The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Speaking this Saturday at London's Amazing Meeting
- US copyright net-censorship bill is dead -- for now
- Canon's printer/photocopier blocks jobs based on keywords
- Old Weather: read old ships' logs and record their weather observations to improve current climate models
- Just look at this zombie banana.
- Tom Waits and Preservation Hall Jazz Band release limited-edition 78RPM record and matching limited edition record-player
- WWII Star Wars action figure mods
- Curating a TEDx (or, from Arrogance to Humility)
- The birth of the Conan blimp
- Chile mine rescue efforts under way: something like space travel
- HOWTO Make a sock Cthulhu
- Melitta Perfect Brew Cone
- Unfinished Michelangelo found in Buffalo home?
- Squirrelproof your birdfeeder with a Slinky
- Documentary about life as a train hobo: "Train on the Brain"
- Fannish Disneyland blueprints
- On board the ship that tips
- Science fiction charity auction
- More on the T-Mobile G2 "rootkit" -- it's actually a "NAND Lock" (and it's still a ripoff)
- How To: Brew beer in a coffee maker, using only materials found on a modestly sized oceanographic research vessel
- Potentially habitable exoplanet may not actually exist
- Nipper 1963-1964: Doug Wright's comic about family life with two young boys
- Pratchett's I Shall Wear Midnight, sentimental and fun book about a witch among enemies
- Photography project comparing the lives of 20-something women in the US and Yemen
- Extremely tiny apartment in Rome
- Great moments in typo history
- Koster's "Fundamentals of Game Design"
- Rogue taxidermist in the Netherlands
| Speaking this Saturday at London's Amazing Meeting Posted: 13 Oct 2010 02:32 AM PDT  I'm speaking this weekend at the London edition of James Randi's The Amazing Meeting, a two-day event featuring the likes of Stephen Fry, James Randi, Alan Moore, Graham Linehan, PZ Myers, Susan Blackmore, Rebecca Watson, and Simon Singh (and many more!). The Amazing Meeting is a fundraiser to support science and critical thinking. TAM London 2010 is a world-class fundraising conference which this year is being held on 16 - 17 October 2010 at the Hilton London Metropole hotel. Join amazing speakers and over 1000 like-minded delegates for a fundraising celebration of science, critical thinking and entertainment in the heart of the city.The Amazing Meeting London
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| US copyright net-censorship bill is dead -- for now Posted: 13 Oct 2010 02:26 AM PDT It's a good day for American copyfighters -- COICA, the fast-track Leahy bill that would have established a China-style "Great Firewall of America" has been postponed. That means that instead of being rushed through without substantive debate, it has been put off until after the midterm elections, and come back to a longer debate with more opportunity for public action to defeat it comprehensively. (Thanks, manddroo, via Submitterator!) |
| Canon's printer/photocopier blocks jobs based on keywords Posted: 12 Oct 2010 11:18 PM PDT Canon's new printer/scanner/fax devices can search jobs for keywords (say, the names of sensitive clients) and stop jobs if they contain them. I'm of mixed minds about this feature. On the one hand, I can see how it would go some ways to, say, preventing unscrupulous employees from printing out confidential docs and breaching the privacy of clients. On the other hand, the record is pretty clear on what happens with keyword blocking -- it's trivial to circumvent by dedicated bad guys, and it screws up the good guys (I remember AOL blocking "Phuc" as an alternate spelling for "Fuck" and rendering its Vietnamese chat rooms all but unusable; and by all accounts, it's pretty miserable trying to research breast cancer on a censored school network). Ultimately, regular expressions are a poor substitute for trustworthy employees, minimal data gathering, and assiduous purging of old records. The latest version of Uniflow has a keyword-based security system. Once configured by an administrator, the system can prevent a user from attempting to print, scan, copy or fax a document containing a prohibited keyword, such as a client name or project codename. Update: From the comments, Sabik adds: "Or, of course, you could set it up as part of industrial espionage so that when it detects a keyword, it e-mails the PDF out of the company." That's the stuff, right there -- forgotten feature in your Canon printer is activated by a rogue employee! Prevents unauthorised document use. (via /.)
