The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Games to play with coffee beans
- Woman Faces Jail Time For Growing Veggies In Front Yard
- NuPenny Store in Wichita is never open
- Snapping turtle expresses displeasure at being plucked from pond
- An appreciation of '60s and '70s bubblegum trading cards
- Talking Space: awesome podcast hosted by 17-year-old space enthusiast
- Baby Yoda Beanie
- Two takes on Titusville FL, a space shuttle ghost town
- Internet angered by website redesign
- Photo: Father and son at first and last Space Shuttle launches, 30 years apart
- Watch these kids play Star Wars on a giant touch screen
- How To: Make Polaroid Film
- "Ancient buried landscape" off the coast of Scotland
- My Drunk Kitchen
- Pedobear? There's an app for that.
- Skull cufflinks
- Animated GIFs rule in 2011
- Propellerhead's Balance box promises clip-free recordings
| Games to play with coffee beans Posted: 12 Jul 2011 05:24 PM PDT  When we were in Costa Rica we ate several of our meals at the hotel restaurant. Each table had a decorative bowl of coffee beans on it. The service was very friendly at the restaurant, but it was a little slow, so to pass the time, my family and I invented games to play with the coffee beans. Some of the games were fun, others were interesting failures. The more entertaining games included: 1. Nim. (We didn't invent this one.) To play Nim, you arrange coffee beans (or other small counters) into piles. On your turn, you can take as many beans as you wish from any one pile. The object is to take the last bean from the table. We played lots of variations of this basic game. 2. Guess the Total. Each player puts between zero and four beans in his/her hand. Then each player guesses the total number of beans being held by all the players. Whoever is closest wins. 3. Tower of Beans (as seen above). Everyone starts with three beans. On "go" everyone tries to be the first to stack all three beans. Variation: who can make the highest stack of beans? (We couldn't make a stack higher than three.) If you know of any good counter games suitable to play while waiting for dinner, please post them in the comments!   |
| Woman Faces Jail Time For Growing Veggies In Front Yard Posted: 12 Jul 2011 04:52 PM PDT Here's a story to stimulate the "rules are rules" crowd -- "A Michigan woman is looking at the prospect of 93 days in jail because she planted vegetables in planters in her front yard and refused to abide by the town elders' interpretation of the planning code." Consumerist: Woman Faces Jail Time For Growing Veggies In Front Yard |
| NuPenny Store in Wichita is never open Posted: 12 Jul 2011 04:06 PM PDT  Randy Regier's NuPenny Store in Wichita, KS is not opening today. In fact, it will never open. More photos after the jump. .   |
| Snapping turtle expresses displeasure at being plucked from pond Posted: 12 Jul 2011 05:07 PM PDT [Video Link] Todd Bieber made a fascinating short film about a self-styled snapping turtle expert who encounters a snapper that tries to bite him in the face. (The fellow could be a stand-in for Will Ferrel!) I learned many things from watching this, but two things stand out -- 1. Snappers release a foul smell when you mess with them. 2. Don't mess with them. Also, Todd is co-producing a documentary about "turtles, kids and the environment" and is seeking funds via Kickstarter. |
| An appreciation of '60s and '70s bubblegum trading cards Posted: 12 Jul 2011 02:52 PM PDT  Dangerous Minds recently did a nice image gallery of selected bubblegum trading cards of the 1960s and '70s, including some sci-fi classics, Bo Derek, What's Happening, and Dukes of Hazzard. |
| Talking Space: awesome podcast hosted by 17-year-old space enthusiast Posted: 12 Jul 2011 02:24 PM PDT  [Photo, top: the final Space Shuttle launch, STS-135, taking off from Kennedy Space Center. Shot by Joel Rosenstein, Sawyer's dad. Below, the podcast team "puts their hands together to show unity and harmony between the team of Talking Space," photo by Dr. Lucy Rogers.]  One of the highlights of my trip to Florida last week to witness the final launch of the Space Shuttle was meeting Sawyer Rosenstein [Twitter], a 17-year old college freshman from New Jersey. Sawyer loves space (as do all of us here at Boing Boing), and he's a flight director who runs simulated space missions at the Lower Hudson Valley Challenger Center, sharing the wonders of space with people "ages 6 to 106." Sawyer and friends do a podcast called Talking Space [Twitter], and their episode this week is really worth a listen. I believe they have a special "end of the shuttle era" episode coming up soon, too. Here is a newspaper feature with more about Sawyer's life. Dude is my hero. The short version is that Sawyer was attacked by school bullies at age 12, and lost the ability to walk. He is a smart, kind, and inspiring person who refuses to be defined by what makes him "different," and instead chooses to be defined by what he loves. He was a guest on the STS-135 SpaceFlightNow live launch webcast. Below, an iPhone snap I took of Sawyer (L) with space journalist Miles O'Brien (center) and astronaut Leroy Chiao (R) during the webcast, just before the shuttle took off from launchpad 39A. (thanks, Miles O'Brien!)
