The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Magical short story podcast about Google Book Search, data visualization and the Olde Curiousity Shoppe
- Vegemite's stupid and clueless linking policy
- Randall Munroe reading to benefit EFF, San Francisco, Sept 21
- Dictator Wars: social game where you get to be a despot
- Sysadmin of the Year 2009 -- nominations open
- Treatment of intersexed African athlete appalling
- UK: Treatment of (gay) genius mathematician Alan Turing "appalling"
- David Lynch, window-dresser.
- Clickable map of Los Angeles area marijuana dispensaries
- The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly
- Lawyers for TV überdouche Glenn Beck go after satirical website, saying the url itself is defamatory
- Daredevil LA tagger "Buket" of YouTube fame gets nearly 4 years in jail.
- Dogs Doing Yoga
- Beautiful glass sculptures of deadly viruses and bacteria
- It's Always the Fixer Who Dies
- Pop-Up Magazine, Issue 2: Live!
- Commemorative mug of courtroom colostomy bag eater
- Interview with John Marcotte, author of bill to ban divorce
- Recently on Offworld: Beatles go 8-bit, Dreamcast gets a new game, let concept artists rule
- How foreclosures breed mosquitoes
- Old bee-related illustrations
- UK police watchdog finally gets off its butt to investigate terrorism detention-and-search of children, theft of electronics
- If distance education was Zork
- Pigeons are faster than DSL
| Posted: 11 Sep 2009 04:35 AM PDT This week's story on the Escape Pod science fiction podcast is a remarkable tale called "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store" written by Robin Sloan and billed as a "short story about recession, attraction and data-visualization" and it is fabulous. It's a fantastic, magical realist tale about Google Book Search, magick with a K, an olde curiousity shoppe, and the power of data-visualization. The story was initially self-published on Sloan's blog and was recommended to the Escape Pod editors by a friend, who read it, loved it and bought it. If you enjoyed Ben Rosenbaum's The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale, you'll love this. EP215: Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store (podcast) |
| Vegemite's stupid and clueless linking policy Posted: 10 Sep 2009 11:26 PM PDT Anaglyph sez, "I was going to do a post on my blog about Kraft's new Vegemite product and I visited their official site to find that before you can get access you're forced to agree to one of the the stupidest legal disclaimers I've ever read on the net. To whit: they expressly forbid anyone to link to them!" You may access and display pages of the Site on a computer or a monitor, and print out for your personal use any whole page or pages of this Site. All other use, copying or reproduction of any part of this Site is prohibited (save to the extent permitted by law). Without limiting the foregoing, no part of this Site may be reproduced on any other internet site, and you are not authorised to redistribute or sell the material or reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise convert it to any other form that people can use. You are also prohibited from linking the Site to another website in any way whatsoever. [emphasis added]This is like saying "You are prohibited from giving people directions to the Kraft factory." Putting a link to a URL on your site doesn't require permission of the linkee. You can say it all you want, but it doesn't make it true. Still, goes to show you that all the legendary brilliance and efficiency of the consumer packaged goods giants is vastly overrated -- what a pack of morons. Allow me to remind you of Boing Boing's superior linking policy. Terms of Use, Disclaimer and Copyright Notice (Thanks, Anaglyph! Previously:
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| Randall Munroe reading to benefit EFF, San Francisco, Sept 21 Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:02 PM PDT Randall Munroe, creator of the awesome XKCD webcomic, is coming to San Francisco to give a benefit appearance and reading for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now that sounds like a kick-ass evening. EFF's Geek Reading: xkcd Webcomic Author Randall Munroe |
| Dictator Wars: social game where you get to be a despot Posted: 10 Sep 2009 09:59 PM PDT  Dictator Wars is the latest game from GameLayers, the creators of the Nethernet (AKA Passively Multiplayer Online Game). Justin Hall sez, In Dictator Wars you can arrest dissident bloggers, move the national treasury into your home, and subsidize the price of oil to create religious policemen. Players can ban threatening religions, develop domestic drug production, and ride around on aircraft carriers threatening larger nations.Dictator Wars: Your Game of Supreme National Power (Thanks, Justin!) (Disclosure: I'm proud to serve on the GameLayers advisory board) |