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| Posted: 12 Oct 2010 10:19 PM PDT Old Weather is a citizen science project that asks its participants to parse out the contents of thousands of scanned pages from old nautical logbooks. Participants are asked to find the date, the location of the ship, and the weather observations made in the ship's log. These observations are being pieced together to create a better historical view of how climate works and how it has changed. These new, rare data points will help test and improve current climate models. Old Weather (via Kottke)
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| Just look at this zombie banana. Posted: 12 Oct 2010 10:06 PM PDT  Just look at it. Look at This Undead Banana. Just Look at it. (Thanks, BenTrippi, via Submitterator) Previously:
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| Posted: 12 Oct 2010 10:03 PM PDT Tom Waits and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band recorded a pair of songs to benefit the Preservation Hall Music Outreach Program and they're releasing them as a limited-edition 78RPM album. Donate $200 and you can get a gorgeous, custom 78RPM record player to go with it (alas, the first-day sales are limited to in-person customers at Preservation Hall in NOLA, and I'm guessing everything will be snapped up for eBay resale by the time the official online sales open up the next day). I'm really interested in the creative use of premium physical objects that trade on the value of digital art. It seems to me that the more widely copied and well-loved a digital piece is, the more the limited physical premium will be. Alas, many of the physical premiums offered by bands and authors and so on look like they came out of a Skymall catalog. But stuff like this, well, it's so far in my sweet spot that I'm wondering if I can get back to NOLA for the sale. Preservation Hall Jazz Band & Tom Waits On 78 rpm Vinyl (TomWaits.com) Tom Waits Releases 78 RPM Record and Player (Pitchfork.com) (Thanks, Stuart, via Submitterator!)
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| WWII Star Wars action figure mods Posted: 12 Oct 2010 09:53 PM PDT  Veteran Star Wars action figure modders Sillof & Glorbes have a new series of alternate Star Wars dollies: Star Wars 1942, which reimagines the lovable Star Wars people as Allied bomber crew, and sinister Nazis. Star Wars 1942 (Thanks, Sayeth, via Submitterator!)
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| Curating a TEDx (or, from Arrogance to Humility) Posted: 12 Oct 2010 09:02 PM PDT Arrogance is an enormous turn-off in personal relations, but sometimes it's a pretty good motivator to do good work. It's what turned this music fan into a critic and producer: the (sometimes quite incorrect) belief that I could do something better. Arrogance is one of the two dueling ingredients of ambition, which is, after all, a combination of arrogance that you can do something better and humility in the face of so many people who inspire you. One of the best places to witness that combination of arrogance and humility is TED. I've been lucky enough to attend the TED conference several times and I've been intrigued by how the organizers are trying to extend it via videos and independently organized events, collectively know as TEDx. (I've been thinking about both the elitism and openness of TED and will publish an essay on it early next year in HBR.)  This year I served as one of the curators of TEDxBoston, along with four tremendous colleagues. It was a chance to step out of the audience for a change and see what it might be like from the other side. Like many who spent a lot of time in a particular audience, I had ideas on what I might do differently if given the chance. It's the same impulse that leads people to call in to radio shows to say how they would have handled that 4th and 1 situation better than Bill Belichick did. It was a thrill to help develop and organize the programming, but what struck me most, after we picked the speakers, all of them enormously ambitious, was how humble the best of them were. They inspired people by telling stories about what inspired them. Some of my favorite talks from the day: Bill Walczak, a Boston legend, showed how a new model for urban healthcare and education can change a culture of despair into a community of opportunity. Plenty of TED speakers talk about how they want to change the world; Bill showed us how he actually did it. Vibha Pringle of Ubuntu at Work told how microfinance doesn't help women out of poverty; it merely helps them cope with poverty better. And she pointed toward a real way out. We've covered previously Eric Mongeon's work to bring Edgar Allan Poe back to life. Here's his talk on how he did it, with a hat tip to Boing Boing. There's plenty more. In particular, I was moved by Ann Christensen, whose talk, as well as some recent work by her father, Clay Christensen, I'll celebrate in a post later this week. (If you like these and want to sample some more, you can see 'em all here.)
