The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Nevada wacky-race with $500 cars
- Small sf press rallies despite recession
- Fourth Street Fantasy Con, intimate, literate convention in Minneapolis
- God comics: God asserts his copyright in the universe
- Why it's hard not to stare at facial deformities
- Plagiarising Canadian think tank who used tax dollars to shill for Big Content refuses to back down
- Pirate theater automata built from Legos*
- Hostage Hallucinations: Visual Imagery Experienced by Victims of Torture, Rape... and UFOs.
- Doctor Jesus (snapshot from the road in Guatemala)
- Under My Thumb given the "legion of rock stars" treatment
- Into The Subdimensions
- A Case of Spring Fever (1940): Industrial film about a man tormented by a mischeivous animated spring
- Candid Camera: 5 Decades of Smiles
- Beautiful Clouds
- Freesouls: Joi Ito's book of freely licensed photos of the wonderful weirdos in his orbit
- Superb fan-made Green Lantern movie trailer
- Science of orgasm video
- Canadian think-tank spends tax dollars to plagiarize and regurgitate talking points from US entertainment lobby group
- Open proposal for national town-hall meetings on America-wide broadband
- Coaxing bees into making honeycomb sculpture
- Kiwis who took the money and ran located through Facebook update
| Nevada wacky-race with $500 cars Posted: 25 May 2009 11:08 PM PDT  Murilee sez, "It was hot as hell in the Nevada desert for the 24 Hours Of LeMons Goin' For Broken race (in which all cars must be built for $500 or less and twisted themes are strongly encouraged), but that didn't stop these crazy bastards on the ZZ Uber Das team (which ran a pair of matching VW GTIs, one black and one white) from rockin' these great Spy Versus Spy costumes all weekend. Everywhere you turned, one of these guys would be popping his snout around the corner and brandishing a highway-flare 'dynamite bomb' at you. There was also a Ford Capri-based team called 'Dungeons And Dragsters,' which featured fuzzy 20-sided dice hanging from the rearview." Cheaters Busted, Awesome Themes Admired: Tomorrow, We Race! (Thanks, Murilee!) |
| Small sf press rallies despite recession Posted: 25 May 2009 10:18 PM PDT Brett from the independent sf publisher ChiZine sez, The Tel Aviv Dossier TPB pre-order info! (Thanks, Brett!) |
| Fourth Street Fantasy Con, intimate, literate convention in Minneapolis Posted: 25 May 2009 10:13 PM PDT Elise Matthesen, conference chair for the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis, writes, From 1986 to 1995, Steven Brust and his friends put on a deep, intelligent, and intimate convention on the literature of the fantastic. Its return in 2008 was so much fun that we couldn't resist bringing it back again in 2009Fourth Street Fantasy Convention (Thanks, Elise!) |
| God comics: God asserts his copyright in the universe Posted: 25 May 2009 10:10 PM PDT  Elan sez, "I'm an Eisner Nominee for Best Digital Comic, and I just wanted to share with you my newest project: 'God' (the abridged title): Some day the intellectual property of God will be owned by a media, entertainment, and theme park corporation that rhymes with 'Malt Crispy'. The Apocalypse is looming and its up to Reverend Joeb Kim, an ordained minister in the Sacred Order of Accounting, to stop it." |
| Why it's hard not to stare at facial deformities Posted: 25 May 2009 10:08 PM PDT On Wired Science, DeAnne Musolf writes about the neurological basis for staring at facial deformities or irregularities: When someone unfamiliar approaches you in the aisle of a grocery store, a glance at his face and its expression helps your brain to sort that person into one of two broad categories: safe or potentially unsafe. The amygdala (the brain area associated with judgment) depends upon the emotion conveyed by the person's facial features to make that crucial call. Is he happy? Angry? Irritated?Why We Stare, Even When We Don't Want To |
