The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Kinetic sculpture recreates grass in the wind
- Chat with Graham Linehan
- Egypt: general confirms "virginity checks" forced on female protesters by military
- Mexico: kindergarten teacher keeps class calm with song as narco gun massacre rages outside
- Memorial Day Manhattanhenge, 2011
- PBS hack: the HOWTO?
- Nyan Cat (aka Pop Tart Cat) 101
- Hackers hack PBS statement on hack
- Cthulhu Weenie Roaster
- Ultimate troll smackdown: KKK vs. Westboro Baptist at Arlington National Cemetery
- Review: Blue Microphones' Yeti Pro
- Urban Outfitters' $5 Ramen Noodles on special!
- Diapered man cavorts in public while wearing giant latex baby-head
- Qatar "bought" World Cup, writes FIFA chief
- Gweek podcast 005: Cursed Pirate Girl
- SPECIAL FEATURE: Science fiction you can dance to
- Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral: why less copyright gets you more culture
- Social incentives vs economic incentives in crowdsourced work
- Sensation: Acerbic novel about pop culture and popular madness as functions of parasitic manipulation
| Kinetic sculpture recreates grass in the wind Posted: 30 May 2011 10:31 PM PDT David Bynoe sez, "This is a kinetic sculpture I built to look like a field of wheat blowing in the wind. It consists of 40 wooden poles, each about 6' high that are hooked up via a series of ropes to a pair of large motorized cams. Each cam turns at a slightly different speed, and the movement of each is mixed so that it will take about 14 minutes for the machine to repeat its pattern. The show is happening at Truck Gallery in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, it opens on June 3rd, and runs till the 30th." |
| Posted: 31 May 2011 02:14 AM PDT Earlier this year, I interviewed IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan at The Story conference. Matt Locke, who put on the event, has just posted an MP3 of the chat.   |
| Egypt: general confirms "virginity checks" forced on female protesters by military Posted: 31 May 2011 12:07 AM PDT  Via CNN and other sources today, the revolting news that a senior Egyptian general admits so-called "virginity checks" (presumably, forcible examination of the hymen) were performed on women arrested in at least one demonstration this spring. Previously, military authorities denied it. Now, an Egyptian general who asked not to be identified defends the practice—wait for it—as a protective measure for the women's own good. As noted previously on Boing Boing, Amnesty International reported and condemned news of this systematic sexual abuse by military agents back in March. At the time, women were at the forefront of the historic Tahrir Square protests that overthrew the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. And Amnesty International was told then by a group of women protesters "that they were beaten, given electric shocks, subjected to strip searches while being photographed by male soldiers, then forced to submit to 'virginity checks' and threatened with prostitution charges." With that in mind, here's a snip from Shahira Amin's report today for CNN: The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs)." ...and if you're not a virgin, it's not rape, anyway. But more to the point: these so-called "virginity checks" are nothing less than a form of rape. As a human biology note, not that it would make this horrific form of militarized sexual abuse any more justified, and not that it was the point of those perpetrating the abuse: examining the hymen is not an accurate way to determine virginity. This is a myth. And a personal observation? My god, but these women out at the protests in Egypt, knowing that these are the sort of barbaric risks they face, are strong, strong human beings. (PHOTO: Egyptian soldiers stand behind veiled women opposition supporters at Tahrir Square in Cairo in February, 2011; roughly the same period during which reports of this form of sexual abuse by military began to emerge. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic.)   |
| Mexico: kindergarten teacher keeps class calm with song as narco gun massacre rages outside Posted: 30 May 2011 10:37 PM PDT Boing Boing reader GIFtheory says, "This video of a kindergarten teacher [near Monterrey, Mexico] beseeching her students to keep their heads on the floor while leading them in song is simultaneously the most horrifying and inspirational thing I've seen in a while." (via BB Submitterator) |
| Memorial Day Manhattanhenge, 2011 Posted: 30 May 2011 11:10 PM PDT  Boing Boing reader Vivienne Gucwa took this shot today, May 30, 2011, as the sun set directly in line with the New York City grid next to the Chrysler Building. Wikipedia: Manhattanhenge (sometimes referred to as the Manhattan Solstice) is a semiannual occurrence in which the setting sun aligns with the east-west streets of the main street grid in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The term is derived from Stonehenge, at which the sun aligns with the stones on the solstices. It was coined in 2002 by Neil deGrasse Tyson.And, lo and behold, Neil took his own snapshot today, too!   |
| Posted: 30 May 2011 04:21 PM PDT @LulzSec just posted what it claims were the methods used to hack PBS.org. "PBS.org was not owned by SQL," they write, "PBS.org was owned via a 0day we discovered in mt4 aka MoveableType 4." Kevin Mitnick, who knows a little about this stuff, responds: "Yeah, they claim it's a bug in mt4... but I doubt they would reveal the vector until much later." I'd imagine this will become clear soon, after the holiday passes. Background on the incident in this BB post; the mess continued throughout the day today and appears to be ongoing at the time of this blog post. |
| Nyan Cat (aka Pop Tart Cat) 101 Posted: 30 May 2011 11:44 PM PDT  For some, a defacement page from the PBS LulzSec hack will be the first introduction to Nyan Cat. For others, the animated pop-tart rainbow feline is already a familiar form of internet meme happies, despite having originated just two months ago.
