The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Mecha Walker Hallowe'en costume
- Did the Tea Party cost the GOP the Senate?
- Star Wars Revisionism: it was all Jar-Jar's fault
- Galaxy Tab verdict: good, but not great
- Prop 19: Up in Smoke
- I am governor Jerry Brown / My aura smiles and never frowns
- Republicans take House, Dems keep Senate
- The Access Maze
- Bomb found in home of guy who shot self in head turns out to be fake prop
- Digital Semaphore: the 2D Tag
- Dress like Carl Sagan, impress potential romantic interests
- Song warning about STDs is catchy, somewhat counterproductive
- Choosy Phones Choose Glif
- Pumpkin Gutter
- Will recent "parcelbomb" threat block inflight WiFi and cellphone use?
- Inside a Chinese playing cards factory (Video)
- Inside a Chinese iPhone factory
- For sale: Used condoms made from fish swim bladders
- Baby animals: Boy, they sure are cute!
- Alien hand syndrome
- South Park cosplay
- How to produce fractals without a computer
- When, not if, will full-body "naked scans" become mandatory in the USA?
- San Francisco: GAMA-GO holiday sale this Saturday!
- US Air Force wants neuroweapons to literally blow the enemy's minds
- Image: Voting Day
- Weird 1940s advice for moms who want their boys to tuck in their shirts
- Bedtime Story: Supernatural thriller about the dark side of "getting lost in a good book"
- ICON 35: science fiction convention in Cedar Rapids, IA this weekend (I'm guest of honor!)
- IT Crowd Box Set has no region, can be viewed anywhere
| Mecha Walker Hallowe'en costume Posted: 02 Nov 2010 11:33 PM PDT Redditor This_comment_has built this insane Hallowe'en mecha walker costume out of aircraft aluminum and sheet metal. The Reddit thread is a hilarious collection of nerdgasmic worship and internet miseryguts whining about how he made himself vulnerable to drunken douchebags who'd want to push him over.
Sheet metal, aircraft aluminum, and other parts: $600.At 250 hours of construction, and well over $1000 of "aircraft aluminum and other parts," I humbly submit my vote for most extravagant costume this year. (youtube.com) |
| Did the Tea Party cost the GOP the Senate? Posted: 02 Nov 2010 11:37 PM PDT It's been a good night for Republicans, but it has not escaped notice that some high-profile Tea Party candidates got crushed. Josh Marshall believes that by displacing more electable center-right Republicans, Tea Partiers — and one in particular — just lost the senate for the GOP. [TPM] |
| Star Wars Revisionism: it was all Jar-Jar's fault Posted: 02 Nov 2010 11:29 PM PDT This cute Lego Star Wars video presents a revisionist look at the original Star Wars trilogy in which the prime moving force was the off-stage bumbling of Jar-Jar Binks. (via Super Punch) |
| Galaxy Tab verdict: good, but not great Posted: 02 Nov 2010 11:28 PM PDT  Samsung's Galaxy Tab, out this month, is the strongest rival to Apple's iPad. Running Android 2.2 on similar, smaller hardware with a 7" display, it finally makes honest men out of those who habitually talk of the 'mobile tablet' market as if there were more than one horse in the race. Reviews: Engadget, Telegraph, Slashgear, TechRadar, and PCPro. Consensus: good, but not as good as the iPad. |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2010 10:23 PM PDT |
| I am governor Jerry Brown / My aura smiles and never frowns Posted: 02 Nov 2010 08:54 PM PDT The suede denim secret police are coming for your uncool niece. California Über Alles, performed by the Dead Kennedys at the Mabuhay Gardens in 1979. The song was written during Governor Jerry Brown's last session as governor of California, when he was the youngest Californian elected to the post. Exit polls tonight show that he will now return, and become the oldest Californian ever elected as governor. In so doing, he defeats GOP candidate Meg Whitman. As an aside, why do people always identify Whitman as former eBay chief, and totally overlook her past position as the head of Mr. Potato Head? |
| Republicans take House, Dems keep Senate Posted: 02 Nov 2010 07:41 PM PDT  With the first bout of results in -- no major surprises -- the networks have called it. Fivethirtyeight's ever-fascinating projections are already hitting the probability extremes. [538] |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2010 05:41 PM PDT Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG speculates on architectural anomalies, unlikelihoods, and what-ifs in a way that effectively liberates building design from the limits of mortar and steel -- and, not for nothing, from more elemental constraints like gravity and logic. His essay on "trap rooms" is enough to spawn nightmares. Remember the 1998 feature "Dark City," about a world which literally rebuilt itself every night, a dreamscape demimonde unfolding like an accordion while the people slept? (No? It's okay, almost nobody saw it. It was sort of impenetrably trippy. It's worth looking up, though, for Kiefer Sutherland's way, way over-the-top turn as a mad scientist.) Manaugh's rumination on the trap room is like that, at least insofar as it pushes thoughts about quotidian spaces in some uncomfortable directions. But Manaugh may have outdone himself with this short, sharp post about the "access maze," an urban amenity that doesn't exist, but should. And his speculation about what it would be like to have one borders on poetry: You don't like your address, you simply hurl a chain-linked access stair up over and out to whatever street you prefer--and you enter there, turning a key and stepping into a steel maze of steps and ladders, cantilevered walkways and pillared decks. Fifteen minutes later, passing over and beneath ribbons of other parallel geographies, looping down alleys and nesting briefly on thin platforms in the canopies of trees, walking alone in this isolated cocoon like a private enclave in the city, you're home. |
