The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Fleshing out the garden
- Lab-grown teeth
- Hotmail bans crap passwords
- Clever indie games
- Interactive map of undersea cables
- Fox News won't touch Murdoch story with a "ten foot turban Durbin"
- Adorable naked mole rat snacking on fruit
- Gator and canoe, Texas summertime (photo, Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
- 5 places in your home that are breeding superbugs
- Green Energy's Forgotten Past, Uncertain Future
- FBI to investigate News Corp
- Straw hat making class at Machine Project in LA
- Cute Couple: a funny short film and the director's Kickstarter project
- The Bronx Riviera: summertime NYC photo-essay (Boing Boing Flickr Pool)
- Final space shuttle launch, as seen from booster camera (video)
- Music: Tinariwen's "Tassili" (fresh Touareg grooves from North Africa)
- Song about the Cambrian Explosion
- The Singularity is Far: A Neuroscientist's View
- Happy birthday and Godspeed, John Glenn.
- Spiders and the perils of new technology
- Angry Birds on a physics exam
- Why the dinosaurs died
- Prosecute News Corp in the U.S.?
- Emil Goodman's "Henry Waltz" animated film trailer
- Susannah Breslin on PTSD and Obama's response to US military suicides
- $2000 clock for audiophiles
- The Majesty of Benny Hill
- Pipe bending robot charms pipes into amazing shapes
- Banksy promo van covered in graffiti
- Murdoch summoned to parliament to answer for hacking claims
| Posted: 15 Jul 2011 01:06 AM PDT  Naked volunteers pose for American artist Spencer Tunick in front of Gaasbeek Castle in Belgium, July 9, 2011. Organizers estimated 800 people posed for the early morning nude photo installation, titled "Sleeping Beauties". Photo: Thierry Roge with Reuters.  |
| Posted: 15 Jul 2011 01:10 AM PDT  Photo: Mrs. Gemstone Scientists in Japan grew new mouse teeth from stem cells, reports the Times of India, paving the way for replacement human choppers somewhere down the line. The team pointed out that the new teeth were good for eating and sensitive to pain. At The Awl, Alex Balk remarks: "If they could knock them all out and put in a whole new model I'd be the first one to sign up for the procedure. (I assume they'd put me under for that, which, you know, bonus.) But hold up a second: "sensitive to pain"? WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU WANT THAT?"   |
| Posted: 15 Jul 2011 12:35 AM PDT Microsoft's free email service, Hotmail, is forbidding the use of particularly awful passwords. In a story at Ars Technica, Peter Bright describes how it's taking measures to prevent users compromising themselves. Anyone creating a new Hotmail account or changing the password of an existing account won't be able to use obvious and common passwords like "123456" or "password." The system will also block common phrases, like "ilovecats." In the future, Microsoft may also extend this ban on obvious passwords to existing accounts at a later date.People getting hacked can reflect badly on the service, too, especially when garbled early reports lead with huge lists of compromised data. Hotmail banning common passwords to beef up security [ars]   |
| Posted: 15 Jul 2011 12:23 AM PDT |
| Interactive map of undersea cables Posted: 15 Jul 2011 12:22 AM PDT  The first undersea telecommunications cable was laid in the 1840s. Now there are many. [Cablemap via Gizmodo]  |
| Fox News won't touch Murdoch story with a "ten foot turban Durbin" Posted: 15 Jul 2011 01:01 AM PDT Notwithstanding the amusing spectacle of Fox Newspeople avoiding discussion of their parent firm's legal troubles in Britain, what on earth is a "ten foot turban?" It's like "Hey, ten foot pole is so cliché! I know, I'll dress it up with a touch of contextually meaningless racism. That's the ticket." Update: on the contrary, it is a dick joke! It is very likely a reference to Sen. Richard "Dick" Durbin, discussed earlier in the segment: far less offensive, unless you are Sen. Richard "Dick" Durbin.   |
| Adorable naked mole rat snacking on fruit Posted: 14 Jul 2011 05:16 PM PDT |
| Gator and canoe, Texas summertime (photo, Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 14 Jul 2011 02:42 PM PDT  Photographer and Boing Boing reader Fred Facker of Houston, TX shares this image with the Boing Boing Flickr pool. "Just a floating log next to our canoe." "You can go get the canoe," he writes. "I'll catch up." |
| 5 places in your home that are breeding superbugs Posted: 14 Jul 2011 01:55 PM PDT Your daily dose of paranoia: Mara Grunbaum on the 5 places in your home that are breeding superbugs. There's some serious besorgniserregend going on in this article. You'll walk away feeling both educated and an intense need to wash your hands.   |
| Green Energy's Forgotten Past, Uncertain Future Posted: 14 Jul 2011 01:46 PM PDT This afternoon, I participated in a live webchat about energy's past, present, and future with Alexis Madrigal and Eli Kintisch. If you missed it, you can read the (not live) transcript anytime. Some of the subjects discussed: What makes low-carbon energy today different from the times people have briefly gotten into it in the past?; why should you be paying attention to the way the military thinks about energy?; and what matters more&mash;population or consumption?   |
