Wednesday, January 12, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Confessions of a Disney World castmember

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 12:06 AM PST

HOWTO make a secure, decentralized, human-readable name system

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 11:58 PM PST

Aaron Swartz has posted a clever proposal for locating things on the Internet (such as web-pages), without having to resort to a centralized authority, while still making the names we give to objects readable by human beings (that is, without assigning them long strings of random crypto-gibberish). This is in answer to Zooko's widely cited paper arguing that Internet names can only have two out of these three properties: secure, decentralized and human readable.

This stuff is more important than ever, especially now that governments are asserting the right to confiscate domain names like wikileaks.org. A decentralized system for naming and locating stuff would be much harder to censor.

Let there be a document called the scroll. The scroll consists of a series of lines and each line consists of a tuple (name, key, nonce) such that the first N bits of the hash of the scroll from the beginning to the end of a line are all zero. As a result, to add a line to the scroll, you need to do enough computation to discover an appropriate nonce that causes the bits of the hash to be zero.

To look up a name, you ask everyone you know for the scroll, trust whichever scroll is the longest, and then start from the beginning and take the key for the first line with the name you're looking up. To publish a name, you find an appropriate nonce and then send the new line to everyone you know.

Be sure to RTFA before commenting; the solution proposed here is quite elegant.

Squaring the Triangle: Secure, Decentralized, Human-Readable Names

 


Insects made of human hair

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 12:02 AM PST

Jeff Koons claims to own all balloon dogs

Posted: 12 Jan 2011 12:09 AM PST

Lawyers representing Jeff Koons, the pop artist known for remixing common objects and other peoples' art, have demanded that San Francisco's Park Life stop selling book-ends that look like balloon dogs. Koons's lawyers argue that since Koons once produced a set of iconic statues of balloon dogs, all representations of balloon dogs are henceforth Koons's exclusive purview, and anyone who makes or sells a balloon dog infringes on Koons's copyright.

I always say that every pirate wishes he was an admiral, but it's not often that you get as clear an example as this: having built a career on the flexibilities in copyright law that allow artists to make transformative use of the works around them, Koons now wishes to terminate those flexibilities and award himself exclusive rights over all the works he's made, and the works that inspired them.

This is a textbook case of why artists who argue against copyright flexibilities should be viewed with great skepticism; like the established fashion designers who say that it's unfair that clothing patterns don't qualify for copyright (and never mind the fact that all these designers benefited enormously from the right to copy popular designs when they were starting out), Koons believes that copyright flexibilities should only apply to him, and not to the artists who come after him.


lawyers of american artist jeff koons issued a cease-and-desist letter to park life, a small san francisco store and gallery, asking them to stop selling and advertising their balloon dog bookends.

can koons own something that existed before him? also considering that the artist has based his whole career on appropriating pop culture and has been repeatedly sued for inappropriately using others' copyrighted images.

jeff koons : can one copyright a balloon animal? (Thanks, Pesco!)
 


HOWTO make a motorcycle out of cigarette lighters

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 10:57 PM PST

Calvin and Hobbes/Fight Club mashup

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 10:45 PM PST

A reader writes: "A Fight Club/Calvin And Hobbes mashup. The first rule of 'G.R.O.S.S.' (The Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS Club) is you do not talk about G.R.O.S.S."

A GorillaMash-Up: I Am Jack's Calvin And Hobbes

 


Timelapse: a year in Norway

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 10:42 PM PST

HOWTO avoid writer's block

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 05:00 AM PST

Great advice from Roald Dahl (via Lifehacker) on keeping your momentum going on big projects: leave the last task you're working on before putting the project away unfinished. I always do this when working on long writing projects, like novels: I stop mid-sentence at the end of each session. That way, the next time I sit down to work, I can type several words without having to be "creative," and by the time I've done that, I'm back in the groove.
"When you are going good, stop writing." And that means that if everything's going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter's going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don't go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next?
Leave Your Tasks Unfinished to Maintain Momentum and Avoid Mental Blocks
 


