By Cory Doctorow at 8:13 pm Saturday, Sep 18
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Found in this morning's Flickr
RSS photostream of pix of graffiti, a three-storey building in Montreal covered in a beautiful blue anime mural.
Link
Update:
Andre sez: "Today's Flick image image is not the only anime-inspired mural in Montreal. Check out
this one."
By Xeni Jardin at 4:06 pm Saturday, Sep 18
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The only accessory you need for Talk Like A Pirate Day, September 19.
The site's creator,
Grant Henninger, says:
"Let me present t' you t' iPatch! It really has no purpose, but it was a fun site t' build. Hope people get a good harty-har-har out o' it."
Arrrrrrrrrr!
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:23 pm Saturday, Sep 18
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I'm stopping at my local 99-cent store today. As reported in Cartoon Brew:
Rivaling Fleischer studios with their abstract rubber-hose animation style and hot jazz musical scores, the RKO Van Beuren Tom & Jerry cartoons (1931-1933) have become classics for their sheer surrealism. Currently in distribution at 99 Cents Only Stores is one of the greatest bargains I've ever seen: a dvd of nine Van Beuren TOM & JERRY cartoons! That's 11 cents per cartoon! And if that's not enough for you, it comes with a free 10 minute phone card inside the package!!
(Semi-related aside: Many moons ago, I wrote about a trip to the 99-Cent Only store for the print edition of bOING bOING)
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:47 pm Saturday, Sep 18
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Here's a fun way to look at a bunch of old stereoscope pictures without the stereoscope. The images are blinked. Move the mouse up to increase the blink rate.
Link (Thanks, Mark!)
By Xeni Jardin at 1:27 pm Saturday, Sep 18
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Stephen Holden of the
NY Times reviews
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which opens this weekend nationwide.
If nothing else, "Sky Captain" is a landmark in computer-generated imagery. Its actors cavort through an entirely synthetic, computerized retro-styled future world that fuses Art Deco, Futurism, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and the spirit of the 1939 World's Fair into an all-purpose eve-of-World-War-II environment extrapolated into a science fiction limbo. Its cheerfully ominous scenario of a planet invaded by robots that systematically set about stripping the earth of its natural resources resonates in any number of ways without seeming strident or promoting a political agenda.
But the visual elegance of the movie, which opens today nationwide, comes at a price. If its ethereal evocation of a pulp fiction future-past eclipses almost any other sci-fi franchise in subtlety and imagination, its shadowy washed-out color is a far cry from the robust hues of a movie like "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The monochromatic variations on sepia keep the actors and their adventures at a refined aesthetic distance, and the bleached, tinted face of Mr. Law is simply not as real a screen presence as the ruddy, flesh-and-blood Harrison Ford. At times the film is hard to see. And as the action accelerates, the wonder of its visual concept starts giving way to sci-fi cliches.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 11:41 am Saturday, Sep 18
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Over a thousand pounds of pig flesh processed at a Sioux Center meatpacking facility was recalled over fears that a missing microchip could be embedded in the meat.
The Sioux-Preme Packing Co. recalled 110 pork shoulder butts -- about 1,100 pounds of meat -- that could contain the metal devices used to measure scientific data in hogs.
Pass the tofurkey, please.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 10:37 am Saturday, Sep 18
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Speaking of energy and excess: The International CXT, short for Commercial Extreme Truck, can haul six tons of dirt and tow a 20-ton yacht at the same time. It's 9 feet high, 8 feet wide, 21 feet long, and weighs 15,000 pounds. Ergo, about 2 feet taller x 4 feet longer than the honkin' Hummer H2. Which, btw, it could tow
along with that yacht, if need be. I'm using the word "need" loosely here.
"International built the CXT to make a bold statement," said Rob Swim of International Truck and Engine Corporation in a prepared statement announcing the CXT's launch. Exactly what statement would that be?
Link to CXT debut site, and Link to press release announcing launch.
By Xeni Jardin at 10:15 am Saturday, Sep 18
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BoingBoing reader
George W. Maschke says,
Saving Energy Without Derision (5 mb PDF) is a new (and free) e-book by former Sandia National Laboratories senior scientist Dr. Alan P. Zelicoff. This book is intended to be a real-world, no-nonsense, thoroughly documented collection of easy-to-implement recommendations to help the average thoughtful person to pick the "low-hanging fruit" of conservation and renewable energy. The author is after the easy 75% of actions we can all take (but almost uniformly ignore) that most certainly make a difference in energy costs (after all that's what most people care about) and adjuring a bit of unnecessary adverse impact on the environment (which a few folks actually think is important beyond the mere dollar valuation).
The author (who welcomes comments at zalan8587@qwest.net) intends to continuously update the book (consistent with readership interest) and address many new topics. For example, next on his list is an analysis of the economics and scientific basis of fuel-cell vehicles powered by hydrogen. (Bottom line, he maintains, is that it's a cruel hoax and energy disaster, and far less useful than, for example, heavy hybrid automobiles that get about 50 - 60 miles on an electric charge alone -- which accounts for more than 85% of driving in the US and elsewhere on a daily basis -- and which are available now.)
Link Looks like the link's overloaded with traffic for the time being, but a short preview is available for d/l
here.
By Xeni Jardin at 10:14 am Saturday, Sep 18
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Newsweek's Brian Braiker interviews T. Coraghessan Boyle (
image: AP), author of
The Inner Circle. The interview is a terrific read, and I really can't wait to read the book.
