Friday, September 3, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Heavily stapled phone-pole

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 08:43 PM PDT


Behold, the glory of a thoroughly enstapleified telephone pole, snapped last week in Toronto.

Phone poles



Typewriter key jewelry

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 08:18 PM PDT

O_O

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 07:37 PM PDT

Hurricane Earl IV

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 05:08 PM PDT

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Xeni posted a great NASA image of the 2010 Hurricane Earl earlier this afternoon, which got me hunting around for some information on Hurricane Earls past. After all, this is not the first Earl. There've been three others, as well as some lesser Tropical Storms of the same name. The naming lists for these things are used again every seven years, and individual names are only retired after they've been attached to a particularly damaging storm. Earl, so far, has not.

When the names do get retired, replacing them isn't easy. According to Time magazine, there's a whole list of types of names that aren't allowed. Over the years, the meteorologists in charge of naming have resorted to flipping through the weirder end of baby name books and adding friends' names to the list.

Time: How are hurricanes and tropical storms named?

Above: Hurricanes Earl and Danielle in their 1998 incarnations.

Another oil rig explosion, and the science of dispersants

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 04:42 PM PDT

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Another oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded today. All crew members survived. Right now, nobody knows whether or not the explosion caused a leak in any of the seven wells that the rig collects from. There have been reports of an oil slick on the water near the fire, but that could just as easily be from the finite amount of oil stored on the rig—which would still a spill, but a significantly less problematic one.

Other than that, there's not really much information out about this right now. If anybody's learned anything from Deepwater Horizon it seems to be that you're better off, PR-wise, if you don't have to correct everything you say two days later.

To give you something to chew over in the meantime, though, Deep Sea News has been doing a really interesting series on the science (such as it is) of oil dispersants. It's interesting, not just because of the basic facts, but also because it gets into the details of why we don't know more.

Dispersants must be applied successfully and have a high effectiveness once in ocean waters. This sounds easy, in principle--once you've perfected your Corexit formula in the lab, just spray it from a helicopter, and voila! Except there are a lot of factors which you also have to take into account: the composition of the oil spilled, sea energy, whether the oil has been subjected to weathering at all, exact type of dispersant used and the amount which you sprayed, and ocean temperature/salinity.

Thank goodness for all those lab tests over the years which figured all this stuff out, you say. Um, well actually it seems like even designing simulation experiments is difficult, and different tests can report different effectiveness scores for the same dispersant. It is difficult to accurately scale up lab tests in order to predict dispersant action on real spills. Older studies used methods and analyses which have since been discredited. Wave-tank tests can probably provide upper limits on dispersant effectiveness, but there are SEVENTEEN (!!) critical factors that require strict control for accurate results (Fingas 2002). Field tests in open ecosystems are even worse for measuring the fate of oil and controlling variables. In terms of measuring dispersant effectiveness, tank tests, field tests, and lab tests all disagree. Awesome.

Part 1: How effective are dispersants on real oil spills?

Part 2: How toxic are dispersants?

Part 3: Do dispersants really promote degradation of oil?

Image of a random oil rig: Some rights reserved by kenhodge13

Preschoolers being radio-tagged

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 04:37 PM PDT

Mary Robinette Kowal sez, "Preschoolers in Richmond, California are being handed RFID jerseys when they get to school. The ACLU points out that in addition to the privacy concerns, these are not secure tags. It has the potential to make kidnapping and stalking very easy."
The editors of Scientific American said it well back in May 2005: "Tagging ... kids becomes a form of indoctrination into an emerging surveillance society that young minds should be learning to question."
Don't Let Schools Chip Your Kids (Thanks, Mary, via Submitterator!)



Cartoonist Pete Emslie posing with Julie Newmar

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 03:59 PM PDT

201009021524 I can't stop looking at this photo of talented cartoonist Pete Emslie posing with my favorite Catwoman, the beautiful Julie Newmar.

