The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Leak fallout: Putin angry at U.S.; China had it up to here with North Korea; Prince Andrew "is a twat."
- CAPL, an open multilingual photo dictionary
- San Francisco's steep hills
- Walt Disney World employees demand a living wage
- Astonishing jump-rope team skipping their way into my heart
- Philadelphia Type-In for vintage typewriter restorers
- Help Readergirlz donate 125,000 great books to low-income teens
- TSA "opt out" parody from the Red vs Blue creators
- Hotel peephole doctored for easy removal and spying
- DC-area county official says TSA patdowns are "homosexual agenda"
- Chain of Command
- Seattle Streets Are Gangsta
- Love is a Stranger
- Hairpiece or Herpes?
- Gates on Wikileaks: "Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.''
- Beautiful illustration of fantasy-science
- Home made spectrometer tells you what rainbows mean
- Jack Shafer: "I love Wikileaks for restoring distrust in our most important institutions."
- Hungry rats vs. a scary-looking LEGO robot
- Graph of jobs lost in recessions since 1948
- How the Bandit, Coors and a bunch of Makers changed the course of booze history
- PUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDI
- Interpol issues "Red Notice" for arrest of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange over "sex crime"
- DIY metallurgists liberate and scrap America's vital telephony substrate
- TSAnta Claus tee
- Holiday Cool Tools Contest
- Freeway-blocking Imperial Stars charged with felonies
- Makers Market refugees
- American Pickers' Mike Wolfe and vintage bicycles
- Boing Boing is answer to "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" TV game show question
| Posted: 01 Dec 2010 05:11 AM PST • Breaking news on the Prince Andrew beat! Wikileaked missives analyzed today have him praising bribery, directly meddling in a corruption investigation, and being the recipient of the sort of praise that cannot be offered without caveats such as "He is a twat." [The Guardian] • Vladimir "Dobby" Putin is upset. One cable, attributed to U.S. Defense chief Robert Gates, reported Russian democracy has 'disappeared,' to be replaced by an oligarchy centered on the state security apparatus. Putin warned him to stay out of Russian affairs, suggested that the country may develop new nuclear weapons should the U.S. fail to cut a new security deal with it, and pointed out that unlike at least one U.S. president, he did in fact get the most votes. [NYT] • Barbed wire fences in Pakistan are inordinately expensive, at least when you are paying for them. Did you know it cost $70m to maintain radars to help fend off the Taliban Air Force? The nonexistence of this martial institution is apparently not an impediment to those cutting the checks. So confusing! • Not to be outdone by Sarah Palin calling for Julian Assange's assassination, Mike Huckabee says he wants presumed leaker Bradley Manning dead. • China is indeed 'ready to abandon' North Korea, says the Guardian.   |
| CAPL, an open multilingual photo dictionary Posted: 29 Nov 2010 07:57 PM PST  As a language teacher, I am always making my own materials. Good language teachers do this habitually. We don't only rely on content provided to us; we constantly tinker with materials, re-form them, borrow, adapt, and use anything we can get our hands on to make the language learning process more relevant and interesting to our students. We are essentially "makers" of curricular materials. Images do improve vocabulary acquisition and are essential for the instruction of culture. Simply put, access to good media is limited for teachers. Sure, we all have MS Clipart, but how do you explain a ticket cancelling machine in the unit on public transit with clipart? Or how do you convey what a Döner is? An image is a good place to start. Simply taking images from search engines doesn't always work. There can be too many and finding the right image is often hard when you want to convey a specific cultural idea in a different language. In 2003 I approached a colleague of mine at W&J College about a project idea I had.Jason Parkhill, now director of academic IT services at Colby College, worked with me to help design, program, and provide content for what we consider to be the first "authentic" picture dictionary. It is a classic academic project that was under funded, too complex for two people, and for which we were unsure of the target audience. We went with the non-sexy name of a "pictorial lexicon" as we thought it best described our efforts to visually represent a set of words in a given language. The images in CAPL are not generic representations of objects, but are photos taken in an unaltered context. Since German is my field, I figured we would start there as a way to attack the problem I had finding high quality images for my German classes. In designing the database, we went with the strategy of providing a limited amount of meta-data to accompany each image. We basically have two categories for each image, an English description, and