Wednesday, July 21, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Hi-rez 3D "terracotta" printing

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 02:34 AM PDT


The folks at Shapeways -- a firm that prints your 3D models using a variety of materials and apparatus -- have a new toy to show off: an Envisiontec Aureus, which is very, very accurate -- "XY resolution is 43 micron and the Z voxel height is 25 micron." The resulting models can be plated as well.

Very high detail printing... also in wax



Lucasfilm lightsaber legal threat letter sells for $3,850

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 02:32 AM PDT


The cease-and-desist letter that Lucasfilm sent to the company that made a laser-pointer alleged to infringe the Lucas trademark on lightsabers sold recently on eBay for a whopping $3,850. The winning bidder has moderate eBay history (12 transactions), which suggests that this isn't (merely) a publicity stunt.

LUCASFILM CEASE AND DESIST LETTER REAL LIFE LIGHTSABER

(Note: This story was submitted by a PR company apparently retained by the seller of this document)



Winnie the Hulk

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 02:23 AM PDT


Loving Andrew Harkins's Winnie the Hulk art: "I also wanted to attempt to create a comic book feel, as if you were reading a page from a longer story. I'm not a color expert, so it's a little gaudy there, and the layout feels a bit 90's but in the end I had fun."

One More I Forgot To Add (via Super Punch)



Trouble with Tribbles posters

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 02:22 AM PDT

Fridges built from old iceboxes

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 02:17 AM PDT


Italian bespoke appliance manufacturer Meneghini rebuilds old iceboxes with modern fridges inside, an exceedingly winning combo (especially the ones with portholes!). They're insanely expensive (five figures!), but they're fun to day-dream about!

Meneghini (via Core 77)



CCTV laptop webcam stickers in Boing Boing Bazaar

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 02:13 AM PDT


Ozge Kirimlioglu has brought her wonderful little die-cut vinyl CCTV stickers to the Boing Boing Bazaar. They fit neatly around the webcam pinhole on your laptop, and serve as excellent reminder that a compromised machine can be used to spy on its owner, as they discovered in Lower Merion County, Pennsylvania. Before pasting mine on, I cut out a second pinhole so I could see the "camera active" light on my Thinkpad.

Cctv Stickers



Pirate Party starts its own ISP

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 02:08 AM PDT

The Swedish Pirate Party has founded its own ISP, built on the principle of maximum privacy and minimum control. That means no logging. The tech management comes from the folks who run the IPREDator proxy, which has been my proxy of choice for six months now, and is well worth the &euro5;/month for the assurance that my network connection isn't being sniffed, especially when using public WiFi.
Gustav Nipe, student of economics, long-standing Pirate Party member and CEO of Pirate ISP told TorrentFreak that Pirate ISP is based on the hacker ontology. "If you see something and you think it's broken you build a patch and fix it. With that as a reference point we are launching an ISP. This is one way to tackle the big brother society."

"The Pirate ISP is needed in different ways. One is to compete with other ISPs, let them fight more for our internet. If they don't behave there will always be someone else taking their share," Nipe added.

Aside from the competition angle, Gustav Nipe told TorrentFreak that the Pirate ISP will maximize privacy for all its customers. Operated by ViaEuropa - the company behind the iPredator anonymity service - Pirate ISP users will remain anonymous...

"It would be a pity to reveal all the tricks that we have, so we will save those for later. But we have ways to ensure that no customer should have to get a sad letter home from Henrik Pontén."

World's First Pirate ISP Launches In Sweden (via /.)


RIP, Robert Galambos, bat-neuroscientist

Posted: 21 Jul 2010 01:54 AM PDT

The NYT obit for Robert Galambos ("Neuroscientist Who Showed How Bats Navigate") includes this smashing mad-science-y photo of a young Mr Galambos testing a bat's acoustic capability by holding it before the cone of a Victrola.

Robert Galambos, Neuroscientist Who Showed How Bats Navigate, Dies at 96 (Thanks, Steve!)

