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| RNC chairman says that gay marriage is bad for economy Posted: 20 May 2009 03:56 AM PDT Kieth Olbermann responds to RNC chairman Michael Steele's statement that gay marriage harms the economy by creating a new class of beneficiary spouses by pointing out that gay marriage would likely create more than $16 billion in economic activity for weddings, which benefit local stationers, photographers, bakers, hoteliers, etc. etc. etc. Keith Olbermann's WTF!?!: RNC's Michael Steele & Gay Marriage (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) |
| Congress proposes anti-DRM law for cars Posted: 20 May 2009 02:44 AM PDT An unlikely pair of We're all for promoting competition and consumer choice. But this bill points to a much bigger consumer issue. The problem that this law attempts to fix is the direct result of the use of computers in cars, accompanied by proprietary diagnostic tools and "lock-out codes." Sound familiar? It should, as it's the very sort of thing that can also make it difficult to repair computer systems, sell replacement garage door openers, and refill printer toner cartridges. One underlying legal problem here is the DMCA, which prohibits bypassing or circumventing "technological protection measures."Right-to-Repair Law Proposed ... for Cars |
| Posted: 20 May 2009 01:49 AM PDT  Check out WooWook's crocheted grenades: "I made these grenades from rows of popcorn stitches and double crochet stitches, with increasing single crochet stitches between each row." Make textiles not war. Green 'round Grenades (Thanks, Shellie!) |
| Bush cronies land jobs charging for advice on not getting eaten by the monsters they created Posted: 19 May 2009 10:25 PM PDT From USA Today: "More than one in four members of President George W. Bush's Cabinet have landed jobs with consulting or lobbying firms in which they can help clients navigate the departments they once oversaw." Michael "DHS" Chertoff is now charging for advice on how not to get screwed by the DHS (the former director of the CIA is working for him); Ashcroft is working for companies that his own DoJ brought anti-trust charges against. Nice work if you can get it. |
| Silent, low-power ionic cooling for laptops -- Boing Boing Gadgets Posted: 19 May 2009 10:13 PM PDT Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Steven's got some exciting news about the possibility of replacing laptop fans with silent ionic cooling systems. My laptop runs as loud and hot as a jet-engine, as does my wife's -- add to that the noise from the consoles and the PVR and our living room sounds like the inside of a wave-machine. Tessera's ionic cooler sits near a vent inside the laptop. Heat pipes, which transfer heat using the evaporation and condensation of a fluid, draw heat away from the computer's processing units and toward the ionic-cooling system. Inside the ionic-cooling device are two electrodes: one that ionizes air molecules such as nitrogen, and another that acts as a receiver for those molecules. When a voltage is applied between the two electrodes, the ions flow from the emitter electrode to the collector. As they move, their momentum pushes neutral air molecules across a hot spot, cooling it down...Ionic-Cooling Laptop |
| Minimum font-size for credit card fine-print Posted: 19 May 2009 10:11 PM PDT The new US credit-card bill specifies a minimum type-size and a list of approved fonts for the terms and conditions, to replace the mind-clouding teeny-weeny eye-strain-o-rama font that normally fills a Bible-sized tome that accompanies your standard credit card. Section 122 of the Truth in Lending Act (U.S.C. 1632) is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection:H. R. 627 (via Kottke) |
| Damien Hirst's giant replica of a kid's anatomy model Posted: 19 May 2009 06:12 PM PDT  Damien Hirst was sued by the company that makes the 14-inch Young Scientist Anatomy Set for his giant sized replica of the same, but it was so worth it. |
