Saturday, January 29, 2011

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Van Gogh pie-charts

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 03:54 AM PST


This is Arthur Buxton's set of Van Gogh pie-charts; each one represents the color-distribution in a famous Van Gogh painting (can you guess which is which?)

He sez, "I know you lot are fans of new ways of visualizing data. As far as I know, I've come up with a novel way of looking at colour schemes. The pie charts are designed to be visually pleasing but also fuction as a colour trend visualization tool. They represent famous paintings, portraying the five most prominent colours in each as a percentage. I'm having a show at The Arts House in Bristol with a drinks reception at 7pm on Friday the 18th of February. Mutants welcome!"

Van Gogh Visualisation (Thanks, Arthur!)

 


HOWTO make health-care cheaper by spending more on patients who need it

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 03:50 AM PST

Atul Gawande's New Yorker feature "The Hot Spotters" is a fascinating look at a small group of doctors and medical practitioners who are working on reducing systemic health care costs by doing data-analysis to locate the tiny numbers of chronically ill patients who consume vastly disproportionate resources because they aren't getting the care they need and so have to visit the emergency room very often (some go to the ER more than once a day!) and often end up with long ICU stays.

The approach is marvellous because it is both data-driven (data-mining is used to identify which patients aren't getting the care they need) and extremely compassionate ("super-utilizers" are voluntarily enrolled in programs where they get 24/7 guaranteed access to doctors, nurses and social workers). The programs are successful, and even though they cost a lot to administer, they still generate system-wide savings -- one patient helped with this sort of care had previously cost $3.5 million a year because of heavy ER and ICU use. In other words, providing excellent, personalized care to the small number of patients who don't fit the system's model saves far more money than making the system more stringent, with more paperwork, higher co-pays and other punitive measures. It's a win-win.

Except that it's not really catching on. Some of the doctors pioneering this approach are frustrated because they can save Medicare or an insurer millions, but they can't get funded by Medicare or the insurers -- instead, they have to fundraise from private foundations.

As he sorts through such stories, Gunn usually finds larger patterns, too. He told me about an analysis he had recently done for a big information-technology company on the East Coast. It provided health benefits to seven thousand employees and family members, and had forty million dollars in "spend." The firm had already raised the employees' insurance co-payments considerably, hoping to give employees a reason to think twice about unnecessary medical visits, tests, and procedures--make them have some "skin in the game," as they say. Indeed, almost every category of costly medical care went down: doctor visits, emergency-room and hospital visits, drug prescriptions. Yet employee health costs continued to rise--climbing almost ten per cent each year. The company was baffled.

Gunn's team took a look at the hot spots. The outliers, it turned out, were predominantly early retirees. Most had multiple chronic conditions--in particular, coronary-artery disease, asthma, and complex mental illness. One had badly worsening heart disease and diabetes, and medical bills over two years in excess of eighty thousand dollars. The man, dealing with higher co-payments on a fixed income, had cut back to filling only half his medication prescriptions for his high cholesterol and diabetes. He made few doctor visits. He avoided the E.R.--until a heart attack necessitated emergency surgery and left him disabled with chronic heart failure.

The higher co-payments had backfired, Gunn said. While medical costs for most employees flattened out, those for early retirees jumped seventeen per cent. The sickest patients became much more expensive because they put off care and prevention until it was too late.

Lower Costs and Better Care for Neediest Patients (via Kottke)

(Image: Emergency Room / Health Care, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 41178161@N07's photostream)

 


Chinese activist photographer places Avatar action figs in forced demolition scenes

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 04:00 AM PST

Li Yalong, a bureaucrat in China's Hubei province, has been photo-documenting the forced demolitions of peoples' homes in the region, first posing action figures from the disempowerment-allegory film Avatar in the shots to make sure his point isn't missed:
Atop the ruins of the twisted steel and broken concrete blocks in a demolition site sit a pair of turquoise-painted dolls. Bearing a resemblance to characters from the film, "Avatar," the dolls are part of a project by photographer Li Yalong, who works as the Deputy Secretary of Yichang City in Hubei Province
An Unofficial Critique of Forced Demolitions (Thanks, Stirland, via Submitterator!)
 


Update on the Boing Boing post release for your weekend project

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 04:30 PM PST

You are planning to make something cool with the last 11 years of Boing Boing posts, right? Here's a quick update on the release from earlier in the week:

• So far, the XML file I posted last week has been downloaded 2,500 times. Woo! We're very excited to see what you all do with it.

