The Latest from Boing Boing

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• NSFW tribute to Ray Bradbury
• Hitchcock vs. The Birds (spoiler: the birds win)
• The Wandering Marionettes' Gorgeous Masked Performances
• Gabrielle Bell's comic strip about ComicCon
• My favorite museum in Japan: The Takayama Showa Kan
• The 90th anniversary of the 19th amendment in Mississippi will be in 2074
• Bus-on-stilts from China is awesome, not widely useful
• Tom the Dancing Bug: Deficit Hawk Down
• The very hungry (and carnivorous) caterpillar
• The Fuggetabuddies
• A lifetime supply of doll arms on the auction block
• Coin-operated park bench in China?
• Otyp nears Kickstarter goal to make DNA thermal cylclers for high schoolers
• Science cookie cutters
• Dr. Laura: criticism of me infringes my first amendment rights

NSFW tribute to Ray Bradbury Posted: 18 Aug 2010 04:40 PM PDT Rachel Bloom from Upright Citizens Brigade has a not-safe-for-work ode to the greatest sci-fi writer in history. Makes me want to do an answer song about Philip K. Dick. F* Me, Ray Bradbury [also submitterated by teig]

Hitchcock vs. The Birds (spoiler: the birds win) Posted: 18 Aug 2010 04:24 PM PDT Video Link. Brosmind posted this homage to the 1963 Hitchcock classic. (Thanks, Jeff O!)

The Wandering Marionettes' Gorgeous Masked Performances Posted: 18 Aug 2010 04:13 PM PDT Photo: Shannon Cottrell/LA Weekly from "Hello Kitty's Bats and Cats Masquerade @ Royal/T" The Wandering Marionettes are a performance troupe based in Los Angeles who have become an important part of the city's nightlife. They appear frequently at clubs and other events (like Labyrinth of Jareth) across L.A. dressed in black and white and wearing sleek masks, using music and dance to tell a story of mysterious dolls. I wrote about The Wandering Marionettes when they put together their own party, Kabinet Theatre, in Hollywood last year. (They've hosted Kabinet Theatre nights since then, as well, but moved it downtown.) I like The Wandering Marionettes for a reason similar to The League of S.T.E.A.M.: both emphasize audience interaction in their work. Typically, The Wandering Marionettes will do a few dance numbers on stage, but that's only part of what they do. The members of the troupe are in character all night and much of their performance revolves around their interaction with the crowd. They might be on the dance floor or hanging around the bar with everyone else, but they don't speak and how you react to them more or less prompts what happens next. Check out the video below to see The Wandering Marionettes on stage. Link: The Wandering Marionettes

Gabrielle Bell's comic strip about ComicCon Posted: 18 Aug 2010 03:12 PM PDT Cartoonist Gabrielle Bell's multi-part comic strip about being at ComicCon is terrifically entertaining and a good reminder of why I don't have a hankering to go there. Gabrielle Bell's San Diego ComicCon Comicumentary: part 1 | part 2 | part 3

