Attack of the 50-Foot Baby is a set of nesting, stacking cardboard boxes for your toddler to stack up and smash like a vengeful, pudgy, be-diapered goddess. The blocks are covered in dense comic art that reminds me of the Sergio Argones marginalia in MAD Magazine -- a million zillion sight gags on the theme of "Oh God the baby is coming to destroy us all!"
Curious Inventions of Dr. Roberts
Update: All sold out! Here's what you missed
In this odd and eminently enjoyable little video, Neil Gaiman waxes rhapsodic about buttons. It's all in aid of tying in with his new movie Coraline, which opened last night.
Smallest Russian Submarine: Officially Registered as Boat (Thanks, Colin!)
“I was not satisfied with the fate that was laid out for me. I wanted to satisfy myself and to have some respect for my life. If I learned to respect myself, I felt it would be easier to find my niche in life. I didn't know it would work. I just hoped.”His family, particularly his father, condemned him and his submarine flights of fancy, and the longer the construction took, the more he complained. The first test of the sub came in 1984 and it “sank like a stone,” in Puchkov’s own words, breaking a rudder in the process and setting a climate for the early dives, which were always a bit tense. He said of those times:
“I was so distracted watching for leaks and checking all the equipment, that I didn't have time to enjoy it. You don't remember a thing afterward.”
It took three years before he was able to get the submarine to dive and surface. In 1988, he put the reinforced plastic sub in a box on a truck and shipped it to the Tosna River about 15 miles south of St. Petersburg. There, he continued his nocturnal voyages and in 1994, he took to the open sea on a secret cruise to the island of Kronshtadt, a closed military base in the Gulf of Finland.
YouTube Link (thanks, Keith Carunida)
Previously on Boing Boing:
Kid on Drugs
David After Dentist (aka Kid on Drugs), the remixes
[HTRK photo by Emma Pop]
Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.
I love making serendipitous musical discoveries via MySpace. It's amazing how many unique, talented, unsigned bands there are on the site. Okay, they are somewhat overwhelmed by the Tbits of less-than-unique-and-talented bands, but that makes the accidental discoveries all the happier. Musical taste is clearly and utterly subjective, so YMMV, but here are a few of my recent MySpace finds.
Lunabee & Swan I love how bands categorize themselves on MySpace. Belgium/UK duo Lunabee and Joanna Swan describes their music as "Melodramatic Popular Song/Trip Hop/Electronica" and that's pretty accurate. The two artists, Lunabee the musician, Swan the singer, actually met on MySpace. Swan bumped into Lunabee's page (again with the serendipity) and sent her a message saying she wanted to collaborate. A week later, an album's worth of music showed up in Swan's inbox and Lunabee & Swan were born. Their song "Smoke Rings" blew my wig off the first time I heard it... and the 20th time (I gotta get stronger toupee tape!). It's like Annie Lennox on the lower register, Shirley Bassey in the middle, and Prince wailing away up on top. I have to sit up and listen to any band that lists Poulenc, Ella Fitzgerald, and Tod Browning's Freaks as influences!
ZAZA My pal, Pete Kennedy, of the most-excellent psychedelic folk duo The Kennedys, turned me on to these 21st century shoegazers, another duo, this one from Brooklyn. Pete says they've only done a handful of gigs, but they're already generating a buzz, on both coasts. Echoey, ethereal singing over smeared-out gothy soundscapes. The male singer sounds a little like Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips (never a bad thing in my book). One reviewer described their sound as "like drowning with a smile on your face." Yeah. It's like that.
HTRK My favorite "MySpace band" of the moment is HTRK, pronounced "Hate Rock." This trio of young ones from Melbourne, Australia makes a primitive, minimalist form of noise rock (vocalist Jonnine Standish's percussion instrument is a single maraca and a floor tom). They also do some poppier fare, like "Fascinator," the first song to prick my ear. When I started listening to their MySpace jukebox a few weeks ago, Fascinator had 80,000 listens. It's now shot up to over a quarter million. At least some of those are not me. HTRK just released a three-song MP3 bundle "Ha-Panties," which includes the tracks "Ha," "Panties," and "Fascinator." It's tasty, GBP2.97, and deliciously DRM-free.
FBI Investigates $9 Million ATM Scam (via Beyond the Beyond)These people in the photos are believed to be "cashers," low-level players, in a scheme devised from some mastermind -- a dangerous computer hacker or hacking ring authorities fear could strike again.
Here's how it all came down, according to information Fox obtained from the FBI and law enforcement sources:
The computer system for a company called RBS WorldPay was hacked. One service of the company is the ability for employers to pay employees with the money going directly to a card, called payroll cards, a lot like a debit card that can be used in any ATM. The hacker was able to infiltrate the supposedly secure system and steal the information necessary to duplicate or clone people's ATM cards.
"We've never seen one this well coordinated," the FBI said.
Then shortly after midnight Eastern Time on November 8, the FBI believes that dozens of the so-called cashers were used in a coordinated attack of ATM machines around the world.
"Over 130 different ATM machines in 49 cities worldwide were accessed in a 30-minute period on November 8," Agents Rice said. "So you can get an idea of the number of people involved in this and the scope of the operation."