• macartisan on Twitter noticed some validation errors in the original XML file, and others of you saw similar issues. Fortunately, ntoll at FluidDB fixed these errors while working with the data. The XML file has been updated so you won't have to worry about wonky characters while parsing it.

• ntoll also converted the file to JSON for those of you who don't want to deal with XML. That file is available for download as well, and has some extra goodies like better category organization and a list of URLs and domains mentioned in each post.

• The FluidDB for Boing Boing has finished parsing. You will now be able to access all 64,000 posts through their API. ntoll is also adding the URL and domain information from the JSON file to the API. He'll be doing a write up with some examples and explanations on how to use the API soon.

If you've got some time this weekend, and want to play around with a huge collection of text, URLs and other interesting information, we'd love to see what you come up with. You can send me your projects directly at dean@boingboing.net or on Twitter.

Eleven years of Boing Boing posts available in [XML], [JSON] and via [FluidDB]

Poster-sized map of BSG/Caprica 12 colonies

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:43 PM PST

500x_map_of_the_colonies_1.jpg Given the recent mournful Caprica love here, this should gladden a few toaster-loving hearts: former showrunner Jane Espenson and science advisor Kevin Grazier (a JPL astronomer who works on the Cassini mission) have teamed up to release a spiffy annotated diagram of how twelve inhabited planets could hypothetically exist in one star system.

The map also includes short histories of all twelve colonies drawn in part from my own tiny contribution to BSG/Caprica lore. (The word "tiny" is not false modesty. It's really tiny.)

Egypt (photo): protesters face off water cannon in prayer (Updated)

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 08:22 PM PST

232088808.jpg

Via @Mayousef, photographer unknown, apparently shot in Cairo, Egypt today.

Update: In the New York Times, the story behind this image.

Internet-enabled activism versus Malcolm Gladwell: snarkypants edition

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:53 AM PST

Egypt's men in Washington

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:22 PM PST

Internet Society statement on Egypt 'net shutdown

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:18 PM PST

The Internet Society issues a statement on the Egyptian government's auto-unplugging: "Cutting off a nation's access to the Internet only serves to fuel dissent and does not address the underlying causes of dissatisfaction." Related update on that story today from Wired News: the state shut down the 'net with a series of phone calls.

JR Minkel, science writer, RIP

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:15 PM PST

Minkellll Rising-star science journalist JR Minkel, whose work we've linked to many times on Boing Boing, took his own life on Monday. Only 31 years-old, JR was a talented writer who covered space, physics, cosmology, and technology for Scientific American, where he was a staff writer, Popular Science, New Scientist, LiveScience, IEEE Spectrum, and many other publications. Author of the Instant Egghead Guide: The Universe, he also blogged at his own site, A Fistful of Science. JR had a knack for making complex science understandable by anyone, and his quest for knowledge, meaning, and humor shone through his writing. We send our deepest condolences to JR's family and friends. JR Minkel obituary (The Tennessean)

Egypt: yet another iconic photo of a brave protester smooching a bewildered cop

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 02:52 PM PST

RTXX7QX.jpg

Photo: A protester kisses a police officer during a demonstration in Cairo January 28, 2011. Police and demonstrators fought running battles on the streets of Cairo on Friday in a fourth day of unprecedented protests by tens of thousands of Egyptians demanding an end to Mubarak's three-decade rule. (REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh)

What a meme! Previously.

Mysterious empty hallway at Disney World hotel

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:05 PM PST

The always-excellent Passport to Dreams blog (devoted to design analysis and critique of Disney parks) looks at the strange case of the Contemporary Hotel's out-of-place second floor mezzanine, a large and echoing emptiness that was once part of a busy convention space.
Today the Level of the Americas mostly houses a reception area for the California Grill restaurant which supplanted the original Top of the World supper club in 1994. Neo-modern furnishings scatter the handsome wide hallways randomly, sometimes housing guests, slumped in couches like vagrants waiting to be evicted from a train station in a snowstorm. Other times, guests wander aimlessly down those lifeless wide hallways, looking furtively for someone or something that's never there. Since the addition of the new Fantasia-themed convention center wing in the early 1990s designed by Michael Graves, those original Contemporary meeting rooms and banquet spaces seem desolate, remote, and unloved. Very few places in all of Walt Disney World exude the same sense of not belonging as the Level of the Americas. "Is this supposed to be here??"

