Rich sez, "This is not for the faint of heart, but a friend and I recently wrote a 120 page murder mystery game for 8 daring role-players. It's called 'The Little Engine That Could Kill.' The game consists of 8 short stories, each of which details the perspective of a character who may have been involved in a somewhat gory murder that has occurred on a transcontinental train in 1932. Everybody reads a story and then plays their character as they wish, using what they know to try to figure out who did it. The true murderer, of course, must lie to avoid being caught. The characters are over-the-top and super-suspicious, and, the plot is ridiculously complicated - nobody we've seen has been able to figure out the whole thing so far. We've posted it free on Scribd under a CC license. Hope you enjoy!"
Fun stuff!
You waddle through the Bar Car
into you room. You waddle past the Violinist who is sitting on your bed red-faced and angry. You
open the door and waddle forward with a last desperate step as your lungs burn with every breath
and you see the Barman entering the Magician’s quarters. Your sweaty fingers clasp the bottom
corner of his white apron, but they are too wet and slippery and you are too drunk on capitalism and
whiskey to maintain your hold. The Barman pulls himself into the room and swiftly closes the door.
But you are out of control. Your weight is propelling you forward and you can’t stop in time. You
crash into the firm metal door and crumble into a pile of flesh and bones – more flesh than bones --
and the voice of Adam Smith, now wheezing and hacking with exhaustion, whispers “A true
capitalist would tear down barriers to entry. A true capitalist would. A true capitalist. Capitalist.”
You shove your flabby shoulder against the door, but you are shoving against more than just
a steel barrier. You are shoving against fair trade, shoving against the public school tax, and shoving
against...no, you can’t say it, but you can think it. You think, “I am shoving against the the not-for-
profit charity. You shove with the full force of thought conviction, but your weak shoulder bounces
off the door and your bulky body makes a soft wet thud against the cool tile floor...Mr. Smith, are
you there?...Mr. Smith?...You call to him through the darkness of your mind, but he’s not there
anymore and you pass out.
Writing in the Washington Post, Bob Woodward quotes a senior Bush official saying that a high-value prisoner at Gitmo was subjected to torture and can't be prosecuted:
The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."
"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.
Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.
Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge" to call it torture, she said.
Livejournaller Crisper points out that January 27th (Lewis Carroll's birthday) is the fifth annual "Rabbit Hole Day," wherein bloggers and journallers change their blogging style for 24h. I'll be getting off an overnight flight returning from the awesome Cryptic Confusion science fiction convention outside of Detroit that morning, but who knows, maybe I'll whomp up a post or two about my personal life, pets, or similar on the cab ride back into town...
January 27th is the birthday of Lewis Carrol, author of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Alice fell down a rabbit hole into a place where everything had changed and none of the rules could be counted on to apply anymore. I say, let's do the same: January 27th, 2005 should be the First Annual LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day. When you post on that Thursday, instead of the normal daily life and work and news and politics, write about the strange new world you have found yourself in for the day, with its strange new life and work and news and politics. Are your pets talking back at you now? Has your child suddenly grown to full adulthood? Does everyone at work think you're someone else now? Did Bush step down from the White House to become a pro-circuit tap-dancer? Did Zoroastrian missionaries show up on your doorstep with literature in 3-D? Have you been placed under house arrest by bizarre insectoid women wielding clubs made of lunchmeat?
Let's have a day where nobody's life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let's all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what's there. It will be beautiful.
Servotron from the Sprite Stitch Board spent four months creating this fantabulous Zelda: A Link to the Past map in cross-stitch form. It measures 36.5cm by 32cm. Now I want a Torah-sized scrolling cross-stitch of all the Super Mario levels!
Slashdot submitter Kdawson has good news: " A high-profile task force representing 49 state attorneys general was organized to find a solution to the problem of online sexual solicitation. But instead the panel has issued a report (due to be released tomorrow) claiming that 'Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.' The report concluded that 'the problem of child-on-child bullying, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.'"
Well, good news if you're worried about sexual predation on kids. Not so good if you're worried about bullying. But of course, now that we know that kids are more threatened by the (less-sexy, less-mediagenic) scourge of bullying than the (incredibly scary, totally mediagenic) risk of sexual predation, we'll divert funds and resources to the real risk, right?
Right?
The 278-page report, released Tuesday, was the result of a year of meetings between dozens of academics, experts in childhood safety and executives of 30 companies, including Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and Facebook.
The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants and are already at risk because of poor home environments, substance abuse or other problems.
