The Latest from Boing Boing

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• North Korea's woman traffic-cops and the robotic mime they do
• Kids' gimbal-mounted cereal bowl
• Punk math philosophy and podcast
• Just look at this awesome slow-moving performance artist whose face has been covered with exploding bananas.
• UK Digital Economy Bill will wipe out indie WiFi hotspots in libraries, unis, cafes
• Chile earthquake: First-hand notes from Camilo of Disorder Magazine
• Chile quake, Pacific tsunami watch: open thread
• The Great Battle of Sitting and Spitting: Whitney, Texas, 1949
• Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Static is funny
• BeFunky's Way Cool Portraits

North Korea's woman traffic-cops and the robotic mime they do Posted: 27 Feb 2010 10:56 PM PST Super Punch has rounded up a bunch of the best YouTube videos of Kim Jong Il's "traffic girls," who are dressed in snappy uniforms, which they wear as they perform an elaborate, robotic mime-show that directs North Korean traffic. They only turn counter-clockwise. Of course. Super Punch: North Korean Traffic Girls:Traffic Previously: Boing Boing: Kim Jong Il's fanatical food fetish Sing along with Kim Jong Il - Boing Boing Boing Boing: Rare NoKo literary gems written by Kim Jong Il China 'net video mocks Kim Jong Il's yen for embargoed Hen - Boing ... China 'net video mocks Kim Jong Il's yen for embargoed Hen - Boing ...

Kids' gimbal-mounted cereal bowl Posted: 27 Feb 2010 10:51 PM PST Loopla's "Gyro-bowl" is a kids' eating-bowl mounted on a gimbals so that it can swing freely as your kid picks it up and moves it around. It looks like it would be a lot of fun -- and easier for kids to carry without spilling. Loopla (via Make)

Punk math philosophy and podcast Posted: 28 Feb 2010 01:52 AM PST I've just signed up for Tom Henderson's Math for Primates podcast on the strength of this interview he conducted with Technoccult about his theory of punk mathematics. My dad's a mathematician and I love math, but stopped taking it after first year university calculus and stats and feel like I'm losing it by the year. I like Henderson's approach to the subject! Bonus: Tom helped Jane McGonigal and pals make the awesome Superstruct game. So, the concept I pitched to Nick was, "Let's talk about math from the platform of 'Math that humans are likely to want to know, because it's about other humans.'" Social conflict. Sex. Beauty. It gives us an excuse to talk extensively about game theory. And, game theory is a key place to teach humans mathematics, because we seem to have some optimized "cheat detection" in our brains. Let me give you an example, it's something like, uh... There are four face-down cards on a table. There is a rule: "If the number showing is even, then the back of the card MUST have a vowel." Now, given an E, 3, 8, D, what is the smallest number of cards you need to flip over to verify that the rule is being followed? Maybe I fucked up the puzzle. But, anyway, the answer as I've phrased it is NOT E and 3. You need to make sure that 8 has a vowel on the back, and you need to make sure that D does NOT have an even number on the back. Everyone gets this wrong, basically. Well, non-mathematicians always do, and I'm pretty sure I got it wrong because I get every answer wrong on the first try. Punk as fuck. Now, if you ask the same people a logically equivalent question: "You see four people. Two are drinking beer and two are drinking coke. Whose IDs do you have to check?" No one says you have to check the ID of the coke drinker. Because who cares how old they are? If it's the same puzzle, but phrased as a problem of possible social cheating, we nail it. The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics - Technoccult interviews Tom Henderson (via Beyond the Beyond) Previously: Boing Boing: Reasons to take math in high school Monkeys do mental math - Boing Boing Boing Boing: Math proves you can stop table-wobble by rotating The math of faucet-fiddling to get a constantly warm shower ... Do plants know math? - Boing Boing Math and physics visualizers - Boing Boing

