The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Swanwick and Gunn's steampunk story ZEPPELIN CITY
- Executive compensation vs. the world
- Stop-motion Atari re-creation
- Human skull papercraft
- Healthy baby poop gallery
- Successful marriage proposal via 3D-printed ring
- Octavia Butler and Carl Brandon tribute reading, San Francisco, Oct 10
- Disney's giant, robotic eyeball prototype
- Fair use and choreography
- Warren Ellis's readers' tour through Etsy
- Juvenile dollar-mod
- Google map of jailed Chinese netizens
- Quickdraw Noir, by Merrill Markoe
- The Aliens: "Sunlamp Show" music video
- A musical clock made of stars
- Woman gives birth in pool with dolphin, internet gives birth to meme.
- Booker White "Aberdeen Mississippi Blues"
- Power To the People
- Giant-sized Gary Baseman drawing for charity
- Flag of Benin Empire may be the best flag depicting a decapitation in the history of the world
- Exorcisms vs. schizophrenia drugs
- Funktionide hints at the future of body pillows
- It's Time To Play...Is! It! Sinful!?
- The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesn't want you to see!
- Love Cake, a baking song by Rocky and Balls
- The ecologist who found his wedding ring
- Femke Hiemstra print from Pressure Printing
- Video: Finnish rappers, age 4
- How private equity firms make billions by driving companies into bankruptcy
- Artsy Rube Goldberg machine makes eggs, toast, coffee
| Swanwick and Gunn's steampunk story ZEPPELIN CITY Posted: 07 Oct 2009 01:55 AM PDT  Eileen Gunn sez, "Michael Swanwick and I have dragged steampunk kicking and screaming out of the Victorian era, slapped it about a bit and tossed it, still writhing, into an Art Deco cityscape. Tor.com editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden described our story, Zeppelin City as "a stew of Metropolis, King Kong, Brazil, and the Critique of the Gotha Programme" and has published it as part of Tor.com's Steampunk Month. Michael and I worked on this story for so long that-- well, suffice it to say, as Michael does, that when we started it, the technology was cutting edge. Is it really steampunk? You decide. The fabulous illustration for the story, by Benjamin Carre, totally captures the cityscape with autogyro and zeppelin." Zeppelin City (Thanks, Eileen!) |
| Executive compensation vs. the world Posted: 07 Oct 2009 01:55 AM PDT  GOOD's executive compensation infographic shows the compensation levels of the business world's top execs, with the number of minimum wage earners each super-suit's take-home pay would support. Top 8 of 2008 CEO Compensation (via Digg) |
| Posted: 06 Oct 2009 11:05 PM PDT Tony sez, "Attached is a stop-motion video my filmmaker friend Justin Grizzoffi and I made a couple of years ago. It was super easy to make - we simply edited together a couple hundred still photos of Post-Its stuck to a wall and scored it using samples from an old Casio SK1 keyboard." Post-It Note Atari (Thanks, Tony!) |
| Posted: 07 Oct 2009 01:55 AM PDT  Ravensblight has a great collection of free spooky papercraft models, just in time for Hallowe'en. |
| Posted: 07 Oct 2009 01:56 AM PDT Wonder what healthy baby-poo looks like? Wonder no more: here's a gallery of normal, healthy steaming baby excreta: Baby poop: A visual guide (via Neatorama) (Image: Diaper pail, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Ingamun's photostream) |
| Successful marriage proposal via 3D-printed ring Posted: 07 Oct 2009 01:56 AM PDT Bre sez, "Fynflood used his MakerBot [ed: 3D printer] to create a ring and then proposed with it! She said yes!" MakerBot LOVE (Thanks, Bre!) |
| Octavia Butler and Carl Brandon tribute reading, San Francisco, Oct 10 Posted: 06 Oct 2009 10:53 PM PDT Rina writes, Saturday is Litquake Day! And we have a very special reading for you.Saturday is Litquake Day Previously:
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| Disney's giant, robotic eyeball prototype Posted: 07 Oct 2009 01:56 AM PDT A reader writes, "Disney's Imagineers realize that the eyes convey emotions and a two-foot eye prototype showcases the newest concept for animatronic models." Hands, Eyes Convey Emotions For Disney's Audio-Animatronics Technology Previously:
