To do this weekend: Maker Faire Bay Area Watch the latest videos in Boing Boing's video post archives World's tiniest monkey eats a noodle Black Code: how spies, cops and crims are making cyberspace unfit for human habitation Yuck! NYC fourth grader sneaks camera into school, makes documentary about gross cafeteria food India's OMICS Publishing Group threatens scholarly critic with $1 billion lawsuit, jail time Brain hacking: using neurofeedback to master conflicting wills in your mind Video of a maker's everyday day carry HOWTO kill a tiger (1902) Grizzly bear eats video camera: close up of terrifying maw George Takei responds to "traditional" marriage fans Crazy guy with a gun shoots at Cannes film festival Who Said It: Rob "alleged cracksmoker" Ford, or Simpsons Mayor Diamond Joe Quimby? DirecTV among possible buyers of video site Hulu MIT Master's Thesis on Denial of Service attacks as a form of political activism Last chance to enter the Armchair Taxonomist challenge! Skepticism about the rent-a-disabled-guide/skip-the-lines Disney World story What tigers and kiwi birds have in common Draw freehand fractal art with Doodal Double rainbows: Here's what they mean 11 year old and his 3D printer Computer scientists to FBI: don't require all our devices to have backdoors for spies OXO adjustable measuring cup Welcome to Google Island To do this weekend: Maker Faire Bay Area
By Xeni Jardin on May 18, 2013 11:53 am Maker Faire Bay Area is this weekend, in San Mateo, California! Pesco, Mark and I will all be there, and I'm sure many of you reading Boing Boing will be, too. Mark has been posting some great behind-the-scenes snapshots on his Instagram. And of course, the #makerfaire hashtag is a good way to peek at ...
Read in browser Watch the latest videos in Boing Boing's video post archives
By Xeni Jardin on May 18, 2013 11:46 am Among the most recent video posts you will find on our all-new video archive page: • Child sneaks camera into school to document gross food. • The art of brain hacking. • Grizzly bear eats video camera. • 11 year old and his 3D printer. • HOWTO make glowing Converse. • Monkey shares lollipop with ...
Read in browser World's tiniest monkey eats a noodle
By Xeni Jardin on May 18, 2013 11:28 am About this video, which shows a Pygmy Marmoset noshing on a macaroni, Meredith Yayanos says: "The tinier the primate, the deeper the Uncanny Valley." I don't know anything about the conditions under which this video was shot, but obviously monkeys belong in their natural habitat, not in someone's home eating macaroni. Still, wow: how amazing ...
Read in browser Black Code: how spies, cops and crims are making cyberspace unfit for human habitation
By Cory Doctorow on May 18, 2013 11:15 am I reviewed Ronald Diebert's new book Black Code in this weekend's edition of the Globe and Mail. Diebert runs the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and has been instrumental in several high-profile reports that outed government spying (like Chinese hackers who compromised the Dalai Lama's computer and turned it into a covert CCTV) ...
Read in browser Yuck! NYC fourth grader sneaks camera into school, makes documentary about gross cafeteria food
By Cory Doctorow on May 18, 2013 09:20 am Here's a clip from an upcoming documentar by a fourth grader who snuck a camera into school to document his horrible school lunches and the vast distance between the food that the school claims to serve and food he and his friends end up eating. Zachary is a fourth grader at a large New York ...
Read in browser India's OMICS Publishing Group threatens scholarly critic with $1 billion lawsuit, jail time
By Cory Doctorow on May 17, 2013 11:00 pm OMICS Publishing Group, an Indian scholarly publisher has threatened to sue one of its critics, Metadata librarian Jeffrey Beall, for $1 billion, and has threatened him with prison time over posts he made to his prominent Scholarly Open Access site. OMICS cites India's terrible Information Technology Act as the basis for its threats. However, it ...
Read in browser Brain hacking: using neurofeedback to master conflicting wills in your mind
By Cory Doctorow on May 17, 2013 10:12 pm I've written before about Moran Cerf -- celebrated neuroscientist, former military hacker, and good-guy bank robber -- who also happens to be a great storyteller. Here's a video in which Cerf recounts some clever and fascinating neuroscience experiments that use neurofeedback to help people resolve competition between different thoughts and wills in their minds. The ...
Read in browser Video of a maker's everyday day carry
By Mark Frauenfelder on May 17, 2013 08:38 pm At Maker Faire Bay Area 2013 longtime Make pal Kent Barnes kindly opened his everyday carry case and showed me what's inside. It's a highly personalized collection of tools, including a flashlight, X-Acto knife, drivers, laser pointer, and lock pick tools. See the video at Makezine.com
Read in browser HOWTO kill a tiger (1902)
By Cory Doctorow on May 17, 2013 07:03 pm The Public Domain Review has a nice gallery of plates from Lieutenant Colonel Frank Sheffield's 1902 book "How I killed the tiger; being an account of my encounter with a royal Bengal tiger, with an appendix containing some general information about India," which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: My main purpose in ...