a short vernacular description. In a world of too much information, limited data can be a blessing. • Try finding an image in our database. It is fairly easy. If you are looking for an image of a specific object in a culture, my hope is that you can easily find it there. Clearly there are other sources for images, Corbis, Getty, and Wikipedia for example, but the amount of information there can be something through which you must wade with knee high boots. Besides Wikipedia, the cost of other photo databases is prohibitive. The German database was well received by the teaching community, logging 6 million page views in a few years. Yes, BoingBoing gets 10 million a month, but for a home grown teacher resource and almost no funding, we feel like we came a long way to make our point about visual aspects of different languages. Last year, however, we got a grant to start to expand the database and re-program it to handle multiple languages. Two very sympathetic IT guys at the college, Jason Pergola and Brad Kita, came on board and put in a lot of time to adapt the database to handle multiple languages and keep the interface simple. We also added some new content and the new database works well. You might even find an image of a Russian banana if you desire to look at one. Once we have some content and an editor, we can expand into any language and are editing new databases currently. Behind the CAPL database has always been the spirit of sharing content so that other educators may "make their own" lessons. We use a Creative Commons 3.0 US License to allow for free non-commercial use and adaption. We actually encourage use and adaption of the images there. Schools, universities, or any nonprofit entity or individual may use these authentic photos for a variety of purposes. Use them on a school web site; put them in a blog, print them on a credit card for all we care. The images come in three sizes from thumbnail to very large and we are constantly expanding. My college (Washington & Jefferson) has long been a supporter of this open content project. Connexions is a great resource database cataloging numerous open content projects for making your own educational materials. My long term hope is that at some point there will be a truly authentic visual dictionary that is multi-lingual and authentic. Current search engines don't have an elegant way to sift through visual content with a cultural filter. Perhaps it could be done with geo-tagging in combination with meta-data, but for now our project does it by hand. We are trudging along with our group of volunteer experts who edit the images we have in our database. It is a type of "slow media" project. As you can see in our database list, there are some starter projects just getting off the ground with less than 1000 unique entries, and we have other languages that have many more images in the database. For now, if you need a CC licensed photo of a particular object, try CAPL. I recently was at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Conference 19 talking about the pedagogical reasons for using authentic images over generic images and how teachers can use CAPL to make their own multi-media learning materials. I have provided some examples of how teachers are already using these images in the traditional language learning classroom, but I would love to hear from some creative readers what they think they could do with the images in an electronic learning environment. How would you make a web based vocabulary learning game out of the images? Would you adapt it for a mobile device? If so, which platform? What are your experiences with educational media? (From film strips to pod casts) I am exploring options for mobile learning using authentic images now and will start once we have our funding in place. In the academic world, we might say "There's a grant for that." Knock, knock, Gates foundation.   |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:55 PM PST  Håkan Dahlström got this delightful shot of one of San Francisco's steeper hills, turning his camera so that the road (and not the houses) were at level to convey the extent of the slope. Crazy hills of San Francisco (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) |
| Walt Disney World employees demand a living wage Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:52 PM PST Long, drawn out negotiations between Walt Disney World and the Services Trade Council have not resulted in a contract for the 20,000 cast-members the STC represents. In this video, the affected cast-members explain how their wages have failed to keep pace with inflation, meaning a de-facto paycut that has some of them visiting local food-banks to stay fed. Disney's cast-members are some of the most remarkable people I've ever met; as a visitor to Walt Disney World, I want them to receive a living wage. |
| Astonishing jump-rope team skipping their way into my heart Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:48 PM PST In this remarkable performance at the US naval academy, the Kings Firecrackers jump-rope team conduct a high-intensity, skip-rope-fuelled close-order drill that seriously agogified me. Kings Firecrackers (via Reddit)   |
