Sunday, February 13, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Could you make a Tahrir Square game about nonviolent revolutions?

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 11:39 PM PST

Over on the Play This Thing games review blog, JZW wants to know why no one has made a game built around nonviolent revolutions.
Modern non-violent revolutions are very dramatic, very to the point, have excellent pacing, and are a perfect example of asymmetric struggle. You can interpret them as the state versus the people, or dictatorship versus the republic. But their most important aspect is the struggle between centralised technologies of the industrial age and distributed technologies of the information age. The state uses armed forces and television. The people uses crowd psychology and communication networks. The state exerts control by giving orders and withholding information. The people exerts control by spreading information and defying orders.

It's also a fresh new challenge gameplay-wise, because you don't get to give direct orders, and the situation can spin out of your control easily. You reach your goal by nudging people in the right direction one step at a time, giving them tools they need, and keeping them connected. It's far more organic and fuzzy than the kind of direct control you can find in a first person shooter or a real-time strategy.

Tahrir: The Game (Play This Thing)

(Image: Feb4-12:49pm, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 89031137@N00's photostream)

 


The Legend of Zelda: the 80s teen movie

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 10:43 PM PST

Truly, words can not justify what you are about to witness, but I'll give it a whack anyway: A brilliant mashup trailer of 80s teen movie moments all smoothly tied together into a video game character love story. You're going to nostalgia so hard, you have no idea.

The details make it. And it's weighted down with them. Enjoy!

[Video link] Thanks for making me cry tears of joy, Dannel!

Cut-up Charlton Heston video: "The Future has Already Been Written"

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 09:08 PM PST


An excerpt from transmedia artist Anthony Discenza's "Charlton Heston: The Future has Already Been Written," that "fuses Planet of the Apes, Omega Man, and Soylent Green. The 3 films (in their entirety) are visually alternated with each other every 1/10 of a second, while the soundtracks are layered simultaneously." Nope, I didn't watch the whole thing. Couldn't do it. But I might try again. Later.

ImageShack serves dire warnings to victims of pharmaceutical spams

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 01:26 AM PST


ImageShack discovered that they were being used by fake pharmacy scammers to host images for their crappy websites and spam. So ImageShack now serves this warning image for all the pharma referrers they can find.

Imageshack Swaps Spam Pages for Scam Alerts

 


Parent pranks Disney World-bound kids with fake flier

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 01:21 AM PST


Reddit user Gljo wanted to keep the nature of a Disney World trip a secret from her/his kids, so s/he made this flier and told the kids that's what they were going to see. I love the bit about the chalkboard!

Wanted to keep the trip to Disney World a secret from the kids, so I made this flyer and told them this is why we're driving to Florida.

 


Maggie talking science on Bloggingheads.tv

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 02:27 PM PST

The connection between cheese and your armpit, why biofuels are better when they're local, biological symbiosis, and more! I'm on Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday video discussion, chatting with synthetic biologist and blogger Christina Agapakis.



Rural farm-school ready to chuck it all due to "safety" regs

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 01:16 AM PST

Lenore "Free Range Kids" Skenazy brings us the story of the Moorestown Children's School in New Jersey, a school that opened in 1981 on farmland, where kids are invited to learn by playing with logs, splashing in the mud, taking care of the cat, and messing around in a barn. But now, Moorestown's director, Sue Maloney, is considering shutting down the school, because inspectors (who already required her to fence off the stream and get rid of the logs) want her to cut back all tree branches that hang below the seven foot mark, due to the notional hazard they present.
"But they play with the trees!" school director Sue Maloney recalls telling the inspection crew. The children "touch the trees! They shake the leaves. It's what they do..."

The 10-year-old tabby sleeping in a basket, for instance. From now on, she had to be leashed or caged or evicted. Then there's the fact that some of the 15 students, ages infant to 8, were padding around inside in stocking feet. By law, they are required to wear shoes. And there were some other concerns Maloney was happy to fix: a patch of uneven surface on the playground, some mildew in a storage building. Finally, as it said on the Dec. 20 "Inspection/Violation" report, the center had to "cut back low-hanging tree branches."

