The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Working Lego printer adorned with minifigs
- Fordlandia: novelistic history of Henry Ford's doomed midwestern town in the Amazon jungle
- Help a gamer find an elusive Tetris knockoff.
- Alien taxidermy throw-rug
- Dolphin uses iPad as way to communicate with humans
- Image: While you were Tetrising...
- Tortoise/shoe sex
- Funny anti-parkour sign
- Impossible Happiness, an elegy for Peter Orlovsky by Steve Silberman
- Video: Alex Varanese's My Desk Is 8-bit
- Google phasing out Windows
- LOST explained in 3 seconds
- Politico: Al and Tipper's 'playful romance' over
- Narrow Streets: Los Angeles
- Venereal disease propaganda posters
- Real life version of Minority Report's user interface
- Can a book about Jerry Falwell bring people together?
- Study finds women try to look better on Mondays
- Narita Airport cleaning robots
- Lamp made out of egg cartons
- Man repeatedly calls 911 after mom takes his beer
- Nomen Ludi
- Sony makes Tweeting device for cats
- The unreasonable effectiveness of self-experimentation
- Six megaprojects for the future
- The dark side of engineers
- Brass screw earrings
- Scientists in India are studying the use of high-frequency ultrasound for torture
- Shoot yourself doing something very fast, win an awesome timepiece from Watchismo
- Meet the bone-eating snot-flower worm
| Working Lego printer adorned with minifigs Posted: 02 Jun 2010 05:10 AM PDT B3ta user squirrelfantasy made this wonderful Lego/felt-tip pen printer that is adorned with Lego minifigs who really make it into a whimsical masterpieces. Lego printer: I made this! (Thanks, Francesco and everyone else who submitted this!)
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| Fordlandia: novelistic history of Henry Ford's doomed midwestern town in the Amazon jungle Posted: 02 Jun 2010 04:24 AM PDT  Greg Gardin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City is the best kind of historical nonfiction: a thrilling, engrossing narrative about odd events that serve to illuminate the large and fascinating shifts of the world's values, politics, and economics. In 1927, Henry Ford was basically conned into tapping the Brazilian Amazonian rainforest for latex. The Amazon was the birthplace of latex rubber, but had not been a substantial producer of industrial latex -- plantations in UK and Dutch tropical colonies outproduced Brazil by a large margin, thanks, in part, to the absence of local parasites that plagued Amazon trees. Ford was convinced that the Brit-led charge to cartel-ize the rubber trade would send the cost of essential materials skyrocketing, and resolved to become independent of foreign powers for his rubber. So he set off for the Amazon, armed with hubris, spite, madness, vision, utopianism and contempt for expertise. He resolved not merely to establish a rubber plantation in the heart of the jungle, but rather to establish a small, perfect midwestern town in the middle of the Amazon, a place where Fordism and its model villages, squeaky-clean abstinence, freedom from trade unionism, and emphasis of turning industrial workers into avid consumers of industrial goods would reign supreme. For more than a decade, Ford's men did battle with the wilderness, with Brazil, and with Brazilians, striving to overcome Ford's distant edicts (a revolt was sparked, for example, on Ford's personal insistence that plantation workers be fed midwestern cooking at the mandatory mess-hall), internal Ford politics (the plantation was originally overseen by someone from Harry Bennett's notorious Social Department, a first-class thug and profiteer), and the Fordist contempt for expertise that caused them to eschew all botanical, parasitological, and agricultural advice. Gardin's account of this battle is exquisitely researched and serves as a springboard for a moving and often thrilling account of the way that the world's ideology shifted because of (and in spite of) Ford's ideals and vision. Gardin goes beyond the caricature of Ford as a union-busting anti-Semite villain and paints a subtler picture: a picture of a man who was, on the one hand, deeply committed to restoring human dignity to industrial society; and on the other, often found himself on the wrong side of the battle for liberty, dignity and freedom. Ford was the first industrialist to hire blacks at the same wage as whites, but his goons beat and chased black workers out of the model towns where the best Ford jobs were to be had. Ford was an anti-war activist who thought the worst day was when the beautiful word "machine" was married to the ugly word "gun," but he produced (and grew rich on) munitions and materiel in his factories. Against this backdrop, we have the story of Fordlandia, an anachronistic and even sweet version of capitalist globalism: while today's globalists chase the lowest wages they can find around the globe to increase their profits by lowering their costs; Ford wanted to build an industrial Brazil where "savage" jungle tappers were turned into the same kind of industrial consumers that had both built and bought Model Ts in such number as to make him the richest man on the Earth (Ford also hated consumerism and materialism and his critique of Marxism was that the abundance capitalism would usher in would free workers from materialist anxiety and allow them to set aside their pursuit of their next meal or next year's model in favor of self-reliance and community). Fordlandia reads like a novel, the characters lively and improbable, the events weird and often darkly hilarious. But it's history, and it's the kind of history that opens your mind and changed your perspective. It's a tremendous read, and highly recommended.
