Sunday, June 19, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Carved hard-hat

Posted: 19 Jun 2011 04:14 AM PDT


This carved hard-hat -- vintage unknown, as is the creator -- is up for sale on eBay, where it's currently hovering around $400 with eight hours to go.
Hello, up for auction is a vintage/antique B.F. McDonald engraved/hand hammered hard hat. The hat has off-shore oil rigs all around the sides and a helicopter towards the top/front and a helicopter landing pad around the back. The metal work is stunning. Signed "Wisna" on the top center (5th photo down). .
VTG Aluminum Hard Hat McDonald Engraved Hand Hammered (via Making Light)

Literary fail shirt!

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 02:15 PM PDT

Apelad's "Literary Fail" shirt.woot is guaranteed to assplode the pedants' heads in your life (as is this sentence).

Literary fail (Thanks, Apelad!)

Snarkily liveblogging Bilderberg

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 01:16 PM PDT

Charlie Skelton is liveblogging the scene outside the annual meeting of the Bilderberg Group, a secretive, high security movers-and-shakers event characterized by (literally) private choppers, armed sniper security, and total secrecy. Meanwhile, outside, "a bunch of politically articulate, highly intelligent, engaged individuals: many of whom are scarily young and energetic" have gathered outside the Bilderberg's conference hotel in Switzerland to gather and report what they can:
Thomas Jefferson said: "Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government." And: "If once they [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves."

Without the people's attention to government, government grows fangs; but: "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day."

And then we have Bilderberg. A massive great, sniper-armed, window-tinted, helicoptering slap in the face to any concept of enlightened democracy. Shrouded, misty and removed. A place where "Congress and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors" sit about in secret and do business with bank bosses and the chairmen of corporations, and policemen stand guard lest the citizenry become too informed.

Bilderberg is a backwards step, heading in wholly the wrong direction when "transparency of government" is something we're all clawing towards. It's a dinosaur. A childish, irritating dinosaur. It's Godzuki.

Bilderberg 2011: The tipping point (via Reddit)

Identifying Sioux Falls in 1956 from a set of unattributed parade photos

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 11:46 AM PDT


Cozyoak sez, "The latest installment of the Ferrous Archive takes us through the process of figuring out a place and time (via a Kodachrome parade from 1956). Dear Sioux Falls: Ethel's All Girl Bar and Lounge needs to be re-opened."
Look at all those great businesses - Gridley Martz Insurance, Don's Drive-In Liquor, Vandel Furniture, Ethel's All Girl Bar and Lounge (bar AND lounge? So much drinking going on!). Keep going down the street, Canton Chow Mein Cafe, Ace Variety, Sansa's Cafe, Maytag District Store - lots and lots of easy leads to pinpoint where the parade happened, right? Wrong! I have not been able to find evidence of any of these businesses! Seriously - no one cared to remember and record Ethel's? That's ridiculous.
Kerrville or Sioux Falls? 1956 Centennial Parade.

Jeff VanderMeer's public fiction project: The Journals of Doctor Mormeck

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 11:15 AM PDT

Jeff VanderMeer sez, "Sometimes a story lends itself to being written in public, and 'The Journals of Doctor Mormeck' is one of those stories. I'm typing it right into a blog entry at the rate of one installment every couple of days, so readers get to see the rough draft version and I get to live on the edge--pushed out of the comfort zone of my usual process. Supported by paypal donations from readers, to vanderworld at hotmail.com. Anyone who donates over $21 will receive a free copy of the first appearance of the finished story, whether in an anthology or stand-alone book."

KFC: support diabetes research by buying an 800 calorie, 56 spoonful of sugar "Mega Jug"

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 11:18 AM PDT

Mitch sez, "A KFC franchise in Utah is asking customers to help fight diabetes -- by purchasing an 800-calorie Mega Jug of sugary soda to wash down their meals."
The reaction: It's hard to imagine what KFC was thinking, says Joe Waters at Selfish Giving. Although after "the dreadful Double Down," it's no surprise these folks have "deep fried their reputation again." Give this franchise owner credit for wanting to do some good, says Jenn Savedge at Mother Nature Network. But why not tie the promotion to something healthier like, say, grilled chicken? Trying to link a drink with 56 spoonfuls of sugar to a health cause has to qualify as one of the biggest PR misfires ever.

Irony alert: Buy KFC's 800-calorie soda to support diabetes research (Thanks, Mitch!)

(Image: Ridiculous drink size, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from wyscan's photostream)

Caturday!

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 09:09 AM PDT

5238011767_891f93dd53_o.jpg

Contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Bill Benson.

