Watchismo Vintage & Modern Horology - Our watches will improve your self esteem by 7% Minimum wage hike coming to Guangdong, the world's factory Hacking geigers: Safecast crowdsources radiation data in Japan after Fukushima disaster Romenesko resigns from Poynter In Wikileaks case, US court rules Twitter data is not protected, but government orders are Man shot near Occupy Oakland Occupy Legoland (with Lego QR code) HoJo's soda can design Bechdel's Fun Home to be a musical Hulkmania to the nth Medieval marketing Neil deGrasse Tyson's Symphony of Science Taleb: Banker bonuses should be banned Movie poster for next Republican debate revealed Whimsical, anatomy-inflected art from Yoan Capote Computer-human interaction that gives hands their due respect Mexico: Nuevo Laredo online says murdered man wasn't blogger or "social media" reporter, but scapegoat for terror Mexico's "War on Drugs" leads to catastrophic rise of murder, torture, "disappearance" Cainthology: Songs In The Key Of Cain, by Tim Heidecker Warner Bros admits it sends takedown notices for files it hasn't seen and doesn't own French court sends EDF execs to jail for hacking, spying on Greenpeace The Cave Singers: "Black Leaf" (MP3) OWS: Police beat protesters with clubs at "Occupy Cal" protest, UC Berkeley Report: "No proof" man killed in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico was social media user Art Spiegelman lecture on Maus Potash mining on the Colorado River Next up: The search for alien light pollution Post-modern, paleontological art All roads lead to "Philosophy" Antique photos from optical telescopes What friends are for: making Simpsons humor real Minimum wage hike coming to Guangdong, the world's factory
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 11, 2011 06:28 am Guangdong, the Chinese province in the Pearl River Delta where practically everything you've bought in the past ten years was made, is about to see a minimum wage increase effective Jan 1, with some workers seeing increases as high as 20 percent. Guangdong has experienced high inflation. The wage increases, combined with weak western currencies, ...
Read in browser Hacking geigers: Safecast crowdsources radiation data in Japan after Fukushima disaster
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 11, 2011 01:21 am Watch Online "Hacker" Group Crowdsources Radiation Data for Japanese Public on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.On PBS NewsHour tonight, a report I helped the program's science correspondent Miles O'Brien produce about the challenge people in Japan face of finding and sharing reliable data about radiation contamination, after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear ...
Read in browser Romenesko resigns from Poynter
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 11, 2011 12:52 am Poynter reports that Jim Romenesko has resigned from his long-running series of daily online reports about the business and culture of news. Apparently this was the result of some kind of weird conflict over attribution in his posts. I don't really get it, but I have long been a fan of his pioneering style of ...
Read in browser In Wikileaks case, US court rules Twitter data is not protected, but government orders are
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 11, 2011 12:47 am Big blow to online privacy today, and another win in the US government's war on Wikileaks. A US District Court ruled that private info on Twitter accounts of three people related to Wikileaks must be turned over to federal demands. And, those three people have no right to demand that secret government orders for private ...
Read in browser Man shot near Occupy Oakland
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 11, 2011 12:38 am Near the Occupy Oakland site in downtown Oakland, CA, a man was shot tonight in an incident protesters say was unrelated to the protest. An eyewitness account is here.
Read in browser Occupy Legoland (with Lego QR code)
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 11:00 pm Adam Greenfield snapped this "Occupy Legoland" piece at OWS, including a Lego QR code (!). As Adam says, 99%, but 100% awesome. Occupy Legoland!
Read in browser HoJo's soda can design
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 10:03 pm Love the package design on this old-timey Howard Johnson's own-brand soda from the depths of yesteryear. Howard Johnsons
Read in browser Bechdel's Fun Home to be a musical
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 09:02 pm "Fun Home," Alison Bechdel's brilliant graphic novel memoir (review here) is being adapted for musical theater: "My father and I grew up in the same small Pennsylvania town and he was gay and I was gay and he killed himself and I became a lesbian cartoonist," Bechdel's character says in Fun Home. Kron is a ...
