Creative Commons for education
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* With legal barriers, we advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. We also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.
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EZ-Bake oven for your PC
Link (via Shiny Shiny)
Now the computer savvy among us can relive the fun of having your very own personal mini-oven with the PC Ez-Bake oven! It fits in a 5 1/4" drive bay and plugs right into your power supply with the included Molex connector. Also included is "PC Ez-Cook", the open-source oven controller software with hundreds of easy and creative recipes for your PC Ez-Bake oven, and even a fuzzy-logic cooking control system to precisely measure the doneness of your cake, cookie, or cheese souffle. The PC Ez-Bake oven can even be used to cook your Pop Tarts, Bagel Bites, or any tiny or flat food. YUM!
Vintage Planned Parenthood issue of Spider-Man comic
Spiderman fan Andrew Farago was browsing in my favorite bookstore in the world, San Francisco's KAYO Books, when he stumbled upon a Planned Parenthood issue of The Amazing Spider-Man from the 1970s. Actually, the title page reads "Stan Lee presents: A Special Planet Parenthood Issue Of The Amazing Spider-Man" and it was distributed by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The inside cover contains ads for Planned Parenthood booklets and the back pages include "the facts" about pregnancy, VD, homosexuality, etc. Thankfully, Andrew scanned and posted the whole comic.Link (Thanks, COOP!)
Animated flashlight film
Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno made this wonderful animated film titled "Pika Pika 2007" by taking long-exposure photographs of people waving flashlights and stitching the photos together. You may also have seen their work in a recent Sprint television commercial. Link to Pika Pika 2007, Link to Sprint commercial (Thanks, Michelle Hlubinka!)
Planned communities for amateur astronomers
Here's a Reuters profile of Arizona Sky Village, a planned community for astronomy lovers in Arizona. Above, a building there shown with observatory dome. This is not the only such purpose-built community for stargazers; others include Deerlick Astronomy Village in Georgia and Chiefland Astronomy Village in neighboring Florida. Snip:
The communities are all located in remote areas far from flaring city lights that spoil views of the night sky. Residents abide by rules forbidding bright lights anywhere from dusk till dawn to preserve optimum viewing.Link. (thanks, Jon)With its stable weather conditions, bone-dry air and isolated location, the Arizona Sky Village offers a near-perfect setting for astronomers, allowing them to see even faint objects like the swirling clouds of gas that make up nebulae and the spiral arms of far-off galaxies in transparent detail.
"It's ink-black, dead-dark, one of the darkest places in the country," says Gene Turner, an amateur astronomer and one of the project's developers.
"The Milky Way is so bright here, it's three-dimensional. In 1500 you could see it everywhere like this but now that's very rare," he said.
Reader comment: Tom says,
Planned communities are nice. But the pro's and filthy-rich dot.commer's go to NM Skies.
Weekly World News dies after 28 years of awesum, Bat Boy bummed
The final issue of Weekly World News is slated for August 3, 2007. Lesbian Space Alien and Vegan Vampire Lady could not be reached for comment.
As you can see here, Bat Boy remains inconsolable.
SF Scope has more: Link 1, Link 2. WaPo: Link. Reuters: Link.
Reader Comment: Nathan Cobb, MD, says,
While the cover stories of the Weekly World News were always amusing, it was in reality a sleazy tabloid that used its fictional stories to protect itself from charges of libel and slander. Inside the stories were often adopted from real news and freely changed or embellished. I'll never forget being in the supermarket with my college roommates, picking up the WWN and laughing at the headlines - only to open up to an "article" on the recent murder of one of my relatives by a mentally ill handyman (in front of her two little children.) The crime was horrific; the fact-free hatchet job they did on her husband for opposing the death penalty was over the top. Good riddance.
Chris Jordan's photos of disturbing consumer stats: interview
Chris Jordan renders American consumer statistics as art. For instance: above, 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day. At left, an idea of what the 60 x 100" piece looks like from a distance; at right, detail view. I imagine they'd look amazing IRL.
We've blogged his work a number of times here on BoingBoing (1, 2), but here's a Link to a new interview with him, by Nicole Pasulka in The Morning News.
