The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Canada's Internet rescued from weak and pathetic regulator
- Anti-Microsoft rap
- Seminars suck
- Pencil offers dim opinion of modern replacement
- Verizon iPhone 4 reviews
- Inside Sukey the anti-kettling mobile app
- Immigration officer put wife on no-fly list
- Is it OK to write about Tim Cook being gay?
- X-Keys Desktop
- Kepler: All systems go!
- More geeky science badges please!
- The history of the Death Ray
- Using the Force. Messing with kids' heads can be fun!
- Fellow wears "old man" mask and wows crowd with skateboarding chops
- The Exotica Project
- Egypt: CNN's Anderson Cooper beat up by pro-Mubarak thugs
- Egypt: protests were safe space for women until they turned violent today
- Report: Egyptian Facebook Activist Arrested
- Egypt: The viral vlog of Asmaa Mahfouz that helped spark an uprising
- ROA's street art
- The Daily launches
- Tom the Dancing Bug: Did You Know? Fun Facts About the Super Bowl!
- Diane Duane's crowdfunded publishing experiment finally concludes
- Science and press conferences: Seeing our own shadow
- Mummy DNA: History or hype?
- Today in inappropriate gifts
- When the Mayor of Boston asked MIT for anti-snow flamethrowers
- Shadow of the Swarovski Colossus
- Wedding rings inspired by vintage science fiction paperback cover art
- Kids' drawings of human biology
| Canada's Internet rescued from weak and pathetic regulator Posted: 02 Feb 2011 10:32 PM PST  Canadian Industry Minister Tony Clement has told the press that he will overturn the decision to allow "usage-based billing" with thich the CRTC (Canada's telcoms regulator) gifted the telcoms industry. Canada's heavily concentrated telcoms companies have long used dirty tricks (secret filtering and throttling) to punish customers for using services that compete with their own, such as VoIP and video on demand, and Usage-Based Billing would have raised the cost for using these services sky-high. The CRTC's controversial decision to substantially increase Internet costs to Canadians will be reversed, the Toronto Star has learned.Ottawa to reverse CRTC decision on Internet billing (via Reddit)   |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 10:26 PM PST Copyfighting rapper Dan "Dear Lily" Bull has a new rant up, this one about Microsoft and the horrors thereof. Dear Microsoft (an open letter by Dan Bull)   |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 11:45 PM PST Seminars suck, writes Adam Ruben: "In the idyllic vision of the uninitiated, a seminar tells a story, starting with a clear description of a problem, then outlining a series of steps ... In reality, scientific seminars usually consist of quasi-related PowerPoint slides cobbled together from prior seminars." [via Metafilter and 3 Quarks Daily]   |
| Pencil offers dim opinion of modern replacement Posted: 02 Feb 2011 11:37 PM PST  Scott Beale at Laughing Squid spotted this wonderful pencil at Zach Hilder's new Etsy store. It's only $3 a go! How about a matching paintbrush for Painter, and a pen for Microsoft Word? [via Nerdcore and Laughing Squid]  |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 11:21 PM PST Verizon's iPhone is in the wild. The results are as expected: same phone, better network: NYT. Wired. Daring Fireball. WSJ. Engadget. TechCrunch. Laptop Mag. Bloomberg. MacWorld.   |
| Inside Sukey the anti-kettling mobile app Posted: 02 Feb 2011 10:43 PM PST  The Guardian's Patrick Kingsley has a great look at the story behind Sukey, a networked tool that helps protestors in London avoid police "kettles" (when police illegally corral protestors, passers-by and residents into a small area and detain them for hours without access to food, toilets, or medicine). Sukey was used for the first time on Saturday's protests against anti-cuts march in London, and for the first time in recent history, protestors avoided kettling (their counterparts in Manchester and Edinburgh -- who don't have Sukey yet -- weren't so lucky). I keep trying to put myself in the cops' shoes and imagining what I would do to defeat Sukey. I think throwing a lot more cops at the kettle (to make it harder to escape the cordon as it tightens) would go some way toward this, and of course, they could try to shut down mobile connectivity and/or jam WiFi in central London, but I don't think that the public would be too happy about that. They could try to inject misinformation into the system (the recent revelations about large numbers of paid provocateurs in British protest movements certainly makes this plausible), which would probably spark some countermeasures from its creators. Mostly, I suspect they're going to try to lean on the kids who make and use Sukey, and also try to get their ISP shut down. They may even find some trumped-up charge to use ("Reporting the position of a police officer" could be "obstructing justice," with enough imagination) against anyone caught reporting or accessing Sukey. It probably won't hold up in court, but it's probably got limited efficacy as a shakedown/intimidation tactic. What I really wonder is if the cops will ever use Sukey's