The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Freedom, photography, and the "Power of Open"
- The Final Space Shuttle Launch: Atlantis STS-135 (liveblog + webcast)
- Bytemaster computers, 1978
- Gentleman gets his hand stuck attempting to retrieve candy bar from gas tank
- TWA Las Vegas tourism poster (1965)
- I love my club soda maker
- Under the sea: Life on a lost shipping container
- Harnessing the power of feedback loops
- iPhone SLR lens mount
- Zinnia Jones: "My conversations with Bradley Manning," available for download
- News of the World to "close"
- Rideable strandbeest
- Podcast: I interview Thomas Gideon from the Command Line
- Zombie bikinis
- SPECIAL FEATURE: Interview: Apollo astronaut Al Worden
- Railway sleeper service, glorious 1946 ad
- Influencing Machine: Brook Gladstone's comic about media theory is serious but never dull
- Women football players half as likely to fake an injury as men
| Freedom, photography, and the "Power of Open" Posted: 08 Jul 2011 05:02 AM PDT Photographer Jonathan Worth sez, "I've written an article for the Telegraph that argues for searching out new business models from old relationships. It posits 'free' as an emotive distraction. Similarly it argues that the notion of photo/media-convergence is being mis-represented as a 'what technology does' issue rather than what it will come to mean. It suggests that the important issues for trace-storytellers (photographers in this case) are not 'will new cameras kill the decisive moment' but instead questions what this century's decisive moment will be. The 'big-reveal' is that the article itself is not paid for by the Telegraph but two other parties - those whom the author (me) decides are most likely to benefit." This reluctance to accept the shift and recognise alternative ways of leveraging 'free', is born out of a tendency amongst photographers to see technology in terms of what it does rather than what it means. The latest Red cameras see photographers clamouring over the future of the 'decisive moment', a phrase coined by the Henri Cartier Bresson in the last century that referred to a precise moment at which everything came together, Zen-like, both in the mind of the photographer and in the 'real world'. Red cameras can shoot movies at such high resolution that print-ready still frames can be pulled directly from the footage, leading some to call this a 'convergence' and others citing futuristic films as proof of such an inevitability. Mo< If the lessons learned from free and instantaneous modes of delivery teach us anything, it's not that photographers of the future will be hosing down decisive moments by the terabyte. It tells us that the decisive digital moment will be when the subject takes ownership of their story in real-time and engages in dialogue with the audience and the creator. The decisive convergence that technology is driving toward is not one of stills vs moving capture, but one of traditional content supplier vs mediated authorship and direct engagement with the audience. "[A] tendency ... to see technology in terms of what it does rather than what it means." There's an epithet for the age we live in, all right. How the Power of Open can benefit photographers (Thanks, Jonathan!) |
| The Final Space Shuttle Launch: Atlantis STS-135 (liveblog + webcast) Posted: 08 Jul 2011 03:33 AM PDT Watch live streaming video from spaceflightnow at livestream.com Greetings from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. I'm here with thousands of other space devotees and media folk for the 135th and final launch of the Space Shuttle. If weather and technology permit, we will see Atlantis and her four-person crew lift off at 11:26am ET, headed on a mission to bring supplies to the International Space Station. I'm here at the press mound with space reporter Miles O'Brien and the SpaceFlightNow crew, who will be hosting a live webcast, rain or shine, scrub or launch, starting at 630am ET. I'll post updates in this post as events progress, and you may also want to follow on Twitter: @xenijardin for my fast personal observations, and @SpaceFlightNow for short news updates. Current chatter from those in the know: 30% odds for launch, but all of the experienced shuttle reporters and astronauts around our camp are cautiously optimistic. If today is a scrub, Saturday's weather looks better than Sunday's. The two most likely points at which we'd hear "no go": just before the crew get on board, or then, of course, just at the final countdown. Here's Bill Harwood's take. [photo below: SpaceFlightNow producer Kate Tobin surveys the many live HD feeds that will comprise today's webcast.]  |
| Posted: 08 Jul 2011 02:32 AM PDT  This April, 1978 ad for the Bytemaster computer from Denver's Digital Group Bytemaster is a pretty fascinating look at the first hesitant tendrils of the personal computer, a year after the introduction of the Apple ][+. The form-factor prefigures the Kaypro and the "portable computing" revolution, but also shares some heritage with the ubiquitous radio-with-handle devices of the day, from boom-boxes to little kitchen models. |
