Friday, September 18, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

DIY fisheye lens

Posted: 18 Sep 2009 04:43 AM PDT


Here's a simple way to turn a broken lens -- available in plenty at yard sales -- into a fisheye for your point-and-shoot.

Recycling Project - A Broken Glass To A Fisheye Lens

(via Make)

Smokescreen privacy game uses fun missions to show kids how data on social services can be used against them

Posted: 18 Sep 2009 04:41 AM PDT

Smokescreen is a privacy game for kids, it runs them through a series of clever online missions that serve to explain how information disclosed on social sites like Facebook can come back and bite you in the ass:

Horror stories about social networks are legion. From teenagers who announce house parties online only for hundreds of gatecrashers to show up and wreck the place to people who've been fired over pictures they posted or Facebook status updates when they're supposed to be ill... and far worse things can and do happen too. But online social networking isn't going away and age restrictions don't really keep young teenagers off websites, so Channel 4 has come up with Smokescreen, a game that teaches players about the potential pitfalls of posting their every thought and action online...

The game, created by Six to Start, uses familiar-looking social networks to tell a story. Players interact with characters in the game to solve a mystery, and while the problematic aspects of social networks are highlighted along the way, it's fun rather than didactic. So in one mission, you use 'Gaggle' search to find the 'Fakebook' and 'Tweetr' accounts of a girl your friend fancies, then dig around to see where she's going out that night, what she'll be wearing, and what her interests are, so that your friend can better chat her up. Each piece of information that she shared seemed totally innocuous until you put it all together and use it to stalk her: it's scary how easy it is, and how totally plausible.

Smokescreen

Game neatly sidesteps social networking horrors (Wired UK)

(Disclosure: My wife, Alice Taylor, commissioned Smokescreen for Channel 4)

Free Culture Forum Barcelona, Oct 29-Nov 1

Posted: 18 Sep 2009 04:36 AM PDT

Wouter sez,

From October 29 till November 1, the international Forum on Access to Culture and Knowledge in the Digital Age is organised in Barcelona. Exgae, Networked Politics and the Free Knowledge Institute, three renown and respected organisations working in the field of civil rights are behind this important event.

The Forum will be a major international meeting of the most relevant organizations and individuals working on the international scene, who are engaged in reflecting on the social and economic challenges of the dissemination of culture and knowledge in the digital age.

While the European Union discusses legislation and self-regulation proposals, at the state and community level, the forum aims to articulate the valuable proposals that are emerging from civil society, so that it too can participate in this legislative process. The forum is based on the idea of finding ways to harmonise the recognition of creativity, innovation and investment with the civil rights of access to knowledge and culture and with sustainable development.

Free Culture Forum: Organization and Action (Thanks, Wouter!)

Indie sf anthology with Moorcock, Bear, Ford, Reynolds and others

Posted: 18 Sep 2009 04:33 AM PDT

Tony from the StarShipSofa podcast sez,

Celebrating the show's 100th episode, show host and editor Tony C. Smith unveiled StarShipSofa Stories Volume 1, an anthology of some of the finest stories featured on the show. The book was released simultaneously in print-on-demand paperback (deluxe and standard versions) and a free downloadable ebook. This is absolutely the first anthology to present writers of this calibre without big publisher backing - from Science Fiction Grand Master Michael Moorcock to Hugo winners Elizabeth Bear and Jeffrey Ford to the SF writer who's just bagged the £1,000,000 ten book deal Alastair Reynolds (that's almost $2,000,000 in the USA).

Speaking of seeing, that's something you've got to do with this book. Don't take my word for it -- download the free ebook or flip through the pages for yourself with the super-cool online widget. This volume is an homage to the tatty old paperbacks of science fiction past, recapturing the visual wonder of the 1950's pulp paperbacks that we all love so well. Original artwork sets off each story, rendered by top artists published by the likes of 2000AD and Neil Gaiman. Sprinkled liberally throughout are original vintage images and magazine adverts from the 1950's. A true homage to classic science fiction and a daring experiment in the publishing revolution, this is nostalgia nouveau and tomorrow today all in one package.

Anthology (Thanks, Tony!)