(Image: Uncredited)



The great Vaseline skin-whitening controversy of 2010: danah boyd weighs in

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:20 PM PDT

"What intrigues me the most about the anti-Vaseline discourse is that it seems to be Americans telling the global south (which is mostly in the northern hemisphere) that they're being oppressed by American companies. The narrative is that Vaseline is selling whitening products to perpetuate colonial ideals of beauty. In the story that I'm reading, those seeking to consume whitening products are simply oppressed voiceless people who clearly can't have any good reason for wanting to purchase these products other than their own self-hatred with regard to race."— danah boyd on controversy around the skin-whitening Facebook ad campaign which was blogged recently here on Boing Boing.

Drowning doesn't look like drowning

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:33 PM PDT

lifepreserver.jpg

The kind of drowning you see on T.V.—think thrashy, screamy—doesn't have much in common with what real drowning looks like, according to writer and Navy/Coast Guard veteran Mario Vittone. That's because of something called the Instinctive Drowning Response, a pattern of behavior that appears to be hard-wired into humans and pops up whenever somebody feels like they're suffocating in water.

Frank Pia, Ph.D., the psychologist and lifeguard to first described the Instinctive Drowning Response explains it this way:

  1. 1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.

  2. 2. Drowning people's mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people's mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.

  3. 3. Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water's surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.

  4. 4. Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.

  5. 5. From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people's bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.

In real life, a drowning person will be a lot more still and silent than you expect.

Image courtesy Flickr user jopoe, via CC

Just look at this one-ingredient banana "ice cream"

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 05:11 PM PDT

banana.jpg

Everybody's favorite fruit has a secret. When you freeze it, and then stick it in a food processor, a banana will whip up into a texture not unlike soft-serve ice cream.

I just made up a version of this that added a little honey and peanut butter to the basic frozen banana cream. Not everybody will dig this—my husband, for instance, wasn't a fan—but I loved it. Plus, it's such a great summer solution for vegans. (And for lazy ominvores who want a quick dessert with little work.)

My curiosity now: Why frozen bananas turn out so creamy when you beat them senseless. The Kitchn blog says it has to do with the very small amount of fat in the banana, and that makes sense. But I haven't been able to find a source to verify it. Chemistry people and food scientists, weigh in!

BP launches effort to restrict publication of scientific research on disaster

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 08:37 PM PDT

Climate Progress reports that scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M "have 'signed contracts with BP to work on their behalf in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) process' that determines how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region is suffering from BP's toxic black tide. The contract, the Mobile Press-Register has learned, 'prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years." More at Think Progress, where the story broke.

Apple doesn't have a monopoly on Death Grip: "Don't hold it wrong" manuals from phones other than iPhone

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 04:42 PM PDT

BP's photoshopped spill response command center

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 04:26 PM PDT

The altered image BP released of its crisis command center, outed as a Photoshop job by bloggers (and apparently shot back in 2001).

AOL News (and many other outlets) report that BP's PR woes got even weirder today...

...when AMERICAblog's John Aravosis pointed to a poorly Photoshopped photo of the company's crisis command center in Houston which was published on BP's official crisis response website. The company has now come clean (sort of) to The Washington Post -- claiming this morning that it was the photographer who snapped the image who was responsible for inserting three extra video screens into a bank of monitors. It still remains unclear, though, precisely why the alterations were even made in the first place.
At the top of this blog post, the altered image (note that there's something going on in each and every one of those monitors).

Below, the image later released as "unaltered" by BP (note that some monitors are dormant).

And next, beneath that, the image I am confident is the REAL THING YOU GUYS.

BP released this image as "unretouched," but I'm skeptical.


Finally! This one's authentic, for sure.


(thanks, wawb)

Kombucha war brewing between food regulators and fermenty beverage makers

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 03:46 PM PDT

The SF Weekly notes the trend of increasing FDA regulatory scrutiny around the fermented beverage known as kombucha, because some commercial preparations can contain trace amounts of naturally occurring alcohol (say, .4 or .5 percent, compared to 5% in a light beer). Reader Michael Robbins, who sends in this link, adds, "Sadly, all my Kansas stores have pulled my daily drink from the shelves because of the new regulations. Have to go back to home brewing this treat."

