The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Assemblage octopus for sale
• Building a better Nerf gun
• The Internet: It's gotta be evil. It's just gotta be.
• Olympus TP-7 Telephone Recording Device
• Study: Lots of people drink alcohol at sporting events
• Tunisia protest banner: Mark Zuckerberg good, Ben Ali evil
• Squirrel Shadow (BB Flickr Pool)
• ID guns in movies better with IMFDB
• Owl, drunk on schnapps, detained and given water by police 'til it sobers up
• Snowflake photographs from late 1800s
• The last of a species, caught on film
• Two dudes seeking "maximum lols" charged in AT&T iPad hack case
• Vatican ordered bishops to protect and not report pedophile priests
• Wikileaks not really all that damaging, say US officials privately
• EDGE World Question 2011: "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"
• Found: Lost Pictures of New York Blizzard
• Sarah Palin Battle Hymn (Disco Edit)
• Comcast-NBC deal approved by FCC, Justice
• Facebook backs off on revealing your phone number and address
• Monsters in Minecraft
• Chicks dig Vespas
• Sony Ericsson sues Clearwire over logo
• Tron: Ancestry T-Shirt
• Guns, the Gipper, and steel
• Haunting coyote roadkill silhouette
• Someone is paying more than $400 for leftover Apollo mission pot roast

Assemblage octopus for sale Posted: 18 Jan 2011 10:00 AM PST Jeremy Mayer, one of my favorite found object sculptors (along with Roger Wood), is selling off his "studio mascot," this giant assemblage octopus. Octopus   Old typewriters turned into beautiful, expressive animals and ... Deer made from typewriter parts - Boing Boing San Francisco: Machinations art show, with Pesco moderating panel ... Humanoid sculptures made from old typewriters - Boing Boing

Building a better Nerf gun Posted: 18 Jan 2011 05:38 PM PST Via Make: Simon, our favorite New Zealand maker, decided to build a better Nerf gun. "The pistol is made from 32mm ID PVC pipe, some aluminium extrusion and aluminium pipe, wood for the grip and various pieces of metal and plastic. The main spring is one I got from Bunnings warehouse. This gun should be able to take a cut down AR-15 spring as used in the Boltsniper weapons but these aren't that easy to come by in New Zealand. I believe I am legally allowed to buy one but by the time I found that out I already had the Bunnings spring. I may still get one to play with. The idea of a toy gun using a part from a real one appeals to me for some odd reason..." Also check out Simon's steam-powered record player and weather satellite receiving station.

The Internet: It's gotta be evil. It's just gotta be. Posted: 18 Jan 2011 04:43 PM PST The Atlantic turned its first profit in at least a decade, largely thanks to embracing the Internet. The owner of longtime rival magazine Harpers—who hates the Internet with burning fire of 10,000 suns and is, thus, not at all likely to be biased in his assessment of Internet-based business plans—reportedly told his staffers that he thinks The Atlantic is lying.

Olympus TP-7 Telephone Recording Device Posted: 18 Jan 2011 04:35 PM PST Interviewing someone over the phone is never easy, and it is a task that has been made a bit more difficult since the switch to mobile phones. Where as with a landline you could use something like the previously reviewed Mini Phone Recorder, there are no simple bypasses for cellphones. I was originally hopeful when a previous reviewer devised a way to record cell phone interviews while wearing a hands free headset using parts found at Radioshack. But I wanted something simpler. With a little bit of research I discovered the Olympus TP-7; a miniature microphone that slips into your ear and plugs into your recording device (or computer) and enables easy recording of phone calls. At $11 it seemed like a low risk move to try one out. Given its low cost, I didn't have any expectations in terms of audio quality, but was surprised to find that it was crystal clear (or as clear as a cell phone conversation normally is, clipping and all). While it's true my questions were louder than their answers the difference didn't hamper playback and transcription. Furthermore, the TP-7 is comfortable enough in-ear that I practically forgot it was there (just remember if you ever switch your phone to the other ear you have to move the microphone as well). The TP-7 comes with a bevy of plug adaptors, as well as different sized ear plugs for a comfortable fit. I have, in the past, tried Google Voice's recording services that only work on incoming calls to your Google Voice activated line (and also announce that the telephone call is being recorded due to varying state requirements). The recording quality is significantly worse compared to what my Olympus TP-7 and Olympus LS-10 produced, and the transcription (another feature offered by Google Voice) was laughable. Also, unlike the previously reviewed hands-free setup, the TP-7 has the added advantage of being a single piece of equipment that requires no extra cables or accessories, and is small enough to be carried around in my bag all day just in case I have to record a call on the road. If you ever have a need to record phone calls or interviews over the phone (mind you, legally) I can wholeheartedly recommend this tiny, lightweight but high quality in-ear microphone. -- Oliver Hulland Olympus TP-7 Telephone Recording Device $11 Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool!