Reader comment: Mark Hurst says,
Here's a video clip of Chris Jordan speaking at my Gel 2007 conference this spring.
Musurgia Universalis: 17th-c text on music, math, machines
Above, a detail from a page in Athanasius Kircher's "Musurgia Universalis," printed in 1650. Snip from a post on Bibliodyssey:
A large part of the book is devoted to the history of instrumentation, including the anatomy of voice and hearing, and an extensive theory on acoustics entitled 'Magia Phonocamptica, sive de Echo', in which he described sound as 'the ape of light.'Link to scanned pages and links to online copies of this work.Kircher professes the Boethian concept of musical harmonies' mathematical correspondences within the body, the heavens, and the natural world, and concludes with a discussion of the unheard music of the nine angelic choirs and the Holy Trinity. Kircher's research in music and acoustics led to many innovations and inventions, particularly in the area of amplification and sound design, which he would expand upon in his Phonurgia nova (Kempten 1673).
Other devices created the illusion of talking statuary, hydraulically powered mechanical music-playing automata, the aeolian harp (which was revived and venerated by the English romantic poets as a model of divine inspiration), the hearing aid, and the arca musarithmica: a primitive mechanical computer that would compose simple random compositions, as well as write messages in cipher, calculate the date of Easter in any year, and design fortifications.
Previously on BoingBoing:
LAT kills column that suggested free CDs instead of Page One ads
Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein wrote an article suggesting it might be a good idea give away CDs inside the paper, instead of putting lots of advertising on Page One. The column got spiked by an associate editor, and the Times simply said Goldstein was "on assignment".Link. More on Romenesko: Link.
Religious "priming" promotes cooperation
"One idea that we seriously considered was that God, to those who believe, is a supernatural policing agent," says psychologist Azim Shariff...Link
"We can't compare the relative strengths of religion and civics, or draw tight analogies to real-world situations," says Shariff. "What we can do is identify that both concepts have substantial effects on prosocial behaviour."
UPDATE: Howard Rheingold, who has done extensive research on cooperation for a project with Institute for the Future (IFTF), says:
David Sloan Wilson has written extensively about theory in this respect in "Darwin's Cathedral," and this research supports his hypothesis.Link to buy Darwin's Cathedral, Link to buy Why Humans Cooperate, Link to the Cooperation Commons, a collaboration between Howard Rheingold and IFTF
If you want to get into real detail, there's Henrich and Henrich's recent book, "Why Humans Cooperate" that details how cultural evolution works with groups: individual humans learn by imitation; when one member of a group makes a discovery that enhances survival value, and that discovery spreads through the group, the fitness of the group improves. Again, according to cultural evolution theory, religion is an example of a norm that is internalized by members of the group, thus reducing dramatically the cost of policing, that constrains individual behavior but improves group fitness.
Cry havoc, and let slip the squirrels of war
Link (thanks Bonnie, photo: thanks BB reader Bob, don't know who shot this)A few weeks ago, 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems of foreign intelligence services were captured by [Iranian] intelligence forces along the country's borders.
These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes.
According to the announcement made by Iranian intelligence officials, alert police officials caught these squirrels before they could carry out any task.
Update: Wired's Danger Room blog has more: Link. And while I'm at it, here's another post there about Pentagon researchers looking for "crystal balls" and electronic choose-your-own-adventure novels: Link. (thanks, Noah!)
BB reader Dappledthings asks,
Any connection to the death badgers we've apparently inflicted upon Iraq, do you think? Link.
Artist Jeremy Blake missing, and his girlfriend has committed suicide
In NYC, a filmmaker/games designer committed suicide last week. Her companion, a well-known contemporary abstract artist, has gone missing for 8 days and is presumed dead:
The filmmaker, Theresa Duncan, 40, who has also drawn attention for her writings on cultural topics, committed suicide in their East Village apartment on July 10, the police said. Her companion, Jeremy Blake, 35, a well-regarded artist known for digital animation that blurs the line between abstract painting and film, has been missing since his clothes were found on a beach in the Rockaways on Tuesday evening, they added.Link to NYT story. Here's a related item on Gothamist. Modern Art Notes has more, including word that the Corcoran will go forward with a planned exhibition of Blake's work.
