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Comics Rack: Boing Boing's comic books picks for October Quant: leaving finance made me happy, you should try it Images to make perfectionists suffer Game mechanics for work Time-lapse of 12-foot Lego vampire build Post-"Gangnam Style," America wakes up to K-pop Elfquest: a grandsire twice Cory in St Louis and 17 other cities eBook review: Midnight's Tale Searching the universe for habitable planets (video) Kindle Paperwhite reviewed Modified pop culture Virgin Mary icons The Golden Dawn Replacement ear grown on an arm Sleight of hand, without hands Mind bending music mash up WSJ trend story of the week: ending "jerky shame" by adding adjectives, increasing price of dried meat products Gangnam Style as a "literal" music video, remixed without music (video) Howard Rheingold's Mind Amplifier ebook Dick Will Make You Slap Some Body Two cats just hanging out in a frying pan (video) Shocking: NBC series "Parenthood" nailed the experience of breast cancer A website for elaborately handmade barrister's wigs Comics Rack: Boing Boing's comic books picks for October
By Brian Heater on Oct 01, 2012 12:20 pm Sick of New York stories? No? Good, we've got a pair of those this month. And for those of you who could care less about the plights of Brooklynites in the early 21st century, no need to fear -- there's also the tale of a big, blurry sea monster and a vampire with disablingly large ...
Read in browser Quant: leaving finance made me happy, you should try it
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 01, 2012 12:17 pm Cathy "Mathbabe" O'Neil is a former finance-industry quantitative analyst who escaped her former career and has advice for other quants looking to do something better with their lives. She works in a startup now, and offers a fascinating study of the contrasts between finance culture and startup culture: First, I want to say it's frustrating ...
Read in browser Images to make perfectionists suffer
By David Pescovitz on Oct 01, 2012 11:53 am Are you a perfectionist? Do you like everything "just so"? Do you pick lint from others' clothes? Do you alphabetize your spice rack? Are you a masochist? If you answered yes to that last question and any of the previous ones, this Imgur blog is for you! (via @arielwaldman)
Read in browser Game mechanics for work
By David Pescovitz on Oct 01, 2012 11:52 am Over at our sponsor Intel's My Life Scoop site, I wrote about "Work As A Game": "Fun is not the enemy of work." That's the slogan of Natron Baxter Applied Gaming, a boutique game development firm that's developed gaming experiences for the World Bank Institute, Institute for the Future (where I'm a researcher), and many ...
Read in browser Time-lapse of 12-foot Lego vampire build
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 01, 2012 11:52 am [Video Link] Fiona Chan says: Last night, LEGO kicked off the countdown to the Halloween season by inviting the New Orleans community to build a 12-foot tall LEGO vampire by the light of the full moon in the company's first ever all night build. Set against the backdrop of Jackson Square and the St. Louis ...
Read in browser Post-"Gangnam Style," America wakes up to K-pop
By Xeni Jardin on Oct 01, 2012 11:28 am "Factory Girls," a [paywalled] New Yorker piece this month by John Seabrook, explores the rise of the two billion-dollar Korean pop music industry and "its fraught entry into the Western music market" despite the YouTube-driven viral success of PSY's "Gangnam Style." Typical K-pop "is an East-West mash-up," writes Seabrook. "The performers are mostly Korean, and ...
Read in browser Elfquest: a grandsire twice
By Wendy and Richard Pini on Oct 01, 2012 11:02 am Page 4 of The Final Quest: Prologue is published online-first for the first time here at Boing Boing. Previously. First time reader? You're a few issues behind.
Read in browser Cory in St Louis and 17 other cities
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 01, 2012 11:01 am Hey, St Louis, MO! I'm headed your way, for the kick-off of the tour for my latest YA novel, Pirate Cinema. I'll be at the St. Louis County Library on Tuesday, October 2 at 7PM for an event hosted by Left Bank Books. There are 18 (!) cities on this tour, so be sure and ...
Read in browser eBook review: Midnight's Tale
By Jason Weisberger on Oct 01, 2012 10:51 am Midnight's Tale by George Berger was a completely unexpected pleasure. While I don't often enjoy stories told from the POV of an animal, Berger's tale drew me right in. While Midnight's life may seem simple, it isn't easy being such a self-aware goat. Having briefly tasted love in his youth, Midnight searches to understand and ...
