Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Today, a gentleman on an American Airlines from Boston to Los Angeles stripped naked, got dressed again, and then attempted to open the emergency exit door. He was then "subdued" by theNew England Revolution soccer team who were also on board. From The Boston Channel:
He was asked to go back to the bathroom to put his clothes on and he did and went back to his seat and then allegedly attempted to open an aircraft emergency exit door," (FBI spokesman Gary) Johnson said...
After the man was subdued, the flight was diverted to Oklahoma City and the man was taken into FBI custody, (American Airlines spokesman Tim) Wagner said.
The man, whose name was not immediately released, was put into flexible handcuffs by flight attendants and held until the plane landed.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Photog Kem McNair snapped this amazing shot of a spinner shark jumping out of the water behind surfers at New Smyrna Beach, Florida. No, it isn't Photoshopped. CNN.com has a video interview with McNair. Shark and surfers (CNN.com)
FSM knows this isn't new, but for some who stop by Boing Boing, it may be yet-unseen. Dramatic Lemur [actually Tarsier, but whatever, the Chipmunk upon which it's based was a hamster or something IIRC. ]
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
The new issue of Smithsonian has an interesting short article about traditional sericulture, AKA silkworm farming, in the 16th century. Apparently. one of the hardest parts was keeping the farmhouse at the perfect temperature for incubation. From Smithsonian:
The process began with the 10-to 14-day incubation of silkworm eggs, which are produced by the mating of adult silkworm moths. According to the Silk Museum, keeping the tiny, delicate eggs (about the size of a pinhead) at just the right temperature was "the task of the women, who often carried small bags of eggs in direct contact with their skin. . .sometimes between their breasts." Once hatched, the worms, only about one millimeter long, had to be fed mulberry leaves night and day.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
An incredibly rare set of conjoined twin birds, attached at the hip, were found earlier this week in White County, Arkansas. The Arkansas game & Fish Commission is sending the barn swallows to the Smithsonian Institution for further examination. No photo in the Associated Press article. Form the AP:
While conjoined twins have been documented in humans, other mammals and reptiles, finding conjoined birds is difficult, as they likely die before being discovered, (Arkansas Game & Fish Commission ornithologist Karen) Rowe said. X-rays of the pair found each bird was fully formed, Rowe said. Scientists at the Smithsonian will examine the birds to determine whether they were fraternal twins or identical twins.
Rowe said the birds would have had to come from a double-yolk egg.
Phil Torrone, whose work you may know from MAKE magazine, shares his latest online video project with us -- it looks pretty awesome! Hats off! He explains.
Citizen Engineer is an online video series about open source hardware, electronics, art and hacking. The first video debuted at "The Last HOPE" conference today in New York City. Volume 1is about phones: SIM card & payphone hacking. Learn how a SIM card works (the small card inside GSM cell phones) make a SIM card reader, view deleted messages, phone book entries and clone/crack a SIM card. Modify a "retired" payphone so it can be used as a home telephone and for VoIP (Skype). Then learn how to modify the hacked payphone so it accepts quarters - and lastly, use a Redbox to make "free phone" calls from the modified coin-accepting payphone.
Device is a new art gallery in La Jolla, California created by sculptor Greg Brotherton and his wife Amy. Their next show, Fantastic Contraption, opens July 19 (and runs through Sept. 2). The 18-artist show explores the leaky margins between humans and their machinery and includes some of my favorites: Stephane Halleux, Nemo Gould, Theo Kamecke, and Mike Libby (all of whom have appeared here on Make: Blog).
IDW Publishing has produced Device Volume 1: Fantastic Contraption, a gorgeous art book, to accompany the show. I was thrilled and honored to be asked to write the introduction for it.
The book is 140 full-color pages, sells for $20 ($13.60 on Amazon), and is available for pre-order now.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Chris Woodside, 46, of CIncinnati, Ohio is an insurance claims adjuster who owns perfect replica of the Batmobile from the 1966 Batman TV series. Today's Cincinnati Enquirer profiles Woodside, an eBay collector who has 3,000 vintage PEZ dispensers and was previously attempting to build a B9 "Danger, danger!" robot from Lost In Space. He attempted to build the Batmobile too, from a kit, but eventually outsourced the assembly. From the Enquirer (click image to see the full photo):
The original Batmobile, created by George Barris, was made from a 1955 Lincoln Futura, a concept car that Ford never put into production. Woodside, a self-proclaimed "GM guy," decided his 19-foot-long replica would rest on the restored chassis of a 1976 Catalina station wagon.
