Life imitates art: Swiss police brutally crack down on squatters who inhabit fake "art favela" Miss Utah? Barely coherent The death of Yuri Gagarin Police chief upset by 1988's "Fuck tha police" Minecraft in Assembly language Edward Snowden answers your questions Demonstrating "a load of cock" to censorship-crazed UK MP Claire Perry Restart Project: helping people fix their broken devices Mean Monkey Monday 12 Carl Hiaasen's Bad Monkey Snowden leak: How UK spies attacked delegations to the 2009 G20 Carry On X-Men Bernie Sahlins, RIP Software-authored book of conversation-starters LAX TSA officer shames my 15-year-old daughter for her outfit What would it cost to store all of America's phone calls? Men in Toronto Mayor Rob Ford photo arrested in gang sweep UPDATED: NSA admits it listens in on US phone calls and reads US emails without a warrant What's happening in São Paulo? Brutal crackdown on Turkish protests From Gezi Park Scary NYC neighborhood, 1888 Life imitates art: Swiss police brutally crack down on squatters who inhabit fake "art favela"
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 17, 2013 12:16 pm Richard sez, "The Swiss riot police have taken a page out of the Turkish authorities' book. After occupiers ('critics'?) responded to the 'irony' of Tadashi Kawamata's cafe/boutique in the form of a favela by occupying it, moving in and throwing a down-home favela house party, the Swiss police forcibly evicted them from the art installation using real, unironic tear gas and batons."
Polizei räumt Favelabesetzung auf dem Messeplatz Read in browser Miss Utah? Barely coherent
By Jason Weisberger on Jun 17, 2013 12:05 pm Whatever she said,
Miss Teen South Carolina is still our nation's pride.
Read in browser The death of Yuri Gagarin
By Rob Beschizza on Jun 17, 2013 11:46 am At the BBC: "New details have emerged about
the air crash on 27 March 1968 that killed Yuri Gagarin - the first man in space."
Read in browser Police chief upset by 1988's "Fuck tha police"
By Rob Beschizza on Jun 17, 2013 11:38 am Straight Outta Cape Cod: "an incident involving Police Chief Jeff Jaran and a rap song about police brutality playing at a restaurant he was at on May 7.
Read in browser Minecraft in Assembly language
By Rob Beschizza on Jun 17, 2013 11:26 am Overv
cloned Minecraft using x86 assembly. You can boot your computer into it. Crazy: "Starting in assembly right away would be a bit too insane, so I first wrote a reference implementation in C".
Read in browser Edward Snowden answers your questions
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 17, 2013 11:10 am On the Guardian
right now NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is answering live questions from the world at large.
1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime.
Read in browser Demonstrating "a load of cock" to censorship-crazed UK MP Claire Perry
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 17, 2013 10:06 am The British Government is determined to be seen to be doing something (anything, really) about pornography online. The current incarnation of "something must be done; there, we did something!" is based on blaming "Internet companies" for not doing enough to prevent children from seeing porn, and demanding an expansion of the existing program of blocking a secret and unaccountable blacklists.
Read in browser Restart Project: helping people fix their broken devices
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 17, 2013 09:58 am David sez, "The Restart Project is a London-based social enterprise and charity aiming at changing our relationship with information technologies by empowering people to repair and reuse their electronic devices.
Read in browser Mean Monkey Monday 12
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jun 17, 2013 09:46 am Emmanuel Frémiet (1824 - 1910)
“Gorilla Carrying off a Woman” (1887)
(Via Suddenly) Where are the other Mean Monkey Monday posts?
Read in browser Carl Hiaasen's Bad Monkey
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 17, 2013 06:33 am Rejoice! For Carl Hiaasen, author of the funniest crime novels in the business, bar none, has a new book out!
Bad Monkey has just arrived on shelves and it is every bit as hilarious as you could hope -- I spent the weekend reading choice bits aloud to whomever I could grab, and giggling noisily to myself when no one was around.
