[Sponsor] The Batman Limited Edition Watch from Diesel's The Dark Knight Rises timepiece collection is available for preorder exclusively at Watchismo. The stealthy black steel and industrial rubber features of the Diesel BATMAN Watch capture the essence of this highly evolved 21st century character.
Eisenstaedt photographs a county fair, 1938 Custom Hitchcock vinyl toy Spoilers are actually kind of nice TOM THE DANCING BUG: The Tax Return Mitt Romney Doesn't Want You to See World's earliest known matchsticks Tiny, perfect, movable, flat-pack live-work loft More on Marvel's Joss Whedon news, including how he's now involved with basically everything through 2015 Coding Curiosity Invasive species: From the classroom to the creek Vote for Limor Fried for Entrepreneur of 2012! Texas executes mentally handicapped man Boy Scout "perversion files" reveal repeat child abuse by sexual predators Photo gallery of Mars landing scenes, on both planets Crazy stuff they'll teach in Louisiana's publicly funded charter schools Curiosity landing is a bonanza for YouTube ContentID copyfraudsters Call centre brings in prison labour at £3/day, fires regular workers Join ZomBees, help track bee parasites that turn their hosts into colony-threatening living dead Who will buy the WELL? Video for Tom Waits's "Hell Broke Luce" An encounter with Russell Kirsch, inventor of the world's first internally programmable computer New SF bookstore devoted to rescuing out-of-print sf books and making them into free ebooks Apple suspends over-the-phone password resets The Human Jukebox: Donations to street musicians, as votes Comic legend Mark Waid on the medium's future Every one of Rudy Rucker's short stories on one web-page for free US goes after bloggers for writing about imaginary laser weapon that could set insurgents' clothes on fire A Sinister Reading of A Poky Little Puppy Excerpt from Devil Said Bang, the forthcoming Sandman Slim novel Internet Archive adds 1,000,000 legal files to the world's store of BitTorrents Don't let zombies get the jump on you! Eisenstaedt photographs a county fair, 1938
By David Pescovitz on Aug 08, 2012 12:51 pm In 1938, famed photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt visited the Greenbrier Valley Fair in West Virginia. LIFE published his shots in that year's September 26 issue. From the accompanying article The first Greenbrier Valley Fair was held just 80 years ago. The few hundred farmers who attended gaped at the wonderful Howe sewing machine and admired a ...
Read in browser Custom Hitchcock vinyl toy
By David Pescovitz on Aug 08, 2012 12:45 pm Here's an excellent custom Hitchock vinyl toy by Atomic Ω Blythe! Built on one of these blank KidRobot Munnyworld Mini Bub Figurines.
Read in browser Spoilers are actually kind of nice
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 08, 2012 12:37 pm UCSD psych researchers Jonathan D. Leavitt and Nicholas J. S. Christenfeld have published a paper called Spoilers Don't Spoil Stories in Psychological Science, in which they systematically study the effect of spoilers on audiences' appreciation of stories. As the title suggests, they found that despite subjects' stated sensitivity to spoilers, having stories spoiled for them ...
Read in browser TOM THE DANCING BUG: The Tax Return Mitt Romney Doesn't Want You to See
By Ruben Bolling on Aug 08, 2012 12:30 pm Tom the Dancing Bug by @RubenBolling is supported by readers like you. Join the the INNER HIVE -- it's easy, fun, and you get STUFF.
Read in browser World's earliest known matchsticks
By David Pescovitz on Aug 08, 2012 12:29 pm Small clay and stone artifacts found in Israel's Jordan Valley, long thought to be phallic symbols, may actually be 8,000-year-old matchsticks. Scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem used electro-microscopy to examine the objects, kept in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and found friction marks and possible burn marks suggesting that the cylinders had been ...
Read in browser Tiny, perfect, movable, flat-pack live-work loft
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 08, 2012 12:23 pm SpaceFlavor, a design firm, won the 2012 Small Project Awards for "Cube," a flatpack live/work loft elegantly crammed into a teeny weeny mobile space. Responding to the Ming's preference for zen-modernism, the Cube was designed with simplicity, efficiency and a sense of discovery. The stair and cabinet doors, including a stair slipper-drawer, are concealed, subtly ...
