The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- HOWTO make an 8-track cassette walkman
- Tiburon, CA will photograph and record license plate of every visitor to town
- Glasgow steampunk fair at the world's oldest music hall, the Panopticon
- CCTV density-maps of the UK
- Baltimore transit wants to use microphones to record all conversations on trains and buses
- Surgical sutures filled with stem-cells
- @BBVBOX: recent guest-tweeted web video picks (boingboingvideo.com)
- US withheld reports on the risks of driving while using mobile devices
- Wired presents the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs
- Insectoid centaur fighting Barbie robot
- Why didn't Alexi Leonov take that one small step?
- Today at Boing Boing Gadgets: Take me to the moon
- Oleg Sharov plays "Flight of the Bumblebee" on accordion
- Marina Gorbis signs off from BB
- License Agreement for a Public Park
- Bill Barker of Schwa: found! Alive, well, creative
- HOWTO carve a Mario mushroom from a radish -- Offworld
- History of the US-USSR hotline
- Radley Balko on NY Times photo: " I can’t really conceive of a scenario where it wasn’t staged."
- Vladimir Nabokov discusses “Lolita"
- "Jesus H. Christ, Houston, we're on the &*!!@# moon"
- Lunar rocks are a controlled substance
- Couple from iconic Woodstock photo still a couple
- Bye-bye, Boing Boing!
- Video: from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens in 5 minutes
- New black spot on Jupiter -- from comet, asteroid?
- How the Moon Landings Were Faked on the Surface of the Moon
- Interfictions 2 - anthology of genre-transcending fiction - needs your support!
- Video of the first moon landing, 40 years ago today
- Ozark Music Festival's 35th anniversary
| HOWTO make an 8-track cassette walkman Posted: 21 Jul 2009 02:38 AM PDT Here's an "admittedly mad" Instructables project from XenonJohn: how to hack a portable 8-track tape walkman in the style of the original Sony cassette Walkman. 8 Track Walkman-Pod thing (Retro-tech) (Thanks, Michael Chabon!) Previously:
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| Tiburon, CA will photograph and record license plate of every visitor to town Posted: 20 Jul 2009 11:52 PM PDT John sez, "The town of Tiburon, California (pop. 9,000) has a scheme to photograph and record the license plate number of every single vehicle that enters the municipality, in order to 'fight crime.' But don't worry: 'As long as you don't arrive in a stolen vehicle or go on a crime spree while you're here, your anonymity will be preserved,' said Town Manager Peggy Curran." h Melissa Ngo, a privacy rights attorney and consultant who publishes privacylives.com, said she is not aware of a situation where a town is keeping a record of all visitors.Town on SF Bay wants to photograph every car (Thanks, John!) |
| Glasgow steampunk fair at the world's oldest music hall, the Panopticon Posted: 20 Jul 2009 11:50 PM PDT Merlin sez, The Panopticon is the oldest music hall in the world (to the knowledge of the Britannia Panopticon Music Hall Trust). It was home to the early careers of many music hall legends such as Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame. The hall fell into disuse and disrepair after it closed in 1938 with the rise of the film industry and has since been reopened. A trust (aforementioned) has been established to renovate it and repair the insides The hall still needs donations to help foot the bill for renovations and as such the trust has opened it up for shows. It has been doing shows for some time now and is now reasonably successful.GUESS presents "Glasgow By Gaslight" - Aug 8th - Maker Fair and Show (Thanks, Merlin!) |
| Posted: 20 Jul 2009 11:47 PM PDT John sez, "As a UK resident I am getting increasingly pissed off with the amount of cameras aimed at me. I live and work in central London and cameras are everywhere. I was amazed to see from this map of the UK showing number of CCTV cameras per 1000 that London did not beat all. This place is crazy." The statistics of CCTV (Thanks, John!) |
| Baltimore transit wants to use microphones to record all conversations on trains and buses Posted: 21 Jul 2009 02:44 AM PDT The Baltimore public transit system is trying to get the legal go-ahead to use microphones to record the conversations of passengers and drivers on the buses and trains. Shocking, huh? Watch how fast this becomes everyday -- just like CCTV. After all, if we can simply ignore the all-seeing, all-spying eye, why not the all-listening ear? Update:: Thanks to Jackie31337 in the comments for pointing out that the MTA withdrew the proposal, "Maryland Transportation Administration Acting Secretary Beverly Swaim-Staley said Monday evening that she has withdrawn the following request to the attorney general for a legal opinion, saying the matter should have been reviewed at the department level before the MTA sought legal advice." I translate this as meaning, "We didn't know that sunshine laws meant that floating this kind of insane balloon within government meant that the public would find out how totally, completely, creepily nuts we are, whoops!" The MTA is considering installing audio surveillance equipment on its buses and trains to record conversations of passengers and employees, according to a letter sent by the MTA's top official to the state Attorney General's Office...MTA thinking of listening in (Thanks, Patrick!) |
| Surgical sutures filled with stem-cells Posted: 20 Jul 2009 11:40 PM PDT Biomedical engineering students at Johns Hopkins have shown how to make sutures containing the patient's own adult stem cells to promote quicker healing: Students Embed Stem Cells in Sutures to Enhance Healing (via Medgadget) Previously:
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| @BBVBOX: recent guest-tweeted web video picks (boingboingvideo.com) Posted: 20 Jul 2009 10:50 PM PDT (Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com |
| US withheld reports on the risks of driving while using mobile devices Posted: 20 Jul 2009 10:33 PM PDT  The New York Times today published a previously unreleased body of research conducted by the Department of Transportation in 2003 on the safety effects of using cellphones and other wireless communications devices while driving. The New York Times obtained the research from the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen, two consumer advocacy groups that earlier this year acquired more than 250 pages of undisclosed material through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.Here is the takeaway: talking on a mobile, or worse yet, inputting text or fiddling around with an app -- all are forms of distraction while driving. The less distracted you are while driving, the safer you and everyone else on the road with you will be. Duh. Documents: Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Related article: DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION: U.S. Withheld Data on Risks of Distracted Driving (Matt Richtel, NYT) Previously on Boing Boing: |
| Wired presents the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs Posted: 20 Jul 2009 06:01 PM PDT Here's a sample from David Wolman's list of the 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs: 7. Human stomach. People can digest a lot — except for cellulose, the primary component of plant matter. Why don't we have commensal bacteria in our guts to do it? They're busy helping termites. |
| Insectoid centaur fighting Barbie robot Posted: 20 Jul 2009 04:49 PM PDT |
| Why didn't Alexi Leonov take that one small step? Posted: 20 Jul 2009 06:08 PM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap. I'm still all hopped-up on moonwalk sauce today, so I thought it would be worthwhile to take a moment to consider the other end of the Space Race-- the Soviets. After all, without a competitor, it's not really a race, now is it?  At the beginning of the 1960s, a betting man would have likely put his cash down on a hammer and sickle getting planted into the lunar regolith before Old Glory. It makes sense-- the Soviets had a hell of a space program, which, by certain metrics (endurance, space station systems) can still be considered the best in the world. But they didn't get to the moon. They came close-- closer than most people realize-- and for years they denied they were even trying. They were close to scooping the US's Apollo 8 trans-lunar flight (they did get some turtles to fly around the moon), they had a massive moon rocket, a one-man lander, and an impressive mother ship-- but they didn't have the money, time, or, really, leadership to get it all together. In the end, they had too many technical problems with the N-1 moon rocket (it had many engines that had to all work together-- a technical nightmare), and just not enough money or time to fix it. They did eventually get lunar samples returned robotically, and sent some delightfully jalopy-like lunar rovers to the moon. These rovers were long suspected to have had human (midget or child) drivers, so, who knows, maybe they did get some comrades up there after all. Anyway, as we happily remember Buzz and Neil, spare a thought for our lovable loser pals. Things would have been lots more exciting if they made it up there, too, and I bet we'd still be there now if there was a Moskvaluna next door to Moon-Newark. |