| Astronaut Reaches Mt. Everest Summit (BB Video Update) Posted: 19 May 2009 05:07 PM PDT (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube) UPDATE: Astronaut Scott Parazynski, the astronaut whose climb we followed in yesterday's episode of Boing Boing Video with Miles O'Brien, has reached the summit of Mt. Everest! Read more about their trumphant ascent here, including the GPS devices they're using to track and publish the effort. He tried this last year, but was injured when he was very, very close to reaching the summit -- so this success, a year later, is all the more sweet. Congrats, Scott! Previously: |
| My recent money-related posts at Credit.com Posted: 19 May 2009 04:50 PM PDT I've been having a blast blogging for credit.com. Here are a few recent posts: Spend Less by Keeping Large Bills in Your Wallet: You're less likely to spend your cash if it's in large denominations, reports the authors of a paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page: Included in this ebook are a number of great tricks and tips for both spending less and earning more. Make a list of the 10 most expensive things you own vs. the 10 things that make you the most happy: "Consumerist capitalism is the least oppressive system of mass trait display ever developed." My Personal Credit Crisis - a New York Times' economics reporter's tale of financial disaster: Edmund L. Andrews says he willingly "joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages." |
| Posted: 19 May 2009 03:58 PM PDT  Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, you can read about: *A fossilized stack of floppy disks; *The Face Bank loses its creepy eyes; *Joel's take on the Myka; *A laptop that cools itself ionically; *the 2003 filmTom Dowd and the Magic of Music; *Smaller, faster, cooler netbooks of the future; *A charming netbook review by a Polish kid. |
| Pool rules at Florida condo complex Posted: 19 May 2009 02:48 PM PDT  Odd list of swimming pool rules. I guess the last one makes sense though - some people may think the other rules ensure that the water is safe for drinking. Pool rules |
| Posted: 19 May 2009 02:49 PM PDT (Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)
There's a great show at the SFMOMA now, showing all 84 prints from Robert Frank's classic mid-1950s photo book The Americans, along with some outtakes, such as the image shown above---which is not in the book. The reason the image above looks funky is because it's my photo of Frank's casual working print that's glued to a wall at the show with a bunch of others. More outtakes can be found in Looking In, the catalog for the show, which also includes all the prints from The Americans---but I'd say the print quality of the images in the catalog isn't as good as in the book, although the catalog does have a lot of interesting essays. I've had a copy of The Americans for years, and I study it fairly often. So it was almost dizzying to see the book's 84 pictures on the walls, in order---it was like getting inside this world at last.
Another cool thing about the show is that they have, like I said, a wall of these working prints of Robert Frank's outtakes for the book, all curly-edged, as if still in Frank's studio. He took some 20,000 photos while driving in a huge loop around the US, then printed the 1,000 pictures that he liked best, and then winnowed those down to the final 84. I grabbed shots of two of the outtakes for this post. I like the waiting-room scene at the start of this post, the languid curve of the woman's hand, and it's cool that these aren't models, they're just people hanging out. Women actually wore hats like that in the 1950s, even in bus-stations! And the outtake below shows some Buicks getting unloaded and, in the background, on the billboard, a guy with a moose.
From Jack Kerouac's introduction to The Americans: Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with that little camera that he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a big sad poem right out of America onto film, taking rank with the tragic poets of the world. To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes. |
| Posted: 19 May 2009 01:31 PM PDT  With the release of its Neutraface Slab family of fonts, House Industries is selling a number of products, including a set of alphabet blocks, totes, T-shirts, mousepads, posters, and this handsome boomerang chair.
