The Latest from Boing Boing |  |
- Whitecross Street Party: street art in East London
- Oslo terror suspect: Anders Behring Breivik, 32, links to right-wing extremism
- Colorful Dairy Queen ad, 1960
- Deviled Tongue: organ meat ads of yesteryear
- Solution claimed to Zodiac's last code
- Oslo bombing, shooting (big photo gallery, news updates)
- Arduino interface for iPhone and iPad on sale in Maker Shed
- Sesame Street/Beastie Boys mashup
- New Yorkers freestyle rap in Union Square
- Demand Media sics its lawyers on DemandStudiosSucks.com
- Where music and foodie culture meet
- Isaiah Seret on his Jonestown video for Cults
- Dwarf Fortress: "perhaps the most complex video game ever made"
- Friday Freak-Out: The 5th Dimension's "Up, Up and Away" (1967)
- Time capsules of Los Angeles
- Oslo bombing shocks Norway
- Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling
- Prison chase Benny Hillified
- Parody ads tell the horrible truth about AT&T&T
- Subterranean sewer mutant caught on CCTV
- Young Rewired State: learn to hack government data workshop for kids
- Auditions for a black cat, 1961
- Troy public library needs your help - shutdown imminent!
| Whitecross Street Party: street art in East London Posted: 22 Jul 2011 11:15 PM PDT  Dan Hillier writes, "The Whitecross Street Party: Rise of the non-conformists is a two-day street party and four week exhibition featuring some of the world's most creative pranksters and musical mischief makers. For two days on the 23rd and 24th July the Street will become a celebration of the arts involving some of the most exciting local and international creatives who will transform the city landscape into a giant outdoor art gallery." Hoo-yah! This is right around the corner from my flat, and what's more, it's ALSO around the corner from my favorite London coffee spot, the tiny Giddy-Up coffee stall in Fortune Park. Great coffee and street art? Count me the hell in! ::Whitecross Street Party::: (Thanks, Dan!) |
| Oslo terror suspect: Anders Behring Breivik, 32, links to right-wing extremism Posted: 22 Jul 2011 06:39 PM PDT  The suspect arrested in today's bombing and shooting attacks in Oslo is 32-year-old Anders Behring Breivik, who is believed to have links to right-wing extremist and anti-immigrant (read: anti-Muslim) organizations. (source: Sky News). And now, he has a Wikipedia page. The Daily Mail has photos. Here's what Norwegian media are reporting as his Facebook page, and Twitter account. Looks like they were both just activated within the past week, which is all very suspicious. Aftenposten notes that he is said to be a conservative Christian and a Mason, and into hunting and bodybuilding. He owned a farming company that had access to chemicals believed to have been used for bomb-making. According to comments attributed to him on various Norwegian right-wing/anti-immigrant forums, he was a fan of an array of white supremacist and anti-Muslim pundits—including some from the US. Assuming it's legit, all of this makes early reports that Muslims were responsible for the attacks all the more regrettable.
