(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com
"Ript" is so technologically advanced, it comes with a HOWTO, bitches:
Ript, via Book of Joe.
Cross-stitch ninja's photostream (via Craft, thanks, Alice!)
No word on whether the Obamabot will allow release of the photos of the waterbotting on Pleasure Island, a no-go zone for civilians for several years now.
We're just sorting out our Christmas at Disney World plans -- our first WDW trip with the baby -- and I'm looking forward to this. There is something eerily cool and compelling about all those hyper-detailed robots nodding and twitching at you from out of the uncanny valley while Maya Angelou tells you about the War Between the States.
Barack Obama Joins Hall of Presidents at Disney's Magic Kingdom (Thanks, Patricio!)A remarkably lifelike Audio-Animatronics figure of President Barack Obama enters the spotlight in a revised and refreshed Hall of Presidents show when it reopens July 4 in Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World Resort. The addition of the countrys 44th chief executive is just part of the most significant update to this classic attraction since its 1971 debut in the parks Liberty Square.
Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin helped develop the show with Disney Imagineers. In this video they talk about the Hall of Presidents: A Celebration of Libertys Leaders.
Last year on July 4, we were walking down the beach in Santa Monica and we saw a pap stop his car in traffic, jump out, run up to the passenger window of a car and start shooting. It turned out Courtney Love and a friend were in the car, enjoying a drive.
We chased the pap back to his car and paced him in the snail-traffic with our cameras, snapping pictures of him as he crawled to the next traffic light.
The Times of India is calling it "India's Gay Day." A ruling on Thursday overturned a colonial law nearly 150 years old that describes sex acts between two persons of the same gender in India's capital city as an "unnatural offense."
Homosexual acts were punishable by a 10-year prison sentence. Many people in India regard same-sex relationships as illegitimate. Rights groups have long argued that the law contravened human rights.A clarification from an earlier iteration of this blog post: The ruling only applies to India's capital city of Delhi. Sex acts between two men or two women is, if I'm reading this right, still a crime in the rest of India.
India media hails gay sex ruling (BBC). See also: Mumbai gays' long fight for recognition (BBC). Below: image from WAtoday: "A eunuch kisses another member of the transgender, gay and lesbian communities as they celebrate the Indian court decision." (thanks, Antinous!)
(Thanks, Tony!)Arnie Miller, a palentologist at the University of Cincinnati who was chairman of the convention, said he hoped the tour would introduce the scientists to "the lay of the land" and show them firsthand what's being put forth in a place that has elicited vehement criticism from the scientific community...
"And there was a feeling of unhappiness, too, about the extent to which mainstream scientists and evolutionists are demonized -- that if you don't accept the Answers in Genesis vision of the history of Earth and life, you're contributing to the ills of society and of the church."
Daryl Domning, professor of anatomy at Howard University, held his chin and shook his head at several points during the tour. "This bothers me as a scientist and as a Christian, because it's just as much a distortion and misrepresentation of Christianity as it is of science," he said.
(Image: (AFP/File/Jeff Haynes)
Famous prostitute's gravestone deemed too 'slutty' (Thanks, Rosa!)
The 77-year-old artist Tomi Ungerer's parting gift to his friend Domenica Niehoff was to be a gravestone featuring two ample pink marble boulders in homage to her famously top-heavy figure. But those responsible for the Garden of Women cemetery, resting place of Hamburg's most famous women, turned his design down, the paper reported...Ungerer and Niehoff were friends for decades, and even shared a flat for a while in 1984. He published drawings of Niehoff and her colleagues in a book entitled "Guardian Angels of Hell" at the time...
Niehoff, who gained fame for advocating the rights of sex workers in the 70s and 80s, died at age 63 in February 2009.
