eyeballs. Six Questions from Kicker: Jack Schulze (via Beyond the Beyond)

Users asked to design their own MMO levels make up really easy games Posted: 12 May 2009 04:42 AM PDT City of Heroes, a multiplayer superhero game, decided to allow its users to design their own levels. While some users created some fun and imaginative levels, the majority produced incredibly easy treasure-hauls, the sort of quest we used to call "Monty Haul dungeons" in the D&D era. There's something weird and paternalistic about the relationship between gamers and game-designers. It goes like this: "I will deny you reward until you complete some arbitrary tasks of my devising, because I know that this will make you happier than simply giving you the rewards right away" (what's more, the designer is generally right about this). This authority and arbitrariness is simpler to navigate when you're playing D&D with some friends around a table -- the GM is a pal of yours in whom you've put your trust for a few hours, and if she doesn't deliver the promised fun, she can be ousted and replaced. The GM doesn't even have to stick to the rules: if she thinks that the game's fun will go up if she ignores the outcome of a dice-roll behind her screen, she can make up an epic save or fail. But it's different when the "GM" is a bunch of rules programmed into a computer by an engineer working at a multinational. In that universe, if the rules are bent for the sake of fun, it's cheating. And the social contract that comfortably defines the relationship between friends stretches and tears when it's applied to the relationship between customers and corporations. When City of Heroes released its user-created mission generator, it was mere hours before highly exploitative missions existed. Players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These are by far the most popular missions. Actually, from what I can tell, they are nearly the only missions that get used. Aside from a few "developer's favorite" quests, it's very hard to find the "fun but not exploitative" missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity. This was not what the designers hoped for. Somehow they had convinced themselves that the number of exploiters would be relatively low -- certainly not the vast majority of the users. But they were wrong, and now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. They feel they must counteract these abusive quests, "for the sake of balance". But how? Well the first step is to ban people who make cheaty content. But what's cheaty? Do they explicitly list every possible exploit condition? What if they miss one? Nah, then the problem would start all over again. Instead, how about if they just issue blanket threats that they'll ban missions that seem "exploitative", without actually explaining what is and isn't "exploitative"? They went with the latter. User Generated Quests and the Ruby Slippers

Electronic Police States defined, ranked Posted: 12 May 2009 04:30 AM PDT A report from "CryptoHippie" (don't know anything about this person/group) has created an index to surveillance states, ranked from worst to best. What's especially notable about this report is its concise, intelligent definition of "Electronic Police States:" The two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these: 1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial. 2. It is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions. In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it - the evidence is already in their database. Perhaps you trust that your ruler will only use his evidence archives to hurt bad people. Will you also trust his successor? Do you also trust all of his subordinates, every government worker and every policeman? The worst offenders are China, North Korea, Belarus and Russia, followed by the UK, the US, and Singapore. The Electronic Police State

Mountain-Dew-scented Xbox controller soap Posted: 12 May 2009 04:22 AM PDT These XBox controller soaps from Etsy seller Digitalsoap are scented with essence of Mountain Dew for a caffeinated clean. There's also a line of Playstation, NES and Wii controller soaps, as well as phone and iPod soap. Realistic Xbox replica soap (via Red Ferret) Can't see the video? Click here

Emo vs. 19th century Romanticism: "Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!" Posted: 12 May 2009 04:16 AM PDT Andrew sez, I've interviewed Australian writer and youth radio host Craig Schuftan, who has just released a new book called 'Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone!' It's an exciting, discursive analysis, which at its heart compares emo, pop and rock n' roll to the philosophies of the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century. The two part interview is almost as wide-ranging and certainly as interesting as the book (if I do say so myself). He's a culture sponge and we discuss (among many other things) Nietzsche's philosophy, Weezer's lyrics, ludditism, the create font of melancholy, and whether the anti-depressant generation will have trouble expressing themselves artistically. My Chimerical Romanticism: Part One (Thanks, Andrew!)

Tennis-ball chair Posted: 12 May 2009 04:12 AM PDT Jill sez, "Here's a chair made from 297 recycled tennis balls. Fun, bouncy and surprisingly comfortable! I just discovered it at the BKLYN Design show in NYC, and thought you might like it." Hugh Hayden's FUNature Tennis Ball Chair (Thanks, Jill!)

