Some street artist in NYC is using tile-mosaics to turn the street-level water hookups into a giant Super Mario reenactment!

Seen On The Steets Of New York (via Wonderland)

John Reed writes a long and compassionate piece about Detroit in the Financial Times, suggesting that it has many lessons to learn for America as many other industries fail and the cities built around them have to figure out how to survive. Refreshingly, he puts some effort into puncturing the myth of the greedy auto-worker as the author of Detroit's destruction.

I was at Confusion, a science fiction convention in the Detroit area recently, and I got to thinking that Detroit may be the most science fictional city in the world -- if sf is about the way that technology changes society (and vice-versa), then Detroit, the first New World, world-class city built around a high-tech industry that collapsed, is about as science fictional as it gets.

Detroit may be the archetypal down-and-out rust-belt city, but to call it “dying” masks a more complex reality. Greater Detroit still has three to four million residents, a world-class university next door in Ann Arbor and the bone structure of a great city, as a car-industry consultant with the ear of a poet put it over lunch one day. Why, then, the relentless focus on its failings? Nearly everyone you meet is either weary or angry at seeing their home town made the butt of jokes on late-night television and the subject of anguished political commentary. But no one denies that the region’s property market is abysmal, its finances a mess and its industrial base shrinking at an alarming rate.

Instead, Michiganders, despite being self-deprecating to a fault, make a point their countrymen won’t want to hear: Detroit is no longer the nation’s worst-case scenario, but on its leading edge, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. “It’s like the rest of the country is getting to where Detroit has been,” said Peter De Lorenzo, who writes the acerbic and very funny Autoextremist.com blog. That means that smug mock-horror is no longer the appropriate reaction to the frozen corpse. Instead, get ready for a shock of recognition...

Moreover, many Michiganders – whose parents had been able to send them to college thanks to the middle-class salaries of assembly-line work – felt the Republicans had made United Auto Workers members into hate figures on a par with the “welfare queens” conjured up by Reagan-era Republicans. National newspaper and television reports mostly followed rightwing Washington’s cartoonishly simple version of what ails the American auto industry. “Labour is totally under attack,” said Mike Smith, director of the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University. “And who is it under attack from? The supposedly leftwing media.”

Smith, a former mechanic and self-described “working stiff” turned librarian, is clearly an interested party, but he may have a point. In January, Ford followed GM and Chrysler in eliminating one of the UAW’s most jealously guarded perks, the “jobs bank”, which allows workers whose services are not needed to receive pay by doing course work, community service or – in some cases – just showing up and watching TV. I duly recorded this in a story for this newspaper, and found myself silently cheering the move, one of the conditions of the bail-out. Then I tuned into the news on Detroit’s local Channel 4 station, and listened to an auto-worker pointing out that many people at his shuttered plant were paying their grocery bills and mortgages from their jobs bank money, and did not know how they would replace the income.

The travails of Detroit (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: Detroit Disgrace, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Extremeezine's Flickr stream, courtesy http://passionatephoto.com/

At an anti-gay marriage rally Tuesday in Raleigh, North Carolina, David Gibbs III, the Christian fundamentalist lawyer who fought to keep brain-damaged Terry Schiavo on life support in 2005, publicly expressed his deep-seated fear of machine love. From the News & Observer:

(Gibbs) told rally participants gay marriage would "open the door to unusual marriage in North Carolina.

"Why not polygamy, or three or four spouses?" Gibbs asked. "Maybe people will want to marry their pets or robots."

"Marriage rally draws 1,000"

Here's some brain-scanning humor from the University of Western Ontario's Psych department site:

9. While pouring syrup on your Eggo waffles, you note that you missed a few voxels.

8. Your knowledge of brain anatomy exceeds your knowledge of geography. As in, "The transverse occipital sulcus intersects the intraparietal sulcus near the level of the parieto-occipital fissure" and "The Sahara is in Afghanistan, I think."...

5. Friends wonder how you can run a four million dollar scanner and still fail to program a VCR.

4. You suffer frequent left/right confusion and find yourself saying things like, "Make a left turn at the lights... No, I meant a *radiological* left!"

Top Ten Signs You've Been Scanning Too Much (via Beyond the Beyond

The message of these lovely anatomical armchairs seems to be, "Tain't no sin, to take off your skin and laze around in your guts."