I visited Dharavi with an NGO back in September, and I'm inclined to agree with Charles -- the poverty in Dharavi seems to be of a different character to the poverty elsewhere in Mumbai. Here you see poor children who nevertheless are shod, are playing, attending school, and not begging. Not to say that Dharavi is a paradise or even pleasant to live in -- the toxic fumes from the plastics recycling plants are reason enough to want to raise your children elsewhere -- but that, as compared to government schemes to cram poor people into tower-blocks, Dhravi has a lot going for it.
Charles declares Mumbai shanty town model for the world (via Squattercity)
Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 residents are crammed into 520 acres, contains the attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world's increasingly urban population, he said. The district's use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to "an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to 'warehouse' the poor".
This conclusion angered many who sincerely believe that the Internet is full of pedophiles, and they're attacking the study. danah boyd, one of the researchers, responds:
Now, let's do some math. The National Alert Registry has over 491,000 registered sex offenders on its list. In data collected in December, Pew found that 35% of American adults are on social network sites. If sex offenders were a representative population, we'd expect that 172,000 of them would be on social network sites. Now, I know nothing of who is on that list, but if they were to skew younger or more urban, we'd expect even more of them to be on those sites. Regardless, the number announced by MySpace should not be unexpected or shocking.doing the math on MySpace and registered sex offendersOne of the worst parts of dealing with quantitative numbers of any kind is our tendency to read into them what we want to read into them. We see a number like 90,000 and expect that it's high and outrageous. But it is not more than would be expected by statistical patterns. And it's not an automatic indicator of a problem. We need to know WHO those registered sex offenders are and WHAT they are doing to get a critical assessment of the risk. By focusing solely on the number, we introduce a red herring and, in doing so, miss the whole point of our report: there are children online engaging in risky behavior who desperately need our help. Blocking adults who have raped other adults, while likely desirable in general, does NOTHING to help at-risk kids.
Why are we so obsessed with the registered sex offender side of the puzzle when the troubled kids are right in front of us? Why are we so obsessed with the Internet side of the puzzle when so many more kids are abused in their own homes? I feel like this whole conversation has turned into a distraction. Money and time is being spent focusing on the things that people fear rather than the very real and known risks that kids face. This breaks my heart.
Crowdsourced science: drinking straw gel electrophoresis (Thanks, Meredith!)The DIYbio mailing list (diybio@googlegroups.com) has been hard at work developing molecular biology techniques that are accessible to garage scientists with no budget. The latest development is "keiki gels" -- agarose gel electrophoresis using nothing but a drinking straw, a 9V battery and a pair of alligator clips.
This is an amazing example of crowdsourced science -- the elapsed time between the initial discussion and Tito Jankowski's working proof of concept was approximately three days.
Tybooks on Amazon
Someone gave us a pair and I scoffed, both at the price and the claims the company made. My daughter is seven months old now and to this date nothing has occupied her time as well as our pair of Tybooks. They look like hell, sure, but they have not torn, dissolved, or come unbound.
TyBook - built for the way babies read (Thanks, Jonathan!)
Jason sez, "Inspired by DePauw University's videos, I wanted to explore how I can simulate my own PDP-11 and run the programs from the video. So, I did it and I'm in the process of posting how on my blog.
Later on I hope to add to the series and explore the areas the videos didn't have time for, like running Star Trek.
Right now, you can get a walkthrough of how to compile the SIMH simulator and toggle in a Hello, World program. Enjoy!"
Programming Your PDP-11: Part 0:
(Thanks, Jason!)
Link, and Link. These snips of the president speaking in pottymouth are from his audiobook. They're excerpts where he's reading for a friend he knew, as I understand it. But taken out of context, they are pure awesome. Below, the first known techno remix spotted in the wild. (Thanks, Clayton Cubitt and Wayne de Geere!)
Recently on Offworld, in anticipation of an empty weekend, we wondered, what's everyone watching on the Xbox 360's Netflix app, and gave our top picks for hidden instant watching gems.
We also looked at a tour through the game that broke Tom Clancy's will (and made him decide to start a games studio), heard about new downloadable content for Left 4 Dead, got hot for some Pac-Man oven mitts, heard a hardcore Super Mario remix, and played a literally viral disease spreading game.
Elsewhere we watched Beck take on retro games and chiptunes, played Left 4 Dead in true 3D, saw a real live Duck Hunt trophy, read again about the beauty and the wonder of Gravity Bone, pondered what Apple can do to make the App Store even more usable, and, most wonderfully, saw Obama officially enter the world of Street Fighter (above).
I attended a private screening of a yet-unreleased new movie today, hosted by the director of that movie. At the end of the screening, the filmmaker shared with me that a rough cut of this film had been leaked to BitTorrent, with the screener blurb marking ("PROPERTY OF #### FILMS, DUPLICATION PROHIBITED" or something) clearly placed on every frame. The filmmaker was upset about this and asked what they ought to do, if anything, to try and stem its spread, or deal with whatever unknown damage the leak might cause. Here's the interesting part: their concern mostly stemmed from the fact that this was not the final cut or mix of the film, and the filmmaker didn't consider it a finished work. For them, it wasn't a perfect enough, complete enough, final enough product. And I'm confident this wasn't a faked "leak" designed to drum up publicity. I told them I'd ask someone with expertise, but then thought it might be more interesting to ask all of you. If you were advising this filmmaker, and you knew they wanted to do the right thing by the internet community *and* by the film and all the people who worked on it -- what would you do or not do, say or not say? By the way, the film was amazing.