Victorian museum's collection for sale Posted: 12 May 2009 04:06 AM PDT Steampunk paradise: an entire museum of Victoriana being auctioned off: The entire collection of the Shambles, a museum of Victorian life recreated as a small town on an acre of land, has been split into 2,300 lots and is up for grabs. Collectors, other museums looking to add to their collections and lovers of curiosities are expected to descend on Newent, Gloucestershire, to bid for everything from boxes of Victorian soap to scary veterinary implements. The Shambles was opened 20 years ago by Jim Chapman and his wife, Holly, both keen collectors of Victorian memorabilia. They laid out the museum as a town, complete with pub, police station, shops and workshops, and have been attracting 40,000 visitors a year. Entire collection of the Shambles museum on sale Auction of the Shambles Village Museum (Thanks, Taikonaut!)

Recently on Offworld Posted: 12 May 2009 12:37 AM PDT Recently on Offworld we saw the addition of a new guest blogger, with Mike Nowak bringing us Rome's Il Creatore and his lo-fi Commodore 64, SIDStation, talk-box, and vocoder pixel pop, and saw The Wire's Clay "sheeeit" Davis re-emerge as Doc, the coach of Punch-Out!! revival star Little Mac (above). We also saw the fruits of Klei Entertainment's labor in bringing the full weight of traditional animation to their beat-em-up Shank, moved on the last chance to pick up another gloriously cartoon-y game, The Behemoth's Alien Hominid, and found and fancied another fantastic Grim Fandango custom vinyl toy. Finally, we saw grandfather of home videogame Ralph Baer take on the retro-futurist version of his original creation in style, a low-bit mountain climbing game design loosely based on an Akira Kurosawa short, and the creators of the masochistic arcade game PainStation return with the MoshPit Amp, a music peripheral that cranks its tubes to 11 the harder you headbang until the echo effect builds to the point that the pyrotechnics flair and the amp moshes itself. And our 'one shot's for the day: the gorgeously ultra-vivid early days of similarly moshable metal game Brutal Legend, and the founder of Harvard College reimagined as Halo's Master Chief.

Guatemala: In YouTube Video Shot Before His Death, Attorney Blames President for His Assasination Posted: 11 May 2009 11:12 PM PDT Boing Boing reader "Tricky" in Guatemala says, I'm writing you this email to let you know about the video testimony of Rodrigo Rosenberg that has been uploaded to YouTube. He was a lawyer in Guatemala City, and he was murdered this past Sunday, May 10. He left this video, taped before he was killed, in which he names his murderers: President Alvaro Colom, his wife and his private secretary. Part 1 of his posthumous video, and here is part 2. Here is an account in El Periodico, the Guatemalan newspaper that published the story. The local TV channels are avoiding the story altogether, and have been on a campaign for awhile now trying to discredit the written press. I'll try to summarize the El Periodico story and his last words. Rosenberg was the legal representative of two murdered Guatemalans: Khalil Musa and his daughter Marjorie Musa. Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom approached Khalil Musa and asked of him to work in the board of Banrural, one of the state banks in Guatemala. Khalil Musa accepted the job but the government didn't put him in the post, after three months he told the president that he was resigning to the position he never took, because his good name was being used to say that no more strange transactions were happening within the bank. Musa was murdered. and the police and judicial system didn't find anything about the murderers, as a matter of fact, they said that it was their own factory workers that murdered them, finally saying in private to members of the family of the murdered Khalil Musa, that it was indeed because of the corruption that was going on at Banrural and that it was their own fault. Rosenberg filmed and wrote this document, because he didn't want to shut up. Now I'm thinking also of why the "state of calamity" was proclaimed here in Guatemala last week, that uses the swine flu outbreak as an excuse, with only 3 confirmed cases. The state's reaction to only 3 confirmed cases of H1N1 seemed a bit much, but makes more sense when you consider that same "state of calamity" imposes restraint on freedom of the press. Part 1 is above, Part 2 is below. Here is a related item in English, from the Associated Press. An anonymous BB commenter has kindly translated the document written by Rosenberg for posthumous release, in the comments below.

Man enjoys snacking on bricks Posted: 11 May 2009 10:45 PM PDT This chap eats rocks, sand, and bricks.

