The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Wajeha Al Huwaider, a woman, driving in Saudi Arabia
- KantCon: a home-made con for gamers
- Sign for the US Border: unprovoked beatings ahead
- $3 hand-powered suction device quickly heals wounds
- Sculptures from digested mouse parts and pulped hornet nests
- Time traveler caught in 1940 photo?
- Process shots of famous Grace Jones album cover
- How-to: 2-Mile Camera Remote
- Purdy junkbots from Andrea Petrachi
- Every comic is funnier with "Christ, what an asshole" for a punchline
- Coachella: Xeni hosting LA Times Brand X webcast all weekend
- Sinister moon landing t-shirt
- Q&A with Peter Gleick: how to be more water efficient (part 2)
- God game: SimCity urban planning taken to terrifying extreme
- Jenny Hart's art show opens May 1 in Austin
- Maintenance man chops off tree branch his ladder is leaning on, sues employer
- ACTA goes public
- Willie Nelson is high while on Larry King show
- Nose-dwelling leech
- UK LibDems pledge to repeal the Digital Economy Bill
- Interlocking Lego rings in Boing Boing Bazaar
- Talk like Sinatra
- Superbrothers' Sword & Sworcery EP goes full HD
- National Pickle Week kicks off
- Reducing the World's Suck with Henry Jenkins
- Computer built into a guitar amp
| Wajeha Al Huwaider, a woman, driving in Saudi Arabia Posted: 17 Apr 2010 01:38 AM PDT This incredible video from 2008 shows Saudi activist Wajeha Al Huwaider driving a car in Saudi Arabia on International Women's Day. Women in Saudi Arabia are not allowed to drive; by shooting footage of herself driving and then posting it on YouTube, she was able to send a message out to the world while also protecting herself from punishment through international exposure. This video was part of a presentation on how Muslim women are using the web for human rights by Mona Eltahawy at the Skoll World Forum. More than half of bloggers in Saudi Arabia are women, and many are using the medium as a way to speak out. |
| KantCon: a home-made con for gamers Posted: 16 Apr 2010 05:48 PM PDT Tracy sez, "A while ago, I started listening to the podcasts from The Gamer's Haven. The man who heads up the group, Ethan Parker, had made it a yearly habit to attend GenCon, but last year was unable to attend due to financial reasons. So, he decided to not waste the time that would have been spent at GenCon, and he created his own convention: KantCon. It was mainly a large group of friends that got together for three days and played games together. They recorded their gaming sessions and put them up in their podcast feed, and it sounded awesome. When I was listening to the sessions, I found myself wishing that I could play with the people I heard; it sounded like they were having a great time. Well this year, I get my wish. Ethan has decided to expand KantCon and make it possible for people who enjoy games to get together and spend some time together and play. No salespeople, no booths, just gamers playing games, and all put together by a group of people who are passionate about their hobby. |
| Sign for the US Border: unprovoked beatings ahead Posted: 16 Apr 2010 05:46 PM PDT  Kai was outraged by the conviction of Dr Peter Watts, the Canadian science fiction writer who got out of his vehicle while crossing back into Canada to ask a US border guard why his car was being searched, and was clubbed, gassed, charged with a felony, and left in wet clothes in an unheated cell overnight during a snow-storm. So Kai made this sign warning unwary travellers of what they might expect the next time they cross into Canada at Port Huron. I've checked with Peter (who is awaiting sentencing) and he's OK with this being posted. Unprovoked Beatings Ahead (Thanks, Kai!) Previously: |
| $3 hand-powered suction device quickly heals wounds Posted: 16 Apr 2010 04:48 PM PDT  MIT Grad Student Danielle Zurovcik (above) designed this hand-powered suction device to speed up wound healing. It costs $3 and it works. Nobody knows precisely why it works, but doctors have known for decades that the healing process for open wounds can be greatly speeded up by applying negative pressure — that is, suction — under a bandage sealed tightly over the affected area. The speculation is that it helps by drawing bacteria and fluid away from the wound, keeping it cleaner.$3 hand-powered suction device quickly heals wounds (Thanks, Bob!) |
| Sculptures from digested mouse parts and pulped hornet nests Posted: 16 Apr 2010 04:26 PM PDT  Alastair Mackie sometimes uses most unusual materials for his sculptures and installations. For example, the doll house above, titled "House," was constructed from 300 pulped wasp and hornet nests. And from Hi-Fructose, a description of the piece below, "Untitled (+/-)": The Works of Alastair Mackie |
