Monday, June 29, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

We Make Stories: tool to let kids make physical books

Posted: 29 Jun 2009 04:49 AM PDT

Jeremy Ettinghouse from Penguin sez,

We Make Stories is a unique suite of digital tools for children to create, print and share a variety of innovative story forms. Members will be able to create pop-up books, customise audiobooks, design their own comics, produce exciting treasure maps and learn how to create a variety of entertaining adventures. The site has been developed with a group of interaction designers and is aimed at 6-11 year olds.

Jason Bradbury, author of Dot Robot and presenter of the Gadget Show has played with the site and says; "I am constantly playing with technology and stories - this site brings the two together in a blissfully easy to use and engrossing interface." Membership of the site will cost £5.99/$9.99 for individuals and £49.99/$74.99 for a schools licence (up to 15 users).

We Make Stories (Thanks, jeremyet!)

Explaining physics to a TV camera

Posted: 29 Jun 2009 02:53 AM PDT

Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physicist who's got a good rep with her local news media, describes the process she went through to calculate the sound-bites explaining how a styrofoam soda-cup thrown from an oncoming car managed to smash the windscreen of the car it hit.
The reporter for Channel 8 asked me what the force actually meant. The best way to describe it would be that a scale placed on the windshield would register between 20 and 120 lbs when the cup hit. That quick calculation convinced me that it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that a drink cup could actually break a windshield. If the cup were thrown, even a pretty bad arm could give it an additional 30-40 mph, so the force could have been much larger.

When we taped my interview for Channel 8, the reporter asked if it mattered how the cup was oriented when it hit. It does. Brandon - who is just a joy to work with - had pitched them the idea of taping the segment in front of a car using a Sonic cup as a prop, so I had the cup right there. This was a question that just came up, so I hadn't had a lot of time to think about it. That always makes me nervous because the last think you want is to be captured on tape saying something wrong. Sonic_CupShape

It does make a difference. Compare what happens when a cup hits bottom first or side first, as I've tried to illustrate to the right. The bottom of the cup is really rigid, so there isn't going to be a lot of give. If it hits side first, the cup is going to give. If you've ever grabbed a flimsy drink cup and it squished and the lid came off, that's exactly what would happen. This is the exact same principle the SAFER barriers use for racetracks. Deforming the wall increases the time it takes for a car to come to a stop, and that decreases the force the driver feels. If the cup hit side first, it wouldn't create as much force as if it hit end first.

And, of course, I wasn't mentally or numerically agile enough to think to calculate the kinetic energy during the taping. A 2 lb cup of soda going 130 mph would have the same kinetic energy as a baseball thrown at 150 mph, or the same energy you get from exploding a half gram of TNT. (Total tangent: A 44 oz Coke contains 371 kilocalories of energy, which is equal to the kinetic energy of a passenger car going 86 mph.)

dial-a-scientist

Automated shakedown racket sends legal threats, demands cash

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 11:13 PM PDT

Former cigarette retailer Nexicon has a new shakedown racket: they automatically detect things that look like copyright infringement on the net, automatically find people who look like they're responsible for it, then automatically send a dire legal threat demanding cash to go away. Mostly, they work for pornographers, and the estate of Frank Zappa.
The process is simple. Their software monitors BitTorrent swarms and other filesharing networks and records the IP-addresses of those people who share the work of their clients. It then automatically sends an email to the ISP linked to the IP-address with a request to forward it to the associated customer...

In their email they write that "it may be beneficial to settle this matter without the need of costly and time-consuming litigation."

If you don't settle they are "prepared to pursue every available remedy including damages, recovery of attorney's fees, costs and any and all other claims that may be available to it in a lawsuit filed against you." To make it even more scary, they point out that ISPs might cut your Internet connection if you don't comply.

In the FAQ on the VPA website it is noted that consulting a lawyers is an option, but it would be a rather silly thing to do since it will cost more than the settlement itself. "It is likely that the cost incurred to retain a lawyer will exceed the settlement amount offered." [Ed: it's cheaper to pay us than it is to ask a professional whether to pay us].

Automated Legal Threats Turn Piracy Into Profit (via Digg)

Rubber Room: documentary about New York teacher purgatory

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 10:26 PM PDT

The Rubber Room is the name for the places where New York City teachers who are under disciplinary investigation are sent to await their. For months -- sometimes years, and sometimes decades, these teachers go to "work" every day in a mostly bare room, and wait, and wait, and wait. Even if exonerated, many of these teachers are so stigmatized that they have to switch careers. Sounds like something out of Sartre or Kafka, but it's just New York.

Here's a documentary on the Rubber Room, made by an ex-teacher who was sentenced to it.