At the centre of (PCH International) is a comprehensive database of some 900 Chinese companies with world class facilities in and around the Pearl River Delta..."The Remarkable Mr China" (BBC Radio 4) Program podcast (Peter Day's World of Business)
Take an idea to PCH, and his people will help you design the product, simplify it to make it manufacturable, find the Chinese firms to make it for you, and fulfil the orders and get them dispatched.
What role for the Western business in all this ? Well, Liam Casey will do the donkey work in the middle... and your Western company will work at either end of what he calls the “smiley curve”… providing the big idea at the beginning, and the astute marketing at the end.
This is getting very close to a very important new business model that I’m calling Capitalism without Capital.
By putting the cars on a glass slide, and using a... a hacked fluorescence microscope the team was able to see them moving around at room temperature, says Stephan Link, a chemist who led the study, published in the journal ACS Nano."World's Smallest Cars Have Moving Parts"
To verify that the carborane — carbon and boron — wheels actually turn, the researchers built some nano-tricycles and compared them to the cars. The triangles remained stationary, presumably because each of their wheels points in a different direction.
In honor of Oregon's 150th birthday, Portland's Grass Hut Gallery is holding a "Sesquatennial" artist exhibition opening tonight and running through March 1. There happen to be several Yeti/Sasquatch pieces in the show, but I'm particularly fond of this graphite drawing by Carson Ellis.
The ultimate ray gun pen
An absolutely gorgeous ray gun pen by the appropriately named ACME Writing Tools, available mid-February for $130. The barrel separates from the brightly colored, Marvin Martian base as a retractable roller ball. I only wish the handle / stand were less cartoonishly abstract.
Psychologist Jennifer Mather is on stage at TED2009. She has been studying the minds of squids and octopuses. On a scuba expedition she witnessed an octopus build a wall of stone around its home, and she believes that cephalopod molluscs are much smarter than previously thought.
Are we the only intelligent beings in the Universe? Look to the oceans -- they are precious and we have to save them.
Octopuses as intelligent animals is that they are different from us (different branch on tree of live, different evolutionary paths). This makes it interesting to compare how they are smart and how we are smart.
When cephalopod lost shell, they had to come up with some good tricks (to survive) -- exquisite senses and very good brains being the main two.
Shows an amazing photo of octopus camouflage -- they are the real chameleons.
Octopuses have eyes similar to mammalian eyes. They have 8 arms -- "We call them arms, not tentacles, by the way."
What might indicate intelligence -- personalities, play, problem solving.
1. Personalities. Aquarium volunteers give names to different octopuses, because they have different personalities. She read about temperament and starting with observation. You turn your back on the normal scientific procedure we think about, Instead expose animals to common situations, then you run the through and record different behaviors, determine which ones are common, use statistical tools. One thing -- touching the octopuses with bottle brush. Some got mad and fought, some fled. They found three separate dimensions -- active, reactive, avoidant. So there's a background for developing intelligence.
2. Play. What is play? Out of context, fragmentary or repetitious, not immediately adaptive, simple. You won't play unless you are comfortable, well fed, and bored. They gave octopuses a floating pill bottle (neutrally buoyant). Initialy they grabbed it and brought it up to their mouth. After a while, the octopus would squirt a jet of water to the bottle to send it to the water intake, which would make it drift back to the octopus. She did it 20 times. "She's bouncing the ball!" Play is using inteligence, picking up info, storing it for the future.
3. Problem solving. Clams are a problem. They are in an arms race with their predators. Over the millennia, clams get stronger and octopus get smarter at opening them. They have strong arms, parrot-like beak, can secret acid with tooth covered organ to open clams. Scientist wired shut an easy-to-pull-open species of clam, and the octopus shifted its usual opening method (from pulling apart to chipping and drilling).
Octopuses have big brain, but not a highly developed nervous system. They are quick to learn, but equally quick to forget. Why? They have a short life. Sexuality is relegated to end of life span, it doesn't get in the way of their intelligence. They give us a chance to understand intelligence from a different model.
Thelma Golden is on stage at TED2009. She's the executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1993 she co-curated the Whitney Biennial, featuring politically-charged art made mostly by non-white non-males.
The board game Masterpiece sparked her love of art. The game wasn't that interesting to play, but the cards themselves were reproductions of the art musuem's of Chicago's collection. She tacked the cards on her wall -- her first curated collection.
Her work in understanding culture comes from following artists. She grew up liking JJ Walker's paintings (remember how amazing those were?), Jean-Michel Basquiat. Then started studying more work by black artists. (She shows a slide Frank Stella's "black art".)
For 1993 Whitney Biennial she decided to look at artist studio as laboratory, gallery as research institute and exhbition as "ultimate white paper."