Pete Emslie at Fan Expo 2010



My Name is (Hurricane) Earl

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 03:40 PM PDT

How astronauts see Hurricane Earl. This image acquired by NASA two days ago:

The relatively placid view from the International Space Station belied the potent forces at work in Hurricane Earl as it hovered over the tropical Atlantic Ocean on August 30. With maximum sustained winds of 135 miles (215 kilometers) per hour, the storm was classified as a category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale as it passed north of the Virgin Islands.

Lowbrow Tarot Deck

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 04:12 PM PDT

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Curator and artist Aunia Kahn selected a group of 23 lowbrow/pop surrealist artists to interpret one card each of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck. Hi-Fructose has a sneak preview of 14 of the cards, which will debut October 1 with a full show at Los Angeles's La Luz de Jesus Gallery, a book, and of course a deck of cards. Above left, card back by Daniel Martin Diaz; right, The Devil by Chet Zar

The LowBrow Tarot Card Project preview (Hi-Fructose)

LOWBROW + TAROT + PROJECT

UPDATE: You can see the entire show at the La Luz de Jesus site here.

Looking for Bigfoot in Minnesota

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 03:14 PM PDT

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Yesterday, while flipping through my Minneapolis Continuing Education fall catalog, I noticed a class on the Great Mysteries of Science, which turned out to be lake monsters, Sasquatch and UFOs. The class was to be taught by a retired University of Minnesota professor who has since participated in an expedition to study said Sasquatch.

Now, this surprised me, because I had previously pegged Bigfoot as one of those coastal elites, who spent all his time in the Pacific Northwest and shunned the forests here in flyover country. But, apparently, Sasquatch is a Real American after all. In fact, sightings are common enough in northern Minnesota that the Bigfoot Field Research Organization recently organized a Sasquatch search party up there. Forty-two people went along, including my friend, travel journalist Frank Bures, who wrote about the experience of "'squatch hunting" for Minnesota Monthly magazine.

We'd been split into 15 camps, and we were carrying an armament of investigative equipment: night-vision scopes, walkie-talkies, GPS, infrared cameras, thermal-recording devices, video and audio recorders, and more. Someone handed me a thermal imager, which would show bright heat signatures of the living things in the forest. I scanned the area around us but saw nothing except a few warm rocks and something that may have been a raccoon.

"We've got some activity here," came another report across the radio. "They're walking around our site." Whenever the group laughed, apparently, there was a rustling in the woods. When they laughed really hard, there was even more rustling.

Those lucky bastards!

Just that morning I had seen the ghost of a footprint in the soft sphagnum near the other group's tent. It looked not quite human, but not quite ape. It had toes, but it was hard to tell what kind of biped might have made it. Two of the people in that camp, a young couple who had once recorded sounds thought to be a Sasquatch running through their hometown near Cass Lake, had heard many strange noises and seen odd shapes just beyond the light of their campfire the previous night.

"We can hear it walking past our tent," they now called over the radio. "It sounds like it's wearing corduroys."

"So," someone in our group replied dryly, "Sasquatch isn't very stylish."

The article contains more science than you might expect. After being told about the alleged Sasquatch's alleged ability to "zap" potential prey into submission with ultra-low frequency sounds, Frank muses on the vast gulf between the deeply silly Sasquatch and the Sasquatch which may, at least, have some tenuous connection to reality.

From Bigfoot's invisible energy beams, it's not far to the edge of the cliff that many enthusiasts have happily thrown themselves over, leaping from simple zoological fact into a morass of New Age nonsense. ... Even if I did want to believe, these things make it very hard.

The notion that there are small populations of unknown primates around the world got an unexpected boost when Scientific American published a cover story in 2000, titled: "We Were Not Alone." It began: "Our species had at least 15 cousins. Only we remain. Why?" The article said our last relative died out 25,000 years ago. But a 16th cousin was added in 2003, when the existence of the "hobbit," a human-like creature that scientists believe died out 12,000 years ago, was confirmed in Indonesia.

For years, locals in that country had told stories of Orang Pendek, a small hairy person that lived in the forest, yet such tales were dismissed as folklore. Now that science has begun to rewrite the evolutionary family tree, the question arises: Are we really alone?

