Wireless restoration of sight to the blind (rats) Nice jacket Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" played by 5 pianists on one piano, all at once Looking for a sciencey article to email your sleep-deprived loved ones, to remind them why they need sleep? Not the 1s: You Can't Scare Me London's exploding pavements* TOM THE DANCING BUG: Did You Know - Fun Facts About NYC! Gweek 098: Win Hugh Howey's Paperwhite Kindle! Massive, CC-licensed 34GP panorama of Prague Lexicon: smart, sharp technothriller from Max "Jennifer Government" Barry How the NSA leaks may help EFF sue the government into defending its bulk surveillance programs Real Stuff: The Joeist Philosophy Seinfeld's theme is scary at 1/12 speed Enigma Variations Civil disobedience and the Internet Tiger's whiskers are pulse detectors Public Resource wants to liberate tax records for US nonprofits - converting 100lbs of scanned bitmaps on DVDs into searchable data on $1.5T worth of activity Check out the latest original long-reads in Boing Boing's Features archive Video of Cambodia's homebrew "bamboo railroad" Anatomical glass sculptures from MRI/CT scans What happened to David Mery, the techy who was arrested as a terrorist in a London tube station because of his coat Excellent signs from K.L. Rankine, a gentleman sign painter in Jamaica Having your account frozen at Amazon means losing ongoing access to your ebooks Watch this vampire bat run like hell NSA leaks forcing more official transparency "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," animated and accelerated Iceland resumes whale hunting, endangered Fin Whale killed Wireless restoration of sight to the blind (rats)
By David Pescovitz on Jun 19, 2013 12:59 pm http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmVQLCgcJFY Stanford researchers developed a retinal prosthesis that wirelessly transmits images from a video camera in a pair of glasses directly to a chip implanted inside the retina tissue.
Read in browser Nice jacket
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 19, 2013 12:52 pm This jacket is a wonderful mystery to me; found upon the tumblrs, and seemingly sprung from the ether. Do you know where it came from?
Read in browser Daft Punk's "Get Lucky" played by 5 pianists on one piano, all at once
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 19, 2013 12:33 pm "
Daft Pianists (cover of Get Lucky)," the latest musical experiment by
Joe Sabia's wonderful
CDZA (Collective Cadenza) YouTube project.
Read in browser Looking for a sciencey article to email your sleep-deprived loved ones, to remind them why they need sleep?
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 19, 2013 12:29 pm This New York Times WELL column should do the trick. Probably why it's currently the most-shared item on nytimes.com. It's about a thousand words of sciencey science stuff, but the tl;dr is: go the fuck to sleep.
Read in browser Not the 1s: You Can't Scare Me
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 19, 2013 12:24 pm Eric Steuer shares
this wonderful videogame-themed rap video, made for
Music Video Race, a project in which
20 Bay Area musical acts were randomly paired up with 20 filmmakers, and each pair was given 48 hours to conceive, shoot, and edit a music video).
The song is by Not the 1s, "You Can't Scare Me" (prod. by Edison Victrola).
Read in browser London's exploding pavements*
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 19, 2013 12:05 pm Underground power-boxes nestled beneath the pavements* of London keep blowing the hell up. In its defense, UK Power Networks reminds us that there's a lot of these boxes, and only a few of them explode catastrophically every year, blowing huge, dramatic holes in the streetscene.
Read in browser TOM THE DANCING BUG: Did You Know - Fun Facts About NYC!
By Ruben Bolling on Jun 19, 2013 11:45 am Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH many Fun Facts about NYC, the Biggest City In The World*, are crudely illustrated!
Read in browser Gweek 098: Win Hugh Howey's Paperwhite Kindle!
By Mark Frauenfelder on Jun 19, 2013 11:30 am Your browser does not support the audio tag.
This episode of Gweek is brought to you by 23andMe, the leading health and ancestry DNA service. Read in browser Massive, CC-licensed 34GP panorama of Prague
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 19, 2013 10:00 am Jeffrey from 360 Cities sez, "My latest 'gigantic panorama' is of my adopted home city, Prague. (previously:
1 2) This time I'm trying something new: download, share, remix this one yourself!
Read in browser Lexicon: smart, sharp technothriller from Max "Jennifer Government" Barry
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 19, 2013 08:54 am Max Barry's new technothriller
Lexicon is a gripping conspiracy novel about a cabal of "poets" who have mastered the deep language of the human brain and can use it to boss the rest of us around.
Read in browser How the NSA leaks may help EFF sue the government into defending its bulk surveillance programs
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 18, 2013 11:00 pm The "other shoe" in the Edward Snowden NSA leaks has been the potential effect of all these disclosures on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's efforts to force the government to account for itself in court.
Read in browser Real Stuff: The Joeist Philosophy
By Dennis Eichhorn on Jun 18, 2013 09:16 pm "I was working in a small tavern in Moscow, Idaho, when I got the call... I took the next pickup truck to California." From
Real Stuff #2 (Fantagraphics, March 1991).
