The Latest from Boing Boing

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• New Adrian Mole diary is dark, hopeless and hilarious
• One terabuck, visualized
• Soviet computers from the Cold War tech-race
• HOWTO use physics to beat "how many candies in the jar" games
• Time-lapse footage of Disneyland's construction, for the first time
• Two images from an awesome, historic week of Moon.
• Odd Images of Escape Chute Lead to Better Story

New Adrian Mole diary is dark, hopeless and hilarious Posted: 27 Jul 2009 04:04 AM PDT This weekend, I discovered to my absolute delight that Sue Townsend had published another volume in the Adrian Mole diaries, a series I have followed since I was a teenager. The new book, The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001, was published in hardcover in 2008, but I missed it until now -- it's just been released in paperback. The Adrian Mole diaries start with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (published when I was about 13 3/4, explaining, in part why I've found these books so compelling over the years) and they chronicle the improbable adventures of Adrian Mole, a lower-middle-class would-be intellectual from the English lowlands. Adrian's life is plagued by parental insanity, poor romantic relationships, ill-advised pregnancies, angry pensioners whom Adrian inevitably ends up caring for, doctors frustrated by his hypochondria, and a streak of hilarious and painful self-sabotage as wide as Basil Fawlty's. In The Lost Diaries, we get a bit of in-fill on the series, a documenting of the years leading up to the War on Terror, during which Adrian reaches a low point, living as a single father in a terrible council estate, his parents again divorced (then remarried, then divorced, then remarried), his two sons stuck in a miserable educational situation, and his finances and mood in the pits of despair. But Adrian soldiers on, as he always does, blissfully unaware of the comedy in his tragedy, writing a terrible kids' story about pigs, another terrible murder comedy about builders; discovering globalism's seedy underbelly through the lens of a road-size fry-stand where he meets truckers bound for and from every part of the Eurasian landmass; contending with pernicious headlice, authoritarian schoolmasters, foot-and-mouth, and a petrol shortage, and all the while chronicling it all in Townsend's deadpan style. I purely love these books, every word of every one of them. Townsend's gift is to make you choke with laughter and tears at once, to create a nebbishy antihero who is both terrible and lovable, and to torture him mercilessly for our benefit and edification. And I was fantastically happy to see at notice at the book's end that another volume is due in November, Adrian Mole, the Prostrate Years. The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001 Previously: Boing Boing: Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Adrian Mole: the text-adventure game - Boing Boing Boing Boing: Sue Townsend is continuing Adrian

One terabuck, visualized Posted: 26 Jul 2009 10:12 PM PDT Barry sez, "One of the most difficult things you encounter when discussing the bailouts is getting people to understand concepts of enormity that are literally beyond comprehension. 'Trillion' is one of those concepts. This visualization (by Jess Bachman, who does the fabulous Death and Taxes poster), goes along way to making the number more understandable. " Visualizing One Trillion Dollars (Thanks, Barry!) Previously: Visualizing $1 Trillion as an endless field of bales of C-notes How much is a trillion dollars -- two perspectives Zimbabwean billboards from trillion dollar notes - Boing Boing Zimbabwean $100 trillion note - Boing Boing Three trillion dollars - Nobel winning economist tabulates true ... Bailout costs more than Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase ... Record co's seek $1.65 trillion from AllOfMP3.com - Boing Boing Fair use industries returned $4.5 trillion to the US in 2006 ... Boing Boing: IBM's Blue Gene: thousand trillion mathematical ops ... Guy in Malaysia gets $218 trillion dollar phone bill - Boing Boing

