The Latest from Boing Boing

UK-wide teen hackathon, Aug 2-6: Young Rewired State
Hide the kitchen! Company's coming!
Woo-fighting scientist takes the funny high-road when libeled by millionaire "nutritionist"
Indian bureaucracy to VS Naipaul: Can you prove that you're really Indian?
Bad ideas from The Little Mermaid
Bizarro fiction: stupid and intelligent at the same time
New railroad will link Europe to Asia by way of the Caucasus
Congress's groovy, formerly secret fallout shelter
Fiber optic knife
HG Wells writing competition demands handwriting, no science fiction; no one applies
MRI scans of food
SadNES' 8-bit style cover of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game

UK-wide teen hackathon, Aug 2-6: Young Rewired State

Posted: 19 Jul 2010 03:47 AM PDT

Stef sez, "Young Rewired State is a multi-city, multi-day UK event to get the best of young UK coding talent mashing up government data and generally encouraging insightful and innovative trouble-making."

During the first week of August, Young Rewired State will again show what groups of talented young coders can do with Government data. Young developers will spend the week at centres held at businesses and organisations across the UK, working with established tech teams, mentors and visiting experts making apps, websites, games and visualisations.
These will then be played back to an awed roomful of Press, government and interested people on the Friday afternoon in London, with pizza, cake and drinks.

Stef adds, "There's prizes too!"

#yrs2010 = Young geeks + mentors + 1 week August 2-6, across the UK. (Thanks, Stef!)

Hide the kitchen! Company's coming!

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 11:37 PM PDT

This ad from the Oct, 1947 issue of Better Homes and Gardens will help you source a kitchen that doesn't have any unsightly food preparation or consumption surfaces, so it can open off the living room without alienating your guests with the sight of a kitchen.

You'd Hardly Know it's a Kitchen

Woo-fighting scientist takes the funny high-road when libeled by millionaire "nutritionist"

Posted: 19 Jul 2010 03:54 AM PDT

Dr Ben Goldacre is the woo-fighting science writer for The Guardian, and in that capacity he has dogged the heels of "Doctor" Gillian McKeith, a "nutritionist" whose explanations for the way that nutrition works defy science and delve into bizarre areas of Being Wrong, such as her claims about the way that chlorophyll operates in your pitch-black gut.

Goldacre devoted a chapter of his excellent Bad Science book to McKeith's claims, and paid special attention to McKeith's use of Britain's brutal libel laws to silence her critics.

Now Goldacre finds himself libeled by McKeith on Twitter; McKeith, rather than apologizing or defending her libel, has backtracked from it, instead claiming that her Twitter account isn't really her; sloppily removing links to it from her official website, etc.

Goldacre's response has been to ~~record~~ post this wonderful megaphone-jazz-style ballad in tribute to McKeith's zany beliefs and practices:

Update: Ben corrects the record:

That tune's not by me! It's all by Doghorse, from 2007 when the saga of the awful poo lady all began. Doghorse also wrote another great song called "I just wanna look at your poo" for which he received legal threats from McKeith, which he dealt with very admirably (it's about one minute in...). Lots more excellent creativity around McKeith and her scientific expertise here in the b3ta image challenge. Truly, she has inspired some great works of art."

And then I was incompetently libelled by a litigious millionaire

Indian bureaucracy to VS Naipaul: Can you prove that you're really Indian?

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 10:42 PM PDT

The Times of India reports on the Overseas Citizenship of India program, through which people born abroad to people of Indian origin can claim citizenship, "to woo the rich and influential Indian diaspora from across the world."

It's been quite a success, though the bureaucracy can be a little thick at times:

Recently, the scheme was in news when Nobel laureate V S Naipaul, whose ancestors belonged to UP's Gorakhpur, was given a hard time by overzealous babus in London when he applied for the card. Naipaul was asked to provide documents to prove that his ancestors indeed lived in India.

Dual citizenship a hit amongst PIOs

Bad ideas from The Little Mermaid

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 10:36 PM PDT

John sez, "This video shows all the bad ideas Disney's The Little Mermaid is giving young girls about their options. The Second City is considering making it into a series."

Advice for Young Girls from The Little Mermaid (Thanks, John!)

Bizarro fiction: stupid and intelligent at the same time

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 10:35 PM PDT

Carlton sez, "Have you discovered the genre that can be stupid and intelligent at the same time? The Guardian discusses the cult underground genre of campy weird fiction known as Bizarro Fiction. From Jeff Burk's 'Shatnerquake,' about all of the characters Wiliam Shatner has ever played are suddenly sucked into our world on a mission to hunt down and destroy the real William Shatner to Cameron Pierce's "Ass Goblins of Auschwitz" that is the literary equivalent of Schindler's List rewritten by the Marquis De Sade and filmed as a Tim Burton animated feature: 'Bizarro Fiction is by turns stupid, repulsive and crude. But at its best, it is also intelligent, compelling and well-written. Any literary genre that can be both bad and good at the same time is worth watching.'"

