The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- SPECIAL FEATURE: 30 days through Muslim America, a photo essay
- Where Good Ideas Come From, 4 minute version
- Ninjabread cookies
- HOWTO fast-infuse your booze with nitrous
- Contrastive reduplication: do you LIKE IT like it?
- Wood-burned comic characters
- Maker reading list
- Koko Be Good launch at Secret Headquarters LA tonight (Friday)
- Elvira returns, with a new Movie Macabre
- Chile: 17yo girl protesting animal cruelty at rodeo is roped, dragged like animal
- Spring Breakers Without Borders
- Halloween display creator seeking funding on Kickstarter
- What Kevin Kelly learned about technology when he homeschooled his son
- Nude Feud: Fundamentalist nudists terrorize naked swingers in France
- Brighton, England town council says that councillor is violating copyright law by youtubing the council meetings
- Big Agriculture in CA gets $180K in federal funds to fight pesticide critics
- Bearded lady and long-lost son to appear on Maury
- Bill Clinton, Plant-Eater
- Sascha Nordmeyer's forced-smile stent
- Fossil corals in Indiana
- Woman tracks down man who broke into her car
- Making sharing irresistible
- Purported HP Slate appears in video
- How a man caught covered in blood was acquitted of murder
- Fashion Week Dispatch: Samantha Pleet proves eco-couture need not "scream green"
- The insect highways in the sky
- Bank of America forecloses on a man who has no mortgage
| SPECIAL FEATURE: 30 days through Muslim America, a photo essay Posted: 23 Sep 2010 05:20 PM PDT During Ramadan last year, Aman Ali and I visited 30 mosques in 30 days around New York City. Regular Boing Boing readers may remember our two-week stint guestblogging here during that experiment. This year, while I was in Pakistan, we decided on a whim to revisit that adventure, but this time, take on the rest of America. We didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. Our Ramadan road trip trip this year drew much interest from big media, thanks to the "Ground Zero Mosque controversy" and Terry Jones' Quran-burning fiasco. It was unsettling to sit through interview after interview, fielding questions about mosque construction and the state of the American Muslim community. Every TV interview eventually veered into "Islam on trial" territory, and we were the ones defending it. Aman and I became Ambassador Muslim. It sucked. Ramadan ended, the news cycle moved on, and we were lost to the archives. We're good for clicks, but only when we're controversial. And as far as that part goes, I am happy it's all over. But I'll miss every other part of our 30-day adventure. It's been two weeks since we've been back and already I miss the road, the people we met, and the America I experienced. The following photos come from our month-long road trip through Muslim America. I've selected a special assortment of images for Boing Boing, and am honored to share these photos with you.
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| Where Good Ideas Come From, 4 minute version Posted: 23 Sep 2010 10:46 PM PDT Here's a short video promo for Steven Johnson's upcoming Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, a lecture on the way that transformative ideas incubate for long times, come out of left field, and thrive best when there's no one foreclosing on them because they're too weird or disruptive. It's inspiring stuff, and a real indictment of proprietary and closed systems that put blocks and hurdles in the way of creators in the name of "good user experience" or legal compliance. WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson (via Kottke)
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| Posted: 23 Sep 2010 10:45 PM PDT  Instructables user Jayefuu likes the EpicWinFTW ninjabread cookie makers, but wanted to try his hand a DIY version. Now Jayefuu has shared the results, which are damned impressive. Ninjabread Men (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)
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| HOWTO fast-infuse your booze with nitrous Posted: 23 Sep 2010 10:41 PM PDT Here's a fast way to infuse booze with flavors -- cacao nibs, herbs, etc -- using nitrous oxide and a whipped-cream maker: Infusion Profusion: Game-Changing Fast 'N Cheap Technique