As a claim rep with plenty of body shop contacts, he thought it would be easy to build a Batmobile.
It wasn't.
He shipped his body kit and chassis to a California builder, and frustrations mounted as the work dragged on for three years. Woodside finally took delivery in November 2005.
On Cool Tools, Merlin Mann reviews It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life With Less Stuff.
It's All Too Much is a terrific book that inverts the typical approach to dealing with existential kipple. Rather than helping you find new places and novel ways to "organize" all your crap, author Peter Walsh encourages you to explore why you ever kept all that junk in the first place. Does it reflect a fantasy waistline or a long-abandoned career? What about this "priceless" relic of a late loved one that's been sitting in a moldy trash bag for 10 years? Be honest: what place do these things have in the life that you imagine for yourself? Because, if the stuff you accumulate isn't actively helping get you closer to a life you truly want, then it's getting in the way, and it needs to go. Period.
The biggest change in attitude this book made in my life was to teach me not to generate false relevance by "organizing" stuff I don't want or will never need. Organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love - it's not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to manufacture makebelieve meaning. For me, this is about the opposite of organizing; it means disinterring every sarcophagus of crap in my house and, item by item, evaluating whether it's making my family's life better today.
Kevin weighs in with his own hearty recommendation for the book:
Merlin Mann's review turned me onto this fantastic book. We've rethought our household because of it. We were reminded that life is not about stuff; it's about possibilities, which the right tools can enable. For a world of expanding stuff, this book is the necessary anti-stuff tool. If you are reading Cool Tools, you need to read this. It will help you distinguish between that which is fabulous for you personally and that which is just more junk to organize.
Kevin includes a bunch of excerpts from the book. Here are a few:
Imagine the life you want to live. I cannot think of a sentence that has had more impact on the lives of people I have worked with. ... When clutter fills your home, not only does it block your space, but it also blocks your vision.
*
You need space to live a happy, fruitful life. If you fill up that space with stuff for "the next house," your present life suffers. Stop claiming your house is too small. The amount of space you have cannot be changed -- the amount of stuff you have can.
*
I know it sounds strange, but if you start by focusing on the clutter, you will never get organized. Getting truly organized is rarely about "the stuff." This is the bottom line: If your stuff and the way it is organized is getting you to your goals... fantastic. But if it's impeding your vision for the the life you want, then why is it in your home? Why is it in your life? Why do you cling to it? For me, this is the only starting point in dealing with clutter.
*
If it's taken you ten years or more to accumulate your mess, it's impossible to make it disappear overnight. Letting go is a learning process. You might need to start slowly, and it may take time to discover that not having things makes your life better, not worse.
*
Most things that you save for the future represent hopes and dreams. But the money, space, and energy you spend trying to create a specific future are wasted. We can't control what tomorrow will bring. Those things we hoard for an imaginary future do little other than limit our possibilities and stunt our growth. When I urge you to get rid of them, I'm not telling you to discard your hopes and dreams. It's actually quite the opposite. Because if you throw out the stuff that does a rather shabby job of representing your hopes and dreams, you actually create room to make dreams come true.
Kat Kinkade has died. Kat was the founder of Twin Oaks Community, the place where I basically grew up. I travelled there two days after graduating high school. I was there for 6-1/2 years. So much of the foundation of who I am was forged on the anvil of that community experience. I don't hold all of the same beliefs I did then, but I credit the freedom found in that great social experiment as the greatest gift I could have received as an evolving human intelligence unit. In my life, I've had the profound pleasure of sitting at the feet of, learning from, counting as friends, some true giants of 20th/21st century counter-culture, people possessed of big personalities, stunning intellects, relentless work ethics, grand plans and great ideas. Kat Kinkade was my first.
This Friday July 18th M Modern Gallery will be curating an epic show entitled Crimes on Canvas. This group exhibition takes place within the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Grand Ballroom and is part of the 944 magazine 3rd anniversary party.
The show will feature new sculpture and paintings by some of the east and west coasts' finest artists, including: Andrew Brandou, Tim Biskup, Glenn Barr, SAS Christian, Bob Dob, Pizz Chris Mars, Amy Crehore, David Stoupakis, Travis Louie, Shag, Amanda Visell (shown above), Ron English and many more.