That's where Maloney drew the line. She called me to explain why. "This is a country environment! I grew up here. Honestly, that's what I wrestle with: Do we even want to remain a child care center if we have to eliminate all the parts we love?" Do away with the cat, the stream, the logs, the bare feet and the branches -- what's left?

School Inspectors Say: Trees Too Dangerous!
 


What's wrong with thinking of a "balance" between security and privacy

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 01:23 AM PST

In this short essay inspired by a Orin Kerr's paper on an equilibrium-adjustment theory of the Fourth Amendment, Julian Sanchez raises some important problems with the traditional framing of security being "balanced" with privacy concerns:
In my own area of study, the familiar trope of "balancing privacy and security" is a source of constant frustration to privacy advocates, because while there are clearly sometimes tradeoffs between the two, it often seems that the zero-sum rhetoric of "balancing" leads people to view them as always in conflict. This is, I suspect, the source of much of the psychological appeal of "security theater": If we implicitly think of privacy and security as balanced on a scale, a loss of privacy is ipso facto a gain in security. It sounds silly when stated explicitly, but the power of frames is precisely that they shape our thinking without being stated explicitly.

There's a deeper problem, though: Embedded in the idea of the scales is a picture of a process for arriving at sound decisions--which if the metaphor is sufficiently pervasive we may come to think of as the only method for making sound decisions. A scale is a machine for reducing diverse objects--or in the metaphor, interests and values--to a single shared dimension. You might have items as varied as toasters and giraffes on the opposing plates of the scale, but all the scale cares about--or all we care about when we employ it--is that they both have weight and mass. Every other difference between the items in the balance is irrelevant so long as they have this one shared property, this one dimension along which they intersect, which allows us to quantify each in terms of the other.

The Trouble With "Balance" Metaphors (via Schneier)

(Image: Balanced, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from ejmc's photostream)

 


Egypt: New York Post wraps it up in one fell 'shoop

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:12 PM PST

3D typography made by folding pages in books

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 01:03 AM PST

American origami from the early Depression

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 10:59 AM PST

This December 1929 Modern Mechanix article on paper folding fun must have really enlivened the early months of the Great Depression; I imagine average people sitting on upturned apple crates, doing this religion-tinted American origami with worthless stock-shares.
Among paper conjuring tricks, perhaps the most amusing is the "Passport" effect. Briefly, the thing is this: The performer takes an oblong piece of paper, about 4 inches by 8 inches, and folds it as shown by the dotted line in Diagram A of Illustration 1. He then folds it again, as shown by the dotted line in Diagram B, and again as shown by the dotted line in Diagram C.

The paper at this stage is shown in Diagram D. A final fold, creasing along the dotted line No. 1, and bringing the edge of the paper to the dotted line No. 2, will result in a piece of paper like the one pictured in Diagram E. This is then torn or cut down the dotted line as indicated. The result is an odd combination. The single upper layer of the tear, as indicated by the arrow, will, when opened up, form a perfect cross; while the remaining pieces can be assembled to form the word "Hell"!

Easy STUNTS with Paper (Dec, 1929) (Thanks, Christian Nightmares!)

Book uses colored thread between pages to make hyperlinks

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 04:21 PM PST


Maria Fischer's "Traumgedanken" book is a collection of "literary, philosophical, psychological and scientifical texts" about dreams. The book uses threads pierced through the pages and affixed to other pages to make physical hyperlinks between ideas.
On five pages there are illustrations made out of thread. Their shape and colour relies on the key words on the opposite page. This way an abstract image of the dream about dreaming is generated.

In addition there are five pages where a significant excerpt from a text of the opposite page is stitched into the paper. It is not legible because the type's actual surface is inside the folded page. This expresses the mysteriousness of dreams and the aspect of dream interpretation.

Traumgedanken (Thanks, Michael Chabon!)
 


Batman: Dead End and Hunter Prey director free in San Francisco this Weds

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 10:21 AM PST

Rina from the wonderful, free SF in SF reading series writes,

SF in SF is delighted to welcome filmmaker and director, Sandy Collora, here from Los Angeles for a special evening of discussion/Q & A, autographing, and a screening of both BATMAN: DEAD END* and HUNTER PREY. This is a one-of-a-kind event - we promise you won't be disappointed! Come ask the director about filmmaking, good old-fashioned thrilling science fiction, Comic-Con, and what's it like to be an auteur!

