Friday, February 11, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Fiendish CSS-based technique for obfuscating text

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 10:23 PM PST

Asa Raskin's developed a fairly ingenious, CSS-based means of obfuscating text; briefly, he inserts random characters in the text and applies a "do not render" CSS style to them. The words render as normal on your screen, but when copied to the clipboard, the junk text is also picked up.

It's been years since I did much with CSS, but I have a feeling that you could create a bookmarklet that calculates what the text should look like as rendered and discards the hidden characters, but I fully expect the DRM snake-oil peddlers to leap on this as a way to make "uncopyable web-pages."

Besides spammers using this trick to get around your Bayesian spam filters, there are other bad things for which this can be used. This first is for that misguided holy-grail of publishers: copy-protection for their words. A publisher could generate, on the server side, a new random mess of HTML and CSS that would render their text uncopyable. This also has the side-effect of making your pages impossible for search engines to index sensibly; it's an easy way to keep your information human-readable but cloaked from Google's all-seeing Sauronic eye.
How To Phish, Protect Your Email, and Defeat Copy-And-Paste with CSS (Thanks, Alan!)

Photos from inside Maison Matin, the time-capsule mansion

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 10:27 PM PST


Chris from National Geographic sez, "Boing Boing previously covered the time capsule mansion Maison Mantin, closed for a hundred years and re-opened as a museum. We just scored a bunch of photographs from inside the mansion and ran them on National Geographic News. Highlights include a diorama of swordfighting frogs, a leather-walled master bedroom, and a silk-filled pink love den. You go, 1911!"

Photos from 100-year-old "time capsule" mansion (Thanks, Chriscombs, via Submitterator!)



Evolution Control Committee's 'All Rights Reserved': Old school mashup

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 02:09 AM PST

ecc-all-rights-reserved.jpg Evolution Control Committee's new compilation collects all the cool stuff they have released in bits and pieces over the last few years. Who knew we'd reach a point where there were mashup nostalgia acts! It's hard to believe ECC has not been sued into oblivion since their seminal Rocked by Rape* single took aim at how the mainstream news packages fear for consumption (between similarly-themed television commercials). Well, Dan Rather is retired, but ECC is still here in all their parodic/fair-commenting glory. If you haven't heard them before, "Stairway To Britney" is hard to beat in the mashup pantheon, and "Pwn Monkey" blends Jonathan Coulton's "Code Monkey" with a manic pastiche of samples not seen since Paul's Boutique. They even start the album with a funny EULA-pimping "Listener License Agreement" track. You can find ECC on Amazon, iTunes, most major P2P sites, or below. They're doing live shows to support the album, too, so check it out.

All Rights Reserved RELEASED! (via bootiemashup)

*Imma let you finish, but "Rocked by Rape" is the greatest mashup of all time.

With a Little Help on DailyLit

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 12:12 AM PST

My DIY short story collection With a Little Help is now available as a series of daily, one-page emails from DailyLit -- all 151 installments' worth!

Electronic Literature Vol 2: experimental e-lit from around the globe

Posted: 09 Feb 2011 11:08 PM PST


"Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2" is a just-published, Creative Commons licensed multiformat volume from the The Electronic Literature Organization. It comprises 63 works:
* Countries: Austria, Australia, Canada, Colombia, France, The Netherlands, Spain, UK, US

* Languages: Catalan, Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish

* Formats: Flash, Processing, Java, JavaScript, Inform, HTML, C++

You can get it packaged as a DVD. The Web-based version linked below is a little browser-unfriendly (mysterious icons without descriptors), but the projects themselves are pretty interesting!

Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two

My essential Mac applications, part 2

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 04:59 PM PST

I recently bought a new iMac computer, and I installed about 30 different programs on the first day. Yesterday I described the first five programs I installed. Today I'm describing the next batch of five applications I installed.

(I actually installed two other applications that I'm not going to bother reviewing: Adobe Creative Suite 5, and FileMaker Pro 8. I feel everyone knows enough about these programs that I don't need to describe them.)

6. dragon-logo.jpgDragon Dictate (Cross Platform, about $150 on Amazon). I wrote about Dragon Dictate in December 2010, so I'm just re-running my comments here. It's a lot easier for me to talk than it is to type, because I'm a pathetically clumsy typist. The last time I tried using a speech-to-text application (1998 or so), the training took much longer and the accuracy was terrible. After hearing Alex Lindsay of MacBreak Weekly sing the praises of Dragon Dictate, I decided to give it a try. It is fantastic.