Read in browser Snowden leak: How UK spies attacked delegations to the 2009 G20
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 17, 2013 01:00 am On the eve of the G8 summit (taking place in a
specially prepared Potemkin village in N. Ireland), the Guardian has published another Edward Snowden leak, this one describing how the UK spying agency GCHQ aggressively spied upon delegates to the G20 summit in 2009.
Read in browser Carry On X-Men
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 16, 2013 10:56 pm Chris Weston's poster for a notional "Carry On X-Men" has me wanting very badly to inhabit his alternate universe. He says of the film, "Despite the bawdy humour,
'Carry on X-Men' is in many ways
more faithful to the source material than Bryan Singer's films.
Read in browser Bernie Sahlins, RIP
By Jason Weisberger on Jun 16, 2013 10:12 pm Today Bernard "Bernie" Sahlins, co-founder of the Second City, passed away at age 90. His contributions to the world of comedy and acting are immeasurable.
Read in browser Software-authored book of conversation-starters
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 16, 2013 10:01 pm JanusNode sez, "Janusnode is 'a user-configurable dynamic textual projective surface,' AKA a programmable text generating application. It has released a book entitled 'You can bring an elephant to a Broadway show, but you cannot make it drink Chablis: 365 computer-generated excuses to converse', self-published (copyright-free) through Lulu.com.
Read in browser LAX TSA officer shames my 15-year-old daughter for her outfit
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jun 16, 2013 09:22 pm This morning, a TSA officer at LAX humiliated and shamed my 15-year-old daughter. She is traveling with a group of high school students on a college tour and we were not with her when he verbally abused her.
Read in browser What would it cost to store all of America's phone calls?
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 16, 2013 08:54 pm The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle has done the math on building a data-center that could hold all of America's voice-calls, and concluded that this it wouldn't quite fit within the $20M price-tag reported for Prism, though it's not far off.
Read in browser Men in Toronto Mayor Rob Ford photo arrested in gang sweep
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 16, 2013 06:50 pm Toronto police carried out a series of dramatic raids on alleged gang-members across the city in Friday. They raided 15 Windsor Rd, a run-down and notorious bungalow that is also noteworthy for providing the backdrop against which Toronto Mayor Rob "Laughable Bumblefuck" Ford was photographed, arms around three men -- two of whom were arrested in the sweep, the third of whom was murdered in an apparent drug-related slaying.
Read in browser UPDATED: NSA admits it listens in on US phone calls and reads US emails without a warrant
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 16, 2013 04:38 pm It's a pity that
so many senators skipped the NSA's classified briefing on its secret spying program, because if they'd attended, they'd have heard something shocking: the NSA can and does access the content of emails and phone calls of Americans on US soil without a warrant.
Read in browser What's happening in São Paulo?
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 16, 2013 03:00 pm Between Syria, Turkey and the G8, it's hard to keep track of popular resistance to oligarchy and corruption, but please don't forget São Paulo, where the police are treating public anti-corruption demonstrations with all the bedwetting cowardice of a tinpot dictatorship.
Read in browser Brutal crackdown on Turkish protests
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 16, 2013 02:13 pm Barricades at Nisantasi, at 4:50AM Sunday Poiu is in Turkey; he writes: " Since yesterday evening, everything has worsened. Unfortunately it is not really covered by local media, the consequence of that being that it gets a lot less international attention than it should.
Read in browser From Gezi Park
By Brian Felsen on Jun 16, 2013 01:43 pm I've been attending the Gezi Park protests since arriving in Turkey on June 6. Thousands of people have camped at the park in Taksim Square, traditionally a gathering place for all kinds of meetings and protests, to prevent Prime Minister Erdoğan from razing the park to remove the place of assembly and erase some of the last green space in Istanbul to turn it into an Ottoman barracks shopping mall.
Read in browser Scary NYC neighborhood, 1888
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 16, 2013 01:23 pm Here's a photo from Jacob Riis's 1890 classic "
How the Other Half Lives," "an early publication... documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s." It shows "Bandit's Roost, at 59½ Mulberry Street (Mulberry Bend), was the most crime-ridden, dangerous part of all New York City." Those guys are clearly total bad-asses.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment