There is a test rig with wheels and cogs and four magnets meticulously aligned so as to create the maximum tension between their fields and one other magnet fixed to a point opposite. A motor rotates the wheel bearing the magnets and a computer takes 28,000 measurements a second. The magnets, naturally, act upon one another. And when it is all over, the computer tells us that almost three times the amount of energy has come out of the system as went in. In fact, this piece of equipment is 285% efficient.Link (Thanks, Adrian Champion!)In Steorn's theory, fixed magnets could act upon a moving magnet in such a way as to make it a virtual perpetual motion generator. In an electrical appliance - a computer, kettle, mobile phone or toy - that would provide all the power for its lifetime. Of course, free-energy cars, power plants and water-pumping systems could follow. A better world indeed.
More on "free energy" company
Photo of the hummingbird hawkmoth
This beautiful photo of a Hummingbird Hawkmoth was taken by Jane Cockman and posted to her Flickr stream. I'd never heard of a Hummingbird Hawkmoth before, but I like the name. It's as if the first person to see one didn't quite know what they were looking at, so they just named it after three flying animals. (Personally, I would have called it the Hummingbird Batmoth, just to throw a mammal into the mix.)
Hummingbirds are native to the Americas only, but the Hummingbird Hawkmoth does a decent job of mimicking a true hummingbird, much to the delight of easily fooled Europeans. Link (Via Neatorama)
Reader comments: Jan says:
I saw these buggers in France a few years ago, where I went to attend a friend's wedding in the country side. My wife and I were awestruck and more than a little confused at to what we were looking at, so you're absolutely right that the name is most likely given to cover all the bases (though hawk seems a bit off, but what the heck).I saw a bunch of these fluttering around a bush, drinking the nectar, and we stood there for quite some time debating whether it was a hummingbird or not.
Joe says:
Fabulous find, the photos of the hummingbird hawkmoth. Sometime these creatures are stranger than we imagine.I tooks some similar shots of what I thought was a hummingbird last fall. Investigation showed it, too, was a moth -- a hummingbird clearwing moth. Photos here.
Business Card Sponge event at Machine Project in LA
LinkMenger’s Sponge - named for its inventor Karl Menger and sometimes wrongly called Sierpinski’s Sponge – was the first three dimensional fractal that mathematicians became aware of. In 1995 Dr Jeannine Mosely, a software engineer, set out to build a level 3 Menger Sponge from business cards. After 9 years of effort, involving hundreds of folders all over America, the Business Card Menger Sponge was completed. The resulting object is comprised of 66,048 cards folded into 8000 interlinked sub-cubes, with the entire surface paneled to reveal the Level 2 and Level 3 fractal iterations.
Recipe for a Menger Sponge: Take a cube, divide it into 27 (3 x 3 x 3) smaller cubes of the same size; now remove the cube in the center of each face plus the cube at the center of the whole. You are left with a structure consisting of the eight small corner cubes plus twelve small edge cubes holding them together. Now, imagine repeating this process on each of these remaining 20 cubes. Repeat again. And again, ad infinitum … To make a Level 3 sponge, stop after 3 iterations.
ABC two-part series on Xeni's "Hacking the Himalayas" reports
This week, ABC World News with Charles Gibson webcast a two-part online video series about the reports I filed (NPR, Wired News 1 2 3 4) on technology and the Tibetan diaspora.
PART 1: Here is the link to the piece, Here is the link to the whole webcast.
PART 2: Here is the link to the piece, Here is the link is the whole webcast.
ABC has now been webcasting news for about 9 months, and it's interesting to watch this take form. Some stories are not part of the normal World News Tonight broadcasts -- they appear exclusively in the webcast (what I love about their web delivery interface: it's *not* WMV, unlike some of their competitors; what I don't like: unless I'm missing something, it seems you're not able to navigate forward or back within a video once it's begun playing).
But the network is also making these available as video podcast quicktime files (for free), so you can noodle around to your heart's content. And some longer-form ABC News specials are available via iTunes now, for $1.99 or so a pop: Link.