It wasn't always this way. Convention going was a big part of Walt Disney World's bottom line all through the 70's and 80's, and continues to be so today. All through the first twenty years of the resort, the absolute top spot for Conventions in all of Walt Disney World was the Contemporary, and the cutting-edge Ballroom of the Americas featured a hydraulic stage which could raise or lower and even closed-circuit television linking one ballroom to another. All drenched in 1970's earth tones, full of hustle and bustle and strange geometric patterns. Because nothing says "here and now" like geometry.

Snapshot: Mysteries of the Second Floor
 


Egypt: without internet, country may face "economic doom" Monday

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:02 PM PST

Wilson Rothman at MSNBC.com: "Egypt's government must return Internet access to the country by Monday or perhaps suffer massive economic damage, as banks and other economic institutions return to work without the ability to conduct commerce." (Background here and here on BB)

Mubarak: I'm dissolving Egypt's government, new one forms tomorrow, I'm not going anywhere

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:48 PM PST

RTXX7U6.jpg

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak just appeared on television, live, in what was apparently a pre-recorded message, to address the massive protests that have erupted throughout the country this week. At the end of his speech, which mostly addressed economic issues, he said he has asked the current government (meaning, basically, his cabinet) to resign, and says he will form a new one tomorrow. With him remaining in power as president.

Contrast this with the "demands" document widely distributed throughout Egypt today by demonstrators, translated here at manalaa.net...



People wanted to overthrow the regime

We are the masses in the sit in in Tahrir Square, who ignited the spark of the uprising against injustice and tyranny, where raised by the will of the people, the people who suffered 30 years of oppression, injustice and poverty under the rule of Mubarak, and his cronies in the National Party .

Egyptians have proven today that they are capable of extricating their freedom and destroying tyranny


The people's demands were vocalized today in their chants:


1. Mubarak's immediate stepping down from power.

2. The resignation of the cabinet.

3. the dissolution of the fraudulent parliament

4. The formation of a national government.

We will continue to sit-in until our demands are met, and we call upon the masses all over Egypt and the trade unions, professional syndicates, political parties, and institutions to rise up and extricate these demands.

let us strike and sit-in and protest everywhere, untill we topple the regime


UPDATE: The New York Times has updated their lead story with coverage of Mubarak's speech.


PHOTO: Protesters carry a carpet with an image of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, with a shoe placed on it, in Suez January 28, 2011. Mubarak imposed a curfew and ordered troops to back up police as they struggled to control crowds who flooded the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities on Friday to demand that he step down. (REUTERS/Mohamed Abdel Ghany)

Egypt: iconic photo of protester kissing guard during demonstrations

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 02:14 PM PST

This amazing photograph by Lefteris Pitarakis for AP is making the Twitter/Facebook/blog rounds today:
egyptkiss.jpg

An Egyptian anti-government activist kisses a riot police officer following clashes in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, Jan. 28, 2011. Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters poured into the streets of Egypt Friday, stoning and confronting police who fired back with rubber bullets and tear gas in the most violent and chaotic scenes yet in the challenge to President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule.

Full size image here.

Keychain fob that unsnaps to reveal a tiny USB cable

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:41 AM PST


The flipSYNK USB cables are clever little keychain-sized multi-USB adapters (this one's got a micro- and mini-USB tip) that snap together to form a small, easily-pocketed, snag- and tangle-proof fob. Some users have reported difficulty in getting the cables to work as both a charge- and data-conduit (I've had this problem with retractable USB cables before), but others seem to get along fine. I've ordered one for my Nexus S, but I'll be returning it if I can't use it for data as well as juice. Caveat emptor.

Scosche Keychain USB 2.0 for all BlackBerry models flipSYNK

 


Mark Dery on The Office Park

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 01:46 PM PST

Images Cobb14
I've posted previously about artist Nicholas Cobb who built and photographed a detailed architecture model of a Ballardian office park "where where work is done, as well as extracurricular activities of a more malevolent nature." Over at 21C, culture critic Mark Dery, himself a JG Ballard disciple and scholar, takes us on a tour of Cobb's not-so-imaginary postmodern landscape. From 21C:
Images Images Cobb7-1 Ballard's "psycho-spatial" critique of the built environment (a term coined by the architectural critic Geoff Manaugh) was an active ingredient in The Office Park. In Crash, Concrete Island, Kingdom Come, and Super-Cannes, Ballard reveals himself as our preeminent social theorist of postmodern (and, increasingly, posthuman) landscapes: freeways and traffic islands, suburbia and megamalls, office parks and gated communities.