| Today at Boing Boing Gadgets: Take me to the moon Posted: 20 Jul 2009 03:38 PM PDT  What happened to the original Apollo tapes, variously said to be wiped, lost, or freshly rediscovered? Lisa Katayama interviews NASA flight engineer Dick Nafzger to find out.  The case against iPhone in the bedroom: three rules to live (and swipe) by.  The most famous photo from the Apollo Moon landing has a story of its own. And don't miss Steven Leckart's interview with engineer, rapper and heart-breaking realist Buzz Aldrin. |
| Oleg Sharov plays "Flight of the Bumblebee" on accordion Posted: 20 Jul 2009 02:06 PM PDT Such a showoff, that Oleg Sharov. (Via Filled With Chocolate Pudding) |
| Marina Gorbis signs off from BB Posted: 20 Jul 2009 02:15 PM PDT Guestblogger Marina Gorbis is executive director at Institute for the Future. Thank you so much for allowing me to engage you in a conversation. Our signature process at the Institute for the Future is what we call "Foresight to Insight to Action." We don't predict the future, because nobody can do that. Rather, we create provocative but realistic visions of the future. We use those forecasts to engage people in conversations about what this particular future might mean to them and to their organizations, what is important, what they need to pay attention to, what challenges they might be facing. Those are the insights that they can then use to develop action steps to achieve a desirable future. Your generous comments were full of insights that I found really interesting and helpful. Here is what I learned from you in response to posting Socialstructing, Dead Souls on Social Media, Socialstructing: Statement of Social Currency, and Dushechka: • Socialstructing -- organizing around social relations and not against them -- has the potential to humanize our economy. At the same time, substituting social capital for money as the new currency can bring in new challenges and new social divisions. We can end up with whole new classes of rich and poor based on new social capital metrics. • Social networks can be exclusionary (secret societies, clubs, cliques), again something to watch for. • The drive for accumulation may be as harmful with regard to social capital as it is with regard to money. People may engage in all kinds of unsavory practices to build up social capital (just as they do with financial capital). • Any single metric of a person's reputation is bound to create a crooked mirror of someone's worth. Humans are too complex to be reduced to one measurable metric. What isn't the metric measuring? What perverse incentives for accumulation it is creating? • Finally, and most importantly, as my son leaves for college, I need to watch out lest I develop new passions much less savory than bluegrass and baseball (thank you, @samuraizenu). I want to leave you with one of my favorite short clips from an exercise IFTF did at the 2008 Maker Faire Bay Area. As visitors passed our booth, we asked them to record 30 second videos outlining their visions of the future. Great wisdom from the mouth of the babe, completely spontaneously. Make a Better Future! Previously:
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| License Agreement for a Public Park Posted: 20 Jul 2009 02:16 PM PDT Now, this is nice and insane. So, apparently HSBC has "bought" the normally-public Madison Square Park in New York for today, and to make sure everyone knows it, by just setting foot in the park today is the equivalent of clicking the "I agree" box on something you'd probably never agree to. This Awl article has details.  And what exactly is HSBC advertising? HSBC seems like one of those companies you end up doing business with because you have to-- does anyone seek out HSBC products? How would one even try to be excited about them? I did a parody of these agreements for Carrie's Illegal Art exhibit; it looks like reality's hell bent on catching up. I'm sure in a couple of years, after Mountain Dew owns the now fluorescent-yellow moon, we'll be used to these kinds of things popping up everywhere. Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture, that he hopes you'll want to buy. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap. |