Years-old fast-food cutlery chunk removed from man's lung

Posted: 18 Sep 2009 04:29 AM PDT

A North Carolina man who suffered from terrible lung ailments is recovering nicely now that doctors have removed a 1" piece of plastic cutlery from his lung; the man believes it is part of a utensil from Wendy's that got into his drink: "I like to take big gulps of drink."
Doctors at Duke University Medical Center say the plastic fragment of an eating utensil -- with the Wendy's logo still legible on the side -- was likely to blame for the coughing, fatigue and pneumonia spells that plagued John Manley for almost two years.

They pulled the fast-food foreign object from Manley's left lung during a Sept. 10 surgery. The 50-year-old Wilmington resident said he probably inhaled it while gulping a drink from Wendy's.

"I like to take big gulps of drink," the former home remodeler said. "I don't know of any other ways of it getting in there."

NC doctor removes plastic fragment lodged in lung (Thanks, Anonimouse)

JUSTICE Act: a bill to restore the Bill of Rights to America

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 08:46 PM PDT

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Kevin Bankston has a post about the new JUSTICE Act:

Today, Senators Russ Feingold and Dick Durbin -- along with eight other Senators -- have taken the Administration up on its offer by introducing the JUSTICE Act, which would rein in the worst excesses of PATRIOT and last year's FISA Amendments Act (FAA). The announcement of the bill's introduction, along with a fact sheet outlining the bill's details, is here; the text of the JUSTICE Act is here (the "JUSTICE", if you're wondering, stands for Judiciously Using Surveillance Tools In Counterterrorism Efforts").

The JUSTICE Act would renew two of the three expiring PATRIOT provisions, PATRIOT sections 206 (John Doe roving wiretaps) and 215 (FISA orders for any tangible thing), but would also add strong new checks and balances to those provisions and to the PATRIOT Act in general, especially those provisions dealing with the government's authority to issue National Security Letters. If passed, the bill would also establish critically important protections for Americans against surveillance authorized under the FAA. Of particular importance to EFF's clients in the Hepting v. AT&T case and to the preservation of the rule of law, PROTECT would completely repeal the FAA provision intended to legally immunize telecoms like AT&T that illegally assisted in the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. Last summer when Congress passed the FAA, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stated his intention to revisit that law as part of the PATRIOT renewal debate, and we're very glad that Senators Feingold and Durbin have kick-started that process.

EFF Supports JUSTICE Bill to Reform the USA PATRIOT Act and Repeal Telecom Immunity

The Jet-Propelled Couch: true story of a physicist who thought he was a science fiction hero on another planet

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 03:50 PM PDT

This is the incredible true story of a physicist who believed he could project himself to another solar system and live as a swashbuckling interplanetary adventurer. When he was a teenager and living on a Polynesian island, he had read a series of "strange and adventurous" science fiction / fantasy books by an American writer. The protagonist shared his name, and eventually the physicist started thinking he really was the character. But he was still able to maintain a duel identity -- he sort of "astral projected" into that fantasy world while keeping the appearance of a skinny-tie wearing physicist.

The article was written by the man's psychiatrist, Robert Lindner, and appeared in Harper's in 1954. (It was also a chapter in Linder's entertaining case-history book The Fifty-Minute Hour). The physicist, "Kirk Allen" (his name was changed by Lindner), worked in a government research lab, and his superiors were concerned by his behavior (Allen would often space out at work while his fantastical reveries played out in his head) so they sent him to Lindner.

I don't want to spoil the story (and the excerpt below won't spoil it). You can read it in its entirety at Harper's website (Part I, Part II). Harper's kindly opened access to the article at my request, so now anyone can read it for free. (If you subscribe to Harper's for just $16.97 in the United States and CAN$24.00 in Canada, you'll get access to all the archives dating back to 1850!)

200909171508 Kirk read the numerous volumes of his "biography" over and over again. Soon he no longer needed the books "to refresh my memory," but was able to recapitulate them entirely in his mind. While his corporeal body was living the life of a mundane boy, the vital part of him was far off on another planet, courting beautiful princesses, governing provinces, warring with strange enemies. Now, using his "biographer's" material as a base, he took off on his own. Assisted by the maps, charts, diagrams, architectural layouts, genealogical schemes, and timetables he had painstakingly worked out while using the books for his guide, he filled in spaces between the volumes with fantasy "recollections" of his own; and when this was done, he began the task of his life: that of picking up where his "biographer" had left off and recording the subsequent history of the heroic Kirk Allen.

...