Read in browser Grizzly bear eats video camera: close up of terrifying maw
By Cory Doctorow on May 17, 2013 06:16 pm Here's a video of biologist Brad Josephs's GoPro camera being eaten by a grizzly bear in Alaska; he'd set it out in order to get footage for a BBC documentary. The grizzly went above and beyond the call of duty. A grizzly Ate My GoPro!!! GoPro HD (Thanks, Hugh)
Read in browser George Takei responds to "traditional" marriage fans
By Xeni Jardin on May 17, 2013 06:00 pm Star Trek star and noted homosexual George Takei responds to bigots who believe in restricting the right to love to straight people only: an image gallery on Imgur. Oh, snap, oh glorious snap.
Read in browser Crazy guy with a gun shoots at Cannes film festival
By Xeni Jardin on May 17, 2013 05:47 pm A man with a gun described as a "starting pistol" was arrested at the Cannes film festival today after firing the weapon during a live TV broadcast of a Canal+ show. Actors Christoph Waltz and Daniel Auteuil, who were being interviewed at the time, scampered off for cover. The armed man was also carrying a ...
Read in browser Who Said It: Rob "alleged cracksmoker" Ford, or Simpsons Mayor Diamond Joe Quimby?
By Xeni Jardin on May 17, 2013 05:40 pm Justin Peters at Slate.com says Toronto Mayor Rob Ford "most closely resembles" the mayor on TV's The Simpsons, Diamond Joe Quimby. "Both men are heavyset. Both are often at odds with constituents, colleagues, and the press. And both are prone to saying outrageous things in public. I've prepared a 20-question quiz of quotes from Ford ...
Read in browser DirecTV among possible buyers of video site Hulu
By Xeni Jardin on May 17, 2013 05:34 pm Reuters reports that DirecTV, America's largest satellite television provider, is one of a number of companies considering a buyout of Hulu.com. Time Warner Cable has been identified as one of the other possible suitors.
Read in browser MIT Master's Thesis on Denial of Service attacks as a form of political activism
By Cory Doctorow on May 17, 2013 05:00 pm Molly sez, "For the past two years I've been researching activist uses of distributed denial of service actions. I just finished my masters thesis on the subject (for the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT). Guiding this work is the overarching question of how civil disobedience and disruptive activism can be practiced in the current ...
Read in browser Last chance to enter the Armchair Taxonomist challenge!
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on May 17, 2013 04:13 pm All this month, we've been telling you about a fantastic challenge from the Encyclopedia of Life. Called Armchair Taxonomist, it's an opportunity to research and write about different plants, animals, fungi, and microscopic organisms — and, in the process, help move scientific information from places where it's hard for most people to see, to an ...
Read in browser Skepticism about the rent-a-disabled-guide/skip-the-lines Disney World story
By Cory Doctorow on May 17, 2013 04:13 pm I was skeptical of the NY Post story alleging that rich New York private-school parents use a service that lets them hire disabled people to act as line-jumping Disney World guides. Now Lesley, a Disney-obsessed local, has published a rebuttal pointing out that such a service wouldn't work well because there are lots of rides ...
Read in browser What tigers and kiwi birds have in common
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on May 17, 2013 03:51 pm Species that lack significant levels of genetic diversity have a big problem. And it's not just about ending up with tiger and kiwi bird versions of Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Beyond the risk of inbreeding, genetic diversity supplies the tools that help a species adapt to change. If there's not enough of it, then the ...
Read in browser Draw freehand fractal art with Doodal
By Rob Beschizza on May 17, 2013 03:14 pm As delightful and intuitive as it is, the creator explains how it works. [Pishtaco]
Read in browser Double rainbows: Here's what they mean
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on May 17, 2013 03:02 pm The physics blog Skulls in the Stars has answers to your rainbow-related questions. Among the fascinating things we learn here — each color in a rainbow represents the light reflected by a separate group of raindrops; skydivers can see circular rainbows; and the famous double rainbow happens when light bounces off the inside of a ...
Read in browser 11 year old and his 3D printer
By Cory Doctorow on May 17, 2013 02:53 pm Alex sez, "My colleague Chris Neary and filmmaker Nathan Fitch made this great short film about 11-year-old inventor Andrew Man-Hudspith, who was so intent on getting a 3D printer he made a PowerPoint presentation to convince his parents to help him get one." An 11-year-old and his 3D printer (Thanks, Alex!)
Read in browser Computer scientists to FBI: don't require all our devices to have backdoors for spies
By Cory Doctorow on May 17, 2013 01:59 pm In an urgent, important blog post, computer scientist and security expert Ed Felten lays out the case against rules requiring manufacturers to put wiretapping backdoors in their communications tools. Since the early 1990s, manufacturers of telephone switching equipment have had to follow a US law called CALEA that says that phone switches have to have ...
Read in browser OXO adjustable measuring cup
By Cool Tools on May 17, 2013 01:44 pm OXO has a serious presence in my kitchen, but the one- and two-cup adjustable measuring cups I added four months ago might be the last items I would sell. They are darned near perfect. I've used other plunger-and-sleeve style adjustable measuring cups, and they were great for measuring odd quantities or volumes without using several ...
Read in browser Welcome to Google Island
By Xeni Jardin on May 17, 2013 01:21 pm "'Hello.' The soft, froggy voice startled me. I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses."— Mat Honan at Wired: Welcome to Google Island.
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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