My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
At a press conference held in Nanchong, China about the success of anti-gun campaign, three news reporters were shot. A police office was holding up a homebrew gun when it accidentally fired. From the BBC News:
A reporter needed surgery for injuries to his ankle, crotch and chest, after being hit by what appeared to be pebbles fired by the gun.
Two others were slightly injured in the incident...
According to the Chongqing Times, the home-made gun had been designed for shooting birds.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
My pal Terre Thaemlitz in Tokyo sent me this ad for a cross-promotional offering from the mobile phone operator "au" (エーユー) and Adidas. As Terre says, "How super-fucked is this logo?"
No country creates more beautiful product packages than Japan, in my opinion. Here, PingMag takes a look at some innovate packages from Japan.
Tofu packed into balloons, by Kamakura-komachi?! Surprisingly a great example for reduced packaging: Its elastic material is extensively stretched, and when pierced with a toothpick, the balloon bursts and only a tiny bit remains. How amazing! REDUCE with more flexibility! The same packaging concept is also applied to a pudding.
Stephen Worth of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive says:
Today, we posted another installment in our ongoing overview of the life and career of "Li'l Abner" creator, Al Capp. This one is a doozy... It features a 1967 parable on the subject of venereal disease titled "The Lips Of Marcia Perkins." The only explanation for why this comic strip was allowed to run in family newspapers is that editors at the time were just too dense to understand it!
Also included is a drop dead funny sequence where Li'l Abner invades the competing strips, "Mary Worth" and "Steve Canyon;" pressbooks, puzzles and ads featuring the characters; and vintage cover stories on Capp from Life and Time magazines. This series of posts is turning into a definitive online book on Al Capp. Enjoy!
I adore Martha Stewart, and I love that she wrote a blog post about her visit to the DMV to get her driver's license. She titled it "A Fun Trip To The DMV." She took a bunch of photos of the office, including the above photo of vending machines that sell ball point pens for 25 cents.
Just 2 days before, I had flown to Maine and there was a window of opportunity between returning home and immediately packing my bags for an expedition to Iceland. I was informed that the computers at the DMV were down, so I escaped into nearby Katonah for a much-needed pedicure and manicure. When I arrived at the DMV at 3:30, the lines were empty and the service was fast and friendly. I was allowed to pay the $42.50 charge by credit card. They seized my old CT license – for reasons, unexplained. My new license is good for 5 years because I am from another state – another reason unexplained. I was told that after the 5 years, when I renew, it will be good for 8 years.
Tor Books is raffling off this gorgeous Asus Mini laptop that's been hand-painted by famed science-fictional artist Donato: all you need to do to win is sign up to get word when the awesome (yes, I've seen it) tor.com website launches:
As a promo for Tor.com, we asked Donato to paint an Asus mini computer which you, yes you, can win! To sign-up, go to Tor.com.
The first time I watched this I realized what makes Donato Donato. There's a point about third of the way through where I thought he was done....and then he keeps painting.
The computer is in my office and is supposed to be on display at ComicCon. It's been hard to bat co-workers away from it. Should it go missing, my list of suspects is long.
A few weeks ago, several blogs reported that I had removed a number of my own posts from public view. I took those posts down more than a year ago for personal reasons that weren’t (and still aren't) appropriate to discuss in public.
I didn't announce that I had taken the posts down when it happened because I didn't think I needed to. When the news came out, though, it became clear that a lot of people disagreed with my decision.
Some of our community here at Boing Boing, and elsewhere around the web, viewed the post takedown as a violation of an unwritten rule of blog etiquette. Many more were frustrated with us for taking so long to respond, and being vague when we finally did. You, our readers, were angry because we weren't communicating with you.
We're sorry we didn't communicate more quickly and clearly. We delayed posting in part because I (and we) were trying to avoid something I feared would become a petty, personal online fight that would violate the privacy of parties involved.
When it became clear this strategy wasn't fair to our community, we were in a poor position to respond: a few of the Boingers were on vacation in remote places with their families, making coordinated communication and action difficult.
Finally, when we did post a response that drew heated comments, we didn't have a way to coordinate with our moderators and join the conversation in a consistent way. We screwed up. And we're sorry.