Just look at this awesome slow-moving performance artist whose face has been covered with exploding bananas. Posted: 27 Feb 2010 10:32 PM PST Just look at it. Bananas Exploding on Face (via JWZ) Previously: Just look at this awesome EU banana curvature regulation. Boing Boing Just look at this awesome anti-banana-ripening bag. Boing Boing Just look at this awesome Korean banana-ripening facility. Boing Boing Just look at this awesome banana peeler. Boing Boing Just look at this awesome banana peeling simulator. Boing Boing Just look at this awesome banana slicer. Boing Boing Just look at this awesome banana saver clip. Boing Boing Just look at this awesome banana bunker. Boing Boing HOWTO disassemble a banana - Boing Boing Robber uses banana as "gun" - Boing Boing Hemant "The Friendly Atheist" Mehta Interviews Ray "The Banana Man ... Peeling bananas from the other end is easier - Boing Boing Forlorn bananas of London - Boing Boing 11 students suspended for banana prank - Boing Boing

UK Digital Economy Bill will wipe out indie WiFi hotspots in libraries, unis, cafes Posted: 27 Feb 2010 10:24 PM PST GlennF sez, "The Digital Economy Bill in the UK that Cory has written about has a new, horrible portion that could cause many (most?) public hotspots to shut down unless run by companies large enough to handle the recordkeeping requirements. This ZDNet UK article cites legal experts who say that the penalties associated with failure to comply will make small businesses turn off hotspots. Universities and libraries may face huge liability as well." Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in an explanatory document would effectively "outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses", and would leave libraries and universities in an uncertain position. "This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in," Edwards said. "Even if they password protect, they then have two options -- to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café." The Digital Economy Bill is being sold to us on the grounds that copyright infringement harms the British economy because of the importance of our entertainment industry. But while the measures in the DEB won't stop copyright infringement (copying isn't going to slow down -- as computers and the technology they enable gets cheaper and more widely distributed, copying will continue to speed up, just as it has done since the dawn of the computer industry), they will harm British business and British families, by making the Internet generally less useful and more difficult and more expensive for honest people to use. In other words, the Digital Economy Bill will do no good for the analogue economy industries, and will weaken the digital economy. Open Wi-Fi 'outlawed' in Digital Economy Bill (Thanks, Glenn!) Previously: Liberty's briefing on Britain's Digital Economy Bill Digital companies object strenuously to UK Digital Economy bill http://boingboing.net/2009/11/19/breaking-leaked-uk-g.html Britain's Digital Economy Bill will cost ISPs £500M, knock 40K poor households offline Britain's new Internet law -- as bad as everyone's been saying, and worse. Much, much worse.

Chile earthquake: First-hand notes from Camilo of Disorder Magazine Posted: 27 Feb 2010 11:59 AM PST Camilo Salas K. from Disorder Magazine in Chile (a very cool publication about music and culture, in the same eclectic/irreverent vein as Boing Boing) writes to us from the capital city of Santiago: The situation right now is very bad. We are getting news of the most bad places (the south center of Chile) and the news is no good. I am listening about buildings on the floor, hospitals with a lot of people and aftershocks. Every 5 or 10 minutes we feel shakes from the earth. Right now I am experiencing a VERY LONG ONE. The news says there are over one hundred dead people and lot of injuries. I have electric light and internet, i can use my cellphone, with some difficulty, but it works. In the most damaged areas there is no electricity or water, but you can buy food. The supermarkets are full of people, but they are working. The most difficult thing is that we dont have a lot of information about the most damaged places, but suddenly news appears about huge fires last night and people escaping from one of the prisons. I was sleeping at 3:30 in the morning with my girlfriend. I live in the 10th floor of a 10 floor building and i woke up with a little shake. Then it was growing in intensity, and growing and growing. I get to the door and stay there. I have a lot of confidence in the strength of the building I live in, because nothing happend in 1985, the year we experienced another bad earthquake, and my building was built in the 70s. Chile has a really good earthquake standard for buildings. So after 3 minutes or something like that, I walked out to the street and there was no light. Everyone in my building was good, afraid but good. I stayed like 4 hours down there listening to the radio, finding out what was going on. 12 hours later I don't now whats going on with the most damaged areas. The roads are cut, and this Monday was the day everyone is scheduled to go back to school. Universities and businesses have been closed, a lot of people are on vacation, so the authorities are moving everything to the following week. In the most damaged areas, there are buildings on the floor, houses constructed with lightweight material destroyed, and hospitals with a lot of damaged people. I saw a picture of the museum of contemporary art and it is really damaged. The airport is not working and on TV they show that everything was on the floor. All the airplanes are detoured to argentina or peru. The old buildings are damaged, and some of the new ones, but in general, Santiago is okay. One of the the strange things about this earthquake is that almost 80% of the population felt it. The state of emergency is in 5 regions, from the 5th, the metropolitan, and the more damaged ones, Bio-bio and Maule. I read there was a tsunami alert and one island was striked by a very big wave, but there is no news about tsunamis on continental Chile. Follow Disorder Magazine on Twitter.