| Gentleman gets his hand stuck attempting to retrieve candy bar from gas tank Posted: 07 Jul 2011 04:35 PM PDT  I couldn't help but snicker when I read the news about a gentlemen who got his hand stuck in his car's gas tank when he tried to retrieve a candy bar he saw in there. Fortunately, firefighters swooped in like the 3 musketeers and twizzled his hand out. He is in good heath, save for a couple of small mounds on his finger (which are easily treated with the application of a bit o' honey).  |
| TWA Las Vegas tourism poster (1965) Posted: 06 Jul 2011 10:28 PM PDT  This 1965 Vegas/TWA tourist poster pretty much screams "Vegas, baby!" Love the way the artist represented daytime and nighttime here, along with the color scheme (safety orange being my favorite color). |
| Posted: 07 Jul 2011 01:18 PM PDT  I don't buy the argument that people need to drink eight glasses of water every day, or that they should start drinking before they feel thirsty in order to avoid getting dehydrated. Why not behave like other animals and drink when you are thirsty? That said, just thinking about club soda makes me thirsty. I don't know why, but fizzy water is very satisfying to me, and much tastier than flat water. I'm usually too lazy to stock up on bottles of club soda so I don't drink it that often. But a couple of weeks ago my family bought me a water carbonation system for Father's Day. It's called the Sodastream Genesis and it costs about $100. It comes with a CO2 cartridge that makes about 60 liters of soda (I have a feeling I will get more liters than that, because I like my water lightly carbonated). You can return the empty cartridges to a participating retail store and receive a full cartridge for about $15. The appliance itself doesn't use batteries or electricity. You just screw in a plastic bottle and press a button to release the CO2 into the bottle. It takes about 5 or 6 seconds to carbonate. This has turned out to be one of the best Father's Day presents I've ever received. I've got it right next to my beloved espresso maker. |
| Under the sea: Life on a lost shipping container Posted: 07 Jul 2011 01:04 PM PDT  (c) 2004 MBARI In 2004, on a trip from San Francisco to the Port of Los Angeles, the shipping vessel Med Taipei hit a patch of bad weather. Like all shipping vessels, Med Taipei was loaded down with 40-foot-long metal containers—the moving boxes that bring us stuff from all over the world and deliver our exports to other countries. In the storm, 24 of these containers fell off the Med Taipei and into the ocean. That's not a particularly rare event. Thousands of shipping containers are lost every year, in much the same way, says Andrew DeVogelaere, Ph.D., research coordinator for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. What makes this story remarkable is that one of the lost shipping containers was eventually found. Just months after the box fell off the Med Taipei, researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute stumbled across it while placing sensors for a survey of the ocean floor within the Marine Sanctuary. This year, the Sanctuary and MBARI were able to apply that good luck in a practical way, performing what is likely the first detailed study of a lost shipping container, and the effects it has on the ocean environment. I told you about this study back in March, when it was announced. Now that researchers have collected data and are starting to analyze it, I wanted to check in and find out more. In an interview last week, Andrew DeVogelaere told me about why it's difficult to study lost shipping containers, what creatures the researchers have found living on this container, and why what we don't know could hurt us. Maggie Koerth-Baker: Your press materials say that this is the first time the environmental effects of lost shipping containers have been studied. But containers like this one have been in use for decades. Is this really the first time? What took so long? Andrew DeVogelaere: That surprised me to. But I've not found any scientific publications on people studying containers. So I do think we're the first to do that. They're falling off all the time, 10,000 per year is best estimate. And the container we found is in really good condition. If we didn't know it had been down there for 7 years, we'd have guessed 4 months. But the containers aren't being found or studied because so few organizations can operate at that depth. The place we're looking at is 4,000 feet deep. Outside of oil companies operating rigs, MBARI is really one of the very few groups that's out there daily. Maybe the only one. It's still a poorly understood area. In these deep sea ecosystems we don't even know the species names for a lot of the creatures, and the way they interact with one another and the environment is still a mystery. MKB: Tell me about the