The medical implications of space tourism Photos of a simpler time ... in North Korea How steampunk can humanize gadgets Crowds aren't stupid. Crowds aren't smart. Crowds are people. How Victoria's Secret censored a burgeoning anti-rape social media campaign Trailer for Minecraft: The Story of Mojang Infographic: Which Wes Anderson character are you? Last minute gift: ugly sweater Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, The History of Apache, and more "If it's free..." and the challenge of getting people to care Killer elephant sought Ayatollah online Amazon Replacement Order Scam: anatomy of a social engineering con in action How to make giant bubbles Instagram's new legalese pisses off users Kingdom Rush for iPhone free in app store today Cigarette company endorses apples Nexus: fast, exciting technothriller about drug-war crackdown on brain/computer interfaces "Not Exactly Rocket Science" writer Ed Yong moves to Nat Geo Analyzing gun violence and its effect on young people in Oakland NBC's Richard Engel and team freed after 5 days captive in Syria Point of Sale skimmer that prints out real-seeming receipts UK record industry spokesman wants you to know why his employers are going after Pirate Party execs personally Machine-learning algorithm develops heuristics for trustworthy tweets in time of emergency Yorkie in a monster costume If you're suspected of drug involvement, America takes your house; HSBC admits to laundering cartel billions, loses five weeks' income and execs have to partially defer bonuses NY Giant Victor Cruz pays tribute to a Newtown victim Rumor: Jimmy Fallon to take over The Tonight Show in 2014? The War Game (1965): "too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting" Gillian Anderson returning to TV to play Hannibal Lecter's therapist The medical implications of space tourism
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Dec 18, 2012 12:48 pm This article from the British Medical Journal should give aspiring space tourists some food for thought. The basic gist: Traveling into the heavens is not really comparable, physically and medically, to Earth-bound travel. In fact, up until now, extreme physical fitness has been a major factor in how we select space travelers. What happens when ...
Read in browser Photos of a simpler time ... in North Korea
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Dec 18, 2012 12:38 pm Retro DPRK is a blog that collects images of North Korea from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Getting into North Korea from the United States and Western Europe is not easy today. But up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was even more difficult. If you weren't also from a Communist country, ...
Read in browser How steampunk can humanize gadgets
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 18, 2012 12:35 pm Ben sez, "In 'Being More Human,' an essay in the fall/winter issue of Oregon Humanities magazine, Intel futurist and technological optimist Brian David Johnson explains what steampunk has to do creating friendlier, more humanist gadgets." Steampunk reveals three relationships that people want with their technology. First, they want their technology to have a sense of ...
Read in browser Crowds aren't stupid. Crowds aren't smart. Crowds are people.
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Dec 18, 2012 12:16 pm We have this idea that physical crowds are stupid herds. Give them half a chance, and they'll form a stampeding riot mob driven by emotion. Look at history, though, and you'll see many examples of large groups of people being perfectly well-behaved. In fact, in disaster situations, like on 9/11, crowds can even organize themselves ...
Read in browser How Victoria's Secret censored a burgeoning anti-rape social media campaign
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 18, 2012 11:58 am The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Alison Dame-Boyle has a good post on Victoria's Secret bad-tempered attempt to censor a campaign by the feminist group FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, which parodied the "Sure Thing" and "Unwrap Me" underwear that Victoria's Secret sells to high-school students with its PINK line, replacing the slogans with phrases like "Ask First" ...
Read in browser Trailer for Minecraft: The Story of Mojang
By Mark Frauenfelder on Dec 18, 2012 11:56 am The Kickstarter-funded documentary about Minecraft and its creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, debuts on Saturday, December 22 on Xbox Live. Some time after that, the video will come out on DVD. Some Minecraft players are upset that Xbox Gold subscribers are going get to see the crowdfunded documentary before folks who both donated money to the ...
Read in browser Infographic: Which Wes Anderson character are you?
By Jamie Frevele on Dec 18, 2012 11:50 am If you're a fan of Wes Anderson movies because you felt you could relate to the characters, then this is the infographic for you! Follow this flow chart (created by Jennifer Lewis at Flavorwire) to find out which Wes Anderson character you are. (For the record, I'm Steve Zissou. I haven't decided how to feel ...
