[Sponsor] Watchismo's Too Cool For School Sale - Save Up To 20% On Most Watches. It's simple, they're offering three progressive discounts for 10%, 15% or 20% off your purchases. The more you buy, the more you save! You don't need school to know these are some seriously good deals. Use code SCHOOL10 for 10% off any order over $100; SCHOOL15 for 15% off any order over $500; and SCHOOL20 for 20% off any order over $1000.
Advice to the poor, from world's richest woman: "spend less time drinking" Woman dies after police kick her in the genitals; LAPD now investigating 'Questionable Tactics' Passing the Drum (video) Things that almost make you want to go back to school The shape your beer mug might help explain why you get drunk so fast Bikram Choudhury, yoga's biggest asshole, squares off for a copyright showdown Building an indoor hurricane at the University of Miami Shit White People Do, part umptybillion: "Les Indes galantes—Les Sauvages" (video) Seed artists support marriage equality Meet your face mites! Insane, true energy fact of the day Indie Capitalism relies on crowds—and you can do it too Video: slowmo water balloons Case of the upside-down woman in the emergency room New Boing Boing T-shirt: Robots, by Tom Gauld Revealed at last: India's public safety code for tamarind pulp Campaign to rename our moon That time a German prince built an artificial volcano Interview with and reading by Richard Kadrey for Devil Said Bang The Trestle, Kirtland Air Force Base Apple granted patent for location-based camera phone disabling Attention Browncoats: Get ready to squee over this 10th anniversary poster Cast iron crepe pan on Kickstarter Audrey Kawasaki: exclusive first look at new paintings This Is How I Roll: Kat Vecchio and Joe "Maulin' Brando" Mihalchick on the rise of men's roller derby Advice to the poor, from world's richest woman: "spend less time drinking"
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 31, 2012 12:58 pm Are you broke? Can't pay the bills or feed your family, despite holding down one or more jobs you hate? Can't get a job because there are no jobs to be gotten? Australian mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, the richest woman in the world, has advice for you: "spend less time drinking." The longer quote: "There ...
Read in browser Woman dies after police kick her in the genitals; LAPD now investigating 'Questionable Tactics'
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 31, 2012 11:24 am A drug-addicted woman who dropped off her two children at a police station because she recognized that she was unable to care for them was tracked down by LAPD officers who reportedly told her to "get your fat ass in the car," threatened to stomp her genitals, then followed through on that threat. 35-year-old Alesia ...
Read in browser Passing the Drum (video)
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 31, 2012 11:06 am [Video Link] The 30 Days Ramadan guys have put out a wonderful new short film in their series of profiles on Muslim life in America. This one was directed by Zeshawn Ali, and focuses on a father-son legacy of music, in Brooklyn. Snip: Mohammad Boota walks the streets of NYC walking Muslims up with a ...
Read in browser Things that almost make you want to go back to school
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Aug 31, 2012 10:51 am A new trend: Colleges offering chemistry cooking classes as an undergraduate science course.
Read in browser The shape your beer mug might help explain why you get drunk so fast
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Aug 31, 2012 10:44 am In a recent study at the University of Bristol, young people drank beer faster when it was served to them in a curved, fluted glass. It's a small study, but the researchers think it could be a first clue toward understanding why we sometimes get more drunk than we meant to do. Researchers found it ...
Read in browser Bikram Choudhury, yoga's biggest asshole, squares off for a copyright showdown
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 31, 2012 10:40 am I missed this great piece in the LA Weekly from a few weeks back about multi-millionaire yogi blowhard Bikram Choudhury. We've covered his antics before, but his copyrighty litigiousness just got interesting again. Short version: Bikram is basically the Walter White of yoga. And I'm talking Breaking Bad Season 5 episode 6 Walter White. The ...
Read in browser Building an indoor hurricane at the University of Miami
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Aug 31, 2012 10:30 am This is how Hurricane Isaac looked on Tuesday, as it made landfall on America's Gulf Coast. If you've never been to the Gulf of Mexico, here is a key fact you should know: The water there is warm. While Pacific coastal waters might be in the 50s during August, and the central Atlantic coast is ...
Read in browser Shit White People Do, part umptybillion: "Les Indes galantes—Les Sauvages" (video)
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 31, 2012 10:20 am [Video Link] BB Community moderator Antinous (the person who nukes your comments at Boing Boing when you act like a dick) plucked this gem from the jaws of YouTube and says, I could watch this a hundred times and find something new to be horrified at every time. I love Rameau's music, but who thought ...
