Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels: the ingenious spoon-management system at a cafe in Kensington Market, Toronto, a neighborhood that I like so much I set a novel there. Link

Big Big Battles: Crawly Combat is a forthcoming tabletop miniatures combat game where you cut out, assemble and color the tokens.

Any thing that creeps and squeaks is fair in a game of Crawly Combat. The premier set of the miniatures system Big Big Battles, Crawly Combat is an all ages miniatures game with rules so easy a child could comprehend and yet enough play value to keep even adults coming back for more.

Link (Thanks, Mike!)

The Japanese team on the International Space Station will launch a paper airplane (co-designed with the Japan Origami Airplane Association) into the Earth's atmosphere -- the plane's been treated with heat-resisting stuff and is expected to survive reentry:

The researchers are scheduled to begin testing the strength and heat resistance of an 8 centimeter (3.1 in) long prototype on January 17 in an ultra-high-speed wind tunnel at the University of Tokyo’s Okashiwa campus (Chiba prefecture). In the tests, the origami glider — which is shaped like the Space Shuttle and has been treated to withstand intense heat — will be subjected to wind speeds of Mach 7, or about 8,600 kilometers (5,300 miles) per hour.

A large spacecraft such as the Space Shuttle can reach speeds of up to Mach 20 (over 15,200 mph) when it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere, and friction with the air heats the outer surface to extreme temperatures. The much lighter origami aircraft, which the researchers claim will come down more slowly, is not expected to burn up on re-entry.

Link (Thanks, Steve!)

(Image: A good loft, a Creative Commons Attribution Licensed photo from Old Sarge's Flickr stream)

Got a spare Denso 6DOF industrial robot arm? Why not program it to play the integral role in a large round clock, hypnotically sweeping back and forth in regular, smooth arcs, plucking bricks and moving them, resetting them and keeping time? Seriously, this is endlessly fascinating. Link (Thanks, Dean!)

The Gaiastore's polyester tentacle arm slips neatly over your boring old human arm, giving you hentaicred to burn. Or squish. At fifteen bucks each, I think you could get four of 'em and go quadtentacular. Link (via Wonderland)

I whipped up some easy icons for all three Boing Boing sites just in case anyone wants to save a page to the menu screen of their iPhone or iPod Touch with a spiffy custom button. (You have to be on the latest firmware to do this. And own an iPhone or iPod Touch. And have the desire to visit us on a regular basis.)

In my infinite wisdom, I took Kevin Worthington's advice and made them twice as large as Apple advises, the better to be scaled down for "crispness"—except I think I made them 157 pixels square instead of 158, which I believe means they're not going to be any more crisp than anything else. But still, they look okay!

Two things to like about this 1938 Merrie Melodies cartoon, "Katnip Kollege": 1) The music and animation are of the first water, and 2) the quality of the video is remarkably good for a YouTube video. Kudos to the uploader. (Via Ursi's Blog)

Longoland's Monster Skin Rug comes in three sizes and is made from cashmere, wool and polymer clay. No prices on the site ("Price available on request") which makes me think, yikes, I probably can't afford this. The same designers do a line of twisted stuffed animals that make me incredibly happy. Link (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

WFMUs Beware of the Blog has links to a couple of early BeeGees' songs that sound very much like Beatles and John Lennon songs. The first is "In My Own Time" (RealAudio archive), "which could be the musical result of Dr. Robert meeting the Taxman in the Rain."

And there's "Have You Heard the Word" (MP3), with a snockered Maurice Gibb practically channeling John Lennon.

The boozily Beatlesque result somehow found release, evidently without the permission of the principals, in 1970 as a single on the tiny U.K. label Beacon Records, with this one-off congregation identified as The Fut.

Did they do a good job? Just ask the bootleggers, who have placed the track on countless Beatles boots, hoodwinking many a rabid Fab Four obsessive.

Again, did they do a good job? Just ask Yoko Ono, who in 1985 attempted to register "Have You Heard the Word" as a John Lennon composition.

If this is your cup of tea as much as it is mine, I recommend the Bee Gees' lysergically-fortified Bee Gees' 1st, their first album, remastered and released on the Rhino label, which has "In My Own Time" on it. Link

Quack science has hit a new high in FPSBrain, a German caffeine-laced vitamin beverage pill intended to improve your performance at playing first-person shooter games:

1 FpsBrain is the only effective product with a 110% money-back guarantee. Clinical research and expert knowledge made it possible to develop an effective neural accelerator.