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| Posted: 06 Oct 2009 10:42 PM PDT Joe sez, "My friend Julia is a choreographer who is doing some really interesting work looking at how sampling and fair use questions apply to the world of dance. This link is an artist's statement on an upcoming show, Punk Yankees: I had the good fortune of receiving a choreographic fellowship from the Maggie Alessee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) to support the research and initial development of Punk Yankees, which is the title of our anniversary concert. While at MANCC, I began working with the ensemble to address my research questions: What defines "fair use" in dance? Is it permissible to "borrow" choreographic devices if the movement is reinvented? If the dancers can't execute the movement in the way it was originally intended, is there something interesting about that failure? If someone "stylistically" references a choreographer, should it be acknowledged as a derivative work, or is it what naturally occurs through dance education and lineage? Ultimately what we created was a work-in-progress that experimented with meta-theatrical devices and formal conventions to elucidate these provocative questions with transparency and humor.How do appropriation and copyright inform your work? |
| Warren Ellis's readers' tour through Etsy Posted: 07 Oct 2009 01:56 AM PDT  Warren Ellis has put an open call out to Whitechapel readers who have Etsy stores for their crafts to pimp their offerings for early Xmas shopping. So far, we've got wool candy, steampunk jewellery, surreal paintings, paintings of demon cats, handmade jewellery, custom toys, fashion, goggles, felted dissected animals, hand-dyed wool, chainmail, etc etc. Instant clicktrance! Warren's Pub Table: [Sticky] Etsy People Stand Up (late 2009) (Image: Knitted Fetal Pig Biology Project) |
| Posted: 07 Oct 2009 01:56 AM PDT  Spotted in the wild by the inestimable Fipi Lele, a modded US dollar bill with extra juvenile hilarity. I've seen lots of variations on this theme, but these two gags are new to me. (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) |
| Google map of jailed Chinese netizens Posted: 06 Oct 2009 10:20 PM PDT  Oh, the unfortunate irony. The annotations on this Google Map are all in Chinese, so it's of little utility for a non-Chinese-speaker like myself -- but it's the most extensive such documentation I've seen about the jail locations of persons in China imprisoned for online dissidence. (via @rmack) |
| Quickdraw Noir, by Merrill Markoe Posted: 06 Oct 2009 09:30 PM PDT German expressionism meets film noir meets Saturday morning cartoon funnies. Quickdraw Noir. "The rare noir episode of Quickdraw McGraw that featured Peter Lorre. With music by Andy Prieboy." Created by the great Merrill Markoe, who is perhaps best known as David Letterman's original head writer -- she won 5 Emmys for the show. She oughta get one for this, IMHO. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin) |
| The Aliens: "Sunlamp Show" music video Posted: 06 Oct 2009 10:11 PM PDT The groovy video for this new track "Sunlamp Show" by The Aliens is Yellow Submarine-esque madness. A Scottish band, The Aliens feature Gordon Anderson, John Maclean, and Robin Jones, formerly of Beta Band. The Aliens' new album, Luna, was released in the US today by Birdman Records. The Aliens (Thanks, DKN!) |
| Posted: 06 Oct 2009 08:44 PM PDT Jim Bumgardner has created a lovely sound project that brings to life the music of the spheres: "Wheel of Stars." Sean Bonner, upon whose blog I discovered this, says, "I highly recommend fullscreen and the use of headphones. Listening to this is hypnotic. I want it to play constantly in the background of my life." |
| Woman gives birth in pool with dolphin, internet gives birth to meme. Posted: 06 Oct 2009 08:46 PM PDT |
| Booker White "Aberdeen Mississippi Blues" Posted: 06 Oct 2009 03:45 PM PDT I sure like Booker White's slapping technique! |
| Posted: 06 Oct 2009 02:14 PM PDT As a huge fan of FlowingData, NPR and electricity, I'm super excited about this interactive map that gives you a clear view of the structure of the U.S. power grid. Clicking through, you'll see how areas of the country currently are (and aren't) connected to one another, what's in the works to improve the system, and why that matters (a lot) when you start talking about alternative energy sources. Good stuff.
