The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Pinhole camera from an old hardcover
- Welcome to the Canadian Internet, now stop using it
- Philip Pullman on saving libraries
- Senate filibusters explained
- Unusual location to put a straw on a princess sippy cup
- Bob Staake's Look! A Book! exclusive preview
- Free excerpt from Jo Walton's brilliant Among Others
- 11 percent of American homes are vacant -- UPDATED
- Blue collar energy beverage in an oilcan
- Escher/escalator mashup
- James Booker's New Orleans piano
- Egypt: Mubarak speech sounds like a plan for one more crackdown
- Chimpanzee mother learns her infant has died (video)
- Debunking yet another bought-and-paid-for report on the need for non-neutral net
- Egypt: Mubarak speaks, won't run again, elections in September
- City of Boston to sell off entire contents of its glorious, ancient print shop
- Egypt turns to retro tech during online blackout: Xeni on Madeleine Brand show
- What is "liquid ass?"
- Dale Dougherty: "All of us are makers"
- Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante
- Metagames in review
- Photo of uncontacted Amazonian tribe
- What is autism, really?
- Outplacement cowboys screw the recently unemployed
- Noctilucent clouds: more of 'em and brighter too!
- Whimsical, fantastical matrioshke
- Pot soda
- Coney Island's 1907 "buried alive" attraction
- Music sampling 101
- Cyborg video games
| Pinhole camera from an old hardcover Posted: 02 Feb 2011 12:42 AM PST  Etsy seller Engrained has hollowed out a 1920 copy of Zane Grey's The Man of the Forest and turned it into a pinhole camera: "This unique camera has a magnetic shutter crafted from wood and leather and is finished off with beautiful ebony and pearl knobs. This book is full of character with the fabric cover torn and tattered to perfection." Zane Grey - Hardback Book Pinhole Camera (via IZ Reloaded) |
| Welcome to the Canadian Internet, now stop using it Posted: 02 Feb 2011 04:02 AM PST  Welcome to the Canadian Internet, where extreme concentration in telecoms and a weak, lame regulator have given rise to a nation where your Internet access is metered in small, ungenerous dribs, and where ranging too far afield during your network use results in your ISP breaking into your browsing session to tell you that you're close to being cut off from the net. The incumbent telcos have successfully petitioned for "usage based billing," wherein their customers only get so much bandwidth every month (they've also long practiced, and lied about, furtive throttling and filtering, slowing down downloads, streams, and voice-over-IP traffic). This will effectively make it cheaper to use their second-rate voice-over-IP and video-on-demand service than it is to use the superior services the rest of the developed world enjoys. If you were a Canadian entrepreneur or innovator looking to start your own networked business, this would be terminal. How can an innovative service take hold in Canada if Canadians know that every click eats away at their monthly bandwidth allotment? I can think of no better way to kill Canadians' natural willingness to experiment with new services that can improve their lives and connect them with their neighbours and the wide world than to make them reconsider every click before they make it. Welcome to the Canadian Internet, and welcome to Information Age Canada, a nation whose government is willing to sell the country's future and competitiveness for the sake of a few more points on the bottom line of the creaking telcoms industry. Way to go, eh?
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| Philip Pullman on saving libraries Posted: 02 Feb 2011 12:45 AM PST In Britain, a new austerity budget has threatened massive library closures across the country, with some communities in danger of ending up with no public library at all. Philip Pullman's local chief counsellor accused authors of defending libraries because they like the royalties they earn from the books libraries buy. In response, Pullman has given this stirring speech about the value of libraries to their communities and to civilization: Leave the libraries alone. You don't understand their value. (Thanks, GuidoDavid, via Submitterator!) (Image: Manchester Central Library, March 2010, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 16712259@N04's photostream) |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2011 02:25 AM PST If you've ever been flummoxed by the US Senate's bizarre practice of days-long minority filibusters which result in the blocking of bill after bill despite a majority in favor of the legislation, here's Filibustery to the rescue. In a series of videos (the first one is up now, and embedded above) as well as interactive tutorials, Filibustery explains the arcane Senate rules that permit this kind of legal spoilery and makes a good case for a sane set of reforms. Filibustery (via MeFi) |
| Unusual location to put a straw on a princess sippy cup Posted: 01 Feb 2011 04:23 PM PST  My sister took this photo of a Disney princess sippy cup with an odd location for the drinking straw. |
| Bob Staake's Look! A Book! exclusive preview Posted: 01 Feb 2011 03:36 PM PST  As I've mentioned before, Bob does all of his illustration work using a pre-OS X version of the Macintosh operating system and Photoshop 3. He doesn't use a stylus, and instead does everything with a mouse. Here's a video of Bob's process - it's amazing. After the jump, you can see two additional page spreads from the book.