New map of forest heights around the world released by NASA

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 03:40 PM PDT

Scientists have released a new kind of map that uses NASA satellite data to show the height of forest canopies around the world.

Although there are other local- and regional-scale forest canopy maps, the new map is the first that spans the entire globe based on one uniform method. The work -- based on data collected by NASA's ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites -- should help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world's forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere.

The map reveals that the world's tallest forests are clustered in the American Pacific Northwest, and areas of Southeast Asia.

First-of-its-Kind Map Depicts Global Forest Heights (nasa.gov)

Taking Photos In Public Places Is Not A Crime

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 03:16 PM PDT

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a piece in Popular Mechanics about the growing trend of cops bullying photographers who take pictures in public places, and why officials who believe such photography is against the law are mistaken.
photo_phobia_0710-md.jpgI believe there is a good case to be made that having lots of cameras in the hands of citizens makes us more, rather than less, safe. Here's how bad it has gotten: Not long ago, an Amtrak representative did an interview with local TV station Fox 5 in Washington, D.C.'s Union Station to explain that you don't need a permit to take pictures there--only to be approached by a security guard who ordered them to stop filming without a permit.

Legally, it's pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you're not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, "The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you're entitled to photograph it." What's more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that "the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act." But this doesn't stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don't seem much like national-security zones.

Taking Photos In Public Places Is Not A Crime: Analysis (popularmechanics.com, Illustration by Rui Ricardo, courtesy Popular Mechanics)

"I hate my ex" vanity plates

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 03:07 PM PDT

132810301-ac10180667d63f1d4eddaccbd80d1cf7.4c461c60-full.jpg Someone in Hawaii really hates his/her ex. My friend's husband Derek took this photo.

Cow choreography set to electronic music by Cyriak

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 03:07 PM PDT

The latest music and choreography from British animator Cyriak = cows getting down. He writes: "No cows were harmed during the making of this video, though their future prospects probably aren't as optimistic." Video link.



Rapping Paper

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 02:14 PM PDT

I blogged about "Rapping Paper" here on Boing Boing four years ago, but the folks behind it apparently ran into some legal troubles over lyrics clearance. All is well again, and you can order the stuff in Eminem, Run-DMC, and Sugar Hill Gang. Above, the classic "Rapper's Delight," the first hip-hop/rap record I ever owned.

Rapping Paper



Pro-urban-farming graffitti, Los Angeles street curb (snapshot)

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 02:00 PM PDT

Link.

A fiberglass bench that doubles as an imaginary friend

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 12:20 PM PDT

kid_robot_mr_ttt_benchench_friendswithyou.jpg

If I had a kid and $650 to spend lavishly, I might get this colorful fiberglass bench from Kid Robot. It's called Mr. TTT and it doubles as a piece of furniture and an imaginary friend.

Product page

Social Media Theater

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 12:08 PM PDT

Wp-Content Uploads 2009 01 About Chinaka
It's one thing for massively popular TV shows like Heroes and Lost to use social media to build characters and infill back-stories. But can a young playwright turn those same viral marketing techniques into art?  

Twenty five-year-old Chinaka Hodge's play, Mirrors in Every Corner, is an intimate story of a black family set in West Oakland. But even that simple description doesn't work. By the time the play begins, the mom in the family, who already had three black sons, has inexplicably given birth to a white daughter. (The girl, by the way, is played by the same adult black actress who portrays the mother.) The story explores how race is lived within this family and out in the world, today and across generations. (Here's a long review.)  

The play debuted this spring at the small non-profit theater, Intersection for the Arts, in San Francisco. For the next run of Mirrors in Every Corner, even before her characters say their first lines on stage, Chinaka is (as danah boyd might say) "writing them into being" (PDF) via platforms like Twitter, Facebook, GChat, and blogs. Her first attempt---a Twitter version of her play's opening scene (scroll all the way down to get to the first tweet).