Silence of the Chips (Flickr)
One of the most important action point is the launch of "a debate on the technical and legal aspects of the 'right to silence of the chips', which has been referred to under different names by different authors and expresses the idea that individuals should be able to disconnect from their networked environment at any time."This is one of the main actions of the plan in order to allow the usage of the RFID while respecting privacy and the protection of personal data, two fundamental rights of the EU.
Silence of the Chips (CafePress)
(via Beyond the Beyond)
For the past fifteen years, I have been making pilgrimages to the deserts and mountains of China's western borders, focusing on Tibetan and Uyghur communities. These remote frontier regions are laced with contested geographies where religious and cultural legacies confront powerful economic and political transformations.20x200 just released a collection of four 11x14 prints from his "Travels Without Maps" project. You can buy them as a set, or individually. Truly beautiful work. (thanks, Sara Distin)In these far away places, I look for way stations between cultures where one can see the past and future simultaneously. Seeing these changes over such a short time is a perspective that is at once disorienting and tragic. I try to make images that show these things, or at least some of the emotional truths behind them, because I know each time I return everything will be almost unrecognizable.
Ever the happy prankster, Paul Krassner "met" with Larry King for an interview.
This video was made to promote Paul's new book: Who's to Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture & Comedy in America Today.
A mock interview between Paul Krassner and Larry King by Andy Thomas. (Thanks, Doug Rushkoff!)
Direct link to video. There is no part of this trailer that is not made of awesome. A robot geisha transforms into a tank. Two robot geishas (I guess) spew poison milk (don't ask) out of their titties at an opponent. A girl gets stabbed to death in the butt with a giant sword. Robot girls make giant swords pop out of their butts, presumably with which to stab other people in their butts. "Bust Machine Gun." And a dude is blinded with tempura shrimp.
All this and more in the trailer for Noboru Iguchi's new film RoboGeisha - you may recall his work on similarly-themed films Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police. According to the website, the film will be "in theatre fall 2009." (thanks, bobby ciraldo, via geektyrant)
(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube / View large at boingboingvideo.com)
Joel Johnson writes over at Boing Boing Gadgets,
Should you buy the Sigma DP2? Only if you're in love with the sensor. While it's definitely a better choice than its predecessor and is not without its manual charms, its high price puts it in range of DSLRs and other cameras that come without as many limitations.Join the discussion on this video over at Boing Boing Gadgets, where Joel has also uploaded a slideshow of unretouched images from the DP2!Looking through a glass viewfinder is such a treat, though—too bad it doesn't seem to actually line up very well with the actual pictures.
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com
Alan Watts: priest, scholar, monk, author, trickster guru“The point is that rapport with the marvelously purposeless world of nature gives us new eyes for ourselves – eyes in which our very self-importance is not condemned, but seen as something quite other than what it imagines itself to be. In this light, all the weirdly abstract and pompous pursuits of men are suddenly transformed into natural marvels of the same order as the immense beaks of the toucans and hornbills, the fabulous tails of the birds of paradise, the towering necks of the giraffes, and the vividly polychromed posteriors of the baboons… Seen thus, the self-importance of man dissolves in laughter.”
Hard facts on a soft matter! ... The hypothesis presented herein says that abdominal hair is mainly responsible for the accumulation of navel lint, which, therefore, this is a typically male phenomenon. The abdominal hair collects fibers from cotton shirts and directs them into the navel where they are compacted to a felt-like matter. The most abundant individual mass of a piece of lint was found to be between 1.20 and 1.29 mg (n=503). However, due to several much larger pieces, the average mass was 1.82 mg in this three year study. When the abdominal hair is shaved, no more lint is collected. "NCBI ROFL
From the materials and methods: "The author first observed the accumulation of navel fluff in his early 20s. Despite thorough body hygiene including a daily morning shower, the navel filled with lint over the day. The author collected 503 pieces of navel fluff since approximately March 2005 with a total weight of almost 1 g... ...In order to investigate the role of the abdominal hair, the author also shaved his belly for this study."