For many days I pondered the question of how Kirk Allen could be restored to sanity–and yet remain alive. For there seemed to be nothing that could compete with the unending gratifications of his fantasy. Meanwhile Kirk turned over to me all of his records.

It is impossible to convey more than a bare impression of these. There were, to begin with, about 12,000 pages of typescript comprising the amended "biography" of Kirk Allen. This was divided into some 200 chapters and read like fiction. Appended to these pages were approximately 2,000 more of notes in Kirk's handwriting, containing corrections necessitated by his more recent "researches," and a huge bundle of scraps and jottings on envelopes, receipted bills, laundry slips.

There also were a glossary of names and terms that ran to more than 100 pages; 82 full-color maps carefully drawn to scale, 23 of planetary bodies in four projections, 31 of land masses on these planets, 14 labeled "Kirk Allen's Expedition to —," the remainder of cities on the various planets; 161 architectural sketches and elevations, all carefully scaled and annotated; 12 genealogical tables; an 18-page description of the galactic system in which Kirk Allen's home planet was contained, with four astronomical charts, one for each of the seasons, and nine star-maps of the skies from observatories on other planets in the system; a 200-page history of the empire Kirk Allen ruled, with a three-page table of dates and names of battles or outstanding historical events; a series of 44 folders containing from 2 to 20 pages apiece, each dealing with some aspect–social, economic, or scientific–of the planet over which Kirk Allen ruled. Finally, there were 306 drawings of people, animals, plants, insects, weapons, utensils, machines, articles of clothing, vehicles, instruments, and furniture.

The reader can imagine my dismay at the sheer bulk of this material; I do not know if he can appreciate with what misgivings I approached the task of weaning this man from his madness. Aside from everything else, he was my patient under the most inauspicious possible conditions, for he had not come of his own volition. The authorities had sent him, demanding he be treated not only for his sake but because they feared that in his disturbed condition he was a poor security risk who could neither be kept on the job nor discharged.

Speculation abounds on the true identity of Kirk Allen. Alan C. Elms thinks it could be Cordwainer Smith. It's more fun for me to think Kirk Allen's real name was John Carter and that he had fantasized that being on Barsoom, fighting the bad Martians while Deja Thoris stayed at home hatching the eggs containing his and her children.

"The Jet-Propelled Couch" (Part I, Part II) (Thanks, Paul Ford!)

Pesco on Rushkoff's radio show

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 01:33 PM PDT

I was honored that BB pal Doug Rushkoff invited me onto his excellent radio show on WFMU, "The Media Squat." We had a great time talking about synthetic biology, futurism, and the notion that "everything is programmable," from the micro to the macro-scale, from our minds and bodies to our cities and ecosystems. At Institute for the Future, we're exploring that idea of looking at the world through a "computational" lens. Doug and I wrapped up our hour with a quick tangent on Bigfoot, belief, and the wonder of the world. It was a lot of fun and I hope you enjoy it too! Archive of Doug Rushkoff's Media Squat radio show

Guitar-shaped spatula

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 02:21 PM PDT

Flippperrererere Our pals at GAMA-GO created this unusual spatula in the shape of a guitar. I wish all my kitchen utensils were this random. It's available in red or black for $9.50.
Flipper Guitar Spatula

LIFE photo gallery of old cars

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 12:08 PM PDT


Yesterday was the 101st anniversary of GM's founding. Ben Cosgrove of LIFE says, "in light of the super-efficient but very same-y, dull designs of so many of today's vehicles, I put together a look back at those decades when cars had real personality, real spark, real curves. There's a lot to be said for a fender that makes one's heart race faster, or a bumper that can make a person blush ...

Above: "Fiat's streamlined, one-cylinder Volugrafo got 100 miles per gallon, 1947."

LIFE photo gallery of old cars

Touchable holography

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 12:02 PM PDT




Professor Hiroyuki Shinoda and his colleagues at Tokyo University are making headway in haptic holography, 3D projections you can actually feel. I first experienced something like this probably 15 years ago at the late holography pioneer Steve Benton's laboratory at MIT's Media Lab. Back then, the hologram was grainy and grayscale and the physical feedback came from a handheld Phantom stylus that provided some sensation of touching a real object. Based on this demonstration, it appears that the technology has come a long way. From Reuters:
By using ultrasonic waves, the scientists have developed software that creates pressure when a user's hand "touches" a hologram that is projected.

