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Moon Zappa: "Valley Girl" "Lovers locks" to be cut from Roman bridge Nude monk tripping on bad berries Tomorrow: Student-designed experiments take flight on the International Space Station Higgs Boson papers clear peer review TOM THE DANCING BUG: Mitt Romney Plays "Santa Claus Politics" Skeleton found at dig may be Richard III Lego's massive Haunted House set Jason Sudeikis will return to Saturday Night Live for an abridged season Teenage Mutant Turtles ephemera: the precambrian merchandising explosion Why cilantro-haters hate cilantro Interview with the Singularity Weblog A tour of the bat cave Something new under the sea What's climate change ruining today? Crappy YouTube trailer leads to death of US diplomat and others in Mideast David Byrne's How Music Works Save on Apple at eBay In Letterspace, No One Can Hear You Kern Hacks that never happened Nasty smell explained The iconic M*A*S*H still Cupertino tech firm to announce new products tomorrow The streets of Manhattan, transformed into song on 9/11 (music video) Larry Flynt and Hustler offer $1 million bounty for Romney tax info AT&T blocking iPhone FaceTime on its network is a big blow to Deaf people A father's note, on 9/11 "The Sifr," a global Muslim jam session (music video) Mark Dery on "Aesthetics after 9/11" Upcoming episode of Gravity Falls features animation by Paul Robertson (episode clip) Moon Zappa: "Valley Girl"
By David Pescovitz on Sep 12, 2012 12:53 pm Moon Unit Zappa performs "Valley Girl" on Solid Gold, 1982. (like, for Sarah Ruxin)
Read in browser "Lovers locks" to be cut from Roman bridge
By David Pescovitz on Sep 12, 2012 12:34 pm (CC-licensed photo by Ela2007) Rome's Ponte Milvio Bridge is decorated with thousands of padlocks that couples have attached to the structure to signify their love. Now, city workers are taking bolt cutters to the tradition. In 2007, the mayor introduced a fine to punish those caught attaching the locks, but now the city council says ...
Read in browser Nude monk tripping on bad berries
By David Pescovitz on Sep 12, 2012 12:20 pm A hiker in Unterwössen, Germany called police after coming across a naked, disoriented man in the woods who refused any help. Turns out, the gentleman was a monk who had gone off camping and, according to the police report, ate some poisonous Belladonna berries that spurred a rather bad trip. From the Local: He failed ...
Read in browser Tomorrow: Student-designed experiments take flight on the International Space Station
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Sep 12, 2012 12:18 pm The YouTube Space Lab competition gave teenagers around the world a chance to design a science experiment for the International Space Station. Tomorrow morning, starting at 9:30 Central, you can watch live while astronaut Sunita Williams conducts the two winning experiments, and see Bill Nye interview the experiments' creators—Amr Mohamed from Alexandria, Egypt; and Dorothy ...
Read in browser Higgs Boson papers clear peer review
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Sep 12, 2012 12:12 pm The two papers documenting evidence that CERN has found a particle matching the description of the Higgs Boson have cleared peer review and are now published in the journal Physics Letters B. Ironically, that journal is the offspring of Physics Letters, the journalwhich rejected Peter Higgs' 1964 paper that first hypothesized the existence of the ...
Read in browser TOM THE DANCING BUG: Mitt Romney Plays "Santa Claus Politics"
By Ruben Bolling on Sep 12, 2012 12:10 pm Help sustain Tom the Dancing Bug, by @RubenBolling, by joining its INNER HIVE. Please click HERE for information.
Read in browser Skeleton found at dig may be Richard III
By Rob Beschizza on Sep 12, 2012 12:00 pm The remains of England's King Richard III, killed in battle 500 years ago, may have been found in ancient ruins long-hidden by modern development: "a result beyond our wildest dreams." [Telegraph]
Read in browser Lego's massive Haunted House set
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 12, 2012 12:00 pm Drew sez, "Lego has released a Haunted House set with vampire figures, zombie chef, Frankenstein butler, and glow in the dark ghosts. It's not a traditional Lego set as it's made to look in a state of disrepair with cracked windows, crumbling foundation and broken shutters. 2000 pieces make it a substantial build intended for ...
Read in browser Jason Sudeikis will return to Saturday Night Live for an abridged season
By Jamie Frevele on Sep 12, 2012 11:55 am All summer long, following the departures of Andy Samberg and Kristen Wiig from the Saturday Night Live cast, Jason Sudeikis never really committed to staying or going. It was a tricky situation, since he has found some success in movies, but has been playing a really great version of Mitt Romney on the show throughout ...
Read in browser Teenage Mutant Turtles ephemera: the precambrian merchandising explosion
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 12, 2012 11:54 am Brain Rot's Ed Piskor says: I was just digging around in my comic collection and found this great editorial in an old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, that appeared just before the merchandising onslaught took place. You might dig it. In all those old editorials, a real, episodic, narrative took place, starting with Eastman and ...
Read in browser Why cilantro-haters hate cilantro
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Sep 12, 2012 11:18 am I have loved cilantro (also known as coriander) passionately since first eating it in a Vietnamese restaurant in a former gas station in downtown Chicago when I was 10. And most people seemed to agree with me that it is the best herb ever. Only in recent years did I stumble upon the vocal minority ...
Read in browser Interview with the Singularity Weblog
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 12, 2012 11:11 am I recently sat down for a video interview with the Singularity weblog to talk about about The Rapture of the Nerds, Singularity, science fiction, how fiction works, sf movies, and a lot of varied subjects. Cory Doctorow on Singularity 1 on 1: The Singularity Is A Progressive Apocalypse
Read in browser A tour of the bat cave
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Sep 12, 2012 10:54 am In this video for Science Friday, bat biologist Nickolay Hristov takes a thermal camera inside Carlsbad Caverns to see what bats do in the dark when nobody's watching. In his footage, a blazing yellow blob on the cave ceiling—which the video's narrator likens to a pool of lava—is actually a mass of bats, packed closely ...
Read in browser Something new under the sea
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Sep 12, 2012 10:44 am Drug cartels are building their own diesel submarines in the jungles of South America. A recently caught version wasn't fully submersible—the engine needed to bring in air via a snorkel that stuck out above the waterline—but it did have a range of 3000 miles. (Via Mo Costandi)
Read in browser What's climate change ruining today?
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Sep 12, 2012 10:37 am Barring a seriously crazy shift that plunges us quickly into an especially cold winter, 2012 will likely go down as the hottest year on record in the United States. More importantly, this broken record is part of a larger pattern that affects the whole world—record-breaking high temperatures are becoming, themselves, a bit of a broken ...
Read in browser Crappy YouTube trailer leads to death of US diplomat and others in Mideast
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 12, 2012 10:36 am Sam Bacile is an Israeli filmmaker based in California who made an independently produced and financed anti-Muslim movie that's sort of "Birth of a Nation" meets "Bed Intruder." The YouTube trailer is embedded above, and it unapologetically attacks Islam's prophet Muhammad. Bacile has no known prior history as a filmmaker. His D-grade web trailer inspired ...
Read in browser David Byrne's How Music Works
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 12, 2012 09:15 am Former Talking Heads frontman and all-round happy mutant David Byrne has written several good books, but his latest, How Music Works, is unquestionably the best of the very good bunch, possibly the book he was born to write. I could made good case for calling this How Art Works or even How Everything Works. Though ...
Read in browser Save on Apple at eBay
By Advertiser on Sep 12, 2012 09:12 am ADVERTISEMENT This post is sponsored by eBay. From the new to the hard to find, when it's on your mind, it's on eBay. No, that isn't the brand new iPhone in the center there. It's the iPhone 4S. And while the new phone grabs the spotlight, the 4S is hardly obsolete. Just back to school ...
Read in browser In Letterspace, No One Can Hear You Kern
By Glenn Fleishman on Sep 11, 2012 10:56 pm We spent $2.5 billion to put Helvetica Arial on Mars (and incidentally, an SUV-sized robotic science rover), and yet not a cent was devoted to kerning. The Curiosity rover brought with a calibration target for its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), an adjustable focus camera designed to take close-up pictures. It's one of 17 cameras ...
Read in browser Hacks that never happened
By Rob Beschizza on Sep 11, 2012 10:47 pm Yesterday, GoDaddy went down, taking with it countless hosted sites. A hacker claimed credit, gaining the attention of the entire tech press. But his story was soon debunked: a DNS configuration mistake was the real cause. At Threat Level, Robert McMillan recounts the greatest hacks that never were.
Read in browser Nasty smell explained
By Rob Beschizza on Sep 11, 2012 10:37 pm A peculiar rotten-egg smell covering the Los Angeles region has an explanation: it was brought in by winds blowing in from Salton Sea, a saline lake in Southern California, where a recent massive fish die-off occured. [Examiner]
Read in browser The iconic M*A*S*H still
By Jason Weisberger on Sep 11, 2012 09:31 pm Earlier I stumbled across this fantastic history of the iconic M*A*S*H still. It is beautiful and evokes such great memories of a phenomenal show. I have always wanted one in my home. From M*A*S*H4077THTV.com's Prop Spotlight: For eleven years, the cornerstone of the Swamp was the homemade distillery. Presumably, Hawkeye and Trapper built it together ...
Read in browser Cupertino tech firm to announce new products tomorrow
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 11, 2012 07:31 pm On September 12 at 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET, Apple's big event kicks off. One never knows exactly what to expect, but all signs point to the iPhone 5 (or whatever they end up calling it). The revised smartphone is rumored to include a larger 4-inch screen, a smaller docking port, updated design, ...
Read in browser The streets of Manhattan, transformed into song on 9/11 (music video)
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 11, 2012 07:18 pm [Video Link] Joe Sabia of the Youtube CDZA project sends this week's musical video experiment: the streets of Lower Manhattan, turned into music. See a map of where they walked on Google Maps. Featuring Sam Reider, accordion, Eddie Barbash, saxophone, Mark Johnson, guitar, and Allan Mednard, percussion.
Read in browser Larry Flynt and Hustler offer $1 million bounty for Romney tax info
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 11, 2012 07:07 pm Mitt Romney's personal tax history is exactly the kind of political mystery that porn mogul and free speech advocate Larry Flynt would like to uncover. So he and Hustler are offering $1 million in cash for information on the presidential candidate's "unreleased tax returns and/or details of his offshore assets, bank accounts and business partnerships" ...
Read in browser AT&T blocking iPhone FaceTime on its network is a big blow to Deaf people
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 11, 2012 07:00 pm Brendan Gramer, who is deaf, writes in Wired News today about how AT&T's recent announcement that it will block FaceTime on its networks affects deaf people, who use FaceTime to converse in sign language. It's disappointing that AT&T is standing in the way of innovation that addresses the needs of its deaf and hard-of-hearing customers. ...
Read in browser A father's note, on 9/11
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 11, 2012 06:52 pm "84th floor / West Office / 12 people trapped. It is not these words alone that change the narrative of Randy Scott's final moments. The other content on the note is a dark spot, about the size of a thumbprint. It is Randy's blood, and the clue that eventually enabled the medical examiner's office to ...
Read in browser "The Sifr," a global Muslim jam session (music video)
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 11, 2012 06:51 pm [Video Link] Aman Ali is one of the guys behind "30 Days Ramadan," a Muslim media project, and he writes: This one one of our proudest creations. I got 12 of my music friends around the world to put together a collaborative music video. I got a drummer in Morrocco to jam on a cajon ...
Read in browser Mark Dery on "Aesthetics after 9/11"
By David Pescovitz on Sep 11, 2012 05:23 pm Over at Thought Catalog, the inimitable Mark Dery riffs somberly on terrorism, art, Hollywood, and the society of the spectacle where we all have a front row seat: The reflexive habit — reflexive, at least, in these United States — of falling back on the mythic languages of Hollywood and Madison Avenue when we're narrating ...
Read in browser Upcoming episode of Gravity Falls features animation by Paul Robertson (episode clip)
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 11, 2012 04:48 pm [Video Link] My daughter and I are hooked on Gravity Falls, a quirky new cartoon series on Disney about about the goings-on in an occult curio shack in the Pacific Northwest (see Jane's interview with show creator Alex Hirsch here). Now David and his son are hooked, too! The next episode, which airs Friday, September ...
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
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