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| Posted: 12 Jul 2011 01:31 PM PDT  $24, Etsy (knitterkrys), via bookofjoe via Tara McGinley. |
| Two takes on Titusville FL, a space shuttle ghost town Posted: 12 Jul 2011 11:51 AM PDT I spent the last week or so in and around Florida for the final Space Shuttle launch. During that time, I spent more time than I wanted to in a small town called Titusville, not far from the shuttle's home at Kennedy Space Center. You might think that Titusville would be an interesting subject for a "disintegration of small towns due to the end of the shuttle program" documentary, but as a friend pointed out, it was kinda disintegrated to begin with. The best thing Titusville had going for it was good launch observation spots along the water. Anyway, SpaceFlightNow's Steven Young turned me on to this hilarious "unofficial Titusville Tourism video," created by native Titusville teen Ryan Williams. Apparently, this video sparked a huge local scandal. Local lawmakers and TV news stations reacted to the "youtube sensation" with much outrage. There was a part two. I hear the city council even produced a "response video," though I can't find it. And then, as if he was reading my mind, Boing Boing reader Ryan Kerrison emailed right out of the blue: I'm a huge fan of Boing Boing and in particular your space related posts. I was recommended by a couple of my friends at Vimeo to send you a short film I recently finished called Welcome To Titusville. I was in Orlando this past April for the Florida Film Festival with a feature documentary I made last year and while in the area I made this short about the local town who are affected by the Space Shuttle closure.
[Video Link.] So, turns out I was wrong. Potshots notwithstanding, there is an interesting story to tell about how the end of the 30-year shuttle program has affected this Florida community, and Ryan tells it in that short film. Really a must-watch, with some great local people who have personal stories to share. As an aside, I had one of the most repulsive culinary experiences of my life in Titusville on this trip. Some hours after STS-135 took off, my travel companion and I were trying to grab a fast bite near KSC on a tight schedule. The one open spot with veg options ended up being the Titusville Denny's. Short version: if you like veggie burgers that taste like poop and sawdust, and you like them fried to a charcoal crisp in rancid hamburger drippings, this is the place for you. For others: try to stick with Dixie Crossroads.
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| Internet angered by website redesign Posted: 12 Jul 2011 12:17 PM PDT  Major tech blog MineCrunch went live with a long-awaited redesign today. Naturally, the internet is angry and confused. With radical features like black text typeset in Helvetica against a white background, a traditional blog river, bold headlines, faster load times and a fashionable 8-bit style logo, there are .. wait, there's nothing crazy at all! So what on Earth are its readers complaining about?The new look focuses on readability, removes (most) of the old site's mesh of pointless gridlines, and cleans up its ill-fitting accretion of social networking buttons. Design lead Dave Feldman writes how they set out to take the best of recent makeovers like Gawker's, without making the same mistakes, and the result is exactly what you'd imagine from such a considered and cautious effort: a minimal-but-stylish redesign that looks a bit like Engadget. The only thing emerging from the oven a little soft is an odd scrolling effect, whereby the MineCrunch logo vanishes into a fixed-position navbar at the top as a smaller version emerges. The way the two areas interact is distracting. But the minimal, scrolled-up version of the nav area is an exercise in plain class. The headlines are too big, sure. But that's the tiniest of problems. What the rage--the word "vomit" seems curiously predominant--shows is that people will complain about anything. Similar reactions against other redesigns made some sense. Gawker challenged its readers with a radical app-imitative UI that was frustrating in a web context and pretty much broken out the gate. Our own last major redesign in 2008 added an enormous 'promo carousel' of features that dominated the blog river. Wired's latest looks like someone put 400 pixels of transparent margin on top of the navbar and just forgot to fix it. And so on. Legitimate targets. But most objectors to the new MineCrunch aren't even bothering to explain their distaste for change with actual criticism; it all merges into a sort of defiant mooing noise emanating from the comments section. And the specifics that do emerge often seem particularly unconvincing! For example, someone complained that black text on a white background is unreadable. Venture capitalist and famed typographer Chris Sacca complained that the use of large, bold fonts for headlines makes it look "pimp slapped" and "pearl necklaced." This kind of criticism, you could say, speaks for itself. You may as well complain about the design of a German toaster or the packaging a ream of legal paper came in! Logo does look like a Creeper, though, seriously.   |
