Saturday, October 9, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Art inspired by the Haunted Mansion

Posted: 09 Oct 2010 02:58 AM PDT

Sesame Street Old Spice ad parody

Posted: 09 Oct 2010 02:56 AM PDT

Student finds GPS bug on car, uploads photo, FBI demands to have their warrantless bug back

Posted: 09 Oct 2010 02:50 AM PDT

Yasir Afifi is a 20-year-old, US-born American citizen, a California university student. Last week, he found a GPS tracker attached to his car. A friend uploaded a photo of the bug to Reddit, and asked if anyone knew anything about it. 48 hours later, the FBI showed up at his door, announced that the bug was theirs, and asked for it back. The 9th Circuit recently ruled that cops can secretly enter private property, without a warrant, and sneak covert bugs onto suspects' cars.
The agent who initially spoke with Afifi identified himself then as Vincent and told Afifi, "We're here to recover the device you found on your vehicle. It's federal property. It's an expensive piece, and we need it right now."

Afifi asked, "Are you the guys that put it there?" and the agent replied, "Yeah, I put it there." He told Afifi, "We're going to make this much more difficult for you if you don't cooperate."

Afifi retrieved the device from his apartment and handed it over, at which point the agents asked a series of questions - did he know anyone who traveled to Yemen or was affiliated with overseas training? One of the agents produced a printout of a blog post that Afifi's friend Khaled allegedly wrote a couple of months ago. It had "something to do with a mall or a bomb," Afifi said. He hadn't seen it before and doesn't know the details of what it said. He found it hard to believe Khaled meant anything threatening by the post...

Afifi's encounter with the FBI ended with the agents telling him not to worry.

"We have all the information we needed," they told him. "You don't need to call your lawyer. Don't worry, you're boring. "

Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back (Thanks, Marilyn, via Submitterator!)

(Image: Yasir Afifi)



Sven Saw

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 01:25 PM PDT

Sven Folding Saw - 21''-1.jpeg The Sven Saw is an ideal camping saw. I grew up watching my Dad use one to make short work of the tree limbs I dragged through the woods to the campsite. Now I take mine on every backpacking trip. It makes gathering firewood easier, because you don't have to search for logs you can break or hack through. Larger logs left by others or downed trees that you'd never be able to hack down or break are fair game. I leave my hatchet at home, because this saw is so efficient and well-designed. I've used mine extensively for almost ten years without replacing the blade. It's also great for pruning tree limbs and taking care of downed wood at home. The original 21" saw weighs less than a pound and folds down to 24" x 1 3/4" x 5/8", which slips easily (and safely) along the inside of an internal frame backpack. A 15" version is now available, which saves even more weight on long treks. draw-1.gif [Note: While similar to the previously reviewed ultra-portable Fiskars Pruning Saw, the slightly less packable Sven comes with a significantly longer blade capable of tackling larger logs at the cost of added weight and size. -- OH] --Greg Schneider Sven Saw $30 Available from REI Comment on this tool at Cool Tools. Submit a tool.



The Christine O'Donnell "I'm You" parody of the day

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 01:21 PM PDT

Paula Deen takes 'ludes, makes foods

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 02:15 PM PDT

I realize this ultra-weird YouTube slowdown video is about a year old, but I've been laughing at it for three days, so I figured it's worth a post. Do stay with it through the end: like any great Paula Deen meal, the dessert is the real treat. Below, another couple of videos posted just yesterday by this same YouTube remixer. They are even more horrifying. The remixer, WolfGoreShow, has an entire channel of Paula Deen clips remixed with a special blend of hatred and Final Cut talent.

(thanks, Mikael Jorgensen)

The Elements Song (Tom Lehrer tune), Super Cute Japanese Version

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 01:12 PM PDT

Remember that fantastic iPad app, The Elements, blogged here around the time of the iPad's US launch? And that cute little easter egg within the app: an animated rendition of Tom Lehrer's "The Elements Song?" Here's a new version to accompany the new Japanese edition of the Elements App, sung by two cute girls who dig science. I love it.