My favorite museum in Japan: The Takayama Showa Kan Posted: 18 Aug 2010 03:54 PM PDT (In July, I went on a family vacation to Japan. Here are my posts about the trip: The Ghibli Museum | Watermelons in the shape of cubes, hearts, and pyramids | What happened to the Burgie Beer UFO of Melrose Avenue? | Shopping in Harajuku | A visit to Iwatayama Monkey Park in Kyoto Japan | Nara Deer Park near Kyoto.) I felt like I was in a giant thrift store bursting with Japanese products from the the mid 20th century. No guards were stationed in the many rooms crammed with household goods, educational equipment, tools, and other cultural artifacts. No items, as far as I could tell, were nailed down. This place would be a shoplifter's paradise (and a liability insurance abuser's motherlode) in the United States, but we were in Japan, where they don't seem to worry as much about that kind of thing. The place is called the Showa Kan (Showa refers to the time period, 1926-1989, and Kan means hall). It's a privately run museum in Takayama, a beautiful city in the Chūbu region of central Japan. My wife, two daughters, and I spent a couple of pleasant hours wandering through the rooms here, which were decorated like businesses and institutions from the period. There was a doctor's office, a classroom, an appliance store, a bicycle repair shop, a living room, a bedroom, a barber shop, and so on. Many more photos and remarks after the jump. (You can click any photo to embiggen it.) The display in the front window facing the street drew us toward the museum. I don't consider myself a collector of things (too much clutter!) but I would like to have that motorized bike and some of those figurines. Before entering the museum proper (admission is ¥500 for adults, and ¥300 for kids), you walk past these cool-looking old cars. I'm not sure why Mickey Mouse is driving that three-wheeled pickup truck. Signs with happy faces on them are an old advertising trick, and one that I approve of. This hallway made to look like post WWII Japan, complete with a brothel on the second floor. In this simulacrum of an appliance store, products separated by decades happily sit beside one another. Too bad the washing machine in the middle can't wash itself! Mod lamps. Despite the missing ear, this dog keeps a cheerful expression. The less said about this guy's engorged, long, stiff nose, the better. Motorized bikes and a bike repair shop. A semi-westernized, semi-depressing Japanese living room. The next three photos remind me of Coop's collection. My daughter is trying to play a non-working arcade game. I wish it worked, because it looks like fun! UPDATE: It's a Bally Spinner arcade game from 1962. Here's a video. (Thanks, Darryl!) My daughter really wanted to sit on this toy JR train and take it for a spin around the museum. I didn't allow it, but I didn't blame her for wanting to. I recall reading that someone infamously sat on Rauschenberg's stuffed goat when it was on display and damaged it. You can find character statuettes like this in front of stores in Japan today. They are about three-feet tall. I'm not sure what their function is other than to lure customers. This creepy doll is a far cry from the kawaii look associated with contemporary Japanese characters. Slightly less creepy doll inside a very creepy wooden child containment device that looks like something the Pilgrims would have made to teach their babies about the misery of Hell. How long would those beads on a wire keep toddlers occupied before they went out of their mind? Bring back tin containers for food packaging! (Here's why.) Missing BOTH ears and still as happy as can be! This doctor's office could be used as a set for a scary movie. The food goes into slot A, and moves its way down and out. An Alan Watts quote comes to mind: [L]iving organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd. Truer words were never spoken! Another look at the interior of a tube. Tube malfunction! Joseph and the liver of many colors. Making a new tube. A red eye is an unhappy eye. If I had to pick an eye disease based on the models alone, I think I'd pick the one on the lower right. How about you? The kawaii is starting to kick in. A classroom planetarium. This looks like a machine to demonstrate bell curves and standard deviations. People who know more than I do about statistics (and that would be just about everyone) can explain the real purpose of this. Maybe it's a pachinko machine for Zen Buddhists. Magnetic poles, electrical current, a rotor. What is it? A classroom orrery. As an early lesson in environmentalism, here's a model of a sea creature that bit into a can of expanding foam sealant that had been carelessly tossed overboard by a callous merchant marine. Before you scroll down to the next photo, take a look at the long glass tube with a liquid-filled bulb at the bottom and try to guess what it is used for. A fly catcher! Thank you for making it this far. If you ever find yourself in Takayama, Japan, I strongly encourage you to visit the Showa Kan.

The 90th anniversary of the 19th amendment in Mississippi will be in 2074 Posted: 18 Aug 2010 04:23 PM PDT Today is the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which granted women the right to vote and be just as disappointed in their choices at the ballot box as men. Delightfully, while most of the states ratified the amendment in 1919 and 1920, 10 states either initially rejected the measure, or simply put it off altogether. (Federal law trumped, so women could still vote in the 10 holdout states, even before they got around to ratification.) Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Alabama had all ratified by the mid 1950s. Florida signed on in 1969. The Carolinas, Georgia and Louisiana all agreed that women should be able to vote during the 1970s. Mississippi held out until 1984. (Via hectocotyli)

Bus-on-stilts from China is awesome, not widely useful Posted: 18 Aug 2010 01:10 PM PDT You take the low road—I'll take the 1200-person bus on stilts. Pros: Basic concept—raised passenger compartment that allows "bus" to use regular roads while cars travel beneath it—seems like a fun solution for getting to the faster-than-a-traffic-jam speeds of dedicated rail without, you know, the cost of dedicated rails. Cons: Trying to imagine a city in the United States that simultaneously has the density to need a 1200-person bus and the height clearance to allow something this tall to travel freely about town. Even if you scaled it down to a smaller passenger size, I don't see this fitting under freeway overpasses or even beneath the electrical lines that hover over wide avenues.

