The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Ain't Misbehavin': subject index to democratic parenting
- I get better spam than you
- Wired.com: Lamo/Manning Wikileaks chat logs contain no unpublished references to Assange or private servers
- Muppets with people eyes
- Video: Kenny Powers struts to Kid Cudi
- Aerial photos of industrial eco-messes
- Greenwald vs. Wired in 1000 words or thereabouts
- Robbers used musket
- Barge Cement
- Sea Lion shot in the face lives
- TSA prepares for potential hot cocoa bombers with Thermos terror alert
- Police say gentleman playing "real-life Frogger" in traffic lost game
- Real-life "Sound of Music" family member dead at 97
- Haikuleaks: "Cable is Poetry"
- BBC Engineering Monographs from 1950s and '60s: Once 5 Shillings, Now Free
- Neanderthals ate their veggies, too: all-meat diet a myth
- Onion on gamer memories
- Tom the Dancing Bug: Twelve-Year-Old Discovers New Gender!
| Ain't Misbehavin': subject index to democratic parenting Posted: 30 Dec 2010 04:49 AM PST  Alyson Schafer's latest parenting book, Ain't Misbehavin' is an excellent companion to her Honey, I Wrecked the Kids; the latter being a humane, sensible book on the theory and practice of raising kids with their cooperation (rather than in spite of them). But while Honey was meant to be read from cover-to-cover in one go; Ain't Misbehavin' is a series of short articles arranged by subject, a kind of shorter, wittier contemporary Dr Spock reference that you can turn to when you find yourself brought up short by the challenges of parenting. Shafer's democratic approach to child-rearing really resonates with me; it focuses on getting kids to want to participate in family life, school and wider society, rather than bribing or forcing them. But it doesn't stint on suggestions for what to do when kids test their limits or enervate their parents -- solutions that allow you to retain your sanity and your integrity without escalating spats into fights and fights into wars. We've been trying Shafer's suggestion for keeping Poesy, our daughter in her own bed at night. We've got a calendar on the fridge now, with stickers for the days when Poe has a "sleep over" in our room. On those nights, we make a real occasion of things, with snacks and stories and tickling (and we all enjoy it). On other nights when Poesy tries to come into bed with us, we show her the calendar and remind her that there's a sleepover day and this isn't it (we're also using the calendar to track when one or the other of us is away or out, weekend swims and zoo trips, etc -- it's really helping the kid with her dates and sense of time, too). This is what I love about Schafer's approach: it acknowledges that the kid is part of the family and that things should be arranged to her liking when possible, but also lets parents stay in charge of the stuff we understand best and negotiate to maintain our own space and sanity. A subject-index to Schafer's advice is the perfect antidote for those moments of angry upset when your best efforts, patience and goodwill fail -- a bridge from despair back to hope. |
| Posted: 29 Dec 2010 11:33 PM PST Posted here, verbatim, is an example of the sort of spam I get.
The video was attached to the email as a giant .wmv file.  |
| Posted: 29 Dec 2010 10:22 PM PST  Wired.com's Kevin Poulsen and Evan Hansen have confirmed key details concerning unpublished chat logs between whistleblower Bradley Manning and informant Adrian Lamo. Responding to questions on Twitter, Poulsen wrote that the unpublished portion of the chats contain no further reference to 'private' upload servers for Manning, while Hansen indicated that they contain no further reference to the relationship between Manning and Wikileaks chief Julian Assange. U.S. Army Pvt. Manning, who allegedly sent 250,000 diplomatic cables and other secrets to Wikileaks, awaits trial in Quantico, Virginia. Wikileaks, working with newspapers in Europe, has so far published about 2,000 of the cables, with minor redactions. U.S. prosecutors are said to be building a case against Assange. Such a case would, according to legal analysts, have to prove he actively helped Manning leak classified information rather than act merely as a journalist working with a source. There is already discussion in the already-published part of the logs of a hypothetical secure FTP server. But public statements by Lamo suggested that such a server may in fact have been provided for Manning to upload classified documents, leading to intense debate over the