The Latest from Boing Boing

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• Brooklyn Buzzers (photo, Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
• China: artist Ai Weiwei detained in tiny cell under harsh conditions
• Naked body scanners are just fine, no "constitutional arguments," court rules
• Man calls police to report pot theft
• DJ KITTENS (video)
• Medieval combat game turned into soccer hooligan sim
• DIY palm-mounted laser
• Rainbow Moon
• Dog bites shark (video)
• Tracking whale sharks with citizen science and astronomy software
• Train track therapy in Indonesia
• Friday Freak-Out: Brothers Johnson play "Strawberry Letter #23"
• Bolivia: an extremely funky house, and other visual delights.
• Happy Carmageddon!
• The Best of New Order
• President Obama speaks to Space Shuttle crew (live)
• The Beekeeper's Lament: Must-read book on bee life, and death
• Space Shuttle lives on... in Hollywood
• Murdoch apologizes
• Internets Celebrities: What is Mofongo?
• Monkey Mountain, Hong Kong (photo, Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
• Scherer on Assange: "Penetrating a sleeping woman...is not a political act."
• Love letter found 53 years late
• Transparent chair filled with hay

Brooklyn Buzzers (photo, Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 15 Jul 2011 03:24 PM PDT (Image: EEM01-13, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (2.0) image contributed to the BB Flickr Pool from macdawg's photostream)

China: artist Ai Weiwei detained in tiny cell under harsh conditions Posted: 15 Jul 2011 03:21 PM PDT The sister of artist and dissident Ai Weiwei says that during his time in jail, Ai was not tortured and received food and his medications regularly. But he was kept in a tiny cell, 6 cell tiles wide in either direction, and under conditions that amounted to psychological pressure. When he paced inside that tiny cell, she said, he was followed by two guards, who accompanied him everywhere, all the time. From a Washington Post interview: "The room light was on 24 hours every day," she said. "The only furniture in the room was a bed. Except for the bed, there was nothing else in the room, no chair, no desk. They didn't offer Ai anything-- no book, no newspaper, no TV, no radio, not even a piece of paper or a pen." Gao said the two guards watched him constantly, never speaking; the officers changed shifts every three hours. "They stared at him without ever moving their eyes," she said, adding that they stood close by even while he used the toilet. "And when he took a shower, they just stood right next to him, even though they were getting totally wet. "Can you imagine the feeling of having four eyes always on you, no matter what you do?" Gao said. "If you lie down and go to sleep, they just stand at the side of the bed and look at you without a blink of the eye. When he had a walk in the room, they also followed him. These measures were designed to destroy people's minds," she said. More here. China: Renowned poet and artist Ai Weiwei detained China: Lawyer linked to "disappeared" artist Ai Weiwei resurfaces after detention China: artist, poet, activist Ai Weiwei released on bail China: Artist and dissident Ai Weiwei freed, but must pay 1.85 million What do 100 million hand painted fake sunflower seeds look like? Photos of Ai Weiwei's architecture work in Beijing - Boing Boing Ai WeiWei and Blackjack - Boing Boing

Naked body scanners are just fine, no "constitutional arguments," court rules Posted: 15 Jul 2011 12:00 PM PDT David Kravetz in Wired News: "A federal appeals court on Friday unanimously declined to block the government from using airport body scanners across airports nationwide, saying it is 'not persuaded by any of the statutory or constitutional arguments' against them."

Man calls police to report pot theft Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:52 AM PDT Max Fleck, 20, of Chicago, Illinois, called police to report that three men robbed him of two pounds of marijuana. The police arrived, found more drugs, and arrested Fleck. According to investigators, Fleck had invited one of the three men to his home and instead all three came. The five spent about an hour at the apartment before one of the men punched Fleck and broke a bottle over his companion's head... When officers and paramedics arrived Fleck declined medical attention. As the officers spoke to him about the robbery, they saw various other drugs "in plain view." "Man reports drug robbery to cops, gets arrested"   Police seek man's stolen medicinal weed - Boing Boing Gallery of medical marijuana - Boing Boing

DJ KITTENS (video) Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:43 AM PDT Three kittens, two turntables and a microphone. Catboy Slim! [Video Link, thanks Karl Stevens!]