Tom the Dancing Bug: Deficit Hawk Down Posted: 18 Aug 2010 11:30 AM PDT

The very hungry (and carnivorous) caterpillar Posted: 18 Aug 2010 11:01 AM PDT At first, you might think the weirdest thing about this little caterpillar is its body—long and skinny, with a patch of legs at the front and a patch at the back, it does a lot of rearing up and strategically falling onto things. That last bit becomes important later. See, this little Hawaiian caterpillar is a killer. The Carnivorous Caterpillar is a product of island evolution, which is, itself, a pretty weird phenomenon. For instance, a study published in PLoS Biology in October of 2006 found that mammal populations on islands can change their physical appearance and structure at a rate as much as 3.1 times greater than that of mainland mammals. Islands breed both unusual caterpillars and fast-evolving mammals thanks to a combination of isolated populations—through which mutations can more easily spread—fierce competition for limited resources, and the odd interactions that happen between species of plants and animals that are all experiencing the same sort of pressures. After all, the ecological niche—what you eat, where you live, who eats you—a species inhabited on the mainland might not exist the same way on an island. And it's likely to change relatively rapidly, along with resources and the spread of useful mutations. Over hundreds or thousands of years, an island species can come to look and act very differently from its mainland cousins. This video is part of Life Is—A new website that brings together tons of clips from BBC nature documentaries and arranges them in a procrastination-friendly browsing menu. You can search for videos by climate, geography, even predominant color scheme—so a passing fancy for a carnivorous caterpillar could lead you to pig-nosed turtles, Chinese rice fields and whistling rats.

The Fuggetabuddies Posted: 18 Aug 2010 10:33 AM PDT The Fuggetabuddies are Jon Benjamin and Jon Glaser. Jesse Thorn says, "When it comes to comedy pieces that are barely anything, this is by far my favorite. I can watch this over and over and laugh every time. Fuggetaboutit." Not safe for work. Fuggedabuddies Part 1 | Fuggedabuddies Part 2

A lifetime supply of doll arms on the auction block Posted: 18 Aug 2010 10:13 AM PDT On eBay: "Big lot of 630 antique german bisque doll arms." High bid is just $5.50 (but shipping is $39). More photos of similar auctions at Anonymous Works.

Coin-operated park bench in China? Posted: 18 Aug 2010 10:37 AM PDT PAY & SIT: the private bench (HD) from Fabian Brunsing on Vimeo. In 2008 artist Fabian Brunsing made a coin-operated park bench. When you insert a 0.50 Euro coin, spikes in the bench's seat retract, allowing you to sit. This story from Orange News claims that officials at Yantai Park in Shangdong province, eastern China, have installed similar benches in the park. I doubt it. The photo in the article is of Brunsing's bench. Do any of our readers from China know if this story is true or not?