Flow armchair by AK-LH (via Cribcandy)

Jeff Simmermon says:

I've been performing at The Moth, a spoken word/storytelling non-profit with arms in NYC and LA. Essentially, folks perform a 5-minute story (without reading or notes) based on a theme. It's rated like figure-skating -- with teams of judges awarding scores like "9.5" or "8.0". They have the second-largest podcast on iTunes right now, too.

So anyway -- in 2003, I met a woman online. She was from Western Australia, I was living in Richmond, VA. I ended up selling all my stuff and flying over there to meet her in person. Here's the story.

Alvin Buenaventura, publisher of Buenaventura Press, took this photo when he and his posse of cartoonists went to France. You're looking at the cream of the crop here. From left to right: Robert Crumb, Chris Ware, Mellisa P. Coats (of Buenaventura Press), Dan Clowes, and Adrian Tomine.

Plenty more photos here.

Alvin also let me know about two brand new very-limited hand-made book releases from BP:

Swipe File, by Charles Burns.

and

New Character Parade #2 by Johnny Ryan.

BB pal Steven "Invention of Air" Johnson sez, "thought you might want to link to the pretty funny interview I did on Colbert last night, including an excellent little exchange about an imaginary Founder Father named Robert Cornhole who should really have a Wikipedia page."

March 5, 2009: Steven Johnson

Previously:

• Steven Johnson's "The Invention of Air" -- how an eclectic ...
• To do in NYC: Shepard Fairey + Lawrence Lessig + Steven Johnson on ...

Irene sez, "A user nicknamed 'hadopi' put up the whole French Internet for sale on eBay (starting price: 0.01 Euro), in a humorous stunt against the new Internet legislation project debated in the French parliament. This project is named by its acronym, HADOPI, and it contains the same kind of provisions as the one defeated recently in New Zealand." Réseau internet français contrôlé, idéal pour industrie, Mirror (Thanks, Irene!)

I hope you join us at BlogTalkRadio for our first Make: Talk call-in show. The call-in number is: (646) 915-8698

The Economist says legalization is the least harmful drug policy. (But it won't happen, because the criminals don't want it, law enforcement doesn't want it, and the prison systems -- one of the few growth industries remaining in the Great Recession -- don't want it.)

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

“Least bad” does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.

Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution

Barbara Demick of The LA Times reports on Sun Yaoting, China's last living eunuch (Left, standing with his biographer, Jia Yinghua).

In 1911 when he was eight years old, his father castrated him with a razor in preparation of "an imperial life of riches." It didn't quite work out as his father had hoped.

After the Communists came to power in 1949, Sun and other surviving eunuchs were despised as freakish symbols of the feudal past. He was nearly killed during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, and his siblings were so fearful of persecution that they threw away his bao, or treasure: the severed genitals that eunuchs kept pickled in a jar so they could be buried as complete men.

It was not until the final years of his life that Sun was recognized as a rare living repository of history. A biography based on hours of interviews in the years before his death in 1996 was recently translated into English. The book arrives as a museum dedicated to eunuchs, built around the tomb of a 16th century eunuch, is undergoing a major expansion. It is scheduled to reopen in May.

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

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Les Claypool apparently has an thing obsession with pigs.

Boing Boing Video cohort Matty Kirsch captures another interesting conversation with Les Claypool, now we explore the rock legend's preoccupation with swine, and the presence of porcine symbolism in his work.

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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. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

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(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

The Mayor of Mount Holly turned me on to these surreal music videos from the Uncharted Zone's YouTube Channel. Songs by amateur singer-songwriters include "Gray Days," "Will I Ever Get Out of Debt?" "My Parachute Won't Open," "Charlie's Shoes."

The spirit of these singer/songwriters coupled with the video handiwork of Phil Thomas Katt has totally motivated me to spend the next week indulging myself and introducing you to the world of Song Poem Music. Stay tuned!

Some of the tunes are quite catchy!

Residents of California's Central Coast experienced a sonic boom Wednesday morning but nobody knows the source. The Federal Aviation Administration reviewed their data and came back empty-handed. According to FAA spokesman Ian Gregor, it's possible their system may have missed a plane flying supersonic. From the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

The mystery has spurred its share of conspiracy theories. On the Sentinel Web site, readers comments suggested the boom was E.T.'s return, an intercontinental missile that North Korea, or test runs of new, secret U.S. Navy jets.