Incidentally, CNN International ran a "Techwatch" segment this week about the Tibet series, too (video isn't available for blogging at this time).
Custom-made changing spooky portraits

Last September, Mark blogged the changing spooky portraits of Haunted Memories, lenticular goth-y pictures that changed between innouous old-timey portraits to spooky axe-murder-y ones.
Now Haunted Memories is offering custom verisons of these portraits, where they'll turn you into a haunted, changing portrait. I'm ordering one now. Link
Lost: stack of stripper polaroids in San Francisco
From The Seven Deadly Sinners: "This guy is offering only $50 dollars for the return of a stack of polaroid photos of strippers all held together with a rubberband." Link
Update: Is this Flicker set from the stack of missing stripper polaroids? (Thanks to everyone who pointed me to this!)
Manifesto Games: an indie label for the best games you never played
I've been watching master game-designer Greg Costikyan plan his new gaming startup, Manifesto Games, for some time now. Greg (Paranoia, Toon, Star Wars: the RPG) promises to reinvent video-game publishing with a model that's sustainable, creator-friendly, and fun as hell. It's like an indie label for video games, publishing deserving games that mainstream publishers are too blinkered, risk-averse or stupid to put out.
Manifesto went live today, filled with amazing-looking games, the likes of which I've never seen. Congrats, Greg!
Link (Thanks, Ellie!)The NOKs
It's Delightful, It's De-Lovely, It's... Pretty Damn Strange
The Noks is about the weirdest game I've seen this year. I'm tempted to call it "indescribable," except we need to describe it, eh?
Partly, it's a game of collectibles. There are several hundred "Noks" in the world at present, and the developers plan to add more over time. You can think of Noks as something like, say, Magic: The Gathering cards, except that they aren't cards. They're animated 3D avatars with backstories. Some of them sing songs or perform music. And most have something to tell you about the game itself, or the backstory of the Noks universe. To understand that universe, you'll need to collect--well maybe not "them all," but lots of them.
Update: Ellie adds, "This is still in beta, within a couple of weeks the site will be an order of magnitude better."
Windows Media DRM cracked, no one cares
Burning Man 2006: a reliable map, and GPS data files.
PDF link for map. Here are data files you can load into your GPS device or Google Earth.
This year's Burning Man camp is located at a site about a mile and a half north of the 2005 edition.
(Thanks, Wayne Correia!)
Previously:
Burning Man Bingo is Back
Burning Man 2006 - come all ye roving art-cars
RE/Search Pranks 2 book coming soon
Link (Thanks, V. Vale and Scott Beale!)What are pranks? For us, pranks are any humorous deeds, propaganda, sound bites, visual bites, performances and creative projects which pierce the veil of illusion and tell the truth. Pranks unseriously challenge accepted reality and rigid behavioral codes and speech. Pranks deftly undermine phoniness and hypocrisy. Pranks lampoon sanctimoniousness, self-glorification, selfmythologizing and self-aggrandizement. Pranks force the laziest muscle in the body, the imagination, to be exercised, stretched, and thus transcend its former self.The imagination is what creates the future; that which will be.
Mad Hatter's Tea Party cafe

From Nendo's site:
We radically distorted the size of the long table and rows of chairs to heighten the room’s sense of receding depth, and did the same thing with the silhouettes of characters from the novel used as the pattern for the wallpaper. These details let us create a space that felt long and narrow, as though it was pulling in visitors. The scale of the installation changed just like Alice after eating the cake. We shrank some of the chairs so that visitors could barely squeeze into them, and enlarged others until visitors’ feet couldn’t touch the ground.Link (via Sensory Impact)
Walking cane with telescope
Link (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)This excellent system walking cane boasts an extendable spyglass as the handle that is made of brass. The handle is hand carved out of appealing dark red Mahogany in the shape of two folded hands that are actually holding the removable telescope. At the narrow end the lens cap of the spyglass can be unscrewed and it can be removed from the circular opening in the hands.