| Bill Barker of Schwa: found! Alive, well, creative Posted: 20 Jul 2009 01:34 PM PDT  On Friday I asked if anyone knew where Bill Barker, creator of the stupendous Schwa art project, was. Today Bill (he goes by William now) emailed me and called my friend and bOING bOING senior editor Gareth Branwyn. In short, he's doing fine and has a new book and website coming out! Here are the details. |
| HOWTO carve a Mario mushroom from a radish -- Offworld Posted: 20 Jul 2009 12:23 PM PDT Over on Offworld, our Brandon's spotted step-by-step instructions for carving Mario mushrooms from radishes! Cooking with Anna the Red: Mario mushrooms from regular radishes |
| History of the US-USSR hotline Posted: 20 Jul 2009 12:20 PM PDT Here's a pieced-together social and technical history of the Kremlin-White House hotline, a fascinating story of crypto, diplomacy and wicked hardware: THE WASHINGTON-MOSCOW HOT LINE (via Beyond the Beyond) |
| Radley Balko on NY Times photo: " I can’t really conceive of a scenario where it wasn’t staged." Posted: 20 Jul 2009 12:09 PM PDT  Radley Balko wrote on his blog, The Agitator: I'm trying to figure out how the photo for this NY Times scare story on distracted driving was taken. I can't really conceive of a scenario where it wasn't staged. Which means the caption is misleading. Also, who does this? I've never been in a car where the driver asked the passenger to hold the wheel so he could use both hands to send a text message. Does this actually happen? It's a good question. What *did* the photographer talk about with the kids in the car? UPDATE: PDN Pulse asked the photographer, Dan Gill, about the photo. He says he took it last year when the NYT assigned him to hang around with a group of teenagers. He didn't stage the photo, he says. "In the course of doing the story in which I was hanging out with or shadowing three high school students I made the picture. |
| Vladimir Nabokov discusses “Lolita" Posted: 20 Jul 2009 10:58 AM PDT |
| "Jesus H. Christ, Houston, we're on the &*!!@# moon" Posted: 20 Jul 2009 10:52 AM PDT Evolution Control Committee's awesome soundtrack is NSFW. |
| Lunar rocks are a controlled substance Posted: 20 Jul 2009 09:51 AM PDT  US law forbids private citizens from possessing any of the 842 pounds of moon rocks collected by astronauts and brought back to Earth. Nevertheless, the allure of moon rocks is strong enough to have created a black market where moon rock fragments and dust are sold for astronomical prices. One way to obtain a moon rock is by purchasing a plaque that the US government sometimes gives to famous people and to politicians from other countries. They contain tiny slivers of moon rock. Some of these gifts have drifted into the collectors' market. A 1998 CNN article, "Customs agents seize 4-billion-year-old moon rock," reported that a Florida man was arrested for trying to sell a "fingernail-sized moon rock, weighing barely more than a gram" for $5 million. The rock was originally given to the Honduran government in 1973 by then-President Richard Nixon: Customs agents, postal inspectors and NASA launched "Operation Lunar Eclipse" in September with an advertisement in USA Today seeking moon rocks, officials said.Walter Cronkite got one of these plaques in 2004. Now that he is dead, I wonder where it will end up? There's also an underground market in moon dust taken from dirty spacesuits. From a 1993 Omni article:
Upon the Apollo astronauts' return from each mission, NASA shipped the spacesuits to their manufacturer for inspection. According to unpublished accounts, workers sometimes ran loops of scotch tape across them, picking up small amounts of moon dust.According to Antiques Roadshow, Christie's sold a moondust-on-tape sample for $300,000. Also from Antiques Roadshow: At a Superior Galleries sale in Beverly Hills in October 2000, one lucky collector named Florian Noller spotted a bag used to store artifacts collected on the moon that was taken from the Apollo 15 command module Endeavor. He bought the bag for $2,300. When Noller looked inside the bag, he found a previously unnoticed sprinkling of moon dust along its seams. He put scatterings of dust on little thumb-sized white cards and placed them on photos of astronaut James Irwin saluting the American flag, and then sold them in 2001 through Spaceflori, the German space memorabilia dealer he formed. Compared to the Irwin patch, this serendipitous moon dust was a bargain: the 12 larger cards sold for $2,495, the 50 smaller ones for $995.One perfectly legal way to own a moon rock is by finding or buying a lunar meteorite. Here's a New Scientist video (and article) on how to tell if a rock is from the moon:
