I know nothing about Bitter Sisters' cocktail mixes -- I don't drink hardly at all (puts me straight to sleep) and for all I know, this stuff tastes like gasoline. But the new packaging, designed by Shane Crawford, tickles my desiderata bone. Sure is purdy.
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
I didn't watch AMC's remake of The Prisoner when it aired last November, but I was delighted to see that all 17 episodes of the original 1967-1968 British series are still viewable in full for free on the AMC site. If JG Ballard wrote a TV series, I'd imagine it would have been something like The Prisoner. For those who aren't hip to it yet, the show is a trippy psychological drama about a former spy held captive in a mysterious resort-like prison. The Prisoner video player(AMC, apologies if non-US viewers are shut out)
Murray sez, "I recently launched a podcast at the UK-based harmonica website www.harpsurgery.com. The episode here features five young players aged 14-18 (with one 22-year-old to mess up our average) who are playing WAY beyond their years... and in some cases, pushing harmonica-playing into dark scary places where it was never meant to go.
The podcast is a little ragged but the playing is great. I thought it pertinent to send this through after Roger Daltrey's shabby harp solo at last night's Super Bowl show. Any one of these kids could destroy Roger Daltrey with a single fog-horn like blast from their instrument. All he'd leave behind is a smoking pair of hush puppies."
Alan sez, "A Japanese company is producing gramophones with natural touches such as bamboo needles."
The player is produced by world-class hobbyist supplier Gakken, and the quality shows. This gramophone supports all record sizes, features speed and tone adjustment, and even lets you record music! No file formats to worry about, no batteries to replace, and the warm, nostalgic sound of analog - this just might be the perfect music player.
Morgunblaðið, Iceland's oldest newspaper and most-visited website (now co-edited by the former prime minister and head of the central bank) has just announced an anti "deep linking" policy saying that Icelanders aren't allowed to link to individual pages on the site, only the front door. Which is to say, the people of Iceland can no longer talk about any news online unless it happens to still be on the front page of the newspaper. Ah, there's the commitment to public service that makes journalism so critical to a free society! (Thanks, Halli!)
The Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition takes place March 12-14 in Emeryville, CA. Organizers promise "the best elements of traditional science fiction and fantasy conventions, [combined] with the passion, ingenuity, and hands-on workshops of Maker events, in a steam-powered, neo-Victorian setting that spans the 1830s through the early 1910s, from the cultured salons of gaslit London to the rugged coast of San Francisco." Sure sounds fun. I'm delighted to see a number of folks we've covered on Boing Boing before, including Jon Sarriugarte, Kimric Smythe, and The Neverwas Haul Crew in the "kinetics" portion of the event.
Standard vaccine injections, done with a 1-in.-long needle, aren't as effective in obese patients. Instead, they need a longer needle to get the same level of immune response. Researchers aren't sure why, but it's possible that fat prevents shorter needles from delivering the vaccine directly into muscle, where it has better access to immune cells.(Via Ivan Oransky.)
The whole American food system, from farm to fork, accounts for about 10% of the energy we use in this country. Of that, the largest single portion, 32%, is the energy involved in household food storage and cooking.
Put it another way: If we reduced agricultural energy use by 5%, nationwide, we'd save about 20 trillion British Thermal Units of energy a year. Them's no small potatoes.
But if just 5% of American households got a more efficient refrigerator, we'd save 54 trillion BTU.
I'm a contributing editor here at Boing Boing. I also have a blog (TokyoMango), a book (Urawaza), and I freelance for Wired, Make, the NY Times Magazine, PRI's Studio360, etc. I'm @tokyomango on Twitter.
The food and the concept may be repulsive to many (ok screw it, by "many" I mean "me"), but what gets me the most is the Sad Sexy Nurse waitress, at far right in the 'shopped image above, photo courtesy of the Florida ABC affiliate TV station WPBF. Sexy nurse, why you so sad?
Fred from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "Paul Sweeting, one of the smartest analysts covering Hollywood's collision with the Internet, does a great job reminding us of the real reasons behind the recent spate of layoffs at Sony Pictures. 'Hitting the snooze button when the alarm goes off doesn't mean that what happens in the meantime is beyond your control. It means you're asleep.'"
The shift in consumer behavior toward rental? That was a function of wholesale pricing and the consumers' perception of value, which are entirely under the studios' control. If 40,000 supermarkets in America were selling new release DVDs for $8.99 by the checkout counter, how many consumers do you think would be lining up at the Redbox kiosk in the parking lot? How many supermarkets do you think would let Redbox on the premises?