location where the shipping container was found. What's it like? Some of the photos I saw before made it look kind of desolate. AD: The seafloor there [at the container site] is quite beautiful. It's not just flat sand. there's topography and sea pens sticking up and crabs. Every few inches there's something. There's beautiful, lacy sea cucumbers, and a certain kind of pink crab that's associated with this species of sea cucumber. We're going to write a little scientific note on that relationship pattern, because people hadn't really noticed it before. We did just because we were down there [looking at the container]. People assume that we know more about the ocean than we do. There have been discussions about lost containers, especially in the European Union. They're a hazard because they'll float for a while and could sink wooden fishing boats. In the whole discussion, though, nobody talks about impacts to the deep sea. That's what we have to offer. When one of these falls off a boat it's not just a loss of merchandise, or a risk of loss of life. We're also impacting the deep sea community we don't even understand yet. And there's a societal cost to that, though how much we don't really know yet. MKB: How difficult is it to do this kind of research? What has to happen just so you can observe the interaction between a shipping container and this environment that it's landed in? AD: The first thing is the mechanical problem of getting something to that depth to look at it. Fortunately, we have MBARI. They have a big undersea robot the size of a car, tethered on 4,000 feet of cable. It's got mechanical arms. You also have to have a special ship that can maneuver to stay above the robot and manage the cable so it doesn't get tangled up. And it's only been in the last 10 years that we can go to that depth and find a specific place we've been before. That's not a trivial engineering thing to know exactly where the ship is, and from there to know where the ROV is and communicate with that from the ship. as technology advances we're going to have a lot more opportunities to study these containers. Beyond the cabled robots there are now autonomous vehicles being developed. If you can send these AUVs out in search patterns, we'll be able to find more containers. So technology is a problem. But the number two difficulty is that we think there could be several levels of impact. Obviously [the container] crushes everything it lands on, but there's the question of how it affects the local ecology. It looks like certain species are attracted to this container. For instance, there's a relatively large snail that seemed to be attracted to the container where it would lay these amazing egg sacks, 5 or 6 inches high. But it looked like the container was also attracting crabs and octopus that fed on the snails as they're coming and going. So, when we look, we don't see many snails but they're somehow congregating around this container and changing predation patterns. You find a lot of empty shells in the area. Two king crabs, Family Lithodidae, near a shipping container lost in Monterey Bay. The empty shells are from the gastropod Neptunea amianta. (c) 2011 MBARI/NOAA MKB: Before you started this study, what kinds of effects were you worried about? How did you expect shipping containers to interact with the environment they found themselves in? AD: It's interesting, in that when this container fell into the sanctuary there were negotiations with the shipping company about mitigating damage. They were arguing there was no impact because there was nothing living down there. Luckily, we had research going on at that depth and could say that stuff lives there and this is what it looks like. MKB: When we were first talking about your study on BoingBoing, both the readers and I thought about artificial reefs—how there are places where they've intentionally dumped things, like old subway cars, off the coast, and those form new habitats. It sounds somewhat like the shipping container is doing something similar, with the snails you mentioned. So I'm wondering, should we be worried about this? Are lost shipping containers a good thing? AD: In some ways, saying that something is positive is a bit of a judgement call. If you like one kind of species it's positive to you. If you're a diver looking for big fish, then artificial reefs are good for you. But they're not good if you're a fisherman looking for squid [whose habitats are displaced by the reefs]. In this case, we saw these scallops that were living all over the container. MBARI has something like 8,000 hours of video at that depth and we've maybe only seen these scallops a few times before. So, maybe these containers are a positive for the deep sea scallops. It's possible. At this stage in the research, I wouldn't even want to say that anything is a huge negative or positive. But we now know something is going on and we should start studying it and stop ignoring it. The toughest question is the