| Posted: 14 Jul 2011 01:43 PM PDT The FBI will investigate Murdoch's News Corp over charges "employees or associates may have hacked into phone conversations and voicemail of September 11 survivors, victims and their families."   |
| Straw hat making class at Machine Project in LA Posted: 14 Jul 2011 01:45 PM PDT  This looks like fun! On Saturday, July 30 & Sunday, July 31, 2011 from 1 – 4pm at Machine Project, Corina Haywood will be teaching a Sculptural Straw Hats Class. Millinery is the art of making hats by hand using wooden head blocks and simple hand-sewing techniques. In this 2 day class you will make your own, one-of-a-kind hat using natural woven straw material and an assortment of trim materials. Design techniques are based on the free-form blocking and draping techniques that were used during the 1920’s to the 1940’s when women were making their own hats to cut costs and introduced innovative styles into the world of fashion. You can make an original version of a classic design, or combine different hat shapes to invent your own free-form sculpted design. If you have a specific idea of a hat you would like to make or lines that you would like to evoke, such as architectural designs, photos of flowers or landscapes, please feel free to bring images or hats from your own collection to this class. You may also bring any feathers, jewelry, buttons or fabric that you would like to use.I would take the class, but when I wear a hat, not only does it make me look like a moron, it makes me think like a moron, too. |
| Cute Couple: a funny short film and the director's Kickstarter project Posted: 14 Jul 2011 01:33 PM PDT A few years ago Courtney Moorehead Balaker wrote and directed the above 15-minute short film called "Cute Couple," which won the Audience Choice Award at the Jackson Hole Film Festival (There is one brief NSFW scene). Now she is seeking funds on Kickstarter to create her first feature length film. Untitled Jackson Hole Project is a feature film that brings a group of (mostly) thirty-somethings together for a mini-reunion in beautiful Jackson Hole, Wyoming over a long holiday weekend. What starts out as a fun-loving reunion filled with reminiscing quickly degrades into a test of relationships once a shocking request is made by their host, Meredith. |
| The Bronx Riviera: summertime NYC photo-essay (Boing Boing Flickr Pool) Posted: 14 Jul 2011 03:02 PM PDT  Photographer and Boing Boing reader Charles le Brigand shares with the Boing Boing Flickr Pool a series of images he shot at the so-called "Bronx Riviera" over the Fourth of July holiday weekend. "People go to Orchard beach to have fun and they look genuinely happy," he explains. "Orchard Beach is one remaining enclave of the real New York, and there's nothing better than the real New York during summer." View the entire photo-set here. |
| Final space shuttle launch, as seen from booster camera (video) Posted: 14 Jul 2011 12:19 PM PDT Sweet fancy astronauts, this video just published by NASA is a thing of beauty. Cameras mounted on the two solid rocket boosters that helped propel space shuttle Atlantis into orbit on July 8 provide unique angles of the launch from the Kennedy Space Center and their subsequent water landing downrange in the Atlantic Ocean
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| Music: Tinariwen's "Tassili" (fresh Touareg grooves from North Africa) Posted: 14 Jul 2011 12:26 PM PDT [Video Link] Tassili, the new record from Tinariwen comes out in a few weeks. With all the political unrest in their native country of Mali, in the Sahara desert region of north Africa, the music and the spirit behind their work seem all the more timely. This band of Touareg musicians are touring the US right now, and just played LA's Troubadour last night (Henry Rollins called 'em "one of the best live bands ever"). Above, a preview of the new album. Below, a music video from their 2009 release, "Imidiwan: Companions." Look for their music on Boing Boing's in-flight entertainment TV channel on board Virgin America Airlines, too. Catch them on tour. Here's a schedule. |
| Song about the Cambrian Explosion Posted: 14 Jul 2011 11:45 AM PDT This fabulous song about the most epic phase of biological diversity on planet Earth was written by Canadian elementary school teacher John Palmer—he's also the guy playing guitar. The rest of the trio, Brighter Lights, Thicker Glasses, is made up of Michael Dunn on the dobro and Brian Samuels on the cello. Via Smithsonian Surprising Science Thanks, David Ng!   |
| The Singularity is Far: A Neuroscientist's View Posted: 14 Jul 2011 11:14 AM PDT  David J. Linden is the author of a new book,The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good. He is a professor of neuroscience at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Chief Editor of the Journal of Neurophysiology. Ray Kurzweil, the prominent inventor and futurist, can't wait to get nanobots into his brain. In his view, these devices will be equipped with a variety of sensors and stimulators and will communicate wirelessly with computers outside of the body. In addition to providing unprecedented insight into brain function at the cellular level, brain-penetrating nanobots would provide the ultimate virtual reality experience. In an interview with GOOD magazine, Kurzweil says:
