Saturday, November 21, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Crucifix multi-screwdriver

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 10:03 PM PST

Designer Michiel Cornelissen laser-sintered stainless-steel crucifix has screwdriver bits cut into each tip, turning it into a screwdriver that repels vampires.

a bit cross (via Make)



Lego hole-punch for paper-meets-Lego projects

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 09:58 PM PST

Muji's going to start selling hole-punches that knock out patterns that can be threaded between two Lego bricks. They go on sale in a week, and open up many possibilities for crafty Lego extensions.

LEGO for MUJI Paper and Block Sets (via Make)



EZ Cracker egg cracker

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 04:26 PM PST


This looks like a truly useless, and depressingly ugly device for cracking eggs (which this TV commercial would like you to believe is a big problem).

Video of Tiny Tim performance mentioned in Pynchon's Inherent Vice

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 03:18 PM PST


Gary says:

I'm reading the latest Thomas Pynchon book, Inherent Vice, and he makes reference to this song.

It's like Tiny Tim is tripping on acid, entertaining children, and predicting global warming — all at once.



Cop gets 7-day paid vacation for Tasering child

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 01:48 PM PST

The Arkansas cop who used a Taser on a 10-year-old girl was punished with a 7-day paid vacation -- not for stungunning a little girl, but for not having a camera on his Taser.

3D scanning with a plain webcam

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 01:14 PM PST

Coming soon to a science fiction plot near you: with the right software, a plain-jane webcam can be a 3D scanner. It's a project from Qi Pan, a PhD candidate at Cambridge University Engineering Department.

ProFORMA: Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition (via Futurismic)



Let's blow up the moon

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 01:05 PM PST

Behold! The Rings of the Earth.

Photographs of residents in their tiny flats in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 12:37 PM PST

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Michael Wolf took 100 photos of people living in Hong Kong's oldest public housing estate. Each flat is 100 square feet. Almost every room has the same kind of metal bunk bed. They almost all have a TV, electric fan, and rice cooker.

I looked at all 100 photos. Here's the creepiest room. Here's the most cluttered room. Here's the tidiest room. Here's the most spartan room.

Michael Wolf 100 x 100 (Thanks, Lookforthewoman!)

Matt Logue's "Empty Los Angeles" photography book

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 12:08 PM PST

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Matt Logue says: I just completed a self-published book depicting an uninhabited Los Angeles, and it got an honorable mention in the photography.book.now competition at blurb.com!  The photos were made over a period of 4 years, beginning in 2005, at a variety of locations around LA.

Empty Los Angeles

A Klingon Christmas Carol

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 12:22 PM PST

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An after-Thanksgiving treat for the whole family...

Scrooge has no honor, nor any courage. Can three ghosts help him to become the true warrior he ought to be in time to save Tiny Tim from a horrible fate? Performed in the Original Klingon with English Supertitles, and narrative analysis from The Vulcan Institute of Cultural Anthropology.

Playing November 27 through December 13 at Minneapolis' Mixed Blood Theater. No really, this is for serious.

(Thanks Joel!)



Mishap at the Electrical Substation

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 12:00 PM PST

As a little kid, I used to think electrical substations would make really awesome jungle gyms. This video helpfully demonstrates why 5-year-old Maggie was an idiot.

This is the Eldorado Substation near Boulder City, Nevada. What you're seeing: A substation like this one is connected to long-distance transmission lines and electricity has to be very high voltage to travel on those. The substation "steps up" the voltage so the electricity can travel. Everything at a substation is hot, in that shock the bejeezus out of you sense. So that maintenance can be done, substations are built with switching functions that allow you to disconnect and reconnect various parts of the system in modular sort of way. The big, crazy spark in this video happened when some of the switching mechanisms failed. The Arcs 'n Sparks page at Stoneridge Engineering explains what happened next...

There's some technical jargon involved in this, but I thought you'd find it interesting and it gets the point across.