Previously: The making of Bob Staake's New Yorker cover Video of Bob Staake's unusual drawing process |
| Free excerpt from Jo Walton's brilliant Among Others Posted: 01 Feb 2011 02:18 AM PST Tor.com is hosting a long excerpt from Jo Walton's extraordinary Among Others, one of the best books I've read in years. From my original review: Excerpt: Among Others
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| 11 percent of American homes are vacant -- UPDATED Posted: 02 Feb 2011 03:57 AM PST UPDATE: Barry Ritholz sez, In this case, what she wrote is not technically incorrect, but its very misleading. The lowest this rate has been over the past few decades is 8.5%. So while 11% sounds shocking, it is only somewhat elevated after the worst housing crash in the US since the Great Depression.Welcome to America after the housing bubble, where, according to the census, 11 percent of homes are vacant: Nearly 11 Percent of US Houses Empty (via Consumerist) (Image: Doors, Vacant House, Spring, Texas 0329091251, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from nakrnsm's photostream) |
| Blue collar energy beverage in an oilcan Posted: 01 Feb 2011 11:05 PM PST  "Rivet" is a new energy beverage aimed at blue-collar workers rather than, say, hackers or party kids (slogan: "energy that works.") Its manufacturer has packaged it in a faux-distressed oil-can-esque vessel with a rivetty lid. |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2011 02:30 AM PST  Bravo to b3ta user E Dubya for this brilliant viral vid/MC Escher mashup, "Shopping in EscherLand has its ups and downs". |
| James Booker's New Orleans piano Posted: 01 Feb 2011 02:19 PM PST Ten years ago, I first posted about my favorite piano player of all time, the Crescent City's James Booker (1939-1983). Booker's hands were like "Spiders on the Keys," which is the name of his live album upon which you can find another smoking, drunken rendition of the above song, "Papa Was A Rascal," along with Eleanor Rigby, Tico Tico, Over the Rainbow, and a slew of other fantastically-chaotic tracks. |
| Egypt: Mubarak speech sounds like a plan for one more crackdown Posted: 01 Feb 2011 02:12 PM PST Spencer Ackerman at Wired News on Mubarak's speech just now in Cairo: "That sounds like an invitation for a crackdown. Although there has been some rioting, the protests have been largely peaceful. One protester in Cairo today even told Al Jazeera that her friends are starting a soccer tournament in the packed Tahrir Square. But if the police still consider Mubarak's instructions to have the force of law, those protesters may soon be under assault if they don't disperse. Will the Army defend the protesters against the police, after saying earlier that soldiers won't open fire on civilians?" |
| Chimpanzee mother learns her infant has died (video) Posted: 01 Feb 2011 02:10 PM PST This video contains excerpts of the reaction of the mother chimpanzee to the body of her deceased infant. The video was recorded at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust in Zambia. A full report of this event is in press in the American Journal of Primatology (DOI: 10.1002/ajp.20927). This report was a collaborative effort between the Max Planck Institute, Chimfunshi, and Gonzaga University.(thanks, Tara McGinley) |
| Debunking yet another bought-and-paid-for report on the need for non-neutral net Posted: 01 Feb 2011 02:14 AM PST  Ars Technica's Nate Anderson has some excellent analysis of a new telco-commissioned report on net neutrality. Consultancy A.T. Kearney was paid by Euro ISP giants Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telecom Italia, and Telefónica to write a report on the future of Internet provision. Kearney accordingly produced a report that repeated the telcos' talking points: ISPs need to charge more, meter bandwidth, triple-charge (by charging companies like YouTube and YouTube viewers to connect to the net, then charging YouTube again for the right to reach those viewers) and using Egypt-style "deep packet inspection" to filter out or limit customer-traffic that the ISPs don't like. He quotes skeptical telco consultant Paul Budde: In the world of the Internet nobody gets a free ride. The only way you can connect is if you pay, and the more you use the network the more you pay. The good thing, however, is that the customer can choose who they spend their money with. In principle, the more customers an ISP has, the lower its costs will be, and the lower its prices will be. So ISPs and content providers alike try to get more customers, and to get global connections at lower prices.Canada's lame telco regulator, the CRTC, has just approved "usage-based billing," which incumbent telcos wanted specifically so that they could limit their customers' use of services that competed with their own, like Netflix and Skype. Canada's regulators have set back Canada's competitiveness capacity for innovation by decades, ensuring that no new Canadian service can get off the ground unless they do a deal with the telco giants who currently enjoy monopoly rents on infrastructure that the Canadian taxpayer has subsidized for more than a century. Nice one, eh? Huge ISPs want per-GB payments from Netflix, YouTube