| Philadelphia Type-In for vintage typewriter restorers Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:44 PM PST A group of Philadelphia-area manual typewriter enthusiasts are staging a "type-in" with free typing paper, carbons and stamped envelopes -- it runs on Dec 18 at the Bridgewater's Pub in the 30th Street Station: A pleasant afternoon of manual typewriting?   |
| Help Readergirlz donate 125,000 great books to low-income teens Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:39 PM PST Awesome kids' book author and literacy activist Lorie Ann Grover sez, "readergirlz and First Book are partnering to give away more than 125,000 brand-new books to low-income teen readers. We need help getting the word out about the A Novel Gift campaign. Let's get organizations serving these teens registered with First Book so they can be matched with inventory during the holidays. If you participate, drop us a note at readergirlz@gmail.com to be included in our blog roll of thanks to run December 31." rgz and First Book Partner for A Novel Gift! Over 125,000 free books to low-income teens (Thanks, Lorie Ann, via Submitterator!)   |
| TSA "opt out" parody from the Red vs Blue creators Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:35 PM PST Rooster Teeth, creators of the brilliant Red vs Blue machinima series, produced this chortle-inducing short about the essential and creepy incoherence of the security theory that says aviation safety is improved by allowing the TSA to see and touch our junk. TSA invades House Party (Thanks, AirPillo, via Submitterator!)
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| Hotel peephole doctored for easy removal and spying Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:31 PM PST Last week, as Kent Brewster was leaving his hotel room in the morning, he found a small piece of crumpled paper on the floor of his room; he realized that this had been used to plug up the peephole in the door, which had been doctored to allow people in the hallway to spy on the goings-on in the room. Says Kent: " The hotel manager took care of me--and was just as freaked as I was, and instantly sent housekeeping to check every room--so I don't want to call them out by name ... but still ... brrr! Creepy!" Check your peephole when you check in! (Thanks, Kentbrew, via Submitterator!)
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| DC-area county official says TSA patdowns are "homosexual agenda" Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:26 PM PST The crazy, it burns: Loudon County, VA Board of Supervisors representative Eugene Delgaudio says TSA patdowns are part of the "homosexual agenda": "It's the federal employee's version of the Gay Bill of Special Rights... That means the next TSA official that gives you an 'enhanced pat down' could be a practicing homosexual secretly getting pleasure from your submission." (Thanks, Frank!)   |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:26 PM PST  This remarkable painting apparently hangs on a hotel wall in New Orleans. Anyone know anything else about it?  |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:32 PM PST  The streets of Seattle are no longer safe--for cute little dogs and fiber-optic cables. First, The Seattle Times reported today on the strange case of a dog being electrocuted as it walked down the street. A privately and legally installed street light lacked proper grounding, and the dog was zapped walking over a metal plate on the sidewalk. My condolences to Lisa Kibben, who lost her 68-pound German shorthair pointer, Sammy, in this bizarre event. The utility dispatched a crew immediately, fixed the problem, and apologized, trying to reassure the public that we (and perhaps our sub-70-pound children) are not in danger. This reminded me of the peculiar death of Jodie S. Lane in Manhattan (East Village) in 2004, walking down the street with her two dogs when one apparently received a severe shock, and Lane, unaware of what was happening, attempted to help the dogs. The dogs survived. Jodie's father, Roger M. Lane, received a massive amount of information about electrified Con Ed objects and shocks caused to people as part of a settlement. He created a Web site which showed the 31,900 objects found to cause electrical shocks between 2004 and 2009. Seattle has no such history, but you can imagine that Emerald City denizens will be skipping metal panels for a while. Second, local Seattle business site TechFlash reported that a bullet was fired into a fiber-optic cable owned by Comcast, severing access to 2,500 customers. The motivation is unknown, and the company isn't asking for a police investigation. Oddly enough, this is not the first time. A Comcast spokesperson told TechFlash, "About 13 years ago, someone shot a bullet into a main fiber line in Tacoma on New Year's Eve, knocking out service to about half the city." Man, I guess people are really angry about Comcast's attempting legal contractual modification of a peering agreement with Level 3. First they came for the fiber-optic cables, and I tweeted nothing. Photo by Photocopy, used via Creative Commons.  |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 09:24 PM PST |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 07:38 PM PST  From the people who brought you Bacon or Beer Can, now this: Hairpiece or Herpes? (via reposter, thanks teapot) |