The April, 1957 issue of Mechanix Illustrated predicted that New York's slum children would escape "gang wars, fiercely fought with knives and zip-guns" by moving to high rooftop baseball diamonds:
There, a few yards from the tenements where they live, on their very roofs, in fact, is a regulation-size baseball diamond with real springy turf! But the kids aren’t interested just now–they played ball all afternoon. Instead, they enter the locker room and in a few minutes are cavorting noisily in a big, broad and very cool swimming pool. Afterwards, they troop onto the ball field, where chairs have been set up, and watch a movie under the stars.
What’s it all about? “This magic land for kids doesn’t exist in my city,” you say. No, it doesn’t–yet!
But it darn well could! It could exist in your town and in hundreds of other communities throughout the nation. Every city could construct huge, all-encompassing playgrounds and recreation centers, using the enormous, readily available space now going completely to waste on the rooftops of their congested areas!
Consumerist has a reprint of a supposedly real apartment-for-rent ad from Craigslist that has been repeatedly pulled off the service. It's hard to believe that a landlord could be this much of a self-caricature, but stranger things have happened (well, maybe not the ID bracelet and exercise yard thing). Real or not, it had me rolling in the aisles.
Electricity
* Heat – Maintained at 21 degrees with lock box to prevent unauthorized tampering. Additional heating available for $20.00 per extra degree of heating per month. You may not use your oven to heat the apartment. If you do, you will be fined $50.00 per occurrence.
* Air conditioning – Maintained at 25 degrees during the summer with lock box to prevent extra cooling from being dispensed. Additional cooling for sale for $20.00 per degree of cooling requested per month.
* 25" Zenith color television set with basic cable service - INCLUDED IN RENT!
* Wireless internet (with content filter applied to block forbidden/immoral websites) - INCLUDED IN RENT!
* Provision of coin laundry services - You will have your own personal coin laundry washer and dryer machines. Washers and dryers are paid using a token system. Tokens can be purchased through the landlord. Washer tokens cost $4.15 each and dryer tokens cost $3.60 each. You are not allowed to use foreign currency or slugs in the washer and dryer. Violators will be fined $100.00 per infraction.
CLEANLINESS: You are responsible for the cleanliness and orderliness of your apartment. Beds are to be made before leaving your suite, countertops must be wiped down, and you must remove all trash. Upon inspection, if the tenant's basement suite is not clean, the cost of cleaning services plus a fine of $100.00 will be levied.
LIGHTS: The lights in your basement suite and in the day room are not to be tampered with. If a light needs repair, report the condition to the Landlord.
WAKE-UP: Wake up will be at 5:30am each morning. All ceiling lights in the suite will be turned on automatically.
LIGHTS OUT: Ceiling lights in the suite will be turned off at 11:30pm.
CONTRABAND: The following items are considered contraband – alcohol, illegal drugs, tobacco, weapons, lock picking equipment. If any contraband is discovered to be in your possession, you will be subject to a minimum $1,000.00 fine. In addition, your items will be confiscated permanently. Second offense – you will be evicted without notice. A bailiff will escort you and your belongings off the premises. Your security deposit will not be returned.
Mark sez, "I brought a few Edison Cylinders in for the elementary kids we're coaching for a Maker-like school competition called Mind Games here in Richmond, VA. (Innovation, compare to iPhone, etc). Since they'll be returning to the idea later I thought some pics would save the 100-year old pieces a grubby-fingered death. That's where the 35-cent price floor jumped out at me. I knew he was brutal about IP, but dayyum, international price cartels too?"
Patented in Great Britain, Germany, France and other Countries. This record is sold upon the condition that it shall not be re-sold to or by any unauthorized dealer or used for duplication, and that it shall not be sold, or offered for sale, by the original, or any subsequent purchaser (except by authorized jobber or factor to an authorized retail dealer) for less than 35 cents in the United States, nor in other countries for less than the price given in the current Edison catalogues of the country in which it is sold. Upon any breach of this condition, the license to use and vend this record, implied from such sale, immediately terminates.
Someone flew a payload of something into Elmley Prison in Sheerness, Kent, using a RC helicopter. Whatever it was, it's been ingested or hidden, because no one can find it. Not bad!
A spokesman said: 'A remote control helicopter was flown into the grounds of HMP Elmley on December 23.
'As a result of this, a search of the prison grounds and an accommodation block were carried out and nothing was found...'
'Using a mini-helicopter to get contraband into jails is unprecedented. When officers spotted it they nearly fell off their chairs', a prison source told the Sun.
