Saturday, August 22, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

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

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 03:52 PM PDT


(Ed. Note: The Boing Boing Video site includes a guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. We'll post roundups here on the motherBoing.)

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com



AIDS Healthcare Foundation files workplace safety complaints against porn producers

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 03:53 PM PDT

Snip from LA Times article: "Vowing "never to stop pushing" for condom use in porn, AIDS Healthcare Foundation officials said Wednesday that they plan to file complaints today with state officials against 16 California-based production companies they say have violated workplace safety laws." (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

TIME on unsustainable farming practices

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 04:02 PM PDT

Nothing new in here for slow/sustainable food junkies, but it's wonderful to see this discussion expand beyond alt.food.michael.pollan. Noteworthy in that it's an easy item to forward to friends and relatives who won't have the patience or inclination to read through a dozen Boing Boing posts on the matter, or subscribe to Ethicurean. Snip:
burger.jpgSomewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon -- circa 2009.
Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food (TIME, via Wayne's Friends List)

Web Zen: Playing Games Zen

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 03:47 PM PDT

playinggames.jpg

08.21.09 : playing games zen
funny farm
memory game
xwung
time warp
shift
effing hail
golden republic

previously on web zen:
mind games zen

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Image courtesy Eric Curry. Thanks Frank!)

Visualization of popular Iran uprising tweets

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 03:19 PM PDT

Gilad sez,

ReTweet Revolution is a visual exploration of the most popular conversation threads that were passed amongst Twitter users at the time of the events following the recent Iranian elections earlier in June of 2009. The applet displays 372 of the most popular threads extracted from a pool of over 230,000 messages posted on Twitter between June 14th and June 24th, polled from the public timeline at regular intervals.

By clicking on a specific topical thread, it is possible to view its network structure: how the message was ReTweeted from one user to another and how its content changed as it was passed along. It is also possible to see posts that were obviously "retweets" but with no attribution to the original source.

ReTweet Revolution (Thanks, Gilad!)
Previously:


Wikileaks publishes large cache of US neo-Nazi group's emails

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 02:06 PM PDT

More than 600 "private emails" from the National Socialist Movement, aka NSM88, basically the reincarnation of the American Nazi party, managed to find their way into the hands of the folks who maintain Wikileaks. These don't look so much like "private emails" as the contents of an opt-in email mailing list maintained by the group, but I'm still trying to confirm their origin.

Anyway, Wikileaks has published them all, and you can browse through chronologically, or by author, or download the whole lot of 'em for fun weekend reading. Yeah, there's a lot of what you'd expect in here. The one funny light spot was finding utterly banal spam for Bing.com, and "back-to-school specials" and ancestry.com promotions mixed in with the more sobering stuff like this:

This email is not a calling for a putsch, revolution, or violence of any type, those types of actions will not be necessary; nonetheless, certain events will naturally occur and will need to be taken advantage of by all of us. (...)

Gentlemen, for too long only one race has made gains in their freedom and survival. That race has not been ours. If you look at things objectively, you will see that all of you have been fighting a good fight but our race is losing ground at a very fast rate; Obama running for President is evidence of that. We have a great opportunity in front of us and we need to ensure it is recognized for what it is and can be. The Fuhrer made great strides by knowing when and where to put his foot down, what moves to make and we need to follow his example.

US National Socialist Movement private emails ,until 15 Aug 2009 (Wikileaks)

Previously:


Curt Smith (Tears for Fears) on "the value of musical sharing"

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 01:16 PM PDT

Our friends at GOOD Magazine have posted a neat item here -- Curt Smith, best known as co-founder of the band Tears for Fears, but now an independent, solo artist with a new set of fans, talks about the "musical value of sharing." Great stuff. Snip:

I got my first record deal when I was 18 years old--next year that will be about 30 years ago, so I have been doing it for quite a while. The industry when I first started was very much one-sided in the sense that it favored the industry and not the musicians. We would sign deals when we were quite young that were pretty bad across the board: from record deals to publishing deals, even management deals and touring. You just didn't make as high of a percentage as you would now. But of course that has changed over the years, especially in the last few years with the internet and sharing your music with people.