By the summer of 2008, Cobb had worked his way through the novels in question and emerged deeply influenced by Ballard's analysis. Following the lead of Will Self---an avowed Ballardian whose philosophical investigations into "the modern conundrum of psyche and place," in Psychogeography, had led the photographer to Ballard in the first place---Cobb "went for a series of walks along arterial routes heading out of London," Ballard's narratorial voiceover echoing in his head like a museum audio guide.

Of course, wandering the city in search of serendipity, perversity, or "profane illumination" (Walter Benjamin's term for Surrealism's ability to make us see the everyday in radically dislocating ways) is an implicitly political act---especially so for a photographer, in a city that monitors its threat level like the jittery EKG of the Age of Terror, in a CCTV-infested "surveillance society" noted for its irony-free hostility toward people who take pictures in public places.

"Mark Dery on The Office Park"

Tiny transistor 45 RPM record player

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 01:05 PM PST

micro-record-player.jpg


I like Pete Verrando's Commodore Micro Record Player as much as I like his taste in music!

This 45 rpm player is early '70s Japanese vintage, and employs a crystal cartridge with a 3 transistor amplifier. The label "Precision Transistorized Instrument" is molded into the cover. Precisely or not, it works very well after some cleanup and lubrication.
Pete also made a cool retro iPod dock/guitar amp from an old piece of Philco instrumentation.

Commodore Micro Record Player (Via Retro Thing)

Necktie-tying Rube Goldberg machine

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:34 AM PST

Kinetic sculptor Seth Goldstein's 2008 piece "Why Knot?" is a delightful necktie-tying Rube Goldberg robot that a rhythmic, mechanical dance out of one of fashion's dreariest rituals.

Why Knot? - A kinetic sculpture by Seth Goldstein (via JWZ)

 


Cutaway of Fantastic Four HQ

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:29 AM PST


I love this old Marvel Comics panel showing a cutaway view of the Baxter Building, which served as Fantastic Four headquarters: if I someday command enough of an empire to warrant my own high-rise, I want it to be like this one. Though this is less sharp than the black and white Mark posted in 2007, I think I prefer it for its four-color glory.
 
(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Memory Palace: PT Barnum's "Natural Curiosity"

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 12:31 PM PST

Wp-Content Uploads 2011 01 Joice-Heth In episode #37 of Nate DiMeo's excellent Memory Palace podcast, we travel back to 1835 to meet Joice Heth, a slave who was said to be 161-years-old and the former nanny of George Washington. Who said that? Well, PT Barnum for one. Memory Palace 37: "Natural Curiosity"


Squirrel works its way through backyard obstacle course for food

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 11:21 AM PST


It looks like the squirrel was enjoying itself!

Purplehayes says, "This used to be on the BBC about 15 years ago, I think they had a different course each week."

Mission Impossible Squirrel (Submitterated by agroman)

Lego haunted house

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 02:58 AM PST


Mike Doyle's rotting Lego Victorian haunted house contains 50k-60k and took 450 hours to build. It's part of a series of Lego haunted houses that he's building, photographing and selling prints of.
In this series, I am most interested in textures and the effect of layering textures over each other. To this end, the absence of color helps the viewer to focus on just this. Lego colors tend to be pretty harsh and unrealistic for my tastes, so I stick to black/white and grays. Without color, we dive right into form, which is where I want you to be.

The tree was the most difficult texture to determine. I had thought by reversing the bricks - to show backs - worked best (you can see this in my previous post with the detail of the tree trunk). But very late into the process, a friend had advised me that it didn't look as real as everything else. What to do? Spend a week rebuilding the tree and perhaps money for more bricks or let well enough be. In the end, I found that hinge cylinders worked well to describe bark texture. Strung together, they conform to all sorts of organic configurations. Additionally, they could be skinned onto the trees that I had already built so I would not have to rebuild or spend much more money. Whew! It's not perfect, and I hope to try something similar but different in future, but for now, seemed pretty effective. The branches were created with ridged 3mm hose and a variety of droid arms as well as other technic connectors to give the appearance of branches.