In order to track a user's hand, the researchers use control sticks from Nintendo's popular Wii gaming system that are mounted above the hologram display area.

The technology has so far been tested with relatively simple objects, although the researchers have more practical plans, including virtual switches at hospitals, for example, and other places where contamination by touch is an issue.
"Japan scientists create 3-D images you can touch" (Reuters, thanks Bob Pescovitz!)

Touchable Holography (University of Tokyo)

Previously:


Recently on Offworld: New Indie Hotness, the sniper and the spy, Tetris in 3D

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 12:16 PM PDT

cf5.jpg With Austin's Game Developers Conference fully underway, Offworld's got updates on a few of the Indie Games Summit sessions nearest and dearest to its heart, with my own 'New Indie Hotness' show and tell (above), where I ran live demos of seven of the best up and coming indies you need to play (with the help of a special guest star), and a look behind the smash success of Colin Northway's Flash construction kit Fantastic Contraption. Elsewhere we saw Namco tease a screenshot of its upcoming iPhone version of Keita Takahashi's PS3 game Noby Noby Boy, LucasArts revealed the gorgeously illustrated dream world in its new Lemmings-esque downloadable Lucidity, From Software showed off its upcoming PS3 exclusive 3D Dot Game Heroes -- an 8-bit Zelda inspired adventure pixel-popped into glorious 3D, and Metanet (behind Flash hit ninja sim N) announced Office Yeti, their Skool Daze meets Rampage workplace game. Finally, former Spore tech lead Chris Hecker announced he'd be going indie with Spy Party, his "asymmetric multiplayer espionage game about subtle behavior and deception", we watched the winner of the Super Mario artificial intelligence contest, art/game/culture shop Attract Mode opened its doors, and for our LA readers: indie musician Chris Schlarb will be performing live versions of his tracks for the upcoming Night Game tonight at the Slow Sound Festival. And our 'one shot's: Iggy Pop rocks Lego, the Alien origins of Machinarium, Super Mario's Twin Towers, and 3D Tetris of the Magic Eye kind.

Blind juggling robot

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 11:39 AM PDT



BB's secret software hacker Dean Putney spotted this neat "blind" juggling robot. Dean writes:
This machine bounces a ball without any sensory input. The surface it is bouncing the ball with is slightly curved, so that if the ball doesn't hit in the center it will be bounced at an angle and correct for the horizontal motion. The machine actually has no idea where the ball is though, since its feedback control system is purely mechanical. It's surprisingly robust, allowing the machine to be moved under the ball, swung on a pendulum and it works with several different balls, as shown in these videos.
Blind Juggling Robot

Chumby kits for sale in Maker Shed

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 11:33 AM PDT

200909171128

Maker Shed is offering the Chumby, a cool programmable Internet media player, in kit form.

At this year's Maker Faire, the Maker Shed offered a unique product, a Chumby in kit form. Created expressly for Maker Shed by Chumby, the kit contains everything needed to build your own Chumby, or alternatively, hack it into into any form of your own choosing. The price for the kit was $99. We sold out almost immediately.

Through a special arrangement with our pals at Chumby, the Shed recently managed to order another batch of Chumby Kits. Last week, the Shed sent out a mailing to a select group of loyal customers, again offering the kit. And again, the positive response was swift. They sold a bunch, but they still have some left, so there's still time if you want to pick one up. This is a great opportunity to get the guts of a versatile Internet appliance, on the cheap, that you can use for all sorts of experimentation, custom projects, and cool casemods. They're still $99 and you can get yours here (there's a limit of 3 per customer).

Note: These kits are still being produced at Chumby, so this is a pre-order. The Shed expects to have them by the end of the month.

Chumby guts -- so delicious!

Spies in Canada

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 12:14 PM PDT

Canada is apparently a hive of foreign spies and Ottawa is "crawling with them," according to an Ottawa Citizen article about a new book, titled Nest of Spies. The book was written by an investigative journalist and a former intelligence officer with the RCMP Security Service and Canadian Security Intelligence Service. If the article is any indication, this book is just laden with intrigue and scandal. For example, it claims that 1970s/1980s Russian hockey star Vladislav Tretiak was also a spy "talent scout," recruiting new secret agents for the Soviet Union. From the Ottawa Citizen:
Nestspieeeee Led by the Chinese but including intelligence officers from at least 20 nations including allies, the book says, the infiltrators are stealing an estimated $20 billion to $30 billion annually worth of cutting-edge research in products and technologies, other scientific, business and military know-how and political secrets. Others, it says, are infiltrating ethnic communities, suppressing criticism of homeland governments, recruiting industrial spies, stoking political violence among the diaspora and operating front companies and political lobbies aimed at manipulating government policies.