Read in browser Hulkmania to the nth
By Rob Beschizza on Nov 10, 2011 08:49 pm Welcome to the Hulkursion loop. [Moustair via Matt Haughey and Mike Monteiro]
Read in browser Medieval marketing
By Mark Frauenfelder on Nov 10, 2011 08:28 pm Grant McCracken, a research affiliate at MIT and the author of Chief Culture Officer, writes about the appeal of "hidden messages" in popular culture. Fnord. The medieval world took for granted that the universe was filled with secret messages, placed there by God and the correspondences on which the world was built. What did not ...
Read in browser Neil deGrasse Tyson's Symphony of Science
By David Pescovitz on Nov 10, 2011 08:11 pm The amazing Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the forthcoming TV sequel to Cosmos, stars in this latest auto-tune Symphony of Science. Onward to the edge! (via Imaginary Foundation)
Read in browser Taleb: Banker bonuses should be banned
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 08:02 pm Nassim Nicholas "Black Swan" Taleb has an NYT op-ed arguing that the best way secure the financial system from future collapse is to eliminate bankers' bonuses altogether. Taleb says bonuses reward risk-taking behavior without any counterbalancing punishment for bad risks, which provides an incentive for bankers to take stupid risks and hide their mistakes with ...
Read in browser Movie poster for next Republican debate revealed
By Rob Beschizza on Nov 10, 2011 06:52 pm 
Read in browser Whimsical, anatomy-inflected art from Yoan Capote
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 06:25 pm I'm loving the works of Yoan Capote, whose paintings, drawings and sculpture are just the right mix of horror, whimsy and anatomy to tickle my aesthetic sense. If I ever need a bench, this is the one I want. ...my work has been the result of analyzing objects and their relationship with our body; studying ...
Read in browser Computer-human interaction that gives hands their due respect
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 05:18 pm Bret Victor's "Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design" is an eye-opening look at the poverty of the current options for computer-human interaction. Victor argues that our hands have enormous expressive range and sensitivity, but our devices accept only pokes and swipes from them, and only provide feedback in the form of a little ...
Read in browser Mexico: Nuevo Laredo online says murdered man wasn't blogger or "social media" reporter, but scapegoat for terror
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 10, 2011 05:16 pm In Mexico, online local news site Nuevo Laredo Live is tweeting today that the man murdered yesterday in gruesome cartel-style killing was not, as widely reported, a blogger, forum moderator, or an affiliate of any kind with their site. Translating loosely: "Negative, he was not our partner, he is confirmed to have been a scapegoat ...
Read in browser Mexico's "War on Drugs" leads to catastrophic rise of murder, torture, "disappearance"
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 10, 2011 04:53 pm Human Rights Watch reports that instead of reducing violence, the 'war on drugs' in Mexico has resulted in a dramatic increase in killings, torture, and "disapparances." Read the report. [Video Link]
Read in browser Cainthology: Songs In The Key Of Cain, by Tim Heidecker
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 10, 2011 04:14 pm Tim Heidecker, whom you may know best as "Tim of Tim and Eric," or one of the "Check it Out with Dr. Steve Brule" creators (a second Brule season is coming up!), has come forward with new allegations of song against presidential candidate and alleged serial sexual harasser Herman Cain. Behold! Cainthology (Songs In The ...
Read in browser Warner Bros admits it sends takedown notices for files it hasn't seen and doesn't own
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 04:10 pm Warner Brothers has filed a brief in its lawsuit against file-locker service Hotfile in which it admits that it sent copyright takedown notices asserting it had good faith to believe that the files named infringed its copyrights, despite the fact that it had never downloaded the files to check, and that it sometimes named files ...
