[Sponsor] The Alessi Grow Watch is a cool new timepiece designed by Andrea Morgante of Shiro Studio and now available at Watchismo! The watch concept is derived from the 'act of growing' which often results in forms and patterns which we can all instinctively relate to. The surface of the design features a rippled texture, much like the muscle fibers which lay below our skin. Perceived as a single entity rather than an assembly of multiple mechanical parts, 'grow' is an external manifestation of our bodies' qualities.
Telephone management skills, 1957 edition: Stephen Potter Homebrew Nintendo laser zapper is powerful, awesome Great Graphic Novels: Carnet de Voyage, by Craig Thompsom Turn your personal mob into an army A perfect political ad (Video) Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, The Art Scene, Basquiat, Fab Five Freddy Meets Charlie Ahearn The Mongoliad: Book Two - exclusive excerpt Awesome action alert: Gina Carano signs on for lady-filled action ensemble flick How to write with style, by Kurt Vonnegut, the 1980 edition The Other Death Sentence: the cost of keeping very old men in prison As car service app Uber grows, D.C. council pushes to regulate United Airlines killed my golden retriever, says supermodel Bad Pharma: account of pharmaceutical industry scientific fraud is readable and rigorous Unique issues in Japan for Apple iOS6 maps Your friendly neighborhood boring machine Game of Thrones cosplay: a most excellent Daenerys Targaryen (photo) Black American sign language and American sign language are different languages Guerrilla Grafters covertly add fruit-tree branches to ornamental trees A guide to animal CPR Mr. Gay Denmark is Muslim Preservation Hall 50th Anniversary Collection: four discs of New Orleans jazz with guest appearances from Tom Waits, Pete Seeger, Del McCoury and others Ad, 1970: Use Dixie Cups, ladies, and you will never grow old Liquid nitrogen + ping-pong balls = pure awesome Confronting a troll in real life Pranksters crash final speech of corporate tax avoidance taxman, posh hilarity ensues Adobe releases open-source coding typeface Pistols made of bones Audrey Kawaski Hint Mint tins Blast from the past: Boing Boing's Fulchau page Is Diablo III turning virtual economies Into real ones? (Video) Telephone management skills, 1957 edition: Stephen Potter
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 12:51 pm From the wonderful blog "Vintage Scans," a page from Lifemanship lesson from Stephen Potter, 1957 (11th impression). Potter was a British writer known for dry, mocking, self-help books, and the TV and film projects they inspired.
Read in browser Homebrew Nintendo laser zapper is powerful, awesome
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 12:31 pm "The plan was simple. Take a nostalgic NES "duck hunt" Zapper, and retrofit it with a ridiculously powerful laser." A project from North Street Labs. In case it's not obvious, this project is dangerous, and could lead to death or blindness without safety precautions. Components: "2.1A input buck driver, 2x 750mAh 35-70c Lipo batteries, M140 ...
Read in browser Great Graphic Novels: Carnet de Voyage, by Craig Thompsom
By Barry McWilliams on Sep 25, 2012 12:30 pm Last month I asked my friends to write about books they loved (you can read all the essays here). This month, I invited them to write about their favorite graphic novels, and they selected some excellent titles. I hope you enjoy them! (Read all the Great Graphic Novel essays here.) -- Mark “This is not ...
Read in browser Turn your personal mob into an army
By Rob Beschizza on Sep 25, 2012 12:10 pm The startup team behind Human.io. Human.io is the new thing from Joshua Schacter, founder of bookmarking site del.icio.us. This time, however, he's not suggesting you share your travels with a few friends—he's suggesting that you turn them into an army. "If you want to build a flash mob, but have it actually do something useful, ...
Read in browser A perfect political ad (Video)
By Amy Seidenwurm on Sep 25, 2012 12:01 pm I love firemen! I love brotherhoods! I love gay marriage! This ad has everything!
Read in browser Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, The Art Scene, Basquiat, Fab Five Freddy Meets Charlie Ahearn
By Ed Piskor on Sep 25, 2012 12:00 pm Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!
Read in browser The Mongoliad: Book Two - exclusive excerpt
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 25, 2012 12:00 pm In April we ran an excerpt from The Mongoliad: Book One, a shared universe epic written by Neal Stephenson, Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, Cooper Moo, Mark Teppo. Book Two is out today and we have an exclusive excerpt. Read it after the jump. This riveting second installment in Stephenson and company’s ...
