Friday, February 19, 2010

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Highlights from the AAAS: Science speed-dating

Posted: 19 Feb 2010 01:43 AM PST

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From robots that study the seas, to the surprising connection between dolphins and diabetes: The American Association for the Advancement of Science conference hasn't even started yet, and I'm already learning about some wonderful things. Technically, AAAS opens Friday morning, but I got to San Diego on Wednesday so I could get in on some laboratory tours at the University of California San Diego, and a few press briefings Thursday.

Eric Vance, another journalist here, compared it to speed-dating—15 minute sprints through what a scientist is working on and why they think it's important. And, by that standard, there were definitely a few researchers I'd have shaved my legs for.


Robots Under the Sea

We know that the oceans are changing along with the climate, and the Argo program is one of the ways scientists collect that data. Made up of more than 3200 unassuming, little Army green floats, the array collects information on ocean temperature and salinity from all around the world and radios it back to researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In the past year alone, information collected by Argo has found its way into more than 100 scientific papers.

Argo is important because it can measure temperature and salinity at different depths, from lots and lots of places. Over the course of 10 days, the floats sink down 1000 meters, drift for days, then go down even further—another 1000 meters—before returning the surface and sending home the bacon. Each float can take 150 of these profiles over 4-5 years of life.

The downside to Argo is that you can't control where the floats travel—they just drift on the current. Their cousin, an underwater glider called "Spray", takes directions a little better. The neat thing about Spray is that the gliders can travel without a propeller, by simply changing buoyancy—up and down—they slowly move forward. Pitch and roll are adjusted, via remote control, by shifting the position of heavy battery packs inside the glider.

Tracking Tumors

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have come up with a way to tell whether a cancer patient has beaten their disease—and keep track of any recurrence—with just a blood test.

The test works a lot like viral load tests for HIV. Cancer cells carry altered DNA, where large chunks of the sequence have been flip-flopped. It's a kind of alteration that doesn't occur in healthy tissue. The more cancer cells in the body, the more of this altered DNA that can be found in the blood stream, and vice versa.

The catch: This is all very personal. No two individuals have the same alterations, so to find the cancer fingerprint, you first have to sequence each patient's healthy genes, and genes from a biopsy of their tumor. It's an expensive process—about $5000 per patient right now—and it can't be used without an initial cancer diagnosis.

But even with those limitations, there's a lot of potential. The blood tests could help doctors determine whether surgery to remove a tumor was successful—if the patient's blood is free of altered cancer DNA, then the cancer is gone, and they could avoid post-op chemotherapy. The tests could also be used to monitor cancer survivors over long periods of time, and make sure their tumors don't grow back.

Dolphins and Diabetes

Dolphins could serve as an important model for Type 2 diabetes in humans, according to researchers at the National Marine Mammal Foundation. Like humans, dolphins have a brain that is very large for their body size and needs a lot of glucose (fancy word for sugar) to function properly. Since the early 1990s scientists have thought that this need for glucose was key to the evolution of diabetes.

The basic idea works like this: When you eat a high-protein diet, you aren't getting a lot of sugars. Humans had very high-protein diets during the Ice Age, which set the stage for diabetes. A chance mutation might have made some people more resistant to insulin—and thus, more likely to keep the sugars they did get in their bloodstream longer. Given the circumstances, that mutation would have been beneficial. But in a world where carbs are cheap and Twinkies are plentiful, the same mutation works against you—too much sugar builds up and you get diabetes.

Dolphins, meanwhile, also have a high-protein, low-sugar/carb diet. And they've also developed insulin resistance that helps them retain sugars. In fact, when dolphins are fed sugar, they end up with high blood glucose levels that last for hours, the same as diabetic humans. The difference: Dolphins seem to be able to turn their insulin resistance on and off, depending on how much and how often they're able to eat. There have already been some indications that humans have a similar switch. So studying dolphins could help us learn to turn off insulin resistance, and effectively cure Type 2 diabetes.

Coming tomorrow: Coverage from more in-depth lectures on alternative energy, food allergies and more.

Image courtesy Flickr user krister462, via CC

Supersonic rocket + ice crystals = science beauty

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:01 PM PST

Skip forward about two minutes into this launch video of the Atlas V rocket on Feb 14, 2010, for the moment when it goes supersonic while passing through a layer of ice-crystals, creating a visible sonic boom in sun-dog form. Breath-taking.