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| Posted: 22 Jul 2011 02:14 AM PDT  There's something almost pornographic about the color palette and line-weights in this 1960 ad for Dairy Queen. |
| Deviled Tongue: organ meat ads of yesteryear Posted: 22 Jul 2011 03:02 AM PDT  It's been a long time since you could call a product "Deviled Tongue." 1918 was a fine year for organ meat. |
| Solution claimed to Zodiac's last code Posted: 22 Jul 2011 03:44 PM PDT
A hobbyist codebreaker believes he's cracked the Zodiac killer's last encoded message (above). It is, he claims, a Caesar cipher with some substitution stuff, though it's not really clear from the article. His solution identifies Arthur Leigh Allen as the killer: KILLSLFDRHELPMEKI LLMYSELFGASCHAMBE RAEIOURDAYSQUESTI ONSABLEEVERYYWAKI NGMOMENTIMALIVEMY PRIDELOSTICASTGOO NLIVINGINTHISWAYK ILLINGPEOPLEIHAVK ILLDSOMANYPEOPLEC ANTHELPMYSELFIMSO ANGRYICOULDDOMYTH INKIMALONEINTHISW ORLDMYWHOLELIFEFU LOLIESIMUNABLETOS TOPBYTHETIMEYOUSO LVETHISIWILLHAVKI LLDELEVENPEOPLEPL EASEHELPMESTOPKIL LINGPEOPLEPLEASEM YNAMEISLEIGHALLEN With spaces, that reads "KILL SLF DR HELP ME KILL MYSELF GAS CHAMBER AEIOUR DAYS QUESTIONSABLE EVERYY WAKING MOMENT IM ALIVE MY PR IDE LOST I CAST GO ON LIVING IN THIS WAY KILLING PEOPLE I HAV KILLD SO MANY PEOPLE CANT HELP MYSELF IM SO AN GRY I COULD DO MY THINK IM ALONE IN THIS WORLD MY W HOLE LIFE FUL O LIES IM UNABLE TO STOP BY THE TIME YOU SOLVE THISI WILL HAV KILLD ELEVEN PEOPLE PLEASE HELP ME STOP KILLING PEOPLE PLEASE MY NAME IS LEIGH ALLEN". I always assume "multiple keys used for different parts of the ciphertext", "Bible Codesque frequency shenanigans", etc., with these things. And it contains no new information, just the prime suspect and generic pathos. Cynical, I know! Be sure to drink your ovaltine. |
| Oslo bombing, shooting (big photo gallery, news updates) Posted: 22 Jul 2011 02:17 PM PDT  (Photos: scenes from a powerful explosion that rocked central Oslo July 22, 2011. A huge explosion damaged government buildings in central Oslo on Friday including Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's office. The blast blew out most windows on the 17-story building, as well as nearby ministries including the oil ministry, which was on fire. REUTERS/Berit Roald/Scanpix) Above and following, photos from the bombing that took place in Oslo earlier today. Two apparent terrorist attacks struck the Norwegian capital: a car bombing at government offices in the city's center, and a shooting at an island youth camp of Norway's labor party. At least 16 are confirmed dead at the time of this blog post. Immediate theories of who was responsible varied, and ranged from domestic right-wing extremists to possible external groups retaliating for Dagbladet's publication in 2010 of a comic that portrayed the Muslim Prophet Muhammad as a pig writing the Qur'an. But the BBC reports: Police said the suspected gunman had been arrested, and later that he was also linked with the bomb attack. Reports described him as tall and blond.The man arrested for the shootings is Norwegian, and Norwegian authorities have since stated that they do not currently consider this an act of foreign terrorism. More: Washington Post, ABC News, New York Times, and a Telegraph report on a related Wikileaks cable: a US State Department memo portrays the country as "over its head," and "unable to keep up" with terror risks.
Here's an excellent Twitter list of journalists covering the attacks, assembled by the Washington Post.
(all images in this post: REUTERS/Scanpix) |
| Arduino interface for iPhone and iPad on sale in Maker Shed Posted: 22 Jul 2011 01:33 PM PDT Maker Shed has a deal on its new Arduino development kit for iOS. It's $79.99. Redpark Breakout Pack for Arduino and iOS   |
| Sesame Street/Beastie Boys mashup Posted: 22 Jul 2011 03:04 AM PDT This Sesame Street/Beastie Boys "Sure Shot" mashup does some very clever stuff with fast and slow framerates that makes the puppets appear to be perfect lipsynchers. It's virtuoso editing and a demonstration of the puppet's natural place in mashups. (via Kottke) |
| New Yorkers freestyle rap in Union Square Posted: 22 Jul 2011 03:14 AM PDT In 2009, Chris Sullivan hung out a beat-box shingle in NYC's Union Square, inviting passers-by to come and rap with him. The results were great, and the Master of Fine Arts rap is especially piquant. |
| Demand Media sics its lawyers on DemandStudiosSucks.com Posted: 22 Jul 2011 12:50 PM PDT Demand Media, the content farm that pays people a pittance to write and edit crappy articles and then uses SEO tricks to push its content (which appears on sites like eHow, Cracked, and Livestrong) to the top of Google searches, has seen a huge drop in market capitalization, in part because Google initiated countermeasures to reduce the googlejuice of content farms. Now Demand is going after Demand Studios Sucks, "a blog maintained by refugees, malcontents and other critics" for posting "content that was confidential, proprietary and trademarked," according to a Demand spokesperson. Here's the letter from Demand Media to Demand Studios Sucks. Jeff Bercovici of Forbes' Mixed Media has the story.