| Photo: Father and son at first and last Space Shuttle launches, 30 years apart Posted: 12 Jul 2011 10:50 AM PDT  "Father and Son: STS-1 and STS-135," a photo by Chris Bray, who is the younger of the two in these side-by-side captures from the very first shuttle launch thirty years ago, and the final one, last Friday. "The picture we waited 30 years to complete." (Flickr, via Reddit and Laughing Squid.) |
| Watch these kids play Star Wars on a giant touch screen Posted: 12 Jul 2011 09:17 AM PDT It's probably the level of concentration required, but these kids do not look nearly as excited about what they are doing as I think they should. For the last two years, University of Illinois at Chicago graduate student Arthur Nishimoto has been working on this incredible-looking video game based around a multi-touch interface. According to the YouTube page, the game:
There's more about the game's development at Nishimoto's website. Also: In before the Orson Scott Card jokes! Via Golem.de and Carl Wirth   |
| Posted: 12 Jul 2011 09:03 AM PDT Joel Johnson and Bill Barol have blogged here before about The Impossible Project, a group of Dutch Polaroid enthusiasts who bought an old Polaroid factory and recreated the company's instant film manufacturing process. General consensus: It's an impressive undertaking, but also kind of unnecessary and expensive. Today, we're going to focus on the impressive part, with this video showing the manufacturing process that creates Impossible Project instant film. It's 5 minutes long, but the joy you'll get from watching it rivals those old Sesame Street crayon manufacturing videos, so it's totally worth it. Conclusion: The Impossible Project may not be necessary, but it sure is a lot of fun to watch. Via Gizmodo, with a tip of the hat to Gideon VanRiette.   |
| "Ancient buried landscape" off the coast of Scotland Posted: 12 Jul 2011 09:06 AM PDT  Scientists have found evidence of an "ancient buried landscape" that was once above North Atlantic waters, the temporary result--at least in geographical terms--of thermal turmoil beneath the planet's surface. In "Transient convective uplift of an ancient buried landscape," Ross A. Hartley and his co-authors write that pressure forced parts of the European continental shelf above water in three discrete steps of up to 400m. Here, we use three-dimensional seismic data to reconstruct one of these ancient landscapes that formed off the northwest coast of Europe during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. We identify a drainage network within the landscape and, by modelling the profiles of individual rivers within this network, we reconstruct the history of surface uplift. We show that the landscape was lifted above sea level in a series of three discrete steps of 200-400 m each. After about 1 million years of subaerial exposure, this landscape was reburiedP.S. This new Atlantis' time in the sun was a good 55m years ago, which means we can just go totally science fiction with it. More details from Annalee Newitz at io9: This lost continent off the coast of Scotland disappeared beneath the ocean 55 million years ago [io9]   |
| Posted: 12 Jul 2011 08:21 AM PDT [Video Link] via Sean Bonner. Contains swearing and alcohol, may not be work or child-safe. |
| Pedobear? There's an app for that. Posted: 12 Jul 2011 07:55 AM PDT  The Smoking Gun reports that Pedobear has infiltrated Apple's App Store, in the form of a free app titled "Cuddle Bear." My two cents: if you're gonna do this, go all the way. The app itself is a pretty lame thing, intended to sell pedobear hats or some such nonsense. I want to see him running after innocent children in a bug-eyed gropey rage, á la Angry Birds. |
| Posted: 12 Jul 2011 07:30 AM PDT  If you'd like to pay Ralph Lauren $9,995 for these Skull Cufflinks With Diamond Eyes, tough cheese. They're sold out. [Mr. Porter via Acquire]   |
| Posted: 12 Jul 2011 07:24 AM PDT  Image: From Blade Runner (1982), animated by If We Don't, Remember Me. Animated GIFs were once the loathed embodiment of everything wrong with 1990s web design. Now they are the new art of the 'net, from message-board humor tropes to mesmerizing distillations of classic movie scenes. Anil Dash: The facts about animated GIFs are stark. They only support a palette of 256 colors. No current browser lists support for animated GIF as a codec for the HTML5 video tag. That omission is understandable, as GIF compression of animation isn't particularly efficient. They even lived under an unfashionable cloud of patent uncertainty during the web's formative years. And those are just some of the traits I love about the format.They work perfectly, impose strict creative limitations, and invite artists to solve certain addictive puzzles (such as smooth looping) every time. But there's more to it than that...   |
| Propellerhead's Balance box promises clip-free recordings Posted: 12 Jul 2011 07:26 AM PDT  The developers of popular music-making software package Reason are going into the hardware business with Balance, a 2-in 2-out USB audio recording box. Features include automatic clipping prevention (by recording at two volumes and "healing" clipped recordings), two XLR mic inputs with phantom power, and direct monitoring with a built-in headphone amp. It will be available Sept. 30 and come with Reason Essentials, a cut-down version of Reason 6, also out in the fall.  |
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