Theodore Gray, the guy behind all of it, explains:

I have a cousin, Thomas Howard Lichtenstein, who has lived in Osaka for the past 20 years making a living as a lounge singer at night and composer during the day. This turned out to be a remarkably useful fact when I decided that, based on the huge success of The Elements for iPad in Japan, I really wanted to record a translation into Japanese of Tom Lehrer's elements song. (The entire rest of the ebook had been translated into Japanese: The only things left in English were the song and the spoken element names.)

I asked my cousin if he could make it sound like a nauseatingly cute Japanese pop song. My exact words were "make me think of cats with big eyes". Which I think he has clearly achieved.

I had planned to locate and hire some kind of B-list J-Pop idol to sing it, but he suggested his daughters give it a try, and they did a fantastic job. So the singers are in fact my twin 13-year-old, half-Japanese first cousins once removed. So there you have it, my contribution to increasing the world's supply of WTF, one song at a time.

More at periodictable.com.

'90s UFO conspiracy documentary clips (put on your AFDB before watching)

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 05:38 PM PDT

Video Link, from Everything is Terrible. Be sure your AFDB is on your head and fitted snugly before clicking "play."

Mark Ryden's new painting: Awakening The Moon

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:19 PM PDT

A night in a Detroit trauma ward

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:05 PM PDT


My old friend from journalism school Charlie LeDuff, who writes for the Detroit News, spent the night hanging around one of the city hospital's trauma wards. His host was chief surgeon Dr. Pat Patton, 46. Among patients with stab and gunshot wounds, Charlie gains some insight into the consequences of a crap economy, health insurance, and a routine evening for a surgeon who has regularly worked 100 hours per week in the ward... for the last twenty years. From the Detroit News:

Consider his case load on a typical evening: A child was hit by a car and rushed to the trauma unit. After a battery of tests, the child was found to be well enough to go home. Instead of picking him up, the boy's mother told the nurse to send him home on a city bus.

A man was shot through the ankle with a high-caliber rifle, the foot holding tenuously by a flap of skin. The victim owed the dope man money and the bullet was a "friendly reminder" that the bill had come due. A man who had been stabbed in the chest with a knife was being discharged to his girlfriend that evening. As it happened, the man admitted it was the girlfriend who had stabbed him in the chest with a knife...

The trauma surgeon — perhaps the most knowledgeable about the workings of the entire human body — is considered something of a butcher among the cutting class: a brute who is the jack of all trades, the master of none. A general surgeon like Patton may not understand the intricacies of neurosurgery, but he is able to cobble together the shattered pieces of a gunshot victim in a late-night marathon of surgery.

Patton's most important tool appears to be his right index finger. That digit acts as his probe, his periscope, his divining rod, his cork. He can remember on more than one occasion saving the life of a gunshot victim who arrived at the hospital in the back of a sedan. He simply plugged the hole with his finger.

"Feeling is believing," Patton tells a glassy-eyed intern as he fishes around in a knife wound in the back of a man's knee, trying to augur whether its damage to the vein or the artery.

Watching Patton work shatters the illusion of TV medicine. For one, he would win no beauty contests: large, broad-shouldered and ill-shaven, the doctor looks more like a football tackle than a soap-opera heartthrob. For another, when he operates it is not the stuff of daintiness accompanied by the subdued pings of the EKG machine. He is often elbows deep inside the victim's cavity, tugging and rooting around as if he's lost a set of keys. And then there is his bedside manner, which is not so much sympathetic clucking, but rather a combination of pugilism and cold-water truth that has an odd but soothing effect on the patient.

"You're going to die if you keep pulling that tube out," he tells the wino who insists on yanking out his catheter. The wino gives him a gummy smile and sweetly asks for a thimble-full of morphine.

"LeDuff: Trauma ward shows a harsh reality"



Hungary: Toxic sludge flood kills, causes chemical burns, wipes out entire towns

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:02 PM PDT

Via the BB Submitterator, pato pal ur says: "Here in Hungary we're undergoing one of the worst ecological catastrophes to have hit Europe in the past 20-30 years: a flood of deadly toxic sludge. This AlJazeera video sums up the awful situation. Many people have received chemical burns from the chemical slurry; some have died. Now it seems that three inundated towns will be razed completely along, with everything in them. "

Tijuana Innovadora, Mexico: Speakers incl. Pres. Felipe Calderon, Al Gore, Carlos Slim (and Xeni)

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:06 PM PDT

On Saturday, October 16, I'll be speaking at Tijuana Inovadora: a *really* ambitious conference under way in Mexico through October 21. Speakers include the president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon; Mexican astronaut José Moreno Hernández; Al Gore; Carlos Slim (richest man in the world, owns a big chunk of the New York Times); Chris Anderson of Wired and DIY Drones fame; Jimmy Wales; Biz Stone; and many more.

