Friday, August 14, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Sf great Geoff Ryman seeks aspiring composer to set Dante to music for podcast of the award-winning novel THE CHILD GARDEN

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 04:01 AM PDT

Geoff Ryman, author of the stellar novel The Child Garden (a book in which cancer is cured with the side effect of reducing human lifespan to 30 or so), needs your help:
I'm looking for a composer to collaborate on a podcast project, an audio version of my novel The Child Garden. The novel is in part about a musician who sets all of Dante's Divine Comedy to music. I'm hoping to provide excerpts from this fictional opera as part of the podcast, short interludes of contemporary classical music for orchestra and voice, to be sung in Italian. It would be used in key scenes and as signature music for the serial podcast.

How many such interludes and how long they are would be up to you as I can't pay anything. I'm hoping that the project would appeal to someone needing to compose music for a dissertation or doctorate. The music would of course remain your copyright; my site would link to yours, provide a biography and help to maximise publicity and PR value for you. The Child Garden won the Arthur C Clarke Award, the John W Campbell Award (first place) and an excerpt from it won the British Science Fiction Association Award.

I fell in love with this book when Jeff VanderMeer gave it to me for my birthday when we were both at Clarion in 1992. I've thought about it more or less constantly ever since. I only wish I was a musician so that I could work on this.

Email Geoff

Brown fat makes you thin

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 03:45 AM PDT

More on "brown fat" -- the fat that burns regular fat -- from the New Scientist. They say that 50g of brown fat in your body burns 500 calories a day, and hint that it's possible to lipo out your regular white fat and turn it into brown fat and re-implant it.
Brown fat's role in heat generation, also known as thermogenesis, has been extensively studied by animal physiologists. It turns out that brown fat cells have unusual mitochondria, the tiny structures found in almost all cells that release energy from food. In the vast majority of cells this energy is either stored or used to power cellular processes. The mitochondria in brown fat, however, contain a protein called thermogenin (or uncoupling protein 1), which causes energy to dissipate as heat. "This is a tissue whose sole purpose is burning energy," says Francesco Celi, a researcher at the US National Institutes of Health...

Kahn's team is focusing on a compound called bone morphogenetic protein 7, or BMP-7, also known as osteogenic protein 1. It is best known for promoting the formation of bone and cartilage, and a genetically engineered version is used in bone surgery. Last year, the group showed that if cells derived from mouse embryonic stem cells are treated with BMP-7 they turn into brown fat cells. When transplanted into a special breed of mouse that accepts tissue from unrelated individuals, they formed discrete islands of brown fat (Nature, vol 454, p 1000).

To test this approach in people, the team now plans to take white fat cells obtained through liposuction and treat them with BMP-7. The resulting brown fat cells could then be reimplanted into the original donor. "It's got a lot of potential," says Kahn.

The fat that makes you thin

(Image: Bacon Fat, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from kaktuslampa's photostream)

Previously:


Food-face plates

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 03:37 AM PDT


Food Face plates! I love food in face form. My wife gives me smiley-face porridge in bed every year on my birthday, and it's the highlight of the day.

Food Face Kid's Dinner Plates

Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, one of the all-time great American comedy sf novels, will be a movie

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 07:15 PM PDT

Holy CRAP this is good news: Bradley Denton's incredible comic sf novel Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede is being made into a movie directed and written by Robert Rugan.

Buddy Holly is the story of Oliver Vale, whose mother was obsessed with Buddy Holly, and who one day discovers that Buddy Holly is on the TV, on every TV, on every station, with a guitar around his neck, standing in a bubble on the surface of Ganymede, disoriented, musical, and periodically reading out a sign saying that further information is available from Oliver, and supplying his home address.

The entire world chases Oliver at this point: cops, radio cops, televangelists and their flocks, aliens -- you name it. And Oliver begins a road-trip across America to Lubbock, Texas, there to exhume Buddy Holly's corpse and verify for himself that the famous musician is not on a distant, airless moon.

When this book came out, I was a bookseller at Bakka in Toronto, the venerable science fiction bookstore. If you were a science fiction reader in Toronto in those days, it's a damned good bet I sold you a copy of it. I hand-sold about 750 copies of that book, and would have sold more. Will sell more.