issue of these containers forming stepping stones from one harbor to another across the deep sea. If you're familiar with invasive species, what prevents them from invading is often geographic breaks. Sandy surfaces can't be crossed by creatures that need a hard substrate. But these containers, falling off along shipping routes, could form stepping stones that allow creatures to move. That's just a hypothesis right now. We'd need to look at multiple containers to figure that out. But it's a hypothesis that makes sense. MKB: Do shipping containers affect more of the environment than just wildlife? AD: We don't have the results yet on this. But we took these sediment samples at different distances from the container. When you put something like that on the bottom of the ocean it affects the deep sea current and the size of sediment grains around it. We have to look at the grains we collected and see but, generally, faster currents mean larger grain size. There could be localized changes in sediments and that can impact the organisms, like which can live there. Also, it's a bit of a stretch with this particular container, but the sediment thing also has an impact on pollution. Pesticide in the river, for instance, it sticks to the sediment, not the water. And it sticks more to smaller particles. Like I say, that's not as big of an issue here, but it could affect other shipping containers in other situations. MKB: Let's talk about pollution a little bit more. Do the contents of the container matter? What's in your container? AD: It's full of radial tires. I have said before that I didn't think tires were that toxic and one of my colleagues got upset. I was thinking more like it's not bleach or pesticide. Relatively speaking. The other containers that were lost [at the same time as this one] and that we never found contained cardboard, hair ribbons, hospital beds, sofas. Again, on a relative scale, those wouldn't be as bad. We do have some sediment where we'll be doing chemical analyses, to see if anything is leaching out. One thing were were interested in is whether things were spilling out because of locks rusting after 7 years underwater. We thought we'd find something like that. In this case it didn't. It does happen though. There are famous stories of containers of Doritos that come ashore on the beach on the East Coast. Or a million bananas on the shores of the Netherlands. There's also a case where Nike shoes that were in a container spilled into the North Pacific and it became this big oceanographic study. Scientists figured out where currents were in that part of the ocean by following the shoes and where they ended up. MKB: So you've collected all this data about this one shipping container, and you're in the process of analyzing that data to see what you can learn. But, once you've got your results, how much of that can you really extrapolate to other containers throughout the ocean? Does this really tell you much about the bigger picture? AD: You're right on. Really, we took a relatively very quick look at one container. We can say some things about that one container and develop hypotheses about others. But I think we have a long way to go. As much as anything we have some ideas of potential impacts, and we think some effort should be made to start looking at other containers. Once you learn one thing you're going to have five other questions. Meanwhile, while we know very little about the consequences, shipping containers are being lost all the time. When we first started this, I learned some amazing things about the things we use and where they come from. For instance, here in California we're interested in eating local fish. But squid caught in Monterey are taken to a packing company, shipped to China for processing, and then shipped back to Monterey to be sold as Monterey squid. We all benefit from the things that move around in containers and I don't think we realize that it's even happening. MKB: So what happens next, both for you and on this larger issue? AD: Right now we have a lot of video. We have notes and observations we made while we were at sea. We also have the sediment samples. We're going to look at chemistry, micro-invertebrates inside the sediment, and grain size. We can see general patterns in the video, but we're going to try to get down to a more refined taxa to figure out whether the species are invasive. And we want to quantify more carefully the density of organisms around the container. And my hope is that in two to three years we'll go back and visit again and try to detect other changes. Our hope is to publish this in some journals. That always takes a lot longer, though. Within half a year we'll have the data analyzed. It will take another year to get published after that. On the other side, I'll be meeting with someone to look at international venues for discussing shipping container practices. We've been approached by a group from New Zealand to see how we can insert the information we do have into those ongoing discussions. There are suggestions that maybe there should be standard loading practices. Right now they don't even have to be weighed. You might be overloaded, lopsided, or heavy containers on top. And there aren't standards for how you tie them down, either. It would take longer and cost more, but it's something that's worth considering I think.   |