China bans Bayesian statistics textbook

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 04:56 AM PST

Columbia University's Andrew Gelman ponders the fact that his innocuous Bayesian statistics textbook, Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models, has been banned in China: "Oooh, it makes me feel so . . . subversive. It reminds me how, in Sunday school, they told us that if we were ever visiting Russia, we should smuggle Bibles in our luggage because the people there weren't allowed to worship. Xiao-Li Meng told me once that in China they didn't teach Bayesian statistics because the idea of a prior distribution was contrary to Communism (since the "prior" represented the overthrown traditions, I suppose)."

I have no idea if it's true that China prohibits Bayesian math, but if they do, I wonder what they use for spam-filtering (not to mention censorware).

I guess they noticed that if you take the first word on every seventeenth page, it spells out "Death to the Shah" (via Reddit)

 


HOWTO make an ultra-gross melting-head cake

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 04:49 AM PST


Barbara Jo made this brilliant severed head cake whose flesh was designed to melt off during the course of a party, in grisly fashion, revealing a skull beneath. She used whipped-cream icing over a molded royal icing skull, and garnished it with cordial cherry eyeballs. The whole thing was frozen and airbrushed, with cotton-candy hair, then set out under a heat-lamp when the guests arrived: "I brought her out and set her on the hotplate, turned on the heat lamp on one side and the 200 watt bulb on the other and . . . her flesh started to melt! And, because I only had one heat lamp, at first only the left side of her face melted. Which was incredibly cool looking! She ended up with one side of her face still solid and the other melted all the way to the skull. The heat lamp even toasted the melted icing a bit at the closest point, so it looked like the skull had been cooked."

Melting Head Cake (via Neatorama)

 


Breaking News: Tila Tequila can't remember her MySpace password

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 07:21 PM PST

"I just lost my passion for MySpace. I haven't logged on because it's not simple anymore."—Tila Tequila, in a front page (that's right, A1) New York Times story on the decline of MySpace. (via Dave Itzkoff)

Snow Wars (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 07:09 PM PST

HOWTO make monster snowshoes for your kids

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 04:37 AM PST


Kim from SloMoMama found a recipe for DIY kids' snow-shoes in a copy of Snow Play and implemented it for her own spawn with marvelous results: "we were inspired to make our own tracks yesterday by creating snow shoes out of some left over cardboard from our moving boxes (and, nope, we're not done unpacking yet). There are all sorts of creatures among us!"

creatures among us (via Craft)

 


Wikipedia's list of common misconceptions

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 04:31 AM PST

The Wikipedia entry for "List of common misconceptions" is chock-a-block with fascinating tit-bits that you can amaze and disabuse your friends with:
# There is no evidence that Vikings wore horns on their helmets.[3][4]
# There is no evidence that Iron maidens were invented in the Middle Ages or even used for torture, despite being shown so in some media, but instead were pieced together in the 18th century from several artifacts found in museums in order to create spectacular objects intended for (commercial) exhibition.[5]...
# Al Gore never said that he "invented" the Internet; Gore actually said, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet."[33] Gore was the original drafter of the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, which provided significant funding for supercomputing centers, and this in turn led to upgrades of a major part of the already existing, early 1990s Internet backbone, the NSFNet, and development of NCSA Mosaic, the browser that popularized the World Wide Web; see Al Gore and information technology. ...

# Microwave ovens do not cook food from the inside out. Microwave radiation penetrates food and causes direct heating only a short distance from the surface. This distance is called the skin depth. As an example, lean muscle tissue (meat), has a skin depth of only about 1 cm at microwave oven frequencies. [47]...

# Shaving does not cause terminal hair to grow back thicker or coarser or darker. This belief is due to the fact that hair that has never been cut has a tapered end, whereas, after cutting, there is no taper. Thus, it appears thicker, and feels coarser due to the sharper, unworn edges. The fact that shorter hairs are "harder" (less flexible) than longer hairs also contributes to this effect.[73] Hair can also appear darker after it grows back because hair that has never been cut is often lighter due to sun exposure...