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| Police shoot stuffed animal with Taser Posted: 19 May 2009 12:03 PM PDT Rogier says: It's not every day that police officers gang up on a toy cougar and taser it into submission. Such an event ought to be commemorated, don't you think? Annually, perhaps. From redOrbit: Police in Michigan responding to a report of a cougar on the loose said they ended up shooting a large toy cat with a Taser stun gun.Rogier's proposal: [On]nce a year, in early May, we scour our attics and thrift shops for stuffed animals, then donate them to our local police force. It's optional to dress the toys in darling prison stripes, or tie cute bandanas around their furry necks that say things like "Do Tase Me Bro."Wherein I Propose a National Cougar Day |
| More fossilized modern objects -- Boing Boing Gadgets Posted: 19 May 2009 11:27 AM PDT  Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's spotted the latest installment in Christopher Locke's Modern Fossil series: iconic modern devices recast as ancient fossils. Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets |
| Hunt for the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In's secret AM broadcast Posted: 19 May 2009 11:23 AM PDT 
John Young says: Back in 2007, you posted a link to the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In, where we project 16MM movies at secret locations from the sidecar of my 1977 BMW motorcycle: |
| Canadians: Globe and Mail wants you to rewrite the Copyright Act Posted: 19 May 2009 11:09 AM PDT Jesse sez, "The Globe and Mail has set up a Wiki where anybody can contribute and offer their thoughts on copyright in Canada to draft a community-sourced version of a new copyright bill, as opposed to the horrible Bill C-61 that the Harper Government was trying to ram through last year. The original BIll C-61 is provided as a starting point, which 'You can use the built-in wiki tools to modify ...and add or remove whatever you think is necessary to create a piece of modern copyright legislation.' The Globe and Mail will submit the final version to Ottawa for consideration on Canada Day, July 1st." Rewriting Canada's Copyright Law (Thanks, Jesse!) |
| For sale: San Francisco church converted to home Posted: 19 May 2009 11:17 AM PDT   This 1910 Gothic Revival style church in San Francisco's Mission District has been converted (tastefully, it seems!) into a 3+ bedroom home. The interior photo above is the living room. Asking price? Just under $10 million. See BB pal Koshi's Flickr set of photos inside before it was remodelled! From the listing: Formerly the Golden Gate Lutheran Church, this stunning Gothic Revival style building is now one of the most extraordinary and largest single family homes in San Francisco. This one-of-a-kind property features an enormous living area that includes the original sanctuary with soaring, coffered and hand-painted ceilings, arched windows framing Dolores Park as well as most of the original stained glass windows, custom mahogany wood finishes, four fireplaces (2 wood-burning & 2 gas), a new chef's kitchen and a spacious dining room. The Master suite level features a marble Roman tub room, dressing room and incredible 360 degree views from the tower meditation room and deck. The home includes an expansive ground floor level that could be used as exhibition space, recording studio, gym and/or home office. There is also a garage that accommodates 4-6 cars.Castle on the Park (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!) |
| Carb overload: Bread Bowl Pasta Posted: 19 May 2009 11:02 AM PDT  Today during our Make editorial conference call Collin Cunningham told me that he had just gotten this flier for a pasta-filled bread bowl. I asked him to take a picture so I could share it. Collin said, "Just in time for summer … though I may hold out for the bread-bread bowl. That 'rising-heat' effect on the Domino's Flash is making me sleepy already :("
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| Corpses are rotting more slowly than they used to -- is it because we are germophobic? Posted: 19 May 2009 10:56 AM PDT UC Berkeley psychology professor and author of The Shangri-La Diet: No Hunger, Eat Anything, Weight-Loss Plan, has been writing about the health benefits of cultured food (see: Probiotics and Resistance to Illness, The Dose-Response Revolution and Fermented Food, How Things Begin (Japan Traditional Foods), Antibiotics Associated with Later Infection, The Good Scots Diet, and many other entries about fermented food). In a recent post, Roberts says he thinks that the shift in the 1960s from home-made food to processed food, which has resulted in people having less bacteria in their bodies, has caused corpses to rot more slowly than they used to. A friend of mine, who went to college at MIT around 1980, had a classmate who was the son of an undertaker. His dad had told him that when he (the dad) had entered the business, you had to work fast. Bodies would start to smell quickly. But now — around 1980 — that was no longer necessary. You could wait a lot longer before they smelled bad.How Fast Do We Rot?
