By Mark Frauenfelder at 6:52 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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Mark Allen of Machine Project in Los Angeles is holding a workshop on making the classic crank ghost animatronic Halloween project.
Brought to life by the mad scientists at MAKE magazine, this Sunday, October 7th, 2007 we’re offering a build-your-own Animatronic Ghost workshop. Combining a slow motor, a simple system of pulleys, and a deathly amount of fun (and almost as much electricity), this ghoul will be the “life” of your Halloween party. Along the way, you’ll learn the basics of working with motors and mechanisms.
This project (originally by Doug Ferguson) is featured in an article by Edwin Wise in the special halloween edition of MAKE, which you’ll receive as part of the class materials.
Cost of $150 will get you in the door and all materials needed. Class enrollment limit is 7 people, so sign up today!
Machine Project - 1200 D North Alvarado Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026
Link
By David Pescovitz at 4:05 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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COOP scanned an entire Matchbox Collector's Catalog from 1969. It's filled with terrific illustrations of the diecast toy cars. These people sure were having a grand old time playing with them.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 3:26 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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Surrealist clothiers and thinktank The Imaginary Foundation have released their latest series of wonderful t-shirts. Seen here is Parallel Universe, which reads "Possible parallel universe one millimeter from here." Also available are limited-edition giclee art prints featuring other stunning designs.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 2:11 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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Canned Peaches In Syrup is a new post-apocalyptic comedy play about the survivors of a global environmental catastrophe who have divided into two, er, polarized groups: cannibals and vegetarians. This weekend, Los Angeles's award-winning Furious Theatre Company will bring the play, written by playwright
Alex Jones, to the stage for the first time. Jones is part of the "
in-yer-face theatre" movement, which according to Wikipedia involves the presentation of "vulgar, shocking, and confrontational material on the stage." Indeed, the last Furious Theatre Company production that I saw -- The God Botherers, about foreign aid workers -- was more entertaining, provocative, and intense than anything I've seen on TV in years, including HBO. And I'd say that even if my brother, Robert Pescovitz, was not in the cast. Bob is also starring in Canned Peaches and the only reason he's letting me post about the play on BB is because it's right up our alley: futuristic, dark, romantic, nihilistic, and funny. From the play description:
Alex Jones' timely and hilarious post-apocalyptic comedy, CANNED PEACHES IN SYRUP places us in a seemingly absurd and inconvenient future, where water is scarce, the sun has gone crazy and love still survives. In a post-environmental apocalyptic future, the world is divided into two tribes of nomadic humans: Cannibals and Vegetarians. Can star-crossed lovers Rog (think Romeo as a cannibal) and Julie (think Juliet as a vegetarian) cross tribal lines?! Can Rog's taste for flesh be suppressed?! Can Julie deny her parents' "meat is murder" mantra?! And, who exactly is Blind Bastard? A lone can of peaches in syrup holds their fate...and the fate of all mankind...
Link to the Furious Theatre Company site for tickets
Link to "The Making of 'Canned Peaches in Syrup'" podcasts
Link to the Furious Theatre Blog
Link to the Canned Peaches site
By David Pescovitz at 1:12 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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Originally an April Fools' Day gag, ThinkGeek is now selling their nerdcool 8-Bit Tie. It's a clip-on, 'natch.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 1:00 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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This
extraterrestrial spacecraft Benthocodon jellyfish was spotted near undersea mountains. The photo is in a new book titled
The Deep that features more than 200 photos of the insanely strange and beautiful denizen of our oceans. It was edited by Claire Nouvian, a French documentary filmmaker. Smithsonian has a feature on the book and a sampling of remarkable photos from it. From the Smithsonian article:
The more than 200 photographs–most taken by scientists from submersibles and ROVs, some shot for the book–show just how head-shakingly bizarre life can be. The scientists who discovered the creatures were apparently as amused as we are, giving them names such as gulper eel, droopy sea pen, squarenose helmetfish, ping-pong tree sponge, Gorgon's head and googly-eyed glass squid.
Nouvian herself made two dives in a submersible, to 3,200 feet. The first thing she noticed, she says, was that "it's very slow. You can tell that all their laws are different."
Link to Smithsonian article,
Link to slideshow,
Link to buy
The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:38 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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Danny says:
Tangled telephone cords and electronic cables that come to resemble bird nests can frazzle even the most stoic person. Now researchers have unraveled the mystery behind how such knots form."
[Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego] and UCSD colleague Dorian Raymer ran a series of homespun experiments in which they dropped a string into a box and tumbled it for 10 seconds (one revolution per second). They repeated the string-dropping more than 3,000 times varying the length and stiffness of the string, box size and tumbling speed.