Otyp nears Kickstarter goal to make DNA thermal cylclers for high schoolers Posted: 18 Aug 2010 04:15 PM PDT When I was at Maker Faire Detroit last month, I met the guys from Otyp, and was very impressed by them and their work. They've created an open source thermal cycler, called the Thermotyp, along with a number of biotech projects for high schoolers. At Make Faire, they were showing people how to use the Thermotyp to clone jellyfish DNA and spell out "Hello World!" in fluorescent DNA in a petri dish. Otyp is trying to raise a total of $10,000 to distribute their thermal cyclers and project kits to high schools. Through Kickstarter, they've already received about $7,500. They have five days to go before the campaign closes! Our project is designed to give students a first glimpse at the tools used in modern biotechnology. By performing the same techniques that were used to generate recombinant insulin to treat diabetics and make transgenic animals to study cancer, but on a standardized, introductory level, students can learn the basics of how biotechnology is done, so that they can start to think about how they can use those tools to create and experiment themselves. It's like a "Hello, World!" computer programming tutorial, but for biotechnology. The biotech hardware and supplies produced today are too expensive for high schools' tight budgets. For our lab course, Cloning a Fluorescent Gene, to be affordable, we are reducing costs to schools: (1) by distributing Cloning a Fluorescent Gene's hybrid textbook and lab manual under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license, so that teachers can download, print, and distribute the textbook at no cost (2) by renting out equipment that would cost schools an initial investment of more than $6000 for $300 per school. This is the first time that a company has offered to do this, and it currently the only way to get these expensive research tools to fit into schools' tight budgets (3) by developing an industry-sized 96-well open source PCR machine (Thermotyp), a tool that is the foundation for manipulating DNA that until now has cost $3500. This will give us a low cost machine that can accommodate the experiments from multiple classes, which we can then use to make our equipment rentals even more affordable. The combination of these strategies will allow us to produce Cloning a Fluorescent Gene, a high-level biotech laboratory course, for about the same price as existing, dull high school lab kits. "Hello, World!" - Modern Biotechnology for High Schools, a Kickstarter for Otyp

Science cookie cutters Posted: 18 Aug 2010 08:35 AM PDT I've posted in the past about biological anthropologist-turned-geeky Martha Stewart Not So Humble Pie—especially the magical way she has with science-themed baked goods. Now there's a quick way for less-ambitious cooks to capture a teeny bit of the Not So Humble ambiance—a set of four science cookie cutters, featuring beaker, flask, test tube and atom shapes. In the picture above, you can see the results, as decorated by Ms. Humble (though she's not the one selling them). Bonus for Oklahomans (and how often does that happen?): If you live in the OKC area you can arrange pick-up on these cookie cutters and save yourself some shipping costs. (Thanks to Sophia C.—my favorite Belgian—for pointing this out!) Science-themed cookies for all your holiday baking needs Blood Cell Bakery: Using cookies to explain science Science teacher's mitosis cookies HOWTO make fractal cookies HOWTO Make a Death Star Cookie

Dr. Laura: criticism of me infringes my first amendment rights Posted: 18 Aug 2010 03:43 PM PDT Dr. Laura Schlessinger is leaving radio to regain her "first amendment" rights on the internet. Welcome to the blogosphere, Dr. Laura! This follows her on-air use of the N-word to suggest that it shouldn't always be taken as a slur. It's not clear exactly who Schlessinger claims took her free speech away, though she suggests special interest groups are silencing her by pressuring sponsors. Without the ability to earn a living, she said, "I don't have the right to say what I need to say. My first amendment rights have been usurped." Schlessinger's announcement -- and her invocation of a constitutional right to earn a living from her speech -- was made on Larry King Live. In it, King and Schlessinger both indulged the idea that the issue is about whether its OK for black people to use the N-word but not OK for whites. "I thought I was trying to be helpful," she told King. "I thought I was making a philosophical point." Laura believes her use of the term illustrates an important point about semantics: that its offensiveness is rooted in context and history, and that we'll be happier if we look beyond our reactive sensitivitities to better understand our interlocutors' motives. But that "philosphical" point was never really the problem. Context does matter, and the context here was a caller suffering from daily encounters with racial discrimination in her family life. Schlessinger denied the reality of her caller's problem so she could veer off into a rant about political correctness and language. Laura's not quitting because her constitutional rights are under threat, but because she said the N-Word eleven times in an act of childish transgressive spite and can't take the heat. People get the criticism of our racial double-standards, but also get that she used that as a specious excuse to turn a caller's personal problems into an inane tirade about something else entirely. In watching the Larry King Live segment [Gawker TV], however, the most striking thing is how eager Schlessinger is to play the hapless, helpless victim herself. For someone in the business of giving life advice, bathos is clearly the new black.

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