| Plagiarising Canadian think tank who used tax dollars to shill for Big Content refuses to back down Posted: 25 May 2009 10:06 PM PDT The Conference Board of Canada, who were caught plagiarising in a report on the Digital Economy, produced the at Ontario tax-payers' expense, have responded. They claim it's not plagiarism or intellectual dishonesty that led them to copy-and-paste from an American entertainment lobby group's materials, it's just that the corporate mouthpieces of the record, film and software industries happened to have published the best, most balanced account of copyright in the digital age. As Michael Geist points out, their definition of plagiarism wouldn't pass muster at any university, and the report they copied is wrong, wrong, wrong. Leaving aside the fact that all the most relevant arguments just happen to come from a U.S. lobby group with direct links to the funders of the Digital Economy report, the Conference Board of Canada has failed to understand the rules associated with plagiarism as a sprinkling of citations is simply not good enough. As the University of Ottawa's plagiarism guidelines (which are mirrored in academic institutions around the world) note "if you use someone else's words, data, etc., use quotation marks and give a complete reference." The Digital Economy report repeatedly used the same or very similar wording to the IIPA document and does not use quotations. Moreover, my posting cited to factual errors contained within the report and the press release. For example, the Conference Board claimed that the OECD concluded that Canada is the world's file sharing capital on a per capita basis. This is simply false as anyone who reads the OECD report will find that it did not reach that conclusion. Nevertheless, the Conference Board has chosen not to respond to this issue.Conference Board of Canada Responds, Stands By Its Report |
| Pirate theater automata built from Legos* Posted: 25 May 2009 10:00 PM PDT This astounding mechanical Lego pirate theater, controlled by Mindstorm/Nextstorm robot Lego, marries the Victorian dramatic clockwork automaton with 21st century cheap computation and precision brick-making. And it's got pirates! Seriously, this one had me scraping my jaw off the keyboard as wave after wave of awesomeness emanated from my browser. The Pirates and the NXTfied Theater (via Geekdad) * Oh, I do love calling them "Legos." Legos, Legos, Legos! |
| Hostage Hallucinations: Visual Imagery Experienced by Victims of Torture, Rape... and UFOs. Posted: 25 May 2009 03:33 PM PDT Mindhacks blog points to a fascinating (though also disturbing and graphic) study conducted in the mid-1980s about hallucinations experienced by the victims of kidnappings, rape, torture -- and people who claim to have been abducted by UFOs. The reasoning behind including two 'alien abductees' was to compare hallucinations in verified versus unverified hostage situations. Cases of people who were hostages but did not hallucinate are also included.Link to Mindhacks post, which includes links to the studies, and an excerpt of one torture victim's hallucination testimony, in which he compares the visual imagery experienced to a PCP trip. As the Mindhacks writer, Vaughn, says, "Worth reading the paper in full if you can, or at least from the beginning of the case studies, as it's a rarely discussed but remarkably striking aspect of human experience." (via Maggie KB) |
| Doctor Jesus (snapshot from the road in Guatemala) Posted: 25 May 2009 08:07 PM PDT  iPhone snapshot of a painting that hangs in a traumatologist's waiting room in Guatemala. Story + sizes here. Hi to the home blog from the road (and I am fine, I'm not the patient, thanks).
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| Under My Thumb given the "legion of rock stars" treatment Posted: 25 May 2009 02:28 PM PDT More fun from the "legion of rock stars" which takes classic rock song videos and adds in their own horrendous versions of the songs. |
| Posted: 25 May 2009 06:11 PM PDT (Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.) I can't put my finger on a really good link to the word "subdimension" in Golden Age SF and comics, maybe some readers can come up with it. It's basically a place-holder word, a liguistic MacGuffin, used to fill in for any type of weird science that happens to be needed. But I've always wanted to visit the subdimensions.
Experientially, I think of going into the subdimensions as being something like SCUBA diving...here's a photo of a guide, my big brother Embry and me diving near Yap Island in Micronesia. In recent years I decided to retrofit the word "subdimensional" and use it to apply to a hypothetical cosmos that lies "inside the Planck length," in a sense that I'll explain at the end of this post. I introduced this SFictional usage three yeares ago in a story with Paul DiFilippo, "Elves of the Subdimensions," which is still online in issue #1 of my webzine Flurb. And I used it again in my novel Postsingular. You can either buy the paperback or download a free Creative Commons PDF release from my site for Postsingular. Here's a drawing from my online working notes for the novel (these notes are also online my Postsingular site).
