WATCHISMO TIME MACHINES - Timing is everything...
The tweets that homeland security spooks look for What happens at the edge of the solar system? Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, Bull99 Becomes Fred Fab 5 Inside Kabul: landmine survivor aid activist live-blogs from lockdown in Afghanistan What's Occupy Minnesota doing during winter? Quilts inspired by the Large Hadron Collider Miserable working conditions in ecommerce packing facilities Quick! Apply to taste Mars mission food during 120-day study in Hawaii The Story of Sushi, told in video with handcrafted miniatures Romantic Death Star cake serving suggestion The End of Chiptune History Thumbdrive computer up for pre-order Antichamber, for Windows and OS X Tom Gauld's Goliath: exclusive excerpt Anthology of upbeat steampunk fiction from Singapore: Steampowered World The problem with body mass index Celebrity gift party operator threatens blogger who wrote about it Big ships can leave "contrails" too Friends With Boys: graphic novel about fitting in at high school, seeing ghosts Occupy London says St Paul's Cathedral colluded with eviction effort Occupy London protesters evicted from St Paul's square Coffee Common at TED2012 Kickstarter success for DRM-free webcomics, reader-funded long-form journalism Clever assemble-yourself toys and models made with laser-cutters Techdirt post about SOPA censored from Google results due to bogus DMCA complaint Bolivian riot cops gas, beat wheelchair protesters Maggie speaking at public events in Minneapolis and online HOWTO make shark jaws out of paper plates Download the Universe: Reviews of science e-books and apps Blackboard anatomy art and the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge The tweets that homeland security spooks look for
By Rob Beschizza on Feb 28, 2012 12:53 pm Joel Johnson found that the Department of Homeland Security's list of Facebook and Twitter search terms was not in an easily-available public format, "curiously embedded as an image of text" in a PDF to prevent indexing. He fixed it. [Animal]
Read in browser What happens at the edge of the solar system?
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 28, 2012 12:46 pm This is a drawing of what the edge of the solar system might look like, as envisioned by plasma physicist Merav Opher. One of the few women in this field, Opher is also one of the top scientists, of any gender, studying what happens at the edges of space. John Rennie has written a great ...
Read in browser Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, Bull99 Becomes Fred Fab 5
By Ed Piskor on Feb 28, 2012 12:45 pm Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics!
Read in browser Inside Kabul: landmine survivor aid activist live-blogs from lockdown in Afghanistan
By Xeni Jardin on Feb 28, 2012 12:44 pm I've known of James Hathaway and the NGO he co-founded, Clear Path International, for many years. They do great work to help landmine blast survivors with disabling injuries live better lives through better access, medical care, education, and other forms of support. Clear Path originally focused their efforts in Vietnam, but have since expended into ...
Read in browser What's Occupy Minnesota doing during winter?
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 28, 2012 12:11 pm It's cold outside in Minnesota (though, not as cold as it usually is), but the Occupy movement has not been idle here. They've been busy occupying a house threatened with foreclosure and saving homeowner Bobby Hull from becoming homeless. Hull says the very public pressure and media exposure provided by Occupy played a major role ...
Read in browser Quilts inspired by the Large Hadron Collider
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 28, 2012 11:58 am Last week, while I was on a train, researchers at CERN announced that neutrinos are probably not traveling faster than the speed of light. Last year, as you'll recall, the OPERA experiment clocked the neutrinos breaking that speed limit. Unfortunately, it looks like those measurements were probably caused by one or more problems with the ...
Read in browser Miserable working conditions in ecommerce packing facilities
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 28, 2012 11:43 am Mother Jones's Mac McClelland goes underground at an unnamed ecommerce packing facility in a rural American town and reports on the terrible, back-breaking working conditions that are compounded by continuous verbal abuse, unsafe working conditions, mandatory overtime, and humiliating disciplinary procedures. At lunch, the most common question, aside from "Which offensive dick-shaped product did you ...
Read in browser Quick! Apply to taste Mars mission food during 120-day study in Hawaii
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 28, 2012 11:42 am Yes, the deadline is tomorrow. But I know this is the perfect opportunity for at least one of you, so hop to it! Cornell and the University of Hawaii are putting together a series of studies aimed at finding out what it's going to take to keep people well-fed (both in the physical and psychological ...
