The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Namco Music Quiz!
- HOWTO graft the RFID from a payment-card onto your phone
- Lincolnbot Mark I
- Horribly disfigured porcelain dolls
- Four Lions, Chris Morris' terror-LOL movie, opens tonight in US theaters
- What We Talk about When We Talk about Bandwidth
- Maker Shed deal of the day
- Egypt keeps blogger in jail past release deadline
- BART cop Mehserle gets 2 years (minimum possible sentence) for shooting unarmed man in the back
- Seal's shark bite healed with honey
- Six Flags New Orleans
- Decomposing Hamburgergate: Now with 100% more science!
- Solar electricity: Why it's expensive now & where it's heading
- Murder pamphlets
- GeekDesk
- Rocket to Russia: Day 0
- Keep Your 40 Acres, Just Send the Mules
- Japanese police mascots
- Radioactive Rabbit Contaminated by Cold War Waste Tracked by "Hot" Droppings
- Hold Fast, a documentary about anarchy and sailing
- Yet another perpetual motion generator
- NYT reporter disconnects from internet for a week, vlogs results: prison or paradise?
- Nick Hafermaas' eCLOUD at SJC
- Google Mobile Girl videos in Japan
- The U.S. Military's weirdest medical technologies
- Conjoined twins with shared brains can pass sensory information to one another
- Crutchfield Dermatology of Minneapolis claims copyright in everything you write, forever, to keep you from posting complaints on the net
- Downwind faster than the wind: Blackbird sets a record
- Zoo City: hard-boiled South African urban fantasy makes murder out of magic
- Train crossing Brooklyn Bridge: Thomas Edison film, 1899
| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 08:52 AM PDT  "Pac-man's skeleton" by Le Gentil Garçon, in collaboration with François Escuilié, palaeontologist Twaggies presents a quite impossible quiz that should tax even the hardest-core retrogamers. The subject: musical scores from arcade and video games by Namco, one of the golden-age greats from Japan. Test your knowledge after the jump! |
| HOWTO graft the RFID from a payment-card onto your phone Posted: 06 Nov 2010 03:19 AM PDT Hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang is living in Singapore, and he's finding it difficult to board the public transit system because he habitually carries so many RFID-embedded cards that the automated turnstiles can't get a read from his EZlink card. So he decided that he would remove the RFID from his transit card and delicately graft it onto the back of his cell phone ("transplanting RFID chips is a much cleaner solution from both the legal and technical perspective versus cracking the security and programming your own RFID to be compatible with the existing payment system. While many of the security systems used in RFID are already broken or have serious known vulnerabilities, I can't think of any country where the authorities would take kindly to you doing it.")
RFID Transplantation
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| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 07:55 PM PDT  Disney's put the original Abe Lincolnbot Mark I from the 1964 New York World's Fair on display at the gallery at Disney Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World. Walt Disney: One Man's Dream Reopens With New Magic, Fond Memories at Disney's Hollywood Studios |
| Horribly disfigured porcelain dolls Posted: 05 Nov 2010 07:51 PM PDT  Jessica Harrison's wounded porcelain dolls depict china maidens with horrible, disfiguring injuries. The gore and the saccharine sweetness make quite a counterpoint. Jessica Harrison (via Neatorama) |
| Four Lions, Chris Morris' terror-LOL movie, opens tonight in US theaters Posted: 05 Nov 2010 05:11 PM PDT  Take a tip from Jihadi Honey Monster above: run, don't walk, to the nearest movie theater showing Four Lions from director Chris Morris. The film opens in select US cities tonight, and should expand to more in the coming weeks. Cory reviewed earlier this year when it opened in the UK; and this week I interviewed Morris for a Boing Boing feature article. The tl;dr version of both our posts? Go see it.