RubberRoomMovie.com (via DNTO)

New Pirate Parties spring up all over Europe

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 10:22 PM PDT

After the Swedish Pirate Party (devoted to copyright liberalization and Internet freedom) took a seat* in the last EU election, new local Pirate Parties have launched in France (where a series of restrictive Internet laws have been proposed by Sarkozy) and the Czech Republic.
The Czech party has collected 2,500 electronic signatures to date and hopes to compete in October elections. It was just certified as an official political party by the Czech Interior Ministry under the name "Českou pirátskou stranu" (ČPS).

"We do not want any political posts," spokesperson Ondrej Profant told Czech news agency CTK. "If we managed to implement our program exclusively on the level of thinking, which means that large parties would embrace it as their own we would be satisfied."

Like many of the other European pirate parties, the Czechs lack a broad political program; they care only about intellectual property issues and hope to partner with other parties in a coalition.

The French pirates have little more than a Facebook group and a Wordpress blog at the moment, but they too hope to shape policy in the aftermath of the Swedish Pirate Party's win. France might seen like fertile soil for such a party to flourish, since the government has been pushing a tough "three strikes" law. To date, the group has 1,600 members of a Facebook group.

Pirate parties parade through Prague, Paris

*Two seats, if the Treaty of Lisbon is ratified

Previously:


2009 Locus Award winners

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 10:19 PM PDT

The 2009 Locus Award winners for best science fiction and related books published in 08, as voted by the general public, have been announced. A good place to start your reading if you want to read some of the best stuff out there.
Science Fiction Novel: Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Atlantic UK, Morrow)
Fantasy Novel: Lavinia, Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)
First Novel: Singularity's Ring, Paul Melko (Tor)
Young-Adult Book: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, Bloomsbury)
Novella: "Pretty Monsters", Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters)
Novelette: "Pump Six", Paolo Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories)
Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
Anthology: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)
Collection: Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)
Non-Fiction/Art Book: P. Craig Russell, Coraline: The Graphic Novel, Neil Gaiman, adapted and illustrated by P. Craig Russell (HarperCollins)
Editor: Ellen Datlow
Artist: Michael Whelan
Magazine: F&SF
Publisher: Tor
2009 Locus Award Winners
Previously:


Honduran coup is the first successful military coup d'etat in the region since the Cold War ended

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 11:41 PM PDT

Honduras has undergone a military coup, with left-leaning president Manuel Zelaya being sent into exile by the Army after proposing a referendum on a constitutional change that would have let him run for a third second term in office. This is the first successful Latin American military coup since the end of the Cold War (though Honduras has a large English-speaking native minority, so "Latin American" may not be the right word here). Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, a close ally, has warned that any moves on the Venezuelan embassy will be treated as an act of war.

We honeymooned on Roatan, one of Honduras' Bay Islands, and it was not without its political problems. Indeed, martial law was briefly declared on Roatan during our two week stay, after a series of blockades and sabotage in protest of massive rate-hikes from the newly privatized power company. Zelaya's personal handling of that problem was less than perfect. But as developing nations' governments go, Honduras had a pretty stable, relatively non-corrupt government and administration. Certainly, a military coup is less democratic than a leader seeking a mandate to try for a constitutional reform.

U.S. President Barack Obama and the European Union expressed deep concern after troops came for Zelaya, an ally of socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, around dawn and took him away from his residence. He was whisked away to Costa Rica.

Zelaya, who took office in 2006 and is limited by the constitution to a four-year term that ends in early 2010, had angered the army, courts and Congress by pushing for an unofficial public vote on Sunday to gauge support for his plan to hold a November referendum on allowing presidential re-election.

Army overthrows Honduras president

Lenovo expanding Del and Esc keys, nuking Caps Lock

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 10:10 PM PDT

Lenovo's new laptop keyboards have bigger Del and Esc keys, which sounds right to me. I love the Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards more than any other keyboard I've tried. I recently switched away from Thinkpads for a season and then switched back and I could almost hear my fingertips sighing in relief as they touched down on the clacky, springy, responsive X200 keyboard. What a treat.
After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have installed larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range...

The change is based on testing users on which keys they use the most. On average, they used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys, that hadn't been made bigger.

Lenovo decided to make these two keys about twice as long in the vertical direction to fit the way people reach up for them.

Apparently the next keyboard evolution could be the death of the caps lock. It comes from the days when you wrote headings in capitals but these days exists only to be accidently pressed, stuff up passwords, or make you shout online.

Lenovo increases size of panic buttons (via /.)

Persepolis 2.0: fan-art story about Iran elections

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 10:07 PM PDT

CC-licensed photo-book to accompany my CC-licensed essay on CCTVs

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 09:52 PM PDT

Emma sez,
"Snitchtown: the photo essay" is a book of photographs of a (very small) subset of the 4.2 million CCTV in Britain. These have been put together with Cory Doctorow's essay on ubiquitous CCTV coverage, "Snitchtown" as part of the SoFoBoMo event, in which photographers work to put together a solo project in book form in one month.