Her "Black Male" exhibition -- one painting shows Washington and his soldiers as men on blackface crossing the Delaware, done in paint by numbers style.
She asks: What does it mean to be African American and what can a museum do to answer this for everyone?
She is amazed by way artists can ask questions and address topics of race that go way beyond what is usually discussed in other forms of media.
She is creating a network of artists around world -- beyond Harlem -- focusing in Africa. Learning what they tell us about the future.
I've decided to wind up my guest blogging a couple days early, but I want to thank Mark Frauenfelder for offering me the unique and wonderful opportunity to post here. Thanks Mark.
If any BB readers wish to contact me I am easily findable through makezine.com.
--Charles Platt
The Joker ski-mask is a hell of a thing -- full of all the scary mojo of the iconic character and the implicit creepiness of going about with your face in this state. Menacing and geeky at once, like a flail made of giant polyhedral dice.
The Dark Knight Joker Combination Ski Mask & Winter Beanie
(via Geekologie)
This thing's just great. The manufacturer goes to some length to show you how indestructible it is, and after giving it a good working-over here, I believe it. It was a little hard to get the brim back into shape after crumpling it up, but not impossible, and short of actually incinerating this thing, I'm willing to believe it'll stand up to anything. The canvas is worn as soft as felt, the stitching's strong, and the thing's lightweight.
I don't know that I'd wear it in London winter, but once the sun's out again (2011, I think?), you damn betcha.
Real Deal Brazil
The Real Deal is made in Brazil of recycled canvas tarpaulins from cargo trucks used for transporting goods. Every hat is truly one of a kind as no two are the same. Each hat has its own unique character. Made from various colors of tarp, these hats may have patches, seams, holes, or even Portuguese writing. These hats are hand sewn by Brazilian villagers and reflect the true craftsmanship of the locals. Because the tarpaulins were designed to protect its contents from the rough elements in Brazil, they make perfect covers to shield your cabeça (that's head in Portuguese) from the hot summer sun. Every characteristic of The Real Deal tells a story of its prior life lived as a lonely truck tarp and reveals its journeys through the harsh elements in equatorial Brazil. Here are some examples of the characteristics you could find in your own Real Deal Brazil.
Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. And here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.
Today's Boing Boing Video episode is a quick preview of our forthcoming episodes from the Global Game Jam, around the world. A number of our correspondents, pals, and fellow mutants sent in video from places as diverse as LA, Costa Rica, Australia, Scotland, Israel, and Venezuela. We're digging through the deep well of footage, and digging on all the awesome games people created at the jam, in just 48 hours. Check out the clip above for a taste of what's ahead on BB Video next week! And check out some of the games!
What a treasure.
(Tell you what, if you want to see how to intelligently market creative work online, go and follow Neil Gaiman around for a month or two.)
Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets:
• We considered jamming wooden ear buds into our cochleas.
• Bill Gates unleashed malaria-stricken mosquitoes on Silicon Valley.
• Verizon Wireless did not understand the decimal experience.
• We thought about hard drives on a planetary scale.
• We looked at an interesting concept phone, half Blackberry Storm, half Optimus Maximus.
• Amazon misunderstood the prime purpose of a fleshlight.
• Steampowered R2D2!
• Let that modern day Cyrando de Bergerac, Mr. Brando himself, inspire Tesla-powered love in our hearts.
• We watched Tetris blocks tumble from the sky.
• Rob clued us in on how to make all joysticks wireless.
• Brownlee admired a machinist/inventor's pedal-powered submarine, which he hopes to pilot across the Atlantic.
• Joel admired a steampunk plasma bell jar.
• We discovered that the Vaio P may not be the netbook we all were waiting for.
• Rob horded some weapon pens that can be used even more ably to stab out someone's eyes.
• We pulled out LEGO minifig visors over our eyes and called it a day.
And much more besides! Come read us!
Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.
I think I have one of the coolest jobs in the world. I get to work for Maker Media, helping to create magazines, books, web media, and events that I truly care about, that excite and inspire me. I just got back from the MAKE offices in Sebastopol, CA, where I was helping to put Volume 17 to bed. It's the "Lost Knowledge" issue, pressurized with plenty of steampunky goodness. It'll hit newsstands on March 10th. Last year, I got to lead the team that created The Maker's Notebook. Every engineer, artist, designer, crafter, or other creative type I know has ideas on what would make the ideal blank notebook. We took a lot of this input and tried to incorporate it into our design.
One of the things we wanted to do with The Maker's Notebook was design in hackability. We wanted the book to beg to be customized, extended, repurposed. The cover was designed to look like a cross between a blueprint and an empty storyboard. We created special stickers with which to customize it. We're thrilled by all of the useful, creative, and crazy things users have done with their books. We gave some notebooks to teacher Steve Davee's 4th grade math class to see what they'd do with them. Above is student Aiden's LED cover mod video. Steve has done some crazy-cool hacks of his own, including a binary indexing system, which you can see here. Below are a few other mod projects. More can be found on the Maker's Notebook webpage.
This is an impostor! Kent Barnes Maker-ized his pocket Moleskine by covering it with a paper bookcover he made of the Maker's Notebook. I did one of those jowly cartoon triple-takes when I saw this image on Flickr.