built-in facility for allowing law enforcement to communicate their goals to protestors and vice-versa. Sam Carlisle, 23, an electronics engineer who graduated from Durham, became politicised after his girlfriend was trampled in a horse-charge at the protest on 24 November. Outraged, he decided to offer his exceptional technical skills to the UCL occupation, where he met Gaus. To differentiate between the two Sams, other occupiers christened them "Sam the techie" (Carlisle), and "Techie Sam" (Gaus). Physically, the pair are chalk-and-cheese - Carlisle is pale and stocky; Gaus dark-haired and tall - but intellectually they seem united. The night before the 9 December protest, both independently came up with the same idea: a live, online map that could show people at home where protest troublespots were located.Inside the anti-kettling HQ   |
| Immigration officer put wife on no-fly list Posted: 02 Feb 2011 08:35 PM PST An immigration officer in the U.K. found a novel way to end his relationship with his wife. His cunning plan was to wait until she went abroad to visit family, then add her to name to the terrorist no-fly list. Unable to return from Pakistan for three years, with officials refusing to tell her why, it took three years for the truth to emerge According to the Daily Mail, his act was only discovered during a background check required for a promotion. He got fired. Furthermore, his wife is now able to return home. Immigration officer fired after putting wife on list of terrorists to stop her flying home [Daily Mail]   |
| Is it OK to write about Tim Cook being gay? Posted: 02 Feb 2011 10:00 PM PST  Photo: Brendan McDermid Apple's Tim Cook has become a role model: brilliant, hard-working, and now running the world's sexiest consumer electronics company. Tech writers, however, avoid talk of Mr. Cook's sexuality. When they do discuss it, it's often to declare how unworthy of discussion it is, and how doing so is discriminatory, sensationalist, or invasive. But Joe Clark isn't buying the idea that this is just about protecting Mr Cook's privacy. When you tell us it's wrong to report on gay public figures, you are telling gays not to come out of the closet and journalists not to report the truth. ... When you insist being gay couldn't possibly matter less, what you actually insist is that the subject never be brought in the first place. ... [that] straight people have lives but all we have is "sexuality." Obviously it follows that reporting on gay sexuality is one step removed from pornography. Especially for gay males, the most troubling group on earth for the heterosexualist male technology journalist. He notes one frequently-made comparison: that talking about someone's sexuality is like talking about their children. But the more you think about that comparison, the less sense it makes: a reflexive association of different 'private' things that intersect no-where else except for the fact that one may result in the existence of the other. (But not for gays!) "What you have is a life," he writes, "but all we have is a secret you want us to keep to ourselves." Responding, Macworld editor Jason Snell's thoughts on this are clear: "He is apparently an angry, conflicted, and confused man," and then "The good news is, he doesn't appear to make any money from that crap." The tone is what it is (Snell's publication runs the column that Clark was most critical of), but what interesting is the fact Clark's argument -- that homosexuals don't need the press to protect their sexual privacy from the press -- seems literally incomprehensible to those he's addressing. Disagreement is easy, given the low-profile nature of Cook's celebrity. But to not even understand what Clark's getting at makes his point for him, rather well. Far beyond this story, sites like Gawker or Techcrunch often receive criticism from more traditional rivals on similar grounds. It goes something like this: tech blogs are too reliant on anonymous sources, too interested in prurient subjects, and too willing to play fast and loose with journalistic ethics. In the background of these criticisms, however, is an uncomfortable fact about enthusiast coverage. It's often reliant on PR gatekeepers and its own analysis for original material. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a world far-removed from the front lines where newsy scoops are found. Such journalism is far more interesting to readers, however, than laundered press releases or how many iPads some analyst thinks will ship in Q2 -- even when it's "bad" journalism. When you see an inordinate amount of insider outrage directed at muckraking, there is maybe a bit of cognitive dissonance going on about the general journalistic credibility of our beat and what the success of such material means for it. So that is another explanation for why media types may object to coverage of stuff like "executive sexuality" without it necessarily being because they have a subliminal problem with the subject matter. Computer press so liberal it puts gays back in closet [Fawny]   |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 06:31 PM