The telescope comes in working condition and the view is very good. The hand carving applied is of high quality and the bronze collar as well as two gilt copper collars at the upper end of the shaft, match the overall appealing look perfectly.
UPDATE: Chris Meadows writes, "You can get a more modern version of this sort of thing for substantially less." Link
Fiberglass mascots gallery
Link (Thanks, Todd!)A home for storefront fiberglass mascots from around the world. The Big Boy. The Doggie Diner. The ubiquitous Col. Sanders statues outside of KFC outlets in Japan. From Tulsa to Tokyo and everywhere in between, feel free to post your photos of fiberglass mascots here.
Burning Man Bingo is Back
Joel Johnson, who came up with the dang thing in 2003, says, "Sorry, I moved some stuff around. It now lives here: Link. Please note that I predicted the Chuck Norris meme by a full three years. I am the Oracle of Ephemera."
Alternate Link (Thanks, Sherman!)
Previously: Burning Man 2006 - come all ye roving art-cars
Jews for Jesus' wacky pamphlets: Jackie Mason strikes back

David Goldenberg from Gelf Magazine says,
Remember those silly JFJ pamphlets you guys featured on BoingBoing not too long ago?Link to AP story. Lawsuit or not, the pamphlet examining Mr. Mason's Jewishness and Jesusness is still live on the Jews For Jesus website: Link, here's the PDF for online viewing, and here's another version formatted for printing.Well, comedian Jackie Mason didn't find them nearly as funny as you guys (and presumably Steve Jobs) did. He's suing the JFJs for $2 million, saying "While I have the utmost respect for people who practice the Christian faith, the fact is, as everyone knows, I am as Jewish as a matzo ball or kosher salami."
T-shirt: "I am not a terrorist," in Arabic
On the t-shirt site, Tim says: "All the shirts are set to $1.00 more than the Spreadshirt base price — all profits will be sent to the ACLU."After reading about blogger Raed Jarrar's experience at JFK (he was forced to take off a shirt with Arabic writing on it or miss his flight), I finally stopped being depressed about the war on terror and began being proactively pissed off. I made this shirt, which says "I am not a terrorist" in Arabic. I plan to wear it every time I go to the airport from now on.
Reader comment: George Murray says,
Xeni, Thanks for linking to the Arabic shirt. I just bought one. I'm a 6' 2", 220lbs white guy with red hair and an Scottish last name. I wonder what will happen when I try to wear it while flying from St. John's to Toronto in September. I'll let you know.Cindy Mosqueda says,One thing: are we sure it doesn't say "I've got the mother of all bombs up my ass, please check"? Cause that would be bad.
black lava, has had a shirt reading the same thing for a while. a muslim friend named mohammad wears the shirt all the time, but leaves doesn't wear it when he's going to fly somewhere. i guess he has enough trouble with the name mohammad. Link
War on World of Warcraft? Toilet-plunked iPod leads to security freakout.
A World of Warcraft forum member posts this bizarre story: a guy accidentally drops his iPod into an airplane toilet, and a terror alert freakout follows: Link. It's a very wordy tale, and I don't quite grok all the details or have resources to factcheck right now -- but if it's all true, it really is "overreaction at its worst," as Bruce Schneier said. (Thanks to Sean Bonner and everyone else who suggested)
Canadian music label puts fans and artists first
Terry McBride has an idea. Another idea. A good – no, a great idea. McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music Group, is sitting in his Vancouver, British Columbia, office with his local marketing staff discussing strategy for the release of a new album by Barenaked Ladies. The marketing departments in three other cities are conferenced in. The conversation ping-pongs from Nascar promotions to placement in a Sims videogame. McBride is on a roll.Link"This one's a real wingdinger," he says, leaning into the speakerphone so New York, Denver, and Los Angeles won't miss a word. "Let's give away the ProTools files on MySpace. Vocals, guitars, drums, and bass. We'll let the fans make their own mixes." The room falls quiet. Musicians usually record their instruments and vocals on separate tracks; the producer and mixer combine those tracks into a finished product. McBride wants to make the individual files available so that amateur DJs can use them like Lego bricks to create something all their own. The record industry likes control. McBride is proposing unfettered chaos.