The point of the conferenc is more or less that this place is a generative source of forward-thinking ideas in technology, culture, art, and design. Or, as the conference website blurbs, the mission is...

[T]o show the community, country, and strategic audiences abroad, the processes of innovative technology, education, technological culture, and art that are exported from Tijuana to the world.
Much of what we hear in the US about Mexico these days has to do with the narco-mess, but the border region has a long history of tech innovation. It's sad to see that lost in the noise of late; this event seeks to change that perception. Tijuana's an interesting place, I know from personal experience—and it should be a particularly interesting place while Tijuana Inovadora is under way. Tickets here, here's the website, Twitter and Facebook.

Christian leader: Avoid yoga!

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 11:30 AM PDT

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler says that Christians shouldn't do yoga. Mohler told the Associated Press that it's not good to think that "the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine." Of course, yoga practitioners, including Christian ones, vocally disagree. The controversy started with an essay titled "The Subtle Body — Should Christians Practice Yoga?" that Mohler posted on his blog late last month. Yesterday, Mohler responded to his critics with another post, titled "Yahoo, Yoga, and Yours Truly." Now, it's worth noting that Mohler's organization isn't a fringe group. The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary is the country's oldest seminary affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, and is apparently one of the largest theological seminaries of any kind in the world. From the Associated Press:
Mohler argued in his online essay last month that Christians who practice yoga "must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga."

He said his view is "not an eccentric Christian position."

Other Christian leaders have said practicing yoga is incompatible with the teachings of Jesus. Pat Robertson has called the chanting and other spiritual components that go along with yoga "really spooky." California megachurch pastor John MacArthur called yoga a "false religion." Muslim clerics have banned Muslims from practicing yoga in Egypt, Malaysia and Indonesia, citing similar concerns.

"Southern Baptist leader nixes yoga for Christians"

Making a set of wood bowls on foot-powered lathe

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 10:53 AM PDT


From Llyod Kahn's blog:

Robin Wood makes a nesting set of bowls to commemorate the death of the 'last bowlturner' George Lailey who died 50 years ago. Inspired by Lailey's tools and lathe in the Museum of English Rural Life, Robin recreated the lost craft fifteen years ago and now makes his living as a bowlturner.
I like the satisfying "click" when Robin pops a smaller bowl out of the larger one.



Digitally masking corporate logos in your home videos

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 03:18 PM PDT


Hacktivist/tech artist Jeff Crouse is developing a digital filter that automatically masks corporate logos in recorded video. I'd imagine that it won't be too long before this can be done in real-time for mobile augmented reality applications! Crouse set up a Kickstarter project to fund his next phase of development. From the project page:

Unlogo is a web service that eliminates logos and other corporate signage from videos. On a practical level, it takes back your personal media from the corporations and advertisers. On a technical level, it is a really cool combination of some brand new OpenCV and FFMPEG functionality. On a poetic level, it is a tool for focusing on what is important in the record of your life rather than the ubiquitous messages that advertisers want you to focus on. In short, Unlogo gives people the opportunity to opt out of having corporate messages permanently imprinted into the photographic record of their lives.

It's simple: you upload a video, and after your video is processed, you get an email with a link to the unlogofied version (example: http://vimeo.com/14531292). You can choose to have the logos simply blocked out with a solid color or replaced with other images, such as the disembodied head of the CEO of the company. This scheme is a bit ridiculous (which is kind of my style), but I like it because it literalizes the intrusion into the record of your life that these logos represent.

"Unlogo, the Corporate Identity Media Filter by Jeffrey Crouse" (via Submitterator, thanks Darran Edmundson!)



