Saturday, June 6, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing
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Japanese battle underwear

Posted: 06 Jun 2009 02:57 AM PDT


Shibuya246 sez, "A brand of Japanese men's underwear has been launched by a company called Login, which depicts the motif of the popular warlords from the Warring States period. There is a brand for Oda Nobunaga as well as Tokugawa Ieyasu and others." And it's a mere $80 a pair!

Battle Underwear

English order-page (Thanks Shibuya246

Evolution, religion, schizophrenia and the schizotypal personality

Posted: 06 Jun 2009 01:20 AM PDT

Stanford's Joel Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities.

Sapolsky on Religion (Thanks, Avi!)

Previously:


Polka Grammy axed

Posted: 06 Jun 2009 01:10 AM PDT

The Recording Academy has eliminated the Grammy award for best polka album. Damn.

Grammys drop polka album award (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Ukelele with mustache diagrams

Posted: 06 Jun 2009 12:32 AM PDT

Xylocopa's "The Complete Ukulele Guide to the Moustaches of the World" is a ukelele sporting diagrams showing the world's 25 major mustache groups.
The Ukulele Guide includes not only the standard moustache groups, but also exotic and endangered moustaches like the Shirley Temple and the LARP-stache. Recently cultivated strains of moustache such as the Octopus also feature prominently, and the headstock is graced with an inspiring moustache quote, sure to please any moustache fancier.

You may be asking yourself at this point you have survived without such a practical object, and what you can do to obtain one. If this is the case, please contact us.

The Complete Ukulele Guide to the Moustaches of the World (Thanks, Dan!)

New fashion copyright bill will let big companies own public domain designs and bury young, indie designers in legal costs

Posted: 06 Jun 2009 12:28 AM PDT

Miss Jess sez, "The Design Piracy Prohibition Act is very, very scary to all of us in the apparel industry. There are millions of jobs at stake if this legislation passes, and this act is simply being pushed by a handful of wealthy celebrity designers who continually pirate the 'little guys' designs anyway. Basically, this act will kill my business along with thousands upon THOUSANDS of other small, medium and large design and manufacturing businesses around the US and the world if it is passed. It's a big deal!
Under this legislation, however, designers will need to consult with a lawyer throughout the design process to ensure that every new design created could not subjectively be found at a later date to be "closely and substantially similar" to one protected in the Copyright registry...

Further, young, up-and-coming designers would be susceptible to legal intimidation from designing anything new at all, as they would likely not have the resources to fight a legal challenge in court...

While the bill purports to keep all fashion designs that have existed in the past free and open for all to use, the legislation would allow the ability to copyright non-original design elements in the public domain if arranged in an original way.

Moreover, since there is no test for originality, the registry will begin to be populated with designs that from the public domain. Thus, a designer who draws upon inspiration from the public domain, can easily find himself/herself stuck in costly litigation.

Fashion-Incubator: a good idea while it lasted (Thanks, Miss Jess!)

Portland's Pedalpalooza includes an XKCD bike ride

Posted: 06 Jun 2009 12:14 AM PDT


Theo sez, "Pedalpalooza is 2+ weeks of open-source bike rides in Portland, Oregon starting on June 11th and ending June 27th. Rides are created, posted to the calendar, and lead by anyone. One of my rides is the XKCD ride, for which I will be dressed as Cory Doctorow; thought readers might find that funny."

Other rides include: chocolate ride, noobs on unicycles, yoga for cyclists, naked bike ride, surprise bike wedding, homeless hotspots bike tour, tour de goats, old French bikes, pun-ishment ride, trek-tosterone ride, pretty panty ride, dead freeways ride, unimproved road ride, Sisyphean cruller crawl, pedal powered pajama party, etc etc etc.

Pedalpalooza (Thanks, Theo!)

The "super-villain transparencies" brain-teaser

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 05:58 PM PDT

Here's a good brain-teaser from [wu:riddles] --
You're a super-villain and you want to prepare a transparency (the kind that goes on an overhead projector) with the key points of your plan for world domination so you can present them to the hero/superagent before you attempt to kill him in some ridiculously novel way. You don't want this information to fall into the wrong hands before you're ready. Smart villain that you are, you know you can share the information across several slides so that if the enemy agents capture any 2 of your slides, they won't learn even the tiniest bit of information about your plan. How?
Super-villain transparencies

Maker of world's cheapest car is going to sell $7,800 apartments in India

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 05:52 PM PDT

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According to PayScale, a call center employee in India with 10-20 years experience makes about $6,400 a year. These folks might be able to afford one of the 1,000 tiny apartments being made by Tata, the company that makes the $2,200 car.