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| Where music and foodie culture meet Posted: 22 Jul 2011 10:52 AM PDT Covers is an underground dinner club in San Francisco where -- now stay with me here -- "covers" of famous chefs' signature dishes are paired with thematically-appropriate cover songs. Sponsored by Bay Area's Noise Pop music festival, Covers is only one of many recent hipster foodie efforts to connect fine dining with fine tunes. The Bay Citizen gives us a taste: "Mixtapes for Meals: The New World of Music Pairings"
"What Sounds like Dessert? Local Chefs and Musicians Recommend Pairings" |
| Isaiah Seret on his Jonestown video for Cults Posted: 22 Jul 2011 03:16 PM PDT Last week, we premiered the provocative and fantastic new video for the song "Go Outside" by Cults. Directed by Isaiah Seret, the video is made from archival footage of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple before the mass suicide of more than 900 people in Guyana. Over at Turnstyle, Noah Nelson interviews Seret about the project: "When the idea [for the video] came about," Seret tells me, "it came about in a spontaneous moment. And I really feel that afterwards I had to check it: Wait is this being exploitive? What is this going to be? That process of checking back in actually helped me shape the story."Go Outside" Director Isaiah Seret on the Specter of Jonestown
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| Dwarf Fortress: "perhaps the most complex video game ever made" Posted: 22 Jul 2011 10:33 AM PDT  In the July 24, 2011 edition of the New York Times Magazine, Jonah Weiner profiled Tarn and Zach Adams, the brothers who created the game Dwarf Fortress, which is kind of like a much geekier, vastly more complex version of Minecraft (in fact, the creator of Minecraft is a fan of Dwarf Fortress). Weiner says, "Dwarf Fortress is, from the perspective of game play, perhaps the most complex video game ever made." It's rendered with extended ASCII characters, like a roguelike. The article is a fascinating profile of obsession. Rob and I are going to interview Jonah about his article in the upcoming edition of Gweek, Boing Boing's podcast about games, science fiction, comic books, and other geek media. |
| Friday Freak-Out: The 5th Dimension's "Up, Up and Away" (1967) Posted: 22 Jul 2011 10:17 AM PDT [video link] Friday Freak-Out: The 5th Dimension perform "Up, Up and Away" from their 1967 debut album of the same name, also available on the "Essential 5th Dimension" compilation.