The application costs $150 on Amazon, which may seem steep, but it comes with a nice Plantronics USB headset. It took only about five minutes to train the application to learn how I speak. It's magical seeing my words appear on the screen almost as fast as I utter them. I think I would probably be too embarrassed to use DragonDictate in an environment where other people could hear me talking to my computer. I work alone in a home office, so there's not really a problem with that. (My 7-year-old-daughter has overheard me using it, and now she likes to tease me about it: "Hello period my name is Mark period new paragraph I am really a robot exclamation point".) I'm so pleased with DragonDictate's accuracy, and how it saves wear and tear on my hands and wrists, that I am sold on it and never want to go back to typing.

bean.jpg7. Bean (OS X, free) This free OS X word processor was written by James Hoover, a programming hobbyist and fiction writer. James wrote bean by reading a webpage called "Lean Word Processor Specifics" by Marten van de Kraats and teaching himself Objective-C and the Cocoa frameworks. Bean is a fast and slick application that can read most Microsoft Word documents (it doesn't handle footnotes or hierarchical styles) as well as RTF and HTML formats. It displays a live word count at the bottom of the window, which is essential for me when I write and edit articles and columns. Its full-screen mode makes everything on the desktop disappear except for a blank screen and the words I'm typing. I find this to be an excellent way to tune out of everything else and concentrate on editing a MAKE magazine story. (You can read more about the origins of Bean here.)

Bean looks simple and spare, but it has a lot of useful functions under the hood that are found in high-end word processors. I can insert pictures, add headers and footers, see invisible characters, and zoom the size of the text.

One day someone will send me a Microsoft Word document that Bean won't be able to open and then I will have to install Microsoft Word onto my iMac. That will be a sad day indeed -- I can't stand Microsoft Word because it is a sluggish, bloated, processor-hogging POS and its stench will contaminate everything else on my hard drive.


text-expander-logo.jpg8. TextExpander (OS X, $34.95) This universal utility lets me type a short abbreviation that gets instantly replaced with a larger chunk of text. For instance, when I type "mf," TextExpander knows to convert it to Mark Frauenfelder.
I often need to e-mail someone a large bloc of boilerplate, such as MAKE's submission guidelines, strings of HTML, addresses, driving directions to my house, my bio, my digitized signature, my headshot, my sig file, etc. I just enter a two- or three-letter abbreviation and TextExpander takes care of the rest. It is also available on the iPhone and iPad. I bought it, but it doesn't really work the way I would like to and so I don't use it.


r-name.jpg9. R-Name (OS X, free) When I'm working with a group of related files, such as a bunch of photographs, or a series of text documents, I find that it's easier to deal with them if I give them all the same name followed by a dash (for example, photo-01.jpg, photo-02.jpg, and so on). The easiest way to accomplish this is to use a batch file renaming program. And the best batch file renaming utility I've tried is called R-Name. It's a free program that was developed by a fellow in Japan named Tagaya Yoichi. Unfortunately it looks like Yoichi's site and R-name are no longer available. After quite a bit of searching around and I found a place to download R-Name. Here it is, but since it's not an official source I can't vouch for its security; for all I know it could be loaded with malware. NOTE: I just made a batch renamer service with Automator by following Boing Boing reader Andy Vanee's instructions. I like it even more than R-name. Thanks, Andy!


alarms-logo.jpg10. Alarms (OS X, $15). This nifty utility is on my menubar. When I remember something that I need to do at a certain time, such as pick up my daughter from school, meet my wife for lunch at a restaurant, turn off the burner under a boiling pot of pasta, or call someone, I click on the alarm icon. A timeline appears at the top of the screen, pushing everything else on the desktop down. I then add the task to the timeline and slide the task back or forth to set the trigger time. When the task is due the menu bar icon flashes and the application makes a "ping." I can snooze the task for 5 min. by shaking my mouse back and forth. If I continue to ignore the alarm, it gets louder and louder.

A streamlined version of alarms called Alarms Express is available in the Mac App Store for $7.99. I think it has the same features as the $15 version, except it won't sync with iCal, doesn't support Growl, and doesn't offer customizable keyboard shortcuts. But I don't use those features; if Alarms Express had been available to me at the time I made my purchase, I would have bought it instead of Alarms.

Tomorrow I'll present my next five essential Mac apps.