In this picture, you can see the yellow lines that really seem to do a good job of efficiently linking up the whole country. Those power lines haven't been built yet. In the interactive part, you can take those off, revealing a clearer view of our current transmission infrastructure that looks more like a series of occasionally connected river systems than a grid. |
| Giant-sized Gary Baseman drawing for charity Posted: 06 Oct 2009 01:19 PM PDT  Bob Self of Baby Tattoo says: A massive 6 x 3 foot drawing (that's 72 x 36 inches, woo!) that Gary Baseman created while visiting Chaing Mai, Thailand is being auctioned on eBay. All proceeds will go to Cultural Canvas Thailand, a Chiang Mai-based organization that uses visual arts, dance, music and drama to give a voice to struggling and marginalized social groups in the local community.Giant-sized Gary Baseman drawing for charity |
| Flag of Benin Empire may be the best flag depicting a decapitation in the history of the world Posted: 06 Oct 2009 12:11 PM PDT  This flag, for the long-defunct Benin Empire, may just be the ne plus ultra of sigils. I think that when I am god-emperor of some distant land, I shall install it as my standard. |
| Exorcisms vs. schizophrenia drugs Posted: 06 Oct 2009 11:22 AM PDT  NCBI ROFL spotted this 1994 scientific paper extract describing an Indian man in the UK who blamed his crimes on ghostly possession. When exorcisms failed, he was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. That apparently helped. From the abstract in the British Journal of Psychiatry: Treatment commenced using trifluoperazine and clopenthixol. RESULTS. The patient underwent remission during neuroleptic treatment, despite previous evidence of genuine possession. CONCLUSIONS. Many cultures give rise to apparently genuine cases of ghost possession. Neuroleptics may relieve symptoms of exorcism-resistant possession.While searching for the whole paper, I found a great analysis of the case by Vaughan over at Mind Hacks. Vaughan wrote: So this might be an otherwise unremarkable psychiatric case if it were not for the fact that the prison chaplain, and several of the patient's cellmates, saw the spirit possess the patient as a ghostly mist. The chaplain was convinced this was a genuine case of possession, as had priests from several other faiths who had previously carried out exorcisms on the patient. |
| Funktionide hints at the future of body pillows Posted: 06 Oct 2009 12:46 PM PDT |
| It's Time To Play...Is! It! Sinful!? Posted: 06 Oct 2009 10:58 AM PDT Say you're an average medieval Euro-Joe and you want to have sex with your wife. But first, you need to know, IS IT SINFUL? Digging through all those manuscripts of canon law can take forever (plus, as average medieval Euro-Joe, you can't read, anyway). Luckily, James A. Brundage has prepared a handy flow chart for sexual decision making the summarizes the medieval Christian church's take on when sex was OK (Think: In the dark, Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays only), and when you were totally going to go to hell. Unfortunately, I'm not cool enough to figure out how to gank a picture from a Google Books page, so you'll have to follow this link to see the flow chart in all its glory. |
| The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesn't want you to see! Posted: 06 Oct 2009 10:25 PM PDT  Last month, Xeni blogged about the photoshop disaster that is this Ralph Lauren advertisement, in which a model's proportions appear to have been altered to give her an impossibly skinny body ("Dude, her head's bigger than her pelvis"). Naturally, Xeni reproduced the ad in question. This is classic fair use: a reproduction "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting," etc. However, Ralph Lauren's marketing arm and its law firm don't see it that way. According to them, this is an "infringing image," and they thoughtfully took the time to send a DMCA takedown notice to our awesome ISP, Canada's Priority Colo. One of the things that makes Priority Colo so awesome is that they don't automatically act on DMCA takedowns. Instead, they pass them on to us and we talk about whether they pass the giggle-test. This one doesn't. So, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we're gonna mock them. Hence this post. As Wendy Seltzer from the Chilling Effects project said, "Sounds like a pretty solid fair use case to me. If criticism diminishes its effectiveness, that's different from the market substitution copyright protects against. And I've rarely seen a thinner DMCA form-letter." So, to Ralph Lauren, GreenbergTraurig, and PRL Holdings, Inc: sue and be damned. Copyright law doesn't give you the right to threaten your critics for pointing out the problems with your offerings. You should know better. And every time you threaten to sue us over stuff like this, we will: a) Reproduce the original criticism, making damned sure that all our readers get a good, long look at it, and; b) Publish your spurious legal threat along with copious mockery, so that it becomes highly ranked in search engines where other people you threaten can find it and take heart; and c) Offer nourishing soup and sandwiches to your models. Update: Looks like Photoshop Disaster's ISP caved to a similar notice. |
| Love Cake, a baking song by Rocky and Balls Posted: 06 Oct 2009 10:35 AM PDT Teen Brit ukulele sensation Rocky and Balls have a new song, called "Love Cake." We love cakes. We love eating cakes and making cakes, so we wrote this song to sing whilst making said cakes. Previously: |
