Tesla vs. Edison vs. The Great Men of History Brazil's music collecting societies convicted of forming an illegal cartel Guatemala genocide trial continues; watch or listen live Human bodies mercilessly jiggled by gravity at 2000fps [NSFW] Astounding Beetlejuice roller-coaster made in Minecraft Transgender teacher kills self after Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn denounces her Act now to stop the UK Leveson press-regulations from applying to blogs and individuals online! Interview with Peter Clines, author of Ex-Heroes and Ex-Patriots MAD Artist's Edition: a massive tribute to Harvey Kurtzman Apple removes Sweatshop iOS game Vatican: Batman has "grown bitter and more vengeful" Polite boos now OK at Riverhead town board meetings Girl, 7, brought into pepper-spray fight Well-planned bank heist fails Donglegate Cory signing Rapture of the Nerds at Forbidden Planet London tomorrow DRM-free label for all your DRM-free stuff Skull wedding cake Elf beer needs your vote How to fix the worst law in technology GoPro sends fraudulent DMCA notice to site that ran a negative review of its products Why did Lee Baca win Sheriff of the Year award? Internet-of-Things answering machine from 1992, with marbles Dominique Pruitt "He's Got It Bad" music video Supercut of all the alternate endings to the Animaniacs theme Why user interfaces should be visible, seamful, and explicit Jörg makes an Oreo-shooting pump-action crossbow South London bridge loves Boing Boing How chopsticks are made EFF blasts plans to build DRM into HTML5 Tesla vs. Edison vs. The Great Men of History
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Mar 22, 2013 12:43 pm Matt Novak (aka Paleofuture) is a historian and blogger who writes about the history of innovation and the history of the way we imagine the future. A couple of weeks ago, at South by Southwest, he gave a fascinating presentation that I wanted you guys to hear more about. The basic thesis: Tesla vs. Edison ...
Read in browser Brazil's music collecting societies convicted of forming an illegal cartel
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 22, 2013 12:35 pm Ronaldo Lemos sez, The Competition Authority in Brazil (CADE) convicted om March 20th the country's six major collecting societies and their central office (ECAD) - responsible for the collection of music royalties for public performance in Brazil - of formation of cartel and abuse of dominant position in fixing prices. According CADE, the Ecad and ...
Read in browser Guatemala genocide trial continues; watch or listen live
By Xeni Jardin on Mar 22, 2013 12:01 pm This tribunal is the first and only genocide trial in history held in a domestic court against a former head of state, and is a huge historic moment for Guatemala. It's also an important moment for the United States.
Read in browser Human bodies mercilessly jiggled by gravity at 2000fps [NSFW]
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 22, 2013 10:32 am This slow motion study reveals the shocking effects of gravity upon our body.
Read in browser Astounding Beetlejuice roller-coaster made in Minecraft
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 22, 2013 09:45 am This five-minute video takes you on a tour of the astounding
Beetlejuice roller-coaster created by Nuropsych1 and friends.
Read in browser Transgender teacher kills self after Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn denounces her
By Rob Beschizza on Mar 22, 2013 09:19 am Lucy Meadows was a teacher. Born male, Lucy transitioned to female later in life, a process that was supported by her employers. Writing at the Daily Mail—one of Britain's largest-circulation newspapers—Richard Littlejohn publicly denounced her in terms usually reserved for child abusers. Not long afterward, Meadows killed herself. The Daily Mail took the article down ...
Read in browser Act now to stop the UK Leveson press-regulations from applying to blogs and individuals online!
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 22, 2013 09:05 am I've written here before that the impending UK press-regulation rules coming in as a result of the Leveson report will inadvertently end up treating bloggers and other everyday Internet users as though they were newspapers, exposing them to the threat of arbitration proceedings where they will have to pay the legal costs of people who ...
Read in browser Interview with Peter Clines, author of Ex-Heroes and Ex-Patriots
By Mark Frauenfelder on Mar 22, 2013 09:00 am Peter Clines is the author of Ex-Heroes, a science fiction novel about super humans trying to save what remains of Los Angeles in a post-apocalyptic zombie wasteland. Above, the cover for the Clines' upcoming follow-up novel: Ex-Patriots. Below, an interview with Clines about his love of Dr. Who. (Keep your eye out for 3 Doctor ...
