In this week's Weekend Project video from MAKE:, Bre Pettis shows how to build your own Rodent Powered Nightlight! William Gurstelle's printed plans for this project, based on Otherpower.com's hamster-powered generator, can also be found in MAKE: Volume 6.
Link

Comic book artist Jim Woodring is selling beautiful water colors and pen-and-ink drawings at his "Ivory Tower Art Outlet."

Frank is just beginning to understand what is meant by the phrase "Catch you later". He hopes not. In any event, he has learned an important lesson.

India ink on paper, image size 9" x 5", 2005. Price $250

Link

The terrific Eyebeam art/science/tech atelier in New York City is holding its second open call for research fellows. All work created as part of the program will be free under open licenses, without patents, released under GPL, Creative Commons, and documented in the form of DIY guides. This is an amazing opportunity for makers/hackers.

From the R&D Fellows Program page:

Join the OpenLab and Make Your Mark on the Public Domain
Eyebeam is now accepting applications for the next round of R&D Fellows in the R&D OpenLab. We are looking for hardware and software hackers, techno arts-and-craftsters, and new types of open source makers to come to New York City and develop experimental creative technologies and media. The OpenLab represents an opportunity for selected individuals to work in a state-of-the-art digital fabrication laboratory, to collaborate with a range of talented technologists and artists from diverse and hybrid backgrounds, to gain international exposure for innovative work and to directly enrich the global DIY community, free culture and the public domain. Join past OpenLab Fellows and projects like MintyBoost, OGLE (OpenGLExtractor), SlashLinks, LED Throwies, Contagious Media and FundRace and make your mark on the Public Domain.

Link (Thanks, Mike Frumin!)

Limor says: "I figured since y'all were posting a bunch of these things, the magic of persistence-of-vision electronics brings you an red LED bikegoatse. I dunno, I think it'd awesome to bike around with this." Link

A number of months ago, I wrote about John Hodgman's funny song, "700 Hobo names." I said that it would be fun to start a Flickr group where artists get together to draw each on of the whimsically named hoboes in the song. And it started happening right away.

The project has heated up considerably. Behold the 700 Hoboes Project, a beautifully designed site that archives the current drawings and offers new features, such as semantic classification of the hoboes.

Daniel and Sarah Drucker worked to semantically classify 125 of the 700 Hoboes, and are now hoping that others will pitch in after their example to help with the rest. With this semantic information available, viewers at e-hobo.com would be able to view just hoboes with hats, or with missing body parts, or who are named anacronistically.

Link

After one brief look at Goatse, your brain is scarred forever. You can't help but see Goatse again and again -- in ads, photos, logos, and so on. Here are a few that have been submitted to Boing Boing this week:

Superman advertisement.
Tour de Goatse (three handed!)
Flickr downtime Goatse contest entry
AOL member retention goatse graphic (I think the hands were added on after the fact)
Intentional Goatse T shirt

Reader comments:

Keith says:

I couldn't help but notice the flickr downtime goatse. Note that I did one as well, but I was more creative with mine. It's a double-goatse. The one you have posted didn't exactly follow the rules. The image had 2 circles.

Kyle says:

God bless Boing Boing for doing more than anybody for populating the Goatse meme into the mainstream conciousness -- though the mainstream conciousness will never be able to acknowlege the goatsiliciousness of this fact.

I wanted to pass on a link to some goatse bumper stickers Bumperactive developed a while back. We did something pretty innovative, I think, which is create special "cut-out" stickers with a hollow oval in the center, which is being "gripped" by the receiver. The idea is, you can use the stickers to guerilla goatse anything.

Also, there's Condi/Goatse '08. Which is on my car at the moment, in fact.

Magnus says:

This one is a little far-fetched, but as you wrote, "you can't help but see Goatse again and again"...

Lawrence says:

Here's a pic of "Mr. Sprinkles," the Goatse'd clown of sugar showers. Every time I see him in the kitchen I think of you and ... I finally had to open my vault of Goatse goodness.

Here's the animated video for the New York Dolls' new song, "Dance Like A Monkey." I was pleasantly surprised by how excellent the song is, especially without Johnny Thunders (who died in 1991) on guitar. Link

FutureLab has a nifty service that erases people, cars, etc. from photographs. It works by comparing several photos of a scene, and getting rid of the stuff that's different from the other photos. Check out the gallery of "ghost town" photos! Link (thanks, Marc!)

Reader comment: moon_custafer says:

You can use this to evoke the photography of the 1840s, when the exposure time was too long for passers-by to register! (as seen in the following photo of Nelson's Column under construction.

The Department of Defense has contracted Lockheed Martin to design a remote-controlled nano air vehicle that looks like a maple seed.

Designed for release from a hover craft, and similar to the propeller-like maple seed, the one-bladed NAV should rotate in flight while a camera on board provides a "stable forward view and transmit images back to a small, hand-held display. "The NAV should be equipped with a chemical rocket to power it 1,100 yards, yet it should weigh only 0.07 ounces.

Link (thanks, Guy!)

Dan Howard says: "My pal Charlotte and her partner went to Tokyo's Sanrio Puroland, and made a video of exactly the stuff I would want to document -- the weird stage shows, Hello Kitty's house, and, most importantly, the most freakishly over-themed restroom you'll ever see."

Like all themeparks, it is both crappy and great. We pick a day when we know that it’ll be dead and quiet and we work our way through a series of over-designed shows that feature Hello Kitty and her pals vanquishing various forces of evil, sitting amongst impassive audiences who are urged “Let’s Dancing!!” by overexcited performers. We hug various people (Men? Women? Children? Who knows) dressed in furry Sanrio mascot suits. We eat a Hello Kitty bun. We visit Kitty’s house, where everything is shaped like her head. We nod and smile and bow at female Sanrio staffers who talk to everybody in creepy baby voices.