| Bomb found in home of guy who shot self in head turns out to be fake prop Posted: 02 Nov 2010 05:01 PM PDT  Via the BB Submitterator, Yoshua says: Man commits suicide to be discovered by trick-or-treaters. Family cleans out dead guy's trailer home and finds fake bomb. Police close down the whole block. The photo reveals it to be an old gag prop, and not particularly convincing. Above, a photo of said prop. The kids trick-or-treating at the home thought the dead guy with gunshot wounds to the head was some kind of totally realistic Hallowe'en prop. From today's article about the "bomb," now presumed to have been left in his trailer by one of the 68-year-old man's grandkids: "As the family was clearing out the trailer, they found a kid's toy that looked like a stick of dynamite," Lewisberry Fire Chief Travis Fuhrman said. He added, "they called in what we would consider the cavalry."Fake bomb found in home of man whose body was found by trick-or-treaters (Patriot-News) |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2010 04:58 PM PDT
I'm a 2D tag freak. These square of dots and rectangles seem as exotic as hieroglyphics, even though they're as mundane as yesterday's junk mail. A 2D tag (sometimes called a 2D barcode, even though there aren't any bars) uses all two glorious dimensions to encode data. This provides a much denser blob of information. A 1D barcode might incorporate just a few digits; a 2D code occupying the same space, dozens to hundreds of characters. The most common format is QR Code, although there are several others. And the most common text to be encoded is a URL. (QR Code is patented and has other protections, but creator Denso-Wave has foresworn enforcement.) Made popular early in the oughties in Japan, where handset makers, advertisers, and telecom firms collaborated to build an end-to-end QR Code ecosystem, we're just now starting to see widespread appearances of codes in the United States and Europe. There have been plenty of pilot projects, but it's clear that casual use in media, ads, billboards, and kiosks is growing. Planet Money, the NPR podcast, mentioned a few days ago that the designer T-shirt project the show's staff is developing will be superhot because they'll put a QR Code on the front (listen at mark 18:18). QR Codes have no particular scale, either: they are limited in interpretation by the resolution and clarity of the camera taking the picture, although you can encode with extra error correction to cope with poor cameras. 2D tags are actually more easily interpreted by phone cameras than 1D barcodes, which were designed to work with lasers. Diffraction sometimes combined with the low resolution on a fixed-focus lens makes it impossible at the necessary focal distance to measure correctly all of the gaps and lines in a 1D barcode. 2D codes are designed to work with cameras, and take diffraction into account. I like QR Codes because they are this weird amalgam of analog and digital. They're like a universal a-to-d converter, whether the analog part is a page in a magazine, an image on a monitor, or a ginormous tag on a billboard hundreds of feet away. It's like semaphore for the digital age. I use QR Codes when I want to arc the gap between one medium and another. For instance, I'm reading an article in a Web browser on my desktop computer, and want to continue reading it on my phone. I could copy the URL, switch to my email program, create a new message to myself, paste it in, launch my phone's mail program, retrieve email, open the message, and click. Or I could pop up a QR Code on my desktop, tap a couple times to bring up a 2D code reader on my phone, and tap to open the URL. It seems more efficient, but perhaps that's just me. Mainstream media and advertising seems to have finally decided the time is ripe, although when you see a QR Code in print, there's typically an explanation alongside it. People might otherwise wonder, is Proctor & Gamble trying to give me a Rorschach? I see a bunny! For advertisers and media alike, QR Codes provide precise source tracking: an ad with a custom QR Code in a bus station in Pittsburgh, or a run of 10,000 copies of a magazine regionally distributed in California. QR Codes can be laser printed just like custom ad copy is now in some publications; you could be tracked as an individual if you have a magazine or newspaper subscription, if it were worth it to the advertiser. The less sinister part is that software is readily available for cheap or free for stupid and smartphones alike. Google incorporated QR Codes directly into the Android Market by using and encouraging the use of 2D tags to link to apps. On the iPhone, I prefer QuickMark 4 (99 cents), which can also generate QR Codes. There are plenty of others, including eBay's RedLaser, which is designed for product comparisons, but can also read 1D barcodes and QR Codes. ScanBuy has its own code system, but also supports QR Code in its software, which is available nearly every smartphone platform and a number of Sprint feature phones. The one problem I've had with QR Codes is generating them. On a couple of Web sites which I run or develop for, I was using a quirky perl library that hasn't been updated in years, and for which the licensing and provenance were murky. The fine folks at Kaywa offer an online QR Code maker, but the company asks it be used for noncommercial purposes, and it's a round-trip to another Web site if you're just trying to grab an URL. A few days ago, however, my friend Lex Friedman--co-author of the Snuggie Sutra--and I were talking about creating a Safari extension, as he has a few under his belt. He found that Google's charts site (Chart API) lets you send parameters in a URL for a QR Code that Google returns in real time as an image. You can programmatically incorporate such URLs to have them generated for yourself or users. (Google doesn't limit chart API calls, but asks you contact them for quantities over 250,000 per day.)
