The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Fried egg rug
- Startups of London's "Silicon Roundabout"
- Jud Turner's Lotus Eaters sculpture: media will consume itself
- Database to foil yoga copythieves to launch
- Antifeatures: deliberate, expensive product features that no customer wants
- Hymn to evolution sung by an innocent child
- More literalism errors in package design
- Dread clicks and whirs: the sounds of hard drives failing
- Typography for Lawyers
- Steampunk Etch-a-Sketch
- Spokesscientologist refuses to answer the volcano question
| Posted: 05 Feb 2011 09:57 PM PST  Architect Valentina Audrito's fried egg throw-rug looks comfy and delicious! Salone Satellite: Valentina Audrito (via Cribcandy)   |
| Startups of London's "Silicon Roundabout" Posted: 06 Feb 2011 04:52 AM PST The Observer's Jemima Kiss does a roundup of exciting new startups in London's satirically named "Silicon Roundabout," including my wife's new project, a game-based 3D printed dolls company called MakieWorld. My own pride aside, Kiss makes interesting points about the UK government's goal of cultivating a tech boom in the area while courting staid tech giants instead of spunky startups. The tech startup stars   |
| Jud Turner's Lotus Eaters sculpture: media will consume itself Posted: 05 Feb 2011 10:09 PM PST  Sculptor Jud Turner writes, "My latest sculpture, 'Lotus Eaters', was inspired by characters from Homer's Odyssey. The Lotophagi (lotus eaters) feed on a soporific plant which causes them to forget their homelands and live apathetic, uncaring lives. Their diet causes them to be sleepy and languid, as well as disinterested in the world around them. In my version, the lotus plants being consumed are media, depicted by the warped reflections of the 8 individuals gazing at themselves, further distorted and recorded by their repeated third-eye surveillance lenses." "Lotus Eaters" (Thanks, Jud!)   |
| Database to foil yoga copythieves to launch Posted: 06 Feb 2011 04:42 AM PST A open Indian database of all yoga postures will go live soon. It's intended to serve as a reference for patent and copyright offices around the world who are petitioned by the likes of Bikram Choudhury with patent and copyright applications for individual postures and sequences of postures. The Times of India article is somewhat confusing in that it mixes patent and copyright freely. I haven't heard of patents being granted on yoga postures, but there have been many stories about the controversial practice of copyright offices allowing registration of choreography copyrights for sequences of postures: India pulls the plug on yoga as business (Thanks, Msikk, via Submitterator!) (Image: Bikram Yoga - with Bikram Choudhury, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from tiarescott's photostream)   |
| Antifeatures: deliberate, expensive product features that no customer wants Posted: 05 Feb 2011 10:02 PM PST Free software advocate Benjamin Mako Hill's lecture on "Antifeatures" for the Free Technology Academy is a fascinating look at the ubiquitous "antifeature" -- that is, a deliberately designed product feature that none of the product's users desire. Examples include cameras that block saving images as RAW files, phones that are designed to identify and drain third-party batteries, and, of course, printers that are designed to reject third-party ink. Mako makes a compelling case that these sorts of features are endemic to proprietary technology, and that free and open technology are the antidote to them. Antifeatures at the Free Technology Academy
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| Hymn to evolution sung by an innocent child Posted: 05 Feb 2011 04:19 PM PST Evolution Made Us All from Ben Hillman on Vimeo. Boing Boing fave Richard Dawkins points us to Ben Hillman's lovely hymn about evolution that should be taught in all schools. Sung by the angelic Beatrice Athene. Video link |
| More literalism errors in package design Posted: 05 Feb 2011 01:11 AM PST  The large pink panel on this German package of jasmine rice bears the legend "Transparentes Sichtfeld," or "transparent field of view" -- in other words, "Dear manufacturer, please leave this part transparent, OK?" Norma: Rice-epe For An E-Norma-s Disaster (via Revealing Errors) |
| Dread clicks and whirs: the sounds of hard drives failing Posted: 05 Feb 2011 02:14 AM PST  Datacent, a data-recovery house, has a page of recordings of the sound of hard drives failing, segmented by vendor and cause of failure (e.g., "Western Digital 250GB desktop drive with stuck spindle can't spin up, chatters" and "Fujitsu laptop hard drive with bad heads making sweeping sound"). I love the idea of listening to these until you can identify them by rote, like Sherlock Holmes examining a cigar ash or a birder identifying some exotic warbler's song. More practically, as Datacent notes, "If your hard drive makes noises like these and you are still able to access your files - backup immediately." Hard drive sounds (Thanks, Fipi Lele!) (Image: Dead Laptop HDD, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from kdga's photostream)   |