"It was a chemtrail weather modification program jet making rain for you," a reader going by the handle "sameold" wrote.

"The easiest answer is probably right. I'm going with aliens," commenter "jarbee" wrote.

"Sonic boom remains a mystery"

This incredible sculpture is by Vancouver-based artist Dirk Staschke. It's titled "Premonition" (10" x 28" x 6", ceramic and mixed media). Dirk Staschke (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

UPDATE: In the comments, TALIA adds, "For the interested, this sculpture and other Staschke works are currently on exhibit at the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia, through 4/2."

One of the best sessions I attended at last weekend's Convention on Modern Liberty was the panel on children's rights, mostly because of the fantastic presentation from Samantha Dimmock from the Children's Rights Alliance for England, in which she delivered the findings in a new report called "Another Perspective: How Journalists Can Promote Children's Human Rights and Equality." This is a really meaty study on the systematic vilification of children in the English press, and the effect that this has on public opinion. It includes recommendations for journalists who cover children's issues, and is endorsed by the National Union of Journalists. Another perspective: How journalists can promote children’s human rights and equality (PDF)

The KZ Xtreme Defense Pen appears to be designed for stabbing people with:

# 6061 Aircraft Grade Aluminum
# CNC Machined.
# Type II Class 3 Hard Anodized
. # Ergonomic Design Provides Superior Grip and Comfortable Texturing.
# Threaded Cap.
# Slip Free, Knurled Center.
# Heavy Duty, 1/16 Inch Stainless Steel Heat Treated Pocket Clip

KZ Xtreme Defense Pen (via Schneier)

Nothing says geekmacho like a fistful of chunky silver drum machine rings.

Power On Self Fist

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's spotted this superb little USB-toy-hack:

Oh Gizmo's Evan Ackerman plugged four USB Cat Tails into the USB Cow Hub. This cuddly abomination--which has 8GB of storage--is the result.

USB cow with furry tentacle legs

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

According to Yeni, these scrumptious Obama snacks were banned in Indonesia because they were marketed without an expiry date. Silly Indonesians! Everyone knows that Obama expires on Nov 4, 2016!

YLKI Minta BB POM Bandung Segera Tarik Snack Obama (Thanks, Yeni!)

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

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Les Claypool is a man of many dimensions. Known for gathering an eclectic mix of talented musicians from around the world, Les has fronted a number of projects including the Frog Brigade, Colonel Claypool's bucket of Bernie Brains, Sausage, and Electric Apricot.

But, when Les visited the Boing Boing Video studio, we asked him about the band he didn't get to play for. In 1986, before Primus came into fame, Claypool auditioned for a heavy metal band called Metallica after their bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a tragic bus accident.

BB Video pal Matty Kirsch got the inside scoop on all things Les: past, present, and future. Since boingers seemed pretty jived about the interview we posted earlier in the week, we thought we'd give you a little more Les love.

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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. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

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(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

Over 2,000 US doctors have joined a service that supplies them with EULAs for their patients to sign, EULAs that forbid the patients from writing bad reviews of their treatment online:

Segal said such postings say nothing about what should really matter to patients — a doctor's medical skills — and privacy laws and medical ethics prevent leave doctors powerless to do anything it.

His company, Medical Justice, is based in Greensboro, N.C. For a fee, it provides doctors with a standardized waiver agreement. Patients who sign agree not to post online comments about the doctor, "his expertise and/or treatment."

"Published comments on Web pages, blogs and/or mass correspondence, however well intended, could severely damage physician's practice," according to suggested wording the company provides.

Segal's company advises doctors to have all patients sign the agreements. If a new patient refuses, the doctor might suggest finding another doctor. Segal said he knows of no cases where longtime patients have been turned away for not signing the waivers.

Doctors are notified when a negative rating appears on a Web site, and, if the author's name is known, physicians can use the signed waivers to get the sites to remove offending opinion.

Docs seek gag orders to stop patients' reviews (via Futurismic)

Danny sez, "Naomi Novik, the author of the excellent (and Peter Jackson-optioned) Patrick O'Brian-meets-Anne McCaffery historical fantasy series, Temeraire, has announced that Del Rey is putting it the first volume as a free, DRM-free, PDF download! Novik's series is perfect for this. I know a lot of people who love Hornblower Napoleonic barnstormers, but who might be put off by the dragons: now's their chance to get drawn into this historical fiction on the sly!"