Sonic Boom Meets Sun Dog 720p (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

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Infographic: buying DVDs vs pirating them

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:24 PM PST


This pithy and funny chart does a superb job of explaining how the insertion of a lot of "business model" (FBI warnings, unskippable trailers, THX vanity sequences) makes buying a DVD a lot worse than pirating the same disc online. I rip all my kid's DVDs (not least because she has a tendency to scratch them to hell), and the difference between firing up a movie on a laptop and it just starting versus trying to explain to a toddler why Daddy has to spend five minutes pressing next-next-next menu-menu-menu is enormous. I think it all comes down to the stuff in the DVD-CCA spec that allows DVD creators to flag sequences as unskippable: that's such an attractive nuisance, it's bound to attract every hard-sell marketer and power-tripping fool in any media company, who will eventually colonize it with so much crapola that it comes just short of destroying the possibility that anyone will voluntarily pay for the product. (Be sure to click below for the whole thing)

If you are a pirate, this is what you get (via Making Light)

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Popgun, Vol 4. release parties

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:13 PM PST

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Scott says:

"The much anticipated 4th volume of Image Comics' Harvey Award-winning anthology, POPGUN, hits stores next week, and features new work by an eclectic mix of artists sure to please both fanboys and Juxtapozers: Ben Templesmith, Erik Larsen, Jeffrey Brown, Mark Andrew Smith, Jeremy Tinder, Brian Winkeler, Jess Fink, D.J. Kirkbride, Jock, Thomas Scioli, Dave Curd and many more. To celebrate, Meltdown Comics in Hollywood and Jim Hanley's Universe in NYC are throwing release parties on February 24th! Drop by to meet the creators, eat, drink and and listen to groovy music."

Hollywood, NYC.

Pre-order Popgun, Vol 4. on Amazon

The Race Card

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 06:20 PM PST

racecard.jpg Image: Mollena, with the Race Card she created to respond to the annoying expression of the same name. "Every once in a while some fooligan will roll to you talkin' some trash about how you discussing your racial background in a broader social context is a 'back-handed maneuver," she says. "They may even accuse you of 'playing the Race Card' because you mention that life is different for you because you are different. Next time that shit goes down, be prepared." (Incidentally, she's also Miss SF Leather 2009 / photo: Colm McCarthy.)

Q & A: Charles Burns and Gary Panter

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 04:08 PM PST

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Tim Lillis, a fantastic illustrator for MAKE, wrote to me about a neat project he's working on: "I'm speaking at SXSW Interactive on the subject of Indirect Collaboration and Collective Creativity. My fellow panelists and I have put together a blog where we're collecting lots of thoughts on the subject, and my esteemed colleague Joe Alterio has just posted a Q&A with Charles Burns and Gary Panter where they discuss their collaborations with each other."

CB: For me doing a collaboration is taking "time out" from my usual work. It's actually fun to do and I think part of the reason is there are different expectations and less control. It's like letting go of the tight control I always maintain on my writing and drawing and allowing myself to work on something with no "rules". For it to work there has to be a mutual respect, but you also need to be aggressive enough to alter (fuck-up?) the other persons drawing.

GP: Projects do need leaders or cheerleaders. Often one person will push the project harder. There is the danger of people getting too knitted together. We have to learn to easily move from isolated creative vision and consensual ideation and work. I am interested in the strength of little things and little things as prototypes for bigger things, so a team of one or two or three appeals to me. Vermeer would've done one t-shirt in his whole career and he would've known it was the best t-shirt Threadless ever had.

Q & A: Charles Burns and Gary Panter

Interview with David Byrne

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 02:01 PM PST

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David Byrne with ETHEL and Thomas Dolby at TED2010, Friday, February 12, 2010, in Long Beach, California. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

I enjoyed David Byrne's presentation at TED2010. He spoke about the way artists create their music and other works to look and sound their best in the venue they appear in. After his presentation, I asked him about his research, his upcoming projects, R. Crumb's Illustrated Book of Genesis, and his run-in with the City of New York regarding the bike stands he designed.

Here's the 10-minute audio interview:


I'm sorry that the first part of the interview has some background chatter. The interview took place in the press room, and it was kind of noisy.

The audio file is available in other formats here at Archive.org and I gave it a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Creative Commons license.

