WATCHISMO TIME MACHINES - Timing is everything...
Norwegian butter crisis predicted a year in advance in "funny" ad from butter monopolist Articulate explanation of how SOPA came about, and how it might be stopped Proto-maker spaces: the "New Inventors Club" Cheap game design through prototyping Public domain WPA posters from the Library of Congress Stamp semaphore as early emoticons Porous paywalls are an admission that virtually no one wants to subscribe to newspapers Leica M9-P: $8k camera looks beautiful even in a Windows screen grab How to make your online shopping cart suck less How cloture works and what it means for PIPA The Thing, starring Pingu Call for Participation - Los Angeles Stereoscopic 3-D Showcase Canadian Parliament: a notorious pirate marketplace Vintage space flight books blog Thought-provoking essay on cause and correlation in modern science Electronic pioneer Daphne Oram recordings now available Dr Seuss meets the Joker Banach-Tarski!: Fun with some very weird math The Zen of Steve Jobs: graphic novel Macoto Murayama's incredible digital flower diagrams Comet Lovejoy + Total Recall = awesome Greatest map of the U.S. TOM THE DANCING BUG: Super-Fun-Pak Comix Reveals the Mystery of Dark Matter!! Bush-era whistleblower faced even more intense harassment under Obama HP unveils 27" iMac Five women in lingerie cavort on a giant toothbrush Roku Streaming Stick plugs directly into HDMI port Quantum levitation realizes humanity's age-old dream of floating supercooled Wipe Out RC cars Retrode, a USB game cartridge adapter Elegant bug-juice bottle Norwegian butter crisis predicted a year in advance in "funny" ad from butter monopolist
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 05, 2012 09:03 am This year-old butter ad from TINE, Norway's "butter monopolist" manufacturer, eerily presages Norway's notorious, Atkins-fuelled butter shortage. Reklamefilm TINE Smør - Superchef (Thanks, Samurai!)
Read in browser Articulate explanation of how SOPA came about, and how it might be stopped
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 05, 2012 03:07 am A redditor called BobA841908 lays out a lucid and compelling case for how SOPA came about and what might stop it: A full blackout is a reasonable response, because, in the language that is so popular with politicians, SOPA is going to result in excessive regulation that will cost jobs and likely cause significant increases ...
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By Cory Doctorow on Jan 05, 2012 01:58 am In the Nov, 1950 issue of Mechanix Illustrated, a piece about an early iteration of the hackspace: the "New Inventors Club" where a technician would help you modify your project designs so that you could get something that worked and try to sell it without having to pay big bucks to scumbag "promoters" who'd string ...
Read in browser Cheap game design through prototyping
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 05, 2012 01:26 am Raph Koster, who has many critical insights on game design, has a great new essay on his blog called "Making games more cheaply," which closes with this statement that applies to practically every form of digital media extant, and may just be the secret to success in the 21st century: Embrace prototyping. Make your game ...
Read in browser Public domain WPA posters from the Library of Congress
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 05, 2012 12:31 am Mynonymouse sez, "The Library of Congress just posted a Flickr set of lovely WPA posters. There are awesome ones about keeping your teeth clean, science and one that seems to be about drunk driving but also might warn of a previously unknown deadly reactive incompatibility between gas and whiskey." These are awesome designs, but it's ...
Read in browser Stamp semaphore as early emoticons
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 04, 2012 10:35 pm From an 1890 edition of the Szarvas és vidéke, a weekly Hungarian newspaper, an explanation of the "stamp code" used to signal one's intention when sending mash notes and such through the Emperor's post. The secrets of the language of stamps. For all those who are in the situation of Hero and Leander, and similarly ...
Read in browser Porous paywalls are an admission that virtually no one wants to subscribe to newspapers
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 04, 2012 09:00 pm Clay Shirky rings in the new year with another barn-burning essay about the state of newspapers, first noting that a "porous" paywall that allows 20 free pageviews per month is a tacit admission that pretty much no one who visits the paper's site is a potential customer for the paper's product: To understand newspapers' 15-year ...
