The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Oscar-winning Saul Bass short on the nature of creativity
• Lazy Teenage Superheroes: $300 short superhero movie kicks ass
• Mindfulness meditation and the brain
• Bruce Sterling talk on "vernacular video"
• Wikileaks panel with Ellsberg, Shirky, Thiel, Zittrain & Singham
• Madness's "Baggy Trousers" as toothpaste jingle
• Boutique hotels and their custom light-bulbs
• Stephen Colbert on Limbaugh's ching-chong moment
• Elaborate televised prank on Belgium's terrible phone company
• Portugal: 10 years of decriminalized drugs
• Old anthropomorphic tank loves its new "heart"
• Coop's Beholder
• Woman paralyzed by hickey
• EFF warns: mobile OS vendors aren't serious about security
• Windoro the window-cleaning robot
• Imaginary WWI "Trench Destroyer" from Gernsback's Electrical Experimenter
• Formal portraits with animals
• Sudan's online guns, tanks and ammo vendor
• PirateBay to launch MusicBay
• Parents who won't vaccinate their kids should pay higher insurance premiums
• Jimmy Wales narrates history of Wikipedia's first decade
• Awesome Foundation: $1,000 a month for the most awesome idea, every month

Oscar-winning Saul Bass short on the nature of creativity Posted: 23 Jan 2011 04:06 AM PST Zack sez, "Found a number of Oscar-winning short-subject films on YouTube -- a real prize was this number from legendary poster and title creator Saul Bass, which was also broadcast on the very first installment of 60 MINUTES. It's a classic look at creativity, along with an unforgettable sequence about the history of man involving an edifice. Why Man Creates (Part 1) (Thanks, Zack!)   Saul Bass's iconic logos - Boing Boing Star Wars credits redone in the style of Saul Bass - Boing Boing Art of film title sequences - Boing Boing

Lazy Teenage Superheroes: $300 short superhero movie kicks ass Posted: 23 Jan 2011 04:02 AM PST Lazy Teenage Superheroes is an extremely funny, extremely well-executed 13-minute rude little superhero movie, made by Michael Ashton for a mere $300. It's full of cussin', lewd speculative scenarios involving the private lives of slacker teen supes who are mostly interested in using their powers to get loaded and/or laid. And there's ninjas and herpes jokes. Lazy Teenage Superheroes - Short Film   Real-life superhero Phoenix Jones gets a broken nose - Boing Boing Real life superheroes in the news - Boing Boing Dr. Electronic trailer! A Breakdancing superhero! - Boing Boing Superhero Loses His Pants - Boing Boing

Mindfulness meditation and the brain Posted: 22 Jan 2011 05:06 AM PST A Massachusetts General Hospital study in next week's Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging shows marked brain changes over an eight-week practice of mindfulness meditation. Of course, by definition, every experience you have makes changes in your brain (that's pretty much the definition of experience: "something that changes your brain"), but in this case, the changes point to deep and lasting effects as a result of meditation that correspond to the reported experience of meditators. (This confirms earlier research from the hospital, like this study from 2005). Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased grey-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection. Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased grey-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time. Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in 8 weeks Mindfulness with Jon Kabat-Zinn (Google Video) (via Reddit) (Image: Meditation - Higher Ground, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from oddsock's photostream)   Monk building meditation center in California desert - Boing Boing Boing Boing: Meditation alters brain structure How to run, meditate, and not get hurt - Boing Boing Army's New PTSD Treatments: Yoga, Reiki, 'Bioenergy' - Boing Boing Default state of the human brain - Boing Boing

Bruce Sterling talk on "vernacular video" Posted: 22 Jan 2011 04:11 AM PST Closing Keynote: Vernacular Video from Vimeo Festival on Vimeo. Here's a very stern and sardonic Bruce Sterling at the Vimeo Festival discussing "vernacular video." Bruce notes, "This speech goes on for 56 minutes, practically forever by vernacular video standards." Despite that, I was riveted by all 56 minutes' worth -- Bruce takes an unexpected turn through the history of the Dick Van Dyke show on the way to explaining how to predict the future and then wraps it up with a sinister turn around the morality of cigarette sponsorship and what it is that vernacular video does that runs parallel to selling coffin nails. Showtime: Bruce Sterling at Vimeo Festival, 'Vernacular Video' Download video: Low res, Hi res