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| Egypt: Mubarak speaks, won't run again, elections in September Posted: 01 Feb 2011 02:15 PM PST  [Yes, they've Godwin'ed Egypt: A man carries a picture depicting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as Adolf Hitler during a protest in Cairo January 31, 2011. Mubarak overhauled his government on Monday to try to defuse a popular uprising against his 30-year rule but angry protesters rejected the changes and said he must surrender power. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic ] On the 8th day of increasingly massive protests in Egypt calling for the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president has just addressed the nation and the world: he will not run for presidency again, and will "speed up" elections scheduled months from now. How the Egyptian people react to this is yet to be seen, but as I type this post, the endless ocean of demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square —who were heckling him during the speech—don't seem satisfied: "We're not leaving today, we're not leaving Wednesday, we're not leaving Thursday," the crowd is chanting. They won't leave, in other words, until Mubarak leaves. "I will die in the land of Egypt," said the Egyptian president during his address, meaning he won't flee the country, as Tunisian president Ben Ali did after popular revolt there. Fake Hosni Mubarak on Twitter breaks it down for us: "Read between the lines: I will steal as much as I can in the few months I have left as president." Al Jazeera item on speech here. Nick Kristof's analysis here: "Clueless in Cairo." Nothing in Mubarak's speech about unlocking the clampdown on press (such as Al Jazeera), or turning on communications again: internet and mobile remain down for nearly all users throughout the country. |
| City of Boston to sell off entire contents of its glorious, ancient print shop Posted: 01 Feb 2011 02:55 PM PST The city of Boston has shut down its 78-year-old printing office to save money, and they're auctioning off 200 lots of astounding old print-shop junk. This is a potential bonanza for fine-art printers, zinesters, and people whose idea of fun is historical recreation of pre-digital printing techniques (green eyeshade optional). The auction is being held on Feb 24 at 11AM estern and will be simultaneously conducted live and digitally. Putting a price on antique printing (Boston Globe) (via Make) (Image: John Tlumacki/Boston Globe) |
| Egypt turns to retro tech during online blackout: Xeni on Madeleine Brand show Posted: 01 Feb 2011 01:08 PM PST Shortly after the protests began in Egypt last week, the government shut down internet access, and crippled texting and mobile phone communication. Still, Egyptians, either on their own, or with the help of outsiders, have managed to keep some channels of communication open. Today I joined Madeleine Brand on her eponymous radio program to talk about the communication coming out of Egypt. |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:28 PM PST I was looking at my Amazon affiliate sales report just now, and I noticed that someone bought a product called "liquid ass" for $5.12. I wondered what it could be, so I clicked the link. Here's what I learned: Of course, the Amazon report does not tell me who bought the bottle of Liquid Ass, which is as it should be. But I would love to have the person who bought this stuff explain why he or she bought it. Please let me know in the comments thread! |
| Dale Dougherty: "All of us are makers" Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:30 PM PST Gareth Branwyn says: "Here's the TED@MotorCity talk that Maker Media General Manager Dale Dougherty gave last month. I love the enthusiasm Dale has for the enthusiasts we call 'makers.' I also really like the idea of 'playing technology' (and the power of playing technology in groups)." |
| Batman: billionaire plutocrat vigilante Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:45 AM PST On Tor.com, comics editor Steve Padnick has some trenchant perspective on Batman as a plutocrat vigilante who inherited half of Gotham, is the town's major employer, and who unilaterally overrides temporal and elected authorities to expel and defeat underclass villains who aspire to his wealth and privilege. Batman: Plutocrat
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| Posted: 01 Feb 2011 11:37 AM PST Andy Baio reviews the state of affairs in games about games. The metagaming concept begins with hardly-playable jokes like Desert Bus, finds creative fluency in extending game mechanics and tropes to the point of absurdity, and ends with that annoying version of Tetris which always gives you the most contextually inconvenient brick. |
| Photo of uncontacted Amazonian tribe Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:06 PM PST  Survival International and Brazil's National Indian Foundation released this image of what they say is an uncontacted tribe in the Amazonian rainforest near the border between Brazil and Peru. You may recall that in 2008, Survival International was the subject of controversy after releasing another photo of an uncontacted tribe. Whether any of these people are uncontacted, undiscovered, or just very isolated concerns me less than that their home is being needlessly annihilated. From AFP: "Illegal loggers will destroy this indigenous people. It is essential that the Peruvian government stop them before it is too late," warned Survival's director Stephen Corry."Photos released to protect threatened Amazonians" (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!) |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2011 11:17 AM PST  Earlier this month, I ran across two different reports summing up two very different ways legitimate autism researchers are approaching the biological mechanisms behind cognitive difference. Although studies have found genetic correlations, nobody knows the exact cause of autism. And that's led to a couple of interesting approaches. On the one hand you have Joachim Hallmayer, one of several researchers interviewed for a story in Stanford University magazine, who think that what we call "autism" is actually a number of different, distinct biological differences, something that would account for the wide range of symptoms, severity, and associated disorders. These researchers talk about autism as a series of subgroups—defined by particular genetic and chromosomal abnormalities. One example:
Meanwhile, neuroscientists Kamilla and Henry Markram have a different perspective. They think the diverse symptoms of autism all come from a single, common cause—a brain that is hyper-sensitive to stimuli. Their "One cause for many symptoms" theory isn't as well supported, biologically speaking, as the idea of many causes for many symptoms. Blogger Neuroskeptic explains:
Technically, these two perspectives aren't mutually exclusive. It could be that there are lots of different ways that a brain can end up being hyper-sensitive. And, of course, the Markrams could just be wrong. But I think it's interesting to see what scientists are learning about the origins of autism—what we do know, and what we don't. So often, we spend more time debunking the fraud and false hope that we spend talking about the real research. There is much more research out there than this post could hope to address, but these two articles should give you an idea of the diversity of studies that are going on, the evidence that exists, and how scientists are trying to make sense of it all. Smithsonian Magazine: Breaking Through Neuroskeptic: A Grand Unified Theory of Autism? |
| Outplacement cowboys screw the recently unemployed Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:06 AM PST The WSJ reports on the slipshod cowboys who've rushed in to fill the demand for "outplacement firms" who are meant to help laid-off employees find a better job. Some of these firms assign their "coaches" 15 clients per day, send out amateurish, typo-laden job applications on behalf of job-seekers (without their knowledge, signing their names to the cover letters, no less), and generally make a piss-poor hash out of their charges' future employment prospects. Laid-off workers are wising up and asking their former employers for cash instead of "counselling." I'm always reminded of my friend's outplacement horror story: when he was laid off, he was called into a board room with the other unlucky unemployment lotto winners, where a high price consultant had scattered coins all over the floor and furniture and dimmed the lights save for a few dramatic spots. "Change," he intoned, "is all around you. And there's no need to fear it." True story. Outplacement Firms Struggle to Do Job (via Consumerist) (Image: Unemployment Report, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from notionscapital's photostream)
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| Noctilucent clouds: more of 'em and brighter too! Posted: 01 Feb 2011 11:03 AM PST  While still very rare, spectacular night-shining clouds, aka noctilucent clouds, are becoming more common and increasingly brighter, according to a NASA atmospheric scientist. Noctilucent clouds are the highest in Earth's atmosphere, forming from water ice at altitudes of 76 to 85 kilometers. NASA's Matthew DeLand suggests that their increased visibility could be linked to greenhouse gases. From Space.com: Night-shining clouds are extremely sensitive to changes in atmospheric water vapor and temperature. The clouds form only when temperatures drop below minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 130 degrees Celsius), when the scant amount of water high in the atmosphere freezes into ice clouds. This happens most often in far northern and southern latitudes (above 50 degrees) in the summer when, counter-intuitively, the mesosphere is coldest."Mysterious Night-Shining Clouds Getting Brighter" (via Fortean Times) Previously: |
| Whimsical, fantastical matrioshke Posted: 31 Jan 2011 11:41 PM PST  Doublefine's sweet matrioshkes are dead lovely -- and backordered. I grew up in a house full of these things, since they were the standard gift every time my grandparents went to Leningrad to see the family, or brought the family over for a visit, and I was delighted to discover that my daughter finds them as fascinating as I do -- especially as there are so many more variations on the designs available today. |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2011 10:33 AM PST Canna Cola is a line of THC-enriched sodas to be sold at medical marijuana dispensaries. Flavors include: DocWeed, Orange Kush, Grape Ape, Sour Diesel, and the classic Canna Cola. (Thanks, Mathias Crawford!) |