During normal operation, the switcher will first open the SF6 interrupters which disconnects the HV circuit so that the air break switches can open with no current flowing. Once the air break switches completely rotate to the "open" position, the SF6 interrupters then reclose. Normally, this sequence insures that the air break switches operate de-energized and arc free.

Instead, here, the air break switches opened while the current was still coming through.

The arc stretches upward, driven by rising hot gases and writhing from small air currents and magnetic forces, until it easily exceeds 100 feet in length. As impressive as this huge arc may be, the air break switch was really NOT disconnecting a real load. This arc was "only" carrying the relatively low (about 100 amps) magnetizing current associated with the line reactor. The 94 mile long transmission line associated with the above circuit normally carries over 1,000 megawatts (MW) of power between Boulder City, Nevada (from the massive generators at Hoover Dam) to the Lugo substation near Los Angeles, California. A break under regular load conditions (~2,000 amps) would have created a MUCH hotter and extremely destructive arc. Imagine a fat, blindingly blue-white, 100 foot long welding arc that vaporizes the contacts on the air break switch and then works its way back along the feeders, melting and vaporizing them along the way. Still, you've got to admit that this "little" 33 MVAR arc is certainly an awesome sight!

Indeed.



Humans are domesticating themselves with smaller brains as a result

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 11:48 AM PST

Marginal Revolution posted the following excerpt from Jeremy Taylor's book titled Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human.
200911201140 I think we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50,000 years have been domesticating ourselves.  If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior.  And the amazing thing once you start thinking in those terms is that you realize that we're still moving fast.  I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves.  The way it's happening is the way it's probably happened since we became permanently settled in villages, 20 or 30,000 years ago, or before.

Jeremy Taylor's brain is not yet too small to notice that our brains are becoming smaller

Rats in the urban ecology

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 11:34 AM PST

Ratttttt

(CC-licensed image by Flickr user laverrue)

Gregory Glass is a disease ecologist -- he studies the relationship between pathogens and hosts. A professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Glass's laboratory is Baltimore's urban underbelly, where he hangs out with beefy sewer rats. Apparently, Baltimore is a hotbed of rat research. I wonder if Glass has encountered any Rat Kings. From Smithsonian:
Glass has been following the secret lives of wild Norway rats – otherwise known as brown rats, wharf rats, or, most evocatively, sewer rats -- for more than two decades now, but Baltimore has been a national hotspot for rat studies for well over half a century. The research push began during World War II, when thousands of troops in the South Pacific came down with the rat-carried tsutsugamushi disease, and the Allies also feared that the Germans and Japanese would release rats to spread the plague...

Glass – who started off studying cotton rats in the Midwest – traps the animals with peanut butter baits and monitors the diseases they carry. (Hantavirus, once known as Korean hemorrhagic fever, and leptospirosis – which can cause liver and kidney failure – are of particular concern.) Lately he's been interested in cat-rat interactions. Cats, he and his colleagues have noticed, are rather ineffectual rat assassins: they catch mainly medium-sized rodents, when they catch any at all. This predation pattern may actually have adverse effects on human health: some of the deceased mid-sized rats are already immune to harmful diseases, while the bumper crops of babies that replace them are all vulnerable to infection. Thus a higher proportion of the population ends up actively carrying the diseases at any given time.

"Crawling Around with Baltimore Street Rats"



Man to marry his video game girlfriend this Sunday

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 11:42 AM PST

12302-620x-lp.jpgLast month, I wrote about a Japanese husband who confessed to his wife that he had a virtual girlfriend, a character from an addictive Nintendo DS game called Love Plus. Now, another man is planning to hold a wedding ceremony with his Love Plus girlfriend this coming Sunday. The man, who calls himself SAL9000, was so in love with Nene Anegasaki that he decided to marry her and take her on a honeymoon to Guam. Of course, this means that he literally just took his Nintendo DS to Guam... while there, he took photos, livecast their adventures on popular video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga, and documented their adventures using the augmented reality iPhone app Sekai Camera. In any case, the guy plans on having a public reception in Tokyo this Sunday. It will be livecast on Nico Nico Douga, but in case you miss it, we'll be bringing you an update early next week. Stay tuned! via IT Media News (Japanese)

Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 11:34 AM PST

spraypaint.jpg [Click for larger image.] I was lucky enough to see Black Flag play live a number of times in the '80s, around the time Glen E. Friedman shot the photo that graces this book's cover. I was an underage teen sneaking into grownup punk clubs, high on moshpit fumes (and, truth be told, lots else). The band, and that subculture that surrounded them, changed my life.

Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag explores the history of one of the most important bands, if not the most important, in American punk history.

Snip from observations by writer Joe Carducci, who was long associated with SST Records (some links added):

"[The book is] very well reported and assembled by Brit music writer Stevie Chick, author of the better of the recent Sonic Youth books. Neither Greg Ginn nor Henry Rollins sat for interviews but their voices are included from earlier interviews, and more importantly Chuck Dukowski spoke to Chick - a first I believe. The story, laid out from the band's earliest practices in 1976 to its end ten years later, makes a far more dramatic book than the usual shelf-fillers with their stretch to make the empty stories of various chart-toppers sound exciting and crucial and against the odds. "

Spray Paint the Walls: The Story of Black Flag (Amazon, book comes out later this month)

Here's a related post on photographer Glen E. Friedman's blog.

You may also be interested in some of Carducci's own writings on the subject of music and fandom.

Big Bird cakes disasters

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 11:23 AM PST

200911201121 Cake Wrecks has a gallery of horrendous cakes with a Big Bird theme. To be fair, it seems really difficult to decorate a cake to look like Big Bird, what with that long beak of his.

Big Bird cakes disasters

Getting meaningful things done using "fixed-schedule productivity"

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 11:20 AM PST

Cal Newport, a post-doc at MIT who writes the blog Study Hacks, has an interesting method of getting important work done. He calls it "fixed-schedule productivity."

The idea, in a nutshell, is this: "Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way."

Newport works between 8:30 and 5:30 on weekdays only, yet he gets a lot done:

This past summer, for example, I completed my PhD in computer science at MIT. Simultaneous with writing my dissertation I finished the manuscript for my third book, which was handed in a month after my PhD defense and will be published by Random House in the summer of 2010. During this past year, I also managed to maintain my blog, Study Hacks, which enjoys over 50,000 unique visitors a month, and publish over a half-dozen peer-reviewed academic papers.

Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You To Be Rich wrote about Newport and a few other people who use similar techniques to get a lot of meaningful work accomplished in 40 hours a week or less.

I think they are onto something -- ever since I had kids (which gave me fewer hours in the day to work, and also put a start and end time on my day) I've been much more productive.

Time management: How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, and 6+ peer-reviewed papers — and finishes by 5:30pm

Beard worn as cage around head

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 11:47 AM PST


This fellow apparently won a facial hair competition in 1991 for his beard head-cage with working door. (via Imaginary Foundation)

UPDATE: In the comments, lots of speculation that this is fake. May very well be, but I still think it's delightful.

Brilliant meteor over Utah

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 10:43 AM PST

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A gorgeously glowing meteor flew over Utah on Wednesday night, alarming some citizens and delighting others. The image above is from a security camera at the IMFT plant in Lehi, Utah. From KSL-TV, were you can also see some video of the fireball:
Clark Planetarium Director Seth Jarvis said the stony meteorite was probably traveling 80,000 miles an hour when it hit our atmosphere. He said it happened 100 miles up in the air; so despite the brightness, Utah was never in any danger. "These collisions can do damage, but they are extremely rare; and literally once in a century do you observe something that's actually doing damage," he said. Witness Andy Bailey said, "Oh, it lit up the whole sky, like almost brighter than the day. It was bright." Don White was in Wyoming and told KSL Newsradio for a moment he suspected a nuclear strike. "With something that brilliant and that fast, it was like, whoa, did we just get hit or something? It would have been some bigger noise I guess if a nuclear device had gone off," he said.
"Meteor lights up early morning sky, alarms Utahns"

