Thursday, September 16, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Hard-to-burn, lightweight 3D printing goop can be used to print airplane parts

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:57 PM PDT

Sabic's Ultem 9085 is 3D printing goop for the Stratasys FDM machine; with a high burning point (and a tendency to self-extinguish) and low toxicity when burned, it can be used to make aircraft parts. Here's Joris Peels taking a brulee torch to a finished piece made of Ultem (admittedly, a brulee torch generates nothing like the heat from burning aviation fuel; but it's comparable to conventional and electrical fires).

We try to burn Ultem 9085 a 3D printing material for commercial aircraft (via Make)



Hoodie with a hidden Live Long and Prosper

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:54 PM PDT

Threadless's "Traditional Greeting" hoodie has a hand emblazoned on its front; unzip it halfway and you reveal the hidden Vulcan salute.

Traditional Greeting by Paulo Bruno (Thanks, Barry, via Submitterator!)



Astronauts' fingernails fall off

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:53 PM PDT

You know how you always wanted to be an astronaut, because you really wanted to have an EVA jaunt in the great empty of space? Well, good luck with that: it'll make your fingernails fall off. Some astronauts actually pull their own fingernails off before heading into space to get it over with. It turns out that wide-handed astronauts are at the highest risk of "fingernail delamination." NASA's Astronaut Glove Challenge has been running for several years, but still the nails fall off.
In several cases, sustained pressure on the fingertips during EVAs caused intense pain and led to the astronauts' nails detaching from their nailbeds, a condition called fingernail delamination.

While this condition doesn't prevent astronauts from getting their work done, it can become a nuisance if the loose nails gets snagged inside the glove. Also, moisture inside the glove can lead to secondary bacterial or yeast infections in the exposed nailbeds, the study authors say.

If the nail falls off completely, it will eventually grow back, although it might be deformed.

Astronauts' Fingernails Falling Off Due to Glove Design (via JWZ)

(Image: An Old Digit, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from chefranden's photostream)



Knot Chair: cozy, semi-stone-age

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:42 PM PDT

John Makepeace's Knot Chair, a finalist for the 2010 Prince Philip Designers Prize, poleaxed me this morning during my dawn RSS patrol. Something about it -- it seems so friendly, homey, something between a twig chair at a cottage and a furnishing from the Flintstones house. It's got the desiderata enzyme, whatever it is.

Prince Philip Designers Prize 2010 Shortlist Announced



Tiny, well-designed apartment is snug, cozy

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:39 PM PDT


Seattle's Steve Sauer (a former Boeing interiors engineer) has done up his 182 sqft apartment over two levels, with cleverly segmented nooks and crannies for different uses. It's as snug as a houseboat, and looks like it'd be a great place to live: "I wanted to compress my home to squirt me back out to the community.That was one of the philosophical reasons. I want to be able to shop daily, not store a lot and eat really well."

Tiny apartment shows the value of a good fit

(Image: BENJAMIN BENSCHNEIDER / THE SEATTLE TIMES)



Typographic zombie poster

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:33 PM PDT


The inaugural poster from a new site called freakingaweso.me features 978 zombie movies, games and books assembled into one awesome typographic zombie hand.

Zombies



Quest to Learn: video-game-based school

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:31 PM PDT

Sara Corbett's long NYT feature on the experimental Quest to Learn school in NYC, founded by game designer Katie Salen with some MacArthur and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dough, is awfully exciting. Q2L uses custom-designed video games and game-like activities to teach and focus attention. Instead of getting grades, you level up ("pre-novice," "novice," "apprentice," "senior" and "master."), and subjects are interdisciplinary -- there's a "Math and English" class. Students design and build their own games, starting with physical prototypes made from cardboard and the like.
In Smallab sessions, students hold wands and Sputnik-like orbs whose movements are picked up by 12 scaffold-mounted motion-capture cameras and have an immediate effect inside the game space, which is beamed from a nearby computer onto the floor via overhead projector. It is a little bit like playing a multiplayer Wii game while standing inside the game instead of in front of it. Students can thus learn chemical titration by pushing king-size molecules around the virtual space. They can study geology by building and shifting digital layers of sediment and fossils on the classroom floor or explore complementary and supplementary angles by racing the clock to move a giant virtual protractor around the floor.