| Coney Island's 1907 "buried alive" attraction Posted: 01 Feb 2011 10:28 AM PST  Morbid Anatomy's Joanna Ebenstein is currently Coney Island Museum's Artist in Residence. As such, she's curating what can only be a fantastic exhibition about the amusement park during its turn of the 20th century heyday! The exhibit, titled The Great Coney Island Spectacularium, launches in April. During her research, Joanna dug up a 1907 New York Times article describing a glorious attraction called "Night and Morning: or, A Journey Through Heaven and Hell." From the NYT, April 21, 1907: "The first room into which the people enter is like a big coffin with a glass top and the lid off. You look up through the roof and see the graveyard flowers and the weeping willows and other such atmospheric things. When everything is ready the coffin is lowered into the ground. It shivers and shakes, and when it tips up on end you hear a voice above give a warning to be careful. Then the lid is closed and you hear the thud of the dirt.Buried Alive at Coney Island: "Night and Morning," 1907 |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2011 10:21 AM PST If you've ever wondered how sampling—the art of combing bits of other artists' music into a new composition—works, then you should check out this new video from NPR's Science Friday blog. DJ Aaron LaCrate demonstrates both analog and digital sampling techniques, and talks a little about why sampling and stealing are different things. (Submitterated by leharrist) |
| Posted: 01 Feb 2011 10:12 AM PST Stanford bioengineer Ingmar Riedel-Kruse isn't the first person to combine biology and gaming, but he is most definitely the first to mix paramecia and Pac-Man. Riedel-Kruse has created a series of games where human players control living, single-celled organisms, manipulating the creatures' movements to collect points and avoid obstacles in a digital world. It works because many types of mobile cells—including separate life forms like paramecia, and some human cells like lymphocytes—have a special relationship with electricity. In the presence of an electric current, these cells move, always in the same direction relative to the current. To make them play a game, all you have to do is trigger electric currents in the right places. This isn't the same thing as just electrocuting the paramecium and watching them run. Instead, this process—called electrotaxis or galvanotaxis—is a natural part of cell behavior. In the case of lymphocytes, some researchers think galvanotaxis may be one of the triggers that helps these white blood cells move around your body and know where to go to fight intruding viruses and bacteria. The video above will show you how Riedel-Kruse harnessed galvanotaxis for video games. And you can get a closer look at each of the four specific games at Scientific American. Submitterated by Mottel. Special thanks to Mike Orcutt! |
The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that's all he understands. What he doesn't understand is enterprises that don't make a profit, because they're not set up to do that but to do something different. He doesn't understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch - how much money did it make last year? Why aren't you charging higher fines? Why don't you charge for library cards? Why don't you charge for every catalogue search? Reserving books - you should charge a lot more for that. Those bookshelves over there - what's on them? Philosophy? And how many people looked at them last week? Three? Empty those shelves and fill them up with celebrity memoirs. 
Now, let me tell you what this is all about. Among Others is the diary of Morwenna Phelps, a Welsh teenager whom we really meet just after her twin sister, Morganna, has died in an unspecified but terrible way. It's 1979, and Morwenna and her sister see fairies and do magic, and have done all their life. Their mother is a terrible and evil witch, and the death of Morganna is somehow related to a spell that they did together to protect themselves -- and maybe the world -- from her. 
Now to vacancies. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the U.S. in Q4 '10 (11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round), which is actually an improvement of 427,000 from a year ago, but not for the reasons you'd think. 
Row after row of creaky oak drawers hold thousands of letters, both metal type and wooden blocks, from fine print to 72-point Tudor. A cigar box brims with square block stamps of the city seal. And there are metal etchings of a few of the city's forefathers, presumably used years ago to print their faces on official documents... 
This 30ml (1 fl oz) Liquid ASS spray bottle mists out silently, emitting a mega-powerful gawd-awful ASS smell that can last for hours. Brings an instant punch of vile ASS odor to any location! FAA regulations currently allow travelers to carry liquids on board in containers holding 100ml (3.4oz) or less ... but that's only because the folks at the Department of Homeland Security have never caught a whiff of liquid ASS! So order today, before this weapon of nasal destruction is banned from any enclosed space. 
True, it's a very American version of aristocracy, based on wealth rather than divine right, but in practice it's basically the same. The myth of aristocracy is that class is genetic, that some people are just born good enough to rule, and that this inherent goodness can be passed down from generation to generation. It's long been established, and Grant Morrison's recent "Return of Bruce Wayne" miniseries reaffirmed, that there has always been a Wayne in Gotham City, and that the state of the city reflects the status of the Waynes at the time. The implied message of Batman: Year One, and Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight Returns, Batman Beyond, and so on is... if the Waynes are absent from Gotham, the entire city falls apart. 
Damian Birkel, a career coach, joined Right in June 2007, initially as a contract counselor and later as a full-time employee. He primarily worked from home, but spent at least one day a week in Right's office in High Point, N.C. | 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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