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| What We Talk about When We Talk about Bandwidth Posted: 05 Nov 2010 04:59 PM PDT
Cellular carriers' competing claims as to what constitutes 4G (fourth-generation) cellular data networks got me to thinking about how speed is only one part of the story about why allegedly faster networks are being built. I've been writing about Wi-Fi since 2000, and that informs my thinking, because Wi-Fi has matured to a point where raw speed doesn't have the same marketing value it once did, because networks are generally fast enough. Instead, multiple properties come into play. I want to talk about bandwidth, throughput, latency, and capacity, and how each of these items relates to one another. Let me start all folksy with analogies. For simplicity's sake, let's consider a medium-sized city that serves water to all its residents through one central reservoir. The reservoir's capacity represents the total pool of water it can deliver at one time to residents through pipes of varying sizes and at different distances. The diameter of the pipe, of course, determines how much water can pass from the reservoir to your particular tap. All of the pipes are from somewhat to very leaky, so the diameter only represents the potential water you could receive at any given time (under the same pressure), while the leaks reduce that. You receive your raw diameter's water after those leaks take their toll. For people who live far away from the reservoir, I turn the pressure way down, because too much water leaks out. Thus, they receive less water with taps wide open than their pipes' diameters would suggest.
In nearly every part of town, the pipes bringing water to neighborhoods have way too many smaller diameter pipes feeding homes and businesses. If everyone flushes his or her toilet at once, only a trickle of water flows out, albeit continuously. I'm cheap, too, in my thought experiment water system: I've brought very small diameter pipes into many areas so that the diameter of every home or building's feed is greater than that of the pipe that feeds a whole neighborhood. What a bastard. Finally, I designed this city water supply in a peculiar fashion. In normal city systems, water is under pressure through the system all the way to your tap. When you open up a faucet, the pressure immediately pushes water out. The quantity is relative to the aperture of your faucet and the system's pressure. At 80 psi, you can get a shower head that sprays out one gallon per minute or two. But in my system, your faucet's handle is directly and mechanically connected to a pipe far away from your home, at a water distribution point or back at the reservoir. Each time you turn off a faucet the valve at the far end is shut down and all the water drains out. When you need water, you have to wait for the faucet to open up that remote valve, and for the water to reach you from wherever it starts. Because I'm a water nazi, my system has sensors that only let water flow if you have a receptacle being filled. Thus, if you want to fill up a gallon jug of water, you wait a moment for the water to flow, but it can fill quite fast. If you're having a big sit-down dinner for 100 people, my sensors turn off the water between each glass you fill. It can take a good 30 minutes to for those 100 glasses. (Shouldn't you fill up pitchers instead? I'm not your mother.) Good? Let's switch off the folksy bit. Capacity. The reservoir represents the overall pool of bandwidth or capacity of the network. Even though it's constantly replenished, you can't take more water out at once than fits in the pool. Capacity is measured by how much raw bandwidth is available across part of the system or the whole, depending on what you want to manage. Picture central POPs (points of presence) in which fiber brings gigabits per second as your reservoirs, which have feeders out to water towers and smaller pools in the form of metropolitan Ethernet, ATM, T3s, T1s, and other technologies eventually reaching DSLAMs, cable head-ends, and cellular base stations. Bandwidth. The diameter of a pipe corresponds to how much water may be delivered to a home; ditto, a given network pipe has a certain raw speed. For wired or wireless connections, that's dependent on the two sides of a transaction handshaking to agree on encodings that determine the speed, which, in turn are based on distance. Throughput. After leaks, how much water arrives? Networks are designed for particular signaling rates for given encodings or protocols. Gigabit Ethernet may push a billion symbols a second through a wire, and 802.11n with three receive/transmit chains can gross 450 Mbps over the air. But bits used for framing packets, error correction, and other overhead can reduce that by a little with Ethernet and quite a lot with Wi-Fi, even when the Wi-Fi signal is in perfect isolation from interference. Throughput is your real data rate after overhead is subtracted: how long did it take for a 100 MB file to get from A to B multiplied by bits, divided by seconds? Latency. This is the toughest one to explain in analogies or with actual technology. Latency