Wikileaks panel with Ellsberg, Shirky, Thiel, Zittrain & Singham Posted: 22 Jan 2011 03:13 AM PST This 1:48 panel discussion from Silicon Valley's Churchill Club features Daniel Ellsberg, Clay Shirky, Peter Thiel, Jonathan Zittrain and Neville Roy Singham on the topic of "WikiLeaks: Why it Matters. Why it Doesn't." Though the Q&A gets a little sidetracked, the discussion covers a lot of good, thoughtful, nuanced ground. WikiLeaks: Why It Matters. Why It Doesn't? (via Hack the Planet in Exile)   Wikileaks reveals secret blacklist behind proposed Great Firewall ... California judge shuts down wikileaks - Boing Boing Wikileaks-inspired phone scam - Boing Boing Pentagon orders Wikileaks to delete classified documents - Boing Boing Wikileaks volunteer detained - Boing Boing Wikileaks releases nearly 400000 new secret Iraq docs, with help ... Iraq: Wikileaks video of US military killing journalists - Boing Boing

Madness's "Baggy Trousers" as toothpaste jingle Posted: 22 Jan 2011 03:08 AM PST From the Vintage Ads group, this 1980s British Colgate ad that uses Madness's classic Baggy Trousers (a song about youthful hijinx) as its jingle. Colgate, 1980s (British ad)   Whisky toothpaste - Boing Boing

Boutique hotels and their custom light-bulbs Posted: 22 Jan 2011 03:03 AM PST Boutique hotel chain The Standard has commissioned its own custom lightbulbs whose filaments are replaced with double-Xs that glow with delicate, pastel hues; other boutiques like Chateau Marmont and The Mercer also have do their own bulbs. The 3 watt bulbs have a warm low glow. Dimensions of each globe is about 4.75" x 2.25" and they screw into any standard incandescent fixture. We love how they look on a light string using multiple sets. The bulbs are individually boxed with a KAWS and The Standard sticker and then wrapped again in an outer box that holds all three, also co-branded. KAWS Light Bulb Set for The Standard (via Dvice)   The 100 Watt Lightbulb Goes Out: Ronald Howes, Easy Bake Oven ... Frog eats Christmas light, gets illuminated - Boing Boing Failed project: goldfish in a light fixture - Boing Boing Homebrew steampunk lamp - Boing Boing Lightbulb that's burned for 107 years - Boing Boing HOWTO make dust-goggles from a bra-strap, light-bulb screens, and ... Boing Boing: History of the Light Bulb photo exhibit Light bulb art shows wasted electricity - Boing Boing

Stephen Colbert on Limbaugh's ching-chong moment Posted: 22 Jan 2011 02:56 AM PST Just when you thought that everything that could be said about Rush Limbaugh's ching-chong-chop-suey impersonation of Chinese Premier Hu Jintao had been said, here comes Stephen Colbert with the absolute last word on the matter (How to watch The Daily Show & Colbert Report from outside the US). Rush Limbaugh Speaks Chinese (via Reddit)   The imaginary Chinese vocabulary of Rush Limbaugh - Boing Boing