Study: Lots of people drink alcohol at sporting events Posted: 18 Jan 2011 04:42 PM PST Based on the breathalyzer results of a small percentage of sports fans who agreed to be tested post-game, the roads leading away from major sporting events could be chock full of drunk drivers, says Scientific American. If you extrapolate the findings of this study to entire NFL games, as many as 5000 people could be leaving each game, legally too drunk to drive. That extrapolation is interesting as a thought experiment, but it's not necessarily a valid thing to do with this small of a per-game sample size, especially when the people sampled were (partially, anyway) self-selected. In reality, the numbers could be lower or higher. I bring this study up, though, because it is apparently one of the first attempts, ever, to measure the blood alcohol content of people leaving major sporting events. It was meant to test the feasibility of such a study, as much as anything else. Conclusion: It's possible. And the study also brings up some interesting questions that I hope will be addressed in future research: • Are baseball and football fans different from other sports fans, when it comes to drinking? What about hockey and basketball? Or something less popular, like volleyball? • How do these numbers compare to the percentage of legally inebriated people leaving other kinds of cultural events, like plays? • What were the transportation choices of the people sampled? I don't really care if you get drunk at a Packer's game, as long as somebody sober drives you home. • How does the percentage of legally inebriated people who choose to drive after a sports game compare to, say, the percentage of legally inebriated people who choose to drive home from a play, and from the bars on Saturday night? And how do those figures compare to the BACs of a random sampling of Americans driving on a busy highway? Is there just a flat percentage of us who don't care much about driving drunk? Or does the size of that group vary by activity? (Via Brian Mossop) Some rights reserved by jasondmckay

Tunisia protest banner: Mark Zuckerberg good, Ben Ali evil Posted: 18 Jan 2011 03:57 PM PST Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic blogs the photograph above. "The Watergate is across the street from the Saudi Embassy, so I happened to spot it as I was walking around," he says. "Has anything been more Bruce Sterling ever?" Zuckerberg's inclusion appears to symbolize the role of social media in helping the Tunisian people organize themselves for the overthrow of the government. The cover was Photoshopped to include a lipstick kiss on Zuckerberg's cheek.

Squirrel Shadow (BB Flickr Pool) Posted: 18 Jan 2011 03:47 PM PST Photograph contributed to Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Ed Sweeney aka Navicore.

ID guns in movies better with IMFDB Posted: 18 Jan 2011 03:14 PM PST If you've spent the past 14 years wondering about the guns used by Nicolas Cage's character Castor Troy in the 1997 smash hit Face/Off, today just became the most important day of your life. Because I bet you never thought to look it up on the Internet Movie Firearms Database. Here, let me IMFDB that for you: Castor Troy's (Nicolas Cage) weapons of choice are two gold titanium nitride plated Springfield Armory M1911-A1 V-10s fitted with custom gold inlaid grips, that he keeps in two small-of-the-back holsters. Among the obvious modifications to the guns include skeletonized hammers, beavertail grip safeties, ambidextrous slide stop safeties, target sites, moderately bevelled magazine wells, and V-10 ported slides/barrels. Feel free to spend the rest of the day looking up any and every other gun you've ever seen on the silver screen. You're welcome. IMFDB [Thanks Siege]

Owl, drunk on schnapps, detained and given water by police 'til it sobers up Posted: 18 Jan 2011 03:17 PM PST "An owl that had evidently drunk too much Schnapps from two discarded bottles was so inebriated that it got picked up by police. The bird will be released once it has sobered up." (Der Spiegel, via Jen Phillips)

