The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Bletchley Park gets National Lottery preservation funds
- @BBVBOX: recent guest-tweeted web video picks (boingboingvideo.com)
- The space-soteric graphic art of Michæl Paukner
- The speech Safire wrote for Nixon if Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon.
- Downward Facing Dollar
- Japanese Festivals: a snapshot gallery (and an odd "Sesame Street" knockoff)
- Warhol and the bounty hunters
- French burlesque film: The Dancing Pig
- 1971 French translation of Chester Himes novel shows woman with smart phone
- Wisconsin Tourism Federation loses to WTF, changes name
- Public fountains are disappearing because the concept of public is disappearing
- More on the LRAD sound cannon at Pittsburgh G20 protests
- Make your own $1 million vomit-inducing flashlight for $250
- POGO For A Happy Monday
- Dookie-Poo, Mr. Hankey for your kids
- G20 protesters blasted by sonic cannon
- Lonnie Johnson - Another Night to Cry, 1963
- 1987 dating video
- Indiana prosecutor says she's duty bound to prosecute grandma who bought cold medicine
- Oldest bird-like dinosaur
- Mitch Horowitz: What is the occult?
- Occult historian Mitch Horowitz, Boing Boing's latest guestblogger
- John Muir, naturalist and maker of odd inventions
- Here come the airport rectal exams!
| Bletchley Park gets National Lottery preservation funds Posted: 29 Sep 2009 04:03 AM PDT The National Lottery has awarded Bletchley Park -- the site of the invention of modern cryptography and a key piece of computer history -- a £460,500 grant as a start on the £10m worth of desperately needed preservation spending. There's some indication that they'll come up with more money in the future, too. Don't get me wrong, I'm overjoyed to see Bletchley saved from ruin, but isn't it kind of ironic that the funding to preserve the institute that demonstrated, once and for all, the power of randomness and the dangers of statistical innumeracy is coming from a state-sponsored scam that preys on innumeracy and bad intuition about randomness? I suspect that Turing and co would have sensibly looked at the lotto and said, "Pssht, I have a higher chance of dying before the balls are drawn than I have of winning the jackpot. No thanks." The grant, announced today, is worth £460,500 - a fraction of the £10m it will take to convert Bletchley Park into a world-class heritage site but it will allow the trust to draw up a detailed plan and go back for more. Combined with other money coming in, including grants from English Heritage and Milton Keynes Council, it should be enough to save Bletchley's famous out-buildings.Huts used to defeat Nazis rescued by £4m grant (via O'Reilly Radar) Previously:
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| @BBVBOX: recent guest-tweeted web video picks (boingboingvideo.com) Posted: 28 Sep 2009 11:15 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
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| The space-soteric graphic art of Michæl Paukner Posted: 28 Sep 2009 08:50 PM PDT  There's a lot to enjoy in the Flickr stream of Vienna-based graphic designer Michæl Paukner. I intend to start following him on Twitter. I think this piece, above, is my favorite of the 27 he has posted online so far. "A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest. - A kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." |
| The speech Safire wrote for Nixon if Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the moon. Posted: 28 Sep 2009 08:40 PM PDT  Columnist and conservative speechwriter William Safire died yesterday at age 79. Here is the speech he drafted for president Nixon to read in the event that Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong found themselves stranded to die on the moon. I am happy to note that Messrs. Aldrin and Armstrong are all still alive (as is Michael Collins, who orbited the moon while his colleagues walked on her surface). William Safire's Finest Speech. (Gawker, via Scott Beale) |
| Posted: 28 Sep 2009 07:34 PM PDT More bad news for the dollar. The head of the World Bank says the importance of American currency will continue to diminish in relation to the euro and the Chinese renminbi. "The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar's place as the world's predominant reserve currency," the World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a speech at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. "Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar."New York Times article here. |
| Japanese Festivals: a snapshot gallery (and an odd "Sesame Street" knockoff) Posted: 28 Sep 2009 11:12 PM PDT  Former BB guestblogger and Japan-based blogger Danny Choo has a neat post up with snapshots from Japanese festivals, shot with a Lumix. Above, one of the game/contest stalls alongside one ceremonial observance. "Kingyo Sukui is where folks try to nab as many goldfish as possible from the tub with a single hoop of thin paper." Another photo in the gallery shows Sesame Street character dolls on display at a festival vendor stall. Danny jokes that Sesame Street looks a li'l different over there. You have to watch the video clip after the jump to appreciate just how different: now, I'm very ignorant about Japanese media culture, but am guessing that this is a spoof on a comedy show or something. Japanese Festivals (dannychoo.com) |
| Posted: 28 Sep 2009 04:20 PM PDT  Coop took this great photo of Andy Warhol. Coop: "In the future, everyone will be an intergalactic bounty hunter for 15 minutes." Click the image for the Flickr post. |
| French burlesque film: The Dancing Pig Posted: 28 Sep 2009 04:10 PM PDT |