Chuck Prophet documentary

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 10:17 AM PST


My film director pal Scott Compton just finished shooting a documentary about singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet. Scott and collaborator John Behrens joined Prophet and his band in Mexico City earlier this year where the group recorded ¡Let Freedom Ring!, an album of "political songs for non political people." My favorite Prophet quote from the trailer: "I walk into the (recording studio's) control room and I could not believe what I saw -- I was looking at a studio that is totally state-of-the-art... for 1957." So with a background of earthquakes, H1N1 hysteria, power outages, sirens, and corrupt police, the band plugged in their instruments and set to work. "The best thing about Prophet as a film subject," Scott told me, "is that even as things fell apart around him, he always was looking for the bright side of the mayhem." I can't wait to watch the whole film, slated for completion by March. I'll see Scott later today when he'll be directing a Boing Boing Video interview I'm doing with Swell Season, aka Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová from the film Once. They're performing tonight at Oakland's Paramount Theatre.

Cigar box ukulele kit

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 10:09 AM PST

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Yesterday I received a surprise package in the mail: a cigar box ukulele kit from Papa's Boxes (which sells kits for four different ukuleles and a 5 string banjo, all based on cigar boxes). It looks like it has everything needed -- a cigar box, strings, hardware, glue, drill bits, and even a piezoelectric buzzer for an acoustic/electric pickup. The parts are all labeled and everything looks like it's been put together with loving care.

The neck is pretty much finished, with fretboard and frets already in place. That means it ought to be pretty easy to make with just a few standard tools, like a drill and a screwdriver.

I think this will be my Thanksgiving weekend project!

Papa's Boxes

Demi claims missing hipflesh is for real. But $5,000 says it's Moore photoshopping.

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 10:13 AM PST

demi.jpg

Demi Moore gets the Ralph Lauren treatment in December "W" Photographer Anthony Citrano recently pointed us to a possible Photoshop Disaster on the cover of W magazine's December issue, in which Demi Moore (aka @mrskutcher) appeared to be missing a chunk of flesh from her hip.

This reminded me of the Ralph Lauren debacle. Many blogs and news sites picked the item up. Over at Jezebel (they posted about it before BB), W magazine fessed to having altered the image, but "nothing out of the ordinary."

Yesterday, Mrs. Kutcher herself tweeted, "Here is the original image people my hips were not touched don't let these people bullshit you!"

Anthony Citrano replies: "I feel bad that Demi is on defense - she should not have to defend other people's mistakes; W Magazine should be addressing this rather than her." Citrano offers $5,000 to the charity of her choosing if the image she tweeted is provably the unretouched original.

Citrano's full reply and details on the thrown-down-gauntlet follow. All of this, by the way, IS VRY SRS BIZNESS.

To reiterate, Demi is a beautiful woman who needs no help from retouching. This was never about her, nor about retouching - I have no problem with either.

Further, I feel bad that Demi is on defense - she should not have to defend other people's mistakes; W Magazine should be addressing this rather than her.

Having said that, she did raise the stakes considerably yesterday by posting what she claims is the original unretouched shot, along with the accusation that "these people" (presumably Xeni and me) are "bullshitting."

Well, whether or not her hip was botched, I do not believe for a moment that the image Demi posted yesterday is the original shot.

If she's aware of that - and I expect she is - it's irresponsible (and silly) of her to make that assertion.

So, I'll see her move and raise her $5,000: if the shot she posted yesterday is really the unretouched original, I will donate $5,000 to a charity of her choosing.

Let's see who's "bullshitting", shall we?

