More than 30 signatories, including Gordon Roddick, who founded the Body Shop with his late wife Anita, leading green campaigner Tony Juniper and Rev Ian Galloway, convenor of the Church of Scotland, take the government to task for failing to push RBS and the other bailed-out banks into supporting socially useful investments.Celebrities, MPs and clergy urge government to rein in RBSIn their letter, written to mark the first anniversary of the British taxpayer becoming its largest shareholder, they call on Darling to transform RBS into the "Royal Bank of Sustainability".
The strongly-worded communication criticises the Treasury for standing on the sidelines while RBS took a controversial decision to support US foods group Kraft in its bid for chocolate maker Cadbury, despite the fact the bid will put jobs at risk and therefore work against the interests of the UK taxpayer. The bank's conduct has also raised eyebrows in the City because it breached protocol by neglecting to inform Cadbury of its planned defection to the Kraft camp, despite having a decades-long relationship with the confectioner.
Geekologie's superb "Evolution of Storage" infographic traces the history of data, music and photo storage from the wax cylinder to the 2TB hard drive. I think I'll print this out and hang it on the wall of my office, for the same reason poets kept skulls on their writing desks*: "this too shall pass, all is hubris and folly, the future rushes up upon you."
Incidentally, why is a raven like a writing-desk? Because Poe wrote on both of them.
- Netgear's tiny Network Attached Storage RAID -- just right for a ...
- How to fit 500GB on a DVD - Boing Boing
- Learn to build a network-attached storage out of old PCs tonight ...
- Open design for a 67 TB array for $7867 - Boing Boing
- USB cow with furry tentacles and 8GB of storage -- Boing Boing ...
- Nano-turbine is a generator, data-storage medium and molecular ...
John sez, "Steampunk Tales, the electronic magazine of original steampunk pulp fiction, just released its 4th issue. Selling for only $1.99 on most platforms, Steampunk Tales: Issue 4 delivers 10 tales of adventure and daring for less than the cost of a good cup of coffee."

John sez, "Batman: Year 100 creator Paul Pope illustrated three Japanese concept cars for GQ, as well as a flying car of his own design. You can see all the illustrations at the GQ link."Superpunch's gallery of photos of the actual cars
(Thanks, John!)
- LIFE photo gallery of old cars - Boing Boing
- GM's PAD concept car and "reconfigurable cities" - Boing Boing
- Concept car spins passenger-cabin around instead of 3-pt turns ...
- Boing Boing: Cool concept car
- Honda's concept car for dog owners - Boing Boing
- Amazing hot rod auction - Boing Boing
- Small wheelchair car you drive with a joystick - Boing Boing

R. "Diesel Sweeties" Stevens sez, "These steel keychain-mounted screwdrivers are the ultimate in unbranded, unbreakable gadget gifts. I've had mine since the summer and they work like a charm and make great boxcutters. Planning to pick up a few more sets for stocking stuffers! Unlike a Swiss Army Knife or the like, I've never had trouble flying with these."
Purdy, too.

Marilyn sez, "Until 375,000 years ago, plants had be by physically close to each other in order to reproduce. Pollen changed all that. From the article by Rob Dunn in the Dec. issue of National Geographic:"
In the 300,000 pollen-bearing plant species on Earth, there are 300,000 different forms of pollen. The great variety in colors, shapes, and textures of the grains has evolved in accordance with each plant's biological particulars. Beetle-pollinated plants tend to have smooth, sticky pollen, the better to adhere to the lumbering beetles' backs. Plants pollinated by fast-moving bees or flies may have spiny pollen that lodges easily between the insects' hairs. Plants pollinated by bigger animals, such as bats, sometimes have bigger pollen, though not always -- perhaps not even most of the time. In the details of pollen's variety, more remains to be explained than is understood.A friend with allergies once compared living through high-pollen-count days as "being the involuntary star in a vegetage-kingdom bukkake movie." I haven't been able to think of pollen the same way since.
Love Is in the Air (Thanks, Marilyn!)
A reader writes, "This was our birthday candle a year ago, one day the candle just started playing again (maybe heat change...) and was pathetically trying to get "happy birthday" to sound right... You can't imagine how badly one candle can get this tune."
It's got a sad, defiant, haunted hurdy-gurdy sound to it, like the ghost of Tom Waits was trapped in it, playing a Casiotone.
Alt-history hypothesis: if the news industry was already being subsidized by search-engine exclusivity, Murdoch would be itching to upend the market and go to Google. Slash-and-burn, not desperate weak-partner deals with assimilators like Microsoft, is his way.
With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications."Sony still subsidizing US military supercomputer efforts" (Ars Technica, thanks Rob Rader!)
These handsome Sasquatch and Yeti ornaments for the Christmas Tree are around 4.5" tall and made from glass and resin. They're available from Loren Coleman's International Cryptozoology Museum gift shop. Coming soon on BB, an interview with Coleman about the new public museum!Bigfoot & Yeti Ornaments
The Swiss have voted to ban minarets. There's no mincing words over why: the measure is designed to curtail Islam. Hitherto held among the most liberal democracies, Switzerland now faces international condemnation for such a blatant (if superficial) suppression of religious freedom. The measure is a cipher for a deeper weakness: the assumed inability of Swiss culture to withstand the influence of another.
Makers (Cory Doctorow):
Technology lets low-cost providers take market share away from established companies, as Detroit auto makers and Paris fashion house designers have seen. Even high-tech companies have a hard time building sustainable businesses now that good ideas are copied so quickly that they become commodities.
In a time of great change, fiction can sometimes provide better understanding than facts alone. "As the pace of technological change accelerates, the job of the science fiction writer becomes not harder, but easier--and more necessary," he writes. "After all, the more confused we are by our contemporary technology, the more opportunities there are to tell stories that lessen that confusion."
L. Gordon Crovitz, Wall Street Journal
Full review | Purchase
The Strain: Book One
of The Strain Trilogy Someone said The Strain is a
combination of The Stand, Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, and I am Legend, which I'd say is a pretty
fair way of describing it. The first chapter is about an airplane that
lands at JFK from Germany and goes completely dark on the runway. It's
so creepy that when I told my wife and daughter about it *they* got
creeped out just from my description.
Full
review | Purchase