Read in browser MAD Artist's Edition: a massive tribute to Harvey Kurtzman
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 22, 2013 08:54 am (The cover; my feet, a KISS matrioshke, and spring-loaded gag eyeballs included for scale) IDW's Artist's Edition series is a line of enormous (15" x 22") hardcover art-books that reproduce the full-page, camera-ready paste-ups used to create classic comics, from Groo to Spider-Man, offering a rare look at the white-outs, annotations, corrections, and pencil-marks that ...
Read in browser Apple removes Sweatshop iOS game
By Rob Beschizza on Mar 22, 2013 08:36 am Matthew Humphries: Sweatshop HD was created by BAFTA-winning creative studio Littleloud. It has tower defense gameplay mechanics, but tasks the player with running a sweatshop producing clothing and footwear. It is aimed at young people in a bid to get them thinking about where the clothes we buy come from and the conditions workers in ...
Read in browser Vatican: Batman has "grown bitter and more vengeful"
By Rob Beschizza on Mar 22, 2013 07:39 am The Vatican reassured the Catholic faithful that it hadn't been hacked Thursday after as unusual tweet--"Holy Switcheroo! Batman has grown bitter, more vengeful with the years"--appeared on a popular news feed.
Read in browser Polite boos now OK at Riverhead town board meetings
By Rob Beschizza on Mar 22, 2013 07:34 am A ban on booing has been lifted at Town Hall board meetings in Riverhead, N.Y., but officials warn that only polite booing will be permitted. [Newsday]
Read in browser Girl, 7, brought into pepper-spray fight
By Rob Beschizza on Mar 22, 2013 07:31 am Stephanie Farr, at Philly.com: A woman who had been banned from an Upper Darby dollar store doused store employees with pepper spray as they tried to escort her out on Monday, and when they tackled her to the ground, she gave the spray can to her 7-year-old daughter and told her to finish the fight, ...
Read in browser Well-planned bank heist fails
By Rob Beschizza on Mar 22, 2013 07:15 am In a daring, Hollywood-style bank heist, a crack team of thieves occupied offices above their target, covered its windows to make it look like they were working on renovations, cut through a concrete floor to gain access to a secure area, bypassed an alarm system, and used hockey bags to exfiltrate $293,000 from the vault ...
Read in browser Donglegate
By Rob Beschizza on Mar 22, 2013 07:07 am The fight against ingrained sexism in tech culture is gruelling indeed; but what do you do when an off-color joke about "dongles" leads not only to internet drama, but everyone—including the claimed victim—getting fired? Ars Technica sums up "Donglegate". Adds Amanda Blum: everyone lost.
Read in browser Cory signing Rapture of the Nerds at Forbidden Planet London tomorrow
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 22, 2013 03:55 am Hey, Londoners! A reminder that I'll be signing the UK edition of Charlie Stross's and my novel Rapture of the Nerds, tomorrow at 1PM at Forbidden Planet. Charlie can't make it, so I have fashioned a cunning 3D printed Space Marine Stross to accompany me, which you may rub for good luck if you attend.
Read in browser DRM-free label for all your DRM-free stuff
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 22, 2013 12:23 am Kxra sez, "Defective by Design, the Free Software Foundation's campaign against DRM has just released a new graphic to mark DRM-free works on the web. The DRM-free label quickly communicates the DRM-free status of files, increases in value as more distributors adopt the label, and adds value to being DRM-free by linking to an informational ...
Read in browser Skull wedding cake
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 21, 2013 11:18 pm Baker Anna at Eat Your Heart Out Bakers made this astounding skull wedding-cake. Food artist Annabel de Vetten, also known as Conjurer's Kitchen, created this incredible skull wedding cake for the Eclectic Wedding Extravaganza in Birmingham this weekend. Her theme being " 'Til Death Do Us Part". It features solid chocolate skulls of 16 carrion ...