The beings who live in the subdimensions are called "subbies," and generally speaking, you're better off not having any dealings with them! It's always nice have some kind of scientific justification for what I write about, and, by way of justifying the reality of the subdimensions, I found the following passage in Michio Kaku, Parallel Worlds, where he discusses a 1984 theory of “string duality” ascribed to Keiji Kikkawa and Masami Yamasaki. String duality allows for interesting physics below the Planck length (which is roughly a quadrillionth of the diameter of a proton). The Planck length becomes something like an interface between two worlds. As Kaku puts it:
Let's say we take a string theory and wrap up one dimension into a circle of radius R. Then we take another string and wrap up one dimension into a circle of radius 1/R. By comparing these two quite different theories, we find that they are exactly the same. Now let R become extremely small, much smaller than the Planck length. This means that the physics within the Planck length is identical to the physics outside the Planck length. At the Planck length, spacetime may become lumpy and foamy, but the physics inside the Planck length and the physics at very large distances can be smooth and are in fact identical. |
| Posted: 25 May 2009 01:04 PM PDT A gem from The Prelinger Archives: An impish spring named Coily curses a fellow who complains about springs by removing all springs from his environment. When the man repents and becomes a convert to the Cult of Coily, he bores his friends by incessantly singing the praises of springs. I believe in this and it's been tested by research: He who slams springs will later join the church (of Coily). |
| Candid Camera: 5 Decades of Smiles Posted: 25 May 2009 12:38 PM PDT  This 10-DVD set of the best episodes from Candid Camera is a big hit in our house. I wasn't sure our 11-year-old daughter would appreciate the older, black-and-white skits but she laughed harder than my wife or I did. It's fun to watch people placed in surreal situations to see how they react. For instance, in one scene the Candid Camera crew set up a one-hour photo shop along the main street of a town. People would drop off film and they'd be told to return in an hour to pick up their prints. As soon as they left, the crew would change the camera shop into a dry cleaners, complete with new signs. The same clerk (a cast member) who took the film from the customer would now be wearing a different outfit. When the customers returned, they tried to hide their befuddlement and asked the clerk for the prints. The clerk would tell them that they were in a dry cleaners, not a photo lab. The customers refused to believe their eyes and ears. In another scene, a messenger was instructed to pick up some papers at a house, take them somewhere else to get signed, and then return the papers to the house. As soon as the messenger left, the crew removed the house (which was just a false front) leaving an empty lot. Then one of the crew members stood in front of the lot adjusting a "for sale" sign. The messengers would walk walk back and forth past the lot, unwilling to accept the fact that the house had disappeared. Then the crew member would interview the poor messenger and ask them if they needed help. Other skits are simpler but just as fascinating. I liked the bit where a crew member would ask a person walking by to hold one end of a tape measure while he went around the corner. Then the same crew member would ask another person around the corner to hold the other end of the tape. The crew member would then walk away from both victims, who were now each holding one end of the tape. After a few minutes, one of the victims would typically walk around the corner, see the other fellow holding the tape, then return to his original spot and continue to hold his end of the tape. Candid Camera is surreal street theater of the highest order. You can buy the set on Amazon or rent it on Netflix. Interestingly, YouTube hardly has any Candid Camera segments on it. |
| Posted: 23 May 2009 10:51 AM PDT (Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.) If it was for some reason hard to see clouds, can you imagine how much people would pay for the privilege? Like, if there was only one spot on Earth that had clouds, everyone would be going there and having these big spiritual experiences just from seeing the clouds.