Read in browser More on Marvel's Joss Whedon news, including how he's now involved with basically everything through 2015
By Jamie Frevele on Aug 08, 2012 12:19 pm Yesterday brought the exciting, but not at all unexpected news that Joss Whedon will return to write and direct the sequel to this year's superhero success The Avengers. While that's basically the gist of it, there is a little bit more information coming out about his involvement in not just Avengers 2, but also a ...
Read in browser Coding Curiosity
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Aug 08, 2012 12:09 pm A project like Curiosity involves lots of computer programming. So what language is that done in? And what's the procedure for testing something so high-stakes? In a fascinating conversation, programmers discuss NASA's coding standards and how software engineers at JPL make sure something like Curiosity works before they send it to Mars. Reminds me of ...
Read in browser Invasive species: From the classroom to the creek
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Aug 08, 2012 11:58 am A survey of 2000 science teachers in the United States and Canada found that, of those who used live animals in the classroom, 1 in 4 were releasing those animals into the wild afterwards. Why worry about that? Because the animals they reported releasing were often potentially invasive species: including crawdads, amphibians, and aquatic plants. ...
Read in browser Vote for Limor Fried for Entrepreneur of 2012!
By David Pescovitz on Aug 08, 2012 11:52 am Entrepreneur Magazine has announced its five finalists for their Entrepreneur of 2012 award. Our friend Limor "Ladyada" Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, is one of the finalists! Limor is not only an entrepreneur (and the only female finalist in this contest) -- she's an engineer, hacker, activist, and open source superhero! Voting is now open. ...
Read in browser Texas executes mentally handicapped man
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 08, 2012 11:41 am God Bless America. The state of Texas just killed a man who was mentally impaired with an IQ of 61.
Read in browser Boy Scout "perversion files" reveal repeat child abuse by sexual predators
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 08, 2012 11:22 am An investigative report by the Los Angeles Times shows that the the Boy Scouts of America has, for about a century, used a secret blacklist called "perversion files" to track sexual predators within the organization. Scouting officials say they've used the files to prevent hundreds of men who had been expelled for alleged sexual abuse ...
Read in browser Photo gallery of Mars landing scenes, on both planets
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 08, 2012 10:37 am The Atlantic has a doublewide photo gallery of Associated Press photos from the night of the Mars Landing. I'm in this shot (#13). The whole gallery is a great reminder of the range of emotions and excitement you feel when you're witnessing one of these historic space events. I will never forget this night, as ...
Read in browser Crazy stuff they'll teach in Louisiana's publicly funded charter schools
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 08, 2012 10:12 am Louisiana governor (and retired exorcist) Bobby Jindal has signed an aggressive charter school bill that will transfer millions in tax dollars to religious academies run by evolution-denying, homophobic, climate-change-denying Christian extremists. Mother Jones's Deanna Pan went for a dig through these schools' official texts and discovered that Louisiana's publicly funded education system will soon tell ...
Read in browser Curiosity landing is a bonanza for YouTube ContentID copyfraudsters
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 08, 2012 09:42 am Remember the bogus takedown of NASA's YouTube footage of the Curiosity landing? It gets worse. Lon Seidman uploaded some clips from the Curiosity landing to his Google+ hangout, only to have them taken down by five takedown requests from various scumbags who play the YouTube content matching system to force people to accept ads on ...
Read in browser Call centre brings in prison labour at £3/day, fires regular workers
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 08, 2012 08:28 am Becoming Green is a Welsh call centre that brought in cheap prison labour at £3 per day. These workers were supposed to be receiving temporary on-the-job training, but just as they were brought on, non-prisoner workers who'd been doing the same job for a real wage were fired. The company claims these two facts are ...
Read in browser Join ZomBees, help track bee parasites that turn their hosts into colony-threatening living dead
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 08, 2012 01:47 am You've doubtless heard about the parasite Apocephalus borealis, which infects bees and turns them into weird zombies. It's pretty awesomely awful stuff. The ZomBees project aims to track the spread of the parasite through citizen scientists like you, who will run the critters to ground and tell the project about them. ZomBees are implicated in ...
Read in browser Who will buy the WELL?
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 08, 2012 12:18 am No one knows what will become of the WELL, the venerable online community that erstwhile owners Salon.com have put on the auction block. One group of users is pledging cash for a co-op buyout. Now another group has incorporated a for-profit entity that says it will raise capital to make a cash offer to SALN.
Read in browser Video for Tom Waits's "Hell Broke Luce"
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 07, 2012 11:40 pm The new video for "Hell Broke Luce," the best track on Tom Waits's outstanding recent album Bad As Me is every bit as kick-ass as it should be. Directed by Matt Mahurin. (Thanks, Jonny!)
Read in browser An encounter with Russell Kirsch, inventor of the world's first internally programmable computer
By Rob Beschizza on Aug 07, 2012 11:17 pm Joel Runyon: "That's the problem with a lot of people", he continued, "they don't try to do stuff that's never been done before, so they never do anything, but if they try to do it, they find out there's lots of things they can do that have never been done before." I nodded my head ...
Read in browser New SF bookstore devoted to rescuing out-of-print sf books and making them into free ebooks
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 07, 2012 11:06 pm Singularity & Co is a new Brooklyn based science fiction bookstore with a mission: based on the Kickstarter project that provided its seed funding, the store is devoted to rescuing one customer-chosen, out-of-print sf book from obscurity by buying the rights to publish it online as a free ebook. We love books. A lot. And ...
Read in browser Apple suspends over-the-phone password resets
By Rob Beschizza on Aug 07, 2012 10:44 pm Following the incredible social engineering hack suffered by Wired's Mat Honan over the weekend, Apple's shut down the exploit by "ordering support staff to immediately stop processing AppleID password changes requested over the phone."
Read in browser The Human Jukebox: Donations to street musicians, as votes
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 07, 2012 10:20 pm [Video Link] The latest musical video experiment from Joe Sabia and friends at CDZA: "Donations as votes. A fun and democratic way for street musicians to receive money." Charles Yang on Violin. Michael Thurber on Bass. Eddie Barbash on Alto Saxophone. Money was sent to Wingspan Arts, a non-profit that aims to expose diverse and ...
Read in browser Comic legend Mark Waid on the medium's future
By Rob Beschizza on Aug 07, 2012 10:20 pm Turnstyle's Noah Nelson interviewed comic book great Mark Waid, longtime creator of adventures for Superman, Batman, Spider-man and The Incredibles. He's now mastering the format's transition to digital media such as the iPad. "That doesn't change the image but it completely changes the context of what the story is." Take the comic Waid wrote for ...
Read in browser Every one of Rudy Rucker's short stories on one web-page for free
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 07, 2012 10:10 pm Rudy Rucker has put every goddamned one of his mind-bendingly awesome short stories on his website for free. This includes collaborations with some of the best names in the field ("This huge collection includes collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Paul Di Filippo, Marc Laidlaw, John Shirley, Rudy Rucker Jr., Terry Bisson, and Eileen Gunn."). It's a ...
Read in browser US goes after bloggers for writing about imaginary laser weapon that could set insurgents' clothes on fire
By Xeni Jardin on Aug 07, 2012 10:08 pm A number of journalists I know believe the Obama administration is the most secretive administration yet. When I read news like this, I am inclined to believe them: the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is going after our pals at Danger Room, over a 5-year-old leak about a weapon that was never built. "Federal agents are ...
Read in browser A Sinister Reading of A Poky Little Puppy
By Rob Beschizza on Aug 07, 2012 09:24 pm It has come to my attention that my Sinister Reading of A Poky Little Puppy is no longer available at its original host. Fortunately, I backed it up to Soundcloud, and can give it a new home here at casa del Boing. Sweet dreams, children.
Read in browser Excerpt from Devil Said Bang, the forthcoming Sandman Slim novel
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 07, 2012 09:05 pm IO9 has published the first 40 pages of Devil Said Bang, the fourth of Richard Kadrey's kick-ass, super-gritty demonic supernatural horror Sandman Slim novels (the first three were Sandman Slim, Kill the Dead, and Aloha From Hell). I loved Devil. Even by the high standards set by the whole series, it shines. It's out on ...
Read in browser Internet Archive adds 1,000,000 legal files to the world's store of BitTorrents
By Cory Doctorow on Aug 07, 2012 07:56 pm The Internet Archive has partnered with BitTorrent to publish over 1,000,000 of its books, music and movies as legal torrents. It's a huge whack of legal content in the torrentverse, and a major blow to the schemes of entertainment execs to have the whole BitTorrent protocol filtered away to nothing on sight. From the Internet ...
Read in browser Don't let zombies get the jump on you!
By Jason Weisberger on Aug 07, 2012 07:14 pm An IFTTT recipe may give you an early enough warning to head for the hills, or a mall. "Text me if the CDC reports a zombie outbreak" (Via Dennis)
Read in browser 
No comments:
Post a Comment