Read in browser Awesome action alert: Gina Carano signs on for lady-filled action ensemble flick
By Jamie Frevele on Sep 25, 2012 11:59 am That moment that MMA fighter-turned-action star Gina Carano is having? It's going to continue. The breakout star of last year's Haywire has just signed on for an upcoming action ensemble movie that will feature an all-female group of asskickers. It's not exactly going to be a huge studio movie; indie production company 1984 Private Defense ...
Read in browser How to write with style, by Kurt Vonnegut, the 1980 edition
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 11:55 am Larger size here, so you can read all the text. Writing Tips from Kurt Vonnegut, 1980, sponsored by International Paper Company. Shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by vintage ad archivist MewDeep. Update: Oooh, here's a PDF of the whole ad series.
Read in browser The Other Death Sentence: the cost of keeping very old men in prison
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 11:47 am Mike Mechanic from Mother Jones shares a link to a new longread on the moral, practical, and financial costs ($16 billion a year) of keeping thousands of frail, infirm old men locked up in prison. The MoJo feature includes a powerful photo-essay. Mike says, In the piece, James Ridgeway shows how 100,000 Americans are now ...
Read in browser As car service app Uber grows, D.C. council pushes to regulate
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 11:23 am I absolutely love the smartphone app Uber, which allows you to order car service on demand, instead of trying to hail or call a cab or order a black car. It became an essential tool during my radiation treatment for cancer in LA, when treatment made me too weak to drive, public transportation didn't serve ...
Read in browser United Airlines killed my golden retriever, says supermodel
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 11:09 am Maggie Rizer, a well-known fashion model, blames United Airlines for the death of her Golden Retriever, Bea, who suffered heat stroke and died during a cross-country flight two weeks ago. From NY Daily News: "Their plane had been delayed in New York and the captain told passengers to turn on their air vents to help ...
Read in browser Bad Pharma: account of pharmaceutical industry scientific fraud is readable and rigorous
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 25, 2012 11:06 am Ben "Bad Science" Goldacre's new book Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients ships today, and Ben has posted the foreword, including this helpful paragraph, which explains the book's entire thesis in one handy blob: Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers ...
Read in browser Unique issues in Japan for Apple iOS6 maps
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 11:03 am Inconsistencies and funny goofs with Apple's new iOS6 maps feature have been widely reported. But in Japan, a country-specific set of technical issues contribute to the feature's lack of reliability there. The biggest problem, according to a NYT article by Hiroko Tabuchi, is that "much of its data appears to be drawn from OpenStreetMap Japan, ...
Read in browser Your friendly neighborhood boring machine
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Sep 25, 2012 10:41 am Check out this great interactive map of the London subway system, showing the real-time location of the giant boring machines that are currently digging new tunnels beneath the city. (Via Nicola Twilley)
Read in browser Game of Thrones cosplay: a most excellent Daenerys Targaryen (photo)
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 10:37 am Larger sizes here. Boing Boing reader jojo.edtan's Flickr stream is full of wonderful photographs of cosplayers, and he shared a bunch of great shots from the recent PAX Prime convention in our Boing Boing Flickr pool. Here's a "Game of Thrones" cosplayer, as the character Daenerys Targaryen. I'm afraid we don't know the name of ...
Read in browser Black American sign language and American sign language are different languages
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Sep 25, 2012 10:37 am I've been fascinated by the history and development of sign language for a while now. Highly linked to local Deaf cultures, individual sign languages have deep roots in the home-made systems people came up with in order to communicate with one another and with their families at times when Deaf people were often a lot ...
Read in browser Guerrilla Grafters covertly add fruit-tree branches to ornamental trees
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 25, 2012 10:09 am The Guerrilla Grafters are a group of rogue artists who roam San Francisco, covertly grafting fruit-tree branches onto ornamental trees to create a municipal free lunch. John Robb calls it "resilient disobedience." How can you improve the productivity of your community even if the officials are against it? One way is through resilient disobedience. For ...
Read in browser A guide to animal CPR
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Sep 25, 2012 10:01 am Back in May, I posted about how the Smithsonian National Zoo took another shot at inseminating Mei Xiang, a female giant panda. Female pandas are only fertile once a year, for 24-72 hours, and the zoo had already tried unsuccessfully to get Mei Xang pregnant for eight years in a row. This year, though, they ...
Read in browser Mr. Gay Denmark is Muslim
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 09:12 am Michael Sinan, Mr. Gay Denmark 2012 is out and proud. As a Muslim. (Thanks, Antinous!)
Read in browser Preservation Hall 50th Anniversary Collection: four discs of New Orleans jazz with guest appearances from Tom Waits, Pete Seeger, Del McCoury and others
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 25, 2012 09:09 am Last week, I linked to a couple early tracks from the new Preservation Hall Band CD, St. Peter & 57th St, which comes out today. What I didn't mention is that today also marks the release of The Preservation Hall 50th Anniversary Collection, a four-disc box-set spanning the Preservation Hall band's storied history from 1962 ...
Read in browser Ad, 1970: Use Dixie Cups, ladies, and you will never grow old
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 25, 2012 05:44 am "Think of it. You'll have more time on your hands (...) to make a pantsuit. To live a little." Shared in the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by vintage ad archivist MewDeep, and larger size here.
Read in browser Liquid nitrogen + ping-pong balls = pure awesome
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 25, 2012 01:32 am Dr. Roy Lowry demonstrates the awesome power of liquid nitrogen for a group of students at Plymouth University with a riveting demonstration that culminates in making an LN2-based bomb out of a water bottle, placing it in a giant rubber trash-can full of 1500 ping-pong balls, and waiting for the BANG. Liquid Nitrogen and 1500 ...
Read in browser Confronting a troll in real life
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 25, 2012 01:00 am Leo Traynor, a "writer, analyst & political consultant" in Ireland, was hounded off of Twitter by a vicious anti-Semitic troll whose ghastly threats against him and his family were too much to bear. Traynor located his tormentor, though, and got quite a surprise. It's a tale well told, and gave me goosebumps.
Read in browser Pranksters crash final speech of corporate tax avoidance taxman, posh hilarity ensues
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 25, 2012 12:00 am UK fair tax/anti-cuts activists crashed the Key Haven Publications' Practical Tax Planning conference in Oxford, where Dave Hartnett, the outgoing top UK taxation bureaucrat, was giving the final speech of his career. Hartnett was responsible for widely criticized blunders that forgave billions in tax liability owed by Vodaphone and Goldman Sachs. Posing as representatives of ...
Read in browser Adobe releases open-source coding typeface
By Rob Beschizza on Sep 24, 2012 11:31 pm Adobe's Paul D. Hunt announces the company's latest open-source typeface. This one's for coders and anyone else who loves legible monospaced figures—and who hates getting confused between l, 1 and I. To my eye, many existing monospaced font suffer from one of three problems. The first problem that I often notice is that, many monospaced ...
Read in browser Pistols made of bones
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 24, 2012 11:26 pm Bruce Mahalski, an artist in New Zealand, created a set of sculptural "dueling pistols" out of bone. Bidding opens at NZD1500. Two bone dueling pistols (with spare bullets) mounted in a custom altered case which has been counter-sunk into a specially made rimu table. All of the bones have been found locally by the artist. ...
Read in browser Audrey Kawaski Hint Mint tins
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 24, 2012 10:51 pm Artist Audrey Kawasaki has teamed up with Hint Mint to produce a series of beautiful mint tins with her art on them. I just bought two gift sets. See more Audrey Kawasaki posts on Boing Boing.
Read in browser Blast from the past: Boing Boing's Fulchau page
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 24, 2012 10:20 pm I forgot about my fulchau page until I got an email from a fellow fulchau admirer today. In 2002 there was one Google search result for fulchau. Today there are 768. (I see that fulchau.com has not been registered yet.) Mystery of the fulchau
Read in browser Is Diablo III turning virtual economies Into real ones? (Video)
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 24, 2012 09:20 pm Heath says: The latest episode of PBS Digital Studios’ weekly Web series, Idea Channel, from producers Kornhaber Brown, questions whether games like Diablo III are creating actual value from their virtual economies. For years now, people have traded virtual goods in online games like Second Life for real money. A black market has arisen for ...
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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