unpublished part of the chat logs. Wikileaks supporters—most notably Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald—urged Wired to reveal more information. Wired balked, citing journalistic privilege and the need to protect the privacy of sources and subjects. Poulsen's comment appears to suggest Lamo's claims cannot be sourced to the remaining chat logs, only to the published sections or other communications. Along with Hansen's tweet, that leaves no new smoking guns in the unpublished portion or the logs, and little to suggest the degree of collaboration between Pvt. Manning and Wikileaks that prosecutors may need to pursue charges. Assange, who is neither a U.S. citizen nor resident there, is currently on bail in London, where he faces extradition to Sweden on unrelated charges. Notes and screenshots of the tweets follow after the jump
Above, a screenshot of an exchange I had over Twitter today with Wired Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen. If you find the last 72 hours of Wikileaks/Wired/Greenwald/Poulsen back-and-forth confusing, you aren't alone. Both sides have published lengthy attacks on the other which, while presumably intending to answer questions, have left many bystanders scratching their heads. Rob Beschizza summed up a lot of it earlier today, but here's my short summary: • There has been wide speculation that the United States will attempt to prosecute Julian Assange by claiming he somehow coerced or convinced Bradley Manning to give him the classified US documents Wikileaks has been publishing. At the very least, the US may try to prove that Manning received some kind of special treatment from Wikileaks/Assange. • Adrian Lamo has made statements to various news agencies in which he suggests that Manning told him Assange set up some kind of private or "special" FTP servers for his use. Obviously, a private server could be considered special treatment. • Assange has publicly denied this on numerous occasions, claiming Wikileaks received the cables through their normal submission system, and that he never heard the name "Bradley Manning" until it was published in the press. • Lamo claims that when he turned in Manning to the government, all of Lamo's hardware and data were seized by the feds, leaving him without a copy of the chat logs between himself and Manning. • Before that happened, apparently, he gave the complete logs to Wired News (wired.com). Since we understand that they have only published 25% of those chat logs so far, logic follows that they (and possibly the Washington Post) are the only ones (other than the feds) with access to the full logs. Wired News know what is actually in them and perhaps more importantly, what isn't. They have so far refused to publish or comment on the content of the other 75% of the Manning/Lamo chat logs. • This has become an issue, (most vocally noted by Salon's Glenn Greenwald) because of Lamo's interaction with the press. He's made claims (like the one about the private server) that are impossible for reporting journalists to fact-check without having access to the chat logs. • The assumption has been that the unpublished portion of the chat logs are relevant to these issues. • After all the huffing and puffing, the situation boils down to one question, which was posted at heykevinpoulsen.com: "The central issue is simply Wired refusing to confirm or deny what Adrian Lamo claims is in the unreleased chat logs." Earlier this evening I posted that link on twitter and Kevin Poulsen responded to me saying they'd already answered that question. I asked him to clarify and after a bit of discussion, he made the statement screenshotted above. At about the same time, Evan Hansen, Editor in Chief of Wired.com responded to Glenn Greenwald with this:
You see what they just did there? Kevin and Evan both independently verified that in the unpublished portions of the chat logs between Adrian Lamo and Bradly Manning there is no further reference to private FTP servers, and no further discussion about the relationship between Manning and Assange. That's kind of a big deal, because the published portions of the logs do not support or back up the statements Adrian Lamo seems to have been making. And that would mean that his claims are based solely on opinion, not based on evidence in the chat logs. IANAL, but this would not appear to be good news for anyone attempting or threatening to prosecute Julian Assange and/or Wikileaks. What could have been a smoking gun now looks more like an empty water pistol.
