The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Mat Ricardo at Edinburgh Fringe
- 3 Little Pigs rendered into Papua New Guinea pidgin
- Why they call the Tories “the nasty party”
- Norwegian PM refuses to let terrorist attacks drive his country to intolerance and paranoid “security”
- The Slow BRAAAAINNS Movement
- Spock is Not Impressed
- Daily Show episode yanked from UK TV because Brit law prohibits using Parliamentary footage in satire
- Piers Morgan not linked to phone spying scandal, no way no how, nuh-uh
- From Dust revives god game genre … for some
- Wu-Tang clan seeks intern
- Beach gadgets to make yourself: 1950
- Scientists build robot octopus, one tentacle at a time
- Stop motion animation on fingernails
- Books-rupturing-the-walls installation
- Canada: Prime Minister Stephen Harper likes posting cat pictures to Google+
- Bioartist training fungi to devour her when she dies
- Steve Jobs shills green tea and Sony hardware in Taiwan
- Report: Hacktivist Aaron Swartz arrest was a webcam stakeout
- Fast Slow Food: 5 devices for healthier, yummier eating
- Koko’s Kitten — a classic kids’ book
- Star Trek as you’ve seen it many times before
- LulzSec’s Topiary arrested, say cops
- How wild animals evolve to live in cities
- TOM THE DANCING BUG: Billy Dare trapped! But, meanwhile…..
- Science Hack Day gets grant funding, goes global
- Pundits deploy retrocausality to blame Islam for Norway attacks
- Can a brain live for a minute after decapitation?
- Korean Air jets being fitted with three bars
- Robot-hand ring presentation box
- Buy an Old West town in South Dakota for $0.8M
| Mat Ricardo at Edinburgh Fringe Posted: 28 Jul 2011 02:21 AM PDT Funny juggler/conjuror Mat Ricardo sez, “Remember last year when I staged a one-man show at the Edinburgh festival, asking if – after 25 years of touring, performing and slowly going mad – I should continue doing my job as a juggler and comedian? Remember how I discussed it with the audience and got their advice during each show? Well – the results are in – the show was a massive success and I got the best reviews of my career (Graham Linehan came, and called it ‘Charming, funny and startling;). the feedback was literally unanimous that I should keep doing it. Hooray! The show transferred to a short London run earlier this year, which sold out, and I’ve been booked to perform it at a larger venue for the duration of the Edinburgh fringe, starting next Wednesday. The lesson here is simple – if you make something, then make it personal and meaningful. When you do a job that you love for a long time, as I have, it’s easy to forget why you loved it in the first place. It’s easy for it to become just a job, and that’s what had happened to me – but writing and performing ‘Three Balls and a New Suit’ helped me remember, and now I love doing it as much as I ever have. Win!” | ||||
| 3 Little Pigs rendered into Papua New Guinea pidgin Posted: 28 Jul 2011 02:02 AM PDT Mikey sez, “A recording of the story of the three little pigs in Pidgin Inglis (Tok Pisin). Great to listen to if you only speak English because you can get the gist of it anyway (and you already know the story).” I love listening to familiar texts in pidgin (moreover, I could just listen to pidgin being spoken all day long). The Ur-example, of course, is Makbed, Ken Campbell’s Melanesian pidgin rendering of Macbeth.