Gallery of people in heavy knit clothing Posted: 11 May 2009 10:32 PM PDT It must be mighty cold where these people hail from. Gallery of people in heavy knit clothing

Leonard Shlain, RIP Posted: 11 May 2009 10:04 PM PDT Dr. Leonard Shlain, surgeon and author of the groundbreaking books Art & Physics, Alphavet vs. The Goddess, and Sex, Time, and Power, died this morning after a long battle with brain cancer. Len was 71 and had just completed his fourth book, Leonardo's Brain. Len's knowledge, wisdom, and humor will be remembered by everyone who had the pleasure of meeting him. His books are a permanent, timeless, and beautiful reminder that the line between art and science is imaginary and that the world is full of wonder if we just open our eyes and minds to it. Len's legacy -- his children, grandchildren, books, and the thousands of people he helped as a physician -- are a testament to who he was. Our thoughts are with the extended Shlain family. Dr. Leonard Shlain

Cornell says no to restrictions on public domain materials Posted: 11 May 2009 06:24 PM PDT A reader writes, "Cornell University Library just announced that it will now allow free reuse of public domain works copied from its collection without the permission and license fees it formerly required." "The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks." The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell's donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell). "Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles," said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn't make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works." Cornell University Library Removes All Restrictions on Use of Public Domain Reproductions

Mr Bump cold-packs Posted: 11 May 2009 06:39 PM PDT Love this kid-friendly Mr Bump ice cold-pack -- a perfect merch tie-in! Mr. Men Bruise Soothers. Mr. Bump

Selling fiber broadband by inviting users to dig their own trenches Posted: 11 May 2009 06:21 PM PDT Lyse, a wildly successful Norwegian ISP, is getting fiber into peoples' houses by getting them to dig their own trenches: Lyse's business model is different from companies like Verizon, which is currently rolling out fiber across its service area and then trying to sign up customers. Lyse instead sends people into unserved areas, knocks on all the doors, and passes out information on the new fiber service. Only when 60 percent of the people in an area sign up in advance for the service does Lyse start the actual fiber install... In addition to entering an area with tremendous support already lined up, Lyse also does something innovative: it allows prospective customers to dig their own fiber trenches from the street to their homes. In return, customers can save about $400. "They can arrange things just the way they want," says Herbjørn Tjeltveit of Lyse, which makes for happier customers; apparently, nothing angers a Norwegian more than having some faceless corporation tunnel through his flower garden. Norwegian ISP: dig your own fiber trench, save $400

WiFi gets clobbered by baby-monitors, not other WiFi Posted: 11 May 2009 06:17 PM PDT Ofcom, the UK equivalent to the FCC, has a new report that identifies baby monitors and other wireless devices as serious interferers with urban WiFi. I've got WiFi and a baby-monitor in my tiny London flat and I can't say I've ever noticed the issue -- on the other hand, my spark-gap generator seems to really do some interesting stuff to the network. "There is a view that some domestic users generate excessive amounts of Wi-Fi traffic, denying access to other users," claims the report from wireless specialists, Mass Consutling. "Our research suggests that this is not the case, rather the affected parties are almost certainly seeing interference from non-Wi-Fi devices such as microwave ovens, Audio Video senders, security cameras or baby monitors." "The greatest concentration of different radio types tends to occur in urban centres, so interference tends to increase with population density. "However, interference also occurs in low population density areas. It only requires a single device, such as an analogue video sender, to severely affect Wi-Fi services within a short range, such that a single large building or cluster of houses can experience difficulties with using a single Wi-Fi channel." Baby monitors killing urban Wi-Fi (via /.)

