Ah, I remember the good old days -- whenever a new South Park episode aired, we used to walk uphill in the snow, barefoot, to download it off BitTorrent networks or websites like AllSP. And we were grateful!

But no more. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have just debuted a new version of the South Park Studios website with Comedy Central, where - with Darth Viacom's blessing - you can now stream any episode from any of the show's 12 seasons.

Reached by email this afternoon, Matt Stone tells Boing Boing,

Every South Park episode and billions of clips have been online for years on YouTube or BitTorrent (...) we've always loved the fact that more people in more places could see our little show. The new website just makes it easier for people to see and share South Park.

Eventually every episode and clip will be available everywhere in the world. There is a tangle of contracts that Comedy Central has with different cable companies and territories that are preventing us from that right now. But hopefully it won't be long.

Basically, we just got really sick of having to download our own show illegally all the time. So we gave ourselves a legal alternative.

Other features on the new site include embeddable clips, a new avatar builder, and same-day simulcasting of new episodes.

News of these plans broke late last year, but entire episode viewing launched just today. The site's new look was developed by a team at Schematic.

(Thanks, Jason McHugh, Miles, and Jolon Bankey!)

Boing Boing fan Sarah McKinley Oakes says,

This past weekend I went on a Zero-G flight out of Las Vegas, and was thrilled to see that they use shots of your flight in the training video (I loudly said 'I know her' and then realized that that was, of course, a lie). Thought you'd like to know, it was very cool.

While floating around in no gravity, my boyfriend proposed.

It was great.

Congratulations, Sarah! Link to their lovely Flickr set.

If you recall the recently viralized La Pequeña Prohibida, and La Pequeña Amy Winehouse, then this video will come as no surprise. Honestly? I'd rather vote for this perky Chilean performing artist than McCain, Obama, and Clinton combined. (thanks, Susannah Breslin, via dlisted)

Today on Boing Boing tv, a vlog from Mark about Socialbomb, a real-world tech game that explores social circles and ways to measure interpersonal reputation.

The current version is designed to accommodate 30 players. Each player is awarded points for being near players with higher reputations, and penalized for being near players with lower reputations. Bonuses and penalties are applied according to overall social promiscuity and status. The player with the worst reputation score is the 'Socialbomb.' Their score will have the most negative impact on a social circle.

Shot on location at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Link to Boing Boing tv blog post, with discussion and downloadable video.

Researchers applied for a patent on antibodies that bind to methamphetamine-like compounds such as Ecstasy to quickly remove the drug from a user's bloodstream. Developed by University of Arkansas scientists, the antibodies could eventually be used to prevent some of the drugs' side effects before they occur. From New Scientist:

The team have not yet tested the antibodies in humans, only in rats, but they say that a single injection can reduce the level of drug within the bloodstream for several days. By binding to drug molecules, the antibodies prevent them from reaching tissues like the heart and brain, and mark the compounds for clean up by the body.

Link to New Scientist, Link to patent application

Calpernia Addams is the star of the subversive new competitive dating show "Transamerican Love Story" -- following on Mark's post, this seems like an apropos moment to point to her hilarious how-not-to video about rude questions transgendered people are often asked. The video's a little long, but it's full of great material, and highly edumacational. Thumbs up.

When you're done with that -- brace yourself, whore, you're about to get a stunning. (thanks, Andrea James!)

Thomas Beattie lives in Oregon and is married to a woman named Nancy. He's pregnant.

To our neighbors, my wife, Nancy, and I don’t appear in the least unusual. To those in the quiet Oregon community where we live, we are viewed just as we are -- a happy couple deeply in love. Our desire to work hard, buy our first home, and start a family was nothing out of the ordinary. That is, until we decided that I would carry our child.

I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy. Unlike those in same-sex marriages, domestic partnerships, or civil unions, Nancy and I are afforded the more than 1,100 federal rights of marriage. Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire.

Link (Via YesButNoButYes)

Earlier toady, I posted Dale Dougherty's essay about the wifi health scare in Sebastopol. In a similar vein, here's a New Yorker article about the crazy comic book inquisition of the 1950s.

From a congressional hearing in 1954:

[EC comics publisher William] Gaines was not a stupid man, but, as Hajdu points out, he was in the position many liberals find themselves in when they set out to defend the freedom of artistic expression: he claimed that comic books that treated social issues in a progressive spirit were good for children, and that comic books that were filled with pictures of torture and murder had no effect on them. If art can be seriously good for you, though, it follows that it can be seriously bad for you, and that is the point at which censorship enters the picture. The committee was not interested in debating the merits of comics that treated social issues in a progressive spirit; it was interested in the claim that horror and crime comics were merely anodyne entertainment, and they twisted Gaines like a pretzel. “Let me get the limits as far as what you put into your magazine,” the committee’s junior counsel, Herbert Beaser, asked him. “Is the sole test of what you would put into your magazine whether it sells? Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?”