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| Contrastive reduplication: do you LIKE IT like it? Posted: 23 Sep 2010 11:11 PM PDT Here's a fantastic summary of "Contrastive focus reduplication in English (the Salad-Salad paper)", Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 22(2) 2004, written by Jila Ghomeshi, Ray Jackendoff, Nicole Rosen, and Kevin Russell. "Reduplication" is the doubling-up of words in speech and prose for rhetorical effect ("I don't want tuna salad, I want salad salad!"). This paper presents a phenomenon of colloquial English that we call Contrastive Reduplication (CR), involving the copying of words and sometimes phrases as in 'It's tuna salad, not SALAD-salad', or 'Do you LIKE-HIM-like him?' Drawing on a corpus of examples gathered from natural speech, written texts, and television scripts, we show that CR restricts the interpretation of the copied element to a 'real' or prototypical reading. Turning to the structural properties of the construction, we show that CR is unusual among reduplication phenomena in that whole idioms can be copied, object pronouns are often copied (as in the second example above), and inflectional morphology need not be copied. Thus the 'scope' of CR cannot be defined in purely phonological terms; rather, a combination of phonological, morphosyntactic, syntactic, and lexical factors is involved.Contrastive reduplication: the Salad-Salad paper and the ooglie-booglies of English
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| Posted: 23 Sep 2010 10:14 PM PDT  Deviant Art's Daniel Crosier creates comic-book-inspired wood-burnings with a lot of zest. Something about burned wood just suits the subject-matter. ~DanielCrosier/The Wood Guy (via Neatorama)
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| Posted: 23 Sep 2010 10:09 PM PDT In celebration of the arrival of Maker Faire NYC, Tor.com has published a maker reading list curated by Mark and me. It was a lot of fun to put together -- I queried all my favorite makers for the books they couldn't live without and the passionate responses made me want to add to my own crowded library. Tor's also giving away 10 sets of Makers tile games to people who send them a tweet or a FB update. Makers Recommendations & Giveaway!
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| Koko Be Good launch at Secret Headquarters LA tonight (Friday) Posted: 23 Sep 2010 09:54 PM PDT Our pals at LA's finest comic shop, The Secret Headquarters, are launching the wonderful graphic novel Koko Be Good (reviewed here earlier this month) tonight (Friday), and the author/illustrator Jen Wang will be there in person. Wang writes and draws good clever, and I imagine she's a lot of fun in person.
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| Elvira returns, with a new Movie Macabre Posted: 23 Sep 2010 06:27 PM PDT  Recent Boing Boing guestblogger Liz Ohanesian alerts us to an LA Weekly cover story on Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. "Karina Longworth, our film editor, wrote the story," explains Liz. "It's about Elvira's new Movie Macabre. The show is syndicated and will debut on September 25. It's a pretty lengthy story, and a really good read." Read: Elvira's World (LA Weekly, photograph by Kevin Scanlon)
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| Chile: 17yo girl protesting animal cruelty at rodeo is roped, dragged like animal Posted: 24 Sep 2010 02:12 AM PDT Via the BB Submitterator, reader muis says, A 17-year-old kid (or "woman", as the press prefers to call it) is lassoed and dragged by a horseman after she and other animal rights activists entered a corral to protest against the rodeo. According to the news article linked here, the Chilean Rodeo Federation's director "regretted what happened, but at the same time justified the attitude of the riders".News report at El Mercurio, a Spanish-language newspaper in Chile, and here is the YouTube video link. Her name is Constance. From the YouTube description: the incident occurred on September 19, during the "Patriotic Celebration Festival" at the National Stadium. The video shows three young people entering the corral to peacefully protest animal abuse by the rodeo; then we see riders on horseback and rodeo men on foot lassoing one female protester later identified as a 17-year-old child. Any Boing Boing readers know whether a specific animal rights organization was behind the protest?