Recently, scientists with more than a few credentials have started to take that question seriously, people like primatologist Jane Goodall (who, in 2002, told Talk of the Nation host Ira Flatow, "You'll be amazed when I tell you I'm sure they exist") and Jeff Meldrum, an anthropology professor at Idaho State University. In his book, Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, Meldrum looks at the assembled evidence and finds that some Sasquatch footprints have a midfoot joint that's common in nonhuman primates while others have toe prints running lengthwise instead of across the foot. And new examinations of the old Patterson-Gimlin footage suggest the figure's torso and limbs don't match typical human anatomy.

But what about the zapping? Seriously? Zapping?

... After all, as Meldrum pointed out, it was recently discovered that tigers stun their prey with a blast of infrasound just before they pounce.

They zap them.

Image: Some rights reserved by Wayne_Parrack

Rob Cockerham's quest for a solid ice beer tray

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 03:13 PM PDT

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Rob say: "I spent way too much time making a solid-ice beer tray, but I still feel it was worth the effort. To be truly complete, I should have test floated it in a pool or hot tub, but the bottle opener kept short-circuiting my experiments."

The Quest for a Solid Ice Beer Tray



Kids' Rube Goldberg machine

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 03:00 PM PDT

Here's video of the triumphant success of an elaborate kids' Rube Goldberg machine, created at an "informal Rube Goldberg summer camp for kids ages 3-8." I know nothing about this summer-camp, but it seems like one of the great Good Things of our era -- especially judging from the awesome elation of the kids after the successful run!

How to Get a Beach Ball Into a Galvanized Bucket (the Hard Way)



White tiger turning black

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:58 PM PDT


A white tiger cub born at the Vandalur zoo in Chennai, India is turning black. From The Telegraph:

Biologists believe a large presence of melanin, the dark skin pigment, is the likely reason for its unusual colouring.

Tigers' skin colour is determined by the presence of black and yellow pigments. In most tigers, the colour yellow dominates over black to give them their characteristic colouring.

"In this cub, the reverse has happened — black is the dominant colour," senior zoo biologist Dr Manimozhi told The Times of India.

"It is the dominance of yellow pigment that enables tigers to survive in the wild," he added. "In fact, this is the reason why most white tigers are found only in zoos and not in the wild," Dr Manimozhi said.

"White tiger cub in Indian zoo turns black"

Mario mural

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:50 PM PDT

Quiznos sandwich: reality versus advertising

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:49 PM PDT

Wendy's restaurants beverage-handling training songs

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:43 PM PDT

Consumerist reader SteveDave has dug up a pair of 1990s-vintage Wendy's training videos explaining how to serve beverages. They're masterpieces of shitty, squirm-worthy industrial video, especially the insincerely rapped "cold beverages" short (they should have just licensed the kick ass G Love and Special Sauce song). Looking at the Submitterator queue, I see that Cassandra found this one last week, too -- thanks, Cassandra!

The Coolest & Hottest Wendy's Training Videos Ever



Mopion cargo bike

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:45 PM PDT

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Our friends at Biomega designed this cool-looking cargo bike for Puma.

PUMA Mopion is rock steady for the daily grind. It mixes city bike features, and cargo bike features, making it a sturdy companion. It comes with a super-size innovative front carrier for heavy duty transport of your groceries or other needs. Developed for city dwellers, Mopion features a light aluminum frame, making it a one-of-a-kind lightweight cargo bike weighing only 22 kilos. The geometry holds the body in a slightly inclined, but still heads-up position for navigational ease and exceptional balancing.
PUMA Mopion



HOWTO: Organic, erratic gears

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:35 PM PDT

Here's a mesmerizing three-minute tutorial on cutting erratic "organic" gears that spin freely despite their odd shapes. After watching it, I was left wondering how you'd make a third (and fourth, and fifth) gear that could mesh with the system without repeating the earlier gear forms, to create an enormous, improbable Rube Goldberg display.