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| Posted: 12 Oct 2010 09:03 PM PDT My mother lives in a high-rise in downtown Philadelphia. We were talking on the phone last week when she suddenly stopped and said, in a wondering voice: "Look at that. It's a dirigible," accenting the second syllable: di-RIG-ible. (My mom is elderly.) I realized later it was the Conan blimp, a brilliant viral marketing gambit for the upcoming Conan O'Brien show on TBS. The blimp is fitted out with a number of whiz-bang bells and whistles, including the capability to auto-check in at Foursquare, if you go for that sort of thing. And I wondered: Where does an idea like this come from? It comes from Breakfast, a New York-based advertising shop with an appealing retro-futuristic sensibility. It shouldn't be surprising, I guess, that the lightbulb moment for guys like these came when somebody sat up straight and blurted out: "A blimp!" Or maybe, in this case, "A dirigible!" And in fact, the roots of the Conan blimp go back, way back, all the way back to May of 2010. (All right, maybe that's not so far back, but things move so fast nowadays.) That's when Breakfast rigged, for the New York design event MunNY, an iPad-controlled video blimp. It was 52 inches long, silver, and video-enabled (of course it was) and it circled the MunNY afterparty at a dizzying height of about eight feet, beaming a live feed back down to the skinny, well-dressed crowd below. What was it Springsteen said -- "From small things, mama, big things one day come."
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| Chile mine rescue efforts under way: something like space travel Posted: 12 Oct 2010 10:18 PM PDT  (Credit: Hugo Infante/Government of Chile) Like millions around the world, I'm currently following the live tweets, more live tweets, live blog and television coverage of attempts to pull up the stranded miners in Chile. At left, we see the rescue capsule carrying rescue worker Manuel Gonzalez arriving in the miners' refuge, half a mile under the earth's surface. Gonzales carried a communications device to transmit back up to the surface. VIDEO: Here's CNN's live stream. Here's the CBS News live stream. Here is a Chilean TV network's stream. And here's the BBC's. With all the talk of tiny capsules, oxygen masks, and extreme psychological transitions, I keep thinking how much this phase of the rescue effort reminds me of astronauts' accounts of space travel. Those of you who, like me, are watching it live: aren't you reminded of Buzz and Neil landing on the moon? I can't imagine what it's like for the trapped miners, but man, what must be going on in the mind of the paramedics/rescuers they're sending down into the mine? What kind of absolute unshakeable strength must someone have to enter that tiny rescue shaft to drop half a mile down towards the center of Earth? Whatever it is, I don't think I have that stuff within me. Your thoughts welcome in the comments. (via Submitterator, thanks pjk)
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| Posted: 12 Oct 2010 01:04 PM PDT  Gavin sez, "David Erik Nelson's new Maker book, Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred, has 24 awesome low-budget projects for kids (and, er, me) such as an electric guitar screen-printed tees, and the one and only Sock Cthulhu! Download Project No.3: The Sock Squid from the publisher and check out the last page: Sock Cthulhu! (Note, 'sock' is a noun here, not a verb.)" Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred (Amazon) Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred: Seriously Geeky Stuff to Make with Your Kids (No Starch Press) (Thanks, Gavin!)
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| Posted: 12 Oct 2010 01:18 PM PDT  This simple plastic cone coupled with a filter is the best tool I have found for quickly making great tasting coffee. I have tried a French press but found the coffee to be gritty and bitter. Automatic drip coffee makers are expensive and don't provide much control over water temperature, not to mention the amount of wasted coffee when all I really wanted was a single cup. And honestly, I picked up this cone because it was affordable when compared to the previously reviewed Yama Vac Pot or Aeropress. This cone is so simple that it almost defies the need for an explanation. Put a #2 cone coffee filter in and fill it with the desired amount of ground coffee (I use extra-fine), and pour as much hot water over it as you like. You may need to refill it if you like larger cups of coffee. In less than 60 seconds you will have made a fresh brewed cup of coffee that tastes better than any from an automatic machine, or the bitter stuff from Starbucks that's been sitting around all day. The one thing I don't love about this cone is that it uses disposable filters. Despite that, the filters are cheap and can be found in most grocery stores. I was convinced that these cones were the best when I went to Blue Bottle Coffee in San Francisco and watched professionals make great coffee this way. They use a more expensive ceramic version, but the basic idea remains the same. Small, simple, easy to clean, and cheap. Cool. -- Oliver Hulland Melitta Perfect Brew Filter Cone $5 Available from Amazon Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool!
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| Unfinished Michelangelo found in Buffalo home? Posted: 12 Oct 2010 01:20 PM PDT This painting may be a lost Michelangelo. For nearly thirty years, it was kept behind a sofa in the Buffalo, New York home of Martin Kober. Once he retired, Kober investigated the old family story that the painting was a real Michelangelo. Turns out, the myth may be reality. From the New York Post: "A 'Mike' found in Buffalo?"
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| Squirrelproof your birdfeeder with a Slinky Posted: 12 Oct 2010 11:51 AM PDT Squirrel vs. Slinky. The smart squirrel eventually wins, as always. (Thanks, Antinous!)