So I am very very happy to announce that my publishers have gotten onto the pixel-stained technopeasant bandwagon, and you can now find His Majesty's Dragon available as a free download at Del Rey's brand-new Suvudu Free Library, along with many other fine works including Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb, Settling Accounts: Return Engagement by Harry Turtledove, and Blood Engines by T.A. Pratt. \o/

His Majesty's Dragon now available online!

Her Majesty's Dragon on Amazon

Here's a massive, haunting collection of photos from Pripyat, Ukraine, the industrial city that housed Chernobyl's workforce. It's been an abandoned radioactive no-go zone for some 23 years now, gradually sinking into ruin, and it just gets more and more beautiful and melancholy.

Ukraine, Pripyat. 2009

Rogier van Bakel had fun finding these books on Amazon.

Recently on Offworld, teenage superhero team The Superf*ckers dropped in to review Guerilla's just released PS3 shooter Killzone 2. The 'f*ckers are easily my favorite comic James Kochalka's ever done (just above this official Hulk comic), so I'm super happy to see them come aboard alongside his Monster Mii series.

Elsewhere, One More Go columnist Margaret Robertson turned briefly away from videogames to investigate Werewolf, or why playing games can give you hairy palms, and we looked at Computermusic4kids, a brilliant looking museum exhibit from Marieke Verbiesen that works as as both a history lesson and a baby's-first-chiptune-maker.

We also saw an original game coming from the team that ported Quake 3 to the iPhone, watched the nominees for scene.org's demoscene awards, confirmed that PopCap's Plants Vs. Zombies will feature actual plants, and started drawing entries for their Peggle art contest.

Finally, we listened to Anamanaguchi's new 8-bit punk EP, drooled over the best Fallout 3 shirts ever made, wished more games came with a 'hug' button, geared up for The Beatles: Rock Band, geared up to torture ragdolls in a new iPhone game, and, wonderfully, saw that recently featured indie fave Jumpman will also be coming to Apple's device.

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco. 

My friend Andy's literature blog recently pointed to this essay by Pat Holt, about how book publishers lose tons of money printing hardcover books. Publishers see them as expensive promotional copies that they need to print in order to get the reviews and interviews that sell profitable softcovers later.

But to use a trite formulation, publishers of hardcover books must realize that they aren't in the printing printed object business, they're in the talking-stick business. We have a shared general public dialog, but because there are more people with things to say than the public has time to hear, we need some object to confer attention-- like the talking stick around a campfire. In our culture, this object is the hardcover from a major publisher, which ideally makes a single timely point to inject into the public discussion.

Here's something less expensive that I think could replace hardcovers. Each publishing house puts a video billboard in a protected, shared area of Times Square or similar that's dedicated to showing the authors/books currently being promoted. I know outdoor advertising in NYC is expensive, but one sign has got to be cheaper than thousands of hardcovers plus distribution. If the signs are properly imbued with significance, which the industry could easily do, they would accomplish everything that a hardcover run does.

The book industry would tell book reviewers, talent coordinators, etc. that the signs are the new hardcover. In other words, this is the pool of people we're putting out there to make the rounds in the media, and other people will be covering them and people will be thinking about them at the same time that you are. Meanwhile, aspiring authors should want to see themselves up on one of those signs. They should be framed with appropriate gravitas indicators (marble, columns) and designed by famous artists.

According to Pat Holt, publishers fear that reeducating the audience away from hardcovers is impossible. But I think it would happen quickly if all the major publishing houses unveiled their signs at once with some fanfare and ribbon-cutting. It would be a major cultural event, and would get plenty of free coverage.

The signs would also establish a site for publishers to compete against one another, telegraphing how well they are currently doing, by things like how big their sign is, how well-maintained, how state-of-the-art the display technology, and any other ways of showing off how much money the house can publicly burn on image.

LATE ADD: With the "single timely point" etc. I'm just talking about nonfiction.

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco. 

I love the idea of NuRide, although I've never used it myself. Anyone have some first-hand experience? It's a ridesharing system that hooks up drivers with passengers via the web, and it's running now in a few cities. The way they get past the axe-murderer problem is by having participants sign up via their employers or schools. Maybe the reasoning there is that if employees or students do go psycho, at least they'll be traceable?