Snowflake photographs from late 1800s Posted: 18 Jan 2011 03:09 PM PST Wilson A. Bentley was one of the first known photographers of snowflakes. He adapted a microscope to a bellows camera, and with this device -- after much trial and error -- became the first person to photograph a single snowflake in 1885. He sent 500 prints of his snowflakes to the Smithsonian in 1903. Those images are now part of the Smithsonian Institution Archives. Bentley's book Snow Crystals, with more than 2,400 snowflake images, was published in 1931. This photomicrograph and more than 5,000 others supported the belief that no two snowflakes are alike, leading scientists to study his work and publish it in numerous scientific articles and magazines. This photo is one of 137 million artifacts, works of art and specimens in the Smithsonian's collection. It is not on public display. You can view some of Bentley's snowflake prints here. And guess what? You can buy a reprint of the original Bentley book here: Snow Crystals.

The last of a species, caught on film Posted: 18 Jan 2011 02:52 PM PST As a kid, I was fascinated by the photos of the extinct quagga that were bolted to the sides of the zebra pen at the Topeka Zoo. I knew about extinction, of course. Dinosaurs were extinct. And I knew that buffalo had been shot by the 1000s a long time ago and might have become extinct, if they hadn't been protected. But I remember the quagga being a little shocking, nonetheless. Here was an animal, that had been alive recently enough to be photographed—not just drawn, like some imaginary beastie—but which no longer existed. Not even one. Not anywhere. It probably didn't hurt that the quagga looked just different enough for little me to feel it as a loss. It wasn't quite a horse. Not quite a zebra. And I would never see one, except as a photo. It was a weird, existential sort of feeling, which I felt again while watching this video of a thylacine, also called Tasmanian tiger or Tasmanian wolf. This animal is actually a marsupial, not directly related to wolves (or big cats). Any similarity you see is purely convergent evolution at work—different species adapting to similar environmental niches. Not surprisingly, like the wild dogs they resemble, thylacines were hunted with abandon in the 19th and 20th centuries, because of the threat they posed to domesticated herd animals. The last confirmed* wild thylacine was killed in 1930. The last captive one died six years after that. That's him, a male sometimes referred to as "Benjamin" in this video, shot in 1933. Thanks to Waslijn for Submitterating! *The possibility of living thylacines in the wild is a favorite topic of cryptozoologists. There have 3800 recorded sightings on since 1936. But nothing conclusive.

Two dudes seeking "maximum lols" charged in AT&T iPad hack case Posted: 18 Jan 2011 02:41 PM PST Two suspects are charged with federal crimes for hacking AT&Ts website in 2010 to obtain personal data of more than 100,000 iPad users. From Kim Zetter's Wired News piece: Daniel Spitler, 26, of San Francisco, Calif., was charged in New Jersey on Tuesday with one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. Andrew Auernheimer, 25, of Fayetteville, Ark., was charged in Arkansas for the same crimes. The chat transcripts really do say it all: Spitler: I hit fucking oil Auernheimer: loooool nice Spitler: If I can get a couple thousand out of this set where can we drop this for max lols? Auernheimer: dunno i would collect as much data as possible the minute its dropped, itll be fixed BUT valleywag i have all the gawker media people on my facecrook friends after goin to a gawker party Two Charged in AT&T Hack of IPad Customer Data (Wired News)

Vatican ordered bishops to protect and not report pedophile priests Posted: 18 Jan 2011 02:24 PM PST "A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police -- a disclosure that victims' groups described as 'the smoking gun' needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests." (AP)

Wikileaks not really all that damaging, say US officials privately Posted: 18 Jan 2011 02:21 PM PST "I think they just want to present the toughest front they can muster. We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging." —One of two congressional officials briefed on internal U.S. government reviews of the mass leak of diplomatic cables. (Reuters)

EDGE World Question 2011: "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?" Posted: 18 Jan 2011 12:45 PM PST Each year, über-big-think-literary-agent and EDGE founder John Brockman poses a question, and collects and publishes the answers. This year: WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY'S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT? The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A "scientific concept" may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or "in a phrase") but has broad application to understanding the world. • My response to the EDGE 2011 Question is here ("Ambient Memory And The Myth Of Neutral Observation"). • Here is the index of all participants, more than 150 of them, including Brian Eno, J. Craig Venter, George Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Evgeny Morozov, Linda Stone, and Richard Dawkins (who will be returning soon as a Boing Boing guestblogger, I'm happy to report!). • News coverage so far includes: The Atlantic, Wired UK, New York Times, Sueddeutsche Zeitung , Newsweek, Die Welt, The Guardian , Publico. (Image: RUDBECKIA, Katinka Matson)