From Business Week:

Luxury flats in Mumbai can cost more than ones in Manhattan. But these apartments won't be luxurious. The Tata apartments will be built on 67 acres in Boisar, an industrial area where many lower-wage commuters already rent. These apartments will be absolutely tiny. The carpeted area of the smallest units will be 218 square feet, too small even for most Manhattanites. The largest units would be about 373 square feet (Click here to see the floor plans). Can you imagine squeezing a family into one of these units? The community would have its own garden, post office, meeting hall, schools, and hospital.
Tata's Nano Home: Company behind world's cheapest car to sell $7,800 apartments

Justin

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 09:47 PM PDT


Above, the first video I saw on this YouTube account about an hour ago. Here was the second, here was the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. Wait, don't miss this one either. You kind of need to just take some time and watch all of them.

Nadja over at Street Carnage says,

[He] looks like he might have Progeria, a terrible disease where your body is elderly even though you're only 8. Regardless of this disfiguring disease, he's a true gangster. He has the balls to go online and be like every other pre-teen boy on youtube, singing along to Papa Roach and generally being awesome. The fact that he does this, that it brings him some kind of happiness, and that he calls himself "chick3n little", is why the internet is amazing and why the world doesn't seem so shitty sometimes.
Looks like the content was previously uploaded to YouTube under another name, deleted, then re-uploaded them under this new account name.

His real name is apparently Justin?

He is already huge in France. Here's an english translation of that article.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome ("Progeria", or "HGPS") a rare, fatal genetic condition characterized by an appearance of accelerated aging in children.

Update: Ah, 4chan. Some BB commenters have stated that the current YouTube channel is not controlled by the person in the videos, but was reconstructed by channers. In other words, the videos may be real, but the YT channel, and the descriptions/titles therein, no longer. Various accounts name the person in the video as Justin Tsimbidis; the new account name sounds like a mean way some others have come up with to make fun of him. The videos are fascinating, but it sucks that anonymous jerks on the internet are being cruel to this person.

(Thanks, Sean Bonner and Richard Metzger!)

Underground Classics - The Transformation of Comics into Comix

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 04:13 PM PDT

Comix-Kitchen

I get about three or four review books in the mail every day. Very few interest me, but once in a great while I get a gem of a book, and Underground Classics - The Transformation of Comics into Comix is one of them.

There have been a few histories of underground comics as of late, but this is the first one to really focus on the artwork of underground comics, as opposed to their cultural significance, which most histories cover. That's not to say the book doesn't look at the era in which these comics were made -- it does, but it's first an foremost an art book.

Most of the pages are devoted to high quality scans of original art by all the usual suspects -- R. Crumb, Rand Holmes, Vaughn Bode, Robert Williams, William Stout, Art Spiegelman, Gilbert Shelton, Trina Robbins, Jay Kinney, and the rest.I love seeing the zip-a-tone, blue lines, and white-out that you don't get to see in the printed comics. I have a lot of the comics this art came from, and it's a treat to see it presented with such great attention to detail. Each illustration is accompanied by enlightening commentary.

The book is edited by Denis Kitchen and James Danky, co-curators of the exhibition of underground comics at the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisonsin-Madison that this book is based on.

The book includes essays by Paul Buhle, Trina Robins, Jay Lynch, and Patrick Rosenkranz (who wrote a great history of underground comics called Rebel Visions).

(Also -- the Crumb illo on the cover is from Snarf #6 [1975]. The guy in the car would be very welcome at Maker Faire!)

Underground Classics - The Transformation of Comics into Comix

Cat Workout

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 02:55 PM PDT


Cat Workout. You may want to begin with low-impact moves like Twists or Bench Press. Then, work up to a Keyboard Cat Variant. When you're done, be sure to hydrate, Twitter, and do cool-down stretches. (thanks, Sean and Tara!)

National Review cover illo of Sonia Sotomayor

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 02:30 PM PDT

200906051401

There's talk that this illustration of Sonia Sotomayor depicted as an Asian on the cover of The National Review is racist, which I kind of think it is. But I also have to admit the craftsmanship of the illustration is top-notch. It reminds me of Artzybasheff or Covarrubias (see here and here).

How to tap the wisdom of the crowd in your head

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 01:53 PM PDT

Researchers conducted a test to find out if individuals can make better estimates of historical dates if they make two guesses and average them. It turns out they can!
Herzog and Hertwig used the insights of the "wisdom of crowd" perspective to make one head nearly as good as two. After participants made their first guesses at the dates of historical events, they then made a second estimate using one of two methods. In one condition, participants simply gave a second estimate. This condition did little to increase either knowledge or diversity.

In the second condition, participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: "First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?... Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate." When the participants used the more involved method, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate. The "crowd within" achieved about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person.