# In South Korea, it is commonly believed that sleeping in a closed room with an electric fan running can be fatal in the summer. According to the Korean government, "In some cases, a fan turned on too long can cause death from suffocation, hypothermia, or fire from overheating." The Korea Consumer Protection Board issued a consumer safety alert recommending that electric fans be set on timers, direction changed and doors left open. Belief in fan death is common even among knowledgeable medical professionals in Korea. According to Yeon Dong-su, dean of Kwandong University's medical school, "If it is completely sealed, then in the current of an electric fan, the temperature can drop low enough to cause a person to die of hypothermia."[93][94][95][96] Although an air conditioner transfers heat from the air and cools it, a fan moves air to increase the evaporation of sweat. Due to energy losses, a fan will slowly heat a room.

List of common misconceptions

(via Reddit)


(Image: Best. Picture. Ever., a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from pirateyjoe's photostream)

Skull made of McDonald's fries

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 04:21 AM PST


The truly amazing thing about this web-anonymous image of a skull made out of McDonald's fries is that it was sculpted using the skull of someone who died eating McD's frites as a reference. Seriously, though: anyone know the hot-fat-and-spuds virtuoso behind this Lincoln Log Noggin?

Behold, The McDonald's Skull of French Fries (via Geekologie)

 


El Guincho (music video, NSFW)

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 03:45 PM PST

EL GUINCHO | Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

I can't really tell you what this music video is about, other than that it's totally rocking my world right now. Full warning, it's NSFW as it's got teh boobies, but they are gold painted and have sparklers, which I think makes them awesomer. There are subtitles for those of us who do not speak Spanish, but honestly I think it's better without knowing what's going on.

Where Tarantino came from

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 03:36 PM PST

I've heard about this on and off over the years, but had never seen it until Kottke posted a link this morning: It's a clip from "My Best Friend's Birthday," Quentin Tarantino's first film, ca. 1987. If I didn't know better, and I'm not sure I do, I'd suspect it's an elaborate prank. The young Tarantino who appears as a motormouth DJ is a pretty good caricature of everything we associate with Tarantino the actor -- all the hyperkinetic, can't-sit-still, chew-the-scenery mannerisms are there in full. Fortunately, the things we associate with Tarantino the writer are present too -- the black humor, the perfect pauses, the on-a-dime conversational switches. The directing? It's a wash. The thing's pretty primitive, but most of it was apparently destroyed in a fire at the lab. Still, it's a satisfying glimpse of one of our greatest, weirdest auteurs in utero.



The amazing antics of Larry Griswold

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 03:27 PM PST


[Video Link] If you have never seen Larry Griswold before, you are in for a treat. He defies serious injury about 5 times a minute doing this diving board comedy routine on the Frank Sinatra Show in 1951. What a master! (Thanks, Chris!)

50 Cent tweets stock tips for company he owns 30 million shares in, nets $10 mil

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 04:18 AM PST


50 Cent spent the weekend on Twitter pimping a company called H&H Imports; according to the SEC, he owns 30 million shares of the firm. Over the weekend, the shares gained $0.29, netting the rapper nearly $10 million.
Earlier we noted that shares of HNHI added $50 million in market cap today thanks to tweets from 50 Cent aka Curtis Jackson.

Obviously he's being compensated. How much? A LOT.

How To Make $10 Million From Just One Weekend Of Tweeting (via Kottke)
 


Sculptor creates life-sized model kit of himself

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 04:07 AM PST


Sculptor Wayne Chisnall created a life-sized pre-assembly model kit of himself for the "States of Reverie" show at the Scream gallery in Mayfair, London. The piece is called "And When I'm a Man."

'States of Reverie' exhibition at Scream (via Super Punch)

 


Simpsons porn parody finally out; is so super brain-hurty

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 03:16 PM PST

"SIMPSONS -- THE XXX PARODY!" [Video Link, work-safe other than groaning porny sounds]. You can order it here. I am no stranger to porn and am no prude, but this is so unsettling on so many levels. I need to go be alone for a little while with some hot tea and a kitten.