PST  I have used this programmable keypad for the past five years, and find it a huge time saver. I am a C.A.D. software user, cnc programmer, and often use graphic software to aid in my work. This key pad allows the user to program any number of keystrokes, computer functions, or a combination into a single button. The obvious use is to make a single button activate a tool or function in a program that can be done with a keystroke combination, ie: "ctrl+P" which in most programs will activate the Print command. However, it can be much more elaborate than that. I reserve a few buttons to record job specific macros. This might include something like a series of offsets in the CAD program. I set up a macro to change the offset dimension as it creates each object, resulting in a series of concentric objects with one push of a button. A fantastic time saver for repetitive work.PI engineering makes several models of key pads with different configurations and numbers of buttons. They also continue to improve the software, a free download, that works with the keypads. The software will now detect what programs are running, which program is the active program, and allow the user to program specific macros for each button for each program. In other words, when you are using a word program, a key may, say, type in your name, title and contact information. When you are in Photoshop, that same key may open up the new document window, or start to rip a CD in iTunes, etc.- automatically changing what it does, based on the active program. Or a button can be set to operate the same no matter the open programs - a short cut to open a specific document or program, etc. In addition to being incredibly handy for anyone who spends a lot of time on a computer, the unit is built like a tank. The model I have is built using a metal carcass. I often use a laptop and have a piece of hardboard setup to hold the computer, this X-keys keypad, other peripherals and electrical strip in place using Velcro - keeping me portable. I recently left this hardboard - without the computer - on the top of my truck as I drove away. It hit the pavement X-keys first. The damage? I lost one cap to one key, for which I had an extra, and a small area of road rash that is simply now silver instead of black. I, perhaps obviously, cannot say enough about this product, and am constantly finding new ways to use it. --Sean Frey Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool!   |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 03:13 PM PST  An artist's rendition of Kepler-11, a newly announced system of 6 confirmed transiting exoplanets that will be a laboratory for planet-formation theories for years to come. If these 6 worlds were somehow transplanted into our own solar system, all of them would lie within the orbit of Venus, and 5 would lie within the orbit of Mercury. How this "packed" planetary system was formed is a puzzle for astronomers. NASA/Tim Pyle The Kepler teleconference ended a couple of hours ago. I tried my best to live-tweet salient details, so you can get your fill on my Twitter page. Here's the very compressed big picture: Kepler is working nearly flawlessly, and it's finding oodles of *candidate* transiting exoplanets, some of which appear to be rocky worlds orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars. The Kepler team has announced more than 1200 new candidates. Of those, 68 are approximately Earth-sized (equal to or less than 1.25 Earth radii). More than 50 candidates of all sizes are located in the habitable zone of their host stars, including 5 that are less than twice the size of Earth. The evidence suggests that smaller planets occur more frequently around smaller, cooler stars than hotter, larger stars, of which our Sun is one example. Nearly 15 percent of the stars with candidate planets harbor more than one candidate, suggesting that multi-planet systems are fairly common. Much more work remains to be done, and indeed the follow-up observations required to confirm that all these candidates are actually planets will likely take many years. We still don't know if life exists elsewhere in the universe, but we've now taken another major step into the asymptotic frontier, and life's cosmic abundance appears more inevitable than it did yesterday.
This moment has been coming for a long, long time. Most commentators will point to Kepler's immediate origins in a 1992 mission proposal called FRESIP from Kepler's eventual Principal Investigator, William Borucki. But I prefer to trace the defining moment back forty years more, in the overlooked musings of a brilliant Russian-American astronomer, Otto Struve. In this paper, first published in The Observatory in 1952, Struve lays out the basic case for hunting for planets using both high-precision radial-velocity spectroscopy as well as transit photometry. He was a remarkably prescient man, and his story is worth telling, but that will be for another time. Suffice to say, I think Struve deserves far more credit than he has received for his early contributions to the wildly successful modern era of planet-hunting.
