Monday, September 20, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Amateur Russian low-budg Transformers short out-bad-asses Hollywood film

Posted: 20 Sep 2010 04:30 AM PDT

Transformers from repey815 on Vimeo.

A Russian amateur filmmaker called Alexander Semenov produced this 2.5 minute bootleg Transformers short with a couple of sub-$1,000 cameras, two hours' of footage and a month in the editing suite. It is insanely badass: a perfect vision of an alternate universe where shirtless Russian thugs go bot-to-bot on dusty distant roads; more fun that the big-budget Hollywood equivalent.

Russian Transformers short delivers more awesome than Hollywood version



R2D2 home entertainment center integrates 11 consoles, projector

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 11:45 PM PDT


Brian DeVitis, a UCLA mechanical engineering grad student, has spent the past three years modding a giant R2D2-shaped Pepsi dispenser into a home entertainment system with eleven integrated game consoles, a projector, and eight-way sound.

This appears to be an update of the eight-console R2D2 I wrote about last September -- either DeVitis has been adding more stuff to his bot, or there's two of them out there.

DeVitis's gallery

Fort90 coverage



Journal of a 6 year old's 3-year whaling ship voyage in 1868

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 11:39 PM PDT

Scalzi, Wheaton, friends do DRM-free ebook to benefit Lupus foundation

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 11:46 PM PDT


John Scalzi sez,
Wil Wheaton, John Scalzi and Subterranean Press are proud to announce the publication of CLASH OF THE GEEKS, a special and fantastical electronic chapbook. It features stories by Wheaton, Scalzi, New York Times bestseller Patrick Rothfuss, Norton Award winner and Hugo Best Novel nominee Catherynne M. Valente, Hugo and Nebula Award nominee Rachel Swirsky, and others, and is for the benefit of the Michigan/Indiana affiliate of the Lupus Alliance of America.

The chapbook is available DRM-free in multiple electronic formats at http://unicornpegasuskitten.com. It is free to download, but voluntary payment is strongly encouraged, via Paypal or by tax-deductible donation, with links to both provided at the unicornpegasuskitten.com Web site. All proceeds from this chapbook will go to the Michigan/Indiana affiliate of the Lupus Alliance of America.

The stories in the chapbook are each based on an image created by artist Jeff Zugale at the direction of Scalzi, in which Scalzi, portrayed as an axe-wielding orc, is confronted by Wheaton, who is wearing a clown sweater and holding a spear whilst astride a flying unicorn pegasus kitten. Each author was encouraged to use their own imagination to explain what was going on in the picture and why. The results were diverse, imaginative, and given the caliber of the contributors, unsurprisingly well-done.

In addition to the professional writers who agreed to contribute works, Wheaton, Scalzi and Subterranean Press also ran a "fan fiction" contest, in which anyone could submit a short story based on the picture. From hundreds of submissions, two stories, by Bernadette Durbin and Scott Mattes, were chosen. In addition, songwriter John Anealio composed a ballad, the musical transcription of which is included in the chapbook, and online gaming community legend Stephen Toulouse contributed a tech-oriented one-act play.

CLASH OF THE GEEKS (Thanks, John!)



Retro-futuristic GM bus designs from the Parade of Progress

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 09:57 PM PDT


From Dark Roasted Blend, a gallery of GM concept-bus designs built for an event called the "Parade of Progress": "One of twelve beauties built by General Motors, this is a self-contained display and transport vehicle created by the GM design staff under Harley Earl's direction. Opening side, lighting, retractable stage, distinctive center 'cupola' cockpit driving position and dual wheel front axle. Used in the 'Parade of Progress' touring exhibit created by 'Boss' Kettering that complemented the GM 'Motoramas' from 1940 through 1956."

Vintage & Modern Concept Buses (Thanks, Salimfadhley, via Submitterator!)



Giant peaceful animals towering over Tokyo

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 09:52 PM PDT


Shuichi Nakano's "Searching for Paradise" paintings show fanciful giant, gentle zoo animals towering over iconic Tokyo landscapes, quietly going about their business. They're really beautiful and peaceful. Shown here, "Chill at 5:25" ("５時２５分の寒気").