| The ecologist who found his wedding ring Posted: 06 Oct 2009 03:47 PM PDT  Photo: Dagmara Nall When Aleki Taumoepeau, a 42-year old ecologist, dropped his wedding ring in the murky waters of a New Zealand just months after he and his wife Rachel got hitched, he was determined to find it at all costs. Everyone — including Rachel — thought he was crazy. Quite miraculously, Aleki found the ring at the bottom of the sea a year and a half later. I got on the phone with Aleki recently to find out how he lost and found his wedding ring in the ocean. It's a story of love, faith, obsession, and GPS coordinates, and it starts in a beautiful harbor town on the southern tip of New Zealand's North Island. I'm a fresh water ecologist at the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research in Hamilton. My main job is to help the scientists survey lakes and vegetation, identify species, and advise the power company and regional councils on how to treat noxious plants. I usually work in fresh water, but on that day, I was helping the short-staffed salt water marine guys look for invasive organisms in Wellington Harbor. There were several divers with me on board the inflatable Naiad boat, and I was trying to start the engine when the ring just flew off my finger. We all saw it go in the water. I usually don't wear my ring when working on boats or diving — this was just the one time that i forgot to take it off. My first reaction was to grab an anchor and drop it where the ring went down. After that, four of the divers on the boat went down to have a look, but they couldn't find the ring or the anchor. The water was particularly murky that day, so after about thirty minutes I told them not to worry about it. It was Friday afternoon, and we still had one more job site to attend to. That was in March 2008, three months after I had married my wife Rachel. Three months later, I was at a conference in Wellington so I decided to go and have a look. I asked some of the delegates there to help me out — they thought it was a great cause and were keen to do so. So at 6AM on a cold wintery morning, four of us went out to the beach. The water was quite rough and cold, about 50 degrees fahrenheit. I brought Scuba diving gear, a metal detector, and a dry suit. We were at a sampling site when I lost my ring, so we had recorded its GPS coordinates on our field sheets. The area where I'd lost the ring was supposed to be about 100 yards from the shore and about three meters deep. When I got out in the water, though, there was so much debris in the area — pipes, old tire rims, coins, belts — that the metal detector just went off all the time. I also realized that I had brought the wrong GPS coordinates with me — the area where the lost ring was supposed to be a little bit further away. I was cold and the metal detector was going crazy, so I headed back to shore. Later that week, I had another go, but that was also unsuccessful. Rachel and I met on a golf course — we just clicked, and things went very quickly after that. We had a big Tongan island wedding in November 2007. When I told Rachel about the lost ring, she said she would buy me another one. But that was too easy for me. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I insisted that I was going to find my ring. Rachel and I returned to Wellington again this past July to attend another conference. I said to her, "Let's go a day earlier to look for the ring!" She said, "You're crazy. It's been 15 months. What are the chances of finding it?" I promised her it would be the last time I'd look for it, and that if I didn't find it she could buy me another ring. She was happy with that. So off I went to the beach again with my scuba gear and metal detector. We now have a baby son, so he and my wife sat on the shore while I went searching in the water. This time, I did a little bit more homework. I managed to get the field sheet from our original trip with the right GPS coordinates. I mapped them out on Google Earth &mdash with Google Earth I could actually see the physical landscape and the trees, which would be useful for me to relocate the site while swimming. I loaded the coordinates on my ETrex and swam out to the site. As soon as I got there, I realized that the terrain had physically changed. I was a bit concerned that recent storms could have moved the anchor. And even if the anchor was still there, the ring may not be next to it. Regardless, I knew that if I found the anchor, I'd have a very good chance of finding the ring. I dropped a little white marker with a plastic bag tied to a rope, put on my snorkels, and stuck my head under water. The water was so clear. I had never seen it so clear before. I had a good feeling that I would find it. I'm Christian, so I said a little prayer. I said, "God, don't make it too easy for me because I was feeling a bit confident that I would find it." Then I began swimming around. I figured weeds would have grown over the anchor, so every clumps of weeds I saw, I'd swim down and have a look. I covered a lot of ground to no avail. The water was quite cold, and I was getting tired. I said another prayer: "God, if the ring is here, it would be nice to show it to me right about now. I'm tired from bobbing up and down." I swam back towards my marker to start over again. I had told myself I would look for a minimum of three hours. I looked at my watch. Just over an hour. I stopped and took a deep breath, and started swimming again... And there it was! The anchor was right beneath me. I just couldn't believe it. There weren't even any weeds on it. I was just so excited, and I thought, wow, I better not lose this spot. I kept looking