Christopher Hitchens on "Tumorville" and the enemies of science

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:37 PM PDT

"Tumorville," Christopher Hitchens' current Vanity Fair column about the wealth of bad advice and scarcity of effective options he faces, takes aim at pro-life "religious maniacs" who lobby against stem cell research—one scientific avenue that really does offer real hope: "The politicized sponsors of this pseudo-scientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the 'war' against cancer, and other terrible maladies too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity."

Write or Be Written

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 10:32 AM PDT

Remember the recently degraded Texas textbook standards? The ones requiring the removal of left-leaning historical figures like Thurgood Marshall, while inserting important institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association. Or that America be referred to as a "republic" rather than a "democracy" - lest kids learn to like the word democrat? Well, Thomas Gokey of Syracuse University wants to fight back against this top-down dismantling of education with some bottom-up restoration of the historical record. He's organizing a wikibook called A Supplement to the Texas U.S. History Textbook in the hope of developing "a textbook written from a different perspective" (like, what really happened, without blacks and Jews and lefties removed). From our email exchange:
It is meant to be used in the classroom and written by people all over the world, including Texas middle and high school students themselves. An 11th grade social studies class in Ohio is already writing their own textbook, and I think this is a great way to avoid be written out of history. I think that our wiki textbook can be more faithful and be a better read and be a much better educational tool because it involves the students themselves in the messy task of historical research. If students can create their own textbook and in the process enter into debates in real time with historians and amateur history buffs it will demystify the process of historical research. I want to get students to really confront critically the way a history gets produced. How exactly do historical facts and cultural values entangle themselves in the production of history? Instead of writing term papers I would like to see teachers have their students research a particular historical event and write an article for inclusion in the textbook.



Very tiny people moving pencil and scissors

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 09:59 AM PDT

Ijp Wg6Tnag Tkkhdtg70Wi Aaaaaaaafnc 8Ank4Vabsh0 S800 Incredible Shrinking Man Props Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art spotted this fantastic photo in the LIFE photo archive on Google. Allan Grant took the shot in September 1956 of "movie stagehands pushing a 400-pound pair of gigantic scissors on a dollie next to two men carrying a 21-ft. pencil, just some of the props that created the illusion of a dwindling hero for the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man at Universal Studios."

Peniplus: miracle cure for men born with only one penis

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 08:53 AM PDT


A NSFW fake ad from sketch comedy group Rue Brutalia.

HOWTO bake porridge in a pumpkin

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 08:22 AM PDT


I am a stone oatmeal fiend. I get up extra early every morning just to make my special oatmeal for the family. Also, I love pumpkins. So when I saw this recipe for cooking oatmeal inside a sugar pumpkin, with optional kid-involvement, I began to dribble and drool copiously.
Preheat oven 375 degrees. Start by carefully cutting the top off your pumpkin and cleaning the insides out. (Save the seeds for later - recipe to come!) Combine all remaining ingredients (except the sugar for sprinkling and milk for splashing) in a large bowl. Stir well and divide batter evenly between the two pumpkins. Sprinkle lightly with brown sugar. Place both pumpkins on a cookie sheet and bake for 45 mins to an hour or until pumpkin is soft enough to scoop and oatmeal is done. After it was done, we added a splash of milk.
Baked Pumpkin Oatmeal (via Craft)



Life Inc Becomes NBC Today Show Series

Posted: 06 Oct 2010 10:56 AM PDT

lifeinctoday.jpg
Life Inc is being made into a series for the NBC Today show called Life Inc: The Economy and You. Unfortunately for me, it's not based on my book Life Inc, about the rise of corporatism and the way corporate logic replaces human and community values, but on their own idea for a series on the rise of corporatism and the way people can learn to play the game, too. (Thus, the banner ads for sponsor and personal finance guru Suze Ormond). Oh well. Serves me right for employing such a standard (and overused) construction for the title of a book. Luckily for me, however, the Life Inc. series will still be running for the January 1, 2011 paperback release of Life Inc: How corporatism conquered the world and how to take it back - which has been expanded by a third to include a resource guide on how to take back our world. In there, I've got essays from people and organizations who are modeling some great post-corporate strategies for creating and exchanging value. They include Freecycle, LocalHarvest, Streetsblog, CableCar Cinema of Providence, Kiva, Metacurrency, Four Corners Exchange, a babysitting co-op, a biodiesel collective, and more. With any luck, a few people looking for a get-rich scheme will buy my book by mistake, and get a some good ideas for getting rich slowly and sustainably, instead.



