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UN's copyright agency won't let the Pirate Party in Einstürzende Neubauten's "Blume" video (1993) If Looper had been made in 1994 -- by Disney Happy Anniversary, Sweetcakes -- From Gina New kids book from creators of Yo Gabba Gabba! Man in a "drunken blackout" bought 69 percent of the global market in oil futures Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: "Only In My Dreams" The dead rise in Georgetown Berlusconite politician caught slashing disabled man's tires The surface of Venus Fossils in storage: How do you sort through the backlog? Cory in San Francisco tonight How to: Read the abstract of a scientific research paper Rube Goldberg machine that integrates freerunners with lots of guts, little regard for own safety Sailor Twain: don't fall in love with the mermaid of the Hudson valley Nina Paley's history of the Holy Land: "This Land Is Mine" Download the Little Brother audiobook Congress: The DHS's "fusion centers" full of bad intelligence, lies, and imaginary buildings Meaningful appeals for accused YouTube uploaders E. Horton Kinsman, Shoe Consultant Replica vintage sports jerseys made out of new-old vintage fabric The new trailer for Movie 43 is very, very funny and not-at-all SFW Theatre Bizarre: Stupendous yearly Halloween ball in Detroit A cool way to turn a window into a door The science of debate strategy Skateboarder runs into deer Wingnut fantasy: Obama's mom was a porn star, dad was communist poet The weird, black, spidery things of Mars RiffTrax is bringing Birdemic: Shock and Terror to theaters for festive October soul-hurt (and jokes)! Start saving now! UN's copyright agency won't let the Pirate Party in
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 04, 2012 01:00 pm International non-governmental organizations with an interest in copyright and related issues have always been admitted to the United Nations's World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as observers (I was once such an accredited observer, working on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation). Historically, the NGO "observers" at WIPO were industry groups, such as the motion picture ...
Read in browser Einstürzende Neubauten's "Blume" video (1993)
By David Pescovitz on Oct 04, 2012 12:33 pm From pioneering German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, this terrific video for their song "Blume" that embodies the underground spirit of the time/scene. The song is on their 1993 album Tablua Rasa. Einstürzende Neubauten, which means "collapsing new buildings," often fashions their own instruments from scrap metal and construction tools. It makes sense then that the ...
Read in browser If Looper had been made in 1994 -- by Disney
By Jamie Frevele on Oct 04, 2012 12:32 pm (Video link) This is an amazing discovery! Not only was Looper a remake of a (fake) madcap family comedy from the '90s, but it's a remake that starred the same exact actors! I can't wait until someone unearths Disney's 1993 hit Saw, which was actually a delightful adaptation of the game Mouse Trap starring Cary ...
Read in browser Happy Anniversary, Sweetcakes -- From Gina
By Jason Weisberger on Oct 04, 2012 12:23 pm Late last week we got an email from Gina. Her husband Sweetcakes is an avid Boing Boing reader and she thought there'd be no better way to say "I love you" than with a message here. Thank you so much for appreciating the site. We all wish you the happiest anniversary!
Read in browser New kids book from creators of Yo Gabba Gabba!
By David Pescovitz on Oct 04, 2012 12:14 pm Six years ago, a group of hyper-creative old-school punks from Orange County unleashed the psychedelic kids insanity of Yo Gabba Gabba! on the world. The moment that Boing Boing first discovered the show pilot before it was even picked up for TV, the surreal antics of DJ Lance and his mutant pals infiltrated my home. ...
Read in browser Man in a "drunken blackout" bought 69 percent of the global market in oil futures
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 04, 2012 11:52 am 2009: "Between the hours of 1:22 a.m. and 3:41 a.m., [Steve Perkins] gradually bought 69 percent of the global market [7 million barrels of crude oil], while driving prices up from $71.40 to $73.05, by bidding higher each time. At 6:30 a.m., presumably sobering up and realizing what he’d done, he sent a message to ...
Read in browser Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: "Only In My Dreams"
By Aquarius on Oct 04, 2012 11:50 am "I'm just a rock n' roller from Beverly Hills / My name is Ariel... Pink!"
Well, okay. Sing it, Ariel! Peculiar popsmith Ariel Pink and his Haunted Graffiti are back, and as absurdly delightful and infectiously catchy as ever. Hella amusingly weird too - just check out the damaged Beach Boys vibe of, uh, "Schnitzel Boogie". Oh, and of course AP couldn't resist titling a track here, "Pink Slime"!