| Time traveler caught in 1940 photo? Posted: 16 Apr 2010 04:29 PM PDT  The above photo was taken in 1940. Some people say the hipster-looking fellow with the sunglasses on the right side of the photo is a time traveler because his hair, shades, clothing, and camera didn't exist at the time. But Forgetomori does a fine job of busting this rumor, complete with photos. Curses! The outfit could also be found 70 years ago. Being used as we are to our contemporary fashion, we look at the man and assume he's wearing a stamped T-shirt, something that would be indeed out of place (or time). But if you look carefully, you can see that he's actually wearing (or could as well be wearing) a sweatshirt. And sweatshirts with bordered emblems were not uncommon in the 1940s – in fact you can find those in other photos from the same exhibit.Time traveler caught in 1940 photo? |
| Process shots of famous Grace Jones album cover Posted: 16 Apr 2010 04:13 PM PDT  Mister Jalopy says of Jean-Paul Goude's website: "Dazzling work held captive by the worst website interface." |
| Posted: 16 Apr 2010 01:37 PM PDT Make: Online's Kipkay built a 2-mile camera remote, following the instructions in MAKE Vol. 15. |
| Purdy junkbots from Andrea Petrachi Posted: 16 Apr 2010 01:34 PM PDT  Junkbot artist Andrea Petrachi has the true gift for conjuring the inner friendly robot from random piles of techno-detritus. A rare and increasingly valuable skill. Andrea Petrachi (via Make) Previously: |
| Every comic is funnier with "Christ, what an asshole" for a punchline Posted: 16 Apr 2010 01:31 PM PDT  Robert sez, "As a followup to Cory's post on the fact that New Yorker cartoons can be captioned with 'Christ, what an asshole' without compromising their comedic value: I discovered that it works on virtually every comic, old and new." Christ, It Works for Everything |
| Coachella: Xeni hosting LA Times Brand X webcast all weekend Posted: 16 Apr 2010 01:20 PM PDT  The Coachella festival lineup is nuts. Gary Numan, Jay-Z, Gorillaz, LCD Soundsystem, PiL, The Specials, Echo and the Bunnymen, Them Crooked Vultures, MGMT, Die Antwoord, Thom Yorke, Tiësto, Imogen Heap, Major Lazer, Faith No More, Benny Benassi, Hot Chip, DEVO, Sly Stone, Mike Snow, David Guetta, King Khan & the Shrines, Aterciopelados... (¡¡¡¡!!!!) I'm try to wrangle as many of the artists as possible, tell me in the comments who you'd most like to have me interview (and what you'd like to ask them!) Brand X: Live from the Coachella Oasis, and live embed is after the jump. And a snapshot: Here's me, Metzger, and our Philip from Newtek, the company that makes the Tricaster live video system we'll be using to broadcast all the fun.
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| Posted: 16 Apr 2010 01:17 PM PDT  The title of this shirt is "Houston we have a problem." Even though the company is called Public Domain, it says "All designs are the exclusive copyrighted property of Public Domain Clothing." |
| Q&A with Peter Gleick: how to be more water efficient (part 2) Posted: 16 Apr 2010 12:11 PM PDT  Earlier today at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, I caught up with Peter Gleick, co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute, to find out how we can make sure the world doesn't run out of water. (I first wrote about Gleick and the water problem yesterday.) How are we going to sustain our water supply if the population of the world continues to grow? I'm a big believer that we have to deal with population, and we don't talk about it enough. But I also believe that, no matter what the population is, we have a responsibility to meet basic human needs for water. We have to look through a much broader lens than saying this is only a population problem. What can we do to save water? One of the panelists mentioned that eating bananas in the winter is bad for the world water supply, for example. All sorts of things that we do have water implications that we often don't understand. It takes a lot of water to grow food. That water often comes from regions that don't have much water, like the Middle East. They grow a lot of bananas in Jordan, one of the water poorest countries in the world. Should Jordan be spending its limited water supply to grow bananas for rich people to eat in the winter? I'm not going to answer that, but there are water implications in everything we do. Here's another connection people don't make. It takes a lot of energy to provide the water goods and services we demand. It takes a lot of energy to move water, to collect and treat water, and to use water. One of the things we realized in the last couple of years is that some of the smartest ways to save energy and reduce climate change may be to save water — to rethink the way we use water in our homes, industry, and agriculture.