World of Warcraft as everyday life in China Posted: 11 May 2009 06:13 PM PDT In this Chinese video, an average dude plays out his life by invoking World-of-Warcraft-style game mechanics. Funny and strategically useful! Very funny Chinese wow video (Thanks, Thomas!) Can't see the video? Click here

Pirate Bay founder proposes to pay his fine with tiny, expensive-to-receive payments Posted: 11 May 2009 06:16 PM PDT One of the Pirate Bay's founders has vowed to pay off his court-ordered fine (if it isn't successfully appealed, I assume) by getting net-users to send tiny sums to the entertainment industry's law-firm, thus swamping them with transaction fees that could cost them millions: A friend of anakata told Blog Pirate that the bank account to which the payments are directed has only 1000 free transfers, after which any transfers have a surcharge of 2 SEK for the account holder. Any internet-fee payments made after the first 1000, which includes the law firm's ordinary transfers, will instead of giving 1 SEK, cost 1 SEK to the law firm. Since Danowsky & Partners Advokatbyrå is a small firm, all the transactions are handled by hand. Handling all payments will be time consuming, costing the law firm in productivity. Maybe it will even affect their success in other cases... Additionally if after paying the internet-fee you determine that your payment was erroneous, Swedish law states that you can request the money back, putting an additional load on Danowsky's law firm. Pirate Bay Founder Devises DDo$ Attack (via /.)

Word-cloud from the National Dialogue on Recovery Posted: 11 May 2009 06:07 PM PDT Gabriela sez, "The Sunlight Labs scraped all the ideas off of the latest National Dialogue on Recovery.gov to see if they could condense what most of the ideas were about. The answer is pretty clear - check out the word cloud." What do people want from Recovery.gov? (Thanks, Gabriela!)

Free ebooks' effects on book-sales Posted: 11 May 2009 06:05 PM PDT Simon sez, "John Hilton, a doctoral candidate in Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, crunched the numbers to determine whether releasing books through Creative Commons and other methods really does benefit authors and publishers. He found that four titles recently released for free by Random House saw an 11 percent increase in sales in the eight weeks after releasing the online copies compared to the eight weeks prior." For his research, he has located, so far, approximately 40 book titles for which publishers have released free online versions at least eight weeks after releasing the printed version. He does not consider books that were released both simultaneously for free online and as print products because then he wouldn't be able to observe the before and after effects on sales. He then records the Bookscan numbers -- which account for about 70% of all US book sales, including those sold at most retailers -- for the eight weeks prior to the free release and the eight weeks after. On March 4 of this year, Random House announced that it would release five books for free through its science fiction portal, all of which came in downloadable PDF files (among other formats). Hilton recorded the before and after book sales and found that "one of the five books has had zero sales in 2009. So no sales before or after the free version. But the other four books all saw significant sales increases after the free versions were released. In total, combined sales of the five books were up 11%. Together they sold 4,633 copies the 8 weeks prior to being released free and 5,155 copies the eight weeks after being released." Did Random House's free online book releases affect sales? (Thanks, Simon!)

Retro-futuristic designs by the bushel Posted: 11 May 2009 06:03 PM PDT Muhammad sez, "WebUrbanist has collected what can only be described as a master-list of cool. They describe it as 'From retrocool concept cars to far-out fashion in sci-fi inspired cities of tomorrow, these 173 samples of retrofuturistic design & technology will take you back to the good old days to come!' and I have to agree, this is way cool! Future Past: 173 Radical Retrofuturistic Directions in Design & Technology (Thanks, Muhammad!)

Hugo Chávez: Eat the Rich Posted: 11 May 2009 04:32 PM PDT In this video clip which is making the viral rounds in the Spanish-speaking online world, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez says "The rich are not human, they are animals in human form." A Boing Boing reader who lives in Venezuela says, I decided to leave Venezuela soon, if I can, when I saw this. Dehumanizing a group of people is certainly in the manual to start genocide and living in a country where officially a portion of the population are not human by decree is against my ideals. I can live with crime, bad public health and even scarcity, but to live with this crap is not acceptable, even with all the basic needs covered. Yes, I might be too sensitive, but I cannot forget all those other times and places where dehumanizing has brought woes.