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| Posted: 22 Jul 2011 03:30 AM PDT  Los Angeles Magazine celebrated its 50th anniversary by planting a time-capsule at 5900 Wilshire. Now, the magazine has assembled a map of all the known time capsules buried beneath Los Angeles, which will serve as a useful guide for SCUBA-equipped archaeologists of the future. Los Angeles Magazine Presents: Time Capsules Under Los Angeles 1904-2106 (via Super Punch) |
| Posted: 22 Jul 2011 10:04 AM PDT The latest on the Oslo bombing, which has claimed a number of lives and injured many more, and shootings at a nearby youth camp where the prime minister was thought to be in attendance. [BBC]   |
| Lowercase theories, uppercase Theories, and the myth of global cooling Posted: 22 Jul 2011 10:00 AM PDT  "Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." Men In Black's Agent Kay isn't exactly a great public philosopher, but I think he does do a good job of summing up the reason why some people don't like the idea of applying the science of climate change to the realm of political policy. Science changes, after all. Who's to say that 100 years from now we won't find the results of 21st century climate modeling as ridiculous as a map of a flat Earth? This argument isn't totally off-base. Scientific theories are frequently overturned by new evidence. But, just as often, the new evidence changes one part of a theory, while leaving the big picture intact. That's because scientists use the same word--"theory"--to describe two very distinct classes of ideas. Gravity is a theory. But so is the existence of Gliese 581g--a wobble in the light given off by a distant star which may, or may not, turn out to be a planet. One of these things is not like the other. Of the two, new evidence is much more likely to disprove the existence of Gliese 581g. Scientists still study what gravity is and how it works. It's a living theory, not a cold, unchanging edifice. In fact, there's a lot of weird, little anomalies that tell us we don't have this gravity thing totally figured out just yet. But as new evidence comes in, it tends to refine the details, not demolish everything we thought we knew. Einstein revolutionized the theory of gravity, but he didn't make apples start to fall up. With that in mind, I want to tell you a story. There are a lot of climate myths out there—misconstrued facts and frank deceptions used to discredit good climate science. But one of those myths is particularly interesting to me, because it's a very good example of the difference between little lowercase "theories" and uppercase "Theories". The myth of global cooling is the kind of thing that happens when people get the two mixed up. Let's start at the beginning, with a quick summary of the myth itself. According to the standard version of this story, everybody in the 1970s thought that the Earth was actually getting colder, and that we were in for a new Ice Age. Animals like armadillos were migrating southward, fleeing the encroaching cold. The Arctic ice pack was unexpectedly thick. Scientists warned of massive crop failures, and wrung their hands over the fate of the millions who would die in our frozen future. They urged governments to take action, either by stockpiling food, or with more disturbingly drastic measures--such as intentionally melting the Polar ice caps. All the same people who, today, tell us that the Earth is heating up were, once upon a time, singing a very different tune. The implicit message about scientists that people get from this story: You just can't trust 'em. It would be nice if the myth of global cooling were a fringe belief. But it's not. Influential, big-name talkers push the story. Lots of average people listen to them. The author Michael Crichton worked it into his last novel. Senator James Inhofe told the tale in Congress. Rush Limbaugh believes in the myth. So does George Will. And, consequently, so does at least one of my uncles. But they're all wrong. In reality, global cooling was never a broadly accepted Theory. It's reasonable to assume that a good chunk of Americans never heard about it at all. And global cooling never had the support of most climate scientists, let alone scientists in other disciplines, like biology and public health, which are linked to climate change in many important ways today. We know all of this thanks to the work of two scientists, Thomas Peterson and William Connolly, and a journalist, John Fleck. In 2008, they published a detailed history of this myth in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. So that's another thing that makes the myth of global cooling stand out from the pack. Unlike a lot of myths, the path from fact to fiction is very well-documented. A Myth is Born The truth is, for a short period in the mid-1970s, the idea of global cooling was somewhat trendy--as measured in newspaper and magazine stories, but not scientific evidence. In 1975, both Newsweek and Time ran articles about the coming Ice Age. The next year, National Geographic published a more detailed story about climate science, in general. It touched on global cooling as one of several possibilities for the future of climate. But all of these stories were based on the same small handful of peer-reviewed papers. In fact, Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck found that, between 1965 and 1979, only 7 peer-reviewed papers were