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Glen Hansard sings for The Nature Conservancy Exploding washing machines? Adrian Tomine on tour for his new book, New York Drawings Geeks, Girls, and Super Identities - new kids' novel with great illustrations by Mike Maihack Music review: Common Eider, King Eider's "Sense of Place" TOM THE DANCING BUG: Super-Fun-Pak Comix - Percival Dunwoody vs. Hitler, and MORE!! Monkey Jesus cosplayer Todd Akin on the scourge of doctors giving abortions to non-pregnant women Correlation, Causation and Internet Comments Cory in Menlo Park tonight eBook review: Blue Skies, Atopia Chronicles A Wrinkle in Time, worthy graphic novel adaptation So that's what an execution chamber in Japan looks like Quadcopters playing catch Time-traveling designer produces 1970s ads for MP3 player, laptop, mobile phone & gameboy Solar-powered dowel-sawing machine is a perfect desktop distraction Topless dungeon master sought Gweek 070: John Hodgman returns Hexaflexagons! The miracle of the inside-out hexagon with many, many sides 3D domino fall illustrates the extinction of the dinosaurs Your drugs are tested on Russians Exploration Day > Columbus Day Science of L.A.'s 'Carmageddon' proves (shock!) that cars cause much of LA's air pollution Goldilocks in space: Interview with Lee Billings about the hunt for aliens and habitable planets A pillow into which you insert your head Boing Boing Music! Costumes that integrate wheelchairs Children's Hospital upset by creepy clown ads for Rob Corddry's TV show, "Childrens Hospital" Creepy vintage novelties (photo gallery) What it's like to be a black man working in a tech startup where white guys are free to be racist Glen Hansard sings for The Nature Conservancy
By David Pescovitz on Oct 03, 2012 12:48 pm The Nature Conservancy is collaborating with some excellent musicians and filmmakers to raise awareness of environmental issues. Boing Boing is pleased to premier this video with Swell Season and The Frames' Glen Hansard, star of the film Once.
Read in browser Exploding washing machines?
By David Pescovitz on Oct 03, 2012 12:34 pm The rise of the machines has begun. Apparently, dozens of washing machines from numerous brands are "exploding" and UK consumer product watchdog magazine Which? is investigating. The typical story involves the glass door of the washing machines violently shattering, possibly caused by the drum splitting apart while the machine is on high spin. From The ...
Read in browser Adrian Tomine on tour for his new book, New York Drawings
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 03, 2012 12:23 pm Adrian Tomine is on tour to promote New York Drawings, his anthology of New Yorker illustrations. He'll be in Providence, RI tonight, and Cambridge, MA tomorrow. Peggy Burns of Drawn & Quarterly, Adrian's publisher, says: The Providence Phoenix spotlights Adriane event at AS 220 tonight, with Ada Books. And the Boston DIG interviews Adrian in ...
Read in browser Geeks, Girls, and Super Identities - new kids' novel with great illustrations by Mike Maihack
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 03, 2012 12:08 pm I admire the work of illustrator and cartoonist Mike Maihack. His simple line art, subdued color palette, and quietly humorous illustrations remind me a bit of Seth, if Seth liked to draw female superheroes. I just found out Mike illustrated a kids' novel called Geeks, Girls, and Super Identities. Check out a few of his ...
Read in browser Music review: Common Eider, King Eider's "Sense of Place"
By Aquarius on Oct 03, 2012 12:00 pm Sense Of Place is an ambitious audio/visual document that captures San Francisco drone/ambient/folk band Common Eider, King Eider's quest to build a cabin in the wilds of Alaska. It's an incredible package including both a book and a dvd.
Read in browser TOM THE DANCING BUG: Super-Fun-Pak Comix - Percival Dunwoody vs. Hitler, and MORE!!
By Ruben Bolling on Oct 03, 2012 11:55 am Presenting another installment of Super-Fun-Pak Comix, featuring "Percival Dunwoody, Idiot Time Traveler From 1909," "Darthfield," "Mother-In-Law Guffaws," and much, much MORE.
Read in browser Monkey Jesus cosplayer
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 11:42 am Here's a Monkey Jesus/restored icon cosplayer in full regalia. The identity of the person behind the mask is the source of controversy: it was posted to Reddit by OhioUPilot12, whose description implied that s/he was the creator of the costume. However, when Spinjump posted that this had been her/his Anime Weekend Atlanta costume, OhioUPilot12 backpedaled ...
Read in browser Todd Akin on the scourge of doctors giving abortions to non-pregnant women
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 03, 2012 11:18 am [Video Link] Salon: Among “abortionists,” Akin said in a floor speech in 2008, “you find that along with the culture death go all kinds of other lawbreaking: the not following good sanitary procedure, giving abortions to women who aren’t actually pregnant, cheating on taxes, all these kinds of things.” Later in the video Akin also ...
Read in browser Correlation, Causation and Internet Comments
By Jason Weisberger on Oct 03, 2012 11:08 am Daniel Engber wrote a wonderful piece at Slate. Engber examines when you can hide behind the phrase correlation does not imply causation and when that may not be the best idea. "The correlation phrase has become so common and so irritating that a minor backlash has now ensued against the rhetoric if not the concept. ...