Matt Mechtley's, of Flashbang Studios, notebook, modded at the workshop at last year's Maker Faire Bay Area.
Val Hutchins made a cloth tool caddy that attaches to the cover of her notebook.
MAKE Online Editor Marc de Vinck made a snap enclosure for his book.
Matchboxes from the Subcontinent (via Core77)
Jumbohostel (via Neatorama)
In December 2007, Sigtuna authorities granted a building permit for establishing Jumbo Hostel at the entrance to Arlanda airport. In January 2008, the aircraft was moved to a construction site parking where the first phase of the conversion has begun with the dismantling of the old interior, new paint and new decorations for the rooms. 450 seats are taken out and the plane is sanitized in its entirety. The hostel is built like any house, subjected to the same demands on climate control and isolation. It adheres to all common energy standards. Heating is achieved with an air-air inverter.Summer 2008 the plane was towed to its final destination at the entrance to Arlanda where it was placed on a concrete foundation with the landing gear secured in two steel cradles. Here, Jumbo Hostel are a spectacular landmark as a portal to Arlanda offering a view of the landing strip. No visitor to Arlanda will miss the new hostel!
Lord Goodlad, the former Tory chief whip and committee chairman, said there could be no justification for this gradual but incessant creep towards every detail about an individual being recorded and pored over by the state.Lords: rise of CCTV is threat to freedom"The huge rise in surveillance and data collection by the state and other organisations risks undermining the long-standing traditions of privacy and individual freedom which are vital for democracy," he said. "If the public are to trust that information about them is not being improperly used there should be much more openness about what data is collected, by whom and how it is used."
The constitution committee makes more than 40 recommendations to protect individual privacy, including the deletion of all profiles from the national DNA database except for those of convicted criminals and a call for the mandatory encryption of personal data held by public and private organisations that are legally obliged to hold it.
But the report is silent on proposals from Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for a "superdatabase" tracking everybody's emails, calls, texts and internet use and from Jack Straw, the justice secretary, to lower barriers on the widespread sharing of personal data across the public sector.
In my part of London, we have live smallpox measles and TB scares on a regular basis, because so many parents have been convinced that inoculation is bad for kids that they won't get them their jabs. They're not just risking their children's lives, but the lives of the kids around them -- first, the kids who are too small to get inoculated, and second, the kids for whom the inoculations don't take, who would otherwise be protected by herd immunity.
The science on inoculations is a settled matter. The fact that some vaccinations are given around the same age in which autism symptoms first present means that some fraction of kids will develop autism around the same time that they get their shots. This is not causality, it is co-occurrence. Everyone knows someone whose kid got sick around vaccination time -- but the plural of "anaecdote" is not "fact."
Goldacre wants to systematically rebut every point that this DJ, Jeni Barnett, made on the public airwaves. There is a compelling public interest here that makes this a case of fair dealing -- but the radio station's deep pockets and retained lawyers mean that this doesn't matter.
Two days ago I posted about a broadcast in which their presenter Jeni Barnett exemplified some of the most irresponsible, ill-informed, and ignorant anti-vaccination campaigning that I have ever heard on the public airwaves.Er, “help”. Legal Chill from LBC 97.3 and “Global Radio” over Jeni Barnett’s MMR scaremongering (Thanks, Paul!)To illustrate my grave concerns, I posted the relevant segment about MMR from her show, 44 minutes, which a reader kindly excerpted for me from the rest of the three hour programme. It is my view that Jeni Barnett torpedoes her reputation in that audio excerpt so effectively that little explanation is needed.
LBC’s lawyers say that the clip I posted is a clear infringement of their copyright, that I must take it down immediately, that I must inform them when I have done so, and that they “reserve their rights”.
From GeekDad Project to a Real Business (via Futurismic)
Now this project has gone pro. Our first commercial autopilot, the Arduino-compatible ArduPilot, has been released and our goal of taking an order or two of magnitude out of the cost of an autopilot has been achieved: it's $24.95!Combined with a RC plane, this makes it easy to build a complete UAV for less than $500, which is really kind of amazing. As exciting as that it is, it's also sobering to know that a technology that was just a few years ago the sole domain of the military is now within the reach of amateurs, so we spend a lot of time educating our community on FAA regulations and safe and responsible flying (always under 400 feet, stay within line of site, pilot always able to regain control).
Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.
Back in the early '90s, at print bOING bOING, we all took a shine to a Bloomington, IN cable-access TV show called "J & B on the Rox," or just "Rox" (in Wired, Mark called Rox "the best TV show in America"). It was pre-Vlog, proto-YouTube, Wayne's World meets Michael Moore's TV Nation (on prodigious amounts of herb and alcohol). These guys were good. They made it look effortless. And they never took themselves, or their show, too seriously.
Now, through the reconnective magic of Facebook, I've found my Bartender J again! Turns out, he and B are back to putting out periodic episodes and releasing some cutting-floor specials, like the video seen below. The most recent episode, Fifteen Months of Katrina, is a moving look at B and (wife and Rox regular) Xy returning to their home after the hurricane and trying to make sense in the aftermath.