Soviet computers from the Cold War tech-race Posted: 26 Jul 2009 10:07 PM PDT Steve Silberman sez, "The Cold War computing race from the Russian side, including the development of the MESM -- for 'Small Electronic Counting Machine' -- powered by more than 6000 vacuum tubes." Building digital computers in Soviet post-war Russia was a dangerous business. To protect himself and his staff from criticism that could end in them being sent to labour camps, Russian computer pioneer Sergei Lebedev of the Kiev Electro-Technical Institute declared that the computers they wanted to build would carry out only ideologically correct calculations. Described as 'the Soviet Alan Turing', Lebedev had been thinking about how to build a computer since 1948, and by the end of 1949 he had the basic principles down on paper. In a climate of deep suspicion, Lebedev assembled a team of 12 designers and 15 technicians at a disused monastery at Feofania, near Kiev, and gave it the seemingly ironic name 'Secret Laboratory Number One'... The Russian System/360 clone was called the ES EVM, and it soon became widely available in Russia. In 1972, the year that the ES EVM was released, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev virtually admitted what was going on when he told a meeting of officials, "We communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their credits, their agriculture and their technology." Theft quickly became the principal way that Russian computing kept pace with the West. In 1975, production began of a clone of the influential DEC PDP-11/40 minicomputer. Called the SM-4, it featured multiple video terminals and twin magnetic tape units - just like the real thing. The SM-4 so faithfully reproduced the original hardware that it even ran Unix, enabling it to run a wide range of stolen applications. The successor to the SM-4 was the SM-1420. A cloned version of the DEC PDP-11/34+, it was produced in large numbers across the Soviet Union. The standard machine had 256kb of RAM, two 2.5MB removable disc packs, two magnetic tape drives and the ability to handle several video terminals. Predictably, the mid-1980s saw the first cloned Russian IBM PC, called the ES PEVM. It ran DOS and early versions of Windows. Up until his death last year, my great uncle Bora Rachman was curator of the Popov technology museum in St Petersburg. He let me do a ton of photography the last time I visited him (alas, my camera broke that day, necessitating the use of a crummy phonecam). Lots of shots of handsome old Soviet clunker computers. Secrets of Communist computing (Thanks, Steve!)

HOWTO use physics to beat "how many candies in the jar" games Posted: 26 Jul 2009 10:07 PM PDT Here's an Australian physics teacher using principles of molecular physics (the "packing fraction") to "shark" games where you are asked to guess the number of M&Ms (or, presumably, other ellipsoid candy) in a jar. How to shark a 'guess the number of M&Ms in a jar' contest... (Thanks, Darren!)

Time-lapse footage of Disneyland's construction, for the first time Posted: 26 Jul 2009 10:26 PM PDT John sends us "Rare and unseen footage of Disneyland's construction narrated by Imagineers. Includes some amazing new footage of Walt Disney walking the site before construction even started and some never-before-seen timelapse footage of the park from groundbreaking until opening day. This film was on the way to deep storage and was found by a curious employee, otherwise there's a good chance we'd never get to see this." This is just fascinating -- a look into the raw bones beneath one of the most polished created environments we have. The narration, from Tony Baxter, Ed Hobleman, and Walter Magnuson, is great. And I'm in heaven over the glimpses of the original Tomorrowland, another top time-traveller destination for me once I develop my Tardis. Be sure to click through to see the whole thing; this is just part one of five. Building Walt's Dream - Disneyland Construction Timelapse Video (Thanks, John!)

Two images from an awesome, historic week of Moon. Posted: 26 Jul 2009 08:41 PM PDT Both via Boston.com's "The Big Picture." Above (click for large size): A NASA photo of a young Neil Armstrong, 1966. (view the full Apollo mission photoset here). Below: (click for large size) the longest eclipse of the century, seen beyond a statue of Mahatma Gandhi (Chennai, India, July 22, 2009 - REUTERS/Babu) (All spotted on missom's blog.)

Odd Images of Escape Chute Lead to Better Story Posted: 26 Jul 2009 12:23 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 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 originally scanned these images from yet another old 1970s Popular Science from my big stack purely for aesthetic reasons: these illustrations, out of context, are baffling and oddly appealing. But then I read the article, about the Zephinie Escape Chute-- a sort of flexible nylon and fiberglass tube used to rescue people from emergencies in skyscrapers and other situations where the big problem is the distance between the people and the hard, unforgiving ground. There also seems to be a story behind this all-- a bitter, determined story, as Zephinie never seemed to have gotten certification in the US, and feels that sinister, unfair forces were at play. The website has a bit of that Dr.Bronnerish rambling quality, but the idea certainly seems sound, and is in place in Europe and Asia. Plus, the site references some fascinating metrics like "90 teenagers evacuation per minute." I think the "x teenager evacuation/min" standard is one that probably has lots more use than we think. For something that I thought was just a funny visual image, I stumbled upon a very interesting device and a compelling story. Not a bad deal from a 32-year old magazine.

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