javascript:void(window.open('http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=150x150&chl='+encodeURIComponent(top.location.href)+'&chld=H|0','qr','width=155,height=155')); I don't think QR Codes are revolutionary--they're 15 years old, for cripes' sake--but they are useful at avoiding retyping material to move from one place to another. With Google's Chart API, even the tiniest Web site could add their use at no cost. We might be ready to catch up with Japan ten years ago. |
| Dress like Carl Sagan, impress potential romantic interests Posted: 02 Nov 2010 03:45 PM PDT  Nerd Boyfriend is a Tumblr that provides a guide to dressing your significant other in the style of pretty much every male nerd superhero you can imagine—from Adam West to Woody Guthrie. (Plus quite a few dudes that I don't really think of as geeky icons, like Yves Saint Laurent. But maybe that just because my list of nerderies doesn't include "fashion".) I'd be intrigued by this Carl Sagan cosplay ... that is, if my husband didn't already pretty much dress exactly like this. Via Kottke |
| Song warning about STDs is catchy, somewhat counterproductive Posted: 02 Nov 2010 03:29 PM PDT Meant to be a reminder that being "nice" or "healthy looking" doesn't mean you're immune to the likes of syphilis and gonorrhea, this 1969 public service video ends up making VD look kind of appealing. Like, maybe it's a new kind of soda that will represent our generation and help us spread world peace. Or, perhaps, an option available on the new VW Beetle. Submitterated by edinblack |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2010 02:33 PM PDT The Kickstarter crowdfunding for Glif, an iPhone 4 tripod adapter, is a few hours from ending. The two designers hoped to raise $10,000 over 30 days to fund a few hundred production units of low-volume injection molding and break even. Instead, their total is closing on $135,000 with over 4,500 people paying $20 for what will be higher-finish first run model, and over 500 for that plus a 3D-printed model that will be sent shortly after funding closes. Glif involves nearly every current Internet buzzword, and it's cool to boot. I interviewed Dan and Tom, Glif's designers, for the Economist a few days into their project. Nice guys, and good luck on shipping! |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2010 02:31 PM PDT  The Pumpking Gutter is a drill bit that is much much better at cleaning out a pumpkin than a spoon. We used the device last night to clean out 5 large pumpkins. It works very well. You can feel the device breaking up the stringy wall parts and other gut items (not sure the proper terms for these things). I had tried using a spoon and a spatula-like thing that came in a pumpkin carving kit last Friday. This was very difficult and took about the same time to do one pumpkin as 5 large pumpkins and the result was not as clean. It is very easy to start taking chunks off the inside walls with the Pumpkin Gutter, which is usually a good thing. It's just something to be aware of while you're working the pumpkin.  It's longer than I expected from the pictures on the website. I will be storing it in my kitchen drawer. I don't know exactly what I might use it for outside of pumpkins, but any larger mixing project would be game. I was thinking an Uncle Buck style pancake mixer would do. -- Paul Knuth Note: Here is a Youtube video showing how to use the Pumpkin Gutter. -- OH Pumpkin Gutter $10 Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool! |
| Will recent "parcelbomb" threat block inflight WiFi and cellphone use? Posted: 02 Nov 2010 01:46 PM PDT  [Image: Bricked Sky, submitted to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Cameron Russell] Over at New Scientist, Paul Marks speculates that "the long-awaited ability to use a cellphone or Wi-Fi connection on an aircraft might become a casualty of the latest aviation security threat." It is not yet known whether the cellphones in the printer bombs were intended to be triggered remotely. They may have been intended simply as timers, as in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. But future devices could take advantage of wireless communication.Aircraft bomb finds may spell end for in-flight Wi-Fi (New Scientist) |
