Planet Hiltron takes photos of celebs and photoshops them so that they look like normal people -- poorly dressed, flabby, nourished by fast food and a little bit wrinkly. The Johnny Depp is amazing but Madonna (shown here) is by far the creepiest. Link (Thanks, Bill!)

For the latest edition of the Get Illuminated! podcast, Mark and I talked with artist Drew Friedman. Drew's incredibly-detailed caricatures and biting parodies have appeared in publications ranging from Raw Magazine, Weirdo, and Heavy Metal to Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, and the New York Observer. His appreciation for yesteryear's entertainers, expressed in many strips and his terrific book Old Jewish Comedians, is infectious. As the New York Times said of Old Jewish Comedians, "Friedman might very well be the Vermeer of the Borscht Belt." Also this year, Blab!/Fantagraphics published an anthology of Friedman's comix and illustrations titled The Fun Never Stops. It's a real laff-riot.

Mark and I have been fans of Drew's work for years and it was an absolute delight to chat with him about art, comics, and, of course, old Jewish comedians.

While listening to the Podcast, peruse the exclusive sneak preview below of drawings that will appear in Drew's next book, More Old Jewish Comedians, to be published early in 2008. (From left, Joe E. Lewis, Morey Amsterdam, Herbie Faye, Molly Picon, and Jan Murray. Click for larger images.) And for a taste of The Fun Never Stops, visit Drew's online gallery here.


MP3 link | Podcast feed | Subscribe via iTunes | Previous Get Illuminated! shows

Link to buy The Fun Never Stops, Link to buy Old Jewish Comedians

Previouly on BB:
• Drew Friedman: Guilty Pleaure of Lit. Great Link
• Drew Friedman's Old Jewish Comedians Link

Peter Stafford, author of the fascinating Psychedelics Encyclopedia died on July 20, 2007. Bruce Eisner, his friend, writes:

Peter Stafford (1941-2007) author of Psychedelics Encyclopedia, and LSD in Action died last night in Santa Cruz, California. Peter was a friend of mine since we met in Canada back in 1971 and I will miss him.

I will add more to this post in the next day or so.

Link

Truly, the fun never stops around here. Hot on the heels of the Drew Friedman podcast, here's an interview with longtime Boing Boing pal R.U. Sirius, co-creator of the mind-bending magazines High Frontiers, Reality Hackers and Mondo 2000, the host of the RU Sirius Show, a contributor to 10 Zen Monkeys, and the author of True Mutations: Interviews on the Edge of Science, Technology, and Consciousness

RU and David Pescovitz will be at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco on Tuesday, July 24th, 7pm to conduct a live taping of the RU Sirius show. They'll be joined by Lynn Hershman, Jamais Cascio, and Howard Rheingold.

True Mutations looks at the wild changes that may be coming to the human species during the 21st Century. In a series of interviews, author/host RU Sirius explores a series of (r)evolutions in disciplines ranging from the evolution of clean energy to the possibilities of endless neurological ecstasy; from open-source free access to nearly everything under the sun to self-directed biotechnological evolution; from psychedelic culture mash-ups to the possibilities of a technological singularity that alters not only humanity but the entire universe.

MP3 link | Podcast feed | Subscribe via iTunes | Previous Get Illuminated shows

For the latest edition of the Get Illuminated! podcast, Mark and I talked with artist Drew Friedman. Drew's incredibly-detailed caricatures and biting parodies have appeared in publications ranging from Raw Magazine, Weirdo, and Heavy Metal to Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker, and the New York Observer. His appreciation for yesteryear's entertainers, expressed in many strips and his terrific book Old Jewish Comedians, is infectious. As the New York Times said of Old Jewish Comedians, "Friedman might very well be the Vermeer of the Borscht Belt." Also this year, Blab!/Fantagraphics published an anthology of Friedman's comix and illustrations titled The Fun Never Stops. It's a real laff-riot.

Mark and I have been fans of Drew's work for years and it was an absolute delight to chat with him about art, comics, and, of course, old Jewish comedians.