Previously:


Food label designed by "neurological and bodily responses"

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 12:13 PM PST

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From the Wall Street Journal via Good: Campbell's Soup redesigns a label using "neuromarketing" techniques.

Campbell's New Neuromarketing

Police tape and element spectrum scarves

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 01:41 PM PST

System Product Images 202 Original Beckypolicetape System Product Images 559 Original Limorsilicon
Over at our new Boing Boing Bazaar in the Makers Market, crafter Becky Stern is selling fun, hand-knitted machine-knit by hand police tape scarves for $75. She also makes custom "Emission Spectrum" scarves of any element, starting at $100 for basic spectra like oxygen. Above right is hardware hacker Limor Fried sporting a Silicon spectrum scarf. Sternlab at the Makers Market

A new back for the penny

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 11:53 AM PST

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The US Mint has revealed a new design for the 2010 penny. Lincoln in still on the front, but this is the new back. And here I was just having a conversation last night about why we still have the penny at all.

7 things to do with poop

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 11:46 AM PST

From gunpowder to alternative energy: 7 things to do with poop.

Pot leaf pot holder

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 12:04 PM PST

Pot-Holder-1 Damn, those Gama-Go "creatives" are punny! Their new Pot Holder is just $8.
Gama-Go's pot leaf Pot Holder

Chan meets Chatroulette, Goatse ensues

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 11:56 AM PST

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Sean Bonner says,

/b/ [NSFW link!] decided that chatroulete wasn't interesting enough on it's on, and decided to start showing photos instead of livewebcams and then getting screan grabs of reaction shots.This site is now totally amusing in a way 17 year old russian kids could never have imagined.
Image here, cropped for your safety, is a Chatroulette screengrab in which a /b/tard has displayed goatse.cx [NSW link!] to two victims. Not so much a screengrab as a SCREAMGRAB.

Previously:


Algae bloom photos from Minnesota

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 11:01 AM PST

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Algae blooms on rural lakes—some of which are toxic to humans and wildlife&mash;increase along with fertilizer and manure pond runoff from farms. Minnesotan Mary Taffe took this ironically beautiful image of algae on Big Stone Lake. You can see more of her photos in a Treehugger gallery.

Beautiful wooden clocks to build at home

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:54 AM PST


Clayton Boyer makes incredible wooden clocks and clockworks, and sells the plans to build them -- you'll either need some leet woodworking skills, a CAD rig, a laser-cutter, or a lot of willingness to learn.

Clayton Boyer Clock Designs (Thanks, Brian!)

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Skeptical birds debunk "Artificial Flight"

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:52 AM PST

Dresden Codak's "Artificial Flight and Other Myths (a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds)" is a superb, spot-on critique of artificial intelligence skeptics (like, ahem, me), comparing the our arguments against the emergence of "real AI" to the arguments a bird might make against "real" artificial flight. I love being made to re-examine my own convictions while laughing my ass off:
We can start with a loose definition of flight. While no two bird scientists or philosophers can agree on the specifics, there is still a common, intuitive understanding of what true flight is: powered, feathered locomotion through the air through the use of flapping wings. While other flight-like phenomena exist in nature (via bats and insects), no bird with even a reasonable education would consider these creatures true fliers, as they lack one or more key elements. And, while some birds are unfortunately born handicapped (penguins, ostriches, etc.), they still possess the (albeit undeveloped) gene for flight, and it is indeed flight that defines the modern bird.

This is flight in the natural world, the product of millions of years of evolution, and not a phenomenon easily replicated. Current A.F. is limited to unpowered gliding; a technical marvel, but nowhere near the sophistication of a bird. Gliding simplifies our lives, and no bird (including myself) would discourage advancing this field, but it is a far cry from synthesizing the millions of cells within the wing alone to achieve Strong A.F. Strong A.F., as it is defined by researchers, is any artificial flier that is capable of passing the Tern Test (developed by A.F. pioneer Alan Tern), which involves convincing an average bird that the artificial flier is in fact a flying bird.