Whaddya say, Demi? Are we on?

demimidrez.jpg





Google puts a stop to tooth-whitening, belly-flattening scumbags

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 09:53 AM PST

The Big Money reports that Google has made a "minor shift in its policy that has major implications." Instead of banning scammy ads for bogus teeth whiteners and stomach flatteners, Google will now ban the advertiser itself, "effectively neutering the advertiser's ability to shift from one ad and shell site to another."
Think of it like the struggle between the police and a graffiti vandal. Up until now Google has only been erasing the tags after they've been put up. Going forward, they're going to take away his spray cans and put a GPS collar on him, making sure he never does it again. It would be a principled stand by any company, but especially by Google because of its position in the market. I worry, though, that the rest of the industry won't pay attention. On this issue, Google might be a leader without any followers.
Google Does Non-Evil Thing: Bans White Teeth, Flat Stomachs

Taste Test: natto, gooey fermented soy beans

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 10:03 AM PST

2575452959_3e70c24168_b.jpg In Japan, we eat soy all the time. For breakfast we have rice with natto and miso soup with tofu; for dinner we pop edamame into our mouths in between chopsticks-full of vegetables sauteed in soy sauce. I always assumed it was good for you, until I came to California and my health-conscious American friend told me that soy was actually really bad for you. So which is it?

3129760879_e5c9fcc492.jpgNatto spaghetti Ingredients: packet of natto, soy sauce, butter, chopped scallions, nori seaweed, spaghetti Boil the spaghetti in a pot. Open the natto packet and mix the ingredients (it usually comes with some mustard and a soy-based sauce) together. Once the spaghetti is cooked and drained, toss it in butter and soy sauce, then place the natto, scallions, and seaweed on top.

Here's what we know about soy: unprocessed, it's a great source of digestible protein and has tons of vitamin B, calcium, and folate — all things that are good for you. It also contains isoflavones, and here's where things get tricky. Some studies prove that isoflavones are beneficial, while others have shown that it promotes breast and prostate cancer. Soy has also been called out as an agent of brain cell aging and thyroid dysfunction, too. In her recent book The Jungle Effect, San Francisco-based physician Daphne Miller — who studied low cancer rates in Okinawa extensively — writes:
While Okinawans take in over 80 percent of their soy in a relatively unprocessed form as tofu, edamame, soy flour, soy milk, or miso, people in the United States eat a similiar percentage of their soy in a processed form. Our soy foods are heated, mashed, and denatured to create a vast array of substances ranging from Tofurky to fillers for tuna fish to ice-cream sandwiches... while whole foods offer valuable protection, concentrated or denatured derivatives of these foods are having the opposite effect.
The bottom line, at least for now, seems to be that good soy prevent cancer and bad soy might promote cancer. Good soy = tofu, soy sauce, miso, natto, edamame. Bad soy = soy protein powder, energy bars made with soy, fake hot dogs, tofurky. A lot of Western people think natto — fermented soy bean — is gross because of it's gooey texture and stinky smell, but it's one of my favorite things to eat for breakfast. It's filled with protein and great for a post-workout snack, too. If you're still iffy about it, why not combine the foreign with the familiar and cook some natto spaghetti? The slippery texture of the pasta cuts the gooeyness a little, and in my opinion this is a gentle way to ease natto into your culinary life. Every installment of Taste Test will explore recipes, the science, and some history behind a specific food item.

Images via Jasja Dekker's Flickr and Gaku's Flickr



A programmer's lament on the Apple App Store

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 08:45 AM PST

"How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak." — Paul Graham.

Please release me: Mario, MinMe & Mini Squadrons, DigiDrives & Captain Successors

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 08:52 AM PST

It's a sure sign it's gearing up to the holidays when the games start pouring in thick and fast, and this week saw the high profile release of two just as highly-anticipated (and by all accounts excellent) sequels: the renaissance stealth of Assassin's Creed II to the dirty Delta zombie-slaughter of Left 4 Dead 2, but there's one return that's captured more of my time than all the above.

New Super Mario Bros. [Nintendo, Wii]

Classing the latest Super Mario Bros. as a sequel would be a bit of a misnomer: so unabashed is Nintendo about letting this latest game sit directly alongside its decades old brethren that they're using NES-era screenshots to advertise the game in Japan.

And that's precisely what it gives you (as it did with the DS NSMB), in modern dress, letting all of the true forward-looking innovation run off the evolutionary fork spawned by Mario 64 that led down to Galaxy and the upcoming Galaxy 2.