While listening to the Podcast, peruse the exclusive sneak preview below of drawings that will appear in Drew's next book, More Old Jewish Comedians, to be published early in 2008. (From left, Joe E. Lewis, Morey Amsterdam, Herbie Faye, Molly Picon, and Jan Murray. Click for larger images.) And for a taste of The Fun Never Stops, visit Drew's online gallery here.


MP3 link | Podcast feed | Subscribe via iTunes | Previous Get Illuminated! shows

Link to buy The Fun Never Stops, Link to buy Old Jewish Comedians

Previouly on BB:
• Drew Friedman: Guilty Pleaure of Lit. Great Link
• Drew Friedman's Old Jewish Comedians Link

Stanford design prof Michael Shanks has an online course unit about the design, politics, sociology and economics of slot machines that is flat-out fascinating, especially the manipulative psychology of slot and casino design.

The layout also takes advantage of the differences between slot and table players. In general, table players do not like the noise of slot machines because they find it distracting. In addition, they may sometimes play a few rounds on slot machines spontaneously, but obviously prefer table playing. At the same time, however, spouses or partners of table players will often wile away time playing at a nearby slot machine. Thus casinos are planned such that there are slot machines lining walkways around tables. However, these slots are always tight. This cuts down on the noise and distraction to table players, and makes sense because the majority of players on these machines are playing spontaneously, with little expectation of winning. This demonstrates to what degree casino layouts are optimized—in this case, to the point that a complex system is implemented simply to clean up loose change from spontaneous players.

Link (via Architectures of Control in Design)

Update: Andy sez, "Just for accuracy's sake, the report on slot machines is actually a student project by William Choi and Antoine Sindhu."

Instructables contributor The Jehosephat posted a neat guide to making shadow sculptures from piles of junk.
Link

Previously on BB:
• History of the shadow in art Link
• Shadow billboard Link
• 4D sculpture with a 3D shadow Link

Grad student Ethan Garner created CraigStatsSF, a site that slices, dices, and visualizes CraigsList San Francisco housing rental listings with Google Maps overlays. For example, this heat map shows a citywide view of rental costs for one bedroom apartments over the last year.

From the project description:

After living in this city for 8 years, living in a lot of horrible neighborhoods, and doing the eternal run-around to find a decent apartment I have become fascinated with the San Francisco rental market .

At the end of the August 2006, I was dealing a really shady landlord whose house was going into foreclosure as he (like a lot of the city) had speculated on an adjustable rate mortgage...and he was desperately trying his best to get as much money as he could out of me in any illegal way possible.

Not wanting to deal with such a shady landlord, I broke the lease, and fled to find a new place.

As I started looking for places, I noticed everything that used to be for rent was now for sale due to the same forclosure effect that happened to my landlord.

It also appeared that the rents were going up..... but... were the really? or am I just paranoid and bitter?

Since I was waiting to get my research published, I figured I could waste ample amounts of time coding perl scripts and learning google maps.

This project was born out of boredom.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Almost a decade ago, filmmakers Syd Garon and Rodney Ascher created their fantastic, critically-acclaimed animation of the seminal Jack Chick religious tract "Somebody Goofed." Last year, the duo reunited for a sequel, mashing up Chick's tract about the sinking of the Titanic with clips from James Cameron's film.

Link to "Jack Chick's Titanic" on YouTube, Link to watch "Somebody Goofed" via a film festival page

Previously on BB:
• Rodney Ascher's short film about a freefalling parachutist Link

This huge graphic seeks to map the Internet onto a map of the London Underground Tokyo rail system (the series of Tubes as a tube-map). There's a lot of dense info here and I'm not sure I agree with all of the implied relationships, but it's some interesting stuff. Link (Thanks, James!)

Update: Thanks to everyone who noted that this is the Tokyo rail map, not the London Underground

Students at the University of Kansas who are accused of "downloading copyrighted material" will have their network access permanently terminated. Presumably this means that even downloading "fair use" works (mashups, etc), looking at web-pages, or even getting your profs' lectures is disallowed.

The law doesn't require universities to spy on their students' network use. It doesn't require them to bear the enforcement costs of the RIAA's business model. Students' tuition is being spent to subsidize giant corporations bent on subverting the rule of law, free speech and free inquiry, and now, students caught in the entertainment industry's fatwa will be locked out of the network.