How-To: Make Organically-Shaped Gears



German "secure" ID cards compromised on national TV, gov't buries head in sand

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:31 PM PDT

A German TV programme showed hackers from the Chaos Computer Club using off-the-shelf equipment to extract personal information from the government's new "secure" ID card, which stores scans of fingerprints and a six-digit PIN that can be used to sign official documents and declarations.
In an interview with the show, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said he saw no immediate reason to act on the alleged security issue.

Meanwhile on Tuesday the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) rejected the Plusminus' criticism of the new ID card. The agency's personal identification expert Jens Bender said the card was secure and called the combination of an integrated chip with a PIN number a "significant security improvement compared to today's standard process of user name and password."

But a classic Trojan horse program that logs keystrokes remained a threat, he admitted, because users must use keyboards in addition to the scanners.

New government ID cards easily hacked (via /.)



The West Chester Guerilla Drive-In MacGuffin Quest

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:30 PM PDT


John Young says:

Boing Boing has mentioned us at the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In a couple of times now (here and here). We show 16-millimeter movies at secret locations that match the film, projected from the sidecar of my 1977 BMW motorcycle. In order to find out where and when the movies will be, folks must find the MacGuffin -- an AM transmitter hidden in a waterproof Pelican case.

This year, we raised the bar on the quest. The MacGuffin is hidden in public. In order to finish the quest, folks must memorize and recite Percy Shelley's "Ozymandias", the most metal poem ever written. Some of the folks present will know what is going on, but they will not let on that they know until the recitation is complete. And the reciter can't half-ass it, either. Unless they chew the scenery, unless they really SELL the bombastic majesty of the lone and level sands, the judges won't reveal themselves, and you won't even be sure that you're reciting in the right place.

To demonstrate a proper recitation, I asked Hunter Davis to do a reading. Hunter is the fellow who did the "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" in the voice of Sir Ian McKellen. Here's the result, setting the bar for all our MacGuffin quest-ers. You must be at least THIS METAL when reciting the poem!

MacGuffin quest on the Guerilla Drive-In site



Laser cut and 3D printed decorative objects derived from geography

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 03:04 PM PDT


Fluid Forms is a 3D printing and laser-cutting company that produces a wide range of objects based on maps, satellite images, and other photos. They started off with topographical maps of physical places printed in sterling silver with pinbacks, and now they've expanded their repertoire. The new offerings include necklaces with steel charms based on your photos, or maps (inexplicably, these are marketed as "necklaces for men," though I can't imagine why they're not unisex -- the same charms are also available as earrings) and acrylic/wood clocks with finely cut lines reproducing streetmaps.

I love the idea of using "emotionally significant" places as motifs for jewelry and other decorative items. On the 3D printing side, it's a clever way of giving everyone a ready-made, personally important 3D mesh to use as the basis for an object.



Mad Men discover the laptop computer

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:44 PM PDT

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Mad Men's Ken Cosgrove and Harry Crane stumble upon a MacBook Pro about 40 years before its time. What did the web look like in 1965? From a terrific Rolling Stone gallery of behind-the-scenes Mad Men photos by James Minchin III.

Inside 'Mad Men': On Set and Behind the Scenes

Applying "ownership" to links, public domain material does more harm than good

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:03 PM PDT

My latest Locus Magazine column, "Proprietary Interest," talks about the way that our instinctive ownership claims over the stuff we find and post to the Internet do more harm than good. When we claim that public domain images, interesting links, or other net-fodder are "ours," we invite a muddle in which others make even more compelling ownership claims. For example, if the old public-domain Lysol ad you scan is "yours," then why shouldn't it be Lysol's?. This is a world in which we spend all our time arguing about whose interest is most legitimate, instead of sharing, discussing, criticizing and enjoying the world around us.
Any ethical claim to ownership over a scan of a public domain work should be treated with utmost suspicion, not least because of all the people with stronger claims than the scanner! To be consistent with the ethical principle that one should never use another's work without permission (regardless of the law or the public domain), every scanner would have a duty to ask, at the very least, the corporations whose products are advertised in these old chestnuts (the very best of them are for brands that persist to today, since these vividly illustrate the way that our world has changed - for example, see the very frank Lysol douche ad). For if scanning a work confers an ownership interest, then surely paying for the ad's production offers an even more compelling claim!