'It could have been drugs or a mobile phone in the package. It is possible it was a dummy run.'
Jonathan sent us his 1-Up mushroom bike-helmet covers, which are guaranteed* to give you an extra life in the event that you get hit by a truck on your push-bike.
In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.
More importantly, the permissive CC-BY license means that the footage can be used by anyone including, rival broadcasters, documentary makers, and bloggers, so long as Al Jazeera is credited.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Brownlee has the details on this Atari 400 stuffed with a DIY analog music synthesizer. I like how none of the knobs is labeled. "Atari 400 goes analog synth"
While your thoughts are being filled with images of Felix Adler (the Jell-O clown), take a look at this.
This is a photo of a flower arrangement sent by the folks at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus for the memorial service this week of Wayne Scott, a former circus clown who for years made all our shoes for us.
My latest io9 post takes a look at the coolest robots, androids, and cyborgs of Pre-Golden-Age SF. These include: Tiktok the Mechanical Man of Oz. The biological "robots" (an original coinage) who rebel against their human masters in Karel Čapek's 1921 play, "R.U.R." Futura, the evil fembot star of Thea von Harbou's "Metropolis"; and Sola, a female android who refuses to kowtow to her lustful inventor. The Nyctalope, the first cyborg superhero, star of a series of French pulp novels from the 1910s-20s. And Professor Jameson, whose brain is transferred into a mechanical body 40 million years after his death, in a story that inspired Isaac Asimov's benevolent robots. PLUS: A complete list of 19th and early 20th-century fictional robots.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz built this prototype robotic exoskeleton to amplify the strength of the wearer's arms. Noninvasive electrodes on the skin detect the neural activity in muscles and translate those signals into movements of the robot arms. Lead researcher Jacob Rosen says his latest exoskeleton provides 95 percent of a human's natural range of motion. From UCSC:
"People with muscular dystrophy and other neuromuscular disabilities could use the exoskeleton to amplify their muscle strength, and it could also be used for rehabilitation and physical therapy," said Rosen, an associate professor of computer engineering in the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
"One of the major challenges in this field is to establish an effective human-machine interface, or 'bio-port,' between the operator and the wearable robot, such that the robot becomes a natural extension of the human body," he said. "This bio-port may be established at the neural level, allowing the human brain to control the wearable robot with the same type of signals that it uses to control its own actuators, the muscles."
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
My Institute for the Future colleague Anthony Townsend is collaborating with Outside.in's John Geraci in a new effort for hacking the urban environment. DIYcity is having its first NYC meet-up tomorrow, January 14, at 7pm at the Project for Public Spaces. I'm really looking forward to how the project evolves! From the overview:
Intro: How do you want to reinvent your city?
Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?
DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them.
It's a demo of my dad's new Voice Box (harmonizer/vocoder) as performed by a pair of really talented folks I found via YouTube (I found Jack and Nataly when researching user-generated videos for the new EHX site).
The Voice Box's harmonizer is vaguely like Songsmith, in that you feed it a mic and an instrument, and it can then create multipart vocal harmony -- the vocoder is totally different, it give more of that robotic man-machine sound.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
The magnificent Mark Ryden has a long-awaited solo show of paintings opening February 7 at Tokyo's Tomio Koyama Gallery. The exhibition, titled "The Snow Yak Show," will run until February 28. Kirsten Anderson posted a sneak preview of a few pieces at her Write Some Good Blog. Kirsten and her partner-in-crime Kenny Montana will head to Tokyo for the opening and plan to report on BB about their adventures. "Yakity Yak Ryden's Back"
Here's a little peek at a page from Robert Crumb's forthcoming Book of Genesis, a literal adaptation from the first book in the Old Testament. It's been years-in-the-making (Here's a 2004 Guardian article about it). The only other book I'm looking forward to with as much excitment as this one is Harvey Kurtzman's Humbug anthology.
The long-awaited publication of Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis, an adaptation of the Bible story, which Norton will be publishing in Fall 2009. I had the privilege of seeing some of the pages in France two years ago, and the scope of the work has haunted me ever since. I’m sure the religious right will be all up in arms with cliché horror that a quote unquote “cartoonist” has defamed their sacred cow, but Crumb is taking this work very seriously, and Genesis is some of his best work.