Read in browser Seed artists support marriage equality
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Aug 31, 2012 10:06 am I've written here before about seed art at the Minnesota State Fair. Every year, Minnesotans glue thousands of tiny seeds to heavy backing material to create some surprisingly elaborate examples of portraiture and political commentary. Oddly, given that this is folk art at a state fair in the Midwest, most of that political commentary is ...
Read in browser Meet your face mites!
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Aug 31, 2012 09:40 am "Everything you never wanted to know about the mites that eat, crawl, and have sex on your face". How can you say, "No", to that headline? Ed Yong has a great post up today at Not Exactly Rocket Science about Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevis, two species of mites which spend their entire lives on ...
Read in browser Insane, true energy fact of the day
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Aug 31, 2012 09:28 am Exit signs are so ubiquitous that they're almost invisible. Every public building has them. In fact, they are so common that, taken together, these little signs consume a surprisingly large amount of energy. Each one uses relatively little electricity, but they are on all the time. And we have a lot of them in our ...
Read in browser Indie Capitalism relies on crowds—and you can do it too
By Glenn Fleishman on Aug 31, 2012 07:41 am Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt are enthusiastic fellows. The makers of the Glif iPhone tripod adapter and Cosmonaut stylus for capacitive touch screens, you can't help but get a contact high from the joy they get out of designing stuff and running a company. I've met and spoken to them several times, and I always ...
Read in browser Video: slowmo water balloons
By David Pescovitz on Aug 30, 2012 08:25 pm Slow motion water balloons, sans breakage.
Read in browser Case of the upside-down woman in the emergency room
By David Pescovitz on Aug 30, 2012 08:17 pm A 7-foot-man walked into an emergency room dangling a 5-foot-woman by her feet. She told the staff that if she was upright, she'd pass out. She was only able to maintain consciousness while upside down. No, this isn't a joke. This is a true story that her attending physician, cardiac electrophysiologist Louis F. Janeira, recounts ...
Read in browser New Boing Boing T-shirt: Robots, by Tom Gauld
By Mark Frauenfelder on Aug 30, 2012 05:59 pm The great cartoonist Tom Gauld (The Gigantic Robot, Goliath) designed our latest Boing Boing T-shirt. It's called "Robots." New Boing Boing T-shirt: Robots, by Tom Gauld: $16.95 More Boing Boing Tees: Demolish Serious Culture $14.95 Fnord $14.95 Boing Boing Beetle $14.95 Boing Boing Ship $16.95 Boing Boing Critter - Baby Snapsuit $8.95 Boing Boing - ...
Read in browser Revealed at last: India's public safety code for tamarind pulp
By Mark Frauenfelder on Aug 30, 2012 05:41 pm Carl Malamud says: Public.Resource.Org has published 701 technical standards for the Republic of India. These government-produced documents cover everything cover a vast array of topics important to the people of India, including fascinating topics such as specifications for spices and condiments (tamarind pulp, cloves, fenugreek, curry powder). You'll also find safety specifications for bicycles, codes ...
Read in browser Campaign to rename our moon
By Mark Frauenfelder on Aug 30, 2012 05:28 pm Jack Pate says: "'The Moon' is a stupid name for our moon. As a species, we should all come together and come up with something even marginally more creative. The planet Jupiter has 63 moons. None of them is named 'Moon.' This has got to be the biggest astronomical gaffe in the Universe."
Read in browser That time a German prince built an artificial volcano
By Mark Frauenfelder on Aug 30, 2012 05:25 pm Perrin Doniger of Smithsonian.com says: "When a 18th century German prince visited Mt. Vesuvius in Naples, he insisted on building a replica of it on his estate back home." Leopold III Friedrich Franz, Prince and Duke of Anhalt-Dessau ... ruled a small kingdom near the modern-day town of Dessau in the 18th century. Born in ...
Read in browser Interview with and reading by Richard Kadrey for Devil Said Bang
By Mark Frauenfelder on Aug 30, 2012 05:18 pm Rick Kleffel says: Richard Kadrey read from Devil Said Bang at SF in SF and afterwards I spoke with him about the novel. He told me that he originally wanted to write some hard-edged noir like Jim Thompson or Richard Stark with a supernatural aspect. Since he'd sold one book to the publisher, he figured ...