Both films knocked 'em dead at Comic-Con!! Film director and comic book writer Kevin Smith called BATMAN: DEAD END "possibly the truest, best Batman movie ever made", and comic book artist Alex Ross praised it as "Batman the way I've always wanted to see him." DVDtalk.com points out that "At the very least, "Hunter Prey" will entertain you, but it will also remind you beyond the big budget Hollywood excess, there are still those willing to break their backs to get their vision on the big (or small) screen." AND for you Gen-Xers out there, actress Erin Gray gives a classy performance as the voice of the computer! And did we mention the free popcorn???

A Movie Guest (Thanks, Rina!)

Drawing a bike from memory

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:01 PM PST

(Before you look at the images linked below, please try drawing a bike from memory and post a link in the comments.) A couple of days ago, Andrew Neher asked me to draw a bike from memory. He's asked a bunch of people to do this and has been posting the results at bikedrawings.tumblr.com. He said, "It doesn't have to be a good drawing or anything, actually, the ones I'm most interested in are the ones that are a bit off, where the memory of how a bike is put together isn't quite accurate, but of course, you can do it however you like."

I drew a bike from memory, and I asked my wife, my two daughters, and my daughter's friend to draw a bike, too. The results are fascinating and funny!

Carla's bike, Sarina's bike, Jane's bike, Mark's bike, Lilli's bike.

Anatomical sleeping bag

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 09:01 AM PST


This anatomical Japanese sleeping bag is a vivid and colorful way to bring a touch of Hellraiser to your campouts and sleepover parties.

人体模型寝袋 (via Neatorama)

 


Mechanical anatomy animation

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 08:57 AM PST

Fritz Kahn's 1920/30's illustration "Der Mensch als Industriepalast" depicted the human body as a large, integrated industrial process. This video from Henning M Lederer animates Kahn's vision, really capturing the spirit of the mechanical metaphor for human anatomy.

Der Mensch als Industriepalast. (via Reddit)

 


CPAC hears plan to deny citizenship to Americans born to foreigners

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 11:50 PM PST

Presenting at the right-wing love-in CPAC, cuddly Kris Kobach (architect of Arizona's racist "papers, please" law) revealed his plan for getting around the pesky Constitutional guarantee of citizenship for people born in the USA -- he's going to get state legislatures to deny "state citizenship" to kids born to foreigners. Presumably this means that they wouldn't be issued birth certificates and wouldn't be entitled to attend school, etc. Kobach was joined by numerous birther loonies who, um, think that states should provide special super-birth-certificates attesting to the citizenship of one particular American.
Other foes of birthright citizenship have gone so far as to call for a Constitutional amendment, but Kobach sees a more promising path through the states, which he says have the authority to make "certain legal arrangements" that bear "the force of federal law."

"We can't change the way Congress define US citizenship, but we can conceive of ways to change how a state defines its own citizenship," he told the crowd. And while he admitted that this was "maybe not the most important issue with regard to immigration," he added that tearing down birthright citizenship was important if Americans wanted to remain faithful to their Constitution.

Republican leaders have sought to tamp down this inflammatory issue in the run-up to November 2012. Rep. Lamar Alexander (R-Texas), said he won't make it a priority in the House Judiciary Committee, and he passed over Rep. Steve King of Iowa--a GOP flamethrower and avid birthright foe--for the chairmanship of Judiciary's immigration subcommittee.

AZ Immigration Guru Targets "Anchor" Babies (Thanks, Mmechanic, via Submitterator!)

(Image: Statue of Liberty from below, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from melanzane1013's photostream)

 


Jeff Koons's claim to own all balloon dogs deflates

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:58 PM PST

Last month, I blogged about Jeff Koons's lawyers, who objected to a company in San Francisco selling bookends that look like balloon-dogs because Jeff Koons also once made a sculpture that looked like (different) balloon dogs.