Read in browser Searching the universe for habitable planets (video)
By Xeni Jardin on Oct 01, 2012 10:33 am Filmmaker Matt Checkowski sends word of two cool new documentary shorts he produced for the University of California video series "Onward California." These episodes focus on the work of a UC Santa Cruz astrophysicist who has discovered two potentially human-inhabitable planets. Most of the universe is incredibly hostile, it's a vacuum, it's freezing-cold space or ...
Read in browser Kindle Paperwhite reviewed
By Rob Beschizza on Oct 01, 2012 10:08 am Joshua Topolsky, representing the consensus: "Amazon wants to make great reading devices for the masses, and with the Paperwhite, they just took the game to a whole new level."
Read in browser Modified pop culture Virgin Mary icons
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 01, 2012 10:07 am French artist Soasig Chamaillard turns damaged icons of the Virgin Mary into popular culture figurines, to great effect. The pieces themselves are for sale individually, and you can buy beautiful catalogs of the whole set from 2011 and 2012 at €25 each. Soasig Chamaillard | Détournement Statue Sainte Vierge | Plasticienne Sculpture | Nantes et ...
Read in browser The Golden Dawn
By Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple on Oct 01, 2012 10:00 am The Golden Dawn, Greece's ultra-right thug club, used to come out only at night. For a street-fighting fascist gang turned ascendant political party, with all the weary symbolism of flame-waving and puffed-up synchronized shouting, individual members were curiously reticent to attack immigrants and people of colour before nightfall—until now. Now, they're killing in daylight.
Read in browser Replacement ear grown on an arm
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 30, 2012 09:01 pm A woman whose exterior ear was removed during her fight with cancer has grown a replacement ear made from starter-tissue harvested from her rib, which was cultured and scaffolded on her arm. Once the ear was ripe, it was removed from her arm and affixed to the side of her head. "I thought of this ...
Read in browser Sleight of hand, without hands
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 30, 2012 05:55 pm Here's a video of a Mahdi Gilbert card magic show at Magic-Con 2012. Madhi's a 20 year old magician from Toronto, whose arms and hands are affected by a congenital condition. His sleights and routines are rather novel, adapted for his anatomical quirks, and his mastery is indisputable. PeaceLove, the magician who sent in this ...
Read in browser Mind bending music mash up
By Mark Frauenfelder on Sep 30, 2012 05:12 pm Joshua Glenn says: "Singer-songwriter, music critic and theorist Franklin Bruno has discovered that if you play Terry Riley's pioneering minimalist song 'In C' (1964) at the same time as Marc Cerrone's influential 1976 disco song 'Love in C Minor,' the results are mind-bending!"
Read in browser WSJ trend story of the week: ending "jerky shame" by adding adjectives, increasing price of dried meat products
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 30, 2012 03:22 pm Meat jerky "is like Greek yogurt for men."
Read in browser Gangnam Style as a "literal" music video, remixed without music (video)
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 30, 2012 03:13 pm [Video Link] by UK-based remixer Moto2h via Flux.
Read in browser Howard Rheingold's Mind Amplifier ebook
By Cory Doctorow on Sep 30, 2012 02:47 pm Howard Rheingold sez, "I have been interested in mind amplifiers since I wrote my 1968 Reed College thesis on brain biofeedback and the future of consciousness. This short e-book contains all kinds of goodies I've always wanted to put in my books -- embedded videos, rollover definitions. And I've been wanting to connect the dots ...
Read in browser Dick Will Make You Slap Some Body
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 30, 2012 02:32 pm [Video Link via Sean Bonner] Alexyss K Tylor, Atlanta, GA-based public access cable television host and Vagina Power Coach.
Read in browser Two cats just hanging out in a frying pan (video)
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 30, 2012 02:22 pm [Video Link] From Shironekoshiro.
Read in browser Shocking: NBC series "Parenthood" nailed the experience of breast cancer
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 30, 2012 02:14 pm Jody Schoger, writing about a rare instance of a TV show getting the cancer experience right: "Most women diagnosed with breast cancer aren't feeling sick to begin with. They walk from the land of the well into the land of the bald, the nauseated, the medical record number, the breastless and the reconstructed. Then they ...
Read in browser A website for elaborately handmade barrister's wigs
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 30, 2012 02:01 pm I was waiting in line in a coffeeshop recently, when I looked over the shoulder of a guy at a nearby table and saw this website: legaltailor.com. The Hong Kong-based company claims their primary clientele are legal professionals, but Judicial cosplayers and barrister fetishists can also plunk down hundreds to thousands of dollars for handmade ...
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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