Bradley Denton is a stone comic genius and no two of his books are alike, but this is the one I love -- I worship -- as the apotheosis of a certain kind of gonzo, brilliant, marvellous thing that is to American science fiction comedy what Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' series is to British sf comedy.

To see it come back and to the big screen, too -- marvellous. Congrats, Brad, and well-deserved.

Jon Heder to star in 'Buddy Holly' (via IO9)


Dingbat dictatorship in Belarus invents magical anti-cancer pockets for school uniforms

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 07:07 PM PDT

Evgeny sez, "Authorities in Belarus, the last authoritarian regime in Europe, are considering introducing a new school uniform that would protect schoolchildren from electromagnetic radiation that comes from their mobile phones. The phones would be stored in a special pocket. The government is apparently very excited about it."

Belarus develops school uniform that makes tin foil hats obsolete (Thanks, Evgeny!)

(Image: Maker Faire 2007: Tinfoil Hat, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from r3v || cls' photostream)

Previously:


Robot negotiates with mentally ill man who threatened White House (UPDATED)

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 10:29 PM PDT

20090813_043527_standoffguy.jpg

Here in Los Angeles, local news channels have been locked on a chase and subsequent standoff between police and a mentally ill man accused of making threats on the White House. The LAPD have him cornered at the Federal Building. I was just in the area (for other reasons) -- traffic's a mess, streets are blocked off, law enforcement all over the place.

The LAPD bomb squad is using a robot (more specifically an ROV, remotely operated vehicle) to coax the suspect out of his Volkswagen beetle. This device is remotely operated by a human, and is not autonomous -- sort of a humanoid drone, a machine proxy for a human negotiator. You can see it in the photo above, from the Daily Breeze. I wonder if anyone knows more about the particular robot/ROV/whatever they're using?

At least four police cruisers blocked the red Volkswagen Beetle in the driveway of a parking lot on Veteran Avenue just south of Wilshire Boulevard. Officers stood nearby with their guns pointed at the vehicle, and a police robot wheeled its way next to the driver's side door as the standoff continued. A military-style armored vehicle was also brought to the scene and was parked near the vehicle.

gfx_law_02.jpg

Update: Anonymous says,

That particular piece of equipment is a Remotec (a subsidiary of Northrup-Gruman) model F-6A by the looks of it. It has 3 cameras, a microphone and a speaker. It can be operated remotely by a fiber optic tether or by radio waves. It is used by Law enforcement and the Military typically in bomb disposal operations. The use in hostage situations is not unprecedented however.
Above, a photo of the ANDROS F6A with Window Breaker and Dual PAN Disrupter mount. On the product page, the manufacturer refers to it as a "robot," so all of you arguing in the comments that this is an improper term can simmer down now, please. More photos of an ANDROS equipped with a gun and window-basher, and live video stream of today's human/robot standoff, after the jump.

here's the Daily Breeze, here's KTLA, LA Times.

Image: ANDROS F6A on toes with SL6 shotgun and mount.

gfx_law_01.jpg

 

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3D

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 03:22 PM PDT


Cool video about the Hubble ultra deep field in 3D. A photo of utter blackness taken in "a patch of sky no bigger than a grain of sand held out out arm's length."

Photo-crashing squirrel

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 03:16 PM PDT

Too cute not to post: Melissa Brandts' photo, featured in NatGeo.
200908131514 My husband and I were exploring Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park-Canada when we stopped for a timed picture of the two of us. We had our camera set up on some rocks and were getting ready to take the picture when this curious little ground squirrel appeared, became intriqued with the sound of the focusing camera and popped right into our shot! A once in a lifetime moment! We were laughing about this little guy for days!!
Squirrel Portrait, Banff (Via Andrew Hearst)

(BB Video) Mighty Boosh, part 2: Crimpin' Ain't Easy

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 06:41 PM PDT


(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

Part 2 of Boing Boing Video's interview series with Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, co-creators, writers, and stars of the "psychedelic comedy" series The Mighty Boosh. In this installment, Noel and Julian share insights into the role music plays in their TV show and live stage performances, and we also learn about "crimping" -- the nonsensical, nerdy, embarassingly British dork-raps you'll see often in their hit BBC program. Imagine these two grown men in crazy character costumes acting out nursery rhymes, and you've got the idea. Or, watch this episode, in which they perform a "Boing Boing" crimp. Yup.