| Harnessing the power of feedback loops Posted: 07 Jul 2011 01:21 PM PDT I enjoyed Thomas Goetz's article in the June issue of Wired about companies who are designing technologies that incorporate feedback loops to change human behavior. The two most interesting companies that Thomas wrote about are Vitality and GreenGoose. Vitality makes a cap for prescription pill bottles called the GlowCap: The device is simple. When a patient is prescribed a medication, a physician or pharmacy provides a GlowCap to go on top of the pill bottle, replacing the standard childproof cap. The GlowCap, which comes with a plug-in unit that Rose calls a night-light, connects to a database that knows the patient’s particular dosage directions—say, two pills twice a day, at 8 am and 8 pm. When 8 am rolls around, the GlowCap and the night-light start to pulse with a gentle orange light. A few minutes later, if the pill bottle isn’t opened, the light pulses a little more urgently. A few minutes more and the device begins to play a melody—not an annoying buzz or alarm. Finally, if more time elapses (the intervals are adjustable), the patient receives a text message or a recorded phone call reminding them to pop the GlowCap. The overall effect is a persistent feedback loop urging patients to take their meds.GreenGoose is making sensors that turn boring daily chores into a game: The GreenGoose concept starts with a sheet of stickers, each containing an accelerometer labeled with a cartoon icon of a familiar household object—a refrigerator handle, a water bottle, a toothbrush, a yard rake. But the secret to GreenGoose isn’t the accelerometer; that’s a less-than-a-dollar commodity. The key is the algorithm that Krejcarek’s team has coded into the chip next to the accelerometer that recognizes a particular pattern of movement. For a toothbrush, it’s a rapid back-and-forth that indicates somebody is brushing their teeth. For a water bottle, it’s a simple up-and-down that correlates with somebody taking a sip. And so on. In essence, GreenGoose uses sensors to spray feedback loops like atomized perfume throughout our daily life—in our homes, our vehicles, our backyards. “Sensors are these little eyes and ears on whatever we do and how we do it,” Krejcarek says. “If a behavior has a pattern, if we can calculate a desired duration and intensity, we can create a system that rewards that behavior and encourages more of it.” Thus the first component of a feedback loop: data gathering.A fascinating read. I hope Thomas writes a book about feedback loops. |
| Posted: 07 Jul 2011 01:08 PM PDT  Photojojo sells adapters that allow you to use DSLR lenses with an iPhone; the iPhone 4 model is $250, and the iPhone 3 one is $190. The result looks like a parody of all those new concealed-carry Micro 4/3-style cameras that don't make their massive lenses fit in your pocket. [Photojojo via Laughing Squid]  |
| Zinnia Jones: "My conversations with Bradley Manning," available for download Posted: 07 Jul 2011 09:13 AM PDT Zinnia Jones, the genderqueer YouTube vlogger who had an online friendship with alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning, has made their internet conversations available for download. The only redactions that have been made are to remove the identifying information of certain individuals. I'm releasing these logs because, thus far, all that we've heard from Bradley himself is in the form of incomplete conversations from Adrian Lamo. That was during an exceptional time in his life, and it doesn't give the whole picture of who Bradley is. I knew him as an intelligent, motivated and ambitious soldier who was dedicated to doing the best for his country, and I believe his words reflect that.Here's the download link.
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| Posted: 07 Jul 2011 09:51 AM PDT  News of the World, the Murdoch-owned newspaper at the center of a phone 'hacking' scandal, is to close after Sunday's edition. Though the world's second largest English-language newspaper (after the India Times), recent revelations that its reporters and investigators illegally accessed the cellphone messages of murdered schoolgirls, military casualties, and their families, appear to have finally drowned the newspaper in a national outpouring of vomit. One possible escape for the paper and its staff: the News of the World is a Sunday newspaper with a sister paper, The Sun, which runs Monday-Saturday. Don't be surprised if a Sunday Sun shows up in the coming weeks. Following is the text of a press release (PDF) issued by News International, its parent company.