| Inside a Chinese playing cards factory (Video) Posted: 02 Nov 2010 12:46 PM PDT (Video link) I wonder what goes through this fellow's mind as he packs cards all day? |
| Inside a Chinese iPhone factory Posted: 02 Nov 2010 12:48 PM PDT   Our old pal Joel Johnson just returned from China where he was working on a special feature about electronics manufacturing that will appear in a future issue of Wired. While there, he snapped some shots inside the Shenzhen factory of Foxconn, manufacturers of gadgets from Apple, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard, and other big names. More than 200,000 of the workers live on the factory campus. Workers sleep eight-deep in dorm rooms like the one seen above that Joel says is about the size of a two-car garage. At left is the netting installed around all the buildings after eleven suicides at the factory this year."Where the Workers Who Made Your iPhone Sleep At Night" |
| For sale: Used condoms made from fish swim bladders Posted: 02 Nov 2010 10:54 AM PDT  Think of this as an anti-unicorn chaser for the cute baby animals. This set of 110-year-old condoms, made from the swim bladders* of fish, are up for auction in Vienna. Delightfully, they seem to have been meant to be reusable, as evidenced by the former owner's careful tally of how many times each condom had been used. It looks as though you were only supposed to reuse 10 times. *Not a "bladder" like what fills up with urine, but, rather, a gas-filled internal balloon that helps fish control their own buoyancy. The other bladder usually is much less condom-shaped. Via Dinosaurs and Robots, with assistance from hectocotyli. |
| Baby animals: Boy, they sure are cute! Posted: 02 Nov 2010 10:42 AM PDT  Behold! A positive application of the old saying, "What is seen can never be unseen."
Wired: Cutest Book Ever: Zooborns Internet Craze Moves to Print |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2010 10:14 AM PDT According to a 1997 medical journal paper, a 67-year-old man was frequently woken by his own hand, out of his control, grabbing at his collar. He managed to control the problem by wearing an oven mitt. Of course, this is only one of many strange cases of Alien Hand Syndrome aka "Dr. Strangelove syndrome," which we've posted about on BB previously. It's rare, but sometimes seen in individuals who have had their two brain hemispheres separated to alleviate epileptic seizures, or people who have suffered strokes or other brain injuries. MSNBC's The Body Odd surveys a few cases: "When one hand develops a mind of its own"
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| Posted: 02 Nov 2010 10:11 AM PDT  LA Weekly reporter and former BB guestblogger Liz Ohanesian says, I was at Long Beach Comic Con last weekend. Funny thing is that we don't usually see much in the way of South Park cosplayers, but, this time, there were two guys dressed as Terrance and Phillip. They did a good job.Liz's report is here, with lots of great photos. |
| How to produce fractals without a computer Posted: 02 Nov 2010 10:04 AM PDT Via the BB Submitterator, TheOtherMichael points us to a nifty YouTube video of...
Computer-free fractals using "light on a wall as memory and the physical geometry of the path taken by the light into the camera and out from the projector as the processor to calculate the appropriate affine transformations." A lot of familiar fractal patterns show up -- and the universe itself is the computer.From the video description, by YouTube user YummyFuture:
The images seen in this video are not software-processed in any way. The camera is plugged in directly to the projectors. The pulsing and color shifting comes from the white balance and gain control of the camera.