| 1971 French translation of Chester Himes novel shows woman with smart phone Posted: 28 Sep 2009 03:11 PM PDT  Joshua Glenn says: "I've just discovered that the French already had BlackBerries iPhones... back in 1960. Who knew?" |
| Wisconsin Tourism Federation loses to WTF, changes name Posted: 28 Sep 2009 02:51 PM PDT  Like AYDS and Beaver College, the WTF (Wisconsin Tourism Federation) got tired of being the butt of jokes and changed its name to the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin. That's too fucking weird, if you ask me. WTF? No, TFW! (Thanks, Ben!) |
| Public fountains are disappearing because the concept of public is disappearing Posted: 28 Sep 2009 01:54 PM PDT  Laura says: "I came across this post where this teacher compares the disappearance of public drinking fountains and the rise of bottled water to the rise in popularity of charter schools." Public water fountains are not dangerous (unless cooties are real). Tap water is safe, and the spigots are designed to prevent contamination.Charter schools are like bottled water--they're believed to be superior, and their standards are less stringent that their more public counterparts. |
| More on the LRAD sound cannon at Pittsburgh G20 protests Posted: 28 Sep 2009 01:43 PM PDT   Dean Putney took the photos of the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) used in the Pittsburgh G20 protest. He says: My roommate and I went to check things out downtown to see how the riot was coming along. We stopped here along with the news crews and a few spectators to watch. Police came in off of city buses in groups of about 50 or so and down the street (in the UPitt campus) they were setting off smoke grenades, tear gas and using the LRAD. The police warned protestors to leave multiple times over the loudspeaker before and during their use of force.Previously: G20 protesters blasted by sonic cannon |
| Make your own $1 million vomit-inducing flashlight for $250 Posted: 28 Sep 2009 01:24 PM PDT Lady Ada and Phil Torrone made a $250 working replica of the Dazzler, a $1 million non-lethal puke flashlight developed at the request of the US Dept. of Homeland Security. The link below includes complete instructions for making one of your own. |
| Posted: 28 Sep 2009 01:19 PM PDT Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY. Check out Pogo's YouTube Channel for more videos - http://www.youtube.com/user/Fagottron |
| Dookie-Poo, Mr. Hankey for your kids Posted: 28 Sep 2009 01:19 PM PDT Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY. I do a lot of random YouTube video searching at work and somehow found this little commercial. Turns out there's a whole bunch of characters in this "Poo-verse." Dookie-Poo has a best friend, an uncle and a nephew. There is also this grumpy dog, Skooch the Pooch, that moved from NYC to Pooville. Here's a little bio of Dookie-Poo off the site - Dookie-Poo is not the smartest of all the Poos in Pooville but he tries real hard and he has good intentions. Dookie never quits because he's just too dumb to do so. He tries way beyond the point of all reasoning. Dookie doesn't think much about anything. In fact he almost never thinks at all. I am tempted to throw some turd puns, but will resist. For more fecal-toon fun check out: www.dookie-poo.com |
| G20 protesters blasted by sonic cannon Posted: 28 Sep 2009 12:26 PM PDT This could have been a deleted scene from Children of Men. US security forces turned the piercing sound on their own citizens yesterday to widespread outrage. Pittsburgh officials told the New York Times that it was the first time "sound cannon" had been used publicly.G20 protesters blasted by sonic cannon |
| Lonnie Johnson - Another Night to Cry, 1963 Posted: 28 Sep 2009 12:14 PM PDT Thanks to Amy Crehore for pointing me to this video of Lonnie Johnson performing "Another Night to Cry" in 1963. Also, Amy is giving away one of her paintings to whoever comes up with the best title for it! |
| Posted: 28 Sep 2009 07:18 PM PDT So many men to choose from! |
| Indiana prosecutor says she's duty bound to prosecute grandma who bought cold medicine Posted: 28 Sep 2009 04:43 PM PDT Vermillion County Prosecutor Nina Alexander is proud to be "enforcing the law as it was written" by prosecuting Sally Harpold, a grandmother who bought two boxes of cold medication in less than a week. Alexander admits she knows Harpold had no intention of making meth with the medicine. That's beside the point. "The public has the responsibility to know what is legal and what is not, and ignorance of the law is no excuse," she Alexander. Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel got his chance to show off a rock-solid understanding of cause-and-effect, too: "I feel for her, but if she could go to one of the area hospitals and see a baby born to a meth-addicted mother …" |
| Posted: 28 Sep 2009 09:29 AM PDT  Scientists in China have discovered the oldest dinosaur that had feathers. Thought to be between 1 to 11 million years older than the first known bird, the dinosaur, named Anchiornis huxley, was about 28 centimeters tall at its hip. From Science News: Two types of feather adorn the creature, said (Xing) Xu, of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. One kind, commonly referred to as "dino-fuzz," resembles a frayed bundle of filaments. The other type, similar in overall structure to the feathers of modern-day birds, consists of small filaments that branch from a larger shaftlike filament."Feather-covered dinosaur fossils found" |
