The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Enterprise crew at the Shuttle Enterprise, 1976
- Space Oddity, David Bowie (1969)
- 30-year space shuttle era to end with Atlantis STS-135 landing
- Apple board searches for Gil Amelio successor
- Bad words, fine typography
- Canada's toothless telco regulator finally shows a minute hint of fang
- Life in Rebekah Brooks's newsroom
- Bride's mugshot photo (complete with veil)
- Suit to simulate reduced gravity, 1965
- FBI releases files on controversial booksellers Paladin and Loompanics
- Purebred's photos of Alex Pardee battling a tree monster
- Wario doll's eyes light up and smoke comes out ears when online business makes a sale
- Japan: Fukushima sows sunflowers to soak up radiation
- Mac OSX 10.7 Lion: the mother of all reviews, by Ars Techica's John Siracusa
- Planet of the Apes Party Fun Time: Damn Dirty Disco Apes! (video)
- 30 Mosques in 30 Days in 30 States: Kickstarter
- Counterfeit coin puzzle
- Happy Moon Day!
- Visit to a fake Apple store in China
- Korea solves mystery of shaking skyscraper (spoiler: not an earthquake)
- NMA animates #NOTW: Murdoch having sex, pie attack, Lulzsec, Wendi Deng "tiger attack"
- Why is the state of Alabama still collecting tax for needy Confederate Civil War vets?
- Deliverance church casts out demons with pile-ons, burps, snot expulsion, farting
- NASA Messenger: A farewell to Earth
- Probiotics and "Science by Product Release"
- Universal Music accused of using fraudulent DMCA notices as a negotiating tactic in licensing music from other labels
- Heat stroke turns me into Dave Barry
- Suppressed report on raided file-sharing community reveals users as big-spending entertainment purchasers
- Ancient exercise contraptions and their well-dressed users
| Enterprise crew at the Shuttle Enterprise, 1976 Posted: 20 Jul 2011 11:31 PM PDT  To boldly go....  |
| Space Oddity, David Bowie (1969) Posted: 20 Jul 2011 10:40 PM PDT |
| 30-year space shuttle era to end with Atlantis STS-135 landing Posted: 20 Jul 2011 10:22 PM PDT Watch live streaming video from spaceflightnow at livestream.com
"On an evening that is draped in emotion and steeped in history, down the hallowed halls of Mission Control here in Houston, this is likely the final shift in the history of space shuttle program." —NASA commentator Rob Navias, on the live-streamed coverage of shuttle Atlantis' landing.
Space shuttle Atlantis' wakeup song for landing day was "God Bless America" by Kate Smith, played at 9:29 p.m. EDT, for the entire crew and all the men and women who have worked for the shuttle program over the years. Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Doug Hurley and Mission Specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim will begin deorbit preparations a little before 1 a.m. EDT for their planned landing at 5:56 a.m. at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. More at SpaceFlightNow, and of course at NASA.gov. Astronauts have been tweeting from space. You can track the shuttle's descent live in Google Earth, too: KMZ. For groovy ambient electronica mixed with the live NASA audio, tune into Soma FM's Mission Control feed. Boing Boing pal Miles O'Brien recorded a video farewell to the shuttle mission for the PBS Newshour. When Atlantis lands and is retired, America will no longer have a vehicle with which to bring humans into space. Yes, NASA or private industry plan to deliver that eventually, but for now, we'll be renting space from Russia. As you might imagine, many who were involved in the US space program during the Cold War era are none too happy at this strange turn of history. Consider this line in this blog post a moment of silence and respect for all of the astronauts, workers, and families who have been part of America's space shuttle era over these past three decades—and for those astronauts who did not return. Godspeed.