Found: Lost Pictures of New York Blizzard Posted: 18 Jan 2011 12:04 PM PST [Video Link] One of those "I'm trying to find who made this via the interwebs" videos. Todd Bieber says, I was skiing in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and I found a roll of film. I had the film developed and this is what I found. Please contact me if you recognize the people in the photos. brooklynfoundfilm@gmail.com (thank you, Mark Day)

Sarah Palin Battle Hymn (Disco Edit) Posted: 18 Jan 2011 11:29 AM PST Link to Soundcloud page. Direct MP3 Link. Remixed from the original Sarah Palin Battle Hymn by Ethan Persoff.

Comcast-NBC deal approved by FCC, Justice Posted: 18 Jan 2011 11:58 AM PST "The proposed combination of Comcast and NBC Universal was approved by the Federal Communications Commission Tuesday, smoothing the way for the deal to close by the end of January." As the NYT's Brian Stelter notes, "Copps, the only FCCer to oppose deal, says it "confers too much power in one company's hands." His statement (Scribd). Here is the FCC press release (Scribd). Update: The Department of Justice has now also approved the deal.

Facebook backs off on revealing your phone number and address Posted: 18 Jan 2011 10:49 AM PST Did you catch the story about Facebook giving apps access to your phone numbers and home addresses? The idea is going down about as well as might be expected. [Ars]

Monsters in Minecraft Posted: 18 Jan 2011 10:50 AM PST You may now how have more monsters in your Minecraft worlds [Indiegames] , should their blocky acres become insufficiently dangerous. Sick of said blocky acres? Fans of sandbox explore-em-ups can take a look at the landscape-generating tech behind forthcoming epic Skyrim. [Game Informer]

Chicks dig Vespas Posted: 18 Jan 2011 10:27 AM PST (Via Little Hokum Rag)

Sony Ericsson sues Clearwire over logo Posted: 18 Jan 2011 09:58 AM PST Metallic green swirls are in! Cellphone maker Sony Ericsson is suing Clearwire over the similarities between the two companies' logos. The trademark infringement comes down to the 'swirl' motif, color scheme and both companies' presence in the same market. Complaint [PDF via Engadget]

Tron: Ancestry T-Shirt Posted: 18 Jan 2011 09:41 AM PST This lovely T-shirt design by Spiritgreen is on sale today at Woot. [via Laughing Squid]

Guns, the Gipper, and steel Posted: 18 Jan 2011 11:27 AM PST Mitch Horowitz ordered a copy of Ron Reagan's new book "My Father At 100" from Amazon and was presented with: Customers Who Shopped for My Father at 100 Also Shopped For * An American Life: The Autobiography * Crosman 760 Pumpmaster, Pink Stock air rifle * Leatherman 830846 Skeletool Multitool (Thanks, Mitch!)

Haunting coyote roadkill silhouette Posted: 18 Jan 2011 07:26 AM PST Dylan Menges snapped this haunting silhouette of left behind when he moved the still-warm corpse of a roadkilled coyote: "She hadn't been there long (still warm), and moving her carcass off the road revealed the salty silhouette from passing cars on a winter highway." Charlie Down (via Reddit)

Someone is paying more than $400 for leftover Apollo mission pot roast Posted: 18 Jan 2011 07:21 AM PST A packet of freeze-dried beef pot roast from the Apollo program is up for auction, and the price is currently $472. $520 if you want to bid in. Good's Nicola Twilley notes some important facts about the Apollo food program that make this pot roast even less appetizing than it looks. 1. Inflight food consumption proved inadequate to maintain nutritional balance and body weight. 2. Inflight nausea, anorexia, and undesirable physiological responses experienced by some crewmen were believed to be partly attributable to the foods. 3. Meal preparation and consumption required too much crew time and effort. 4. Water for reconstitution of dehydrated foods was unpalatable initially and contained undesirable amounts of dissolved gases. 5. Functional failures occurred in the rehydratable food packages in the early Apollo flights.

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