Artificial Flight and Other Myths (a reasoned examination of A.F. by top birds) (via Futurismic)

(Image: Anna's Hummingbird in Flight, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Noël Zia Lee's photostream)

Previously:


Luc Sante's "Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930"

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:41 AM PST

Img Photos 2010 02 17 Folk Photography T610
In the early 20th century, the popularity of the pocket camera in America led to a wave of DIY postcards. The snapshots depicted anything that the sender wanted to share with remote friends or colleagues, from family snapshots to amateur photojournalism. According to former BB guestblogger Mark Dery, real-photo postcards "are transmissions from the postmortem Internet," and they definitely have the feel of a visual Tweet shared with one's social network. In the Las Vegas Weekly, Dery reviews a recent book on the topic, Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930, by Luc Sante, author of the seminal account of New York City's underbelly in the early 1900s, Low Life. Dery's review of the book makes me want to start collecting Real-Photo Postcards. Me and everyone else, I'm sure. From Dery's essay, titled "Ghost Cards":
In one of those harmonic convergences of popular desire, profit motive, and governmental intervention that punctuate media history, the emergence of the real-photo postcard as the cell-phone snapshot of small-town America was the result of Kodak's rollout, in 1903, of its cheap, easy-to-use No. 3A Folding Pocket model; the U.S. Postal Service's introduction, in 1905, of the penny rate for postcards; and the growing penetration of Rural Free Delivery into heartland America.

To Sante, these postcards constitute a "ghost telegraph," as he told a radio interviewer. In Folk Photography, he writes, "The real-photo card was typically a product of the small town, particularly the small town isolated on the plains, whose newspaper did not have the capacity to reproduce half-tones, and whose lonely citizens felt an urgent need to communicate with absent friends, distant in those days even if they lived only three stops down the railroad line." Like the blues, field hollers, chain-gang songs and other folkways of Old Weird America, real-photo postcards served as a social network, a kind of Basement Tapes of the backwoods unconscious, reporting local news, memorializing personal tragedies, scrapbooking sentimental moments.
"Ghost cards: Thanks to Folk Photography, at long last, we've got mail" (Las Vegas Weekly)

Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 (Amazon)

Frugan Living blog

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:42 AM PST

201002181024 Fairfax loves a bargain. She loves one so much she is willing to eat food that others have thrown away. She buys plain coffee at cafes and adds milk, which is much cheaper than buying a latte. She holds dinner parties where people bring stuff they no longer want and swap it. She finds lots of good books to read in "trash receptacles surrounding college dormitories at the end of the year." She takes photos of her finds, scores, and tips at her blog, called Frugan Living.

Excerpts:

• After catering an event, a friend of mine was saddened to see tray after tray of untouched food tossed out, so she brought me approximately 79 pounds of pesto pasta.  I froze it in baggies, and have enjoyed a plate of it weekly for going on three months.

• I recently secured $50 selling two charcoal BBQs that I found on the street and ended up having no room for.  Two posts, two emails, two 3 minute exchanges.  Now I have pocket cash and less clutter, an Irish lady has the means to cook on her camping trip, and the Broke-ology set at Lincoln Center Theater has a prop.  Three winners!

•A couple months ago I collected many books from the dumpsters at Columbia and NYU.  The other day I finally got around to posting a couple on Amazon, not really expecting them to sell given a presumed summertime lull in textbook sales.  Lo and and behold, I am now $140 wealthier!  And two more people can gain knowledge (or not, based on how pristine these books were) from the pages of those trees. Aren't trees and trash generous!!

Frugan Living

Xyloexplosive Devices

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:45 AM PST

Beyond domino toppling lies the next big thing in kinetic art: xyloexplosive devices. I met kinetic artist Tim Fort when he put on a workshop at the wonderful Leonardo's Basement in Minneapolis and taught me the basics of stick bomb building.

Fort apparently holds the world's record for building the largest such device, shown in this recently recorded video clip.

Obama meets with Dalai Lama (finally), monks back home celebrate

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 10:48 AM PST

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His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama met with US President Barack Obama today. China is not stoked. But the exiled Tibetan leader is. Departing the White House, he described himself as "very happy" with the meeting, saying Obama was "supportive." AP quotes him as having "urged a greater leadership role for women in the public life of nations." Back in the homeland, Tibetans in HHDL's native province of Amdo celebrated the meeting with fireworks and the burning of incense (sangson in the Tibetan language):

"We do this whenever something big, and good happens," said Losan, swathed in the vermillion robes of a Buddhist holy man, standing on a hillside above a monastery where monks were lighting fireworks in the early hours of Thursday.

"He's really going to meet Obama?" interrupted a monk standing next to him, sounding somewhat incredulous.