Two things that would help would be to put it on mobile devices and get rid of the requirements for joining. I expect that when API's for mobile phone services come out, which someone told me should happen within a couple of years, an open system like this will be written that anyone will be able to use. This would mean way more people using it, which means way more rides offered-- and at some point it would reach a tipping point where people use the service casually, without planning ahead, figuring that they'll be able to get a ride back from wherever they are pretty easily. You could just rely on it the way people in some cities rely on being able to catch a cab.

If so, some custom would likely bubble up to make it worthwhile for the person giving the ride, probably some system for estimating gas and toll expenses. As the classic 70's dashboard sticker warns, "Ass, Gas, or Grass: Nobody Rides for Free." (NuRide rewards drivers with gift cards from participating retailers-- maybe they get money or tax breaks for promoting clean air.)

As for the axe-murderer problem, I think it's less of a liability and insurance issue if it's freeware tapping into a publicly hosted database, rather than a single company owning and running the system. And on the user side, I think there are enough people out there who would trust their own judgment whether or not to get in the car. But I suspect that it might find trust and acceptance faster if it started out only running on Blackberries.

Great Guardian piece about Chinese gold farming, an elusive and fascinating and weird phenomenon:

For thousands of Chinese workers such as Li, "gold farming" is a way of life. Workers can expect to earn between £80-£120 a month which, given the long hours and night shifts, can amount to as little as 30p an hour. After completing his shift, Li is given a basic meal of rice, meat and vegetables and falls into a bunk bed in a room that eight other gold farmers share. His wages may be low, but food and accommodation are included.

These virtual industries sound surreal, but they are fast entering the mainstream. According to a report by Richard Heeks at Manchester University, an estimated 400,000 Asian workers are now employed in gold farming in a trade worth up to £700m a year. With so many gamers now online, these industries are estimated to have a consumer base of five million to 10 million, and numbers are expected to grow with widening internet access.

These figures mean big business. The gold farming industry may be about playing games, but these companies take their work seriously. At Wow7gold, a sophisticated division of labour splits workers into different departments, including production, sales, advertising and research. What's interesting about this "virtual division of labour" is that traditional concepts of "men's work" and "women's work" still apply. While young, largely unskilled "playbourers" such as Li spend their days toiling in the virtual field, highly skilled female graduates receive higher salaries working as customer service operators.

Welcome to the new gold mines

(Image: Anthony Gilmore)

Fred sez, "Today, Uncensored Interview, a video producer and licensor of musician interviews, is releasing thousands of videos from its interview footage archive under the most permissive CC license Attribution. All of the videos are available via download in Ogg Theora, the free and open video compression format. Under CC-BY, users of the content are only required to give attribution to Uncensored Interview as the content source. The site is also creatively using our CC+ protocol to help users purchase permissions outside the scope of the Attribution license, such as the right to use the video unaccredited or for endorsement of a commercial product. Check the link for more info and check out a cool interview with Matthew Dear discussing file sharing."

Uncensored Interview Releases 1000+ Creative Commons Theora Videos (Thanks, Fred!)

This gentleman held a woman hostage for ten hours. His weapon? A Sega light gun. Rob has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets. "Hostage held for 10 hours with Sega light gun"

On Friday March 6th at 12pm Pacific, Dale Dougherty and I will be hosting the first episode of our new live call-in show, Make: Talk. Our guest are Gareth Branwyn, who edited the "Lost Knowledge" section of MAKE Vol. 17, and Jake von Slatt, who designed and built the Wimshurst Spark Generator shown on the cover.

To listen to the show, you can click the player above tomorrow at noon, or visit the show page at BlogTalkRadio. We welcome your calls at (646) 915-8698.

You can also subscribe to the podcast of the show here.

MAKE Volume 17 goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene, makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine, an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts, a "Florentine Flask" siphon coffee brewer, and a tea cup-powered Stirling Engine. The section will also cover watchmaking, letterpress, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th century technologies. Our guest is Gareth Branwyn, who edited this volume's special section. We'll also talk with Jake von Slatt, creator of the Victorian-era Wimshurst Spark Generator that appears on the cover of our current issue.

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco.

I have just a few days left of guestblogging and more ideas than I can fit, so here's a list of some. For all of them, I'm thinking super-short here, just a few paragraphs each, outlining the "and here's why..." part. If you want to read any of these, please post in the Comments, and I'll write them up. Just one reader's expression of interest is enough to put me to work, and if no one cares, I'll pick myself.