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| Apple board searches for Gil Amelio successor Posted: 20 Jul 2011 04:52 PM PDT I almost missed this as it was buried around the time Apple announced its earnings, so maybe you missed it, too. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple's board of directors is looking outside the company for a potential Steve Jobs replacement.   |
| Posted: 20 Jul 2011 03:09 PM PDT   Theo Olesen's "Beautiful Swear Words" is a blog of bad words presented in lovely hand-drawn typography. Beautiful Swear Words (Thanks, Lisa Mumbach and Jason Tester!)   |
| Canada's toothless telco regulator finally shows a minute hint of fang Posted: 20 Jul 2011 02:45 PM PDT Michael Geist sez, Canada's telecom regulator hearing into usage based billing concluded yesterday with a final decision expected some time in the fall. This long post focuses on the shift in CRTC thinking on the state of broadband competition in Canada but wonders whether it comes too late to make a difference. For many years, the CRTC has steadfastly maintained that the Canadian ISP market is competitive. The view that the Canadian Internet services market is competitive has shaped virtually every recent important CRTC decision on broadband regulation. Given its longstanding view that the market was competitive, the frustration felt by independent ISPs, businesses, and consumers simply didn't resonate with the commission. Yet despite this track record, the recent hearing provided glimpses of a change. On Monday, CRTC Vice-Chair Len Katz posed a question that started from the following premise:The Usage Based Billing Hearing Concludes: Has the CRTC Come to Competition Too Late?   |
| Life in Rebekah Brooks's newsroom Posted: 20 Jul 2011 02:44 PM PDT Disgruntled former News of the World employees are starting to anonymously gossip about the working conditions in Rebekah Brooks's newsroom. A lot of it is what you'd expect -- bullying demands for unwavering loyalty -- but the business of the reporter with the Harry Potter beat is just beyond the pale: At Rupert Murdoch's tabloids, refusing to play ball meant being pushed to the sidelines. One reporter who said he went through that was Charles Begley, News of the World's Harry Potter correspondent in 2001 when Brooks was its editor.With Brooks arrested, tabloid insiders open up (via Reddit)   |
| Bride's mugshot photo (complete with veil) Posted: 20 Jul 2011 03:08 PM PDT  This is the mugshot of one Tammy Lee Hinton, 50, who was arrested just after her wedding at City of Zion Ministries church in Jackson County, Michigan. There was a 3-year-old warrant out for Hinton for identity theft charges. Apparently, she's also a runaway bride, having missed her court appearance this week. "Michigan bride arrested on warrant misses court date" (Detroit Free Press) "Blushing Bride Is Busted On Her Wedding Day" (Smoking Gun) |
| Suit to simulate reduced gravity, 1965 Posted: 20 Jul 2011 02:20 PM PDT  From a photo gallery at LIFE, titled "NASA's Most Excellent Outfits": "A suit designed for the Reduced Gravity Walking Simulator located at the Lunar Landing Facility (in 1965). The purpose of this simulator was to study the subject while walking, jumping, or running. Researchers conducted studies of various factors such as fatigue limit, energy expenditure, and speed of locomotion."NASA's Most Excellent Outfits   |
| FBI releases files on controversial booksellers Paladin and Loompanics Posted: 20 Jul 2011 01:12 PM PDT  The FBI has released its files on two famously controversial publishers, Paladin Press and Loompanics Unlimited, following a FOIA request filed by Government Attic. The files suggest that the booksellers' huge libraries of books on drugs, guns and other ultra-libertarian issues only rarely drew the FBI's attention. Though their catalogs were similar, Loompanics stood out for its countercultural style, whereas Paladin specialized in republishing declassified military guidebooks and the like. When Loompanics wound up operations in 2006, Paladin acquired part of its back catalog. The FBI's files on Paladin Press date back some forty years, and reveal an early 1970s investigation into the classification status of the U.S. government materials that Paladin republished. Since then, however, the release shows that the bureau took little interest in it except to execute procedural inquiries on behalf of foreign investigators. The Loompanics file is much the same. Concluding that the organization and its publications were legal, the FBI only revisited it to conduct inquiries triggered by hand-wringers and foreign cops. Paladin Highlights • In the early 1970s, the FBI looked into of how Paladon got hold of various government documents. A la "Wow, we declassified that? Huh." • In 1983, a recipient of an unsolicited catalog for Paladin's books sends an angry letter to their