Above: still from Jeremy Blake's 14-minute DVD art piece "Sodium Fox," 2005. Link to Theresa Duncan's blog.
Snip from the last entry on Ms. Duncan's blog, dated July 10, 2007:
"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."(thanks, Coop, and Circuit Master)--Reynolds Price
Smorgasbord of short links
(thanks, John Parres, Kim, Alfred, Wayne Correia, Bonnie, axlrosen, John, Katherine Hannaford, Destiny, Susannah Breslin)
Reader comment: Jesse Raub says,
It should be noted that the other guy in the Kanye video is none other than Will Oldham, otherwise known as Bonnie “prince” Billy and of Palace Records. This is funnier to me than Zack Galifinakis.
Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend
LinkThe story is partly about the massive and fascinating DIY effort to try to find Gray and his sailboat -- involving satellites steered over the Pacific, NASA planes, ocean simulators, and 12,000 volunteers analyzing images on Amazon's Mechanical Turk -- but it's also deeply about who Jim Gray was, and why his loss at sea was such a loss for our collective future. Gray was an brilliant, generous, self-deprecating man who routinely gave his expertise away, acting as a mentor to dozens of scientists all over the world, and building enormous resources for amateur science. As I say in the article:
He turned a dorky Windows NT marketing concept ("Scalability Day") into an excuse to build TerraServer, which brought satellite imagery - previously the exclusive domain of intelligence agencies and weather forecasters - to the masses. Then Gray teamed up with astronomer Alex Szalay at Johns Hopkins University to port a massive star-mapping project - the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - to the Web, making the data accessible to professional astronomers, backyard stargazers, and students. Since its debut in 2001, SkyServer has become the most widely used astronomical resource in the world, sparking discoveries about dwarf galaxies, dark matter, and sonic waves triggered by the big bang.
To Gray, both sites were teasers for the coming era of data-centric science made possible by the proliferation of cheap sensing devices, very large data bases, and online interfaces. For life-science researchers, he was like an ambassador from the future who spoke their language. The morning he set sail for the Farallon Islands, he had collaborations under way with oceanographers, soil ecologists, and public health officials.
And he was at least as interested in the scientists themselves as in the petabytes of data they produced. "We connected so deeply," Szalay says. "Sometimes you make these kinds of connections very early in life or in graduate school. But by the time you get to 50, it's rare to meet someone who is so much on the same wavelength. We talked this way, usually several times a day, for eight years."
Previously on Boing Boing:
• Database pioneer Jim Gray missing at sea
Fighting the pirates
The attack came after daybreak. The Delta Ranger, a cargo ship carrying bauxite, was steaming through the ink-blue Indian Ocean in January 2006, about 200 nautical miles off Somalia's coast. A crewman on the bridge spied two speedboats zooming straight at the port side of his vessel. Moments later, bullets tore into the bridge, and vapor trails from rocket-propelled grenades streaked across the bow: pirates.Link
A member of the Delta Ranger's crew sounded the ship's whistle, and the cargo ship began maneuvering away as bullets thudded into its hull. The captain radioed a message to distant Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) operates the world's only pirate reporting and rescue center. In describing the attack, he added that the pirates seemed to be using a hijacked Indian dhow, a fishing vessel, as their mother ship.
The center's duty officer immediately radioed an alert to all ships in the Delta Ranger's vicinity and found that two other cargo ships had escaped similar attacks in recent days. The duty officer's next message went to the USS Winston S. Churchill, a Navy guided-missile destroyer on patrol about 100 nautical miles from the pirates' last reported position. Soon after, the Churchill headed for the dhow....
...As governments cut their navies after the cold war, as thieves have gotten hold of more powerful weapons and as more and more cargo has moved by sea, piracy has once again become a lucrative form of waterborne mugging. Attacks at sea had become rare enough to be a curiosity in the mid-20th century, but began to reappear in the 1970s. By the 1990s, maritime experts noted a sharp increase in attacks, which led the IMB to establish the Piracy Reporting Centre in 1992—and still the buccaneering continued, with a high of 469 attacks registered in 2000. Since then, improvements in reporting, ship-tracking technology and government reaction have calmed the seas somewhat—the center counted 329 attacks in 2004, down to 276 in 2005 and 239 last year—but pirates remain very much in business, making the waters off Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Somalia especially perilous. "We report hundreds of acts of piracy each year, many hundreds more go undetected," says Capt. Noel Choong, head of the Piracy Reporting Centre, in Kuala Lumpur. "Ships and their crews disappear on the high seas and coastal waters every year, never to be seen again." Even stationary targets, such as oil platforms, are at risk.