Digital photos and video of the tumbling strings revealed: Strings shorter than 1.5 feet (.46 meters) didn't form knots; the likelihood of knotting sharply increased as string length went from 1.5 feet to 5 feet (.46 meters to 1.5 meters); and beyond this length, knotting probability leveled off.
Their conclusion?
While there is no magical knot buster, Smith advised what all sailors, cowboys, electricians, sewers and knitters know: to avoid tangles, keep a cord or string tied in a coil so it can't move.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:32 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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Ruuskado says:
"Ahh Boston, now here's something worthy of an anti-terror alert. Thief steals over 100 parking meters and keeps them in his apartment. Oddly, during his arraignment, they let him sit behind a privacy screen."
Cambridge police arrested Thomas Gannon, 38, Monday night after they served an unrelated trespassing and larceny warrant at his Plymouth Street home. Detectives performing a routine safety sweep discovered the 123 stolen meters under beds, in closets and under blankets, said Cambridge police spokesman Frank Pasquarello.
(Above image is a thumbnail of a photo by Angela Rowlings)
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:27 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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Scott says:
A fantastic and slightly disturbing series of pinhole photography taken from inside the mouth.
Justin Quinnell, the photographer,
sells "SmileyCam" mouth cameras for $23 so you can take you own inside-the-mouth-looking-out photos.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:21 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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Ben says: "I remember the story of the substitute teacher accused of showing porn on a school computer in January and figured I'd share a related story. I wonder if [Ohio] Rep. Barrett will end up convicted of risk of injury to a minor and face a 40 year sentence as well?"
State Rep. Matthew Barrett was giving a civics lesson Tuesday when he inserted a data memory stick into the school computer and the projected image of a topless woman appeared instead of the graphics presentation he had downloaded.
Police interviewed Barrett and school officials and seized the data memory stick and the computer to determine where the image came from, a state highway patrol spokesman said.
...
"I have no idea where these came from," the Democrat said.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:18 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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Hart says: "The city of Duncan on Vancouver Island, British Columbia isn't allowing anyone to take pictures of their 80 totem poles, without the city's permission - because of copyright(!?!?).
This is an article from one of Canada's national newspapers The Globe and Mail about it..."
The city policy, created this summer, states that "the use of the totem images in any form requires approval from the City of Duncan." Applicants have to complete a form detailing how totem pole images will be used.
After living in China for three years, and seeing how personal rights were violated, Mr. Langevin, who designs learning materials and is well-versed in copyright law, gets a little "touchy" when excessive rules, such as the totem policy, are enacted. "It borders on extortion," he said.
Here are a bunch of nice photos of the totem poles on Flickr. (Shown above, a thumbnail of Josky_TW's beautiful photo which captures four of the totem poles.)
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 12:10 pm Thursday, Oct 4
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JMT says:
"I ran accross this flickr photo by accident. Apparently, it's an exact replica of 'Chairy' from PeeWee's playhouse found on the side of the street, wet and neglected. I think it might be New York. How could the photographer have not picked it up?!?!?!"
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 11:16 am Thursday, Oct 4
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Here's a collection of scanned in high-rez, public-domain anatomical atlases from the National Institutes of Health. There's some beautiful squishy bits there, ripe for use in design projects. We are truly marvellous inside.
Link
(
via Kottke)
By David Pescovitz at 9:56 am Thursday, Oct 4
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Biologists from Delhi University discovered this darling frog that when fully grown is just 0.3937 inches or 10 mm. From Loren Coleman's post at Cryptomundo:
Delhi University Systematics Biologist S. D. Biju and his colleagues have found this new frog, India’s smallest land vertebrate, in the Western Ghats of Kerala, a mountainous region in the western portion of India.
The humid rainforests of the Western Ghats are the perfect habitat for these nocturnal frogs, which enjoy making mating calls from under leaf litter and among the roots of ferns during the monsoon months.
Link
By David Pescovitz at 9:26 am Thursday, Oct 4
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In honor of the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, IEEE Spectrum interviewed science fiction author and futurist
Arthur C. Clarke. In the October 1945 issue of Wireless World, Clarke forecasted the idea of geostationary satellites in a paper titled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?" From IEEE Spectrum:
SPECTRUM: You, Frederick Durant, and Ernst Stuhlinger were all in Barcelona at an International Astronautical Federation meeting on 4 October 1957. What was your reaction when you got the news about Sputnik?