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City |
| Help a gamer find an elusive Tetris knockoff. Posted: 01 Jun 2010 09:00 PM PDT On September 10, 2001, Akira began searching for one of the hundreds of Tetris knockoffs that graced the 16-bit Commodore Amiga in the 1980s. Or, rather, he began the public search: he'd already tested and discounted a few dozen before appealing for help. The 23-page forum thread--and the hunt--continues to this day, despite Akira's offer of a cash bounty; his or her most recent post was just a few weeks ago. He seems dejected: "It was the best Tetris port to any system. Second place is for Gameboy Tetris and third is for Tengen Tetris on the NES. [But] I have no will to invest this much energy in a stinking game. Looking around for disks and stuff ... May it be lost forever!" Looking for this Tetris game fer years! |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 08:35 PM PDT  From the fevered imaginations of the Bob Basset leatherworking group in the Ukraine comes this piece, simply entitled "Alien Taxidermy." Now that's a throw-rug! |
| Dolphin uses iPad as way to communicate with humans Posted: 01 Jun 2010 05:21 PM PDT Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art came across this press release about a dolphin named Merlin who uses an iPad. Dolphin enjoys using the iPad |
| Image: While you were Tetrising... Posted: 01 Jun 2010 12:58 PM PDT |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 05:14 PM PDT |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 02:37 PM PDT  Ryan sez, "I was taking my kids to a public park in Winter Park, FL this weekend. I noticed this sign stating 'No Par Core'. I made sure my kids didn't jump over any of the tires or backflip off of the swings." |
| Impossible Happiness, an elegy for Peter Orlovsky by Steve Silberman Posted: 01 Jun 2010 01:26 PM PDT  My friend Steve Silberman wrote an elegy for poet Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg's longtime companion. Orlovsky died on Sunday at a hospice in Vermont. Peter and Allen were the first gay married couple that most people ever heard of. As well as being Allen's comrade, Peter was an enthusiastic organic farmer, poet, and musician who taught at Naropa University and performed in a million benefits with Allen worldwide. After Allen died in 1997, Peter was well cared for by the Shambhala Buddhist community, as I describe in the piece.Impossible Happiness, an elegy for Peter Orlovsky by Steve Silberman Photo of Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg by Cliff Fyman |
| Video: Alex Varanese's My Desk Is 8-bit Posted: 01 Jun 2010 12:59 PM PDT Says Alex Varanese of his stop-motion animated shoot'em'up: I'd like to think I'm the first person to be inspired by Michel Gondry and R-Type on the same project.And I'll be damned if it's not dying for a collaboration with Crayon Physics creator Petri Purho. the art of alex varanese - my desk is 8-bit |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 12:50 PM PDT  From the FT, via Forbes: The Financial Times reported that, because of security concerns about hacking attacks and viruses, Google has been ending its use of Windows since January.Google Doesn't Want To Do Windows Anymore |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 12:37 PM PDT |
| Politico: Al and Tipper's 'playful romance' over Posted: 01 Jun 2010 11:54 AM PDT |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 10:53 AM PDT David Yoon is a "writer, designer, photographer, and self-confessed urban planning geek" whose blog "Narrow Streets: Los Angeles" plays with an intriguing idea: What if Los Angeles' wide streets could be narrowed? What would it do to the identity of the city, and to the place of people in it? "Narrow Streets' is a notional cousin to the idea of LA without cars, first visualized by photographer Matt Logue and later borrowed by filmmaker Ross Ching, but where those projects attempted to render LA quieter and emptier, Yoon's is after something more elusive: A city rescaled. If you're an urban planning geek, or even just a resident of the actual, wide-gauge LA, it's a stimulating way to think about the place, and it raises a nutty, bracing possibility -- liberation by smooshing.