Read in browser Cory in Menlo Park tonight
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 10:53 am Hey, Menlo Park! I'm coming to Kepler's Books tonight at 7PM for the Pirate Cinema tour! I hope to see you there. I'll be in San Francisco tomorrow (Thu), Berkeley on Friday, and then I head south to Pasadena and Redondo Beach, before going east to Lansing, MI, and then many other cities. Here's the ...
Read in browser eBook review: Blue Skies, Atopia Chronicles
By Jason Weisberger on Oct 03, 2012 10:47 am Blue Skies is a great start to Matthew Mather's Atopia Chronicles. In just a few pages he introduces you to believable future and a character I immediately identified with. Olympia is an advertising exec run out of steam, but she can't admit it. She is part the edge of a nervous breakdown and needs to ...
Read in browser A Wrinkle in Time, worthy graphic novel adaptation
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 09:00 am This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle's justly loved young adult novel about children who must rescue a dimension-hopping physicist who has been trapped by a malignant intelligence bent on bringing conformity to the universe. Hill and Wang's A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel is ...
Read in browser So that's what an execution chamber in Japan looks like
By Xeni Jardin on Oct 03, 2012 08:53 am The Kyodo/Reuters photograph accompanying this NYTimes article by Hiroko Tabuchi is a stunner.
Read in browser Quadcopters playing catch
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 01:25 am The ETH Zurich quadcopter folks have added to their already impressive collection of videos of cooperative, autonomous quadcopters doing exciting things (previously) with this video of the adorable little gizmos throwing and catching balls together. To toss the ball, the quadrocopters accelerate rapidly outward to stretch the net tight between them and launch the ball ...
Read in browser Time-traveling designer produces 1970s ads for MP3 player, laptop, mobile phone & gameboy
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 12:19 am Alex Varanese's "ALT/1977" post on Behance is as sweet a piece of contrafactual history as I've seen in a lifetime of pursuing this. I want to live in his timeline. I've explored that idea in this series by re-imagining four common products from 2010 as if they were designed in 1977: an mp3 player, a ...
Read in browser Solar-powered dowel-sawing machine is a perfect desktop distraction
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 02, 2012 11:27 pm Alex's Almost Useless Machine is a solar-powered desktop amusement that slowly saws through dowels whenever the light is bright enough to power its motor. It's mesmerizing. This little machine uses a so called solar engine to drive the motor. This solar engine is able to collect tiny amounts of energy over time and stores it ...
Read in browser Topless dungeon master sought
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 02, 2012 10:09 pm A Craigslist poster is looking for a woman to dungeon-master a D&D game/bachelor party. DM must be familiar with D&D 3.0 or 3.5, and topless. C-cup or greater preferred. "There will be 5 'guys' that will be participation (sic) including myself. We are at all above the age of 24. Each of us are gentlemen ...
Read in browser Gweek 070: John Hodgman returns
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 02, 2012 09:27 pm Click here to play this episode. Gweek is Boing Boing's podcast about comic books, science fiction and fantasy, video games, board games, tools, gadgets, apps, and other neat stuff. My co-hosts for this episode: Glenn Fleishman. Glenn is a long-time tech reporter, a hacky perl programmer, and one of the writers of the Economist’s Babbage ...
Read in browser Hexaflexagons! The miracle of the inside-out hexagon with many, many sides
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 02, 2012 09:21 pm The incomparably great Vihart continues her Doodling in Math Class video series with a history and demonstration of the miraculous Hexaflexagon, a simple-to-fold paper hexagon that contains several iterations of itself, which can be found by turning it inside-out over and over again. Sure to delight, inform, entertain, and mystify! Historical Note: This video is ...
Read in browser 3D domino fall illustrates the extinction of the dinosaurs
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 02, 2012 07:18 pm FlippyCat's animated 3D domino depiction of the comet-strike extinction of the dinosaurs is both poignant and exciting, and the setup/blooper-reel that follows the main action is a real nail-biter. Also known as domino-saurs This took 38.5 hours of setup time, over about 2 weeks. This project contains several smaller projects that I have wanted to ...
Read in browser Your drugs are tested on Russians
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 02, 2012 06:52 pm It's so difficult to get access to modern health care in Russia that the country is becoming a haven for medical testing — there are more people there willing to be guinea pigs for more stuff simply because they have no other way to see a doctor. This is one of those fun dilemmas where ...
Read in browser Exploration Day > Columbus Day
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 02, 2012 06:43 pm First celebrated nationally in 1937, Columbus Day pays homage to Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas. It is, needless to say, viewed very differently by different groups of Americans. Some people forget it's a holiday at all. Some Italian Americans see it as a point of cultural pride. Other people — especially Native Americans — ...
Read in browser Science of L.A.'s 'Carmageddon' proves (shock!) that cars cause much of LA's air pollution
By Xeni Jardin on Oct 02, 2012 05:43 pm Suzanne Paulson, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, saw "Carmageddon" as an opportunity to make use of a "natural experiment." She and a colleague "measured pollutants in the air during the LA freeway shutdown last year, and have now released their findings. Air quality near the normally busy highway improved by 83 percent that ...
