Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Michael Lewis's THE BIG SHORT, visiting the econopocalypse through the lens of LIAR'S POKER

Posted: 18 Mar 2010 04:56 AM PDT

Penguin books was kind enough to send me a copy of Michael "Liar's Poker" Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine yesterday, and I've just finished it, having stuffed it up my eyeballs as fast as I could.

Lewis is a gifted chronicler and debunker and demystifier of the world of finance. Twenty-odd years ago, in Liar's Poker, he revealed the crucial story behind the junk bond debacle, turning it into something human-scale for those of us who don't live and die by the pink sheets.

Now he's done it again, with The Big Short, looking at the econopocalypse with its unimaginable sums and (literally) incomprehensible financial instruments, and unravelling it into a story that, for the first time, really made sense to me.

The Big Short follows a handful of prescient contrarian investors who doubted the subprime bubble and sought out ways to bet against it (called "going short" on Wall Street). Contrarian investment is an old institution, but these people aren't just contrarian in their views on the market -- they're genuinely a little odd. Most of them are proudly obnoxious, one realizes halfway through that he has Asperger's, all are tough as nails, some still manage to be sweet, and all are, ultimately, likeable (if only slightly, in the case of the bond salesman who set out to find people willing to bet against the bubble that his employer had created).

In Lewis's book, these individual investors -- many of whom never come into contact with one another -- are financial detectives, each with his own specialization. One is convinced that it's all a fraud because he knows the people involved, personally, and thinks that they're crooks. Another has read the impenetrable prospectuses that accompany the exotic derivatives and realized that people are investing in garbage. Others are investigating the bond-rating agencies and coming to understand the institutional failures that lead them to be criminally negligent when it comes to rating these investments.

As each detective investigates his corner of the puzzle, Lewis pulls together the whole story, explaining how a combination of genuine fraud, negligence and dereliction (of the firms and their regulators), greed and groupthink turned the economy into a socialized casino where profits always ended up in the hands of a few institutions and their cronies, and the losses were absorbed by the rest of us.

Lewis is an extraordinary writer, and the people and stories he brings to life here had me as engrossed as I would be by a top-notch novel (I shocked someone on the plane this morning by doubling over with laughter at one particularly wild scene). But he's also a great explainer, and the story that he spins here turns the opaque markets into something that make a certain twisted sense -- something that's helped by his clear delineation of the parts that simply didn't make sense, the parts that were just bullshit, and designed to make you feel stupid.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Previously:


Happy Meal is ageless: no decay in a year on a shelf

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:39 PM PDT

Joann Bruso, author of Baby Bites - Transforming A Picky Eater Into A Healthy Eater Book, a book on getting kids to overcome picky eating habits, has been blogging the half-life of a McDonald's Happy Meal that she bought a year ago. In the intervening year, the box of delight, plastic toys and food-like substances has experienced virtually no decay.
NOPE, no worries at all. My Happy Meal is one year old today and it looks pretty good. It NEVER smelled bad. The food did NOT decompose. It did NOT get moldy, at all.

This morning, I took it off my shelf to take a birthday photo. The first year is always a milestone. I gave it one of my world famous nonna hugs as we've been office mates for a year now! (Okay, maybe my sanity is in question.)

Happy Birthday to My Happy Meal (via Consumerist)
Previously:


RIP Alex Chilton

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:56 PM PDT

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Ben Greenman remembers singer and guitarist Alex Chilton, who died tonight at age 59.

Alex Chilton, who died, wrote songs. He recorded songs. He made songs. He unmade them. In the end, the life was largely in song, and the songs all had life, and that's all there is to say, and there isn't anything that can be done. Once he covered "Let Me Get Close to You," which was Goffin-King via Skeeter Davis:

How long I'll never know
I've waited to tell you that I love you so
Now I have finally said it
Come on baby don't make me regret it

"It's Your Funeral" is an instrumental. There are no words.

RIP, Alex Chilton

North Korean finance official blamed for currency crisis executed by firing squad

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:15 PM PDT

A government official in North Korea blamed for the nation's currency devaluation has been executed by the state. "Pak Nam-gi, who was reportedly sacked in January as chief of the planning and finance department of the ruling Workers' Party, was executed at a shooting range in Pyongyang."

