By Cory Doctorow at 11:53 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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David Byrne and Brian Eno have completed a new album (of "electric gospel") for released before 2009 and have booked a North American tour on which they're planning to play at least 40 percent old Talking Heads material. Holy moly, this is as good as life gets!
Update: Turns out the tour's just Byrne, not Byrne and Eno!
Byrne told us he’s collaborating with their mutual friend Brian Eno “for the first time in 20 years. Brian had written a lot of music, but needed some words, which I know how to do. What’s it sound like? Electronic gospel. That’s all I’m saying.”
Link,
Link to NY Daily News piece
See also:
Byrne/Eno "Bush of Ghosts" tracks re-released under CC
Missing Byrne/Eno track "Qu'ran" appears on blogs
Byrne/Eno's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" -- remix it yourself!
David Byrne's guide to being a musician in the 21st century
By Xeni Jardin at 10:39 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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Meteorologist Edward Lorenz, credited for having founded the field of chaos theory, died Wednesday of cancer in Massachusetts. He was 90 years old.
He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he came up with the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes, something that was explained in a simple example known as the "butterfly effect." He explained how something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil changes the constantly moving atmosphere in ways that could later trigger tornadoes in Texas.
His discovery of "deterministic chaos" brought about "one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton," said the committee that awarded Lorenz the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences. It was one of many scientific awards that Lorenz won. There is no Nobel Prize for his specific field of expertise, meteorology.
Jerry Mahlman, a longtime friend, noted that the man who pioneered chaos theory was "the most organized person I ever knew."
Link to AP obituary,
here is the New York Times piece, and here is more about Lorenz
at the MIT website.
(thanks, gATO)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:49 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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A new exhaustive study called "Access Denied" tells the whole story of Internet censorship around the world:
Many countries around the world block or filter Internet content, denying access to information--often about politics, but also relating to sexuality, culture, or religion--that they deem too sensitive for ordinary citizens. Access Denied documents and analyzes Internet filtering practices in over three dozen countries, offering the first rigorously conducted study of this accelerating trend.
Link
(
Thanks, Seth!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:46 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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Bell Canada has formally announced that its commercial customers -- other ISPs -- will henceforth have all their traffic throttled and filtered by Bell, who will be degrading some connections based on the protocol they use.
Bell's bizarre argument for this? We're screwing our retail customers with throttling. If we let our wholesale customers offer a better connection to their retail customers, our customers will be upset that they're not getting as good a deal.
"Granting CHIP's request would actually have the perverse effect of providing an unreasonable preference to wholesale ISP customers and their end users who will be able to continue to use a disproportionate amount of available bandwidth during peak periods, creating an unreasonable disadvantage for Sympatico retail and business customers," Bell writes in its response.
Link
(
Thanks, Nibor!)
See also: Bell Canada caught throttling ISPs' net connections
By Cory Doctorow at 6:41 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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The Disney Experience's papercraft replica of the dear departed Disney skybucket ride is fantastic -- so cool to have a replica of this notorious widowmaker from the Happiest Place(s) on Earth.
Link
(
Thanks, Mike!)
By Xeni Jardin at 4:19 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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Parts With Appeal (Section), 30" X 10.5", a lovely new Giclée print from Coop -- $100 each. Link.
By Xeni Jardin at 4:06 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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A new member of this blog's extended universe introduces himself to the world today, over on Bing Bong Gidgets.
The name's Marvin, by the way. Marvin Battelle. I'm Boing Boing Gadgets' "band manager," whatever that is. And I am from the future.
I don't want to dwell too much on how I got here or why I came: the cautionary value of warning you evolutionary mollusks about mistaking a flux capacitor for a french tickler would be just shy of zilch. Needless to say, the slippery slope, one thing led to another and now I'm stuck here.
Without any of the valueless scraps of disease-soaked paper your rappers call "Benjamins" to my name, my first priority was clear: find someone to mooch from. Luckily, I had a prime candidate: my great-great-great-great-great-great23 uncle, John Battelle.
Link.
Update: AHAHHAHAHA Marvin has a twitter.
By Xeni Jardin at 3:33 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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Continuing in Boing Boing tv's week-long "best of" retrospective, a pair of surreal shorts about food and drink, from filmmaker Stefan Nadelman.