published supporting the idea of global cooling. (In contrast, during that same time period, 44 published peer-reviewed papers found that the Earth was getting warmer. And 20 were neutral on the subject.) All those papers were the work of scientists who were, for the most part, trying to understand the basics of how the climate system worked, not expanding and refining an already accepted big idea. These were, in other words, lowercase "theories". Cause and Effect The issue was inputs. These are the variable factors--like levels of greenhouse gases, or particles of dust and soot in the atmosphere--that can impact how the natural processes of the climate system play out. In the 1970s, scientists didn't understand variable inputs very well. They knew, based on ice cores and tree rings, that the Earth was probably coming due for a cold snap. In fact, the Northern Hemisphere had been cooler than average between 1940 and 1970. And they knew that particulate matter--the smoke of volcanoes, the soot of factories, the obvious air pollution--could reflect light from the sun and have a cooling effect. But they also knew about the greenhouse effect. This is the almost 200-year-old idea at the heart of the Theory of climate change. For a quick refresher, the greenhouse effect describes the cycle of heat transfer that keeps our planet from becoming a frigid ball of dirt, no more habitable than Mars. First, heat from the Sun passes through our atmosphere. Some is absorbed by the ground and oceans, and some of that heat gets reflected back towards space. But the gasses in our atmosphere don't let all that reflected heat out. Instead, atmospheric gasses bounce most of the heat back down again. It's kind of like turning on a laser pointer in a hall of mirrors. Because of the greenhouse effect, Earth is able to trap enough heat to sustain life-as-we-know-it. We've known about this effect since 1824. Climate change is really just an exaggeration of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide is better than a lot of other gasses at bouncing heat back down to Earth. The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the more heat gets trapped, and the higher our global average temperature rises. We've known about the way rising carbon dioxide levels enhance the greenhouse effect since 1896. By the 1970s, climate scientists knew cars, power plants, and other aspects of modern energy use were releasing unprecedented amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The question everybody was trying to answer: Which input was more powerful? In other words, would particulate matter beef up a natural cooling trend to the point that the greenhouse effect was merely a pleasant distraction? Or, would the impact of carbon dioxide and its greenhouse gas cousins outpace both natural and anthropogenic cooling, and take us to a warmer world? The Way It's Supposed To Work In the 1970s, nobody really had a solid answer to those questions. In a given year, one scientist would publish a paper that supported cooling, while another two or three would publish results that favored warming. And journalists would report on all those papers. In 1975, the same year that Newsweek and Time warned of a coming Ice Age, Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck found that The New York Times actually ran two climate science stories. The first was titled "Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May be Ahead." The second: "Warming Trend Seen in Climate; Two Articles Counter View that Cold Period is Due." If you saw both Times stories, you'd have a pretty good idea that scientists weren't totally in agreement on this issue. But not all journalists provided that kind of context. Every peer-reviewed climate science paper was like a part of a mountain range. The only way to make sense of the topography was to zoom out, and look at the whole thing. But, some journalists had a tendency to report on each new study that came out as though it were an isolated hill of fact in the middle of an empty plain. One group actually did review the big picture of climate science in 1975. That was the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The NAS is sort of like a cross between a professional organization and a medieval court adviser. Not all the scientists in the United States are members. Instead, current members elect new ones, based on the quality, importance, and influence of their research. Think of it as the Science Hall of Fame. Getting in is a big deal. But it's more than just symbolic. That's because the NAS plays a role in American politics. Most politicians aren't trained scientists. Even if they are, they can't be expected to be experts on everything. So, instead, when politicians need to know what's going on in a particular field of science, they turn to the actual experts at the NAS. Every year, the Academy puts together many reports summarizing the state of scientific research on a wide array of topics and offers their advice about what politicians should do with that information. The 1975 NAS report on climate science reflects the confusion that surrounded the field at that time. In fact, the introduction flat out says, "...we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate..." There wasn't anything close to a scientific consensus on climate in 1975. But that was about to change rapidly. Over the next five years, research methods