(Thanks, Mikey!) This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | ||||
| Why they call the Tories “the nasty party” Posted: 28 Jul 2011 01:12 AM PDT Steve Hilton, UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s “strategy guru” has a cure for the sluggish British economy: temporarily abolishing all maternity rights and consumer protection laws. He’s not interested in proposals for lowering executive pay in publicly backed financial institutions that drove the world’s economy off a cliff, or for increasing transparency in the executive compensation packages offered to the heads of publicly traded companies. | ||||
| Posted: 27 Jul 2011 11:59 PM PDT Norwegian Jens Stoltenberg has vowed not to let the terrorist attacks on his country be used as an excuse for taking away fundamental freedoms. He’s treating the attacks as a policing matter (a crime), not as a military matter (that is, something requiring a “war on terror” with concomitant war-footing). He acknowledges that his country will be changed by the attacks, but he’s hopes it will be “more open, a more tolerant society than what we had before.” My goodness, what I would have given to hear those words sometime in the autumn of 2001. Norway's Premier Vows to Keep an Open Society (via Reddit) | ||||
| Posted: 27 Jul 2011 11:42 PM PDT
Scott Weikert‘s response to the image by Adam Fields featured in my earlier post about “5 Slow Food Gadgets” (alternate link). Both gentlemen contributed to a thread about the aforementioned article on Google+. | ||||
| Posted: 27 Jul 2011 11:31 PM PDT | ||||
| Posted: 27 Jul 2011 10:29 PM PDT Graham Linehan (co-creator of such beloved TV as Father Ted and The IT Crowd) asked Channel 4 why they hadn’t aired the most recent Daily Show in the UK, given that the episode deals with the News of the World scandal. The answer he got floored him: as it is against the law in the UK to use Parliamentary footage for satirical purposes, the Daily Show episode in question couldn’t be aired here. The issue is Parliamentary Copyright, a weird concept in UK law that gives Parliament (not the public) ownership over its publications, utterances, and so on. Parliamentary copyright means that it’s illegal to print books containing complete records of Parliament without Parliament’s permission (contrast this with the US, where anything produced by the federal government is presumptively in the public domain, belonging to all people). We tend to think of Parliamentary Copyright as a kind of innocuous peccadillo — after all, the Clerk of Parliament gave a license (retroactively) to the activists who made They Work For You, the best-of-breed Parliamentary tracker and activist tool. But this shows what happens when politicians, and not the people, own the record of government: Britons are denied access to commentary on their national news because there’s no way an American TV show will know or care enough about Parliamentary Copyright to get a license to use clips in its shows in case the shows are exported to the UK. Get a load of this ridiculous thing I found the fuck out last night | ||||
| Piers Morgan not linked to phone spying scandal, no way no how, nuh-uh Posted: 27 Jul 2011 05:48 PM PDT Former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan denies (for the second time this week) he printed stories obtained through so-called “phone hacking,” via a CNN statement (Guardian) | ||||
| From Dust revives god game genre … for some Posted: 27 Jul 2011 02:54 PM PDT
Rock Paper Shotgun‘s Alec Meer offers his first impressions of From Dust, Eric Chahi’s god game. Unfortunately, it sounds more Black and White than Populous.
Other early reviews are more positive, but it is, as they say, a mixed bag. Impressions: From Dust [RPS] | ||||
| Posted: 27 Jul 2011 02:00 PM PDT “Excellent written communication skills, with ability to communicate with diverse audiences.” Wu-Tang advertises for an office intern. Unpaid, we presume, so: no dolla dolla bill, ya’ll. (via @jonswaine) | ||||
| Beach gadgets to make yourself: 1950 Posted: 27 Jul 2011 01:53 PM PDT
The June, 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics featured a collection of buildable inventions to take to the beach, including this floating playpen, with four auto inner-tubes to prevent tipping. I love the playpen especially, because it has the look of the sort of device that produces incredibly sweet nostalgic memories in 99 percent of its users, and terrible memories of drowning tragedies (or near-tragedies) in the remaining one percent. | ||||