A voice from LA breaks the silence: "For the single, you mean, right?" McBride's features screw up in concentration, then quickly expand into a grin. "What I'm proposing," he says, "is that we make all 29 songs available as ProTools files. In two weeks." The Internet marketers in Vancouver look worried. "But," he adds, "we'll get the files from the single up on MySpace by Monday." Libby White, a member of the department, shoots McBride a skeptical look. Can they make it? McBride asks. White sighs. "We'll make it," she says.
Hand-carved Kenyan iPod stands from tropical woods
Link (via Red Ferret)SafariPod craftsmen make each object sold here to his own design. We determine the need for a specific type of product... say, an iPod stand. Then, we tell the artist what we need the object to do, and he then develops a design to his own taste and standard. Each of our artists have been sculpting native wildlife pieces for many years. Now, they are applying those years of thoughtful experience to creating technology accessories just for you. And, each of our objects is made of renewable tropical woods, so as not to contribute to Kenya's horrific wood depletion problem. This makes your SafariPod object not only a wonderfully beautiful possession, but one that is also made to respect the environment.
Post-Pluto mnemonics for the planets
Many Very Earnest Men Just Snubbed Unfortunate Ninth Planet (Dave Child)Link"My vision, erased. Mercy! Just some underachiever now." (Delia, as spoken by Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh)
Most vexing experience, mother just served us nothing! (Bart Baxter)
Universities put Hollywood ahead of students
USC has a pretty crummy track-record here: A USC student who was downloading copies of Larry Lessig's FreeCulture, a book distributed via BitTorrent and Grokster at the behest of its author, was censured by USC for installing the app. He got kicked off the campus network and told that he would not be allowed back on until he promised to uninstall all general-purpose file-sharing software. He wrote letters of protest to the university about this, but never heard back.
The Colbert Report rips off Ze Frank? For shame, if so.

BB reader Dave says,
I'm sure I'm not the first to have noticed this, but if you watched The Colbert Report on tuesday night you saw a bit about the Fields Medal and the Poincaré conjecture, in which he smooshed a doughnut into a ball, providing a (somewhat shaky) demonstration that the Poincaré conjecture is b.s.I asked Ze how he felt about it, and he tells BoingBoing,However, if you watched The Show with Ze Frank that morning, you would have notice that Ze did a suspiciously similar bit, where he too smooshes a toroidal doughnut into a ball and eats it (as well as making a gag about everyone's favorite spherical doughnut, the Munchkin, which Colbert also does!).
Was Ze ripped off? Links to the two video clips are here.
I was a bit sad at first... but someone in my forum pointed out that whether or not it was a rip off, it was not a great joke to begin with :)Reader comment: Patrick Allen says,
Regarding the Stephen Colbert seemingly ripping off Ze Frank post, I was a bit sad myself after watching that segment on the Report just a few hours after watching the same bit on Ze's show. But you know, this isn't the first time I've seen Colbert "ripping off stuff" from the Internets. In fact, his shows of late seem to be almost mirror projections of what is 'hot' on the Internets that day, or at least that week.Ed. Note: Whether the Colbert Report/Ze Frank Show donutgate incident is coincidence or "rip-off," I can't say. But when internet-idea-poaching does happen, remember: TV shows are created by teams of writers, producers, editors, and others. If Ze Frank's donut was poached, it's not reasonable to assume that Colbert, the host, is personally responsible. But screw all that, why doesn't the Colbert Report just poach Ze himself? I hear he comes with free donuts, too. The Show is funnier than just about anything else out there on TV right now, basic cable or otherwise.As someone who spends a good deal of time swimming in the tubes, The Colbert Report is feeling more and more like a rerun of what I read and saw throughout the day. When I say rerun, I mean just that. It's like he takes the stuff that, say, received 1,300 diggs that day and does the same thing on show and passes it off as his own. Unlike Keith Olbermann who takes something that was popular on the Internets that day and files his own, original report on it.