Proportionately, it estimates more spies operate here than in the U.S...

"The great Tretiak was quite a celebrity in his day, and not only among hockey fans. CSIS was also an avid Tretiak-watcher. A number of good sources inside the organization have told us that Tretiak was 'ticketed' at the time. That means that he was believed to be a 'co- opted' individual, somebody who has been recruited as an informer and was being paid or recompensed in some way. There were hundreds of these back then, especially among Soviet citizens like himself who had received job offers from outside the homeland." But, the book continues, "there was also a hypothesis that he was more than a simple informer." In Friday's interview, Juneau- Katsuya said one of three CSIS sources believes Tretiak worked as a "talent-spotter" for the Russian foreign intelligence service, the SVR, successor to the KGB.
"The spies who love us" (Ottawa Citizen, thanks Chris Arkenberg!)

Buy "Nest of Spies: The Startling Truth About Foreign Agents at Work Within Canada's Borders" (Amazon)

Ask the Government Printing Office to release the US Constitution in XML

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 11:15 AM PDT

Gabriela from the Sunlight Foundation sez,
Today is the 220th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution. In 1789, it was made available to the American people by the most modern technology of the day. We should do no less today, and provide the Constitution (along with commentary) in XML.

To celebrate the 220th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the Sunlight Foundation is calling on the Government Printing Office to publish the legal treatise The Constitution Annotated online in XML format as it is updated. (The Constitution Annotated has been written by the Library of Congress for nearly 100 years, and contains analysis of nearly 8,000 U.S. Supreme Court cases.)

Over the decades, GPO has published print versions of this extraordinary resource every two years, with limited electronic versions available from 1992 edition onward. Although the Library of Congress has drafted the Constitution Annotated in XML for a number of years, that data is no longer present when it is published online by GPO. Releasing the treatise in XML would allow for the easy sharing of information between different kinds of computers, applications, and organizations, and provide a roadmap to the underlying data.

In addition to asking for The Constitution Annotated to be published online in XML, Sunlight is also asking that as the data is updated and made available to congressional staff, it also be made available to the general public. 220 Years Later, It's Time to Publish the Constitution Annotated Online in XML (Thanks, Gabriela!)

Europeans! Call your MEP to protect Net Neutrality

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 11:13 AM PDT

Jeremie Zimmermann sez, "Organizations from all around Europe share their concern of seeing Net Neutrality being sacrificed during the conciliation procedure of the directives of the EU Telecoms Package. They sent this letter to the Members of the European Parliament, urging them to take decisive action in order to guarantee a free, open and innovative Internet, and to safeguard the fundamental freedoms of European citizens.

"Everyone can take action by calling the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) who were supportive of citizens' fundamental rights and freedoms in the past and ask them to do all they can to participate in the conciliation committee of the Telecoms Package."

We Must Protect Net Neutrality in Europe! - Open letter to the European Parliament

Zombie shooting-range targets

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 11:12 AM PDT

Law Enforcement Targets does a handsome line of shooting range zombie targets, including several in inexplicable Nazi uniforms. Good practice, I suppose, for the forthcoming Nazi zombie uprising.

Law Enforcement Targets: Zombie Targets (via Geekologie)


Philip K. Dick radio program by Ken Hollings

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 11:12 AM PDT

Images Pkdhead-1 In 2006, my friend Ken Hollings, author of Welcome to Mars, wrote and presented a BBC Radio 4 piece about Philip K. Dick's weird relationship with God. As Ken says, it's a "a strange tale of madness, machines and attempted suicide." The star-studded list of contributors include Kim Stanley Robinson, Ray Nelson, Brian Aldiss, Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and the PKD android that mysteriously vanished shortly after the program was recorded. The fantastic show, titled Confessions Of A Crap Artist, is now available on Speechification.
Confessions of a Crap Artist

Previously:


Unusual police sketch

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 11:04 AM PDT

200909171102 Victoria police are looking for a gentleman who matches this composite sketch in connection with a knife attack. (Via Arbroath)

Robot can hop over 25-foot fences

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 10:57 AM PDT

200909171057

Sandia National Labs and Boston Dynamics made this cute little jumping robot.