| Scientists build robot octopus, one tentacle at a time Posted: 27 Jul 2011 01:52 PM PDT Last year, I interviewed Binyamin Hochner of Hebrew University about his work developing new robotics systems based on the neurobiology of octopuses and other cephalopods. That interview ended up being incorporated into a video about cephalopod intelligence that was posted here on BoingBoing. Long story short: Cephalopods don’t have their neurons organized in the same way that we vertebrates do. An octopus has as many neurons as a cat, but instead of relying on a central brain, the octopus’ neurons are far more scattered. Some are centralized into what we might think of as a “brain”—in this case, a donut-shaped organ that actually wraps around the octopus’ esophagus. But the bulk of the neurons are distributed throughout the octopus’ body. When the octopus moves, the centralized and decentralized neurons work together, sharing information and the duties of processing and control*. Researchers like Hochner think that distributed processing system could make for better robots that can do more thinking on their own. Now, his work is paying off. In the video above, you can see the robotic arm produced by an interdisciplinary, team funded by the European Commission, of which Hochner is a part. The 17-inch arm can grasp objects and is the first step in a larger plan to build an entire robot octopus. I’ll say that again, “Robot octopus.” Feel free to squeel with delight. *For the record, this is my guess for why the technically dead squid in that video Xeni posted on Monday still reacted when doused with soy sauce. Squid have distributed neurons, just like octopuses. So some of its “brain” was dead. But the distributed neurons spread throughout its arms were still, apparently, somewhat functional. In the video, I mentioned that one of the scientists I spoke with told me that the humane way to kill an octopus was to kill the whole octopus at once. | ||||
| Stop motion animation on fingernails Posted: 27 Jul 2011 01:38 PM PDT Kia’s ad agency made this clever (and time-consuming) stop-motion animation using 900 cels painted onto artificial fingernails and then captured on a model’s hand. The animation is very fun, especially if you turn off the sound and avoid the awful accompanying music. Picanto nail art animation (Full version) (via Neatorama) Presented By:
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| Books-rupturing-the-walls installation Posted: 27 Jul 2011 01:09 PM PDT
Warey Myers designed this installation for the new offices of Portland’s VIA Advertising Agency, which are in the Baxter Building, home to the Portland Public Library from 1888-1960: “Books breaking through the (faux) wall downstairs, referencing the “basement stacks” every library has. In this case it’s as if those stacks had been sealed up during some remodel, and are anthropomorphically breaking through, referencing the old library, history, roots, poltergeists…” ^^^ Wary Meyers The Basement Stacks ^^^ | ||||
| Canada: Prime Minister Stephen Harper likes posting cat pictures to Google+ Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:59 PM PDT
Canada’s Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has figured out what Google+ is good for: cat pictures. Apparently he has a history of using kitteh as political props…
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| Bioartist training fungi to devour her when she dies Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:53 PM PDT
(via Kottke) Presented By:
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| Steve Jobs shills green tea and Sony hardware in Taiwan Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:48 PM PDT
Andy Ihnatko explains what’s going on in the image above, which was snapped and submitted to him by a reader in Taiwan. | ||||
| Report: Hacktivist Aaron Swartz arrest was a webcam stakeout Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:41 PM PDT Hacker activist Aaron Swartz was nailed with an MIT webcam stakeout, and the U.S, Secret Service was involved from the start, according to the arrest report. Wired News has more. (via Ryan Singel) | ||||
| Fast Slow Food: 5 devices for healthier, yummier eating Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:30 PM PDT
I wrote a feature about my 5 favorite kitchen gadgets, “Fast Slow Food,” on Intel’s “My Life Scoop” site. I own and use every one of these, and prepare meals (and beverages!) with them each day. In the feature, I explain why. From the intro:
Devices reviewed in this piece: Vita-Mix blender (best there is, no other brand is even close), VitaClay electric cooker (has a clay pot inside, instead of nonstick metal), Capresso Burr Grinder (reasonably affordable burr grinder for far better tasting coffee than the kinds of electric grinders most people have in their homes), a Veggie Spiralizer, and a Japanese quick pickle press (you can make other kinds of “quick pickles” with it too, it’s not just for tsukemono). I shared this earlier today on Google+, and an interesting discussion thread emerged over there. Thanks for the image, Adam Fields! Words to live (and cook) by.
Presented By:
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| Koko’s Kitten — a classic kids’ book Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:20 PM PDT [Heartbreaking video link] I really like Burgin Streetman’s blog called Vintage Kids’ Books My Kid Loves. Today, Burgin wrote about Koko’s Kitten.