Elaborate televised prank on Belgium's terrible phone company Posted: 22 Jan 2011 02:50 AM PST Belgium's much-reviled phone company Mobistar was elaborately pranked by a program on VRT Belgium; the pranksters hid themselves in a steel container, which they had dropped directly in front of the gates of a large Mobistar office at 5AM. The container had a prominent customer service number printed on the side of it -- a number which rang the pranksters inside the container -- that was promptly called by a series of Mobistar employees who wanted to get the container moved off before 2,000 Mobistar employees reported for work and found the parking lot blocked off. The pranksters proceed to put the Mobistar employees through a high-art comedic phone hell, disconnecting them, subjecting them to terrible hold music (performed live from within the container on a little synthesizer), gradually ratcheting the misery up in a Dante-worthy re-enactment of every terrible, awful mobile phone company experience. The program was a huge hit in Belgium (be sure to watch it all the way through for the a killer punchline), and has been captioned in English for those of us in the anglosphere to enjoy. Prank on a Belgian call center (with captions in English) (via MeFi)   Robin Cooper Urdu talk show phone prank: "My only friend" - Boing ... Pranknet's Skype "phone assaults" detailed, head bully in charge ... Prank poster to trick cell-phone - Boing Boing Vintage, profanity-laced cable complaint that was hand-to-handed ... Enormous Superbowl prank (hoax?): 2350 lights smuggled in - Boing ...

Portugal: 10 years of decriminalized drugs Posted: 22 Jan 2011 02:40 AM PST Here's a good Boston Globe report on the first decade of Portugal's bold experiment with drug decriminalization and increased treatment. Ten years ago, Portugal -- whose drug problem had been spiraling out of control -- decided to treat drug addiction as a public health matter, not as a criminal matter. They decriminalized possession of drugs, and increased treatment available to addicts, and experienced an immediate, dramatic and sustained drop in negative effects from drug use -- though the use of some drugs went up. In this sense, one drug policy expert noted, the Portuguese experiment has become a sort of Rorschach test -- in the dark blobs on the page, people can see whatever they want to see. But Tom McLellan, the former deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Obama, said he's happy for the conversation. While not in favor of decriminalization, McLellan believes that the American debate over drug reform has become too polarized, with one side calling for incarceration and the other for legalization. "And I just don't buy it," McLellan said. The answer is likely somewhere in the middle, he believes, and perhaps that's where we can learn something from Portugal, a country that at least tried something new. "I like that approach to drug policy," McLellan said. "Policy is really a product. And like a product, policy can be made better with experimentation and honest evaluation, rather than stupid polemic polarization of ideology." Drug experiment (via Kottke)   Ex-drug czar John Walters made a fool on CNN - Boing Boing Junk science and cocaine scares - Boing Boing A new Drug Policy Alliance PSA - Boing Boing Video: Brief History of Weed - Boing Boing UK govt demands an end to evidence-based drug policy - Boing Boing What would an evidence-based drug policy look like? - Boing Boing Netherlands runs out of criminals, has to shut prisons - Boing Boing

Old anthropomorphic tank loves its new "heart" Posted: 22 Jan 2011 02:12 PM PST

Coop's Beholder Posted: 22 Jan 2011 01:34 PM PST I love Coop's take on the Beholder, a true Monster Manual classic. beholder.jpg   Erotic Monster Manual entries - Boing Boing Ballad of the Monster Manual - Boing Boing Presidential candidates as Monster Manual monsters - Boing Boing Read an RPG Book in Public Week - Boing Boing Original D&D art from 1974: our craptastic nerd origins - Boing Boing Weird D&D advice-column questions - Boing Boing McCain's D&D character stats - Boing Boing

Woman paralyzed by hickey Posted: 22 Jan 2011 02:23 AM PST A 44 year old woman in New Zealand presented with partial paralysis at Auckland's Middlemore Hospital emergency department; after examination, the doctors concluded that she'd suffered a mild stroke caused by a hickey near a major artery in her neck. She recovered after being treated with anti-coagulant. "Because of the physical trauma it had made a bit of bruising inside the vessel. There was a clot in the artery underneath where the hickey was." Wu said the clot dislodged and traveled to the woman's heart, where it caused a minor stroke that led to the loss of movement. "We looked around the medical literature and that example of having a love bite causing something like that hasn't been described before," he said. New Zealand Woman Partially Paralyzed by Hickey (Image: File:Love bite.jpg, Janek B./Wikimedia Commons)