Guitar + Voice Box Rendition of Beach Boys' "God Only Knows." Posted: 11 May 2009 03:10 PM PDT Video Link. YouTuber electricpony made this awesome video using a Stratocaster + Guyatone Micro Octaver + SRB808 Overdrive + EHX Voice Box (Shure SM57 Mic) + Epiphone Valve Junior. Here's more about the voice box gizmo, from Electro Harmonix -- who we've covered previously in a Boing Boing video episode. (thanks, Scott Matthews!) Related: * BB Video: Inside Electro-Harmonix, guitar pedal engineers and vintage vacuum tubes * "Golden Throat" talk box from the golden age

Cuba Tiene Hambre: A Viral Video Makes the Rounds Posted: 11 May 2009 02:57 PM PDT This video is making the viral rounds in Cuban 'net circles, and throughout Latin America in general. "Cuba Tiene Hambre" has also spawned many a reggaeton fan remix. People are loading the audio clip onto phones as a ringtone, too. In the video, a "regular guy" identified as Pánfilo on the streets of Cuba is basically saying "What Cuba needs right now is FOOD. Cuba is HUNGRY." A timely viral phenom to be aware of as America's president makes public overtures to Cuba, and calls throughout the world for an end to the US embargo are renewed. (via Ned Sublette's list)

Housing Market Collapses, Literally: Bank Pays to Destroy Unwanted Model Homes. Posted: 11 May 2009 03:51 PM PDT How to solve the real estate crisis? Bulldoze brand-new but unwanted homes! This video documents bank-hired wrecking crews destroying model homes in a Southern Californiahousing development that never filled with homeowners, when the economy collapsed and the developer went bankrupt. The bank involved was fined by the city for each day the homes sat unoccupied, so the bank paid to wreck all the homes. Snip from the local paper's account: The housing collapse is taking a literal form for one bankrupt housing development. Four model homes and 12 nearly finished spec homes at Bear Valley Road and Highway 395 are being demolished. The developer filed bankruptcy about 18 months ago and the foreclosed property went to Guaranty Bank in Irvine. A Guaranty Bank official, Real Estate Officer Dean Smith, said they were facing daily fines from the city of Victorville if they didnt do something with the homes and property that not up to code. He said it was a choice of pumping their own money into property site improvements and additional money to bring the home up to code or tear down the 16 homes. Smith said the bank is not in the building or land development business and because of the current housing market does not see anything happening with the property for at least five years. Our only option is to either proceed with putting more than a million bucks into the land, which weve already taken a huge hit on and lost a lot of money, or, we tear down the houses, Smith said. Videos: Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. (thanks, Todd Lappin!) Update: A commenter points us to the related WSJ story.

Alien hand syndrome video Posted: 11 May 2009 02:45 PM PDT Here's a video of a woman with alien hand syndrome from 2006. From Mind Hacks: As it turns out, the patient says she generally knows it is hers, but when it is draped across her body in a certain position and making involuntary movements she can think it is someone else's limb. In other words, she seems to have fleeting somatoparaphrenia. The video then shows the hand moving of its own accord and the patient having to use the other hand to keep it out of trouble. Despite looking like she's in pretty bad shape, frankenerin later posted a wonderful follow-up video where she is back on her feet and feeling fine, although discusses how she's had to adjust her career aspirations owing to the longer-term effects of the brain injury. Alien hand syndrome video Previously: Alien hand syndrome masturbation - Boing Boing Phantom Limb Phenomena conference - Boing Boing Woman has developed an imaginary, but useful, third arm - Boing Boing

Colliding Particles: Webisodes Starring Large Hadron Collider Physicists Posted: 11 May 2009 02:30 PM PDT Colliding Particles Part 4 is the latest in a series of short web videos featuring physicists involved in research at the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland. Episode 4, 'Problems' travels to Paris for a look at some of the theoretical work behind the 'Eurostar' paper. Gavin and his PhD student Mathieu explore the mathematics behind the behaviour of fundamental particles, and we have an update on the 'incident' which is holding up work at the LHC. For an introduction to the 'Eurostar' project, watch Episode 1. A higher rez version from Vimeo is above. Here's the same stuff on YouTube. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!) Can't see the video? Click here

Swine Flu Quiz from Art of Bleeding Posted: 11 May 2009 02:08 PM PDT Video Link. The Art of Bleeding Magic Ambulance crew, featuring Abram the Safety Ape and R2 the robot, respond to the Swine Flu crisis. "Nurses, robots, duct tape, and pork are involved," explains Reverend Al Ridenour. CAST & Crew: Phil Glau, Randy Horton, Selene Luna, Auriana-Lynn, Radhika Hersey, Emmeline Chang, Vima Sophia, Howard Hallis, Dapper Cadaver, Eric Ridenour, Al Ridenour.

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