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| Venereal disease propaganda posters Posted: 01 Jun 2010 10:36 AM PDT  Mother Jones has a gallery of venereal disease propaganda posters from World War 2, when STDs were rampant but awareness was not. The enemy in your pants [Mother Jones] |
| Real life version of Minority Report's user interface Posted: 01 Jun 2010 02:38 PM PDT At TED2010, John Underkoffler gave a demo of his remarkable g-speak user interface. He was the science advisor for Minority Report. Remember the data interface from Minority Report? Well, it's real, John Underkoffler invented it -- as a point-and-touch interface called g-speak -- and it's about to change the way we interact with data.John Underkoffler points to the future of UI |
| Can a book about Jerry Falwell bring people together? Posted: 01 Jun 2010 10:50 AM PDT  My friend, the writer Kevin Roose, just started a project where he's trying to build a bunch of little brid ges across the red-blue/atheism-religion culture gap. Not a grand Roebling-style bridge. Just a few small foot bridges. But it's a start. To back up, I met Kevin when I was writing a book about following all the hundreds of rules in the Old Testament. During my project, I was looking for a way to address the thorny issue of biblical slavery, because certain parts of the Scriptures seem to condone the practice. The closest thing to a legal slave in the Tri-State area? An intern. It fulfills the "unpaid labor" part of the definition, at least. So I hired Kevin - then an 18-year-old freshman at Brown University - as my intern/slave for a summer. He did research. He sold my possessions on eBay for me. He baked me a delicious loaf of Ezekiel bread. Kevin also came with me on a research trip to Jerry Falwell's church in Lynchburg, Virginia. When we got back to New York, Kevin had an idea: What if he transferred from ultra-lefty Brown University to ultra-righty Jerry Falwell's Liberty University for a semester, and wrote about the experience? The book came out last year and it's called The Unlikely Disciple. Kevin didn't take the easy road, which would be to mock those across the cultural divide. Instead, he went into this venture with curiosity and compassion and an open mind. Kevin doesn't agree with a lot -- well, almost all -- of the late Falwell's theology and politics. Kevin enjoys the occasional R-rated movie and vodka cocktail. He doesn't let Falwell's church off easy for its views on homosexuality. But at the same time, Kevin treats the Liberty folks fairly and seriously. And he even finds life-changing wisdom in certain aspects of the Liberty worldview. This month, as a clever way to promote the release of his paperback, Kevin started what he calls The Jonah Project. He's offering 500 free copies of "The Unlikely Disciple" to pairs of readers. But not just any readers - they have to be ideological opponents. You can only get a copy of the book if you agree to discuss it with someone whose views you hate. If you're an MSNBC watcher, you need to pair up with a FoxNews fan. And then, you're encouraged to post a video or text entry about your spirited conversation. As Kevin says, "The theory is that we need to break out of our echo chambers to become smarter and better citizens. And that this is a way to self-improve without having to pack up and move to Lynchburg, VA." Amen. |
| Study finds women try to look better on Mondays Posted: 01 Jun 2010 09:46 AM PDT A new study has found that women spend four times longer to get ready for work on Mondays than on Fridays. On average, women spend 76 minutes getting ready on Mondays -- with almost a third of that spent on their hair -- 18 minutes on make-up, 16 minutes trying on different combinations of clothes and the rest taken up by showering and washing.Do your colleagues look better on Mondays? [Reuters] |
| Narita Airport cleaning robots Posted: 01 Jun 2010 09:42 AM PDT  Tokyo's Narita Airport is probably one of the cleanest airports in the world, thanks in part to these two adorable cleaning robots, Narita-kun and Epo-chan. via Shibuya246 |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 09:27 AM PDT  via Moco Loco |
| Man repeatedly calls 911 after mom takes his beer Posted: 01 Jun 2010 09:25 AM PDT 32-year old Charles Dennison of Pasco, Florida was charged $150 after repeatedly calling 911 because his mother stole his beer. |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 11:13 AM PDT  Ever get a weird memory about a game, book or movie from when you were a kid, but no-one else has any idea what you're going on about? Enjoy Nomen Ludi, a Boing Boing special feature. |
| Sony makes Tweeting device for cats Posted: 01 Jun 2010 09:13 AM PDT  Sony Computer Science Laboratories has created a device that detects cats' activities and Tweets them. Using a camera, an acceleration sensor, and GPS, it keeps track of the cats movements, tracking basic activities like eating, sleeping, walking, and playing with other cats. It then sends one of 11 set text messages via bluetooth to a computer and posts it to the cat's Twitter feed. Sony makes cats tweet with wearable lifelogging device [Tech-On] |