Which is by no means a slight, simply a forewarning that while it will trigger all the nostalgia you might expect, it can't -- and doesn't bother to -- feel like the classic reinvention (that each successive 8-, 16- and 64-bit entry did) that it now saves for its 3D kin.

Except for its four-player multiplayer, obviously. Because while the Bros. might at first seem to move a bit more mechanically this time around (a necessity for its now more technical wall-jumping play, compared to the classic free-wheeling right-ward sprint), it does allow expert players to perform the staggeringly complex ballet you see in the video at top. Even though the majority might never fully experience that dance themselves, that's what this New Super Mario is all about.

Art Style: DigiDrive [Q-Games, DS]

Nintendo's second best release this week is actually another refresh, this time the DSi downloadable release of DigiDrive, originally one of the keystones of the 'bit Generations' series -- a cult franchise of import-only art/experimental Game Boy Advance games released alongside the GBA Micro, in an effort to give that device a lifestyle vibe that would take it off the playground and into the boutique.

The first release from developer Q-Games to give us a taste of what they'd eventually accomplish on the PlayStation 3 with their own art-styled PixelJunk series, DigiDrive was the most boldly abstract of all the bit Generations games, but still one of its most instantly compelling.

Per the video above (taken, obviously, from the GBA version [the only DSi video is hopelessly low-res]), its an action-puzzle game of crossroads color-sorting, where successful stacking earns you fuel reserves collected by the flashing ambulance-syringes (Trigger Cars) to propel the shuffle puck (Core) at right (or, in the DSi version, on bottom) forward and away from an approaching Spike.

It's never explained in which realm of existence the Core actually relates to the cars, or why the Spike can't touch the Core, nor does it have to be, really, because the woman says Danger! when the Spike gets close, and that's all the impetus anyone should need. Those are the rules.

While it may easily be the most baffling gameplay description I've ever tried to convey, in practice it's a fantastically meditative experience, punctuated with quick bursts of more frantic traffic-directing in its Overdrive mode, and, three years on from its original release, again ranks at the top of the now Art Style brand.

Mini Squadron [MrFungFung, iPhone]

Full disclosure: even after decades of repeat exposure and furious concentration, I've still never managed to wrap my head around 3D dogfighting games, which in nearly ever case rapidly devolve into catching fast glimpses of my foes passing on either side to circle around behind and destroy me, or impotently spinning in tight loops hoping to spot an opening in someone else's defense, if not just to spot anyone at all.

Enter Mini Squadron, the first, best dogfighting game to let out the ace baron I knew I had in me all along, and all it took was stripping that z-axis nuisance and letting the aerial dance commence in 2D.

The indie debut of former Lionhead/Microsoft/Sony programmer Tak 'MrFungFung' Fung, Mini Squadron's pastel downsizing belies the arcade intensity of its battles (including local multiplayer fights), and the true tantalizing draw is the collecting and compulsive re-testing of new fighter planes unlocked in the course of each level.

minme-thumb-200x300-26208.jpgMinMe [Chaim Gingold, iPhone]

The eagle-eyed will note that MinMe isn't exactly new, having first been released in late September as a rare App Store entry as part of the ongoing Experimental Gameplay Project, but this week saw an update that was a wish fulfilled.

Developer Chaim Gingold -- best known as the design lead behind Spore's Creature Creator (and who you now may also recall from his previously covered more official App Store debut Earth Dragon) -- took that month's EGP 'Bare Minimum' theme even more seriously than fellow EGP entrant Adam Saltman's Canabalt, devising a stripped-bare square-pushing puzzle game of nine tutorial levels and a single final proper puzzle, ending precisely when the going was getting good.

I joked at the time that the game duly deserved another 60 some odd puzzles, and lo, Gingold did deliver, reconfiguring the game to give players 15 levels in its free download, and an additional 45 unlocked via an in-app purchase of a dollar.

