Germany wants to know if UK spying targeted Germans Putin: Snowden is in Russia, and America can't have him Petition to pardon Snowden at whitehouse.gov President Obama "Deeply disappointed" on Supreme Court's ruling on Voting Rights Act TOM THE DANCING BUG: Chagrin Falls - Gavin Has Nothing to Hide From the NSA Rock, Rot or Rule, the ultimate rock snob argument LA issues cease-and-desist to Uber and other car ride apps Frequent caller to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's radio show is secretly guy now on the mayor's payroll NYT columnist on Snowden story: I'd "almost arrest" Greenwald; NBC host: he "aided and abetted" NYT uses work of journalist covering Manning hearings, refuses to call her a journalist Supreme Court alters the Voting Rights Act Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five Break Up Death and the Mainframe: How data analysis can help document human rights atrocities The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős -- great kids' book Snowden may never have gone to Russia Texas set to execute 500th death-row inmate Egyptian statue filmed inexplicably rotating Interview with Richard Matheson Berlusconi sentenced to 7 years in prison 4m-long cake-train in Paddington station Kickstarting a $400 "appliance" 3D printer YouTube, fair use and takedowns: with puppets! Namibia's Herero: amazing fashion derived from early 20th century German colonizers Hunting the source of the mysterious Windsor Hum Red panda escapes zoo, is recaptured with help from Twitter Bigfoot by K-tel Trash anthropology in NYC Tangoborn Menclenty Successful Russian spacewalk today paves the way for lab module later this year Arduino Workshop: A Hands-On Introduction with 65 Projects Germany wants to know if UK spying targeted Germans
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 25, 2013 12:56 pm Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, Germany's justice minister,
has written to UK officials asking about allegations of mass surveillance by British intelligence, and if Germans were targeted by GCHQ.
Read in browser Putin: Snowden is in Russia, and America can't have him
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 25, 2013 12:53 pm Even though Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says
Edward Snowden isn't in Russia, Putin
says he is: "Putin announced that Snowden is in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, and he said that Russia would not hand him over to the United States, with whom it does not have an extradition agreement."
Read in browser Petition to pardon Snowden at whitehouse.gov
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jun 25, 2013 12:47 pm Tim O'Reilly
says:
I just signed this White House petition, along with 110,000 other people (so far). Whistleblowers who alert the American people to possible crimes by their own government should not be prosecuted as criminals.
Read in browser President Obama "Deeply disappointed" on Supreme Court's ruling on Voting Rights Act
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 25, 2013 12:42 pm "I am deeply disappointed with the Supreme Court's decision today,"
says Obama in a statement issued Tuesday. "I am calling on Congress to pass legislation to ensure every American has equal access to the polls."
Read in browser TOM THE DANCING BUG: Chagrin Falls - Gavin Has Nothing to Hide From the NSA
By Ruben Bolling on Jun 25, 2013 12:25 pm Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH Gavin Smythe of Chagrin Falls has nothing to hide from the NSA.
Read in browser Rock, Rot or Rule, the ultimate rock snob argument
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 25, 2013 12:22 pm On
Tom Scharpling's
"The Best Show" on WFMU, Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster plays a character named "Ronald Thomas Clontle" promoting his book "
Rock, Rot & Rule: The Ultimate Argument Settler" on Scharpling's show.
Read in browser LA issues cease-and-desist to Uber and other car ride apps
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 25, 2013 12:14 pm "How can ride-app outfits like Lyft, Uber and Sidecar operate in a town with strict rules about how and where taxis can do business?,"
asks Dennis Romero at the LA Weekly.
Read in browser Frequent caller to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's radio show is secretly guy now on the mayor's payroll
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 25, 2013 11:47 am Toronto mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford -- the man accused of
smoking crack with gang-members, and whose family are alleged to have
ties to the KKK and organized crime -- has made a career out of avoiding answering serious questions posed by the press, preferring to address the public via the talk-radio program he and his brother, Councillor Doug Ford (accused to being west Toronto's hashish kingpin in the 1980s) host.
Read in browser NYT columnist on Snowden story: I'd "almost arrest" Greenwald; NBC host: he "aided and abetted"
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 25, 2013 11:39 am On his Sunday politics/media talk show
Meet the Press, host
David Gregory asked Glenn Greenwald, "To the extent that you have 'aided and abetted' [Edward] Snowden, even in this current movement, why shouldn't you, Mr.
Read in browser NYT uses work of journalist covering Manning hearings, refuses to call her a journalist
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 25, 2013 11:15 am [
Update:
The New York Times issues a correction.]
Alexa O'Brien, the independent journalist who has been doggedly covering the Bradley Manning case and has been in court every day at Ft.
Read in browser Supreme Court alters the Voting Rights Act
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jun 25, 2013 11:07 am Despite what you may have gathered from some of the overwrought headlines I've seen on social media, the Supreme Court did not invalidate the Voting Rights Act today.
