The Latest from Boing Boing

Cybercat
Unicorn
"I have noticed that you failed to come into the lab on several weekends"
How To: Make one-atom thick layers of carbon
Canadian teens invited to pick their favorite reads
Toronto's secret ID law used to arrest G20 protestor
What the invention of Nicaraguan Sign Language teaches us about the human brain
Giant carapace made out of trash cans
Lisa interviews Jackson backup singer Judith Hill for Studio360
Handmade Music Night in LA this Friday, June 25, 2010
Chris Schaie's mechanical irises for sale in Makers Market / Boing Boing Bazaar
Private

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 07:33 PM PDT

Wired's Priya Ganapati:

Oscar, a three-year old British cat, has joined the rarefied ranks of bionic animals. After a horrifying accident chopped off his hind legs, Oscar has gotten a second lease on life through two bionic leg implants.

The provisional headline for this post was "Oscar Purrstorius" Bionic Cat Walks on Prosthetic Legs [Wired via Gizmodo]

Unicorn

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 06:47 PM PDT

Furthermore, there is a limited edition poster. Unicorn with David Mason - Styling by Slick It Up [Exterface. Mildly NSFW]

"I have noticed that you failed to come into the lab on several weekends"

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 02:17 PM PDT

The stereotypes those little seventh graders had, of scientists who do nothing but work? Those come from somewhere. It's worth noting that Guido Koch is employed today, despite his youthful experimentation with the forbidden allure of the weekend.

Chemistry Blog: Something Deeply Wrong With Chemistry

(Thanks, Aaron Rowe!)

How To: Make one-atom thick layers of carbon

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 03:36 PM PDT

The tip of your pencil (you do remember pencils, right?) is made out of graphite. Break that stack of carbon down into one-atom thin sheets and you get graphene, a recently isolated material that's got all sorts of fun properties—including the ability to conduct electricity faster at room temperature than anything else known to humans. It's pretty nifty and you can make it—with the help of masking tape—using this handy step-by-step guide put together by Scientific American.

(Via Mark Changizi)

Canadian teens invited to pick their favorite reads

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 01:43 PM PDT

Canada's Indigo/Chapters books have launched a summerlong teen literacy promotion that invites readers to pick their favorite books and vote for them in a nationwide poll (you can vote every day, so no need to pick just one!). I'm delighted to learn that my latest YA novel, For the Win, is one of the titles featured. If you liked FTW (or any other recent teen novel), I hope you'll stop in at Teen Read Awards and cast your vote!

BEST CANADIAN READ NOMINEES

Toronto's secret ID law used to arrest G20 protestor

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 01:36 PM PDT

Alan sez, "In Canada you're not required to show ID. Except if you're in the 'G20 Zone'. You see, the law allows an exemption to the 'show ID' principle for public works. These are usually things like power stations, dams, etc. Well, the government got clever and just declared the entire area a 'public work' so police can go around demanding ID. The best part of this? The law that made this happen won't even be PUBLISHED until after the G20 is over. So nobody knew about it until the cops arrested someone."

And the guy they arrested? They put him in a cage.

Vasey was arrested Thursday afternoon while exploring the G20 perimeter with his friend, Cameron Fenton. He said they were just "walking around" when they were stopped by police at York St. and Bremner Blvd.
"The officer told me, 'I am going to have to place you under arrest if you don't show your identification,' and I replied 'I'm not comfortable with that.'"
Vasey said he had been provided with legal information prior to the G20 from the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, an umbrella group supporting thousands of protesters descending on the city.

Man arrested and left in wire cage under new G20 law (Thanks, Alan!)

What the invention of Nicaraguan Sign Language teaches us about the human brain

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 01:32 PM PDT

Recently, I learned that signed languages don't necessarily have anything to do with the language spoken by the hearing people who live in the same country. American Sign Language isn't just English done with your hands. In fact, it's a completely different language from British Sign Language—a deaf American and a deaf Briton wouldn't be able to converse any better than an English speaker could with someone who speaks Japanese.

