The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- SEC Crowdfunding Exemption action: File No. 4-605
- Video from last week's talk in DC
- Advice for girls from Kotex, March 1953
- Deepwater Horizon: New NASA images from space show oil invading Louisiana wetlands
- New York Times and other papers use deceptive death-notice company
- Miraculous concrete house is pink, firesafe and cheap
- Apartment made out of books
- Riepl's Law: how future media compost the past
- Online video patents: an impassable thicket?
- Industrial music pioneer Chris Carter with gear, 1980
- 8-bit costume
- Could Toxoplasma gondii help your country win the World Cup?
- Funny book: P.S. I Hate It Here, Kids' Letters From Camp
- Update: SS United States saved from the scrapper (for now)
- Game Dev Challenge: deadline is Monday!
- Realistic "Handsome Guy" mask
- Mark at Skylight Books in LA on Saturday, July 3, 2010
- Coffee table looks like a Venn diagram
- Apple's letter about the iPhone4 antenna issue
- Jaycee Dugard gets $20 million settlement
- Silver spork made from Taco Bell plastic spork
- Robot babies roundup
- Skeletal stilletos
- Why heterosexual men are attracted to women with small feet
- Dan Hillier's "The Collector"
- 90-yo woman gets wrong leg amputated at hospital
- Mathematician turns down $1 million prize
- Erik Davis visits Damanhur's Temples of Humankind
- Taste Test: Sea beans
- Airplane! quiz
| SEC Crowdfunding Exemption action: File No. 4-605 Posted: 02 Jul 2010 01:53 PM PDT  When I guestblogged here last year, I wrote about crowdfunded securities. The upshot was that crowdsourcing platforms like Kickstarter can't support investment, because that's illegal; they can only offer tiered "perks" for donations at various levels. But I (and others) believe that crowdfunded securities should be legal without expensive SEC registration under certain conditions, starting with if individual investment is capped at a relatively low figure, like $100. In that post, I also floated the idea of crowdfunding a campaign to pursue such a "crowdfunding exemption." I invited people to contact me if they wanted to keep up with such efforts, and got nice feedback from a bunch of folks. Encouraged, I dug in some more and found out that getting something like this going would actually be easier than I thought. First of all, the SEC has the authority to rewrite its own regulations, without any congressional review (which sounds like a recipe for corruption, and indeed...). Second, the SEC, via its website, lets anyone submit Petitions for Rulemaking and solicits comments on these petitions. You send it, and they will post it-- and then also post all the comments they receive. This quiet backwater of the SEC's website struck me as good territory for some crowd action. Now, a half year later, all the pieces are in place. A campaign on IndieGoGo quickly raised the money to fund the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) to draft the petition, which was completed last week. I'm thrilled at how the petition came out-- it's very well researched and argued, and joy to read. The SELC sent the petition to the SEC last Thursday, and as of this morning, the SEC has posted it to their website, as File No. 4-605. You can see the list of funders in the first footnote, at the bottom of page 1. Huzzah! In addition to the $100 cap on individual investment, the petition recommends: a $100,000 cap on the total offering; offerors can only be individuals; offerors can't have more than one offering open at a time; and disclaimers must be included stating the possibility of total loss of the investment, and that investors must carefully evaluate the offeror's trustworthiness. This all sounds good to me, but maybe the cap should be $50, or $500, or $5000. The more thought that goes into this, the better, and now that the petition is on the SEC site, it's time for all of us involved to spread the word. For anyone who's interested, here's what you can do to help:
You can follow this effort at my freshly-minted Change Crowdfunding Law blog. |
| Video from last week's talk in DC Posted: 03 Jul 2010 12:10 AM PDT It was great to see so many Boing Boing readers at my talk last week at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC (co-sponsored by DC Copynight and Public Knowledge). The New America folks recorded the event and have put the video online, along with the Q&A. Thanks to Everyone who Attended CopyNight DC with Cory Doctorow |
| Advice for girls from Kotex, March 1953 Posted: 02 Jul 2010 11:58 PM PDT  Here's some handy lifestyle advice for ambitious young women from the March, 1953 issue of Cosmo, courtesy of Kotex: What to do about the Spaniel Type?Are you in the know? (Mar, 1953) |
