Obama and Maroney are not impressed Ron English's Hulk baby Hatsune Miko, posthuman pop star Dog-headed man and other strange encounters Hidden Motivations Of Video Game Characters, In Order Pete Namlook, FAX label founder and ambient pioneer, RIP Possibly the worst example of "pink nausea" and breast cancer exploitation ever Kickstarter from the Relatively Prime folks I Have Your Heart UK: ex-politician wrongly accused as pedo will sue tweeters who linked him to sex abuse DIY laser-cut desktop Marble Machine 3 astronauts return to earth from ISS, touching down in chilly Kazakhstan steppe Huffington Post, CNBC ran articles bought and paid for by Kremlin's PR agency Petraeus: if you think the FBI has broad email snooping powers, get a load of their phone-spying Elfquest: Nameless worries Google's gig-per-second broadband in Kansas could change data speeds around the USA FBI's Petraeus/Broadwell email dragnet reveals agency's sweeping surveillance power Google's cheaper Chromebook: enough of a computer Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland ORG needs your money to kill UK copyright trolls Fan video for Jonathan Coulton's anthem for the Atari 2600 My favorite logo for a pest exterminating company Artist arrested at Oakland airport for wearing ornate watch Obama and Maroney are not impressed
By David Pescovitz on Nov 19, 2012 12:56 pm Very cute. (CNN)
Read in browser Ron English's Hulk baby
By David Pescovitz on Nov 19, 2012 12:46 pm Ron English's wonderful "Temper Tot" will be born as an 8" vinyl toy early next year. (Popaganda)
Read in browser Hatsune Miko, posthuman pop star
By Rob Beschizza on Nov 19, 2012 12:42 pm Wired's James Verini, on just how real Japan's real-life Rei Toei is: Miku was "born," as Itoh puts it, on August 31, 2007, with the launch of her software. The program would soon become popular, but from the start Miku attracted her own fans, and they began riffing. Crypton set up a site where they ...
Read in browser Dog-headed man and other strange encounters
By David Pescovitz on Nov 19, 2012 12:31 pm In 1999, a reader of the venerable Fortean Times contacted the editors to report that she had spotted a man with the head of a dog. "He was kind of like a basset hound with long floppy ears," she wrote. Over at the Financial Times, David Sutton, Fortean Times' editor, shares several other reports of ...
Read in browser Hidden Motivations Of Video Game Characters, In Order
By Rob Beschizza on Nov 19, 2012 12:12 pm "36. Failure to understand nuances of newly installed alien government." [The Awl]
Read in browser Pete Namlook, FAX label founder and ambient pioneer, RIP
By David Pescovitz on Nov 19, 2012 12:12 pm Pete Namlook, founder of the pioneering ambient label
FAX +49-69/450464 died last week.
Read in browser Possibly the worst example of "pink nausea" and breast cancer exploitation ever
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 19, 2012 11:55 am As I said to cancer pals on Twitter earlier today, if my loved ones arrange a funeral for me where everyone is dressed like this, I swear unto you that I will come back from the dead and stab everyone in the face. (via @regrounding)
Read in browser Kickstarter from the Relatively Prime folks
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 19, 2012 11:46 am Samuel sez, "ACMEScience.com is the home of many math and science podcasts, including the mathematical story series Relatively Prime. It has been run for the past four years in the spare time between jobs, and with cheap or second-hand equipment. Now ACMEScience wants to change its lot and turn itself into a full-time operation for ...
Read in browser I Have Your Heart
By Molly Crabapple, Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt on Nov 19, 2012 11:30 am We're proud to present the short animation, '
I Have Your Heart', a collaboration between New York illustrator Molly Crabapple, international rockstar Kim Boekbinder, and Melbourne animator Jim Batt.
Read in browser UK: ex-politician wrongly accused as pedo will sue tweeters who linked him to sex abuse
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 19, 2012 11:30 am Former Conservative Party treasurer Lord McAlpine was accused of pedophilia in a now-famous Newsnight broadcast that led to the ouster of the head of the BBC. McAlpine now says he plans to sue Sally Bercow, the wife of the Speaker of the Commons, and George Monbiot, a columnist for the Guardian, for tweeting his name ...
Read in browser DIY laser-cut desktop Marble Machine
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 19, 2012 11:23 am Busted Bricks is selling a laser-cut Marble Machine kit for £12.95.