Of course, the trail goes back further still. Some 2,500 years ago, in Ionian Greece, a man named Leucippus, of the town of Miletus, first theorized that everything in the universe was made of tiny, indivisible atoms.
His disciple, Democritus, extended these ideas to state that endless configurations of atoms and void created infinite worlds that exist apart from our own, and that the Milky Way's soft glow emerges from countless faraway suns. Two centuries later, the philosopher Epicurus best summarized these ideas in a letter to a certain Herodotus (not to be confused with the historian of the same name): "There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours ... We must believe that in all worlds there are living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world." It's not a stretch to say that, with today's announcement, the Kepler team has, in one swift stroke, made more progress toward solving this ancient mystery than has been made in the entirety of previous human history on Earth. Think about that, and then realize that the most exciting steps—confirming these planets, finding ones even more Earth-like around nearby stars, and studying them for signs of life—still lie in our future. With any luck, and a hefty helping of public engagement, these things will happen before you, me, and everyone we know are only memories like Struve and Democritus. Read More: Here's a nice round-up of coverage from Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. Nature has an excellent overview of the new discoveries, including a smashing Kepler feature story by Eugenie Samuel Reich, and an accompanying piece from yours truly discussing cost-effective technical and technological developments that are poised to deliver potentially habitable worlds for prices even a rabid deficit-hawk could love. I'll probably discuss some of those developments in more detail in coming blog posts.   |
| More geeky science badges please! Posted: 02 Feb 2011 03:04 PM PST Last Friday night I attended a Jamboree, and yes it was a "jamboree." We weren't all dressed in the same uniform, but there was talk about badges and the occasional hushed mention of sashes. Except that this wasn't your usual jamboree - no, this was a Science Scout Jamboree. Hold on - in case, you're scratching your head and wondering what I'm going on about, let me explain. The Science Scouts is this somewhat silly thing that is probably best described as a mix of science geekery, badges, and the occasional beer. It's been mentioned a few times here and there, but really, at the end of the day, it's just an excuse for folks with a vested and/or peripheral interest in science to hang out. It's interesting because that description is general enough that a really interesting and diverse mix of people come out. But back to the badges - yes, there are badges! In fact, there are over a hundred of them right now and you can check them all out on the website, as well as read the many hundreds of comments left by people who have taken the effort to tell us why they deserve specific badges. For instance, some of my favourite include the four below:  The one on the far left is the "I can be a prick when it comes to science" badge. This one is interesting, because there are lots of folks who argue against woo, creationism, and climate change denialism, and feel that this badge was made for them. The next badge is the "call me a visionary, because I do a pretty convincing science dystopia" badge. I love this one, because it was created with the help of someone who obviously knows what she's talking about, and is just an example of how funny little web things can lead to interesting connections. Moving along, the "I've named a child or pet for science" badge) is just cool, because so many folks have left comments telling us what they've named their child or pet and why. Finally, there is the "I've set fire to stuff (LEVEL IV)" badge, because there are different levels when it comes to combustion.Right now, the badges are pretty much existing only in the virtual world, but there have been some who have actually physically made them and then put them up for sale (see Angelheart704's examples below). In fact, since launching the site, I get at least 4 emails a week on badge making services (usually from India or China). Anyway, making them for sale is o.k. with us, and is something that we've talked about on the website - it's kind of a free market thing. All to say that at Friday's meeting, we had a great turn out with lots of interesting folks, including a wildlife photographer, an expedition writer, a children's author (about pirates no less), an environmental political scientist, an evolutionary biologist (who occasionally moonlights as a Darwin impersonator), architects for humanity, folks who report on the Vancouver Art scene, journalists, museum curators, lots of students, and many many more. It was awesome, and it got me thinking that one of these days, I need to organize and host a proper (a.k.a. conference style) "jamboree" in Vancouver. More importantly, it got me thinking that we need some new ideas for badges. So, here's an open call for new science scout badges. No need to produce art, just the idea is fine. Funny is great, but funny because it's so wonderfully true and geeky is better. Anyway, you can leave comments below, or better yet, (since the idea of the description being less than 140 characters is particularly appealing to me), send along a tweet to @dnghub with the hashtag #sciencescout.   |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 02:48 PM PST  Image: Steampunk Old Vic Ray Gun by ~Builders Studio. Screw flying cars, I want a death ray. We've been trying to make them for centuries. Why don't I have one? Because this is not Boeing Boeing. Becky Ferreira explains: Developing electromagnetic weaponry is expensive and requires innovative thinking-- "duh!" says every scientist and inventor who has tried to develop it. But listen, you smug scientist/inventors, our new millennium has borne witness to a surge of fresh ideas about how to finally pull the death ray from the world of dreams and imagination into reality. It's looking increasingly likely that the death ray's 2,200-year-old journey may be coming to an end.Until our military contractors make the world a better place, you'll just have to make do with something like Builders Studio's death ray (above) instead, available from its Etsy store. Humanity's Endless Quest to Invent a Death Ray: A History [The Awl]   |
| Using the Force. Messing with kids' heads can be fun! Posted: 02 Feb 2011 03:24 PM PST   |
| Fellow wears "old man" mask and wows crowd with skateboarding chops Posted: 02 Feb 2011 01:45 PM PST [Video Link] SPFX makes very realistic masks. In fact, they are sometimes used by bank robbers. Here's a fellow who put on the "Old Man" mask and had a good time on Venice Beach, dancing and trick skateboarding to the delight of onlookers. Previously |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 01:29 PM PST  It's easier for me to define exotica, a lush, atmospheric, sometimes-sappy instrumental pop music of the '50s and '60s, than it is for me to explain why I love it. I think it has something to do with nostalgia for a time I didn't really live through -- a late-postwar period in which the world was bigger and stranger, and unfamiliar locales could be described with a straight face as "exotic." (One historical theory holds that the music was initially marketed to ex-GIs home from the Pacific, and trickled down to the populace at large.) There's something emotionally resonant in that idea. It's like we're looking back at a generation that looked forward, and out to a larger world it hadn't yet subsumed. Also: While the music is frequently syrupy, some of it is unironically pretty. And some of it, like the best of genre superstar Les Baxter, bubbles with an unexpected, almost subliminal complexity. Dan Shiman, who's also proprietor of the excellent MP3 blog Office Naps, curates a fantastic introduction to the music at The Exotica Project. (Via the tireless Maria Popova.)   |
| Egypt: CNN's Anderson Cooper beat up by pro-Mubarak thugs Posted: 02 Feb 2011 02:00 PM PST  Link to details at Huffington Post, and CNN has posted this video. Shortly after the incident, Cooper tweeted, "Its getting really bad in front of Egyptian museum"—all of the Twitter feeds I'm following from folks on the ground there point in the same direction. The protests are now being flooded by pro-Mubarak thugs, and various state employees paid to be present, and there are very high counts of injuries today. The situation sounds increasingly dangerous. As an aside, I have plenty of complaints about CNN, but I have nothing but respect for Anderson Cooper's work. Dude is for real. From the tweets, sounds like he and his crew have been awake for four days solid since landing in Egypt. I think they're doing solid reporting under extremely difficult conditions. Update: Cooper spoke to Reuters about the attack. Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour, and a number of reporters with Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera have also been beaten up by thugs who back (or are employed by) Mubarak. |
| Egypt: protests were safe space for women until they turned violent today Posted: 02 Feb 2011 01:02 PM PST Sarah Topol in Slate: "Egypt has a sexual harassment problem. In a 2008 study, 86 percent of women said they had been harassed on Egypt's streets--any woman walking through a crowd of men in Egypt braces to get groped. But in the square, crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, men apologized if they so much as bumped into you. After wandering around the protests for days, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn't been groped, a constant annoyance when I'm faced with large crowds in Cairo. When I pointed this out to other women in the square, we all took a moment to reflect. 'I hadn't even thought of that,' one woman in Tahrir told me. 'But it's because we're all so focused on one goal, we're a family here."   |
| Report: Egyptian Facebook Activist Arrested Posted: 02 Feb 2011 12:52 PM PST |
| Egypt: The viral vlog of Asmaa Mahfouz that helped spark an uprising Posted: 02 Feb 2011 12:40 PM PST Video Link. 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz of Egypt recorded this video on January 18th, uploaded it to YouTube, and shared it on her Facebook. Within days, the video went viral within Egypt and beyond.