Yelp: a short film by Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:10 PM PDT

Yelp is Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg's new short film that provides a glimpse at their work-in-progress, a feature documentary called Connected about "what it means to be human in the 21st century."

The Young Man's Book of Amusement

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 04:06 PM PDT

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newdrownedfly.png From the title of this Victorian science book it's not out of line to assume that there might be at least a few diy methods for accidentally electrocuting yourself, but that's just the beginning.

The tome in its entirety is supposed to be available for free as a hi-res e-book sometime this month, but for now you can see a full list of some actually really beautiful sounding demonstrations, (like how to make phosphorescent displays using oyster shells), and some other cool heirloom science excerpts at Lateral Science.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly for the link.

A guide to understanding "Organic" and other food labels

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 03:57 PM PDT

A sane, hype-free guide to natural food certifications. Which labels can you trust? Which are marketing hooey? And how much do we really know about "Certified Organic"?

Savanna Snow and Michael Eli: A Golden Dawn art show

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:46 PM PDT

The Huntress Savanna Snow Aleph
Northern California artists Savanna Snow, who I've previously featured on BB, and Michael Eli have a magickal show opening Friday evening at Oakland's Art At The Oakbrook gallery. Titled "A Golden Dawn," the show runs until April 19, with an artists' discussion on April 10. (Click the lovely invite below to see it larger.) A preview of the show is also viewable on Flickr. Savanna writes:
Invite Card Geometry Big This show of paintings & installation of a Hermetic Lodge seeks to place the viewer at the dawn of a New Romantic era. These two artists offer up a meditation on the Magical Order & past Utopian movements of late 19th century California. All the exhibited pieces were created via collaboration utilizing only found materials, these elements wrought from nature directly correlate to the history they evoke. Key figures such as Joaquin Miller, William Merrit Chase, Bernard Maybeck, John Muir & Ordonez De Montalvo are some of the Esoterics represented by the artists.
"A Golden Dawn" preview (Flickr, thanks Korin Faught!)

Savanna Snow (artist site)

Previously:


How blind people ski

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 03:54 PM PDT

Downhill skiing is a team sport in the Paralympics. Visually impaired skiers hurtle down the mountain at highway speeds, guided by another skier, who goes a few seconds ahead and calls back changes in direction and terrain via radio headset.

Visually impaired ski racer Danelle D'Aquanni Umstead says:

It is a "visually impaired team," not an athlete and their guide. Guiding is not something just anyone can do. As a guide you have to be just as committed, ski faster and also be able to turn around at any given moment to look behind you at the other athlete when at high speeds. This is not an easy task, and takes a lot of training as a team. Finding the right guide is definitely the hardest part for a visually impaired skier. To be able to trust in that person one hundred percent, and find a guide who has the same goals as you.

Peruvian Scissor Dancing

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 02:59 PM PDT

My documentarian friend Andrea Dunlap over at the Seedling Project pointed out this great footage of a 'scissor dancing' contest in Peru, something she saw when she was living and filming there a few years ago. It happens a few times a year to mark Easter, Christmas, and Yacu Raymi (an annual water festival).

Andrea says participants travel everywhere with an entourage of harpists and violinists, doing intricate, rhythmic, often acrobatic dances using pieces of metal shaped like broken scissor halves as percussion, "eventually degenerating into stunts like dancing with cactus stuck all over the dancer's body, breathing fire, throwing firecrackers, etc...They make their own costumes and they have fierce names like Terror of Puquio, and The Lion." And you thought you were rebel for running with scissors!

Andrea has some scissor dance footage of her own and more photos from her time in Peru on her site. In addition to her focus on the food movement in California, she's currently working on a documentary about the incredible Cusichaca Trust, a group of archaeologists who are studying ancient Incan agricultural techniques and trying to revive them for modern farmers.

Cat resembling Wilford Brimley skilled in art of playing "death by diabeetus"

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 01:48 PM PDT

brimleycat.jpg Watch above in delight as a Wilford Brimleyesque feline named Cooper demonstrates the fine art of BANG DEAD. It's the fisheye lens what makes it magic. MOAR at sweetfurr.blogspot.com. (thanks, Susannah!)