CLARKE: Although I had been writing and speaking about space travel for years, I still have vivid memories of exactly when I heard the news. I was in Barcelona for the 8th International Astronautical Congress. We had already retired to our hotel rooms after a busy day of presentations by the time the news broke. I was awakened by reporters seeking an authoritative comment on the Soviet achievement. Our theories and speculations had suddenly become reality!
For the next few days, the Barcelona Congress became the scene of much animated discussion about what the United States could do to regain some of its scientific prestige. While manned spaceflight and Moon landings were widely speculated about, many still harboured doubts about an American lead in space. One delegate, noticing that there were 23 American and five Soviet papers at the Congress, remarked that while the Americans talked a lot about spaceflight, the Russians just went ahead and did it!...
SPECTRUM: A lot of what was achieved at the beginning of the Space Age–from Sputnik to the first landing on the moon–was spurred on by the rivalry that was the Cold War. Without that competition, do you think the human impetus to reach for space has slowed somewhat?
CLARKE: Launching Sputnik and landing humans on the Moon were all political decisions, not scientific ones, although scientists and engineers played a lead role in implementing those decisions. (I have only recently learned, from his long-time secretary Carol Rosin, that Wernher von Braun used my 1952 book, The Exploration of Space, to convince President Kennedy that it was possible to go to the Moon.) As William Sims Bainbridge pointed out in his 1976 book, The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study, space travel is a technological mutation that should not really have arrived until the 21st century. But thanks to the ambition and genius of von Braun and Sergei Korolev, and their influence upon individuals as disparate as Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Moon–like the South Pole–was reached half a century ahead of time.
I hope that nations can at last see better reasons for exploring space, and that future decisions would be informed by intelligence and reason, not the macho-nationalism that fuelled the early Space Race.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 9:14 am Thursday, Oct 4
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This five-foot tall, 1920 Chinese automaton performs a lovely little clockwork magic trick: making other clockwork dolls disappear and appear. It's being sold at auction on Oct 28 at Skinner in Bolton, MA -- judging from the video, this looks like the kind of thing I'd love to bid on but could never afford.
Link
(
Thanks, Gary!)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:09 am Thursday, Oct 4
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Ken sez, "FON and British Telecom have partnered to create the BT FON Community to cover the entire U.K. with hundreds of thousands of BT FON hotspots. Very cool!
FON has the interesting, copyleft-ish 'you share yours, you get others for free' model, or you can go all capitalistic and share revenue from your hotspot with them. This agreement will really ramp up their networking effect in the UK."
Every person in the UK who agrees to share a small portion of their home broadband connection will be able to share the connection of any other member. Anyone joining in will be able to use those FON hotspots across the world and all the new BT FON hotspots free of charge.
From the very beginning, all of you, Foneros, believed in the concept of sharing and in people's ability to build something important that would benefit everyone. BT is one of the most important telcos and ISPs in the world, so with BT FON those beliefs have proved to be well-founded!
Link
(
Thanks, Ken!)
See also:
Free WiFi routers from FON for 10,000 Americans
Spanish ISP wants its customers to share WiFi
By Cory Doctorow at 9:04 am Thursday, Oct 4
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Brian Boyko from Network Performance Daily sez, "We spoke to the creator and editor of Slashdot, Rob Malda, about Slashdot's past and its future as Slashdot hits its 10th anniversary."
NPD: What will Slashdot look like in 2017?
RM: If I win, hopefully mostly the same, except maybe a little more interactive and comprehensive. I hope that we're talking about the same types of things, but 10 years more advanced. I hope that the same level of conversation is taking place. And I hope that they keep letting me do it.
NPD: What do you mean by "win", what happens if you "lose", and if so, do you think you'd just start over again with a new site?
RM: Well, my job is often balancing the economic realities with the desires of the users. There's a lot to that- advertisers want X, sales/marketing wants Y, readers want Z, and I have a certain budget, a certain number of engineer man hours, and only so many clock cycles of DB time.
If I lose, it means Slashdot no longer is able to be an independent voice on the Internet, and it is instead overrun by commercial interests. And at that point I'd probably leave. I don't know if I'd consider starting over again. It's a lot of work, and to have done this at the level I have, it would be anti-climactic personally to start over at zero unless I could find something worth doing it. Like a truckload of cash, or some sort of really interesting challenge to make it mentally worth trying. But quite honestly, Slashdot is interesting and on most days satisfying -- starting over again would suuuuck. The first time around was 20-hour days for many years!
Link
(
Thanks, Brian!)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:00 am Thursday, Oct 4
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The UK competition commission has had enough of the incredible queues at Heathrow airport and they're promising to heavily fine the management company that runs the airport.