This Know Your Meme feature is a good place overview of its origins. The attention-deficit-version is this: PRguitarman created it. Everything began on April 2, 2011, at LOL-COMICS, then hit Tumblr, and from there, mutated and spread rapidly like so many strains of gleeful, 8-bit ebola. Below, one of the early videos to surface; and following that, a dubstep remix of the same, both via Laughing Squid.
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| Hackers hack PBS statement on hack Posted: 30 May 2011 05:45 PM PDT  Adding a touch of hallucinogenic Pink Floyd shit to today's 'rolling boil' hackfest at PBS, Lulzsec has apparently hacked PBS's own statement on the hack. Posted earlier by Manuel Piñeiro, this image is currently unable to verify as PBS has finally locked their site down after a day of defacements.  |
| Posted: 30 May 2011 03:05 PM PDT  What better way to warm up a lot of nitrate delivery systems and show your allegiance to the mythos of the Great Old Ones than with this handy-dandy Cthulhu Weenie Roaster? |
| Ultimate troll smackdown: KKK vs. Westboro Baptist at Arlington National Cemetery Posted: 30 May 2011 02:54 PM PDT  Members of the Westboro Baptist Church today "were met with an unlikely group of counter-protesters Monday at Arlington Cemetery"—the KKK. Problem solved for media unsure of whether to give more attention to racists or homophobes. Not that the presence of either group is new. File photo above, via Reuters: Westboro Baptist Church trolls holding anti-gay signs at Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day, November 11, 2010. God hates faps. |
| Review: Blue Microphones' Yeti Pro Posted: 30 May 2011 01:15 PM PDT  Blue Microphones' Yeti Pro adds XLR sockets, and the promise of pro-quality results, to the USB-only original. It has three capsules, with settings for stereo, cardioid, omnidirectional, and bidirectional recording; a built-in headphone amplifier for latency-free monitoring; and dials to control gain and headphone volume. There's also a mute button. The most striking thing about the $250, 24bit/192kHz Yeti Pro is its huge size compared to most mics: it's as big as a beercan and weighs 3 1/2 pounds when attached to the bundled desk stand. It's pretty, though, and looks and feels extremely sturdy. The quality is far better than inexpensive audio-jack mics, and audibly so compared to USB models I've used such as M-Audio's Producer. It is more expensive, however, and the differences will be most clear to musicians rather than, say, casual podcasters. Indeed, unless you're already planning to wed it to studio gear for one reason or another, the XLR outputs (which require 48v phantom power from a pre-amp) will only sit there encouraging you to buy some so that you may. It worked on Windows and OSX without any faffing around, though on the Mac, the monitoring jack also worked as a 24bit/192kHz audio output for the computer, which is nice. The only problem I had was it recording too quiet at first, even with the gain up. The fix was to turn the mic gain and headphone volume to zero and cycle the mute button. Since then, it's been fine. Blue Yeti Pro Multipattern Condenser Microphone (Amazon link) Product Page  |
| Urban Outfitters' $5 Ramen Noodles on special! Posted: 30 May 2011 12:14 PM PDT  Did you know that Urban Outfitters prices Ramen Noodles at $5 a bag? Or they did, at least, before slashing the prices to something more palatable. I guess the idea of using ironic cooking directions to turn a 25c product into a a hip Veblen good isn't quite working out!  |
| Diapered man cavorts in public while wearing giant latex baby-head Posted: 29 May 2011 09:47 PM PDT Landon Meier, a latex mask-sculptor, talked his friends Brett and Betty into test-driving his Hyperflesh baby mask in public. The sight of a diapered grown man with the head of a giant baby that's totally losing his mind is one of those things you can never un-see. |
| Qatar "bought" World Cup, writes FIFA chief Posted: 30 May 2011 09:12 AM PDT FIFA secretary Jerome Valcke wrote that Qatar, winner of the rights to host the 2022 World Cup, "bought" it. After a Qatari potentate launched a bid to become president of FIFA itself, Valke emailed a colleague that Mohamed bin Hammam "thought you can buy FIFA as they bought the world cup." The Guardian has a photo of a bag of cash one football official claims that bin Hammam sent him.   |
| Gweek podcast 005: Cursed Pirate Girl Posted: 30 May 2011 12:23 PM PDT  In Gweek 005 Rob and I are joined by Tony Moore, the Eisner-award nominated co-creator of The Walking Dead, as well as the co-creator of Vertigo's The Exterminators and Dark Horse's Fear Agent. The Exterminators (Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Vol 4, Vol 5) Fear Agent (Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Vol 4, Vol 5) The Modern Scholar: From Here to Infinity: An Exploration of Science Fiction Literature (on Amazon, study guide) Nonplayer (Electronic version at Comixology) Download Gweek 005 as an MP3 | Subscribe to Gweek via iTunes | Subscribe via RSS | Download single episodes of Gweek as MP3s |
| SPECIAL FEATURE: Science fiction you can dance to Posted: 31 May 2011 04:07 AM PDT When I'm not writing esoteric science fiction reviews, I'm a singer, writer, performer, and concept-maker for a band called YACHT. Occasionally, these wildly separate spheres of reality do have axes of intersection; now is one of those times.