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| Posted: 29 Dec 2010 08:22 PM PST |
| Video: Kenny Powers struts to Kid Cudi Posted: 29 Dec 2010 06:23 PM PST "Wild'n Cuz I'm Young": Kid Cudi fan video featuring Kenny Powers. "Fuck the blogs, I'mma tell my story." (via @twilitekid) |
| Aerial photos of industrial eco-messes Posted: 29 Dec 2010 08:39 PM PST  Above is an aerial view of heavy metal waste caused by fertilizer production. The photograph, titled "Crucible," is the work of artist J. Henry Fair. He flies in small planes over oil refineries, paper mills, and factories to take shots of environmental decay and toxic industrial sites. Fair's solo exhibition, titled "Abstraction of Destruction," opens January 13 at New York's Gerald Peters Gallery. His new photo book The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis is published next month. From Smithsonian: J Henry Fair: "Abstraction of Destruction" (Gerald Peters Gallery) "Devastation from Above" (Smithsonian) The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis by J Henry Fair (Amazon) |
| Greenwald vs. Wired in 1000 words or thereabouts Posted: 29 Dec 2010 03:43 PM PST  Glenn Greenwald and Wired.com's Christmas gift to internet trashtalk is finally beginning to make sense! So let's recap. The smackdown started a few days ago with Greenwald reiterating his demand that Wired.com reveal more of the chat logs in which Pvt. Bradley Manning, alleged whistleblower, confided in Adrian Lamo, who turned him over to the authorities. While Wired's news-writing is accurate, the problem with writing the story of the year is that how it was written is often the next headline, especially when the relationships between source, subject and reporter are unusually close and opaque. And there are two sides to that story: what was left unpublished from the chat logs, and how did Wired get the scoop in the first place? Melding these two issues led Greenwald to lard salient questions about the logs with conspiracy theories about how Wired sourced its reporting. His aggressive style, directed at Wired Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen and his longtime association with Lamo, earned a defensive and contemptuous response from Poulsen and Wired.com chief Evan Hansen. With the mutual trashtalk, however, focus blurred away from the more interesting question of what the logs reveal about Manning and Lamo's chats. These details loom ever larger in the public imagination, not least because they could help American prosecutors get international man of demystery Julian Assange charged over Manning's exfiltration of sordid (and occasionally very witty) displomatic cables.Today, mercifully, Greenwald separated out the personal stuff and got back to basics with a new post that focused on the issue of the logs. It comes down to this: is there anything Wired can say about the logs that helps others verify Lamo's increasingly erratic recollections of them, without compromising its journalistic duty to protect sources and subjects? Though Greenwald's aggressive style alienated many, few today seem entirely happy with Wired's given answer, which was "No." But why is this? One reason is because Adrian Lamo keeps getting fresh press attention by describing what's in the chat logs, but in a way that contradicts established facts or seems otherwise inconsistent or shifty. Wired may be in a position to at least fact-check him without further compromising anyone's privacy, but hasn't. Another reason is because the story's enormous importance makes every detail seem equally important, even if it isn't. We become fixated on Poulsen's personal associations because its easy to imagine moral hazard spreading like kudzu in the shadow cast by the journalist's shield. Other questions stand out: is anyone being protected who is not a public figure? Did Wired.com receive legal advice on running the logs? It's possible that the options available to it are limited by matters that it can't discuss in public. (A good example of this would be our own run-in with a company that sued us over a blog post: we remained silent as the court case dragged on because that helped ensure we could go public in full later on.) If it's able to, Wired has a great opportunity for some radical transparency. That doesn't have to be running the chat logs: it could be a straightforward discussion of why it would be impossible or inappropriate to do so. In the meantime, lovers of DRAMATIC HUMAN can still enjoy all the smacktalk at Wired, Salon, BB, Facebook, Reddit and elsewhere: a sure antidote to the winter gloom. So, the normal procedure here would be for me to polish this off with some clever analysis, then slam dunk in a zinger that fills everyone involved with epic pathos. Instead, brainfarts: • Perhaps Lamo isn't lying exactly! Instead, he could be studiously trying to limit what he discusses to the inventory of facts currently in the wild, a misguided sense of propriety doing battle with a desire to get what's