Afrigadgets: homemade model airplane from Kenya
Erik at Afrigadget.com has an interesting post up about a Kenyan metal craftsman named Phillip Isohe, who builds wonderful little models of planes and buses in his spare time. Snip from post:
This seems to be an extension of what many of us did while growing up in Africa - building wire, or tin can, cars. What’s most interesting is the excruciating attention to detail that he puts into each one. In fact, they each have motors with working lights, steering, engine and interiors.Link to post with video and more photos, and you may also want to take a peek at the AfriGadget Flickr stream.
San Francisco's devil taxi 666
Byrne, a 30-year veteran driver, was assigned No. 666 only last August, Thigpen said, after another applicant refused to accept the number. Since then, sources said, Byrne has been involved in at least one accident -- even after taking the precaution of having the cab blessed at Mission Dolores.And from a post-vote article:
"Do I believe in the Mark of the Beast myself?'' Thigpen said in an interview. "No. But there is a lot of negative energy around that cab. If we can help somebody out, why not do it? If something's a nuisance, it's our duty to get rid of it, right?''
A commission clerk, who asked not to be identified, said Byrne "had many deaths around him and his family'' and that getting rid of the cursed number "is an idea that speaks for itself.'' Link
"How dare you take Lucifer's number away,'' said Thomas George-Williams, president of the cab drivers union, who was sporting the red horns (at the hearing). "This is a serious issue.''
A cabbie named Tom warned the commission that it was "opening a can of worms" and would soon be deluged with requests to retire other numbers. A cabbie named Barry pointed out that 666 was the address of SS Peter and Paul's Church on Filbert Street, an outfit not thought to be in Satan's pocket. A cabbie named Grasshopper said it was a "bad idea to get into mysticism and voodoo.'' Link
ARC, by Christopher Louie
Link (View the quicktime here)"ARC is a short movie-come-music video concerning the only slightly implausible affair between a young man with Down's syndrome and a very beautiful young blonde." -- Ben Marshall, Guardian Unlimited
Music by Why? "Gemini (Birthday Song)"
BBC: W's grandpappy planned fascist coup of USA
LinkDocument uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen.
The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.
Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy.
Reader comment:
Steve says:
Prescott Bush stole Geronimo's bones! This has even been fact-checked: The skull of Geronimo, Fort Sill's most illustrious prisoner of war, no longer occupies his tomb on the base; the Apache warrior's cranium was reportedly exhumed one night in 1918 by a group of Army officers and smuggled to Yale, where it resides in the vault of the Skull and Bones society. The young officer who wielded the shovel, according to university historian Alexandra Robbins, was the President's grandfather, Prescott Bush.
Adam says:
The BBC was in touch with me about its Fascist Coup program, as much of its information came from the Feral House release, War is a Racket by General Smedley Butler. My introduction discussed the coup attempt, which was first revealed to Congress and the press by General Butler, and it had material that was initially covered up in the public release of the Congressional Investigation into the fascist coup and later revealed in an obscure book called 1000 Americans: The Real Rulers of the U.S.A. by George Seldes.I think I should also mention that Prescott Bush, though he later openly expressed sympathies to Hitler, was not specifically involved with the 1933/34 coup attempt. This was mainly engineered by J.P. Morgan's forces.
Sony Spyware license-agreement performed by a women's choir
Celebrate Sony/BMG's lawsuit against SunComm, the company that provided the rootkit spyware that caused such a ruckus, with this oddly powerful rendition of the Sony/BMG End User License Agreement -- arranged for women's choir and recorded by Toronto recording artist Brian Joseph Davis.Link, Coral Cached link to MP3
Analysis of poster colors of top grossing movies
This graphic shows the color breakdowns of top grossing movies, arranged by rating (NC-17 at the top, G at the bottom).