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| Spring Breakers Without Borders Posted: 23 Sep 2010 04:05 PM PDT |
| Halloween display creator seeking funding on Kickstarter Posted: 23 Sep 2010 03:14 PM PDT  Peter Montgomery of Glendale, CA has developed a reputation for making mind-bending Halloween displays. Check out his past work here. gerG says: Peter has created some of my favorite Halloween displays EVER. His sunken pirate ship, and that amazing crashed locomotive were the most startling constructions I've seen. And his robots. OMG. He needs $2,000 to fund it. Peter's amazing Halloween display
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| What Kevin Kelly learned about technology when he homeschooled his son Posted: 23 Sep 2010 02:47 PM PDT My friend Kevin Kelly always has interesting observations. Last year he homeschooled his 8th grade son for a year. He wrote about it for the New York Times Magazine. Here's a list of the things he learned about technology from the experience: Technology will change faster than we can teach it. My son studied the popular programming language C++ in his home-school year; that knowledge could be economically useless soon. The accelerating pace of technology means his eventual adult career does not exist yet. Of course it won't be taught in school. But technological smartness can be. Here is the kind of literacy that we tried to impart:Achieving Techno-Literacy
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| Nude Feud: Fundamentalist nudists terrorize naked swingers in France Posted: 23 Sep 2010 02:01 PM PDT  A Nudist Beach at Cap d'Agde, France (Wikipedia). The nudist holiday getaway of Cap d'Agde, on France's Languedoc coast, has become ground zero in a war between two factions of the clothing-free: "traditional" naturists, and free sex advocates or "libertines." All hell broke loose at a "naked city" town council meeting this week. From the UK Independent: Old-fashioned naturists have been complaining for years that Cap d'Agde's once-sedate nudist quarter has been disfigured by an influx of partner-swapping clubs and raunchy hotels. A flurry of arson attacks on sex clubs two years ago was blamed on low-level terrorism by nudist fundamentalists.Oh, but on the other side? They're no innocents either, mon frere. Another snip from the Independent article, this part attributed to Deirdre Morrissey—a journalist with the Irish Independent who "sampled the nightlife" and found the libertines to be pretty pushy:
Nudists fight for bare essentials as swingers invade holiday colony (Independent.co.uk) (Nudism brochure scan from the Flickr stream of "A Journey Round My Skull.")
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| Posted: 23 Sep 2010 01:31 PM PDT Jason Kitcat, a town councillor in Brighton, England, faces suspension from the council for posting clips of town meetings to YouTube. The council says that his attempt to "hold the administration politically to account" by trying "to highlight what the he believed were the administration's deficiencies" constitutes a political use of the council's "intellectual property." This is prohibited. These rules are designed to stop unfair use of telephones and offices to campaign for re-election, for instance. The rules are not meant to be applied to matters of free speech, with no impact on council finances, using tools that are freely available to everyone.Brighton tries to use copyright to censor Councillor
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| Big Agriculture in CA gets $180K in federal funds to fight pesticide critics Posted: 23 Sep 2010 12:42 PM PDT  Image: A CC-licensed photo by Pink Sherbet Photography. If this news alert from the Environmental Working Group is to be believed, The CA Dept. of Food and Agriculture has awarded $180,000 in federal funds to finance an agribusiness-chemical industry plan to combat its critics, which include various health, consumer and organic farming advocates who have campaigned against overuse of pesticides on food crops (including, it should be noted, The Environmental Working Group). California officials announced last Friday (Sept. 17) that the Alliance for Food and Farming would receive $180,000 to "correct the misconception that some fresh produce items contain excessive amounts of pesticide residues." The state press release added that the grant would go to rebut "claims by activist groups about unsafe levels of pesticides [that] have been widely reported in the media for many years, but have largely gone uncontested. ... The goal is to generate more balanced media reporting and change public perception about the safety of produce when it comes to pesticide residues."(via @ethicurean)
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| Bearded lady and long-lost son to appear on Maury Posted: 23 Sep 2010 10:19 AM PDT Last week, I posted about Richard Lorenc, a man who searched for his long-lost birth mother and found out she's Vivian Wheeler, a famous bearded lady who made a career on the carnie circuit. Now, the two will appear on The Maury Show where DNA testing will reveal whether they're definitely blood relations. From AOl News: "Bearded Lady and Son Face DNA Test on 'Maury Show'"
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| Posted: 23 Sep 2010 01:04 PM PDT  "I went on essentially a plant-based diet. I live on beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit." Former President Bill Clinton on the foodie details and health impact of his newfound whole-foods, low-starch, mostly vegan diet. Sounds basically like what Joi Ito and our own Cory Doctorow have blogged about previously (both also noting positive personal impact). Full disclosure here: I made a similar switch earlier this year, as an experiment, and have had a similarly positive experience. I've also been working with a very skeptical MD to do blood tests and other measurements, to test the theory: so far everything checks out far better than either of us expected. Read the whole transcript. I dig his empirical, pragmatic, "self-experimentation" approach. (Photo by Xeni Jardin.)