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| Documentary about life as a train hobo: "Train on the Brain" Posted: 12 Oct 2010 11:38 AM PDT Tgg161 says: "Over the weekend I watched Alison Murray's documentary from 2000 where she embarks on a hobo's journey across Canada and the US. Watching her hop trains is inspiring, in an I-would-never-do-that kind of way. Bonus: The soundtrack is a rare example of Beck granting permission for his music to be used."
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| Posted: 12 Oct 2010 10:38 AM PDT  Flickr user Enfilm creates insanely detailed, beautiful blueprints for rides and buildings at Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Disneyland Paris (including plans for lost favorites, such as If You Had Wings). Shown here, the Disneyland Enchanted Tiki Room. Disneyland Drawings (via A Whole Lotta Nothing)
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| Posted: 12 Oct 2010 09:35 AM PDT In the comment thread of my recent post on How To: Make Beer in a Coffee Pot, Using Only Materials Found on a Modestly Sized Oceanographic Research Vessel, several people have pointed out a photo in the original article, which shows a special research ship intentionally tipping—Titanic-style—from horizontal to vertical. The ship is FLIP—FLoating Instrument Platform—and it's been around since the 1960s, providing a stable surface where deep-sea research that can't be buffeted as easily by waves. In the video above, you can see what it's like to be on FLIP when it flips. The solutions for movable furnishings
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| Science fiction charity auction Posted: 12 Oct 2010 08:16 AM PDT Matthew from NYC's KGB science fiction reading series sez, "Ellen Datlow and I are currently holding a raffle to support the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series in NY. We are raffling off prizes from such notables as Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Nancy Kress, Catherynne M. Valente, George R.R. Martin, Ellen Kushner, & dozens more. We also have carnivorous plants. (We also may be raffling off wormholes, signed by physicist Michio Kaku, but we are awaiting confirmation.) Raffle tickets are $1 each." I've got a prize or two in there too! (Thanks, Matthew!) |
| More on the T-Mobile G2 "rootkit" -- it's actually a "NAND Lock" (and it's still a ripoff) Posted: 12 Oct 2010 08:14 AM PDT Ars Technica's Ryan Paul has a write-up about the "rootkit" in the new T-Mobile HTC G2 phone. Background: New America Foundation recently sounded an alarm about a countermeasure built into the new G2 handsets that T-Mobile was selling. The countermeasure watches to see if you've changed your phone's OS, and if you have, it wipes out your changes and reinstalls T-Mobile's stock firmware. New America erroneously called this a rootkit; it's technically called a "NAND Lock," and other HTC handsets have come from carriers locked like this too. However, fact remains that T-Mobile has chosen to lock its handsets to prevent their owners from rooting/jailbreaking them. As a 10-year T-Mobile US customer who bought two full-price HTC Android handsets from T-Mobile for the purpose of rooting them so that I could load my own software, I find this repellent. I'm not the only one -- this year, the US Copyright Office carved out a legal exemption in order to explicitly legalize opening up your mobile phone. A statement from T-Mobile calls this a "side-effect" of a corruption prevention method, but this is horsewash: if all T-Mobile cares about is stopping your phone from getting corrupted, they could give jailbreakers the keys necessary to open up their handsets. The good news is that the phone jailbreaking community generally gets through this stuff with relative ease, and the G2 will fall sooner rather than later. But what a misery it is that the mobile phone companies continue to spend good money to frustrate the legitimate activities of their customers. G2 doesn't have rootkit, it's just the same old NAND lock (Thanks, Bluerabbit, via Submitterator!)
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| Posted: 12 Oct 2010 07:30 AM PDT Who knew science had so much in common with prison? Southern Fried Scientist explains how you can set up your own franchise of Baby Duck Breweries, using a coffee maker, cereal flakes, Vegemite "malt", seaweed "hops", and baker's yeast.