Three Story Victorian with Tree (via Super Punch)
 


Gallery of depressing children's playgrounds in Russia

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 11:10 AM PST

playground-19.jpg

We've linked to galleries of photos of creepy playgrounds in Russia before, and this batch has a few repeats, but there are a few new photos in here. Enjoy! Creepy Children's Playgrounds (Submitterated by J_champagne)

Professor pees on other professor's door

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 11:48 AM PST

Tihomir Petrov, a 43-year-old mathematics professor at California State University, Northridge, was charged with two counts of uirnating in a public place, specifically the office door of a colleague in the same department. As BB pal Jim Leftwich emailed me, I guess you could say that Petrov "is a real math whiz." From the AP:
Investigators say a dispute between Petrov and another math professor was the motive.

?The Los Angeles Times says Petrov was captured on videotape urinating on the door of another professor's office on the San Fernando Valley campus. School officials had rigged the camera after discovering puddles of what they thought was urine at the professor's door.

"Professor charged with peeing on colleague's door"

Ayn Rand took government assistance while decrying others who did the same

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 10:31 AM PST

Noted speed freak, serial-killer fangirl, and Tea Party hero Ayn Rand was also a kleptoparasite, sneakily gobbling up taxpayer funds under an assumed name to pay for her medical treatments after she got lung cancer.
tea-party-john-galt.jpgAn interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor (husband Frank O'Connor).

As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."

But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so.

Ayn Rand and the VIP-DIPers

Anteater vs Nighthawks

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 04:29 AM PST


I'm not sure who's behind this fantastic mashup of Internet lolanteater Fuck You I'm an Anteater and Hopper's Nighthawks -- TinEye's got hundreds of copies floating around -- but this person is an unsung genius.

Fuck You I'm an Anteater vs Nighthawks (TinEye) (via JWZ)

 


An octopus who lives in a beer bottle

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 10:07 AM PST

Science blogger Mike Lisieski found this video of an octopus who's turned trash into treasure. It's a tight squeeze to get out of the bottle, but the ability to maneuver through tiny spaces is one of those skills octopuses evolved both to defend themselves against predators, and catch their own prey. Basically, an octopus can go anywhere that it can fit its hard beak through—the rest of its body is squishy and malleable. In fact, in aquariums, octopuses are often given mazes with narrow passageways and hidden food "prizes." The games help keep the octopus' awesome brain entertained in captivity.

Bonus: There's a great color-change moment right as the octopus pops out of the bottleneck.

Coil's Hellraiser Theme

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 03:06 PM PST

Coilhead
While Clive Barker was writing the story "The Hellbound Heart" that would eventually become Hellraiser, he visited his acquaintances in the experimental music group Coil. Barker was a fan -- he once described Coil as "the only group I've heard on disc, whose records I've taken off because they made my bowels churn." And yes, that was a compliment. The story goes that Coil loaned Barker a stack of extreme bodypiercing magazines that inspired the birth of, you guessed it, Pinhead. Barker later invited Coil to compose the soundtrack for the Hellraiser film. Coil did their magic on the score but, ultimately, the Hollywood studio went with the safe (and far less sinister) sounds of Christopher Young. Of course, Young did a respectable job but, well, it isn't Coil. Here is a taste of what could have been. Tracks from that project appear on the Coil collection "Unnatural History II" and the very limited "Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser" cassette, vinyl, or CD. (Rest in peace, Sleazy and John.)

All of Pearl River Delta to be amalgamated into a 42-million-person megacity

Posted: 28 Jan 2011 04:18 AM PST

The Chinese government has announced plans to amalgamate the nine major cities in the Pearl River Delta (home to a manufacturing-driven economic boom) into a single city with a population of 42 million people (more than Argentina, the world's 32nd largest country), occupying an area twice the size of Wales. The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" will link all of these centers by high-speed rail links that will put every point in the new megacity within an hour's journey of every other point.
The idea is to merge all nine cities around the Pearl River Delta (under the aptly-named plan, "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One") and connect them via power and water, telecommunications networks and 29 new rail lines.

That includes the cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, which are the second and third largest cities in China, with populations of 11.7 million and 8.9 million, respectively.

This new city hasn't been named yet, but we think Kung Wow That's A Lot Of People is fitting.

China Plans To Create The World's Largest City (via Futurismic)

(Image: Pearl_River_Delta_Area, Croquant/Wikimedia Commons)

 


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