Monday, November 9, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

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Peter & Max: the Fables comics jump to novel

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 04:17 AM PST


The Fables comics are an infinitely entertaining and moving series of comics about a world in which every fable, legend and belief of humanity has been chased from the worlds of fantasy to exile on Earth, hiding in a secret side-street in Manhattan. The chaser is The Adversary, an evil emperor, and his numberless goblin shock-troops. This is such rich material, as it allows for tellings and retellings of every beloved story of humanity.

In Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, writer Bill Willingham tells a key piece of the story in prose form, and proves that he's every bit as wonderful a prose-writer as he is a comics-writer. Peter and Max is the story of two brothers, Peter (Piper, also Pumpkin Eater) and Max (the Pied Piper), who grow estranged from one another on the eve of the Adversary's invasion of their homeworld, and lose themselves in a blood-soaked Black Forest, where they are both fired by the crucible of war and magic into men whose innocence will never be recovered.

Max is the villain here, jealous of Peter's inheritance of Frost, the magic flute of their father. Max acquires Fire, another powerful magic flute, from Frau Totenkinder, the evil witch of the Black Forest, and he and Fire warp each other into something monstrous.

Peter, meanwhile, is orphaned in Hamelin, where he becomes an accomplished thief, escaping from the worst circumstances with the help of Frost, and forever pining for his lost love, Bo Peep, disappeared into the evil woods.

The action moves from this mythic backstory to a contemporary tale in which Max has come at last to contemporary Fabletown, and Peter must hunt him, even though it means his certain doom.

As with the Fables comics, Willingham manages to merge the gentle, meandering feel of fairy tales with a breakneck, contemporary pacing -- a very clever trick indeed. The characters and stories are very engaging, the tension real, the mythos powerful. There's everything to like about Peter & Max, even if you've never cracked a Fables comic (though you probably will, once you've finished reading the book).

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel

Previously:


3D printer jargon in action

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 10:21 PM PST

This Shapeways tutorial on "Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing" is not only useful for 3D printers, it is a treasure-trove of 3D printing jargon.
If you have a model created from several objects or meshes, first make sure that each individual mesh is manifold (water-tight). You can tell this by going into edit mode, pressing A (once if any vertices are selected or twice otherwise) to select none, then hit ctrl-alt-shift-M (on a Mac it's ctrl-opt-shift-M).

Any vertices that get selected when you press that key combination are non-manifold vertices that have to be fixed. Often, fixing these is just a matter of creating new faces (F key) out of sets of 3 or 4 vertices. Sometimes these are stray vertices that are unattached to anything, or are attached to just one vertex by an edge. These can usually be deleted, unless they are intentional (such as those vertices uses to affect the shape while using a subsurf modifier), in which case you want to wait until after you've applied your modifier to delete them. Another possibility are vertices that are part of more than one overlapping faces...

Open the copy of the file, and select each object, one at a time. In object mode, apply all modifiers, then switch to Edit mode, hit A once or twice to select all vertices, then press ctrl-T to triangulate all faces. I don't know why, but Blender does a much better job with Boolean operations if the meshes are triangulated.

Prepping Blender Files for 3D Printing (via Beyond the Beyond)
Previously:


Color film of 1927 London

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 10:19 PM PST

This early (1927) color film shows 10 minutes of remarkable vintage London -- especially the Petticoat Lane market scenes around 6:00, which are a rare glimpse into the life of everyday people (it's even cooler if you were actually down on Petticoat Lane yesterday, as I was!).

The Open Road London (1927) (via Making Light)

Previously:


Slow News: designing reflection and contemplation into the news-cycle

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 10:14 PM PST

Dan Gillmor sez, "Slow food was a great idea. Maybe we need 'slow news' in an era of accelerating -- and wrong -- information."
Like many other people who've been burned by believing too quickly, I've learned to put almost all of what journalists call "breaking news" into the categories of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, "interesting if true." That is, even though I gobble up "the latest" from a variety of sources, the closer the information is in time to the actual event, the more I assume it's unreliable if not false.

It's my own version of "slow news" -- an expression I first heard on Friday, coined by my friend Ethan Zuckerman in a wonderful riff off the slow-food movement. We were at a Berkman Center for Internet & Society retreat in suburban Boston, in a group discussion of ways to improve the quality of what we know when we have so many sources from which to choose at every minute of the day...

But this isn't about saving the old guard. It's mostly about persuading audiences to, among other things, "take a deep breath" before leaping to conclusions, as PaidContent's Staci Kramer tweeted. (I don't trust journalists to do this anymore, with too few exceptions.)

In a practical sense, we can help it along if we find ways to preserve a happy by-product of the manufacturing process. Or, as Clay puts it in an email, "the idea -- that we have to get back, by design, the kinds of things we used to get as side-effects of the environment -- is so important right now, and especially for news."

