The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Wikibumps
- Notice how bored the female turtle looks
- Big Lebowski rewritten as a work of Shakespeare
- War brewing between Mexico and Starbucks over unauthorized use of Aztec art
- Dude buys CD on Amazon for $3 billion (plus $3.99 shipping/handling)
- Avatar is srs bizness: Self-help thread for depressed Na'vi
- Portraits of an aging, decaying Biosphere 2
- Twitter as a US foreign policy and psyops tool?
- Britain without the gulfstream
- Nuvigil, descendant of Provigil, to "treat" jet lag
- Look at this photo of Emma Watson in the Burberry Spring 2010 campaign
- Toronto: global epicenter for oppression of sex and gender minorities
- New Palm Pre and Pixi announced
- Potato salad
- Review: Serenity Gaming PC
- The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin
- Controversial gym ad warns that aliens will eat overweight people
- 1954 MAD compares movie version of book
- CES in brief: The year of 3D
- Combination lock made of wood
- Gallery of science tattoos
- The video-phone rises again
- Weirdest NSFW YouTube video of all time: walrus performing auto-fellatio
- Spy satellites for science
- CES in brief: Tablets galore
- The tale of /b/ and LUKEYWES1234
- Dogs and cats, living together ... mass hysteria!
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 11:07 PM PST  The elegant and useful Wikipedia article traffic statistics utility is a great poor man's Q score, but it has a lot of delightfully useless uses as well. One of my favorites is monitoring "wikibumps," the jump in traffic that happens when an article is in the news.It turns out that wikibumps usually peak in the first 24 hours, then taper off in about a week, giving further evidence for the hypothesis that the public's memory generally extends back to the last issue of People magazine. In some cases, the article achieves stasis at a higher level than it had before the wikibump. For instance, Kanye "Imma Let You Finish" West's bump was 300,000. Taylor Swift's was 250,000, but Taylor probably came out ahead, as she achieved stasis at more than twice Kanye's views in December, the last full month of reporting. More observations below. What wikibumps can you find? The best way to get a Wikibump is to:
2. Be involved in a controversial incident Alleged terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had a delayed Wikibump due to low-traffic pantsbombing during the holidays. Travis the rampaging chimpanzee got the same wikibump as Mr. Sizzlepants, about 10,000, up from 0. Beauty pageant bigot Carrie Prejean had a highly unusual trifecta of wikibumps in April, May, and June following her comments on gay marriage and the ensuing fallout. What I like most is to compare paired Wikibumps. For instance, cartoonist Sean Delonas and Travis the chimp had connected Wikibumps after Delonas did a controversial political cartoon about the Travis incident. Delonas' was more of a wikibump echo. Wikibumps are also closely tied with article improvement. Articles tend to have a flurry of editing during a wikibump, demonstrating that the fastest ways to get an article expanded are death or controversy. Or nominating it for deletion. Please share wikibumps you discover in the comments! |
| Notice how bored the female turtle looks Posted: 07 Jan 2010 04:45 PM PST First, walrus auto-fellatio. Now, turtle orgasms. Today is just going GREAT, isn't it? (Possibly NSFW. But much, MUCH less NSFW than that walrus.) (Thanks, gnat!) |
| Big Lebowski rewritten as a work of Shakespeare Posted: 07 Jan 2010 04:15 PM PST "The knave abideth." Sweet baby Jesus, the attention to detail in this sucker is just mindblowing! What a thing of beauty. Here's the carpet-staining scene: Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, by Adam Bertocci (thanks, chris arkenberg, PLEASE PLEASE let this end up as a live stage performance for yea, verily I should like to see it) |
| War brewing between Mexico and Starbucks over unauthorized use of Aztec art Posted: 07 Jan 2010 03:43 PM PST The government of Mexico and Starbucks are engaged in an intellectual property rights battle over a line of coffee mugs at the coffee chain that display images of the Aztec calendar stone and the Pyramid of the Moon, from the Teotihuacan ruins. |
| Dude buys CD on Amazon for $3 billion (plus $3.99 shipping/handling) Posted: 07 Jan 2010 03:59 PM PST "Amazon called me today to discuss my $2.9billion purchase. They wanted to make sure I had received the order cancellation e-mail, and confirm that everything was OK on my end."—Brian Klug, a software engineer who purchased a CD-ROM on Amazon.com for the price of a bank bailout. (thanks, Owen) |