Honestly -- doesn't the University of Kansas have a law-school? What the hell is wrong with Kansas?

A brief notice on the University of Kansas ResNet site explains the university's new position very succinctly. "If you are caught downloading copyrighted material, you will lose your ResNet privileges forever," reads the notice. "No second notices, no excuses, no refunds. One violation and your ResNet internet access is gone for as long as you reside on campus." Presumably, the University is referring to illegally downloaded copyrighted material, as there is plenty of copyrighted material that can be downloaded legally.

Link

Chore Wars: a site that lets your household turn chores into a game, with points.

Chore Wars lets you claim experience points for household chores. By getting a few people in your house or workplace to sign up, you can assign experience point rewards to individual chores, and see how quickly each of you levels up.

Experience points are tracked both as weekly high-score charts, and as ongoing character sheets - every time you rack up 200XP of chores, your character gains a "level", and their class changes to match the type of chores that they've been doing.

Link (via MeFi)

Amy Crehore has just painted her very first ukulele. It's beautiful.

Here is my very first fine art ukulele ("Tickler" brand label). This is a soprano uke that was lovingly hand-built by luthier Lou Reimuller, creator of Teenar Girl Guitar.

It has a solid mahogany body and neck with a rosewood fingerboard and bridge. It plays and sounds great!

This "Tickler" brand uke is a one-of-a-kind fine art object which is entirely painted in oils on all sides by myself, Amy Crehore, with my trademark motifs: "The Banana Eater" image is on the back (from my "Monkey Love" series), a monkey and "little pierrot" combination are painted on the front.

It's $3,000. Link

Various researchers have spent years developing robotic insects, including some that might someday fly through the air, detecting biotoxins and conducting remote surveillance. Harvard University engineer Robert Wood's robotic fly is the first that's actually taken off. The 60 fly milligram robofly has a three centimeter wingspan and achieves lift using wing motions modeled on a real fly. Currently, the fly lacks a control system so its maiden voyage required a tether. From Technology Review:

"Nature makes the world's best fliers," says Wood...

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding Wood's research in the hope that it will lead to stealth surveillance robots for the battlefield and urban environments. The robot's small size and fly-like appearance are critical to such missions. "You probably wouldn't notice a fly in the room, but you certainly would notice a hawk," Wood says.

Link

• UC Berkeley's micro-mechanical flying insect Link

SeeqPod has developed a custom version of its MP3 searching technology that autodetects iPhones. The service looks for MP3 files on the Web and lets you play them on your computer or iPhone. From Wired News:

[Y]ou can search for any artist and play their songs within seconds, for free. SeeqPod doesn't transcode the music as it streams, so you hear it in its original form as scraped from MP3 blogs, personal web pages, and anywhere else on the internet that hosts MP3s.

Or, you can use SeeqPod on an iPhone to browse the internet's music pretty much as you would the music on an iPod. Choose a letter, then an artist, and boom -- you see a list of songs by that artist that are playable right then and there (thus the tagline: "playable search").

Link

Bob Knetzger, an amazing toy designer and MAKE magazine contributer, recently went to Japan and discovered tiny anatomical toys there. (Click on thumbnails for enlargement)

He says:

Dunno if two things make a trend but "anatomical toys" seemed to be all around. This isn't new, of course, we all remember the "Visible Man" model by Revell, but in true Japanese mode, the idea has been miniaturized and taken to a whole new level of detail and collectability.

This one was a really cool line of tiny anatomical models of human anatomy. Sold as a blind assortment in a closed box you don't know which one you'll get: surprise!--it's a pop-open stomach! Or you might get a skeleton, or a see-thru uterus with a removable fetus, or one of 15 different organs. Thanks, Mom!

They are so unbelievably cool and well done, they are to the Revell Visible Man model as the Nozomi Bullet train is to Amtrak. They come completely finished and assembled. I count 10 different colors of paint in dozens of paint operations in fantastically perfect tiny detail. It's like one of those doctor's office models, only tiny.