Read in browser Last minute gift: ugly sweater
By Rob Beschizza on Dec 18, 2012 11:30 am Look, you shouldn't search for ugly sweater—you'll end up with one that's all obvious and funny about it. If the recipient knows you did it ironically, you've failed: the "prestige" moment is when they chuckle and say, "Haha! An ugly sweater!" and you respond with stone-faced silence. Just get one from this Etsy search; if ...
Read in browser Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, The History of Apache, and more
By Ed Piskor on Dec 18, 2012 11:00 am Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!
Read in browser "If it's free..." and the challenge of getting people to care
By Rob Beschizza on Dec 18, 2012 10:48 am "If you want to stop social networking services from exploiting your likeness for advertising," writes Alexis Madrigal, "you've got to start paying up." But how do you convince them to, if, as Henry Blodget adds, "The truth about Instagram's horrifying new terms of service: No one will care."
Read in browser Killer elephant sought
By Rob Beschizza on Dec 18, 2012 10:46 am Gopal Sharma: "Soldiers in Nepal are on the hunt for a wild elephant after it strayed into villages in the southern part of the Himalayan nation and killed four people in three months, officials said on Monday." [Telegraph]
Read in browser Ayatollah online
By Rob Beschizza on Dec 18, 2012 10:45 am Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is now on Facebook. No-one tell him they're gonna swipe his Instagrams. [Reuters]
Read in browser Amazon Replacement Order Scam: anatomy of a social engineering con in action
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 18, 2012 10:41 am Social engineering scams involve a mix of technical skills and psychological manipulation. Chris Cardinal discovered someone running such a scam on Amazon using his account: the scammer contacted Amazon pretending to be Chris, supplying his billing address (this is often easy to guess by digging into things like public phone books, credit reports, or domain ...
Read in browser How to make giant bubbles
By Mark Frauenfelder on Dec 18, 2012 10:00 am This post is brought to you by The New Santa Fe from Hyundai. When my family and I had our epic fun day at the beach recently, we brought along a bottle of bubble solution. The included wand made wimpy bubbles, so we made a larger wand out of sticks and strands of seaweed. It ...
Read in browser Instagram's new legalese pisses off users
By Xeni Jardin on Dec 18, 2012 09:51 am Popular mobile photo-sharing service Instagram just updated its user terms and conditions, after having been snarfed up by deep-pocketed Facebook. The new legalese really sucks: among other things, they're asserting the perpetual right to sell and otherwise commercially exploit your photos, even if you're a teen, which many instagrammers are. Some are calling it a ...
Read in browser Kingdom Rush for iPhone free in app store today
By Mark Frauenfelder on Dec 18, 2012 09:40 am One of my favorite iOS games is Kingdom Rush, a medieval fantasy tower defense game. It's free to play on the Web. I talked about it on Jesse Thorn's Bullseye radio show here, and Jane and I reviewed it on Apps for Kids here. Here's what I said about the game in an earlier post: ...
Read in browser Cigarette company endorses apples
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 18, 2012 09:33 am Apparently there was a time when tobacco companies tried to link their products with good health in the public mind by devoting their ads to nutritional advice. Cheese, __________, Cigarettes.
Read in browser Nexus: fast, exciting technothriller about drug-war crackdown on brain/computer interfaces
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 18, 2012 09:21 am Ramez Naam's debut novel
Nexus is a superbly plotted high-tension technothriller about a War-on-Drugs-style crackdown on brain/computer interfaces.
Read in browser "Not Exactly Rocket Science" writer Ed Yong moves to Nat Geo
By Xeni Jardin on Dec 18, 2012 09:17 am Ed Yong of science blog "Not Exactly Rocket Science" has, like bacterium by an archaeon, been swallowed up by National Geographic. About the new home base, he writes: "This is ostensibly a news site. It covers what I like to call the "wow beat"—the wonderful bits of science that we're learning about every day, which ...