Don't believe me? Then how is it the studios were previously able to alter consumer behavior from rental to purchase when they introduced the (comparatively) low-priced DVD to replace the high-priced VHS cassette?
San Francisco's famed science museum, The Exploratorium, recently transformed into a giant cocktail lab for an evening fundraiser. The Science of Cocktails featured interactive exhibits and presentations demonstrating the physics, chemistry and biology of cocktails and drinking.
Presentation topics ranged from "Ice and Thermodynamics in Cocktails" to "Anatomy of a Hangover". I also studied the effects of vodka on gummy bears. Image above right.
Verizon Wireless is said to be filtering HTTP traffic to/from boards.4chan.org (all image boards). From status.4chan.org: "After an hour and a half on the phone, we've received confirmation from Verizon's Network Repair Bureau (NRB) that we are 'explicitly blocked."
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Cass Sunstein, Administrator of the White House's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, recently suggested that the feds should "cognitively infiltrate" conspiracy theorist hang-outs and anti-government groups online. Over at Huffington Post, former BB guestblogger Arthur Goldwag, author of the fantastic book Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, lays out why the government "shouldn't resort to secret agents and bought-and-paid-for claques and shills and ringers to promote its ideas." From HuffPo:
Sunstein's proposal was not issued under the auspices of the government, but in an academic paper. Co-authored with Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule and published in The Journal of Political Philosophy in 2008 (it can be downloaded as a PDF file here), "Conspiracy Theory" surveys the existing scholarship on the origins and characteristics of conspiracy theories and contemplates whether or not governments should try to neutralize them. In general, it takes a social sciences approach, arguing that conspiracy theories are neither legitimate political ideas nor symptoms of a psychological disorder, but are rather the inevitable distortions of closed-off, self-reinforcing belief systems. Using government agents to inject "cognitive diversity" into those communities, it suggests, just might provide the body politic with an antidote to the thought contagions they inspire.
I'm a contributing editor here at Boing Boing. I also have a blog (TokyoMango), a book (Urawaza), and I freelance for Wired, Make, the NY Times Magazine, PRI's Studio360, etc. I'm @tokyomango on Twitter.
Best SNL skit since Black Flag was still together. Dave Grohl? More like Dave LOL. Video at Hulu, and alternate link which may or may not work for non-USA viewers. Or maybe this one. Sorry, region-blocking sucks. Alternates welcome in comments. (thanks, Sean Bonner)
Collector of anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities.
Researchers have used brain scans to communicate with individuals in total vegetative states. Scientists at the University of Cambridge asked "yes" or "no" questions of the patients which they answered by imaging one of two different activities: playing tennis, or just moving around their house. Depending on what they were thinking, different regions of their brains lit up. From New Scientist:
"I think we can be pretty confident that he is entirely conscious," says Owen. "He has to understand instructions, comprehend speech, remember what tennis is and how you do it. So many of his cognitive faculties have to have been intact."
That someone can be capable of all this while appearing completely unaware confounds existing medical definitions of consciousness, Laureys says. "We don't know what to call this; he just doesn't fit a definition."
Doctors traditionally base these diagnoses on how someone behaves: if for example, whether or not they can glance in different directions in response to questions. The new results show that you don't need behavioural indications to identify awareness and even a degree of cognitive proficiency. All you need to do is tap into brain activity directly.
The work "changes everything", says Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, who is carrying out similar work on patients with consciousness disorders. "Knowing that someone could persist in a state like this and not show evidence of the fact that they can answer yes/no questions should be extremely disturbing to our clinical practice."
One of the most difficult questions you might want to ask someone is whether they want to carry on living. But as Owen and Laureys point out, the scientific, legal and ethical challenges for doctors asking such questions are formidable. "In purely practical terms, yes, it is possible," says Owen. "But it is a bigger step than one might immediately think."
I'm a contributing editor here at Boing Boing. I also have a blog (TokyoMango), a book (Urawaza), and I freelance for Wired, Make, the NY Times Magazine, PRI's Studio360, etc. I'm @tokyomango on Twitter.
This sign, spotted by James Fallows of the Atlantic in the Marina district of San Francisco, reminds me of that scene in Clueless where Alicia Silverstone donates her skis to the Pismo Beach Disaster.
