Portland man charged with choking girlfriend with his own dreadlocks Saudia Arabia: 70-year-old man marries 15-year-old girl for $20K Kraken video to be released Lead and violent crime — why a good hypothesis isn't proof Bailout beneficiary A.I.G. may say "thank you, America" by suing the government Widow of Chilean folk singer Victor Jara asks for extradition of accused murderer The trillion dollar coin solution to the debt ceiling Science, confidential Build a kid crafts studio for $50 Australian heatwave goes into the pink Website lists all the free ebooks available on Amazon Moms, booze, and why social science is so damn hard Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, Uptown Meets Downtown For Baskins Quadcopter vs moose Piers Morgan interviews "Deport Piers Morgan" guy African sf anthology Zombie attack sheet-set Kid in an R2D2 hat Minecraft torch torch Picnic table pyramid builders delight/enrage (take your pick) If Star Wars creatures were taxidermied Gweek 080: Interview with Anarchy Comics publisher Jay Kinney Another danger for astronauts: Super bacteria Trombone player with camera mounted on his slider "Looney gas" and lead poisoning What you can learn from the million-dollar tuna Parasitic wasp sanitizes its victims from the inside out San Francisco: Dean & Britta and Warhol's Screen Tests live on February 9 Webcomics in The Economist Portland man charged with choking girlfriend with his own dreadlocks
By Xeni Jardin on Jan 08, 2013 12:58 pm Portland, OR police say 32-year-old Caleb Grotberg used his "dreadlocked" hair to choke his girlfriend during a domestic assault. She was taken to a hospital "with several non-life threatening injuries."
Read in browser Saudia Arabia: 70-year-old man marries 15-year-old girl for $20K
By Xeni Jardin on Jan 08, 2013 12:50 pm Human rights advocates say a 70-year-old man has married a 15-year-old girl in Saudi Arabia, after the girl's parents sold her to him for about $20,000. News of the transaction emerged after the man complained to a local official that the girl's family had reposessed her, so he'd been ripped off. (CNN)
Read in browser Kraken video to be released
By Xeni Jardin on Jan 08, 2013 12:29 pm Still from video of giant squid, courtesy NHK/NEP/Discovery Channel. Discovery Channel and Japan's NHK teamed up to capture video of one of the most elusive and fascinating deep ocean creatures: the giant squid. The joint press release announcing the air date of this long-coveted footage contains the sort of prose I wish we were also ...
Read in browser Lead and violent crime — why a good hypothesis isn't proof
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 08, 2013 12:21 pm We know that lead exposure can be dangerous. We know that it can cause brain damage. But what levels are dangerous. How does that damage express itself? And how do you separate the effects of lead poisoning from a whole host of other potentially dangerous, damaging factors? Last week, Mother Jones had a well-done article ...
Read in browser Bailout beneficiary A.I.G. may say "thank you, America" by suing the government
By Xeni Jardin on Jan 08, 2013 12:18 pm You may have seen ads from a current AIG campaign with the tagline "Thank you America." After paying back its $182 billion bailout, the board of American International Group Inc. meets Wednesday to consider joining a $25 billion shareholder lawsuit against the government, on the grounds that the way the bailout was handled deprived shareholders ...
Read in browser Widow of Chilean folk singer Victor Jara asks for extradition of accused murderer
By Xeni Jardin on Jan 08, 2013 12:09 pm The widow of legendary Chilean poet, theatre director, folk singer, and activist Victor Jara (left), who was brutally tortured and killed by Chilean army officers during the South American country's civil war, is asking the United States to extradite a man identified as one of the men who killed her husband in 1973. The suspect, ...
Read in browser The trillion dollar coin solution to the debt ceiling
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 08, 2013 12:05 pm "[I]f Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling, Treasury could avoid catastrophe by creating a … single trillion-dollar coin — deposit it in the Federal Reserve, and, boom, problem solved." New York: Republican member Greg Walden has introduced a bill banning the Treasury Department from using large denomination coins to save the economy from crazed ...
Read in browser Science, confidential
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 08, 2013 11:56 am We've talked here before about the crazy things you can find when you read the "Methods" section of a scientific research paper. (Ostensibly, that's the boring part.) If you want a quick laugh this morning — or if you want to get a peek at how the sausages are made — check out the Twitter ...
Read in browser Build a kid crafts studio for $50
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 08, 2013 11:55 am Handmade Charlotte shows you how to make a kids' crafts studio for about $50. I like the crayon storage cubbies, which allow you to sort crayons by color. Perfect for kids (and more likely, parents) with OCD. Store All Of Your Kid’s Crafts For Under $50
Read in browser Australian heatwave goes into the pink
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 08, 2013 11:45 am Yesterday, Australia experienced its hottest nationwide average temperature ever — 40.33 degrees C (104.6 degrees F). Today, the country's national weather bureau added a new color to official weather forecast maps, reflecting a need to predict temperatures higher than 52 C (125.6 F). Insert your Spinal Tap jokes and terrified flailing here.
Read in browser Website lists all the free ebooks available on Amazon
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 08, 2013 11:43 am By the same folks who brought you Last Minute Auction ("an hour or less, a buck or less on eBay"), here's another great site for discriminating cheapskates: FreebookSifter.com. If you’re a digital book fanatic, you probably know that Amazon offers a ton of free books, but it’s hard to get a good overview of them. ...
Read in browser Moms, booze, and why social science is so damn hard
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 08, 2013 11:30 am In the past year, I've had multiple social scientists tell me that people are the hardest thing to study. Sure, you don't need a Large Hadron Collider. And the chances of suddenly requiring a HAZMAT suit are pretty slim. But people almost never give you the kind of solidly reliable data you can get out ...