J & B also have a new podcast, called J & B's Nightcap.
Biologist Robert Full is on stage at TED2009. He "studies cockroach legs and gecko feet. His research is helping build the perfect 'distributed foot' for tomorrow's robots, based on evolution's ancient engineering."
Here's a video of his talk from 2005.
He's back with an update, and his mustache is bigger and better than ever.
His is curious about gecko toes. How can they climb up walls so fast? Their feet have little hairs and they ends have tons of split hairs. They are so tiny that molecular forces create the stickiness.
Now they have synthesized this stuff. It's a "directional adhesive." He showing a video of a woman climbing the side of a building using synthetic gecko feet material.
Problem with robots is that they can't get unstuck with this stuff. But he's solved that. He built a robot that uses the "toe peeling" technique to climb up walls like a gecko. (Here's a video of the Stickybot).
Engineers discovered that if robots don't have a tail, they fall off the wall. The "active tail" functions as a 5th leg and creates stability. A gecko uses its tail to right itself when it falls so it can land on its feet. Video of gecko flying around in wind chamber. It uses tail to guide it around to a landing spot. They learned that geckos glide in nature, too. So they created an active tail for the gecko.
Roboticist Catherine Mohr is on stage at TED2009.
She "works on surgical robots and robotic surgical procedures, using robots to make surgery safer -- and to go places where human wrists and eyes simply can't."
She's talking about surgical robots and surgical vision technology. Surgeons are tailors, plumbers, butchers of medical industry.
History of surgery. How did we even come to believe that surgery -- cutting and reforming -- was OK? Shows picture of ancient trepanated (hole drilled in) skull. Goes back 5k to 10k years. This is the dawn of interventional surgery. How much was intended to be religious or therapeutic? we know that these patients lived for many years after being trepanned.
The itinerant barber surgeon - before age of anesthesia. Patient in pain was a public spectacle. Barber surgeon was almost a form of entertainment. Surgery was done on public in front of big crowd.
1847 -- anesthesia. It gave surgeons freedom to operate, to delve deeper into body. A revolution in surgery. But problem: after surgery, the patients died, of massive infection. Surgery didn't hurt but it killed you.
Aseptic technique. Joseph Lister was thought to be a fool for believing that it was as important for surgeons to wash hands before surgery as after. After a while, the medical community warmed to the idea.
Healthy people don't need surgery, unhealthy people need surgery, but since they are unhealthy, it's harder for them to recover.
Laparoscopy -- small incisions. A lot easier on the body. Much easier to heal. But laparoscopy is hard to learn. Surgeons had to give up 3D vision, wrists, etc. External ergonomics are terrible. Instruments are working backwards. You need to take capability of your hand and put it at the business end of instrument.
Robotic surgery tool -- the DaVinci -- has "wrists" and 3D vision that greatly improve dexterity. She's showing amazing videos of heart and prostrate surgery. Tiny pincers at work.
Limitations -- if you need to reach more places that just one, you need to move robot and open new holes in patient. Becomes time-consuming. To solve this we need to bring camera and instruments through one small tube. She's showing a new surgery tool -- it looks like an HR Giger tentacle with mini tentacles that blossom open from the main trunk. Can inject dyes into cells and the light can make cancerous cells visible.
Ed Note: Boingboing's current guest blogger Gareth Branwyn writes on technology, pop and fringe culture. He is currently a Contributing Editor at Maker Media. Recent projects have included co-creating The Maker's Notebook and editing The Best of MAKE and The Best of Instructables collections.
My friend, DC-area video artist Rob Parrish, posts a weekly video on his site Next to Heaven. Each week, he goes onto Archive.org, sniffs out new raw material, dreams up an idea for a found art video, edits, audio-records, and then on Wednesday, releases a new piece. Some of the resulting videos feel immediate, small, off-the-cuff, others strike much deeper, more resonant chords, and are truly impressive in their impact, given the production timeline. I'm always impressed with Rob's clever use of the found footage. And I love his perverse sense of humor. Given the retro source material, there's a haunting quality to many of these videos, a pervasive sense of loss, faded memories, tragic childhoods, dreams unfulfilled, and dirty secrets unrevealed -- all usually leavened with humor and a healthy helping of the absurd.
Above is Episode 41, about a junkie who replaces his love of smack with drug education films narrated by Paul Newman. Other favorites of mine include the special episode The Tapes of My Father, about a son who discovers that his late Public Access TV producer dad recorded his innermost thoughts over found video footage from the PATV archives, and Episode 49, which has a man reminiscing about his macho childhood of sports and trouble-making while the video shows a young boy timidly putting on his mother's make-up.
A description of Electric Fault Circuit Interrupter (EFCI) on stage at TED2009.
Smoke alarms are great -- they detect fires but don't prevent them. One of main causes of fires is electricity.
How does electricity ignite fires? Faulty, overloaded or misused outlets. 83% of all fires start at loads below circuit breakers (invented by Edison) trip.
By putting a 10-cent data tag (like RFID) in an appliance plug and a reader in the electrical outlet, you can prevent fires. The appliance's safe operating parameters are embedded in the plug. If there's an overload, the power shuts off. Also, outlets are off unless the appliance with the chip is plugged in. That means a kid can stick a fork in the outlet and not get shocked.