Of course, there's no reason why these nanobots must be restricted in their manipulations to the sensory portions of the brain. In Kurzweil's scenario, brain nanobots could just as easily manipulate motor functions, cognitive processes, memories, emotions, and basic drives. But nanobot-mediated virtual reality, virtual emotion, and modulated cognition are only the beginning. Kurzweil predicts that by the late 2030s, we will be able to routinely scan an individual's brain with such molecular precision and with such a complete understanding of the rules underlying neuronal function and plasticity that we will be able to "upload" our mental life into a vastly powerful and capacious future computer. As Kurzweil describes it his book The Singularity is Near , "This process would capture a person's entire personality, memory, skills and history." At that point, boundaries between brain, mind, and machine would fall away. Once our individual mental selves are instantiated in machine form, manipulations of mental function, perception, and action just become software modules. Want to improve your mood? Want to preserve all your experiences in memories with perfect fidelity? Want to have the mother of all orgasms? There's an app for that. As much as I respect Ray Kurzweil and appreciate his willingness to make predictions about and argue for specific future events, I take issue with his timetables for both the introduction of brain-nanobots and the ability to upload the contents and meaning of a brain.
I am a neurobiologist and I have spent the past 28 years engaged in studies of the cellular and molecular basis of memory and cognition. I am an optimist and a technophile, but I believe that I speak for the vast majority of brain researchers when I express serious doubts about Kurweil's timetable. The central premise underlying his predictions is that enabling technologies like computer processors, computer memory, microscopes, brain scanners, and DNA sequencing machines have been on an exponential rather than a linear trajectory in terms of their capacity, speed, resolution, and real-world cost, and that it is reasonable to imagine that this exponential trend will continue. Kurzweil also assumes that the human mind resides entirely in the brain (or at least in the nervous system): There is no immortal soul, collective energy, or other nonbiological component that encodes our individual mental selves. At this point in his argument I'm still on board. However, Kurzweil then argues that our understanding of biology—and of neurobiology in particular—is also on an exponential trajectory, driven by enabling technologies. The unstated but crucial foundation of Kurzweil's scenario requires that at some point in the 2020s, a miracle will occur: If we keep accumulating data about the brain at an exponential rate (its connection maps, its activity patterns, etc.), then the long-standing mysteries of development, consciousness, perception, decision, and action will necessarily be revealed. Our understanding of brain function and our ability to measure the relevant parameters of individual brains (aided by technologies like brain nanobots) will consequently increase in an exponential manner to allow for brain-uploading to computers in the year 2039. That's where I get off the bus. I contend that our understanding of biological processes remains on a stubbornly linear trajectory. In my view the central problem here is that Kurzweil is conflating biological data collection with biological insight. A Lake of Data, A Puddle of Knowledge Let's take genetic sequencing as an example. Yes, we have now sequenced quite a few human genomes and, yes, the speed and cost of doing so are improving exponentially. The human genome sequence—and those of the rat, mouse, fly, zebrafish and rhesus monkey—are an invaluable tool for biologists. That said, while the fundamental insights that have emerged to date from the human genome sequence have been important, they have been far from revelatory. For example, we have learned that gene duplication is more common than we originally thought. It's not all that rare for regions of chromosomes to repeat themselves. We have also learned that humans have fewer genes, but that those genes have more complex modes of regulation and more splice-forms than we had initially predicted. That's all useful information, but it doesn't represent a game-changing, exponential transformation in our understanding of genetics. When the human genome sequence was finished, no one was able to look at it and say, "A-ha, now I can understand what makes us uniquely human," or "A-ha, now I see how a fertilized egg becomes a newborn during the course of gestation." There have been a number of genuine paradigm-shifting insights in genetics in recent years. For example, we now know that chemical modification of DNA through a process called methylation can alter its structure and the way in which it interacts with a set of regulatory/structural proteins called histones, thereby silencing the expression of certain genes. This is one of several mechanisms that controls the regulation of gene expression or "epigenetics". Such insights have explained a whole set of puzzles and are a major step forward in our understanding of genetics. But these discoveries, and most of the other key