Read in browser The dead rise in Georgetown
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 04, 2012 11:49 am Authorities think that an area of Washington D.C.'s Georgetown neighborhood — on Q Street north of Volta Park — might once have been part of a cemetery. Several sets of human remains have been found there over the years, including, last month, the skeletons of five people. All five were found in the driveway and ...
Read in browser Berlusconite politician caught slashing disabled man's tires
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 04, 2012 11:39 am Antonio Piazza, a Milanese government official from Italy's People of Freedom party (that's Silvio Berlusconi's party), has made headlines after he was caught on CCTV slashing the tires of a disabled person's car. Piazza had been in the habit of parking his car in a disabled spot near his office. When a police officer fined ...
Read in browser The surface of Venus
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 04, 2012 11:37 am I love rediscovering cool things. I'm sure I learned, at some point, that the Soviet Union had once sent probes to land on the surface of Venus. But I had completely forgotten this fact until today. This photo comes from Venera 9, which landed on Venus on October 22, 1975. The lander remained operational for ...
Read in browser Fossils in storage: How do you sort through the backlog?
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 04, 2012 11:05 am Yesterday, I posted about Pegomastax africanus, a parrot-like dinosaur whose fossil was discovered not in a remote waste in some far corner of the world, but in a rock that had sat in storage at Harvard University for 50 years. In the post, I tried to explain why something like that could happen. The simple ...
Read in browser Cory in San Francisco tonight
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 04, 2012 10:42 am Hey, San Francisco! I'm at Borderlands Books in the Mission tonight at 7PM, for the Pirate Cinema tour! Tomorrow night it's Berkeley, then south to LA, then all the way to Lansing, MI, and then a host of other cities across Canada and the USA. Check the full schedule -- I hope I get to ...
Read in browser How to: Read the abstract of a scientific research paper
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 04, 2012 10:34 am Abstracts are summaries — the short paragraph that usually explains the question a study was asking and the answers it found, plus a brief overview of what methods the researchers used. Because most peer-reviewed scientific research papers sit behind big, awkward pay walls, abstracts are often the only part of the paper that you, the ...
Read in browser Rube Goldberg machine that integrates freerunners with lots of guts, little regard for own safety
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 04, 2012 10:31 am Freerunner Jason Paul and friends got (a presumably large amount of) money from Red Bull to construct a building-scale Rube Goldberg machine that integrated several parkours at various stages of its operation, mixing the improbable action of inanimate objects with the improbable (and breathtakingly dangerous) actions of human lunatics. Human-Powered Freerunning Machine - with Jason ...
Read in browser Sailor Twain: don't fall in love with the mermaid of the Hudson valley
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 04, 2012 09:20 am I wrote about Sailor Twain, Mark Siegel's beautiful, haunting serialized graphic novel when it began. Since then, the story of a New York steamship captain who is haunted by his love for a mermaid has run its course, and today it has been published in a single, handsome hardcover volume from FirstSecond. Sailor Twain tells ...
Read in browser Nina Paley's history of the Holy Land: "This Land Is Mine"
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 10:40 pm Nina Paley's new "potential-possible-maybe-feature film" project is Seder-Masochism, and she's posted a clip called "This Land Is Mine," which she envisions as the final scene of the movie. "This Land Is Mine" is a history of the Holy Land and all the blood spilled over the years by various parties who laid claim to it. ...
Read in browser Download the Little Brother audiobook
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 09:35 pm Thanks to the kind folks at Random House Audio, I'm now able to offer direct downloads of the unabridged audiobook of Little Brother, read by Kirby Heyborne. The download is DRM-free, and comes with no EULA -- in other words, the only terms binding your use of it are: "Don't violate copyright law." It's $20, ...
Read in browser Congress: The DHS's "fusion centers" full of bad intelligence, lies, and imaginary buildings
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 07:27 pm A bipartisan report on the DHS's much-vaunted, scorchingly expensive "fusion centers" that were supposed to be the future of American security. The Congressional investigators who wrote the report don't mince words, and accuse the DHS of uncontrolled spending, poor, false and even lying intelligence reporting, illegal intelligence gathering, and even making up four imaginary fusion ...