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| Sascha Nordmeyer's forced-smile stent Posted: 23 Sep 2010 09:55 AM PDT  Designer Sascha Nordmeyer made a forced-smile stent out of red plastic and photographed people using it. (Via Design Boom)
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| Posted: 23 Sep 2010 09:47 AM PDT  Oh, those fabulous Midwestern tropical seas! For those of you not in the know, the middle of the United States spent a lot of deep time underwater as various inland seas rose and drained over millions of years. Today, you can see the result in a tendency toward decidedly marine fossils throughout the region. Kansas is full of great, little rice grain fusulinids and hunks of chambered, tubular shell broken off the bodies of long-dead baculites. I went through a phase as a kid where I was all huffy about the dearth of fossilized charismatic megafauna in my backyard, but I pretty quickly got over it, soothed by how easy it was to find the small stuff. Case in point, these lovely shots of fossilized corals, taken by paleo-blogger David Orr at Indiana's Falls of the Ohio state park, where it's just a short walk through a shallow patch of river to reach an outcropping of exposed 380 million-year-old limestone. The picture above is a horn coral, but Orr took a lot more shots of several different kinds of coral—some of which are even home to living animals today. You can check out some more photos and his descriptions at the Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs site.
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| Woman tracks down man who broke into her car Posted: 23 Sep 2010 09:48 AM PDT On Salon, Amanda Enayati wrote an engrossing piece about how she used the Web to track down a man who broke into her car, stealing her wallet and other items. See, aspiring thief, you just never know what you're stepping into when you hit up a random car on a random street. However badass you think you may be, there is someone on the other side of the robbery. And in this particular case it was someone who escaped the Iranian Revolution as a child; who roamed the world alone for five years because her parents couldn't get out; who watched from a dozen blocks away as the twin towers crumbled; who had just barely clawed her way out of that concentration camp known as late-stage cancer, if only because she was intent on raising her babies, come hell or high water. And all of this before she even turned 40. Can you see how that someone might be way more twisted than you?My relentless pursuit of the guy who robbed me" A thief broke into my car. I used Craigslist, a dating site, MySpace and a fast food joint to track him down (Via Cynical-C)
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| Posted: 22 Sep 2010 11:22 AM PDT  The "Mesh" describes businesses and organizations that share stuff, fueled in part by the mobile web & social networks. Mesh lifestyles and businesses embrace a world in which access to things trumps owning them. In my book, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, I talk about dozens of these new outfits, and why they are growing at such a prodigious rate. There are a couple of thousand more at www.meshing.it. Well-known examples include car & bike sharing, (Zipcar , B Cycle & GetAround) and vacation home-sharing services. (AirBnB & VRBO). But there are lots of more surprising ideas brought to market -- fashion & craft exchanges, tools libraries, p2p energy, co-working, rooftop farming, p2p money lending, technology driven by sharing, and support for the arts. Mesh companies leverage billions of dollars of investment in tech and physical infrastructure, and are relatively inexpensive to start and run. For many people, the Mesh will provide opportunities to generate extra income (through "meshing" your possessions on sites that help with all the details), and to save money by only accessing goods and services only when you need them, rather than aspiring to own one of everything. In the next decade, I predict, this model will conspicuously shape how we think about our lives and work and will shake-up the buy-and-throw-away economy. (hint: it already has) By re-using, repairing, and recycling goods, the Mesh also makes sense as the global population zooms toward 9 billion persons. Meshing It
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| Purported HP Slate appears in video Posted: 23 Sep 2010 08:26 AM PDT Remember when Microsoft rushed to announce its own new tablet when it became clear Apple was about the drop the iPad? And how it would run Windows 7? And the arguments over the continued wisdom of tablets running heavy-duty desktop operating systems in the touchscreen age? A purported hands-on of HP's Slate is out, and you can decide for yourself whether it's cookin'. One innovative feature is the hardware CTRL-ALT-DELETE button, so you can quickly kill any browser processes that Adobe Flash has hung. [via Daring Fireball]   |
| How a man caught covered in blood was acquitted of murder Posted: 23 Sep 2010 07:14 AM PDT  In Jazz Age Brooklyn, police arrested dockworker Francesco Travia as he dumped a bulky, wrapped lump into the river. His shoes and socks were caked in blood. And, in his apartment, they found half of a dead woman. But Francesco Travia wasn't guilty of murder, writes Deborah Blum, In a story taken from her book, The Poisoner's Handbook, she recounts how a smart investigator and the early techniques of forensic science saved an innocent man.
