Dubai police's Lamborghini Aventador patrol car The important business of mess-resistant toddler snack containers Debut of the Picturephone Explain why Jews are evil Kmart wants you to ship your pants World noticing US microbreweries Google plans sci-fi style supercomputer Salt is beautiful How to: Become a tenured professor at Harvard DC introduces its first openly transgender character It's time to eat insects 5 steps to not being bamboozled by bad science reporting Ordered list of credible fictions The Lancet: You do, in fact, know something, John Snow Celebrate the first interplanetary holiday! Update on Maine hermit arrested after 27 years' living in the woods "You published my age!" IMDd case rejected Boris Karloff's Monster Game Hardships by Computer Jay Hugging robot 28-geared, 3D-printed cube Amazing things to do with a Raspberry Pi The Guardian, a spooky free flash game New Yorkers: catch Molly Crabapple's new show this weekend BioShock, finis Making brains transparent Twitter and information anxiety JOHN WILCOCK: Interview at the New Yorker Solving classic NES games computationally Huge anamorphic sculpture of actor's face Dubai police's Lamborghini Aventador patrol car
By David Pescovitz on Apr 12, 2013 12:58 pm In Dubai, the fuzz drive Lamborghinis. Also, BMW 5 Series, Chevy Camaros, and Dodge Chargers. (Laughing Squid)
Read in browser The important business of mess-resistant toddler snack containers
By Mark Frauenfelder on Apr 12, 2013 12:33 pm Today's Cool Tool is about the Munchkin Snack Catcher, a container with a multi-flapped lid. You fill it with whatever your toddlers or sysadmins like to eat, snap the lid on, and hand it to them with the confidence that they aren't going to spill everything on the floor. It turns out there are other ...
Read in browser Debut of the Picturephone
By David Pescovitz on Apr 12, 2013 12:32 pm In this press conference, Microsoft finally reveals its plans for Skype.
Read in browser Explain why Jews are evil
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2013 12:22 pm Dan Amira writes, An unnamed English teacher at Albany High School who wanted to "challenge" his/her students to "formulate a persuasive argument" tasked them with writing an essay about why "Jews are evil," as if they were trying to convince a Nazi official of their loyalty Time for a teacher training day!
Read in browser Kmart wants you to ship your pants
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2013 12:17 pm By Kmart, via Kottke and ★interesting.
Read in browser World noticing US microbreweries
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2013 12:07 pm "Once widely mocked, US beer is now popular globally", writes the BBC's Jon Kelly. "Why is the world buying in to the American brewing revolution?"
Read in browser Google plans sci-fi style supercomputer
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2013 12:00 pm Farhad Manjoo: "Google has a single towering obsession: It wants to build the Star Trek computer." [Slate]
Read in browser Salt is beautiful
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2013 11:58 am Alan Taylor offers a gallery highlighting the Strange Beauty of Salt. Previously: Dead Sea Salt Formations.
Read in browser How to: Become a tenured professor at Harvard
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 12, 2013 11:55 am You have, at some point, probably heard an academic wistfully daydream about what it would be like to have tenure, or (alternately) moan about the process that it takes to achieve that dream. Tenure is a promotion, but it's more than just a promotion. For instance, it's a lot harder to fire a tenured professor ...
Read in browser DC introduces its first openly transgender character
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2013 11:53 am Alysia Yeoh, Batgirl's roommate. [HRC]
Read in browser It's time to eat insects
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 12, 2013 11:45 am Not only are insects a more resource-efficient food source than meat (and more nutritious, to boot), you're also already eating them, writes Mary Hall at Mind the Science Gap. Insect parts are considered unavoidable, natural "defects" in foods and the FDA makes allowances for them, including up to 30 insect parts per average chocolate bar, ...
Read in browser 5 steps to not being bamboozled by bad science reporting
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 12, 2013 11:34 am Can you trust the headlines in your newspaper? What can you actually learn from reading message boards and random Facebook forwards? If you aren't sure what to believe, this guide by Gabrielle Rabinowitz and Emily Dennis can help. It describes how to track "digested" information back to an original, scientific source, the questions to ask, ...
Read in browser Ordered list of credible fictions
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 12, 2013 11:31 am I love Bruce Sterling's "Design Fiction Slider-Bar of Disbelief," a list of fictions in ascending order of credibility: 9.4 New age crystals, lucky charms, protective pendants, mojo hands, voodoo dolls, magic wands 9.3 Quack devices, medical hoaxes 9.3 Fantasy "objects" in fantasy cinema and computer-games 9.2 Physically impossible sci-fi literary devices: time machines, humanoid robots ...
Read in browser The Lancet: You do, in fact, know something, John Snow
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 12, 2013 11:17 am The editors of The Lancet (the long-running British journal of medicine) issued a correction this week for several rude statements and a rather terse obituary that it published in the 1850s. All of these relate to John Snow, the epidemiologist famous for figuring out that cholera was spread by contaminated water. The trouble with this: ...
Read in browser Celebrate the first interplanetary holiday!
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Apr 12, 2013 10:54 am Tonight is Yuri's Night — a holiday celebrating the first human spaceflight. You can throw a Yuri's Night party yourself, or simply join one of the 340 parties that are already scheduled. Scheduled events range from the ubiquitous "let's drink vodka shots in a Russian restaurant" to more kid-friendly, telescope-centric themes. And this year, you ...
Read in browser Update on Maine hermit arrested after 27 years' living in the woods
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 12, 2013 09:27 am Photo: Reuters Update: Patrick adds, "Maine crime writer is dubious about the veracity of a great deal of that Maine 'hermit' story." More of the story has come out about the Maine hermit that David blogged about on Wednesday. When Christopher Knight was 19, he abandoned his plans (documented in his high-school yearbook) to become ...
Read in browser "You published my age!" IMDd case rejected
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 12, 2013 09:23 am An actress who sued the Internet Movie Database for publishing her age has lost her case. [BBC]
Read in browser Boris Karloff's Monster Game
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 12, 2013 12:57 am I'd be (pleasantly) amazed if the actual play in Boris Karloff's Monster Game was anything but tedious, but LOOK AT THOSE GAME TOKENS. DANG. Boris Karloff's Monster Game
Read in browser Hardships by Computer Jay
By Jason Weisberger on Apr 11, 2013 09:52 pm This video is beautiful.
I really love Computer Jay's work. The passion and effort he puts into his music, video and programming boggle my mind. The 8bit style game he wrote to stand beside Savage Planet Discotheque is a lot of fun too!
Read in browser Hugging robot
By David Pescovitz on Apr 11, 2013 08:21 pm Today at Institute for the Future's Ten Year Forecast conference, my friend Kal Spelletich's "Huggerer" pneumatic robot is delivering free hugs. Here is a video of Kal demonstrating the machine. It's very satisfying.
Read in browser 28-geared, 3D-printed cube
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 11, 2013 05:56 pm Shapeways user Maundy created the
Steampunk Geared Cube, a magnificent geared confection that came out of the 3D printed fully assembled!
Read in browser Amazing things to do with a Raspberry Pi
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 11, 2013 05:50 pm Raspberry Pi, the tiny, cheap and hackable computer for children of all ages, may be used as the heart of an Ambilight media center, a cat feeder, a Minecraft or MAME console, to pwn your foes' websites and serve torrents, or as the brains of a supercomputer cluster. Me, I've been recreating the magic of ...
Read in browser The Guardian, a spooky free flash game
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 11, 2013 05:10 pm Nicole Brauer's The Guardian is a dreamlike adventure about a boy with a girl's name who feels compelled to leave the village where he is shunned. I love both the Shadow of The Colossus-inspired design and the fact that your sprite is a single pixel seen from afar—like my own TinyHack, but backed by beautiful ...
Read in browser New Yorkers: catch Molly Crabapple's new show this weekend
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 11, 2013 04:48 pm Shell Game, a new exhibition from artist Molly Crabapple (previously, previously, previously) opens Sunday in New York.
Read in browser BioShock, finis
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 11, 2013 04:35 pm The BioShock series, notable for the doomed libertarian dystopias into which the player is sent, took a startling turn in its latest outing, Bioshock Infinite. Taking place in a perversely patriotic theme-park echo of America, its spectacular world-building and storytelling generated critical acclaim, but its generic gameplay prompted second thoughts. Leigh Alexander puts it like ...
Read in browser Making brains transparent
By David Pescovitz on Apr 11, 2013 04:26 pm Researchers developed a process to make a mouse brain totally transparent, enabling this magnificent fly-through video.
Read in browser Twitter and information anxiety
By Rob Beschizza on Apr 11, 2013 04:06 pm "Sometimes at night I reach over and pluck my phone from my nightstand, press a little blue icon, and suddenly the whole world is in bed with me, talking," writes Mat Honan. "This is deeply unhealthy, of course, for my sleep patterns, my mental well-being, my marriage."
Read in browser JOHN WILCOCK: Interview at the New Yorker
By Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall on Apr 11, 2013 03:51 pm A visit to the New Yorker building in 1959, at its original location at 25 west 43rd street.
Read in browser Solving classic NES games computationally
By Cory Doctorow on Apr 11, 2013 02:52 pm Dr. Tom Murphy VII gave a research paper called "The First Level of Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel . . . after that it gets a little tricky."
Read in browser Huge anamorphic sculpture of actor's face
By David Pescovitz on Apr 11, 2013 02:37 pm Bernard Pras built a room-sized anamorphic sculpture of Malian actor Sotigui Kouyaté's face from wood, branches, rugs, clothing, rubber scraps, and other odds and sods.
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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