And the publishers of the magazines and the newspapers - to scan is one thing, but what about the firm that paid to physically print the edition that we make the scan from? And then there are the copywriters and illustrators and their heirs - if scanning an ad confers a proprietary interest, then surely creating the ad should give rise to an even greater claim?

We do acknowledge these claims, at least a little. A good archivist notes the source. A good critic notes the creator. But that is the extent of the claim's legitimacy. If we afford descendants and publishers and printers and commissioners their own little pocket of customary right-of-refusal over their works, we would eliminate the ability to keep these works alive in our culture. For these owed courtesies multiply geometrically - think of the challenge of getting all of Dickens' or Twains' far-flung heirs to grant permission to do anything with their ancestors' works. What a lopsided world it would be if ten seconds' scanner work with the public domain demanded 100 hours' correspondence and permission-begging to be ''polite!''

Proprietary Interest



Student sues school for not preventing him from attaching electrodes to his nipples

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 02:03 PM PDT

TipEx's clever, raunchy YouTube ad

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 01:53 PM PDT

TipEx (a Commonwealth analogue for Wite-Out and other correction-tape products) has an ingenious and engaging YouTube marketing campaign: a video called "NSFW: A hunter shoots a bear," branches off into a kind of video-text-adventure, where you are invited to type verbs into a box and see what the bear and the hunter do with one another (you can get funny results out of "fuck," of course, and also "gets high with" and "dances" -- I'm sure there's more). It's a kind of next-generation Subservient Chicken, and the (no doubt blisteringly expensive) creative reworking of YouTube's familiar user-interface makes it even more click-trancey than its forebears.

This is how to use YouTube to sell a product. (Thanks, Copyranter!)



Pedal-powered farm machinery for use in rural Guatemala

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 01:46 PM PDT

Maya Pedal is a Guatemalan NGO that works with international volunteers and local experts to remanufacture old bicycles to serve as "people-powered farm machines." The dozens of "Bicimaquina" designs include bike-powered washing machines, blenders, grain mills, water irrigation devices and animal-feed mills.

Up to ten volunteers from around the world take up residency in San Andreas Itzapas each year for several weeks at a time. Based on bicycle parts contributed by their partner organizations around the world, they work with Mr. Marroquin and his staff to produce between five and ten bicimaquinas a month, and up to fifty over the course of a year. Roughly half the working time at Maya Pedal is devoted building these machines, and the remainder is directed to an extensive bicycle maintenance program for the residents of the city. The bicimaquinas are sold locally for the cost of manufacturing. Several family-run businesses have developed from the bicimaquinas program including a shop that grinds different grains for customers, and a building contractor that uses a bicycle-powered concrete compaction machine at construction sites in the region.
Maya Pedal (Thanks, Hughadam, via Submitterator!)



SPECIAL FEATURE: Death in Space

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 01:41 PM PDT

The U.S. has plans for a manned visit to Mars by the mid-2030s. The ESA and Russia have sketched out a similar joint mission, and it is claimed that China's space program has the same objective. Apart from their destination, all these plans share something in common: extraordinary danger for the explorers. What happens if someone dies out there, months away from Earth?

Read the rest



More free tickets available for special Boing Boing screening of CATFISH

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 01:51 PM PDT

201009021306 It turns out there are more free tickets available for the special Boing Boing screening of CATFISH in Los Angeles on Wednesday, September 8. Grab one while you can!

Read the announcement here.

Reserve tickets here.

Warning: LSD turns hot dogs into screaming trolls with 7 children

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 12:56 PM PDT

Case Study: LSD, a PSA produced by Lockheed Aircraft (!) in 1969.

Trailer for Walking Dead series on AMC

Posted: 02 Sep 2010 12:02 PM PDT


Here's the trailer for the AMC series based on the fantastic, long-running comic book series about a zombie apocalypse, The Walking Dead. It premieres on Halloween night!
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