News International today announces that this Sunday, 10 July 2011, will be the last issue of the News of the World.   |
| Posted: 07 Jul 2011 12:56 PM PDT Metrod's Panterragaffe is a rideable strandbeest (Theo Jansen's wonderful kinetic sculpture). There've been strandeests for hamsters and 3D printed strandbeests, but none are as sweet as perching on the seat of a strandbeest built for two. It was created by Metrods, in West Vancouver, a studio that does work for hire. They previewed it last month at the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire. In this configuration it requires smooth hard ground, but we're working on a modification to the mechanism to pick the feet up higher with each step. We should then be able to walk on grass and slightly irregular ground.Panterragaffe (via Make)   |
| Podcast: I interview Thomas Gideon from the Command Line Posted: 06 Jul 2011 10:48 PM PDT To commemorate the sixth anniversary of the excellent Command Line podcast, I interviewed the show's host, Thomas Gideon, now a staff technologist at New America Foundation. Command Line covers technology, games, civil liberties and related issues, and it's one of my favorite podcasts -- it was great fun to chat with Thomas on his podaversary. (MP3 link)   |
| Posted: 07 Jul 2011 07:50 AM PDT  Pale Horse designs' zombie bikinis come in four eerie styles, and there are matching hoodies and pumps (previously featured here). (via Super Punch) |
| SPECIAL FEATURE: Interview: Apollo astronaut Al Worden Posted: 07 Jul 2011 05:12 PM PDT Col. Al Worden, an Engineer and Apollo 15 CMP, talk about the back side of the moon, the universe, and everything.
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| Railway sleeper service, glorious 1946 ad Posted: 06 Jul 2011 10:46 PM PDT  This ad from a 1946 issue of New York Central Railroad's magazine features the kind of railway sleeper service you see in old movies, but which I've never found the like of in real life. Is there a railway left anywhere in the world that has this kind of romance? Were the original items half as glorious as they seem in restrospect? |
| Influencing Machine: Brook Gladstone's comic about media theory is serious but never dull Posted: 04 Jul 2011 04:08 AM PDT  Brooke Gladstone, co-host of the excellent NPR-syndicated "On the Media," has teamed up with illustrator Josh Neufeld to produce a fantastic nonfiction comic book called The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media. This is one of those books that feels like the author has been working up to it for her whole life, distilling all her varied experience and insight into one mind-opening, thought-provoking, and incredibly timely volume. Influencing Machine begins with a history of the news, starting with Mayan scribes, Herodotus, and Julius Caesar's Acta Diurna (the original syndicated newsheet and the first widely distributed sensationalist tabloid), and then to the Anglo-American history of news, propaganda, bias, lies, censorship, bravery, principle, and truth. This fascinating history serves to introduce the major thesis of Influencing Machine: that the "media machine" that cynically distorts in order to serve the rich and powerful is a delusion. The reality is that the "media agenda" is an emergent phenomenon that arises spontaneously from commercial constraints, human frailty, state interference, and cognitive blindspots. Gladstone's history of the best and worst of journalism is a prelude to an analysis of the present day, and the peculiar moment we inhabit, as partisan news -- once the dominant form of publishing, but long discredited and dormant -- begins to arise, just as the Internet is changing the way that news is gathered, reported, and analyzed and paid for. Gladstone makes a good case for the idea that total upheaval is actually pretty normal in the world of news, and even if this total upheaval is a bit more total than all the other ones, the apocalyptic story of the death of journalism is overstated, as is the evil nature of the Internet as a sapper of critical thought and sustained attention. Touching on everything from the impossibility of impartiality to the practical way to address bias, from copyright law to business models, from sensationalism to complicit silence, Gladstone and Neufeld's Influencing Machine is an absolutely spectacular read: serious without being weighty, accessible without being thin. It's one of those graphic nonfiction volumes, like Understanding Comics, that shows just how well suited comics are to explaining and exploring serious subjects. The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media
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| Women football players half as likely to fake an injury as men Posted: 06 Jul 2011 10:35 PM PDT According to a study published in Research in Sports Medicine, woman football (soccer) players are about half as likely to fake an injury as male players. The researchers used a representative sample of match-videos, counted injuries, and noted whether the player left the field for a substantial period or had visible blood, and counted those as definite injuries, then ranked the remaining injuries by their plausibility. Hilariously, they use the term "injury simulation," instead of "faking an injury," the former is apparently the term of art preferred by FIFA, which knows an awful lot about fraud.
(Image: Ambulance, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from danielmorris's photostream) |
"While it was difficult to know for certain if a player had a true injury or was faking or embellishing, we found that only 13.7 percent of apparent injuries met our definition for a 'definite' injury," Rosenbaum said. "Also consider that we saw six apparent injuries per match in the 2007 Women's World Cup but team physicians from the tournament reported only 2.3 injuries per match, so it looks like there may be some simulation in the women's game." 
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