Read in browser Leica M9-P: $8k camera looks beautiful even in a Windows screen grab
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 04, 2012 08:20 pm The above photo of the M9-P is how Leica's publicist sent it to me -- an uncropped screen grab. It caught my attention! The price tag also caught my attention: $7,995.00. It's the flip side of the luxury consumer goods coin, the other face of which was explored yesterday in Rob's post about Vertu (the ...
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By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 04, 2012 08:01 pm Gareth sent me this link to The Oatmeal's funny and all-too-true 6-page comic strip about the horrible interaction design of many online checkout procedures. How to make your online shopping cart suck less
Read in browser How cloture works and what it means for PIPA
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 04, 2012 07:51 pm James Losey from the New America Foundation sez, "Ernesto Falcon with Public Knowledge does a great job explaining Senate rules on filibuster and cloture, and what the rules mean for the Protect IP Act when the Senate comes back in session later this month:" On January 23rd, the United States Senate will reconvene to begin ...
Read in browser The Thing, starring Pingu
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 04, 2012 07:00 pm 00
Read in browser Call for Participation - Los Angeles Stereoscopic 3-D Showcase
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 04, 2012 06:21 pm Agent X-Ray says: The Los Angeles Chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH and the LA 3-D Club want you to participate in our non-competitive 3D Stereoscopic film festival. The LA 3-D Club (Stereo Club of Southern California) was established in the Greater Los Angeles area in 1955 by a dedicated group of 3D stereo photographers to further ...
Read in browser Canadian Parliament: a notorious pirate marketplace
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 04, 2012 06:03 pm The IP addresses assigned to the Canadian Parliament have been implicated in several copyright-violating BitTorrent downloads. The 192.197.82.0 – 192.197.82.255 IP block was seen to be in BitTorrent swarms for movies, Windows cracks, Adobe Premiere, ripped CDs, and many other files. The IP records were retrieved from YouHaveDownloaded, a Russian database of IP addresses seen ...
Read in browser Vintage space flight books blog
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 04, 2012 05:48 pm Dreams of Space is a wonderful blog that celebrates non-fiction kids' books about space flight from 1945 to 1975. But the images are so small that the creator of the blog ought to be fined by the League Of People Who Like To Download Large Images To Their Swipefile (LOPWLTDLITTS, or Lopwiltidlit, for short). (Thanks, ...
Read in browser Thought-provoking essay on cause and correlation in modern science
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 04, 2012 05:23 pm Science is the best method we have for understanding the world. That doesn't mean that everything scientists ever think they've figured out is correct. And it doesn't mean that we're doing science in the best way possible right now. For a great illustration of this, I recommend reading Jonah Lehrer's new piece in WIRED, about ...
Read in browser Electronic pioneer Daphne Oram recordings now available
By David Pescovitz on Jan 04, 2012 05:16 pm Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering electronic musician and sound engineer at the famed BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I've posted previously (link, link) about her amazing creativity and invention of Oramics, an electronic musical instrument based on converting drawings on 35mm film into sound textures. The Young Americans label has just issued a luxurious 4 LP ...
Read in browser Dr Seuss meets the Joker
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 04, 2012 05:00 pm DrFaustusAu, the DeviantArt member who created the fabulous Cthulhu and Ghostbusters Dr Seuss mashups, is back with this great Joker-by-Seuss mashup. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Arkham Asylum (via Super Punch)
Read in browser Banach-Tarski!: Fun with some very weird math
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 04, 2012 04:54 pm The Banach-Tarski paradox is one of the many places where higher-level math starts to sound like a stoned conversation in a Freshman college dorm room. Imagine a ball. Now imagine cutting that ball up into a finite number of pieces. Six, maybe. Or five. The Banach-Tarski paradox proposes that you could take those pieces and, ...
Read in browser The Zen of Steve Jobs: graphic novel
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 04, 2012 04:44 pm [Video Link] The Zen of Steve Jobs is an 80-page graphic novel by Caleb Melby and Jess3 that "imagines the part of his life when he was fired from Apple in the mid-80s... He turned to Buddhism, which he familiarized himself with both in high school and college." The Zen of Steve Jobs tells the ...
