Sierra Club magazine list of "Earth's Weirdest Landscapes" How to get out of your AT&T contract early without an early termination fee Subway Ballet Awesome Tapes from Africa Drunken sex causes car wreck UK film industry requisitions cops for massive raid on suspected pirate, get to question him at police station TOM THE DANCING BUG: Lucky Ducky, in "Gimme Shelter" 15 weirdest things on wheels at Maker Faire 2013 Pentagon project seeks to gamify cyberwar Beach House: Wishes, directed by Eric Wareheim Larry King has new TV show on RT, and new man-crush on Vladimir Putin A soil atlas of Africa Beavers bite Belarusian, who bleeds to death Little Italy Surprise: Serenading tourists on New York's Mulberry Street Guatemala: Genocide in Our Hemisphere—livestreamed event in D.C. today with scholars, survivors; Xeni moderating Reality check on the 3D printing hype-cycle Tonight on NOVA: Manhunt—Boston Bombers Watch the latest hand-picked videos in Boing Boing's video archives Why Cling to the Past? Exclusive essay by Stephen King's publisher about Joyland Interview with Soviet-era TV ad director Harry Egipt: erotic ice cream and nightmare chicken Michelle Bachmann to leave congress Serotonin found to influence sexual preference in mice Survivorship bias and electronic publishing: practically no one is making any money Hitler kettle sells out The Damsel in Distress, game edition Free David Byrne/St Vincent EP Police trick people into buying "stolen" iPhones, then arrest them Legal analysis of the conclusion to Dark Knight Rises Media hypocrisy in Rosen case Toronto cops hospitalize hotel guest who recorded them arresting another guest Sierra Club magazine list of "Earth's Weirdest Landscapes"
By David Pescovitz on May 29, 2013 12:56 pm Sierra Magazine posted their picks of "
Earth's Weirdest Landscapes." Some I was familiar with, like the Fly Geyser in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, California's Mono Lake, and Hawaii's Kilauea volcano. But others are new-to-me strange spots that I would be delighted to explore.
Read in browser How to get out of your AT&T contract early without an early termination fee
By Mark Frauenfelder on May 29, 2013 12:40 pm This month AT&T started charging a monthly "Mobility Administrative Fee" of $0.61 to mobile customers. If you want to get out of your contract early, you can use this fee increase to cancel the contract without paying an early termination fee.
Read in browser Subway Ballet
By David Pescovitz on May 29, 2013 12:37 pm BB contributor
Mark Dery points us to a lovely New York Time video and article about "Subway Ballet." Mark says:
Like breakdancing, parkour, urban climbing, and Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Towers, this is my idea of the inspired wedding of art, sport, and what Hakim Bey called "temporary autonomous zones"---brief-lived pockets of anarcho-carnivalesque resistance to…call it what you will: the daily grind, the status quo, the "unitary urbanism" imposed on city life by capitalism.
Read in browser Awesome Tapes from Africa
By David Pescovitz on May 29, 2013 12:17 pm Awesome Tapes from Africa is just that. They also issue some of their finds on vinyl, CD (and, duh, tape), including the fantastic sounds of Ethiopia's Hailu Mergia posted above.
Hailu made his name in Walias Band and later went on to do some visionary solo recordings.
Read in browser Drunken sex causes car wreck
By David Pescovitz on May 29, 2013 12:01 pm Luis Briones, 25, blew through a red light in Albuquerque and crashed, resulting in his female passenger being ejected from the car. Briones was allegedly drunk. Oh, apparently he was also having sex with the woman at the time of the crash.
Read in browser UK film industry requisitions cops for massive raid on suspected pirate, get to question him at police station
By Cory Doctorow on May 29, 2013 11:40 am In the UK, the movie industry's lobby group gets to requisition huge numbers of police officers to raid peoples' houses, solely on their say-so. Here's the story of one man who was raided by ten cops, who arrived in five cars, along with representatives from FACT (the horribly named Federation Against Copyright Theft).
Read in browser TOM THE DANCING BUG: Lucky Ducky, in "Gimme Shelter"
By Ruben Bolling on May 29, 2013 11:25 am Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH wealthy HoundCo works so hard to get its corporate tax rate down... but poor Lucky Ducky will always finish as Top Dog!