Adorable hi-def slow-motion chipmunk

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 03:54 PM PST

Video Link. THX sound effect remix now, please. (thanks, Joe Sabia!)

The sound of a TV through a wall

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 04:19 PM PST

ambianceapp.jpg
Today I want to offer my thanks to a nameless collection of audio nerds. Armed only with DAT recorders and patience, and maybe some Mojo bars and sports drinks, and, I don't know, tents and blankets, I guess, these are the dedicated hobbyists who have provided a company named Urban Apps with the raw materials for a great product called Ambiance, newly arrived for the desktop. (It's also available for iOS, Android and Blackberry.)

Ambiance is, more or less, a slick front end for an audio archive called The Freesound Project, but it adds tons of value. It gives you the capability to download (for free) a large number of high-quality ambient audio clips, arrange them in playlists, and play them back in any order you choose. You can set them to shuffle and loop, and set a timer so the sounds fade away after a given period. The variety of clips on offer is staggering, and goes way beyond the usual waves and showers. As I write this I'm listening to a clip called "Sonoran Desert," which features the dry whisper of wind over sand, bird sounds and -- alarmingly -- what sounds like the rattle of a rattlesnake really freakin' close. This has the vestigial effect on my ancient fight-or-flight response of making me want very badly to choose flight, which is probably the exact opposite of the restful effect the developers were seeking, but never mind. If that isn't your cup of noise you can choose from rural sounds or urban sounds (I love "NYC Rooftop," which perfectly captures the attenuated whoosh of a city street overheard from a high roof). You can pick from sounds of static, sci-fi sounds, the sounds of various kinds of machines, sports, environments and a bunch of more arcane choices, including a clock shop, somebody endlessly clicking a pen, and -- this one I really don't get, because it's the exact sound that almost prompted me to murder my neighbors when I lived in New York -- the sound of a TV playing through a wall. Whatever floats your sonic boat, I guess. The app is beautiful, works great on multiple platforms (it runs on Adobe AIR) and is a dead steal at $9.99. It's a supermarket of sound, right on your desktop.

Leg bone cane

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 03:44 PM PST

Bonecane
Bob of Sauquoit, NY, designed this leg bone cane that he sells on eBay. They're made of polycarbonate and available in a variety of lengths. "Leg Bone Cane/Walking Stick" (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

iPhone confession app for sinners on the go

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 04:17 PM PST

iConfess.pngFinally! A way to confess your sins with one hand while possibly still committing them with the other: Confession: a Roman Catholic App comes with "a personalized examination of conscience for each user, password protected profiles, and a step-by-step guide to the sacrament," all given an official imprimatur by the Bishop of Ft. Wayne, Indiana.

The gallery of user images makes it seem easy to use -- just click radio buttons to select your sins, then humbly Submit. And if someone hails you while you're hailing Mary, just put the Almighty on call waiting, re-engage with the secular and profane, then get back to your eternal soul. Pretty spiffy.

(And no, according the National Catholic Register, this isn't a joke.)

Bake a cake for Darwin

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 04:14 PM PST

In case you didn't know, February 12th is Darwin's 202nd birthday, and that means you've got a perfect opportunity to practice your culinary baking skills. That's right: it's time for us all to "Bake a Cake for Darwin." There's already a few such culinary odes here and there on the internet, but the Beaty Biodiversity Research Center and Museum in Vancouver has been doing this in full on celebratory style since Darwin's 200th birthday in 2009. Over the last few years, they've seen some pretty cool entries and you can see many of them here. In fact, here's a close-up of a cupcake from a dessert entitled, "A Phylogenetic Tree of Darwin's Books." insectplantcupcake.jpg Anyway, you too can participate! If you're game, all you need to do is bake an evolution-themed cake and then show it off for all to see by uploading a photo onto Flickr, and tagging it "darwincake." Even better, you can tag it and also enter it into this Flickr pool. Note that the cake doesn't have to be fancy, as illustratedd by one of my favourite past entries, "The Primordial Ooze." Plus, if you're in Vancouver, you can even bring along your dessert to Vancouver's Beaty Biodiversity Museum. The fine folks there will be hosting their 3rd annual local bake-off in their gorgeous atrium on Friday, February 11th. It starts at 4pm and note that everyone and anyone is welcome to check it out.

Video: St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 02:03 PM PST


Turnstyle spent a morning inside San Francisco's famous St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. A love supreme, indeed. "Inside Coltrane Church"

Where stars are born ...