| Mitch Horowitz: What is the occult? Posted: 28 Sep 2009 08:42 AM PDT Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.  When discussing the occult, a natural question arises: Just what is the occult? In short, the occult encompasses a wide range of mystical philosophies and mythical lore, particularly the belief in an "unseen world" whose forces act upon us and through us. Here is a piece of my introduction to Occult America that expands on that question.... Occultism describes a tradition--religious, literary, and intellectual--that has existed throughout Western history. The term comes from the Latin occultus, meaning "hidden" or "secret." The word occult entered modern use through the work of Renaissance scholar Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who used it to describe magical practices and veiled spiritual philosophies in his three-volume study, De occulta philosophia, in 1533. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first instance of the word occult twelve years later. Traditionally, occultism deals with the inner aspect of religions: the mystical doorways of realization and secret ways of knowing. Classical occultism regards itself as an initiatory spiritual tradition. Seen from that perspective, the occultist is not necessarily born with unusual abilities, like soothsaying or mind reading, but trains for them. Such parameters, however, are loose: Spiritualism is impossible to separate from occultism, whether believers consider channeling the dead a learned skill or a passive gift. Its crypto-religious nature draws it into the occult framework. Indeed, occultism, at its heart, is religious: Renaissance occultists were particularly enamored of Jewish Kabala, Christian Gnosticism, Egypto-Hellenic astrology, Egyptian-Arab alchemy, and prophetic or divinatory rituals found deep within all the historic faiths, especially within the mystery religions of the Hellenic and Egyptian civilizations... ...The sturdiest definition of classical occult philosophy that I have personally found appears not in a Western or Egyptian context but in Sino scholar Richard Wilhelm's 1950 introduction to the Chinese oracle book The I Ching or Book of Changes: . . . every event in the visible world is the effect of an "image," that is, of an idea in the unseen world. Accordingly, everything that happens on earth is only a reproduction, as it were, of an event in a world beyond our sense perception; as regards its occurrence in time, it is later than the suprasensible event. The holy men and sages, who are in contact with those higher spheres, have access to these ideas through direct intuition and are therefore able to intervene decisively in events in the world. Thus man is linked with heaven, the suprasensible world of ideas, and with earth, the material world of visible things, to form with these a trinity of primal powers. |
| Occult historian Mitch Horowitz, Boing Boing's latest guestblogger Posted: 28 Sep 2009 08:21 AM PDT   I'm delighted to welcome Mitch Horowitz as a guestblogger on Boing Boing. Mitch is a fantastic tour guide to the fringes of reason, high weirdness, deep esoterica, secret societies, and mystery religions. Mitch's fantastic new book Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation shares a "sacred space" on my bookshelf with works by Manly Hall, Robert Anton Wilson, Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee, and Erik Davis. In fact, Mitch, who is also a book editor/publisher, has revived essential classics by several of those folks. The next two weeks should be quite a trip. Mitch writes:
Previously: |
| John Muir, naturalist and maker of odd inventions Posted: 28 Sep 2009 07:12 AM PDT  John Muir, Sierra Club founder and Yosemite savior featured in the new Ken Burns docoumentary, was a fantastically creative maker too! The Sierra Club has posted details about several of his inventions, including an alarm clock that knocks the leg out from under the bed, and his mechanical study desk, pictured above, that "would automatically light his lamp and fire, open the right book to study, and then change books after half an hour." "Was John Muir a Mad Scientist?" (Thanks, Orli Cotel!) |
| Here come the airport rectal exams! Posted: 28 Sep 2009 06:16 AM PDT Uh-oh. Now that a terrorist has tried unsuccessfully to blow up a Saudi prince with a bomb shoved up his ass, the TSA is obliged to perform rectal exams on every flier for the rest of time. After all, once a jihadi failed to blow up a plane with his shoe, we all needed to start taking our shoes off. Then some knuckleheads believed they could blow up a plane with energy beverages and hair gel, so now we have to limit ourselves to 100ml of all liquids and gels, unless they're for babies or are prescription (because no mass-murderer would be so evil as to forge a doctor's note, which, as every junkie knows, cannot possibly be forged). Now we found someone who was made to believe he could kill people with an asshole bomb, and so it follows that the TSA will have to ban -- or at least inspect -- our assholes. They're like opinions, you know, everybody's got one. Except, of course, most of us got to keep our assholes to ourselves. Not anymore. Let's just be thankful that no one has yet convinced a suicidal murderer that he could blow up a plane with his mind, because once that happens, we're all in for mandatory airport trepannations. Because, you know, you can't be too safe. Every little bit helps. If an unhinged suicide bomber believes it's possible, we must take it seriously. To do less would be irresponsible. For years, I have made the joke about Richard Reid: "Just be glad that he wasn't the underwear bomber." Now, sadly, we have an example of one.Ass Bomber |
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