As new as the Smallab concept is, it is already showing promise when it comes to improving learning results: Birchfield and his colleagues say that in a small 2009 study, they found that at-risk ninth graders in earth sciences scored consistently and significantly higher on content-area tests when they had also done Smallab exercises. A second study compared the Smallab approach with traditional hands-on lab experimentation, with the group that used mixed-reality again showing greater retention and mastery. As it is more generally with games, the cognitive elements at work are not entirely understood, but they are of great interest to a growing number of learning scientists. Did the students learn more using digital mixed-reality because the process was more physical than hearing a classroom lecture or performing a lab experiment? Because it was more collaborative or more visual? Or was it simply because it seemed novel and more fun?

Learning by Playing (Thanks, Menachem!)



No Accepted Medical Use? Three Perspectives on Medical Cannabis

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 07:37 PM PDT


The latest video from Reason.tv takes a look at the federal Schedule I classification of marijuana.

The U.S. government classifies marijuana—along with heroin and LSD—as a Schedule I drug, the most tightly restricted category of drugs in the United States. According to the federal government, Schedule I drugs are unsafe and have "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States."

Really?

As medical marijuana proponents have pointed out since the Controlled Substances Act was passed by Congress in 1970, cannabis has been used medicinally for thousands of years, and there has never been a reported case of a marijuana overdose. Moreover, in recent years clinical researchers around the world have demonstrated the medicinal value of cannabis.

We talked to a doctor, a pharmacist, and a patient to get three firsthand perspectives on medical cannabis. Special thanks to Dr. Donald Abrams, JoAnna LaForce and Don Grubbs.

No Accepted Medical Use? Three Perspectives on Medical Cannabis



Henry Winkler on Sound of Young America

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 05:12 PM PDT

Jesse Thorn interviewed the great Henry Winkler on The Sound of Young America.
201009151705Television legend Henry Winkler is best known for his role as Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli on Happy Days, but he's continued to add acting, producing, and directing credits to his name over the past thirty years. He's also co-written a series of children's books about a boy with learning disabilities, inspired by his own challenges with dyslexia.

You can see him currently as Dr. Sy Mittleman on the new season of the [adult swim] show Childrens' Hospital, airing Sundays at 10:30pm, and on USA's Royal Pains.

Another reason to like Henry Winkler: When my wife was in high school she worked as a parking valet for Chuck's Parking. Winkler hired them to valet for a party he threw, and when it was over, he gave each of the valets a generous tip and invited them in for snacks. She said he was very nice.

Henry Winkler on Sound of Young America



Camel saved from sinkhole in Oregon

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:55 PM PDT

201009151650

Moses the camel got stuck in a sinkhole, but Clackamas County firefighters pulled him out. (Thanks, Alan!)



Mark's article in The Atlantic about DIY education

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 04:30 PM PDT


I wrote a piece for October 2010 issue of The Atlantic called "School for Hackers: The do-it-yourself movement revives learning by doing." Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic interviewed me about it in the video above.

So it makes sense that members of the DIY movement see education itself as a field that's ripe for hands-on improvement. Instead of taking on the dull job of petitioning schools to change their obstinate ways, DIYers are building their own versions of schools, in the form of summer camps, workshops, clubs, and Web sites. Tinkering School in Northern California helps kids build go-karts, watchtowers, and hang gliders (that the kids fly in). Competitions like FIRST Robotics (founded by Segway inventor Dean Kamen) bring children and engineers together to design and build sophisticated robotics. "Unschooler" parents are letting their kids design their own curricula. Hacker spaces like NYC Resistor in Brooklyn and Crash Space in Los Angeles offer shop tools and workshops for making anything from iPad cases to jet packs. Kids in the Young Makers Program (just launched by Maker Media, Disney-Pixar, the Exploratorium, and TechShop) have built a seven-foot animatronic fire-breathing dragon, a stop-motion camera rig, a tool to lift roofing supplies, and new skateboard hardware.
School for Hackers



"Craigslist has terminated its adult services section."

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 03:27 PM PDT

"Craigslist has terminated its adult services section. Those who formerly posted adult services ads on Craigslist will now advertise at countless other venues."—William Clinton Powell, director of customer relations and law enforcement relations at Craigslist, speaking in a hearing on sex trafficking of minors before the House Judiciary Committee.

Prison inmates vs bulls

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:54 PM PDT


Maria Galperina on the documentary, Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo.

