The Latest from Boing Boing |
- Not Just Drones: Militants Can Snoop on Most U.S. Warplanes
- Dark Horse Conan comics collections
- Australian fliers will get their cutlery and knitting needles back
- Spite Houses, built to piss off the neighbors
- Bug powder causes male bedbugs to stab each other to death with their penises
- Installing Windows considered as a literary genre
- Montage of magic "photo enhancement" in cop shows and movies
- Association for Computing Machinery tries to undermine open access
- Remixed Danish tourist poster reflects the brutal new Copenhagen police-state
- How would you win this game show?
- The Simpsons turns 20 today
- Update on the Frazetta heist: Notary says artist gave son permission to take paintings
- See-through "never clog" sink drain
- Chicago MD better at hide-and-seek than Evan Ratliff
- Vintage Frazetta anti-smoking ad
- LED traffic lights don't melt snow
- Blondie - We Three Kings Music Video (2009)
- Electric Sheep artificial life screensaver goes super hi-rez
- "A higher bandwidth than any internet connection that ever existed"
- Gibberish rock song written by Italian composer to sound like English
- All you need to know about the Motorola Droid
- Proof that goats cannot be trusted
- What a luxury ski resort is doing to solve climate change
- Hacking the Predator drone: Cheaper than dinner and a movie
Not Just Drones: Militants Can Snoop on Most U.S. Warplanes Posted: 18 Dec 2009 05:31 AM PST Yesterday, news broke that insurgents used a $25 application available online to hack into US military drone video feeds, and view, copy, and potentially distribute their contents. Hmmmm... Unauthorized copying of audio and video material? Some on Twitter have suggested that we might just send the MPAA or RIAA after them -- then, for sure we'll at last find Bin Laden. But Wired Danger Room's Noah Shachtman says, Tapping into drones' video feeds was just the start. The U.S. military's primary system for bringing overhead surveillance down to soldiers and Marines on the ground is also vulnerable to electronic interception, multiple military sources tell Danger Room. That means militants have the ability to see through the eyes of all kinds of combat aircraft -- from traditional fighters and bombers to unmanned spy planes. The problem is in the process of being addressed. But for now, an enormous security breach is even larger than previously thought.Here's the Danger Room article. |
Dark Horse Conan comics collections Posted: 18 Dec 2009 03:33 AM PST After my review last November of John Clute's outstanding collection of Robert E Howard's short fiction, Dark Horse was kind enough to send me all seven collected volumes of their superb Conan graphic novel series. The series ran from 2004-2008, cycling through an assortment of writers and artists who've taken Howard's work and paid it great justice indeed. Cary Nord, who illustrated the first three books, set a high standard for the art, devoting himself to a Frazetta-esque attention to anatomy, blood, and action. The writers, meanwhile blended Howard's own storylines with original material that serve to connect one adventure to the next (there wasn't much continuity in Howard's original Conan saga, which ran more like a series of discrete adventures, each intended to stand alone). As I've noted before, I have enormous affection for Conan; these stories are the origin node of the modern network of heroic fantasy, the original strong brew that has been diluted for a million mighty-come-lately adventures. Howard's muscular prose, his romanticization of "uncivilized" life ruled by passion and honor, and his faultless pacing (when in doubt, insert an epic battle with an army of the undead, a pack of thieves, a gang of ice-giants, or, if necessary, a dalliance with a hot-blooded swordswoman that ends with the two fighting back to back against a pack of lions or similar) make each Conan adventure a perfect, blood-pounding escape. The comics form is especially kind to Conan. The artists are able to do the heavy lifting of setting the scene and depicting the action, whittling away Howard's prose to the unselfconsciously heroic dialog: blood oaths, curses, seductive grunts, defiant yells. I devoured all seven volumes in three days, reading one at the office and one before bed every night, waking up my wife to show her particularly gore-spattered panels (she's the illustrator in the family and enjoys this stuff as much as I do). It was just wonderful returning to Conan's world, to the heroic lands I'd lived in in my imagination as a boy.