And they all come with one cello-wrapped piece of chewing gum. Cuz it's always more fun to chew while you learn about the pancreas.

Collect them all.

And speaking of collecting, I found another line of anatomical toys, this time in the gashapon machines: Visible Animals! These aren't quite as deluxe, but they're also very cool and take the Visible Horse model concept even further. I was so hoping for a Visible Puffer Fish ...but I got the Visible Chicken out of the machine.

These kind of remind more of butcher’s models, showing various cuts of meat, hmm, ....let’s see, there’s beef, pork, chicken, tuna, fugu, “long pork”...

I see that my favorite on-line source for fun Japanese stuff, J-List, has some of these. They were about $4.30 US in Tokyo, so J-List’s price isn’t really too bad.

Link

Reader comment:

Ryan says: Regarding your post on the Japanese anatomical you can buy these at the Giant Robot store in Los Angeles, or from their online store, the link is here and here.

The NYT has an interactive graphic with mini-bios of the world's richest Americans. My favorite is Russell Sage (1816-1906) who was worth $43 billion in today's dollars:

Made most of his money on Wall Street, where he is credited with creating puts and calls. Known as a shrewd pinchpenny, he was once caught stealing a fan out of the offices of Western Union, where he was a board member. Arrested for loan-sharking in 1869, he used his powerful connections to avoid a sentence.

Bill Gates is #5 on the list. Link (Via haha.nu)

Wired News has an interesting photo essay on interactive birth simulators for students to practice delivery. For example, this baby is part of the Limbs & Things' Prompt Birthing Simulator, consisting of a pelvis-and-thigh device and baby, complete with placenta. From Wired News:

The device simulates various types of delivery, including breech birth, birth on all fours, forceps delivery and the delivery of the placenta.

The simulator also allows students to practice extricating babies when their shoulders get stuck during delivery, said (Harvard obstretician Dr. Roxane Nelson). "We can learn how to recognize a situation and use the proper maneuvers."

Link

Anthony says: "The Smoking Gun has a scan of a letter that Mike Polensek, a Cleveland Councilman, wrote to a Arsenio Winston, who was arrested for drug trafficking.

I just love that he puts quotes around any obscenity or colloquialism, such as 'dumber than mud,' and even random phrases, such as, 'not for losers!'" Link

Snip from an essay at Edge.org by Kevin Kelly:

The main question that I'm asking myself is, what is the meaning of technology in our lives? What place does technology have in the universe? What place does it have in the human condition? And what place should it play in my own personal life? Technology as a whole system, or what I call the technium, seems to be a dominant force in the culture. Indeed at times it seems to be the only force - the only lasting force - in culture. If that's so, then what can we expect from this force, what governs it? Sadly we don't even have a good theory about technology.

I'm trying to investigate ways to understand the long-term consequences of technology in the world and place it into some position along with other grand things like biological nature, big history, the physics of the cosmos, and the future. It's a very ambitious project and, surprisingly, there isn't really much thinking about technology in terms of its sphere of influence in a way that might be useful to thinking about how to evaluate what we make.

Link to full text of essay.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine and author of books including New Rules for the New Economy, and Out of Control. He is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools, True Film, and Street Use websites. (thanks, John Brockman)

BoingBoing reader Chris says,

While on vacation on North Carolina's Outer Banks, my kids and I thought quite a bit about what to sculpt from in sand. Apple's "most successful product introduction in history" provided ample inspiration. The sand iPhone attracted quite a crowd, although none were willing to buy it at my asking price ($599 plus service, of course).

Link to photoset.

* vvork
* 4x6 art
* surreal art
* hot lunch
* swap meat
* we heart prints
* fine art adoption network

Image: Pictures from the series “Blast” by Naoya Hatakeyama, via vvork.com: Link.

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

In this video, hundreds of inmates in a Philippine prison reenact the video for Michael Jackson's Thriller (complete with ladyboy!) -- they're eerily awesome at it, too. Link (Thanks, Ben!)