１３年目の奇跡 via Pink Tentacle and Geisha Asobi)



Vintage Rootes automotive ads in Russian and English

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 09:39 PM PDT


LiveJournal Vintage Ads group member valaamov_osel scanned this 1961 Rootes automotive booklet that is inexplicably in both some Cyrillic language (I'm assuming Russian) and English. It's dozens of pages of pure vintage auto-ad gold, especially the heavy goods/passenger vehicles with names like "Gamecock" and "Avenger."

Rootes ad. 1961.



Custom skull shoes

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 09:31 PM PDT

Radium woo: the bad health science of yesteryear wants to irradiate your colon

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 09:27 PM PDT


Modern quackery might be full of terrible, life-threatening health advice, but it's really not got a patch on the golden age of radium-based medicine, when the newly discovered radioactive material was held to cure practically anything, especially in suppository form. Yowch.
If this was 15 May 1915, we could all be attending the Illinois State Medical Society's annual meeting at the Masonic Temple in Springfield, Illinois.And if we went to booth 18, we could've bought some fine, newish radium-based products that would be enjoyed drinking or bathing in. And all for the cause of human progress, the radium-based nonsense promised cures for all sorts of ills: rheumatism, dandruff, dull teeth, gout, sexual problems, general malaise, and on and on...

Many of these companies employed the real stuff, affecting thousands of people, radium-based cure-alls being ingested, injected, applied and bathed-in. For example, there were numerous companies distributing 'radium water" (such as "Radithor" by William J.A. Bailey's company), radium suppositories ("in a cocoa butter base"), toothpaste ("Doramad", distributed by Doramad Radioaktive Zohncreme during WWII, to Germans), cosmetics ("Tho-Radia"), and many different varieties of radium-enriched healing belts (to be worn or slept on). There were plenty of other products that used the "radium" name but didn't actually use the substance itself, further selling the idea of its usefulness on the individual level. There was radium beer, nail clippers, starch, cigars, polish, headache tablets, razor blades, butter and of course, condoms.

Radioactive Suppository Sex Aids & Radium Toothpaste: Shining Lethal Nonsense (via IO9)



Visual 6502: a visual simulation of a vintage microprocessor, in Javascript

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 09:22 PM PDT


The Visual 6502 project uses Javascript (!) and hi-rez images of vintage processors (notably the MOS 6502) to recreate functional, visual models of these ancient beasts:
In the summer of 2009, working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip.

This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their 'high' or 'low' logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the 'clock') on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done.

You can see this operation right now in your browser (except for Internet Explorer) with our interactive JavaScript simulation. We suggest a fast computer and lots of memory for this version.

The Visual 6502 (via JWZ)



Mark interviewed on IFC's The Grid

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 12:47 PM PDT


Alex Berg, host of IFC's The Grid, interviewed me about about my latest book, Made By Hand.

The Grid: Mark Frauenfelder Interview



Planter shaped like nuke reactor cooling tower

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 05:37 PM PDT

V Vspfiles Photos La0109-2 GAMA-GO's funny new Power Planter comes with organic soil and wheatgrass seeds. It would be fun to grow some bioluminescent plants in it!
Power Planter

Peter Murphy in Maxell cassette ad

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 08:49 AM PDT


Bauhaus frontman Peter Murphy in a 1980s TV ad for Maxell cassettes. Press the eject and give me the tape?

Who benefits from US tax-cut extension? [Chart]

Posted: 19 Sep 2010 07:54 AM PDT


Barry Ritholtz sez, "The NYTimes graphic department has your Sunday morning chart porn regarding the extension of tax cuts. Its an illustration fueled by data from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization. The graphic shows how much Americans have gotten so far broken down by income groups. And it calculates that extending all of the Bush Tax Cuts for the next decade will cost another $2.7 trillion (through 2020)."

Your Coming Tax Cut (or Not) (Thanks, Barry, via Submitterator!)



Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

CrunchyTech

Blog Archive