Where did the name “Barbecue Swingers” come from?"July 4th BBQ Essentials from New Orleans Legend Kermit Ruffins"
Kermit Ruffins: From tailgating. I started tailgating at Vaughn’s during break-time so the guys could have something to eat. So one morning I woke up and said “Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Kings,” but by the middle of the evening I had changed it to “Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers.” I was having so much fun barbecuing during the show that it just hit me: “Barbecue Swingers”.
So you originally were barbecuing to have some hot food at the shows, then the idea just caught on?
Kermit Ruffins: Yep, the tailgating started [it] all. I would cook hot sausage for the guys during break time, and whatever was left over, we would give it to the fans. Then I bought a big grill and started cooking for everyone, still up [to] today!
BK: Do you have any recipes or tips you would like to share with us?
Kermit Ruffins: I like to use a pan. I cook a lot of things in the pan - shrimp, fish, chicken, anything. Just a little olive oil, Tony Chanceries’, granulated garlic, thyme, and a little beer. Wrap it tight for an hour and a half; it’s like cooking in the oven. After, if you want, you can put them on the grill so they get that pecan wood taste.
By the way, in April Shana contacted Wall Street Prison Consultants, a firm that "gives advice to future inmates on how to survive prison time and win an early release." According the the firm's website, Shana can "learn the ropes of federal prison" including: "Prevent Being RAPED, Prison Living Conditions, The Daily Prison Grind, Your 1st Day What To Bring With, Inmate Personal Property, Inmate Etiquette & Politics, Dealing With Other Inmates, Avoiding and Spotting Informants, Dealing With Gang Members, Defusing A Confrontation, Prison Slang & Lingo, Avoiding Bad Prison Jobs, Getting A Lower Bunk Pass, Getting A Soft Shoe Permit."
The IRS has announced it will allow favorable ordinary loss treatment for investment theft losses. Basically, such losses occur when your money is never actually used for the intended purpose of acquiring investment assets.Tax Breaks for Ponzi-Scheme Victims (via Consumerist)Instead, the money is hijacked by the perpetrator of a fraud. The classic example is the so-called Ponzi scheme where money collected from later "investors" is used to cover "income distributions" and "withdrawals" paid to earlier "investors" without any investments ever actually being made.
Taxpayer-friendly ordinary loss treatment takes some of the sting out of Ponzi scheme losses. Unfortunately, however, there are plenty of victims who can benefit from the IRS's enlightened attitude. Not only did Bernie Madoff lose some $65 billion of investors' money, but other similar frauds have since come to light. The sad truth is, Ponzi losses are more widespread than you might think.
Page after page of this unsettling effect applied to well-known folks. (However, the photo of James Earl Jones looks about the same. And I guess you could argue that George W. Bush looks more distinguished).
Celebrities upside down pictures
Heather McDougal on black widow spidersUnlike brown recluse spiders, whose venom is cytotoxic, meaning it is meant to slow down the prey, partially digesting the tissues and making for failure of the prey's systems, the black widow spider's venom is based on a neurotoxin, which I would much prefer. In mammals, when they are bitten by a spider with cytotoxic venom, it means the tissue surrounding the bite turns necrotic (dies) and is often unable to heal afterwards. There are some truly horrific pictures on the Internet of brown recluse spider bites several months on, which I would rather not contemplate.
The venom of a black widow, being a neurotoxin, has a more widespread effect, entering the bloodstream and being deposited at the nerve endings where the endings insert into the muscles. This causes intense, painful cramping and muscle spasms, and is very painful. It lasts a few days and then disperses, leaving only a few minor symptoms - spasms, tingling, nervousness and weakness - to remember her by. For me - though I would not want to encounter a black widow bite - the biggest fear has been for my children, because the smaller the body mass, the more likely the venom is to cause shock to the system and death.