Read in browser Goldilocks in space: Interview with Lee Billings about the hunt for aliens and habitable planets
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 02, 2012 05:38 pm Are we alone in the Universe? Last year, journalist Lee Billings wrote an excellent series of guest posts for BoingBoing about the quest to answer that question. One of those posts — Incredible Journey: Can we reach the stars without breaking the bank? — was recently reprinted in The Best Science Writing Online 2012. As ...
Read in browser A pillow into which you insert your head
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 02, 2012 05:37 pm "The Ostrich Pillow" is Kawamura-Ganjavian's oversubscribed Kickstarter project, a kind of padded textile space-helmet into which you insert your head (and, optionally, your hands), muffling your hearing, dimming your vision, and padding your whole head. OSTRICH PILLOW is a revolutionary new product to enable easy power naps anytime, everywhere, OSTRICH PILLOW 's unique design offers ...
Read in browser Boing Boing Music!
By David Pescovitz on Oct 02, 2012 05:14 pm Do you dig ambient drone? Are you deep into sixties psych? Curious about forest metal? Connoisseur of outernational grooves? Unclear on dubstep vs. brostep? Krautrock vs. komische? Fussy about free jazz? Wondering about wyrd folk? We are pleased to introduce our newly-designed Boing Boing Music page and several new features to guide you in your musical discovery!
Read in browser Costumes that integrate wheelchairs
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 02, 2012 05:13 pm On Buzzfeed, a collection of Hallowe'en costumes that integrate wheelchairs, for adults and kids, ganked from a wide variety of sources. I really like this ice-cream wagon costume, and I wish it was clearer who had originated it for proper credit. Do you know? Add a comment, please! 20 Creative Costume Ideas For People In ...
Read in browser Children's Hospital upset by creepy clown ads for Rob Corddry's TV show, "Childrens Hospital"
By Xeni Jardin on Oct 02, 2012 05:10 pm Snip: "People in clown costumes and makeup are not allowed in Children's Hospital Los Angeles.'We do observe a no-clown policy because they can be scary for some kids." More on the controversy surrounding creepy clown billboards for Childrens Hospital. FWIW, I drove by another set of ads for this show every day on the way ...
Read in browser Creepy vintage novelties (photo gallery)
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 02, 2012 05:05 pm A couple of weekends ago I took my 15-year-old daughter to the fabulous Farmers Market in Los Angeles. It isn't a typical farmers market. It was established in 1934 at the corner of Third and Fairfax, and over the years it has grown into a charming, bustling cluster of shops and restaurants. It has a ...
Read in browser What it's like to be a black man working in a tech startup where white guys are free to be racist
By Xeni Jardin on Oct 02, 2012 04:59 pm This first-person account of Qu33riousity's experience of racism in a Bay Area startup will no doubt ring familiar to other "others" who've been there, too. And, it will no doubt inspire some number of privileged white guys to post comments about how wrong he is. The startup is not named, but it would appear to ...
Read in browser Meet SparkTruck, an “educational build-mobile” for the twenty-first century.
Dreamed up by a group of Stanford d.school students and funded through Kickstarter, SparkTruck is a mobile maker space currently traveling across the United States. At schools and summer camps and libraries around the country, the SparkTruck team offers workshops to help kids “find their inner maker” as they design and build projects like stamps, stop-motion animation clips, and “vibrobots.”
[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRKXqDwieY&feature=plcp]
This might seem all shiny and new. And it is—but only in part. What’s so striking (and exciting) about SparkTruck is the way it combines old and new. It does so in the tools it gets kids using, which range from pipe cleaners to laser cutters. It does so in its educational approach, which combines cutting-edge (get it?) STEM and design pedagogy with the fundamentals of an old-school shop class. And it does so in its method, which combines the iconic, century-old technology of the bookmobile with the hot new form of the maker space.
In doing so, SparkTruck joins a growing number of libraries which are combining time-tested principles (like equal access to information) with new technologies (like 3-D printers), putting in maker spaces and media production labs alongside bookshelves and meeting rooms. As I’ve argued over on bookmobility.org, these combinations make sense because reading and making actually have a lot in common. They’re both creative processes that take existing materials and combine them in new ways. Getting people engaged in those kinds of processes—through imaginative thinking, contemplation, hands-on problem-solving, and collaborative learning—is what both maker spaces and libraries are all about.
Taking that commitment on the road with scissors and hammers and 3-D printers and a great big bookmobile-like truck, SparkTruck serves as a laboratory for new approaches, as well as a reminder that trying new things doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t!) necessarily mean tossing old ones out.
After all, what would those vibrobots be without classically crafty pipe cleaners and tongue depressors? And what would a library be without the creative, participatory, straight-up awesome experience of reading?
SparkTruck schedule [sparktruck.org]
How to arrange a visit from SparkTruck [sparktruck.org]
SparkTruck YouTube channel [youtube.com]
Signature: --Derek Attig, bookmobility.org
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