See female prison inmates carted out in cattle trailers to maybe get hoof-impaled at the "rough stock rodeo." They tear up from joy, because they can really "touch freedom"… if freedom is a trampling bull.  Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo is a touching doc where "We don't want anyone to get hurt or get killed, but if they do, you darn sure don't want to miss it."
Inmates Vs. Bulls: American Entertainment



Carved vegetable skulls of Dimitri Tsykalov

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:36 PM PDT


Dimitri Tsykalov is an artist who carves many useful and enjoyable sculptures from vegetables, notably some extremely excellent skulls.

Dimitri Tsykalov (via Medgadget)



Englishman Who Posted Himself: biography of a postal experimenter

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:35 PM PDT

A new book called The Englishman who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects tells the amazing story of W. Reginald Bray, a stamp collector who experimented with mailing odd objects (including himself) through the Royal Mail. Whoever said philately will get you nowhere?

The New Yorker has a small and edifying gallery of his postal experiments.

Perhaps most remarkably, he posted himself, becoming the first man to send a human through the mail in 1900, and then, through registered mail, in 1903. Tingey's book includes a picture of Bray being delivered to his own doorstep--presumably the sort of package likely to please the lady of the house.

And Bray did not stop there. He sent postcards crocheted by his mother. He made out address fields in cryptic verse, or to the inhabitants of empty caves, or describing only the latitude and longitude of the destination, or with a picture of the location to which the article was meant to be delivered (see, in the slideshow below, the postcard made out to "The Resident Nearest This Rock," for example). He threw messages into bottles and solicited the world's largest collection of autographs, including ones from Gary Cooper and Laurence Olivier, Charlie Chaplain and Maurice Chevalier. The image that emerges from this antic and visually arresting volume is of a blithe English rogue, testing the system, stretching its limits--an experimenter, playing the most relentless, and amusing, of pranks.

The Eccentric Englishman (Thanks, Fonsecalloyd, via Submitterator)



Alviso's Medicinal All-Salt: hand-harvested medicinal cure-all salt

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 02:28 PM PDT

201009151418

Jon Cohrs and Morgan Levy are selling bottles of Alviso's Medicinal All-Salt: hand-harvested medicinal cure-all salt for $52.50 each.

Are you feeling depressed? Sick of paying exorbitant rates for birth control? Traditionally, medical conditions are treated through expensive appointments and prescription drugs. Alviso's Medicinal All-Salt is a unique low-dosage cocktail of all our most commonly used drugs, brought together in one simple salty remedy, naturally.

The All-Salt process harvests two popular commodities, sea salt and recycled pharmaceuticals from water treatment plants, to produce one fine medicinal product: a cure-all salt for every condition, hand harvested and sun dried for purity.

Inhabitants of San Jose have long harvested sea salt from the San Francisco Bay's ocean waters. Today, Bay waters are fed by more than ocean tides and freshwater streams. Sewage piped from urban Bay Area communities to water pollution control plants along the Bay's edges drains into the bay. Wastewater treatment plants filter out most toxic contaminants, but not the pharmaceuticals that many of us flush down our toilets - anything from antibiotics to antidepressants that are not completely absorbed by our bodies. Valuable drug compounds make it through treatment intact and collect in Bay saltwater, where they are available to be re-harvested and re-used.

Medicinal All-Salt products are for sale now! And, research and instructions on how to understand and make use of the bounty of the yet-unregulated pharmaceutical disposal industry available at All Salt 

Alviso's Medicinal All-Salt

How to give an opossum a "proper pedicure"

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 03:51 PM PDT

"Do not put false fingernails on an opossum. I cannot emphasize this enough." Video link.

The uploader and star (well, the human star) of this video, ME Pearl, has no fewer than nine opossum videos on her channel.

And her website is not to be missed. Read the "Herstory." Or the Pearl Prophecies.

(images courtesy of mepearl.com; link via BB Submitterator, thanks Freddie Freelance!)

Update: Is she a genuinely endearing wacko, or is it viral marketing? My money's now on the latter. "Site Design and edits by www.companyv.com," says the website. Lots of squirrel and critter stuff here and here, and her web designers are in Santa Monica. Hmmmm. (Thanks, Andrea James!)




Free climbing a tower higher than the Empire State Building

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 06:36 PM PDT


This video has been making the rounds, but in case you missed it, it's a real thrill. I watched it in full-screen mode, like my friend Jim Leftwich suggested. My palms got sweaty and the soles of my feet ached, like they do whenever I'm on the edge of a cliff or other high place without a barrier between me and a plunge to death.

"Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" cartoonist "going ghost" on FBI's advice

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 11:49 AM PDT

On the advice of the FBI, the cartoonist formerly known as Molly Norris has reportedly changed her name and gone into hiding, after "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" resulted in consequences for which she was ill-prepared.

Age-defying drug discovered, claims Russian scientist

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 11:42 AM PDT


A Russian scientist named Vladimir Skulachev says he's come up with an anti-aging drug. Inhuman Experiments discusses it:

It appears that Skulachev has synthesized a mitochondrially targeted antioxidant. There's no detailed information in the article, but based on the papers Skulachev's group has published in the past, it looks like the compound in question is SkQ1, an antioxidant attached to a positively charged ion. Experiments have shown that SkQ1 prolongs the lifespan of a variety of species, including mice (link, link).

Clinical trials on humans are underway, and if everything goes smoothly, the drug will be out in a few years. After successful results from animal studies using eye drops, Skulachev tried it on his own cataract. After six months, his cataract was gone.

So what's the catch here? Well, looking at the lifespan data from mice, they're not talking about an increase in maximum lifespan but in median lifespan. The oldest mice receiving the drug did not live longer than the oldest mice in the control group, they just had a squared mortality curve. In other words, the mice that got SkQ1 made it to old age more often than the control mice.

Russian Scientist Claims to Have Found Cure for Aging



Tom the Dancing Bug: God Man in "A Necessary Invention"

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 11:11 AM PDT

ttdb091410_thumb.jpg

ttdb091410.jpg

Images of alcohol under a microscope

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 10:46 AM PDT

Time Photoessays 2010 Micro Liquor Micro Liquor 02
This is an image of tequila under a microscope with 1000x magnification. Unclear whether this is well tequila or god's piss. Time magazine has more micrographs of libations. "What Booze Looks Like Under A Microscope"

Ant death spiral

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 10:02 AM PDT


From The Ant Room:

This is one of my favorite things about ants — the ant death spiral. Actually, it's a circular mill, first described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die.
Ant Death Spiral (Via Cynical-C)



Is the FDA about to ban antibiotics for cows? Maryn McKenna explains ...

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 10:15 AM PDT

cowbiotics.jpg

There's been a flurry of headlines the past couple days about new FDA rules for antibiotic use in animals meant for the table. To get a better understanding of what's going on and what it means, I turned to my favorite Scary Disease Girl, Maryn McKenna, author of Superbug, a book about the antibiotic-resistant bacteria that evolve when we use too many antibiotics, too often, on both people and animals. Here's what she had to say:

Short version: Yes, the FDA is considering doing something; the guidelines the NYT talked about were actually published in June. No, they're not banning antibiotic use; what they're talking about is voluntary guidelines, not legislation or regulations. Yes, there is abundant science to support making this move; it's been clear for decades that antibiotic overuse in farming fosters the growth of drug-resistant organisms that affect humans. No, the agricultural industry does not agree.

And now, the long version ...

Antibiotic use in farming breaks down into three major categories. There's therapeutic use, giving antibiotics to sick animals to treat disease. (No one that I know of argues with that.)

There's prophylactic use, giving antibiotics to healthy animals to prevent them developing diseases.

And there's growth promotion: That's giving small doses of antibiotics to animals because it helps the animal put on weight faster, which if you're growing animals for the purposes of getting them to market weight and selling them, looks like an efficient goal.

Growth promotion—sometimes called subtherapeutic dosing or "for production purposes" in the FDA's very careful languag—has been around since the 1940s, when a couple of scientists at Lederle Labs wanted to find a use for the carbohydrate mash left over from manufacturing chlortetracycline, and decided to try it out as a chicken feed. It's been fully banned in the European Union for four years on evidence that those small doses contribute to the development of resistant bacteria in animals and the farm environment.

One of the chief drivers of the EU ban was a link between the use of a drug called avoparcin on farms, and the occurrence of the virulent hospital organism vancomycin-resistant Enterococci (VRE) in humans; avoparcin and the last-resort human drug vancomycin are very similar. When avoparcin was removed from use, VRE rates declined.

The FDA has been looking at growth promoting antibiotics since the 1970s, but it has never banned them, and it isn't proposing to do so now. What it wants, instead, is for agriculture to agree to two things: Voluntarily stop using using subtherapeutic growth-promoting dosing, and involve veterinarians in the administration of antibiotics to farm animals.