conceptual breakthroughs in this field, have come slowly, the result of stubbornly linear small science, and not of the huge technology-driven data sets that Kurzweil describes. This linear progress also holds true for the growth in our knowledge of brain function. For example, we now have a map called the Allen Brain Atlas that shows the expression pattern of almost every gene in the mouse brain, detailed in a huge series of microscopic images. This resource, which is available to everyone on the Internet, is a wonderful tool for brain researchers, but it has produced few "Eureka!" moments. The temporal and spatial resolution of our brain scanners is also improving, but these improvements have likewise yielded fundamentally linear insights. Space Invaders Kurzweil's ideas about nanobots in the brain are problematic, as well. He says his nanobots will measure seven microns across—about half the diameter of a typical neuronal cell body—and their job will be to maneuver through brain tissue and deploy microsensors and stimulators to evaluate normal brain function. You might imagine the nanobot as a car, something the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. It drives down the road, until it finds something the size of an SUV (a neuron). Here is the first of many problems in Kurzweil's scenario: The brain is composed of neurons and glial cells—non-neuronal cells that outnumber neurons 10-to-1 and provide metabolic support and slow forms of information processing in the brain. These cells are packed together very tightly, leaving only miniscule gaps between them. It is easy to look at the left panel of the figure that shows a computer-based reconstruction of the tip of a growing axon in the brain and imagine that there is plenty of space around it. However, the complete view of this same growing axon tip is shown in the panel on the right. This image is made with a transmission electron microscope and it shows how the same growing axon (marked with asterisks) is packed into a dense and complex matrix of tissue containing other neurons and glial cells. The scale bar in the left panel is 0.5 microns long, about 1/160th of the diameter of a human hair. So you can imagine Kurzweil's brain nanobot, a structure about fourteen times larger in diameter than the scale bar, crashing through this delicate web of living, electrically-active connections. What's more, the tiny spaces between these cells are filled not just with salt solution, but with structural cables built of proteins and sugars, which have the important function of conveying signals to and from neighboring cells. So let's imagine our nanobot-Volkswagen approaching the brain, where it encounters a parking lot of GMC Yukon SUVs stretching as far as the eye can see. The vehicles are all parked in a grid, with only one half-inch between them, and that half-inch is filled with crucial cables hooked to their mechanical systems. (To be accurate, we should picture the lot to be a three-dimensional matrix, a parking lot of SUVs soaring stories into the sky and stretching as far as the eye can see, but you get the idea). Even if our intrepid nanobot were jet-powered and equipped with a powerful cutting laser, how would it move through the brain and not leave a trail of destruction in its wake? The nanobot also needs its own power source. And it needs to evade reactive microglia, specialized brain cells that attack and engulf foreign bodies. And all of this has to happen in a way that does not compromise the physiology that the nanobot is trying to measure. These problems are not fundamentally or philosophically unsolvable, but they are enormous. The 2020s are coming up fast, and so there's a lot that would need to be accomplished in a very short time to keep Kurzweil's nanobot timetable on track. Don't get me wrong. I do believe that the fundamental and long-standing mysteries of the brain will ultimately be solved. I don't hold with those pessimists who claim that we can never understand our minds by using our brains. I also share Kurzweil's belief that technological advancement will be central to unlocking the enduring mysteries of brain function. But while I see an exponential trajectory in the amount of neurobiological data collected to date, the ploddingly linear increase in our understanding of neural function means that an idea like mind-uploading to machines being usefully deployed by the 2020s or even the 2030s seems overly optimistic.   |
| Happy birthday and Godspeed, John Glenn. Posted: 14 Jul 2011 11:05 AM PDT  Ben Cosgrove at LIFE sends word of a new batch of never before publicly viewed photographs from the "seemingly bottomless LIFE archives." On the occasion of astronaut John Glenn's 90th birthday (the actual day is Monday, July 18), LIFE published a gallery of 25 previously unpublished pics of Glenn from the late 1950s and '60s. Here's the rest of the gallery. |
| Spiders and the perils of new technology Posted: 14 Jul 2011 10:40 AM PDT  The author of the Skulls in the Stars blog has a vast and delightful collection of historical papers about science, technology and how those things affect human lives. In an 1887 issue of Science, he found a letter that brilliantly captures what always happens when you use technology to solve a problem—namely, you create a new problem.
