The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- NYT: Whiskey, your only defense against diseases from space
- Louis Vuitton sues artist, again
- B-Boy ブンガク: sublimely dope vintage Japanese rap mixtape
- Mario Brothers 2: Kong Country
- Not so much cellphones as tracking devices: a surveilled day in the life of German politician Malte Spitz
- How to tell which side of your rental car the gas cap is on
- Xeni on The Madeleine Brand radio show: NYT paywall debut, and US censorware in mideast (audio)
- Divvy: an OCD sufferer's delight
- Kill Team: Mark Boal's Rolling Stone profile of US unit accused of murdering Afghan civilians, shooting trophy photos
- Xeni on Leo Laporte's TWIT TV with Baratunde Thurston, Marshall Kirkpatrick
- Game Deaths MP3
- South Park 15th anniversary art show in NYC
- Japan tsunami sweeps Bieber, Sheen, from their perches atop Twitter
- Pocket Geiger Counter
- Paul Baran, Internet pioneer and Institute for the Future co-founder, RIP
- Jeff Koons Must Die: '80s arcade game themed art piece in which you shoot Koons' work
- Haute nuke-couture
- OpenNet Initiative releases new report on use of Western censorware by Mideast censors
- Japan: death toll rises, nuclear crisis continues with fears that reactor is leaking contaminated water
- Time's "140 best Twitter feeds" list includes a @boingboing editor
- Deathless: Cat Valente's beautiful fantasy of Stalinist Russia and the Siege of Leningrad
| NYT: Whiskey, your only defense against diseases from space Posted: 28 Mar 2011 04:14 PM PDT  What can't whiskey cure? Link. "What is the Grip?," from the April, 22, 1891 edition of the New York Times. Via Gabriel Snyder of Atlanticwire, originally the subject of this "Found item" post. (BB headline by Warren Ellis, for whom this item was almost certainly written lo these many years ago.) |
| Louis Vuitton sues artist, again Posted: 28 Mar 2011 03:12 PM PDT  In a T-shirt sold in 2008 to raise money for victims of violence in Darfur, artist Nadia Plesner depicted an African child holding a Louis Vuitton-style bag. So Louis Vuitton sued her. When she recently included the same design in a painting, it sued her again. The first time around, Louis Vuitton claimed it wanted merely to stop her from selling the merchandise. This time, however, there is little pretense that it is about anything other than wanting the image gotten rid of. Paul Schmelzer writes: Despite a clearly artistic -- and not commercial -- intention behind the work, Louis Vuitton is seeking monetary penalties (220,000 Euros or roughly $307,000 and counting, with no ceiling on the penalty) and aims to prevent Plesner from exhibiting the painting either on her website or at venues in the European Union. (Here's an unofficial English translation of the court order.)LV sues artist Nadia Plesner [Eyeteeth] |
| B-Boy ブンガク: sublimely dope vintage Japanese rap mixtape Posted: 28 Mar 2011 02:55 PM PDT  Via Jay Smooth, Andrew MonkOne Mason, and egotripland, this wonderful mix of Japanese hip-hop at Names You Can Trust Radio: "B-Boy Bungaku, an hour's worth of solid nipponese rap heat straight from the shelves of Cisco, Manhattan, DMR and other long-gone Shibuya record shops of the '90s, mixed with love." Listening and loving it. #ganbarenippon (art by egotripland) |
| Mario Brothers 2: Kong Country Posted: 28 Mar 2011 02:49 PM PDT The "Serious Mario Movie Trailers" meme meets a second layer of recursion in this latest amusement. If you are a PC gamer worth your salt, you'll know why I think the creators of this should be in charge of a remake of Deus Ex. |
| Posted: 28 Mar 2011 01:11 PM PDT  "Green party politician Malte Spitz sued to have German telecoms giant Deutsche Telekom hand over six months of his phone data that he then made available to ZEIT ONLINE. We combined this geolocation data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the internet."Interactive map here, article here, in Die Zeit (English). A related New York Times item is here. |
| How to tell which side of your rental car the gas cap is on Posted: 28 Mar 2011 03:34 PM PDT  Here's something I've never been able to remember: when I rent a car I forget to notice which side the gas cap is on. For the rest of my trip, I don't think to look. I only think about it when I'm driving and it's time to fill up the tank. I try to use the side view mirrors to see which side the gas cap is on. It never works. Then I look at other cars on the road, hoping to spot one that is the same model as mine so I can see which side the gas cap is on. Unfortunately, I'm car blind in the way that some people are face blind, so that usually doesn't work. I usually end up driving to the pump and finding out if I got lucky. But last month I met Joshua Schacter (creator of Delicious) at TED and he told me that most late-model cars have a little arrow on the gas gauge that points to the side of the car with the gas cap. This information has changed my life. Joshua's latest creation is ClueDB, a website "for sharing tips and tricks on how to make life better. You can tag, vote and comment on the clues you like. And you can contribute clues as well." Sample clue: "Putting a screw into a threaded hole -- Turn the screw backwards until it clicks into the first thread. the chances of putting it in wrong are much less that way." |
| Xeni on The Madeleine Brand radio show: NYT paywall debut, and US censorware in mideast (audio) Posted: 28 Mar 2011 12:28 PM PDT  I joined host Madeleine Brand today on her eponymously-named radio program for a segment on two tech-related headlines of the week: first, the New York Times paywall, which went live earlier today. The new subscription model purports to limit readers to 20 articles per month, but that doesn't include front page items, or pages you visit through a Facebook or Twitter link, and so on. Separately, we spoke about the OpenNet Initiative report on American- and Canadian-made censorware used by governments in the mideast to squelch political speech. Listen here. You can follow The Madeleine Brand show here, on Twitter. Photo: Wally Gobetz, via scpr.org. |
| Divvy: an OCD sufferer's delight Posted: 28 Mar 2011 11:51 AM PDT [Video Link] Divvy doesn't do anything except let you resize OS X and Windows windows by snapping them to widely-spaced gridpoints. I watched the above video, and was interested enough to download the demo (which doesn't expire but has nags about 2 or 3 times a day). I ended up liking it so much I bought it for $14. I use it dozens of times a day. For example, I use it to set up a couple of Finder windows and a FileMaker window (so I can compare MAKE stories that are on my hard drive, on MAKE's file server, and in the editorial database.) I use it to quickly pop open and resize side-by-side Chrome browsers so I can write a blog entry. I find more uses for it almost every day. Divvy offers configurable keyboard shortcuts - I use "1" to fill the left half of the screen and "2" to fill the right half. This is something OS X and Windows should have baked into their operating systems. Divvy |
| Posted: 28 Mar 2011 04:09 PM PDT  Online today at Rolling Stone, and in the current print issue on newsstands: "The Kill Team," Mark Boal's feature on a group of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan who are accused of murdering innocent civilians, mutilating their corpses, and taking "trophy photos" of the bodies. How and why did their officers fail to stop them? Includes gruesome and explict war crime photos censored by the Pentagon. Photo (pixelated by us): "In the process of suppressing the photographs, the Army may also have been trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. In this image, the bodies of two Afghan men have been tied together, their hands bound, and placed alongside a road." Update: Michael Yon has seen some of the same material, and disagrees strongly with Boal's conclusions, calling the story "bullshit." |
| Xeni on Leo Laporte's TWIT TV with Baratunde Thurston, Marshall Kirkpatrick Posted: 28 Mar 2011 11:36 AM PDT  I had a fun time yesterday on episode #294 of Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech webcast, with fellow guests Baratunde Thurston of The Onion and Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb. Topics included online news coverage of the Japan nuclear crisis and post-quake/tsunami humanitarian efforts; the internet of things and what a Facebooking refrigerator means for your personal privacy; Google and Honeycomb; the $41 million dollar data mining app called Color; and various things Kanye West has tweeted while high. You can watch the video here (direct MP4 links: hi-rez, lo-rez), or listen to audio, and transcript will be here later today. Thanks again to Leo, and to TWIT producer Eileen Rivera for inviting me! |
| Posted: 28 Mar 2011 11:03 AM PDT So many people have asked for it, so here it is: an MP3 of the MIDI mix of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" as used in our "Game Deaths" montage of classic arcade death sequences: Download/MP3 file link. Here's another version, with the lead chip an octave lower. It took me far too long to decide which of the two to use! The original, of course, was composed by Roland Orzabal and performed by Tears for Fears, the band that Orzabal and Curt Smith founded in the early 1980s. The slower arrangement used here is derived from a cover by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, famously used in the film Donny Darko and a big hit in its own right. The mix was made very simply. First, I found one of the countless MIDI arrangements of "Mad World" on the 'net (I wish I could credit someone, but they're naked of metadata) and imported it into Reason, a popular music-making app. From there, the notes and instrumentation are easy to edit; a verse was removed for length, drums added, and some of the sections edited or re-keyed to sound better with square waves. (A square wave, for the uninitiated, describes the shape of the waveform that creates the bleepy noise used in the arrangement, creating a distinctively primitive chipmusic-style sound.) |