Read in browser French court sends EDF execs to jail for hacking, spying on Greenpeace
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 04:10 pm EDF, the French energy company, has been fined €1.5 million and its head and deputy-head of nuclear operations have been jailed over its use of Kargus (a private security firm run by a French ex-secret service operative) to use illegal surveillance techniques against Greenpeace. I recently switched away from EDF at home and at the ...
Read in browser The Cave Singers: "Black Leaf" (MP3)
By Amy Seidenwurm on Nov 10, 2011 03:45 pm Sound It Out #6 The Cave Singers' No Witch was probably my favorite record of 2011. It really epitomized the sludge of wintertime when it came out in January and it has managed to reflect moods and seasons throughout the year. It's rare to hear a collection of songs that deepen over time like this ...
Read in browser OWS: Police beat protesters with clubs at "Occupy Cal" protest, UC Berkeley
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 10, 2011 03:42 pm Above, video footage of police beating protesters at Wednesday's "Occupy Cal" demonstrations on the UC Berkeley campus. The video was uploaded to YouTube by Miles Mathews. More on the peaceful protest, and the violent police response, here. In videos surfacing today of this and other police beat-downs at Berkeley, observers note that cops are routinely ...
Read in browser Report: "No proof" man killed in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico was social media user
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 10, 2011 03:08 pm UPDATE: Nuevo Laredo Live reports that the man killed is "not one of our collaborators," but "a scapegoat" whose murder serves to send a message of fear. Animalpolitico reports about questions in the case of a man murdered yesterday in a cartel-style torture and beheading, who was identified in the press as a moderator of ...
Read in browser Art Spiegelman lecture on Maus
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 02:56 pm In this fascinating hour-long Seton Hall lecture, Art Spiegelman expounds on Maus, his Pulitzer-winning graphic novel history of the Holocaust, providing excellent companion material to Metamaus, the new book that recounts Maus's history, which came out last month. Art Spiegelman lecture
Read in browser Potash mining on the Colorado River
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Nov 10, 2011 02:21 pm EcoFlight is a group that photographs ecological threats in western states from the vantage point of small airplanes. The idea is to give people a clear picture of the contrast between wilderness and the industrial sites that threaten the ecological health of that wilderness. It's an interesting idea, and certainly results in some amazing photos, ...
Read in browser Next up: The search for alien light pollution
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Nov 10, 2011 01:48 pm Today's best telescopes could see the amount of light produced by Tokyo from as far away as the Kuiper Belt. Future telescopes may be able to hunt for alien civilizations by looking for artificial lighting. (Via Gary King)
Read in browser Post-modern, paleontological art
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Nov 10, 2011 01:43 pm One a recent art crawl in St. Paul, Minnesota, I ran across the work of Michael Bahl. Dressed in a white lab coat, Bahl bills his work as "post-osteological interpretation." Basically, he's built both skeletal monsters, and an ostensibly real research history to go with them. This creature, for instance, is a Chalicotherium laurentian. She ...
Read in browser All roads lead to "Philosophy"
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Nov 10, 2011 01:39 pm A neat widget demonstrates the truth behind an XKCD joke: Take any article on Wikipedia, click the first link in the article, and then repeat—and you will eventually end up at "Philosophy." It even works for "Justin Beiber." (And, yes, I know, this is a biased exercise because it starts with a pre-chosen endpoint. You ...
Read in browser Antique photos from optical telescopes
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Nov 10, 2011 01:24 pm The Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) is home to the Astronomic Photographic Data Archive (APDA), a collection of photographic plates taken by optical telescopes from the mid-19th century through the late-20th century. Some of these plates are the only existing documentation of astronomic features that are no longer there. All of them represent shots of ...
Read in browser What friends are for: making Simpsons humor real
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 10, 2011 01:04 pm A grief-stricken Redditor asked by a friend if there was anything he needed quoted the Simpson's episode in which Barney's Japanese girlfriend requests "A single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat." The friend obliged. My grandma died, and a good friend asked: "Is there anything you need?" As a joke, I said: ...
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