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 12:32 PM PST

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One reason I like writing about space science is because it offers so many gorgeous, mind-blowing images. Each and every day, they pulse from observatories that dot the Earth, and trickle down from our probes in the sky. The flow of visual data is already too much for our planet's limited number of professional astronomers, and is only set to ramp up further in the immediate future as multiple new deep-looking telescopes and all-sky surveys come online. This means there will be more and more opportunities for amateurs, average folks with just a bit of time and interest, to make real discoveries by sifting through images that the pros didn't have time to closely examine.

A good example of the visual depths waiting to be plumbed is this new image of the North America Nebula from NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope. The North America Nebula is an emission nebula, essentially just a huge cloud of dust and molecular hydrogen that has been partially ionized and lit up by massive stars somewhere deep inside it. It doesn't seem that interesting until you actually look at it, preferably in multiple wavelengths. The thicker clumps of gas and dust occlude light at optical wavelengths, masking processes taking place inside, but infrared light can pass straight through these regions, revealing their mysterious inner workings. And we really want to know what's taking place there, because in all likelihood our Sun and its planets formed in a nebular cloud very much like this one.

Each little pinpoint speck of light in Spitzer's image is a young star at some particular point in its development. Some are still undergoing their initial gravitational collapse, and haven't even become true stars yet—that only occurs when thermonuclear fusion kicks off in their cores. Others have begun their stardom, but are still sheathed in spherical cocoons of gas and dust, shells of material that will gradually grow puffy and vaporous from the inner star's light and heat, until they whisper away on stellar winds. Many of these points of light are ringed by thick accretion disks of material that formed from the angular momentum of their initial gravitational collapse. Sometimes parts of the disk get sucked too close to the star, and are shocked into plasma and spun away and out from the star's poles in powerful collimated jets that can sculpt and shape the surrounding gas and dust into abstract whorls and tendrils. And, in the background, almost unnoticed against all the stellar fireworks, in all probability planets are slowly and surely forming. Perhaps, on a few them, the seeds of life are already being sown by comets and meteorites, the infalling detritus of star formation delivering water and complex chemical compounds brewed in the stellar clouds.

The most amazing thing is, you can actually see a lot of this stuff happening when you download one of the high-resolution versions of this image and zoom around its different parts.

You could while away an entire afternoon just exploring one small patch of this single image. You won't, unfortunately, be able to resolve individual details as small as planets, but you will be able to get a sense of the scale and grandeur that lurk in the origins of every lowly rock and square inch of our own planet. To actually see planets mid-formation, you won't have to wait too long, though. A new, ambitious radio telescope array in Chile, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), is steadily approaching full operational strength. And this particular piece of kit, once it's up and running, will be able to provided deep, high-resolution views of the interiors of accretion disks. The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will help, too, but you'll probably have to wait a bit longer for that, since it won't be launching any earlier than late 2015.

The point is, as beautiful as this Spitzer image is, it's only a preview of what we're likely to see and learn about our deepest planetary origins in the next decade.



Technology and porn: San Francisco's 1969 rise as 'Smut Capital of America'

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 03:48 PM PST

NSFW: clip contains nude-idity. Mikl-Em at Laughing Squid has an excellent post today about how San Francisco became the epicenter of the professionalization of America's pornography industry. Sex and early adoption of technology are always closely intertwined, and many new technologies become widely adopted because they improve the means of production and/or distribution of pornography. San Francisco's mix of hippies, recently discharged Vietnam veterans, burlesque halls, and shuttered film houses created a perfect storm of opportunity in 1969 for amateur stag films to evolve into a nascent film industry. I can't wait to see the full-up version of this documentary.

Documentary On When San Francisco Was Smut Capital of the USA (via laughing squid)

Using a rock instead of soap

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 01:14 PM PST

lava-as-soap.jpg

A couple of months ago Wendy Jehanara Tremayne stopped using soap. She keeps herself clean with a rock.

The no soap adventure continues, in my sixth week I made a remarkable discovery - the lava rock. It happened when I walked by a pile of lava rocks and thought "that looks a lot like a pumice stone." So I grabbed a couple of them and put them by the bathtub. As previously reported quitting soap greatly reduced dry skin itch, though it did not get rid of it completely. It seems this lava rock provides that last bit of exfoliation that was needed. I'm using the rock like soap, washing the entire body with it and getting an enlivening scratch that leaves the skin feeling like it was just dipped in peppermint.
An Ever Simplified Life: Rock Replaces Soap

Previously:

Gentleman mistakes urinal and urinal cake for sink and soap

18 months without soap or shampoo: success!