GAINES: No, I wouldn’t say that there is any limit for the reason you outlined. My only limits are bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.

BEASER: Then you think a child cannot in any way, in any way, shape, or manner, be hurt by anything that a child reads or sees?

GAINES: I don’t believe so.

BEASER: There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?

GAINES: Only within the bounds of good taste.

BEASER: Your own good taste and saleability?

GAINES: Yes.

Kefauver spoke up. He pointed to one of the covers, from an issue of “Crime SuspenStories,” on display in the hearing room.

KEFAUVER: Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

GAINES: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it, and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

KEFAUVER: You have blood coming out of her mouth.

GAINES: A little.

As I recall from reading the (sadly, out of print) Mad World of William M. Gaines many years ago, Gaines has taken a fistful of tranquilizers before he testified, which made him break out in a sweat and act loopy. The overall effect did not help his case. Link

Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a mid-'80s film documenting lifeforms that once orbited around Judas Priest concerts, has been circulating on shitty-quality VHS bootlegs for years. I just watched it for the first time last night -- and it blowed mah mahnd. BB friends Coop + Ruth turned us on to it, and the film recently became available on DVD (along with Neil Diamond Parking Lot, and lots of other good stuff). Zebraman FTW!

Amazon Link for DVD purchase.

Update: Oh dear god there are ringtones.

Jon says:

My friend Tommy has just published a wallet-sized map of over 250 public toilet locations in Manhattan, and is selling them on Etsy.

As he put it, "The New York City Public Toilet Map was unveiled today on Uncle Bob's Variety Show at the Jewish Museum as part of the Off the Wall: Artists at work.

After the presentation, a mob gathered at the edge of the stage to buy copies of the map!"

Sure nyrestroom.com will do the same thing on your smartphone, but sometimes you gotta empty your tank with a dead battery.

Link

Austin Davis-Richardson says: "Apparently Tux isn't able to make ends meet as the Linux mascot and has to work a second job selling soft drinks at a gas station in Gainesville, Fl. " Link

A man cut off his finger tip while working on a model plane. His brother, a medical research scientist, sent him a vial containing powdered pig bladder and told him to sprinkle on the severed finger tip. It grew back -- "flesh, blood, vessels and nail" -- in four weeks.

That powder is a substance made from pig bladders called extracellular matrix. It is a mix of protein and connective tissue surgeons often use to repair tendons and it holds some of the secrets behind the emerging new science of regenerative medicine.

"It tells the body, start that process of tissue regrowth," said Badylak.

Badlayk is one of the many scientists who now believe every tissue in the body has cells which are capable of regeneration. All scientists have to do is find enough of those cells and "direct" them to grow.

"Somehow the matrix summons the cells and tell them what to do," Badylak explained. "It helps instruct them in terms of where they need to go, how they need to differentiate - should I become a blood vessel, a nerve, a muscle cell or whatever."

Link (Thanks, Lex10!)

Over at BB Gadgets, Joel has word of a Gundam statue guarding a train station in Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Link

Researchers in Antarctic's Ross Sea found huge starfish, sea snails, and jellyfish with tentacles 12-feet long. The exploration of 2,000 miles of New Zealand's Antarctic waters also revealed "meadows of sea lilies" hundreds of yards across and potentially hundreds of new species, including several mollusks. From the Associated Press:

The survey was part of the International Polar Year program involving 23 countries in 11 voyages to survey marine life and habitats around Antarctica. The program hopes to set benchmarks for determining the effects of global warming on Antarctica, researchers said...

Cold temperatures, a small number of predators, high levels of oxygen in the sea water and even longevity could explain the size of some specimens, said (Don) Robertson, a scientist with (the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research).

Link

In 2010, motorcycle gear manufacturer Dainese will release protective suits outfitted with airbags. It's apparently taken them ten years to get the system right and they've just released a video demo. I wonder what the outtakes look like. Link to YouTube video, Link to Dainese site (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

Terence Alun Jacob of South Wales thought his neighbors were too noisy, so he used his DIY skills to damage their house in sneaky ways...

...including drilling holes in the roof to let the rain in, super-gluing the door locks, removing a security light by smashing it and redecorating the front of a house by throwing paint over it.

The court heard that Jacob also removed a CCTV camera, smashed the front door, cut wiring from the satellite dish, scaled the flat roof and filled the drains and drainpipes with expanding insulating foam, causing them to block.