| South Park 15th anniversary art show in NYC Posted: 28 Mar 2011 10:43 AM PDT Laughing Squid blog has photos from the South Park 15th Anniversary tribute art show going on in New York City at Opera Gallery. The show opens today and continues through April 10th. |
| Japan tsunami sweeps Bieber, Sheen, from their perches atop Twitter Posted: 28 Mar 2011 10:38 AM PDT On Friday, March 11, 2011, 66% of news links on Twitter were about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. From March 7-11, 20% of the news links were on that subject, making it the number one story for that week. |
| Posted: 28 Mar 2011 02:33 PM PDT  I've had this pocket geiger counter for a while, and I have not used it much. I took it out recently to check its battery just in case. The unit is made to check for radioactivity in industrial or geological uses, like testing scrap metal from unknown sources, old Uranium glazes on pottery, or possibly contaminated waste sites. The device clicks satisfyingly clearly when it detects three types of radiation. It's bigger than a pocket, but much smaller than the old fashioned vacuum tube variety. It runs off an 9-volt battery. This device is not sensitive enough to detect natural background radiation, or radiation drift in the atmosphere, or mild exposure on clothing, say. The device has to be very close to the radioactive source. It would have had trouble detecting the radiation during the accident at Chernobyl 500 meters outside of the plant itself. To measure the radiation in uranium ore, for instance, the device has to be just about touching the rock. Stuff has to be significantly "hot" to register, but this is the stuff worth worrying about.As you might expect, you can't buy one anywhere at the moment (immediately after the Fukushima incidents). But they will be back. UPDATE: This device is a little bit more sensitive than your classic hand-held geiger counter, and cheaper, and also smaller. It's a good bargain. But geiger counters in general as not extremely sensitive. They can be made more sensitive by wiring them up to count "hits" over hours, days, and weeks instead of per second. See, for example, the Sparkfun geiger kit. --KK UNDX-1 Pocket Geiger Counter Available (eventually) from: Specs: Operating Range: Sensitivity: Don't forget to comment over at Cool Tools. And remember to submit a tool! |
| Paul Baran, Internet pioneer and Institute for the Future co-founder, RIP Posted: 28 Mar 2011 10:18 AM PDT Paul Baran, whose co-invention of packet switching lies at the very foundation of the Internet, has died. He was 84. Baran spent the 1960s at RAND's computer science department where he focused on developing a system for "distributed communications," fundamental research that was seminal to the birth of Arpanet which, of course, became the Internet. In 1968, Baran left RAND to co-found the Institute for the Future, the not-for-profit forecasting group where I'm a research director. His impact was broad, deep, and truly transformational. From the NYT: "Paul Baran, Internet Pioneer, Dies at 84" |
| Jeff Koons Must Die: '80s arcade game themed art piece in which you shoot Koons' work Posted: 28 Mar 2011 10:14 AM PDT  Boing Boing pal Syd Garon points us to a wacky piece of arcade-themed art by Hunter Jonakin called "Jeff Koons Must Die." "It's a 80's style video cabinet with a first-person-shooter game he created, where you run around a museum shooting Jeff Koons' work," says Syd. "It's pretty fucking awesome. Koons comes out to stop you, Big Boss style. I love that you end up fighting an endless wave of lawyers." From Jonakin's website: The game is set in a large museum during a Jeff Koons retrospective. The viewer is given a rocket launcher and the choice to destroy any of the work displayed in the gallery. If nothing is destroyed the player is allowed to look around for a couple of minutes and then the game ends. However, if one or more pieces are destroyed, an animated model of Jeff Koons walks out and chastises the viewer for annihilating his art. He then sends guards to kill the player. If the player survives this round then he or she is afforded the ability to enter a room where waves of curators, lawyers, assistants, and guards spawn until the player is dead. In the end, the game is unwinnable, and acts as a comment on the fine art studio system, museum culture, art and commerce, hierarchical power structures, and the destructive tendencies of gallery goers, to name a few.