Now I wish I had a bunch of examples to give you to back up my point, but I don't. I know, bad me. But it's something I've only started noticing in the last few weeks, and I really didn't start taking notes or anything like that. The first thought that came to mind after reading your post today was: 'hmmm, maybe I'm not the only one who feels Colbert is beginning to pass certain content off as his own, knowing that only a small percentage of people are going to know where it originally came from. And who's going to have the balls to say anything about it. Colbert's a geek/nerd/dork hero right now.'
Now, I could be wrong of course. I've been a big fan of Colbert since his days on The Daily Show. I would hope he's not starting to stake claim as his own the content created by folks like you or me. Now, I'm also a big fan of fair use, but Colbert getting paid the big bucks telling the same jokes Ze Frank and others created aint cool or fair in my book. Or maybe it's all in my head, and there's only been a few isolated instances that I'm making a mountain out of. I think I'll start paying closer attention...
BB reader Todd Jackson says,
As someone who worked as a humor writer and editor, I can say in full confidence that Colbert didn't take anything from ZeFrank. They're both using a simple construction for a joke implied by the article itself - that you can't turn a doughnut into a sphere. It's a common structure: one character saying "it can't be that simple" and then another character doing it just that simple. Both came to it because it's a time-tested formula for a gag that works.
Burning Man: come all ye roving art-cars
Update: See map coordinates data correction note below.
To all you dirty hippies our esteemed friends traveling to Burning Man this year: be safe, stay hydrated and sunscreened, please don't floss your butt with el-wire, and watch out for these characters.
The event has a new theme this year: Hope and Fear. But, bla bla bla, theme schmeme, we all know it's about the pink-haired girls and real-life Magritte tableaux, awesome footwear, naked people on hobby-horses, beautiful fire, and all the other indescribable stuff that flashes in your head when someone asks "What's Burning Man?" and you can't explain.
BoingBoing reader Turgan has created a neat interactive map website that lists events, camps, and artwork at Burning Man 2006 here. More information about that site here, here, and here:
Update: Wayne Correia says there's a problem with some of the data in Turgan's map:
The camps map google maps overlay stuff is using the wrong location data, overlaying camps on a satellite photo from a previous year that doesn't reflect this year's location -- which is north about 1.33 miles from the 2005 site. These files can be loaded into your GPS or Google Earth to see exactly where the event is located this year. This BRC layout is accurate for this year and should be disseminated.And Thomas Terashima tells BoingBoing,
Link to more info, and here are photos from last year's edition of The Xeni Cup.
I am helping host the Canadian Street Hockey Tournament -- better known as the Xeni Cup -- this year at Burning Man at The_Many theme camp, located at 9:00 near Guess.The time is set for Thursday at 3:00 PM. Equipment will be provided. Bring your own favorite hockey stick and (Canadian) beer.
Update: Alas, the Burningman bingo image link is dead. Anyone have an archived copy somewhere? Going to Black Rock City without it is like going to see Snakes on a Plane without your audience participation script!
Update 2, yay: Here is is.
Reader comment: Phil Stripling says,
The Civilized Explorer is having its annual geek fashion show on Friday September 1 at 2:00 pm, Chance at 8:30. Photos from last year here. We give away free clothes to geeks with no fashion sense so they don't look like tourists at the Burn on Saturday night. As you can see from the photos, many arrive as geeks, but no geeks leave.
The real Mexican "lucha" wrestlers
Yes, there were luchadores in Mexico before Hollywood pounced on the colorful phenom for lame-o Jack Black movie fodder. British photographer Malcolm Venville's photographs of real Mexican wrestlers are captured in a new book, and there's more on the project here at pleasantmorningbuzz blog: Link.
Giant praying mantis invades Prague
QTVR panorama of a giant mantis invading Prague yesterday at 8:30pm in the city's old town square. Link (Thanks, jeffrey martin)
Reader comment: Rich B says,
We posted some additional info yeserday on the praying mantis in Prague: Link.