| Deepwater Horizon: New NASA images from space show oil invading Louisiana wetlands Posted: 02 Jul 2010 11:40 PM PDT  Images released today from NASA: "Multiple cameras on JPL's MISR instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft were used to create two unique views of oil moving into Louisiana's coastal wetlands." More details about what we're seeing here: The left-hand image contains data from MISR's vertical-viewing camera. It is shown in near-true color, except that data from the instrument's near-infrared band, where vegetation appears bright, have been blended with the instrument's green band to enhance the appearance of vegetation.(NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team) |
| New York Times and other papers use deceptive death-notice company Posted: 02 Jul 2010 11:09 PM PDT After a close friend committed suicide, Maciej Cegłowski discovered that a company called Legacy.com provides the back-end for almost every US paper's death notices, and that this company uses deceptive practices to get money from vulnerable, grieving people: The Great Legacy.com Swindle (via Waxy) |
| Miraculous concrete house is pink, firesafe and cheap Posted: 02 Jul 2010 11:00 PM PDT 
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| Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:59 PM PDT Rintala Eggertsson's Ark is part of the Victoria and Albert Museum's Small Spaces exhibition: 6,000 books turned into a small and delightful flat. I Want to Live Inside The Bookshelf Apartment |
| Riepl's Law: how future media compost the past Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:54 PM PDT Here's a useful rule of thumb from 1913: Riepl's Law says, "new, further developed types of media never replace the existing modes of media and their usage patterns. Instead, a convergence takes place in their field, leading to a different way and field of use for these older forms." (via Beyond the Beyond) |
| Online video patents: an impassable thicket? Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:52 PM PDT Posting on New America Foundation's site, copyfighting lawyer Wendy Seltzer gives an excellent primer on the patent thicket around online video, where multiple corporations assert overlapping claims to ownership of patents on practically every video format, and reserve the right to use these claims to shut down video-sharing sites. Luckily, a pair of free/open video formats are on the scene, and have the potential to make video on the Web as unrestricted as HTML, RSS, and the other standards that power it: On June 20, 2009, nearly 150,000 people witnessed the death of 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan, but unlike the Iranians who passed her by in the street, they weren't bystanders to the post-election turmoil in Tehran that claimed her life. They were merely the first of over 600,000 who have since viewed a now-symbolic YouTube video that helped propel the opposition political movement forward in the following days of protest. The democratizing power of the Web lies in video like this one--not just because of its content, but because anyone with an Internet connection can contribute to a global dialogue.Video Prison: Why Patents Might Threaten Free Online Video (Thanks, James!) |
| Industrial music pioneer Chris Carter with gear, 1980 Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:58 PM PDT  Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey at his Industrial Records studio, 1980. Chris recently tweeted, "WTF! I've just exceeded (by quite a margin) ONE MILLION views of my photos on Flickr - this image was tops at 10k+" From his Flickr stream: The gear is...Chris Carter "Me @ Industrial Records Studio 1980" (via @chriscarter) |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2010 09:51 PM PDT   Kiel Johnson and Klai Brown recently built a fantastic 8-bit costume for a Toshiba commercial. They cut the "pixels" from large sheets of high density foam and glued them to an articulated cardboard suit structure. Kiel says, "I think I cut around 4000 pixels. Not all used for Gary... we are building two more characters for a video project." He's posted a posted a slew of terrific images from the build and commercial shoot. "8-Bit Gary" |
| Could Toxoplasma gondii help your country win the World Cup? Posted: 02 Jul 2010 05:16 PM PDT An interesting Slate piece points out a correlation between rates of infection by "cat poop protozoa"—that's Toxoplasma gondii— and success rates in soccer: Landon Donovan Needs a Cat (Slate, thanks Farhad Manjoo)