"I heard it on Voice Of America," Losan told him confidently.

The sound of conch shells being blown echoed around the valley as a group of monks burned an offering of flour and a ceremonial Tibetan scarf on a fire.

"I'm very excited about who the Dalai Lama is going to meet," said one Tibetan woman, who declined to be identified citing the sensitive nature of the topic. "But I worry about what measures the government could take against us in retaliation."

[Image at top: "In Memory of Tibet," a Creative-Commons-licensed photo from the Flickr photostream of "Breathtaking Photos."]

Anonymous Iranian dissidents launch online comic about Iranian current events

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 09:51 AM PST

Gina from kick-ass comics publisher FirstSecond sez,

First Second Books is pleased to announce a new online serial project: Zahra's Paradise, a graphic novel about the social and political situation in today's Iran, will be serialized on line beginning 12:00 a.m., February 19, 2010 and be published in book form in 2011. In the beginning, the serialization will reflect events in Iran's recent past, but in the months to come, as current events unfold in Iran, they will be woven into the story.

Written by Amir, a human rights activist, and illustrated by Khalil, Zahra's Paradise tells the story of an Iranian blogger's search for his brother, Mehdi, a nineteen year old protester who has disappeared in Tehran after the June 2009 unrest. As the blogger and his mother, Zahra Alavi, begin their search for Mehdi, we are drawn into the underbelly of the Islamic Republicâ€"an elaborate labyrinth in which countless dissidents have vanished over the past decades. Although the characters are fictional composites of actual people in Iran, the context and events are real. The project is a roman à clef of history as it happens.

Zahra's Paradise (Thanks, Gina!)

(Disclosure: I'm happy to say that FirstSecond will publish a graphic novel based on one of my short stories)

Previously:


VIP prison treatment for rich Indonesians convicted of bribery

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 09:47 AM PST

Indonesian prison cells for wealthy people convicted of bribery and other corruption crimes are a palatial resorts (and you have to bribe the guards to get in to see the prisoners!). The Indonesian government is trying to fix things, but corrupt officials stand in the way.
The money cycles through the prison system, he explains. Prisoners and their visitors pay bribes to block leaders, who then give a cut to officials. Block leaders often hold auctions where new detainees can bid for certain cells. Those without money are packed into 10- by 13-foot cells with up to five other inmates, while others receive upgrades depending on how much they are willing to pay.

Service varies by prison, according to descriptions from former inmates and people who have investigated prison operations. Wealthy inmates can hire people to deliver food and clean their cells. In Cipinang and Selemba high-security prisons, inmates can buy air conditioning and laptop computers.

Prison for wealthy Indonesians puts Club Fed to shame
Previously:


UFO files from the UK's National Archives

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 12:07 PM PST



Today, the UK's Ministry of Defence and National Archives released a huge chunk of UFO files. The collection of 6,000 pages chronicles UFO reports and investigations from 1994 to 2000. This is the fifth collection the UK's UFO files released online. They're available for free for the next month here. According to a National Archive press release, here are some of the highlights from these documents:
Images News Ufo • A UFO sighted by Boston and Skegness Police captured on film and then spotted by a ship's crew in the North Sea. Simultaneously, an unidentified blip was picked up on radar over Boston. A detailed investigation followed, which identified some of the lights as the planet Venus rising and the blip on the radar as 'a permanent echo' made by a tall church spire.

• A Birmingham man arrived home at 4am to find a large, illuminated blue triangle hovering over his garden. The craft 'shot off' leaving behind a 'silky-white' substance on tree tops in his garden, which he saved in a jam-jar. The file that contains the report of the incident does not reveal what happened to the substance.  

• Copies of original statements taken from the UK's 'Roswell', Rendlesham Forest, and calls for an inquiry into 600 alleged sightings in Bonnybridge, Scotland, known as the 'Bonnybridge Triangle'.

• A West Lothian electrician spotted a 'Toblerone-shaped' UFO hovering over a field. A sketch of the craft is included in the report.

"Close Encounters of the Second Kind: the latest release of UFO files" (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)

TED Talk: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 11:29 AM PST


Here's Bill Gates' Zero Carbon presentation from TED2010. It was one of my favorite talks at the event.