| Avatar is srs bizness: Self-help thread for depressed Na'vi Posted: 07 Jan 2010 03:37 PM PST Thread topic on a Na'vi self-help discussion board: "Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible." Going back to see the film again seems to be one popular therapeutic approach. (thanks, @ tamaeaston) |
| Portraits of an aging, decaying Biosphere 2 Posted: 07 Jan 2010 03:09 PM PST  BLDGblog has published a series of photographs by Noah Sheldon that capture what remains of Biosphere 2, "a semi-derelict bio-architectural experiment in the Arizona desert." Looking at these images, it's hard to believe some 200 million dollars went into this thing. The site was sold to private developers in 2007. It is still open to visitors. More images on Sheldon's website. Official Biosphere 2 website is here. |
| Twitter as a US foreign policy and psyops tool? Posted: 07 Jan 2010 02:53 PM PST In his Foreign Policy magazine article "Twitter vs. Terror," Senator Richard Lugar proposes that the US government promote social networking services as psyops tools, or as he puts it, a form of "21st-century statecraft" to promote freedom and democracy throughout the world. |
| Britain without the gulfstream Posted: 07 Jan 2010 01:25 PM PST  Britain is unusually warm for its latitude because of the gulfstream. This week, however, the gulfstream is on vacation in Greenland. So this is what Britain is like without the gulfstream. [NASA via Metafilter] |
| Nuvigil, descendant of Provigil, to "treat" jet lag Posted: 07 Jan 2010 01:14 PM PST Nuvigil is the slight new tweak on Cephalon's Provigil, a narcolepsy drug that became a big off-label brain hack hit for its ability to keep you awake without the jittery side effects of typical speed compounds. The company is banking on Nuvigil becoming the first FDA-approved "treatment" for jet lag. Of course, some jet setters and business travelers have been using Provigil for that very purpose since the drug's launch. So why Cephalon's big Nuvigil push and the jet lag "antidote" approval? Well, Provigil goes generic in just two years while the Nuvigil patent is protected until 2024. From the New York Times: Cephalon plans to aim Nuvigil at business travelers who might go to Europe for a couple of days, not those staying longer term. For a short trip, "you don't want to shift your circadian clock very much," said Dr. Lesley Russell, Cephalon's chief medical officer."A Drug's Second Act: Battling Jet Lag" Previously: |
| Look at this photo of Emma Watson in the Burberry Spring 2010 campaign Posted: 07 Jan 2010 01:20 PM PST  Just look at it. I reached out to Burberry for comment on the image above, which has been described by some as a Photoshop Disaster, but have not received a reply. What do you think? (Thanks, Souris)
Previously: |
| Toronto: global epicenter for oppression of sex and gender minorities Posted: 07 Jan 2010 01:01 PM PST  You know those reparative therapy "experts" who influenced the homophobic death penalty legislation in Uganda? For sex and gender minorities, that movement is not led by religious zealots, but by a handful of Toronto psychologists like Kenneth Zucker who still get taken seriously in their field. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided that gay people were no longer mentally ill, but that changed nothing for trans and gender-variant people. In fact, "experts" led the push to create a new disease called "gender identity disorder," which they successfully got added to the APA's big book of mental illnesses, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Though trans activists have been protesting to get this mental illness removed in the 2012 revision, these Toronto "experts" hold key positions among the people doing the revising. Even worse is a sub-disease they created called "gender identity disorder in children." They have made a lot of money claiming to "cure" hundreds of children who are "too feminine." While they also treat kids who are "too masculine," in most clinics which have adopted their methods, 5 to 30 times more children assigned as males are treated. The methods? No playing with dolls, no drawing with the "wrong" colors like pink or purple, and no playing with or drawing pictures of girls. The anxious parents who bring their children in to be "cured" are expected to enforce all rules. They are sent home with instructions to make the child go through all their possessions and remove anything "inappropriate," as well as ways to use reinforcement to "correct" their child's thinking and behavior. How did nonconformity become a disease? And how did Toronto become infamous for this? It's a textbook case of pathological science with roots in the 20th-century eugenics movement, and it shows how a few misguided people can have impact all over the world. (Screenshot: gender reparative therapist Kenneth Zucker appearing on TVO Parents)