I was inspired by some of the things that Cory said at an Open Rights Group debate. Not least of these was the fact that his daughter's pocket money was tied, in part, to her spotting the CCTV cameras on the way to school. This sounded so damned transgressive, and I realised how much we've been trained to pay no attention to the cameras that record our daily lives (I counted 21 on my exit from the tube station this evening alone.)

The book needed some words to explain why I wanted turn the lens back onto the CCTV cameras. I started by using some extracts from "Snitchtown", along with quotes from the press, and from CCTV manufacturers' catalogues. I quickly realised that none of these told the story as cogently as the original essay does. The upshot is a creative commons licensed collection of photographs, a creative commons licensed book (PDF only at the present time, but I plan to put it on a print on demand server.)

I'm very new to photography and I know of many people that could have done a much better job, but I wanted to stand under these cameras and document them. Doing so has made me much more aware of just how ubiquitous they are. I hope the photographs will help others to do likewise.

This is, I believe, my absolute favorite CC adaptation of my work to date; in that it's the first adaptation that I prefer to my original. Great work, Emma!

Snitchtown

Previously:


Thank you and farewell

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 08:47 PM PDT

Joshua Foer and Dylan Thuras are guest bloggers on Boing Boing. They are co-founders of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica.

aogoodbye.jpgMany thanks to David, Mark, Xeni, Cory, the Boing Boing team, and all of Boing Boing's readers for making these two weeks of guest blogging so terrific. We were thrilled to be able to introduce the Atlas Obscura to the world on Boing Boing.

One of the best parts of this experience has been following the thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion thread comments. We're awed by the responsiveness of BB's readers, and by the generosity with which you all have shared your knowledge and opinions.

We especially want to thank everyone who has taken time to add places to the Atlas Obscura. Over the last two weeks, the site has already grown to be more than just a collection of "wondrous, curious, and esoteric" places. Your contributions and comments are starting to turn it into a community. We hope you'll continue to share your knowledge of obscure places, so that we can continue to build the site into a truly awesome resource.

Please stay in touch with any thoughts, critiques, or suggestions that come to mind. Thanks again!

All Best,

Josh and Dylan

The Devil's Kettle

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 06:02 PM PDT

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

devilskettlefalls.jpg

I ought to leave the Minnesota curiosities to Dylan, since that's his home turf, but I was just poking around the Atlas and stumbled on a mysterious waterfall called the "Devil's Kettle," recently added by a user named nursecarman. I realized I'd never seen anything quite like it before.

There is a mysterious waterfall in Judge Magney State Park in Minnesota. Half of the water drops 50 feet into the Brule river; the other half falls into a cauldron and disappears! Dyes and ping pong balls have been dropped into the pothole in an attempt to trace its route and find its outlet--presumably the water winds its way underground to Lake Superior a mile away--but the other end of the Devil's Kettle has yet to be found.

Anyone know of any other disappearing waterfalls like this? I'm guessing there must be others.

Pirate Bay founders launch beta of "The Video Bay"

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 10:10 PM PDT


vblogo2.gif

The developers behind the Pirate Bay team have been developing a video streaming site for the past two years, and an "extreme beta" version of the project is available (meaning, in their words, "Don't expect anything to work at all"). Users can share video clips here without having to fear concerns they may be removed over copyright claims, as with the current dominant video-sharing service, YouTube. Snip from an item on Torrentfreak:

However, as with most of their projects it can take a while before the public can catch a glimpse of what they are working on. The Video Bay - as the project is named - opened up to the public with a very early test version a few weeks ago. Initially, users were able to browse though the videos but this has been disabled now. What is left is an announcement that the site will be launched somewhere in the future.(...)

Pirate Bay Spokesman Peter Sunde agreed that it might take a while before the site goes live and told us that "it will be done when it's done, in the future, in like a year or five."

The Video Bay.

Previously:


God Hates the World, by Westboro Baptist Church

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 10:16 PM PDT


The part that starts right about 5 minutes in is utterly terrifying and sad. Watch the whole thing from the top, though. "God Hates the World," brought to you by Westboro Baptist Church who previously became internet-famous for "God Hates Fags" and "God Hates America." Incidentally, the song and lyrics of which this is a remake were co-created by none other than the recently departed Michael Jackson. (Uh, thanks Richard Metzger).

Previously:


"Crop Circles" Reveal an Ancient Burial Site a Thousand Years Older Than Stonehenge

Posted: 28 Jun 2009 02:24 PM PDT

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

090615-stonehenge-tombs-crop-circles_big.jpg

Riffing off David's recent post about stoned wallabies making crop circles, here is yet another set of "crop circles," made this time not by marsupials but by the gravesites of prehistoric man. From National Geographic

A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.

Discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage, the U.K. government's historic-preservation agency, the "crop circles" are the results of buried archaeological structures interfering with plant growth.

Link to the National Geographic article
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