| The unreasonable effectiveness of self-experimentation Posted: 01 Jun 2010 08:56 AM PDT Psychology professor and self-experimenter Seth Roberts (who seeks to discover his Optimal Daily Experience) has written a paper on why his self-experiments are so effective. Here's an abstract: Over 12 years, my self-experimentation found new and useful ways to improve sleep, mood, health, and weight. Why did it work so well? First, my position was unusual. I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, the freedom of an outsider, and the motivation of a person with the problem. I didn't need to publish regularly. I didn't want to display status via my research. Second, I used a powerful tool. Self-experimentation about the brain can test ideas much more easily (by a factor of about 500,000) than conventional research about other parts of the body. When you gather data, you sample from a power-law-like distribution of progress. Most data helps a little; a tiny fraction of data helps a lot. My subject-matter knowledge and methodological skills (e.g., in data analysis) improved the distribution from which I sampled (i.e., increased the average amount of progress per sample). Self-experimentation allowed me to sample from it much more often than conventional research. Another reason my self-experimentation was unusually effective is that, unlike professional science, it resembled the exploration of our ancestors, including foragers, hobbyists, and artisans.Here's a PDF of Roberts' paper, which was published in Medical Hypotheses. The Quantified Self: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Self-Experimentation |
| Six megaprojects for the future Posted: 01 Jun 2010 08:46 AM PDT  Shimizu Corporation, a Japanese construction company, presents proposals for six awe-inspiring megaprojects. Luna Ring's 11,000-kilometer (6,800-mile) "solar belt" spans the Moon's equator.Other proposals include giant floating cities in the sun-drenched equatorial Pacific, mega-city pyramids to house a million people, a low-Earth orbit space hotel, modular lunar bases, an underground network of "community facilities such as grocery stores, exhibition halls and public bathhouses," and a network of lakes and aqueducts in the desert. |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 08:32 AM PDT  Love this comic from Cowbirds in Love. Unfortunately, it's got a bit of a "funny 'cause it's true" vibe going on. Last year, two sociology researchers at Oxford looked at the statistics of who becomes a terrorist and found that engineers were three to four times more likely to go down that road than peers in other professions. Why? There's a lot of social background that goes into that question, but one key issue is that engineers just don't seem to be hardwired to deal well with shades of gray. They like things definitive and uncompromising. In fact, even when they don't turn evil, engineers are more likely than other science-based professions to describe themselves as religious and conservative. Slate: Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees? (Comic via hectocotyli) |
| Posted: 01 Jun 2010 08:09 AM PDT   I find Earthfire Studio's Brass Screw Earrings to be quite an elegant bit of maker bling. They're $25 in the Boing Boing Bazaar. Brass Screw Earrings |
| Scientists in India are studying the use of high-frequency ultrasound for torture Posted: 01 Jun 2010 07:58 AM PDT This may well be the creepiest research abstract I have ever read. I'm not terribly surprised that people are out there coming up with "better" methods of torture. But I guess I didn't expect them to publish on it. (Via Vaughan Bell) |
| Shoot yourself doing something very fast, win an awesome timepiece from Watchismo Posted: 01 Jun 2010 08:02 AM PDT  Our pals at Watchismo have a a fantastic giveaway offer: one of these beautiful Under Pressure watches, for a BB reader with a special appreciation for time's passage. Spotted by Mitch while exploring Las Ramblas in Spain, the model -- and everything else from 666 Barcelona, the company that made it -- might otherwise not have found themselves available for purchase outside of Spain. It took less than a minute to know that we had to introduce this collection worldwide! From the creative minds of Spanish industrial designers Ferran Serra & Oscar Vera of Serradelarocha, they have assembled an entirely original wristwatch collection for men and women with unconventional tastes in timepieces. Each watch different from the next but all with distinctive design, personality and soul.Here's what you have to do to win: add a still photo of yourself doing something very fast to Boing Boing's flickr pool. Be sure to tag it "Watchismo" so that we know it's intended for this giveaway. We'll pick a winner presently. |
| Meet the bone-eating snot-flower worm Posted: 01 Jun 2010 07:39 AM PDT  Osedax mucofloris—otherwise known as the bone-eating snot-flower worm—is a species of undersea worm discovered in 2005. It eats the bones of deceased whales. On the surface of the bone, the worm looks like a curly, pink flower. Burrowed into the bone is a mass of worm-y tissue that, presumably, does the actual eating. |
Last week, a young bottlenose dolphin named Merlin became the first of his species to join the growing number of enthusiasts using the Apple iPad. Dolphin research scientist, Jack Kassewitz of SpeakDolphin.com, introduced the iPad to the dolphin in early steps towards building a language interface. 
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