at the land to triangulate the spot. My plan was to go back to get my marker and put it on this spot. Before I went back, though, I decided to have a quick look &mdash so i went down to the anchor on the snorkel and circled it. Lo and behold, about three yards away, was the ring. It was lying flat on the shelly surface, glimmering in the water. I grabbed it, grabbed the anchor, and pushed up to the surface. And then I started cheering. Yeaaaaarhhhh!! Yahoooo! Rachel heard me from shore — she was talking on the phone to someone at work about how crazy I was to be in the water. A couple of people walking their dogs had asked her what the crazy guy in the water was doing. When I got back to shore, just Rachel and the baby were there. I held up the ring. It's a simple gold band with four rolls, kind of like four thinner rings connected together. It was slightly tarnished on the inside, and the gold was a bit dull, but you could still see it shine. I had had this elaborate methodical plan to lay out a search grid on snorkels, then get my scuba gear and metal detector from shore and check each square from my marker. But I didn't even need that. I just found it on my snorkels. "God, you're just awesome," I thought. People read a lot of romantic things into this, but for me it was sort of a challenge. It's not the same to buy a new one, you know? In the back of my mind, I knew I would find it. I have honed my diving skills and the ability to search for and identify things underwater from my job — I'm usually looking for plants, but I know that it's important to be familiar with the environment, for example, and to recognize different sediments and substrates at the bottom. I would have definitely had to use the metal detector if I'd lost the ring on soft sediment, but here I was dealing with sandy shell. I later talked to a scientist who maps sand movements, and he said that that particular area had a lot of sand movement. It's possible that the ring was buried in sand and then unburied again due to water movements and erosions. That explains why, on my first go at finding the ring, I only saw logs and murkiness. I found the ring on July 29, 2009. After that, the Hamilton Press picked up the story, and then it took off on a world scale. A lot of people emailed me saying what a nice story it was. On the Internet, some people believed in me all along, some people discounted God, and others thought I had just gone out and bought another ring and pretended I'd found it. I realized it had impacted a lot of people. This experience definitely strengthened my faith. It's just the power of prayer, I guess. |
| Femke Hiemstra print from Pressure Printing Posted: 06 Oct 2009 09:37 AM PDT  The fine artisans at Pressure Printing have been busy, following up their stunning Ron English piece with this lovely intaglio fine art print from a drawing by Amsterdam-based painter Femke Hiemstra. Femke also has a new book out, Rock Candy, collecting her phantasmagorical fairy tails. Last year, my wife purchased a small Hiemstra original from Roq La Rue Gallery as a birthday gift for me and it brings me spooky joy every day. The new piece from Pressure Printing, in a signed/numbered edition of 100, is 8.75" x 12.75" and sells for $150. It's titled "Haniwa." The Pressure Printing blog has terrific photos of the drawing and printmaking process. Femke Hiemstra's Haniwa Previously: |
| Posted: 06 Oct 2009 09:21 AM PDT Ella ja Aleksi is a Finnish musical group featuring two four-year-old rappers. This video for the song "Yöjuna Rovaniemelle " is an absolute delight. (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!) |
| How private equity firms make billions by driving companies into bankruptcy Posted: 06 Oct 2009 09:14 AM PDT Private equity firms use borrowed money to buy undervalued companies, suck the cash out of the companies in the form of special dividends and other fees, and then rake in more fees when they unload the damaged and desperate company to another private equity firm, which squeezes more value out of it, repeating the cycle until the company is bankrupt. In the short video accompanying a New York Times article about the 133-year-old Simmons Bedding Company's fatal entanglement with the private equity industry, Charles Duhigg, a financial projects reporter, remarked, "When I was in business school, there was nothing sexier in this entire world than private equity. It's exactly where you went if you wanted to one day own an island -- and one of my classmates just bought an island." These private investors were able to buy companies like Simmons with borrowed money and put down relatively little of their own cash. Then, not long after, they often borrowed even more money, using the company's assets as collateral — just like home buyers who took out home equity loans on top of their first mortgages. For the financiers, the rewards were enormous.At Simmons, Bought, Drained and Sold, Then Sent to Bankruptcy |
| Artsy Rube Goldberg machine makes eggs, toast, coffee Posted: 06 Oct 2009 12:19 PM PDT  At Amsterdam's Platform21 design museum last month, kooky Japanese product designers Yuri Suzuki and Masa Kimura — both former assistants at the wonderful art collective Maywa Denki — showed a three-week-long installation that followed the process of him making a giant, functional Rube Goldberg machine that would automatically churn out a full breakfast — coffee, toast, and an omelet. The Breakfast Machine is quite big and impractical, but nonetheless wonderful. There's a video of the machine at work after the jump. |
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