senator, expressing disbelief "that something like this could exist in this country." The senator asks the FBI to investigate it "because of the desire of my office to be responsibe to all inquiries." The FBI: "Our review failed to find any violation of federal law ... the Paladin press has been brought to our attention in the past." • After a Paladin video tape was found in the possession of a murder victim in Liverpool in 1997, the coppers there ask the U.S. Embassy if these guys ship guns or silencers to England or something. The FBI checks it out. Paladin says it only sells media, and refuses to provide general customer info on privacy grounds, but will do so for specifically-named suspects or victims. Once given the info, it reports that it has no records of any of them. • Australia gets upset when Paladin republishes stuff from its classified military manuals. The resulting FBI investigation asks Paladin, where did you get that? Paladin says it bought the original manuals in a bookstore in Sidney, Australia. The FBI takes a motrin and fixes itself a drink. Loompanics Highlights • A typical FBI response to an inquiry from whomever: "AGAIN THIS IS NOT CLASSIFIED OR RESTRICTED MATERIAL ... THESE ITEMS ARE POSSIBLY OF INTEREST TO TERRORISTS OR EXTREMISTS, BUT, AS ALL ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OF THE U.S., POSSESSION OF SUCH ITEMS CONSTITUTE NO VIOLATION OF LAW." • In 1984, the FBI interviewed the "owner" of Loompanics (i.e. Mike Hoy) in order to identify a particular subscriber to Loompanics who was a suspect in a criminal investigation. He was concerned about government intervention in his business but "reluctantly" advised that in order to get on the subscriber list, you had to buy a book. The FBI concluded that he violated no laws through the operation of his mail-order bookselling business. • In the 1980s, police in Germany make an inquiry about the origins of Loompanics materials owned by locals who, "with the help of these materials ... have been attempting to create dissention." The books were "Total Resistance You can download the files at Government Attic's Department of Justice documents page.   |
| Purebred's photos of Alex Pardee battling a tree monster Posted: 20 Jul 2011 12:32 PM PDT   My insane and insanely-talented pals Stacey Ransom and Jason Mitchell at Purebred still + motion created a startling new photo series starring lowbrow artist Alex Pardee. Yes, that monster is real. Well, real in that it's not Photoshopped into the picture. Pardee is at ComicCon right now and will be signing photos at the ZeroFriends booth. Follow @alexpardee for times. And for all of the images, check out the Purebred portfoilo.
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| Wario doll's eyes light up and smoke comes out ears when online business makes a sale Posted: 20 Jul 2011 12:22 PM PDT From Make: "Tiburcio and his daughter Helena have an interesting tool for learning when an online purchase has been made from their web store — an Arduino-controlled Wario toy. Tiburcio explains:" I wanted something nice to have at the office that tell us every time someone make a purchase on our game. Every time we make a buck Wario rings the bell and flash his greedy green eyes. If we made a lot then Wario shoot smoke from his ears!"You can check out Wario in action in the video, including the sketch that allows Tiburcio's Mac to communicate with Wario wirelessly via an XBee module." |
| Japan: Fukushima sows sunflowers to soak up radiation Posted: 20 Jul 2011 11:47 AM PDT City officials in Fukushima, Japan sowed sunflower seeds Wednesday at a plaza in the city as part of efforts to remove radioactive materials from the soil following leaks and meltdowns at a nearby nuclear plant, following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.   |
| Mac OSX 10.7 Lion: the mother of all reviews, by Ars Techica's John Siracusa Posted: 20 Jul 2011 11:41 AM PDT John Siracusa at Ars Technica has an extensive, and I do mean extensive, review of Apple's just-released new Lion operating system.   |
| Planet of the Apes Party Fun Time: Damn Dirty Disco Apes! (video) Posted: 20 Jul 2011 11:40 AM PDT [Video Link] Remixed to "Benny Benassi Presents the Biz," via Laughing Squid. |
| 30 Mosques in 30 Days in 30 States: Kickstarter Posted: 20 Jul 2011 11:08 AM PDT Bassam Tariq and Aman Ali, two funny and talented guys behind "30 Mosques" who've contributed to Boing Boing as guestbloggers in the past, are raising funds for a new round of their ambitious "30 Mosques in 30 Days" project (which we've featured here before). "Ramadan is starting again in three weeks and we're finishing our US tour by visiting the 20 states we missed in our last trek," says Bassam. "We have started a kickstarter page and have only seven days left for fundraising." A cool project with a proven track record. Recommended. More about it here.