Can save thousands of lives and conserve energy.
Waxy's rounded up YouTube clips of the iconic "Ooh-De-Lally" song from Walt Disney's Robin Hood as performed in many languages -- Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, German, Catalan (!) and Norwegian. Top prize for translated title, "Tirly Tirly Truly Truly" (Russian). Though the best song itself is definitely "Durul·lari" (Catalan).
Robin Hood's "Oo De Lally," Translated (Thanks, Andy!)
Louise Fresco, food and agriculture expert is on stage at TED2009. She's making bread as she talks. She is holding up two loaves, one in each hand: Wonder Bread, and artisanal whole meal bread. Asks audience, which do you like better. Only about two people out of thousands say they like the Wonder Bread.
Fresco says that we feel whole meal bread is more real, more honest, more authentic. Why do we feel that whole meal bread has these attributes? Because we connect it to a mythical agricultural past, of Tuscan farms.
We have mythical image of how life was in rural areas in the past. The reality is quite different. These poor farmers had hard lives.
200 years ago we had industrial revolution. It brought us power, mechanization, fertilizer, drove up yields. Horrible things like picking beans by hand is automated. All this is a great improvement. We've enveloped world in dense chain of supermarkets with global trade, we can eat food from around the world.
You may prefer the artisanal bread, but don't despise the white bread. Bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all. It has changed the world.
As food became plentiful it also meant we were able to decrease the number of people working in agriculture. Only 1% of people are farmers. It frees us up to do other things and not worry about food. Never before have so few people been responsible for feeding the rest of the world. And we are oblivious.
Today bread is associated with obesity, which is weird. We have been making it for 10,000 years. The whiter the bread in many countries, the better it is.
How many of you can tell wheat from other cereals? Can you make bread? Do you even know how much a loaf of bread costs? We are removed from our food.
But some people are still struggling for their daily food. Wheat is getting more expensive because meat consumption in China and Asia is driving up wheat prices. Can we find a solution to help them produce more food? Yes, but we need mechanization. It is not good to have small farmer grow rice by hand and work under lousy conditions. We need clever low-scale mechanization to help these small farmers. Fish ponds and horticulture in basements and rooftops.
Ask your government for an integrated food policy.
Now she removes some bread from an over and is sharing it with people in front row.
The incredible statistician Hans Rosling is is on stage at TED2009.
Here's his TEDtalk from 2008.
He's talking about AIDS, and showing an amazing animated graph of the rise of AIDS around the world. Y axis is percentage of adults with HIV, X axis is dollars per person (per capita GDP?) So what factors correlates with HIV infection? High percentage areas have: low condom use, uncircumcised men, older men having sex with younger women, having more than one partner in the same month. Section of Southern Africa with 4% of world population has 50% of HIV-infected persons.
At IDS: Community (via Cribcandy)
Artisan and furniture, product, and interior designer Rob Southcott is showcasing Community at IDS Prototype. A dresser made from “locally produced reclaimed lumber species assembled together in an abstract configuration,” Community embodies Southcott’s belief in diversity. Like a wooden mosaic, the furniture unites interesting and individually distinct pieces to make a statement about both harmony and humanity
The first wave arrived in October 2005, drawing thousands of New Yorkers onto the streets for a lively debate. Was it maple syrup? Caramel? A freshly baked pie? But as quickly as it arrived, it had vanished. Then, last month, the smell returned.New Jersey Plant Is Called Source of Sweet Smell (via Kottke)Both times, the city’s police and 311 information lines were flooded with calls. Many feared bioterrorism cloaked in an pleasant aroma.
On Thursday, the city announced that the mystery had been solved. The source of the odor was a plant in North Bergen, N.J., which processes seeds of the herb fenugreek to produce fragrances.
Anthropologist Nina Jablonski is on stage at TED2009. She is talking about the consequences of darkly-pigmented people moving from high UV areas to low UV areas. If people move to areas where they didn't evolve skin to handle the types and quantity of UV, it can lead to trouble. Light pigmentation in tropics causes cancer and darkly pigmented people will get vitamin D deficiency, which leads to loss of immune function, mood, mental health, and a host of other disorders.
I'm here at TED2009, sitting next to Jennifer 8. Lee, a reporter and blogger for the New York Times. She showed me this image from an 1862 scan of a Lincoln speech that appears to contain an emoticon.
In the transcription of President Lincoln’s speech, which added comments about applause and shouts from the audience was this line:“… there is no precedent for your being here yourselves, (applause and laughter ;) and I offer, in justification of myself and you, that I have found nothing in the Constitution against.”
Bryan Benilous, who works with historical newspapers at Proquest, said the team felt the “;)” after the word “laughter” was an emoticon, more than a century before emoticons became a widespread concept.
Could it be? Was this just a typo, a mistake, or was the reporter, transcriber or typesetter having a bit of sly fun?
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About a year ago, Boing Boing's video production crew was having our weekly content pitch meeting and my colleague Jolon brought up a video project he'd been following called "How's Your News." It was a news program in which the presenters are people with physical and mental disabilities. Some have Downs Syndrome, others cerebral palsy, and so on.