I'm certainly not going to say I'm glad this whole thing happened, but we did learn a lot. The whole kerfuffle made us realize that the way we work together needs to evolve as we grow. Boing Boing is still the shared personal blog of multiple editors who work together asynchronously with almost no formal editorial process. That's the way Boing Boing began and I hope it doesn't change too much. Each of us has our own opinions and we may not agree with each other. We don't coordinate what we post, and until now, we didn't have a process or protocol for taking posts down.
In fact, it's not unusual for us to take down posts. For example, I might accidentally post something that Pesco hit on a week (or a year), before. So I nuke my post. Or Mark might make a quick post on some big topic, not knowing that Cory is working on a longer, more-informed piece. Very rarely, we also take posts down for personal reasons. It's an incredibly infrequent occurrence, but sometimes one of us feels strongly that it's the right thing to do.
We've learned, though, how much those decisions can impact each other and our readers. So in the extraordinary event that one of us feels compelled in the future to take down any of our past work for non-usual reasons, we've agreed that we'll talk to each other before acting. That way, we can weigh the decision very carefully as a group and consider all of the possible consequences. In the end though, the decision will be up to the person who made the posts. After all, it's his or her work.
But we also do believe that transparency is a desirable goal. So we're exploring a few ideas for providing information to our community when we take down posts for reasons above and beyond the norm (dupes, etc.). If you have thoughts on that, we'd love to hear them.
Thanks for your continued support. Now, let the happy mutation continue....
This weekend, the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project at the Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in NYC will introduce a new location-aware social networking system to track and bring together hackers based on a huge array of matching interests. Conference goers will be given unprecedented ability to connect with new people, find the talks they're most interested in attending, see what's happening and where in real time, and experience and talk about the way RFID technology is changing the world.
The AMD social networking site lets visitors "tag" themselves based on a diverse set of interests. Old-school hackers, network security experts, cryptographers, political activists, law geeks, lockpickers, reverse engineers, bloggers, privacy advocates, and far more–visitors can label themselves with multiple interests, to become discoverable by fellow visitors from around the world with similar interests, in the same room or across the building. Attendees can then use email or text messages to "ping" the people they discover on the site–new contacts and old friends alike.
The AMD site connects visitors to the many talks and events occurring during the conference, too. The same interests tags are used to highlight events and alert visitors to something they might otherwise miss–a vital feature for such a large conference. Attendees can also use the interactive schedule to select events they want to attend, and receive alerts before those events begin.
The site also provides visualizations of activity on the conference floors. Website users can watch the real time positions and movements of people across the Mezzanine, revealing the group dynamics of a massive number of people and instantly identifying the hotspots. Users can also click on any conference room to see its current event, speakers, and attendees.
Grimgarden's "Doomies" are little ceramic fellers shaped like hooded death. Fill them with incense cones and they waft magic stench through your poisoned herbs and carnivorous fly-traps.
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
Update: Geez, I almost missed their "Rebirdy" -- a skull-shaped bird feeder that has the chirpy critters feeding out of the eye-sockets.
Cory visits his favorite comic book store in all the world -- Secret Headquarters, in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles. With shop owner Dave Pifer, he walks us through some of the graphic novels and comics he loves, everything from manga to zine howto manuals to Jodorowsky to Warren Ellis. Cory is particularly fond (as are all of us at BBtv) of the shop's awesome simultaneous tribute to Stan Lee and the Sex Pistols in this t-shirt, "God Save Stan Lee."
Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions on how to subscribe to the BBtv video podcast.
Infinite Matrix editor Eileen Gunn sez, "I've put up a new issue of the Infinite Matrix -- in honor of Cory's birthday and because I have three great stories the world needs to read: a reprint of Cory's fine Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers and two excellent stories by writers from Eastern Europe: Serbian activist and writer Yasmina Tesanovic's charming Cats and Cars at and Ukrainian SF writer Yana Dubinianska's spine-tingling Barge over Black Water. "
Nimby and the D-Hoppers is one of my most widely reprinted stories, and it's one of a very small handful of stories that I hadn't yet published for free online, though it has been released as CC-licensed podcasts and a CC licensed comic. As with the other adaptations, the text is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.
And yup, yesterday was my birthday! I'm 37, which means I'm now in my prime. It sure beats being a total square at 36.
Link
Mary sez, "Jim C. Hines, author of Goblin Quest, has just written lyrics to go with the Gilbert and Sullivan perennial 'Modern Major General' AND he's released them under a Creative Commons license. They are ripe with video potential."