A) What is a crackpot?

B) My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering.

C) Was Jesus a comedian?

D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures.

E) We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem.

F) Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition.

G) Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others.

H) Poetry will become popular again.

I) "Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's.

J) The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential.

K) Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship.

L) Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry.

M) Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability.

 

Happy Harry made a terrific "reanimation" of The Watchmen as if it was a Saturday morning cartoon. (Follow the link and click "Watch This Movie!") Saturday Morning Watchmen (Thanks, Joel Johnson!)

Vancouver-based painter Ryan Heshka takes inspiration from Golden Age science fiction pulp covers. He has a show opening March 14 at Miami's Harold Golen Gallery. Above is a sneak preview of startling works from the exhibition, titled "Electro-Wonders"; click the images to see them larger. Ryan Heshka (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

According to Cool Tools, the best source for Neodymium Iron Boron (NIB) super magnets is "Mr. George the SuperMagnetMan." He's a charming fellow, wont to saying things like, "These magnets have caused more blood blisters than any other magnet I have."

His prices are the best on the net. His selection is vast: no one else has the stock he has or the variations in size of commonly available shapes. This is no exaggeration or hype. He's got stuff you can't get anywhere else and is constantly adding new items, like axially- and diametrically-magnetized NIB wedding rings and radially-magnetized ring magnets. He has magnets so large they are dangerous (fortunately he has put videos on YouTube that show you how to safely handle these monsters -- with large leather welding gloves and a special wooden wedge and a 2x4!). He also sells magnetic hooks, pyramid shaped magnets, magnetic jewelry, teflon coated magnets, heart, star, and triangle magnets. You can even get powdered magnets that act like iron filings on steroids! You name it he's got it. Most magnets are N45-N50 grade, the highest strength you can buy.

Don't miss Mr. George's video of supermagnet crashes, where he smashes limes and grapes.

At Music Machinery, Paul Lamere posts about his search for drummers who use a click track, an electronic metronome that helps the musician avoid tempo deviations. Paul wanted to see if he could use software to identify which drummers use click tracks on recordings. The graph above on the left plots the natural tempo deviations for The Beatles' Dizzy Miss Lizzie. For comparison, the graph on the right shows the "unnatural" lack of tempo deviation on Green Day's "American Idiot." Now, this analysis surely isn't an exact science and there's an interesting discussion about the project following Paul's blog post. "In Search of the Click Track" (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

A cleverly-placed sticker changes the meaning of this road sign.

BB pal and former guestblogger Bruce Stewart sent along this slippery little geometry brain teaser. Click the image to see it larger.

Alfred Poulet wrote the book on foreign bodies found in people's bodies. Literally. His two-volume set from 1880, titled "A Treatise on Foreign Bodies in Surgical Practice," is up for auction on eBay. Click the images above to see larger. From the item description:

* The books describe, for example, a case of a woman who had been experiencing vaginal bleeding for several months, but which failed to respond to conventional treatments. After direct observation, the patient was found to have a live leech in the vagina [after removal of the leech, the doctor recommended her to use an underwear or a cork stopper when going to the river for a bathe]. Leech died of starvation after removal.

* There are other cases in which spoons, cups, needles, glass bottles, hair brushes, avocado pits, beans, snails, or a variety of insects, arachnids, or fish were removed from different orifices of the human body.

A Treatise on Foreign Bodies in Surgical Practice (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

Over at Boing Boing Offworld, Brandon has the details on this clever Ghostbusters/Pac-Man t-shirt. Glenn Jones' Called for Help T-shirt (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

This is beautiful! I think it is from Indonesia. From the eBay listing:

I saw this at the flea market and it was drawing so much attention, I knew I should buy it before it got snapped up. The hand tooling on this thing is amazing. It is covered with fancy designs and also heavy equipment, including a bulldozer, road grader, dump truck, and crane. There is a large eagle on the front over the nameplate, which reads "C.L. Aldrich". On the back is a nameplate which reads "Atlas". The condition is excellent, though it could use a little cleaning. The liner is in good condition as well. This is a standard McDonald Mine safety Appliance Co. hardhat that has been laboriously hand tooled into a one of a kind work of art. On top it is inscribed Kota Gede Yogya with the initials NR. Kota Gede/Yogya is a region in Indonesia widely recognized for it's fine silver craftsmen. The initials NR are probbably those of the artist.