From my report last week on Gates' talk:

"A molecule of uranium has a million times more energy than a molecule of coal." He and Nathan "Mosquito Zapper" Myrhvold are backing a nuclear approach. It's called Terrapower, and it's different from a standard nuclear reactor. Instead of burning the 1% of uranium-235 found in natural uranium, this reactor burns the other 99%, called uranium-238. You can use all the leftover waste from today's reactors as fuel. "In terms of fuel this really solves the problem." He showed a photo of depleted waste uranium in steel cylinders at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Kentucky -- the waste at this plant could supply the US energy needs for 200 years (woah!), and filtering seawater for uranium could supply energy for much longer than that.

TED Talk: Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero

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Technology secrets of Coney Island's people-tossing machinery, 1931

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 09:40 AM PST


In "Thrill Makers of Coney Island" from this July, 1931 issue of Modern Mechanix, we learn many amazing facts about the high-tech people-hurling technologies being developed for the burgeoning Coney Island amusement park:
Another mechanical ride which brings the owners a rich harvest each season is the Steeplechase. In this sweepstake there are four wooden horses which race around a course which is supposed to represent hill and dale and the riders imagine themselves as embittered jockeys. Two persons ride each saddle.

At the starting point the horses are released down a mild decline and again they are driven by gravity until they reach a gentle slope of a track. Here they are pulled up for about 25 yards by a system of chains and gears, not unlike the method used in the roller coaster, and then when they reach the top of this first hill, they glide off and downhill on their own again.

The horses are placed on two trolley wheels and it is these wheels which whirl them around the whole course after their first descent. Gravity and the wheels do the rest on the 1/2-mile ride.

There are 65 races run off an hour on this mechanical track. Over 5,000 ride these horses daily. Not more than $5.00 worth of electricity is consumed each day.

On the other hand, Coney Island has become so vast that there is a large electrical plant there and one of the biggest gas works in the country. It is estimated that the pleasure colony's electric bill each day is $10,000 and that its gas bill is more than $5,000. Next to the labor item, these are the two outstanding costs of upkeep which disturb the proprietor at Coney Island, who is perhaps the only individual in the universe who can mix pleasure and business and make it pay.

Thrill Makers of Coney Island (Jun, 1931)
Previously:
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James Jean: limited edition print

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 12:08 PM PST

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The latest fine art edition from Pressure Printing is by painter and comix artist James Jean, who in 2008 also designed a stunning series of fabric prints for Prada (and incredible promotional animation too). The print above, titled "Dive," is Jean's second piece with Pressure Printing. A limited edition of 15, the print is $2,000. From the Pressure Printing blog:
James employed a technique he's got a unique mastery of here, working up a one-color "key" drawing by hand and then going back and adding tone and color in Photoshop. This technique just happens to lend itself perfectly to printmaking. After much color proofing and not a few sets of test plates, we decided upon printing the key drawing in a dark burgundy, with the tonal additions printed in a warm cyan.

The print is large, with an image size of 29" x 16", and a paper size of 36" x 23". It has been printed via an intaglio process, with the two plates cut to slightly different sizes giving the print its unique double-plate-embossed border.

"Dive" by James Jean

Previously:


The Decision Tree

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 08:31 AM PST

thedecsiontree.jpgLast May I had the opportunity to talk a while with Wired Magazine's Thomas Goetz about the idea of how people can take control their over own health care using the tools and data available on the Internet. His new book on the subject, entitled The Decision Tree, is a step above most health improvement books in terms of the scholarship/readability (i.e. it's based on good science and it's easy for me to understand.)

The big idea is this: A person's health doesn't happen all at once; it's a consequence of years of choices - some large and some small, some good and some bad. His book looks at the choices that advances in genomics, self-monitoring, new screening techniques, and collaborative health tools are giving the average patient. The trouble is, there's so much information available that it's really, really hard to interpret it all. What to do? According to Goetz, the answer is to make a decision tree.

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Decision trees or flowcharts that make all of these decisions more visible and more obviously something we are actually choosing. Unfortunately, most current decision trees look like the one to the right: technical and hard to understand

But where we are apparently headed is in the direction of interactive ones like this one at Preventative Math.net. It really makes the tradeoffs clear: If I do this (e.g. take a baby aspirin daily) I can expect to add X days to my life. For me, the daily aspirin adds a probable 293 day to life span - why wouldn't I do that?