2 FpsBrain is active within the first 60 minutes after use and releases its active ingredients constantly for 6 hours maximum into the body.

3 Fps has been tested by experience computer players and results in a remarkable increase in perception and reaction capacities.

4 FpsBrain contains only ingredients that have been tested and are approved in Germany.

Link (via Wonderland)

Three cheers for the kind soul who posted this video of Raquel Welch in a space girl outfit dancing in front of giant abstract sculptures (where are they?) (Via Eye of the Goof)

The Open Rights Group is throwing a series of seminars on Creative Business in the Digital Era -- intensive workshops on making creative stuff in the era of open copyrights. The seminars are in London, March 17-19.

Free culture - giving versions of creative works away, and even allowing others to copy, distribute, sample or create derivative works from them - is at the heart of these new opportunities. This approach seems alien to many in the creative world who assume that free culture cannot generate income, but a freer attitude to cultural distribution will help you connect with a new audience, to develop a more engaged audience and even to make new business connections.

The Creative Business in the Digital Era seminar will help you understand the opportunities presented by open IP (intellectual property) and how being open should be a central part of your creative business model.

The project is being prepared openly, under a Creative Commons licence, on the Creative Business wiki.

Who should come?
This seminar is aimed at people interested in doing business in the open environment presented by rapidly developing networked communications. You could be a C-level executive or an independent creator, or anyone in between, from any size of company:

* C-level executives, independents, freelances, entrepreneurs, corporates, SMEs
* Musicians, record labels, music publishing companies
* Writers, journalists, publishers
* Film makers, production companies, broadcasters
* Visual artists, photographers, artists, illustrators and designers

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

(Disclosure: I'm a founder of and advisor to the Open Rights Group)

Richard Knerr, the co-founder of Wham-O has died at the age of 82.

Wham-O was a toy inventor’s dream; a company where garage tinkers could show up with wacky ideas and watch them turn into national fads in a matter of months. Wham-O was the birthplace of some of the most memorable and innovative toys in history: the Super Ball, Silly String, the Frisbee, the Slip ‘N Slide, and the Hula Hoop. Wham-O was a perfect blend of California entrepreneurship, space-age optimism and postwar manufacturing methods. It was, in short, the best toy company ever.

Founded as a mail-order slingshot business in 1948 by childhood buddies Rich Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin, Wham-O didn’t really take off until 1957, after the partners spotted a man on the beach throwing a plastic flying saucer. They bought the idea for $1 million, changed its name from the Pluto Platter to the Frisbee and had an instant hit on their hands. A year later, inspired by a friend’s account of seeing Australian children twirling wooden hoops around their waists, Knerr and Melin made a plastic version, dubbed it the Hula Hoop, and sold 100 million in 16 months. Fueled by the gusher of cash rushing in from the sales of these two items, Wham-O became a 1,000-employee company, occupying 8 buildings in a 171,000-square-foot complex in San Gabriel, California. Wham-O developed between 40 and 50 new toys a year. Some were hits, like the Superball; others were flops, like the $119 build-your-own bomb shelter.

When Knerr and Melin sold the business to Kransco in 1982, the company crashed. It was bought by Mattel, which killed off all the products except the Hacky Sack, the Hula Hoop, and the Frisbee.

Here's the Los Angeles Times obit: Link

UPDATE: YouTube videos of Wham-O toy commercials:
• Super Ball and Super Elastic Bubble Plastic
• Wheelie Bar
• Water Wiggle
• Silly String
• Bubble Thing

Make reader RoboGeek has been playing with a Spectrum Z510 3D printer, whipping up science fictional objects out of bits and atoms.