He was arrested, entered a plea of guilty and was ordered to perform 100 hours of unpaid work.

Robert Crumb, artist and 78 record album collector, talked about the "creepiness" of collecting in a book titled Vinyl Junkies: Adventures in Record Collecting by Brett Milano.

“Collecting is creepy. Record collectors put each other down for their various fixations. Everybody is convinced that his way of collecting is superior. They look down on casual collectors, who are just accumulators -- the kind who’ll just pick up anything and let it pile up. A true collector is more of a connoisseur, and that’s the good thing about collecting. It creates a connoisseurship to sort out what’s worthwhile in the culture and what isn’t. Wealthy art collectors in this country have sorted out who the great artists are. If you’re collecting a lot of objects of one particular kind, you develop a very acute sense of discrimination.”

“Any of the younger guys who get into collecting are quirky and oddball types, pretty maladjusted people. They’re not into hanging around in bars and picking up chicks or nothing. If they have a girlfriend at all it’s amazing. And the older collectors I know, a lot of them just have their little room down in the basement where they go and listen. They don’t share it with anyone, and their wives don’t know anything about it. So when they die, the vultures start descending.”

Link

Dale Dougherty, the founder of MAKE, wrote about the Sebastopol (the town in California where MAKE is published) City Council's recent decision to rescind its earlier resolution to provide public wireless access after it received an online petition with 235 "signatures" that read: "The convenience of this technology does not warrant the increase in radiation and the potential risks to the health of our community."

The effect of the resolution would have been to add a few wireless access points downtown. There are already several hundred in private homes and businesses in town. The same people who oppose public wifi still walk along streets and into buildings where they are invisibly bathing in wifi. Will this small group of people now demand that we outlaw wireless in public areas, just to accommodate their fears?

Now, I don't know that wireless (or electricity) is without harm. I can read the research that does exist and learn more -- if I have the time and reason to do so. However, I do not like the smell of fear, and when people justify actions based on their own fears, I become suspicious that the concern is unwarranted. If it wasn't wifi, it would be flouride. Something is needed to affix to their anxiety.

Link

These walnut "wooden knuckles" are "hand-crafted in Nashville by woodworking gangsta Mitch Roberson." For $40, you can leave a lasting impression of your woodworking appreciation on your melee playmates. Link (via Make)

After a Northern Ireland soccer match between Ballymena United and Distillery on Saturday, someone threw a lamb's leg onto the field. According to the USPCA, the act "demonstrated general disregard for animal welfare." From the BBC News:

"It also follows a recent incident in which a horse's head was left outside the home of a hockey player in Cookstown," (the animal welfare organization's spokesman) added.

Link (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

Farewell My Subaru is a new book from Doug Fine, environmental journalist and NPR contributor, documenting an experiment in green living (in which, we might add, the author does not abandon his laptop, or the internet). Snip from the summary:

[He] vows to grow as much of his own food as he can, use only the sun to power his ‘Net surfing and sub-woofer, and consume little to no fossil fuel for an entire year — never mind that he’d never raised so much as a chicken or a bean. Or that he had no mechanical or electrician skills. Or that coyotes and mountain lions would like to treat his Funky Butte Ranch like a buffet line.

Today on Boing Boing tv, a short film to give you a taste of that experience, directed by Jason Ensler.

Link to Boing Boing tv blog post, with discussion and downloadable video.

This prototype backyard cardboard playhouse from SuperColossal is, indeed, super-colossal -- a gigantic play-structure that would be a wicked play environment for kids of all sizes.

...we produced a prototype for a flat-pack cubby house, made of cardboard that would could be recycled easily once it is no longer fun, or when it rains, whichever comes first.

This version is probably a little larger than it needs to be and ultimately we are planning a version that will come flat packed in a size that fits in the boot of a car, is ultra cheap and easy to construct.

Perhaps we could embed the cardboard with seeds and as it slowly disintegrates in the rain and early morning dew, it starts a new growth, planting dense native shrubbery where the cubby house once stood.

Link (via Babygadget)

The Washup is a concept design for a "Greener Gadget" contest that incorporates a washing machine into a toilet, recycling wash-water as toilet water, and saving space by absorbing the washing machine's footprint into the basin's. Link (via Geekologie)

This Boing Boing restaurant (no relation) is apparently located in Valencia, Spain. Wonder if the food's any good? Wonder if the menu's, um, eclectic? Anything, you know, steampunk? Link (Thanks, Juergen!)

Simon Jansen undertook to build this massive, elaborate Tardis-shaped MAME cabinet for his home in New Zealand: it sports an impressive homebrew MAME control array, housed in an even more impressive replica Tardis. He even had it signed by the seventh Doctor Who!