Read in browser 15 weirdest things on wheels at Maker Faire 2013
By Advertiser on May 29, 2013 11:22 am ADVERTISEMENT SPONSORED: This post is presented by the Toyota RAV4 EV. Because innovation can be measured in miles, kilowatts and cubic feet. Learn more at toyota.com/rav4ev
Maker Faire launched in 2006 as a place for makers to meet up and show off their stuff.
Read in browser Pentagon project seeks to gamify cyberwar
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 11:00 am Noah Shachtman at Wired's Danger Room reports on a project developed by top technologists at the Pentagon, which will make "cyberwarfare" easy. "It's called
Plan X. And if this demo looks like a videogame or sci-fi movie or a sleek Silicon Valley production, that's no accident.
Read in browser Beach House: Wishes, directed by Eric Wareheim
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 10:58 am "Wishes" appears on the
Beach House album
Bloom. Music video directed by
Eric Wareheim. Ray Wise, who you may recall from
Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, stars as the Coach.
Read in browser Larry King has new TV show on RT, and new man-crush on Vladimir Putin
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 10:52 am "I can't explain it. I had an affinity with him. You try to get that with a lot of guests, but I really had it with [Putin]. He has 'it,' whatever 'it' is." —
Larry King, on his new best bro Vladimir Putin.
Read in browser A soil atlas of Africa
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 10:48 am A group of international experts has created a
Soil Atlas of Africa, which maps the earth to "help farmers, land managers and policymakers understand the diversity and importance of soil, and the need to manage it through sustainable use."
More at the Guardian.
Read in browser Beavers bite Belarusian, who bleeds to death
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 10:44 am "The fisherman wanted his photo shot with a beaver. The beaver had other ideas: It attacked the 60-year-old man with razor-sharp teeth, slicing an artery and causing him to bleed to death."
Beavers are attacking people in Belarus.
Read in browser Little Italy Surprise: Serenading tourists on New York's Mulberry Street
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 10:38 am The latest CDZA musical experiment: Serenading Tourists on Memorial Day Weekend, from four stories above Mulberry street. Charles Yang on Violin, Michael Thurber on Double Bass, playing a Tarantella and "That's Amore."
(Thanks, Joe Sabia!) Read in browser Guatemala: Genocide in Our Hemisphere—livestreamed event in D.C. today with scholars, survivors; Xeni moderating
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 10:13 am Photo: James Rodriguez,
mimundo.org. From 2-5 Eastern time today in Washington, DC, I will be among the moderators at a special event at the New America Foundation, "
Genocide in Our Hemisphere: Justice and Reconciliation in Guatemala Beyond the Conviction of General Ríos Montt." You can watch live online,
the event will be streamed here.
Read in browser Reality check on the 3D printing hype-cycle
By Cory Doctorow on May 29, 2013 10:05 am Carl Bass, president and CEO of Autodesk, has a very good post on the limits and opportunities of 3D printing. Because 3D printing is constrained by the immutable fact of cubic volume, which means that making things larger costs exponentially more, the major opportunities aren't in printing big stuff.
Read in browser Tonight on NOVA: Manhunt—Boston Bombers
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 10:04 am For the past few weeks, I've been in Boston, hanging out at WGBH as Miles O'Brien and the PBS science program
NOVA worked to put together this documentary on the science and technology inside the Boston bombing manhunt and investigation. It airs tonight, and it's pretty phnomenal.
Read in browser Watch the latest hand-picked videos in Boing Boing's video archives
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 09:42 am Among the most recent video posts you will find on
our video archive page: • Gary Baseman and Die Antwoord: The Buckingham Warrior • ZOMG crazy bike tricks! • Devo and Neil Young play "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" • Middle Eastern flavored Radiohead cover • What does a $4,000 vinyl record sound like?
Read in browser Why Cling to the Past? Exclusive essay by Stephen King's publisher about Joyland
By Charles Ardai on May 29, 2013 09:28 am Originally, we were only going to publish
Joyland in paperback. Steve grew up buying paperbacks for fifty cents from the wire spinner racks at his local drugstore in Lisbon Falls, Maine, the sort with sexy cover paintings and lurid cover copy and breathless storytelling that kept you glued to the page well past your bedtime.
Read in browser Interview with Soviet-era TV ad director Harry Egipt: erotic ice cream and nightmare chicken
By Xeni Jardin on May 29, 2013 09:11 am The weirdo
Soviet-era television ads directed by Harry Egipt are the stuff of internet legend, and we've blogged about them here on Boing Boing
many times over many years. His 30-second meditation on ground chicken meat is a surrealist vegetarian nightmare that pre-dates "pink slime" hysteria by half a century; his lightly erotic ice cream ads are stil creamily creepy.
Read in browser Michelle Bachmann to leave congress
By Rob Beschizza on May 29, 2013 09:06 am Max Read at
Gawker watched the announcement so no-one else has to: "an interminable video
posted to her website—
eight fucking minutes, of just her talking, the vibe somewhere between airplane safety video and personal-injury lawyer ad."
Read in browser Serotonin found to influence sexual preference in mice
By Rob Beschizza on May 29, 2013 09:03 am "When Yi Rao of Peking University in Beijing, China, and his colleagues genetically engineered female mice so that they could no longer make or respond to serotonin, it appeared to affect their sexuality. Although they would still mate with males if no other females were present, given the choice,
the rodents preferred sniffing and mounting females." [New Scientist]
Read in browser Survivorship bias and electronic publishing: practically no one is making any money
By Cory Doctorow on May 29, 2013 09:03 am Toby Buckell has posted a great piece on "survivorship bias" and new models for electronic publishing. Survivorship bias occurs when we only hear about spectacular success stories, and not the vast number of modest success stories, and the titanic, unbelievable number of failure stories, and therefore conclude that spectacular success is the norm.
Read in browser Hitler kettle sells out
By Rob Beschizza on May 29, 2013 09:00 am JC Penney's
Hitler kettle has sold out online.
Josh Sanburn at Time: "You'll have to visit JC Penney stores in person to buy the tea kettle that resembles former German Chancellor and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler."
Read in browser The Damsel in Distress, game edition
By Rob Beschizza on May 29, 2013 08:51 am Anita Sarkeesian tackles
the "damsels in distress" trope as it appears–widely!–in video games. The inevitable sideshow: angry Internet men
managed (briefly) to get YouTube to remove the video.
Read in browser Free David Byrne/St Vincent EP
By Cory Doctorow on May 28, 2013 11:13 pm OK, this is the best music-related news of 2013 to date -- David Byrne and St Vincent have released an EP of material from their
Love This Giant tour (both the best tour and the best album I heard in 2012), and it's totally free.
Read in browser Police trick people into buying "stolen" iPhones, then arrest them
By Mark Frauenfelder on May 28, 2013 09:36 pm Here's Ted Balaker's latest video about questionable police practices.
If a shady character stops you on the streets of San Francisco and tries to sell you a stolen iPhone or iPad, he just might be a cop. San Francisco Police Department officers are going undercover to peddle "stolen" Apple devices, and whoever takes the bait gets taken down (by five cops no less!).
Read in browser Legal analysis of the conclusion to Dark Knight Rises
By Cory Doctorow on May 28, 2013 09:00 pm If you saw
The Dark Knight Rises, you know that at the end of the movie... [SPOILERS FOLLOW]
Bruce Wayne is declared legally dead, despite there not being any body. Law and the Multiverse tackles the thorny question of having someone declared dead, in a guest-post by James Daily
Mike Lee:
As is Law and the Multiverse's convention for Gotham, let's look at New York law.
Read in browser Media hypocrisy in Rosen case
By Mark Frauenfelder on May 28, 2013 08:47 pm Here's the latest
Narco Polo comic from Rob Arthur, former inner-city teacher and public defender. He's the author of
You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos. I interviewed Rob
here.
Read in browser Toronto cops hospitalize hotel guest who recorded them arresting another guest
By Cory Doctorow on May 28, 2013 07:00 pm A man staying at Toronto's Sheraton Centre Hotel used his Blackberry to video-record police who were arresting another guest. The police objected and several of them piled onto him, beating him savagely while screaming "Stop resisting! Stop resisting!" They broke two of his ribs.
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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