The Latest from Boing Boing

Free copies of FOR THE WIN for teachers, librarians, youth workers, and others
Velociraptor cufflinks
Happy Mother's Day from Yoko Ono
48 Hour Magazine is almost finished
Leonard Nimoy posts picture of his mom for Mother's Day
Fanciful handmade wallpaper features unsung scientific heroines (and giant bugs)
Use rust particles to reveal the data on your credit-card's magstripe
Tiny cannon is adorably deadly
Copyfighter tee: STEP OUTSIDE ANALOGUE BOY
Snow Crash CosaNostra Pizza tee

Free copies of FOR THE WIN for teachers, librarians, youth workers, and others

Posted: 10 May 2010 03:06 AM PDT

Are you a teacher, librarian, youth worker, or someone else who could use a copy of my new young adult novel FOR THE WIN?

As I've done with my previous three books, I've set up a matchmaking service for people who need copies of my books and people who want to buy copies of my printed books as a way of paying me back for the free, downloadable versions I make available on my site.

If you work at an institution that could use a free copy, please send your details to freeftwbook@gmail.com. The book launches tomorrow, and the website and free ebook editions direct potential donors to the list of institutions that need copies. Previous donation programs have resulted in hundreds of hardcovers being donated to worthy institutions by generous readers.

Please pass the word!

In the virtual future, you must organize to survive
At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual "gold," jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world's poorest countries, where countless "gold farmers," bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.
Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of "General Robotwalla." In Shenzen, heart of China's industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.
The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power--including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister's people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once--a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.
Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation

Velociraptor cufflinks

Posted: 09 May 2010 11:00 PM PDT

Make a stylish and rapacious impression with Etsy seller GiantEye's velociraptor cufflinks!

Velociraptor Cufflinks (Thanks, Sinbox!)

Previously:

Happy Mother's Day from Yoko Ono

Posted: 09 May 2010 08:43 PM PDT

Photo: Yoko Ono: My Mommy Is Beautiful (2004).

Stretched and primed linen canvases, paper, pens, tape, glue, table, chair, artist's holograph instructions. Visitors were invited to write a thought or memory about their mothers, or bring a photograph, and attach it to the canvases.

"Very quickly, the canvases became completely covered in memories and messages, which soon covered the walls as well," Ms. Ono writes.

She invites Boing Boing readers to engage in an online version of this project here: My Mommy is Beautiful / 2010.

48 Hour Magazine is almost finished

Posted: 09 May 2010 12:33 PM PDT

Happening now: two dozen editors, writers, and designers are gathered around the former Rolling Stone conference table putting together a magazine in two days. 48 Hour Magazine kicked off on Friday at noon when it opened to submissions, and if all goes well it will ship to the printer in less than an hour and a half. The theme is Hustle, and that's pretty much what we're doing right now.

Leonard Nimoy posts picture of his mom for Mother's Day

Posted: 09 May 2010 10:17 AM PDT

Leonard Nimoy shared a picture of his mother on his Twitter feed today in honor of Mother's Day:

The lady is my Mom. She was curious. The man walking on is Dad. Los Angeles, 1970's.

Fanciful handmade wallpaper features unsung scientific heroines (and giant bugs)

Posted: 09 May 2010 09:07 AM PDT

At BKLYN DESIGNS this weekend I ran into Katie Deedy, whose handmade wallpaper featuring a Victorian woman walking giant bugs on a leash caught my eye. She explained that all of her wallpaper was "narrative-inspired" and this was her new line, which paid homage to under appreciated 19th century female scientists:

And while discoveries by men such as Darwin and Newton have made them household names, there are countless others whose scholarly work has been lost, forgotten or even usurped by other intellectuals. Our Spring 2010 wallpaper line highlights three such individuals, all of whom are women, whose phenomenal academic stories have fallen between the cracks of history. As female scientists in the nineteenth century, these women faced an oxymoronic distinction that their male counterparts eluded. Sexist barriers discouraged most young girls from the pursuit of an intellectual calling, yet our subjects persevered by challenging the status quo and developing their own route to recognized scholastic excellence. Each woman was largely self taught, and relied almost entirely on an innate passion for her respective field--something that makes their achievements all the more remarkable. Our bonnet is off to these unsung scientific heroines!

Grow House Grow

Use rust particles to reveal the data on your credit-card's magstripe

Posted: 09 May 2010 05:46 AM PDT

Here's a fun science experiment: finely powder some rust and then blow it over the magstripe on your credit card and you can see the zeroes and ones encoded on it by the stripes where the magnetic forces attract the ferrous particles. For a bonus, Anaglyph tried this out on a woo-woo product called a Shoo!Tag, which is supposed to use "a three dimensional or trivector signature imprinted onto the magnetic field of a three field magnetic memory card to create a protective barrier from pests." No evidence of a "trivector signature" was in found.

Amazing! The fine particles clearly delineate the data on the card! What we're seeing here tells us lots about how a credit card works. First of all, you will notice that Gilbert's card has three horizontal magnetic bands. This is the standard for all swipe cards. In most cases, information is recorded on one, or sometimes two of these bands. The two outside bands are called high density tracks and contain data at 210 bits per inch. If you know anything about computers, you will realise that the term 'high density' here is relative: 210 bits per inch, by modern data standards, is pretty damn lousy. To give you some idea, one of these tracks can carry about 79 x 6bit alphanumeric characters. Your credit card would typically have, on track 1, your name, your card number and an expiry date. That's it. Not much.

Another Science Experiment (Thanks, Anaglyph!)

Tiny cannon is adorably deadly

Posted: 09 May 2010 05:46 AM PDT

This tiny brass cannon fires steel ball bearings with great force and accuracy, making it the deadliest cute thing and cutest deadly thing I've seen all year.

Mini Cannon Firing and Destroying Targets. Among the World's Smallest Guns (via @georgeruiz)

Previously:

Copyfighter tee: STEP OUTSIDE ANALOGUE BOY

Posted: 09 May 2010 05:38 AM PDT

Copyfighting UK MP Tom Watson (who voted against his party whip on the loathsome Digital Economy Act) is styling in this STEP OUTSIDE ANALOGUE BOY tee made for him by @jkerrstevens. WANT.

Step Outside Analogue Boy (via @glynwintle)

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