Read in browser Meaningful appeals for accused YouTube uploaders
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 06:43 pm After years of video creators being caught in Kafkaesque support-loops from Google, the company has finally introduced a meaningful appeals process to copyright complaints for YouTube videos. Though, as Timothy Lee points on at Ars, the new process still has plenty of room for abuse.
Read in browser E. Horton Kinsman, Shoe Consultant
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 03, 2012 05:49 pm Share stories of your experiences with E. Horton Kinsman, Shoe Consultant, in the comments. (Via Drew Friedman)
Read in browser Replica vintage sports jerseys made out of new-old vintage fabric
By Cory Doctorow on Oct 03, 2012 05:21 pm Ebbets Field Flannels makes replicas of vintage baseball jerseys from various leagues (including Cuban and Japanese jerseys), using new-old vintage textiles for their projects. They also do hockey jerseys, hats, and other replicas of bygone-era sportswear. The Stanley Cup used to be an open tournament which included non-NHL teams. In 1917, the Seattle Metropolitans of ...
Read in browser The new trailer for Movie 43 is very, very funny and not-at-all SFW
By Jamie Frevele on Oct 03, 2012 05:20 pm (Video link) A rather off-the-wall trailer for the upcoming anthology flick Movie 43 -- which stars every single person in Hollywood and is directed by everyone else who showed up late the day it was cast (except for Elizabeth Banks, who directs and stars) -- was unleashed on the internet today. Made in the vein ...
Read in browser Theatre Bizarre: Stupendous yearly Halloween ball in Detroit
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 03, 2012 05:17 pm The coolest thing that I saw at the Detroit Maker Faire in 2011 was John Dunivant's Theatre Bizarre. John (right) is an immensely talented artist who creates stages, costumes, artwork, carnival attractions, signs, and everything else that goes into an amazing yearly Halloween show held at the abandoned Michigan State Fairgrounds in Detroit. I was ...
Read in browser A cool way to turn a window into a door
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 03, 2012 04:15 pm Last weekend, I visited St. Louis and got to catch up with some friends who live in an old brick house in that city's South Grand/Tower Grove neighborhood. (Which is awesome, by the way. After hearing nothing but bad news about St. Louis for years, I was pleasantly surprised by great, thriving neighborhoods like this ...
Read in browser The science of debate strategy
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 03, 2012 04:03 pm In preparation for tonight's American presidential debate, please enjoy this Science Friday piece on the social psychology involved in successfully dodging a question. How do politicians slip into answering the questions they want to answer, instead of the ones you asked? What can you do to be more aware when this is happening?
Read in browser Skateboarder runs into deer
By David Pescovitz on Oct 03, 2012 03:53 pm During last weekend's Buffalo Bill Downhill race in Golden, Colorado, a skateboarder hit a deer crossing the road. I hope the deer is OK. (7News, thanks Gabe Adiv!)
Read in browser Wingnut fantasy: Obama's mom was a porn star, dad was communist poet
By Mark Frauenfelder on Oct 03, 2012 03:49 pm From Digital Journal: A scandalous DVD claiming that President Barack Obama's mother posed for pornographic photos and that his real father was a communist poet who indoctrinated young Barack with Marxism is reportedly being mailed to more than a million swing-state voters. The video, a pseudo-documentary produced by right-wing filmmaker Joel Gilbert, is titled "Dreams ...
Read in browser The weird, black, spidery things of Mars
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 03, 2012 03:48 pm See those weird, black, spidery things dotting the dunes in this colorized photo taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010? Yeah. Nobody knows what the hell those things are. What we do know about them just underlines how incredibly unfamiliar Mars really is to us. First spotted by humans in 1998, these splotches pop ...
Read in browser RiffTrax is bringing Birdemic: Shock and Terror to theaters for festive October soul-hurt (and jokes)!
By Jamie Frevele on Oct 03, 2012 03:41 pm There are colossally bad movies, and then there is Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Written, directed, and produced (all badly) by James Nguyen, this movie is one of the more delightful disasters you'll come across in your lifetime. It follows the sweeping, environmental romance between two people who are barely trying to act at all, and ...
Read in browser Start saving now!
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Oct 03, 2012 03:12 pm It would cost $384 million to launch my 1500-square-foot house into space. Theoretically. Based on estimated weight of the house. But the point is, there's an app that can show you how much it would cost to launch your house into space. What you do with it once it's up there remains anybody's guess.
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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