The Latest from Boing Boing

Cruise ship docks at private beach in Haiti for barbeque and water sports
Photos of derelict Japanese sanatorium
Table that turns into a secret house
Cracking ice-sheets sound like Star Wars blasters
Homemade Tetris blanket
Groovie Movie: Jitterbug Madness
When getting the bombsquad called to school was a badge of honor
Awful dance music remixes of Strawberry Fields Forever
Haiti: Photos from the ground, by AIDG's Catherine Lainé
Haiti: A call to "peoplefinder" site builders - open your data!
Britain's Business Secretary wants to turn the nation's back on basic science

Cruise ship docks at private beach in Haiti for barbeque and water sports

Posted: 18 Jan 2010 02:16 AM PST

The Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines' ship Independence of the Seas went ahead with its scheduled stop at a fenced-in private Haitian beach surrounded by armed guards, leaving its passengers to "cut loose" on the beach, just a few kilometers from one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the region's history. The ship's owners justified it as a humanitarian call, because the ship also delivered 40 palettes of relief supplies while its passengers frolicked on zip-lines and ate barbeque within the 12-foot-high fence's perimeter:

The Florida cruise company leases a picturesque wooded peninsula and its five pristine beaches from the government for passengers to "cut loose" with watersports, barbecues, and shopping for trinkets at a craft market before returning on board before dusk. Safety is guaranteed by armed guards at the gate.
The decision to go ahead with the visit has divided passengers. The ships carry some food aid, and the cruise line has pledged to donate all proceeds from the visit to help stricken Haitians. But many passengers will stay aboard when they dock; one said he was "sickened".
"I just can't see myself sunning on the beach, playing in the water, eating a barbecue, and enjoying a cocktail while [in Port-au-Prince] there are tens of thousands of dead people being piled up on the streets, with the survivors stunned and looking for food and water," one passenger wrote on the Cruise Critic internet forum.
"It was hard enough to sit and eat a picnic lunch at Labadee before the quake, knowing how many Haitians were starving," said another. "I can't imagine having to choke down a burger there now.''

Cruise ships still find a Haitian berth

(Image: Frontal view, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Bernt Rostad's photostream)

Previously:

Photos of derelict Japanese sanatorium

Posted: 17 Jan 2010 10:06 PM PST

Den from Tokyo Times sends us this collection of photos from the ruins of the Higashi Izu-cho Hospital Isolation Ward: "A predominantly wooden structure that, due to its location in a relatively dense bamboo forest, is rapidly decaying -- the sanatorium's brave battle with mother nature now very much a long lost cause."

Bleak and abandoned isolation ward (Thanks, Den!)

Previously:

Table that turns into a secret house

Posted: 17 Jan 2010 10:00 PM PST

The "Daily Shelter" by artist Ingrid Brandth is a dining-room table that converts to a secret fort: "At first glance it looks like an ordinary table. But for the one who knows its secret, it can be transformed into a shelter where one can hide from scary sounds, ghosts or family members. Just like a snail feels safe in its house."

One of the coolest parts of having a two-year-old around the house is getting to play fort all the time -- we dive under the covers and shout "cave of wonders," hide in closets, and so on. I wish I had the chops and the space to build one of these for Poesy, but we're doing OK with blankets and pillows.

Daily Shelter (via Cribcandy)

Cracking ice-sheets sound like Star Wars blasters

Posted: 17 Jan 2010 09:54 PM PST

This remarkable recording of ice-sheets cracking on a frozen lake sounds just like a Star Wars blaster fight. Andreas Bick, a Berlin sound designer/composer, made the recording and explains, on his Silent Listening blog: "In my experience, thin ice is especially interesting for acoustic phenomena; it is more elastic and sounds are propagated better across the surface. Snowfall, on the other hand, has a muffling effect and the sound can only travel to a limited extent. The ice sheet acts as a huge membrane across which the cracking and popping sounds spread. Underwater microphones proved especially well-suited for these recordings: in a small hole drilled close beneath the surface of the water, the sounds emitted by the body of ice carry particularly well."