You can thank (or blame) TapRoot for posting this to Submitterator. Image: Some rights reserved by C+H
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| Potentially habitable exoplanet may not actually exist Posted: 12 Oct 2010 07:04 AM PDT  As I told you a couple weeks ago, Gliese 581g, planet of dreams, comes with a lot of uncertainty. It may, or may not, be habitable. It may, or may not, contain life. And now, it may, or may not, exist. Steven Vogt and his colleagues based the discovery of Gliese 581g on data taken from both their own research at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and previously published data collected by the Geneva-based High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) team at an observatory in Chile. And, you'll recall, Vogt spent a surprising chunk of the peer-reviewed paper arguing for better teamwork and more cordial relations between his group and the Europeans. But, this week, HARPS researchers told the International Astronomical Union that their newer, more accurate, and so-far unpublished data doesn't confirm Gliese 581g's existence. Let's get ready for a (generally polite, conducted in peer-reviewed papers) science rumble! This doesn't mean Gliese 581g absolutely isn't there. The answer won't shake out until HARPS actually publishes their new data and independent researchers get a chance to compare both sides. But it does look like Vogt and company won't be singing "Kumbaya" with the Geneva team anytime soon. Via the Dynamics of Cats blog and Stuart Clark
Image: Some rights reserved by NASAblueshift
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| Nipper 1963-1964: Doug Wright's comic about family life with two young boys Posted: 07 Oct 2010 04:51 PM PDT  I'd never heard of Doug Wright or Nipper before I received this comic strip anthology published by Drawn & Quarterly. It's about the day-to-day events of a suburban family: husband, wife, and two small boys (one named Nipper). I read it a couple of nights ago with my daughter and we laughed quite a few times. (When I say "read," I mean I studied the panels, because the comic strips are wordless.) There are a lot of things to like about these comic strips, which appeared in newspapers across Canada in the mid-20th century. First, Wright's artwork is charming. The facial expressions of the people are subtle and often essential to understanding the joke of each comic strip. Wright's balance between detail and economy reminds me of Hank Ketcham's, but with less forcefulness. Wright doesn't overtly tell you what to look at. Instead, he invites you to soak in the scene and absorb the different things going on in each panel. Second, Wright's depiction of children is the best I've seen in a comic. They way the siblings behaves rings true: the taunting, tormenting, fighting, playing, thoughtlessness, selfishness, fear, and joy. These are real kids, as opposed to the pint-sized adults of the Peanuts universe (as Art Spiegelman once pointed out, the only kid in Peanuts is Snoopy). Their antics (as well as their parents' antics) are timeless. Third, the way these wordless stories are told is like nothing I've seen in a comic strip before. The apparent simplicity of the strips is deceptive. Often, it's not clear what is going at the beginning of a strip. But as the story unfolds, the meaning is revealed. It's very lifelike. These aren't gags; they're slices of life. Nipper: Classic Comics from 1963-64 See two example strips after the jump.
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| Pratchett's I Shall Wear Midnight, sentimental and fun book about a witch among enemies Posted: 10 Oct 2010 10:46 PM PDT  Terry Pratchett's newly released I Shall Wear Midnight is the fourth volume in the Tiffany Aching books, about a young girl born to be the witch of a chalky, sheep-farming area called, simply, The Chalk (the other three volumes being Wee Free Men, Hatful of Sky and Wintersmith). Tiffany's old gran was the "Wise Woman" of the hills, and her gifts came down to Tiffany, who, at the age of 7 or 8, began to need them -- first to rescue the Baron's son when he was kidnapped by the Queen of Faerie (Tiffany hit her with an iron frying pan) and then to learn proper magic while apprenticed to a real witch, and finally to kiss the Wintersmith during a morris dance, and then have to set the seasons to right. In Midnight, Tiffany returns. Now she's 16, and she has assumed all the burdens of being The Chalk's witch -- and they are burdensome -- delivering the babies, salving the wounds, clipping the neglected old ladies' toenails, changing the bandages, and using magic to take away the pain of the Baron, who is dying. As if being thrust into an early maturity wasn't enough, witchery has fallen into disrepute on The Chalk -- and seemingly everywhere. There are old ladies being crushed and drowned by mobs, there are the whispers and the forked fingers to fight the evil eye when Tiffany passes, and then, when the Baron dies while Tiffany eases him into the next world, there is the wildfire rumor that Tiffany killed him. What Tiffany learns is that a shade of an old witchburner, called the Cunning Man, has been summoned to the world. Where the Cunning Man walks, poison follows -- poison against witches, against the odd, against foreigners, against the out-of-place. The Cunning Man is shambling evil, a corruption that goes into all the places that welcome poison, all the dark and ugly corners of our minds. Luckily, Tiffany has help -- her guardians and charges, the Nac Mac Feegle or Wee Free Men, a race of tiny blue faerie folk (technically, they are Pictsies) that wear kilts, carry claymores, live under the chalk, and