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Australian fliers will get their cutlery and knitting needles back Posted: 18 Dec 2009 04:19 AM PST Australia's aviation authority has announced a return to sanity, allowing nail files, umbrellas and metal cutlery on its planes, saying that it will focus instead on "real risks." The changes will see passengers again allowed to carry some sharp implements, such as nail files and clippers, umbrellas, crochet and knitting needles on board aircraft from July next year.The best secondary customs screening I ever had was in Brisbane. We got off the plane and were directed to secondary. I told the customs guard that Alice was pregnant and he practically ran to get her a chair and a glass of water while we waited. Shortly thereafter, two customs agents came over and asked us a few simple questions ("where are you staying, why are you here?") in a friendly tone and then told us we were done. I thought they were just passing the time of day before the screening -- they were so incredibly nice, the way Canadians are meant to be (except when you cross a border, where they turn into total bastards in the name of ensuring that you don't cheat the government out of its national sales tax). Carry-on restrictions to be relaxed (via Schneier) (Image: TSA Screener with Checkpoint Friendly Laptop Case, a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike image from Mobile Edge Laptop Cases' photostream) Previously:
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Spite Houses, built to piss off the neighbors Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:24 PM PST Ape Lad sez, "I somehow ended up reading about spite houses (homes built specifically to piss off a neighbor) this evening, which I had never heard of before. Flickr has several when you search the tags, including the sad story behind this house in Connecticut." Spite house (Thanks, Ape Lad) (Image: File:AlamedaSpiteHouse.jpg, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, Wikimedia Commons) Previously: |
Bug powder causes male bedbugs to stab each other to death with their penises Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:50 PM PST Male bedbugs will schtup anything, and when they do, their stabby little penises can do great damage to one another. Female bedbugs have some "down there" armor that absorbs the punishing blows of the bedbug's love-spear, but males lack this protection. A pheromone discovered by a Swedish researcher can cause male bedbugs to kill each other with their penises through uncontrolled shagging: According to lead researcher Camilla Ryne, bedbugs are notoriously undiscerning about who they mount, and are accustomed to stab their penis straight into another male's abdomen...New discovery may help deal with bedbug infestation (Thanks, Steve) (Image: 98221_hires.jpg, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from liz.novack's photostream) Previously: |
Installing Windows considered as a literary genre Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:43 PM PST During a discussion of Charlie Stross's epic tale of Windows installation, a Making Light reader called Ajay worked up this killer formal structure of "the well-established genre, the tale of godawful Windows-installation woes": I. Exordium. The narrator introduces himself, establishes his experience in computing (ethos) and exhorts the listeners to gather round.Chkdsk red in tooth and claw (Image: Frustration!, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from basykes' photostream) Previously: |
Montage of magic "photo enhancement" in cop shows and movies Posted: 17 Dec 2009 10:02 PM PST Darren sez, "A terrific montage of those 'can you clean that up a little' moments in film and TV. You know the trope: when back at the lab, some nerdy technician spouts technical gobbledygook and uses some fancy version of Photoshop to improbably improve the quality of some grainy security footage." My favorite one of these -- I think it was in Enemy of the State? -- was two supercops looking at a satellite image of a terrorist standing on the roof of a building, and one says to the other, "can you rotate the picture so we can see his face?" I was waiting for the other guy to say something like, "sure, I'll just rewrite the fundamental laws of the universe so that cameras from overhead satellites can see around corners," but no, he did it. As the lady said of Meg Ryan, "I'll have what he's having." |
Association for Computing Machinery tries to undermine open access Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:32 PM PST Naty sez, "As a longtime member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), I've often had cause to be annoyed by their approach to copyright (the ACM exists to support the computing community, not to make money, and they seem to have forgotten that). I've just written a blog post about their latest bit of asshattery - they are trying to convince the US government not to expand the successful NIH open access requirement to other government funding bodies, all in the name of protecting the revenue from their digital library." The ACM has no legitimate needs or interests other than those of its members! How would U.S. voters react to a Senator claiming that a given piece of legislation (say, one reducing restrictions on campaign financing) "strikes a fundamental balance between the needs of the Senate and those of the United States of America"? ACM has lost its way, profoundly and tragically.One data-point: I wrote a short story for Communications of the ACM that they were supposed to put on their website for free more than a year ago, and they still haven't figured out how to do this; they say that their website back-end makes it impossible to flag articles as open access. US Gov Requests Feedback on Open Access - ACM Gets it Wrong (Again) Previously:
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Remixed Danish tourist poster reflects the brutal new Copenhagen police-state Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:26 PM PST Carsten sez, "My friend, artist Camilla Brodersen created a wonderful, freely-redistributable rehash of an old Danish tourist poster, highlighting the new situation after the new police powers, as demonstrated in the heavy-handed clampdown on protesters at the recent climate change summit in Copenhagen. My friend Amila juxtaposed the mashup with the original poster on her English-language blog, creating a chilling and all too realistic contrast." Copenhagen before and after (Thanks, Carsten) Previously: |
How would you win this game show? Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:20 PM PST Here's a nice little game-theory exercise: You are in a game show with nineteen other players. You don't know the other players, you can't see them, and you can't communicate with them. The game you are in is called 'Greed!', and is straightforward to explain. You are asked to write down a whole dollar amount in the range $1 - $1,000,000 on a piece of paper. You will be paid the amount you asked for if it is deemed to be 'non-greedy'. Whether your request is indeed 'non-greedy' will be decided once all twenty request have been received by the host of the show. Your requested amount will be labeled 'non-greedy' if no other player has asked for less, and at least one player has asked for more.Game Theory - The Art Of Acting Rational (Thanks, Dad!) (Image: Money!, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from yomanimus' photostream) Previously:
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Posted: 17 Dec 2009 08:44 PM PST Twenty years ago today, the first full-length episode of The Simpsons -- known as The "Christmas Special" -- aired on television. This episode was originally intended to be show number 8, but ended up being first after a series of production glitches and switches. You can find streamable copies around the internets. I've been traveling in rural, indigenous communities in Central America this week. I was reminded of the awesome happy-power and transcultural reach of the Simpsons in a conversation last night with an 8-year-old K'iche Maya kid. He lives in a highland village. His family is too poor to own a TV, but we got to talking, and he volunteered out of the blue his love for the show. He knows exactly who his favorite character is, too: "Omero" (Homer). He's a shy, quiet, serious boy, but lights right up when he's talking about the Simpsons. Pretty cool to think that a show could delight so many around the world, for so many years. A special holiday shout-out to David Silverman, a personal friend who also happens to have been the director of that very first episode (and, of course, many others, and that movie). David, I hope you're having a more relaxed December than you did in 1989.