his by throwing new tidbits at journalists. The result, however, is that his story morphs over time as new info emerges. Mr. Lamo, unaware of why this makes him look bad, is therefore unaware of why it makes reporters who rely on him look bad. • The AP-style story format now prevalent at Wired.com makes it less bloggy than readers think it is. This establishes a distance between readers and reporters and restores a traditional tone of objectivity to its newswriting. As it is, Wired's commenters rarely emerge from a state of inchoate, slavering rage, so there's no incentive for its writers to enter the peanut gallery. And the blog river itself is polished to such a high standard that casual, chatty posts don't really belong. Without a local venue where writers and readers can engage readers in non-confrontational discussion, it all ends up as bitching on Twitter. • Even if Lamo is as mendacious as he appears to be, Poulsen may have a responsibility to protect him as a source, even if Lamo abuses that by going on television to discuss that which Poulsen offered discretion on. A promise is a promise, even if you shouldn't have made it, and especially when legal uncertainty coincides with public opprobrium. I can't help but think there is some kind of journalistic paradox going on over there with no real solution. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but you know what? Transparency is harder than it looks when the well-being of innocent people depends upon keeping secrets. You could drown in the polite ironies of journalism. • Boing Boing also received a version of the Manning-Lamo logs, and we've run what we've got with some redactions. (We also received chat logs not involving Manning, which we didn't run ourselves: they're up here) The Washington Post also received yet another version of these mysteriously never-quite-identical logs. But no-one cares about that, because discussing journalism with the Washington Post would be like discussing metaphysics with a melting knob of butter. |
| Posted: 29 Dec 2010 02:42 PM PST Now these are some classy robbers. On Saturday, two young fellows in St. John's, Newfoundland attempted to rob a Super 8 Motel using a musket. They split before getting their loot. "Musket used in St. John's motel robbery" |
| Posted: 29 Dec 2010 12:09 PM PST  My dad used Barge Cement for various things on his boat since I was a child. It is actually a cobbler's glue, but it works with just about anything. It is a bit hard to find and there are inferior products touting the same uses (less toxic), but nothing is as good as Barge. I mainly use it for leather - hems, applique, etc., but I have also used it to glue a flat-bottomed birdhouse onto a flat-cut tree trunk, to tack down wallpaper seams that have lifted, to hold wood seams prior to screws being put in place, to secure a rubber foot to a chair leg, or the chair leg to the seat when wood glue has failed - just about anything you wouldn't use Crazy Glue for. In a pinch, Barge can fill the need of many sewing jobs (not buttons, though). Barge Cement does what you really want rubber cement to do when its hold isn't enough. It takes some dexterity to use, and it is difficult to remove from skin or clothes (there is a Barge Cement Thinner), but it dries quickly and sets up a strong, waterproof bond. Barge Cement typically comes in a tube, like toothpaste. I got really tired of getting to the end of the tube and then having to hunt it down, so I bought a gallon of it (with the thinner) at a great price from Filmtools. Now I cut the empty tub open at the end, fill it, and recrimp it. Otherwise I use old Tupperware to seal and store it, and then apply it with a disposable paint brush. -- Nancy Niche Barge Cement $4 Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool! |
| Sea Lion shot in the face lives Posted: 29 Dec 2010 10:48 AM PST Another heart wrenching story of good work done by the Marine Mammal Center. On December 8th, locals on Swede's Beach (a tiny cove in Sausalito where incidentally I used to live,) came across a listless and barely moving California sea lion. They called the Marine Mammal Center, who came to its rescue and found that it had been shot in the face with a shot gun. During the few weeks of his recovery the doctors at the center were impressed with the sea lion's stoic nature and apparent refusal to bark, naming him Silent Knight. Turns out that both Silent Knights eyes are ruined and that while he is slowly making a recovery -- he will never be able to be released into the wild again. From San Francisco Examiner: "But now that the veterinary team has determined the animal is completely blind, the center has to try to find a zoo or aquarium for him since he is not suitable for re-entry to the wild, (center exec director Jeff) Boehm said...Also running this week is an opportunity to have donations to the Marine Mammal Center matched. Apparently members of their board of directors are matching the next $10,000 in donations made.