Professor Alexander's Botanical Vasculum - Steamed 300 watt Moss Terrarium from Etsy seller SteamedGlass is a beautiful blown-glass steampunk Rube Goldberg terrarium: "This is the largest of our "steamed" light bulb terrariums with a bulb measuring 3 3/4" x 7 3/4". It stands 10 1/4" tall as mounted on the SteamPunked stand made of a simulated cherrywood base, copper tubing, chemistry glass, an adjustable 4x magnifying glass and other ornate trimmings. The bulb houses a small solar powered LED bulb that lights itself when all other lights go out and throws a dreamlike shadow pattern on your walls making the perfect night light. It can also be turned on and off with the old fashioned knife switch mounted to the base."
Drool.
Professor Alexander's Botanical Vasculum - Steamed 300 watt Moss Terrarium (Thanks, Armand!)
TAFF is also auctioning off a first edition of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (!), and John Hersey's "Hiroshima."
It's a great cause, and great prizes that make killer gifts (how cool would it be for a kid to grow up with her name on a character in a wonderful novel?)
TAFF updatery! (Thanks, Frank!)
The Origin of Big (via Kottke)Since then, Potvin has brought his expertise on parachute physics to these parachuting whales. He and the other scientists have developed a sophisticated new model that tracks the incoming water more carefully. It's a lot of water, the scientists have found: in one lunge, a fin whale can momentarily double its weight.
If a whale simply let the water come rushing in, there would be a tremendous collision-more than a whale could handle. Instead, the scientists argue, the whales actively cradle their titanic gulp. As the water rushes in, the whales contract muscles in their lower jaw. The water slows down and then reverses direction, so that it's moving with the whale. (It just so happens that fin whales do have sheets of muscle and pressure-sensing nerve endings in their lower jaw. Before now, nobody quite knew before what they were for.) Once the water is moving forward inside the whale it can then close its mouth and give an extra squeeze to filter the water through its baleen.