Read in browser 3 astronauts return to earth from ISS, touching down in chilly Kazakhstan steppe
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 19, 2012 11:19 am After a 125-day stay at the International Space Station, NASA's Sunita Williams, Russian astronaut Yury Malenchenko and Aki Hoshide of Japan's JAXA space agency landed in their Soyuz capsule at 07:56 a.m. local time (0156 GMT) northeast of the town of Arkalyk, in the very cold steppes of Kazakhstan. More in an Associated Press bulletin.
Read in browser Huffington Post, CNBC ran articles bought and paid for by Kremlin's PR agency
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 19, 2012 11:12 am ProPublica's Justin Elliott reports that a series of opinion columns praising Russia's "ambitious modernization strategy" and "enforcement of laws designed to better protect business and reduce corruption" published in the last two years on CNBC.com and the Huffington Post were written by "seemingly independent professionals" but were paid PR placements "on behalf of the Russian ...
Read in browser Petraeus: if you think the FBI has broad email snooping powers, get a load of their phone-spying
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 19, 2012 11:08 am The Petraeus/Broadwell email dragnet, which hasn't yielded evidence of any crime, has brought our attention to the FBI's sweeping powers to surveil email. But as ProPublica's Peter Maas writes, "It's not just email." In July, Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, cajoled major cellphone carriers into disclosing the number of requests for data that ...
Read in browser Elfquest: Nameless worries
By Wendy and Richard Pini on Nov 19, 2012 11:00 am Page 11 of
The Final Quest: Prologue is published online-first
for the first time here at Boing Boing. First time reader? You're
a few issues behind.
Read in browser Google's gig-per-second broadband in Kansas could change data speeds around the USA
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 19, 2012 10:46 am From MIT Technology Review: "Google's effort to install a blazingly fast, gigabit-per-second fiber Internet service in the two-state metropolis of Kansas City—a speed 100 times faster than the national average—is a radical new business direction for the company, and perhaps provides an unorthodox model for how to rewire parts of the United States." And an ...
Read in browser FBI's Petraeus/Broadwell email dragnet reveals agency's sweeping surveillance power
By Xeni Jardin on Nov 19, 2012 10:18 am The FBI's dumpster-dive into Paula Broadwell's email archive has not yet revealed evidence of any crime, but it has revealed to America the extent to which our government is capable of collecting and surveilling our electronic communications. Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post : Many details surrounding the case remain unclear. The ...
Read in browser Google's cheaper Chromebook: enough of a computer
By Rob Pegoraro on Nov 19, 2012 09:20 am The cheaper Chromebooks that Google introduced last month don't deserve credit for being a cheap way to read e-mail and surf the web: any smartphone meets that specification. But the $249 Samsung model I've been testing for the past two weeks also plausibly replaces a low-end laptop.
Read in browser Fables: Werewolves of the Heartland
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 19, 2012 08:34 am Fables creator Bill Willingham continues his impossible run of prolific, high-quality, highly varied stories based on the idea that all the fables, myths and stories of the world are secretly true, and that they all live together, hidden among the real, "mundy" world. The hardcover Werewolves tells the back-story of Bibgy Wolf -- his time ...
Read in browser ORG needs your money to kill UK copyright trolls
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 19, 2012 03:16 am Jim from the UK Open Rights Group sez, Last year, the porn company Golden Eye asked for 9,000 O2/Telefonica customer details in the UK, in order to send them letters demanding payments for alleged copyright downloads. However, in March a judge decided that 6,000 names and addresses could not be given to Golden Eye. Golden ...
Read in browser Fan video for Jonathan Coulton's anthem for the Atari 2600
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 18, 2012 06:45 pm Craig sez, "Jonathan Coulton and John Roderick have a new Christmas album out entitled 'One Christmas at a Time.' One of the songs, called '2600,' is a tribute to the classic 80's video game console. Here's an unofficial video for '2600.'" Jonathan Coulton & John Roderick ❄ 2600 (Thanks, Craig!)
Read in browser My favorite logo for a pest exterminating company
By Mark Frauenfelder on Nov 18, 2012 02:45 pm I am scanning some old invoices and I came across one for a termite exterminator. I thought the drawing of the 4-legged bug on its back was sketched just for me before they faxed the invoice over, but I visited the website and saw that it's their logo. Wonderful!
Read in browser Artist arrested at Oakland airport for wearing ornate watch
By Cory Doctorow on Nov 18, 2012 02:01 pm Geoffrey McGann, a southern California artist, was arrested at Oakland airport for wearing an assemblage sculpture/watch he'd made. The TSA were also worried because he had a lot of insoles in his shoes. He was eventually released on $150,000 bail. OAKLAND, Calif. -- A Southern California man was arrested at Oakland International Airport after security ...
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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