(via The Daily What)

Major record labels forced to pay CAD$45M to ripped-off musicians

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 04:02 AM PST

Michael Geist sez, "The four major record labels that comprise the Canadian Recording Industry Association - EMI Music Canada Inc., Sony Music Entertainment Canada Inc., Universal Music Canada Inc. and Warner Music Canada Co. - have agreed to pay $45 million to settle one of the largest copyright class action lawsuits in Canadian history. The settlement comes after years of fruitless efforts to get the industry to pay for works it used without permission. The press release indicates that everyone is pleased with the settlement, though it is striking that it took a class action settlement to get the record labels to address their own ongoing copyright infringing practices in paying artists for the use of their works."

Note that the labels in the "Canadian" Recording Industry Association aren't Canadian labels -- they're the same multinational, US-centric cartel that runs music around the world. They're "Canadian" in the same sense that the members of Tony Soprano's "Businessmen's Club" are businessmen.

The claims arise from a longstanding practice of the recording industry in Canada, described in the lawsuit as "exploit now, pay later if at all." It involves the use of works that are often included in compilation CDs (ie. the top dance tracks of 2009) or live recordings. The record labels create, press, distribute, and sell the CDs, but do not obtain the necessary copyright licences.

Instead, the names of the songs on the CDs are placed on a "pending list", which signifies that approval and payment is pending. The pending list dates back to the late 1980s, when Canada changed its copyright law by replacing a compulsory licence with the need for specific authorization for each use. It is perhaps better characterized as a copyright infringement admission list, however, since for each use of the work, the record label openly admits that it has not obtained copyright permission and not paid any royalty or fee.

Canadian Recording Industry To Pay $45 Million To Settle Class Action Over Copyright Infringement (Thanks, Michael!)
 


Banksy speaks about Exit, Thierry/Brainwash, and filmmaking

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 02:52 PM PST

banksy.jpg When British street artist Banksy released his debut film Exit Through The Gift Shop it was interesting to see how much skepticism it met with among audiences and critics— many people instantly assumed it must be the punchline of a massive meta-prank. Understandable, given some of his history. But I knew many of the people in the film personally, and I knew it was completely legit.

(Backstory: I co-ran an art gallery and for many years worked closely with Shepard Fairey and Invader, and Thierry Guetta aka Mister Brainwash aka MBW was around frequently, camera in hand).

When talking to people about the film I constantly found myself trying to prove that Thierry really existed, which was amusing in its own right. Recently Banksy himself spoke with All These Wonderful Things about making the film, and some of the issues surrounding the project:

Thierry's entertainment potential wasn't difficult to spot - he actually walks into doors and falls down stairs. It was like hanging out with Groucho Marx but with funnier facial hair. Thierry arrived at a point when my world was becoming infested with hipsters and heavy irony, so his exuberant man-child innocence was fun to be around. Maybe I convinced myself Thierry was a good subject just because I liked him. I'd be lying if I told you the first time I met him I thought 'this man's life will deliver a good narrative arc'.

It's a great interview filled with some fantastic insight, well worth checking out. Story Link.

Banksy's identity eBayed

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 02:44 PM PST

Yours, for $25,000 or best offer, is the identity of Banksy, street artist. Allegedly!

Letter from Kerouac to Brando

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 02:09 PM PST

This is a c.1957 letter from Jack Kerouac to Marlon Brando. Helen Hall, former head of Christie's auction house's Entertainment Memorabilia division, found the letter a few years ago in Brando's house. Hall is guestblogging over at Collectors Weekly right now. The letter from Jack to Marlon brought in $33,600 at auction. Click to see the whole thing larger.
Lotfinderimages D45377 D4537761X "I'm praying that you'll buy ON THE ROAD and make a movie of it…. I visualize the beautiful shots could be made with the camera on the front seat of the car showing the road (day and night) unwinding into the windshield, as Sal and Dean yak…. You play Dean and I'll play Sal."
"Letter from Jack Kerouac to Marlon Brando"

Eboy designed a Boing Boing T-shirt

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 01:49 PM PST

eboy-crew-tshirt.jpg

Our incredibly talented artist pals at Eboy designed this limited edition Boing Boing crew T-shirt. It's $40 in the US and Canada and €30 elsewhere.