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| Moist, and other words people dislike Posted: 19 May 2009 10:40 AM PDT Apparently, a lot of people hate the word "moist." They also hate "hate," "no," "like," and "impossible." This, according to an essay by Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus. From his post: Many people feel quite strongly about moist — there's even a Facebook group called called "I HATE the word MOIST!" with more than 300 members. One Facebooker calls moist "possibly the worst word in the English dictionary," while another says, "I despise the sick, repugnant word!" It's hard to top the aversion felt for moist, but some other Visual Thesaurus "least favorites" can provoke similar reactions: panty/panties, vomit, ointment, and slacks."Which Words Do You Love and Which Do You Hate?" (Thanks, Tara McGinley!) |
| Posted: 19 May 2009 08:18 PM PDT (Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)
I finished a new painting this week, seemingly just a still life of a geranium---often I paint more surreal kinds of things, as you can see on my paintings site. With this geranium I did, however, have something extra in mind, that is, I'm working on a kind of urban fantasy/sf novel called Jim and the Flims, and my characters are about to make their way to the castle of the King of Flimsy.
[Somewhat irrelevant picture of a beautiful neon sign.] I should mention that Flimsy is an alternate world that is, I think, our afterworld, kind of medieval and bucolic---and I had the idea that the castle could look like a giant geranium. Those leaves are thick, you see, with rooms in them, and the flims (that is, the denizens of flimsy) are buzzing around them like gnats, only too small to see in the painting---that's the part I need the word-processor for! You can hear me reading a draft of the first chapter of Jim and the Flims at my Feedburner podcast station, which you can access by clicking the button below.  As for painting and writing, Charlie Jane Anders has a nice article, "SF Writers Make Art," in the io9 SF site, featuring interviews with SF writers who paint, including me, Audrey Niffenegger, and Mary Robinette Kowal. |
| Brian Morris & Mitch O'Connell exhibition in Chicago Posted: 19 May 2009 10:02 AM PDT  Rotofugi Gallery in Chicago will be showing new works by Brian Morris & Mitch O'Connel. The show is called Secret Handshakes. May 22 - June 7, 2009. Opening Reception Friday, May 22nd, 7-10pm. |
| Music video: Les Ballets Jackson "Fiesta Hippie" Posted: 19 May 2009 09:18 AM PDT  Spike Priggen sells DVDs of old Scopitone videos. (Scopitones were jukeboxes that played 16mm movies that were precursors to music videos. Read about them on Wikipedia.) Spike just sent me this bizarre Scopitone movie called "Fiesta Hippie,: which stars Les Ballets Jackson, a topless troupe of French dancers dressed in Roger Vadim fantasy outfits. |
| Posted: 18 May 2009 06:04 PM PDT (Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)
I saw Richard Kadrey and Heather Shaw reading at the SF in SF series this weekend. The readings were good and somewhat cyberpunk/urban-fantasy. Heather read her story "LIttle M@tch Girl," and Richard read from his Sandman Slim novel, due out in July, 2009. "Little M@tch Girl," by the way, exists online, but in the context of incredibly weird zine called Tumbarumba. In order to read the stories in Tumbarumba, you go to their site, download a Firefox add-on, and wait for random story scraps to show up on pages that you're browsing. If you click on one of the story scraps you get more of the story in question. Not exactly the kind of presentation that most writers would pick! I'm kind of hoping to see "Little M@tch Girl" in an easier-to-access format one of these days...