"Whoever says women shouldn't go to the protests because they will get beaten, let him have some honor and manhood and come with me on January 25th" she says in the video, "They don't even have to go to Tahrir Square, just go anywhere and say it: that we are free human beings." And she condemns the couch potatoes and armchair internet activists, in no uncertain terms. "Sitting home and just following us on news or on Facebook leads to our humiliation -- it leads to my humiliation!," she says in the video. "If you have honor and dignity as a man, come and protect me, and other girls in the protest. if you stay home, you deserve what's being done to you, and you will be guilty before your nation and your people. Go down to the street, send SMSes, post it on the internet, make people aware." The video is popularly credited with helping inspire fellow Egyptians by the thousands to participate in protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square, calling for an end of the 30-year authoritarian rule of Hosni Mubarak. The video is also credited with helping to inspire the Egyptian government to block Facebook. Whether it's accurate to credit this one video, and this one young woman, with all of that, I'll leave to activists in Egypt who know the history better than I. But at the very least, her powerful video captures the spirit of an important moment in history.
The original version of the video is here. The video is the subject of a New York Times piece today on the role of Egyptian women in the popular uprising, "Equal Rights Takes to the Barricades," by Mona el-Naggar:
"As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope." That was what Ms. Mahfouz had to say in a video she posted online more than two weeks ago. She spoke straight to the camera and held a sign saying she would go out and protest to try to bring down Mr. Mubarak's regime. (English language version of Asmaa Mahfouz's video translated by Iyad El-Baghdadi, subtitles by Ammara Alavi. Thanks, Marianne Shaneen) |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 11:29 AM PST  Graffiti is often a harmful imposition on communities, but ROA's is so delightful and imaginative surely anyone would think twice about whitewashing it -- especially commissioned works. Thankfully, authorities in London saw reason in that case and allowed the Hackney rabbit to stay. Pictured above is his cousin in Brooklyn. UPDATE: Zeitgeist Magazine has a marvelous gallery showcasing how ROA paints his rabbits. Here's a map of some of his stuff in London. Behold! The circulatory system of the rabbit. ROA !'s photostream [Flickr via I360]  |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 10:47 AM PST News Corp. and Apple have launched The Daily, a $30m iPad-only newspaper where you can find out what happened in Egypt yesterday.   |
| Tom the Dancing Bug: Did You Know? Fun Facts About the Super Bowl! Posted: 02 Feb 2011 10:09 AM PST   |
| Diane Duane's crowdfunded publishing experiment finally concludes Posted: 02 Feb 2011 09:22 AM PST Six years ago, Diane Duane started to ask her readers if they'd be willing to subsidize her next book through subscriptions as she wrote it. Things went great for a while, and then they didn't. Diane's health, circumstances, and life went through a long, bumpy patch and her book went off the rails. Now she's finished it, and put it online with a long and heartfelt apology to the readers who'd backed her. This is an important -- and underreported -- problem with "micropatronage" and "street performer protocol"-style artistic experiments. Writers are often late with their books. Sometimes they're so late that the books are given up for dead (I was once contracted to write a book called /usr/bin/god, which died on the vine after 80,000 words, so I started writing Makers, which also stalled, so I wrote Little Brother, which gave me the insights I needed to finish Makers, which my publisher accepted in place of /usr/bin/god, and that's how this stuff goes sometimes). When that happens, hardcore fans -- the kind who pay attention to the things authors say about upcoming books in press interview -- are sometimes let down, but mostly, it's a private matter between the author, her agent, and the publisher. This is normal, and we know how to deal with it in the world of traditional publishing. But in the world of public writing-as-performance where there are hundreds or possibly thousands of people with a financial stake in the book -- people who aren't editors at a house with 400 books under contract, but rather people who've never been around a book during its creation -- it gets really difficult and sticky. I have a lot of sympathy for Diane here. Boing Boing readers have written to me periodically over the years to ask if I knew what was happening, and Diane always seemed to be working hard, amid a lot of hardship. But I have sympathy for the readers, too -- who donated in good faith and didn't know what to make of what had happened to their money. We're going to see a lot of this in the future, as more writers try this kind of experiment. Off the rails is the normal state for most books, and readers rarely get to hang around the sausage factory watching the ugly production cycle. "The Big Meow": Completion (Thanks, Diane!)   |