Thanks to generous provincial funding, CAMH has become a power base for eugenic ideology, though they started calling it "sociobiology" after that whole Holocaust thing. One of the most notable devices developed at CAMH is the penile plethysmograph, a device hooked up to male genitalia to see what arouses the subject (usually administered involuntarily). Though most courts treat this plethysmograph like a polygraph (lie detector) and deem it scientifically unreliable and inadmissible as evidence in criminal trials, that hasn't stopped the CAMH people from using it to create evidence about all kinds of sex and gender minorities. One reason these guys have been able to stay in business so long is the politics around "paraphilia," especially attraction to people under the age of consent. Politicians tend to throw money at this issue because no politician wants to deal with an opponent's ad that says they voted against funding for stopping pedophilia. CAMH has capitalized on the moral panic around pedophilia and other sex offenses to generate revenue for all of their programs. With this job security, they have been able to gather a group of like-minded psychologists under their roof. Ken Zucker and his colleague Susan Bradley have led the movement along with US and UK counterparts like Susan Coates and Richard Green. Remarkably, some of the "experts" advocating this reparative therapy of gender-variant children are gay men who would have been incarcerated at those Toronto facilities in the past, or subjected to "cures" used in the past like castration, shock therapy, etc. Luckily, most of these "experts" are middle aged or near retirement, and there don't seem to be too many younger "experts" lining up to replace them. Most mental health professionals under 40 have a more compassionate and progressive view on gender variance, and they don't want to be on the wrong side of history. To use a movie quote, you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
1. Let your friends and loved ones in Canada know that their taxes are supporting this kind of child abuse. Ask them to contact their legislators. Share this article with them. 2. Tell your friends and loved ones who are psychologists and psychiatrists about this controversy. Ask them to think about the parallels with pathologization of gays and lesbians. Share this article with them. 3. Support non-profits like TransYouth Family Allies, a group of parents and professionals who honor and support gender-variant children. I joined their Board to help stop this child abuse emanating from Toronto. These young people tend to be very bright and creative and outgoing until they start getting psychology-approved aversion therapy at home and on the playground. TYFA seeks to end the shame and fear inflicted on these young people in their formative years. More info: Drop the Barbie! (Brain, Child Magazine) Two Families Grapple with Sons' Gender Preferences (NPR) Child Gender Identity (TVO Parents) 'I'm a Girl' -- Understanding Transgender Children (ABC News) Gender Madness in American Psychiatry: Essays From the Struggle for Dignity Gender Shock |
| New Palm Pre and Pixi announced Posted: 07 Jan 2010 12:48 PM PST |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 12:42 PM PST By the Ross Sisters. Straight out of 1944. Shit gets real about a minute in, and it keeps getting real-er, so stay with it. Jonas Brothers, you better step it up. YouTube Video (thanks, Antinous) |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 01:21 PM PST  Puget Systems makes old-school boutique tower PCs for gamers. The last time I looked at one, it brought performance, heft, multiple video cards, and coolant tubing packed into a giant enclosure. It also came with something else: noise. Wired puts it so: performs like a Ferrari, sounds like a Mack Truck. Its latest, the Serenity gaming PC, fixes it for who hate the hum. On the outside, it's a classy, if nondescript Antec case. Inside, however, it's calmed with acoustic foam panels, dampered screws and other vibration-reducing handiwork. And while Puget's online configurator lets you change most components, it defaults to selections tested for quiet operation. The result is a pleasing murmur, if not complete silence -- the optical drive spinning up is by far the loudest thing in it. But silence doesn't come cheap. Starting at $1,682, it's about $400-$500 more expensive than a standard, similarly-specced desktop from Dell or HP. And while buying boutique means you get better customer care (including a logbook of system construction, burn-in tests, gaming becnhmnarks, and even Robocop-vision thermographs of the completed system under load) it's also true that configuring the same stuff into Puget's own standard gaming PC configurator results in a similar discount, albeit on an AMD platform instead of Intel Quad Core. Tested at the base Serenity Gaming configuration, it has an i5 CPU, 4GB of RAM and an XFX Radeon HD 5770 video card with 1GB RAM. A fanless video card option is available, but those defaults are already as modest as most gamers will likely want to settle for. Heading in the other direction, a faster CPU or more RAM shouldn't result in more system noise, but moving to a top-shelf video card will. It performs well enough, and has a nice clean Windows 7 installation, but the real plus to buying from a boutique retailer is getting a reliable custom machine without having to put the damned thing together yourself. Noise reduction is as much a time sink as squeezing an extra FPS or two from marginal hardware ever was, but with the added irritation of it always being hands-on process involving pads, washers, glues, icky thermal pastes, heatsinks, incantations... Envisage the woe-pregnant nightmare of building your own computer, but where labor's diminishing returns lie not in easily-diagnosable config issues but in inexplicable vibrations and weird noises emanating from nowhere in particular. Finding that last whining component is like when you have a dying battery in a smoke alarm, but there are eight smoke alarms inside a box and each one must be individually unscrewed before you can figure out which is making the infernal squeak, and ... you get the idea. So you get the point of the Serenity PC, for those who care about these things. The pros being clear, the cons for Serenity are its price, its heavy case, and (for those of you who still buy games on disc and don't NOCD) the whirry default optical drive. Get it if you want quiet, custom, upgradeable gaming without the hassle, but not if budget performance--or preserving desktop space--is your real priority. Here's an account of buying from Puget from a paying customer. Serenity Gaming PC [Puget] |
| The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin Posted: 07 Jan 2010 11:37 AM PST  Gretchen Rubin spent a year studying books and research reports about happiness and then tested out the ideas on herself to find out if they would make her happier. She wrote about her experiments in a highly-entertaining memoir called The Happiness Project, which came out last week. Rubin was actually pretty happy before starting the project. She is a wife and mother of two children, and a successful author. They have a nice apartment in New York. What's not to be happy about? The problem for Rubin was that she wanted to appreciate the good life she knew that she had, and stop feeling annoyed so much. She felt guilty for being a nag and a complainer. "How could I discipline myself to feel grateful for my ordinary day?" she wondered. Because she knew her life was already good, she didn't want to radically change it -- she wanted to change small things in reasonable ways that made sense for her and her family. As she explains, "I didn't want to reject my life." Rubin was a little concerned that focusing so intently on her own happiness was selfish, but she learned from her research that happy people are "more altruistic, more productive, more helpful, more likable, more creative, more resilient, are interested in others, friendlier, and healthier. Happy people make better friends, colleagues, and citizens." One thing Rubin learned while researching happiness studies was that "people are more likely to make progress on goals that are broken into concrete, measurable actions, with some kind of structured accountability and positive reinforcement." So she came up with a chart (inspired by the 13-point chart for virtuous living that Benjamin Franklin kept) to track the virtues she was interested in. (Here's a Word doc of Rubin's charts.) Rubin went to work tackling one major resolution per month for a year, reporting on how it affected her happiness. In January, she strove to boost her energy by sleeping more, exercising better, organizing her home and office, completing "nagging tasks," and pretending to have more energy. In February, she worked on making her happy marriage even happier. In March, she addressed work-related goals, and in subsequent months she worked on parenthood, play, friendship, money, spirituality, passion, mindfulness, and attitude. I had fun reading about Rubin's triumphs, insights, and failures. She's honest about her frustrating experiences, which are often more interesting that her successful ones. I admire her for wanting to become a better, more interesting, and more helpful person, and for sharing her story. I'm going to apply much of what I read in this book into my own life. |