| Gates on Wikileaks: "Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.'' Posted: 30 Nov 2010 06:22 PM PST "Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.''—Defense Secty. Robert Gates, on the Wikileaks "Cablegate" fallout.   |
| Beautiful illustration of fantasy-science Posted: 30 Nov 2010 06:18 PM PST  From the cover of the May 28, 1954 issue of Colliers. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is an illustration. Just lovely. Paleo-Future blogger Matt Novak (whose presence in the Twin Cities is sorely missed) says this cover story is just the tip of a very big iceberg. Controlling the weather was right up there with flying cars in mid-century dreams of the Future.   |
| Home made spectrometer tells you what rainbows mean Posted: 30 Nov 2010 06:00 PM PST  Don't tell the Double-Rainbow guy, but all those beautiful colors really can have a deeper meaning. That's because different chemicals reflect and absorb different wavelengths of light, leaving tell-tale patterns in the rainbow. If you know what colors specific chemicals absorb, you can look at the light reflected off a sample and use the rainbow to figure out what you've got. That's basically what a spectrometer does. And blogger Charles Soeder made his own.
There's more photos of all the different parts in his set-up. My favorite features the helpful caption, "This is where the rainbow goes." (Thanks to Kevin Zelnio!)   |
| Jack Shafer: "I love Wikileaks for restoring distrust in our most important institutions." Posted: 30 Nov 2010 05:34 PM PST "If you want to dismiss [Julian Assange] just because he's a seething jerk, there are about 2,000 journalists I'd like you to meet."—Jack Shafer, Slate.com.   |
| Hungry rats vs. a scary-looking LEGO robot Posted: 30 Nov 2010 05:29 PM PST  Fear is like hot porridge. Too much is bad. Not enough is bad. You want that balance to be just right. The amygdala is the part of the brain tasked with job of playing Goldilocks. If it's overactive, you'll end up a quivering ball of uselessness. If it's missing, you'll be an action-movie badass—right up until the point where you get yourself killed. At least, that's how it worked in rats when researchers at the University of Washington put a terrifying, snappy-jawed LEGO robot between the rats and their food. Faced with that threat, healthy rats quickly learned to snatch food that was just out of the robot's reach—while leaving the robot-guarded food alone. But amygdala-less rats just didn't care. They went after all the food, getting close enough to the Predator-Bot that they'd have likely been eaten had it been a Killer Predator-Bot. Meanwhile, rats with too much activity in their amygdala gave up on the food entirely, rather than get anywhere near the robot's toothy jaws. And there are videos of this experiment. Chief among them: The robot's view of the situation. (Thanks, hectocotyli!)   |
| Graph of jobs lost in recessions since 1948 Posted: 30 Nov 2010 05:27 PM PST  Can't we do a census every six months? Kelsey C., a master's student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, sent in this image from Calculated Risk showing the percent of jobs lost in each recession since 1948, relative to the peak of the pre-recession job market. In terms of the percent of jobs lost, the current recession is by far the worst we've seen since World War IIGraph of jobs lost in recessions since 1948   |
| How the Bandit, Coors and a bunch of Makers changed the course of booze history Posted: 30 Nov 2010 04:58 PM PST  So last night, while attempting to explain the plot of Smokey and the Bandit to my husband, it occurred to me that I didn't really understand the back story that spawned this, one of my favorite childhood films. Why did Bandit and Snowman (and Fred) have a long way to go and a short time to get there? There was beer in most parts of Georgia by the 1970s. And even if you were trying to get booze to a dry county, why start in Texas and only give yourself 28 hours? Thanks to Wikipedia and the very helpful Stephan Zielinski, I discovered the awful truth—Smokey and the Bandit is centered around America's brief love affair with Coors Banquet Beer. All that work, for Coors? It's true. Wikipedia explained that the beer wasn't available East of Oklahoma at the time. But I didn't get the full extent of what was really going on until I read a 1974 Time magazine article sent to me by Zielinski. If, like me, you didn't begin drinking until the late 1990s, this is going to come as a shock, but, once upon a time, Coors was apparently the best American breweries had to offer.