An overall goal of the robots is to decrease the number of casu alties in combat. To that end, the hopping robots will provide enhanced situational awareness for shaping the outcome of the immediate local combat situation, Salton said. Their compact, lightweight design makes them portable, and their semiautonomous capability greatly reduces the workload burden of the operator.

In addition to providing military assistance, the hopping capabilities of the robots could be used in law enforcement, homeland security, search and rescue applications in challenging terrain and in planetary exploration, [Jon Salton, Sandia program manager] said.

Sandia hopping robots to bolster troop capabilities

Moon Wanderers photographed by Brian McCarty

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 10:51 AM PDT

Toy photographer Brian McCarty shot this dreamy image of the Moon Wanderers, resin figures that are hand-cast and painted by Russian artist Sergey Safonov. Here's what Brian said of the photo shoot:
Epostcard Ecard 0973A I fell in love with the characters, instantly imagining a scene of floating figures under a paper moon. To achieve the shot, I mounted the toys on metal rods and drove them deep into the soft mud of Two Ocean Lake inside Grand Teton National Park. The camera was placed on a semi-submerged tripod, and a very long exposure made the water seem glassy, except for the rippled reflection of strobe light off a paper moon suspended in the background.
Moon Wanderers

Previously:


An American visits the Beijing Wal-Mart

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 11:12 AM PDT

Seth Roberts made a list of 11 observations while shopping at a Wal-Mart in China. Here are the first four.
  1. They sell live turtles.
  2. A whole display case is devoted to sea cucumbers.
  3. Like any upscale American or Beijing supermarket, they have a sushi case. The prices are half what they'd be in America, but the pieces of fish are much thinner.
  4. They cut up meat in front of you. A whole pig was being butchered on a table. A roast duck was being sliced for packaging.
(Here's a slideshow about Wal-Marts in China)

Beijing Wal-Mart

Comic book covers redrawn

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 10:10 AM PDT

Darnoldduck

Commixredrawn

Covered is a blog that posts comic book covers redrawn by different cartoonists. The results are fascinating. Covered

Peter Bagge's Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 09:43 AM PDT

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

I've been enjoying cartoonist Peter Bagge's contributions to Reason Magazine for years now, which I've always read on their website. But now Fantagraphics has collected them into a great-looking trade paperback! Here's a PDF of a free chapter (link).

Fans of Bagge's from his HATE days are sometimes turned off by the politics of his Reason comics. I'm not. I think Bagge has been doing really interesting work, mixing field journalism with humor and opinion in an entirely novel way.

As an essayist Bagge is never preachy, and he often points out the shortcomings of his fellow libertarians (his account of meeting Ron Paul is particularly funny). He explores more than he rants, and when he does let loose, he's got a healthy sense of self-satire.

These comics will piss you off, and that's good. (Amazon link)

How to make chai tea syrup

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 09:33 AM PDT

200909170925 Cartoonist Lucy Knisley shares her recipe for chai tea syrup. Looks like fun, and the illustration is lots of fun. (Here's her pickle recipe, too.)

Previously:


Beatles remasters: the Metzger review

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 08:53 AM PDT

GuyPeellaert_TheBeatles_thumb.jpg

I'm a bit late posting this, but BB pal/guestblogger/kindred mutant Richard Metzger has penned (pixelled?) what I believe to be the definitive review on the recently-released Beatles remasters. Before you read, a caveat:

I'm an unashamed audiophile. I do not listen to MP3s on my computer, I listen to music on a proper "hi fidelity stereo" (one that I bought used, so no charges of elitism, please) with good speakers.
The review is detailed, and lovingly exhaustive. Here's a core slice:
Whether or not you opt for the Beatles Mono box or the stereo versions, a few things are not in dispute: They've managed to bring McCartney's bass out in a manner never before revealed. His bass patterns were far more intricate than we've ever been able to hear before and there is a noticeable fullness in the mid-range that was lacking on the 1987 versions. His prodigious musical genius seems even more dazzling when seen in this new light. Ringo's drums, uniformly throughout all the records, sound as crisp as can be: you don't just hear his drums, you hear the sound of the stick hitting the drum and how hard it is being hit. Nuanced is the word I keep using to describe them to friends and it's the right one. The layered backing vocals, hand claps, tambourines, all the exotic instrumentation, orchestrations and tape manipulations have a wide-screen presence as never before. The group sounds "friskier" throughout. When the piano keys are pounded, you can tell how hard they were being pounded. The Beatles remasters--continuously--reveal things we've never heard before until now.
YOU NEVER GIVE ME YOUR MONEY: METZGER ON THE BEATLES REMASTERS (Dangerous Minds)

Amazon Link to purchase the remastered recordings.