is a measure of the round-trip signal, but may have little to do with the distance traversed, even if many thousands of miles. Rather, latency occurs at each hop along a packet's path. Slower links increase latency as do more links, and subtler system design. All of those contribute to taking longer to prime the pump--for water to start coming out of the faucet--when a system has high latency between two points or in the local link. Latency is most noticeable in two-way communications, like voice and video chat, because you wind up responding out of sync with other party (unless you say, "over"). But it also makes interactive Web sites seem non-responsive because they sluggishly react to your actions. Latency can cause jittery or lower-quality video if a device can't provide feedback to a streaming server to throttle down or open over very short periods of time. 2G and 3G cellular data networks, 802.11b and 802.11g Wi-Fi, and pre-switched (hub-only) Ethernet networks were all about getting enough capacity and bandwidth to deliver a usable amount of data to every part that wanted in on the action. With switching, Ethernet essentially creates a private pool for each port on the switch, allowing full-speed communication between ports without sharing the bandwidth with other devices on other ports. Neat, but not practical in wireless communications. (There's switched wireless, but it has more to do with managing dumb access points with smart switches than in adding capacity by established conflict-free channels.) So-called 4G networks (which aren't 4G by the standards of the international body that sets such standards, the ITU-R, but, oh well) and the fastest 802.11n networks aren't designed to bring the maximum possible bandwidth to every party. Rather, there's the expectation that devices will be throttled well below what's possible most of the time to provide a greater reservoir of available bandwidth. That's partly why you see average ranges and peak speeds advertised. The peak speeds are often for sustained downloads, and are balanced against other local users' needs. Even if the bandwidth is available, you might be throttled to allow bursty uses by other parties. With Wi-Fi, the three-radio 450 Mbps 802.11n hardware now on the market isn't intended to give every user 300 Mbps or more of throughput. Rather, the designs provide faster connections at greater distances, fill in dead areas, and allow more simultaneous users. The same is true of 600 Mbps 802.11n (not quite here yet), and the future 802.11ac 1 Gbps-or-faster update to Wi-Fi for 5 GHz. Better networks, not faster networks, is now the general goal. Latency has been a particular focus in cellular networks. The voice component of 3G networks is designed separately from data in order to keep latency as low as possible. (It's all bits in 2G and 3G, but you can handle signaling, framing, priority, and other factors differently.) With 4G networks, the differentiation between voice and data is supposed to disappear; everything uses Internet protocol (IP), which means latency has to be locked down to prevent poor quality phone calls and jittery video. Mobile network companies are trying to boast of new networks having high speeds, but speed isn't the bugbear of cell operators. WiMax, LTE, and HSPA+ networks are or are going to be much faster--but they're also going to be deeper and broader. And, yes, I did just explain that the Internet is a series of pipes. Image by Dann Stayskal via Creative Commons. |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 04:32 PM PDT  If youve ever wanted to explore the wonderful world of Arduino, this Quickstart pack is for you. At $33 The price can't be beat. Get the guide and the Arduino all in one! Includes our best-selling Getting Started with Arduino book by one of the co-founders of the Arduino project, plus an Arduino Uno microcontroller.Arduino Quickstart Pack |
| Egypt keeps blogger in jail past release deadline Posted: 05 Nov 2010 04:18 PM PDT  Kareem Suleiman, the first blogger in Egypt to face a court trial for what he published online, was due to be released from prison term on Friday after four years of incarceration. From the Boing Boing post in 2007: He was charged with "inciting hatred of Islam" and insulting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on his blog, where he wrote under the pseudonym of "Kareem Amer": Link (Arabic), here is his Blogger.com profile, and here are writings he posted on a discussion forum: Link (Arabic). The sentence comes three years after Mubarak announced he would abolish the practice of imprisonment for "press offenses." The photo above was taken right after the court convicted Kareem in 2007, and he was loaded inside a truck to be taken into jail:
Seconds after he was loaded into the truck and the door closed, an Associated Press reporter heard the sound of a slap from inside the vehicle and a shriek of pain from Nabil.His sentence ended Thursday November 4, but the Egyptian government did not release him today, or explain why. Al Jazeera has more. The online group for Kareem supporters, and a letter-writing campaign, are here.