Whoops. Which brings me to my next point: Nothing is perfect. The goal of technology isn't to create a world where everything works exactly the way we want it to. At least, that shouldn't be the goal. Because it's completely and utterly unattainable. Instead, the goals of technology ought to be centered around mitigating problems and replacing them with problems that aren't as big of a deal. It's about balancing trade-offs. Finding a happy medium between what we want, and what we're willing to live with. In the long run, spiders turned out to be a small price to pay for the conveniences of electric light. Image: Spiders, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from gramody's photostream   |
| Posted: 14 Jul 2011 10:26 AM PDT  This was pretty much destined to happen, eventually. The old Wile E. Coyote story problems were getting a bit stale. Via Rishabh Agarwal   |
| Posted: 14 Jul 2011 10:19 AM PDT  I am pretty sure this is also why the utility company wants you to call before you dig. You could get stuck down there! Watch out! From Dirty Pretty Things, via Adam Fields   |
| Prosecute News Corp in the U.S.? Posted: 14 Jul 2011 10:09 AM PDT Former New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer says that the U.S. must also prosecute Rupert Murdoch's companies, because British authorities are too corrupt to get to the bottom of it all.   |
| Emil Goodman's "Henry Waltz" animated film trailer Posted: 14 Jul 2011 09:58 AM PDT "Henry Waltz" is a feature-length animation in development by director Emil Goodman. The trailer gives me the same feeling as Peter Chung's early Æon Flux shorts. I look forward to the full film! Henry Waltz |
| Susannah Breslin on PTSD and Obama's response to US military suicides Posted: 14 Jul 2011 10:21 AM PDT Susannah Breslin, periodic Boing Boing guestblogger and current Forbes contributor, was a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation to talk about President Obama's plan to begin sending condolence letters to military families whose loved ones committed suicide while in combat zones. Susannah argues the policy falls short, overlooking suicides committed by service members outside combat zones. Susannah is also the person behind The War Project.   |
| Posted: 14 Jul 2011 09:27 AM PDT  McIntosh now offers the MCLK12 mantle clock, which has the same faceplate and meters as its amplifiers, including hands that "fly back in retrograde fashion when they reach the end of their scale". It is $2,000. [McIntosh via Uncrate]  |
| Posted: 14 Jul 2011 09:17 AM PDT Yesterday I posted a demonstration of the raw power of a great sword. Someone in the comments requested that the video be Benny-Hillified, and now, thanks to reader zax I can share that with you. From zax's description of the video: Ever wanted to see a "portly" gentleman with an awesome tache chop up pigs with a two handed sword to the theme music from benny hill? Well here it is!!   |
| Pipe bending robot charms pipes into amazing shapes Posted: 14 Jul 2011 09:14 AM PDT [Video link] This robotic pipe bending machine looks like a snake charmer but with raw steel, or maybe a real life version of that old screensaver. It basically just extrudes metal and oozes raw, controlled power. Unfortunately, one of the more interesting videos of the machine is blocked for embedding. I want a PlayDoh extruder that does this. I would be the envy of kindergarteners everywhere. Thanks Joe! |
| Banksy promo van covered in graffiti Posted: 14 Jul 2011 08:51 AM PDT A van promoting Banksy's movie, Exit Through the Gift Shop, was grievously tagged in Japan. BB Reader Bender points out: "And yet what it's promoting is still perfectly visible. What thoughtful taggers!" [Timeout]   |
| Murdoch summoned to parliament to answer for hacking claims Posted: 14 Jul 2011 06:33 AM PDT Rupert, the adventurous teddy bear turned evil media mogul, has been summonsed to answer questions in parliament over the phone hacking affair. [BBC]   |
Image: Harris KM, Fiala JC, Ostroff L. 
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