Clean, Soap-Free Living: Here Comes the Science

I haven't used soap or shampoo in a year, and it's awesome: personal experiment update

Body washing with water alone

Another look at soap and science

Boing Boing

HOWTO wash your hands and beat the flu

SPECIAL FEATURE: Valentines' Day Boardgame Remix Kits

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 01:26 PM PST

The game-redesigning-geniuses at London's Hide-and-Seek have released a V-day add-on for their clever Boardgame Remix Kit.

Read the rest



Early 20th century magic posters

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 11:11 AM PST

 Images Boing Thurston  Images Alexander Over at LIFE, our pal Ben Cosgrove presents a gallery of "Spooky Old Magician Posters" from the early 20th century. The illustration and design of these is, well, magical. It's no wonder that these posters are highly valuable. The art also reminds me that I have a brand new magic history book in my teetering reading queue and it looks terrific: Jim Steinmeyer's "The Last Greatest Magician in the World" tells the tale of Howard Thurston (1869-1936) and his rivalry with Houdini!

Notebooks with weapons embossed in the cover

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 01:32 AM PST


Mollaspace's $20 Armed Notebooks come with embossed weaponry silhouetted in their PVC covers. Available in grenade, dagger, and pistol. They've all got integrated keyrings, and it's particularly strategic in the grenade's case.

Armed Notebook (via OhGizmo)



Huckleberry Finn, the Robot Edition

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 10:23 AM PST


[Video Link] Much controversy of late over editing out the n-word from a forthcoming NewSouth Books edition of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Well, as Perry Michael Simon on Nerdist blog points out, someone's about to take that to the proverbial whole 'nother level:
See, someone's following up on NewSouth Books' intention to edit out the offending word by going one step further. And that step is... Robots.

Yes, robots. The plan by Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine is to replace "n-word" Jim with Robot Jim. "Statistically, people prefer robots to the word 'n-word,'" say the proponents of this audacious plan. "The word 'n-word' is ugly and pejorative. Robots are fun and cool... even when they're trying to take over our world! So we've decided to take the word 'n-word' out of Mark Twain's classic and replace it with 'robot.'" And they've commissioned an artist to alter the original illustrations to include the robot.

Where do you come in? Simple: They're raising money for a short print run of the robot-inflected "Huck Finn."

'Huckleberry Finn,' ROBOTIC EDITION (nerdist.com)

South Korea: backlash over delivery deaths attributed to Domino's Pizza 30-min delivery promise

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 10:13 AM PST

"A popular Domino's Pizza marketing strategy promising pizza delivery within 30 minutes of an order has met with a public backlash in South Korea, following the deaths of several young delivery personnel. The Young Union, the union For Occupational and Environmental Health (FOEC) and several labor unions held a press conference on 8 February in front of Domino's Pizza's headquarters in Seoul, pressuring the company to abolish the '30 Minute' delivery system." (Global Voices)

EFF's 21st birthday party: all-ages event in San Francisco, Feb 16

Posted: 09 Feb 2011 11:48 PM PST


Katina from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Join EFF on February 16th, as nerdcore and chiptune artists Dual Core, Crashfaster, Doctor Popular, and Trash80 sling dope rhymes and bangin' bleeps for EFF's 21st birthday at the future-focused BAMM.tv studio [43 Norfolk St] in San Francisco."
There will be an open bar while supplies last.

This is an all ages event.

We'll be asking for a $30 donation at the door to fund our work, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Admission for current EFF Members is $25 in advance or at the door with your EFF Member Card. Contact membership@eff.org for your member ticket link!

EFF's 21st Birthday Party!

What not to bring to Tahrir square: NYT photog on his Egypt gear kit

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 10:08 AM PST

"It is rare that the most important piece of equipment in your bag is the bag itself, even more rare for that bag to be a black plastic trash sack slung over your shoulder as you walk past pro-government thugs on a bridge over the River Nile. The trash bag's purpose, of course, is to conceal your large nylon camera bag, which is likely to get you grabbed off the street by the aforementioned thugs."—Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, in a photo-essay detailing his conflict zone gear kit.

Egypt: Mubarak's exit appears imminent; will Army rule follow?