Read in browser Analyzing gun violence and its effect on young people in Oakland
By Xeni Jardin on Dec 18, 2012 09:10 am Data shows the overall number of reported shootings in Oakland, CA rising in recent years, from 869 in 2009 to more than 1,200 in 2011, the highest since 2003; homicide totals in Oakland follow the same curve. At Oakland North, a post that breaks down shooting data for this Bay Area city to try and ...
Read in browser NBC's Richard Engel and team freed after 5 days captive in Syria
By Xeni Jardin on Dec 18, 2012 09:03 am "After being kidnapped and held for five days inside Syria by an unknown group, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and his production crew members have been freed unharmed. We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country." NBC World News. There's raw video here. The network asked news organizations (and ...
Read in browser Point of Sale skimmer that prints out real-seeming receipts
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 18, 2012 09:00 am Brian Krebs reports on a terrifyingly real-seeming Point of Sale skimmer.
Read in browser UK record industry spokesman wants you to know why his employers are going after Pirate Party execs personally
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 17, 2012 10:55 pm Last weekend, I posted about the UK record industry lobby's strategy of legally threatening executives of the UK Pirate Party over the party's Pirate Bay proxy. Now, Adam Liversage, BPI Director of Communications, wants you to know that his employers had no choice but to threaten the personal finances of Pirate Party officers: The facts ...
Read in browser Machine-learning algorithm develops heuristics for trustworthy tweets in time of emergency
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 17, 2012 08:49 pm In "Credibility ranking of tweets during high impact events," a paper published in the ACM's Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Privacy and Security in Online Social Media , two Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology researchers describe the outcome of a machine-learning experiment that was asked to discover factors correlated with reliability in tweets during ...
Read in browser Yorkie in a monster costume
By Xeni Jardin on Dec 17, 2012 07:09 pm A photo shared in the Boing Boing Flickr pool by BB reader Fred Facker.
Read in browser If you're suspected of drug involvement, America takes your house; HSBC admits to laundering cartel billions, loses five weeks' income and execs have to partially defer bonuses
By Cory Doctorow on Dec 17, 2012 06:31 pm Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is brilliantly incandescent in his column about the HSBC drug-money-laundering settlement with the US government. HSBC was an active, knowing participant in laundering billions in drug money, and was fined a small percentage of its net worth (five weeks' income). Meanwhile, private individuals who are suspected of being incidentally involved in ...
Read in browser NY Giant Victor Cruz pays tribute to a Newtown victim
By Jamie Frevele on Dec 17, 2012 06:26 pm When New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz found out that Newtown victim Jack Pinto, 6, was a huge fan, he decided to dedicate Sunday's game against the Atlanta Falcons to the first-grader. Cruz, the father of an eleven-month-old girl, decorated his cleats and gloves with tributes to Jack, calling the boy his "hero." Normally, ...
Read in browser Rumor: Jimmy Fallon to take over The Tonight Show in 2014?
By Jamie Frevele on Dec 17, 2012 05:08 pm Apparently, there are some "rumblings" (a professional show business term) that NBC is looking at Jimmy Fallon to replace Jay Leno as the host of The Tonight Show when the latter's contract is up in 2014. Unless, you know, NBC changes their mind and just lets Jay Leno stay on. Again. (via New York Daily ...
Read in browser The War Game (1965): "too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting"
By Mark Frauenfelder on Dec 17, 2012 04:37 pm Wanabee2w says: "The War Game is a fictional, worst-case-scenario docu-drama about nuclear war and its aftermath in and around a typical English city." Wikipedia: The War Game is a 1965 television documentary-style drama depicting the effects of nuclear war on Britain. Written, directed, and produced by Peter Watkinsfor the BBC’s The Wednesday Playanthology series, it ...
Read in browser Gillian Anderson returning to TV to play Hannibal Lecter's therapist
By Jamie Frevele on Dec 17, 2012 04:27 pm We don't see a lot of Gillian Anderson lately, but when she's coming back to genre television, that's pretty noteworthy! After a ten-year absence from American television, the former X-Files star is set to play a recurring role as Hannibal Lecter's therapist on NBC's upcoming Hannibal series. I like this news. I like it bunches. ...
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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