Now that I'm living in London again, I find myself flying through Heathrow a lot, which has all the charm of a colonoscopy and all the comfort of being trapped in a cargo container. The lines are like something out of the ninth pit of hell, especially in the Virgin terminal, and the rules about carry-ons and so forth keep getting more and more inhospitable.
God, I hope that this means that I can look forward to a more pleasant aviation experience.
"BAA has failed to manage security queueing and queue times to avoid unacceptable delays to passengers, crew and flights, and have not furthered the reasonable interests of the users of Heathrow and Gatwick," a report by the Competition Commission said...
The commission statement contained severe financial implications for Ferrovial, which throw into doubt the refinancing of the £9.3bn debt the Spanish group took on when it bought BAA for £10.3bn last year. The commission backed CAA proposals to slash BAA's return on capital at its two biggest airports, which led Ferrovial to warn that refinancing plans "might not be able to be implemented as envisaged".
Link
(
Thanks, Alice!)
By Xeni Jardin at 7:28 am Thursday, Oct 4
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A new episode of Boing Boing tv is now up -- Trailers from Hell and Discount Lobotomies, plus a unicorn chaser of Ape Lad drawing cartoon monkeys. Link to video.
By Cory Doctorow at 6:29 am Thursday, Oct 4
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The Chronulator is an open source kit for building a handsome and marvellously impractical clock; the builders at ShareBrained Technology say, "The Chronulator starts life as a clock, showing the hours and minutes on two old-school analog panel meters. Dress it up to look like old test equipment, audio VU meters, or motorcycle gauges. Mount it in a picture frame, shadow box, computer case, plush toy, pumpkin... Customize the code and hardware to make the meters indicate something other than time -- network traffic/lag, outside temperature, freeway congestion, terror threat level, stress level, whatever! Let your imagination run free."
Link
(
via Make)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:02 am Thursday, Oct 4
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In this video, 86 PCs are lined up like dominoes, wrapped around a generic office corridor, and then knocked over. Apparently, this is a youtube genre, because the video claims to be THE ORIGINAL! and starts with a rebel yell: "The best thing to come out of the dot-com crash: Domino PCs!."
Link
(
via IZ Reloaded)
Update: Flo pointed out this youtube of 22 terabytes' worth of Maxtor hard drives being knocked over, domino-style. It's pretty hot.
By Cory Doctorow at 3:58 am Thursday, Oct 4
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Now,
this is a gamer-tattoo -- a full back-piece framed by an NES controller and the legend, "Leave Luck to Heaven."
Link
(
via Wonderlandblog)
See also:
MC Router, "queen of nerdcore," just got this new tattoo.
Nerd tattoo gallery
Zelda tattoo of all time
Fan-art tattoo gallery
Pac Man ass tattoo
Super Mario sleeve tattoo
Update: From the comments, Cyberscythe sez, "The phrase 'Leave Luck to Heaven' is a paraphrase of the meaning of the word Nintendo."
By Cory Doctorow at 3:54 am Thursday, Oct 4
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Harvard researchers are experimenting with adding capsaicin -- the thing that makes chilis spicy -- to topical anesthetic to numb bits that were otherwise unavailable. I'm a spicy food junkie and I live and die by
the French sauce, a muscle-rub that's got enough capsaicin in it to raise blisters if you use it too much.
Clifford Woolf and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School have now discovered a way of blocking just the pain neurons using capsaicin - the active ingredient in chilli peppers - along with a version of lignocaine that can't diffuse through cell membranes unassisted.
Capsaicin activates the TRPV1 receptor on pain neurons. This in turn opens up a channel on the neurons' membrane, allowing the lignocaine to pass though. The drug then gets to work blocking the sodium channels. In tests on rats the drug combination completely blocked pain without affecting motor function or other senses (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature06191).
Link
See also: Thai food sparks terror alert in London
By Cory Doctorow at 3:48 am Thursday, Oct 4
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This illustration -- Toren Atkinson's "Where the Great Old Ones Are" (2003) -- is a twisted and hilarious mashup of Maurice Sendak's
Where the Wild Things Are and the Cthulhu mythos.
Link
(
via Neatorama)
By Cory Doctorow at 3:44 am Thursday, Oct 4
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Motoart sells furniture made from aviation salvage, like this desk made from a polished 727 cowling -- you can get a
matching chair made from B-52 ejection seat! Lots of good stuff, no prices, probably out of my league, but a guy can dream.
Link
(
via Cribcandy)
Go Ape has a funny new Star Wars tee -- the Han (guitar) Solo.