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| Funny book: P.S. I Hate It Here, Kids' Letters From Camp Posted: 02 Jul 2010 05:20 PM PDT I like it when my kids say funny things without realizing they are being funny. P.S. I Hate It Here is a collection of unintentionally funny kid's letters from camp, collected by Diane Falanga. The letters are presented as scans of the originals, which is great, but I wish they book had included plain-text transcriptions too, because some of the letters are hard to read. Camp letters are interesting, because it's one of the few times that kids communicate with their parents using the written word. Also, I doubt these letters (or the camp experience) would be as fun if email was allowed at camp. Here are a few sample letters from the book: More after the jump. Buy P.S. I Hate It Here on Amazon
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| Update: SS United States saved from the scrapper (for now) Posted: 02 Jul 2010 07:28 PM PDT  A few months back, in one of my first posts for Boing Boing, I wrote about the plight of the SS United States, the fastest ocean liner ever built. It was docked in Philadelphia at the time, a beautiful ghost from a pre-jet era when sea travel was both glamorous and financially viable, and the scrappers were circling. Some things haven't changed since March: The great days of the ocean liner are still gone, and "The Big U" is still sitting forlornly in her mooring on the Delaware River. But against all odds, one very big thing has transpired: The SS United States Conservancy, a volunteer group of self-described ship geeks, has managed at the 11th hour to keep the ship from the scrapyard. The Conservancy announced yesterday a deal to purchase the SSUS from its owner, NCL Group. It's an astonishing victory. The Wall Street Journal reports the purchase price to be $3 million; NCL reportedly turned down a bid of almost twice as much from a scrapper. A Philadelphia philanthropist, Gerry Lenfest, has agreed to pay the $60,000-per-month upkeep on the ship for 20 months while the conservancy looks for a partner with whom to repurpose the vessel, most likely as a hotel or mixed-use development on the Philadelphia or New York waterfront. My last post on the ship churned up a lot of comment, as this one will probably will, and a lot of readers said, in effect, "Let the thing rust away and die." I wonder how many of them would have said the same thing about New York's Pennsylvania Station, the grand Beaux Arts railroad terminal whose destruction in the early '60s helped to spark the modern preservation movement. The problem is, once these things are gone they're gone, and with them goes a piece of our shared history, even our national identity. The good guys won one today in Philadelphia. Here's hoping that 20 months from now some of us will be lucky enough to pop champagne corks on the deck of a refurbished Big U. |
| Game Dev Challenge: deadline is Monday! Posted: 02 Jul 2010 06:49 PM PDT  Just a reminder that Monday is the deadline for submissions to our game development competition with Safari Books Online! Need technical help? Read these game development books free online for 30 days. And even if you're not planning to enter, nothing goes better with fireworks and charcoal than chiptunes! Hit this link for a fine selection: "Games Inspired By Music: A game development competition with Safari Books Online" |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2010 01:54 PM PDT Join the denizens of the uncanny valley with this "Handsome Guy" mask, made by SPFXMasks. This is the same company that makes the mask used by an alleged bank robber we posted about a while ago. (Via Robert Popper) |
| Mark at Skylight Books in LA on Saturday, July 3, 2010 Posted: 02 Jul 2010 01:36 PM PDT  I'm giving a presentation about making yogurt, kombucha, sauerkraut, and cigar box guitars at Skylight Books on Saturday, July 3, 2010 at 5pm. Hope to see you there! Join us for a special presentation by Boing Boing founder, Make magazine editor, and Made by Hand author Mark Frauenfelder! In this 45-minute demo, he'll show us how to make yogurt, sauerkraut, kombucha, and cigar box guitars and amplifiers. MARK FRAUENFELDER discusses and signs his book "MADE BY HAND" with DEMONSTRATION! |
| Coffee table looks like a Venn diagram Posted: 02 Jul 2010 01:14 PM PDT  Out of stock design [via MocoLoco] |
| Apple's letter about the iPhone4 antenna issue Posted: 02 Jul 2010 01:03 PM PDT Apple PR has issued a letter responding to the slew of complaints regarding the faulty antenna and signal strength display on the new iPhone4. As Brian of Gizmodo points out, it reads a bit like an Onion article: Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don't know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place. |