Read in browser The Story of Sushi, told in video with handcrafted miniatures
By Xeni Jardin on Feb 28, 2012 11:35 am [Video Link] Boing Boing pal Joe Sabia, who works with me to create our in-flight Boing Boing Virgin America TV channel, shares his latest project. This delightful short film was 7 months in the making, all done with hand-made miniatures. It's a promotional video for Bamboo Sushi, a restaurant in Portland. Joe says: Lori Nix/Kathleen ...
Read in browser Romantic Death Star cake serving suggestion
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 28, 2012 11:00 am If you're looking for serving suggestions to accompany yesterday's post on how to bake a Death Star cake, have a look at this groom's cake that @paulblomdahl's wife made for him.
Read in browser The End of Chiptune History
By Rob Beschizza on Feb 28, 2012 10:32 am Thomas Gilmore offers a brief history of chipmusic, whose practitioners "make complex music in a minimal way." The more popular tools of the chipmusic (or chiptune, or 8bit) trade were made from the early '80s to the early '90s, when the most efficient way to add sound to a video game or computing experience was ...
Read in browser Thumbdrive computer up for pre-order
By Rob Beschizza on Feb 28, 2012 10:12 am Cotton Candy, a computer the size of a (big) thumbdrive, is available for pre-order and will ship in March. The $199 machine, which runs Ubuntu or Android 4, has a 1.2GHz ARM CPU, 1GB of RAM, and HD video acceleration. [FXI via Ars Technica]
Read in browser Antichamber, for Windows and OS X
By Rob Beschizza on Feb 28, 2012 10:02 am With hellish out-of-body action and 3D graphics that look eerily like an Amiga-era Cyberpunk game left to self-replicate for 20 years, Antichamber already defies description. But it's the soundtrack's sinister naturalism that really screws with your expectations. The work of Alexander Bruce, it's coming later this year to Windows and OS X. At Kotaku, Stephen ...
Read in browser Tom Gauld's Goliath: exclusive excerpt
By Mark Frauenfelder on Feb 28, 2012 10:00 am As reviewed in Gweek - Tom Gauld's tragic, darkly funny retelling of David and Goliath from Goliath's perspective. Gauld's work is always quietly powerful and emotionally grabbing. Here's a seven-page taste of the new graphic novel, which is presented in a beautiful hardcover format from Drawn & Quarterly Buy Goliath on Amazon
Read in browser Anthology of upbeat steampunk fiction from Singapore: Steampowered World
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 28, 2012 10:00 am On IO9, Jess Nevins reviews The Steampowered World, a Singaporean anthology of steampunk short stories published by a "micropress" called Two Trees. The editors put out a call for upbeat stories ("No depressive ending, no preaching, no agendas, no angst-ridden misery."), noting that "depressive endings with angst‑ridden misery is prevalent here in local (Singapore) publishing. ...
Read in browser The problem with body mass index
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 28, 2012 09:53 am The Body Mass Index is a popular way to measure and assess whether someone is overweight or underweight. Basically, it's just your weight divided by your height. BMI is a simple system, but it does have some flaws. Over at the Obesity Panacea blog, Peter Janiszewski (who has a Ph.D. in exercise physiology) has a ...
Read in browser Celebrity gift party operator threatens blogger who wrote about it
By Rob Beschizza on Feb 28, 2012 09:43 am Gawker's Hamilton Nolan was invited to and attended one of those pre-Oscar parties where celebrities are loaded with luxury gifts. Subsequently, Secret Room Events, the "product placement" outfit concerned, threatened him with a lawsuit for having written about it. It has come to our attention the Hamilton Nolan has written a very unessessary and hateful ...
Read in browser Big ships can leave "contrails" too
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 28, 2012 09:34 am You're familiar with contrails, the tracks left by airplanes as they move across the sky. Those are made when hot water vapor from the exhaust of jet engines hits cold, high-altitude air and condenses into ice. Under the right conditions, big ships can leave a very similar trail, but it's caused by a slightly different ...