| Science and press conferences: Seeing our own shadow Posted: 02 Feb 2011 09:31 AM PST  I hadn't realized (until checked my news feed this morning) that today was Groundhog Day, the annual holiday celebrated in the United States and Canada where a chubby, furry rodent—a groundhog—is made to emerge from its burrow, and then given a choice: Either stay out, or go back in. The story goes that if the groundhog emerges under cloudy skies, it will hang around outside, and wintry weather will soon cease. If the groundhog comes out into sun, it will retreat, and winter will endure for six more weeks. The crux of the rite is whether or not the groundhog sees its shadow. It makes me smile, wondering whether the scientists and administrators for NASA's Kepler mission knowingly chose today for their next data release based on its tenuous resonance with a bizarre cultural tradition. What we will see later this afternoon at NASA's 1pm EST press conference is fairly similar in its essentials. Researchers, of course, play the groundhogs. Bright-and-bleary-eyed from excitement mixed with lack of sleep and too many hours burrowing into their light curves and RV plots on computer monitors, they will emerge from their isolation and tell the world whether they saw shadows, silhouettes of alien worlds transiting distant suns. The biggest difference is that the more shadows they see, and the smaller they are, the more likely a spring awakening will occur in exoplanetology. This is because Kepler's primary goal is not, despite frequent misleading statements to the contrary, to discover Earth-like planets—living worlds. Rather, its official mission is to provide a good estimate of the frequency of all varieties of planets and planetary systems that may exist in our galaxy. Planets like ours, places like home, will be equivalent to cherries atop Kepler's far larger smorgasbord of discoveries that astronomers and the interested public will devour. The point, from the very beginning, has been to leave everyone hungry for more. Kepler alone cannot tell us whether we live in a crowded, living universe. For that, astronomers unavoidably need more, and more expensive, telescopes on the ground and in space. They need people to care about the question they're trying to answer, and to believe that answering the question is possible. They need public support and interest. Otherwise there is scant hope that the costly hardware required to take the next bold steps will be built, and the goal of finding life beyond the solar system may slip beyond our lifetimes. Which, at risk of running my cultural comparison into the ground, brings me back to Groundhog Day—not the holiday per se, but the excellent Bill Murray film, where he plays a jaded newscaster who cycles endlessly through a closed loop of time, experiencing the same events over, and over, and over. The Kepler conference hasn't even happened yet, but I already have the worrisome gut feeling that I've seen this show before. It happened in 1996, with the premature declaration of Martian life in an ancient meteorite. It happened in 2004 with controversial detections and interpretations of methane, a potential biosignature, in the Martian atmosphere. It happened in 2010 with the sensationalized announcement of arsenic-munching bacteria, and with the disputed discovery of a habitable planet, Gliese 581 g, thought to orbit a nearby red dwarf star. There are many other lower-profile examples. I'm not rejecting these previous claims as necessarily false, but I am questioning the wisdom of the manner in which they were often communicated to the public. It is irresponsible and inherently self-defeating for scientists, press officers, and journalists to not highlight key uncertainties when revealing scientific results on a topic as explosively profound as the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. The truth is, at least until we can actually go off-planet to farflung places for first-hand investigations, the quest for extraterrestrial life is an asymptotic frontier, approaching, but never reaching, certainty that someplace else is just like home, that something else lives or thinks just like we do. Evidence will accrue, conclusions and rebuttals will battle, and progress will be made, but there are limitations to our knowledge that must be acknowledged rather than dismissed. I hope I'm wrong, and that the Kepler press conference comes off without a hitch. But until the mics have been turned off and the cameras turned away, I'll be holding my breath, praying I'm not reliving my own private Groundhog Day.   |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 09:13 AM PST  Last February, you got a glimpse of the first DNA study of Egyptian mummies—research that suggested King Tut was the product of brother/sister incest, among other discoveries. But recently, complaints from geneticists have started surfacing, making the earlier study—which was largely overseen by Egyptologists and mummy experts, including newly appointed Egyptian Minister of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass—seem seriously flawed. At the heart of this story is a dispute over methodology. What is the right way to assess the DNA of a mummy? And, beyond that, is the DNA of a mummy likely be intact enough to tell you anything at all? Hawass' team diverged from majority opinion on both counts. And, because they haven't published their raw data, the concerned geneticists haven't been able to judge for themselves whether the unorthodox methods were valid. Jo Marchant wrote an article on the geneticists' critiques for New Scientist, and she delves deeper into the story on her own blog:
With the current political situation in Egypt—where all the mummy DNA research was done—it'll probably be a while before there's any resolution on this issue. Zahi Hawass probably has bigger things on this mind right now. But I think this is an interesting story, and one that's worth paying attention to—especially given the way Hawass' conclusions have already become accepted cocktail-party fact. That study was partially funded by the Discovery Channel, and its results were broadcast in a TV special. So, what happens if those results were wrong? This is shaping up to be a great example of the conflict between how the timeline and process of science works, compared to the timeline and process of journalism. Or, for that matter, edutainment. Image: Flickr user jparise, via CC   |
| Posted: 02 Feb 2011 09:09 AM PST Ibrahim Mansi's birthday gift to employee Silvia Olveira, according to a lawsuit, was a vibrator: "When I opened it, I saw this thing. I was like, what is this? I didn't know what to do in that moment." Birthday suit: Gal miffed over vibrator gift [NY Post]   |
| When the Mayor of Boston asked MIT for anti-snow flamethrowers Posted: 02 Feb 2011 09:02 AM PST  In this 1948 letter from the MIT archives, Mayor James Curley of Boston asked MIT President Dr. Karl Compton to task his engineers with designing an anti-snow technology, using flamethrowers or whatever else they had handy. 1948 Mayor to MIT: Use Flamethrowers to Melt Snow? (Thanks, MITAA!)   |
| Shadow of the Swarovski Colossus Posted: 02 Feb 2011 09:02 AM PST  According to uploader Michael Slonecker, this incredible fountain is part of the entrance to Swarovski Crystal in Wattens, Austria. Fountain [Wikipedia via Uncertain Times]  |
| Wedding rings inspired by vintage science fiction paperback cover art Posted: 02 Feb 2011 12:46 AM PST  TimeMachine sez, "Our friends are sci-fi geeks and wanted space themed wedding bands. My wife dug out our collection of vintage paperbacks for design inspiration, then carved these by hand." karen and jon's spacey rings (Thanks, TimeMachine, via Submitterator!)   |
| Kids' drawings of human biology Posted: 02 Feb 2011 08:08 AM PST  Back in 2001, a 2nd grade class in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, did a year-long integrated education project on the human body—combining science, language arts, social studies, fine arts, and math. It sounds like a really cool way to learn, and even involved bringing several local doctors into the classroom to teach kids about what surgeons, and other specialties, do. Second-grade Maggie is retroactively jealous. This gallery of drawings—featuring 2nd-graders' interpretations of a variety of different organs and biological systems—comes from that project. It's a great mashup of science and creativity, producing everything from the fairly true-to-life skeleton pictured above, to fun (and funny) cartoons of the human brain. I found the gallery via Cliff Pickover, but we are, apparently, not its only admirers. In 2003, Steve Harvey, professor of biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, used the kids' drawings to illustrate a series of lectures on human biology for non-biologists. Part of what I like about this gallery is the Internet Time Machine effect—stumbling across something wonderful that was made 10 years ago. It's a bit weird to think that the kids who drew these pictures have probably graduated from high school now, or are about to. I wonder what impact they'd say that year of 2nd grade had on them? I wonder whether any of them are planning on biology as a career ...   |
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