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Steampunk's guide to sex Stross at Doctorow at RIT tonight! Gendered crayons Increasingly desperate quest to find photos to illustrate news stories about Eurozone crisis Alan Turing memorial Monopoly set Can fandom change society? PBS video Video from the Stross and Doctorow show at MakerBot in Brooklyn Super Scratch Programming Adventure: Fun introductory programming book Warren Ellis on life in the science fiction condition Radio circuit board laid out like the London tube map We Got Power!: Hardcore Punk Scenes from 1980s Southern California - exclusive photo gallery excerpt The 1 Purr-cent: Internet fat cats Steampunk's guide to sex
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 09, 2012 01:00 pm Margaret Killjoy sez, "Combustion Books, the indie publisher of SteamPunk Magazine, is raising funds to print A Steampunk's Guide to Sex. The book is aimed to be a serious (though entertaining) look at how Victorian sexuality influences contemporary sex. The contributors include OWS's Steampunk Emma Goldman, From Hell author Alan Moore, and Professor Calamity, the ...
Read in browser Stross at Doctorow at RIT tonight!
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 09, 2012 11:17 am Reminder: Charlie Stross and I are doing our grand finale tonight at Rochester's RIT -- last chance to see!
Read in browser Gendered crayons
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 09, 2012 09:15 am Here's a set of gendered crayons from Melissa and Doug, whose image is of a cool, progressive toymaker. I found the "Truck Crayon Set" and "Princess Crayon Set" in the gift-shop at the Rochester, NY Hyatt yesterday, after checking in for the RIT appearance that I'm doing with Charlie Stross later today (tell your friends!). ...
Read in browser Increasingly desperate quest to find photos to illustrate news stories about Eurozone crisis
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 08, 2012 10:42 pm In Der Spiegel, Friederike Ott polls Europe's photographers on their increasingly desperate quest to find compelling images to use in illustrating stories about the Eurozone crisis. Taking pictures of distressed Euro coins isn't cutting it anymore. "It is difficult to keep finding a new approach," he says. "I'm glad the euro coins have different designs ...
Read in browser Alan Turing memorial Monopoly set
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 08, 2012 08:59 pm Last year, I wrote about the hand-drawn Monopoly board that Alan Turing and friends played with at Bletchley Park. Now it's an official set. Chris from Bletchley Park sez,: Bletchley Park is delighted to officially launch the Alan Turing Monopoly board, developed from a unique original board in the Bletchley Park Museum, hand-drawn by William ...
Read in browser Can fandom change society? PBS video
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 08, 2012 07:49 pm [Video Link] PBS has been making great videos about online culture. This one about fandom is especiall good. Before the mass media, people actively engaged with culture through storytelling and expanding well-known tales. Modern fan culture connects to this historical tradition, and has become a force that challenges social norms and accepted behavior. Whether the ...
Read in browser Video from the Stross and Doctorow show at MakerBot in Brooklyn
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 08, 2012 07:03 pm Joly McFie captured video of Charlie Stross's and my tour-stop at Brooklyn's MakerBot this week. We were there in support of our new novel Rapture of the Nerds, and did a talk, reading and Q&A that touched on the Singularity, its precedents, its discontents, and its inherent comedy -- all while 3D printers chattered in ...
Read in browser Super Scratch Programming Adventure: Fun introductory programming book
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 08, 2012 06:00 pm Scratch is a graphical programming language for kids that was designed at the MIT Media Lab. To write a program in Scratch, you connect colored code blocks together. The neat thing about not having to type in lines of code is that you don't have to worry about spelling errors. Also, the blocks fit together ...
Read in browser Warren Ellis on life in the science fiction condition
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 08, 2012 04:57 pm Warren Ellis has posted a transcript of "How To See The Future," they keynote he gave at the Improving Reality conference in Brighton, England this week. Ellis works his way through McLuhan's statement that "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He's onto something -- our world ...
Read in browser Radio circuit board laid out like the London tube map
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 08, 2012 02:53 pm Yuri Suzuki's "London Underground Circuit Maps" is being shown at the London Design Museum until next January. It was developed through the museum's Artist-in-Residence programme. responding to 'thrift' as a theme, suzuki's work explores communication systems in consumer electronics. a printed circuit board (PCB) is used as a precedent for developing a electrical circuit influenced ...
Read in browser We Got Power!: Hardcore Punk Scenes from 1980s Southern California - exclusive photo gallery excerpt
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 08, 2012 01:59 pm Jello Biafra as the president of the United States in Lovedolls Superstar, occupying an empty office adjacent to SST/Global, 1985. JORDAN SCHWARTZ We Got Power! is a book of nearly 400 photographs taken for an early-1980s LA hardcore punk zine of the same name. The book includes new essays by Keith Morris of the Circle ...
Read in browser The 1 Purr-cent: Internet fat cats
By Leigh Alexander on Sep 08, 2012 01:13 pm Some months ago, I put a dollar bill on my cat Zelda's head, took a picture and submitted it to cashcats.biz, then a fledgling Tumblr apparently devoted solely to images of cats with money. At the time, I didn't think much about why I thought it was funny. I'm just one of those internet cat ...
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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