Medieval combat game turned into soccer hooligan sim Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:36 AM PDT Someone turned Mount and Blade, a group combat game with a medieval setting, into a Glaswegian football hooligan simulator. [Rock Paper Shotgun]

DIY palm-mounted laser Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:34 AM PDT Inspired by Iron Man, Patrick Priebe built his own palm-mounted laser. It apparently uses a 1,000 miliwatt, 445nm laser diode. That ain't no laser pointer. From MSNBC: That laser is among the most powerful you can buy commercially, and it is capable of blinding instantly and setting fire to skin. Fortunately, the palm mount is made from a 2mm-thick sheet of brass, which acts as a heatsink that protects the wearer. "DIY palm-mounted laser is ridiculously dangerous" (Thanks, Jacques Vallée!) More at Hack A Day

Rainbow Moon Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:17 AM PDT What does it mean? This colorized NASA image shows changes in the composition of the Moon's surface. Bright pinkish areas are highlands materials, such as those surrounding the oval lava-filled Crisium impact basin toward the bottom of the picture. Blue to orange shades indicate volcanic lava flows. To the left of Crisium, the dark blue Mare Tranquillitatis is richer in titanium than the green and orange maria above it. Thin mineral-rich soils associated with relatively recent impacts are represented by light blue colors; the youngest craters have prominent blue rays extending from them. Via Mother Nature Network

Dog bites shark (video) Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:18 AM PDT Video Link. Dogs rule. (via Sean Bonner)

Tracking whale sharks with citizen science and astronomy software Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:05 AM PDT Scientists have figured out a clever way to distinguish one, individual whale shark from another using computer algorithms originally developed for astronomy. That's because whale sharks are spotted, and individuals have unique spot patterns, just like different parts of the sky have unique star patterns. More than simply a one-time ID system, the method works with a database of whale shark photos so that different people all over the world can upload photos and find out where else "their" whale shark has been. And it's not just for scientists. This is one of those places where laypeople can participate in helping collect data. The next time you're in an area where whale sharks are present, you can take a photo and contribute it to the growing database. Deep Sea News explains how the system, called ECOCEAN works: 1. You photograph the left flank of a whale shark, in the area above the pectoral fin, level and perpendicular with the animal 2. You upload the image, along with pertinent details, via the ECOCEAN website. An ECOCEAN-affiliated scientist like me processes the image, cropping, straightening and marking the spots and some other important anatomical landmarks. 3. The software compares the photo to a database of over 3,000 different animals using a couple of different similarity algorithms, and then returns a list of possible matches with scores for how good a match each is. 4. An ECOCEAN-affiliated scientist like me then makes the final call on whether the photo matches an existing animal (i.e. is a re-sighting), or whether it's a first timer, in which case it gets assigned a unique ID number that will follow it throughout its days. 5. The submitter gets an email telling them whether their animal is already known to ECOCEAN, or is new. 6. (and this is especially cool) Thereafter, whenever that animal is seen again, any submitter of a picture of that animal also gets an email letting them know that "their" animal has been resighted. Image: whale shark, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from jonhanson's photostream

Train track therapy in Indonesia Posted: 15 Jul 2011 10:43 AM PDT These people aren't protesting anything ... they're hoping to be healed. In the Indonesian town of Rawa Buaya, people believe that electrical energy carried by the railroad tracks can cure disease. REUTERS/Enny Nuraheni

Friday Freak-Out: Brothers Johnson play "Strawberry Letter #23" Posted: 15 Jul 2011 10:49 AM PDT [video link] Friday Freak-Out: The Brothers Johnson perform "Strawberry Letter 23," circa 1977, available on their album "Right On Time". I selected this song after BB commenter ThomDowting pointed out how the opening notes of Cults' "Go Outside," heard in our video premier Wednesday, recall the lovely 60s glockenspiel intro to "Strawberry Letter 23" played by the song's author, Shuggie Otis, in 1972, and playable here.   Friday Freak-Out: The Rolling Stones' "2000 Light Years From Home ... Friday Freak-Out: Electric Lucifer - Boing Boing Friday Freak-Out: It's A Beautiful Day's "White Bird" (1971 ... Friday Freak-Out: Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" (1970) - Boing Boing Friday Freak-Out: Arthur Brown's "Nightmare" - Boing Boing Friday Freak-Out: Ready, Steady, Go psych/mod parody from ... Friday Freak-Out: The Electric Prunes' "I Had Too Much To Dream ...