Read in browser Brain Rot: Hip Hop Family Tree, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five Break Up
By Ed Piskor on Jun 25, 2013 10:06 am Read the rest of the Hip Hop Family Tree comics! Read in browser Death and the Mainframe: How data analysis can help document human rights atrocities
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jun 25, 2013 09:00 am Between 1980 and 2000, a complicated war raged in Peru, pitting the country's government against at least two political guerilla organizations, and forcing average people to band together into armed self-defense committees.
Read in browser The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős -- great kids' book
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 25, 2013 08:53 am The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős is a beautifully written, beautifully illustrated kids' biography of Paul Erdős, the fantastically prolific itinerant mathematician who published more papers than any other mathematician in history.
Read in browser Snowden may never have gone to Russia
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 25, 2013 08:07 am The BBC reports that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says that Edward Snowden has not entered Russia at all -- but he and the rest of the country are mighty resentful of all the US officials who've been claiming that he was kidnapped by Russian authorities.
Read in browser Texas set to execute 500th death-row inmate
By Jason Weisberger on Jun 25, 2013 07:32 am In what reads to be an astounding example of wrong, Texas is set to execute its 500th death-row inmate this Wednesday.
Read in browser Egyptian statue filmed inexplicably rotating
By Jason Weisberger on Jun 25, 2013 06:28 am Super-natural effects are always caught with the worst cameras. It is very clear this statue is moving, inside its locked case, but why?
Read in browser Interview with Richard Matheson
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 25, 2013 02:36 am Rick Kleffel sez, "We'll miss Richard Matheson... he introduced me to the sort of stories he wrote when I was arguably too young to read them.
Read in browser Berlusconi sentenced to 7 years in prison
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 25, 2013 12:28 am Silvio Berlusconi, the disgraced former prime minister of Italy and billionaire media baron, has been sentenced to seven years in jail for having sex with an underaged prostitute.
Read in browser 4m-long cake-train in Paddington station
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 24, 2013 10:46 pm To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Heathrow Express train service from Paddington to the airport in London, a PR firm built a 4m-long cake shaped like a train on the platform, guarded by birds of prey to keep the pigeons away.
Read in browser Kickstarting a $400 "appliance" 3D printer
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 24, 2013 10:00 pm John sez, "Pirate3D have a Kickstarter project for The Buccaneer. It's a 3D printer, designed to be used as an appliance.
Read in browser YouTube, fair use and takedowns: with puppets!
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 24, 2013 08:13 pm Here's Fred von Lohmann, one of the senior copyright attorneys at Google -- and formerly head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's copyright practice -- describing how YouTube takedowns and fair use claims work, with generous use of excitable puppets.
Read in browser Namibia's Herero: amazing fashion derived from early 20th century German colonizers
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 24, 2013 07:53 pm Wired has a gorgeous gallery of photos from
Conflict and Costume, a new book by Jim Naughten documenting the Herero tribe of Namibia, who fought an early 20th-century action with German colonizers, and wore captured German uniforms as trophies.
Read in browser Hunting the source of the mysterious Windsor Hum
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jun 24, 2013 07:44 pm The Windsor Hum is a weird thing —
a low-frequency buzzing that drives some people in Windsor, Ontario crazy and, yet, doesn't seem to be heard by the Americans who live closest to its source, an island crowded with industrial facilities.
Read in browser Red panda escapes zoo, is recaptured with help from Twitter
By Maggie Koerth-Baker on Jun 24, 2013 07:18 pm Three weeks ago, humans set Rusty the Red Panda up on a blind date of indeterminate length with a female red panda named Shama at the Smithsonian National Zoo.
Read in browser Bigfoot by K-tel
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 24, 2013 07:15 pm The reason you really know
this was a seventies TV commercial? Children playing outside.
Read in browser Trash anthropology in NYC
By David Pescovitz on Jun 24, 2013 07:13 pm For years, Robin Nagle was anthropologist-in-residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation. She's just published a book about trash and how we deal with it, or don't.
Read in browser Tangoborn Menclenty
By Jason Weisberger on Jun 24, 2013 07:08 pm Writer and director Ted Michaels is looking to fund his absurist comedy
Tangoborn Menclenty via Indiegogo. Ted has long been one of my favorite improvisational comedians.
Read in browser Successful Russian spacewalk today paves the way for lab module later this year
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 24, 2013 07:04 pm SpaceFlight Now: "Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin staged a successful six-hour 34-minute spacewalk Monday, installing cable clamps, attaching handrails and testing rendezvous equipment to help pave the way for installation of a new Russian laboratory module later this year."
Read in browser Arduino Workshop: A Hands-On Introduction with 65 Projects
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jun 24, 2013 06:56 pm The Arduino is a low cost microcontroller that was made for artists and designers to add interactivity to their projects. If you are interested the Arduino microcontroller but have no experience with it, buy an
Arduino and a copy of
Getting Starting with Arduino.
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