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| Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral: why less copyright gets you more culture Posted: 30 May 2011 10:50 AM PDT Here's a short video I recorded for The Guardian called "Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral," in which I lay out the case for a less-restrictive copyright as better for culture. Cory Doctorow on copyright and piracy: 'Every pirate wants to be an admiral' |
| Social incentives vs economic incentives in crowdsourced work Posted: 30 May 2011 05:42 AM PDT  Here's a summary of "Designing Incentives for Inexpert Human Raters," a paper presented at the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work by John Horton, Daniel Chen and Aaron Shaw. The authors -- two economists and a sociologist -- designed a bunch of different incentive structures for encouraging high-quality work from Mechanical Turk-style systems and evaluated their relative efficacy. They concluded that social/psychological incentives have no measurable impact on performance, while a few well-constructed economic incentives make a substantial difference. From these results, we concluded that our horse race had two clear front-runners: the "Bayesian Truth Serum" (BTS) and "Punishment - disagreement" conditions, each of which improved average worker performance by almost half of a correct answer above the 2.08 correct answers in the control group. A few of the other financial and hybrid incentives had fairly large point estimates, but were not significantly different from control once we adjusted the test statistics and corresponding p-values to account for the fact that we were making so many comparisons at once (apologies if this doesn't make sense -- it's yet another precautionary measure to avoid upsetting the stats nerds among you). In a tough turn for the sociologists and psychologists, none of the purely social/psychological treatments had any signficant effects at all.Designing Incentives for Crowdsourcing Workers (via O'Reilly Radar)   |
| Posted: 29 May 2011 08:36 AM PDT  Nick Mamatas's novel Sensation is the story of Julia Hernandez, a mild Brooklyn semi-hipster who is stung by a mutant wasp and colonized by its parasitic eggs, who warp her neurochemistry to turn her into a catalyst for chaotic destruction. Hernandez leaves her husband, Raymond, at gunpoint, and proceeds to assassinate a gentrifying real-estate baron. This turns her into a Brooklyn folk-hero, as blogging hipsters from the midwest found a kind of situationist political movement with no name (you discuss it by ironically waggling your hand back and forth). The wasps who have taken over Julia have an ancient enemy: a race of spiders who are normally a prey animal for the wasps (the wasps lay their eggs in the spiders, who are then compelled to spin a kind of nursery for the larvae, who eat the spiders on the way out). These spiders are an ancient, collective intelligence, and they use their power to spin facsimile humans ("men of indeterminate ethnicity") who form a spy network that oversees the human race and invisibly fights off the wasps' influence, in an ancient battle that has been waged for the whole history of our three species. Sensation is told from the spiders' collective point of view, as they attempt rescue Julia from the wasps' clutches and stash her in the Simulacrum, a network of places, retailers, and lifestyles that don't ever mesh with the real world. It recounts Raymond's fraught relationship with the movement and its non-founders who refuse to plan, or take on any sort of authority structure. Mamatas is a powerfully acerbic writer, both in fiction and online. His acid wit is infamous, and it is on splendid display in Sensation, which is alive with scornful insight about pop culture, the net, and politics. Sensation is a kind of bastard love-child of GG Allin and Kurt Vonnegut, a science fiction story that is funny but always discomfiting. I recommend it highly. |
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