The Fridge Campaign

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 08:48 AM PDT

Pass out at Frat Party.jpeg

Capitalizing on the bad vibes circulating on release of Facebook-bashing The Social Network social networking competitor The Fridge has come up with a poster campaign based on those of the Hollywood pic. While The Fridge's claim of a totally private network is limited, of course, by the discretion of any particular group's membership, they certainly know how to enjoy a media moment.



CBC agreement with talent agency prohibits use of Creative Commons music

Posted: 08 Oct 2010 08:54 AM PDT

According to a comment from a CBC producer on a message board, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has banned the use of Creative Commons licensed music from its podcasts. Apparently, this goes "against some of the details in collective agreements [the CBC] hold with certain talent agencies."
In other words, groups are actively working to block the use of Creative Commons licenced alternatives in their contractual language. It is enormously problematic to learn that our public broadcaster is blocked from using music alternatives that the creators want to make readily available. The CBC obviously isn't required to use Creative Commons licenced music, but this highlights an instance where at least one of its programs wants to use it and groups that purport to support artists' right to choose the rights associated with their work is trying to stop them from doing so.
CBC Bans Use of Creative Commons Music on Podcasts



Underground: graphic novel thriller set in a cave

Posted: 07 Oct 2010 03:55 PM PDT

Images I 61Aur-Lzozl Caves are great locations for thrillers. I enjoyed The Descent, a B movie about a group of women spelunkers who get lost in a cave and have to fight a horde of blind humanoid monsters. And I really enjoyed Scott Sigler's EarthCore, about a platinum mining expedition in Utah that goes horribly awry when the mining party bumps into an ancient race of violent creatures that live in an immense underground network of caves three miles below the surface of the earth.

Underground, a 136-page graphic novel by written by Jeff Parker and illustrated by Steve Lieber, doesn't have any malevolent mutants, but I can look past that. It still has bad guys, in the form of ruthless and relentless human scumbags who want to kill a pair of Kentucky park rangers who have witnessed their dynamiting of the caves as part of a sleazy business plan.

The artwork is just superb. It doesn't seem easy to draw the interior of a cave in a way that's realistic and interesting, but Lieber handles it with aplomb. The coloring, by Ron Chan, is very effective: in the cave it's monochromatic, and outside full-color, which give the cave scenes creepy and intense mood.

Lieber also illustrated Greg Rucka's Whiteout, which was mominated for four Eisner Awards (Best Limited Series, Best Graphic Album, Best Writer, and Best Penciller/Inker). I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list.

Underground

THE UNIDENTIFIED: dystopian YA about education tranformed into a giant, heavily sponsored game

Posted: 04 Oct 2010 01:34 AM PDT

Rae Mariz's debut YA The Unidentified is a thrilling, engaging polemic about the corporatization of kids' lives in the guise of a mystery story.

In the future, the US education system has gone bankrupt, and has been rescued by the private sector, who convert giant malls into heavily surveilled school buildings in which all education takes place as a series of sponsored games that, on the one hand, deliver tailored, creative curriculum, but, on the other, commodify all learning, social intercourse and creativity, turning it all into trends and products that are sold back to the students and the wider world.

Our plucky heroine is a girl named Kid. Kid likes mixing her own music, is a moderately successful student, but isn't anywhere near the top of the social ladder. Far from it; she's hardly got any friends at all on her profile, and is skeptical of the whole enterprise.

This makes her an ideal candidate for the school's corporate sponsors, who are anxious to reach the disaffected outsiders who are the last remaining target market. So when Kid discovers a gruesome, anti-corporatist prank and begins to investigate it, it's only natural that the sponsors would swoop in to underwrite her mystery and use it to sell a whole new package of anti-sponsor sponsored goods.

Subversive, cleverly written, challenging, and surprising, The Unidentified is a great book for young adults and the grownups who care about them, in the tradition of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies. Highly recommended.

The Unidentified



Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

CrunchyTech

Blog Archive