Beninati's complaint stated that when he approached the bonfire, the flames were still roughly 40 feet high. He walked around the bonfire three times, each time "circl[ing] a little closer to the fire." Eventually, he walked still closer, into what was variously described as an area of "embers," "low flames," "burning remnants," and "a spot where there was fire on either side of him." Basically, he had walked inside a huge bonfire. Then, as you might have expected, he tripped on something and fell into the actual fiery part of the bonfire, burning his hands.Court: Man Burned at Burning Man Assumed Risk of Being Burned by Burning ManIn his deposition, Beninati admitted he knew "fire was dangerous and caused burns" before he walked into one. He knew there was some possibility of falling into said fire. He admitted no one affiliated with the defendants asked him to walk into the fire or told him it would be safe to do so. But he testified that he did not think it would be dangerous to walk into the fire, although he knew it "was not 'absolutely safe, because there [was] a fire present.'" And, as noted, fire is hot.
Today on Offworld we took an extensive look at Treasure World (above), the just-released DS game that turns the ubiquitous cloud of Wi-Fi signals around you into collectible treasures -- it's easily one of the most magical game experiences we've had in a while, and expands into an equally amazing array of synced up social-site achievements, and, of all things, a mini-music tracker that lets you compose by arranging your scalped booty.
Elsewhere we looked at the first live demo of cloud-gaming service Gaikai, which shows Spore, World of Warcraft and Mario Kart being played, in-browser, from a server 400 miles away, and Microsoft's just-launched Kodu, the 21st century LOGO-like Xbox 360 game that teaches principles of programming logic with simple sentence-structure syntax and lets you build and share up to 4-player minigames.
We also stumbled across Crazy Planets, a new Worms-like Facebook game that makes a fighting unit out of you and your friends, and watched the first tech demo video of Robotology from N+ developers Metanet, which, eventually, will be a parkour/grappling hook mashup of Mario Galaxy, Shadow of the Colossus, and Umihara Kawase (!), and, finally saw Bob Dylan's hard-livin' invade The Sims.
Ian McDonald's Desolation Road is one of my most personally influential novels. It's an epic tale of the terraforming of Mars, whose sweep captures the birth and death of mythologies, economics, art, revolution, politics. Its publication preceded Kim Stanley Robinson's brilliant Red/Blue/Green Mars books by years, but the two are very good companions, in that McDonald captures almost everything Robinson got (in a third of the number of pages), and adds the poetry and spirituality of Mars in the bargain.
Desolation Road pays homage to David Byrne's Catherine Wheel, to Ray Bradbury's entire canon and to Jack Vance, blending all these disparate creators in a way that surprises, delights, then surprises and delights again. Spanning centuries, the book includes transcendent math, alternate realities, corporate dystopias, travelling carnivals, post-singularity godlike AIs, geoengineering, and mechanical hobos, each integral to the plot.
Pyr Books has done us all the service of bringing this remarkable volume back into print after too long a hiatus (the equally delightful sequel, Ares Express, is out of print and pricey). They sent me a copy that I picked up from the post-box an hour ago, and I've been flipping through it ever since, getting reacquainted with this old and dear friend.
Moovida, the free media player - Jamendo (Thanks, Jutta!)Moovida Media Center now offers Jamendo's creative commons music library. Access over 20,000 albums straight from your living room TV!
Moovida, the free and open source media center for Windows and Linux, has integrated Jamendo in its new interface. With the aggregation of Jamendo to its content catalogue, Moovida brings a new dimension to the promotion of free culture: over 20,000 albums by 9500 artists can now easily be browsed on a TV screen, from your living room couch.
On a streamlined and easy-to use interface, the artists' creations are at the heart of Moovida: the artwork and songs are the center of attention and presented in a attractive layout. Also offering free content from other sources, Moovida is the cutting edge application when it comes to media convergence. From photos and videos to music, Moovida presents all types of local or online content in the same place. It transforms a Windows or Linux computer into a real theatre.
Profiling Minorities: A Study of Stop-and-Search Practices in Paris (PDF) (Thanks, Chris!)