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts has an exhibition called To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape. New Scientist has a 14 images from the show. Beautiful. Shown here: "The Ice Dwellers Watching the Invaders" (around 1875) by William Bradford.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
In 2006, we posted about the Institute For Figuring's collaborative project to crochet a handmade coral reef. It's come a long way. The Crochet Coral Reef is on display at Santa Monica's Track 16 Gallery until February 21, along with the Toxic Reef, made from plastic trash. From the press release:
One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland Australia, in a riotous profusion of color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile marvel that it may well be gone by the end of the century. In homage to the Great One, Christine and Margaret Wertheim of the Institute For Figuring have instigated a project to crochet a handmade reef, a woolly testimony that now engages thousands of women the world over.
Vast in scale, collective in construction, exquisitely detailed, the Crochet Reef is an unprecedented, hybridic, handicraft invocation of a natural wonder that has become, in itself, a new kind of wonder spawned from tens of thousands of hours of labor.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
This photo has been making the rounds online on Spanish and French "paranormal" blogs. Is it a bird? A toy? An insect? Or something much much... freakier? Loren Coleman weighs in with a bit of Fortean skepticism at Cryptomundo. "Carnivorous flying mammal?"
Glyn sez, "Passengers who buy a London train or tube ticket would automatically be giving their consent to be searched, under proposals now under consideration."
Senior British Transport police officials told MPs today that they wanted to change the railways' "conditions of carriage" to close a loophole that means officers using mobile knife-detecting arches at stations have no legal power to search someone who sets them off unless they have a reasonable suspicion that they are breaking the law.
The late Rufus Hussey shows off his respectable beanshooter (slingshot) skill in this video, probably made in the early 1990s. Watch him throw a quarter in the air and ding it with a rock, and shoot a Japanese beetle off a leaf.
Rufus Hussey - The beanshooter man
Videogum has some funny things to say about this commercial for Microsoft's Songsmith. The technology actually looks kind of neat -- you sing anything you want and the program creates bland instrumental music to match your vocals. But the commercial itself is hilariously clunky.
In 2009, even the lamest cultural contributions have some kind of underlying self-awareness. Like, even the people who work for Bill O’Reilly, or the SkyMall catalog, are aware that what they work on sucks. But a job’s a job and they probably find a way to have fun with it (especially at the SkyMall catalog.) So that’s why this REAL commercial for Microsoft’s new Songsmith software (you sing at it and it creates horrible musak to accompany you) is completely insane. Not only is it apparently earnest and not a parody, self- or otherwise, it seems like it comes from a bizarro parallel universe where irony was never discovered. It’s like Microsoft found some kind of home-schooling Christian commune in the woods and hired them to make their commercial.
(Flash embed above, MP4 download here.)Television host and gadget-o-phile Drew Carey visited with the Boing Boing crew in Las Vegas to roam the blinking, beeping halls of CES 2009. He was there with his lovely fiancé, and her three year old son, Connor. Today's episode documents Connor's search for talking robots and "tiny cars I can ride in." Along the way, Drew stops at the Intel booth to check out a $47,000 VR racing system that puts you in the driver's seat on famous racetracks around the world -- the system includes topographically accurate maps, down to the pebble, of famous tracks.
This image, drawn in ink on heavy paper, and annotated "3/4 in. connectors," was in a box of papers and files that I shipped from my storage locker in Toronto. It's incredibly familiar, but I have no idea what it is. Anyone recognize it?
Update:
The mystery is solved! It was an icon drawn for a UI for a FirstClass BBS at ConnAd, an ad agency I was CIO at. It was drawn by Tara Tallin, and implemented by Michael Hainsworth! And yes, it was based on Silent Running.
The excellent faux-educational brit comedy series "Look Around You" launches on Adult Swim this Sunday Jan 18th, at 1 am. (Thanks, Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz)
Conrad sez, "I discovered that my parents bought ten of the most popular national papers in the UK the day after the September 11th and stored them in the attic, so I decided to take photos of the front pages and put them on Flickr. It's interesting to see the tabloid reaction compared to the broadsheets."
Newspapers of September 12th 2001
(Thanks, Conrad!)
Fee sez, "The government releases the 1911 census in the UK today, three years ahead of the normal 100 year embargo.
The website allows family historians to search for ancestors using names and birth dates, and provides a lot more information than previous censuses, including the length of marriage, number of children, including those who have died, and more accurate information about places of birth.
That's the upside: the downside is that it costs 10 credits to view a transcript, and 30 credits to view the actal census return filled in by an ancestor... and 60 credits cost £6.95.
As a friend said, it seems a bit odd that the tax payer can be asked to pay for the original collection of the material, and then stiffed to this extent for access to the information."
_-_The_Remorse_of_Orestes_(1862).jpg){kind=link}