The test and interface is simple. In fact, I wish there were a lot more factors to play with (e.g. how many days of life, if any, would a daily glass of red wine add, etc?) I eagerly await the day that an organization that I trust puts up a decision tree website like that with a lot more factors (daily alcohol intake, quantity of fruit eaten per day, basement radon test, etc.)

Chromakey is everywhere

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 07:54 AM PST

Alan sez, "A great, but slightly disturbing, look at how pervasive green-screening has become in simply every scene in television these days. Pretty much everything you think is outdoors is faked, at least to some degree. I particularly like the faked ferry fire..."

Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel 2009 (Thanks, Alan!)

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Vintage photos of "The Empire That Was Russia"

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 08:24 AM PST

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Vann Hall says:
Yesterday's Boing Boing entry on panoramic photos of power-plant control rooms reminded me of a Library of Congress site, "The Empire That Was Russia," showcasing the color(!) photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, taken in the years immediately preceding WWI.

Prokudin-Gorskii used a camera of his own design that took three photographs in rapid succession on a 9x3" glass plate; the images were shot through a red, green, and blue filter, respectively. After developing, a full-color image could be projected from the plate using a custom, three-part projection system.

In 1948, the LoC bought the existing plates from Prokudin-Gorskii's heirs -- seemingly including nearly 1,900 color images, along with an unknown number of black-and-white photos. They've since been digitized and made available on the LoC web site. Most are available in three variations -- composite color image, single-frame black-and-white image, and entire (three-frame) negative -- and, amazingly, each variant is available as a medium- or high-resolution JPEG ('high-resolution' in this case reflecting typical usage at the time the scan was made: namely 1024 x 826 or thereabouts) or an uncompressed archival TIFF (e.g. 3200 x 2700 pixel for composite image). In addition, selected images are also presented in a "corrected" format that takes into account problems with plate shrinkage and misregistration.

The subject matter varies widely, as Prokudin-Gorskii's intent had been systematically to document the Russian Empire...

The Empire That Was Russia (Thanks, Vann!)

21 ways in which Canada's copyright law is stronger than US copyright law

Posted: 18 Feb 2010 07:01 AM PST

Michael Geist sez, "Howard Knopf has an absolute must-read post that lists 21 reasons why Canadian copyright law is already stronger than the U.S. Knopf's list includes the existence of the private copying levy, neighbouring rights, movie theatre payments for exhibiting films, moral rights, the fact that broadcasters pay more copyright royalties and educators pay more copyright royalties, and that fair dealing is more restrictive than fair use. There are many more - read the whole thing."

For non-Canadians: an oft-heard reason for urgent reform to make Canadian copyright more restrictive is that the US government (and the US copyright lobby) say that Canadian copyright law is lax compared to the US version. Canada has even been put on copyright watchlists, along with countries like China and Russia.

1. Canada has about 36 copyright collectives, many of which have received substantial direct and indirect government subsidies. The U.S. has only about half a dozen, with no government support.

2. Canada has a full-time Copyright Board which has normally had four full time members plus a sitting or retired Judge as Chairman and currently about a dozen full time professional and administrative staff. The Board has enormous policy and, effectively, law making powers. No other country of which I am aware comes close to having such a large, permanent, powerful and full time copyright tribunal.

3. Broadcasters pay more for copyright royalties than their counterparts in the USA, much of it for rights that don't even exist in the USA - for example the "ephemeral right."The U.S. provides an outright exemption in 17 USC §112 for the "ephemeral right." Now, about $50-million a year more over and above is being demanded by a collective dominated by the American dominated record labels for this right in addition to amounts now collected by composers, authors and publishers.(Canada's Copyright Board heard a major case where this will be decided on commercial radio in December of 2008 and January of 2009. However, it will probably be at least 18 months to two years after the hearing before a decision is announced, based upon the timing of some recent major decisions from the Board.

4. The Canadian Copyright Board values each right under the Copyright Act brought before it separately, with little regard to the layering and multiplicity of tariffs that result, in effect, for the same transaction. Whether this is an error in approach by the Board, and/or in policy, and/or in legislative drafting or at all is subject to fair debate. But the fact is that U.S. law goes to great length to avoid such a result, as recent court decisions have confirmed...

The Annual "301" Show - USTR Calls for Comment - 21 Reasons Why Canadian Copyright Law is Already Stronger Than USA's (Thanks, Michael!)
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