| Sysadmin of the Year 2009 -- nominations open Posted: 10 Sep 2009 09:55 PM PDT Once again it's time for the annual Sysadmin of the Year award, and nominations are open. Of course, my vote -- as always -- goes to our very own Ken Snider, the very epitome of everything wonderful about sysadmins. Ken is level-headed and calm, technically skilled, bright and quick, tireless and impassioned. He cares about the systems and he cares about the people who use them. He has beaten DoS attacks, tuned and maintained our hardware to a startling level of reliability, and has gotten out of a warm bed more times than I can count to battle demon entropy. What's more, Ken cares about systems in general, with a deep commitment to justice and freedom on the network. Thank you Ken, you're the sysadmin of the century in my books. We're talking about sysadmins here--the unsung rock stars of IT. The kind of sysadmin that plays the network blindfolded and upside down like Stevie Ray Vaughn, makes ch, ch, changes faster than David Bowie, smashes hackers like Pete Townsend does with guitars, keeps the show going like Bill Graham, and does it all with Ringo's good humor.About - Sysadmin of the Year Contest (Thanks, Barak!) Previously: |
| Treatment of intersexed African athlete appalling Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:21 PM PDT  South African athlete Caster Semenya (shown here holding a gold medal she's just won) has been the subject of gender-related cheating allegations. She was forced to take a gender test (perhaps more accurately, a "sex test"), and the results have been released: Semenya is intersexed. For context: we're not just talking about deeply personal medical news becoming very public world news, we're talking about that happening before the person involved was informed or counseled on the results. And, she had no option to keep the very private information private. Mainstream news coverage, within South Africa and worldwide, has reflected ignorance, and worse. Here's a snip from a news article that describes her with the derogatory term "hermaphrodite": The athletics governing body is also expected to advise her to have surgery to fix the potentially deadly condition, the paper reported. The IAAF would not comment on the results that have yet to be released.You stay classy, New York Daily News. Blogger Pam of Pam's House Blend, where I'm reading this news, says, Someone please tell me how the f*ck her natural condition -- which is that of a superb physical athlete -- is deadly? Thankfully Semenya wants no part of this.Update: Some BB commenters have pointed out that the "potentially deadly condition" of which they they speak may be the belief that having male sexual organs "embedded" within the body means elevated cancer risk in intersexed people. Another BB commenter who says they're an intersexed person argues the purported risk is a ruse to pressure intersexed people towards altering themselves through surgery. Semenya, who identifies as female, says, "God made me the way I am and I accept myself. I am who I am and I'm proud of myself," she told [South Africa's] You Magazine, which ran a photo spread. "I don't want to talk about the tests. I'm not even thinking about them."Runner Caster Semenya takes gender test -- she is intersexed; MSM reporting is offensive (pamshouseblend.com, via Kate Bornstein) |
| UK: Treatment of (gay) genius mathematician Alan Turing "appalling" Posted: 10 Sep 2009 05:15 PM PDT At long last:
Treatment of Alan Turing was "appalling" - PM (number10.gov.uk)
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| Posted: 10 Sep 2009 03:31 PM PDT  Image of one of the window installations created by David Lynch for the Galeries Lafayette du Boulevard Haussmann in France. David Lynch aux Galeries (express.fr, via Susannah Breslin) |
| Clickable map of Los Angeles area marijuana dispensaries Posted: 10 Sep 2009 03:21 PM PDT  A wonderful infographic over at the LA Times of pot dispensaries throughout greater Los Angeles. I love this. You can even see which have licenses, which don't, and how close some of them are to schools, or to other dispensaries. I live in an LA neighborhood in which there are far more weed dispensaries per square mile than Starbuckses. Almost without exception, the ones around here are shady, creepy and not professionally run. My favorite is either the one where the "clinic" is split into two parts, one of which doles out 420, the other Botox and Juvederm injections (same doctor doing the prescriptions for both, apparently). Or, the other one where bikini-clad, hard-eyed Euro-hos jump right out at you in the street, grab you by the arm, and squeal, "Hiyeee! Doo yoo vant to get leeegal?" No: I want to punch you. I don't use the stuff at all (I don't drink or use any recreational drugs), but I'm all for straight-up legalizing pot -- if only to banish the recent proliferation of these gray-market dispenaries, which I believe are directly linked to a spike in crime and black-market drug activity around my 'hood. It's all I can do to not flip those pot-hawkers the bird when I walk by. Map: Where's the weed?, and related: Mapping L.A.'s marijuana dispensaries (latimes.com) |