Link

Previous posts about his work here and here. From today's batch of drawings, this one about a 5-year-old relative stuck in the warzone with a gaming console to comfort him:

21 july 2006
i am at home in sin el fil
thinking of evan
prisoner in a house
playing playstation all day long
alone
and asking everyday: why can't i go see farid / yasmina / simon / etc.
what can i answer?

Link to image, here's another from today: "the bombs pass and we bark." And here's his blog.

BoingBoing reader Melly in Israel writes, "I'm Canadian but flew to Israel on Tuesday the 18th to be with my family who lives in the northern part of Israel." She's blogging her experience here. Snip:

Alright, I'll admit it. I'm scared. About half an hour ago there was a series of nearby explosions without the warning of a siren. So far, this is the most scared I've been. So far, I've counted on the sirens to at least warn us.

[My] parents live in a north-facing apartment. Meaning, an apartment facing Lebanon, where the rockets are coming from. Without a siren, we're very exposed as there is pretty much only the corridor that can serve as an inner room, as futile as it may sound. My heart doesn't stop racing and I have that bitter fear taste in my mouth.

Slowly, my other family members are leaving the north, heading south of Haifa. There is no relief and no quiet. I'm trying to calm my racing heart, and maybe writing about this helps. Not sure.

Earlier this morning there was a siren and one distant boom after the siren. This time - no siren and a series of nearby booms. At the same time we just heard of massive casualties in Lebanon and I want to cry for them and for us, but I must stay strong or I'll crumple.

A Pelican Bay inmate serving life in solitary confinement for second-degree murder creates amazing images with paint brewed from M&Ms. Snip from NYT article by Adam Liptak:

[Donny Johnson] orders his supplies from the prison commissary once a month. The M&M’s are 60 cents a pack, and he gets 10 packs at a time. He puts from one to five of the candies in each of the jelly containers, drizzles a little water in and later fishes out the chocolate cores, leaving liquid of various colors, which get stronger if they sit for a couple of days.

He has tried other candy, but there are perils. “It’s the same process with Skittles,” he said, “but I end up eating them all.”

Sometimes he experiments with other materials. “Grape Kool-Aid in red M&M color makes a kind of purple,” he wrote in a letter to a reporter not long ago. “Coffee mixed with yellow makes a light brown. Tropical punch Kool-Aid granules can be made into a syrup and used as a paint wash of sorts. But it’s a bear to work with and it’s super-sticky and it never dries.”

And there are frustrations. “If lint gets in a piece, I feel like screaming,” he wrote.

Link (thanks, yehuda)

Google's just launched a site that gives higher results-ranking to pages that are designed to be accessible to people with visual disabilities. Link

Siva "Anarchist in the Library" Vaidhyanathan sez, "I am working on a book about Mickey Mouse in American culture. It's a broad survey of the ways the Mickey image means different things in different contexts. This corporate spokesmouse is much more than a cartoon character. Can someone tell me more about the origins of these two images?"

The black light hippie Mickey shirt
And the "Hey Iran" Mickey, giving the finger to the Ayatollah, circa 1980:
Link (Thanks, Siva!)

Last week was the least-viewed week in the history of broadcast network television in the USA.

CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox averaged 20.8 million viewers during the average prime-time minute last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. That sunk below the previous record, set during the last week of July in 2005.

TV keeps losing to gaming, the Internet, youtubing, etc, and yet our elected representatives are willing to kill innovation and open source with a Broadcaast Flag that is intended only to assuage the fears of the broadcasters and studios, but which will have no impact at all on file-sharing. Link (via TWIT)

Here's a $20 pen with a built-in WiFi finder and an LED flashlight. I have my doubts about the wifinder component, though -- usually these things depend on having a pretty good antenna that's at least as good as the one in your laptop, otherwise it will miss networks that your laptop could see. Link (via Red Ferret)

The "creation science evangelism" founder faced off with a judge in a Florida courtroom this week, and...

Neither he nor his wife and co-defendant, Jo, wanted to enter a traditional plea of guilty or not guilty. The Hovinds question the court's right to try them. They consider themselves missionaries exempt from taxes to a government that, incidentally, is providing them with attorneys.

But Magistrate Miles Davis wanted them to enter pleas just as any other citizen would. "If they don't wish to enter a plea, I'll enter one for them," Davis said.When asked by the prosecutor to list his residence, Kent Hovind said he lives in "the church of Jesus Christ ... located all over the world."

(...) Then, Hovind offered another wrinkle. "I would like to plead subornation of false muster," he said, announcing a defense I haven't heard in 30 years of hanging around courtrooms. The precedent is not good. A man in the state of Washington tried a similar defense a few years ago, claiming he was a "citizen of heaven" and not subject to state laws. But a court there ruled that when in Washington, do as Washington law requires, and found him guilty.

Link. False muster! Good to know. If I'm ever busted for these many years of live baby-eating (don't tell anyone, please), I'll tell the judge I'm a "citizen of blogosphere" and see how far this gets me. (Thanks, rusty)

Previously: Dr. Dino arrested for unpaid taxes

I love the idea of a biofeedback game that challenges you to relax faster and more deeply than your opponent. Best of all -- there are build notes so you can make your own biofeedback driven game. it would be perversely great to do one that's wired to so you win the more stressed-out you become, and attach it to an espresso machine, and a monitor that shows nothing but comments from Slashdot that have been ranked -1 or lower.

Simmer Down Sprinter is a two player, sit-down, arcade style video game I designed and programmed in which players compete to move runners around a track. The game is controlled by player’s bio-feedback. The more relaxed the player becomes, the faster the runner moves around the track. Essentially it is a game of competitive relaxation.

Link (via Evhead)