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| TSA prepares for potential hot cocoa bombers with Thermos terror alert Posted: 29 Dec 2010 10:16 AM PST WaPo on THERMOS-TERROR MENACE: "A top military official says new warnings about insulated beverage containers are an example of federal officials trying to anticipate terror tactics. Adm. James Winnefeld told the AP Friday that the TSA is 'always trying to think ahead." |
| Police say gentleman playing "real-life Frogger" in traffic lost game Posted: 29 Dec 2010 10:08 AM PST  A 23-year-old man in South Carolina was hospitalized after having been hit by an SUV while playing a real-life version of the video game Frogger, according to police. In the "Frogger" arcade game, players move frogs through traffic on a busy road and through a hazard-filled river. Before he was hit, police say the man had been discussing the game with his friends. Chief Jimmy Dixon says the man yelled "go" and darted into oncoming traffic in the four-lane highway.Link to news report (via Submitterator, thanks J. Napsterista). |
| Real-life "Sound of Music" family member dead at 97 Posted: 29 Dec 2010 09:38 AM PST Agathe von Trapp, the oldest daughter of Austrian naval officer Capt. Georg Ritter von Trapp, has died at age 97 according to a family friend. Her family inspired the 1965 movie "The Sound of Music." (thanks, Jason Weisberger!) |
| Posted: 29 Dec 2010 09:19 AM PST  HaikuLeaks searches through the Wikileaks "Cablegate" data for haikus. I'm not sure if it's fully automated, or human-generated—seems too perfect to be computerized. Either way, genius. (thanks, JJ!) |
| BBC Engineering Monographs from 1950s and '60s: Once 5 Shillings, Now Free Posted: 29 Dec 2010 09:05 AM PST  The legendary BBC Radiophonic Workshop closed down in 1998, after 40 years. 50th-anniversary celebrations in 2008, and a just-published book by academic Louis Niebur, titled Special Sound (Oxford), have helped to secure the Workshop's legacy of sonic experimentation, notably the efforts of such figures as Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, and the creation of the theme song and sci-fi sound design for Doctor Who -- not to mention work on Quatermass serials and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. While I was finishing up a review of the Niebur book, a friend introduced me to the following. Over at the BBC website, there is a treasure trove of old technical monographs from the Radiophonic's heyday. The documents, packed with technical diagrams and detailed descriptions of BBC procedures, date back to the 1950s. These include, for Radiophonic fans, a great one from November 1963. The monograph series deals with various aspects of the BBC's operations, but this specific one (number 51) is 21 pages long and is entirely dedicated to the Radiophonic Workshop. It cost five shillings upon release, but is available for free download these days. The above image, from Monograph 51, shows a "keying unit" that was rigged up in the studio:
"For convenience in 'playing' sequences of electronicaly generated sounds, a short section (an octave) of a piano keyboard was adapted to make the necessary contacts to the outputs of the bank of signal generators. However, it was soon found that simple on-off switching was very limited in its application ... and the Workshop engineers devised this modification to the keyboard which gave adjustable rise and decay characteristics."
[ PDF link ]
And there are index PDFs contained at this page that have embedded links to the various monograph PDFs. The BBC documents cover such subjects as "Drop-out in Video-tape Recording," "Distribution Systems for Receiving Stations in the l.f., m.f., and h.f. Bands," and early color-TV testing. Sadly, there appear to be no signs of any Dalek technology in the monographs.
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| Neanderthals ate their veggies, too: all-meat diet a myth Posted: 29 Dec 2010 08:56 AM PST  (Photo: "Romanesco," contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by BB reader Wokka.) Paleo and raw foodie diet flame war in the comments, commence! New findings show that that early hominids ate and even cooked their vegetables. Researchers in the archaeobiology laboratory at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC have found remnants of date palms, seeds and legumes (including peas and beans) stuck in the teeth of three Neanderthals unearthed in caves in Iraq and Belgium. Neanderthals went extinct approximately 28,000 years ago. Snip: Among the scraps of food embedded in the plaque on the Neanderthals' teeth were particles of starch from barley and water lilies that showed tell-tale signs of having been cooked. The Ice Age leftovers are believed to be the first direct evidence that the Neanderthal diet included cooked plants as well as meat obtained by hunting wild animals.Neanderthals may have feasted on meat and two veg diet (Guardian) Neanderthals cooked and ate vegetables (BBC News) 2010: A Good Year For Neanderthals (And DNA) (NPR News) All of these news reports are based on a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Journal, which is subscription-only: Microfossils in calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and II, Belgium) . The (free) abstract is here. |
| Posted: 29 Dec 2010 08:27 AM PST "Approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes." |
| Tom the Dancing Bug: Twelve-Year-Old Discovers New Gender! Posted: 29 Dec 2010 08:17 AM PST   |
Fair, who lives in New York State, consults scientists to better understand the images in his viewfinder: vast cranberry red ponds of hazardous bauxite waste spewed by aluminum smelters; kelly green pits filled with byproducts, some radioactive, from the manufacture of fertilizer. But pollution never looked so good. "To make an image that stops people it has to be something that tickles that beauty perception and makes people appreciate the aesthetics," says Fair, who specialized in portraiture before taking to the skies.| You are subscribed to email updates from Boing Boing To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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