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Update on the Frazetta heist: Notary says artist gave son permission to take paintings Posted: 17 Dec 2009 06:27 PM PST Here's an update on the arrest of Frank Frazetta's son, who was charged with swiping at least $20 million of his father's paintings last week. The story has a few twists and turns, as you might imagine in a case in which an adult child has been accused of ripping off his own parent. The details are fuzzy, but it sounds like Frazetta's adult children are fighting over the art created by their father, who is 81 years old and has dementia. Three of his children apparently want to sell the paintings (one painting recently went for $1 million, and it wasn't even one of Frazetta's most famous works) while Frank Jr. apparently doesn't want to sell them off, and that's why he broke into the family museum to take the paintings. Heidi MacDonald of The Beat adds this important bit: The REAL bombshell, however, comes from a notary who says that Frank Frazetta Sr. came to her nine days before the aborted heist and asked her to notarize a power of attorney removing control of the art from Bill, Heidi and Holly and giving it to Frank Jr! "He was in the right frame of mind," said the notary.Frazetta Heist update: Notary drops bombshell Previously:
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See-through "never clog" sink drain Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:56 PM PST The $20 PermaFLOW Never-Clog Drain seems like a good idea! With its innovative, self-cleaning design and integrated wiper that removes blockage, PermaFLOW eliminates the need for chemical drain cleaners, plungers, and expensive pipe repairs. This smart alternative to traditional P-traps installs in a snap and even allows for easy retrieval of accidentally lost jewelry and other items.Amazon has videos of it in action. |
Chicago MD better at hide-and-seek than Evan Ratliff Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:41 PM PST In 2004, doctor Mark Weinberger vanished from a private yacht in the Aegean. In debt to the tune of $5.7 million, and facing a class-action suit from patients who believed he performed unnecessary surgery on them, he was featured on America's Most Wanted more than once. This week, he was caught, 6,000 feet up an Italian mountain, living in a tent. (Thanks, Steve Silberman!) |
Vintage Frazetta anti-smoking ad Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:41 PM PST Many thanks to copyranter for reminding me about the world's greatest anti-smoking ad, illustrated by Frank Frazetta, and co-starring the world's only selectively-blind teenage surfers. (Click image for a closer look.) Previously:
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LED traffic lights don't melt snow Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:22 PM PST Cities that installed LED traffic lights to save money are learning that the incandescent lights they got rid of had a useful purpose: their waste heat melted the snow that covered them in winter storms.