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| When, not if, will full-body "naked scans" become mandatory in the USA? Posted: 02 Nov 2010 01:35 PM PDT Travel blogger Christopher Elliot has an informed post up about the odd timing of the latest terror scare, and a theory that this might be "just another cleverly-timed event that pushes us toward mandatory full-body scans at the airport," just like the underwear failbomber conveniently ended a lively debate about the privacy issues posed by "strip-search machines." When will full-body scans become mandatory? (elliott.org)
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| San Francisco: GAMA-GO holiday sale this Saturday! Posted: 02 Nov 2010 09:36 AM PDT  The big GAMA-GO holiday sale is this Saturday, November 6, from 11am-4pm at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco. Big deals to be had! Go getcha some. (The wagon train is in L.A. on 11/14!). |
| US Air Force wants neuroweapons to literally blow the enemy's minds Posted: 02 Nov 2010 09:38 AM PDT Noah Shachtman reports that US military bureaucrats are asking scientists to help them "degrade enemy performance" by attacking the brain's "chemical pathway[s]." Says Noah, "Let the conspiracy theories begin." |
| Posted: 02 Nov 2010 09:30 AM PDT |
| Weird 1940s advice for moms who want their boys to tuck in their shirts Posted: 02 Nov 2010 08:59 AM PDT  1940's advice: "To cure boys of the habit of not keeping shirttails tucked in, sew an edging of lace around the bottom of the lad's shirt. There'll be no more shirttails showing." (Via tywkiwdbi) |
| Bedtime Story: Supernatural thriller about the dark side of "getting lost in a good book" Posted: 02 Nov 2010 08:32 AM PDT  Robert J Wiersema's second novel, Bedtime Story, is a spooky, fast-moving horror novel that asks whether the power of storytelling can be something less-than-wonderful. Christopher Knox is a failing novelist struggling with his very late second novel and his dissolving marriage. When his son turns 11, Christopher blows the birthday present: instead of buying the kid a copy of Lord of the Rings, he comes home with a leather-bound first edition of To the Four Directions, an obscure kids' fantasy novel by Lazarus Took, a writer Knox himself adored in his boyhood. But Knox is redeemed when David gets utterly hooked on To the Four Directions, skipping meals and getting in trouble at school because he can't tear himself away from it. It seems that Knox has found the answer to his son's status as a "reluctant reader" -- right up to the point that David collapses into a catatonic state while reading the novel and is taken to hospital, gripped with seizure after seizure. Though Knox doesn't know it (at first), David has been literally sucked into the novel, cast as the protagonist in a hero's journey fantasy plot where things aren't quite right. All Knox knows is that reading the book aloud to David takes him out of the seizures and calms him. Soon enough, though, Knox is playing detective, learning more about the mysterious Lazarus Took, his literary estate, the book, and the other people whose lives it has ruined. Bedtime Story becomes a supernatural thriller, a race between Knox and his attempt to discover and break the spell on David, and the forces within the story who are bent on devouring David's soul. This is a well-crafted story, one that really works through the fantasy novel cliches and looks at the darkness lurking behind them. It was a fun read -- and quick, too, despite the hefty, near-500-page weight of the thing. Weirsema's a fine storyteller, and once he gets his hooks into you, you won't want to stop reading. |
| ICON 35: science fiction convention in Cedar Rapids, IA this weekend (I'm guest of honor!) Posted: 02 Nov 2010 08:24 AM PDT  I'm just finalizing my schedule and packing list for ICON 35 A Steam Powered Convention of the Future, the science fiction convention in Cedar Rapids, IA, where I'm guest of honor this weekend. The event's got several kinds of gaming (including two weekend-long LARPs), its own Stormtrooper garrison, an art show and masquerade, a writers' workshop, and appearances from writers including Joe and Gay Haldeman (and many others). I'm really grateful to the ICON volunteers for bringing me to Iowa for the first time in my life, and can't wait for the event, which promises to be a delight! |
| IT Crowd Box Set has no region, can be viewed anywhere Posted: 02 Nov 2010 08:53 AM PDT  (Click above to enbiggen) Here's a sneaky fact that's fun to know: the UK-only special edition boxed set of the IT Crowd (which comes complete with its own awesome tabletop RPG) is set to Region Zero, which means that it will play on any DVD player, even those outside the UK. What's more, Amazon UK will ship it to anywhere in the world -- so Americans and other exotic foreign types can get a usable copy no matter where in the world you reside. (The IT Crowd DVD extras are wicked fun -- things like leet subtitles and 8-bit RPG extras!) The IT Crowd - Series 1-4 Special Edition Box Set [DVD] (Thanks, anonymous source!) |
Lex turned this into a nifty bookmarklet that worked across all the browsers we tested to pop up a QR Code of the current page's URL. Copy the code from the text below or snap a picture of the code at right, then create a new bookmark, pasting in the code into the location field. Stick that in your bookmark bar, and you can make codes with a click.
"An alien hand is an arm and hand that moves when the person to whom that arm belongs does not intend it to move," says Dr. Ken Heilman, a neurologist at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Gainesville, Fla. Heilman goes on to note that there are many neurological conditions that cause an arm to move unintentionally -- like seizures or tremors, and movement disorders such as chorea, dystonia and athetosis. Here's the difference: In each of those cases, if the arm moves, it's pretty much just flailing about purposelessly, "but with an alien hand, the movement appears to be purposeful." Creepy.
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