Tokyo's underground bike-storage robots Gweek 097: Ramez Naam and Jason Snell Duck penises: The saga continues How 3D printing will rebuild reality The case for flowers on the farm Surveillance-oriented kids' book remixes Walking Dead 18: a magnificent villain who makes Hannibal Lecter look like Mr Rogers In which Ye Olde Metadata Network tracks that traitor Paul Revere TSA Denver tries to confiscate Chewbacca actor's light-saber cane My week with the 2013 Toyota RAV4 EV Mean Monkey Monday 11 Who's claiming copyright on the Prism logo? NSA whistleblower goes public Prosthetics maker does a roaring trade in replacement pinkies for ex-yakuza Tokyo's underground bike-storage robots
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 10, 2013 12:00 pm Culture Japan Network TV shows us the underground bicycle-parking robots of Shinigawa, Tokyo. These machines ingest RFID-tagged bicycles and whisk them into their bowels and set them lovingly into huge subterranean crypts, from which they are robotically disinterred when their owners are ready to ride.
Read in browser Gweek 097: Ramez Naam and Jason Snell
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jun 10, 2013 11:45 am Your browser does not support the audio tag. In this episode of Gweek, I talked to Ramez Naam and Jason Snell.
Ramez Naam is a computer scientist and the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of three books, including the sci-fi thriller
Nexus.
Read in browser Duck penises: The saga continues
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jun 10, 2013 11:19 am As we all know by now,
ducks have penises. Rather
epic penises, in fact. Chickens, though, are penis-less. In fact, most birds don't have them. In an important update in duck sex news,
Ed Yong follows the work of several scientists who are trying to better understand how genitals evolve and why they differ so much between species and genuses.
Read in browser How 3D printing will rebuild reality
By Steven Ashley on Jun 10, 2013 11:00 am A 3D model of a complex anaplastology case, created in collaboration with the anaplastologist Jan De Cubber, is seen at the Belgian company Materialise. 3D printing has already changed the game for manufacturing specialized products such as medical devices. REUTERS/Yves Herman When
Star Trek debuted in the mid-60s, everybody geeked out about the food synthesizers.
Read in browser The case for flowers on the farm
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jun 10, 2013 10:58 am South African mango farms that added patches of native, flowering plants not only attracted more pollinators than traditional, monoculture mango farms —
they also produced more mangoes.
Image: Flowers Under Attack, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from suckamc's photostream Read in browser Surveillance-oriented kids' book remixes
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 10, 2013 10:54 am Twitter user
Darth polled followers for satirical, surveillance-oriented kids' book parodies, and created illustrations for the best. They're collected by the Guardian.
NSA surveillance as told through classic children's books Read in browser Walking Dead 18: a magnificent villain who makes Hannibal Lecter look like Mr Rogers
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 10, 2013 10:50 am When
the 17th Walking Dead collection came out last December, I called it "grim," and mentioned that Kirkman and co had introduced some new bad guys that made the Governor seem like a Smurf. Well, now
Book 18: What Comes After is out, and the new badguy, a psycho named Negan, is back, and holy.
Read in browser In which Ye Olde Metadata Network tracks that traitor Paul Revere
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jun 10, 2013 10:42 am Sociologist Kieran Healy does a nice job of explaining how
even a data system that doesn't contain the actual content of conversations can be part of a very powerful surveillance state. Part parody and part demonstration, he uses information about organization membership roles in 18th-century Boston to pinpoint Paul Revere as a key player in a network of "traitors".
Read in browser TSA Denver tries to confiscate Chewbacca actor's light-saber cane
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 10, 2013 10:21 am Peter Mayhew, the seven-foot-tall actor who played Chewbacca in the Star Wars movies, livetweeted his dustup with the TSA operatives at Denver airport as they attempted to confiscate his light-saber-themed cane, which he needs to walk.
Read in browser My week with the 2013 Toyota RAV4 EV
By Advertiser on Jun 10, 2013 10:00 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.
Last week our sponsor Toyota delivered a 2013 Toyota RAV4 EV to my house so I could drive it for a week.
Read in browser Mean Monkey Monday 11
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jun 10, 2013 09:30 am (Via X-Ray Delta One) Where are the other Mean Monkey Monday posts?
Here! Read in browser Who's claiming copyright on the Prism logo?
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 09, 2013 09:19 pm Gawker's Max Read tried to set up a Zazzle store to sell t-shirts with the logo of the NSA Prism program, recently outed in a set of spectacular leaks in the Guardian and Washington Post. His store was short-lived; a copyright complaint from an unnamed party shut it down.
Read in browser NSA whistleblower goes public
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 09, 2013 03:41 pm Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old NSA contractor and ex-CIA employee, has revealed that he is behind the series of leaks that have appeared in the Guardian and Washington Post this weekend, which detailed top-secret, over-reaching, and arguably criminal surveillance programs run by America's spies with the cooperation of the Obama administration.
Read in browser Prosthetics maker does a roaring trade in replacement pinkies for ex-yakuza
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 09, 2013 03:09 pm Shintaro Hayashi, a Tokyo prosthetics maker, spent most of this life making medical prostheses for people who'd lost breasts, limbs, etc, but now does a booming trade in fake pinkie fingers for ex-yakuza gangsters who don't want to broadcast their criminal past (yakuza members who screw up have their pinkies lopped off in retaliation).
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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