This is a cloud I saw in Big Sur. We get so much beauty for free in life. I always enjoy photos of weird and unusual clouds, and I found a cornucopia of them on the over-the-top image site, "Dark Roasted Blend". |
| Freesouls: Joi Ito's book of freely licensed photos of the wonderful weirdos in his orbit Posted: 25 May 2009 09:08 AM PDT  I've finally dug far enough through my pile of must-read books to have a proper look at Joi Ito's wonderful book of freely licensed photography, FreeSouls. For years, Joi has travelled the world, photographing the activists, creators, inventors, hackers and entrepreneurs he's met. Noticing that many of these people had very poor portraits in their Wikipedia entries and learning that this was because professional portraits almost always have some licensing restrictions, Joi assembled his remarkable photos into a book and online repository, licensing the whole thing Creative Commons Attribution. Although the photos can be had for free, Joi's publisher has assembled an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous book (in a limited edition of 1024 copies!) that includes a stirring intro by Larry Lessig and essays from Yochai Benkler, Isaac Mao, Howard Rheingold, me and Marko Ahtisaari. I've been lucky enough to be in Joi's orbit for several years now and one thing is certain, any time you find Joi, you find interesting things happening, and this book is no exception. FreeSouls is an existence proof of a different kind of creator: an amateur who is driven to create work that's as good as anything a professional might produce, but it is produced for the love that characterizes amateur activity. |
| Superb fan-made Green Lantern movie trailer Posted: 25 May 2009 03:24 PM PDT Jay sez, "Awesome fan-made trailer for Green Lantern film (live action) starring Nathan Fillion! Cool clips from Firefly, JLU, Star Trek and much more included!" It's so true: Copyright infringement is your best entertainment dollar! Green Lantern Trailer (Thanks, Jay!) |
| Posted: 25 May 2009 03:23 PM PDT Mary Roach's TED Talk, "10 things you didn't know about orgasm," will have you scratching your, um, head, in amazement as you learn the particulars of pig-wanking, the delicate matter of explaining foreplay to royalty, and the business of measuring the human penis's muzzle-velocity. Mary Roach: 10 things you didn't know about orgasm (via MeFi) Previously: |
| Posted: 25 May 2009 12:19 PM PDT The Conference Board of Canada, a think-tank, took money from the province of Ontario to develop a paper on the "Digital Economy" and then copy-pasted most of the material in it from the International Intellectual Property Alliance (an American lobby group representing the music, film and software industries). Some of the material was plagiarized -- copied without attribution. Michael Geist has some pointed questions for the authors and the funders of the report: The Digital Ecomomy report raises some deeply troubling questions for the Conference Board of Canada, its board directors, and for Minister John Wilkinson, whose department helped fund it. In particular:The Conference Board of Canada's Deceptive, Plagiarized Digital Economy Report |
| Open proposal for national town-hall meetings on America-wide broadband Posted: 25 May 2009 08:06 AM PDT Andy Oram, an editor at O'Reilly, sez The Obama Administration decided to expand always-on, high-speed network access in the US, but there's a limit to what can be decreed in Washington. I tried to combine practices that seem to have been successful in a proposal to the recent forum set up the by White House.Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband): proposal open for votes (Thanks, Andy!) |
| Coaxing bees into making honeycomb sculpture Posted: 25 May 2009 08:03 AM PDT Hilary Berseth, an artist/beekeeper, makes his sculptures by coaxing bees into making their comb in specific shapes. It's no wasp factory, but it's still awfully lovely. The Hive Mind (via Make) |
| Kiwis who took the money and ran located through Facebook update Posted: 25 May 2009 07:57 AM PDT The NZ couple who took off after a bank error dropped NZ$10,000,000 in their account have been finked out by a relative's Facebook update, which tipped off authorities that they're in China. But their chances of being caught have increased after they were joined overseas by Ms Young's sister, Aroha Hurring, who posted details about their location on her Facebook page.Facebook blunder betrays NZ millionaires (via Consumerist) |
While many other publishers, big and small, have been firing people and putting acquisition freezes on their lists, we at ChiZine Publications have been trying to push our business to the wall and make a real go of it. To that end, we're launching four books at WorldCon in August: 
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