Bolivia: an extremely funky house, and other visual delights. Posted: 15 Jul 2011 10:16 AM PDT Photographer and Boing Boing reader Mario Landivar has a wonderful set of photos from his native Bolivia, but none so Boingy as this one, here: a fantastically funky house in the town of El Alto. Makes more sense in the context of so much indigenous color. I love this languid shot of Lake Titicaca. More great shots in his feed, here. Thanks for sharing them in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool, Mario!

Happy Carmageddon! Posted: 15 Jul 2011 10:02 AM PDT [Video Link] Here in Los Angeles, the 405 freeway —a main artery for already-clogged traffic—will be closed this weekend. Closed! Totally closed. Panic has been building over predicted "Carmageddon." Local cyclist group @wolfpackhustle is organizing a ride, #FlightVsBike, to see if a pack of cyclists can beat a @jetblue plane from Burbank to Long Beach (the airline was selling tickets as a stunt for $4 this week). More here, and more here. Me? Screw bikes and cars and jets, I'll be using my personal, cat-GIF-powered spaceship.

The Best of New Order Posted: 15 Jul 2011 09:38 AM PDT Despite promoting a new Best Of collection together, the members of New Order do not get along: "Too many things have been said and done," nods Bernard Sumner, the "twat" of Hook's complaint." [Guardian via The Awl]

President Obama speaks to Space Shuttle crew (live) Posted: 15 Jul 2011 09:50 AM PDT US President Barack Obama speaks to the crew of the final Space Shuttle mission STS-135, and to all who are on board the International Space Station. Watch it live. Update: Obama, who sounds as if he might be chewing a Nicorette gum while on the phone, cracks a LOL when the first astronaut picks up the phone: "Oh, I was just dialing out for pizza and I didn't expect to end up in space." The rest of the conversation between POTUS and the combined crews of Expedition 28 and STS-135 included ceremonial formalities, appreciations of hard work and extraterrestrial hazards, and potty humor: "I understand you have to share a bathroom. My wife and daughters are always crowding me out. Hopefully you all have a better arrangement up there." Image above: The STS-135 and Expedition 28 crews gather together in the International Space Station's Kibo module Friday to answer questions from the media around the world. Image credit: NASA TV

The Beekeeper's Lament: Must-read book on bee life, and death Posted: 15 Jul 2011 09:27 AM PDT What's killing the bees? After reading The Beekeeper's Lament —Hannah Nordhaus' lyrical, haunting book about the complicated lives and deaths of America's honeybees—my question has shifted more towards, "Good lord, what doesn't kill bees?" Domesticated bees turn out to be some amazingly fragile creatures. In fact, Nordhaus writes, bees were delicate even before the modern age of industrial farming. It wasn't until the second half of the 19th century that humans were able to reliably domesticate bees. Even then, beekeeping was anything but a stable business to be in. But in the last decade, the job has gotten harder, and the bee deaths have piled up faster. Bees are killed by moths and mites, bacteria and viruses, heat and cold. They're killed by the pesticides used on the plants they pollinate, and by the other pesticides used to protect them from murderous insects. And they're killed by the almond crop, which draws millions of bees from all over the nation to one small region of California, where they join in an orgy of pollination and another of disease sharing. None of this negates the seriousness of Colony Collapse Disorder, that still-mysterious ailment that reduced more than 1/3 of America's healthy beehives to empty boxes in 2007. But what Nordhaus does (and does well) is put those famous losses into a broader context. Colony Collapse Disorder is a problem. But it isn't the problem. Instead, it's just a great big insult piled on top of an already rising injury rate. Saving the honeybee isn't just about figuring out CCD. Bees were already in trouble before that came along. In the years since 2007, Nordhaus writes, bees have died at a rate higher than the expected and "acceptable" 15% annual loss, but the majority of those deaths weren't always caused by CCD. The picture of bee maladies that Nordhaus paints isn't a pretty one. The bees continue to be extremely important to our national food system, and they continue to die in numbers that are far more vast than the normally high death rates beekeepers have always dealt with. Worse, there's no easy answer. At least not one that scientific evidence has been able to pin down yet. If you're looking for a simple solution—if you want somebody to justify your pet explanation, whether pesticides, or GMOs, or totally natural causes that have nothing to do with modern farming practices—then you probably won't like what Nordhaus has to say. But if you're interested in the real complexity behind the headlines, you're in luck. There's so much going on in this book, details that are vitally important to understanding how modern beekeeping works and what happens when it fails, and which almost never make it into the short articles and TV segments. Nordhaus doesn't even really start talking about Colony Collapse Disorder in an in-depth way until chapter 6. And that's a good thing. By the time you get to that chapter, it's clear that she couldn't have written about it any sooner. There's too much context that you need to understand before you can really make sense of that hot-button issue. Better yet, Nordhaus manages to wrap all that nuance up in some of the best narrative and storytelling I've had the pleasure of reading since Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Like Skloot, Nordhaus owes some of the credit to the fact that her primary source is a fabulous character to hang a story on. John Miller, the professional beekeeper whose work and adventures set the stage for Nordhaus' reporting, is curmudgeonly and charming, hard-headed and hilarious. He's a conservative farmer who likes fast cars, loves his bees, and writes Nordhaus emails that read like Zen koans. Even when it's clear that some of the practices that keep people like Miller in business are also hurting the bee populations, it's hard not to root for him, as a person. Nordhaus puts the bee panic into perspective, and Miller puts a human face on the complexities and contradictions behind it. Before you build a beehive, before you post another Internet forum message about what absolutely just has to be killing the bees, you must read this book. The Beekeeper's Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America by Hannah Nordhaus Image: Return of the Bee, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (2.0) image from mightyboybrian's photostream