| The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly Posted: 10 Sep 2009 03:54 PM PDT  The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, a massive anthology of old comic book stories for kids, is a big hit around my house. My six-year-old loves it so much she reads it to herself. The oversize format and 350 pages make for a delightful reading experience. Art Spiegelman (creator of Maus) and his partner Francoise Mouly (art editor of The New Yorker) selected 60 terrific stories from comic books published between the 1930s and the 1960s. Characters include Sugar and Spike, Dennis the Menace, Little Archie, Little Lulu, Pogo, Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Melvin Monster, Gerald McBoing Boing, and a bunch of others who are new to me. Spiegelman and Mouly picked stories that are smart, funny, and warm. Thankfully they didn't concern themselves with finding stories that are overly simple -- the have engaging plots and I enjoy the stories as much as my kids do. In his introduction to the book, Jon Scieszka writes, "Wow, 'Treasury' is right. You have just entered the bank, the mint, the Ali Baba cave full of gold, silver, ruby, emerald, and diamond toons." I couldn't agree more. The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly |
| Lawyers for TV überdouche Glenn Beck go after satirical website, saying the url itself is defamatory Posted: 10 Sep 2009 02:53 PM PDT  Conservative television dirtbag Glenn Beck, formerly of CNN, now of FOX, is none too happy with the domain name glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com (website is down). Beck's lawyers are attacking this satirical website, which has only been up for one week, on the grounds that the very domain name is defamation. That's right, the url, apart from the contents. Apparently the whole thing started with Fark and Gilbert Gottfried. I'm confused, but Ars Technica has an exensive post up: Can a mere domain name be defamation? Glenn Beck says yes (via @EFF) |
| Daredevil LA tagger "Buket" of YouTube fame gets nearly 4 years in jail. Posted: 10 Sep 2009 05:10 PM PDT Los Angeles tagger "Buket," aka, Cyrus Yazdani, was today sentenced to 3 years and 8 months in California state prison. He gained online fame when he tagged a sign over an LA freeway in broad daylight, and vandalized a bus. Yazdani became something of an Internet sensation when he plastered his "Buket" bomb 20 feet above the busy Hollywood Freeway -- vandalism that was captured on videotape and posted with a rap soundtrack on YouTube and numerous tagger-related blogs.Yazdani must also pay $117,196 in restitution fines. Daredevil street artiste or reckless egomaniacal douchetard? Not sure. Either way, I feel badly for the guy. He's going to do that kind of prison time, for a nonviolent crime? Seems harsh. Maybe part of the logic was that he could have caused accidents in the freeway incident, leading to injury or death. But you can actually kill someone, under some circumstances, and do less time. Hash it out in the comments. More: Los Angeles Times (today), LAist (from May, 2009). |
| Posted: 10 Sep 2009 02:16 PM PDT |
| Beautiful glass sculptures of deadly viruses and bacteria Posted: 10 Sep 2009 01:25 PM PDT Above, video of a glass sculpture of the AIDS virus being created by glass blower Kim George, designed by artist Luke Jerram. London's Smithfield Gallery is hosting an exhibit of Jerram's glass renderings of deadly microbials from Sep 22-Oct 3. The show is called "Virology." Snip: The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine and its use for science communicative purposes, is a vast and complex subject. If some images are coloured for scientific purposes, and others altered simply for aesthetic reasons, how can a viewer tell the difference? How many people believe viruses are brightly coloured? Are there any colour conventions and what kind of 'presence' do pseudocoloured images have that 'naturally' coloured specimens don't? See these examples of HIV imagery. How does the choice of different colours affect their reception?Below: a most elegant representation of Swine Flu, from this series. Glass Microbiology (lukejerram.com, via Book of Joe, thanks Joe!)