fight and steal and steal and fight as though there was nothing better in the world. They are fast as lightning, nigh indestructible, silly as a bag of jello, good-hearted, and very difficult to be with. Some allies! Midnight is certainly the darkest of the Tiffany Aching books, which, though touched with Pratchett's gift for sweet and even sentimental characterization and madcap plotting, have been somewhat sleight. These are young adult books and they are uplifting in their way, and lots of fun, but until now, without the barbs that lurk under Pratchett's humor and light treatment, making him such a beloved writer. But Midnight is dark. As the Chalk's witch, Tiffany is called upon to tend to the horrors that everyone else would turn a blind eye to, including a man who beat his pregnant, 13 year old daughter so fiercely that she lost the baby. And the Cunning Man is a scary haint, described with merciless horror by Pratchett, who can do terrifying so well because you hardly expect it. Give this book to 15 or 16 year old who started reading about Tiffany when they were 8 or 9, and I think you'll hit them right where they live. What adolescent doesn't struggle with the bad things that everyone says they're too young to experience, but are there nevertheless? And what teenager doesn't know about the infectious hatred that sweeps through a mob when there is someone different and vulnerable, when one wicked or insecure person throws the first insult or whispers the first innuendo? Of course, there's lots here for adult Pratchett fans to love -- Tiffany's travails take her to Ankh-Morpork, where she meets the Watch and has adventures on Tenth Egg Street (lately famed in Making Money and the other Moist von Lipwigg novels), and runs into one of the earliest and most delightful of Pratchett's heroines; she seeks counsel from the Lancre witches (and even Magrat comes along), and so on. This book really feels like a tying together of many loose ends in the Discworld, and I'll happily admit that it had me sniffling back tears in the last chapter. It's a Pratchett novel -- there's really not much else to say.
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| Photography project comparing the lives of 20-something women in the US and Yemen Posted: 12 Oct 2010 12:00 PM PDT  Amira Al Sharif is a Muslim woman from Yemen who recently moved to the US to attend The International Center of Photography, and is working on a year-long project comparing the lives of American and Yemeni women her age. She writes:
How do they dress? What are their relationships like with their families, boyfriends, colleagues? In what ways are we similar? And in which ways are we different? She's got a Kickstarter page up and is trying to raise some funds to help her with the needed supplies, and is more than halfway there for her entire year budget. This sounds like a super cool project and I can't wait to see the results.
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| Extremely tiny apartment in Rome Posted: 11 Oct 2010 12:55 PM PDT This is a five square meter apartment in the center of Rome. Formerly a porter's closet, it's just been listed for sale at 50,000 Euros. From the Croatian Times: "Flat rate for world's smallest apartment" (via Fortean Times)
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| Posted: 12 Oct 2010 06:23 AM PDT "Correction: This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men."—Actual correction posted to a blog on the Washington D.C.-centric TBD news website. (Via Gene Weingarten) |
| Koster's "Fundamentals of Game Design" Posted: 12 Oct 2010 06:08 AM PDT Raph "Theory of Fun" Koster has reposted his classic essay, "The Fundamentals of Game Design." As the title suggests, it's a succinct, vastly informative piece that is useful even to those of us who don't plan on designing games, for all the insight it provides into the games that fill our lives. The first thing to understand is that games are made out of games. A large game is actually composed of minigames. Even a small game is built out of very very simple small games. The smallest games are ones that are so simple and stupid, you can't lose. You can think of this as "game atoms," if you like.The Fundamentals of Game Design
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| Rogue taxidermist in the Netherlands Posted: 12 Oct 2010 06:01 AM PDT  Despite residing in the Netherlands, dead-stuff sculptor Van Essie is a member of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. I love this little girl duckie thing. I think the dollie just makes it.
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Mr. Waits traveled to New Orleans in 2009 to record two songs with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band for the critically acclaimed project Preservation: An album to benefit Preservation Hall and the Preservation Hall Music Outreach Program, "Tootie Ma Was A Big Fine Thing" , and "Corrine Died On The Battlefield". Originally recorded by Danny Barker in 1947, these two selections are the earliest known recorded examples of Mardi Gras Indian chants. 
"It wasn't the story that had scared me, but that it had been exposed to heating commonly found inside a middle-class home," (art retorer/historian Antonio) Forcellino writes in his new book, "La Pieta Perduta," or "The Lost Pieta," published in Italy and due out in the United States next year. 
Described as a "compact bedsit" the property is in one of the city's smartest districts right next to the ancient Pantheon and with Italy's billionaire Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi as one of your neighbours. 
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