Space Shuttle lives on... in Hollywood Posted: 15 Jul 2011 09:21 AM PDT Over dinner last night, a new friend pointed out that the Space Shuttle, and Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will be featured in more than one big Hollywood film comin' down the pipeline soon. Today, I'm listening to this NPR segment on how the 30-year NASA program will be immortalized in movies. (via @isalara)

Murdoch apologizes Posted: 15 Jul 2011 09:10 AM PDT This statement, purportedly Rupert Murdoch's forthcoming apology for crimes committed at one of his London newspapers, is doing the rounds on Twitter. It's not terribly convincing! It reads to me kind of like this:

Internets Celebrities: What is Mofongo? Posted: 15 Jul 2011 08:56 AM PDT [Video Link] Internets Celebrities, a wonderful internet video series out of New York, has just released a new episode in which hosts Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam explore the mysteries of mofongo (also known as mangú), a savory Caribbean dish typically made from plantain and meat or seafood. Is it Dominican? Maybe. Is it Puerto Rican? Maybe. Is it yummy? Yes. A YouTube commenter (they're all so civilized in this thread!) correctly points out that the dish is a direct descendant of West African 'fufu', which in Cuba is sometimes called fufu de plátano. Other versions of this diaspora dish are enjoyed throughout the Caribbean. In related news, I am now hungry. Oh, and the latest edition of Boing Boing's inflight entertainment channel on Virgin America Airlines (#10 on the TV dial) features a couple Internets Celebrities episodes! Enjoy them while you fly. But alas, no mile-high mofongo on the in-flight food menu. (Directed by Casimir Nozkowski, Edited by Josh Weisbrot, Original Music by Bless 1, Produced by Robin Oye, Jesse Wilson, Cornelius van Gorkom)

Monkey Mountain, Hong Kong (photo, Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 15 Jul 2011 08:36 AM PDT A wonderful photo contributed to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by reader Ben Shapiro, who is traveling through the monkey-filled mountains of Hong Kong.

Scherer on Assange: "Penetrating a sleeping woman...is not a political act." Posted: 15 Jul 2011 08:27 AM PDT TIME's Michael Scherer on the hero theater around Julian Assange's sex case: "Penetrating a sleeping woman he had only recently met, if true, is not a political act, despite the efforts of his supporters to cast the resulting high cost of his house arrest as some sort of effort to stop the Arab Spring. It is the behavior of a brute, at best, and a criminal, at worst."

Love letter found 53 years late Posted: 15 Jul 2011 11:18 AM PDT Postal workers found an ancient love letter, sent in 1958, at a Pennsylvania mailroom. They're trying to track down the intended recipient. Reuters writes: 'The letter had been addressed to Mr. Clark C. Moore, then a junior at the university, which was known at the time as California State Teachers College, she said. It included a return address, but little other information about the sender, who signed the letter, "Love Forever, Vonnie."' Follow @BoingBoing on Twitter.

Transparent chair filled with hay Posted: 15 Jul 2011 07:58 AM PDT Fabio del Percio, an Italian upholsterer, recently launched this attractive new line of furniture made from Icelandic hay and transparent vinyl. The series is called "Hey" and available at U.K. retailer e-side. Pictured here is "Transparent Chair", which weighs 18kg and has a £540 price tag. [via Design Milk]

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