| Controversial gym ad warns that aliens will eat overweight people Posted: 07 Jan 2010 01:00 PM PST The following statement is from a new advertisement campaign for one of the largest health clubs in the UK: "Advance health warning! When the aliens come, they will eat the fatties first." Apparently, quite a few people were offended by it. From The Telegraph: Vicky Palmer contacted the health club (attached to Bristol's Cadbury House hotel) to complain after seeing an advert similar to the sign in a local newspaper. Mrs Palmer, who had an eating disorder as a teen, said the sign and adverts should be removed."Gym advert warned 'fatties' would be eaten by aliens" (via Fortean Times) UPDATE: Several folks in the comments remind us of a similar ad and similar controversy in San Francisco a decade ago. |
| 1954 MAD compares movie version of book Posted: 07 Jan 2010 11:30 AM PST  Jack Davis was clearly having a ball illustrating this MAD story from 1954. The chicken fat sprinkled in the panels is nearly Elder-esque. (The story itself was written by Harvey Kurtzman, natch!) |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 10:54 AM PST  Ten years ago, much of the excitement at CES and in Hollywood involved the possibilities of digital cinema and television. This week in Vegas, it's all about 3D. Sony CEO Howard Stringer described it as "the next great consumer experience," and was joined on stage by previously Kanye-bashed pop star Taylor Swift, whose performance was then streamed live in 3D. Earlier this week, Sony announced a joint venture with Discovery Communications and IMAX to create a new 24-hour 3D channel, to launch next year. ESPN promises to use Sony pro HD cameras to capture sporting events for a new 3D sports channel which will launch in June, coinciding with the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. Sony, Samsung, LG and Toshiba all unveiled 3D HDTVs, and related 3D offerings. But Panasonic's VT25 flat-screen HDTVs will actually include the funny glasses.
Previously: CES in brief: Tablets galore |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 09:15 AM PST Matthias Wandel demonstrates this neat combination lock he made from wood. The second part of his video reveals an interesting vulnerability in Master combination locks. In MAKE Vol 20, Matthias wrote an article about how to make a mechanical calculator out of wood and marbles. Wooden combination lock (Via MAKE) |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 01:18 PM PST  Witty, smart and beautiful body art. Readers of Carl Zimmer's blog, The Loom, sent in pictures of and stories about their science-themed tattoos. Some are just amazing bits of work, including this one that looks like a standard butterfly on first glance, but is actually the four finch species that helped Charles Darwin formulate his early ideas on evolution. The tattoo's owner writes ...
The Loom: Science Tattoo Emporium (Thanks to Hannah Lucy King!) |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 08:49 AM PST  Like a punch-drunk phoenix swaying awkwardly up from the ashes, one of the great highlights of historical Visions of the Future is making another go at the consumer market. This time, it's building off a couple already popularly accepted technologies. The inspiration is telepresence, which uses high-definition video and audio, large screens and carefully structured interior design to make long-distance conversations feel like they're taking place in the same room. Environmental- and cost-conscious companies have been using it in recent years to cut down on the number of business flights their employees need to take. The new consumer version that will be offered by several companies—including Skpye—is much less elaborate, basically allowing VOIP video systems to link up with standard hi-def TVs. But you can't underestimate the psychological improvement of talking to someone whose face is life-size vs. talking to a little box on your computer screen. I've seen corporate telepresence systems and it really does make a difference in how you feel about the conversation and the people on the other end of the line. Plus, home telepresence gets around problems with Futuristic Video Phone systems of the past, which usually required buying expensive new hardware that nobody you actually knew also had, thus making it useless. I'm curious to see whether this takes off. Reuters: Cisco bringing high-end videoconferencing to homes Pictured, Bell Labs' 1927 attempt at the video phone. Taken by Flickr user Marcin Wichary and used via CC |