There were connoisseurs of Coors, y'all. Let that sink in. Besides explaining why that truckload of unpasteurized, preservative-free Coors had to get from Texas to Georgia so damn fast, the Time article also spent a few inches discussing the Coors family's business plan and predicted trends in the American beer industry. It's easy to forget, with the variety available today, but craft beer is a pretty recent thing. From Prohibition through the 1970s, America's breweries were consolidating, and choice was shrinking. In 1974, there were only 60 breweries left in America, with most of them making the same style. 660 breweries had gone out of business since 1934. And nobody expected that ever-narrowing path to diverge. In fact, Bill Coors told Time that there would only be three major breweries left in the United States by 1990. His plan was for Coors to be one of them. At the time this article was written, it was clear to everybody that mediocre, watered-down pilsner was the way of the future. And yet, here I sit, more than 35 years later, with a tall glass of Belgian-style black ale. Ironically, from Colorado. I have Makers to thank for this change of tipsy fortune—people who wanted to make their own beer at home, just because they liked that sort of thing. They're the ones who got Prohibition-era laws changed, opening opportunities for bars and small companies to make their own beer, in a wide variety of styles. It was slow going. Places like Kansas didn't legalize brew pubs until the late 1980s. It wasn't until 2009 that the good folks at Free the Hops managed to convince the state of Alabama to legalize beer with an alcohol volume above 6%. (You'd be surprised how much good stuff the old laws banned.) But I have to wonder: How many of those Makers were inspired to brew something amazing when they discovered that "not terrible" was a possibility? After all, Smokey and the Bandit was one of the most popular movies of 1977. After that, it was no secret that beer could be at least slightly better. Within three years, brewery consolidation had ground to a halt and begun to reverse. Today, there are more than 1400 breweries in the United States. Even Coors—successfully the third largest brewer in America—sells a selection of craft beers under different labels. I don't drink Coors Banquet Beer, but I suspect I owe it a toast or two. It, the DIY community, and an old rascal called The Bandit. Some rights reserved by david.nikonvscanon   |
| PUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDI Posted: 30 Nov 2010 04:41 PM PST At this very moment, 4chan founder Moot is experimenting with fake ads for pudding, or something, and /b/ is going crazy. It all seems to revolve around this Japanese pudding ad, which Cory blogged here on Boing Boing a month ago.