There's legislation in Congress, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, that would go much further, but the FDA is treading carefully and starting small. They may have tougher action in mind, though: Deputy FDA Commissiner Dr. Joshua Sharfstein said in testimony in June: "We have the regulatory mechanisms and the industry knows that. But we are also interested in what things can be done just voluntarily that they would do them. And I think it'll be interesting to see how the industry responds to this."

Maryn McKenna is a journalist and author and blogs about scary diseases and food policy at Superbug.

Image: Some rights reserved by foxypar4

Make a kayak balance stool

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 09:41 AM PDT

Erik of Homegrown Evolution make a kayak balance stool. It looks fun!
kayak balance stool Today I canceled my YMCA membership and started to put together my own home gym. Bored with the usual gym accouterments, I've set out to build some fitness equipment on my own starting with a kayak balance stool.

I discovered this idea in Christopher Cunningham's book Building the Greenland Kayak. To make your kayak balance stool, find a piece of scarp wood. I used a 2 x 8 and cut it to fit my ass to toe dimensions. Cut two end boards, each a foot long. Attach the end boards to the sittin' board with some bolts or sturdy screws. The deeper the curve on the bottom of the end boards, the more tippy it gets. Cunningham suggests a depth of 1 1/2 inches to start. I'd suggest making that curve a bit on the "pointy" side, as any flatness will lead to a lack of tippitude.


A New Fitness Craze: The Kayak Balance Stool



Yoga Bear

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 10:59 AM PDT

The Guardian has a photo gallery of Santra, a female brown bear, doing what looks an awful lot like yoga stretches one morning at the Ahtari zoo in Finland. A human visitor named Meta Penca took the photos. Her asana series went on for about 15 minutes. In an accompanying story, a yoga teacher guesses that she's probably doing this "to stay sane" in the unnatural, crazy-making captive zoo environment. I'd have preferred to hear from an animal behavior expert in the article, but I do have a hunch he's right.

Maggie in St. Paul tonight w/ Non Sequitur Futurists Brigade

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 01:03 PM PDT

Minneapolitans and St. Paulites: I'll be in St. Paul tonight for a meeting of the Non Sequitur Futurists Brigade—5:30 at the bar in The Lexington. I don't exactly know what to expect, but with a name like that (and what with the bar) we can hardly go wrong.

1980s classics in chip and song

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 08:39 AM PDT

Arman Bohn has a 1980s synthpop cover album out, sequenced with a Nintendo DSi running the KORG DS-10 Plus cart. You can listen to clips on his website and buy it here for a fiver.

10 Years Ago: The Anarchist Cookbook

Posted: 06 Sep 2010 02:22 PM PDT

Ten years ago on Boing Boing I wrote about how the author of The Anarchist Cookbook renounced his book on Amazon.com
201009061418 The Anarchist Cookbook was written during 1968 and part of 1969 soon after I graduated from high school. At the time, I was 19 years old and the Vietnam War and the so-called "counter culture movement" were at their height. I was involved in the anti-war movement and attended numerous peace rallies and demonstrations. The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in.

...

The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this.

During the years that followed its publication, I went to university, married, became a father and a teacher of adolescents. These developments had a profound moral and spiritual effect on me. I found that I no longer agreed with what I had written earlier and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the ideas that I had put my name to. In 1976 I became a confirmed Anglican Christian and shortly thereafter I wrote to Lyle Stuart Inc. explaining that I no longer held the views that were expressed in the book and requested that The Anarchist Cookbook be taken out of print. The response from the publisher was that the copyright was in his name and therefore such a decision was his to make - not the author's. In the early 1980's, the rights for the book were sold to another publisher. I have had no contact with that publisher (other than to request that the book be taken out of print) and I receive no royalties.

Unfortunately, the book continues to be in print and with the advent of the Internet several websites dealing with it have emerged. I want to state categorically that I am not in agreement with the contents of The Anarchist Cookbook and I would be very pleased (and relieved) to see its publication discontinued. I consider it to be a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print.

The author of The Anarchist Cookbook (written in 1968-69) tells Amazon customers that he "would like to see the publication discontinued."



Ninja Steve animated

Posted: 15 Sep 2010 08:18 AM PDT

Taiwan's news animators tackle Ninja Steve Jobs in 20 seconds. Thanks, Joel!
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