It's this week's dollar best spent, too: running off a simple mechanic of pushing consecutive colored tiles into adjacent grid cell receptacles, Gingold wastes no time in conjuring up level after level of deviously complex and awesomely rewarding puzzles that are precisely what I'd hoped for after quickly conquering the original demo.

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Captain Forever / Captain Successor [Farbs, web]

And finally, a special bonus entry released just hours before publication, as indie dev Farbs announces the completion of Captain Successor -- the follow-up to his original ship-constructing space-shooter Captain Forever -- and sets that latter game free for all to play, giving everyone a chance to finally understand why it's most hardcore indies' game of the year.

I've previously talked a bit more at length about what makes Forever special, and while I still haven't had the chance to fully explore what Successor brings to its simulated low-tech display, the promise of new ship parts and weaponry, and the chroma-spanning wireframe landscape that now glitches and flows beneath your ship is more than enough to bring me back.

Donating to the Forever Project gives you access to play Successor -- and, indeed, each further successor Farbs has planned down the road -- before its public release, and there are few indie efforts this year more deserving of that support.



EFF takes on Volomedia's stupid attempt to patent podcasting

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 09:01 AM PST

A company called Volomedia just got the US Patent Office to grant them exclusive rights to patent podcasting. Say what? The Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting, and is putting out a call for help for all the O.G. podcasters out there. Paging Dave Winer and Adam Curry! Snip:
The Volomedia patent covers "a method for providing episodic media." It's a ridiculously broad patent, covering something that many folks have been doing for many years. Worse, it could create a whole new layer of ongoing costs for podcasters and their listeners. Right now, just about anyone can create their own on-demand talk radio program, earning an audience on the strength of their ideas. But more costs and hassle means that podcasting could go the way of mainstream radio -- with only the big guys able to afford an audience. And we'd have a bogus patent to blame.

In order to bust this patent, we are looking for additional "prior art" -- or evidence that the podcasting methods described in the patent were already in use before November 19, 2003. In particular, we're looking for written descriptions of methods that allow a user to download pre-programmed episodic media like audio files or video files from a remote publisher, with the download occurring after the user subscribes to the episodes, and with the user continuing to automatically receive new episodes. You can read the entire prior art request here, and if you have something that could help, please send it to podcasting_priorart@eff.org or fill out the form on our Volomedia page.

EFF Tackles Bogus Podcasting Patent - And We Need Your Help (thanks Peter Kirn)

Seth Godin rants on faux science and irrationality

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 09:35 AM PST

"The news here is not that people are irrational, giving too much credence to the dramatic and the local and the short-term (that's not news), but that people have added a veneer of scientific rationality to their irrational decisions." Seth Godin rants on the growing use of phony sciencey-sounding arguments to validate irrational decisions. Like "truthiness," for science.

Unemployment stats in the USA just got worse

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 10:18 AM PST

America's official national unemployment rate is now 10.2%. But there are more sad numbers in the Bureau of Labor Statistics's October report, out today. Jobless rate in some states is higher. Michigan's the most grim: 15.1 percent. Nevada: 13.0, Rhode Island: 12.9, California: 12.5, South Carolina: 12.1. Over the year, rates are up in all 50 states and in D.C. Among cities, Detroit's tops. 30%. The actual, practical toll of unemployment is worse when you count the underemployed and those on the streets and off the grid.

Evolution Among the Cannibals

Posted: 20 Nov 2009 08:42 AM PST

The South Fore people of Papua New Guinea used to eat their dead relatives' brains as a sign of respect, passing on the deadly prion disease kuru--a relative of mad cow disease--in the process. But long before the Fore stopped the tradition on the advice of scientists in the 1950s, evolution was already at work. Less than 200 years ago, according to New Scientist, a member of the Fore was born with a gene mutation that protected against kuru. They passed it to their children.

Because having the mutation helped you live longer (and, thus, have more children), it quickly spread through the Fore population. Today, several Fore families descended from people who took part in the brain-eating rituals owe their existence to the reality of evolution.

(Via Mind Hacks.)



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