improved, more papers were published, and all those little theories began to add up to a single big Theory--the Earth was getting hotter. By 1979, it was already clear that the effect of greenhouse gases had a bigger impact than the effect of dust particles. When the NAS came back to the subject of climate science that year, the state of research had changed enough that their summary was now very different. Instead of uncertainty, the 1979 NAS report emphasized a message that was, basically, the same as what we still hear today: The Earth is warming, and that fact should not be ignored. The popular press liked the story of global cooling. But their interest in that story didn't reflect what scientists were actually thinking. There was no flip-flop of science here. Instead, what happened in the 1970s was that science worked the way it's supposed to work. Researchers identified an important question. They studied it. They figured out how to study it better. And, slowly, between roughly 1970 and 1980, they came up with a broad, generalized answer. They went from a jumble of lowercase theories to an uppercase Theory. Since then, the uppercase Theory hasn't changed. No new evidence has surfaced to challenge it. Instead, researchers have busied themselves with the details—studying the lowercase theories within climate change to try and make that big Theory more specific. What they've learned has made them more and more certain that the big Theory is correct. So, in a way, the scientific consensus certainly has changed since 1975. But it changed from, "We don't know," to "Climate change is definitely happening. Image: Frozen World, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from laszlo-photo's photostream   |
| Posted: 22 Jul 2011 09:16 AM PDT This video was made from surveillance footage of correction officers chasing an inmate around New York's Albany County jail. A jail investigator made the film a few years ago while looking into the events leading to an officer's injury during the chase. That former corrections officer sent the video to the Times Union newspaper this week after losing a federal lawsuit "that claimed he was the butt of derogatory comments by his co-workers." From the Times Union: Robert D. Hunter, who sent the video, said it was evidence in his 2008 lawsuit..."Benny Hill behind bars?" (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)   |
| Parody ads tell the horrible truth about AT&T&T Posted: 22 Jul 2011 09:11 AM PDT
Eddie sez, "The media reform group, Free Press, has released a series of satirical videos to fight the AT&T/T-Mobile merger." |
| Subterranean sewer mutant caught on CCTV Posted: 22 Jul 2011 09:19 AM PDT  This image was taken by a CCTV camera exploring an underground sewer pipe in Newtonbreda, Northern Ireland. NI Water officials say that "Sewerface," as they've dubbed this character, is most likely "a result of a combination of the bend in the sewer line and variations in light." But of course we know the Truth."'Sewerface' lurking in city underground" (via Fortean Times)   |
| Young Rewired State: learn to hack government data workshop for kids Posted: 22 Jul 2011 08:54 AM PDT Adam sez, "Young Rewired State is an annual week-long working-with-government-data-learn-how-to-hack-code event aimed at those 18 and under. Building on the skills of those competing, YRS throws in a place to code outside of the bedroom, to meet fellow geeks, and support from a network of mentors. The week concludes, on the Friday afternoon, with hackers presenting their work to an audience of geeks, other YRSers, journos, politicos, civil society, civil service, and nosey-parkers for show and tell/prize-giving. There's still space for people to sign up to code and for show-and-tell. Here's a map of centres."   |
| Auditions for a black cat, 1961 Posted: 22 Jul 2011 08:53 AM PDT   Here's a wonderful series of 1961 photos from the LIFE archive documenting "Black Cat Auditions in Hollywood." The photographer is Ralph Crane. One of the photos includes a shot of Vincent Price, suggesting that this audition could have been for director Roger Corman's Tales of Terror (1962), film adaptations of a trio of Edgar Allen Poe stories including "The Black Cat." "Audition for a Black Cat" (via a 2009 Thought Patterns post)   |
| Troy public library needs your help - shutdown imminent! Posted: 22 Jul 2011 01:22 PM PDT  Steamed Punk sez, "The Troy, Michigan Public Library will close unless the citizens pass a dedicated millage. Normally this would be no big deal, here in Troy there is a well financed group that ruthlessly undermines the efforts of library supporters. Forty years ago Isaac Asimov, E. B. White and other supported the newly opened library with letters to the kids encouraging them to make the most of the library. With your help the people of Troy can enjoy the library as Asimov, Suess, and other intended for years to come!" Vote Yes - Aug 2 (Thanks, Steamed Punk!)   |
"The beef represents Dylan's leathery exterior — the man is 70, after all — and the seaweed and soy provide heavy notes that pair well with his raspy voice," said (Covers founder Blair) Warsham, whose events aim to match wide-ranging musical selections with complementary dinner entrees...
and sees gibberish, but the Dwarf Fortress initiate sees a tense tableau: a dog leashed to a tree, about to be mauled by a goblin. 
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