The Latest from Boing Boing

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• "An imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square"
• Speed-assembling servers
• Super Mario on a Arduino-controlled 8x8 pixelboard
• Ironic broken-English press-release for English editing services
• Happy Pi Day!
• Hello, I must be going
• Chuck Berry, "Tulane" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

"An imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square" Posted: 15 Mar 2010 04:50 AM PDT Will Insley's ONECITY project envisaged a grid of arcologies stretching across the great plains, each 2.5 miles square. His interests, Insley wrote, have very little do do with planning theories, but instead the 'dark cities' of mythology. From a 1984 NYT story by Vivien Raynor: It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. ''Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing,'' [who] ''often carry around personal abstract structures'' that they exchange ''according to mysterious rituals.'' BLDGBLOG points out the curious resemblance of Insley's illustrations to sewing diagrams, "megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness." But I'm reminded (especially by this one) of proposals for monuments to place over nuclear waste dumps, to serve as warnings for future civilizations or extraterrestrial visitors. Dark Cities [BLDGBLOG] and pics from The Nonist ART: WILL INSLEY'S VISIONS OF A LABYRINTHINE CITY [NYT, 1984]

Speed-assembling servers Posted: 14 Mar 2010 11:06 PM PDT At SXSW (where my two of the games my wife commissioned just won Best Game and Best Edugame!), the trade-floor booth for hosting company The Planet is holding competitions to speed-assemble rack-mounted servers. It's like watching latter-day Marines field-strip and assemble their weapons. How Fast Can You Build A Server? (via Hack the Planet) Previously: Google's new data-center cools with weather prediction, not ... InfoBunker: nuclear hardened data center Data-center built into a shipping container Petascale data-centers in Nature Photos from a Bell Labs' data center from the '60s ... Data-centers built out of sealed shipping containers filled with ... Jennfomation Data Center Art of data-center cabling

Super Mario on a Arduino-controlled 8x8 pixelboard Posted: 14 Mar 2010 11:03 PM PDT CMU's Chloe Fan hacked an Arduino controlled 8x8 pixelboard to play a wicked side-scrolling game of Super Mario. What a fun and creative use of the board! Someone needs to start an Arduino summer-camp; I went to Logo camp when I was 11 or 12 and it was life-changing. I expect there's a kid or two out there waiting to have their minds blown with Arduino. (If you know of such a summer camp, post to the comments; if you're looking for such a summer camp, check the comments!). Mario Goes Open-Source with Arduino (via /.) Previously: Mario and Luigi: warrior plumbers tee Mario takes the Metropolis Custom Mario levels used as rhythm section for anime theme medley ... Super Mario vs NYC -- street art Super Mario Bros theme performed by an RC car on a row of liquid ... Hand-painted Mario shoes Mario recreation on India's Got Talent Make's gift guide to Arduino Learn how to use the Arduino microcontroller with Make's tutorial ... Massive Arduino-and-solenoid percussion array controlled by a ... Arduino starter project video Text on an Arduino-based Monome clone Gadgets

Ironic broken-English press-release for English editing services Posted: 14 Mar 2010 10:55 PM PDT Impress your target audience with quality English language: A press-release for a company that will help you improve your English communications, written in fractured machine-translation-esque English. "In order to expand your panorama and reach to a wider audience, you can integrate the editing services to fulfill your requirements. You can take help of the online editing services to get your documents corrected in a systematic manner. Online English will help you to create the perfect format of data along with appropriate editing services that will suit to your needs as well as create a positive impact on the target market." (Thanks, Steve!)

Happy Pi Day! Posted: 14 Mar 2010 03:33 PM PDT A lovely pie for Pi Day (3/14), by Boing Boing reader Genise Schnitman. I wish I could taste a bite.

Hello, I must be going Posted: 14 Mar 2010 10:28 AM PDT Has it been two weeks already? This has been fantastic. Those of you who read and comment on this website may suspect that the people who run it are the coolest people on the planet; turns out your suspicions are absolutely correct. This has been a wonderful place to blab on about all sorts of issues and I hope I get the opportunity to contribute again. Thanks in particular to Mark for helping me not get Boing Boing sued, and Xeni for turning me into a YouTube-embedding ninja. In the unlikely event that you're still interested in anything I have to say after these two weeks, you can find me on twitter, my blog, and my website. You can also find me at my new job, which I'll be able to reveal in a week or so.

Chuck Berry, "Tulane" (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day) Posted: 14 Mar 2010 09:21 AM PDT "Tulane" wasn't Chuck Berry's last great song -- that would be "Oh What a Thrill," from Rockit -- but it's awfully close. Recorded for Back Home, the 1970 album he recorded for his return to the Chess label after a few years at Mercury that we fans are still trying to forget, "Tulane" both sounds like classic Chuck (you have heard this guitar intro before) and completely up-to-date (it's about a head shop raid). On the album, Berry follows it with "Have Mercy Judge," one of his sharpest blues performances, the tale of what happened when Tulane got away from the cops but the singer didn't.

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