Chinaka wants audiences to know more about these five family members than can fit inside the play itself. She wants us to share experiences with her characters (like, say, a recent Dave Chappelle show at the New Parish in Oakland), interacting with them in the same digital spaces where we congregate with friends. It's about making the play relevant for young theatergoers. "We're asking them to take a huge leap in terms of what race is, a huge leap in terms of time, space, ancestorship," she says, given the impossibility of the play's premise and the way her story wedges history into the present. Chinaka's banking on achieving realism by extending the play's artifice beyond the theater.

I've known Chinaka since she was in high school, when she started performing stunning poetry as part of our shared work at Youth Speaks, the nation's leading spoken-word poetry organization based in San Francisco. Here she is just a few years post-grad on the HBO series, Def Poetry Jam. In the video below, she describes her social media plans for the next staging of Mirrors in Every Corner.




Indie producers started integrating social media into the creative process a long time ago. But Chinaka's vision for rupturing the fourth wall raises all sorts of questions for playwrights and others who've traditionally touched audiences through live performance. What does an author do with the character-building that takes place in the digital beyond, outside her control? How does that engagement feed back into the stage piece? Does the author have to out the characters as fictional, so as not to risk leaving audiences feeling duped? How does an emerging artist get audiences to care about obscure characters in a small independent theater project in the first place?


When you think about it, social media makes all of us into playwrights, turning ourselves into characters and our lives into scripts. We upload pictures that make us look way better than in real life, we labor over getting the phrasing of an update just right. And so it seems oddly fitting, as we move through social media spaces, to run into fully fabricated characters, whose creators have unleashed them onto a different kind of stage.

Birth of the Illuminati

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 11:54 AM PDT

In DarkLore Volume II, an anthology of writings on high weirdness and secret history, Mike Jay lays out the birth of the Illuminati conspiracy at the end of the 18th century. The Daily Grail has just published the article, which tells how the modern myth (?) began with a society floundering to understand the French Revolution. From "Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy:"
Wp-Content Uploads 2009 12 Illuminatibill At the beginning of 1797, John Robison was a man with a solid and long-standing reputation in the British scientific establishment. He had been Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh University for over twenty years, an authority on mathematics and optics, and had recently been appointed senior scientific contributor on the third edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to which he would eventually contribute over a thousand pages of articles. Yet by the end of the year, his professional reputation had been eclipsed by a sensational book that vastly outsold anything he had previously written, and whose shockwaves would continue to reverberate long after his scientific work had been forgotten. Its title was Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, and it launched on the English-speaking public the enduring theory that a vast conspiracy, masterminded by a covert Masonic cell known as the Illuminati, was in the process of subverting all the cherished institutions of the civilised world and co-opting them into instruments of its secret and godless plan: the tyranny of the masses under the invisible control of unknown superiors, and a new era of 'darkness over all'.

The first edition of Proofs of a Conspiracy sold out within days, and within a year it had been republished many times, not only in Edinburgh but in London, Dublin and New York. Robison had hit a nerve by offering an answer, plausible to many, to the great questions of the day: what had caused the French Revolution, and had there been any plan behind its bloody and tumultuous progress?

Many had located the roots of the revolution in the ideas of Enlightenment figures such as Voltaire, Diderot and D'Alembert, who had exalted reason and progress over authority and tradition; but none of these mostly aristocratic philosophes had advocated a revolution of the masses, and indeed several of them had ended their lives on the guillotine. In the early 1790s, it had been possible to believe that the power-hungry lawyers and journalists of the Jacobin Club had whipped up the Paris mob into their destructive frenzy as a means to their own ends, but by 1794 Danton, Robespierre and the rest of the Jacobin leaders had followed their victims to the guillotine: how could they have been the puppet-masters when they had had their own strings so brutally cut? What Robison was proposing in the densely-argued and meticulously documented pages of Proofs of a Conspiracy was that all these agents of revolution had been pawns in a much bigger game, whose ambitions were only just beginning to make themselves visible.

"Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy" (Daily Grail)

DarkLore Volume II (Amazon)

When you hear "biodynamic" think "astrology and cow skulls"

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 11:17 AM PDT

I've started hearing a lot about biodynamic wine recently, and had gotten the impression that it was just a fancy way of talking about organic wine. Turns out, that assumption was incorrect. According to this fascinating—and frequently funny—piece in San Francisco Weekly, biodynamic farming is, essentially, organic farming ... plus a heaping helping of astrology, mysticism and some delightfully medieval-gothic growth preparations. (One involved taking fresh cow skulls, stuffing them with oak bark, burying them at the fall Equinox, unearthing in spring and adding minute amounts of the resulting goop to compost piles. Ostensibly to promote healing in plants.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, large, independent, peer-reviewed studies haven't found much of a difference between biodynamic and organic grapes. Now, some folks like biodynamic wine, and that's cool. I just think people ought to know what it is they're paying a premium for.

Anti-aircraft laser demo video

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 11:17 AM PDT


Above is a new video of Raytheon's laser weapon shooting down an unmanned aerial vehicle. They fired the Laser Close-In Weapon System (CIWS) from a ship, linking the weapon to the US Navy's anti-missile system of a Gatling gun steered by radar guidance. The breakthrough here is that the CIWS uses solid-state laser technology that until recently didn't have the oomph required by the military. From the BBC News:

Although Raytheon would not give details of the height, speed and range of the UAVs, saying that data "sensitive", it did say that the Navy wanted tests to be as realistic as possible, suggesting that the aircraft were behaving in the way military planners would expect them to.

"This is the first time a UAV threat has been targeted and neutralised in a marine environment," said (Raytheon Missile Systems' vice president, Mike) Booen

"On a ship, the laser can be mounted inside a ship and the beam fed up through fibre cables.

"It was a bad day for UAVs and a good one for laser technology," he added. The firm is also working on a sister land based system that can be used to target mortar and rocket rounds.

"On land, it could be mounted in trailers so it has applications across the globe," said Mr Booen.

"Anti-aircraft laser unveiled at Farnborough Airshow"

The Kodachrome curtain

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 10:51 AM PDT

kodacurtain.jpgAs Kodachrome passes into history -- photojournalist Steve McCurry, who shot the famous 1984 "Afghan Girl" cover for National Geographic, processed the last roll of the stuff last week in Parsons, KS -- it seems appropriate to think about its memorial. I mean, beyond the millions of images shot over decades in the film stock's characteristically rich, saturated colors. Maybe it's this: A DIY Kodachrome curtain, with instructions for assembly at Craftster. Craftster reader "Lufah" also includes the recipe for a neat little table lamp/photo sculpture stitched together from Kodachrome slides. (Via PSFK.)

Amish teen charged for alcohol possession, overdriving an animal

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 10:22 AM PDT

An Amish teenager named Levi E. Detweiler was pursued by police after running a red light and refusing to stop when police warned him to. He was caught when his getaway vehicle — a horse and buggy — landed in a ditch; he was charged with alcohol possession and overdriving an animal.

First (Australian) surfing photo?

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 11:29 AM PDT

Img News 2010 07 20 Surf First Pic 465X288 200710 T325
Is this the first Australian surfing photo? Taken in 1912, the shot depicts surfing pioneer Tommy Walker catching a wave at Main Beach on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia. From Warwick Daily News:
While there are photos of people with surfboards that predate the shot of Mr Walker in action, (Manly Surf Life Saving Club historian Ray) Moran said they did not show people actually surfing.

"There is a 1909 photo taken of Tommy Walker at Manly standing alongside his surfboard on the beach – it's a nice portrait, but he's not surfing. If there is one that is older I would definitely be interested in seeing it," Mr Moran said.

"Is this surfing's first photo?"

Today: anniversary of the first moon landing

Posted: 20 Jul 2010 09:56 AM PDT
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