BirdBox is a physical bird box that turns an iPhone or iPod Touch into a nesting-box cuckoo alarm clock. Touching the clock face reveals the interior of the birdbox, whilst the alarm gently wakens you with the soundand sight of the nesting birds.
The BirdBox app is free and is on the App Store, whilst Birdboxes are for sale.
On January 28, 1986 a retired optometrist named Jack Moss captured the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster on his Betamax camcorder. He never showed it to anyone, but told his pastor, Marc Wessels, about it shortly before he died from cancer in December. Wessels, who is also the executive director of the Space Exploration Archive, found the tape and added it to the Archive.
It is believed to be the only amateur film in existence of the world's worst space disaster, recorded in an era before mobile phone cameras, when even home camcorders were rare.
...
"It took a while to find someone with an old Betamax video player, [said Wessels] then I had to watch four hours of gameshows and sitcoms from the 1980s, but when I found the Challenger film my reaction was that people really have to see this."
Former BB guestblogger Marina Gorbis, exec director of Institute for the Future, considers how small groups/organizations can achieve scale and do good by sharing resources. Essentially every person (and every company) has a surplus of something that other people want/need:
Not everyone has a large house to trade or a large sum of money to donate but look around you -- we have excess of stuff, talent, ideas, information--in our homes , in our communities, and in our organizations. We are over-producing and under-utilizing resources all over the place. Witness the recent example of clothing retailers like H&M deliberately mutilating and tossing unsold clothes in the trash. Many experts in retail concede that the practice is not uncommon--for some unfathomable "economic" reason it makes more sense to destroy clothes than to release them into a local community. The situation is even worse when it comes to food. We over-produce and waste a lot of it. According to the USDA, just over a quarter of America's food -- about 25.9 million tons -- gets thrown into the garbage can every year. University of Arizona estimates that the number is closer to 50 percent. The country's supermarkets, restaurants and convenience stores alone throw out 27 million tons between them every year (representing $30 billion of wasted food). This is why the U.N. World Food Program says the total food surplus of the U.S. alone could satisfy "every empty stomach" in Africa. How about empty stomachs in our own communities?
The list goes on an on. We have surplus of space--many commercial buildings, schools, corporate and government spaces are underutilized, while many small organizations and individuals are struggling to find spaces for their work. We also have excess of talent--musicians, artists, designers, educated unemployed people, young and old--needing audiences, venues to work in, or contribute ideas to.
I'm a contributing editor here at Boing Boing. I also have a blog (TokyoMango), a book (Urawaza), and I freelance for Wired, Make, the NY Times Magazine, PRI's Studio360, etc. I'm @tokyomango on Twitter.
I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo last week where I was seated in front of some very interesting hanging art. It wasn't the only thing about the decor that was conspicuously phallic...
As case classification goes, the BookBook, offered in black and red for 13" and 15" laptops, would fit in the 'hardback leather' category. But where, pray tell, does it go under Dewey? An iPad edition is planned, too. Wouldn't a real book, cut hollow and appropriately modified, do the trick for less than the $80 price? [TwelveSouth]
I've just posted a new short-short story to my podcast: "Sensored" was commissioned by the UK Open University's computer science department for use in My digital life (TU100), its ubiquitous computing course. It's licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. I'm pleased with how it worked out, and I'm honoured to be a Visiting Senior Lecturer in the OU's comp sci department.
I'm a contributing editor here at Boing Boing. I also have a blog (TokyoMango), a book (Urawaza), and I freelance for Wired, Make, the NY Times Magazine, PRI's Studio360, etc. I'm @tokyomango on Twitter.
Sometimes, a bag full of bite-sized, custard-filled, Hello Kitty-shaped pancakes is all you need to be happy. At this storefront in Harajuku, a woman in a pink bandanna in a small pink Hello Kitty-ed out room takes your order through a Hello Kitty head-shaped window with a giant pink ribbon. When she hands you the bag full of Hello Kitty pancakes, she says: "Please take your Kitty-chan!"
Why do Hello Kitty-branded businesses always have to go for overkill?
Mamma always said you can do anything you put your mind to. But that's both a blessing and a curse. Science has made some amazing strides in medicine, but where minds—and money—aren't applied, progress sputters.
Chagas is a parasitic disease spread by a bug. Somewhere between 8 and 20 million people—mostly in the Americas—are infected. No one knows for sure. Most of the victims are poor.