We didn't get around to producing a BB feature, but then just this past weekend, I met with Matt Stone and learned that he and fellow South Park creator Trey Parker are producing a version of How's Your News as a new MTV series. It debuts this Sunday, February 8.
He kindly offered to allow us to take a sneak peek at the first few episodes, and cut together an exclusive preview. That is today's episode of Boing Boing Video.
Matt explained that he and Trey are mostly hands-off with regard to the creative and editorial process on the MTV series, they're more like "godfathers" on the television project. HYN creator and director Arthur Bradford and the correspondents are pretty much in charge. It sounds like MTV has handled the project admirably, too.
When I first saw the internet version, I remember first feeling a little guilty or awkward for laughing at people with disabilities on-screen. But when I watched the MTV episodes in entirety with the BBV crew, I started to feel like I knew these people, and was more comfortable with it the more I watched. Maybe part of the lesson here is that people with disabilities are real people. They don't need me to feel "precious" or "protective" about them. It is okay to laugh with them, and when they are being funny in a comedy series, it's okay to laugh at them, too. Not as people to be pitied, just as people.
Matt Stone tells Boing Boing,One of the first things that Arthur Bradford said about doing How's Your News as a TV show was that he absolutely didn't want to pitch the show to Lifetime or PBS or anyplace else where you would EXPECT a show like this. He wanted to fly into the center of the sun and have the show on MTV. The How's Your News crew is about redefining expectations and the show is by far their best work. It is my favorite show on television beside South Park....Heh. And I asked Arthur Bradford to share some words with us, too. He says:
I think the big question everyone has about our TV series goes something like this "Does this show really belong on MTV? Aren't all those kids going to laugh for all the wrong reasons?" I have so many thoughts about that I don't know where to begin, but let me just say that I think this line of questioning does a sort of disservice to both people with disabilities and the kids who watch MTV. People with disabilities don't really need a bunch of watchdogs looking out for their "best interests". They are most often able to do this themselves and I can assure you our cast is extremely proud of the work they did on this show, as are their families. And the kids who watch MTV are much smarter than we are giving them credit for. They deserve something like this, a show that doesn't assume they can't decide things for themselves.And about Jeremy, the HYN correspondent waving to you in the video frame above and in the middle of the trio below (photo), Arthur says:We had a lot of fun shooting this series. Everywhere we went people would stare at the bus and come up and talk to us. For me, as the director, it was often exhausting and sometimes stressful, like when one of our reporters would have a seizure or shit their pants in the middle of shooting something important. Both of these things happened more than I'd like to recall. But it was overall a pretty magical experience and the fact this this show is now going to air on primetime and be available to so many households across America is something we should all rejoice in. It's a small miracle, really. We're like that guy on the British American Idol, Paul Potts, the car phone salesmen who got up there and shook everyone up with his passionate opera voice. He was pure genuine desire and authenticity without the annoying gloss and it was great to see him break through. That's what you'll see on How's Your News: pure, unpolished gems.
Jeremy Vest is one of our greatest reporters. He is so eager to talk to everyone and he would not even know how to be a fake douchebag like so many people we see on TV. My favorite moment with him was on the red carpet at the Grammys when he blew off all the big pop stars like Rianna and Slash because really wanted to talk to the guy who did the voice for Kermit the Frog. He literally refused to talk to Slash because he was so concerned that Kermit would leave before he got the chance to say hello. For Jeremy, meeting that muppet was the biggest thrill of the night, that and meeting Wolfgang Puck.Here's more on the MTV series, which you can catch on-air starting this Sunday, February 8. Notorious crankypants critic Tom Shales at the Washington Post gave it a good review. I'm looking forward to it.
Roger writes,
After seeing your post on Boing Boing of the Kid on Drugs video yesterday, I was instantly convinced that this kid was destined for greatness. And just how could he achieve greatness? Why, with the aid of METAL! Here's my tribute to the "David After Dentist" video which shows that he's really preparing to take the world of metal music by storm.And below, Josh Ayala and @wifone went the early 90s candyraver ecstasy-fueled route, with David After The Dentist (BadEmpire mix).
The audio-only version (this mix created by @wifone) is growing on me. David After The Dentist (BadEmpire mix): Stream, or Download.
Update: Oh, this one's good, too.
Previously on Boing Boing:
* Kid on Drugs
* Kid on Drugs, the Animated Remake.
Boing Boing reader J. Howe says, "The US Copyright office has an FAQ on protecting an Elvis sighting."
"How do I protect my sighting of Elvis?Video above from 1992's "Live Special: The Elvis Conspiracy."Copyright law does not protect sightings. However, copyright law will protect your photo (or other depiction) of your sighting of Elvis. File your claim to copyright online by means of the electronic Copyright Office (eCO). Pay the fee online and attach a copy of your photo. Or, go to the Copyright Office website, fill in Form CO, print it, and mail it together with your photo and fee. For more information on registration a copyright, see SL-35. No one can lawfully use your photo of your sighting, although someone else may file his own photo of his sighting. Copyright law protects the original photograph, not the subject of the photograph. "
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