Read in browser Elf beer needs your vote
By Rob Beschizza on Mar 21, 2013 09:41 pm Attention, users of "The Face Book": self-published indie comic ElfQuest (syndicated of late exclusively here at Boing Boing — see also TTDB, Brain Rot and Wilcock) is running neck and neck with Doctor Who and Superman in a contest to have a microbeer made in its honor for the 2013 Denver Comic-Con. So allow me ...
Read in browser How to fix the worst law in technology
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 21, 2013 09:40 pm Tim Wu's New Yorker piece on Aaron Swartz and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act explains how Obama could, with one speech, fix the worst problem with the worst law in technology. The CFAA makes it a felony to "exceed your authorization" on a computer system, and fed prosecutors have taken the view that this ...
Read in browser GoPro sends fraudulent DMCA notice to site that ran a negative review of its products
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 21, 2013 08:51 pm GoPro, manufacturers of small digital video cameras, sent a Digital Millennium Copyright Notice to a site called DigitalRev, which had compared GoPro's latest camera to Sony's rival Action Video Camera, and concluded that the Sony camera was much better. When GoPro was called on its censorship, the company said, The letter that was posted next ...
Read in browser Why did Lee Baca win Sheriff of the Year award?
By Mark Frauenfelder on Mar 21, 2013 08:31 pm The National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) awarded LA County Sheriff Lee Baca "Sheriff of the Year." What does it take to win Sheriff of the Year? 1,480 wrongful incarcerations? The LA Times reported that "hundreds of people have been wrongly imprisoned inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department jails in recent years, with some spending weeks ...
Read in browser Internet-of-Things answering machine from 1992, with marbles
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 21, 2013 07:38 pm Durrell Bishop's 1992 grad project for his design program at the Royal College of Art was a brilliantly conceived riff on the answering machine.
Read in browser Dominique Pruitt "He's Got It Bad" music video
By Mark Frauenfelder on Mar 21, 2013 06:39 pm Here's the wonderful Dominique Pruitt performing "He's Got It Bad." Previously: Dominique Pruitt "To Win Your Love" music video
Read in browser Supercut of all the alternate endings to the Animaniacs theme
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 21, 2013 06:33 pm Here's TammieRD's compilation of all the alternate endings to the Animaniacs theme song, each better than the last.
Read in browser Why user interfaces should be visible, seamful, and explicit
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 21, 2013 06:29 pm Timo Arnall from the design studio BERG has makes several great and provocative points in his essay "No to NoUI" -- a well-argued piece that opposes the idea of "interfaces that disappear" and "seamless computer interfaces," arguing that by hiding the working of computers from their users, designers make it harder for those users to ...
Read in browser Jörg makes an Oreo-shooting pump-action crossbow
By Mark Frauenfelder on Mar 21, 2013 05:53 pm The latest from The Slingshot Channel: an Oreo Separation Pump Gun. It's a basic human desire to destroy an OREO cookie with a pump action crossbow. Some men simply love neither cookie nor creme, so sometimes a man just needs to invent a badass crossbow to do the hard work of shooting the two from ...
Read in browser South London bridge loves Boing Boing
By Mark Frauenfelder on Mar 21, 2013 05:36 pm We ♥ you, too, South London! (Not that we condone this sort of thing). (Image: I heart Boing Boing, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (2.0) image from delete08's photostream) (Thanks, Luke!)
Read in browser How chopsticks are made
By Mark Frauenfelder on Mar 21, 2013 05:26 pm Len says: "A post from Xeni about disposable chopsticks and deforestation reminded me of this video. It's from Japan's version of 'How it's Made.' It is hard to believe how much hands-on work goes into making them (wait 'til you get to the women at the pile). Astonishing. I've never been able to look at ...
Read in browser EFF blasts plans to build DRM into HTML5
By Cory Doctorow on Mar 21, 2013 05:22 pm The Electronic Frontier Foundation has weighed in on the growing controversy over the proposal to build DRM into HTML5, the next version of the standard language for building Web pages and applications. Staff technologists Seth Schoen and Peter Eckersley have written a great essay explaining how this kind of work is totally incompatible with the ...
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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