Carlton was one of my Clarion West writing students, and is a talented, energetic and successful Bizarro author and impresario -- congrats on the recognition from the Guardian, Carlton!

If the history of Bizarro fiction is ever long enough to look back on, it's likely that Carlton Melick III will loom large over the retrospective. If Shatnerquake typifies the screwball exuberance of Bizarro fiction, then Carlton Melick III exemplifies the intelligence and wit that lurks between its lurid covers. In a genre where crude titles are an art in themselves, Melick is a true artist. Satan Burger, The Cannibals of Candyland, Adolf in Wonderland, War Slut, The Haunted Vagina, The Faggiest Vampire, The Baby Jesus Butt Plug, and my personal alliterative favourite, Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland. These are titles that fail to offend only because of their blatant offensiveness, and illustrate Bizarro's fascination with the vulgar, smutty, distasteful and crude.

Bizarro fiction: it's terribly good (Thanks, Carlton!)

New railroad will link Europe to Asia by way of the Caucasus

Posted: 19 Jul 2010 12:23 AM PDT

Marilyn sez, "The 750-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway that will connect the oil-rich Caspian Sea region to Turkey and beyond is being built to grease a trade boom, transporting European goods east and petroleum products west across the southern Caucasus. Once completed, by 2012, the railway will begin at the Azerbaijani capital of Baku and travel through the Georgian city of Tbilisi, before carrying on to Kars, a Turkish post town on the southwestern lip of the Caucasus region."

... says N. Ahmet Kuşhanoğlu, the Turkish deputy director of transport in charge of railways. "Turkey's face is turned westward since two centuries." Now Turkey is looking east in order to make itself indispensable to the West. Once the Marmaray rail tunnel opens in 2013 beneath the Bosporus in Istanbul, trains from Baku will reach all the way to London. "It is easy to see that this railway shall serve Europe also," says Kuşhanoğlu."
But not everyone in the region stands to benefit:
"...the BTK railway is the result of an alliance between Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan; neighboring Armenia was deliberately left out of the party. And like the pipeline, this east-west corridor will provide an alternative to going through Russia to the north or Iran to the south. It is a more than $600-million project of economic development, social engineering, or shrewd geopolitics, depending on your point of view, which in the southern Caucasus shifts as quickly as the snow that obscures the mountain road."

Eurasian Railroad (Thanks, Marilyn!)

(Image: Alex Webb/National Geo)

Congress's groovy, formerly secret fallout shelter

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 10:23 PM PDT

Atlas Obscura takes us on a tour of the US Congress's secret fallout shelter, built in the fifties so that Congresscritters and their aides (but not their families) could survive a nuclear holocaust. Its location -- beneath Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, WV -- was outed by the WashPo in 1992, it has since been superseded by an even s33ktr1ter shelter with even groovier wallpaper to take into the next world.

To help ensure its secrecy the bunker was operated by a dummy company known as Forsythe Associates and workers on the bunker all dressed as hotel audiovisual employees. Any calls going in and out of the bunker were routed through the hotel switchboard so it looked as if they originated from and were going to the Resort.
The shelter was fully equipped and among its standard bunk-beds, TVs and furniture, which populate the "Graceland of Atomic Tourism," there are a few very curious items. Among these are a special room meant for holding and calming members of Congress who can't handle the stress, and an incinerator meant for "pathological waste," or the Congressmen's irradiated bodies. A huge 100-foot radio tower installed 4.5 miles away was connected to the bunker so that the congressmen could broadcast emergency messages.

Congressional Fallout Shelter at the Greenbrier Resort (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Fiber optic knife

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 10:18 PM PDT

This glass knife was hand-knapped by Mike Cook of Portland, Michigan out of fiber optic glass. Magnetometer-invisible and broadband; can't hardly ask for a better tool!

"Primitive" knife knapped from fiber optic glass

HG Wells writing competition demands handwriting, no science fiction; no one applies

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 11:37 PM PDT

A writing competition held in HG Wells's honor demanded that entries be handwritten ("to address the low standard of literacy and handwriting these days...it's an important art in itself and many of our most famous authors find that's the best way to do creative writing.") and that they treat with subjects other than science fiction ("Last year there were plenty of entries because the competition was open to writers of all ages and stories could include science fiction, depicting ghastly invasions of our everyday lives by all sorts of nameless horrors.").

Unsurprisingly, the contest did not get a single entry.

Budding young writers were invited to send their short stories creating a picture of contemporary life in Kent, to Reg Turnill, a former BBC aerospace correspondent who as a young reporter interviewed Wells. But due to what Mr Turnill now believes were over-strict rules, he has had to change the entry conditions.

No entries for £1,000 HG Wells story competition (via @stevesilberman)

(Image: Wikimedia Commons/Gutenberg.org)

MRI scans of food

Posted: 18 Jul 2010 09:55 PM PDT

The Inside Insides blog features animated MRI scans of food. I love the graceful swaying of dragonfruit, but am absolutely taken by corn's freneticism. I've had a couple of these scans recently and I had to say that it's eerie fun to fly through your own body; I keep wanting to shout: "Stay on target! Stay on target!"

Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Foods