Toward a Slow-News Movement (Thanks, Dan!)

Replacing $100K diagnostic chip fab with Shrinky-Dinks and a laser-printer

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 10:11 PM PST

CCrawford sez, "Michelle Khine couldn't afford the $100,000 fabrication gear to make micro-fluidic chips needed for chip-based diagnostic tests. She turned to Shrinky-Dinks and found a new way to solve the problem."
To test her idea, she whipped up a channel design in AutoCAD, printed it out on Shrinky Dink material using a laser printer, and stuck the result in a toaster oven. As the plastic shrank, the ink particles on its surface clumped together, forming tiny ridges. That was exactly the effect Khine wanted. When she poured a flexible polymer known as PDMS onto the surface of the cooled Shrinky Dink, the ink ridges created tiny channels in the surface of the polymer as it hardened. She pulled the PDMS away from the Shrinky Dink mold, and voilà: a finished microfluidic device that cost less than a fast-food meal.

Khine began using the chips in her experiments, but she didn't view her toaster-oven hack as a breakthrough right away. "I thought it would be something to hold me over until we got the proper equipment in place," she says. But when she published a short paper about her technique, she was floored by the response she got from scientists all over the world. "I had no idea people were going to be so interested," Khine says.

A children's toy inspires a cheap, easy production method for high-tech diagnostic chips (Thanks, CCrawford!)

(Image: Dave Lauridsen)

Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp's websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 12:29 AM PST

For months (years?) Rupert Murdoch has been waving his jowls around and shouting that Google is stealing from him by not paying to index his material. And all along, we've been saying, "Pffft, right. If you don't like it, just add a robots.txt file that tells Google not to index you. Until you do, stop whining and put it back in your pants."

Now Rupert has promised to do exactly that. He claims that he's going to take all of News Corp's websites pay-only and have them removed from Google when he does.

You know what? He's lying. But I think it'd be entertaining if every reporter who interviewed him, for the rest of his life, said, "Hey, Rupert, when are you going to take all your company's websites out of Google?" It'd also be hilarious to get the CEOs of the various pieces of Rupert's empire to comment on whether they want all their company's materials invisible to search engines.

Rupert also thinks that fair use is illegal and that the right court case would result in it being "barred altogether." Again, another hilarious interview question for the rest of his career: "Hey, Rupert, when are you going to abolish fair use? How's that plan coming, pal?"

The revelation came early in the interview, after Murdoch claimed that Google and others are stealing News Corp content in response to a question about who he was talking about when he talked about plagiarists. "The people who simply pick up everything to run with, and steal our stories...they just take them..without payment. That's Google, Microsoft, Ask.com..a whole lot of people."

Murdoch claimed that readers who visit News Corp sites via search offer little value to advertisers, and that News Corp would rather have fewer people coming to their websites, but paying. Asked why News hasn't made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: "I think we will....but that's when we start charging."

Murdoch also claims that News Corp believes that the doctrine of Fair Use can be challenged in court and "barred altogether."

Epic Win: News Corp Likely To Remove Content From Google (Thanks, Dustin!)

Update: So here's what I think it going on. Murdoch has no intention of shutting down search-engine traffic to his sites, but he's still having lurid fantasies inspired by the momentary insanity that caused Google to pay him for the exclusive right to index MySpace (thus momentarily rendering MySpace a visionary business-move instead of a ten-minutes-behind-the-curve cash-dump).

So what he's hoping is that a second-tier search engine like Bing or Ask (or, better yet, some search tool you've never heard of that just got $50MM in venture capital) will give him half a year's operating budget in exchange for a competitive advantage over Google.

He may, in fact, get a taker. And it will be a disaster. A search engine whose sole competitive advantage is "We have Rupert Murdoch's pages!" will not attract any substantial traffic. The search engine will either go bust or fail to renew the deal.

On this fair use question, my guess is that some evil Richilieu in the legal department has been passing torrid whispers to Rupert about how the Berne Convention's "Three Step Test" for exceptions to copyright is overstepped by US fair use and by many countries' fair dealing rules. So Rupert thinks that he can take a case to the WTO (membership in the WTO is contingent on compliance with the Berne Convention) and get all these rules struck down.

Of course, Rupert's own media products make frequent and copious fair use of other copyrights -- you can't create without fair use. But the mustache-twirling lawyer at Newscorp probably didn't mention this to Rupert Palpatine (the lawyer probably thinks it'd be OK if every single one of those fair uses was replaced by a process in which lots of lawyers negotiated the terms of every use, probably all reporting to him).