I am the Very Model of a Modern SF Novelist
I am the very model of a modern SF novelist,
I've manuscripts space opera, anime, and fantasist,
I know the kings of fandom and the best flamewars historical
From Andrew Burt to LiveJournal, in order categorical;
I'm very well acquainted too, with matters editorial,
I keep my cover letters brief and never too suctorial,
About rejection etiquette I'm teeming with propriety,
With many cheerful facts about your online notoriety,
I'm very good at worldbuilding and proper use of ansibles;
I know the hyphenated names of beings unpronounceable:
In short, in matters space opera, anime, and fantasist,
I am the very model of a modern SF novelist.
Rachel sez, "Yesterday the Melbourne Museum conducted a dissection of a giant squid that was open to the public. Now the whole 1.5 hour operation can be downloaded or viewed online. "
Link, WMV Link, Coral Cache mirror of WMV
George Dyson, one of my all-time-favorite science writers, has written a short science fiction story for Edge. Bruce Sterling describes it thusly: "Amazingly, this piece reads almost exactly like I would have imagined it. Try to imagine Hugo Gernsback writing "Ralph 124C41+" only Hugo used to live in a treehouse, is a comprehensive scholar of extinct technologies, and has an IQ high enough to boil mercury."
Google was inverting the von Neumann matrix–by coaxing the matrix into inverting itself. Von Neumann's "Numerical Inverting of Matrices of High Order," published (with Herman Goldstine) in 1947, confirmed his ambition to build a machine that could invert matrices of non-trivial size. A 1950 postscript, "Matrix Inversion by a Monte Carlo Method," describes how a statistical, random-walk procedure credited to von Neumann and Stan Ulam "can be used to invert a class of n-th order matrices with only n2 arithmetic operations in addition to the scanning and discriminating required to play the solitaire game." The aggregate of all our searches for unpredictable (but meaningful) strings of bits, is, in effect, a Monte Carlo process for inverting the matrix that constitutes the World Wide Web.
Ed developed a rapport with the machines that escaped those who had never felt the warmth of a vacuum tube or the texture of a core memory plane. Within three months he was not only troubleshooting the misbehavior of individual data centers, but examining how the archipelago of data centers cooperated–and competed–on a global scale.
Michael Geist sez, "Tens of thousands of Canadians have spoken out against Bill C-61 [Ed: the Canadian DMCA] over the past month. In addition to the letters, MP meetings, and town halls, many have created mashups, videos, comics, posters, photos, and other creative art to express their disappointment and concern with Industry Minister Jim Prentice's plan for copyright in Canada. To build on this creativity, the Fair Copyright for Canada group is launching a new YouTube video competition. C-61 in 61 Seconds invites everyone to post a video - whether rant, mashup, or something new - on the copyright bill."
Link
(Thanks, Michael!)
MIT's FreeCulture club has started "YouTomb" -- a graveyard for youtubes taken off the Internet due to copyright complaints.
YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.
More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.
I read in Dispatches From the Culture Wars about Scott Conover, who was arrested for taking a picture of a policeman during a traffic stop.
Conover quotes the police officer as saying "... you took a picture of me. It's illegal to take a picture of a law enforcement officer... if you don't give it to me, you're going to jail".
The arrest was, technically, for pointing a laser at a police officer (the officer claims he thought Conover was pointing a laser at him, but he arrested Conover even after discovering that it was a cell phone, which, y'know, looks a lot like a laser, dunnit). A commenter on the Dispatches blog points out how "The law they charged him under is 39-13-605, which requires that 'the photograph... was taken for the purpose of sexual arousal or gratification of the defendant'."... Seems like a bit of a stretch.
Marilyn sez, "California uses more gas than any country in the world (except US), including China, according to the California Energy Commission's State Alternative Fuels Plan. Another interesting fact: California gas usage has increased 50% since 1988."
Link
(Thanks, Marilyn!)
It's All Too Much is a terrific book that inverts the typical approach to dealing with existential kipple. Rather than helping you find new places and novel ways to "organize" all your crap, author Peter Walsh encourages you to explore why you ever kept all that junk in the first place. Does it reflect a fantasy waistline or a long-abandoned career? What about this "priceless" relic of a late loved one that's been sitting in a moldy trash bag for 10 years? Be honest: what place do these things have in the life that you imagine for yourself? Because, if the stuff you accumulate isn't actively helping get you closer to a life you truly want, then it's getting in the way, and it needs to go. Period.
(
My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.
My pal 