Read in browser Macoto Murayama's incredible digital flower diagrams
By David Pescovitz on Jan 04, 2012 04:25 pm Macoto Murayama's exquisite "Inorganic Herbarium" diagrams will be on display at Frantic Gallery's booth in the Art Stage Singapore Art Fair next weekend, January 12-15. I first posted about his work back in 2009 and its evolution is nothing short of breathtaking. This time we present exclusively large scale Botanical Diagrams by Murayama with a ...
Read in browser Comet Lovejoy + Total Recall = awesome
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 04, 2012 04:13 pm Further evidence that the ability to remix scientific videos and images is awesome: Here's NASA's footage of the International Space Station rounding planet Earth to catch a glimpse of the comet Lovejoy, set to a piece of Jerry Goldsmith's score for the movie Total Recall. The result is breathtaking. Real life > than special effects. ...
Read in browser Greatest map of the U.S.
By David Pescovitz on Jan 04, 2012 04:12 pm Each year, the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society awards a "Best of Show" prize for excellence in map design. The winners have included the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Census Bureau, and National Geographic Magazine. This year though, the winner was one guy: David Imus. Slate posted an analysis of what ...
Read in browser TOM THE DANCING BUG: Super-Fun-Pak Comix Reveals the Mystery of Dark Matter!!
By Ruben Bolling on Jan 04, 2012 04:05 pm RECOMMEND: Follow RUBEN BOLLING on TWITTER.
Read in browser Bush-era whistleblower faced even more intense harassment under Obama
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 04, 2012 04:00 pm Jesselyn Radack is a former US government lawyer, blew the whistle on the US Justice Department when her advice that John Walker Lindh request to have access to a lawyer during questioning should be allowed was sealed, and then Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that Lindh had not requested a lawyer. She was given a ...
Read in browser HP unveils 27" iMac
By Rob Beschizza on Jan 04, 2012 03:45 pm HP's new 27" Omni all-in one is not a clone. The photoshopped slash of reflected light is at a totally different angle.
Read in browser Five women in lingerie cavort on a giant toothbrush
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 04, 2012 03:43 pm Or is that five lilliputian women cavorting on an ordinary toothbrush? In any case, these woman love the two-tone design and "automatic" gum-massaging action of the Pro-Phy-Lac-Tic Double Duty toothbrush. Phil Are Go: Double Duty Toothbrush - Prevents things.
Read in browser Roku Streaming Stick plugs directly into HDMI port
By Rob Beschizza on Jan 04, 2012 03:12 pm Roku today announced the Streaming Stick, a wireless dongle that plugs directly into a TV set's HDMI input and requires no external power of its own. The stick features all the usual services and streams accessible using one of Roku's other Smart TV boxes, and works with universal remotes. Unfortunately, it's not enough to simply ...
Read in browser Quantum levitation realizes humanity's age-old dream of floating supercooled Wipe Out RC cars
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 04, 2012 03:00 pm Researchers at the Japan Institute of Technology have a killer demo for their controlled quantum levitation technology: they outfitted little slot-car-style RC cars with liquid nitrogen tanks and sent them whizzing around a track modelled on the classic video game Wipe Out. Update: Many commenters believe that this is faked. They can tell by the ...
Read in browser Retrode, a USB game cartridge adapter
By Rob Beschizza on Jan 04, 2012 02:55 pm Retrode, a USB adapter for 16-bit Nintendo and Sega carts, may be preordered for $85 at the official website. Features include two controller ports for each platform, driverless operation with any emulator software, and plug-in expansion possibilities.
Read in browser Elegant bug-juice bottle
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 04, 2012 02:21 pm On Core77, Hipstomp gives us a structural package designer's perspective on the elegant and lethal Talstar Professional Insecticide bottle. The bottle contains a potent concentrate of bug-killing juice. The user is meant to squeeze the base of the bottle, causing a measured amount of product to be drawn up into the heart-shaped chamber, which is ...
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