One of the objects is a "metatron" by Bathsheba Grossman. The red polyhedral sphere is the work of George Hart (http://www.georgehart.com/rp/rp.html) and is actually 7(!) nesting spheres, I assigned a different color to each one. I hope one day to print that one out of plastic. When you take an object out of the "build tray", you place it in a dust cabinet and blow off ant excess powder with a needle tipped airbrush. Then you CAREFULLY "infiltrate" it with cyanoacrylate. I did this by dipping one of those little red coffee stirrers you find in office kitchenettes, and applying it one drop at a time. Having a touch of OCD helps this procedure. ;-) We used Loctite 408, as it was less expensive than buying replacements from ZCorp. MicroMark sells little paint/glue brushes that are small plastic handles with fuzzy flocking on one end. The Serenity is from a poly mesh sent to me by Sean Kennedy, aka Treybor in the 3d computer modeling community. I don't recall where I got the Hawk Mark IX mesh from. The Z510 can print from vrml models. None of these are painted; the Z510 prints in color. Good joke: the software comes with a jpg of the IniTech (Office Space) logo! Note the logo on the command cabin of the Hawk Mark IX. The Lego gears I designed in AutoCad 2002. The yellow one is a replica of a 40-tooth Lego Technic gear, the largest they make. The others are 56 & 96-tooth, I designed for use as parts in an all-Lego clock.

Link (Thanks, PT!)

JMT sez, "I can't remember the last time I diagrammed a sentence, but this breakdown of the Preamble to the US Constitution is almost beautiful in structure. Very awesome."

Indeed. Plus, I hear the Schoolhouse Rock version in my head whenever I see this. Link (Thanks, JMT!)

Today: a new installment of Boing Boing tv's 8-Bit Theater, featuring My Little Pony and the (hungry) animated head of David Bowie (classic game footage from The Dot Eaters). Then, Borna Sammak of Free art and Technology transforms the 8-bit classic game CONTRA into a melty, gooey, hallucinatory haze.

Link to BBtv post with video and comments. Previously on BBtv:

Super Mario 8-bit theater / David O'Reilly short

Giant Atari Joystick / 8-bit Therapy

Dave Hill + Blip Fest + 8-bit Combat

A 29-year-old man in Minnesota died soon after being shot with a Taser by state troopers on the site of a car crash Tuesday evening.

According to the State Patrol, he was involved in a rush-hour crash and troopers shot him with the Taser because he was uncooperative. He was breathing but unconscious when paramedics arrived, according to the Medical Transportation spokesman but was pronounced dead at the Hospital. The cause of death was listed as heart failure. The man's father is questioning the actions of the troopers, and claims that his son had no heart condition.

Link (thanks, Adam)

David sez, "A Canadian Foreign Affairs Department training manual names Guantanamo Bay as a site of possible torture and abuse. Despite this, they're doing nothing to help Omar Khadr, a Canadian held there since 2002."

The U.S. prison camp in Cuba is among several countries listed as potential trouble spots, including Afghanistan, the United States, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Mexico and Syria...

When asked in the past about Khadr's claims that he had been abused, Foreign Affairs officials have said Canada takes the issue seriously and has received assurances from U.S. officials it wasn't happening...

His lawyers say he has been held in stress positions, thrown into solitary confinement for months on end and used as a human mop to clean up his own urine.

Link (Thanks, David!)

(Image: PDR_4470, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike-licensed image from Whomever's Flickr stream)

Futures From Nature: 100 Speculative Fictions is an anthology of 100 short-short science fiction stories originally published on the back page of the prestigious weekly science journal Nature. The stories come from all matter of writers -- science fiction professionals, working scientists, science writers (there's even one -- rather good -- story written by a scientist's 12-year-old daughter!), and take all manner of approaches to the challenge.

As is inherent in the short-short story form, the pieces are often comic and conceptual, rather than fleshed out narratives -- it's quite a trick to cram a full-blown story with realized characters into a mere 700 words. Many of these stories are flat-out brilliant, and not all of those come from professional writers (though sf pros like Bruce Sterling, Ben Rosenbaum, Joan Vinge, Kathryn Cramer, Robert Charles Wilson and Toby Buckell all have superb little gems here). Clearly, many scientists have a frustrated sf writer lurking within them.

100 short-short stories make for a very strong cup of tea indeed. The opening paragraphs alone are something of a masterclass in the rapid establishment of a story: setting, person and problem all nailed up within a few words. Plunging into -- and emerging out of -- 10 worlds in a day's reading can be a genuinely disorienting experience.

But it's a good kind of disorientation. These stories take on the big and small problems of science, from grant-writing to debunking pseudoscience, from Frankensteinian techno-apocalypses to the brightest utopias. Considered purely as an exercising in finding out what sort of thing captures the imagination of a working scientist, this is a fantastic little journey.

And of course, it doesn't hurt that many of these are just plain great stories. Link

(Disclosure: I have a story in this collection)