Today on the Worth1000 photoshopping contest: "Graffiti Ren" -- scenes from fine art improved with graffiti.
CCD (via Making Light)
Put them on a car and point them out and you have a backup camera. Buy why restrict it to just backing up? Why isn't the rear-view mirror a full panorama of the environment around the whole car stitched together from a dozen CCD cameras?That's pointing out from the car, point them at the car and the possibilities are different. Put them next to highways to monitor rushhour traffic. Point them at your license plate and you have either an automatic red-light running ticket writing machine, or a new toll system, where a camera based system that reads license plates could be used instead of the current RFID based solutions.
Put them on your house pointing outwards and you have a security system. Point them into the house and you have a system that turns the lights and HVAC off in rooms that are empty. Think how much better it would be than those motion sensing systems in some meeting rooms today, where the lights switch off in the room and everyone waves their hands in the air like a bunch of drunk pelicans trying to get the lights back.
If I hang one over my kitchen table will it be able to count calories for me? Can I hang one over my desk and not need to buy a scanner? How about one in the bathroom? How much health information could you extract from an image taken every morning? Could it track my weight? Detect signs of depression? Obviously there are security and privacy concerns.
(Image: CCD, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from AMagill's Flickr stream)
The Games Workshop Files Purge of '09
No doubt those of you who have supported Games Workshop in the past by creating files for use with their games will have noticed they are all being deleted from BGG at the behest of their lawyers.So here's a little paeon to the games that I spent many hours creating rules summaries and reference sheets for that are no longer available here. They're still at my personal site, but I don't imagine they'll be there for long.
No doubt they'll be more items on this list before long.
The Eigenharp, a crazy, science fiction instrument from Eigenlabs, comes on two forms, the "Alpha" ("Our professional level instrument allows the musician to play and improvise using a limitless range of sounds with virtuoso skill. It has 120 playing keys, 12 percussion keys, two strip controllers and a breath pipe. Available in a variety of custom finishes.") and the "Pico" ("It's ideal as a solo instrument or for playing in a band. With 18 playing keys and 4 mode keys, a strip controller and breath pipe, the smaller Pico has the majority of the playing features of the Eigenharp Alpha. It plays an unlimited range of sounds and is available in two finishes."). Check out the stunning performance of the Bond theme.
Graham Cove told ZDNet UK on Friday he believes the case to be the first of its kind in the UK. However, he would not identify the pub concerned, because its owner -- a pubco that is a client of The Cloud's -- had not yet given their permission for the case to be publicised...Pub 'fined £8k' for Wi-Fi copyright infringement (Thanks, Zoran)According to internet law professor Lilian Edwards, of Sheffield Law School, where a business operates an open Wi-Fi spot to give customers or visitors internet access, they would be "not be responsible in theory" for users' unlawful downloads, under "existing substantive copyright law".
DRM versus innovation
Here's a superb essay on the other DRM problem -- DRM isn't only bad for fair use, it's also a disaster for innovation, because it forecloses on the possibility of disruptive new technologies (you can only build on DRM with permission from the DRM maker; no DRM maker is going to authorize a disrupti... moreBoing Boing Gift Guide 2009: nonfiction! (part 4/6)
Saturday Morning Science Experiment: Gravity Is For Suckers
Astronaut Don Pettit--inventor of the Zero-G Coffee Cup--plays with free-floating, head-sized water bubbles on the International Space Station. Make sure you stick around for the third experiment, where Pettit sticks an antacid tablet into one of the bubbles.
Thumbnail image courtesy Flickr user ... more
Canadian border guards want to be sure that foreign journalists don't criticise Vancouver Olympics
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's As It Happens radio show covers the story of Amy Goodman's recent' border crossing into Canada. Goodman -- host of the US public radio show Democracy Now! -- was coming to Canada to give a speech at a library, and Canadian border guards questioned her intensel... moreTweets while in furlough land screenwriter Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) back in regular old jail
The web has been buzzing with the odd discovery that Pulp Fiction co-screenwriter Roger Avary was apparently tweeting while serving his sentence in a work furlough program for a fatal car crash. The LA Times now reports that the furlough deal is off, and that Avary was placed back in a regular old ... moreStylophone synthesizer at Restoration Hardware
Invented in 1967, the Dübreq Stylophone is a small synthesizer played by touching a built-in stylus to the metal keyboard. It was famously used on David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and Kraftwerk's "Pocket Calculator." I just spotted it in Restoration Hardware's catalog for $29. I was slightly surprise... more
Dr. John's weird New Orleans psych music
Years ago, I got turned on to the psychedelic New Orleans "voodoo" vibe of Dr. John (aka Mac Rebennack, Jr.). His 1968 debut Gris-Gris is a fantastically weird amalgam of R&B, dark psych rock, and NOLA culture. I'd never seen footage of the Night Tripper, as Dr. John is also known, until today. Qui... more
Rumor: will iconic Technics DJ turntables be discontinued?
Ssssssh, what's that sound? Why, it's the sound of a million deejays weeping. Rumors abound that Panasonic may kill off the iconic Technics 1200 turntable. One DJ site compared the (unconfirmed) news with "parents talking about where they were when they heard that JFK was shot, or that man had lande... moreRoomba: 1, Deadly Snake: 0
What's that Roomba, you say Timmy is stuck in a well? A Roomba vacuuming robot did more than clean the floor for one family in Israel, killing a venomous Vipera palaestinae by, apparently, running over the snake and wrapping the creature around one of its rotating brushes. The family credits the rob... moreLaser cut Poe in stainless steel
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Since then, Potvin has brought his expertise on parachute physics to these parachuting whales. He and the other scientists have developed a sophisticated new model that tracks the incoming water more carefully. It's a lot of water, the scientists have found: in one lunge, a fin whale can momentarily double its weight.


bjacques
Iain Banks and other prominent Scots call for reform of Roya
mamarox
A girl at the 1978 comic-con
NickPheas
Keychain screwdrivers of stern utilitarian beauty
peterbruells
Paul Pope illustrates Japan's grooviest concept cars
Tezcatlipoca
Sad, hurdy-gurdy Happy Birthday rendition from dying electro
Cory Doctorow
Iain Banks and other prominent Scots call for reform of Roya
gouldina
Eigenharp, crazy sci-fi instrument
OriGuy
High-mag pollen photos highlight the invisible beauty of pla
maxoid
Sad, hurdy-gurdy Happy Birthday rendition from dying electro
maxoid
Infographic: the compleat and astounding history of storage