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| God game: SimCity urban planning taken to terrifying extreme Posted: 16 Apr 2010 12:19 PM PDT Not a half-step away from yesterday's Dwarf Fortress mega-construction -- but somehow with a much darker core -- TheImperar's over-meticulously constructed Sim City 3000 island paradise/hell is "inspired by the wheel of life and death" and supports an apparently unheard-of six million+ population ("more residents than Hong Kong", notes Julian Dibbell). Watching the work that went into the magnum opus feels a bit like wandering into the hastily-abandoned studio apartment of an evil genius, or, worse, having your eyelids propped open and being forced to behold his magnificent wonder. Anyway, it's the most drama you'll see squeezed from a pile of skyscrapers and ideally-placed libraries all week, probably. [via RockPaperShotgun, via Julian Dibbell] |
| Jenny Hart's art show opens May 1 in Austin Posted: 16 Apr 2010 11:21 AM PDT  Our friend Jenny Hart, who owns the Sublime Stitching embroidery kit business, has a solo art show of amazing drawings that opens on May 1 at Domy Books in Austin, TX. These are drawings based on year-book photos of various students from my high school. I grew up and attended school in the same town throughout my life and went from daycare to graduation with many of the same kids from this farming town. Despite the access FaceBook offers, I have no idea where most of these people are today.Study Hall Drawings -- new work by Jenny Hart Previously: |
| Maintenance man chops off tree branch his ladder is leaning on, sues employer Posted: 16 Apr 2010 11:09 AM PDT While pruning a tree on the grounds of a hotel where he worked, Peter Aspinall, 64, sawed off the branch that his ladder was leaning on. He fell and suffered injuries that required surgery. Now he's sued the hotel. From The Telegraph: He took the action after health and safety inspectors concluded the hotel failed to carry out a risk assessment on the dangers of pruning. They also said that his employer should have given him training on where to place the ladder..."Handyman injured after chopping down branch he propped his ladder against" |
| Posted: 16 Apr 2010 10:51 AM PDT Michael Geist sez, The New Zealand round of ACTA [ed: the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty being negotiated outside of the United Nations] negotiations concluded earlier today with participants promising to release the draft text next week. This obviously represents a major new development that reflects the mounting global pressure for greater transparency that built in the weeks leading up to the negotiations.ACTA Participants Agree To Release Draft Text Next Week Previously: |
| Willie Nelson is high while on Larry King show Posted: 16 Apr 2010 10:45 AM PDT Willie Nelson tells Larry King he is stoned as they speak. It reminds me of the time Timothy Leary was at a press conference and a reporter asked him: "When was the last time you took LSD?" and Leary said, "I'm tripping now." |
| Posted: 16 Apr 2010 12:48 PM PDT  Researchers have discovered a species of leech that has a "particularly unpleasant habit of infesting humans," most notably in people's noses. The team of scientists published their study of this animal in in the Public Library of Science. The "clinical presentations" are not for the faint-of-heart. From PLoS: A new genus and species of leech from Perú was found feeding from the nasopharynx of humans. Unlike any other leech previously described, this new taxon has but a single jaw with very large teeth. Phylogenetic analyses of nuclear and mitochondrial genes using parsimony and Bayesian inference demonstrate that the new species belongs among a larger, global clade of leeches, all of which feed from the mucosal surfaces of mammals."Tyrannobdella rex N. Gen. N. Sp. and the Evolutionary Origins of Mucosal Leech Infestations" (Thanks, Antinous!) |
| UK LibDems pledge to repeal the Digital Economy Bill Posted: 16 Apr 2010 10:34 AM PDT Nick Clegg, leader of the UK Liberal Democrats party, has pledged to repeal the odious Digital Economy Act, which was rushed through without substantial debate before Parliament adjourned for the election. Time to start asking the other party leaders and MPs if they'll support the repeal of the DEAct and a revisiting of the issues from the bottom up: Q: Will you reconsider the Digital Economy Bill considering the manner it was pushed through, without proper scrutiny, the lack of MPs in attendance at the Bill's hearing and also taking into account that some ministers have demonstrated considerable lack of technical knowledge on the consequences of the proposed legislation?STUDENT QUESTION TIME - Nick Clegg answers your questions (Thanks, Glyn!) Previously: |
| Interlocking Lego rings in Boing Boing Bazaar Posted: 16 Apr 2010 10:34 AM PDT  New in the Boing Boing Bazaar: Rubygirl makes these interlocking sterling silver rings by sandcasting Lego bricks. One Lego brick set rightside-up and one Lego brick set upside-down are the basis for this awesome interlocking ring set. (Please note: These rings DO fit together. However, because metal is more rigid than the original plastic pieces, they do NOT click into place.) Interlocking Rings - Set of 2: $125 Previously:
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| Posted: 16 Apr 2010 10:01 AM PDT As Cory Doctorow has pointed out here on Boing Boing, Brett and Kate McKay's The Art of Manliness is an essential resource for all things manly. Cory blogged the site's "Dictionary of Manly 19th Century Vernacular," but my tastes run more to "Talk Like Frank Sinatra." I should point out that I've done my own research in this area. In 1987, on my way to Las Vegas to write about the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon for Newsweek -- a telethon at which Sinatra himself appeared, albeit on video -- I spent a good part of the plane trip poring over Kitty Kelley's "My Way" and picking out useful bits of Rat Pack-ese, my favorite being "The Big Casino" (i.e., Death). But nothing in the Kelley book approaches the McKays' guide for sheer comprehensivness. It's a treasure trove of Sinatraspeak, from Harvey ("A man or woman who acts in a stupid or naive fashion; sometimes shortened to a "Harve") to Twirl ("A girl who loves dancing. An alternative word with the same meaning is a "Twist"). Paired with Gay Talese's awe-inspiring Esquire profile from 1966, "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold," the glossary provides everything you ever needed to know about mid-'60s cool. It's a gasser. |
| Superbrothers' Sword & Sworcery EP goes full HD Posted: 16 Apr 2010 09:57 AM PDT  Superbrothers takes a surprising turn and remasters his upcoming iPhone adventure Sword & Sworcery EP with "detailed surfacing, complex lighting & credible 3D". (Actually, obviously, a wicked lovingly modeled and photographed Lego sculpture by Clay Morrow.)
Previously: |
| National Pickle Week kicks off Posted: 16 Apr 2010 10:36 AM PDT |
| Reducing the World's Suck with Henry Jenkins Posted: 16 Apr 2010 08:50 AM PDT
USC Professor Henry Jenkins is a hard-core fan with hard-core fans. I should know. I'm one of the audience members who stalked him at a conference a few years ago after his keynote, hoping to have a conversation about a paper he'd just published at the time. It was an argument for a whole new way of thinking about literacy. Reading, writing, and understanding words on a page won't cut it anymore. In a digitized world, Henry says young people need new skills that go way beyond basic composition and comprehension. Skills like play ("the capacity to experiment with one's surroundings as a form of problem-solving"), collective intelligence ("the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal"), and transmedia navigation ("the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities").
Henry's ideas about literacy were formed out of his academic training for sure, but he also draws from a more personal source--his own fan identity. I crossed paths with Henry again this year at another meeting about digital culture and learning, and this time I cornered him (via follow-up email) to talk more about the relationship between fandom, literacy, and scholarship. Why fans make better scholars Henry: Fandom taught me how to read television. Television is a challenging medium for critics. A long-running television series may run on for 100-200 hours of content. Academic critics don't typically work on that scale. It isn't like reading an individual novel or watching a single film. For a time, academics would choose episodes almost at random for close examination in the classroom, feeling that any given episode might represent the series as a whole. Fans have always insisted that each episode contributes something vital to the life of a series: even when television series were largely episodic, they look for the connections across episodes, and now that television is more serialized, they are very good at tracing how characters grow over time and anchoring that growth to specific transformative moments in particular episodes. They do some of this work as individuals, but they do more of it as a community of readers, who compare notes, pool knowledge, and thus can deal with the scope and complexity of rich television narratives. As critics, they are so far ahead of either academics or journalists in terms of dealing with television as television.... Fandom describes a creative lifestyle, not a subservient relationship of worshipful awe before some creative artist. So what does fandom have to do with literacy? Henry: Fans are people who actively engage with the content of the culture around them and often use it as resources for their own cultural productions. Many of them write original stories or songs about the shows they watch; some make art or costumes; some edit vids or produce film parodies or do podcasts or develop websites or engage in a broad range of other expressive practices. They do so in a context that encourages their participation and where they often get benign and sometimes constructive feedback on their work. In short, they are part of a literacy community that supports their growth as writers, critics, and artists and provides a distribution network for their work. Our schools at best struggle to provide these same resources and experiences to students; fandom offers these resources in a context of shared interests and playful pedagogy, and it does so for people of all ages, not simply school children...Right now, education assumes that anything worth knowing should be taught to every student. We should know the same things, and we should structure what happens in the classroom to prepare us for a standardized test, which tries to make sure we all know the same things. But in the kind of community I've described above, value gets produced because we all know different things. Reducing the world's suck Henry wants digital culture researchers to use what they do to "reduce the suck" in the world. I wondered how Henry knows suck when he sees it. Henry: For me, suck consists in imposing your tastes on someone else by cutting them off from participating in meaningful activities. Right now, our schools do that all the time. Mark Twain told us to never let schooling get in the way of our education. Yet, for too many kids it does. And the first standard of education should be to above all, do no harm. So, for me, when school computers block sites having to do