(Image: Primo, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from billbenson's photostream)

Richard Dawkins: Sex selection and the shortage of women: is science to blame?

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 12:41 PM PDT

RTR1G1QO.jpg A couple watch their baby inside a waiting hall at the Nanjing railway station, capital of Jiangsu province. [Reuters/2006]

In nature, the balance of males and females is maintained by natural selection acting on parents. As Sir Ronald Fisher brilliantly pointed out in 1930, a surplus of one sex will be redressed by selection in favour of rearing the other sex, up to the point where it is no longer the minority. It isn't quite as simple as that. You have to take into account the relative economic costs of rearing one sex rather than the other. If, say, it costs twice as much to rear a son to maturity as a daughter (e.g. because males are bigger than females), the true choice facing a parent is not "Shall I rear a son or a daughter?" but "Shall I rear a son or two daughters?"

So, Fisher concluded, what is equlibrated by natural selection is not the total numbers of sons and daughters born in the population, but the total parental expenditure on sons versus daughters. In practice, this usually amounts to an approximately equal ratio of males to females in the population at the end of the period of parental expenditure.

Note that the word 'decision' doesn't mean conscious decision: we employ the usual 'selfish gene' metaphorical reasoning, in which natural selection favours genes that produce behaviour 'as if' decisions are being made.

Interestingly, Fisher's reasoning remains intact, even in harem-based societies such as those of elephant seals, where a minority of males monopolise the females and the majority of males hang about as disconsolate bachelors. From a parent's point of view, a daughter is a 'safe' choice, likely to yield an average number of grandchildren. A son is a high risk choice. He is most likely to give you no grandchildren at all. But if he does give you grandchildren he'll give you lots. The figures balance out and Fisher's equilibrium still holds.

That's what happens in nature. But what if we are dealing with a human society in which cultural traditions over-ride the genetic imperatives (yet another example, this time not necessarily a benign one, of 'rebelling against the selfish genes'). What if the religion of a country fosters a deep-rooted undervaluing of women? What if there is an ancient culture of despising women, whether for religious or otherwise traditional or economic reasons?

In past centuries such cultures might have fostered selective infanticide of newborn girls. But now, what if scientific culture makes it possible to know the sex of a fetus, say by amniocentesis or ultrasound scanning? There is then an obvious temptation selectively to abort female embryos, which could have far-reaching and probably pernicious social consequences. I'll refrain from gloating over the possibility of Taliban-inspired woman-hating societies going extinct for lack of women.

The Guardian has a report today on 'sex selection of babies', which is described as a 'scourge' of the developing world:

Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world.

While the natural sex ratio at birth is 105 boys born for every 100 girls, in India the figure has risen to 112 boys and in China 121. The Chinese city of Lianyungang recorded an astonishing 163 boys per 100 girls in 2007.

The bias towards boys has been estimated to have caused the "disappearance" of 160 million women and girls in Asia alone over the past few decades. The pattern has now spilled over to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, the Balkans and Albania, where the sex ratio is 115/100.

The unnatural skewing towards male populations has become so pronounced in recent decades that Hvistendahl, a writer for Science magazine, says it has given rise to a new "Generation XY". She raises the possibility that with so many surplus men - up to a fifth of men will be single in northwestern India by 2020 - large parts of the world could become like America's wild west, with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence.

I'm sure Hvistendahl is right when she says, "Historically, societies in which men substantially outnumber women are not nice places to live", and when she compares it to the American wild west "with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence."


But is she right to blame Western science and governments for making sex selection possible? Why do we blame science for offering a method to do bad things? Science is the disinterested search for truth. If you want to do good things, science provides very good methods of doing so. And if you want to do bad things, again science provides the best practical methods. The ability to know the sex of a fetus is an inevitable byproduct of medical benefits such as amniocentesis, ultrasound scanning, and other techniques for the diagnosis of serious problems. Should scientists have refrained from developing useful techniques, for fear of how they might be misused by others?


Even sex selection itself and selective abortion of early embryos is not necessarily a social evil. A society which values girls and boys equally might well include parents who aspire to at least one of each, without having too large a family. We all know families whose birth order goes girl girl girl girl boy stop. And other families of boy boy boy boy girl stop. If sex selection had been an option, wouldn't those families have been smaller: girl boy stop, and boy girl stop? In other words, sex selection, in societies that value sexual equality, could have beneficial effects on curbing overpopulation, and could help provide parents with exactly the family balance they want.