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| BART cop Mehserle gets 2 years (minimum possible sentence) for shooting unarmed man in the back Posted: 05 Nov 2010 03:48 PM PDT
A judge in Los Angeles today sentenced 28-year-old Johannes Mehserle (shown at left), former BART transit officer, to two years in prison for shooting an unarmed man on an Oakland train platform. Oscar Grant, 22 years old, (shown at right) died. A number of witness cellphone videos circulated online shortly after the incident, and were used in the court hearings. Two years was the minimum sentence Mehserle could have received for the involuntary manslaughter conviction. The trial had been moved to LA over concerns about the extensive media coverage of the killing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Let's hope Oakland stays non-violent tonight. Oakland-based Youth Radio has some excellent coverage of the Oscar Grant story. More on today's sentencing: NPR, LA Times, SF Chronicle, Oakland Tribune. The SF Appeal is liveblogging whatever unfolds with protests tonight.
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| Seal's shark bite healed with honey Posted: 05 Nov 2010 03:53 PM PDT  The folks at the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California do the work of heroes. Whenever a seal, sea lion, dolphin gets in trouble, the dedicated team of full-timers and volunteers head out and try to help. They heal and return to the wild a huge number of these wonderful animals. My family has been members for years and the hospital is a favorite place for my young daughter to visit. Today they released an awesome story of success: They used honey as an antibiotic to heal a shark bite wound on an elephant seal. "Honey has gained recent popularity in both human and veterinary medicine as a wound treatment due largely to its natural healing properties. It has a very high sugar content and as a result binds water molecules strongly. That makes the water unavailable to organisms trying to make a living in the area. This is why honey can be safely stored on the shelf without refrigeration. Honey also contains a variety of compounds that may enhance the tissue response to infection and inflammation. It's less expensive than most topical antibiotic ointments and evidence suggests it is just as effective. So the Center's staff and volunteers cleaned the wound and applied a generous layer of honey to it. Thanks to both the honey and the tincture of time, Gupta's wounds healed very quickly. In fact, he was released on October 25 at Chimney Rock, Point Reyes National Shore, California.""Gupta: Sweet As Can Bee!" |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 03:00 PM PDT Six Flags New Orleans locked its gates as Hurricane Katrina bore down on The Crescent City in 2005, and never unlocked them again. At least it hasn't yet -- with the exception of one attraction that was rehabbed and moved to another Six Flags park, the rides have been so damaged by exposure to salt water that they're unsafe to operate. Last month the city, which owns the land under the park, gave local photographer Teddy Smith permission to go in and poke around with a video camera. The resulting film is almost painfully unsettling, whether you view the park as the set for a zombie movie that never got made, as the travel blog Gadling does, or simply as a reminder of how broken parts of New Orleans still are. |
| Decomposing Hamburgergate: Now with 100% more science! Posted: 05 Nov 2010 02:40 PM PDT  Periodically, over the last year, I've wasted a day or so screaming at my computer screen about how photos of a McDonald's hamburger failing to rot were not a sign that the food was somehow artificial or dangerous, but, rather, just what happens to meat products and bread when you leave them out in the open air. Think about the last hunk of baguette you didn't finish. Same thing. Basically, the food dries out before it has a chance to rot. I'd been concocting a scheme to try this out at home, pitting a McDonald's burger against one made at home from free-range beef and organic bread. Luckily for my husband, Serious Eats up and did what I'd merely threatened. In the picture above: A real, Interestingly, because he ran this experiment with an impressive level of thoroughness, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt figured out that large McDonald's burgers (as opposed to the single-patty Happy Meal size) will, in fact, rot in open air. As will home-made burgers of similar proportion. It's only the small ones that get mummified. His conclusion:
Read the full experiment (includes graphs!) at Serious Eats |
| Solar electricity: Why it's expensive now & where it's heading Posted: 05 Nov 2010 02:00 PM PDT  Solar photovoltaic is currently the most expensive form of electricity available ... which is weird, right? I mean, the fuel is free and the intermediate technology is made out of, essentially, sand. So what's the deal? In this article for National Geographic News, I probe the details to try and understand what makes solar power so spendy most places—and why it's actually already a reasonably-priced option in others.