Sign languages tend to spontaneously emerge when the deaf people of a country or region first start coming together to form a community, usually based around a school. It's happening right now in Nicaragua, where special education schools opened in the 1970s. Over the past 30 years, Nicaraguan Sign Language has evolved from simple gestures between friends, to a full and complete language. That recent evolution makes Nicaraguan Sign Language the enticing blue bug zapper to linguists' and cognitive scientists' curious moths. Case in point: The study of the way language and learning interact. The structure and composition of the language you speak has a big impact on how you think and perceive the world.

In the first version [of Nicaraguan Sign Language] developed in the 1970s, the children hadn't settled on a consistent way of indicating left and right, and the locations of objects in their conversations are fairly ambiguous. The second group of children to expand NSL in the 1980s had more specific conventions for position.

Pyers compared the abilities of people from both groups, now fully grown adults, in two spatial tests. First, she led them into a small room with a single red wall. She hid a token in one corner of the room, blindfolded the children and spun them around until they lost their bearings. When she removed the blindfold, the children had to say where the token was. The second test, like the first, involved hiding a token in the corner of a room, but this time the room was a tabletop model that was rotated while the children were blindfolded.

In both tests, the second group of adults (who learned the more advanced form of NSL) outperformed the first group. Even though their memories and ability to understand the tasks were just as good, the expanded vocabulary of geographical gestures that they learned as children also gave them better spatial abilities well into adulthood.

Not Exactly Rocket Science: New Nicaraguan Sign Language Shows How Language Affects Thought

Image courtesy Flickr user Tambako the Jaguar, via CC.

Giant carapace made out of trash cans

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 11:21 AM PDT

One of the newer works by artist Brian Jungen is this giant tortoise shell made out of garbage bins.

Artist page [via NotCot]

Lisa interviews Jackson backup singer Judith Hill for Studio360

Posted: 25 Jun 2010 12:09 AM PDT

Today is the one year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death, and for this week's episode of PRI's Studio360, I produced a piece on Judith Hill — the half-Japanese, half-black singer from Pasadena who was supposed to sing alongside Jackson on his This Is It tour. You may remember her from the memorial concert and the movie.

I flew to LA last month and spent a couple of hours at Judith's family home to do this interview. Her parents are Michiko and Pee Wee Hill, two LA funk musicians who have worked with the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Chester Thompson, and Bob Dylan. When I visited, they were in their studio at the back of the house recording tracks for Chaka Khan with Rufus guitarist Tony Maiden. Judith and I chatted for a couple hours and played with her dog, and she sang me a few tunes from Jackson's and her own repertoire. It was really fun, and really touching to hear the story of Jackson's death first hand from someone who had been so close to him. You can listen to the segment below, on the Studio360 podcast, via your local NPR radio station, or at the Studio360 web site.

Handmade Music Night in LA this Friday, June 25, 2010

Posted: 24 Jun 2010 09:47 AM PDT

The Handmade Music Event being held at Crash Space in Los Angeles on Friday, June 25, 2010, looks like fun!

Part party, part mixer, part Science Fair, and part performance, this is an informal chance for geeksters and the geek-curious to come together, relax, and discover new sounds. The evening is a gathering of inventors of new instruments & music technology. Featuring circuit-bent toys, custom software and patches, interactive digital & visual instruments, custom electronics, electricity-powered noisemakers, DIY robots and new acoustic instruments. And it's open to everyone from hard-core hackers & newcomers to music lovers who want to learn about the DIY music scene.

Introducing Handmade Music LA

Chris Schaie's mechanical irises for sale in Makers Market / Boing Boing Bazaar

Posted: 24 Jun 2010 06:24 PM PDT

Sean Michael Ragan says:

When I first saw Chris's gorgeous brass-and-wood irising door peephole mechanism in the ShopBot booth at Maker Faire, I knew it was something special: A beautiful piece of machinery, designed and built solely for the pleasure of operating and observing its operation. When Chris contacted us wanting to sell them in Makers Market, naturally I was excited, but I was also a bit skeptical. I couldn't imagine that such a large, relatively complex machine of solid brass and wood could be manufactured and sold at anything like a reasonable price point. But the $285 Chris is now asking, while certainly not cheap, is about 35% of what I was expecting to see when I clicked on his listing. I will be surprised if he can afford to continue selling them at that price. Which is why I already bought mine.

Chris Schaie's mechanical irises for sale in BB Bazaar