| Jaycee Dugard gets $20 million settlement Posted: 02 Jul 2010 01:39 PM PDT Just a quick update on a story we followed here on Boing Boing last fall — Jaycee Dugard, the woman who was kidnapped at age 11, held captive by a sex offender for 18 years, and gave birth to two of his children, got a $20 million settlement from the state of California for totally failing to protect her from a known dangerous man. I don't know if any amount of money can atone for what this woman went through, but I'm glad someone's owning up to it. Her alleged rapist Philip Garrido and his wife have pleaded not guilty. Jaycee Dugard to get $20 million in settlement [SfGate] |
| Silver spork made from Taco Bell plastic spork Posted: 02 Jul 2010 11:21 AM PDT  Dave says, "A few weeks ago I lost my titanium spork! Instead of buying a new one, I went to Taco Bell and grabbed a handful of plastic sporks and tried some lost-plastic-casting in silver (which cost about $18 per spork)." |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2010 11:11 AM PDT  Erico Guizzo of the IEEE Spectrum says: "Every week I grab New York Magazine and flip to the last page to see their despicably funny Approval Matrix. I like it so much in fact that I decided to shamelessly rip it off -- robot style." |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:48 AM PDT  If you look very closely at these DSQUARED2 "skeletal stilettos," you can actually see the disc bulge that will form after you've worn them for a night, macheteing its way through your sciatic nerve until you are paralyzed from the waist down. Anatomic Fashion Friday: Alicia Keys Skeletal Stilettos |
| Why heterosexual men are attracted to women with small feet Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:47 AM PDT  The face on the left is a composite of eight women with "unusually small feet." The face on the right is a composite of "eight women with unusually large feet." The morphs were created by evolutionary psychologists Jeremy Atkinson and Michelle Rowe at the University at Albany, New York. Atkinson called them the "most strikingly different morphs I've ever seen." These morphs were then rated for attractiveness by 77 heterosexual male students. The men were three-and-a-half times as likely to pick the short-footed morph as more attractive, and almost 10 times as likely to say it was more feminine, Atkinson and Rowe found.New Scientist: Why men are attracted to women with small feet |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:44 AM PDT  New work from Boing Boing fave Dan Hillier: "The Collector."
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| 90-yo woman gets wrong leg amputated at hospital Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:46 AM PDT A hospital in Austria amputated the wrong leg of a 90-year old woman who suffered from vascular disease. After doctors realized they had taken her healthy leg, they amputated the other a few days later. |
| Mathematician turns down $1 million prize Posted: 02 Jul 2010 09:17 AM PDT Brilliant and reclusive mathematician Grigory "Grisha" Perelman turned down yet another big prize for his breakthroughs. Of course, I only know they're breakthroughs because I read that they are. Math is hard. Anyway, this year, the Clay Mathematics Institute awarded Perelman its $1 million Millennium Prize. His "no thanks" wasn't a big surprise -- in 1996 he didn't show up to accept the hugely prestigious Fields Medal from the European Congress of Mathematics. At the time, he said, "I'm not interested in money or fame. I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo. I'm not a hero of mathematics. I'm not even that successful; that is why I don't want to have everybody looking at me." From the AP: Russian mathematician rejects $1 million prize (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!) |
| Erik Davis visits Damanhur's Temples of Humankind Posted: 02 Jul 2010 08:13 AM PDT Our pal Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis and Visionary State, is a fantastic tour guide to hot spots of spiritual high weirdness, from UFO cult hangouts to the San Francisco's Vedanta Society Old Temple to Esalen. Erik calls himself a "spiritual tourist." The tourist part is important, he explains, because "serious seekers limit their pilgrimages in ways that the eclectic, omnivorous, and sometimes willfully perverse spiritual tourist does not. I have gotten as much out of tacky roadside shrines and UFO cults as the most charismatic buildings of the A-list faiths. It's all about perspective. I willfully cut my sacred with profanation, and keep my eyes peeled for sparkling ironies as well as eruptions of the marvelous." Last year, Erik visited the Federation of Damanhur, an intentional community just north of Turin in the foothills of the alps, where the residents carved out a labyrinth in the mountain to create their Temples of Humankind. It sounds, and looks, breathtaking. From