| Posted: 04 Feb 2011 06:02 PM PST  I’m not a lawyer. Typography for Lawyers isn’t just for lawyers. It’s for anyone who cares about how text looks in print or on the Web. The author, Matthew Butterick, is a lawyer, and also a professional typographer who has created several original commercial fonts. Butterick’s main point is that appearance matters for anyone making or reading a written argument. Most any written communication is an argument of some sort. Most legal communication is unnecessarily ugly. So, I would add, is most everyday business communication. In a clear, coherent, and personable way, Butterick guides the reader through seemingly mundane matters like font, font size, paragraph format, line spacing, em dashes, en dashes, and the rest. He makes a case for what looks good, what doesn’t, and why it matters. He supplies plenty of visual examples. While some material will interest only attorneys, those parts don’t break the flow for the general reader. Anyone who uses a computer is also a user of typography, even if few people take that fact seriously. Other top-notch typography books are available. One is the previously reviewed classic Elements of Typographic Style. But like most, Elements is aimed mainly at serious students of typography and typography pros. Butterick's book assumes no knowledge of the subject and focuses on the what to do, and how to do it. -- Russ Mitchell
Sample Excerpt: Comment on this at Cool Tools. Or, submit a tool!   |
| Posted: 05 Feb 2011 08:36 AM PST  Reddit user Halokitty made this sweet, elaborate steampunk Etch-a-Sketch for a Christmas present -- I want to get on her Christmas list! I'm a she, and it was a joint effort between my husband and myself. I'm a video game designer/writer and my husband is an industrial designer.A steampunk Etch-A-Sketch we made for a friend this Christmas   |
| Spokesscientologist refuses to answer the volcano question Posted: 05 Feb 2011 05:07 AM PST In this ABC video clip (uploaded in 2010), Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis is asked gentle questions about his faith by the interviewer, who wants to know if it's true that a Scientological article of faith is that the human race has its origins in the strange business of energy beings strapped to volcanoes by a space-tyrant and so forth. It's true that there's nothing objectively stranger about this than reincarnated saviours, plagues of boils, transubstantiation, or talking burning bushes, but Davis doesn't say this. Instead, he evinces this bizarre, put-upon reaction, insisting that this factual question is "offensive" and eventually storming off the set. I'm pretty convinced that the volcano/galactic tyrant business is the basis for the Scientological faith, and I'm also convinced that if this was more widely known, it would be harder to get people to take the institution and its beliefs seriously. "Free personality test" is a lot more attractive than "Free personality test from someone who thinks your problems stem from an earlier incarnation in which you were strapped to a volcano by a galactic space tyrant." While I think you should be free to believe in anything you want, I also think it's pretty shabby to try to bring people into your faith while deliberately disguising the tenets of the religion because you know that if you do, you can't get them in the door. Galactic Emporer Xenu? Scientology (via JWZ)
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Alice Taylor was trawling the aisles of a toy fair in London's Olympia last year when the seed for Makieworld was sown. "I was struck by the total lack of innovation and creativity," she says. So she began devising an "entertainment playspace for young people" that will invite users to download and print 3D dolls and accessories. Taylor wants to build on the success of digital favourites Stardoll, Moshi Monsters and Habbo, which all offer safe fantasy characters and environments for children to explore online. 
In order to stop self-styled yoga gurus from claiming copyright to ancient `asanas', like Bikram Choudhury's Hot Yoga -- a set of 26 sequences practised in a heated room -- India has completed documenting 1,300 'asanas' which will soon be uploaded on the country's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), making them public knowledge. 
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