Read in browser Seinfeld's theme is scary at 1/12 speed
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 18, 2013 09:00 pm Slowing down the Seinfeld theme by 1200% turns it into a David Lynch soundtrack, full of nightmares and menace, as Gorge Catanda demonstrates with this 8 minutes youtube.
Read in browser Enigma Variations
By Jason Weisberger on Jun 18, 2013 06:17 pm Composed by Edward Elgar between 1898 and '99,
Variations on an Original Theme for Orchestra ("Engima"), Op. 36, has long been my favorite piece of classical music.
Read in browser Civil disobedience and the Internet
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 18, 2013 06:14 pm Molly sez, "I wrote this short essay over at iO9 on what the future of civil disobedience could look like. Though in the past civil disobedience was enacted in the streets, with people placing their bodies in harm's way for their cause, now online activists can engage in digitally-based acts of civil disobedience from their keyboards.
Read in browser Tiger's whiskers are pulse detectors
By David Pescovitz on Jun 18, 2013 04:36 pm Sierra Club magazine discusses "
4 Ordinary Animals with Superhero Abilities." (Flight is not included.) My favorite tidbit is about a tiger's whiskers:
They are filled with sensitive nerve endings, which help them detect distances and changes in their surroundings.
Read in browser Public Resource wants to liberate tax records for US nonprofits - converting 100lbs of scanned bitmaps on DVDs into searchable data on $1.5T worth of activity
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 18, 2013 04:06 pm Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,
On November 1, Public.Resource.Org released a new service which put 6,461,326 US nonprofit tax returns on the net for bulk download, developers, and search engines to access.
Read in browser Check out the latest original long-reads in Boing Boing's Features archive
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 18, 2013 03:33 pm Did you know that we publish several
original feature articles each week on Boing Boing? We're more than the
old-school linkblog this website began as, way back in the year 2000 (we were a zine before that, but man, that's a whole 'nother saga).
Read in browser Video of Cambodia's homebrew "bamboo railroad"
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 18, 2013 03:10 pm At long last, here's video of the
Cambodian bamboo railroad I wrote about in 2006; this being a homebrew railroad running at 40km/h off an electric motor, along decrepit and degenerating rails that only see one scheduled train per week.
Read in browser Anatomical glass sculptures from MRI/CT scans
By David Pescovitz on Jun 18, 2013 02:36 pm Fine artist Angela Palmer takes CT/MRI scanner of people and animals, engraves the data onto thin glass sheets that are then combined into 3D sculptures.
Read in browser What happened to David Mery, the techy who was arrested as a terrorist in a London tube station because of his coat
By David Mery on Jun 18, 2013 02:23 pm [Editor's note: I mentioned the arrest of technology editor David Mery in my recent Guardian column on Prism; he wrote in to correct some details and explain the astounding circumstances of how Britain's absurd war on terror caught him in its mesh for the crime of wearing a coat in the summer -CD] I was observed directly when I entered Southwark tube station and then on CCTV.
Read in browser Excellent signs from K.L. Rankine, a gentleman sign painter in Jamaica
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 18, 2013 01:48 pm Click to view large. Photo: Jeff Simmermon. Boing Boing pal
Jeff Simmermon sends us some wonderful snapshots of a local Jamaican artist who lives and works in Treasure Beach, "a very sparsely populated rural beach town in Southern Jamaica," where Jeff and his bride are celebrating their honeymoon (congrats, you two!).
Read in browser Having your account frozen at Amazon means losing ongoing access to your ebooks
By Cory Doctorow on Jun 18, 2013 01:37 pm A woman who placed a big computer order at Amazon had her account frozen while they tried to verify her credit-card, a process that went horribly awry (they demanded that she fax them her bank-statement, which she did, eight times, but they never got it, and who knows where those eight copies ended up).
Read in browser Watch this vampire bat run like hell
By David Pescovitz on Jun 18, 2013 01:32 pm Over at National Geographic, Carl Zimmer reveals the wonder of vampire bats. "Of the 1200 or so species of bats, vampire bats are among the very few that can move quickly on the ground." Watch one run in the video above.
Read in browser NSA leaks forcing more official transparency
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 18, 2013 01:25 pm Trevor Timm
wrote a piece for Freedom of the Press Foundation about how much more we're learning not just from the NSA leaks themselves, but from the response to those leaks.
Read in browser "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," animated and accelerated
By David Pescovitz on Jun 18, 2013 01:19 pm Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (the movie) on speed. Er, even
more speed. From
1A4 Studio who have done this with a number of movies, including Star Wars, Back to the Future, and The Matrix.
Read in browser Iceland resumes whale hunting, endangered Fin Whale killed
By Xeni Jardin on Jun 18, 2013 01:11 pm "Kristjan Loftsson, CEO of the the company Hvalur hf." Photo:
News of Iceland.
Icelandic news outlets are
reporting that an Icelandic whaling company, Hvalur hf, "caught its first fin whale yesterday evening," after sailing out yesterday with two boats, both due back in port today.
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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