National Geographic News: Shining a Light on the Cost of Solar Energy Image: Some rights reserved by Eleaf |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 01:52 PM PDT  What's that show with the murder cops? "The First 48"? Yeah, that one. You call that true crime -- a bunch of guys in Dacron shirts driving around Minneapolis in Crown Vics? Please. They knew something about true crime in the 18th and 19th centuries, let me tell you, and they had their own little niche of the penny press to show it off in. "Murder pamphlets" were cheap, lurid little rags detailing violent crime in all its many colors, from the case of the unhappy servant who tried to dispatch her employer with arsenic-laced dumplings to the handyman who murdered his boss and the boss's family with an axe. (Workplace dissatisfaction seems to have been a big thing in the murder pamphlets.) The National Library of Medicine shows off its collection of murder pamphlets here. Have a great weekend, and sleep tight! |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 02:20 PM PDT  The GeekDesk is the best and most versatile desk I have found for my home office. It uses an electric motor to switch from sitting to standing position, and after nearly a year of using other standing desks I can say that it is one of the best investments anyone can make if they are interested in an adjustable desk. My foray into standing desks began when I started working from home more often. I found that when I was sitting at work I would easily become distracted and more often than not lethargic. After reading several articles about the perils of sitting around all day I decided it was probably in my best interest to get a standing desk. My first standing desk was a lectern I found on craigslist for $10. It was not adjustable, had an angled surface, and wasn't the best solution. But for the cost, it served me well. I learned how to stand all day, and the small footprint of the podium meant that I could keep my regular desk without sacrificing too much space. The difference between sitting and standing was immediately noticeable. I was much more likely to walk away from my desk and do something that needed to get done, I found that I didn't tire as much, and that my back no longer hurt from long days in a soft cushy chair. I was a standing desk convert.
All of this explains why I am so happy to have discovered the GeekDesk. Simply put, it is a traditional two-legged desk frame that uses an electric motor to raise or lower the working surface from 26" to 46.5" and anywhere in-between. It can lift up to 175 pounds, and it rises and falls at 1" per second. The desk itself is made up of two steel legs connected by a cross bar that contains the electric motor and rack-and-pinion lift mechanism. The top of the desk is screwed on to the legs. GeekDesk sells the legs separately for those interested in attaching their own surface. I have the slightly smaller GeekDesk Mini. It is identical to the GeekDesk except that it comes with a shorter crossbar that is 37.75" wide compared to the standard 61.42" model. It is more than enough space for me as I have a fairly compact setup including a 15" laptop, and a 24" external monitor. To raise or lower the desk there are controls attached to the underside of the working surface. They remain out of the way, and are very easy to use. Simply push the button to activate, and click up or down on the toggle. It is a smooth movement and you can do it with everything on your desk without a fear of spills, or toppling monitors. While my AnthroCart desk served me well, I realized that having the versatility of being able to sit and stand at the same workspace was really valuable to me. The biggest downside of this flexibility is that the temptation to sit is ever present. Since adopting the GeekDesk I do find myself sitting down more often than I would if I didn't have the option. I am undecided about whether this is a good or bad thing, but if you find that you have low self control then it is possible this desk isn't for you. I love being able to sit and stand at my workspace, and I believe it has improved my general well being and happiness while working from home. A word of warning: anybody interested in switching to standing all day should, as with anything bio-mechanical, take it slow and make sure not to cause too much strain. I have had friends who have made the switch too quickly complain about back strain, foot pain, and tired legs. This goes away, but can easily be avoided by slowly easing into standing all day. And I strongly believe the GeekDesk represents one of the absolute best ways to do so. -- Oliver Hulland GeekDesk Mini GeekDesk Original Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool! |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 02:53 PM PDT  Seeing one's name in cyrillic script is slightly jarring. Dateline: Prague As bassist for electric guitar icon (and extremely nice person) Joe Satriani on a European tour I thought to regale you, dear Boing Boing reader, with the exploits of an American rock band touring in Russia. We've been traveling around Europe with two buses (one band and one crew), one tractor trailer loaded with tons of audio and lighting gear, and our crew of about 20. But we're stripping down for this leg: no buses, no truck, and only 13 of us are making the trip. Everything besides instruments (which must fly with us as checked baggage -- what could possibly go wrong?!) is being provided by the venue. Because of severe weight restrictions and their attendant costs, we've been valiantly pitching overboard anything not absolutely essential for this leg. Astonishingly I was able to drop at least twenty pounds of road accretion onto my bunk in the bus (that we will be returning to in Budapest in four days). I will attempt to post as regularly as connectivity and time allow, sometimes from a Blackberry, and hopefully more often using a real camera and laptop. (Ed. note: While we are waiting for Allen's next dispatch, why not enjoy this live performance of Soul Surfin' by The Mermen.) |
| Keep Your 40 Acres, Just Send the Mules Posted: 05 Nov 2010 12:46 PM PDT  I suppose I can boil down my complaints about U.S. law enforcement's attempts to do something effective about rampant and metastasizing cybercrime to two things. The first is that our guys don't have good relations with Russia and other countries that are knowingly harboring the worst criminals. And the second is that they don't have bad relations with those countries--not bad enough to blow the whistle. Instead, U.S. authorities are the co-dependents in a perennially depressing romance, always thinking that real change in their partner is right around the corner. Think about Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. After spending a couple of vacation days this week at a cybercrime conference aimed mostly at bankers--'cause hey, that's how I roll--I'm still convinced that we are in much bigger trouble than people realize. The Zeus family of financial computer trojans, which are probably on millions of PCs and often escape the notice of antivirus software, is truly impressive. Even if your bank cares enough about you to hand over a gadget with ever-changing one-time passwords, Zeus can intercept them and do other neat tricks, like redirecting you to a "down for maintenance" page while it cleans out your account. It can then do math on the fly so that when you check your balance, it appears to be right where it should be. I'm pretty sure it can walk on its hands while juggling with its feet, but you should check with one of the people who have lost or nearly lost their businesses, like Karen McCarthy. But I also spoke to the Secret Service and FBI delegates to the conference, and they gave me a glimmer of hope that I would like to fan into a faint glow. It wasn't their accounts of the five big cheese Ukranians detained recently in a $70 million Zeus case, though that was certainly a good thing. Those men still haven't been charged, let alone convicted and sent to jail; the FBI man grimaced when I asked about the chances for locking up Zeus' Russian author; and forensics maven Gary Warner reported this morning that new Zeus control servers are popping up every day.
What cheered me was that they showed more pragmatism and less bust-down-the-doors machismo than I have ever seen in high-level feds. They are making slow progress in tough spots like Ukraine, they said, in part because the criminals screwed up and started attacking their countrymen. If every other country starts cooperating, pressure on Russia will grow. In the meantime, they are seizing servers, building intelligence on 50 top criminals, and disrupting their networks when they can. Looking at the big picture, they see that the current bottleneck for the mobsters is the mules--the tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone who often unwittingly accept transfers from compromised accounts, take a cut, and wire the rest overseas. The cyber gangs have access to more bank money than they can get out of the country. So that's why the FBI made a big deal out of picking up some dozens of mules a few weeks back. Arrests and news conferences get precious TV time and stories, which can alert people that those work-from-home payment processing jobs are a really bad idea. Like the occasional fall of one or another honcho or botnet, the removal of scores of low-level employees won't do much to stem the tide. But an amplified message could reduce access to some of the kingpins' most precious assets, and it's certainly a worthwhile thing to try. Something else seems increasingly doable as well, but that calls for a broader effort from outside law enforcement. The recent Zeus cases depended on work by outside security researchers, who often know far more than the cops. I would really like to see more such collaboration. I don't see why thousands of people would work together on such open-source projects as Linux and Mozilla and not on something so core to defending the Internet as a reasonable place to exist.
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| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 11:59 AM PDT  Edward Harrison is the co-author of the eye-poppingly cute book about Japanese mascots called Idle Idol. He has painstakingly compiled an online illustrated compendium of 48 Japanese police mascots, which are also eye-poppingly cute. Police in the United States have mascots, too! When my seven-year-old daughter visited the Los Angeles Police Department, a kindly officer gifted her with a mascot medallion. Can you guess which mascot is from Japan and which is from the United States? Post your answers in the comments! |
| Radioactive Rabbit Contaminated by Cold War Waste Tracked by "Hot" Droppings Posted: 05 Nov 2010 11:23 AM PDT Via the BB Submitterator, Steve Silberman says, "A radioactive rabbit has been trapped on the Hanford nuclear reservation after being tracked by locating its 'hot' droppings. Meanwhile, workers on the reservation are deploying fox urine to discourage other rabbits from entering the contaminated zone." Full story here and here (thanks, also, ChshreCat). |
| Hold Fast, a documentary about anarchy and sailing Posted: 05 Nov 2010 11:25 AM PDT Via the BB Submitterator, Boing Boing reader cibomahto says, Ever dream of taking off for the equator, fixing up an old boat, and then sailing it off into the sunset? Well, a few years ago, a group lead by Moxie Marlinspike did just that. Under the banner of the Anarchist Yacht Club, they migrated to Florida, found and restored a boat that they named the Pestilence, then proceeded to sail it around the Bahamas. It's the ultimate adventure, and luckily they captured their experience in the documentary Hold Fast.More at MAKE online, and you can watch the trailer above or here at Vimeo. |
| Yet another perpetual motion generator Posted: 05 Nov 2010 12:39 PM PDT (Video link) How do you like Muammer Yildiz' "overunity homopolar electrical generator?" He claims it generates more energy than it consumes. His claim and his device, however, are less interesting to me than 3:19 mark in the video where one of the demonstrators comes close to getting his fingers amputated by the spinning fan, and doesn't seem to care a whit about it. (Via Greg's comment at Make: Online)
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| NYT reporter disconnects from internet for a week, vlogs results: prison or paradise? Posted: 05 Nov 2010 11:00 AM PDT  New York Times media columnist David Carr, a guy whose life and livelihood depend on being plugged in to a daily stream of stimuli from the web, Twitter, email, and the like, unplugs for a week on a 9-mile island in the Bahamas. He took along a little Flip video recorder and captured daily diaries, which are boiled down to a punchy little piece you can watch here: Video Link. (The NYT being the NYT, they don't allow you to embed it). It's a fun piece. |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 12:46 PM PDT My friend Louis Rossetto of Tcho told me about the gorgeous eCLOUD, created by Dan Goods, Nik Hafermaas, and Aaron Koblin. It's on permanent display between gates 22 and 23 at the San Jose International Airport. I'll be checking it out in a couple of weeks when I'm there. The eCLOUD is a dynamic sculpture inspired by the volume and behavior of an idealized cloud. Made from unique polycarbonate tiles that can fade between transparent and opaque states, its patterns are transformed periodically by real time weather from around the world.eCLOUD |
| Google Mobile Girl videos in Japan Posted: 05 Nov 2010 10:30 AM PDT Andrew Lim says: Google rarely advertises its services but it seems that in Japan not many people know that Google search is "just as powerful on mobile devices as it is on PCs." So Wieden+Kennedy Tokyo were tasked with creating an ad campaign to set the record straight.The taxi driver character is spot-on! |
| The U.S. Military's weirdest medical technologies Posted: 05 Nov 2010 10:16 AM PDT If you are squeamish, as I am, you may want to find a way of avoiding the images before you click on this gallery of "freakiest U.S. military medical technologies." Bone cement, inside-out face transplants, suspended animation? The text, I can handle! |
| Conjoined twins with shared brains can pass sensory information to one another Posted: 05 Nov 2010 09:45 AM PDT Conjoined twins Tatiana and Krista Hogan share part of their brain, and, seemingly, can pass sensory impressions and thoughts between each other: Adding to the conundrum, of course, are their linked brains, and the mysterious hints of what passes between them. The family regularly sees evidence of it. The way their heads are joined, they have markedly different fields of view. One child will look at a toy or a cup. The other can reach across and grab it, even though her own eyes couldn't possibly see its location. "They share thoughts, too," says Louise. "Nobody will be saying anything," adds Simms, "and Tati will just pipe up and say, 'Stop that!' And she'll smack her sister." While their verbal development is delayed, it continues to get better. Their sentences are two or three words at most so far, and their enunciation is at first difficult to understand. Both the family, and researchers, anxiously await the children's explanation for what they are experiencing.A piece of their mind (via Kottke) |