Technology has changed so much that now, people are quite capable of making records themselves. It used to be a very expensive process, but its not anymore. In the past, the industry controlled how your music got out there, so if you didn't have a record deal it would never be on shelves; there was no Amazon, there was no iTunes. There was basically just radio, and the record companies controlled that as well. Now, with the freedom of the internet, people can go and discover your stuff.

The down side is that there is now so much music, some form of filtering tool is required.

Curt Smith on the Musical Value of Sharing (GOOD, as told to Eric Steuer, creative director of Creative Commons)

Curt is fun to follow on Twitter. So is GOOD.

I really dig Curt's current solo work, but I have been looking for an excuse to embed the video above on Boing boing for a long time, so I will. It's my favorite Tears for Fears song, and sometimes when I play it in my car, and I'm driving along PCH, it still makes my eyes well up with emo. (link: Pale Shelter)

$25 baby incubator for premature newborns in poor places

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 01:18 PM PDT

From FORA TV, this video of a presentation by George Kembel, co-founder of the Stanford d.school, about the "Embrace," an extremely low-cost incubator for premature newborns. The challenge: design better technology to help keep premature newborns alive. The reality: the most at-risk newborns are in rural areas, far away from hospitals where $25,000 incubators are housed. The solution: a $25 "incubator" with materials that can be heated up in a pot of boiling water.

Awakening Creativity / FORA (thanks, Blaise Zerega)

Free download: tribute to The Clash's Sandinista!

Posted: 18 Aug 2009 11:45 AM PDT

sandinistaprojectcover.jpg

A few years ago, writer Jimmy Guterman produced The Sandinista Project, in which 36 performers each covered one song from the Clash's Sandinista! Jimmy writes to tell us he's doing something with it online today:

"It's Joe Strummer's birthday, a good day to give Clash fans a present. The Sandinista Project didn't set any sales record and of course the number of copies shared on the Net was greater than the number we sold. We didn't undertake the project to make ourselves any money (it was a charity record) so I didn't mind that it was available everywhere for free. But it did bother me that so many of the torrented versions sounded like crap.To rectify this situation, for one day only, we're offering, without charge,the full record in good quality, as well as one bonus cut and PDFs of the CD booklet and packaging. And hurry up: this is a 24-hour offer. At midnight Pacific Time tonight, it's gone."
The Sandinista Project: free for one day only!

Recently at Boing Boing Gadgets

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 07:38 AM PDT

Discovery975_B_Silver_rgb_Preview.png • Failing retailer Circuit City made creepy inspirational videos for its workers as destiny loomed. • Apple is, for reasons unknown, selling first-gen iPhones again. • Plantronics' bluetooth headset is modeled an the window crank handle from a 1974 Lincoln Continental. • There is the Benz of Bling. • Steven reviewed the Chrome Warsaw bag. • Kodak wants to call its next HD pocket camcorder something better than Zi10. You can help it. • Behold! The most hideous cellphone in the universe! • Urban Outfitters scored the last Polaroid film kits. • Qclocktwo gives the time in plain English -- for $1,600. • Apple analysts are at is again. Today's prediction: a television set! • Stephen Fry has one of those wristphones from LG. • Oscar Diaz's RGB Vases look like science fiction movie props, hold flowers. • Behold! A Diplo-dock-us. • Sony's WX1 point-and-shoot camera works great in low-light conditions. • Need to fix a typewriter? Ask Andrew Leman if you can borrow his repair kit. • Instructions were found on how to make a steampunk flash drive. Someone's already selling Terminator Skull ones. • "This is going to be such a rad tweet!"

How many minutes do people in your city have to work to buy a Big Mac?

Posted: 21 Aug 2009 05:51 AM PDT


From The Economist, a chart showing "how long it takes a worker on the average net wage to earn the price of a Big Mac in 73 cities."

The more important question is how long you have to work to eat something less gross than a Big Mac, of course.

An alternative Big Mac Index (via Digg)
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