EFF warns: mobile OS vendors aren't serious about security Posted: 22 Jan 2011 02:09 AM PST Chris Palmer -- formerly Google Android security framework engineer and now Technology Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- writes about the cavalier attitude toward security exhibited by the major mobile operating system vendors, and the risk this poses to all of us: By contrast, mobile systems lag far behind the established industry standard for open disclosure about problems and regular patch distribution. For example, Google has never made an announcement to its android-security-announce mailing list, although of course they have released many patches to resolve many security problems, just like any OS vendor. But Android open source releases are made only occasionally and contain security fixes unmarked, in among many other fixes and enhancements... Android is hardly the only mobile security offender. Apple tends to ship patches for terrible bugs very late. For example, iOS 4.2 (shipped in early December 2010) contains fixes for remotely exploitable flaws such as this FreeType bug that were several months old at the time of patch release. To ship important patches so late is below the standard set by Microsoft and Ubuntu, who are usually (though not always) much more timely. (For example, Ubuntu shipped a patch for CVE-2010-2805 in mid-August, more than three months before Apple.) Don't Sacrifice Security on Mobile Devices   GSM security defeated by German hacker: NYT on CCC Boing Boing Now you, too, can engage in warrantless wiretapping! - Boing Boing More on the T-Mobile G2 "rootkit" -- it's actually a "NAND Lock ... Boing Boing: TOS on Cingular's wireless data service sucks as much ... Password Doesn't Shear Firesheep - Boing Boing Boing Boing: Security blunder: Sprint Wireless leaks customer data China cracks down on "money sucking" mobile phones loaded with ...

Windoro the window-cleaning robot Posted: 22 Jan 2011 11:30 AM PST IEEE Spectrum reports on Windoro the window-cleaning robot. The robot consists of two modules that go on opposite sides of the window and hold each other using permanent magnets. The Windoro robot can clean windows 6 to 25 millimeters thick (0.2 to 1 inch). And no, you won't see it hanging on skyscrapers -- its creators say it's designed for cleaning windows at homes and stores. One of the robot's two modules works as the navigation unit. It uses accelerometers to navigate and bump sensors to detect obstacles and window frames. The other module is the cleaning unit, which has four spinning microfiber pads and a reservoir that dispenses detergent. Windoro the window-cleaning robot

Imaginary WWI "Trench Destroyer" from Gernsback's Electrical Experimenter Posted: 22 Jan 2011 02:02 AM PST From the last days of WWI, Paleofuture brings us this illustration for a "trench destroyer" that graced the Feb, 1917 cover of Hugo Gernsback's The Electrical Experimenter: "The design of this mobile dreadnaught, with its steel-tired, spoked wheels, suggests that its inventor may have been influenced by agricultural tractors or perhaps an amusement park Ferris wheel. The trench destroyer also embodies the common goal of military visionaries: maximum offensive power with total defensive security." (This description is from Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future, by Corn and Horrigan). The Trench Destroyer (1917)   WWI and WWII Propaganda Posters - Boing Boing Satirical WWI maps - Boing Boing Scott Westerfeld's Behemoth: return to the steampunk WWI of ... WWI pro-reading ad - Boing Boing WWI-era photos of people pretending to be patriotic pixels - Boing ... Radiohead Song in memory of Harry Patch, WWI survivor and pacifist ... WWI images from Library and Archives Canada - Boing Boing Draft cards of famous people from WWI - Boing Boing

Formal portraits with animals Posted: 22 Jan 2011 01:31 AM PST In his series Regresiones, Mexican artist Alex Castro depicts animals posed for traditional human portraits, working the curious, anthropomorphic expressiveness of animal faces for all its worth. Regresiones (via Geisha Asobi)   Best Wild Animal Photos of 2008 - Boing Boing Illustrated book about cats written by Amazon Mechanical Turk ...