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| Posted: 20 Jul 2011 10:57 AM PDT Futility closet has a good brain teaser: You have nine coins and a balance scale. One of the coins is lighter than the others. Is it possible to identify it in only two weighings?Counterfeit coin puzzle   |
| Posted: 20 Jul 2011 10:52 AM PDT  On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. From the Smithsonian, this image: In celebration of the first man on the moon, we share with you the Apollo 11 Command Module, "Columbia" - the living quarters for Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. The Command Module was one of the three parts of the complete Apollo spacecraft and the only portion of the spacecraft to return to Earth. It was transferred to the Smithsonian in 1970 and can be seen on display at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.This is one of my favorite exhibits at the National Air and Space museum. If you've never been, or if you're a parent and your kids haven't been yet--go!   |
| Visit to a fake Apple store in China Posted: 20 Jul 2011 11:31 AM PDT  Jessica found three fake Apple stores in China and took photos. It's not clear whether the products were genuine or knockoffs. They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks... But some things were just not right: the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn't been painted properly.Visit to a fake Apple store in China (Via Jack Shafer)   |
| Korea solves mystery of shaking skyscraper (spoiler: not an earthquake) Posted: 20 Jul 2011 10:47 AM PDT BB pal Syd Garon, who shared this with me, notes: "On the Venn diagram of science and comedy this fits right smack in the middle." From SFGate.com: Korean scientists think they have determined what caused a 39-story Seoul skyscraper to shake violently for 10 minutes, causing the building to be evacuated for two days. Earthquake? Nope. Gale-force winds? Sorry. Volcanic activity? Unh-uh. |
| NMA animates #NOTW: Murdoch having sex, pie attack, Lulzsec, Wendi Deng "tiger attack" Posted: 20 Jul 2011 10:40 AM PDT [Video Link]. This one, I personally requested of NMA. |
| Why is the state of Alabama still collecting tax for needy Confederate Civil War vets? Posted: 20 Jul 2011 10:36 AM PDT AP via blog.nola.com: "The last of the more than 60,000 Confederate veterans who came home to Alabama after the Civil War died generations ago, yet residents are still paying a tax that supported the neediest among them." (via Ned Sublette)   |
| Deliverance church casts out demons with pile-ons, burps, snot expulsion, farting Posted: 20 Jul 2011 10:41 AM PDT  ABC News has a look inside a New York church where members expel demons through football-tackle-like pile-ons, as well as belching, puking, farting, and snot expulsion. [Video Link]. I checked out their website, and it is clear that they do not like Harry Potter or Disney. (via Wonbo Woo) |
| NASA Messenger: A farewell to Earth Posted: 20 Jul 2011 09:13 AM PDT MESSENGER is the NASA mission to study the surface of Mercury. Launched in August of 2004, it made several flybys of Mercury before finally settling into orbit around the planet in March 2011. Back in 2005, as MESSENGER passed by Earth one last time, it took a series of photos that researchers stitched together into a movie that I like a whole awful lot.
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| Probiotics and "Science by Product Release" Posted: 20 Jul 2011 08:52 AM PDT  When heavy publicity turns early scientific findings into massive public debacles—see: Life, arsenic—we spend a lot of time talking about the problems inherent in doing science by press release. Essentially, an early finding might be pretty damn intriguing. But an early finding doesn't mean much until it's been picked apart by other scientists, and held up to criticism and verification. The process of science is glacially slow, while the news cycle moves like a waterfall. But there's another place in public life where the speed of good science conflicts with outside demands. Namely: The food industry. Over at Slate, Amanda Schaffer has a really interesting article about how food companies (Big Food and crunchy hippie mom n' pops, alike) have taken incomplete, relatively new research on probiotics and turned it into absolute (and frequently overblown) statements about functional foods. There's certainly a scientific basis for humankind's relationship with symbiotic bacteria, and there's also research suggesting that you can ingest these bacteria and benefit from it. But there is still a lot we don't know, and the benefits are usually smaller than you've been led to believe.
That last sentence is particularly important when it comes to safety. As Schaffer points out later in the article, most of the major trials of probiotics haven't been designed to monitor adverse effects at all. So while we know that there might be some benefits from ingesting bacteria, we know next to nothing about the potential downsides. Via Ed Yong Image: leafyog, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from kenningtonfox's photostream   |
| Posted: 20 Jul 2011 02:35 PM PDT  Skepta, a London-based hip-hop artist, uploaded a video for his original song called "Dare to Dream" to YouTube earlier this month. Jimmy Iovine, founder of the Universal-owned label Interscope, heard the song and decided that he'd like to license it for use by Eminem, who is signed to Iovine's label. So far, so good. But then it gets weird. Iovine reportedly then filed a fraudulent copyright declaration with YouTube, claiming he owned the rights to the song and getting it taken down. Then he approached Skepta and his label to license the song for Eminem's use. Presumably, the false Whatever the motivations, this demonstrates the pervading mentality regarding copyright takedowns in entertainment companies: they're handy tools for removing anything you don't like from the Internet for an indefinite period, and there's no penalty for perjuring yourself in your notices. I'm not sure who has standing to pursue Iovine for his alleged fraud. I fear that the only party situated to bring him to justice are Skepta and his label (who are unlikely to pursue a claim against their new business partner). But I hope that YouTube can -- and does -- take action to produce an object lesson that abusing the law to censor the Internet isn't a consequence-free tactic in the normal course of business, but a crime that undermines copyright law itself. |
| Heat stroke turns me into Dave Barry Posted: 20 Jul 2011 08:05 AM PDT On Tuesday evening, Moorhead, Minnesota was the most humid place in the entire world. I am not making this up.   |
| Posted: 20 Jul 2011 07:26 AM PDT Following last June's raids on the filesharing site Kino.to, the Society for Consumer Research carried out research on the users' entertainment consumption habits. The study concluded that Kino.to's users were among the entertainment industry's best customers, using filesharing as a sampling method to determine which media to purchase, spending premiums to attend weekend showings of new films, and generally outspending average consumers in their media consumption. The unnamed client who commissioned the research reportedly rejected the findings and refused to publish them. The Kino.to raids were accompanied by inflammatory press releases that characterised Kino as "a criminal organization to commit professional copyright infringement" and threatened criminal prosecution for Kino's users. Suppressed Report Found Busted Pirate Site Users Were Good Consumers   |
| Ancient exercise contraptions and their well-dressed users Posted: 20 Jul 2011 05:47 AM PDT  Another great gallery from How To Be A Retronaut (which is fast becoming one of my favorite sites on the net): a gallery of extraordinary vintage exercise machines. The best part of these images are the "athletic wear" enjoyed by their users -- skirts and petticoats, three-piece suits, watch-chains, and shiny leather shoes. |
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Obviously it would be of great interest to see the report in full, but it appears that is not going to be possible. According to an anonymous GfK source quoted by Telepolis, the findings of the study proved so unpleasant to the company that commissioned the survey that it has now been locked away "in the poison cupboard." 
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