| Weirdest NSFW YouTube video of all time: walrus performing auto-fellatio Posted: 07 Jan 2010 08:18 AM PST |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 08:02 AM PST In 2001, the Bush Administration killed a program that gave security-cleared scientists access to highly detailed satellite images and other information gathered by the intelligence community. Now scientists and spies are re-starting the collaboration, mostly using the data for environmental and climate research. Naturally, this infuriates the sort of senators who dislike science and like to find things to be infuriated about. |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 08:41 AM PST  Microsoft and HP announced a "Slate PC." It looks pretty cool, with a big touchscreen and svelte design, and the specs suggest an ability to perform. And yet it has a plain air about it: it runs Windows 7, has an enormous bezel, and is a bit chunky. Windows 7 on a tablet? Indeed, the spectacle of Ballmer's effusive keynote fades to sinister string music as the intrepid tech press realizes that Microsoft just rebadged old news with the name of an Apple rumor. Then again, in the absence of iSlate fever, Microsoft could have called it something like "High Performance Ultra Mobile Multimedia Presentation Platform" or "Zing." So count your blessings. Perhaps capacitative touch and better specs will make all the difference. [Gizmodo and Daring Fireball]
Sony's 7" Dash tablet is even chunkier, but that's OK, because it's a new Chumby! As such, it's designed to lounge around at home (there's no battery) as an alarm clock-cum-webTV thingy, not replace a netbook or do much in the way of computer powerhousing. It enters the fray with the original Chumby's open-source software and many existing widgets and apps--but better hardware and an impulse-buy $200 price tag. [Crunchgear]
Kodak's super-slim Slice camera, shot here by Engadget's Tim Stevens, has a 3.5" touchscreen display and looks no thicker than an iPod Touch. But the promise of 14MP images suggests either great new technology or more visual noise than a firework factory explosion. Nvidia has its own tablet concept: Android, 1080p playback, no fancy design.
Motorola's Backflip runs Android, too, but is a cellphone with a big qwerty keyboard. The most exciting thing about it is the way it opens up: screen and keyboard on the *outside* of the clamshell. This means that it opens completely flat, like a tablet, but can be set on a table (in an inverted 'V') for video and alarm clock use. [Gadget Lab. Photo: Priya Ganapati]
Sony's Bloggie camcorder [Telegraph] is a Flip-like HD pocket camcorder with 1080p recording, a swiveling lends and image stabilization. Alas, no external mic jack, such as Kodak's supreme Zi8 offers. It also announced 13 nearly-identical standard camcorders [Gizmodo]. It's interesting to see the behemoth's two sides in action: one sharply-named and interesting item buried in a swathe of branding business-as-usual, right down to a product list that has all the panache of an industrial adhesives catalog. Make mine the DX-CX150-500N!
Sanyo's pistol-grip Xacti camcorders got an awful lot smaller, offering 1080p recording with a 35mm "wide angle" lens in a form that'll actually fit in your pocket (unlike the otherwise excellent SD1010/2000). It's wafer thin! [Slashgear]
Sony's F-series laptop is big and heavy, with a 16.4" 16:9 display, Blu-ray and an i7 processor; the 13.3" Y-series is like the Macbook, but $200 cheaper; and the Z-series (pictured) looks like a larger version of the T/TT/TZ models of yore, with a light weigh-in, 13" display, 3G internet, and SSD-only storage. Cuter is the new W, a low-end netbook with a high-end price. [Gizmodo]
Lenovo's U1 touchscreen tablet runs android and clips into a keyboard to become a netbook. [JKKMobile] Sprint's Overdrive is a Mifi-like portable router, but this time using WiMax instead of standard 3G wireless internet. Great if you live in downtown Baltimore. [Engadget] |
| The tale of /b/ and LUKEYWES1234 Posted: 07 Jan 2010 06:41 AM PST Nevermind CES, health care, or Qaeda cells in Yemen, this is the real story of the week. Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams has a piece out about LUKEYWES1234, a chunky, bespectacled 10 year old boy who happily cranked out YouTube videos about playing with Luigi and Mario—until 4chan discovered him. Read: The littlest YouTube sensation |
| Dogs and cats, living together ... mass hysteria! Posted: 07 Jan 2010 05:21 AM PST |
WOO: Rise, and speak wisely, man--but hark; I see thy rug, as woven i'the Orient, A treasure from abroad. I like it not. I'll stain it thus; ever thus to deadbeats. 
(recommended book)
(recommended book)
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