HiLobrow: With over six hundred permanent residents, and hundreds of more "citizens" of various grades scattered around Italy and the world, Damanhur possesses an enviable range of quality businesses, workshops, schools, healing centers, and quasi-independent collective homes, all organized according to an innovative governance system notable for its pragmatism and productivity. Damanhur organizes conferences, restores medieval buildings, sells high-end cloth and foodstuffs, and trades goods and services among themselves using their own currency. Erik Davis visits Damanhur (Thanks, Greg Taylor!) |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2010 09:10 AM PDT  Last week, my cousin and I went to a lovely dinner party hosted by forageSF, a wild foods community in San Francisco. One of the eight courses was a green salad with beets and foraged sea beans. It was the first time I've ever eaten sea beans. They are a delightful addition to my growing list of favorite greens. I've seen wild sea beans growing along the coast of Northern California, but I never knew they were actually good to eat. Even after they're washed and coated in dressing, they sustain the aroma of the salty ocean — they have a really unique crunch to them, too, almost like they're fried. The flavor? I'd say it's a cross between string beans, asparagus, and potato chips. Delicious! The official name for sea beans is salicornia (it's the only word I know that rhymes with California!) but they're also known as pickleweed, glasswort, drift seeds, sea asparagus, sea pickles, and marsh samphire. Sea beans have been around forever, but it's only recently that we've started to see them pop up at farmer's markets and at local grocery stores. There are a lot of fancy ways to prepare sea beans, like this black roasted cod with sea beans and oysters recipe on Epicurious — inspired by the movie Mostly Martha — but I would suggest simply sauteeing or boiling them just to enjoy the full effect of the veggie on its own. Every installment of Taste Test will explore recipes, the science, and some history behind a specific food item. Image via Migraine Meals |
| Posted: 02 Jul 2010 07:46 AM PDT  Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. BB's occasional quizmaster David K. Israel has cooked up an Airplane! quiz to celebrate the film's 30th anniversary today. "Don't Call Me Shirley" (Mental Floss) |
In other words, the site takes money from bereaved people without disclosing what it's billing them, gambling on the fact that they're probably too preoccupied to care. Whether or not this kind of thing is legal, it is completely unethical. Even an undertaker who has upsold you on everything from coffin to funeral buffet has to show you a number before you sign on the dotted line. 
If we set aside the qualifying rounds (in which teams can play to a draw) and focus on matches with a clear winner, the results are very compelling. In the knockout round of this year's tournament, eight out of eight winners so far have been the teams whose countries had higher rates of Toxo infection. If we go back to the 2006 World Cup, seven out of eight knockout-round winners could be predicted by higher Toxo rates. The one exception to the rule was Brazil's defeat of Ghana, a match between two nations that each have very high rates. (Aside from having the winningest team in World Cup history, Brazil has quite a few cases of Toxo: Two out of three Brazilians are infected.) 
The Interfax news agency quoted Perelman as saying he believed the (Millennium) prize was unfair. Perelman told Interfax he considered his contribution to solving the Poincare conjecture no greater than that of Columbia University mathematician Richard Hamilton.
But the community's on-the-ground success story pales in comparison to what that hole in a mountain became. Over the weeks and years, without much formal training, working at night and with music blaring to cover up the drills, a select crew of Damanhurians hollowed out a series of mighty chambers and passageways, all without other members of the community—to say nothing of the greater world—clueing-in to their secret work. With tenacious devotion and a startling degree of art, they transformed these underground spaces into the Temples of Humankind: a remarkable otherworldly honeycomb of sacred murals, onyx mosaics, stained glass, sculpture, inlaid marble, hidden passageways, precious metals, mirrored stone, alchemical elixirs, and—who knows?—maybe even the cosmic energy circuits, intergalactic portals, and temporal wormholes that the people of Damanhur suggest are the ultimate functions of their sacred architecture.| You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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