The Guardian: Forensic Science Was Not Always CSI-Style Teamwork
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| Fashion Week Dispatch: Samantha Pleet proves eco-couture need not "scream green" Posted: 23 Sep 2010 02:32 PM PDT Video: Samantha Pleet SS 2011, Starring Victoria Legrand, Directed by David Black. Mercedes Benz Fashion Week might have a new location this year at Lincoln Center, but the freshest and most creative fashion presentations arguably were found off-site. A perfect example was Samantha Pleet's Spring/Summer 2011 presentation, which was part of the Greenshows downtown. A film created by Pleet's friend David Black featured BeachHouse singer Victoria Legrand as a star-crossed lover. The film and still images were projected onto the walls surrounding models styled by Christina Turner in jewelry by Bliss Lau and shoes designed specially for Pleet by Osborne. Nothing about the clothing looked particularly eco-friendly, ethically sound or fair trade, but it was nice to know that fantastic design and styling can be all those things without screaming "green." To top off the evening, Pleet gathered friends and fans at the Classic Car Club, where she and I grabbed a seat in 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder for a quick interview... (Photographs by Kristen Philipkoski) KP: How did the film collaboration come about? SP: Dave and I had worked on my last spring film. We're really good friends. My friend Turner also really wanted to style the film, so the three of us came together went down to Baltimore's Pretty Boy Dam. (Beachhouse is from Baltimore). We were a tight crew of eight people and we drove down in two cars, and shot the whole thing over a weekend. It ended up being this lost lovers film of finding something 10 years later and having this melancholy but beautiful feeling towards it which really went well with the collection. KP: What was your inspiration for Spring/Summer 2011? SP: Twin Peaks is always an inspiration for me. I'm really influenced by film: Godard, David Lynch, Czech new age films. I think the subconscious element really comes out in my designs. I was also reading Franny and Zooey and Moby Dick, so the line has a nautical New England twisted preppiness with the collared shirts. They're very masculine. KP: What's your over-arching approach to designing clothes? SP: I want the girl to be able to create her own story and feel special in the clothes. I'm not so trend driven. You could put (one of my pieces) on five years later, or give it to your grandchildren one day. I wear my grandmother's clothes from the 50s. But i don't want my clothes to look vintage. I want them to be modern but have that feeling.
SP: We are best friends we share everything. He's so creative but we are very different. I'm very fast with a million ideas, and he's very deliberate. Our two minds work well together in our relationship and our work. We have a very strong relationship; we're very lucky. KP: Tell me how your line is "green?" SP: I work with all local business and source my material as locally as possible. I work with people who i really believe in, like Osborne. I'm pretty much a one-person company. I produce everything locally in New York City. I use organic cottons. I think I have a really small carbon footprint. I hand-deliver my garments to stores in New York, and as I've been growing bigger that hasn't changed. All the clothes in my collaboration with Urban Outfitters were organic.
Above: Dave Black and Samantha Pleet.
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| The insect highways in the sky Posted: 23 Sep 2010 06:04 AM PDT In this world, we humans are but hobos, living beneath several layers of insect interstate highway. On any given summer day, there are three billion bugs in the air above our heads. This video from NPR explains what they're all doing up there. Via the Bug Girl blog
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| Bank of America forecloses on a man who has no mortgage Posted: 23 Sep 2010 05:07 AM PDT Jason Grodensky, a Fort Lauderdale man who bought his house with cash last December was surprised to discover that Bank of America had foreclosed on him, though he has no mortgage. Florida's foreclosure mills being what they are, the checks and balances against erroneous foreclosure have eroded to the point where banks can seize and sell homes they have no interest in.
Man's home sold out from under him in foreclosure mistake
(Image: Thumbnail from larger photo by Robert Duyos, Sun Sentinel)
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Digital by Design: This is a great book that showcases some fabulous projects that can inspire anyone who wants to get into the business of "physical computing" and making stuff professionally. A lot of my peers and people I look up to are in there. - Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Arduino hacker 
KOKO BE GOOD
Despite Wheeler's beard, (Lorenc) just hopes "The Maury Show" doesn't turn it into a sideshow. 
Grodensky's story and other tales of foreclosure mistakes started popping up recently across South Florida. This week, GMAC Mortgage -- one of the nation's largest mortgage servicers and a major mortgage lender -- told real estate agents to stop evicting residents and suspend sales of properties that had been taken from homeowners in foreclosure. The company said it might have to "correct" some of its foreclosures, but was not halting those in process. 
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