How to tap the wisdom of the crowd in your head

Monkeylectric's "Full Color Persistence of Vision" Bike Wheel Video Display

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 12:28 PM PDT


Remember Star Simpson? We do (previous BB post here), and we think she's pretty great. Star emailed today and said,

I've been working at MonkeyLectric (the POV bike wheel makers, boingboing covered their very first stuff), and just finished this video of the latest wheel display at MonkeyLectric.
Specs: A 4-spoke 256 RGB LED system with stabilized images and video from 8 to 25 mph (12 to 40 km/h). Zigbee wireless control. More on the system at MonkeyLectric.com.

Previously:


Japan: Man Beaten Into False Confession of Child Murder Set Free After 17 Years in Prison

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 12:14 PM PDT

Our Lisa Katayama of BB Gadgets, who also maintains the Tokyomango blog about Japanese culture, says,

A guy who served 17+ years for child murder in Japan was proved innocent and freed yesterday. He claims he was threatened and beaten into making a confession, and his dad died from shock after his conviction. Sad.

Man intimidated into admitting murder is set free after 17 years in prison (Tokyomango)

The Bing Thing

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 12:26 PM PDT

I don't purport to be an expert in things computer and Internet related. Usually I just read what people I respect say and go with that. Often, they point me me to Google's stuff (search, gmail, Picasa, youtube, etc) and I've always been pretty impressed with their services.

Microsoft just introduced Bing to compete with Google search. My friend Mark Hurst sent me a very interesting article he wrote about it.

Everything Microsoft has tried recently hasn't worked. They tried the "I'm a PC" ads, a knockoff of the Mac ads - didn't work. Tried the Zune, a knockoff of the iPod - didn't work. Tried redoing MSN Search again and again, as a knockoff of Google - didn't work. What's the world coming to, when Microsoft can't build a monopoly around a knockoff?

It's those effing customers. They keep choosing the best experience.

I have to imagine this is tough on Ballmer and whoever else over there. No matter what they try, the customers refuse to take orders from Redmond. Sure, lots of people still pay the upgrade tax on Windows and Office every two years, but only because they have to. There's no love.

So what does Microsoft do? They launch - I'm still reeling from this - they launch a search engine. To compete head-on with Google. In search. I just need to type that again: Microsoft wants to unseat Google with a search engine.

Now here's where it gets really nuts.

Microsoft's strategy, to win market share from Google, is not to compete on user experience. No. Microsoft's strategy is to advertise the heck out of the thing and hope people flock to the site.

They are spending - wait, let me try my best "Dr. Evil" voice - one hundred million dollars to order the world to use their search engine. According to a Microsoft exec in charge of the launch, "The key will be whether we deliver a product and connect with people emotionally in the advertising."

A hundred million dollars to "connect with people emotionally in the advertising." If I've learned one thing in my customer experience work over 12 years, it's this: any online strategy built on emotional connection, based on flashy ads or a new font or color scheme on the website, is guaranteed to fail.

Hurst's full post is at http://goodexperience.com/2009/06/microsoft-has-a-probl.php

The Least Exciting Moments in Sports

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 09:45 AM PDT

(Bill Gurstelle is guest blogging here on Boing Boing. He is the author of books including Backyard Ballistics, and the recently-published Absinthe and Flamethrowers)


Wow, it's Mike Hargrove week here at BoingBoing. Yesterday, I wrote about the 35th Anniversary of the 10-Cent Beer Riots at Cleveland's Municipal Stadium. As baseball buffs may remember, rookie first baseman Mike Hargrove was a prime target of drunken fans, getting pelted with missiles of all sorts including an empty jug of Thunderbird. (As one commenter pointed out, who would in the world would smuggle in a bottle of T-Bird when beer is only a dime?) But Hargrove survived, and played well in the pros for the next 10 years.

I thought of Hargrove last night while watching the not-worth-watching fourth quarter of the Laker-Magic game. Now, you may be asking yourself, what does Mike Hargrove have to do with the NBA playoffs? Well , Hargrove had a nickname as a player. He was called "The Human Rain Delay" because he took soooo long to stand in the batter's box. He drove pitchers (and fans) crazy. Hargrove may be extreme but there seems to be a lot of waiting around in pro sports.

I'm making up a highlight reel of the least exciting moments in professional sports. It's for those nights when I need help falling asleep.

1. The point after touchdown. Why does this still exist? This is nothing more than an excuse to go get another beer.

2. The intentional walk. Wow, the excitement of watching a pitcher and catcher to stand up and lob baseballs to one another. Definitely something I can't get enough of.

3. Watching a relief pitcher throw yet more warm up pitches on the mound. Hasn't this guy been throwing in the bullpen for last 10 minutes?

4. Any NBA game where there's a 10 point difference with less than 3 minutes to play. Garbage time. (Okay, this isn't hard and fast rule. In 1977, the Milwaukee Bucks overcame a 29 point deficit with 8:43 seconds remaining. But that's pretty darn rare.)

5. The NFL instant replay challenge. When Ed Hochuli walks to the sideline and puts on the cans, you know you're in for excitement.