The trend seems to be: the more risqué the movie, the redder and blacker the poster. Link (Thanks, hurty elbow!)
YouTube remains blocked in Thailand, nevermind
Last night I posted word from a few BoingBoing readers in Thailand that YouTube was suddenly, without notice, available once again in Thailand (Link to BB post). Authorities had blocked the site for months, as we understand. Looks like it's still blocked for some? Maybe the accessibility will come in waves, or maybe the whole shebang is still off limits? I'm confused, and have asked YouTube and others to help us sort out what's going on over there.
Meade in Bangkok shares the screengrab above and says,
I'm in Bangkok, and, as of 16:24 Wednesday 25 July 2007, YouTube is still blocked. When I try to access it, it redirects to the usual "Police Aleart [sic]," as shown in attached.Grant Peck says,Unblocking YouTube would make one of the local English-language newspapers here (Link 1, Link 2). Nothing in the news today.
Can finally get get YouTube again tonight in Bangkok via my True DSL account. Haven't yet tried other providers. The discrepancy could have to do with sites being blocked at two points. The ISPs have their own blocks, based on govt "suggestions." But the govt controls (officially, anyway) the intl gateways, and makes some effort to block there. It seems likely that the gateway block is lifted but some ISPs haven't lifted their redundant blocks yet. Interested in censorship in Thailand? Here's the site to go to: Link.And BB reader Myo Kyaw Htun, who first shared news from Thailand yesterday that YouTube *was* accessible, says,
I received a lot of comments from Thailand local bloggers told me that they can't still access to YouTube from their home. Actually, I watched YouTube in News Reader when I arrive at office in this morning. I gave a tip to boingboing as soon as I posted about this in my blog. On tommorow I'll post again with some snapshots If I can still watch YouTube. I'm still confused that this is a technical problem of government ISP (I think that we're directly using from Government but I'm not still sure). The reason why I give tip to editors from boingboing again is that BoingBoing is my favorite blogs and I don't want to give you wrong information because you're #1. I do apologize If I will not access YouTube on tomorrow. I hope I posted correct information.Anonymous person in Thailand says,
As of 00:05 local time, YOuTube is still blocked in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in the Northern part of the country. Can anyone recommend a good proxy service that actually has decent upload speeds? Oh wait, forget that last part. As of July 18th, the police can kick in your door for that.Previously on BoingBoing:
Wooden car
This wooden car, built in Japan, cost roughly $32,500 and can reach 90 km/h. According to a Japan Probe post, it was made by a furniture manufacturer.Link to Japanese language site with lots of photos. Link to Japan Probe with pointers to video (Thanks, Paul Saffo!)
Previously on BB:
• Wooden motorcycle Link
• Lee Stoetzel: sculpture show Link
• Lee Stoetzel's wood chopper Link
UPDATE: Charles Shopsin says, "Here is a 1956 Mechanix Illustrated article with plans to build a really spiffy looking mahogany sports car. It even has pop-up headlights." Link
A surreal and supremely inane compendium of miscellaneous knowledge, Vol 2
"If you only watch one YouTube movie today featuring dancing country farmer's daughters contortionists singing about potato salad, it should be this one."
Jory Squibbs 100 mpg handmade car
Text of 1903 book: Wee Tim'rous Beasties: Studies of Animal Life and Character
Pygmy baby marmoset plays peekaboo with stuffed toy snake
Video of kid eating a habenero pepper
Over 100 people witness UFO in night sky in England
Previously on Boing Boing:
• ASASICOMK, Vol. 1
Top ten spacewalks
fogonazos has a great post about the top ten space walks, with awe-inspiring photos.
3. Bruce McCandless, floating free in space (1984)LinkAt about 100 meters from the cargo bay of the space shuttle Challenger, Bruce McCandless II was further out than anyone had ever been before. Guided by a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), astronaut McCandless, pictured above, was floating free in space. McCandless and fellow NASA astronaut Robert Stewart were the first to experience such an "untethered space walk" during Space Shuttle mission 41-B in 1984
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