Dispersion of Sound Waves in Ice Sheets (via Kottke)

(Image: Frozen Lake, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from m.prinke's photostream)

Previously:

Homemade Tetris blanket

Posted: 17 Jan 2010 09:31 PM PST

Katherine sez, "This is a photo of the Tetris blanket I made for a friend as an Agnostica gift. It took me four months to make, and I wanted to show off a little."

Tetris blanket (Thanks, Katherine!)

Previously:

Groovie Movie: Jitterbug Madness

Posted: 18 Jan 2010 04:07 AM PST

The weekend's almost over- GET UP AND DANCE! More 'buggin' after the jump...

EXTRA! Make sure you read the comments. Marcelo gives us a great historical insight into how important this film is to the LA Swing Dancing scene.

When getting the bombsquad called to school was a badge of honor

Posted: 17 Jan 2010 11:59 AM PST

Murilee from Jalopnik sez, "After reading your post about the candy-ass school VP who freaked out over that kid's science project, I remembered my own similar experience in high school ('75 Ford seat-belt buzzer hooked up to batteries and put in a locker, which resulted in school evacuation). This was in 1983- before a handful of terrorists defeated us- which meant that A) my life wasn't ruined, B) I didn't have to get 'counseling,' C) it wasn't a national news story, and D) everyone thought it was pretty funny the next day."

Naturally, it didn't take me long to discover that 8 AAA batteries in a $2.99 Radio Shack holder will provide sufficient current to run a '75 Ford Elite seat belt buzzer all day long, and- in the mind of a 17-year-old under the influence of certain evil corruptors of youth just across the Bay- there really aren't too many mental steps between this realization and the idea of placing a battery-powered Ford seat belt buzzer in a high-school locker with the power switch in the ON position. BZZZEEEEEEEEEEEP!!! It'll drive everyone crazy! Ho ho!
So, a few hours later I'm in physics class, having already mostly forgotten about the maddening Malaise soundtrack issuing from my junkyard pal's locker (I could never remember my own locker's combination, so I stashed it in my friend Scott's locker), and my classmates notice some sort of commotion in the street outside. Cop cars all over the place! We're all crowding for a look out the window when several APD officers come into the classroom and ask the teacher to identify... me! Oh, shit! I get not-quite-frogmarched out of the room, it being clear that I'm in Big Fucking Trouble, and as I'm contemplating the reality that every wholesome Duran Duran-listening, lip-gloss enhanced girlie in the school will consider me a totally, radioactively untouchable, criminal for the rest of my high school days and probably- if I don't go to college in some other state- well beyond that, and I'm probably going to have to answer a lot of very pointed questions from the kind of humorless Authority Figures I dreaded most, it occurs to me that perhaps this whole hassle might have something to do with my harmless seat belt buzzer prank.

How My Youthful Junkyard Scrounging Habit Got My High School Evacuated By The Bomb Squad (Thanks, Murilee)

Previously:

Awful dance music remixes of Strawberry Fields Forever

Posted: 17 Jan 2010 11:23 AM PST

I am unable to stop listening to Gigi d'Agostino's unpleasant cover of Strawberry Fields Forever. It's not merely bad, but an atrocity that seems a parody of dance music: overlaying the cacophony is a recurring simulation of club-inflicted tinnitus. Why can't I get it out of my head? The Beatles wedded to nascent stirrings of 1990s nostaglia? Insane! I know! Perhaps you imagine it could not be worse. You would be wrong. Exhibit A: Candy Flip's own version of S.F.F., which stormed the British charts in 1990. Then I was but a child and knew no better--now there no excuses. YouTube has more. Also from the same abyss: listening to the theme tune from Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds (wherein the apotheosis of European culture is found at the intersection of French literature, Spanish television and British children's music); You are a Pirate; and anything at all by The Shamen.

Haiti: Photos from the ground, by AIDG's Catherine Lainé

Posted: 17 Jan 2010 10:32 AM PST

Catherine Lainé of the sustainable tech non-profit AIDG, who was featured in this Boing Boing Video interview on Friday, is in Haiti and has begun uploading photos of what she's witnessing there, as connectivity permits.