They're wrong, of course. The WTO's rules -- and Berne -- are necessarily subservient to realpolitik, viz., the US gets $1 trillion of economic activity out of fair use, and it's not going to get rid of it because it makes some UN agency sad (if the UN mattered to the US, the US'd be paying the billions in back-fees it owes). And if the WTO imposes trade sanctions on the US, they'll just be ignored, because the world's factory-states (China, with also-rans such as India and Vietnam) can't afford to stop sending shipping containers full of Happy Meal toys to America. And if the WTO tries to embargo China, it'll quickly discover that the rest of the world isn't prepared to live without plastic tchotchkes and junkware either.

So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet, hoping that the world's politics and economies will reform themselves to suit your fevered imaginings. This is how history will remember you.

How the ambient sound at Walt Disney World works

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 09:52 PM PST

Noah sez, "An interview with the man who designed the ambient sound at Disney World, ensuring a constant experience rather than one that ends with the end of the ride. It was initially a little uneven, with sound changing volumes depending on where you stood, so they used algorithms to position 15,000 speakers around the park so that the levels would never change."

I like the way there's often running water or waterfalls between different soundscapes to act as a white-noise buffer. It's subtle but incredibly effective. You almost never hear two contrasting soundscapes at once.

In the mid 1990's, the park started researching the problem. It would eventually find no existing solution, so the engineers had to design and construct, on their own, one of the most complex and advanced audio systems ever built. The work paid off: today, as you walk through Disney World, the volume of the ambient music does not change. Ever. More than 15,000 speakers have been positioned using complex algorithms to ensure that the sound plays within a range of just a couple decibels throughout the entire park. It is quite a technical feat acoustically, electrically, and mathematically.

As we land, I ask Mr Q what he considers the highlight of his career. He describes how he wrote some software for "manufacturing emotion" with the thousands of new speakers in the park. The system he built can slowly change the style of the music across a distance without the visitor noticing. As a person walks from Tomorrowland to Fantasyland, for example, each of the hundreds of speakers slowly fades in different melodies at different frequencies so that at any point you can stop and enjoy a fully accurate piece of music, but by the time you walk 400 feet, the entire song has changed and no one has noticed.

How Mr. Q Manufactured Emotion (Thanks, Noah!)

Man walks into own funeral

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 09:35 PM PST

On the Day of the Dead (Dia de Finados) in Brazil, Ademir Jorge Goncalves walked into his own funeral. His family had thought he had died in a car wreck but Goncalves had actually been out drinking. According to CNN, "the sight of... Goncalves alive shocked relatives, some of whom tried to jump out of the windows of the funeral home in southern Brazil."

Sleep: more important than you think (Psychology Today)

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 04:24 PM PST

"Getting enough sleep, on a regular cycle, may make us a better version of ourselves. And even though my greatest wish is usually more time in the day, I'd rather feel good and perform well than get to be a crankier, impulsive, sick version of myself for a few extra hours a day."

Hitler: football coach?

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 11:45 AM PST

The Scottish veterans charity Erskine surveyed 2,000 young people between the ages of nine and 15 about World War I and II. Apparently, five percent thought that Hitler was a German football coach; sixteen percent believed that Auschwitz is a WWII theme park; five percent said the Holocaust was a bash to celebrate the war's end. (STV News)

Ebook license "agreements" are a ripoff

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 07:29 AM PST

In today's Observer Business column, John Naughton discusses what a ripoff it is for ebook vendors to "sell" you books with abusive, multi-thousand word "license agreements," pretending that because you bought your book over the network, it wasn't a sale, and so you don't get to own it. These "licenses" aren't about upholding copyright (if they were, you could replace thousands of words of lawyerese with four simple words: "Don't violate copyright law"). They're about overriding copyright -- which has all kinds of guarantees for the rights of book-owners -- with a private law that gives every advantage to the publisher or retailer, converting you from a noble reader to a wormy, contemptible licensor who doesn't deserve to own books.
The Kindle EULA is a good example. Section 3, which deals with "Digital Content" (such as downloaded books), says that "Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content." In other words, you are forbidden to lend or sell the book you've just "bought". In real-world terms, you can't lend your copy of 1984 to a friend or donate it to the school jumble sale.

Under the subsection on "Use of Digital Content', the Kindle EULA says: "Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use."

Translation: you can't back up your electronic books on to any other device - which means that if your Kindle packs up, or if Amazon moves on to another technical standard, you're screwed: your entire digital library has effectively been vaporised. Then you look round your house and note the number of electronic devices that no longer work.

Kindle readers beware - big Amazon is watching you read 1984

Carrier bags made from Indian newspapers and Bollywood posters

Posted: 08 Nov 2009 07:23 AM PST


These newspaper carrier bags are made in India by an NGO that provides education and shelter to street kids. The bags themselves are very sweet and good for several uses before they're ready for the recycling box, and make good use of the striking designs from the newspapers they're folded from (I like the Bollywood poster ones, too!).

Newspaper Bags (Thanks, Alice!)
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