Before the reading we had dinner at a place near this great collaborative graffiti mural at 2nd St. and Minna St. in San Francisco. I dig that savage alien fire hydrant. "Bad dog!" |
| Dirty ISPs can sabotage the nation's digital future Posted: 19 May 2009 08:43 AM PDT My latest Guardian column, "We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garage," talks about how the policy debate over "Digital Britain" has ignored the most important aspect of a digital nation: a fair deal on open network access. But the real problem of per-usage billing is that no one - not even the most experienced internet user - can determine in advance how much bandwidth they're about to consume before they consume it. Before you clicked on this article, you had no way of knowing how many bytes your computer would consume before clicking on it. And now that you've clicked on it, chances are that you still don't know how many bytes you've consumed. Imagine if a restaurant billed you by the number of air-molecules you displaced during your meal, or if your phone-bills varied on the total number of syllables you uttered at 2dB or higher.We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garage |
| Posted: 19 May 2009 08:41 AM PDT  Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death is the latest collection from Wondermark, the demented and delightful webtoon built around Victorian engraving clip-art and snappy dialog. As the title suggests, this volume is loosely structured around medical themes, with loads of funny little arch snippets of text and graphics on the theme of absurd, notional Victorian quack remedies (I kept being reminded of The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases). |
| NY Mag: In Defense of Distraction Posted: 19 May 2009 08:23 AM PDT Jill says: "In this week’s New York magazine, contributing editor Sam Anderson declares enough with the anti-multitasking alarmism (Google is making us stupid, multitasking is draining our souls, and the 'dumbest generation' is leading us into a 'dark age') and writes about the benefits of overstimulation. The future won’t be about focusing more—it’ll be about focusing even less…" This doomsaying strikes me as silly for two reasons. First, conservative social critics have been blowing the apocalyptic bugle at every large-scale tech-driven social change since Socrates’ famous complaint about the memory-destroying properties of that newfangled technology called “writing.” (A complaint we remember, not incidentally, because it was written down.) And, more practically, the virtual horse has already left the digital barn. It’s too late to just retreat to a quieter time. Our jobs depend on connectivity. Our pleasure-cycles—no trivial matter—are increasingly tied to it. Information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so. The question, now, is how successfully we can adapt.In Defense of Distraction |
| Harper's Weekly for May 19, 2009 Posted: 19 May 2009 08:19 AM PDT Here's my favorite bit from the latest edition of Harper's Weekly: Harper's Weekly for May 19, 2009 |
| BB Video - Diving into Space: Miles O'Brien in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab Posted: 19 May 2009 09:54 AM PDT (Download MP4. This episode of Boing Boing Video is brought to you by WEPC.) Boing Boing Video guest contributor Miles O'Brien brings us this special report on the same day NASA astronauts complete their final space walk -- and zero-g repair job -- on the Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission #4. Miles says:Miles is the only reporter who has ever dived in the NBL. Hubble crewmember Mike Massimino, shown above doing Hubble telescope repairs today in the Atlantis cargo bay, is on Twitter: @Astro_Mike. You can follow Miles O'Brien on Twitter, too: @milesobrien. His features at trueslant.com are here. Catch his launch coverage at spaceflightnow.com. Official NASA STS-125 mission page is here. RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic). Previously:
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Arkansas state Senator Kim Hendren [left] apologized for calling New York Senator Chuck Schumer "that Jew" at a county Republican meeting. "I was attempting to explain that, unlike Senator Schumer, I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on The Andy Griffith Show," explained Hendron. "I made the mistake of referring to Senator Schumer as 'that Jew' and I should not have put it that way, as this took away from what I was trying to say." Venetia Phair, nee Burney, who as an 11-year-old girl in 1930 named the newly discovered planet Pluto, died at age 90. "In the year 4,000 A.D., when Pluto is hollowed out and millions of people are living inside," said an amateur astronomer, "the name of Venetia Burney may be the only thing that Great Britain is remembered for."
Astronauts spend a lot more time training for missions than flying in space. But I wouldn't feel sorry for them as the training is an amazing adventure unto itself. They practice in airplanes that fly a roller-coaster pattern to give them brief stints of weightlessness (the so called Vomit Comet); they get to zoom around in supersonic T-38 training jets; they fly approaches to shuttle runways in a Gulfstream jet rigged up to fly (or more accurately, plummet) like a real orbiter; they get time in high-fidelity full motion simulators; they use virtual reality goggles to practice tasks they will perform in space - and if they are a spacewalker, they get to spend a lot of time in a huge swimming pool in a former hangar at Ellington Field - near the Johnson Space Center in Houston - learning the nuances of working in the void.
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