Municipalities around the country are taking different steps to keep their signals shining brightly in the face of Mother Nature. Crews in St. Paul, Minnesota, use compressed air to keep their lights clean. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, city workers brush the snow off by hand in a labor-intensive process. Unintended Consequence of Technology: New LED traffic lights can't melt snow |
Blondie - We Three Kings Music Video (2009) Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:46 AM PST The band has a new album coming out in 2010, too. |
Electric Sheep artificial life screensaver goes super hi-rez Posted: 17 Dec 2009 11:27 AM PST Scott Draves sez, "The Electric Sheep makes art collaboratively with 60,000 computers and people all over the internet. It's based on a free screensaver that anyone can download and run. As it runs you may vote on designs you like, and the favorites survive to reproduce with a family resemblance, hence the flock evolves to please its human audience. It also supports Intelligent Design: you can use a genetic editor to create your own sheep and upload them into the gene-pool. All the sheep are CC licensed and may be remixed or remade into your own work. I use the free screensaver as a design laboratory and supercomputer to realize higher quality works such as all-over print t-shirts, limited edition c-prints, and high-resolution videos (like the one recently commissioned for the new Gates Center for Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and the sample from our Blu Ray). Our objective is to make this artificial life-form self-sustaining, so the revenue generated by these pieces funds the operation of and improvements to the open source screensaver. For example, In the past 6 months the Electric Sheep have been totally remade. We have a new server (including support from archive.org) and the client has been rewritten. The whole setup is 10x better than it used to be: the visual/genetic language is more expressive, the sheep have double the resolution and a better codec (x264), display is totally smooth, and download works for everyone. More information can be found on the Wikipedia and in my bio. High Fidelity Demo Excerpt (2009) (Thanks, Scott!) Previously: |
"A higher bandwidth than any internet connection that ever existed" Posted: 17 Dec 2009 10:15 AM PST How much data--in terms of genetic information--does a human sperm carry and what is the rate of transfer? Can you properly compare a penis to an ethernet connection? The good citizens of Reddit attempt to convert "bits" to bits. Hilarity ensues. (Thanks, Marc Abrahams!) |
Gibberish rock song written by Italian composer to sound like English Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:30 PM PST In this remarkable and fully rockin' video, an Italian singer performs a rock piece whose lyrics are gibberish intended to sound like English. Entitled "What English Sounds Like to Foreigners," the video is meant to illustrate which English phonemes and syllables carry into the foreign ear, but I tell you what, it sounded like English to me, too, though like English as sung in such a way as to make it hard to decipher. What English Sounds Like to Foreigners (via Making Light) Update Thanks to commenter LukeWhite for this intelligence: "It's actually titled Prisencolinensinainciusol, written by Adriano Celentano wrote it in 1972." |
All you need to know about the Motorola Droid Posted: 17 Dec 2009 12:08 PM PST I liked it, but I wouldn't buy it. |
Proof that goats cannot be trusted Posted: 17 Dec 2009 09:09 AM PST Professor Eustace P. Toffeynuts III, Ph.D., D.D.T., L.S.D., has produced a very important treatise on the freaky nature of goat eyes, their relationship to the freaky nature of octopus eyes and why both animals are clearly in league with Satan.
Ignore this research at your own peril. Professor Eustace P. Toffeynuts III, Ph.D., D.D.T., L.S.D.: Goat Eyes: Satanic ploy, or merely horrific crime against nature? A serial treatise on the unnatural pupils of those beasts of the genus capra (2006) (Thanks, Ed Yong!) Image courtesy Flickr user BitBoy, via CC Previously: |
What a luxury ski resort is doing to solve climate change Posted: 16 Dec 2009 03:49 PM PST I'm sitting in the lobby of the Little Nell with Auden Schendler. This is a fancy pants, 92-room spa and resort in Aspen that routinely hosts world leaders and celebrities in rooms that cost upwards of $760 a night. The Nell is a major energy spender — in 2008, it used 25,556 MMBTU of natural gas and 3,269,967kWh of electricity, generating 4,245 tons of CO2 emissions (the average house generates about 17,000 lbs). Aspen is an entire town full of buildings like the Nell; in addition to the hotels and shops, the luxury ski town hosts four mountains full of energy-sucking ski lifts, snowmaking machines, snowcats, and heated buses on constant rotation that take people from one part of town to another. Add to that the transportation costs to and from the resort of the 1.36 million skiers and 34,000 employees that come here every ski season, and you've got what seems like a major environment killer. But if you ask Schendler, he'll tell you that the Little Nell is a prime hub for fighting climate change. Schendler — a tall, mountain-man type wearing big boots and a puffy jacket — is the Sustainability Director of the Aspen Skiing Company. What this means is that he has the seemingly absurd task of transforming the entire energy-sucking, luxury-soaked resort into a tool to fight climate change. Earlier this year, Schendler authored a book called Getting Green Done: Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution — a fun-to-read motivator that very clearly outlines how big, influential corporations can leverage their power to lead the fight against climate change. Schendler used to be a regular grassroots "enviro guy"; but now that he's a bigwig exec at a big corporation, he's even more hell bent on solving the climate problem. We chatted for about an hour at the Nell's restaurant last week, and here's what he said: The question: "How do you even justify what you're doing?" comes up all the time. I'm sorry, you're the sustainability guy at the ski resort? You care about climate change? Why don't you shut down the resort? Aspen flies people in from all over the world. If you look at carbon footprint, that's 27,000 tons of CO2 a year. For your day of skiing, it's about 30-40 lbs of CO2 for one day. Per skiier! Snowmaking uses huge energy. Shut down! Images: Jeremy Swanson (top), Paul Morrison (thumbnail), courtesy of the Aspen Skiing Company |
Hacking the Predator drone: Cheaper than dinner and a movie Posted: 17 Dec 2009 05:59 AM PST 1 Predator drone: $4.5 million Intercepting video from the Predator drone's unprotected communications link: $25.95
Wall Street Journal: Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones |
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