Sudan's online guns, tanks and ammo vendor Posted: 22 Jan 2011 01:24 AM PST Sudan's Military Industry Corporation has everything you need to stage your militaristic atrocity, from small arms to tanks, mortar rounds to army boots (boots presently out of stock). No prices given -- goodness, what a bunch of e-commerce tyros! Military Industry Corporation (Thanks, Rob!)   Sudan: 19 young Muslim guys get lashes for wearing false lashes ... Sudan gov. to foreign journos: you're subject to death penalty ... UN Envoy in Sudan booted after blogging about Darfur - Boing Boing Schoolteacher in Sudan on trial for naming teddy bear Muhammad ... BB Video: "Christmas in Darfur" -- Not "Yet Another" Darfur ...

PirateBay to launch MusicBay Posted: 22 Jan 2011 07:29 AM PST From TorrentFreak, a whispered innuendo about a new PirateBay project: fear.musicbay.com. "The music industry can't even imagine what we're planning to roll out in the coming months. For years they've complained bitterly about piracy, but if they ever had a reason to be scared it is now."

Parents who won't vaccinate their kids should pay higher insurance premiums Posted: 22 Jan 2011 07:40 AM PST Writing on CNN, pediatrician Rahul K. Parikh suggests that parents who allow the irresponsible lies of publicity-mongers like Jenny McCarthy to scare them into not vaccinating their kids should have to pay higher insurance premiums. I think this sounds like a good start, but I'd go further: I think that kids should have to show a certificate of vaccination to use public schools -- because vaccinations don't confer resistance on all people, we have to rely on "herd immunity" (that is, a preponderance of people taking vaccination) to keep all of us safe. Here in Hackney, London, we've got live measles, whooping cough and other terrible, preventable childhood diseases in the field, thanks to this kind of fearmongering. For those of us with kids who are too young to be vaccinated, it means that other parents' uninformed fear create a health risk for our families. Refusing to vaccinate a child is dangerous not just for that child but for entire communities. It's precisely this point a colleague of mine was considering when he had the idea that parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids should pay substantially higher health insurance premiums. It makes sense. Insurance, after all, is just a pool of money into which we all pay. In determining how much we or our employers pay, risk is taken into account. The perfect analogy is smoking. If you smoke -- and want to turn your lungs black and spend a greater portion of that pot of money on your possible chronic lung disease or any cancers you'll get -- then you may have to pay more. Make anti-vaccine parents pay higher premiums (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) (Image: Measles and Scarlet Fever, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from perpetualplum's photostream)   Scientist who criticised DJ for vaccination scare talk gets ... Whooping cough on the rise - Boing Boing Roald Dahl on vaccinating your kids - Boing Boing Read the journalism that exposed MMR vaccine/autism fraud - Boing ... Salon retracts 2005 story linking vaccines and autism - Boing Boing Anti-vaccine fear versus science - Boing Boing

Jimmy Wales narrates history of Wikipedia's first decade Posted: 22 Jan 2011 12:55 AM PST In this short, stylish video, Jimmy Wales recounts the story of the founding and evolution of Wikipedia, lo those ten years ago. The State of Wikipedia (Thanks, Simon!) /   12 volume set of books reprints Wikipedia's edits of the Iraq War ... Wikipedia's first 10000 edits - Boing Boing A decade of Wikipedia: lesser-known miracles - Boing Boing

Awesome Foundation: $1,000 a month for the most awesome idea, every month Posted: 22 Jan 2011 06:26 AM PST The Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences organizes regional groups of 10 people who commit to "showing up each month, stuffing $100 each into a paper bag, and giving that bag to the person we think has the best chance at achieving something awesome." The Toronto chapter is up and dispersing grants, with no strings attached. Submissions through our application form are placed in a common pool viewable by all chapters. Each chapter meets monthly to select a project to fund. By consensus, trustees determine which project to fund, and the $1,000 fellowship is distributed accordingly. Some chapters also routinely contact applicants for interviews before awarding the fellowships. Chapters are divided by geography, and more recently by topic of interest. While specifying a chapter to apply to is not necessary (all chapters can view the applications received by all other chapters), many chapters show a preference for local projects. The Awesome Foundation (via Confessions of a Science Librarian)

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