In France, there's no provision for monitoring ethnicity under the law. This is not an altogether bad thing, but it makes it impossible for anyone to get data about police 'ethnic profiling' [what us Brits call 'racial discrimination'] in the way that they treat members of visible minorities.With no official data to go on, and no official co-operation, French researchers surreptitiously staked out areas of heavy police presence, and then noted the ethnicity of people stopped, before approaching them and conducting their own follow-up interviews. Their methodology needed to be pretty robust to make sure that this rather innovative way of collecting data did not bias the sample.
The results are pretty conclusive: even allowing for the nature of the population in the public space, if you are of Black appearance, you are more than six times more likely to be stopped than in you look White. People who look like Arabs are more than seven times more likely than Whites to be stopped.
What's to be done? The report makes a number of practical suggestions.
As Waxy notes, the inane Facebook photos make this story even more delicious.
24-year-old burglar Gregory McCalium beaten by 'victim' - elderly retired boxer Frank Corti (via Waxy)
A mug shot released by the Thames Valley Police reveals the results after Corti disarmed his attacker, let loose with two punches to the face and restrained McCalium until the police arrived on the scene...Corti, a veteran of the British armed forces, was at home with his wife during the mid-morning attack, according to testimony in the case. McCalium, a bartender, may have held a grudge over a noise complaint lodged by the Cortis earlier that morning, the Daily Mail reported.
After the guitar was built, by master luthier George Rizsanyi, Taylor took to the road again, getting all manner of people to play it, from Canadian musical legends (Gordon Lightfoot on his birthday, in his home) to world-famous musicians touring the country, to hundreds of ordinary people, who were all able to touch, hold and play this remarkable instrument (it has a case that is every bit as storied, of course -- part of it is sewn from the trousers of veteran hockey announcer Don Cherry!).
The net effect is of an instrument -- an artefact -- that is sacred and profane, precious and invaluable, common and unique. Marketers try to imbue their products with stories in order to create emotional ties with customers (think of Apple's Think Different campaign, or the mythology spun around Walt Disney), but this is the genuine article, a genuinely storied thing that is as much socially constructed as it is physically crafted.
I've asked the publisher for a review copy of Six String Nation (it comes out at the end of July) and if it's as good as it sounds, I'll have a review of it up as soon as I can.
Six String Nation: 64 Pieces, 6 Strings, 1 Country, 1 Guitar (Amazon)
Robbie sez, "I have no other reason for sharing the link to this video of Life During Wartime than I can't stop watching it. It's from the Talking Heads concert film for _Stop Making Sense_, directed by Jonathan Demme. The music and choreography are mindblowing. My mind is blown right now."
Mine too. This is the best concert movie I've ever seen, one of the greatest albums ever recorded, and the amazing thing is that the trajectory of the band and its components went up from there. I've been listening to the new Byrne/Eno for weeks on heavy rotation and going crazy over it.
I'm really hoping to get to the David Byrne show in London next month!
Talking Heads - Life During Wartime
Stop Making Sense DVD (Thanks, Robbie!)
The agent is really high on The Unicornians. She thinks it's the next Twilight. So she submits it to several editors at once. Editor 1 comes back offering $300,000 for three books. Editor 2 offers $30,000 for three books but with a significantly better hardcover royalty. (Say, 20% instead of 10%.)Book Advances and Marketing and the Cart and the HorsePutting aside the (very important) questions of which editor would be a better fit and which publisher is doing a better job with Unicornian-esque books, I would argue that the author of The Unicornians is always better off signing with Editor 2.
Let's say that The Unicornians is not a tremendous success. The first book in the trilogy sells 8,000 copies in hardcover; the second two sell 6,000*. With Editor 1, the author gets her $300,000^^, but The Unicornians comes up $240,000 short^^^ of earning out. With Editor 2, the author only makes $80,000 on the series, but $50,000 of that is royalty, and the publisher has also made a (modest) profit. The publisher will likely ask the author for another series, perhaps something focused in on the werewolf dude...