Previously:


What's with the Terry Richardson witchhunt?

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 01:25 PM PDT

"Says one person who's worked with [photographer Terry] Richardson: 'It's just impossible for me to see him as a sexual predator. What he does is completely out in the open.'

Gritty guerrilla poster artist Robbie Conal's new book features... cute animals!? 

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 01:18 PM PDT

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I've been a huge fan of Robbie Conal ever since Mark asked me to profile him for The Happy Mutant Handbook back in 1995. Conal is the Los Angeles-based artist who creates unflattering portraits of (mostly white, male, right-leaning) political and other public figures -- think Reagan, Bush I and II, and their cronies -- and prints them on 2-by-3-foot posters. Then in the dead of night, he and his posse paste 'em up, guerrilla-style, in U.S. cities, in bus shelters and construction sites where, in the morning, folks on their way to work get an eyeful of funny, gritty, cheeky political satire.  I first went "postering" with Robbie in San Francisco, and can testify it's some of the most fun I've ever had with my clothes on. I've done it several times since, and still have a gloop of dried wheat paste in the trunk of my Honda. 

It's hard to pick a favorite from among Robbie's 20-plus-year portfolio, but a couple come to mind: Kenneth Starr, at the zenith of his power, smiling smugly from inside the caption STARR F**KER. Or the late Jessie Helms, the self-designated arbiter of artistic taste, portrayed on an artist's paintboard as an ARTIFICIAL ART OFFICIAL (thumb-hole centered on his forehead, of course).

Conal draws from a long history of political satirists going back as far as...well, as long as there's been politics to satirize, and a couple of great books
have chronicled his work in this context. But as you'd expect, now and then Robbie needs to cleanse his, er, palette, and he does so by painting wildlife: cats, mostly, and frogs, dogs, and more. His excellent new book, Not Your Typical Political Animal, co-created with his wife, Deborah Ross -- a powerhouse in her own right -- collects all these critters from over the years into one bestiary, tracing the history of their role as muses for the artist and his own background as a latchkey kid raised, as he says, "by Manhattan museums and Siamese cats."

The beasts are definitely not all cute. Robbie's work is as unflinching as it is funny, though the presence of animals leavens some of his political gut-punch. Like most of us who work at home, Robbie serves his felines, who get top billing here. But frogs, who first appeared in a two-sided poster designed to raise awareness for the endangered Ballona Wetlands in L.A., and bunnies (remember A BOMBIN' NATION?) make a stand, too. And lest he disappoint his fans, the book also includes a series of diptychs featuring politicians and their pets. (And yes, J. Edgar Hoover did look like his Boston Terrier.)

Besides fine art, there's plenty to read, here, too. If you've ever heard Robbie speak, you know how much he loves wordplay (he's the master of puns) and Political Animal deftly captures the artist's original voice. Compassionate, whip-smart, playful -- turns out this political animal can purr as well as snarl, and the essays in the new book perfectly complement its images -- loveable yin to the yang of Conal's biting visual commentary.

If you live in L.A., don't miss Robbie's appearance at Skylight Books in Los Feliz on Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 5:00pm.

Selected images from Robbie Conal's Not Your Typical Political Animal (click for bigger):



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Bob Harris: Joy is an international language

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 12:22 PM PDT

Bob Harris, the eight-time Jeopardy champ who wrote a terrific Peru travelogue a couple of weeks ago for Boing Boing gave a great talk about the culture of joy as an international language. It's on YouTube now.


Last year I was asked by Web Directions North, a gathering of assorted bigshots from Google, Yahoo!, etc. -- people who literally convene to design the next phases of the Internet itself -- to deliver the closing keynote.  The subject?  The future of the Internet's influence on global culture and politics.

Naturally, my take on it was illustrated with people dancing in the streets, teenage males being given fake boobs, and coffee made from civet poop.  

I'm happy to tell you it got a long standing ovation.

And now you can see the whole talk online here.

It's broken into bite-size pieces, organized loosely by the point I'm making, each about the length of a pop song.

The first chunk is above.

Bob Harris' Keynote Talk on the Web, Global Culture, and Monumental Screw-ups

Larry Flynt to write history of presidents' sex lives

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:58 AM PDT

From Washington Post: Hustler publisher Larry Flynt is "teaming up with Columbia University lecturer David Eisenbach to write "One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents and First Ladies Shaped America," due in 2011 from Palgrave."

Trailer for Parallel Lines: five short films that use the same dialogue

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:17 AM PDT


Parallel Lines is a project by from Ridley Scott Associates that will be released April 8. It's a neat premise!

Five directors were each challenged to create short films in different genres using the same dialogue. The five 5 beautifully diverse films are by Greg Fay, Jake Scott, Johnny Hardstaff, Carl Erik Rinsch and animators Hi-Sim and their genres range from drama, animation, action, to sci-fi and thriller.

Trailer for Parallel Lines

British Racing Green

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:24 AM PDT

Most countries have national colors, but many are shared. As a result, Britain chose a deep, rich shade of green to distinguish itself in competitive endeavors from rivals who had already claimed red, white and blue. The association is now so close (especially in motorsports) that the shade is often called British Racing Green. But did you know it was originally selected as a mark of respect for the Irish?

Magnatune goes flat rate

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:08 AM PDT

John Buckman from the excellent CC-friendly label Magnatune has great news: "The good-to-artists, DRM-free, Creative-Commons friendly music service said that their 'no-limits membership' offering now accounts for 3/4rds of their revenue, and so they are switching to that as their main business. As part of the move, Magnatune stops selling CDs, stops offering a streaming music membership, in favor of a simple $15/month membership which offers unlimited downloads and online listening. Magnatune is known as a pioneer music service, coining the term 'open music' and thumbing their nose at the industry with their strapline: 'We are not evil'."

R.I.P. He Pingping, the world's shortest walking man

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 12:25 PM PDT

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The world's shortest walking man, 21-year old He Pingping from Inner Mongolia, died this past weekend from heart complications. Sadly, we do not know much about his life aside from the fact that he was a 27-inch tall chain smoker who spent much of the last few years traveling to Japan, the US, and Italy after being recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007. I wish people focused more on what kind of person he was and how he coped with the constant stares and media attention instead of just displaying him as a freak show. He's pictured here with the world's tallest man, Bao Xishun, who is also from Inner Mongolia.

Bet you didn't know: "Avatar" is a Sanskrit word

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:11 AM PDT

vishnu.jpg

In a Twitter exchange, Anil Dash just reminded me that the word "avatar" comes from from the Sanskrit word Avatãra. The word means, more or less, "descent." More, from a related blog post at Heritage Key:

But while the modern day meaning implies gaming and interaction, the original definition has a very different meaning. In Hinduism, avatars act as manifestations of deities. This occurs when a god has decided to come to our world by taking a human or animal form.

The most well-known avatars were associated with the god Vishnu, who often appeared in our world to restore good in the world when evil threatened to corrupt it. The deity would do so by fighting off demons as a fish or a boar. At other times, Vishnu would lead armies to victory as an eventual king (Sounds a little similar to the plot of the movie Avatar?).

What is an Avatar? Creators Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer Trace the Ancient Roots of the Latest Buzzword

(Heritage Key, thanks, @xlent1 / Image: "Vishnu Dreaming," a Creative Commons licensed image from the Flickr stream of Vaticanus)

Previously:


The Society of Illustrators in NYC presents “BLAB!: A Retrospective”

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 10:04 AM PDT

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The opening night reception for the BLAB! art retrospective in NYC is Friday, March 26th, 6-9 PM. There will be 100 pieces in the show!

The Museum of American Illustration at the Society of Illustrators presents "BLAB!: A Retrospective," a periodic anthology of works from leading contemporary illustrators, painters, sequential artists and printmakers worldwide. Founded by acclaimed Chicago-based graphic designer and art director Monte Beauchamp in 1986, BLAB! invites more than twenty-five visual artists each year from the fields of sequential art, graphic design, illustration, painting, and printmaking to contribute to BLAB!, a selection informed by Beauchamp's distinctive vision and aesthetic. The anthology will be on display March 24-May 1, 2010 in the museum's galleries in New York City's Upper East Side.