Read in browser Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, Uptown Meets Downtown
By Ed Piskor on Jan 08, 2013 11:00 am Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!
Read in browser For Baskins
By Nicholas Gurewitch on Jan 08, 2013 09:52 am We're proud to welcome Nicholas Gurewitch, who did
The Perry Bible Fellowship for his college newspaper between 2001 and 2004, and then for newspapers (including
The Guardian between 2004 and 2007. He now does them "on occasion". Today
he's done one for Boing Boing.
Read in browser Quadcopter vs moose
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 08, 2013 08:55 am Tech-enthusiast Eirik Solheim (
@eirikso) at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) was out fooling around with his quard-copter this weekend, and managed to sneak up on a slightly confused moose.
Read in browser Piers Morgan interviews "Deport Piers Morgan" guy
By Rob Beschizza on Jan 07, 2013 11:17 pm I don't quite know what I expected.
Read in browser African sf anthology
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 07, 2013 10:38 pm Liam sez, "On the tail of the CC-licensed Muslim SF Anthology: there's a recently-released collection of African SF stories, called Afro SF. It's a collection of stuff written by folks in and around the African continent, so there's a fairly wide spread of content and focus. It's pretty new, and pretty neat, although it isn't ...
Read in browser Zombie attack sheet-set
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 07, 2013 09:03 pm Melissa Christie's screen-printed zombie sheet set is sadly no longer in the stream of commerce, but it's a very nice -- and well-executed -- idea. I never sleep alone (via Crazy Abalone)
Read in browser Kid in an R2D2 hat
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 07, 2013 07:34 pm Marlene sez, "I have knit my son a tres chic R2D2 hat. It is based on a pattern I found on the Ravelry website by Carissa Browning. I'm very pleased with how it has turned out." Ravelry: marlene-duck's R2D2 Hat
Read in browser Minecraft torch torch
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 07, 2013 06:59 pm ThinkGeek's sold-out Minecraft Light-Up Torch is funnier if you speak one of the Commonwealth English variants where "torch" is a synonym for "flashlight" -- but even in the rest of the world, it's still pretty awesome. Minecraft Light-Up Torch (via Wonderland)
Read in browser Picnic table pyramid builders delight/enrage (take your pick)
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 07, 2013 05:49 pm A Boing Boing reader says: Thought you might enjoy this... A group of teens has begun stacking picnic tables in Spokane, WA (where I live). They've hit a couple times at local parks and the authorities are up in arms. Spectacular... amazing... daring... and I'm glad my son isn't involved! Or is he?!! Link to ...
Read in browser If Star Wars creatures were taxidermied
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 07, 2013 05:48 pm Tauntr's "Star Wars Taxidermy" is inspired photoshoppery, but it'd be even better as a series of physical installations. I would hang these guys in my office in a SECOND. Star Wars Taxidermy (via Neatorama)
Read in browser Gweek 080: Interview with Anarchy Comics publisher Jay Kinney
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jan 07, 2013 05:31 pm In this episode of Gweek I interviewed one of my publishing heroes, Jay Kinney. Jay was a founding member of the underground comics movement in the late 1960s beginning with Bijou Funnies in 1968. In 1970 he launched Young Lust comics, a great parody of the true love comics of 40 through 60s. He was ...
Read in browser Another danger for astronauts: Super bacteria
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 07, 2013 04:57 pm Bacteria living zero-gravity environments become more virulent. People living in zero-gravity environments have less-than-fully-functional immune systems. The result is a danger for space travelers that few of us on Earth ever think about — even though a lot of early astronauts, right up through the Apollo program, suffered severe infections in flight, or shortly after ...
Read in browser Trombone player with camera mounted on his slider
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 07, 2013 04:53 pm It turns out that if you put a
GoPro camera on the slider of a trombone, facing you, and then play a number, you get a perfectly synched, awesomely comical, mesmerizing video.
Read in browser "Looney gas" and lead poisoning
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 07, 2013 04:43 pm Last week, Mother Jones published a really fascinating article arguing that the crime wave that swept through America between the 1960s and 1980s can largely be blamed on leaded gasoline — and the subsequent lead poisoning of an entire generation of Americans. For more background on the dangers of leaded gas, I suggest reading this ...
Read in browser What you can learn from the million-dollar tuna
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 07, 2013 04:34 pm On Saturday, a bluefin tuna was sold at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market tuna auction for $1.76 million. Which is a little crazy. (Also crazy, the size of the fish in question.) But the amount paid for this specimen of a chronically overfished species doesn't really represent simple supply and demand, explains marine biologist Andrew David ...
Read in browser Parasitic wasp sanitizes its victims from the inside out
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jan 07, 2013 04:23 pm So, the downside is that you are being eaten alive, from the inside out, by a wasp larva. On the plus side, though, at least it has the courtesy to disinfect you as it goes along. At Nature News you can watch a baby cockroach wasp burrows around through the insides of an American cockroach, ...
Read in browser San Francisco: Dean & Britta and Warhol's Screen Tests live on February 9
By David Pescovitz on Jan 07, 2013 04:17 pm Several years ago, Dean Wareham (ex-Galaxie 500) and Britta Phillips (ex-Luna) created an alluring soundtrack of new songs and covers to accompany Andy Warhol's famed "Screen Tests" shot at The Factory in the mid-1960s. On February 9, Dean & Britta will bring this mesmerizing multimedia song cycle to life once again in a special concert ...
Read in browser Webcomics in The Economist
By Cory Doctorow on Jan 07, 2013 04:17 pm A Dec 22 article in the Economist looks at the thriving world of webcomics and suggests that they have broken the awful cycle of mediocre newspaper comics -- a cycle that Bill Watterson decried when he gave up on Calvin and Hobbes. It's a great piece: Many of these comics are expanding outwards into little ...
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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