Like Boyle's "The Road to Wellville," "Circle" is a fictionalized account of a historic figure. Instead of John Harvey Kellogg, Boyle this time tackles Alfred C. Kinsey, the Indiana University professor who jump-started the sexual revolution with the 1948 publication of "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." The novel is narrated by John Milk, a naive researcher at the center of Professor Kinsey's, or "Prok's," inner circle. Kinsey -- who would have abhorred the euphemism "adult film" -- proposes that poets have had 2,000 years to tell us about romance and love, and now science ought to tell us about the physiology of sex, without regard to emotional content. (Kinsey is also the subject of an upcoming biopic starring Liam Neeson.)
And boy, is the professor ever interested in sex. He charms his researchers into bed, encourages them all to swap wives and generally get it on as much as possible -- all in the name of science, of course. Because the intent behind the sex is clinical, the steady stream of graphic episodes in the novel becomes numbing, unsexy and, well, clinical. But things get sticky when Milk, a married man with a bit of a Stockholm syndrome infatuation for his mentor, fails to disentangle his emotions. Milk is in love with Kinsey. He's in love with Kinsey's wife. And he's in love with his own wife, Iris. In the end, the novel is a meditation on family, on marriage, love and sexuality.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 10:07 am Saturday, Sep 18
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So cool. BoingBoing reader
Inder says,
I want to let boingboingers know that WanderPort will be providing a free wi-fi network at the launch of SpaceShipOne for the Ansari X-Prize in the Mojave Desert September 29th through to the second launch. If any bloggers are attending the launch and want to have a mac address pass-through to make sure they can file, just send us an email info@wanderport.com and we'll make sure they can get their blogs posted. We'll also be providing a few WISIP phones for free North America phone calls.
Link to Ansari X-Prize home.
By Xeni Jardin at 10:02 am Saturday, Sep 18
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Following up on
yesterday's post about an apparent bit of political humor on the Harvard Primate Neuroscience Lab's website, one BoingBoing reader wrote in to tell us that a relative worked at the lab -- and confirmed that indeed, the chimp-to-Dubya morph was no accident. Also, BoingBoing reader
Chris Holland says:
That "image" at the top-right corner actually is a scaled-down display of a bigger quicktime movie ... for a more dramatic effect. Now if I could only dig out that morphing I did when I was a kid of Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford.
Link to chimp-Bush-mov. Whoahhhh. If anyone has the url for a chimp-to-Dubya-to-Claudia-to-Cindy morph mov, dude -- send it to us before Fleshbot gets their greedy (and well-lubed) little hands on it.
By Xeni Jardin at 9:55 am Saturday, Sep 18
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BoingBoing reader Prodigal Tom says, "This is a fascinating article about deaf and totally neglected children in Nicaragua inventing their own sign language. I was also psyched because I learned there is an actual job called a psycholinguist! There's also a great point about how the language has evolved, so the younger members have a slightly different version than the originators."
Link to Reuters synopsis, and
Link to Science Magazine article, which appears to be available only to paid subscribers. (
Thanks also to Mike Oliveri and others who pointed us to this item)
Update: BoingBoing reader jd says, "This story is a fascinating one - but it originally hit the mainstream media world back in 1999 in the New York Times. Here's the story (featuring Noam Chomsky, as well!) -- A Linguistic Big Bang (Link)."
Update 2: Reader Paul Camp of the Spelman College Department of Physics in Georgia says,
Yet another update: this story is way older than either of your current sources. I remember reading about it in The Language
Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by MIT psycholinguist Stephen Pinker (which you and everyone else should read), published in 1994.
In fact, Pinker makes a case that this mechanism is how pidgins become creoles generally. Pidgins are work languages without significant grammatical structure, created by adults who speak different native languages. But children have a critical developmental period when they are learning language and imposing what appear to be innate grammatical structures on the language-like things in their environment (Chomsky's Universal Grammar). Pinker describes several examples of the process, including the Nicaraguan children as well as American Sign Language, and several verbal creoles.
By David Pescovitz at 9:15 am Saturday, Sep 18
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My friend Barnaby Whitfield is a pastel artist in New York City. He's listed in the prestigious
White Columns Curated Artist Registry and is represented by the
31GRAND gallery in Brooklyn. Barnaby's work is incredibly beautiful and deeply twisted. I'm proud to know him.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 9:03 am Saturday, Sep 18
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Harvard scientists report that Rembrandt may have suffered from stereoblindness. The neurobiologists believe that many of Rembrandt's self-portraits show his eyes focused assymetrically. From the
New England Journal of Medicine:
Stereopsis is an important cue for depth perception, yet it can be a hindrance to an artist trying to depict a three-dimensional scene on a flat surface. Art teachers often instruct students to close one eye in order to flatten what they see. Therefore, stereoblindness might not be a handicap — and might even be an asset — for some artists.
Link (to Boston Globe article)
By David Pescovitz at 4:24 am Saturday, Sep 18
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Last night, we visited the
Palais de Tokyo to see the work of Wang Du, a Chinese artist living in Paris. Du creates massive sculptures and installations that manipulate and deconstruct mass media and pop culture imagery. In "Oarribeancom," surreal graphics from a Japanese erotic Web site are recreated in a collection of much larger-than-life resin models like the one pictured here. (Click on the photo for a larger version.)
Link