BB caught up with the Boosh gang when they were touring the US to promote the stateside release of a three-season DVD set, also available on iTunes. Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" recently begain airing episodes in the US, too.

If you missed part 1 of our interview series with Noel and Julian, you'll find that here.

Did you know there's a supervillain made of bubblegum? Watch this episode 'til the very end, and feel his chewy justice.

Previously:

(Special thanks to Mark Kleiman and Stefanie Fletcher for their generous support of this Boing Boing Video interview series.)

Nano Air Vehicle takes flight

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 11:59 AM PDT



The Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) is a small bird-sized aircraft that uses flapping wings to fly and hover. It was developed by UAV-pioneers Aeronvironment with funding from (you guessed it) the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA). Aeronvionment is now working to improve the robot so it can fly in outside winds. From New Scientist:
Aeronvironment's flapper appears to achieve propulsion, stabilisation and control all at once using its paired wings. Details of the technology are confidential, however, under the US ITAR arms control export restrictions...

DARPA has said it wants a 10-gram aircraft with a 7.5-centimetre wingspanMovie Camera that can explore caves and other hiding places, relaying GPS data and images to base. It will need to fly at 10 metres per second and withstand 2.5-metre-per-second gusts of wind.

That goal is a long way off, but DARPA programme manager Todd Hylton says Aeronvironment is on the right track. "Progress to date puts us on the path to such a vehicle," he says.
"Hover no bother for flapping 'nano' aircraft"

Previously:


Dery: "Head Case" in Cabinet Magazine

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 11:39 AM PDT

Fig22B

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

As its name suggests, the Brooklyn-based quarterly magazine Cabinet is a wunderkammer between two covers, a Baedeker for psychogeographers, a random walk through the postmodern baroque.

Although many of its contributors are card-carrying members of the professoriat, a significant number are artists and some are "independent scholars," a discreet euphemism for defrocked academics; trust-fund autodidacts who've disappeared down the rabbit hole of their obscure obsessions; intellectual omnivores with a magpie's eye and a hummingbird's attention span who Want to Know Everything About Everything (a cardinal sin in an age of intellectual niche marketing).

Slavoj Žižek, the Plastic Man of continental philosophy, has called Cabinet "my kind of magazine; ferociously intelligent, ridiculously funny, absurdly innovative, rapaciously curious. Cabinet's mission is to breathe life back into non-academic intellectual life. Compared to it, every other magazine is a walking zombie." Zizek's emphasis on the importance of non-academic intellectualism is deeply political, a pointed jab at the intellectual foppishness and laughably extravagant self-regard of academe at its worst, typified by academic journals like October, a petting zoo for mandarins. Re/Search magazine's Industrial Culture Handbook, early Amok Press catalogues, Disinformation.com and The Baffler and Hermenaut in their heyday, Juxtapoz magazine (when it isn't taking its studious lowbrowism to sub-Bukowski extremes), not to mention the art criticism of Dave Hickey's Air Guitar and Ralph Rugoff's Circus Americanus, the Ballardian urbanism of Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG, the edgy enthusiasms of New New Journalist Ron Rosenbaum, and virtually anything by Mike Davis, 21st century socialism's unchallenged master of intellectual parkour: all of these examples of bracingly original analysis are a standing rebuke to the timidity and claustrophobic self-referentiality of too much academic cultural criticism. They remind us that the academy doesn't have a monopoly on the Act of Thinking Deeply; that some of the most critically engaged analysis of the world around us is being done by thinkers willing to wade hip-deep into it; and, to belabor the obvious, that intelligent analysis---intelligence, period---isn't an academic prerogative. (Yes, some of the writers mentioned above have been academics, but most of them keep one foot in the popular arena, and tap much of their intellectual voltage from non-academic sources.)