From its roots as an exposition of comic illustration, the original BLAB! anthology format has evolved and diversified, with recent editions incorporating the work and vision of renowned illustrators and artists including Chris Ware, Gary Baseman, Sue Coe, Camille Rose Garcia, The Clayton Brothers, Owen Smith, SHAG!, Joe Sorren, Ron English, and Mark Ryden. BLAB! also features selections of vintage "found" graphics, such as Depression-era matchbook covers, obscure Valmor cosmetic labels and pre-1920 European Krampus postcards.

BLAB!: A Retrospective

Rubik's Cube for the blind

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:54 AM PDT

Did Perez Hilton violate a federal obscenity law?

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:52 AM PDT

"Perez Hilton may have violated a federal obscenity law when he posted an explicit adult video clip to his widely-read site earlier this week," writes Susannah Breslin at True/Slant. The perezhilton.com post included what was believed to be a hardcore porn video clip featuring Chuy Bravo, a man with dwarfism whose day job is performing as Chelsea Handler's sidekick on her late-night E! talk show, Chelsea Lately. "In doing so, Hilton may have run afoul of obscenity laws that strictly dictate the terms under which pornographic content can appear online."

David Byrne on the nature of collaboration

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:40 AM PDT

A wonderful blog post from David Byrne on the process of creative collaboration (which he's doing a lot of these days). Includes photos of his gloriously untidy home studio.

Inventor makes scanner that processes a 200-page book in one minute

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:30 AM PDT


IEEE's Erico Guizzo visited the lab of Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo, and videotaped this demo of his machine that scans the text and images of a book as you flip through its pages.

Ishikawa is well known in robotics circles for his Matrix bullet time-style amazing demos -- like a robo-hand that can dribble a ball and catch objects in midair with superhuman dexterity. How he does it? A Super Vision Chip (that's what he calls it) that can "see" events too fast for the eye.

Ishikawa and his colleagues are already working on several applications -- including a microscope that can track individual bacteria and a video game motion-capture system (similar to Microsoft's Project Natal) for gesture playing. Late last year when I visited the lab, they showed me their latest creation: a superfast book scanner.

The system, developed by lab members Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe, lets you scan a book by rapidly flipping its pages in front of a high-speed camera. They call this method book flipping scanning. They told me they can digitize a 200-page book in one minute, and hope to make that even faster.

Superfast Scanner Lets You Digitize a Book By Rapidly Flipping Pages

Steve Jobs' head sculpted from cheese

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:17 AM PDT

Ipadthai

The big cheese of Apple as a big cheese. The Cooks Den has the recipe.

Steve Jobs Cheese Head

Local TV news: Not just crappy, also in violation of FCC regs

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:12 AM PDT

LA Times: Local TV news isn't meeting FCC standards of operating in the public interest. USC study shows just 22 seconds of local gov coverage for every 30 minutes. Humpback whale sightings, celebrity perfume lawsuits cited by stations as examples of "significant treatment of issues facing the community." Nothing particularly earth-shattering here, but interesting to see blatant disregard for public interest quantified and publicly talked about.

Previously:


Crayons carved into the 12 symbols of the Chinese zodiac

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:14 AM PDT

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Artist Diem Chau usually works in porcelain, but she sometimes steps it up and uses crayons as her medium. This post has lots of photos showing her carvings of the 12 symbols of the Chinese zodiac. They're on exhibit at the Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago. My favorite is the rat.

Diem Chau's crayons carved as the 12 symbols of the Chinese zodiac (Thanks, Robert!)

A new "Between Two Ferns" with Zach Galifianakis

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 09:17 AM PDT

The new episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis on Funny or Die features special guest Ben Stickler. No, Stiffler. Stiller.

Happy Birthday, William Gibson!

Posted: 17 Mar 2010 08:58 AM PDT

The man who brought us "cyberspace," and much else of enduring beauty, celebrates a birthday today. Happy Birthday, William Gibson. Above, a video snip from No Maps for These Territories, a documentary about Gibson and his work.
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