My favorite is this "Rare Moon Rock 'Metal' Piece" selling for $2000:
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| Couple from iconic Woodstock photo still a couple Posted: 20 Jul 2009 09:43 AM PDT   On Saturday, I posted about a new gallery show of Burk Uzzle's Woodstock photos, including the iconic shot seen above left. Turns out, the couple in the photo who had only met a few months before the concert are still together 40 years later. From the New York Daily News (photo Harbus for News): (Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, now 60,) say they remember nothing of the original shot, taken by Burk Uzzle. "We weren't striking a pose," Nick says. "We were as surprised as everybody to see that photo on the album cover.""Woodstock concert's undercover lovers, Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, 40 years after summer of love" (Thanks, Richard Metzger!) |
| Posted: 20 Jul 2009 09:02 AM PDT Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry. And so ends my guestblogging stint here on Boing Boing. Thank you so much to Xeni, David, Cory, and Mark for having me! It was a delight, an honor, and a thrill. I leave you with this awesome video created by Lieutenant Commander Spencer Abbot, who shot this footage from the cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet with a fiber optic camera stuck to his helmet. This is a video of a Navy F/A-18 Hornet tanking from Air Force KC-10's and KC-135's (the KC-135 is particularly challenging-- pilots call it the "Iron Maiden"). In turbulent weather, especially at night, tanking can be even tougher than landing on the ship. The basket is heavy, and it can damage the plane if it strikes it, to include shattering the canopy. One can only imagine the amusement of the tanker crews (to whom we're very grateful) as they watch us flail around on a bumpy day. More videos here, including "an amazing low-level through the Cascades that pilots call 'The Million-Dollar Ride.'" As for me, you can find me here. Thanks, Boingers! |
| Video: from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens in 5 minutes Posted: 20 Jul 2009 08:56 AM PDT I agree with Derren Brown's comments about this video: PLEASE – do yourself a favour and turn the sound OFF – NOW. I'm almost willing to throw the towel in admit that creationists are right when I hear it. However the video is just brilliant (if you ignore the silly text as well)... Here's 500 generations every SECOND backed up by actual fossil evidence – shoved in to a computer and animated together. It's fantastic to watch.Video: from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens in 5 minutes (Via Daily Grail) |
| New black spot on Jupiter -- from comet, asteroid? Posted: 20 Jul 2009 08:49 AM PDT  An amateur astronomer in Australia was the first person to report the appearance of this black spot on Jupiter on July 19. Anthony Wesley from Canberra wrote on his online journal: It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new - I'd imaged that exact region only 2 days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.Impact mark on Jupiter, 19th July 2009 |
| How the Moon Landings Were Faked on the Surface of the Moon Posted: 20 Jul 2009 12:21 PM PDT Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture, that he hopes you'll want to buy. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap. A few years back I did some intense research into this. Lay down a dropcloth, because your mind is about to be blown.  |
| Interfictions 2 - anthology of genre-transcending fiction - needs your support! Posted: 19 Jul 2009 10:03 PM PDT Ellen Kushner sez, Support Interfictions 2! (Thanks, Ellen!) Previously: |
| Video of the first moon landing, 40 years ago today Posted: 20 Jul 2009 07:08 AM PDT |
| Ozark Music Festival's 35th anniversary Posted: 20 Jul 2009 06:51 AM PDT  Old-school bOING bOING pal Jim Leftwich writes: I saw that you'd posted links to photos of Woodstock on its 40th anniversary. |
"Using sutures that carry stems cells to the injury site would not change the way surgeons repair the injury," said Matt Rubashkin, the student team leader, "but we believe the stem cells will significantly speed up and improve the healing process. And because the stem cells will come from the patient, there should be no rejection problems." 
eBay currently has 
MOON ROCK "METAL" 
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