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| Posted: 28 Mar 2011 09:51 AM PDT Some artists and fashion designers in Paris put together a "haute nuke couture" conceptual video, inspired by... Fukushima. One of many to come, I'm sure. (thanks, Susannah Breslin) |
| OpenNet Initiative releases new report on use of Western censorware by Mideast censors Posted: 28 Mar 2011 07:57 AM PDT From ONI: "The recent political unrest in the Middle East and North Africa has thrown into focus the information shaping, events-based blocking, and counter-control activities undertaken by governments throughout the region. New research by the OpenNet Initiative shows that many of these activities are supported by Western filtering tools and services." Read the OpenNet Initiative's new report: "West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors, 2010-2011," authored by Jillian York and Helmi Noman. A related Wall Street Journal item is here, but requires subscription/login. |
| Posted: 28 Mar 2011 08:30 AM PDT The latest from Japan: 11,004 are confirmed dead, and 17,339 are missing after the March 11 quake and tsunami. Updates from the weekend's developments in the nuclear crisis: Water in a trench outside reactor number 2 at Fukushima shows very high radiation levels. Two workers who were injured from contact with a highly radioactive pool of water were today discharged from the hospital. This weekend, TEPCO gave conflicting readings of radiation levels inside Fukushima, prompting confusion and concern over the reliability of their data and the safety of workers at the plant. In related news, there is controversy over the fact that shelters in the hardest-hit areas of Japan are requiring radiation screening certificates for displaced people who enter, but that the nature of the screening methodology is scientifically dubious. Also this weekend, 1200 anti-nuclear demonstrators showed up at TEPCO headquarters, demanding that nuclear reactors be shut down. Traces of radioactive particles have been detected as far away as Massachusetts. (links for Japan-based news sources in this item via Mizuko Ito, who you should follow on Twitter.) |
| Time's "140 best Twitter feeds" list includes a @boingboing editor Posted: 28 Mar 2011 08:27 AM PDT Time "picks the 140 Twitter feeds that are shaping the conversation," and this @boingboing editor is among them—not that a happy mutant stands a chance against Palin, Bieber, or Lord Voldemort, who by the way totally cheats. Also: captcha umlaut vote-rigging! |
| Deathless: Cat Valente's beautiful fantasy of Stalinist Russia and the Siege of Leningrad Posted: 28 Mar 2011 05:33 AM PDT  Catherynne M Valente's Deathless is a beautiful Russian fairy-tale set in the Stalinist era, brilliantly conceived and executed. Masha is the youngest of four sisters in Petrograd and, over the years, she has watched the birds come for her sisters. They thump against the windows and fall to the ground and spring up as soldiers and thump again on the door and beg to be wed to the girl in the window. When the Soviet nationalizes her home and moves 11 other families into it, Masha becomes a girl with 12 mothers, and no bird comes for her, but the house elf, the domovoi, reveals itself to her, and brings her to the Domovoi's Committee, where all 12 families' house-elves have formed a congress to decide how best to run their shared home. With their advice, she finds a witch, who gives her a book and tells her where to find a hairbrush, and these, at last, conjure a husband for her. But Masha's husband is no soldier: he is Koschei, the Tsar of Life, and he spirits her across the steppes to his kingdom, where he is locked, as always, in fierce battle with his brother, the Tsar of Death. There, Masha becomes a consort and dreams of becoming a queen, but she cannot, not until she has completed the quests of Baba Yaga, the sister of the Tsar of Life, who now styles herself Chairman Yaga. From this unflowers a lyrical, beautiful story about the war between lovers, the war over life, the beauty and the terror of revolutionary dreams. Valente's prose is transporting, and her instincts for when to draw a section to a close and insert a gap of years or decades for best effect is flawless. This is a book that broods but never stoops to cynicism, a book full of dream-logic and eros. Valente is a major talent, and this is some of her best work. |
"The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral," Baran said in an interview in 1990. "Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, 'I built a cathedral.'
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