Chile quake, Pacific tsunami watch: open thread Posted: 27 Feb 2010 11:54 AM PST A todos los amigos chilenos de Boing Boing, y toda la gente de latinoamerica que tienen familiares y amigos allá, les saludamos y esperamos por lo mejor para ustedes y sus familias. An 8.8 earthquake struck Chile last night, killing at least 150 people, leaving some half a million people homeless, and setting off tsunami activity that now threaten islands in the Pacific, and coastlines from South America to Canada. Related quake activity has claimed lives and caused structure collapse in Argentina. Chile sits along the seismologically volatile "Ring of Fire," and has a long history of strong earthquakes. While the force of this quake was some 800 to 1,000 times stronger than the quake that recently struck Haiti, the destruction and loss of life, by early estimates, seems lower—in part, say some, because the country has more wealth, better infrastructure and architectural standards, and is generally well-prepared. As I publish this blog post, the National Weather Service reports that the waves hitting the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia were smaller than forecast, causing some to believe that the coming impact on Hawaii may be less than initially feared. A few early resources here, please feel free to share others in the comments: * Photographs at Boston.com. * Google: chilepersonfinder.appspot.com * NOAA's tsunami tracker * USGS: Surviving a Tsunami - Lessons from Chile, Hawaii & Japan * USGS: ongoing notifications of aftershocks in Chile. As I publish this post at 11:15am PT, there have already been 50 aftershocks, many of which were over 5.5 in magnitude. * Once again, Robert Mackey at NYT's The Lede Blog is doing a great job gathering loose ends into must-read blogging. (some items via @seanbonner, @mgorbis)

The Great Battle of Sitting and Spitting: Whitney, Texas, 1949 Posted: 27 Feb 2010 10:04 AM PST "Why, they must spit two or three gallons a day!  They ain't died fast enough, these old men!"--Mrs. T.E. Bagley, Whitney, Texas, 1949 John Ptak comments on a story from a 1949 issue of LIFE. The photos are fantastic. It isn't, I guess, so much a story about their sitting as it is a story about their not sitting, about how it came to be that their lumber was removed and the men forced to find another place to take in the sights and construct their great edifices of commentary and asides. The story appears in LIFE Magazine of 15 August 1949, and lays the whole drama out in two splash pages, with bare editorializing and some great photos. The story goes like this: "In 1922 D. (Doctor Dee) Scarborough, the druggist in Whitney, Texas, put up a bench outside his store, and immediately it became a loafing headquarters for the gaffers of the Brazos River Valley. 'Year after year they sat there looking like a jury of irritable terrapins, whittling, spitting and passing judgment on everything that passed. But finally reform caught up with them." It caught up to them, even if everyone was wearing a collared shirt. The Great Battle of Sitting and Spitting: Whitney, Texas, 1949

Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Static is funny Posted: 27 Feb 2010 08:24 AM PST What do you get when you combine Mr. Wizard, Harpo Marx and "Adventures with Bill"? I'm not sure exactly, but the exploits of Dr. Ernest Otherford get pretty close. In this segment, the good Dr. Otherford explores the power of static electricity. Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user johnwilson1969 via CC

BeFunky's Way Cool Portraits Posted: 27 Feb 2010 08:22 AM PST My friend Gareth Branwyn, chief blogster at Makezine.com, had a picture of himself drawn as a robot that I thought was pretty cool. Investigating that idea led me to the befunky.com website. Tons of interesting ways to rendering your portrait without having to know or have Photoshop. The interface is easy too. Impessive!

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