Read in browser The Trestle, Kirtland Air Force Base
By Mark Pilkington on Aug 30, 2012 03:22 pm Unknown Fields (UF) is a design studio, originating in London's Architectural Association, that "ventures out on annual expeditions to the ends of the earth exploring unreal and forgotten landscapes, alien terrains and obsolete ecologies." Right now, Mark Pilkington, author of Mirage Men and publisher of Strange Attractor, is leading this busload of architects, writers, filmmakers ...
Read in browser Apple granted patent for location-based camera phone disabling
By Mark Frauenfelder on Aug 30, 2012 03:13 pm Last week I was frustrated in my attempt to take a screen grab of a frame from the cartoon Gravity Falls, which I was playing in iTunes on my Mac. The screen grab image showed the player window as gray-and-white checkerboard. Next, I downloaded a 3rd party screen grab application, and it gave me the ...
Read in browser Attention Browncoats: Get ready to squee over this 10th anniversary poster
By Jamie Frevele on Aug 30, 2012 02:55 pm Fans of the cult TV series Firefly may not ever get their wish of having the show come back to the air, but they do have nostalgia! Geek swag purveyor Quantum Mechanix is currently offering up a 10th anniversary poster by graphic designer -- and Browncoat -- Jeff Halsey, who created the design after watching ...
Read in browser Cast iron crepe pan on Kickstarter
By Mark Frauenfelder on Aug 30, 2012 02:24 pm I enjoyed Joe Sandor's crepe pan Kickstarter video. He's seeking $6k. I hope he gets it, because it's nice to see a project that doesn't have electronics in it for a change.
Read in browser Audrey Kawasaki: exclusive first look at new paintings
By David Pescovitz on Aug 30, 2012 02:19 pm As regular BB readers know, we are huge fans of Los Angeles-based painter Audrey Kawasaki. Mark and I both have had original paintings by Audrey hanging in our homes for years and they continue to bring us great joy. Audrey's next solo show, titled "Midnight Reverie," opens September 8 at New York City's Jonathan LeVine ...
Read in browser This Is How I Roll: Kat Vecchio and Joe "Maulin' Brando" Mihalchick on the rise of men's roller derby
By Jamie Frevele on Aug 30, 2012 01:50 pm Last weekend, I was lucky enough to attend a screening of This Is How I Roll, a documentary about the growing presence of men's roller derby teams. Not satisfied with acting as coaches and referees -- or standing on the sidelines rooting for their derby girlfriends -- a small group of guys started talking about ...
Read in browser Meet SparkTruck, an “educational build-mobile” for the twenty-first century.
Dreamed up by a group of Stanford d.school students and funded through Kickstarter, SparkTruck is a mobile maker space currently traveling across the United States. At schools and summer camps and libraries around the country, the SparkTruck team offers workshops to help kids “find their inner maker” as they design and build projects like stamps, stop-motion animation clips, and “vibrobots.”
[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRKXqDwieY&feature=plcp]
This might seem all shiny and new. And it is—but only in part. What’s so striking (and exciting) about SparkTruck is the way it combines old and new. It does so in the tools it gets kids using, which range from pipe cleaners to laser cutters. It does so in its educational approach, which combines cutting-edge (get it?) STEM and design pedagogy with the fundamentals of an old-school shop class. And it does so in its method, which combines the iconic, century-old technology of the bookmobile with the hot new form of the maker space.
In doing so, SparkTruck joins a growing number of libraries which are combining time-tested principles (like equal access to information) with new technologies (like 3-D printers), putting in maker spaces and media production labs alongside bookshelves and meeting rooms. As I’ve argued over on bookmobility.org, these combinations make sense because reading and making actually have a lot in common. They’re both creative processes that take existing materials and combine them in new ways. Getting people engaged in those kinds of processes—through imaginative thinking, contemplation, hands-on problem-solving, and collaborative learning—is what both maker spaces and libraries are all about.
Taking that commitment on the road with scissors and hammers and 3-D printers and a great big bookmobile-like truck, SparkTruck serves as a laboratory for new approaches, as well as a reminder that trying new things doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t!) necessarily mean tossing old ones out.
After all, what would those vibrobots be without classically crafty pipe cleaners and tongue depressors? And what would a library be without the creative, participatory, straight-up awesome experience of reading?
SparkTruck schedule [sparktruck.org]
How to arrange a visit from SparkTruck [sparktruck.org]
SparkTruck YouTube channel [youtube.com]
Signature: --Derek Attig, bookmobility.org
No comments:
Post a Comment