with Herman Melville's great American novel because Moby-Dick contains the word, Dick, they introduce a certain amount of suck into the world. When schools use technology to spy on their students rather to open the world to their investigation, that's suck, no matter how you cut it. And when kids are classified as "dangerous" because they are emo or gamers or..., then again, there goes the big suck. Post-Columbine testimony revisited Speaking of dangerous youth, I wondered if Henry's thinking about the relationship between entertainment, media, and violence had changed since he testified before congress more than ten years ago after the Columbine killings. Henry: I wish I could say yes, since it seems shallow to say you haven't rethought your position. So, let me put it this way, nothing has led me to challenge my initial perspective that media violence does not cause real world violence, that playing video games is not going to turn a normal child into a killer, or that the best way to rid the world of aggression is to ban violent entertainment. Where my views have changed is that I once accepted as given that there was something called "media violence" and now, the idea that this constitutes a meaningful category seems to me increasingly ridiculous. Our culture tells many different kinds of stories about human aggression and tragedy; those stories carry a range of different meanings and emotional resonances. Some of them involve direct representations of violence. Some of them involve physical or emotional or social violence. Yet, the idea that we can lump all of those varied representations together, count them, and assume we've said something meaningful about our culture is silly in the extreme. And I would say the idea that we could construct meaningful art by excluding discussion of these themes, which are so central to human experience, seems also far-fetched. I certainly think it is a problem that violence is so often depicted in banal, formulaic, meaningless, and heartless ways. My goal would be to encourage more meaningful representations of violence. But it depresses me that ten years of actively challenging the myths around media violence has done little to change the way the public thinks about these issues. We have to assume that people are deeply invested in the myth of media violence and that it serves some larger function in the way our culture operates. And finally: the myth of videogame addiction Henry had more to say about myths when I asked him about what he might say to families (like my own) who don't know what to do when their kids retreat into videogames to an extent that the parents feel like they can't reach their children anymore. Henry: Well, I would be asking as much about what [the kids were] escaping from as I was concerned about what [they were] escaping into. I think media addiction per se is largely a myth. But I do believe that retreating from the world into a game, cutting yourself off from friends or family, may be a manifestation of depression. I know that for many kids what happens in the game is more meaningful, more emotionally rewarding, more gratifying that anything they experience at school. I know that for many kids, who feel disempowered, playing the game may offer them a sense of empowerment. For kids who feel unsafe, the game may offer a sense of security. For kids who feel alone, the game may offer a chance to interact with others. For kids who feel bored, the game may be challenging and enlivening. When we know what the game is providing that is absent from their lives otherwise, we can then assess whether the problem lies in their heads, their environment, or their games. What's more... You can find outtakes from Henry's interview on Youth Radio's site, including his take on the term "digital native," whether the digital divide is history, and how schools need to change. Tomorrow, I'll post my interview with computer scientist and literary artist, Professor Fox Harrell, who's been developing an app inspired in part by a combo of eBay's rating system and W.E.B. DuBois's concept of "Double Consciousness" from The Souls of Black Folk. |
| Computer built into a guitar amp Posted: 16 Apr 2010 10:37 AM PDT  The OPC guitar amplifier from Orange comes with a built-in computer. It'll be released in June. As a fully fledged computer it has 4GB DDR2 RAM, 500GB Hard Drive, Intel chips, Windows 7 x64 home premium, 8 x USB2.0 ports, is Wi-Fi enabled and has an integrated GeForce 9300 graphics card with an optional dedicated ATI 5670 512MB card for those who may want to play a few games while they put their guitars down. The first models will include modeling software incorporating computer samples of vintage and current Orange amps and cabinets as well as free branded recording software package. Once plugged in, you can then use the software included to create music or choose your guitar sound and then play, record and hear your guitar through the computer!OPC guitar amplifier from Orange |
Alastair explained to me that he had spent a year collecting barn-owl pellets, after processing the pellets down to the mouse fur and bones within, Mackey used the loom to create fabric from the fur, the pile of bones correlating directly to the size of the sheet of the fur. Whether utilizing hornet nests, mouse skulls, toy airplanes, matchsticks or even plain old conventional bronze, Mackie tunes us in to the dialogue between his pieces and their composite material, a conversation that the viewer need not contribute to, only listen.
I'm at the Coachella Oasis (a giant, sprawling, endless rave taking place at the lavish desert manse formerly inhabited by Merv Griffin) setting up a weekend-long webcast with 
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