Putumayo blog

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 08:57 AM PDT

Putumayo World Music launched their blog with an interesting collection of interviews about the "universal appeal of kids music." They spoke with DJ Spooky, Lila Downs, and Herbie Treehead. From the Putumayo blog:
Why do you think children's music has such a universal appeal?

Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky: "Something about children's music plays on the innocence and openness that children have. You can't listen to kids music without a sense of wonder at the simplicity. I think children's music is catchy precisely because it is about memory - we always strip memory down to its most essential components. That's why people like "riffs" - it's a way of simplifying and connecting fragments, just like sampling."
Official Blog Launch & Kickoff Post: DJ Spooky, Lila Downs and Herbie Treehead Discuss Kids Music!

The Green Fairy

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 08:42 AM PDT

(Bill Gurstelle is guest blogging here on Boing Boing. He is the author of books including Backyard Ballistics, and the recently-published Absinthe and Flamethrowers)


I had two major motivations for writing my new book, Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. First, I wanted to provide readers with the logical arguments behind living a slightly dangerous life; and second, I wanted to research and document some interesting ideas for getting started. One easy idea is sampling absinthe. Now, it's true there is no real danger involved in imbibing any of the fine, modern absinthes now on the market, if done in moderation. But when living dangerously, reputation and history very important.

absinthe 5A.jpg At one time, drinking the stuff could be pretty dangerous. The icon of the bohemian life, l'heure verte, or green hour was a daily event among hip European imbibers. Indeed, the image that often comes foremost to mind when considering absinthe is a streetful of dissipated Parisian intellectuals, some of whom sunk into poverty and madness by dancing a bit too closely with the Green Fairy.

Maybe the most well known absintheur is Vincent Van Gogh. Long unknown and impoverished, he became famous and successful only posthumously. Van Gogh was a clinically depressed epileptic, and a social outcast who also happened to drink a whole lot of absinthe. Famously, he shared rooms with Paul Gauguin in Provence for several weeks until he sliced off his ear in a fit of rage. In 1889 the townspeople of Arles forcibly sent him to a mental hospital to rid themselves of their frightening, alcoholic neighbor.

Was Van Gogh truly plunged into madness by absinthe? Maybe, but probably not because of any psychotropic chemical contained in the wormwood from which absinthe is distilled. Some researchers say it was the drink's extremely high alcohol content required to keep the natural oils in suspension that made it dangerous. Others claim it was the way the drink was manufactured. According to Scientific American, low-cost, low-grade absinthe, accounted for the majority consumed at the turn of the 19th century. And this was true rot-gut, often adulterated by cheap, poisonous chemicals such as antimony salts and copper sulphate.

The ban on absinthe was lifted a few years ago and absinthe distillation has reemerged as a boutique industry with several small distillers turning out handmade, small batches of the stuff. My personal favorite is called Taboo and it comes from, of all places, Canada! It's intensely anise flavored and the wormwood bitterness is pleasingly apparent at the start. Lucid is a well known brand and is similarly intense. Interestingly, both of these are considerably paler in color than typical French and Swiss absinthes but they do produce the well known "louche" or milky colored opalescence when water is added.

I'm glad it's Friday. I can hardly wait until 5 O'clock for my cocktail. A votre santé!

Recently on Offworld

Posted: 05 Jun 2009 09:08 AM PDT

nightgameshot.jpgIn her latest One More Go column for Offworld, Margaret Robertson murders Steven Spielberg. Three dozen times she murders him, for his appearance at E3 and his "increasingly asinine - and frankly pretty arrogant - repetition of the 'games won't be important until they can make you cry, which up until now they haven't been able to, but don't worry I've come to fix things' line", as she otherwise looks at the game she can't stop returning to, Intelligent Qube, which she proclaims is the 'Modern Times' of videogames. Elsewhere, 5th Cell's DS game Scribblenauts, in which the player can conjure, well, just about anything simply by writing in its name, solves the immortal "God vs. Kraken vs. Keyboard Cat" debate, and Metal Gear producer Hideo Kojima takes on Konami's Castlevania franchise, with a newly announced Xbox 360/PS3 version that could be the 3D 'vania we've always been waiting for. And we sum up a number of the DS and Wii games that went undermentioned at Nintendo's E3 conference: the WiiWare port of gold-standard indie platformer Cave Story, the gorgeously serene 'gaming's version of the bedtime story', Night Game (above), twisted indie platformer And Yet It Moves announced for WiiWare, the Kid Icarus-esque WiiWare game Icarian, and the possible localization of the brilliant DS logic puzzler Picross 3D. Finally, Fez creators Polytron unveil their latest retro-future logo for Infinitron Polypharma, which can only mean that work steadily continues on Power Pill, their iPhone collaboration with Paper Moon creators Infinite Ammo.
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