A little over 100 years after the parasite that causes Chagas was first discovered, this disease is still difficult to diagnose, treatment regimens are complicated and fraught with side-effects and 20,000 people die from Chagas each year. The best hopes are prevention campaigns, and a new generation of drugs that researchers hope will be easier to take.
I thought you might be interested in this video from a recent Kim Stanley Robinson talk in which he describes life in the present as a science fiction novel we all collaborate on. This is an excerpt from a pair of talks he gave at the Duke in January; the entirety of the other talk is available here. Here's a transcript of the first part of the video:"
KSR: I think it's very true that we are living in a science fiction novel that we all collaborate on, and it's because everything that science fiction was about through its historical named period, the twentieth century, has kind of come true. And also we live in a world that is so intensely structured by science and technology that we can't get out of it. If we were to get out of it would still be a science fiction move, the retreat to the farm. So it's hegemonic, you can't escape it, we're in that world created by science and technology.
And also there's this intense sense of futurity, in that if you opened up your newspaper or laptop tomorrow and it said,"They've cloned six South Koreans successfully and they're all named Kim," you would believe it, there would be no surprise there. Anything could happen. You could say, well, we just got a signal from Alpha Centauri, there are intelligent aliens there, they sent us the code for pi and the Pythagorean theorem. There's no reason to disbelieve that, either. So we live in this world of anticipation of strangeness, of change, rapidly accelerating change.
I came through the Atlanta airport today, and you know those speedwalkers that are underneath the various terminals? When I was young there was this famous bestseller, Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. Future shock: we don't talk about that anymore because none of you are shocked. And that's because the shock comes at the moment you step on the walkway and you feel the drag between one acceleration and another. At the moment you're being accelerated to a new speed there's a little gravity drag on your body, and that's the moment of "future shock"--1972 or '3--and when you're walking with the walkway that's moving at a different speed there's no shock there. You simply are moving at that speed. So now we're moving a new historical speed that's faster than the historical speed was when I was a kid. That moment was marked by this book Future Shock, and it's an archaic term, obsolete, because there's nothing in our experience now-- I don't think there's anything that could happen that would shock us, because we're moving at such a fast speed now, and because we're conditioned by science fiction.
GC: What about the other end of the runway?
KSR: When you slow down? Well, that's another--you feel that too. This is like when your connection to the Internet goes out for three days, or your phone line, or when your cell phone dies--these moments when you're suddenly not having the sixth sense of the cloud--
For years, it's been called the fuel of the future. But I wasn't expecting THIS vision just yet.
Hydrogen fuel cell technology was first embraced a few years back by carmakers eager to go green. The big obstacle? Hydrogen at the pump wasn't available, and was expensive to produce.
But one inventor hope to change that.
Hubbing through Hong Kong, Taras Wankewycz showed me a table-top hydrogen power station that can extract hydrogen from water to be used in fuel cells.
The Hydrofill uses electricity from the outlet (as well as solar panels if you're particularly green), and produces hydrogen that can then be stored in refillable cartridges. The system can pump out 2.5 watts of power.
(And brushing Hindenburg nightmares aside, the company insists the technology is safe.)
Murray sez, "I recently launched a podcast at the UK-based harmonica website 
, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.
The shift in consumer behavior toward rental? That was a function of wholesale pricing and the consumers' perception of value, which are entirely under the studios' control. If 40,000 supermarkets in America were selling new release DVDs for $8.99 by the checkout counter, how many consumers do you think would be lining up at the Redbox kiosk in the parking lot? How many supermarkets do you think would let Redbox on the premises?
Video above: 
Sunstein's proposal was not issued under the auspices of the government, but in an academic paper. Co-authored with Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule and published in The Journal of Political Philosophy in 2008 (it can be downloaded as a PDF file here), "Conspiracy Theory" surveys the existing scholarship on the origins and characteristics of conspiracy theories and contemplates whether or not governments should try to neutralize them. In general, it takes a social sciences approach, arguing that conspiracy theories are neither legitimate political ideas nor symptoms of a psychological disorder, but are rather the inevitable distortions of closed-off, self-reinforcing belief systems. Using government agents to inject "cognitive diversity" into those communities, it suggests, just might provide the body politic with an antidote to the thought contagions they inspire.
Best SNL skit since 
As case classification goes, 
I've just posted a new short-short story to my podcast: "Sensored" was commissioned by the UK Open University's computer science department for use in 