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| It's Always the Fixer Who Dies Posted: 10 Sep 2009 02:58 PM PDT A New Yorker essay by George Packer on the death of Sultan Munadi, the "fixer" killed during a raid in which British commandos attempted to free him and New York Times reporter Stephen Farrell. One of the soldiers also died in the raid. Farrell was successfully freed. I have known a number of war correspondents, both personal friends and work colleagues, who've spoken about the inherent imbalance of power in this warzone relationship. One friend of mine saw "his" fixer mortally wounded as he walked out of a similar situation unharmed. Packer's essay echoes the sense of guilt I remember my friend articulating. Snip: The relationship between fixers and foreign correspondents can be very close. Shared dangers and successes will do that, especially when the work done together, the tie between you, is what puts you at risk. In Iraq and Afghanistan and a growing number of other places, the foreign correspondent would be a target with or without the fixer, but the fixer is a target because he or she is with the foreign correspondent. Both are considered spies, but one is only an infidel, while the other is something worse--an apostate, a traitor. In my experience, this mutually voluntary risk is rarely a source of resentment on the part of fixers. They are generally young, cosmopolitan, quick-witted, stoical, tinged with idealism, implacable foes of their countries' extremists; and, after all, they understand better than anyone what they have signed up for. For the most part, the risk strengthens the bond. It becomes a cause of tension only when it's borne by just one side. In spite of the closeness, the relationship is troubled by a kind of imbalance of power.IT'S ALWAYS THE FIXER WHO DIES (newyorker.com) Related: Colleagues remember Sultan Munadi (New York Times) Also related: The Reporter's Account: 4 Days With the Taliban (NYT). Farrell basically blogs his own kidnapping, and talks about the death of his deceased colleague Munadi. |
| Pop-Up Magazine, Issue 2: Live! Posted: 10 Sep 2009 06:31 AM PDT  Tickets for the second installment of Pop-Up Magazine, a live event on Sept. 25 in San Francisco, go on sale today at 12 noon PST.What is Pop-Up? A 75-minute reading/performance highlighting two dozen writers, photographers and filmmakers whose work appears in places like Wired, This American Life, New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. The evening is structured just like a magazine: short front-of-the-book bits, reviews, essays, columns, mini-features, photo essays, and features. Issue 1, which debuted last spring, featured Michael Pollan, the Kitchen Sisters, Larry Sultan, Todd Lappin, Lisa Margonelli and more. While I can't reveal Issue 2's lineup, I will mention that once again I've been handed the Gallagher slot — i.e. the gadget portion of Pop-Up. Tickets sold out fast last time. If you want to attend this intimate event at San Francisco's Brava Theater on Friday, Sept. 25 at 7pm, then I recommend you head on over to Pop-Up Magazine today at, or soon after, 12 noon PST. Tickets are $15. Oh, and If you do attend please be sure to come say hi after the show! |
| Commemorative mug of courtroom colostomy bag eater Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:53 AM PDT  Cincinnati.com is selling commemorative mugs and other memorabilia emblazoned with the face of James Orr. As you may recall, he is the gentleman who ate the contents of his colostomy bag in a futile attempt to delay his trial for robbing and kidnapping a woman and forcing her to withdraw money from an ATM. (He was sentenced to 37 years today, which means he could be enjoying prison food until he's 103.) |
| Interview with John Marcotte, author of bill to ban divorce Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:15 AM PDT  Rob Cockerham interviewed John Marcotte, a Sacramento man who filed a petition with the California Secretary of State to get a voter's initiative onto the 2010 ballot in California that would make it ban divorce. RC: Are you going to hit the streets collecting signatures for the initiative?Interview with John Marcotte, Author of the 2010 California Protection of Marriage Act