| Posted: 05 Nov 2010 06:21 PM PDT An anonymous reader writes, Crutchfield Dermatology, in the Minneapolis area, requires its patients to give them the copyright for everything they write on the Internet, in exchange for service. The provision is in an agreement called: "No Show and Cancellation Policy, Patient Satisfaction Agreement, Privacy Protection and Assignment of Copyright Policy." Basically, the company doesn't want its patients saying bad things about it on the Internet. So it demands:Crutchfield Dermatology |
| Downwind faster than the wind: Blackbird sets a record Posted: 05 Nov 2010 12:26 PM PDT  Blackbird wind cart. Photo: Steve Morris "Is it possible to build a wind-powered vehicle that travels directly downwind, faster than the wind, powered only by the wind, continuously?" Wanting to settle this question, Rick Cavallaro embarked on a series of experiments and cart-builds to find out, culminating with this really cool wind powered vehicle that he and his colleagues tested on the El Mirage Dry Lake Bed in southern California. In July, it achieved a downwind speed 2.8 times faster than the wind. Today, Make: Online is running Rick's story. Downwind faster than the wind: Blackbird sets a record |
| Zoo City: hard-boiled South African urban fantasy makes murder out of magic Posted: 05 Nov 2010 08:57 AM PDT  South African writer Lauren Beukes's second novel Zoo City, is a remarkable, gritty, noir urban fantasy set in a Johannesburg where criminals and sinners are marked out by animal familiars that mysteriously appear after the commission of a great evil and attach themselves for life. When your animal dies, you are taken by The Undertow, a malevolent black hole in space that arrives within moments of your animal's death and reduces you to ash. But being animalled isn't all bad: the animalled get magical powers, randomly assigned by whatever fate grants you your familiar. The protagonist of Zoo City is Zinzi December, former journalist, former junkie, former fratracide, now living in Zoo City, a squatter slum filled with the animalled. Zinzi's magic power is the ability to locate lost objects, and her dark secret is that she pays back the crime syndicate that bought out her dope-debt by running 419 scams. This is more awful, even, than the fact that she accidentally got her brother killed, and she doesn't share the secret with anyone -- not even with her horribly burned refugee boyfriend. Zoo City follows a fairly traditional (not to say predictable) noir plot: Zinzi takes a minor job finding a lost ring for a rich lady, but the lady is murdered as she is on her way to return the job and get paid, throwing suspicion on her. A mysterious animalled pair on the site offers her a job finding a missing person -- a rising young pop-star who's vanished after a fight with her producer -- and Zinzi takes it against her better judgment. She needs the money to pay off the crime syndicate, who are pushing her deeper into the 419 scams. But Zinzi's new job is anything but straightforward, and the story twists and turns as the true nature of the millionaire power-broker producer comes to light, and we learn about the dark side of magic, the animalled, and murder. The story writhes back and forth like the best noirs, Chandleresque, but filled with unknowable magic and set in an ultra-gritty Jo-burg that makes District 9 look like a holiday camp. Zoo City is a fabulous outing from an extremely promising writer. Beukes's first novel, Moxyland, was a dystopian cyberpunk thriller that never quite jelled for me, despite moments of real brilliance. But I had no such reservations about Zoo City, which has so much fabulous wordplay, imaginative settings and scenarios, and such a dark and cynical heart that I was totally riveted by it. |
| Train crossing Brooklyn Bridge: Thomas Edison film, 1899 Posted: 05 Nov 2010 08:21 AM PDT Here's a video transfer from an 1899 film shot by Thomas Edison of a rail-crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge. As with all Edison films of the day, it ends spectacularly, with the electrocution of an elephant, the cursing of Tesla, and broad claims of credit for all the research performed by every researcher at Edison Labs. It originally retailed for $22.50 in the Edison films catalog. Brooklyn to New York via Brooklyn Bridge 1899 (via Kottke)
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