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 10:03 AM PST

RTXXP29.jpg

The story of the day, and a moment in history: masses are gathered in Cairo's Tahrir square tonight, once again. All eyes around the world are on Egypt for the anticipated announcement that president Hosni Mubarak will step down, and cede power to the Egyptian Army. Is this a military coup? Will representative civilian rule follow? Al Jazeera is updating this live blog every minute.

(Image: Tahrir square crowds, Feb. 11, 2011. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez)

Blog to read: NYT's "Disunion"

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 10:03 AM PST

If you are not already reading Disunion—the New York Times' amazing blog about the American Civil War and everything that led up to it—then I pity you. Both because you've been missing out on a fascinating look at American history and cultural analysis that goes far beyond anything you learned in school, and because you're about to waste your entire Thursday reading through the archives. Sorry about that.

Geez Pete's list of "Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdos"

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 02:05 PM PST

 Images Prometheus-Rising-1561840564-L  Pistols Pistols Lipstick Traces  Jackets High Res Jpgs 9780374528997
Inspired by the Modern Library's "Top 100" list, Cheryl Botchick over at the Geez Pete blog took a crack at listing his picks for the "Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdos." Now, of course this is a "fool's errand," as she says, and the word "weirdo" is made of an infinite number of pocket subcultures, but it's still a list of mostly really great, inspiring, or at minimum, provocative, books (not that I've read them all). Next, Geez is planning to tackle fiction for weirdos. Here are a few of my faves from her non-fiction list:
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream by Hunter S. Thompson: Looking over my list, my husband asked, "Isn't that almost fiction?" Good point! But reporting on events through the filter of copious drugging and a sizable helping of paranoia is still technically reporting in my book. Hunter's world view is one of the backbones of modern counter-cultural thought. Start here, and maybe try his vicious lone wolf  takedown obit of Nixon, too.

Just Kids by Patti Smith: Yet another book about a world long lost to our modern times. Smith tells the story of coming to New York, meeting her lifelong friend Robert Mapplethorpe, and living the happy-but-skint life of artists in the big city. While reading, be sure to consider that today you can get a $50 cheeseburger in Manhattan without looking very hard.

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil : I don't care how historic or high-minded any artistic movement is, it's going to be full of sniping and backstabbing and petty jealousies. We're all human, and that's just part of the fun. Kudos to McNeil for getting all these stories about hairy nights hanging out in front of CBGBs on paper, before many of the principals were lost.

Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson: If that book cover isn't enough to convince you to check this out, what is? Robert Anton Wilson (RAW to his fans and followers) was an icon of brain-altering philosophies, and his writing has lost zero of its power over time. The headline here is that Prometheus Rising is about meta-programming your own mind. The subheads are many. You'll feel altered.

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus : Marcus tackles what should be an impossible task — taking anarchic artistic and social movements throughout roughly a century of history, and tying them together into a narrative thread that leads straight through punk rock and pop culture — and pulls it off. And it's entertaining to boot.

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante: Scorsese's mostly horrendous Gangs of New York dabbled in the nefarious history of lower Manhattan, but Sante goes for the full narrative, from the Civil War straight through the first couple decades of the 1900s. Learn what the crooks, prostitutes, swindlers, junkies, grifters and their various known associates were doing for "fun."

"The Top 50 Essential Non-Fiction Books for Weirdos" (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)

Undoing the effects of pre-photography "Photoshop"

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 09:42 AM PST

JQA.jpg

Before the advent of photography, everybody's likeness was, effectively, 'shopped—whether intentionally (when somebody pays you a lot of money to paint a portrait, you try to make them look good) or unintentionally, as features shifted to fit the style of the person doing the painting. But two researchers think they've hit on a way to strip away the changes and show what famous people who lived before photography really looked like.

The key: 19th-century artist Gilbert Stuart, who painted the portraits of just about everybody who was anybody in America. Because Stuart was so prolific—and because a handful of his subjects were actually photographed in old age—Eric Altschuler of the New Jersey Medical School in Newark and Krista Ehinger of MIT were able to pinpoint several ways that Stuart's style reliably diverges from reality. Compensate for those quirks, and you end up with faces that are probably closer to how people like John Quincy Adams truly appeared.

Fuller cheeks and higher eyebrows, for example, tend to mark a Stuart portrait. The duo then created a computer algorithm that took an average of the portrait and the painting. They applied the method to portraits of the presidents who lived before photography, effectively subtracting Stuart's signature changes.

The technique, described online this month in Perception, revealed only subtle differences between the portraits and the retroactive "photographs," and it's tough to draw any major conclusions with so few photograph-portrait pairs to work with, say the authors. But as more examples are found, Stuart's method will become clearer, and some more major alterations he made may emerge in a refined model, says Ehinger.

To that end, Altschuler and Ehinger have set up a website and are trying to find more people whose ancestors were painted by Stuart and then later photographed. They're also trying to collect similar portrait/photo pairs for the British and European subjects of Thomas Lawrence, early 19th-century president of the U.K. Royal Academy of Arts.

Science: What did George Washington really look like?

Via Dave Munger



Handmade hats in San Francisco

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 09:05 AM PST

 Wp-Content Uploads Pauls-Hat-Works-20110209-142901
Over at Laughing Squid, my friend John Law visits Paul's Hat Works in San Francisco, a very rare shop in that they actually make hats on the premises by hand. The century-old establishment had a near-death experience in 2009 until four female hatmakers took over the business. I generally feel awkward in hats, but I bet that Abbie Dwelle, Wendy Hawkins, Olivia Griffin, and Kirsten Hove -- now known as the 4 Pauls -- can help me pick a chapeau that fits, in all senses of the word.
(In the 1970s,) there was a guy, Michael (Paul was a long gone and hadn't been Paul anyway – he was Napolean) who would clean and block your hats.

If you had the dough, he would MAKE you as fine a hat as you could acquire ANYWHERE in the world.

Michael had had enough by 2009 and was to retire, planning to auction off the arcane, singular and irreplaceable hat making tools that Paul's had housed for 90 years. You see, for some indecipherable reason, along about 1962 American men stopped wearing hats. Over the next 30 years, hundred's of men's hat shops and factories shut down. There was a surge in sales of cold, flu and pneumonia remedies and sunburn ointment as more and more men took ill due to unnecessary exposure to the elements. What morons.

A year and a half ago, Paul's was saved from oblivion by four angels.

"Hats are Back at Paul's Hat Works in San Francisco"

Paul's Hat Works

Archaeologists love Google Earth

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 09:00 AM PST

Google Earth continues to play a big part in the future of archaeology. Archaeologists have used the program to cheaply scan the Amazon for ancient cities. More recently, a researcher in Australia used Google Earth to spot almost 2000 potential archaeological sites in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Cool stuff! And much less expensive than doing the same thing with lasers or buying satellite time.

Government transparency doesn't matter without accountability

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 08:54 AM PST

My latest Guardian column is "Government data like crime maps is not enough - there needs to be action," and it looks at two recent data-crunching apps for UK policing: first, the crime-maps that tell you what the crime's like in your neighbourhood, and second, Sukey, an app that helps protesters evade police "kettling" -- an inhumane form of arbitrary detention practiced by police.
When the citizenry need to build apps to protect themselves from unlawful detention by the police, it's not surprising that a new application that allows you to go down to your local police station and ask them to do something about some newly transparent crime statistic is greeted with indifference or jeers. If you can't trust the police not to detain your children on a freezing road for hours, why would you believe that you could have a productive dialogue about how they should be deploying their resources?

After all: tuition fee rises are a complete reversal of a critical Lib Dem pledge; mass NHS redundancies for nurses and other frontline workers are a complete reversal of a critical Tory pledge. When you've voted for a party that promises one thing and does the opposite, no amount of data about how rotten things are will inspire you to join a "big society" that works with the state to accomplish its aims.

Meanwhile, Sukey's authors cleverly included a facility in their app that allows the police to communicate with demonstrators who are using it - an architecture for dialogue, built right in at the code level. If this was a "big society", then the police would be using that channel to come to some accommodation with protestors that acknowledged the fundamental right to peaceful protest. But the radio silence to date tells us exactly why the crime map will serve no purpose: what good is it to know how your taxes are spent if you don't believe that anyone will listen when you complain?

Government data like crime maps is not enough - there needs to be action

(Image: A lot of yellow : TSG Police Line : Student Protests - Parliament Square, Westminster 2010, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from bobaliciouslondon's photostream)



Everest's open graveyard

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 08:40 AM PST

Godhead/v writes of Green Boots, the mysterious climber whose body lies abandoned at the edge of heaven ... and the others: "What happened next entered the folklore of the highest mountain on earth. Every man interviewed gives a different story." [Gizmodo]

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