Okay, so now let's say The Unicornians IS successful. Let's say the first book sells 250,000 copies in hardcover**, because they make a movie, and teens squeal about how hot the unicornian boy's horn looks. The second and third books also sell 250,000.*** With Editor 1's deal, the author earns back her advance and makes $1.2 million, for a total of 1.5 million dollars. With Editor 2's deal, the author earns out and makes $2.7 million in royalties, for a total of $3 million.****
Really Long & Boring Post about Book Advances and Publishing
(via Scalzi)
Robbo sez, "Talented Toronto writers & filmmakers, Jim Taylor & Cory Laffin, have announced the first Zombie Short Film Festival and are calling for submissions.
The festival will be held in Toronto, at the glorious Revue Cinema (in my friendly neighbourhood Parkdale) on October 30th.
The criteria for submissions is pretty straight forward:
1) It must be a short film with a maximum running time of 20 minutes; and
2) It must involve zombies.
Further details can be found on their web site."
Zombie Short Film Festival: Call For Submissions (Thanks, Robbo!)
(Image: Toothless Zombie, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Ateo Fiel's Flickr stream
Hello I've been in japan about a year now, and live near roppongi. In the past couple of weeks, police have been stopping late night/early morning revellers when they are leaving bars and clubs, and asking them to provide urine samples. Essentially they are testing for drug use/abuse. Whilst i have nothing to hide, i cant help but think this is an invasion of my personal liberty/human rights. It also concerns me that things are quite easily added to drinks without people knowing much about it. its not much surprise, that out of the 40 or 50 that i saw being pulled on fri night, all bar one were gaijin. I just wondered if they are within their rights to be doing this? thanks...Tokyo police raiding Roppongi, stopping NJ on Tokyo streets for urine tests (UPDATED) (Thanks, Francesco!)It's confirmed. Called Asabu Police Station today (03-3479-0110(代表)) in Roppongi and talked to an officer Teshima. He admitted that yes, they are carrying out urine tests on people. He denied that they were targeting foreigners, but he refused to divulge what sort of criteria they use to select their testees. Separate blog entry on this by midnight tonight. Arudou Debito
Blackest Black Ever: Ultra-thin Material Absorbs Almost 100% Of Light (Image: Blue'n'black, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from szeretlek_ma's Flickr stream)Two researchers, Eduard Driessen, MSc, and Dr Michiel de Dood, have demonstrated that at a thickness of 4.5 nanometer niobiumnitride (NbN) is ultra-absorbent. They have recorded a light absorption of almost 100%, while the best light absorption to date was 50%. This research brings the ideal light detector a step closer.
doug's vintage trailers
Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Thanks Frank!)
(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)
More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com
Video of an iPhone knock-off from China. It looks OK, but as you might guess the software is slow and sucky. Apparently, some poor guy bought it on eBay and now wants his money back.
Counterfeit iPhone 3G stops by MacMedics by way of disputed eBay auction
Diane from the World Science Fiction Convention sez, "Just wanted to drop you a quick note to say that the voting deadline for the Hugo awards is this Friday. Eligible voters must vote online by July 3rd, 23:59PM EST. People should vote as early as possible in case of computer problems and to ensure their ballot is received before the deadline."
You get a vote if you're signed up to attend the WorldCon (it's in Montreal this year). It's one of the best Hugo ballots I've seen in all my years as an sf reader. And yes, I'm eligible twice, once for best novel (Little Brother) and again for best novella (True Names, with Ben Rosenbaum).
Final Ballot for the 2009 Hugo Awards and John W. Campbell Award
A grand piece of thinking from ex-CIA Michael Scheuer who told Glenn Beck: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States." Scheuer is the former head of the Bin Laden unit at the CIA under Clinton and Bush.
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