The Settlers of Catan

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 01:16 PM PST

settlersbox.jpeg If you asked people in the street to name three new books, films, TV shows or music they’ve enjoyed in the past 20 years, you’ll soon have hundreds of different answers. Ask them to name three boardgames, and you will likely only hear “Monopoly, Scrabble & Cluedo” (aka Clue)*. Not an exaggeration, most people have no idea how far boardgame design has progressed recently. Modern boardgames compare to Monopoly like a BMW compares to a Model T Ford. It’s that different.   I was shown Settlers Of Catan in 1996, just after it was first published and it changed my life**. The epitome of modern German game design, Settlers is totally engaging. You have to think, make decisions, barter, trade and influence the other players. You don’t attack people, but you can block them. You don’t get eliminated and the game takes about two hours tops. Settlers does use dice, but you win by being smart, not lucky. The ‘board’ is modular, large hex tiles, so every game is different and fresh.

Settlers setup.jpeg
Settlers Of Catan won the Spieles des Jahres (SdJ) in 1995, the highly prestigious jury prize, and has gone on to sell millions of copies with many expansions & variants. More importantly, the SdJ stimulates game designers and publishers to constantly strive for high quality, novel, easy and fun family games. Today, the market has expanded rapidly through Europe and now ‘eurogames’, as we call them, come from all around the world.
 
Should you buy a copy of Catan? Nope, not right away. I suggest you do some research on the game***, ask around, find one to play. Maybe you’ll love it, maybe not. You might prefer Carcassonne, or Ticket To Ride, Power Grid, Pandemic, Hey! That’s My Fish,Niagara or Manhattan. There are hundreds upon hundreds of fascinating, easy, quick games you’ve never heard of. But at least you’ll discover there is life after Monopoly.

* combined age 107 + 72 + 66 = 245 years
** after 15 years, I have over 1700 modern boardgames
*** I recommend you check out the previously reviewed Board Game Geek for more info.

-- Jon Power

The Settlers of Catan
$33

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Man shot in head, sneezes out bullet

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 01:08 PM PST

On New Year's Eve, Darco Sangermano, 28, was hit in the head by a stray bullet fired during a celebration in Naples, Italy. While waiting to be seen by physicians, he sneezed out the bullet. From The Telegraph:
"The route of the bullet broke his temporal bone, near his temple, and this slowed down the bullet which grazed his eyeball without hitting it directly," Dr Guglielmo Ramieri told Gente magazine.

Surgeons operated on the eye, removing splinters of bone that the bullet left in its wake.

"The operation lasted several hours but he is fine," said Mr Sangermano's uncle, Vito Sangermano. "The doctors agree that he will not lose the use of his eye, even if for now his sight is blurry."

"Italian man shot in head sneezes out bullet"

Soap mummy and grave wax

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 01:45 PM PST

Archaeology 2011 01 04 Soapman-Zoom
Above is a "soap mummy" from the collection of Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. This person lived in Philadelphia during the 18th century. After he was buried, water leaked into his casket and converted his body fat to soap, specifically adipocere, known to the trade as "grave wax." Soapman: The Mummy Made of Soap (Discovery, thanks Bob Pescovitz!)

Rock Star Scientist posters

Posted: 11 Jan 2011 04:32 PM PST

Teslaaaaaa Bohrrrrr
Etsy seller Megan Katasuskas offers stately and elegant "rock star scientist" posters, including those above honoring Niels Bohr and Nikola Tesla. Rock Star Scientist Posters
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