Read in browser Friends With Boys: graphic novel about fitting in at high school, seeing ghosts
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 28, 2012 09:00 am Faith Erin Hicks's new graphic novel Friends With Boys launches today. It's the story of Maggie, who is about to follow her three older brothers to the town high-school after a lifetime of home-schooling. Maggie is understandably nervous, because everything in her life is unsettled: her mother mysteriously left the family at the start of ...
Read in browser Occupy London says St Paul's Cathedral colluded with eviction effort
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 28, 2012 05:27 am Following last night's eviction of Occupy London from St Paul's Square, many of the protesters blame the cathedral for colluding with the eviction effort. This past winter, the cathedral was rocked by a series of high-profile departures from clerics who sided with Occupy, and this culminated in the cathedral "pausing" its action against the protests. ...
Read in browser Occupy London protesters evicted from St Paul's square
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 28, 2012 01:21 am The Occupy London camp at St Paul's Cathedral has lost its legal fight to remain in place. Once the injunction was ordered, bailiffs and officers from the City of London Police (a separate police force directed by the Corporation of the City of London, whose council is elected by the companies in the financial district, ...
Read in browser Coffee Common at TED2012
By Mark Frauenfelder on Feb 28, 2012 12:10 am [Video Link] Our friend Sean Bonner filled me in on the goings on here at TED2012's Coffee Common.
Read in browser Kickstarter success for DRM-free webcomics, reader-funded long-form journalism
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 07:58 pm Some heartwarming news on the Kickstarter front: fans of the Diesel Sweeties webcomic have oversubscribed R. Stevens's DRM-free ebook, for which he was hoping to raise $3,000, and brought the total up to nearly $40K. Meanwhile, Matter, the startup that wants to fund long-form journalism online, blew past its $50K target in two days, and ...
Read in browser Clever assemble-yourself toys and models made with laser-cutters
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 06:52 pm Artifacture Studios is a maker shop based near Dallas, TX (I met the founders at a recent speaking gig at U Texas at Arlington) that does pretty amazing stuff with laser-cutters. They are probably best known for their laser-cut Eiffel Tower models, ornate models of the iconic building cut from stiff card that use cunning ...
Read in browser Techdirt post about SOPA censored from Google results due to bogus DMCA complaint
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 05:56 pm James from New America Foundation sez, "Mike Masnick has done an incredible job covering copyright issues and the SOPA debates at Techdirt but today he had a troubling post: an important post on why SOPA/PIPA are misguided has been removed from Google over a DCMA request. Mike writes:" We've talked a lot about how copyright ...
Read in browser Bolivian riot cops gas, beat wheelchair protesters
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 05:24 pm A group of protesters in wheelchairs who gathered in La Paz to demand legal recognition of disability along with monetary benefits were met by a line of riot cops with shields and batons and gas. The photos of the ensuing violence are shocking. The demonstrators had been on the road since Nov 15, and they ...
Read in browser Maggie speaking at public events in Minneapolis and online
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 27, 2012 04:50 pm This is, to say the least, a busy week. There's several events happening that I'm involved in. They're all related to my upcoming book on the future of energy, and they're all open to the public. I wanted to take a quick moment to tell you about them, because I'd love for you all to ...
Read in browser HOWTO make shark jaws out of paper plates
By Cory Doctorow on Feb 27, 2012 04:19 pm From last August, here's Jeanette Strole Parks on Dollar Store Crafts outlining a method for turning a paper plate into a set of shark jaws: 1. Fold your paper plate in half "backwards" (with the bottom of the plate facing you, and the folded edges coming toward you). 2. Using small scissors trim away the ...
Read in browser Download the Universe: Reviews of science e-books and apps
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Feb 27, 2012 04:12 pm I'm really happy to be a part of Download the Universe, a new group blog dedicated to reviewing science e-books and apps. No dead trees allowed. It fills a long-ignored niche, helping readers find high-quality science writing in the digital realm, and my partners in this little side project are all top-notch. Download the Universe ...
Read in browser Blackboard anatomy art and the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge
By David Pescovitz on Feb 27, 2012 03:56 pm This is a 2006 winner in the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science. The Challenge always showcases mind-blowing work, but I just love this one -- A DaVinci Blackboard Lesson in Multi-Conceptual Anatomy -- because it's so, er, analog. As explained on the NSF site, ...
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