First, "Food Fight," a stop-animation piece that provides an abridged history of war, told through the foods of the countries in conflict (Ed.: the original work has been edited for time, and captions have been added to assist the history-impaired). Next, "My Dog Impersonating Orson Welles," in which a pooch clutches a bottle of champagne, and attempts to form sentences.
Link to Boing Boing tv post, with discussion and downloadable video.
By Mark Frauenfelder at 3:01 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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I like Sarah Ross' line of leisure jogging suits made to counteract anti-sleeping benches.
Archisuit consists of an edition of four leisure jogging suits made for specific architectural structures in Los Angeles. The suits include the negative space of the structures and allow a wearer to fit into, or onto, structures designed to deny them.
Link (via CRAFT)
By Xeni Jardin at 2:33 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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DS Fanboy (an offshoot of gaming blog
Joystiq) interviews a dude who's using
Pokémon as a smoking cessation aid.
Q: How does it work? Walk us through the process.
A: I decided that every time that I wanted a cigarette, I would turn on my DS and play some Pokémon. But the thing about going from two packs a day to cold turkey is that at first, you always want a cigarette. So the first three days, I did nothing but play Pokémon non-stop. My routine was to sleep extra late (because if I'm not awake, I'm not craving a smoke), play Pokémon for about 8 hours with breaks to stretch and eat, read Pokémon walkthroughs, F.A.Q.s, strategies, and websites, and then sleep. Experience has shown me from previous attempts to quit smoking that the hardest thing is to be around other smokers. Unfortunately for me, every single one of my friends that I see on a regular basis are smokers. So for those first few days, I went into seclusion, locking myself in my room and not answering my phone. After the initial push, it just required the willpower to keep playing Pokémon instead of smoking.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:46 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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Charliekkendo says: "You have to see some of these images. Users duplicate a picture of themselves from when they were younger - same pose, the current "me" by the child "me." The results are fascinating."
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:27 pm Thursday, Apr 17
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A quick-thinking police officer spotted a 49-year-old man taking photos of Christmas lights and busted him on the spot for not having a camera license. When the photographer failed to produce a license (which would have been a neat trick, since there's no such thing as a camera license in England or any other free nation) the officer kept the world safe from terror by making the man delete all the photos in the camera.
"People were still taking photos with mobile phones and pocket cameras, so maybe it was because mine looked like a professional camera with a flash on top," he says.
"I wasn't very pleased because I was taken through the crowd and through the barriers at the front and people were probably thinking 'I wonder what he was doing.'
"To be pulled out of a crowd is very daunting and I wasn't aware of my rights.
"It's a sad state of affairs today if an amateur photographer can't stand in the street taking photographs."
Here are Flickr photos of the Christmas lights of Ipswich, every one taken by terrorists no doubt.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:54 am Thursday, Apr 17
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In
MAKE Vol. 11, we ran on of my favorite articles to appear in the magazine: a how-to piece on making your own "kitchen floor" vacuum former, which lets you make cool 3D parts out of plastic. The article was written by toy designer Bob Knetzger, who uses his vacuum former to make prototypes of his toys.
In this video, Kipkay shows you how to make the vacuum former. Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:46 am Thursday, Apr 17
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After a long search, Scott McLemee finally found a recording by a pair of Russian conceptual artists who created a song that most people will despise, as determined by a survey they conducted.
For example, people hate songs about holidays, choirs, and kids singing. So there was a passage where a children's chorus singing about Labor Day.
[Phil Ford] quotes an account of how the sonic parameters were selected:
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance--someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example--fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.
Well damn....it turns out I'm one of them.
Hiphop tuba plus a soprano rapping about the Old West -- what's not to like? You can listen to it here.
I guess I'm one of the 200 people who likes it, too.
Link | Song (via Coop)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:24 am Thursday, Apr 17
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Joshua Allen of
The Morning News says all pop songs must be 2:42. Even one second, in either direction will ruin it.
What else is at 2:42? “Don’t Do Me Like That” by Tom Petty. “Divine Hammer” by the Breeders. “Helplessly Hoping” by Crosby, Stills & Nash. “Get Up” by R.E.M. “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas. “This Charming Man” by the Smiths.