Web Zen: traveling zen
one minute vacationsturn here
drive project
yutaka love london
kenya
big things
lost america
roadside america
Web Zen Home, Store (Thanks Frank!)
Image: From Lost America, "Whorehouse art collection. Bobbie's Buckeye Bar, Tonopah, NV. Abandoned bar and whorehouse. Shot summer 2004, 35mm film. Abandoned for about a year before I found it (judging by the expired liquor license), the place was unlocked and wide open that day, but on my last trip to Tonopah it was locked up tight. No idea if it has been vandalized or ransacked."
War on Moisture "permanent," say UK air transport authorities
Video: "Tokyo hectic"
BoingBoing reader Fosta placed a still camera in various spots around Tokyo last week, then shot lots of timelapse photography, and later stitched it into a short video."Tokyo is a particularly unique city," says Fosta, "Pedestrians are treated like traffic, with pedestrian 'roads' on floating skyways, and one way systems. It's truly odd."
Link. The video's great, but what I want to know -- who's that soundtrack? Update: wasabi_pz says,
The song is "Beef or Chicken", done by the Teriyaki Boyz, a Japanese rap/hip-hop group (obviously). The band is composed of members of Rip Slyme and m-flo. Here's the wikipedia article on them. They have a song on the soundtrack for "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift."Chad Arsenault says,
Ron Fricke has a similar segment in his art-house documentary, "Baraka." Definitely worth checking out. Also, the first part of that clip was of the six-way intersection in Shibuya. My girlfriend and I made a video of the same interesection from street level. (We're standing beneath the ginormous video screen). It's here. Oh, and some flickr photos: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Menger’s Sponge - named for its inventor Karl Menger and sometimes wrongly called Sierpinski’s Sponge – was the first three dimensional fractal that mathematicians became aware of. In 1995 Dr Jeannine Mosely, a software engineer, set out to build a level 3 Menger Sponge from business cards. After 9 years of effort, involving hundreds of folders all over America, the Business Card Menger Sponge was completed. The resulting object is comprised of 66,048 cards folded into 8000 interlinked sub-cubes, with the entire surface paneled to reveal the Level 2 and Level 3 fractal iterations.
The NOKs
What are pranks? For us, pranks are any humorous deeds, propaganda, sound bites, visual bites, performances and creative projects which pierce the veil of illusion and tell the truth. Pranks unseriously challenge accepted reality and rigid behavioral codes and speech. Pranks deftly undermine phoniness and hypocrisy. Pranks lampoon sanctimoniousness, self-glorification, selfmythologizing and self-aggrandizement. Pranks force the laziest muscle in the body, the imagination, to be exercised, stretched, and thus transcend its former self.The imagination is what creates the future; that which will be.
This excellent system walking cane boasts an extendable spyglass as the handle that is made of brass. The handle is hand carved out of appealing dark red Mahogany in the shape of two folded hands that are actually holding the removable telescope. At the narrow end the lens cap of the spyglass can be unscrewed and it can be removed from the circular opening in the hands.
A home for storefront fiberglass mascots from around the world. The Big Boy. The Doggie Diner. The ubiquitous Col. Sanders statues outside of KFC outlets in Japan. From Tulsa to Tokyo and everywhere in between, feel free to post your photos of fiberglass mascots here.


Ccartoonist Jef Czekaj in Somerville, Massachusetts, got a bunch of cartoonists together to design a miniature golf course. Looks like fun!
SafariPod craftsmen make each object sold here to his own design. We determine the need for a specific type of product... say, an iPod stand. Then, we tell the artist what we need the object to do, and he then develops a design to his own taste and standard. Each of our artists have been sculpting native wildlife pieces for many years. Now, they are applying those years of thoughtful experience to creating technology accessories just for you. And, each of our objects is made of renewable tropical woods, so as not to contribute to Kenya's horrific wood depletion problem. This makes your SafariPod object not only a wonderfully beautiful possession, but one that is also made to respect the environment.


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