Now, after having a lawsuit filed against them, and after being humiliated around the world as idiotic bullies, the selfsame lawyers have, um, deflated. Koons's firm has given their official okey-dokey to selling balloon-dog-looking housewares and other goods so long as you don't call them "Jeff Koons Balloon Dogs." Of course, no one ever did call them "Jeff Koons Balloon Dogs." But there you go. Money well spent, Koons and Co!

Bloggers largely scoffed at the threat, but Park Life decided not to just sit around and see if Mr. Koons would sue. On January 20, its lawyer, Jedediah Wakefield of Fenwick and West, working pro bono, sued Jeff Koons LLC in San Francisco federal court, asking the court to declare that Park Life wasn't infringing on Mr. Koons's i rights. "They very quickly indicated they weren't interested in putting up a fight," Mr. Wakefield said of Mr. Koons's lawyers. Ultimately, Jeff Koons LLC agreed not to pursue the gallery for the sale of the bookends, and the gallery agreed not to indicate that the bookends were by Mr. Koons, which, Mr. Wakefield added, "they hadn't done and weren't going to do anyway." As a result of the deal, he said, he was planning to file on Thursday for a dismissal of the declaratory judgment suit.
All Bark, No Bite: Settlement Reached in Balloon Dog Dispute (Thanks, Greg Long!)
 


Toolish App Contest

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 07:17 AM PST

ihandy-level-app-sm.jpeg Now that Android and iOS (and Windows 7) smartphones have matured and given rise to a robust application marketplace, it is about time we hold a contest to identify the most useful mobile applications that qualify as Cool Tools. We are seeking reviews of the best and most useful apps out there. Seeing as how there are so many (over 300,000 in iOS alone) we only want the absolute best. As long as you think its useful or have found that it has somehow improved your life, we want to hear about it.

Remember, a great review consists of the following five parts:
1) a succinct description of what the application does,
2) how it changed your behavior,
3) why Cool Tools should run the item,
4) why it is superior to other things, and
5) why we should believe you.

We will be accepting entries until Friday February 18th. The author of the best and most compelling review gets to select a prize from the Prize Pool and will be published the following week. So tell us what applications you are using, and why they rock!

For an idea of what we are looking for in an application check out some previous reviews:
Anki
Cyclemeter
How to Cook Everything
Evernote

-- Oliver Hulland, Editor, Cool Tools

Be sure to check out some of the submissions in the comments over at Cool Tools.



Tribute to John Hughes gallery show

Posted: 12 Feb 2011 12:07 AM PST

HOWTO have a D&D party for 8-year-olds

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 11:38 PM PST

Tavis Allison staged a Dungeons and Dragons birthday party for a group of 8- and 9-year-old boys. He came up with a lot of clever rule-simplifications to make the game easy to learn and play, and it really sounds like a fine time was had by all!
2) Kids chose which color dice they want and which miniature will be their hero, both of which they got to keep as "goodie bags" from the party. We didn't have them do any further character creation (all heroes had the same stats behind the screen) except for name. Lots of the kids who hadn't played before had problems coming up with a name, so I asked if they wanted to roll for one. I didn't actually have a table, I just used the time they were rolling the dice to think them up.

3) The scenario was that the heroes set forth from their stronghold to explore the surrounding wilderness in search of magical items to claim and Pokemon to capture. We had the kids construct the wilderness using Heroscape hexes, and the stronghold using wooden Kapla blocks

What Made for a Successful D&D Birthday Party (Thanks, Jason!)

(Image: Painted Trophy: Red Dragon, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from benimoto's photostream)

 
(Thanks, Jason!)

Kickstarter project: handbags made from old 35mm feature films

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 11:32 PM PST

Portland's Julie Lewis has a Kickstarter project to raise funds for another run of her handbags made from 35mm feature films; the films have passed through their exhibition window the distributors are obliged to shred them. Lewis employs a women's co-op to use the material to make cool, translucent purses. Pledge $100 and you get a large tote as well as a bunch of other goodies.

Handbags made from 35mm Pre-run Hollywood Movies (Thanks, Lunadog, via Submitterator!)

 


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