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| Recently on Offworld: Beatles go 8-bit, Dreamcast gets a new game, let concept artists rule Posted: 10 Sep 2009 10:21 AM PDT  Is the games industry missing an opportunity to let concept artists rule the roost? In his latest Ragdoll Metaphysics column, Jim Rossignol points to both success stories and missed opportunities where letting artists spearhead the game either did bring or should have brought the game closer to art, and calls for a new industry arms race to create the best "watercolour FPS games, painterly RTS games, and oil-painting strategies." Elsewhere, 09/09/09 was a double-header day in games: less celebrated for the 10th anniversary of the cut-down-in-its-prime Dreamcast, which Sega celebrated by announcing a return to Sonic the Hedgehog's roots with a new hi-def 2D game due in 2010, while a group of indies announced Rush Rush Rally Racing, the first new Western-made game for the console in many years. But 09/09's more prevalent significance to The Beatles didn't go unnoticed by groups other than Harmonix (with the unleashing of The Beatles: Rock Band), as chiptune collective 8-Bit Operators unveiled "WANNA HLD YR HANDHELD", a 20-track 8-bit Beatles cover compilation, nearly half of which they're streaming ahead of its release. Finally, we listed the 4 things gamers need to know about Apple's Rock'n'Roll keynote, saw two years of glorious technical failures in the making of Polytron's Fez (above), heard Montreal art/game collective Kokoromi would be bringing their indie showcase to GDC, and our 'one shot's: Silent Hill artist Takayoshi Sato does Salome, and a look at the anatomical/biological innards of the Wii-mote. |
| How foreclosures breed mosquitoes Posted: 10 Sep 2009 08:26 AM PDT Here's a scene from American Casino, a new documentary about the subprime lending scandal and the resulting $12 trillion Wall Street bailout. Another consequence of the meltdown -- the swimming pools of foreclosed homes have become mosquito breeding grounds. |
| Posted: 10 Sep 2009 08:18 AM PDT  Bibliodyssey, a blog that scans and posts illustrations from old books, has a nice gallery of bee related images. Illustration above is from Leben und Zucht der Honigbiene - ein gemeinverständliches Lehrbuch über Behandlung der Bienen und über Tätigkeit, Nutzen und Anatomie der Biene 1922 by Oskar Krancher. Old bee book illustrations |
| Posted: 10 Sep 2009 06:07 AM PDT The UK police watchdog is finally looking into the widespread use of anti-terrorism stop-and-search powers by cops. The event that spurred them into it? Two plainclothes cops stopped a 43-year-old man and his 11-year-old daughter and her six-year-old friend. They took the man's USB sticks, phones, camera and CD, made him stand in front of a CCTV to be photographed, and then they searched and photographed the children. They never told the man where he could go to get his property returned. They never returned it. Where I come from, that's called "being mugged." The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said todayit would "manage" the investigation into the incident in July, meaning that an independent investigator will control the inquiry conducted by the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards...Police investigated over stop and search of man and children under terror law Previously:
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| If distance education was Zork Posted: 10 Sep 2009 05:19 AM PDT Acephalous's DISTANCE LEARNING! is a notional Zork-like game that illustrates the daily round of a distance education instructor: You are sitting at your desk with a cup of coffee, checking your online course webpage. There are twenty-three assignments that need grading.DISTANCE LEARNING! (via Uncertain Principles) |
| Posted: 10 Sep 2009 05:15 AM PDT A South African IT company got so fed up with the national telco's notoriously poor Internet service that they decided to set up a race that pitted the telco's network against a carrier pigeon. The pigeon won. Now, this is very funny, but I think that over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn't an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours. I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York. SA pigeon 'faster than broadband' (via Engadget) |
IT'S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT. 
A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom. | You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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