How Islamist gangs use chat rooms to lure, torture and kill Iraqi gays

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 08:49 AM PDT

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

The Guardian has a chilling report on how fundamentalist murderers are using the Internet to locate, entrap, and brutally murder dozens of gay Iraqi men:

Sitting on the floor, wearing traditional Islamic clothes and holding an old notebook, Abu Hamizi, 22, spends at least six hours a day searching internet chatrooms linked to gay websites. He is not looking for new friends, but for victims.

"It is the easiest way to find those people who are destroying Islam and who want to dirty the reputation we took centuries to build up," he said. When he finds them, Hamizi arranges for them to be attacked and sometimes killed.

(link)

Thanks, Phillip

The Lessons of Lindsay

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 08:52 AM PDT

2267_1.jpgA powerful and beautiful photo-essay by Matt Mendelson about a powerful and beautiful young woman from my home town named Lindsay Ess, a fashion major at Virginia Commonwealth University. Same school, even the same building where I spent a lot of time as a kid, growing up -- so the story *really* felt familiar and personal to me, even though I do not know her, and cannot imagine what it feels like to endure what she's prevailed through.

The story begins at a student runway showing, where Linsday is looking on:

Lindsay, it should be noted, has no hands to clap and no feet on which to get up. She had them back in the summer of 2007, when she was tall and thin and had just graduated from VCU with a fashion merchandising degree. Then, to use her words, a blur. When she entered Henrico Doctors' Hospital that summer, the procedure to remove a small piece of inflamed intestine, a nagging complication of her Crohn's disease, was supposed to go routinely. But supposed to go routinely rarely turns out well, and there hasn't been a routine day in Lindsay's life ever since. Not since the leak, not since the sepsis, not since the organ failures, the brain seizures, and not since the coma. Definitely not the coma. Not since one day in August turned to October and then drifted on towards Christmas. Certainly not since the quadruple amputations, the cruel coda to having been so close to death all those months and then surviving. Oh, honey, you know what they're going to do, right? the nurse said. There's no routine to being bathed and fed and dressed like a child mere months after you've graduated college, and no routine to learning how to walk again at the age of twenty-five. No routine in continuing a long-distance relationship with someone who admits to having originally been smitten by your looks, or to being with your mother almost every waking hour. There's no routine for taking a fistful of pills a day--the Pentasa, the Entocort EC, the Lexapro, the Keppra, the Urosidol, the Spiranolactone, the Zolpidem, the Lyrica, not to mention the occasional shot of actual alcohol. There's no routine, no manual, for wishing you were whole again, so that just one morning of your life you could actually wake up and make it to the bathroom on your own, even if the arms and legs you now covet so are made of acrylic and not skin and bone and muscle. And, perhaps most of all, no routine for the long, slow realization that those acrylic arms and legs might not, in the end, be the answer to anything. If you're Lindsay Ess, routine pretty much stopped on August 3, 2007.
The Lessons of Lindsay (story) Sports Shooter Q & A: with Matt Mendelsohn (chat with the photographer).

(Sports Shooter, via @Glennf)

Griddleville: amazing cartoon made entirely by one dude.

Posted: 17 Sep 2009 11:37 AM PDT

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest-blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

The most creative guy I knew in high school was this kid Ba Blackstock. He drew hilarious cartoons, directed theatrical adaptations of Dan Clowes comics and made crazy short movies.

Later, he spent years of his life making this cartoon. He went old-school, penciling by hand over a light board (he's entirely self-taught). Then he inked and colored it and added 3D stuff digitally. Of course, he nearly lost his mind in the process.

The resulting cartoon speaks for itself.

NOTE: this is just one chapter. I recommend watching the whole 14 minute thing (link.)

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