See also:
Lego Thriller

Update: Toshi.M sez, "The Japanese kids' show Pitagora Suicchi has a recurring segment called the Algorithm March in which they do a little dance with a different group of people each week; here it is with ninjas. And, the relevant bit, here it is with 967 Filipino prisoners."

Today on Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday: Song-titles as movie posters. I'm partial to this Strangelove/End of the World as We Know It, though the Indiana Jones "Whip It" poster was very fine indeed. Link

The Ten Weirdest Condoms in Japan -- I'm partial to the one that comes packaged in a hollow plastic mobile phone, but the ultimate winner is the Gundam rubber. Nothing says hot love like giant killer mechas. Link (via IZ Reloaded)

Kids in Conakry, Guinea gather at the airport to study under the parking-lot lights. Guinea's economy has tanked, a process accelerated by the martial law declared by the ailing, mad ruler Lansana Conte. Most of the country has limited electricity or none at all, so kids huddle in the light of the parking lot, revising for their exams.

The lot is teeming with girls and boys by the time Air France Flight 767 rounds the Gulf of Guinea at an hour-and-a-half before midnight. They hardly look up from their notes as the Boeing jet begins its spiraling descent over the dark city, or as the newly arrived passengers come out, shoving luggage carts over the cracked pavement.

"I used to study by candlelight at home but that hurt my eyes. So I prefer to come here. We're used to it," says 18-year-old Mohamed Sharif, who sat under the fluorescent beam memorizing notes on the terrain of Mongolia for the geography portion of his college entrance test.

Link (Thanks, Alex!)

SoundExchange has offered a poison pill to webcasters: add DRM to your streams, get a discount. SoundExchange are the gangsters who control the royalties for Internet radio, and they recently convinced regulators to raise the rates to insane heights, effectively shutting down all Internet music stations.

Now they've offered a dangerous reprieve to the largest webcasters: add DRM to your streams and you can pay a lowered rate. As EFF points out, this won't stop programs like Audio Hijack and Total Recorder from recording these streams, but it will give the entertainment industry the right to dictate technology choices to webcasters. Imagine if the record labels had been able to tell your local radio station that they had to play CDs, and weren't allowed to DJ from their MP3 payers -- it's invasive, overreaching and unreasonable.

SoundExchange is a front for the RIAA. It was part of the RIAA until 2003, and even today, each major label has a seat on its board. Independent labels and artists have reported that SoundExchange won't pay them the royalties they're owed -- instead, all that money seems to flow straight to the majors.

What's at stake here isn't just the implementation of DRM-laden streaming formats like WMA but also whether the RIAA will get to dictate the sorts of technologies that webcasters use in the future. After all, while DRM would certainly frustrate certain tools that allow users to time-shift, it won't make a lick of difference to software like Total Recorder and Audio Hijack that can record sound as it's outputted in unencrypted form to a sound card. You can bank on the RIAA coming back for more restrictions once it gets DRM in the door, as long as it can hold the threat of ridiculous royalty rates over webcasters' heads.

Link

See also:
SoundExchange won't enforce new royalty rates on Sunday?
Ex-RIAA agency "can't find" artists it owes money to, like Public Enemy

This hand-powered chainsaw will come in handy after the hydrocarbon apocalypse -- think of your neighbors' envious glares (through their bulbous desert-goggles) as you effortlessly cut down the looming branches of the few remaining trees for firewood, while they are forced to make do by burning huge bales of devalued trillion-dollar bills.

The High limb Chain Saw has introduced a whole new method of cutting down high tree limbs. Because of this new "saw on a rope", the job of tree trimming in now safer and easier than ever before and can be done while standing on the ground.

Link (via Gadget Lab)

Update: Dan sez, "I have had one of those 'new' chain-on-a-rope saws for almost twenty years. Exactly the same as pictured - yellow rope, red throwing bag, metal plate hanging off one end of the chain. It works, but it is by no means 'effortless'. This is especially true if the limb sags in such a way as to pinch the chain. If that happens, you've got to climb the tree or a ladder to finish cutting with another saw. The simplest way to make sure the cut doesn't pinch the chain is to stand under the limb as you pull the ropes, so the chain is always cutting straight down. That's not usually a good idea."