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| Interpol issues "Red Notice" for arrest of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange over "sex crime" Posted: 30 Nov 2010 04:52 PM PST Kevin Poulsen at Wired News: "The international police organization Interpol has issued a Red Notice for the arrest of WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange, in connection with a sex crime investigation in Sweden." A copy of the Interpol notice is here. The timing, just a couple of days after the largest leak ever, is interesting. Certainly sounds simpler than arresting him for the leaks. Assange is reportedly "at a secret location somewhere outside London, along with fellow hackers and WikiLeaks enthusiasts." |
| DIY metallurgists liberate and scrap America's vital telephony substrate Posted: 30 Nov 2010 01:57 PM PST Spiraling commodity prices and a plummeting US job market have apparently made digging up copper phone lines and selling them for scrappage an attractive proposition. AT&T is offering $3K for information leading to the arrest of the copper scrappers who freelanced enough copper out of the fertile Atlanta soil to knock 7,000 people offline. It's part of a wider nationwide pattern of DIY five-finger discount recycling -- 100 miles of copper vanished from Appalachia, three hits to the same NJ station, and a $75K score also in the Garden State. AT&T goes after copper wire thieves (via /.)   |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 01:55 PM PST  Ape Lad sez, "Here's the latest shirt I designed for woot. Perfect for your holiday air travel!"   |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 02:41 PM PST  If you are going to give a gift why not make it a useful one? What tools or tool-ish gifts will you be giving this holiday season? Share with us your favorite utilitarian gifts by sending us a description and link. We'll award the best review a prize from the prize pool. We'll be assembling a running list of the best gift ideas, so submit as many gift ideas as you would like. Remember, a great Cool Tool review consists of the following five parts: 1) a succinct description of what the tool is, 2) how it changed your behavior, 3) why Cool Tools should run the item, 4) why it is superior to other things, 5) why we should believe you, 6) and why you're giving it as a gift Submissions will be accepted until Monday December   |
| Freeway-blocking Imperial Stars charged with felonies Posted: 30 Nov 2010 01:53 PM PST The Imperial Stars, who blocked the 101 freeway in Los Angeles with a moving truck in October to punish drivers with their abysmal music, have been charged with felonies. "The   |
| Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:20 AM PST  Since the Makers Market shut, a group of self-described "MM Refugees" set up an Etsy treasury to promote their "wonderful science, tech and artistic creations." Some of my favorite items from the Makers Market are in their collection, from nixie clocks to the Time Bandits map to the phillips head steampunk earrings. Great gift ideas! MM Refugees (Etsy) MM Regufees (Facebook) |
| American Pickers' Mike Wolfe and vintage bicycles Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:14 AM PST  Mike Wolfe of the History Channel's "American Pickers" is a junk archeologist even during his free time. Mostly, he feeds his jones for vintage bicycles. Over at Collectors Weekly, Ben Marks talked to Wolfe about old bikes, from Victorian high weelers to balloon-tire Schwinns: "Mike Wolfe On His Love Affair With Vintage Bikes"   |
| Boing Boing is answer to "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" TV game show question Posted: 30 Nov 2010 10:18 AM PST  Boing Boing reader John Wessling of Texas kindly alerted us to the fact that "Boing Boing" was the answer to a question on the television game show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire," hosted by Meredith Viera. The contestant incorrectly chose "Bang Bang," and lost $20,000. |
Long before the laptop or the mainframe, writers, reporters, and bureaucrats alike relied on the typewriter to get the word out. Today, only a few companies make typewriters--but thousands of classic Remingtons, Underwoods, and Olivettis are still around, waiting to be dusted off. Just as vinyl records have held their mojo in a digital world, these miniature printing presses are attracting a new group of fans, many half the age of the typewriters they've lovingly restored. 
They're great books, too, donated by generous publishers. Among the three dozen choices are P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast's HOUSE OF NIGHT series and Alyson Noël's SHADOWLAND. 
The FBI report shows that industry and local officials are taking countermeasures to help address the scrapper problem, but apparently much more needs to be done. For example, while a variety of physical and technological security measures have been taken there are limited resources available to enforce these laws, and a very small percentage of perpetrators are arrested and convicted. Additionally, as copper thefts are typically addressed as misdemeanors, those individuals convicted pay relatively low fines and serve short prison terms. 
The late '80s, early '90s, was the heyday of balloon-tire bike collecting. That's when Schwinn went crazy. This was before the bankruptcy and everything, and they were trying to create a museum in Chicago. Schwinn had warehouses full of its turn-of-the-century bikes, but they had failed to keep any of their balloon-tire stuff. So they hired James Hurd as a curator for their museum, and he started selling off all these turn-of-the-century bikes to enable for them to acquire balloon-tire ones.
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