The TARDIS is assembled in the following order. First the base is positioned on the floor. At this point it is very, very important to remember to put it over the power cable that runs the TARDIS and console when it is assembled. If you miss this step you can't then easily get the cable under the base without taking the TARDIS apart. Once the base is in place the four corner posts are stood in position, the dowels in the base of each fitting into the corresponding hole in the base. The corners aren't actually fixed to the base in any way. Weight holds it all together. Even in the great Auckland earthquake of 2007 the TARDIS stood solid as a rock.

Next the roof ring beam is attached. This sits on the blocks screwed to the inside of the corner posts. The blocks mean it sits at the right height. Screws then pass through the ring into the corner to hold it in place.

Next the walls and the three steps are loosely screwed in place. Everything is kept loose until the doors are fitted to allow things to be moved around. The doors are then put into position and the hinge pins put in place. The three step above the doors is also positioned now. The doors are closed and I make sure they sit square and open and close freely before tightening the rest of the walls and three steps into position.

Link (via Wired Gadgets)

Link Flickr user SueJG whipped up these fantastic Hobbit socks, based on the runic cover design of the classic hardcover. (via Making Light)

"What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?" first published in the November, 1968 issue Mechanix Illustrated, contains many exciting predictions for that far-off, futuristic date.

The car accelerates to 150 mph in the city’s suburbs, then hits 250 mph in less built-up areas, gliding over the smooth plastic road. You whizz past a string of cities, many of them covered by the new domes that keep them evenly climatized year round. Traffic is heavy, typically, but there’s no need to worry. The traffic computer, which feeds and receives signals to and from all cars in transit between cities, keeps vehicles at least 50 yds. apart. There hasn’t been an accident since the system was inaugurated. Suddenly your TV phone buzzes. A business associate wants a sketch of a new kind of impeller your firm is putting out for sports boats. You reach for your attache case and draw the diagram with a pencil-thin infrared flashlight on what looks like a TV screen lining the back of the case. The diagram is relayed to a similar screen in your associate’s office, 200 mi. away. He jabs a button and a fixed copy of the sketch rolls out of the device. He wishes you good luck at the coming meeting and signs off.

Link

Peep War is an edible tabletop military strategy game played with marshmellow peeps. The instructions are a free download -- I'm guessing that the game gets a lot less edible if you paint the peeps first, but you could probably do some nice terrain effects.

Each player needs the following supplies:

* Approximately 3-5 Marshmallow Peeps of a single color, or a sheet of our Peep Understudies.
* Approximately 30 jellybeans of a single color, or a sheet of our Jellybean Understudies, to represent Troops.
* Two halves of a plastic egg, or two tokens to represent Supply Centers
* 3 copies of the Invisible City Productions Peep War Hex Map.

Link (via Make)

Dolores Labs is a startup that helps companies solve their problems using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (a piecework service that allows millions of casual laborers to contribute to "distributable judgment problems" -- like analyzing a large set of photos to find the faces in them, or classifying documents. The brief list of projects they've conducted to date is a fascinating glimpse into the kinds of problems that are tractable with "mechanical turks."

Document Classification: We helped Scribd, an online publisher, classify documents.

Sentiment: We labeled sentiment (buy/hold/sell) for stocks from posts on message boards.

Price Extraction: We extracted prices from popular shopping sites, as well as an open question to find the lowest price on a given product.

Search Relevance: We judged the relevance of a webpage for a search query.

Link (via Data Mining)

See also: Mechanical Turked color names

Guinness just orchestrated a record-breaking gathering of people in video-game-character costumes on the London Millennium Bridge. As impressive as this is, I find it hard to believe that there were more costumed warm bodies present at this event than at, say, the Tokyo Game Show. Link (via Wonderland)

Artist Devorah Sperber's "Mirror Universe" show opened last week at Caren Golden Fine Art in New York -- it features giant pixellated mosaics of scenes from the Star Trek franchise, including this "mid-transporter-beam" looking Kirk curtain:
For some of the pieces, Sperber used spools of thread to create photomosaics of Trek characters. A 47 x 37.5 x 60-inch portrait of Spock took 1,200 spools to make; a stainless steel ball is required to see the piece right side up. Sperber also threaded together TNG's Holodeck (using 9,600 spools) and the Enterprise bridge (5,822 spools).

To re-create the look of being beamed up, Sperber used semi-translucent beads to thread the standing characters into shape. The image of Captain Kirk (pictured) uses 25,000 plastic beads strung onto monofilament. Link (via Wonderland)