But the general question I want to raise is whether the evils of what Mara Hvistendahl calls the XY generation should be blamed on "western governments and businesses that have exported technology and pro-abortion practices without considering the consequences." Or whether they should be blamed on the cultural and religious practices that despise and discriminate against women in the first place.



Related reading: the book Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl (PublicAffairs, June 7, 2011).

[This essay also published on RichardDawkins.net, where you can find an archive of essays by Dr. Dawkins, and links to his books and upcoming appearances.]



 

Chopped and Screwed music compilation

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 07:48 PM PDT

Matt Biddulph turned me on to this excellent 14 Tracks MP3 compilation titled "Screw The Pitch," a very trippy batch of hip hop, dub, and electronica music that's been cut up, pitch-shifted, and tempo-tweaked to create a weirdly hypnotic opiated sound. As Matt pointed out, this drunky, slurry, sizzurpy mix is something of a toast to the "chopped and screwed" (or "slowed and throwed") remixing style that emerged from Houston's Purple Drank-drenched underground hip hop scene of the 1990s. (For those not aware of the alluring potion, Purple Drank is cough syrup that contains codeine and Promethazine mixed with Sprite or Mountain Dew and sometimes Jolly Rancher hard candies.) From 14 Tracks:
Rocks Purpledrank Rollin' from DJ Screw's doped tones to Markus Schmickler's queered pitches, this 14tracks selection explores the relationship between displaced pitch and space in screwed HipHop, dub and experimental electronics. From the very first experiments with variable tape speeds, through the widespread use of turntable pitch controls, right up to the application of autotune and time-stretching, the evolution of electronic and mechanised music is continually displacing our perception of the "norm", and in turn creating heightened (or equally drowsy) psychedelic effects. Our selection focuses on a bunch of cuts which toy with our perceptions of time and space...
"14 tracks: Screw the pitch"

 


"Folder Rock": the language of band PR

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 07:42 AM PDT

Tony Bedard, who books live music at San Francisco's Hemlock Tavern, has a hobby as a "Folder Rock" archivist. What the hell is "Folder Rock"? It's Bedard's name for the sometimes overwrought, ham-fisted promotional mailers containing demo tapes and adjective-laden text that bands send out to show-bookers and music journalists. As a former music editor for an alt-weekly in the early 1990s, I can vouch that there is something to this. In my day, choice examples of folder rock arrived inside pizza boxes, with a bouquet of balloons, or sometimes via hand-delivery by "band managers" who were best avoided. I bet labels get more of this than anyone else. I remember someone in the early days of the Sub Pop Records explosion telling me that they instructed bands to submit their demos on very high-quality audio cassettes with the record tabs left intact. Nowadays, Folder Rock has of course become virtual. Still, Bedard collects the best of the worst. Indeed, this year he held a reading of Folder Rock at a local LitQuake/Noise Pop event. The Bay Citizen talked to Bedard about his fascination:
Uploaded Images 2011 6 Folder-Rock Original Folderrock Group "A classic piece of folder rock is a padded mailer. You open it up and inside of that would be a colored, translucent plastic folder with a drawstring that you have to navigate. And inside of that a glossy folder, maybe with band sticker, and then inside the folder there would be the business card, the bio, and a photo. Sometimes there'd be these crazy promotional items, like golf tees or mints," says Bedard, who has also played in San Francisco bands for 20 years...

Folder Rock is marked by hyperbole ("There is no other keyboardist in the history of rock & roll with a more stunning, voluminous résumé than Ian McLagan!"), baffling claims ("The aptly named-rebellious Perfectionist chooses his battles Wisely, with an evident persona that silently confirms that he does not Play!") and down-right silliness ("My name is Shovelman and this is what I do: I play a guitar that's made out of an antique SHOVEL. DIG IT, Folktronica!!")...

There are the bands that claim they sound like diametrically opposed bands at the same time. ("We're a rock band that sounds something like The Police meets AudioSlave meets Danzig.") Bedard likens this to Stagflation, which is when recession and inflation exist at the same time.

There is a tendency among newly established bands to supply incredibly long, but less than riveting creation myths: "The band was started when former member Michael delivered a package to drummer Zack's house."

"Folder Rock: The Unintentionally Hilarious World of Band PR"

With a Little Help in the Harvard Bookstore

Posted: 18 Jun 2011 05:36 AM PDT

Last week, New York's McNally-Jackson Books started printing and carrying my DIY short story collection, With a Little Help using their on-site print-on-demand machine. Now, the most excellent Harvard Bookstore has begun to do the same, retailing the book in its Cambridge, Mass store.

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