According to founder/editor Sina Najafi, Cabinet is committed to "the politics of curiosity." And that rage to know is evident in every one of its themed issues. (I've always loved the editorial coherence, the intellectual holism, of themed issues. Granta uses this device to brilliant effect. Why haven't more magazines followed suit, I wonder?) Its post-postmodernism notwithstanding, Cabinet exudes a Victorian gentleman-scholar eccentricity, a mauve-glove, pince-nez appetite for the curious and curiouser. Call it Richard Dadd-aism. A bouquet of titles, gathered from the magazine's 34 issues to date: "Speaking Martian"; "The Celestographs of August Strindberg"; "Incorruptible Teeth, or, the French Smile Revolution: Laughter and the Birth of Dentistry"; "The Golden Lasso: Wonder Woman and the Birth of the Lie Detector"; "The Human Telegraph: Francisco Salva's Shocking Invention"; "Captured Lightning: The Fractal Beauty of Lichtenberg Figures"; "A Minor History of Useful Corpses: Not All Bodies Molder in the Grave"; "Ingestion: The Beast Within---The Tale of the Tapeworm"; and, apropos of nothing, the "Condensed Directions for Using the Drake Electrical Vibrator, 1922."

As it happens, I've appeared in a number of issues, including the latest, Issue 34: Testing (Summer 2009). My contribution to the titular theme is "Cortex Envy," a psychobiographical essay on the IQ test in which I refract the social history of the Wechsler and the Stanford-Binet through the prism of my intellectual anxieties, rooted in a suitably neurotic childhood. Trying to make sense of the enduring effects of an IQ test I took in early childhood, I peel back the scientific "objectivity" of intelligence testing in American society, revealing a muck pond of eugenicist social engineering. Then, I guinea-pig myself by confronting the IQ test again, at the age of 49---a revealing, if harrowing, experience. (And no, you can't see my scores. But I do disclose some revealing details.)

A snip from my essay:

Fig24For much of their history, intelligence tests have been rotten with the cultural and class biases of their makers, a diagnostic deck stacked against minorities, immigrants, and those at the bottom of the wage pyramid.

[Louis Terman, inventor of the Stanford-Binet test] begrudgingly conceded that environmental factors might play some small part in IQ-test scores. For the most part, though, he was a thoroughgoing hereditarian. "High-grade or border-line deficiency...is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes," he notes, in The Measurement of Intelligence (1915). "Their dullness seems to be racial...Children of this group should be segregated into separate classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstractions but they can often be made into efficient workers."

At the very moment that intelligence testing was sanctifying the race-based educational neglect of blacks, Mexicans, and other textbook examples of the "defective germ plasm," legislatures in 33 states were writing the compulsory sterilization of the "unfit" into law, a stroke of the pen that would lead, over time, to the coerced sterilization of 60,000 Americans. The black stork of the eugenics movement was spreading its wings across America, and in much of the era's officially sanctioned bigotry, the IQ test was a silent partner. "While America has had a long history of eugenics advocacy," notes the historian Clarence J. Karier, "some of the key leaders of the testing movement were the strongest advocates for eugenics control. In the twentieth century, the two movements often came together in the same people under the name of 'scientific' testing."

Knowing what a blunt instrument the IQ test is, what a dark and storied history it has, why am I so nervous about taking the WAIS [Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale test]? Why am I so inordinately proud when I knock a few softball pitches---What is the speed of light? Where were the first Olympics held? Who was Catherine the Great? What is the Koran?---out of the park? Why do I experience a near panic attack when I can't name three kinds of blood vessels or (to my undying chagrin) the seven continents?


Read the rest in Cabinet 34: Testing, available---forgive product placement---here.

IMAGE TOP: Prison inmate taking the cube-pattern performance section of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, 1939. From Paul F. Ballantyne, American Schooling, Administrative Reform, And Individual Ability Testing: Assimilation and Sorting before World War I.

IMAGE MIDDLE: Additive Structure of Human Intelligence, from Peter Sandiford, Foundations Of Educational Psychology (1938). From Paul F. Ballantyne, American Schooling, Administrative Reform, And Individual Ability Testing: Assimilation and Sorting before World War I.



My favorite nearby waterfall, once the home of rockets (iPhone video snapshot)

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 11:33 AM PDT

Here's a quick video snapshot I took over the weekend from one of my favorite local hikes here in Southern California: the Solstice Canyon trail above Malibu. The video's nothing special, but as I was shooting it (on my iPhone 3GS, with a twig for a tripod) I thought "this might be an inspiring little ambient morsel for BB readers to zone out to during their work day. So here it is. I mention the device used because I was pretty wowed by the video and audio quality. Here's my Flickr set of more video snapshots from the waterfall (others are higher-quality and less compressed than this).

There are some spots on the trail where you can look out over the Pacific, and if the season's right you may view a migrating gray whale or two. According to an LA Times article published in 1988 when this land became a state park,

[The site] was formerly used as a laboratory to test payloads for space shots for TRW Inc. and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. (...) [T]he aerospace firms picked the site because they needed a "non-magnetic setting," or an area far removed from telephone lines and electrical cables. One of the buildings had a removable roof so that heavy equipment could be lifted from the structure.
Near this 30-foot waterfall, there's an old stone cabin from the late 1800s, one of the oldest residences in the area. Also on this trail: the burnt-out remains of an amazing midcentury ranch mansion designed by African-American architect Paul Revere Williams. I love walking through those ruins. More on that after the jump.

paulreverewilliams.jpg

Above, what was once the view from the breakfast nook in the now-destroyed Roberts home. The building was constructed in the 1950s, and burned down decades ago. There are lots of wildfires in this area, even a big one just last year.

Snip from a website about the architect who designed it:

In 1952, Fred and Pearl Roberts bought land in Malibu Canyon and had Paul R. Williams design a rustic but elegant home for them. The house was built of stone and wood, fitting naturally into its canyon environment. This interior photograph illustrates a Williams' architectural feature, bringing the outside in as part of the design. Assemblyman Fred Roberts, a lifelong Republican, was a contemporary and political sparring partner of the progressive Charlotta Bass, owner and editor of the Eagle, an influential African American newspaper in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, Roberts died from injuries sustained in an automobile accident before he and Pearl could move into the house Williams designed for them.
(Image: Residence, Roberts Ranch House, Los Angeles, CA Julius Shulman Photographic Archive, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute)

HOWTO Handcraft an Achingly Self-Referential Virtual Commodity Fetish Object

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 10:59 AM PDT

A tweet from Quinn Norton reminded me of this very funny parody Instructable by jdibbell. In just seven unneccesarily complicated steps, you too can learn how to transform a "weightless virtual commodity into a lovingly handmade piece of artisanal craftwork fated to collapse into its own meta-indexical core like the semiotic black hole it is."
FX5T2O9FEQHFHNW.MEDIUM.jpg Materials:

* one literary property (written but not owned by you)
* one arguably enforceable end-user license agreement (can be custom-ordered from an intellectual-property law firm or cribbed from software packaging and/or online terms-of-service agreements)
* one Second Life user account
* one United States Federal Reserve note or other tangible piece of currency (optional)
* basic bookbinding materials (available at most art-supply stores)

How to Handcraft an Achingly Self-Referential Virtual Commodity Fetish Object (For Fun and Profit!) (instructables.com)

Ed Fredkin and the universe as a computer

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 09:40 PM PDT

I recently had lunch with Erik Davis, whose riffs and insights on the intersection of technology, mysticism, and high weirdness have always inspired me. We talked about one of my favorite head trips, the idea that we're living in a simulation or control system of some kind. Decades before The Matrix, folks like Jacques Vallee, John Keel, Stephen Wolfram, Rudy Rucker, and Hans Moravec explored this notion. And of course it's also been the subject of countless science fiction novels. Recently, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom developed a mathematical argument to support the mind-bending theory. But Erik turned me on to Ed Fredkin, a computer scientist whose name I knew but had somehow missed in the context of the Simulation Argument. A pioneer of "digital physics," Fredkin worked with Richard Feynman, made a ton of money in various tech businesses, and is currently a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. He is also convinced that the universe is a computer. Robert Wright's 1988 book Three Scientists And Their Gods includes a profile of Fredkin. When the book came out, the section on Fredkin was excerpted in The Atlantic. The piece really gives me a sense of the scientist and also does a great job explaining his theories in simple terms. From The Atlantic:
Fredkin works in a twilight zone of modern science—the interface of computer science and physics. Here two concepts that traditionally have ranked among science's most fundamental—matter and energy—keep bumping into a third: information. The exact relationship among the three is a question without a clear answer, a question vague enough, and basic enough, to have inspired a wide variety of opinions. Some scientists have settled for modest and sober answers. Information, they will tell you, is just one of many forms of matter and energy; it is embodied in things like a computer's electrons and a brain's neural firings, things like newsprint and radio waves, and that is that. Others talk in grander terms, suggesting that information deserves full equality with matter and energy, that it should join them in some sort of scientific trinity, that these three things are the main ingredients of reality.

Fredkin goes further still. According to his theory of digital physics, information is more fundamental than matter and energy. He believes that atoms, electrons, and quarks consist ultimately of bits—binary units of information, like those that are the currency of computation in a personal computer or a pocket calculator. And he believes that the behavior of those bits, and thus of the entire universe, is governed by a single programming rule. This rule, Fredkin says, is something fairly simple, something vastly less arcane than the mathematical constructs that conventional physicists use to explain the dynamics of physical reality. Yet through ceaseless repetition—by tirelessly taking information it has just transformed and transforming it further—it has generated pervasive complexity. Fredkin calls this rule, with discernible reverence, "the cause and prime mover of everything."
Did The Universe Just Happen?

UPDATE: Kevin Kelly also points me to his excellent meditation on digital physics and the all stars of the field that appeared in a 2002 issue of Wired. The piece is aptly titled "God Is The Machine."

Previously:


@BBVBOX: recent guest-tweeted web video picks (boingboingvideo.com)

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 10:38 AM 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



Dude lives in spaceship house

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 11:30 AM PDT

13who600.1.jpg
(Image: Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times)

Happy mutant architect Wilfred J.O. Armster designed this fabulous spaceship/boat/floating orb residence from steel, copper and concrete. One of the factors that influenced the design of this building was the need to fit it within a very narrow site. The home was even featured in a 2002 Zippy the Pinhead strip. Snip from NYT profile of the man and his house, by Penelope Green:

"Monstrous," is how a few described the project in an article in The New Haven Register. In the local public school, an eighth-grade teacher held up the article, which was accompanied by a picture of the building's design, and proclaimed, "This is the kind of building that should not be built here." What the teacher didn't know was the name of the architect -- perhaps she hadn't read the article carefully -- so she was unaware that his daughter, Nicola, was in the classroom. "Nicola stood up and debated her," Mr. Armster said proudly.

The public hearing to approve the project has become a local legend, said Mr. Portly, the engineer, who remembered it vividly.

Guilford residents packed the town hall, and stood up one by one to announce their objections: that the structure wasn't Colonial enough, that it didn't fit into the town's heritage, that building it was a kind of heresy. One woman said it would ruin her view as she sailed on the sound. When the litany of complaints had finished, Mr. Armster began to speak.

"I said something like: 'I know you're all Republicans and businessman and I know you think I'm a communist or a socialist. But it seems to me that you are objecting to this building because you don't like the way it looks.' "

The Spaceship Down the Street (New York Times)

Mouse nesting in ATM

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 10:06 AM PDT

A mouse was found living inside an Oregon gas station's ATM. It had made a nest out of more than a dozen $20 bills. Sadly, no photos. From the AP:
The bank replaced all the money that wasn't extensively damaged, and the ATM has continued to work just fine. The mouse also got a reprieve: He was evicted from his nest but set free outside the station.
"Mouse builds nest in ATM with $20 bills"

VH1 documentary on Timothy Leary

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 09:45 AM PDT


Tonight VH1 is airing a Timothy Leary documentary as part of its "Lords of the Revolution" series. Here's an excerpt from the show featuring our pal, R.U. Sirius (Ken Goffman). Our friend Michael Horowitz was also interviewed for the program.

VH1 documentary on Timothy Leary

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 09:15 AM PDT

Cheap-Book In Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, author Ellen Ruppel Shell asks, "What are we really buying when we insist on getting stuff as cheaply as possible?" Her answer: a low-quality food supply, a ruined economy, a polluted environment, low wages, a shoddy educational system, deserted town centers, ballooning personal debt, and the loss of craftsmanship.

In the introduction to her book, Shell admits that she used to be obsessed with bargain prices, but says a "boot incident" changed her. She went to a shoe "mini-outlet" to buy a pair of boots for a New Year's party, and asked for "something special." The clerk showed her a pair of "buttery" leather Italian boots, but they were too expensive so she bought cheap knockoff boots from China that cost one-quarter as much as the Italian boots. After wearing the boots just once, she decided that they were "clunky and so uncomfortable" that she threw them into the back of the closet with the "heap of other unwearable 'good deals' in bad colors or unflattering shapes: a bargain hunter's pile of shame."

