Monday, November 23, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Beautiful transparent sea-cucumber from the ocean depths

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 03:28 AM PST


Have a gander at this magnificent transparent sea cucumber, found in the sunless ocean depths by the Census of Marine Life and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Thousands of strange creatures found deep in ocean (Thanks, Brandon!)

(Image: Larry Madin / AP)

Shackleton's Antarctic whisky found

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 10:45 PM PST

pvos.jpg
Photo: PDVos In 1909, British explorer Ernest Shackleton aborted an attempt to reach the south pole. He abandoned two cases of scotch at base camp. A century on, we've found it.
Whyte & Mackay, the drinks group that now owns McKinlay and Co., has asked for a sample of the 100-year-old scotch for a series of tests that could decide whether to relaunch the now-defunct Scotch. Workers from New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust will use special drills to reach the crates, frozen in Antarctic ice under the Nimrod Expedition hut near Cape Royds.
Thought discovered in 2006, conservation guidelines impose strict rules on how the ice-embedded bottles may be recovered. Whyte & Mackay's master blender says it will taste extactly as it did 100 years ago. Company Wants To Drill For Whiskey Lost In Antarctic [CBS]

Murdoch-Microsoft deal in the works

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 08:09 PM PST

balldock_and_mumer.jpg Microsoft is ready to pay Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to remove its news content from Google, according to the Financial Times. Microsoft has also approached other "big online publishers" with similar deals.

"One website publisher approached by Microsoft said that the plan 'puts enormous value on content if search engines are prepared to pay us to index with them",' wrote the FT's Matthew Garrahan. "... Microsoft's interest is being interpreted as a direct assault on Google because it puts pressure on the search engine to start paying for content."

This he calls a "ray of light to the newspaper industry."

Now, every site in Google is currently there by choice. As it could conceivably change its mind and shank Balldock and Murmer with fair use, let's assume that they're planning on exclusivity. End-user license agreements, paywalls, spider-blocking, that sort of thing. Maybe even encryption and plugins and other delights. Sayonara, RSS!

In any case, participating publishers have to become invisible to search engines who don't pay up. Think of all the gambles encoded in that decision: that the U.S. ad market won't rebound enough to go it alone. That subsidized foreign competitors like the BBC aren't a domestic threat. That people will change their surfing habits to find them. And so on.

But there's one gamble which does make some twisted sense: that Microsoft is an irrational consumer. It's easy to believe that it may spew senseless riches into publishers' pockets, radically distorting the news market, just to spite Google. In this case, Murdoch could be wringing cash out of a market he knows is doomed to implosion or assimilation. And he doesn't even have to be an evil genius, either: he just has to be smarter than Steve Ballmer.

Previously:


Spectacular slow card-flourishes from Dimitri Aleri

Posted: 23 Nov 2009 03:07 AM PST

PeaceLove sez, "My buddy Chris 'Orbit' Brown just hipped me to this lovely video of one Dimitri Arleri doing some amazing card flourishes, set to an unidentified piece of ambient opera. Most flourish videos are rapid-fire montages of jaw-dropping excellence (ie. the brilliant Buck Twins) but this guy slows the pace and goes for a more flowing, elegant style. Magicians are taking note. Watch to the end; it's killer!"

Card Flourishes: Dimitri Arleri - "Opera" www.thecuso.info (Thanks, PeaceLove)

Previously:


Associated Press loves fair use (we just wish they'd share)

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 10:58 AM PST

The Associated Press, a organization with so little respect for fair use that they expect you to pay for a license to quote as little as five words from its articles, describes how it relied on fair use to do reporting on Sarah Palin's memoir Glowing Rouge:
"The AP was determined to get the first copy," Oreskes [a senior managing editor] wrote, detailing how the writers learned a store had "inadvertently placed the book on sale five days before its official Nov. 17 release date." "They bought a copy, ripped it from its spine and scanned it into the system so it could be read and electronically searched," he wrote.
As Rebecca Tushnet notes, this is fair use. And so is quoting the AP.

Actually, the AP likes fair use after all (via @CathyGellis)

Previously:


Short papercraft film on the beauty of the book

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 10:51 AM PST

Going West is a beautiful short film illustrating the worlds in a book, incorporating papercraft to make something dreamlike and wonderful. It was animated by Andersen M Studio.

NZ Book Council - Going West (via @GreatDismal)

16 Golden Retrievers Teach You About Atoms

Posted: 22 Nov 2009 11:59 AM PST

I've often found that, when I can't understand a concept in science or math, putting it into pictures will make everything make more sense. It's like magic. Now, none of the visualizations I used as a kid involved a cadre of trained golden retrievers, but maybe that's a flaw the Kansas school system needs to correct.

(Thanks, Mark Day!)
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

CrunchyTech

Blog Archive