More pics here: Hand-tooled aluminum hard hat

"If Mirrors Could Speak" is a super creepy educational film from 1976 in which misbehaving kids are presented in clown make-up.

In hopes of keeping kids' attention, social engineering films would often use supernatural elements to make their points. In this film, we see a magic talking mirror that reflects bratty kids as clowns. Most of the misbehaving kids understand how their behavior is disruptive and make amends. Surprisingly, one kid doesnt care if he is a "clown" and continues being a jerk probably for the rest of his life.

This film is included in archive.org's stupendous "A/V Geeks Film Archive"

Hey there Boingdom -- I'm en route to Cotonou, Benin as I type this, and will be meandering around several countries in West Africa for a few weeks. I hope to capture some special things to share with you. In my not-very-connected absence, my Boing Boing Video colleagues Jolon Bankey, Derek Bledsoe, and Wesly Varghese will keep our daily original video programming rockin', and we're planning some super rad new stuff for later in the month, together with all the Boingers. More on that soon, in another post. Producer Derek Bledsoe will be blogging each day's BBV episode while I'm on the road, and today's ep is a very interesting feature about Darfur. Hope you enjoy all they're going to publish while I'm traveling, and if you have any recommendations, questions, or thoughts to share on what I ought to be paying attention to (or pointing camera/microphone at) in the region where I'll be, please share in the comments!

Above, a snapshot I took of the door at the Temple of Pythons, in Ouidah, Benin, back in 2007. Ouidah is the spiritual heart of Benin, and is considered an important historical center of Voudun ("voodoo") tradition.

Remember the Groove Armada "Download MP3s from their new EP via Bacardi and maybe win an iPod Touch courtesy of Boing Boing Video" contest? We now have a winner. BB commenter NiCaprio, whose followers on the bliveshare site can be seen here. Thanks for participating, everyone, and NiCaprio -- we'll send the prize to you soon!

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

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For all the charity and humanitarian aid that's been poured into the Darfur region, and all of the celebrities pleading for change -- it seems nothing has changed. People are still dying, atrocities continue, and the war worsens. This sense of futility is what makes the project we're sharing with you today so interesting.

The ultra-low-budget documentary "Christmas in Darfur?" follows the challenges two amateur filmmakers (and their limited crew) face as they attempt to make a film about what it was like for aid workers to spend their holiday season in this war-torn African desert. Boing Boing Video guest correspondent Sean Bonner interviewed the film's director Jason Mojica about that experience, and we bring you that conversation today, along with clips from the finished film.

Driven by the desire to understand the gap between all the global attention to Darfur and the worsening conditions there -- and with no experience in filmmaking, or any connections in Africa -- the filmmakers' guileless approach takes them deep into the refugee camps of Chad and Sudan.

"Christmas in Darfur?" is about an hour long and available online for anyone to freely view, embed, or dowload. You can watch the full film online at christmasindarfur.org. And you can make a donation to the filmmakers, if you are so moved -- they're still trying to recoup the costs of making the film. Look for the PayPal link on the left side of this page.

UPDATE: According the the AP two British aid agencies working in Sudan, Oxfam GB and Save the Children UK, have had their licenses revoked and have been asked to suspend operations only hours after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir.

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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. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

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(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

Marilyn sez, "Urban Camouflage: imaginative use of military ghillie suit where you look like a tree, local vegetation etc. Funny videos! Another guy disguised to look lie a pile of boxes that has tumbled from shelves in the warehouse area. When he starts to shuffle away it's funny!" Shown here: "person disguised as pile of colored paper at Ikea, next to display of same."

URBAN CAMOUFLAGE (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Jonathan sez,

Peter Cowhey (UCSD and now the Senior Counselor at USTR) and Jonathan Aronson (USC) have a new book out from MIT Press. It can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license.

Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation explains why global information and communication markets matter, why change is needed, and what should be done.

I was an early reader of the book in draft and was very impressed -- this is good, insightful scholarship.

Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets (Thanks, Jonathan!)

Since the 1930s, IBM has not only created adding machines, computers, and the like, but also collected them. They apparently have an amazing historical collection of "counting and reckoning tools and devices," some of which can be checked out online. Joel has the details over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Seen here is a Hahn Calculator from 1774. It could multiply, divide, add, and subtract up to values with 12 digits. "IBM's 'Antique Attic' Gallery"