Cheapness, argues Shell, has ruined just about everything. Main streets, with knowledgeable clerks and friendly service, have been decimated by discount stores like Wal-Mart staffed with ignorant employees who don't give a damn. Customer service has all but vanished (A sign on the entrance of IKEA stores reads, "No One Will Bother You"). Factory outlets have become the "fastest growing segment of not only the retail industry but also the travel industry." Jobs were lost when manufacturers moved their factories overseas and used cheap labor to produce mountains of cheap junk. Products now come in two categories: stratospherically priced luxury objects or slipshod discount crap, with few mid-priced, well-crafted objects available, because craftsmanship can't compete in the mass market. (As Roger Price, author of The Great Roob Revolution said "If everybody doesn't want it, nobody gets it.")

So, how do we get ourselves off the cheapness drug? In her concluding chapter, Shell says individuals have to shake the habit themselves: "We can set our own standard for quality and stick to it. We can demand to know the true costs of what we buy, and refuse to allow them to be externalized, We can enforce sustainability, minimize disposability, and insist on transparency. We can rekindle our acquaintance with craftsmanship. We can choose to buy or not, choose to bargain or not, and choose to follow our hearts or not, unencumbered by the anxiety of that someone somewhere is getting a 'better deal."

For the last couple of years, I've been practicing pretty much what Shell recommends here. When I start thinking I need to buy something I first ask myself if owning it will truly make my family's life better in some way -- Will it save us time, or consume time? Do I have to learn a new user-interface to use it? What am I going to get out of it? What would happen if I put off buying it for a year? What else could I spend the money on that might be a better choice? Is it something I can hand down to my kids or will it break? Can it be serviced and repaired at home? Will it make our household environment more pleasant, or less pleasant? Will it clutter the house? how much storage space will it consume? These are then kinds of questions I now ask myself before buying something. The one thing I don't consider is how "cheap" something is. As a result, I don't buy nearly as much stuff as I used to (it turns out that my decision not to be cheap has made me more frugal and thrifty) and the things I do buy more often end up being well-made and improve the quality of my family's life.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

Recently on Offworld: a more social Nintendo, more DS blood diamonds, time ufck'd pathos puzzling

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 08:47 AM PDT

roadrage.jpg Recently on Offworld we've had a good slate of indie devs giving us a deeper look into some of the games already high on our most-wanted lists: chief among them is Castle Crashers devs The Behemoth officially beginning to reveal the mechanics of their cutely chaotic party/arena game still known as Game 3, and art game champ Jason Rohrer showing off a paper prototype of his Angolan conflict diamond-based DS multiplayer game. Elsewhere, we got the first shot of Die Gute Fabrik's gorgeously illustrated swamp-opera adventure Mutatione, Edmund McMillen & co. showed off the first video of their pathos puzzler Time Ufck, and Taito revealed the first video of dual control methods in their upcoming Puzzle Bobble iPhone port. We also saw Nintendo plunging their toes further into the social media space with the U.S. release of their free web-sharable DS flipbook animation app FlipNote Studio, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner revealed the first draft script for a prequel to his PC adventure The Last Express, the EA Black Box team behind Skate gave us their top 10 user-made skate videos, and Team Fortress devs began dropping awesomely gentlemanly turn-of-the-century ephemera surrounding their latest game update. Finally, our 'one shot's: the nostalgic simplicity of Six Flags' early-80s Pac-Man theme park, Metroid's Samus on a ZX Spectrum, 9 0 0 0 gives us a motivational ninja poster, and, as above, Brock Davis shows us the sobering tragedy of a Mushroom Kingdom hit and run.

Brazillian crime-TV host ordered executions to boost ratings, say cops

Posted: 13 Aug 2009 08:18 AM PDT

Police in Brazil noticed that reporters for a TMZ-meets-COPS style TV show about murder in western Brazil kept managing to show up at murder scenes before they did. Authorities allege that's because the show's host Wallace Souza ordered at least five of the murders. Souza is a local lawmaker who loved to denounce crime during the program, but he is charged with dealing drugs and using the show to bump off his rivals. NPR Audio
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