You need more proof? Jerk. Let’s look at Sgt. Pepper. “Lovely Rita” is two minutes, 42 seconds. It delivers that psychedelic vibe and a coda but then gets the hell out of your life.
Compare that to “With a Little Help From My Friends.” It’s a mere two seconds longer but feels like it drags on for hours. Maybe it’s Ringo, maybe it’s the tedious melody–or maybe it’s the two goddamn seconds.
Then over here we have “Good Morning Good Morning,” rightfully discarded by the masses as a throwaway. Why? Two minutes, 41 seconds. Hey, Beatles, maybe next time think about tacking on an extra second to give a song the grandeur and majesty it deserves.
Link (via Gerry Canavan)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:07 am Thursday, Apr 17
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Kevin Kelly, one of the smartest people I know, wrote a great blog post about digital things he's been wrong about. He thought The Sims would flop, but 100 million copies have been sold. He thought Photoshop, ink jet printers, Quicken, and eBay were sure losers and that push technologies, MusicJam, and virtual shared workspaces were sure winners.
Sadly I can detect no pattern to my mis-predictions. In some cases, I did not anticipate improvements and advances that would remake a pathetic first version into a truly cool tool. In others I anticipated advances that never came.
If I could actually tell which inventions were going to succeed, I'd be a billionaire. You would too.
I believe no one can always be right about what will work because the number of variables determining success are too high. The details of execution for each idea matter greatly. The Sims by a different genius, different company, different platform, different ecosystem may well have flopped. Photoshop by a different team may have crashed. Likewise, MusicJam or Second Life is a different setting may have flown.
This inherent uncertainty about success is what makes life so interesting.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 8:06 am Thursday, Apr 17
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Continuing in Boing Boing tv's "best of" our first 6 months, as chosen by you, our viewers, we revisit the dulcet tones of....
Gabe and Max, who have taught so many of us how to achieve the dream lives of our dreams using the internet. Today they answer questions from the Bing Bong audience. Then, aliens discover Mark Frauenfelder's book, "Rule the Web."
Link to BBtv post with discussion and downloadable video.
By Cory Doctorow at 7:37 am Thursday, Apr 17
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The Starry Rift, a new anthology of teen-oriented science fiction, comes out today. It's edited by Jonathan Strahan, and includes fiction by Neil Gaiman, Steven Baxter, Greg Egan, Jeffrey Ford, Gwyneth Jones, Kathleen Goonan, Ian McDonald, Kelly Link, Scott Westerfeld, Garth Nix, Walter Jon Williams and others -- including me (with my story
Anda's Game).
The editor, Jonathan Strahan, did a fantastic job in pulling this together, and it couldn't come at a better time. Teen literature is peaking right now, and a high-quality anthology that introduces young people to authors they can plunge into for books and books and books is a timely and great idea.
Jonathan's giving away five copies of The Starry Rift to the first five young readers who write to him and name the last sf novel they loved and why.
Link, Buy it on Amazon
By Cory Doctorow at 3:31 am Thursday, Apr 17
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Adrian sez,
I'm the lead designer for We Tell Stories - it's a website created for Penguin, in which six authors are telling six stories in ways that are completely original to the web.
Our first story, The 21 Steps (a homage to The 39 Steps) was told over Google Maps; another was written live and displayed in real-time, in five hour-long installments, by Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. This week's was by Matt Mason ('The Pirate's Dilemma') and Nicholas Felton ('Felton Personal Annual Report'), and they created an infographic snapshot of teen life and the new media world.
We're really pleased with all these stories, but the final sixth story is coming out on Tuesday, and it's the one I'm most impressed by. It's basically an unholy cross between a text adventure, choose your own adventure, and dungeon map. Technically speaking, it's not very sophisticated, but it has an interface that I'm sure hasn't been done before.
It's written by Mohsin Hamid - author of the Booker-shortlisted 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'. I would be the first to say that good novelists or screenwriters don't necessarily make good game writers, but in this case, Mohsin really nailed it and he wrote a story that shows a very deep understanding of interactive storytelling; it's called 'The (Former) General in his Labyrinth'.
Link
(
Thanks, Adrian!)