House are FLATTENED. Coming in to Port Au Prince, about 1 in 20 had collapsed, then 1 in 10. In Delmas 33 where we were earlier, it's 1:5. People are sleeping outside in makeshift settlements b/c either 1) their house was destroyed 2) their house had significant damage and is visibly unsafe or 3) they are not sure of their home's structural integrity and with all the aftershocks, they are taking no changes. Everyone has lost someone close to them or someone they knew... you can hear gunshots at night though. Daytime seems really safe.

She's uploading images to the AIDG Flickr stream. Unlike the Associated Press, hers are all licensed as Creative Commons images and may be freely re-blogged. Some images may not be properly tagged yet (her access to internet and electricity is sporadic in Haiti), but she's told us that is her intent.

Previously:

Haiti: A call to "peoplefinder" site builders - open your data!

Posted: 17 Jan 2010 10:31 AM PST

An open letter from Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, Director of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, concerning the sites set up by news organizations to help find people in Haiti. Chris has a suggestion for making these efforts more effective. A post on the New York Times says they've made their data available to Google. No word from CNN. Christopher writes:

In the response to the earthquake in Haiti, many organizations worked to create sites where people could find one another, or least information about their loved ones. This excellent idea has been undermined by its success: within 24 hours it became clear that there were too many places where people were putting information, and each site is a silo. The site Haitianquake.com began "scraping" -- mechanically aggregating -- the most popular such sites, like koneksyon.com and American Red Cross Family Links.
As people within the IT community recognized the danger of too many unconnected sites, and Google became interested in helping, they turned their work over to Google which is now running an embeddable application at haiticrisis.appspot.com.
We recognize that many newspapers have put precious resources into developing a people-finder system. We nonetheless urge them to make their data available to the Google project, and standardize on the Google widget. Doing so will greatly increase the number of successful reunions. Data from the google site is currently available as "dumps" in the standard PFIF format (on this page), and an API is being developed, and licensed through Creative Commons. I am not affiliated with Google -- indeed, this is a volunteer initiative by some of their engineers -- but this is one case where their reach and capacity can help the most people.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the reasoning behind this request. Any questions about the widget or its functionality or features are best directed to Google.

Christopher P. Csikszentmihalyi

Director, MIT Center for Future Civic Media

csik at media dot mit dot edu

(via Mark Fest, of the Knight Foundation -- the MIT Center for Future Civic Media is a Knight Foundation grantee).

Previously:

Britain's Business Secretary wants to turn the nation's back on basic science

Posted: 17 Jan 2010 08:26 AM PST

Today in the Observer, business columnist John Naughton describes in exquisite detail the blinkered pig-ignorance of Business Secretary Peter Mandelson's plan to de-fund basic research in favor of "prioritising research that would contribute to Britain's future prosperity." That is, he's only going divert funding to those small, incremental technologies that have well-understood, overhyped revenue models, leaving out the visionary basic science that has historically accounted for the largest payouts for industry and government. If Mandelson's criteria had controlled spending 50 years ago, no one would have wasted money on go-nowhere egghead flights of fancy -- like the laser.

Lasers are thus a critical part of our technological infrastructure, yet no one involved in the research that led to them had any inkling of what their investigations would produce. The original idea goes back to a paper Albert Einstein published in 1917 on "The Quantum Theory of Radiation" about the absorption, spontaneous emission and stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. For 40 years, stimulated emission was of absorbing interest to quantum physicists, but of little interest to anyone else - certainly to nobody in government.
Which brings us to Lord Mandelson, now in charge of all government funding of universities and academic research. He has no personal experience of research in science or technology, but, like many people whose minds are unclouded by knowledge, has strong views on these matters.
In his first speech after taking control of Britain's research spending, for example, he "made no apology for prioritising research that would contribute to Britain's future prosperity". The occasion was the celebration of the centenary of the Science Museum, and Mandy left his listeners in no doubt that he will continue government policy of allocating more of the £6bn science budget to areas with commercial applications - in other words, areas that the government (and its industrial advisers) think will yield short-term benefits for Britain.