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| Star Trek as you’ve seen it many times before Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:17 PM PDT
Space Trek is a collection of oblique shots from a certain television series, illustrating “the quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise.” | ||||
| LulzSec’s Topiary arrested, say cops Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:15 PM PDT Topiary, a spokesperson with web-cracking troublemakers Lulz Security, is said to be in custody in Britain. London’s Metropolitan Police:
A 17-year-old male is also being interviewed under caution in connection with the inquiry, but has not been arrested. Behold the Shetlands. Man arrested in e-crime investigation [Met] Presented By:
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| How wild animals evolve to live in cities Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:02 PM PDT A fascinating NYT story looks at evolutionary biologists who work in NYC, studying the way that species mutate to adapt to urban life. From cod that became PCB resistant after GE’s notorious 30-year poisoning of the Hudson to mice whose city-wide genetic divergence is as broad as the whole global population’s, to ants that have adapted to life on traffic islands:
Evolution Right Under Our Noses (via Kottke)
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| TOM THE DANCING BUG: Billy Dare trapped! But, meanwhile….. Posted: 27 Jul 2011 12:00 PM PDT
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| Science Hack Day gets grant funding, goes global Posted: 27 Jul 2011 11:59 AM PDT My Institute for the Future (IFTF) colleague Ariel “Spacehack” Waldman and Science Hack Day have launched a new initiative to help communities organize their own Science Hack Days around the world. Science Hack Day is a 48-hour event where scientists, designers, artists, and developers get together to make and do science and science-related projects. The new effort is supported with a grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to IFTF, where Ariel is a research affiliate. Congrats, Ariel! This is terrific news.
Presented By:
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| Pundits deploy retrocausality to blame Islam for Norway attacks Posted: 27 Jul 2011 11:35 AM PDT “It is not disputed that Breivik technically did it: the question, surely, is who is going to have made him do it? Europe awake. Yestermorrow there will was be going to have been Jihadi retrocausality to contend with.” From China Mieville’s stirring rant about the pundits who declared that the Norway attacks must be the work of Islamic terrorists, then shamefully backpedaled and made excuses about how Breivik was a Paladin of the West, or was inspired by Islamic terrorists, or that in some way, Islam was to blame for Breivik’s rampage. | ||||
| Can a brain live for a minute after decapitation? Posted: 27 Jul 2011 11:09 AM PDT Since I was a kid, I’ve been fascinated by 19th century guillotine anecdotes about severed heads winking, attempting to speak, or smiling. The “Guillotine” entry in Wikipedia has a section on “Living heads” and The Straight Dope has investigated the topic as well. And now, two new scientific studies also push on the question of whether the brain is still “alive” after decapitation. From Science News (painting by Francisco de Goya):
“‘Wave of death’ may not be a last gasp“ | ||||
| Korean Air jets being fitted with three bars Posted: 27 Jul 2011 10:52 AM PDT Korean Air is outfitting its new A380 jumbo jets with three bars — two open bars in business, one staffed bar in first. No bars for coach passengers, natch.
Airplane Upgrade: Boozeness Class | ||||
| Robot-hand ring presentation box Posted: 27 Jul 2011 10:49 AM PDT
Atelier Ted Noten & Laikingland designed this horribly-named Lady Killer Volume 1 — a jewelry presentation box that contains a robotic arm that extends itself to proffer a ring in its pincer. Presented By:
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| Buy an Old West town in South Dakota for $0.8M Posted: 27 Jul 2011 10:33 AM PDT
The whole town (“kit and kaboodle!”) of Scenic, South Dakota is up for sale, for the asking price of USD800,000. Dave Olsen, a local realtor, has put the town up for sale, including its two jails (one still fit for use!), train depot, museum, dance hall, saloon and bunkhouse. Also, there’s DSL.
Got $799,000? You could buy a town in South Dakota (CNN) |
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